Tag: Trump

Originally a comment by Omar on As the police leaders laughed.

Trump does not need a speechwriter. He just needs a blank form in which he can fill in the spaces, and maybe the odd picture he can colour in in primary colours in case he gets restless and bored. I humbly offer this as a first draft.

It must give you all here at ………………………………. to have me, Donald Trump, President of the United States and the greatest genius in the world, no make that the Universe, present here with you at …………………………………….. on this raised dais above you so you can all see me, and with the TV coverage from all the networks that matter, which does not include ……………………………………. . and everyone please note that its CEO ……………………………………………….. sent me a humble, grovelling apology for something someone on it said on that network and is now back in favour with me, thanks to that humble, no make that humble, crawling, grovelling, obseekweeus or whatever the word is apology from its CEO ……………………………………………………… which was posted to my press secretary ………………………………. who passed it on to my political adviser …………………………………………… who passed it to my chief of staff …………………………………………….. I accepted it but told but told them to tell him to make sure in future he held everything in the nearest Trump Hotel, golf course, tower or whatever, of which there are currently ……………………………. to choose between.

Why we are here at ……………………………………. when we could be at Trump Tower or at Trump Golf Club or one of my chains of hotels needs investigating. Chief ……………………………………… please start a police investigation of that as a matter of supreme national importance.

John Kelly and the yes-man warning and the handling a genius failure:

Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, made the comments during an interview at the Sea Island Summit political conference hosted by the Washington Examiner this weekend.

Kelly said if he had stayed on as chief of staff Trump wouldn’t be in the midst of the current impeachment inquiry, implying that White House advisers could have prevented it.

“I said, whatever you do — and we were still in the process of trying to find someone to take my place — I said whatever you do, don’t hire a ‘yes man,’ someone who won’t tell you the truth — don’t do that,” Kelly said. “Because if you do, I believe you will be impeached.”

Which is a not very subtle way of portraying himself as nobody’s yes man, when in fact he did little or nothing to interfere with Trump’s worst impulses and had some shit impulses himself.

Trump weighed in Saturday on Kelly’s interview with the Washington Examiner, saying in a statement to CNN, “John Kelly never said that, he never said anything like that. If he would have said that I would have thrown him out of the office. He just wants to come back into the action like everybody else does.”

If he had said that, not if he would have said that. Dork. Anyway my guess Kelly probably did say something like it, because he has a high opinion of himself.

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham added, “I worked with John Kelly, and he was totally unequipped to handle the genius of our great President.”

Trump did a talk to police chiefs in Chicago today, and used the opportunity to attack the Chicago chief of police.

Speaking at the International Association of Chiefs of Police convention at McCormick Place, Trump noted Johnson snubbed his address because he said it didn’t align with his and the city’s values.

“There is one person who is not here today. We’re in Chicago. I said, ‘Where is he? I want to talk to him.’ In fact, more than anyone else, he should be here, because maybe he could learn something,” Trump said of Johnson before several hundred convention attendees.

Trump called Johnson’s rationale for avoiding his address “a very insulting statement after all I’ve done for the police. And I’ve done more than any other president has ever done for the police.”

The gloating emphasis Trump put on Baghdadi’s “whimpering” and fear disgusted me from the outset – I hate that kind of thing. I hate it anyway and I hate it x a billion in Trump, who has never in his life demonstrated any kind of courage, including moral courage. I suspected it was bullshit anyway because how would he know that and was it likely? (Not least, Baghdadi probably thought he was achieving a martyr’s death, with all those juicy virgins waiting.) The Guardian confirms he couldn’t know that.

Footage of the US special forces raid on Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Syrian compound reportedly consisted of overhead surveillance footage and no audio, prompting questions over the extent of the dramatic licence taken by Donald Trump in describing the final moments of one of the most wanted terrorists in the world.

US officials who also watched the feed have declined to echo details of Trump’s macabre account of the Isis’s leader death on Saturday, including that Baghdadi was “whimpering, crying and screaming all the way”.

Along with all his other faults he’s a sadist. Of course he is.

The footage piped into the situation room would have consisted of overhead surveillance shots of the dark compound with heat signatures differentiating between US fighters and others, intelligence and military officials told the New York Times.

Those cameras would not have been able to peer into the tunnel where Baghdadi died, nor provide audio proof of his conduct during the last minutes of his life.

…

The US defence secretary, Mark Esper, declined to endorse aspects of Trump’s cinematic account in an interview with ABC’s This Week programme on Sunday morning.

“I don’t have those details,” Esper said, when pressed on how Trump knew Baghdadi had whimpered and cried. “The president probably had the opportunity to talk to commanders on the ground.”

The president probably made it all up.

Of course he did.

President Donald Trump’s announcement of the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi revealed a slew of sensitive details about the secret military operation that could imperil future raids, special operations and intelligence, veterans fear.

Trump, who spoke for a full 48 minutes and took a series of questions at the White House, went into unusual detail about the mission inside hostile territory in Syria that he said he watched in real time “as though you were watching a movie.”

Among the most striking were his descriptions of how the Army Delta Force was inserted into the heavily fortified compound, breached its walls to avoid booby-trapped doors and pursued the terrorist kingpin into a network of tunnels, where he detonated his suicide vest, killing himself and three children. But considered especially egregious were Trump’s remarks about the number and route of the commando’s helicopters.

Which is especially galling when you remember he didn’t inform Pelosi and Schiff about the raid beforehand and cited the risk of “leaks” as his excuse.

Trump didn’t offer specifics about how the U.S. located Baghdadi. But he keyed in on the highly sensitive discipline of signals intelligence — or the remote monitoring of enemy communications — that struck several with deep experience as better left alone.

“These people are very smart, they’re not into cell phones anymore,” Trump said. “They’re not — they’re very technically brilliant. You know, they use the internet better than almost anybody in the world, perhaps other than Donald Trump. But they use the internet incredibly well.”

“Why mention it?” asked Nagata. “It could contribute to a reverse engineering of our intelligence methods by the adversary, and if there’s any possibility of that, why do it?”

Because it’s an opportunity to show off, that’s why. Donald Trump never turns down an opportunity to show off.

Finally, when the helicopters carrying the commandos and their haul took off, they “took an identical route” back to friendly territory, Trump revealed.

That detail bothered the former military officials more than any of the others. “That’s the most worrisome,” said Nagata. “The force is vulnerable throughout the operation, but arrival and departure by helicopter are very dangerous. For me, the idea that anyone would talk publicly about how we did the most dangerous part of the operation — the risks far outweigh the storytelling value.”

“I don’t know why the f— he would say that, honestly,” fumed the other former special operations commander. “If we’re doing the same approaches and egresses, that can get helicopters shot down. It’s happened in Afghanistan.”

Why would he say that? Because it’s something to say. Because it’s a chance to show off. Because the storytelling value accrues to him and the risks accrue to other people, so obviously the choice is simple.

Trump hates DC, because he knows he is widely despised there. He usually avoids it but for some reason yesterday he ventured out to a baseball game. Big mistake.

On Sunday, President Donald Trump made a rare public appearance at Game 5 of the World Series to root for the home team, the Washington Nationals. Trump’s attendance, his very first Major League Baseball game since taking office, proved instantly regrettable, as a wave of sustained boos and chants of “lock him up” met his jumbotron introduction.

Whole goddam town’s fulla libbruls.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The White House is planning to instruct federal agencies to not renew their subscriptions to the New York Times and the Washington Post, administration officials said, escalating President Trump’s attacks on the media outlets.

“Not renewing subscriptions across all federal agencies will be a significant cost saving—hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars will be saved,” White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said in an email Thursday.

Trump says aw yeah we’re building that wall in Colorado we are.

The Guardian has the transcript:

“You know why we’re going to win New Mexico?” Trump told the crowd on Wednesday, talking about a bona fide border state, which he lost in 2016. “Because they want safety on their border. And they didn’t have it. And we’re building a wall on the border of New Mexico, and we’re building a wall in Colorado. We’re building a beautiful wall. A big one that really works, that you can’t get over, that you can’t get under.”

There’s more though. He stops for applause and to gather his thoughts, and he comes up with a solution.

And we’re building a wall in Texas…and we’re not building a wall in Kansas but they get the benefit of the walls we just mentioned.

That right there? That’s Trump not deciding to say “Oops I misspoke there” but rather to pretend there was some logic to what he said. It’s what he always does when he flubs. He does catch his mistakes, but what he doesn’t do – ever – is admit they were mistakes. If he slurs a word he pauses to repeat it as if for emphasis; if he uses the wrong word he repeats what he said but with the right word added in, but as if for emphasis rather than just admitting the flub. During those few seconds of applause he decided the way to justify his having said we’re building a border wall in Colorado was to pretend he’d meant to say Colorado because hey Colorado gets the benefit of the wall just like Kansas.

It didn’t work though; people made fun of him just the same.

The governor of Colorado, Democrat Jared Polis, dunked on Trump on Twitter.

“Well, this is awkward,” Polis wrote. “… Colorado doesn’t border Mexico. Good thing Colorado now offers free full-day kindergarten so our kids can learn basic geography.”

Others on social media suggested that if the Trump administration does set out to build a border wall in Colorado, perhaps New Mexico, which borders Colorado to the south, would pay for it.

Others compared the moment to an episode in Trump’s follies from earlier this year, in which the president, sitting in the Oval Office and holding up a map, tried to defend his assertion that Hurricane Dorian threatened the state of Alabama…

Senator Patrick Leahy for one…

So Trump had to stay up late yelling back.

(Kiddingly) We’re building a Wall in Colorado”(then stated, “we’re not building a Wall in Kansas but they get the benefit of the Wall we’re building on the Border”) refered to people in the very packed auditorium, from Colorado & Kansas, getting the benefit of the Border Wall!

Nah. Also, “referred.” Also, he was in Pittsburgh, which is quite a long way from Colorado and Kansas.

Updating to add:

Mashable

Heather Cox Richardson underlines some things, starting with Bill Taylor’s public statement to the impeachment inquiry:

He confirmed that while the official American policy was to encourage democracy in Ukraine to help it fight off Russia, the Trump administration had a shadow foreign policy team, headed by Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Guiliani, and including special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker, the Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, and acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney. Trump did not want “to provide any assistance at all” to Ukraine in its struggle against Russia. The president personally withheld money that Congress had appropriated for that struggle until Ukraine leaders promised to state publicly that they were opening an investigation into the company for which Joe Biden’s son Hunter worked.

This information devastates Trump’s position that there was “no quid pro quo,” (although, again, asking was itself a crime)… and Taylor kept proof in the form of a paper trail. This. Is. Huge. White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham tried to push back by calling leaks from Taylor’s testimony “triple hearsay” and said “this is a coordinated smear campaign from far-left lawmakers and radical unelected bureaucrats waging war on the Constitution,” but Taylor’s statement was explosive even without hearing what he said behind closed doors.

Note, though, what Taylor said Trump wanted in exchange for the release of military aid. He didn’t demand actual dirt on Hunter Biden (again, there is no evidence that Biden did anything illegal), but rather he wanted a public declaration that Ukraine was investigating the company for which Biden worked. The information that Ukraine was investigating the company, dumped into the media, would swamp Joe Biden’s presidential candidacy.

This is important. Trump understood that the idea that Ukraine was investigating corruption was the story, not that actual corruption existed. This is precisely what happened in 2016 with the story of Clinton’s emails, which continually dominated the 2016 election coverage, and which we now know was a complete non-story. Trump wanted to skew the public narrative before the 2020 election, and he pressured a foreign government to help him do that.

His primitive little ferret brain is good at some things, and this is one of them – knowing what kind of rotting meat draws media coverage.

And on the same day, Mitch McConnell again killed a Senate effort to guard our elections.

The other big news today was that the Senate once again refused to pass measures to secure the 2020 elections. One bill they rejected was co-sponsored by Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Lindsay Graham (R-SC), and required on-line platforms to make “all reasonable efforts” to ensure foreign entities do not buy political advertising. It also would make buyers of the ads public. The other bill they rejected provided $1 billion to secure the 2020 election and require paper ballots for backup in case electronic voting machines produced unexpected results.

We must have rigged elections! It’s imperative! It’s the American way!

H/t What a Maroon

Trump claims he’s being lynched – yes, lynched.

So some day, if a Democrat becomes President and the Republicans win the House, even by a tiny margin, they can impeach the President, without due process or fairness or any legal rights. All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here – a lynching. But we will WIN!

But it’s not a lynching. It’s not a witch hunt, and it’s not a lynching. Trump is not a woman, and he is not a black man. He is not being burned alive, and he is not being hanged.

Even Republicans don’t like the “lynching” claim…except for Lindsey Graham.

President Donald Trump’s shocking comparison of the ongoing impeachment inquiry against him to a “lynching” provoked widespread condemnation from congressional members of both parties on Monday—with the notable exception of Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who told reporters on Capitol Hill that the investigation into Trump is “a lynching in every sense.”

In every sense? So, including the literal one? Because…come on now Senator.

“I think it’s pretty well accurate—this is a shame, this is a joke,” Graham told a gaggle of reporters on Monday morning. “This is a lynching in every sense. This is un-American. I’ve never seen a situation in my lifetime as a lawyer where somebody’s accused of a major misconduct who cannot confront the accusers, call witnesses on their behalf, and have the discussion in the light of day so the public can judge.”

Trump’s Monday morning tweet—in which he encouraged Republicans to “remember what they are witnessing here – a lynching”—is the latest escalation in the president’s increasingly hyperbolic reactions to the impeachment inquiry, which he has called a “coup,” a “scam” and, of course, a “witch hunt.”

Later on Monday, Graham doubled down on the comparison, calling the impeachment inquiry “literally a political lynching,” and accusing reporters of holding Republicans to a higher standard than Democrats.

There’s no such thing as “literally a political lynching.” That’s like saying “literally a figurative lynching,” which would be silly.

White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley defended Trump’s use of the word.

“The president has used many words, all types of language, to talk about the way the media has treated him,” Gidley told reporters outside the White House, adding that Trump “wasn’t trying to compare himself to the horrific history in this country at all.”

Oh really? Then what did he mean by the word? Why use that word if not to compare the impeachment inquiry to being hanged from a tree by a white racist mob?

Graham, a longtime defender of some of the president’s most appalling excesses, represents South Carolina,  a state with a violent history of racial injustice. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal non-profit, an estimated 184 black people were the victims of lynchings in the state between 1877 and 1950. The number of those killed by white mobs in the Jim Crow South without the ability to confront accusers, call witnesses, and be tried by a jury of their peers tops an estimated 4,000 people.

We treat rich white guys much better in this country.

Here he is saying it (go to 2:20). He says a lot of other stupid shit too.

 

The Guardian says Trump told lie after lie after lie in that Cabinet meeting.

Trump bounced from one falsehood to another while speaking to reporters during his cabinet meeting at the White House.

Here are just a few fact-checks from reporters about the president’s 70-minute meeting:

Toluse Olurunnipa:

Trump’s remarks in the Cabinet room are a stream of exaggerations, boasts and falsehoods….

For example, in his remarks about Doral: “Miami International, one of the biggest airports in the world. Some people say it’s the biggest.”

(MIA is not even in the top 20)

That stupid “some people say” thing, as if simple facts like comparative airport size can be decided by “some people saying.”

Yamiche Alcindor:

President Trump on Syria: “We’re having very good news coming out. The ceasefire’s holding.“

Note: U.S. officials have told NBC & CNN that the ceasefire is not holding in Syria.

Peter Baker:

Repeating it over and over doesn’t make it true. Contrary to what Trump says, the whistleblower complaint was factually quite accurate, according to the White House’s own rough transcript.

Lie after lie after lie after lie.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Is Taco Bell available?

I know normally the game is “what if Obama had done this,” but I think in this instance it’s more fun to play “what if Hillary had done something even vaguely approaching this?”

Like, let’s say the G-7 summit host contract was awarded to some resort after a thorough bid process pursuant to applicable government procurement regulations. Then some enterprising right wing news site “uncovers” that President Hillary Clinton’s former college roommate’s cousin’s dentist sits on the board of that resort. Scandal! The right wing erupts in fury and outrage! Fox News runs wall to wall coverage. Every conservative legal analyst soberly opines that this is EXACTLY the sort of situation that the Emoluments Clause was intended to prevent, and because Republicans care so much about the Constitution, they really have no choice but to impeach her. The Washington Post tries to be “balanced” by noting the “controversy,” but the New York Times dives right in, quoting anonymous FBI sources who are reportedly “troubled” by the allegations.

If you think I’m exaggerating, consider this: conservatives are currently trying to invent a scandal out of the fact that the lawyer who represents one of the Ukraine whistleblowers used to (pre-2000) work for the same public interest organization as the man who went on to be Hillary’s campaign manager. Two DC figures crossed paths once? They are “linked,” and obviously conspiring!

At this point, Trump could announce that he’s taking the U.S. government’s gold reserves and using it to make new toilets at every Trump Hotel, and GOP senators would nod and say “yes, that makes perfect sense and is utterly appropriate. Trump Properties have excellent experience with gold furniture and fixtures.”

Trump is currently busy pissing on the Constitution in public.

Even after reversing his decision to hold the June G7 summit at his Florida resort, Trump is still insisting that the property would have been the best place for the multi-nation event.

Reuters White House reporter tweets:

.@realDonaldTrump says during White House cabinet meeting that the G7 at his Doral resort would have been the greatest G7 ever, Democrats went crazy about that plan even though he would have done it for free. (Trump announced Saturday he would no longer hold the G7 at Doral.)

The Guardian continues:

The president is blaming Democrats for forcing his hand on the issue, but a number of reports have surfaced that Trump only changed his mind after hearing frustration from congressional Republicans about having to defend the decision.

But wait! That’s not the pissing on the Constitution part! That came a few minutes later:

Taking questions from reporters about his canceled plans to hold the June G7 summit at his Florida resort, Trump appeared dismissive of a constitutional clause forbidding federal officeholders from accepting gifts from foreign states.

The president said, according to the pool report: “You people with this phony Emoluments Clause.”

That’s it! That’s the pissing part. Trump calling a clause of the Constitution he swore a solemn public ceremonial oath to protect and defend, “phony.”

The reaction was too much even for “President” Shameless: Doral’s off.

Responding to stinging criticism, President Donald Trump has abruptly reversed his plan to hold the next year’s Group of Seven world leaders’ meeting at his Doral golf resort in Florida.

“I think he knows,” his acting chief of staff said Sunday, “people think it looks lousy.”

Think? Mulvaney thinks he knows? How could he possibly not know? Are they holding him in an empty room and feeding him only the information they want him to have?

And people think it looks lousy? It’s not a matter of opinion and it’s not an appearance – we know for sure it is lousy, very lousy indeed. Also bedbuggy and mosquitoey.

“Based on both Media & Democrat Crazed and Irrational Hostility, we will no longer consider Trump National Doral, Miami, as the Host Site for the G-7 in 2020,” Trump tweeted.

Ah what a hardened liar he is. If he really thought it was just crazed irrational hostility from Enemies on the Left he wouldn’t have ditched it.

Mulvaney on Sunday claimed that Trump was “honestly surprised at the level of pushback” after the Doral announcement.

Well, chum, that’s because he’s stupid, and corrupt, and mind-blind, and narcissistic. That’s your boss: the guy who can’t comprehend any opinion or view of the world other than his own.

Eric Lipton at the Times

The rules are clear for nearly everyone who works in the executive branch: Officials are prohibited from playing even a minor role in a decision that directly creates a financial benefit for the employee or the employee’s immediate family.

But those rules do not apply to the president and vice president, the only executive branch officials who are exempt from a criminal statute and a separate ethics regulation that govern conflicts of interest.

Exempt…because?

I’ll take a wild guess that it’s the usual bullshit “because the president is so very busy, must not be investigated or prosecuted, much too busy” – the bullshit that is letting this brazen criminal get away with brazen crimes for close to three years now.

That exemption is the reason President Trump could legally play a role in the selection of the Trump National Doral resort near Miami as the site of next year’s summit meeting of the Group of 7. If anyone in the executive branch other than Mr. Trump or Vice President Mike Pence tried the same thing, they would likely have been blocked by government lawyers, faced an ethics investigation and perhaps become the subject of a criminal inquiry, federal ethics lawyers from both parties said Friday.

But if Trump does it it’s totally legal.

Pardon me while I smash up the furniture.

Nine days before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, one of his lawyers, Sheri A. Dillon, released a document detailing how Mr. Trump would avoid conflicts of interest after he was sworn in, even if he was not prohibited under law from taking actions that would benefit his family financially.

“President-Elect Trump, as well as Don, Eric, and Alan are committed to ensuring that the activities of The Trump Organization are beyond reproach, and that the Organization avoids even the appearance of a conflict of interest, including through any advantage derived from the Office of the Presidency,” Ms. Dillon wrote in the six-page document, referring to Mr. Trump’s two oldest sons and Alan Garten, the chief legal officer at Trump Organization.

Hahahahahahaha just kidding folks, we don’t mean a word of it.

But that same day, Mr. Trump made clear he was aware that he had a legal exemption that provided him considerable flexibility to decide for himself what would be permissible.

“I have a no-conflict-of-interest provision as president,” Mr. Trump said. “It was many, many years old, this is for presidents. Because they don’t want presidents getting — I understand they don’t want presidents getting tangled up in minutia; they want a president to run the country. So I could actually run my business, I could actually run my business and run government at the same time.”

Yeah we definitely don’t want Donnie the Trump getting tangled up in minutiae like being told he can’t book international meetings into his foul hotels, he’s far too busy tweeting and watching Fox and tweeting and screaming about shifty Schiff and tweeting and holding rallies and tweeting.

The acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, said on Thursday that Mr. Trump was the first to recommend the Doral resort as a site for the Group of 7.

“We were back in the dining room and I was going over it with a couple of our advance team,” Mr. Mulvaney said. “We had the list, and he goes, ‘What about Doral?’ And it was like, ‘That’s not the craziest idea. It makes perfect sense.’”

No it is the craziest idea. Really.

Mr. Mulvaney on Thursday defended the approach the White House took in selecting the Doral, saying that a dozen locations were evaluated, which suggests that federal contracting rules might have been honored. But Mr. Mulvaney would not disclose the other locations or the process used to evaluate them.

So that’s totally above suspicion then.

David Farenthold of the Post tells Chuck Todd at Meet the Press about the ludicrous pantomime of “looking at other possible sites for the meeting and finding them all unsuitable” – except they won’t say anything about exactly what the sites are or how they decided to look at them. Farenthold:

The only thing they’ll say is that one of them was so high in the mountains that if you wanted to hold a meeting you’d have to give the leaders oxygen.

I burst out laughing at that and so did they. Why pick that one to consider then? Well exactly; why indeed. Farenthold:

That’s the thing – if your list was like a campground at the top of Mount McKinley, and a Chuck E. Cheese, and Doral, then Doral was the best place, you know?

I see a new game forming.

A chicken processing plant; Folsom Prison; Doral.

A forest that is on fire; Arctowski Station in Antarctica; Doral.

Kīlauea; an airport runway; Doral.

A cotton field in Arkansas; Pizza Hut; Doral.

Namik Tam, former Turkish ambassador to the US, tweets a cartoon from the New Yorker: