Trump 21: Tweeting Us Into the Apocalypse

[AmazonGrace]

I think Junior tweeted the emails because he knew that the NY Times was about to publish them and wanted some free brownie points from Trumpkins. ("See, he has nothing to hide, totally transparent" / "now where are Hillary's emails?!?!?!" /"Yay Donnie, the fake NYT was about to post incriminating information about you but you WON, you posted it FIRST!!"

[fraurosena]

20 minutes ago, Audrey2 said:

I'm hoping that he will be gone as well, but I fear his true believers will elect him to another term, no matter what.

 

1 minute ago, VixenToast said:

This is also my fear too.  so much, some days I feel so anxious about it. Deep, healing breaths, in, out, in, out, woosah.

Don't worry, with all the revelations coming out lately, it's only a matter of time before he's gone. Just you wait. The rats will be leaving the ship soon, and the BT's will magically evaporate. Only the most ardent, deluded and cockamamy ones will remain. But they will be a tiny, tiny minority.

Yes, I'm that optimistic. 

[JenniferJuniper]

26 minutes ago, Audrey2 said:

I'm hoping that he will be gone as well, but I fear his true believers will elect him to another term, no matter what.

He doesn't have enough true believers to win any election legitimately.  What we need to worry about is continued Russian control of our election system.

[AmazonGrace]

 

Scheduling conflict my ass... He goes golfing every weekend, but he can't find a couple of off days to go see the Queen? 

[Audrey2]

6 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

 

Don't worry, with all the revelations coming out lately, it's only a matter of time before he's gone. Just you wait. The rats will be leaving the ship soon, and the BT's will magically evaporate. Only the most ardent, deluded and cockamamy ones will remain. But they will be a tiny, tiny minority.

Yes, I'm that optimistic. 

Sadly, one of my closest friends is a yuge Trump supporter. All he can talk about is how wonderful Trump is. His lips are so far up Trump's bum that they've come out through his mouth and have recirculated. (Crude, I know, but you should see my imitation of him! It's awful!)

2 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

Scheduling conflict my ass... He goes golfing every weekend, but he can't find a couple of off days to go see the Queen? 

I'm not a Brit, but I have tremendous admiration of the Queen. Let's not inflict him upon her.

[fraurosena]

11 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

Scheduling conflict my ass... He goes golfing every weekend, but he can't find a couple of off days to go see the Queen? 

Methinks it's the other way around. It's the Queen's polite way of saying she doesn't want to meet him. 

Who knows, maybe she's keeping her fingers crossed that he'll have been ousted before a new date has been set. 

[Childless]

2 hours ago, Destiny said:

Hey Cheeto, Los Angeles has been working on the Olympics bid for a couple of years. Stop taking credit for other people’s work.

That's his MO.  I don't think he's ever accomplished anything on his own.

[JenniferJuniper]

30 minutes ago, Childless said:

That's his MO.  I don't think he's ever accomplished anything on his own.

It's like your old drunk uncle with mid-stage dementia suddenly became president of the United States.  The man is a total loser and almost certainly guilty of major financial crimes beyond what he has done to this country.   

Oh, and Tiffany, girl, you are so lucky he rejected you!   Write a book.  Unlike your mother, you haven't had to sign a non-disclosure agreement!  

[VixenToast]

I have no doubt the Queen will be her usual cheeky self when it comes to people she doesn't like. Hell, once in the 80s or 90s when she was visited by the Saudi King, she insisted on driving him around (women aren't/weren't allowed to drive in SA.)

Gooooood, I'd love to see what she would do to him. That lady has balls. She lived through Hitler, I doubt she much likes Twitler.

[Destiny]

So. Yeah. This new email mess. If this is what takes Cheeto down, I may forgive emails for existing.

Related: I tuned into faux news to see what they were saying about this. They were taking about ISIS.

[fraurosena]

Keith Olbermann. Of course he has a new video out now. 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Taking a momentary break from the Junior stuff, this is an interesting analytical piece: "Why is Trump more worried about coal miners than department store employees?"

Spoiler

On the campaign trail, few groups of workers were mentioned more often by candidate Donald Trump than coal miners. Factba.se, which indexes every speech and tweet of the president’s, tallied 294 total references to coal miners over time. By contrast, Trump only mentioned doctors 94 times, despite the issue of health care being prominent in politics over the past few years.

In one sense, it’s easy to see why. The coal industry has shed thousands of employees over the past few years, with the number of people working in the coal mining industry declining by more than 41 percent since Barack Obama took office in January 2008. (The overall mining and logging industry — which includes oil drilling — fared better, shedding only 6 percent of its jobs.)

...

In terms of raw numbers, though, there’s another industry that has fared even worse. Compared to January 2009, there are 35,600 fewer coal miners. But over that period there are also 198,400 fewer department store employees.

...

Yet Trump mentioned department stores four times as a candidate.

Over the weekend, the department store giant Sears announced that it planned to close 43 more stores across the United States. When the chain announced 72 additional closures in June, Business Insider obtained a list of the store locations.

...

Twenty-three are in nine states Hillary Clinton won in 2016. Forty-nine of them are in 20 states Trump won — of 30 total. About 178,000 people work for Sears, more than three times the number of people that work in the coal mining industry. But over the last five years, BI reports, a quarter of those stores have closed.

So why hasn’t Trump championed the dying department store industry the way he has coal? It’s true that department stores are struggling in part because of changes to the industry, with online retailers eating into the profitability of large brick-and-mortar retailers. But, then, the coal industry is also a victim of shifts in technology. The rapid rise of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) led to a huge spike in cheap, cleaner-burning natural gas, which in turn prompted utilities to switch over from coal. If department stores are archaic vestiges of a world gone by, one can argue that the coal industry is, too.

A key difference lies in the way that Trump describes his mandate. His campaign slogan — “make America great again” — centers on a vision of a United States that embraces the rugged blue-collar aesthetic of the coal miner. In Trump’s halcyon America, men go to work in mines and at manufacturing plants and produce the energy we need and the goods the rest of us buy. It’s a traditional vision of the working class, pitting guys who work with their hands against the white-collar management.

It is not, however, an accurate depiction of the United States as it is today.

Trump’s campaign was explicit in its appeal to working-class whites, and, it’s probably fair to say, to working-class white men. Coal miners are almost all men and almost all white, as data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows. By contrast, 60 percent of the employees of department stores are women and 40 percent are black, Hispanic or Asian.

...

It’s not that the diversity necessarily precludes Trump from focusing on the industry. It’s that the industry looks more like the modern American economy Trump was implicitly running against. He was running against global trade. He was championing manufacturing over service. He was celebrating a macho, idealized past, not the murkier present. In America in 2017, service-sector jobs that employ a large percentage of women and non-whites are more common than jobs in manufacturing or coal mining. But those aren’t the jobs that Trump was running to protect.

Far less of Trump’s core base of support is negatively affected by a stumbling coal industry than a crumbling department store chain. But department stores don’t carry the cultural weight that coal mining does, particularly to Trump and his base of support. As with so many other aspects of the United States these days, the political utility of the people who are negatively affected makes an enormous difference in how much political leaders care.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"A Conspiracy of Dunces"

Spoiler

Here is a good rule of thumb for dealing with Donald Trump: Everyone who gives him the benefit of the doubt eventually regrets it.

This was true of clients and contractors and creditors throughout his business career. It was true of the sycophants and opportunists before whom he dangled cabinet appointments during the campaign and then, oh, never mind. It has been true of his cabinet members and spokesmen, whose attempts to defend and explain their boss’s conduct are gleefully undercut by the boss himself. And it should be true — for the sake of their souls, I sincerely hope it’s true — of the Republican leaders whose reputations for probity and principle he has stomped all over since winning their party’s nomination.

And now it’s true of me.

The benefit of the doubt I extended to Trump was limited, but on a rather important subject: I thought that direct collusion between his inner circle and Russian officialdom during the 2016 campaign was relatively unlikely and the odds of ever finding proof of such a conspiracy vanishingly low. A lot of weirdness around Trump and Russia, I argued, had a more normal explanation — he had made business deals with Russians, he still harbors a 1980s-era vision of superpower cooperation, and as a foreign-policy neophyte he clutched the idea of détente like a security blanket even as the Russians separately made moves to help him win.

You can read my argument in full here; it’s a mere six weeks old. It’s also no longer operative, because we know now that Donald Trump’s son, his son-in-law and his campaign manager all took a meeting in which it was explicitly promised that damaging information on Hillary Clinton would be supplied as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

The meeting’s existence does not carry us all the way to the maximal collusion scenario, in which Trump himself was aware of Russia’s role in the hack of the Democratic National Committee and ordered his aides to conspire with WikiLeaks and Russian intelligence to time the drip-drip-drip of hacked emails and maximize their impact.

As the hapless Don Jr. — the Gob Bluth or Fredo Corleone of a family conspicuously short on Michaels — protested in his own defense, the Russian rendezvous we know about came before (though only slightly before) the WikiLeaks haul was announced. So the Trump team presumably assumed that it involved some other Hillary-related dirt — some of the missing Clinton server emails that Trump himself jokingly (“jokingly”?) urged Russian hackers to conjure and release, or direct evidence of Clinton Foundation corruption in its Russian relationships.

With that semi-exculpatory explanation in hand, you can grope your way to the current anti-anti-Trump talking point — that Don Jr. and company were just hoping to “gather oppo” to which a foreign government might happen to be privy, much as Democratic operatives looked to Ukraine for evidence of the Trump campaign’s shady ties.

But even if accepting oppo from a foreign government is technically legal — it probably is, but I leave that question to campaign finance lawyers to work out — this talking point takes you only so far. I am not a particularly fierce Russia hawk, but the Russians are still a more-hostile-than-not power these days, with stronger incentives to subvert American democracy than the average foreign government. So taking their oppo has a gravity that should have stopped a more upright and patriotic campaign short.

Second, if the Russians had been dangling some of Hillary’s missing 30,000 emails, those, too, would had to have been hacked — that is, stolen — to end up in Moscow’s hands. So Don Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner should have known going in that if the offer was genuine, the oppo useful, it might involve stolen goods.

But on the basis of the emails, the younger Trump went in not skeptically but eagerly (“if it’s what you say I love it”), ignoring or simply accepting the weird formulation about Russian support for Trump’s campaign. And then of course everybody lied about or “forgot” about the meeting, repeatedly and consistently, right up until the emails themselves made their way to the press.

So while this is not direct evidence that the president of the United States was complicit in a virtual burglary perpetrated against the other party during an election season, it’s strong evidence that we should drop the presumption that such collusion is an extreme or implausible scenario.

Instead, the mix of inexperience, incaution and conspiratorial glee on display in the emails suggests that people in Trump’s immediate family — not just satellites like Roger Stone — would have been delighted to collude if the opportunity presented itself. Indeed, if the Russians didn’t approach the Trump circle about how to handle the D.N.C. email trove, it was probably because they recognized that anyone this naïve, giddy and “Burn After Reading”-level stupid would make a rather poor espionage partner.

Then keep in mind, too, that all of this has come out (relatively) easily, thanks to digging by this newspaper’s reporters and leaks from the various factions in and around the White House, without the subpoenas and immunity deals that the formal investigations have at their disposal. That means there is probably more and worse to come, and the more there is, the worse the president’s dealings with James Comey look. Even if the president himself is innocent of Russian collusion, protecting your family from exposure is a pretty strong motive for obstruction.

In the end, impeachment is political, not legal, and the House G.O.P. probably won’t impeach for anything short of a transcript of a call between Trump and Putin in which the words “yes, I want you to hack their servers big-league, Vladimir” appear in black-and-white. And even then ….

But right now, the 2018 congressional elections promise to be a de facto referendum on impeachment. There are enough sparks in the smoke; there will probably be fire for some of Trump’s intimates before another year is out.

And as for the president himself — well, to conclude where I began, anyone presuming his innocence at this point should have all the confidence of Chris Christie awaiting his cabinet appointment, or Sean Spicer reading over the day’s talking points. Keep an eye on that Trump-monogrammed rug under your feet; it may not be there for long.

They are all competing for dumbest, aren't they?

[Cartmann99]

9 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

If there was any justice, his prison TV would only get Lifetime, WETV, OWN, and Oxygen.

I like this, but I'm crueler than you. I want him to have a television in his cell that he can't turn off, and that only gets one channel. I want a channel with Rosie O'Donnell as the host, where she just does interviews with the people Trump hates, or has hurt or attacked in some manner, and are now living happy and fulfilled lives. It would drive him up the wall to see his "enemies" laughing and enjoying their lives, while he's stuck in prison. 

[Ali]

2 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

I like this, but I'm crueler than you. I want him to have a television in his cell that he can't turn off, and that only gets one channel. I want a channel with Rosie O'Donnell as the host, where she just does interviews with the people Trump hates, or has hurt or attacked in some manner, and are now living happy and fulfilled lives. It would drive him up the wall to see his "enemies" laughing and enjoying their lives, while he's stuck in prison. 

I would have Megyn Kelly and all the journalists he hates do interviews too.

[GreyhoundFan]

I shudder to think of the tweetstorm that will happen in the morning: "‘Category 5 hurricane’: White House under siege by Trump Jr.’s Russia revelations"

Spoiler

The White House has been thrust into chaos after days of ever-worsening revelations about a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a lawyer characterized as representing the Russian government, as the president fumes against his enemies and senior aides circle one another with suspicion, according to top White House officials and outside advisers.

President Trump — who has been hidden from public view since returning last weekend from a divisive international summit — is enraged that the Russia cloud still hangs over his presidency and is exasperated that his eldest son and namesake has become engulfed by it, said people who have spoken with him this week.

The disclosure that Trump Jr. met with a Russian attorney, believing he would receive incriminating information about Hillary Clinton as part of the Kremlin’s effort to boost his father’s candidacy, has set back the administration’s faltering agenda and rattled the senior leadership team.

Even supporters of Trump Jr. who believe he faces no legal repercussions privately acknowledged Tuesday that the story is a public relations disaster — for him as well as for the White House. One outside ally called it a “Category 5 hurricane,” while an outside adviser said a CNN graphic charting connections between the Trump team and Russians resembled the plot of the fictional Netflix series “House of Cards.”

Even Vice President Pence sought to distance himself from the controversy, with his spokesman noting that Trump Jr.’s meeting occurred before Pence joined the ticket.

Inside a White House in which infighting often seems like a core cultural value, three straight days of revelations in the New York Times about Trump Jr. have inspired a new round of accusations and recriminations, with advisers privately speculating about who inside the Trump orbit may be leaking damaging information about the president’s son.

This portrait of the Trump White House under siege is based on interviews Tuesday with more than a dozen West Wing officials, outside advisers, and friends and associates of the president and his family, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid.

The makeup of Trump’s inner circle is the subject of internal debate, as ever. Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and senior adviser; Jared Kushner, her husband and another senior adviser; and first lady Melania Trump have been privately pressing the president to shake up his team — most specifically by replacing Reince Priebus as the White House chief of staff, according to two senior White House officials and one ally close to the White House.

The three family members are especially concerned about the steady stream of unauthorized leaks to journalists that have plagued the administration over the nearly six months that President Trump has been in office, from sensitive national security information to embarrassing details about the inner workings of the White House, the officials said.

Stephanie Grisham, the first lady’s communications director, said: “Of course, the first lady is concerned about leaks from her husband’s administration, as all Americans should be. And while she does offer advice and perspectives on many things, Mrs. Trump does not weigh in on West Wing staff.”

Lindsay Walters, a deputy White House press secretary, disputed reports about Priebus’s standing. “These sources have been consistently wrong about Reince, and they’re still wrong today,” she said.

After this story first published, Josh Raffel, a White House spokesman, said in a statement on behalf of Kushner and Ivanka Trump: “Jared and Ivanka are focused on working with Reince and the team to advance the President’s agenda and not on pushing for staff changes.”

Trump recently publicly praised Priebus’s work ethic, and the chief of staff’s allies note that Priebus has done as good a job as can be expected under the unique circumstances of this administration. Defenders of Priebus have long said they expect him to make it to a year in the position, and Trump is said to be hesitant to fire him or any other senior staffer amid the escalating Russia investigation led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

The mind-set of Trump Jr. over the past few days has evolved from distress to anger to defiance, according to people close to him. He hired a criminal defense attorney but maintains that he is innocent of any wrongdoing. After his tweets commenting on the matter drew scrutiny, he agreed to his first media interview — with his friend Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity on his show on Tuesday night.

One friend of Trump Jr.’s said the presidential son saw the Hannity appearance as an opportunity to give his version of Richard Nixon’s “Checkers” speech, a 1952 address in which the then-vice-presidential candidate defended himself against accusations of financial improprieties.

Trump has had no public events since returning Saturday night from Germany but has been closely monitoring developments with his eldest son in the news.

Trump continues to view the Russia controversy as an excuse used by Democrats for losing an election they thought they would win — and an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of his victory, aides said. They said that the president’s frustration is based on the media coverage of his son’s actions, as opposed to the actions themselves.

“He just looks at this as the continuum of taking a group of unrelated facts and putting them together in concentric circles and saying, ‘Aha — look what happened!’ ” said Thomas J. Barrack Jr., a longtime friend of the president who was chairman of the Presidential Inaugural Committee. “With Don Jr., whatever set of facts there are may not lead to the conclusion that the establishment media is making.”

Trump and his advisers are deeply frustrated that the disclosure by Trump Jr. has overshadowed the positive coverage they expected to receive from the president’s trip abroad, as well as other issues they hoped to spotlight this week, such as the Senate health-care bill and trade.

A handful of Republican operatives close to the White House are scrambling to Trump Jr.’s defense and have begun what could be an extensive campaign to try to discredit some of the journalists who have been reporting on the matter.

Their plan, as one member of the team described it, is to research the reporters’ previous work, in some cases going back years, and to exploit any mistakes or perceived biases. They intend to demand corrections, trumpet errors on social media and feed them to conservative outlets, such as Fox News.

But one outside adviser said a campaign against the press when it comes to Trump Jr.’s meeting could be futile: “The meeting happened. It’s tough to go to war with the facts.”

In the West Wing, meanwhile, fear of the Mueller probe effectively paralyzed senior staffers as they struggled to respond.

No official has yet delivered a robust defense of Trump Jr., although Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the principal deputy press secretary, told reporters Monday, “I would certainly say Don Jr. did not collude with anybody to influence the election.”

At Tuesday’s press briefing, Sanders read a brief statement from the president — “My son is a high-quality person and I applaud his transparency” — but declined to speak further on the issue, referring all questions to Trump Jr.’s attorney.

Other senior White House officials were hesitant to talk about Trump Jr. — even on the condition of anonymity — for fear of exposing themselves legally.

Some top officials, as well as outside advisers, had earlier suggested that the White House conduct its own internal review to identify any potential problem areas related to Russia so that it can release the information on its own rather than be caught unaware by news reports. But that notion went nowhere, in part because officials were afraid to discuss any potential Russia interactions that could make them targets of Mueller’s probe.

One White House official went so far as to stop communicating with the president’s embattled son, although this official spoke sympathetically about his plight, casting Trump Jr. as someone who just wants to hunt, fish and run his family’s real estate business.

“The kid is an honest kid,” said one friend of Trump Jr. “The White House should’ve never let that story go out on the president’s son. . . . What he’s upset about was that it was a minor meeting and the media glare — anything that’s Russia-related, gets picked up the way roaches get caught in a roach motel.”

Eric Trump, another son of the president, defended his older brother Tuesday night by retweeting a message from British politician Nigel Farage, who said Trump Jr. was under attack because he is “the best public supporter” of the president. Eric Trump tweeted: “This is the ­EXACT reason they viciously attack our family! They can’t stand that we are extremely close and will ALWAYS support each other.”

Critics of Trump Jr. counter that he should have known better than to accept a meeting with someone who was explicitly described in an email as a “Russian government attorney.”

“It wasn’t naivete,” said Michael McFaul, the U.S. ambassador to Russia in the Obama administration. “It was, ‘Oh, they have some dirt on our opponent and I’m eager to receive it.’ Nobody thought to think, ‘Well, how did they obtain that? Is this coming from the Russian government, Russian intelligence?’ Those are the kinds of obvious questions that should have been asked, in my opinion.”

Pence found out about Trump Jr.’s meeting with the Russian attorney Friday evening in advance of the first Times story, said one person familiar with the discussions. Both Pence and his team view the Russia coverage as a distraction, and are working to keep the vice president clear of it and focused on Trump’s policy goals — such as health care, the subject of his scheduled visit to Kentucky on Wednesday.

“The vice president is working every day to advance the president’s agenda, which is what the American people sent us here to do. The vice president was not aware of the meeting,” Pence’s press secretary, Marc Lotter, said in a statement. “He is not focused on stories about the campaign, particularly stories about the time before he joined the ticket.”

On Capitol Hill — where Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced Tuesday that he is delaying his chamber’s August recess by two weeks — Republican senators were becoming increasingly frustrated with the White House, which they blame for Congress’s inability to pass any major legislation.

A growing number of senators believe that the widening Russia probe — as well as the Trump-fueled tumult that seems to dominate nearly every news cycle — have stalled their legislative agenda, leaving them nothing to offer their constituents by way of achievements when they head home over the break.

I can't imagine the screaming going on.

[AnywhereButHere]

They're like those baby sharks that eat each other in utero until only the strongest is born. I'm pretty sure that I will hate whatever will out from that gene pool. 

[Dandruff]

15 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

If there was any justice, his prison TV would only get Lifetime, WETV, OWN, and Oxygen.

I'd throw in CNN and MSNBC.

[JMarie]

10 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

At Tuesday’s press briefing, Sanders read a brief statement from the president — “My son is a high-quality person and I applaud his transparency” — but declined to speak further on the issue, referring all questions to Trump Jr.’s attorney.

Well, as long as Jr. is a high-quality person, everything's good.

[fraurosena]

All Americans should read this. Wise words never get old.

Still applicable today.

[GrumpyGran]

13 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Eric Trump, another son of the president, defended his older brother Tuesday night by retweeting a message from British politician Nigel Farage, who said Trump Jr. was under attack because he is “the best public supporter” of the president. Eric Trump tweeted: “This is the ­EXACT reason they viciously attack our family! They can’t stand that we are extremely close and will ALWAYS support each other.”

No, Eric, that's not it. Oh, honey, does Daddy sometimes forget that you exist?

[AuntK]

They, the Trumps and their minions, have to be the most stupid, gullible, airheads ever to participate in a political campaign.  Even I know that the Soviets always toss some worthless bait out initially to see if the target is susceptible.  Jr was too easy. What an idiot! And I strongly suspect that the Russians have tapes of their meetings, hell, all of their conversations, because as any American kid growing up in the 60S knows, the Russians tape EVERYTHING!

The most amazing part of this story is how in the hell this bunch of idiots got Cheeto duncehead elected.  Either the Russians were successful with their hacking, or Americans are the most ignorant nation in the history of the planet.

[AnywhereButHere]

Support from Nigel Farage. 

Well, the company you keep...

[formergothardite]

22 minutes ago, AuntK said:

 Even I know that the Soviets always toss some worthless bait out initially to see if the target is susceptible.  Jr was too easy. What an idiot! And I strongly suspect that the Russians have tapes of their meetings, hell, all of their conversations, because as any American kid growing up in the 60S knows, the Russians tape EVERYTHING!

As a kid of the 80's I know this! They really have to be stupid to get contacted by Russians not not automatically think "this is a trap". 

[GrumpyGran]

35 minutes ago, formergothardite said:

As a kid of the 80's I know this! They really have to be stupid to get contacted by Russians not not automatically think "this is a trap". 

In all fairness, when they are your very good friends and you've had a long and profitable relationship with them, then you probably wouldn't see that disappointment coming. He thought that this woman, like all of the other Russians his family has dealt with, wanted to jump on the Trump bandwagon