Tag: Trump

  • All that glitters

    Greg Sargent at the Post spells it out about the white nationalist motivation.

    This year Democrats repeatedly offered Trump deals with money for the wall in exchange for protecting the dreamers, and he rejected them all, because Trump also wanted deep cuts to legal immigration. After that, multiple immigration packages failed to pass the Senate. The one based on Trump’s framework — citizenship for 1.8 million dreamers traded for $25 billion in wall money and deep cuts to legal immigration — got the fewest votes, at 39, with 14 Republicans defecting.

    The bottom line is that Trump will not accept anything that protects the dreamers unless it also contains deep cuts to legal immigration. But nothing like that can pass Congress, because it faces bipartisan opposition.

    Trump’s tirade at Nielsen is a reminder that he is the real obstacle to any deal protecting the dreamers. It reminds us of Trump’s bottomless irrationality on this issue: Border crossings have been at historic lows, but #Foxlandia keeps telling him the border is overrun by invading dark hordes, which makes it true.

    It’s the invading dark hordes. He hates them.

    Indeed, it has become undeniable that Trump’s overriding goal on immigration is to reduce the number of immigrants in the United States to the greatest degree possible. As Eric Levitz notes, Trump moved to end temporary protected status for various groups with no credible rationale for doing so and even though U.S. diplomats have warned that it is dangerously bad policy. And as Trump’s “shithole countries” comment confirmed, his main driving impulse on immigration is white nationalism — rolling back the current racial and ethnic mix of the country at all costs — and this is shaping policy.

    More white people! Fewer brown people! More yellow hair, less black hair.

    Image result for hitler youth

     

  • Trump yelled about the United States’ porous border

    Once again people who work for Trump are surprised to find that he’s not a nice man or a reasonable boss. Once again I wonder where they’ve been for the past two years.

    Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, told colleagues she was close to resigning after President Trump berated her on Wednesday in front of the entire cabinet for what he said was her failure to adequately secure the nation’s borders, according to several current and former officials familiar with the episode.

    Did she think he wouldn’t act like that? Did she think he’s mean only to the nasty brown people but kind to nice blonde people with Norwegian names?

    (That’s probably exactly what she thought.)

    Mr. Trump’s anger toward Ms. Nielsen, who was sitting several seats to his left at the meeting, was part of a lengthy tirade in which the president railed at his cabinet about what he said was its lack of progress toward sealing the country’s borders against illegal immigrants, according to one person who was present at the meeting.

    Asked about the heated exchange at the meeting, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said Thursday that “the president is committed to fixing our broken immigration system and our porous borders.”

    Translation: Trump is determined to get all the brown people out.

    He’s mad because the rate of illegal border crossings has gone up again after falling last year, so he can no longer brag about his success at scaring people off.

    In remarks to reporters before Wednesday’s meeting, Mr. Trump hinted at the anger that would cause him to erupt once TV cameras were led out of the room.

    “We’ve very much toughened up the border, but the laws are horrible,” Mr. Trump said. “The laws in this country for immigration and illegal immigration are absolutely horrible. And we have to do something about it — not only the wall, which we’re building sections of wall right now.”

    I wonder if he’s given any thought to internment.

    During the meeting, Mr. Trump yelled about the United States’ porous border and said more needed to be done to fix it. When members of his cabinet pointed out that the country relies on day laborers who cross the border each day, Mr. Trump said that was fine, but continued to complain, one person said.

    Well, that’s what small children do – you explain to them why it’s not possible and they go right on whining, or yelling.

    One persistent issue has been Mr. Trump’s belief that Ms. Nielsen and other officials in the department were resisting his direction that parents be separated from their children when families cross illegally into the United States, several officials said. The president and his aides in the White House had been pushing a family separation policy for weeks as a way of deterring families from trying to cross the border illegally.

    Or mass internment would do that, or mass gassing.

    In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has been increasingly focused on the obstacles to immigration changes, even in public speeches where he had planned to talk about other topics.

    “We don’t have laws. We have laws that were written by people that truly could not love our country,” the president told members of the National Rifle Association last week in Dallas during lengthy remarks about immigration.

    Why is he so focused on it? Because he doesn’t want all these new brown people. He doesn’t want any brown people, and with brown people who are immigrants he thinks he sees a way to get rid of them.

  • Take away credentials?

    He’s musing aloud about suppressing the news media again.

    The Fake News is working overtime. Just reported that, despite the tremendous success we are having with the economy & all things else, 91% of the Network News about me is negative (Fake). Why do we work so hard in working with the media when it is corrupt? Take away credentials?

    Says the most corrupt president in living memory (and probably in dead memory too – Teapot Dome wishes it had been that corrupt.)

    In his tweet, Trump referred to a study that found 91 percent of network news stories about him are negative.

    Shortly before, the anchors on “Fox & Friends” on Fox News discussed a study by the Media Research Center study citing that figure after evaluating the nightly newscasts on ABC, CBS and NBC between January and April.

    Fox News of course is not corrupt at all, it’s only the ones that don’t kiss his ring that are corrupt. 91% of the total, apparently.

  • There can be only one loudmouth fool at a time

    Uh oh – the honeymoon is over.

    President Donald Trump is growing increasingly irritated with lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s frequently off-message media blitz, in which he has muddied the waters on hush money paid to porn actress Stormy Daniels and made claims that could complicate the president’s standing in the special counsel’s Russia probe.

    Not to mention Rudy is getting all that attention. Attention is supposed to be for Donnie, all for Donnie. No amount is ever enough.

    Trump also expressed annoyance that Giuliani’s theatrics have breathed new life into the Daniels story and extended its lifespan. It’s a concern shared by Trump allies who think Giuliani is only generating more legal and political trouble for the White House.

    Darn those theatrics. If only Giuliani could be sober and temperate and thoughtful, like Trump.

    After Trump chided Giuliani on Friday, saying the lawyer needed to “get his facts straight,” the former mayor put out a statement trying to clarify his remarks. But in weekend interviews, Giuliani appeared to dig himself a deeper hole by acknowledging that “Cohen takes care of situations like this, then gets paid for them sometimes.” He did not rule out the possibility that Cohen had paid off other women.

    Trump, who has denied the affair with Daniels, was angry that Giuliani had given the impression that other women may make similar charges of infidelity, according to the people familiar with his views.

    “Dammit Rudy you’re making me look sleazy here!”

    Trump, according to one confidant, celebrated Giuliani’s hiring last month by declaring that he had enlisted “America’s Fucking Mayor” as a legal attack dog with star power. But many in the White House have begun evoking comparisons with Anthony Scaramucci — who, like Giuliani, was a hard-charging New Yorker with a knack for getting TV airtime.

    Yeah he’s not America’s fucking mayor. That’s just the usual catchphrasey bullshit that doesn’t mean anything. He was highly visible on September 11 2001, but that doesn’t make him permanent national mayor. If we were going to have one of those it wouldn’t be Rudy Giuliani.

  • Boom! Come over here.

    Oh lord.

    The BBC explains:

    US President Donald Trump has outraged French opinion by suggesting the 2015 attacks on Paris could have been stopped by giving people guns.

    He mimicked gunmen summoning and shooting victims one by one, saying “Boom! Come over here!” and using his hand to imitate a gun being fired.

    Oh christing fuck.

    It’s not even the first time – he said it then.

    In the aftermath of the Paris attacks, Donald Trump and other American conservatives repeated a familiar and predictable response to mass shootings in other countries: France has a gun problem. If Parisians could legally carry weapons, they could have fought back against the assailants.

    That argument doesn’t have much support in France — a country that has around 1,800 firearms deaths every year, as opposed to the more than 33,000 in the United States.

    The US has more people, of course – 326 million compared to France’s 67 million. Call it five times as many, then multiply 1,800 by 5: 9000. 33,000 is quite a lot more than 9000.

    Back to the BBC:

    The French foreign ministry called for the victims’ memory to be respected.

    “France expresses its firm disapproval of the comments by President Trump about the attacks of 13 November 2015 in Paris and asks for the memory of the victims to be respected,” the foreign ministry said.

    François Hollande, who was French president at the time of the attacks, said Mr Trump’s remarks were “shameful”. They “said a lot about what he thinks of France and its values”, he added.

    Manuel Valls, who was France’s prime minister in 2015, tweeted: “Indecent and incompetent. What more can I say?”

    …

    “Paris, France, has the toughest gun laws in the world…” he told the NRA.

    “Nobody has guns in Paris, nobody, and we all remember more than 130 people, plus tremendous numbers of people that were horribly, horribly wounded. Did you notice that nobody ever talks about them?

    “They were brutally killed by a small group of terrorists that had guns. They took their time and gunned them down one by one. Boom! Come over here. Boom! Come over here. Boom!

    “But if one employee or just one patron had a gun, or if just one person in this room had been there with a gun, aimed at the opposite direction, the terrorists would have fled or been shot.”

    They wouldn’t have fled, they were on a suicide mission. One employee or patron wouldn’t have been able to shoot many of them, if any.

    But more to the point it’s just so disgusting – pantomiming it, saying “Boom.”

    The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, tweeted that President Trump’s depiction of the 2015 attacks was “scornful and unworthy”.

    The Latin is Paris’s motto: It is tossed by the waves but doesn’t sink.

    Trump’s motto is: “I can’t keep my mouth shut.”

    https://youtu.be/YecDQQbiC_s

  • So important

    A moment from Trump’s performance at the “National Day of Prayer” [why do we even have such a thing, and especially why is it something the president makes a fuss about?] yesterday:

    Today, during his remarks to commemorate the National Day of Prayer, President Trump departed from the prepared text to insert a boast that had presumably not been cleared by fact-checkers. Prayer “unites us all as one nation under God. So important,” he said. (“So important” being a common Trump tic to indicate he is encountering his own words for the first time and finds them important.) Then came the riff about “one nation under God”:

    And we say it here, ya know? Lot of people, they don’t say it. But, you know what, they’re starting to say it more, just like we’re starting to say ‘Merry Christmas’ when that day comes around. You notice the big difference between now and two or three years ago, it was, all, it was going in the other direction rapidly, right? Now it’s [thrusting his hand vertically in the air] straight up.

    No, I don’t notice that, and neither does he; he just thinks he does, because he’s too dumb to distinguish between “this idea that popped into my brain” and “a statistic I know.”

  • The Oslo police are investigating

    I’ve seen one or two headlines lately saying Trump had been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, but I didn’t follow them up. (There’s only so much disgust I can take in one day.) But it may have been a false alarm.

    [A] wrinkle in this time-honored process — the peace prize was first awarded in 1901 — emerged on Tuesday, when the committee announced that it had uncovered what appeared to be a forged nomination of President Trump for the prize. The matter has been referred to the Oslo police for investigation.

    Moreover, the forgery appears to have occurred twice: Olav Njolstad, the secretary of the five-member committee, said it appeared that a forged nomination of Mr. Trump for the prize was also submitted last year — and was also referred to the police. (The earlier forgery was not disclosed to the public at the time.)

    Inspector Rune Skjold, the head of the economic crimes section of the Oslo police, said that investigators had been in touch with the F.B.I. since last fall, which suggests that the forged nominations originated in the United States. He said the police believed that the same perpetrator was behind both forgeries.

    Forged in what sense?

    In a phone interview on Wednesday, Mr. Njolstad of the Nobel committee, said, “We verify all nominations, at least the ones with a shadow of doubt.”

    Mr. Njolstad declined to provide details or copies of the forged nominations, but he said it was fair to assume that the documents purported to have been from a nominator who — when contacted — said the nominations were not valid.

    So someone in a red MAGA cap pretending to be a person or organization of the kind that gets to nominate people for the prize.

    Now if there were a prize for shameless lying…

  • An obvious and demonstrable lie

    Speaking of Trump versus truth –

    Trump: As everybody is aware, the past Administration has long been asking for three hostages to be released from a North Korean Labor camp, but to no avail. Stay tuned!

    Jake Tapper: 2 out of 3 of these hostages were detained in Trump presidency:

    Tony Kim (aka Kim Sang-duk) detained 22 April 2017.

    Kim Hak-song detained 6 May 2017.

    An obvious and demonstrable lie in a tweet that remains up, a monument to how much President Trump doesn’t care about truth.

    The Times on April 19th:

    One was sentenced to 10 years of hard labor in 2016 for an espionage conviction. Two others are scholars — one studies accounting, the other agriculture — who taught at a prestigious science and technology university before they were arrested in 2017 on suspicion of “hostile acts.”

    All three are Korean-American men who have been held in North Korea. They share a common surname, Kim, but they are not related.

    So “the past Administration” was not asking for the release of the two arrested in 2017 before they were arrested; the two arrested in 2017 were arrested during Trump’s administration, not “the past” one.

    Another smoking lie.

  • It’s not optional

    Meanwhile, Jennifer Rubin reiterates that Trump does not get to just say no. It’s not something he can choose to do or not.

    As Right Turn has discussed from time to time, the story line that President Trump has the option whether to sit down with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is simply wrong. Mueller has the option to ask the grand jury to issue a subpoena to compel Trump’s testimony under oath and without his lawyer present. (Witnesses can go outside to consult with a lawyer, but witnesses ordinarily do not get to bring their attorney into the grand jury room.) Perhaps now Trump, his lawyers and the TV talking heads will approach Trump’s testimony more realistically: It isn’t up to him to decide to cooperate — unless he wants to take the unprecedented step of thwarting an investigation into his own wrongdoing by invoking the Fifth Amendment.

    If he did that his presidency would be over, according to people who know things.

    Yesterday’s late in the day boom has the details on why it’s not up to him:

    In a tense meeting in early March with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, President Trump’s lawyers insisted he had no obligation to talk with federal investigators probing Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.

    But Mueller responded that he had another option if Trump declined: He could issue a subpoena for the president to appear before a grand jury, according to four people familiar with the encounter.

    Ah but the lawyers had a retort.

    Mueller’s warning — the first time he is known to have mentioned a possible subpoena to Trump’s legal team — spurred a sharp retort from John Dowd, then the president’s lead lawyer.

    “This isn’t some game,” Dowd said, according to two people with knowledge of his comments. “You are screwing with the work of the president of the United States.”

    The work of watching Fox News and tweeting insults and holding rallies. Important stuff.

    After that Trump’s lawyers fought amongst themselves and Dowd resigned.

    Now Trump’s newly reconfigured legal team is pondering how to address the special counsel’s queries, all while assessing the potential evidence of obstruction that Mueller might present and contending with a client who has grown increasingly opposed to sitting down with the special counsel. Without a resolution on the interview, the standoff could turn into a historic confrontation before the Supreme Court over a presidential subpoena.

    One thing I haven’t seen discussed yet is how well Trump can stand up to the interview given how long and arduous it will be.

    Paul Rosenzweig, who worked as a senior counsel on independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s investigation during the Clinton administration, predicted that the president would face a long interview if the special counsel hewed to the list Sekulow compiled.

    “This isn’t a list of 49 questions. It’s 49 topics,” Rosenzweig said. “Each of these topics results in dozens of questions. To be honest, that list is a two-day interview. You don’t get through it in an hour or two.”

    That would be hard work no matter what, and it will be all the harder for Trump because he’ll be struggling to answer in ways that won’t get him impeached and imprisoned, and for a guy with his limited abilities…dayum.

    For his part, Trump fumed when he saw the breadth of the questions that emerged out of the talks with Mueller’s team, according to two White House officials.

    The president and several advisers now plan to point to the list as evidence that Mueller has strayed beyond his mandate and is overreaching, they said.

    Whose fault is it that the questions cover so much territory? It’s not Mueller’s fault, it’s Trump’s, for being such a crook in such various ways. Crooks don’t get to say “this is too much!!!” when they did all the crooked things.

    (Morally speaking they don’t. For all I know maybe legally speaking they do.)

    Trump advisers are particularly frustrated by the Mueller team’s focus on whether Trump was obstructing justice by trying to push last summer for Sessions to resign. If the attorney general had stepped down, Trump could have chosen a replacement who was not recused from running the Russia investigation.

    Dowd has repeatedly argued that the president has ultimate authority under the Constitution to fire or demote any of his appointees and that his firing decisions cannot be used as evidence of obstruction.

    Lawyers who don’t work for Trump have repeatedly responded that firing decisions that obstruct justice can indeed be used as evidence of obstruction.

    Alan Dershowitz, a well-known lawyer and Trump advocate, said Tuesday that it would be dangerous and unwise for the president to agree to an interview.

    “The strategy is to throw him softballs so that he will go on and on with his answers,” he said. “Instead of sharp questions designed to elicit yes or no, they make him feel very comfortable and let him ramble.”

    Isn’t that interesting? Dershowitz obviously realizes how stupid Trump is – only a damn fool would “feel very comfortable” and ramble away to a special counsel – yet he still advocates for him. Why? Why advocate for a criminal idiot? What’s not to dislike?

  • Not so astonishingly excellent after all maybe

    A word to the wise: don’t piss off Donnie.

    In February 2017, a top White House aide who was Trump’s longtime personal bodyguard, along with the top lawyer at the Trump Organization and a third man showed up at the office of Trump’s New York doctor without notice and took all the president’s medical records.

    The incident, which Dr. Harold Bornstein described as a “raid,” took place two days after Bornstein told a newspaper that he had prescribed a hair growth medicine for the president for years.

    Yes that would do it. We’re supposed to pretend he has a full head of gorgeous blond hair, kind of a young Robert Redford look.

    In an exclusive interview in his Park Avenue office, Bornstein told NBC News that he felt “raped, frightened and sad” when Keith Schiller and another “large man” came to his office to collect the president’s records on the morning of Feb. 3, 2017. At the time, Schiller, who had long worked as Trump’s bodyguard, was serving as director of Oval Office operations at the White House.

    Well not raped, because seizing paperwork isn’t the same as rape, but scared and intimidated yes.

    A framed 8-by-10 photo of Bornstein and Trump that had been hanging on the wall in the waiting room now lies flat under a stack of papers on the top shelf of Bornstein’s bookshelf. Bornstein said the men asked him to take it off the wall.

    I’m pretty sure they had no right to enforce that.

    Bornstein said the original and only copy of Trump’s charts, including lab reports under Trump’s name as well as under the pseudonyms his office used for Trump, were taken.

    That seems like a gross violation of the public’s right to know the truth about Trump’s health.

    Bornstein said that Trump cut ties with him after he told The New York Times that Trump takes Propecia, a drug for enlarged prostates that is often prescribed to stimulate hair growth in men. Bornstein told the Times that he prescribed Trump drugs for rosacea and high cholesterol as well.

    Too bad there’s not a drug for meanness or stupidity or greed or dishonesty.

    Bornstein, 70, had been Trump’s personal doctor for more than 35 years.

    During Trump’s presidential campaign, Bornstein wrote a letter declaring “unequivocally” that Trump would be the healthiest president in history. He called Trump’s health “astonishingly excellent.” The Trump campaign released the letter in December 2015.

    Bornstein told NBC News in 2016 that he wrote the note in just five minutes while a limo sent by the candidate waited outside his office.

    To the surprise of absolutely no one.

    Updating to add breaking news item (also surprising to no one):

  • Better message

    Trump has a new job opportunity! He’s very excited about it. His interview the other day went so well that it looks as if the bosses might make it a permanent gig.

    Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway told the hosts of “Fox & Friends” on Friday morning that President Trump wants to come on the show regularly.

    “The president has said he would like to perhaps come once a month and as news breaks,” Conway said. “He’ll keep us guessing.”

    Aw yeah he’s so zany and unpredictable, it’s what we love about him, amirite? We’ll just never know: he might be on Fox today or he might not.

    Trump is a regular viewer of the show and has tweeted praise for its hosts in the past.

    He was also a regular on the Fox News morning program for years before announcing his candidacy in 2015.

    The weekly segment, which started in 2011, was called “Monday Mornings with Trump”

    “Bold, brash and never bashful, the Donald now makes his voice loud and clear every Monday on Fox,” proclaims a Fox News narrator in a promo that aired at the time.

    It then cuts to a soundbite of Trump saying, “My message is a better message than anybody else’s.”

    Image result for trump mocks disabled reporter

  • Words cannot express

    He actually said that.

  • He sees that stuff and he’s smart

    The Globe has another tidbit. (I guess I’ll have to watch/listen to a little of it eventually, but I so hate listening to his clogged croaking voice saying all the stupid things I’m putting it off.)

    The sitting president of the United States talked about Kanye West and Shania Twain and was completely serious about it

    “Mr. President, we want to get to Kanye West,” one of the show’s anchors said like it was a completely normal thing to discuss with a US president.

    The day before, West, a rapper, showed off how Trump autographed a “Make America Great Again” hat for him and then wrote on Twitter: “You don’t have to agree with Trump but the mob can’t make me not love him. We are both dragon energy. He is my brother.”

    Trump then tweeted back his thanks.

    On Fox News Thursday morning, Trump said the reason why Kanye likes him is because unemployment for African Americans is so low. He did not elaborate, nor mention that the decline has slowed since Trump took office.

    “He sees that stuff and he’s smart,” Trump explained. “He says, you know what? Trump is doing a much better job than the Democrats did.”

    The president then talked about how earlier in the week Canadian country singer Shania Twain said she would have voted for Trump had she been registered in the US. She later apologized, but subsequently said it was a mistake for her to have done so.

    Next time let’s elect Bart Simpson president.

  • He was shouting into the phone

    Peter Baker and Eileen Sullivan at the Times have more on that lunatic phone call Fox News had with the so-called president of the US. They make clear how full-on crazy it was.

    They start with a little booboo he made on the Stormy Daniels thing.

    The president acknowledged that Mr. Cohen represents him in connection with Stephanie Clifford, the pornographic film actress known as Stormy Daniels who has asserted that she had extramarital sexual relations with Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen paid Ms. Clifford $130,000shortly before the 2016 presidential election as part of what she now calls a “hush agreement.”

    But Mr. Trump said Mr. Cohen did nothing wrong in that matter. Mr. Cohen handled just “a tiny, tiny little fraction” of his legal work, Mr. Trump said. “But Michael would represent me and represent me on some things,” the president said in a telephone call to “Fox & Friends,” his favorite cable television show. “He represents me, like with this crazy Stormy Daniels deal, he represented me.”

    See that’s a booboo because the other day he said the opposite. Michael Avenatti was all over it.

    Michael Avenatti, Ms. Clifford’s attorney, quickly seized on the president’s comments, suggesting they would help her lawsuit trying to nullify the 2016 nondisclosure agreement by proving Mr. Trump’s involvement in the effort to keep her quiet before the election.

    “Thank you @foxandfriends for having Mr. Trump on this morning to discuss Michael Cohen and our case,” he wrote on Twitter. “Very informative.”

    He went on MSNBC and CNN to reinforce his point. “This case gets better every day, every hour, and one of the reasons why it gets better is that they step in to every trap that we lay,” Mr. Avenatti said on CNN.

    “The president’s statements this morning are very, very damaging to him in our case,” Mr. Avenatti added. “It directly contradicts what he said on Air Force One relating to his knowledge, or lack thereof, of the agreement of $130,000.”

    He said that “it is going to add considerable momentum to our efforts to depose the president and place him under oath, because now we have two contrary statements, made within the same month, relating to what he knew about the agreement, what he didn’t know, what his relationship was with Michael Cohen and we’re going to utilize that statement today to argue for his deposition.”

    And that wasn’t even the craziest part.

    The president’s discussion of Mr. Cohen’s legal troubles came during an expansive, wide-ranging and at times rambling half-hour telephone interview on Fox. At times, it sounded as if he was shouting into the phone.

    Without being asked, Mr. Trump hit on many of his favorite subjects, including his win in the Electoral College in 2016, the no-knock F.B.I. raid on the home of his former campaign chairman, Paul J. Manafort, and a CNN debate during the Democratic primaries in 2016 when Hillary Clinton’s campaign got advance warning of some of the questions, according to emails stolen by Russians and released by WikiLeaks.

    In other words he perseverated, as he so often does.

    Unprompted, he attacked former Secretary of State John Kerry (“the worst negotiator I’ve ever seen”), “Sleepy Eyes” Chuck Todd of “Meet the Press” on NBC News (“the guy shouldn’t even be on the show”) and Andrew G. McCabe, the fired former deputy director of the F.B.I. (part of a “crooked” bureau leadership). And the president indicated that he had watched a CNN town-hall-style program on Wednesday night featuring James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director he fired last year, who is now one of his toughest critics (“a lying leaker”).

    Even the Fox hosts seemed concerned as the president railed at length about the “fake news” media. “I’m not your doctor, Mr. President, but I would recommend you watch less of them,” one of the hosts, Brian Kilmeade, told him.

    Even the Fox hosts noticed how batshit crazy he sounds. Even Fox hosts are not immune to nuclear weapons.

    Mr. Trump presented himself as the victim of a far-reaching conspiracy by an establishment out to stop him from changing the system. “I’m fighting a battle against a horrible group of deep-seated people, drain the swamp, that are coming up with all sorts of phony charges against me, and they’re not bringing up real charges against the other side,” he said. “So we have a phony deal going on, and it’s a cloud over my head.”

    Tourette’s also? “Drain the swamp” in the middle of a sentence?

    Democrats cited the president’s latest attacks on the Justice Department and Mr. Mueller’s office to argue for legislation approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday to bar Mr. Trump from firing Mr. Mueller without cause. That bill now goes to the full Senate.

    Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said Mr. Trump’s comments were “embarrassing to America.”

    “The president seems to live in an alternative reality,” Mr. Schumer said on the Senate floor. “He says things that are patently false and he thinks just by saying them they become true. The amount of 180-degree turns, name calling and blaming — you watch the president this morning and the way he acted, it is so unbecoming of a president and democracy.”

    Excruciatingly so.

  • “A horrible group of deep-seated people”

    It seems Trump did a chat with Fox News this morning.

    While many reporters have described President Trump’s aggrieved psychology, his phone call this morning on Fox & Friends gave outsiders unfiltered access to the sorts of rants he routinely imposes upon his staff. In the interview, Trump’s sense of persecution was so acute he was barely able to concentrate on an open invitation to tout his own success, the thing he does best.

    Depending on how you define “best.” He does it volubly and at speed and often, but the outcomes aren’t always the ones he intends. It didn’t go over well with Comey at that small table in the blue room, for instance.

    “A horrible group of deep-seated people,” he insisted, “are coming up with all sorts of phony charges against me and they’re not bringing up real charges against the other side.” Trump’s belief that his enemies, not he himself, should be the subject of legal investigation overwhelmed even his ability to boast about his great success.

    What other side? The other president? There is no other president. There is no “other side.”

    But the most disturbing moment came at the very end, when Trump threatened to force the Department of Justice to adopt his own chosen priorities, ignoring the “phony” charges against him, and prosecuting the “real” ones against his opponents:

    You look at the corruption at the top of the FBI, it’s a disgrace. And our Justice Department – which I try and stay away from, but at some point I won’t – our Justice Department should be looking at that kind of stuff, not the nonsense of collusion with Russia. There is no collusion with me and everyone knows it.

    At this point, astonishingly, the embarrassed hosts ushered Trump off the phone, insisting he must be busy — likely the only time in memory a “journalist” has cut short an interview with the president of the United States. Trump is making his intentions perfectly clear. He wants the Department of Justice to lock up his political opponents and witnesses to his misbehavior. And he wants it to stop investigating his own misdeeds. The Department of Justice is constructed around restraints designed to prevent any such interference, because the power to use federal law enforcement as a weapon to protect the president and his party, and to harass the opposition, is so terrifying it has to be prevented at all costs. Trump is, on national television, making existential threats to the rule of law.

    So the question becomes: what will happen when he does it?

  • He did not just do that

    Mon dieu.

  • He meant exactly what you think

    There was that tweet the other day where Trump linked immigrants and “breeding,” so that was startling. I objected on Twitter but didn’t get around to doing so here.

    What exactly did President Donald Trump mean by “breeding” when he tweeted Wednesday about cities that will not cooperate with the federal government to deport the undocumented.

    This is Donald Trump. He meant exactly what you think.

    Ya it’s not ambiguous. We don’t talk about people “breeding” unless we’re intent on insulting them.

    The tweet, offered Wednesday morning, argued that Californians prefer his hard-line policies to those of Gov. Jerry Brown.

    “There is a Revolution going on in California. Soooo many Sanctuary areas want OUT of this ridiculous, crime infested & breeding concept. Jerry Brown is trying to back out of the National Guard at the Border, but the people of the State are not happy. Want Security & Safety NOW!”

    Taken literally, the most likely explanation is that he’s talking about sanctuary cities as places where undocumented immigrants breed.

    If that’s right, there’s a racial undertone in the comment should slap you in the face.

    Fear of immigrants from certain countries “breeding” has been a staple of nativist thought for hundreds of years. The “breeding” fear has been affixed to Jews from Eastern Europe, Catholics from Ireland and Italy, Chinese and, now, Latinos, Filipinos, Africans and Haitians. This is dog-whistle politics at its worst.

    Today Sarah Sanders was asked about it.

    Asked by CNN’s Jim Acosta during Monday’s daily briefing whether Trump had used a derogatory term to refer to Latinos, Sanders said that wasn’t the case.

    “No, he’s talking about the problem itself growing and getting bigger,” said Sanders, who was conducting her first briefing since the episode.

    A few minutes later, April Ryan of American Urban Radio Networks returned to the issue, telling Sanders that “when you think of breeding, you think of animals.”

    “I’m not going to begin to think what you think,” Sanders said. “The president’s talking about a growing problem.”

    Puhleeze.

  • The Fox White House

    Watch Fox News write Trump’s lines for him. Watch Trump dutifully deliver them.

    Trump’s tendency to echo the network’s shows was documented on Sunday’s “Reliable Sources” on CNN.

    Remarks Trump made last week — railing against the Russia investigations and attacking his enemies — were juxtaposed with previous clips of Fox personalities saying almost exactly the same things.

    The same things paraphrased. He uses his own 30 or 40 words, but the content is identical.

    Mind you, it must flow both ways. Fox knows what Trump thinks, and what makes him happy or livid, and it feeds him his lines accordingly. No collusion! Democrats mad! Sore losers! Hillary!!

    “Typically talking points in the past have gone from politicians to partisan media,” said John Avlon, editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast. “It is an extraordinary two-way relationship, the likes of which we’ve never seen.”

    Trump has hired numerous people who have appeared on the network — as contributors, commentators or guests — to work in the administration.

    And Sean Hannity, who hosts the prime-time show “Hannity” on Fox News, has a close relationship with Trump. The pair talk on the phone “several times a week,” The Washington Post recently reported.

    We live in Fox World.

  • Respect

    Funniest headline ever:

    Trump won’t attend Barbara Bush funeral ‘out of respect’ for family, White House says

    Aka he wasn’t invited and they had to explain it somehow, so they chose an absurd non sequitur. The usual form of “respect” in this sitch is to go to the funeral. The White House is saying that Trump’s presence at the funeral would be a token of disrespect. Why? Well because Trump is so disreputable.

    But also of course there’s just the hilarious transparency of it – “They don’t want me there and it’s because I’m SO AWESOME I might spoil it for everyone else.”

    President Donald Trump will not join first lady Melania Trump in attending the funeral services for Barbara Bush, the White House said in a statement, citing a desire to “avoid disruptions” stemming from the increased security presence and “out of respect for the Bush Family and friends.”

    Sure, because the Bushes are totally unused to all the fuss and muss that follows a president, so they’d be freaked out by it. Excellent choice of explanation for embarrassing absence.

    A spokesperson for former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton confirmed they will attend the funeral, as will former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama, according to Bush family representative.

    But the current president has to stay home to tidy his sock drawer.

  • Turn of the worm

    You know how Trump treats even people close to him like shit? Maybe it’s going to bite him in the ass now.

    For years, a joke among Trump Tower employees was that the boss was like Manhattan’s First Avenue, where the traffic goes only one way.

    That one-sidedness has always been at the heart of President Trump’s relationship with his longtime lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, who has said he would “take a bullet” for Mr. Trump. For years Mr. Trump treated Mr. Cohen poorly, with gratuitous insults, dismissive statements and, at least twice, threats of being fired, according to interviews with a half-dozen people familiar with their relationship.

    “Donald goes out of his way to treat him like garbage,” said Roger J. Stone Jr., Mr. Trump’s informal and longest-serving political adviser, who, along with Mr. Cohen, was one of five people originally surrounding the president when he was considering a presidential campaign before 2016.

    Now, for the first time, the traffic may be going Mr. Cohen’s way. Mr. Trump’s lawyers and advisers have become resigned to the strong possibility that Mr. Cohen, who has a wife and two children and faces the prospect of devastating legal fees, if not criminal charges, could end up cooperating with federal officials who are investigating him for activity that could relate, at least in part, to work he did for Mr. Trump.

    May it prove true.

    Trump has always felt he had leverage over Cohen, but his goons say the raid has flipped that.

    For years, Mr. Cohen has described himself as unflinchingly devoted to Mr. Trump, whom he has admired since high school. He has told interviewers that he has never heard Mr. Trump utter an inaccuracy or break a promise. He has tweeted about Mr. Trump nearly 3,000 times.

    In a Fox News interview last year, Mr. Cohen declared: “I will do anything to protect Mr. Trump.’’ He told Vanity Fair in September that “I’m the guy who would take a bullet for the president,” adding, “I’d never walk away.”

    Image result for brando godfather

    Over the years, Mr. Trump threatened to fire Mr. Cohen over deals that didn’t work out, or snafus with business projects, people who were present for the discussions said. He was aware that Mr. Cohen benefited in other business projects as being seen as affiliated with the Trump Organization, and it irked him.

    Which is funny, when “the Trump Organization” itself is what it is only because of Trump’s gigantic tower of lies.

    But this part is really sad: Trump loves Lewandowski more than Cohen. A lot more.

    Particularly hurtful to Mr. Cohen was the way Mr. Trump lavished approval on Mr. Lewandowski in a way he never did for Mr. Cohen. When Mr. Cohen told Mr. Trump that he believed that Mr. Lewandowski had been behind a negative story about Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump dismissed the comments as simple jealousy, and didn’t pay attention, according to two people familiar with the incident.

    Aw. Ouchy.