Trump 37: Tweeting instead of Leading

[AmazonGrace]

RED ALERT!  WAR ON CHRISTMAS!  Manbaby cancels Christmas party. 

 

[onekidanddone]

6 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

RED ALERT!  WAR ON CHRISTMAS!  Manbaby cancels Christmas party. 

 

Meh. Christmas will be permanently canceled when Trump gets his big beautiful wall dome over AMERICA.  We can't have just anybody fly in here on a sleigh giving away toys to children. That is communist socialism. BAD.

Think Stephen King's Under the Dome, only better.  

[GreyhoundFan]

1 hour ago, onekidanddone said:

Meh. Christmas will be permanently canceled when Trump gets his big beautiful wall dome over AMERICA.  We can't have just anybody fly in here on a sleigh giving away toys to children. That is communist socialism. BAD.

Think Stephen King's Under the Dome, only better.  

Hey, we could do a combination of Under the Dome and Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Put Dumpy, his associates, and supporters in the arena from the 75th Hunger Games and let them fight it out. The rest of the world would be a better place.

[AnywhereButHere]

I needed 50 generic, Happy Holidays money card holders for our office's gifts to the building staff. It took me over an hour at three drugstores, sitting on their floors, sifting through all of their stock to find 24 of them. 24 generic, happy holidays cards. I had to go to Amazon to find the rest of them, and even they didn't have anything until my third page of scrolling.

All of the Christmas warriors can pout up their arms. I am officially proclaiming the War on Christmas over.

[CTRLZero]

4 minutes ago, AnywhereButHere said:

generic, happy holidays cards.

I had pretty much the same experience.  I finally found what I needed at a college bookstore, which had a little bit of diversity in its offerings.  Are stores that afraid of War on Christmas rioters?  Next year I may just design my own "Live Long and Prosper" cards.

[apple1]

Maybe try Target next time? Our Target has a pretty diverse selection (fyi - it's also in a diverse neighborhood, so...)

[GreyhoundFan]

A good one from Dana Milbank: "Six steps to surviving a job in the Trump administration"

Spoiler

So you are about to accept President Trump’s offer to be White House chief of staff. On behalf of a grateful nation, thank you. We were worried nobody would take the job.

You say you have no experience in government or politics. Not a problem! Nobody else in the White House knows how to run a country, either. And don’t be alarmed by those never-Trumpers who claim “Everything Trump Touches Dies.” That’s overstated. You will be ostracized, publicly humiliated and possibly imprisoned — but you won’t literally die. At least not if you take the following precautions to maximize your job satisfaction and personal happiness:

Find a therapist. Working for Trump is bruising to self-esteem. Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, in receiving his three-year prison sentence Wednesday, tearfully described his “personal and mental incarceration” in Trump’s employ. He surely felt the pain of going from being a “fine person” and a “great guy” in Trump’s eyes to a “weak person and not a very smart person.”

But with cognitive-behavior therapy, you may feel less hurt than those before you. Former secretary of state Rex Tillerson, who ran ExxonMobil, was reduced from being called a “world class player” by Trump and “one of the truly great business leaders” to being “dumb as a rock” and “lazy as hell.” Jeff Sessions, who surrendered a Senate seat to become attorney general, went from an “honest man” to “Mr. Magoo.” Stephen K. Bannon was “tough and smart” before “Sloppy Steve” “lost his mind.” Omarosa Manigault Newman, a “loyal friend,” turned into a “lowlife” “Wacky” “dog.”

Don’t quit your day job. Consider a leave of absence from your current job. Or maybe just call in sick. Anthony Scaramucci, one of several communication directors under Trump, lasted just 10 days. Even if you last longer, it won’t be by much. Kathryn Dunn Tenpas of the Brookings Institution says turnover among the most senior White House staffers (that’s you!) is 83 percent. And it happens suddenly: A deputy national security adviser was just ousted after the first lady’s office requested it — publicly.

Also, a former White House official complained to BuzzFeed , “no one is really hiring people with Trump White House experience.” Possibly that’s because so many depart under accusations of domestic abuse, white supremacy, drunkenness or, in the case of former Cabinet members Tom Price and David Shulkin, feasting at the taxpayer trough. Former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt is now associated primarily with Ritz-Carlton lotion, “tactical” pants and a soundproof phonebooth.

Get married, or join a celibate religious order. Trump once boasted that avoiding sexually transmitted diseases was his own “personal Vietnam”; his aides now find that dating is their own personal Syria. People who work for Trump cannot get dates. Politico reported that “Trump supporters swipe left” could be “the single most common disclaimer on dating app profiles in Washington.” Loveless young Trump aides have “quietly settled on the margins” of D.C., in newly built neighborhoods where people don’t (yet) know each other and outcasts can enjoy anonymity.

Open Uber Eats and Instacart accounts (under a pseudonym). Take sensible precautions to minimize the inevitable shunning that comes with the job. Embattled Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, right after defending Trump’s soon-to-be-abandoned family-separation policy, unwisely dined at a Mexican restaurant — where she was heckled.

As Sarah Sanders found, even Virginia is unsafe for Trump people. And the chuckling (if not the heckling) will follow you after the job, as Washington paragons-cum-punchlines Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer know. You should feel free to blame George Soros if anybody is rude to you in public. But better to lie low, as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin does: Booed at UCLA, he canceled an appearance at his alma mater, Yale.

Get a lawyer. Very important! Do not wait until you’ve broken the law. Five former advisers to Trump — Cohen, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and George Papadopoulos — have already accepted guilty pleas or been convicted, and several more — Roger Stone, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner — could be in jeopardy, too. With so many scandals enveloping so many in Trump’s orbit, the best criminal-defense lawyers are already spoken for. (Pro tip: John Dowd, Ty Cobb and Donald McGahn, all recently departed from Trump’s legal service in less-than-glorious circumstances, may have time.)

Above all: Have fun! There are great names in the graveyard of former Trump officials. John F. Kelly, H.R. McMaster and Flynn were much-decorated generals before their humiliations, and Gary Cohn was a Wall Street titan before his. But you, Trump’s third chief of staff in two years, are not burdened by good reputation, so there’s little to lose. Worst case, you wind up in jail, which isn’t so bad. You wouldn’t be able to get a date anyway.

 

[fraurosena]

Remember all that sniffing the presidunce does? Turns out he snorts. 

Former Apprentice Staffer Claims Trump Was ‘Speed Freak,’ Invited Teen Beauty Queens to His Suite

Quote

A former staffer on The Apprentice and current stand-up comic named Noel Casler claims that Donald Trump was a “speed freak” who snorted crushed-up Adderall, and also says that Trump invited teen beauty pageant contestants up to his suite.

During a recent performance, Casler told the crowd that he worked on The Apprentice for six seasons, as well as some of Trump’s beauty pageants during the 1990s, and he made some brutal revelations:

I worked on a bunch of those beauty pageants he had in the nineties too. That was a good idea, Miss Teen Universe? Yeah, that’s like giving Jeffrey Dahmer a cooking show. He would line up the girls on the side of the stage, and he would inspect them literally, he would stick his little freaking doll fingers in their mouth and look at their teeth. I’m not kidding, this is true, he would line them up like they were pieces of meat. He’d be like, “You, you, and you, if you want to win I’m in the penthouse suite, come and see me.” Yep. If Trump had a cooking show they’d caught the douchebag diet. McDonald’s, chocolate ice cream, and girls that look like Ivanka are all he ever eats.

Casler then claimed that Trump is a “speed freak,” and that Trump “crushes up his Adderall and he sniffs it because he can’t read, so he gets really nervous when he has to read the cue cards.”

Casler told the crowd “I’m not kidding this is true. I had a 24-page NDA non-disclosure agreement, I didn’t know that he was becoming president, now it’s no way dumbass, I’m telling you everything I know.”

Watch the clip [below], via YouTube.

I did a quick wikipedia search on adderall. If the allegation that he snorts the ground up pills, it really explains a lot.

From wikipedia, bolding mine:

Quote

Adderall is generally well-tolerated and effective in treating the symptoms of ADHD and narcolepsy. At therapeutic doses, Adderall causes emotional and cognitive effects such as euphoria, change in desire for sex, increased wakefulness, and improved cognitive control. At these doses, it induces physical effects such as a faster reaction time, fatigue resistance, and increased muscle strength. In contrast, much larger doses of Adderall can impair cognitive control, cause rapid muscle breakdown, or induce a psychosis (e.g., delusions and paranoia). The side effects of Adderall vary widely among individuals, but most commonly include insomnia, dry mouth, and loss of appetite. 

Impaired cognitive control? Psychosis (delusions and paranoia)? Insomnia? Dry mouth? They all sound rather familiar, don't they?

[GreyhoundFan]

Sigh. "Trump claims ‘money we save’ from trade deal means ‘Mexico is paying’ for border wall"

Spoiler

President Trump claimed Thursday that “money we save” from a new trade deal with Mexico and Canada would make good on his long-standing promise to have Mexico pay for a new southern border wall.

Trump’s highly questionable assertion, in a morning tweet, comes as he is lobbying Congress for $5 billion to help fund construction of the wall and threatening a partial government shutdown if he does not get his way.

In recent days, as the debate over the wall has come to the fore, Trump has faced renewed criticism for appearing to have abandoned his campaign pledge to make Mexico pay for it.

“I often stated, ‘One way or the other, Mexico is going to pay for the Wall,’” Trump wrote on Twitter. “This has never changed. Our new deal with Mexico (and Canada), the USMCA, is so much better than the old, very costly & anti-USA NAFTA deal, that just by the money we save, MEXICO IS PAYING FOR THE WALL!”

Mexican officials have said there was no discussion in the trade-deal negotiations of mechanisms under which Mexico would pay for the wall.

And on Thursday, both House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) ridiculed Trump for his assertion.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Pelosi told reporters at a news conference. “Maybe he doesn’t understand how a trade agreement works. ... I think the Oval Office is an evidence-free zone.”

Pelosi, who is likely to become House speaker in January, also pointed out that Congress has yet to ratify Trump’s new trade deal.

Schumer, meanwhile, suggested on the Senate floor Thursday that if Mexico is truly funding the wall, Congress does not need to spend any money on it.

“Mr. President, if you say Mexico is going to pay for the wall through NAFTA — which it certainly won’t — then I guess we don’t have to,” Schumer said. “Let’s fund the government. Honestly. If the president really believed what he tweeted this morning, that his new NAFTA would pay for the wall, he wouldn’t be threatening to shut down the government unless American taxpayers fund his wall. You can’t have it both ways.”

Trump spent much of the 2016 campaign promising American voters that Mexico would somehow pay for the construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, a demand that angered Mexican officials but enthralled his supporters. Since becoming president, though, Trump has sought U.S. taxpayer money to fund the wall’s construction and threatened to shut down parts of the U.S. government if lawmakers do not acquiesce.

Last month, Trump and the leaders of Canada and Mexico signed documents that would rework the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The new deal, which Trump has designated the USMCA, still must be approved by Congress before it takes effect, and some Democrats have signaled they will demand changes.

But Trump is claiming that this new trade deal, even though the outcome is uncertain, would somehow pay for the wall, an assertion that has stumped many budget experts.

“Boy, this is a stretch,” said William Hoagland, a former Republican staff director of the Senate Budget Committee.

Hoagland said the only reasoning he could contemplate to back up Trump’s Twitter post Thursday is that if the U.S. economy grows because of the new trade deal, Trump could claim that the new tax revenue is a bonus and therefore is somehow related to Mexico.

But he said the same reasoning could be used to say that Canada is paying for the wall’s construction. Hoagland also said that none of this new money would actually come from Canada or Mexico. In addition, Hoagland said he could not see a scenario under which the USMCA would “save” taxpayer money, as Trump asserted in his Twitter post.

“At the end of the day, the American taxpayer is still paying for it,” he said. “Because where are the revenues coming from? They are not coming from Mexican taxpayers.”

Trump made the same argument Tuesday during a contentious Oval Office meeting, during which the two Democratic leaders urged the president not to pursue a partial government shutdown. Pelosi and Schumer instead urged Trump to take a deal that would provide $1.3 billion for border fencing by extending levels of funding.

Trump raised the idea that some money for the wall could come from the newly renegotiated North American trade agreement, an idea that Pelosi dismissed.

On Thursday morning, the White House released a summary of a Wednesday phone call between Trump and Mexico’s new president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The readout said the two leaders discussed illegal immigration, but it made no mention of Trump’s proposed border wall.

I long for the days when the US president had actual live brain cells.

[fraurosena]

Trump plans 16-day holiday visit to Mar-a-Lago, because he has nothing better to do, like run the country or something.

Quote

President Donald Trump is expected to spend 16 days at Mar-a-Lago over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, according to an alert issued by the Federal Aviation Administration this morning.

The alert warns pilots to avoid the airspace over Mar-a-Lago during the more than two-week time frame, from Dec. 21 to Jan. 6, but does not indicate when Air Force One will arrive or depart Palm Beach International Airport.

The upcoming visit would be longer than last year’s 12-day visit, putting Trump in Palm Beach a day earlier than his Dec. 22 arrival last year and four days later than his Jan. 2 departure. It would be his longest retreat at Mar-a-Lago, dubbed the Southern White House, since the president’s inauguration in January 2017.

Trump’s extended stay means he will not be in Washington when the new Congress, including the Democratic majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, is sworn in on Jan. 3. That event will mark the end of the GOP’s eight-year grip on the House, although Republicans slightly increased their Senate majority in the 2018 midterm elections.

It also means a more prolonged street closures in the Town of Palm Beach, and sporadic traffic tie-ups, as well as more security expenses for local law enforcement agencies that assist the Secret Service in protecting the president and first family.

“We are certainly grateful to the president of the United States that he enjoys his Palm Beach White House,” said Palm Beach mayor Gail Coniglio. “The police department and town managers will take the appropriate steps to continue protection for the safety and security of the president and the public.”

The president’s planned arrival date — Dec. 21 — is the final day for the White House and Congress to avoid a government shutdown. Trump has vowed to shut down the government if Democratic congressional leaders do not give him the money he wants to build a wall along the southern border.

The president’s holiday could also be interrupted by his search for a new chief of staff, a pivotal West Wing post soon to be vacant following the announced resignation of John Kelly. The presumptive heir apparent, Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff Nick Ayers, rejected Trump’s offer, which reportedly left the president befuddled and angry and without a back-up in the wings.

Although the president’s schedule is not yet known, he will likely continue two family traditions: Christmas Eve service at Bethesda-by-the-Sea church and his annual New Years Eve party at Mar-a-Lago.

The red-carpet affair is not open to the public. However, club members and guests will pay more this year to get in.

Ticket prices for dues-paying club members are $600, up from $600 last year and $525 the year before, according to Palm Beach sources. Club guests will pay a hefty $1,000 to ring in the New Year with the president, up from $750 last year and $575 the year before, according to sources.

Party-goers at last year’s event included Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Fox News host Lou Dobbs, the parents of first lady Melania Trump for billionaire casino owner Steve Wynn, who stepped down as finance chairman of the Republican National Committee amid allegations of sexual misconduct several weeks after the Mar-a-Lago party.

The Jan. 6 departure date means the president could also attend the Palm Beach Police Foundation’s Policeman’s ball on Jan. 5. The foundation is one of the few charities that remained loyal to Mar-a-Lago after more than two dozens groups canceled their events in the wake of the the president’s comments about a deadly, white supremecist protest in Charlottesville, Va.

As Trump did last year, the president will likely tweet before heading off to golf. During his 2017 holiday visit, Trump visited his golf club eight time, playing with an impressive roster of pros including Daniel Berger, Jim Herman and Justin Thomas, PGA Tour member Bryson DeChambeau and former professional golfer Dana Quigley.

During his 2017 holiday visit, Trump visited his golf club eight times, playing with an impressive roster of pros including Daniel Berger, Jim Herman and Justin Thomas, PGA Tour member Bryson DeChambeau and former professional golfer Dana Quigley.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump has been walking a tightrope of lies"

Spoiler

There was plenty of awful legal news for President Trump this week, but the worst may have come from an official who hasn’t yet been sworn in.

Letitia James, who will become the New York state attorney general next month, told NBC she plans to “use every area of the law to investigate President Trump and his business transactions and that of his family as well.” James also said she hopes to pursue state charges against Trump associates whom the president might pardon for federal crimes.

No wonder Trump was so untethered when Chuck and Nancy dropped by.

Trump has been walking a tightrope of lies all his adult life, and now he is teetering. He has inflated his wealth. He has aggrandized his business acumen. He has managed to convince supporters that he is a respected businessman who brilliantly commanded a vast real estate empire. In a fanciful 2015 statement of his net worth, he claimed that his brand alone — just the name Trump — was worth $3 billion.

I wonder what it’s worth now.

In reality, Trump has never come anywhere near the top rank of New York real estate developers. He ran not a huge, sprawling enterprise but a small family firm in which he and his children had direct control. He was seen as so unreliable that genuine moguls refused to have anything to do with him. When he tried to go big — risking everything on casino development in Atlantic City — he failed miserably despite his father’s efforts to bail him out. His bankers were left holding the bag, and now most major financial institutions won’t lend the Trump Organization a dime. It was Trump’s undeniable skill as a television performer on “The Apprentice” that saved him from total ruin.

Now the law is beginning to squeeze him from all directions. His former consigliere, Michael Cohen, was sentenced Wednesday to three years in prison. One of the crimes Cohen confessed to was violating federal campaign finance laws by orchestrating six-figure payments to a Playboy model and an adult-film star, in the weeks before the 2016 election, to ensure their silence about sexual encounters they say they had with Trump. Cohen says he did this at Trump’s direction.

Trump’s see-no-evil allies dismiss Cohen as a proven liar about other matters. But also Wednesday, the company that owns the National Enquirer — American Media Inc. (AMI), which is run by Trump’s close friend David Pecker — admitted playing a major role in that same hush-money scheme. The aim, according to the company, was to help Trump win the election.

Trump responded by tweeting that “I never directed Michael Cohen to break the law.” But in the past, the president has also said that there weren’t any hush-money payments; that if such payments were made, he didn’t know about them; and that the payments, which totaled $280,000, were a “simple private transaction.”

The bottom line is that two witnesses, Cohen and AMI, independently now implicate the president of the United States in the commission of two felonies.

The campaign finance case is being brought by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. Back in Washington, meanwhile, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has been busy, as well.

We learned this week that Michael Flynn, Trump’s short-lived national security adviser, has met with Mueller’s team 19 times to tell them what he knows. We also learned that Cohen has been eagerly cooperating with the Mueller probe. This means that at least two people in a position to know whether collusion with the Russians took place are singing like songbirds.

Potentially more serious for Trump and his family in the long run, however, is what the New York state probe might discover.

How much of the Trump Organization’s revenue has come from the sale of luxury real estate to oligarchs from Russia and other kleptocracies? Where did these buyers’ money come from? Why was Deutsche Bank — recently raided by German authorities and under investigation for money laundering — the only major financial institution willing to lend money to Trump in recent years? Where did Trump’s company get the large amounts of cash used in several transactions that Post reporters uncovered? How much commingling of funds was there between Trump’s company and his eponymous foundation?

Trump’s longtime accountant, Allen Weisselberg, has turned state’s evidence. He may be the Virgil who guides federal, state and local prosecutors through a Trumpian inferno of shell companies and opaque transactions. The outlines of Trump’s fate begin to emerge.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

From Jennifer Rubin: "All the things Trump didn’t count on"

Spoiler

President Trump’s inability to respond to one charge emanating from one witness, a charge not even within the purview of the special counsel, suggests he will be entirely overwhelmed when the closet full of shoes starts dropping. He never knew about the payments, or he did, or it was Michael Cohen’s fault, or it wasn’t a crime, or if it was a crime it was no big deal. This might be the most inept response to allegations of presidential wrongdoing ever.

Michael Cohen’s interview with ABC News underscores a critical point: His own credibility has been enhanced because prosecutors have so much information tying Trump to illegal payments and suggesting he knowingly made the payments in a way to avoid detection or harm to his campaign. (“There’s a substantial amount of information that they possess that corroborates the fact that I am telling the truth,” he said.)

Now consider all the other investigations out there — on collusion, the Trump Foundation and obstruction of justice. Each of those investigations represents a bevy of possible criminal charges. Under the umbrella of “obstruction,” there could be specific criminal violations for obstruction, witness tampering, perjury and conspiracy. Consider that Robert S. Mueller III and the Southern District of New York could have multiple witnesses, phone records, texts, financial records, Trump’s own words and, in some cases, recordings to bolster his case. The sheer weight of all that evidence would break even a stable defendant represented by the best counsel.

For Trump, it is becoming hard to imagine how he survives politically or legally. Even if he avoids impeachment or avoids removal, only about a third of the country (with a smidgen of the total universe of evidence available to them) thinks he’s innocent. When charge after charge piles up, each backed up by multiple pieces of evidence, it’s not impossible to imagine that elected Republicans will turn on him — or that Republican voters, who see his presidency at a standstill, will begin to look for alternatives for 2020.

Remember that Trump never thought he’d really get elected — and then all this would come out. And once he got elected, he failed entirely to appreciate that he could not control investigators, witnesses, the press and even former associates. Cohen is right when he says that “the pressure of the job is much more than what he thought it was going to be. It’s not like the Trump Organization where he would bark out orders and people would blindly follow what he wanted done.”

Trump seems to have gotten a bunch of things wrong:

• He thought former attorney general Jeff Sessions would shut down the Russia probe;
• He thought the bullying and lies and congressional allies would impede investigators;
• He thought Cohen would never flip and would never have tapes and other evidence;
• He never thought Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg or American Media executives or David Pecker would cooperate with authorities;
• He never thought his tweets and public outbursts were helping to incriminate him;
• He never thought the shady operation of his foundation would draw the attention of the press, and in turn of New York state authorities;
• He never thought his pardon power would be so useless (If he pardons associates, the dam may break in Congress; if he tries to pardon himself it likely would be ineffective);
• He never thought he’d have to answer prosecutors' questions, or that his written answers may have locked him into answers that could be disputed by multiple witnesses;
• He never thought he’d face Democrats in Congress with subpoena power; and
• He never thought his media circus would be entirely ineffective in stopping skilled prosecutors.

Trump’s presidency, his financial empire and even his freedom are at risk. (Presidents can be indicted after leaving office and cannot pass out pardons for state offenses.) He can be angry at Sessions or Cohen, but he is solely responsible for his own fate, which right now looks awfully bleak.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I hope the "acting" COS is prepared for the shitshow tweet storm that is likely to happen if Dumpy hears this: "‘A breakdown in trust’: Revelations about hush money and Russian interference renew debate over the legitimacy of Trump’s 2016 win"

Spoiler

As if the country didn’t have enough to be divided about, now the forces aligned for and against President Trump are battling over whether his presidency is legitimate.

The evidence emerging in recent days and months of crimes committed to help Trump win the presidency is fueling arguments from Democrats and other Trump critics that the man in the Oval Office got the job through nefarious means. Even without proof that those crimes swayed votes, the critics say Trump has no moral hold on the office.

In the past week, the legitimacy debate has swelled with each new court filing in cases stemming from the investigations into Trump’s 2016 campaign.

First came the statement by federal prosecutors in New York that Trump attorney Michael ­Cohen “sought to influence the election from the shadows” by arranging to pay hush money to women who said they had extramarital affairs with Trump. Then, on Tuesday, executives at the National Enquirer’s parent company admitted paying hush money to prevent news of the candidate’s alleged infidelities “from influencing the election.”

In Congress, in the media and among activists, criticism of Trump is increasingly taking the form of arguments that he won office fraudulently — especially as the hush-money revelations have landed atop allegations by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s team that Russian agents engaged in a criminal scheme to undermine Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy.

“People don’t actually really consider Trump a legitimate president,” former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean said on MSNBC last month. “He was obviously elected and all this business, but he does not represent American values.”

Trump and his defenders retort that prosecutors so far have fallen well short of proving criminal deeds by the president himself. They say the legitimacy debate is just one more weapon in a bristling partisan arsenal deployed by Trump haters on the left.

“Questioning Trump’s legitimacy is basically the birtherism of the left,” said Christopher Buskirk, publisher of American Greatness, a conservative website. “Illegitimacy is just where both left and right are going these days when they lose elections. We don’t have a shared consensus on what the institutions of government should do, and that makes it harder for partisans to accept the outcome of elections.”

The attack on Trump’s right to govern comes at a vulnerable moment in American political history. His three immediate predecessors also were attacked as illegitimate occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, a signal to political scientists and historians that the American consensus over how the nation is governed is suffering from significant stress.

Trump seemed keenly sensitive to questions about his legitimacy even before “Not My President” signs and chants emerged at the Women’s March the day after his inauguration. Beginning in the transition, Trump was false asserting that he really won the popular vote in addition to the electoral college majority.

Before Trump took office, Reps. John Lewis (D-Ga.) and Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), who is now poised to become chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, declared him an illegitimate president. New York’s attorney ­general-elect, Letitia James, campaigned this fall on her intention to “challenge this illegitimate president.”

But the illegitimacy argument has made little or no inroads into the president’s support.

Trump’s base tends to reject the idea that the president was involved in illegal acts during the campaign. Even Republicans in Congress who are, as Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) put it, “1,000 percent certain that the Russians interfered in our election” say the meddling didn’t change the result of the vote.

“Russia didn’t beat Clinton,” Graham tweeted. “Trump beat Clinton.”

“It is possible to conclude Russian interfered in our election in 2016 without delegitimizing his electoral success,” Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) said earlier this year.

For three decades now, presidents have faced not only the usual opposition from people who voted against them, but a more foundational challenge to their credibility as the nation’s chief executive.

Bill Clinton’s presidency was labeled illegitimate by some conservative opponents because he had been accused by several women of improper sexual conduct, because his informal style sullied the office and because he won with only a plurality of the popular vote.

The historically close 2000 election, decided in the end by the U.S. Supreme Court, left George W. Bush facing allegations of illegitimacy from day one, with Lewis and some other members of Congress refusing to attend his inauguration because they didn’t accept Bush as the duly elected president.

And Barack Obama had to fend off sometimes inchoate cries of illegitimacy from a significant minority of voters who believed that he was not born where his birth certificate said he was but was actually a foreigner.

The jump from opposing a president to declaring him illegitimate stems from a breakdown in trust, said Roderick Hart, a government professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

“We’ve shifted from institutional trust — the traditional idea that the institution of the presidency will survive despite any one candidate losing — to partisan trust, the idea that I don’t care who the president is as long as he marches in the direction I want,” Hart said.

In 2000, although many supporters of Democrat Al Gore believed the election had been stolen from him by courts partial to Republican George W. Bush, “institutional trust won out, especially after Gore’s statements saying, ‘I’ve lost, I’m not happy about it, but the nation will move on and Bush is our president,’ ” Hart said.

“With Obama, it took parts of the nation a while to get behind a black president, but the institutional trust held because he was a squeaky-clean guy,” Hart said. “But with Trump, partisan trust has taken precedence. Look at the evangelicals, who stay with him even though he’s a profligate, a person from the dark side.”

Legally, Trump’s hold on office seems firm. The Founders designed the presidency to avoid disputes over who won. The electoral college gets to decide the winner, period. With rare exceptions, legal scholars agree there’s no mechanism for do-overs in case of election fraud. (Non-presidential elections are a different story, as the current debate over whether to call a new vote in North Carolina’s disputed 9th Congressional District illustrates.)

The only remedies the Constitution provides if a president were to be fraudulently elected are impeachment or waiting for the next election, most scholars say.

But that hasn’t stopped critics of the president from jumping to a challenge to his right to be chief executive.

“We’re in a very polarized period where the other side is not only wrong, but illegal,” said Rick Hasen, a professor at the University of California at Irvine’s law school and author of the Election Law Blog. But Hasen said many of those who allege that Trump broke the law are really raising larger objections to his disruptive manner and disregard for facts and traditions.

“Trump is both a cause of and a reflection of a breakdown in norms, so it’s not surprising that you see attacks on his legitimacy,” he said.

Still, those who question Trump’s legitimacy go beyond whether he won by fraudulent means, often focusing on his basic fitness to hold the office — a blanket rejection of the president reminiscent of how some of Richard M. Nixon’s opponents regarded him from the start.

In 1968, when violent clashes between protesters and police turned the Democratic convention in Chicago bloody and when race riots seared American cities, the ensuing debate about the legitimacy of Nixon’s presidency wasn’t based on questions about campaign fraud. Rather, many Americans who opposed Nixon declared his presidency illegitimate because he led what they considered an illegal war in Vietnam.

“The 1968 election was so pyrotechnic in so many ways — the nation was asking existential questions of who are we, what kind of people are we?” said Hart, the government professor. “In a time that was at least as tumultuous as today, people didn’t trust the institution of the presidency.”

Yet Nixon was reelected in a landslide in 1972. Nixon’s hold on power — and most importantly on his supporters — didn’t collapse until the release in 1974 of the smoking gun tape that proved that Nixon had directed the coverup of the burglary of the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate in Washington.

“An awful lot of stuff happened before the smoking gun, yet a lot of Republicans stayed with Nixon,” said Stephen Craig, a political scientist at the University of Florida. “The partisanship is so deep now that it may take multiple smoking guns to change Trump’s supporters’ minds.”

It’s also possible that evidence of crimes wouldn’t matter to many of the president’s supporters, affirming his statement in 2016 that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”

“It all comes back to this idea of a shattered consensus,” said Buskirk, the conservative publisher. “In this time of division, every election seems like the most important. You’re playing for everything every time.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Is there anything Trump touches that isn’t corrupt?"

Spoiler

President Trump would like to consider himself a modern-day King Midas, with the ability to turn anything he touches to gold (and his Manhattan apartment certainly looks like the actual Midas careened drunkenly about the place, laying hands on everything from the wallpaper to the furniture). But it’s becoming clearer by the day that everything he touches is poisoned by corruption.

It’s not as though we didn’t know it before, but somehow the Republicans who followed him into power in Washington haven’t fully reckoned with what they made themselves a part of. They figured out how to live with their fears about his ideological reliability (“It’s about judges!”) and his repellent personality (“I wish he’d tweet less, but ... judges!”), but with each new corruption scandal, they seem caught off-guard, as though surprised that they’d have to defend him.

And now it seems that just about everything Trump has ever done has in one way or another either been proved to be corrupt or is under investigation and will likely be proved corrupt. Here’s the latest, from the Wall Street Journal:

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are investigating whether President Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee misspent some of the record $107 million it raised from donations, people familiar with the matter said.

The criminal probe by the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, which is in its early stages, also is examining whether some of the committee’s top donors gave money in exchange for access to the incoming Trump administration, policy concessions or to influence official administration positions, some of the people said.

Giving money in exchange for political favors could run afoul of federal corruption laws. Diverting funds from the organization, which was registered as a nonprofit, could also violate federal law.

At this point, the only surprise would be if there hadn’t been any corrupt dealings in the inauguration. It has long been a source of suspicion (for those who care about this sort of thing), because the records are not public, and the sums are staggering.

How could they have spent that much money? One clue comes in the form of an event-planning company called WIS Media Partners that was formed 45 days before the inauguration, and was led by Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a friend of Melania Trump’s. The company received an incredible $25.8 million in inaugural funds for doing ... something or other.

According to the Wall Street Journal report, prosecutors now have a tape of her and Michael Cohen in which “Ms. Wolkoff expressed concern about how the inaugural committee was spending money.” You don’t say. “Ms. Wolkoff and several partners were paid about $1.6 million of the $25.8 million, and the remainder went to subcontractors, a person familiar with Ms. Wolkoff’s work said,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

Subcontractors, yes. Am I the only one who suspects that some of those millions found their way into Trump’s bank account, through a web of cutouts and shell companies? And that if we actually saw his tax returns we’d be able to trace the path back to him?

Perhaps that’s unfair of me; after all, as of yet we have no evidence that such a thing occurred. But at this point, it’s hard not to assume that if Trump is involved, there’s probably something corrupt happening and it probably means he’s getting paid.

Just consider the following brief roundup:

• Trump’s campaign is under investigation for possible hidden dealings with Russia and a possible conspiracy to violate campaign-finance laws.
• Trump's administration has been beset with a shocking number of scandals of various types.
• Trump is currently being sued for allegedly violating the Constitution’s emoluments clause, since foreign governments are directing money his way by booking large numbers of rooms and holding events at his properties.
• The attorney general of New York is seeking to have the Trump Foundation dissolved, citing a pattern of "persistently illegal conduct" that made the foundation little more than a scam devoted to self-dealing.
• In October, it was revealed in an exhaustively documented investigation that Trump, his father and his siblings engaged in a conspiracy to commit tax fraud on an absolutely epic scale, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
• Trump and his daughter Ivanka Trump repeatedly misled buyers and investors about properties they were developing in order to acquire funding and pump up sales.

So there are allegations and investigations around Trump’s business, Trump’s personal taxes, Trump’s campaign, Trump’s inauguration, Trump’s foundation and Trump’s administration.

We see it in even relatively trivial ways, such as Trump charging the Secret Service hundreds of thousands of dollars to use golf carts to get around his properties when he visits there, or the fact that he has offered ambassadorships to four different members of his Mar-a-Lago club, all of whom have paid him six-figure sums in membership fees.

Trump is always looking to get paid, and has never in his life seemed too concerned about what ethics or the law demanded, except insofar as it might require covering his tracks. Perhaps it would be better to ask not what Trump is involved in that’s corrupt, but what Trump is involved in that isn’t corrupt.

His tax returns are the key to answering those questions, which is why he will fight like hell to keep them secret. When the House Ways and Means Committee demands them once Democrats take over in January, as it has a legal right to do, Trump will probably order the IRS not to comply with the law, and the whole matter will end up before the Supreme Court. There’s no telling if the court’s five conservatives will save him, but before they decide, we’ll have plenty of time to debate it.

And when we have that debate, what will Republicans say? How will they argue that the American public, faced with the most comprehensively, blatantly, obviously corrupt president certainly of our lifetimes and perhaps in all of American history, has no right to see the documents that could reveal the full extent of his corruption? How will they look voters in the face and say, "You don't have to know — just trust Trump that everything is on the level"? How will they claim afterward that they care in the least about integrity in government? How will they sleep at night?

If history is any guide, they’ll find a way. And who knows, maybe Trump will get away with all of it. But every new question we ask reveals that this president and this presidency is even more rotten than we realized. We’ve only begun to plumb the depths.

 

[fraurosena]

Oh dear. He's troubled by the media reports again.

 

[Howl]

Yup, this is where we're at, people.   (This video was also embedded in the article posted by @fraurosena above)

Also, just learned the phrase, tweaker tweeting.  Does Noel Casler know where the tapes are hidden?

And, according to commenters, this speech is protected by 1st Amendment rights.  Comedians know what the limits are, thanks to Lenny Bruce. 

[AmazonGrace]

https://twitter.com/ChrisMurphyCT/status/1073919780279726081

[AmazonGrace]

 

[smittykins]

37 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

Good dogs!

[GreyhoundFan]

"As Trump prepares for his holiday respite in Florida, he is more isolated than ever"

Spoiler

President Trump, more isolated than at any point in his presidency, is scheduled to leave Washington at the end of this week for a holiday respite: two-plus weeks at his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago. When he returns in January, he will be girding for what is likely to be the most difficult year yet of his tumultuous presidency.

His approval ratings aren’t much different than they were when he took office. His hardcore supporters haven’t budged. GOP elected officials remain hesitant to break with him. But his party took a beating in the midterm elections, and the legal process continues to move closer to him. Newly empowered House Democrats are preparing to challenge his authority with hearings and investigations.

Republican elected officials have stuck with him, mindful of his support among the GOP rank and file. But Senate Republicans last week joined with Democrats to deliver a pair of rebukes over the administration’s policy toward Saudi Arabia and the president’s unwillingness to condemn Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom the CIA concluded sanctioned the murder of journalist and Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Was that a one-off or cracks in the wall?

Trump’s on-again, off-again search for a replacement for outgoing White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly is symptomatic of his situation. In any presidency, the role of chief of staff is vital. For Trump, at this moment, it could be crucial. Yet potential contenders walked away from the job until the president tweeted on Friday afternoon that he was naming budget director Mick Mulvaney as his acting chief of staff, not his permanent one.

The announcement came hours after former New Jersey governor Chris Christie took himself out of contention for the post. Christie had spent more than an hour with the president on Thursday talking about the job. His decision to withdraw from consideration came at the end of a week that began when Nick Ayers, who serves as chief of staff to Vice President Pence and who was in line to succeed Kelly, suddenly backed out. Several names were floated but none came to fruition.

Christie and Trump have been friends for years, long before they became rivals for the GOP nomination in 2016. Christie assumed he would outlast Trump in that competition. When the opposite happened, he immediately endorsed Trump, who later asked him to head up transition planning. However, days after the election, Christie was summarily dismissed as transition director. Trump then asked Christie to consider other jobs in the administration. Christie rejected them. Recently, he was reported to be in the mix to succeed Jeff Sessions as attorney general, a job he would have liked but which went to former attorney general William P. Barr.

Christie has maintained a cordial and clear-eyed relationship with the president. Though he carries some political baggage from his time as governor, he had credentials that few of the others considered for the chief of staff position could offer — skills that Trump likely will need in the year ahead. Among them were executive experience, political experience, communications skills, independent political relationships and, above all, legal experience as a former U.S. attorney.

Christie apparently concluded this was no time to go inside the Trump administration and to work for a president who rarely takes the advice of his advisers and whose volatility and unpredictability could prove to be even more detrimental in the months ahead.

The decisions by Ayers, Christie and others underscore the precariousness of Trump’s position. At a time when he will need all the strength, wisdom, firepower and support directly around him, Trump presides over a White House that is thinning out rather than beefing up.

The White House Counsel’s Office is understaffed heading into a year that could bring multiple requests for documents from congressional committees and the possibility of impeachment proceedings, if what special counsel Robert S. Mueller III ultimately reports rises to that level. So far that is an open question. Others already have moved out of the White House to jobs on the Trump 2020 campaign or the private sector. More could follow in the months ahead.

Some loyalists remain. Among them are Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Sanders, and the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner. But on the issue of fresh recruits, the question is: Who would want to come to work for a president at this moment, knowing that could result in sizable legal fees as a side benefit?

For Trump, a group of people he once counted as among his most trusted advisers has been turned into a weapon in the hands of prosecutors. Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime fixer and lawyer who once said he would take a bullet for Trump, has turned. Last week Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison for his crimes. He told the court that he had done some of what he did, including lying to Congress, to hide the “dirty deeds” of Trump.

In an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Cohen repeated what he said in court, that he had acted at Trump’s direction in paying off two women who alleged they had affairs with the president. He accused Trump of being a serial liar. Trump in turn has accused Cohen of lying, but the president’s credibility on these matters has been shredded. He first denied any knowledge of the payments to Karen McDougal and adult-film actress Stormy Daniels, but his story has changed repeatedly, whenever evidence comes forward that undermines what he last said.

Another person who once protected the president and is now on the other side is David Pecker, of American Media, the publisher of the National Enquirer, which shielded Trump through the campaign by buying and killing damaging stories and through phony stories about Hillary Clinton. On the day Cohen was sentenced, Pecker acknowledged in a filing that the Enquirer — out of concern that the revelation could influence the outcome of the election — had paid McDougal $150,000 to keep her story from becoming public.

Equally worrisome for Trump could be the role of Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s longtime chief financial officer and the person who must know as much as anyone about the inner financial workings of Trump’s empire. He has been granted immunity from prosecution in return for his cooperation.

Meanwhile, Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and has cooperated with prosecutors. His former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, is in prison for crimes unrelated to the campaign. His former deputy campaign manager, Rick Gates, Manafort’s business partner, has also pleaded guilty for his role in the Manafort business.

No one outside Mueller’s circle knows what the final conclusions of his investigation will say — on Russia, on campaign finance violations, on the financial dealings of the Trump Organization, on any of the multiple threads that exist. The same can be said of the work of federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York.

Congress is not likely to impeach the president over violations of campaign finance law, but the congressional machinery is cranking up to investigate the many aspects of Trump’s operations that have fallen under the view of prosecutors. The president can only wait, nervously, to see where it all leads. He will continue to fire back, to try to diminish the work of the prosecutors. But he does so from a far shakier position.

 

[AmazonGrace]

Manbaby wants legislation to force SNL say nice things about him 

 

[AmazonGrace]

Manbaby has the right to remain silent but he won't 

 

Reminder: https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-missing-dnc-server-is-neither-missing-nor-a-server

[47of74]

And fuckhead didn’t melt.

https://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/ny-pol-trump-arlington-cemetery-wreath-visit-20181215-story.html

[onekidanddone]

1 hour ago, AmazonGrace said:

Manbaby wants legislation to force SNL say nice things about him 

 

Hold a sec because I do seem to recall he mocked SNL saying their ratings sucked and nobody watched it right? What does he mean by  "Dem commercials"?

[Audrey2]

1 hour ago, AmazonGrace said:

Manbaby wants legislation to force SNL say nice things about him 

 

I'm going to show my age. I was in college in the early 90's, then continued to watch Saturday Night Live until around 1999 or 2000. I remember SNL roasting George Bush, Bob Dole, and George W. Bush, but I also remember its treatment of Ross Perot, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore. If anything, it was an equal opportunity annoyer. I don't remember it being harder on one party than another; if anything, some candidates/ Presidents were easier to lampoon, and that is why SNL lampooned them more. With Trump, the material just writes itself. I feel like I'm on an episode of SNL every time I check the news, as Trump continues to lower the bar. At present, his bar goes through the core of the earth.