Tag: Trump

Aw. He mad.

Time Magazine called to say that I was PROBABLY going to be named “Man (Person) of the Year,” like last year, but I would have to agree to an interview and a major photo shoot. I said probably is no good and took a pass. Thanks anyway!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 24, 2017

That interview Terry Gross did with Luke Harding about his book on Trump and Russia.

The new book “Collusion” is about what the author, my guest Luke Harding, says appears to be an emerging pattern of collusion between Russia, Donald Trump and his campaign. Harding also writes about how Russia appears to have started cultivating Trump back in 1987. The book is based on original reporting as well as on the Trump-Russia dossier compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. Harding met with Steele twice, once before and once after the dossier became public. Harding had a lot of good contacts to draw on for this book because he spent four years as the Moscow bureau chief for the British newspaper The Guardian. During that time, the Kremlin didn’t like some of the stories Harding was investigating, and in 2011, he was expelled. In Moscow, he learned a lot about Russian espionage partly through his own experience of being spied on and harassed.

The Russians were paying attention to Trump in the 1970s when he married Ivana, on account of how she’s from Czechoslovakia which was then a satellite of the Soviet Union.

But I think what’s kind of interesting about this story, if you understand the kind of Russian espionage background, is Trump’s first visit to Soviet Moscow in 1987. He went with Ivana. He writes about it in “The Art Of The Deal,” his best-selling memoir. He talks about getting an invitation from the Soviet government to go over there. And he makes it seem kind of rather casual. But what I discovered from my research is that there was actually a concerted effort by the Soviet government via the ambassador at the time, who was newly arrived, a guy called Yuri Dubinin, to kind of charm Trump, to flatter him, to woo him almost. And Dubinin’s daughter, sort of who was part of this process, said that the ambassador rushed up to the top of Trump Tower, basically kind of breezed into Trump’s office and he melted. That’s the verb she used. He melted.

GROSS: That Trump melted when he was flattered.

HARDING: Yeah. That Trump melted with this kind of flattery. And several months later, he gets an invitation to go on an all-expenses-paid trip behind the Iron Curtain to Soviet Moscow. Now, a couple of things which were important here. One of them is that his trip was arranged by Intourist, which is the Soviet travel agency. Now, I’ve talked to defectors and others who say – this is actually fairly well-known – that Intourist is basically the KGB. It was the organization which monitored foreigners going into the Soviet Union and kept an eye on them when they were there. So kind of he went with KGB travel. Now, according to “The Art Of The Deal,” he met various Soviet officials there. Who they were, we don’t know. But what we can say with certainty is that his hotel, just off Red Square, the National Hotel, would have been bugged, that there was already a kind of dossier on Trump. And this would have been supplemented with whatever was picked up from encounters with him, from intercept, from his hotel room.

He was in their file system. He was just a rich punk then, but you never know. Strange things can happen with rich punks.

You know, we can’t say that Trump was recruited in 1987. But what we can say with absolute certainty is there was a very determined effort by the Soviets to bring him over, and that moreover, his personality was the kind of thing they were looking for. They were looking for narcissists. They were looking for people who were kind of – dare I say it – corruptible, interested in money, people who were not necessarily faithful in their marriages and also sort of opportunists who were not very strong analysts or principle people. And if you work your way down the list through these sort of – the KGB’s personality questionnaire, Donald Trump ticks every single box.

Bing, bing, bing, bing. Narcissistic; corrupt; pussygrabber; morally empty. That’s our guy!

And there’s a kind of curious coda to this, which is, two months after his trip – actually, less than two months, he comes back from Moscow and, having previously shown very little interest in foreign policy, he takes out these full-page advertisements in The Washington Post and a couple of other U.S. newspapers basically criticizing Ronald Reagan and criticizing Reagan’s foreign policy.

In 1987. I did not know that.

When Trump started up with the birther crap, the Russians started cultivating him again.

HARDING: Yeah. And, Terry, what you also have to understand is that Putin has a kind of very clear goal here. He’s got a clear political goal, which is to get the United States to lift sanctions which were imposed by the Obama administration on Russia in 2014, after the war in Ukraine and after Putin basically stole Crimea using kind of military force. And the thing is, sort of sanctions play into the Russian domestic political conversation because despite what state TV says there they have had an overwhelmingly negative effect on the economy. People have felt them, they’re fantastically irritated. Putin’s kind of oligarchic inner circle, many of whom are now sanctioned. They can’t travel to the U.S., they can’t travel to the European Union. They can no longer access their yachts in the Mediterranean or their wine cellars in Switzerland. They see this as an affront and an indignity. And so Putin really wants to get rid of sanctions. And really, he viewed Trump as the best vehicle for doing that because Trump kept on saying let’s be friends with Russia. Meanwhile, we know that secretly his aides were emailing the Kremlin, asking for assistance with building a hotel in Trump Tower. And then of course, Trump wins, to Putin’s surprise. But the problem is that the Russia story becomes such a kind of billowing scandal that Trump is no longer kind of politically able to deliver an end to sanctions.

But what he can do is destroy everything within his reach here at home. Thanks, Putin.

And this is the thing with the kind of Trump-Russia story – that wherever you look, all of the people in Trump’s government, especially in its early stages, have a kind of Russia connection.

I mean, it’s – obviously, Trump did the picking, but it’s almost as if Putin had the kind of last word because we’ve got Wilbur Ross, who as well as the Bank of Cyprus, we now know was doing business of our shipping company with Vladimir Putin’s son-in-law. We have Michael Flynn, whose woes are well-known, but clearly, was taking money from Russia Today, the Kremlin propaganda channel, and other Russian interests and not declaring it. Then we have Rex Tillerson. I mean, he was a famous oil guy. I used to write about him in Moscow, and he got this Order of Friendship from Vladimir Putin – sort of a sky blue ribbon pinned to his chest. And he pops up as U.S. secretary of state almost from nowhere.

And so we go down the list, whether it’s from policy aids like Carter Page or George Papadopoulos, who’s pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, or Trump associates like Felix Sater, longtime business pal, or Michael Cohen, the personal lawyer, who’s married to a Ukrainian. I mean, the sort of constellation of Russian connections circling around planet Trump is just quite extraordinary. And I think this, more than anything else, is what Mueller is now looking at.

And then there’s Manafort and Yanukovich.

GROSS: Now, you mentioned that after Viktor Yanukovych won the presidency in Ukraine, and his campaign was managed by Paul Manafort, Yanukovych imprisoned his opponent, Tymoshenko. And that seems to be almost like an echo of the Trump campaign – people saying, lock her up, lock her up, about Hillary.

HARDING: Yeah. I mean, there are some astonishing parallels between what happened in Ukraine under Viktor Yanukovych between 2010, let’s say, and 2014, when the country kind of fell into war and what’s been happening into sort of 2016 and – first of all, this – the lock her up – Yanukovych actually really did lock up Yulia Tymoshenko.

She spent several years in jail. She was persecuted, harassed. And I think Yanukovych’s people would say, well, she did bad things. She stole money in the 1990s. Frankly, every Ukrainian politician from the ’90s, almost, has stolen money. So it looked very much like a case of selective justice and kind of political repression. And, of course, we had this kind of motif throughout 2016.

I remember vividly watching Michael Flynn addressing the Republican convention in Cleveland, looking really sober and serious, saying, you know, lock her up, lock her up; if I had done the tenth of the things that Hillary had done – well, of course, now we know that Flynn was secretly on Moscow’s payroll, hadn’t declared that, hadn’t declared much else. But first, the desire for vengeance to lock up your particular political opponents is very kind of former Soviet Union. And there are kind of other aspects, as well.

I mean, Yanukovych had a kind of family regime. His son became enormously rich after he became president, worth many hundreds of millions of dollars. Now, I’m not saying that Trump’s family have enriched themselves, but certainly, breaking with all precedent, that they play, politically, highly influential roles. Jared Kushner is a senior adviser. Ivanka is a senior adviser and has her father’s ear. And this is very much a kind of Eastern, almost Central Asian model of that kind that America has never seen before. It’s quite astonishing.

And corrupt, and anti-democratic, and incompetence-promoting, and generally horrible. We have these terrible, ignorant, unqualified, greedy, corrupt people running our government and our foreign policy. It’s a nightmare even without the Russia connection.

Short version: it’s even worse than we think.

Howard Blum at Vanity Fair has new reporting on just what Trump said in that private meeting with Kislyak and Lavrov right after he fired Comey last May.

They start with the relationship between US spies and Israeli spies: the US is the hulking senior partner but at the same time Israel shares valuable intel. Israel had been doing a good job of that in the months before Trump was elected.

It was against this reassuring backdrop of recent successes and shared history, an Israeli source told Vanity Fair, that a small group of Mossad officers and other Israeli intelligence officials took their seats in a Langley conference room on a January morning just weeks before the inauguration of Donald Trump. The meeting proceeded uneventfully; updates on a variety of ongoing classified operations were dutifully shared. It was only as the meeting was about to break up that an American spymaster solemnly announced there was one more thing: American intelligence agencies had come to believe that Russian president Vladimir Putin had “leverages of pressure” over Trump, he declared without offering further specifics, according to a report in the Israeli press. Israel, the American officials continued, should “be careful” after January 20—the date of Trump’s inauguration.

That’s not new information, but put that way it brought me up short. It’s really astounding. US intel told Israeli intel that the incoming US president is a captive of the Russians, so…don’t trust us while he’s in office.

The US president is working for the Russians.

It was possible that sensitive information shared with the White House and the National Security Council could be leaked to the Russians. A moment later the officials added what many of the Israelis had already deduced: it was reasonable to presume that the Kremlin would share some of what they learned with their ally Iran, Israel’s most dangerous adversary.

Trump n Putin n Iran. Fabulous.

Currents of alarm and anger raced through those pres­ent at the meeting, says the Israeli source, but their superiors in Israel remained unconvinced—no supporting evidence, after all, had been provided—and chose to ignore the prognostication.

I guess that’s why the wording brought me up short – because it’s been all claims with no real smoking gun as far as we in the public can tell, so I wasn’t really believing it.

On the cloudy spring morning of May 10, just an uneasy day after the president’s sudden firing of F.B.I. director James B. Comey, who had been leading the probe into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, a beaming President Trump huddled in the Oval Office with Sergey Lavrov and Sergey Kislyak.

And, no less improbably, Trump seemed not to notice, or feel restrained by, the unfortunate timing of his conversation with Russian officials who were quite possibly co-conspirators in a plot to undermine the U.S. electoral process. Instead, full of a chummy candor, the president turned to his Russian guests and blithely acknowledged the elephant lurking in the room. “I just fired the head of the F.B.I.,” he said, according to a record of the meeting shared with The New York Times. “He was crazy, a real nut job.” With the sort of gruff pragmatism a Mafia don would use to justify the necessity of a hit, he further explained, “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.” Yet that was only the morning’s perplexing prelude. What had been an unseemly conversation between the president and two high-ranking Russian officials soon turned into something more dangerous.

“I get great intel,” the president suddenly boasted, as prideful as if he were bragging about the amenities at one of his company’s hotels. “I have people brief me on great intel every day.”

He quickly went on to share with representatives of a foreign adversary not only the broad outlines of the plot to turn laptop computers into airborne bombs but also at least one highly classified operational detail—the sort of sensitive, locked-in-the-vault intel that was not shared with even Congress or friendly governments. The president did not name the U.S. partner who had spearheaded the operation. (Journalists, immediately all over the astonishing story, would soon out Israel). But, more problematic, President Trump cavalierly identified the specific city in ISIS-held territory where the threat had been detected.

As for the two Russians, there’s no record of their response. Their silence would be understandable: why interrupt the flow of information? But in their minds, no doubt they were already drafting the cable they’d send to the Kremlin detailing their great espionage coup.

It could be just Trump being Trump, showing off his new big boy pants. It could be. Or it could be even worse than that.

Yet there is also a more sinister way to connect all the dots. There are some petulant voices in official Washington who insist that the president’s treachery was deliberate, part of his longtime collaboration with the Russians. It is a true believer’s orthodoxy, one which predicts that the meeting will wind up being one more damning count in an indictment that Robert Mueller, the special counsel, will ultimately nail to the White House door.

But, for now, to bolster their still very circumstantial case, they point to a curiosity surrounding the meeting in the Oval Office—U.S. journalists were kept out. And, no less an oddity, the Russian press was allowed in. It was the photographer from TASS, the state-run Russian news agency, who snapped the only shots that documented the occasion for posterity. Or, for that matter, for the grand jury.

The Guardian reporter Luke Harding has a new book out which argues that Trump is and has been for decades actively colluding with Russia and Putin.

Trump this morning:

It wasn’t the White House, it wasn’t the State Department, it wasn’t father LaVar’s so-called people on the ground in China that got his son out of a long term prison sentence – IT WAS ME. Too bad! LaVar is just a poor man’s version of Don King, but without the hair. Just think..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 22, 2017

…LaVar, you could have spent the next 5 to 10 years during Thanksgiving with your son in China, but no NBA contract to support you. But remember LaVar, shoplifting is NOT a little thing. It’s a really big deal, especially in China. Ungrateful fool!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 22, 2017

The NFL is now thinking about a new idea – keeping teams in the Locker Room during the National Anthem next season. That’s almost as bad as kneeling! When will the highly paid Commissioner finally get tough and smart? This issue is killing your league!…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 22, 2017

Three race-baiting tweets in a row, two of them aimed at one obscure citizen…by the president of the US.

Every day a new plunge downward.

The Post says anyway Trump is bullshitting about what their fate would have been without his miraculous powers.

Trump is right that China’s criminal justice system has a very high conviction rate and that the punishment for theft ranges widely, from a couple of days to 10 years in prison.

But experts say the basketball players would have almost certainly escaped China without jail time. When foreigners commit minor offenses, Chinese officials are more likely to deport them instead of imprisoning them. It’s just not worth the diplomatic headache. “It’s nonsense,” Fu Hualing, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong, told the New York Times of Trump’s assertion that he was solely responsible for the athletes’ release. “I would be surprised if they were even prosecuted.”

Jerome Cohen, an Asia expert and faculty director of New York University’s U.S.-Asia Law Institute, told USA Todaythat it’s “extremely unlikely” that the players would have been sentenced to any jail time. From the start, the players were given bail, a sign that Chinese officials weren’t going to push for a full sentence.

Facts are for libbruls.

Meanwhile, activists are asking why Trump didn’t use his sway to advocate for the release of some of China’s political prisoners, like Liu Xia, an artist, photographer and the widow of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo. She is being held in unofficial custody away from family and friends, punished simply for being the wife of Liu.

Activists also highlighted the plight of Ilham Tohti, an advocate for China’s Uighurs, a Muslim ethnic minority that has long faced oppression. Tohti was imprisoned in 2014 and sentenced to life in prison. Wang Quanzhang, a human rights lawyer, was arrested in 2015 as part of a crackdown against human rights activists. No one has been permitted to visit him, and his wife says she doesn’t even know whether he’s alive.

Well you can’t expect Trump to care about people like that. One, they’re Chinese. Two, they’re disobedient to Authority, or married to people who are disobedient to Authority. Three, that Totey guy is a Mooslim. Four, they’re not American. Five, they’re Chinese. Six, he’s never heard of them. Seven, he doesn’t care.

Now, who’s ready for some golf?

Another steep downward plunge for President Tweety.

Now that the three basketball players are out of China and saved from years in jail, LaVar Ball, the father of LiAngelo, is unaccepting of what I did for his son and that shoplifting is no big deal. I should have left them in jail!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 19, 2017

Yeah, he should have left them in jail for not kissing his bum – or rather, because the father of one of them didn’t kiss his bum; the players themselves all thanked him.

Sen. Jeff Flake(y), who is unelectable in the Great State of Arizona (quit race, anemic polls) was caught (purposely) on “mike” saying bad things about your favorite President. He’ll be a NO on tax cuts because his political career anyway is “toast.”

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 19, 2017

Got it all – the rude nickname, yet again that stupid “the Great State of” formula, the political sabotage, the random “quotation” marks, the lunatic claim that he’s our favorite, the vindictive gloating.

Shoplifting is a very big deal in China, as it should be (5-10 years in jail), but not to father LaVar. Should have gotten his son out during my next trip to China instead. China told them why they were released. Very ungrateful!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 19, 2017

Head of state, and he’s obsessing in public over the fact that this one guy doesn’t love him.

Big-game trophy decision will be announced next week but will be very hard pressed to change my mind that this horror show in any way helps conservation of Elephants or any other animal.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 19, 2017

Uh huh. People were rejoicing that he’d put the reversal of the ban on trophies on hold while he pretended to “think” about it, and already he’s letting them know he was toying with us.

Border Patrol Officer killed at Southern Border, another badly hurt. We will seek out and bring to justice those responsible. We will, and must, build the Wall!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 20, 2017

Wall! Wall! Wall! And while we’re at it, how about some gas chambers?

Republican Senators are working very hard to get Tax Cuts and Tax Reform approved. Hopefully it will not be long and they do not want to disappoint the American public!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 20, 2017

Hurry up with cutting taxes on the super-rich, willya!

Marshawn Lynch of the NFL’s Oakland Raiders stands for the Mexican Anthem and sits down to boos for our National Anthem. Great disrespect! Next time NFL should suspend him for remainder of season. Attendance and ratings way down.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 20, 2017

Blah blah blah football players blah blah National Anthem blah blah NFL blah.

Head of state, don’t forget. Head of state, obsessing over basketball players and football players.

Under President Trump unemployment rate will drop below 4%. Analysts predict economic boom for 2018! @foxandfriends and @Varneyco

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 20, 2017

President Trump gets all his “information” from Fox “News.”

(You see I actually know how scare quotes work.)

It’s like Bernie Madoff accusing someone else of being a lying cheating fraudulent thief:

President Trump, who was dogged by sexual misconduct allegations during his 2016 campaign, took aim at longtime critic Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) on Thursday night, after Franken was accused of forcibly kissing and groping a woman 11 years ago.

“The Al Frankenstien picture is really bad, speaks a thousand words,” Trump wrote on Twitter, misspelling the apparent reference to the 19th-century novel “Frankenstein.”

Novel? Oh don’t be silly, he has no idea there’s any such novel. He thinks it’s a movie.

Eleven women came forward during Trump’s presidential campaign to accuse him of unwanted touching or kissing over several decades. Trump called the charges “pure fiction” and “fake news” and referred to the women as “horrible, horrible liars.”

Polls showed that a clear majority of voters came to believe that Trump had committed the kind of behavior described by his accusers. But the specific allegations did little to budge an electorate that had become almost tribal in its divisions.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said last month that all the women who have accused Trump of sexual harassment are lying.

As if there were any way she could possibly know that, and as if there were no public fully-visible reason to believe the women.

Trump shyly confesses that he doesn’t watch much tv, he’s too much of a bookworm.

Over the weekend, as Air Force One made its way to Vietnam, President Trump was questioned about Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore. Wasn’t it time, Trump was asked, for the president to cut his support of Moore, given a spate of allegations about his behavior with teenage girls several decades ago?

“Well, again,” Trump replied, “I’ve been with you folks, so I haven’t gotten to see too much. And believe it or not, even when I’m in Washington and New York, I do not watch much television. I know they like to say — people that don’t know me — they like to say I watch television. People with fake sources — you know, fake reporters, fake sources. But I don’t get to watch much television, primarily because of documents. I’m reading documents a lot, and different things.”

Oh yes, documents. He’s reading them a lot, and absorbing nothing. At any rate, people who know him know he always has his nose in a book and never watches that box that holds the Fox News stories. Never. The fact that he so frequently tweets what they just said is pure magical coincidence.

Notice, though, that his response reveals how he takes in news: by seeing it. He doesn’t say, “I haven’t gotten to read too much.” And in case you think he’s using “see” in the broader sense of seeing things on TV or online, he quickly explains that he’s talking about television.

Which he says does not watch much.

After he left Vietnam, he traveled to the Philippines for a summit. While there, he was subjected to a horrifying experience: Being “forced” to watch CNN.

While in the Philippines I was forced to watch @CNN, which I have not done in months, and again realized how bad, and FAKE, it is. Loser!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2017

He was captured by terrorists while he was there? Why weren’t we told?

There are multiple levels of weirdness here. Who did the forcing? Couldn’t he have chosen to not watch any television at all? Isn’t feeling compelled to watch television an odd thing to cop to days after insisting that you don’t watch a lot of television?

They had a gun to his head, I tell you! They swore he would never eat ice cream again if he didn’t watch.

So now Trump is in a snit because everyone isn’t running around squawking about what a brilliant job he did of making “Asia” our new best friend. He channeled his rage into giving a long speech to instruct us about how awesome he was and how deeply “Asia” now adores us thanks to his awesome amazing very very tremendous work.

This was Trump playing his own hype man. He felt like the Asia trip went well and he wasn’t getting enough credit for exactly how well it went. So, why not give a speech and force the “fake news” to cover it?

From his opening statement onward, it was clear that Trump’s lone goal with the speech was to pat himself on the back. Repeatedly.

Here’s how the speech started:

“Last night I returned from a historic 12-day trip to Asia. This journey took us to five nations to meet with dozens of foreign leaders, participate in three formal state visits and attend three key regional summits. It was the longest visit to the region by an American president in more than a quarter of a century. Everywhere we went our foreign hosts greeted the American delegation, myself included, with incredible warmth, hospitality, and most importantly, respect. And this great respect showed very well our country is further evidence that America’s renewed confidence and standing in the world has never been stronger than it is right now.”

God he’s dumb. He mistakes the normal diplomatic niceties for everyone having a crush on him.

Trump’s emphasis on not only solving America’s image problems but doing so very, very quickly was a theme throughout his Asia trip. In a press conference aboard Air Force One while flying in Vietnam over the weekend, here are few of the things Trump claimed credit for:

• “Prime Minister Abe came up to me just at the end and he said that since you left South Korea and Japan that those two countries are now getting along much much better.”
• “There’s been a real bonding between South Korea and Japan.”
• “They say in the history of people coming to China, there’s been nothing like that and I believe it.” (This was about Trump dining with Chinese President Xi Jinping in the Forbidden City — the first time a US president has dined there since the founding of modern China.)
• “It’s the biggest state entrance and the biggest state dinner they’ve ever had. By far.” (Again, China.)

Trump is someone who needs his successes — real or imagined — acknowledged.

The Guardian is not all that impressed either.

Trump did not mention that during his tour, 11 US allies had decided to move ahead with the creation the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade zone without US involvement, following the president’s withdrawal in March.

Richard Haass, the president of Council on Foreign Relations, said in a tweet that Trump “claims to have established a new framework for trade in Asia when the reality is that the US has placed itself outside the best available framework for trade in the region.”

“The country will pay an enormous economic, strategic price as a result,” Haass said.

Lacking any real news, Trump’s speech prompted more headlines for an awkward pause in which the president reached for a sip of water. He twice stopped mid-speech to quench his thirst, drawing instant comparisons to the viral moment in 2013 when Florida senator Marco Rubio made headlines with a desperate lunge for an out-of-shot water bottle while delivering the formal Republican response to Barack Obama’s State of the Union address.

Trump chided Rubio at the time, tweeting: “Next time Marco Rubio should drink his water from a glass as opposed to a bottle – would have much less negative impact.”

Nothing corrupt and sleazy about this, oh hell no.

The Justice Department said Monday that prosecutors were looking into whether a special counsel should be appointed to investigate political rivals President Trump has singled out for scrutiny, including Hillary Clinton.

The department, in a letter sent to the House Judiciary Committee, said the prosecutors would examine allegations that donations to the Clinton Foundation were tied to a 2010 decision by the Obama administration to allow a Russian nuclear agency to buy Uranium One, a company that owned access to uranium in the United States, and other issues.

The letter appeared to be a direct response to Mr. Trump’s statement on Nov. 3, when he said he was disappointed with his beleaguered attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and that longstanding unproven allegations about the Clintons and the Obama administration should be investigated.

Any such investigation would raise questions about the independence of federal investigations under Mr. Trump. Since Watergate, the Justice Department has largely operated independently of political influence on cases related to the president’s opponents.

But now there’s a lying raping thief squatting in the White House, so fancypants ideas like “the independence of federal investigations” are a dead letter.

Although Mr. Sessions has recused himself from all matters related to the election, he and the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, will oversee the prosecutors’ decision to appoint the special counsel, the letter said.

It’s what autocrats and dictators do. It’s what Putin and Erdoğan and Mugabe do. It’s filthy.

During his Senate confirmation hearing this year, Mr. Sessions said he would not name a special prosecutor to investigate Mrs. Clinton even if ordered to do so by the president.

“This country does not punish its political enemies,” he told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Emphasis added.

Mr. Trump, who closely monitors the conservative news media ecosystem for ideas on how to attack his opponents, has cited reports from those outlets to aides and friends as examples for why a special counsel should be appointed.

One commentator in particular, the Fox News host Jeanine Pirro — who is a friend of Mr. Trump’s and whose show he rarely misses — has aggressively denounced Mr. Sessions as weak for not investigating the uranium deal. In addition to making scathing critiques on her show, Ms. Pirro — who had interviewed to be the deputy attorney general, according to three transition officials — recently met with the president to excoriate the attorney general.

In an Oval Office meeting on Nov. 1, Ms. Pirro said that a special counsel needed to be appointed, according to two people briefed on the discussion. Through a Fox News spokeswoman, Ms. Pirro said, “Everything I said to President Trump is exactly what I’ve vocalized on my show, ‘Justice with Jeanine.’”

So Fox News and a lying thieving fraud are running the country. Awesome.

Peter Baker points out how aberrant all this is.

President Trump did not need to send a memo or telephone his attorney general to make his desires known. He broadcast them for all the world to see on Twitter. The instruction was clear: The Justice Department should investigate his defeated opponent from last year’s campaign.

However they were delivered, Mr. Trump’s demands have ricocheted through the halls of the Justice Department, where Attorney General Jeff Sessions has now ordered career prosecutors to evaluate various accusations against Hillary Clinton and report back on whether a special counsel should be appointed to investigate her.

Mr. Sessions has made no decision, and in soliciting the assessment of department lawyers, he may be seeking a way out of the bind his boss has put him in by effectively putting the matter in the hands of professionals who were not politically appointed. But if he or his deputy authorizes a new investigation of Mrs. Clinton, it would shatter norms established after Watergate that are intended to prevent presidents from using law enforcement agencies against political rivals.

Emphasis added, again.

The request alone was enough to trigger a political backlash, as critics of Mr. Trump quickly decried what they called “banana republic” politics of retribution, akin to autocratic backwater nations where election losers are jailed by winners.

My point exactly.

“You can be disappointed, but don’t be surprised,” said Karen Dunn, a former prosecutor and White House lawyer under President Barack Obama who advised Mrs. Clinton during her campaign against Mr. Trump. “This is exactly what he said he would do: use taxpayer resources to pursue political rivals.”

Democrats still vividly recall Mr. Trump on the campaign trail vowing to prosecute Mrs. Clinton if he won. “It was alarming enough to chant ‘lock her up’ at a campaign rally,” said Brian Fallon, who was Mrs. Clinton’s campaign spokesman. “It is another thing entirely to try to weaponize the Justice Department in order to actually carry it out.”

He is – in his thinking, his rhetoric, his character, his innermost essence – a dictator. He clearly thought being president actually meant being a dictator, and he’s thrashing wildly against all the restraints. He’s going to destroy the place.

While presidents typically are not supposed to intervene in investigations or prosecutions of specific individuals, Mr. Trump’s calls for an investigation of Mrs. Clinton over the last several months have been repeated, insistent and not even slightly subtle.

“So why aren’t the Committees and investigators, and of course our beleaguered A.G., looking into Crooked Hillarys crimes & Russia relations?” he wrote on Twitter in July.

“There is so much GUILT by Democrats/Clinton, and now the facts are pouring out,” he wrote in October. “DO SOMETHING!”

“At some point the Justice Department, and the FBI, must do what is right and proper,” Mr. Trump wrote again in November. He added: “Everybody is asking why the Justice Department (and FBI) isn’t looking into all of the dishonesty going on with Crooked Hillary & the Dems.”

That’s a dictator raving.

Trump does love human rights violators.

President Trump said on Monday that he had a “great relationship” with President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, making little mention of human rights at his first face-to-face meeting with an authoritarian leader accused of carrying out a campaign of extrajudicial killings in his nation’s war on drugs.

In a stark break from past practice by American presidents, who have pressed foreign leaders publicly and privately about allegations of human rights abuses, Mr. Trump instead pursued his own transactional style of diplomacy, dwelling mostly on areas of common ground during his meeting with Mr. Duterte. On the sideline of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit meeting, Mr. Trump focused on combating the Islamic State and illegal drugs as well as on trade issues, the White House said.

Making “deals.” It’s what he knows.

“Human rights briefly came up in the context of the Philippines’ fight against illegal drugs,” said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary.

But Mr. Duterte’s spokesman denied that the subject of rights was ever broached, even as the Philippine president spoke about the “drug menace” in his country.

Mr. Trump “appeared sympathetic and did not have any official position on the matter and was merely nodding his head, indicating that he understood the domestic problem that we faced on drugs,” said Harry Roque, Mr. Duterte’s spokesman. “The issue of human rights did not arise; it was not brought up.”

Could it be that Sarah Sanders lied? It wouldn’t be the first time.

Now here’s a jaw-dropper:

The meeting also highlighted the potential conflicts of interest inherent in Mr. Trump’s position as both a president and a global real estate developer. Among those at the private session was Jose E. B. Antonio, a developer who is Mr. Trump’s partner on a $150-million, 57-story luxury tower in Manila’s financial district and also serves as Mr. Duterte’s trade envoy to the United States.

What? How can that be allowed?

As journalists shouted questions about whether Mr. Trump would press Mr. Duterte on human rights, the Philippine president quickly silenced them.

“Whoa, whoa — this is not the press statement,” Mr. Duterte said. “We are in a bilateral meeting.”

“You are the spies,” he told the reporters, as Philippine security personnel jostled some of them roughly. The remarks elicited a hearty laugh from Mr. Trump before the journalists were led out of the room.

Meanwhile police were attacking protesters in the streets of Manila.

White House officials have said that Mr. Trump has a “warm rapport” with Mr. Duterte, with whom he has spoken and exchanged letters since taking office, and that he wants to mend the American-Philippine alliance after strains during the Obama administration.

“President Trump specifically said he has always been a friend of the Duterte administration, unlike the previous administrations of the United States,” Mr. Roque said on Monday. “He stressed that he can be counted upon as a friend of the Duterte administration.”

Of course he did. He loves tyrants and rights-abusers. He loves the Saudis, he loves Erdoğan, he loves Putin – naturally he loves Duterte.

To the surprise of no one, Brennan and Clapper say Trump is being played by his BFF Puteekins.

“By not confronting the issue directly and not acknowledging to Putin that we know you’re responsible for this, I think he’s giving Putin a pass,” former CIA director John Brennan said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “I think it demonstrates to Mr. Putin that Donald Trump can be played by foreign leaders who are going to appeal to his ego and try to play upon his insecurities, which is very, very worrisome from a national security standpoint.”

Not his insecurities, his narcissism. He doesn’t have any insecurities. What you see is what you get: what looks like immovable conceit and grandiosity is just that. Trump is too stupid to have insecurities.

“He seems very susceptible to rolling out the red carpet and honor guards and all the trappings and pomp and circumstance that come with the office, and I think that appeals to him, and I think it plays to his insecurities,” Clapper said.

Or, rather, his ravenous ego.

Trump told reporters traveling with him in Asia that Putin had assured him at a conference in Danang, Vietnam, on Saturday that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, and he indicated that he believed Putin was sincere.

Later, in a news conference Sunday in Hanoi with Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang, Trump appeared to be trying to parse his earlier remarks, saying, “What I said is that I believe [Putin] believes that.”

In his earlier remarks to reporters, Trump also referred to Brennan and Clapper as “political hacks.” Brennan said Sunday that he considers Trump’s characterization “a badge of honor.”

Well, yes; if Trump says nice things about you it’s time to worry. But from a national and global perspective, it’s not so great.

Both men were highly critical of Trump for not saying more definitively that Putin was behind the Russian interference in the U.S. election, a conclusion strongly endorsed by the U.S. intelligence community.

“I don’t know why the ambiguity about this,” Brennan said. “Putin is committed to undermining our system, our democracy and our whole process. And to try paint it in any other way is, I think, astounding, and, in fact, poses a peril to this country.”

Astounding and, to put it bluntly, treasonous. Trump is trying to defend Putin for his own warped reasons, when Putin is bent on damaging the US and democracy as surely as if he were throwing bombs at us.

Uh oh he’s found the Twitter again.

When will all the haters and fools out there realize that having a good relationship with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing. There always playing politics – bad for our country. I want to solve North Korea, Syria, Ukraine, terrorism, and Russia can greatly help!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 12, 2017

Yes, that’s the way to work out policy: call everyone names on Twitter.

Does the Fake News Media remember when Crooked Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, was begging Russia to be our friend with the misspelled reset button? Obama tried also, but he had zero chemistry with Putin.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 12, 2017

He wants to talk about spelling? Really? When he just spelled “they’re” as “there”?

Also, the name calling. Fake News, Crooked Hillary, zero chemistry. This is our head of state.

But he saved the best for last.

Why would Kim Jong-un insult me by calling me "old," when I would NEVER call him "short and fat?" Oh well, I try so hard to be his friend – and maybe someday that will happen!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 12, 2017

No comment necessary.

Trump says who ya gonna believe, US intelligence people or the former head of the KGB?

Correct answer is the former head of the KGB, of course. Duh.

President Trump said on Saturday that he believed President Vladimir V. Putin was sincere in his denials of interference in the 2016 presidential elections, calling questions about Moscow’s meddling a politically motivated “hit job” that was hindering cooperation with Russia on life-or-death issues.

Speaking after meeting privately with Mr. Putin on the sideline of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting in Danang, Vietnam, Mr. Trump said that he had again asked whether Russia had meddled in the contest, but that the continued focus on the issue was insulting to Mr. Putin.

Well we can’t have that. We can’t insult dear Mr Putin, that nice nice man who grabbed the Crimea and invaded Ukraine and had all those pesky journalists killed.

“He said he didn’t meddle — I asked him again,” Mr. Trump told reporters traveling with him aboard Air Force One as he flew to Hanoi for more meetings. “You can only ask so many times. I just asked him again. He said he absolutely did not meddle in our election. He did not do what they are saying he did.”

This is the guy who put his name to a whole entire book about making “deals.” This is a guy whose only skill is “making deals” by lying and cheating and manipulating, yet he wants us to agree with him that when the famously crooked and corrupt Putin says he didn’t do a thing, we totally should believe him and move on. This is a guy who himself lies to us every hour yet he expects us to take him seriously when he insists Putin must be telling the truth now that he’s said it twice.

Mr. Trump did not answer a direct question about whether he believed Mr. Putin’s denials, but his account of the conversation indicated he was far more inclined to accept the Russian president’s assertions than those of his own intelligence agencies, which have concluded that Mr. Putin directed an elaborate effort to interfere in the vote.

It’s a matter of loyalty. Trump is loyal to dear Mr Putin, because why wouldn’t he be? Putin is his friend. They grew up together playing baseball on the meadows of Flushing.

“Every time he sees me he says, ‘I didn’t do that,’ and I really believe that when he tells me that, he means it,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Putin. “I think he is very insulted by it, which is not a good thing for our country.”

Oh well then. If he means it, it must be true.

[Seriously? This is making my hair stand on end. Scrolling down my disbelief keeps expanding like a balloon.]

Mr. Trump heaped disdain on the former leaders of three American intelligence agencies — John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director; James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence; and James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director he fired this year — appearing to suggest that they were less trustworthy than Mr. Putin.

“I mean, give me a break — they’re political hacks,” Mr. Trump said. “You have Brennan, you have Clapper, and you have Comey. Comey’s proven now to be a liar, and he’s proven to be a leaker, so you look at that. And you have President Putin very strongly, vehemently says he had nothing to do with that.”

Jesus god.

Trump goes to ForrinLand and tells it how much better the US is than everyone else.

Promising to pursue “mutually beneficial commerce” through bilateral trade agreements, Mr. Trump roundly condemned the kind of multilateral accords his predecessors pursued, reprising a message he brought to China this week that blamed weak American leadership for trade imbalances that he said had stripped jobs, factories and entire industries from the United States.

“What we will no longer do is enter into large agreements that tie our hands, surrender our sovereignty, and make meaningful enforcement practically impossible,” Mr. Trump said.

It was a strikingly hostile message to an audience that included leaders who had tied their fortunes to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a sweeping 12-nation accord that was to be led by the United States, from which Mr. Trump withdrew immediately after taking office.

Hostile is what he does. He’s hopeless at the other thing, like all that sick-making flattery of Xi yesterday.

As in his speech to the United Nations in September, Mr. Trump emphasized the idea of sovereignty, a concept that is often seen as being at odds with global cooperation and that is sometimes used by countries to fend off interference by outside powers.

He closed the speech with an inward-looking paean to the virtues of home, declaring, “In all of the world, there is no place like home,” adding that nations should “protect your home, defend your home, and love your home today and for all time.”

He’s Dorothy in the Hollywood version of The Wizard of Oz.

Of course they are.

President Donald Trump’s upscale Mar-a-Lago club received permission from the federal government to temporarily hire 70 foreign housekeepers, waiters and cooks to fill out its staff during its upcoming busy season, with its managers attesting there aren’t enough Americans qualified, willing and available to do the work.

Liars. When Americans apply to do the work Mar-a-Lago doesn’t hire them.

The president’s hiring of foreign workers at the Florida resort over several years was criticized by his opponents during the 2016 campaign after he slammed companies for moving jobs out of the U.S. and others for hiring immigrants in the country illegally. During the Republican primary debates, Trump defended Mar-a-Lago’s hiring practices, saying not enough Americans apply for its low-end service jobs and if his managers didn’t recruit outside the country “we might as well just close the doors.”

Or his managers could up the pay offered – ever think of that? If you pay a decent wage, enough Americans damn well will apply for those service jobs, and those decent wages will help boost the local economy; win-win.

Under requests approved by the U.S. Labor Department, Mar-a-Lago can employ 35 foreign waiters, 20 cooks and 15 housekeepers to help serve its 500 members starting this month through May 31. The waiters will receive $11.88 an hour with no tips, the cooks $13.34 an hour and the housekeepers $10.33 an hour. The waiters’ and cooks’ wages are slightly above the national average for those fields and the housekeepers’ slightly below, according to Labor Department statistics.

So pay the waiters and housekeepers $20 and the cooks $25. Spread the wealth a little.

Mar-a-Lago has made similar requests in recent years, ranging from 88 employees in 2014 down to 64 last year.

And Mar-a-Lago is not alone. Many other high-end resorts and clubs in Palm Beach County annually receive similar approvals from the government, including 141 foreign employees this year for The Breakers, a historic beachfront hotel near Mar-a-Lago, and 65 for The Polo Club of Boca Raton. All are offering wages roughly similar to Mar-a-Lago, according to their Labor Department filings. The area’s peak tourist season is from about Thanksgiving to Easter.

The workers are hired under the H-2B visa program, which is for seasonal, non-agriculture employees and is capped at 66,000 nationally per year.

How does Trump know they’re not Sekrit Mooslim Terrorisssts?

Trump in China sounds like Basil Fawlty meeting Lord Melbury (who in fact is a conman).

President Trump heaped praise on President Xi Jinping of China on Thursday, blaming Mr. Trump’s own predecessors for China’s yawning trade surplus with the United States and saying he was confident that Mr. Xi could defuse the threat from North Korea.

Mr. Trump’s warm words, on a state visit to China replete with ceremony but short of tangible results, showed a president doubling down on his gamble that by cultivating a personal connection with Mr. Xi, he can push the Chinese leader to take meaningful steps on North Korea and trade.

In public, Mr. Trump projected an air of deference to China that was almost unheard-of for a visiting American president. Far from attacking Mr. Xi on trade, Mr. Trump saluted him for leading a country that he said had left the United States “so far behind.” He said he could not blame the Chinese for taking advantage of weak American trade policy.

You just know what he looked like. He’s no better at that kind of thing than he is at its opposite – he’ll have been pure Basil fawning on the conman pretending to be a toff.

Mr. Trump marveled at the reception Mr. Xi had given him, from a full-dress military parade in Tiananmen Square to a sunset tour of the Forbidden City. He congratulated him on consolidating power at a recent Communist Party congress, declaring, “Perhaps now more than ever we have an opportunity to strengthen our relationship.”

“You’re a very special man,” he told Mr. Xi in an appearance before reporters, at which they did not take questions.

Of course he did; that’s our Basil.

Mr. Xi, for his part, did not return Mr. Trump’s fulsome personal praise, seeming to treat him like any other American leader.

Because he’s not stupid enough to think that gross obvious asskissing is effective.

At their joint appearance, Mr. Trump turned to the Chinese president and declared, “A great responsibility has been placed on our shoulders. It is truly a great responsibility.”

What’s he trying to say? Something about a great responsibility, is it? It’s all a bit over my head.

Let’s hope this is spoiling Trump’s fun adventure in Chy-nah: voters said a big Nope.

Republicans awoke Wednesday to a series of aftershocks following Democratic victories across Virginia and other local elections that far exceeded either side’s expectations.

That performance, particularly in key suburban battlegrounds across the nation, validates a strategy that Democrats on Capitol Hill had embraced earlier this year: trying to win back the majority by riding a wave of liberal resentment toward President Trump while also promising rational governance to centrist swing voters.

The resounding victory by Gov.-elect Ralph Northam (D) tells only part of the story of Tuesday’s “old-fashioned thumping,” as former Virginia congressman Tom Davis called it. Beneath the top-of-the-ticket races, in many fundamental places, the ground shifted against Republicans in ways that have properly struck fear in the hearts of GOP consultants.

What, just because Republicans are standing by and watching their president destroy everything?

The Republicans were dejected seeing the results — left to question how much of a downballot effect Trump’s unpopular presidency will have on them next year, and unclear what they can do to appeal to voters.

Wellllll, they could impeach Trump.

Michael Lewis on Fresh Air yesterday on how Trump appointees in the departments of Energy and Agriculture are “ill-prepared for the jobs they have and uninterested in the work of the departments they’re running” and how bad and dangerous that is.

MICHAEL LEWIS: Well, my mind when Trump was elected was on the subject of risk because I just finished a book, “The Undoing Project,” about people’s – the difficulty people had processing risk, in evaluating risk. And I was wondering what risks Trump brought with him. I then saw that the transition from the Obama administration to the Trump administration basically didn’t happen, (laughter) that – what normally happens after a new president comes in is that the day after the election, dozens of people roll into each of the agencies and start getting briefings from the people who are on their way out or from the career civil servants.

And across the government, there were people waiting inside the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture, and no one showed up to be briefed. And so I thought, well, maybe this is a way to get at the question of what risk we’re running with this new kind of president, go in and get the briefings myself that they didn’t get and see and ask them. Like, what are the risks to the society if the government is neglected or mismanaged or misunderstood?

What does the Department of Agriculture do? A lot more than you think, Lewis says.

LEWIS: You know, so – right, if I ask you, the USDA shoots geese at LaGuardia airport so they don’t get into airplane engines – if you answered no, you’d be wrong. They – the USDA polices essentially all conflict between animals and people in the country.

The USDA makes sure that circus elephants aren’t being abused. The USDA makes sure that each of the 9 billion birds we kill each year to eat are – aren’t going to make us sick. The USDA oversees firefighting in the country while firefighting and the National Forest Service and 200 million acres of national forest. The USDA funds a vast majority of the science research into food production. The USDA feeds poor people and schoolchildren who can’t afford school lunches.

I mean, it goes on and on. And the actual farming part of it, the agricultural part of it, the farm subsidy part of it, even if you count it generously, is less than 10 percent of the budget.

And they were ready to brief the Trump people, and the Trump people never showed up.

DAVIES: Did – were they really expecting people the day after the election? Is that…

LEWIS: Oh, my God. They had parking spots reserved, and they had offices set aside and the briefing books on the table. And they’d arranged Wi-Fi for the computers and passwords for everybody and, you know, badges to get in and out of the buildings. They expected a team of people to show up. And this wasn’t just the Department of Agriculture. There were other agencies where they were similarly prepared that just wondered, where is everybody?

And then days passed, and they finally kind of get word that, well, they’re a little disorganized, and nobody’s coming. And it was actually the better part of two months before anybody shows up who’s going to be – who’s going to represent Trump’s transition to the Department of Agriculture. So they had – they were just left waiting for a long time.

They were expected the day after the election, and it took them two months. That’s the level of incompetence and indifference here. If they just drove tanks through all the buildings it couldn’t be worse.

And the thing that’s bewildering to the people inside the USDA who thought they were going to be passing the baton and explaining to the Trump administration how the Department of Agriculture works is that they thought this is a job for 20 people to be done over 80 days, not one person over a couple of weeks. So the feeling generally inside the institution was that the transition never really happened, and the people who eventually come in never really got the briefings.

DAVIES: And so Klippenstein wasn’t interested in details.

LEWIS: Well, according to my sources, he was interested in some things and not others. And he took a peculiar interest in anything having to do with climate change. He wanted to know who inside the agency had been responsible for responding to climate change. And this also happened in the Department of Energy.

Essentially there was a witch hunt across the government for scientists, policy people who were responsible for responding to climate change because the position of the Trump administration was that basically it didn’t exist. And so the career civil servant who was asked for the names of people in the Department of Agriculture who might be involved in, say, researching climate change refused to give up names. So that got shut down right away.

It goes on like that. It’s enraging.