Trump 31: Parody of a Presidency

[Audrey2]

1 hour ago, CTRLZero said:

If Amazon decides not to conduct business through the US Postal Service, I guess we'll have our answer on whether the agency can stay afloat.  I wonder where Trump got the $1.50 figure--did Fox and Friends have a segment?  I am guessing the USPS does lose on some deliveries, but probably makes up for the loss in volume deliveries for Amazon.  Trump picks the oddest battles. 

I wonder which shipping company Trump has family/buddies in that he's trying to push business their way.

[AmazonGrace]

U R IN for leaks about a meltdown 

 

[fraurosena]

2 hours ago, CTRLZero said:

If Amazon decides not to conduct business through the US Postal Service, I guess we'll have our answer on whether the agency can stay afloat.  I wonder where Trump got the $1.50 figure--did Fox and Friends have a segment?  I am guessing the USPS does lose on some deliveries, but probably makes up for the loss in volume deliveries for Amazon.  Trump picks the oddest battles. 

Oh, his hatred of Amazon is quite easy to explain: It’s all about it’s owner, Jeff Bezos. Who also happens to be the owner of WaPo.

And you know how much the presidunce hates the free press for exposing him instead of fawning all over him.

[AmazonGrace]

Jeff Bezos is probably everything that Trump hates. He's richer, younger, less obese, his lawyer wasn't raided recently, he has larger hands and fewer sex scandals, he graduated from Princeton, understands science ,  AFAIK there is no special counsel investigating whether he's a treasonous twatwaffle, AND he is brave enough to be bald.   

Well actually I have no idea what his hands are like but I bet Trump thinks they're yuge.

[AmazonGrace]

 

[fraurosena]

The presidunce's farcical flip-flopping on TTP:

Then...

Now...

So, mr. Stable Genius & Very Best Dealmaker, dissing the party you're negotiating with in a tweet is the best way to ensure a good deal is made? 

[fraurosena]

Oh dear, he's back to hyping his Wall again. What scandal is attempting to deflect from now? Is it Comey's book that has him rattled? 

Ah, I guess it is Comey's book... 

It's so incredibly childish that it's hard to believe this a message from the person inhabiting the highest office in the US government.

 

Oh, he finally tweeted the follow-up tweet. Way to go with the name-calling! Such a show of dignity and maturity!

 

[Howl]

The irony, of course, is that James Comey exercised the e-mail nuclear option that probably cost Hillary the election.  

The latest is Trump is a Baby Daddy, and there's quite a bit of speculation on the identity of the Trump housekeeper Baby Mama.   

Someone mentioned Steve Miller as a possible Trump love child.  I don't know if I can continue to eat and breathe if the drollness factor on twitter goes any higher. 

5 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

treasonous twatwaffle

Awesome alliteration! 

[apple1]

Seth Abramson has long made the argument that Comey's statements on Hillary Clinton were under pressure from pro-Trump factions in the New York FBI office, who (IIRC) were threatening to go public with anti-Clinton info.

and...

 

[Howl]

53 minutes ago, apple1 said:

Seth Abramson has long made the argument that Comey's statements on Hillary Clinton were under pressure from pro-Trump factions in the New York FBI office, who (IIRC) were threatening to go public with anti-Clinton info.

I'm certainly familiar with the "rogue faction in the FBI's NY office" story, but if Comey capitulated under pressure, again, going against established policy and clear guidelines in his  own agency, what does that say about his leadership?  And, surprise!, the emails were a nothing burger. 

And what does it say for the FBI that a rogue office could gain sufficient power to swing an election?  Something doesn't fit here.  

[47of74]

I saw the best response for fuck face this morning on FB....

Which according to FB means....

[fraurosena]

6 minutes ago, 47of74 said:

I saw the best response for fuck face this morning on FB....

Which according to FB means....

That is all.

[AmazonGrace]

 Is America great again yet?

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[apple1]

2 hours ago, Howl said:

I'm certainly familiar with the "rogue faction in the FBI's NY office" story, but if Comey capitulated under pressure, again, going against established policy and clear guidelines in his  own agency, what does that say about his leadership?  And, surprise!, the emails were a nothing burger. 

And what does it say for the FBI that a rogue office could gain sufficient power to swing an election?  Something doesn't fit here.  

Oh, I'm not excusing it - and definitely I think that Comey is, as I heard from some pundits, a "flawed messenger".

[Howl]

Fun interaction on twitter: 

Janne M. Korhonen‏ @jmkorhonen,  Replying to @NuclearAnthro @CherylRofer

I admire your restraint. "I fear this 'administration' lacks desire & capability to efficaciously connect action to goals & strategy" sounds like "I fear a pack of rabid wolverines binging on PCP lack desire and capability to express Tchaikovsky's more delicate overtures."

Back to your Friday the 13th! 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Whatever happened to Trump neckties? They’re over. So is most of Trump’s merchandising empire."

Spoiler

Before he ran for office, Donald Trump made millions by selling his name to adorn other people’s products. There was Trump deodorant. Trump ties . Trump steaks. Trump underwear. Trump furniture. At one time, there was even a Trump-branded urine test.

Now, almost all of them are gone.

In 2015, Trump listed 19 companies that were paying him to produce or distribute Trump-branded consumer goods.

In recent weeks, only two said they are still selling Trump-branded goods. One is a Panamanian company selling Trump bed linens and home goods. The other is a Turkish company selling Trump furniture.

Of the rest, some Trump partners quit in reaction to campaign-trail rhetoric on immigrants and Muslims. Others said their licensing agreements had expired. Others said nothing beyond confirming that they’d stopped working with Trump. Their last Trump goods are now being sold off, often at a discount: One cologne is marked down from $42 to $9.99 for an ounce.

“Success by Trump,” the website says. And below that: “Clearance.”

The decline of the Trump merchandise empire is another sign of how politics has changed the president’s business. On one hand, it has allowed his Mar-a-Lago Club and his D.C. hotel to mon­etize his political alliances, raking in money from evangelical Christian groups and GOP campaigns.

But it has also driven away customers and partners who’d been drawn to the old Trump — a hustling icon of ostentatious wealth, who sold golf memberships to the truly rich and $42 cologne to those who merely wanted to be.

“Once the political campaign started, the wall went up,” said Marshal Cohen, who measures retail business trends for the NPD Group. “The wall that he [built] was more around his merchandise than it was around Mexico.”

The Trump Organization did not respond to questions about its licensed-merchandise business. Trump has said he has given up day-to-day management of his company while he’s in the White House. But he still owns it.

The Trump Organization sells its own name-branded merchandise. Last year, it opened an e-commerce site, www.TrumpStore.com, with an inventory of Trump T-shirts, teddy bears and key chains.

But the licensed-merchandise business was something different. It allowed Trump to make money off other people’s work, other people’s products, other people’s marketing.

All Trump had to do was sell something that he could never run out of.

His name.

Trump first pursued the idea in 2004. His emissaries contacted an executive at Phillips-Van Heusen, the menswear giant, with a proposition.

How would his company like to pay Trump for the right to put his name on their clothes?

The menswear executive wasn’t interested.

“He laughed,” Jeff Danzer, who was a marketer working for Trump, recalled later.

At that point, Trump was still emerging from the long, low years of the 1990s: huge debts, corporate bankruptcies, tabloid divorces. What customer wanted that on their shirt collar?

But then, “The Apprentice” took off — and rebranded Trump as a sharp-dressed boardroom titan.

After that, the idea of Trump shirts wasn’t laughable.

In fact, it wasn’t enough.

“Suits, dress shirts, ties, even down to shoes,” Danzer recalled. “Any- and everything that you would wear in the board room is what we were going out to license.”

By the end of 2004, Trump had a deal with Phillips-Van Heusen and a Donald J. Trump Signature Collection of clothes at Macy’s.

But that wasn’t enough, either.

Eventually, Trump was a smell — A “masculine combination of rich vetiver, tonka bean, birchwood and musk.” Trump was a chandelier. Trump was a mattress. Trump was a steak. “The meat category represents Mr. Trump’s power,” an underling told the media when Trump Steaks launched.

Trump was a urine test.

“Take a snapshot of the most critical metabolic markers in your body’s natural waste fluids,” said the website for the Trump Network, a vitamin company that sent its customers urine-sample kits with the Trump logo on them. The tests would be used to determine what vitamins the customer needed, according to archived versions of the Trump Network website.

The rest of the marketing business shook its head. But, for a time, it worked.

“A caricature of what wealth is — as opposed to what real wealth is,” said Milton Pedraza, chief executive of the Luxury Institute, a consultant to luxury brands. Trump sold to those, he said, “who didn’t know the difference,” he said.

However, Pedraza said, Trump began to undermine his own success by “label-slapping” — sticking his name on anything he could, even the farfetched and ridiculous. Emeril Lagasse sold pots. Greg Norman sold golf shirts. Trump sold. . . everything.

“There was no strategy,” Pedraza said.

In 2009, Trump reported that his licensing partners had sold $215 million worth of Trump-licensed goods worldwide. That ranked him 80th on License Global magazine’s list of the top 125 merchandisers. In some years, Phillips-Van Heusen alone paid him more than $1 million.

For Trump, the benefit wasn’t just the money. The items brought his name into closets and kitchens around the country.

“It’s ties, shirts, cufflinks, everything sold at Macy’s. And they’re doing great,” Trump told David Letterman in 2012, during an interview in which he’d also complained that China was overtaking the United States as an economic power. “Number-one-selling tie anywhere in the world.”

“The ties are made in China,” Letterman said.

By 2015, when Trump entered the presidential race, some of his more far-out ideas — steaks, urine tests and vitamins — were already kaput. But, according to his financial disclosures, the 19 remaining licensees were still paying him a combined $2.4 million-plus per year, just to put the Trump name on their goods.

Then Trump ran for president

Within a few weeks, the number was down to 14.

“We are disappointed and distressed by recent remarks about immigrants from Mexico,” said a corporate statement from Macy’s, after Trump called Mexican immigrants criminals and “rapists” at his first campaign event. “. . . We have decided to discontinue our business relationship with Mr. Trump.”

Losing Macy’s meant losing all the Trump merchandise that Macy’s had sold. Phillips-Van Heusen, his first big deal. Peerless, which made Trump suits. Parlux, which made his colognes. Another company, Randa, made Trump leather goods. All gone.

“They’ll all be back,” Trump told Forbes magazine.

A few months later, Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the United States.

He lost another partner, a Dubai-based company that had a license to sell Trump furniture in the Middle East, Africa and India.

That left 13.

What happened to the rest?

To find out, The Washington Post and the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University tried to contact all of the remaining companies that Trump had listed as licensing partners on his 2015 financial disclosure forms.

In one case, the company was mystified to have been listed at all.

“We haven’t done business [with him] for a long time,” said Jim Ehren, an executive at a sign-making company in the Los Angeles suburbs. His facility had once made inspirational posters, which paired Trump quotes with scenes of Wall Street or a golf course. But not recently.

Two other partnerships — one to sell Trump-branded shoes in Mexico, the other to sell Trump home organizational products — had apparently ended before any Trump-branded merchandise was sold.

That left 10.

Trump vodka also seems dead. It had survived in Israel, after the product had fizzled elsewhere. But Trump’s own financial disclosures don’t list it after 2015.

Trump coffee, also, is no more.

“It was a lack of sales,” said Sam Blaney at Two Rivers Coffee, which stopped making its Select by Trump coffee pods last year. “Not every idea was a good idea.”

At Downlite, which had sold Trump-branded pillows, the company said it had let the license expire in 2015.

“Purely a business decision,” said Josh Werthaiser, the company’s chief executive. “It had nothing to do with the election.”

That left seven.

Of them, five companies said that they weren’t making Trump products anymore — but gave little detail beyond that.

Wonu, which made Trump-branded bedding in Korea, said simply that its license had expired. Ditto for the makers of Donald J. Trump eyeglasses. A French company that once made Trump mattresses has been sold. Its new owner said it didn’t make them anymore.

At the company that once made Trump-branded throw blankets, executives did not call back. When The Post visited its office, a receptionist said she didn’t know of any Trump products being made there now.

At Elk Lighting, a staffer said the company has stopped making Trump-branded chandeliers and sconces. On its website, the company’s Trump Home Regency chandeliers are now sold as just “Regency.”

Since Trump began his campaign, the Trump Organization’s website has not added any listings of new manufacturers, to replace those it has lost. In Trump’s 2017 financial disclosure, he reported that his royalties from licensed merchandise had fallen from more than $2.4 million to over $370,000. The forms do not give exact numbers, only a range of values that the figures fall between.

Only two companies are still paying to put Trump’s name on their products.

One is HomeStudio, which produces Trump-branded bed linens and housewares for the Latin American market. It declined to comment for this story, beyond confirming that it still makes Trump goods.

The other is Dorya, a Turkey-based manufacturer of Trump Home Collection furniture.

When a reporter visited the company’s Chicago showroom recently, there was a room full of sleek, modern, expensive chairs and tables. But the Trump name itself was hard to find, unless you knew where to look

On one $4,000 end table, for instance, the silver nameplate reading “Trump” — the name Dorya was paying to use — wasn’t on the outside of the piece at all.

To find it, customers had to look inside the drawer.

Okay, the urine test thing is just too funny, considering his hissy fit over the "pee tape".

[samira_catlover]

ICYMI: good article in the Lying Amazon Washington Post re: Fearless Leader's online stores NOT collecting sales taxes in many states. (Picked up by Chicago Tribune, which is a historically-Republican paper: http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-trump-online-store-sales-tax-20180410-story.html

Sooooo: Comey is being blasted as a lying and leaking slimeball, but FL has just issued a pardon to Scooter Libby, a  convicted criminal who leaked and lied on felony charges of...wait for it...perjury before a grand jury, lying to FBI investigators and obstruction of justice during an investigation (Valerie Plame case).   Can somebody put those poor Rescue Ferrets on triple-pay for overtime?  They ain't NEVER gonna get out of the rabbit holes we've all fallen into.

Don't know how to link to Twitter, but That Damned Fool sounded off about 35 minutes ago with this:  <snip> DOJ just issued the McCabe report - which is a total disaster. He LIED! LIED! LIED! McCabe was totally controlled by Comey - McCabe is Comey!! No collusion, all made up by this den of thieves and lowlifes! <snip>

Sounding scared and irrational much, you think? 

[Cartmann99]

That kid who throws tantrums at the grocery store has broken into the White House again:

Edited to add: @samira_catlover and I are obviously sharing a brain at the moment. 

[samira_catlover]

Even splitting a brain, Cartmann99, we're still MUCH more highly powered than FL...

Don't even want to think how many years it's going to take to restore US prestige around the world.  Suspect that there are a lot of non-USA-based folk who are wondering "wtf is WRONG with those Americans, that 60+ million of them voted for that incompetent fool?"

 

[fraurosena]

The toddler twitter tantrum ranting will only get worse now the presidunce's ass is puckered up so tightly with fear at all the damaging Cohen info in the hands of the FBI.

Here's his latest attack, full of name calling of course. Panicking much, presidunce dear?

They're thieves! They're thieves! They're filthy little thieves!  They stole it from us, our precious Cohen tapeses. Curse them! WE hates them! it's ours it is, and we wants it! We wants it, we needs it. Must have the precious collusion tapeses. They stole it from us. Sneaky little agentses. Wicked, tricksy, false!

 

 

I see I crashed @samira_catlover's and @Cartmann99's party. I hope you don't mind!

[samira_catlover]

4 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

I  see I crashed @samira_catlover's and @Cartmann99's party. I hope you don't mind!

Not at all, hon (or anyone else): drinks are over there, and we've got a tractor-trailer of popcorn coming by before midnight.   Isn't it delightful to see what sort of reasoned intellectual discourse FL can deliver when he puts his mind to it?

[onekidanddone]

McCabe=Comey=Muller=Hillary=Bill=Sasquatch=FAKE NEW=Bengazi=McCabe.

See I proved it: they are all and all are they. 

A innocent man does not act like this. 

[Howl]

Have any of y'all picked up on the running DC joke that is Infrastructure Week?  From way back (in Trump time) on April 10, otherwise known as this past Tuesday.

From HuffPo: 

FBI Raid, Staff Exits, Canceled Foreign Trip Making For Best ‘Infrastructure Week’ Yet  In a chaotic administration, this week could be one for the books – and it’s not even half done

Quote

“It’s unadulterated madness. But because it happens so often, it tends to become the norm,” said John Weaver, who joked that the last few days could set a low-water mark for an “infrastructure week” ― Washington shorthand for times when the White House has attempted to set a coherent message, only to see it descend into bedlam.