Trump 32: Pissing off the World, One Country at a Time

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Cartmann99]

Trump is so damn embarrassing.

Quote

President Donald Trump stunned his fellow world leaders at the G7 meeting when he said he would ship “25 million” Mexicans to Japan, which would result in Prime Minister Shinzo Abe losing his next election.

During the gathering in Quebec — which ended with Trump leaving early and refusing to sign the traditional joint communique — the president was talking about what he called Europe’s immigration problem when he turned his attention to the Japanese leader.

“Shinzo, you don’t have this problem, but I can send you 25 million Mexicans and you’ll be out of office very soon,” Trump said, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing a senior EU official who was in the room.

https://nypost.com/2018/06/15/trump-told-shinzo-abe-hed-ship-25-million-mexicans-to-japan/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

[fraurosena]

I see he's being a whiny-ass bitch again.

Do you think that Manafort thing today has gotten to him? 

/sarcasm

[formergothardite]

Aww, Poor Baby. He thought he got to be a dictator like his bestest friend Putin but now he has sooooo many people being soooooo mean to him. Why can't the American people be like the people of North Korea and just worship him. It isn't fair! 

[fraurosena]

So much whining. 

The presiduncial fear is dripping from every tweet. His ass is probably puckered so tightly with fear that only whiny sounds can be emitted from it.

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Smoochie]

2 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

Don't be silly, he doesn't like it because someone once said he shouldn't like it, so dammit he doesn't like it!  He has no clue what the TPP stood for or what it entailed.

[Audrey2]

Tee hee hee...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/short-staff-trump-administration-turns-jobs-fair-222112827.html

Quote

President Trump once promised to hire “the best people,” even as he also promised to drastically reduce the size of the federal government, perhaps by eliminating some agencies altogether. But more than a year into his first foray into the astonishingly complex realm of public service (who could have known?), Trump is discovering that even limited government needs plenty of workers to carry out its functions. And so, with many federal agencies severely understaffed, the White House turned to a job fair.

The announcement of the fair, which was hosted on Friday by the Conservative Partnership Institute, was met with amusement by the press when it was reported earlier in the week. “The White House is two staff defections away from advertising jobs on Craigslist,” said a Vanity Fair headline. This may have been a haughty response, but there was substance to the criticism. A functional White House shouldn’t need a job fair, especially not this late into a presidential term. For critics of the administration, this was further proof that Trump was nothing like the capable chief executive portrayed on “The Apprentice"

 

Yeah, Cheeseboy, no one wants the taint of working in your administration regime.

Seriously, I don't think a job in this administration will open any doors, except, perhaps, on Fox News. You will lose all credibility, and the stress of having to blow whichever way the Orange Storm leans in his latest Tweet would be too much.

[GreyhoundFan]

From the wonderfully snarky and sarcastic Alexandra Petri: "We are definitely not a Trump cult"

Spoiler

Hello, Republicans!

You may have been hearing worrying things from people such as Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) about how we have ceased to be a party of principles and have become a cult of personality around President Trump. But I will swear on my MAGA hat that this is not the case.

It would be shameful if we were in a position where we had to pretend everything Trump did was okay with us, even if it were not. But everything Donald Trump does is perfect and beautiful and correct. He moves from strength to strength, blown on the breath of the Almighty, and the only thing sharper than his vision is his judgment.

It is not that we are in some kind of coven where Donald Trump is our god and we must believe on any given day that which he believes, and that his enemies are our enemies, his friends our friends. It is just that it has always been our policy that it is good for America to show respect to repressive regimes, for instance, by bowing or salutes. We don’t cringe at the sight of the North Korean and U.S. flags side by side. Trump deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, either for his work with North Korea or for making the rain fall and the crops grow. Or both!

We are not praising him because we are rudderless and terrified and adrift and have lost sight of our principles. We are praising him because he is right about everything, and he always golfs under par, and his children are gorgeous and deserve power, and his hands are of course the right size. Those who cross him will come to rue it.

To those who say that Trump is obviously incompetent, small-minded and surrounded by a deep slough of corruption, I can only respond: You are a traitor and a conspirator and you need to get your mind right. Open your eyes, sheep-person! Do not let the Fake News Media sway you with their facts. Do not listen to what John McCain or Bob Corker or Jeff Flake have to say. Honestly, if you can even hear the voices of these malingerers, I wonder about your loyalty.

To those who say that Trump is using his office for personal gain, I say, no, the Trump International is simply the best place for meetings, and every contract Ivanka has secured was because hers was the best offer. This is a real fact, not an alternative fact. To those who sue his charity for being a charity in name only, I say, maybe “charity” is a meaningless word. If Donald Trump thinks so, we should consider it.

To those who say his administration is corrupt, I say, that is just what the people who report facts want you to believe, and we know what Donald Trump thinks about them. To those who say, wait, didn’t EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt use government employees to find him moisturizer from a hotel, I say, as House Speaker Paul Ryan did: What, I literally cannot hear you, who is Scott Pruitt, probably this is a misunderstanding, I know nothing about any of this!

To those who say he has no grasp of the issues at hand, I repeat one of his many simple slogans until the objection stops.

To those who say he has lowered the level of our discourse, I say, **** off, ********.

There is nothing inconsistent or unprincipled in our embrace of this man, because he embodies every virtue, except virtues we have previously said we valued — like marital fidelity and probity and not making excuses for white supremacists. Speaking of which, we have literally no idea why all of these white supremacists are showing up now, and it has nothing to do with Trump, unless it does, in which case, it is a good thing. But they do not represent us, except in the literal sense that they have been nominated to be our representatives, and speak for us.

I am not in a cult. I just love Donald Trump so much, and since deciding to love Trump, my pores have become clearer and my flocks have thrived, and my atherosclerosis went away — maybe spontaneously, but maybe not. I am prospering now as I have never prospered before. I would say that if loving Donald Trump is wrong, I don’t want to be right, but I know that loving Donald Trump is not wrong. It is the only thing that is right. I would give him my arm. I would give him my kidney. I would give him everything that I am. I would have nothing left.

 

[CTRLZero]

27 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

From the wonderfully snarky and sarcastic Alexandra Petri

Exquisite! 

[AuntK]

My mother passed away in October 2013. As much as I miss her,  I am grateful that she missed this debacle of a presidency and this daily shitshow starring the Orange idiot. At times, I get so depressed,  I wish I could join her. How much longer must we endure this inept, corrupt,  infantile,  narcissistic, old man destroying our democracy? When will it stop? I heard tonight that he wants a summit with Putin - I guess he wants to just hand over everything!

[AmazonGrace]

 

[fraurosena]

This should be asked every single time a repug talks to the press. Every.single.time.

Or they should call the presidunce out on his blatant lying, without couching it in delicate allusions, like this:

 

[fraurosena]

This hypocrisy hurts.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Because children are bargaining chips to Dumpy: "Trump cites as a negotiating tool his policy of separating immigrant children from their parents"

Spoiler

President Trump has calculated that he will gain political leverage in congressional negotiations by continuing to enforce a policy he claims to hate — separating immigrant parents from their young children at the southern border, according to White House officials.

On Friday, Trump suggested he would not change the policy unless Democrats agreed to his other immigration demands, which include funding a border wall, tightening the rules for border enforcement and curbing legal entry. He also is intent on pushing members of his party to vote for a compromise measure that would achieve those long-standing priorities.

Trump’s public acknowledgment that he was willing to let the policy continue as he pursued his political goals came as the president once again blamed Democrats for a policy enacted and touted by his own administration.

“The Democrats are forcing the breakup of families at the Border with their horrible and cruel legislative agenda,” he tweeted. After listing his demands in any immigration bill, he added, “Go for it! WIN!”

The attempt to gain advantage from a practice the American Academy of Pediatrics describes as causing children “irreparable harm” sets up a high-stakes gambit for Trump, whose political career has long benefited from harsh rhetoric on immigration.

Democrats have latched onto the issue and vowed to fight in the court of public opinion, with leaders planning trips to the border to highlight the stories of separated families, already the focus of news media attention. Democratic candidates running for vulnerable Republican seats also have begun to make the harsh treatment of children a centerpiece of their campaigns.

The policy has cracked Trump’s usually united conservative base, with a wide array of religious leaders and groups denouncing it. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Southern Baptist Convention issued statements critical of the practice.

The Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, who delivered a prayer at Trump’s inauguration, signed a letter calling the practice “horrible.” Pastor Franklin Graham of Samaritan’s Purse, a vocal supporter of the president’s who has brushed aside past Trump controversies, called it “terrible” and “disgraceful.”

Besides increasing the odds of a broader immigration bill, senior Trump strategists believe that the child separation policy will deter the flow of migrant families across the border. Nearly 2,000 immigrant children were separated from parents during six weeks in April and May, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The figure is the only one released by the goverment.

“The president has told folks that in lieu of the laws being fixed, he wants to use the enforcement mechanisms that we have,” a White House official said. “The thinking in the building is to force people to the table.”

Trump reinforced that notion Friday morning at the White House when he suggested Democrats alone had the power to alter the policy.

“I hate the children being taken away,” Trump said.

The president used a similar strategy last year as he sought to gain approval for his immigration demands by using the lure of protection for young immigrants brought to the United States as children. That effort, which ran counter to Trump’s earlier promise to sign a bipartisan bill protecting the young immigrants, foundered in Congress.

Democratic and Republican strategists believe the odds of passing a broad new immigration law — this one ending the family separation policy — remain slim.

House Republican leaders nonetheless have been trying to broker the compromise between moderate and conservative GOP lawmakers that would encourage families to be kept together, while also providing funding for a new border wall, a path to citizenship for the young immigrants brought to the country as minors, and new limits on legal immigration.

The White House told lawmakers Friday that Trump would sign the bill if it passes.

Some Republican immigration hard-liners, however, continue to hold out, saying they will not support any path to citizenship and do not support any accommodations to keep families together. “I don’t see a reason to spend the money doing that,” Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said in an interview Friday. “And I don’t see how you do that without having a suite for every self-described family unit.”

If Republicans come together, the bill would need to attract Democratic support to pass the Senate. “They’re claiming it addressed separations, but clearly, when you put that in a bill that funds a wall and won’t get Democratic votes, they don’t have a serious plan,” said Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.). “They never expected the bill to pass.”

Democratic House aides said there were no negotiations Friday on a possible bipartisan compromise. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has introduced a bill in the Senate focused narrowly on ending the child separations, but it has not yet attracted any Republican support.

“On the legislative side, they are not trying to talk to any Democrats,” said Drew Hammill, deputy chief of staff for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). “They are holding the kids hostage.”

The current policy resulted from a decision made in April by Attorney General Jeff Sessions to prosecute all migrants who cross the border, including those with young children. Those migrants had avoided detention during the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Because of a 1997 court settlement that bars children from being imprisoned with parents, Justice Department officials now say they have no choice but to isolate the children.

Sessions and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders have defended the policy as a sound, and biblical, decision to enforce the law.

“The previous administration wouldn’t prosecute illegal aliens who entered the country with children,” Sessions said Thursday in Fort Wayne, Ind., citing biblical advice to follow laws. “It was de facto open borders.”

The biblical underpinnings have been challenged by religious leaders.

“There’s definitely a groundswell of opposition from virtually every corner of the Christian community,” said Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. “People are able to understand immediately the drive of parents to protect their child and to understand the horror of splitting up vulnerable children from their parents.”

Yet several key Trump administration officials support the family separation policy, including Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and senior adviser Stephen Miller, a vocal supporter of stricter immigration laws.

Some senior officials think Democrats will be pressured by the policy to cut an immigration deal.

“If they aren’t going to cooperate, we are going to look to utilize the laws as hard as we can,” said a second White House official.

Others have argued that the main benefit of the policy is deterrence. Miller has said internally that the child separations will bring the numbers down at the border, a goal that Trump wants to achieve. Miller and Marc Short, the White House director of legislative affairs, have argued that immigration legislation is unlikely to pass this summer, officials said.

“The side effect of zero tolerance is that fewer people will come up illegally, and fewer minors would be put in danger,” said a third senior administration official. “What is more dangerous to a minor, the 4,000-mile journey to America or the short-term detention of their parents?”

Democrats have been incorporating the plight of the separated children in their midterm election campaigns.

Pelosi will join members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in a Monday visit to the Southern California border, where she plans to talk to parents who have been separated from their children. Several other lawmakers, including Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), chairman of the Senate Democratic midterm effort, plan to visit the border city of Brownsville, Tex., on Sunday to highlight the concerns.

Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke, who is challenging Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), visited a detention center Tuesday, later describing in a Facebook video the concerns of a mother he met who was about to be separated from her 7-year-old daughter. The video had been viewed 40,000 times by Friday.

Democratic candidate Josh Harder held a protest Thursday over the separation policy at the Modesto, Calif., offices of Republican Rep. Jeff Denham, one of the leaders of the House effort to craft a Republican compromise bill. “These stories are horrifying,” Harder said. “It’s deeply impactful in a district like ours, where we are 40 percent Latino.”

In response to the rally, Denham released a statement to The Washington Post expressing optimism that the Republican House bill would end the practice.

“We are fixing family separation within this bill and have made changes to keep children with at least one of their parents,” he said.

Correction: An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the period during which nearly 2,000 immigrant children were separated from their parents. It was over six weeks, not two weeks.

 

[fraurosena]

I love Rick Wilson's seriously snarky Daily Beast op-ed. 

Donald Trump, the Insecure Pledge in the Dictatorship Fraternity

Quote

“He is the strong head. Don’t let anyone think anything different. He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”

That was Donald Trump on Friday morning, former leader of the free world, praising murderous North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. It set off a justified firestorm. Sure, his usual cheerleaders immediately jumped to, “He was joking! Why are you libtard sharia Soros Pizzagate Killary supporters so triggered?” or “Don’t you get it, man? It’s 9th-dimensional quantum chess.”

Sorry, I’m all out of passes in the “He’s new at this” or “He’s joking” or “That’s just Trump being Trump” categories his enablers have gotten away with using for far too long. After the last week, Trump is clearly a man who puts the dick in dictator. He’s a fanboy of Putin, Kim, Duterte, and a dog’s breakfast of the worst examples of oppression, thuggery, and anti-Western values the globe has to offer.

Why is today’s statement so much more outrageous, so much more egregious than any of a host of other Trumpian excesses, deviations from American values, shit-talking lunacy, and post-truth verbal dysentery? Because this week, Trump’s love of authoritarians, dictatorships and his actions and words came together. Donald Trump first went to the G-7 to wreck the proceedings with a combination of insult-comic schtick, diplomatic demolition derby, Putin cheerleading, and giant-toddler petulance.

He followed that with the Singapore Shitshow. It was a monstrous reality TV event, as was intended. But it left our putative allies wondering at the new Axis of Assholes Trump has joined—the CRANK: China, Russia, America and North Korea. By the end, it didn’t feel like he was after denuclearization but management tips from the portly little thug Kim.

For the American president to normalize, excuse, and ally himself with the worst of the world's bad actors while insulting, degrading, and destroying our allies and alliances would be appalling in any circumstance. The fact that Trump acts like a bumbling, eager fraternity pledge, desperate to join Phi Sigma Dictator makes it all the worse.

Donald Trump’s authoritarian impulses have never exactly been a state secret. The entire Trump leadership oeuvre is a grotesque, bubbling slurry of reality TV star egomania and crap-tier nationalist nostrums that sound like Pat Buchanan and Lyndon LaRouche had a love child. Barely contained racial animus and a will to power is what resembles the real heroes of Trump's blisteringly awful mental and moral landscape.

We know from whence some of this impulse came. A gloriously illiterate cretin with a reading level routinely bested by simple, non-digital household appliances and talented flatworms on his best days, Trump’s interior intellectual life has never been, well, visible without the use of highly sensitive lab equipment. Roy Cohn’s tutelage, his father’s racial beliefs, and his indifferent education all contributed to the creature he is today. Trump’s bedside reading list was, according to his first wife, a collection of Adolf Hitler’s speeches. As they say, you've got to give the kids something they're interested in to make reading special.

Trump's style from the beginning was authoritarian-chic; bossy, needy, insufferable, and centered on the bright, hot star in the center of the stage. Trump was never a man running as a servant of the people; he was an avatar for their darkest, most vengeful, most petty grievances and imagined slights from a catalog of monsters from the Fox News scare closet. He wasn’t a leader; he was an avenger. He played an old tune from the authoritarian songbook: pose as the one man who will the avenge the Dolchstoßlegende committed against MAGAmerica by the perfidious Others, whether they be Mexicans, Chinese, Jews, Muslims, RINOs, the Establishment, or the literate.

In office, he adopted more than even the usual trappings of the Imperial Presidency, right down to the Royal Family serving in positions of influence. His staff engaged in behavior toward Trump that treated him not as a President, but as a king. It started before the White House, with his dictator-chic interior design sensibility striking every wrong chord, a trainwreck of Saddam and Liberace set loose with too much gold leaf, a glue gun, and a half-pound of cocaine.

Before his inauguration, Trump requested a massive, Soviet-style military parade and salute in his honor. He has consistently returned to this particular piece of Maximum Leader tableau vivant over and over again, hoping by some magical associative property of the heroism and skill of our men and women in uniform to somehow become something more than a five-time draft dodging chickenhawk.

Trumpian language, like that of so many actual and wannabe-strongmen, is always overwrought, hyperbolic, and self-aggrandizing. Listen to Trump’s language or that of his surrogates and staffers, and it’s always the biggest, best, first, only. All his actions are perfect, all his thoughts are genius, all his ideas are born fully formed and intellectually unassailable. He also hits a hole-in-one every time. Oh, wait. That’s the ex-dictator father of his new bestie Kim Jong Un.

The disregard for truth is also another hallmark. No one conspired with Russia. The harvest was amazing. There are no children in cages. We built more tractors than ever due to the Stakhanovite workers’ determination to exceed the Five Year Plan. The Trump family charity isn’t a criminal enterprise, but rather a source of hope for millions. Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort fetched coffee, at best.

Every authoritarian hellhole—pardon me, shithole—needs a state-run media to salute the Father of the Nation for exceeding the Five Year Plan’s Beet Harvest totals, or to praise the construction of the 3,000-mile, 500-foot tall pure-titanium Glorious All-Peoples Border Wall. State-run media must offer not only praise for His Umber Majesty but also scourge and punish any apostates. The surreal outing when a Fox News host bot demanded Marco Rubio retract his critique of Kim Jong Un because it might reflect badly on Donald Trump was one of those, “Screw it, the Westworld robots are loose, and it’s only a matter of time before they get us all” moments.

The constellation of talk radio, Fox, Infowars, Breitbart (It’s English for “Der Sturmer”), devote every moment of bandwidth not spent fellating Trump to punishing and pursuing his critics. Sean Haw Haw of Fox News spends his nightly 43 minutes of airtime between commercials for catheters, reverse mortgages, stairlift, and survival food screaming into the camera like a turgid ham with a series of denunciations that would make Beria lean back and say, “Oh, easy there, tovarish.” Judge Jeanine Pirro needs only a pink hanbok to rival North Korea’s Ri Chun-hee for paint-peeling agitprop in service to Kim Jong Don.

Authoritarian states also require the sick infrastructure of informers, and enforcers, petty zampolits, petty commissars and chekists do what they do; punish deviations from the constant worship, adulation, and praise of the Dear Leader. The White House is a Hobbesian snakepit, and Republican politics has become filled with denunciations of any deviation from the True Faith.

When Republican National Committee Ronna Romney McDaniel tweeted, “Complacency is our enemy. Anyone that does not embrace the @realDonaldTrump agenda of making America great again will be making a mistake” it wasn’t just the new normal; it was a set of marching orders to monitor, report, purge and punish any variation from Trump juche.

The entire l’etat c’est Trump mindset of today’s Washington, D.C., is making Trump feel frisky, as the GOP continues to lay in the road like a dead animal, even as the buzzards of reality, conscience, and truth peck at them. Paul Ryan’s utter, final moral collapse was on full display this week; now he’s pretending he doesn’t even read the news about Trump’s behavior or that of his cabinet members. Trump is unbounded, unbridled, and unhinged.

Yes, some of Trump’s distractions are to cover the pendant doom of Paul Manafort, now rotting in jail for the foreseeable future, the Cohen trainwreck, and the failure of this weeks IG report to categorically demonstrate him is as pure as the driven snow and that his Russia ties were all Hillary’s fault. But much of this authoritarian statist flirtation is because Trump wills it so.

We are told to take Trump seriously, but not literally. I’m not sure we can afford to do that any longer.

The president of the United States of America is an office which imposes a vast, consequential responsibility on the person who holds it to represent America's values to the world. If those values are liberty, equality, freedom, the rule of law, and the Constitution, Trump is failing on every front. If they are the values of the thug, the tyrant, the bully, the circus freak third-world tinpot?

Then he’ll get his pledge pin any day now.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I love Bill Maher's update of Goofus and Gallant:

 

[Howl]

4 hours ago, fraurosena said:

I love Rick Wilson's seriously snarky Daily Beast op-ed. 

Donald Trump, the Insecure Pledge in the Dictatorship Fraternity

There's nothing, absolutely nothing that is better than the gems Rick Wilson can polish when he's on a regular Never-Trump tear.

Is this the best?

Spoiler

Donald Trump’s authoritarian impulses have never exactly been a state secret. The entire Trump leadership oeuvre is a grotesque, bubbling slurry of reality TV star egomania and crap-tier nationalist nostrums that sound like Pat Buchanan and Lyndon LaRouche had a love child.

Or is it this turn of phrase

Spoiler

 

A gloriously illiterate cretin with a reading level routinely bested by simple, non-digital household appliances and talented flatworms on his best days, Trump’s interior intellectual life has never been, well, visible without the use of highly sensitive lab equipment. 

 

Might it be this?

Spoiler

Trump was never a man running as a servant of the people; he was an avatar for their darkest, most vengeful, most petty grievances and imagined slights from a catalog of monsters from the Fox News scare closet. 

This may be my fave

Spoiler

It started before the White House, with his dictator-chic interior design sensibility striking every wrong chord, a train wreck of Saddam and Liberace set loose with too much gold leaf, a glue gun, and a half-pound of cocaine.

Darnit, just click on the link above and enjoy.  Dagnabbit! STILL not convinced? Sean Haw Haw of Fox News spends his nightly 43 minutes of airtime between commercials for catheters, reverse mortgages, stairlift, and survival food screaming into the camera like a turgid ham with a series of denunciations that would make Beria lean back and say, “Oh, easy there, tovarish.” 

Anyway, just click on @fraurosena's link above, and if you'd like a onsie, a two-fer, a trio or a quartet or more of Wilsonian goodness:  thedailybeast.com/author/rick-wilson

[fraurosena]

6 minutes ago, Howl said:

Anyway, just click on @fraurosena's link above, and if you'd like a onsie, a two-fer, a trio or a quartet or more of Wilsonian goodness:  thedailybeast.com/author/rick-wilson

I'd like to add to @Howl's advice that you can also follow Rick on twitter too: https://twitter.com/TheRickWilson, where he shows he's not only a great op-ed writer, but also a veritable master of snarky one-liners.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

A good one from Maureen Dowd: "Psychos on the Potomac"

Spoiler

WASHINGTON — A new study from Southern Methodist University says the nation’s capital has more psychopaths per person than anyplace else in the country.

No surprise there.

Psychopathy is defined in the study as a “Temperamental and Uninhibited Region.” Which is the perfect description of the Trump reality distortion field where we all now dwell.

The study notes that “psychopaths are likely to be effective in the political sphere” and that “the occupations that were most disproportionately psychopathic were C.E.O., lawyer, media, salesperson, surgeon, journalist, police officer, clergyperson, chef, and civil servant.”

So if a chief executive, salesman and media personality becomes a politician, he’s hitting four of the highest-risk categories.

This might explain why it was another insane week in Trumpworld and why, redolent of Seabiscuit in the Depression, people were finding hope rooting for a raccoon climbing to the top of a Minnesota skyscraper. Turns out another spunky Twin Cities female was going to make it after all.

The week started with the Summit of the Cruel Scions, following the Summit of the Scorned Allies, with President Trump “crashing around the world like a hormonal musk ox,” as The Financial Times put it. (And that was a positive appraisal.)

Next came the soul-deadening inversion of American values, when Jeff Sessions and Sarah Huckabee Sanders cited the Bible to justify ripping children from their parents at the border — including a baby being breast-fed by her Honduran mother. The Statue of Liberty wept.

Sessions is on a vile tear. A week ago, he vitiated the policy that made it possible to give asylum to women who are victims of domestic abuse or who are raped or threatened by the sort of gang members Trump decries as “animals.”

By Friday, the narrative had corkscrewed to Paul Manafort getting thrown in a cooler here for witness-tampering and reports that Michael Cohen, who has said his “glory days” with Trump were helping him think of mean tweets about Rosie O’Donnell, could flip on his former don.

The week was capped, naturally, with a Giuliani aria — “When the whole thing is over, things might get cleaned up with some presidential pardons,” Rudy told The Daily News in New York — and by the usual torrent of whiny, delusional, deceptive, self-exalting tweets by President Trump.

In between, we had jolts to the system spurred by the things that always make people here go bonkers: hubris (You know it, Comey); sex (Looking at you, Peter and Lisa), alienation of affection (Hi, Melania and Michael Cohen) and greed (Heads up, Trumps and Kushners).

Jonathan Swift said, “A wise man should have money in his head but not in his heart.” The Trumps have green running through their veins.

They have succeeded in superseding conflicts of interest with confluences of interest. Ethics bore this crew. The White House is just another business opportunity.

Once upon a time, it was scandalous to see Reagan image wizard Mike Deaver posing in a limo in front of the Capitol for a Time cover story headlined “Cashing In on Top Connections,” showing off his success with post-White House lobbying, and to see Obama social secretary Desirée Rogers referring to the classy president as a “brand.”

Over the past week, we learned that Javanka have been profiting handsomely while doing whatever it is they do in the White House. In their first year in public service, their total income from investments was between $82 million and $222 million. Ethics watchdogs are daily distraught over who is financing these investments.

Ivanka raked in $3.9 million from her stake in the D.C. Trump hotel, which was saved from a shaky start by becoming the inevitable destination for foreign dignitaries and others seeking to flatter and enrich a White House that revolves around flattery and riches.

We knew Trump was a skinflint and a grifter. But the New York attorney general deeply documented just how cheesy he and his children are with a suit accusing the Trump charitable foundation of illegal behavior and self-dealing. It was just what Trump always accused the Clintons of doing.

The supposed nonprofit was little more than a Trump piggy bank used to settle legal claims and pay off political backers. The good news for Trump was that the prosecutor proposed that he be banned from charitable activities — a fine excuse for someone who obviously wants nothing to do with charity.

Trump has also proved once again that he can turn Washington upside down and inside out. He has somehow managed to get Republicans in a position where they are cooing over his overtures to North Korea — overtures for which they would have impeached Barack Obama — and looking the other way while he upends the free trade policy that has been party dogma for decades. Meanwhile, the usually peacenik Democrats are assailing Trump for deigning to talk nice with Kim.

Asked by a Fox anchor what he was going to be doing on Father’s Day, the president replied, “I’m going to be actually calling North Korea.”

It makes sense if you think about it: A wannabe dictator who took over the family business from a dictatorial father talking to a real dictator who took over the family business from a dictatorial father.

Happy Father’s Day.

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

So many innocent people who pleaded guilty

[Howl]

16 hours ago, fraurosena said:

I'd like to add to @Howl's advice that you can also follow Rick on twitter too: https://twitter.com/TheRickWilson, where he shows he's not only a great op-ed writer, but also a veritable master of snarky one-liners.

Ditto!  Rick Wilson was my gateway tweeter! 

[JMarie]

2 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

So many innocent people who pleaded guilty

Well, this is a dark and dangerous period in American history....