He really did say it. Go to 2:20 and see for yourself; he really said it. “That’s big stuff. That’s big stuff. Those are very big phrases, very big words.”

He’d just gotten through saying them – oppression, cruelty, injustice, inflicted – and he managed it without stumbling. Ooooooh Mommy I said the big big words.

It should have been John Lewis. John Lewis stayed away because Trump was there – so instead of John Lewis who actually understands and feels the words because he lived them, they got Trump who thinks they’re meaningless, and couldn’t care less.

Editing to add a photo from March 2015:

… Read the rest

And then – more from the Times piece – there’s Trump’s way of evaluating fact claims.

In almost all the interviews, Mr. Trump’s associates raised questions about his capacity and willingness to differentiate bad information from something that is true.

Monitoring his information consumption — and countering what Mr. Kelly calls “garbage” peddled to him by outsiders — remains a priority for the chief of staff and the team he has made his own. Even after a year of official briefings and access to the best minds of the federal government, Mr. Trump is skeptical of anything that does not come from inside his bubble.

The hardcore Trumpists of course think that’s a good thing. His bubble is the best … Read the rest

Another huge Times piece – Maggie Haberman, Glenn Thrush, and Peter Baker on day-to-day Trump.

As he ends his first year in office, Mr. Trump is redefining what it means to be president. He sees the highest office in the land much as he did the night of his stunning victory over Hillary Clinton — as a prize he must fight to protect every waking moment, and Twitter is his Excalibur. Despite all his bluster, he views himself less as a titan dominating the world stage than a maligned outsider engaged in a struggle to be taken seriously, according to interviews with 60 advisers, associates, friends and members of Congress.

Interesting. He’s right about that – he is a … Read the rest

Trump went to Jackson. Trump read the words they wrote for him, and then added his own, more stupid ones.

In his remarks to assembled guests, Trump said: “The civil rights museum records the oppression, cruelty and injustice inflicted on the African-American community, the fight to bring down Jim Crow and end segregation, to gain the right to vote and to achieve the sacred birthright of equality.”

He said: “And it’s big stuff. That’s big stuff.”

Uh uh uh, big stuff, uh uh.

He doesn’t, of course, mean a word of the first paragraph. He likes the oppression, cruelty and injustice inflicted on the African-American community, and has done what he can to add to it. He has no quarrel … Read the rest

Trump and his goons try to turn it around.

NEW from @PressSec on Lewis, Thompson missing the Civil Rights Museum opening: “We think it’s unfortunate that these members of Congress wouldn’t join the President in honoring the incredible sacrifice civil rights leaders made to right the injustices in our history." (1/2)

— Elizabeth Landers (@ElizLanders) December 7, 2017

No, that’s not what’s happening. They’re refusing to join Trump because he is a racist himself, because he opposes civil rights himself, because he thinks there were good people “on both sides” in Charlottesville, because he refused to rent to black people in the 60s, because he was a birther, because he demanded the death penalty for the Central Park 5, … Read the rest

Trump is going to the opening of the Civil Rights Museum in Jackson, Mississippi, so John Lewis is not going. Brilliant. The noisy venomous racist toad is going, so the civil rights veteran is not.

U.S. Rep John Lewis announced Thursday that won’t speak at the opening of Mississippi civil rights and history museums, saying it’s an “insult” that President Donald Trump will attend.

The long-planned Saturday ceremony will mark Mississippi’s bicentennial of admission into the union. But what was intended as a moment of racial unity and atonement in the state with the largest share of African-Americans is descending into racial and partisan strife after Republican Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant invited fellow Republican Trump to attend.

What an … Read the rest

Don Junior is refusing to answer.

In a closed-door interview with congressional investigators yesterday, Donald Trump Jr. refused to divulge the contents of a phone conversation with his father — that would be the president — that took place just after news broke of Trump Jr.’s now-notorious June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower with a Kremlin-connected lawyer. According to reports, investigators wanted to know whether Senior and Junior discussed what happened at that meeting and how they should respond to the news of it, but Trump Jr. cited attorney-client privilege and clammed up.

…

In an interview with me this morning, Rep. Adam Schiff (Calif.) — the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, which interviewed Trump Jr.