Tag: Trump

  • Il ne regrette rien

    Bob Corker, the Tennessee senator who’s been brawling with Trump lately, chatted with the Times yesterday. He apparently gets what a disaster Trump is yet he thinks it will all be ok somehow.

    Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, charged in an interview on Sunday that President Trump was treating his office like “a reality show,” with reckless threats toward other countries that could set the nation “on the path to World War III.”

    In an extraordinary rebuke of a president of his own party, Mr. Corker said he was alarmed about a president who acts “like he’s doing ‘The Apprentice’ or something.”

    “He concerns me,” Mr. Corker added. “He would have to concern anyone who cares about our nation.”

    So then it’s a pity that Corker endorsed Trump during the election, isn’t it. It’s not as if Trump seemed ok until after the inauguration – he never seemed ok.

    Trump was of course lying when he tweeted that Corker had begged for his support.

    Mr. Corker flatly disputed that account, saying Mr. Trump had urged him to run again, and promised to endorse him if he did. But the exchange laid bare a deeper rift: The senator views Mr. Trump as given to irresponsible outbursts — a political novice who has failed to make the transition from show business.

    Mr. Trump poses such an acute risk, the senator said, that a coterie of senior administration officials must protect him from his own instincts. “I know for a fact that every single day at the White House, it’s a situation of trying to contain him,” Mr. Corker said in a telephone interview.

    Yes, but again, none of this is surprising. It was always clear what Trump is.

    The deeply personal back-and-forth will almost certainly rupture what had been a friendship with a fellow real estate developer turned elected official, one of the few genuine relationships Mr. Trump had developed on Capitol Hill. Still, even as he leveled his stinging accusations, Mr. Corker repeatedly said on Sunday that he liked Mr. Trump, until now an occasional golf partner, and wished him “no harm.”

    How can a reasonable person (and Corker seems reasonable) possibly like him? If you have a friend or acquaintance who has been friendly and charming to you but is also a noisy emphatic misogynist and racist and xenophobe and bully…doesn’t that curdle the liking? That’s not some wild hypothetical, I’m sure we’ve all had that experience in miniature and felt the tension. Trump makes it easy by skipping over any tension and just making it impossible to “like” him.

    In a 25-minute conversation, Mr. Corker, speaking carefully and purposefully, seemed to almost find cathartic satisfaction by portraying Mr. Trump in terms that most senior Republicans use only in private.

    The senator, who is close to Mr. Tillerson, invoked comments that the president made on Twitter last weekend in which he appeared to undercut Mr. Tillerson’s negotiations with North Korea.

    “A lot of people think that there is some kind of ‘good cop, bad cop’ act underway, but that’s just not true,” Mr. Corker said.

    Without offering specifics, he said Mr. Trump had repeatedly undermined diplomacy with his Twitter fingers. “I know he has hurt, in several instances, he’s hurt us as it relates to negotiations that were underway by tweeting things out,” Mr. Corker said.

    Make America Great Again, yeah?

    All but inviting his colleagues to join him in speaking out about the president, Mr. Corker said his concerns about Mr. Trump were shared by nearly every Senate Republican.

    “Look, except for a few people, the vast majority of our caucus understands what we’re dealing with here,” he said, adding that “of course they understand the volatility that we’re dealing with and the tremendous amount of work that it takes by people around him to keep him in the middle of the road.”

    Then they should invoke Article 25 without delay. The man is wholly unfit, he’s deranged, he’s reckless – why are they not removing him from office?

    One of the most prominent establishment-aligned Republicans to develop a relationship with Mr. Trump, the senator said he did not regret standing with him during the campaign last year.

    “I would compliment him on things that he did well, and I’d criticize things that were inappropriate,” he said. “So it’s been really the same all the way through.”

    Well he should regret it. The Trump of now is the Trump of then. He should regret it.

    In August, after Mr. Trump’s equivocal response to the deadly clashes in Charlottesville, Va., Mr. Corker told reporters that the president “has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be successful.”

    He said on Sunday that he had made all those comments deliberately, aiming them at “an audience of one, plus those people who are closely working around with him, what I would call the good guys.” He was referring to Mr. Tillerson, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and the White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly.

    “As long as there are people like that around him who are able to talk him down when he gets spun up, you know, calm him down and continue to work with him before a decision gets made, I think we’ll be fine,” he said.

    That’s just incomprehensible to me.

  • Wait and see

    It’s Saturday afternoon; I guess Trump is bored with watching football.

    “Presidents and their administrations have been talking to North Korea for 25 years, agreements made and massive amounts of money paid … hasn’t worked, agreements violated before the ink was dry, makings fools of U.S. negotiators. Sorry, but only one thing will work!” Trump tweeted in two messages on Saturday afternoon.

    “Sorry, but I plan to blow up the world.”

    “Soz, but I’m a reckless idiot who can’t find his own buttocks in the dark so I’m going to go to war with North Korea and its buddy China.”

    “Sorry, but you laughed at me one time too many.”

    The president’s latest tweets come as the world continues to try to decipher another cryptic message that Trump issued on Thursday night at the White House, as he posed for a photo with the country’s top military leaders.

    “You guys know what this represents?” Trump asked reporters in the room that night. “Maybe it’s the calm before the storm.”

    When pressed to explain what he meant, Trump said: “You’ll find out.”

    Oh, isn’t that adorable. He’s such a card.

    More on that fun moment:

    At 7:18 p.m., reporters were led into the lavish dining room where the military’s senior leaders and their spouses were lined up on either side of the president and first lady Melania Trump in preparation for a formal group photo.

    “You guys know what this represents?” Trump said gesturing to the commanders surrounding him as he made looping motions with his right index finger.

    He dramatically paused and then said: “Maybe it’s the calm before the storm.”

    “What’s the storm?” a reporter called out, as the officials and their spouses continued to pose, their faces frozen in toothy smiles, even as many of their eyes began to dart around the room.

    “Could be the calm before the storm,” the president said.

    It felt like the opening scene of an action movie — the president, stiffly rotating from side to side, surveying the country’s military leaders and providing an ominous hint that something would soon unfold. He wouldn’t say what, but it seemed clear that it wouldn’t be anything good. Maybe something involving North Korea or the Islamic State terrorist organization or Iran or who knows what else.

    Who knows, who knows, because here is this stupid vain greedy man we’ve given possession of all the keys, and he’s toying with us. It could be anything – anything except a good idea.

    On Thursday evening, reporters were only in the dining room for about a minute — and they kept asking the president to explain what he meant.

    “What storm, Mr. President?” an NBC News reporter called out.

    “We have the world’s great military people in this room, I will tell you that,” Trump said in a loud but calm tone, flanked by his generals, whom he then thanked for coming to the White House.

    Again, a reporter asked: “What storm, Mr. President?”

    He responded: “You’ll find out.”

    That’s this reckless toad of a man playing games with the people he’s supposed to serve.

    At the White House press briefing on Friday afternoon, about one quarter of the questions directed at press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders revolved around the president’s calm-before-the-storm remark. She did little to provide clarity to Americans worried that the country might be headed into war.

    “We’re never going to say in advance what the president’s going to do,” Sanders said when first asked about the storm comment. “And, as he said last night. . .you’ll have to wait and see.”

    As if we were talking about birthday presents or a surprise trip to who knows where. That’s how childish and incompetent they are.

    Later in the briefing, another reporter noted that the president did give advance warning that he might do something by saying that there could be a storm coming.

    “He, unprompted, dangled these hints,” the reporter said.

    Sanders responded: “He didn’t talk about any specific actions at all.”

    So she confirmed he was playing a stupid sadistic game. That makes sense.

  • White House press release on late night talk shows

    Lordy lordy lordy.

    He thinks a “good story” is one that says nice things about him. I guess no one has ever explained to him that in journalism the criteria for “good” have more to do with accuracy and clarity and significance and the like than with whether or not they say nice things about belligerent stupid frauds who get themselves elected to high office.

    He’s working hard for his donors. I guess no one has ever explained to him that he’s supposed to work hard for all of us, not just his donors.

    All that’s going on in the world and the country, and the president of the US is yammering about late night talk show hosts.

    More and more people are suggesting=Donald Trump is saying more and more times every hour.

  • The god memo

    And just in time for the weekend – Sessions issues a heap of theocratic guidance for federal agencies. Amen, Master.

    Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued sweeping guidance to executive branch agencies Friday on the Justice Department’s interpretation of how the government should respect religious freedom, triggering an immediate backlash from civil liberties groups who asserted the nation’s top law enforcement officer was trying to offer a license for discrimination.

    In a memorandum titled “Federal Law Protections for Religious Liberty,” Sessions articulated 20 sweeping principles about religious freedom and what that means for the U.S. government — among them that freedom of religion extends to people and organizations; that religious employers are allowed to hire only those whose conduct is consistent with their beliefs; and that grants can’t require religious organizations to change their character.

    …

    “Except in the narrowest circumstances, no one should be forced to choose between living out his or her faith and complying with the law,” Sessions wrote. “Therefore, to the greatest extent practicable and permitted by law, religious observance and practice should be reasonably accommodated in all government activity, including employment, contracting, and programming.”

    Bollocks. To a great many people, “living out her/his faith” means treating men as superior & dominant and women as inferior & subordinate. It means treating children as needing regular beatings to teach them how to be “good” (according to a narrow pinched religious idea of “good”). It means treating lesbians and gays as wicked outcast demons. It can mean treating people who follow rival religions as enemies.

    Of course it can also mean compassion, generosity, altruism – but then that kind of thing is not likely to be in tension with laws about equal treatment and the like, is it. It’s the evil stuff they have to protect.

    And civil liberties groups said there could be other effects. The principle allowing religious employers to hire only those whose conduct is consistent with their beliefs, for example, might allow a religious school to fire a teacher who had a child out of wedlock or a man who wed another man, said Louise Melling, deputy legal director at the ACLU.

    “It is countenancing discrimination,” Melling said. “It is countenancing exercises of faith in a way that will harm other individuals.”

    That’s why they like it. The chance to harm other individuals is the point.

  • President Pious

    President Pussy Grabber is doing his best to make it more difficult for women to get contraception. I hope Princess Ivanka comes darting out to tell us how empowering this is.

    The Trump administration issued a rule Friday that sharply limits the Affordable Care Act’s contraception coverage mandate, a move that could mean many American women would no longer have access to birth control free of charge.

    No, that they would no long have access to birth control as part of their insurance. It was never “free of charge”; it was included in insurance coverage.

    The new regulation, issued by the Health and Human Services Department, allows a much broader group of employers and insurers to exempt themselves from covering contraceptives such as birth control pills on religious or moral grounds. The decision, anticipated from the Trump administration for months, is the latest twist in a seesawing legal and ideological fight that has surrounded this aspect of the 2010 health-care law nearly from the start.

    What could be more edifying than seeing President “you can grab them by the pussy” making it more difficult for women to get contraception on “moral” grounds? You can grab them by the pussy, and they can’t even get contraception through their employee health insurance; hahaha it sucks to be a woman doesn’t it.

    As part of the rule, made publicly available in the Federal Register late Friday morning, administration officials estimate that 120,000 women at most will lose access to free contraceptives — many fewer than critics predict.

    They’re not free. Wouldn’t you think journalists for the Post could get this right? They’re part of employer-based insurance. That’s not the same thing as free – it’s part of their compensation, that they work for.

    The rule follows some social conservatives’ increasing frustration with the pace at which the Trump administration has addressed their demands on issues such as the ACA contraception requirement. “An awful lot of people who voted for this president did so believing this was going to be something he would solve,” said Mark Rienzi, senior counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, who hailed the rule as a correction of overly aggressive liberal actions under President Barack Obama. “There are other ways to get contraceptives. You don’t need to force nuns to give people contraception.”

    Nuns, and the Catholic church more broadly, don’t need to try to run the lives of everyone who works for them. And they don’t give the contraception in any case; they provide insurance coverage that includes it. It’s an included benefit, not a donation.

    In his sweeping May 4 executive order on free speech and religious liberty, Trump directed his Cabinet to address the concerns of those who had “conscience-based objections” to contraceptive coverage.

    In previewing the rule for reporters, Roger Severino, director of HHS’s office for civil rights and a longtime proponent of religious liberties, reiterated Trump’s May pledge from the Rose Garden. The president had promised that “we will not allow people of faith to be targeted, bullied or silenced any more . . . We are ending the attacks on religious liberties.”

    On Friday, Severino elaborated: “That was a promise made, and this is the promise kept. … We should have space for organizations to live out their religious identity and not face discrimination because of their faith.”

    But not, of course, for women to live without fear of unwanted pregnancy.

  • Tillerson has been neglecting his Trump-image duties

    Trump and Tillerson don’t get along because Trump is all mavericky and Tillerson (in Trump’s view) is “conventional.” Now I think Tillerson is not all that conventional, for instance he’s not conventional enough to think a Secretary of State should have some relevant education or experience. I think it’s pretty unconventional for a corporate executive to think he’s qualified to be in charge of US foreign policy.

    The already tense relationship between the two headstrong men — one a billionaire former real estate developer, the other a former captain of the global oil industry — has ruptured into what some White House officials call an irreparable breach that will inevitably lead to Tillerson’s departure, whether immediately or not. Tillerson’s dwindling cohort of allies say he has been given an impossible job and is doing his best with it.

    For months now, Trump has been piqued by rumors of disloyalty that have filtered up to him from Foggy Bottom, the home of the State Department. In private meetings, the president has also been irked by Tillerson’s arguments for a more-traditional approach on policies, from Iran to climate change to North Korea, and by Tillerson’s visible frustration when overruled. Trump has chafed at what he sees as arrogance on the part of an employee.

    But Tillerson isn’t “an employee.” Trump isn’t a god or a king or a mafia boss. He is, terrifyingly, at the top of the chain of command, but that doesn’t mean everyone else is his “employee” in the usual sense. They all work for the country and its people first of all, and presidents shouldn’t be demanding shows of deference from colleagues.

    And as Tillerson has traveled the globe, Trump believes his top diplomat often seems more concerned with what the world thinks of the United States than with tending to the president’s personal image.

    What? What did they just say? Along with thinking Tillerson is too “arrogant” for an employee, he’s also miffed that Tillerson pays more attention to what the world thinks of the United States than to tending to the president’s personal image? Secretaries of State aren’t there to tend to presidents’ images! That’s not their job and it shouldn’t be their job.

    Meanwhile, Tillerson — who ran one of the world’s largest corporations with near-dictatorial control — has struggled to submit to the whims and wishes of a boss who governs by impulse. Deliberative in style, he has been caught off-guard by Trump’s fiery and injudicious tweets and repulsed by some flashes of the president’s character, such as when Trump saidthere were “fine people” among those marching at a deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. “The president speaks for himself,” Tillerson said at the time.

    That’s Trump. He’s scum. Tillerson should have quit.

    Tillerson entered office as one of the mainstream foreign policy and national security voices around Trump, putting him at odds with Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and his former chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon.

    In other words with two internet-famous crazies.

    Also that shining example of foreign policy experties Jared Kushner is annoyed with Tillerson because blah blah blah who cares. The inmates have taken over, we’re all doomed.

  • Can’t somebody just arrest NBC?

    Trump went to Las Vegas yesterday and had just the best time! It was so much fun.

    But now he’s back home and wondering why the government isn’t doing its job and telling the news media what they can say.

    Also he thinks he can know with certainty what a particular person never said.

    I’m guessing Tillerson will be gone in a matter of days not weeks.

  • He mad

    It seems Trump watched NBC report that Tillerson called him a moron.

    Diddums. No matter what he says, “they” keep noticing that he’s a malevolent fool. Of course that’s because he is a malevolent fool, and no matter what he does or says, that remains obvious.

    Oh no, not the dreaded “their ratings are down”! Of course his ratings are down too, but whatever.

    No, it has not. Tillerson refused to disavow the claim that he called the Donster a moron…indeed, a fucking moron.

  • Timeserver Rex

    Well, I guess Tillerson will be cleaning out his desk soon.

    Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was on the verge of resigning this past summer amid mounting policy disputes and clashes with the White House, according to senior administration officials who were aware of the situation at the time.

    The tensions came to a head around the time President Donald Trump delivered a politicized speech in late July to the Boy Scouts of America, an organization Tillerson once led, the officials said.

    Just days earlier, Tillerson had openly disparaged the president, referring to him as a “moron,” after a July 20 meeting at the Pentagon with members of Trump’s national security team and Cabinet officials, according to three officials familiar with the incident.

    In an unscheduled statement to reporters Wednesday morning, Tillerson directly addressed that version of events, saying, “I have never considered leaving this post.”

    But did he deny calling Trump a moron? No he didn’t. He had to resort to the old “I’m not going to dignify that with a response” ploy, which won’t make the Donster happy.

    Pence has since spoken to Tillerson about being respectful of the president in meetings and in public, urging that any disagreements be sorted out privately, a White House official said. The official said progress has since been made.

    “Look, Rex, we’ve got to keep up the fiction because what do we look like if we don’t? We can’t just come right out and say we accepted jobs in the administration of a sleazy lying corrupt moron.”

    In August, Trump was furious with Tillerson over his response to a question about the president’s handling of the racially charged and deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, administration officials said. Trump had said publicly that white nationalists and neo-Nazi sympathizers shared blame for violence with those who came out to protest them.

    “The president speaks for himself,” Tillerson said at the time, when asked on “Fox News Sunday” about Trump’s comments.

    Hammond said Trump addressed the issue with Tillerson in a meeting the next day. He said that during the meeting, Trump congratulated another White House official, Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert, for his performance on the Sunday news talk shows. Bossert had defended Trump’s controversial pardon of former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio.

    Well that’s the thing, isn’t it – Trump is a moron and he’s also a complete narcissist who judges everything on how flattering to him it is.

    The frustrations run both ways. Tillerson stunned a handful of senior administration officials when he called the president a “moron” after a tense two-hour long meeting in a secure room at the Pentagon called “The Tank,” according to three officials who were present or briefed on the incident. The July 20 meeting came a day after a meeting in the White House Situation Room on Afghanistan policy where Trump rattled his national security advisers by suggesting he might fire the top U.S. commander of the war and comparing the decision-making process on troop levels to the renovation of a high-end New York restaurant, according to participants in the meeting.

    But what did Tillerson think he was? Not a moron? Did Rex ever think the Donster is a smart guy? He can’t have. He took the job. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for him.

    Trump has already seen an unusually high level of turnover in his administration, with the departures of his national security adviser, deputy national security adviser, his chief of staff, press secretary, communications director — twice — his chief strategist, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the acting head of the Justice Department. Last Friday Trump accepted the resignation of Tom Price, the Health and Human Services secretary.

    Because he’s a chaotic narcissistic dangerous fool. What did anyone expect?

  • Possess your own SoHo

    Pro Publica, the New Yorker, and WNYC have collaborated on an investigation of that time a few years ago when New York prosecutors were considering bringing a felony fraud case against Ivanka and Donald Junior Trump, but didn’t.

    In the spring of 2012, Donald Trump’s two eldest children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., found themselves in a precarious legal position. For two years, prosecutors in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office had been building a criminal case against them for misleading prospective buyers of units in the Trump SoHo, a hotel and condo development that was failing to sell.

    Oh surely not. Real estate grifters never mislead prospective buyers.

    By which I mean, they do that routinely; I’m surprised to learn that anyone even considers prosecuting them. I thought they had some kind of Real Estate Grifters’ Exemption to lie to people about the product.

    In June 2006, during the season finale of “The Apprentice,” Donald Trump Sr. unveiled the Trump SoHo as a visionary project. The luxury development was intended to mark the ascension of Ivanka and Donald Jr. — then 24 and 28 years old, respectively — as full players in the Trump empire. They signed the licensing deal alongside their father, and photographs of Ivanka were featured in the Trump SoHo’s advertising, under the tagline “Possess your own SoHo.”

    A rather tasteless double meaning there.

    The Trump SoHo was beleaguered from the start: Named for one of Manhattan’s trendiest neighborhoods, the development wasn’t really in SoHo, but located just west of it, near the entrance ramp to the Holland Tunnel.

    Ummmyeah, “just west” but a world away, because who the fuck wants to live near the entrance ramp to the Holland Tunnel? Plus that business of naming it SoHo when it’s not SoHo – that’s so Trump. So, not surprisingly, people didn’t rush to snap up these hot properties. That’s where the lying and fraud comes in…well, that plus the massively undesirable terms.

    Zoning laws wouldn’t allow a residential tower at the location, so the Trumps fell back on an alternative: a “condo-hotel,” in which buyers got a hotel room rather than an apartment, and were legally prohibited from staying there more than 120 nights per year. Worse, the high-priced condos hit the market in September 2007, just as the global economy began to crater in what became the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

    Oh, awesome – who wouldn’t want to pay an inflated price for a third of a hotel room overlooking the entrance to the Holland Tunnel? Besides absolutely everyone?

    And yet…

    Business was slow, but the Trump family claimed the opposite. In April 2008, they said that 31 percent of the condos in the building had been purchased. Donald Jr. boasted to The Real Deal magazine that 55 percent of the units had been bought. In June 2008, Donald Jr. and Ivanka, alongside their brother Eric, gathered the foreign press at Trump Tower in Manhattan, where Ivanka announced that 60 percent had been snapped up. “We’re in a very fortunate position,” she said, “where we have enough sales and now we are strategically targeting certain buyers.”

    That’s amazing!

    But not true.

    None of that was true. According to a sworn affidavit by a Trump partner filed with the New York attorney general’s office, by March of 2010, almost two years after the press conference, only 15.8 percent of units had been sold.

    This was more than a marketing problem. The deal hinged on selling at least 15 percent of the units. By law, the sales couldn’t close with anything less. The Trumps and their partners would have had to return the buyers’ down payments.

    Some buyers concluded that they’d been cheated. In August 2010, some sued the Trump Organization and others involved in the project in New York federal court. “This action seeks to redress the substantial and ongoing pattern of fraudulent misrepresentations and deceptive sales practices” by the Trumps and the other defendants, the suit charged. The plaintiffs argued that there’s a vast difference in value between a unit in a building that is 15 percent sold and one that is 60 percent sold. Their complaint accused the sellers, including the Trumps, of “a consistent and concerted pattern of outright lies.”

    I guess the deal with real estate grifting is that they can talk whatever bullshit they like about what’s going to happen, because who can demonstrate they knew it wouldn’t happen? But lying about what has already happened is not quite so easy to get away with.

    They did get away with it though.

    After the civil suit was filed, the Manhattan district attorney’s office opened a criminal investigation. Prosecutors are often wary of getting involved in a dispute between wealthy litigants. But in this instance, according to a person familiar with their thinking, the lawyers in the Major Economic Crimes Bureau quickly concluded that there was enough to warrant an investigation. They believed that Ivanka and Donald Jr., might have violated the Martin Act, a New York statute that bans any false statement in conjunction with the sale of a security or real estate. Prosecutors also saw potential fraud and larceny charges, applying a legal theory that, by overstating the number of units sold, the Trump were falsely inflating their value and, in effect, cheating unsuspecting condo buyers.

    But then Marc Kasowitz paid a call on the DA, who told the prosecutors to drop the case. Kasowitz had contributed $25 k (which seems like a trivial sum to me) to the DA’s re-election campaign; the DA returned it after that meeting.

    I recommend reading the whole article. It’s not an “aha!” about the money; it’s not at all clear that that made a difference. But. The whole thing is just skeevy as hell. It’s typical Trumpiana – lying, gilding, puffing, cheating, hyping, thieving, manipulating, backrooming, sleaze sleaze sleazing. It just sickens me that people like this are running the government. They’re cheap crooks and they should be selling used cars in Perth Amboy.

  • Differences

    It’s a grotesque fact of life here that commenting on mass shootings is one of the duties of the head of state. ABC compares the two most recent.

    Former President Obama addressed mass shootings roughly 18 times during his administration, with some of his most damning comments coming exactly two years before this weekend’s deadly shooting in Las Vegas.

    For Obama, it was the shooting at a community college in Roseburg, Oregon, where nine people were killed Oct. 1, 2015. And for President Trump, it was the Sunday shooting at a country music concert in Las Vegas, where at least 59 people were killed and 527 others injured.

    One responded like an adult who thinks and feels, the other like a callous fraud who can barely read a speech written by others.

    Obama opened his remarks in the press briefing room by saying “there’s been another mass shooting in America.”

    “That means there are more American families — moms, dads, children — whose lives have been changed forever,” he said.

    Obama went on to talk about how the response of many people to mass shootings has become almost routine, and to criticize those who only offered words instead of actions.

    “Our thoughts and prayers are not enough,” he said. “It’s not enough. It does not capture the heartache and grief and anger that we should feel. And it does nothing to prevent this carnage from being inflicted someplace else in America — next week, or a couple of months from now.”

    “Of course, what’s also routine is that somebody, somewhere will comment and say, Obama politicized this issue. Well, this is something we should politicize. It is relevant to our common life together,” Obama said.

    “When roads are unsafe, we fix them to reduce auto fatalities. We have seatbelt laws because we know it saves lives. So the notion that gun violence is somehow different, that our freedom and our Constitution prohibits any modest regulation of how we use a deadly weapon, when there are law-abiding gun owners all across the country who could hunt and protect their families and do everything they do under such regulations doesn’t make sense,” he added,

    Trump spoke as if pious words were indeed all that was called for.

    “Hundreds of our fellow citizens are now mourning the sudden loss of a loved one — a parent, a child, a brother or sister,” the president said. “We cannot fathom their pain. We cannot imagine their loss. To the families of the victims: We are praying for you and we are here for you, and we ask God to help see you through this very dark period.”

    That means absolutely nothing. “We are here for you”? He’s not. His administration isn’t. It’s just mouthing, what he did.

    Trump quoted Scripture, ordered federal flags to be flown at half-staff and announced that he would be traveling to Nevada two days later.

    He made no mention of gun laws or steps to be taken to prevent mass shootings from happening again.

    “In times such as these, I know we are searching for some kind of meaning in the chaos, some kind of light in the darkness,” he said. “The answers do not come easy. But we can take solace knowing that even the darkest space can be brightened by a single light, and even the most terrible despair can be illuminated by a single ray of hope.”

    That. That’s just fakey, pretentious, poeticky bibley bullshit in place of useful action or at least analysis. What “single ray of hope” is he even talking about? None, he’s just throwing words around the way he threw rolls of paper towels around in San Juan this afternoon.

  • Trump spots a miracle

    Trump says what happened in Las Vegas was a miracle.

    “Look, we have a tragedy. What happened is, in many ways, a miracle,” Trump said as he departed the White House for a trip to Puerto Rico on Tuesday morning. “The police department, they’ve done such an incredible job. And we’ll be talking about gun laws as time goes on. But I do have to say, how quickly the police department was able to get in was really very much of a miracle. They’ve done an amazing job.”

    But if you’re going to go for a miracle, it would have been a better miracle to jam all the guy’s guns, or swap the bullets for blanks. It’s not much of a miracle to let him kill 59 people and injure more than 500 and then get the police there in a hurry.

    We don’t always have to find a Good News story. What happened Sunday night was not a Good News story. There were no miracles. There was a bad man with an armory of guns in his hotel room.

    Despite the historic number of people killed, Trump has repeatedly stressed that the shooting could have been even worse.

    “I want to thank the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and all of the first responders for their courageous efforts, and for helping to save the lives of so many,” Trump said in the hours after the shooting on Monday. “The speed with which they acted is miraculous and prevented further loss of life. To have found the shooter so quickly after the first shots were fired is something for which we will always be thankful and grateful. It shows what true professionalism is all about.”

    Nonsense. The shooter’s room filled with smoke from the guns, which set off the fire alarm, which told the cops where he was. It’s not miraculous and not something to be particularly grateful for. I mean yeah it’s better that they stopped him as opposed to just saying “Nah, we’re on break,” but it’s not a bright side of what happened. There is no fucking bright side.

  • Not a real catastrophe

    Oh goddddddd. Bozo is in Puerto Rico. Bozo is talking.

    President Trump on Tuesday told Puerto Rico officials they should feel “very proud” they haven’t lost thousands of lives like in “a real catastrophe like Katrina,” while adding that the devastated island territory has thrown the nation’s budget “a little out of whack.”

    Silly silly silly Puerto Rico, inviting a hurricane to visit them without checking the nation’s budget first.

    Trump’s remarks came as he touched down in San Juan amid harsh criticism of the slow federal response to the natural disaster and after he praised himself earlier in the day for the “great job” and “A-plus” performance he said his administration deserved for its response to Hurricane Maria.

    He’s an awesome A-plus guy, with the world’s most gorgeous blonde hair and a brain second only to Isaac Newton’s.

    “Every death is a horror, but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina, and you look at the tremendous — hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and you look at what happened here, with really a storm that was just totally overpowering, nobody’s ever seen anything like this,” Trump said, before turning to a local official to ask how many people had died in storm. “What is your death count as of this moment? 17? 16 people certified, 16 people versus in the thousands.”

    Yay! So so lucky. Puerto Rico didn’t have a storm surge that drowned thousands of houses, instead it had winds that smashed every bit of infrastructure on the island, so they get to die more slowly than the people of New Orleans. SO LUCKY.

    The president also seemed to fault the small island for imperiling the United States’s budget by requiring hurricane relief funds, saying, “I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you’ve thrown our budget a little out of whack.”

    He’s such a lovely thoughtful compassionate tactful guy.

    Before Trump’s impromptu remarks, the president’s visit was intended to be highly scripted…

    Yeah well. Toddlers don’t know from scripted.

    As the president, clad in a black windbreaker and khakis, departed the White House, he said Cruz has “come back a long way,” before returning to one his favorite topics — himself and his own performance.

    “I think it’s now acknowledged what a great job we’ve done, and people are looking at that,” he said. “And in Texas and in Florida, we get an A-plus. And I’ll tell you what, I think we’ve done just as good in Puerto Rico, and it’s actually a much tougher situation. But now the roads are cleared, communications is starting to come back. We need their truck drivers to start driving trucks.”

    Yes can we please stop talking about Puerto Rico now and talk about Trump instead? About how awesome Trump is? Can we stick to that please? Is that asking too much?

  • How not to write a speech for Trump to read

    We should not have to hear Donald Trump talking like this:

    Hundreds of our fellow citizens are now mourning the sudden loss of a loved one, a parent, a child, a brother or sister. We cannot fathom their pain, we cannot imagine their loss. To the families of the victims, we are praying for you and we are here for you. And we ask God to help see you through this very dark period.

    Scripture teaches us the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. We seek comfort in those words, for we know that God lives in the hearts of those who grieve. To the wounded who are now recovering in hospitals, we are praying for your full and speedy recovery, and pledge to you our support from this day forward.

    We all know he doesn’t believe a word of that, and it sounds ridiculous read by the guy we’ve heard bragging about grabbing them by the pussy.

    In memory of the fallen, I have directed that our great flag be flown at half-staff. I will be visiting Las Vegas on Wednesday to meet with law enforcement, first responders, and the families of the victims. In moments of tragedy and horror, America comes together as one. And it always has.

    We call upon the bonds that unite us, our faith, our family, and our shared values. We call upon the bonds of citizenship, the ties of community, and the comfort of our common humanity. Our unity cannot be shattered by evil, our bonds cannot be broken by violence, and though we feel such great anger, at the senseless murder of our fellow citizens, it is our love that defines us today. And always will. Forever.

    That, from him, is completely disgusting. He doesn’t get to babble about bonds that unite us and how our unity cannot be shattered and the love that defines us when picking fights is his favorite activity and he’s constantly boiling over with hatred.

    In times such as these, I know we are searching for some kind of meaning in the chaos, some kind of light in the darkness. The answers do not come easy. But we can take solace knowing that even the darkest space can be brightened by a single light and even the most terrible despair can be illuminated by a single ray of hope.

    Jezus – that is some bad speechwriting. His speeches should fit him; they should be plausible. They should be written in such a way that they sound like him. That passage obviously sounds nothing like Donald Trump. It’s way way way too elevated and full of deepities for a Trump to read aloud.

    Melania and I are praying for every American who has been hurt, wounded or lost the ones they loved so dearly in this terrible, terrible attack. We pray for the entire nation to find unity and peace, and we pray for the day when evil is banished and the innocent are safe from hatred and from fear.

    May God bless the souls of the lives that are lost, may God give us the grace of healing and may God provide the grieving families with strength to carry on. Thank you. God bless America. Thank you.

    Phony as a 3-dollar bill.

  • Trump says he won’t fail, doesn’t explain why

    The Post on Trump’s gruesome undermining of his own Secretary of State.

    “Humiliating for Tillerson, but worse, renders him useless. He’ll resign, today or after a brief face-saving interval,” predicted former Obama administration ambassador and National Security Council official Dan Shapiro, one of many foreign policy experts who tweeted about Trump’s Sunday comments, sent from his New Jersey golf club.

    So I went to look at Shapiro’s Twitter and that was valuable. I decided to look at all this as an interesting learning opportunity until the moment the nukes burst overhead. Might as well, right?

    Later in the day Trump expanded on his point.

    “Being nice to Rocket Man hasn’t worked in 25 years, why would it work now? Clinton failed, Bush failed, and Obama failed. I won’t fail.”

    Ah. Because he’s so much better at all this than Clinton and Obama.

    Tillerson of course is a terrible secretary of state.

    Tillerson, a former ExxonMobil chief executive with no previous diplomatic experience, has been under a broader cloud in office, with lawmakers and others criticizing the slow pace of diplomatic appointments, his acquiescence to massive budget cuts proposed by the White House, and the State Department’s lack of visibility on a number of issues.

    Other than that…

  • Not a joke

    Tillerson is trying to talk to North Korea, which admittedly is not a project full of promise but when the alternative is nuclear war you kind of have to try, mk? But Trump doesn’t think so, and Trump also doesn’t think it’s a bad idea for a president to undercut his own Secretary of State on Twitter. Yes I said on Twitter. The history books of the future, if there is any future, will be full of lines like “war broke out on Snapchat in the autumn of that year…”

    He should be

    1. removed from office
    2. arrested

    The Times says it’s not clear if he’s a treasonous maniac or playing a fun game of good cop bad cop.

    WASHINGTON — President Trump seemed to undercut his own secretary of state on Sunday as he belittled the prospect of a diplomatic resolution to the nuclear-edged crisis with North Korea even as the administration was seeking to open lines of communication.

    In a fresh set of Twitter messages from his New Jersey golf club, where he was spending the weekend, Mr. Trump diminished Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson’s outreach to Pyongyang and its autocratic leader, Kim Jong-un, leaving the impression that he was focused on possible military action. On a visit to China, Mr. Tillerson acknowledged on Saturday that he was trying to open talks.

    So what could be more productive than having Mr Clownshoe shouting on Twitter that it’s all for naught?

    Negotiations with North Korea have long proved frustrating to American leaders. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both tried talks and granted concessions while ultimately failing to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons. But national security analysts have said there is no viable military option at this point without risking devastating casualties.

    White House officials have had no comment on Mr. Tillerson’s disclosure, and it was unclear whether Mr. Trump was aware of it in advance or was using his Twitter feed to play a diplomatic version of good cop, bad cop with his secretary of state. Mr. Trump plans to visit China, South Korea and Japan in November, among other destinations, to keep up regional pressure on Pyongyang.

    Mr Trump should be locked up.

    Mr. Tillerson, a former chief executive of Exxon Mobil with no prior government experience, has been deeply frustrated working for Mr. Trump, according to associates, who have said it is not clear how long he will choose to stay.

    This was not the first time the secretary of state has been publicly contradicted by Mr. Trump. In June, the president launched a harsh broadside against the Persian Gulf state of Qatar barely an hour after Mr. Tillerson, trying to mediate a dispute among Arab neighbors, called for a “calm and thoughtful dialogue.”

    The president has not shied away from undercutting other members of his own team during his eight months in office. The most sensational example came in July, when Mr. Trump spent days publicly castigating Attorney General Jeff Sessions as “very weak” and saying that he regretted appointing him.

    The president’s tweets about Mr. Tillerson came on a day when he planned to attend the President’s Cup golf tournament and present the trophy to the winner at Liberty National Golf Club in Jersey City, not far from his own golf club in Bedminster, N.J. He planned to return to Washington in the evening.

    In other words his tweets came on a day when he’s busy corruptly using his office to promote his business.

    He should be removed and arrested for treason.

  • Enthroned

    Speaking of people who want everything done for them…

    Meanwhile the mayor of San Juan has been working around the clock.

  • He’s back

    Six hours later the monster returns.

    “Never mind about the lives of three million people in Puerto Rico, rant about “Fake News” and Democrats instead.”

    “I like him but I don’t like her, she can’t come to my party.”

    “They say we’re great! It’s all about us and how great we are! Me me me me me me me.”

    “She’s a nice Spick Puerto Rican, not like that other one who had the nerve to beg for help.”

    “To the people of Puerto Rico: this is all about me. You are thinking about me, aren’t you? In a good way? Don’t be fooled: I’m awesome. Have a nice afternoon!”

    “Whew! I finally remembered to say something about the suffering! Close call there.”

    “She’s such a whiny bitch.”

  • A significant step downward

    James Fallows is scathing – and James Fallows is not a guy who scathes easily.

    [Trump’s] Twitter outburst this morning — as he has left Washington on another trip to one of his golf courses, as millions of U.S. citizens are without water or electricity after the historic devastation of Hurricane Maria, as by chance it is also Yom Kippur — deserves note. It is a significant step downward for him, and perhaps the first thing he has done in office that, in its coarseness, has actually surprised me. (I explained the difference, for me, between shock and surprise when it comes to Trump, in this item last week.) Temperamentally, intellectually, and in terms of civic and moral imagination, he is not fit for the duties he is now supposed to bear.

    That’s been both true and obvious all along, but by god this Twitter outburst does underline the fact.

    His first tweet [the one about the mayor being told by the Democrats to be mean to Trump] dramatized his inability to conceive of any event, glorious or tragic, in terms other than what it means about him. People are dying in Puerto Rico; they have lost their homes and farms; children and the elderly are in danger. And what he sees is, “nasty to Trump.”

    What he sees, what he reacts to, what he cares about, what he takes deeply to heart.

    Then there’s the one about “such poor leadership ability” in the mayor and others who can’t get “their workers” to help – you know, the workers who are struggling to survive and help people near them survive just like everyone else in PR, and who are cut off just like everyone else.

    This is an outright attack on the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulin Cruz, whose passionate appeals for her people would evoke compassion and support from any normal person — and from other politicians would stimulate at least a public stance of sympathy. I can think of no other example of a president publicly demeaning American officials in the middle of coping with disaster. There were nasty “God’s punishment!” remarks about New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina, but they did not come from the White House or George W. Bush.

    And finally there’s the blockbuster about wanting everything done for them.

    Want “everything to be done for them.” It is impossible to tell whether this is a conscious racist dog-whistle by Trump—these people! always looking for a handout—or whether it is instinctive. Either way, it is something that no other modern president would have said in public, and that no one who understood the duties of the office could have done.

    ***

    A man who can say these things—from a golf course, while millions of his fellow citizens are in dire straits, and during an emergency that is worse because of his own narcissistic inattention—does not understand the job.

    This has not happened before. It is not normal. It should not be acceptable. The United States is a big, resilient country, but a man like this can do severe damage to it and the world — and at the moment, he is leaving many Americans in mortal peril.

    It is not acceptable. I can’t begin to express how not acceptable it is.

    He should be removed from office.

  • He golfs while they die

    Some reactions to President Monster.

    https://twitter.com/JessicaValenti/status/914125778941554688