Trump Thread

[a completely inoffensive name]

And so with him, perhaps more than figuratively, dies American Conservatism as we knew it in the Twentieth Century. A major loss for this country and a painful reminder of the ideological contrasts in vogue in the Twenty First.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

And so with him, perhaps more than figuratively, dies American Conservatism as we knew it in the Twentieth Century. A major loss for this country and a painful reminder of the ideological contrasts in vogue in the Twenty First.

Perhaps so, though I hope you are wrong.

Far too much of conservatism in the USA is too rabid these days. Sen. McCain was to my lights a darn good conservative. I did, on occasion, disagree with him but I cannot recall ever viewing him with disrespect. Glad I got to shake his hand once, back when he was a new senator.

[Montmorency]

Overheard from a Trump fan:

'Small business owners are going to hate Trump because he just forced Mexico to pay its workers a minimum wage of $16, which will attract all the Latin American immigrant labor to Mexico and drive wage inflation in the United States. Trump is for the common people!'


Of course, none of that is remotely true.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Florida Dems just nominated a Sanders-policy-type chap (not on all issues, but on most) to be their gubernatorial candidate.

[Strike For The South]

And so with him, perhaps more than figuratively, dies American Conservatism as we knew it in the Twentieth Century. A major loss for this country and a painful reminder of the ideological contrasts in vogue in the Twenty First.

I mean I would be happy with getting rid of forever war and replacing it with health care.

In the state of Arizona your medical debt goes through your estate and then gets passed to your next of kin. Brain cancer is expensive.

I won't speak ill of the man but it is absolutely unconscionable that this is the best thing we can come up with.

[Strike For The South]

The grandstanding around McCains death has lead me to some reflecting.

How much does a persons political intersect with their personal? McCain was a cornerstone in post cold war American foreign policy. This foreign policy has wrought some serious and lasting horrors in the globe. As much as blame can be assigned, how much of it goes to him? The people that voted for him? The citizenry at large? The solider who enacted the violence? The person who opposed but did nothing to stop it?

I am not surprised by the hagiography, it happens to everyone save the most heinous among us. Sainthood happens shortly after death. I am not sure it means anything beyond a courtesy. Don't give your opponents something to harp on, no need to create your own problem. Perhaps the most self centered may see an opportunity. Others may simply pay their respects as politeness, not able to conjure feeling on way or another.

The attacks on him really don't move my meter any either. There are plenty of people and reasons to not like him. It would be a pointless masturbation for these people to hide the feelings they had simply because he is no longer drawing breath. Speak your truth and all that. Of course these people have their own blood soaked hereos and ideas, it is just a different blood. Tribalism, politics and all that.

Maybe it is the inexorable condition of man that in a world fueled by power, justice can be enacted but never fully realized? Or perhaps a limited vision justice can be realized but only at the expense of other limited justices?

What really separates John McCain from anyone else? What makes him worthy of praise? Perhaps more frightening, with the institutions we have in place, did John McCain matter all that much? Or was he simply just another cog? Perhaps the most frightening, with the violence needed to tear down these institutions, will we ever break free of them?

[Husar]

Did he not stop the GOP from dismantling the ACA when the vote hinged on him or something like that?
I guess he did both good and bad and sometimes people also change a little or a little bit more over time.
Sometimes even to the better. Maybe the later McCain was a better and wiser man than the early one?
I don't really know, I'm just thinking out loud.

[a completely inoffensive name]

I mean I would be happy with getting rid of forever war and replacing it with health care.

In the state of Arizona your medical debt goes through your estate and then gets passed to your next of kin. Brain cancer is expensive.

I won't speak ill of the man but it is absolutely unconscionable that this is the best thing we can come up with.

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?

[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".

[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.