Tag: Trump

  • A clinical study of a man in severe cognitive decline

    Charles Pierce at Esquire writes that Trump’s conversation with the Times reporter shows that he (Trump) is falling off a cognitive cliff.

    In my view, the interview is a clinical study of a man in severe cognitive decline, if not the early stages of outright dementia.

    Over the past 30 years, I’ve seen my father and all of his siblings slide into the shadows and fog of Alzheimer’s Disease. (the president’s father developed Alzheimer’s in his 80s.) In 1984, Ronald Reagan debated Walter Mondale in Louisville and plainly had no idea where he was. (Would that someone on the panel had asked him. He’d have been stumped.) Not long afterwards, I was interviewing a prominent Alzheimer’s researcher for a book I was doing, and he said, “I saw the look on his face that I see every day in my clinic.” In the transcript of this interview, I hear in the president*’s words my late aunt’s story about how we all walked home from church in the snow one Christmas morning, an event I don’t recall, but that she remembered so vividly that she told the story every time I saw her for the last three years of her life.

    Trump’s obsessive repetition does seem very Alzheimer’s like, and so do some of his blurts of incoherence.

    In this interview, the president* is only intermittently coherent. He talks in semi-sentences and is always groping for something that sounds familiar, even if it makes no sense whatsoever and even if it blatantly contradicts something he said two minutes earlier. To my ears, anyway, this is more than the president*’s well-known allergy to the truth. This is a classic coping mechanism employed when language skills are coming apart.

    An apparent hope that speed and momentum can conceal the confusion and missing pieces.

    There’s a lively discussion on the Esquire Politics page on Facebook. One comment is particularly grim:

    Cognitive decline on top of pathological narcissism is extremely dangerous. As a clinician (retired) who specialized in personality disorders, it is obvious to me that Trump’s narcissism is extreme and when he implodes, he will lash out violently which is probably what the rest of the world is worried about. Cognitive decline will only accelerate his lashing out as he will have diminished ability to control his impulses. Simply put, we haven’t seen anything yet in terms of this man’s potential destructiveness.

    Like General Jack D. Ripper only a lot worse.

  • Fore!

    This is a small thing, but telling.

    Photo and video crews were stymied in their attempts to film President Trump on a golf course Wednesday, an apparent response to CNN’s recent footage of the commander-in-chief on the links.

    As the president completed another round at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, a large white truck obscured nearby journalists — who were positioned on public property — from getting a shot of Trump on their cameras.

    When CNN’s photojournalist moved his camera, the truck likewise moved, blocking the picture.

    On Tuesday, CNN recorded a shot of the president on the course in West Palm Beach. The network did the same on Saturday and Sunday, shooting the footage through a gap in the hedges while positioned on a public sidewalk.

    The Secret Service said it wasn’t the Secret Service. The Palm Beach County sheriff’s office said it wasn’t the Palm Beach County sheriff’s office. “A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment” – and I’m betting the White House spokesperson did not respond in the fullness of time, either. I think we get to conclude that it was Trump’s gang who shielded his golfing self from view.

    Wednesday’s outing marked the 87th day Trump has spent at one of his golf properties since taking office.

    87 out of about 240 – so more than a third.

  • Can we handle the truth?

    With all its faults, Twitter can produce interesting conversations, like this one in which a lot of people press Maggie Haberman on the question of why the Times does such softball interviews with Trump, why Times reporters don’t ask for detail or source or evidence when Trump makes a wild claim, why they simply transcribe instead of interviewing.

    As at least one person rejoined, it’s funny that she frames the cross-examination in A Few Good Men that way, because what happens there is that the cross-examination elicits the truth. Do we not want that to happen in press interviews with Trump?

    https://twitter.com/ezlusztig/status/946589679004061696

    https://twitter.com/aravosis/status/946593143943778304

    That’s the one I was thinking of.

    https://twitter.com/EvaChanda/status/946608860671901696

    And so on.

    I sort of get the claim that he exposes himself the best, but I also think he should be treated like any other president, and asked grown-up questions.

  • Hangin’ with Don

    So yesterday a couple of New York Times reporters were hanging around Mar-a-Lago and Donald “president” Trump finished lunch and sat down to chat with them. He was as modest, cogent, and informed as ever.

    During an impromptu 30-minute interview with The New York Times at his golf club in West Palm Beach, the president did not demand an end to the Russia investigations swirling around his administration, but insisted 16 times that there has been “no collusion” discovered by the inquiry.

    “It makes the country look very bad, and it puts the country in a very bad position,” Mr. Trump said of the investigation. “So the sooner it’s worked out, the better it is for the country.”

    Hm. Interesting take. From where I sit it’s not the investigation that makes us look bad, it’s Trump that makes us look bad. Isn’t perspective fascinating.

    Asked whether he would order the Justice Department to reopen the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, Mr. Trump appeared to remain focused on the Russia investigation.

    “I have absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department,” he said, echoing claims by his supporters that as president he has the power to open or end an investigation. “But for purposes of hopefully thinking I’m going to be treated fairly, I’ve stayed uninvolved with this particular matter.”

    Having “the power” to do something is one thing, and having an “absolute right” to do it is another. Trump thinks like a dictator – like, precisely, an absolutist. He does that because he’s a bossy bullying authoritarian asshole, but he also does it because he’s stupid and simple-minded. He translates everything into the simpler, cruder terms that he can understand, and spits it back out in this trumpified version. It takes a very childish mind to announce to the world “I have the absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department,” especially when the subject is his own alleged wrongdoing.

    He chatted a little about how furious he is with China and how he’s not going to sit with them at the lunch table any more.

    Despite saying that when he visited China in November, President Xi Jinping “treated me better than anybody’s ever been treated in the history of China,” Mr. Trump said that “they have to help us much more.”

    I wonder how much Trump knows about how other people have been treated “in the history of China.” My guess would be that the answer is Nothing.

    Mr. Trump gave the interview in the Grill Room at Trump International Golf Club after he ate lunch with his playing partners, including his son Eric and the pro golfer Jim Herman. No aides were present for the interview, and the president sat alone with a New York Times reporter at a large round table as club members chatted and ate lunch nearby.

    In other words…”well that was weird.”

    Mr. Trump disputed reports that suggested he does not have a detailed understanding of legislation, saying, “I know the details of taxes better than anybody. Better than the greatest C.P.A. I know the details of health care better than most, better than most.”

    Later, he added that he knows more about “the big bills” debated in the Congress “than any president that’s ever been in office.”

    Then he said he has the biggest penis that’s ever been measured, and that he can fly, and that he knows how to shoot flames out of his nostrils.

    Mr. Trump said he believes members of the news media will eventually cover him more favorably because they are profiting from the interest in his presidency and thus will want him re-elected.

    “Another reason that I’m going to win another four years is because newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if I’m not there because without me, their ratings are going down the tubes,” Mr. Trump said, then invoked one of his preferred insults. “Without me, The New York Times will indeed be not the failing New York Times, but the failed New York Times.”

    He added: “So they basically have to let me win. And eventually, probably six months before the election, they’ll be loving me because they’re saying, ‘Please, please, don’t lose Donald Trump.’ O.K.”

    Yes, it’s all about the ratings.

  • That good old Global Warming

    Trump decided to remind us again how stupid and uninformed he is. (Does he think we don’t realize?)

    As severe cold and record amounts of snow swept across the US east coast, Trump wrote on Twitter that his people “could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against”.

    “Bundle up!” he added.

    The president was reheating two favourite tropes: the conflation of weather with climate to pour scepticism on global warming, and the supposed cost to the American taxpayer of the Paris climate accord, from which he has confirmed the US will withdraw.

    Bundle up.

    On Friday, Anthony Leiserowitz, director of Yale University’s project on climate change communication, said Trump’s tweet was “scientifically ridiculous and demonstrably false”.

    “There is a fundamental difference in scale between what weather is and what climate is,” he said. “What’s going on in one small corner of the world at a given moment does not reflect what’s going on with the planet.”

    Oh now come on. You can’t expect Trump to understand words like “demonstrably” and “scale” and “planet.”

    Matthew England, a climate scientist from the University of New South Wales, called Trump’s comment “an ignorant misconception of the way the earth’s climate works”.

    “Nobody ever said winter would go away under global warming, but winter has become much milder and the record cold days are being far outnumbered by record warm days and heat extremes,” he said. “Climate change is not overturned by a few unusually cold days in the US.”

    It is if you’re the president of the Yoonited States.

  • The Germans were determined not to repeat that diplomatic gaffe

    I’m reading a big long Times piece about Trump’s new and different (i.e. crazy and reckless) foreign policy, and something jumped out at me. Not a good something.

    Few countries have struggled more to adapt to Mr. Trump than Germany, and few leaders seem less personally in sync with him than its leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel, the physicist-turned-politician. After she won a fourth term, their relationship took on weighty symbolism: the great disrupter versus the last defender of the liberal world order.

    In one of their first phone calls, the chancellor explained to the president why Ukraine was a vital part of the trans-Atlantic relationship. Mr. Trump, officials recalled, had little idea of Ukraine’s importance, its history of being bullied by Russia or what the United States and its allies had done to try to push back Mr. Putin.

    German officials were alarmed by Mr. Trump’s lack of knowledge, but they got even more rattled when White House aides called to complain afterward that Ms. Merkel had been condescending toward the new president.

    Oh god oh god oh god. It’s not her fault that he’s so ignorant and so stupid and so unaware that he is both and so irresponsible about the whole.damn.thing. It’s horrifying that he’s in that job and needs Ukraine explained to him by another head of state. It’s horrifying and shaming that his minions decided to scold her for having necessary knowledge of foreign affairs and explaining some of it to him.

    The Germans were determined not to repeat that diplomatic gaffe when Ms. Merkel met Mr. Trump at the White House in March.

    At first, things again went badly. Mr. Trump did not shake Ms. Merkel’s hand in the Oval Office, despite the requests of the assembled photographers. (The president said he did not hear them.)

    Later, he told Ms. Merkel that he wanted to negotiate a new bilateral trade agreement with Germany. The problem with this idea was that Germany, as a member of the European Union, could not negotiate its own agreement with the United States.

    Rather than exposing Mr. Trump’s ignorance, Ms. Merkel said the United States could, of course, negotiate a bilateral agreement, but that it would have to be with Germany and the other 27 members of the union because Brussels conducted such negotiations on behalf of its members.

    “So it could be bilateral?” Mr. Trump asked Ms. Merkel, according to several people in the room. The chancellor nodded.

    “That’s great,” Mr. Trump replied before turning to his commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, and telling him, “Wilbur, we’ll negotiate a bilateral trade deal with Europe.”

    Afterward, German officials expressed relief among themselves that Ms. Merkel had managed to get through the exchange without embarrassing the president or appearing to lecture him. Some White House officials, however, said they found the episode humiliating.

    The episode is, indeed, humiliating.

  • The administration has been strategizing

    Trump’s legal team have come up with a genius plan to make this whole thing go away.

    President Trump’s legal team plans to cast former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn as a liar seeking to protect himself if he accuses the president or his senior aides of any wrongdoing, according to three people familiar with the strategy.

    Zowie! No wonder they make the big bucks! Who could possibly have thought of a cunning scheme like that? Those fools at the FBI certainly won’t have thought of it, so this is going to throw their whole case into disarray. I expect they’ll be calling the whole thing off by the end of today.

    Attorneys for Trump and his top advisers have privately expressed confidence that Flynn does not have any evidence that could implicate the president or his White House team. But since Flynn’s cooperation agreement with prosecutors was made public earlier this month, the administration has been strategizing how to neutralize him in case the former national security adviser does make any claims.

    I expect they started with planning to have him killed, but then decided that might violate one of those weird “rules” that keep plaguing Trump and co.

    Trump’s legal team has seized on Flynn’s agreement with prosecutors as fodder for a possible defense, if necessary.

    Who has ever thought of such a thing, other than anyone who has ever watched Law & Order or Boston Legal or The Good Wife or any other lawyer-heavy tv show over the past six or seven decades? And lawyers? Other than them, nobody. It’s sheer genius.

    “He’s said it himself: He’s a liar,” said one person helping craft the strategy who was granted anonymity to describe private conversations.

    Sick burn!

    Outside legal experts said that discussing ways to undermine a possible witness is a natural first step for defense lawyers to consider.

    “It’s pretty predictable,” said Randall D. Eliason, a former public corruption prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington. “Defense will always argue that a cooperator who lied previously should not be believed, and that there is insufficient evidence of the conspiracy. It’s Defense Strategy 101.”

    Oh, shucks, there was me thinking it was so genius and original.

  • They laughed when he sat down to the piano

    Ermmmmmmmmm

    No. Just being hated and despised by all and sundry does not make you a Churchill or Beethoven or Michelangelo or anyone else who was looked at askance for a time and then recognized as OMIGOD A GENIUS.

    It’s entirely possible to be seen as a worthless fool by everyone who has an opinion on the subject and actually be a worthless fool. It’s not only possible, it’s dead easy. Most people who are universally considered worthless fools are worthless fools. That’s how that works. The exceptions are the exceptions.

    Also, Trump a Churchill? Please. Churchill was a jackass in many ways, yes, and a Tory, and an ardent imperialist, and a strikebreaker; Churchill had some commonalities with Trump politically, but in terms of talents? Don’t make me laugh. The fact that they are both “blunt” does not mean they are both blunt in the same way, with the same level of crudity, with equivalent vocabularies.

    Also, Mike Huckabee: your daughter tells lies for Trump.

  • The River of Blood just off the 15th tee

    Let’s go back a couple of years, to November 2015.

    STERLING, Va. — When Donald J. Trump bought a fixer-upper golf club on Lowes Island here for $13 million in 2009, he poured millions more into reconfiguring its two courses. He angered conservationists by chopping down more than 400 trees to open up views of the Potomac River. And he shocked no one by renaming the club after himself.

    But that wasn’t enough. Mr. Trump also upgraded its place in history.

    Between the 14th hole and the 15th tee of one of the club’s two courses, Mr. Trump installed a flagpole on a stone pedestal overlooking the Potomac, to which he affixed a plaque purportedly designating “The River of Blood.”

    Snopes has a close-up.

    The Times continues:

    “Many great American soldiers, both of the North and South, died at this spot,” the inscription reads. “The casualties were so great that the water would turn red and thus became known as ‘The River of Blood.’ ”

    The inscription, beneath his family crest and above Mr. Trump’s full name, concludes: “It is my great honor to have preserved this important section of the Potomac River!”

    You can tell what’s coming. It’s not true. The Times asked local historians and they said no, it’s not true.

    In a phone interview, Mr. Trump called himself a “a big history fan” but deflected, played down and then simply disputed the local historians’ assertions of historical fact.

    “That was a prime site for river crossings,” Mr. Trump said. “So, if people are crossing the river, and you happen to be in a civil war, I would say that people were shot — a lot of them.”

    But the plaque doesn’t say “This was a popular river crossing, so it stands to reason that a lot of soldiers were shot crossing it during the Civil War.” That would look ridiculous on a plaque, so instead Trump just made shit up.

    Also, notice “Many great American soldiers, both of the North and South” – i.e. there were good people on both sides. He’s consistent on that point, at least.

    The historians said it is true that Confederate soldiers crossed the river at a nearby ford (which has its own, accurate marker), but no soldiers were killed crossing the river.

    “How would they know that?” Mr. Trump asked when told that local historians had called his plaque a fiction. “Were they there?”

    Aha, he can do skepticism when it’s someone else’s claim…just not when it’s his.

    Mr. Trump repeatedly said that “numerous historians” had told him that the golf club site was known as the River of Blood. But he said he did not remember their names.

    Also that they’d eaten his homework.

    Then he said the historians had spoken not to him but to “my people.” But he refused to identify any underlings who might still possess the historians’ names.

    “Write your story the way you want to write it,” Mr. Trump said finally, when pressed unsuccessfully for anything that could corroborate his claim. “You don’t have to talk to anybody. It doesn’t make any difference. But many people were shot. It makes sense.”

    No, not really. Armies can’t be everywhere. If the Union troops were massing at Gettysburg, then they weren’t also staking out the Potomac. It “makes sense” to think the Union army could have picked off Confederate troops on their way to Gettysburg if conditions had made that possible and useful, but that’s not at all the same thing as asserting that they did.

    Which is obvious, of course, but it’s interesting how childishly crude his thinking is.

    In its small way, the plaque bears out Mr. Trump’s reputation for being preoccupied with grandeur, superlatives and his own name, but less so with verifiable facts, even when his audience is relatively small.

    Members of what he renamed the Trump National Golf Club, and some former employees, said the plaque generally drew laughter or eye-rolls, much as when Mr. Trump periodically descends from his helicopter to walk one course or the other.

    Pause to sigh for the good old days – two years ago, when we could laugh and roll our eyes at him.

  • Table talk

    The cat escaped the bag.

    President Trump kicked off his holiday weekend at Mar-a-Lago Friday night at a dinner where he told friends, “You all just got a lot richer,” referencing the sweeping tax overhaul he signed into law hours earlier. Mr. Trump directed those comments to friends dining nearby at the exclusive club — including to two friends at a table near the president’s who described the remark to CBS News — as he began his final days of his first year in office in what has become known as the “Winter White House.”

    No, it hasn’t “become known” as that. Trump calls it that. Trump also spends our money to go there and profits further by attracting more paying customers there; it’s win-win for him and lose-lose for us. That doesn’t make it “the Winter White House.”

    The president has spent many weekends of his presidency so far at the “Winter White House,” where initiation fees cost $200,000, annual dues cost $14,000, and some of the most affluent members of society have the opportunity to interact with the president in a setting while many Americans cannot.

    Well that’s what makes it so much fun. “We can and you can’t.”

    Image result for monopoly man

  • Proud to have led the charge

    Twitter’s algorithm has a sense of humor. Today the first things I saw in my feed were John Lewis, Adam Schiff, and Barack Obama telling us to have a merry or happy Christmas.

    So then naturally I had to check out what the current “president” has been up to.

    So much aggression for what purports to be a defense of a benevolent sentiment. He might as well be shouting “Merry fucking Christmas you nigger-loving pussy-whipped atheist scum!!”

    Steve Silberman has an eloquent riposte:

    Psst, can we talk? I promise to be mostly positive on this day of all days. But there’s something DEEPLY CREEPY about Trump taking credit for people wishing each other “Merry Christmas.” It’s not just that it’s a ridiculous lie and Obama said it all the time. It’s not just, “Oh there he goes again.” It’s not just that it ridicules people for trying not to exclude their Jewish and Muslim neighbors. Trump is trying to steal our basic goodness and courtesy as a nation. Some people are good Christians, and some people are bad Christians, but Trump is *the opposite of a Christian.* He brags about stuff he didn’t do, blames others for stuff he did, and attacks those who have less than he does. This “War on Christmas” nonsense is a microcosm of the spiritual sickness he has brought to this country.

    Granted, the eloquence rests on the assumption that “Christian” stands for decent qualities that Trump defies and attacks, but that doesn’t really matter here. The important part is that Trump is the opposite of a decent human being, and that he performs that opposition all day every day while being the head of state.

    So yeah happy holidays and everything.

    Image result for snow

     

  • It’s not “partisan”

    The Post tells us how the campaign to discredit the FBI in hopes of protecting the most corrupt incompetent mendacious malevolent president we’ve ever had has picked up steam lately.

    This is Republicans and “conservatives” trying to discredit the FBI, which is quite a turn-up for the books. Time was, the FBI and the Republicans were best buddies and their common enemy was anyone to the left of Gerald Ford. The FBI has a long long history of treating everyone on the left as suspect and “UnAmerican”…but now suddenly everything is switched, all to defend a guy who is both criminal and hateful in every possible way.

    If I were a Republican I would be doing the opposite, because I would not want to be tainted by this horrible man. Flake and Corker seemed for awhile to feel the same way, but it surprises me that more of them don’t. It surprises me that they’re so keen to tie themselves to a lying mean bullying sexist racist shit like him.

    For months, efforts to discredit special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign flickered at the fringes of political debate.

    Now, the allegation that FBI and Justice Department officials are part of a broad conspiracy against President Trump is suddenly center stage, amplified by conservative activists, GOP lawmakers, right-leaning media and the president himself. The clamor has become a sustained backdrop to the special counsel investigation, with congressional committees grilling a parade of law enforcement officials in recent days.

    All to defend that terrible man. It’s just nuts.

    The partisan atmosphere is a sharp departure from the near-universal support that greeted Mueller’s selection as special counsel in May — and threatens to shadow his investigation’s eventual findings. Trump, while vowing to cooperate with the special counsel, has also encouraged attacks on Mueller’s credibility, tweeting that the investigation is “the greatest Witch Hunt in U.S. political history.”

    That’s the part that surprises me: the “partisan” aspect. However partisan one is, I would think moral squalor at the Trump level would override that.

    The controversy, percolating for months, escalated dramatically in early December with the revelation of text messages in which one of Mueller’s former top investigators, Peter Strzok, called Trump an “idiot” last year and predicted Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton would win the election in a landslide.

    As the deputy head of counterintelligence at the FBI, Strzok played a critical role in both the Clinton email investigation last year and the Russia probe before he was removed by Mueller this summer.

    Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who met with Fitton earlier this year and has for months alleged that the FBI was working against Trump’s election, said in an interview that many of his Republican colleagues now share his view that there has been an orchestrated effort against Trump.

    “I’ve had all kinds of Republicans come up to me and say, ‘This is unbelievable, it looks like the FBI was trying to put its finger on the scale here,’ ” Jordan said.

    But, see, it’s not clear that that’s because they were “partisan” or favoring the Democrats or political at all, because most of what’s wrong with Trump is to do with Trump, not with politics at all. Strzok called Trump an “idiot” – well he is an idiot, and Republicans and conservatives can see that just as well as Democrats and lefties. It’s not inherently partisan to see Trump as both an idiot and an ignoramus, and thoroughly unqualified to be president, before we even get to his issues of temperament and character and morality.

    Trump is busy demonstrating his swampy disgustingness today.

  • Pushing back

    There is resistance.

    More than 40 former U.S. attorneys and Republican and conservative officials are pushing back against efforts to discredit the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election.

    In a pair of letters, the groups say Robert Mueller and his team must be allowed to continue their work, unimpeded.

    The 22 former U.S. attorneys, who served under presidents from Richard Nixon through Barack Obama, say it is “critical” to the “interests of justice and public trust to ensure that those charged with conducting complex investigations are allowed to do their jobs free from interference or fear of reprisal.”

    Seeking Mueller’s removal “would have severe repercussions for Americans’ sense of justice here at home and for our reputation for fairness around the world,” they wrote in a letter to President Donald Trump on Friday that was coordinated by Georgetown Law’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection.

    Another letter signed by 20 former members of Congress and other top U.S. officials says efforts to discredit Mueller’s work “undermine the institutions that protect the rule of law and so our nation.”

    “We urge the Administration, members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, and the American public, to support the work of Special Counsel Mueller to its conclusion, whatever it may be,” reads the open letter signed by officials including former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, former State Department counselor Eliot Cohen and former George W. Bush administration ethics lawyer Richard Painter.

    Buncha long-haired crazies, right?

  • Sneers from Florida

    No Baby Jesus’s Pretend Birthday truce for Mean Donnie: he’s bullying the deputy director of the FBI now.

    The F.B.I.’s embattled deputy director, Andrew G. McCabe, an unlikely lightning rod who has been attacked repeatedly by President Trump and congressional Republicans, is expected to retire after he becomes eligible for his pension early next year, according to people familiar with his decision.

    While Mr. McCabe’s plans to leave aren’t unexpected, his decision should take some of the pressure off Christopher A. Wray, who was confirmed as F.B.I. director in August. Mr. Trump has complained to confidantes that Mr. Wray has not moved fast enough to replace the senior leadership that he inherited from his predecessor, James B. Comey, whom Mr. Trump summarily dismissed in May.

    A White House official said in a statement this week that many senior leaders of the bureau were “politically motivated” and said Mr. Wray was the “right choice to clean up the misconduct at the highest levels of the F.B.I.”

    All this, let’s not forget, because Trump played footsie with Putin in order to steal the election and now he hopes to get away with it by bullying top people at the FBI who are investigating his theft of the election. It could hardly be any more corrupt and degrading, although I suppose he could have had a few people killed to make it even worse.

    Trump this afternoon between rounds of golf:

    That vulgarity is from the phone of the president of the US.

    It looks as if he hopes to make sure McCabe won’t get full benefits, but the Post says he can’t:

    In fact, as a career civil servant, Mr. McCabe, 49, has protections and cannot be pushed out by the president.

    I hope Trump drops dead over the two scoops of ice cream tonight. Or it could be while he’s watching Fox later on, or while he’s watching Fox again in the morning…but no later than that. We need to be rid of the poison.

  • They win you lose

    From Occupy Democrats:

    Image may contain: 1 person, text

    Image: Trump pointing at us in the manner of a recruiting poster, with caption

    I LIED TO YOU

    BILLIONAIRES COME FIRST

    SO YOU LOSE YOUR HEALTHCARE

  • A sensitive conversation in the Oval Office

    The Times shares a disgusting little vignette of life with “President” Trump:

    Late to his own meeting and waving a sheet of numbers, President Trump stormed into the Oval Office one day in June, plainly enraged.

    Five months before, Mr. Trump had dispatched federal officers to the nation’s airports to stop travelers from several Muslim countries from entering the United States in a dramatic demonstration of how he would deliver on his campaign promise to fortify the nation’s borders.

    But so many foreigners had flooded into the country since January, he vented to his national security team, that it was making a mockery of his pledge. Friends were calling to say he looked like a fool, Mr. Trump said.

    No foreigners, god damn it! We don’t want all these stinkin foreigners stinkin up our beautiful country with all its beautiful golf courses and Luxxury High Righzez. Our country is for not-foreign white people with beautiful golden hair.

    Then he started reading from the doc, which listed how many dastardly foreigners had received visas to come into the beautiful US in 2017.

    More than 2,500 were from Afghanistan, a terrorist haven, the president complained.

    Haiti had sent 15,000 people. They “all have AIDS,” he grumbled, according to one person who attended the meeting and another person who was briefed about it by a different person who was there.

    Forty thousand had come from Nigeria, Mr. Trump added. Once they had seen the United States, they would never “go back to their huts” in Africa, recalled the two officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss a sensitive conversation in the Oval Office.

    That’s the president of the US. That’s the squalid reality we’re living in. Everybody’s meanest ugliest racist uncle is the president.

    Kelly and Tillerson tried to explain that many of the visas were just temporary ones for visits, but then Kelly and Miller turned on Tillerson, blaming him for all these filthy foreigners, causing him to blow a gasket.

    It’s a miracle they haven’t melted us all down for soap yet.

    Tempers flared and Mr. Kelly asked that the room be cleared of staff members. But even after the door to the Oval Office was closed, aides could still hear the president berating his most senior advisers.

    For not moving quickly enough on the ethnic cleansing.

    The meeting in June reflects Mr. Trump’s visceral approach to an issue that defined his campaign and has indelibly shaped the first year of his presidency.

    It reflects everything – his “visceral” racism and general loathing for people he sees as inferiors, his rage and hatred and lack of control, his grandiosity and cluelessness about the extent of his power, his hideous urges, his authoritarianism, his filthy temper – his thoroughgoing badness on every dimension.

    Seizing on immigration as the cause of countless social and economic problems, Mr. Trump entered office with an agenda of symbolic but incompletely thought-out goals, the product not of rigorous policy debate but of emotionally charged personal interactions and an instinct for tapping into the nativist views of white working-class Americans.

    But mostly of his own hateful malevolent nature. He boils with loathing, and it bursts out of him all the time (think April Ryan and that press conference and the way he spoke to her). He’s that mean drunk at the bar who empties the room.

    Those who know Mr. Trump say that his attitude toward immigrants long predates his entry into politics.

    “He’s always been fearful where other cultures are concerned and always had anxiety about food and safety when he travels,” said Michael D’Antonio, who interviewed him for the biography “The Truth About Trump.” “His objectification and demonization of people who are different has festered for decades.”

    He thinks they’re dirty. He’s that literal-minded. That’s what all the gold is about, maybe – purity and Cleanness, along with Expense. Gold people are white and clean, and poor people are brown and dirty.

    Happy holidays.

  • From e pluribus unum to MAGA

    Oh gawd.

    There’s such a thing as a presidential coin. Presidents give them out as little presents. Trump decided they weren’t flashy enough so he came up with his own new design.

    The presidential seal has been replaced by an eagle bearing President Trump’s signature. The eagle’s head faces right, not left, as on the seal. The 13 arrows representing the original states have disappeared. And the national motto, “E pluribus unum” — a Latin phrase that means “Out of many, one” — is gone.

    Instead, both sides of the coin feature Trump’s official campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

    The presidential seal has been replaced by an eagle bearing President Trump’s signature. The eagle’s head faces right, not left, as on the seal. The 13 arrows representing the original states have disappeared. And the national motto, “E pluribus unum” — a Latin phrase that means “Out of many, one” — is gone.

    Instead, both sides of the coin feature Trump’s official campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

    Mere words can’t do justice to its ugliness. The Post kindly put it next to three of the previous type for a snapshot.

    Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post

    So ugly, so vulgar, so inappropriate (the campaign slogan! his name in three places! the garish colors!), so narcissistic.

  • The chorus of delegitimation

    Yascha Mounk at the NYRB takes a less optimistic view, pointing out how far the Overton window has shifted in the past 11 months.

    [W]hile many of the violations of basic democratic norms that President Trump and his collaborators have perpetrated over the past twelve months would not have been foreseeable before he took office, most of them had come to seem all-but-inevitable by the time he actually committed them. Trump’s unwillingness to dissociate himself from his most radical supporters was evident throughout the opening months of his presidency. The firing of FBI Director James Comey was preceded by a series of outrageous attacks. Even Trump’s endorsement of Roy Moore in the Alabama special election seemed inevitable by the time he tweeted his support.

    These realities make it all the more infuriating that we are now hurtling toward yet another constitutional crisis, and that supposedly moderate Republicans are once again refusing to do anything about it.

    Isn’t it though. We read stories in the Post about Republicans in Congress who are disgusted shocked appalled by Trump and yet…they never do a damn thing about it.

    For the better part of a month, Fox News and other conservative media outlets have been smearing Special Counsel Robert Mueller, all but calling him an enemy of the American people. Over the past week, a series of senior Republicans have joined in the chorus of delegitimation, with a host of voices—from Mike Conaway, who leads the investigation of Trump’s campaign on the House Intelligence Committee, to John Cornyn, who heads the Senate equivalent—insinuating that it is time to wrap up the special counsel’s investigation.

    In short, they’ve been clearing the path of brambles so that Trump can careen madly down it and fire Mueller at the end.

    I fear that there is a simple reason for skepticism about whether Congress will defend the rule of law: over the past year, Republicans had a comparatively easy way to police this particular red line without overtly opposing Trump. “Obviously,” they could have said, “the president would never do anything as crazy as this; but if he did fire Robert Mueller, I would have to support congressional action to reinstate him.” Indeed, following that rationale, they could easily have signed onto bipartisan legislation that would have stopped Trump from being able to fire Mueller in a fit of rage in the first place.

    Instead, virtually all of them refused to comment; the few who did actively conspired in undermining Mueller. (When former attorney general Eric Holder claimed to speak “on behalf of the vast majority of the American people,” when he said that “any attempt to remove Bob Mueller will not be tolerated,” for example, Senator Cornyn replied, simply, “You don’t.”)

    Yes he does – but that’s not the point; the point is that Cornyn spurned Eric Holder’s warning about firing Mueller. Remember what Mueller is investigating? Russia’s interference with the election. The Overton window is out of sight somewhere over the horizon.

  • Trump could

    Painter and Eisen on the ways Trump can and cannot impede Mueller.

    Mr. Trump could install someone at the Department of Justice to oversee Mr. Mueller’s investigation, a minder who could control (and cut) Mr. Mueller’s budget, eliminate some of his team or curtail the scope of his investigation. Mr. Mueller seems safe as long as his current supervisor, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, is in place; Mr. Rosenstein just vouched for the special counsel before Congress. But the president has reportedly grumbled about Mr. Rosenstein and could replace him with a crony who would be more willing to interfere.

    As Nixon tried to do. It didn’t work out for Nixon, but he didn’t have a Republican Congress…and Republicans weren’t as cynically indifferent to law and morality then.

    The president may also try to pardon away the special counsel’s investigation. Mr. Trump could grant pardons to individuals who have already pleaded guilty, such as Michael Flynn, his former national security adviser, who pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. this month. Or Mr. Trump might do so prospectively, to those who may be targets, such as his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, or his son Donald Trump Jr. Mr. Trump might even issue one to himself (he reportedly asked about it), whether individually or as part of a blanket pardon of all those involved in the Russia investigation.

    And then we would know we were stuck in a tinpot dictatorship. It would be terrifying.

    They can talk smack about Mueller, and they are, but it’s a hard sell when Trump is such a puffed-up turd of a man and Mueller is not.

    Trump could just fire Mueller. He said the other day that he’s not planning to, but so what, he says all kinds of things (that’s what makes him such an expert on all the things), and he could say the opposite tomorrow, or just do it without saying anything.

    The drumbeat of distortions and threats will, sadly, continue and must be promptly rebutted by commentators, Congress and the public. Democracy demands defense with analysis, opinion and the readiness for public protest (one of the co-authors, Mr. Eisen, has been involved in organizing these efforts). Peaceful force is something that Mr. Trump has made clear he understands. We must continue to deploy it, lest the president achieve by debasement what our collective efforts have thus far prevented him from doing directly: stopping Robert Mueller’s investigation.

    I wish us all the best of luck.

  • You gonna respect us?

    The UN told Trump to go fuck himself.

    The United Nations general assembly has delivered a stinging rebuke to Donald Trump, voting by a huge majority to reject his unilateral recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

    The vote came after a redoubling of threats by Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, who said that Washington would remember which countries “disrespected” America by voting against it.

    Jesus. Who else talks like that? Bullies, that’s who. “You will respect me or else.”

    Despite the warning, 128 members voted on Thursday in favour of the resolution supporting the longstanding international consensus that the status of Jerusalem – which is claimed as a capital by both Israel and the Palestinians – can only be settled as an agreed final issue in a peace deal. Countries which voted for the resolution included major recipients of US aid such as Egypt, Afghanistan and Iraq.

    Although largely symbolic, the vote in emergency session of the world body had been the focus of days of furious diplomacy by both the Trump administration and Israel, including Trump’s threat to cut US funding to countries that did not back the US recognition.

    But only nine states – including the United States and Israel –voted against the resolution. The other countries which supported Washington were Togo, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Marshall Islands, Guatemala and Honduras.

    Ouch. Micronesia – says it all, dunnit.

    35 countries abstained, including a lot of allies like Australia and Canada.

    While support for the resolution was somewhat less than Palestinian officials had hoped, the meagre tally of just nine votes in support of the US and Israeli position was a serious diplomatic blow for Trump.

    On the one hand he’ll hurl insults about it, on the other hand he’ll blame it all on Hillary and Fake News and The Swamp. What he won’t do is learn anything or feel chastened.

    Speaking to the assembly before the vote, Haley – who earlier in the week told members that the US “would be taking names” – returned to the offensive.

    She never left the offensive. She’s stuck in the offensive as long as she works for that excrescence.

    “I must also say today: when we make generous contributions to the UN, we also have expectation that we will be respected,” she said. “What’s more, we are being asked to pay for the dubious privileges of being disrespected.”

    Who’s “we”? She doesn’t represent the whole of the US, and Trump certainly doesn’t. US payments to the UN don’t come out of Trump’s pocket, and he doesn’t get to take UN votes personally.

    While Thursday’s resolution was in support of existing UN resolutions on Jerusalem and the peace process, the clumsy intervention by Trump and Haley also made the vote a referendum on Trump’s often unilateral and abrasive foreign policy.

    You know, the foreign policy designed to insult and alienate everyone on the planet except for Netanyahu – that “foreign policy.”

    Updating to add: