Tag: Trump

  • The bumbling

    So much bumbling.

    When Donald Trump ran for the White House, he insisted that his lack of experience in politics and his complete disdain for the details (or even the broad strokes) of policy were not only not a problem, they were a key reason why he’d be such a terrific president. The system needed to be shaken up, and it couldn’t be done by someone locked inside it.

    This is inane. If you don’t like the way your mechanic is keeping your car running, you hire a better mechanic…

    You don’t hire a pastry chef or a lawyer or a journalist. Incompetence and ignorance and lack of qualifications do not automatically combine into the ideal person to improve an imperfect government.

    As the New York Times reports Monday, National Security Council staff “get up in the morning, read President Trump’s Twitter posts and struggle to make policy to fit them. Most are kept in the dark about what Mr. Trump tells foreign leaders in his phone calls.” Then there’s this:

    Two people with direct access to the White House leadership said Mr. Flynn was surprised to learn that the State Department and Congress play a pivotal role in foreign arms sales and technology transfers. So it was a rude discovery that Mr. Trump could not simply order the Pentagon to send more weapons to Saudi Arabia — which is clamoring to have an Obama administration ban on the sale of cluster bombs and precision-guided weapons lifted — or to deliver bigger weapons packages to the United Arab Emirates.

    Well I’m sure he knew how to look it up in the manual. There is a manual, isn’t there?

    The truth is that no president has ever needed an experienced, capable staff more than this one. Trump’s own ignorance and lack of concern about policy and the bureaucratic details of governing meant that he came into office incapable of offering his staff clear direction on both what they should do and how things should run. In that vacuum, he needed people who could execute policy with a minimum of bumbling, and that takes at least some who understand the system.

    Instead, he stocked the upper echelon of his staff with people without any government experience. Look at his closest advisers. Bannon was in the Navy in the 1970s and 1980s, but otherwise has never worked in government. Reince Priebus has never worked in government. Jared Kushner has never worked in government. Kellyanne Conway has never worked in government. Miller has worked in Congress, but not in the executive branch. The Cabinet, too, is filled with officials who have no government experience.

    The result is an administration interested in “disruption” which in practice is going to create a lot of destruction.

    Destruction is what they want – “starve the beast.”

    Then there are the leaks.

    Leakers have told reporters that Trump watches huge amounts of cable news, that he called Flynn in the middle of the night so Flynn could clarify whether it’s better to have a strong dollar or a weak dollar, that he interrupted a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin so someone could explain to him what the New START treaty was, that he was unaware that an executive order he signed had put Bannon on the “principals committee” of the National Security Council, that he threatened to send troops into Mexico in pursuit of “bad hombres,” and that he demands that briefing papers be kept to “a single page, with lots of graphics and maps,” among other things.

    While Trump’s top advisers go on television and describe him as a kind of living god with infallible judgment and superhuman accomplishments (“We have a president who has done more in three weeks than most presidents have done in an entire administration,” said Miller on Sunday), those a level or two below are rushing to the media to warn that their boss is a complete nincompoop.

    We know. We can tell.

  • Flynn acted alone, and I’m Marie of Rumania

    And then there’s the whole Bigger Picture question.

    The Trumpies are (of course) presenting this as shock-horror, this one guy lied to us. Please. He did what he was told, and then they pushed him onto his sword. The really surprising part is their bumbling – their failure to realize the Russian ambassador’s phone is bugged.

    Ryan Lizza calls the Flynn/administration story self-serving and dubious, and reminds us of the chronology.

    Almost immediately after Obama made his sanctions announcement, on December 29th, expelling thirty-five Russian diplomats and closing down two Russian compounds, the Russian government made clear that Putin would retaliate in kind.

    “We, of course, cannot leave unanswered the insults of the kind, reciprocity is the law of diplomacy and foreign relations,” the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said during televised remarks in Russia. “Thus, the Russian Foreign Ministry and officials of other authorities have suggested the Russian President to announce thirty-one personnel of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and four diplomats from the Consulate General in St. Petersburg persona non grata.” Lavrov also said that he had recommended the closure of two U.S. facilities used by American diplomats.

    Lavrov’s spokesman said similar things, and so did Putin’s press secretary. Then nothing happened. Then something different happened.

    On Friday, December 30th, early in the morning in the United States (the afternoon in Moscow), an official statement from Putin was posted on the Kremlin’s Web site. “Although we have the right to retaliate, we will not resort to irresponsible ‘kitchen’ diplomacy but will plan our further steps to restore Russian-US relations based on the policies of the Trump Administration,” the statement said. “We will not create any problems for US diplomats. We will not expel anyone.”

    A few hours later, Trump celebrated the decision. “Great move on delay (by V. Putin) – I always knew he was very smart!” he tweeted.

    Why…goodness me, Spanky, could there have been phone calls in between those two items?

    What happened between Obama’s statement on Thursday and Putin’s statement on Friday to change the Russian government’s response? This is the period when Flynn and the Russian Ambassador exchanged a flurry of communications, including, we now know with certainty, discussions about the Obama Administration’s sanctions. Before the Post confirmed with nine officials that Flynn had discussed sanctions on those calls, both Vice-President Mike Pence and Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, denied that Flynn had. The White House would like this to be a story about Flynn lying to them.

    But now Flynn is gone, and there are some bigger unresolved questions. Did Trump instruct Flynn to discuss a potential easing of sanctions with Russia? Did Flynn update Trump on his calls with the Russian Ambassador? Did Trump know that Flynn lied to Pence about those contacts? What did the White House counsel do with the information that he received from Yates about Flynn being vulnerable to blackmail?

    What did he know and when did he know it.

    I doubt the Republicans can bury this.

  • The real story

    Donnie admits what a fuckup it was and unreservedly apologizes and promises to do better.

  • President Caddyshack

    Commentary on the open-air situation room:

    “Now you’ve got some pretty good pictures — the prime minister of Japan, and the president.”

    That’s President Trump, crashing a wedding party at his Mar-a-Lago club on Saturday night, immediately after holding a news conference with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan to address North Korea’s firing of a missile, which flew 310 miles before dropping into the Sea of Japan. The news conference took place after Mr. Trump held a meeting with Mr. Abe and their entourages out in the open in the club dining terrace, examining documents and talking on a commercial cellphone as guests drifted by and took photos, servers reached over the papers to deposit the entree, and Mike Flynn, his national security adviser, held up his phone, on flashlight setting, so everybody could get a good look.

    Mike Flynn did that – that’s a new item (to me). He’s military…wouldn’t you think he’d be just a little security conscious? After all those years?

    It apparently never occurred to Mr. Trump, Mr. Flynn or Steve Bannon, another member of the National Security Council, who also trained his cellphone on the paperwork, that holding a cellphone camera over these documents might allow foreign adversaries and hackers to get “some pretty good pictures,” too. Cellphones aren’t allowed even in secured areas of the White House. Yet there they all were, playing Situation Room in the open air, for a random crowd in Palm Beach, Fla.

    Well Trump removed most of the adults from the National Security Council…but still. I would have expected basic precautions. Silly me.

    Mr. Trump’s big weekend generated lots of Facebook and Twitter posts: the president holding a young woman around the waist, flashing a lecherous thumbs-up; vamping with a bevy of fuchsia-clad bridesmaids; posing in his golf togs with another group of women. And then there’s the video of his wedding “toast” to the happy couple. Of course, the wedding was of the son of a big-dollar political donor, a longtime Mar-a-Lago member who, Mr. Trump said, has “paid me a fortune,” according to CNN.

    One must wonder how Rick, Mr. Abe or his diplomatic entourage felt as they were dragged like pull toys through Mr. Trump’s club, props in his bizarre and potentially dangerous effort to show off.

    Disgusted and bewildered, is my guess.

    One would think leadership of the free world would have scratched Mr. Trump’s itch for publicity. But this is the man who called reporters using a fake name to generate stories about himself; who introduced a member of one of his clubs to a Golf Digest reporter as “the richest guy in Germany,” instead of by name; who looks pained when having to share the podium with anyone, from Sarah Palin to the prime minister of Canada. This is rule by Al Czervik, Rodney Dangerfield’s character in “Caddyshack”: a reckless, clownish boor surrounded by sycophants, determined to blow up all convention. But this is real life, and every time Mr. Trump strikes a pose, the rest of the world holds its breath.

    Oh well – it’s only nukes.

  • The open-air situation room

    The Chicago Tribune on Trump’s idiotic recklessness:

    Richard DeAgazio was already seated for dinner, on the Mar-A-Lago Club’s terrace, when President Trump entered with the Prime Minister of Japan on Saturday night. The crowd – mostly paying members of Trump’s private oceanfront club in Palm Beach, Fla. – stood to applaud. The president’s party sat about six tables away.

    Then, DeAgazio – a retired investor who joined Mar-A-Lago three months ago – got a text from a friend. North Korea had just test-fired a ballistic missile, which it claimed could carry a nuclear warhead. DeAgazio looked over at the president’s table.

    “That’s when I saw things changing, you know,” DeAgazio recalled in a telephone interview with the Washington Post on Monday. He said a group of staffers surrounded the two world leaders: “The prime minister’s staff sort of surrounded him, and they had a little pow-wow.”

    What was happening – as first reported by CNN – was an extraordinary moment, as Trump and Abe turned their dinner table into an open-air situation room. Aides and translators surrounded the two leaders as other diners chatted and gawked around them, with staffers using the flashlights on their cellphones to illuminate documents on the darkened outdoor terrace.

    An open-air situation room populated by members of a golf club, and their guests, and servers, and an alligator or two.

    The scene of their discussion, Trump’s club, has been called “The Winter White House” by the president’s aides. But it is very different than the actual White House, where security is tight and people coming in are tightly screened. Trump’s club, by contrast, has hundreds of paying members who come and go, and it can be rented out for huge galas and other events open to non-members. On the night of the North Korea launch, for instance, there was a wedding reception going on: CNN reported that Trump dropped by, with Abe in tow.

    What better place to discuss a security crisis? Well I suppose there’s Wal-Mart, but apart from that…

    DeAgazio told the Post that, after Trump and Abe had spoken for a few minutes, they left the open terrace and spent about 10 minutes in private before conducting a joint press conference at about 10:30 p.m. Eastern time. Later, he said that Trump and First Lady Melania Trump had returned to listen to music on the terrace – which faces the Intracoastal Waterway – and shake hands and speak with club members.

    DeAgazio said he’d been impressed with how the president had handled the situation.

    “There wasn’t any panicked look. Most of the people [on the terrace] didn’t even realize what was happening,” DeAgazio said. “I thought he handled it very calmly, and very presidentially.”

    Security experts have said this casual approach to national security discussions was very risky.

    The two leaders could have discussed classified documents within earshot of waiters and club patrons. Those cellphones-turned-flashlights might also have been a problem: if one of them had been hacked by a foreign power, the phone’s camera could have provided a view of what the documents said.

    But DeAgazio, for one, said he was impressed that Trump had not gotten up from the table immediately, to seek a more private (and better-lit) place for his discussion with Abe.

    “He chooses to be out on the terrace, with the members. It just shows that he’s a man of the people,” DeAgazio said.

    Membership at the Mar-a-Lago Club now requires a $200,000 initiation fee — a fee that increased by $100,000 after Trump was elected.

    Salt of the earth. Trump is a man of the people. A crowded restaurant is an excellent place for two heads of state to discuss a security crisis. It all makes sense.

     

  • Trump likes showing off his new gig

    The Times has more on Trump’s dinner with Abe and a few hundred of his closest friends.

    President Trump and his top aides coordinated their response to North Korea’s missile test on Saturday night in full view of diners at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida — a remarkable, public display of presidential activity that is almost always conducted in highly secure settings.

    The scene — of aides huddled over their computers and the president on his cellphone at his club’s terrace — was captured by a club member dining not far away and published in pictures on his Facebook account. The images also show Mr. Trump conferring with his guest at the resort, Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister.

    Well it could have been worse. They could have gone to Olive Garden or Applebee’s.

    The fact that the national security incident was playing out in public view drew swift condemnation from some Democrats, who said it was irresponsible for Mr. Trump not to have moved his discussion to a more private location.

    “There’s no excuse for letting an international crisis play out in front of a bunch of country club members like dinner theater,” Representative Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House, said in a Twitter message.

    Discussions about how to respond to international incidents involving adversaries like North Korea are almost always conducted in places that have high-tech protections against eavesdropping, like the White House Situation Room. When presidents are away from the White House, they often conduct important business in a “Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility,” or SCIF, a location that can be made temporarily impervious to eavesdropping.

    Mr. Trump and his White House aides who joined him for dinner, including Steve Bannon, his chief strategist, did not relocate the discussion to such a facility.

    It’s like this. They were hungry, see? The steak and baked potatoes had just arrived, and they didn’t want to wait to dive in. They’re people too you know.

    The president’s dinner with Mr. Abe was also a departure.

    Mr. Trump’s predecessors have almost always held such working dinners in private facilities. In 2013, former President Barack Obama held a dinner with China’s President Xi Jinping at the Sunnylands resort in Palm Springs, Calif. But the dinner between the leaders was out of sight of members of the public.

    But Mr. Trump appears to enjoy presenting the spectacle of his presidency to those at his privately held club, where members pay $200,000 to join. While the club is not open to the public, Mr. Trump’s dinner with Mr. Abe was in the club’s dining room, where any member or their guests were likely to be.

    But they had to pay 20 grand to be there, or at least be the guests of people who paid 20 grand to be there. Obviously those people are not going to be agents of North Korea. That’s biologically impossible, or something.

    But seriously – I want to know why Trump is not being boiled in oil over this.

  • Loose lips star on Facebook

    The Times also notices the whole “talking about national security in a public place surrounded by people eating their highpriced dinners” issue.

    By the looks of his Facebook feed, Richard DeAgazio is a big fan of President Trump’s. Witness his Facebook feed on anti-immigrant protests in Italy, courtesy of the Russian propaganda network RT, the photo of Bill Clinton with a woman that he spuriously identifies as the former president’s new girlfriend, and a caricature of Barack Obama in a sombrero.

    But Mr. DeAgazio did the current president no favors with his fanboy posts from Mar-a-Lago this weekend in a public dining room as the prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, and the president of the United States scrambled to respond to a North Korean ballistic missile test.

    Cool for the rest of us that he took snaps though.

    It was a remarkable display on Mr. Trump’s part of a lack of concern for prying eyes and security awareness.

    But hey, Mr. DeAgazio also posed with the service member who carries the nuclear launch codes for the president.

    “This is Rick…He carries the “football” The nuclear football (also known as the atomic football, the President’s emergency satchel, the Presidential Emergency Satchel, the button, the black box, or just the football) is a briefcase, the contents of which are to be used by the President of the United States to authorize a nuclear attack.”

    Public posts, too.

    But hey, emails!!!

  • Speak directly into the mic please

    Holy shit. Trump was at din-dins with Abe at a public restaurant at Mar-a-fucking-Lago when they were told about North Korea’s latest missile-throw, and they discussed it right then and there. In public!

    Sunday night, CNN reported details of the moment that Trump, joined by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, learned about a missile launch in North Korea. Trump and Abe were enjoying dinner at Trump’s exclusive Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida at the time, but, CNN reported, began to discuss the details of this international incident right there at their table.

    “As Mar-a-Lago’s wealthy members looked on from their tables, and with a keyboard player crooning in the background,” CNN’s Kevin Liptak reported, “Trump and Abe’s evening meal quickly morphed into a strategy session, the decision-making on full view to fellow diners, who described it in detail to CNN.”

    Are you fucking kidding me?

    It’s not clear that anyone heard particulars of the conversation, but other diners certainly noticed. Richard DeAgazio was in the room and posted photos of the moment to Facebook.

    The post has now been made private; a screenshot is below.

    Screen Shot 2017-02-13 at 9.39.50 AM

    Others who were there added their thoughts in the comments beneath the post. One wrote that he “was watching very close by. Had no idea what it was about.” That’s probably not the case for the waiters, who, CNN reports, “cleared the wedge salads and brought along the main course as Trump and Abe continued consulting with aides.”

    Oh but it gets worse.

    Notice, though, that the photos appear to corroborate an important detail from the CNN report. “The patio was lit only with candles and moonlight, so aides used the camera lights on their phones to help the stone-faced Trump and Abe read through the documents,” Liptak writes. In DeAgazio’s first photo, you can see a phone flashlight being used in that way.

    It’s a funny thing – I’m surprisingly familiar with that scenario. Just last month, when I was on the Monterey Peninsula taking care of Cooper while his humans were away, he and I took our evening walk past that scenario regularly. It’s a posh golf club with condos, and I like walking us up to the inn after dark – past the outdoor terraces that surround the restaurant, where there are fire pits and torches and people shivering in the wind off the Pacific. It’s not what you would call a secure place to discuss national security. Not even close.

    Why is this important? Mobile phones have flashlights, yes — and cameras, microphones and Internet connectivity. When Edward Snowden was meeting with reporters in Hong Kong at the moment he was leaking the material he’d stolen from the NSA, he famously asked that they place their phones in the refrigerator — blocking any radio signals in the event that the visitors’ phones had been hacked. This was considered the most secure way of ensuring that the phones couldn’t be used as wiretaps, even more secure than removing the battery. Phones — especially phones with their flashes turned on for improved visibility — are portable television satellite trucks and, if compromised, can be used to get a great deal of information about what’s happening nearby, unless precautions are taken.

    Precautions weren’t taken. One of DeAgazio’s photos shows Trump using a phone at the table, within view of other diners (and while sitting next to a foreign leader). It’s not clear what phone Trump is using in that picture, but it’s known that he uses a relatively old Android device, even while serving as president. As we noted last week, Trump generally uses that device when he’s not in the middle of a work day. Shortly before the dinner with Abe, he tweeted from it.

    And guess what! His phone is almost certainly compromised!

  • What about them, Mr Pussygrabber?

    Before he put his nasty hands all over Trudeau, Donnie from Queens told us what they would be chatting about.

    Can you imagine? Talking about women in the workforce with the guy who bragged about being able to grab women by the pussy because he’s a star? Can you imagine?

  • Step back

    Oh god, poor Justin Trudeau.

    Ew ew ew right up in his face, and the nasty little hands all over him. Ew.

  • The powers of the president will not be questioned

    Aaron Blake at the Post on Stephen Miller’s attempt to bully us all into silence:

    Senior White House policy adviser Stephen Miller made the rounds on the Sunday talk shows over the weekend, and his comments about voter fraud have earned him justifiably dim reviews. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump and Fact Checker Glenn Kessler dealt with those claims in depth.

    But amid all the baseless and false statements about electoral integrity, Miller did something even more controversial: He expanded upon his boss’s views of whether judges are allowed to question President Trump’s authority. And at one point, Miller even said Trump’s national security decisions “will not be questioned.”

    Blake provides the transcript:

    Here’s the key exchange, with “Face the Nation’s” John Dickerson (emphasis added):

    DICKERSON: When I talked to Republicans on the Hill, they wonder, what in the White House — what have you all learned from this experience with the executive order?

    MILLER: Well, I think that it’s been an important reminder to all Americans that we have a judiciary that has taken far too much power and become, in many cases, a supreme branch of government. One unelected judge in Seattle cannot remake laws for the entire country. I mean this is just crazy, John, the idea that you have a judge in Seattle say that a foreign national living in Libya has an effective right to enter the United States is — is — is beyond anything we’ve ever seen before.

    The end result of this, though, is that our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.

    Does nobody in Trump’s administration even know what the judiciary is?

    “Will not be questioned.” That is an incredible claim to executive authority — and one we can expect to hear plenty more about. Trump has beaten around this bush plenty, yes. But Miller just came out and said it: that the White House doesn’t recognize judges’ authority to review things such as his travel ban.

    Oh well I don’t think Trump was beating around any bushes; I think he came right out and said it too. “So-called judge” is pretty clear.

    Miller clarified the threats somewhat though:

    And on “Fox News Sunday”: “This is a judicial usurpation of the power. It is a violation of judges’ proper roles in litigating disputes. We will fight it. And we will make sure that we take action to keep from happening in the future what’s happened in the past.”

    So…that will be a coup then? That’s what they’re telling us? On the Sunday talk shows?

    Miller seemed to be serving notice Sunday that the administration thinks the courts should play no role in reviewing any of Trump’s decisions related to national security.

    That makes even some Republicans uneasy.

    “I mean, obviously, the president wants to keep the country safe. I recognize that. I think everybody does, and I applaud him for trying to do so,” Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) said on “Face the Nation” after Miller’s appearance. “But, obviously, it needs to be constitutional, and it needs to be wise.”

    Miller is basically arguing that it doesn’t need to be constitutional — or, more specifically, that anything Trump decides to do when it comes to national security is inherently constitutional, regardless of whether it targets a specific religion or anything else.

    That is a massive claim to power. And it apparently won’t be the first time Trump’s White House attempts to claim it.

    I think he meant it won’t be the last time – and it clearly won’t.

  • From Howdy Doody to Bill O’Reilly

    Trump still watches lots of tv, and no matter how often his people tell him it’s not a great idea, he goes on watching. I suspect he has to – I suspect it’s his life source. Not watching, for him, would be like a vampire seeing direct sunlight. He would fade fade fade fade pop – gone.

    In the heat of the 2016 campaign, “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd asked Donald Trump whom he spoke to for military advice.

    “Well, I watch the shows,” Trump responded. “I mean, I really see a lot of great — you know, when you watch your show and all of the other shows, and you have the generals.”

    “I watch the shows.”

    Image result for alec baldwin trump

    It’s where he gets his material.

    Take this example from Sunday morning. At 6:25 a.m., Fox News showed a graphic claiming that 72 percent of all refugees admitted into the United States since Trump’s travel ban was put on ice by the courts hail from the seven countries that were on the no-admittance list of the executive order. Thirty minutes later, Trump tweeted: “72% of refugees admitted into U.S. (2/3 -2/11) during COURT BREAKDOWN are from 7 countries: SYRIA, IRAQ, SOMALIA, IRAN, SUDAN, LIBYA & YEMEN.” (Thanks to CNN’s Brian Stelter for documenting it!)

    That’s the only one I blogged about today. I didn’t realize he’d gotten his “facts” from Fox News. Like a fool, I assumed he was looking at some special government source.

    In fact, it has become something of a cottage industry to try to link Trump’s early-morning tweets to something he has seen on television in the very recent past. An Associated Press article this past week detailed Trump’s difficult transition to the White House and included this remarkable paragraph.

    “The president’s advisers have tried to curb his cable news consumption during the workday. But there are no limits when the president returns to the residence. During another recent telephone conversation, Trump briefly put down the phone so he could turn up the volume on a CNN report. When he returned to the call, he was complaining about ‘fake news.’ ”

    Angela Merkel? Malcolm Turnbull? Theresa May? “Hang on for a sec, I wanna hear this…FAKE NEWS.”

  • Strong words

    Bernie Sanders today mentioned that Trump’s pants are on fire. Al Franken suggested he’s a hot dog short of a picnic.

    Sanders made the charge on NBC’s “Meet the Press” as he attacked Trump’s travel ban — which faces a federal court challenge — and Republican plans to revamp the Affordable Care Act.

    “We have a president who is delusional in many respects, a pathological liar,” Sanders said.

    “Those are strong words,” moderator Chuck Todd interjected while asking Sanders whether he can work with a liar.

    Yes of course they’re strong words, but seeing as how they’re obviously true, since Trump barfs out blatant lies on Twitter daily, so what if they’re strong words? Why should we tiptoe around the truth while Trump lies himself blue? Why is the onus on everyone else instead of on him? It’s not our duty to use a euphemism, it’s his duty to stop lying.

    “It makes life very difficult. It is very harsh, but I think that’s the truth,” Sanders replied. “When somebody goes before you and says that 3 to 5 million people voted illegally … nobody believes that. There is not a scintilla of evidence to believe that, what would you call that remark? It’s a lie. It’s a delusion.”

    Well, lie and delusion aren’t the same thing. But a head of state has a responsibility not to blurt out whatever pops into his head or whatever he reads on some deranged alt-right blog. Trump’s total lack of responsibility makes his delusions into lies. He has no right to assume they’re true without doing any work to see if they are or not. He has no right to say things that people have repeatedly told him have no evidence to back them up.

    Franken first raised questions about the president’s mental health Friday night on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” saying Republican senators privately express “great concern” about Trump’s temperament. The senator doubled down Sunday morning, telling CNN’s “State of the Union” that “a few” Republican senators feel that way.

    “In the way that we all have this suspicion that — you know, that he’s not — he lies a lot, he says things that aren’t true, that’s the same thing as lying, I guess,” Franken told moderator Jake Tapper, mentioning the president’s repeatedly false claims of voter fraud.

    “You know, that is not the norm, uh, for a president of the United States or, actually, for a human being,” Franken said.

    Exactly. It’s not for a human being, and especially not for a president. A president’s lies can make things happen, and they can be very bad things. Gulf of Tonkin. Japanese internments.

    Elsewhere, Democratic lawmakers called for investigations into White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, who last week used a national television interview to encourage viewers to buy items from a clothing line designed by Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter. The comments appeared to violate a key ethics rule barring federal employees from using their public office to endorse products.

    Hours after Conway’s interview, members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee called on the Office of Government Ethics to recommend discipline, given that Trump, who is Conway’s “agency head,” holds an “inherent conflict of interest” because of the involvement of his daughter’s business.

    Conway’s comments were “a textbook case of a violation of the law,” Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (Md.), the committee’s top Democrat, told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday.

    “You cannot go out there as an employee of the government and advertise for Ivanka Trump or anyone else, their products. You can’t do that. And anybody else would be subject to a minimum, probably, of a reprimand, or they could literally lose their job over this,” he said.

    Cummings added that Conway’s promotional message was “very blatant” and “intentional,” and said the Office of Government Ethics should “take a thorough look” at the situation before recommending a potential punishment.

    It was as blatant as it would be possible to be – telling the people in tv land to buy Ivanka’s trash.

     

  • The White House has not provided “enormous evidence”

    Trump and his puppets are still telling lies about voter fraud.

    White House adviser Stephen Miller doubled down on the Trump administration’s groundless claims of voter fraud in New Hampshire — and across the nation — during in an interview on ABC’s This Week on Sunday.

    Earlier this week President Trump claimed, with no evidence, that voters from Massachusetts were bused to New Hampshire to vote illegally.

    That’s not a thing you just do – it’s not normal. It’s Hitlery. It’s what aspiring dictators do – they announce the whole thing is broken and corrupt and Only They can fix it.

    On This Week, host George Stephanopoulos asked Miller, a senior White House policy adviser, to provide that evidence. In fact, he asked three times.

    Miller said the show was “not the venue” to supply evidence, but repeated the baseless claim multiple times. He said in part:

    “I can tell you that this issue of busing voters into New Hampshire is widely known by anyone who’s worked in New Hampshire politics. It’s very real. It’s very serious.”

    New Hampshire’s secretary of state has said there is no proof of buses appearing at polling places, and that a large number of voters arriving like that would have attracted attention.

    The New Hampshire voting fraud claims are a variant on a frequently repeated Trump claim of nationwide voter fraud — which is also unfounded.

    It’s a red flag. It’s one of many, which makes it hard to focus on all of them, but that is what it is – he’s calling various elections fraudulent. That’s dictator territory.

    It’s possible that he doesn’t even realize that, because he doesn’t realize much, but we can be sure Bannon does.

    But Miller stood by those claims too, saying in part:

    “The White House has provided enormous evidence with respect to voter fraud, with respect to people being registered in more than one state, dead people voting, noncitizens being registered to vote. … I’m prepared to go on any show, anywhere, anytime, and repeat it and say the President of the United States is correct 100 percent.”

    The White House has not provided “enormous evidence” of massive nationwide voter fraud.

    So, Miller lied.

    Image result for red flag

  • The new Spicey

    The Times kindly collected their neighbors’ Trump-related segments in one article. Go New Yawk.

    Rejoice therefore: there’s more Spicer.

  • Trump is horrified that many refugees are from Syria

    He doesn’t get it.

    That’s because they are refugees. Refugees don’t come from Sweden and Canada and Japan.

    Let’s consult the UNHCR on this point.

    A refugee is someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war, or violence. A refugee has a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. Most likely, they cannot return home or are afraid to do so. War and ethnic, tribal and religious violence are leading causes of refugees fleeing their countries.

    Things are a little bit tough in Syria right now. That’s why there’s a Syrian refugee crisis. That’s why Syrians are a high proportion of refugees.

  • Neatly capturing the blithe, criminal ignorance

    Albert Burneko translates Politico’s somewhat tactful language about Trump’s surprise and distress about realizing being president is a hard job into language that is less tactful and more honest.

    “Being president is harder than Donald Trump thought,” begins the article, neatly capturing the blithe, criminal ignorance that characterizes both Trump himself and the many dozens of millions of morons who thought he should be the leader of the free world.

    Exactly what I thought. How could he not know it’s a hard job? How dare he go for it without knowing? How dare he be so reckless and so lazy and so entitled?

    Our new president occupies a wild outer range of blundering, arrogant stupidity, far beyond that typically euphemized in newspaper-ese, and the effort to describe the former truthfully and accurately—but without using such frank and impolite words as “stupid” and “ignoramus” and “spray-tanned fart balloon”—very nearly breaks the latter.

    It’s one of the joys of blogging, that you don’t have to euphemize such things if you don’t choose to.

    I love this article so much. Nearly every sentence contains some marvel of delicacy. The new president “often asks simple questions about policies, proposals and personnel.” When confronted with details, he “has been known to quickly change the subject” or direct questions to one of his chief advisers. His aides “joke that they wish their boss would spend more time at his Mar-A-Lago estate.” How many ways can you avoid saying that the president is a bumbling, pillow-fisted shit-for-brains, in a story about that exact fact?

    Here’s the most incredible example. We learn that after unflattering details (what other kind could there be? He’s Donald Trump!) of his phone conversations with other foreign leaders were leaked to the press, Trump grew paranoid about National Security Council staffers and launched an investigation into the source of the leaks. We also learn this (emphasis added):

    In turn, some NSC staff believe Trump does not possess the capacity for detail and nuance required to handle the sensitive issues discussed on the calls, and that he has politicized their agency by appointing chief strategist Bannon to the council.

    The President of the United States of America is too stupid to participate in discussions held expressly for his benefit. That is what “some NSC staff” have said, here. Talking to him is a waste of time, because he’s literally incapable of grasping what is being talked about, and he just gets mad, like a baby. Like a big red baby with a sensitive heinie.

    It’s a doozy all right. Oh, he lacks the capacity for detail and nuance? Yet he’s the president? Oh. Uh…oops.

  • A jaunt for Eric

    Interesting – Eric Trump gets a publicly funded security detail when he travels to promote his profit-making business interests.

    When the president-elect’s son Eric Trump jetted to Uruguay in early January for a Trump Organization promotional trip, U.S. taxpayers were left footing a bill of nearly $100,000 in hotel rooms for Secret Service and embassy staff.

    It was a high-profile jaunt out of the country for Eric, the fresh-faced executive of the Trump Organization who, like his father, pledged to keep the company separate from the presidency. Eric mingled with real estate brokers, dined at an open-air beachfront eatery and spoke to hundreds at an “ultra exclusive” Trump Tower Punta del Este evening party celebrating his visit.

    And we had to pay for it. (What, by the way, was embassy staff even doing there? Why was embassy staff there and billing us for their hotel rooms? Surely it’s not the embassy’s job to help the president’s kid flog their merchandise? And bill us for expenses?)

    The Uruguayan trip shows how the government is unavoidably entangled with the Trump company as a result of the president’s refusal to divest his ownership stake. In this case, government agencies are forced to pay to support business operations that ultimately help to enrich the president himself. Though the Trumps have pledged a division of business and government, they will nevertheless depend on the publicly funded protection granted to the first family as they travel the globe promoting their brand.

    Eric Trump ignored the Post’s questions about the trip.

    The bill for the Secret Service’s hotel rooms in Uruguay totaled $88,320. The U.S. Embassy in Montevideo, the capital city of Uruguay, paid an additional $9,510 for its staff to stay in hotel rooms to “support” the Secret Service detail for the “VIP visit,” according to purchasing orders reviewed by The Washington Post.

    “This is an example of the blurring of the line between the personal interest in the family business and the government,” said Kathleen Clark, an expert on government ethics and law professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

    How and why does embassy staff need to “support” the Secret Service? Especially on commercial junkets by the president’s adult offspring?

    Despite the use of public funds, government agencies would not provide key details connected to the trip, including the duration of the stay, the name of the hotel or the number of booked rooms. A spokesman from the Secret Service, citing security concerns, declined to comment.

    Telling the Post the duration of the stay and the number of rooms after the junket would not mess with their security concerns.

    The money for the hotel rooms was paid through the State Department, but a spokesman there declined to comment on the trip. He instead referred reporters to the White House and back to the Secret Service, whose spokesman once again declined to comment. The White House also did not respond to requests for comment.

    Why in hell was the money for the hotel rooms paid through the State Department?! This was not a diplomatic visit – Eric Trump is not a diplomat and he was there to promote his profit-making business…while his Daddy is president of the US. The State Department should have nothing to do with it.

    “There is a public benefit to providing Secret Service protection,” Clark said. “But what was the public benefit from State Department personnel participating in this private business trip to the coastal town? It raises the specter of the use of public resources for private gain.”

    To put it mildly. Trumps selling their tacky glittery sleazy trashy shit on our dime is not any kind of public benefit.

    “The Secret Service does not have an option as to when it is, where it is, nor as to how much it costs, and whether it’s domestic or international,” said W. Ralph Basham, former director of the service. “Think about the consequences of something happening to one of the children. The security of it outweighs the expenses of it.”

    Therefore Trumps should not go on profiteering junkets. They should stay the fuck home.

    “Having refused to sever his own personal financial interests, [the president] is now sending his emissaries, his sons, out to line his own pockets, and he’s subsidizing that activity with taxpayer dollars,” said Norm Eisen, a former Obama administration ethics adviser who is part of a lawsuit accusing Trump of violating a constitutional provision barring presidents from taking payments from foreign governments.

    Sleazy sleazy sleazy.

  • Not that again

    Trump still has trouble staying on-topic.

    On Thursday, during a meeting with 10 senators that was billed as a listening session about Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, the president went off on a familiar tangent, suggesting again that he was a victim of widespread voter fraud, despite the fact that he won the presidential election.

    As soon as the door closed and the reporters allowed to observe for a few minutes had been ushered out, Trump began to talk about the election, participants said, triggered by the presence of former New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte, who lost her reelection bid in November and is now working for Trump as a Capitol Hill liaison, or “Sherpa,” on the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch.

    The president claimed that he and Ayotte both would have been victorious in the Granite State if not for the “thousands” of people who were “brought in on buses” from neighboring Massachusetts to “illegally” vote in New Hampshire.

    According to one participant who described the meeting, “an uncomfortable silence” momentarily overtook the room.

    Yes, it must be awkward to be trapped in a closed room with such a droning fantasist who thinks he’s The Boss of Everything.

    During the meeting, Trump also reacted to Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren being silenced on the Senate floor while trying to read a 1986 letter by Coretta Scott King and in objection to Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions before he was confirmed as attorney general. According to participants in Thursday’s meeting, Trump referred to Warren several times as “Pocahontas,” the moniker he gave her during his campaign, and told the Democrats he was glad Warren is becoming the face of “your party.”

    He calls her Pocahontas. Still. On the job. To her fellow senators.

    That’s not a “moniker,” by the way, it’s a sneering reductionist insult to all Native Americans – it’s like calling an African American “Aunt Jemima” or “Sambo.” It reveals how his tiny little mind works – he hears the phrase “Native American” and translates it to “Pocahontas” as if they were interchangeable.

    It was horrendous during the campaign. It’s mind-boggling that he’s still doing it now.

  • Verb tenses

    Trump’s bonehead mistake about the New York Times article:

    Oh Donnie Donnie Donnie. That’s not what it said. You changed one crucial letter, and it changes everything.

    Here’s what the Times article actually said:

    The concession was clearly designed to put an end to an extended chill in the relationship between China and the United States. Mr. Xi, stung by Mr. Trump’s unorthodox telephone call with the president of Taiwan in December and his subsequent assertion that the United States might no longer abide by the One China policy, had not spoken to Mr. Trump since Nov. 14, the week after he was elected.

    HAD not spoken. The pluperfect. That’s the verb tense you use when you’re talking about more than one past event, and you need to distinguish the earlier from the later. It’s a sophisticated concept, yes, but most native speakers manage to pick it up. That’s what’s going on in that final sentence – Mr Xi HAD not spoken to Mr. Trump since Nov. 14…until yesterday’s conversation, which is the entire subject of the article. Dense Donnie somehow managed to interpret that as the Times saying, in an article about his conversation with Xi, that they had no conversation.

    And he has the nuclear codes.