Tag: President Tweet

  • Busy times

    First stop, Trump’s Twitter.

    Even though I am not mandated by law to do so, I will be leaving my busineses before January 20th so that I can focus full time on the……

    Presidency. Two of my children, Don and Eric, plus executives, will manage them. No new deals will be done during my term(s) in office.

    Notice the despicable boasting about this grossly inadequate gesture toward removing himself from his businesses in order to avoid inevitable conflicts of interest, as being “not mandated by law.” As if mandated by law were the only relevant criterion.

    He’s treating the presidency as a vanity project, a prize, as opposed to a very demanding and serious job involving the welfare of 325 million people…or, indeed, 7 billion people. He’s treating it as a magnanimous gesture to do very little to avoid conflicts of interest with his profit-making enterprises. He’s putting himself first and everyone else dead last.

    Also note that he puts it out there for applause and admiration that he intends to focus full time on the presidency. Gee, big of you, Sir. I’m reminded, not for the first time, of Mr Collins:

    Elizabeth was chiefly struck by his extraordinary deference for Lady Catherine, and his kind intention of christening, marrying, and burying his parishioners whenever it were required.

    Then – still rather in the vein of Mr Collins – he tells us about his schedule:

     

    I will hold a press conference in the near future to discuss the business, Cabinet picks and all other topics of interest. Busy times!

    Busy times – you don’t say! Made all the busier (and less productive) by all these fascist rallies.

    This of course is his attempt to excuse his “postponement” of the promised press conference to explain what he was going to do about his conflicts of interest (spoiler: almost nothing). Oh gosh, he’s too busy to do that press conference he said he was going to do, because he has to go to Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Alabama – one fascist rally per day for the rest of this week.

    Presidents-elect don’t normally do fascist rallies, because they really are busy doing the real work of getting up to speed for the job. But that doesn’t apply to Trump, because the whole point is to upend everything and start over, applying the skills of real estate huckstering to government and diplomacy.

    Then he moves on to his Exxon CEO Secretary of State:

    I have chosen one of the truly great business leaders of the world, Rex Tillerson, Chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil, to be Secretary of State.

    The trouble with that is, however “great” Rex Tillerson may or may not be as a “business leader,” the fact remains that the skills and experience and especially values needed for that job are not the same as those needed for a top job in diplomacy. The goals are different, the problems are different, the challenges are different…it’s all different. Business skills are not infinitely transferable to other kinds of work.

    The thing I like best about Rex Tillerson is that he has vast experience at dealing successfully with all types of foreign governments.

    But that “dealing with” was done with a fundamentally different kind of goal from the kind a Secretary of State should have.

    It’s all bad.

  • Monitoring

    Aaron Blake at the Washington Post also says no we shouldn’t ignore Trump’s tweets.

    Undergirding the idea that Trump’s tweets shouldn’t be big news is the theory that he’s manipulating the media into focusing on small things to cover up less sexy but more important things — conflicts of interests and possible corruption, in particular.

    I’m skeptical any such plan exists, given that Trump’s thin-skinned tweeting is pretty indiscriminate. But this idea has returned with a vengeance given the latest tweetstorm, and it’s likely to perk up again after Trump on Tuesday morning suggested revoking the citizenship or jailing of people who burn the American flag.

    …

    What we’re basically talking about here is treating Trump like a social media troll with an egg for an avatar who can be blocked or ignored and hopefully loses the will to keep harassing us.

    But this is the president-elect of the United States. The job comes with the so-called bully pulpit, and what he says matters and will be the subject of debate no matter what the mainstream media does. Everything he says reverberates. It doesn’t matter if he says it on Twitter or at a news conference; either way it’s going to be consumed by tens of millions of people, and the media has an important role to play when it comes to fact-checking and providing context.

    Plus it matters. It matters that he’s that reckless and irresponsible, that petty and vain, that rage-driven and out of control, that wholly unfit for the job he’s taken on.

    ProPublica senior reporting fellow Jessica Huseman nailed it in an interview with The Fix’s Callum Borchers on Monday.

    “If he had said something similar in a press conference, no one would be concerned that journalists are getting distracted by his absurd language,” Huseman said. “But because it was a tweet, that’s somehow different? Unfortunately, this president-elect has decided to make Twitter his main means of communicating with the American public, and the American public listens deeply to things that he says on Twitter.”

    We can’t ignore any of it.

  • The day in Trumptweets

    President Pussygrabber’s latest batch of tweets is astounding.

    “Only the crooked media” cares about the massive conflicts of interest that a president who has “interests in properties all over the world” presents. No, Donnie, you’re wrong about that, citizens also care.

    This is President Corrupt doing that projection thing again – accusing other people of the very crimes he is trying to hide. Tragically, it’s worked for him so far.

    Nigel Farage. Ambassador. To the US. Oh dear god.

    Fortunately it’s not President Pussygrabber’s choice to make. He no doubt thinks it is, but he’s wrong.

    “Not nice” – as if he would know.

    That’s because you’re a bad, stupid, mean, childish, incompetent man who somehow parlayed your money and fame into being elected president.

    He really needs to start acting like an adult now.

    He thinks he’s become a god.

    Oh look, the National Review agrees with him! No shit, Sherlock.

  • Trump v Saturday Night Live

    Our petulant imbecile of a president-elect is still whining and complaining on Twitter, along with trying to tell us all what to do. He is so confused. He seems to think the president (and even the pres-elect) can just bark out orders and have them obeyed. That’s not how this works.

    God he’s stupid. He really is like a child, a very young and very spoiled child. That interpolated “which I hear is highly overrated” – that’s so transparent and so goofy. No he doesn’t hear that, except from people who are sucking up to him, which they’re doing because he’s rich and tragically powerful. How can he be dense enough to take that at face value? And dense enough to say it in public in aid of his pissy resentment? How can he not notice what a fucking fool it makes him look?

    I know; he’s always looked like a fucking fool and he got elected as such. I know. But the election is over now – he shouldn’t still be performing the fucking fool routine.

    Spoken like a true fascist. (Seriously. That’s what fascists say, apart from “Bedminster” and “America.”)

    Again – he shows himself up. “Nothing funny at all” – because it made fun of him. Not presidential, Donnie from Queens. And the suggestion of “equal time” is ludicrous. It’s a satirical show, and it gets to choose its own subjects.

    Uncomplicated disgust. He’s rejoicing in a Defense Secretary nicknamed “Mad Dog” – as if frenzied rage is what the job calls for.

  • Operation #TrumpCup

    Jim Wright:

    Apparently the latest trend is for conservatives to go to Starbucks and order a drink and when the barista asks for the name on the order they say “Trump.”

    This means the liberal company run by famously liberal CEO Howard Schultz is now shouting “Trump!” from behind the counter several thousand times a day all across the country.

    Conservatives who’ve never shopped at Starbucks are now dropping in to pull this stunt. They’re right now busy organizing trips to their local franchise via social media and posting pictures of their orders on Twitter and Facebook.

    #TrumpCup is currently trending on Twitter.

    Which conservatives find hilarious.

    And it IS hilarious.

    Especially when you realize Trump is getting his revenge on those who opposed his candidacy by having tens of thousands of his supporters buy $12 coffee drinks from his enemies.

    A very cunning plan.

     

  • Trump is the only one who knows who the finalists are!!!

    Trump has been puking out crazed tweets again.

    Jeremy Duns observed that that one sounds as if he thinks it’s a game show.

    That’s the next president, taking to Twitter to – again – abuse the New York Times in his familiar dishonest bullying way. The next president.

    Will he still be calling Senator Warren “Pocahontas”?

    Outraged vanity on display. What could possibly go wrong?

    The Washington Post reports on this unseemly display of childish temper.

    President-elect Donald Trump took to Twitter on Wednesday morning to push back against news coverage describing a chaotic transition to power, saying the process of selecting Cabinet secretaries and working with the Obama administration “is going so smoothly.’’

    Trump took particular aim at a favorite target, the New York Times, which reported Wednesday that the transition has been marked by firings and infighting, and that U.S. allies were having trouble reaching Trump at New York’s Trump Tower as he plans his government.

    It’s so reassuring to see how level-headed and reasonable he is. Of course a president-elect has nothing more urgent to do than snipe at the New York Times on Twitter. I wish he’d post a few selfies to decorate his thoughtful tweets.

    As turbulence within the team grew, some key members of Trump’s party began to question his views and the remaining candidates for top positions. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Trump’s efforts to work more closely with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin amounted to “complicity in [the] butchery of the Syrian people” and “an unacceptable price for a great nation.”

    Yes yes yes but he and Mr Putin get along so well. Leave them alone.

    As he had during the campaign, Trump appeared to be increasingly uncomfortable with outsiders and suspicious of those considered part of what one insider called the ­“bicoastal elite,” who are perceived as trying to “insinuate” themselves into positions of power.

    In other words anyone at all qualified and experienced. Trump’s presidency will be incompetent or it will be bullshit.

    Those in the inner circle reportedly were winnowed to loyalists who had stuck with Trump throughout the campaign and helped devise his winning strategy. They include Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), former Breitbart News head Stephen K. Bannon, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, and members of Trump’s family, including son-in-law Jared Kushner.

    “This is a very insular, pretty closely held circle of people,” said Philip D. Zelikow, a former director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia and a senior figure in the George W. Bush transition. “Confusion is the norm” for transitions, he said, “but there are some unusual features here, because they’re trying to make some statements.”

    “They feel like their election was a lot of the American people wanting to throw a brick through a window,” Zelikow said. “They want to make appointments that make it sound like glass is being broken.”

    Yeah great. Let’s throw a big brick through that window, aka the country and to a considerable extent the world. Let’s put movie stars and game show hosts and reality tv “personalities” in all the government jobs, and then stand back and see what happens. Crash crash tinkle.

    Increasingly, among the shards are more mainline Republicans in the national security field. In an angry Twitter post Tuesday, Eliot A. Cohen, a leading voice of opposition to Trump during the campaign who had advised those interested in administration jobs to take them, abruptly changed his mind, saying the transition “will be ugly.”

    After responding to a transition insider seeking names of possible appointees, Cohen said, he received what he described as an “unhinged” email from the same person saying “YOU LOST” and accusing Trump critics of trying to infiltrate the administration’s ranks.

    “It became clear to me that they view jobs as lollipops, things you give out to good boys and girls, instead of the sense that actually what you’re trying to do is recruit the best possible talent to fill the most important, demanding, ­lowest-paying executive jobs in the world,” Cohen said.

    That’s not at all terrifying…

    The two people whose names are mentioned most often for [Secretary of State] — former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and John R. Bolton, an undersecretary of state and one-year ambassador to the United Nations during the George W. Bush administration — are Trump loyalists. But both could be problematic, even among Republicans who would have to confirm them.

    Giuliani, thought to be an early choice for attorney general, was said by a person close to the transition team to have personally appealed to Trump for the diplomatic job. He has virtually no diplomatic experience or knowledge of the State Department bureaucracy.

    Bolton, a national security hawk who got his U.N. job through a recess appointment after the Senate refused to confirm him, was a leading advocate for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, contradicting Trump’s campaign position opposing it.

    Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Tuesday that Bolton would be a “disaster” and that he would actively oppose his nomination.

    And so on. The clown car continues to plunge down the cliff, taking us all with it.