Trump 36: We Shall Overcome

[Destiny]

Continued from here:

I thought with the midterms coming, we could use a mildly hopeful thread title. Here's hoping I don't spend another election night crying again!

[AmazonGrace]

We shall overcomb

[fraurosena]

 This is the stuff authoritarian dictatorships are made of.

 

[laPapessaGiovanna]

Seems so much like today. We shall overcome!

[Howl]

2 hours ago, fraurosena said:

 This is the stuff authoritarian dictatorships are made of.

This is the Republican theme going forward until mid-terms are done; they (and Fox) are going to push it hard and not let up and it will be brutally effective -- but to what extent we don't yet know.  This is dirty politics at its worst, but its what they have and what they know, and for a certain segment of the electorate, it works.  Sadly, I'm not seeing an equally effective  Democratic strategy to counter this. 

However, I truly think the Republicans have stepped on their own dicks and alienated many many women in the way that they championed Brett Kavanaugh and sh*t on on Blasey-Ford. Again, the extent to which this is true will be seen in November. 

 

[fraurosena]

30 minutes ago, Howl said:

Sadly, I'm not seeing an equally effective  Democratic strategy to counter this. 

If you ask me, Beto O'Rourke most certainly has a pretty effective strategy, don't you think?

If his strategy can be extrapolated from state to federal level I believe that the Dems stand a good chance of forming a united front against the Rape-ugly-klans.

[danvillebelle]

Melania Trump can jump on the fast train to hell and take Fuckface Von Clownstick with her:

https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/10/politics/melania-trump-metoo-evidence/index.html

What if I don't have evidence because the people who molested and raped me are fucking DEAD, you raging Queen of Denial.

 

[AmazonGrace]

Alert: we have reached peak Trump

 

[Cartmann99]

3 hours ago, danvillebelle said:

Melania Trump can jump on the fast train to hell and take Fuckface Von Clownstick with her:

https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/10/politics/melania-trump-metoo-evidence/index.html

What if I don't have evidence because the people who molested and raped me are fucking DEAD, you raging Queen of Denial.

 

I'm sorry, and I believe you.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s USA Today piece reveals the GOP’s massive problem on health care"

Spoiler

President Trump wrote a remarkable op-ed in USA Today on Wednesday, remarkable because one wouldn’t think it possible to pack so much dishonesty into such a small space, nor would one think a newspaper would willingly publish such a steaming pile of lies. As fact-checker Glenn Kessler wrote, “almost every sentence contained a misleading statement or a falsehood.”

But I’ll leave the fact-checking (mostly) to others on this score. What interests me for the moment is what Trump says about Medicare.

As Democrats have increasingly advocated for some kind of universal, government-guaranteed health insurance program (though there are multiple plans floating around with different features), Republicans have struggled to settle on the most effective rhetorical counter to the idea. “Big government takeover!” has gotten a little old. “Bureaucrats making decisions for you instead of your doctor!” rings false to anyone who has had to deal with the nightmare of insurance company bureaucracy. “It’ll cost trillions!” is less persuasive when they’re running up trillions in debt themselves for things like corporate tax cuts.

So what’s the alternative? Here are some selections from Trump’s op-ed:

I also made a solemn promise to our great seniors to protect Medicare. That is why I am fighting so hard against the Democrats’ plan that would eviscerate Medicare … Democrats would gut Medicare with their planned government takeover of American health care … The Democrats’ plan means that after a life of hard work and sacrifice, seniors would no longer be able to depend on the benefits they were promised. By eliminating Medicare as a program for seniors … Seniors would lose access to their favorite doctors … In practice, the Democratic Party’s so-called Medicare for All would really be Medicare for None. Under the Democrats’ plan, today’s Medicare would be forced to die.

Trump and the Republicans will defend Medicare from Democrats! If you believe that, you’ll hire an arsonist to protect your house from the fire department.

The strangeness of this argument highlights a fundamental problem Republicans can’t get away from: They hate Medicare, but the American public loves Medicare.

They hate it for two basic reasons. The first is ideological: It is indeed a big-government program and therefore an affront to their free-market beliefs. They have been horrified by the idea of the government providing health coverage ever since a future president and conservative icon tried to prevent the program from being enacted with the hit 1961 spoken-word album “Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine.”

The second reason Republicans hate Medicare exists at the intersection of policy and politics. Because Medicare works extremely well and provides a valued benefit to tens of millions of politically potent citizens, it is impossible for them to unwind it as they would like to do. So every election, Democrats accuse them of wanting to destroy the program, which requires them to pretend that they actually love it and want to defend it.

There is a long history of Republicans enacting that charade, so it isn’t much of a surprise that they have just grafted the old argument on to a new health care debate. But it fits particularly awkwardly here.

Perhaps never before has the GOP had less credibility on health care than it does now, when it just failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act and is suing to eliminate the ACA’s protection for people with preexisting conditions. And while there is a certain get-off-my-lawn appeal to the argument that if we let the non-elderly have Medicare, then Medicare will be undermined, to buy it, you have to believe that the person making the argument doesn’t actually want Medicare to be undermined. There is only so far you can go insisting one moment that you despise government health insurance and claiming the next moment that you’ll protect seniors’ beloved government health insurance.

For the moment, though, almost every Republican seems on board with this strategy. Yes, there is an occasional note of dissent on the right. For instance, Philip Klein argues that “By perpetuating the idea that Medicare is a great program that needs to be protected at all costs (rather than an unsustainable entitlement) it only makes it easier for liberals to make the case for socialized medicine.”

But as a policy wonk, Klein has the luxury of thinking about the long term. Politicians, on the other hand, tend to be more concerned about what will work right now.

Klein is right that Republicans sowed the seeds for Medicare-for-all, but not just by praising Medicare. They also did it by attacking everything Democrats proposed on health care, even market-based reforms such as the ACA, as horrifying big-government socialism. Eventually, Democrats realized that if Republicans were going to call even something modeled on Mitt Romney’s plan “socialism,” they might as well not bother trimming their sails and just advocate something actually socialistic. And here we are.

If and when Democrats control both the presidency and Congress — perhaps in 2021 — we’ll have a real, sustained debate about Medicare-for-all or some version thereof. It would be foolish to imagine that we can predict exactly how that debate will go. It is entirely possible that “Giving more people Medicare will destroy Medicare!” will effectively mobilize seniors against universal coverage. It is also possible that the contradictions in their arguments will make Republicans unable to resist the appetite for a government guarantee of security that they helped reinforce.

One thing we can predict with some certainty, however, is that what they’ll say then will be just as dishonest as what they’re saying now.

 

[Howl]

I've been on a tear over at the JaVanka thread about the assassination (and possible subsequent dismemberment) last week of  Saudi journalist Jamal Khshoggi in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul.

Please remember that Khashoggi is (was) a legal resident of the US for the last year.  This CNN article lays the assassination at Trump's feet and is very much in line with what I've been thinking: 

Donald Trump Is Complicit In Jamal Khashoggi’s Likely Death. So Are Many Others.

and if that's not scary enough: Jamal Khashoggi is not the first Saudi journalist to disappear

This is just another one of those incidents that lays bare how things play out on the world stage when the evil, greed and immorality of this administrations hooks up with the evil, greed and immorality of another nation.  MBS is very busy being charming and portraying himself as a reformer while busy being a viciously repressive autocrat on the home front.  Another instance of a foreign power emboldened to carry out extrajudicial killings, in this instance on a legal US resident, without fear of repercussions.  Jeeze, does this piss me off. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Lawless, raging president fears the ‘angry mob.’ Good — he should."

Spoiler

At a rally in Iowa on Tuesday night, President Trump once again cast the Democratic opposition as the “angry, left-wing mob” and mocked Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) for supposedly leaking word of Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault allegations against Brett M. Kavanaugh. The crowd responded with a lusty chant of “Lock her up! Lock her up!” Trump smiled approvingly.

This moment nicely captures the throbbing big lie at the core of the closing argument that Trump and Republicans hope will salvage their House and Senate majorities. If the candidates backed by the “angry mob” win in sufficient numbers, we will get not lawlessness but rather the beginnings of a check on Trump’s lawlessness, which, as it happens, was displayed right there in that very same “lock her up” moment.

In this sense, Trump is right to fear the angry mob — anger means political engagement among voters who oppose Trump, and political engagement makes a Democratic-controlled House more likely, and with it, an effort to establish real accountability and oversight on a corrupt, unchecked, out-of-control presidency.

New numbers out this morning illustrate that the anger really does appear to be translating into an intention to vote.

A new Politico-Morning Consult poll finds that voters say by 46 percent to 40 percent that the Senate was “wrong” to confirm Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, but also that the battle over Kavanaugh is energizing Democratic voters more than Republican ones:

Following the GOP-led effort to push through his nomination, enthusiasm among Democratic voters has surged. More than 3 in 4 Democrats (77 percent) say they are “very motivated” to turn out and vote in the midterms — more than the 68 percent of Republicans who say they’re “very motivated.”

This is a spike of 10 points in Democratic enthusiasm from last month, when 67 percent of Democrats said they were very motivated. By contrast, according to the poll, last month Republican enthusiasm was roughly where it is now.

That’s only one poll, but it’s borne out by other polling. This week’s CNN survey, which found Democrats holding a 13-point lead among likely voters in the battle for the House, finds that 62 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are “extremely” or “very” enthusiastic about voting, up seven points since last month. By contrast, that number is only 52 percent among Republicans, showing almost zero movement. Perhaps the CNN poll is an outlier; it’s likely that amid the Kavanaugh brawl public sentiment has been very volatile.

But Axios has new numbers today that take a longer view. Axios looked at 19 competitive House districts that had competitive primaries in both parties this cycle and in 2014, the last midterm election. Axios compared Democratic vs. Republican voter turnout in these primaries and found:

Democratic voter turnout in this year’s House primaries increased in each of the 19 competitive, comparable House districts compared to 2014, and doubled in more than two thirds of them. That’s far better than Republican voter turnout, which increased in 14 of those districts but didn’t double in any of them.

As Axios notes, the fact that Democratic turnout surged in these particular 19 districts (see Axios’s chart for a rundown of them) shows that Democratic enthusiasm is up not just in very blue areas, but also in more swingy areas that could decide control of the House.

The big lie at the core of Trump’s closing midterm message

The attacks on the “angry mob” that opposed Kavanaugh are very much bound up with the idea that a Democratic victory means an outbreak of lawlessness. In just about every conceivable way, the claim is the opposite of the truth.

First, take this in the context of the Kavanaugh battle. Echoing Trump’s message, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) recently claimed that vows by Democrats to continue investigating the process leading to Kavanaugh’s confirmation mean Democrats want to “turn the law upside down.” But Democrats have promised to reexamine how Senate Republicans and the White House limited the FBI’s reopened background check and have sought release of the FBI report itself. These would restore transparency and reveal how Trump and Senate Republicans subverted a serious fact-finding effort.

Or take immigration, which is central to the evocation of Democratic lawlessness. Trump has a new piece in USA Today that claims Democrats want “open borders.” This is a lie — most Democrats back comprehensive immigration reform, which means nothing of the sort, and even Democrats who want to reconfigure Immigration and Customs Enforcement don’t want to end border enforcement. But what’s more interesting is what a Democratic House would actually mean on this issue: increased oversight on Trump’s cruel and destructive immigration agenda, and possibly investigations into bad-faith abuses of government process that produced humanitarian disasters such as the child separations policy. This means a check on Trump’s cruelties and abuses of power.

The other day, we learned from a New York Times exposé that Trump’s whole self-made businessman mystique is based on hundreds of millions of dollars that he garnered through massive, far-reaching tax fraud. A Democratic House means a serious effort to shake loose Trump’s tax returns, which Republicans have actively helped shield from public view, and real oversight on Trump’s nonstop self-dealing.

After the election, Trump is expected to fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions and replace him with someone who might constrain special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation. A Republican victory means a continued House GOP effort to help Trump harass and undermine that probe — which has included trying to redirect law enforcement toward Trump’s political foes, in “lock her up” fashion — and protection for Trump if he does shut Mueller down. A Democratic House means an end to that GOP harassment effort — and at least some form of accountability, possibly in the form of impeachment, if he does go full authoritarian.

If Trump fears the “angry mob,” it’s for good reason. It threatens a restoration of oversight and accountability, and a serious effort, on multiple fronts, to check his raging, out-of-control lawlessness.

 

[Cartmann99]

So, he's gonna be making stupid jokes and leading chants while folks on the Gulf Coast are getting knocked around by a hurricane?!? 

 

[fraurosena]

I have to say I don't like the "mob" part of the description used by the R's, though. A mob is a mindless thing, blindly following, not thinking and uncontrolled.

The women are angry. People are angry. But they are not a mob. They are calculating and perceptive. They know what they are doing, and are fully in control of what they are doing, and why.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

@fraurosena -- I don't like the term mob either, but it's often applied. This op-ed compares and contrasts Dem and Rapeub reactions: "Republicans used to love the sound of an angry mob. What happened?"

Spoiler

Not all mobs are equal, apparently.

There was a time, less than a decade ago, when the sound of red-faced protest was music to Republican ears. 

That, of course, was when Barack Obama was president, and the tea party movement was hijacking congressional town hall meetings with shouts of “Tyranny!” There were plenty of shoving matches, and Democratic lawmakers were burned in effigy. The police were regularly called in to bring a semblance of order.

Democrats tried to dismiss the significance of all this disruption. “It’s not really a grass-roots movement,” said Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who was soon to lose the majority that had made her speaker of the House. “It’s Astroturf by some of the wealthiest people in America to keep the focus on tax cuts for the rich instead of for the great middle class.”

Meanwhile, Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) lauded the conservative agitation as a pure expression of the frustrations and values of ordinary Americans.

“You’re the people who prove the politicians wrong when they say that all this activism and unrest was crafted, somehow, in a boardroom, down on K Street,” he said. “The grass-roots movement isn’t Astroturf, as they like to put it. It’s something that started at your kitchen tables.”

Now it is the Democrats who are making the noise, and the argument is playing in reverse.

“You don’t hand matches to an arsonist, and you don’t give power to an angry left-wing mob. Democrats have become too EXTREME and TOO DANGEROUS to govern. Republicans believe in the rule of law — not the rule of the mob,” President Trump tweeted Saturday about the demonstrations that erupted after the Senate voted to confirm his nomination of Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

Other Republicans have taken their lead from Trump. “Mob rule,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said of the protests. “Screaming animals,” wrote Fox News’s Todd Starnes, who added for good measure that those who demonstrated in the Senate gallery should be “tasered, handcuffed and dragged out of the building.”

As for McConnell, he declared he is “proud of my members for not knuckling under to those kind of moblike tactics.”

Just as Democrats once dismissed the outrage of tea party agitators as having been ginned up by the Koch brothers, Republicans see the hand of George Soros behind the hundreds who showed up to voice their objections to Kavanaugh.

In the case of Soros, the conspiracy theories also carry a familiar whiff of anti-Semitism, as Trump and others suggest — with no evidence — that the foreign-born Jewish billionaire is paying the demonstrators to do his bidding.

“The paid D.C. protesters are now ready to REALLY protest because they haven’t gotten their checks — in other words, they weren’t paid! Screamers in Congress, and outside, were far too obvious — less professional than anticipated by those paying (or not paying) the bills!” the president tweeted Tuesday.

There can be a sort of solace in the thought that all of this anger is being manufactured by an evil genius, rather than accepting it as evidence that a significant share of the populace actually opposes what your party has done.

But as Democrats learned from the trouncing they got in the midterm elections of 2010 and 2014, this kind of rationalization can be dangerous to a party’s health.

Republicans also contend that there is a qualitative difference between the liberal protesters who confronted senators in the Capitol last week and the conservative ones of previous election cycles who aired their grievances at town meetings in individual congressional districts. But it was telling that during this year’s August recess, most lawmakers of both parties decided not to hold any town meetings at all, rather than face another wave of constituent fury.

The superheated media environment amplifies the volume of these protests, but the tactics themselves are hardly new. And sometimes, they are the only way for the aggrieved to make themselves heard over powerful interests.

In 1989, then-House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.) was chased down a Chicago street by a group of seniors angry about the cost of a new Medicare catastrophic health-insurance program. When one of them draped herself over the hood of his car, the 6-foot-4 congressman escaped by dashing through a gas station.

“These people don’t understand what the government is trying to do for them,’’ Rostenkowski said as he fled the furious seniors.

Still, he got the message. The Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act was repealed less than a year after it went into effect.

Sometimes, the key to surviving in politics is knowing when to listen — a lesson the Republicans might learn the hard way, come Nov. 6.

 

[Workingmom]

Barbra Streisand - Don't Lie to Me (Official Vide…: https://youtu.be/kNrj87Q-4Yk

wheaterforecast: the biggest twitterstorm ever

[fraurosena]

Sweet Rufus.

Like Maggie says, just read it.

 

[47of74]

18 hours ago, Howl said:

I've been on a tear over at the JaVanka thread about the assassination (and possible subsequent dismemberment) last week of  Saudi journalist Jamal Khshoggi in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul.

Please remember that Khashoggi is (was) a legal resident of the US for the last year.  This CNN article lays the assassination at Trump's feet and is very much in line with what I've been thinking: 

Donald Trump Is Complicit In Jamal Khashoggi’s Likely Death. So Are Many Others.

and if that's not scary enough: Jamal Khashoggi is not the first Saudi journalist to disappear

This is just another one of those incidents that lays bare how things play out on the world stage when the evil, greed and immorality of this administrations hooks up with the evil, greed and immorality of another nation.  MBS is very busy being charming and portraying himself as a reformer while busy being a viciously repressive autocrat on the home front.  Another instance of a foreign power emboldened to carry out extrajudicial killings, in this instance on a legal US resident, without fear of repercussions.  Jeeze, does this piss me off. 

Donnie Fungus Dick drools over the possibility of being to import that brand of autocratcy here.  He loves when journalists are attacked and is looking forward to the day when he can disappear US citizens who call him out on his horseshit.

[GreyhoundFan]

They re-enacted the movie "Dumb and Dumber" in the Oval Office today: "Here’s what happened at Kanye West’s incredibly bizarre meeting with Donald Trump"

Spoiler

It was a head-scratching afternoon at the White House on Thursday as rapper Kanye West and so many of his opinions descended upon 1600 Penn. to discuss everything from North Korea to bipolar disorder with his “brother” President Trump.

Sporting his now-signature “Make America Great Again” hat, West made his first trip to the executive mansion to move the needle on several issues close to his heart and, before he deleted it, his social media feed — among them prison reform, gang violence and his hometown of Chicago.

With West seated across from him at the famous Resolute Desk, Trump began the Oval Office meeting — which also included Pro Football Hall of Famer Jim Brown and Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner — by saying that the administration has been “keeping our promises.”

West responded, “I like the North Korea.”

Trump went on to explain that the United States had been “headed for war” with North Korea and that his administration had stopped the war and “saved millions of lives.” According to Trump, President Barack Obama told him that North Korea was one of the country’s biggest problems.

West was impressed. “Day One, solved one of his biggest problems,” the rapper said. “We solved one of the biggest problems.”

With that, West launched into a nearly 10-minute-long speech that the rapper said was “from the soul,” according to White House pool reports.

[A timeline of Kanye West’s most political moments]

The meandering soliloquy roller-coastered from the personal to the political. West called the president’s work on criminal-justice reform (an issue championed by his wife, Kim Kardashian, during her own visits with Trump) “bravery.” He said he was advised not to wear his MAGA hat, though he did not specify by whom: “They tried to scare me to not wear this hat.” He commented on his childhood. “My dad and my mom separated, so there was not a lot of male energy in my home and also I’m married to a family where, you know, there’s not a lot of male energy. It’s beautiful, though.” He said that Trump had given him (we assume metaphorically) “a Superman cape” to help do good.

West also had some clarifications about his mental health, a hot topic following his appearance on “Saturday Night Live” on Sept. 30. After the show went off the air, the rapper kept talking to the cast and audience about random topics that were captured on social media, including welfare conspiracies, racism and being bullied for his choice of hat. West has spoken out before about his bipolar disorder, but he told Trump on Thursday that was a misdiagnosis and that he is instead just sleep-deprived.

West, who received harsh criticism for suggesting that slavery was a “choice,” also told Trump that “we have to release the love [throughout] the country . . . we don’t have the reparations, but we have the 13th Amendment.”

The rapper referred to his own Oval Office opus as “a fine wine,” adding that “it has complex notes to it.”

When his monologue was finally finished, it was Trump’s turn to say something.

“I tell you what, that was pretty impressive,” Trump said. “That was quite something.”

The president added that West could “speak for me any time he wants. He’s a smart cookie. He gets it.”

When asked by a reporter if West, who has teased a presidential run in the past, was a viable candidate for commander in chief, Trump said that the rapper “could very well be.” But West himself had a caveat: “Only after 2024.”

West continued: “Let’s stop worrying about the future, all we have is today. . . . Trump is on his hero’s journey right now. He might not have thought he’d have a crazy motherf—er like [me].”

The pair then posed for photos and West, who did not cast a vote in the 2016 presidential election but has been a vocal supporter of Trump, hugged the president.

“I love this guy right here,” West said.

Good grief. That is all.

[AnywhereButHere]

@GreyhoundFan I hit the Upvote button quite a few times but could not settle on a reaction. There are so many that fit...

Kanye uses so many words (albeit arranged in a completely bizarre manner) that there are none left for anyone else. I know I'm pretty much speechless.

[SilverBeach]

13 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Sweet Rufus.

Like Maggie says, just read it.

 

I read it. Heaven forbid. There is no fake news that can make orange fuckface and his "administration: look worse than the actual words coming out of their mouths. Dump is certifiable.

Oh, and fuck Kanye, he is certifiable too and is an attention whore. I wish his mother was here to see how he is embarrassing himself.

[GreyhoundFan]

"The saddest part of Kanye West’s visit with President Trump"

Spoiler

If you’re looking for a non-narcotic downer, rapper Kanye West’s visit to the White House on Thursday offers your pick of poisons. This meeting between President Trump and one of the few genuinely famous people to have embraced him was a dismal, relentless reminder of how celebrity has captured our politics.* It’s depressing to see a tremendously gifted artist reduced to grade-school provocation, claiming that wearing one of Trump’s signature Make America Great Again hats is an act of courage.

And saddest of all, at least for me, was West’s embrace of Trump on the grounds that “my dad and my mom separated, so there was not a lot of male energy in my home, and also I’m married to a family where, you know, there’s not a lot of male energy.”

It’s one thing to make peace with Trump’s failures as a man in exchange for his willingness to advance certain policy priorities, as some evangelical Christian voters and leaders have done because they believe it is the best way to transform the judiciary. That’s the sort of bargain I hope I never have to confront — in retrospect, I was lucky to be merely 8 and 12 years old when Bill Clinton was the Democratic nominee for president — but in utterly, purely pragmatic terms, I can see why some people would make it. But to mistake Trump, who ranks among the world’s most morally impoverished human beings, as an example of nourishing “male energy” is to set expectations for men and for masculinity catastrophically low.

Judged by old-fashioned and decidedly restrictive standards of what it means to be a man, the president is a failure. He’s hardly a macho archetype — a man who took extraordinary measures to avoid service in Vietnam even as he mocked Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for having been captured and held prisoner there, and whose most prominent display of physical force came in a professional wrestling match. His crude boasting about forcing himself on beautiful women, captured on tape in 2005, is ugly and unnerving, but it also reeks of a desperate desire to impress. And Trump’s constant need to inflate his wealth and status speak to a profound insecurity.

The assessment of Trump gets even worse if you think it’s worth expanding the notion of masculine virtue. If you think a real man is confident enough to accept women as his equals and his competition — to admit weakness and error, and to change course in response; to reject artificial distinctions between women’s and men’s work and to shoulder half the work of raising children and maintaining a household — then the president’s personal deficits are even more dramatic.

None of this is to say that West’s hunger for male influences in his life is manufactured or misplaced. But lessons about masculinity are closer at hand than West suggests. If he wanted to know more about what it takes to evince “male energy” in the eyes of the public, and about the costs and privileges that come with having America see you as a masculine ideal, West doesn’t need Trump. He could have asked his mother-in-law, Caitlyn Jenner.

*I should note that I don’t include the work that West’s wife, Kim Kardashian West, has done to persuade Trump to commute the sentence of a nonviolent drug offender, or to push the White House to consider criminal justice reform. Getting a 63-year-old woman out of prison may be one small step, but it’s an actual achievement, not mere show.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

From a WSJ reporter:

I'm surprised Dumpy didn't play a couple rounds of golf.

[onekidanddone]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

They re-enacted the movie "Dumb and Dumber" in the Oval Office today: "Here’s what happened at Kanye West’s incredibly bizarre meeting with Donald Trump"

  Reveal hidden contents

It was a head-scratching afternoon at the White House on Thursday as rapper Kanye West and so many of his opinions descended upon 1600 Penn. to discuss everything from North Korea to bipolar disorder with his “brother” President Trump.

Sporting his now-signature “Make America Great Again” hat, West made his first trip to the executive mansion to move the needle on several issues close to his heart and, before he deleted it, his social media feed — among them prison reform, gang violence and his hometown of Chicago.

With West seated across from him at the famous Resolute Desk, Trump began the Oval Office meeting — which also included Pro Football Hall of Famer Jim Brown and Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner — by saying that the administration has been “keeping our promises.”

West responded, “I like the North Korea.”

Trump went on to explain that the United States had been “headed for war” with North Korea and that his administration had stopped the war and “saved millions of lives.” According to Trump, President Barack Obama told him that North Korea was one of the country’s biggest problems.

West was impressed. “Day One, solved one of his biggest problems,” the rapper said. “We solved one of the biggest problems.”

With that, West launched into a nearly 10-minute-long speech that the rapper said was “from the soul,” according to White House pool reports.

[A timeline of Kanye West’s most political moments]

The meandering soliloquy roller-coastered from the personal to the political. West called the president’s work on criminal-justice reform (an issue championed by his wife, Kim Kardashian, during her own visits with Trump) “bravery.” He said he was advised not to wear his MAGA hat, though he did not specify by whom: “They tried to scare me to not wear this hat.” He commented on his childhood. “My dad and my mom separated, so there was not a lot of male energy in my home and also I’m married to a family where, you know, there’s not a lot of male energy. It’s beautiful, though.” He said that Trump had given him (we assume metaphorically) “a Superman cape” to help do good.

West also had some clarifications about his mental health, a hot topic following his appearance on “Saturday Night Live” on Sept. 30. After the show went off the air, the rapper kept talking to the cast and audience about random topics that were captured on social media, including welfare conspiracies, racism and being bullied for his choice of hat. West has spoken out before about his bipolar disorder, but he told Trump on Thursday that was a misdiagnosis and that he is instead just sleep-deprived.

West, who received harsh criticism for suggesting that slavery was a “choice,” also told Trump that “we have to release the love [throughout] the country . . . we don’t have the reparations, but we have the 13th Amendment.”

The rapper referred to his own Oval Office opus as “a fine wine,” adding that “it has complex notes to it.”

When his monologue was finally finished, it was Trump’s turn to say something.

“I tell you what, that was pretty impressive,” Trump said. “That was quite something.”

The president added that West could “speak for me any time he wants. He’s a smart cookie. He gets it.”

When asked by a reporter if West, who has teased a presidential run in the past, was a viable candidate for commander in chief, Trump said that the rapper “could very well be.” But West himself had a caveat: “Only after 2024.”

West continued: “Let’s stop worrying about the future, all we have is today. . . . Trump is on his hero’s journey right now. He might not have thought he’d have a crazy motherf—er like [me].”

The pair then posed for photos and West, who did not cast a vote in the 2016 presidential election but has been a vocal supporter of Trump, hugged the president.

“I love this guy right here,” West said.

Good grief. That is all.

Can I be done with humanity now?  

[fraurosena]

Owned.