Trump 31: Parody of a Presidency

[fraurosena]

@Howl, WaPo's Ruth Marcus coined another apt phrase to go with yours: Decency Deficit.

Trump’s decency deficit is trickle-down

Quote

Washington today suffers from multiple deficits: The budget deficit, a failure to match resources to appetite, measured in hard dollars and red ink. The institutional deficit, the misalignment of national needs and political capacity to respond, displayed in legislative gridlock and partisan bickering. But also, and maybe most worrying, the decency deficit, etched in acid sound bites and accusatory tweets that forsake stating facts for impugning motive.

This deficit of decency, of course, is trickle-down, with President Trump as its most masterful practitioner. And so, because presidential indecency no longer surprises, we scarcely pause to note the latest iteration. And, in turn, we become numbed to its presence when practiced by others, who may be in less exalted positions but who ought to know better. We shrug and move on.

Not this column. It is both a lament about the latest manifestation of the decency deficit and a celebration of a recent pinpoint of decency. And it is a reminder to courtiers brought low by Trump: Some reputational damage is beyond repair. Someday he will be gone, but people will remember what you were willing to say and do on his behalf.

The immediate target of this advice is White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who took to “Fox & Friends” Monday to urge the confirmation of Mike Pompeo to be secretary of state. “Look, at some point, Democrats have to decide whether they love this country more than they hate this president,” Sanders said, thus equating support for the president’s nominee with patriotism.

This was, as The Post’s Aaron Blake noted, no accidental rhetorical overstep but a calculated administration talking point. Sanders used a similar formulation in January to talk about Democrats and immigration. She did it again after Democrats’ refusal to applaud during Trump’s State of the Union address, observing, “Democrats are going to have to make a decision at some point really soon: Do they hate this president more than they love this country? And I hope the answer to that is no.”

Give Sanders a smidgen of credit for that last sentence — she did not go as far as Trump, who suggested that Democrats’ lack of applause was “treasonous.” But Republican National Committee Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel abandoned any filigree of restraint, and betrayed her family heritage of decency, when, at the party’s winter meeting in February, she flatly asserted of Democrats: “They hate this president more than they love this country.” Again, no momentary lapse — McDaniel said it again on Twitter last month.

This is not acceptable. It is fair game to go after opponents for being wrong on substance or excessive in terms of tactics and partisanship. Say their vision would harm the United States, but do not accuse them of not having the country’s best interests at heart. That is the vilest calumny.

I have gone down the patriotism road myself, reluctantly and deliberately, in writing about Trump and his negligent response to Russian election interference: “This is a terrible thing to have to say, but the president is not a patriot, if an essential part of patriotism means being willing to stand up for your country when it is under attack.” But that is the point — it is a terrible thing to say. It should not be done lightly. That accusations of being unpatriotic have become standard Trump administration fare — and that this kind of rhetoric is received with such equanimity — is alarming.

I end with a grace note, which, like Sanders’s ugly remark, also involves Pompeo. It was the move by Sen. Christopher A. Coons (Del.) to allow Pompeo’s nomination to go forward. Coons, a Democrat, planned to vote against Pompeo in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

But his Republican colleague, Sen. Johnny Isakson (Ga.), was to speak at the funeral of a close friend at the same time. So rather than force Isakson to race back to vote later that day, Coons instead voted “present,” letting the Pompeo nomination proceed, which it did, and Pompeo was confirmed Thursday.

Graciousness knows no partisan boundaries. Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) performed the same service for Coons when the senator’s father died last year. But it is a measure of our frayed national temper and poisonous politics that what Coons described as his own “small gesture of kindness” brought the committee’s chairman, Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), to the brink of tears. The decency deficit is wide and widening.

 

[Howl]

I was at Barnes and Noble this afternoon, and saw a book  titled (I sh*t you not) The Faith of Donald Trump. 

I checked on Amazon.  Out of 98 reviews, 34 are critical, and of those, most are one star, because as a reviewer noted, "one star given because four spaces to the right of a decimal were not available."   My favorite: "Trump is the best at religion. Tremendous Jesus, biggest prayers. No one is better with God than Trump."

[onekidanddone]

Tweet of the day

 

[JMarie]

Warning:  could be rage-inducing

Spoiler

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2018/04/28/paralympic-games-organizers-respond-to-insensitive-trump-remarks/23422716/

“What happened with the Paralympics was so incredible and so inspiring to me,” Trump told members of the Olympic and Paralympic teams.

He then suggested that the games made him uncomfortable and he’d been unable to watch a lot of the competition.

“And I watched — it’s a little tough to watch too much, but I watched as much as I could,” Trump said from the White House.

Trump delivered the insensitive remarks while surrounded by members of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic teams, whom he congratulated for competing in Pyeongchang last month.

Funny, when I watch them every time (not just when I'm president), I'm breathless, not uncomfortable.  Douche.

[47of74]

49 minutes ago, JMarie said:

Warning:  could be rage-inducing

  Reveal hidden contents

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2018/04/28/paralympic-games-organizers-respond-to-insensitive-trump-remarks/23422716/

“What happened with the Paralympics was so incredible and so inspiring to me,” Trump told members of the Olympic and Paralympic teams.

He then suggested that the games made him uncomfortable and he’d been unable to watch a lot of the competition.

“And I watched — it’s a little tough to watch too much, but I watched as much as I could,” Trump said from the White House.

Trump delivered the insensitive remarks while surrounded by members of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic teams, whom he congratulated for competing in Pyeongchang last month.

Funny, when I watch them every time (not just when I'm president), I'm breathless, not uncomfortable.  Douche.

Yeah I was just coming here to note what fuck face said about the Paralympics.

The organization fired back at fuck face for his remarks;

 You could not pay me enough to want to be in a photo with fuck face.  Or even the same room, for that matter.  Because fuck face would make it all about him and manage to insult in the process.  

Does fuck face wanna know what's tough to watch?  Him and his fucking GOP groupies. 

[onekidanddone]

1 hour ago, JMarie said:

Funny, when I watch them every time (not just when I'm president), I'm breathless, not uncomfortable.  Douche.

First words I think of is awe, respect, and Wow! that is fucking cool.

[JMarie]

Paralympians downhill ski on one leg.  I doubt Trump could do it with two legs.

[GreyhoundFan]

5 minutes ago, JMarie said:

Paralympians downhill ski on one leg.  I doubt Trump could do it with two legs.

I imagine he'd slide down the hill on his ample ass.

[47of74]

I imagine he'd slide down the hill on his ample ass.

And leave a nice orange streak on the snow.

[JMarie]

Found the video on YouTube!  Good boy, YouTube!  Good boy!  (pats YouTube on the head)  Here, have a liver snap!

Boy, he looks extra orange when next to normal people.

[candygirl200413]

I'm personally disgusted with people trying to defend what he said. One argument was that he meant how hard it was to "watch" with him being busy/it not being broadcasted. He has amble time to watch Fox on a morning basis that we know of so I really highly doubt it that it was an issue. Could've been how often they didn't show it? of course, possibly. While they've improved greatly on live broadcasting over the years it isn't 100% like the olympics. But again it shouldn't shock us that he made a comment because of the reporter he mocked during his campaign trail. It was just so disgusting.

[Audrey2]

3 hours ago, JMarie said:

Paralympians downhill ski on one leg.  I doubt Trump could do it with two legs.

Why would he want to do that? He might fall and hurt his arm, which would mess up his golf swing.

[AmazonGrace]

He is constantly downplaying his TV consumption because he gets mocked for having the time so I could buy he was trying to deny he watches.

But I don't think he watched, because there are hardly any  ladies in skimpy bikinis in the winter sports and because they're not talking about him at all.

 

[AmazonGrace]

Trump saying Veselnitskaya doesn't really take orders from the Russian government, she just lied that she does because Putin told her to do so. 

Next, if you traveled in time and killed your grandfather as a baby and no one heard the treeni fall,  did any of it really happen?

[AmazonGrace]

 

 

[JMarie]

6 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

 

Community colleges became popular when World War II vets wanted to go to college, using their G. I. Bill benefit.  So yeah, people have known about community colleges for a long time.  Decades, even.  And I truly doubt the students on either side of Trump were destined for blue collar jobs.  Not at his fancypants school.

[formergothardite]

Why is he so hung up on community colleges? Has he truly no heard of them until recently? Because I"ve never met anyone who didn't understand what a community college is. 

[Cartmann99]

3 hours ago, formergothardite said:

Why is he so hung up on community colleges? Has he truly no heard of them until recently? Because I"ve never met anyone who didn't understand what a community college is. 

He's such an ignorant man. My local community college offers a variety of programs in which students can either earn an associate's degree, or the certificate required to pursue employment in a particular field. 

[Howl]

4 hours ago, formergothardite said:

Why is he so hung up on community colleges? Has he truly no heard of them until recently? Because I"ve never met anyone who didn't understand what a community college is. 

There's every possibility that he has never heard of a community college/vocational school/junior college.  What in his experience living in a tower bubble in NYC would expose him to that? 

Just returned from a day trip to Fredericksburg, TX and passed through Stonewall, TX (home of LBJ Ranch) and Johnson City (LBJ boyhood home).   A few miles outside of Johnson City, a rancher had hung up a large banner by his gate that said, "Democrats will destroy us trying to get to Trump."

[47of74]

15 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

He is constantly downplaying his TV consumption because he gets mocked for having the time so I could buy he was trying to deny he watches.

But I don't think he watched, because there are hardly any  ladies in skimpy bikinis in the winter sports and because they're not talking about him at all.

 

Yeah, pretty much fuck face.  You've all but admitted to a fair number of high crimes and misdemeanors.  

29 minutes ago, Howl said:

A few miles outside of Johnson City, a rancher had hung up a large banner by his gate that said, "Democrats will destroy us trying to get to Trump."

That's why I have a very hard time dredging up any amount of sympathy for farmers who voted for fuck face and are now gonna get screwed over by him.  As I believe I said before I grew up on a farm too.

[Cartmann99]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump spent years in reality TV. Why doesn’t he have better stagecraft?"

Spoiler

This week, President Trump posed with visiting French President Emmanuel Macron for a photo op of the two men planting a tree from France’s Belleau Wood, the site of a World War I battle that claimed the lives of thousands of American soldiers. But, the optics were notably off.  The tree looked small and barren on the White House lawn. The president seemed uncomfortable wielding the ceremonial shovel, and there was no evident plan for where first ladies Melania Trump and Brigitte Macron should stand as their husbands scooped soil. The ceremonial scene was notably missing a director.

This wasn’t the first time. Last year, during a trucking industry event, Trump jumped into the cab of a big rig and was photographed pretending to steer it, the images inadvertently evincing the feel of a kid playing with a toy, not of the nation’s chief executive. His assorted overseas trips have been filled with awkward handshakes and a moment when he appeared to “shove” Montenegro’s prime minister, Dusko Markovic, while jockeying his way to the front of a pack of NATO leaders. There was also the time he offered an Irish proverb when Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny visited the White House — only to learn the proverb probably wasn’t Irish. Two years in a row, he’s declined to attend the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, missing an opportunity to charm a press corps that he decries as adversarial and reinforcing a narrative that he’s thin-skinned and petulant. Two years in a row, he’s passed on throwing out the first pitch of the baseball season — one of the few remaining rites of office that is uncontroversial.

These weren’t just unfortunate, clumsy flub-ups, of the sort Gerald Ford came to be known for — tripping as he descended the stairs from Air Force One or his remark, in the thick of the Cold War, that “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.” Rather they expose a fundamental difference between Trump and his predecessors in their media operations.

Over the past century, modern presidents have increasingly relied on a strategy, as political scientist Samuel Kernell describes, of “going public” to roll out their political agenda, retail-style, directly to the American people. This strategy has allowed the executive branch to become more involved in the legislative process by swaying public opinion to justify executive input and authority. This process also required creating positions, from press secretary to director of communications, to coordinate how issues, and visuals, are presented.

In some ways, Trump should be expected to be better at this: He has a media savviness unlike his predecessors — he comes from the world of TV and he’s revolutionized, for good or ill, the use of social media in politics. But he’s struggled to translate this into effective strategies for governance. The tree-planting ceremony is instructive. As Twitter users were quick to point out, planting a tree wound up underscoring the dissonance between Trump’s administration and Macron’s after Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accord last year and has since allowed his EPA to unwind a number of key environmental regulations. Instead of reinforcing a message of presidential leadership, the tree ceremony highlighted this tension.

He relishes the image of disrupter-in-chief: At a recent speech, he looked delighted to literally throw his script away. But he forfeits a lot of the symbolic power of what Theodore Roosevelt famously called the bully pulpit when he treats his perch so cavalierly.

Visuals have always been important to the presidency. But who controls the image of the president has changed. During the 19th century, political parties had this power. This was at a time when the presidency was seen by political insiders as valuable because it presented an avenue for political patronage, on which parties depended.

Over the course of the 20th century, figures like Roosevelt used the presidency as a platform to shape public opinion and expand presidential authority. Through motion pictures, staged photo opportunities on the White House lawn and radio addresses, the public felt like they got to know the president more and more each day. But those interactions were diligently controlled by a team of image professionals — figures like Bruce Barton, the PR man extraordinaire who ran Calvin Coolidge’s media operations, or Stephen Early, the journalist who became the first official press secretary for Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The subsequent growth of television posed a new challenge. Would the emphasis on the visual expand interest in American politics? Or would it give advertisers a new role to “merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal,” as unsuccessful Democratic presidential contender Adlai Stevenson lamented in 1956.

It did both.

After ceding the TV edge to John F. Kennedy in 1960, Richard Nixon revamped his 1968 campaign by prioritizing television. Figures like Roger Ailes (later of Fox News Channel fame), Harry Treleaven, Len Garment, Bill Gavin and Ray Price worked to construct a likable Nixon persona. As Price wrote in one memo, “It takes art to convey the truth from us to the viewer.”

This didn’t stop with Nixon’s election: He made this image-making apparatus central to how he governed. His newly created White House communications office and his reelection committee carefully coordinated such efforts. The goal: to create a media image that promoted the president and advanced his agenda. Sometimes it worked, as when Nixon opened relations with China with a perfectly executed media script. Other times it failed, such as when his team initially treating the Watergate investigation as merely a PR problem.

Candidates in the 1970s relied more heavily on consultants and media advisers, shifting the power away from party insiders and rewarding those with showmanship skills, not necessarily those with political experience. Reforms to the primary system escalated this trend. As one aide for George McGovern’s presidential campaign noted, campaign managers previously stood on the sidelines, “chewed cigars and handed out turkeys.” But now they had to generate excitement, turn out crowds and attract cameras for news coverage. They had to play “media games.”

Ronald Reagan benefited from these changes and further ingrained them into White House operations. When he was shot in 1981, his media team, led by Michael Deaver and David Gergen, leveraged images of a stalwart president recovering in the hospital to win support for his pending tax legislation. His communications team strategized on how to insert images of Reagan into the nightly news while working to promote Reagan’s “line of the day.” And, as historian David Greenberg argues, photo ops “displaced the moribund routine of the presidential press conference.” State events, like welcoming dignitaries, became an opportunity to dismiss inquisition from the press and instead focus on creating a presidential aura that allowed Reagan more control in shaping overall perceptions of his administration.

His Democratic successors, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, expanded these practices. The former created a “war room” to monitor the 24/7 news cycle, while the latter even ventured into the realm of online shows like “Between Two Ferns” to boost the Affordable Care Act. For both, publicity was a tool to promote their agenda, and they adjusted the bully pulpit to navigate new media, from cable television to the Internet.

So, why hasn’t Trump done a better job of harnessing the power of the symbolic presidency?

It’s true that part of Trump’s appeal to his core supporters has been his performative commitment to flouting various presidential norms — the Twitter insults, dismissively tossing paper towel rolls into the crowd at a hurricane relief center, brushing dandruff off Macron’s shoulder. That he was the un-Jeb Bush and the un-Obama worked to his advantage when he ran for president. Trump saw that breaking the rules of presidential decorum, by dismissing the traditional image-making apparatus, would appeal to Americans disaffected by politics-as-usual.

But this approach focuses inordinate amounts of attention on Trump’s whims and personality, not his leadership ability or his legislative agenda. An improvisational style may work on reality television, where the goal is to entertain audiences with unexpected twists and turns. Even then, though, such publicity ploys frequently crash and burn. The stakes are higher in the Oval Office, and the opportunities for asserting meaningful, rather than purely performative, presidential leadership abound. If the president wants to gain the approval of more than the roughly 40 percent of Americans he currently has, actually embracing the leadership and publicity potential of the bully pulpit would be a logical place to start.

 

[EmmieJ]

8 hours ago, formergothardite said:

Why is he so hung up on community colleges? Has he truly no heard of them until recently? Because I"ve never met anyone who didn't understand what a community college is. 

Well he's not an ordinary moron.  He's a fucking moron.  The most moronic ever!  Nobody is more of a moron than he!

[GreyhoundFan]

From Jennifer Rubin: "Trump has already been ‘played’"

Spoiler

President Trump looks with disdain on those who get snookered, which is odd since he’s the easiest of marks for anyone with a red carpet and a batch of insincere compliments.

His defensiveness about being “played” was evident when asked about the upcoming meeting with North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Un. “We’re not going to be played, okay? We’re going to hopefully make a deal, if not that’s fine,” he said on Friday at the White House during a press availability. He claims he is different from all previous presidents. Sadly, that is true — he is more ignorant and susceptible to flattery than any of his predecessors.

Trump shows every sign he is already being suckered. He blessed talks between South and North Korea on formally ending the Korean War and tweeted gleefully the war might be over. Does he know they cannot end it on their own without other parties to the armistice, including China? Chances are he doesn’t know this is part of a stage show designed to lure in an American president blinded by his own need for personal affirmation.

He touted North Korea’s shuttering of a nuclear facility that, it turn out, may have collapsed and become inoperative anyway The danger of a gullible president is never greater than when a manipulative dictator is practiced at telling Western leaders what they want to hear.

Trump seems to be under the misconception that we haven’t gone down this same road with Pyongyang before. Wrong. My colleague Max Boot explains that “the news coverage of the 2000 meeting between South Korean President Kim Dae-jung and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang parallels the euphoria over Friday’s meeting in Panmunjom between Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong Un.” Never have we gotten so far, never have we had so much enthusiasm for a deal, Trump says. Yeah, right. If Trump actually believes this, chances are he is falling for Pyongyang’s act.

While I am quite confident that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton understand that “denuclearization” from North Korea’s perspective means the end of a U.S. presence on the Korean peninsula and dissolution of our security guarantee for Seoul, I’m not at all certain that Trump does. In order to secure a PR victory and garner praise Trump might well sacrifice American interests — and certainly those of allies he thinks have been taking advantage of America’s largesse.

He wouldn’t be the first president to be certain of his genius in obtaining a historic breakthrough. Trump, like his predecessors, fails to grasp the essence of the regime we confront.

Nicholas Eberstadt explains:

For North Korea to end its war on the South, and accept the South as a legitimate, coequal government on the peninsula, would mean abandoning the quest that has legitimized the Kim family’s rule for three generations. The decision would call into question why, exactly, North Korea should hold power at all. It would be system-threatening — a mistake on the scale of the string of blunders by President Mikhail S. Gorbachev that doomed the Soviet Union.

And so the North, rather than committing to a legally binding (and potentially destabilizing) peace treaty, is likely to do again what it has gotten away with in previous meetings with the South: dangle aspirational goals in jointly signed, but totally unenforceable, official statements.

Because Trump is the master of believing what he wants to believe and trying to win favor with whomever is sitting in the room with him the real danger is that Trump impulsively accepts frothy promises in exchange for concrete concessions. The North Koreans are practiced at conning U.S. administrations into believing they have found the key to peace on the Korean Peninsula. Meanwhile, Pyongyang retains a nuclear arsenal that Kim, like his father, believes is essential to the regime’s survival and to reunification of the peninsula on its terms.

I would suggest Trump’s advisers print out directions to him on little cards — “DO NOT BETRAY OUR SECURITY ALLIANCE WITH SEOUL” — but I’m afraid he doesn’t as a rule follow such advice, caps or no caps. Pompeo will have his work cut out for him to avoid a blowup that results in miscalculated aggression by the North, or worse, a rupture in our alliances because Trump has succumbed to flattery.

Trump has been under the impression our Asia allies have been “ripping us off.” Wait until he strikes the “best deal EVER” with Kim Jong Un. Then you’ll really see how America gets ripped off.

 

[Dandruff]

8 hours ago, formergothardite said:

Why is he so hung up on community colleges? Has he truly no heard of them until recently? Because I"ve never met anyone who didn't understand what a community college is. 

I've taken courses at several community colleges and was very happy with the quality of teaching and the cost.

Then there's Trump U...