Jump to content
IGNORED

Trump 21: Tweeting Us Into the Apocalypse


Destiny

Recommended Posts

I can't say that I agree with all of this author's points, but his central assertion is sound: "Want to Get Rid of Trump? Only Fox News Can Do It"

Spoiler

KNOXVILLE, Iowa — President Trump’s administration is in crisis, consumed by fears of what Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russia’s meddling in the election, might find. Everyone’s lawyering up — even the lawyers have lawyers.

But here in rural Iowa you might never hear about any of that. What I do hear from my conservative friends — most still ardent Trump supporters — is a collective yawn at the Washington maelstrom. Few care about his tweets — even about Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough and the CNN body slam. The whacking of James Comey? About time. President Obama’s appointee anyway. Mr. Trump’s asking if Mr. Comey could drop the Michael Flynn investigation? It was a simple question, not obstruction of justice. The Comey testimony? Vindication for Mr. Trump! Mr. Comey is a leaker, he lied under oath, and he’s going down. He’ll be lucky if he doesn’t serve prison time.

No, the big stunner in that testimony was Mr. Comey’s statement about former Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton — that’s where the real obstruction of justice lies.

Here, conservatives celebrate the successes in Mr. Trump’s short time in office: a conservative Supreme Court justice now seated; Mexico and Canada back to the trading table; red tape cut; the E.P.A. hamstrung; climate change nonsense tossed aside. It’s exactly what they elected him to do — victory after victory in a bigger battle than just policy, a battle for America’s soul.

For many conservatives, they support Mr. Trump because he’s their de facto leader in a cultural war. Liberals mock Christianity and demean Christian morals. Conservatives respect our police and military, while liberals romanticize street thugs. Conservatives’ tax dollars help pay for public schools and colleges that indoctrinate liberal values. Out here some conservatives aren’t even calling them “public” schools anymore. They call them “government schools,” as in, “We don’t want to pay for your damn ‘government schools.’ ” They’re afraid to send their kids to them.

They bend over backward to justify everything Mr. Trump does, largely because they don’t believe what anyone in the news media is telling them, except for maybe Fox News.

A prominent businessman here, for example, views the “whole fake Russian story” as “a coup attempt by the media.”

A sergeant major in the Iowa National Guard recently overheard a pro-Trump law enforcement friend and me disagreeing about Mr. Trump. He shook his head and smiled, telling me, “Well, all I know, Bob, is that my unit’s budget just doubled.”

Now, they’re not entirely blind to the damage Mr. Trump is doing to the Republican brand. Democrats are energized, and though Mr. Trump’s base is holding, “soft” Trump voters are slowly sinking his approval numbers. One friend who twice voted for Barack Obama now sees World War III on the horizon and deeply regrets his vote for Mr. Trump.

President Trump has been in office only about six months and yet is already under investigation by congressional committees and the special counsel, Mr. Mueller. This fact alone should make every Republican nervous.

The country needs to see these investigations through. Regardless, my conservative friends should ask themselves, what has President Trump accomplished that a President Mike Pence couldn’t have, without all of the drama? And what matters more: President Trump or their conservative values? Here, I believe it’s the latter. Mr. Trump, after all, was runner-up to Ted Cruz in the Iowa caucuses.

I see only one thing that might give my conservative friends pause about turning against Mr. Trump — Fox News. After all, it helped create him. Most people here watch Fox News, and have for a generation.

Fox News is always on the TV in diners and other restaurants. In bars, if there isn’t a game on, Fox News is there. If there are a couple of televisions or more, one will most likely be tuned to Fox. And it’s not only TV. It’s radio. Our big “blow torch” conservative radio station out of Des Moines blasts conservative indignation and self-righteousness for hours a day and serves up Sean Hannity for hours every night.

I once grumbled to a friend that I didn’t think Fox was “Fair and Balanced” at all. He started to argue with me, then thought better of it, saying, “But at least they try — no one else does.”

To me, only that network has the power to convince conservatives that, if one or more of the investigations raises the question of impeachment, it’s in the best interest of the party and the conservative agenda to dump Mr. Trump.

Mr. Hannity and other Fox hosts could provide cover for congressional Republicans to consider impeachment. If you believe that impeachment is a political and not a legal question, they need that cover. Right now, Mr. Hannity might have more power over an impeachment process than Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell.

Even if the investigation turns up clear evidence of presidential misconduct, I believe it would be impossible for the party to consider impeachment without Fox’s support. The first Republicans to even mention impeachment would probably be vilified by Fox and find themselves facing an angry constituency and a primary opponent next election. Yet if Fox turns, it’s inevitable. For reasons I do not understand, that network has that kind of power among most of the conservative rural voters I know.

Mr. Trump has proved to be more of a liability than an asset in bringing about the changes conservatives want, and I suspect congressional Republicans know that. After all, whom would they rather work with, Mr. Trump or Mr. Pence?

If, in fact, Mr. Trump is, one way or another, removed from office, or takes the hint and resigns, maybe he will prove to be an effective bulldog for conservative causes from the sidelines. Perhaps conservatives will make him a martyr, a victim of the excesses of liberalism and a dishonest media.

Or they can let him fade away as a historical embarrassment like Warren Harding or Richard Nixon. Even if Mr. Trump goes down, the war for the soul of America will continue.

Hannity for hours every night...that makes my head hurt.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 568
  • Created
  • Last Reply

I don't believe Hannity will be helpful unless maybe Trump turns on him and tweets something nasty about  his sexual prowess. He's been such a cheerleader for Trump he'd have to think about issuing some uncomfortable mea culpas if he suddenly did a 180 and started advocating for impeachment. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Off topic: I also had a phase of loving the titanic at 6 years old even though it went completely over my head so I wonder if it's some type of right of passage :lol:

I also don't know if we talked about this but it is obvious that Trump cognitive ability is decling. This happened a few days ago

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

"Trump is enthusiastic to learn a political term that’s been in use for at least 127 years"

Spoiler

During Fourth of July celebrations at the White House on Tuesday, President Trump made a surprising revelation: He’d never heard the expression “Second Lady,” referring to the wife of the vice president.

“There is one military family here today I am especially excited to recognize,” Trump said — “our great vice president, Mike Pence, and our second lady — never heard that term before, but that’s what they say — and she is some lady, that I can tell you — of the United States, Karen Pence, are here along with their son, Marine 1st Lt. Michael Pence.”

By now, we should not be terribly surprised when it turns out that Trump is unfamiliar with some aspects of Washington decorum. After all, Trump ran proudly on his outsider status, and there are some things with which only insiders are likely to be familiar.

The term “second lady,” though, is not one of them.

William Safire, who for years evaluated language for the New York Times, once wrote a book titled “Safire’s Political Dictionary.” In it, he suggested that the use of “second lady” began in the 1980s, only to be dropped in the 1990s. As it turns out, on this one, Safire was off by a century.

Google’s Ngram (pronounced “en-gram”) tool, which shows the use of words and phrases in books over the past 220 years or so, indicates that use of the  phrase “Second Lady” surged a bit in the 1860s, but really came into force in 1892 or so, spiking through the turn of the 20th century.

...

It’s possible in the abstract that Google’s Ngram is picking up usages besides a reference to the vice president’s wife. But we know that it was used in that context at that time, thanks to a mention in The Washington Post.

On Jan. 9, 1890, we wrote about Anna Street Morton, the wife of Vice President Levi Morton, who was receiving visitors at the vice president’s residence.

“It seems as if every one in town who ever calls was out yesterday taking advantage of the fine weather,” we wrote, “and the first opportunity of greeting the second lady of the land in her own house.”

...

This usage predates the tenure of Jennie Tuttle Hobart as second lady by seven years. Hobart is often credited with having coined the phrase, thanks in part, no doubt, to having written a book in 1933 titled “Second Lady.”

The Post’s usage suggests that, as the Ngram graph would suggest, the use of “second lady” was not unfamiliar to readers of the newspaper. Over the next few years, usage in the Times makes clear that the term was a common one.

In 1913, the Times asked the second lady her opinion on women’s suffrage. (Lois Kimsey Marshall, wife of Thomas Marshall, suggested that marching for suffrage was “silly” and that women should instead “bring about dress reforms and settle the domestic problem” before trying to “handle men’s affairs.”)

...

In 1927, Caro Dawes (wife of Vice President Charles Dawes) was profiled by the Times under the headline “‘Second Lady of Land’ Makes Home a Career.”

...

This was about two decades before Donald Trump was born.

While the term may have been a new one to Trump, it clearly wasn’t to whoever designed the White House’s website. As New York magazine noted, Karen Pence is described there as being “Second Lady of the United States” — no fewer than three times.

...

I guess we could stop cataloging what he doesn't know, since that is a huge body of information.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I wonder if that is evidence that his vocabulary is on the decline. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

"Trump’s tweets have suddenly grown a lot more dangerous"

Spoiler

The Los Angeles Times reports Wednesday morning that foreign policy experts are worried that President Trump could be caught flat-footed at his upcoming meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg on Friday. Even Trump’s aides acknowledge the president’s unwillingness to read the briefings they have compiled about his cunning Russian counterpart.

As a result, they have opted for their best chance of penetrating the president’s consciousness: “a list of tweet-length sentences that summarize the main points Trump could bring up with Putin.”

The Twitter president, known for favoring the medium as the best way of reaching his base, taunting his adversaries and boosting his self-esteem, is apparently only able to conceptualize the world’s most explosive geopolitical conflicts in 140 characters.

Trump and his allies have long portrayed his Twitter habit as a plus, a way of citizens gaining an unvarnished view into the president’s methods for making America great again. Even when his tweets are ugly or violent or abusive, his aides rationalize his conduct as necessary to defend himself against perceived enemies. When he tweeted nonsense, such as the notorious “covfefe” tweet, his spokesman claimed his jumble of letters had a secret meaning to which a small circle of people were privy.

But the time for rationalizations and jokes should have been over well before Jan. 20. As his presidency enters its sixth month, it has become terrifyingly clear that Trump’s Twitter habit is no longer an “outsider president” curiosity, fodder for Internet memes, or even an occasion for his fellow Republicans to offer tepid critiques of Trump’s lack of dignity. It’s long, long past time for more Republicans to acknowledge that his use of Twitter could well pose a serious danger to the world, and to think seriously about what can be done about it.

The recent alarming escalation in North Korea’s nuclear ambitions presents perhaps the most hazardous Twitter minefield. On Tuesday, the regime tested an intercontinental ballistic missile, marking “a long-sought milestone, demonstrating a capability of striking targets thousands of miles from its coast,” Joby Warrick writes in The Post. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who is known for his own unhinged provocations, called the launch a “gift for the American bastards” on July Fourth.

North Korea experts fear Trump taking Kim’s bait — something that is not beyond the realm of possibility, given his notoriously thin skin. Robert Kelly, an expert on North Korea at Pusan National University in South Korea, tells the Guardian, “It would help if Trump backed away a little. His childish, personalized tweets bring the US down to the level of the North Koreans.”

But the tweets could provoke more than just propaganda wars — impetuous tweets could trigger something far worse. As Motoko Rich writes in the New York Times:

What makes the situation so dangerous is how easy it would be for either side to take action that leads the other to conclude an all-out war is imminent and escalate the battle. The United States and South Korea could hit targets besides artillery, including supply lines and communication facilities, for example. The North could send tanks and troops across the border and drop special forces into the South’s ports.

Especially perilous would be any hint that the United States and South Korea were preparing a “decapitation” strike against the North Korean leadership, which could lead a desperate Mr. Kim to turn to nuclear or biochemical weapons.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has warned that a North Korean attack on South Korea could be “catastrophic” and “probably the worst kind of fighting in most people’s lifetimes.”

Trump’s Twitter habit has long been an urgent problem, but it is even more so now. Over the course of his short presidency, Trump’s tweets have been called a “laughing stock;” “embarrassing,” “shameful” and “disgusting;” “shocking;” and “sexist.” But rather than rein in Trump’s Twitter usage, those closest to the president seem to be egging it on.

On “Fox & Friends” this week, after Trump’s tweets attacked the co-hosts of “Morning Joe” and depicted him punching a CNN logo, Kellyanne Conway derided the media for its coverage of the them. She accused reporters of “trying to interfere with the president communicating directly through his very powerful social media network channels.” White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders has depicted Trump’s tweets as a necessary antidote to criticism of him, insisting that Trump “is a president who fights fire with fire and certainly will not be allowed to be bullied by liberal media or liberal elites in Hollywood or anywhere else.”

But we’re no longer talking about Trump merely feuding with networks and media personalities. We’re talking about the possibility of escalating crises involving North Korea, Russia, China, Iran or Syria. The notion that Trump’s tweets are justifiable on the grounds that he is “fighting back” are only more worrisome in this international context. The possibilities for escalating incendiary situations seem far too ominous to leave to chance — or to Trump.

This op-ed says it well. It's not funny anymore, it's scary and serious.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

With friends like these...

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This opinion piece talks about another danger in Agent Orange's "voter fraud" commission's requests: "Trump’s voter data request poses an unnoticed danger — to national security"

Spoiler

The Trump administration’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity is asking states for voter-registration data from as far back as 2006. This would include names, dates of birth, voting histories, party registrations and the last four digits of voters’ Social Security numbers. The request has engendered controversy, to put it mildly, including refusals by many states and a caustic presidential tweet.

But whatever the political, legal and constitutional issues raised by this data request, one issue has barely been part of the public discussion: national security. If this sensitive data is to be collected and aggregated by the federal government, then the administration should honor its own recent cybersecurity executive order and ensure that the data is not stolen by hackers or insiders.

We know that voting information has been the target of hackers. News reports indicate that election-related systems in as many as 39 states were penetrated, focusing on campaign finance, registration and even personal data of the type being sought by the election integrity commission. Ironically, although many of these individual databases are vulnerable, there is some protection in the fact that U.S. voting systems are distributed among thousands of jurisdictions. As data-security experts will tell you, widespread distribution of individual data elements in multiple separate repositories is one way to reduce the vulnerability of the overall database.

That’s why the commission’s call to assemble all this voter data in federal hands raises the question: What is the plan to protect it? We know that a database of personal information from all voting Americans would be attractive not only to adversaries seeking to affect voting but to criminals who could use the identifying information as a wedge into identity theft. We also know that foreign intelligence agencies seek large databases on Americans for intelligence and counterintelligence purposes. That is why the theft of more than 20 million personnel files from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and the hacking of more than half a billion Yahoo accounts were such troubling incidents.

Congress and the states need to be advised on how any data would be housed and where. Would it be encrypted? Who would have administrative access to the data, and what restrictions would be placed on its use? Would those granted access be subject to security background investigations, and would their behavior be supervised to prevent the kind of insider theft that we saw with Edward Snowden or others who have released or sold sensitive data? What kinds of audit procedures would be in place? Finally, can the security risk of assembling so much tempting data in one place be mitigated by reducing and anonymizing the individual voter information being sought?

In May, President Trump signed the executive order on cybersecurity to instill tough security in federal offices that handle critical government data. That order is a commendable initiative to hold officials accountable for safeguarding sensitive personal information, such as voter information. The president’s election integrity commission should live up to the president’s own directive.

I'm sure Kobach and team couldn't care less about data security.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

He goes on an international "diplomacy" trip in which he is going to meet in person with Putin. He:

- Expresses publicly that maybe Russia wasn't the one that meddled in out election

- Speaks negatively about our mainstream media

- Speaks negatively about our intelligence community

- Speaks negatively about our previous President

Ummm, with friends like this, who needs enemies?

Embarrassing.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

"Donald Trump, in Poland, Urges West to ‘Defend Our Civilization’"

Spoiler

WARSAW — President Trump signaled a tougher line against Russia on Thursday, a day before his first face-to-face meeting with its president, Vladimir V. Putin — but he still refused to concede that Moscow was solely responsible for interference in the 2016 election.

Mr. Trump, delivering a stark message to a friendly Polish crowd before a two-day summit meeting of Group of 20 leaders, cast the West’s battle against “radical Islamic terrorism” as a way to protect “our civilization and our way of life.” He portrayed his domestic agenda as an equally serious challenge to powerful, entrenched bureaucracies in the United States and Europe.

“I am here today not just to visit an old ally, but to hold it up as an example for others who seek freedom and who wish to summon the courage and the will to defend our civilization,” Mr. Trump said in a speech in Krasinski Square, where a monument commemorates the 1944 Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis.

“The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive,” he said, employing the same life-or-death language as in his inauguration speech, which promised a war against the “American carnage” of urban crime. “Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?”

Mr. Trump also denounced “the steady creep of government bureaucracy that drains the vitality and wealth of the people,” citing the value of individual freedom and sovereignty, in front of an audience that was composed in part of loyalists bused in for the occasion.

“Poland will prevail,” he said, citing the country’s centuries-long history of endurance in the face of invasion, partition, Nazi occupation and communist domination. “Poland will always prevail.”

Mr. Trump had harsh words for North Korea after its recent test of a new long-range missile, but he refused to say during a short news conference with the Polish president, Andrejz Duda, what steps he would take to punish Pyongyang.

He said earlier on Thursday that he was weighing “some pretty severe things” to respond to the North Korean nuclear threat, and he called on all nations to confront what he called the “global threat” from Pyongyang.

“We’ll see what happens — I don’t like to talk about what we have planned — but I have some pretty severe things that we’re thinking about,” Mr. Trump said at the news conference. “They are behaving in a very, very serious manner, and something will have to be done about it.”

Mr. Trump — who is under pressure to confront Mr. Putin on his attempts to sway the election — delivered a mixed message on Russia, one tailored for his Polish audience, the other straight out of his Putin playbook.

The president, acknowledging Polish concerns about Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, said, “We are working with Poland” to deal with “Russia’s destabilizing behavior.”

But he said he was still not entirely convinced that Russia was solely responsible for interference in the 2016 election, breaking with American intelligence agencies that have agreed that the efforts emanated from Moscow and were directed by Mr. Putin.

“I think it was Russia, and it could have been other people in other countries,” Mr. Trump said when asked for a yes-or-no answer to the question about Russian meddling. “Nobody really knows for sure.”

Mr. Trump also came with an announcement intended to emphasize his commitment to defending Poland against aggression — possibly from Russia — and to helping American workers. Mr. Duda’s government has agreed to buy the Patriot missile defense system from the United States, a senior administration official said.

Mr. Trump emerged from a Marriott in Warsaw on Thursday a little after 9:15 a.m., his sprawling motorcade of flag-flapping black sedans, police escorts and shuttle buses riding along the Vistula River to a back entrance to the presidential palace. He was greeted by Mr. Duda, and disappeared for closed-door meetings after a session with photographers, emerging only for the news conference.

Unlike in Hamburg, Germany, the site of the G-20 meeting, no major protests were expected in Warsaw, but there were signs of dissent. Wednesday night, around the time Air Force One arrived in Warsaw, environmental protesters projected a message on the side of the Palace of Culture and Science, reading “No Trump, Yes Paris,” a dig at Washington’s plan to withdraw from the Paris climate accord.

And Michael Schudrich, Poland’s chief rabbi, and other Jewish leaders issued a statement Thursday morning that was critical of the White House’s decision not to visit a monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943.

Every American president and vice president who has visited Warsaw since the fall of communism in 1989 has visited the monument. “We deeply regret that President Donald Trump, though speaking in public barely a mile away from the monument, chose to break with that laudable tradition, alongside so many other ones,” the statement read. “We trust that this slight does not reflect the attitudes and feelings of the American people.”

But Mr. Trump’s appearance in a setting that symbolizes the Polish people’s resistance to tyranny was well received, as was his message linking the fight against the Islamic State to Poland’s resistance of German invasion and occupation from 1939 to 1945.

“We must stand united against these shared enemies to strip them of their territory, their funding, their networks and any form of ideological support,” Mr. Trump said. “While we will always welcome new citizens who share our values and love our people, our borders will always be closed to terrorism and extremism.”

The pro-Duda crowd at Krasinski Square, in which many waved American and Polish flags, serenaded reporters from both countries with periodic chants of “fake news.”

That came about an hour after Mr. Trump tag-teamed with Mr. Duda in a transnational denunciation of journalists who write negative stories about them.

The American president slammed CNN and defended what he suggested was a lighthearted tweet of a video depicting him body-slamming a figure whose head was replaced by the CNN logo.

What made Mr. Trump’s sermon against the mainstream news media different this time was that Mr. Duda’s center-right party, Law and Justice, proposed restricting the media’s access to the Parliament last year. The government backed down after street protests.

“They have been fake news for a long time,” Mr. Trump said of CNN when asked about the tweet, adding that the network had been covering him in “a dishonest way.”

“We don’t want fake news,” he added, as Mr. Duda nodded vigorously in agreement.

Mr. Duda, responding to an American reporter’s question about his own actions toward the news media, blamed Polish journalists for intentionally distorting his record and for failing to include his positions in articles critical of his government.

After chastising CNN — a go-to move on both sides of the Atlantic — Mr. Trump went after NBC, his former employer. “NBC is nearly as bad, despite the fact that I made them a lot of money on ‘The Apprentice,’ ” he said.

Krasinski Square, dominated by a monument to the 1944 uprising, is considerably smaller than Zamkowy Square, outside the Royal Palace, where President Barack Obama spoke in 2014.

Worried that crowds would not show up on Thursday — Mr. Trump is less popular in Poland’s liberal capital than in the conservative countryside — the authorities chose a smaller, though still symbolically rich, site. The governing party also bused in supporters from the countryside to ensure a large crowd.

They had to bus in supporters to listen to the tangerine toddler in Poland. To quote twitler: SAD!

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Bwa-haha!

Poland's First Lady pulls a Macron-move on the presidunce! :laughing-rofl:

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If you want to see his twisting and turning and spinning around the interference in the election, watch the video linked in this tweet.

 

In summary: it could have been Russia but he doesn't think so, it might be other countries, it's Obama's fault, and the intelligence agencies - 14 of them, (he doesn't think there are that many) they had to retract, at most there are four and they got it wrong. :pb_rollseyes:

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@fraurosena -- His dumbassery (is that a word?) knows no bounds, does it?

"Trump Organization renews rights to TrumpTowerMoscow.com"

Spoiler

The Trump Organization has renewed its claim on more than 1,000 of the web domains registered by its general counsel, including some politically sensitive websites such as TrumpRussia.com and TrumpTowerMoscow.com.

The company, which President Donald Trump’s two adult sons are managing while he serves in the White House but from which he has not divested, has reserved thousands of web domains associated with the Trump name and its various properties.

POLITICO recently published a searchable database of hundreds of those URLs, based on publicly available internet directory records on the domain registration database website WhoIs.com.

Some of the domains reference the company’s various existing business ventures, such as its golf courses and hotels, while others describe products or properties the Trump Organization has yet to develop, including TrumpTowerLondon.com.

The Trump Organization’s claim on hundreds of the web domains was set to expire at the end of June or the start of July. Among some of the websites the company re-registered last Wednesday: some URLs referencing Donald Trump poker, the political site ElectTrump.com and the two domains referencing potential business ventures in Russia.

This is the first time the company has renewed the Russia domains since Trump entered the White House. The Trump Organization says it will not pursue any new foreign business deals while Trump is in the White House, and the president has repeatedly denied that he has any inappropriate business entanglements in Russia, but given that a special prosecutor is currently investigating the Trump campaign’s ties to the country, it’s nonetheless politically sensitive.

According to experts, it’s common for large companies to buy up hundreds or even thousands of web domains, often to claim URLs for products they think they may want to develop in the future.

Businesses often also register potentially embarrassing web domains defensively to prevent competitors or critics from taking them first. Last week, the Trump Organization renewed several URLs that seem to fall into that category, like DonaldTrumpSucks.com.

That last URL should be aliased to this thread.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Color me unsurprised: "White House gender pay gap more than triples under Trump"

Spoiler

...

The pay gap between male and female White House staffers has more than tripled in the first year of the Trump administration, according to an analysis by economist Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

The median female White House employee is drawing a salary of $72,650 in 2017, compared to the median male salary of $115,000. “The typical female staffer in Trump's White House earns 63.2 cents per $1 earned by a typical male staffer,” Perry writes.

The 37 percent gender pay gap in President Trump's White House is more than double the 17 percent gender pay gap nationally. According to the Pew Research center, the Trump White House gender gap is wider than the national gender pay gap stood in 1980.

Other news outlets have reported smaller Trump White House pay gaps. But those outlets calculated the pay gap using average, rather than median salaries. Averages are often skewed by outliers at the high and low ends of the income spectrum, making them less reliable for understanding what a “typical” worker makes.

“To be as statistically accurate as possible, almost all reports on pay differences by gender compare median wages, income, or salaries and not differences in average (mean) pay,” Perry writes.

Trump's gender pay gap is also up sharply from the 11 percent gender pay gap in the last year of the Obama White House, according to Perry's calculations. In President Barack Obama's first year, the gender pay gap was about 16 percent, according to an earlier Wonkblog analysis. It peaked at 18 percent in 2014.

The current Trump pay gap is considerably higher than the pay gap observed in any White House going back to 2003, according to an earlier Wonkblog analysis.

Perry's 2017 analysis excludes three staffers, including the president's daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner, who are not being paid for their work at the White House.

In the White House and at the national level, much of the gender pay gap is due to the types of jobs men and women tend to be hired for: Men tend to occupy higher-paying roles, while women tend to occupy lower-paying ones. This has led some conservative commentators to declare that the gender wage gap is a myth.

Perry notes that the highest-paid staffers in the Trump White House are primarily men: Nearly 74 percent of the top 23 staffers are male. By contrast, in the Obama White House of 2015 only 52 percent of the highest-paid staffers were men.

As the Economic Policy Institute points out in its gender wage gap primer, “gender discrimination doesn’t happen only in the pay-setting practices of employers. ... A woman’s occupational choice is the culmination of years of education, guidance by mentors, expectations of parents and other influential adults, hiring practices of firms, and widespread norms and expectations about work/family balance held by employers, co-workers, and society.”

Any of those steps can be shaped by gender discrimination, explicit or otherwise. The cumulative effect of that discrimination can lead to women being selected into lower-paying positions than men.

Obama was vocal about the gender wage gap during his presidency. He signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which made it easier for employers to be sued over wage discrimination. He also announced new rules last year requiring large companies to report salary data by gender and ethnicity.

Trump, by contrast, has rolled back Obama-era fair pay regulations but has otherwise not made the issue a focus of his presidency. Ivanka Trump, who declined pay for her work in the White House, has been vocal about women's and family issues.

“Women deserve equal pay for equal work,” she said on Twitter earlier this year. “We must work to close the gender pay gap!”

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

21 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Color me unsurprised: "White House gender pay gap more than triples under Trump"

  Hide contents

...

The pay gap between male and female White House staffers has more than tripled in the first year of the Trump administration, according to an analysis by economist Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

The median female White House employee is drawing a salary of $72,650 in 2017, compared to the median male salary of $115,000. “The typical female staffer in Trump's White House earns 63.2 cents per $1 earned by a typical male staffer,” Perry writes.

The 37 percent gender pay gap in President Trump's White House is more than double the 17 percent gender pay gap nationally. According to the Pew Research center, the Trump White House gender gap is wider than the national gender pay gap stood in 1980.

Other news outlets have reported smaller Trump White House pay gaps. But those outlets calculated the pay gap using average, rather than median salaries. Averages are often skewed by outliers at the high and low ends of the income spectrum, making them less reliable for understanding what a “typical” worker makes.

“To be as statistically accurate as possible, almost all reports on pay differences by gender compare median wages, income, or salaries and not differences in average (mean) pay,” Perry writes.

Trump's gender pay gap is also up sharply from the 11 percent gender pay gap in the last year of the Obama White House, according to Perry's calculations. In President Barack Obama's first year, the gender pay gap was about 16 percent, according to an earlier Wonkblog analysis. It peaked at 18 percent in 2014.

The current Trump pay gap is considerably higher than the pay gap observed in any White House going back to 2003, according to an earlier Wonkblog analysis.

Perry's 2017 analysis excludes three staffers, including the president's daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner, who are not being paid for their work at the White House.

In the White House and at the national level, much of the gender pay gap is due to the types of jobs men and women tend to be hired for: Men tend to occupy higher-paying roles, while women tend to occupy lower-paying ones. This has led some conservative commentators to declare that the gender wage gap is a myth.

Perry notes that the highest-paid staffers in the Trump White House are primarily men: Nearly 74 percent of the top 23 staffers are male. By contrast, in the Obama White House of 2015 only 52 percent of the highest-paid staffers were men.

As the Economic Policy Institute points out in its gender wage gap primer, “gender discrimination doesn’t happen only in the pay-setting practices of employers. ... A woman’s occupational choice is the culmination of years of education, guidance by mentors, expectations of parents and other influential adults, hiring practices of firms, and widespread norms and expectations about work/family balance held by employers, co-workers, and society.”

Any of those steps can be shaped by gender discrimination, explicit or otherwise. The cumulative effect of that discrimination can lead to women being selected into lower-paying positions than men.

Obama was vocal about the gender wage gap during his presidency. He signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which made it easier for employers to be sued over wage discrimination. He also announced new rules last year requiring large companies to report salary data by gender and ethnicity.

Trump, by contrast, has rolled back Obama-era fair pay regulations but has otherwise not made the issue a focus of his presidency. Ivanka Trump, who declined pay for her work in the White House, has been vocal about women's and family issues.

“Women deserve equal pay for equal work,” she said on Twitter earlier this year. “We must work to close the gender pay gap!”

 

It always amazes me that there are still women willing to work* for this administration, especially if it's for comparitively little pay. Why? Why demean yourself? Why be willing to be associated with this misogynistic crew? 

:dontgetit:

 

*I'm referring to new employees of course, not women already working there - I realize they could just be victims of circumstance.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

22 hours ago, JMarie said:

I could care less if a salesperson doesn't wish me a Merry Christmas while handing me my change and purchase.  Many times, they don't say anything at all.  Won't make me want to boycott their store.

It's just such an asinine thing to complain about.  I don't get it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

21 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Trump is enthusiastic to learn a political term that’s been in use for at least 127 years"

I guess we could stop cataloging what he doesn't know, since that is a huge body of information.

TT also decided to educate the public about Lincoln being a Republican "Who knew"? he said. Add that to "Health care is complicated. Who knew"?. Umm hey orange jack ass... who knew? EVERYBODY except you.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

For years I always thought "Happy Holidays" was short for "Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!" Silly me. I'm Christian, and I am not offended in the least by someone wishing me, "Happy Holidays."  

I am offended by tax cuts for the wealthy, doing away with environmental regulations that protect our air and water, selling our national park lands to corporations, denying healthcare to millions, failing to provide for the elderly and veterans, allowing churches to become PACs yet retain their tax-exempt status, appointing incompetent, non-qualified persons to high posts in government, a presidunce who is a daily embarrassment to the Office and to this nation. . . need I continue? The greeting, "Happy Holidays" is so insignificant in light of the issues facing America, only a complete dunce would even mention it.  Oh wait. . .

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

29 minutes ago, Childless said:

It's just such an asinine thing to complain about.  I don't get it.

 The religious "We're persecuted!" industry considers it to be of prime importance.  Their thing is that because they're persecuted, they deserve more rights to persecute people godless heathens and especially, gay people.   

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The real question...

 

... will never be truthfully answered by this presidunce. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I had to bite my tongue earlier in front of my mom.  She had the TV on the local ABC station (thankfully she and dad do not watch Faux).  Anyways they were wondering about what Agent Orange would say when he finally meets Putin and I almost blurted out a crude remark that he probably wouldn't say anything because he'd be too busy performing oral stimulation of Putin's reproductive organ.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@47of74 -- yeah, I was thinking the same thing. I wonder if Spicey will carry kneepads for Agent Orange.

"Donnie and Vlad: A Love Story"

Spoiler

Like most great romances, theirs borrows from others.

It’s “Sleepless in Seattle,” except they’re both blonds — sort of. Their feelings bloom long before they ever meet. They communicate across time zones, in words and wishes rather than caresses. Can reality match giddy expectation? The answer comes Friday, when they gaze into each other’s eyes for the first time.

It’s “Romeo and Juliet.” Their clans have long feuded, but they won’t be denied. Vladimir, Vladimir, wherefore art thou, Vladimir? In Hamburg, Germany, looking past the duller leaders of lesser countries to his chosen one.

You can regard the relationship of Putin and Donald Trump as purely odd and possibly corrupt, or you can see in it and in them a classic tale of affections strangled and at times set free. It’s irrepressible, international — part “Clueless,” part “Casablanca.” They have gone through all the usual phases of courtship. They have plumbed all the customary emotions.

At least Trump has. To be brutally honest and risk bruising his quivering heart, this has been a lopsided affair, unless you count Putin’s meddling in the 2016 election as the purest possible expression of ardor and fidelity, which I suppose you can.

When did love begin to take root?

As far back as a decade ago, Putin caught Trump’s eye, and Trump sent him a signal, courtesy of a little birdie named Larry King. “Whether you like him or don’t,” he told King on CNN in 2007, “he’s doing a great job in rebuilding the image of Russia and also rebuilding Russia, period.”

Trump liked him all right and stopped playing coy in 2013, before he traveled to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant there. “Do you think Putin will be going?” Trump tweeted, and you could picture him poised blushingly over his keypad, like a schoolgirl scribbling in her diary. “If so, will he become my new best friend?”

After the event, he did what all freshly besotted lovers do: crowed to the world about the bliss that the two of them had known.

“Putin even sent me a present, a beautiful present,” he said early the next year, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, but he failed to describe the token. Lovers have their confidences, and must hold tight to them.

Trump enveloped the two of them in mystery, creating confusion about what was really going on. Apparently referring to that Miss Universe moment, Trump told journalists, “I was in Moscow recently, and I spoke, indirectly and directly, with President Putin.”

So they were unambiguously and ambiguously involved. “We were stable mates,” he said of another time that they kind of, but not really, crossed paths, each with a separate segment on the same “60 Minutes,” two wild horses in one media corral.

But how Trump felt about Putin was no secret. He routinely praised Putin’s muscular will. He repeatedly defended Putin’s honor, taking umbrage at talk of Putin’s Russia as a place where naysaying journalists and political opponents wound up dead.

“I think our country does plenty of killing also,” he told Joe Scarborough on “Morning Joe.”

This was when Barack Obama was still in the White House, and the fact that he was Putin’s official counterpart, with more formal claim to the Russian leader’s time and attention, drove Trump a little mad. Jealousy is a tangerine-topped monster, and Trump repeatedly insisted that he’d be better with and for Putin, that Obama and Putin even looked wrong together.

“Really bad body language,” Trump tweeted at one point. And later, this, in an interview with Anderson Cooper: “He has no respect for Obama.” The proof, Trump added, was Edward Snowden’s safe harbor in Russia. “If I’m president, Putin says, ‘Hey, boom, you’re gone.’ I guarantee you this.” Love, alas, is as bad at predictions as it is blind.

Trump had a way of hauling Putin into unrelated conversations, just to insist that Putin cared only for him. He volunteered that while Marco Rubio, one of his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, was a dreamboat to some, he’d be a leaky dinghy to Putin.

“Can you imagine Putin sitting there waiting for a meeting and Rubio walks in and he’s totally drenched?” Trump said in the winter of 2016. “I’ve never seen a human being sweat like this man sweats.” Take me, Vlad. I don’t sweat. I glow.

Trump grew frisky. “Russia is like, I mean, they’re really hot stuff,” he blurted, and it was obvious that he was thinking of Putin, whom he’d mentioned a moment earlier.

Trump grew insecure. Not once and not twice but more than eight times he bragged that Putin had called him “brilliant” or “a genius,” when there was in fact much dispute about that. By some translations, Putin merely described him as “colorful,” and could well have been appraising nothing more than his vaguely orange hue.

Is it any wonder that Trump craved a grand gesture for all the world to behold? He publicly beseeched Russia to ferret out and expose “the 30,000 emails that are missing” from a personal server that Hillary Clinton used as secretary of state. If I mean anything at all to you, Vlad, you’ll do it.

Now, at long last, they come face to face, and while it’s uncertain what Trump will say, it’s clear what Trump has done: fashioned himself in the swaggering, blustering image of his beloved. It’s “Grease.” And it’s gross.

Some of the pictures in the article are too much...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Good gravy: "Would the Trump administration block a merger just to punish CNN?"

Spoiler

Buried in a New York Times profile of CNN chief Jeff Zucker was a brief comment from an unnamed official that could make the Trump administration’s already rough political road that much rockier.

“White House advisers have discussed a potential point of leverage over their adversary” CNN, the official told the Times’s Michael Grynbaum: “a pending merger between CNN’s parent company, Time Warner, and AT&T.”

There’s a threat implicit in that comment. CNN has emerged as the administration’s favorite media punching bag, and if it doesn’t start producing Trump-friendlier reporting, its parent company’s business plans might suffer.

Using the government’s antitrust powers against political opponents has been attempted by a president before, and it would be hard to prove that politics drove the final decision on whether Time Warner and AT&T should merge. But, that said, the administration is in a bind: If it does decide to contest the merger, its motivation for doing so will be suspect.

President Trump’s leverage over the AT&T-Time Warner proposal comes via the Justice Department, which is evaluating the merger on antitrust grounds. In the past, the department has insisted that parties to a merger include certain agreements to prevent anti-competitive behavior, said Steven Salop, a law professor at Georgetown University. For example, Salop said, the Comcast-NBC merger approved in 2011 included stipulations that Comcast could not withhold NBC content from its competitors, nor could it threaten NBC’s competitors with access to its distribution network. The final judgment in that case ran 33 pages.

The Justice Department can also sue to prevent a merger from being completed, as it did in 2016 to block the merger of health-care giants Humana and Aetna. This is the threat that looms over AT&T and Time Warner — a threat that looms over nearly any merger at this scale. What’s different is the idea that the threat might stem from the president’s anger at a Time Warner subsidiary.

“This idea that we would somehow punish CNN for political reasons by blocking a merger is just … it would be highly unusual and something that would be very hard to contemplate that it would happen,” said Columbia Law School professor Anu Bradford. But her bigger concern was about the precedent that would be set.

“The main thing that the U.S. has pronounced is that countries’ antitrust laws need to be equal in ways that are consistent with economic analysis,” Bradford said. Determining antitrust violations on the basis of political whims would undercut decades of American insistence on that principle, she said. The long-term danger is to U.S. companies, which might find themselves the targets of political retribution in other countries that then block international merger attempts.

In February, Salop and co-author Carl Shapiro wrote an analysis of antitrust policies under Trump for an industry magazine. In it, they contemplated the exact scenario presented by that unnamed White House source — precisely because it’s something that Trump had threatened on the campaign trail. Ultimately, they echoed Bradford’s concern.

“We certainly hope that the Trump administration (or any other administration) avoids the use of antitrust as a tool for political leverage or retribution, or even permits any appearance or hint of such an abuse of the rule of law in antitrust,” Salop and Shaprio wrote. “We fear that if the Trump administration does act in that manner, doing so would seriously undermine the legitimacy of U.S. antitrust enforcement. That would harm American antitrust institutions. In addition, it would weaken the ability of the United States to convince foreign jurisdictions to adopt the U.S. approach to antitrust.”

Damage to institutions aside, could Trump intervene to punish Time Warner?

“The [Department of Justice] and its assistant attorney general must follow the law,” Bradford said in an email, “and the U.S. antitrust laws do not allow for blocking the merger for political reasons — such as to pursue revenge against a news media organization. However, it us unlikely that the [department] would concede that their action was politically motivated, and it would be harder to claim illegality if they brought the case formally relying on some economic argument (even if the true motivation was different).” In other words: Justice probably would figure out an economic reason to object to the merger — just as Attorney General Jeff Sessions once cobbled together a rationale that provided cover for Trump to fire the director of the FBI.

And that’s the political problem for the White House: How do we know that’s not what they’re doing anyway? Salop pointed to several existing objections to the proposed merger, including from key Democrats and Consumers Union. There are any number of reasons that could be used to support a decision by the administration to block the merger, but by dangling the idea that one motive might be political, all possible motives come under suspicion.

That said, any attempt by the administration to block the merger would have to be approved by the courts. You may have noticed above that Justice’s objection to the Aetna-Humana merger took the form of a lawsuit; it wasn’t until this year that a court agreed to intervene. So an attempt by Trump’s administration to block Time Warner-AT&T would need at least enough rationalization to persuade a judge.

As mentioned above, a president has tried to use the review process for political purposes before, and the name of the president who did so will not surprise you. Salop and Shapiro wrote about it in their February analysis:

[M]ost telling was the Nixon administration’s delaying a threatened lawsuit against the three prominent TV networks as a way of obtaining more favorable news coverage of the administration. Apparently, the DOJ was considering an antitrust case against the networks involving ownership of “prime-time” programming. As reported by The Washington Post in 1997 when Nixon White House tapes relating to this matter were released, the tape transcript indicated that, “Nixon decided to have [Attorney General] Mitchell ‘hold it for a while, because [Nixon was] trying to get something out of the networks.’” As the President himself declared in the tape, “We don’t give a goddam about the economic gain. Our game here is solely political. . . . As far as screwing them is concerned, I’m very glad to do it.”

Still, that this was a point of concern at this moment was surprising to Bradford.

“This is something that I had not even thought about that there would be a question like this,” she said. “But every day is a new day.”

Yeah, I can see the orange manbaby playing games to upset CNN.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

"How to handle an unhinged president"

Spoiler

It is sometimes argued that the media should spend less time on President Trump’s transgressive tweets in order to devote more attention to real issues, such as North Korea. In fact, it is necessary to focus on Trump’s tweets precisely because they shed light on the mind that is doing the deciding on North Korea. It is a distasteful exercise. But we cannot look away. We need to know the state of mind we’re dealing with.

Trump’s tweets reveal a leader who is compulsive, abusive and easily triggered. Trump describes all this as “modern day presidential.” Lincoln had his Gettysburg Address. Franklin Roosevelt had his Four Freedoms. But modern schoolchildren will learn the Mika bloody face-lift tweet.

What we are witnessing is not a new age in presidential communications. It is an ongoing public breakdown. And the question naturally arises: Is this the result of mental dysfunction?

Most psychiatrists are (understandably) uncomfortable with diagnosing from a distance. And the particular diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder requires significant impairment — which is a hard case to make of a figure at the pinnacle of American politics.

And yet. There are judgments that must be made about the fitness of leaders. Citizens are under no ethical obligation to be silent when they see serious dysfunction. The challenge here is not merely the trashing of political norms. The main problem is the possibility that America has an unbalanced president during a period of high-stakes global testing. This is not a clinical diagnosis. It is a civic and political judgment, made necessary by the president’s own words and acts. Trump holds a job that requires, above all else, the ability to unite and steady the nation in a time of crisis. There is no reason to believe he can play that role.

Much of the prudence and courage required to confront this problem will need to come from Republicans and conservatives. Where to start? How about refusing to play down revolting lunacy?

It is not merely an “occasional ad hominem” for a president to employ the tremendous power of his office to target individual American citizens who oppose him. It is an abuse of power.

It is not merely “uncouth” for a president to tolerate, even to hint support for, violence against political opponents (“I’d like to punch him in the face”). It creates an atmosphere of intimidation.

It is not merely “exaggeration” for a president to issue a series of eye-stretching lies, including that his predecessor spied on him and that a popular-vote victory was denied to him by widespread electoral fraud. It indicates either a deep cynicism or a tenuous connection to reality.

It is not being “coarse” for a president to engage in consistent misogyny. It is a sign of a disturbing and deep-seated dehumanization of women.

Many conservatives would respond to this critique by saying, “At least he fights!” The question is: For what? Trump evinces no strong or consistent policy views. He fights for himself — for admiration and adulation — which is the only cause his extreme narcissism allows.

Many conservatives would also respond by saying, “At least he does conservative things!” But if health care is any indication, Trump lacks conviction, knowledge and the ability to persuade. Other than that, he is Ronald Reagan incarnate.

Trump’s conservative defenders are attempting something extraordinary: to politically normalize abnormal psychology. Their sycophancy enables a sickness.

What next? Applying the 25th Amendment (containing the procedure to remove an unfit president from office) is a practical impossibility, since it involves the Cabinet turning against the president. But House and Senate Republicans should be prepared to aggressively challenge unbalanced or unhinged presidential language and decisions, rather than trying to dismiss them as simply a “distraction.”

And responsible officials in the executive branch — particularly at the State, Defense and Justice departments and in the various intelligence services — may also need to provide an internal check on foolish, precipitous orders. The option here is to refuse, to defy, to resign (or be fired) and then to publicly provide the reasons.

No one really knows how to deal with this situation, which still feels more like an unnerving political novel than our political reality. Trump has led our country into unexplored territory. If this is “modern day presidential,” all progress moves toward the past.

Excellent points.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Destiny locked this topic

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.



×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use.