Tag: Trump

  • We’re in a National Emergy

    Good morning Don.

    In case it gets corrected, it reads

    Sadly, it looks like Mexico’s Police and Military are unable to stop the Caravan heading to the Southern Border of the United States. Criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in. I have alerted Border Patrol and Military that this is a National Emergy. Must change laws!

  • He has privately grimaced

    The Post called Don for a chat about Saudi Arabia last night.

    President Trump strongly criticized Saudi Arabia’s explanation for the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi late Saturday, saying that “obviously there’s been deception, and there’s been lies.”

    At the same time, Trump defended the oil-rich monarchy as an “incredible ally” and kept open the possibility that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman did not order Saudi agents to kill Khashoggi.

    That is, Trump talked his usual incoherent contradictory bafflegab late Saturday.

    Trump had told reporters Friday that the Saudi explanation was credible, but U.S. officials said he has privately grimaced that his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s close relationship with the crown prince has become a liability and left the White House with no good options.

    You can’t “grimace that.” You can “grumble that” but you can’t grimace that. A verb for making a facial expression is not a verb for saying.

    But putting accuracy in language aside, what is Trump doing complaining about Jared Kushner as if giving him a job in the White House had been someone else’s idea? He’s Trump’s daughter’s husband, not anyone else’s. It’s Trump who has put his family members in administration jobs, not anyone else. It’s Trump who has broken laws against nepotism from the outset, not anyone else.

    In the interview, Trump defended Kushner as doing a “very good job” but acknowledged that he and the crown prince, both in their 30s, are relatively young for the amount of power they wield.

    Well yes, they are, and in Kushner’s case at least also callow and ignorant and unqualified. Whose fault is that?! Whose idea was it to put callow young Kushner in that job? Trump’s, not anyone else’s.

    “They’re two young guys. Jared doesn’t know him well or anything. They are just two young people. They are the same age. They like each other, I believe,” Trump said.

    As is Princess Ivanka. Neither Princess Ivanka nor Prince Jared should be anywhere near the White House.

    On Saturday, King Salman increased his support for the crown prince, putting him in charge of the official review of the Saudi intelligence apparatus.

    The decision raised questions about the quality of Saudi Arabia’s review and investigation of its actions, which Pompeo touted as a key achievement of his trip.

    “We talked about the importance of the investigation, completing it in a timely fashion, and making sure that it was sufficiently transparent that we could evaluate the work that had been done to get to the bottom of it,” Pompeo told reporters on the tarmac in Riyadh before leaving the country. “So that was the purpose of the visit. In that sense it was incredibly successful.”

    Oh yes, hugely successful, with the crown prince now in charge of the review.

    One U.S. official expressed dismay that Kushner’s close relationship with the crown prince was not enough to provide guardrails against the killing and now leaves the administration vulnerable to criticism that the United States is beholden to the Saudis.

    The official said Trump is annoyed by a sense that he was blindsided and by what he sees as Kushner’s misjudgment. Kushner has in recent days been sidelined from the Khashoggi case, which many in the administration see as beneficial.

    Blah blah blah; all this normalizing talk, as if there were nothing corrupt or incompetent about making stuffed dummy son-in-law responsible for the Saudi Arabia beat.

    Trump suggested on Saturday that the crown prince was a stabilizing force in Saudi Arabia, despite the view of critics who note his government’s slaughter of civilians in Yemen, crackdown on dissent and jailing of political opponents.

    “He’s a strong person. He has very good control,” Trump said. “He’s seen as a person who can keep things under check, I mean that in a positive way.”

    Well of course he does; he’s a bully himself.

  • Never shrug

    WHCA is the White House Correspondents’ Association.

    Well said. Crisp and to the point.

  • The celebration of male thuggishness

    Worse every day. He’ll be outright calling for genocide in ten, nine, eight…

    Jennifer Rubin at the Post:

    One can hardly fathom the twisted psyche of a president who, after acknowledging that Jamal Khashoggi, a contributing columnist for The Post’s Global Opinions, had likely been murdered, would go before a cheering mob to lavish praise on a U.S. congressman who physically attacked a journalist. “Any guy who can do a body-slam, he’s my kind of — he’s my guy,” Trump said in a Montana campaign appearance on Thursday, referring to Rep. Greg Gianforte (R-Mont.) who pleaded guilty to assaulting the Guardian’s reporter Ben Jacobs, who had the temerity to ask Gianforte a health-care question. “I had heard that he body-slammed a reporter. And he was way up. … I said ‘Oh this is terrible, he’s gonna lose the election,’ ” Trump continued. “Then I said, ‘Well, wait a minute, I know Montana pretty well, I think it might help him.’ And it did.” And his ghoulish fans ate that up.

    It’s like settling down to live in a sewer. Trump turns everything to shit; everything.

    The Guardian’s U.S. editor responded with a statement: “To celebrate an attack on a journalist who was simply doing his job is an attack on the First Amendment by someone who has taken an oath to defend it,” said John Mulholland. “In the aftermath of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, it runs the risk of inviting other assaults on journalists both here and across the world where they often face far greater threats. We hope decent people will denounce these comments and that the president will see fit to apologize for them.”

    The Guardian’s US editor should have phrased that last sentence differently. It’s pointless and feeble to express hope that Trump will do something an evil narcissistic moron will never do, plus it’s too late. He said the things; apologizing for them afterwards would be meaningless. Rubin points out that this is what Trump’s fans love about him:

    the contempt for a free press, the celebration of male thuggishness, the mindless emotional outbursts. Somehow it empowers them, to side with brutes and bullies, to revel in the silencing of a free press.

    That’s a tautology, really, because how else could they be his fans? What else is there to like about Trump? His wisdom, his insight, his eloquence, his generosity, his sense of justice? No, there’s only the gilded grinning monster, flapping his hands back and forth while encouraging violence against reporters.

  • They helped mislead investors and buyers

    Speaking of Ivanka Trump, and the other Trumps – ProPublica published a big story yesterday on their criminal activities over the last couple of decades. It’s about all these international property deals, which they have said are just branding exercises with no actual involvement. Not true, says ProPublica.

    The Trumps were typically way more than mere licensors or bystanders in their often-troubled deals. They were deeply involved in these projects. They helped mislead investors and buyers — and they profited handsomely from it.

    Patterns of deceptive practices occurred in a dozen deals across the globe, as the business expanded into international projects, and the Trumps often participated. One common pattern, visible in more than half of those transactions, was a tendency to misstate key sales numbers.

    In interviews and press conferences, Ivanka Trump gave false sales figures for projects in Mexico’s Baja California; Panama City, Panama; Toronto and New York’s SoHo neighborhood. These statements weren’t just the legendary Trump hype; they misled potential buyers about the viability of the developments.

    Can you say “felony fraud”?

    Not so much the most competent to be US Ambassador to the UN as a crook who lies to potential buyers to get them to overpay for dud properties. There was that project in Panama City that flopped, for instance.

    Trump touted himself as a “partner” of the developer. His daughter Ivanka briefly boasted that she had personally sold 40 units. (A broker on the project said he couldn’t remember her selling even one.) Meanwhile, Ivanka told a journalist at the time that “over 90 percent” of the Panama units had sold — and at prices five times as high as comparable buildings. Both statements were untrue.

    Not only were the Panama sales figures inflated, but many “purchases” turned out to be an illusion. That was no coincidence. The building’s financing depended on obtaining advance commitments from buyers, often before concrete had started pouring. But in between the sale of the bonds in 2007 and 2013, the year the building went bankrupt, buyers of 458 units in the 1,000-unit building abandoned their purchase contracts. Those buyers forfeited more than $50 million in deposits, and they never took possession of finished units. Given that the “buyers” were often shadowy shell companies or other paper entities, it was nearly impossible to discern who the actual purchasers were, let alone why they backed out.

    Trumps “forfeiting” deposits that they had paid themselves via shell companies to lure in real buyers?

    They’re skilled at being crooks, I’ll give them that.

  • He doesn’t like that

    Trump says it’s all so unfair to Saudi Arabia, just as it was to Brett Kavanaugh.

    President Donald Trump Tuesday criticized rapidly mounting global condemnation of Saudi Arabia over the mystery of missing journalist Jamal Khashoggi, warning of a rush to judgment and echoing the Saudis’ request for patience.

    In an interview with The Associated Press, Trump compared the case of Khashoggi, who Turkish officials have said was murdered in the Saudis’ Istanbul consulate, to the allegations of sexual assault leveled against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing.

    “I think we have to find out what happened first,” Trump said. “Here we go again with, you know, you’re guilty until proven innocent. I don’t like that. We just went through that with Justice Kavanaugh and he was innocent all the way as far as I’m concerned.”

    Except that we have only his word for that, and he told lie after lie under oath.

    Also…remember the Central Park 5.

  • Keynote indeed

    Greedy foul-mouthed pussy-grabbing racist misogynist pig Donald Trump is giving the keynote at the “Values Voter Summit” on Friday. Yes that’s right, Mr Worst on Almost Every Category One Can Think Of is going to lecture people on “values.” Of course they don’t mean values as normally understood, they mean values as in “hate gay people” and “bully immigrants.”

    The anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council, labeled as a hate group by the SPLC, has hosted its annual summit since its inception in 2006.

    “Values voters have waited eight years for a leader who puts America’s mission first and respects the values that made America into a great nation,” the council’s president Tony Perkins said in a statement reported by The Hill.

    Well there was the genocide and the slavery and the slavery-replaced-by-vagrancy-laws, true, but those aren’t really the values that made the US a great nation. Rich, maybe, but not great.

  • What he always does to women

    Even more disgusting.

  • Who cares?

    So Elizabeth Warren has called Trump’s bluff.

    In a rather unusual campaign move, Sen. Elizabeth Warren has released the results of a DNA test that she says provides “strong evidence” of Native American ancestry dating back six to 10 generations, addressing a controversy that has followed her for years.

    …

    At a rally in Montana this past July, Trump taunted Warren for her claims of Native American ancestry, calling her “Pocahontas.” He suggested that if he were to debate her in 2020, he would give her one of those take-home DNA kits “they sell on television for $2.”

    “Trump taunted Warren” is putting it very mildly. The obnoxious, childish, bullying grossness of his performance is nausea-inducing. NPR helpfully included the clip.

    “I will give you a million dollars to your favorite charity paid for by Trump if you take the test and it shows you’re an Indian,” Trump added, as the crowd cheered. But on Monday morning, the president was asked about the challenge and falsely told reporters, “I didn’t say that.”

    That is to say, he lied to reporters.

  • Trump spectacularly outdid himself

    Gregg Sargent at the Post argues that Trump has to dial up the asshole to get the vote out when he’s not on the ballot.

    In an interview broadcast Sunday night on CBS, President Trump spectacularly outdid himself in revealing all of his very worst qualities in a compressed time period: the relentless lying; the unabashed sympathy with autocrats and dictators; the gloating, misogynist contempt for Christine Blasey Ford and the millions who saw her as an icon; the rabid xenophobia; and the lack of even minimal regret over the cruelest policies birthed by that xenophobia, such as the family separations resulting in thousands of children locked in cages.

    In so doing, Trump perfectly showcased the Republicans’ predicament as they seek to hold the House: They need Trump to go full Trumpist to get out his voters, because his policies aren’t getting the job done — yet these displays are simultaneously strengthening the anti-Trump backlash among the constituencies most likely to deliver the House to Democrats.

    …

    As The New York Times recently reported, the White House has adopted a strategy of unleashing what counselor Kellyanne Conway describes as “Donald Trump in full.” This entails letting Trump do as many rallies and as much talking as possible, enabling him to unleash as many lies and depravities as the media space will absorb.

    It’s like a four-year-long Vegas act or YouTube performance, as opposed to being like responsible administration of a large and too-powerful country.

  • It’ll change back again

    Trump did his first president-ish interview with 60 Minutes, and CBS provided the transcript. We don’t have to wait for the stupidity, he leads with it. Lesley Stahl asks him if he still thinks climate change is “a hoax.”

    I think something’s happening. Something’s changing and it’ll change back again. I don’t think it’s a hoax, I think there’s probably a difference. But I don’t know that it’s manmade. I will say this. I don’t wanna give trillions and trillions of dollars. I don’t wanna lose millions and millions of jobs. I don’t wanna be put at a disadvantage.

    Dear god. It’s changing and it’ll change back again. What’s that supposed to mean, and how does he think he knows that? And what is “something”? And then the abrupt lurch back to what he can manage to understand: munneee.

    He says the idiotic thing again. “I’m not denying climate change. But it could very well go back.” Sure, it’s like a rubber band, it could just snap back.

    Stahl does needle him about his sloppy attributions.

    President Donald Trump: –of years. They say that we had hurricanes that were far worse than what we just had with Michael.

    Lesley Stahl: Who says that? “They say”?

    President Donald Trump: People say. People say that in the–

    Lesley Stahl: Yeah, but what about the scientists who say it’s worse than ever?

    “They say”; “people say”; he’s an idiot.

    He gets mushy about Kim.

    President Donald Trump: No I’m not doing it. This isn’t the Obama administration. I haven’t eased the sanctions. I haven’t done anything. I haven’t done anything. We’re meeting. I believe he likes me. I like him. We have a good relationship. It’s very important.

    President Trump at rally: “And then we fell in love, okay. No really. He wrote me beautiful letters. And they’re great letters. We fell in love.”

    Lesley Stahl: I wanna read you his resume, okay? He presides over a cruel kingdom of repression, gulags, starvation– reports that he had his half-brother assassinated, slave labor, public executions. This is a guy you love?

    President Donald Trump: Sure. I know all these things. I mean– I’m not a baby. I know these things.

    Lesley Stahl: I know, but why do you love that guy?

    President Donald Trump: Look, look. I– I– I like– I get along with him, okay?

    Lesley Stahl: But you love him.

    President Donald Trump: Okay. That’s just a figure of speech.

    Lesley Stahl: No, it’s like an embrace.

    President Donald Trump: It well, let it be an embrace. Let it be whatever it is to get the job done.

    Lesley Stahl: He’s a bad guy.

    President Donald Trump: Look. Let it be whatever it is. I get along with him really well. I have a good energy with him. I have a good chemistry with him. Look at the horrible threats that were made. No more threats. No more threats.

    A good energy. A good chemistry. That’s what it’s all about. Trump’s infinite charm will save the world.

    Also, he knows more than anyone else. About everything.

    President Donald Trump: Now, I like NATO, NATO’s fine. But you know what? We shouldn’t be paying almost the entire cost of NATO to protect Europe. And then on top of that, they take advantage of us on trade. They’re not going to do it anymore. They understand that.

    Lesley Stahl: Okay, but are, it does seem this, are you willing to disrupt the Western Alliance? It’s been going for 70 years. It’s kept the peace for 70 years.

    President Donald Trump: You don’t know that. You don’t know that.

    Lesley Stahl: I don’t know what?

    President Donald Trump: You don’t know that.

    Lesley Stahl: Is it true General Mattis said to you, “The reason for NATO and the reason for all these alliances is to prevent World War III?”

    President Donald Trump: No, it’s not true.

    Lesley Stahl: What’s not true?

    President Donald Trump: Frankly, I like General Mattis. I think I know more about it than he does. And I know more about it from the standpoint of fairness, that I can tell you.

    He thinks he knows more about it than Mattis does. He knows less about it than Mattis’s dog does.

  • Wholly owned

    You don’t see presidents do this every day:

    On Wednesday evening, Politico reported that Fox News, the last adherents of the air-every-Donald-Trump-rally-live philosophy, were backing off that policy. Fox News had been a respite for President Trump, who has praised the network for showing his rallies while other networks aired other coverage. Whatever else was going on, Fox could be relied on to stick with the president’s riffs and rants, no doubt to the enjoyment of much of its audience.

    But Trump has already held six rallies this month, on 60 percent of the evenings in October so far. That’s a lot of time to devote to what is essentially the same thing over and over. Trump doesn’t have a stump speech, but he does have a stump patter. Pick out a string of four sentences from any of his recent events and they could probably slot, unedited, into any of the others. Why keep showing it? Ratings for the Trump Show, Politico reports, had started to slip below the standard ratings for the network’s prime time programming.

    Not that Trump is at all boring or anything. It’s just that – oh look, is that a hedgehog?

    So Trump got bumped. On Wednesday night, as Trump had a rally in Pennsylvania, Fox aired “The Story With Martha MacCallum.”

    Asked about the move away from airing Trump’s rallies, unnamed White House officials told Politico that they “planned ‘to look into that,’ ” noting that the president’s current director of communications is Bill Shine, who came to the White House after years in a senior programming position at Fox News.

    That. That’s what you don’t see presidents do every day. You don’t see presidents “look into it” when a network skips reporting on one of the president’s rallies, especially when that network has reported on all the preceding rallies as if they were visits from the Emperor of the Galaxy. You don’t see presidents leaning on news networks to give them free publicity.

    Whether or not it was Shine’s work, Trump was back on Fox News in short order. At 9:20 p.m. — a little over an hour after the Politico piece was published — Fox sent out an alert: Trump would be interviewed in the 11 o’clock hour by host Shannon Bream. On Thursday morning, another late notice. Shortly before 7 a.m., the network informed the public that the president would also be calling in to “Fox and Friends,” his preferred morning cable news show.

    Trump’s conversation with Bream and his call to “Fox and Friends” — a show with which Trump once had a deal to provide weekly call-in commentary — stretched for the better part of an hour, combined. On the morning program alone, Trump was given more than half an hour to expound on whatever subject he wished, loosely corralled by the show’s always generous hosts. The content was indistinguishable from the rally content: riffs about his various political opponents, vague assertions about his policy goals, disparagement of the news media. But because it was an interview, and not a rally, Fox aired it in full. And, for what it’s worth, other members of the media who might not pay much attention to a campaign rally tuned in, as well.

    This is so ludicrous, and corrupt.

     

  • This thing happened in Turkey

    Well there you go – he’s not even a citizen.

  • Republicans believe in the rule of law?

    Ye gods. Trump pretending to be a fan of the rule of law.

    The rule of law – says the guy who cheated on his taxes to the tune of half a billion dollars, who uses his presidency to enrich himself contrary to a clause of the Constitution as well as regulations, who lies to all of us every day, who brags of sexual assault, who uses his presidency to enrich his children, who makes all of us pay for his frequent trips to his own golf clubs, who stiffed contractors and abused bankruptcy laws, who has been obstructing justice in plain sight for the entirety of his presidency to date.

  • A very scary time for young men

    Jennifer Rubin points out how rich it is for Trump to start manscreaming about the presumption of innocence.

    President Trump on Tuesday cranked up the volume on his white male base’s primal scream to ear-shattering decibels. He worries that this is a “very scary time for young men” in America, who are at risk of being accused of things they didn’t do. He insists, “My whole life I’ve heard you’re innocent until proven guilty, but now you’re guilty until proven innocent. That is a very, very difficult standard.” The president — with more than a dozen accusers claiming he engaged in unwanted sexual conduct — knows a thing or two about victimhood, he’d have you believe.

    As he demonstrated in his mockery of Christine Blasey Ford at a fascist rally last night.

    Trump’s concern for the falsely accused doesn’t extend to either Bill or Hillary Clinton, whom he’d like to “lock up” without further ado. His concern for false accusations did not extend to the Central Park Five, the African American teenagers whom he initially wanted executed — and 14 years after the fact still claimed were guilty despite DNA evidence exonerating them. His concern about the presumption of innocence doesn’t extend to Mexican immigrants (“rapists!”), Muslim immigrants (“terrorists!”), FBI agents (liberal schemers), President Barack Obama (tapped his wires) or really anyone except privileged, rich white men whose lives and politics resemble his own.

    And who don’t get in his way or contradict him or give him advice he doesn’t like.

    We know false accusations of sexual assault are no higher than false accusations of other crimes (2 to 8 percent). The percentage of unreported sex crimes is estimated to be over 60 percent and perhaps as high as 77 percent. Trump is more concerned about the 2 to 8 percent than the reported or unreported cases of rape. Eighty-four percent of sex crime victims are women. It’s a scary time for men, you see.

    That’s because women are comparable to mosquitoes while men are comparable to Nobel Prize-winning Olympic medalist billionaire king-emperors. It’s a difference in value, you see. Mosquitoes are abundant plus they’re a pest while Nobel Prize-winning Olympic medalist billionaire king-emperors are rare and precious. If a billion mosquitoes die we’re better off, if one Nobel Prize-winning Olympic medalist billionaire king-emperor is accused of rape the world might end.

    Playing victim is a transparent attempt in many instances to avoid responsibility for one’s actions. It often aims to deprive actual victims of sympathy and help. (And by mocking Ford, he victimized her once more while sending a warning to other women that they too will be ridiculed if they come forward.) Playing victim can give one license to engage in discriminatory behavior toward others (e.g., not serving LGBTQ customers, insulting women) and to be cruel as Trump and his hooting, hollering crowd was Tuesday night at Ford’s expense.

    That’s why DARVO is a thing – deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. Trump is darvoing like mad.

  • It should disgust us all the same

    https://twitter.com/B_Ehrenreich/status/1047478640022360066

  • The Bully-in-chief

    CNN on Trump’s sneers at Ford last night:

    President Donald Trump for the first time directly mocked Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee by casting doubt on her testimony during a campaign rally.

    Before the crowd Tuesday night in Southaven, Mississippi, Trump imitated Ford during her testimony, mocking her for not knowing the answers to questions such as how she had gotten to the high school party where she says Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her.

    “I had one beer. Well, do you think it was — nope, it was one beer,” Trump said, mimicking Ford’s testimony last week to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

    “How did you get home? I don’t remember. How’d you get there? I don’t remember. Where is the place? I don’t remember. How many years ago was it? I don’t know.”

    Trump’s comments were met with laughter and applause from the crowd.

    “I don’t know. I don’t know,” the President continued. “What neighborhood was it in? I don’t know. Where’s the house? I don’t know. Upstairs, downstairs — where was it? I don’t know — but I had one beer. That’s the only thing I remember.”

    This is the president talking. The president.

    Trump had previously been conciliatory toward Ford, calling her a “good witness” earlier on Tuesday and on Monday saying he respected her position very much.

    “With all of that you cannot say that we’ve done anything but be respectful, and I do. I respect her position very much. I respect her position very much,” Trump said to reporters on Monday.

    And made a liar of himself the next day.

    The President said Tuesday night that Kavanaugh’s “life is in tatters. A man’s life is shattered. His wife is shattered, his daughters. … “

    That ” … ” replaces the bit where he slavers over the beauty of Kavanaugh’s daughters.

    He called Democrats who are against Kavanaugh “evil people” who want to “destroy people.”
    He reiterated his earlier claims Tuesday that nowadays you are “guilty until proven innocent,” and stepped up his line of argument that men are under attack in America, without mentioning survivors of sexual assault.

    “Think of your son. Think of your husband,” Trump told the rally, noting he has had “many false allegations” against him.

    Very true, except for the “false” part.

    Flake and Collins were not impressed. Trump is making it so unpleasant for them to stay loyal and vote for Kavanaugh.

    “There’s no time and no place for remarks like that. To discuss something this sensitive at a political rally is just not right. It’s just not right. I wish he hadn’t had done it,” Flake told NBC’s Savannah Guthrie on “Today,” adding, “It’s kind of appalling.”

    Collins, a Republican from Maine, similarly condemned Trump’s comments, telling CNN’s Manu Raju they “were just plain wrong.” She would not say if the remarks would affect her vote.

    And, I’m guessing, it won’t.

  • You never do

    Trump earlier today:

    Here is Trump calling on ABC News’s Cecilia Vega for the first question of the news conference:

    Trump: “She’s shocked that I picked her. She’s in a state of shock.

    Vega: “I’m not. Thank you, Mr. President.”

    Trump: “That’s okay, I know you’re not thinking. You never do.”

    Vega: “I’m sorry?

    Trump: “No, go ahead.”

    It seems likely Trump heard her say “I’m not thinking,” instead of “Thank you,” hence his reply. Still, there are two things about this exchange that are disturbing, although not out of character for Trump:

    First, his attack on Vega came out of the blue. Vega hadn’t yet asked a question, so Trump can’t blame his derision on something she had just asked. (Not that that would be normal behavior for a president, either.)

    No, it wouldn’t. It would be normal for a pissy, obnoxious junior high school student. For a president? It’s a million miles from normal. He has what is probably the biggest platform in the world, and he has no qualms about using it to insult people who don’t have that kind of influence.

    Second, the attack came across as gender-driven. When Trump wants to attack women, he often resorts to stereotypes, reducing women to their looks or their intellect (or supposed lack of it) in many instances. In summer 2017, he attacked MSNBC anchor Mika Brzezinski by alleging that she had a “facelift.” In his very first presidential debate, Trump pushed back on host Megyn Kelly for questioning him about his treatment of women by saying that “she had blood coming out of her wherever.” He has called NBC News’s Katy Tur “little Katy” and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd “crazy.”

    And don’t forget Maxine Waters, whom he persists in calling “very low IQ” and just plain “stupid” from his unrivaled platform.

    Old news, but never normal.

  • Another way wealth and privilege work

  • The universal daddy

    Steve Bannon was terrified that the women will take over way back in February.

    In the new paperback edition of his book “Devil’s Bargain,” journalist Joshua Green writes that Bannon, the former Trump campaign chairman and White House chief strategist, “thought Oprah might represent an existential threat to Trump’s presidency if she decided to campaign for Democrats in 2018.”

    But, Green wrote, Bannon believes the most powerful backlash to Trump is bigger than Winfrey, who’s been the subject of much 2020 speculation. He’s most concerned by the women-led wave of liberal, anti-Trump activism, fueled by the #MeToo movement.

    Yes, very scary, much scarier than the activism of scruffy racist wife-beaters and gilded smirking pussy-grabbers.

    “The anti-patriarchy movement is going to undo ten thousand years of recorded history,” Bannon told Green. “You watch. The time has come. Women are gonna take charge of society. And they couldn’t juxtapose a better villain than Trump. He is the patriarch.”

    Ohhhhhhhhhhhh no. No, chum, he’s not. Not in any way. He’s too slack, too soft, too weird-looking, too floppy separating fakey gilded hair-looking – I mean come on who looks more patriarchal, Trump or Kelly? A bizarro-world comb-over that matches the gilt in his apartment is not a patriarchal accessory. Plus he’s too dim, too talkative, too inept, too freakish – too confused, too incompetent, too bad-tempered, too out of control – too laughable. He’s a lot of things, but The Patriarch is not one of them.

    Bannon made these comments after watching Winfrey deliver an impassioned speech at the 2018 Golden Globes, in which she lauded the #MeToo movement and delivered a call to arms against racial and gender-based injustice in front of an audience dressed in black to recognize victims of sexual misconduct.

    Well, you know…that may be an advantage women have over men. The criteria for being a matriarch are a bit looser than those for being a patriarch. One doesn’t have to resemble a ramrod to be a matriarch.

    Image result for trump bad hair

    Not the patriarch