Tag: Trump

David Leonhardt on Trump’s contempt for the rule of law.

Even amid bitter fights over what the law should say, both Democrats and Republicans have generally accepted the rule of law.

President Trump does not. His rejection of it distinguishes him from any other modern American leader. He has instead flirted with Louis XIV’s notion of “L’état, c’est moi”: The state is me — and I’ll decide which laws to follow.

How does Trump scorn the law? Let Leonhardt count the ways.

LAW ENFORCEMENT, POLITICIZED. People in federal law enforcement take pride in trying to remain apart from politics. I’ve been talking lately with past Justice Department appointees, from both parties, and they speak in almost identical terms.

They view the Justice Department as more independent than, say, the State or Treasury Departments. The Justice Department works with the rest of the administration on policy matters, but keeps its distance on law enforcement. That’s why White House officials aren’t supposed to pick up the phone and call whomever they want at the department. There is a careful process.

That’s what I and no doubt others have been learning over the past few weeks (which makes it all the more dubious that Kennedy made his brother Attorney General). Trump’s behavior with Comey was way over the line.

The attorney general, Jeff Sessions, is part of the problem. He is supposed to be the nation’s head law-enforcement official, but acts as a Trump loyalist. He recently held a briefing in the White House press room — “a jaw-dropping violation of norms,” as Slate’s Leon Neyfakh wrote. Sessions has proclaimed, “This is the Trump era.”

Like Trump, he sees little distinction between the enforcement of the law and the interests of the president.

Then there’s Trump’s habit of attacking the courts.

Trump has tried to delegitimize almost any judge who disagrees with him.

His latest Twitter tantrum, on Monday, took a swipe at “the courts” over his stymied travel ban.

“We need the courts to give us back our rights,” he said, as if the courts had taken them away. It’s all very coup-y.

It joined a long list of his judge insults: “this so-called judge”; “a single, unelected district judge”; “ridiculous”; “so political”; “terrible”; “a hater of Donald Trump”; “essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country”; “THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE!”

“What’s unusual is he’s essentially challenging the legitimacy of the court’s role,” the legal scholar Charles Geyh told The Washington Post. Trump’s message, Geyh said, was: “I should be able to do what I choose.”

Wouldn’t you think he would have educated himself on all this between the election and the inauguration? If he were anyone other than himself, I mean?

TEAM TRUMP, ABOVE THE LAW. Foreign governments speed up trademark applications from Trump businesses. Foreign officials curry favor by staying at his hotel. A senior administration official urges people to buy Ivanka Trump’s clothing. The president violates bipartisan tradition by refusing to release his tax returns, thus shrouding his conflicts.

He doesn’t accept the idea of equality.

The larger message is that people who support him are fully American, and people who don’t are something less. He tells elaborate lies about voter fraud by those who oppose him, especially African-Americans and Latinos. Then he uses those lies to justify measures that restrict their voting. (Alas, much of the Republican Party is guilty on this score.)

And there’s the kingdom of lies problem.

TRUTH, MONOPOLIZED. The consistent application of laws requires a consistent set of facts on which a society can agree. The Trump administration is trying to undermine the very idea of facts.

It has harshly criticized one independent source of information after another. The Congressional Budget Office. The Bureau of Labor Statistics. The C.I.A. Scientists. And, of course, the news media.

Fake news, enemies of the people, yadda yadda.

The one encouraging part of the rule-of-law emergency is the response from many other parts of society. Although congressional Republicans have largely lain down for Trump, judges — both Republican and Democratic appointees — have not. Neither have Comey, the F.B.I., the C.B.O., the media or others. As a result, the United States remains a long way from authoritarianism.

Unfortunately, Trump shows no signs of letting up. Don’t assume he will fail just because his actions are so far outside the American mainstream.

He hasn’t failed yet, so I’m not assuming he ever will.

Greg Sargent at the Post points out the Trump’s rages at people in his own branch of government have a strong whiff of authoritarianism.

Trump appears worryingly unable to contemplate his own role in bringing about the special counsel. The firing of FBI Director James B. Comey led to reports that Trump allegedly demanded Comey’s loyalty and to Trump’s admission that he fired Comey over the Russia probe. This revealed that the Justice Department’s memo providing Trump his initial rationale for the firing (Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton probe) was bogus. Which led to the special counsel.

No no, it was a Stab in the Back.

Both Comey and Sessions enraged Trump because in some manner or other, they failed to show a level of loyalty to Trump that would have trumped (as it were) legitimate processes. Comey kept publicly validating the Russia investigation (which Trump dismisses as nothing but “Fake News”) and would not make it disappear by stopping leaks about it. Sessions recused himself to display (nominal) independence, which Trump somehow interpreted as a lapse into weakness that led to the special counsel, further affirming the probe’s weightiness.

Students of authoritarianism see a pattern taking shape

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history at New York University who writes extensively on authoritarianism and Italian fascism, told me that a discernible trait of authoritarian and autocratic rulers is ongoing “frustration” with the “inability to make others do their bidding” and with “institutional and bureaucratic procedures and checks and balances.”

That’s been visible in Trump from the very first days, when he was raging about crowd sizes and yelling at CIA agents about his…crowd sizes.

Trump expects independent officials “to behave according to personal loyalty, as opposed to following the rules,” added Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale University who wrote “On Tyranny,” a book of lessons from the 20th century. “For Trump, that is how the world is supposed to work. Trump doesn’t understand that in the world there might truly be laws and rules that constrain a leader.”

That’s one of the most hateful things about him – that thinking everything is about him and that he always comes first no matter what. He has no interest in or loyalty to anything that’s not about him. It’s a hideous quality. It’s also of course dangerous in a head of state, but it’s worth underlining the character problem.

Snyder noted that authoritarian tendencies often go hand in hand with impatience at such constraints. “You have to have morality and a set of institutions that escape the normal balance of administrative practice,” Snyder said. “You have to be able to lie all the time. You have to have people around you who tell you how wonderful you are all the time. You have to have institutions which don’t follow the law and instead follow some kind of law of loyalty.”

In short you have to have a hell on earth.

No one human being merits all that. We can be amazing collectively, but no one person is fit for worship. Shakespeare was an amazing guy but a big part of that is because he built on the work of other amazing people. He was part of human collective amazingness. Whoever painted the Lascaux caves? Probably inspired by predecessors.

Furthermore, Trump is mad at his racist Attorney General. Aw. Not because he’s racist, of course, but because he didn’t lie down in front of the nearest approaching locomotive for Trump’s sake.

Those tweets yesterday made this visible to the public.

In private, the president’s exasperation has been even sharper. He has intermittently fumed for months over Mr. Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from the investigation into Russian meddling in last year’s election, according to people close to Mr. Trump who insisted on anonymity to describe internal conversations. In Mr. Trump’s view, they said, it was that recusal that eventually led to the appointment of a special counsel who took over the investigation.

He expects people who work for him to defy the law and ethical rules.

David B. Rivkin Jr., a lawyer who served in the White House and Justice Department under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, said Mr. Trump clearly looked at the case from the lens of a businessman who did not get his money’s worth.

“He’s unhappy when the results don’t come in,” Mr. Rivkin said. “I’m sure he was convinced to try the second version, and the second iteration did not do better than the first iteration, so the lawyers in his book did not do a good job. It’s understandable for a businessman.”

And that’s why a business person with zero experience of government or public policy or law or anything relevant to being president should not run for president. What’s understandable for a (corrupt and dishonest) businessman is not understandable for a president.

The frustration over the travel ban might be a momentary episode were it not for the deeper resentment Mr. Trump feels toward Mr. Sessions, according to people close to the president. When Mr. Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, Mr. Trump learned about it only when he was in the middle of another event, and he publicly questioned the decision.

A senior administration official said Mr. Trump has not stopped burning about the decision, in occasional spurts, toward Mr. Sessions. Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who was selected by Mr. Sessions and filled in when it came to the Russia investigation, ultimately appointed Robert S. Mueller III, a former F.B.I. director, as special counsel to lead the probe.

In fact, much of the past two months of discomfort and self-inflicted pain for Mr. Trump can be tied in some way back to that recusal. Mr. Trump felt blindsided by Mr. Sessions’s decision and unleashed his fury at aides in the Oval Office the next day, according to four people familiar with the event. The next day was his fateful tweet about President Barack Obama conducting a wiretap of Trump Tower during the campaign, an allegation that was widely debunked.

BFFs no more.

Adam Liptak and Peter Baker at the Times spare a thought for Trump’s lawyers.

In a series of Twitter posts Monday that continued into the evening, Mr. Trump may have irretrievably undermined his lawyers’ efforts to persuade the Supreme Court to reinstate his executive order limiting travel from six predominantly Muslim countries, according to legal experts.

Saying he preferred “the original Travel Ban, not the watered down, politically correct version” he had issued in March, Mr. Trump attacked both the Justice Department and the federal courts. He also contradicted his own aides, who have suggested he was causing a pause in travel, by calling the order “what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN!” He said it would be imposed on “certain DANGEROUS countries” and suggested that anything short of a ban “won’t help us protect our people!”

He did the thing lawyers want their clients not to do: he blabbed. The first thing lawyers tell their clients is SAY NOTHING. Donnie doesn’t do Say Nothing.

Still, some administration supporters said the court should not consider the tweets. While looking beyond the letter of the order might be appropriate in domestic policy, the president has a freer hand in foreign policy, said David B. Rivkin Jr., a lawyer in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush. “As a constitutional matter, as a legal matter, it should make absolutely no difference,” he said of the president’s extracurricular messaging.

Last week, lawyers in the solicitor general’s office filed polished briefs in the Supreme Court. They urged the justices to ignore incendiary statements from Mr. Trump during the presidential campaign, including a call for a “Muslim ban.” The court should focus instead on the text of the revised executive order and statements from Mr. Trump after he had taken the inaugural oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution,” the briefs said.

Mr. Trump, his lawyers said, was now a changed man, alert to the burdens and responsibilities of his office.

“Taking that oath marks a profound transition from private life to the nation’s highest public office, and manifests the singular responsibility and independent authority to protect the welfare of the nation that the Constitution reposes in the president,” they wrote.

Ah no. No no. No no no no. That’s what you’d expect but it’s absolutely not what happened. That’s why we’re all so amazed. It never stops being amazing how completely he has not changed, how entirely the huge responsibilities of the office have not forced him to grow up.

On Twitter early Monday, though, Mr. Trump appeared to say that the latest executive order was of a piece with the earlier one, issued in January, and with his longstanding positions.

In calling the revised order “politically correct,” Mr. Trump suggested that his goal throughout had been to exclude travelers based on religion. And in calling the revised order “watered down,” he made it harder for his lawyers to argue that it was a clean break from the earlier one, which had mentioned religion.

Other than that, they were very helpful.

Mr. Trump’s adversaries certainly welcomed his tweets.

“It just adds to the mountain of already existing evidence that the government has had to ask the court over and over to ignore,” said Omar Jadwat, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents people and groups challenging the law. “Blinding the courts to a reality that everyone else is aware of is never an attractive position, but is especially problematic when you have to ignore in real time what’s being said by the president of the United States.”

Neal K. Katyal, who represents Hawaii in a separate challenge to the order, said there was a yawning gap between Mr. Trump’s tweets and his lawyers’ filings.

“The president’s statements, before, during and after his inauguration, continually demonstrate what his so-called travel ban is really about,” Mr. Katyal said. “It’s not surprising his story and his tweets don’t match up with what the solicitor general has been trying to say in court.”

The latest in Donnie.

Yesterday everyone was pointing and laughing at his tweets screaming that what he wants is a BAN god damn it not some politically correct intermediate step but A BAN A BAN A BAN. People were laughing because now the courts can just point at his tweets and say “unconstitutional”; job done.

So of course he said it again, to make sure.

That's right, we need a TRAVEL BAN for certain DANGEROUS countries, not some politically correct term that won't help us protect our people!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017

Good job, Don. You’re awesome at this.

The FAKE MSM is working so hard trying to get me not to use Social Media. They hate that I can get the honest and unfiltered message out.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017

Actually no. As journalists I’m pretty sure it’s pure gold to them. I know it is to me as a blogger. But as citizens? That’s another story. You shame and degrade us all every day with your disgusting xenophobic eruptions. That’s not a media thing, it’s a citizenship thing.

During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology. Leaders pointed to Qatar – look!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017

Uh huh, and you also planted big wet sloppy kisses on Saudi Arabia, which does more funding of Islamism than anyone else.

Sorry folks, but if I would have relied on the Fake News of CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, washpost or nytimes, I would have had ZERO chance winning WH

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017

Tsss. Not if you “would have” – if you had. Lordy. At least get an aide who can write basic English to proofread your tweets.

At any rate, we take note of your preference for Fox & Friends over the Washington Post and the New York Times, and we laugh a bitter laugh at your assumption that we would recoil in horror at the thought of your having no chance to win the election.

But you’re right, of course. If Fox “News” didn’t exist you wouldn’t be in the White House.

Trump’s people, saving face, are saying he has decided not to invoke executive privilege to stop Comey testifying. Ha. He can’t, so they’re saying he decided not to. We can see you, Donnie.

“The president’s power to assert executive privilege is well established,” principal deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters during the daily press briefing. “However, in order to facilitate a swift and thorough examination of the facts sought by the Senate Intelligence Committee, President Trump will not assert executive privilege regarding James Comey’s scheduled testimony.”

Which being interpreted is, in order to not look like a hapless fool when he invokes executive privilege and everyone laughs, Donnie won’t assert executive privilege regarding Comey’s tell-all.

Earlier, the White House had said that Trump was considering the use of executive privilege to halt Comey’s testimony, essentially arguing that he is afforded an expectation of privacy in conversations he may have had with a government official.

But then people told him that he’d blown that by talking publicly about the conversations himself.

I suspect a lot of people will be watching those hearings.

The Toronto Star is keeping a tally of all Trump’s falsehoods. He made 19 of them in the speech on withdrawing from the Paris Accord.

“And exiting the agreement protects the United States from future intrusions on the United States’ sovereignty and massive future legal liability. Believe me, we have massive legal liability if we stay in.”

Source: Speech on Paris climate accord

In fact: The agreement does not create any legal liability, independent experts in environmental law have told various publications.

“Of course, the world’s top polluters have no affirmative obligations under the Green Fund, which we terminated.”

Source: Speech on Paris climate accord

In fact: This is so misleading that we’re calling it false. The U.S. itself is one of the world’s top polluters, and nobody at all has any affirmative obligations under the Green Climate Fund. Trump creates the impression that the fund treats the U.S. more harshly than others though this is not the case.

“And nobody even knows where the (Green Climate Fund) money is going to. Nobody has been able to say, where is it going to?”

Source: Speech on Paris climate accord

In fact: There is a detailed list of funding recipients on the Fund’s very own website. Click the “Browse Projects” button and you can read all about them – a hydro project in Tajikistan, a flood management project in Samoa, a project to help farmers in Sri Lanka’s dry zone, and many more.

Politico reports in that monster-Trump piece that the failed casino tycoon ignored what his own National Security people urged him to say at NATO in favor of bullying them the way he’d always wanted to.

[T]he president also disappointed—and surprised—his own top national security officials by failing to include the language reaffirming the so-called Article 5 provision in his speech. National security adviser H.R. McMaster, Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson all supported Trump doing so and had worked in the weeks leading up to the trip to make sure it was included in the speech, according to five sources familiar with the episode…

It was not until the next day, Thursday, May 25, when Trump started talking at an opening ceremony for NATO’s new Brussels headquarters, that the president’s national security team realized their boss had made a decision with major consequences—without consulting or even informing them in advance of the change.

Well you see he’s the boss. That’s all there is to it really. He’s the boss, he can do whatever he wants to, and they can’t tell him what to do. It’s nursery school with nuclear weapons.

Added a senior White House official, “There was a fully coordinated other speech everybody else had worked on”—and it wasn’t the one Trump gave. “They didn’t know it had been removed,” said a third source of the Trump national security officials on hand for the ceremony. “It was only upon delivery.”

The president appears to have deleted it himself, according to one version making the rounds inside the government, reflecting his personal skepticism about NATO and insistence on lecturing NATO allies about spending more on defense rather than offering reassurances of any sort; another version relayed to others by several White House aides is that Trump’s nationalist chief strategist Steve Bannon and policy aide Stephen Miller played a role in the deletion.

He does what he wants. Nobody can stop him. We’re fucked.

This may be the worst photo of Trump as prez that I’ve seen so far – it’s like something out of a nightmare.

Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

It’s interesting and I think meaningful that there are so many photos of him of that kind. It’s interesting that his face so readily and often takes up that enraged hostile belligerent expression – that hideous anti-human hate-engorged snarl.

That’s not a good human being.

Sasha Abramsky at The Nation thinks Trump is not quite but almost plagiarizing Hitler.

 On September 30, 1942, shortly after the death camps began gassing Jews, Hitler declared, “In Germany too the Jews once laughed at my prophecies. I don’t know whether they are still laughing, or whether they have already lost the inclination to laugh, but I can assure you that everywhere they will stop laughing. With these prophecies I shall prove to be right.”

Five weeks later, he declared, “Today countless numbers of those who laughed at that time, laugh no longer. Those who are still laughing now, also will perhaps laugh no longer after a while.”

On June 1, 2017, Donald Trump announced that he was pulling America out of the Paris climate accord. “At what point does America get demeaned? At what point do they start laughing at us as a country? We want fair treatment for its citizens and we want fair treatment for our taxpayers. We don’t want other leaders and other countries laughing at us anymore, and they won’t be. They won’t be.”

It’s not a direct quote from Hitler, but it’s perilously close.

Is it though? Really? I don’t think so. It’s a very common trope, “they’re laughing at us.” “Who’s laughing now?” is almost as common. I don’t think it’s convincing to say Trump is almost quoting Hitler just because he says we don’t want other countries laughing at us anymore. That thought is nowhere near arcane or obscure enough to be copyright Hitler. And “they won’t be, they won’t be” sounds to me more like one of Trump’s stupid ad libs than a steal from Hitler.

That Trump essentially used the Rose Garden podium yesterday to give a giant “Fuck you” to the rest of the world is bad enough. But that he paraphrased Hitler in so doing raises a stench that even the cretins who head the Republican Party ought to blanch at. Trump will, I am sure, deny any intended overlap with Hitlerian language. But, as a longtime journalist I know that my editors would red-flag an unattributed quote like this…

I don’t believe that. I don’t believe editors red-flag commonplace thoughts like “other countries laugh at us” as theft. If they did how would they get anything else done, and how would stories ever get published?

Especially since “other countries” is hardly the same kind of designated enemy as “the Jews.”

… and as a lecturer in journalism, I know that were a student of mine to try to pass such words off as original, they would be flying perilously close to a plagiarism citation.

I hope that’s not true, because it seems grotesque.

We already know that Trump is very like Hitler in many ways, including much of his “thinking.” There will naturally be some echoes, but that doesn’t mean they’re deliberate liftings. Abramsky mentions a rumor that Trump keeps a book of Hitler’s speeches on his bedside table, but come on. One, Trump doesn’t read books. Two, he doesn’t remember what he reads. Three, why would he read Hitler when he can read Bannon or, better yet, just watch Fox?

Nope, I think that’s one Hitler too many.

The Beeb on Trump’s horrific behavior:

Mr Trump’s attacks on Mr Khan have drawn condemnation from both sides of the Atlantic.

His critics have accused him of being insensitive and twisting the mayor’s words.

Politicians in the UK on Monday called on the prime minister to withdraw the invitation for Mr Trump’s state visit later this year.

The leader of the Liberal Democrats, Tim Farron, said: “This is a man insulting our national values at a time of introspection and mourning.”

Over the weekend, Prime Minister Theresa May refused to criticise Mr Trump, simply saying that Mr Khan was doing a “good job”.

I suppose she doesn’t want to inspire him to start insulting her on Twitter. You know he would.

“Try to imagine the UK prime minister attacking the Mayor of NYC the day after 9/11,” said European Parliament cabinet member Simon O’Connor.

The US Conference of Mayors, representing more than 1,400 American cities, backed Mr Khan.

“He has risen above this crisis of death and destruction, as mayors continue to do, to alleviate fear, to bring comfort to his people of London”, the mayors wrote in a statement on Sunday.

Trump shames us.

Trump three hours ago:

Pathetic excuse by London Mayor Sadiq Khan who had to think fast on his "no reason to be alarmed" statement. MSM is working hard to sell it!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 5, 2017

People who are not Trump:

The response from emergency services, law enforcement & officials in Ldn–as well as ordinary Londoners–has been extraordinary. – LLukens 2/3

— U.S. Embassy London (@USAinUK) June 4, 2017

I commend the strong leadership of the @MayorofLondon as he leads the city forward after this heinous attack. – LLukens 3/3 https://t.co/p4dDZuCpyO

— U.S. Embassy London (@USAinUK) June 4, 2017

Mayor Sadiq Khan is doing an extraordinary job supporting Londoners in a time of pain. President Trump's attack on him is unacceptable.

— Mayor Eric Adams (@NYCMayor) June 5, 2017

https://twitter.com/ezlusztig/status/871733772869357569

Philip Rucker at the Post underlines how disgustingly out of control and malevolent Trump is.

A traditional president would have reacted carefully to the London Bridge terrorist attack by instilling calm, being judicious about facts and appealing to the country’s better angels.

Donald Trump, of course, is no traditional president. He reacted impulsively to Saturday night’s carnage by stoking panic and fear, being indiscreet with details of the event and capitalizing on it to advocate for one of his more polarizing policies and to advance a personal feud.

He started by retweeting a brainless headline from the Drudge Report.

Before offering his condolences to the British people, the victims of three gruesome attacks in as many months, Trump pecked out a second tweet. “We need to be smart, vigilant and tough,” the president wrote, calling on U.S. courts to affirm his administration’s “travel ban” on people from six majority-Muslim nations.

After that he sent a “God bless!” But he took it back after a night’s sleep.

On Sunday morning, however, once the breadth of the horror in London was clear, Trump was back on Twitter. He criticized the city’s mayor — Sadiq Khan, a liberal Muslim and an old Trump foil — for not being tough enough protecting his citizens.

“At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is ‘no reason to be alarmed!’” Trump tweeted.

Trump took Khan’s quote out of context. The mayor had urged Londoners, in a BBC interview that was replayed, not to be “alarmed” by an increased police presence in the city. He said that after condemning the “deliberate and cowardly attack” as “barbaric.”

That’s how our president helps out after a hideous terror attack – by lying about the mayor in order to attack him for not doing enough.

White House officials did not respond to questions about Trump’s response on Sunday.

With Trump spending another day at his private golf club in Sterling, Va., the White House’s social media director, Dan Scavino, revived an old Trump-Khan feud on Twitter and scolded the mayor to “WAKE UP!!!!”

Yes, he really did.

.@MayorofLondon– refer to below tweet 13 months ago, after you criticized … now President @realDonaldTrump — and WAKE UP!!!! https://t.co/RzGOHny37L

— Dan Scavino Jr. Archived (@Scavino45) June 4, 2017

These people are the worst. They’re like drunken frat boys who have taken Sadism pills.

Chris Lu, who served as White House Cabinet secretary under President Obama, was aghast.

“The fact that the White House social media director is commenting before the national security leadership has spoken is yet another example of Trump’s ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ attitude towards handling international incidents,” Lu said.

Historian Robert Dallek said Trump is exhibiting an entirely new style of presidential leadership. “Trump rubs everything raw,” he said. “He makes it more acerbic, more contentious.”

Dallek, who has studied former president Franklin D. Roosevelt, who steered the country through Pearl Harbor, was unsparing in his critique of Trump’s response to the London attack.

“There’s something so petty about this man,” Dallek said. “What we’re dealing with is someone who is, and I think this is the best term, an egomaniac. Everything has to revolve around him — he knows better, he’s right, he one-ups everything.”

And it’s not because he’s “insecure” or has “low self-esteem.” It’s because he’s far too secure and has way too much self-esteem. Some people just are mean shits, and Donald Trump is one of them.

Trump of course made everything worse by being an asshole on Twitter.

At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is "no reason to be alarmed!"

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 4, 2017

Not what a decent head of state is supposed to do.

Naturally people in the UK – once our closest ally, would you believe it?! – are not much pleased.

Donald Trump has sparked fury after hitting out at Sadiq Khan over his response to the London terror attack.

…

 

Following the atrocity, Sadiq Khan said he was “grieving” for the victims and said the terrorists “would not win”.

But the US President slammed that response on Twitter, saying: “At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is ‘no reason to be alarmed!’”

He caused confusion with a further tweet, saying: “Do you notice we are not having a gun debate right now? That’s because they used knives and a truck!”

Tottenham MP David Lammy told him: “Stop commenting on what has happened in my city. Put your phone down.”

Funny coincidence, I told him the same thing early this morning when I read his stinking tweets.

“As an international politician, he should know better than taking cheap and unwarranted shots at the people actually on the ground,” a follower agreed.

He should know better and, even more basically, he should be a minimally decent enough human being not to take cheap and unwarranted shots at the people actually on the ground. He has a repulsive instinct for doing the nastiest thing possible in any given situation.

Mr Khan’s statement appeared to have been taken out of context by Mr Trump. The Mayor had said this morning: “Londoners will see an increased police presence today and over the course of the next few days.

“There’s no reason to be alarmed.”

A spokesman for Mr Khan later branded Mr Trump’s comment “ill-informed” and said the president had deliberately taken out of context remarks made by the mayor to reassure people about the increased police presence in the wake of the attack.

He said: “The mayor is busy working with the police, emergency services and the Government to co-ordinate the response to this horrific and cowardly terrorist attack and provide leadership and reassurance to Londoners and visitors to our city.

“He has more important things to do than respond to Donald Trump’s ill-informed tweet that deliberately takes out of context his remarks urging Londoners not to be alarmed when they saw more police – including armed officers – on the streets.”

But our ugly squalid malevolent president has nothing better to do than insult the mayor of the city dealing with the attack.

We apologize to Sadiq Khan, to the people of London, to the world.

Trump doesn’t have time to fill vacancies at FEMA and NOAA because he’s so dang busy planning things like a “Pittsburgh not Paris” rally in Lafayette Park. (Wait, Lafayette? Isn’t that some damn frog name? Couldn’t they have found a good Murikan-name park to hold a rally at?)

President Donald Trump’s campaign announced a “Pittsburgh, not Paris” rally across from the White House on Saturday to celebrate the United States’ withdrawal from a global climate agreement.

The Fairfax County Republican Committee and the Republican Party of Virginia are sponsoring the rally in Lafayette Square, which is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. Saturday, according to an announcement from the Trump campaign.

Yeeah! And while we’re at it, Detroit not Dijon, Buffalo not Berlin, Milwaukee not Milan, Akron not Athens. Those stinking Yurrupeeans got nothing to teach us.

“As you know, the President has been under siege from the mainstream media and the Democrats, especially now that he put American jobs first by withdrawing from the Paris Accord. Therefore, we are organizing a group to demonstrate our support for President Trump and his fearless leadership,” the invitation reads.

Liars. Informed word is that the Paris Accord and the efforts to improve energy technology will result in more jobs, not fewer. It’s only if you think that mining coal is good for its own sake that you object to this transition.

Trump didn’t even go to the rally outside his back door. He went – you’ll never guess – golfing.

While Trump is at his golf club, the “Pittsburgh, not Paris” rally has kicked off with “dozens” of Trump supporters who gathered to express their support for Trump’s decision to pull out of the landmark Paris Agreement.

Whole entire dozens.

Dozens gathering to support President Trump at WH. Shouts of, Pittsburgh Not Paris! pic.twitter.com/8HqFvMnkbt

— Tom Vanden Brook (@tvandenbrook) June 3, 2017

Trump has found another Obama action to reverse.

President Trump is considering reversing major pieces of the Obama administration’s opening with Cuba and reinstating limits on travel and commerce, citing human rights abuses by the Castro government as justification for a more punitive approach.

That’s funny, because just the other day he was telling the Saudis that he wasn’t there to “tell them how to live” – by which he meant, to tell them not to imprison, flog, or kill people for being atheist, or to tell them not to treat women as helpless brainless children, or to tell them not to treat foreigners like so much garbage. He went on to all but crawl into their arms and dribble. In short he made it very clear that he doesn’t give a flying fuck about human rights abuses. Of course we knew that anyway, since he’s so indifferent to them right here in the US of A.

In seeking to justify his changes on human rights grounds, Mr. Trump would be taking an approach far different from the one he has applied to other parts of the world, where he and his advisers have viewed human rights considerations as an impediment to trade and partnerships that create jobs in the United States.

“Given their complete lack of concern for human rights around the world, it would be a tragic irony if the Trump administration uses that to justify policies that harm the Cuban people and restrict the freedom of Americans to travel and do business where they please,” said Benjamin Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser to Mr. Obama who negotiated the 2014 announcement. “It’s clear that the Cuban and American people want to move forward, and nothing can change that reality.”

Yes but Obama.

More bogus “suspense” from the Trump camp. Will he invoke “executive privilege” to stop Comey testifying, or won’t he? Stay tuned to find out.

Legal experts say Trump could invoke a doctrine called executive privilege to try to stop Comey from testifying. But such a maneuver would likely draw a backlash and could be challenged in court, they said.

Just a tad. What would that look like? Trump fires FBI director to prevent him from investigating Trump’s ties to Putin, then invokes “executive privilege” to prevent him from testifying. Self-incriminating much?

Also, checks and balances. What checks and balances are there if a Trump can hide behind executive privilege to protect the very crimes that need to be investigated?