Tag: Trump

Trump has to go Abroad now. He’s not the most cosmopolitan head of state we’ve ever seen, so it may be difficult for him. His aides have been working hard to prepare him.

White House advisers insisted Trump was up to speed on the Middle East, having already hosted Arab, Israeli and Palestinian leaders at the White House.

“His way of doing diplomacy, which really contrasts with President Obama’s approach, is to … prioritize the personal relationship,” said Michael Singh, a foreign policy adviser to former Republican President George W. Bush.

In other words his way of doing diplomacy contrasts with the sane adult approach. The personal relationship is largely beside the point, even though a good one doubtless does make discussion and negotiation easier. But of course Trump is Trump. It’s not that prioritizing the personal relationship is a considered approach, it’s that it’s all he knows.

Conversations with some officials who have briefed Trump and others who are aware of how he absorbs information portray a president with a short attention span.

He likes single-page memos and visual aids like maps, charts, graphs and photos.

National Security Council officials have strategically included Trump’s name in “as many paragraphs as we can because he keeps reading if he’s mentioned,” according to one source, who relayed conversations he had with NSC officials.

Of course he does.

The Post’s Daily 202 points out that all this underlines how clueless Trump always was and still is about what exactly his job entails.

The same president who allegedly asked James Comey to drop the FBI’s probe into Michael Flynn – potentially imperiling his grip on power – has also said “nobody knew health care could be so complicated,” volunteered that he only learned containing North Korea is “not so easy” when the Chinese president tutored him on the region’s history and expressed surprise that government cannot be run like a business.

He seems to have thought it was like being a pretend boss on tv – you just give orders and say “you’re fired” when you feel like it. The end.

— Only an amateur would be surprised that Comey took notes after a meeting like this and that they would emerge if he got fired while the investigation in question was still ongoing. How the last several days have played out was entirely foreseeable for anyone who has even a basic grip of how Washington works and how Comey operates.

Dud theory of mind yet again. Trump saw it all from his point of view and didn’t even pause to remember that Comey has one too and it won’t consist solely of “must do whatever Trump wants because Trump awesome.”

Why did the president ask Pence and Sessions to leave the room when he talked to Comey? “This is the kind of conversation that rational, experienced presidents know not to have,” Ruth Marcus writes. “It is the kind of conversation that a White House counsel should make sparklingly, crystal clear to a president that he is not to engage in, not even close. It is the kind of conversation that seems completely in character for Trump, who, over the course of the campaign and now in office, has betrayed no — zero — understanding of the necessary separation of the president and his Justice Department when it comes to making independent judgments about political matters and political opponents.”

It’s not clear to me either how explicit that necessary separation is. News talkers keep pointing out that the president can fire anyone in the DOJ, the DOJ works for the president, the DOJ is part of the executive branch, yadda yadda. The message seems to be that Trump can do whatever he likes when it comes to the Justice Department and no one can stop him. They don’t talk nearly as much about this necessary separation.

Clearly though there should be such a separation when it comes to questions about the president’s own actions, because the president should be accountable and subject to the law. It’s pretty appalling seeing all these “actually, legally speaking, he has the right to ______” – to fire anyone in the DOJ, to declassify information on the spur of the moment while chatting with Russians with only Russian state media present, to fire prosecutors, to…what? Apparently asking the FBI director to let something go is a step too far, but it’s not clear to me where that bright line is.

Benjamin Wittes at Lawfare points out what Trump did to Rod Rosenstein and what Rosenstein did to himself.

Trump happily traded the reputation of Rosenstein, who began the week as a well-respected career prosecutor, for barely 24 hours of laughably transparent talking points in the news cycle. The White House sent out person after person—including the Vice President—to insist that Rosenstein’s memo constituted the basis for the President’s action against the FBI director. The White House described a bottom-up dissatisfaction with Comey’s leadership, which Rosenstein’s memo encapsulated and to which the President acceded. And then, just as casually as Trump and his people set Rosenstein up as the bad guy for what was obviously a presidential decision into whose service Rosenstein had been enlisted, Trump revealed that Rosenstein was, after all, nothing more than a set piece.

Trump used Rosenstein, Wittes says. Rosenstein knew it. He got the White House to correct the record and say that Rosenstein’s memo wasn’t the reason for firing Comey.

But.

The trouble is that while Rosenstein got what he wanted, Trump’s idea of correcting the record was to say publicly exactly the thing about a law enforcement officer that makes his continued service in office impossible: That Trump had used his deputy attorney general as window dressing on a pre-cooked political decision to shut down an investigation involving himself, a decision for which he needed the patina of a high-minded rationale.

Once the President has said this about you—a law enforcement officer who works for him and who promised the Senate in confirmation hearings you would show independence—you have nothing left. These are the costs of working for Trump, and it took Rosenstein only two weeks to pay them.

Wittes had a high opinion of Rosenstein, and thought his presence would keep the DOJ from being too terrible despite Jeff Sessions.

I was profoundly wrong about Rosenstein.

Rosenstein’s memo in support of Comey’s firing is a shocking document. The more I think about it, the worse it gets. I have tried six ways from Sunday to put an honorable construction on it. But in the end, I just cannot find one. The memo is a press release to justify an unsavory use of presidential power. It is also a profoundly unfair document. And it’s gutless too. Because at the end of the day, the memo greases the wheels for Comey’s removal without ever explicitly urging it—thus allowing its author to claim that he did something less than recommend the firing, while in fact providing the fig leaf for it.

Just one of Trump’s incidental kills.

Ok Trump is in a really really bad mood now and he’s not going to take it any more. You people have got to stop fucking up this way. Heads are gonna roll!

Mr. Trump’s appetite for chaos, coupled with his disregard for the self-protective conventions of the presidency, have left his staff confused and squabbling. And his own mood, according to two advisers who spoke on the condition of anonymity, has become sour and dark, turning against most of his aides — even his son-in-law, Jared Kushner — and describing them in a fury as “incompetent,” according to one of those advisers.

Seriously! And they all have ridiculous hair, too!

He called his PR peeps in on Monday to tell them to shape up and stuff, but he also said they could still keep their jobs. He told other people a different thing though.

Even as Mr. Trump reassured advisers like Mr. Spicer that their jobs were safe at the morning meeting, he told other advisers he knew he needed to make big changes but did not know which direction to go in, or whom to select.

Why that sounds kind of like…incompetence.

Also there’s another problem: nobody is going to want that job. Nobody.

Later, reporters could hear senior aides shouting from behind closed doors as they discussed a defense after Washington Post reporters informed them of an article they were writing that first reported the news about the president’s divulging of intelligence.

They turned the tv up to drown out the yelling.

A dozen of Mr. Trump’s aides and associates, while echoing Mr. Trump’s defiance, privately agreed with Mr. Corker’s view. They spoke candidly, in a way they were unwilling to do just weeks ago, about the damage that was being done to the administration’s standing and the fatigue that was setting in after months of having to defend the president’s missteps, Twitter posts and unpredictable actions.

“After months” – people keep saying that. Yes technically it is months, since it’s more than one, but that would usually suggest a bigger number than three. Almost four. It’s only been almost-four. It’s a short time.

There is a growing sense that Mr. Trump seems unwilling or unable to do the things necessary to keep himself out of trouble, and that the presidency has done little to tame a shoot-from-the-hip-into-his-own-foot style that characterized his campaign.

What did they think would happen? Why did they expect anything else? He’s a bad, stupid, malevolent man; what the fuck made them think he would be anything else after he took office?

There is a fear among some of Mr. Trump’s senior advisers about leaving him alone in meetings with foreign leaders out of concern he might speak out of turn. General McMaster, in particular, has tried to insert caveats or gentle corrections into conversations when he believes the president is straying off topic or onto boggy diplomatic ground.

Can you imagine? Can you imagine being a serious grownup and having to try to manage that out-of-control monstrosity?

This has, at times, chafed the president, according to two officials with knowledge of the situation. Mr. Trump, who still openly laments having to dismiss his first national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, has groused that General McMaster talks too much in meetings, and the president has referred to him as “a pain,” according to one of the officials.

He keeps telling Don to turn off the tv.

The Times reports it was Israel.

The classified intelligence that President Trump disclosed in a meeting last week with Russian officials at the White House was provided by Israel, according to a current and a former American official familiar with how the United States obtained the information. The revelation adds a potential diplomatic complication to the episode.

Israel is one of the United States’ most important allies and a major intelligence collector in the Middle East. The revelation that Mr. Trump boasted about some of Israel’s most sensitive information to the Russians could damage the relationship between the two countries. It also raises the possibility that the information could be passed to Iran, Russia’s close ally and Israel’s main threat in the Middle East.

Israeli officials declined to confirm.

In the meeting with the Russian ambassador and foreign minister, Mr. Trump disclosed intelligence about an Islamic State terrorist plot. At least some of the details that the United States has about the plot came from the Israelis, the officials said.

The officials, who were not authorized to discuss the matter and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that Israel previously had urged the United States to be careful about the handling of the intelligence that Mr. Trump discussed.

Yes but this is Russia we’re talking about, our dear dear friend Russia, who loves us so much and has our best interests at heart, not to mention Israel’s. Russia is a great friend to Israel, as well as to us. All this is just a super-friendly conversation among three close buddies.

Mr. Trump said Tuesday on Twitter that he had an “absolute right” to share information in the interest of fighting terrorism and called it a “very, very successful meeting” in a brief appearance later Tuesday at the White House alongside President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.

Erdogan. Of course.

“What the president discussed with the foreign minister was wholly appropriate to that conversation and is consistent with the routine sharing of information between the president and any leaders with whom he’s engaged,” General McMaster said at a White House briefing, seeking to play down the sensitivity of the information Mr. Trump disclosed.

General McMaster added that the president, who he said was unaware of the source of the information, made a spur-of-the-moment decision to tell the Russians what he knew.

Wait. Why was Trump unaware of the source of the information? Because he didn’t read his briefings? Or because it’s one of the pieces the national security are keeping back from him because he’s so reckless? If it’s the second – doesn’t that just put the lid on it? He’s too dangerous for this job no matter what you do: if you give him the intel he blabs it, and if you don’t give him the intel he blabs it.

But General McMaster also appeared to acknowledge that Thomas P. Bossert, the assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, had called the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency after the meeting with the Russian officials. Other officials have said that the spy agencies were contacted to help contain the damage from the leak to the Russians.

General McMaster would not confirm that Mr. Bossert made the calls but suggested that if he did, he was acting “maybe from an overabundance of caution.”

An overabundance of caution? Really? I wonder if he’s consulted Israel on that.

Israel’s concerns about the Trump White House’s handling of classified information were foreshadowed in the Israeli news media earlier this year. Newspapers there reported in January that American officials warned their Israeli counterparts to be careful about what they told the Trump administration because it could be leaked to the Russians, given Mr. Trump’s openness toward President Vladimir V. Putin.

Oh well. At least we got those nice Oval Office photos out of the deal.

God damn. I was out getting Cooper wet and muddy and tired all afternoon, and I was just browsing Twitter and kicking back when I encountered the Post’s latest scoop. Donnie talked about top-secret shit with his Russian guests.

President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.

The information the president relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.

A source on IS, and Mister BewareoftheScaryMooslims blabs it because he’s showing off to the Russians.

The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said Trump’s decision to do so endangers cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State. After Trump’s meeting, senior White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and the National Security Agency.

Those must have been awkward conversations.

“This is code-word information,” said a U.S. official familiar with the matter, using terminology that refers to one of the highest classification levels used by American spy agencies. Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”

No wonder they were grinning so hard in those photos that Trump didn’t realize they were going to make public.

One day after dismissing Comey, Trump welcomed Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak — a key figure in earlier Russia controversies — into the Oval Office. It was during that meeting, officials said, that Trump went off script and began describing details of an Islamic State terrorist threat related to the use of laptop computers on aircraft.

Oh gawd.

Because he’s prez, he didn’t do anything illegal. It’s just that it was a very bad thing to do, that’s all.

But officials expressed concern about Trump’s handling of sensitive information as well as his grasp of the potential consequences. Exposure of an intelligence stream that has provided critical insight into the Islamic State, they said, could hinder the United States’ and its allies’ ability to detect future threats.

But no biggy, right? Certainly Trump has never expressed any alarm about Islamic State…

“It is all kind of shocking,” said a former senior U.S. official who is close to current administration officials. “Trump seems to be very reckless and doesn’t grasp the gravity of the things he’s dealing with, especially when it comes to intelligence and national security. And it’s all clouded because of this problem he has with Russia.”

In his meeting with Lavrov, Trump seemed to be boasting about his inside knowledge of the looming threat. “I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every day,” the president said, according to an official with knowledge of the exchange.

Oh god. Oh god oh god oh god. This is what we all knew would happen; this is the idiocy and engorged vanity that we knew would make it happen; but how is it possible that no one can stop this?

Trump went on to discuss aspects of the threat that the United States learned only through the espionage capabilities of a key partner. He did not reveal the specific intelligence-gathering method, but he described how the Islamic State was pursuing elements of a specific plot and how much harm such an attack could cause under varying circumstances. Most alarmingly, officials said, Trump revealed the city in the Islamic State’s territory where the U.S. intelligence partner detected the threat.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuck.

Well, on the day when ten passenger jets are blown out of the sky, we’ll know we have Trump to thank…unless we were on one of the planes.

The identification of the location was seen as particularly problematic, officials said, because Russia could use that detail to help identify the U.S. ally or intelligence capability involved. Officials said the capability could be useful for other purposes, possibly providing intelligence on Russia’s presence in Syria. Moscow would be keenly interested in identifying that source and perhaps disrupting it.

This is horrifying.

A former intelligence official who handled high-level intelligence on Russia said that given the clues Trump provided, “I don’t think that it would be that hard [for Russian spy services] to figure this out.”

At a more fundamental level, the information wasn’t the United States’ to provide to others. Under the rules of espionage, governments — and even individual agencies — are given significant control over whether and how the information they gather is disseminated, even after it has been shared. Violating that practice undercuts trust considered essential to sharing secrets.

But we have an angry toddler as head of state, so that’s that.

The officials declined to identify the ally but said it has previously voiced frustration with Washington’s inability to safeguard sensitive information related to Iraq and Syria.

“If that partner learned we’d given this to Russia without their knowledge or asking first, that is a blow to that relationship,” the U.S. official said.

Trump also described measures that the United States has taken or is contemplating to counter the threat, including military operations in Iraq and Syria, as well as other steps to tighten security, officials said.

And this is inevitable and will go on happening because he refuses to read the briefings that tell him not to do this kind of thing, and why.

Trump has repeatedly gone off-script in his dealings with high-ranking foreign officials, most notably in his contentious introductory conversation with the Australian prime ministerearlier this year. He has also faced criticism for seemingly lax attention to security at his Florida retreat, Mar-a-Lago, where he appeared to field preliminary reports of a North Korea missile launch in full view of casual diners.

U.S. officials said that the National Security Council continues to prepare multi-page briefings for Trump to guide him through conversations with foreign leaders, but that he has insisted that the guidance be distilled to a single page of bullet points — and often ignores those.

“He seems to get in the room or on the phone and just goes with it, and that has big downsides,” the second former official said. “Does he understand what’s classified and what’s not? That’s what worries me.”

I keep saying – many people keep saying – this level of stupidity is dangerous in a president.

This shit has seriously got to stop.

The funniest first paragraph I’ve read so far today:

Donald Trump is embarking on a week of diplomacy and preparation for his first foreign trip as president, aimed at demonstrating that his personal charisma can override longstanding global divisions and conflicts of interest with old allies.

His wut?

Trump doesn’t have charisma; he doesn’t even lack charisma; he has whatever the opposite of charisma is. He’s a force that sucks all the charisma out of the air for miles in every direction. He’s repellent.

Trump’s personality-driven approach seeks to reassert US pre-eminence in the world through consolidating bonds with foreign leaders, most notably autocrats, as long as they are aligned with the administration’s priorities of defeating Islamic State and al-Qaida while containing Iranian influence. Pressure to observe human rights has been explicitly relegated as a foreign policy mission.

The president’s critics argue, however, that abandoning such values damages long-term US aspirations to global leadership. They warn that Trump’s overweening confidence in his own persuasive powers is simply delusional and will not help resolve intractable global conflicts and the often contradictory aims of his own foreign policy objectives.

And even if he were right about his persuasive powers, what good are they if he has all the wrong goals? But he’s not right about them, so we don’t really need to contemplate that question.

[National Security Adviser HR McMaster] laid out the agenda for Trump’s trip, which starts with visits to the ancient capitals of Islam, Judaism and Christianity and culminates in Nato and G7 summits at the end of the following week, describing it in almost messianic terms.

“This trip is truly historic. No president has ever visited the homelands and holy sites of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faiths all on one trip,” McMaster said. “And what President Trump is seeking is to unite peoples of all faiths around a common vision of peace, progress, and prosperity.”

It will be like a visit from God, but more fun.

Trump’s week starts on Monday with a meeting in Washington with the Abu Dhabi crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, that is supposed to underline US backing for the United Arab Emirates (UAE). There is deep unease in the state department and the Pentagon about the UAE’s human rights record in its role as part of an Arab coalition against Iran-backed Houthi forces in Yemen. But Trump is not expected to raise those concerns in his meeting with the sheikh.

Of course he’s not. What does he care about human rights? They don’t put money in his pocket.

Trump has already made clear he will not let Obama-era opposition to Erdoğan’s creeping authoritarianism become a hindrance in the bilateral relationship. He formally congratulatedthe Turkish president on winning a referendum amending the constitution to give him more power.

For its part, Turkey has also focused on cultivating a personal relationship with Trump. A meeting of Turkish and US business leaders starting next Sunday has been moved to the Trump hotel in Washington.

Putting a lot of money in Trump’s pocket. That’s the important thing.

The consistent message being conveyed in this week’s meetings, and then in the trips to Saudi Arabia and Israel over the weekend, is that US support for its traditional allies is personal and no longer has to be balanced by scruples about human rights or by the pursuit of detente with Iran.

“One of the main comparisons with Obama is that he seemed to be aloof. He didn’t take sides. His temperament was cerebral and over the fray,” said Natan Sachs, the director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.

“Trump is the opposite. He is partisan. He is saying he is on their side. He is saying: ‘We are not the UN. We are not Sweden. We are the US and we are your ally.’”

We like authoritarians and dictators.

I’ve seen a lot of references to the interview Trump did with TIME magazine as startling evidence of how…what to call it…under-equipped he is.

Here’s a sample on his first use of force:

I’ve been doing this, in all fairness, when I first came into the office, the first night. You weren’t here.

But they say sir, we’re ready to go. I said where? They had some people in a certain country, Yemen, where they had them [surveilled] and they needed the go ahead to kill, to kill them.

But in other words they wanted the right to go. So they’re telling me this. And this happened for two or three weeks, four weeks. And they keep coming to me, at weird times too. I don’t care about that.

And they’re in parts of the world that most people have never even heard about. They were in cities that nobody every heard about or towns. And in some cases they’re ISIS or al-Qaeda. And so they say sir, we have a situation we’d like to be able to go and they tell me what.

Then after about four or five weeks I said wait a minute. By the time they get to me, and I get back to them, usually it’s over anyway, it’s gone, they’re gone. They couldn’t fire. You know under the Obama Administration they get back to them three or four weeks later and say it’s okay to go. They say okay to go, they left three weeks ago.

Here’s some wisdom on China (or Chy-nah as he pronounces it):

You know I have a lot of respect for President Xi [Jinping]. I have great respect for him. I think we have a very good mutual liking of each other. And I told you we had tremendous dialogue at Mar-a-Lago.

And Mar-a-Lago is a great place for the dialogue because there’s a warmth to Mar-a-Lago that you just don’t find anywhere else. You can sit down in a chair and just talk for hours. Where in some places you don’t have that.

And this is great. I mean it’s very different. But you don’t have that here. It’s not the same. It’s great in a different way.

We’ve never had the relationship that we have now. Now, in all fairness to President Xi, he loves China, he loves his people, and he is representing the people of China. He’s not representing the people of the United States. So we’ll see how that all turns out.

On his genius at debt-collection:

You know we’ve gotten billions of dollars more in NATO than hat we’re getting. All because of me. I mean it’s not like a bragging thing, I’m just saying. If Hillary Clinton would have gotten in, she wouldn’t even know that we’re getting screwed by everybody.

But we have gotten billions of dollars more coming in. and coming in. I asked one simple question, I says is everybody paid up? An they bring their chart, and these countries haven’t paid for years. Haven’t paid a fair amount for years. Billions, and billions, and billions and billions of dollars. And we’re paying. We’re paying for it.

And they pay 2% and we pay close to 4%. And in all fairness it’s better for them than it is for us. It’s wonderful. But its better for them. And I get along great with Merkel. I got along great with all of them. I said folks, you gotta pay. You gotta pay.

In their story on Trump after hours, there’s a touching little item about joining him for dinner.

the Blue Room has been lit with nearly a dozen votive candles, the table is set with yellow roses, and the Washington Monument is neatly framed in the South window.

The waiters know well Trump’s personal preferences. As he settles down, they bring him a Diet Coke, while the rest of us are served water, with the Vice President sitting at one end of the table. With the salad course, Trump is served what appears to be Thousand Island dressing instead of the creamy vinaigrette for his guests. When the chicken arrives, he is the only one given an extra dish of sauce. At the dessert course, he gets two scoops of vanilla ice cream with his chocolate cream pie, instead of the single scoop for everyone else.

What elegant manners.

Via Eneraldo Carneiro:

 

Nicholas Kristof asks if Don of That Outer Borough is obstructing justice.

For months, as I’ve reported on the multiple investigations into Trump-Russia connections, I’ve heard that the F.B.I. investigation is by far the most important one, incomparably ahead of the congressional inquiries. I then usually asked: So will Trump fire Comey? And the response would be: Hard to imagine. The uproar would be staggering. Even Republicans would never stand for that.

Oh ha no, Republicans will stand for anything. Trump could eat an infant on camera and they would tell us to move on.

Alas, my contacts underestimated the myopic partisanship of too many Republicans. Senator Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, spoke for many of his colleagues when he scoffed at the furor by saying, “Suck it up and move on.”

Yeah suck it up. What’s the big deal? So Russia tilted the election to a malignant narcissist, so what? So the malignant narcissist just fired the guy leading the key investigation of that Russian activity, so what? Suckitupandmoveon.

Trump challenges the legitimacy of checks on his governance, bullies critics and obfuscates everything. Trump reminds me less of past American presidents than of the “big men” rulers I covered in Asia and Africa, who saw laws simply as instruments with which to punish rivals.

He’s our very own Mugabe.

James Fallows was a novice journalist during Watergate.

So I’ve been thinking about comparisons between Watergate and the murky, fast-changing Comey-Russia-Flynn-Trump affair. As with anything involving Donald Trump, we have no idea where this will lead, what is “true,” and when the next bombshell will go off.

But based simply on what is known so far, this scandal looks worse than Watergate. Worse for and about the president. Worse for the overall national interest. Worse in what it suggests about the American democratic system’s ability to defend itself.

He goes on to give some reasons for this view.

Watergate was comparatively parochial.

And what is alleged this time? Nothing less than attacks by an authoritarian foreign government on the fundamentals of American democracy, by interfering with an election—and doing so as part of a larger strategy that included parallel interference in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and elsewhere. At worst, such efforts might actually have changed the election results. At least, they were meant to destroy trust in democracy. Not much of this is fully understood or proven, but the potential stakes are incomparably greater than what happened during Watergate, crime and cover-up alike.

Undeniable. Do we want the US to come to resemble contemporary Russia? No we do not.

Nixon was scuzzy but he put up at least a show of deference to law and norms.

Nothing Donald Trump has done, on the campaign trail or in office, has expressed awareness of, or respect for, established rules. Nixon’s private comments could be vile, but nothing he said in public is comparable to Trump’s dismissing James Comey as a “showboat,” or the thuggishly menacing tweet that Trump sent out today –

That being the infamous “Comey better hope” tweet.

Nixon was terrible in many ways, but he was neither stupid nor ignorant.

He was paranoid, resentful, bigoted, and a crook. He was also deeply knowledgeable, strategically prescient, publicly disciplined—and in some aspects of his domestic policy strikingly “progressive” by today’s standards (for instance, his creation of the Environmental Protection Agency).

Donald Trump, by contrast—well, read the transcripts of his two most recent interviews, and weep. He is impulsive, and ignorant, and apparently beyond the reach of any control, even his own.

And that’s not even all. It’s far from all. He’s also mean, and a bully, and narcissistic, and sexist, and rapey, and a liar, and a cheat, and a thief, and a fraud…and that too is not all. One can list bad things about him for a long time, and I can think of literally nothing to put in the good column. What is there? He doesn’t actually punch people on camera? Not good enough to merit placement in the good column. He’s not generous – he’s not kind – he’s not compassionate – he’s not amusing – I could go on that way for a long time too.

Then there’s the fact that people stopped Nixon, including some Republicans. Now? Cue hollow laughter.

On the merits, this era’s Republican president has done far more to justify investigation than Richard Nixon did. Yet this era’s Republican senators and members of congress have, cravenly, done far less. A few have grumbled about “concerns” and so on, but they have stuck with Trump where it counts, in votes, and since Comey’s firing they have been stunning in their silence.

The outlook is grim.

Trump, absurdly, today gave a commencement address at a “university.” The fact that it’s not a real university makes it a little less absurd, but the fact that it’s a theocratic pseudo-university makes it more sinister and repellent. The Post has details:

In his first commencement address as president, Donald Trump on Saturday drew a parallel between what he faces as a political outsider in Washington and what he said the Christian graduates of Liberty University can expect to encounter in a secular world.

Aw yeah – he’s a christian martyr and so are they.

Of course being an “outsider” is one thing and being an ignorant reckless narcissistic bully is another.

“Be totally unafraid to challenge entrenched interests and failed power structures,” Trump said. “Does that sound familiar, by the way?”

“Relish the opportunity to be an outsider,” he continued. “Embrace that label. Being an outsider is fine. Embrace the label, because it’s the outsiders who change the world and who make a real and lasting difference.”

“Outsider” – the guy who used his landlord daddy’s money to pile up a real estate fortune. He’s never spent a single hour as a real outsider. He’s widely despised, it’s true, but that’s because he’s a shit human being.

Jerry Falwell Jr., Liberty University president and evangelical icon, endorsed Trump in January 2016, calling him “a successful executive and entrepreneur, a wonderful father and a man who I believe can lead our country to greatness again.”

A wonderful father? In what way? He refused to play any part at all in his children’s upbringing; he wouldn’t even go to the park with them. That’s not a wonderful father.

In the fall, after The Washington Post published a 2005 video recording on which Trump could be heard boasting about being able to “do anything” to women and get away with it, a student group called Liberty United Against Trump issued a strong rebuke of the candidate and Falwell.

“We are Liberty students who are disappointed with President Falwell’s endorsement and are tired of being associated with one of the worst presidential candidates in American history,” the group’s statement read. It added that Trump “received a pitiful 90 votes from Liberty students in Virginia’s primary election, a colossal rejection of his campaign.”

Three students authored an opinion piece in The Post, writing that “Trump is the antithesis of our values.”

That was then.

Trump demands loyalty to Him from others, but heeds no corresponding obligation to others. It’s a very godlike way of viewing the world…which is to say it’s pathologically narcissistic.

After the “Access Hollywood” scandal, Mr. Trump raged at Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, for going on TV to defend him, arguing that he wanted to attack Hillary Clinton, not play defense. Corey Lewandowski, Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign manager until he fired him, repeatedly groused to friends that he was forced to absorb all of the criticism for the campaign’s practice of confining reporters at rallies in small pens. Mr. Trump, he told two people close to him, had ordered him to do it — but placed the blame on Mr. Lewandowski when reporters complained about it.

The firestorm touched off by the Comey firing has only reinforced the lesson Mr. Trump has usually taken away from past crises, that only one person was truly capable of defending him: the man in the mirror. It would be a “good idea” to end the daily news briefing, he told a Fox News host on Friday, suggesting that he was considering hosting his own news conferences every two weeks or so.

Like that awesome unscheduled presser he held a few weeks into his coup, the one where he told April Ryan to set up a meeting with Elijah Cummings and yelled at the Israeli reporter to sit down and be quiet. He’s good at this stuff.

“The most hazardous duty in Washington these days is that of Trump surrogate because the president constantly undercuts the statements of his own people,” said David Axelrod, a communications and messaging adviser to President Barack Obama.

“You wind up looking like a liar or a fool, neither of which is particularly attractive.”

Over the past few days, Mr. Trump deployed his two top aides — his press secretary, Sean Spicer, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a top deputy — to deliver dubious or false information about his decision-making process.

He asked Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein to draft a letter documenting Mr. Comey’s shortcomings to leave the impression that it was Mr. Rosenstein’s judgment and not his own that led to the dismissal — an idea that was reinforced by Vice President Mike Pence, who was part of the small group of advisers who planned Mr. Comey’s ouster in near secrecy.

On Thursday, Mr. Trump himself vaporized every version of the Comey story his defenders, including Mr. Pence, had labored so earnestly to put forward. “I was going to fire Comey — my decision. There is no good time to do it, by the way,” Trump told the “NBC Nightly News” anchor Lester Holt. “I was going to fire regardless of the recommendation” made by Mr. Rosenstein, he said.

I found that “my decision,” and the way he said it, telling – it appeared to me that it was just typical Trump grandiosity and jealousy – they didn’t decide, I decided, because I’m The Man.

Few of Mr. Trump’s eruptions have had such a destructive effect on his administration or left such deep resentments among his scarred staff, according to Trump aides and surrogates.

They were expecting something different?

For his part, the president’s mood, according to people close to him, alternates between grim frustration with Washington and his news coverage, and a belief that his own political capital is regenerative. Mr. Trump saw that running against strong headwinds in the campaign worked for him, and he has frequently reverted to that playbook.

Uh-huh. It’s going to turn around for him any day now. Any. day.

Mr. Trump was not in a mea culpa mood. He was still raging over what he viewed as Mr. Comey’s “witch hunt” against him — and blaming the bipartisan condemnation of his action on the failures of his embattled and overworked communications team.

Mr. Trump is growing increasingly dissatisfied with the performance of his chief of staff, Reince Priebus; the communications director, Michael Dubke; and Mr. Spicer, a Priebus ally, according to a half-dozen West Wing officials who said the president was considering the most far-reaching shake-up of his already tumultuous term.

There probably aren’t a lot of professionals lining up for those jobs at this point, but no worries, there are thousands of eager Twitter trolls who would jump at the chance.

Mr. Trump’s four-decade career in real estate, casinos and entertainment has given him a sense, associates say, that a tacit agreement exists between him and the people who work for him: In exchange for the wealth, fame and power he conveys to them, they agree to absorb incoming fire directed at him.

Like a mob boss. Not much like a political leader, but very much like a mob boss.

The past few hours in Trump. The Times starts with the Twitter threat at Comey.

Mr. Trump chose not to clarify when asked later in the day by Fox News if there were tapes of conversations. “That I can’t talk about. I won’t talk about it,” he said. “All I want is for Comey to be honest.”

He lies every time he opens his mouth, and he’s telling other people to be honest.

Democrats were incredulous. “For a president who baselessly accused his predecessor of illegally wiretapping him, that Mr. Trump would suggest that he, himself, may have engaged in such conduct is staggering,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

Representatives John Conyers Jr. of Michigan and Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the top Democrats on the judiciary and oversight committees, sent a letter to the White House demanding copies of any recordings if they exist. The letter noted that “it is a crime to intimidate or threaten any potential witness with the intent to influence, delay or prevent their official testimony.”

It’s a crime the sitting president just committed in public. What will it be tomorrow? “We know where your kids go to school”? “Hope you have good life insurance”? “Keep your mouth shut or I’ll have you killed”?

[Spicer] denied that the president was threatening Mr. Comey. “That’s not a threat,” Mr. Spicer said. “He simply stated a fact. The tweet speaks for itself. I’m moving on.”

Of course it’s a threat, Spicey. It is not true that Trump “simply stated a fact.” The wording: “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” Saying somebody “better” something is not stating a fact, it’s issuing a warning or a threat. If I say “You better shut up” that’s not stating a fact.

Allies and former employees of Mr. Trump have long said that he taped some of his own phone calls, as well as meetings in Trump Tower. During the campaign, Mr. Trump’s aides told reporters that they feared their offices were bugged and that they were careful about what they said.

But the implicit threat to Mr. Comey was ripped from a familiar playbook that Mr. Trump relied on during the campaign to silence critics or dissent.

He threatened on Twitter to tell stories about Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the hosts of “Morning Joe” on MSNBC, after they criticized him. He threatened to air unspecified dirty laundry about the wealthy Ricketts family as it financed efforts against him. And competing with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas for the Republican nomination, he threatened to “spill the beans on your wife!”

Oh god. I didn’t even know that. He is so loathsome.

This is unbearable. We knew it would be, that November night, and it is.

In this case, however, the warning came in the context of an F.B.I. investigation. Samuel W. Buell, a Duke University law professor and former federal prosecutor who led the Enron task force, said Mr. Trump’s attempt on Twitter to quiet Mr. Comey could be viewed as an effort to intimidate a witness to any future investigation into whether the firing amounted to obstruction of justice.

“If this were an actual criminal investigation — in other words, if there were a prosecutor and a defense lawyer in the picture — this would draw a severe phone call to counsel warning that the defendant is at serious risk of indictment if he continues to speak to witnesses,” Mr. Buell said. “Thus, this is also definitive evidence that Trump is not listening to counsel and perhaps not even talking to counsel. Unprecedented in the modern presidency.”

And also that he’s trying to intimidate a witness.

The Post on Trump’s tantrum and what followed from it.

Rosenstein threatened to resign after the narrative emerging from the White House on Tuesday evening cast him as a prime mover of the decision to fire Comey and that the president acted only on his recommendation, said the person close to the White House, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Now he doesn’t have to, because Trump said it was his decision – leaving all his press people looking like liars, but whatevs.

“He wasn’t doing a good job,” Trump told reporters Wednesday. “Very simple. He wasn’t doing a good job.”

But the private accounts of more than 30 officials at the White House, the Justice Department, the FBI and on Capitol Hill, as well as Trump confidants and other senior Republicans, paint a conflicting narrative centered on the president’s brewing personal animus toward Comey. Many of those interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to candidly discuss internal deliberations.

Trump was angry that Comey would not support his baseless claim that President Barack Obama had his campaign offices wiretapped.

Which is pretty amazing. That claim is something that Trump simply made up; it’s very delusional to expect the FBI director to support a made-up claim, especially one like that – a claim that the former president committed a felony. Imagine the legal difficulties Comey could get in by supporting that claim, even assuming he wanted to.

Trump was frustrated when Comey revealed in Senate testimony the breadth of the counterintelligence investigation into Russia’s effort to sway the 2016 U.S. presidential election. And he fumed that Comey was giving too much attention to the Russia probe and not enough to investigating leaks to journalists.

The known actions that led to Comey’s dismissal raise as many questions as answers. Why was Sessions involved in discussions about the fate of the man leading the FBI’s Russia investigation, after having recused himself from the probe because he had falsely denied under oath his own past communications with the Russian ambassador?

Why had Trump discussed the Russia probe with the FBI director three times, as he claimed in his letter dismissing Comey, which could have been a violation of Justice Department policies that ongoing investigations generally are not to be discussed with White House officials?

And how much was the timing of Trump’s decision shaped by events spiraling out of his control — such as Monday’s testimony about Russian interference by former acting attorney general Sally Yates, or the fact that Comey last week requested more resources from the Justice Department to expand the FBI’s Russia probe?

And will he get away with it, and will it work? Will he succeed in shutting down the investigation?

In the weeks leading up to Comey’s firing, Trump administration officials had repeatedly urged the FBI to more aggressively pursue leak investigations, according to people familiar with the discussions. Administration officials sometimes sought to push the FBI to prioritize leak probes over the Russia interference case, and at other times urged the bureau to investigate disclosures of information that was not classified or highly sensitive and therefore did not constitute crimes, these people said.

Over time, administration officials grew increasingly dissatisfied with the FBI’s actions on that front. Comey’s appearances at congressional hearings caused even more tension between the White House and FBI, as Trump administration officials were angered that the director’s statements increased, rather than diminished, public attention on the Russia probe, officials said.

It’s not a kind of thing that should be played down. It’s important.

In his Tuesday letter dismissing Comey, Trump wrote: “I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation.” People familiar with the matter said that statement is not accurate, although they would not say how it was inaccurate.

I’ll make a guess: Comey didn’t say it, and anyway it’s not true.

Within the Justice Department and the FBI, the firing of Comey has left raw anger, and some fear, according to multiple officials. Thomas O’Connor, the president of the FBI Agents Association, called Comey’s firing “a gut punch. We didn’t see it coming, and we don’t think Director Comey did anything that would lead to this.’’

Many employees said they were furious about the firing, saying the circumstances of his dismissal did more damage to the FBI’s independence than anything Comey did in his three-plus years in the job.

One intelligence official who works on Russian espionage matters said they were more determined than ever to pursue such cases. Another said Comey’s firing and the subsequent comments from the White House are attacks that won’t soon be forgotten. Trump had “essentially declared war on a lot of people at the FBI,” one official said. “I think there will be a concerted effort to respond over time in kind.”

There are times when an administration should declare war on the FBI. When the FBI investigates and suppresses lawful dissent, it should be pulled back. But this? This isn’t that.