Donald Trump and the Deathly Fallout (Part 15)

[fraurosena]

I guess in his own, senile alternate reality, he is quite right. However, in this reality, the one we all live in...

Trump: 'Totally' possible for U.S. to address North Korea threat alone

Quote

The United States is prepared to respond to North Korean nuclear threats on its own if China fails to pressure Pyongyang, President Donald Trump said in an interview with the Financial Times on Sunday.

"Well if China is not going to solve North Korea, We will. That is all I am telling you," he was quoted as telling the newspaper.

...this is frightening. I hope for all our sakes that the dude with the codes keeps his briefcase far, far away from the tangerine toddler's grubby little hands.

[fraurosena]

Ugh. Another sign he's senile. First he hates on the Freedom Caucus, now he's touting party unity. 

Trump Touts Party Unity Days After Threatening Dissident Lawmakers

Quote

President Donald Trump signaled Sunday that he wasn’t abandoning efforts to dismantle and replace the Affordable Care Act, invoking unity within the same Republican Party he threatened just last week to purge of dissident lawmakers.

“Anybody (especially Fake News media) who thinks that Repeal & Replace of Obamacare is dead does not know the love and strength in R Party!” according to message posted on Twitter on Sunday by Mr. Trump. He added: “Talks on Repealing and Replacing Obamacare are, and have been, going on, and will continue until such time as a deal is hopefully struck.” [...]

Mr. Trump’s tweet marks another shift in the roller-coaster rhetoric from the president following the failure of the Republican health-care push. After initially blaming Democrats for the bill’s fate, Mr. Trump later lashed out at conservatives and floated the idea of working with Democrats to craft a compromise. [...]

Last week, Mr. Trump set his sights on the conservative Freedom Caucus. He said he would target them in the 2018 elections unless they got on board with his plans, as punishment for their opposition to the GOP health bill.

Mr. Trump wrote that the Freedom Caucus would “hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don’t get on the team, & fast.” Referencing the midterm elections, Mr. Trump lumped in Freedom Caucus members with Democrats as opponents “we must fight.”

 

[fraurosena]

The LA Times has a four part scathing op-ed on the parasitic presidunce. Here's a link to part 1. 

Our Dishonest President

You really should read the whole article, but I particularly liked this bit:

Quote

What is most worrisome about Trump is Trump himself. He is a man so unpredictable, so reckless, so petulant, so full of blind self-regard, so untethered to reality that it is impossible to know where his presidency will lead or how much damage he will do to our nation. His obsession with his own fame, wealth and success, his determination to vanquish enemies real and imagined, his craving for adulation — these traits were, of course, at the very heart of his scorched-earth outsider campaign; indeed, some of them helped get him elected. But in a real presidency in which he wields unimaginable power, they are nothing short of disastrous.

Parts 2, 3 and 4 will be posted on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday respectively.

[candygirl200413]

That LA Times series already pisses me off because President Barack Obama and Secretary Hillary Clinton have been telling us for like what almost 2 years that this was going on, but her damn emails

[GreyhoundFan]

1 hour ago, candygirl200413 said:

That LA Times series already pisses me off because President Barack Obama and Secretary Hillary Clinton have been telling us for like what almost 2 years that this was going on, but her damn emails

Don't forget Benghazi.

 

"Trump remains the center of attention, but he’s increasingly isolated politically"

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For a second consecutive weekend, President Trump remained in Washington — tweeting in the morning, holding meetings at the White House and heading to his Virginia golf club on Sunday — all the time surrounded by aides and patrons yet, increasingly, politically marooned.

Weighed down by dismal approval ratings, the president has been unable to wrangle enough support in Congress to advance his agenda and is searching for outside support to defend him from attacks coming from all sides.

Ahead of his 100th day in office, which he will mark this month, Trump has struggled to build a governing coalition that matches the nontraditional alliance that put him in the Oval Office. And he has turned to making enemies of former partners among Republicans in Congress, even as Democrats keep him at arm’s length.

“He seems both politically and personally isolated these days,” said David Gergen, a former adviser to Democratic and Republican presidents dating to Richard M. Nixon. “He’s flailing because he doesn’t know where to find his natural allies.”

The result has been a presidency lacking in significant victories, beset by major stumbles — including the downfall of the Republicans’ health-care bill and his travel ban on six Muslim-majority countries — and that is the target of litigation as a result of executive actions, especially related to the environment.

There are more potential roadblocks ahead. Already, congressional Republicans have balked at his proposed budget, and the White House’s insistence on increased spending for the military and a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border could imperil a spending bill needed to keep the government running past the end of April.

No easy resolution has appeared, and despite loose talk from White House aides and staff-level conversations this week, little has been done to court Democratic support for his priorities. Meanwhile, most Democrats remain wary of Trump’s hard-line policies and incendiary persona, and the confirmation vote on Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, faces a potential filibuster by Senate Democrats.

“Part of it is self-imposed,” former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele said of Trump’s challenges and political drift, adding that many key players often find it difficult to build a bond with the 70-year-old executive. “People know him, they see him at meetings, but it’s been hard for people in Congress and around it to get to know him in a way that’s helpful for Trump.”

...

In the West Wing, frustration abounds. For a president fixated on winning, people close to him say he is anxious to find out what went wrong with his team’s health-care push and get to a deal on that issue or another front such as taxes or infrastructure as fast as possible.

Christopher Ruddy, the Newsmax Media chief executive who is a friend of the president, said the lesson learned within the White House is to be more careful moving forward when it comes to trusting Congress and the leadership’s whip counts.

“The White House did the right thing. Ryan carried the luggage here. He delivered it and it was damaged goods,” Ruddy said of the health legislation. “They wanted to work with Congress, they accepted the congressional plan and it blew up on them. Now they realize they can’t do that in the future.”

...

Trump showed some signs over the weekend of softening his assault on conservatives in Congress. On Sunday morning, he tweeted a more positive message about unity on health care — “Anybody (especially Fake News media) who thinks that Repeal & Replace of Obamacare is dead does not know the love and strength in R Party!” — and later went golfing with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a staunch opponent of the bill who lobbied House conservatives to oppose it.

But building support will take more than schmoozing. Needham argued that the White House and congressional leadership asked Republicans to make a politically impossible decision on health care — casting a vote in support of a bill that had a 17 percent public approval rating, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll.

That angst remains pervasive, with members wondering whether Trump is backing the right kind of bills, the sort of agenda that could lift him and the GOP ahead of the 2018 midterms.

...

Among Trump’s closest confidants are those urging him to abandon hard-liners in the Republican conference and strike a deal with Democrats on health care and on other issues.

“The president is a dealmaker, and he realizes that 30 members of the House shouldn’t control the process,” Ruddy said. “He is looking for a way to develop a majority that doesn’t include them.”

Striking such a deal is likely to require even more political acumen than bringing Republicans in line, as it could risk alienating the Republican leadership in Congress and the conservative base. It, too, would necessitate that Trump find stakeholders and power brokers he can trust on the other side of the aisle.

“You look at George W. Bush, who worked with Ted Kennedy early on with education. Trump is going to have to find somebody he can work with on the other side,” Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) said. “He knows he has to appeal to people because he’s not ideological, but he has to find out how he can get out of the Republican straitjacket and build the relationships, figure out a coalition for taxes, for infrastructure.”

Democrats remain skittish about cutting deals with a president who so easily lashes out at his own party.

“Right now he looks, I don’t know, in personal disarray,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said. “In some ways, he had a successful campaign, ‘Make America Great Again,’ something that is obviously very appealing to many people.

“He’s interpreting that as a personal endorsement,” she added. “Members of Congress vote their district; they don’t necessarily vote their president. The powers of persuasion that worked on the campaign trail aren’t going to seal the deal in Washington.”

 

We need to truly isolate him...on that desert island we keep discussing.

[GreyhoundFan]

So, Agent Orange will be taking the president of China to golf at Mar-a-Lago this week. That's going to be a problem, according to CNN.

Quote

It's the US President's preferred weekend pastime and one he's used to strike up a rapport with other world leaders.

But few expect Donald Trump to tee off with Xi Jinping, his Chinese counterpart, in Florida this week.

Trump will host Xi at his exclusive Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach on April 6 and 7, but any suggestion of an outing to the nearby Trump-owned golf courses is likely to land in the rough.

Xi, an avid soccer fan, isn't known to be a golfer -- and he's been waging a war on the sport in his country.

Since he came to power nearly five years ago, Xi's government has shut down scores of golf courses across China and effectively banned the 88 million members of the ruling Communist Party from playing.

"For Xi, golf is just such a touchy topic back home, saddled with so much baggage -- the optics would be awful, with or without Trump," said Dan Washburn, author of "The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream," a book on the tumultuous history of golf in China.

"It's a symbol of the corruption Xi has been railing against," he added. "It represents a lot of the things he has spent much of his presidency fighting, so it's hard to envision the government embracing the game any time soon -- at least publicly."

The Communists banned golf in China after they took power in 1949, denouncing it as a "game for millionaires."

Even after China re-opened to the outside world and golf emerged again in the mid 1980s -- largely as a way to attract foreign investment -- Beijing has swung between rejecting and supporting the sport.

A 2004 nationwide ban on new golf course projects was aimed at preserving natural resources in a country with a severe shortage of water and arable land. However, local officials, eager for huge profits from selling land, had often ignored the order until Xi decided to enforce it.

Golf has come under particular scrutiny as Xi continues his massive campaign against political corruption, long a lightning rod for public discontent amid a slowing economy and widening income gap.

The Communist Party, also headed by Xi, forced its members to pack away their clubs when it published a new code of conduct in 2015, detailing a series of punishable acts that range from using public funds to play golf to overspending on meals and overseas trips.

With golf club membership fees running to thousands of dollars a year -- far exceeding the salaries of most officials or party members -- the rule amounts to a de facto ban.

Trump has been taking some heat for indulging in his golf habit.

His presence at a Virginia golf club in late March triggered an online uproar, as his aides had claimed he was working in the White House during the same time.

Critics have been especially pounding Trump for his hypocrisy as the US president once repeatedly complained about the amount of time his predecessor, Barack Obama, spent golfing and vacationing.

Trump even memorably declared at a campaign rally last summer: "I'm going to be working for you -- I'm not going to have time to go play golf."

As Trump and Xi prepare to discuss weighty topics such as trade friction and North Korea, Trump's golfing image problem -- coupled with Xi's lack of interest in the sport -- suggests the two men need to find another connection -- presumably something visually appealing but not too physically demanding.

It's a task made even more pressing thanks to the picture-perfect golf diplomacy that was on display in Florida in February when Trump played two rounds with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, China's historical archrival.

It could be that Trump needs to take a leaf from the book of former President Richard Nixon, who invited the Chinese table tennis team to the US for an exhibition match that ultimately led the two countries restoring diplomatic ties.

Time, perhaps, for Trump to pack up his golf clubs and dust off his ping pong paddles.

Gee, maybe if he would have not fired most of the high-ranking people in the State Department, he'd have found this out...not that he would listen.

[GreyhoundFan]

I thought this was a good editorial: "Pick Your Favorite Ethics Offender in Trumpland"

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President Trump and his administration are offering the country a graduate-level course in the selling of the presidency. Much attention has focused on how Mr. Trump is using the White House for personal gain, but many other officials, including members of his family, friends and close aides, also stand to rake it in at the public’s expense.

Mr. Trump has driven right over the Constitution by allowing foreign governments to funnel money to him through his hotels and golf courses, in violation of the emoluments clause. So it comes as no surprise that the people who work for him have felt free to abuse their positions and run roughshod over ethics rules. He has created an anything-goes culture in which some aides and advisers are openly working to bend government policy to serve their personal interests. In other cases, the potential for corruption is less obvious but no less dangerous. Here are some of the most egregious offenders.

...

 

I also liked this piece from a couple of weeks ago: "Tweeting Toward Oblivion"

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Donald Trump faces a stark choice. He can tweet, or he can govern.

He can indulge his persecution complex, firing off missives that compare Barack Obama to Joseph McCarthy and American intelligence officers to Nazis, or he can recognize it as a gateway to disgrace and irrelevance.

He can make his presidency about his own viscera, or he can make it about the country’s welfare. He can do what feels cathartic in the moment, or he can do what’s constructive in the long run. He can dabble in bright colors and shiny objects, or he can deal in durable truths.

I’m focusing on Twitter because it teases out his worst traits. It’s the theater for vainglorious, vindictive, impulsive Trump, and it was the realm in which he made the wild accusations that Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower. On Monday, James Comey debunked those charges, certifying them as the gaseous fulminations we more or less knew they were.

And through much of Tuesday, Trump’s personal Twitter account essentially went dark. There was nothing from the hours around dawn, which is when he typically visits with his darkest vapors. There was only anodyne stuff later on: a shout-out to the scientists at NASA, a salute to American farmers.

Either someone in his orbit convinced him, at least briefly, of the damage he was doing and the miserable situation he’s in, or Trump himself summoned some wisdom and restraint. He must be capable of that. Can he continue it?

It could be argued that every presidency is a tug of war between private demons and the public interest, between the commander in chief’s indulgence of his own psychological needs and his attentiveness to the hard work of America. With Trump it’s a furiously pitched battle, and the demons are way out ahead.

One of them hasn’t received the attention it warrants. With all our condemnations of Trump the bully, we’ve overlooked Trump the bullied, which is the version more likely to bring him down. I mean the Trump who’s hellbent on believing that he’s up against ruthless enemies; the Trump who must amplify every stride by casting it as a triumph over formidable odds; the Trump who’s throwing a pity party for himself the likes of which few of his predecessors ever attempted.

His election somehow brought this Trump to the fore. In a paradox as strange as everything else about him, victory played handmaiden to a feeling of victimization: his own and the country’s.

t’s precisely that feeling — “a sense of persecution bordering on faith,” as Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman wrote in The Times on Monday — that brought about the wiretapping tweets.

But it has also brought about many other ill-advised tweets and ill-considered public statements, enveloping Trump in a foul air of grievance. If it’s not the Mexicans taking advantage of him and of us, it’s the Australians or the Germans or the Chinese. Take your pick.

...

 

[Flossie]

12 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

“He seems both politically and personally isolated these days,” said David Gergen, a former adviser to Democratic and Republican presidents dating to Richard M. Nixon. “He’s flailing because he doesn’t know where to find his natural allies.”

He'll find them approximately 4,857 mi to the east.  It's a big place, impossible to miss.  Can I call him a cab?

[GreyhoundFan]

@Flossie, heck, I think a bunch of us would spring for a chartered plane (one way only, of course).

 

Chris Cillizza, formerly of the WaPo, is now with CNN. I agree with this article: "Chaos worked for Trump as a candidate. As president? Not so much"

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Way back in December 2015, Jeb Bush said something incredibly prescient about Donald Trump.

"Donald, you know, is great at the one-liners," said Bush at the final GOP debate of the year. "But, he's a chaos candidate. And he'd be a chaos president."

No one paid much attention at the time. Voters were a month away from, you know, voting. Trump was riding high and Jeb(!) was, um, not. But, on the 73rd full day of the Trump presidency, it's clear that Jeb's prediction was spot on.

Trump's tendency toward chaos -- creating it if it didn't exist or reveling in it when it did -- served him well as a candidate. It kept his opponents -- in both the Republican primary and the general election -- off balance. Hillary Clinton learned the hard way how challenging it is to run against someone whose only guiding light is unpredictability. Because Trump never did anything by the book, it was incredibly tough for Clinton to ever get her feet under her; she was forever second- and third-guessing what to do and when to do it.

And, because the American public tends not to pay terribly close attention to the nitty-gritty of a campaign, Trump's one-liner confectionaries were a perfect fit. People ate them up because, well, it was more fun than what the other candidates were saying. Would you rather watch Trump attack "Lyin' Ted" Cruz or "Little" Marco Rubio or spectate a dry policy discussion about tax reform? Be honest.

The problem for Trump is that while his embrace of chaos fit a campaign perfectly, it's turned out to be far less beneficial for him since he's entered the White House. The presidency tends to reward discipline and strategic planning. For the first few years, you are really running a race against yourself: How much can you get done of your agenda before the concerns of Congress turn toward their awaiting fate in the midterm elections?

To prosper as president, you need to have both a short-term (daily/weekly) strategy of what you want to talk about and how you want to talk about it and a long-term strategy blueprint aimed at getting re-elected in four years. Then -- and this is the most important thing for any president -- you have to stick to the plan. You have to avoid being sidetracked by every daily molehill. Turn too many of those into mountains and even the best strategy fails.

Trump is either unwilling or -- and this idea should terrify Republicans looking to hold their congressional majorities in 2018 -- incapable of anything approaching that sort of discipline. At public events he often spends 10 minutes (or more) making off-the-cuff remarks before finally delivering the speech his staff has written for him. Those off-the-cuff remarks -- wait for it -- often lead the news and blot out his chosen message of the day. Then there is the Twitter feed which the President uses as part flag-waving for his most loyal supporters and part score-settling tool for his enemies -- real and imagined.

Add it up and you get chaos -- a disorganized jumble of messages, policies and actions that have had Trump and Republicans on the defensive for the lion's share of his time in the White House. In fact, in thinking back on Trump's first 72 days as President, I can think of only two that could reasonably be declared clear victories for him:

1. His nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court

2. His speech before a joint session of Congress.

A quick bit of math yields this: Less than 3 percent of the total days he has spent in the White House have been good ones for Trump. (It's 2.7 percent, to be exact.) That's horrible in a vacuum. It's even worse when you consider that Trump is now three-quarters of the way through his first 100 days, the period that new presidents view as their best chance to get major things done legislatively.

A course correction is clearly needed. But, this is Donald Trump we're talking about. To make a course correction, you would first have to admit a mistake in navigation has been made. And he doesn't admit to making mistakes. Not ever.

For Republicans, that means one very simple thing: Buckle up, because the ride is going to get even bumpier.

 

 

I see there was a bombing in St. Petersburg. I wonder if the tangerine toddler will Tweet something more appropriate than he did with the terror attack in London.

[GreyhoundFan]

This is terrifying: "The looming strategic disaster at Mar-a-Lago this week"

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But no, after reading about the preparations for Trump’s scheduled summit with Chinese premier Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago later this week, I have to write about this. I blame man-in-charge-of-Mexico-and-Canada-and-the-Middle-East-and-China-and-government-reform-and-criminal-justice-reform Jared Kushner.

Three stories dropped over the weekend about Kushner’s role in planning this summit. The Financial Times’ Edward Luce was first:

Though he has almost no China background, Jared Kushner, Mr Trump’s son-in-law, is leading the US preparation for next week’s meeting. His counterpart is Cui Tiankai, China’s ambassador in Washington. That, alone, gives China an edge. Mr Cui is a professional diplomat who knows America well — he did his postgraduate studies in the US capital and worked as an interpreter at the UN.

Mr Kushner’s chief qualification is that he is married to the president’s daughter. Mr Cui has just one job — US-China relations. Among other things, Mr Kushner is the White House point person for Middle East peace, criminal justice reform and US business innovation.

China seems to have grasped that the best way to influence Mr Trump is via his family. Chinese diplomats have gone out of their way to court Mr Kushner and Ivanka Trump, who were their guests of honour at the Chinese new year celebration in February. China has also looked favourably on Mr Trump’s business.

The New York Times’ Mark Landler offers up some additional details that help to explain why China is working through Kushner rather than, say, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson:

Mr. Kushner’s central role reflects not only the peculiar nature of this first meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi, but also of the broader relationship between the United States and China in the early days of the Trump administration. It is at once highly personal and bluntly transactional — a strategy that carries significant risks, experts said, given the economic and security issues that already divide the countries.

While Chinese officials have found Mr. Trump a bewildering figure with a penchant for inflammatory statements, they have come to at least one clear judgment: In Mr. Trump’s Washington, his son-in-law is the man to know. …

China’s courtship of Mr. Kushner, which has coincided with the marginalization of the State Department in the Trump administration, reflects a Chinese comfort with dynastic links. Mr. Xi is himself a “princeling”: His father was Xi Zhongxun, a major figure in the Communist revolution who was later purged by Mao Zedong.

It’s so great that the American political system resembles China’s political system enough for the Trump administration for have its very own princeling.

...

I don’t mean to suggest that a new Cold War with China is a better outcome. It isn’t. I don’t want Peter Navarro running China policy either. I’m all for endorsing One Belt, One Road as a stabilizing move for Asia. But it is hard not to conclude that Trump and Kushner are spectacularly out of their depth on these issues. Worse, Trump displays no metacognition whatsoever: He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, and probably never will. He and Kushner will therefore sell off core national interests and investments at cut-rate prices.

That’s usually what happens when neophytes bargain with experts.

Every day seems to bring something scarier. I don't even want to think about how bad it will be next week.

[RoseWilder]

Trump has disdain for technology (other than twitter, apparently.) 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Why is Trump flailing? Because Americans hate his agenda, and it’s based on lies."

Quote

Everyone in Washington is trying to figure out why President Trump’s agenda has stalled on multiple fronts and why his approval numbers are swirling down the toilet. CNN’s Chris Cillizza suggests Trump’s penchant for disruption and chaos actually works against him. (I agree.) Others point to Trump’s failure to forge relationships on Capitol Hill.

Still others say the problem is congressional Republicans. Trump’s social media director has called for a primary against a House conservative who opposed Trump’s health plan, which may have violated a law designed to keep government officials from swaying elections. Some GOP groups are reportedly mulling ads targeting GOP lawmakers who don’t vote with Trump. Thus, the problem is their disloyalty.

All this has some truth to it. But here’s another overarching reason for Trump’s travails: As his campaign promises are getting translated into concrete policy specifics, Americans are recoiling from the results. What’s more, this process is unmasking the disconcerting levels of dishonesty, bad faith, and lack of concern for detail and procedure that are rotting away at the core of his agenda and approach to governing, all of which is plainly working against him.

...

Trump alone is not to blame for this. Trump didn’t care about the details — he only wanted a “win” — and thus embraced Paul Ryan’s plan. It is Ryanism, which includes repeal-and-replace as part of the broader goal of shredding the safety net, that helped create this disaster. Ryan was supposed to craft a policy that would prove ideologically satisfactory to congressional Republicans and could also be sold through shrewd rhetorical subterfuge as a fulfillment of Trump’s promise of better health care for everybody at lower costs. The CBO blew all that up by unmasking its truly regressive nature and, in the process, the big policy lie at the core of Trump’s repeal-and-replace promise. The details ended up mattering.

Something similar is happening on the travel ban and border wall. The original travel ban, which was blocked by the courts, was the result of a laughably slapdash process that could not conceal its anti-Muslim animus. The new version was also put on hold, in part because Trump and his advisers themselves revealed that its true rationale and goals were very similar, thus making it just as vulnerable to legal challenges, even as its stated rationale has been undercut by Homeland Security’s own analysts. (The fact that there’s no serious rationale for it may help explain why it’s unpopular.) Meanwhile, the wall on the Mexican border may also stumble over one of Trump’s big lies. He claimed Mexico will pay for it, but now that Congress actually has to do so, Republicans are privately saying they don’t really want to fight for that spending. The fact that the wall is also very unpopular probably makes this easier for them.

Trump could still notch victories soon. Neil Gorsuch may be confirmed to the Supreme Court. Trump may get tax reform of some kind (including huge tax cuts for the rich). But other aspects of his agenda are still in doubt. Trump has signed executive orders rolling back our policies to fight climate change, but doing that will take years and is very unpopular, perhaps in part because it won’t actually restore coal jobs, as he has promised. Trump’s vow of infrastructure spending could prove popular, but we don’t know whether it will amount to anything more than a tax break and privatization scheme. Trump’s trade bluster is also colliding with the complexity of policy reality.

Why is Trump tanking? The bottom line is that the ongoing translation of Trump’s agenda into policy specifics is showing that major elements of it are unpopular, or unworkable because they are premised on lies, or both.

...

 

[RoseWilder]

Is anyone shocked by this: 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is what happens when you don't listen to professionals/experts: "White House violated protocol by confirming Jared Kushner’s trip before he landed in Iraq"

Quote

Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, is in Iraq as a White House envoy in a further expansion of his role as shadow diplomat.

Kushner arrived in Iraq on Monday with Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who invited him on the trip, an official confirmed. The New York Times first reported that Kushner was on the trip.

In a breach of protocol, senior White House officials confirmed reports of Kushner's trip before he had landed in Iraq, raising security concerns from the Pentagon. U.S. military officials typically provide information about trips made by senior officials under the condition that media not report them until the official already has landed in a country, and declined to confirm Dunford and Kushner’s trip until they arrived in Iraq on Monday.

As reporters caught wind of Kushner’s trip and began calling the White House Sunday night, senior administration confirmed the early reports of the visit, including the original — and  incorrect — timeline, saying Kushner was already on the ground. Asked about the mistake, a White House official Monday said their timing on the logistics of the trip had been slightly off.

And Reuters, which Sunday night initially reported that Kushner had arrived in Iraq over the weekend, took the step of briefly pulling its story until Kushner had touched down in Iraq.

Navy Capt. Gregory Hicks, spokesman for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reached by email Monday, declined to comment on the White House releasing the information before Trump and Kushner were on the ground.

In a statement, Hicks did say that Dunford invited Kushner to take part in meetings that include a “visit with U.S. forces in the field to receive an update on the status of the counter-Isis campaign in Iraq and Syria.” Also on the trip is Thomas Bossert, the assistant to the president on domestic security and counterterrorism.

Usually when Pentagon officials travel to active combat zones, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, their destinations and travel dates are left intentionally vague and distributed to the press for planning purposes only.

Even though they fly into the countries on military aircraft, usually after swapping their civilian jets in hubs such as Kuwait or Bahrain, their travel is still kept secret to help ensure that the enemy does not attempt to attack their aircraft or launch any large assaults. Officials believe that U.S. government delegations may be seen as a target.

In 2007, for instance, the Taliban, having gained knowledge of Vice President Dick Cheney's visit to Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, carried out an attack on the base, killing more than 20 people.

...

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Anatomy of a fake scandal, ginned up by right-wing media and Trump"

Quote

President Trump started off this morning as he often does, by settling in to watch the festival of nincompoopery that is “Fox & Friends.” On the show, he saw something that he believes vindicates the bizarre and false charge he made that Barack Obama was tapping his phones during the presidential campaign.

I’ll try to sort through the substance of all this. But I also want to make a broader argument about how Trump’s support system — inside his government but especially in the conservative media and on Fox, which is where he apparently gets most of his intelligence information — is playing to his worst instincts, harming him politically, and making his presidency even more dangerous.

Today’s antics all started with a report on “Fox & Friends” in which correspondent Adam Housley reported that a high-ranking Obama administration official had requested the “unmasking” of the names of Trump officials who were caught up in surveillance of foreign targets. Ordinarily, when a U.S. person shows up in such surveillance — say, talking to a Russian ambassador whose communications are being monitored — that person’s identity is blacked out in reports on the surveillance. While Housley did not identify the Obama administration official, he did say that Trump associates were being picked up by this surveillance for a year before Trump took office.

...

In this case, clinging to the idea that the Obama administration unfairly monitored the Trump campaign only encourages further investigation of what could turn out to be one of the biggest scandals in American political history. Nunes’s buffoonish efforts on Trump’s behalf haven’t helped him at all. Quite the contrary, they’ve made his committee utterly irrelevant and increased pressure on the Senate Intelligence Committee to conduct a thorough and objective review. Nunes has zero credibility, and so he can no longer be an asset to the White House.

But when Trump tunes in to “Fox & Friends” every morning, he learns that he’s right about everything. He doesn’t need to listen to his intelligence briefers or anyone else who might tell him something he doesn’t want to hear. He can keep telling tall tales and pursuing his petty grievances. He never does anything wrong and never has to change. I shudder to think how that dynamic will play out when this administration faces its first foreign policy crisis, with untold numbers of lives at stake.

"...the festival of nincompoopery that is “Fox & Friends.”...": what a perfect description!  The article has a lengthy timeline of the crap F&F has stirred up in the tangerine toddler's addled brain.

[onekidanddone]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

This is what happens when you don't listen to professionals/experts: "White House violated protocol by confirming Jared Kushner’s trip before he landed in Iraq"

 

Trump: What do I have on the schedule for today?

Appointment secretary:  Violating protocol.

Trump: Really?  That is getting so boring.  I do that every day.  SAD

41 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Anatomy of a fake scandal, ginned up by right-wing media and Trump"

"...the festival of nincompoopery that is “Fox & Friends.”...": what a perfect description!  The article has a lengthy timeline of the crap F&F has stirred up in the tangerine toddler's addled brain.

That name always irked me. Friends?  These fuck wads are not my friends.

[GreyhoundFan]

Good opinion piece: "Serving a president who feels no one else’s pain"

Quote

Nikki Haley, the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, came before the Council on Foreign Relations last week to, among other things, pronounce human rights as at “the heart” of her mission. She mentioned the term “human rights” about 30 times, leaving no doubt about her seriousness. Later that day the State Department announced that it supports the sale of F-16 fighter jets to Bahrain — reversing an Obama-era policy regarding that country’s nasty record on human rights.

Ambassador, get with the program.

Ah, but what is the program? In foreign affairs, it is hard to say. President Trump has been all over the lot, initially questioning the venerable “one-China” policy and then reversing himself. In the Middle East, he said he would accept a two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio or, come to think of it, a one-state solution. Either way, there could be more settlements in the West Bank or, upon consideration, maybe not so many.

It is, however, Russia policy where Haley’s admirable aspirations collide with Trump’s wall of ignorance or avarice. Haley has actually talked about the Russia that exists — conqueror of Crimea, aggressor in Ukraine, and human-rights despoiler. Trump, however, has yet to call Vladimir Putin what he is or walk back his lavish praise of the Russian leader as being on the same moral level as Germany’s Angela Merkel. American foreign policy, like Trump’s mind, is a mess.

In this miasma, one thing seems clear: Trump does not give a damn about human rights. If he does, he has managed to restrain himself from emphasizing it in the campaign or since assuming the presidency. A recent report on conditions in Syrian prisons — wholesale torture, rape, starvation, etc. — elicited not a peep of a tweet, and in the runup to this week’s meeting at Mar-a-Lago between Trump and China’s Xi Jinping, human rights is not being mentioned.

This is to be expected. Everything about Trump strongly suggests he is indifferent to human rights because he is indifferent to suffering. In contrast to Bill Clinton, who felt everyone’s pain, Trump feels only his own. The prime example, because it involves actual pain, was to demean Sen. John McCain’s suffering as a prisoner of war in Vietnam and to disparage his heroism because he had been captured. The odor of that remark not only clings to Trump, but to everyone who disregarded it and jumped on the Trump bandwagon.

Trump also mocked the physical disability of New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski. While that brought a gasp from some people, it was really nothing compared to what Trump said about Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the couple who lost a son in Iraq. Trump likened what they had “sacrificed” to what he called the “sacrifices” he made building his business — all that overtime, all those conference calls, those bankruptcies. Who were the Khans to complain? “I think I’ve made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard.”

If ever Trump releases his tax returns, we will undoubtedly learn that his charitable giving peaked at a pittance. He is renowned in Gotham for being a deadbeat — bills not paid, commitments not honored. He will not give back because, clearly, he thinks he’s deserving of what he’s got and others definitely are not.

Sometimes the only reason I can think of for the United States to emphasize human rights is empathy — the desire to end pain and suffering and to have others treated as you would want yourself to be treated. (There’s a rule there, somewhere.) But there’s a pragmatic side to it as well. As the most powerful nation on Earth, we have insisted on a modicum of human decency. We used to be good at setting the rules.

...

Good luck to Haley. She was indifferently appointed to a post Trump does not care about, and she articulates policies that contradict the very heart of Trump’s heartlessness. She is a foreign policy ingenue — new, fresh but out of step with the president. She will learn. He, after all, will not.

How very true.

[Cartmann99]

Hot damn!  I have another bingo! 

Quote

 

Last week, conservative activists Don and Mary Colbert appeared on “The Jim Bakker Show” for the program, “Reclaiming the Land: Inauguration 2017.”

Mary Colbert—who, along with her husband, was listed by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign site as a pro-Trump “Christian leader”—said that Trump is “the chosen one of God” and anyone who challenges him will be cursed by God. That curse, she said, will extend to their children and grandchildren.

 

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/mary-colbert-god-will-curse-trumps-opponents-and-their-children-and-grandchildren/

[Click on through for the video. They've got what appears to be boxes of vitamins in front of them, which saddens me, as I thought the 'doom buckets' were extra-super nutritious. What fresh hell is this, when you have to buy supplements for your 'doom buckets'?]

Anyhoo, I've been anxiously awaiting the chance to mark off the "cursed by God" square on my bingo card! The fact that it comes from someone associated with Jim Bakker and the food buckets o' doom show, just makes it that much sweeter! 

On a serious note, since I don't have children, does my curse go to my cats, or will it skip over to my nephews and great-nieces? Do I get a free t-shirt, or a scarlet letter to wear before they cart me off to the brainwashing camp?

[GreyhoundFan]

Yeah, this will happen. <end sarcasm font>  "Trump will donate his first-quarter salary — $78,333 — to the National Park Service, White House says"

Quote

President Trump has chosen to donate his salary for the first quarter of the year — a total of $78,333 — to the National Park Service, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said in a briefing Monday afternoon.

“It is every penny that the president received from the first quarter to the day,” Spicer said. “It's from January 20th, noon, forward.”

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who attended the news conference, said that the money would be put toward the maintenance of historic battlefields. The Park Service maintains dozens of sites connected to battlefields of the Civil War and other conflicts.

“We're going to dedicate it and put it against the infrastructure of our nation's battlefields,” Zinke said. “We're about $229 million behind in deferred maintenance on our battlefields alone.”

That announcement marked another change in the president's plans for his $400,000 annual salary.

During the presidential campaign, Trump had said he would not accept a salary if he won the White House. But the Constitution requires the president to be paid, so — after his election — Trump's spokesmen said he would give the money away instead.

But then, on March 13, Spicer said that Trump would not actually donate the money until the end of the year. Spicer also said that Trump had not selected a charity to receive the money and asked the news media to help the president choose.

On Monday, however, the recipient had been chosen and the donation had been made.

“The president has spoken with counsel and made the decision to make his first-quarter salary in total to a government entity,” Spicer said. “He has chosen this quarter to donate it to the National Park Service.”

The actual donation check was shown during the briefing. It listed Trump as the payer, with an address at Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York.

Spicer said the choice of the Park Service — and, in particular, the battleground parks — was made by the president himself.

“It's a decision he made. Counsel presented him with several options. He believed . . . some great work is being done there, especially work being done to restore our great battlegrounds,” Spicer said.

Earlier this year, Trump proposed a presidential budget that would cut the Interior Department's funding by 12 percent, a decrease of $1.5 billion.

...

 

[onekidanddone]

11 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Yeah, this will happen. <end sarcasm font>  "Trump will donate his first-quarter salary — $78,333 — to the National Park Service, White House says"

 

How about he just doesn't cut funding?  I don't believe for a second the check is real.  I bet it bounces.

[GreyhoundFan]

Sigh. I don't think this has been posted yet. "Trump can quietly draw money from trust whenever he wants, new documents show"

Quote

Newly released records show the trust agreement that Donald Trump used to put his adult sons in charge of his company allows him to draw money from it upon his request, illustrating the thin divide between the president and his private fortune.

The filing, first reported by ProPublica and found on page 161 of 166 of a bundle of documents released last week by the General Services Administration, says the trust that owns hundreds of Trump businesses “shall distribute net income or principal to Donald J. Trump at his request,” or whenever his son and longtime employee “deem appropriate.”

Trump and his attorneys have pointed to the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust as a response to widespread worries from ethics lawyers, who have said Trump’s refusal to divest ownership of his company creates the potential that he can derive personal profit from his public office.

The filing — signed Feb. 10 by the trust’s managers, Donald Trump Jr. and Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg — reveals more evidence that the trust offers little barrier against Trump making money from the hotels, golf courses, branding deals and other business interests that he has widely promoted during his presidency.

Trump has visited his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, his luxury hotel in Washington and other Trump-brand properties for nine weekends in a row.

“He’s still the beneficiary of all these assets. He is still entitled to the income and the profits of the trust if he wants them,” said Beth Shapiro Kaufman, the president of law firm Caplin & Drysdale, who reviewed the trust document. “Has he put these things out of his control and out of his personal benefit? The answer is no.”

The filing summarizes Trump’s trust agreement, which has not been made public, and it is does not make clear whether the “at his request” provision is a change to the trust or simply an additional detail of the broader trust.

...

Past presidents have traditionally sold their financial interests or sequestered them in “blind trusts,” overseen by independent monitors with complete control. Trump’s trust is not blind, because he knows how his assets are performing, has close relationships with both trustees, can make money off the trust’s financial interests and can revoke the trust at any time.

A separate provision says the trustees “shall not provide any report to Donald J. Trump on the holdings and sources of income of the trust,” matching Trump’s insistence that he will limit the amount of information he learns about the business’ performance.

But Trump’s son, Eric, whom the filing calls “chairman of the advisory board for the trust,” told Forbes last month he intends to update his father on the business quarterly, adding, “My father and I are very close. I talk to him a lot. We’re pretty inseparable.”

Some trust attorneys say the provision is largely meaningless, because the president still maintains power over how the trust is managed and who runs it for his benefit.

“The whole thing is total smoke and mirrors,” said Bob Lord, a tax lawyer and associate fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies, who advised Sen. Bernie Sanders’s Democratic presidential campaign on tax issues.

The filing was revealed last week after the GSA, which oversees federal land, told the Trumps that the company is “in full compliance” with its lease for the Trump International Hotel, which is located in a federally owned building near the White House.

...

Neither the president nor the company have to disclose when or whether he draws money from the trust, which is privately held and whose purpose “is to hold assets for the benefit of Donald J. Trump.”

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said in an interview with the Atlantic published Friday that he was not concerned that Trump could reap money from his presidency because “he’s already rich.”

“He’s very rich,” Chaffetz said. “I don’t think that he ran for this office to line his pockets even more. I just don’t see it like that.”

Some legal experts said the trust agreement appears to offer no resistance if Trump did seek to receive money from private business dealings while deciding the nation’s affairs.

“He’s given up absolutely no control whatsoever,” said Fred Tansill, a trust attorney in McLean, Va. “If he wants to buy a fourth yacht or a jet plane, he can go to the trustees and say, ‘I’d like you to exercise your discretion,’ and they can give him anything he wants. If they say no, he can fire them.”

“This is trust law 101,” Tansill added. “Any trust lawyer understands that he’s given up no control. . . . There’s no blindness to this trust, and it’s not subtle.”

Gee, I guess Chappass knows as much about blind trusts as the tangerine toddler; that is to say, not a damned thing. And, I think the tangerine toddler ran for office to get adulation, lining his pockets is just a bonus to him.

[Ali]

78,333/1,500,000,000 = 0.0000522

So, he is allegedly donating 0.00522% of the amount he wants to cut.

[RoseWilder]

How low can he go? Apparently, really fucking low:

When it comes to presidential approval ratings, 28% is considered rock bottom (that is the percentage of people who are unmovable in their opinion.)  He's getting closer and closer to rock bottom. 

[47of74]

Just saw this article on the Washington Post;

washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-failing-presidency-has-the-gop-in-a-free-fall/2017/03/30/e0882d62-1581-11e7-ada0-1489b735b3a3_story.html

Quote

In the aftermath of the GOP health-care debacle came a revealing act of candor. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan admitted that his party, which controls the House, Senate and White House, is not yet a “governing party” because it could not “get 216 people to agree with each other on how we do things.”

This part in particular caught my attention.

Quote

It is now dawning on Republicans what they have done to themselves. They thought they could somehow get away with Trump. That he could be contained. That the adults could provide guidance. That the economy might come to the rescue. That the damage could be limited.

Instead, they are seeing a downward spiral of incompetence and public contempt — a collapse that is yet to reach a floor. A presidency is failing. A party unable to govern is becoming unfit to govern.

It just reminded me how about 80 years ago in a certain European country there was someone else very much like Lord Dampnuts.  And like said Dampnuts, the conservatives of the day thought he too could be contained, that "the adults" could guide him.  We all know how well that worked out in the end. 

[PreciousPantsofDoom]

3 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

We're about $229 million behind in deferred maintenance on our battlefields.

 

And he's giving them under $80 000? Even if he actually does it (not holding my breath) that is just insulting.