Trump 21: Tweeting Us Into the Apocalypse

[GreyhoundFan]

"No matter what he does, history says Trump will never be popular"

Spoiler

President Trump seems to live atop his own petard. Every time it seems like he should have an advantage, he squanders it by torpedoing a legislative package, firing a government official, making absurd utterances to foreign leaders or ranting on Twitter, often against the better judgment of many who work for him. No wonder that, since Inauguration Day, his approval rating has never risen higher than the 46 percent of the vote he won last November; a Washington Post-ABC News poll out last weekend showed it at 36 percent.

But these unforced errors don’t quite explain his inability to take advantage of a boost in economic confidence or to expand, even slightly, the passionate base that carried him to victory. The problem lies with that very victory — the one that won him not only the presidency but also 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. The legacy of such deficits suggests there’s little he can do to gain the trust of the majority. American history is clear: Presidents who’ve lost the popular vote don’t win popular support.

The four previous presidents who finished second in votes cast all struggled to convince Americans that they were doing a good job. Each battled the perception that his victory was undemocratic and illegitimate; each soon lost the confidence of his own partisans in Congress and led an administration that historians regard as a failure. Each faced an uphill struggle to keep his base happy and mobilized while also reaching out to the majority, which preferred policies his voters detested. Most, like Trump so far, did not even try to square that circle.

Only George W. Bush seemed to escape this fate, for a time. But his temporary success had more to do with the acclaim he received after the attacks of 9/11 than anything else he accomplished in office. And this crisis-induced honeymoon didn’t last: During most of his second term, Bush’s rating stalled far below the 48 percent of the vote he had won in 2000, when half a million more Americans preferred Al Gore.

The three other presidents who lost the popular vote all lived and governed in the 19th century. None managed to overcome his initial political deficit or to enact any of the major policies he desired. In the 1824 election, John Quincy Adams drew just 31 percent of the popular vote. The conditions of that contest have never been repeated: Adams was one of four candidates, all of whom nominally belonged to the same party, the Democratic-Republicans. Because no man won an electoral-vote majority, the decision fell to the House of Representatives. Adams triumphed, largely because he agreed to appoint Henry Clay, one of his erstwhile rivals, as secretary of state. Andrew Jackson, whose popular-vote count had easily topped that of Adams, screamed that his rivals had made a “corrupt bargain”; if citizens accepted it, he charged, “they may bid farewell to their freedom.”

Old Hickory need not have worried. Adams was a brilliant man but a clumsy politician. He urged Congress to enact an ambitious program of public works and to establish a national university. But Adams sabotaged his own cause by declaring, in his first annual message no less, that if voters did not like such expensive measures, lawmakers should not be “palsied by the will of our constituents.” It was an oddly cavalier way to talk about what American voters wanted. After all, how courageous was it to turn away from their desires when you’d never reflected them in the first place?

Politicians who believed that Jackson had been cheated out of the presidency took full advantage of this unintentional gift. They organized a formidable coalition to oppose Adams at every turn, touching a deep popular reserve of resentment against the president. In 1828, Jackson took the presidency, carrying nearly every state outside the incumbent’s home region of New England.

Half a century later, President Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican nominee, proved unable to banish the specter of his own highly controversial triumph. In 1876, his opponent, Democrat Samuel Tilden, won a clear majority of the popular vote. But the result turned on disputed ballots from three Southern states where Republicans had clearly committed fraud yet where white Democrats had also violently intimidated many African Americans, keeping them from voting. A divided Congress threw the power to decide a winner to a special commission, which narrowly sided with Hayes.

Unhappy Democrats branded the new president “His Fraudulency” and vowed to resist his agenda in Congress. Hayes actually helped the opposition party by removing federal troops from most of the South, where they had at least tried to stop racial terrorism by former Confederates, nearly all of whom were Democrats. Neither was the president a friend to wage-earners, many of whom were suffering amid a long depression. In the summer of 1877, Hayes dispatched soldiers to break a national railroad strike, which morphed into riots against property in several big cities. A year later, the Democrats captured the Senate and maintained control of the House; Hayes’s only power was the veto, which he used on 13 occasions. In 1880, Republican operatives were relieved when the unpopular president honored his earlier pledge not to run for reelection. Hayes must have known he stood no chance.

GOP pols were sorry a dozen years later when President Benjamin Harrison declined to do the same. In 1888, Harrison had defeated the incumbent Democrat Grover Cleveland by winning every big industrial state in the Northeast and the Midwest. But his share of the popular vote, at just under 48 percent, lagged behind Cleveland’s. And, like Adams, Harrison lacked the ability to appeal to voters who had not warmed to him before. In fact, Harrison was such a stiff, pompous fellow that even officials of his own party dubbed him a “refrigerator” and a “human iceberg.” Although Republicans enjoyed a majority in Congress throughout his term, they failed to enact the only bills Harrison really cared about: to give federal aid to public schools and to protect black voters in the South. In 1892, the Democrats nominated Cleveland again. This time, he thumped Harrison in both the popular and electoral votes, and his party seized back control on Capitol Hill.

Trump is the very opposite of a “human iceberg,” but he shows a similar reluctance to alter his style of political persuasion. When the president lies that millions of votes were cast illegally for Clinton in 2016, he betrays an insecurity that stems both from his personality and from knowing that most Americans wanted someone else to run the country. If Trump had begun his administration by reaching out to Democrats on a plan to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, he may have had a chance to confuse, if not divide, the opposition. Instead, he decided to wage a relentless battle against the federal bureaucracy and the news media — which comes off as defensive instead of confident. Any chance Trump has to gain majority support and get reelected probably depends on changing his behavior. That is a difficult task for any politician, much less an inexperienced one in his 70s. The knowledge that millions of Americans consider his 2016 victory undemocratic and illegitimate could render it impossible.

Of course, he's most popular president ever -- in his own mind.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Why Trump and the conservative media are still obsessed with Hillary Clinton"

Spoiler

There is a specter haunting the United States, or at least the Republican Party and its friendly news outlets. You may think it’s just a former government official who holds no office and won’t be running for anything again, but they know the truth. America needs to get worried, and more importantly, angry, at Hillary Clinton.

Oliver Darcy of CNN has been watching Fox News:

The former Democratic presidential candidate, a favorite villain of the right, has been featured prominently across Fox News’ programming this week.

In many cases, instead of the network’s hosts applying pressure to the current President, who is grappling with the fallout from a federal investigation related to Russian election meddling, Fox News’ personalities have deflected and turned their attention to Clinton. On Tuesday night, for instance, Clinton found herself a key point of discussion throughout the network’s primetime lineup.

It isn’t just them. President Trump himself seems to be practically obsessed with Clinton, as Philip Bump explains:

Whatever Trump does or doesn’t do, he’s always willing to point out what Clinton did or didn’t do that’s worse.

So she comes up in his interviews a lot. In fact, in 19 interviews that he’s conducted since becoming president, we found that Clinton tended to be mentioned much earlier than a number of Trump’s other favorite topics: The 2016 election, the votes he received, the electoral college and Barack Obama…

In 17 of 19 of his interviews, Clinton came up, on average about 36 percent of the way in.

Without going back and checking, I’m pretty sure Barack Obama didn’t bring up how he beat John McCain in 90 percent of the interviews he conducted during his first six months in office. I don’t recall George W. Bush talking about Al Gore at all after he became president. So what’s going on here?

For Trump personally, I think it’s mostly about the deep insecurity that comes through every time he opens his mouth. It’s why he’s always telling everyone how smart and knowledgeable and accomplished he is, something that people who are actually smart and knowledgeable and accomplished don’t do. He feels a need to remind everyone that he won the election, usually embellishing the story by characterizing it as bigger and more emphatic a victory than it actually was. As his vanquished opponent, Clinton is a symbol of his potency and dominance.

The fact that Clinton got millions more votes than him is obviously a wound that won’t stop hurting, so he keeps trying to convince everyone that the vote was fraudulent and whatever he’s being accused of, she did it worse. Eight months after the election, she’s still the yardstick he’s measuring himself against.

Trump also seems to bring up the campaign (and Clinton) so much because things were much clearer for him then. It was him against her, in a contest that made sense, and he won. Now he has to spend his days worrying about policies he neither understands nor cares about, he’s bedeviled by investigations, and he doesn’t have the succor that comes from hearing the cheers of an adoring crowd every night. When he brings up Clinton he’s like an aging athlete reliving his glory days. Hey, did I ever tell you about the time I threw a touchdown pass to win the homecoming game? Yes, Uncle Don, only about a hundred times.

For the conservative media, there’s a slightly different motivation at work. If you’re Fox News or a conservative talk radio show, the fact that Trump squeaked out an electoral college victory laid waste to the plans you had for the next four years. It was going to be such fun! A Hillary Clinton presidency would have been a glorious time, filled with purpose and professional success. Now you find yourself defending a dreadful health care plan, but if she were president, you would have been luxuriating in constant congressional investigations, innumerable phony scandals, and an endless supply of things to get outraged about. And outrage is the fuel of conservative media — it’s what provides the content, engages the viewers and listeners, and keeps the audience coming back. Getting people mad is much easier than convincing them to feel happy or hopeful or excited about what the administration is doing.

That’s especially true if the administration isn’t actually doing very much. As the months drag on without any significant achievements from the Trump administration, the need to pump up the emotional volume becomes more acute. And emotion comes not from discussions about policy but from stories with heroes and villains.

The problem for conservatives is that American politics today is a story that has its hero but doesn’t have a villain. The president makes news nearly every day, but we can go weeks without hearing something interesting from Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi. And like all opposition leaders, next to the president with the majesty of his office behind him, they look small and inconsequential, barely worth getting mad at.

Donald Trump got elected in large part by getting his voters mad — at immigrants, at Muslims, at politicians, and at a supposedly rigged political system. But as president, he’s had a hard time sustaining that anger and constructing that story of himself as a warrior fighting against a threatening enemy.

Other Republican presidents had it much easier. Ronald Reagan had a natural counterpoint in the Russians, an enemy Americans had hated for decades. The Cold War provided opportunities for threat and confrontation — invade a tiny island country here, make a speech in Berlin there, and you have a drama that never gets old. George W. Bush spent eight years telling Americans they were about to be annihilated by villainous Middle Easterners, first Al Qaeda, then Saddam Hussein. By the end of his tenure the story had lost its punch, but it did get him reelected.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, has no villain to fight. So he and his allies are left looking backward to the person who was supposed to be the villain of the moment, but now is just a retiree strolling around the woods in Westchester county. No wonder they seem so dispirited.

I certainly understand why Trumplethinskin can't quit Hillary, but I find the analysis of the conservative media quite interesting.

[AmericanRose]

Ahh. So that's why my mother stated that Clinton should be investigated! It seemed so random... but she is a devout Faux News watcher/devotee.

[fraurosena]

Oh, and about that self-pardoning thing? That question was resolved in 1974.

 

[AmazonGrace]

So Jeff Sessions is a lying liar who lies while he perjures himself. 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/21/jeff-sessions-meeting-russian-ambassador-trump-campaign

Jeff Sessions discussed Trump campaign with Russian ambassador – report

US intelligence intercepts detail what Sergey Kislyak told supervisors

Trump tweets anger against ‘Amazon Washington Post’ and ‘illegal leaks’

Jeff Sessions discussed Donald Trump’s White House bid with the Russian ambassador to Washington in 2016, according to reported US intelligence intercepts which contradict the US attorney general’s assurances that the campaign was not discussed.

 

Spoiler

Sergey Kislyak told his superiors in Moscow he talked about campaign-related matters and significant policy issues during two meetings with Sessions, according to current and former US intelligence officials, the Washington Post reported on Friday.

The ambassador’s accounts of the meetings – which US spy agencies intercepted – clash with those of Sessions and pile fresh pressure on the attorney general just days after the president publicly criticised him.

 

On Saturday morning, Trump tweeted his anger at the Post – but not a defence of Sessions.

“A new INTELLIGENCE LEAK from the Amazon Washington Post,” the president wrote, just after 6.30am ET and in reference to Post owner Jeff Bezos’ main business holding, “this time against AGJeff Sessions. These illegal leaks, like [former FBI director James] Comey’s, must stop!”

Trump has complained that Comey, whom he fired in May, has leaked confidential information.

Trump also tweeted a complaint about the Post’s main rival: “The Failing New York Times foiled US attempt to kill the single most wanted terrorist, [Islamic State leader Abu Bakr] Al-Baghdadi.Their sick agenda over National Security” . 

On Friday, Gen Raymond Thomas, head of Special Operations Command, blameda “media leak” for one instance of Baghdadi escaping capture or death.

Trump did not immediately follow up or expand his argument, instead tweetingabout a speaking engagement in Norfolk, Virginia on Saturday morning.

 

 Jeff Sessions denies contact with Russians during Senate hearing – archive video

Sessions, formerly a senator from Alabama, was a senior foreign policy adviser to Trump during the presidential race. After being tapped to run the justice department, he first failed to disclose his encounters with Kislyak and then said the meetings were not about the Trump campaign.

The Post cited an unnamed US official who called Sessions’ statements “misleading” and “contradicted by other evidence”. An unnamed former official said the intelligence indicated Sessions and Kislyak had “substantive” discussions on matters including Trump’s positions on Russia-related issues and prospects for bilateral relations in a Trump administration, the paper reported.

The officials acknowledged that the ambassador could have mischaracterised the meetings in his briefings to Moscow.

The attorney general has repeatedly said he never discussed campaign-related issues with Russian officials and that it was in his capacity as a senator, not a Trump surrogate, that he met Kislyak. “I never had meetings with Russian operatives or Russian intermediaries about the Trump campaign,” he said in March.

 Six months into America's nightmare, how likely is Trump's impeachment?

Richard Wolffe

 

Read more

The apparent discrepancy with Kislyak’s version of events capped a torrid week for Sessions. Trump said in an interview published on Wednesday that he regretted appointing him after Sessions recused himself from investigations into links with the Trump campaign and Russia.

The president, marking six months in office, appeared to be venting concern that the investigation headed by Robert Mueller was reportedly expanding to include his business ties with Russia.

Advertisement

Sessions told reporters on Thursday that he would continue in his job “as long as that is appropriate”. He made no immediate response to the Post’s article on Friday.

However in a statement, a justice department spokeswoman told the paper: “Obviously I cannot comment on the reliability of what anonymous sources describe in a wholly uncorroborated intelligence intercept that the Washington Posthas not seen and that has not been provided to me.”

In a separate development on Friday, the Senate judiciary committee said that next week it would interview the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr, and his former campaign chief Paul Manafort behind closed doors rather than in public testimony, as originally planned.

Both men agreed agreed to negotiate to provide the committee with documents and be interviewed by committee members and staff prior to a public hearing, the committee chairman, Chuck Grassley, and its ranking member, Dianne Feinstein, said in a statement. “Therefore, we will not issue subpoenas for them tonight requiring their presence at Wednesday’s hearing but reserve the right to do so in the future.”

 

 

[fraurosena]

Interesting. Very interesting.

Newly Disclosed Clinton-era Memo Says Presidents Can Be Indicted

Quote

Although nothing in the Constitution or federal law explicitly says presidents are immune from indictment while they remain in office, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel has asserted that they are. A newly disclosed legal memo from the office of Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel who investigated President Clinton, challenges that analysis. The National Archives made the memo public in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by The New York Times.

The (loooong) memo is included in the article. But this quote sums it up nicely without too much legal mumbo jumbo.

Quote

[...] I conclude that, in the circumstances of this case, [the President] is subject to indictment and criminal prosecution, although it may be the case that he could not be imprisoned (assuming that he is convicted and that imprisonment is the appropriate punishment) until after he leaves that office. A criminal prosecution and conviction (with imprisonment delayed) does not, in the words of Nixon v. Sirica, compete with the impeachment device by working a constructive removal of the President from office."

Although this is about Bill Clinton, the argument itself still stands. I'm not too happy with the conclusion that even if the presidunce were to be indicted, criminally prosecuted and subsequently convicted, that punishment could be delayed until the end of office. I would sincerely hope that the Repugs would come to their senses and impeach and remove instead of leaving him in office. But we are living in very strange times, so I wouldn't be surprised if they attempt to keep him in office. 

[fraurosena]

Ok, everybody, it's time for WUT again.

 

Oh, the comments! 

 

[formergothardite]

What the fuck is even talking about? I really do wonder if he has dementia. 

[onekidanddone]

Sick agenda over national security? National security has been trying to tell him about Russia and he blasts them as "fake". 

[GreyhoundFan]

Aw, poor widdle Trumplethinskin: "Trump on Twitter: Republicans 'do very little to protect their President'"

Spoiler

President Donald Trump on Sunday afternoon claimed that GOP lawmakers "do very little to protect" him.

"It's very sad that Republicans, even some that were carried over the line on my back, do very little to protect their President," Trump wrote on Twitter after a visit to Trump National Golf Club in Virginia.

It is not clear what the president was addressing, but Congress has yet to pass any of Trump's key legislation, despite a Republican majority in both the House and the Senate. Last week, Republicans in the Senate failed to garner enough votes to pass their legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare, though they may well try again this week. Republican members of Congress are also participating in various investigations of his campaign's interactions with Russia during the election season.

Trump also again denied Russia's involvement in the 2016 election.

In his first tweet of the afternoon, he wrote: "As the phony Russian Witch Hunt continues, two groups are laughing at this excuse for a lost election taking hold, Democrats and Russians!"

Special counsel Robert Mueller and the FBI also are investigating Russia's involvement with the 2016 election.

Maybe he'll hold his breath until he passes out and drops his phone down the toilet. We should be so lucky.

[formergothardite]

Another sign he really doesn't understand his job. Congress isn't there to protect him. 

[GreyhoundFan]

An interesting opinion piece: "How Trump remains untouchable as a celebrity, rather than a politician"

Spoiler

In Joshua Green’s conception of the perfect storm that produced the Trump presidency, Steve Bannon is the brilliant ideologue who had spent years searching for the right vessel for his nationalist, populist politics, and Donald Trump is the intellectually unmoored master marketer who had everything but a message to win over millions of frustrated Americans.

The two men come together in a marriage made by Hillary Clinton, a merger cemented in the decades-long obsessions of the anti-Clinton right, a subculture of roiling hatreds and conspiracy theories that rose up to take over the Republican Party and finally crush the Clinton machine.

Bannon did come to the 2016 campaign with a bubbling pot of notions about the decline of the West and the existential threat posed by both radical Islam and corporatist financiers on Wall Street (where he spent much of his early career). But the story of Trump and Bannon is only partly a tale of charisma connecting with content.

The “Devil’s Bargain” in Green’s title refers to what the author, a reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek, calls an “implicit bargain” between Bannon and Trump in which the candidate adopts the mastermind’s hard-right, nationalistic program, and together these two outsiders — each in his own way seething with resentments about class, respect and stature — land the ultimate insider positions.

But the devilish bond between Bannon and Trump is best revealed through each man’s most successful ventures: Breitbart and “The Apprentice.” Two men who delight in railing publicly against the media are serial entrepreneurs who found their most enduring and powerful influence when they built media properties that shot bull’s-eyesinto the American psyche.

Through Breitbart, which Bannon ran after the death of its founder, Andrew Breitbart, in 2012, Bannon learned how populism could blend with the power of new media to produce a political juggernaut. With “The Apprentice,” Trump crystallized a lifetime of media ma­nipu­la­tion, crafting an on-air character who was at once a billionaire object of aspirational envy and a man of the people.

Mix, bring to a rapid boil, and — voila! — the result is a robust and radical new dish on the menu of American democracy.

But a key ingredient is undervalued in this effort to retroactively write a recipe for the Trump victory: celebrity. “The Apprentice” not only allowed Trump a fresh start after three decades as a pop-culture punchline, but the reality show also bestowed upon the billionaire a new level of fame, which he correctly saw as a kind of bulletproofing. Throughout 2016, as one revelation after another pummeled voters with evidence of Trump’s financial failures and personal misdeeds, the candidate was confident that he would survive because he would be judged not as a politician but as a celebrity.

Just as sports figures and Hollywood types are allowed their foibles and felonies as long as they keep us entertained, so, too, would Trump get away with all kinds of stuff that would be career-ending for politicians of any party or ideology.

Green makes an important point about the vital role “The Apprentice” played in making Trump president. On the show, Trump was even more popular among blacks and Hispanics than he was among whites. That made him a darling of advertisers eager to be associated with a show and a character that were friendly to a multicultural image of the new America.

Trump willingly discarded that aspect of his popularity when he went after Barack Obama by becoming a leading spokesman of the birther movement. Green, like many observers, sees Trump’s embrace of birtherism as a conscious, strategic appeal to latent racist tendencies among disaffected Americans. But Trump’s life is a consistent pattern of impulsive acts that tell us more about his prejudices and predilections than about any well-hidden philosophy or principles.

The notion that Trump knew, as he sank ever deeper into birtherism and related departures from reality, that he was sabotaging his popularity among black and Hispanic voters does not comport with the life he has lived. Trump maintained right up to Election Day that he would do exceedingly well among racial minorities. The insults and slurs he trafficks in express his free-floating aggression far more than any ideology or strategy.

Green argues that Bannon had the upper hand in the relationship that won the presidency and that his primary tool was ideas. The wizard of the new American populism is presented as Oz, the grand manipulator, the secret power behind the throne. But just as the Oz of the children’s classic turned out to be a sad, small shell of a man who didn’t really have the power to grant courage, heart or smarts to those who lacked them, Bannon, could not have waved his magic wand and put any old pol into office, either.

It was Trump who used his instincts and above all his celebrity to survive the “Access Hollywood” groping tape and the “John Miller” PR man recording and the bankruptcies and myriad other campaign disasters.

“Devil’s Bargain” markets itself as a dual profile, the story of the core relationship that shaped Trump’s appeal and his presidency. The tendency here to put Bannon at the heart of the action perhaps stems in part from the fact that Green had more than 20 hours of interviews with Bannon and just 90 minutes with Trump.

But there are some remarkable parallels between the two men. Both went through elite institutions — Harvard, Goldman Sachs, Hollywood for Bannon; Penn, inherited wealth, New York’s high society for Trump — yet remained outsiders miffed that the true elites would never respect them. Both relish the attack; Green has good detail on how Trump and Bannon crafted a way out of the groping-tape mess by, as Bannon put it, turning Bill Clinton into Bill Cosby.

Like Trump, Bannon, too, learns essential lessons from his media successes. In 2005, he moved to Hong Kong and jumped into the business of video games, discovering a disaffected world of young American men who lived in the alternate realities of games that took up much of their time — “a rolling tumbleweed of wounded male id and aggression” that he would tap into through both Breitbart and the Trump campaign.

Bannon in this book is a much richer character than Trump, presented less as the mad genius of the nationalist right and more as a hungry, ambitious searcher, an intellectual wanderer who craves greatness but has trouble sticking with any single path.

The portrayal of Trump offers a straightforward recitation of how the candidate consistently outfoxed and outpunched the opposition. Green is justifiably fascinated by the possibility that Trump might have run well to the left of Republican orthodoxy — embracing his multiethnic fan base; positioning himself as a social liberal, as he often had on Howard Stern’s radio show; pushing, as he did against Mitt Romney after the 2012 election, for a more liberal approach on immigration.

But Trump concluded in 2013 that the votes were on the other side, that the post-2012 Republican consensus that the party had to appeal to Latinos and liberalize its approach on immigration was not the way to disaffected voters’ hearts. The evidence, therefore, is not that Trump was a natural nationalist eager to create a white-identity movement but rather that he would do what it took to win, period.

Two big egos came together in service of their belief that they could save a declining nation. One man believed that his ideas would turn history. The other believed that his personality would do the trick. It’s possible that history will look back upon Trump and Bannon as the architects of a campaign that altered the nation’s direction. It’s also possible that history will settle on a more modest interpretation of events: As Bannon puts it in “Devil’s Bargain,” Clinton “represented everything that middle-class Americans had had enough of.” And maybe, as the Madeline books say, that’s all there is, there isn’t any more.

...

The cover of the book, pictured in the article, is nauseating. Don't look if you have a weak stomach.

[nvmbr02]

Here is the New York Times' response to the tweet @fraurosena posted...

How Trump Got It Wrong in Saying The Times ‘Foiled’ Killing of ISIS Leader

Spoiler

WASHINGTON — President Trump wrongly tweeted on Saturday that The New York Times had “foiled” an attempt by the United States military to kill Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State.

“The Failing New York Times foiled U.S. attempt to kill the single most wanted terrorist, Al-Baghdadi,” the president wrote. “Their sick agenda over National Security.”

Mr. Trump’s statement appeared to be based on a report by Fox News; he is known to be an avid viewer, and a version of the story was broadcast about 25 minutes before he posted. The report said that The Times had disclosed intelligence in an article on June 8, 2015, about an American military raid in Syria that led to the death of one of Mr. Baghdadi’s key lieutenants, Abu Sayyaf, and the capture of his wife, who played an important role in the group.

That Fox News report cited comments by Gen. Tony Thomas, the head of the United States Special Operations Command, in an interview conducted Friday by the network’s intelligence correspondent, Catherine Herridge, at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado.

General Thomas said that a valuable lead on Mr. Baghdadi’s whereabouts “was leaked in a prominent national newspaper about a week later and that lead went dead.” He did not name The Times.

But a review of the record shows that information made public in a Pentagon news release more than three weeks before the Times article, and extensively covered at the time by numerous news media outlets, would have tipped off Mr. Baghdadi that the United States was questioning an important Islamic State operative who knew of his recent whereabouts and some of his methods of communication. Further, the information in the Times article on June 8 came from United States government officials who were aware that the details would be published.

A White House spokesman had no comment on Mr. Trump’s tweet. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said on Friday that he believed Mr. Baghdadi, whose possible death has been the subject of repeated rumors, was still alive.

Here are the facts.

What happened in 2015 that led to the controversy?

Delta Force commandos conducted a raid in Syria on May 16, 2015, on the residence of Abu Sayyaf, the Islamic State’s top financial officer and a close associate of Mr. Baghdadi. The commando raid was the first in Syria against the militant group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, and a trove of information was harvested from cellphones, laptops and other materials. Abu Sayyaf was killed, and his wife, Umm Sayyaf, was captured and flown out of the country for questioning.

That day, the Pentagon announced that the raid had taken place and that Umm Sayyaf had been detained.

“Last night, at the direction of the commander-in-chief, I ordered U.S. Special Operations Forces to conduct an operation in al-Amr in eastern Syria to capture an ISIL senior leader known as Abu Sayyaf and his wife, Umm Sayyaf,” Ashton B. Carter, the defense secretary at the time, said in a statement.

“Abu Sayyaf was involved in ISIL’s military operations and helped direct the terrorist organization’s illicit oil, gas and financial operations as well,” Mr. Carter added. “Abu Sayyaf was killed during the course of the operation when he engaged U.S. forces. U.S. forces captured Umm Sayyaf, who we suspect is a member of ISIL, played an important role in ISIL’s terrorist activities, and may have been complicit in what appears to have been the enslavement of a young Yazidi woman rescued last night.”

Until the raid, the American military had little knowledge about how the Islamic State leadership worked, and officials were eager to highlight the intelligence breakthrough.

The raid was covered extensively by the Western news media when it was announced, and accounts citing the Pentagon appeared the next morning on the front pages of dozens of newspapers, including The Times.

In the article cited by Fox News and published more than three weeks after the raid, The Times reported new details, including that as much as seven terabytes of data had been seized, which, with information from Umm Sayyaf, provided new insights into how Mr. Baghdadi operated and tried to avoid detection.

For example, the article noted that regional emirs in his organization were required to hand over cellphones before being driven to meetings with Mr. Baghdadi so their movements could not be tracked. Wives of the Islamic State leaders, the article noted, also played an important role in passing information to minimize the risk that the group’s communications would be intercepted.

At his appearance on Friday at the security conference, General Thomas was asked whether American forces had ever been close to capturing or killing Mr. Baghdadi.

“There were points in time when we were particularly close to him,” he responded. “Unfortunately, there were some leaks about what we were up to about that time. When we went after Abu Sayyaf, the oil minister who was very close to him, one of his personal confidants, he didn’t live, but his wife did. And she gave us a treasure trove of information about where she had just been with Baghdadi in Raqqa, days, if not within days, prior. And so that was a very good lead. Unfortunately, it was leaked in a prominent national newspaper about a week later and that lead went dead.”

The account by General Thomas — who at the time of the raid was the head of the secretive Joint Special Operations Command, whose commandos target Islamic State leaders in Syria and Iraq — was imprecise in two aspects.

The Pentagon itself provided the confirmation on May 16, 2015, that Abu Sayyaf’s wife had been captured.

And the Times account was published not a week later, but 23 days after the Pentagon statement.

That gap matters because Mr. Baghdadi is almost certain to have taken precautionary steps, such as changing his pattern of behavior, shifting his location and adopting new procedures for communicating with other Islamic State commanders, in the days after the May 16 raid and the capture of a close associate — that is, well before the publication of the Times article on June 8.

The Pentagon raised no objections with The Times before the article was published, and no senior American official had complained publicly about it until now. Some officials expressed hope at the time that some of the details in the article would sow fear in the ranks of the Islamic State by demonstrating that the United States could penetrate the group’s secrecy.

What does the military say?

It is clear that Mr. Baghdadi would have known almost immediately from his own sources or from the Pentagon announcement and news media coverage of it that Umm Sayyaf was being held by the United States and was undergoing interrogation.

That raises a number of questions about why General Thomas pinned blame on what he viewed as a leak to a newspaper. If the military wanted to exploit the information from Umm Sayyaf about Mr. Baghdadi’s movements, why did the Pentagon rush to announce her capture on the day of the raid?

If the military gleaned intelligence from Umm Sayyaf about Mr. Baghdadi’s likely whereabouts, why did it not act in the three weeks after the May 16 raid? Did she initially refuse to cooperate? If so, that would have meant that the information she eventually provided would have been less timely.

Asked for comment, Kenneth McGraw, a spokesman for the Special Operations Command, declined to say which information in the Times article, if any, was a source of concern.

General Thomas “did not name a specific publication or a specific article in his remarks,” Mr. McGraw wrote in an email. “It would be inappropriate for me to make any further comment.”

Citing the need to protect classified information, Mr. McGraw also declined to say whether the Islamic State leader could have been expected to adopt new precautions soon after Umm Sayyaf’s capture or why the military did not go after him soon after the May 16 raid if information about his movements and patterns of behavior was likely to be perishable.

“Any intelligence used in the decision-making process would still be classified and not releasable,” Mr. McGraw wrote. “Any intelligence about Baghdadi’s behavior or new precautions he may have taken would still be classified and not releasable.”

Mr. McGraw also noted that the decision to immediately issue a news release confirming the capture of Umm Sayyaf was made by the Defense Department, not the Special Operations Command.

Former Obama administration officials said there were a number of reasons the Pentagon announced the raid and the detention of Umm Sayyaf. The White House, they said, had to notify Congress under the War Powers Resolution about the operation, which was the first Special Operations raid against the Islamic State in Syria. Further, the mission was mounted from Iraq, so the Iraqis also needed to be informed.

As a matter of policy, they said, the United States also needed to tell the International Red Cross that it had a detainee.

Mr. Carter, they said, also believed the American people should be informed about the first attempt to go after a member of Mr. Baghdadi’s inner circle. Nor did the Pentagon want to be accusing of capturing an important figure and covering it up.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

How very true: "The Trump election commission exists solely to justify a Trump lie"

Spoiler

President Trump had some remarkable things to say at the inaugural meeting of his Commission to Promote Voter Suppression and Justify Trump’s False Claims, which is formally known as the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. He also asked a question that deserves an answer.

Lest anyone believe Vice President Pence’s claim that “this commission has no preconceived notions or preordained results,” Trump was on hand last week to state clearly what its agenda is.

With the resignation of Sean Spicer as White House press secretary and the rise of Anthony Scaramucci as White House communications czar (an appropriate word these days), the television cameras are riveted on the latest reality show, “Spicey and The Mooch.” But we dare not lose track of the threat the Trump administration poses to the most basic of democratic rights.

Remember that in January, Trump told congressional leaders that between 3 million and 5 million illegal votes were cast in last year’s election and that they were the reason he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 2.9 million.

There is not a shred of evidence for this — none, zero, zilch. Trump’s defenders could find no plausible way to support his statement, which is not unusual. But Trump never backs off from a falsehood. So instead, he did something without precedent: He appointed a presidential commission solely to justify an offhand lie.

And now that this body exists, it will almost certainly try to find ways to rationalize purging legitimate voters from the rolls and erecting yet more barriers to voting.

Trump would not let the commissioners forget their reason for being there, his belief that those phantom votes really exist, although he put his own words into the mouths of unnamed “people,” who — surprise! — came to the same conclusions he did.

“Throughout the campaign and even after it,” Trump said, “people would come up to me and express their concerns about voter inconsistencies and irregularities, which they saw. In some cases, having to do with very large numbers of people in certain states.”

The commission issued a sweeping request to the states for data that included everything from voters’ Social Security numbers, military status and party affiliation to information on felony convictions.

Trump purported to be pleased because “more than 30 states have already agreed to share the information with the commission.” In truth, the request has been met with widespread resistance from Republican as well as Democratic officials. As of July 8, the Associated Press reported , not a single state was in full compliance. The Republican secretary of state of Mississippi, Delbert Hosemann, spoke for many of his colleagues (with a regional twist) when he told the administration to “go jump in the Gulf of Mexico.”

Trump is not happy, and he responded in the way he knows best: with innuendo questioning the motives of others. “If any state does not want to share this information, one has to wonder what they’re worried about. And I asked the vice president, I asked the commission: What are they worried about?”

Excellent question. Here’s what we should worry about.

We should worry about the security of the data. States have absolutely no confidence that the Trump administration will protect it. They also have every reason to fear Trump will misuse it.

We should worry because his commission is the furthest thing imaginable from a dispassionate investigation into voting procedures.

We should worry because Kris Kobach, Kansas’s secretary of state, is vice chairman of the commission. Kobach is a voter suppression fanatic. He is also a Trump flunkie. The Post’s Philip Bump, who is doing an excellent job covering this charade, noted that when NBC’s Katy Tur asked him about Trump’s claim of 3 million to 5 million fraudulent votes, Kobach replied: “We will probably never know the answer to that question.” Sorry, but we do know, and if Kobach thinks we don’t, not a single state should trust him with a single bit of information.

We should worry because, as Ari Berman noted in the Nation, a new study by MIT found that 12 percent of the electorate in 2016 encountered a problem voting, and the Brennan Center for Justice reported that more states have enacted new voting restrictions in 2017 than in 2015 and 2016 combined. This commission will push states to enact even more laws like these.

We should worry because the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and this Congress has shown no signs of wanting to fix it.

We should worry about the Trump administration closing civil rights offices and the Justice Department switching sides in voting rights cases. As Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) said: “I am old enough to remember when African Americans were denied access to the ballot box, and I fear that we are watching history repeat itself.”

We should worry that Elijah Cummings’s intuition is right.

 

[AmazonGrace]

Jared Kushner's written statement 

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/24/politics/jared-kushner-statement-russia-2016-election/index.html

The AP writeup: https://apnews.com/3dbc5b4c43984889b35c1c6fb68ef9dd

Shorter Jared: I did not collude and if I did I don't remember anything about it, except these specific details. 

[GreyhoundFan]

@AmazonGrace -- 11 pages to say "I didn't do it". Crazy stuff.

 

"Trump insists that senators (who won without him) owe him loyalty (that isn’t returned)"

Spoiler

The thing that’s wrong with the tweet below isn’t the thing that you might at first have assumed.

... <Twitler's tweet that whined about the Repugs not protecting him>

President Trump appears here to be questioning the loyalty of senators who have balked at supporting him on the issue of the moment, the Senate Republicans’ proposal to overhaul Obamacare. There’s an unsubtle nudge within it: I helped you win, and now you owe me.

Taken at face value, that itself is not a good argument.

It’s tricky to identify the role that the broader political environment played in a candidate’s victory or loss in a campaign. We’re still arguing about why Hillary Clinton lost last year, for example, in part because there are so many things that might have made the difference in Trump’s narrow electoral college victory.

One way to consider the question is to look at how Trump did in each state versus how the Republicans running for Senate did. If he outperformed them — got a higher percentage of the vote, for example — that suggests he was broadly more popular and may have pulled Republicans to the polls who otherwise would not have voted. A better metric for that, of course, is the actual number of votes cast.

In November, Trump got a higher percentage of the vote than 11 Republican Senate candidates and more actual votes than 13. But those Senate candidates outperformed Trump in vote percentages 23 times and in vote totals 21 times.

...

This data, though, includes Senate candidates who lost — clearly not individuals who are included in Trump’s hand-wringing tweet. Among Republicans who won, Trump got a higher percentage of the vote than five of them, and more total votes than seven.

So who were those seven senators, who might have benefited from Trump’s base of support streaming to the polls?

There’s Sen. John Boozman (R-Ark.), who won by nearly 24 points.

There’s Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), who won by 21 points.

There’s Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), who won by nine points — in a state where Trump likely overperformed in large part because he’d picked its governor as his running mate.

There’s Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who won by more than 15 percentage points. Murkowski is a senator whose vote Trump has been fighting to earn — but it’s pretty clear that she doesn’t owe him her victory.

The other three are interesting cases. They are Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) and Roy Blunt (R-Mo.). Paul has been a critic of the health-care bill and was an early “no” on it in various iterations — but he won his race by almost 15 percentage points despite being outperformed by Trump. Trump can’t claim that one. Toomey won by only a little more than a point, but has been supportive of the overhaul effort in the Senate. Same with Blunt, who won by about three points. He, too, is a yes vote.

The other opponents of the bill include Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Jerry Moran (R-Kan.). Collins wasn’t up for reelection last year; Lee and Moran won by 41 and 30 percentage points, respectively. Lee did 23 percentage points better than Trump in Utah; he certainly wasn’t carried to victory by the president. Even Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who has opposed earlier iterations of the bill and who won by only about three points last year, got more votes in his state than Trump and won by a wider margin.

Again, let’s set all of that aside. There’s no evidence that senators who are wavering owe Trump their positions in the first place. But even if they did, Trump is demanding loyalty to him while repeatedly having demonstrated that he can’t be trusted to reciprocate.

Trump treats loyalty the way that he treats bipartisan unity: He invokes it regularly but repeatedly demonstrates that he simply means that people should rally around and unconditionally back him, not that he’d do his part in the bargain. After the election, he kept insisting on unity, but did little to nothing to actually reach out to or consider the viewpoints of his Democratic opponents. He asks for loyalty, cajoling Republican members of the House for their votes on that chamber’s version of the health-care bill, only to later throw them under the bus by describing the legislation as “mean.” It’s always been easier to predict Trump’s stated position on an issue by considering current popular opinion or the views of the audience to which he’s speaking than to appeal to his core ideologies. He’s done little to demonstrate to Republican senators that, if this bill is passed and becomes an albatross for the party, he won’t quickly try to disavow it.

Even more broadly, of course, Trump’s tweet insisting that he helped Republicans win and now they owe him flies in the face of his core campaign promise: He was the dealmaker who could get the job done. “I alone can fix it,” he famously said, almost precisely one year ago at the Republican convention. Where’s the fixing? Where’s the deal? This is the master dealmaker, crankily tweeting that senators owe him, even though they don’t?

Trump has learned that being president isn’t like being CEO: Congress doesn’t work for him and can’t be ordered to do what he wants. His pledge that he could fix everything was, of course, always empty. If there’s one thing that career politicians know, it’s who got them elected and who might get them elected next time.

A few senators, up in 2018, are certainly wary of offending Trump’s energetic base of support. But when Trump is threatening people not up for reelection until after he is or claiming to have delivered seats to people who can be confident they would have won anyway, it’s pretty easy to understand why this deal keeps eluding him.

Poor widdle snowflake's fee-fees are hurt because every senator doesn't genuflect in his presence.

[47of74]

On 7/21/2017 at 7:15 PM, GreyhoundFan said:

"Why Trump and the conservative media are still obsessed with Hillary Clinton"

  Hide contents

There is a specter haunting the United States, or at least the Republican Party and its friendly news outlets. You may think it’s just a former government official who holds no office and won’t be running for anything again, but they know the truth. America needs to get worried, and more importantly, angry, at Hillary Clinton.

Oliver Darcy of CNN has been watching Fox News:

The former Democratic presidential candidate, a favorite villain of the right, has been featured prominently across Fox News’ programming this week.

In many cases, instead of the network’s hosts applying pressure to the current President, who is grappling with the fallout from a federal investigation related to Russian election meddling, Fox News’ personalities have deflected and turned their attention to Clinton. On Tuesday night, for instance, Clinton found herself a key point of discussion throughout the network’s primetime lineup.

It isn’t just them. President Trump himself seems to be practically obsessed with Clinton, as Philip Bump explains:

Whatever Trump does or doesn’t do, he’s always willing to point out what Clinton did or didn’t do that’s worse.

So she comes up in his interviews a lot. In fact, in 19 interviews that he’s conducted since becoming president, we found that Clinton tended to be mentioned much earlier than a number of Trump’s other favorite topics: The 2016 election, the votes he received, the electoral college and Barack Obama…

In 17 of 19 of his interviews, Clinton came up, on average about 36 percent of the way in.

Without going back and checking, I’m pretty sure Barack Obama didn’t bring up how he beat John McCain in 90 percent of the interviews he conducted during his first six months in office. I don’t recall George W. Bush talking about Al Gore at all after he became president. So what’s going on here?

For Trump personally, I think it’s mostly about the deep insecurity that comes through every time he opens his mouth. It’s why he’s always telling everyone how smart and knowledgeable and accomplished he is, something that people who are actually smart and knowledgeable and accomplished don’t do. He feels a need to remind everyone that he won the election, usually embellishing the story by characterizing it as bigger and more emphatic a victory than it actually was. As his vanquished opponent, Clinton is a symbol of his potency and dominance.

The fact that Clinton got millions more votes than him is obviously a wound that won’t stop hurting, so he keeps trying to convince everyone that the vote was fraudulent and whatever he’s being accused of, she did it worse. Eight months after the election, she’s still the yardstick he’s measuring himself against.

Trump also seems to bring up the campaign (and Clinton) so much because things were much clearer for him then. It was him against her, in a contest that made sense, and he won. Now he has to spend his days worrying about policies he neither understands nor cares about, he’s bedeviled by investigations, and he doesn’t have the succor that comes from hearing the cheers of an adoring crowd every night. When he brings up Clinton he’s like an aging athlete reliving his glory days. Hey, did I ever tell you about the time I threw a touchdown pass to win the homecoming game? Yes, Uncle Don, only about a hundred times.

For the conservative media, there’s a slightly different motivation at work. If you’re Fox News or a conservative talk radio show, the fact that Trump squeaked out an electoral college victory laid waste to the plans you had for the next four years. It was going to be such fun! A Hillary Clinton presidency would have been a glorious time, filled with purpose and professional success. Now you find yourself defending a dreadful health care plan, but if she were president, you would have been luxuriating in constant congressional investigations, innumerable phony scandals, and an endless supply of things to get outraged about. And outrage is the fuel of conservative media — it’s what provides the content, engages the viewers and listeners, and keeps the audience coming back. Getting people mad is much easier than convincing them to feel happy or hopeful or excited about what the administration is doing.

That’s especially true if the administration isn’t actually doing very much. As the months drag on without any significant achievements from the Trump administration, the need to pump up the emotional volume becomes more acute. And emotion comes not from discussions about policy but from stories with heroes and villains.

The problem for conservatives is that American politics today is a story that has its hero but doesn’t have a villain. The president makes news nearly every day, but we can go weeks without hearing something interesting from Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi. And like all opposition leaders, next to the president with the majesty of his office behind him, they look small and inconsequential, barely worth getting mad at.

Donald Trump got elected in large part by getting his voters mad — at immigrants, at Muslims, at politicians, and at a supposedly rigged political system. But as president, he’s had a hard time sustaining that anger and constructing that story of himself as a warrior fighting against a threatening enemy.

Other Republican presidents had it much easier. Ronald Reagan had a natural counterpoint in the Russians, an enemy Americans had hated for decades. The Cold War provided opportunities for threat and confrontation — invade a tiny island country here, make a speech in Berlin there, and you have a drama that never gets old. George W. Bush spent eight years telling Americans they were about to be annihilated by villainous Middle Easterners, first Al Qaeda, then Saddam Hussein. By the end of his tenure the story had lost its punch, but it did get him reelected.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, has no villain to fight. So he and his allies are left looking backward to the person who was supposed to be the villain of the moment, but now is just a retiree strolling around the woods in Westchester county. No wonder they seem so dispirited.

I certainly understand why Trumplethinskin can't quit Hillary, but I find the analysis of the conservative media quite interesting.

Bottom line is that Mrs. Clinton is a strong, intelligent, and independent woman, and such women send conservative men running screaming to defend their manly territory.  (H/T Karen Traviss/Star Wars: Revelation)

[GreyhoundFan]

"Another lawsuit seeks Trump's tax returns"

Spoiler

President Donald Trump is facing a new legal demand for his tax returns in a lawsuit from protesters who say they were roughed up at Trump’s instigation at a campaign rally last year.

Lawyers for the demonstrators recently made a formal request for the tax returns as part of the discovery process in a suit over altercations at a Trump campaign event in Louisville, Kentucky, in March 2016.

“We want to know where his money is going and where it’s coming from,” said Greg Belzley, an attorney for the protesters. “What are his connections with the hate groups that regularly attended his rallies? What security did he have? Did they make any arrangements? Does he have the money to pay a jury verdict in this case?”

While Trump seems likely to be able to cover any direct damages the protesters are claiming, they are also seeking punitive damages, Belzley noted. The suit contends that Trump egged on the crowd to injure the demonstrators by declaring, “Get ‘em out of here.” The attorney said punitive damages tied to Trump’s income and worth may be appropriate to make sure Trump doesn’t do anything similar in the future.

“What is it going to take to get [Trump’s] attention?” Belzley asked. “The jury should be given the opportunity to decide what they need to do to deter the wrongful conduct and prevent it from happening again.”

An attorney for Trump did not respond to a request for comment Friday, but in a court filing last week, Trump’s legal team complained that the suit is being used to dredge up "embarrassing" information on the president.

“From the moment Plaintiffs filed their Complaint, it has been clear that their primary objective has been to use the court system and the discovery process to inflict maximum political damage on President Trump,” Trump’s attorneys wrote. They dismissed as “clearly irrelevant” the request for the tax returns and another request for the identities “of all medical providers from whom Trump has sought or received any psychological and/or psychiatric and/or mental health treatment or counseling.”

Trump’s lawyers are also trying to a block a demand that he sit for a deposition in the case. That request is pending before U.S. District Court Judge David Hale, an appointee of President Barack Obama.

The Kentucky case is one of at least five pending lawsuits in which plaintiffs have publicly indicated a desire to obtain Trump’s tax filings.

They include several suits contending that Trump’s foreign business ties violate the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause. Lawyers for the liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, for the state of Maryland and the District of Columbia and for Democratic lawmakers have all stated plans to request the tax returns as litigation on those issues moves forward.

Even if a judge orders Trump's tax returns turned over in one or more of those cases, there is no guarantee they'd be made public. Such information is usually subject to a court order that limits its distribution to the lawyers and parties to the suit, as well as others directly involved in the litigation.

At least one group — the Electronic Privacy Information Center — is trying to obtain the tax returns directly from the Internal Revenue Service through a Freedom of Information Act suit.

The Kentucky suit appears to be the first to progress to the point where lawyers have made a formal discovery request for the Trump tax returns.

Every president since Jimmy Carter has released at least some personal tax returns. Trump has declined to do so, saying that his recent returns are under audit — although that is no legal barrier to releasing them under those circumstances,.

At the moment, there is no law requiring presidents to make their tax returns public, although Democrats in Congress and in state legislatures have filed legislation that would force such a disclosure for presidents or presidential candidates.

Cue the tweetstorm.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump: Washington is a 'sewer' not a 'swamp'"

Spoiler

After a little more than six months in office, President Donald Trump offered an update Monday to perhaps his most popular campaign slogan that he said might more accurately address the realities of Washington politics.

“Drain the Swamp should be changed to Drain the Sewer - it's actually much worse than anyone ever thought, and it begins with the Fake News!” Trump wrote on Twitter Monday morning.

Trump’s “drain the swamp” campaign pledge became a call-and-response crowd favorite during 2016 campaign rallies for Trump, a pledge from the outsider candidate to end what he saw as Washington’s culture of political corruption. In his address to last summer’s Republican National Convention, Trump explained that he had seen firsthand the flow of power and influence in Washington and that “I alone can fix it.”

But since moving into the White House, Trump has struggled to gain traction with his agenda, bogged down at times by ongoing investigations into Russia’s campaign to interfere in last year’s presidential election and allegations that individuals tied to Trump aided the Kremlin in those efforts. The president has labeled those investigations a “witch hunt” and said they amount to little more than Democrats searching for a way to excuse their surprising losses last November.

The president has also complained loudly about the coverage his administration receives from what he considers to be biased “fake news” media outlets, including CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times. White House press secretary Sean Spicer, who has at times had a combative relationship with the press, announced last Friday that he would resign in order to give incoming White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci a “clean slate.”

Trump’s promise to repeal and replace Obamacare, the first line item on a long list of policy goals, has stalled multiple times on Capitol Hill, most recently in the Senate, where negotiations are ongoing within the majority GOP caucus to find enough support for a procedural vote to move a repeal-and-replace bill forward. The House, which similarly struggled to find compromise on its repeal-and-replace measure, ultimately did so, narrowly passing healthcare legislation last spring.

The president has suggested that he does not intend to let setbacks on his healthcare agenda imperil other priorities, including a major rewrite of the U.S. tax code and an infrastructure plan on which he hopes to work with Democrats. But Trump’s tax plan, which has been outlined by the White House but only sparsely so thus far, is intended to go hand-in-hand with an Obamacare repeal, which would remove many of the healthcare legislation’s taxes.

It's only a sewer because of Agent Orange and his buddies.

[GreyhoundFan]

Trumplethinskin just can't quit Hillary: "Trump Asks Why ‘Beleaguered’ Sessions Isn’t Investigating Clinton"

Spoiler

WASHINGTON — President Trump turned up the pressure on his own attorney general on Monday, calling him “beleaguered” in a tweet questioning why the Justice Department is not investigating Hillary Clinton.

...

Mr. Trump’s comments are remarkable because if the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, is beleaguered of late it is largely because of Mr. Trump himself.

In an interview last week with The New York Times, Mr. Trump said he never would have nominated Mr. Sessions if he knew he intended to recuse himself from the investigation into Russian meddling and the Trump campaign. Those comments raised speculation that Mr. Sessions would quit, but he did not. Instead, Mr. Sessions said he would stay on as attorney general “as long as that is appropriate.”

Mr. Sessions has made it a priority to address violence, gangs and drugs — carrying out Mr. Trump’s inaugural pledge to end “American carnage.” But his tense relationship with Mr. Trump has overshadowed his agenda at the Justice Department. Mr. Sessions was the first senator to endorse Mr. Trump’s candidacy and was an architect of his populist message on immigration and trade.

In his tweet, Mr. Trump returned to campaign rhetoric, suggesting his Democratic opponent should be the subject of an investigation into murky ties to Russia, not him.

On Saturday, Mr. Trump tweeted that “so many people” were asking why Mr. Sessions and the special counsel were not looking into Mrs. Clinton and her deleted emails.

After winning the election, Mr. Trump declared that the Justice Department should not pursue investigations of Mrs. Clinton. But some of his outside advisers have called for him to push for such an inquiry. Mrs. Clinton also faced investigations into her family’s foundation and her use of a private email server.

During the campaign, Mr. Trump’s supporters were most animated by chants of “Lock her up!” Those chants have continued at rallies Mr. Trump has held as president.

The president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, released prepared remarks early Monday ahead of his interview with the Senate Intelligence Committee, and said that he “did not collude” with a foreign government. Mr. Kushner and others associated with Mr. Trump’s campaign have also talked to congressional committees as part of the lawmakers’ investigations into the Trump campaign’s ties with Russia.

Mr. Trump attacked Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, on Twitter, as well, on Monday, calling him “sleazy” and “totally biased.”

...

He is more and more unhinged.

[GreyhoundFan]

"If donations to Democrats mean you’re anti-Trump, the White House is in very deep trouble"

Spoiler

On Friday, The Washington Post reported that President Trump, his lawyers and aides are working to undercut the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. On Sunday, Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway appeared on the CNN show “Reliable Sources” and offered an example of what that effort looks like.

“Many people are afraid that if this president fires Robert Mueller, we will be in a constitutional crisis,” CNN host Brian Stelter said. “Why doesn’t the president just want Mueller to prove that Trump is right, that Russia was a hoax? Why doesn’t he just want Mueller to go ahead and confirm that for him?”

“Isn’t Mr. Mueller and his band of Democratic donors doing that?” Conway responded.

That’s a neat trick. Of course Trump wants Mueller to do his work, she implies — and then disparages Mueller’s team as a “band of Democratic donors.”

While Mueller’s investigators have decades of experience in the Justice Department and the FBI, critics of the special counsel have focused on the fact that several gave money to Democratic politicians, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, in past election cycles. This, they charge, hints at a bias that will color their investigation into Trump and his campaign’s alleged collusion with Russian efforts to influence the election. That’s what Conway’s doing, working to associate “Democratic donor” with Mueller’s team so that whatever that eventual finding might be, Trump supporters will be predisposed to dismiss it.

There’s just one problem with that strategy. A lot of key White House figures are also Democratic donors — and gave to Hillary Clinton.

We can start with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who on Monday traveled to Capitol Hill to provide a closed-door statement on his interactions with Russian figures last year. Kushner’s political contribution history is dark blue, including thousands given to Hillary Clinton in the past.

...

His wife, Ivanka Trump, is more bipartisan in her giving, but, excluding the 2012 cycle, mostly gave to Democrats as well. She, too, is a former Clinton donor.

...

Likewise with Trump’s secretaries of the treasury and commerce. Both Steven Mnuchin and Gary Cohn have given hundreds of thousands to Republicans, but also a combined $371,000 to Democrats over the past 20 years and more than $14,000 to Clinton and her political PAC.

...

Even the newest member of Trump’s team has given heavily to Democrats in the past. White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, like Cohn, has given more to Republicans in recent years, but has a lengthy track record of being a Democratic donor — including to Clinton.

...

Oh, and there’s one other figure about whom the administration might be nervous if Democratic contributions are a sign of bias: A guy named Donald Trump has given hundreds of thousands to Democrats and several thousand to Clinton herself.

...

Can Donald Trump and his band of Democratic donors be trusted to treat Donald Trump without bias? If Kellyanne Conway’s fears are valid, we simply can’t trust the president and the president’s family to not be quietly working to undercut everything the president is doing.

I guess Kellyanne forgets that donations, like the internet, are forever.

[AmazonGrace]

Guys, I think there is a possibility that the president of the USA is an idiot. 

 

[Cleopatra7]

9 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

Guys, I think there is a possibility that the president of the USA is an idiot. 

 

Given how Republicans seem to have written GWB out of history, I'm of the opinion that many, perhaps most, conservatives think Obama somehow pulled an FDR and served four terms, even though that would be constitutionally impossible. But given how many Trump fans complained when NPR tweeted the Declaration of Independence, it's obvious they don't bother to read the documents they claim to revere.

[candygirl200413]

So really his mental capacity shouldn't be in power and I will forever be disgusted at all his enablers not doing anything.

 

Also is that suppose to be the "victims" of obamacare? All the children?

[GreyhoundFan]

This is from the WaPo's daily mega-article with links and info that are important. I'm just quoting the beginning, but there is much worth reading: "The Daily 202: Trump marginalizes experts, debases expertise"

Spoiler

THE BIG IDEA: Donald Trump, the first president in American history to take office with no prior governing or military experience, has appointed someone with no professional communications experience to be White House communications director.

Making his debut on the Sunday shows, former hedge fund manager Anthony Scaramucci said his new boss still does not accept the consensus of professional analysts and case officers across the intelligence community that Russia attempted to influence the 2016 presidential election.

“He basically said to me, 'Hey, you know … Maybe they did it, maybe they didn't do it,’” Scaramucci said on CNN.

These two things are not unrelated. Trump has repeatedly dismissed the knowledge and wisdom of experts while elevating nonexperts who lack relevant experience into important jobs across the federal government. This gets less attention than other story lines, but it has been a hallmark of the president’s first six months in power.

Party planner Lynne Patton, who helped plan Eric Trump’s wedding but had no professional experience in housing, was appointed last month to  head the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s office for the region that covers New York and New Jersey.

Last week Trump nominated someone who is not a credentialed scientist to be the Agriculture Department’s chief scientist. Sam Clovis has described himself as “extremely skeptical” about the expert consensus on climate change. The post he’s been tapped for has been occupied by a string of individuals with advanced degrees in science or medicine.

News broke Friday that Trump will nominate a prominent coal lobbyist, Andrew Wheeler, to serve as the No. 2 at the Environmental Protection Agency.

-- Meanwhile, the Trumpists have actively taken steps to prevent experts from doing their jobs. The EPA removed several agency websites in April that contained detailed climate data and scientific information, including one that had been cited to challenge statements made by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. One of the Web pages that was shuttered had existed for nearly two decades and explained what climate change is and how it worked.

The weekend before last, Trump’s political appointees at the Interior Department abruptly removed two top climate experts from a delegation scheduled to show Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg around Glacier National Park.

-- The administration is heavily populated with people who lack qualifications that would have been prerequisites to get the same jobs in past Republican and Democratic administrations. It starts at the top: No one not named Trump seriously believes that the president’s daughter and son-in-law could have gotten their plum West Wing jobs if not for nepotism.

Jared Kushner purportedly proposed to Russia’s ambassador the possibility of setting up a secret and secure communications channel between Trump’s transition team and the Kremlin last December, using Russian diplomatic facilities in an apparent move to shield their pre-inauguration discussions from monitoring by the U.S. government.

The president, for his part, didn’t want any professionals from the government, including the Russia expert on the National Security Council, to sit in on his meeting with Vladimir Putin. The Russians also reportedly recommended that a note taker be present, but Trump refused.

-- Previous presidents have worked the referees, but Trump has taken it to a whole new level. He’s declared war on any ref who calls him for fouls.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated last week that the revised Senate Republican health-care bill would increase the number of uninsured people by 22 million people over the next 10 years if it passed. Knowing the numbers would be abysmal, the administration placed an op-ed preemptively dismissing the independent forecast. “Although the media and the political left will certainly seize on it, the CBO’s estimates will be little more than fake news,” wrote Marc Short, Trump’s director of legislative affairs, and Brian Blase, a special assistant to the president for the National Economic Council.

Trump attacked federal judges who found that his travel ban was unconstitutional. Then he criticized professional lawyers in his own Justice Department for pursuing a “watered down” version of the ban that could withstand judicial scrutiny.

The day after he took office, the president personally pressured the head of the National Park Service to back up his overinflated claims about the size of his inauguration crowd. He also vented that the agency had tweeted a picture that showed how relatively few people actually turned out.

The director of the independent Office of Government Ethics, a persistent critic of the Trump administration’s approach to ethics, stepped down last week nearly six months before his term was scheduled to end. Walter M. Shaub Jr. drew the ire of administration officials when he challenged Trump to fully divest from his business empire and chastised Kellyanne Conway for promoting Ivanka Trump products from the White House briefing room.

In an administration characterized by its embrace of what Conway notoriously called “alternative facts,” the systemic effort to sideline experts who challenge Trump has been a feature, not a bug. But none of this is terribly surprising in the context of the campaign: Trump said he knew more about war than the generals. He cast doubt upon the medical community consensus that vaccines do not cause autism. And he said a federal judge of Mexican descent couldn’t objectively adjudicate a fraud lawsuit against Trump University because of his heritage. Speaker Paul Ryan called this “the textbook definition” of a racist statement at the time.

-- Trump’s embrace of experts and expertise is situational. Candidate Trump often claimed that the government’s unemployment rate was “totally fiction,” even though the economists who tabulate it are insulated from political pressure. “Don’t believe these phony numbers,” Trump said at a rally last year. “The [real] number is probably 28 [percent], 29, as high as 35. In fact, I even heard recently 42 percent.”

But when there was a good jobs report in March, which showed the unemployment rate was 4.7 percent, then-press secretary Sean Spicer said Trump now believes the same numbers. “They may have been phony in the past, but they are very real now,” Spicer said.

-- In a new book entitled “The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters,” Tom Nichols describes Trump’s victory last November as “undeniably one of the most recent—and one of the loudest—trumpets sounding the impending death of expertise.”

The president defended his lack of specific policy knowledge during a rally on the eve of the Wisconsin primary in 2016. “They say, ‘Oh, Trump doesn’t have experts,’” Trump said. “You know, I’ve always wanted to say this: … The experts are terrible! They say, ‘Donald Trump needs a foreign policy adviser.’ … But supposing I didn’t have one, would it be worse than what we’re doing now?”

Nichols, a professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College in Rhode Island, believes the “death of expertise and its associated attacks on knowledge fundamentally undermine the republican system of government.”

“The abysmal literacy, both political and general, of the American public is the foundation for all of these problems. It is the soil in which all of the other dysfunctions have taken root and prospered, with the 2016 election only its most recent expression,” Nichols writes. “Americans have increasingly unrealistic expectations of what their political and economic system can provide. This sense of entitlement is one reason they are continually angry at ‘experts’ and especially at ‘elitists,’ a word that in modern American usage can mean almost anyone with any education who refuses to coddle the public’s mistaken beliefs. When told that ending poverty or preventing terrorism is a lot harder than it looks, Americans roll their eyes. Unable to comprehend all of the complexity around them, they choose instead to comprehend almost none of it and then sullenly blame experts, politicians and bureaucrats for seizing control of their lives.”

Professionals in every industry report that laypeople increasingly challenge their know-how. “No area of American life is immune to the death of expertise,” writes Nichols, who worked for the late Republican Sen. John Heinz (Pa.) early in his career. “Doctors routinely tussle with patients over drugs. Lawyers will describe clients losing money, and sometimes their freedom, because of unheeded advice. Teachers will relate stories of parents insisting that their children’s exam answers are right even when they’re demonstrably wrong. Relators tell of clients who bought homes against their experienced advice and ended up trapped in a money pit.”

The 252-page book is packed with illustrations. “What I find so striking today is not that people dismiss expertise, but that they do so with such frequency, on so many issues, and with such anger,” Nichols laments. “It may be that attacks on expertise are more obvious due to the ubiquity of the Internet, the undisciplined nature of conversation on social media, or the demands of the twenty-four-hour news cycle. But there is a self-righteousness and fury to this new rejection of expertise that suggest, at least to me, that this isn’t just mistrust or questioning or the pursuit of alternatives: it is narcissism, coupled to a disdain for expertise as some sort of exercise in self-actualization.”

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Tom Nichols' book sounds quite interesting.