Tag: Trump

  • The base doesn’t pay the bills

    Robert Reich’s friend thinks the end is near.

    This morning I phoned my friend, the former Republican member of Congress.

    ME: So, what are you hearing?

    HE: Trump is in deep shit.

    ME: Tell me more.

    HE: When it looked like he was backing down on the wall, Rush and the crazies on Fox went ballistic. So he has to do the shutdown to keep the base happy. They’re his insurance policy. They stand between him and impeachment.

    ME: Impeachment? No chance. Senate Republicans would never go along.

    HE (laughing): Don’t be so sure. Corporate and Wall Street are up in arms. Trade war was bad enough. Now, you’ve got Mattis resigning in protest. Trump pulling out of Syria, giving Putin a huge win. This dumbass shutdown. The stock market in free-fall. The economy heading for recession.

    ME: But the base loves him.

    HE: Yeah, but the base doesn’t pay the bills.

    “Follow the money.”

    HE: So they’ll wait until Mueller’s report, which will skewer Trump. Pelosi will wait, too. Then after the Mueller bombshell, she’ll get 20, 30, maybe even 40 Republicans to join in an impeachment resolution.

    ME: And then?

    HE: Senate Republicans hope that’ll be enough – that Trump will pull a Nixon.

    ME: So you think he’ll resign?

    HE (laughing): No chance. He’s fucking out of his mind. He’ll rile up his base into a fever. Rallies around the country. Tweet storms. Hannity. Oh, it’s gonna be ugly. He’ll convince himself he’ll survive.

    ME: And then?

    HE: That’s when Senate Republicans pull the trigger.

    ME: Really? Two-thirds of the Senate?

    HE: Do the math. 47 Dems will be on board, so you need 19 Republicans. I can name almost that many who are already there. Won’t be hard to find the votes.

    But it will be slow, and while it’s being slow, bad things will happen.

    ME: I mean, we could have civil war.

    HE: Hell, no. That’s what he wants, but no chance. His approvals will be in the cellar. America will be glad to get rid of him.

    ME: I hope you’re right.

    HE: He’s a dangerous menace. He’ll be gone. And then he’ll be indicted, and Pence will pardon him. But the state investigations may put him in the clinker. Good riddance.

    I’m still afraid of the bad things that will happen before he’s gone.

  • Ann Coulter in charge

    So apparently Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter are running the country. Trump threatened a shutdown; he backed away; he flipped again.

    So what caused Trump to flip back? Some have suggested that he bowed to backlash from high-profile conservative pundits — notably Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh — who lambasted the president for appearing to concede on the wall funding.

    It may or may not be true, but it’s more plausible than it would be for any other president, even the most corrupt or dim-witted. (Isn’t it interesting that Trump is both crookeder than Nixon and dumber than Reagan and Bush 2? And meaner than anybody ever?)

    Coulter, during a podcast on the Daily Caller, said Trump’s White House would become “a joke presidency who scammed the American people” if he didn’t build the wall, adding that “he’ll have no legacy whatsoever.” She also wrote a scathing column about the president and launched a flurry of criticisms on Twitter.

    Limbaugh and Fox talkers were also in the chorus.

    Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) on Friday expressed discontent with the apparent influence these commentators have on the president, stating that they “completely flipped” Trump.

    “This is tyranny of talk radio hosts, right? And so, how do you deal with that?” Corker told reporters. “You have two talk radio hosts who completely flipped the president. And so, do we succumb to tyranny of talk radio hosts?”

    If only we had a choice in the matter.

    On Friday, CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin said Trump’s reversal on the shutdown was due to conservative commentators challenging Trump’s “manhood.” When asked what Republicans should do to learn exactly where Trump stands, Toobin took another jab at Coulter’s apparent influence on the president.

    “What they should be doing, obviously, is checking with Ann Coulter,” Toobin said. “Because apparently she’s the president of the United States, as far as this is concerned.”

     

  • Better and better every day

    Maggie Haberman and Peter Baker tell us Trump is increasingly isolated and self-willed (as only a narcissist can be).

    When President Trump grows frustrated with advisers during meetings, which is not an uncommon occurrence, he sits back in his chair, crosses his arms and scowls. Often he erupts.

    He calls his aides “fucking idiots.”

    For two years, Mr. Trump has waged war against his own government, convinced that people around him are fools. Angry that they resist his wishes, uninterested in the details of their briefings, he becomes especially agitated when they tell him he does not have the power to do what he wants, which makes him suspicious that they are secretly undermining him.

    It’s weird that – assuming the wealth of reporting that says this is correct – he never pauses to think he might be the one who’s an idiot. Maybe he does and he just doesn’t betray the fact, but then that doesn’t sound like the Trump we see every day, does it – what crosses his mind falls out of his mouth. It appears that he does think everyone else is a fool and he alone is a genius…but how? I mean, when you and I see someone doing a difficult gymnastics move or designing an astonishing bridge, we don’t tell ourselves we could do it better, right? We pay some attention to the world around us and we understand that many people can do things we can’t do, and we thus realize that we’re not sitting alone on some pinnacle of excellence – in short we don’t automatically assume we’re the smartest person in the room. Trump is the opposite of that, yet he’s dumb as a stump. It’s very odd.

    At the midpoint of his term, Mr. Trump has grown more sure of his own judgment and more cut off from anyone else’s than at any point since taking office.

    While the disasters pile up. How is he growing more sure of his own judgment? What’s the mechanism?

  • You’re not quitting, I’m canning your disloyal ass

    Trump – of course – is in a snit. Mattis didn’t resign, Trump retroactively fired him after he said he was resigning! So there and ha!

    The Times reports:

    Aides said that the president was furious that Mr. Mattis’s resignation letter — in which he rebuked the president’s rejection of international allies and his failure to check authoritarian governments — had led to days of negative news coverage. Mr. Mattis resigned in large part over Mr. Trump’s hasty decision to withdraw American forces from Syria.

    When Mr. Trump first announced that Mr. Mattis was leaving, effective Feb. 28, he praised the defense secretary on Twitter, saying he was retiring “with distinction.” One aide said that although Mr. Trump had already seen the resignation letter when he praised Mr. Mattis, the president did not understand just how forceful a rejection of his strategy Mr. Mattis had issued.

    Hahaha no, it takes reading comprehension to figure that out. Mattis didn’t say “You, sir, are a fat-headed dope and a menace,” so Trump didn’t get that it was implicit in what Mattis did say.

    The president has grown increasingly angry as the days have passed, the aide said. On Saturday, Mr. Trump posted a tweet that took a jab at Mr. Mattis, saying that “when President Obama ingloriously fired Jim Mattis, I gave him a second chance. Some thought I shouldn’t, I thought I should.”

    So neener-neener. Or something.

  • Confused and bewildered

    Another one Trump has driven out:

    Brett McGurk, the special presidential envoy to the coalition fighting the Islamic State, has accelerated his resignation, telling colleagues this weekend that he could not carry out President Trump’s newly declared policy of withdrawing from Syria.

    A seasoned diplomat considered by many to be the glue holding together the sprawling, American-led coalition fighting the terrorist group, Mr. McGurk was supposed to retire in February.

    According to an email he sent his staff, he decided to move forward his departure after Mr. Trump did not heed his own commanders and blindsided America’s allies in the region by abruptly ordering the withdrawal of the 2,000 troops stationed in Syria.

    And for why? Because Erdoğan told him to.

    “The recent decision by the president came as a shock and was a complete reversal of policy that was articulated to us,” Mr. McGurk said in the email to his colleagues. “It left our coalition partners confused and our fighting partners bewildered.”

    “I worked this week to help manage some of the fallout but — as many of you heard in my meetings and phone calls — I ultimately concluded that I could not carry out these new instructions and maintain my integrity,” he said.

    What was that about needing adults in the room again?

  • Adults in the room

    Let’s read the Mattis letter.

    Dear Mister Prez, privileged to serve, proud of the progress, troops continue to provide.

    One core belief I have always held is that our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships. While the US remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies…

    Similarly, I believe we must be resolute and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours. It is clear that China and Russia, for example, want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model – gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions – to promote their own interests at the expense of their neighbors, America and our allies. That is why we must use all the tools of American power to provide for the common defense.

    My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues.

    That last sentence is a stinger, a double stinger. One, Mattis is underlining the fact that Trump does not think we should treat allies with respect, and that he (Trump) puts his thought into practice by very conspicuously treating allies with disrespect and outright rudeness. He’s also underlining the fact that Trump does not think we should be resolute and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours, and, again, acts accordingly. Two, Mattis is underlining the fact that he has over four decades of experience and knowledge on these issues, which as we all know Trump emphatically does not.

    We must do everything possible to advance an international order that is most conducive to our security, prosperity and values, and we are strengthened in this effort by the solidarity of our alliances.

    Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.

    Note how those two sentences interact. We need to follow a sane course, and you don’t agree with that view, so you need someone crazy enough to join you on that path to authoritarian doom. Byeeeeee!

    Jim Acosta reports that Trump is in a tantrum about the letter.

    CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta said Friday that a source has told him that President Donald Trump is furious about Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’ resignation letter, tendered in the wake of the president’s decision to pull U.S. troops out of Syria.

    But Trump is even more incensed about news coverage indicating he needs adult supervision, Acosta told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.

    “He hates that letter,” Acosta said, citing a source close to the White House who “advises the president occasionally.” But he added that Trump is even more upset by the “conventional wisdom” that Mattis and some others in his administration “were sort of the adults in the room … to keep the president from going overboard, to be a check on his impulses.”

    Trump is “irritated by this notion here in Washington that he is sometimes in need of adult daycare,” Acosta added.

    Well, good, I guess; I want him to feel bad. But better would be if he didn’t need adults in the room.

  • Trump pressed Whitaker

    Well this is scandalous. CNN reports:

    President Donald Trump has at least twice in the past few weeks vented to his acting attorney general, angered by federal prosecutors who referenced the President’s actions in crimes his former lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

    Trump was frustrated, the sources said, that prosecutors Matt Whitaker oversees filed charges that made Trump look bad. None of the sources suggested that the President directed Whitaker to stop the investigation, but rather lashed out at what he felt was an unfair situation.

    The first known instance took place when Trump made his displeasure clear to acting attorney general Matt Whitaker after Cohen pleaded guilty November 29 to lying to Congress about a proposed Trump Tower project in Moscow. Whitaker had only been on the job a few weeks following Trump’s firing of Jeff Sessions.

    Three weeks in fact; very few.

    Over a week later, Trump again voiced his anger at Whitaker after prosecutors in Manhattan officially implicated the President in a hush-money scheme to buy the silence of women around the 2016 campaign — something Trump fiercely maintains isn’t an illegal campaign contribution. Pointing to articles he said supported his position, Trump pressed Whitaker on why more wasn’t being done to control prosecutors in New York who brought the charges in the first place, suggesting they were going rogue.

    Nixon got bounced out of there for doing less than that.

  • If nothing else

    At least Putin is happy.

    First, President Trump blindsided his aides and the rest of the world by deciding to pull the full contingent of some 2,000 American troops out of Syria, helping the Kremlin to confirm Mr. Putin’s gamble that intervening in Syria would revive Russian influence in the Middle East.

    Mr. Trump followed that up by declaring that the United States would pull half its forces out of Afghanistan; the combined withdrawals prompted the resignation of Jim Mattis, the respected general who leads the Pentagon.

    All that followed Mr. Trump’s already substantial effort to undermine NATO and the European Union by weakening the American commitment to its traditional alliances.

    By among other things energetically alienating all their heads of state.

  • True for thousands of years

  • The talking points were very firm

    How Trump foreign policy decisions get made:

    President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw American troops from Syria was made hastily, without consulting his national security team or allies, and over strong objections from virtually everyone involved in the fight against the Islamic State group, according to U.S. and Turkish officials.

    Trump stunned his Cabinet, lawmakers and much of the world with the move by rejecting the advice of his top aides and agreeing to a withdrawal in a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last week, two officials briefed on the matter told The Associated Press.

    Well who ya gonna trust, your own aides or that nice Mister Erdoğan? He’s so good at that authoritarian thing, you know, Trump can’t help but admire and love him.

    Secretary of State Mike Pompeo arranged the Dec. 14 call a day after he had unsuccessfully sought clarity from Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu about Erdogan’s threats to launch a military operation against U.S.-backed Kurdish rebels in northeast Syria, where American forces are based.

    Pompeo, Mattis and other members of the national security team prepared a list of talking points for Trump to tell Erdogan to back off, the officials said.

    But the officials said Trump, who had previously accepted such advice and convinced the Turkish leader not to attack the Kurds and put U.S. troops at risk, ignored the script. Instead, the president sided with Erdogan.

    Well now look. The talking points were before he talked to Erdoğan. The talking to Erdoğan was after that. You can’t expect Trump to remember talking points while he’s actually talking to the other guy, now can you. Talking to the other guy kind of blots out the talking points. It’s a very hard skill to learn, to keep the talking points in mind while you go to step two. It’s like figure skating while playing the violin.

    In the following days, Trump remained unmoved by those scrambling to convince him to reverse or at least delay the decision to give the military and Kurdish forces time to prepare for an orderly withdrawal.

    See that’s an easy skill; you just pay no attention. It’s especially easy if you’re very conceited and stupid, like Trump.

    “The talking points were very firm,” said one of the officials, explaining that Trump was advised to clearly oppose a Turkish incursion into northern Syria and suggest the U.S. and Turkey work together to address security concerns. “Everybody said push back and try to offer (Turkey) something that’s a small win, possibly holding territory on the border, something like that.”

    Erdogan, though, quickly put Trump on the defensive, reminding him that he had repeatedly said the only reason for U.S. troops to be in Syria was to defeat the Islamic State and that the group had been 99 percent defeated. “Why are you still there?” the second official said Erdogan asked Trump, telling him that the Turks could deal with the remaining IS militants.

    With Erdogan on the line, Trump asked national security adviser John Bolton, who was listening in, why American troops remained in Syria if what the Turkish president was saying was true, according to the officials. Erdogan’s point, Bolton was forced to admit, had been backed up by Mattis, Pompeo, U.S. special envoy for Syria Jim Jeffrey andspecial envoy for the anti-ISIS coalition Brett McGurk, who have said that IS retains only 1 percent of its territory, the officials said.

    Bolton stressed, however, that the entire national security team agreed that victory over IS had to be enduring, which means more than taking away its territory.

    Trump was not dissuaded, according to the officials, who said the president quickly capitulated by pledging to withdraw, shocking both Bolton and Erdogan.

    Caught off guard, Erdogan cautioned Trump against a hasty withdrawal, according to one official.

    So, that went well.

  • More ice cream for him

    Meanwhile Trump is filling the last hours before he goes on his multi-week vacation doing his bit to take food stamps away from poor people.

    The Trump administration is setting out to do what this year’s farm bill didn’t: tighten work requirements for millions of Americans who receive federal food assistance.

    The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Thursday is proposing a rule that would restrict the ability of states to exempt work-eligible adults from having to obtain steady employment to receive food stamps.

    The move comes just weeks after lawmakers passed a $400 billion farm bill that reauthorized agriculture and conservation programs while leaving the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which serves roughly 40 million Americans, virtually untouched.

    Trump is pissed off that they didn’t gut SNAP more than they already had, so he’s doing it himself.

    Currently, able-bodied adults ages 18-49 without children are required to work 20 hours a week to maintain their SNAP benefits. The House bill would have raised the age of recipients subject to work requirements from 49 to 59 and required parents with children older than 6 to work or participate in job training. The House measure also sought to limit circumstances under which families that qualify for other poverty programs can automatically be eligible for SNAP.

    None of those measures made it into the final farm bill despite being endorsed by President Donald Trump. Now the administration is using regulatory rulemaking to try to scale back the SNAP program.

    Because starving people magically causes jobs to pop into existence.

    “The president has directed me to propose regulatory reforms to ensure those who are able to work do so in exchange for their benefits,” Perdue said during a media call Wednesday. “We would much rather have Congress enact these important reforms for the SNAP program. However, these regulatory changes by the USDA will save hardworking taxpayers $15 billion over 10 years and give President Trump comfort enough to support a farm bill he might otherwise have opposed.”

    Image result for starve the poor

     

  • Pretend he’s a king

    Bad news 2:

    William P. Barr, President Trump’s nominee to be attorney general, wrote an unsolicited memo to top Justice Department officials in June objecting to the notion that Mr. Trump may have committed the crime of obstruction of justice.

    And by “memo” they don’t mean a short note scribbled on an office pad with “Memo” at the top.

    In a 19-page memo, Mr. Barr sharply criticized an apparent aspect of the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, that Mr. Trump may have committed a crime by trying to get the F.B.I. director at the time, James B. Comey, to quash the criminal investigation into his first national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, and later by firing Mr. Comey.

    Mr. Barr argued that the Justice Department must not accept the notion that a president can violate a statute that criminalizes obstruction of justice by exercising his constitutional authority in an otherwise lawful way — such as by firing a subordinate, pardoning someone, or using his “complete authority to start or stop a law enforcement proceeding” — but with a corrupt motive.

    In other words Barr told the Justice Department that a president – in this case the runaway maniac Trump – is above the law.

    Mr. Barr’s views are likely to become a topic of intense scrutiny at his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing. They raise the question of whether, if he is confirmed and takes over supervision of Mr. Mueller’s inquiry as attorney general, he would order Mr. Mueller to shut down the obstruction-of-justice component of his investigation.

    Ya think? It’s hard to see how he wouldn’t do that.

    Mr. Barr’s theory that obstruction-of-justice statutes cannot cover a president’s exercise of authorities echoed constitutional arguments put forward by other defenders of Mr. Trump over the past year, including Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard Law School professor. But the now open embrace of it by a nominee to take over the Justice Department — and supervision of Mr. Mueller — elevated the debate to new significance.

    Several Democrats reacted with alarm. Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, called Mr. Barr’s memo “very troubling,” saying it concluded that “the president is above the law.”

    I don’t think it’s “very troubling.” I think it’s fucking terrifying. We cannot be having a Trump who is above the law, a Trump the law cannot constrain.

    Renato Mariotti on the memo:

    This is the guy who will be Trump’s next Attorney General if he’s confirmed.

  • An outrageous amount of political bias

    A reporter asks Sarah Sanders if Trump shouldn’t, rather than speaking just for himself and in his own interest, speak to and for the American people. She of course responds with a misdirection, explaining that the people elected Trump [they didn’t, actually] because they want his opinion and he should give it.

    Then she explains how evil and unfair the FBI is.

    We know for a fact that the FBI engaged in an outrageous amount of political bias, the fact that the FBI could deny that there was political bias within the FBI particularly under James Comey’s leadership is frankly just laughable.

    But Comey was a lifelong Republican, until he ran up against Trump and his attempts to extort special treatment for Flynn. It seems quite plausible that Comey feels considerable distaste for Donald Trump, but his distaste is not political so much as it’s moral and law enforcemental. Trump is a bad man and a crook; that’s not so much political as ontological.

  • Sarah Sanders says the FBI “ambushed” Flynn

    CNN reports:

    During the White House press briefing, a reporter asked White House press secretary Sarah Sanders to clarify if the White House was disputing that Flynn “is a liar.”

    “We’re disputing any actions he engaged in had nothing to do with the President. Just because, maybe he did do those things, but that doesn’t have anything to do with the President directly,” Sanders said.

    Sanders also said she would not like to revisit her Fox News comments asserting that Flynn was “ambushed” by the FBI during an interview with him in 2017.

    At Flynn’s sentencing hearing on Tuesday, he said he knew lying to federal investigators was illegal and accepted responsibility for his crimes.

    “No. We still firmly believe — look the things that may have taken place, again, that’s for the judge to make that determination, whether he engaged in anything inappropriate. What we do know that was inappropriate by the … self-admittance of (fired FBI Director) James Comey is that the FBI broke standard protocol in the way that they came in and ambushed Gen. Flynn and in the way that they questioned him and in the way that they encouraged not to have White House counsel’s office present. And we know that because James Comey told us that and he said the very reason that they did it was because … they thought they could get away with it,” Sanders said, adding, “We don’t have any reason to walk that back.”

    She sounds like a mobster’s flunky.

  • Repeated and willful self-dealing transactions

    Bam.

    The Donald J. Trump Foundation will close and give away all its remaining funds under judicial supervision amid a lawsuit accusing the charity and the Trump family of using it illegally for self-dealing and political gain, the New York attorney general’s office announced Tuesday.

    The attorney general, Barbara Underwood, accused the foundation of “a shocking pattern of illegality” that was “willful and repeated” and included unlawfully coordinating with Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

    “This amounted to the Trump Foundation functioning as little more than a checkbook to serve Mr. Trump’s business and political interests,” Ms. Underwood said.

    In short, he’s a crook and a liar and a fraud and a thief…and he’s also the president of the United States.

    His kids are also crooks, liars, frauds, thieves.

    The closure of the foundation is a milestone in the investigation. But the broader lawsuit, which also seeks millions in restitution and penalties and a bar on President Trump and his three oldest children from serving on the boards of other New York charities, is proceeding.

    While he continues to squat in the Oval Office, doing his best to destroy the country as he goes down.

    Ms. Underwood’s office sued the Trump Foundation in June, charging it with “improper and extensive political activity, repeated and willful self-dealing transactions, and failure to follow basic fiduciary obligations or to implement even elementary corporate formalities required by law.”

    Nonprofit foundations are supposed to be devoted to charitable activities, but the attorney general’s office, following a two-year investigation, accused the Trump Foundation of being used to win political favor and even purchase a $10,000 portrait of Mr. Trump that was displayed at one of his golf clubs. The existence of the portrait was first reported by The Washington Post.

    The lawsuit accused the foundation of virtually becoming an arm of the Trump campaign, with its campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, directing the foundation to make disbursements in Iowa only days before the state held its presidential nominating caucuses.

    So you’re not supposed to use a charitable foundation to bribe voters? Who knew?

    The foundation lawsuit follows years of scrutiny of President Trump’s charitable activities and adds to his extensive legal challenges, amid a continuing investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

    Tick tock tick tock.

  • Little more than a checkbook for Donnie Two-scoops

    There’s one.

    https://twitter.com/NewYorkStateAG/status/1075057547072233473

    https://twitter.com/NewYorkStateAG/status/1075058113148002305

  • If you can grab it, never mind how, you get to keep it

    Laurence Tribe is profoundly aghast at the notion that a crook can crook his way into the presidency and then be untouchable on account of how the Justice Department Has Ruled that a sitting president can’t be indicted. The problem with that is obvious. If he got the position by committing crimes, how can it make sense to then make the very position he got by criminal means the thing that protects him from law enforcement? It’s absurd and it’s also…you know…a fucking disaster.

    Pinned tweet:

    That Truthout piece has Neil Katyal agreeing with Tribe’s view.

    The Office of Legal Counsel memos stating that a sitting president is immune from criminal prosecution do not necessarily protect Trump, according to some legal experts.

    “The justifications underlying the general practice of treating [Office of Legal Counsel] opinions as binding on executive branch officials do not necessarily apply to the Office of Special Counsel, which is supposed to be insulated from the influence of political appointees when assessing the president’s exposure to criminal liability,” Harvard law professor Andrew Crespo wrote at Lawfare blog. The Office of Legal Counsel memos, Crespo noted, were written by presidential appointees beholden to the president.

    Neal Katyal, solicitor general in the Obama administration, says the Office of Legal Counsel opinions may not prevent Trump from being indicted because they “don’t necessarily apply to a circumstance in which the actual crime may have involved him obtaining the presidency in the first place.”

    One would certainly hope so.

  • What you see is what you get

    Luciano Guerra voted for Trump and now he’s surprised and sad that Trump is shoving a border wall right down the middle of the wildlife center where Guerra works.

    I work at the National Butterfly Center — which is along the U.S.-Mexico border — documenting wildlife and leading educational tours. Many of our visitors are young students from the Rio Grande Valley. When they first arrive, some of the children are scared of everything, from the snakes to the pill bugs. Here, we can show them animals that roam free and teach them not to be afraid. We talk about how we planted native vines, shrubs and trees to attract some 240 species of butterflies, as well as dragonflies, grasshoppers and other insects. The bugs brought the birds — including some you can’t see anywhere else in America, like Green Jays and Chachalacas — and from there, the bobcats and coyotes. We want to teach kids what it takes to create a home for all kinds of animals.

    President Trump’s new border wall — which he has threatened to shut down the government to fund — will teach them what it takes to destroy it.

    The first section, funded by Congress in 2018 for construction starting early next year, will cut right through our 100-acre refuge, sealing off 70 acres bordering the banks of the Rio Grande. The plan that we’ve seen calls for 18 feet of concrete and 18 feet of steel bollards, with a 150-foot paved enforcement zone for cameras, sensors, lighting and Border Patrol traffic.

    There will be flooding. The animals won’t be able to range the way they did. Lights will be on all night. Bulldozers will bulldoze.

    We’re not the only ones standing in the wall’s path. It will also slice through the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, and in Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park — which draws birdwatchers from all over the country and has hosted countless picnics and barbecues for local families like mine. The wall will cut through the park’s land that is behind its parking lot and visitor center. There isn’t much public open space in the Rio Grande Valley. What’s there is fragmented and precious to all of us: According to a 2011 estimate, ecotourism brings $463 million a year to our economy and supports more than 6,600 jobs.

    I’m a lifelong Republican who voted for Donald Trump for president in 2016.

    Thinking what? That he’s a lover of butterflies and wildlife and fragile ecosystems? That he would leave big holes in his Wall for the National Butterfly Center and the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge and the Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park? That he would do the right thing?

    I have little if any sympathy. Trump is plain about what he is and he is not given to self-reform.

    People have asked me, “Didn’t you listen to Trump when he said that he would build a wall?” I didn’t take the idea seriously during the campaign. I knew he couldn’t get Mexico to pay it — that’d be like asking Hurricane Harvey to foot the bill for rebuilding Houston — and thought it was just talk: another candidate making big promises he couldn’t keep. I never thought it would actually happen.

    I know, it’s like all those earthquakes and hurricanes and wild fires we see predicted; we never think they will actually happen.

  • More for him, less for them

    Trump’s gilt palace overlooking Central Park and his golf resorts and solid gold shoes and all the rest of it comes out of the wallets of poor people. That tax scam meant fraudulently hiked rents.

    They were collateral damage as Donald J. Trump and his siblings dodged inheritance taxes and gained control of their father’s fortune: thousands of renters in an empire of unassuming red-brick buildings scattered across Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.

    Those buildings have been home to generations of strivers, municipal workers and newly arrived immigrants. When their regulated rents started rising more quickly in the 1990s, many tenants had no idea why. Some heard that the Trump family had spent millions on building improvements, but they remained suspicious.

    That’s how it’s done: you claim fake improvements and then you get to hike the rent.

    As it turned out, a hidden scam lurked behind the mysterious increases. In October, a New York Times investigation into the origins of Mr. Trump’s wealth revealed, among its findings, that the future president and his siblings set up a phony business to pad the cost of nearly everything their father, the legendary builder Fred C. Trump, purchased for his buildings. The Trump children split that extra money.

    Padding the invoices had a secondary benefit for the Trumps, allowing them to inflate rent increases on their father’s rent-regulated apartments.

    Steal from the poor to give to the rich, that’s our boy.

    Lawyers who specialize in representing tenants say the Trumps’ current and former tenants may have an opening to challenge the decades-old increases, potentially rolling back rents and collecting damages.

    Michael Grinthal, supervising lawyer with the Community Development Project at the Urban Justice Center, a nonprofit legal services and advocacy group, said that the current owners would be held responsible for any damages, but that those owners could have a claim against the president and his siblings.

    “If I was talking to those tenants right now, I’d say: ‘Do it. Go,’” Mr. Grinthal said. “This case should be fought.”

    Regulations generally allow tenants to challenge rent for the past four years. But the state’s highest court has held that tenants can look back further to show their landlord increased rent through fraud (though damages are still limited).

    “If they are making false statements about how much it costs, that would be pretty much dead center of the definition of fraud,” Mr. Grinthal said.

    What was that about a “RAT” again?

  • Sir, in mobster lingo

    Trump’s calling Cohen a “RAT” on Twitter is getting some lawyerly attention.