Trump 36: We Shall Overcome

[fraurosena]

Speaking of being a baby. Nice try at deflection. Still didn't give any evidence, presidunce. 

 

[fraurosena]

Don the Con has come out to play again. Sadly the BT's will be lapping it all up.

 

 

[Audrey2]

Guess this is the best place to put this.

This afternoon, I saw Joe Weigand perform as Teddy Roosevelt. He was absolutely phenomenal! As I sat listening to him, entranced, I thought how he would have wiped the floor with Trump. If you've got a bit of time, there are a couple of excellent YouTube videos of his previous performances. Trump is everything T. Roosevelt hated.

[AmazonGrace]

On 10/16/2018 at 7:59 AM, fraurosena said:

Does anyone notice that lately the presidunce is saying “I’m not a baby” quite often?

I wonder why. ?

 

Must be all the diapers he's wearing

[fraurosena]

What?! 

This is unimaginably dangerous. You guys really have to stop him before he breaks the world.

 

Trump says US will withdraw from nuclear arms treaty with Russia

Quote

Donald Trump has confirmed the US will leave an arms control treaty with Russia dating from the cold war that has kept nuclear missiles out of Europe for three decades.

“We’ll have to develop those weapons,” the president told reporters in Nevada after a rally. “We’re going to terminate the agreement and we’re going to pull out.”

Trump was referring to the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty (INF), which banned ground-launch nuclear missiles with ranges from 500km to 5,500km. Signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, it led to nearly 2,700 short- and medium-range missiles being eliminated, and an end to a dangerous standoff between US Pershing and cruise missiles and Soviet SS-20 missiles in Europe.

The Guardian reported on Friday that Trump’s third national security adviser, John Bolton, a longstanding opponent of arms control treaties, was pushing for US withdrawal. The US says Russia has been violating the INF agreement with the development and deployment of a new cruise missile. Under the terms of the treaty, it would take six months for US withdrawal to take effect.

US hawks have also argued that the INF treaty ties the country’s hands in its strategic rivalry with China in the Pacific, with no response to Chinese medium-range missiles that could threaten US bases, allies and shipping.

Bolton and the top arms control adviser in the National Security Council (NSC), Tim Morrison, are also opposed to the extension of another major pillar of arms control, the 2010 New Start agreement with Russia, which limited the number of deployed strategic warheads on either side to 1,550. That agreement, signed by Barack Obama and Dmitri Medvedev, then president of Russia, is due to expire in 2021.

“This is the most severe crisis in nuclear arms control since the 1980s,” said Malcolm Chalmers, the deputy director general of the Royal United Services Institute. “If the INF treaty collapses, and with the New Start treaty on strategic arms due to expire in 2021, the world could be left without any limits on the nuclear arsenals of nuclear states for the first time since 1972.”

Speaking to reporters in Nevada, Trump said: “Russia has violated the agreement. They’ve been violating it for many years and I don’t know why President Obama didn’t negotiate or pull out.

“We’re not going to let them violate a nuclear agreement and do weapons and we’re not allowed to. We’re the ones that have stayed in the agreement and we’ve honoured the agreement but Russia has not unfortunately honoured the agreement so we’re going to terminate the agreement, we’re going to pull out.”

Asked to clarify, the president said: “Unless Russia comes to us and China comes to us and they all come to us and they say, ‘Let’s all of us get smart and let’s none of us develop those weapons,’ but if Russia’s doing it and if China’s doing it and we’re adhering to the agreement, that’s unacceptable. So we have a tremendous amount of money to play with with our military.”

Jeffrey Lewis, the director of the East Asia nonproliferation program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, said: “This is a colossal mistake. Russia gets to violate the treaty and Trump takes the blame.

“I doubt very much that the US will deploy much that would have been prohibited by the treaty. Russia, though, will go gangbusters.”

Russian state news agencies on Saturday cited a foreign ministry source as saying Washington’s move to pull out of the treaty is motivated by a dream of a single global superpower.

“The main motive is a dream of a unipolar world. Will it come true? No,” a foreign ministry source told Ria Novosti state news agency.

The official said that Russia has “many times publicly denounced the US policy course towards dismantling the nuclear deal”.

Washington “has approached this step over the course of many years by deliberately and step-by-step destroying the basis for the agreement,” the official said, quoted by Russia’s three main news agencies.

“This decision is part of the US policy course to withdraw from those international legal agreements that place equal responsibilities on it and its partners and make vulnerable its concept of its own ‘exceptionalism’.”

Russian senator Alexei Pushkov wrote on Twitter that the move was “the second powerful blow against the whole system of strategic stability in the world, with the first being Washington’s 2001 withdrawal from the anti-ballistic missile treaty”.

“And again the initiator of the dissolution of the agreement is the US,” Pushkov wrote.

The Pentagon has been generally supportive of the INF treaty but defense secretary James Mattis warned other Nato ministers earlier this month it would no longer be tenable if Russia did not withdraw its Novator ground-based missile, which the US has argued for nearly four years violates the INF range restrictions.

Nato ministers issued a joint statement saying the INF agreement “has been crucial to Euro-Atlantic security and we remain fully committed to the preservation of this landmark arms control treaty”. But they urged Russia to come clean about the capabilities of its new missile.

The Chinese arsenal has also been a source of concern for the US Pacific Command. Its former commander, Adm Harry Harris, told the Senate in March: “We have no ground-based capability that can threaten China because of, among other things, our rigid adherence, and rightfully so, to the treaty that we sign on to, the INF treaty.”

Lewis disagreed that the INF leaves the US at a significant disadvantage in the Pacific.

“The China stuff is nonsense,” he said. “INF does not prohibit sea- and air-based systems, not does it prohibit South Korea and Japan from developing long-range missiles. If China were a real problem, the US and its allies could have acted long ago.”

Alexandra Bell, a former senior state department official and now senior policy director at the Centre for Arms Control & Non-Proliferation, said: “When problems arise in arms control, you work and fix them.

“What shocks me is that this president who is constantly telling us he is deal-maker has failed utterly to save Reagan’s nuclear legacy. He did nothing with his relationship with Putin. There were trades to be made to fix this treaty and he couldn’t pull it off.”

She added: “Why would the North Koreans have any reason to believe in any deal made with this president, with Bolton whispering in his ear.”

 

[WiseGirl]

Fucking asshole in so many ways.

The evil of this government knows no bounds.  From the NYT:  “The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.”

Fuck him for everything he is trying to do. C'mon blue tide....

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[fraurosena]

Wut?

[fraurosena]

 

[Howl]

20 hours ago, fraurosena said:

This is unimaginably dangerous. You guys really have to stop him before he breaks the world.

Trump says US will withdraw from nuclear arms treaty with Russia

Note that even the Russians think this is a bad idea.

Already a great start to a brand new Infrastructure Week! Got my copy of Craig Unger's House of Trump, House of Putin and started the first chapter.  It actually does have a possibility of being a real page turner -- it covers Trump's Russian mob connections from day one. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s comfort zone this year: Smaller venues and rapturous fans in places where he remains popular"

Spoiler

RICHMOND, Ky. — President Trump’s quest to help Republican midterm candidates has taken him this month to an airplane hangar in a far-flung Nevada county that he won with 73 percent of votes, a fairgrounds building in rural Ohio that could only hold 3,000 and an 8,000-capacity college arena in Kentucky — located about 25 miles south of Lexington, where Air Force One landed and where larger venues are located.

As the president campaigns, he has mostly avoided the suburban areas that strategists say will be key to deciding the midterms — and where he is often less popular and runs the risk of energizing Democrats or hurting Republican candidates who have tried to distance themselves from him. Over the past few weeks, he has focused heavily on more rural areas where he is especially popular and where his presence can encourage the base voters Republican candidates need.

Of the 27 midterm rallies Trump has held this year, more than three-quarters were held in counties that he won in 2016 by an average of 59.5 percent. The few times that he has ventured to counties that Democrat Hillary Clinton won, those places are nearly always surrounded on all sides by counties that he won. And more than a third of the rallies were in or near the Appalachian Mountains, where his popularity remains high.

Those areas, and the snug event spaces he finds there, have become Trump’s comfort zone, and also a sign of how convinced he remains that his most loyal supporters can drive a victory in 2018 as they did in 2016. (A rare departure will occur Monday night, when Trump will attempt to fill his largest venue in nearly two years: The Toyota Center in the heart of Houston can hold 19,000 and is located in a county that Clinton won in 2016.)

“Most people assumed he would go to Lexington, to a big venue like Rupp Arena — and, no doubt, President Trump would fill up 24,000 in Rupp,” Rep. Garland “Andy” Barr (R-Ky.) told the rally crowd gathered Oct. 13 at Eastern Kentucky University. “But when I thought about where the president would want to go, I thought . . . of the people of Madison County, who nearly two years ago delivered a huge victory for Donald Trump, who carried this county by a whopping 32 percentage points.”

Trump’s decision to visit Richmond — which he said was a trip he “normally” wouldn’t make — delighted those who live in the area. As his motorcade snarled traffic, two women stopped into a local craft store to wait out the backup, and one exclaimed to the other: “That’s the coolest traffic I’ve ever been in!”

... < map graphic >

“He understands that America really is in the places that are not the most heavily populated, that are the most working-class — that’s pretty much what he goes for, and that’s why he got elected,” said Aaron Pramuk, 33, an engineer who lives in Richmond and came to the rally with his roommate. The two didn’t get inside but watched Trump’s remarks on a video screen outside with hundreds of others, as a rogue vendor circulated through the crowd selling $10 MAGA hats and cans of Bud Light.

Trump’s rallies have played a huge role in the president’s image-making.

The campaign frequently issues tickets to thousands more than an event space can seat, guaranteeing a full crowd and ensuring that the president will be able to brag that he had to turn people away — a number that, like the number who get in, Trump often wildly exaggerates.

Although Trump regularly claims that tens of thousands of supporters flock to see him, the average capacity of his rally venues this year is about 8,000. The largest venue so far has been the Charleston Civic Center in West Virginia, which can hold 13,500 — although Trump was unable to fill it in late August.

The largest rally that Trump has ever held — according to counts by independent officials — was at a stadium in Mobile, Ala., in August 2015. Estimates for that crowd range from 20,000 to 30,000, although Trump has claimed there were 49,000 people there.

One official said that the campaign’s favorite venues are Rust Belt hockey arenas because of their modest size and proximity to the sorts of voters who want to attend Trump rallies. Of the 27 midterm rallies, 10 have been held at hockey arenas and one at a former hockey arena.

Trump’s Monday event in Texas was previewed more than seven weeks ago, when the president promised on Twitter that he would book “the biggest stadium in Texas we can find” for a rally with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex). Some advisers have told The Washington Post that they tried to discourage the president from going, as they expect Cruz can win the race without the president’s help. Plus, Houston and its suburbs are exactly the sort of place where Trump could hurt local congressional candidates more than he helps.

Early last week, the Trump campaign announced that the president would hold a rally Monday at the NRG Arena in Houston, which can hold up to 8,000 — and is far from the largest venue in the state. At least 90 Texas venues claim to be larger, and the Dallas Morning News noted that the NRG Arena “isn’t close to the biggest event site even in Houston.”

The venue choice prompted online mocking — especially because Cruz’s opponent, Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Tex.), recently held an outdoor concert with musician Willie Nelson that attracted more than 50,000 people.

On Thursday, however, Brad Parscale, Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, announced that because of “HUGE and unprecedented” demand the event had been moved to the Toyota Center in Houston, which can hold up to 19,000 people. Although the arena is much larger than the original choice, it still isn’t one of the state’s top 20 biggest venues — there’s even a high school football stadium that can hold slightly more people.

A campaign spokesman said Saturday that officials first booked the smaller venue because “we were under a deadline to secure a contract” but that they had “continued to push for and negotiate terms for the larger capacity.” The campaign declined to answer other questions.

At Trump’s rally Oct. 13 at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, a few thousand people were turned away at the door, often after waiting for hours. Most of those who did not get inside left — after all, the temperature was about 47 degrees. A few hundred protesters gathered nearby but also left after Trump’s motorcade passed.

“We were so close!” a father said to his young son when they learned the doors had closed. “We tried,” a woman said to those around her.

“I really would love to have seen him,” said Marilyn Staton, 70, a real estate agent who lives in the area and waited in line for more than three hours with her husband, Clinton, who teaches concealed-carry permit courses.

The Statons wore matching red sweatshirts with glittery gold letters they had ironed on themselves. Hers read: “God bless Trump.” And his said: “God be with Trump.”

“He knows that he has a big following here,” Staton said. “There are a lot of people here who are tired of what’s happened with the way the Democrats have been running our country . . . He’s for the people, for everybody.”

During the rally, Trump said he made the trip because he wanted to support Barr, who faces Democrat Amy McGrath, a former Marine fighter pilot and fundraising powerhouse.

“I’ve seen the crowds. You know, outside you have 25,000, 35,000 — some crazy number of people — and we set up movie screens,” Trump said. “We set up beautiful movie screens.”

The hundreds watching on a single screen outside burst out laughing at the president’s exaggerated number, which most figured was a joke.

“And to those people outside: We love you. We love you,” Trump said, to cheers inside and out. “You have to see the lines, they go all the way back, many miles. But a lot of them stayed, and they’re watching screens outside.”

 

[Howl]

7 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Trump’s comfort zone this year: Smaller venues and rapturous fans in places where he remains popular"

Which, as usual, means the MSM will cover these rallies and Trump continues to suck the air out of the room and get wall to wall coverage as he has done since day 1.  MSM, stop covering this crap!  Local paper today had an article on a Texas A & M communications professor's description of the specific and effective rhetorical devices used consistently by Trump.   I'll see if I can find a link. 

[fraurosena]

What are Middle Easterners doing in Mexico?
Why, trying to cross the border illegally in a great big criminal Caravan from Central America of course! 

Also, Middle Easterners? Wut?

Also, also, what's a National Emergy ?

[Audrey2]

30 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

What are Middle Easterners doing in Mexico?
Why, trying to cross the border illegally in a great big criminal Caravan from Central America of course! 

Also, Middle Easterners? Wut?

Also, also, what's a National Emergy ?

Uh oh! looks like someone got ahold of the real phone instead of the play, deactivated phone.

[Howl]

1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

Also, Middle Easterners? Wut?

Obviously Saudi hit squad trying to get to US for asylum....bad hombres.

[Cartmann99]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is scary: "Trump’s impotent rage over the border could lead to something drastic"

Spoiler

Sometimes when President Trump says something false and ridiculous, you say to yourself, “I’m sure his supporters are just going to eat that up.” Other times, you find yourself asking, “Isn’t that too absurd even for them to believe?” Like this:

We’ll get to the caravan in a bit, but on the idea that everything Trump doesn’t like is the Democrats’ fault: Can he possibly think that will persuade anyone?

I don’t mean the general proposition that if you like Trump you should be angry at Democrats. I mean the specific idea that when, say, a group of migrants comes to the United States seeking asylum, not only is that the fault of the Democrats, but if it weren’t for their stonewalling, Trump would have solved the problem by now.

Because here’s the thing: Republicans control every center of power in Washington. They have the White House. They control the House. They control the Senate. They have the courts, to boot. So how is it that despite their complete lack of power, Democrats are managing to stop Trump from implementing his terrific immigration plan?

The answer is that they aren’t. The reason Trump hasn’t signed immigration legislation is that he can’t get Republicans themselves to agree on a set of reforms. As my colleague Greg Sargent noted last week, “the bigger package of ‘tough’ measures Trump favors to ‘solve’ the larger immigration problem — a border wall, deep cuts to legal immigration — got the fewest of any votes in the Senate, meaning his solutions don’t have enough Republican support to pass Congress.”

Trump can’t even get Republicans to agree to fund a border wall, the centerpiece of his presidential campaign.

It has always been obvious that Trump loves to take credit for everything good whether he had anything to do with it or not, and cast blame on others for everything bad even when it’s largely his fault. It will be entertaining to watch him deflect responsibility if Democrats take control of the House in the midterm elections. But the trouble with unified government is that it makes it really difficult to plausibly claim that the people in charge are powerless and the people with no power are actually running the show.

It’s no mystery why Trump is suddenly making an issue out of this group of migrants slowly walking their way north. As The Post reported, he “continues to consider immigration to be a political winner next month in helping turn out his conservative base for the midterm elections.”

And not without reason. After all, it was his xenophobia that made him stand out from the crowd of candidates in the 2016 presidential primaries, and helped motivate enough white voters to the polls to get him elected. In recent days, “Fox & Friends,” where Trump gets most of his information about the world, has put the caravan on heavy rotation. The hope is that dark warnings of a foreign horde coming to kill you and your family will get people angry and scared enough to come to the polls; Trump is throwing around ludicrous claims about this caravan being full of criminals and terrorists.

But since the Republicans are the ones running the government, there’s always the danger that voters will say, “Wait a minute — if this is such a problem, why haven’t you guys solved it?” That’s what Trump is trying to avert by explicitly saying that Democrats are to blame.

Here’s the truth: Republicans are never going to pass immigration reform, for a number of reasons, the most important of which is that they can’t reconcile the “tough” approach their base demands with the humane approach the broader electorate wants. So all that’s left is stirring up as much anger as possible while trying to direct that anger at the opposition.

That’s why we shouldn’t be surprised if a few days before the midterm election, Trump does something dramatic — like following through on his threat to send the military to the border — to make sure that immigration dominates news coverage right before the election. It has already become clear that touting his accomplishments isn’t getting the job of holding off a Democratic wave done. At this point, Democratic anger at him and the Republican Congress is a given, and Republicans haven’t shown that they’re going to stampede to the polls to thank the GOP for its tax cut.

So Trump needs something else to juice Republican turnout, and he falls back on what he always does: hate and fear. It might work, but the odds don’t look good. By the way, if it fails and Democrats take the House, at least for the next two years he’ll be able to say that Democrats really are stymieing his agenda.

 

[fraurosena]

With the trade war, the breaking up of international deals, the attacks on NATO,  who’d have guessed? 

 

[AlwaysExcited]

I'm not an American and have nothing to do with USA, and I'm counting days till midterms. 

 

[Cartmann99]

 

[fraurosena]

Suddenly the presidunce is tweeting about the tariffs again:

In case you're wondering why:

Wall Street opens sharply lower as tariffs hit home and global worries mount

Quote

Wall Street opened sharply lower on Tuesday morning, after disappointing quarterly earnings from strong drivers on the Dow Jones Industrial Average added to mounting geopolitical concerns that fueled a plunge in global markets overnight.

The Dow fell by over 400 points amid a glut of less-than-stellar corporate earnings and global unease over President Donald Trump’s escalating trade war with China and fears of Saudi Arabia isolation as the U.S. weighed possible retaliatory measures for the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Major Dow components Caterpillar and 3M pulled down the blue-chip index.

Caterpillar fell by almost 8 percent — despite earnings that beat expectations — as investors shed shares they considered to have been overpriced and digested the full impact of Trump's tariffs on the construction giant.

"Manufacturing costs were higher due to increased material and freight costs. Material costs were higher primarily due to increases in steel prices and tariffs," said Caterpillar in a statement.

Shares in 3M took a dive of more than 7 percent after the company missed expectations and cut back its guidance for the remainder of 2018.

Bank of America shares fell by 1.5 percent on fears that rising interest rates would lead to a pullback in mortgage demand.

This is a blockbuster week for earnings, with more than 150 companies set to report. Yet investors remain skittish after last week's 800-point drop in the Dow and heightened concern about the Federal Reserve raising interest rates and stunting corporate expansion.

The Dow has been lower for three out of the past four days and the S&P 500 is struggling with a fifth straight day of declines.

“There are a number of underlying risk factors in the markets right now, be it U.S. interest rates, Brexit, Italian debt, trade wars or emerging markets,” said Craig Erlam, senior market analyst at Oanda currency trader. "These are all destabilizing factors and sentiment may finally be caving under the weight of it all.”

 

[fraurosena]

This gave me a giggle. On my twitter feed, literally one above the other like this:

 

[Audrey2]

Yikes! Maybe Pence really does think that people go on walking pilgrimages from the United States to the Holy Land, with no airplanes or boats involved.

[Audrey2]

Dear Donnie and Mikey,

The Middle Easterners didn't swim to South America, so they're not coming from the south. They are on the March through Russia. You need to stop them at the land bridge before they invade Alaska.

Signed,

A Friend

[GreyhoundFan]

A good one from Dana Milbank: "The Trump presidency is a rogue operation"

Spoiler

Adel al-Jubeir, the Washington playboy cum Saudi foreign minister, on Sunday finally delivered the phrase we’ve all been expecting: They were rogue operators.

“This was an operation that was a rogue operation,” he told Fox News’s Bret Baier of the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a Virginia-based contributor to The Post.

Why would the Saudis use the Rogue Operator excuse (after first suggesting Khashoggi was killed in a brawl)? It’s preposterous to think that 15 agents from the authoritarian country flew to Turkey purely on a lark and dismembered a dissident with a bone saw in the Saudi consulate.

Well, maybe because President Trump, eager to let the crown prince and king off the hook, publicly invited such an explanation days earlier. “It sounded to me like maybe these could have been rogue killers,” he said, after King Salman tested the excuse on Trump by telephone.

Calling the killers rogues diminishes the monstrosity by making the perpetrators sound like rascals out for adventure and fun. Even Sarah Palin goes rogue! A “rogue operator” sounds as harmless as the 1980s pop song:

Coast to coast, LA to Chicago, western male

Across the north and south, to Key Largo, love for sale

Smooth operator, smooth operator

The rogue-operator explanation must have special appeal to Trump because he is so familiar with rogues. The election hacking was done not by Russia but by a 400-pound rogue sitting on his bed. The special prosecutor’s office isn’t a legitimate arm of law enforcement but 13 angry Democrats on a rogue witch hunt.

Trump’s pre-midterms campaign speeches warn of rogues around every corner: “There are a lot of rigged things going on,” he announced. Among them: Democrats are financing the caravan of migrants from Honduras. “The deep state” within the Justice Department refuses to investigate Hillary Clinton and Benghazi. More deep staters at the State Department are hiding Clinton’s deleted emails. The sexual-assault allegations of Christine Blasey Ford were a “con job” plotted by Democrats (who also artificially inflated hurricane deaths in Puerto Rico). And “Democrats have become the party of crime.” Protesters are paid by George Soros.

The rogues!

Trump allies in Congress, meanwhile, have started a “whispering campaign” against Khashoggi to portray him as a Muslim Brotherhood figure and Osama bin Laden acolyte, The Post reports. So now the murder victim is a rogue, too?

His eyes are like angels but his heart is cold

No need to ask

He’s a rogue operator

Rogue operator, rogue operator

Trump occasionally even uses the rogue-operator explanation to jettison close aides if they put him in jeopardy, especially those caught up in the Robert Mueller probe: Paul Manafort (“worked for me for a very short period of time”), Michael Cohen (did “a tiny, tiny fraction” of Trump’s legal work) and George Papadopoulos (“low-level volunteer”).

Conversely, Trump has great faith in other, more useful rogues. Rep. Greg Gianforte (R-Mont.), who pleaded guilty to assault for body slamming a journalist, earned praise from Trump at a rally last week for the assault. Vladimir Putin “was extremely strong and powerful in his denial” of election meddling. North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is “very honorable” as well as “honest.” And now Trump, though acknowledging flaws in the Saudi explanation, says he “would love if” Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman isn’t implicated in the Khashoggi killing.

Some of Trump’s best friends are rogues. His aides are liable to go rogue at any moment. And his political opponents, rogues all, are flagrantly breaking all laws to thwart him. How can it be that one man’s life is such a rogues’ gallery?

The president told the Associated Press last week why he’s qualified to doubt climate science: “My uncle was a great professor at MIT for many years, Dr. John Trump. And I didn’t talk to him about this particular subject, but I have a natural instinct for science.”

Well, my grandfather was born on a farm. And I didn’t talk to him about this particular subject, but I have a natural instinct for bull. I therefore am academically qualified to pronounce Trump the greatest rogue of all.

Last week, while Trump was helping the Saudis excuse the Khashoggi killing and accusing his critics and political opponents of every manner of illegality and conspiracy theories, Putin delivered a rather different message: a speech hailing the fading of U.S. economic and military power.

“Thank God, this situation of a unipolar world, of a monopoly, is coming to an end,” Putin said. “It’s practically already over.”

Trump’s rogue friend may be correct. While Trump trashes the international frameworks and alliances that made the United States powerful, and spreads doubts about American democracy being overrun by deceit and corruption, our enemies are exulting.

The Trump presidency is a rogue operation.