Tag: Trump

  • President Bully

    He didn’t. He didn’t. Even he can’t be that stupid and petty and egomaniacal. Can he?

    Tss. Of course he can. There is no limit to how stupid and petty and egomaniacal he can be. He could run over a bunch of children and complain about the mess on his tires.

    Trump responded Saturday morning to harsh critiques from San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz by targeting her personally. The president accused the mayor of playing politics and succumbing to pressure from fellow Democrats to attack his administration. He also, remarkably, directly attacked her and other Puerto Rican officials’ leadership.

    “They want everything done for them.”

    He typed, from his golf club in New Jersey where he is spending yet another weekend profiteering and playing golf while those pesky little brown people in Puerto Rico keep on being dehydrated and sick and in danger of heat stroke.

    There has been anecdotal evidence that Trump doesn’t quite get it. He has repeatedly misstated the size of the hurricane that hit Puerto Rico. He has repeatedly talked about what a tough state the island was in to begin with — as if to shift blame. He has talked repeatedly about how Puerto Rico is an island “in the middle of the ocean” — as if to temper expectations. He has even talked about how Puerto Rico might be made to repay the cost of its recovery. And he’s decided to take a weekend at his golf club in New Jersey right now, even as the scope of the problems in Puerto Rico is growing.

    Puerto Rico is, of course, not “in the middle of” the ocean at all – it’s one of a group of large and small islands near the coasts of North and South America. It’s an island, it’s surrounded by water, but it’s not in the middle of the ocean. It has near neighbors.

    The man is a monster.

  • Nice little island you got here

    Josh Marshall says it looks as if Trump wants to exploit the disaster in Puerto Rico in order to privatize everything. (Can’t you see it? Glorious golf resorts from one end of the island to the other?)

    He keeps talking about Puerto Rico’s public debt.

    Set aside the irony of someone who has made a career and a fortune out of skipping on his own debts pressing an embattled American territory on its debt obligations. This and other comments about the Puerto Rico crisis make it look very much like Trump plans to use the disaster as a wedge to enforce a massive wave of privatization on the Island. His comments, hints and overall attitude suggest he’s looking at the crisis not as a public emergency on US territory but more like the way a rival business looks at a distressed competitor that needs a rescue, with all the maximization of pressure and advantage that entails. For now, look at the comments collected together here. We’ll be discussing this more. This is a big, big deal, in addition to the obvious and immediate humanitarian crisis which is now unfolding.

    MAGA.

  • While he’s stroking his fragile ego

    The mayor of San Juan doesn’t share the Trump administration’s cheerful view of its work in Puerto Rico.

    [T]he idea that there was anything good about the news didn’t sit well with Carmen Yulín Cruz, the mayor of San Juan. (Ms. Cruz is a member of the Popular Democratic Party, which advocates maintaining the island’s commonwealth status.)

    After CNN played Ms. Duke’s comments for the mayor, Ms. Cruz called them “an irresponsible statement.”

    Well, maybe from where she’s standing it’s a good news story. When you’re drinking from a creek, it’s not a good news story. When you don’t have food for a baby, it’s not a good news story. When you have to pull people down from their buildings, because — I’m sorry, but that really upsets me and frustrates me.

    I would ask her to come down here and visit the towns and then make a statement like that, which frankly, it is an irresponsible statement. And it contrasts with the statements of support that I have been getting since yesterday when I got that call from the White House.

    This is, dammit, this is not a good news story. This is a ‘people are dying’ story. This is a ‘life or death’ story. This is ‘there’s a truckload of stuff that cannot be taken to people’ story. This is a story of a devastation that continues to worsen.

    It’s more than a little bit narcissistic to shower praise on one’s own process while ignoring the actual outcome. “It’s good news! We got all our engines started!”

    Paul Krugman has a column today on this self-centered quality of the Trump admin.

    For the trouble with Trump isn’t just what he’s doing, but what he isn’t. In his mind, it’s all about him — and while he’s stroking his fragile ego, basic functions of government are being neglected or worse.

    Let’s talk about two stories that might seem separate: the deadly neglect of Puerto Rico, and the ongoing sabotage of American health care. What these stories have in common is that millions of Americans are going to suffer, and hundreds if not thousands die, because Trump and his officials are too self-centered to do their jobs.

    He starts with Puerto Rico.

    There’s a reason we expect visible focus by the president on major national disasters, including a visit to the affected area as soon as possible (Trump doesn’t plan to visit Puerto Rico until next week). It’s not just theater; it’s a signal about urgent priorities to the rest of the government, and to some extent to the nation at large.

    But Trump spent days after Maria’s strike tweeting about football players. When he finally got around to saying something about Puerto Rico, it was to blame the territory for its own problems.

    The impression one gets is of a massively self-centered individual who can’t bring himself to focus on other people’s needs, even when that’s the core of his job.

    I would call that not so much the impression one gets as the impression Trump creates. We’re not imagining all this. He really did publicly rant and rave about football players while saying nothing about Puerto Rico. He’s said repeatedly that Twitter is his direct line to The People, so that is the message he chose to send us.

  • Lost in the supply closet

    Trump loves him some private plane status symbol.

    “The plane is very much an extension of the Trump brand,” Donald Trump toldThe New York Times of the Boeing 757 he took to calling “Trump Force One” during the 2016 presidential campaign. It was an outdated model, and, as the Times drily noted, “an odd choice for a man who put his net worth at $11 billion.” But the plane was huge, and lined with gold on the inside, communicating to his supporters both might and prestige.

    Well besides, it’s a giant flying penis-shaped thing – what’s not to love?

    He sets the tone.

    [A]n astonishing number of his cabinet members are ensnared in scandals involving air travel, whether on private or civilian planes: Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is in the mix, too, though for slightly different reasons.

    …

    Too many of Trump’s cabinet members have taken to behaving like middle managers let loose in the supply closet for the first time, stuffing their pockets with notepads and pens, hoping the stern secretary doesn’t notice. Oh, but she has. Inspectors general for federal agencies seem to be especially busy these days. Ethics lawyers, too.

    Trump’s gang of imitation moguls seems to have forgotten that it was supposed to be working for the “forgotten Americans.

    Now that’s just silly. Of course they haven’t forgotten; it was never true in the first place. It was a campaign slogan and nothing else.

    Price has used a private flying phallic symbol 24 times so far, including a drop in to that favorite hangout spot of forgotten Americans, the Aspen Ideas Festival.

    Then there’s Mnuchin, a financier known as “the foreclosure king.” He’s worth an estimated $300 million. You’d think the guy could afford a Mint upgrade on JetBlue, if not a Learjet of his own. And he probably can, but why pay when you can get something for free? We recently learned that Mnuchin wanted to use a government airplane to shuttle him and his wife Louise Linton around Europe during their honeymoon. This would cost taxpayers $25,000 per hour. Some sane person denied the request, but months later, Mnuchin and Linton managed to finagle a government jet to view the solar eclipse in Lexington, Kentucky.

    But they explained that: he had to check on Fort Knox.

    Scott Pruitt, the EPA administrator, is a zealous foe of the environment, but at least he isn’t all that committed to his job. Observers see Pruitt making moves for a gubernatorial run in his native Oklahoma. It’s hard to otherwise justify his apparent longing for the Sooner State. As of August, he had spent more than 40 days in Oklahoma, which cost you and me $12,000.

    People do not like Pruitt, at least judging by the number of threats he has received. That’s wrong, no matter how much people may hate his policies. But it’s also wrong to turn high-ranking EPA investigators who are supposed to be delving into environmental crimes into your own security detail. Pruitt has done just that, managing to weaken the agency he runs while abusing its resources.

    “This never happened with prior administrators,” a former official of the agency’s Criminal Investigations Division told The Washington Post, which first reported the news. “These guys signed on to work on complex environmental cases, not to be an executive protection detail.” The Post report suggested that the EPA would spend $800,000 for “the security detail’s travel expenses” this fiscal year.

    Yes but on the upside think of all the complex environmental cases that won’t be investigated.

  • You can’t just drive your trucks there

    Don explains why he’s been talking so much more about football players not standing up because Flag than about the disaster in Puerto Rico: it’s because of the little-known fact that Puerto Rico is an island. An island, people! Water all around. If you try to drive to it your truck gets too wet.

    “It’s the most difficult job because it’s on the island, it’s on an island in the middle of the ocean,” Trump said at a joint press conference with Spain’s prime minister, Mariano Rajoy. “It’s out in the ocean — you can’t just drive your trucks there from other states.”

    Seriously. It’s thousands of miles from anywhere, out there in the middle of the ocean, like the Azores but even farther.

    Puerto Rico was ravaged this month by a recent pair of massive hurricanes, which knocked out power on the island and caused widespread destruction. Trump has received substantial criticism for appearing to focus more on issues such as NFL players protesting during the national anthem at games than on the response to the Puerto Rican crisis.

    Trump touted the US’s response, repeatedly saying Puerto Rico’s governor had assured him the government was doing well in its efforts.

    “This isn’t like Florida where we can go up the spine. This isn’t like Texas where we go right down the middle and we distribute,” Trump said. “This is a thing called the Atlantic Ocean. This is tough stuff.”

    Nobody knows that. Trump knows that, but everybody else just thinks Puerto Rico is down the road from Miami a coupla miles.

  • Don has a flag kink

    Trump’s people are trying to pretend he’s not picking a fight but actually reaching out to embrace us all.

    The White House on Monday sought to soften the president’s controversial comments.

    “Celebrating and promoting patriotism in our country is something that should bring everybody together,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. “This isn’t about the president being against something. This is about the president being for something.”

    Yeah, for everybody doing what he says, and for his absolute power to tell us all what to do and make us obey. He’s down with that.

    At a campaign rally for Sen. Luther Strange (R) on Friday in Huntsville, Ala., Trump previewed the gains he foresaw by denouncing players who voiced political opinions on the field. The first owner who bans players from protesting on the field “will be the most popular person in this country,” he suggested, giving political advice that only he has taken so far.

    And it’s not making him more popular. The people who love everything he does are happy with it, but they already loved him, so that doesn’t gain him anything. Sad!

    There is little question that fights over the flag helped Trump when he was a private citizen and then as a candidate. On his golf courses, he has used flags — typically giant ones on poles as tall as eight stories — as a way of shaming local authorities with whom he has tangled over other issues. He put up one on a California course, refusing to pay the required permitting fee, and another at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., in clear violation of local rules. In both cases, he publicly argued that local officials were unpatriotic, even though they were only following regulations. “The town council of Palm Beach should be ashamed of itself. They’re fining me for putting up an American flag,” Trump fumed to the news media.

    I suppose if he suffocated someone with an American flag, the cops should applaud because flag?

    During his presidential campaign, he repeatedly used respect for the flag as a stand-in for his own connection to his supporters, mocking those who disrespected it as un-American elites. “Total disrespect for the American flag,” Trump said at a Greensboro, N.C., rally in October, after a protester held up a flag upside down and began shouting. “That’s what’s happening to our country.”

    A few weeks earlier, when Colin Kaepernick, then a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers decided to sit for the national anthem before games in protest of racial inequality, Trump had a quick rejoinder. “I think it’s a terrible thing,” he said.

    Those comments were quickly forgotten in the quick-moving presidential campaign. But Trump returned to them weeks after his election, when a flag at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., was burned by an unknown vandal as it hung on a campus pole. Trump’s response was to propose new consequences for a form of protest that the Supreme Court ruled in 1989 is protected under the Constitution.

    “Perhaps a loss of citizenship or a year in jail!” the president-elect tweeted.

    Oh yes, I’d forgotten that. He gives us so much to be disgusted at, the older examples fade out.

  • Tantrum in the West Wing

    Oh look, now Donnie is really pissed off and he’s not going to take it any more.

    He’s changed his Twitter header from that stupid photo of him doing a thumbs up at a table full of his fans to a Great Big Awesome Rippling American Flag.

    Capture

    So patriot!

    Plus he’s splatted out a rash of angry “you have to worship the flag!!” tweets. Nope we don’t Don, and you can’t make us.

    Wut? What does that even mean? What solidarity, whose, where? And how do you have solidarity “for” an anthem? Solidarity is “with” and it’s about people, not songs or pieces of fabric.

    Unlike SOME PEOPLE who weren’t nice enough to Don.

    He retweeted this subtle nudge:

    https://twitter.com/DonnaWR8/status/912019764838649857

    And this one:

    https://twitter.com/DonnaWR8/status/912020084176146432

    Then he just got down to the grubby business of telling us what to do and say and think.

    He keeps telling us and we keep defying him – can you believe it? He’s the president yet we refuse to obey him! Can’t he have us all killed or something? It seems only right.

  • The archduke’s car is approaching Franzjosefstrasse

    This is going well.

    Trump has made new threats against North Korea in response to the country’s foreign minister’s fiery speech at the UN on Saturday.

    Ri Yong-ho described Mr Trump as a “mentally deranged person full of megalomania” on a “suicide mission”.

    The US president responded by saying Mr Ri and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un “won’t be around much longer” if they continue their rhetoric.

    The fresh insults came as US bombers flew close to North Korea’s east coast.

    The Pentagon said the aim was to demonstrate the military options available to the US to defeat any threat.

    Trump intersperses his childish insults aimed at North Korea with childish insults aimed at football players. I supposed by this afternoon he’ll be talking about North Korea taking a knee and football players developing nuclear weapons.

    See that? All of eight hours separated those tweets. Nuclear war in one breath, then a nap, then back to kvetching about protesting football players.

  • Trump smirked and shrugged as the crowd started to chant

    The Post chronicles Trump’s long, rambling, distracted Speech last night in dear old ‘Bama.

    Trump praised Alabama for sheltering “17 million people” displaced by recent hurricanes, a number that seemed high given that the state has fewer than 5 million residents and that nearby Florida has 20.6 million residents. He promised that the country will “win all the time,” just like Alabama’s beloved football teams — and he repeated his attacks on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

    “We can’t have madmen out there, shooting rockets all over the place. And by the way: Rocketman should have been handled a long time ago,” Trump said, as the crowd erupted into its loudest cheers of the night. “… This shouldn’t be handled now, but I’m going to handle it, because we have to handle it. Little rocketman.”

    Which is funny, coming from him. Big rocketman? He’s at least as mad as Kim is, and probably a lot stupider.

    He is, of course, not going to “handle it,” because it’s not that simple. If it were simple, someone less stupid than he is would have handled it before now. It’s not.

    Trump ominously warned that North Korea could explode a “massive weapon” over the Pacific Ocean, resulting in “tremendous, tremendous calamity where the plume goes.” Then he told everyone not to worry about that.

    “Maybe something gets worked out and maybe it doesn’t, but I can tell you one thing: You are protected. Okay? You are protected,” Trump said. “Nobody’s going to mess with our people.”

    That, again, is just empty boasting. We’re obviously not protected, and Trump doesn’t have any supernatural powers to change that fact.

    Trump shared a “quick, crazy story” about health-care reform that he said explains why he likes Strange. But first he name-dropped McCain, prompting loud boos from the crowd, and said that he might have moved to Alabama or Kentucky if he lost the 2016 election because “it’s nice to go to where people love you and you love them.” He added that he has accomplished a lot as president but doesn’t get credit for it.

    “We have a Supreme Court justice, Judge [Neil M.] Gorsuch, who will save — how about a thing called your Second Amendment,” the president said. “Right? Okay, remember that? If Crooked Hillary got elected, you would not have a Second Amendment, believe me. You’d be handing in your rifles. You’d be saying: ‘Here, here they are.’ ”

    The president then stepped away from the lectern to act out how his supporters would have handed over their rifles to Democrat Hillary Clinton, who never called for rounding up all of the rifles in the country. Trump smirked and shrugged as the crowd started to chant: “Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up!” A small group of young men sitting close to the stage, dressed in blazers and red campaign hats, kept the beat by pumping their fists into the air.

    Lies and threats. What more could we want?

    He eventually returned to this quick, crazy story. Basically, the president said, several Republican lawmakers would consider voting for the legislation only if the president had dinner with their various relatives.

    “Pictures all night, everything,” Trump said. “Brutal. Brutal. You know what that is, folks, right? It’s called brutality.”

    Christ almighty. He goes to a rally and complains about how much he hated meeting the families of a bunch of his colleagues. The meanness of the man is just astounding. I don’t generally have a whole lot of sympathy for Republicans but I’m imagining being one of those “various relatives” and I’m cringing.

    Then he talked about his wife’s shoes, and chatting with Senator Shelby about who in Congress is smart and who is not so smart. (How would Trump know?) He talked about needing a wall you can see through in case someone is over there throwing a 50 pound bag of drugs onto someone’s head.

    Trump said Strange has the same “American values” as everyone in the arena that night. And that brought him to the topic of football.

    “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a b—- off the field right now. Out. He’s fired. He’s FIRED!’” Trump boomed.

    As the crowd burst into cheers, the president threw his hands into the air and shook his head. For the fourth time that night, the crowd began to chant: “USA! USA! USA!”

    “That’s a total disrespect of our heritage,” Trump said. “That’s a total disrespect of everything that we stand for. Okay? Everything that we stand for. And I know we have freedoms, and we have freedom of choice and many, many different freedoms, but you know what? It’s still totally disrespectful.”

    A disrespect of our heritage? But our heritage includes slavery. We get to disrespect that – we have to disrespect that. Slavery is one of the things we stand for, and we get to disrespect it, including by not groveling to the flag.

    As for totally disrespectful, he could try respecting other people. That’s more urgent than respecting the damn flag.

    Trump added that the NFL “ratings are down massively,” which he attributed to his own popularity, referees “ruining the game” to impress their wives watching at home and players taking a knee during the national anthem to protest police brutality and racial inequality. The crowd booed in agreement.

    “Not the same game anymore, anyway,” Trump said, before riffing on religious liberty, the Second Amendment and supporting law enforcement officers — comments that he seemed to be reading off his long-forgotten teleprompter.

    “These are Alabama values — I understand the people of Alabama. I feel like I’m from Alabama, frankly,” the president said. “Isn’t it a little weird when a guy who lives on Fifth Avenue in the most beautiful apartment you’ve ever seen, comes to Alabama and Alabama loves that guy? I mean, it’s crazy. It’s crazy.”

    Oh that’s so far from being the most beautiful apartment I’ve ever seen. So far.

    Trump marveled at the full arena and said that there were “thousands of people outside who can’t get in.” Several arena employees who were outside at the time said that a couple hundred people could not get in after the doors closed, and they tried to watch the rally on a big screen outside but there was no audio, so they left.

    “Thousands,” Trump said. “We’ve got thousands of people outside.”

    And that was just the beginning. He went on and on. He went on so long that a lot of people left.

  • He’s fired

    The Chief Bully made it his business yesterday, at yet another campaign rally, to attack football players for demonstrating against racism.

    “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these N.F.L. owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, he’s fired,’ ” Mr. Trump said during an appearance at a political rally in Alabama.

    The Times doesn’t say it, but Trump repeated “he’s fired” with heavy emphasis, his face contorted with rage.

    As to the substance, this nonsense about “when somebody disrespects our flag”…Here’s a wild idea: the important thing isn’t actually the flag, it’s the substance. The flag is only a symbol. To Trump it’s apparently a symbol of what he calls Our Nayshun – but what is our nation? One thing it is is a state that at its very beginning laid out some inspiring ideals that it repudiated at the same time: on the one hand equality and liberty, on the other hand 3/5ths of a person and slavery. It’s a state that started life clinging to the anachronistic horror of chattel slavery, and has been tainted by racism ever since.

    It’s not actually disrespecting the flag to refuse to pay ceremonial homage to it when the state it symbolizes hasn’t yet even come close to repairing the damage done by its long shameful history of the worst kind of racism.

    Trump is both white and a noisy shameless racist. It’s not his job to tell black people they can’t protest the flag. It’s certainly not his job to call them “son of a bitch” and snarl at them from a public stage.

    Editing to add a tweet that sums it all up.

    https://twitter.com/justinjm1/status/911583718179033093

  • Don promoting violence

    Via Editorial & Political Cartoons on Facebook:

    Jesse Duquette, The Daily Don.

    Image may contain: 1 person

  • By our own example we must teach children

    Er…

    Melania Trump gave a speech at the UN “on the dangers of cyber-bullying.”

    That’s nice, I guess, but she is after all married to the biggest cyber bully on the planet.

    Now, she doesn’t make him do that, obviously, and she’s not exactly responsible for him, not quite so obviously…but she does live with him and stay married to him and appear by his side at intervals. She’s not exactly responsible for him but she is implicated in his bad behavior, because she stays. Is that unfair? No, I don’t think so, not really – not given the highly visible nature of his bullying, and how extreme it is. There’s something ethically wrong with someone who condones that level of brutality, and she does condone it by sticking around.

    “We must teach each child the values of empathy and communication that are at the core of the kindness, mindfulness, integrity and leadership which can only be taught by example,” Mrs Trump said, raising more than a few eyebrows in the process, given her husband’s online behaviour.

    “By our own example we must teach children to be good stewards of the world they will inherit.

    “We must remember that they are watching and listening so we must never miss an opportunity to teach life’s many ethical lessons along the way.”

    Like her own kid, who (I assume) is watching and listening to the way his father carries on. That’s some ethical lesson right there.

    Donald Trump has been accused of using his own social media accounts to bully a vast array of people.

    Accused? We’ve all seen them. We can see them right now.

  • He congratulates them

    Trump exercising his diplomatic skillz again.

    At a United Nations lunch Wednesday with African leaders, President Trump marveled at Africa’s “tremendous business potential.” “I have so many friends going to your countries trying to get rich,” he said. “I congratulate you, they’re spending a lot of money.”

    Oh yes, Africa has done so well from all those rich business dudes buying up natural resources. It’s super nice of Trump to congratulate the heads of state on their good fortune, and not at all creepy and patronizing.

    There’s a video clip of him saying it, so you can watch his bizarro gestures while he says that stupid thing.

  • 41 minutes of hell

    The Guardian did an “as it happens” of the UN meeting, including Trump’s speech. It’s quite funny in places. Trump starts on page 3.

    Trump speaks about protecting the rights given by God, emphasizing the word “God” and pausing before he continues.

    “In America, we do not seek to impose our life on anyone,” he says but the US wants to shine as an example.

    He says he was elected to give power to the people “where it belongs”.

    “As president of the United States” he will always put America first, he says. He gets louder, saying that’s what all countries should do. He gets some claps for that remark.

    “He gets louder” – of course he does. It’s all he knows: the pinch, the point, and getting louder.

    Trump says the United States will no longer be taken advantage of in deals it makes with other countries.

    “Our citizens have paid the ultimate price to defend our freedom,” he says. They have also fought to defend other countries represented in the room, he says.

    “It is an eternal credit to the American character,” that we have fought wars abroad but have not “sought territorial expansion” and not imposed our way of life on other people.

    Oh rilly? Mexico could point out that rather large chunk of its territory that we grabbed – you know, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Texas – odds and ends like that. Then there are the indigenous people who were living here when we bounced in and sought territorial expansion like billy-o.

    “We want harmony and friendship, not conflict and strife,” he says.

    He says, a few minutes before gloating at the prospect of destroying North Korea.

    Trump’s speaks loudly again as he discusses the threat of international terrorism.

    He says the US is working with its allies in the Middle East to “crush” terrorists.

    “Our country has achieved more against Isis in the last eight months,” says Trump, then it has in the years before combined. It’s unclear what measure he is using for achievement.

    He thanks Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon for hosting refugees.

    “The United States is a compassionate nation,” he says, before launching into a defense of his government’s efforts to reduce the refugee cap in the US.

    Yeah that’s the guy. Say something and then say the opposite. Nobody ever taught him what a contradiction is.

    Trump briefly winds down his speech to speak about the need to empower “women entrepreneurs,” earning applause, before becoming angry again to talk about the US contributions to the UN.

    He says the US carries an “unfair burden” with the resources it provides to the UN.

    Trump then attacks Cuba and the government of Venezuela. He says people need to do more to address the situation there.

    Nukes, maybe?

    Trump speaks about the US middle class, saying they will be “forgotten no more”.

    He heralds the importance of patriotism, again emphasizing that countries can only resolve global conflict if they protect themselves and their interests first.

    “Now we are calling for a great reawakening of nations,” he says.

    “We need to defeat the enemies of humanity and unlock the potential of life itself,” he says.

    Trump thanks the audience and concludes, after about 41 minutes and 20 seconds, by saying: “God bless you, God bless the nations of the world, and God bless the United states of America”.

    That’s disgusting. He threatens to destroy North Korea while talking about “Rocket Man” and then he goes into full-blown messianic bullshit.

  • The “righteous many” against the “wicked few”

    Let’s see what they’re saying about Trump’s horrific speech outside the US. Let’s read the Guardian.

    Donald Trump’s maiden address to the UN general assembly was unlike any ever delivered in the chamber by a US president.

    There are precedents for such fulminations, but not from US leaders. In tone, the speech was more reminiscent of Nikita Khrushchev, Fidel Castro or Hugo Chávez.

    And going back to pre-UN days it was reminiscent of Hitler. Yes, Hitler.

    Like Bush, Trump offered the world a black-and-white choice between the “righteous many” against the “wicked few” – but his choice of language was far blunter than his predecessor. There can not have been many, if any, threats to “totally destroy” another nation at a UN general assembly. He did not even direct the threat at the regime, making it clear it was North Korea as a country that was at peril.

    Trump issued the warning just minutes after the UN secretary general, António Guterres, had appealed for calmer rhetoric. “Fiery talk can lead to fatal misunderstandings,” Guterres had said in his own first general assembly address, and it was clear who those remarks were directed towards.

    But Trump thinks he’s a law unto himself, and that everyone else is beneath him. He won’t have given a rat’s ass what António Guterres said.

    Venezuela was targeted for the socialist policies of the Nicolás Maduro government and the erosion of its democracy, but Trump did not attempt to distinguish Venezuela’s faults from other autocratic regimes with whom Trump has sought to cultivate.

    Saudi Arabia was not mentioned. Nor was Russia, although there was, early on in the speech, a rare public expression of support for Ukrainian sovereignty.

    Well they’re not socialist. There’s none of that pesky insistence that the wretched of the earth should get a share of the good things too.

    Nor was there any explanation of how the castigation of these “rogue regimes” dovetailed with the dominant theme of the first half of Trump’s speech, which was devoted to the assertion of the undiluted sovereignty of the nation state.

    Seeking to draw a sharp line between his view of international relations and those of his predecessors in the Oval Office, Trump stressed that diverse nations had the right to their own “values” and “culture” without the interference of outsiders. The UN was there as a forum for cooperation between strong and independent nations, not to impose “global governance” from on high.

    In a briefing on the eve of the speech, a senior White House official had insisted that Trump had pondered long and hard over this “deeply philosophical” segment of his address, as it marked an important exposition of his approach to foreign policy, labelled “principled realism”.

    Trump and his administration have frequently invoked such ideas to justify the absence of criticism for Saudi Arabia, Russia and other perceived partners for their appalling human rights records.

    With Tuesday’s address, however, Trump punched yawning holes in his own would-be doctrine, singling out enemies, expressing horror at their treatment of their people and threatening interference to the point of annihilation.

    What was left, when the muted applause died down in the UN chamber, was a sense of incoherence and a capricious menace hanging in the air.

    He’s a toddler with nukes. He’s the stupidest man any of us have ever seen in that job, and he may well destroy everything.

  • And a little child shall barf on them

    Of course he does. Trump makes his debut at the UN by threatening to destroy North Korea while at the same time calling Kim Jong Un by a ridiculous childish nickname. We’re living in a serial titled The Giant Toddler Who Destroyed the Earth.

    “We meet at a time of immense promise and great peril,” Trump said in his maiden address to more than 150 international delegations at the annual U.N. General Assembly. “It is up to us whether we will lift the world to new heights or let it fall into a valley of disrepair.”

    Oops. That was “despair,” Don. Do more rehearsals. The world is not a car that needs repair; it’s a little more complicated than that.

    “I will always put America first just like you, the leaders of your countries, should put your countries first,” Trump said, returning to a campaign theme and the “America First” phrase that has been criticized as isolationist and nationalistic.

    And undermining the whole point of the UN, which was born out of the real-time observation that nationalism ends in war.

    Trump praised the United Nations for enacting economic sanctions on Pyongyang over its nuclear and ballistic missile tests. But he emphasized that if Kim Jong Un’s regime continued to threaten the United States and to destabilize East Asia, his administration would be prepared to defend the country and its allies.

    “The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” Trump said, before calling Kim by a nickname he gave the dictator on Twitter over the weekend. “Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself.”

    And everyone present wished his nanny would come in and drag him back to the nursery.

  • You grab the eyeballs however you can

    Frank Bruni is not amused by Sean Spicer’s gig at the Emmys.

    [W]hat I and anyone else who tuned in to Hollywood’s latest self-congratulatory orgy on Sunday saw wasn’t good fun. It was bad news — a ringing, stinging confirmation that fame truly is its own reward and celebrity really does trump everything and redeem everyone.

    Object of ridicule or object of reverence: Is there a difference? Not if you’re a household name, not if you’re a proven agent of ratings and not if you’re likely to deliver more of them. Our commander in chief took that crude philosophy to heart and rode it all the way to the White House. Sean Spicer took a page from the president and then a bow on the Emmys stage.

    Not exactly a bow, and there are Emmys production folks and television industry figures who are telling themselves that during his fleeting appearance at the ceremony, Spicer was being slyly demeaned, not sanitized.

    What bunk. The message of his presence was not only that we can all laugh at his service and sycophancy in the Trump administration, but that he’s welcome to laugh with us.

    Well jeez, all he did was lie to us for five months. Aren’t they allowed to do that? Don’t we expect it?

    Spicer came onto the stage behind the kind of podium that Melissa McCarthy used in her impersonations of him and told the Emmys host, Stephen Colbert, “This will be the largest audience to witness an Emmys, period — both in person and around the world.”

    His words alluded, obviously, to his fictitious claim — at his very first news conference as the White House press secretary — about the crowds for Trump’s inauguration. But that claim wasn’t merely ludicrous. It was precisely and perfectly emblematic of Trump’s all-out, continuing assault on facts and on truth itself. And it signaled Spicer’s full collaboration in that war, which is arguably the most dangerous facet of Trump’s politics, with the most far-reaching, long-lasting consequences.

    Which is not any kind of joke. Remember how he tweeted that Obama had wiretapped him? Which was a libelous lie? Remember how he insisted there were good people “on both sides” in Charlottesville? Remember the birther lies that went on for years?

    [A]t the Emmys, Colbert abetted Spicer’s image overhaul and probably upped Spicer’s speaking fees by letting him demonstrate what a self-effacing sport he could be. The moment went viral, and I suppose that’s the point. You grab the eyeballs however you can. Trump taught America that, too.

    And that’s how we got into this mess.

    Spicer and Anthony Scaramucci and Corey Lewandowski are all graduating to greater recognition and riches, never mind that they willingly promoted, ignored or sugarcoated actions and pronouncements by Trump that went well beyond the established norms of partisan politics.

    Spicer and Lewandowski will be fellows at Harvard, never mind their volitional submission to someone whose lack of character, grace and basic maturity was just affirmed anew by his retweet of a video of him hitting a golf ball into Hillary Clinton and knocking her over.

    He’s not politically correct! He’s tough! He’s rich! He’s famous! What more do we want?

  • Lunch break

    So that’s hilarious.

    It is every Washington reporter’s dream to sit down at a restaurant, overhear secret stuff and get a scoop. It rarely happens.

    Still, everyone in town important enough to have secrets worth keeping knows that secrets are not safe on the Acela train and in Washington restaurants.

    This is especially true in eateries next door to a major newspaper.

    Yes, Ty Cobb and John Dowd, lawyers for President Trump, we’re talking to you.

    But it’s too late now.

    *stops reading in order to laugh*

    Really? Really? Trump’s lawyers went out for munchies and talked loudly enough to be overheard? Really?

    Together, they went for what appears to have been a working lunch at BLT Steak, 1625 I St. NW in Washington. It’s close to the White House and very convenient.

    It’s also next door to 1627 I St. NW, which happens to house the Washington bureau of the New York Times.

    Walkies, see? Takes 1 (one) minute. They might as well have gotten takeout and gone and sat at a reporter’s desk.

    But they basically did, because there was one at the next table. I guess he wasn’t wearing a big neon sign that said NEW YORK TIMES REPORTER so Trump’s lawyers felt safe discussing things at normal conversational volume.

    Vogel overheard the lawyers talking about White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II and Jared Kushner, president Trump’s son-in-law, as well as the infamous Trump Tower meeting. Here’s a sample from the article bearing the bylines of Vogel and Peter Baker:

    Mr. Cobb was heard talking about a White House lawyer he deemed “a McGahn spy” and saying Mr. McGahn had “a couple documents locked in a safe” that he seemed to suggest he wanted access to. He also mentioned a colleague whom he blamed for “some of these earlier leaks,” and who he said “tried to push Jared out …”

    The White House Counsel’s Office is being very conservative with this stuff,” Mr. Cobb told Mr. Dowd. “Our view is we’re not hiding anything.” Referring to Mr. McGahn, he added, “He’s got a couple documents locked in a safe.”

    … Mr. Cobb also discussed the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting — and the White House’s response to it — saying that “there was no perception that there was an exchange.”

    The movie is probably in production as we speak, with Jim Carey and Seth Rogen playing the lawyers.
    Plus…the reporter snapped a photo.

    Apparently Kelly is not best pleased.

  • Putting on his big boy global pants

    Trump is off to the UN in the morning, because it’s General Assembly time.

    …when Mr. Trump attends the first United Nations session of his presidency this coming week, all eyes will be on him as counterparts from around the globe crane their necks and slide through the crowd to snatch a handshake — and, in the process, try to figure out this most unusual of American leaders.

    “The world is still trying to take the measure of this president,” said Jon B. Alterman, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and author of the speed-dating analogy. “For a number of leaders, this is going to be their first chance to see him, to judge him, to try to get on his good side.”

    In some places, there has been an instinct to dismiss Mr. Trump as a bombastic, Twitter-obsessed political and diplomatic neophyte. “But the fact is you can’t write off the American president,” Mr. Alterman said.

    Hang on. That’s two different things. Obviously nobody can “write off” the US president, because he can do all kinds of damage. But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong to note that he is in fact a bombastic, Twitter-obsessed political and diplomatic neophyte – not to mention a liar, cheat, fraud, sexual assaulter and more. He’s been a synonym for Terrible Asshole in the US for decades, and the fact that we’re now forced to pay attention to him does not alter that fact.

    One of Mr. Trump’s primary tasks will be to define how his America First approach — which has led him to pull out of international agreements on free trade and climate change — fits into the world-first mission of the United Nations.

    It will?

    I don’t think he has any intention of defining any such thing. He couldn’t possibly care less about the world-first mission of the United Nations. He’s a stupid vain little peacock of a man and America First is his idea of wisdom.

    Previewing the week, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the president’s national security adviser, said Mr. Trump would stress “sovereignty and accountability.” Sovereignty is a term that appeals to American conservatives skeptical about the United Nations. It is also a term, however, used by autocrats like Presidents Bashar al-Assad of Syria and Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela to reject interference by outside powers as they crush opposition.

    That’s not a “however,” it’s an “and.” The conservative idea of sovereignty that’s skeptical about the UN is the same thing as rejecting interference by outside powers while one crushes opposition.

    Anyway, it will doubtless be a train wreck one way or another.

  • Fuctupmind indeed

    Another low achieved.

    President Trump retweeted a meme on Sunday morning that showed him hitting Hillary Clinton in the back with a golf ball, prompting another round of outrage from critics who felt the president’s tweets had once again crossed the line.

    The animated GIF spliced together a clip of Trump swinging a golf club with footage of Clinton falling, apparently edited to appear as though a golf ball had struck her down.

    The image was originally posted as a reply to the president by a Twitter user named @Fuctupmind, whose bio consists of pro-Trump, anti-Clinton hashtags.

    “Donald Trump’s amazing golf swing #CrookedHillary,” the user wrote in the caption.

    Yes, that’s what the US head of state should be doing: sharing a tweet by one “Fuctupmind” showing said head of state knocking a woman down with a golf ball to the back. Yes, that’s the kind of thoughtful, reasonable, measured, adult thinking we want in a head of state.

    The retweet immediately drew hundreds of Trump’s critics and supporters into a familiar vortex of debate, with many criticizing the GIF for seeming to encourage violence and others defending the president.

    “You’re a child. Beneath the dignity of your office. Grow up. Be a man,” the actor James Morrison replied to Trump.

    “The man is unfit,” declared Walter M. Shaub Jr., the former director of the independent Office of Government Ethics who resigned in July after clashing with the White House.

    Trump’s love of Twitter and his propensity to post controversial tweets — often very late at night or first thing in the morning — is well known. The golf-swing repost, however, was part of an unusual retweet spree in which Trump shared at least half a dozen tweets from other accounts that showed him in a favorable light. Three were from an account called “Trumpism 5.0,” which included a train wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat.

    He shames us all.