Tag: Trump

  • The greatest gift a President can bestow

    Rachel Maddow did a brilliant cold open last night about Trump and pardons and Nixon and Haldeman and criminal obstruction of justice. Her opening segment sometimes loses me, but this one was genius.

    One part of it was about Camp David (complete with photos of various buildings there and explanation that they are named after trees and that the presidential building is called Aspen and sometimes people talk about the president at Aspen and they don’t mean the one in Colorado), and the fact that Bob Haldeman made a recorded diary entry at the end of every day as Chief of Staff, and he made one after a conversation with Nixon at Aspen right before the indictments and firings. It’s quite incriminating in places yet Haldeman dutifully described the whole thing on the tape, Maddow said in wonder.

    Then the indictments came down. She showed us the Times headline for that day and said if anyone wanted to needlepoint her a Times headline that’s the one she would choose.

    Image result for new york times headline watergate indictments

    One evening in May Nixon called Haldeman on the phone (the one that recorded his phone calls).
    The Times published part of the transcript of that conversation in 1997:

    What better way to mark the anniversaries of Richard Nixon’s resignation (Aug. 9, 1974) and pardon by Gerald Ford (Sept. 8, 1974) than with this never-before-published transcript. The scene: Nixon’s Executive Office Building hideaway, May 18, 1973, the day after the Senate Watergate Committee’s televised hearings began. John Dean will soon testify that Nixon committed high crimes, and the long slide toward resignation will accelerate. As the final Watergate tapes released by the National Archives reveal, Nixon wanted to give three of his allies — H.R. (Bob) Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and John Mitchell, who had all resigned by then — the greatest gift a President can bestow: a blanket pardon. According to Samuel Dash, chief counsel of the Senate Watergate Committee, this exchange, if known to the committee at the time, would have justified a separate article of impeachment all by itself. ”Even Haldeman,” he says, ”was trying to shut him up.”

    According to Samuel Dash, chief counsel of the Senate Watergate Committee, this exchange, if known to the committee at the time, would have justified a separate article of impeachment all by itself. Maddow repeated that at least three times.

    What better way to mark the anniversaries of Richard Nixon’s resignation (Aug. 9, 1974) and pardon by Gerald Ford (Sept. 8, 1974) than with this never-before-published transcript. The scene: Nixon’s Executive Office Building hideaway, May 18, 1973, the day after the Senate Watergate Committee’s televised hearings began. John Dean will soon testify that Nixon committed high crimes, and the long slide toward resignation will accelerate. As the final Watergate tapes released by the National Archives reveal, Nixon wanted to give three of his allies — H.R. (Bob) Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and John Mitchell, who had all resigned by then — the greatest gift a President can bestow: a blanket pardon. According to Samuel Dash, chief counsel of the Senate Watergate Committee, this exchange, if known to the committee at the time, would have justified a separate article of impeachment all by itself. ”Even Haldeman,” he says, ”was trying to shut him up.”

    Nixon: What I mean to say is this — talking in the confidence of this room … I don’t give a (expletive) what comes out on you or John (Ehrlichman) — even that poor damn dumb John Mitchell. There is gonna be a total pardon.

    Haldeman: Don’t — don’t — don’t even say that.

    Nixon: You know it. You know it and I know it.

    Haldeman: Nope. Don’t say it.

    Nixon: Forget you ever heard it.

    Nope. Don’t say it. Why not? Because, Maddow said, it’s criminal obstruction of justice. That’s why not.

  • Trump repeatedly used the word ‘wacky’ to describe the shooter

    Trump met yesterday with families of the people killed in the Santa Fe school shooting slaughter.

    One mother said he showed sincerity and compassion. Another, not so much.

    Rhonda Hart, whose 14-year-old daughter, Kimberly Vaughan, was killed at the school, told The Associated Press that Trump repeatedly used the word ‘wacky’ to describe the shooter and the trench coat he wore. She said she told Trump, “Maybe if everyone had access to mental health care, we wouldn’t be in the situation.”

    Hart, an Army veteran, said she also suggested employing veterans as sentinels in schools. She said Trump responded, “And arm them?” She replied, “No,” but said Trump “kept mentioning” arming classroom teachers. “It was like talking to a toddler,” Hart said.

    But without the cuteness factor.

    Trump then headed to a fundraiser at a luxury hotel in downtown Houston, the first of his two big-dollar events in Texas on Thursday. A White House official did not immediately respond to requests for details about how much money was to be raised, and who was benefiting, from the fundraising events.

    After 17 teachers and students were killed during a February shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Trump said he would work to improve school safety, but has not called for new gun control legislation. He created the commission to review ways to make schools safer.

    Not including gun control.

    As the Parkland students became vocal advocates for gun control, embracing their public positions as few school survivors had before, Trump quickly became a focal point for their anger. In Trump’s visit to Florida after the shooting, aides kept him clear of the school, which could have been the site of protests, and he instead met with a few victims at a local hospital and paid tribute to first responders at the nearby sheriff’s office.

    There has yet to be a similar outcry for restrictions on firearms from the students and survivors in deep-red Texas.

    In Texas school shootings are just The Price of Freedom, I guess. We take the risk of driving in cars, and the same applies to attending school in a country overflowing with guns.

    Displaying empathy does not come naturally to Trump, who has been criticized for appearing unfeeling in times of tragedy, including when he sharply criticized a mayor in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of a deadly hurricane and fought with a Gold Star military family.

    The reason displaying empathy does not come naturally to Trump is because empathy itself does not come naturally to Trump. He can’t display it because he doesn’t feel it. This isn’t an issue of a feeling man rendered awkwardly mute by his stoic character or his reluctance to speak up. This is an issue of a man who is entirely indifferent to everyone on the planet who is not himself.

  • Blagojevich and Stewart

    And for his next trick…

    Hmm. Corruption and lying to the FBI. That sounds familiar somehow…

    What’s the commonality here I wonder…

    https://twitter.com/AshaRangappa_/status/1002222024717107200

    Oh yes, that’s it!

  • They will have a little fun today

    He’s off to Texas to meet with family members of the victims killed in the mass shooting at Santa Fe High School; he plans to have fun there.

    Speaking with reporters on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews Thursday morning, the president detailed his schedule for the day, boasting about the state of the economy and ongoing efforts to arrange a previously scrapped meeting between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

    “I just want to tell you we’re doing very well with North Korea … a letter is going to be delivered to me from Kim Jong Un, so I look forward to seeing what’s in the letter,” Trump said. “…Other than that, the economy is good, stock market is up, a lot of jobs, best unemployment we’ve had in many, many decades actually. And we’re going to Dallas and Houston and we will have a little fun today.”

    Throw paper towels at them, that should fix everything.

  • He’s busy

    Yesterday Trump was way too busy with important president stuff to be talking about Roseanne Barr.

    On Tuesday, when Sarah Sanders was asked for Trump’s view about the cancellation, Sanders said “that’s not what the president is looking at. That’s not what he’s spending his time on. And I think that we have a lot bigger things going on in the country right now, certainly that the President is spending his time when it comes to policy.”

    He was thinking about North Korea, trade deals, the military, the economy, not trivial stuff about some sitcom actor’s racist tweets.

    Today, on the other hand, he was thinking about himself and how come nobody calls him up to apologize? North Korea and trade deals forgotten.

    The White House insisted on Wednesday it was not defending Roseanne Barr for the racist tweet that ultimately led to her sitcom’s cancellation on ABC.

    But President Donald Trump and his press secretary Sarah Sanders insisted they were also owed an apology from ABC for airing derogatory comments about the administration.

    It was an expansive answer on a topic Sanders had said just a day before was not on Trump’s radar. It reflected the President’s deeply felt resentment at his portrayal in the media, and his long list of grievances at perceived slights over the past year.

    “The President is pointing to the hypocrisy in the media saying the most horrible things about this President and nobody addresses it,” Sanders told reporters at Wednesday’s press briefing.

    Which is what presidents do, naturally. That was Obama’s reaction to the massacre in Charleston, for sure – “why isn’t everyone talking about meeeeeeee?”

    No, that’s a bitter joke; that wasn’t his reaction, because he’s not a fucking child. But Sarah Sanders goes out there and says that, with apparent sincerity.

    Sanders expanded on that sentiment, reading from a list of examples meant to bolster Trump’s point, including ESPN host Jemele Hill calling Trump a white supremacist on Twitter, “The View” host Joy Behar likening Christianity to mental illness and ESPN anchor Keith Olbermann attacking Trump as a Nazi.

    “This is a double standard that the President is speaking about,” Sanders said. “No one is defending her comments. They were inappropriate. But that was the point that he was making.”

    …

    “The President is simply calling out media bias,” Sanders said. “No one is defending what she said. The President is the President of all Americans and he’s focused on doing what is best for our country.”

    All Americans? Really? Immigrants? Poor people? Brown people? Liberals? Democrats? Women? Civil servants? FBI agents?

    Nah. That’s just another lie.

  • Creepy stuff

    Our Hitler in action:

  • Whiiiiiiiiiiiiine

    Oh good god.

  • Sessions is a witness

    Aha. So Trump is fashioning a rod for his own back.

    In March 2017 Trump berated Jeff Sessions and told him he should rescind his recusal from the Russia investigation, and Sessions refused.

    The confrontation, which has not been previously reported, is being investigated by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, as are the president’s public and private attacks on Mr. Sessions and efforts to get him to resign. Mr. Trump dwelled on the recusal for months, according to confidants and current and former administration officials who described his behavior toward the attorney general.

    He did some of that in public, on Twitter. Anyway, how interesting that Mueller is investigating. That hints that he could be investigating Trump’s current attempted obstruction by raging and lying about Mueller and the investigation every day on Twitter. Dig dig dig that hole.

    The special counsel’s interest demonstrates Mr. Sessions’s overlooked role as a key witness in the investigation into whether Mr. Trump tried to obstruct the inquiry itself. It also suggests that the obstruction investigation is broader than it is widely understood to be — encompassing not only the president’s interactions with and firing of the former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, but also his relationship with Mr. Sessions.

    We’ve always hoped it was that wide. Certainly there’s been plenty of discussion of how obstruction-oriented Trump’s behavior has been.

    Investigators have pressed current and former White House officials about Mr. Trump’s treatment of Mr. Sessions and whether they believe the president was trying to impede the Russia investigation by pressuring him. The attorney general was also interviewed at length by Mr. Mueller’s investigators in January. And of the four dozen or so questions Mr. Mueller wants to ask Mr. Trump, eight relate to Mr. Sessions. Among them: What efforts did you make to try to get him to reverse his recusal?

    Giuliani, of course, is already on tv saying it’s perfectly fine for Trump to try to make Sessions unrecuse himself.

    Mr. Trump complains to friends about how much he would like to get rid of Mr. Sessions but has demurred under pressure from Senate Republicans who have indicated they would not confirm a new attorney general.

    “Demurred”? No. “Been talked out of it.”

    When Mr. Trump learned of the recusal, he asked advisers whether the decision could be reversed, according to people briefed on the matter. Told no, Mr. Trump argued that Eric H. Holder Jr., President Barack Obama’s first attorney general, would never have recused himself from a case that threatened to tarnish Mr. Obama. The president said he expected the same loyalty from Mr. Sessions.

    What an idiot.

    Prosecutors rarely go back on recusals. Legal experts said that occasionally, prosecutors who handed off a case to colleagues over concerns about a possible financial conflict of interest would take the decision back after confirming none existed. But the experts said they could think of no instance in which a prosecutor stepped aside from a case in circumstances similar to Mr. Sessions’s. Justice Department guidelines on recusal are in place to prevent the sort of political meddling the president tried to engage in, they said.

    In other words Trump’s putting the screws on Sessions to get him to go back on the recusal is just more reason Sessions had to recuse himself. Trump’s bullying was more reason to recuse as opposed to a reason to unrecuse. Trump might as well have said “you have to unrecuse yourself because I need to meddle in the investigation with your help.” Maybe he did say that.

    As the months wore on, Mr. Trump returned again and again to the recusal.

    In July, he told The New York Times that he never would have nominated Mr. Sessions if he had known that Mr. Sessions would not oversee the Russia investigation. Two days later, a Washington Post report about Mr. Sessions’s campaign discussions with Russia’s ambassador sent Mr. Trump into another rage. Aboard Marine One that Saturday, the president told his chief of staff, Reince Priebus, to get Mr. Sessions to resign by the end of the weekend, according to a person briefed on the conversation.

    Unnerved and convinced the president wanted to install a new attorney general who could oversee the Russia investigation, Mr. Priebus called Mr. Sessions’s chief of staff at the time, Jody Hunt, who said that the president would have to ask Mr. Sessions himself to resign. Unsure how to proceed, Mr. Priebus simply waited out the president, who never called Mr. Sessions but did attack him that week on Twitter.

    Days later, Mr. Priebus was out as chief of staff. The special counsel has told the president’s lawyers that he wants to ask Mr. Trump about those discussions with Mr. Priebus and why he publicly criticized Mr. Sessions.

    Trump should get on the phone with Mueller and offer him cash to drop the whole thing. That should work.

  • Why don’t they like you, Don?

    Trump’s repetitive tweets are repetitive.

    From Friday morning until Tuesday morning, Trump sent out 14 — yes, 14! — tweets focused on the ongoing Russia probe.

    The tweets — ranging from quotes of supportive voices from Fox News Channel to references to the “13 Angry Democrats” on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team to allegations of election meddling — illustrate Trump’s near-complete obsessions with the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and its impact on his presidency.

    What’s remarkable about the tweets — other than the pure number of them — is the similarities between them.

    So “similar” that they’re the same three thoughts over and over again.

    This is another marker of his deep stupidity, of course, this wearing of a deep groove in his own brain.

    One from Saturday:

    This whole Russia Probe is Rigged. Just an excuse as to why the Dems and Crooked Hillary lost the Election and States that haven’t been lost in decades. 13 Angry Democrats, and all Dems if you include the people who worked for Obama for 8 years. #SPYGATE & CONFLICTS OF INTEREST!

    One from this morning:

    Why aren’t the 13 Angry and heavily conflicted Democrats investigating the totally Crooked Campaign of totally Crooked Hillary Clinton. It’s a Rigged Witch Hunt, that’s why! Ask them if they enjoyed her after election celebration!

    It’s dementia-like. Yes maybe the endless repetition will move the dial in his direction in the approval stakes, but at the cost of further eroding any confidence in his ability to function like an adult.

    What Trump’s tweets read like is someone who has fixated on the idea that he is being unfairly persecuted by people who have never liked him and will do anything to keep him from being successful.

    He should ask himself why these people have never liked him. He should ask himself what there is about him that is so repugnant. He should, but he’s not capable of it.

  • Draft dodger begs local boss not to deport him

    From last August but worth reviving for Memorial Day: Trump’s grandfather wrote to the local princeling begging him not to deport the little family.

    When Donald Trump’s German grandfather was ordered by a royal decree to leave the country and never return, he wrote a letter pleading the prince regent of Bavaria not to deport him.

    Friedrich Trump wrote the letter in 1905 when he returned to Germany with his wife and daughter after having emigrated to the US.

    German authorities had given him eight weeks to leave and denied him repatriation because he failed to complete his mandatory military service and to register his initial emigration to the US 20 years earlier.

    Emphasis added. Like granddaddy like grandson eh? Military service is for other people; the Trumps don’t want to get any closer than a nice expensive parade.

    The letter, translated from German into English and published in Harper’s Magazine, shows how desperate Mr Trump was to remain with his family in Bavaria.

    Writing to Luitpold, prince regent of Bavaria, he begged for mercy.

    He said: “In this urgent situation I have no other recourse than to turn to our adored, noble, wise, and just sovereign lord, our exalted ruler His Royal Highness, highest of all, who has already dried so many tears, who has ruled so beneficially and justly and wisely and softly and is warmly and deeply loved, with the most humble request that the highest of all will himself in mercy deign to allow the applicant to stay in the most gracious Kingdom of Bavaria.”

    Well at least he had enough self-respect not to grovel.

    Mr Trump was born in the village of Kallstadt, in the Rhineland region in west Germany in 1869.

    He left the country at the age of 16 with little possessions and went to the US in the hope of making fortune.

    He trained to become a barber and he went on to run a restaurant, bar and allegedly even a brothel and became a wealthy man.

    His son Fred got richer by renting apartments to white people, and his grandson got even richer by lying cheating and stealing. So haha to you Prinz Luitpold!

  • One way in which he truly is authentic

    David Frum on Trump’s official Memorial Day statement:

    It is the responsibility and honor of the president to speak for the nation on the solemn occasions of collective remembrance. Some presidents are endowed with greater natural eloquence than others, but that does not matter. What the country listens for is the generous and authentic message underneath the rhetoric, whether that rhetoric is graceful or clumsy. The last general to win the presidency said, “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.” The country heard those words, believed them, and trusted him.

    That was of course Eisenhower, who was in charge of sending thousands of soldiers to the beaches of Normandy.

    The 45th president is often described—and sometimes praised—as “authentic.” That compliment, if it is a compliment, is not truly deserved. In many ways, President Trump is not the man he seems. He was not a great builder, not a great dealmaker, not a billionaire, not a man of strength and decisiveness.

    But there is one way in which he truly is authentic: He is never able to play-act the generous feelings that he so absolutely lacks. “To show an unfelt sorrow is an office which the false man does easy.” In that one sense, Donald Trump is not false. He does not feel sorrow for others, and he does not try to pretend otherwise.

    Yes. I was talking about much the same thing earlier today when I said

    If you had to come up with one word to sum up Donald Trump, on pain of being forced to spend time in his company, “shameless” would be a strong candidate. He’s psychopath-level shameless. He does not care; nothing will ever make him care; he is sealed off in a greasy tube of self-adoration, beyond the reach of shame or remorse.

    It’s the most striking thing about him. He has no generous feelings, no sorrow for the sorrows of others, no compassion, no shame that he has no compassion, no ability to care, no ability to care that he doesn’t care. He couldn’t fake it if he tried because he doesn’t even know what it is.

    Trump’s perfect emptiness of empathy has revealed itself again and again through his presidency, but never as completely and conspicuously as in his self-flattering 2018 Memorial Day tweets. They exceed even the heartless comment in a speech to Congress—in the presence of a grieving widow—that a fallen Navy Seal would be happy that his ovation from Congress had lasted longer than anybody else’s.

    It’s not news that there is something missing from Trump where normal human feelings should go. His devouring need for admiration from others is joined to an extreme, even pathological, inability to return any care or concern for those others.

    It’s the most degrading aspect of this degrading tragedy: the fact that that didn’t make him unelectable. The fact that on the contrary it’s probably why he was elected – the scorching shame of that is what we will never live down.

  • The policies of his own administration

    During intervals from lying about the investigation into Russian meddling in the election Trump is lying about his administration’s policy and practice of taking children away from parents who immigrate illegally.

    President Trump’s attempt to blame Democrats for separating migrant families at the border is renewing a political uproar over immigration, an issue that has challenged Trump throughout his presidency and threatens to grow more heated as he imposes more restrictions to stem the flow of illegal immigration.

    In one of several misleading tweets during the holiday weekend, Trump pushed Democrats to change a “horrible law” that the president said mandated separating children from parents who enter the country illegally. But there is no law specifically requiring the government to take such action, and it’s also the policies of his own administration that have caused the family separation that advocacy groups and Democrats say is a crisis.

    There is no such law; it’s his own administration’s policy and practice.

    In April, more than 50,000 migrants were apprehended or otherwise deemed “inadmissible,” and administration officials have made clear that children will be separated from parents who enter the country illegally and are detained.

    Some of those children will be lost and some of the lost children will be trafficked. Oh well! Nothing is too harsh for people who immigrate illegally.

    Trump’s deflection offers a familiar playbook, critics of the administration’s policies say. In their view, Trump’s most recent comments are strategically similar to tactics he used when he ended the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and then insisted on hard-line measures in a bill to permanently protect “dreamers.”

    “He used DACA kids as a bargaining chip, and it didn’t work,” said Kevin Appleby, the senior director of international migration policy at the Center for Migration Studies, a nonpartisan think tank. “So now he’s using vulnerable Central American families for his nativist agenda. It’s shameless.”

    If you had to come up with one word to sum up Donald Trump, on pain of being forced to spend time in his company, “shameless” would be a strong candidate. He’s psychopath-level shameless. He does not care; nothing will ever make him care; he is sealed off in a greasy tube of self-adoration, beyond the reach of shame or remorse.

  • Nice

    Oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god

  • Suitability

    I hope someone brings this to Trump’s attention.

    Two graduates of the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., penned an op-ed in The Baltimore Sun questioning President Trump’s suitability to deliver the commencement speech to this year’s graduating class of midshipmen on Friday.

    “It is right and fitting that the president of the United States give a commencement address to a service academy’s graduating class,” Daniel Barkhuff and William Burke wrote in Wednesday’s edition of the paper. “It is also right and fitting that citizens of the democracy for which these graduates will soon be charged with protecting point out the personal cowardice, narcissism and incompetency of the current president.”

    They graduated in 2001.

    They wrote of the sacrifices made by various Naval Academy graduates, such as Sen. John McCain, over the years.

    “Contrast this to the personal and professional honor of the sitting president of the United States, who time and again makes small choices guided by self-interest, ego, impulse and immediate self-gratification,” they wrote. “He could never do what we ask our U.S. Naval Academy graduates to do. He is a physical coward, a liar and no leader at all.”

    He’s also a mean bully and an abuser of women.

  • Repetition

    Trump is on a relentless campaign to Repeat the Lies over and over and over and over to chip slowly away at the number of people who recognize that he is both a liar and malevolent.

    Just today and yesterday, and just the tweets related to his treason – there are other tweets lying about North Korea, immigration, whatever else pops into his head. He systematically and repeatedly lies to us because it’s all he has – and it may well work.

  • Trump and Bolton shocked by bellicose rhetoric

    How the beautiful friendship between Kim and Trump fell apart so sudden-like:

    Inside the White House residence, the first alarm sounded about 10 p.m. Wednesday when national security adviser John Bolton told Trump about North Korea’s public statement threatening a “nuclear-to-nuclear showdown” and mocking Vice President Pence as a “political dummy.”

    Trump was dismayed by Pyongyang’s bellicose rhetoric, the same theatrics Trump often deploys against his adversaries. Bolton advised that the threatening language was a very bad sign, and the president told advisers he was concerned Kim was maneuvering to back out of the summit and make Americans look like desperate suitors, according to a person familiar with the conversations.

    Trump was “dismayed” that an adversary is as big an asshole as he is. He does that a lot. He insults people and squeals in outrage if they insult him back.

    As dawn broke Thursday, senior U.S. officials congregated in the West Wing, and by 7 a.m., they were discussing options over the phone with Trump, who was still in his private chambers. The president arrived at a swift decision to cancel the summit.

    A cadre of advisers — including Bolton, Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, vice presidential Chief of Staff Nick Ayers, Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin and deputy national security adviser Mira Ricardel — scurried between Ayers’s, Kelly’s and Bolton’s offices, finalizing their plan to break Trump’s news.

    Trump dictated a stern yet wistful personal letter to Kim blaming him for “the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement.”

    Hah – I knew he’d dictated it. Nobody else would dare to make it that stupid.

    The note bore Trumpian hallmarks, including flattering the recipient (he addressed a dictator who has kidnapped Americans and killed his own citizens as “His Excellency”) and boasting about the size of his arsenal.

    Plus the absurd drivel about the lovely relationship they’d been building up, and don’t hesitate to call or write. Pure Trump.

    Trump made his announcement while several American journalists were in North Korea at the invitation of Kim’s government to witness the apparent destruction of a nuclear test site. In 2009, North Korean soldiers detained two American journalists, Euna Lee and Laura Ling, who were charged with illegal entry and held prisoner for five months.

    CNN correspondent Will Ripley, who was reporting from the test site this week, recalled being the one to read Trump’s letter to North Korean officials.

    “There was just a real sense of shock,” Ripley reported Thursday. “Immediately they got up and left and are now on the phone kind of relaying the news up to the top.”

    The moment, Ripley added, was “very awkward and uncomfortable.”

    Not to mention terrifying.

    Trump suspected that Chinese President Xi Jinping may have had something to do with Kim’s turnabout, musing this week about their meeting this month.

    “When Kim Jong Un had the meeting with President Xi, in China, the second meeting . . . I think there was a little change in attitude from Kim Jong Un,” Trump said Tuesday, with Moon at his side. “I don’t like that. I don’t like it from the standpoint of China. Now, I hope that’s not true, because I have a great relationship with President Xi. He’s a friend of mine. He likes me. I like him.”

    There it is again – that childish burbling about their “friendship.” There is no friendship; this isn’t summer camp. Xi doesn’t love Donnie and he doesn’t care about his beautiful chocolate cake.

    Evelyn Farkas, a former Obama administration national security official who has worked on North Korea issues, said Trump was naive.

    “He fails to understand that while he might have a good rapport with a head of state, that head of state will act based on his national interests and not based on his personal feelings,” Farkas said.

    So not so much naive as childishly idiotic and credulous.

  • Miller and Kushner laughed

    Trump is reeeeeeeally mad at Kirsten Nielsen – not of course because she’s too racist and xenophobic but because she’s not racist and xenophobic enough.

    As illegal crossings are once more on the rise and Trump hears a cascade of criticism from conservative allies, Nielsen finds herself on the receiving end of the president’s visceral anger about immigration, seeing the issue as the reason he won in 2016 and a key to his politicking ahead of the midterm elections.

    The president has chastised her on several occasions this spring, including a much publicized meeting earlier this month when he attacked her in front of the entire Cabinet. He has grown furious because his administration has made little progress building the border wall, and his most ardent supporters have blamed Nielsen for not doing more to halt the caravan of Central American migrants whose advance Trump saw as a personal challenge.

    …

    It remains unclear, according to several people familiar with the situation, how much longer the relationship can last, but the strains illustrate the difficulty faced by Trump subordinates who are tasked with delivering policy solutions to match his most soaring promises.

    “The president has a very rudimentary understanding of what the border is all about and how you secure it,” said a former DHS staffer who worked closely with Nielsen.

    Trump has a very rudimentary understanding of pretty much everything to do with his job (and pretty much everything else as well). He’s a very rudimentary understanding kind of guy.

    Nielsen brings a lawyerly, technocratic approach to an issue that animates the president like no other, with a passion dyed into the blood-red MAGA caps of his supporters.

    The night before Trump delivered his first speech to Congress in February 2017, he huddled with senior adviser Jared Kushner and Miller in the Oval Office to talk immigration. The president reluctantly agreed with suggestions he strike a gentler tone on immigration in the speech.

    Trump reminded them the crowds loved his rhetoric on immigrants along the campaign trail. Acting as if he [were] at a rally, he then read aloud a few made up Hispanic names and described potential crimes they could have committed, like rape or murder. Then, he said, the crowds would roar when the criminals were thrown out of the country — as they did when he highlighted crimes by illegal immigrants at his rallies, according to a person present for the exchange and another briefed on it later. Miller and Kushner laughed.

    They laughed. The prez puts on a racist comedy skit and his people laugh.

    Now, five months into her tenure as homeland security secretary, the measures Nielsen has implemented — separating families, boosting arrests, increasing prosecutions — have made her a villain to many Democrats and immigrant rights’ groups.

    But they have not delivered the immediate results the president demands. In April, the number of illegal border crossers arrested by U.S. agents topped 50,000 for the second consecutive month. The increase has stripped the president of one of his proudest accomplishments — the sharp drop in illegal migration in the months immediately following his 2016 win.

    If only he were even more racist and loathsome, so that no one would want to come here.

    Trump has been in no mood to hear that migration patterns have returned to historic, seasonal norms this spring, a trend occurring in part because the American economy is buzzing and U.S. farms, factories and businesses are desperate for workers.

    Instead Trump has fumed at Nielsen, telling her to “close the border” and growing impatient at her explanations of why that’s not possible. He has also blamed her, at times, for not securing enough money to finish the border wall — even though she was not part of the spending deal struck by senior White House aides and that the president signed, current and former administration officials said.

    Which just illustrates yet again how hopelessly and destructively stupid he is, getting enraged when people explain realities to him and wanting to just bull through them as if he had supernatural powers.

  • What possible legitimate purpose?

    Yes, thank you for asking, it is quite strange that subjects of an investigation were allowed to plant their lawyers and friends in a meeting to discuss the investigation while it is in progress. As a matter of fact, to put it more technically, it’s a fucking circus.

    The president’s chief of staff and the White House counsel attended a classified briefing Thursday with top Justice Department officials and lawmakers about an investigation into the president and his associates — and the events have floored national-security experts and former intelligence officials.

    When the White House announced the first of the two briefings earlier this week, it said chief of staff John Kelly would not be attending.

    One former FBI official said they were “gobsmacked” when they learned the chief of staff would be present after all.

    Why? Because normally investigators don’t like to share details of their investigations with people they’re investigating until it’s time to go to trial. They prefer to keep all that to themselves in the hopes that the people they’re investigating won’t be helped to defeat the purpose of the investigation.

    “This is an investigation centering squarely around the president and his cohorts,” said this person, who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “And we’ve got the president’s chief of staff attending a classified briefing — and getting sensitive intelligence — about said investigation. It’s a f—ing circus.”

    When it emerged later that Emmet Flood, the new White House counsel, also attended the briefing, the person added: “This is truly mind-boggling.”

    It’s a fucking circus, is what it is.

    Renato Mariotti, a longtime former federal prosecutor in Chicago, expressed a similar view.

    “It is completely inappropriate for a lawyer representing a subject of the investigation to attend the congressional oversight meeting in which nonpublic information about the investigation was revealed,” he tweeted following the first briefing. “What possible legitimate purpose could his attendance have served?”

    None, but that’s not why he was there.

  • Kelly and Flood sit in

    The Times reports on Trump’s shockingly open obstruction of justice:

    Top law enforcement and intelligence officials briefed congressional leaders from both parties on Thursday about the F.B.I.’s use of an informant in the Russia investigation, a highly unusual concession to Congress all but ordered by President Trump.

    House Republicans close to the president, led by Representative Devin Nunes, Republican of California and the Intelligence Committee chairman, had been pressing unsuccessfully for weeks for access to material related to the informant, issuing a subpoena and threatening to hold top Justice Department officials in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn it over.

    So that they could covertly hand it over to Trump and his lawyers so that they could improve their defense.

    White House officials had at first arranged for only Mr. Nunes to be briefed. But Republican Senate leaders, including Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, and Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, the Intelligence Committee chairman, pressed the White House to change the audience to the so-called Gang of Eight, the select bipartisan group with whom the government’s most sensitive intelligence is shared.

    Mr. Nunes is the guy who has a track record of handing stuff over to Trump.

    The senators, who have quietly objected to Mr. Nunes’s tactics in the past, were successful, at least in part. Administration officials held two separate briefings on Thursday: one for Mr. Nunes at the Justice Department, which has ended, and another on Capitol Hill Thursday afternoon for the Gang of Eight.

    The details continued to be fluid Thursday. At the last minute, Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, was also included in the first meeting. He was there in place of Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, who received a last-minute invitation.

    All this is basically an attempted coup.

    John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, whom Mr. Trump asked to help organize the meetings, was invited to attend both sessions. His presence was highly unusual in a sensitive congressional oversight briefing and it raised the specter that the top aide to the president could gain access to closely held information about an investigation of the president and his associates.

    Emmet T. Flood, a lawyer representing Mr. Trump in the Russia investigation, was also briefly in the first meeting. Mr. Flood accompanied Mr. Kelly and left the room after initial remarks, according to two officials familiar with the meeting.

    That is completely outrageous. Neither Kelly nor Flood should be allowed anywhere near those meetings.

    It’s a c0up. It’s slow, and sometimes impeded by resistance, but it’s getting there.

  • Maybe you shouldn’t be in the country

    Elsewhere in Trump:

    President Trump praised the NFL’s decision to mandate that players either stand for the national anthem or stay in the locker room in a TV interview that aired Thursday.

    And he questioned whether players who choose not to stand “proudly” should be in the country at all.

    Oh did he. Did he really. This lying stealing bullying garbage fire of a man who defecates on this country every day has the gall to question whether African American athletes who protest racism by kneeling instead of standing while a song is sung should be in the country at all.

    “Well, I think that’s good,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News. “I don’t think people should be staying in locker rooms, but still I think it’s good. You have to stand, proudly, for the national anthem or you shouldn’t be playing, you shouldn’t be there, maybe you shouldn’t be in the country.”

    No you don’t “have to.” Opinion should not be coerced, and public expression of opinion should not be coerced. Employers can make workplace rules, but morally speaking (at least) there are some rules they should not make. It’s not Trump’s decision to make either way, but he does love to find opportunities to bully brown people.