Trump Thread

[Strike For The South]

Sometimes you are not respecting the man because of his results, but because of the way he played the game. No matter how you summarize his life, he played with heart and he played with conviction. Do you believe a theoretical 6 term Sen. Ted Cruz would elicit the same reaction?

I mean it's a game if your house isn't getting thousands of pounds of ordinance on it. I don't really have a hot take on him dying other than the over-the-topness of it all further normalizes an American policy based on brute force.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politic...rt-war-716416/

[Montmorency]

I mean it's a game if your house isn't getting thousands of pounds of ordinance on it. I don't really have a hot take on him dying other than the over-the-topness of it all further normalizes an American policy based on brute force.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politic...rt-war-716416/

Hot takes are disrespectful to the departed. Cold takes are acceptable. (Wait for the body to get cold in the grave.)



Anyway, following my habit of posting only the funniest Trump tidbits, here is another book published in the vein of 'Trump as mad tyrant despised and derided by his underlings':

Many of the feuds and daily clashes have been well documented, but the picture painted by Trump's confidants, senior staff and Cabinet officials reveal that many of them see an even more alarming situation — worse than previously known or understood. Woodward offers a devastating portrait of a dysfunctional Trump White House, detailing how senior aides — both current and former Trump administration officials — grew exasperated with the President and increasingly worried about his erratic behavior, ignorance and penchant for lying.

Chief of staff John Kelly describes Trump as an "idiot" and "unhinged," Woodward reports. Defense Secretary James Mattis describes Trump as having the understanding of "a fifth or sixth grader." And Trump's former personal lawyer John Dowd describes the President as "a fucking liar," telling Trump he would end up in an "orange jump suit" if he testified to special counsel Robert Mueller.

"He's an idiot. It's pointless to try to convince him of anything. He's gone off the rails. We're in crazytown," Kelly is quoted as saying at a staff meeting in his office. "I don't even know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I've ever had."

Then resign, John Kelly you deportacious opportunist piece of crap.

After Trump's Charlottesville, Virginia, controversy, in which he failed to condemn white supremacists, Cohn tried to resign but was instead dressed down by Trump and accused of "treason."

Kelly, who is Trump's current chief of staff, told Cohn afterward, according to notes Cohn made of the exchange: "If that was me, I would have taken that resignation letter and shoved it up his ass six different times."

THEN RESIGN

The book opens with a dramatic scene. Former chief economic adviser Gary Cohn saw a draft letter he considered dangerous to national security on the Oval Office desk.

The letter would have withdrawn the US from a critical trade agreement with South Korea. Trump's aides feared the fallout could jeopardize a top-secret national security program: the ability to detect a North Korean missile launch within just seven seconds.
Woodward reports Cohn was "appalled" that Trump might sign the letter. "I stole it off his desk," Cohn told an associate. "I wouldn't let him see it. He's never going to see that document. Got to protect the country."

Cohn was not alone. Former staff secretary Rob Porter worked with Cohn and used the same tactic on multiple occasions, Woodward writes. In addition to literally stealing or hiding documents from Trump's desk, they sought to stall and delay decisions or distract Trump from orders they thought would endanger national security.

This is what they call "Mickey Mouse bullshit".

"A third of my job was trying to react to some of the really dangerous ideas that he had and try to give him reasons to believe that maybe they weren't such good ideas," said Porter, who as staff secretary handled the flow of presidential papers until he quit amid domestic violence allegations. He and others acted with the acquiescence of former chief of staff Reince Priebus, Woodward reports.

Woodward describes repeated attempts to bypass Trump as "no less than an administrative coup d'état."

The deep state is coming from inside the Oval Office!

In one revelatory anecdote, Woodward describes a scene in the White House residence. Trump's lawyer, convinced the President would perjure himself, put Trump through a test — a practice interview for the one he might have with Mueller. Trump failed, according to Dowd, but the President still insisted he should testify.

Woodward writes that Dowd saw the "full nightmare" of a potential Mueller interview, and felt Trump acted like an "aggrieved Shakespearean king."

Then, in an even more remarkable move, Dowd and Trump's current personal attorney Jay Sekulowwent to Mueller's office and re-enacted the mock interview. Their goal: to argue that Trump couldn't possibly testify because he was incapable of telling the truth.
"He just made something up. That's his nature," Dowd said to Mueller.

A man whose nature leaves him literally incapable of telling the truth should be institutionalized, not elevated to high office.

Despite Dowd's efforts, Trump continued to insist he could testify. "I think the President of the United States cannot be seen taking the fifth," Trump said.
Dowd's argument was stark: "There's no way you can get through these. ... Don't testify. It's either that or an orange jump suit."
What he couldn't say to Trump, according to Woodward, was what Dowd believed to be true: "You're a fucking liar."

Look, this is a fount to be sure. Enough quotes for now, there's too much. Here's a recording of Woodward complaining to Trump about being stonewalled in trying to get an interview with him.

"This guy is mentally retarded," Trump said of Sessions. "He's this dumb southerner," Trump told Porter, mocking Sessions by feigning a southern accent.

Ok, I can't even

Woodward's book relies on hundreds of hours of taped interviews and dozens of sources in Trump's inner circle, as well as documents, files, diaries and memos, including a note handwritten by Trump himself.

It's one thing for a sleazy operator like Michael Wolff to schmooze his way into Trump's inner circle, but apparently these schmucks let legendary Nixon-era muckraker Bob Woodward in just as deep! Contemporaneous with or AFTER the Wolff debacle unfolded. Oy. Puts the massive incompetence of the sequel-trilogy First Order into new perspective.


BTW, of course the White House has been attacking the book and its author (Woodward). Yet check out this Donald Trump tweet from 2013:

Only the Obama WH can get away with attacking Bob Woodward.

4:04 PM - Mar 1, 2013

I lol. I die. I lol again.

[Montmorency]

Anonymous White House "senior official" publishes op-ed describing "heroic" collective sub-rosa effort in the executive branch to neutralize Trump's derangement and malice by misdirecting and subverting his will.

They considered engaging the 25th Amendment provisions at some point(s) but have decided that they don't want a "constitutional crisis" on their hands.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/o...esistance.html

I urge everyone to read this piece and see how it leaves you feeling. It isn't long.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

President Trump is facing a test to his presidency unlike any faced by a modern American leader.

It’s not just that the special counsel looms large. Or that the country is bitterly divided over Mr. Trump’s leadership. Or even that his party might well lose the House to an opposition hellbent on his downfall.

The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.

I would know. I am one of them.

To be clear, ours is not the popular “resistance” of the left. We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.

But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.

That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.

The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.

Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people. At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings. At worst, he has attacked them outright.

In addition to his mass-marketing of the notion that the press is the “enemy of the people,” President Trump’s impulses are generally anti-trade and anti-democratic.

Don’t get me wrong. There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.

But these successes have come despite — not because of — the president’s leadership style, which is impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.

From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.

Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.

“There is literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to the next,” a top official complained to me recently, exasperated by an Oval Office meeting at which the president flip-flopped on a major policy decision he’d made only a week earlier.

The erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren’t for unsung heroes in and around the White House. Some of his aides have been cast as villains by the media. But in private, they have gone to great lengths to keep bad decisions contained to the West Wing, though they are clearly not always successful.

It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.

The result is a two-track presidency.

Take foreign policy: In public and in private, President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations.

Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest of the administration is operating on another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and punished accordingly, and where allies around the world are engaged as peers rather than ridiculed as rivals.

On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin’s spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his national security team knew better — such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable.

This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.

Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over.

The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.

Senator John McCain put it best in his farewell letter. All Americans should heed his words and break free of the tribalism trap, with the high aim of uniting through our shared values and love of this great nation.

We may no longer have Senator McCain. But we will always have his example — a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue. Mr. Trump may fear such honorable men, but we should revere them.

There is a quiet resistance within the administration of people choosing to put country first. But the real difference will be made by everyday citizens rising above politics, reaching across the aisle and resolving to shed the labels in favor of a single one: Americans.

Since the release of the op-ed, "The phrase “The sleeper cells have awoken” circulated on text messages among aides and outside allies.

“It’s like the horror movies when everyone realizes the call is coming from inside the house,” said one former White House official in close contact with former co-workers."



Republican appointed officials are publicly bragging about having orchestrated a semi-soft coup against the unfit and illegitimate President of the United States - of their own party! - all in the name of maintaining his place in office to give cover to furthering their ridiculously-destructive agenda - and are asking to be congratulated for it.

The Republican Party may prove to be the greatest existential threat ever to confront the country. God damn them all.

There is only one epithet in all the ancestral language strong enough to impute the filth of being in Trump and his calamitous cacotopic cabal:

nithing.

Let it be heard.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

The Senate won't decide his fate.

[Husar]

That article basically says that top officials in the administration haven't lost track of neoliberal policies and are continuously working to correct the president whenever he actually threatens the dictatorship of the "markets".

[Montmorency]

That article basically says that top officials in the administration haven't lost track of neoliberal policies and are continuously working to correct the president whenever he actually threatens the dictatorship of the "markets".

The President doesn't do much to threaten the dictatorship of the markets, his willy-nilly tariffs and other economic policies at worst make one set of rich people a bit poorer and another set (including his friends and family) a little richer.

These people don't oppose Trump's agenda so much as his presentation and extreme incompetence as a person. So they subvert our institutions in order to make Trump more secure, you see that? More secure. So that they can keep playing in the halls of power. Even as they admit Trump is unfit and a threat. And to top it all off they haven't even been good at it, Trump having purged his admin of key opponents and thrown off his fetters throughout 2018.

[Husar]

The President doesn't do much to threaten the dictatorship of the markets, his willy-nilly tariffs and other economic policies at worst make one set of rich people a bit poorer and another set (including his friends and family) a little richer.

These people don't oppose Trump's agenda so much as his presentation and extreme incompetence as a person. So they subvert our institutions in order to make Trump more secure, you see that? More secure. So that they can keep playing in the halls of power. Even as they admit Trump is unfit and a threat. And to top it all off they haven't even been good at it, Trump having purged his admin of key opponents and thrown off his fetters throughout 2018.

I wasn't saying he's a socialist, just that the article is only really reassuring if you share the ideals of these people who essentially take power into their own hands. It's even worse than what I think I said when he announced his cabinet, he's giving the lobbyists government power.

It's like the government is run by rogue ministers with corporate interests and whoever slimebag wrote that is trying to sell it as a great idea and asking people to join their efforts...

[Seamus Fermanagh]

@Montmorency: Loved the sig picture


As to staff undermining the President in some areas:


Some of this happens, I suspect, in all Presidencies. An administration is not a monolith with one person issuing commands from on high. At a minimum, no single person could make that many decisions in a single day on so many subjects. I do not know if I would label it a "soft coup."


In the case of this administration, efforts to tone down some of the inanity would only be beneficial. And I suspect that this particular POTUS needs significantly more "editing" than most.

[Montmorency]

@Montmorency: Loved the sig picture


As to staff undermining the President in some areas:


Some of this happens, I suspect, in all Presidencies. An administration is not a monolith with one person issuing commands from on high. At a minimum, no single person could make that many decisions in a single day on so many subjects. I do not know if I would label it a "soft coup."


In the case of this administration, efforts to tone down some of the inanity would only be beneficial. And I suspect that this particular POTUS needs significantly more "editing" than most.

I called it semi-soft, because they basically failed (tariffs, Trump's demands to be acceded despotic stature, compatriots getting fired...)

The gloating and grandstanding over sedition is new, and grating. It would have been sufficient to collapse a government in some eras (now it's the opposite).

Thanks.

I wasn't saying he's a socialist, just that the article is only really reassuring if you share the ideals of these people who essentially take power into their own hands. It's even worse than what I think I said when he announced his cabinet, he's giving the lobbyists government power.

It's like the government is run by rogue ministers with corporate interests and whoever slimebag wrote that is trying to sell it as a great idea and asking people to join their efforts...

Yes, and what drone said. They're cowardly opportunists who want to be met coming off the sinking ship with job offers and book deals.

"I Am Willing to Sacrifice Anything to Protect Our Democracy, Up to But Not Including Losing an Election or Giving Up Literally Any Policy That I Support: A Hero's Story"

But let me break down what these "steady-state" people are doing:

1. We subvert the elected authority and the norms of American government, because the President is a dangerous idiot.
2. The President is also subverting the norms of American government in a fascist direction, because that's his personality and because it's his only strategy for political survival. America is in crisis.
3. However, the 25th Amendment, mass resignations, testimony before Congress, are all out of the question because that would mean a "constitutional crisis" (and our jobs).
4. We can't do much in fact, nor do we really want to rock the boat while looting and/or gutting the government, but sometimes we can steal papers off the President's desk! And he won't even notice!
5. Actually, it turns out we need Trump's base to stay in power so we'll let him turn America into Hungary or Turkey if it means tax cuts and federal judge appointments.
6. bla bla unity, freedom, Murica, bla bla. We left a two-star Yelp review on the White House! Praise us for our heroism.

Basically, 'we can't leave Trump because that would mean abandoning all the parts of his agenda that we like': they are the conservative German elites of the early 1930s, the smug daisies.

[drone]

Anonymous White House "senior official" publishes op-ed describing "heroic" collective sub-rosa effort in the executive branch to neutralize Trump's derangement and malice by misdirecting and subverting his will.

They considered engaging the 25th Amendment provisions at some point(s) but have decided that they don't want a "constitutional crisis" on their hands.

It wouldn't be a "constitutional crisis", it's in the Constitution. They just know they wouldn't get the 2/3rds vote from Congress when Trump objects.

As for the rest, it's establishment Republicans trying to do damage control and riding it out while getting as much through before the inevitable collapse. Once the Democrats get subpoena power, the resulting scandals and convictions could very well end the GOP as a party.

[Xiahou]

It wouldn't be a "constitutional crisis", it's in the Constitution. They just know they wouldn't get the 2/3rds vote from Congress when Trump objects.

The 25th amendment option is a fantasy on multiple levels...
First, as you say, it ultimately would fall to Congress to decide and they would never declare him incapacitated.
Second, on the merits, it's difficult to rationalize in what way he's incapacitated. Like him or not, his fitness is in no way different that what it was when he was elected by the people. He's not incapacitated. Declaring him incapacitated would be overturning an election, nothing less.
Third, removing Trump would leave Pence as President. I'd view this as an improvement- but it would satisfy few of Trump's detractors. Aside from Trump's verbal diarrhea, little would be likely to change (policy-wise certainly) under President Pence.

[Montmorency]

As mentioned much earlier in the thread, the 25th Amendment is more difficult to engage than the impeachment process. You need 2/3 of both chambers, while impeachment requires 2/3 only of the Senate (with the simple majority of the House).

If, as established, even impeachment is impossible this term... one reason the 25th Amendment was mooted only early on may be that it took little time to realize that no Republican Congressperson would ever vote against their President.

More importantly, they have different purposes. Impeachment reflects personal and chronic culpability in some way, while the 25th reflects an episodic or unanticipated change in status.


The office-holder is a criminal tinpot idiot piece of with probable intellectual, emotional, and personality deficits? Impeachment.

The office-holder looked upon the Mountains of Madness from Air Force One and can't stop screaming? 25th Amendment.

Even if by some stretch the 25th Amendment criteria ("unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office") could arguably have been met from the outset, there is no scenario in which it is either preferred or available over impeachment in the case of Trump.


@Xiahou - Pence was elected on the same ticket as Trump, so in no way could the application of any Constitutional process of removal be construed to "overturn" the results of an election. If Pence is proved dirty in his own right, well, that's called a healthy immune response.

[a completely inoffensive name]

25th Amendment is supposed to be used for times such as when Reagan was shot. It just codifies what was already practiced. The president is 'OOO' and we are letting you know the Vice President is in charge now.

Although personally I don't see why it can't be applied here. You are losing sight of the big picture if you believe that incapacitated is defined by the disability of motor functions.

An entire cabinet and the VP rebelling against their President is a big enough act that Congress cannot blindly support POTUS as the act itself shows the extreme lack of trust in the individual which would completely undermine the public's trust in the administration. The average citizen won't be swayed by Paul "it's just politics, support your president" Ryan. It wouldn't be a constitutional crisis, but certainly a crisis of confidence with blowback.

Think of a theoretical Presidential "madman" who (while fully cognizant) blindly wants to start launching nukes in a first strike to trigger a nuclear apocalypse when there is no clear external threat posing the country. I don't think anyone can argue that pointless nuclear self-destruction has been or ever will be the 'will of the people'. Election be damned, the cabinet should invoke the 25th when humanity (as we know it) is on the line. So with the extreme case illustrated, the argument shouldn't be "the 25th can't be applied to these types of cases" the argument what is the line that we will draw for these types of cases and have we gone over that line.