Trump 33: Making Norman Bates Look Like a Choir Boy

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AnywhereButHere]

26 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

 

Well, he had to do something. Michael Cohen betrayed him, he's betraying our country, people don't really like that (and are not liking it loudly and somewhat bipartisanly) - so hey! Time to try antagonize someone into a war!

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[47of74]

Yeah this is satire.  But it wouldn't surprise me if this actually happened.

Quote

In a series of early-morning tweets on Sunday, Donald J. Trump demanded that the Russian national anthem be played before every National Football League game and that all N.F.L. players stand during the performance.

Trump asserted that playing the Russian anthem was a “necessary gesture of good will from the USA to our No. 1 ally,” and that “any player who refuses to stand for the Russian antem [sic] hates America!”

Seeming to double down on his demand, Trump tweeted that all N.F.L. players must remain standing while the color guard unfurls the flag of the Russian Federation.

 

[fraurosena]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

 

Twitter being blocked in Iran is precisely why he has the guts to go on an all out screaming rage-tweet at them. He wouldn't dare otherwise.

[AmazonGrace]

If it's evil they are doing it 

 

[AmazonGrace]

This makes me happy:

 

[Cartmann99]

 

[AmazonGrace]

Rand Paul was tweeting about suggesting this earlier.

[AmazonGrace]

Trump is so petty I'm sure he will now that someone gave him the idea he could

[AmazonGrace]

32 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

Rand Paul was tweeting about suggesting this earlier.

Eh, they're not looking at it too closely it seems as McCabe and Comey already don't have a clearance since they were fired.

[GreyhoundFan]

I like Hayden's response:

 

[Cartmann99]

 

[AmazonGrace]

Man not smart

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

I love this response to Dumpy's screaming Iran tweet:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

An excellent op-ed: "We knew who Trump was"

Spoiler

The most frustrating aspect of the backlash against President Trump’s servility to Russian President Vladimir Putin is that nothing that happened last week in Helsinki should have surprised us.

What has changed is that so many who insisted in 2016 that Trump was not as bad as he looked, that he was a pragmatist at heart, and that we should take him “seriously but not literally” have been forced to face the truth.

The truth is that Trump really does have what you might call a special relationship with Putin and Russia, for reasons still not fully known. He views foreign policy not as a way of protecting the nation but as an extension of his own narrow, personal interests.

He has no respect for our basic liberties, which is why he entertained turning over our country’s former ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, and other Putin critics to the Russian dictator’s mercies until widespread revulsion required Trump to back off.

The focus and discipline necessary to run a government are so alien to him that most of his top lieutenants were left in the dark about what Vlad and Don were cooking up.

Thus was Daniel Coats, the director of national intelligence, sandbagged on Thursday. He was in the middle of a televised interview at an Aspen Institute event with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell when Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, tweeted word that Putin had been invited to visit Washington in the fall.

Coats did not try to pretend he either knew of the decision or approved of it. “That’s going to be special,” he said to laughter from the Aspen crowd. His insouciance infuriated the White House and led one senior official to tell The Post that Coats had “gone rogue.” In fact, it’s the president who has “gone rogue” on the nation’s values, its traditional alliances and the integrity of our electoral system.

Trump, of course, refused to accept that anything had gone wrong. He tweeted Sunday morning that his meeting with Putin was “GREAT” — in all capital letters, of course — and blamed “the Fake News” for disparaging it.

In 2016 and for much of 2017, those warning that Trump was exactly the dangerous scoundrel he appeared to be were accused of missing his fundamental genius and his deep connection with discounted Americans. Trump’s detractors were said to be “out of touch” and “elitist,” as if only those with exquisitely elevated tastes in society’s upper reaches could possibly worry about his indifference to truth, his contempt for women and immigrants, his disdain for a free press and his flouting of the expectations we have of those on whom we confer power.

Was it only an elite thing to be concerned that Trump might be hiding something in those tax returns that he refuses to release? Was it out of touch to wonder why he praised Putin again and again, at one point saying that Putin was far more of “a leader” than President Barack Obama?

One person who was listening closely? Vladimir Putin.

At the Helsinki news conference that will live in infamy, Jeff Mason of Reuters asked Putin: “Did you want President Trump to win the election? And did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?”

Putin replied: “Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Because he talked about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal.”

Interestingly, both the White House and Kremlin transcripts make it appear as if Putin had not offered this startling admission. Whether or not the White House intentionally manipulated the transcript (Transcriptgateski?), and whether or not Putin intended to answer “yes” to both questions, he made it clear that Trump was his pick in 2016. That’s why Russian agents did so much to get him elected.

The vindication of those who saw Trump for who he is (a majority of the 2016 electorate, it’s worth noting) provides little satisfaction because of the peril his presidency poses.

But we can learn from this experience. Trump’s long-standing Republican apologists have lost all credibility. The party needs to be rebuilt, and that task should fall to the handful of GOP dissenters who resolutely refuse to peddle Trump’s propaganda.

We should never again take seriously all those who tell us that paying attention to what a politician says and does blinds us to some deeper (and nonexistent) wisdom he is supposedly conveying.

And we should develop a permanent immunity to a fake and manipulative populism that casts upholding standards and defending decency as the preoccupations of rarefied social and intellectual circles.

This is a condescending view because it underestimates the basic decency of the vast majority. It also gives license to the indecent. Trump and Putin have shown us where this leads.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Sorry, Trump. Your misdirection won’t work this time."

Spoiler

“In order to get elected, @BarackObama will start a war with Iran.” That was Donald Trump tweeting in 2011.

This was President Trump tweeting late Sunday night: “To Iranian President Rouhani: “NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!” 

As usual, Trump is doing exactly what he accuses his opponents of doing, in this case wagging the dog. 

This is part of a pattern. During a presidential debate, when Hillary Clinton accused Trump — presciently — of being a Russian puppet, he shot back: “No, you’re the puppet.” The humiliation in Helsinki confirmed Clinton’s warning — and explains Trump’s rhetorical escalation against Iran. 

Trump is clearly furious that he didn’t get the credit he thinks he deserves for a “GREAT meeting with Putin.” Of course, not even his top aides know all of what was discussed or decided behind closed doors. All that the public saw was that Trump accepted Putin’s lies over the truth-telling of the U.S. intelligence community, and that he refused to criticize the Russian dictator for his many offenses — including ongoing cyberattacks on the United States. Trump’s subservience triggered a week of toxic headlines as criticism poured in from past intelligence officials. Former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. suggested that “the Russians have something” on Trump; former CIA director John Brennan judged the president’s performance “nothing short of treasonous.”

The next move was as predictable as Trump golfing at one of his resorts: He tried to change the subject. His first attempt, on Friday, was to tweet about his favorite controversy: National Football League players kneeling during the national anthem. His stern demand — “First time kneeling, out for game. Second time kneeling, out for season/no pay!” — did not generate the headlines he so transparently hoped for. Maybe he should have suggested guillotining for a third offense. 

Try, try again. Hence his Sunday night threat against Iran. Coming from any other president, this out-of-the-blue, ALL-CAPS ultimatum would have led to suggestions that he’s hitting the bottle. But for Trump the teetotaler, it’s just business as usual. This time, he got the world’s attention. I was actually planning to write Monday about Trump and Russia. Instead, I’m writing about Trump and Iran. Far more important from Trump’s perspective, the talk on cable news turned from Russia to Iran. Mission accomplished.

The problem for Trump is that the credibility of his threats is diminishing. Sure, he scared the world silly in the summer of 2017 by threatening to rain “fire and fury” on North Korea. But within a year, he was all but surrendering to “Little Rocket Man” — legitimating and lavishly praising him on the world stage while stopping U.S.-South Korea joint military exercises in return for nothing but vague promises of denuclearization at some unspecified point in the future. The Post reports that even Trump recognizes that North Korea isn’t living up to its bargain, even though he publicly claims that negotiations are “going very well.” (Good to know he’s deceptive but not delusional.)

The president loves to bluff, but, like many bullies, he is actually a coward who is afraid of real conflict. When Trump picked John Bolton as his national security adviser in March, Kaitlan Collins of CNN reported that he made the ultra-hawk promise that he “wouldn’t start any wars.” I heard something similar from my own sources. Bolton denied it, but the sentiments ring true, because Trump has turned out to be less bellicose than expected.

Trump has started trade wars but, mercifully, not shooting wars. Aside from a few raids by Special Operations forces and the continuation of existing conflicts against the Islamic State and the Taliban, Trump has used force twice — his ineffectual cruise missile attacks against Syria in 2017 and 2018 to punish Bashar al-Assad for his use of chemical weapons. These were precisely the kind of “unbelievably small” strikes that President Barack Obama contemplated in 2013 — and that Trump criticized at the time.

It is, of course, a good thing that Trump is not turning out to be the warmonger that many feared he would be. But there is a real danger from having the president revealed as a BS artist, too: His threats carry less weight. That, ironically, makes it harder for him to achieve his objectives without resorting to force. 

At one time it appeared that Trump would be able to implement Richard Nixon’s “madman theory” of international relations and scare other states into acquiescence more successfully than Nixon had done. But Trump’s approach failed with North Korea, and there is no reason to think it will work with Iran. If past is prologue, maybe next year Trump will be claiming credit for averting war and praising Iranian President Hassan Rouhani as talented, funny, intelligent and a strong leader who loves his people. But what scares me is that, after so much bluster and braggadocio, to make his threats believable Trump may actually have to start carrying them out. 

 

[ADoyle90815]

Another name to call him that I saw on Facebook is Agolf Twittler.

[AmazonGrace]

Because of course they did.

How are they so bad at this?

[47of74]

Just saw this.

Lol

[AmazonGrace]

 

Man not smart:

 

[Audrey2]

1 hour ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

Man not smart:

 

But of course. Trump is concerned that the Democrats might win, or at least do better in November, so he needs to start planting the seed for his devout followers that, if the Democrats win or do better, that it's all because of Russia. In a way, this is brilliant. Buddy up with the enemy to get the office, then have the enemy supposedly back the other party in order to crush the party on collusion claims for a generation by associating them with the enemy who supposedly put them in office. I don't know that Trump came up with it, but it's an interesting strategy, much like the popular guy pretending to date the nerdy girl in school when everyone, but her, knows that it's a joke.

[Cartmann99]