The Post performs contortions in the effort to frame Trump’s batshit tweet about Syria and Russia as a normal announcement of plans.

President Trump warned Wednesday that missiles “will be coming” toward Syria in response to a suspected chemical attack, and he taunted Russia for vowing to shoot down any incoming strikes.

That wasn’t a warning, it was a boast, an eruption, a look at me I can bomb things.

“Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and ‘smart!’” the president wrote on Twitter, referring to missile strikes that have appeared likely since the weekend deaths of more than 40 Syrian civilians, including children.

As if it were just normal for a president to “write on … Read the rest

Trump’s morning of crazy:

The Failing New York Times wrote another phony story. It was political pundit Doug Schoen, not a Ukrainian businessman, who asked me to do a short speech by phone (Skype), hosted by Doug, in Ukraine. I was very positive about Ukraine-another negative to the Fake Russia C story!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2018

Updating to add Maggie Haberman’s response to that:

Political pundit Doug Schoen, who works for that Ukrainian businessman, arranged the speech …as our story says. https://t.co/JCr0CYoPI5

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) April 11, 2018

/update

So much Fake News about what is going on in the White House. Very calm and calculated with a big focus on open and fair trade

Tick tock tick tock tick tock.

NPR reports:

President Trump believes Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller has gone too far in his probe of potential ties between Trump’s campaign and Russian interference in the 2016 election, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said Tuesday.

Her statement to reporters did little to tamp down speculation that Trump may seek to fire Mueller — an authority that Sanders says Trump enjoys.

Well it wouldn’t, would it. Saying Trump thinks Mueller has gone too far would do nothing to tamp down speculation that Trump will try to fire him, because we know Trump is more than stupid enough and way more than criminal enough.

Asked about Trump’s comments, Sanders said at a

Philip Bump at the Post points out that Trump’s “witch hunt” is being carried out by Republicans.

“It’s a disgrace,” Trump said Monday night, talking about the FBI’s searches earlier in the day of the home and office of his longtime attorney Michael Cohen. “It’s, frankly, a real disgrace. It’s an attack on our country, in a true sense. It’s an attack on what we all stand for.” He went on to criticize Attorney General Jeff Sessions and to call Mueller’s investigators “the most biased group of people,” people who “have the biggest conflicts of interest I’ve ever seen.”

The problem, though, is that the people leading the investigation — and the people behind the search of Cohen’s properties

In which Trump says one stupid thing after another.

Trump responds to question "Why don't I just fire Mueller"

"Many people have said you should fire him… we'll see what happens, I think this is disgraceful and so do a lot of other people, this is a pure and simple witch hunt" pic.twitter.com/llJrXhig42

— TheBeat w/Ari Melber (@TheBeatWithAri) April 9, 2018

Chuck Schumer responds.

If @realDonaldTrump is thinking of using the FBI raid to fire Special Counsel Mueller or otherwise interfere with the chain of command in the Russia probe, we Democrats have one simple message for him: don’t.

— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) April 9, 2018

Mueller, a Republican, has uncovered a deep & detailed pattern of Russian interference in

Trump’s reasoned response.

H/t Skeletor… Read the rest

More on the news of the hour:

The @FBI would only have been able to raid the office and home of @realDonaldTrump lawyer Michael Cohen because an independent federal judge found probable cause that Cohen committed one or more crimes. https://t.co/r2xiBGvO4K

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) April 9, 2018

JUST IN: President Trump has been watching TV reports of the FBI raiding the office of Michael Cohen, his longtime lawyer and confidant, a White House official tells @jeffzeleny https://t.co/UiA4ob7HPZ pic.twitter.com/Ff5ADbcGsH

— The Lead CNN (@TheLeadCNN) April 9, 2018

Be afraid.

Latest from @Tom_Winter: FBI is "taking everything they think they need to do a major federal criminal investigation” in Michael Cohen raid

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) April 9, 2018

Whoopsie.

The F.B.I. on Monday raided the office of President Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, seizing records related to several topics including payments to a pornographic-film actress.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan obtained the search warrant after receiving a referral from the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, according to Mr. Cohen’s lawyer, who called the search “completely inappropriate and unnecessary.” The search does not appear to be directly related to Mr. Mueller’s investigation, but likely resulted from information he had uncovered and gave to prosecutors in New York.

Bombs on Syria and North Korea before the day is out?

Mr. Cohen plays a role in aspects of the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016

Of course.

President Donald Trump previously lobbied against a proposed bill requiring high-rise buildings, like Trump Tower, to install life-saving sprinkler systems. A fire in his 5th Avenue building Saturday, with no sprinklers present, left one person dead and multiple firefighters injured.

Then one of New York’s most prominent real estate developers, Trump in 1999 rang city officials to argue against proposed legislation that would have required high-rise landlords to install the systems following fatal high-rise fires in Brooklyn and Manhattan.

The December 1998 blazes killed nine people, including seven firemen.

Trump said it would be too expensive. The bill was altered to exclude older buildings, like for instance, oh just picking one at random, Trump Tower, opened in … Read the rest

The Post has another story about Kelly’s slide to oblivion etc etc – but one paragraph jumped out at me.

More recently, Trump has told friends he is eager to stage more energetic, frenzied rallies — yet another realm where he can theoretically slip Kelly’s shackles.

Oh, goody, what could possibly go wrong.

 … Read the rest

Trump told another giant, walloping lie today while out campaigning.

“In many places, like California, the same person votes many times,” Trump said. “You probably heard about that. They always like to say ‘oh that’s a conspiracy theory.’ Not a conspiracy theory, folks. Millions and millions of people.”

Lie. It’s a lie. It’s a bad, wicked, dangerous lie, and he keeps telling it. He’s been told it’s a lie by many people, but he goes on telling it.

The president stopped talking about voter fraud in public after taking criticism from Republican elected officials for making unsubstantiated charges about misconduct, not only in California but in other states that he lost, such as New Hampshire. But he never completely stopped

But to get the full flavor of Trump’s rudeness and mind-blindness you have to watch the video. He starts in a disciplined way, reading the speech with brief interjections of his own, and then after three minutes says thank you everybody, thank you (meaning, normally, “and good bye”)…and then lurching into a rant about China and “the trade deficit” and Mexico! and borders, with brief interjections where he looks directly at his guests and addresses them, as in “you wouldn’t understand this, you have great borders.” It’s obviously grotesquely inappropriate and protocol-violating – it’s a state visit occasion and he simply wrenches it into a diatribe on subjects that are of no interest to his state guests. This is … Read the rest

The Post gives us a bit of slapstick from yesterday, when Trump threw a lunch party for the presidents of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and spent most of it telling reporters how grumpy he is about

a

long

list

of

things.

President Trump spent nearly three minutes at a luncheon this week welcoming the presidents of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — whose difficult-to-pronounce names he never uttered publicly — and saying he should be given “credit” for pressuring countries like theirs to give more money to NATO.

As he concluded, White House staffers started to shepherd a small group of journalists out of the room — but Trump was far from done sharing his complaints. As reporters shouted out questions

Now he wants to get the military involved in his war on immigrants.

President Trump said on Tuesday that he planned to order the military to guard parts of the southern border until he can build a wall and tighten immigration restrictions, proposing a remarkable escalation of his efforts to crack down on migrants entering the country illegally.

Mr. Trump, who has been stewing publicly for days about what he characterizes as lax immigration laws and the potential for an influx of Central American migrants to stream into the United States, said he had been discussing with Jim Mattis, the secretary of defense, about resorting to military deployments.

“We have very bad laws for our border, and we are going

Remember how last week, to the surprise of all, Trump joined the UK and other allies in expelling Russian diplomats?

He was just kidding. Russia can totally send new ones to replace the expellees.

State Department confirms that Russia can replace the diplomats, alleged to be intel officers, expelled last week.
US "is not requiring the Russian bilateral mission to reduce its total number of personnel" a spox says. New accreditation to be reviewed on a "case-by-case basis.”

— Julian Borger (@julianborger) April 2, 2018

Julian Borger is the Guardian’s world affairs editor.

The Kremlin was boasting and laughing about this on Russian TV two days ago. Putin enjoys showing there’s no limit to the humiliation Trump will accept from

Ah maybe now we know why Trump was in such a Mood this morning.

The cover of the latest @NYMag: pic.twitter.com/TQjMbQwdO6

— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) April 2, 2018

He won’t be framing that and hanging it on the walls of his golf resorts.… Read the rest

Aaron Blake at the Post points out the undeniable fact that people who work for Trump know full well how thick he is.

Lost in the debate over whether President Trump should talk to Robert Mueller is this: The arguments against him doing it often betray a remarkably dim view of Trump’s intellect.

They do, of course. How could they not? Trump makes it blindingly obvious every time he opens his mouth or punches the buttons on his phone that he has no filter, aka is too stupid and heedless to discipline himself even in a situation of legal peril. That’s a remarkable fact, for sure, and with any luck it will soon cause him to perjure himself in … Read the rest

What happens when you let your attention wander for a minute and you elect a toddler to be chief executive of a country with a huge nuclear arsenal:

When Donald Trump was elected president, it quickly became obvious that the traditional national-security briefing a person in his position receives daily would be well beyond his zone of proximal development. The briefings were slimmed down in length, chopped up into easy-to-digest bullet points, and decorated with lots of graphs and pictures. Alas, the Washington Post reports, even the kiddie version of the presidential brief has proven too challenging. Now, Trump gets his briefing verbally.

Michael Wolf is very clear on this in Fire and Fury: Trump won’t read and … Read the rest

Jennifer Rubin at the Post on the emoluments case ruling that granted standing:

In a decision with far-reaching implications for President Trump, a federal court ruled this week that a lawsuit could go forward claiming he unconstitutionally received foreign emoluments — that is, monies from foreign governments explicitly prohibited by the Constitution — from his hotel in Washington. The Associated Press reported:

A federal judge Wednesday allowed Maryland and the District of Columbia to proceed with their lawsuit accusing President Donald Trump of accepting unconstitutional gifts from foreign interests, but limited the case to the president’s involvement with the Trump International Hotel in Washington.

There are other hurdles but that was the biggest one.

If Maryland and the

Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern on what Trump’s inability to get good lawyers to work for him has revealed about the US legal system.

The ongoing and increasingly worrying problem for Trump is that he has lived for so long in the world of rich-man business-mogul law that his conception of lawyers and lawyering is badly skewed. He genuinely believes that attorneys like Michael Cohen—who is now embroiled in a wrestling match with a pugnacious Stormy Daniels and her lawyer—and Marc Kasowitz—who has represented Trump in litigation ranging from his divorce and bankruptcy proceedings to the Trump University lawsuit—can handle any type of legal proceeding…What’s really new here isn’t so much that no serious lawyer wants to