Tag: Trump

  • Guest post: Except the feeling of panic doesn’t go away

    Originally a comment by latsot on Great respect.

    You know when you’re trying to fix something and you strip a screw or something? There’s this momentary panic. You think “fuck, how am I going to fix this now?” Then you remember that even if you don’t know how to deal with the stripped screw or whatever, you know how to find out how.

    That fleeting feeling of panic, that “holy fuck, this is my fault, what do I do now?” is really similar to the feeling I get every time Trump tweets or speaks and every time it becomes even more obvious that Trump’s awfulness has infected horribleness in pretty much every other nation leader. Some of them seem to have been waiting for an excuse to act in an abysmal way and feel that the existence of Trump is that. Some of them seem to recognise a formula we seem to be helpless to protect ourselves against (just lie about everything in the most brazen way possible without caring how it sounds or – especially – how it is).

    Except the feeling of panic doesn’t go away. I know I can find out how to deal with a stripped screw or a software roll-out I monumentally fucked up. I know how I can try to deal with broken laws and proposals for new broken laws. All the tools are available and if I don’t know about them, they’re a duckduckgo search away.

    But not this. Not a president who – as a fundamental – doesn’t care about anyone or anything but himself and every other politician in the world waking up to the fact that you can actually pull that shit and get away with it.

    There just isn’t a way to fix it or a way to find out how to fix it. Trump will be gone sooner or later but his tactics of brazenly lying are quite visible in the words of politicians here in the UK, for instance. They’re not as horrible as Trump, of course, not even such awful people as Johnson, Rees-Mogg and Rudd, but they are quite clearly adopting the same tactics.

    Next time you promise to fix something precious to a loved one and break it instead; next time you plug something into the mains that you made yourself and the lights in the whole street go out; next time you unwittingly reveal something that was supposed to be a secret… well, you’ll rationalise it one way or another and you’ll know the sort of thing you need to do to fix it. You don’t and won’t know what to do about this increasing shitstorm and the feeling of ohshitohshitohshitohshit will not go away.

    Needless to say, these examples were plucked entirely out of the air and don’t relate in any way to anything I might have done. And I’ll orchestrate an amateurish smear campaign against anyone who says otherwise. Unless they buy me a drink, in which case I will definitely spill the beans.

  • Trump tells us to hate all the brown people

    It’s Thursday. Trump has four more days to go Even More Racist, but he’s set himself a high bar today.

    Allyson Chiu at the Post:

    Pinned at the top of President Trump’s Twitter feed Wednesday was a video. The man on the screen has a shaved head and a mustache and long chin hair. Smiling, he announces, “I killed f‐‐‐— cops.”

    The man is Luis Bracamontes, a twice-deported Mexican immigrant who was given the death penalty in April for killing two California law enforcement officers in 2014. At the time of the shootings, Bracamontes was in the United States illegally — and now, with the midterm election approaching, he’s the star of the GOP’s latest campaign ad.

    “Illegal immigrant, Luis Bracamontes, killed our people!” reads text on the 53-second video, which is filled with audible expletives. “Democrats let him into our country. . . . Democrats let him stay.”

    The text is superimposed over videos of Bracamontes appearing to show no remorse for his crimes, and even declaring, “I’m going to kill more cops soon.”

    More footage follows: Throngs of unidentified people rioting in unidentified streets and pushing down fences in undisclosed locations. A Fox News Channel correspondent interviewing a man identified only as “deported immigrant in caravan,” who asks to be pardoned for attempted murder.

    “Who else would Democrats let in?” the video asks. An image of Bracamontes smiling reappears before being replaced by text, “President Donald Trump and Republicans are making America safe again.”

    I watched it. It’s Nazi-level. It’s terrifyingly racist. It’s a national emergency.

    Jennifer Rubin at the Post:

    To all the Republicans who think that words don’t matter, who rationalize support for the president because of judges or tax cuts, who insist that domestic terrorism is unrelated to normalization of virulent racist rhetoric and who remain silent believing they have no moral responsibility for this brand of politics, I would say this is reason enough to vote, as my colleague Max Boot has suggested, against each and every Republican on the ballot. We have not seen individual Republican candidates, let alone House and Senate leaders, denounce the ad or insist that Trump take it down. Silence is assent. And therefore each one deserves the ire of decent voters.

    …

    To Rupert Murdoch, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Lou Dobbs, Fox shareholders, Fox producers and Fox executives and other on-air Fox personalities, I would say that this is in large part your doing. You’ve spent years drumming up fear of immigrants, misrepresenting the danger they pose, blurring the line between criminals and noncriminals (including “dreamers”) and sending dog whistles — no, make that trumpet blasts — to the white nationalists. I would say to you that Fox is not a news organization but a source of material and affirmation for the worst elements in our society, a small sliver of whom become violent. It’s not a place where reputable news people should want to work, nor a network that advertisers should support or viewers should indulge.

    This country is falling off a cliff.

  • The events that took place

    I feel sick.

    That hamfisted attempt to sound somber, followed by the exclamatory Party Political Broadcast – dear god. But also “for the events that took place” – the squeamish little toad can’t even bring himself to name what happened, I suppose lest anyone be reminded that he inspires violent hatred.

    https://twitter.com/NormEisen/status/1057758863494123521

  • The equal protection of the laws

    As soon as I read about Trump’s attack on the Fourteenth Amendment, I wanted Eric Foner’s take. Now we have it.

    (Why Eric Foner? Because he literally wrote The Book on Reconstruction, and because he’s a quality thinker and writer.)

    He starts with saying Trump’s cunning plan would undoubtedly be unconstitutional.

    It would also violate a deeply rooted American idea — that anybody, regardless of race, religion, national origin, or the legal status of one’s parents, can be a loyal citizen of this country.

    (Or sex.)

    Birthright citizenship is established by the Civil Rights Act of 1866, still on the books today, and by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified two years later. The only exceptions, in the words of the amendment, are persons not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. Members of Congress at the time made clear that this wording applied only to Native Americans living on reservations — then considered members of their own tribal sovereignties, not the nation — and American-born children of foreign diplomats. (Congress made all Native Americans citizens in 1924.)

    The Civil War changed things when it came to citizenship.

    The first Naturalization Act, in 1790, limited the process of naturalization to “white persons.” In 1857, on the eve of the Civil War, the Supreme Court, in the Dred Scott decision, declared that no black person, slave or free, could be a citizen of the United States or part of the national “political community.” Echoes of this outlook persist to this day, including in Mr. Trump’s long campaign to deny the birthright citizenship status of President Barack Obama.

    It’s interesting trying to parse this kind of thinking. The “white persons” dragged black persons here to extract their labor by force, and therefore decided none of them – even escapees – could be part of the political community. The violent thieves are the political community, and their victims aren’t good enough. It’s strange.

    The Fourteenth Amendment was meant to provide, for the first time, a uniform national definition of citizenship, so that states would no longer be able to deny that status to blacks. It went on to require the states to accord all “persons,” including aliens, the equal protection of the laws, as part of an effort to create a new egalitarian republic on the ashes of slavery.

    The birthright citizenship provision, explained Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan, one of the founders of the Republican Party and the floor manager of the amendment’s passage in the Senate, was intended to “settle the great question of citizenship once and for all.” The amendment formed part of a constitutional revolution that, in the words of George William Curtis, the editor of the Republican magazine Harper’s Weekly, transformed a document “for white men” into one “for mankind.” In 1870, Congress amended the naturalization laws to allow black immigrants to become citizens. The bar to Asians, however, persisted; they could not be naturalized until well into the 20th century.

    It’s not heartwarming to see the brute Donald Trump trying to vandalize the effort to create a new egalitarian republic on the ashes of slavery. (Egalitarian except for Asians, and women when it came to voting. These things seem to take awhile.)

    In the interview in which he discussed his plan to issue the executive order, Mr. Trump claimed that the United States is “the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States.” This, too, is an exaggeration, as many in the Western Hemisphere do recognize birthright citizenship. But it is true that in the past decade or two the nations of Europe have retreated from this principle. All limit automatic access to citizenship in some way, making it depend not simply on place of birth but also on ethnicity, culture, religion or extra requirements for the children of parents who are not citizens.

    That has not been our way. Adopted as part of the effort to purge the United States of the legacy of slavery, the principle of birthright citizenship remains an eloquent statement about the nature of American society, a powerful force for assimilation of the children of immigrants and a repudiation of our long history of racism.

    Mr. Trump’s order, if issued, will not only violate both the Constitution and deeply rooted American ideals, but also set a dangerous precedent. If the president can unilaterally abrogate a provision of the Constitution by executive order, which one will be next?

    Only the Second would be safe.

  • Back? BACK??

    Will they never learn?

    “Trump punches back” for godsake – nobody punched Trump.

    There’s a lot more where that came from.

  • Eager to test it

    The Times on Trump’s attack on the 14th Amendment:

    Doing away with birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants was an idea Mr. Trump pitched as a presidential candidate, but there is no clear indication that he would be able to do so unilaterally, and attempting to would be certain to prompt legal challenges. The consensus among legal scholars is that he cannot, but Mr. Trump and his allies are eager to test it in the Supreme Court.

    Naturally. They lost the popular vote by over 3 million in a heavily gerrymandered election, so why wouldn’t they be eager to destroy the amendment that covers equal rights for all citizens?

    “We all cherish the language of the 14th Amendment, but the Supreme Court of the United States has never ruled on whether the language of the 14th Amendment — ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ — applies specifically to people who are in the country illegally,” Vice President Mike Pence told Politico in an interview on Tuesday, several hours after Mr. Trump’s comments were reported.

    Well now there’s a big fat lie. Pence doesn’t “cherish the language of the 14th Amendment” – if he did he never would have gone near Trump and his administration.

    Mr. Trump told Axios that while he initially believed he needed a constitutional amendment or action by Congress to make the change, the White House Counsel’s Office has advised him otherwise.

    “Now they’re saying I can do it just with an executive order,” Mr. Trump said. The White House did not immediately respond to requests for clarification of the legal grounds the president’s lawyers have given him for validating such a move.

    His discussion of the idea comes after the administration announced it was streaming more than 5,000 active-duty troops to the southern border, part of an election-season rash of executive action Mr. Trump has undertaken as he works to energize his anti-immigrant base.

    That is, as he works to inflame his rabidly racist “base.” That’s all this is: naked shameless racism.

  • Big plans

    Trump adds another item on the white supremacist agenda: getting rid of citizenship by birth aka the Fourteenth Amendment.

    President Trump is planning to sign an executive order that would seek to end the right to U.S. citizenship for children of noncitizens born on U.S. soil, he said in a television interview taped on Monday.

    A president can’t ditch a constitutional amendment just by signing an order.

    The move would be certain to spark a constitutional debate about the meaning of the 14th Amendment. It reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

    In other words, the people formerly known as slaves and non-citizens are citizens and have the rights of citizens. John Wagner at the The Atlantic gives some background:

    To the members of the 39th Congress who framed the Fourteenth Amendment, the cause of the Civil War was clear. It was something called “the Slave Power”—a term which referred to the concessions made by the Philadelphia Framers to the slave states in 1787. Those were (1) the “three-fifths” clause, allowing extra seats in Congress to states with large slave populations; (2) the “electoral college,” which gave slave states undeserved power over the selection of the president; and (3) the principle of equal representation in the Senate, which had come over time to allow the South a veto over the more populous and dynamic North. As a result of this rigged system, the South had since 1790 dominated the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court. And in the years after the 1857 Dred Scott decision, “the slavocracy” had begun making a legal argument that even “free states” must now be required to permit and protect slavery within their borders. The pro-Southern Supreme Court seemed quite likely to back such a radical new rule. “We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their state free,” Abraham Lincoln warned in 1858, “and we shall awake to the reality, instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave state.”

    We have a history. The Fourteenth Amendment is a corrective to some of that history (far from all of it).

  • Stealing from the poor

    But hey, it’s all ok because Trump is the champion of The Little Guy (not The Little Gal so much), the scourge of the elites, the populist, the friend of miners and factory workers.

    Except, wait a second. He’s being sued for bullshitting people with no money into scam get-rich schemes.

    A new lawsuit accuses President Trump, his company and three of his children of using the Trump name to entice vulnerable people to invest in sham business opportunities.

    …

    The 160-page complaint alleges that Mr. Trump and his family received secret payments from three business entities in exchange for promoting them as legitimate opportunities, when in reality they were get-rich-quick schemes that harmed investors, many of whom were unsophisticated and struggling financially.

    Those business entities were ACN, a telecommunications marketing company that paid Mr. Trump millions of dollars to endorse its products; the Trump Network, a vitamin marketing enterprise; and the Trump Institute, which the suit said offered “extravagantly priced multiday training seminars” on Mr. Trump’s real estate “secrets.”

    The four plaintiffs, who were identified only with pseudonyms like Jane Doe, depict the Trump Organization as a racketeering enterprise that defrauded thousands of people for years as the president turned from construction to licensing his name for profit. The suit also names Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump as defendants.

    It just doesn’t get much more squalid than that, does it. There’s pimping and trafficking, but other than that…this is bottom-feeding shit. Bernie Madoff for broke people.

    The lawyers said they were asking the court to allow the plaintiffs to proceed using pseudonyms because of “serious and legitimate security concerns given the heated political environment.” The lawyers also declined to make their clients available for interviews.

    The four plaintiffs each invested in ACN after watching promotional videos featuring Mr. Trump.

    According to the lawsuit, ACN required investors to pay $499 to sign up to sell its products, like a videophone and other services, with the promise of additional profits if they recruited others to join.

    Mr. Trump described the phone in an ACN news release as “amazing” but failed to disclose he was being “paid lavishly for his endorsement,” the suit says.

    One plaintiff, a hospice worker from California identified as “Jane Doe,” decided to join ACN in 2014 after attending a recruitment meeting at a Los Angeles hotel where she listened to speakers and watched Mr. Trump on video extol the investment opportunity.

    For her, the video was the “turning point,” the lawsuit said.

    “Doe believed that Trump had her best interests at heart,” the suit said.

    Jane Doe then signed up for a larger ACN meeting in Palm Springs, Calif., which cost almost $1,500, and she later spent thousands more traveling to conventions in Cleveland and Detroit, according to the suit.

    In the end, she earned $38 — the only income she would ever receive from the company, the suit said.

    That is the president of the United States.

    There’s an annoying aspect to the article which I haven’t quoted: it undercuts itself in the second paragraph and later interjections by noting how near the election is and wondering if maybe this is all political blah blah blah. The co-author is Maggie Haberman. Adam Davidson, of the New Yorker and formerly NPR, wrote a righteous thread on both-sidesism on Twitter this morning, and Haberman replied to it with praise plus a jab, and he jabbed back. I suspect the ludicrous undercutting of this article by its own authors (or by Haberman alone, more likely) is what inspired his thread. I find it pretty infuriating. The plaintiffs’ lawyers responded in the article by saying they filed now because they were ready now.

  • Incitement of violence

    Worse again.

    We saw this one yesterday, 17 hours ago.

    The next are 5 hours ago, 7:30 a.m DC time.

    A set of three over a period of 12 hours, deliberately consciously in defiance of all pleas and remonstrances, working to incite violence against journalists. Three times in 12 hours – Fake News, Fake & Dishonest reporting,  inaccurate and even fraudulent, Fake News Media, true Enemy of the People, Fake News.

  • Make him stop

    Can no one make this criminal fascist monster STOP INCITING HATRED even now???

  • Setting the tone

    Julia Ioffe asks how much responsibility Trump has for the synagogue massacre.

    The summary: he doesn’t have to do the shooting himself to be part of the cause of the shooting.

    Culpability is a tricky thing, and politicians, especially of the demagogic variety, know this very well. Unless they go as far as organized, documented, state-implemented slaughter, they don’t give specific directions. They don’t have to. They simply set the tone. In the end, someone else does the dirty work, and they never have to lift a finger — let alone stain it with blood. I saw it while reporting on Russia, where, after unexpected pro-democracy protests and the annexation of Crimea, Putin created an environment so vicious, so toxic (he called his critics “national traitors” and “a fifth column”) that, when assassins killed opposition leader Boris Nemtsov at the foot of the Kremlin walls in 2015, it was easy for people to blame the divisive political rhetoric as if it were a spontaneous weather pattern, rather than Putin himself for creating it. And everyone understood immediately the message it sent: Dissent is a deadly business. Putin may not have ordered Nemtsov’s assassination, but Russia’s elite could clearly see he wasn’t too upset about the outcome.

    Trump yesterday? Joking about his bad hair day a couple of hours after the slaughter.

    When President Trump blamed “both sides” for Charlottesville, his supporters heard him loud and clear: “I knew Trump was eventually going to be like, meh, whatever,” Anglin said. “Trump only disavowed us at the point of a Jewish weapon. So I’m not disavowing him.” Many others in the alt-right praised Trump’s statement as moral equivocation on Charlottesville. To them, this, rather than the forced, obligatory condemnation, was the important signal. (According to the Anti-Defamation League, the incidence of anti-Semitic hate crimes jumped nearly 60 percent in 2017, the biggest increase since it started keeping track in 1979. What made 2017 so different? It was Trump’s first year in office.)

    When Trump called himself a nationalist in Houston last week, the alt-right knew exactly what he meant. One alt-right commenter was elated because nationalism “is inherently connected to race.” Another wrote that he was “literally shaking” with glee. Still another wrote “THE FIRE RISES.”

    The president did not tell a deranged man to send pipe bombs to the people he regularly lambastes on Twitter and lampoons in his rallies, so he’s not at fault. Trump didn’t cause another deranged man to tweet that the caravan of refugees moving toward America’s southern border (the one Trump has complained about endlessly) is paid for by the Jews before he shot up a synagogue. Trump certainly never told him, “Go kill some Jews on a rainy Shabbat morning.”

    But this definition of culpability is too narrow, too legalistic — and ultimately too dishonest. The pipe-bomb makers and synagogue shooters and racists who mowed a woman down in Charlottesville were never even looking for Trump’s explicit blessing, because they knew the president had allowed bigots like them to go about their business, secure in the knowledge that, like Nemtsov’s killers, they don’t really bother the president, at least not too much. His role is just to set the tone. Their role is to do the rest.

    There’s no such thing as “just locker-room talk.”

  • His hair got wet

    Have a sick basin at hand.

  • “This is a dispute that will always exist I suspect”

    This fucking fool.

    Oh they should have had armed protection. So what’s he saying? That there should be armed protection everywhere? Supermarkets for instance, like that Kroger in Jeffersontown, Kentucky where a white guy shot two black people to death a few days ago? But what if the security guard is in aisle 10 so the shooter goes to aisle 2 to shoot people there? It would take a lot of armed security to cover the whole space, and the parking lot (the shooter killed one victim in the parking lot). Now multiply that times every supermarket, bank, drugstore, hardware store, shoe store, and every other store of every kind – then add schools, churches, mosques, temples, synagogues, office buildings, factories, hospitals, sports venues, parks, beaches – any place at all that people gather – it’s a bit of a drain on personnel, isn’t it.

    Plus that’s a lot of armed security guards. How would we know none of them would go rogue? How would they be screened before hiring to make sure none of them are seeking the job precisely so that they can shoot up the store themselves?

    Also what the fuck does he mean “This is a dispute that will always exist I suspect”? What “dispute”? Shooting people is not a “dispute,” it’s mass murder. Does he mean anti-Semitism? That needn’t “always exist.” It exists now because of people exactly like him: people who promote it and fan it and cheer it on.

  • If you inflame hatred, hatred will be inflamed

    Gary Younge at the Guardian sees a connection between Trump’s constant stoking of hatred and the highly stoked hatred we see all around us.

    Trump’s election and the xenophobic rhetoric that came with it not only emboldened schoolchildren to parrot bigotry to their peers, it gave the state free rein to unleash its power indiscriminately against a minority community. So when pipe bombs are sent to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, California congresswoman Maxine Waters and CNN it should be understood not only as a specific threat to democracy but as one of the most violent examples yet from a democracy that has long been under threat.

    …

    …Both in his candidacy and presidency Trump has made direct appeals to political violence. He has advocated protesters be beaten up at his rallies; tweeted a simulation of himself pummelling the news network CNN, as though in a wrestling match; encouraged police to rough up suspects; and in the week in which the Saudi government conceded that Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in its consulate, he lauded a politician for body-slamming the Guardian journalist Ben Jacobs.

    It’s not an edge case. He’s abnormal among presidents by a huge margin.

    So when he says, as he did on Wednesday, “We have to come together and send one very clear, strong, unmistakable message that acts or threats of political violence of any kind have no place in the United States of America”, it rings not only hollow but hypocritical.

    …

    This is the man who has led chants for Hillary Clinton to be imprisoned (“Lock her up!”); said the media were the “enemy of the people”; claimedObama founded Islamic State; praised those who marched alongside neo-Nazi demonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia, as “very fine people”; and described Waters, who had called on protesters to face down administration officials wherever they find them, as a “low-IQ person” and warned her “be careful what you wish for”.

    Despite his efforts to appear presidential he could not help himself. “By the way, do you see how nice I’m behaving today? Have you ever seen this?” His curated contrition was a big joke – others may have had their lives threatened but, ultimately, it was all about him.

    Narcissists don’t change.

  • It’s all so unfair to Trump

    Suspect arrested.

    Federal authorities made an arrest on Friday in connection with the nationwide bombing campaign against outspoken critics of President Trump, a significant breakthrough in a case that has gripped the country in the days leading up to the midterm elections.

    …

    The arrest came only hours after the mysterious spate of pipe bombs spread further as federal authorities said on Friday morning that they had found two more of the explosive devices: one addressed to Senator Cory Booker and the other to James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence.
    …

    The package addressed to Mr. Clapper was meant to be delivered to the New York offices of CNN, where he works as an analyst, but was intercepted at a mail facility in Midtown Manhattan, police officials in New York City said. The package addressed to Mr. Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, was found in Florida, which two people briefed on the matter have said has become a focus of the intense, nationwide investigation into the bombs.

    …

    Speaking on CNN on Friday, Mr. Clapper said he was not surprised that a device had been sent to him. He has been a frequent critic of President Trump, a similarity shared with everyone whose names have appeared on the packages discovered so far.

    “This is definitely domestic terrorism,” Mr. Clapper said. “Anyone who has in any way been a critic, publicly been a critic of President Trump, needs to be on an extra alert.”

    That’s a lot of people.

    Meanwhile Trump has been complaining about what a nuisance all this is for him.

    Goddam bombs, hindering Republicans! It’s so unfair!

    Before that he was whining about Twitter. Yes, really, about Twitter.

  • As the audience chanted “CNN sucks”

    Charles Blow on Trump’s hate-mongering and how it may connect to all these bombs popping up:

    Trump’s hatred, racism, insecurity, anti-intellectualism and grudge against the elite society that had always disdained him was perfectly suited for conservatives who were entertaining the same notions but had no one to openly champion their intolerance with effrontery.

    On Monday in Houston, Trump was again whipping a rally crowd into a fear frenzy with his dystopian vision of America. He said:

    “Democrat immigration policies allow poisonous drugs and MS-13 to pour into our country. And Democrat sanctuary cities release violent criminals from jail and straight into your neighborhoods.”

    As the audience chanted, “CNN sucks,” he said, “Don’t worry. I don’t like them either, O.K.?” He added:

    “Do you know how the caravan started? Does everybody know what this means? I think the Democrats had something to do with it.”

    There is no proof that the caravan of Honduran migrants traveling through Mexico toward the United States was instigated by the Democrats, and the claim is ridiculous on its face.

    And very typical of Trump, who just makes shit up all the time and couldn’t care less whether it’s true or not. It’s emotionally true for him, and that’s all he pays any attention to.

  • Trump rebukes news media for the Anger

    Bomb sent to CNN yesterday. Today Trump tweets:

    In other words, Trump says SEND MORE BOMBS.

    The Times:

    President Trump on Thursday blamed the news media for the division and anger in the United States, as the authorities discovered more pipe bombs intended for the president’s political rivals.

    Mr. Trump had called the night before for national unity in response to pipe bombs directed at some of his favorite targets, but soon after said the “Mainstream Media,” which he called “Fake News,” was at fault for the anger because of its “false and inaccurate reporting.”

    In his tweet on Thursday, Mr. Trump did not mention that CNN, the news network that he has long assailed and called “fake news,” was among the targets of a pipe bomb, along with former President Barack Obama, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the actor Robert De Niro.

    Trump didn’t mention CNN because he’d be quite happy to see it bombed.

    Law enforcement officials have shown photographs of some of the packages that contained the pipe bombs. The packages discovered Thursday were similar to the packages intercepted the day before.

    Packages sent to Mr. Biden and Mr. De Niro were discovered Thursday. A law enforcement official said it appeared to be from the same sender of packages to Mr. Obama; Mrs. Clinton; John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director; and Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California — four of the president’s favorite political punching bags. Another device intended for Mr. Obama’s attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., was incorrectly addressed.

    The Brennan one was sent to CNN (by mistake, apparently – he’s a commentator on MSNBC).

    Mr. Brennan has been an outspoken critic of Mr. Trump’s, making pointed remarks that ultimately led to the president stripping him of his security clearance. The return address on the package sent to CNN was that of Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Democrat of Florida and a former Democratic National Committee chairwoman.

    Mr. Trump has called for the Justice Department to investigate Ms. Wasserman Schultz over the theft of internal Democratic National Committee emails, a narrative that has found traction among some right-wing conspiracy theorists.

    After the discovery of packages sent to Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton — which were found during routine mail screening by the Secret Service — a package addressed to Ms. Waters was intercepted at a congressional mail facility.

    Mr. Trump has drawn excitement from crowds of supporters when would sling verbal insults at “Crazy Maxine Waters,” and call her the leader of the Democratic Party. Mr. Trump has also said Ms. Waters had a “very low I.Q.”

    This is where we are.

  • Trump will never get it

    Words matter.

    The president of CNN strongly criticized President Donald Trump on Wednesday for his anti-media rhetoric, just hours after the network discovered that a pipe bomb had been sent to its headquarters in New York.

    “There is a total and complete lack of understanding at the White House about the seriousness of their continued attacks on the media,” Jeff Zucker, the president of CNN Worldwide, said in a statement. “The President, and especially the White House press secretary, should understand their words matter. Thus far, they have shown no comprehension of that.”

    Still not showing any comprehension. Trump is off at another rally as we speak.

    Trump has frequently criticized CNN and other media organizations as “the fake news,” and even going so far as to label them “the enemy” of the American people — a characterization that often draws hearty applause and boos directed at the press at his rallies.

    Matt Dornic, a CNN spokesperson, noted that less than two hours after CNN evacuated its headquarters on Tuesday, the Trump campaign sent an email attacking CNN and calling on people “to give the media another wake-up call.”

    As in, BANG splinter tinkle rattle smash scream scream scream? That kind of wake-up call?

  • Another day, another rally

    Meanwhile though Trump is taking those bombs sent to Democrats and CNN very seriously.

    Kidding. Of course he’s not.

    Will he rant about “fake news” and the evil Democrats at his rally? Of course he will.

  • He’d blab all the secrets if only he knew anything about them

    But her emails department:

    When President Trump calls old friends on one of his iPhones to gossip, gripe or solicit their latest take on how he is doing, American intelligence reports indicate that Chinese spies are often listening — and putting to use invaluable insights into how to best work the president and affect administration policy, current and former American officials said.

    Mr. Trump’s aides have repeatedly warned him that his cellphone calls are not secure, and they have told him that Russian spies are routinely eavesdropping on the calls, as well. But aides say the voluble president, who has been pressured into using his secure White House landline more often these days, has still refused to give up his iPhones. White House officials say they can only hope he refrains from discussing classified information when he is on them.

    But her emails! But her emails! But her emails! But her emails!

    American spy agencies, the officials said, had learned that China and Russia were eavesdropping on the president’s cellphone calls from human sources inside foreign governments and intercepting communications between foreign officials.

    The officials said they have also determined that China is seeking to use what it is learning from the calls — how Mr. Trump thinks, what arguments tend to sway him and to whom he is inclined to listen — to keep a trade war with the United States from escalating further. In what amounts to a marriage of lobbying and espionage, the Chinese have pieced together a list of the people with whom Mr. Trump regularly speaks in hopes of using them to influence the president, the officials said.

    Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up!

    China’s effort is a 21st-century version of what officials there have been doing for many decades, which is trying to influence American leaders by cultivating an informal network of prominent businesspeople and academics who can be sold on ideas and policy prescriptions and then carry them to the White House. The difference now is that China, through its eavesdropping on Mr. Trump’s calls, has a far clearer idea of who carries the most influence with the president, and what arguments tend to work.

    Benghazi!

    Mr. Trump typically relies on his cellphones when he does not want a call going through the White House switchboard and logged for senior aides to see, his aides said. Many of those Mr. Trump speaks with most often on one of his cellphones, such as hosts at Fox News, share the president’s political views, or simply enable his sense of grievance about any number of subjects.

    Yeah that’s cool. It’s all about what he wants and not at all about the bigger picture.

    Administration officials said Mr. Trump’s longtime paranoia about surveillance — well before coming to the White House he believed that his phone conversations were often being recorded — gave them some comfort that he was not disclosing classified information on the calls. They said they had further confidence he was not spilling secrets because he rarely digs into the details of the intelligence he is shown and is not well versed in the operational specifics of military or covert activities.

    Snerk. In other words they have a lot of confidence he’s not spilling secrets because he’s too stupid and ignorant to spill any. Whew!