Tag: Trump

  • One heck of a leader

    Don’t read this if you’re feeling at all queasy. It was party time at Donnie’s place yesterday.

    President Donald Trump recognized the “great chairman” Sen. Orrin Hatch while celebrating the passage of the Republican tax plan Wednesday on the White House steps.

    In turn, Hatch, R-Utah, said, “We’re going to keep fighting to make this the greatest presidency we’ve seen not only in generations but maybe ever.”

    That’s like holding a bowl of warm shit and saying you’re going to keep fighting to make this the most beautiful marble sculpture we’ve seen not only in generations but maybe ever. You can’t turn a bowl of warm shit into a marble sculpture and you can’t turn a Trump presidency into the greatest ever seen. You don’t have the materials.

    Exultant House and Senate Republican leaders gathered with Trump on the White House South Lawn to hail the newly passed tax overhaul and slap each other on the back, with no one heaping higher praise on the president than Hatch.

    “Mr. President, I have to say you’re living up to everything I thought you would,” the seven-term senator said. “You’re one heck of a leader.”

    I did warn you.

  • Exceptions

    Robinson Meyer at the Atlantic reminds us that Twitter carves out big exceptions to its new policy.

    The guidelines do not draw a distinction between user behavior on or off the site: If someone tweets only in coded language on Twitter, but calls for racial violence or genocide elsewhere on the web or in person, then they could still be banned from the service.

    While logos or symbols affiliated with hate groups will not result in someone getting banned, they will carry a sensitive media tag, meaning that they will not automatically display to the site’s users.

    But “context matters when evaluating for abusive behavior,” warns Twitter, and they have included two big exceptions in the new policy. First, their ban on advocating violence against civilians does not apply to “military or government entities.” Second, they may moderate their own rules if “the behavior is newsworthy and in the legitimate public interest.”

    Ah. Guess who fits both of those categories.

    These rules aren’t just an insurance policy for the company—they’ve already been used to shield the president from suspension. In September, when Trump warned in a tweet that “Little Rocket Man … won’t be around much longer,” the company said that the threatening tweets didn’t violate its guidelines because they were “newsworthy.”

    Now the company has slapped on another policy, and Trump—and other government and military leaders—will get the same monopoly on violence on Twitter that they already enjoy out in the world.

    At least we’ll have a thorough understanding of why the nukes are headed this way.

  • Trump über alles

    Max Boot at Foreign Policy also lines up the sinister portents hinting at a near future in which a criminal overturns the US government and takes dictatorial power.

    There is the claim that Mueller is biased because he is friends with fired FBI Director James Comey, who is anti-Trump even though Comey did as much as anyone to elect Trump. That members of Mueller’s staff have made campaign donations to Democrats. That the FBI erred in showing interest in the dossier on Kremlin-Trump links compiled by a respected former MI6 officer. That FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s wife received money from Hillary Clinton (in fact, she received campaign funds from the Democratic Party of Virginia and a political action committee associated with Virginia’s Democratic governor when she ran for a state Senate seat in 2015).

    Based on such flimsy reasoning, Trump besmirches not just Mueller’s team but the whole FBI, tweeting: “After years of Comey, with the phony and dishonest Clinton investigation (and more), running the FBI, its reputation is in Tatters – worst in History!” At his Pensacola rally on Friday, held to promote the Senate candidacy of an accused child molester, Trump decried the entire American government for being biased against him: “This is a rigged system,” he said. “This is a sick system from the inside. And you know there’s no country like our country but we have a lot of sickness in some of our institutions.” It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out which “institutions” he is talking about.

    Naturally, the most fervent Trumpkins have gone even farther than Trump himself; in fact, they are said to be frustrated by the “restraint” he has shown in his war against Mueller. Listen to what the talking heads at state TV, aka Fox News, are saying. Sean Hannity calls Mueller “a disgrace to the American justice system” and “the head of the snake.” Jeanine Piro, sounding very much like a budding commissar, claims: “There is a cleansing needed in the FBI and the Department of Justice. It needs to be cleansed of individuals who should not just be fired, but who need to be taken out in handcuffs.” Greg Jarrett compares the FBI to the KGB, as if the G-men were running gulags in Alaska: “I think we now know that the Mueller investigation is illegitimate and corrupt,” he says . “And Mueller has been using the FBI as a political weapon. And the FBI has become America’s secret police. Secret surveillance, wiretapping, intimidation, harassment and threats. It’s like the old KGB that comes for you in the dark of the night banging through your door.”

    Republicans and the far-right trashing the FBI in order to protect the power of a dimwitted corrupt real estate tycoon with a habit of insulting women. Republicanism has morphed into nihilism as if overnight.

    [G]iven how unfounded and outrageous the attacks are, it is striking and dismaying how few Republicans are rushing to defend Mueller and his team. That is an ominous sign of what will happen if and when Trump tries to fire the special counsel. The GOP has made clear that it is committed not to the rule of law but to the rule of Trump.

    Indeed it has, so what do we do next? What do we do when Trump does fire Mueller and Rosenstein and replaces them with Ty Cobb and Jay Sekulow while the Republicans in Congress applaud? What do we do then?

    I would love to be able to think that’s far-fetched but I’m not.

  • If it ends in .gov

    Speaking of dicks – Trump’s gang is pretending Mueller did a bad.

    A lawyer representing President Trump’s transition team claimed Saturday that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III improperly obtained a trove of transition emails as part of the inquiry into Russian influence in the 2016 election and other matters.

    The batch of emails totaling thousands of pages of communications was provided to Mueller by the federal General Services Administration, a lawyer representing the organization known as Trump for America said in a letter delivered to congressional investigators.

    Blah blah blah unauthorized blah blah private blah.

    Mueller’s people said nah we didn’t.

    The letter from Langhofer is the latest in a series of legal and public relations moves by Trump’s allies to attempt to undermine Mueller’s investigation and portray it as politically motivated.

    With many Republicans in Congress willing and eager to help. Will the US continue as a somewhat valid liberal democracy or will it collapse in a squalid pile of moldy corruption? Nobody knows.

    Randall Eliason, a former federal prosecutor who teaches white collar crime at George Washington University Law School, said it was not at all surprising that Mueller’s team sought Trump transition emails. “It would be almost prosecutorial misconduct for them not to,” he said. He said it was also not surprising that Mueller would ask GSA for emails sent using government accounts.

    “It’s not your personal email. If it ends in .gov, you don’t have any exception of privacy,” he said.

    But he said if Trump’s team had a valid legal claim, there is a standard avenue to pursue — they would file a sealed motion to the judge supervising the grand jury and ask the judge to rule the emails were improperly seized and provide a remedy, like requiring Mueller’s team to return the emails or excluding their use in the investigation.

    “You go to the judge and complain,” he said. “You don’t issue a press release or go to Congress. It appears from the outside that this is part of a pattern of trying to undermine Mueller’s investigation.”

    You put it together with Fox News and you’ve got yourself a winning strategy.

    Rep. Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said the 1963 Presidential Transition Act “simply does not support withholding transition team emails from criminal investigators.”

    “The President’s lawyers have said they want to fully comply with Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation, so it is odd that they now suggest they would have withheld key documents from federal investigators,” Cummings said in a statement.

    Well, by “fully comply” they meant “unless we can find a loophole, however tenuous.”

  • Russia, if you’re listening

    Get a load of this headline at Reuters:

    Trump allies say Mueller unlawfully obtained thousands of emails

    You what? Trump’s friends say Mueller got emails unlawfully? Are they drunk?

    https://youtu.be/gNa2B5zHfbQ

  • Won’t someone please think of the bottled water industry?

    Jonathan Freedland at the Guardian reminds us (as do many) that while we’re fuming at Trump’s misogynist insults he’s doing damage that will last for decades.

    Freedland starts with the murder of net neutrality and the blizzard of judicial appointments.

    Needless to say, 91% of Trump’s nominees are white and 81% are male, re-stacking the judiciary with white men at a rate unseen for 30 years, reversing decades of steady progress towards a bench that resembles the society it judges.

    That’s truer still of his record on the environment, which seems to have no purpose beyond vandalism, erosion of the Obama legacy and the enrichment of his corporate pals. One of Trump’s first acts was lifting the ban on mining companies dumping waste in rivers and streams. Since then he has told national parks they have to resume selling bottled water at sites including the Grand Canyon, even though the ban had prevented the dumping of up to 2m plastic bottles.

    Oh has he. I missed that one. Jessica Glenza in the Guardian September 26.

    A ban on bottled water in 23 national parks prevented up to 2m plastic bottles from being used and discarded every year, a US national park service study found. That is equivalent to up to 326 barrels of oil worth of emissions, 419 cubic yards of landfill space and 111,743lb of plastic, according to the May study.

    Despite that, the Trump administration reversed the bottled water ban just three months later, a decision that horrified conservationists and pleased the bottled water industry.

    More money for people who sell bottled water and shareholders who invest in bottled water companies; that’s the important thing.

    (I remember once grumbling about paper cups for water in a workplace and a co-worker grumbling back about lost jobs if people stopped using a paper cup once then throwing it out. So then why not just buy whole shipments of paper cups and throw them out unused? Or use a separate cup for each sip? Why not set fire to everything as a job creation scheme?)

    The plan to curb pollution in America’s most famous wilderness areas was spurred when arguably its most famous park, the Grand Canyon, banned the sale of plastic water bottles in its gift shops, according to the report. Approximately 331 million people visit US national parks each year.

    The program was meant to support a “life cycle” approach to plastic, which activists say is the largest global threat to the environment behind climate change. One million plastic bottles are sold per minute, according to a Guardian analysis. The top six drink companies in the world use an average of just 6.6% recycled plastic.

    At the same time, new research has shown that plastics which find their way into the sea have entered the food supply. Scientists have found plastic particles in sea salt, honey, fish, beer and tap water.

    But what is all that compared to profits? Who cares about long term damage when there is short term money to be made?

    The agency started allowing parks to ban bottled water in 2011. Since then, the bottled water industry argued that the ban was unfair and eliminated a healthy beverage option, even though hydration stations with free water were installed in parks.

    When the National Park Service ended the ban in August, it echoed an industry argument: “It should be up to our visitors to decide how best to keep themselves and their families hydrated during a visit to a national park, particularly during hot summer visitation periods,” said the acting service director, Michael Reynolds.

    Freedom freedom freedom! Plus expensive bottled water in wasteful harmful plastic bottles. Freedom bottles!

  • Don disappointed

    Trump really really wants to make it more difficult and expensive for women to get contraception because that’s the kind of guy he is, but he’s hit a roadblock.

    A federal court on Friday blocked Trump administration rules that made it easier for employers to deny insurance coverage of contraceptives for women.

    Judge Wendy Beetlestone of the Federal District Court in Philadelphia issued a preliminary injunction, saying the rules contradicted the text of the Affordable Care Act by allowing many employers to opt out of providing contraceptive coverage if they had religious or moral objections.

    In the lawsuit, filed by the State of Pennsylvania, the judge said the rules would cause irreparable harm because tens of thousands of women would lose contraceptive coverage.

    Aw. Poor Don. He would have loved that. He takes such pleasure in seeing other people fucked over thanks to him.

    “A simple hypothetical illustrates the insidious effect of the moral exemption rule,” Judge Beetlestone wrote. “It would allow an employer with a sincerely held moral conviction that women do not have a place in the workplace to simply stop providing contraceptive coverage.”

    It is, she said, difficult to imagine a rule that “intrudes more into the lives of women.”

    Yes, well, that’s the point. That’s what makes it so much fun.

    In her opinion, Judge Beetlestone said Pennsylvania was likely to succeed in its challenge to the birth control rules. In issuing the rules, she said, the Trump administration did not follow “proper procedure.” Federal officials, she said, flouted the Administrative Procedure Act, which generally requires agencies to seek public comment before adopting regulations that have the force of law.

    Public comment!! But Trump is the boss. He’s the top guy! He can fire anyone he wants to! He’s like a king, he’s like Putin. Public gots nothing to do with it; public does what he tells it to do.

    For its part, the Trump administration said that the contraceptive coverage mandate imposed a “substantial burden” on the exercise of religion by certain employers. The new rules, relaxing the mandate, fulfilled a campaign pledge by President Trump, who said that employers should not be “bullied by the federal government because of their religious beliefs.”

    But of course employees should be bullied by the Trump administration because of their failure to be men.

  • Let’s see

    He also hinted he plans to pardon Flynn.

    “I don’t want to talk about pardons for Michael Flynn yet,” Mr. Trump said. “We’ll see what happens. Let’s see. I can say this: When you look at what’s gone on with the F.B.I. and with the Justice Department, people are very, very angry.”

    There’s that theory of mind problem again. He watches Fox and translates that into “people” in general. His people are a minority, at this point a quite small minority.

  • Trump pretends to know what “disgraceful” means

    Trump is attempting to convince us all that he gets to fire Mueller and pardon Flynn and go on his way rejoicing.

    President Trump said Friday there is tremendous anger over what he called the FBI’s “disgraceful’’ behavior, taking aim at the bureau just before he appeared at its training facility to praise the nation’s police officers.

    “It’s a shame what’s happened with the FBI,’’ the president told reporters as he prepared to depart the White House for a ceremony at the FBI’s National Academy in Quantico, Va., where more than 200 law enforcement officers graduated from a program that imparts FBI expertise and standards.

    “We’re going to rebuild the FBI, it’ll be bigger and better than ever, but it is very sad when you look at those documents, and how they’ve done that is really, really disgraceful, and you have a lot of very angry people that are seeing it,’’ Trump said.

    Nah. Far more people think Trump is disgraceful.

    Mind you, the FBI has plenty of disgrace in its history. But what Trump is talking about? Nah.

    Trump appeared on a stage there alongside FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whointroduced the president by calling him “our nation’s highest law enforcement official.’’ That title carries possible implications for the ongoing criminal probe into whether Trump attempted to obstruct justice leading up to the firing of FBI Director James B. Comey in May.

    The president’s defenders say that, as the nation’s top law enforcement official, he cannot obstruct justice by firing the head of the FBI. However, in past administrations that phrase has been used to describe the attorney general, not the president.

    Plus lawyers have been lining up to say no that claim is ludicrous and wrong.

    Just another routine day in Trump.

  • All about him

    The Post has a big think piece on Trump’s completely self-centered attitude to the Russia question. On the one hand yo, national security, rival power, hostile rival power; on the other hand, me me me me ME me me.

    The result is without obvious parallel in U.S. history, a situation in which the personal insecurities of the president — and his refusal to accept what even many in his administration regard as objective reality — have impaired the government’s response to a national security threat. The repercussions radiate across the government.

    Rather than search for ways to deter Kremlin attacks or safeguard U.S. elections, Trump has waged his own campaign to discredit the case that Russia poses any threat and he has resisted or attempted to roll back efforts to hold Moscow to account.

    Because it’s insulting to him and diminishes his Triumph, and that outweighs the rather larger issue of who and what Putin is and what kind of society he presides over and what kind of society he will allow us to have and whether we want him deciding our elections for us.

    To put it another way, the personal insecurities of the president should be entirely beside the point on an issue of this magnitude, yet they are central. The giant narcissism of one Giant Baby could ruin everything in a way even the megalomania of Hitler failed to do.

    White House officials cast the president’s refusal to acknowledge Russian interference in the election as an understandably human reaction. “The president obviously feels . . . that the idea that he’s been put into office by Vladi­mir Putin is pretty insulting,” said a second senior administration official.

    Jesus christ. This isn’t fucking high school. It doesn’t matter what the president feels is “insulting” to his precious Self. Nobody should care what he “feels” about it. (It’s usually the hard right that is scornful of Feelings; I guess Trump is the One Great Exception.)

    Meanwhile, the Russians feel good about it. It didn’t cost much and it has made the US a joke.

    The Russian operation seemed intended to aggravate political polarization and racial tensions and to diminish U.S. influence abroad. The United States’ closest alliances are frayed, and the Oval Office is occupied by a disruptive politician who frequently praises his counterpart in Russia.

    What’s not to like?

    U.S. officials declined to discuss whether the stream of recent intelligence on Russia has been shared with Trump. Current and former officials said that his daily intelligence update — known as the president’s daily brief, or PDB — is often structured to avoid upsetting him.

    Ponder that little bombshell. His daily intelligence update is often structured to avoid upsetting him.

    Russia-related intelligence that might draw Trump’s ire is in some cases included only in the written assessment and not raised orally, said a former senior intelligence official familiar with the matter.

    Which, the Post neglects to spell out, means he’ll never be aware of it, because he doesn’t read. He’s that incompetent for the job. (Bush was close to that incompetent for the job. He demanded and got very short briefings, because he too dislikes reading.)

    The allegations of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, which the president has denied categorically, also contribute to his resistance to endorse the intelligence, another senior White House official said. Acknowledging Russian interference, Trump believes, would give ammunition to his critics.

    Still others close to Trump explain his aversion to the intelligence findings in more psychological terms. The president, who burns with resentment over perceived disrespect from the Washington establishment, sees the Russia inquiry as a conspiracy to undermine his election accomplishment — “a witch hunt,” as he often calls it.

    “If you say ‘Russian interference,’ to him it’s all about him,” said a senior Republican strategist who has discussed the matter with Trump’s confidants. “He judges everything as about him.”

    It’s a loop that he’s caught in. If you’re that entangled in your own ego you can’t get interested in what’s outside your own ego, so you get only more entangled in your own ego, and on it goes.

    All this was perfectly obvious before he was elected. I will never understand why the danger of it was not equally obvious.

  • The war continues

    Meanwhile Congressional Republicans are also pretending to think Mueller is a Secret Agent for The Democrats Plus The Devil Plus The King of the Mooslims.

    Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein adamantly defended the character and impartiality of Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, as he came head-to-head on Wednesday with an increasingly aggressive campaign by Republicans to discredit the inquiry.

    The Republicans’ effort received a fresh jolt from the release one night earlier of text messages exchanged last year between an F.B.I. agent, Peter Strzok, and an F.B.I. lawyer, Lisa Page, describing the possibility of an election victory by President Trump as “terrifying” and saying that Hillary Clinton “just has to win.” Mr. Mueller removed Mr. Strzok from the Russia investigation as soon as he learned of the texts, a step that Mr. Rosenstein praised.

    But is that political? Or is it because Trump is the most disgusting person in the world? That’s the thing about Trump: the horror of him goes way beyond the political, even though the political is certainly included. He’s a terrible person in every perceptible way, and he’s in a position to do damage we quail from itemizing. He terrifies plenty of Republicans.

    “The public trust in this whole thing is gone,” said Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, summing up sentiments among his party. “It seems to me there are two things you can do: You can disband the Mueller special prosecutor, and you can do what we’ve all called for and appoint a second special counsel to look into this.”

    But the swelling campaign to undermine Mr. Mueller’s investigation, which has dominated conservative media for days, appeared to have little effect on Mr. Rosenstein, who oversees Mr. Mueller. Mr. Rosenstein said he would only fire Mr. Mueller if he had cause under Justice Department regulations — and he said nothing that has happened so far met that standard.

    There’s no low they won’t happily stoop to.

    Republicans repeatedly pressed Mr. Rosenstein to appoint a second special counsel to investigate political partisanship in the department in its handling of the Trump-Russia investigation or in last year’s decision not to charge Mrs. Clinton with a crime over her use of a private email server while secretary of state — an idea that has been promoted heavily by commentators on Fox News and elsewhere in recent days.

    Fox News is running the country now. Not informing the people who run the country along with the citizens who vote for them, but just plain running the damn country. It’s so pathetic.

    Mr. Mueller, a registered Republican appointed by President George W. Bush to direct the F.B.I., has long had critics in the most pro-Trump corners of the House and the conservative news media. But in recent weeks, as his investigation has delivered a series of indictments to high-profile associates of the president and evidence that at least two of them are cooperating with the inquiry, those critics have grown louder and in numbers.

    So the more criminal Trump appears to be, the harder Fox and Co try to protect him. I see.

    Democrats say the pattern is becoming clear: As Mr. Mueller moves closer to Mr. Trump’s inner circle, Republicans try to discredit federal law enforcement and undercut the eventual findings of the special counsel. The Republican effort may also be intended to blunt the political repercussions should Mr. Mueller be fired, Democrats say.

    Representative Jerrold Nadler, the Judiciary Committee’s senior Democrat, called the new Republican demands “wildly dangerous” to American institutions.

    “I understand the instinct to want to give cover to the president,” he said. “I am fearful that the majority’s effort to turn the tables on the special counsel will get louder and more frantic as the walls continue to close in around the president.”

    Perhaps more portentous is the restive Senate, a less partisan body where Mr. Mueller’s appointment in May was greeted with relief. Skepticism about the special counsel’s investigation is starting to take root there, too.

    It’s sickening and alarming.

  • Defending the tweet during her daily press briefing

    They’ll defend anything. Sanders will defend anything. Trump could eat a toddler on live tv and she would say “Look, the president is always going to be somebody who has a big appetite.”

    “There’s no way that this is sexist at all,” said White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, defending the tweet during her daily press briefing Tuesday afternoon. “Look, the president is always going to be somebody who responds,” she also said. “We’ve said that many times before.”

    Look, that’s such a vacuous thing to say. Look, you can’t just brush aside loathsome sexist and racist tweets and remarks by saying he’s always going to be sexist and racist. Look, you can’t just blithely excuse everything by telling us what we already know, which is that Trump is a guy who does shit like this. We know he is; that’s the point – he’s a terrible human being and a disgrace to the country.

    Of the five senators who at the time of Trump’s tweet had called for the president to resign, Gillibrand was the only woman. She was also the only one he went after on Twitter.

    But Sanders insisted that has nothing to do with Gillibrand’s gender. “This is simply talking about a system that we have that is broken in which special interests control our government and I don’t think that there’s probably many people that are more controlled by political contributions than the senator the president referenced,” Sanders said, expanding on the president’s tweet with a more serious charge.

    Ironically, it’s true that we have a broken system and that corporate interests control our government, but the implication that Trump opposes that is laughable.

  • Enough

    BBC World anchor Katty Kay in DC:

  • Would do anything

    President Piggy’s carrying on is even international news. The BBC is reporting it, with “slut shaming” in the headline.

    US President Donald Trump has been accused of trying to “slut shame” a female senator who demanded he quit over sexual misconduct claims.

    Mr Trump claimed Kirsten Gillibrand had come “begging” to him for campaign donations and “would do anything” for cash.

    Senator Elizabeth Warren said the president was “trying to bully, intimidate and slut-shame” her fellow Democrat.

    Yes she did.

    In Tuesday morning’s tweet, the US president accused Ms Gillibrand of being a lackey to Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer.

    “Lightweight Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a total flunky for Chuck Schumer and someone who would come to my office ‘begging’ for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them), is now in the ring fighting against Trump,” the US president posted.

    Mr Trump did not explain what he meant by “do anything” for campaign contributions.

    Wink wink nudge nudge.

    Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, a frequent critic of the president, tweeted that “America must reject Trump’s sexist slurs”.

    The only way to do that is to reject Trump. Let’s do that.

  • Way to fire us up

    There’s nothing quite like a rich white ignorant talentless man in a position of maximum power telling women to shut up for making women get EVEN LOUDER.

    That’s especially true when he’s a rich white ignorant talentless man with a long history of assaulting and insulting women.

    It’s especially true when he’s a rich white ignorant talentless man with a long history of assaulting and insulting women who are orders of magnitude more intelligent and better informed and more ethically aware than he is.

    President Trump forcefully entered the national debate about sexual harassment on Tuesday, again dismissing his own accusers as fabricating their stories and saying that a prominent Democratic senator, a woman, “would do anything” for campaign contributions and calling her a “lightweight.”

    The president’s attacks came in early morning Twitter posts after several of the accusers had come forward on Monday to renew their charges that Mr. Trump had sexually assaulted them before he was president. His Twitter attack also came after the senator, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, had called for him to resign.

    By inserting himself directly into the discussion, the president ensured that calls for revived scrutiny over the women’s allegations would gain new energy and prominence.

    Go on, President Pussygrabber, insult us some more. We’ll sink our fangs into your ankles so hard a crowbar can’t get us off you.

    Gillibrand briskly pointed out that Trump’s tweet was a sexist smear.

    The president was pointed in his criticism of Ms. Gillibrand, saying she “would do anything” for campaign contributions, without providing details about what he meant.

    Oh, you know – the usual – blow jobs for drunken sailors, that kind of thing.

    On Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Trump ignored a shouted question from a reporter about what he meant in his Twitter post.

    Coward. Weasel. He can say anything on Twitter, but in person he just scowls and ignores.

    “In his tweets, whether intentionally or not, Donald Trump cues these gendered beliefs that women are less capable (or “lightweight”) and that ambition in women is something to be maligned,” said Kelly Dittmar, a scholar at the Center for Women and Politics at Rutgers University, in an emailed message.

    Of course it’s intentionally. Don’t be giving him wiggle room. He doesn’t trip on a White House carpet and accidentally tweet that Gillibrand is a lightweight. (I know, that’s not what she meant. She meant that he says these things from his foul id and may not be consciously aware of how coded they are. I know. But it’s one of those things where you don’t get to plead ignorance as an excuse. His foul id is reekingly sexist and it knows what it’s doing, even if Definitely Disgusting Donnie doesn’t.)

    Christine Matthews, a Republican pollster, said Mr. Trump was following his playbook by going “full force against accusers.”

    “I think he’s worse with women but he just throws every insult that he can possibly throw,” she said. “That ‘would do anything to get elected’ is fairly ominous — it can be taken in a way that is very suggestive, and I think that is obviously horrible.”

    She said that the political climate had changed and that there was no returning to a time when sexual harassment was tolerated. “Having a president who attacks other women for how they look or suggests that they are sexually promiscuous or liars, it’s going to hurt the party over all,” Ms. Matthews said.

    Is it? When?

  • The shame of a nation

    Donald Trump on whatever popped into his head:

    Why is he suddenly starting almost every word with a Capital Letter?

  • Seldom, if ever

    Trump wants us to know that he doesn’t squander his valuable time watching tv. Instead he squanders it telling us he doesn’t squander it watching tv.

    Cool story, but the Post rudely points out that the timing doesn’t back him up.

    President Trump tweeted on Monday morning that he does not watch as much television as a recent New York Times report claimed, adding that he “seldom, if ever,” tunes in to CNN or MSNBC.

    The tweet posted just 28 minutes after MSNBC wrapped up a segment about the Times report and 30 minutes after CNN did the same.

    I guess he thought the 28 minutes would be enough to throw us off the scent.

    The timing could be a coincidence. Or it could mean that Trump was doing the very thing he denied — watching CNN and MSNBC — shortly before he tweeted.

    Short time?! It was 28 minutes! Long long time, no possible connection between the two.

    One of the Times journalists who reported the story, Peter Baker, appeared on “Morning Joe” on Monday to discuss the president’s TV habit.

    “He likes this jolt of television he doesn’t agree with,” Baker said of Trump…

    Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio appeared on CNN around the same time that Baker was on MSNBC and said that “people who have been around the president for any real period of time know that he is a television addict. He’s probably watching us right now.”

    Image result for waving

  • There were at least 10 billion people there

    Meanwhile Trump is still frantically rubbing his narcissism in full public view.

    President Trump on Saturday called for a Washington Post reporter to be fired over a misleading tweet about the size of the crowd at a rally for the president on Friday in Pensacola, Fla.

    The reporter, Dave Weigel, posted a picture of an arena with many empty seats. He deleted the tweet after learning that the venue had not yet filled up.

    On Saturday night, the president posted a screenshot of Mr. Weigel’s tweet and other photos that showed a crowded arena. “Demand apology & retraction from FAKE NEWS WaPo!” he wrote.

    But it was a tweet – not an article in the Post, a tweet.

    The president of the US, whining on Twitter about one guy posting one tweet. The president of the US, targeting one guy on Twitter for mass harassment. What will he do next, start throwing toddlers into federal prison for sucking their thumbs?

    Trump demanded an apology and got it.

    Trump responded by saying he should be fired.

    Fired from his job for a personal tweet.

    I guess before long it will be a capital crime to say Trump’s audience was very very very very small?

    Mr. Trump’s outburst on Saturday was not the first time he had expressed anger at the news media for its coverage of attendance at his rallies and other events.

    After taking office in January, he accused journalists of deliberately understating the size of the crowd at his inauguration and said that up to 1.5 million people were in attendance, a claim that photographs disproved. Analyses of news footage showed that fewer people attended Mr. Trump’s inauguration than President Barack Obama’s in 2009.

    Don’t ever say Trump has a tiny audience.

    Image result for nuremberg rally

  • Very big phrases, very big words

    He really did say it. Go to 2:20 and see for yourself; he really said it. “That’s big stuff. That’s big stuff. Those are very big phrases, very big words.”

    He’d just gotten through saying them – oppression, cruelty, injustice, inflicted – and he managed it without stumbling. Ooooooh Mommy I said the big big words.

    It should have been John Lewis. John Lewis stayed away because Trump was there – so instead of John Lewis who actually understands and feels the words because he lived them, they got Trump who thinks they’re meaningless, and couldn’t care less.

    Editing to add a photo from March 2015:

    Image result for obama edmund pettus bridge

  • Truth is in the bubble

    And then – more from the Times piece – there’s Trump’s way of evaluating fact claims.

    In almost all the interviews, Mr. Trump’s associates raised questions about his capacity and willingness to differentiate bad information from something that is true.

    Monitoring his information consumption — and countering what Mr. Kelly calls “garbage” peddled to him by outsiders — remains a priority for the chief of staff and the team he has made his own. Even after a year of official briefings and access to the best minds of the federal government, Mr. Trump is skeptical of anything that does not come from inside his bubble.

    The hardcore Trumpists of course think that’s a good thing. His bubble is the best bubble, the only true bubble, the MAGA bubble, the swamp-draining bubble.

    Other aides bemoan his tenuous grasp of facts, jack-rabbit attention span and propensity for conspiracy theories.

    Or, to put it another way, they bemoan his profound stupidity, his ignorance, his childish frivolity…as well they might.

    Jeanine Pirro, whose Fox News show is a presidential favorite, recently asked to meet about a deal approved while Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state that gave Russia control over some American uranium, which lately has become a favorite focus of conservatives.

    Mr. Trump, Mr. Kelly and Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, met for more than an hour on Nov. 1 as Ms. Pirro whipped up the president against Mr. Mueller and accused James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, of employing tactics typically reserved for Mafia cases, according to a person briefed on the meeting.

    The president became visibly agitated as she spoke.

    That’s disgusting – a Fox News hack telling lies about Comey to a credulous childish president.

    Mr. Trump is an avid newspaper reader who still marks up a half-dozen papers with comments in black Sharpie pen, but Mr. Bannon has told allies that Mr. Trump only “reads to reinforce.” Mr. Trump’s insistence on defining his own reality — his repeated claims, for example, that he actually won the popular vote — is immutable and has had a “numbing effect” on people who work with him, said Tony Schwartz, his ghostwriter on “The Art of the Deal.”

    “He wears you down,” Mr. Schwartz said.

    Indeed he does. Everyone I know is worn down.