Tag: Trump

Trump the narcissist.

I recently spoke with former FBI agent Joe Navarro about Donald Trump. Navarro was one of the FBI’s top profilers, a founding member of their elite Behavioral Analysis Unit, and author of several books on human behavior, including Dangerous Personalities: An FBI Profiler Shows You How to Identify and Protect Yourself from Harmful People.

To be clear, at no time did Navarro diagnose Trump as having a narcissistic or predator personality. He says we should leave formal diagnoses to professionals …

Formal diagnoses, sure, but “narcissist” is also an ordinary vernacular descriptive word. Of course Trump is a narcissist in that sense.

Navarro’s book warns that if a “person has a preponderance of the major features of a narcissistic personality,” then he “is an emotional, psychological, financial, or physical danger to you or others.”

And if he’s the president of your country you’re in deep shit.

It’s even more important for journalists to decide if Trump behaves like a narcissist—as James Fallows explains in his must-read post at The Atlantic, “How to Deal With the Lies of Donald Trump: Guidelines for the Media.” Fallows cites a reader’s note to him “on how journalism should prepare for Trump, especially in thinking about his nonstop string of lies.”

“Nobody seems to realize that normal rules do not apply when you are interviewing a narcissist,” this behavior expert explains to Fallows. “You can’t go about this in the way you were trained, because he is an expert at manipulating the very rules you learned.” He criticizes the New York Times for believing what Trump said when they interviewed him (which is the same point I’ve made).

Again – it’s obvious that he lies constantly.

Interestingly, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote in August that Trump’s behavior “is beyond narcissism.” In mid-October, he listed “a dazzling array” of “reasons for disqualification: habitual mendacity, pathological narcissism, profound ignorance and an astonishing dearth of basic human empathy.” And so despite how much he despises Hillary Clinton, he could not bring himself to vote for Trump.

What I keep saying. It transcends politics – he’s a horrible human being.

The Washington Post a couple of weeks ago noted the wholly unsurprising fact that it’s hard to find good writers to say friendly things about Donald Trump.

As they discovered during the long campaign season, the nation’s newspapers and major digital news sites — the dreaded mainstream media — are facing a shortage of people able, or more likely willing, to write opinion columns supportive of the president-elect.

Major newspapers, from The Washington Post to the New York Times, have struggled to find and publish pro-Trump columns for months. So have regional ones, such as the Des Moines Register and the Arizona Republic, which has a long history of supporting Republican candidates.

Well of course they have. Trump isn’t just “a Republican” or “a conservative.” He’s a horrible human being, who puts his horribleness on display at all times. That’s a stumbling block.

Regular conservative columnists don’t like him and didn’t support him.

“We struggled to find voices that could advocate for Donald Trump’s ideas,” said James Bennet, the Times’ editorial-page editor. “It was really unusual. It didn’t help that the conservative intelligentsia lined up against him.” But Bennet says Trump’s campaign contributed to the imbalance: “He didn’t have the people around him who were prepared to put together his arguments” for publication.

No shit, Sherlock. He doesn’t have arguments. He has blurts. That’s another reason people thoughtful enough to write columns don’t like him: he has nothing but contempt for thoughtful people, and he’s the very opposite of thoughtful himself. He has such profound contempt for thoughtful people and for thought itself that he avoids both as if they were his kryptonite.

The general lack of Trump-supporting columns, however, puts newspaper editorial editors in an uncomfortable position. Most newspapers try to create a rough balance between left and right opinions on their op-ed pages, which feature staff and guest columnists. The idea has been to reflect a range of viewpoints, even if the newspaper’s “official” position, as expressed in unsigned editorials, tends to go in one direction.

But all that is beside the point. Trump doesn’t stand for right opinions as opposed to left opinions, he stands for bullying and meanness and insults, for pussygrabbing and wall-building and worker-cheating. He’s a bad bad man.

Trump’s relationship with the news media, of course, has been unusually rocky. During the campaign, he demonized journalists, calling them “dishonest,” “disgusting” and “the lowest form of life.”

That’s my point. He demonizes people all over the place. He works up hatreds. He’s a bad man.

Newspaper editors say they’re on the lookout for more such writers. “What happened this year is that many of the people who we count on for conservative commentary — many of whom have generally supported Republican candidates in the past — simply didn’t support Trump,” said Nicholas Goldberg, editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Times. “I certainly believe our op-ed editor ought to be aggressively seeking smart, articulate people who have positive things to say about Trump, who are sympathetic to his point of view, or who are able to explain, support and justify him to our readers.”

But that just isn’t possible. It’s trying to square the circle. It can’t be done. Smart articulate people aren’t going to have positive things to say about Trump because of how appalling he is. He’s not a “normal” conservative politician, he’s a moral monster playing the part of a conservative politician. Intelligent people aren’t going to write columns supporting a moral monster.

Also amusing in Trump: his sweet baby Jesus wishes for us:

#MerryChristmas pic.twitter.com/5GgDmJrGMS

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 25, 2016

Isn’t that heartwarming? He brandishes his tiny fist at us as if he wants to punch us in the face. #MerryChristmas, he explains, festively and piously. #SameToYouDude. #HelloToJesusToo. #ForUntoUsYaddaYadda.

Charles Taylor doesn’t buy the story that’s being pushed, that we “elites” mustn’t judge people who voted for Trump on the grounds that “Trump voters are too disenfranchised or despised or dismissed to be held morally responsible for their choices.”

It’s just that they resent us, the story goes. It’s just that they hate us for looking down on them. We must sympathize with them, for the sake of having a dialogue.

Time was when battered women were told by police or by their priests that they must try not to antagonize their abusive husbands. That is exactly how Americans of color, gay Americans, undocumented immigrants, and women are now being addressed: They’re being told they must respect people who believe they have the right to jail, deport, or beat — if not yet kill — anyone who makes them uncomfortable. Because, of course, unlike the black or brown or queer people on the coasts, those Trump voters are the real America.

The apologists for Donald Trump voters have given their imprimatur to a culture that equates knowledge and expertise with elitism, a culture ignorant of the history of the country it professes to love and contemptuous of the content of its founding documents. Trump said his campaign would prove the experts wrong. He was right. The Trump supporters who in the last few weeks have contributed to the sudden surge in hate crimes, often invoking the name of their candidate, have shown, much more than the experts, they understand exactly what his candidacy was about.

It’s not as if Trump ever made it a secret.

A guy in Florida made some Facebook comment threats against Trump, and got himself arrested.

“I’m just glad Obama didn’t take all our gunz! I see a good use for one now,” Krohn wrote online above a picture of Trump that read, “He’s not my president / He’s an enemy of the state,” agents wrote in court records.

Krohn posted his remarks in a thread of comments related to Trump’s holiday season stay at his Palm Beach home, according to court records.

It was in comments on a post, you see, not a post. They don’t say whether it was his post or not; it would be mildly interesting to know.

Agents said they were able to track Krohn to his home in Pembroke Pines and he was arrested there on Thursday evening. He could face a federal charge of threatening to take the life of the president-elect or inflect bodily harm. The offense carries a maximum punishment of five years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine.

“Krohn became confrontational when asked if he made the statements threatening the PEOTUS [President-elect of the United States] … Krohn declared any statements he made were an expression of his First Amendment rights,” agents wrote in court records.

When he was asked if he made any threats against Trump, agents said he became more confrontational, “began pacing in the yard, and in a loud voice said, ‘Well then, arrest me.’”

They tried to calm him down but failed; they arrested him. The story doesn’t make clear whether they arrested him because he refused to calm down or because he made the threats in the first place.

Agents said the laptop computer Krohn had been using before they arrived was open on an article that someone had posted on Facebook about “a recent harassment incident” involving Trump’s daughter, Ivanka.

It’s not clear what that has to do with anything.

During a brief appearance Friday in federal court in Fort Lauderdale, Krohn told the judge he was scheduled to start a new job Monday morning cleaning cooking equipment at a chain of convenience stores. He said he was divorced, had little or no money, owns a 1998 Lincoln and owes an unspecified amount of child support arrears.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Barry Seltzer ordered Friday that Krohn will remain locked up at least until a bond hearing scheduled for Thursday. The judge appointed the Federal Public Defender’s Office to represent Krohn, after ruling that he could not afford to hire a lawyer.

Krohn has a long history of arrests in Broward County on allegations including stalking, drug and driving offenses. Records show he served two stints in state prison for a drug offense and for driving with a suspended license.

It seems to me the judge could have released him on his own recognizance so that he could have started his new job…but I wasn’t there, so I don’t know.

I get that the Secret Service takes threats seriously, and with our grotesque history they pretty much have to. On the other hand I don’t really get what Krohn’s being “confrontational” when the Secret Service showed up to talk to him about his Facebook comments has to do with the probability that he would carry out his threats or with the need to arrest him.

But much much much more to the point…what I really don’t get is why Donald Trump got away with publicly openly televised-to-the-masses inciting a huge crowd of people to shoot Hillary Clinton. That was not a couple of comments on a Facebook thread, it was something said out in the open standing on a stage addressing thousands of cheering people.

Is Trump looking to purge the State Department of people and policies that promote women’s rights globally? Or is his team just getting acquainted with those people and policies? Hard to say.

President-elect Donald J. Trump’s transition team asked the State Department this week to submit details of programs and jobs aimed at promoting gender equality, rattling State Department employees concerned that the incoming administration will roll back a cornerstone project of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The one-page memo, a copy of which was provided to The New York Times on Thursday, directed employees to outline “existing programs and activities to promote gender equality, such as ending gender-based violence, promoting women’s participation in economic and political spheres, entrepreneurship, etc.”

The US Agency for International Development got the same memo.

You can’t tell whether they’re looking to squelch or looking to continue.

The wording of the memo is neutral and does not hint at any policy change. Nevertheless, some State Department employees took note of the reference to “gender-related staffing,” which they said could also refer to programs focused on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues, though the memo did not refer specifically to them.

The memo is reminiscent of one the transition team sent recently to the Energy Department, which asked for the names of people who had worked on climate change or attended global climate talks organized by the United Nations within the past five years. That more detailed questionnaire, on the heels of Mr. Trump’s appointment of a climate change denialist to head the Environmental Protection Agency, sowed fears that the Trump administration would purge anyone involved in trying to curb the effects of climate change.

So that could be what they’re doing now, too. “Tell us what you’ve been doing so that we can stamp it all out.”

Transition officials are said to be concerned about how many senior jobs in the department will be vacated by departing political appointees. They asked whether there would be anyone to show the secretary of state-designate, Rex W. Tillerson, around his office.

Ooh, sarcasm.

Mr. Kerry has tended to champion efforts to counter climate change while at the State Department, but Mrs. Clinton made gender-related issues a leitmotif of her tenure.

In her first year, she created the position of ambassador at large for global women’s issues, appointing Melanne Verveer, who had been her chief of staff when she was first lady. Mr. Kerry kept the post, which is currently held by Catherine M. Russell, a former chief of staff to Jill Biden, the wife of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Some at the department now worry it will be eliminated.

He might get rid of it just because it was Clinton’s project. Then again he may have dropped his attacks on Clinton now that they’re no longer needed for campaign purposes. He seems to hold some grudges forever while blithely dropping others as if they’d been a joke all along.

Although Mr. Trump has a record of derogatory comments about women, it is not clear why he would want to roll back the department’s work in this area.

Unless it’s because it’s too closely associated with Clinton.

A senior State Department official said it was possible that the memo was simple fact-finding. But in the current political environment, and given the language Mr. Trump used in the campaign, he said, people were reading the most malign implications into it.

“I can’t believe any of this has been shared with the secretary-designate, because Exxon under Tillerson has been extremely supportive of women’s issues,” Ms. Verveer said. “It’s just really hard to fathom.”

Well, that’s Trump – he likes to surprise us.

Trump isn’t so much filling cabinet posts as he is selecting beauty pageant contestants. It’s what he knows.

Donald Trump believes that those who aspire to the most visible spots in his administration should not just be able to do the job, but also look the part.

That’s ironic, isn’t it, because he so thoroughly doesn’t look the part himself. The brassy hair falling down over the jacket collar? The necktie practically reaching his crotch? The mystifying, ludicrous, distracting comb-over? The terrible dye-job? The orange skin? The constant blowfish face? The stupid puppety gestures? The scowls and pouts? He doesn’t look the part. He looks like The Joker.

But that’s not the point, of course. The point is…he should have better criteria.

“He likes people who present themselves very well, and he’s very impressed when somebody has a background of being good on television because he thinks it’s a very important medium for public policy,” said Chris Ruddy, chief executive of Newsmax Media and a longtime friend of Trump. “Don’t forget, he’s a showbiz guy. He was at the pinnacle of showbiz, and he thinks about showbiz. He sees this as a business that relates to the public.”

Well…yes and no. He wasn’t really at “the pinnacle of showbiz” – he was at the pinnacle of getting people to watch a particular “reality” tv show. He appealed to some people’s taste for watching a bully bullying people. That doesn’t necessarily transfer to show business as a whole.

Battling through the GOP primary, Trump frequently made barbed comments about his opponents’ appearances.

Those kind of skin-deep standards helped make Trump a success as a reality-television star and international brand, but his critics say they are worrisome in the Oval Office.

His personnel choices show signs of being “cast for the TV show of his administration,” said Bob Killian, founder of a branding agency based in Chicago. “They are all perfectly coifed people who look like they belong on a set.”

But Trump spokesman Miller insisted that some qualifications do not lend themselves to lines on a résumé: “People who are being selected for these key positions need to be able to hold their own, need to be doers and not wallflowers, and need to convey a clear sense of purpose and commitment.”

But all this holding and doing and commitment isn’t valuable in itself. It depends on the content of what they’re doing. Style matters, but not more than substance.

All of which has led him to some unconventional picks. If confirmed by the Senate, ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson will become the first secretary of state in modern history to come to the job with no experience in government. Then again, Trump himself has none.

Yes exactly, and that’s a bad thing.

Trump’s closest aides have come to accept that he is likely to rule out candidates if they are not attractive or not do not match his image of the type of person who should hold a certain job.

“That’s the language he speaks. He’s very aesthetic,” said one person familiar with the transition team’s internal deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “You can come with somebody who is very much qualified for the job, but if they don’t look the part, they’re not going anywhere.”

Several of Trump’s associates said they thought that John R. Bolton’s brush-like mustache was one of the factors that handicapped the bombastic former United Nations ambassador in the sweepstakes for secretary of state.

That’s hilarious. He dislikes Bolton’s mustache, but he likes his own hair??

Oh that whole drain the swamp thing? He didn’t mean it. Or he did, but now he’s bored with it. Or both. It was “cute” but now it’s over – which is just as well, since the swamp is full of mastodons.

Newt Gingrich said Wednesday that Donald Trump’s “drain the swamp” catch phrase was “cute” but that the President-elect now disclaims it.

During an interview with NPR’s “Morning Edition” Wednesday, host Rachel Martin asked if the former House speaker had been “working in the swamp, to use Donald Trump’s language.”

“I’m told he now just disclaims that. He now says it was cute, but he doesn’t want to use it anymore,” Gingrich said, referring to the phrase. “I’d written what I thought was a very cute tweet about ‘the alligators are complaining,’ and somebody wrote back and said they were tired of hearing this stuff.”

We were told during the campaign that there was a lot of bad stuff from Trump’s reality tv show The Apprentice, but also that nobody wanted to make it public because contracts and also because Trump is evil. Now we’re being told it again, with maybe a little bit more detail.

The actor Tom Arnold has claimed to have video of Donald Trump using racist language, obscenities and denigrating his own son in outtakes of The Apprentice.

[That is: using racist language and obscenities, and denigrating his own son]

“I have the outtakes to The Apprentice where he says every bad thing ever, every offensive, racist thing ever. It was him sitting in that chair saying the N-word, saying the C-word, calling his son a retard, just being so mean to his own children,” Arnold told the Seattle-based radio station KIRO.

The actor and comedian said a contact from the reality TV show passed him the material before last month’s election, but he did not release it because of a confidentiality clause and the expectation that Trump would lose.

Well, you know, the Access Hollywood tape didn’t keep him from being elected, so why think this would have? Apparently nothing is enough. Apparently enough people in the right states have no problem with a guy who talks about niggers and cunts and bullies his own children that there is nothing that would turn them off him.

Arnold said that the Sunday before the election Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Hollywood agent asked him to release the material on behalf of Hillary Clinton.

“I get a call from Arnold’s CAA agent, sitting next to Hillary Clinton. They said, ‘I need you to release him saying the N-word.’ I said, ‘Well, now these people – two editors and an associate producer – are scared to death. They’re scared of his people, they’re scared of they’ll never work again, there’s a $5m confidentiality agreement.”

The Guardian points out that the claims haven’t been verified.

The president-elect presented NBC’s The Apprentice from 2004-2015 before running for the White House. Rumours of damaging outtakes surfaced after outtakes from another show, Access Hollywood, leaked in October. They revealed Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women.

Bill Pruitt, a producer on the first two seasons of The Apprentice, tweeted that there were “far worse” behind-the-scenes tapes of Trump on the programme.

As a producer on seasons 1 & 2 of #theapprentice I assure you: when it comes to the #trumptapes there are far worse. #justthebegininng

— Bill Pruitt (@billpruitt) October 8, 2016

Meanwhile we’re stuck with the worst man in the world about to have a lot of executive power.

The actor said he believes the material will emerge publicly in part because Mark Cuban, a tycoon who has clashed with Trump, has offered to employ anyone who releases the tapes.

The actor said he doubted the material would have altered the election outcome. “I think if the people that like him saw him saying the N-word, he’s sitting matter-of-factly in front of, there has to be 30 people there, and he’s matter-of-factly saying all of this stuff. So I think they would have liked him more, the people. For being politically incorrect,” he said.

I think so too. I think there’s no limit. It makes me not like living here.

It takes only seven minutes to turn Alec Baldwin into Donald Trump.

A dusting of Clinique Stay-Matte powder in honey. A hand-stitched wig. Eyebrows glued up into tiny peaks. The rest is left to Alec Baldwin: the puckered lips, a studied lumbering gait and a wariness of humanizing a man he reviles.

The transformation of Mr. Baldwin, an outspoken liberal, into the president-elect, Donald J. Trump, for his running parody on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” entails a tangerine hairpiece and a tricky tightrope walk. It means balancing a veteran actor’s determination to subsume his identity into a character, even as, in his offstage life, he is firm in his belief that the man about to take office is a dangerous figure.

The key to a convincing Mr. Trump, the actor said, are “puffs” — his word for the pregnant pauses in the president-elect’s speech. “I see a guy who seems to pause and dig for the more precise and better language he wants to use, and never finds it.”

Haaaaaaaa exactly. He never finds it because he never had it. He knows how to “make deals” but not how to think or be eloquent.

“It’s the same dish — it’s a grilled-cheese sandwich rhetorically over and over again.”

See Trump couldn’t make that joke or that metaphor, because he doesn’t have that kind of intelligence. There are other kinds of intelligence, certainly, but he doesn’t have those either. He has cunning, but that’s all.

…@realDonaldTrump

Release your tax returns and I'll stop.
Ha

— AlecBaldwin(HABF) (@AlecBaldwin) December 4, 2016

His Trump is as much censure as impersonation. He does not write the sketches. He is paid $1,400 for each appearance on the show, he said.

“I’m not interested much by what’s inside him,” he said, but in how he moves and takes up space. Mr. Baldwin then amplifies the gestures, and distills them. An emphatic wave becomes a goofy “wax-on, wax-off” movement, he said, the simple hand motion reducing a candidate to an essence: pitchman.

There isn’t anything inside him. I’ve seldom seen anyone so empty in my life.

The Trumps still haven’t grasped the basic norm that they’re not supposed to use the presidency as an excellent chance to make money by selling access to their wonderful selves.

Last week, Eric Trump tried auctioning a coffee date with his sister Ivanka to raise money for a children’s hospital. Now, Eric and Donald Trump Jr. are named as part of a nonprofit venture that offered the chance to rub elbows with their father during inauguration weekend and go hunting or fishing with the sons in exchange for $1 million donations that would go to conservation charities.

It’s a wonder they haven’t set up a tent on 57th street selling lemonade and/or a chance to be grabbed by their daddy.

The two previous presidents, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, expressly forbade immediate family members from such fundraising activities to avoid the appearance of selling access.

“We kept it simple. We did not allow the first family to be auctioned off, which is what is happening here,” said Norman Eisen, who served as White House chief ethics counselor as Obama took office in 2009.

Richard Painter, who filled a similar role for Bush, said the White House “strongly discouraged” the president, his family and top aides from fundraising for charities, and avoided altogether charity fundraising that came with any access to those people.

Both said that while there’s nothing explicitly illegal about the charity fundraising, it diverges from the best practices of previous White House administrations.

But the Trumps just don’t have that kind of finely-tuned perception of the sleazy. The sleazy is their oxygen, their soft pillow at night, their warm bath after a walk in the snow.

Painter and Eisen — the former White House counselors, who have been critical of Trump’s business entanglements and failure to publicly address them so far — said part of the problem with these charity fundraisers is that the president-elect has yet to explain which of his family members will be involved in the government and which will stay at the helm of his international business empire.

They praised the Trumps for making quick adjustments after seeing bad press about the fundraising but said that doesn’t eliminate the need for Trump to develop and follow hard-and-fast rules as previous presidents did.

“How many times are they going to have to stub their toe?” Eisen said. “If you continually have to reverse course and improvise, what is the point at which it becomes a sign of recklessness instead of willingness to do good will?”

I know! I know the answer! We’ve passed that point.

Another item to be filed under “Terrifying” –

[Part of me wants to turn my back, ignore the whole thing, maybe revert to being a literature nerd…but the rest of me feels the need to know the truth, if only for planning reasons. Stockpile? Find out the lethal dose of something? These questions don’t answer themselves.]

The White House is struggling to prevent a crippling exodus of foreign policy staffers eager to leave before the arrival of the Trump administration, according to current and former officials.

The top level officials in the National Security Council (NSC) are political appointees who have to submit resignations and leave in a normal transition. The rest of the 400 NSC staff are career civil servants on secondment from other departments. An unusual number of these more junior officials are now looking to depart.

The reasons are obvious. It’s not because it’s Republicans, it’s because it’s people who are programmatically opposed to expertise and knowledge and basic competence. It’s people who skip their security briefings. Not that the Guardian says that; I’m assuming it – but it’s not usual for civil servants to leave when an administration changes, so the explanation has to be something other than “wrong party.” The wild disregard for relevant expertise is the one that jumps out at me. In what part of government do you really not want wild-eyed amateurs in charge? National security.

Many are concerned by a proliferation of reports about the incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn. On Wednesday the Washington Post reported that Flynn had improperly shared classified information with foreign military officers. On the same day, CNN reported that the former Defense Intelligence Agency chief had this week deleted a tweet he had sent out a few days before the election that linked to a fake news story suggesting Hillary Clinton took part in crimes against children.

Flynn fits the wild-eyed amateur pattern. He’s a military guy, not an intelligence expert, and he’s reckless as fuck. It’s amateurish to put him in that job and he’ll be an amateur in that job.

“Career people are looking get out and go back to their agencies and pressure is being put on them to get them to stay. There is concern there will be a half-empty NSC by the time the new administration arrives, which no one wants,” said one official.

The official added that the “landing team” sent to the NSC – Trump representatives who are supposed to prepare for the handover to Trump appointees – have been focused on issues of process and how the office functions, rather than issues of substance involving an explanation of current national security threats and the state of the world the new administration will inherit.

There it is again – they don’t know the subject and they don’t care that they don’t know the subject. They’re anti-knowledge pro-business hacks, and they don’t belong there.

The Trump transition team in New York did not respond to a request for comment. The current NSC spokesman, Ned Price, said in an email: “The administration has undertaken its national security transition planning with the utmost rigour and seriousness in order to effect the most seamless and responsible transition.”

Price added: “We have been working since this spring to assemble a broad variety of transition material focused on critical national security challenges as well as NSC organizational issues and the NSC-led interagency policy process. The NSC staff also is offering to the incoming team in-person briefings and discussions with current NSC leadership and staff, and is coordinating statutorily required interagency homeland security exercises that will include both incoming and outgoing national security leadership from departments and agencies, as well as senior career public servants who will provide continuity through the transition.”

You know who Trump’s Ned Price will be? Fox News commentator Monica Crowley.

Yes, really.

It is unclear how much contact there is between the embryonic policy teams in New York and the landing teams in Washington, however.

“Most of the folks I have talked to at the three agencies – DoD (Department of Defense), state and White House – claim they have little or no interaction with these teams to date,” Julianne Smith, a former deputy national security adviser to Vice-president Joe Biden, said.

“There are very important substantive handoffs that need to be occurring that are in fact not happening. That is creating added concern about the career civil servants who are in these agencies, wondering what they are in for.”

I think it’s pretty clear what they’re in for. They’re in for being bossed by a group of people who have no clue what they’re doing and don’t care that they have no clue.

Staffers at the State Department are apparently hoping for the best.

Reports from the state department suggest most of its staff are taking a wait-and-see approach to the prospect of having the ExxonMobil oil chief executive, Rex Tillerson, at the helm. On Thursday, most of the Democrats on the House foreign affairs committee wrote to the current secretary of state, John Kerry, offering his staff protection against a “witch-hunt” by the new administration against civil servants who worked on Obama policies Trump wants to reverse. The letter was sent after the energy department refused to hand over to the Trump transition team a list of names of staffers who had worked on climate change.

Drip drip drip, the poison enters and spreads.

So another feature of Trump world is that he tweets shit that’s wrong, and that he would know was wrong if he took the security briefings he’s supposed to take. But it’s no biggy, because it’s only China.

Donald Trump launched his Twitter campaign against China’s seizure of a U.S. Navy research submersible last week to great fanfare ― and, as it turns out, hours after the crisis had already been defused.

It’s unclear whether the president-elect or his aides knew that fact ― it would have been included in the intelligence briefing available to him each morning ― before he sent out his misspelled missive of outrage at 7:30 a.m. Saturday.

“China steals United States Navy research drone in international waters ― rips it out of water and takes it to China in unpresidented act,” Trump wrote. He deleted that version and replaced it with “unprecedented” spelled correctly at 8:57 a.m.

But even his first version came four hours after U.S. Ambassador to China Max Baucus was informed that the Chinese navy had agreed to return the “underwater unmanned vehicle.”

To be fair – the fact that China agreed to give it back didn’t alter the fact that China had taken it.

But all the same – do we want a president who tweets smack about other countries right after he rolls out of bed in the morning and without talking to anyone? Like, the State Department or intelligence officials? No, we don’t.

Trump transition team spokesman Jason Miller was quick to take credit for his boss when news broke that China had agreed to return the device. At 11:54 a.m., he tweeted: “@realdonaldtrump gets it done,” and attached a link to an article in The Hill about the resolution of the incident. At 6:52 p.m., Miller tweeted a link to another story in The Hill, this one about his earlier tweet taking credit for Trump’s initial tweet.

Seriously? They claimed Trump had anything to do with it?

The encounter’s resolution, though, resulted not from Trump’s 140-character snippets of anger, but days of traditional diplomacy. The Chinese vessel had taken the submersible on Thursday just as the USNS Bowditch was preparing to retrieve it about 60 miles northwest of the Philippines’ Subic Bay in the South China Sea.

Baucus, a former Democratic senator from Montana, lodged his first protest that day, as did U.S. military representatives to their Chinese counterparts. Late Saturday afternoon Beijing time ― pre-dawn 3:30 a.m. in Washington ― Baucus relayed word that China had agreed to return the device, according to the State Department. That handover took place Tuesday, near the same location as the original incident.

I wonder how many wars we’ll be involved in by, say, mid-February.