Tag: Trump

  • He’s very VERY busy watching tv

    Jonathan Swan at Axios lets us in on a secret: Trump is spending most of his time at home watching tv and talking on the phone. He doesn’t get to the office until 11 in the morning.

    Trump’s days in the Oval Office are relatively short – from around 11am to 6pm, then he’s back to the residence. During that time he usually has a meeting or two, but spends a good deal of time making phone calls and watching cable news in the dining room adjoining the Oval. Then he’s back to the residence for more phone calls and more TV.

    Take these random examples from this week’s real schedule:

    • On Tuesday, Trump has his first meeting of the day with Chief of Staff John Kelly at 11am. He then has “Executive Time” for an hour followed by an hour lunch in the private dining room. Then it’s another 1 hour 15 minutes of “Executive Time” followed by a 45 minute meeting with National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster. Then another 15 minutes of “Executive Time” before Trump takes his last meeting of the day — a 3:45pm meeting with the head of Presidential Personnel Johnny DeStefano — before ending his official day at 4:15pm.
    • Other days are fairly similar, unless the president is traveling, in which case the days run longer. On Wednesday this week, for example, the president meets at 11am for his intelligence briefing, then has “Executive Time” until a 2pm meeting with the Norwegian Prime Minister. His last official duty: a video recording with Hope Hicks at 4pm.
    • On Thursday, the president has an especially light schedule: “Policy Time” at 11am, then “Executive Time” at 12pm, then lunch for an hour, then more “Executive Time” from 1:30pm.

    I suppose we can be glad that he’s not doing much, because what he does do is bad.

    Aides say Trump is always doing something — he’s a whirl of activity and some aides wish he would sleep more — but his time in the residence is unstructured and undisciplined. He’s calling people, watching TV, tweeting, and generally taking the same loose, improvisational approach to being president that he took to running the Trump Organization for so many years. Old habits die hard.

    Watching tv and tweeting aren’t really a core part of the job of being president, though, plus watching tv isn’t really “doing something” or part of a “whirl of activity.”

    The Post has more.

    the reason Swan’s scoop paints such a bleak picture of Trump is because it suggests he’s not particularly interested in the official duties of being president. Whatever you think about Trump’s policies or his fitness for the job, the job requires one to be fully engaged, to be processing information (preferably from sources other than cable news), and to always be, for lack of a better word, on. The idea that Trump doesn’t take his daily intelligence briefing until 11 a.m. is shocking just by itself. And whoever leaked his official schedules to Swan seems to be concerned that Trump just isn’t up to the job right now.

    “Right now” meaning “in this particular lifetime.”

    It also is completely counter to Trump’s brand and the promises he made on the campaign trail. Trump said he wouldn’t really take time off as president. “I would rarely leave the White House, because there’s so much work to be done,” he told the Hill newspaper in June 2015.

    Plus he kept telling us Clinton didn’t have the “stamina.” He rode in a golf cart when all the other European heads of state walked, but he’s the Stamina guy. Or as it turns out, not.

  • One or two questions Mr P

    Uh oh. Hearts are racing at the White House – Mueller wants to interview Dopy Don.

    Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has told President Trump’s legal team that his office is likely to seek an interview with the president, triggering a discussion among his attorneys about how to avoid a sit-down encounter or set limits on such a session, according to two people familiar with the talks.

    Hahaha yeah I bet. They know how it will go – he’ll blab out incriminating shit the minute he opens his mouth, just as he did the day after he fired Comey.

    The special counsel’s team could interview Trump soon on some limited portion of questions — possibly within the next several weeks, according to a person close to the president, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations.

    “This is moving faster than anyone really realizes,” the person said. Trump is comfortable participating in an interview and believes it would put to rest questions about whether his campaign coordinated with Russia in the 2016 election, the person added.

    Sure he does; he believes a lot of absurd things; they don’t call him Dopy Don for nothing.

    However, the president’s attorneys are reluctant to let him sit for open-ended, face-to-face questioning without clear parameters, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

    They wake up screaming at 3 a.m.

    It has long been expected that Mueller would seek to interview Trump, in part because the special counsel is scrutinizing whether actions he took in office were attempts to blunt the Russia investigation, according to people familiar with questions posed to witnesses.

    In May, Trump fired FBI Director James B. Comey after Comey testified on Capitol Hill that he could not comment on whether there was evidence that Russia had colluded with the Trump campaign.

    Trump is thinking he’ll just tell Mueller or the investigator “there was no collusion” and boom the whole thing will be over.

    He’ll probably start a nuclear war by the end of that day.

  • His inability to take himself out of the equation

    Jennifer Rubin finds Trump’s genius not all that stable, or genius, after yesterday’s eruptions.

    Both his desire to prevent criticism and his ridiculous “cease and desist” letters sent by his lawyers to Wolff and his publisher betray his contempt for the First Amendment and his inability to take himself out of the equation and recognize the pillars of democracy, a democracy he took an oath to defend.

    Himself is all he really ever talks about. Even when he’s announcing the latest move to drill for oil in the Grand Canyon or open the oceans for toxic waste dumping, it’s always because the punch line is “and I did all this look how awesome I am.”

    Policy isn’t being made or even understood by the president. What comes from his fears and impulses is whatever aides are able to piece together that might satisfy his emotional spasm of the moment without endangering the country.

    Or with endangering the country. Whatever.

    Anyone who listens to him speak off the cuff about health care or tax legislation knows he will not raise any specifics or make a logical argument for this or that provision. It’s all “great,” “fabulous,” “the biggest,” etc. It’s not a sophisticated marketing ploy; it’s evidence of a total lack of understanding or concern about what is in any given piece of legislation.

    …

    We cannot accept, let alone applaud, courtiers scurrying around to create the appearance of a functioning government. He, not they, is the chief executive and commander in chief. We have a vice president elected specifically to take over if the president is incapable of serving; the 25th Amendment does not say “but in a pinch, let the secretaries of defense and treasury run the show.” What we have is a type of coup in which the great leader is disabled. He is propped up, sent out to read lines written by others and kept safely away from disastrous situations. This is not how our system works, however.

    It is now. Of course it’s not actually working, but it’s working for them, and that’s clearly all they care about.

  • Trump laments our feeble libel laws

    Trump did a press conference at Camp David today. Wolff’s book came up a time or two.

    During the press conference, Trump called the book a “work of fiction” and said it was a “disgrace” that Wolff could “do something like this.”

    “Libel laws are very weak in this country,” Trump said. “If they were stronger, hopefully, you would not have something like that happen.”

    But if libel laws were stronger, think of all the people who could sue Trump. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Elizabeth Warner, Kim Jong Un, Chuck Schumer, Steve Bannon, Rosie O’Donnell, Jeff Sessions, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Native Americans, Mexicans, Mexico, Muslims, atheists, Chicago, New York, women – it would never end and it would bankrupt him.

    He added that Wolff did not know him at all and did not interview him, though he then said Wolff interviewed him once “a long time ago” for a magazine story.

    “I guess ‘Sloppy Steve’ [Bannon] brought him into the White House a lot,” Trump said. “That’s why ‘Sloppy Steve’ is looking for a job.”

    Said Dumbshit Don.

    Asked during the press conference why he tweeted about his mental stability, Trump replied, “Only because I went to the best colleges, or college. I went to a — I had a situation where I was a very excellent student, came out and made billions and billions of dollars.”

    No, he was never a very excellent student. Also, he nearly went bankrupt in the 90s.

    Reporters also touched on a recent New York Times report that said Trump asked White House counsel Don McGahn to convince Attorney General not to recuse himself from the FBI’s Russia investigation last year…

    Calling the Times story “way off,” Trump said, “Everything I’ve done is 100% proper. That’s what I do is I do things proper.”

    Hmm gotta disagree with you there Dumbshit Don. That’s not what you do is. What you do is you do most things highly improper, and often downright illegal.

    “Collusion now is dead,” he added. “Because everybody found out after a year of study there has been absolutely no collusion.”

    No. Apparently his people have been telling him that in hopes of keeping him from dousing the White House in lighter fluid and setting it ablaze, but if so they’ve been lying to him.

    Trump said Saturday that he and the White House have been “very open” in cooperating with Mueller’s team. “We could have done it two ways. We could have been very closed and it would have taken years. But you know, sort of, like, when you’ve done nothing wrong, let’s be open and get it over with, because honestly, it’s very, very bad for our country and it’s making us look foolish.”

    He added that “this is a country that I don’t want looking foolish, and it’s not going to look foolish as long as I’m here. So we’ve been very open and we just want to get that over with.”

    God, he is so out of touch with reality. He’s got it exactly backward. The country is going to look foolish as long as he’s here; it’s only if he leaves that we have a hope of eventually, after decades, looking not so foolish any more.

     

  • He went to the best colleges, or college

    After Dim Donald’s shy confession of genius on Twitter this morning he expanded on his explanation to reporters.

    Elaborating during a meeting with reporters at Camp David later in the day, Mr. Trump again ticked off what he called a high-achieving academic and career record. He raised the matter “only because I went to the best colleges, or college,” he said. Referring to a new book citing concerns about his fitness, he said, “I consider it a work of fiction and I consider it a disgrace.”

    Translation: I hate it I hate it I hate it.

    The president’s engagement on the issue is likely to fuel the long-simmering argument about his state of mind that has roiled the political and psychiatric worlds and thrust the country into uncharted territory. Democrats in Congress have introduced legislation to force the president to submit to psychological evaluation. Mental health professionals have signed a petition calling for his removal from office. Others call armchair diagnoses a dangerous precedent or even a cover for partisan attacks.

    What are we supposed to do, ignore how abnormal and crazed and unbefitting a head of state his behavior is? Seeing as how he can start a nuclear war, that would be grotesquely irresponsible. If his brain is melting as we watch, we need to know about it.

    In the past week alone, a new book resurfaced previously reported concerns among the president’s own advisers about his fitness for office, the question of his mental state came up at two White House briefings and the secretary of state was asked if Mr. Trump was mentally fit. After the president boasted that his “nuclear button” was bigger than Kim Jong-un’s in North Korea, Richard W. Painter, a former adviser to President George W. Bush, described the claim as proof that Mr. Trump is “psychologically unfit” and should have his powers transferred to Vice President Mike Pence under the Constitution’s 25th Amendment.

    Mr. Trump’s self-absorption, impulsiveness, lack of empathy, obsessive focus on slights, tenuous grasp of facts and penchant for sometimes far-fetched conspiracy theories have generated endless op-ed columns, magazine articles, books, professional panel discussions and cable television speculation.

    And that’s not even an exhaustive list of what’s wrong with him.

    Still, in private, advisers to the president have at times expressed concerns. In private conversations over the last year, people who were new to Mr. Trump in the White House, which was most of the West Wing staff, have tried to process the president’s speaking style, his temper, his disinterest in formal briefings, his obsession with physical appearances and his concern about the theatrics and excitement of his job.

    And that’s still not an exhaustive list. So far they haven’t mentioned the relentless bullying, for instance.

    “These amateurs shouldn’t be diagnosing at a distance, and they don’t know what they’re talking about,” said Allen Frances, a former psychiatry department chairman at Duke University School of Medicine who helped develop the profession’s diagnostic standards for mental disorders.

    Dr. Frances, author of “Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump,” said the president’s bad behavior should not be blamed on mental illness. “He is definitely unstable,” Dr. Frances said. “He is definitely impulsive. He is world-class narcissistic not just for our day but for the ages. You can’t say enough about how incompetent and unqualified he is to be leader of the free world. But that does not make him mentally ill.”

    No, it makes him a shit.

  • Stable genius meets happy toast

    This is a nice antidote:

    Two scoops!

    “WHO INVITED ALL THE EMPTY SEATS?” – classic.

    All praise to HappyToast.

  • Trump serenely rises above the Wolff book

    The Friday night-Saturday morning installment:

    Dumped like a dog? Does Trump have a habit of dumping dogs? Where, by the roadside? In Central Park? In the East River? Or maybe he means “dog” aka “ugly woman” who gets dumped because ugly. Anyway, all very dignified and presidential, announcing that a book he hasn’t read is boring and that it’s untruthful when it isn’t and when he’s the world’s biggest liar, plus abusing Bannon who used to be his bestie.

    He might as well tweet “I’m so pissed off about this book I’m ready to burn everything down I hate you all you make me sick!!!”

    Well, no. I can see why he’d think that, certainly, but no. Tragically the very fact that he is so stupid and childish is a very big part of why he was able to get elected. Tragically, a lot of people like aggressive conceited stupidity. It’s his popularity that got him elected, not his being like, really smart. His popularity is very much entangled with his stupidity (as well as his ignorance).

    Updating to add (h/t Stewart):

    The Facebook version:

    Michael Wolff is a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book. He used Sloppy Steve Bannon, who cried when he got fired and begged for his job. Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone. Too bad!

    Image may contain: 1 person, smiling

  • What good are coasts anyway?

    Don is universally agreed to be an idiot but hey, he can still destroy all the coasts.

    The Trump administration said Thursday it would allow new offshore oil and gas drilling in nearly all United States coastal waters, giving energy companies access to leases off California for the first time in decades and opening more than a billion acres in the Arctic and along the Eastern Seaboard.

    The proposal lifts a ban on such drilling imposed by President Barack Obama near the end of his term and would deal a serious blow to his environmental legacy. It would also signal that the Trump administration is not done unraveling environmental restrictions in an effort to promote energy production.

    Many states are not pleased, including some with Republican governors…

    …like Gov. Rick Scott of Florida, where the tourism industry was hit hard by the Deepwater Horizon rig disaster in 2010 that killed 11 people and spilled millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

    Governor Scott vowed on Thursday to protect his state’s coast from drilling, saying he would raise the issue with Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke.

    It might help to mention that Mar-a-Lago is in Florida.

    The governors of New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, California, Oregon and Washington have all opposed offshore drilling plans.

    Notice that’s the entire west coast (of the lower 48). The east coast is much spottier.

    Oil industry leaders cheered the reversal, calling it long overdue.

    “I think the default should be that all of our offshore areas should be available,” said Thomas J. Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance. “These are our lands. They’re taxpayer-owned and they should be made available.”

    Interesting idea of “our” and “owned” and “available.” There are of course many of us who think it can mean ours to enjoy and cherish in their natural state complete with resident wildlife, as opposed to ours to exploit and ravage in order to make global warming worse.

    [F]or now, Republicans’ efforts to roll back restrictions on energy production are winning the day. Last month Congress opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR, to oil and gas drilling as part of the tax overhaul. And last week the Interior Department rescinded an Obama-era rule that would have added regulations for hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, on federal and tribal lands. It also repealed offshore drilling safety regulations that were put in place after the Deepwater Horizon spill.

    Oh, brilliant. Make sure there are fewer safety regulations when it comes to drilling for oil off the coast, because who doesn’t want another Deepwater Horizon spill?

  • What me worry?

    People in Europe are somewhat rattled by the whole thing.

    “Is Trump still sane?” asked the Friday lead headline on the site of Germany’s most respected conservative paper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The piece was published under the topic “mental health.”

    Meanwhile, British readers woke up to the Times of London’s main front page headline that also wondered about the president’s stability: “Trump’s mental health questioned by top aide.”

    “Donald Trump’s right-hand man openly questioned his fitness to serve and predicted that he would resign to avoid being removed by his own cabinet, according to a book that the US president tried to block yesterday,” wrote the Rupert Murdoch-controlled Times of London.

    Well at least they found a dignified photo to go with the story.

    Some of the United States’ closest international allies, including Britain, Germany and France, are now openly debating whether the most powerful man in the world and de facto leader of NATO — an alliance on which their entire military strategies are based — can still be trusted.

    Oh, I know the answer to that one. No, of course not.

    “In many European capitals, the prevailing sentiment is helplessness and frustration that Trump won’t engage in a rational dialogue,” argued Stephan Bierling, a professor for transatlantic relations in Germany, who said that he had long admired the United States but that his beliefs were now “shaken to the core.”

    He won’t, but he also can’t. If he suddenly decided he ought to and wanted to do that, he’d be at a loss as to how to go about it. Rational dialogue is way beyond his powers.

  • Boom boom boom

    Boom, as Benjamin Wittes says when one of these appears. Trump tried to order Sessions not to recuse himself.

    President Trump gave firm instructions in March to the White House’s top lawyer: stop the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, from recusing himself in the Justice Department’s investigation into whether Mr. Trump’s associates had helped a Russian campaign to disrupt the 2016 election.

    Public pressure was building for Mr. Sessions, who had been a senior member of the Trump campaign, to step aside. But the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, carried out the president’s orders and lobbied Mr. Sessions to remain in charge of the inquiry, according to two people with knowledge of the episode.

    Mr. McGahn was unsuccessful, and the president erupted in anger in front of numerous White House officials, saying he needed his attorney general to protect him. Mr. Trump said he had expected his top law enforcement official to safeguard him the way he believed Robert F. Kennedy, as attorney general, had done for his brother John F. Kennedy and Eric H. Holder Jr. had for Barack Obama.

    He thought the head of the Justice Department was supposed to be his personal consigliere. (Mind you, this mess does highlight what a terrible move it was for Kennedy to give his brother the job. Trump has been teaching us about how particularly independent the DOJ is supposed to be.)

    The lobbying of Mr. Sessions is one of several previously unreported episodes that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has learned about as he investigates whether Mr. Trump obstructed the F.B.I.’s Russia inquiry.

    Is this the first leak from the Mueller investigation? Reporters are always underlining how under wraps it all is.

    The events occurred during a two-month period — from when Mr. Sessions recused himself in March until the appointment of Mr. Mueller in May — when Mr. Trump believed he was losing control over the investigation.

    Among the other episodes, Mr. Trump described the Russia investigation as “fabricated and politically motivated” in a letter that he intended to send to the F.B.I. director at the time, James B. Comey, but that White House aides stopped him from sending. Mr. Mueller has also substantiated claims that Mr. Comey made in a series of memos describing troubling interactions with the president before he was fired in May.

    Oh he has! That’s interesting. Hardly surprising, but interesting.

    The special counsel has received handwritten notes from Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, Reince Priebus, showing that Mr. Trump talked to Mr. Priebus about how he had called Mr. Comey to urge him to say publicly that he was not under investigation.

    Ah. There you go then. It’s no longer just Comey’s memos.

    The New York Times has also learned that four days before Mr. Comey was fired, one of Mr. Sessions’s aides asked a congressional staff member whether he had damaging information about Mr. Comey, part of an apparent effort to undermine the F.B.I. director. It was not clear whether Mr. Mueller’s investigators knew about this incident.

    Mr. Mueller has also been examining a false statement that the president dictated on Air Force One in July in response to an article in The Times about a meeting that Trump campaign officials had with Russians in 2016. A new book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” by Michael Wolff, says that the president’s lawyers believed that the statement was “an explicit attempt to throw sand into the investigation’s gears,” and that it led one of Mr. Trump’s spokesmen to quit because he believed it was obstruction of justice.

    Is cognitive decline a valid defense?

  • How dare anyone say rude things about Trump?

    Trump is of course firing off threats of lawsuits right and left.

    He’s threatening the publisher and the author.

    The legal notice, which has been published by the Washington Post, demands that author Michael Wolff and the book’s publisher “immediately cease and desist from any further publication, release or dissemination of the book”.

    It accuses Wolff of making “numerous false and/or baseless statements” about Mr Trump and says lawyers are considering pursuing libel charges.

    Considering it. They just might do it! I’m tellin ya, they’ll do it! They will! You better shut up or they will!

    He’s threatening Bannon.

    A private lawyer representing Trump sent a cease-and-desist letter to Bannon, arguing he violated an employment agreement with the Trump Organization when he spoke to author Michael Wolff for a new scathing book about the presidency.

    With the Trump Organization? Huh, there we were thinking he was working for the government, aka us. Not to mention, can a president really sue people into not saying he’s incompetent and a bozo?

    Trump is a public figure. So suing for defamation, as the letter threatens, could require Trump to prove that a statement made by Bannon was false, damaging and delivered with actual malice, meaning that Bannon knew his comments were false and made them anyway.

    Suing Bannon for breaking an employment contract would be even more difficult, said Lobel, who described the move as a “desperate” attempt by Trump to silence his former confidant.

    …

    In the cease-and-desist letter, Trump’s lawyer wrote that Bannon breached three sections of his employment agreement with the Trump Organization by communicating with Wolff, disclosing confidential information and making disparaging statements and in some cases outright defamatory statements about Trump, his family and the campaign.

    Bannon has not revealed the exact terms of the contract he signed. But according to Trump’s lawyer, Bannon promised in his employment agreement not to disclose confidential information, not to demean or publicly disparage Trump, his family, or the campaign, and not to communicate with any member of the news media on behalf of, or about the campaign, without express written authorization from the campaign or Trump.

    That’s such classic Trump – nobody may disparage Trump but Trump may disparage everyone else in the most vulgar and dishonest terms. One rule for Donald and another rule for every other human being on the planet.

    During the presidential campaign, other staffers described how Trump forced their silence through such restrictive agreements, which are highly unusual in political campaigns. One such document, obtained by The Washington Post, includes a “no-disparagement” clause that requires staffers to promise “during the term of your service and at all time thereafter” not to “demean or disparage publicly” Trump, his business ventures or any of his family members or their business ventures “and to prevent your employees from doing so.”

    Essentially, he approached his campaign staff much as he did the employees of his business ventures — demanding control over what they can and can’t say. As he transitioned to the White House, some wondered if he would enforce a similar silence from his administration — raising concerns about government transparency.

    He’s got the world’s most ravenous ego.

  • He reads not, neither does he skim

    John Cassidy at the New Yorker does some more gleaning from Wolff’s book and tosses us the bits of chocolate and almond.

    [T]he over-all portrait that Wolff draws of a dysfunctional, bitterly divided White House in the first six months of Trump’s Presidency, before the appointment of John Kelly as chief of staff and the subsequent firing of Bannon, has the whiff of authenticity about it—and it echoes news coverage at the time. Other details are impossible to confirm but damning if true. Such was the animosity between Bannon and “Jarvanka”—Bannon’s dismissive term for Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner—Wolff reports, that, during one Oval Office meeting, Bannon called Ivanka “a fucking liar,” to which Trump responded,“I told you this is a tough town, baby.” Wolff also quotes Bannon commenting gleefully after Trump decided to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, a decision that Ivanka opposed: “Score. The bitch is dead.”

    Worst clubhouse ever.

    Equally plausible is Wolff’s portrait of Trump as a one-dimensional figure who had no conception that he could win the 2016 election; little clue what to do after he did emerge victorious from the campaign trail; and virtually no interest in, or aptitude for, acquiring the skills and information needed to fulfill the role of President. “Here was, arguably, the central issue of the Trump presidency,” Wolff writes. The Commander-in-Chief “didn’t process information in any conventional sense—or, in a way, he didn’t process it at all.” He continues,

    Trump didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semiliterate  . . . . Some thought him dyslexic; certainly his comprehension was limited. Others concluded that he didn’t read because he didn’t have to, and that in fact this was one of his key attributes as a populist. He was postliterate—total television.

    But not only didn’t he read, he didn’t listen. He preferred to be the person talking. And he trusted his own expertise—no matter how paltry or irrelevant—more than anyone else’s. What’s more, he had an extremely short attention span, even when he thought you were worthy of attention.

    “He preferred to be the person talking” – yes of course he did. He appears to be profoundly bored by pretty much everything that isn’t himself. His is a narcissism that crowds out everything else.

    There are revealing, unconfirmed new anecdotes, too, about Trump’s sexism and narcissism. In one meeting, Wolff says, the President referred to Hope Hicks, his communications director, as “a piece of tail.” In another meeting, he described Sally Yates, the former acting Attorney General, whom he fired early in his term, after she refused to defend his original travel ban, as “such a cunt.”

    Tell us again that that word has nothing to do with misogyny.

  • Attentive to his lapses and repetitions

    Michael Wolff has a summary of his Trump book at the Hollywood Reporter (a fitting place for it).

    Most of it is what we’ve already seen via the news: shock-horror, chaos, incompetence, mass departures, how did we get here, what does this even. But toward the end there are some…let’s say noteworthy details.

    There was, after the abrupt Scaramucci meltdown, hardly any effort inside the West Wing to disguise the sense of ludicrousness and anger felt by every member of the senior staff toward Trump’s family and Trump himself. It became almost a kind of competition to demystify Trump. For Rex Tillerson, he was a moron. For Gary Cohn, he was dumb as shit. For H.R. McMaster, he was a hopeless idiot. For Steve Bannon, he had lost his mind.

    Most succinctly, no one expected him to survive Mueller. Whatever the substance of the Russia “collusion,” Trump, in the estimation of his senior staff, did not have the discipline to navigate a tough investigation, nor the credibility to attract the caliber of lawyers he would need to help him. (At least nine major law firms had turned down an invitation to represent the president.)

    There was more: Everybody was painfully aware of the increasing pace of his repetitions. It used to be inside of 30 minutes he’d repeat, word-for-word and expression-for-expression, the same three stories — now it was within 10 minutes. Indeed, many of his tweets were the product of his repetitions — he just couldn’t stop saying something.

    That. That’s very Alzheimersy, very dementia-indicative.

    Hope Hicks, Trump’s 29-year-old personal aide and confidant, became, practically speaking, his most powerful White House advisor. (With Melania a nonpresence, the staff referred to Ivanka as the “real wife” and Hicks as the “real daughter.”) Hicks’ primary function was to tend to the Trump ego, to reassure him, to protect him, to buffer him, to soothe him. It was Hicks who, attentive to his lapses and repetitions, urged him to forgo an interview that was set to open the 60 Minutes fall season.

    Ah. In other words she realized that an interview would expose how far gone in dementia he is.

    That, by the way, is a reason to invoke the 25th Amendment, not to protect him.

    Donald Trump’s small staff of factotums, advisors and family began, on Jan. 20, 2017, an experience that none of them, by any right or logic, thought they would — or, in many cases, should — have, being part of a Trump presidency. Hoping for the best, with their personal futures as well as the country’s future depending on it, my indelible impression of talking to them and observing them through much of the first year of his presidency, is that they all — 100 percent — came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.

    At Mar-a-Lago, just before the new year, a heavily made-up Trump failed to recognize a succession of old friends.

    Oh.

  • Boasting in strikingly playground terms

    The Times on Trump’s witty and tactful overture to North Korea yesterday:

    President Trump again raised the prospect of nuclear war with North Korea, boasting in strikingly playground terms on Tuesday night that he commands a “much bigger” and “more powerful” arsenal of devastating weapons than the outlier government in Asia.

    CNN last night was doing a lot of underlining of the dick-waving aspect – which was triple, let’s not forget, bigger and more powerful AND IT WORKS.

    This of course was just as South Korea was suggesting talks with the North, so there’s that punch the ally aspect as well.

    The president’s tone also generated a mix of scorn and alarm among lawmakers, diplomats and national security experts who called it juvenile and frightening for a president handling a foreign policy challenge with world-wrecking consequences. The language was reminiscent of Mr. Trump’s boast during the 2016 presidential campaign that his hands, and by extension his genitals, were in fact big enough.

    Dick-waving. That’s our head of state.

    It came on a day when Mr. Trump, back in Washington from his Florida holiday break, effectively opened his new year with a barrage of provocative tweets on a host of issues. He called for an aide to Hillary Clinton to be thrown in jail, threatened to cut off aid to Pakistan and the Palestinians, assailed Democrats over immigration, claimed credit for the fact that no one died in a jet plane crash last year and announced that he would announce his own award next Monday for the most dishonest and corrupt news media.

    Holiday over; work resumed.

    Mr. Trump’s supporters brushed off the criticism, calling the president’s words a bracing stand that would force North Korea to confront the potential repercussions of its efforts to develop nuclear weapons that could reach the continental United States.

    Oh please. Do they think North Korea doesn’t know we have more nukes than they do?

    Many security experts have said there is no reasonable military option for restraining North Korea that would not involve unacceptable loss of life, which is one reason South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, is more eager for dialogue. But Mr. Trump and his national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, have argued that there is a viable military alternative.

    Welll that’s putting it euphemistically. What they really mean is that Trump doesn’t think there is such a thing as unacceptable loss of life, as long as the lives lost are far away and foreign.

  • Mr. Trump has sometimes broken with familiar presidential decorum

    Reality as seen from the Wall Street Journal editorial board: fine, everything is fine, don’t worry about it, the very fact that so many people are so disgusted by Trump shows that he’s not a problem.

    As Donald Trump heads into his second year as President, we’re pleased to report that there hasn’t been a fascist coup in Washington. This must be terribly disappointing to the progressive elites who a year ago predicted an authoritarian America because Mr. Trump posed a unique threat to democratic norms. But it looks like the U.S. will have to settle for James Madison’s boring checks and balances.

    The ones that prevent an incompetent ignorant corrupt malevolent bully from attaining executive power and access to nuclear weapons? Those boring checks and balances?

    Mr. Trump’s rhetorical attacks on the media are excessive. But for all of his bluster, we haven’t seen a single case of Trump prosecutors seeking warrants to eavesdrop on journalists to discover their sources.

    But Trump’s “excessive” and also relentless and non-stop attacks on the news media are not inert; they have an effect; they coach we don’t know how many millions of people to distrust the Times and the Post and trust Fox News.

    Mr. Trump is also facing a special counsel investigation with essentially unchecked power to investigate him and his family.

    As that family infiltrates the federal government in defiance of an anti-nepotism law and enriches itself in defiance of several anti-corruption laws.

    The real story of the past year is that, despite the daily Trumpian melodrama, the U.S. political system is working more or less as usual. Mr. Trump has sometimes broken with familiar presidential decorum, especially in his public statements and attacks on individuals. But he is paying a considerable political price for that excess with an approval rating below 40% less than a year into his term.

    But he’s still doing it. It’s not some minor little side issue.

    But hey, stocks are up, so go buy a golf course or something.

  • They believe their own bullshit

    Jeffrey Goldberg (at the Atlantic) talked to Jonah Goldberg (of National Review). They are not the same person. Indeed the fact that they are not the same person of part of Jeffrey G’s motivation for talking to Jonah G.

    I wanted to interview Jonah because I find him provocative and sharp, but also because I have as a goal the disaggregation of all media Goldbergs. I am frequently confused for Jonah, and sometimes I’m blamed for the things he writes. He is blamed for the things I write, of course, and we sometimes get each other’s mail. This interview was a chance to convince podcast listeners that we are, indeed, two separate people.

    Or one person doing two voices!

    Just kidding.

    Anyway. Jeffrey G starts by asking Jonah G to tell us about his life as a “homeless conservative” – i.e. one who sees Trump as Trump and not our lord and savior.

    Jonah Goldberg: I’m not ideologically homeless. The problem is I’m politically homeless. What we’ve seen in the last couple of years is the Republican Party get either dragged along or leap ahead into essentially a cult of personality. A cult of personality is somewhat misleading because it’s only a handful of people who really think that Comrade Trump will deliver the greatest wheat harvest the Urals have ever seen. But for most of them, it’s more like—and I don’t mean to be glib about this. My brother was an addict. He died a few years ago. And I watched how my parents would try to rationalize his behavior. Every time my brother had a good day, it was the first day of the rest of his life.

    Jeffrey: “This is the day he became president.”

    Jonah: Yeah. This is the thing with Trump. It’s constantly, “This is the day he became president. This is the pivot. He’s off on the right foot. He can change.”

    Jeffrey: So there are two camps. There’s a camp of actual true believers. And then there’s a larger camp to say, “No, it’s not as bad as you think.”

    Jonah: I mean, so, it’s funny. A year and a half ago, at Fox and other places on the right, I remember being so unbelievably disheartened by how many pundits and commentators—not just at Fox, but talk radio, all over the place—lied. They would say, “Trump is fantastic. Trump is awesome. Trump is a genius. He’s a businessman.” All this stuff. And then the camera goes off, and the microphone goes off, and then they would say, “I can’t believe I have to defend this guy.”

    They don’t “have to” of course. It may be that they “have to” if they want to keep their jobs, but that doesn’t count as genuine necessity. The genuineness of the necessity diminishes as the horror of the person being defended expands. Trump is off the charts horrific, so you do the math.

    Jeffrey: That’s terrible.

    Jonah: It’s horrible.

    Jeffrey: By the way, that’s the swamp.

    Jonah: It’s totally the swamp. And what I’ve found though, a year later, you now find people who aren’t lying. Now, you don’t find a lot of people saying, when the camera goes off, “I can’t believe I have to defend this guy.” They believe their own bullshit.

    Which is also terrible and horrible and swampy…especially since his being president makes it so easy to observe for oneself exactly how disgusting he is.

    Jonah: I’ve lost some friends for sure, and I’ve lost a lot of fans. On the right, Trump is still sort of controversial. Just talking about him is divisive. Some people are all-in and some people are against him. And if you get asked the question, and you take a strong stand against him, and you don’t speak in these silly euphemisms, like “Maybe he should tweet less,” you piss people off.

    Jeffrey: His tweeting does cause a disproportionate amount of the destabilization that we are experiencing. Are you saying that telling him not to tweet is akin to putting Bacitracin on a tumor? Because it seems like that’s a stand-in for a whole set of impulsive behaviors that if they did not exist might bring us to a saner place.

    Jonah: The tweeting is a symptom. People tweet. Barack Obama tweeted.

    Jeffrey: No one would confuse their two Twitter feeds.

    Jonah: No. And the problem with Trump’s Twitter feed is that it is like the Narnian wardrobe to his lizard brain. It just vomits out whatever his raging sphincterless id has got going at the given moment. It gets him into an enormous amount of trouble.

    Oh, man – his raging sphincterless id. That’s good. I wish I’d thought of it.

    Read on.

  • Trump wishes the haters a happy new year

    Trump isn’t much for consistency, is he.

    Tweet one:

    Iran has closed down the Internet. Not good!

    Tweet two:

    The US news media are Fake! Fake Fake Fake Fake!

    We know what he would say. In his infinite stupidity he would tell us he isn’t closing down the US news media, he’s simply reminding us how Fake it is. That’s true but incomplete. He’s abusing his power to do everything he can to discredit the US news media by telling a fundamental lie about it, over and over and over again.

  • Still never

    A Republican who likes many of Trump’s policies and actions nevertheless would prefer Clinton to have the job. The surprise there is only that there aren’t more like him.

    And want to preserve your own republican institutions? Then pay attention to the character of your leaders, the culture of governance and the political health of the public. It matters a lot more than lowering the top marginal income tax rate by a couple of percentage points.

    This is the fatal mistake of conservatives who’ve decided the best way to deal with Trump’s personality — the lying, narcissism, bullying, bigotry, crassness, name calling, ignorance, paranoia, incompetence and pettiness — is to pretend it doesn’t matter. “Character Doesn’t Count” has become a de facto G.O.P. motto. “Virtue Doesn’t Matter” might be another.

    But character does count, and virtue does matter, and Trump’s shortcomings prove it daily.

    It’s not even a contest.

    Trump demands testimonials from his cabinet, servility from Republican politicians and worship from conservative media. To serve in this White House isn’t to be elevated to public service. It’s to be debased into toadyism, which probably explains the record-setting staff turnover of 34 percent, according to an analysis from the Brookings Institution.

    In place of presidential addresses, stump speeches or town halls, we have Trump’s demagogic mass rallies. In place of the usual jousting between the administration and the press, we have a president who fantasizes on Twitter about physically assaulting CNN. In place of a president who defends the honor and integrity of his own officers and agencies, we have one who humiliates his attorney general, denigrates the F.B.I. and compares our intelligence agencies to the Gestapo.

    Not worth it, is it.

  • $750 tickets

    Again the scumbag profits from his presidency while we pay his expenses.

    President Trump is set to ring in the new year the same way he has for about two decades — at the lavish party he hosts at his private club here.

    But this weekend’s gala at Mar-a-Lago, his first since becoming president, will be a little different: The security will be tighter. The crowds will probably be bigger. And the tickets will run $750 a guest, a hike from last year, according to members and guests.

    That ticket hike is profiteering from public office.

    Critics said the boost in prices for Sunday’s party and Trump’s regular trips to Trump Organization properties — this is the president’s tenth visit to Mar-a-Lago this year — show how he is using his position to promote his brand.

    “The president continues to find ways to profit from public office, by exploiting the fact that there are people who will pay to spend time with him and to be seen with him,” said Kathleen Clark, a government ethics expert at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis.

    Walter Shaub too.

    https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/947530088639279104

    And they won’t talk about it.

    The White House and Trump Organization officials did not respond to requests for comment. A woman who answered the phone at Mar-a-Lago declined to share details about the party with a nonmember and said there was no press office to respond to inquiries.

    They have no right to stonewall questions or decline to share details. He’s doing all of this at our expense and while holding public office. None of this is “private.”

  • War on “the regulatory state”

    Princess Ivanka is pleased that Daddy is getting rid of all those pesky regulations protections that might eat into her profits a little bit.

    A couple of weeks ago he did a photo op with the Big Pile of Protections that he promises to kill.

    Salon says wait.

    There’s only one problem. That mountain of paper Trump used as a prop symbolizes hard-won measures that protect us.

    To refresh the president’s memory, back in the 1960s, smog in major U.S. cities was so thick it blocked the sun. Rivers ran brown with raw sewage and toxic chemicals. Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River and at least two other urban waterways were so polluted they caught on fire. Lead-laced paint and gasoline poisoned children, damaging their brains and nervous systems. Cars without seatbelts, airbags or safety glass were unsafe at any speed. And hazardous working conditions killed an average of 14,000 workers annually, nearly three times the number today.

    In response, Congress enacted the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act and other landmark pieces of legislation to protect public health and safety. Some of those laws also created the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), National Highway Traffic Safety Commission, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and other federal agencies to write and enforce safeguards.

    But Trump wants more workers killed in hazardous working conditions, more smog, more filthy rivers, more species going extinct, more people killed in car crashes because they weren’t wearing seat belts – the glorious land of FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEDOM.