Donald Trump and the Deathly Fallout (Part 15)

[fraurosena]

8 hours ago, candygirl200413 said:

So um... this is a thing.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/reorganizing-the-executive-branch

 

Let's hope everybody in the Resistance gives their advice on this site then. 

[Howl]

Sweet jeebus. Trying to catch my breath here. 

[Howl]

14 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Yes, this is a historic presiduncy.

From the HuffPo article 'Trump Taps Salesman To Run Military Draft'

This won't end well or maybe it will, in the alternative universe that is Trump World.  Another personality disordered eejit, not unlike Agent Orange himself. 

[SilverBeach]

13 hours ago, HarryPotterFan said:

Well the probationary period where you can get fired is two years, right? So is anyone newer than that screwed or are they safe?

It's been a long time since I was a new fed, but I believe the probationary period is less than two years. Full career status happens at three years, which is when 100% of civil service rights and privileges sink in. Staff reductions usually involve offering an early out incentive to voluntarily get people to leave, especially retirement eligibles like me. Reductions in force (rif) are last because they are expensive.

[GreyhoundFan]

"ICE immigration arrests of noncriminals double under Trump"

Quote

Immigration arrests rose 32.6 percent in the first weeks of the Trump administration, with newly empowered federal agents intensifying their pursuit of not just undocumented immigrants with criminal records, but also thousands of illegal immigrants who have been otherwise law-abiding.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 21,362 immigrants, mostly convicted criminals, from January through mid-March, compared to 16,104 during the same period last year, according to statistics requested by The Washington Post.

Arrests of immigrants with no criminal records more than doubled to 5,441, the clearest sign yet that President Trump has ditched his predecessor’s protective stance toward most of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.

Advocates for immigrants say the unbridled enforcement has led to a sharp drop in reports from Latinos of sexual assaults and other crimes in Houston and Los Angeles, and terrified immigrant communities across the United States. A prosecutor said the presence of immigration agents in state and local courthouses, which advocates say has increased under the Trump administration, makes it harder to prosecute crime.

“My sense is that ICE is emboldened in a way that I have never seen,” Dan Satterberg, the top prosecutor in Washington state’s King County, which includes Seattle, said Thursday. “The federal government, in really just a couple of months, has undone decades of work that we have done to build this trust.”

...

But the biggest spike is the arrest of immigrants with no criminal records, with immigration field offices in New York, Boston and other places doubling or tripling their numbers from last year.

ICE’s Atlanta office arrested the most immigrants who had never committed any crimes, with nearly 700 arrests, up from 137 the prior year. Philadelphia had the biggest percentage increase, with 356 noncriminal arrests, more than six times as many as the year before.

The ICE field offices with the largest total number of arrests — more than 2,000 each — were in Dallas, which covers north Texas and Oklahoma; Atlanta, which includes Georgia and the Carolinas; and Houston, which spans Southeast Texas.

Immigration detainers — voluntary requests from ICE to law enforcement agencies to hold those arrested beyond their normal release so that agents can take them into custody and deport them — also rose, to 22,161. That was a 75 percent jump from the year before. But many were issued in areas that do not necessarily comply with ICE requests.

Overall, deportations are down by 1.2 percent, to 54,741 in January, February and March, compared to the same period last year. Elzea said it can take time to remove someone from the United States, but the number of noncriminals deported is higher this year, while the number of criminals who were deported fell. Despite his pledge to send criminals packing, Trump has struggled to get countries such as China to take their citizens back.

...

In January, he issued executive orders that made all undocumented immigrants at risk of deportation. In February, Trump’s press secretary said the “shackles” were off immigration and border agents, whose unions backed Trump in the election.

“I think the instruction is, ‘Go about your business in terms of apprehending immigrants,” said Joanne Lin, senior legislative counsel with the ACLU. “It’s wherever they can find them.”

 

[47of74]

Mike Pence is now spouting off about how Donald J. Putinfluffer has the most magnificentest penis in all the world to the North Koreans...

nbcnews.com/news/world/pence-warns-north-korea-donald-trump-s-resolve-nuclear-standoff-n747211

Quote

Vice President Mike Pence warned North Korea not to test the strength of America's military might, underlining a message that the Trump administration sought to bring peace through strength.

"Just in the past two weeks we witnessed the strength of resolve of our new leader. North Korea would do well not to test his resolve," Pence added in apparent reference to U.S. missile strikes on Syria following a gas attack in that country, as well as the decision to drop a huge bomb on an ISIS cave complex in Afghanistan.

Great.  Penis measuring contests.  This will end well.

[fraurosena]

42 minutes ago, 47of74 said:

Mike Pence is now spouting off about how Donald J. Putinfluffer has the most magnificentest penis in all the world to the North Koreans...

nbcnews.com/news/world/pence-warns-north-korea-donald-trump-s-resolve-nuclear-standoff-n747211

Great.  Penis measuring contests.  This will end well.

If Un's middle finger is anything to go by, the Toddler might even be in with a chance... who'd have thought?

 

[fraurosena]

It's time to  again .

[fraurosena]

Oh dear. Things got even worse...

He's campaigning to little kids. Little kids.... 

[Childless]

15 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Oh dear. Things got even worse...

He's campaigning to little kids. Little kids.... 

Gotta brainwash them young.

[47of74]

18 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Oh dear. Things got even worse...

He's campaigning to little kids. Little kids.... 

Is it me or does that Easter Bunny look like he got hit in the head by the Mack Truck that Orange J. Putinfluffer had been pretending to be a big man in? 

[Audrey2]

9 minutes ago, Childless said:

Gotta brainwash them young.

Especially if you're going for the Trump dynasty- 8 years each of Donnie JR, Ivanka, Jared, and Erik at least, coming right after 4-8 years of Donald. That's not an earthquake, folks, it's me shuddering at this thought.

[GreyhoundFan]

I saw this picture on CNN.com and just had to make a meme of it.

[candygirl200413]

A kid asked for orange tangerine to sign his hat... look what resulted:

 

[HarryPotterFan]

North Korea 'will test missiles weekly', senior official tells BBC

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-39623882

Can Trump and Un just meet, have a dick measuring contest, and be done with it before there's a war???

[47of74]

17 minutes ago, HarryPotterFan said:

North Korea 'will test missiles weekly', senior official tells BBC

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-39623882

Can Trump and Un just meet, have a dick measuring contest, and be done with it before there's a war???

Complete with electron microscopes.

Shaun King hit the nail on the goddamn head with this article;

nydailynews.com/news/national/king-conservatives-hated-uppity-negro-golfing-president-article-1.3065230

Quote

No President in American history has ever golfed more per week than Donald Trump. In his first 12 weeks in office Trump took a staggering 18 golf course trips. That's unheard of. In his first 12 weeks in office, President Obama didn't visit a single golf course. By the end of this year, it's likely that Trump will have golfed more than President Obama has in his entire presidency.

And that's strange. It's really strange. Because Donald Trump and other conservative pundits seemed to be deeply bothered by the times President Obama went out and golfed. It appeared to genuinely offend them. They obsessed over it.

Throughout the campaign, Trump frequently riffed on how much Obama golfed and pledged, "I'm going to be working for you. I'm not going to have time to go play golf." The crowd ate it up.

Throughout the Obama administration, any time President Obama golfed, some famous conservative pundit chimed in. It was a reliable punchline that consistently got a rise out of their base.

White conservatives are still pissy over the fact that they can't own other human beings anymore.

[GreyhoundFan]

I thought this was a good analysis: "Racism motivated Trump voters more than authoritarianism". There are too many visuals for me to copy here, but it was an interesting read.

 

Another good one: "This brutal new poll shows that fewer and fewer people believe Trump’s lies". The chart is worth looking at, but here's a little info:

Quote

...

 

A new Gallup poll out this morning, however, strongly suggests that an increasing number of Americans just don’t believe Trump’s spin about his presidency anymore. It finds that only 45 percent of Americans think Trump keeps his promises, down from 62 percent in February, an astonishing slide of 17 points

...

Note that the drop has been 11 points among Republicans and 9 points among conservatives. Meanwhile, among Americans overall, there has been a 7-point drop in those who think Trump can bring about the change this country needs, from 53 percent to 46 percent, and a 6-point drop in those who think that Trump is honest and trustworthy, from 42 percent to 36 percent.

...

 

[Howl]

I don't know why y'all have such a bee in your collective bonnets about Trump's golfing activities.  While he's golfing, he's not tweeting shit, launching preemptive (!) bombing attacks, poking a stick in the North Korea ant bed, draining populating the swamp, Who knew things are so complicated?, petting the Russian kitty, putting his ignorance/arrogance on full display,  or engaging in other activities to the detriment of our constitution and our country.  FORE! 

 

58 minutes ago, 47of74 said:

White conservatives are still pissy over the fact that they can't own other human beings anymore.

Well, they've just switched over from chattel slavery to owning people though credit card debt and other financial instruments. 

[fraurosena]

Just a little reminder, to ensure it doesn't become 'normal' because he does it all the time:

It’s not just the golf: Trump’s Mar-a-Lago ethics mess gets worse

Quote

Beach, Florida estate. According to NBC News’ estimates by Sunday Trump will have spent 28 percent of his term traveling to or staying at Mar-a-Lago.

It’s not just a question of travel time, but of ethics and cost efficiency, according to watchdog groups and ethics experts.

While presidents have always traveled on the taxpayer’s dollar – the Obamas were partial to Hawaii and Martha’s Vineyard while President George W. Bush frequented his Crawford, Texas ranch – Trump’s travel is “unprecedented,” one expert says, because he’s repeatedly visiting his own privately ince his January inauguration, President Trump has spent seven of 13 weekends at his Palm owned commercial property at Mar-a-Lago.[...]

But [...] the ethics mess is what matters most: Trump owns the courses he keeps breaking campaign promises to visit. Mar-a-Lago isn’t just some pleasant presidential retreat or a nice place for a president to unwind; it’s a private business that Trump continues to profit from. From the NBC News report:

“It’s just another example of his consistent efforts to exploit public office for private gain,” ethics expert Steve Schooner told NBC News. “He’s using his official office and the fact that people have to travel with him, meet him, and follow him to promote his commercial enterprise, in this case his privately owned club.”

“I can’t think of anything like this that we’ve seen at anytime in the modern era,” the George Washington Law School professor told NBC News. The Mar-a-Lago property is still owned by Trump, who placed his holdings in a trust overseen by his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., and Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg before assuming office, prompting Schooner to lament that the president “should have divested from his properties to begin with.”

Since Trump became president the cost of membership at Mar-a-Lago has doubled, with guests now paying $200,000 just to join.

“This is a privately owned club that for all intents and purposes was just another golf property in Florida before, that almost now is something that Americans immediately recognize,” Schooner continued. “Imagine what you would have to pay to get that kind of brand recognition. That’s extraordinary.”

Circling back to our coverage from last month, this ethical mess is getting worse, not better. I’m reminded anew of this recent New York Times piece, which noted that Team Trump has created “an arena for potential political influence rarely seen in American history: a kind of Washington steakhouse on steroids, situated in a sunny playground of the rich and powerful, where members and their guests enjoy a level of access that could elude even the best-connected of lobbyists.”[...]

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent talked recently to Norm Eisen, the chief ethics czar in the Obama White House, who noted Trump’s habit of welcoming foreign leaders to his private club – something we’ve now seen twice, with separate visits from the presidents of Japan and China.

“We’ve had a lot of presidents who hosted foreign leaders away from the White House,” Eisen said. “But we’ve never in history had one do it in a place where he’s selling memberships for hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop. Trump just could not resist the opportunity to make an infomercial for his property. He’s worked hard all his life to generate free media. Now he’s hit the mother lode, and he’s not going to stop.”

Eisen made these comments two months ago. The “he’s not going to stop” prediction, we now know, was prescient.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump Voters in a Swing District Wonder When the ‘Winning’ Will Start"

Quote

BENSALEM, Pa. — One after another, the gamblers totter along the twisting walkway, bathed in artificial purple light — burdened, at least occasionally, by the instinct that they should have known better.

Usually, this pathway outside Parx Casino is reserved for self-flagellation, a private lament at the last hundred lost. But lately, as with most any gathering place around here since late January — the checkout line, the liquor store, the park nearby where losing lottery numbers are pressed into the mulch — patrons have found occasion to project their angst outward, second-guessing a November wager.

“Just like any other damn president,” sighed Theresa Remington, 44, a home-care worker and the mother of two active-duty Marines, scraping at an unlit cigarette. She had voted for Donald J. Trump because she expected him to improve conditions for veterans and overhaul the health care system. Now?

“Political bluster,” Ms. Remington said, before making another run at the quarter slots. She wondered aloud how Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont might have fared in the job.

Such is a view from this swing county of a swing region of a swing state that powered Mr. Trump’s improbable victory, an electoral thermometer for a president slogging toward the end of his first 100 days. Across the country, Republican officials have grown anxious at their standing on even ruby-red turf, sweating out a closer-than-expected victory last week in a House race in a Kansas congressional district that Mr. Trump had carried by 27 points. Another stress test arrives Tuesday, with a special election for a House seat in Georgia.

...

“No one wants to be wrong,” said Brian Mock, 33, a tattoo artist in Levittown, Pa., and a Trump skeptic. “It’s seeing a house on fire and saying, ‘That house isn’t on fire.’ It is very clearly on fire.”

Yet interviews with voters across the district suggest a nuanced view of a president getting his sea legs. Many still trust him, but wonder why his deal-making instincts do not seem to be translating. They admire his zeal, but are occasionally baffled by his tweets. They insist he will be fine, but suggest gently that maybe Vice President Mike Pence should assume a more expansive role.

Perhaps most forcefully, they question when they will begin to see more of that word they were promised, the outcome that voters were supposed to be “sick and tired of” by now, in Mr. Trump’s campaign estimation.

Winning.

“It’s not what he’s done, it’s what he’s trying to do,” said Bill Yokobosky IV, 33, a train engineer from Langhorne, Pa., who was waiting for a haircut at a strip mall. “He hasn’t succeeded, really.”

Like many colleagues from his rail union, Mr. Yokobosky defied leadership wishes in voting for Mr. Trump. He does not regret it, and he is eager to defend the president against the “nit-picking” of opponents, particularly over any links to Russia. But he has come to consider the perils of a commander in chief plainly “trying to learn on the fly.”

...

Some critics of the president seem to hope so, describing a change in at least a handful of Trump-supporting neighbors recently: a humbling in the face of his stumbles, among voters who used to gloat.

“They’ve quieted down,” said Doug Meginley, the manager at Positively Records in Levittown, perched beside an Elvis mask, a Vanilla Fudge drumhead and a Monkees-themed tambourine. “The Trump supporters know.”

At the same time, many in the area have made a point of reinforcing their loyalty, letting bumper stickers linger and Facebook posts bloom.

In December, some traveled west to Hershey, Pa., for a stop on Mr. Trump’s “thank you” tour.

Patricia Poprik, the chairwoman of the Bucks County Republican Committee, brought her two granddaughters, one of whom had requested a meeting with Mr. Trump as a Christmas gift.

“He goes, ‘Girls, you gotta do better than that,’” Ms. Poprik recalled of the presidential greeting backstage.

...

Well, in my estimation, we won't be "winning" until at least 2018, and probably 2020.

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s no populist. He’s a swamp monster."

Quote

Last year, Mark Meckler, one of the founders of the tea party movement, had concerns about Donald Trump but gave the Republican nominee the benefit of the doubt, because Trump “at least says he’s going to attack” the crony-capitalist system.

Now the conservative activist has revised his opinion. Trump “said he was going to D.C. to drain the swamp,” Meckler said in a recent Fox Business interview, but “now it looks like we’ve got the Creature from the Black Lagoon in the White House.”

For everybody else who believed Trump’s populist talk about tackling a rigged system, it’s time to recognize you’ve been had. The president of the United States is a swamp monster.

The billionaire has embraced a level of corporate control of the government that makes previous controversies involving corporate influence — Vice President Dick Cheney’s attempt in 2001 to keep secret the names of industry officials who participated in his energy task force, for example — seem quaint by comparison.

In the quiet of Good Friday, President Trump’s White House announced that it would end the practice of releasing White House visitor logs, giving the public no way to know which corporate suitors have the ear of Trump and his staff. Trump was already insulated from such disclosure during the disproportionate amount of his presidency he spends at Mar-a-Lago and other Trump properties.

Trump seems to think people won’t care about this any more than they do about his refusal to release his tax returns and other disclosures that would reveal his conflicts of interest. It’s true that “transparency” is the sort of subject that usually excites only good-government types. But in this case the opacity is obscuring the rise of a new American plutocracy.

Steven Aftergood, who runs the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy, said Trump’s actions are testing “the character of the U.S. government” and raise the possibility of the government “devolving into some kind of corporate mutation where the wealthy and well-connected rule.”

...

ProPublica and the New York Times reported over the weekend that the Trump administration is being populated with former lobbyists, lawyers and consultants who are making policy for the industries that had been paying them. The arrangement has violated Trump’s (already weakened) ethics rules, and the administration is secretly issuing waivers exempting the former lobbyists from rules blocking them from working on issues that would benefit their former clients. Trump White House officials had more than 300 recent corporate clients and employers, the Times reported, and more than 40 former lobbyists are now in the White House and federal government. The director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics says even he has “no idea how many waivers have been issued.”

And these corporations are set to get what they paid for.

My Post colleague Juliet Eilperin reported Sunday on some of the 168 requests corporate interests have made, and are likely to be given, for regulatory relief, many of them seeking reduced environmental protections and worker rights. BP wants to make it easier to drill in the Gulf of Mexico. The pavement industry wants a halt to research on the environmental impact of coal tar. And my favorite: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s request that employers no longer be required to report their injury and illness records electronically to the Labor Department.

This should give the lie to Trump’s claims that deregulation is about creating jobs. The Chamber is upset that the government “intends to post the injury and illness records on the internet for anyone to see,” because this “will provide unions and trial attorneys with information that can be taken out of context.” As The Post’s James Hohmann noted, Trump already signed legislation removing a rule requiring businesses seeking large federal contracts to disclose serious safety and labor-law violations.

Trump has a simple answer to those who question his attempts to conceal the corporate influence in his administration. As he tweeted Sunday in response to protests about his failure to release his tax returns: “The election is over!”

Can Trump marginalize those who question his plutocracy? Eric Liu, an expert on mobilization and author of the new book “You’re More Powerful Than You Think,” sees Trump’s abandonment of the little guy as an opening for a “nascent progressive populism.”

But be careful: You don’t have to have seen “Creature from the Black Lagoon” to know that, in the swamp-monster genre, the beast seldom goes quietly.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s ethical transgressions are multiplying. What happens if there are too many to track?"

Quote

The evidence of the Trump administration’s flouting of basic norms of transparency and government ethics continues to mount. A new batch of examples — which we’ll detail below — have just come to light in various news accounts.

And as the scale and scope of the Trump transgressions comes into clearer view, another danger has presented itself: the sheer volume of them may be growing so overwhelming that tracking them could become nearly impossible.

Once again, the president is glibly refusing to comply with the most fundamental practices of governmental ethics and transparency. After demonstrators gathered Saturday in dozens of cities across the country to call on Trump to release his tax returns, Trump, rather than acknowledge voters’ concerns, accused them of being paid protesters. “Someone should look into who paid for the small organized rallies yesterday,” he tweeted.

Meanwhile, even as Trump was employing this diversionary tactic, reporters were busily doing their jobs, by uncovering more stories. Any one of the ones that broke in the past several days would, in a typical presidency, be fodder for multiple-weeks of muckraking.

But the sheer number of them under Trump, along with the investigations into possible Trump campaign collusion with Russian meddling in our election, risks reducing each of them into nothing more than a blip, amid a massive sea of transgressions. In just the past few days, we have learned:

...

• The Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin reports that Trump has invited titans of industry to rewrite — and even eviscerate — regulations protecting the environment and worker safety. As U.S. Chamber of Commerce senior vice president Neil Bradley told Eilperin, industry interests now expect the Trump administration to provide relief “from a regulatory onslaught that occurred, principally, during the prior administration,” and a process is underway throughout the federal government to recast a variety of federal regulations in keeping with corporate lobbyists’ wishlists.
• Meanwhile, Trump is already profiting from his 2020 reelection effort, as his campaign continues to spend money at Trump-owned businesses, the Wall Street Journal reports. In the first quarter of 2017, Trump hotels, golf courses, and restaurants were paid nearly half a million dollars, campaign finance disclosures reveal.
• Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign manager now in the middle of the investigation into the campaign-Russia collusion, has reportedly been meeting with Chinese billionaires eager to get a piece of any Trump infrastructure-building projects, the Financial Times reports. Manafort met with Yan Jiehe, the founder of construction giant Pacific Construction Group, who boasted that he is “definitely the most ideal privately owned unit to invest in construction.”

These are just stories from the past three days. As the Trump White House begins in earnest to staff the hundreds of vacant political positions across government; as congressional and FBI investigations dig further into the Russia story; as Trump’s family businesses continue to grow and profit with his daughter and son-in-law at his side in the West Wing; as the leak-prone Trump White House continues to leak, the drip-drip of ethics-defying stories will only intensify — and become harder and harder to stay on top of.

Each of these stories would be worrisome enough on its own. But all of it adds up to a more long-lasting and insidious threat: that the Trump administration’s offenses become a regular part of the news cycle, lose their power to shock and outrage us, and in the process, make it easier for future presidents to skirt basic norms of government ethics and transparency.

It is mind-numbing.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Meet the new Trump . . . same as the old Trump?"

Quote

In the past week or so, Donald Trump has decided not to be totally Donald Trump. He has changed his positions on many issues, often by simply contradicting himself and sometimes by repudiating what he once said. However he does it, it comes down to this: If policies were gender identities, Trump wouldn’t know which bathroom to use.

The president has reversed himself on NATO. Where just recently he pronounced it “obsolete,” he now has changed his position by cleverly reimagining it. He gave NATO a role in fighting terrorism, which it has been doing all along.

Similar feats of mental prestidigitation got Trump to change his mind on China, Russia and Syria, where the one which was once almost a buddy (Russia) is now a foe and the one which was once a foe (China) is going to help contain North Korea and the one for which he had no policy (Syria) has been whacked by Tomahawk missiles. And for the moment, the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv is not moving to Jerusalem.

These reversals represent nothing less than a retreat to the status quo ante — that halcyon era before Trump and his cast of mental munchkins started messing with foreign policy. The policies that now seem to be in place are ones that even former president Barack Obama might support. In fact, with the exception of hitting Syria, he did.

...

His foreign policy 180s are welcome, but those were not what won the hearts of his ardent supporters. They wanted something more — jobs, affordable health care and a general sense that Washington would once again be their capital. But NAFTA remains in place, Obamacare is still the law of the land, tax reform ain’t coming soon, and the swamp that was supposed to be drained has been replenished with, among others, former Goldman Sachs executives — most prominently Gary Cohn, once No. 2 at Goldman and now, for much lower pay, apparently No. 2 at the White House.

...

This reversal by personnel was not triggered by unforeseen events — Syria’s use of a nerve agent, for instance. It is, instead, a strong indication that Trump’s campaign was a lie. His wooing of the American working class was insincere. For instance, he put more effort into denouncing Obamacare than he did in preparing legislation to replace it. Those who thought Trump was somehow going to pay their doctors’ bills simply got taken. They were — as were the students of Trump University — suckered.

Sooner or later, Trump’s supporters will realize they have been seduced and abandoned. The easy solutions he promised — the return of manufacturing to the Midwest, the restoration of King Coal to its traditional throne — will not materialize. Maybe then these voters will seek an accounting and they will turn, with appropriate fury, not just on Trump but on the coterie of the craven who jumped on his bandwagon. Trump is not the only one who can reverse his actions. So can the voters.

 

 

 

"Trump has spent one out of every five minutes of his presidency in Palm Beach"

Quote

Before hosting the annual Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn of the White House on Monday, President Trump had another traditional Easter event to attend: the annual Easter egg hunt at Mar-a-Lago, his resort in Palm Beach, Fla. On Sunday, the president and first lady Melania Trump attended the private event at the club while the reporter assigned to cover the president for the White House press corps waited in the parking lot. (The only indication of who attended was offered by the cars that arrived for the event: “a cavalcade of luxury vehicles, including Rolls Royce, Bentley, Ferrari, Maserati, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, BMW, Porsche, Land Rover, Jaguar, Tesla, and Cadillac,” according to the pool reporter.)

...

Why was Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Sunday? Quite simply, because he’s usually there on the weekend. On seven of the 13 weekends he has been president, he has spent time at the resort, usually slipping away from Mar-a-Lago to head to one of his nearby golf courses to play a round. That includes each of the past two weekends, when he arrived on Thursday and stayed through most of Sunday.

...

Note that this doesn’t include the time spent on Air Force One getting to Palm Beach: This is solely time once the plane lands in Palm Beach or departs from there. (We did, however, include Trump’s visit to his golf club in Jupiter, Fla. on Feb. 11.)

Trump’s taken to calling Mar-a-Lago the “winter White House” or “southern White House,” clearly in part to give the impression that his time at the facility is spent on presidential business. Often, his time there is spent on leisure, of course — but also occasionally on bolstering the commercial value of the property, however indirectly. There’s no discernible presidential value in attending the annual Easter egg hunt, of course, much less any of the various events he has been photographed popping into over the past few months. There is a clear value to Mar-a-Lago, though.

If we tally the time spent in Palm Beach (at Mar-a-Lago and his golf clubs nearby) rounded to the half-hour since he was inaugurated and through noon on Monday, Trump has spent about one out of every five minutes of his presidency at the “winter White House” — 424.5 hours there and 1,663.5 hours everywhere else, including on Air Force One headed to Mar-a-Lago. (That trip takes about an hour-and-a-half, so that’s an additional 21 hours spent flying there and back.)

...

In other words, there’s a very real sense in which Trump is splitting his time between two jobs: serving as president of the United States and acting as owner/host of Mar-a-Lago. In some cases, those roles overlap, such as when he introduced Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to a couple having their wedding at the resort. Of course, the attention that follows the president also now encompasses Trump’s property. Not just from the media: After all, a staffer for the first lady tweeted a photo of a private Mar-a-Lago event.

It’s not yet clear whether Trump plans to travel to Palm Beach again this week. But if the existing pattern holds, he’ll go on any two of the next four days.

There are some good charts and pictures in the article.

[JMarie]

On ‎4‎/‎16‎/‎2017 at 1:29 PM, HarryPotterFan said:

My fear is Trump doesn't understand this and will do something stupid.

Do you fear this, or, deep down inside, do you know this?

[AmericanRose]

So... since it's no longer winter, is he going to stop visiting the "winter White House"?

I kind of wish the fallout from all the investigations and everything would hurry up and happen  ... though Pence isn't much better.