Remember that surge of invention in the US when we came up with the light bulb and the wheel? That was great, wasn’t it?
Tag: Trump
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Honestly, they don’t have the material
“We have all the material, and WE’RE SITTING ON IT.”
Aka obstruction of justice.The second article of impeachment.
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Headaches and a couple of other things
Trump says traumatic brain injuries are no big deal.
On Wednesday, Trump held a press conference on his last day in Davos, Switzerland, at which CBS News White House correspondent Weijia Jiang pressed Trump about the 11 service members who were evacuated from Iraq to Kuwait and Germany with symptoms of potential brain injuries.
“Initially you said repeatedly to Americans that after Iran retaliated for the Soleimani strike, no Americans were injured,” Jiang said, and added, “We now know at least 11 US service members airlifted from Iraq.”
“Can you explain the discrepancy?” she asked.
“No, I heard that they had headaches and a couple of other things, but I would say, and I can report, it is not very serious,” Trump said.
“You don’t consider a potential traumatic brain injury serious?” Jiang asked.
“They told me about it numerous days later, you’d have to ask Department of Defense, no, I don’t consider them very serious injuries relative to other injuries that I’ve seen,” Trump said, then added, “I’ve seen what Iran has done with their roadside bombs to our troops.”
“I’ve seen people with no legs and with no arms, I’ve seen people that were horribly horribly injured in that area, that war,” he continued. “In fact many cases put those bombs put there by Soleimani, who is no longer with us. I consider them to be really bad injuries. No, I do not consider that to be bad injuries no.”
That’s so Trump. He can’t see brain injuries, unless the head is cut in half, so he figures they’re not bad injuries. He’s just that dumb. But then, it makes sense that he doesn’t think the brain is important. He barely has a functioning one himself, so obviously it can’t be important.
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The misconduct
Schiff’s powerful opening statement.
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The worst
Another book with further details about the horror that is Trump, this one by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig of the Washington Post (we read an excerpt the other day):
Trump’s West Wing is tantamount to a family business and everything is personal. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump obtain security clearances because they are kin.
After publicly punting the issue to Kelly, Trump is described as applying pressure privately. “I wish we could make this go away,” he reportedly told Kelly. “This is a problem.” Said differently, protocols and national security were treated as impediments, not safeguards, when Javanka got involved.
It’s just his personal excellent con, it’s nothing to do with the country or its people.
At a meeting in the Pentagon’s inner sanctum, the “Tank”, the draft-dodging Trump derided America’s generals as “dopes and babies”. He added: “I wouldn’t go to war with you people.” Debasement was a coin of the realm.
That’s the one we read the other day.
When Kirstjen Nielsen, secretary of homeland security and a Kelly deputy, balked at Trump’s demands on immigration, he berated her looks and height. For good measure, according to the authors, Trump would call her at 5am, just for the sake of harassment.
He’s like every shithead you’ve ever had to work with or sit next to at holiday dinners, rolled into one, magnified a thousand times, and running the country.
Likewise, Trump mocked HR McMaster, Michael Flynn’s replacement as national security adviser, for his mien and wardrobe. The scholarly McMaster was always on borrowed time.
Because Trump’s mien and wardrobe are so perfect.
Says one of McMaster’s aides, Trump “doesn’t fire people … he tortures them until they’re willing to quit.”
Every shithead you’ve ever encountered, added together and multiplied…
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Stand still and count to 8
I saw this
so I had to go looking for it.
She’s not kidding. He walks up, shaking his stupid little fists, the two of them stand there with their backs turned as if at a urinal, then Trump puts a “that’s enough I’m bored” hand on Pence’s shoulder and they turn around and Trump shakes a stupid little fist again.
God I wish he would just spontaneously melt into a pool of grease right this second.
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“How much of this shit do we have to listen to?” Trump asked
Trump did a talk for donors at Mar-a-Lago last night, in which he explained that he killed Suleimani because he said bad things about us.
In his speech — held inside the gilded ballroom on his Mar-a-Lago property — he claimed that Soleimani was “saying bad things about our country” before the strike, which led to his decision to authorize his killing.
“How much of this shit do we have to listen to?” Trump asked. “How much are we going to listen to?”
Who knew that badmouthing the US was a capital offense? Trump says bad things about most countries; does that mean those countries all have a right to take him out with a drone?
Trump did not describe an “imminent threat” that led to his decision to kill Soleimani, the justification used by administration officials in the aftermath of the attack.
Almost as if that was just the pretext, for public consumption.
He went on to recount listening to military officials as they watched the strike from “cameras that are miles in the sky.”
Of course he did. Big boy playing with real guns! Look at big boy!
“They’re together sir,” Trump recalled the military officials saying. “Sir, they have two minutes and 11 seconds. No emotion. ‘2 minutes and 11 seconds to live, sir. They’re in the car, they’re in an armored vehicle. Sir, they have approximately one minute to live, sir. 30 seconds. 10, 9, 8 …’ ”
“Then all of a sudden, boom,” he went on. “‘They’re gone, sir. Cutting off.’”
That’s four “sirs” in that short passage. He does love being called “sir,” bone spurs or no bone spurs. Next to killing people, it might be his favorite thing.
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Bone spurs urges violence from a safe distance
Ah yes, the Governor of Virginia is worried that a gun rights rally could turn violent, so what does Trump do? Trump does his bit to encourage violence. Of course he does.
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The atmosphere thickens
NPR on the Parnas hotel room notepad scribbles:
The records provided by Parnas, who has been indicted in New York for alleged campaign finance violations, add to the evidence already released documenting Giuliani’s efforts to get the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to publicly announce an investigation related to former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, who had ties to a Ukrainian energy company.
It’s not that there’s anything new in that, it’s just that I keep wanting to underline how DERANGED it is. Trump’s personal lawyer is working with random guy Lev Parnas to try to force another head of state to damage one of Trump’s political competitors. Trump might as well be sending Barron and a couple of Barron’s classmates to South Korea to try to get that government to sabotage Elizabeth Warren – it would make just as much sense. Then again that would omit the extra poignancy in the fact that Giuliani was once a famous prosecutor in the famous SDNY.
But there is new news on this revolting Robert Hyde character.
But it’s a string of WhatsApp messages from late March 2019 taken from Parnas’ phone that is drawing the most scrutiny. In those texts, Parnas and an associate named Robert F. Hyde, a retired Marine who is running for Congress as a Republican in Connecticut, criticize Yovanovitch, who was still a U.S. ambassador at the time.
She was still an ambassador at that time because Trump hadn’t yet fired her for his own evil self-dealing reasons.
“Wow. Can’t believe Trumo [sic] hasn’t fired this bitch. I’ll get right in that,” Hyde wrote in an encrypted message to Parnas. He added, “She under heavy protection outside Kiev.”
People working for Trump’s personal lawyer are conspiring to harm a US ambassador, presumably because she’s not corrupt and thus won’t help them with their corrupt Cunning Plan.
The messages also seem to indicate that Hyde might have been involved in monitoring Yovanovitch and her movements.
“They are moving her tomorrow,” Hyde later wrote, quickly followed by, “The guys over they asked me what I would like to do and what is in it for them.”
Hyde said Yovanovitch had turned off her phone and computer, and that his associates in Ukraine would give updates on the ambassador’s movements. He added, “They are willing to help if we/you would like a price… Guess you can do anything in the Ukraine with money … what I was told.”
These random crooks are monitoring an ambassador’s phone and computer. On behalf of the president of the US. Along with being criminal it’s just so filthy.
Two days later, on March 29, Hyde wrote, “It’s confirmed we have a person inside.”
But hey, he was only joking, folks!
In a a flurry of comments Wednesday, Hyde said he has never been to Kyiv and that the highlighted exchange was all in fun and had been misconstrued.
Uh huh. Just jokes.
So he’s illiterate as well as criminal and dangerous.
I do not like these people.
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Drip…drip…drip
This. Don’t. normalize. Trump.
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Personal lawyer
CNN on the Giuliani-Parnas-Yovanovitch papers:
Former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch on Tuesday called for an investigation into the “disturbing” notion that she was under surveillance from associates of the President’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.
I’ve asked this before, but the question is even more pressing now: what business would anyone’s personal lawyer have interfering with a US ambassador on the job? Giuliani was emphatic on the point that he wasn’t working for Trump the [pretend] president, he was working for Trump the person. Trump the person has even less right to sandbag an ambassador for his own criminal interests than Trump the [pretend] president has. It’s as if Trump’s dentist tried to pull an ambassador’s teeth out.
The texts released by the House Democrats Tuesday show Connecticut Republican congressional candidate Robert Hyde berating Yovanovitch and suggest he was monitoring her while she was in Kiev and relaying her movements to Parnas. Hyde declined to comment to CNN when asked if he had surveilled Yovanovitch, who served as a key witness in the House impeachment probe.
Robert Hyde is a strikingly horrible character. He’ll probably be president after Trump.
Three retired ambassadors who know Yovanovitch expressed shock and horror Tuesday at the idea that the longtime diplomat was being surveilled by an American.
“It’s horrifying, it’s just unbelievable,” retired ambassador Jim Melville said in a phone conversation with CNN. “The very idea that there were elements, possibly of the US government or connected to the US government, who were trying to do an end run around everything that we’ve established to keep our mission safe is just outrageous.”
Connected to the US government but not officially. Off the books connected. “Private” connected. Connected the way the plumbers were connected to Nixon.
Retired ambassador Nancy McEldowney echoed that sentiment.
“I find this really shocking and alarming and the idea that American citizens would be surveilling an American ambassador with the endorsement of the President’s personal attorney, it’s just so troubling to me,” McEldowney told CNN.
Another retired ambassador said they had “never heard of anything like it.”
“It’s common that terrorists and former communists do this to us. It’s appalling and incomprehensible that somebody who is working for the President’s personal lawyer would have been doing this to our ambassador,” they told CNN.
We get such an onslaught of outrageous criminal actions from Trump and his trumpers that we lose track of how outrageous some of the actions are. This business of having shadowy gangsters abusing an ambassador who is doing her job (and by all non-trumpian accounts doing it brilliantly) is hard to take in.
Asked whether they believed it would be helpful for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to come out in Yovanovitch’s defense in light of the latest developments, both Melville and McEldowney slammed the top US diplomat.
Pompeo isn’t the top US diplomat. He’s a hack, in way over his head. Diplomats are professionals; Pompeo is a hack.
“He hasn’t stood up for anybody in the foreign service. All he’s looking out for is his own back and the President,” Melville said. “He has no interest in the good of the service and its people and he’s made that abundantly clear repeatedly.”
McEldowney told CNN she believes Pompeo is “derelict in his duty for refusing to speak out about diplomats who are loyally and faithfully and professionally carrying out their responsibilities and who are being slandered by political attacks.”
Oh well, it’s only the State Department.
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The announcement is everything
Neal Katyal and Joshua Geltzer in the Post:
The new documents released Tuesday evening by the House Intelligence Committee were devastating to Trump’s continuing — if shifting — defense of his Ukraine extortion scandal, just days before his impeachment trial is likely to begin in the Senate. These new documents demolish at least three key defenses to which Trump and his allies have been clinging: that he was really fighting corruption when he pressured Ukraine on matters related to the Biden family; that Hunter Biden should be called as a witness at the Senate impeachment trial; and that there’s no need for a real, honest-to-goodness trial in the Senate.
They point out that even Nixon didn’t think he could just say No to impeachment.
That’s why the House added Article II to Trump’s impeachment: “Obstruction of Congress.” It was a response to an unprecedented attempt by Trump to hide the truth.
The documents released Tuesday show what Trump has been so afraid of. For starters, they prove that Trump’s already-eyebrow-raising claim to have been fighting corruption in Ukraine was bogus. Notes taken by an associate of Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, Lev Parnas — now facing federal criminal charges — show what his and Giuliani’s mission was when they got in touch with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky: “get Zalensky to Announce that the Biden case will Be Investigated.” Look hard at the real goal here: not to prompt an investigation of Hunter Biden, but to score an announcement of a Biden investigation. Pursuing an announcement, rather than an investigation, makes sense only if Trump’s objective was to dirty the reputation of a leading political rival, Joe Biden.
It’s very Trump though. It’s incriminating but it’s also just so Trump – so about the appearance and so not about the substance. He’s a pretend genius pretending to be a president pretending to do serious grown-up presidenty things. It’s all performance; there is nothing else. He doesn’t know there’s anything else. He thinks what he sees is all there is. He’s that simple.
All told, the documents help to explain Trump’s consistent push to bury the evidence against himself. Every week, it becomes clearer why Trump has withheld documents from Congress, blocked executive branch officials and even private citizens from testifying before Congress, and overall, well, obstructed Congress, as the second article of impeachment rightly describes it. It’s because Trump is a man with something to hide. Let’s see what else he’s hiding — in front of the Senate next week, in a good, old-fashioned American trial for all to see.
Trump has almost everything to hide.
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Truth, lies, beliefs
Why truth matters. People in charge of the guns and bombs and soldiers aren’t supposed to get inventive with the intel.
Esper said well no he didn’t actually see any evidence but…but…but…well he had a hunch.
Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said he “didn’t see” specific evidence that top Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani was planning attacks on four U.S. embassies, but said he believed such attacks would have occurred.
Well that’s good enough for us!
“The president didn’t cite a specific piece of evidence. What he said was he believed,” Esper said Sunday on “Face the Nation.” “I didn’t see one, with regard to four embassies. What I’m saying is that I shared the president’s view that probably — my expectation was they were going to go after our embassies. The embassies are the most prominent display of American presence in a country.”
Plus you can find their addresses by Googling, so it all adds up.
The president and his top officials have said the strike that killed Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s elite Quds Force, was justified because there was an “imminent” threat to American service members and diplomats. Members of Congress, however, have raised questions as to the nature of the threat following briefings on the strike that the administration conducted with all members of the House and Senate.
This is what Trump does – he commits some criminally reckless or destructive act and then when people notice he makes up “reasons” for it retroactively.
Mr. Trump told Fox News in an interview Friday that “it would’ve been four embassies” that were attacked, seemingly revealing more information about the nature of the threat.
Esper said he agreed that the embassies probably would have been targeted by Soleimani.
But that’s not agreeing, it’s changing. Trump stated a fact (which was a lie) and Esper changed it to a speculation. Esper lied to protect Trump’s lie. Whole lotta lying going on.
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Ugly scenes
Samples of Trump’s horrors:
Huh? What was that? What’s he talking about? What country did he “save”?
“I’m going to tell you about the Nobel Peace Prize, I’ll tell you about that. I made a deal, I saved a country, and I just heard that the head of that country is now getting the Nobel Peace Prize for saving the country. I said: ‘What, did I have something do with it?’ Yeah, but you know, that’s the way it is. As long as we know, that’s all that matters… I saved a big war, I’ve saved a couple of them.”
Although he did not name the Nobel Peace Prize winner or the country, it is clear that Mr Trump was referring to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.
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The Norwegian Nobel Committee said Mr Abiy was honoured for his “decisive initiative to resolve the border conflict with neighbouring Eritrea”.
The two countries fought a bitter border war from 1998-2000, which killed tens of thousands of people. Although a ceasefire was signed in 2000, the neighbours technically remained at war until July 2018, when Mr Abiy and Eritrea’s President Isaias Afwerki signed a peace deal. So for two decades, the long border was closed, dividing families and making trade impossible.
Did Trump have anything to do with that? Anything at all?
Nope.
He shames us all.
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The crowd roared
Greg Sargent at The Post underlines the obvious: Trump is an abusive monstrosity bent on destruction.
At a rally in Ohio on Thursday night, President Trump drew deafening cheers by boasting about his order to assassinate Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, deriding Democrats with petty schoolyard taunts and mocking the very idea that Congress should act to constrain his warmaking powers.
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At his rally, Trump belittled House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as “not operating with a full deck.” He derided House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff as “you little pencil neck.” The crowd roared, demonstrating how heavily Trump’s petty abusiveness figures as a factor in his appeal.
But what Trump really displayed here is that his deranged attacks on the opposition aren’t mere insults. Taken along with Trump’s mockery of congressional demands for input into decisions of war, they demonstrate a profound contempt for the very notion that his most consequential decisions should be subject to oversight and accountability at all.
Did we need any more demonstration of that? He’s made it very clear all along.
Mockery of the opposition is, of course, a constant in politics. But this is different. Trump regularly crosses over into a form of harsh belittling and abuse that is designed to delegitimize the opposition, that is, to tell his voters that the opposition has no legitimate institutional role in our politics at all.
Well…I think that attributes too much thought and deliberation to the abuser. Sure, the abuse delegitimizes, but he would do it even if it didn’t. He does it because that’s who he is, and because he thinks it’s funny, and because he thinks he’s a brilliant and successful insult comic, like Don Rickles but sexy and gorgeous. He does it because he likes doing it. That’s who and what he is: a person who loves insulting people, who can’t get enough of insulting people, who lives to insult people. He’s that guy. He’s a howling wilderness of ego and contempt, and the insults are an inevitable output of that recipe.
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Sophomoric and utterly unconvincing
Top Trump stooges “briefed” members of Congress today, leaving them underwhelmed.
The quartet of US secretary of state Mike Pompeo, the still relatively new defense secretary Mark Esper, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff Mark Milley and the historically-controversial CIA director Gina Haspel strode across Capitol Hill today to brief members of Congress on the Iran issues.
It would be like being briefed by the Marx Brothers, but less fun.
Senior Democrat and chairman of the House foreign affairs committee, Eliot Engel, who was deeply involved in the Trump impeachment inquiry, was unimpressed.
Democrat Pramila Jayapal said of the administration’s stated justification for assassinating Iranian general Qassem Suleimani in the Baghdad area last week: “There was NO raw evidence presented that this [Suleimani plotting against US] was an imminent threat.”
Now about that War Powers Act…
US Democrats, who dominate the House of Representatives, are still furious that they were not consulted or even notified before Donald Trump took unilateral action late last week to assassinate senior Iranian general Qassem Suleimani as he was being driven away from the Baghdad airport in Iraq.
Presidents aren’t supposed to do things like that. Trump thinks he has infinite powers, but he’s wrong, but he refuses to learn otherwise.
It may be no more than a democratic gesture (given that the Republicans dominate the Senate and are foursquare behind their president, Trump) but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has announced the introduction of legislation to curb the president’s war powers, and it will come up for voting tomorrow.
Even some Republicans are not impressed by the briefing.
Republican maverick Senators of the day, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Utah’s Mike Lee, are also exasperated.
Lee told Fox News that the congressional briefing was “lame” and that it was “wrong” for the senior Trump administration briefers – the secretary of state, defense secretary, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and director of the CIA – to tell GOP members of congress that there must be “no dissension” in the ranks over any warlike actions from Donald Trump.
It seems the members were given very luke warm, unreassuring assurances over whether Congress would be involved in any near future further actions of aggression towards Iran.
Lee called it the worst briefing he’d ever heard in his nine years in the Senate.
Fewer and fewer people are willing to work for Trump, so what’s left is the dregs. Dregs don’t do good briefings.
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Result
So I guess this is what Trump was going for?
CNN:
At least 10 rockets hit al-Asad airbase in Iraq, which houses US forces, a Sunni commander of the paramilitary forces in a nearby town told CNN. The attack comes days after the US killed top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in an airstrike in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad.
The administration has sought to cast that strike as an attempt to de-escalate tensions with Iran, but Tehran has vowed revenge for the killing, which it says was an “act of war” and “state terrorism.”
Like hell it was an attempt to de-escalate.
Trump was briefed on the reports of rocket attacks, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said.
“We are aware of the reports of attacks on US facilities in Iraq. The President has been briefed and is monitoring the situation closely and consulting with his national security team,” Grisham said.
That’s the scariest thing they could have said. Better Trump should be in a coma right now, and while we’re at it make that a permanent coma.
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Trump the awesome Christian
It doesn’t get much more phony than this:
They came to pray with their president, though in truth many came just to worship him. Donald Trump’s Friday launch of his so-called “coalition of evangelicals”, an attempt to shore up the support of the religious right ahead of November’s election, had the feel of any other campaign rally, except this time with gospel music.
An estimated 7,000 “supporters of faith” packed the King Jesus international ministry megachurch in Miami to hear the word of the president, and decided that it was good. The Maga hat-wearing faithful cheered Trump’s comments on issues calculated to resonate with his churchgoing audience, including abortion, freedoms of speech and religion, and what he claimed was a “crusade” from Democrats against religious tolerance.
So never mind the cruelty, the bullying, the greed, the self-dealing, the endless lies, the trashy insults, the egotism, the cynicism, the corruption, the racism, the hatred and contempt for most people and nearly all women. Never mind the absence of kindness, generosity, compassion, empathy, dedication, discipline, effort, responsibility, humility, honesty.
Religions make large claims about being beacons of morality for poor weak struggling humans. A religion that sees Donald Trump as someone to cheer and support and help get elected to the top US job is a religion that’s just plain admitting it doesn’t give a rat’s ass about any of that.
It was exactly what evangelical Christians in the audience wanted to hear. Some, like Michael David Layne, a 62-year-old US army veteran who regularly attends the King Jesus church, marries what he sees as Trump’s “strong leadership” with “solid Christian values”, which he said the president showed in Thursday’s military strike. “We can get anybody, anywhere, anytime, anywhere there is terrorism,” he said.
I’m not seeing the Christian values. I’m seeing the self-defense values, but those are universal and inherently self-regarding, as opposed to Christian or religious or self-abnegating.
Layne acknowledges that Trump’s life – which includes three marriages, adultery and alleged affairs with porn stars – might appear less than pious, but is able to overlook it. “He might be a little rough around the edges for some people, but he says it like it is, and if some of the things he says or the actions he takes upset some people it doesn’t make him less of a man of God.”
Well that’s shit framing. The sex and cheating branch of Trump’s shit behavior is a very minor branch; the active cruelty and bullying is much more significant. You can see that Mr Layne knows that, since he calls Trump “rough around the edges” and admits he “upsets” people when he “says it like it is” – i.e. insults and bullies and threatens anyone who annoys him.
The moral poverty of this kind of thing is nauseating.
Others who came to hear Trump preach were similarly unfazed by the president’s questionable religious credentials.
“I believe he has moral character and that he is a man of God,” said Steven Johnson, 65, from New Jersey. “I also believe that he believes people have to pick up the banner and do what’s right. If you don’t pick up the banner then are you really Christian?
On the basis of what? On the basis of what does he believe that Trump has “moral character”? And what “banner” is it that people have to pick up? The one with “Jesus rocks!!” on it in BIG LETTERS?
“It sickens me the people that say they’re Christian, and they’re praying for people, but they’re stabbing them in the back. It’s a shame. We need a revival in this country and get back to common sense, moral values. We’ve gone way off the deep end.”
And so for common sense and moral values we look to Donald Trump? At the shallow end?
“In 2016 evangelical Christians went out and helped us in numbers never seen before. We’re going to blow those numbers away in 2020,” Trump said. “I really believe we have God on our side.”
For Rose Ann Farrell, 74, from Florida, the claim rang true. “I really believe he was sent to us,” she said. “From one to ten, he’s a ten. He lives in a Christian world and we needed a strong Christian, somebody who is not afraid. He speaks for us, has the guts and courage to speak what we want to say. His actions, his intentions, are Christian.”
So much the worse for Christian values.
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It’s official
So, is a tweet “official notification of Congress”?
President Trump claimed Sunday that his tweets are sufficient notice to Congress of any possible U.S. military strike on Iran, in an apparent dismissal of his obligations under the War Powers Act of 1973.
Trump’s declaration, which comes two days after his administration launched a drone strike that killed top Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani, was met with disbelief and ridicule from congressional Democrats, who called on the president to respect the role of the legislative branch in authorizing new military action abroad.
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Trump’s claim that the United States will retaliate against Iran “perhaps in a disproportionate manner” also contrasts with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s statement hours earlier on “Fox News Sunday” that the administration “will take responses that are appropriate and commensurate with actions that threaten American lives.”
Well, on the one hand, you have Pompeo, a craven right-wing hack, and on the other hand you have Trump, a raging narcissistic psychopath.
The War Powers Act of 1973 mandates that the president report to lawmakers within 48 hours of introducing military forces into armed conflict abroad. Such notifications generally detail an administration’s justification for U.S. intervention, as well as the constitutional and legislative rationale used by the administration to send troops. It may also include how long the involvement could last.
Mandates? How can that be, when Trump said in that very tweet that notification is not required? Puzzling.
On Saturday, the White House delivered a formal notification to Congress of the strike that killed Soleimani, according to a senior Democratic aide and another official familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity ahead of the notification.
But the document, which is entirely classified, drew scathing criticism from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who said in a statement that the notification “raises more questions than it answers.”
But Trump is god-emperor and she’s not, so it doesn’t matter.
Several congressional Democrats sharply criticized the president on Sunday afternoon for appearing to dismiss the War Powers Act. “OMG, Trump thinks a crazed Tweet satisfies his War Powers Act obligations to Congress,” Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) tweeted. “Our President has taken us to the brink of war and is now vamping with no plan and no clue. Please, someone in the GOP, take the car keys – read the 25th Amendment.”
…
Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) also pushed back against Trump’s declaration. “.@realDonaldTrump, this is Twitter,” Pocan tweeted. “This is not where you wage unauthorized wars.”
Sir, this is a Wendy’s.
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He tells the pool
Trump is – of course, of course, of course – doubling down on the cultural sites threat. Of course he is. Tell him it’s a war crime and he’ll tell you why he doesn’t care.