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Trump 28: He's a "stable genius" with a "big & powerful button"


Destiny

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Continued from here:

 

By the way, Trump's "button" is a thing I don't want to think about ever, but if it will keep him from trying to start a nuclear war on Twitter, I'm willing to measure both of them, assuming the American people are willing to contribute to a GoFundMe for my ongoing therapy.

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"Why ‘executive time’ is a particularly bleak scoop about President Trump"

Spoiler

For the past week, all of Washington has been chewing over Michael Wolff's new book about President Trump and trying to assess which damning conclusions are actually true. But one of the bleakest scoops about Trump popped up elsewhere on Sunday night.

Axios's Jonathan Swan reports that Trump has significantly curtailed his official schedule as president — to the point where his first meeting is often held at 11 a.m., and he spends almost the whole morning in his White House residence -- rather than the West Wing or the Oval Office -- watching TV, tweeting and making phone calls. That chunk of his day, generally between 8 a.m. and 11 a.m., is dubbed “executive time," a phrase that is bound to become the butt of plenty of jokes. Trump then has other periods of “executive time” sprinkled in throughout his official work schedule, which is usually between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. (Nice work if you can get it. And a short commute, too!)

The idea that Trump spends plenty of time on nonofficial pursuits isn't completely groundbreaking. A simple perusal of Trump's Twitter feed shows how much time he spends prosecuting feuds and responding to things he has clearly seen on TV, and it has been reported that being president hasn't been a particularly joyful pursuit for Trump.

But the extent to which he is not engaged in the very serious matters of being president has never been so firmly quantified. As the New York Times's Maggie Haberman noted in response to Swan's piece, the White House has bristled at such questions and lashed out at the New York Times for suggesting Trump watched four to eight hours of TV in a given day.

20180108_tweet1.PNG.6975853693eec006b3246321f626e4b7.PNG

Notably, Sarah Huckabee Sanders's response to Swan's story doesn't exactly read like an ironclad denial. Instead, she insists that Trump conducts at least some official business during his morning routine, which she concedes includes time in the residence.

“The time in the morning is a mix of residence time and Oval Office time but he always has calls with staff, Hill members, cabinet members and foreign leaders during this time,” Sanders told Swan. “The president is one of the hardest workers I've ever seen and puts in long hours and long days nearly every day of the week all year long. It has been noted by reporters many times that they wish he would slow down because they sometimes have trouble keeping up with him.”

It's 100 percent true that the Trump presidency can be exhausting, but it's mostly because of Trump's penchant for controversy, which he often stokes through his Twitter feed during off-hours. And Trump's Twitter habit only seems to have increased as a portion of his day in recent weeks.

And the reason Swan's scoop paints such a bleak picture of Trump is because it suggests he's not particularly interested in the official duties of being president. Whatever you think about Trump's policies or his fitness for the job, the job requires one to be fully engaged, to be processing information (preferably from sources other than cable news), and to always be, for lack of a better word, on. The idea that Trump doesn't take his daily intelligence briefing until 11 a.m. is shocking just by itself. And whoever leaked his official schedules to Swan seems to be concerned that Trump just isn't up to the job right now.

It also is completely counter to Trump's brand and the promises he made on the campaign trail. Trump said he wouldn't really take time off as president. “I would rarely leave the White House, because there’s so much work to be done,” he told the Hill newspaper in June 2015. He added in January 2016: “Somebody says, 'Why don't you take a vacation before you become president?' I said because I like doing this.” (As with Sanders's statement, the White House insists Trump is working even when he's at Mar-a-Lago or at his property in New Jersey.)

The question increasingly is what “this” is. And judging by the Axios report, “this” is increasingly spending time outside the Oval Office, watching TV and tweeting. It suggests that, relative to past inhabitants of the Oval Office, we truly do have a part-time president.

It is pitiful, isn't it?

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15 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"The time in the morning is a mix of residence time and Oval Office time but he always has calls with staff, Hill members, cabinet members and foreign leaders during this time,” Sanders told Swan. “The president is one of the hardest workers I've ever seen and puts in long hours and long days nearly every day of the week all year long. It has been noted by reporters many times that they wish he would slow down because they sometimes have trouble keeping up with him.”

Sarah is a walking bullshit dispenser with false eyelashes and a pearl necklace.  :pb_rollseyes:

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I see some WH staff weren't too happy with fornciate face after he changed his mind about his infrastructure plan....

Quote

The Washington Post reports that at Camp David on Friday, the president “expressed misgivings about his administration’s infrastructure plan . . . telling Republican leaders that building projects through public-private partnerships is unlikely to work—and that it may be better for the government to pursue a different path.” All of which was apparently news to Gary Cohn:

According to the Post, Trump’s repeated grumbling about the workability of public-private partnerships has “infuriated and surprised some administration aides who have worked on the plans for months,” especially as they were aiming to release their goals later this month. In short, it looks like this rollout is set to go about as well for Cohn as the one that preceded tax reform. Perhaps having heard that Cohn wouldn’t commit to sticking around the White House for more than five days, on Saturday Trump pulled his economic adviser up on stage and asked, “Are you happy Gary?” “Yes, I’m happy,” Cohn replied with all the enthusiasm of a hostage. “How’s that?”

Yeah you work for a 71 year old man baby you shouldn't be surprised when he pisses all your work away...

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18 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

And he won't let anyone see his button.

Hogan also said the presidunce is running for re-election. 

Uhm, wut? 

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7 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Hogan also said the presidunce is running for re-election. 

Uhm, wut? 

I think those exams should be required for anyone running for Federal elective office.  With the amount of fornicating up Congress and/or the Presidency could do to the world we need to make sure they can mentally handle the job in the first place.

 

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You only need to substitute 'Friend' with 'Comrade'.

 

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Why the actual fucking fuck would he go to the farmer's association and talk about wanting to end immigration? Does he not know that farmers depend on immigrant labour?

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3 minutes ago, Destiny said:

Why the actual fucking fuck would he go to the farmer's association and talk about wanting to end immigration? Does he not know that farmers depend on immigrant labour?

I don't think the presidunce knows much of anything, really.

But boy, can he tout his own horn! 

:my_sick:

 

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1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

You only need to substitute 'Friend' with 'Comrade'.

 

And the money people pony up for this raffle goes to...? This is interesting, what will they do if a Democrat buys 100 tickets and wins? Are they going to vet people to make sure no enemies end up at the party? And I see he wants to avoid the march in DC. Chicken.

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1 hour ago, Destiny said:

Why the actual fucking fuck would he go to the farmer's association and talk about wanting to end immigration? Does he not know that farmers depend on immigrant labour?

Were these real farmers who get up early, work hard and understand the land? Or were these CEOs of huge agricultural conglomerates who sit in a glass tower each day?

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YES: "Dear Very Stable Genius: The ingrates don’t deserve you. So quit."

Spoiler

From one very stable genius to another, I have some advice for President Trump: Resign immediately.

I feel you. Those small, petty, non-billionaire losers who attack you are not worthy of your brilliance. They don’t deserve the benefit of your intellect, your strength, your devastating good looks. Take your dazzling brain and your normal-size hands and go home. Let the ungrateful wretches suffer. Let them see how they like their precious little democracy without you.

They don’t deserve Ivanka or Jared or Junior or Eric, either. Most of the complainers don’t even have glamorous fashion-model third wives. Sad!

The whiners in the Fake News Media lack your genius for language. In their so-called stories, they never mention that you’ve taught family members and high-ranking White House aides to communicate in a new language you devised as an improvement on standard English. In Trump administration genius-speak, “the president is a moron” clearly means “our Dear Leader is doing a magnificent job.” But will the Failing New York Times or the Amazon Washington Post report that? Not likely.

The losers totally fail to appreciate your advanced, post-literate techniques for processing complex information. They still have to rely on primitive methods such as “reading” and “listening” and “thinking.” They don’t understand — as you and I do, and as Aristotle surely would — that the best way to analyze a problem is to free-associate in an angry nonstop monologue while Fox News blares from a flat-screen on the wall.

The pathetic non-geniuses don’t grasp your anti-management theory of management. To them, it probably looks like chaos — just as Shakespeare must sound like gibberish to an audience of chimpanzees. Even the brainiacs at the Ivy League school you attended find it hard to imagine running something as complicated as the executive branch without crutches like organization charts and defined areas of responsibility. For you, it’s a snap. You intuitively knew it would be more efficient to install a bunch of relatives and cronies in West Wing offices, then let them spend most of their time kneecapping one another.

The snowflakes’ heads explode whenever you cite “alternative facts.” They claim no such things exist — which shows the limits of their understanding. They probably are not even familiar with the “many worlds” theory of cosmology, which holds that aside from the universe we live in, there are countless other universes and that anything that can happen actually does happen in one of those alternate realities.

In some universe, you did win the popular vote. In some universe, the crowd for your inauguration dwarfed Barack Obama’s. In some universe, there was no collusion between your campaign and the Russians. You’re telling the truth; it’s just that only a few physicists at MIT are able to understand.

The philistines don’t appreciate your subtle approach to foreign affairs. They believe that taunting the paranoid and ruthless dictator of an unpredictable nuclear-armed state is somehow unwise. They see international relations as akin to a chess match — failing to realize that you’re playing the game in four-dimensional space-time as described by Einstein, another very stable genius. You know for a fact that Einstein would applaud your crazy-tweet diplomacy because you time-traveled and asked him.

The haters go on about “the rule of law” as if it’s something sacred, but you’re smart enough to know that somebody once said — it must have been another genius — that rules are made to be broken. By extension, laws are made to be broken, too. So when you fired James B. Comey and took all those other steps to impede the Russia probe, you weren’t committing a felony; you were merely being a bold rule-breaker who naturally acts in genius mode.

You must have had a lonely year. A few almost-geniuses appreciate your extraordinary mind — Sean Hannity, the hosts of “Fox & Friends,” some Internet trolls and paid Russian hackers. Most other people, however, think far less of your mind and fear that, in any event, you have lost it.

When you consider the ingratitude, the phrase “sharper than a serpent’s tooth” must come to mind. Or would, if you weren’t post-literate.

You deserve better. You shouldn’t have to spend another night in that “dump” of a White House. You should be able to go back to your gold-plated triplex in Trump Tower and spend your days wallowing in ugly conspiracy theories, screaming at aides and planning a busy schedule of golf outings — the same stuff you’re doing now, but in classier surroundings.

Don’t worry about depriving us of your very stable genius. Somehow we’ll cope.

Yeah, we'll cope.

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28 minutes ago, GrumpyGran said:

And the money people pony up for this raffle goes to...? This is interesting, what will they do if a Democrat buys 100 tickets and wins? Are they going to vet people to make sure no enemies end up at the party? And I see he wants to avoid the march in DC. Chicken.

I wouldn't put it past them to check the winner's social media history.  I bet they also make sure the winner is a white guy, has ancestors who have been here since the Mayflower, and have no scary brown people in their family. Or... it could just be a scam (shocking) and the 'winner' is already picked out. 

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"Football team’s stay at Doral resort could bolster lawsuit targeting Trump"

Spoiler

A week-long stay by the University of Wisconsin football team at a Florida resort owned by President Trump is providing new potential fodder for a lawsuit alleging that the president’s private business has put him in violation of the Constitution.

During a visit to Miami to play in last month’s Orange Bowl, the University of Wisconsin — a public university — put up about 250 players, athletic department staff, senior university officials and board members at the Trump National Doral golf resort.

The university’s stay may provide new ammunition to the state of Maryland and the District of Columbia, which sued Trump in June for allegedly violating anti-corruption clauses in the Constitution by accepting millions in payments and benefits from foreign and state governments to his private company.

In an interview, Maryland Attorney General Brian E. Frosh (D) said that the football team’s stay goes against the Constitution’s domestic emoluments clause, which prohibits the president from accepting benefits or financial rewards from state governments.

“Something like that is a problem, without question,” Frosh said in an interview. “It’s another example of how the potential for corruption is enormous.”

The Justice Department, which is representing Trump in the litigation, declined to comment on the case. The Trump Organization has referred questions about the case to the government.

The Doral resort was not selected by the school but by the Orange Bowl Committee, which organizes the game and signed a multiyear deal with Doral in 2014, before Trump ran for president.

Orange Bowl spokesman Larry Wahl said that the group “conducted a comprehensive request for proposal process to determine viable hotel properties” and determined that “Trump Doral not only meets, but exceeds our partners’ requirements for upcoming bowl games.”

For the Dec. 30 game, the University of Wisconsin-Madison sent 220 students and athletic department staff for seven nights from Christmas Eve through New Year’s Eve. The group included players, student managers, trainers, and full-time staff such as coaches and administrators.

They were joined there by 24 senior administrators, most of the university’s Board of Regents and members of the school’s Athletic Board. (The marching band attended but did not stay at Doral.)

University spokesman John Lucas said the final bill had not been tallied but would be paid by the school in February using revenue from bowl proceeds, ticket sales, concessions and other sources. Lucas said the payment would not come from tax-generated funds, but plaintiffs suing the president, including Frosh, argue such payments from state-controlled entities would be considered emoluments.

Based on rates paid by other large groups to stay at the resort, the university’s Doral accommodations probably cost well over $100,000.

A legislative audit of the university’s 1999 trip to the Rose Bowl found that the school spent $2,093,500 on that trip, though that included a wide array of expenses beyond lodging. The school later reformed its bowl travel procedures.

Although Trump resigned from his management position of his company when he entered the White House, he still benefits financially from his businesses, which include residential, office, hotel and golf properties in the United States, Europe and South America. He bought Doral for $150 million in 2012.

The emoluments provisions have never been tested in the courts, and lawsuits targeting the president on foreign and domestic payments to his properties have so far hit roadblocks.

On Dec. 21, a federal judge in New York dismissed a different emoluments suit, brought by the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), saying the organization lacked standing to file the suit.

A judge in a third suit, brought on behalf of Cork Wine Bar in Northwest Washington, ruled Jan. 2 that the case would be heard in federal court and not D.C. Superior Court, making it more likely it could be dismissed as well.

In legal filings, the Justice Department has argued that courts do not have the authority to enforce the emoluments provisions. After CREW’s case was dismissed, the department issued a statement applauding the conclusion that “Plaintiffs lack standing to pursue these claims in federal court, that Plaintiffs’ claims do not fall within the zone of interests of the Emoluments Clauses, and that Plaintiffs’ claims involve political questions that cannot be resolved in federal court.”

Regardless of whether the football team’s Doral visit makes a difference in court, it created a stir on campus, with one student group issuing a statement saying: “There are hundreds of hotels in the Miami area, and the Wisconsin football team and its supporters should be staying in a different one.”

I know that I wouldn't have stayed there as a student, I would have scraped together money to stay elsewhere.

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1 hour ago, onekidanddone said:

Were these real farmers who get up early, work hard and understand the land? Or were these CEOs of huge agricultural conglomerates who sit in a glass tower each day?

Probably the latter.  Of course there are many of the former who look up to guys like Cloven Hoof Bundy and buy all that anti government bullshit hook, line, and sinker.

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When my youngest niece was about four she was being very contrary and stubborn as any proper four year old would.  My sister told her to stop being so defiant and get her coat on or something like that.  The little girl responded "I AM NOT DEFIANT!  I DON'T KNOW WHAT IT MEANS BUT I'M NOT".  My sister had to walk out of he room to keep from laughing out loud.

Yea, sound familiar? On a four year old it was cute. On a 71 one year old sociopath, not so much.

6 minutes ago, 47of74 said:

Probably the latter.  Of course there are many of the former who look up to guys like Cloven Hoof Bundy and buy all that anti government bullshit hook, line, and sinker.

The TD farmers buy the bull shit and then will wonder what happened when their farms are repossessed and their subsidies go away.

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4 minutes ago, onekidanddone said:

The TD farmers buy the bull shit and then will wonder what happened when their farms are repossessed and their subsidies go away.

I grew up on the farm so I know all about it.  There are a lot of farmers who buy and parrot every reich wing conspiracy theory to put in guys who turn around and stab them in the back the first chance they get.  These farmers do not get it - the Republicans have zero interest in helping them and only want to help big agri business and huge corporate farms.  It's frustrating because there is so much evidence to the contrary but they will not listen. 

I swear some of these guys would support Hitler if he showed up in western wear, a big ass cowboy hat, and humped a hay bale while spewing his nazi horseshit.

This is a parody account but it's all sorts of awesome;

 

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More what the fucks... 

I'd probably be banned if I said what I think about this tweet. Don't want to put @Curious in that position, but damn it, don't talk about us (black people), you bigoted ass hole! 

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Interesting opinion piece: "President Trump is a pig. In the best sense of the word."

Spoiler

Richard Nixon will forever be remembered for his November 1973 protest: “I am not a crook.”

Donald Trump, likewise, may be recorded in history for the assertion he made over the weekend to a skeptical nation: I am not an idiot.

The commander in chief volunteered an unexpected defense of his intellect and sanity in response to a book in which many of his aides are portrayed as believing the boss to be, in the medical parlance, a few fries short of a Happy Meal.

“My two greatest assets have been my mental stability and being, like, really smart,” Trump tweeted — because, like, nothing says “intelligence” like using the word “like” like that. Trump went on to tweet that his achievements qualify him as “genius….and a very stable genius at that!”

At a mini news conference that same day, Trump explained why he felt compelled to defend his mental health and acuity: “I went to the best colleges for college. I went to a — I had a situation where I was a very excellent student.”

This was, like, almost as ill-advised as what Sen. William Scott (R-Va.) did in 1974 upon being named the dumbest member of Congress by an obscure publication. He held a news conference to deny that he was dumbest — thereby proving the charge.

But maybe this is, like, a misunderstanding. Maybe Trump didn’t mean to type that he is a “stable genius” but a “stable genus” — that is, of a genus and species typically found in a stable. In this case, an argument can be made that Trump is indeed a stable genus — specifically a descendant of Sus scrofa known as Sus domesticus. The common pig.

Before you accuse me of being rude (which would compel me to host a news conference to deny it), I am not suggesting that the president is a pig in the pejorative sense Trump meant when calling Rosie O’Donnell a pig. (Although, if the hoof fits . . .) I mean pig in the best sense — that of the most intelligent animals on the farm, and the ones George Orwell selected to lead all other animals in “Animal Farm.”

It has been many years since I read the 1945 classic, but I have perused the CliffsNotes, and my horse sense tells me there are some echoes in current affairs.

There is Snowball, a pig who is the ideological leader of the animal movement. But the leader forces him into exile and thereafter blames him for all hardship. Snowball was originally seen as a Trotsky figure, but after the past week, it is pretty clear that Snowball’s demise foreshadowed Steve Bannon.

There is also the sycophantic Squealer, top pig propagandist, glorifying his boss and vilifying Snowball with misdirection so effective he “could turn black into white.” When the pigs steal the cows’ milk and apples, he convinces the cows that the pigs did it to help the cows. After watching CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, it is clear that Squealer is reincarnated as Stephen Miller — the White House official who defended Trump’s “stable genius” claim by mounting an unrelated and extended attack on CNN and anchor Jake Tapper, who accurately called Miller a “factotum.”

The horses in the story are loyal but naive. One mighty horse, Boxer, believes the leader “is always right.” When Boxer collapses in service to the cause, the pigs promise to send him to a veterinarian but instead sell him to make glue. In modern times, Paul Ryan, Jeff Sessions, Rex Tillerson and Gary Cohn all play the role of loyal steed destined for the knacker.

The sheep, who chant the pig-devised slogan “Four legs good, two legs bad,” immediately revise their tune when the pigs start walking on two legs: “Four legs good, two legs better.” Clearly, the sheep are the Fox News of the story.

Then there is Orwell’s lead pig, Napoleon, a power-hungry swine who rose with a populist promise of wealth to all animals. But then he took milk and apples from cows to feed fellow pigs. He broke his promises, and, when things went wrong, he made scapegoats of animals who did not praise him.

From “Animal Farm”: “It had become usual to give Napoleon the credit for every successful achievement and every stroke of good fortune. You would often hear one hen remark to another, ‘Under the guidance of our leader, Comrade Napoleon, I have laid five eggs in six days’; or two cows, enjoying a drink at the pool, would exclaim, ‘Thanks to the leadership of Comrade Napoleon, how excellent this water tastes!’ ”

I cannot think of any current figure who resembles the pig Napoleon. Maybe I could if I were, like, really smart.

Yeah, Faux is definitely the sheep.

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"The White House struggles to silence talk of Trump’s mental fitness"

Spoiler

The White House is struggling to contain the national discussion about President Trump’s mental acuity and fitness for the job, which has overshadowed the administration’s agenda for the past week.

Trump publicly waded into the debate spawned by a new book, “Fire and Fury” — Michael Wolff’s inside account of the presidency — over the weekend by claiming on Twitter that he is “like, really smart” and “a very stable genius.” In doing so, the president underscored his administration’s response strategy — by being forceful and combative — while also undermining it by gleefully entering a debate his aides have tried to avoid.

Trump privately resents the now-regular chatter on cable television news shows about his mental health and views the issue as “an invented fact” and “a joke,” much like the Russia probe, according to one person who recently discussed it with him.

Doubts about Trump’s state of mind have been whispered about in Washington’s corridors of power since before he was elected and have occasionally broken into the open, such as when Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said last August that Trump lacked “the stability” and “some of the competence” to be successful as president.

But Wolff’s book has thrust the topic to the forefront of public debate, prompting the White House to confront the issue directly.

So far, Trump’s advisers have adopted a posture of umbrage and indignation. Rather than dignifying questions about whether their 71-year-old boss is fit to be president, they attack the inquisitors for having the gall to ask.

In an emailed statement Monday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders slammed what she called “ridiculous reports from detractors” and described an “outpouring of support from a totally indignant staff.”

“The White House perspective is outrage and disgust that people who do not know this President or understand the true depth of his intellectual capabilities would be so filled with hate they would resort to something so far outside the realm of reality or decency,” she said.

Asked Monday by reporters whether Trump’s physical exam, scheduled for Friday at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, would include a psychiatric component, deputy White House press secretary Hogan Gidley barely engaged the question. He replied, simply, “No.”

Former Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller charged that there were partisan motivations behind the talk of Trump’s fitness. “The political left wants this to become a debate about made-up attacks against the president rather than the president’s successes and the success of the country,” he said. “This is a pretty pathetic move.”

White House officials are trying to present Trump as hard at work doing his job. A long-planned working retreat at Camp David over the weekend became a showcase for the commander in chief.

The traveling pool of reporters was invited to the presidential getaway in Maryland, where Trump parried their questions Saturday while Vice President Pence, Cabinet members and Republican congressional leaders flanked him with approving nods and applause.

“Just from a visual standpoint, it shows a very united front,” one White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share an internal assessment, said of the Camp David news conference. “Everyone’s on the same page. There are no fractures. From an optics standpoint, it works very well.”

Scott Reed, a veteran Republican strategist who works for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said Trump can best help extinguish emerging doubts by advancing his policy agenda, including proposals for new spending on infrastructure projects. “This needs to move beyond talking heads and be met with action and discipline,” Reed said.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley also fired back against critics on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, emphasizing the president’s accomplishments rather than his state of mind.

“As much as everyone wants to talk about stability, was he unstable when he passed the tax reform?” she asked. “Was he unstable when we finally hit back at Syria and said no more chemical weapons? Was he unstable when we finally put North Korea on notice? Was he unstable when he said, ‘Wait, we need to look at Iran because this is getting to be a dangerous situation’? Was he unstable with the jobs or the economy or the stock market?”

But Monday, as Trump delivered a speech on agriculture policy in Nashville, neither CNN nor MSNBC carried his full remarks live. Instead, anchors Jake Tapper and Nicolle Wallace, respectively, interviewed journalists and pundits about Wolff’s book and Trump’s reaction to it.

Some Trump allies voiced frustration that the White House does not appear to have implemented a full-scale crisis communications plan.

“When you raise an issue like the mental acuity of the president, there is no organized effort to push back,” said one ally, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly. “How do you disprove a fallacy?”

After several days of blanket coverage of Wolff’s book, the Republican National Committee sent some talking points to Trump allies Friday evening. The memo, titled “Pundit Prep,” urged Trump’s defenders to first focus on “jobs, jobs, jobs,” and offered tips on discrediting Wolff and his tome. The document did not address how to answer questions about Trump’s fitness for office.

White House officials said organizing a public response has been relatively easy, as administration aides and allies have been naturally frustrated and eager to push back. A number of Cabinet members and other people who have worked closely with Trump over the years have come forward with testimonies of the president’s mental capacity.

“He is absolutely no different than the day he got elected, and he has used this unconventional but very effective manner of managing for the 30 years that I’ve known him in business, finance, media and now governing,” Thomas J. Barrack Jr., Trump’s longtime friend and inauguration chairman, said in an interview Monday.

“It’s not mental instability,” Barrack added. “It’s management by controlled and orchestrated chaos.”

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said Monday on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show that his boss is “focused, he’s determined, he’s a business guy. He asks tough questions, and expects solid answers.”

When Hewitt asked if Trump was “really smart,” as the president claimed in his tweet, Perdue replied: “I think he is really smart. He’s instinctive. He has a unique, inherent gift of just being able to figure stuff out. It’s like street smarts.”

CIA Director Mike Pompeo, appearing Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” talked about Trump’s engagement during the near-daily intelligence briefings that Pompeo helps deliver.

“We engage in complex conversation about some of the most weighty matters facing the world,” Pompeo said, adding: “He asks really hard questions. He delivers policy outcomes based on the information that we provide him.”

A more combative defense came from Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior policy adviser, who tangled with Tapper on Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” Miller trashed Wolff as “a garbage author of a garbage book.”

“One of the other tragedies of this grotesque work of fiction is its portrayal of the president,” Miller said. “The reality is, is the president is a political genius.”

As Miller repeated himself again and again, he and Tapper began talking over each other, and the interview grew so contentious that the CNN host eventually cut it — and Miller — off.

Afterward, Miller was delighted. He told others he was proud of his performance and thought the exchange went well. So did the president, who chimed in with Twitter praise, saying his policy adviser had “destroyed” the “Fake News” Tapper.

Boy, Perdue and Pompeo are really fluffing Agent Orange.

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8 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"The White House struggles to silence talk of Trump’s mental fitness"

  Reveal hidden contents

The White House is struggling to contain the national discussion about President Trump’s mental acuity and fitness for the job, which has overshadowed the administration’s agenda for the past week.

Trump publicly waded into the debate spawned by a new book, “Fire and Fury” — Michael Wolff’s inside account of the presidency — over the weekend by claiming on Twitter that he is “like, really smart” and “a very stable genius.” In doing so, the president underscored his administration’s response strategy — by being forceful and combative — while also undermining it by gleefully entering a debate his aides have tried to avoid.

Trump privately resents the now-regular chatter on cable television news shows about his mental health and views the issue as “an invented fact” and “a joke,” much like the Russia probe, according to one person who recently discussed it with him.

Doubts about Trump’s state of mind have been whispered about in Washington’s corridors of power since before he was elected and have occasionally broken into the open, such as when Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said last August that Trump lacked “the stability” and “some of the competence” to be successful as president.

But Wolff’s book has thrust the topic to the forefront of public debate, prompting the White House to confront the issue directly.

So far, Trump’s advisers have adopted a posture of umbrage and indignation. Rather than dignifying questions about whether their 71-year-old boss is fit to be president, they attack the inquisitors for having the gall to ask.

In an emailed statement Monday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders slammed what she called “ridiculous reports from detractors” and described an “outpouring of support from a totally indignant staff.”

“The White House perspective is outrage and disgust that people who do not know this President or understand the true depth of his intellectual capabilities would be so filled with hate they would resort to something so far outside the realm of reality or decency,” she said.

Asked Monday by reporters whether Trump’s physical exam, scheduled for Friday at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, would include a psychiatric component, deputy White House press secretary Hogan Gidley barely engaged the question. He replied, simply, “No.”

Former Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller charged that there were partisan motivations behind the talk of Trump’s fitness. “The political left wants this to become a debate about made-up attacks against the president rather than the president’s successes and the success of the country,” he said. “This is a pretty pathetic move.”

White House officials are trying to present Trump as hard at work doing his job. A long-planned working retreat at Camp David over the weekend became a showcase for the commander in chief.

The traveling pool of reporters was invited to the presidential getaway in Maryland, where Trump parried their questions Saturday while Vice President Pence, Cabinet members and Republican congressional leaders flanked him with approving nods and applause.

“Just from a visual standpoint, it shows a very united front,” one White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share an internal assessment, said of the Camp David news conference. “Everyone’s on the same page. There are no fractures. From an optics standpoint, it works very well.”

Scott Reed, a veteran Republican strategist who works for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said Trump can best help extinguish emerging doubts by advancing his policy agenda, including proposals for new spending on infrastructure projects. “This needs to move beyond talking heads and be met with action and discipline,” Reed said.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley also fired back against critics on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, emphasizing the president’s accomplishments rather than his state of mind.

“As much as everyone wants to talk about stability, was he unstable when he passed the tax reform?” she asked. “Was he unstable when we finally hit back at Syria and said no more chemical weapons? Was he unstable when we finally put North Korea on notice? Was he unstable when he said, ‘Wait, we need to look at Iran because this is getting to be a dangerous situation’? Was he unstable with the jobs or the economy or the stock market?”

But Monday, as Trump delivered a speech on agriculture policy in Nashville, neither CNN nor MSNBC carried his full remarks live. Instead, anchors Jake Tapper and Nicolle Wallace, respectively, interviewed journalists and pundits about Wolff’s book and Trump’s reaction to it.

Some Trump allies voiced frustration that the White House does not appear to have implemented a full-scale crisis communications plan.

“When you raise an issue like the mental acuity of the president, there is no organized effort to push back,” said one ally, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly. “How do you disprove a fallacy?”

After several days of blanket coverage of Wolff’s book, the Republican National Committee sent some talking points to Trump allies Friday evening. The memo, titled “Pundit Prep,” urged Trump’s defenders to first focus on “jobs, jobs, jobs,” and offered tips on discrediting Wolff and his tome. The document did not address how to answer questions about Trump’s fitness for office.

White House officials said organizing a public response has been relatively easy, as administration aides and allies have been naturally frustrated and eager to push back. A number of Cabinet members and other people who have worked closely with Trump over the years have come forward with testimonies of the president’s mental capacity.

“He is absolutely no different than the day he got elected, and he has used this unconventional but very effective manner of managing for the 30 years that I’ve known him in business, finance, media and now governing,” Thomas J. Barrack Jr., Trump’s longtime friend and inauguration chairman, said in an interview Monday.

“It’s not mental instability,” Barrack added. “It’s management by controlled and orchestrated chaos.”

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said Monday on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show that his boss is “focused, he’s determined, he’s a business guy. He asks tough questions, and expects solid answers.”

When Hewitt asked if Trump was “really smart,” as the president claimed in his tweet, Perdue replied: “I think he is really smart. He’s instinctive. He has a unique, inherent gift of just being able to figure stuff out. It’s like street smarts.”

CIA Director Mike Pompeo, appearing Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” talked about Trump’s engagement during the near-daily intelligence briefings that Pompeo helps deliver.

“We engage in complex conversation about some of the most weighty matters facing the world,” Pompeo said, adding: “He asks really hard questions. He delivers policy outcomes based on the information that we provide him.”

A more combative defense came from Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior policy adviser, who tangled with Tapper on Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” Miller trashed Wolff as “a garbage author of a garbage book.”

“One of the other tragedies of this grotesque work of fiction is its portrayal of the president,” Miller said. “The reality is, is the president is a political genius.”

As Miller repeated himself again and again, he and Tapper began talking over each other, and the interview grew so contentious that the CNN host eventually cut it — and Miller — off.

Afterward, Miller was delighted. He told others he was proud of his performance and thought the exchange went well. So did the president, who chimed in with Twitter praise, saying his policy adviser had “destroyed” the “Fake News” Tapper.

Boy, Perdue and Pompeo are really fluffing Agent Orange.

So much for sleeping tonight.

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53 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Interesting opinion piece: "President Trump is a pig. In the best sense of the word."

  Reveal hidden contents

Richard Nixon will forever be remembered for his November 1973 protest: “I am not a crook.”

Donald Trump, likewise, may be recorded in history for the assertion he made over the weekend to a skeptical nation: I am not an idiot.

The commander in chief volunteered an unexpected defense of his intellect and sanity in response to a book in which many of his aides are portrayed as believing the boss to be, in the medical parlance, a few fries short of a Happy Meal.

“My two greatest assets have been my mental stability and being, like, really smart,” Trump tweeted — because, like, nothing says “intelligence” like using the word “like” like that. Trump went on to tweet that his achievements qualify him as “genius….and a very stable genius at that!”

At a mini news conference that same day, Trump explained why he felt compelled to defend his mental health and acuity: “I went to the best colleges for college. I went to a — I had a situation where I was a very excellent student.”

This was, like, almost as ill-advised as what Sen. William Scott (R-Va.) did in 1974 upon being named the dumbest member of Congress by an obscure publication. He held a news conference to deny that he was dumbest — thereby proving the charge.

But maybe this is, like, a misunderstanding. Maybe Trump didn’t mean to type that he is a “stable genius” but a “stable genus” — that is, of a genus and species typically found in a stable. In this case, an argument can be made that Trump is indeed a stable genus — specifically a descendant of Sus scrofa known as Sus domesticus. The common pig.

Before you accuse me of being rude (which would compel me to host a news conference to deny it), I am not suggesting that the president is a pig in the pejorative sense Trump meant when calling Rosie O’Donnell a pig. (Although, if the hoof fits . . .) I mean pig in the best sense — that of the most intelligent animals on the farm, and the ones George Orwell selected to lead all other animals in “Animal Farm.”

It has been many years since I read the 1945 classic, but I have perused the CliffsNotes, and my horse sense tells me there are some echoes in current affairs.

There is Snowball, a pig who is the ideological leader of the animal movement. But the leader forces him into exile and thereafter blames him for all hardship. Snowball was originally seen as a Trotsky figure, but after the past week, it is pretty clear that Snowball’s demise foreshadowed Steve Bannon.

There is also the sycophantic Squealer, top pig propagandist, glorifying his boss and vilifying Snowball with misdirection so effective he “could turn black into white.” When the pigs steal the cows’ milk and apples, he convinces the cows that the pigs did it to help the cows. After watching CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, it is clear that Squealer is reincarnated as Stephen Miller — the White House official who defended Trump’s “stable genius” claim by mounting an unrelated and extended attack on CNN and anchor Jake Tapper, who accurately called Miller a “factotum.”

The horses in the story are loyal but naive. One mighty horse, Boxer, believes the leader “is always right.” When Boxer collapses in service to the cause, the pigs promise to send him to a veterinarian but instead sell him to make glue. In modern times, Paul Ryan, Jeff Sessions, Rex Tillerson and Gary Cohn all play the role of loyal steed destined for the knacker.

The sheep, who chant the pig-devised slogan “Four legs good, two legs bad,” immediately revise their tune when the pigs start walking on two legs: “Four legs good, two legs better.” Clearly, the sheep are the Fox News of the story.

Then there is Orwell’s lead pig, Napoleon, a power-hungry swine who rose with a populist promise of wealth to all animals. But then he took milk and apples from cows to feed fellow pigs. He broke his promises, and, when things went wrong, he made scapegoats of animals who did not praise him.

From “Animal Farm”: “It had become usual to give Napoleon the credit for every successful achievement and every stroke of good fortune. You would often hear one hen remark to another, ‘Under the guidance of our leader, Comrade Napoleon, I have laid five eggs in six days’; or two cows, enjoying a drink at the pool, would exclaim, ‘Thanks to the leadership of Comrade Napoleon, how excellent this water tastes!’ ”

I cannot think of any current figure who resembles the pig Napoleon. Maybe I could if I were, like, really smart.

Yeah, Faux is definitely the sheep.

Pigs are noble, intelligent creatures. Unlike the current White House squatter.  It's insulting to pigs to compare that shithead to them.

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Sorry, @47of74. I should have included my comment under the spoiler as well...

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Wolff's lawyer telling Trump's lawyer they're full of shit and wouldn't like the discovery stage

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