Tag: Trump

  • Hingedness level not high today

    More from that meeting, because it’s just too…

    Ten percent of the population, that would be. Suuuure there are.

    He could be hugely popular everywhere if he wanted to. Everywhere. Hugely. But he doesn’t want to.

  • He thinks he would have been a good general

    More on Trump’s doolally meeting:

    After twelve days of doing, according to his official schedule, absolutely nothing, Donald Trump assembled a photo-op-slash-cabinet-meeting today. Sort of. It was, as usual, heavily steeped in weird. There was a two-month-old meme poster of Trump’s face displayed prominently in the center of the table, for some reason.

    Well let’s talk about that. Why was it there? To double the thrill? To double the sense of awe and mystery? To intimidate? Does he think he’s successful at any of those things? Maybe he thinks a big image of him is magic in some way? Maybe he thinks he looks good in it?

    He blasted deceased Sen. John McCain by name for voting against an Obamacare repeal, and was full of spite for a host of other Republicans. “Jeff Flake is selling real estate, whatever he’s doing.”

    On departed Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis: “What has he done for me? How has he done in Afghanistan? Not too good.”

    Wait. He thinks his cabinet is supposed to do things for him? He doesn’t realize it’s supposed to be for a somewhat larger number of people?

    On his own military prowess: “I think I would have been a good general, but who knows?”

    On Syria: “Look, we don’t want Syria … we’re talking about sand and death. That’s what we’re talking about. We’re not talking about vast wealth. We’re talking about sand and death.”

    On drones, yes, drones: “I know more about drones than anybody.”

    On, um, wheels: “The wheel, the wall, some things never get old.”

    He’s still on that?

    H/t Skeletor

  • See the poster

    Trump is holding a cabinet meeting right now. Shannon Pettypiece is collecting the bulletins.

    https://twitter.com/spettypi/status/1080511779439034368

    Good god. He is sitting right in front of a huge poster of himself.

    https://twitter.com/spettypi/status/1080511938386370560

    How would he know more about drones than anybody, I wonder? It’s a technical subject; he’s not a technical subject guy.

    https://twitter.com/spettypi/status/1080515960765857792

    https://twitter.com/justinsink/status/1080511741790957568

    Heil? I guess?

    https://twitter.com/justinsink/status/1080525572038643713

    https://twitter.com/spettypi/status/1080529889558712321

    Nah, he quit.

    https://twitter.com/spettypi/status/1080530212801167366

    We do! We know!

    Start with the prisons, chum.

  • Manly men build walls

    The Times editorial board is disgusted with Trump and his shutdown. One, he’s messing up the lives of thousands of workers; two, he’s doing it not to Protect Our Security but to defend his ego; three, he’s an asshole.

    With even a quick peek beyond his bubble, the president could learn much about the legions of government employees and contractors who spent the holiday season agonizing over how to cover their next mortgage payment or electric bill or trip to the grocery store if this political charade drags on much longer.

    He could, but it wouldn’t make any difference if he did; he does not care.

    If Mr. Trump would take the time to check in with what’s happening in the real world, he might read about the divorced Army veteran who’d worked “three jobs to survive” before getting hired as a paralegal at the Federal Trade Commission — and who now has no idea if he’ll make the rent. He could hear from the single mother who says that she’ll have enough for rent — but not for food. He might be moved by the wife of a corrections officer wondering how her family will handle their “mortgage, day care and car payments” while her husband is working without pay. Or by the disabled military vet who, having waited more than a year for “service-connected surgery,” cannot get final approval for her procedure until the shutdown ends.

    Trump? “Might be moved by” that or anything else along the same lines? No. Someone else might, but not Trump. His ego is well defended – it has a virtual but powerful 100 foot wall that keeps out all non-self movables.

    Not that Mr. Trump seems much interested in either the public will or the public good. For him, this shutdown is a self-declared point of pride— a gaudy display of his boldness, his manliness and his political steadfastness.

    After all his bluff and bluster, if the president backed down now, he would incur the wrath and ridicule of hard-right pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, who seem to call the shots in this White House, as well as die-hard supporters who still think a concrete wall — or at least some “artistically designed steel slats” — will Make America Great Again.

    See also: the Wheel.

  • Known for big, dumb mouth

    Why did Cyrus Trump fling that tweet full of childish insults at McChrystal? Because McChrystal pointed out that Cyrus Trump doesn’t tell the truth.

    “‘General’ McChrystal got fired like a dog by Obama,” Trump tweeted Tuesday morning. “Last assignment a total bust. Known for big, dumb mouth. Hillary lover!”

    Trump was retweeting a post from Fox News’ Laura Ingraham sharing a story headlined “Media Didn’t Like McChrystal Until He Started Bashing Trump.”

    The commander in chief’s name-calling comes after McChrystal said during an interview Sunday that Trump was dishonest and immoral.

    “I don’t think he tells the truth,” McChrystal told ABC’s Martha Raddatz on “This Week.” When asked if he thought Trump was immoral, McChrystal responded: “I think he is.”

    It’s so typical of Trump to react to being called untruthful and immoral by barfing out a string of untrue insults on a public platform. “Call me immoral?? I’ll show you immoral! Call me a liar?! I’ll show you lies!!”

  • The return of King Cyrus

    Katherine Stewart points out that some militant Christians see Trump as a new King Cyrus.

    Cyrus, in case you’ve forgotten, was born in the sixth century B.C.E. and became the first emperor of Persia. Isaiah 45 celebrates Cyrus for freeing a population of Jews who were held captive in Babylon. Cyrus is the model for a nonbeliever appointed by God as a vessel for the purposes of the faithful.

    The point is, you see, that it doesn’t matter whether Cyrus is a good person or not, the point is what he does for The Believers, who are the only people who matter.

    As the Trump presidency falls under siege on multiple fronts, it has become increasingly clear that the so-called values voters will be among the last to leave the citadel. A lot of attention has been paid to the supposed paradox of evangelicals backing such an imperfect man, but the real problem is that our idea of Christian nationalism hasn’t caught up with the reality. We still buy the line that the hard core of the Christian right is just an interest group working to protect its values. But what we don’t get is that Mr. Trump’s supposedly anti-Christian attributes and anti-democratic attributes are a vital part of his attraction.

    Today’s Christian nationalists talk a good game about respecting the Constitution and America’s founders, but at bottom they sound as if they prefer autocrats to democrats. In fact, what they really want is a king. “It is God that raises up a king,” according to Paula White, a prosperity gospel preacher who has advised Mr. Trump.

    What they like, in short, is the absolute power. They like the dominance, the force, the tough guy. What else is God, after all? The ultimate bully, tyrant, thug, dictator. God is a shit. God creates inferior beings in order to make them suffer for eternity because they don’t crawl to him in the correct way. Trump would do that if he could.

    The great thing about kings like Cyrus, as far as today’s Christian nationalists are concerned, is that they don’t have to follow rules. They are the law. This makes them ideal leaders in paranoid times.

    “When are they going to start rolling out the boxcars to start hauling off Christians?” Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, asked in 2016. If you’re hearing those boxcars pulling up in the distance, as it were, you don’t merely overlook the antisocial qualities of a prospective leader, you embrace them as virtues.

    It is, of course, more of a guy thing. Much more.

    Another important thing to understand about Cyrus is that he is not a queen. In the Christian nationalist world, legitimate political power is largely male power. Mr. Drollinger insists that the Bible describes only “male leadership.”

    So from that point of view, Trump’s contempt for women is a plus, because the only alternative to contempt for women is being ruled by queens.

    This isn’t the religious right we thought we knew. The Christian nationalist movement today is authoritarian, paranoid and patriarchal at its core. They aren’t fighting a culture war. They’re making a direct attack on democracy itself.

    They want it all. And in Mr. Trump, they have found a man who does not merely serve their cause, but also satisfies their craving for a certain kind of political leadership.

    Short version: they love a bully.

  • Messages from a padded cell

    25th Amendment time. Seriously.

  • $1000 a ticket

    While federal workers go unpaid and soybean farmers wonder who will buy their crop now, we are paying for the tents at Trump’s party at Mar-a-Lago.

    While the president has vowed to remain in Washington as the government shutdown continues, his swanky party at the Florida resort will go on regardless. And, as Quartz reported, it will be funded in large part by American taxpayers. The news outlet found expenses for the party on government spending records, showing that a little more than $54,000 went to a tent rental company from Delray Beach, Florida, which confirmed that it was for Trump’s New Year’s Eve party. The purchase was officially made by the U.S. Secret Service, which is in charge of security arrangements when Trump travels to his resort.

    Donald Trump’s exclusive New Year’s Eve party came under fire last year, especially after taxpayers picked up a bill of more than $26,000 for renting lights, generators, tables, and tents at the soiree. Trump has also cashed in big since becoming president, the Press Herald reported. Ticket prices for the party jumped by 25 percent, reaching $1,000 for those who are not members of Mar-a-Lago. Members will still have to pay $650 to attend, which is on top of the club’s $200,000 initiation fee, which doubled the year Trump became president.

    Interesting. He’s raking in the bucks for the party, while we help pay the party’s expenses. Nice little grift he’s got there.

    “This type of naked profiteering off of a government office is what I would expect from King Louis XVI or his modern kleptocratic equivalents, not an American president,” said Norm Eisen, former White House ethics lawyer under Barack Obama.

    Image result for money

  • An invisible 10-foot wall

    Headlines can be funny. Headline in the Post:

    Trump claims there’s a 10-foot wall around the Obamas’ D.C. home. Neighbors say there’s not.

    Immediately below the headline there’s a photo of the house which clearly shows there’s no 10-foot wall around it. The “Neighbors say” is otiose when we can see for ourselves that there’s not.

    Anyway.

    In one of his most recent arguments for a southern border wall, President Trump on Sunday falsely claimed that the Washington home of former president Barack Obama and Michelle Obama is surrounded by a 10-foot wall.

    Damn, talk about other minds. Dude, the house exists and people can see it! We can all see your big dumb stupid lie!

    He might as well say the Capitol is painted orange or the Washington monument has sprouted wings.

    Some found the president’s tweet irresponsible. Fred Guttenberg, the father of one of students killed in the Parkland school shooting, tweeted, “Are you seriously trying to put our former President at risk?”

    The Secret Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump’s tweet and security risks Monday morning.

    A spokesman for the Obamas declined to comment on Trump’s tweet, and the White House did not respond to an email requesting more context on Trump’s claim that there is a wall around the property.

    “More context” – what other context could there be? “Trump makes shit up” is merely what we already know.

  • A necessary quality for leadership

    Expect new Trump eruptions today: top military guy says Trump is crooked as a dog’s hind leg.

    Retired four-star Gen. Stanley McChrystal did not mince words about President Donald Trump in a wide-ranging interview with ABC’s “This Week,” saying the president is dishonest and immoral and adding that he could not work for Trump.

    “I don’t think he tells the truth,” McChrystal told ABC’s Martha Raddatz who questioned the general on whether he feels Trump is a liar.

    When asked if Trump is immoral, McChrystal said: “I think he is.”

    Trump slaps his immorality out there on Twitter every day. A moral person doesn’t talk to and about people the way Trump does, especially from a position of power.

    Having recently published “Leaders: Myth and Reality,” McChrystal took issue with Trump’s leadership style. He mentioned a necessary quality for leadership in his mind — a leader being willing to sacrifice himself for others.

    “I have to believe that the people I’m working for would do that, whether we disagree on a lot of other things,” McChrystal said. “I’m not convinced from the behavior that I’ve seen that that’s the case here.”

    Understatement. I think we’re all quite convinced, from the behavior we’ve seen and read about, that that’s not the case here. Trump wouldn’t sacrifice himself for others to the extent of a paper cut or a mosquito bite.

    McChrystal said, if asked, he would reject the opportunity to work in the Trump administration.

    “I think it’s important for me to work for people who I think are basically honest, who tell the truth as best they know it,” he said.

    “I’m very tolerant of people who make mistakes because I make so many of them — and I’ve been around leaders who’ve made mistakes … but through all of them, I almost never saw people trying to get it wrong. And I almost never saw people who were openly disingenuous on things.”

    “Openly disingenuous” – it should be an oxymoron, but Trump makes it work.

  • Why can’t we do this thing that’s against the law?

    John Kelly on his way out says hey Trump never ordered him to do anything illegal.

    White House chief of staff John Kelly, who will depart President Donald Trump’s administration on Wednesday, told The Los Angeles Times in an extensive interview published Sunday that the president never ordered him to do anything illegal and added that the proposed border wall at the center of the government shutdown fight is not as it has been portrayed.

    Listen, he also never sliced people’s arms off with a sword, so good news, right?

    Kelly, set to be replaced by Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, who will serve as acting chief of staff, said he made sure the president had access to detailed information prior to making decisions, even though the president says publicly that he goes with his gut instinct.

    “It’s never been: The president just wants to make a decision based on no knowledge and ignorance,” Kelly said. “You may not like his decision, but at least he was fully informed on the impact.”

    Nope, not buying that. Kelly may have “made sure the president had access to detailed information” but that doesn’t mean Trump paid any attention to it. Kelly may have “fully informed” Trump in the sense of saying things to him and putting things in front of him, but that doesn’t mean Trump took a blind bit of notice. Do we think Trump can take in information? No we do not. We think Trump lives in his own head and hears only maybe 5% of what anyone says to him.

    The retired Marine general said Trump often pressed him on his legal authority to do certain actions, asking, “Why can’t we do [something] this way?” Kelly added that he was not ordered to carry out any illegal action “because we wouldn’t have.”

    Not because “it would be wrong” but “because we wouldn’t have.” Ringing endorsement of the character and integrity of the sack of hot air sitting in the White House.

  • The scale of the president’s mendacity

    Linda Qiu takes a look at The Year in Trump Lies.

    Here at The New York Times, we have also fact-checked countless campaign rallies, news conferences, interviews and Twitter posts. After nearly two years of assessing the accuracy of Mr. Trump’s statements, we can draw some conclusions not just about the scale of the president’s mendacity, but also about how he uses inaccurate claims to advance his agenda, criticize the news media and celebrate his achievements.

    One, he repeats his lies instead of admitting they are lies.

    Examples abound. He has falsely characterized the December 2017 tax cuts as the “largest” or the “biggest” in American history over 100 times (several others were larger). He has misleadingly said over 90 times that his promised wall along the southern border is being built (construction has not begunon any new section). He has falsely accused Democrats of supporting “open borders” over 60 times (Democratic lawmakers support border security, but not his border wall). And he has lobbed over 250 inaccurate attacks on the investigation into Russian election interference.

    Two, he embellishes and amplifies his lies.

    Take his repeated fabrication about the construction of new steel mills. After his administration announced tariffs on steel and aluminum imports in March, the president claimed in June that United States Steel was “opening six new plants.” A month later, the number rose to seven. He has also occasionally cited eight, possibly nine or a vague “many plants,” and he claimed once that plants were “opening up literally on a daily basis.” To date, United States Steel has yet to open or build one new plant, though the company has restarted idled components of some plants.

    On the one hand, a plant every day; on the other hand, zero plants. That’s quite a gap.

    Three, he adapts his claims as new evidence becomes public.

    Four, he deploys the army of straw men.

    The usual target of this particular strain of falsehoods is the news media, which Mr. Trump suggests purposely underestimates or misinterprets him.

    Mr. Trump often lauds strong job growth under his watch and says that the “fake news” would have deemed such numbers “impossible” or “ridiculous” during the 2016 campaign. Yet he neglects to mention that the number of jobs added in the 22 months after his inauguration — 4.2 million — is lower than the 4.8 million jobs added in the 22 months before he took office, undermining the premise of his retrodiction.

    Well he knows his fans aren’t going to look it up.

  • Let them eat surplus cheese

    Of course he did.

    President Donald Trump issued an executive order Friday freezing federal workers’ pay for 2019, following through on a proposal he announced earlier in the year.

    The move, which nixes a 2.1% across-the-board pay raise that was set to take effect in January, comes as hundreds of thousands of federal employees are expecting to begin the new year furloughed or working without pay because of a partial government shutdown.

    Trump told lawmakers he planned to scrap the 2019 pay bump for federal workers in August, saying the federal budget couldn’t support it. In addition to the 2.1% pay increase, the executive order also cancels a yearly adjustment of paychecks based on the region of the country where workers are posted, called the “locality pay increase,” that was due to take effect in January.

    Right; the federal budget can support a giant tax cut for the rich, and it can support paying for Trump to swan off to Florida nearly every weekend and Secret Service for his kids’ business trips, but it can’t support a tiny pay rise for federal workers at a time when housing costs and medical costs and education costs are soaring way beyond what we are told is the official inflation rate.

    About 380,000 federal employees are on furlough and 420,000 are working without pay as the new year approaches.

    In a letter to House and Senate leaders in August, Trump described the pay increase as “inappropriate.”

    “We must maintain efforts to put our Nation on a fiscally sustainable course, and Federal agency budgets cannot sustain such increases,” the President wrote.

    But it can sustain reckless tax cuts on the rich and reckless spending on the military and Wall. Sure.

  • Taking a wrecking ball to decorum

    Well that’s one way to put it.

    In his first two years in office, President Donald Trump has rewritten the rules of the presidency and the norms of the nation’s capital, casting aside codes of conduct and traditions that have held for generations.

    In Trump’s Washington, facts are less relevant. Insults and highly personal attacks are increasingly employed by members of both parties. The White House press briefing is all but gone, international summits are optional, the arts are an afterthought and everything — including inherently nonpartisan institutions and investigations — is suddenly political.

    The thing is, though, Trump hasn’t actually rewritten any rules; he hasn’t done anything that thoughtful, and he couldn’t if he wanted to, because he doesn’t have the equipment. He doesn’t rewrite rules, he simply ignores them and does what he wants to do. He really is that stupid and headlong and childish. A bull in a china shop hasn’t rewritten the rules, he’s simply barged around the way a bull does. That’s Trump.

    Taking a wrecking ball to decorum and institutions, Trump has changed, in ways both subtle and profound, how Washington works and how it is viewed by the rest of the nation and world.

    Yes, that’s much closer.

    I’m being picky but I think we need to be very careful not to attribute planning or forethought or any kind of thought to what Trump does, because we need to keep constantly in mind just how vacant his mind is. Know the enemy.

    “He’s dynamited the institution of the presidency,” said Douglas Brinkley, presidential historian at Rice University. “He doesn’t see himself as being part of a long litany of presidents who will hand a baton to a successor. Instead, he uses the presidency as an extension of his own personality.”

    Not “litany”; that’s the wrong word. Line. But anyway dynamited, yes. Tear up the drawing of Trump rewriting rules and substitute the drawing of a huge explosion.

    Trump’s tweets often trade in public insults that modern presidents just don’t share in public: The Senate minority leader is “Cryin’ Chuck Schumer.” The media are “the enemy of the people.” His own former secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, is “dumb as a rock.”

    And that level of insult, at times veering into the coarse and the crass, has bled into the dialogue of official Washington. Outgoing Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, weeks before he resigned in a cloud of ethics scandals, tweeted that a Democratic congressman had struggled “to think straight from the bottom of a bottle.” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told fellow Democrats this month that the border wall was a “manhood” issue for the president.

    Oh come on. You can’t compare Trump’s Twitter insults, including “little Adam Schitt,” to Pelosi telling colleagues the wall is a manhood issue. She didn’t tweet it, and it’s not remotely as crass and childish.

    He’s trashed the place like a drunken frat boy. The rules remain unrewritten.

  • A criminal attempt by the president to obstruct justice

    Matthew Miller and Mimi Rocah explain why Trump’s deployment of Whitaker is his worst breach of the wall between president and Justice Department yet.

    The SDNY’s case has already netted one guilty plea for a felony crime of violating campaign finance laws. In his guilty plea and sentencing allocution, Mr. Cohen stated that he worked “in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1,” who is widely understood to be the president. In addition, it is clear from the charging documents against Mr. Cohen that the Trump Organization, which was owned and controlled by Mr. Trump and his children at the time of the conduct, is likely implicated in this criminal scheme as well.

    Taken together, these facts make clear that President Trump, the Trump Organization, and at least one current executive (likely one of Mr. Trump’s sons, who together manage his company today) are subjects and possibly targets of the Southern District’s investigation. In other words, depending on the course of that probe, the president, his children, and his company may all still be charged for the same crime as Cohen, as well as other possible violations of law.

    In pressuring Whitaker, who as acting attorney general oversees the investigation, the president was unquestionably trying to coerce him into blocking prosecutors in New York from either looking at or implicating him or his family members in criminal conduct.

    In our view, that action clearly constituted a criminal attempt by the president to obstruct justice, one that is even more clear-cut than the president’s prior attempts to thwart the federal investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference.

    His attempts to muscle Comey and then his firing of Comey can, just barely, be explained as within the law, but the muscling of Whitaker cannot.

    His intervention in this case can only be understood as an attempt to protect himself, his family, or his business from criminal liability.

    Or all three.

  • Other than that it went well

    Like Basil Fawlty, Trump just can’t get anything right, can he.

    President Trump has an uncanny knack for making a mess of simple, traditional functions every other president has managed to carry out with ease. Talk to a child about Christmas? Yikes — a “marginal” disaster. Go to Europe to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I? He skips one event rather than wilt in the rain and sulks through another. The worst anti-Semitic massacre in U.S. history? He whines about getting his hair wet and keeps campaigning. Visit the troops (finally) in Iraq? Oh boy.

    What, just because he compromised their security? Picky picky.

    So on his belated, first visit to a war zone, Trump once more flubbed a routine presidential task, politicizing his speech(complete with partisan attacks on Democrats on his favorite topic, the border) and even signing “Make America Great Again” hats for the troops, despite regulations prohibiting military personnel from engaging in political events.

    There was also that awkward thing where he talked to some soldiers on Christmas day but instead of really talking to them he ranted about…Comey and the “witch hunt” – in other words himself. “Hi thanksforyourservice now let’s talk about me.”

    To make matters worse, he lied to the military men and women in attendance about the raise they received. ABC News reports:

    “Is anybody here willing to give up the big pay raise you just got?” he surveyed the crowd. “Raise your hand please. Oh, I don’t see too many hands.”

    He continued, citing numbers that have since been debunked and declared untrue.

    “You haven’t gotten [a raise] in more than ten years,” he said. “And we got you a big one. I got you a big one.”

    As the independent fact-checking site PolitiFact noted, the military has received a routine pay raise every year since at least 1961. The 2.4 percent increase that went into effect in 2018 was the largest since 2010, but they have continued apace every year.

    Trump then falsely asserted that the pay increase was actually 10 percent, recounting phony conversations in which “plenty of people” tried to impose a smaller raise.

    Hey, it’s called morale-boosting.

  • The president’s video did not blur the faces

    Newsweek reports that “oops he revealed the location of a SEAL team on Twitter” item:

    President Donald Trump and the White House communications team revealed that a U.S. Navy SEAL team was deployed to Iraq after the president secretly traveled to the region to meet with American forces serving in a combat zone for the first time since being elected to office.

    While the commander-in-chief can declassify information, usually the presence of a special operations unit, to include, showing their faces would not be revealed to the American public, especially while the U.S. service members were still deployed. Current and former Defense Department officials told Newsweek that the information is almost always classified and is a violation of operational security.

    Something went wrong with that middle sentence, but the gist is apparent – usually if a president meets with a special operations unit, it’s not the done thing to show their faces in a fucking tweet.

    A pool report during Trump’s visit said the details of the trip were embargoed until the president finished giving his remarks to a group of about 100 mostly U.S. special operation troops engaged in combat operations in Iraq and Syria.

    The pool report went on to say that Trump paused to take a selfie with U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Kyu Lee, who said he was the chaplain for SEAL Team Five, based out of Coronado, California. The chaplain said Trump told him: “Hey, in that case, let’s take a picture.”

    After Trump left Iraqi airspace, the president posted a video to his Twitter account of his time spent with American forces during his visit to Iraq. Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” plays over the video and shows the president and the first lady posing for pictures with service members that appear to be from SEAL Team Five. The special warfare operators are dressed in full battle gear and wearing night vision goggles.

    The video cuts to team members shaking the president’s hand before cutting to other special operations personnel and support troops.

    Gee, brilliant. I haven’t seen the video because I’d rather gouge my eyes out than watch Trump playing Big Boy with the soldiers.

    Malcolm Nance, a former U.S. Navy intelligence specialist with experience in Iraq told Newsweek on Wednesday that posting the video was a break from traditional procedures that are usually strictly enforced and designed to safeguard the identities of U.S. special operation forces, especially when deployed to a combat zone.

    “Operational security is the most important aspect of personnel deployments. The real names, faces, and identities, of personnel involved in special operations or activities, are usually a closely held secret in a combat zone,” Nance said. “Revealing them casually, through an unusual media exposure even if it’s the commander in chief, would prove a propaganda boom if any of this personnel are detained by a hostile government or captured by a terrorist group. There would be no denying who you are and what you do.”

    Newsweek asked the Pentagon for comment but the Pentagon said talk to him, he says he’s the boss.

    “The deployments of special operation forces, including Navy SEALs are almost [always] classified events, [so] as to protect those men and women that are on the front lines of every overt and covert conflict the United States is involved in,” a Defense Department official told Newsweek on condition of anonymity.

    “Even during special operation demonstrations for congressional delegations or for the president or vice president, personnel either have their faces covered or their face is digitally blurred prior to a release to the general public,” the official said.

    The president’s video did not blur the faces of special operation forces.

    “I don’t recall another time where special operation forces had to pose with their faces visible while serving in a war zone,” the Pentagon official said.

    So…yeah.

  • All modern economies depend on public confidence

    Robert Reich (an economist) on Trump and the stock market dive:

    Let’s get this straight:

    (1) Trump doesn’t want the public to think the stock market has tanked because of his government shutdown, his trade wars, and the $1.9 trillion increase in the nation’s debt caused by his tax cut for corporations and the wealthy. (Actually, these are major reasons for the market’s drop.)

    (2) So he’s blaming the Fed and its chair, Jerome Powell, for raising interest rates. And he’s ordered his staff to find a legal rationale for removing Powell. (Trump has no legal authority to do so.)

    (3) Which is spooking investors even more, because they worry Trump will try to infringe on the independence of the Fed and turn it into his own political tool.

    (4) All modern economies depend on public confidence that politicians can’t lower interest rates to serve their own purposes — such as getting short-term growth at the expense of long-term inflation and instability. (Which is exactly what Trump wants to do.)

    (5) Adding to the panic is Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who announced today that he called bank executives in order to ensure that markets are functioning properly – an intervention that Treasury secretaries typically make when there’s an economic crisis.

    Bottom line: Trump’s ego and his economic team’s incompetence could tank the economy.

    If that happens, many observers are saying, it’s game over. The Republicans will put up with any number of children dying in the custody of ICE and journalists carved up alive on ambassadors’ desks and schools shot up by angry teenagers with arsenals, but they will not put up with stock market fumbles. It’s the wallet, stupid.

  • Economical

    Trump says he’ll never let the government re-open until he gets Wall, and that federal workers are telling him that’s what they want too.

    “I think they understand what’s happening,” he said. “They want border security. The people of this country want border security.”

    “It’s not a question of me,” he continued. “I would rather not be doing shutdowns. I’ve been at the White House. I love the White House, but I wasn’t able to be with my family. I thought it would be wrong for me to be with my family, my family is in Florida, Palm Beach, and I just didn’t want to go down and be there when other people are hurting.”

    Hurting but wanting Wall just the same. They will loses their houses and starve before they give up on Wall!

    Trump was presumably referring to his adult children; his wife, Melania Trump, returned to the White House on Monday to spend the holiday with her husband.

    Trump said many federal workers have told him to hold out for wall funding, though the President didn’t provide names or positions of those workers.

    “But many of those workers have said to me and communicated, stay out until you get the funding for the wall. These federal workers want the wall. The only one that doesn’t want the wall are the Democrats, because they don’t mind open borders, but open borders mean massive amounts of crime,” he said.

    Hey I have an idea, instead of Wall we could just put up big signs saying “WE HATE BROWN PEOPLE SO STAY OUT” every few yards. It’s the same message for a fraction of the cost.

  • Not even a mouse

    The new improved Christmas Carol:

    The Christmas Eve grievances billowing from the White House on Monday formed a heavy cloud of Yuletide gloom.

    In his third straight day holed up inside the White House during the partial federal government shutdown that he initiated over his demand to construct a border wall, President Trump barked out his frustrations on Twitter: Democrats are hypocrites! The media makes up stories! Senators are wrong on foreign policy — and so is Defense Secretary Jim Mattis!

    Wah! Wah! Wah wah wah!

    Trump said war-ravaged Syria would be rebuilt not by the United States but by Saudi Arabia. “Thanks to Saudi A!” he tweeted, two weeks after the Senate unanimously rebukedthe kingdom’s crown prince for the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

    As the stock market closed out its worst December since 1931, the president placed sole blame for the staggering sell-off on the Federal Reserve, likening the central bank to a golfer who “can’t putt.”

    Well, it’s what he knows – that and pussy-grabbing.

    Even for a president accustomed to firing at foes on social media, Monday’s cascade of angry tweets on a day when many Americans were celebrating the season with their families was extraordinary. The rapid-fire missives painted the portrait of an isolated leader nursing a deep sense of injury.

    Also a narcissistic childish fool who can’t stop telling the world what a buffoon he is.

    Just before sundown, Trump tweeted a photo of himself sitting at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, wearing a suit and red tie and accompanied by two aides for what he called a “Christmas Eve briefing with my team working on North Korea.”

    “Progress being made,” Trump wrote. “Looking forward to my next summit with Chairman Kim!”

    Just look at him, pretending to read a piece of paper so that we’ll believe he’s “working.”

    Happy Halloween.