Tag: Trump

  • Some choice words

    The Baltimore Sun editorial board:

    In case anyone missed it, the president of the United States had some choice words to describe Maryland’s 7th congressional district on Saturday morning. Here are the key phrases: “no human being would want to live there,” it is a “very dangerous & filthy place,” “Worst in the USA” and, our personal favorite: It is a “rat and rodent infested mess.” He wasn’t really speaking of the 7th as a whole. He failed to mention Ellicott City, for example, or Baldwin or Monkton or Prettyboy, all of which are contained in the sprawling yet oddly-shaped district that runs from western Howard County to southern Harford County. No, Donald Trump’s wrath was directed at Baltimore and specifically at Rep. Elijah Cummings, the 68-year-old son of a former South Carolina sharecropper who has represented the district in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1996.

    Because why? Silly question. Cummings is not a Republican and he’s not white and he’s not an admirer of Donald Trump.

    In pointing to the 7th, the president wasn’t hoping his supporters would recognize landmarks like Johns Hopkins Hospital, perhaps the nation’s leading medical center. He wasn’t conjuring images of the U.S. Social Security Administration, where they write the checks that so many retired and disabled Americans depend upon. It wasn’t about the beauty of the Inner Harbor or the proud history of Fort McHenry. And it surely wasn’t about the economic standing of a district where the median income is actually above the national average. No, he was returning to an old standby of attacking an African American lawmaker from a majority black district on the most emotional and bigoted of arguments.

    One word: “infested.” It’s a tell.

    Finally, while we would not sink to name-calling in the Trumpian manner — or ruefully point out that he failed to spell the congressman’s name correctly (it’s Cummings, not Cumming) — we would tell the most dishonest man to ever occupy the Oval Office, the mocker of war heroes, the gleeful grabber of women’s private parts, the serial bankrupter of businesses, the useful idiot of Vladimir Putin and the guy who insisted there are “good people” among murderous neo-Nazis, that he’s still not fooling most Americans into believing he’s even slightly competent in his current post. Or that he possesses a scintilla of integrity. Better to have some vermin living in your neighborhood than to be one.

    We’re infested with Trumps.

  • Who is the brutal bully here?

    More overt noisy shameless bullying racism from the monstrous president of the US.

    Straight from Fox to his rotting brain to his thumbs.

    Did you catch the “no human being” part? Geddit?

    Trump’s tweets came about an hour after a Saturday morning Fox and Friends segment where Kimberly Klacik, a black Republican strategist, talked about conditions in the Maryland district.

    She called it the “most dangerous district in America” and claimed that “living conditions at the border are better than most areas in his district” while showing footage of abandoned homes.

    “The President saw my work. This just made my day 😊,” Klacik tweeted following Trump’s comments.

    Smiley smiley smiley happy face smiley. We’re whipping up racism via a trashy right-wing tv network and the president is openly racist smiley smiley happy face smiley.

    “Donald Trump has tweeted more than 43,000 times. He’s insulted thousands of people, many different types of people, but when he tweets about infestation it’s about black and brown people,” Victor Blackwell, the co-host of CNN’s New Day Weekend said on air Saturday responding to Trump’s tweets.

    “The president says about Congressman Cummings’ district that no human would want to live there,” Blackwell added. “You know who did Mr. President? I did. From the day I was brought home from the hospital to the day I left for college and a lot of people I care about still do. There are challenges, no doubt, but people are proud of their community. I don’t want to sound self-righteous, but people get up and go to work there, they care for their families there, they love their children who pledge allegiance to the flag just like people who live in districts of congressmen who support you, sir. They are Americans too.”

    I hope Trump’s head explodes. Today: right now. I hope he goes to kick his golf opponent’s ball into the rough and before he can finish the move his head explodes, boom, and he’s gone. This shit needs to stop right this second.

  • 45 es un titere

    This is a good photo. It’s reminiscent of the yelling at the kid mowing the lawn one.

    Now what’s this about the seal?

    Speaking on Tuesday at a student activist conference hosted by the conservative advocacy organization Turning Point USA, President Donald Trump walked onstage in front of a presidential seal that, upon closer examination, appears to have been altered to include symbols representing Russia and golf.

    For one thing the eagle has two heads, which the more usual seal does not. Also it’s holding a bunch of golf clubs instead of arrows.

    Additionally, instead of “e pluribus unum,” the scroll above the eagle appears to say “45 es un titere,” which appears to translate from Spanish to mean “45 is a puppet.”

    No big macs? No two scoops of ice cream? No hair flying in all directions? No pointing and pinching?

    He got off lightly.

  • That nobody has ever seen before

    Trump gave a speech today. He gave a speech to young people. He told them he has absolute power.

    President Donald Trump was candid about the unlimited power he believes he has during a speech at the Turning Point USA Teen Student Action Summit on Tuesday.

    After reasserting that investigations into Russia’s election meddling found “no collusion,” Trump claimed, “Then I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as President.”

    He’s been saying variations on that all along. This is not the first time that childish “whatever I want” has come out of his corrupted mouth. I’ve posted about it before.

    In recent months, the president has ramped up his rhetoric on the topic, signaling both his misunderstanding of the executive powers outlined in the Constitution as well as his intent to abuse them. Tuesday’s remarks were just the latest example.

    What I’m saying. He has no clue, and he loves to brag about his fantasy powers.

    Last month, in an exclusive interview with ABC News, the president defended his right to fire Robert Mueller if he wanted to. “Article II allows me to do whatever I want,” he explained. “Article II would have allowed me to fire him.”

    Just two weeks ago, when speaking to reporters, Trump reiterated that there was “no obstruction,” insisting falsely that an investigation cannot be obstructed if it turns out there was “no crime” committed.

    “Also, take a look at one other thing,” he said. “It’s a thing called Article II. Nobody ever mentions Article II. It gives me all of these rights at a level that nobody has ever seen before. We don’t even talk about Article II.”

    But if it’s in the Constitution how can it be at a level that nobody has ever seen before? The Constitution isn’t a new thing that nobody has ever seen before.

  • Not very smart

    Trump as adult and reasonable as ever.

    Six hours ago, ranting and raving about the Federal Reserve, followed by ranting and raving about the Washington Post, which brought him to the scary media in general.

    Where exactly would Donald Trump be without the media? Nowhere. He’d be a Queens landlord.

    #TrumpsTerrifiedOfMueller is trending.

    Finally the cherry on top.

    Who is out of control, bonkers, indifferent to what is right or wrong, sick, phony, inexperienced, not very smart, bad for our country?

  • Who is weak and insecure?

    On it goes.

    President Donald Trump on Sunday again ripped into four Democratic congresswomen of color who’ve been the target of his sustained attacks, calling them “weak” and “insecure” minutes after blasting a Washington Post story on the fallout over his initial comments about the members a week earlier.

    “I don’t believe the four Congresswomen are capable of loving our Country,” Trump tweeted. “They should apologize to America (and Israel) for the horrible (hateful) things they have said. They are destroying the Democrat Party, but are weak & insecure people who can never destroy our great Nation!”

    The Washington Post reported Saturday that Trump’s own top aides did not think he fully understood what he had done in posting racist rhetoric about the four congresswoman of color, nicknamed “The Squad,” on Twitter before a golf outing last weekend.

    Well, that’s an easy call, because Trump doesn’t fully understand anything. He’s dimwitted and ignorant and uncomprehending to a degree that’s difficult to take in.

    The Post report, which was based on interviews “with 26 White House aides, advisers, lawmakers and others involved in the response,” said Trump had posted the tweets after watching an episode of “Fox & Friends.” He wanted to elevate the four congresswomen, telling his advisers he thought they were good foils, the newspaper reported.

    Elevate them as targets, that is. Elevate them the better to throw insults and threats at them. Elevate them so that others will throw insults and threats at them too; elevate them to put them in danger.

    Trump’s tweets were widely condemned, with Democrats and a small number of Republicans saying they were racist. The Post reported that Trump “acted alone — impulsively following his gut to the dark side of American politics, and now the country would have to pick up the pieces.” Aides and allies, the report said, “would work behind the scenes to try to fix the mess without any public admission of error because that was not the Trump way.”

    Disgusting cowards and quislings. They should all resign.

    House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings, D-Md., said the president’s comments have brought up “the same feelings that I had over 50 some years ago” as a civil rights activist.

    “And it’s very, very painful,” Cummings told ABC’s “This Week.” “I just don’t think this is becoming of the president of the United States of America, the leader of the entire world.”

    The four congresswomen, Cummings added, were “some of the most brilliant young people I have met.”

    “These are folks and women who love their country, and they work very hard and they want to move us toward a more perfect union that our founding fathers talked about,” Cummings said. “When you disagree with the president, suddenly you’re a bad person. Our allegiance is not to the president; our allegiance is to the Constitution of the United States of America and the American people.”

    Asked if Trump is a racist, Cummings said, “Yes, no doubt about it,” adding, “I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt.”

    Let’s not anybody try to do that any more ever again.

  • Garbahj

    Trump took time out from his busy schedule of yawning in the face of human rights advocates and begging the Swedish PM to let his famous friend’s famous friend out of jail without trial to invent new lies about Those Women.

    After spending much of the week defending his racist assertion that four Democratic congresswomen of color should “go back” to the countries “from which they came,” President Donald Trump on Friday falsely stated that they had used the anti-Semitic slur “evil Jews” and have “call[ed] the people of our country and our country ‘garbage.’ ”

    None of the congresswomen in question—Reps. Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib—have ever been reported to say either of those things.

    “[It’s] horrible what they’ve said about our country, these congresswomen,” Trump told reporters outside of the White House. “They can’t call our country and our people ‘garbage.’ They can’t be anti-Semitic. They can’t talk about ‘evil Jews,’ which is what they say. ‘Evil Jews.’ ”

    Where do they say it? In Trump’s syphilitic imagination. Totally counts.

    Trump repeated a version of his other false claim, that the four congresswomen had called “our country and our people ‘garbage,’ ” at least six times during his talk with reporters on Friday. He had already used that line at a rally in North Carolina on Wednesday, the same rally at which his crowd started chanting “send her back” after a reference to Omar.

    Trump does set a high standard though.

    Trump himself has used the word “garbage” to criticize aspects of the U.S.—in 2014, he tweeted, of President Barack Obama, “Everything he touches turns to garbage!”

    If you say so.

    Image result for garbage trump

    Dario Banegas

  • Justice reform

    On the one hand Trump slumps in bored indifference as Nadia Murad tells him about the plight of the Yazidis, and on the other hand…

    The next day –

    Who???????????

    TIME fills us in:

    A$AP Rocky, whose original name is Rakim Mayers, will be held for one more week in pre-trial detention in a Swedish jail after he was involved in a fight that broke out in downtown Stockholm earlier this month, the Associated Press reported. The court is expected to make a ruling on Friday.

    I bet Trump would just love it if NYC cops arrested a Swedish man – shall we say a Swedish Muslim man? – after he was involved in a fight outside Trump Tower, and the Swedish PM called him up to complain about it.

    A video clip published by a Swedish newspaper appears to show the rapper violently throwing a man to the ground. Another video posted on celebrity news site TMZ shows A$AP Rocky and others punching a man on the floor.

    A defense attorney representing A$AP Rocky has said the incident was an act of self-defense, the Associated Press reported. The rapper also posted a video on his Instagram that appears to show two men trailing him and one of them hitting his security person with his headphones.

    …

    The rapper’s detention had raised concerns about poor conditions in the Swedish jail where he was staying, including unclean water, according to a report from TMZ.

    Oh really? Really? Bad conditions in the jail? Unclean water? How shocking! Sounds almost as bad as conditions in the cages for asylum seekers on the US southern border.

    Mind you, the chief of the Swedish detention center denies it.

    The way the rapper has been treated is “standard, especially when you’re a foreign citizen and there’s a flight risk” and “you are suspected on reasonable grounds” said Dennis Martinsson, a senior law lecturer at Stockholm University, who has frequently spoken about the case for Swedish media.

    “There have been a lot of misunderstandings about how the justice system works in Sweden,” Martinsson said. “I assume that people think we have a bail system and he was denied bail. We don’t have that system, so the only option is detention.”

    But he’s a friend of Kanye West’s, who is a friend of Donald “Yazidi who?” Trump, so that changes everything. Doesn’t it?

    Fortunately none of this has anything to do with celebrity and privilege and influence and string-pulling.

    Ahhhhh “justice reform” – yes that’s what this is, definitely. Let brown asylum seekers in Texas die in custody, but definitely reform all the justice when it comes to people with celebrity friends.

  • Where are they now?

    This happened today.

    It’s disgusting to watch. He turns his back on her, he slumps there looking bored and stupid, he asks her where her family are now when she just told him Isis killed them all. Then he gets perky when he asks her about the fucking Nobel Prize.

    More on Nadia Murad:

    Although Murad, 26, gave the president a very terse explanation of her activism, Murad did not convey the horrors or bravery of the journey that earned her the prestigious award: After ISIS kidnapped her and 6,500 Yazidi women and children, Murad became a sex slave who was raped on a daily basis. She escaped from ISIS in November 2014, and has since made it her mission to lobby world leaders to recognize — and condemn — how sexual assault and rape are used as weapons of war around the world, and to fight for the safety of the Yazidi.

    A recent documentary by RYOT (which shares parent company Verizon Media with Yahoo), On Her Shoulders, follows Murad’s tireless work to bring “ISIS before the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.” The activist was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018, along with Congolese doctor Denis Mukwege, becoming the first Iraqi person and the second-youngest honoree to take home the prestigious award.

    Trump doesn’t care about all that, he just wants pointers on how to get a Nobel Prize. (If he wants to go spend several years being held captive by Islamist fighters and being raped by them repeatedly, I definitely think he should jump at the chance.)

    https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1152204685845106689

    Very much that.

    I’ve never seen such an emotionally and mentally vacant human being in my life.

  • Watch for the nod

    Trump is pretending to disavow the “Send her back!” chanting at his Nürnberg rally Wednesday, and the media are helping him, but the disavowal is absurd. He stood there smirking while the MAGA hats chanted.

    Trump attempted to distance himself from the racist chant on Thursday, saying “I wasn’t happy with that message that they gave last night.”

    “It was quite a chant, and I felt a little bit badly about it. But I will say this, I did — and I started speaking very quickly. But it started up rather fast,” the president added.

    However, as NPR’s Tamara Keith noted, “in reality, Trump stood there for 13 seconds as the chant continued, waiting for it to die down before he resumed his remarks.”

    Stood there and smirked.

    Watch it again.

    Not only does he smirk, he also gives a little nod as the chanting gets going. It starts while he’s still talking, then he completes his sentence and gives a little nod as the chant gets louder. Like hell he disavows it.

    Vox reports that in fact a member of his family prepped the audience to chant before the official start of the rally.

    Trump’s ire is laser-focused on the lawmakers’ purported un-Americanness for inadequately loving the country in which they were born or, in Omar’s case, emigrated to. In fact, before the rally in North Carolina began, Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump led the crowd in a call-and-response chant, saying, “If you don’t love our country, the president said it, you can…” to which the crowd responded, “Leave.”

    But he disavowed it later? Give me a break.

  • Where we are now

    Image result for this is klan country love it or leave it

  • Condemnations waste their sweetness on the desert air

    Condemnation was swift. Too bad it won’t stop him.

    Democrats rushed to condemn Donald Trump after his supporters erupted into chants of “send her back” at the mention of Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar, one of the targets of the president’s recent racist tweets.

    The Vermont senator Bernie Sanders was one of the first to offer his support to Omar following the chants at the Trump rally in North Carolina on Wednesday night, accusing the president of “stoking the most despicable and disturbing currents in our society” and called him the “most dangerous president in the history of our country”.

    Dangerous and destructive. This shit he’s stoking isn’t going to go away even if he vanishes in a puff of smoke right this minute.

    Republican reaction to the moment in Wednesday night’s rally has been much less robust, with only a handful chiming in.

    The former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld said he challenged “every Republican to watch Donald Trump’s rally last night, complete with chants of ‘Send her back’, and ask if that is the Party of Lincoln and Reagan we signed up for”.

    Reagan? It’s not all that far from Reagan. Remember Bitberg?

    The North Carolina congressman Mark Walker said he “struggled” with the “send her back” chant, downplaying the outburst by calling it “brief”. Walker continued: “Her history, words & actions reveal her great disdain for both America & Israel. That should be our focus and not phrasing that’s painful to our friends in the minority communities.”

    So that’s an endorsement of Trump’s racist incitement then.

    Going after the four Democratic congresswomen one by one, a combative Trump turned his campaign rally into an extended dissection of the liberal views of the women of color, deriding them for what he painted as extreme positions and suggesting they just get out.

    “Tonight I have a suggestion for the hate-filled extremists who are constantly trying to tear our country down,” Trump told the crowd in North Carolina, a swing state he won in 2016 and wants to claim again in 2020. “They never have anything good to say. That’s why I say: ‘Hey if you don’t like it, let ’em leave, let ’em leave.’”

    He’s in his happy place. He loves doing this. He’ll never stop.

  • The scene drew reactions of shock and horror

    So we’re going for the full Nuremberg now. We knew he was planning to, but it still comes as a shock to see how far he will go.

    Goaded on by the president, a crowd at a Donald Trump rally on Wednesday night chanted “send her back! send her back!” in reference to Ilhan Omar, a US congresswoman who arrived almost 30 years ago as a child refugee in the United States.

    Trump used the 2020 campaign rally in Greenville, North Carolina, to attack Omar and three other Democratic congresswomen – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan – calling them “hate-filled extremists”.

    Which is deeply ironic given how accurately that describes him.

    The House voted to condemn his venomous “go back” tweets on Tuesday, so naturally on Wednesday he piled on the malevolent racist bullying and incitement, in front of a crowd and a host of tv cameras. This is where we are now.

    “Let ’em leave,” Trump said of the members of Congress. “They’re always telling us how to run it, how to do this, how to do that. You know what? If they don’t love it, tell ’em to leave it.”

    He’s always telling us how to run it, how to do this, how to do that. He hates most of us. He could leave it.

    Trump’s speech in North Carolina also included a professed exasperation with the fact that Ocasio-Cortez’s name is hyphenated.

    “No, no: I don’t have time to go with three different names,” Trump said. “We’ll call her Cortez. Too much time. Takes too much time.”

    The scene drew reactions of shock and horror from across the political spectrum. “The bigoted mob chanting ‘send her back’ tonight is significant,” tweeted Walter Shaub, a former director of the US office of government ethics under Barack Obama.

    “When you outdo [Richard] Nixon in repulsiveness, you’ve gone a long way,” said commentator David Gergen on CNN, a veteran of the Nixon and other Republican administrations.

    “‘SEND HER BACK, SEND HER BACK,’ is ugly. It’s ignorant. It’s dangerous,” tweeted Joe Walsh, the conservative radio host and former Republican congressman. “And it’s un-American. It’s flat out bigotry. And every Republican should condemn this bigotry immediately. Stop this now.”

    But not every Republican will; we’ve already seen that. Most of the Republicans in Congress won’t.

    Nothing will stop him. Not the burning shame, not public opprobrium, not international disgust, nothing.

  • ALCAiDA

    He writes it down. He thinks it’s so good that he writes it down and consults it while he babbles.

    “It’s so SAD” – remember that – so SAD – remember to say SAD louder and angrier.

  • It doesn’t concern him

    Trump has been using his words and his voice and his powerful eloquence just now to explain why The Enemy Women in Congress should get out.

    There’s applause in this one when he says “If you’re not happy you can leave.”

  • True to provocative form

    First the racist outburst, then the racist outburst responding to condemnation of racist outburst #1. This is the cycle we’re stuck in until this disease of a man either drops dead or is removed from office.

    In the face of international condemnation – but very little comment from his own party – Donald Trump returned to the offensive against four Democratic congresswoman he targeted with racial invective on Sunday.

    True to provocative form, the president accused the Democrats of “spewing” “racist hatred” – precisely the offence of which he has been widely accused.

    Well, “provocative form” dignifies it too much. It’s form on the playground – “No you’re the poopyhead.” It’s form among belligerent narcissistic out of control people. It’s form among bullies and abusers.

    In a tweet early on Monday, the president wrote: “When will the Radical Left Congresswomen apologize to our Country, the people of Israel and even to the Office of the President, for the foul language they have used, and the terrible things they have said. So many people are angry at them [and] their horrible [and] disgusting actions!”

    He added: “If Democrats want to unite around the foul language [and] racist hatred spewed from the mouths and actions of these very unpopular [and] unrepresentative Congresswomen, it will be interesting to see how it plays out. I can tell you that they have made Israel feel abandoned by the US.”

    Lindsey Graham knows what side he’s on:

    Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of President Donald Trump’s strongest allies on Capitol Hill, declined on Monday to condemn the President over his racist tweets against several minority members of Congress, instead calling them a “bunch of communists.”

    Graham’s comments, which were later tweeted out by Trump, are the latest example of congressional Republican alignment with Trump in the face of fierce controversy.

    “Well, we all know that (New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) and this crowd are a bunch of communists, they hate Israel, they hate our own country,” Graham said during an appearance on “Fox and Friends.” “They’re calling the guards along our border, the border patrol agents, ‘concentration camp guards.’ They accuse people who support Israel of doing it for the Benjamins. They’re anti-Semitic. They’re anti-America.”

    It’s a miracle he didn’t call them cunts.

  • Examples

    Wait, run that by me again?

    The Guardian:

    The presidential trolling, just ahead of the political talk shows, seemed guaranteed to light a fire, potentially as a distraction from Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids announced by Trump and due to be carried out in major cities on Sunday.

    On CNN’s State of the Union Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, was asked if Trump’s tweets “feed into this impression that the president is racist and is pushing a racist agenda”.

    Cuccinelli said the tweets were examples of “rhetoric for the presidential race”.

    Excuse me? Telling four brown women, three of whom were born in the US, to “go back” is election rhetoric? And we just brush it off that way? Where are you “from,” Mr Cuccinelli? Would you like to hear Donald Trump telling you to go back there? Would you brush it off as election rhetoric?

    Pelosi hasn’t helped; she pretty much handed Trump the ammunition.

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., responded to a dismissive comment by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi about her supporters’ “public whatever” by tweeting that “that public ‘whatever’ is called public sentiment.”

    Ocasio-Cortez’s remark was prompted by a comment from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who was quoted in The New York Times on Saturday criticizing the New York legislator and three of her Democratic colleagues — Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts — for voting against a border funding bill that had the support of a majority of House Democrats.

    “All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world, but they didn’t have any following. They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got,” Pelosi said, according to The New York Times.

    She needs to stop doing that. (I’m sure it’s annoying to have young, new, inexperienced colleagues throwing their weight around, but that just is how electoral politics works, and she shouldn’t respond in ways that give Trump an opening for new horrors.)

    Also, the Guardian (and anyone else who does it) needs to stop calling this kind of thing “trolling.” It might be trolling in a rando on Twitter, but from a president it’s dangerous racist incitement.

  • Shame

    Ohgodohgodohgod

    Oh nononononononono

    Noooooooooooooooooo

    NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

  • Punks in the rose garden

    The Guardian too noticed the herky-jerky quality of Trump’s address to the social media edgelords yesterday:

    In an hour-long rambling speech Trump ping-ponged through a series of lies and bizarre rants about social media companies’ “disgraceful” and “terrible bias”, made outlandish false claims about the census, Democrats’ positions on the border wall, Antifa, Chinese tariffs, the Golan Heights, the authenticity of his hair and other reliable Trump standards.

    Ping-ponged is a good word for it. We need another good word for the way he doesn’t just bounce from one subject to another but interrupts his own sentences to do so. It’s deeply weird, and probably diagnostic. He’s so distractable he’s distracted from his own blather.

    Also of note: there was a near brawl in the rose garden.

    Sebastian Gorka, a former adviser to the president with white nationalist sympathies, got into a shouting match with the Playboy reporter Brian Karem. After exchanging words, Gorka stormed over to Karem as if a fight was about to break out. “You’re not a journalist, you’re a punk!” he shouted. The Secret Service intervened.

    Very dignified, much classy.

    https://twitter.com/nick_ramsey/status/1149438819248365571

  • Another “resigned following criticism”

    Acosta’s out.

    Donald Trump’s labor secretary, Alexander Acosta, has resigned following criticism of his handling of a 2008 plea deal with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, who is awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking underage girls.

    Trump announced the news on Friday with Acosta by his side at the White House. “Alex Acosta is a great secretary of labor,” Trump said. “I hate to see this happen.” He said he did not ask Acosta to leave the cabinet.

    Acosta becomes the latest in a long line of high-profile officials to resign their post. The Trump administration holds the record for the highest turnover of cabinet and White House staff.

    Why? Several reasons. Because Trump is a nightmare; because Trump chooses terrible people; because Trump is impossible so when underlings try to temper or get around his horribility he fires them; because Trump wants all the focus on him at all times; because of general incompetence.

    Trump has since tried to distance himself from Epstein.

    Announcing Acosta’s resignation, he said: “Yes, I did have a falling out a long time ago. The reason doesn’t make any difference … I haven’t spoken to him in 15 years or more. I wasn’t a big fan of Jeffrey Epstein, that I can tell you.”

    Sure, he can tell us, but it’s a lie.