Tag: Trump

  • He never did

    Dana Milbank says he believes all Trump’s lies, because the alternative is…what it is.

    I believe all this and more because the alternative is unthinkable: that our great nation inflicted on the world a president who is, well, a stone cold loser, boorish and ignorant.

    Therefore I plan to do as Trump does: live today as if yesterday never happened. But it’s not enough to imagine away this week’s name-calling. To preserve national dignity, Americans must accept that none of the following ever happened:

    Trump did not shove the prime minister of Montenegro and he didn’t declare that he “fell in love” with the dictator of North Korea. He didn’t hang up on the Australian prime minister, nor attack the pope on Twitter. He didn’t use aphony accent to imitate the Indian prime minister, nor make fun of Chinese leaders’ eyewear. He didn’t refer to African nations and Haiti as “shithole countries.”

    It goes on, for paragraph after paragraph.

    Wewillneverliveitdown.

  • Historians struggled to cite an equivalent threat

    Meanwhile Trump is still trying to put the muscle on CNN, as is totally normal for presidents to do.

    President Trump took his long-running attacks against CNN to a new level on Monday by suggesting in a series of tweets that a consumer boycott of its parent company, AT&T, could force “big changes” at the news organization.

    “I believe that if people stoped [sic] using or subscribing to AT&T, they would be forced to make big changes at CNN, which is dying in the ratings anyway,” Trump tweeted. “It is so unfair with such bad, Fake News!”

    The comment, which Trump tweeted in response to seeing CNN coverage while traveling in London during a European tour, fueled criticisms that the president was using his power inappropriately to intimidate critics.

    Whaddya mean inappropriately? He hates CNN. He’s the president. You do the math.

    Historians struggled to cite an equivalent threat even from presidents such as Richard Nixon renowned for their hostility toward the press. Less democratic nations with more tenuous press freedoms often use government regulatory power, criminal investigations or tax audits to punish news organizations seen as providing unflattering coverage, but past U.S. presidents rarely have taken such public shots at the businesses of the owners of major American news organizations, historians said.

    By “rarely” they mean “never,” but they’re being cautious. Don’t want to make him mad, obvs.

  • Trust me, it’s very funny

    Oh this is glorious.

    I’m sure it’s the pouring rain keeping them away.

    I want to invite that police officer over for brandy and chocolate.

    Look at the crowd roaring approbation.

    That officer gets the brandy and chocolate too.

    I hope he’s sobbing himself to sleep rather than taking it out on Melania.

  • If that’s the hand of friendship…

    No, he’s not offering America’s hand of friendship. Don’t be silly. For one thing the two countries were already friends, before he was elected, before he ran, before he was even born. The relationship has deteriorated since and because he became president. And for another he comes offering nothing, he’s there for his own glory and nothing else.

    For another thing he’s not democratically elected; he’s undemocratically elected. Big empty states get to overrule smaller fuller states.

    And the bit about giving him a welcome to match the office and the country as opposed to the festering pustule that he himself is? No. The two can’t be separated and he’s an evil, cruel, genocide-ready man. He should not be welcomed anywhere by anyone.

    Image result for trump uk

  • Thoughts in the air

    A few hours ago, the plane is over London, Trump is getting restless, so he decides this is the time to broadcasts some insults directed at the mayor of London. Perfectly normal behavior, yes? When you’re in the car on your way to a party, you call the hosts to insult them, right? Doesn’t everyone? “Hello, Inglund, I’m on my way! You’re stupid and ugly, I look forward to our frenndship!”

    He sends a pair of tweets calling the mayor of London a stone cold loser, foolish, nasty, dumb, incompetent, and short – and then says he looks forward to being a great friend to the UK.

    God how I wish he would just drop dead. Right now. Face first into the soup, dead as mutton. I wish we could be assured of never hearing or reading another word out of him.

  • The mayor rolls out the black carpet

    Sadiq Khan doesn’t think much of Trump either.

    This is a man who tried to exploit Londoners’ fears following a horrific terrorist attack on our city, amplified the tweets of a British far-right racist group, denounced as fake news robust scientific evidence warning of the dangers of climate change, and is now trying to interfere shamelessly in the Conservative party leadership race by backing Boris Johnson because he believes it would enable him to gain an ally in Number 10 for his divisive agenda.

    Donald Trump is just one of the most egregious examples of a growing global threat. The far right is on the rise around the world, threatening our hard-won rights and freedoms and the values that have defined our liberal, democratic societies for more than seventy years. Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Matteo Salvini in Italy, Marine Le Pen in France and Nigel Farage here in the UK are using the same divisive tropes of the fascists of the 20th century to garner support, but are using new sinister methods to deliver their message.

    And let’s not forget Bolsonaro and Duterte and Erdoğan.

    Trump is seen as a figurehead of this global far-right movement. Through his words and actions, he has given comfort to far-right political leaders, and it’s no coincidence that his former campaign manager, Steve Bannon, has been touring the world, spreading hateful views and bolstering the far right wherever he goes.

    That’s why it’s so un-British to be rolling out the red carpet this week for a formal state visit for a president whose divisive behaviour flies in the face of the ideals America was founded upon – equality, liberty and religious freedom.

    Why are they doing it?

  • A crass error

    The Guardian editorial board is not excited about Trump’s state visit.

    Two and a half years after Theresa May rushed to become the first world leader to meet the newly inaugurated President Trump in Washington, she has chosen to make a state visit that should not be taking place the final act of her premiership. While the prime minister’s poor political judgment and obstinacy have been hallmarks of her three years in office, the spectacle of the next three days will make a particularly awful ending. Mr Trump is only the third US president ever to be honoured with a state visit, the others being George W Bush and Barack Obama. Inviting him in the first place was a crass error. Following through in the midst of the UK’s current political crisis is an act of gross irresponsibility.

    That’s because, though such visits are symbolic occasions, there is more at stake here than pomp and circumstance. Mr Trump is a demagogue who represents a threat to peace, democracy and the climate of our planet. As elected leader of the UK’s closest ally, he can’t be ignored. But making him, his wife and four adult children the honoured guests of the Queen risks legitimising his destructive policies, his cronyism and his leanings towards autocracy.

    Also his bullying, his rank misogyny, his bragging about assaulting women, his racism, his xenophobia, his ignorance, his malice, his incompetence, his endless lying, his greed, his vanity, his narcissism, his self-dealing, his callousness…

    I could go on this way for a long time. Anyone could. He has a long long list of bad qualities and not one good one. He’s historically grotesque in every way, so yeah, bad idea to give him the royal treatment. Seriously bad idea.

  • Maybe that’s not the best backdrop

    Normal. It’s normal. Totally normal. Nothing to see here. It’s not unreasonable. Not unreasonable at all. You could even say it’s reasonable. Maybe. On a good day. Anyway it’s normal. So so normal.

    Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney defended the administration’s advance team for asking the Navy to obscure the USS John McCain during the president’s recent state visit to Japan, arguing the request was not “unreasonable.”

    Appearing on “Meet the Press” Sunday, Mulvaney said that “it was probably someone on the advance team” in the White House who was responsible, adding that the unidentified staffer who requested to hide the ship, named for the grandfather of the late Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, would not be fired.

    “The fact that some 23, 24-year-old person on the advance team went to that site and said, ‘oh my goodness, here’s the John McCain, we all know how the president feels about the former senator, maybe that’s not the best backdrop, can somebody look into moving it?’ That’s not an unreasonable thing,” Mulvaney said.

    Whee! That was a great big jump he made there. Top marks for jumping. Yes, we all do know how Baby Donnie feels about McCain, but we do not all jump from that all the way to “So he will lose his shit if he sees the name John McCain on a ship, because he is that fucking childish, so we’d better hide it from him somehow.”

    “The president’s feeling towards the former senator are well known. They are well known throughout the office, they are well known in the media, but to think you’re gonna get fired over this is silly.”

    They are well known, but even then we didn’t realize he was such a spoiled petulant whiny brat that he couldn’t be trusted to see the name John McCain on a ship. Thanks for clearing that up for us, I guess.

  • Return

    Play it.

  • Another nasty woman

    Trump is preparing for his unwelcome visit to the UK by saying words.

    Donald Trump has backed Boris Johnson to be the next prime minister, in an interview with the Sun in which he also described Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, as “nasty”.

    …

    Johnson has yet to respond to Trump’s comments, but the frontrunner in the Tory leadership race has not always been complimentary of the US president.

    In 2015, when Trump claimed there were “no-go areas” in London where police feared for their lives because of a threat posed by Muslims, Johnson said it showed “quite stupefying ignorance that makes him frankly unfit to hold the office of president of the United States”.

    It does, yes, and yet there he is. We are rethinking many things.

    During the state visit, the president, his wife, Melania, and his four adult children are expected to meet Prince Harry as well as Prince William and his wife, Kate. Meghan is expected to stay home with Archie.

    Trump referred to the American-born Duchess of Sussex as “nasty” over comments she made in 2016 threatening to move to Canada if Trump won the presidency.

    “I didn’t know that she was nasty,” he said when informed of her criticism.

    Well, that will be pleasant for Harry when he has to meet the horrible toad.

    On Johnson, Trump said: “I like him. I have always liked him. I don’t know that he is going to be chosen, but I think he is a very good guy, a very talented person. He has been very positive about me and our country.”

    Another piece of evidence that he’s far too stupid to hold the office of president of the United States: this total failure to hide the fact that he evaluates people first of all on whether they flatter him or not. Boris is a very talented person because he flatters Trump, Trump says, to a reporter.

  • Blame Mexico

    Trump has a weird new cunning plan.

    President Trump is moving to impose escalating tariffs on Mexican imports to force that government to take a harder line to stem the flow of Central American migrants into the United States.

    So, using tariffs to make the Mexican government keep its people prisoner as opposed to using tariffs in a trade dispute. Isn’t that kind of…nuts? Apart from the whole tariffs a really bad idea thing, I mean? Aren’t they supposed to be about trade and nothing else?

    Trump has said he is imposing the tax to punish Mexico for not doing enough to stop illegal immigration. Tens of thousands of Central Americans, mostly from Guatemala and Honduras and usually traveling with smugglers, journey through Mexico each month. U.S. officials say Mexico is not doing enough to secure its southern border with Guatemala or to crack down on the private bus companies that ferry migrants through the country, usually accompanied by their smugglers.

    But tariffs aren’t supposed to be a way to punish countries for just any old damn thing, are they? Did I skip school the day they taught that?

    The White House has yet to explain exactly how driving up the cost of Mexican goods could stem the flow of migration. Many experts say they believe the tariffs could actually have the opposite effect: If the tariffs damage the Mexican economy, more people may try to cross the border in search of work in the United States.

    I guess Trump just enjoys punishing.

  • Not closed

    He’s both stupid and a lunatic.

    He’s flailing at Mueller now.

    President Trump on Thursday attacked Robert S. Mueller III as “totally conflicted” and “a true never-Trumper” and claimed that the special counsel would have brought charges against him if he had any evidence — a characterization directly at odds with what Mueller said in a public statement Wednesday.

    Mueller said very very clearly on Wednesday that bringing charges against Trump was not an option – his words. It was not an option because of Justice Department policy that a sitting president cannot be indicted. It’s becoming ever more horrifyingly clear that that policy is a disastrous mistake, but policy it is. Trump is lying when he says Mueller would have brought charges against him if he had any evidence.

    Bill O’Reilly says Trump called him late last night to tell him the same stupid pack of lies.

    Trump’s attacks came in morning tweets and later while speaking to reporters at the White House. In one of his tweets, he also seemingly acknowledged for the first time that Russia had helped him get elected in 2016 — but he strongly pushed back against that notion while talking to reporters as he prepared to leave Washington.

    He can’t be held to it, because he’s too dense to know what he’s saying.

    Trump returned to Twitter several hours later and continued opining on the Mueller investigation.

    He said the Mueller had come to the Oval Office in 2017 with an interest of returning to his previous job as FBI director.

    “I told him NO,” Trump wrote. “The next day he was named Special Counsel – A total Conflict of Interest. NICE!”

    But that’s another lie. Mueller wasn’t trying to get the director job back.

    A later tweet:

    Oh, well, if you put it that way.

  • Not a big fan

    One of Trump’s people told the Navy to hide a warship from Trump when he was in Japan, because…

    …because it is named USS John S. McCain.

    Not an Onion story. Repeat, not an Onion story.

    President Trump on Thursday defended as “well-meaning” a White House official who directed the Navy to obscure the warship USS John S. McCain while Trump was visiting Japan, but he said he had no advance knowledge of the action.

    “I don’t know what happened. I was not involved. I would not have done that,” Trump told reporters as he was leaving the White House for Colorado, where he is scheduled to address an Air Force Academy graduation ceremony.

    He “would not have done that” because he would have pitched sixteen public fits about McCain instead.

    Trump, however, suggested that his disdain for the late senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) is well-known and that it was understandable that someone would try to keep a warship originally named for McCain’s father and grandfather, both Navy admirals, from his view.

    “I was not a big fan of John McCain in any shape or form,” Trump said. “Now, somebody did it because they thought I didn’t like him, okay? And they were well-meaning.”

    Which is to say: “Yes, I am indeed a childish petty vengeful idiot with no concept of how to act like an adult when people are watching.”

    A senior White House official confirmed Wednesday that the person who issued the directive did not want the warship with the McCain name seen in photographs during Trump’s visit. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said that the president was not involved in the planning, but that the request was made to keep Trump from becoming upset.

    That is, the request was made to keep Trump from becoming upset and having a huge showy tantrum in public thus humiliating the entire country for the forty millionth time.

    A senior Navy official confirmed Wednesday that he was aware that someone at the White House sent a message to service officials in the Pacific requesting that the USS John McCain be kept out of the picture while the president was there. That led to photographs taken Friday of a tarp obscuring the McCain name, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.

    When senior Navy officials grasped what was happening, they directed Navy personnel who were present to stop, the senior official said. The tarp was removed Saturday, before Trump’s visit, he added.

    Did they pack plenty of pacifiers? Was there ice cream always at the ready? Was the officer of the blanky on duty around the clock?

    Trump says it’s all good.

  • Omit “semi”

    To the surprise of no one, Steve Bannon says Trump is a crook. You don’t say.

    The former White House adviser Steve Bannon has described the Trump Organization as a criminal entity and predicted that investigations into the president’s finances will lead to his political downfall, when he is revealed to be “not the billionaire he said he was, just another scumbag”.

    Well the two are not mutually exclusive. He would still be a scumbag even if he were a billionaire.

    The startling remarks are contained in Siege: Trump Under Fire, the author Michael Wolff’s forthcoming account of the second year of the Trump administration. The book, published on 4 June, is a sequel to Fire and Fury: Trump in the White House, which was a bestseller in 2018. The Guardian obtained a copy.

    In a key passage, Bannon is reported as saying he believes investigations of Donald Trump’s financial history will provide proof of the underlying criminality of his eponymous company.

    Assessing the president’s exposure to various investigations, many seeded by the special counsel Robert Mueller during his investigation of Russian election interference, Wolff writes: “Trump was vulnerable because for 40 years he had run what increasingly seemed to resemble a semi-criminal enterprise.”

    He then quotes Bannon as saying: “I think we can drop the ‘semi’ part.”

    Reflects well on Bannon, doesn’t it. He did his bit to put the scumbag where he now is, knowing perfectly well what a scumbag he is.

  • Making us proud

    Trump’s tweet about hur hur Kim Jong Un agrees with him about how dumm Joe Bidan Biden is hur hur (and he’s not worried about those little weapons) was bad enough, but he repeated it in a press conference with Abe. Yes that’s what I said, he repeated it in a press conference with Abe.

    His latest comments — which came over Memorial Day weekend — departed from precedent that presidents leave domestic political tiffs at home while traveling abroad and were condemned even by members of Trump’s own party along with Biden’s fellow Democrats.

    Trump’s Biden barbs were coupled with a downplaying of North Korea’s recent missile tests, which broke with concerns expressed by his national security adviser and Japanese leaders.

    He later underscored his alignment with Kim in a joint press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. “Kim Jong Un made a statement that Joe Biden is a low-IQ individual. He probably is, based on his record. I think I agree with him on that,” Trump declared.

    In a joint press conference with Abe.

    You can see him say it at the beginning of this clip.

     

  • Horrifying evidence of a disordered personality

    Radio Free Tom sums it up.

    I’ll just quote the rest.

    • These are the same Republicans – my former tribe – who pointed to every slip of the tongue by Hillary Clinton as evidence of fatal illness. Who took a dumb hot mic aside from Obama to Medvedev as treason. Who parsed every word from every Democrat for signs of betrayal. /2
    • Now, the President shows us horrifying evidence of, as @Peter_Wehner once put it, a “disordered personality,” and the GOP and their voter base applaud because it’s evidence to them that Trump is just a Regular Guy Who Talks Like Them. This is not only immoral, but stupid. /3
    • It’s stupid because, on a fundamental level, it’s false. No one “talks like Trump.” Trump-cultists in the heartland claim he’s just like them, when in fact if someone spoke to them – or their loved ones – as Trump speaks to others, they’d punch them right in the face. /4
    • And no one really “talks like Trump” about things like war, or about what a swell guy Kim Jong Un is. With the exception of some morons sitting around diners in red hats, no one really talks this way. No one says “I’m glad the dictator of North Korea is insulting Joe Biden.” /5
    • But because we fear resentment and status envy and intellectual insecurity, we all have to pretend that it’s not a massive failure of character that an entire political party is too cowardly and un-patriotic to stand up to this man even when he’s applauding Kim Jong Un. /6
    • If you can’t bring yourself to criticize Trump for what he just said – and for how he’s been conducting himself for two years – you are either an idiot or a morally deficient coward. And either way, you’re harming your country. /7
    • Happy Memorial Day and thank you for coming to my TED talk. /8x

    He’s not wrong.

  • Keyword: me

    Another thing about Trump’s bottom of the sewer tweet – a thing that’s obvious but needs underlining anyway.

    It’s the “promise TO ME” bit. It’s the radiant, glowing conceit that burns out of those two words. You peasants just don’t understand, it’s between the two of us: he promised ME, and it’s intrusive and blasphemous for you to try to get between us.

    It’s that and it’s also the conceit of thinking a promise to him is magically unbreakable because it’s to him. It’s the radioactive conceit and confidence of this bloated nitwit that is so astonishing, along with our helplessness to stop him. It’s as if Daffy Duck or Yosemite Sam were pirouetting in front of the cameras with Kim Jong Un.

  • Outcry

    The Post on Trump’s alliance with Kim Jong Un against Joe Biden:

    White House press secretary Sarah Sanders on Sunday said President Trump and Kim Jong Un “agree in their assessment” of former vice president Joe Biden, after Trump prompted an outcry by leveraging his friendship with the North Korean dictator against Biden in a tweet.

    Well now who ya gonna trust, a Democrat or Kim Jong Un?

    Members of both parties sharply criticized Trump’s handling of North Korea on Sunday.

    Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) said she “certainly wouldn’t trust” Kim. She described herself as disturbed by both North Korea’s recent missile test as well as Trump’s reaction.

    And on the other hand there are the packets of slime who will do anything for the crook.

    Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a close Trump ally, said that he was “glad the president is engaging” Kim and that the president was “trying to give North Korea some space to come back to the table and end this.”

    “Like every other president, he’s trying hard to stop the advance of nuclear armament in North Korea,” Graham said on “Fox News Sunday.” He added: “I’ll give Trump the space he needs to deal with Kim, but I’ll remind the president, you have to deliver on this. This is one of the signature issues of your administration.”

    But he already has delivered – he and Kim are in total agreement about how stupid Joe Biden is.

  • Swampman

    In case Trump’s tweet yesterday saying he’s not worried about Kim firing all those missiles but he’s happy as a pig in shit that Kim called Joe Biden stupid WASN’T ENOUGH, today Sarah Sanders cheerily told us that yes that’s how he sees it and isn’t it awesome.

    Appearing on NBC News’ Meet the Press on Sunday morning, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders doubled down on her boss’s endorsement of a totalitarian dictator’s attacks on one of his political opponents—an opponent who also happens to be a former American vice-president.

    While overseas during a four-day trip to Japan, President Trump tweeted that he wasn’t bothered by North Korea firing off “some small weapons” because the nation’s brutal leader made him smile “when he called Swampman Joe Biden a low IQ individual.”

    “Go ahead, nuke Japan, nuke Hawaii, nuke the west coast of the US, as long as you keep joking about how dumb Joe Biden is.” That’s the actual literal president and his actual literal official press secretary.

    After Sanders said that Trump “still feels comfortable and confident in his relationship” with Kim despite recent missile tests and that the North Korean dictator will “stay true to the commitment” of denuclearization, host Chuck Todd asked her about the president’s words.

    “Can you explain why Americans should not be concerned that the president of the United States is essentially siding with a murderous authoritarian dictator over a former vice president in the United States?” Todd wondered.

    “Chuck, the president’s not siding with that,” the press secretary asserted before adding, “but I think they agree in their assessment of former Vice President Joe Biden.”

    She went on to say that Trump’s focus right now “is the relationship he has” with Kim and that he hopes that relationship will “move us further down the path” of denuclearization.

    “The president of the United States takes the North Korean dictator’s word about Joe Biden?” Todd exclaimed. “What happened to speaking with one voice in American foreign policy? Is the president not setting up trying to have world leaders sort of pick which political party they should side with? I don’t understand what message the president is sending here.”

    Yes you do. We all do.

  • The fix is in

    Paul Waldman at the Post on Trump’s move to have his tame AG expose classified intelligence looking for some pretext to say the investigation was dirty:

    Barr’s “investigation” is nothing but a propaganda exercise, an effort to provide ballast to the lunatic idea that there should never have been any investigation at all into Russia’s attempts to help Trump get elected president. But we have to be clear about just how shocking this order from Trump is.

    The executive order not only gives Barr permission to “declassify, downgrade, or direct the declassification or downgrading of information or intelligence” to whatever degree he likes, but also orders the leaders of every intelligence agency to give him whatever he wants. If he wants to declassify something and they object, tough luck for them. The New York Times reports that this is “likely to irk the intelligence community”:

    One official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified matters, said previously that Mr. Barr wanted to know more about what foreign assets the C.I.A. had in Russia in 2016 and what those informants were telling the agency about how President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia sought to meddle in the 2016 election.

    Needless to say, the identity of foreign assets is one of the most sensitive categories of information intelligence agencies hold.

    If Barr were a normal AG, Waldman goes on, we could figure he would be careful with that intel, but since Barr is what he is, we can’t.

    [W]ith virtually every action Barr has taken and statement he has made, he has shown himself to be someone who is only too happy to deceive the public, mislead Congress, go on Fox News to spin on the president’s behalf, and generally act as though the only purpose of his office is to cover up for Trump. The idea that this political hack would conduct any investigation related to this president with any other goal in mind is, at this point, not even worth discussing.

    And none of it is anything to do with real investigation, it’s purely a propaganda exercise. They want to find something they can distort into dirt.

    We can be pretty sure of what’s going to happen. Barr will scour every record he can to learn as much as possible about the Russia investigation. Whenever he comes across something that can be spun to make the FBI or anyone Trump has decided is his enemy look bad, he’ll put it in the “Declassify” pile. Then he’ll release it all to the public and hold a news conference where he suggests that there was a conspiracy to take down Trump. The president will then take to Twitter to proclaim that he was indeed the victim of a vile witch hunt that has at last been exposed. The news media, in possession of only the materials Barr has chosen to give them, will struggle to avoid amplifying and reinforcing Barr’s claims.

    And then Trump will tell Barr to do the same thing to the Democratic candidate for president.