Trump 34: Leading the Alternate Reality

[fraurosena]

Sorry, you’re not fooling anyone, presidunce dear. The frequency of reporting has zero effect on performance.

We all know you only want to do this because you need to obfuscate your administration’s bad quarterly results so they won’t affect the Midterms.

I guess your tariffs aren’t working out so well, are they?

 

[AmazonGrace]

.  

[AmazonGrace]

 

[fraurosena]

The presidunce is not at his best today. What a sorry attempt at deflection this is.

 

[fraurosena]

Sweet Rufus, he's channeling his inner Queen of Hearts crying 'Off with her head!'

 

[47of74]

This is an excellent article about Jimmy Carter. I haven't heard him say much against Dumpy before. "The un-celebrity president"
Spoiler PLAINS, Ga.
Jimmy Carter finishes his Saturday night dinner, salmon and broccoli casserole on a paper plate, flashes his famous toothy grin and calls playfully to his wife of 72 years, Rosalynn: “C’mon, kid.”
She laughs and takes his hand, and they walk carefully through a neighbor’s kitchen filled with 1976 campaign buttons, photos of world leaders and a couple of unopened cans of Billy Beer, then out the back door, where three Secret Service agents wait.
They do this just about every weekend in this tiny town where they were born — he almost 94 years ago, she almost 91. Dinner at their friend Jill Stuckey’s house, with plastic Solo cups of ice water and one glass each of bargain-brand chardonnay, then the half-mile walk home to the ranch house they built in 1961.
On this south Georgia summer evening, still close to 90 degrees, they dab their faces with a little plastic bottle of No Natz to repel the swirling clouds of tiny bugs. Then they catch each other’s hands again and start walking, the former president in jeans and clunky black shoes, the former first lady using a walking stick for the first time.
The 39th president of the United States lives modestly, a sharp contrast to his successors, who have left the White House to embrace power of another kind: wealth.
Even those who didn’t start out rich, including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, have made tens of millions of dollars on the private-sector opportunities that flow so easily to ex-presidents.
When Carter left the White House after one tumultuous term, trounced by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election, he returned to Plains, a speck of peanut and cotton farmland that to this day has a nearly 40 percent poverty rate.
The Democratic former president decided not to join corporate boards or give speeches for big money because, he says, he didn’t want to “capitalize financially on being in the White House.”
Presidential historian Michael Beschloss said that Gerald Ford, Carter’s predecessor and close friend, was the first to fully take advantage of those high-paid post-presidential opportunities, but that “Carter did the opposite.”
Since Ford, other former presidents, and sometimes their spouses, routinely earn hundreds of thousands of dollars per speech.
“I don’t see anything wrong with it; I don’t blame other people for doing it,” Carter says over dinner. “It just never had been my ambition to be rich.”
‘He doesn’t like big shots’
Carter was 56 when he returned to Plains from Washington. He says his peanut business, held in a blind trust during his presidency, was $1 million in debt, and he was forced to sell.
“We thought we were going to lose everything,” says Rosalynn, sitting beside him.
Carter decided that his income would come from writing, and he has written 33 books, about his life and career, his faith, Middle East peace, women’s rights, aging, fishing, woodworking, even a children’s book written with his daughter, Amy Carter, called “The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer.”
With book income and the $210,700 annual pension all former presidents receive, the Carters live comfortably. But his books have never fetched the massive sums commanded by more recent presidents.
Carter has been an ex-president for 37 years, longer than anyone else in history. His simple lifestyle is increasingly rare in this era of President Trump, a billionaire with gold-plated sinks in his private jet, Manhattan penthouse and Mar-a-Lago estate.
Carter is the only president in the modern era to return full-time to the house he lived in before he entered politics — a two-bedroom rancher assessed at $167,000, less than the value of the armored Secret Service vehicles parked outside.
Ex-presidents often fly on private jets, sometimes lent by wealthy friends, but the Carters fly commercial. Stuckey says that on a recent flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles, Carter walked up and down the aisle greeting other passengers and taking selfies.
“He doesn’t like big shots, and he doesn’t think he’s a big shot,” said Gerald Rafshoon, who was Carter’s White House communications director.
Carter costs U.S. taxpayers less than any other ex-president, according to the General Services Administration, with a total bill for him in the current fiscal year of $456,000, covering pensions, an office, staff and other expenses. That’s less than half the $952,000 budgeted for George H.W. Bush; the three other living ex-presidents — Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama — cost taxpayers more than $1 million each per year.
Carter doesn’t even have federal retirement health benefits because he worked for the government for four years — less than the five years needed to qualify, according to the GSA. He says he receives health benefits through Emory University, where he has taught for 36 years.
The federal government pays for an office for each ex-president. Carter’s, in the Carter Center in Atlanta, is the least expensive, at $115,000 this year. The Carters could have built a more elaborate office with living quarters, but for years they slept on a pullout couch for a week each month. Recently, they had a Murphy bed installed.
Carter’s office costs a fraction of Obama’s, which is $536,000 a year. Clinton’s costs $518,000, George W. Bush’s is $497,000 and George H.W. Bush’s is $286,000, according to the GSA.
“I am a great admirer of Harry Truman. He’s my favorite president, and I really try to emulate him,” says Carter, who writes his books in a converted garage in his house. “He set an example I thought was admirable.”
But although Truman retired to his hometown of Independence, Mo., Beschloss said that even he took up residence in an elegant house previously owned by his prosperous in-laws.
As Carter spreads a thick layer of butter on a slice of white bread, he is asked whether he thinks, especially with a man who boasts of being a billionaire in the White House, any future ex-president will ever live the way Carter does.
“I hope so,” he says. “But I don’t know.”
‘A good ’ol Southern gentleman’
Plains is a tiny circle of Georgia farmland, a mile in diameter, with its center at the train depot that served as Carter’s 1976 campaign headquarters. About 700 people live here, 150 miles due south of Atlanta, in a place that is a living museum to Carter.
The general store, once owned by Carter’s Uncle Buddy, sells Carter memorabilia and scoops of peanut butter ice cream. Carter’s boyhood farm is preserved as it was in the 1930s, with no electricity or running water.
The Jimmy Carter National Historic Site is essentially the entire town, drawing nearly 70,000 visitors a year and $4 million into the county’s economy.
Carter has used his post-presidency to support human rights, global health programs and fair elections worldwide through his Carter Center, based in Atlanta. He has helped renovate 4,300 homes in 14 countries for Habitat for Humanity, and with his own hammer and tool belt, he will be working on homes for low-income people in Indiana later this month.
But it is Plains that defines him.
After dinner, the Carters step out of Stuckey’s driveway, with two Secret Service agents walking close behind.
Carter’s gait is a little unsteady these days, three years after a diagnosis of melanoma on his liver and brain. At a 2015 news conference to announce his illness, he seemed to be bidding a stoic farewell, saying he was “perfectly at ease with whatever comes.”
But now, after radiation and chemotherapy, Carter says he is cancer-free.
In October, he will become the second president ever to reach 94; George H.W. Bush turned 94 in June. These days, Carter is sharp, funny and reflective.
The Carters walk every day — often down Church Street, the main drag through Plains, where they have been walking since the 1920s.
As they cross Walters Street, Carter sees a couple of teenagers on the sidewalk across the street.
“Hello,” says the former president, with the same big smile that adorns peanut Christmas ornaments in the general store.
“Hey,” says a girl in a jean skirt, greeting him with a cheerful wave.
The two 15-year-olds say people in Plains think of the Carters as neighbors and friends, just like anybody else.
“I grew up in church with him,” says Maya Wynn. “He’s a nice guy, just like a regular person.”
“He’s a good ’ol Southern gentleman,” says David Lane.
Carter says this place formed him, seeding his beliefs about racial equality. His farmhouse youth during the Great Depression made him unpretentious and frugal. His friends, maybe only half-joking, describe Carter as “tight as a tick.”
That no-frills sensibility, endearing since he left Washington, didn’t work as well in the White House. Many people thought Carter scrubbed some of the luster off the presidency by carrying his own suitcases onto Air Force One and refusing to have “Hail to the Chief” played.
Stuart E. Eizenstat, a Carter aide and biographer, said Carter’s edict eliminating drivers for top staff members backfired. It meant that top officials were driving instead of reading and working for an hour or two every day.
“He didn’t feel suited to the grandeur,” Eizenstat said. “Plains is really part of his DNA. He carried it into the White House, and he carried it out of the White House.”
Carter’s presidency — from 1977 to 1981 — is often remembered for long lines at gas stations and the Iran hostage crisis.
“I may have overemphasized the plight of the hostages when I was in my final year,” he says. “But I was so obsessed with them personally, and with their families, that I wanted to do anything to get them home safely, which I did.”
He said he regrets not doing more to unify the Democratic Party.
When Carter looks back at his presidency, he says he is most proud of “keeping the peace and supporting human rights,” the Camp David accords that brokered peace between Israel and Egypt, and his work to normalize relations with China. In 2002, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.
“I always told the truth,” he says.
Carter has been notably quiet about President Trump. But on this night, two years into Trump’s term, he’s not holding back.
“I think he’s a disaster,” Carter says. “In human rights and taking care of people and treating people equal.”
“The worst is that he is not telling the truth, and that just hurts everything,” Rosalynn says.
Carter says his father taught him that truthfulness matters. He said that was reinforced at the U.S. Naval Academy, where he said students are expelled for telling even the smallest lie.
“I think there’s been an attitude of ignorance toward the truth by President Trump,” he says.
Carter says he thinks the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision has “changed our political system from a democracy to an oligarchy. Money is now preeminent. I mean, it’s just gone to hell now.”
He says he believes that the nation’s “ethical and moral values” are still intact and that Americans eventually will “return to what’s right and what’s wrong, and what’s decent and what’s indecent, and what’s truthful and what’s lies.”
But, he says, “I doubt if it happens in my lifetime.”
On Church Street, Carter points out the mayor’s house with his left hand while he holds Rosalynn’s with his right.
“My mother and father lived in that brick one,” he says, gesturing toward a small house across the street. “We use it as an office now.”
“That’s Dr. Logan’s over here.”
Every house has a story. Generations of them. Cracked birdbaths and rocking chairs on somebody’s great-grandmother’s porch. Carter knows them all.
“Mr. Oscar Williams lived here; his family was my competitor in the warehouse business.”
He points out the Plains United Methodist Church, where he spotted young Eleanor Rosalynn Smith one evening when he was home from the Naval Academy.
He asked her out. They went to a movie, and the next morning he told his mother he was going to marry Rosalynn.
“I didn’t know that for years,” she says with a smile.
They are asked if there is anything they want but don’t have.
“I can’t think of anything,” Carter says, turning to Rosalynn. “And you?”
“No, I’m happy,” she says.
“We feel at home here,” Carter says. “And the folks in town, when we need it, they take care of us.”
‘A heart of service’
Every other Sunday morning, Carter teaches Sunday school at the Maranatha Baptist Church on the edge of town, and people line up the night before to get a seat.
This Sunday morning happens to be his 800th lesson since he left the White House.
He walks in wearing a blazer too big through the shoulders, a striped shirt and a turquoise bolo tie. He asks where people have come from, and from the pews they call out at least 20 states, Canada, Kenya, China and Denmark.
He tells the congregation that he’s planning a trip to Montana to go fishing with his friend Ted Turner, and that he’s going to ride in his son’s autogiro — a sort of mini-helicopter.
“I’m still fairly active,” he says, and everyone laughs.
He talks about living a purposeful life, but also about finding enough time for rest and reflection. Then he and Rosalynn pose for photos with every person who wants one, including Steven and Joanna Raley, who came from Annandale, Va., with their 3-month-old son, Jackson Carter Raley.
“We want our children to grow up with a heart of service like President Carter,” says Steven, who works on Navy submarines, as Carter once did.
“One of the reasons we named our son after President Carter is how humble he is,” Joanna says.
Carter holds the baby and beams for the camera.
“I like the name,” he says.
A modest life
When they reach their property, the Carters turn right off the sidewalk and cut across the wide lawn toward their house.
Carter stops to point out a tall magnolia that was transplanted from a sprout taken from a tree that Andrew Jackson planted on the White House lawn.
They walk past a pond, which Carter helped dig and where he now works on his fly-fishing technique. They point out a willow tree at the pond’s edge, on a gentle sloping lawn, where they will be buried in graves marked by simple stones.
They know their graves will draw tourists and boost the Plains economy.
Their one-story house sits behind a government-owned fence that once surrounded Richard Nixon’s house in Key Biscayne, Fla. The Carters already have deeded the property to the National Park Service, which will one day turn it into a museum.
Their house is dated, but homey and comfortable, with a rustic living room and a small kitchen. A cooler bearing the presidential seal sits on the floor in the kitchen — Carter says they use it for leftovers.
In a remodel not long ago, the couple knocked down a bedroom wall themselves. “By that time, we had worked with Habitat so much that it was just second-nature,” Rosalynn says.
Rosalynn Carter practices tai chi and meditates in the mornings, while her husband writes in his study or swims in the pool. He also builds furniture and paints in the garage; the paint is still wet on a portrait of a cardinal that will be their Christmas card this year.
They watch Atlanta Braves games or “Law and Order.” Carter just finished reading “The Innovators” by Walter Isaacson. They have no chef and they cook for themselves, often together. They make their own yogurt.
On this summer morning, Rosalynn mixes pancake batter and sprinkles in blueberries grown on their land.
Carter cooks them on the griddle.
Then he does the dishes.
 

And hopefully Fornicate Face will be the only President to have an even smaller home than the Carters post Presidency. As in a six by eight prison cell.

[laPapessaGiovanna]

3 hours ago, fraurosena said:

The presidunce is not at his best today. What a sorry attempt at deflection this is.

 

It reads like he's saying he colluded with China too. But it could be the hamster in his brain running even slower than usual.

[47of74]

It reads like he's saying he colluded with China too. But it could be the hamster in his brain running even slower than usual.

That hamster died some time ago. Fornicate Face is running on fumes now.

[AmazonGrace]

 

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

Nothing to see here, just your president saying John Dean is a rat

 

[fraurosena]

23 hours ago, fraurosena said:

The presidunce is not at his best today. What a sorry attempt at deflection this is.

 

I'm quoting myself here, because I have to rectify my opinion, believe it or not. It seems the presidunce actually spoke the truth. It looks like there really was collusion with China. Oh, and Malasia too.

A Top Trump Fundraiser Is Reportedly Under Investigation

Quote

Prominent Republican fundraiser Elliott Broidy is under investigation by the Justice Department, which is seeking to determine if he sought money from foreign officials in exchange for influencing Trump administration policy, the Washington Post reported Friday evening.

One key question investigators are asking is whether Broidy hatched a plan to “try to persuade the Trump government to extradite a Chinese dissident back to his home country,” according to the Post, which cited people familiar with the investigation. The paper added:

They also are investigating claims that Broidy sought $75 million from a Malaysian business official if the Justice Department ended its investigation of a development fund run by the Malaysian government. The Malaysian probe has examined the role of the former prime minister in the embezzlement of billions of dollars from the fund.

In March, Broidy, who owns a defense contracting firm, sued Qatar, claiming the Middle Eastern country engaged in a “sophisticated disinformation” campaign by hacking his emails and leaking them to journalists. The emails, obtained in March by the Wall Street Journal, suggested that Broidy and his wife Robin Rosenzweig tried to arrange a consulting contract with the Malaysian official.

In a statement Friday, Broidy’s attorney, Christoper Clark, said that Broidy “has never agreed to work for, been retained by nor been compensated by any foreign government for any interaction with the United States Government, ever. Any implication to the contrary is a lie.”

Broidy, a top Trump fundraiser and former deputy finance chair for the Republican National Committee, resigned from his RNC post in April after it was revealed that he had arranged a settlement, with the help of Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen, to hide an affair with a former Playboymodel who claimed Broidy got her pregnant during the affair.

 

[AmazonGrace]

All his tweets look like obstruction 

which resignations does he even refer to

[Howl]

On 8/18/2018 at 2:36 AM, AmazonGrace said:

Damn! Yet another book (House of Trump, House of Putin) to add to my reading list!  But the main thing is, Trump is a mobbed up money launderer and has been forever.  My question is, how has he stayed clear of the Feds all these years? 

Am now following Craig Unger on Twitter, too. 

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[formergothardite]

From the day he announced what? I'm confused by his sentence structure. 

[laPapessaGiovanna]

8 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

All his tweets look like obstruction 

which resignations does he even refer to

Those of the staff of Hillary's WH of course!

47 minutes ago, formergothardite said:

From the day he announced what? I'm confused by his sentence structure. 

That he was running for presidency. He never got over the campaign.

 

[Cartmann99]

 

Dear Rufus,

Could you possibly could arrange for Trump to insult these donors on Twitter, and then have him say that he'll spend their money as he damn well pleases? 

[onekidanddone]

57 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

 

Dear Rufus,

Could you possibly could arrange for Trump to insult these donors on Twitter, and then have him say that he'll spend their money as he damn well pleases? 

They were not really his donors, and if they were it was only for a short time. All they did was donate covfefe coffee.

[WiseGirl]

14 hours ago, Howl said:

Am now following Craig Unger on Twitter, too. 

I remember the good old days when all I followed was comedians and the weather on Twitter...  *sigh*

[AmazonGrace]

My feed used to be comedians and pictures of cute puppies but now I'm following candidates in elections  I can't even vote in and a porn star.

[AmazonGrace]

 

 

Dude thinks people can't bomb coal plants and trucks and mines.

[fraurosena]

16 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

All his tweets look like obstruction 

which resignations does he even refer to

This is an official statement from a country’s leader. From a country’s official representative. A statement that will go into the annals for posterity.

Think about that for a minute.

[WiseGirl]

9 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

My feed used to be comedians and pictures of cute puppies but now I'm following candidates in elections  I can't even vote in and a porn star.

Oh good call *adds porn star to Twitter feed.

Haha autocorrect keeps changing it to "pork" star.

And may the days of following puppies return to us sooner rather than later...

[GreyhoundFan]