Tag: Trump

Oh good.

Donald Trump’s Aberdeenshire golf resort must pay the Scottish government’s legal costs following a court battle over a major North Sea wind power development.

Mr Trump battled unsuccessfully in the courts to halt the project before he became US president.

Why?

Mr Trump had argued the development would spoil the view from his golf course at Menie.

Goodness, that takes a lot of nerve. You buy a golf course in a foreign country and then you expect to be able to veto anything that country wants to build within sight of your golf course? Like, you own everything as far as the eye can see?

Good that it didn’t work. Even better that he has to pay costs.

Also, hello emoluments clause.

https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1101633194661691394

Also threatened were…

Leading up to the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump directed his personal attorney at the time to threaten legal action against the colleges and high school he attended if they publicly released his grades or standardized test scores, the attorney, Michael Cohen, told Congress on Wednesday.

…

“When I say conman, I’m talking about a man who declares himself brilliant but directed me to threaten his high school, his colleges and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT scores,” he said.

Somehow I always kind of suspected the “brilliant” part was shaky.

In support of his testimony, Cohen provided a May 2015 letter he penned to the president of Fordham University, the New York school Trump attended for two years in the 1960s before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania.

The letter warns that media outlets had requested Trump’s records but were denied by his legal team. Cohen reminded the school that Trump’s student records were protected by federal law, and he threatened to hold the school liable “to the fullest extent of the law” if the university released them.

Cohen emphasized that violating Trump’s confidentiality could result in “both criminal and civil liability and damages including, among other things, substantial fines, penalties and even the potential loss of government aid and other funding. This criminality will lead to jail time.”

The laws are real and Trump’s grades have never been released.

Now, this is Trump. If his grades were impressive, they’d be out there. What are we to conclude? That he’s every bit as thick as he appears to be, which is thick as two short planks.

Cohen said in his testimony that “the irony wasn’t lost on me” that Trump in 2011 criticized President Barack Obama for not releasing his records. He attached to his testimony an Associated Press story that quotes Trump as saying, “How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard? I’m thinking about it, I’m certainly looking into it. Let him show his records.”

Whatever the wizardry was, it didn’t get Trump into Columbia and Harvard.

Trump explains why he takes Kim’s word for it that he had no idea anyone was being harsh to Otto Warmbier.

Chris Cillizza has doubts:

Trump said this of Warmbier and North Korea: “He tells me that he didn’t know about it and I will take him at his word.” Trump added that Kim “felt badly about it. He felt very badly.”

Trump is, apparently, taking the word of a brutal dictator who had his half-brother murdered with nerve gas at an airport and who continues to live a posh lifestyle while his country suffers the effects of staggering economic sanctions? The guy who North Korean media says began driving a car at age 3, helped cure Ebola and can control the weather? We’re going to believe THAT guy???

On its face, Kim’s claim that he was unaware of Warmbier’s arrest and treatment is beyond laughable. Kim rules North Korea with an iron fist. He wouldn’t know that an American college student had been arrested in his country? He would miss how Warmbier’s arrest and incarceration became a massive national and international story? And at no time in the 18 months Warmbier was held would anyone in Kim’s government ever see fit to mention that they were holding an American prisoner?

Another Elinor Lipman gem:

Oversight’s a cruel committee–
Their chairman’s from an inner city!
Let’s all believe that Cohen lies,
Or I won’t get my Nobel Prize. #thepoetryofdonaldtrump

— Elinor Lipman (@ElinorLipman) February 28, 2019

Oops. Duck’s off, sorry.

After all that Look At Me Solve North Korea, Trump failed ignominiously because it turns out – who could possibly have guessed? – that Kim isn’t going to roll over just because Trump tells him to.

President Trump and Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, abruptly ended their second summit meeting on Thursday after talks collapsed with the two leaders failing to agree on any steps toward nuclear disarmament or measures to ease tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

“Sometimes you have to walk,” Mr. Trump said at an afternoon news conference in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam.

He said Mr. Kim had offered to dismantle the North’s most important nuclear facility if the United States lifted the harsh sanctions imposed on his nation — but would not commit to do the same for other elements of its weapons program. That, Mr. Trump said, was a dealbreaker.

“It was about the sanctions,” Mr. Trump said. “Basically they wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety, but we couldn’t do that.”

But we were told that Mr. Trump is The Genius of The Deal. Was that not true? Have we been deceived?

The premature end to the negotiations leaves the unusual rapprochement between the United States and North Korea that has unfolded for most of a year at a deadlock, with the North retaining both its nuclear arsenal and facilities believed to be producing additional fissile material for warheads.

Was it in fact an unusual rapprochement? Is there any chance it was not an unusual rapprochement at all but rather Kim pretending to rapprocher in order to get what he wanted from Trump? I think there is some chance of that.

Before ending the news conference to fly back to Washington, Mr. Trump tried to put a good face on the outcome. “This wasn’t a walkaway like you get up and walk out,” he said. “No, this was very friendly. We shook hands.”

“There’s a warmth that we have and I hope that stays,” he added.

No, there isn’t. There is ice-cold Kim putting on an act, and idiotic Donnie buying it. That’s all.

The collapse of the talks came in the aftermath of withering congressional testimony in Washington by Mr. Cohen. “I think having a fake hearing like that and having it in the middle of this very important summit is really a terrible thing,” Mr. Trump told reporters.

The story of the portrait is a high point (of lowness) for me. Fake bidder. Hiked up price. Paid for by foundation. Twitter boast. It’s got it all.

Michael Cohen claims that President Donald Trump had him find a fake bidder to buy a portrait of him at a 2013 charity auction in the Hamptons so it would sell higher than everything else, and then paid the buyer back with Trump Foundation funds.

As one does, you know.

“The objective was to ensure that his portrait, which was going to be auctioned last, would go for the highest price of any portrait that afternoon,” Cohen said.

So that people would think he’s a hot item.

Just found out that at a charity auction of celebrity portraits in E. Hampton, my portrait by artist William Quigley topped list at $60K

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 16, 2013

Feast your eyes.

He got the hair right; it still sits there like a rug.

Thieves fall out.

Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer, is planning on portraying his onetime client in starkly negative terms when he testifies Wednesday before a House committee, and on describing what he says was Mr. Trump’s use of racist language, lies about his wealth[,] and possible criminal conduct.

[The Times really needs to ditch its stupid rule against the Oxford comma. I’m pretty sure that list at the end of the sentence is three items, not two, but the lack of the comma makes it distractingly annoyingly disruptively ambiguous.]

Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued a statement.

“Disgraced felon Michael Cohen is going to prison for lying to Congress and making other false statements,” she said. “Sadly, he will go before Congress this week and we can expect more of the same. It’s laughable that anyone would take a convicted liar like Cohen at his word, and pathetic to see him given yet another opportunity to spread his lies.”

Says the constantly lying press secretary who lies for her lying boss every day. Laughable? Pathetic? We’re lost in a hall of mirrors.

The testimony provides Mr. Cohen with the opportunity to tell his story under penalty of perjury before an audience of millions of people, about two months before he is scheduled to report to prison.

Among the most explosive and potentially damning aspects of Mr. Cohen’s testimony will be providing evidence of potential criminal conduct since Mr. Trump became president, according to the person familiar with the plans.

So, that should be interesting.

Trump thinks he invented the 4th of July as a National Event. Is being told otherwise with varying degrees of sarcasm.

HOLD THE DATE! We will be having one of the biggest gatherings in the history of Washington, D.C., on July 4th. It will be called “A Salute To America” and will be held at the Lincoln Memorial. Major fireworks display, entertainment and an address by your favorite President, me!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 24, 2019

People are finding “HOLD THE DATE!” particularly hilarious since it’s a federal holiday and has been ever since none of us are old enough to remember when.

Is he … is he taking credit for inventing the 4th of July? https://t.co/fZRsVF13Oe

— Jennifer Wright (@JenAshleyWright) February 24, 2019

Deluded DC area man believes he invented 4th of July celebration

— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) February 24, 2019

No, Trump isn’t planning anything for 4th of July. He’s just trying to take credit for the same fireworks show they’ve had in DC for over 100 years.

— Scott Dworkin (@funder) February 24, 2019

Trump and co are setting up a panel to “discover” that climate change is no problem.

According to a document obtained by The Washington Post, the Trump administration intends to use an executive order to create a panel tasked with assessing the potential harm of climate change.

Citing a memo dated February 14, The New York Times reported the committee, called the  the Presidential Committee on Climate Security, will consist of 12 individuals, including William Happer, who is slated to head the team. Appointed to the National Security Council as the senior director for emerging technologies, the Princeton physicist is a known climate change denier, who once compared the “demonization of carbon dioxide” to the “demonization of poor Jews under Hitler.”

Except for the whole having a brain and feelings part, the comparison is a close one.

The formation of the committee has sparked concern among climate change experts. Marshall Shepherd, Georgia Athletic Association distinguished professor of atmospheric sciences and geography, told Newsweek: “Study after study from the military, bipartisan and nonpartisan organizations and the National Academy of Sciences have confirmed that climate change is a threat to national security.

“I actually served on one of the National Academy studies commissioned by the U.S. Navy, and the findings were crystal clear. To form such a committee smells of confirmation bias and contradicts military generals and admirals that have spoken clearly on this topic.”

Well that’s Trump. Remember the story McCabe tells? Intel people told Trump North Korea was a threat and he said no it’s not, Putin told me so. They said but sir all the evidence – and he said “I don’t care, I believe Putin.” That’s who’s running this. He wants his “committee” to contradict the generals and admirals.

Jan Selby, a professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex, U.K., told Newsweek: “This seems to be just another attempt by President Trump to obscure the reality of climate change, and the weight of scientific evidence on it.

“But the idea that a panel on the security implications of climate change could be headed by someone who doesn’t believe in climate change is patently ridiculous. You don’t need to have an A grade in logic to realize what its conclusions will be.”

Patently ridiculous is what he’s going for.

There’s a report from the House Oversight Committee. Paul Waldman at the Post boils it down for us:

We begin with a company called IP3 International, described as “a private company that has assembled a consortium of U.S. companies to build nuclear plants in Saudi Arabia.” IP3, which has an all-star team of former generals and federal officials on its staff and board, was pushing hard on the Trump administration to approve its plan to build these reactors despite the lengthy process required to transfer nuclear technology abroad.

Not to mention the fact that it’s Saudi Arabia. Remember the twin towers? That Saudi Arabia. Remember Jamal Khashoggi? That Saudi Arabia again.

A key proponent of this nuclear effort was General Michael Flynn, who described himself in filings as an “advisor” to a subsidiary of IP3, IronBridge Group Inc., from June 2016 to December 2016 — at the same time he was serving as Donald Trump’s national security advisor during the presidential campaign and the presidential transition. According to the whistleblowers, General Flynn continued to advocate for the adoption of the IP3 plan not only during the transition, but even after he joined the White House as President Trump’s National Security Advisor…

The other key person inside the administration was Derek Harvey, the senior director for Middle East and North African affairs at the National Security Council in the early days of the Trump administration.

Harvey was fired by McMaster and went to work for Devin Nunes.

But in the White House, he was an unusually strong advocate for IP3′s idea, despite the legal impediments meant to make sure that materials and technology capable of being turned into nuclear weapons don’t spread throughout the world:

Career staff warned that any transfer of nuclear technology must comply with the Atomic Energy Act, that the United States and Saudi Arabia would need to reach a 123 Agreement, and that these legal requirements could not be circumvented.

So they circumvented them, because of course they did.

H/t YNNB

Huh. Word is, Shinzo Abe did indeed nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Because the US asked him to.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe nominated U.S. President Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize last autumn after receiving a request from the U.S. government to do so, the Asahi newspaper reported on Sunday.

The report follows Trump’s claim on Friday that Abe had nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize for opening talks and easing tensions with North Korea.

Trump didn’t say anything about asking him to. He just said Abe nominated him – he said it smugly, as if it were an exciting unsolicited honor, as opposed to a favor done on request from a heavily-armed acquaintance. An extorted “favor” isn’t really a favor and an extorted honor doesn’t count as an honor. Rather the reverse, actually.

The Japanese leader had given him “the most beautiful copy” of a five-page nomination letter, Trump said at a White House news conference.

The U.S. government had sounded Abe out over the Noble Peace Prize nomination after Trump’s summit in June last year with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un…

But then there’s all the “Little Rocket Man” and “my button actually works” aggro, so I wouldn’t place any large bets on his chances.

The Times (the other one, the New York one) has another one of those big articles, this one on Trump’s moves to obstruct justice. It starts with a bang.

As federal prosecutors in Manhattan gathered evidence late last year about President Trump’s role in silencing women with hush payments during the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump called Matthew G. Whitaker, his newly installed attorney general, with a question. He asked whether Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York and a Trump ally, could be put in charge of the widening investigation, according to several American officials with direct knowledge of the call.

Ho yus, perfectly normal, a president asking an attorney general if they can put a friend in charge of an investigation into the president. What could possibly go corrupt?

We’re all familiar with the public obstruction, such as all those tweets; there is also a secret branch.

An examination by The New York Times reveals the extent of an even more sustained, more secretive assault by Mr. Trump on the machinery of federal law enforcement. Interviews with dozens of current and former government officials and others close to Mr. Trump, as well as a review of confidential White House documents, reveal numerous unreported episodes in a two-year drama.

The sewage rises, and rises, and rises.

Whitaker told Congress under oath that Trump had never pressured him over the investigations; Dems are now considering a perjury investigation.

Etcetera.

Was Trump really telling a whopper when he said Obama told him he (Obama) was on the edge of war with North Korea? Peter Baker at the Times has collected some “Nope”s from people who worked in Obama’s administration.

President Trump has been telling audiences lately that his predecessor was on the precipice of an all-out confrontation with the nuclear-armed maverick state. The way Mr. Trump tells the story, the jets were practically scrambling in the hangars.

“I believe he would have gone to war with North Korea,” Mr. Trump said in the White House Rose Garden on Friday. “I think he was ready to go to war. In fact, he told me he was so close to starting a big war with North Korea.”

Well I was there and I say he didn’t. In fact I heard him not say it.

The notion that Mr. Obama, who famously equivocated about a single missile strike against non-nuclear Syria to punish it for using chemical weapons against its own civilians, would have started a full-fledged war with North Korea seems hard to imagine, to say the least. But this presumption has become part of Mr. Trump’s narrative in patting himself on the back for reaching out to North Korea to make peace.

Jack Goldsmith at Lawfare explains why much about Trump’s Fake Emergency is not abnormal or weird or even alarming, and then why much about it is one or all of those.

First, in stating that he “didn’t need to do this,” Trump acknowledged what so much of the run-up to his proclamation makes clear: there is no necessity in his action, and thus no “emergency” in the ordinary language sense of the term. As noted above, this is typically true of emergency declarations. But presidents don’t admit it, much less celebrate it. They tend to make emergency declarations in ways that do not highlight that the entire modern law of emergency power rests on the fiction that emergency powers can be invoked in the absence of what we normally think of as an emergency.

Second, in clumsily denying that the emergency declaration is about politics and the 2020 election, Trump confirmed what many people think: It is about politics and the 2020 election. That acknowledgment heightens and for many will confirm suspicions about mixed motives, pretext, and the like.

Trump is not by a mile the first president to invoke executive power aggressively for political purposes. But he might be the first plausibly to be seen to exercise emergency powers openly for political purposes. In this regard, as in many regards, Trump is undisciplined in his lack of hypocrisy. As I explained a few years ago:

A corollary to Trump’s shamelessness is that he often doesn’t seek to hide or even spin his norm-breaking. Put another way, he is far less hypocritical than past presidents—and that is a bad thing. Hypocrisy is an underappreciated political virtue. It can palliate self-interested and politically divisive government action through mollifying rhetoric and a call to shared values. Trump is bad at it because he can’t “recognize the difference between what one professes in public and what one does in private, much less the utility of exploiting that difference,” Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore have noted in Foreign Affairs. He is incapable of keeping his crass thoughts to himself, or of cloaking his speech in other-regarding principle.

That’s an interesting point, and I suppose I have to agree it’s true. A major reason I hate Trump so intensely is his complete failure / refusal to acknowledge, much less heed, any norms about words and acts in prominent government figures. I suppose I have to agree that that means I think he should make an effort to pretend, and that means I think he should be more of a hypocrite. I do think he should keep his crass thoughts to himself, because his refusal to do so is an inspiration to millions of people who long to shout about their hatred for various appointed underlings. I do think he should palliate his loathsome actions with mollifying rhetoric and a call to shared values, when the alternative is his pissing all over the best of our shared values.

This is a counterintuitive idea. Many people see Trump as hypocritical since he often says one thing and does another (including things that he criticized his predecessor for). But he is profoundly not hypocritical in this sense: As in his border wall announcement, he is often guileless in asserting power, and doesn’t try to hide the tension between his political aims and his asserted constitutional justifications. This is one of Trump’s most remarkable and persistent norm violations. “The clearest evidence of the stability of our values over time is the unchanging character of the lies … statesmen tell,” Michael Walzer famously noted. “They lie in order to justify themselves, and so they describe for us the lineaments of justice. Wherever we find hypocrisy we find moral justice.” Walzer might have added that when we see in our statesmen an absence of hypocrisy in a contested context where principle normally matters, an absence of moral justice creeps in.

We are there.

What happens when he tries to string sentences together.

https://twitter.com/joshscampbell/status/1096445493687635968

Aren’t Republicans supposed to love the military? The Post reports:

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said that Trump’s plan to divert military construction funding to border barriers was “utterly disrespectful” to members of the military.

“This appalling decision by the Trump administration is an egregious example of the President putting his political agenda ahead of the interest of the United States,” Smith said in a statement.

Trump intends to tap $3.6 billion in military construction funds by declaring a national emergency.

What is his political agenda here exactly?

It seems to be to defend and consolidate and underline his image, his “identity,” as a ferocious racist xenophobe. It appears to be to leave no stone unturned in his effort to display his credentials as a hate-mongering white supremacist shit.

Which is sort of funny, in a sour way, because hey, dude, we believe you, you don’t need to do all this to convince us.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Trump’s hand was forced on declaring a national emergency by congressional Democrats.

“President Trump’s decision to announce emergency action is the predictable and understandable consequence of Democrats’ decision to put partisan obstruction ahead of the national interest,” McConnell said in a statement.

Senator would you please go stick your head in a bucket of fresh cement? At once?

So here we go. Trump, sounding both drunk and brain-dead, says he’s declaring a national emergency, then promptly says he didn’t have to do that, which means it’s not an emergency, so all the lawyers are saying that won’t do him a lot of good in court.

Can’t anybody stop this runaway train?

BREAKING: President Trump confirms that he will declare a national emergency to secure funding to build a wall at the US southern border https://t.co/daF5YvWEDs pic.twitter.com/vcHN4MgUwB

— CNN (@CNN) February 15, 2019

Mister Populist is again finding a way to make sure workers get cheated out of their pay.

The Associated Press published a good overview, highlighting a variety of elements in the final package, but the Washington Post flagged a point of particular interest.

Lawmakers grappled with a series of last-minute disputes Wednesday as they sought to finalize the deal, including an ultimately unsuccessful push by Democrats to include back pay for thousands of federal contractors who were caught up in the last shutdown, and – unlike the 800,000 affected federal workers – have not been able to recoup their lost wages.

Alas, this isn’t too surprising. Democrats, led by Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.), pushed a provision to include back pay for federal contractors as part of the spending deal, but when reporters asked Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) yesterday whether it would be included, the senator replied, “I’ve been told the president won’t sign that.”

But but but we’re told he’s a populist. Surely populists don’t approve of stealing from The People?

As Vox recently explained, in reference to those adversely affected by the shutdown, “Up to 580,000 contractors, including cafeteria workers, security guards, developers, and IT consultants, could be missing out on back pay because of the impasse, according to NYU public service professor Paul Light.”

Cafeteria workers and security guards – Trump stiffs them while billing us for his many many trips to his golf resorts.

Well, now we know what Trump is doing with his “executive time,” besides watching Fox & Friends. He’s playing Pretend Golf in a room of the White House.

President Trump has installed a room-sized “golf simulator” game at the White House, which allows him to play virtual rounds at courses all over the world by hitting a ball into a large video screen, according to two people told about the system.

That system replaced an older, less sophisticated golf simulator that had been installed under President Obama, according to two people with knowledge of the previous system.

Trump’s system cost about $50,000, and was put in during the last few weeks in a room in his personal quarters, a White House official said.

He paid for it himself, too – what a big boy.

President Trump has built his schedules around long blocks of “executive time” — unstructured periods in the day where the president’s schedules show no official meetings. He often spends this time watching TV, tweeting, holding impromptu meetings and making phone calls, aides have said.

And eating ice cream and playing Pretend Golf.

Trump — then a businessman and conservative celebrity — repeatedly criticized Obama for spending too much of his presidency playing golf. “Can you believe that, with all of the problems and difficulties facing the U.S., President Obama spent the day playing golf?” Trump wrote on Twitter in October 2014.

As president, however, Trump has played golf more often than Obama did: Obama played about 38 rounds a year, vs. about 70 per year for Trump. That’s just the outdoor kind of golf: The Post could not obtain statistics on Obama’s virtual golf-playing.

Silly Post; they’re overlooking the scoring system. You have to multiply the times Obama played by 5 because his daddy was from Kenya, by 3 because he went to Columbia, by another 3 because he went to Harvard, by 10 because [you know]. Trump on the other hand gets to discount by half because he’s from Queens.

NPR had more on the BBC camera guy assaulted by a Trumpist at Trump’s “rally” in El Paso. It raises some vexed questions.

The BBC’s Ron Skeans was working in the area of a raised camera platform at Trump’s campaign event when, he says, a “very hard shove” came out of nowhere. At the time, Trump was touting recent economic numbers to a roaring crowd in the El Paso County Coliseum.

Skeans’ colleagues say the apparent attack came after repeated verbal assaults on the media during the event. The BBC says it is “clearly unacceptable for any of our staff to be attacked for doing their job.”

NPR frames it very cautiously, as NPR always does, because hey it’s national pr so it has to talk to the Trumpists as well the people who don’t favor assaulting journalists. “Colleagues say”; they could be wrong. “The apparent attack”; maybe it was an accident, or maybe camera guy imagined it, or maybe he’s lying. “Came after”; could be just a coincidence. But caution or no caution, Trump is what he is and his fans react to them as they do. We see his insults and lies about people he wants to damage day in and day out on Twitter, and we know he’s not just talking for the sake of talking. He wants people to hate the people he hates, and he wants people to do harm to the people he hates, including, in my view, violent harm. He tries to pretend otherwise when he’s in a corner, but pretending is all it is. Trump is profoundly stupid, but he’s not so stupid that he thinks a constant barrage of insults and fear-mongering from a president cannot possibly inspire anyone to violence.

“I didn’t know what was going on,” Skeans said, according to the BBC, describing the moment when his camera suddenly skewed down and away from the stage. Video footage showed a Trump supporter yelling obscenities as he was restrained and taken away from the area.

The disruption forced Trump to pause his remarks. Shielding his eyes to see better, the president asked, “You all right? Everything OK?”

He then flashed a thumbs-up in Skeans’ direction.

His concern is touching.

Other BBC staff members who were at the event said the Trump supporter went after a group of news teams and that the cameraman had seemingly taken the worst of it.

Just attended my first ⁦@realDonaldTrump⁩ rally where my colleague BBC cameraman Rob Skeans was attacked by a Trump supporter. The crowd had been whipped up into a frenzy against the media by Trump and other speakers all night #TrumpElPaso pic.twitter.com/Oiw8osPms3

— Eleanor Montague (@EleanorMontague) February 12, 2019

The crowd had been whipped up into a frenzy against the media by Trump and other speakers all night

When you whip people into a frenzy for hours, there’s a real possibility that one or more of the people so whipped will become violent. Frenzies tend to reside next door to violence; that’s part of the meaning of the word. Frenzies are not a thing to mess with, especially with crowds.

Trump has repeatedly called the news media the enemy of the people and accused journalists of creating fake news in an effort to make him look bad.

On Tuesday afternoon, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said, “President Trump condemns all acts of violence against any individual or group of people — including members of the press. We ask that anyone attending an event do so in a peaceful and respectful manner.”

This is possibly the worst thing about Trump and the Trumpers, this utterly revolting cynical pretense that they’re not doing what we can see them doing every hour of every day. Trump systematically and with malice incites loathing of and rage at various individuals and groups, he oversees an administration that works hard to damage and injure those individuals and groups, and when called on it he and his people look at us with big round eyes and claim to condemn the very things they’re doing out in the open where we can see them. Of course Trump doesn’t condemn all acts of violence against any individual or group of people — including members of the press; he loves those acts of violence, he incites them, he encourages them, he laughs gleefully at them, he looks forward to seeing more of them.