Trump 35: Still an Asshole to Everyone but Ivanka

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[formergothardite]

I keep seeing on FB a claim that Trump paid 100 people to come help clear the rubble of the Twin Towers. Google keeps giving the stories about the quote but I can't find anything that proves if it happened or not. Did he actually pay 100 people to come work? Is there evidence that he didn't? 

[fraurosena]

He's seriously delusional. 

 

[formergothardite]

As a resident of NC I just want to say  we really don't need him to come throw paper towels at us while people die and he pretends nothing is happening. 

[AmazonGrace]

 

Could be a 400 pound guy

[AmazonGrace]

After consulting with experts, President Trump declares that water is wet. 

[Audrey2]

5 hours ago, fraurosena said:

This is the presiduncial face you pull and gestures you make when solemnly attending a memorial service.

 

Yet he or his handlers had plaid shirt guy moved at his Montana rally, for his less objectionable facial expressions...

As I say multiple times a week, I have no words. I think he is incapable of showing respect, decorum, or appropriate behavior. To say I'm horrified is an understatement.

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

"What a baby"

Spoiler

Only a man who is deeply worried about his own strength would talk as much as Donald Trump does about the danger of appearing weak.

That’s my biggest takeaway from reading “Fear,” Bob Woodward’s new book about the Trump presidency. The scoops were mostly revealed last week. What’s fresh is Trump’s repeated, obsessive talk about weakness during his first year in office.

Woodward’s recounting of Trump’s conversations is a study in character, or lack of it. The president’s vanity, pettiness and meanness of spirit were evident already in his tweets and public statements. But here is the annotated version, as told to Woodward by Trump’s aides, replete with enough F-bombs to stock an arsenal of profanity.

When Trump is on the verge of doing something conciliatory — apologizing for a racist or sexist comment, for example — he stops himself for fear that it will show weakness. Trump (prodded by his Iago-like deputy macho man, Stephen K. Bannon) keeps insisting that he must stay strong, regardless of how unprincipled it may seem.

Woodward’s narrative of the weakness phobia begins at the low point of the campaign, with the revelation of the “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump boasts about grabbing women’s genitals. His aides have written a statement in which Trump would concede, “My language was inappropriate, not acceptable for a president.” But Trump protests: “I can’t do this. This is bull----. This is weak. You guys are weak.”

Trump often expresses a peculiar concern about looking like a baby. He blasts campaign chairman Paul Manafort after a critical New York Times story, saying, “Paul, am I a baby? Is that what you’re saying, I’m a baby?”

Later in the campaign, after Rudolph W. Giuliani defends Trump from the “Access Hollywood” flap on the Sunday talk shows, Trump still isn’t satisfied: “Rudy, you’re a baby. . . . They took your diaper off right there. You’re like a little baby that needed to be changed. When are you going to be a man?”

Anxiety about weakness mounts when Trump is in the White House. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has many faults in Trump’s eyes. He’s too friendly to Europe, too willing to accommodate Iran, too independent in his views. But Trump sums up the problem at a July 2017 meeting: “Rex, you’re weak.”

The most appalling instance of placing image above principle comes after Trump’s waffling comments about the August 2017 clash between white nationalists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville. Rob Porter, Trump’s staff secretary, encourages the president to give a conciliatory statement.

Despite fears that it “looked weak,” Trump follows Porter’s advice and, using a teleprompter, tells the nation: “We must love each other, show affection for each other and unite together in condemnation of hatred, bigotry and violence.”

When Fox News reports a “course correction” on Charlottesville, the president panics. “That was the biggest f---ing mistake I’ve made,” he tells Porter. “You never make those concessions. You never apologize. I didn’t do anything wrong in the first place. Why look weak?”

It’s a Darwinian worldview. Never retreat; eat or be eaten. Woodward quotes former chief of staff Reince Priebus explaining that Trump didn’t assemble a “team of political rivals,” he put “natural predators at the table.” Priebus notes the inevitable result: “When you put a snake and a rat and a falcon and a rabbit and a shark and a seal in a zoo without walls, things start getting nasty and bloody.”

Bannon shamelessly feeds Trump’s weakness fixation. Woodward’s book gives Bannon a podium to explain how right he was about nearly everything involving Trump. Bannon comes across in these doubtless tape-recorded soliloquies as Trump’s match as a self-promoting egomaniac.

“I’m the director, he’s the actor,” Bannon says of his relationship with the president. And in the end, after he had been fired, says Woodward, “Bannon believed Trump had largely failed as a change agent.” Not tough enough for Steve, evidently.

In my own conversations with top White House aides, I’ve seen a similar obsession with shows of strength. Reversing long-standing positions on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is a “strong position.” Preserving the Iran nuclear agreement is a “weak position.” Perception is policy.

And what about Trump’s ruinous legal problems with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III? They’re the fault of Trump’s chicken-hearted lawyers, of course. Woodward quotes the tough-guy-in-chief. “I don’t have any good lawyers. . . . I’ve got a bunch of lawyers who are not aggressive, who are weak, who don’t have my best interests in mind, who aren’t loyal. It’s just a disaster.”

What a baby.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump didn’t drain the swamp. Supporters are starting to notice."

Spoiler

Here’s the thing about campaigning as an outsider, as Donald Trump did in 2016. If you win the election, you are the person in charge. You are expected to accomplish what you said you would do, or make a darn good effort to do so. And come the next election, it’s all but impossible to pose as an outsider. It defies common sense. If the man in the White House is an “outsider,” then the term has lost all meaning.

That’s one major takeaway from a recent Ohio focus group of swing voters hosted by Engagious, a political research firm. As Axios reports, the voters who voted for Barack Obama and then pulled a lever for Donald Trump still say they believe the overall economy is improving under Trump. But the longer they talked, the more it seemed they still felt left behind:

They think President Trump has failed at “draining the swamp.” They think the Trump administration is corrupt. They don’t think the GOP tax law has helped them and their families. And they’re not feeling the “booming” economy.

Make no mistake. These voters don’t blame mysterious forces swirling around Trump, frustrating a well-meaning agenda. They know where the buck stops. As one voter told the group, “He’s backed out of so many of his promises.”

Trump’s bogus promise to clean up the Washington swamp is high on the list. Trump made this the centerpiece of his campaign. He was, he assured us, the ultimate insider, who would use his savvy to help the common man and woman. He understood how money works, and money corrupts. One example Trump used: how he gave money so Hillary Clinton would attend his wedding to his current wife, Melania. “I’ll tell you what, with Hillary Clinton, I said, ‘Be at my wedding,’ and she came to my wedding,” Trump said in 2015. “You know why? She had no choice, because I gave.”

This is one reason (beyond pure partisanship) that voters who supported Trump in 2016 forgave or ignored a multitude of scandals, most notably the pensioners and other financially desperate people who turned over as much as $35,000 for Trump University, to receive all but nothing in return. They knew he wasn’t an honest businessman. But they thought he would take everything he learned in all his years as a corrupt businessman to clean the joint up. Of course, Trump did exactly the opposite. He used his insider knowledge and connections to appoint a bevy of obscenely wealthy insiders to Washington jobs, where they all did what they know how to do best: Make money for themselves.

The cliche “shooting fish in a barrel” hardly does justice the number of potential scandals Democrats can highlight to show Trump has not cleaned up Washington. It begins with Trump himself, who still will not release his personal tax returns, even as he signed a tax-reform package into law that rained money on the 1 percent and contained provisions that almost certainly enriched his own bottom line, while giving such a small cut to the majority of filers that they don’t even notice it in their paychecks.

Then there is his cabinet of American oligarchs, the richest ever assembled. Their scandals encompass the petty (then-Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt demanding his staff drive him to pick up a fancy lotion in between helping find his wife a job) and the stupendous, such as Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s shorting shares in a stock he was supposed to divest in order to serve in his job and, according to Forbes, allegedly siphoning more than $120 million from his business partners prior to taking a job with the administration. Other members of the Trump White House are intent on making sure the corporate world knows there is a “for sale” sign outside of the White House. Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, who is also the acting Consumer Financial Protection Bureau head, openly boasted of how, when he served in Congress, he wouldn’t even meet with a corporate lobbyist unless they donated to him. Now he has gutted the CFPB’s oversight of multiple industries.

And when Reps. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) and Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.), prominent Trump supporters in Congress, found themselves under federal indictment for their allegedly corrupt financial actions, what did Trump do? He took to Twitter to blame Attorney General Jeff Sessions for endangering Republican election chances in November by bringing charges against “two very popular Republican Congressmen,” law and ethics be damned.

Trump’s presidency is government by a team of smash-and-grab thieves, intent on gaining as much money and advantage as they can while they retain access to the levers of power. Taken altogether, it’s both an affront and an embarrassment. It’s almost certain some portion of 2016 Trump voters know it. His personal approval ratings are falling in multiple polls. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. No one likes to feel had. Especially voters.

 

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[Cartmann99]

Also, we have pictures from the memorial service that show Melania was wearing a different dress today.

[Audrey2]

36 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

Also, we have pictures from the memorial service that show Melania was wearing a different dress today.

And, this picture doesn't include Trump acting like Calvin's t-rex impression from Calvin and Hobbs (see middle and right panels, middle row). Hopefully shrinking worked, although I was unable to isolate the panel I wanted.

[fraurosena]

Sweet Rufus.

 

[fraurosena]

Oooh, I guess the negative feedback from his comments yesterday have gotten to him.

Yeah, your pathetic excuses don't work. The island is perfectly accessible by plane and boat. The fact that the hurricane obliterated the island's infrastructure is something you should have fixed. Also, it's your responsibility to get the electricity back up and running, it's not an excuse for doing a poor job. The Mayor of San Juan is not responsible for anything other than the wellbeing of her city, not the whole island. You are responsible for the adequate response to the hurricane's devastation. Throwing them paper towels and calling it an unsung success is simply ludicrous.

You are a pathetic weakling, no matter how much you bluff and bluster, and everybody in the whole world knows it.

[JMarie]

2 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Oooh, I guess the negative feedback from his comments yesterday have gotten to him.

Yeah, your pathetic excuses don't work. The island is perfectly accessible by plane and boat. The fact that the hurricane obliterated the island's infrastructure is something you should have fixed. Also, it's your responsibility to get the electricity back up and running, it's not an excuse for doing a poor job. The Mayor of San Juan is not responsible for anything other than the wellbeing of her city, not the whole island. You are responsible for the adequate response to the hurricane's devastation. Throwing them paper towels and calling it an unsung success is simply ludicrous.

You are a pathetic weakling, no matter how much you bluff and bluster, and everybody in the whole world knows it.

He just had to throw something in about San Juan's mayor, right?