Trump 34: Leading the Alternate Reality

[AnywhereButHere]

I use all CAPS! Why don't they believe me? ALL CAPS means everyone should believe me! Why aren't people listening when I shout!!!!

[fraurosena]

The presidunce is mightily proud of how he called out Fake News in his interview. So much so that he put out that segment in an official presiduncial tweet.

 

Sweet Rufus. His delusions of grandeur are epic.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[JMarie]

He's found a new target: South Africa

https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/23/africa/trump-south-africa-intl/index.html

 

[AnywhereButHere]

https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/politics/trump-declares-market-would-crash-if-democrats-impeached-him/ar-BBMkgRe?li=BBnb7Kz

Quote

President Trump, in an exclusive interview with Fox News' Ainsley Earhardt, warned that the “market would crash” if he's ever impeached while questioning why Democrats would even consider that course in the future. 

“I don’t know how you can impeach somebody who’s done a great job,” Trump said, in the interview that aired Thursday on "Fox & Friends." 

The president weighed in on calls from the left to pursue impeachment if Democrats seize the House in the midterms. That speculation kicked up following the plea deal struck by his former attorney Michael Cohen claiming the president was involved in hush-money payments and admitting campaign finance violations related to them. 

The president argued that he's done a great job in office, despite the critical coverage in connection with the Cohen case and other controversies. 

Further, he warned, “If I ever got impeached, I think the market would crash, I think everybody would be very poor, because without this thinking, you would see — you would see numbers that you wouldn’t believe in reverse.”

This article is just chock full of self aggrandizing gems from our Asshat in Chief, while he also goes on his usual hit parade of Hilary, Democrats, and illegal immigrants.

[JMarie]

4 minutes ago, AnywhereButHere said:

https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/politics/trump-declares-market-would-crash-if-democrats-impeached-him/ar-BBMkgRe?li=BBnb7Kz

This article is just chock full of self aggrandizing gems from our Asshat in Chief, while he also goes on his usual hit parade of Hilary, Democrats, and illegal immigrants.

Well, he did give himself an A+ (but then, he always gives himself an A+).

[Audrey2]

4 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Well of course he wants it to be illegal. And of course the presidunce thinks it could be. Almost.

 

In other words, I'm totally cool with, "I was just following orders." Underlings should always take the fall for the top guy.- Donald Trump

[GreyhoundFan]

"...the Great Spewdini..." LOL

 

[AmazonGrace]

This book is free for Kindle today https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DB5N59N

[fraurosena]

2 hours ago, JMarie said:

He's found a new target: South Africa

https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/23/africa/trump-south-africa-intl/index.html

 

South Africa's response:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

From Alexandra Petri: "I’m beginning to suspect these were not in fact the best people"

Spoiler

Well, gosh. This is embarrassing. I promised my team would be the “best people,” and, wow, it looks like maybe that was not the case. It is turning out, that, in fact, the people surrounding me and filling this White House were not at all as advertised! Or maybe exactly as advertised! I am starting to notice this from all the trials that keep happening.

I thought I had the best team ever to be assembled, but I had, just, a big coat full of skunks, six rejected concepts for Batman villains, and a disembodied voice that yells rude things in the Quiet Car.

I thought I had the finest cadre of advisers and lawyers the Earth had ever seen, but now that I look I see that all I had was the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, an aardvark in a Model U.N. sweater, a hairpiece on top of a novelty skeleton with light-up eyes, a Mr. Monopoly Man, a paid advertisement for unscientific vitamin supplements and a cursed Oscar statuette brought to life until someone speaks the single phrase that will allow him to sleep once more.

I had a white supremacist, just, full stop; three reverse pictures of Dorian Gray; what should have been a complete set of the two door guardians from a logic puzzle (one always tells the truth and one always lies), but the first one did not arrive with the rest of the shipment; an enormous air dancer attempting to sell used cars and a shark disguised as a meter reader. I really should not, in retrospect, have put two hand-puppets from a wisely canceled local-access children’s show in charge of a Cabinet department, and I definitely should not have been taking legal advice from a half-hour-long program in which Pat Boone urges you with increasing intensity to buy 68 CDs from the 1950s.

I thought I had the best people, but I had a big plane filled with money, a bear that has wandered into a school by mistake, Zombie James Buchanan, a pair of Ivanka Trump pumps that want to speak to a manager, the hair of a televangelist, a Pixar villain whose origin story involved a tanning bed struck by lightning and an anthropomorphic liver. I had a scorpion asking for a ride across a river, an ominous forwarded email with a sad face drawn on it, a statue brought to life by the love of its sculptor but in a twist on the classic Pygmalion scenario it was a Confederate statue, a piece of toast on which sexist words appeared for no reason, a gallon container of snake oil in an expensive leather coat, everyone at a surf-side bar on a Thursday, a reality-TV contestant and Anthony Scaramucci.

I am chagrined. I thought that a pick-up artist book in a big collared shirt, an animatronic statue of Rutherford B. Hayes reprogrammed by HYDRA, and the Thing that appears in the mirror when you blink were good people to surround yourself with, but, in fact, no. A television chicken sales personality, a stand of reeds into which hateful words have been whispered for months, a bag of money with a severed finger in it, a book by a Fox News personality brought to life by the love of a lonely child and a phrenology head — not the elite team I had been led to suspect!

These were not, I now realize, the best people. I get this sense from how frequently they keep being forced to quit, getting charged with and admitting to crimes.

Look, if Melania Trump’s campaign has proved anything, it is that nobody knows what “Be Best” means. But somehow I feel like it is not this. I am quite let down! Next time, I will be more specific.

 

[fraurosena]

Methinks he's figured out what's coming.

Trump starts making predictions about his possible impeachment

Quote

At yesterday’s White House press briefing, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters, “The idea of [presidential] impeachment is, frankly, a sad attempt by Democrats. It’s the only message they seem to have going into the midterms.” This was, of course, largely the opposite of the truth.

Congressional Democrats are going out of their way not to include talk of impeachment in their election-year message – Nancy Pelosi again dismissed the idea yesterday as “not a priority” for the party – and Trump isn’t even the focus of most Democratic campaign advertising.

A Washington Post  analysis last week explained that much of the Democratic message is policy-focused, with a special emphasis on health care.

Donald Trump, however, seems to be talking about the issue quite a bit. Here’s what the president had to say on the subject in his newest Fox News interview:

“I don’t know how you can impeach somebody who’s done a great job. I’ll tell you what, if I ever got impeached, I think the market would crash. I think everybody would be very poor. Because without this thinking [points to his head] you would see, you would see numbers that you wouldn’t believe in reverse.”

He then transitioned to lying about the economy and reflecting on trade with China.

The specific question Trump was responding to was, “If the Democrats take back power [in Congress], do you believe they will try to impeach you?” At no point in his response did the president make the case that he didn’t do anything wrong.

Perhaps this slipped his mind.

Regardless, let’s unpack some of the more glaring errors with Trump’s strange answer:

* Impeachment has nothing to do with whether the accused is doing “a great job” or not. (That said, Trump is not, in reality, doing a great job.)

* Presidential impeachment does not, in fact, remove a president from office. It’s the political equivalent of an indictment, which initiates a Senate trial. Bill Clinton, for example, was impeached, but he nevertheless served two full terms.

* Trump is convinced that the health of the economy is solely dependent on his awesomeness. That’s absurd on its face, but it’s made worse by the fact that job growth in the United States has actually slowed since Trump took office.

* The president’s answer seemed like a pretty big insult to Mike Pence.

But even putting all of that aside, let’s not miss the forest for the trees: we’ve reached the point in Trump’s presidency in which he’s not only being asked about impeachment, he’s also making predictions about what to expect in the event of such developments.

 

[AnywhereButHere]

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/david-pecker-immunity-michael-cohen_us_5b7ee53fe4b0cd327dfacb11

Quote

REPORT: TRUMP
LOSES PECKER

Title of the linked Huff Post article. Appropriate in so many ways...

[Alisamer]

9 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Methinks he's figured out what's coming.

Trump starts making predictions about his possible impeachment

 

I wonder if he knows being impeached won't make it so he doesn't have to work? He might be looking forward to it if he thinks he can just go play golf and watch TV 24/7, instead of pretending to be president for an hour or two each day and only golfing a few times a week.

[fraurosena]

Of course he did. After all, it's what his handler instructed.

White House blocks bill that would protect elections

Quote

A bill that would have significantly bolstered the nation’s defenses against electoral interference has been held up in the Senate at the behest of the White House, which opposed the proposed legislation, according to congressional sources.

The Secure Elections Act, introduced by Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., in December 2017, had co-sponsorship from two of the Senate’s most prominent liberals, Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., as well as from conservative stalwart Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and consummate centrist Susan Collins, R-Me.

Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., was set to conduct a markup of the bill on Wednesday morning in the Senate Rules Committee, which he chairs. The bill had widespread support, including from some of the committee’s Republican members, and was expected to come to a full Senate vote in October. But then the chairman’s mark, as the critical step is known, was canceled, and no explanation was given.

As it currently stands, the legislation would grant every state’s top election official security clearance to receive threat information. It would also formalize the practice of information-sharing between the federal government—in particular, the Department of Homeland Security—and states regarding threats to electoral infrastructure. A technical advisory board would establish best practices related to election cybersecurity. Perhaps most significantly, the law would mandate that every state conduct a statistically significant audit following a federal election. It would also incentivize the purchase of voting machines that leave a paper record of votes cast, as opposed to some all-electronic models that do not. This would signify a marked shift away from all-electronic voting, which was encouraged with the passage of the Help Americans Vote Act in 2002.

“Paper is not antiquated,” Lankford says. “It’s reliable.”

A paper record could prove effective against hackers if they tried to change the reporting of votes on the internet, as opposed to altering the votes themselves. Election officials needs to be able to say, “‘Nope, we can check this,’” as Lankford puts it. “Here’s the paper, here’s the machine, here’s our poll count.”

In a statement to Yahoo News, White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters says that while the administration “appreciates Congress’s interest in election security, [the Department of Homeland Security] has all the statutory authority it needs to assist state and local officials to improve the security of existing election infrastructure.”

Under current law, DHS is already able to work with state and local authorities to protect elections, Walters wrote. If Congress pursues the Secure Elections Act, it should avoid duplicating “existing DHS efforts or the imposition of unnecessary requirements” and “not violate the principles of Federalism.”

“We cannot support legislation with inappropriate mandates or that moves power or funding from the states to Washington for the planning and operation of elections,” she added. However, the White House gave no specifics on what parts of the bill it objected to.

In a statement, Klobuchar thanked Blunt and Lankford, making clear that they were both allies in the effort. “They tried valiantly to salvage the votes for this bill on the Republican side,” Klobuchar’s statement said. “In the end we had every single Democrat on the committee committed to vote for the bill. Any changes that were recently made to the bill were made to accommodate the Republican leadership.”

A spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who sits on the Rules Committee, declined to say whether the majority leader, widely renowned on Capitol Hill for his backroom tactics, was involved in efforts to hobble the Secure Elections Act.

Blunt’s office would not comment on the record.

The Trump administration has been unable to settle on how elections should be secured, and whom they should be secured against. Despite consensus from the nation’s intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in 2016, President Trump has dismissed the threat, even as others in his administration have issued unambiguous warnings. Trump has instead asserted that millions voted fraudulently in New York and California for Hillary Clinton, thus giving her an edge of some 3 million votes in the 2016 presidential race. No evidence of statistically significant voter fraud has been uncovered.

Lankford, Klobuchar and others had worked for months to persuade their peers that electoral security is a nonpartisan issue. Supporters expected the legislation would make its way out of committee and become law, a rare bipartisan success story in the current Congress. As the chairman’s mark approached, they appeared to have won the votes they needed in the Senate Rule Committee.

Speaking to Yahoo News on Tuesday afternoon, Lankford seemed confident. He acknowledged that the federal government should not encroach on states’ administration of elections, but he also argued that states had to show more awareness of the high stakes involved. “Your election in Delaware affects the entire country,” he said. “Your election in Florida affects the entire country.”

In an earlier television appearance with Lankford, Harris rendered the issue of electoral security, and hacking by foreign powers, in stark terms: “We have to be prepared for wars without blood.”

But some apparently remained unconvinced. A staffer for a Republican senator on the Rules Committee described unease with “certain provisions in the Secure Elections Act” on the part of secretaries of state, who oversee elections. “In order for a truly bipartisan election security bill to reach the floor, additional majority support is necessary.”

The bill’s sponsors disputed the notion that it lacked support, noting that secretaries of state had had plenty of time to comment on the proposed legislation.

Lankford, a rising young Republican legislator, vowed to press on. “The issue of election cybersecurity is very important and more must be done now,” he said in a statement. “Congressional inaction is unacceptable.”

Wow. I'm pleasantly surprised. This bill was quite bipartisan. 

[Audrey2]

I think that, before this administration's time is over, they:ll have more flippers than a child's beauty pageant.

(Flippers are a false tooth or teeth attached to plastic that kids wear to have a full smile when they are really missing teeth for a pageant. I'm embarrassed that I know this.)

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Audrey2]

I think this will go right here. While I know the piece is satire (and quite clever), it sounds a little too plausible.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-shot-michael-cohen-broad-080038116.html

The article, from Yahoo, asks, " what would happen if Trump shot Cohen in broad daylight. Sadly, some of the responses from officials may not be far off.

Spoiler

The New York Times:

Breaking news: in an eerie echo of Donald Trump’s infamous campaign trail remark – “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters” – many witnesses report, and CCTV footage obtained by the Times confirms, that early this morning the president drew a handgun on his former lawyer Michael Cohen and shot him dead on a street in midtown Manhattan.

House speaker Paul Ryan:

“If these reports are true – I emphasize IF – then yes, I’m very concerned. I don’t think the president should be killing people in broad daylight in front of Tiffany’s. But I’m not a legal expert, I could be wrong.”

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders:

Associated Press: “Ms Sanders, did the president shoot his former lawyer in an effort to stop him from testifying against the president?”

Sarah Sanders: “No, he did not.”

AP: “Are you saying that the shooting was not motivated by Mr Cohen’s recent plea deal, or rather that the president did not shoot him?”

SHS: “You’ve got my answer, Jim. No, no, no.”

AP: “Ms Sanders, I’m still not clear what –”

SHS: “The answer is no. No as in no. N. O. It’s these kinds of questions that have turned the American people against the press.”

CNN:

Anderson Cooper: “We’re seeing incredible images here. The president being taken into custody. Kellyanne, what can you tell us?”

Kellyanne Conway: “I’m not going to comment on rumors, Anderson.”

AC: “Kellyanne, these are not rumors. The president has handcuffs around his wrists. You’re seeing the same footage we are.”

KC: “You’re free to see things your way. I have an alternative perception.”

AC: “But how can you possibly –”

KC: “Let’s agree to disagree, Anderson!”

Senator Mitch McConnell:

“People die every day in this country. I’m not going to let myself get sidetracked by these distractions.”

Tweet from @realDonaldTrump:

“Back from GREAT chat with members of NYPD--the finest! Brand new police station. Very NICE. They want a wall too. Was NEVER taken into custody. FAKE NEWS cooked up by Crooked Hillary and FAILING NYT and CONFLICTED Mueller! Keep our borders strong – JUST SAY NO to murdering and raping Mexicans.”

There's more in the link. I thought it was an interesting read that should be entertaining, but may be a little too accurate.

[Cartmann99]

I can't quit laughing at how all of these people were recording their conversations for insurance/blackmail purposes:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I like this reply to Dumpy's tweet about Cohen:

 

[Audrey2]

1 hour ago, Cartmann99 said:

I can't quit laughing at how all of these people were recording their conversations for insurance/blackmail purposes:

 

The way Trump lies, backtracks, and makes stuff up, I think I'd want a recording device on me, too. I can almost hear him in a restaurant, after he orders something and the server brings it to him, "I didn't order that. I never order that. I don't even like that. It's fake news- others are trying to put words and food in my mouth."

[Cartmann99]

1 hour ago, Audrey2 said:

The way Trump lies, backtracks, and makes stuff up, I think I'd want a recording device on me, too. I can almost hear him in a restaurant, after he orders something and the server brings it to him, "I didn't order that. I never order that. I don't even like that. It's fake news- others are trying to put words and food in my mouth."

You know he's gotta be a lousy tipper too.

 Remember after the bus tape had been out for a while, and then he started trying to say that he wasn't sure that was really him on the tape?

He's such a lying jackass.

. 

[AmazonGrace]

Not what Sarah Shuckabee said

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

Feds are squeezing Trump's pecker. You're welcome to use the brain bleach in the bathroom