Tag: Trump

  • What Volodya knew and when he knew it

    Michelle Goldberg makes the “this is what Putin has on him” point:

    We still don’t know for certain if Russia has used leverage over Trump. But there should no longer be any doubt that Russia has leverage over him.

    Why? Because it’s now crystal clear that Trump was lying about his dealings with Russia all along and Putin knew it.

    In a Jan. 11, 2017, news conference, Trump said that the “closest I came to Russia” was in selling a Palm Beach mansion to a Russian oligarch in 2008. While we’re just learning precisely how dishonest this was, Putin has known it all along. That means that throughout Trump’s campaign and presidency, Putin has had the power to plunge him into political crisis.

    “If the Russians are aware that senior American officials are publicly stating things that are not true, it’s a counterintelligence nightmare,” Adam Schiff, the California Democrat in line to take over the House Intelligence Committee, told me.

    All this time Putin has been watching Trump lie to us, and watching us helpless to do anything about it.

  • What Putin had

    I hadn’t quite put that together before, I don’t think – the fact that Trump’s lies about the Trump Tower project in 2016 and after were themselves kompromat. Putin didn’t need any piss-stained sheets, because he already had the kompromat.

    And boy did Putin ever get what he wanted – the US turned into a corrupt malevolent reckless pile of shit.

  • A small token of his esteem

    BuzzFeed reports that the Trump gang was planning to bribe Putin with a $50 million dollar penthouse in the proposed Moscow tower building.

    President Donald Trump’s company planned to give a $50 million penthouse at Trump Tower Moscow to Russian President Vladimir Putin as the company negotiated the luxury real estate development during the 2016 campaign, according to four people, one of them the originator of the plan.

    …

    The Trump Tower Moscow plan is at the heart of a new plea agreement by Cohen, who led the negotiations to bring a gleaming, 100-story building to the Russian capital. Cohen acknowledged in court that he had lied to Congress about the plan in order to protect Trump and his presidential campaign.

    The revelation that representatives of the Trump Organization planned to forge direct financial links with the leader of a hostile nation at the height of the campaign raises fresh questions about President Trump’s relationship with the Kremlin. The plan never went anywhere because the tower deal ultimately fizzled, and it is not clear whether Trump knew of the intention to give away the penthouse. But Cohen said in court documents that he regularly briefed Trump and his family on the Moscow negotiations.

    Felix Sater told BuzzFeed today that the idea was that Putin would be a lure for the oligarchs, because they’d all stampede for the chance to live in the same building as Putin. (I kind of wonder why. I’d be afraid he’d shoot me in one of the elevators, myself.)

    Trump had personally signed the letter of intent to move forward on the Trump Tower Moscow plan on Oct. 28, 2015, the day of the third Republican primary debate.

    On Thursday, shortly after news broke about Cohen’s guilty plea, Trump told reporters, “There was a good chance that I wouldn’t have won” the presidential election, “in which case I would have gotten back into the business, and why should I lose lots of opportunities?”

    Yesterday he asked the New York Post “Why would I take a pardon for Manafort off the table?” Because it’s an abuse of power, you stupid fuck. Why you should lose lots of opportunities to make $$$ while running for president is because of the corruption. Duh.

    Developing a tower in Russia had long been a dream of the Trump Organization, which pursued a deal there for three decades. After Trump announced his candidacy in the summer of 2015, Sater saw an opportunity to revive the development.

    “I figured, he’s in the news, his name is generating a lot of good press,” Sater told BuzzFeed News earlier this year. “A lot of Russians weren’t willing to pay a premium licensing fee to put Donald’s name on their building. Now maybe they would be.”

    Ohhh – I hadn’t grasped that part. This wasn’t about Trump’s company building the tower, it was about Trump charging millions just to put his name on the tower – the tower built by other people at their own expense. All this, for Trump’s squalid name on a building.

    So he turned to his old friend, Cohen, to get it off the ground. They arranged a licensing deal, by which Trump would lend his name to the project and collect a part of the profits. Sater lined up a Russian development company to build the project and said that VTB, a Russian financial institution that faced US sanctions at the time, would finance it. VTB officials have denied taking part in any negotiations about the project.

    Nice work if you can get it. They do all the work and advance all the money, and Trump just takes payments for the use of his name.

  • A high likelihood of rampant criminality

    Paul Waldman at the Post says Mueller is closing in on Trump.

    When he spoke to reporters about this Thursday, Trump stressed over and over that it would have been perfectly fine for him to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, as he had long sought to do. Legally speaking, that’s true. But given the controversy around Trump’s solicitousness toward Vladimir Putin and the growing realization that Russia was intervening in the campaign on his behalf, through 2016 it was important for him to distance himself publicly from Russia, which he did many times by stressing that he had no investments there.

    But also there’s a thing Neal Katyal said:

    It wasn’t just normal market negotiating, it was negotiating with officials of the Russian government.

    And then there’s the whole Trump Organization problem.

    Just about everyone who has followed this story closely understands that whatever might or might not have happened with Trump and Russia during the campaign, the real threat to the president lies in the Trump Organization. As Adam Davidson of the New Yorker put it, “I am unaware of anybody who has taken a serious look at Trump’s business who doesn’t believe that there is a high likelihood of rampant criminality.”

    Cohen was intimately involved for years in that business, making deals and putting out fires. If he’s telling Mueller everything he knows, Trump could be in serious trouble.

    I hope his aides packed plenty of changes of underwear for his trip to Argentina.

  • Individual 1 explains all

    “I was allowed to do whatever I wanted during the campaign,” he assures us.

    “There was a letter,” he says, and helpfully draws a rectangle in the air, in case we don’t know what a letter is.

    ANYway, point is, Michael Cohen is a weak person, and not a very smart person.

  • Why Individual 1 was such a friend to Putin

    Oops.

    Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer, who pleaded guilty in August to breaking campaign finance laws, made a surprise appearance in a Manhattan courtroom on Thursday morning and pleaded guilty to a new criminal charge, the latest turn in the special counsel’s investigation of Mr. Trump and his inner circle.

    At the court hearing, Mr. Cohen admitted to making false statements to Congress about his efforts to build a Trump Tower deal in Moscow during the 2016 presidential campaign. That real estate deal has been a focus of the special counsel investigation into whether the Trump campaign conspired with Russian operatives.

    Oooops. That sounds big. Lawfare has posted the docs for us, and from what I’ve read so far it looks big. Cohen admits to telling a bunch of lies to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and not trivial lies but big lies, about that Trump Tower deal in Moscow. He said it was all over and finished in January 2016, before the Iowa caucus and months before the first primary.

    It wasn’t.

    The new guilty plea in Federal District Court marks the first time the office of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has charged Mr. Cohen. In exchange for pleading guilty and continuing to cooperate with Mr. Mueller, he may hope to receive a lighter sentence than he otherwise would.

    But even more than that, from what he has said before, he wants not to take the hit all by himself. He committed all these crimes at the behest of the corrupt pile of shit who squats in the Oval Office, and he wants that corrupt pile of shit to fall with him.

    The Criminal Information doesn’t name Trump but calls him Individual 1 – the Individual 1 who was Cohen’s employer and a candidate for president.

    He should be removed from office right now. Today.

  • [Trump speaks off the record.]

    In their talk with Trump yesterday Josh Dawsey and Philip Rucker asked him about the Mueller-Manafort breakup.

    DAWSEY: People around you have told me you’re upset about the way he’s been treated. Are you planning to do anything to help him?

    TRUMP: Let me go off the record because I don’t want to get in the middle of the whole thing.

    [Trump speaks off the record.]

    DAWSEY: Is there any version of that you’re willing to give us on the record in answer to that question?

    TRUMP: I’d rather not. At some point, I’ll talk on the record about it. But I’d rather not.

    [Trump speaks off the record.]

    So it’s not likely that was an uncomplicated “no,” then. He’s said “no” many times on the record, so if he felt the need to say it off the record, it probably wan’t just another “no.” So what was it?

    DAWSEY: Mr. President, your national security team is going to the Hill tomorrow to brief senators on Saudi Arabia and Jamal Khashoggi. I’ve heard from Senator [Lindsey O.] Graham, who I know you were with yesterday, and others, that they want stronger punishment on Saudi Arabia, tougher sanctions. Do you want them to impose that, or do you think that would be deleterious to our — ?

    TRUMP: I’m going to listen to what they say. They’re all friends of mine, and I get along with them great. I’m going to certainly listen to what they have to say, Josh. In the end, though, they’re spending massive amounts of billions of dollars. If you look at Iran and what they do, and you look at many other countries — I don’t have to embarrass other countries by saying it — if you look at what they do, it’s a rough part of the world. It’s a dangerous, rough part of the world. But they’ve been a great ally. Without them, Israel would be in a lot more trouble. We need to have a counterbalance to Iran. I know him. I know him well, the crown prince. And, by the way, never did business with them, never intend to do business with them. I couldn’t care less. This is a very important job that I’m doing right now. The last thing I care about is doing business with people. I only do business for us. Somebody said, well, maybe they’re an investor in one of his jobs. The answer is no.

    Like hell it is.

    But I just feel that it’s very, very important to maintain that relationship. It’s very important to have Saudi Arabia as an ally, if we’re going to stay in that part of the world. Now, are we going to stay in that part of the world? One reason to is Israel. Oil is becoming less and less of a reason because we’re producing more oil now than we’ve ever produced. So, you know, all of a sudden it gets to a point where you don’t have to stay there.

    RUCKER: And why have you taken his denials for ordering the killing of our colleague, Jamal Khashoggi —

    TRUMP: I haven’t taken anything.

    RUCKER: — over the evidence that the intelligence community has gathered?

    TRUMP: Phil, I haven’t done that. If you look at my statement, it’s maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. But he denies it. And people around him deny it.

    Sometimes people deny things for reasons other than truth-telling. Sometimes.

    RUCKER: Sir, you just said, maybe he did, maybe he didn’t, but are you getting the best advice and the best information from the intelligence community and on the climate issue from your experts in the government, because you’re doubting what they’re saying?

    TRUMP: Phil, I’m getting advice. I’m the president of this country. I have to do what’s the best for our country. We have a very important ally in Saudi Arabia. We have an ally that has tremendous oil reserves, which are — frankly, they can make prices go up and down, and I want to keep them down. We have an ally that’s investing billions and billions of dollars in our country. They could very easily invest $110 billion, $450 billion overall over a period of time, fairly short period of time. $110 billion in military. Russia and China would love to have those orders, and they’ll get them if we don’t. They’ll have no choice, but they’ll get them if we don’t.

    He seems to have completely missed what Rucker was asking, which was about the relationship between his constant dismissal of what experts in his own government tell him and his ability to get good information. If he refuses to pay attention to his own experts, how can he get the best advice and the best information? He doesn’t address that question at all.

    So I take everything into consideration, and again, he totally denies it, and he denied it to me on three different occasions, on three different calls, and a lot of other people deny it, too. Did he do it? As I said, maybe he did and maybe he didn’t, but in the meantime Saudi Arabia’s spending billions and billions of dollars in the United States, and I want them to spend it here. I don’t want them to spend it in China and Russia.

    One, he denies it so it’s not true, and two, never mind whether it’s true because money.

    Also, about that it’s not true – he seems to think he gets to add up all the denials and get a higher not-true number. “He denied it to me on three different occasions, on three different calls, and a lot of other people deny it, too,” so it’s not true times 3 plus a lot. That makes it very very big number not true. You can’t argue with that.

    But if you insist on arguing with it anyway, then money. End of argument.

  • Trump reports he has a very high level of intelligence

    The Post had a conversation with Trump today; it went as well as you’d expect.

    In a wide-ranging and sometimes discordant 20-minute interview with The Washington Post, Trump complained at length about Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome H. “Jay” Powell, whom he nominated earlier this year. When asked about declines on Wall Street and GM’s announcement that it was laying off 15 percent of its workforce, Trump responded by criticizing higher interest rates and other Fed policies, though he insisted that he is not worried about a recession.

    “I’m doing deals, and I’m not being accommodated by the Fed,” Trump said. “They’re making a mistake because I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.”

    Classic. One, he thinks he has great instincts (wrong), and two, he thinks he knows more than anyone else (so very wrong).

    He added: “So far, I’m not even a little bit happy with my selection of Jay. Not even a little bit. And I’m not blaming anybody, but I’m just telling you I think that the Fed is way off-base with what they’re doing.”

    Classic. He tells us how bad Jay is, then he says he’s not blaming anybody.

    Trump also dismissed the federal government’s landmark report released last week finding that damages from global warming are intensifying around the country. The president said that “I don’t see” climate change as man-made and that he does not believe the scientific consensus.

    “One of the problems that a lot of people like myself, we have very high levels of intelligence but we’re not necessarily such believers,” Trump said. “You look at our air and our water, and it’s right now at a record clean.”

    Image result for head desk

    The president added of climate change, “As to whether or not it’s man-made and whether or not the effects that you’re talking about are there, I don’t see it.”

    Says the imbecile who knows nothing at all about it except that he doesn’t like it. “Very high levels of intelligence” in a pig’s eye.

    Trump again questioned the CIA’s assessment that Saudi Arabia’s crown prince ordered the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a contributor to The Post, and said he has considered Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s repeated denials in his decision to maintain a close alliance with the oil-rich desert kingdom.

    “Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t,” Trump said. “But he denies it. And people around him deny it. And the CIA did not say affirmatively he did it, either, by the way. I’m not saying that they’re saying he didn’t do it, but they didn’t say it affirmatively.”

    He’s just repeating the same twenty stupid words he said about it last week. With all his high levels of intelligence, he doesn’t have enough nous to avoid constantly repeating the same stale formulas over and over and OVER again. That is not a sign of someone with an adept mind. Plus he’s so fucking thick that he thinks the normal explanation of what we can know and what we can’t equals “but they didn’t say it affirmatively.”

    The CIA has assessed that Mohammed ordered Khashoggi’s killing and has shared its findings with lawmakers and the White House, according to people familiar with the matter. Intelligence assessments are rarely, if ever, ironclad…

    What I’m saying! They’re not going to send him a note saying “We know for positive he did it, Sir!” That’s not what they do. Trump thinks every opinion he has is the certain truth, and people with functioning brains know they never know the certain truth.

  • Developments

    DTrump is having a tough day. Not as tough as those teargassed asylum-seekers had, but tough. Not one but two shoes hit the floor with a crash.

    The first development came when special counsel Robert S. Mueller III asked a federal court to begin sentencing proceedings for Manafort, sentencing that was on hold while Manafort cooperated with Mueller’s team. According to the filing: “After signing the plea agreement, Manafort committed federal crimes by lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Special Counsel’s Office on a variety of subject matters, which constitute breaches of the agreement.”

    That could be bad for Trump as well as for Manafort.

    First, it’s unlikely that Mueller would be withdrawing Manafort’s plea agreement unless he had specific evidence demonstrating that Manafort lied. He’s going to lay that evidence out for the court as the judge considers what sentence to give Manafort, in what amounts to another indictment.

    Second, Trump’s lawyers and Manafort’s lawyers have a joint defense agreement that allows them to share information. And third, Trump recently completed a set of written answers to Mueller’s questions.

    Marcy Wheeler explains what all that might mean:

    Mueller’s team appears to have no doubt that Manafort was lying to them. That means they didn’t really need his testimony, at all. It also means they had no need to keep secrets — they could keep giving Manafort the impression that he was pulling a fast one over the prosecutors, all while reporting misleading information to Trump that he could use to fill out his open book test. Which increases the likelihood that Trump just submitted sworn answers to those questions full of lies.

    Interesting. The two are very close together in time. Innnteresting.

    That’s a lot of ifs, which is why we’re going to have to wait until Mueller lays all his cards on the table to see the true magnitude of this development. Which brings us to the second of the day’s potentially enormous stories, from the Guardian:

    Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and visited around the time he joined Trump’s campaign, the Guardian has been told.

    Sources have said Manafort went to see Assange in 2013, 2015 and in spring 2016 – during the period when he was made a key figure in Trump’s push for the White House.

    It is unclear why Manafort wanted to see Assange and what was discussed. But the last meeting is likely to come under scrutiny and could interest Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor who is investigating alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

    A well-placed source has told the Guardian that Manafort went to see Assange around March 2016. Months later WikiLeaks released a stash of Democratic emails stolen by Russian intelligence officers.

    It may all just be coincidence.

    Or not.

  • It’s a very minor form of tear gas

    Trump is fine with teargassing children (and of course adults).

  • Dedication

    Trump has had a busy day not believing things he hasn’t read.

    President Donald Trump on Monday dismissed a study produced by his own administration, involving 13 federal agencies and more than 300 leading climate scientists, warning of the potentially catastrophic impact of climate change.

    Why, you ask?

    “I don’t believe it,” Trump told reporters on Monday, adding that he had read “some” of the report.

    The cover, maybe?

    Anyway. There is more than one kind of not believing. There’s the kind that involves knowledge of the thing to be believed or not believed, and then there’s the other kind. You can count on Trump to practice always the other kind.

    If you missed the study’s release, well, that was the point. It was originally slated to be made public next month but was suddenly released on the day after Thanksgiving, aka Black Friday, when the country shops, eats, hangs with family and pays a total of zero attention to what’s going on in politics. Outside of Christmas and the actual day of Thanksgiving, there’s no better day to drop bad news that you don’t want people to see.

    …

    Trump’s willingness to ignore the conclusions of experts because it doesn’t jibe with what he wants the truth to be isn’t isolated to just the climate. Trump has repeatedly dismissed the unanimous conclusion of the country’s intelligence community that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help him and hurt Hillary Clinton. And of late, he has chosen to ignore the CIA’s conclusion that Mohammed bin Salman personally ordered the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey.

    He makes it easy for himself to ignore the conclusions of experts by not finding out anything about them.

  • This way to the gas, kids

    A day that will live in infamy.

    A little girl from Honduras stares into the camera, her young features contorted in anguish. She’s barefoot, dusty, and clad only in a diaper and T-shirt. And she’s just had to run from clouds of choking tear gas fired across the border by U.S. agents.

    A second photograph, which also circulated widely and rapidly on social media, shows an equally anguished woman frantically trying to drag the same child and a second toddler away from the gas as it spreads.

    Tear gas – shot at people who were seeking asylum from violence in their home countries. Yes, I understand that no country can simply invite in all people who are fleeing violence in their home countries because that would be billions of people, but there’s plenty of space between that extreme and gassing people seeking asylum.

    The Post continues:

    The three were part of a much larger group, perhaps 70 or 80 men, women and children, pictured in a wider-angle photo fleeing the tear gas. Reuters photographer Kim Kyung-Hoon shot the images, which provoked outrage and seemed at odds with President Trump’s portrayal of the caravan migrants as “criminals” and “gang members.”

    Trump officials said that authorities had to respond with force after hundreds of migrants rushed the border near Tijuana on Sunday, some of them throwing “projectiles” at Customs and Border Protection personnel.

    No, actually, they didn’t “have to.” Trump told them to, because he’s a murderous racist. It’s pretty much as crude and simple as it looks.

  • State of play

    The Guardian says Mueller has been amazingly speedy.

    Anne Milgram, a law professor at New York University and a former prosecutor and attorney general of New Jersey, said Mueller and his 17 lawyers had done “a terrific job”.

    “Months have gone by – people think it’s a long time – it is not in criminal justice,” she said. “He has moved incredibly quickly, got a lot of cooperation agreements, charges, done an extraordinary job of running down Russian hacking of the election.”

    Elizabeth de la Vega, a former federal prosecutor for the northern district of California, said: “Complex charges against nearly three dozen people [and] organizations in less than two years is unheard of. Federal investigations may go on for three or four years before charges are brought against a few defendants. Also despite nearly daily false attacks from the president and his allies, the entire team has just kept its head down and done their work.”

    The Guardian also says Trump is cornered.

    Trump is approaching the midway point in his presidency and, some argue, a point of no return. The recent midterm elections left him wounded, House Democrats are said to be aiming a “subpoena cannon” at every aspect of his life and special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation appears to be nearing its endgame.

    “There’s no doubt we’re entering new territory and Donald Trump is in big trouble,” said Larry Jacobs, the director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “The election results, no matter what he says, were devastating to him. The coalition he put together is clearly strained and he seems incapable of creating consensus.”

    Ya think?

    the president has been acting like a man cornered. The catalogue is too long to list in full but here are some of the lowlights:

    • Trump fired Jeff Sessions and hired Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general, in what many see as a threat to the special counsel.
    • He tried to ban a CNN correspondent from the White House but lost in court.
    • He skipped a visit to a military cemetery in France.
    • He criticised the admiral who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
    • He floated bizarre theories for the wildfires in California, twice referred to the destroyed city of Paradise as “Pleasure” and revelled in ignorance of climate change.
    • He referred to the Democrat Adam Schiff as “Adam Schitt”.
    • He issued a bewildering statement (633 words with eight exclamation marks) questioning the CIA’s reported conclusion that Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman was responsible for the death of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
    • His daughter Ivanka was caught using a personal email account for government business.
    • He scolded the ninth circuit court of appeals, earning a rare rebuke from the chief justice of the supreme court.
    • It was reported that he wanted the justice department to prosecute Hillary Clinton and former FBI director James Comey.
    • He authorised troops on the US-Mexico border to use “lethal force”, despite concerns their presence is a political stunt.

    None of it’s new but it’s nice to have a handy list.

    Trump’s inability to stay silent suggests he has learned nothing from his election drubbing. Other presidents have suffered similar fates in the midterms, only to bounce back and win re-election. But they have done so by making changes and showing humility; when Trump was asked by Fox News to rank himself in the pantheon of great presidents, he awarded himself an A+; when he was asked by a reporter what he was grateful for on Thanksgiving, he talked about himself.

    Well, he’s an extreme narcissist. Narcissists don’t do self-correction, let alone humility or apology.

    Rick Tyler, a political analyst and Republican consultant, said: “Donald Trump seems like he’s worried about two things. First, he’s clearly worried about the Mueller report. If it was purely a question of ego and whether Russia helped him get elected, this is an overreaction. There’s something else going on.

    “Second, if you analyse Saudi Arabia and the Khashoggi incident, what Trump says makes no sense. Saudi Arabia is not going to cancel contracts and only has a negligible impact on the cost of oil and gas. Yet Trump promoted the awful cover story. He’s hiding something. There’s something there. He’s not protecting the crown prince; he’s protecting himself.”

    Third, there’s that lawsuit against the Trump Foundation.

  • A lumpy pink dope bellowing

    David Roth on Trump’s pre-helicopter shtick is a feast of word-deployment:

    The wheedling honk of Trump’s voice and the uneasy tilt of his standing-on-a-hoverboard-for-the-first-time posture are constants, as is his customary air of triumphal huffiness…

    It’s worthless, of course. Reporters shout something at Trump about a thing he said or did or his response to someone’s else response to something, and then he shouts that he did it because he felt like it or actually didn’t do it at all, or that the criticism of what he did is offensive and illegitimate, or that the question itself is. If he’s asked a question by a woman, he gets extra spicy….

    This is more or less what Trump has always thought the news should be like: people with microphones clamoring for his opinion and asking him about himself. For decades the man has dreamed of reporters calling out “please, sir, what’s the latest on your personal feuds” or “sir, how did you achieve this amazing success?” while he delivers flirty winking answers. That this is not the way it goes now that he’s president clearly causes him great frustration. Watch these pissy helicopter-adjacent scrums and you may see a lumpy pink dope bellowing “we’re looking into that very strongly” in response to questions he transparently can’t answer and dispensing whatever thudding speculative idiocy he thinks will get him to the next question…

    …Trump is nearly as ubiquitous in the culture as he has always believed he should be; the one deeply held belief that has been evident throughout his whole faithless disgrace of a life is people should be talking about Donald Trump more, on television, and he has just about seen that part through. All Trump wants, all he has ever wanted, is to be able to keep doing and taking and saying whatever he wants whenever he wants. He ran for president for this reason and this reason only.

    One small but key additon: to be able to keep doing and taking and saying whatever he wants whenever he wants while millions watch. He’s not content to do all this talking just to himself, or to a captive audience of his wife or porn star or lawyer.

    His politics, to the extent that they’ve ever been legible, have always been off-the-rack big city tabloid bullshit—crudely racist exterminate the brutes/back the blue authoritarianism in the background and ruthless petty rich person squabbling in the front. His actions since becoming president have been those of a dim, cruel child playacting at being a powerful man…

    It’s all that good; you should read every word.

  • There are rules that govern private foundations

    News so new it’s not reported yet except on Twitter:

  • Hey it’s cold, climate change is a hoax

    He’s been working very hard today. Coal mining is a walk on the beach in comparison.

    Mwah Saudi Arabia! Love ya, mean it! That whole thing with what’s his name, water under the bridge, or do I mean fingers, hahahahaha no but seriously thanks.

    I haven’t read it! I never read anything! Reading is hard, and it’s boring! But this book is a great read, because they said so on the tube [makes rectangle gesture].

    Please arrest them all Justice Roberts.

    Those two are retweets from yesterday. AmericaFirstMakeAmericaGreatAgain!! Needs to be said every few hours!!!

  • A void filled with unchecked self interest

    Greg Sargent points out that Trump is not actually putting America first in clinging to Saudi Arabia while shrugging off the torture-murder of Jamal Khashoggi; he’s lying about US interests while putting his personal hatreds and prejudices first.

    The bigger idea at stake here in Trump’s response is the notion that our commitment to international standards of human rights [is] to be jettisoned when they get in the way of our “interests.” It’s true that the United States has a long history of turning a blind eye to Saudi human rights abuses. But this does not preclude responding to this particular atrocity, and merely claiming Trump is revealing “the truth” about our previous realpolitik does not justify the current absence of any response.

    More to the point, Trump is not merely acquiescing to this unfortunate “truth.” He’s actively weakening our commitment to human (and civil) rights on many other fronts as well, both at home and abroad.

    The idea that adherence to international standards on human rights — but also international commitments other matters, such as reducing climate change and taking in asylum seekers and refugees — is a zero-sum negative for America is of course supposed to be foundational to Trump’s worldview. But the administration has never actually defended this proposition on any of these fronts in a fact-based manner.

    This is most glaringly true on asylum seekers and refugees. Limiting their entry is also foundational to “America first” Trumpism. But Trump has not merely tried to reduce asylum seeking; he has justified this with all manner of lies about the supposed threat it poses to us. Trump has not just slashed refugee levels to historic lows and employed bureaucratic chicanery to reduce those levels further. His administration deep-sixed internal data showing them to be a net economic positive.

    And why? Because he hates them, of course. He wants America to look like Princess Ivanka.

    The point here, again, is that Trump is placing his prejudices — his determination to implement a white nationalist agenda — over any good-faith effort to determine what the actual impact of this agenda will be on the country. On the migrants, the self-interest runs even deeper than this. The lies about the “caravan” were all about keeping the House in GOP hands — he even used the military as a prop in this exercise — to prevent Democrats from taking the House and subjecting him to accountability.

    But the racism and lying was of course a happy bonus.

    Need more? The New York Times reports that Trump privately wanted to order the Justice Department to prosecute Hillary Clinton and James Comey. There is no possible way this is based on any conception of the national good, unless Trump is totally delusional, which would itself mean there’s no such operative conception here. Everyone knows Trump appointed Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general not because of his qualifications, but for the sole purpose of protecting him from the special counsel.

    There is no big and unpleasant truth at the core of Trump’s vision of what’s good for the country. That vision is largely a void filled with unchecked self interest, both disguised and sustained by lies.

    And the unchecked self-interest is both $$$ and the joy of hatred. He loves the hatred.

  • Eruptions

  • Accusations of abuse of power

    Wow.

    President Trump told the White House counsel in the spring that he wanted to order the Justice Department to prosecute two of his political adversaries: his 2016 challenger, Hillary Clinton, and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey, according to two people familiar with the conversation.

    The lawyer, Donald F. McGahn II, rebuffed the president, saying that he had no authority to order a prosecution. Mr. McGahn said that while he could request an investigation, that too could prompt accusations of abuse of power. To underscore his point, Mr. McGahn had White House lawyers write a memo for Mr. Trump warning that if he asked law enforcement to investigate his rivals, he could face a range of consequences, including possible impeachment.

    Soon we’ll learn that he wanted to gas us all, and his staff wrote a memo saying that might get him in trouble with anyone who survived the gassing.

    It is unclear whether Mr. Trump read Mr. McGahn’s memo or whether he pursued the prosecutions further. But the president has continued to privately discuss the matter, including the possible appointment of a second special counsel to investigate both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Comey, according to two people who have spoken to Mr. Trump about the issue. He has also repeatedly expressed disappointment in the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, for failing to more aggressively investigate Mrs. Clinton, calling him weak, one of the people said.

    …

    Perhaps more than any president since Richard M. Nixon, Mr. Trump has been accused of trying to exploit his authority over law enforcement. Witnesses have told the special counsel’s investigators about how Mr. Trump tried to end an investigation into an aide, install loyalists to oversee the inquiry into his campaign and fire Mr. Mueller.

    In addition, Mr. Trump has attacked the integrity of Justice Department officials, claiming they are on a “witch hunt” to bring him down.

    His friends at Fox are helping.

    Some of his more vocal supporters stirred his anger, including the Fox News commentator Jeanine Pirro, who has railed repeatedly on her weekly show that the president is being ill served by the Justice Department.

    Ms. Pirro told Mr. Trump in the Oval Office last November that the Justice Department should appoint a special counsel to investigate the Uranium One deal, two people briefed on the discussion have said. During that meeting, the White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly, told Ms. Pirro she was inflaming an already vexed president, the people said.

    Shortly after, Attorney General Jeff Sessions wrote to lawmakers, partly at the urging of the president’s allies in the House, to inform them that federal prosecutors in Utah were examining whether to appoint a special counsel to investigate Mrs. Clinton. A spokeswoman for the United States attorney for Utah declined to comment on Tuesday on the status of the investigation.

    Mr. Trump once called his distance from law enforcement one of the “saddest” parts of being president.

    “I look at what’s happening with the Justice Department,” he said in a radio interview a year ago. “Well, why aren’t they going after Hillary Clinton and her emails and with her, the dossier?” He added: “I am not supposed to be doing the kind of things that I would love to be doing. And I am very frustrated.”

    He would love to be another Stalin, and he’s very frustrated.

  • Annotated

    Aaron Blake at the Post on Trump’s disgusting “statement”:

    Perhaps anticipating a damning report, Trump released a long, exclamation-point-laden statement preemptively making the case for not punishing Mohammed or his father, King Salman, even if they were involved. It’s a remarkable statement that even includes a smear against the slain journalist, while insisting that Trump didn’t believe the smear.

    Below is the statement in full, with our annotations.

    Exclamation points don’t belong in official presidential statements. He might as well do a press conference with his underpants on his head.

    Statement from President Donald J. Trump on Standing with Saudi Arabia

    Annotation: As much as the content of the statement, the headline reveals exactly what it is: A pass. A statement “on standing with” another country is what you put when that country is unfairly maligned or experienced a crisis. It’s not what you say when you are going to hold someone accountable for wrongdoing.

    That is a pretty pregnant choice of words.

    Very. It’s most familiar to me from aggrieved dudebros on Twitter vowing to “stand with” Sam Harris or Jordan Peterson or Lawrence Krauss or [the list is long].

    America First!

    The world is a very dangerous place!

    Annotation: This is not how presidential statements usually begin – particularly on sensitive foreign policy matters involving tragedy.

    There are eight exclamation points in it, including six that Trump used on his own (separate from quoting someone else).

    And why don’t presidential statements usually begin with exclamations? Because it looks childish in an official government statement. It also looks overexcited, out of control, disinhibited.

    Representatives of Saudi Arabia say that Jamal Khashoggi was an “enemy of the state” and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, but my decision is in no way based on that — this is an unacceptable and horrible crime.

    Annotation: 1) This is a baseless smear against a slain journalist, and the president is repeating it while insisting that it doesn’t matter to him. Then why include it? Trafficking in this kind of innuendo in a presidential statement is remarkable, and will likely be criticized even by Republicans.

    2) Trump is disclosing something that Saudi Arabia actually denied.

    On the one hand Saudi Arabia says this so let’s drag it in, on the other hand the CIA says that so let’s throw up our hands and say how can we ever know.

    Our intelligence agencies continue to assess all information, but it could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event — maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!

    That being said, we may never know all of the facts surrounding the murder of Mr. Jamal Khashoggi.

    Annotation: To be clear: The CIA is preparing to report that it has high confidence that Mohammed was behind Khashoggi’s killing. Trump is basically arguing that we’ll never know for sure.

    As I argued this weekend, intelligence is an imprecise business, but if you require 100 percent proof of anything, you’ll never hold countries accountable for taking advantage of you. It’s an impossible standard.

    Trump is also bucking his own intelligence community again – just as he did with Russia’s 2016 election interference.

    Aaron Blake does good annotations.