Tag: Trump

  • The T word

    James Hohmann at the Post says why Trump’s constant cheapening of language matters.

     

    Bigger picture, the president has a pattern of diluting the potency of language. Trump cheapens the value of significant words by overusing and misusing them.

    He encouraged violence against protesters as a candidate. He welcomed chants of “lock her up” about Clinton, whom he routinely described as “crooked.” He attacked the intelligence community: “Are we living in Nazi Germany?”

    After the election, he coopted the term “fake news” — which once described a real phenomenon of made-up stories online. Now, by Politico’s count, leaders or state media in at least 15 countries have adopted the president’s denunciation to quell dissent and question human rights violations.

    Just what the world needed, yeah? A new way for despots to discredit the opposition with lies.

    Many Republicans chalk all these quotes up to nothing more than Trump being Trump. They say he was joking. They believe he should be held to a lower standard because he’s not “politically correct” and still new to this.

    Of course it’s Trump being Trump, and that’s the problem. Being Trump is a very bad thing.

    Obama used the word “treason” only twice during his eight years in office. Not coincidentally, he was discussing the rise of Trump both times. As the Republican primaries raged on in March 2016 and the establishment tried to block Trump from securing the nomination, Obama said during a fundraiser in Austin that their party wouldn’t be in that position if elected Republicans had not looked the other way for years while Trump falsely accused him of being from Kenya.

    “As long as it was directed at me, they were fine with it. … Now, suddenly, we’re shocked that there’s gambling going on in this establishment,” Obama said. “What’s happening in this primary is just a distillation of what’s been happening inside their party for more than a decade. The reason that many of their voters are responding is because this is what’s been fed through the messages they’ve been sending for a long time: that you just make flat assertions that don’t comport with the facts; … that compromise is a betrayal; that the other side isn’t simply wrong … but the other side is destroying the country or treasonous.

    “So they can’t be surprised when somebody suddenly looks and says, ‘You know what, I can do that even better! I can make stuff up better than that! I can be more outrageous than that! I can insult people even better than that! I can be even more uncivil,’” Obama continued. “If you don’t care about the facts or the evidence or civility in making your arguments, you will end up with candidates who will say just about anything and do just about anything.”

    The next day in Dallas, Obama lamented Trump’s proposed Muslim ban and his harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric. “We can have political debates without thinking that the people who disagree with us are all motivated by malice,” the then-president said. “We can support candidates without treating their opponents as unpatriotic or treasonous or somehow deliberately trying to weaken America.”

    In both those cases Obama used the word to disavow it, to say it’s wrong to call opponents treasonous. When Trump uses it he’s doing the thing Obama said not to do. Obama used it in a meta way, to cite the harm it does; Trump uses it on his one flat Trump level, “sincerely,” to brand his opponents. With Obama it was attribution, with Trump it’s always use.

    This isn’t the first time Trump has used the T-word as president. Just last month, he accused FBI agent Peter Strzok of treason for sending negative text messages about him during the 2016 election to a lawyer at the FBI who he was having an affair with. “By the way, that’s a treasonous act,” the president told the Wall Street Journal. “What he tweeted to his lover is a treasonous act.”

    No, it isn’t. Refusing to implement sanctions against Russia passed almost unanimously by Congress? Quite possibly, yes.

    Because of the power of the bully pulpit, this rhetoric is rubbing off on other people who should know better. Presidents set the country’s tone. It’s not just children who listen and mimic them — but also congressmen.

    Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) said last Friday, for example, that the memo written by House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes showed “clear and convincing evidence of treason” by top law enforcement officials. “The full-throated adoption of this illegal misconduct and abuse of FISA by James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Sally Yates and Rod Rosenstein is not just criminal but constitutes treason,” Gosar said in a statement that called upon Attorney General Jeff Sessions to seek “criminal prosecution against these traitors to our nation.”

    The “misconduct and abuse of FISA” that doesn’t exist. Nunes’s memo? It didn’t even get the basic claim right. The FISA application did point out that the Steele dossier was oppo research paid for by the Clinton campaign, only it said it in a footnote. Well guess what: judges don’t skip footnotes the way we amateurs can; judges have to read the whole thing with great care. The fact that it’s in a footnote does not mean that it’s not there or even that it’s hidden. The joke yesterday was that Nunes’s memo ended up amounting to: the font was too small. But on the basis of that garbage here’s a Republican legislator calling Comey, Yates, McCabe, and Rosenstein treasonous.

  • Deeply disgusting Don

    The Times uses the normal restrained newspaper language to describe the infantile out of control disgusting president.

    President Trump accused a top Democratic lawmaker on Monday of being “one of the biggest liars and leakers in Washington,” calling Representative Adam Schiff of California “Little Adam Schiff” and accusing him of illegally leaking confidential information from the House Intelligence Committee.

    In an early-morning tweet, Mr. Trump ominously said that Mr. Schiff “must be stopped,” though he did not elaborate.

    The president’s insult came as Mr. Schiff is expected to call for a vote on Monday afternoon for the Intelligence Committee to release a Democratic rebuttal to the classified memo that the panel’s Republicans released on Friday, which accuses federal law enforcement officials of abusing their powers to spy on a former Trump campaign official.

    Etc etc etc, as if it were all quite normal. It’s not normal. This disgusting childish spoiled-rotten bullying is not normal. This loathsome red-faced insult-spewing despot is not normal.

  • Feeling dirty

    Also Trump today:

    This disgusting man is head of state.

  • Rudeboy

    Trump this morning:

    UK Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt:

    In the UK even the Tories don’t attack the principle of a national health, at least not in public statements.

    The Guardian:

    Theresa May has rebuked Donald Trump over his claim the NHS is failing, publicly backing her health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, after he tweeted disagreement with the US president’s view.

    The response from May – who generally seeks to avoid criticising Trump – came after the president condemned Democrat plans for a universal healthcare system by noting in a tweet Saturday’s protest march in London demanding more NHS funding.

    Democratic plans. Not Democrat plans; “Democrat” is not the adjective; the adjective is Democratic. Using “Democrat” as the adjective is a calculated insult from the other side, and it’s also illiterate.

    Asked whether May backed Hunt’s opinion, her spokesman said: “The prime minister is proud of having an NHS which is free at the point of delivery.

    “NHS funding is at a record high, and was prioritised in the budget with an extra £2.8bn. In the recent Commonwealth Fund international survey the NHS was rated the best in the world for a second time.”

    Asked whether No 10 backed Hunt’s specific tweet, the spokesman said: “Jeremy Hunt is the health secretary and of course he speaks for the government on these matters.”

    The spokesman declined to say whether the PM was annoyed at another leader expressing opinions on UK domestic policy. But asked if May had ever commented on the US healthcare system he said: “I can’t recall her having done so.”

    …

    After his tweet mentioning the NHS, Trump praised the coverage of Fox News for “exposing the truth”.

    The channel’s morning show had featured the former Ukip leader Nigel Farage discussing the pro-NHS marches. Asked why people were protesting, Farage claimed pressure on the NHS was caused by immigration.

    Ah yes, if you’re looking for the truth, Fox News and Nigel Farage are the place to go.

  • The memo undermined the system of checks and balances

    Adam Schiff explains the creation of the wall between the presidency and the Justice Department:

    In the run-up to the release of a deliberately misleading memo, some Republicans hyped the underlying scandal as “worse than Watergate.” When it was published, however, it delivered none of the salacious evidence of systemic abuse that it promised—only a cherry-picking of information from a single FISA court application. The memo’s release provided none of the vindication the President sought or would claim, but it was hugely consequential nonetheless, in how it undermined the system of checks and balances designed to insulate the FBI from White House meddling established in the wake of Watergate.

    The years after the Watergate scandal saw multiple Congressional investigations into misuses of law enforcement and intelligence powers. Under the leadership of Director J. Edgar Hoover, who served in that role for nearly 40 years, the FBI targeted domestic political groups it deemed to be “subversive” for unconstitutional surveillance and covert actions. The targets of these actions included socialist groups, anti-war protesters, and civil rights groups and leaders, among them Martin Luther King, Jr.

    Groups, in other words, that wanted reforms, which should not be seen and treated and spied on as “subversive.” Framing all dissent, or all dissent from the left, as “subversive” is a misuse of law enforcement and intelligence powers.

    Jimmy Carter campaigned for President in 1976 promising a scandal-weary nation that he would wall off the Department of Justice and FBI from political influence and direction. As President, Carter did just that, for the first time putting in place formal rules to govern interactions between the Department of Justice and the White House. Perhaps more important, he established an expectation that the extraordinary powers of the Department of Justice and the FBI would not be wielded as a cudgel against the political opponents of the president.

    New checks and balances, and oversight mechanisms, were added in all three branches of government. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is one.

    What we have witnessed during the first year of the Trump Administration is a determined effort to demolish the separation between politics and the fair administration of justice—an attempt to turn the DOJ’s investigative powers into the personal political tool of the president.

    The president in the person of Donald Trump, that is. He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about what happens in the future. For all we can tell he thinks he’ll never die and never be required to leave office.

    [A] year later, it has become clear that the president views the idea that the DOJ should be anything other than an extension of his political operation as an unacceptable constraint on his authority. He told a reporter in December that he has “the absolute right” to do whatever he wants with “his” Department of Justice. The president has sought to put that statement into action from the very day he was inaugurated.

    Remember that? I remember the horror and disgust when I watched him say that.

    Both the president’s public statements and his private actions make it clear that he is seeking nothing less than to destroy the institutions and norms that shield the Department of Justice from his direction. This is all the more pernicious considering the fact that his own campaign is under investigation for possible collusion with the Russians in their interference in the presidential election. He would take the reins of the FBI to protect himself and to deploy their immense investigative powers against his political opponents at will.

    During numerous oversight hearings over the years, I had many occasions to question former FBI Director Robert Mueller about the Bureau’s important work. Director Mueller frequently referenced in his testimony a little-known requirement for FBI trainees—each class of FBI agents would visit the Holocaust Museum to get a visceral look at what can result when law enforcement becomes a tool of repression, or worse.

    As they launch their all-out assault on the pillars of the rule of law in this country, Republicans would do well to remember the abuses that prompted the creation of the wall between the DOJ and the White House, and the stakes if the FBI becomes simply another instrument of the President’s power.

    Let’s hope they do remember. I feel as if we’re all on a tightrope.

     

  • Cash only

    Meanwhile…government watchdogs spend government money to monitor Trump’s conflicts of interest…and the money they spend goes into Trump’s pocket. The government is paying Trump to let the government monitor his corrupt use of his office for self-enrichment. Nice racket.

    An employee for the federal agency supervising the lease for the Trump hotel in Washington spent more than $900 for a stay there last year, according to a document reviewed by CNN — the first publicly known movement of federal taxpayer dollars into the highly scrutinized business.

    The federal employee worked for the General Services Administration, the agency which supervises the lease of the Old Post Office building to the Trump Organization.
    The GSA reimbursed the employee for a majority of the charges, which was in line with the agency’s policy on per diem expenses, according to a person familiar with the document. That means taxpayer dollars made their way into the hotel’s coffers.

    And Trump owns the hotel so the coffers are belong to him.

    Government watchdogs and the President’s opponents argue the payments to Trump’s business from governments — domestic or foreign –violate anti-corruption and self-dealing clauses in the Constitution. It says the President “shall not receive… any other Emolument from the United States” other than a salary.

    But that was meant for all those peasants who came before him, not gold-plated Donald Trump.

  • A historic world leader

    Trump is feeling perky.

    The Moony paper calls him “Trump the orator” – because he read an address written by other people, from a teleprompter, slowly and with difficulty and not at all well. Some orator.

    Also, applauding himself. Also Mussolini-face.

    Funny how he always cites Rasmussen, which always has his numbers higher than anyone else.

    Why the scare quotes on his own name? Is he saying he’s not real? Is he telling us he’s a myth or a political fiction? Is he signaling that he’s being held captive?

    Why is he talking about himself in the third person?

    Sad about “their” for “there,” especially when immediately followed by the [cough] alternate spelling.

    Anyway – nope, the memo does no such thing. “Trump” is still going to have to talk to Mueller. Feeling perky is not the same as being either vindicated or found innocent.

  • It’s on

    Thug Donald says hell yes release the memo, the memo is out.

    The House Intelligence Committee made the memo public after a week of pleading from senior national security officials not to disclose the classified details, reading it aloud on a conference call with reporters after President Trump declassified the memo.

    “A lot of people should be ashamed of themselves and much worse than that,” Mr. Trump said on Friday.

    The memo alleges that senior government officials favored Democrats over Republicans and accuses federal law enforcement officials of abusing their authorities when they sought permission to surveil a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page.

    Never mind the fact that Carter Page was already dirty, independently of Trump; that he had been under FBI surveillance before the Trump gang ever approached him.

    Earlier on Friday, Mr. Trump said top officials and investigators at the F.B.I. and Justice Department have “politicized the sacred investigative process.”

    I wish a bunch of people would pin him down and shovel dirt into his mouth.

    The early-morning Twitter post reinforced reports that Mr. Trump, in allowing the Republican memo to be released, is seeking to clean house in the upper ranks of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department, even at the risk of losing his own F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray.

    No, not “clean house” – Trump is seeking to replace people in the upper ranks of the FBI with people who are loyal to him. That’s it, that’s his only goal: transforming the FBI into an arm of Donald Trump the ManGod.

    Earlier this week, The F.B.I. made an unusual public plea not to release the document, which could reveal classified sources and methods. Mr. Trump declassified the memo without requesting any redactions.

    In other words he acted as recklessly and self-absorbedly as he always does.

    Constitutional crisis in full flow.

    Updating to add:

    The Times has the memo plus a few annotations.

  • Not future tense any more

    By the way we’re no longer approaching or heading for or in danger of a constitutional crisis, we’re in one. We have met the crisis and it is all around us.

    Reasonable people are saying the US appears to be teetering on the edge of a constitutional crisis, as the system of checks and balances that has kept democracy humming in America for more than 240 years could be on the verge of breaking down.

    “We’re in absolutely uncharted waters,” Heather Richardson, a professor of American history at Boston College and the author of a history of the Republican party, told Quartz, adding “I’m beside myself.”

    The framers of the constitution “did not construct a system that was designed to withstand failing all at once,” she said. But the US is now in the throes of a “rogue presidency, a rogue Congress, and packed courts.”

    “I think this is the most profound crisis the country has ever been in,” she said, “and we’re all acting as if this is normal.”

    Not all.

    “The threat from Russia to our democracy is now far less than the threat from within,” California’s Adam Schiff, the leading Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said today (Feb. 1). “There is nothing Russia can do to us that rivals what we are doing to ourselves right now.”

    Depending on who you ask, the US is on the brink of, or has already fallen into, a constitutional crisis—a political problem brought on by the failure of government institutions to protect democracy in the way they’re supposed to. Here’s why Schiff and others are concerned:

    The White House is refusing to upholding a law passed by Congress, for Russia’s benefit

    The idea of a US constitutional crisis started in earnest on Jan. 29, when the White House said it would not impose new sanctions on Russia, ignoring recent legislation that passed with strong support from both Republicans and Democrats.

    That one is staggering. Nunes’s coup attempt is distracting from it, but it’s staggering.

    There’s Trump’s relentless interference with the Russia investigation, there’s Congress’s failure to do anything about it, there’s the failure to fund the government.

    On Feb. 8, the Congress again is to convene in its next attempt to pass a budget to keep the government open for the next few weeks or months, the fifth time it has been forced to pass a short-term budget since Trump took office, and a sign of how dysfunctional Washington is right now.

    Tonight Trump is addressing the winter conference of the Republican National Committee, and you’ll never guess where.

    At Trump’s hotel, so all the money spent on the conference will go into Trump’s bank account.

    Yeah, we’re in it all right.

  • No objections

    Trump has said sure, go ahead.

    President Trump cleared the way on Thursday for the release of a secret memo written by Republican congressional staffers and said to accuse federal law enforcement officials of abusing their surveillance authorities.

    Mr. Trump, who had a brief window to block the memo’s disclosure on national security grounds, was expected to tell Congress on Friday that he had no objections and would likely not request any material be redacted, according to a senior administration official. It would then be up to the House Intelligence Committee, whose Republican leaders have pushed for its release, to make the document public.

    The president’s decision came despite a growing chorus of warnings from national security officials who say that releasing the document would jeopardize sensitive government information, including how intelligence is gathered, and from Democrats who say it is politically motivated and distorts the actions of the Justice Department and the F.B.I. by omitting crucial context.

    But Mr. Trump wanted the memo out.

    Of course. He thinks it will be good for him, and he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about anything else. What’s good for him is far more important than the good of the 350 million people he’s supposed to be working for.

    His people, on the other hand, are worried that Wray might quit.

    Wray has made clear he is frustrated that President Donald Trump picked him to lead the FBI after he fired FBI Director James Comey in May, yet his advice on the Nunes memo is being disregarded and cast as part of the purported partisan leadership of the FBI, according to a senior law enforcement official.

    Wray’s stance is “raising hell,” one source familiar with the matter said.

    Trump doesn’t care. Trump does what Trump wants to do.

  • No one will ever find out

    Another This Looks Bad item for Mueller’s note pad: last July, that Times story about the Russia meeting at Trump Tower, the scramble on the flight home from Yurrup to put out a statement by Team Trump saying we talked about adoption and nothing else.

    The latest witness to be called for an interview about the episode was Mark Corallo, who served as a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s legal team before resigning in July. Mr. Corallo received an interview request last week from the special counsel and has agreed to the interview, according to three people with knowledge of the request.

    Keep that bit about resigning in July in mind; it’s important.

    Mr. Corallo is planning to tell Mr. Mueller about a previously undisclosed conference call with Mr. Trump and Hope Hicks, the White House communications director, according to the three people. Mr. Corallo planned to tell investigators that Ms. Hicks said during the call that emails written by Donald Trump Jr. before the Trump Tower meeting — in which the younger Mr. Trump said he was eager to receive political dirt about Mrs. Clinton from the Russians — “will never get out.” That left Mr. Corallo with concerns that Ms. Hicks could be contemplating obstructing justice, the people said.

    Her lawyer says oh no she didn’t.

    Before publishing the Times asked the White House some questions while Trump was at the G-20 meeting.

    Times reporters submitted a list of 14 questions about the meeting to the White House and to the lawyers of the Trump campaign aides who attended the meeting. Among the questions: What was discussed, and what did the attendees think was going to be discussed?

    President Trump’s aides received the list midflight on Air Force One on the way back from the summit meeting and began writing a response. In the plane’s front cabin, Mr. Trump huddled with Ms. Hicks. During the meeting, according to people familiar with the episode, Ms. Hicks was sending frequent text messages to Donald Trump Jr., who was in New York. Alan Garten, a lawyer for the younger Mr. Trump who was also in New York, was also messaging with White House advisers aboard the plane.

    Marc E. Kasowitz, the president’s personal lawyer, was not included in the discussion.

    The president supervised the writing of the statement, according to three people familiar with the episode, with input from other White House aides. A fierce debate erupted over how much information the news release should include. Mr. Trump was insistent about including language that the meeting was about Russian adoptions, according to two people with knowledge of the discussion.

    What was the fierce debate about? I’m guessing the issue was the riskiness of making affirmative claims that could be demonstrated to be false?

    the statement that had been cobbled together aboard Air Force One was sent to The Times. The statement was in Donald Trump Jr.’s name and was issued by Mr. Garten.

    “It was a short introductory meeting,” it read. “I asked Jared and Paul to stop by. We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at that time and there was no follow up.”

    According to four people familiar with the discussions, Donald Trump Jr. had insisted that the word “primarily” be included in the statement.

    The Times published, and then another, slightly different statement appeared in another source.

    The dueling statements, both of which withheld the true purpose of the meeting, created tension at the White House.

    Accusations began flying that the botched response made an already bad situation worse. Ms. Hicks called Mr. Corallo, according to three people who relayed his version of events to The Times. She accused him of trafficking in conspiracy theories and drawing more attention to the story.

    American capitalism in action.

    The conference call with the president, Mr. Corallo and Ms. Hicks took place the next morning, and what transpired on the call is a matter of dispute.

    In Mr. Corallo’s account — which he provided contemporaneously to three colleagues who later gave it to The Times — he told both Mr. Trump and Ms. Hicks that the statement drafted aboard Air Force One would backfire because documents would eventually surface showing that the meeting had been set up for the Trump campaign to get political dirt about Mrs. Clinton from the Russians.

    There, that was my guess (via months of following this story, so not much of a leap) – don’t make affirmative claims that are susceptible to being shown to be lies.

    According to his account, Ms. Hicks responded that the emails “will never get out” because only a few people had access to them. Mr. Corallo, who worked as a Justice Department spokesman during the George W. Bush administration, told colleagues he was alarmed not only by what Ms. Hicks had said — either she was being naïve or was suggesting that the emails could be withheld from investigators — but also that she had said it in front of the president without a lawyer on the phone and that the conversation could not be protected by attorney-client privilege.

    Contacted on Wednesday, Mr. Corallo said he did not dispute any of the account shared by his colleagues but declined to elaborate further.

    They’re crooks and they’re incompetent. I guess given the first we should rejoice at the second.

  • R U my devoted slave?

    Chapter 785 of Trump doesn’t know what the rules are and he doesn’t care either. CNN reports:

    Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein visited the White House in December seeking President Donald Trump’s help. The top Justice Department official in the Russia investigation wanted Trump’s support in fighting off document demands from House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes.

    But the President had other priorities ahead of a key appearance by Rosenstein on the Hill, according to sources familiar with the meeting. Trump wanted to know where the special counsel’s Russia investigation was heading. And he wanted to know whether Rosenstein was “on my team.”

    We know he’s been told repeatedly that the whole entire Justice Department is purposely and carefully not on any team, because it’s the Justice Department.

    The episode is the latest to come to light portraying a President whose inquiries sometimes cross a line that presidents traditionally have tried to avoid when dealing with the Justice Department, for which a measure of independence is key. The exchange could raise further questions about whether Trump was seeking to interfere in the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller, who is looking into potential collusion by the Trump campaign with Russia and obstruction of justice by the White House.

    He’s been doing this all along, like any small town hoodlum: taking people aside and demanding to know if they’re “loyal” to him and going to do whatever he tells them to no matter what.

    The meeting happened shortly before Rosenstein was supposed to talk to the House Judiciary Committee. Trump was all worked up about that, and grilled Rosenstein about it. He’d also come up with proposed questions for the Committee to ask Rosenstein.

    One line of inquiry Trump proposed lawmakers ask about was whether Rosenstein appointed Mueller as special counsel to investigate Russian meddling in the 2016 election because Mueller was not selected as FBI director. CNN has reported that Trump has been venting to his aides about Rosenstein in recent weeks and even raised the possibility of his removal. Sources say Trump believes Rosenstein was upset Mueller wasn’t selected as FBI director and responded by making him special counsel. It does not appear those questions were asked of Rosenstein at the hearing.

    Probably because it sounds so junior high school. “Do you like Mueller more than Donnie?? Do you?!?”

    At the hearing, Rosenstein repeatedly declined to say whether Trump had ever asked him about the Russia Investigation. But he testified that he never received any “improper orders” from Trump and denied that anyone ever asked him to pledge his loyalty, dating back to his time in the Bush administration.

    “Nobody has asked me to take a loyalty pledge, other than the oath of office,” Rosenstein said.

    Sooo if this story is accurate then he wasn’t entirely telling the truth. Asking “are you on my team?” is asking for a loyalty pledge, surely.

    While searching for Comey’s replacement, Trump interviewed acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe. Trump asked McCabe who he voted for during that interview, according to a source familiar with the matter. McCabe did not vote for president in the 2016 general election but did vote in the Republican primary in Virginia, sources told CNN. Trump has publicly denied that he asked McCabe who he voted for.

    Seven months later, Rosenstein made his pitch in the December meeting with the President, asking for White House backing as the Justice Department sought to deny access to sensitive documents demanded by Nunes, who has spent months pursuing claims of surveillance abuses by the FBI and the Justice Department against the Trump campaign.

    To no avail, it seems. Dirty dirty dirty.

  • Some people are happy

    Al Jazeera gently points out mash notes to Trump’s speech from white supremacists.

    White supremacists quickly took to social media to comment on the president’s comments, with many of them praising the characterisation of Americans as “dreamers”.

    In a Twitter post, David Duke, former leader of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), a racist organisation popular in the southern US for over a century after slavery ended in the 1860s, thanked the president.

    https://twitter.com/DrDavidDuke/status/958534057159249921

    Yes, some Americans Dream of a White Country.

    During Trump’s electoral campaign in 2016, he came under fire for hesitancy to disavow Duke, who had pledged his support for the then Republican candidate.

    In an interview with CNN, Trump had said of Duke and other white supremacists who endorsed him: “You wouldn’t want me to condemn a group that I know nothing about.”

    Correction: we wouldn’t want you running for political office while not knowing who David Duke is.

    Mike Cernovich, a conspiracy theorist and far-right commentator, described Tuesday as “a good day for the good guys” in response to Trump’s address.

    Cernovich is affiliated with the “alt-light”, a far-right, pro-Trump movement that avoids the open white supremacy of the alt-right and advocates civic nationalism.

    https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/958538670251757568

    Oh yes, there’s nothing like a puffy orange millionaire in a bad suit for projecting strength.

  • Immigrants bad, American bombs good

    Roger Cohen at the Times is scathing.

    Trump portrayed a dark and menacing world in which immigrants, who stand at the heart of the American idea, were equated with gangs, murderous criminals and “horrible people.”

    In his 80-minute speech, the word “woman” did not come up once. Other words or phrases never mentioned included “peace,” “human rights,” “equality,” “Europe,” “multilateral,” “civil rights” and “alliance.”

    Those are all bad, liberal concepts, not fit for a Real Man™.

    If there was a theme, it was the demonization of immigrants and of the rest of the world, combined with an exaltation of American might.

    So pretty much a fascist-xenophobic type theme.

    In perhaps his clearest signal of contempt for the views of allies, Trump announced that he had signed an executive order revoking President Barack Obama’s January 2009 order to close the Guantánamo Bay detention facility. Trump’s order directs that “the United States may transport additional detainees to U.S. Naval Station Guantánamo Bay when lawful and necessary to protect the nation.”

    Guantánamo, where detainees may be held indefinitely as “enemy combatants,” is widely viewed around the world as a facility incompatible with the American principles of fair trial, human rights and the rule of law.

    Which is why fascist-xenophobic types like it.

    This was “Volk und Vaterland” in American guise, stamped with his speechwriter’s clunky and cliché-ridden prose: “If there is a mountain, we climb it. If there is a frontier, we cross it. If there is a challenge, we tame it. If there is an opportunity, we seize it.”

    And if there’s a border, we build a wall. And if there’s a chance to display bigotry, we seize it.

    And until we get rid of him, we’re stuck with it. The nightmare continues.

  • Reviews

    How did Trump’s big evening out go?

    Greg Sargent at the Post says he lied a lot.

    President Trump’s State of the Union speech is being widely described as an effort to move past the chaos, anger, polarization and divisiveness that have been unleashed by his first year in office.

    Oh please. Don’t be ridiculous. If Trump wanted to move past the chaos, anger, polarization and divisiveness that he sprays all over us every day, he could just do that. He delivered a speech that Stephen Miller (no rose himself) wrote for him; it would be criminally credulous to treat anything conciliatory he said in it as meaningful.

    The speech tried to “move past tumult,” proclaimed the front page of the New York Times. It was an “appeal to unity,” said the Times’s lead news story. His speech “attempted to suspend the polarizing realities of his presidency,” insisted CNN.

    But this isn’t what Trump tried to do at all. Instead, Trump actually doubled down on pretty much every aspect of his presidency that large majorities of Americans have found so searingly polarizing and divisive. The real core of the speech was his effort to rhetorically recast the key elements of that approach as unifying and conciliatory without moving past them at all.

    “I’m saying this in my best most politest voice: brown people who want to come here and eat all our ice cream are SCUM. Can we unify now?”

    Trump’s speech had two major goals: First, to persuade working- and middle-class Americans that those [orthodox GOP] economic policies are good for them. Second, to reiterate his commitment to the most polarizing aspects of his approach in the eyes of the base voters who thrill to it while making conciliatory noises directed at the college-educated and suburban white swing voters who have been badly alienated by it — and who, as a result, may deliver control of at least one chamber of Congress to Democrats this year, hamstringing his presidency.

    Pay no attention to the conciliatory noises behind the curtain. They mean nothing.

    Trump didn’t back off his immigration agenda, or the toxic ideas and rhetoric undergirding it, in the slightest. He merely tried to repackage those things as conciliatory. Trump called for a deal protecting the “dreamers” that would, he said, give concessions to both sides. But he reiterated his demand for large cuts to legal immigration, even as he rehashed his ugliest demagoguery about undocumented immigrants by blaming fictional open borders for exaggerated levels of crime, hyping the MS-13 threat, and dissembling reprehensibly about the diversity visa lottery program and “chain migration.”

    Let’s don’t waste any more time expecting a new improved Trump to jump out of a cake all of a sudden.

  • Can we arrest him?

    NBC reports that Trump has A Plan.

    Sources say that Trump has adopted a two-track strategy to deal with the Mueller investigation.

    One is an un-Trumpian passivity and trust. He keeps telling some in his circle that Mueller — any day now — will tell him he is off the hook for any charge of collusion with the Russians or obstruction of justice.

    But Trump — who trusts no one, or at least no one for long — has now decided that he must have an alternative strategy that does not involve having Justice Department officials fire Mueller.

    “I think he’s been convinced that firing Mueller would not only create a firestorm, it would play right into Mueller’s hands,” said another friend, “because it would give Mueller the moral high ground.”

    Instead, as is now becoming plain, the Trump strategy is to discredit the investigation and the FBI without officially removing the leadership. Trump is even talking to friends about the possibility of asking Attorney General Jeff Sessions to consider prosecuting Mueller and his team.

    Again – that whole thing about the Justice Department in all its branches being independent of the White House? Such that a president “asking” an Attorney General to prosecute a Special Counsel for investigating said president is a grotesque violation of all the boundaries? Just pretend that’s not there, because as long as the Republicans in Congress remain corrupted, it might as well not be.

    In short

    DANGER

  • Beautiful women that become a horror

    When you have an ego that blots out the sun, everything is for you and nothing is for anyone else. Other people owe you whatever you demand of them, and you owe no one anything. You are Just That Special.

    Seven months before an alleged tryst with porn star Stormy Daniels, Donald Trump told radio host Howard Stern that he would give his pregnant wife, Melania, a couple of days — or maybe a week — to regain her model figure after giving birth.

    “You know, Howard, she’s got the kind of a body and makeup where, about one day after the baby, it’s going to be the same as it was before,” Trump said during an appearance on Stern’s show on Dec. 7, 2005.

    What a lovely way for a man to talk about the woman he’s married to, to another man, on a broadcast radio program. “I tell you, Howard, she’s got such a great rubber body that I’ll be able to poke it only 24 hours after she pushes out a baby. Is that awesome or what?!”

    The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Speaking generally about his appearances on Stern’s show, Trump told The Washington Post in April 2016: “I never anticipated running for office or being a politician, so I could have fun with Howard on the radio, and everyone would love it. People do love it. I could say whatever I wanted when I was an entrepreneur, a business guy.”

    He could grab them by the pussy. He could do whatever he wanted – and he still can, because you can’t stop him, so ha!

    Trump also said in the 2005 interview that he had seen “beautiful women that for the rest of their lives have become [a] horror” after giving birth.

    “You know, they gain like 250 pounds,” he told Stern. “It’s like a disaster.”

    Seriously. Goddam sex dolls, what do they think they’re doing?

    At the time of the interview, Melania Trump was five months pregnant with her first child, Trump’s fifth. Barron Trump was born March 20, 2006.

    Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, told In Touch magazine that she had sex with Trump in July 2006 at a golf tournament in Nevada. The In Touch interview was conducted in 2011 but published for the first time this week.

    Well you know how it is. Melania had snapped back in 24 hours all right, but still…she wasn’t new, and Trump wants his new. And he’s Trump, so he gets to have his new, because he can do anything.

    Trump’s comments to Stern fit a pattern of public remarks and alleged behavior during and after Melania’s pregnancy. The infamous “Access Hollywood” video, in which Trump boasted about groping and kissing women without their consent, was recorded in September 2005, when Melania was about two months along.

    Celebrity journalist Natasha Stoynoff claims that Trump pressed her against a wall and forcibly kissed her in December 2005, around the time of the Stern interview. At the time, Stoynoff was interviewing the Trumps at Mar-a-Lago for a People magazine feature. She wrote about the alleged encounter in October 2016.

    He’s a manly, entrepreneurial kind of guy, who needs to slam women up against walls and grope them to keep his manly entrepreneuriality fresh and flowing.

  • Trump ignores another law

    The next item in the ongoing constitutional collapse here in the US is the Trump administration’s refusal to implement legislation that Congress passed by a massive majority.

    The Trump administration has announced it will not impose additional sanctions on Russia, despite Congress passing a law allowing the President to do so.

    With Monday the deadline for the White House to impose any new measures, the US State Department insisted the threat of sanctions was already acting as a deterrent.

    The new sanctions would have required the US Treasury Department to penalise foreign governments and companies doing business with Russia’s defence and intelligence sectors.

    The Trump admin says oh foreign governments and companies are already put off by the very mention of sanctions so we’re not going to actually impose any.

    Congress voted almost unanimously to pass a bill last year that punished Russia for its alleged meddling in the 2016 US election and aggression in east Ukraine.

    Mr Trump, who wanted warmer ties with Moscow and had opposed the legislation as it worked its way through Congress, signed it reluctantly in August, branding the bill “seriously flawed”.

    And he’s simply refusing to carry it out.

    The bill allowed sanctions to be delayed or waived, but any inaction would have to come with evidence to Congress that Russia was making progress in cutting back on cyber meddling.

    And evidence means evidence, not just a Trump stooge uttering words.

    The measure, known as the “Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA)”, also required the administration to list “oligarchs” close to Russia president Vladimir Putin’s government and issue a report detailing possible consequences of penalising Russia’s sovereign debt.

    Monday’s deadline to release those reports was seen as a test of Trump’s willingness to clamp down on Russia. Critics condemned him for failing to announce any sanctions.

    And for releasing a laughably bogus list of oligarchs.

  • Our loathing of Donald Trump is not “bias”

    This miserable louse…

    The day after he fired James Comey as director of the FBI, a furious President Donald Trump called the bureau’s acting director, Andrew McCabe, demanding to know why Comey had been allowed to fly on an FBI plane from Los Angeles back to Washington after he was dismissed, according to multiple people familiar with the phone call.

    McCabe told the president he hadn’t been asked to authorize Comey’s flight, but if anyone had asked, he would have approved it, three people familiar with the call recounted to NBC News.

    The president was silent for a moment and then turned on McCabe, suggesting he ask his wife how it feels to be a loser — an apparent reference to a failed campaign for state office in Virginia that McCabe’s wife made in 2015.

    McCabe replied, “OK, sir.” Trump then hung up the phone.

    A White House official, who would not speak on the record, disputed the account, saying, “this simply never happened. Any suggestion otherwise is pure fiction.” The FBI declined to comment on the call.

    Trump, enraged by TV footage of Comey boarding the government-funded plane hours after his firing, believed that Comey should not have been allowed to take the plane, that any privileges he had received as FBI director should have ceased the moment he was fired, the people familiar with the matter said.

    That engorged piece of crap who milks his government job in every possible way, many of them illegal, thinks Comey should have been stranded in LA where he went while doing his job – stranded there and forced to get back whatever way he could at his own expense because Trump fired him without notice while he was on the far side of the country. Trump did not have to fire him that way, you may remember, and there was a lot of outrage about the way he did it – stranding Comey 3000 miles away and leaving him to learn the news from a tv set while he was talking to a room full of agents.

    Then he calls up McCabe to rage at him and insult him for not making Comey walk home.

    The disgustingness of him. It’s breathtaking.

    In the past, Trump had also reportedly asked McCabe how he voted in the 2016 election and repeatedly made public references to campaign donations his wife had received from an ally of Hillary and Bill Clinton.

    In an impromptu exchange last week with reporters who had been speaking with White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, Trump said he did not recall asking McCabe who he voted for in 2016. “I don’t think I did,” he said. “I don’t know what’s the big deal with that because I would ask you … who did you vote for?”

    Stupid turd. Reporters are not federal employees. Also, he should not ask them either; he should not ask anyone.

    In recent weeks the White House has agitated for McCabe’s exit, saying he is part of a broader pattern of bias against the president in the highest levels of federal law enforcement.

    It’s not bias. It’s not bias. He’s an evil, monstrous, out of control, loathsome human being, and we can all see that. It’s not bias to see him for what he is.

    The phone call between Trump and McCabe after Comey’s firing last May underscores the president’s continued fixation on the loyalties of people around him and his frustration with autonomous arms of the government — particularly ones involved in the Russia investigation. It’s also emblematic of his early and persistent distrust of top Justice Department officials.

    The combination of those sentiments whipped the president into such a fury over Comey last year that he wanted his firing to abruptly strip him of any trappings that come with the office and leave him across the country scrambling to find his own way home.

    Precisely. He wanted it that way, he did it on purpose, and then vomited his bile all over McCabe for not helping him do it.

    McCabe detailed his conversation with Trump after Comey’s firing to several people at the Justice Department, people familiar with the matter said.

    And Trump’s people say it didn’t happen. Who ya gonna believe?

  • Still enigmatic

    The Atlantic too is puzzled by McCabe’s abrupt departure…or defenestration, as the url but not the title calls it.

    McCabe was expected to stick around until March. Instead, he abruptly departed Monday, though he’ll still be collecting those benefits. The deputy director is taking what is ominously known as “terminal leave”—he has accrued enough leave to depart his post now but not officially retire until benefits vest.The reasons for McCabe’s abrupt exit are not clear, though. It’s not even clear whether McCabe’s exit came as a surprise to FBI insiders or not. Some reports say yes, while others say no. For what it’s worth, NPR’s Carrie Johnson said in December that McCabe might use accrued leave to depart before March.

    Maybe he just decided: fuck it, I’m off.

    At Monday’s press briefing, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said the president had not played any role in McCabe’s dismissal. This may be true in a narrow sense—Trump may have not ordered his terminal leave—but it’s preposterous in a broader sense. Trump has repeatedly tweeted attacks on McCabe, a move unprecedented before Trump, and according to The Washington Post demanded to know for whom McCabe voted during a meeting in May 2017…

    NBC News also reported Monday that after Comey was fired, Trump called McCabe, furious that Comey had been allowed to return home from Los Angeles on a government plane. McCabe reportedly told the president that he had not been asked to approve the flight but would have done so:

    The president was silent for a moment and then turned on McCabe, suggesting he ask his wife how it feels to be a loser — an apparent reference to a failed campaign for state office in Virginia that McCabe’s wife made in 2015.

    McCabe replied: “OK, sir.” Trump then hung up the phone.

    Wow. What an asshole.

    As so often with Trump it makes me want to see someone, just once, be that frankly rude and contemptuous to him to his face on live television with the whole world watching.