Trump 34: Leading the Alternate Reality

[Drala]

The Full-Spectrum Corruption of Donald Trump:  Everyone and everything he touches rots, by Peter Wehner

Powerful indictment of the Republican party leadership.

https://nyti.ms/2objynq 

 

[fraurosena]

The presidunce is proving for all the world to see that he really is a dunce.

Trump doesn’t seem to realize his new trade deal isn’t a trade deal

Quote

To hear Donald Trump tell it, he and his team achieved a historic breakthrough on trade policy yesterday. I wish that were true, but it’s not.

The U.S. and Mexico struck a trade deal designed to supplant the North American Free Trade Agreement, President Donald Trump said in the Oval Office Monday.

Trump and other administration officials hope that Canada, the third party to NAFTA, will sign on to the agreement, which still must be ratified by Congress. But Canada and the U.S. have been at loggerheads over trade policy, and negotiations among the three countries were paused so that the U.S. could talk directly with Mexico.

Let’s back up to provide some context. For about a year, the Trump administration has engaged Canadian and Mexican officials in renegotiating the terms of the existing NAFTA agreement, which the president claims to hate, despite never fully explaining why. The months-long process has been a struggle, and by all accounts, the countries are not yet close to a trilateral deal.

Recently, however, Trump’s team has been working directly with Mexico on a provision related to auto manufacturing, and yesterday, the White House announced that those talks resulted in an agreement. That’s not nothing, and it may move the administration closer to its goal.

But it’s only a step. The Atlantic’s David Frum joked yesterday, “Congratulations to the Trump administration on reaching a preliminary agreement in principle to begin negotiations with half of America’s NAFTA counterparties with a view to revising one section of the trade agreement!”

The American president, however, desperate for a win and the completion of some kind of trade deal, made a series of claims that were largely incoherent.

At one point yesterday, for example, Trump said, “This is one of the largest trade deals ever made. Maybe the largest trade deal ever made.” That’s absurd. It’s not really a trade deal – Mexico still expects Canada’s involvement in a trilateral agreement – and even if it were, it wouldn’t be anywhere close to the largest in history.

The Trump administration isn’t even calling it a deal, choosing instead to describe it as a “preliminary agreement in principle.”

The American president also claimed, twice, that he’ll “be terminating the existing [NAFTA} deal.” That’s wrong, too. In fact, the opposite is true: U.S. officials are still trying to renegotiate the terms of the existing NAFTA deal, even as their boss tells the world from the Oval Office that the trade agreement is being replaced with an incomplete deal Trump apparently doesn’t understand.

Complicating matters, the idea that Trump can unilaterally “terminate” the international agreement, just because he says so, is highly dubious.

What about our neighbors to the north? The American president added, “As far Canada is concerned, we haven’t started with Canada yet.” In reality, U.S. officials have been in talks with Canadian officials for about a year, which meant the comment reinforced concerns that Trump has no idea what he’s talking about.

At the same time, Trump is characterizing the policy effort as if he’s committed to two separate trade agreements – one with Mexico, one with Canada – which isn’t how his trade partners see it and isn’t how his own administration is approaching the negotiating process.

All of which suggests that the American president, while speaking on camera from the Oval Office, peddled nonsensical claims that he appeared to be making up as he went along.

The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell added, “In other words, it’s precisely the puffery we’ve come to expect from a president who doesn’t understand what his own administration is doing, or doesn’t care.”

The New Republic’s Jeet Heer suggested that the best-case scenario would be for the parties in NAFTA to “just ignore Trump’s misrepresentation and continue with negotiations, treating the president as background noise.”

That would likely increase the odds of success, but isn’t it a shame that everyone has to hope the American president’s ignorance and incoherence doesn’t get in the way of important policymaking?

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump rage-googles himself and reveals a frightening truth about the midterms"

Spoiler

Political Twitter is having fun this morning with President Trump’s latest conspiracy theory: Google is rigging its results, so when you search “Trump news,” only “Fake” news criticism of Trump pops up, while conservative media are getting suppressed!

As the Week put it, Trump “is rage-googling himself, and he doesn’t like what he’s found.”

Trump’s claim is, of course, absurd: As Daniel Dale pointed out, all it means is that when you google about Trump, you are likely to initially see stories from major news organizations that are legitimately reporting aggressively on Trump, rather than from conservative opinion sites that are putting out propaganda on his behalf.

But while this might seem like typical Trumpian buffoonery, at its core is some deadly serious business. These attacks on the media — which are now spreading to extensive conspiracy-mongering about social media’s role in spreading information — form one part of an interlocking, two-piece Trumpian strategy (whether by instinct or design is unclear) that serves to underscore the urgency of this fall’s elections.

Trump is unleashing endless lies and attacks directed at the mechanisms of accountability that actually are functioning right now — the media, law enforcement and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation — to persuade his supporters not only that they shouldn’t believe anything they hear from these sources, but also to energize them and get them to vote, to protect him from those institutions’ alleged conspiracy against him.

At the same time, that campaign of lies is designed to get Republican voters out for the purpose of keeping in place the mechanism of accountability that is not functioning right now — the GOP-led Congress — preventing a Democratic takeover of the House, which would impose genuine accountability.

To varying degrees, Republicans are now unabashedly campaigning on this idea — that if Republican voters don’t show up to keep the GOP in charge of Congress, a Democratic-led House will exercise real oversight on Trump.

This week, Axios reported on a memo circulating among alarmed House Republicans, who laid out a list of investigations Democrats might undertake with control of the House. Among them: getting access to Trump’s tax returns; trying to force more transparency around Trump’s business holdings, to determine whether or to what extent revenue going into his pockets violates the emoluments clause; and examining the process leading up to the thinly veiled Muslim ban and the enactment of Trump’s family separations.

The implicit argument that this memo’s existence makes is striking. The fact that Trump’s combined self-dealing and lack of transparency create extensive possibilities for corruption, and the fact that Trump’s financial dealings with Russia and possible conspiracy with Russian sabotage of our election could subject him to blackmail, should ideally suggest to those tasked with oversight that they should, you know, exercise more oversight.

Instead, as Jonathan Chait points out, Republicans have converted all this into a rationale not to exercise oversight — and into a reason to keep Republicans in control of the House to keep this status quo undisturbed. Notes Chait: “Republicans have so internalized their subordination to Trump that they are now leaning into the cover-up as a case for maintaining their power.”

It’s also worth noting that Republicans have made this argument explicit. Remember, on leaked audio, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes flatly stated that if Attorney General Jeff Sessions won’t rein in Mueller’s probe, House Republicans are Trump’s last line of protection. “If Sessions won’t unrecuse and Mueller won’t clear the president, we’re the only ones,” Nunes said. “We have to keep the majority.”

We are now getting a look at what reversing this state of affairs might look like. In interviews with Michelle Goldberg, Democrats who would head House investigative committees vow a range of probes mostly focused on matters involving Trump’s financial dealings, including with Russia, with an eye toward restoring confidence in functional oversight and democracy. Of course, this is also an unsettling reminder — should Republicans keep the House — of what will be lost.

An argument that works on GOP voters

The argument that Republicans must be elected to defend Trump literally no matter what he does may be working on GOP voters. Today in Florida, Trumpist Ron DeSantis is expected to prevail in the GOP gubernatorial primary. DeSantis attacked his Republican opponent for criticizing Trump over the “Access Hollywood” tape. Trump just rewarded him with a mighty get-out-the-vote tweet.

This has become a pattern: Multiple GOP candidates have found themselves on the defensive for criticizing Trump over the revelation that he was captured on video boasting about committing sexual assault with impunity. Their opponents have cast the disloyalty of these reprobates as a failure of moral fortitude — they failed to stand up to the liberal plot to defeat conservativism by any means necessary, when it really counted.

Which brings us back to Trump’s rage-googling. No matter how absurd the details get in any given case, the story he tells Republican voters is always pretty much the same: The mechanisms of accountability are really functioning as an illegitimate plot against him — against them — so they must get out to vote, to keep Congress in Republican hands, to act as a shield against that plot.

If Republicans keep the House, all these lies will have worked, and congressional oversight will remain largely nonexistent, emboldening Trump to an unforeseeable degree. Fortunately, the media and the Mueller probe would remain. But with Trump still seriously mulling replacing Sessions after the election with a loyal attorney general — and Senate Republicans signaling they might go along with it — there’s no guarantee that the second of those will remain fully functional, either.

 

[Cartmann99]

3 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Sweet Rufus.

It's a miracle people are still willing to talk to him.

So Trump remembers Pearl Harbor even though he wasnt born yet? He's such a lying jackass.

[AmazonGrace]

Well I guess he could remember it from when he read a book about it.

No, wait, read? What's a book?

Cuomo doesn't really say anything much here, I just wanted to post this because I like the headline. Trump looked like a loser. Trump looked like a loser.

I hope google autocomplete will pick this up and start suggesting  "looked like a loser" when you type Trump.

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Cartmann99]

A whole week of the nation celebrating John McCain's life is gonna drive Trump batshit crazy. He's got a rally in Evansville, Indiana on Thursday, so I guess we'll see how he's holding up by then. 

As always, apologies in advance to the sane residents of Indiana. 

[Destiny]

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