Tag: Trump

  • Because of logistics, not because of some stinking law

    Finally the usurper gave up his effort to insert the citizenship question into the census.

    President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he is backing off his effort to include a citizenship question in the 2020 census and is instead issuing an executive order directing departments and agencies to better share data related to the number of citizens and noncitizens in the country.

    …

    The news conference came as two federal judges refused to let the Department of Justice withdraw lawyers from a lawsuit over the Trump administration’s plans to put the citizenship question on the 2020 census form.

    The administration is currently printing census forms without the question after the Supreme Court ruled late last month that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who stood alongside Trump during his announcement Thursday, did not provide an adequate reason for why the question was necessary.

    Attorney General William Barr, who also appeared with Trump at the new conference, said the Supreme Court’s decision effectively closed off the possibility of successfully litigating the issue without jeopardizing the ability to carry out the census on time.

    The situation presented “a logistical impediment, not a legal one,” Barr said.

    Lickspittle. He wants us to conclude that Trump wasn’t trying to pull an authoritarian move. He was though, Barr.

    Meanwhile, the press conference came at the conclusion of another event that’s drawn considerable attention in recent days, the president’s planned social media summit. Trump hosted several right-wing internet personalities to “share how they have been affected by bias online” as Republicans for months have blasted social media companies for what they see as unfair censorship of their views online.

    I watched the live video of Trump addressing the meeting for a few minutes, and was gobsmacked all over again at how frantic his way of talking is. He talks at a rapid clip, so rapid that there is no way for anyone else to get a word in, but what he says is completely incoherent, because he keeps interrupting himself to start a new subject – and when I say “keeps” I mean it’s every few seconds. A few words on this obsession, which suggest this other one so interrupt with a few words on that, which suggest this other one so interrupt with a few words on that, repeat forever. It’s so crazy and disordered and wrong it’s hard to believe. He doesn’t have a mind, he has a bundle of chopped-up clips from Fox News that have been whisked together just long enough to disorganize them but not long enough to make any one coherent talking point. Fox Salad dressed with bullshitpesto.

  • Also, James Madison said Trump would make an excellent host for The Apprentice

    Yesterday:

    CNN:

    Trump passed along a tweet from an obscure account that called itself “The Reagan Battalion,” which appeared to be impersonating a well-known conservative account of the same name. The copycat account had fewer than 300 followers at the time Trump promoted it.

    Its tweet read: “Dear weak Conservatives, never forget that you are no match for ‘we the people,’ and our president.” Attached to the tweet was a photo of Trump and Reagan shaking hands — with a supposed Reagan quote superimposed on top.

    “For the life of me, and I’ll never know how to explain it, when I met that young man, I felt like I was the one shaking hands with the president,” the supposed quote read.

    “Cute!” Trump wrote in his own tweet above the photo.

    Ok just stop. Just wait a damn minute here. What sense would that make? Why would Reagan say “For the life of me, and I’ll never know how to explain it” when he died years before it became true? That’s what you would say if a wild prediction of yours came true – but Reagan died long before it did become true. There was nothing to explain because there was no confirmation of that supposed feeling. We don’t even need to be told it’s fake because it’s laughably anachronistic. It might as well be Coolidge or Andrew Jackson saying it.

    The fake Reagan quote has been debunked by fact-checkers since 2016, when it began spreading in pro-Trump circles on Facebook. Joanne Drake, chief administrative officer of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, told fact-check website PolitiFact in February, “He did not ever say that about Donald Trump.”

    Not saying it is quite easy to explain.

  • 10 or 15, or more like 20 or 70

    Also, Trump hardly knows Jeffrey Epstein, hardly at all, hasn’t seen him in centuries, barely remembers him.

    White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said Tuesday that President Donald Trump told her he has not had contact with Jeffrey Epstein in “over a decade” and that the president finds the recent charges of sex trafficking against the billionaire financier “completely unconscionable.”

    “I talked to the president this morning. He hasn’t talked or had contact with Epstein in years and years and years — and over a decade at least, he said,” Conway told reporters.

    Years x 3 sounds like more than a mere decade to me, but you do you.

    “He doesn’t think he’s talked to him or seen him in 10 or 15 years,” Conway later said. “And he, like everyone else, sees these charges, the description of these charges against Epstein, as completely unconscionable and obviously criminal. Disgusting, really.”

    Uh huh. We totally believe that, because what reason could he possibly have to lie about it? And what history does he have of lying at all?

  • Dignity in all things

    Remember, kids, the thing to do about criticism is to stage a huge tantrum and exact whatever kind of revenge you can come up with. That always works.

    The U.K. is trying to prevent a row with Donald Trump from escalating after the president froze out the British ambassador in Washington over leaked diplomatic memos.

    …

    The row follows the publication of diplomatic cables in the Mail on Sunday newspaper in which the ambassador called the U.S. president “inept” and “incompetent.” That prompted the White House to cancel an invitation on Monday for Darroch to attend a dinner with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and the emir of Qatar, according to a U.S. official.

    Yes!! Brilliant!!! So dignified and mature. Much better than simply rising above the whole thing as if it had never happened.

    A U.K. statement said Britain had made clear to the Trump administration that what it called “selective leaks” didn’t reflect the “esteem” it had for its relationship with the U.S. At the same time, the government said, “we have also underlined the importance of ambassadors being able to provide honest, unvarnished assessments of the politics in their country.”

    Fine, fine, but then Trump will never have them over for hamburrgerrs and ice cream ever again and they’ll be sorry so ha!

  • Triumph

    The vulgar spectacle continues to unfurl.

    The UK’s “wacky” ambassador to the US is “a very stupid guy” Donald Trump has said, amid a row over leaked emails.

    This came after Downing Street reaffirmed its “full support” for Sir Kim Darroch.

    It’s like having Triumph the Insult Comic Dog as president.

    Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said Mr Trump’s comments are “disrespectful and wrong to our Prime Minister and my country.”

    In a tweet to Mr Trump, the Tory leadership hopeful added: “Ambassadors are appointed by the UK government and if I become PM our Ambassador stays.”

    …

    A spokesman for Theresa May said that Sir Kim is “a dutiful, respected government official” and confirmed there are no plans for Mrs May and Mr Trump to hold a call to discuss relations following the leak.

    Sir Kim will now no longer meet the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump as scheduled on Tuesday, the BBC has been told.

    So that’s a big reward.

    Why is Ivanka Trump having a meeting with Britain’s International Trade Secretary in the first place? So that she can flog her merch to him?

    The Beeb adds a photo of Princess with the caption “Ivanka Trump, pictured arriving at a dinner Sir Kim was disinvited from on Monday, was due to meet the ambassador later.”

    Sleazy, corrupt, vulgar, rude – we’re really ticking all the boxes, aren’t we.

  • Guido, you’re blocking

    No, Trump can’t use his Twitter account as his official presidential account and still block people who say things he doesn’t like.

    A federal appeals court says President Donald Trump can’t ban critics from his Twitter account. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan ruled Tuesday.

    A three-judge panel agreed with a lower court judge who said Trump violates the First Amendment when he blocks critics. In May of last year, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled the president was violating the constitutional rights of Americans by blocking them and thus, making them unable to see the president’s tweets.

    The latest ruling came in a case brought by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. It had sued on behalf of seven individuals blocked by Trump after criticizing his policies. The plaintiffs in the case were unblocked in June, and the Knight First Amendment Institute said it later received reports that up to 41 other names it pointed out to the DOJ have also been unblocked.

    Now about those internment camps on the border…

  • Queen cannot say the same

    The spectacle of Donald Trump lecturing other people on how stupid they are.

    But wait, there’s more.

    Donald Trump calling anyone else on the planet a very stupid guy and a pompous fool.

  • “I can say things about him” exclaims giant baby

    Trump says it’s fine for Trump to insult anyone he feels like insulting, but not the other way around. That’s Justice According to Toddlers.

    Of course, there is damage to relations between the UK and the Trump White House too.

    Mr Trump likes to dish out insults and criticism (remember his frequent belittling of Theresa May over Brexit, and his all out verbal attacks on the mayor of London) but he is pretty thin-skinned when the verbal arrows are aimed at him.

    “Pretty” thin-skinned? He goes ballistic at the smallest criticism and even disagreement.

    As the Foreign Office launched an investigation into the source of the leak to the Mail on Sunday, Mr Trump told reporters in New Jersey: “We’re not big fans of that man and he has not served the UK well.

    “So I can understand it and I can say things about him but I won’t bother.”

    What he actually said was

    You know, we’ve had our ins and outs with a couple of countries, and I would say that the UK and the ambassador has not served the UK well. I can tell you that. We’re not big fans of that man and he has not served the UK well. So I can understand it and I can say things about him but I won’t bother.

    Yes, he said the UK has not served the UK well. The BBC left that bit out but you can hear it if you play the first clip.

  • His administration will remain self-interested

    In the least surprising news ever, the UK ambassador to Washington is not impressed by the Trump administration. Someone leaked his emails to the Daily Mail.

    In the messages, the UK’s ambassador Sir Kim Darroch said the White House was “uniquely dysfunctional” and “divided” under Donald Trump.

    “We don’t really believe this administration is going to become substantially more normal; less dysfunctional; less unpredictable; less faction-riven; less diplomatically clumsy and inept,” he said.

    Ya, neither do we. Also on the list of no hopes that: less ignorant, less corrupt, less nepotistic, less xenophobic, less rights-abusing, less authoritarian.

    Although Sir Kim said Mr Trump was “dazzled” by his state visit to the UK in June, the ambassador warned that his administration will remain self-interested, adding: “This is still the land of America First”.

    Differences between the US and the UK on climate change, media freedoms and the death penalty might come to the fore as the countries seek to improve trading relations after Brexit, the memos said.

    To get through to the president, “you need to make your points simple, even blunt”, he said.

    Why? Because he’s thick. Because he’s thick as ten short planks, and he has the attention span of an infant, and he doesn’t listen to other people, and he’s pig-ignorant.

    The leader of the Brexit party, Nigel Farage, has criticised Sir Kim for his comments, branding the ambassador “totally unsuitable for the job” and saying the “sooner he is gone the better”.

    Oh nonsense. Trump is what he is, and it would be dereliction for Sir Kim to say otherwise.

  • The teleprompter did it

    Trump says the teleprompter fell over right at that place and that’s why he said the sojers took over the airports in 1775. Totally the teleprompter’s fault.

    President Donald Trump — who used to mock predecessor Barack Obama for using the devices during speeches — said Friday that technical problems with the teleprompter during his “Salute to America” led to his head-scratching remarks about the Continental Army securing not-yet existent “airports” during the Revolutionary War.

    How does that work exactly?

    Trump, speaking to reporters on the White House lawn en route to his property in Bedminster, New Jersey, acknowledged Friday he had some technical problems because of the soggy conditions during his speech.

    “We had a lot of rain. I stood in the rain. The teleprompter went out,” he said in response to a question from NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell. “It kept going on, and then at the end, it just went out. It went kaput!”

    One of those moments was in the passage about 1775, he said.

    “Actually right in the middle of that sentence, it went out. And that’s not a good feeling. You’re standing in front of millions of millions of people on television and I don’t know what the final count was but that (the crowd) went all the way back to the Washington Monument.”

    Ok, but how do you get from that to airports in 1775? I mean, I don’t believe him anyway, I don’t believe the teleprompter did go out. He went right on reading from it, for one thing. But even if I did, how does that take him to “Our Army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do, and at Fort McHenry, under the rocket’s red glare it had nothing but victory”?

    The teleprompter screen had been “hard to look at anyway cause it was raining all over it.”

    But Trump said he wasn’t letting the rain dampen his spirits about the event.

    “I do the speech very well, so I was able to do it without a teleprompter, but the teleprompter did go out,” he said.

    He do the speech very well.

    No he do not do the speech very well. Not at all. He do the speech like a barely literate airhead from another planet. He do the speech like a robot. He do the speech like someone unaccustomed to words and thinking. He do the speech like a golf club with a blond wig on top.

  • After our army took over the airports, it shelled CNN and MSNBC

    Amee Vanderpool breaks down all of Trump’s failures yesterday:

    What was also interesting was the arrangement of the bleachers at the very front and the placement of the tanks Trump had been going on and on about. In a grand stroke of irony, fences were placed around the Lincoln Memorial and across the Reflecting Pool to kept non-ticket-holders away from the memorial and given the potential for lightning in the forecast, the excessive use of more metal in the pool was a questionable move.

    In other words millions in public money were spent to enable Trump to throw a private party at the Lincoln Memorial. People outside the fence couldn’t see anything, including the much-vaunted tanks.

    It started to pour rain well before Trump’s scheduled speech time and a lot of attendees made a break for it when they realized they couldn’t get into the restricted area to really see anything. Once Trump began his speech, he was standing behind plexiglass-glass so even the television cameras were obscured by drizzling rain. Trump used a TelePrompTer, which might lead you to believe that this would keep him on track and be as accurate as possible, but…no.

    Well you see, for that to work he would have to be able to read, and he isn’t really. He’s able to read in the rudimentary fashion of a learner, but not in the sense of a practiced reader who can read quickly and fluently. He stumbles a lot.

    Our Commander in Chief, who received five deferments for Vietnam due to suspicious bone spurs, encouraged people to “make a great statement in life” and join the military. His cadence was awkward and broken and he looked as uncomfortable as I’m sure all of the attendees felt. His speech, which was likely written after Stephen Miller googled Colonial History rather than learning it, was riddled with errors and mispronunciations and I will summarize the biggest mistakes for you…

    Why is Trump so convinced that July 4 is all about the military?

    Oh, I bet I know why. It’s because he’s so literal, and stunted. He’s too literal and stunted to grasp abstract notions like democracy and rights (let alone incomplete democracy and rights). He can grasp the military because it’s graspable: he can grasp a tank or a fighter jet or a Marine.

    Then came the airports.

    Here is a transcript of what he actually said: “In June of 1775, the Continental Congress created a unified army out of the revolutionary forces encamped around Boston and New York and named after the great George Washington, commander in chief. The Continental Army suffered a bitter winter of Valley Forge, found glory across the waters of the Delaware and seized victory from Cornwallis of Yorktown. Our army manned the [unclear], it [unclear] the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do. And at Fort McHenry, under “the rockets red glare,” it had nothing but victory. And when dawn came, their star-spangled banner waved defiant.”

    There are so many errors here, so let’s jump right in:

    1. British General Cornwallis was defeated at Yorktown but he was from London, which would make him General Cornwallis of London.
    2. The Continental Army wasn’t named after Washington. Trump seemed very confused and disoriented throughout his speech and it was obvious the TelePrompTer was throwing him off so maybe he mis-spoke and used the wrong verb. Or maybe his speechwriter, likely Stephen Miller, really doesn’t know the accurate history.
    3. He combines two separate wars, fought decades apart. Valley Forge, crossing the Delaware and Yorktown all occurred during the Revolutionary War in 1775. But then Trump mentions Fort McHenry and the battle that inspired the national anthem, which was fought in 1814 during the War of 1812.
    4. I’m sure he means “Fort McHenry” here and is just struggling to read, but in the audio you can hear that he pronounces it “Fort McHendry.”
    5. Trump claims that the soldiers in one of these battles, either in 1775 or 1814, took over the airports. The airports.

    Who are we to say they didn’t? Were we there? Did we watch them not take over the airports? Did we?

  • A very real abandonment of the ideals of liberal democracy

    Greg Sargent on Trump’s putsch:

    The authoritarian nationalist leader typically rewrites the story of the nation in his own image. Our own homegrown authoritarian nationalist has proved particularly devoted to this fusion of national mythmaking and self-hagiography, often delivered in his own unique language of crass, gaudy spectacle.

    The historians tell us that this is what authoritarian nationalists do. As Harvard’s Jill Lepore puts it, they replace history with tried-and-true fictions – false tales of national decline at the hands of invented threats, melded to fictitious stories of renewed national greatness, engineered by the leader himself, who is both author of the fiction and its mythic hero.

    The authoritarian nationalists of the past didn’t have Twitter though. How Hitler would have loved Twitter. Hitler Twitler; they were made for each other. Trump announces on Twitter every day that all things have become wonderful since he was miraculously elected our Savior.

    This is what we will be seeing in one form or another on the Fourth of July, no matter what President Donald Trump says in his planned Independence Day speech from the Lincoln Memorial. The very act of taking over the proceedings in the manner he has cooked up itself accomplishes this feat.

    And that’s what makes it so sickening (along with everything else about it). His tweets today are enough to make you want to move to a Pacific atoll.

    Ooooooh airplanes oooh hardware oooh my personal plane because I am so important oooh look at me.

    As many critics have pointed out, by politicizing the Fourth of July so nakedly, Trump has inevitably transformed the celebration into a campaign event. It remains to be seen whether he will do so explicitly in his speech, but either way, that conversion has already been implicitly accomplished.

    It’s the melding of that fact with the particular display Trump is putting on that makes this so ugly. The showcasing of military might, Trump’s association of himself with it, and the unabashed conversion of a paean to the nation’s founding into a re-election event – what it all amounts to is larger than the sum of its parts.

    Couldn’t he just drop dead? Like, right now?

    Trump’s turn away from international engagement has in practice meant a genuine embrace of strongman authoritarian nationalism, and with it, a very real abandonment of the ideals of liberal democracy. Just this week, Trump agreed with Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s claim that “the liberal idea has failed” and “joked” with him about getting rid of journalists. Trump absolved the Saudi royal family of any role in the dismembering of Jamal Khashoggi.

    Trump likes egotism, he likes it so much he even likes other egotists, as long as they don’t actually try to sit in his chair or get an extra scoop of ice cream. What Trump can’t be doing with is any kind of public-spirited generosity or self-abnegation or solidarity. Everything is ego, and if you don’t agree, you’re a stone-cold loser. You’re dumbest and most disloyal.

  • The border patrol are not hospital workers

    Another eruption of filth from the White House.

    I hope a tank runs over him.

  • What’s ours is his

    It gets worse. (It always does, doesn’t it.)

    $2.5 million stolen from the National Parks so that Trump can say LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME. And reward donors on our dime instead of his.

  • Absolutely moving forward

    Trump announces on Twitter that the Supreme Court can’t tell him what to do.

    President Donald Trump on Wednesday branded as “fake” news reports that his administration was dropping plans to ask people if they are U.S. citizens on the 2020 census — despite officials in his own administration having said Monday that the question will not be asked.

    Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and a Justice Department lawyer had both said Tuesday that the Census Bureau is in the process of printing the census questionnaire without the citizenship question.

    Their statements came five days after a Supreme Court decision that effectively blocked the question being added to the 2020 census questionnaire.

    https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1146446890361348097

  • It’ll be special

    The BBC raises a skeptical eyebrow at Donnie Two-scoops’s wannabe-Mussolini parade.

    “We’re going to have planes going overhead – the best fighter jets in the world and other planes too,” the Republican president told reporters at the White House on Monday.

    “And we’re going to have some tanks stationed outside.”

    He said the event will “be like no other, it’ll be special”.

    You can hear them sniggering from all the way over here.

    City leaders have spoken out against the idea.

    “We have said it before, and we’ll say it again: Tanks, but no tanks,” the District of Columbia council tweeted on Monday.

    But the vanity project must go forward!

    Mr Trump has ordered a flyover by the Navy’s Blue Angels and the presidential jet Air Force One, the Washington Post reported.

    He also wants the chiefs of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines standing next to him during the display, according to the New York Times.

    The military flyover will halt air traffic at the US capital city’s main airport, Reagan National, for more than two hours on Thursday evening.

    No inconvenience is too great to feed Donnie’s ravenous narcissism!

    Critics of Mr Trump said his involvement in 4 July amounts to a partisan takeover of a national holiday.

    “Risking damage to local infrastructure and dumping huge piles of taxpayer money onto the never-ending bonfire of Donald Trump’s vanity,” congressman Don Beyer, a Virginia Democrat, said in a tweet.

    Kellyanne Conway says it’s all about the patriotism.

    White House adviser Kellyanne Conway told reporters the president’s Independence Day remarks would pay tribute to “how wonderful this country is”.

    “Our troops and military,” Mrs Conway said. “Our great democracy. And great call to patriotism.”

    I’m not seeing the “our great democracy” part though. Looks more like our great pseudo-monarchy which is actually not great at all, instead.

  • Understanding what is our business

    Spoken like a true dictator.

    Ahead of his expected meeting with Putin on the sidelines of this weekend’s G-20 Summit in Osaka, Japan, the president told reporters that while he expected to have a positive conversation with Putin, he would not divulge whether he will press the adversarial leader about election interference.

    “I will have a very good conversation with him,” Trump said, adding, “What I say to him is none of your business.”

    It is though. It’s every bit our business, and given his incompetence and criminality and profound stupidity, it’s more our business than it is his. He has no business being president, let alone talking secretively to Putin.

  • Crimes

    Trump is feeling bumptious today. He did a shout-fest with reporters on the driveway again today, in which he shouted that it was the Democrats who caused the drowning of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his daughter Valeria on Monday.

    Image result for oscar and valeria ramirez

    Then he shouted that Mueller committed a crime.

    Donald Trump, without offering evidence, on Wednesday directly accused former special counsel Robert Mueller of committing a crime, saying Mueller had illegally “terminated” FBI communications as part of his Russia investigation.

    The Justice Department declined to comment.

    “Mueller terminated them illegally. He terminated all of the emails. … Robert Mueller terminated their text messages together. He terminated them. They’re gone. And that’s illegal. That’s a crime,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business Network, referring to two former Federal Bureau of Investigation employees who exchanged disparaging messages about the president.

    Shall we talk about all the crimes – actual crimes, not notional ones – Donald Trump has committed? How many days do you have?

  • Trump endorses common sense

    Trump blithers about Iran.

    President Donald Trump said Saturday that military action against Iran was still an option for its downing of an unmanned U.S. military aircraft, but amid heightened tensions he dangled the prospect of eventually becoming an unlikely “best friend” of America’s longtime Middle Eastern adversary.

    Trump also said “we very much appreciate” that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard chose not to target a U.S. spy plane carrying more than 30 people.

    Yes, that’s how it’s done. Just sound like an awkward child thanking an adult for a birthday present, and everything will be fine.

    “The fact is we’re not going to have Iran have a nuclear weapon,” he said as he left the White House for a weekend at the Camp David presidential retreat. “And when they agree to that, they are going to have a wealthy country, they’re going to be so happy and I’m going to be their best friend.”

    For the next few months until he’s either impeached or voted out. Not much of a payoff.

    “Everybody was saying I’m a war monger. And now they say I’m a dove. And I think I’m neither, if you want to know the truth,” Trump told reporters. “I’m a man with common sense. And that’s what we need in this country, is common sense. But I didn’t like the idea of them knowingly shooting down an unmanned drone and then we kill 150 people.”

    He added: “I don’t want to kill 150 Iranians. I don’t want to kill 150 of anything or anybody unless it’s absolutely necessary.’”

    What if it’s burgers? He’s perfectly happy to kill 150 burgers any day of the week.

  • Like Bastille Day but with Trump

    Trump is finally getting his big Parade of Sojers along with a Nürnberg-style rally starring himself.

    Interior Secretary David Bernhardt gave details Wednesday on a makeover of the traditional Fourth of July celebration on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. to accommodate a speech by President Donald Trump at the Lincoln Memorial.

    A day after Trump officially began his re-election campaign in Florida, Bernhardt said the July 4 events will include the military parade Trump has wanted since being impressed by the July 14 Bastille Day festivities in Paris he attended in 2017.

    They call him “sir,” you know. Did you know that? They do. The generals call him sir. If you ask him he’ll do a re-enactment for you.

    In a release, Bernhardt, whose department includes the National Park Service, said the National Independence Day Parade along Constitution Avenue NW from 7th Street to 17th Street NW will feature marching bands, a fife and drum corps, floats, military units, giant balloons, equestrian and drill teams and more” in a “red, white and blue celebration of America’s birthday!”

    As opposed to previous July 4 events on the Mall, this year’s will also include a flyover by military jets, Bernhardt said.

    In other words it will be militaristic and fascist-leaning in a way that is new and abnormal and highly undesirable.

    Some previous presidential observations:

    In 2008, President George W. Bush hosted a naturalization ceremony at the White House for 72 new U.S. citizens from 30 countries, the Park Service said.

    In 2010, President Barack Obama hosted a barbecue on the south lawn of the White House for 1,200 members of the military and their families.

    I prefer those.