Tag: President Deranged

  • A remarkable rebuke of a sitting president

    I tolja this was serious biz. I tolja he’d get in trouble. He’s getting in trouble.

    The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, asked the Justice Department this weekend to publicly reject President Trump’s assertion that President Barack Obama ordered the tapping of Mr. Trump’s phones, senior American officials said on Sunday. Mr. Comey has argued that the highly charged claim is false and must be corrected, they said, but the department has not released any such statement.

    Mr. Comey, who made the request on Saturday after Mr. Trump leveled his allegation on Twitter, has been working to get the Justice Department to knock down the claim because it falsely insinuates that the F.B.I. broke the law, the officials said.

    Not because it’s an obvious lie about Obama, but whatever.

    Mr. Comey’s request is a remarkable rebuke of a sitting president, putting the nation’s top law enforcement official in the position of questioning Mr. Trump’s truthfulness. The confrontation between the two is the most serious consequence of Mr. Trump’s weekend Twitter outburst, and it underscores the dangers of what the president and his aides have unleashed by accusing the former president of a conspiracy to undermine Mr. Trump’s young administration.

    Too bad Comey helped him get elected then isn’t it.

    The White House showed no indication that it would back down from Mr. Trump’s claims. On Sunday, the president demanded a congressional inquiry into whether Mr. Obama had abused the power of federal law enforcement agencies before the 2016 presidential election. In a statement from his spokesman, Mr. Trump called “reports” about the wiretapping “very troubling” and said that Congress should examine them as part of its investigations into Russia’s meddling in the election.

    Yeah, Donnie, and while you’re at it tell them to look into Obama’s birth certificate, and also that DNA evidence that exonerated the Central Park 5.

    Mr. Comey’s behind-the-scenes maneuvering is certain to invite contrasts to his actions last year, when he spoke publicly about the Hillary Clinton email case and disregarded Justice Department entreaties not to.

    Well yes. I do wonder about those contrasts.

    The claims about wiretapping appear similar in some ways to the unfounded voter fraud charges that Mr. Trump made during his first days in the Oval Office. Just after Inauguration Day, he reiterated in a series of Twitter posts his belief that millions of voters had cast ballots illegally — claims that also appeared to be based on conspiracy theories from right-wing websites.

    As with his demand for a wiretapping inquiry, Mr. Trump also called for a “major investigation” into voter fraud, saying on Twitter that “depending on results, we will strengthen up voting procedures!” No investigation has been started.

    I know what the resemblance is. It’s that in both cases he’s making shit up. It’s that in both cases he’s completely reckless about making large claims that could have huge impacts without due diligence. It’s that in both cases he seems to have no clue whatsoever how to go about questioning or testing or investigating claims; he seems to have no clue that that’s even necessary.

    He’s hopelessly dense and hopelessly unwilling to learn.

  • The greatest overreach and the greatest abuse of power

    Yesterday it was wild bullshit based-on-nothing claims screamed on Twitter at dawn, today it’s solemn demands for Congressional investigation. No doubt tomorrow it will be Republicans solemnly announcing that investigation. This isn’t a government, it’s a clown car.

    President Trump, a day after leveling a widely disputed allegation that President Barack Obama had ordered the tapping of his phones, on Sunday demanded a congressional inquiry into whether Mr. Obama abused the power of federal law enforcement agencies before the 2016 presidential election.

    In a statement from his spokesman, Mr. Trump called “reports” about the wiretapping “very troubling” and said that Congress should examine them as part of its investigations into Russia’s meddling in the election.

    But there are no such “reports.” There are people saying. The people saying are just saying. Assertions are not the same thing as reports, and it’s not reasonable for Congress to investigate every assertion that someone on Fox News decides to throw out there. The money spent on that could be better spent on foreign aid or clean water.

    A spokesman for Mr. Obama and his former aides have called the accusation by Mr. Trump completely false, saying that Mr. Obama never ordered any wiretapping of a United States citizen.

    “A cardinal rule of the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice,” Kevin Lewis, Mr. Obama’s spokesman, said in a statement on Saturday.

    Obama’s a lawyer and has respect for the law. Trump’s a fraudulent real estate hustler, and has contempt for the law.

    On Sunday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy White House press secretary, said the president was determined to find out what had really happened, calling it potentially the “greatest abuse of power” that the country has ever seen.

    “Look, I think he’s going off of information that he’s seen that has led him to believe that this is a very real potential,” Ms. Sanders said on ABC’s “This Week” program. “And if it is, this is the greatest overreach and the greatest abuse of power that I think we have ever seen and a huge attack on democracy itself. And the American people have a right to know if this took place.”

    By “information he’s seen” she means people barfing it out on Fox and Breitbart. That doesn’t count. Presidents can’t be demanding investigations on the basis of what they saw on Fox News this morning. That’s not how any of this works.

  • Born amid the fever swamps of the far right

    Chris Cillizza at the Post looks at Trump’s raving paranoia.

    Donald Trump’s political career was born amid the fever swamps of the far right. He seized on a favorite conspiracy theory bubbling there — that then-President Barack Obama was not, in fact, born in the United States and therefore was an illegitimate president — to boost his profile in national politics.

    That boost eventually led to his 2016 candidacy. That candidacy led to President Trump. But what never changed is Trump’s roots in the conspiracy theory world.

    That makes sense in a way. Trump is a remarkably empty, unthinking, incurious, ignorant guy. Conspiracy theory is attractive to people with those deficits, because it’s a Story, and a Story is all it is. Shiny! It doesn’t require thought or rich information, and in fact it flourishes in their absence.

    There is, as you probably already guessed, no detail about the alleged wiretapping included in any of the Trump tweets. Trump’s tweets appear to trace back to an article Friday on Breitbart News headlined “Mark Levin to Congress: Investigate Obama’s ‘Silent Coup’ vs. Trump.” That article, based heavily on conservative talk radio host Levin’s views, suggest the Obama administration conducted a “silent coup” to keep Trump from the presidency.

    Here’s the key paragraph:

    In summary: the Obama administration sought, and eventually obtained, authorization to eavesdrop on the Trump campaign; continued monitoring the Trump team even when no evidence of wrongdoing was found; then relaxed the NSA rules to allow evidence to be shared widely within the government, virtually ensuring that the information, including the conversations of private citizens, would be leaked to the media.

    The problem here, of course, is that what Levin — and Breitbart — use as evidence for these claims are a series of seemingly unconnected events — from FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court requests to Trump joking about the Russia email hack, to the release of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails in the fall. The proof that all — or any — of these events are tied together by actual facts as opposed to supposition is not offered.

    But for Trump that’s fine – supposition is good enough for him, because he’s just that empty and mindless.

    Here’s the thing: Conspiracy theorists see everything as connected. If you doubt them, well of course you do because you’re in on it. That’s not the standard that we can have for the president of the United States. Proof is required.

    The ball is in Trump’s court. Short of convincing evidence to back up the wiretapping claims, the conspiracy-theory candidate has become the conspiracy-theory president.

    And he has the nuclear codes. This just won’t do.

  • Is it legal for a sitting President to be out of his tree?

    So…everybody around him must be thinking it’s all over, right? He’s too mentally unstable to have the [shudder] nuclear codes?

    That was 6:30 a.m. at Taco Del Mar, so he probably hadn’t “just found out” anything, let alone that. No, I don’t believe that his staff sit up all night finding out stuff so that they can tell him it at six in the morning when he’s off resting his signing arm at the golf resort.

    Then, two hours later, he got back to the serious business.

    So it’s official now that he’s fucking batshit crazy, right? The kind of crazy that could decide to order the nukes on a whim at any moment?