Trump 38: Donald Trump and the Wall of Lies

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump advisers are cynically feeding his raging ego, and we’re all the victims"

Spoiler

Remember when that anonymous administration official caused a political explosion with a clandestine op-ed piece, smuggled out to the public, informing us that there is a heroic internal resistance toiling away at the heart of the Trump administration, rescuing the country from President Trump’s worst impulses?

With new reports indicating that Trump’s government shutdown is now beginning to threaten serious damage to the economy, it would be nice to hear from some of those people right now. Why aren’t we? Sure, since then, there have been numerous departures, presumably of those who were inclined to constrain Trump. But is there really nothing left of this patriotic resistance?

Instead, we now learn that there are people inside the administration who are actually playing to those terrible impulses in a way that appears to be keeping the shutdown going. The only thing apparently arrayed against that is the vain hope of other insiders that Trump’s ego will ultimately weigh on the side of reopening the government.

The New York Times has an alarming new article documenting the economic damage that the shutdown is beginning to inflict. White House economic advisers are now acknowledging that it’s putting a greater damper on growth than previously anticipated. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers are furloughed or working without pay, and thousands of government contractors are sidelined.

With the economy already taking a hit from Trump’s impulsive and unpredictable trade war (anyone else noticing a pattern here?), economists warn that a damper on economic confidence could soon follow, possibly pushing the U.S. economy into contraction.

Given how deeply Trump’s image of his own success is tied up in the economy’s performance, some in the administration believe that if the economic indicators really start going south, that could be what forces Trump to relent.

But others inside the administration are encouraging Trump to hold fast. From the Times piece (emphasis mine):

To blunt the shutdown’s effects, the administration on Tuesday called tens of thousands of employees back to work, without pay, to process tax returns, ensure flight safety and inspect food and drugs. But some people involved in the shutdown discussions in the White House have privately said they anticipate that Mr. Trump will grow anxious about the economic impact in the coming days, accelerating an end to the stalemate. Others close to the president believe Mr. Trump has leverage and are encouraging him to stand by his demands.

We already know that those telling Trump to stick to a hard line include new White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, a tea party ideologue who’s cheering at what he sees as a way to finally realize the dream of downsized government. These ranks also almost certainly include top Trump adviser Stephen Miller, whose most pressing life mission is apparently to do all he can to ensure that the United States receives as few immigrants as possible. Miller surely knows this is his last shot at getting the wall, and may also believe that there’s a possibility of forcing a deal that includes further restrictions on asylum-seeking and legal immigration, his true holy grail.

In other words, virulent anti-government and anti-immigrant advisers are conspiring to convince the president that he’s the one with all the leverage here, and that if he just remains his strong, powerful and resolute self, he will win a glorious victory. Fox News has also been regularly filling Trump’s head with visions of such an outcome.

We need to know more about these internal deliberations, however. Is anyone telling the president the opposite — that threatening great damage to the economy for the sake of a wall that won’t actually solve the most pressing crisis at the border is utter lunacy? And that Trump does not actually have the leverage here?

In that op ed written by the heroic resistance fighter inside the administration, he or she did make a valuable point, noting: “The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.”

Everyone following this debate knows full well that Trump wants this wall only because he fears that a loss would be too much for his base to bear at a moment when he’ll need his core supporters more than ever in the face of his mounting political and legal travails. Just look at Tuesday’s Senate hearing for William Barr, Trump’s pick for attorney general. While it wasn’t entirely reassuring, the primary takeaway from it, as Dana Milbank writes, is that Barr will not protect Trump from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

Even top Republicans know full well that Trump has no endgame and no real leverage here. We know this because Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) reportedly told the president this to his face in December:

McConnell told the president that he had no leverage and that, without a clear strategy, he would be “boxed in a canyon.” He tried to make the case to Trump that even if Pelosi and Schumer were interested in cutting a deal with him, they would be constrained from compromising because of internal Democratic Party pressures to oppose Trump’s wall, these officials said.

This is right, of course. Democrats cannot give Trump his wall, because it polls in the single digits among Democratic voters; because the new House Democratic caucus is unprecedentedly diverse and mostly represents parts of the country that are comfortable with immigration and globalization, meaning the wall would be a middle finger in the face of the American majority that rejected Trump’s closing campaign message of hateful anti-immigrant xenophobia; and because caving now would set a terrible precedent, paving the way for Trump to demand extortion for far worse things down the road.

But Trump simply doesn’t understand any of these basic incentives. Is anyone on the inside trying to explain any of it to him?

Apparently the opposite is happening. Which means we now have to hope that Trump’s ego takes on so much water from the worsening economic indicators that it overrides the investment his ego has in the wall. Yes, we’ve really come to this.

 

[Howl]

52 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

 

Love Jeff Tiedrich! Quite the astute fellow: 

 

[47of74]

Something occurred to me this evening.  The Orange Fuck Knob is not even a halfway decent foreign agent.  If he was a halfway decent agent people wouldn't know that he is one until it was way too late.  But of course since the Orange Fuck Knob is such a fuck up he can't help but let everyone know that he's a Russian agent. 

[Penny]

Did anyone notice the pictures at the border of lying Ted?  He looks like he is either hiding from the mob or in witness protection. 

[onekidanddone]

36 minutes ago, Penny said:

Did anyone notice the pictures at the border of lying Ted?  He looks like he is either hiding from the mob or in witness protection. 

Where can I find it?

[AmazonGrace]

2 hours ago, onekidanddone said:

Where can I find it?

One pic is on pg 7 in the memes and shenanigans thread

[AmazonGrace]

This thread is far and beyond. (It's your president. )

[AmazonGrace]

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Democrats and activists punish Trump with a new strategy: Ignoring him"

Spoiler

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, once one of President Trump’s biggest antagonists on Twitter, isn’t engaging the president these days — even after he went after the Massachusetts Democrat, her husband, and her beer. Trump didn’t come up in the Golden Globe Awards this year, a departure from the past two years where he was maligned repeatedly from the stage. A satirical cable show about him has been canceled. A group of rank-and-file House Democrats turned down Trump’s invitation to have lunch at the White House on Tuesday.

Trump, who recently pined about being lonely in the White House, is lately finding himself in a position he’s rarely been in over the past few years: Ignored.

His political cachet has been driven by an unerring ability to goad other people into fights that benefit him. The metric he cares about is owning the television ratings and national attention, more than polling or anything else.

So what happens when, instead, he is met with something of a shrug?

The new silent treatment limits Trump’s ability to dictate national coverage and frame the day’s debate. And it’s providing an early template for how Democratic presidential candidates may attempt to deal with him in 2020, essentially forcing him out of a conversation they want to have with voters.

Former secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro, who announced his 2020 campaign over the weekend, mentioned Trump only in passing. Sen. Kamala D. Harris of California, during a book tour that served as a warmup for a likely presidential campaign, rarely brought up Trump unless asked.

“My focus, if I were going to run,” Harris said recently on MSNBC, “it would not be Donald Trump.”

Trump has spent much of his presidency as an inescapable presence. On TV. On front pages. He is tucked inside commentary about football games and Grammy Award winners, and a presence during bus stop conversations and church potluck dinners.

“Donald Trump’s main activity, from the time when he joined his father’s company as a young man until he became president, was attention-seeking,” said Michael D’Antonio, a Trump biographer and author of the book “The Truth About Trump.” “It was as if he didn’t exist if he wasn’t being noticed. Irrelevance is, I think, more painful to him than failure.”

He has bedeviled his opponents with cutting nicknames, and long prompted knee-jerk reactions among Democrats who have struggled with how to balance their outrage over him with their attempts to offer an alternative.

“In 2016 the theory was that . . . it was okay to be fixated on Trump because what he was saying was so inherently disqualifying that there was a path to victory in just reminding people how offensive he was,” said Brian Fallon, a Democratic consultant who was the spokesman for the Hillary Clinton campaign. “Obviously, that didn’t work out.”

As president, Trump will never be fully irrelevant. Yet rather than directly confront him, Democratic candidates in 2018 began trying something new: They stopped talking about Trump so much. They found that the more they spoke about him, the more it turned off disengaged voters. They could more easily win over moderate Republicans in swing districts if they avoided focusing on him, and Democrats didn’t really need to be reminded why they were angry at him.

Only 11 percent of the Democratic ads during the final month of the November elections mentioned Trump, according to data collected by the nonpartisan Kantar Media/CMAG and cited by USA Today.

“Simply being anti-Trump isn’t enough to win the Democratic nomination and won’t be enough to win” in 2020, said Guy Cecil, chairman of Democratic super PAC Priorities USA Action. “Democrats need to tell their own story and share a forward-looking vision for where they want to take the country.”

The most aggressively anti-Trump candidates — lawyer Michael Avenatti and activist Tom Steyer, who is spending millions to advocate for Trump’s impeachment — have decided against running for the Democratic nomination. Other candidates or would-be candidates have mentioned Trump only briefly before moving on to other topics.

“I am not afraid of him and I’m not afraid of his nasty language and his name-calling,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) said in a video accompanying the Tuesday announcement of her presidential candidacy. “What this president is doing is inhumane and immoral.” She then went on to highlight her record in the Senate and her efforts to promote women’s rights and protect 9/11 first responders.

Warren embodies one of the most radical shifts in focus. She once sought to engage Trump frequently, squabbling with him on Twitter and emphasizing her willingness to scrap with him as one of her core strengths.

As she has launched her campaign this month — and tried to retell her life story — she has eliminated Trump from her lexicon almost entirely. She recorded a video of herself in her kitchen, drinking a beer and offering one to her husband (who declined). Trump criticized her, but she mentioned him only once during her later multiday trip to Iowa.

“I think we need to talk about our affirmative vision,” she told reporters in New Hampshire last weekend, when asked why she wasn’t bringing up her onetime chief nemesis. “I’m willing to fight — everyone knows that. . . . I talked serious policy here in New Hampshire and that’s what I’m going to keep on doing.”

Those challenges will get harder, particularly as Democrats move toward the general election.

“Democrats should not overlearn the lessons of 2018,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster, who argued that some level of combat with Trump will be necessary. “The midterms were about defeating Republican candidates for Congress, and 2020 will be about defeating Trump himself.”

One challenge for Democrats is to demonstrate they can capture the public’s imagination without invoking Trump.

“I do think a factor people will look at is, who . . . can cultivate a media ecosystem separate from Trump?” Fallon said. “Who has the ability to command media attention other than just lobbing attacks against Trump? Who is inherently interesting and compelling? Can Trump lob attacks at them without them getting caught in quicksand because of it? Because that is a good indicator for who can withstand the [chaos] that will be the 2020 general election.”

Linda Sarsour, a co-founder of the Women’s March, said that this weekend’s event would unveil a policy-heavy “Women’s Agenda” to emphasize what the Democratic House could focus on in 2019, and what presidential candidates could be discussing in 2020. While Trump was a huge focus in earlier marches, she said, the president’s daily outrage became a smaller and smaller part of the discussion.

“I don’t even pay attention to the president anymore; I focus on what needs to be done,” Sarsour said. “I don’t go down the rabbit hole of distraction; I don’t care whether he ordered hamburgers for people in the White House. I do follow the executive orders, because I want to know what we’ll be suing him over.”

Anthony Atamanuik, a comedian who became known primarily for his impersonation of Trump, saw his Comedy Central show canceled after the last of its 23 episodes aired in October.

The decision stemmed, he said, from a combination of the network’s skittishness over overtly political programming and Trump fatigue among viewers. Comedians have also struggled to strike the right balance with Trump, both in how to satirize events that are close to satirical on their own and how to find something new to say.

“I think there is a general fear that making fun of him gives him oxygen,” he said. “He says the same things; I could say verbatim what he’s said for two or three years. At a certain point we run out of commentary.”

 

[Cartmann99]

7 hours ago, Penny said:

Did anyone notice the pictures at the border of lying Ted?  He looks like he is either hiding from the mob or in witness protection. 

 

Lyin' Ted is losing his hair, so he's decided to grow a beard.

[GreyhoundFan]

8 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

Lyin' Ted is losing his hair, so he's decided to grow a beard.

It doesn't help things because he can still open his mouth.

[GreyhoundFan]

[AmazonGrace]

 

 

[Cartmann99]

20 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

 

From the Daily Beast article:

Quote

Meanwhile, Secretary of Treasury Steve Mnuchin and other Trump administration such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are supposed to travel to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this week.

So, it's okay for members of his cabinet to go Switzerland for a work-related trip, and for Melania to go relax in Florida, but Pelosi's work trip is cancelled? That's petty. If you want to cancel all non-essential travel during a shutdown, that's fine, but there needs to be consistent rules that everyone follows.

 

 

[WiseGirl]

What a petty, petty, petty thing 45 is. 

Of course just hearing that voice results in me yelling "Fuck you!" so loudly that I scared my dogs.  

 

[Audrey2]

This sounds like a cross between grounding your teenage daughter and being terrified the others are going to like Nancy more than they like you, so you won't let her go. (I'd say that smacks of misogyny, but he is one of the biggest misogynists there is.)

[Dandruff]

Could Pelosi get there on a non-military flight?  And bring the Press with her?

[AnywhereButHere]

I https://www.axios.com/trump-told-cohen-lie-congress-moscow-tower-fb2b1c98-9773-41c7-b350-56bcc30be972.html

Quote

President Trump directed his former personal attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about the extent of his plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow — charges to which Cohen has since pleaded guilty, Buzzfeed News' Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier report.

Details: The report — which cites "two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter" — alleges that Trump and Cohen had at least 10 face-to-face meetings about the Moscow deal during the 2016 campaign, and that Cohen provided "regular, detailed updates" to Trump's children, Donald Jr. and Ivanka. Special counsel Robert Mueller has reportedly obtained evidence that Trump directed Cohen to lie to Congress through witness interviews and internal documents and communications from the Trump Organization.

I guess this is why Giuliani was spouting off all over the airwaves yesterday. He always airs his crazy right before a big, anti-Trump news drop. 

Can we impeach this guy yet?

[Cartmann99]

*snickers*

[JenniferJuniper]

4 hours ago, Dandruff said:

Could Pelosi get there on a non-military flight?  And bring the Press with her?

No, it's a war zone

[onekidanddone]

25 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

*snickers*

How long before he tries to 86 Barr’s nomination? Watching this man unravel is both fascinating and horrifying 

[AmazonGrace]

Very cool that Trump canceled Pelosi's trip so she can get started sooner

[Howl]

14 hours ago, Dandruff said:

Could Pelosi get there on a non-military flight?  And bring the Press with her?

9 hours ago, JenniferJuniper said:

No, it's a war zone

Thanks to the Yammering Yam, our enemies were made aware of her plans. 

Likely that Trump will ultimately and disastrously withdraw the US from NATO, because it's what Putin wants and for no other reason.   I'm assuming that, apart from 45's pettiness, this was a strategic pre-emptive strike against Pelosi going to Brussels to reassure anxious allies re: NATO.   

Let's revisit this sentence in Mattis' letter resigning from Sec. of Defense: "The end date for my tenure is February 28, 2019, a date that should allow sufficient time for a successor to be nominated and confirmed as well as to make sure the Department's interests are properly articulated and protected at upcoming events to include Congressional posture hearings and the NATO Defense Ministerial meeting in February," telegraphing that these are the two most important things in this time frame. 

I came across a recent item noting the underlying reason Mattis resigned as Secretary of Defense was Trump's relentless (and effective) promotion of Putin's goals; Syria was the last straw and again, a gift to Putin and Russia's strategic interests in the Middle East. 

 

[fraurosena]

   are coming!!!

Never mind that the people seeking asylum are coming from predominantly catholic countries.