Tag: Trump

  • Unacceptable

    Slate points out (as do others) how long it took Donnie the Racist to say anything about the horror in Portland. When he finally did, he of course didn’t mention anything about racism. Also he did it (or more likely a staffer did it) from his official prez account, not the personal one where he constantly erupts at the news media and most of the population.

    For a candidate that became a darling of the white nationalist fringe, thrusting them closer to the mainstream of American life, the absence of a statement lauding the bravery of the citizens who stepped in to try to stop a raving racist lunatic was particularly conspicuous. The president returned from his trip abroad Saturday and still waited another day and a half to make an official statement.

    He was, Elliot Hannon points out, too busy tweeting about “fake news” and the election in Montana.

  • Spoiler-in-chief

    It’s shaming how stark the isolation is.

    In an unusual admission, Group of Seven (G7) leaders have said in their final communique from a summit in Italy that they had failed to bridge differences over climate change with US President Donald Trump – and America was unable to join other countries in committing to the Paris Agreement.

    “The United States of America is in the process of reviewing its policies on climate change and on the Paris Agreement and thus is not in a position to join the consensus on these topics,” the communique read.

    “Understanding this process, the heads of state and of government of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom and the presidents of the European Council and of the European Commission reaffirm their strong commitment to swiftly implement the Paris Agreement,” it added.

    In other words the normal heads of state re-affirm the work the G7 had already done, and the outlier sticks out his lip and scowls and shouts “No!” like a toddler.

    Under pressure from allies, Mr Trump backed a pledge to fight protectionism, but refused to endorse the global Paris climate change accord, saying he needed more time to decide, with European diplomats frustrated at having to revisit questions they hoped were long settled.

    He doesn’t “need more time to decide.” He needs to build on the work that was already done, during the years he was playing a Ruthless Executive on tv, by people who know something about the subject. What’s he going to base his “deciding” on? His gut? What Steve Bannon tells him? Fox News? He’s not equipped to decide anything, especially not a technical subject that he knows absolutely nothing about.

    Climate action groups were quick to condemn Mr Trump’s actions.

    Roberto Barbieri, Executive Director of Oxfam Italy, said: “President Trump, more than anyone else, has assumed the role of spoiler-in-chief – blocking agreement on many of these key concerns that affect millions of the world’s poorest people.

    “It is courageous that six of the G7 countries stood up to him and reaffirmed their commitment to deliver on the climate deal made in 2015,” he added.

    Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) said that Mr Trump “waffling” on the issue of whether to stay in or leave the accord was deeply damaging.

    “President Trump’s ‘climate inaction plan’ is a threat to every American’s health and future prosperity,” he said.

    That’s why he likes it.

  • Very difficult, not to say very unsatisfactory

    Our problem child didn’t impress the more intelligent, polite, informed, thoughtful heads of state who encountered him on his Adventure Overseas.

    Europe can no longer “completely depend” on the US and UK following the election of President Trump and Brexit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel says.

    Mrs Merkel said she wanted friendly relations with both countries as well as Russia but Europe now had to “fight for its own destiny”.

    It follows the G7’s failure to commit to the 2015 Paris climate deal, talks Mrs Merkel said were “very difficult”.

    And they were very difficult why? Because our stupid self-willed narcissistic president refused to co-operate, because he thinks his ego is more important than the future survival of everyone on the planet.

    Earlier the German leader had described the “six against one” discussion about the Paris Accord during the G7 summit in Sicily as “very difficult, not to say very unsatisfactory”.

    Mr Trump said he would abandon the Paris deal – the world’s first comprehensive climate agreement requiring countries to cut carbon emission – during his election campaign and has also expressed doubts about climate change.

    Speaking in Brussels last week, Mr Trump also told Nato members to spend more money on defence and did not re-state his administration’s commitment to Nato’s mutual security guarantees.

    BBC Defence and Diplomatic Correspondent Jonathan Marcus says the mere fact that this is even in question shows just how uneasy the relationship is between Mr Trump and the organisation of which his country is the leading member.

    Used to be the leading member.

  • Crunching and shoving

    Trump viewed from the vantage point of Jon Henley at the Guardian:

    He crunched hands, shoved shoulders and struck poses. He scoffed chocolates, ignored protocol and harangued heads of state. He denied saying things he had said, then said things that showed he did not understand.

    In short he was an embarrassing ludicrous spectacle.

    First, there were the body language battles. Trump is well known for his efforts to dominate male interlocutors with a firm handshake, often accompanied by an arm wrench: notable victims include the Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, who survived a 19-second power grip in February.

    In Brussels on Thursday for meetings with EU and Nato leaders, he was trumped by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, whose smile and squeeze – reporters present described “knuckles whitening” and “faces tightening” – were so fierce that Trump was forced to yield.

    Macron did what Trump does: he kept the hand and yanked it pitilessly back and forth. How do you like it, Donnie? Not so fun when someone else is doing it to you, is it, you cheap bully.

    The rematch came at Nato headquarters after lunch, when Macron pointedly embraced German chancellor Angel Merkel, and shook hands with several other heads of state, before finally turning to Trump – who jovially pulled the Frenchman’s arm half out of its socket.

    And then the shove.

    Then he artlessly betrayed the fact that his opinions about the EU all stem from his experience of opening golf clubs there.

    What European leaders did not seem to have anticipated was the US president’s patchy understanding of the bloc.

    The Belgian daily Le Soir reported that while eating “a lot” of “the best” chocolates, Trump revealed to prime minister Charles Michel that his frequent criticisms of the EU were due largely to his personal experiences trying to set up businesses there.

    “Every time we talked about a country, he remembered the things he had done,” one source told the paper. “Scotland? He said he had opened a club. Ireland? He said it took him two-and-a-half years to get a licence and that did not give him a very good image of the EU.”

    Besides reportedly telling EU leaders the Germans were “bad, very bad” on trade, Trump and his team shocked the Europeans by their ignorance of the bloc’s trade policy, according to Süddeutsche Zeitung, repeatedly suggesting America had different trade deals with Germany and Belgium.

    Rude, ignorant and domineering – what more could we want?

  • Trump went to the G7 to learn

    The BBC on A Trump Abroad, this time at the G7, refusing to reaffirm the Paris accord.

    The final communique issued at the G7 summit in Italy said the US “is in the process of reviewing its policies on climate change and on the Paris Agreement and thus is not in a position to join the consensus on these topics”.

    However, the other G7 leaders pledged to “reaffirm their strong commitment to swiftly implement the Paris Agreement”.

    German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the discussion on climate change had been “very unsatisfactory”, adding “we have a situation of six against one”.

    Mr Trump tweeted: “I will make my final decision on the Paris Accord next week!”

    His economic adviser, Gary Cohn, said Mr Trump “came here to learn. He came here to get smart. His views are evolving… exactly as they should be.”

    No. No no no no no no no. He should have been smart already. He should have learned long ago. The G7 isn’t School for Stupid Rich Men Who Want to Be Important. The other six heads of state are not there to educate empty-headed Donnie from Queens. It’s way too late for him to “get smart.” Being smart is a prerequisite, not a fun ornament that can be added any time.

  • The Trump administration has hired dozens of former lobbyists

    They gave up on one fight while Donnie Twoscoops was out of town.

    The White House unexpectedly backed down Friday in a confrontation with the government’s top ethics officer, announcing it will publicly disclose waivers that have been quietly handed out since January to let certain former lobbyists work in the administration.

    The reversal came after the White House wrote last week to the Office of Government Ethics and asked its director to suspend his request for copies of the waivers. Such waivers are needed when officials want to work on policies or other government issues that they were directly involved in recently as private-sector lobbyists or industry lawyers.

    The debate over the waivers — which were routinely made public during the Obama administration — has drawn heightened attention as the Trump administration has hired dozens of former lobbyists and lawyers, and is frequently placing them into jobs that overlap with the work they did for paying clients.

    Like this guy for instance:

    Michael Catanzaro, who until early this year worked as a lobbyist for a coal-burning electric utility and an oil and gas company, among other clients. He is now the top White House policy official overseeing the rollback of the same environmental protection rules he had lobbied against. So far this year, the Trump administration has not said if Mr. Catanzaro was given a waiver, as it was keeping them confidential.

    Scuzzy enough? Companies that make money from coal, oil and gas don’t like environmental protection rules that cut into their profits, so lobbyists for such companies should not move to government jobs that have to do with those environmental protection rules. When they go to work for the government they should be working for the public good, not the private good of companies that make money from coal, oil and gas.

    Walter M. Shaub Jr., the head of the Office of Government Ethics, said Friday evening that he was glad that the White House had changed its position, as it will allow his agency, and the public at large, to better evaluate if Trump administration officials are complying with the ethics rules.

    But he also made clear that there should not have been a need for a confrontation before these waivers were made public.

    “This really is routine stuff, and I am glad we are back on track again,” said Mr. Shaub, who is in the final year of a five-year appointment overseeing the agency, which does not have subpoena power.

    It should be routine, but when you have a scuzzy corrupt real estate hustler as president, anti-corruption rules are no longer routine.

    Norman Eisen, who served as the White House ethics adviser at the start of the Obama administration, said this represented a clear reversal of the earlier position, which he said had clearly implied to federal agency heads that they should hold off from complying.

    Mr. Eisen and other ethics lawyers said they believed that the Trump administration — even after promising to “drain the swamp” — had instead looked for ways to place former lobbyists and industry lawyers into jobs from which they could help former clients get special favors, be it in the energy industry or on Wall Street.

    “It’s a victory for checks and balances, the rule of law and the independent oversight of the Office of Government Ethics, and the news media,” Mr. Eisen said. ”With any bully, when you punch them in the nose, they back down.”

    Or else they take to Twitter and accuse you of crimes.

    Former senior officials with the Office of Government Ethics said that in the 39-year history of the agency, which was created in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, they could not remember an instance in which the White House had similarly tried to block, or even to discourage, an effort to collect ethics compliance data.

    Trump is special that way.

  • Phone calls and emails to the State Department go unanswered

    Der Spiegel too dislikes Trump.

    Donald Trump is not fit to be president of the United States. He does not possess the requisite intellect and does not understand the significance of the office he holds nor the tasks associated with it. He doesn’t read. He doesn’t bother to peruse important files and intelligence reports and knows little about the issues that he has identified as his priorities. His decisions are capricious and they are delivered in the form of tyrannical decrees.

    He is a man free of morals. As has been demonstrated hundreds of times, he is a liar, a racist and a cheat. I feel ashamed to use these words, as sharp and loud as they are. But if they apply to anyone, they apply to Trump.

    I’ve used all three of those words many many times since last July. I’m not ashamed to use the words, but I am ashamed that Trump is president.

    We’ll never live this down you know. Never. The Pig of 57th Street has tarnished us permanently.

    Not quite two weeks ago, a number of experts and politicians focused on foreign policy met in Washington at the invitation of the Munich Security Conference. It wasn’t difficult to sense the atmosphere of chaos and agony that has descended upon the city.

    The U.S. elected a laughing stock to the presidency and has now made itself dependent on a joke of a man. The country is, as David Brooks wrote recently in the New York Times, dependent on a child. The Trump administration has no foreign policy because Trump has consistently promised American withdrawal while invoking America’s strength. He has promised both no wars and more wars. He makes decisions according to his mood, with no strategic coherence or tactical logic. Moscow and Beijing are laughing at America. Elsewhere, people are worried.

    In the Pacific, warships – American and Chinese – circle each other in close proximity. The conflict with North Korea is escalating. Who can be certain that Donald Trump won’t risk nuclear war simply to save his own skin? Efforts to stop climate change are in trouble and many expect the U.S. to withdraw from the Paris Agreement because Trump is wary of legally binding measures. Crises, including those in Syria and Libya, are escalating, but no longer being discussed. And who should they be discussed with? Phone calls and emails to the U.S. State Department go unanswered.

    What?

    Phone calls and emails to the U.S. State Department go unanswered.

    I did not know that. I knew Trump and Co had left a lot of positions unfilled, but I didn’t know the State Department was ignoring communications. That’s horrifying. Klaus Brinkbäumer may mean communications from journalists as opposed to diplomats and governments, but that’s still bad.

    Nothing is regulated, nothing is stable and the trans-Atlantic relationship hardly exists anymore. German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel and Bundestag Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Norbert Röttgen fly back and forth, but Germany and the U.S. no longer understand each other. Hardly any real communication takes place, there are no joint foreign policy goals and there is no strategy.

    We elected a child president. Bad move.

     

  • A wise man who wants to see things get much better rapidly

    Amy Davidson at the New Yorker tells us how Trump lectured the democratic heads of state at NATO on how awesome the Saudi king is.

    He had just come from Saudi Arabia, Trump told the nato leaders, in a brief speech. “There, I spent much time with King Salman, a wise man who wants to see things get much better rapidly.” That meeting had been “historic,” Trump said. The “leaders of the Middle East” had promised him that they would “stop funding the radical ideology that leads to this horrible terrorism all over the globe.” So that should take care of the problem. He did not define “radical ideology,” or acknowledge that he was praising a monarch in what seemed to be an attempt to put the assembled elected leaders of democracies to shame. Trump’s world view seems to combine a distaste for Islam with a predilection for monarchs of any background—for anyone with a decent palace, really.

    Even an Islamist monarch, even an Islamist monarch of the family and regime and sect that has been assiduously funding “radical ideology” all over the planet, including the US.

    European leaders were reportedly hoping for an affirmation of Article 5 in Trump’s remarks; they didn’t get it. In general, the approach of his hosts on this trip seems to have been to hope very much that he doesn’t actually break anything. Remarks have been kept short, flattery long—a reminder, as with the international and unmerited fêting of Ivanka, of how Trumpism lowers the level of dialogue all around. Trump does like it when people give gifts (though he may not have appreciated it when Pope Francis, at the Vatican, handed him a copy of his encyclical on climate change), and so he thanked the 9/11 Museum, in New York, which had donated the girders, and Merkel, as a representative of Germany, for donating the slabs. He spoke a few sentences about the memorials’ symbolic power. But, as he looked around at the new headquarters, he seemed, again, to be dwelling on a different definition of a value.

    “And I never asked once what the new NATO headquarters cost,” he said, as if he should be thanked for that act of restraint. “I refuse to do that. But it is beautiful.”

    Even though it doesn’t have the name TRUMP plastered all over it.

  • They just called your number at KFC

    Was it a shove? Yes, of course it was a shove.

    Let’s break it down.

    A slow-motion viewing of the video indicates no words spoken by Trump as he approaches the group from behind. No “Excuse me” or “Pardon me.”

    Trump reaches out his right arm, grabs Markovic’s right shoulder and pushes him aside. Markovic looks surprised. Trump doesn’t acknowledge his existence as he moves past him. It’s as if Markovic isn’t there.

    Or, rather, it’s as if Trump is an arrogant bullying shithead who treats other people as things he gets to shove out of his way.

    Markovic abruptly looks back at Trump but gets no eye contact from Trump in return.

    Then he pats Trump on the back, or perhaps the arm, displaying a slight grin as Trump, at the front of the group, stands tall and adjusts his suit coat. Trump begins conversing with Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite as Markovic looks on from behind.

    Look. That would be rude enough in a crowd of strangers, at a ball game or a protest or a conference – but this wasn’t that. This was a gathering of heads of state. It was a group of people who were there to talk and interact with each other. It was a group of colleagues. That makes Trump’s behavior all the more grotesquely and conspicuously rude. Starting a chat with Dalia Grybauskaite while both stand in front of the shoved aside Marković is kindergarten-level rude.

    White House spokesman Sean Spicer later told reporters that spots for the “family photo” for which the leaders were preparing were predetermined, as is usually the case — implying that Trump was not trying to get a better position, The Washington Post reported, but rather that he was heading for the position reserved for him.

    Half a second faster than he would have arrived anyway, when they weren’t going to take the picture without him even if it did take him an extra half second to get there. No. I think he was dismayed to find himself lost in a crowd instead of conspicuously out in front, and took out his dismay on this frightful little man who had the gall to be slightly ahead of him. I think that’s the kind of pig he is.

    As expected, the Trump shove captured the late-night shows.

    “The President Show” on Comedy Central depicted an exaggerated scene, replacing the Montenegro prime minister with the secretary general of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg.

    “Excuse me, excuse me, get out of my way,” the show’s Trump says to the secretary general, pushing him aside as they walk into a press briefing. “America first. America first.”

    Seth Meyers, host of “Late Night With Seth Meyers,” also riffed on the exchange, saying “Look at this guy. Wow.”

    “You’re a world leader at a meeting of dignitaries and you act like they just called your number at KFC,” Meyers said.

    “Me, that’s mine, the 12 piece,” Meyers said, mimicking someone pushing and shoving others out of the way.

    With two scoops of ice cream.

  • Get outta my way

    How Trump comports himself on the world stage:

    https://youtu.be/TL9XsHZmiys

    That’s Duško Marković he so rudely shoved aside so that he could push forward – Duško Marković the Prime Minister of Montenegro.

    He shoves him aside and pushes himself in front, and then sticks his chin in the air as if to remind everyone how important he is. It’s so ugly.

    Every single other person there is presentable and normal and polite – and then there’s this exaggerated piggish preening shoving bully of a man. He is a nightmare.

  • That promise? Not doing it.

    Oh and that thing about the Trump Organization donating the profits from its DC hotel to the Treasury Department? It’s not going to do that. It doesn’t want to.

    In early January, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer promised that the Trump Organization would donate hotel profits from foreign governments to the U.S. Treasury. It was Trump’s way of trying to relieve concerns about receiving foreign emoluments without giving up his stake in his company. “This way it is the American people who will profit,” the lawyer said.

    Less than six months later, the Trump Organization has said it does not plan to fulfill that promise. The announcement comes by way of a newly released pamphlet from the Trump Organization that implicitly calls the original promise a big dumb idea.

    Why? Because you’d have to ask them, and they wouldn’t like that. They’re there to have a Luxury Experience and to bribe the president, and they don’t want to be bothered with a lot of questions from people at the front desk. It would ruin the brand.

    So instead, the Trump Organization will only include obvious payments from foreign governments when making its donation. Profits that are more difficult to link to a foreign government — those from state-owned businesses that isn’t obviously state-owned, for example — would remain with the Trump Organization. The burden of flagging payments from foreign governments, the Trump Organization appears to be suggesting, is on foreign governments, not the company itself.

    As Maryland representative Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, wrote in a letter to the Trump Organization, that’s a woefully inadequate setup. “Under the policy outlined in this pamphlet, foreign governments could provide prohibited emoluments to President Trump, for example through organizations such as RT, the propaganda arm of the Russian government,” he wrote. “Those payments would not be tracked in any way and would be hidden from the American public.”

    Yes but the brand. The brand is everything. The brand brings in millions just by being the brand. Have some respect.

  • Trump is now morally complicit in future killings

    There was disgust over the loving exchange with Duterte at the time.

    “By essentially endorsing Duterte’s murderous war on drugs, Trump is now morally complicit in future killings,” said John Sifton, the Asia advocacy director of Human Rights Watch. “Although the traits of his personality likely make it impossible, Trump should be ashamed of himself.”

    Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut and a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on Twitter, “We are watching in real time as the American human rights bully pulpit disintegrates into ash.”

    …

    Mr. Duterte’s toxic reputation had already given pause to some in the White House. The Philippines is set to host a summit meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in November, and officials said there had been a brief debate about whether Mr. Trump should attend.

    It is not even clear, given the accusations of human rights abuses against him, that Mr. Duterte would be granted a visa to the United States were he not a head of state, according to human rights advocates.

    But Trump doesn’t care. Trump likes that sort of thing.

    Mr. Trump’s affinity for Mr. Duterte, and other strongmen as well, is firmly established. Both presidents are populist insurgent leaders with a penchant for making inflammatory statements. Both ran for office calling for a wholesale crackdown on Islamist militancy and the drug trade. And both display impatience with the courts.

    After Mr. Trump was elected, Mr. Duterte called to congratulate him. Later, the Philippine leader issued a statement saying that the president-elect had wished him well in his antidrug campaign, which has resulted in the deaths of several thousand people suspected of using or selling narcotics, as well as others who may have had no involvement with drugs.

    Whatever. Obama just didn’t get it. Trump gets it.

    Mr. Trump has a commercial connection to the Philippines: His name is stamped on a $150 million, 57-floor tower in Manila, a licensing deal that netted his company millions of dollars. Mr. Duterte appointed the chairman of the company developing the tower, Jose E. B. Antonio, as an envoy to Washington for trade, investment and economic affairs.

    Ah. Of course he does.

  • Take care of yourself, Rodrigo

    More from the Trump files: last month he phoned Duterte to tell him “awesome job with all the extrajudicial killings, dude.”

    President Trump praised President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines in a phone call last month for doing an “unbelievable job on the drug problem” in the island nation where the government has sanctioned gunning down suspects in the streets. Mr. Trump also boasted that the United States has “two nuclear submarines” off the coast of North Korea but said he does not want to use them.

    Did he boast about his dick size at the same time?

    There’s a Philippine transcript of the call which was circulated yesterday by the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs. A senior administration official vouched for the transcript, on the now-familiar condition of anonymity. Getting hot there, is it?

    The Philippine rendering of the call offers a rare insight into how Mr. Trump talks to fellow leaders: He sounds much the way he sounds in public, casing issues in largely black-and-white terms, often praising authoritarian leaders, largely unconcerned about human rights violations and genuinely uncertain about the nature of his adversary in North Korea.

    The same brutal callous stupid egomaniacal shithead we all know and loathe.

    Mr. Trump placed the call and began it by congratulating Mr. Duterte for the government-sanctioned attacks on drug suspects. The program has been widely condemned by human rights groups around the world because extrajudicial killings have taken thousands of lives without arrest or trial. In March, the program was criticized in the State Department’s annual human rights report, which referred to “apparent governmental disregard for human rights and due process.”

    Mr. Trump had no such reservations. “I just wanted to congratulate you because I am hearing of the unbelievable job on the drug problem,” he said. “Many countries have the problem, we have a problem, but what a great job you are doing and I just wanted to call and tell you that.”

    A great job murdering thousands of people without trial. The president of the US is praising that and saying it’s a great thing. It’s sickening.

    Mr. Duterte responded that drugs were “the scourge of my nation now, and I have to do something to preserve the Filipino nation.” Mr. Trump responded that “we had a previous president who did not understand that,” an apparent reference to President Barack Obama, “but I understand that.”

    He understands mass murder by the state.

    Thanks for the warning.

    The end of the conversation centered on a first meeting between the two men, perhaps when Mr. Trump is in Manila later this year. But Mr. Trump twice invited Mr. Duterte to “come to the Oval Office.”

    “I will love to have you in the Oval Office, anytime you want to come,” Mr. Trump said.

    “Take care of yourself, Rodrigo,” he concluded. “God bless you.”

    Image result for god bless you

  • There with all his friends

    Oh gawd. Trump went to Yad Vashem today. He wrote an entry for the guest book, in all caps:

    IT IS A GREAT HONOR TO BE HERE WITH ALL OF MY FRIENDS — SO AMAZING & WILL NEVER FORGET!

    The guest book entry provides an opportunity to contrast Trump’s style with that of his predecessor, Barack Obama, who spent an hour at Yad Vashem and gave an emotional speech in 2013. Obama had already visited once, in 2008, when he was an Illinois senator running for president. On that trip, he left this note in the guest book:

    “I am grateful to Yad Vashem and all of those responsible for this remarkable institution. At a time of great peril and promise, war and strife, we are blessed to have such a powerful reminder of man’s potential for great evil, but also our capacity to rise up from tragedy and remake our world. Let our children come here, and know this history, so that they can add their voices to proclaim ‘never again’. And may we remember those who perished, not only as victims, but also as individuals who hoped and loved and dreamed like us, and who have become symbols of the human spirit.”

    I’m not crazy about that one either, frankly. Saying we’re “blessed” to have the reminder implies the Holocaust was itself a blessing, or at least a necessary step to attaining that blessing. Still, it’s orders of magnitude less grating than Trump’s little ego-pirouette.

  • Slash slash slash

    I guess the principle of Trumpism and most of the contemporary Republican party in the US is: destroy everything good. Trump’s budget slashes not only Medicaid and anti-poverty programs, but also scientific and medical research. Booya.

    President Trump’s 2018 budget request, delivered to Congress on Tuesday with the title “A New Foundation for American Greatness,” has roiled the medical and science community with a call for massive cuts in spending on scientific research, medical research, disease prevention programs and health insurance for children of the working poor.

    The National Cancer Institute would be hit with a $1 billion cut compared to its 2017 budget. The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute would see a $575 million cut, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases would see a reduction of $838 million. The administration would cut the overall National Institutes of Health budget from $31.8 billion to $26 billion.

    It’s especially ironic that that’s dubbed “A New Foundation for American Greatness” when scientific and medical research constitute one of our major claims to greatness.

    The proposed cuts to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention drew an unusually sharp rebuke from former CDC director Tom Frieden, who went on Twitter to describe the administration’s CDC request as “unsafe at any level of enactment. Would increase illness, death, risks to Americans, and health care costs.”

    In a separate tweet, Frieden listed what he sees as the dire ramifications of the Trump proposal, saying, for starters, that it “Devastates programs that protect Americans from cancer, diabetes, heart attacks, strokes and other deadly and expensive conditions.”

    Steven Houser, president of the American Heart Association, called Trump’s budget “devastating” and “unconscionable.” He urged Congress to boost funding for NIH by $2 billion rather than cut it by nearly $6 billion.

    Rush Holt, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said the Trump budget is short-sighted, particularly in assuming that economic growth won’t be hampered by cuts in government-funded research.

    Seriously. Did no one tell him that the research makes possible a lot of thriving industries? Does Trump think flogging real estate is the only profit-making enterprise there is?

    Slashing programs that normally have enjoyed bipartisan support is part of the Trump administration’s effort to trim trillions of dollars in spending over the next decade while at the same time paying for tax cuts and increases in military spending.

    Because that’s Trump. Money for rich people and weapons good, everything else bad and for losers.

  • Trump says stop standing for the slaughter of innocent people

    The Manchester bomb is of course a gift to Trump: now he can yell that he was right right right about keeping out all the Mooslims except the ones from Saudi Arabia and other not at all Islamist places like that.

    “This is what I’ve spent these last few days talking about in our trip overseas,” Mr. Trump said after a meeting with Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority. “Our society can have no tolerance for this continuation of bloodshed. We cannot stand a moment longer for the slaughter of innocent people.”

    As if everyone else were standing for it, and only Trump thinks we should make it stop. The problem is that it’s not easy to make it stop, and just saying we won’t stand for it isn’t the magic solution.

    Yaakov Peri, a former head of Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security service, said on Israeli television Tuesday morning that “the tragic attack in Manchester plays favorably for Trump, who in Saudi Arabia said that we will fight terror together.”

    But the attack also poses some risks for Mr. Trump, whose responses to fast-moving events — sometimes dashed off in a tweet with a hashtag and an exclamation point — can sound off-key. In his first comments Tuesday morning, Mr. Trump used a playground epithet to describe people like the assailant in the bombing.

    “I will call them from now on losers, because that’s what they are,” Mr. Trump said after the meeting with Mr. Abbas. “They’re losers. And we’ll have more of them. But they’re losers. Just remember that.”

    I flinch. I hate the word “losers” and I hate it all the more coming from Trump, because to him it means men who don’t grab women by the pussy.

    But.

    But all the same I kind of know what he’s getting at and this one time I even kind of agree with him. I think disdain is the right reaction, or part of the right reaction. They want to be feared and hated; they don’t want to be seen as pathetic. The reality is it doesn’t take courage or genius or greatness to set off a bomb in a crowded place. It’s all too easy. Any schmuck can do that.

  • Is there anyone Trump didn’t try to strongarm?

    It wasn’t just Comey that Trump tried to strongarm into squashing the investigation, the Post reports.

    President Trump asked two of the nation’s top intelligence officials in March to help him push back against an FBI investigation into possible coordination between his campaign and the Russian government, according to current and former officials.

    Trump made separate appeals to the director of national intelligence, Daniel Coats, and to Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, urging them to publicly deny the existence of any evidence of collusion during the 2016 election.

    Coats and Rogers refused to comply with the requests, which they both deemed to be inappropriate, according to two current and two former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private communications with the president.

    He thinks he’s a monarch. He thinks he can do anything he wants, and that that applies retroactively too. He understands nothing.

    Current and former senior intelligence officials viewed Trump’s requests as an attempt by the president to tarnish the credibility of the agency leading the Russia investigation.

    …

    In addition to the requests to Coats and Rogers, senior White House officials sounded out top intelligence officials about the possibility of intervening directly with Comey to encourage the FBI to drop its probe of Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, according to people familiar with the matter. The officials said the White House appeared uncertain about its power to influence the FBI.

    “Can we ask him to shut down the investigation? Are you able to assist in this matter?” one official said of the line of questioning from the White House.

    Of course you can’t ask anyone to shut down an investigation, and especially not one of you. It’s Trump who was under investigation, so no he doesn’t get to tell people to shut down the investigation. It’s so basic.

    The new revelations add to a growing body of evidence that Trump sought to co-opt and then undermine Comey before he fired him May 9. According to notes kept by Comey, Trump first asked for his loyalty at a dinner in January and then, at a meeting the next month, asked him to drop the probe into Flynn. Trump disputes those accounts.

    Trump is a habitual liar. What he disputes is neither here nor there.

    Current and former officials said that Trump either lacks an understanding of the FBI’s role as an independent law enforcement agency or does not care about maintaining such boundaries.

    Yeah, we’ve noticed.

    Trump and his allies in Congress have similarly sought to deflect scrutiny over Russia by attempting to pit U.S. intelligence agencies against one another.

    In December, Trump’s congressional allies falsely claimed that the FBI did not concur with a CIA assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Trump win the White House. Comey and then-CIA Director John Brennan later said that the bureau and the agency were in full agreement on Moscow’s intentions.

    Trump is such a lying cheating fraud in every way.

  • Yet another demonstration of disrespect

    Now the Trump admin is trying to cut the Office of Government Ethics off at the knees.

    The Trump administration, in a significant escalation of its clash with the government’s top ethics watchdog, has moved to block an effort to disclose any ethics waivers granted to former lobbyists who now work in the White House or federal agencies.

    The latest conflict came in recent days when the White House, in a highly unusual move, sent a letter to Walter M. Shaub Jr., the head of the Office of Government Ethics, asking him to withdraw a request he had sent to every federal agency for copies of the waivers. In the letter, the administration challenged his legal authority to demand the information.

    Dozens of former lobbyists and industry lawyers are working in the Trump administration, which has hired them at a much higher rate than the previous administration. Keeping the waivers confidential would make it impossible to know whether any such officials are violating federal ethics rules or have been given a pass to ignore them.

    Typical Trump in its brazenness. Dear Mr Shaub, please stop trying to make sure we don’t violate ethics rules all over the place, thanks, Donnie.

    Shaub says he has no intention of complying with that outrageous demand.

    “It is an extraordinary thing,” Mr. Shaub said of the White House request. “I have never seen anything like it.”

    It’s called “draining the swamp.”

    Marilyn L. Glynn, who served as general counsel and acting director of the agency during the George W. Bush administration, called the move by the Trump White House “unprecedented and extremely troubling.”

    “It challenges the very authority of the director of the agency and his ability to carry out the functions of the office,” she said.

    The OMB said no you are.

    President Trump signed an executive order in late January — echoing language first endorsed by Mr. Obama — that prohibited lobbyists and lawyers hired as political appointees from working for two years on “particular” government matters that involved their former clients. In the case of former lobbyists, they could not work on the same regulatory issues they had been involved in.

    Both reserved the right to issue waivers, but in a rather different manner.

    Mr. Obama, unlike Mr. Trump, automatically made any such waivers public, offering detailed explanations. The exceptions were typically granted for people with special skills, or when the overlap between the new federal work and a prior job was minor.

    Ms. Glynn, who worked in the office of government ethics for nearly two decades, said she had never heard of a move by any previous White House to block a request like Mr. Shaub’s. She recalled how the Bush White House had intervened with a federal agency during her tenure to get information that she needed.

    Trump has his eye on history. He wants to outdo all his predecessors in brazen corruption and self-dealing.

    Norman Eisen, the top White House ethics lawyer in the first years of the Obama administration, said he believed that the Trump administration was trying to intimidate federal ethics officers, who are career appointees, without actually ordering them to ignore the directive from the ethics chief.

    “It is yet another demonstration of disrespect for the rule of law and for ethics and transparency coming from the White House,” Mr. Eisen said.

    It’s yet another truckload of slime.

  • Just so you understand

    Look at this imbecile.

    After an appearance alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Monday, President Donald Trump paused to push back against reports that he had disclosed highly classified information to the Russians.

    “Just so you understand, I never mentioned the word or the name ‘Israel’,’” Trump told reporters in Jerusalem. “Never mentioned it during that conversation. They were all saying I did. So you had another story wrong. Never mentioned the word ‘Israel’.”

    He told them it using his tiny stunted repertoire of gestures – the pinch on “never mentioned,” the point on “during that conversation.” The two little hands pushing at the invisible barrier on “Never mentioned the word ‘Israel’.” The gestures always underline how stupid he is.

    The story Trump was reacting to was this one, which ran a week ago in the Washington Post. And the thing about that story is that, well, the word “Israel” is never mentioned. Not one time.

    Of course it’s not. If it had been I wouldn’t have guessed Saudi Arabia. The fact that it was Israel was kept under wraps for some hours after the story appeared.

    In a follow-up story, the New York Times reported — citing anonymous sources — that the information that Trump had passed along had come to the United States from Israel. But even in that piece there is no allegation that Trump mentioned the word “Israel” in his Oval Office meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

    Trump is the denying an allegation that, literally, no news organization made. He’s also implicitly confirming that, yes, he did talk to the Russians about classified information.

    But that’s ok, because he’s Trump, and his “base” will think he made a meaningful point, and it will go on this way until he kills us all.

  • Magic moments

    Keep pressing it. Don’t let go. Whatever you do, don’t lose contact. Grab it. Grab it hard. Grab it like a president.

    Image result for trump orb

    Via the Post.

    Updating to add one more, that captures his innocent awe and wonder:

    Image result for trump orb