Tag: Trump

  • The “of course” brigade appears

    Now Trump’s people are dutifully lining up to say of course he condemned the Nazis in Charlottesville, it’s obvious that he did, he was unambiguous about it.

    The White House said in a statement Sunday that when President Trump condemned “all forms of violence, bigotry and hatred” that were on display in Charlottesville this weekend “of course that includes white supremacists, KKK, Neo-Nazi and all extremist groups.”

    Of course. Of coursey course.

    But inclusion of Nazis wasn’t what was needed. That “and all extremist groups” at the end wasn’t and isn’t what was needed. “Everybody was to blame” isn’t what’s needed. A robust condemnation of racism and racist hatred and incitement of racist hatred is what’s needed. That’s what Trump refused to give.

    You can tell the “from many sides” part wasn’t in the prepared remarks he was haltingly reading. You can tell from the way he looks up and throws his arm out to the side – you can see that that’s one of his ad libs.

    And three of Trump’s top advisers appeared on Sunday morning news shows to defend the vague statement that the president delivered the previous afternoon at his private golf club in New Jersey, although their messaging shifted as the morning progressed. Ivanka Trump, the president’s eldest daughter and a top adviser, broke with her father’s messaging Sunday morning to tweet: “There should be no place in society for racism, white supremacy and neo-nazis.”

    Yes, and then she immediately returned to her father’s message with the second tweet – and she numbered them, so we know the two are one statement – that what we need is to Unite as Americans.

    National security adviser H.R. McMaster said on ABC News that the president was “very clear” in his statement and “called out anyone, anyone who is responsible for fomenting this kind of bigotry, hatred, racism and violence.” Later in the morning, McMaster added on NBC News that it “ought to be clear to all Americans” that Trump’s comments about bigotry and hatred included white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

    Yes, and that’s the problem, because his comments merely “included” the murderous Nazis. He needs to single them out. It wasn’t a lefty who drove that car into the crowd.

    CIA Director Mike Pompeo said on CBS News that the president was “specific,” “very clear” and, “frankly, pretty unambiguous” in responding to the violence. He added: “When someone marches with a Nazi flag, that is unacceptable, but I think that’s what the president’s saying.”

    No, it’s not. He specifically, deliberately avoided saying that. He raised his head and threw his arm out to say “from many sides, from many sides.” He didn’t need to say that. I think it was probably not in the prepared statement. He chose to say it. It’s a lie.

    Tom Bossert, Trump’s homeland security adviser, who has been in direct contact with Charlottesville authorities, repeatedly praised the president on CNN for not naming the groups that were involved and instead focusing on an overarching call for Americans to love one another.

    To love one another? Did he say that? Not that I’ve seen. He told us to “unite.” I don’t recall anything about love. And not naming the groups involved is not something to praise him for. We know who the groups are, and we know they are devoted fans and admirers of Trump’s. This is his baby, not ours.

    Bossert said that people “on both sides” showed up in Charlottesville “looking for trouble” and that he won’t assign blame for the death of a counterprotester on either group, although he said the president would like to see “swift justice” for the victim. After repeated questioning, Bossert did say that he personally condemns “white supremacists and Nazi groups that espouse this sort of terrorism and exclusion.” He did not say whether the president agrees with him on that.

    It must be awkward to be a Nazi in a Nazi administration and be pressed to reject Nazism on national tv.

    While Bossert acknowledged that white supremacy is a problem in the country, he quickly shifted to talking about the greater threat of “a global jihadi terrorist problem.” This is a common tactic used by the Trump administration, which considered refocusing the government’s Countering Violent Extremism program on Islamist groups, not white supremacists, and has proposed slashing funding for the program. A recent study found that between 2008 and 2016, the number of designated terrorist attacks on U.S. soil carried out by right-wing extremist groups, including white supremacists, outnumbered those carried out by Islamists by 2 to 1.

    Trump has a lot more in common with Islamists than lefties do (though many lefties fail to grasp that). Both have contempt for women, both have contempt for gay men (I think they ignore lesbians), both love a good fight.

    Numerous Republicans and Democrats have criticized the usually blunt-speaking president for reacting to the violence and racism in Charlottesville in such vague terms, for placing equal blame on the counterprotesters and for not specifically condemning the white supremacists involved.

    Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) urged the president to use the words “white supremacists” and to label what happened Saturday as a terrorist attack. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) declared that “white supremacy is a scourge” that “must be confronted and defeated.” Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) tweeted, “We should call evil by its name. My brother didn’t give his life fighting Hitler for Nazi ideas to go unchallenged here at home.”

    Charlottesville Mayor Michael Signer (D) has directly blamed Trump for the explosion of hate in his city this weekend, and he continued to do so Sunday in an interview with CNN. He accused Trump of intentionally courting white supremacists, nationalists and anti-Semitic groups on the campaign trail, and he criticized the president for not condemning these groups.

    “This is not hard. There’s two words that need to be said over and over again: domestic terrorism and white supremacy,” Signer said. “That is exactly what we saw on display this weekend, and we just aren’t seeing leadership from the White House.”

    If you vote a hate-mongering racist misogynist evil toad of a man president, this is what you get.

  • The nadir

    Vox typed up his remarks in full:

    We’re closely following the terrible events unfolding in Charlottesville, Virginia. We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.

    It’s been going on for a long time in our country. Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama, this has been going on for a long, long time. It has no place in America.

    What is vital now is a swift restoration of law and order and the protection of innocent lives. No citizen should ever fear for their safety and security in our society. And no child should ever be afraid to go outside and play or be with their parents and have a good time.

    I just got off the phone with the governor of Virginia, Terry Mcauliffe, and we agree that the hate and the division must stop, and must stop right now. We have to come together as Americans with love for our nation and true — really, I say this so strongly, true affection for each other.

    Our country is doing very well in so many ways. We have record — just absolute record employment. We have unemployment, the lowest it’s been in almost 17 years. We have companies pouring into our country, Foxconn and car companies and so many others. They’re coming back to our country. We’re renegotiating trade deals to make them great for our country and great for the American worker.

    We have so many incredible things happening in our country, so when I watch charlottesville, to me it’s very, very sad.

    I want to salute the great work of the state and local police in Virginia. Incredible people. Law enforcement, incredible people. And also the National Guard. They’ve really been working smart and working hard .They’ve been doing a terrific job. Federal authorities are also providing tremendous support to the governor. He thanked me for that. And we are here to provide whatever other assistance is needed. We are ready, willing and able.

    Above all else, we must remember this truth, no matter our color, creed, religion or political party, we are all Americans first. We love our country. We love our god. We love our flag. We’re proud of our country. We’re proud of who we are.

    So we want to get the situation straightened out in Charlottesville, and we want to study it. And we want to see what we’re doing wrong as a country where things like this can happen.

    My administration is restoring the sacred bonds of loyalty between this nation and its citizens, but our citizens must also restore the bonds of trust and loyalty between one another. We must love each other, respect each other and cherish our history and our future together. So important. We have to respect each other. Ideally we have to love each other.

    It’s all horrible, but the worst is:

    Above all else, we must remember this truth, no matter our color, creed, religion or political party, we are all Americans first. We love our country. We love our god. We love our flag. We’re proud of our country. We’re proud of who we are.

    Any fascist could happily agree to that.

    I can’t agree to a single word of it. I don’t love my country, because look at it. A country that could put this terrible terrible man in power is not a lovable country. I’m not American first, there are many things I am before I’m American. I detest god. I don’t care about “our flag.” I’m intensely ashamed of our country. I’m ashamed of who way too many of us are.

  • He hasn’t done his job

    The Times details Trump’s avoidances and lies.

    President Trump on Saturday condemned thebloody protests in Charlottesville, Va., but did not specifically criticize the white nationalist rally and its neo-Nazi slogans beyond blaming “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.’’

    Mr. Trump made the comments to reporters after initially tweeting a statement in language so vague that he omitted mention of Charlottesville…

    …

    The president, who has spent much of the past two days threatening North Korea and congressional Republicans on Twitter and in other public statements, remained silent on the violence for most of the morning even as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, Mr. Trump’s wife, Melania, and dozens of other public figures condemned a march by white nationalists chanting anti-Semitic slurs.

    Mr. Trump first weighed in at 1:19 p.m. “We ALL must be united & condemn all that hate stands for. There is no place for this kind of violence in America. Lets come together as one!” the president said on Twitter.

    He doesn’t mean a word of it. He’s just mouthing a formula because they told him he had to. Telling us to “condemn all that hate stands for” doesn’t mean anything, especially coming from a man who came to power by splashing hate around like holy water.

    Mr. Trump did not single out the marchers, who included the white supremacist Richard Spencer and the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, for their ideology. He did, however, amend his original tweet to include a reference to Charlottesville.

    His response drew criticism from Democrats. “Until @POTUS specifically condemns alt-right action in Charlottesville, he hasn’t done his job,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said in a tweet posted after Mr. Trump’s Twitter messages.

    More than a half-hour before the president commented, Melania Trump, using her official “@FLOTUS” Twitter account, wrote, “Our country encourages freedom of speech, but let’s communicate w/o hate in our hearts. No good comes from violence. #Charlottesville.”

    Mr. Ryan was even more explicit. “The views fueling the spectacle in Charlottesville are repugnant. Let it only serve to unite Americans against this kind of vile bigotry,” he wrote on Twitter at noon, around the time that Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia declared a state of emergency in the typically sleepy college town.

    The president has long denied any connection or affinity to so-called alt-right, racist or anti-Jewish groups, although some of his supporters have made little secret of their beliefs.

    Steve Bannon works in his White House. His denials are an insult.

  • One dead, at least 19 injured

    This country has fallen into the abyss.

    Violence erupted on Saturday as hundreds of white nationalists had gathered here for a rally and clashed with counterprotesters, resulting in at least one death and prompting the governor to declare a state of emergency.

    After the rally at a city park was dispersed, a car plowed into a crowd near the city’s downtown mall, killing at least one person and injuring at least 19 others, according to a spokeswoman for the University of Virginia Medical Center. The authorities did not immediately say whether the episode was related to the white nationalists’ demonstration, but several witnesses and video of the scene suggested that it might have been intentional.

    Well, if you look at the video, there seems little question it was intentional.

    Witnesses said a crowd of counterdemonstrators, jubilant because the white nationalists had left, was moving up Fourth Street, near the mall, when a gray sports car came down the road and accelerated, mowing down several people and hurling at least two in the air.

    “It was probably the scariest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Robert Armengol, who was at the scene reporting for a podcast he hosts with students at the University of Virginia. “After that it was pandemonium. The car hit reverse and sped and everybody who was up the street in my direction started running.”

    People who make a principle of racial hatred are more likely to do that kind of thing than people who don’t.

    Donald Trump has unleashed a nightmare on us. He did it deliberately, with malice aforethought, both to get attention and acclaim for himself, and because he likes it.

    Saturday afternoon, after initially issuing a brief denunciation on Twitter, President Trump, speaking at the start of a veterans’ event at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., again addressed what he described as “the terrible events unfolding in Charlottesville, Virginia.”

    In his comments, President Trump condemned the bloody protests, but he did not specifically criticize the white nationalist rally and its neo-Nazi slogans beyond blaming “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.”

    Which is a malevolent, blood-curdling lie.

    “It’s been going on for a long time in our country, it’s not Donald Trump, it’s not Barack Obama,” said Mr. Trump…

    No too damn right it’s not Barack Obama, but it damn well is Donald Trump. Barack Obama is the one who went to that funeral in Charleston; Donald Trump is the one who targets immigrants and Mexicans and wanted to see the Central Park 5 executed for something they didn’t do.

    The demonstration, which both organizers and critics had said was the largest gathering of white nationalists in recent years, was organized to protest the planned removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from a city park that once bore the name of the Confederate general, but was renamed Emancipation Park.

    It was organized to protest the removal of a symbol of slavery. They want to keep symbols of slavery in public spaces. That’s their “cause.”

    The turmoil in Charlottesville began with a march Friday night by white nationalists on the campus of the University of Virginia and escalated Saturday morning as demonstrators from both sides gathered in the park. Waving Confederate flags, chanting Nazi-era slogans, wearing helmets and carrying shields, the white nationalists converged on the Lee statue and began chanting phrases like “You will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us.”

    We’re in the abyss.

  • You have become extremely famous all over the world

    I think Trump is getting stupider every day – noticeably stupider, strikingly stupider.

    He called up the governor of Guam to tell him the North Korea thing is just wonderful for him and for Guam, because it’s making them famous. They’re celebrities! Tourism will soar!

    You think I’m exaggerating for sarcastic effect as usual. I wish I were.

    The threat by North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, to create “an enveloping fire” around the tiny United States territory in the Western Pacific will boost Guam tourism “tenfold,” Mr. Trump is heard saying in the recorded conversation with Gov. Eddie Calvo.

    The recording was put on the Republican governor’s Facebook page and other social media accounts.

    Mr. Trump said: “I have to tell you, you have become extremely famous all over the world. They are talking about Guam; and they’re talking about you.” And when it comes to tourism, he added, “I can say this: “You’re going to go up, like, tenfold with the expenditure of no money.”

    And it’s all thanks to Trump! He is so awesome!

    Mr. Trump had threatened to rain “fire and fury” on North Korea for any provocation. Alluding to Mr. Kim, he told the governor, “You notice he hasn’t spoken recently. He doesn’t talk so much anymore. We’ll see how it all works out.”

    He added, lowering his voice: “This is between you and I. But you don’t talk like they talk. You can’t do that. You can’t do that with people like us.”

    Ok first the small item – it’s between you and ME, bozo.

    Next – it’s between you and him? Because you lowered your voice? I think you’ll find that’s not quite right.

    And finally – that’s how a street corner tough thinks and talks. That’s how a prickly impulsive self-absorbed neighborhood bully thinks and talks. Trump is supposed to be on a larger stage now. He should have moved beyond narcissistic injury by now, to think about the safety and welfare of seven billion people and however many trillions of animals and the planet.

    But he hasn’t. His mind is shrinking rather than expanding. He’s getting more narcissistic and idiotic every day, not less.

    I mean seriously. He’s recklessly gambling with the lives of billions of people, and he’s babbling about making a few of them famous? How divorced from reality do you have to be to say a thing like that?

    While Guam is generally calm about the escalating threats of a missile attack, some were not thrilled by the tone of conversation between the two men.

    “Listening to that call left me feeling disgusted,” said Andrea Nicole Grajek, a local artist from Dededo village. “I was so shocked I was actually crying. They’re leaders discussing a rise in fame and tourism, while the world is watching our island carefully to see if we’ll still be here tomorrow.”

    But the lunatics think it’s all going swimmingly.

    Mr. Calvo, however, told Mr. Trump that he had “never felt more safe or so confident than with you at the helm. So, with all the criticism going on over there from a guy who is being targeted, we need a president like you. So I’m just so thankful. I’m glad you’re holding the helm.”

    Mr. Trump responded, “We’re going to do a great job. You don’t have to worry about a thing. They should have had me eight years ago, somebody with my thought process.” He added, “And frankly, you could’ve said that for the last three presidents.”

     Definitely. If only Trump had been president ever since January 1993.

  • Tuff

    Childe Pinhead has been making yet more threats at North Korea. It’s worked beautifully so far, so why would he stop?

    President Trump made fresh threats of force Friday against North Korea, writing on Twitter that the U.S. military is “locked and loaded” and later telling reporters that the isolated country would “truly regret it” if it attacks Guam or any other U.S. territory.

    “This man will not get away with what he’s doing, believe me,” Trump said of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, whose nation, in open defiance of the United Nations, has been developing nuclear weapons capable of reaching the United States. “I hope that they are going to fully understand the gravity of what I said, and what I said is what I mean.”

    Because he’s tough. He’s a manly man. He’s tough and strong and macho. Obama was weak and he is TOUGH.

    Image result for tough

    He’s not without optimism though.

    “Hopefully it will all work out,” he said. “Nobody loves a peaceful solution more than President Trump. … We will see what happens.”

    Childe Pinhead is the best at everything. He’s the best at being TOUGH and he’s the best at loving a peaceful solution.

    Asked to respond earlier Friday to those who say his threats could backfire, Trump told reporters, “My critics are only saying that because it’s me.”

    “If somebody else uttered the exact same words that I uttered, they’d say: ‘What a great statement, what a wonderful statement,’ ” Trump said. “I will tell you, we have tens of millions of people in this country that are so happy with what I’m saying, because they’re saying, ‘Finally, we have a president that’s sticking up for our nation and, frankly, sticking up for our friends and our allies.’ ”

    Oh christ. I can’t stand it.

  • Morning and afternoon

    Dear god.

    Trump gets a Big Special Treat twice a day, prepared for him by his handlers.

    Twice a day since the beginning of the Trump administration, a special folder is prepared for the president. The first document is prepared around 9:30 a.m. and the follow-up, around 4:30 p.m. Former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and former Press Secretary Sean Spicer both wanted the privilege of delivering the 20-to-25-page packet to President Trump personally, White House sources say.

    These sensitive papers, described to VICE News by three current and former White House officials, don’t contain top-secret intelligence or updates on legislative initiatives. Instead, the folders are filled with screenshots of positive cable news chyrons (those lower-third headlines and crawls), admiring tweets, transcripts of fawning TV interviews, praise-filled news stories, and sometimes just pictures of Trump on TV looking powerful.

    Tweets. It’s somebody’s job to find and screenshot tweets so that Trump will feel puffed up and conceited and happy.

    Can you imagine Obama doing that?

    One White House official said the only feedback the White House communications shop, which prepares the folder, has ever gotten in all these months is: “It needs to be more fucking positive.” That’s why some in the White House ruefully refer to the packet as “the propaganda document.”

    Thus we learn that there is no one both intelligent enough and brave enough to say no, this is the opposite of what we should be doing. Nobody to say: “Look, conceit he’s already got, what he needs is to grasp that he has faults, and what they are, and what most people think of them.”

    The process of assembling the folder begins at the Republican National Committee’s “war room,” which has expanded from 4 to 10 people since the GOP won the White House. A war room — both parties have one regardless of who’s in the White House — is often tasked with monitoring local and national news, cable television, social media, digital media, and print media to see how the party, its candidates or their opponents are being perceived.

    How Trump is being perceived is, for the most part, not as a good or clever man.

    “Maybe it’s good for the country that the president is in a good mood in the morning,” one former RNC official said.

    Maybe it’s bad for the country that the president is being systematically shielded from how hard most people hate him and what a terrible job they think he’s doing.

    Of course, every White House monitors media coverage to see how they’re being covered, and the RNC may have decided more staff was needed after the party won the White House. As the political media environment has become faster-moving and more frenzied, the efforts to follow it have also become more robust. The Obama White House usually had at least one very caffeinated point person and two others dedicated to watching Twitter, online publications, print media, and cable news, and then compile relevant clips and send them around to White House aides.

    But the production of a folder with just positive news — and the use of the RNC to help produce it — seemed abnormal to former White House officials. “If we had prepared such a digest for Obama, he would have roared with laughter,” said David Axelrod, the senior adviser to Barack Obama during his first two years in the White House. “His was a reality-based presidency.”

    I miss that.

  • Entirely improvised

    So Trump’s idiot outburst at North Korea wasn’t even planned. It was his very own Awesome Idea on the spur of the moment.

    President Trump delivered his “fire and fury” threat to North Korea on Tuesday with arms folded, jaw set and eyes flitting on what appeared to be a single page of talking points set before him on the conference table at his New Jersey golf resort.

    The piece of paper, as it turned out, was a fact sheet on the opioid crisis he had come to talk about, and his ominous warning to Pyongyang was entirely improvised, according to several people with direct knowledge of what unfolded. In discussions with advisers beforehand, he had not run the specific language by them.

    The inflammatory words quickly escalated the confrontation with North Korea to a new, alarming level and were followed shortly by a new threat from North Korea to obliterate an American air base on Guam.

    Ain’t that great? We’ve got a soft-headed conceited bully in charge of the nukes, and he feels entitled to vomit out rabid threats whenever the mood takes him. This will not go well.

    The president had been told about a Washington Post story on North Korea’s progress in miniaturizing nuclear warheads so that they could fit on top of a ballistic missile, and was in a bellicose mood, according to a person who spoke with him before he made the statement.

    Note that he was told about it. He didn’t read it. He doesn’t read things, because he’s too stupid and lazy and shallow. People have to “tell him about” important news.

    And he was “in a bellicose mood” so he increased the risk of a nuclear war. That’s what we’re dealing with here.

  • Sleep well

    Will Trump’s idiot bombast get us all killed? Who knows.

    On Wednesday, Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson played down the threat. “I think Americans should sleep well at night, have no concerns about this particular rhetoric of the last few days,” he said.

    Oh well, if Rex Tillerson says it, there’s nothing to worry about.

    Kidding.

    Mr. Trump’s stark comments went well beyond the firm but measured language typically preferred by American presidents in confronting North Korea, and indeed seemed almost to echo the bellicose words used by Mr. Kim. Whether that message was mainly a bluff or an authentic expression of intent, it instantly scrambled the diplomatic equation in one of the world’s most perilous regions.

    Supporters suggested that Mr. Trump was trying to get Mr. Kim’s attention in a way that the North Korean leader would understand, while critics expressed concern that the American president could stumble into a war with devastating consequences.

    Especially since he is authorized to launch the fucking nukes at any time on his own say-so.

    They really need to invoke the 25th Amendment. But they won’t.

    “This is a more dangerous moment than faced by Trump’s predecessors,” said Mark Dubowitz, chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a nonprofit group in Washington. “The normal nuanced diplomatic rhetoric coming out of Washington hasn’t worked in persuading the Kim regime of American resolve. This language underscores that the most powerful country in the world has its own escalatory and retaliatory options.”

    Oh shut up. “Resolve” is worthless. “Resolve” just means everybody dies. This isn’t a god damn pissing contest, it’s a blow up the whole world fight. Nobody wins. Being mas macho doesn’t help.

    But Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said it would be counterproductive. “President Trump is not helping the situation with his bombastic comments,” she said in a statement. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, also took exception. “All it’s going to do is bring us closer to some kind of serious confrontation,” he told KTAR News radio.

    And that’s not the good outcome, ok?

    Jesus. One stupid tv show, and this is where it gets us.

  • Aw, he’s shy

    Trump is trying to get a nuclear war going, but meanwhile it’s interesting to learn that he’s been sending little mash notes to Mueller.

    President Trump has publicly called the widening federal investigation into Russia’s election meddling a “witch hunt.” But through his lawyer, Trump has sent private messages of “appreciation” to special counsel Robert Mueller.

    “He appreciates what Bob Mueller is doing,” Trump’s chief counsel John Dowd told USA TODAY in an interview Tuesday. “He asked me to share that with him and that’s what I’ve done.”

    Trump’s legal team has been in contact with Mueller’s office, and Dowd says he has passed along the president’s messages expressing “appreciation and greetings’’ to the special counsel.

    “The president has sent messages back and forth,’’ Dowd said, declining to elaborate further.

    Dear Bob –

    I really like you.

    Love, Don. xxxxxx000000

  • Trump boosts Fox’s report on what spy satellites have seen

    Trump is fine with Fox and Friends sharing classified information, and by “classified information” I mean classified information about North Korea’s missile activity.

    President Trump on Tuesday used Twitter to amplify a Fox News report, based on anonymous sources, that U.S. spy satellites had detected North Korea loading two cruise missiles on a patrol boat on the country’s coast in recent days.

    Without adding any comment of his own, Trump, who regularly decries leaks to the media, retweeted to his more than 35 million followers a link to the day-old story, which was featured Tuesday morning on “Fox & Friends,” a program on the Fox News network.

    Erm…doesn’t that seem like the kind of classified information that you really would want to keep secret? For reasons genuinely to do with national security as opposed to outraged vanity or ruthless self-interest?

    A White House spokesman did not immediately respond to a question about whether Trump’s retweet amounted to a confirmation of Fox’s story, which was attributed to unnamed “U.S. officials with knowledge of the latest intelligence in the region.”

    Who are sharing it with Fox because…why?

    One intelligence official said that the report itself was insignificant and not a sign that North Korea was preparing to test a missile or make any other provocation. They are different than the long-range missiles, known as ICBMs, that have been central to escalating tensions in the region.

    However, the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, was chagrined that Trump would retweet a report about “something unimportant” that nonetheless “reveals something about our surveillance capabilities.”

    Isn’t this scary enough yet? It seems plenty scary enough to me.

  • Staying true to himself

    Joan Vennochi at the Boston Globe points out that Trump has a considerable nerve sneering at Richard Blumenthal when he himself successfully avoided the draft altogether.

    Just about a year ago, Donald Trump — the presidential candidate who received a draft deferment for bone spurs and called avoiding sexually transmitted diseases his “personal Vietnam” — mocked Gold Star parents who questioned what he knew about sacrifice.

    So it’s no surprise that as president, Trump would feel free to attack Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut for misrepresenting his military record. Compared with attacking the parents of an army captain killed in Iraq, that barely registers as outrageous.

    It still registers as pretty dang outrageous though. This is 1) a grown man and 2) the President, name-calling and sneering at a Senator on Twitter.

    The president is staying true to the presidential candidate. As his critics continue to note, there’s no grace or humility, just nonstop bullying and hypocrisy.

    With his latest tweets, Trump displays even more disrespect and disregard for people who have actually served in the military and truly sacrificed. Trump can’t stop himself and no one can stop him. It’s not shocking any more, just depressing.

  • The patient is feverish and agitated

    Tweeter Donald is being especially disgusting today.

    We know there’s a core of people who love this terrible malevolent fraudulent greedy man. We know that. But it’s a small core and it’s shrinking.

    The fascist calls the bulk of the most established US news media “fake.” He’ll be having journalists killed next.

    I wish that were true.

    Well, yes, because lying about one’s personal military history isn’t quite the same thing as colluding with a hostile foreign power to steal an election.

  • Trump’s hiring practices

    Trump says “JOBS JOBS JOBS.” Trump says “Hire American.” Trump says we gotta stop letting all these foreigners in, especially the ones seeking low-skill jobs. Trump says Make America Great Again.

    Trump seeks to hire workers for Mar-a-Lago.

    President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club needs to hire 35 waiters for this winter’s social season in Palm Beach, Fla.

    Late last month, the club placed an ad on page C8 of the Palm Beach Post, crammed full of tiny print laying out the job experience requirements in classified ad shorthand. “3 mos recent & verifiable exp in fine dining/country club,” the ad said. “No tips.”

    The ad gave no email address or phone number. “Apply by fax,” it said. The ad also provided a mailing address. It ran twice, then never again.

    This was an underwhelming way to attract local job-seekers. But that wasn’t the point. The ads were actually part of Mar-a-Lago’s efforts to hire foreign workers for those 35 jobs.

    About a week before the ads ran, the president’s club asked the Labor Department for permission to hire 70 temporary workers from overseas, government records show. Beside the 35 waiters, it asked for 20 cooks and 15 housekeepers, slightly more than it hired last year.

    To get visas for those workers, Mar-a-Lago, like other businesses that rely on temporary employees each year, must first take legally mandated steps to look for U.S. workers. That includes placing two ads in a newspaper.

    Which – surprise surprise! – typically get no results.

    You know, if Trump actually wanted to hire US workers he could just say so on Twitter.

    Officials at Mar-a-Lago and at the Trump Organization did not respond to questions for this article. Neither did a White House spokeswoman.

    During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump defended his practice of using foreign workers at his club — even as he blamed immigrants for taking American jobs and keeping wages low for native-born workers.

    “It’s very, very hard to get people. But other hotels do the exact same thing. . . . This is a procedure. It’s part of the law,” he said during a Republican candidates’ debate in March 2016, after Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) criticized him for using foreigners at Mar-a-Lago. “I take advantage of that. There’s nothing wrong with it. We have no choice.”

    Sure, sure. Making no actual effort to find people has nothing to do with it.

    In the past, Trump’s club has followed the same pattern of searching for — and not hiring — American workers. Two years ago, for instance, Jeannie Coleman, who lives in nearby West Palm Beach, applied for a job as a housekeeper.

    Mar-a-Lago called back. She had an interview. Then: nothing.

    “I was very disappointed. At that time, I really needed a job,” said Coleman, now 50, who works at a clothing store. “I had the qualifications. The interview went great. But they never even did the common courtesy to call me and tell me why I wasn’t hired.”

    The Labor Department says that employers seeking foreign workers must “hire any [American] applicants who are qualified and available.” That year, Mar-a-Lago told the government it needed to hire 20 foreign workers as housekeepers. The government gave permission.

    He really is a lying dog.

  • Thanks Nicole!

    So Trump thanked a bot.

    Over the weekend, President Trump RT’d a shout-out of praise from a woman on Twitter named Nicole Mincey.

    Around the same time, I noticed that Mincey’s tweets had been showing up high in Trump’s twitter threads. And as I mentioned in this tweet from Saturday evening, while I wasn’t sure whatever details there were about her, the accounts had all the tell-tale signs of a grift, most notably because of the stylized personal presentation and the focus on a Trump store where this woman – probably better to call her a “persona” – sold all manner of low-tier Trump shirts, hats, hoodies, etc.

    In the course of looking into this I noticed that Trump had actually just RT’d her. That made me even more interested. It certainly seemed like Trump had RT’d a pro-Trump scam account, not a real person, just a faux Trump supporter used as a vehicle to make a quick buck on Trump hats. But then it got a bit more weird.

    I dug into “Nicole Mincey’s” online record and I found her store and her ubiquitous up-from-Obama life story. It went like this: Nicole was a young African-American woman from a rough part of Camden, NJ who got tired of seeing no results from President Obama and decided to support Donald Trump. She got so supportive and so inspired by his example of entrepreneurship that she’d started her own Trump merch store.

    She’d even been written up in conservative publications like Daily Caller, WND and others.

    But guess what: the Caller and WND stories were actually “sponsored articles” paid with a cut of the profits from the merch store.

    Josh Marshall looked into it some more and found that she had a lot of bot friends.

    One thread in “Nicole’s” twitter account was about a new organization she was forming for other pro-Trump black conservatives like her – ‘Young Black Republicans’ or YBR. She had a large number of other bot accounts which were her notional friends, which mainly seemed to exist to retweet her posts. But among these were some with vlog type videos of young African-American men talking up the YBR group. Notionally, these were followers of hers also planning to join YBR and look for support for the group.

    AI is pretty advanced. But it can’t do that. Someone got these men to make these videos. As I said, it all seemed like a very elaborate operation just for a merch store.

    It’s a merch store AND a Trump presidential campaign. Win-win!

    I was off doing other things on Sunday. But Sunday evening I dialed back into the story and a lot had happened. Nicole’s twitter account and all her pro-Trump ‘friend’ bot accounts I’d identified had been suspended by Twitter.

    It may be more than just a merch store; the TPM people are still digging into it.

    Meanwhile we get to laugh at Don thanking a bot.

  • Admission

    I missed this the other day: the White House eventually admitted that Trump was the source of the first statement on Junior’s meeting with the Rooshians.

    The White House has confirmed Donald Trump played a role in drafting a misleading statement about his son’s meeting with a Russian lawyer.

    On Tuesday, the press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, contradicted Trump’s attorney, Jay Sekulow, who said the president had had no involvement.

    “The statement that Don Jr issued is true,” Huckabee Sanders said at the daily press briefing. “There is no inaccuracy in the statement. The president weighed in as any father would.”

    Oh sure, any father who had financial and perhaps even more sinister ties with Russia would issue a lying public statement about his son’s involvement, because that’s what daddies do.

    Also, of course, the statement Junior issued was not true, and there was inaccuracy in the statement. Huckabee Sanders is lying for the boss again, as any decent Christian fanatic would.

    The statement, which was issued by Donald Trump Jr’s lawyer, required repeated updates as more details of the meeting leaked out.

    Initially, Trump Jr said he and the Russian lawyer “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children”. Further reporting revealed that Trump Jr had, in fact, taken the meeting after having been offered incriminating information about Hillary Clinton, forcing the president’s son to release the email exchange leading up to the meeting.

    In the emails, Trump Jr was explicitly told of an effort by the Russian government to aid Trump’s campaign, and that Veselnitskaya could offer highly sensitive information about Clinton. “If it’s what you say, I love it,” Trump Jr replied.

    If the statement had been true they wouldn’t have had to keep updating it, would they.

    The latest allegations about the meeting in Trump Tower dealt another blow to an already beleaguered president, placing him under the microscope as federal investigators look into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow during the presidential election. It also raised fresh questions for the justice department, some legal experts said, as special counsel Robert Mueller examines whether Trump obstructed justice.

    “You’re boxing in a witness into a false story,” Richard Painter, chief White House ethics lawyer for George W Bush, told the Guardian. “That puts them under enormous pressure to turn around and lie under oath to be consistent with their story. I think it’s obstruction of justice.”

    For Trump to draft a “knowingly false” statement for his son, who could be considered a material witness in the Russia investigation, “very likely will be deemed to be obstruction of justice”, Painter said.

    But it’s what any father would do!

  • Trump’s rudeness is a STATE SECRET

    Let’s go back to February 16 to revisit Trump’s fury over “leaks” about his tantrums and train-wrecks.

    President Trump said Thursday that he had personally directed the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation and determine who was responsible for what he said were illegal leaks that have unfairly damaged his fledgling administration.

    “I’ve actually called the Justice Department to look into the leaks,” Mr. Trump said during a contentious, 75-minute news conference at the White House. “Those are criminal leaks.”

    No law forbids a president from making [to make] a criminal referral to the Justice Department, but it is unusual for a president to direct the agency to open a criminal investigation into his perceived opponents or to talk publicly about having done so. The White House, under presidents of both parties, has generally restricted direct contact with the Justice Department about prospective investigations to avoid the appearance of politicizing law enforcement.

    But of course “unusual” and “generally” cut no ice with Trump, because he’s here to drain the swamp, which means he can do anything he wants to.

    Mr. Trump appeared particularly incensed at public reports about his rancorous phone conversations with foreign leaders, including telling the president of Mexico the he might send American troops to stop “bad hombres down there,” and berating the prime minister of Australia over an Obama-era deal to resettle refugees and then cutting the call short.

    But that’s just too bad, because we need to know how rash and inappropriate and incompetent he is.

    He also expressed frustration over leaks about federal surveillance that picked up pre-inaugural phone calls between the Russian ambassador and Michael T. Flynn, who resigned under pressure this week from his role as national security adviser.

    We get it: he wants his lies and corruption kept secret. Of course he does. But that’s in his interest, not ours.

    Susan Hennessy, a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington and former intelligence agency lawyer who has written about leaks, said that Mr. Trump’s directive could send a chilling message.

    “The fear is that these leak investigations will be used as a form of political retaliation” against people who may have exposed information that is personally embarrassing to Mr. Trump, she said. “We don’t want this to become a political witch hunt.”

    If they can get away with using leak investigations as a form of political retaliation, they will use them that way.

    During the news conference, Mr. Trump did not directly answer questions about the substance of other recent reports on private dealings his aides may have had with Russia. Instead, he reframed the question as a problem of leaks. He declared that the “leaks are real,” but denounced articles based on the leaked information as “fake news.”

    This is all about the reframing.

    For most of American history, the government did not prosecute those suspected of leaking. From the founding of the country through the end of the 20th century, just one person was convicted of leaking, and he was later pardoned.

    But starting during the George W. Bush administration and intensifying in the Barack Obama administration, the government has brought leak-related charges far more frequently. Depending on how they are counted, Mr. Obama oversaw nine or 10 leak-related cases, more than all previous presidents combined.

    Still, Matt Miller, a former director of public affairs for the Justice Department in Mr. Obama’s first term, said none of those cases involved going after someone who had leaked information about embarrassing or inappropriate activity by a president or his immediate staff.

    But that’s what they’re planning to do now, if they can get away with it.

    Back to the present.

    The Trump administration has been bedeviled by leaks large and small that have disclosed infighting inside his administration, including the president’s rancorous phone conversations with foreign leaders. Information shared with reporters brought to light what surveillance showed about contacts by Mr. Trump’s associates with Russia and even what Mr. Trump said to Russian visitors in the Oval Office about his firing of Mr. Comey, the former F.B.I. director.

    In May, Mr. Trump himself disclosed sensitive intelligence to visiting Russian officials about an Islamic State plot, blurting out details that had been shared by Israel — a disclosure that some intelligence officials worried might have effectively exposed an important Israeli government source. The president does have the authority to declassify and disclose information at his own discretion.

    Not all leaks are illegal, but the Espionage Act and a handful of other federal statutes criminalize the unauthorized disclosure of certain categories of national-security related information that could harm the country or aid a foreign adversary.

    He tweeted sensitive intelligence just the other day, too.

    In February, Mr. Trump said at a news conference that he told Mr. Sessions to look into leaks — an unusual thing to say, since presidents generally try to avoid appearing as if they are asserting political control over law enforcement.

    Mr. Comey also wrote in a memo, recounting one of his conversations with Mr. Trump, that the president had told him to consider putting reporters in prison for publishing classified information.

    It would be unusual to prosecute a journalist for publishing government secrets, a step that would raise significant First Amendment issues. Mr. Sessions took no questions, but Mr. Rosenstein afterward demurred when asked whether he would prosecute reporters for doing their jobs, saying he would not “comment on hypotheticals.”

    That’s nice. Threaten journalists, and then refuse to answer reasonable questions.

    Somehow I don’t feel any more secure.

  • Look, look at the shiny thing

    Grand jury? What grand jury? Never mind that: it’s all about THE LEAKS.

    Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Friday that the Justice Department has more than tripled the number of leak investigations compared with the number that were ongoing at the end of the last administration, offering the first public confirmation of the breadth of the department’s efforts to crack down on unauthorized disclosures of sensitive information.

    Sessions made the announcement at a long-anticipated news conference with his deputy, Rod J. Rosenstein, as well as Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and National Counterintelligence and Security Center Director William Evanina.

    Yeah, man. Never mind all the ethics violations. Never mind the torrent of lies. Never mind That Meeting. Never mind the fact that Trump personally wrote the lying statement for Junior. Never mind all this pesky obstruction of justice. Never mind the Russians. It’s about THE LEAKS.

    Though he did not say if it resulted in a criminal referral, Sessions cited in particular a recent disclosure to The Washington Post of transcripts of President Trump’s conversations with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and another with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

    We need to know about those. It’s in the public interest to know how Trump talks to foreign heads of state.

    Sessions also said he was devoting more resources to stamping out leaks — directing Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray to actively monitor every investigation, instructing the National Security Division and U.S. attorneys to prioritize such cases and creating a new counterintelligence unit in the FBI to manage the work. He said he was reviewing the Justice Department’s policy on issuing subpoenas to reporters.

    Now why would they want to change what the FBI considers a priority? Any guesses?

    Several prominent conservatives lauded Sessions’s announcement, while open government and free press groups said it was worrisome. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press said it would “strongly oppose” revising department guidelines on issuing subpoenas to reporters, and Danielle Brian, executive director at the Project On Government Oversight, said leak investigations might inappropriately target well-intentioned whistleblowers.

    “Whistleblowers are the nation’s first line of defense against fraud, waste, abuse, and illegality within the federal government, the last thing this administration wants to do is to deter whistleblowing in an effort to stymie leaks,” Brian said.

    Leak cases are difficult to prove and prosecute, and they almost always come with political controversy — especially when the leaks involve providing information to reporters that is arguably in the public interest.

    Quite so. Trump lies and cheats and steals whenever he can get away with it, so it’s in the public interest to keep a very close watch on him.

    It has long been Justice Department practice in leak investigations to try to avoid investigating journalists directly to find their sources. Instead, the policy has been for investigators to first focus on government employees. In some cases, when the scrutiny of government employees has been exhausted, senior Justice Department officials may authorize an investigation of journalists, possibly by examining their phone records.

    As a result, leak investigations are often slow moving, and many never lead to any charges. Within the FBI and the Justice Department, agents and prosecutors who handle leak cases have long argued that if they could investigate journalists earlier and more aggressively, they could be more successful in prosecuting leak cases.

    “We are reviewing the entire process of how we conduct media leak investigations by responding to issues that have been raised by our career prosecutors and agents,’’ said Rosenstein. “We’re taking basically a fresh look at it… We don’t know yet what if any changes we want to make but we are taking a fresh look.’’

    Sessions said the Justice Department must “balance the press’s role with protecting our national security and the lives of those who serve in the intelligence community, the armed services and all law abiding Americans.”

    Yeeaah national security is not the issue here. It’s all about Trump security.

  • Cosmopolitan bias

    Down into the muck they go.

    On Wednesday, for reasons known only to whatever critters inhabit the ravines and gullies of the presidential cortex, they trotted [Stephen] Miller out to talk about the administration’s new proposal to limit legal immigration. Miller is not equipped to be the public face of a phony real estate scam, let alone the executive branch of the government of the United States. Jim Acosta of CNN asked him a question. It did not go well.

    Transcript via Adweek:

    Acosta: This whole notion of they have to learn English before they get to the United States, are we just going to bring in people from Great Britain and Australia?

    Miller: I have to say, I am shocked at your statement that you think that only people from Great Britain and Australia would know English. It reveals your cosmopolitan bias to a shocking degree that in your mind — this is an amazing moment. That you think only people from Great Britain or Australia would speak English is so insulting to millions of hardworking immigrants who do speak English from all over the world. Have you honestly never met an immigrant from another country who speaks English outside of Great Britain and Australia?

    Ah yes your “cosmopolitan bias”…you dirty Jew. That’s what “cosmopolitan” means in the mouths of the Stephen Millers of the world.

    The way Miller leaned into the word “cosmopolitan” while answering Acosta has a long and ignoble history in 20th century authoritarianism, especially the anti-Semitic variety. During World War II, for example, the Soviet government under Stalin used to rail regularly at “rootless cosmopolitanism,” especially in the arts. The Nazis were fond of tossing it around, too. There is no context in which Miller’s use of the word against Acosta makes sense except as a historical signaling device.

    The muck is rising around us.

  • Well no the phone calls didn’t actually happen but

    Sanders was forced to admit that those fantasy “phone calls” of Trump’s were not real, actual, happened in real life phone calls, but phantasmagoria from his distracted brain.

    Has President Trump told you about the time the head of the Boy Scouts called to say his was the best speech ever delivered to the more than century-old organization? What about when the president of Mexico picked up the telephone to let him know that his tough enforcement efforts at the border were paying off handsomely?

    The anecdotes, both of which Mr. Trump told over the last week, were similar in that they appeared to be efforts to showcase broad support for the president when his White House has been mired in turmoil. But they also had another thing in common, the White House conceded on Wednesday: Neither was true.

    Of course they weren’t. It’s become child’s play to recognize his boastful lies. He provides fresh examples every day on Twitter, so we’d be pretty dense if we hadn’t picked up the pattern by now.

    Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, confirmed at her daily briefing what the Boy Scouts and the Mexican government had already asserted publicly, which is that neither phone call that Mr. Trump referred to had occurred.

    But they weren’t lies, she wants you to understand. Lots of people did like his Boy Scouts rant, and he has actually spoken to Peña Nieto, so they weren’t lies, just slight exaggerations about specifics like time, place, medium, content, upshot, and the like.

    The nonexistent phone calls added to questions about Mr. Trump’s credibility and that of his White House, already in doubt given shifting explanations on matters large and small, including the size of the crowd at Mr. Trump’s inauguration and his involvement in drafting a statement about why his son Donald J. Trump Jr. had met with a Kremlin-connected lawyer during the campaign. The calls appeared to be the latest evidence that the president, who prefers impromptu storytelling to a fact-checked script, is willing to shade or even manufacture events to suit his preferred narrative — even when the story is easily disprovable and of little consequence.

    Ok here’s a conundrum: is that more because he’s a self-serving liar, or because he’s stupid? Serious question. That impromptu storytelling thing is a big favorite with people who aren’t all that sharp. It goes with having no interesting thoughts or analyses. Trump’s head is pretty empty. It does have a lot of clutter in the form of slogans and prejudices, but there isn’t much more than that. Who knows whether or not he even realizes it when he’s making shit up?

    “He’s been lying his whole life, almost reflexively, and it’s almost as if he finds it more satisfying and easier than to speak with precision,” said Michael D’Antonio, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who later wrote a biography of Mr. Trump, “The Truth About Trump.” “When he was a kid, he lied about whether he hit a home run or not, and when he was a young man, he lied about how tall Trump Tower is — how many floors it is and the actual floors in feet — and he lied about which beautiful women were interested in him.”

    Narcissism & dishonesty=a bad recipe.