Trump 7 - Cheeto in Charge

[47of74]

And now der Trumpenführer isn't being Nazi conservative enough for the likes of the Savage Weiner

deadstate.org/michael-savage-on-trumps-broken-promises-im-waking-up-to-a-nightmare/

Quote

This Tuesday, conservative radio host Michael Savage voiced his disappointment over Donald Trump‘s walking back on certain campaign promises, pointing to Trump’s recent meetings with Kanye West, Al Gore, and Leonardo DiCaprio.

Trump, who was a frequent guest on Savage’s show, has seemingly softened on some of his campaign rhetoric, signaling that he has an “open mind” on climate change along with his suggestion that he won’t seek a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton.

Savage also was disappointed in Trump’s appointments of establishment Republicans to administration. He also is upset with conservatives to are walking back Trump’s rhetoric for him, saying that when he promised to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, that he wasn’t talking about a literal wall.

“I’m waking up and it seems to be a nightmare,” Savage said. “One day after another, they seem to be tilting so far away from what they promised that it’s hard to even remember what it is that he promised.”

Savage is mad that the concentration camps deportation centers aren't being built right now and that the Klan hasn't been brought in to replace the FBI yet.

[GreyhoundFan]

I love it! A new Chrome extension to fact-check Agent Orange's tweets in the tweets themselves.

It adds context and facts to the crap spewed by the Orange Toxic Megacolon.

It's too bad I won't use Chrome for personal reasons, I think it could be quite entertaining and helpful.

[RoseWilder]

It's so hard to keep up with all of Trump's temper tantrums, so forgive me if this has already been discussed. Vanity Fair reviewed a steakhouse Trump owns and so he threw a twitter temper tantrum. He doesn't have time for intelligence briefings, press conferences, or basic human decency. But he has time to attack Vanity Fair on twitter. 

So he threw a twitter tantrum, insulted Vanity Fair, and the result was this: 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-vanity-fair-tweet_us_5854562ce4b0b3ddfd8cb08a

Quote

After Trump tweeted about the magazine, the steakhouse review received 1 million unique views, Vanity Fair told Folio Friday. Other Trump stories on the magazine’s website brought in more than 330,000 visitors, and Vanity Fair gained almost 10,000 new Twitter followers.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Oh boy -- Trump paid $12.5 million to his own businesses during race

Quote

Donald Trump paid nearly $12.5 million to his own businesses and family members during his 18-month campaign for president, a CNN review of federal reports shows.

The biggest beneficiary was Tag Air Inc., a Trump-owned company that operates his airplanes and was paid $8.7 million. The next biggest payment -- $2.2 million -- went to Trump Payroll Corp. and Trump Tower Commercial LLC.

One campaign finance watchdog said no candidate had ever run so much of a campaign's spending through his own businesses.

"I don't think we've ever seen one like this," said Larry Noble, general counsel of the Campaign Legal Center.

The list of Trump businesses that were paid by the campaign is long.

Trump's hotels and golf clubs received $1.4 million. Some $238,000 went to Trump restaurants and food services.

His son's company, Eric Trump Wine Manufacturing, got $32,196.

All of the money came directly from Trump's own campaign. And it's all legal.

The campaign did not respond to CNN's request for comment.

"If he did it legally and it was in the ordinary course of business, you have to say that he's allowed to do that," Noble said. "If he was doing it to make a profit off of it, and he charged more than he was supposed to have charged, then there is a problem." There is no evidence the Trump campaign did that.

The reports show big and small ticket items.

Mar-a-Lago, Trump's Palm Beach estate, got $423,371. Trump Ice, his bottled water company, got $2,085.

Then there are Trump's restaurants in Trump Tower. The campaign paid Trump Grill $607. Trump Cafe got $94.

"The issue here, in part, was the scale at which it was done," Noble said. "He had these businesses. He could do it at such a tremendous scale."

Even if it is legal, it just looks bad. We had to listen to all the hand-wringing over Hillary's emails, but Agent Orange is the epitome of shady, and nobody bats an eye.

 

 

4 minutes ago, RoseWilder said:

It's so hard to keep up with all of Trump's temper tantrums, so forgive me if this has already been discussed. Vanity Fair reviewed a steakhouse Trump owns and so he threw a twitter temper tantrum. He doesn't have time for intelligence briefings, press conferences, or basic human decency. But he has time to attack Vanity Fair on twitter. 

So he threw a twitter tantrum, insulted Vanity Fair, and the result was this: 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-vanity-fair-tweet_us_5854562ce4b0b3ddfd8cb08a

 

I've actually been trying to patronize businesses that Drumpf bitches about. I already had a subscription to The Washington Post, but have added one to the NY Times. I may have to sign up for Vanity Fair as well. Conversely, those who have publicly supported him have lost my business and I've written to them about it. My mom actually burned her New Balance shoes (Reebok had an offer for people who burned their NB shoes), which she hated to do, but she just couldn't continue to wear them.

[Summer60]

On 12/16/2016 at 0:26 PM, formergothardite said:

But why are you hopeful? What has he done that makes you hopeful? Yeah people are talking about rural America, but the people in charge show no indication that they will pass policies that will help. The policies they are wanting to pass will only hurt rural America.  You don't need a crystal ball, just look at how he(and the rest of people) have behaved in the past and you can tell pretty much what a Trump America will look like. 

"Rebellions are built on hope."

Really though, I am unwilling to give up hope. Hope doesn't equally an unwavering belief, but I do hope Trump does a good job. I don't understand why anyone would not want him to do good for America.

[RoseWilder]

12 minutes ago, Summer60 said:

"Rebellions are built on hope."

Really though, I am unwilling to give up hope. Hope doesn't equally an unwavering belief, but I do hope Trump does a good job. I don't understand why anyone would not want him to do good for America.

When did anyone say they don't want him to do good things for America? We were discussing why anyone would believe there was reason to hope he will. 

No, I don't think he will do a good job. That's not the same as wanting him to. I want him to denounce the hate crimes created in his name. I want him to choose cabinet members who aren't corrupt and incompetent. I want him to protect all people's rights, not just the rights of white men. The list goes on and on. But I don't believe he will do any of those things. And I'm not sure why you are hopeful he will. 

[GreyhoundFan]

It will be interesting to see if Agent Orange will pay attention to the finding that if he doesn't give up both the financial and managerial stake in his new hotel in DC, he will be in violation of the contract, as the site is leased from the Federal Government.  A couple of excerpts:

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“The Deputy Commissioner informed our staff that GSA assesses that Mr. Trump will be in breach of the lease agreement the moment he takes office on January 20, 2017, unless he fully divests himself of all financial interests in the lease for the Washington D.C. hotel. The Deputy Commissioner made clear that Mr. Trump must divest himself not only of managerial control, but of all ownership interest as well,” the Democratic coalition said in their Dec. 14 letter to the GSA administrator.

The Democrats, all ranking members on committees and subcommittees with government contract oversight, also bristled at the discovery that GSA’s primary point of contact in carrying out the lease has been Ivanka Trump, the President-elect’s daughter.

“In other words, Ms. Trump is all of the following — the President-elect’s daughter, a top presidential transition team official, a lessee under the contract GSA oversees, and the primary contact for GSA on the lease.  The conflicts of interest are obvious,” Democrats said in their letter.

Quote

However, contention surrounding Trump’s lease on the federally-owned Old Post Office Pavilion appears to be focused entirely on the wording of the contract.

The Trump Organization’s lease with GSA states that “no member or delegate to Congress, or elected official of the Government of the United States … shall be admitted to any share or part of this Lease, or to any benefit that may arise therefrom.” Gelber, a career federal employee, told lawmakers that the contract language is a standard provision in GSA leases that’s designed to create a “level playing field.”

 

[formergothardite]

9 hours ago, Summer60 said:

"Rebellions are built on hope."

Really though, I am unwilling to give up hope. Hope doesn't equally an unwavering belief, but I do hope Trump does a good job. I don't understand why anyone would not want him to do good for America.

There is  difference between saying "I want him to do good" and saying "he might have not offered false hope", when clearly he did. 

To prevent him from doing a terrible job, people need to drop the notion that Trump as we know it offered hope to America and force him to do the right thing. If the people in NC sat around saying "Well maybe the Republicans aren't offering lies and false hope" we would be more fucked than we already are. Instead people are realizing that all they have offered is false hope and if we want change we have to stand up and do what we can. We have to have hope, not that they will do the right thing, but that we can force the right thing to happen. Because they aren't going to do the right thing. 

[Cartmann99]

Elle magazine did an unflinching article on Ivanka Trump:

Quote

 

Patriarchy has always had room for the Exceptional Woman—the one woman smart enough, sweet enough, strong enough, soft enough, pure enough, sexy enough to satisfy all of our culture's contradictory demands on women, and thus make it to the top of a sexist system on merit alone. Patriarchy needs that woman. She provides men with an excuse to blame women for their own pain and struggles while simultaneously assuring women that sexism only needs to be outwitted to be overcome. She tells us that the system is survivable for women—you simply have to be the right kind of woman.

Exceptional Women don't exist in real life. No one is unaffected by sexism; no woman, no matter how well-behaved, is ever safe. But some women, by dint of privilege and good luck, are fairly convincing avatars. This year's Exceptional Woman is Ivanka Trump, and she's such a convincing Exceptional Woman that she's helped make a self-confessed sexual predator who ran the most openly misogynist presidential campaign in modern history palatable to a large number of Americans

 

http://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a41444/ivanka-trump-distraction/

 

[GreyhoundFan]

3 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

Elle magazine did an unflinching article on Ivanka Trump:

http://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a41444/ivanka-trump-distraction/

 

Thank you for posting that article, it was great!

...

I'm a bit nauseated..."On New York’s Fifth Avenue, Trump’s White House North"

A couple of quotes (make sure to have some Maalox handy):

Quote

A few feet away, Joe Lepore, 57, of Fort Lee, N.J., said he was hoping to deliver to the president-elect a Christmas card and a photograph of himself fist-bumping with Trump 16 months earlier outside a New York courthouse.

As much as he likes having Trump at Trump Tower, a building he believes should be officially designated “White House North,” Lepore said tradition dictates that the president belongs in Washington.

“I’d like to see him ‘Trump’ up the White House, put his name on top of the building,” he said. “I want to see him trick the whole thing out.”

Oh yes, let's encourage him to drown the White House in faux gold. <end sarcasm>

Quote

“Is anybody famous going to come out of the elevator?” asked Leandra Estrada, 39, an occupational therapist visiting from Texas, as she stood in the lobby last week.

That she was even allowed to stand there, Estrada said, proved that Trump “is with the people.”

Her son, Mike, 22, nodded: “I see him on TV — he comes down, he walks around. It’s more relaxed.”

“He’s the president of the people,” Leandra said.

Oh yeah, he's the president of the people, as long as those people are either: A> billionaires or B> buying junky souvenirs from one of his gift shops.

[Howl]

  @Cartmann99, the Elle essay nails it.   Sady Doyle is awesome. 

This was my favorite line:  

Quote

The overall effect is both soothing and dystopian, like watching a ladies' yogurt ad directed by Leni Riefenstahl. 

 

[Cartmann99]

45 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Thank you for posting that article, it was great!

...

I'm a bit nauseated..."On New York’s Fifth Avenue, Trump’s White House North"

A couple of quotes (make sure to have some Maalox handy):

Oh yes, let's encourage him to drown the White House in faux gold. <end sarcasm>

Oh yeah, he's the president of the people, as long as those people are either: A> billionaires or B> buying junky souvenirs from one of his gift shops.

 I don't care if Trump redecorates the private residence in his tacky-ass style, but I'll be extremely pissed if he turns the rest the building into a goldleaf version of Barbie's dream house. He's the prime example of money not being able to buy class or style.

I can't remember where I read it, but Trump made a deal with NYC when he built Trump Tower. The deal was that the ground floor of the building had to be open to the public for a certain number of hours each day. The fact that the Trumpsters are allowed to hang out there is not proof that Trump is a "man of the people". 

[GreyhoundFan]

5 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

 I don't care if Trump redecorates the private residence in his tacky-ass style, but I'll be extremely pissed if he turns the rest the building into a goldleaf version of Barbie's dream house. He's the prime example of money not being able to buy class or style.

I can't remember where I read it, but Trump made a deal with NYC when he built Trump Tower. The deal was that the ground floor of the building had to be open to the public for a certain number of hours each day. The fact that the Trumpsters are allowed to hang out there is not proof that Trump is a "man of the people". 

There's a reference in the same article I posted:

Quote

Under an agreement with the city, Trump Tower’s lobby is accessible to the public from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., a fact that allows spectators an elevator-side perch to watch who’s visiting the president-elect.

My mom and I made a day trip to NYC a couple of weeks ago. Mom wanted to go see Tiffany's. I said NOPE, I didn't want to be anywhere near Drumpf Central. The closest we got was St. Patrick's.

[RoseWilder]

This is revolting: 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-lgbt-state-department_us_58545b9be4b039044708b7cc

Quote

A leading social conservative organization is calling on the Trump administration to “ferret out” employees at the State Department who worked to promote LGBT rights and replace them with conservatives.

The Family Research Council, in a little-noticed statement on Thursday, accused the Obama administration of having deployed the State Department to advance an LGBT agenda, and argued it was incumbent on the next secretary of state ― likely ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson ― to stop it.

 

[SHERA]

Sorry, I haven't been keeping up on this thread. The Electoral College votes on Monday (tomorrow). I know a lot of the/my Evan McMullin supporters/friends are trying to get the Electors to follow Alexander Hamilton advice in Federalist Paper #68 (I think), so they call them the hashtag Hamilton Electors. Then they are also planning on contacting their Senators to get them to not approve of Trump's cabinet nominees.

[Childless]

6 hours ago, RoseWilder said:

This is revolting: 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-lgbt-state-department_us_58545b9be4b039044708b7cc

 

It is revolting, but it's unlikely that Trump will do as they ask.  If there's one good thing about Trump, it's that he appears to generally support the LGBT community (or at least doesn't actively work to strip their rights).  He's racist and misogynistic, but not homophobic.  Like I said prior to the election (and what appears to be happening), Trump doesn't care about anyone but Trump and while in office he will concentrate on supporting legislation aimed at helping himself (i.e. repealing the estate tax).  He doesn't give a flying fuck about illegal immigration, off shoring of jobs, building walls, locking up Hillary, etc.  Those were just sound bites produced to get the gullible to vote for him.  Now, if he does something to get himself impeached (which is highly likely) and Pence gets promoted, then we need to really start worrying about groups like FRC influencing legislation.

[Howl]

2 hours ago, Childless said:

Trump doesn't care about anyone but Trump and while in office he will concentrate on supporting legislation aimed at helping himself (i.e. repealing the estate tax).  He doesn't give a flying fuck about illegal immigration, off shoring of jobs, building walls, locking up Hillary, etc.  Those were just sound bites produced to get the gullible to vote for him.  Now, if he does something to get himself impeached (which is highly likely) and Pence gets promoted, then we need to really start worrying about groups like FRC influencing legislation.

I've been shocked while reading some exchanges on facebook that there are people who believe that Trump had an actual platform during his campaign and an agenda going forward.  He is completely ad hoc, which is why he needs Trumpsplainers (professional spinmeisters, otherwise know as liars, otherwise known as Kellyanne Conway*) to pretend that he didn't say what he clearly just said.  

"Build a wall" and "lock her up" are not a political platform. 

@Childless, Like you, I've been assuming that Trump would be impeached.  Now I'm thinking that the Republicans will want to keep him around, because they are starting to understand that his weaknesses can be so easily exploited and his base easily manipulated. 

The tweets, the crazy cabinet picks, a complete inability to stay on topic ---  his vanity blinds him to his own ignorance and limitations;  professional politicians and clergy know exactly how to exploit that.  While Trump is keeping his base happy with his crazy and the mainstream media are wetting themselves over Trump's latest tweet, they'll be busy ransacking the Treasury by letting loose extraction industries and looting Social Security/Medicade/Medicare and branding the  official state religion (Christian™).  

His presidency will be a cross between elite kleptocracy and religious fanatics with torches and pitchforks nailing a fundamentalist manifesto to the White House door.  

*There was a fabulous TV moment last week when three youngish talking heads had just listened (in person) to Kellyanne Conway's  particularly egregious and blatant Trumpsplain of some issue.  When she was done, they all glanced at each other, clearly telegraphing "that was just such unbelievable bullshit" while totally maintaining a neutral talking head face.  It passed in a flash, but it may be one of my favorite TV moments evah. 

Also wondering what was up with Paul Manafort these days.  Crickets on google, but this turned up.  When you consider Trump's nomination for Sec. of State, it all starts to make sense: 

Oct. 2016  Lobbyist advised Trump campaign while promoting Russian pipeline

ETA:  Article was written in Oct 2016;  the actual speech was in April

[RoseWilder]

4 hours ago, Childless said:

It is revolting, but it's unlikely that Trump will do as they ask.  If there's one good thing about Trump, it's that he appears to generally support the LGBT community (or at least doesn't actively work to strip their rights).  He's racist and misogynistic, but not homophobic.  Like I said prior to the election (and what appears to be happening), Trump doesn't care about anyone but Trump and while in office he will concentrate on supporting legislation aimed at helping himself (i.e. repealing the estate tax).  He doesn't give a flying fuck about illegal immigration, off shoring of jobs, building walls, locking up Hillary, etc.  Those were just sound bites produced to get the gullible to vote for him.  Now, if he does something to get himself impeached (which is highly likely) and Pence gets promoted, then we need to really start worrying about groups like FRC influencing legislation.

The problem is, while Trump doesn't have any interest in stripping right from the LGBT community, and didn't really plan to do a lot of things he promised his gullible supporters, he's very susceptible to outside influence and he's surrounding himself with people who do want to strip the LGBT community of their rights (as well as do all the other horrible things he promised in his campaign.) I think they'll be able to easily manipulate him into doing a lot of horrible things. 

Which is why we all have to stay in regular contact with our senators and let them know we want them to oppose his cabinet picks. We won't be able to stop all of his nominations, but we have to do everything we can to stop as many as possible. 

[Cartmann99]

1 hour ago, RoseWilder said:

The problem is, while Trump doesn't have any interest in stripping right from the LGBT community, and didn't really plan to do a lot of things he promised his gullible supporters, he's very susceptible to outside influence and he's surrounding himself with people who do want to strip the LGBT community of their rights (as well as do all the other horrible things he promised in his campaign.) I think they'll be able to easily manipulate him into doing a lot of horrible things. 

Which is why we all have to stay in regular contact with our senators and let them know we want them to oppose his cabinet picks. We won't be able to stop all of his nominations, but we have to do everything we can to stop as many as possible. 

Yup. My take is that on things that will help him, like cutting taxes on wealthier people, he will fight to get his way. On things that wouldn't personally affect him like LGBT issues or abortion, he'll happily go along with Pence and company if they flatter him enough. Trump craves external validation, and the far-right would happily feed his ego in exchange for him helping to enact their regressive agenda.

 

[Cartmann99]

SNL's latest Trump skit:

Their skit about Hillary Clinton:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

7 hours ago, RoseWilder said:

The problem is, while Trump doesn't have any interest in stripping right from the LGBT community, and didn't really plan to do a lot of things he promised his gullible supporters, he's very susceptible to outside influence and he's surrounding himself with people who do want to strip the LGBT community of their rights (as well as do all the other horrible things he promised in his campaign.) I think they'll be able to easily manipulate him into doing a lot of horrible things. 

Which is why we all have to stay in regular contact with our senators and let them know we want them to oppose his cabinet picks. We won't be able to stop all of his nominations, but we have to do everything we can to stop as many as possible. 

Unlike Hillary, who probably had all of her cabinet and other political appointee picks decided on and in nice, clear spreadsheets, Agent Orange flies by the seat of his pants (because he's "smart"). So, he has all these voices talking at him and he's going to listen to a handful -- Pence, Ivanka and her husband, Bannon, and maybe Priebus. It will be quite easy for one or more of them to slip stuff by him, because he will focus on the stuff that matters to him: cutting taxes on the wealthy and Tweeting 24/7.

[AlwaysExcited]

Well, Trump got his 270 elector votes. 
Congrats, Ivanka, the first de-facto female president of United States. Enjoy all the work, while your daddy enjoys all the attention. 

[Destiny]

55 minutes ago, AlwaysExcited said:

Well, Trump got his 270 elector votes.

 

Sigh. There was a small part of me that was hoping this would not happen.

 

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Why we should be terrified of Donald Trump’s decision-making process. I agree with the article. Sorry for the wall of text, I thought it would be interesting.

Quote

In just a month, Donald Trump will go from being the president-elect of the United States to being the actual president of the United States. When he does, his particular style of decision-making is going to become vitally important to all of our lives. From what we learned in the campaign and since the election, there is reason to believe that his White House is going to be a place of unusual uncertainty, perhaps even chaos, as a president who has no idea what he is doing is served by people who have no idea what their boss wants.

We find a good illustration of this problem in the matter of the Presidential Daily Brief, the intelligence report the president gets every day to apprise him of threats to the United States. As you may have heard, Trump finds the PDB boring and has bothered to receive it only a few times in the six weeks since the election. This is making some people very nervous, as Greg Jaffe reports:

Now it looks as if the PDB’s status as Washington’s most indispensable briefing could be coming to an end. “I get it when I need it,” said President-elect Donald Trump, who so far is taking the PDB only a few times a week. “I’m, like, a smart person. I don’t need to be told the same thing and the same words every single day for the next eight years.”

Those remarks have set off fears that Trump could miss a critical piece of intelligence and raised bigger questions about the president-elect’s attention span and interest in foreign policy. Some Democrats have expressed alarm at Trump’s decision not to sit through the PDB each morning with his staff members. “I think it is totally irresponsible in a post-9/11 world,” said Derek Chollet, a former senior official in the Obama administration. “It is a kind of malpractice.”

Some Republicans downplayed those concerns, noting that retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, Trump’s pick for national security adviser, could summarize the intelligence for him. “That’s a legitimate way to do it,” said Stephen Hadley, who held the same position under President George W. Bush. “It really depends on how the president likes to take information.”

Indeed, it does depend on how the president likes to take information. This president hates reading — particularly boring stuff such as briefing books — and prefers to get information by watching TV. As he said this year, he can make decisions “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already] had, plus the words ‘common sense,’ because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability.” The idea that he’ll be relying on Michael Flynn to give him the information he needs is not reassuring, to say the least.

Trump is about to be thrust into a situation unlike any he has faced before, one in which he will be forced to make an endless string of critically important decisions. As President Obama has said on a number of occasions, the president doesn’t make easy decisions — those are handled by people below him. It’s only when a choice has to be made between difficult options and there’s no obvious answer that the decision is brought to the president. Obama told Michael Lewis in 2012 that he wears only black and blue suits because he didn’t have time to waste deciding what to wear. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia,” he said. When George W. Bush called himself “The Decider,” he wasn’t wrong.

While it’s not always possible for the president to have a good deal of knowledge about the immediate situation he confronts, whether it’s health-care policy or budget deficits or Iran’s internal politics, it certainly helps. Since Trump has neither worked a day in government nor evinced the barest interest in policy, there will be almost no decisions to which Trump will bring any base of knowledge.

That means that perhaps more than any president in history, he’ll have to rely on the people who know more about that particular area than he does to give him the information he needs to make the best decision. This is something all presidents must do, but Trump will be further hampered by what appears to be a deep distrust of anyone who actually has that kind of knowledge.

I suspect that distrust comes from what is obviously his profound intellectual insecurity — no actual smart person goes around saying things like “I’m, like, a smart person” and “Let me tell you, I’m a really smart guy” and “I have a very good brain” and “Look, if I were a liberal Democrat, people would say I’m the super genius of all time” and “Look, I went to the best school, I was a good student and all of this stuff. I mean, I’m a smart person,” unless they have some serious issues.

But for whatever reason, Trump is positively contemptuous of those with expertise, as we saw over and over during the campaign. Trump would assure us that “I know more about ISIS than the generals do,” or “I know more about renewables than any human being on earth” or “I think nobody knows more about taxes than I do, maybe in the history of the world.” These are things he actually said and seems to believe.

So inside the Oval Office, a particular scenario will likely play itself out over and over. Trump will be presented with a decision he has to make on a matter about which he knows nothing. In order to bring him up to speed, he’ll be given the views of some experts, perhaps in person, or in a document, or communicated by his close aides. He’ll then have to weigh what those experts have told him. And what will he do? There’s no way to predict. On one hand, he has this contempt for experts, yet on the other hand, as Jenna Johnson and Robert Costa reported in August, according to those around him, “Trump tends to echo the words of the last person with whom he spoke, making direct access to him even more valuable.”

This is all made even more unusual by the fact that Trump has no coherent ideology or policy agenda. There have been presidents who didn’t concern themselves with the details, like Ronald Reagan. But the people who worked for Reagan knew what he believed and what he wanted (and they largely shared those views), which made implementing policy possible. In Trump’s case, it’s impossible to predict what he might think about an issue he hasn’t dealt with directly, and there’s no way to know whether what he thinks about it today will be the same thing he thinks about it tomorrow.

That’s troubling enough when there aren’t lives at stake in what Donald Trump decides. But before long, there will be.

 

[JMarie]

59 minutes ago, AlwaysExcited said:

Well, Trump got his 270 elector votes. 
Congrats, Ivanka, the first de-facto female president of United States. Enjoy all the work, while your daddy enjoys all the attention. 

I feel sad.  So very sad.  But I don't think he'll be in office long.  He'll either do/say something really stupid or offensive and be asked/forced to step down, or something from his past will be unearthed and he'll be impeached.