Trump 42: Racist In Chief

[fraurosena]

Huh. No bedbugs?

Why this then?

 

[Audrey2]

Well, we all know how to tell when Trump is lying... His thumbs are moving!

[fraurosena]

Holy sweet Rufus on prancing velvet hoofs!!!

 

[Howl]

Hoo boy.  Interesting times ahead.  

I woke up this morning happy that Trump has probably seen the blissful look on his wife's face when she was moving in for a cheek kiss with Justin Trudeau. 

[Dandruff]

1 hour ago, Howl said:

Hoo boy.  Interesting times ahead.  

I woke up this morning happy that Trump has probably seen the blissful look on his wife's face when she was moving in for a cheek kiss with Justin Trudeau. 

Probably a better time for her than with the orange fungus.

[GreyhoundFan]

A good one from Frank Bruni: "Donald Trump Has Worn Us All Out"

Spoiler

Donald Trump’s presidency has baffled me, enraged me and above all saddened me, because I’m a stubborn believer in America’s promise, which he mocks and imperils.

But last week his presidency did something to me that it hadn’t done before. It absolutely flattened me.

I woke up Saturday, made my coffee, shuffled to my computer, started to glance at the news and suddenly had to stop. I couldn’t go on. Trump had yet again said something untrue, once more suggested something absurd, contradicted himself, deified himself, claimed martyrdom, blamed Barack Obama, made his billionth threat and hurled his trillionth insult.

That was all clear from the headlines, which were as much as I could take. He had commandeered too many of my thoughts, run roughshod over too many of my emotions, made me question too many articles of faith.

I was sapped — if not quite of the will to live, then of the will to tweet, to Google and to surf the cable channels, where his furious mien and curious mane are ubiquitous. What I was feeling was beyond Trump fatigue and bigger than Trump exhaustion. It was Trump enervation. Trump enfeeblement.

And within it I saw a ray of hope.

Until now it has been unclear to me precisely how Trump ends. His manifestly rotten character hasn’t alienated his supporters, who are all too ready with rationalizations and fluent in trade-offs. They’re also unbothered by many of his missteps, because he has sold those to a cynical electorate as media fables and rivals’ fabrications. He’s so enterprising and assiduous at pointing the finger elsewhere that many voters have lost their bearings. Defeat is victory. Oppressors are liberators. Corruption is caring. Mar-a-Loco is Shangri-La.

But Americans of all persuasions recognize melodrama when it keeps smacking them in the head, and he has manufactured a bruising degree of it. They’re not keen on Washington or politics, so they don’t care for the way in which fevered discussions of both have become so pervasive as to be ambient.

They’re woozy and wiped out, and they can’t lay their depletion on the doorsteps of frustrated Democrats and Fake News. The president’s tweets speak for themselves, in both volume and vitriol. The president’s thunder is deafening without any amplification by CNN or MSNBC.

The turnover in his White House and the bloat of a Trump-administration diaspora can’t be dismissed as the detritus of disruption, the flotsam and jetsam of an unconventional management style. They’re what happens when you place a cyclone at the Resolute Desk. Everything splinters and screams, and you can’t find a safe space.

“Even Trump’s Supporters Are Getting Tired of His Daily Drama” was the headline on Jim Geraghty’s Monday column in National Review, which sometimes travels fantastically creative routes to reach the sunny side of Trump. Geraghty wrote that the publication’s editors “are exhausted with presidential tweets, from asking whether Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell or Chinese leader Chairman Xi is the bigger enemy, to ‘hereby ordering’ private companies to look for alternatives to operations in China.”

He linked to a lament by the conservative writer Rod Dreher, who, he noted, “is exhausted from the president behaving like ‘a clown who refuses to meet with the prime minister of Denmark because she won’t sell him Greenland.’”

Notice a theme? Apparently weariness with Trump’s wackiness does something virtually unheard-of in the United States circa 2019: It transcends partisanship.

Trump’s instinct and strategy are to conquer by overwhelming. But there’s a difference between wearing people down and wearing them out. He’s like the last seasons of “House of Cards” — a riveting spectacle devolved into a repellent burlesque, so unrestrained in its appetites that it devoured itself.

I wouldn’t be surprised if voters consciously or subconsciously conclude that they just can’t continue to live like this and that four more years would be ruinous, if not to the country as a whole, then to our individual psyches. By the time Election Day rolls around, they may crave nothing more electric than stability and serenity. That wouldn’t be a bad Democratic bumper sticker. It’s essentially the message of Joe Biden’s campaign.

According to Morning Consult’s tracking poll, Trump’s approval rating in vital swing states has declined significantly since he took office. Take Wisconsin: His approval rating in January 2017 was 47 percent, and his disapproval rating was 41, for a net plus of six percentage points. Now his approval has fallen to 41 while his disapproval has climbed to 55, for a net minus of 14.

Maybe that reflects voters’ economic worries. I suspect it’s just as much about their exhaustion. They’ve binged on Trump and now they’re overstuffed with Trump, and if Democratic candidates are smart, they’ll not dwell on his mess and madness, because voters have taken his measure and made their judgments, and what many of them want is release from the incessant drumbeat of that infernal syllable: Trump, Trump, Trump.

They’d like a new mini-series with a different cast, and Democrats aren’t giving them that if they keep putting Trump’s name above the title. On Saturday and then again on Sunday, I turned the whole damn show off and fled to the park for fresh air. I pray that’s some sort of omen.

 

[Audrey2]

2 hours ago, Dandruff said:

Probably a better time for her than with the orange fungus.

I think having a colonoscopy for her would be a better time than with the orange fungus!

[Howl]

5 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Holy sweet Rufus on prancing velvet hoofs!!!

And more boom! 

 

[AliceInFundyland]

Movie plot: It is found that Russian interference invalidates the entire Trump presidency. (*movie magic happens*) Alternate time line emerges where Hilary won and the entire last three years didn't happen

[fraurosena]

2 minutes ago, AliceInFundyland said:

Movie plot: It is found that Russian interference invalidates the entire Trump presidency. (*movie magic happens*) Alternate time line emerges where Hilary won and the entire last three years didn't happen

The first part is actually true, not even a movie plot. The only reason nothing has been done about it, is MoscowMitch and the corrupt Repugliklans holding Congress in a stranglehold.

Alas, the second part is impossible, however much we would like it to happen. 

 

[fraurosena]

Here's a crazy thought: try doing something about climate change.

[fraurosena]

Laughingstock indeed. 

Oh, to be a fly on the wall when those other world leaders talk to each other in private about him. I can't imagine it being anything good.

[GreyhoundFan]

Sigh. "‘Take the land’: President Trump wants a border wall. He wants it black. And he wants it by Election Day."

Spoiler

President Trump is so eager to complete hundreds of miles of border fence ahead of the 2020 presidential election that he has directed aides to fast-track billions of dollars’ worth of construction contracts, aggressively seize private land and disregard environmental rules, according to current and former officials involved with the project.

He also has told worried subordinates that he will pardon them of any potential wrongdoing should they have to break laws to get the barriers built quickly, those officials said.

Trump has repeatedly promised to complete 500 miles of fencing by the time voters go to the polls in November 2020, stirring chants of “Finish the Wall!” at his political rallies as he pushes for tighter border controls. But the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has completed just about 60 miles of “replacement” barrier during the first 2½ years of Trump’s presidency, all of it in areas that previously had border infrastructure.

The president has told senior aides that a failure to deliver on the signature promise of his 2016 campaign would be a letdown to his supporters and an embarrassing defeat. With the election 14 months away and hundreds of miles of fencing plans still in blueprint form, Trump has held regular White House meetings for progress updates and to hasten the pace, according to several people involved in the discussions.

When aides have suggested that some orders are illegal or unworkable, Trump has suggested he would pardon the officials if they would just go ahead, aides said. He has waved off worries about contracting procedures and the use of eminent domain, saying “take the land,” according to officials who attended the meetings.

“Don’t worry, I’ll pardon you,” he has told officials in meetings about the wall.

“He said people expected him to build a wall, and it had to be done by the election,” one former official said.

Asked for comment, a White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Trump is joking when he makes such statements about pardons.

Deputy White House press secretary Hogan Gidley said Tuesday that the president is protecting the country with the addition of new border barriers.

“Donald Trump promised to secure our border with sane, rational immigration policies to make American communities safer, and that’s happening everywhere the wall is being built,” Gidley said. He called internal criticisms of the president “just more fabrications by people who hate the fact the status quo, that has crippled this country for decades, is finally changing as President Trump is moving quicker than anyone in history to build the wall, secure the border and enact the very immigration policies the American people voted for.”

“President Trump is fighting aggressively for the American people where other leaders in the past have rolled over, sold out, and done absolutely nothing,” he said.

Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper is expected to approve a White House request to divert $3.6 billion in Pentagon funds to the barrier project in coming weeks, money that Trump sought after lawmakers refused to allocate $5 billion. The funds will be pulled from Defense Department projects in 26 states, according to administration officials who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the matter.

Trump’s determination to build the barriers as quickly as possible has not diminished his interest in the aesthetic aspects of the project, particularly the requirement that the looming steel barriers be painted black and topped with sharpened tips.

In a meeting at the White House on May 23, Trump ordered the Army Corps and the Department of Homeland Security to paint the structure black, according to internal communications reviewed by The Washington Post.

Administration officials have stopped trying to talk him out of the demands, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is preparing to instruct contractors to apply black paint or coating to all new barrier fencing, the communications show.

Trump conceded last year in an immigration meeting with lawmakers that a wall or barrier is not the most effective mechanism to curb illegal immigration, recognizing it would accomplish less than a major expansion of U.S. enforcement powers and deportation authority. But he told lawmakers that his supporters want a wall and that he has to deliver it.

Trump talked about the loud cheers the wall brought at rallies, according to one person with direct knowledge of the meeting.

Former White House chief of staff John F. Kelly would often tell administration officials to disregard the president’s demands if Kelly did not think they were feasible or legally sound, according to current and former aides.

During a conference call last week, officials at U.S. Customs and Border Protection told Army Corps engineers that the hundreds of miles of fencing must be completed before the next presidential election, according to administration officials with knowledge of the call who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal communications.

“Border Patrol insists on compressed acquisition timelines, and we consent. Their goal is to get contracts awarded, not for us to get a quality contract with a thoroughly vetted contractor,” said one senior official who is concerned the agency has been hurried to hand out contracts as quickly as possible.

Military officials expect more contract protests because the arrangements have been rushed, the official added. The Army Corps already has had to take corrective actions for two procurement contracts, after companies protested.

The companies building the fencing and access roads have been taking heavy earth-moving equipment into environmentally sensitive border areas adjacent to U.S. national parks and wildlife preserves, but the administration has waived procedural safeguards and impact studies, citing national security concerns.

“They don’t care how much money is spent, whether landowners’ rights are violated, whether the environment is damaged, the law, the regs or even prudent business practices,” the senior official said.

CBP has suggested no longer writing risk-assessment memos “related to the fact that we don’t have real estate rights and how this will impact construction,” the official said.

While Trump has insisted that the barriers be painted, the cost of painting them will reduce the length of the fence the government will be able to build. According to the internal analysis, painting or coating 175 miles of barriers “will add between $70 million and $133 million in cost,” trimming the amount of fencing the Army Corps will be able to install by four to seven miles.

In June, teams of U.S. soldiers painted a one-mile section of fence in Calexico, Calif., at a cost of $1 million. The coating, known as “matte black” or “flat black,” absorbs heat, making the fence hot to the touch, more slippery and therefore tougher to climb, according to border agents.

At Trump’s behest, the Army Corps also is preparing to instruct contractors to remove from the upper part of the fence the smooth metal plates that are used to thwart climbers. The president considered that design feature unsightly, according to officials familiar with his directives.

Instead, contractors have been asked to cut the tips of the steel bollards to a sharpened point. Trump had told aides this spring he thought the barrier should be spiked to instill a fear of injury.

The change in the bollard design is likely to reduce the overall length of the barrier by two to three miles, according to the administration’s cost assessments.

CBP has used a pointed design in the past, according to agency officials, either by installing a pyramid-shaped cap or making what the agency refers to as a “miter cut” in the metal.

Trump remains keen to tout incremental progress toward his wall-building commitments, and in recent weeks, top Homeland Security officials have taken to Twitter to promote the advances.

In recent days, DHS leaders including acting CBP chief Mark Morgan and the top official at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Ken Cuccinelli, have tweeted photos of border fence construction, echoing promises that 450 miles of new barrier will be completed by next year. Another senior administration official credited both men with injecting urgency, saying that “things are starting to crank away,” even though Cuccinelli’s agency is not involved in the project.

Dan Scavino Jr., the White House social media director, has asked for video footage and photos of equipment digging up the desert and planting the barriers so that administration officials can tweet about it, aides said.

Administration officials involved in the project also defended the president’s use of eminent domain laws to speed the process.

“There is no more constitutionally permissible public purpose for eminent domain than national defense,” said a current administration official who was not authorized to speak on the record about the contracting process.

“Our intention is to negotiate with every property owner, and every property owner will receive fair market value for the land,” the official said. “But the land that is needed is not replaceable land. This is not like building a hospital or even a school. There is no alternative land to the border.”

CBP and Pentagon officials insist they remain on track to complete about 450 miles of fencing by the election. Of that, about 110 miles will be added to areas where there is currently no barrier. The height of the structure will vary between 18 and 30 feet, high enough to inflict severe injury or death from a fall.

The Border Patrol’s strategic planning and analysis office has not made a final decision on the black paint or other White House design requests .

“Ultimately, we’ll do our assessment and determine what is the best for us operationally,” said Brian Martin, the office’s chief, adding that the agency is waiting to get border agents’ feedback on whether the coating would be beneficial.

Martin also said CBP would continue to install anti-climb panels on portions of the barrier already under contract, calling the design “very vital to overall effectiveness.” But he and other CBP officials said that some new portions of barriers will have the panels and that others will not, a determination that he said will be guided by necessity, not aesthetics.

Trump has recently urged the Army Corps to award a contract to a company he favors, North Dakota-based Fisher Industries, though the firm has not been selected. Fisher has been aggressively pushed by Trump ally Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), who briefly held up the confirmation of a Trump budget office nominee last month in an attempt to put pressure on the Army Corps.

Cramer demanded to see the contracts awarded to Fisher’s competitors, lashing out at the “arrogance” of the Army Corps in emails to military officials after he was told the bidding process involved proprietary information that could not be shared. The CEO of Fisher Industries is a major backer of Cramer and has donated to his campaigns.

Cramer visited the El Paso area Tuesday to tour border facilities and view a span of privately funded border fencing Fisher built as a showcase for what it claims are superior construction techniques. Cramer posted videos of his tour to social media. He undertook the tour “to see the crisis at our border firsthand.”

The senator had asked Lt. Gen. Todd Semonite, the commander of the Army Corps, to meet him at the site, but Semonite is traveling in Brazil, where the Trump administration has offered to help fight wildfires in the Amazon.

In an email to The Post, Cramer said he met with CEO Tommy Fisher on Tuesday at a span of fencing the company built on private land; he said Army Corps officials joined them at the site.

“The agents on the ground said the walls have been very helpful in slowing illegal crossings,” Cramer wrote. “I’m not a wall-building expert, but at the pace of the last few years, it’s hard to see how 450 miles gets built with the same process. . . . I wish DHS would engage a whole bunch of builders and innovators rather than rely on the same decades old bureaucracy.”

Cramer said he shared the president’s “frustration” with the pace of progress.

Several administration officials who confirmed the White House’s urgency said they expect to be able to deliver on Trump’s demands because the actual construction of the barriers is typically the last step in the process.

“There is a long lead time to acquiring land, getting permits and identifying funding,” the official said. “I think you will see a dramatic increase in wall construction next year because all of the work over the past two years has primed the pump.”

 

[fraurosena]

16 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Sigh. "‘Take the land’: President Trump wants a border wall. He wants it black. And he wants it by Election Day."

  Hide contents

President Trump is so eager to complete hundreds of miles of border fence ahead of the 2020 presidential election that he has directed aides to fast-track billions of dollars’ worth of construction contracts, aggressively seize private land and disregard environmental rules, according to current and former officials involved with the project.

He also has told worried subordinates that he will pardon them of any potential wrongdoing should they have to break laws to get the barriers built quickly, those officials said.

Trump has repeatedly promised to complete 500 miles of fencing by the time voters go to the polls in November 2020, stirring chants of “Finish the Wall!” at his political rallies as he pushes for tighter border controls. But the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has completed just about 60 miles of “replacement” barrier during the first 2½ years of Trump’s presidency, all of it in areas that previously had border infrastructure.

The president has told senior aides that a failure to deliver on the signature promise of his 2016 campaign would be a letdown to his supporters and an embarrassing defeat. With the election 14 months away and hundreds of miles of fencing plans still in blueprint form, Trump has held regular White House meetings for progress updates and to hasten the pace, according to several people involved in the discussions.

When aides have suggested that some orders are illegal or unworkable, Trump has suggested he would pardon the officials if they would just go ahead, aides said. He has waved off worries about contracting procedures and the use of eminent domain, saying “take the land,” according to officials who attended the meetings.

“Don’t worry, I’ll pardon you,” he has told officials in meetings about the wall.

“He said people expected him to build a wall, and it had to be done by the election,” one former official said.

Asked for comment, a White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Trump is joking when he makes such statements about pardons.

Deputy White House press secretary Hogan Gidley said Tuesday that the president is protecting the country with the addition of new border barriers.

“Donald Trump promised to secure our border with sane, rational immigration policies to make American communities safer, and that’s happening everywhere the wall is being built,” Gidley said. He called internal criticisms of the president “just more fabrications by people who hate the fact the status quo, that has crippled this country for decades, is finally changing as President Trump is moving quicker than anyone in history to build the wall, secure the border and enact the very immigration policies the American people voted for.”

“President Trump is fighting aggressively for the American people where other leaders in the past have rolled over, sold out, and done absolutely nothing,” he said.

Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper is expected to approve a White House request to divert $3.6 billion in Pentagon funds to the barrier project in coming weeks, money that Trump sought after lawmakers refused to allocate $5 billion. The funds will be pulled from Defense Department projects in 26 states, according to administration officials who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the matter.

Trump’s determination to build the barriers as quickly as possible has not diminished his interest in the aesthetic aspects of the project, particularly the requirement that the looming steel barriers be painted black and topped with sharpened tips.

In a meeting at the White House on May 23, Trump ordered the Army Corps and the Department of Homeland Security to paint the structure black, according to internal communications reviewed by The Washington Post.

Administration officials have stopped trying to talk him out of the demands, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is preparing to instruct contractors to apply black paint or coating to all new barrier fencing, the communications show.

Trump conceded last year in an immigration meeting with lawmakers that a wall or barrier is not the most effective mechanism to curb illegal immigration, recognizing it would accomplish less than a major expansion of U.S. enforcement powers and deportation authority. But he told lawmakers that his supporters want a wall and that he has to deliver it.

Trump talked about the loud cheers the wall brought at rallies, according to one person with direct knowledge of the meeting.

Former White House chief of staff John F. Kelly would often tell administration officials to disregard the president’s demands if Kelly did not think they were feasible or legally sound, according to current and former aides.

During a conference call last week, officials at U.S. Customs and Border Protection told Army Corps engineers that the hundreds of miles of fencing must be completed before the next presidential election, according to administration officials with knowledge of the call who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal communications.

“Border Patrol insists on compressed acquisition timelines, and we consent. Their goal is to get contracts awarded, not for us to get a quality contract with a thoroughly vetted contractor,” said one senior official who is concerned the agency has been hurried to hand out contracts as quickly as possible.

Military officials expect more contract protests because the arrangements have been rushed, the official added. The Army Corps already has had to take corrective actions for two procurement contracts, after companies protested.

The companies building the fencing and access roads have been taking heavy earth-moving equipment into environmentally sensitive border areas adjacent to U.S. national parks and wildlife preserves, but the administration has waived procedural safeguards and impact studies, citing national security concerns.

“They don’t care how much money is spent, whether landowners’ rights are violated, whether the environment is damaged, the law, the regs or even prudent business practices,” the senior official said.

CBP has suggested no longer writing risk-assessment memos “related to the fact that we don’t have real estate rights and how this will impact construction,” the official said.

While Trump has insisted that the barriers be painted, the cost of painting them will reduce the length of the fence the government will be able to build. According to the internal analysis, painting or coating 175 miles of barriers “will add between $70 million and $133 million in cost,” trimming the amount of fencing the Army Corps will be able to install by four to seven miles.

In June, teams of U.S. soldiers painted a one-mile section of fence in Calexico, Calif., at a cost of $1 million. The coating, known as “matte black” or “flat black,” absorbs heat, making the fence hot to the touch, more slippery and therefore tougher to climb, according to border agents.

At Trump’s behest, the Army Corps also is preparing to instruct contractors to remove from the upper part of the fence the smooth metal plates that are used to thwart climbers. The president considered that design feature unsightly, according to officials familiar with his directives.

Instead, contractors have been asked to cut the tips of the steel bollards to a sharpened point. Trump had told aides this spring he thought the barrier should be spiked to instill a fear of injury.

The change in the bollard design is likely to reduce the overall length of the barrier by two to three miles, according to the administration’s cost assessments.

CBP has used a pointed design in the past, according to agency officials, either by installing a pyramid-shaped cap or making what the agency refers to as a “miter cut” in the metal.

Trump remains keen to tout incremental progress toward his wall-building commitments, and in recent weeks, top Homeland Security officials have taken to Twitter to promote the advances.

In recent days, DHS leaders including acting CBP chief Mark Morgan and the top official at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Ken Cuccinelli, have tweeted photos of border fence construction, echoing promises that 450 miles of new barrier will be completed by next year. Another senior administration official credited both men with injecting urgency, saying that “things are starting to crank away,” even though Cuccinelli’s agency is not involved in the project.

Dan Scavino Jr., the White House social media director, has asked for video footage and photos of equipment digging up the desert and planting the barriers so that administration officials can tweet about it, aides said.

Administration officials involved in the project also defended the president’s use of eminent domain laws to speed the process.

“There is no more constitutionally permissible public purpose for eminent domain than national defense,” said a current administration official who was not authorized to speak on the record about the contracting process.

“Our intention is to negotiate with every property owner, and every property owner will receive fair market value for the land,” the official said. “But the land that is needed is not replaceable land. This is not like building a hospital or even a school. There is no alternative land to the border.”

CBP and Pentagon officials insist they remain on track to complete about 450 miles of fencing by the election. Of that, about 110 miles will be added to areas where there is currently no barrier. The height of the structure will vary between 18 and 30 feet, high enough to inflict severe injury or death from a fall.

The Border Patrol’s strategic planning and analysis office has not made a final decision on the black paint or other White House design requests .

“Ultimately, we’ll do our assessment and determine what is the best for us operationally,” said Brian Martin, the office’s chief, adding that the agency is waiting to get border agents’ feedback on whether the coating would be beneficial.

Martin also said CBP would continue to install anti-climb panels on portions of the barrier already under contract, calling the design “very vital to overall effectiveness.” But he and other CBP officials said that some new portions of barriers will have the panels and that others will not, a determination that he said will be guided by necessity, not aesthetics.

Trump has recently urged the Army Corps to award a contract to a company he favors, North Dakota-based Fisher Industries, though the firm has not been selected. Fisher has been aggressively pushed by Trump ally Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), who briefly held up the confirmation of a Trump budget office nominee last month in an attempt to put pressure on the Army Corps.

Cramer demanded to see the contracts awarded to Fisher’s competitors, lashing out at the “arrogance” of the Army Corps in emails to military officials after he was told the bidding process involved proprietary information that could not be shared. The CEO of Fisher Industries is a major backer of Cramer and has donated to his campaigns.

Cramer visited the El Paso area Tuesday to tour border facilities and view a span of privately funded border fencing Fisher built as a showcase for what it claims are superior construction techniques. Cramer posted videos of his tour to social media. He undertook the tour “to see the crisis at our border firsthand.”

The senator had asked Lt. Gen. Todd Semonite, the commander of the Army Corps, to meet him at the site, but Semonite is traveling in Brazil, where the Trump administration has offered to help fight wildfires in the Amazon.

In an email to The Post, Cramer said he met with CEO Tommy Fisher on Tuesday at a span of fencing the company built on private land; he said Army Corps officials joined them at the site.

“The agents on the ground said the walls have been very helpful in slowing illegal crossings,” Cramer wrote. “I’m not a wall-building expert, but at the pace of the last few years, it’s hard to see how 450 miles gets built with the same process. . . . I wish DHS would engage a whole bunch of builders and innovators rather than rely on the same decades old bureaucracy.”

Cramer said he shared the president’s “frustration” with the pace of progress.

Several administration officials who confirmed the White House’s urgency said they expect to be able to deliver on Trump’s demands because the actual construction of the barriers is typically the last step in the process.

“There is a long lead time to acquiring land, getting permits and identifying funding,” the official said. “I think you will see a dramatic increase in wall construction next year because all of the work over the past two years has primed the pump.”

 

Fact: not one meter of that wall has been built after more than two and a half years in office. 

Fact: he may pardon federal offenses; he does not have the authority to pardon state offenses. 

Fact: he is still a mango moron and not one inch of that wall will be built. Ever.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump says ‘no bedbugs’ at his Doral resort. But inspectors have found a host of other problems."

Spoiler

When President Trump conveyed his unprecedented desire to host next year’s Group of Seven summit at his own luxury golf resort in Doral, Fla., it took mere hours for a 2016 lawsuit to resurface, raising questions about the property’s cleanliness.

It was bedbugs, former guest Eric Linder alleged, that left him with “welts, lumps and marks over much of his face, neck, arms and torso,” following a stay at the Jack Nicklaus Villa, considered one of Doral’s most sumptuous rooms. The Trump Organization denied the claims, and the case was settled a year later, but the president on Tuesday blamed Democrats for spreading the “false and nasty rumor.”

Trump has touted the 643-room Doral club as an ideal fit for the 2020 summit because of its convenient location near the airport and its commodious parking. Should his plan come to fruition, six of the world’s leaders and hundreds of diplomats would reside at the “country’s most magnificent golf resort” — which, according to local inspection reports, has a lengthy history of health-code violations.

No, investigators never found bedbugs. But the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation has discovered numerous problems in recent years, particularly inside the 800-acre club’s various restaurants and kitchens. They range from minor complaints such as dirty kitchen appliances, to more egregious violations such as live roaches near ovens and food preparation areas.

Doral’s main kitchen

The resort’s main kitchen has seen its share of problems — such as in 2015, when it was ordered temporarily closed after an inspector found 20-30 “live, small flying insects” in the kitchen and dishwasher room, in addition to “20-25 live roaches on the walls, baseboards and floors” near a food prep area. It didn’t help that several foods at the buffet that were supposed to be cold, including cheese, pork, fish and eggs, were served at temperatures more than 20 degrees too warm.

A year later, an inspector reported more than 40 small flies near a coffee station. A portion of the buffet featuring fruit, bread and yogurts, they wrote, lacked “adequate sneeze guards or other proper protection from contamination.” This issue was noted in 2015 as well.

In 2017, an inspector docked the restaurant for six “high priority violations,” including three trays with “cooked shrimp” that were 56 degrees too cool. Old food was found crusted onto clean dishware, a can opener and a beverage station.

An inspector observed at least one employee did not change their single-use gloves between tasks or after they got dirty.

Champions Bar & Grill

Doral’s sports bar — celebrated for its patio view and “upscale-casual atmosphere” — has been cited for numerous violations over the years, inspection reports show. In April 2015, the restaurant was handed a $200 fine when an inspector observed several “high priority” issues. Among them: an employee who didn’t wash their hands before they began to prepare food.

Cold food was stored at temperatures 10 degrees warmer than allowed, an inspector found, and one walk-in cooler that contained meat and dairy was too warm and needed repairs. Moreover, the report cites “approximately 10 to 11 live roaches,” including several near the dishwasher and two behind ovens.

This was an apparent improvement over 2012, when inspectors reportedly found rodent droppings in addition to roaches in the kitchen.

A November 2016 inspection, conducted less than two weeks after Trump won the presidential election, found more than two dozen violations. The inspector again docked the restaurant for food temperature issues and cited caked-on food inside refrigerators, ovens and reach-in coolers.

The ‘Bungalows’

While discussing possible accommodations for next year’s guests, Trump spoke of the “bungalows” — a “series of magnificent buildings” that each contain 50 to 70 rooms. According to inspection reports, however, the bungalows were flagged last year when an inspector found raw burgers and raw squids together in a cooler, “not properly separated from one another.”

This was apparently a recurring issue over several years, dating back to at least 2014, when inspectors also cited the accumulation of food debris and a mold-like substance inside an ice machine and a beer nozzle at a bar.

The Doral, which Trump purchased in 2012 with the help of $125 million in loans from Deutsche Bank, supplies Trump with more revenue than any of his other hotels. The Trump Organization did not return a request for comment on Doral’s inspection history Tuesday.

Despite the resort’s previous issues, however, investigators found almost no problems during a May inspection.

The near-perfect grade this year could be a reflection of Trump’s mission to host the 2020 G-7 summit at his resort, which one of his company representatives said last year has “severely” underperformed compared to others in the area.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

He never had it to begin with: "Donald Trump is not losing it"

Spoiler

For the past week or so, the hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts has noticed a crescendo of commentary about whether Donald Trump is actually losing it. Rick Wilson offered up one example in the New York Daily News: “Red warning lights are flashing across Washington as even the now-typical levels of uncertainty and political chaos reach epic proportions.” My Washington Post colleague Megan McArdle offered up another one: “This is not normal. And I don’t mean that as in, ‘Trump is violating the shibboleths of the Washington establishment.’ I mean that as in, ‘This is not normal for a functioning adult.’ ”

This theme of the week is surprising, given the political roller-coaster ride Trump has forced us all to partake in. The president canceled a trip to Denmark in a fit of pique over not being able to buy Greenland. Consider the first few paragraphs of The Post’s story on this decision:

President Trump on Tuesday abruptly called off a trip to Denmark, announcing in a tweet that he was postponing the visit because the country’s leader was not interested in selling him Greenland.

The move comes two days after Trump told reporters that owning Greenland, a self-governing country that is part of the kingdom of Denmark, “would be nice” for the United States from a strategic perspective.

Try to imagine any other president or putative president who could generate that opening in a straight news story.

The Atlantic’s James Fallows explores the past few weeks of Trump’s behavior — and finds it more than a little disturbing:

These are episodes of what would be called outright lunacy, if they occurred in any other setting: An actually consequential rift with a small but important NATO ally, arising from the idea that the U.S. would “buy Greenland.” Trump’s self-description as “the Chosen One,” and his embrace of a supporter’s description of him as the “second coming of God” and the “King of Israel.” His logorrhea, drift, and fantastical claims in public rallies, and his flashes of belligerence at the slightest challenge in question sessions on the White House lawn. His utter lack of affect or empathy when personally meeting the most recent shooting victims, in Dayton and El Paso. His reduction of any event, whatsoever, into what people are saying about him.

Fallows concludes that in most other professions, Trump would already have been suspended from his job.

Indeed, there has been so much commentary about Trump’s worsening state that folks such as CNN’s Brian Stelter simply take it as a given and fret about why the media is not covering it properly:

And all of the above took place before Axios’s Jonathan Swan and Margaret Talev broke the story about Trump wanting to nuke hurricanes.

As the curator of the #ToddlerinChief thread, you might expect me to be welcoming my pals to this particular party. Like my Post colleague Greg Sargent, I appreciate that the field of Democratic challengers is following Joe Biden’s lead and raising serious questions about Trump’s fitness to serve. To be sure, the #ToddlerinChief thread has been super active in the month of August — I have added 67 entries since Aug. 1, and the month is not quite yet over. That equates to more than two toddler entries per day, which is double the rate that Trump has kept since I started curating this thread more than two years ago.

That said, the social scientist in me who has been observing Trump like this for his entire administration has a slightly contrarian note to make: This month provides little evidence that Trump is getting worse.

I ground this assertion on two empirical claims. The first is that Trump has had many months like this during his presidency. There have been multiple stretches in which a concatenation of blunders, bombshells and buffoonery have sent Trump careening from one toddler-like state to another. Consider:

• Trump was all over the map in August 2017, as he tried to grapple with the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville and misfired on multiple occasions.
• Trump was so agitated in October 2017 that then-Sen. Bob Corker tweeted, “the White House has become an adult day care center.”
• In January 2018, Trump went bananas after Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” came out, continuing to blast the author despite staff entreaties for him not to give the book more press oxygen.
• In March 2018, Trump burned through a host of staffers, including Gary Cohn, H.R. McMaster and Hope Hicks. Trump told friends that he wanted to be less reliant on his staff because he believed they gave him bad advice.
• In September 2018, Trump completely lost it after the press gorged on two feasts: the anonymous New York Times op-ed and Bob Woodward’s “Fear.” White House staffers told reporters that Trump was “absolutely livid” and in “total meltdown.”
• The government shutdown in January 2019 was littered with stories about Trump having temper tantrums, fits of pique and delusional bargaining strategies.

Trump having a bad month is nothing new. Nor are the claims of cognitive decline, which have been around as long as his presidency. MSNBC host Joe Scarborough suggested back in November 2017 that the president is suffering from dementia. Omarosa Manigault Newman claimed the White House staff has kept Trump’s deteriorating mental status a secret: “They continue to deceive this nation by how mentally declined he is. How difficult it is for him to process complex information. How he is not engaged in some of the most important decisions that impact our country.”

Here’s the big secret: Trump has not declined as president because that would imply there was a better time when this president possessed more of his wits. As long as he has been the commander in chief, he has displayed temper tantrums, poor impulse control, a short attention span and massive knowledge deficits. This month ain’t new; it’s just a particularly concentrated form of this behavior on public display.

That is not to say that nothing is new in the Trump White House. The New York Times’s Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman got at this with a recent story:

Some former Trump administration officials in recent days said they were increasingly worried about the president’s behavior, suggesting it stems from rising pressure on Mr. Trump as the economy seems more worrisome and next year’s election approaches.

After casting off advisers who displeased him at a record rate in his first two and a half years in office, Mr. Trump now has fewer aides around him willing or able to challenge him, much less restrain his more impulsive instincts.

Trump is who he always is. What is different is what is happening around him. The economic and political environment is worsening for him, and he has no idea how to cope with it. Furthermore, Trump’s burn rate on staff has been so high that he is scraping the bottom of the bottom of the barrel. His current dregs are so sycophantic they release statements no self-respecting communications professional would ever say.

There are excellent reasons to be worried about Trump’s behavior through 2020. The cognitive decline of the president is not one of those reasons. Rather, it is that the benign environment and support structures that restrained Trump’s worst impulses are gone.

 

[AmericanRose]

Aren't his 'supporters' the sort that are terrified of a government taking their land?

[47of74]

A good one from Frank Bruni: "Donald Trump Has Worn Us All Out"
Spoiler

Donald Trump’s presidency has baffled me, enraged me and above all saddened me, because I’m a stubborn believer in America’s promise, which he mocks and imperils.
But last week his presidency did something to me that it hadn’t done before. It absolutely flattened me.
I woke up Saturday, made my coffee, shuffled to my computer, started to glance at the news and suddenly had to stop. I couldn’t go on. Trump had yet again said something untrue, once more suggested something absurd, contradicted himself, deified himself, claimed martyrdom, blamed Barack Obama, made his billionth threat and hurled his trillionth insult.
That was all clear from the headlines, which were as much as I could take. He had commandeered too many of my thoughts, run roughshod over too many of my emotions, made me question too many articles of faith.
I was sapped — if not quite of the will to live, then of the will to tweet, to Google and to surf the cable channels, where his furious mien and curious mane are ubiquitous. What I was feeling was beyond Trump fatigue and bigger than Trump exhaustion. It was Trump enervation. Trump enfeeblement.
And within it I saw a ray of hope.
Until now it has been unclear to me precisely how Trump ends. His manifestly rotten character hasn’t alienated his supporters, who are all too ready with rationalizations and fluent in trade-offs. They’re also unbothered by many of his missteps, because he has sold those to a cynical electorate as media fables and rivals’ fabrications. He’s so enterprising and assiduous at pointing the finger elsewhere that many voters have lost their bearings. Defeat is victory. Oppressors are liberators. Corruption is caring. Mar-a-Loco is Shangri-La.
But Americans of all persuasions recognize melodrama when it keeps smacking them in the head, and he has manufactured a bruising degree of it. They’re not keen on Washington or politics, so they don’t care for the way in which fevered discussions of both have become so pervasive as to be ambient.
They’re woozy and wiped out, and they can’t lay their depletion on the doorsteps of frustrated Democrats and Fake News. The president’s tweets speak for themselves, in both volume and vitriol. The president’s thunder is deafening without any amplification by CNN or MSNBC.
The turnover in his White House and the bloat of a Trump-administration diaspora can’t be dismissed as the detritus of disruption, the flotsam and jetsam of an unconventional management style. They’re what happens when you place a cyclone at the Resolute Desk. Everything splinters and screams, and you can’t find a safe space.
“Even Trump’s Supporters Are Getting Tired of His Daily Drama” was the headline on Jim Geraghty’s Monday column in National Review, which sometimes travels fantastically creative routes to reach the sunny side of Trump. Geraghty wrote that the publication’s editors “are exhausted with presidential tweets, from asking whether Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell or Chinese leader Chairman Xi is the bigger enemy, to ‘hereby ordering’ private companies to look for alternatives to operations in China.”
He linked to a lament by the conservative writer Rod Dreher, who, he noted, “is exhausted from the president behaving like ‘a clown who refuses to meet with the prime minister of Denmark because she won’t sell him Greenland.’”
Notice a theme? Apparently weariness with Trump’s wackiness does something virtually unheard-of in the United States circa 2019: It transcends partisanship.
Trump’s instinct and strategy are to conquer by overwhelming. But there’s a difference between wearing people down and wearing them out. He’s like the last seasons of “House of Cards” — a riveting spectacle devolved into a repellent burlesque, so unrestrained in its appetites that it devoured itself.
I wouldn’t be surprised if voters consciously or subconsciously conclude that they just can’t continue to live like this and that four more years would be ruinous, if not to the country as a whole, then to our individual psyches. By the time Election Day rolls around, they may crave nothing more electric than stability and serenity. That wouldn’t be a bad Democratic bumper sticker. It’s essentially the message of Joe Biden’s campaign.
According to Morning Consult’s tracking poll, Trump’s approval rating in vital swing states has declined significantly since he took office. Take Wisconsin: His approval rating in January 2017 was 47 percent, and his disapproval rating was 41, for a net plus of six percentage points. Now his approval has fallen to 41 while his disapproval has climbed to 55, for a net minus of 14.
Maybe that reflects voters’ economic worries. I suspect it’s just as much about their exhaustion. They’ve binged on Trump and now they’re overstuffed with Trump, and if Democratic candidates are smart, they’ll not dwell on his mess and madness, because voters have taken his measure and made their judgments, and what many of them want is release from the incessant drumbeat of that infernal syllable: Trump, Trump, Trump.
They’d like a new mini-series with a different cast, and Democrats aren’t giving them that if they keep putting Trump’s name above the title. On Saturday and then again on Sunday, I turned the whole damn show off and fled to the park for fresh air. I pray that’s some sort of omen.

 

I sometimes would like to rename the concept of trump in euchre just to not have to think about fornicate face when playing.

[fraurosena]

Oh dear, he's really going off the deep end. Now he's mad at Faux!

Isn't that last sentence revealing? "Fox isn't working for us anymore!" 
State propaganda tv, indeed.

[Alisamer]

11 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Oh dear, he's really going off the deep end. Now he's mad at Faux!

Isn't that last sentence revealing? "Fox isn't working for us anymore!" 
State propaganda tv, indeed.

Sounds like he's angling for what I think he was wanting in the first place by running for president - his own news show/network. Unfortunately for the entire universe, his publicity stunt backfired and he got stuck as president. And even more unfortunately, he decided to run with it. 

I have no doubt that if (when... please God WHEN) he is defeated in the next election, once the immediate fallout settles he will be doing everything he can to stay in/on the news constantly. Much the same as now - constant tweeting, randomly calling in to news shows - just amplified by the lack of having to actually pretend to be "working". 

[fraurosena]

20 minutes ago, Alisamer said:

I have no doubt that if (when... please God WHEN) he is defeated in the next election, once the immediate fallout settles he will be doing everything he can to stay in/on the news constantly. Much the same as now - constant tweeting, randomly calling in to news shows - just amplified by the lack of having to actually pretend to be "working". 

I have no doubt he won't have time to do anything of the sort anymore. He'll be too busy being prosecuted for all his evil crimes. If anything, he'll go into complete and utter mental decline.

[47of74]

I have no doubt he won't have time to do anything of the sort anymore. He'll be too busy being prosecuted for all his evil crimes. If anything, he'll go into complete and utter mental decline.

Wasn’t fuck face going to start a tv network if had lost in 2016?

[Dandruff]

4 hours ago, fraurosena said:

I have no doubt he won't have time to do anything of the sort anymore. He'll be too busy being prosecuted for all his evil crimes. If anything, he'll go into complete and utter mental decline.

If he's not arrested, I imagine he'll be having his lawyers deal with the mess while he continually tweets about what a victim he is.

I like the complete and utter mental decline idea better, though.  It could mean he finally shuts up.

[Ozlsn]

10 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Fact: he may pardon federal offenses; he does not have the authority to pardon state offense

Anyone who is stupid enough to believe that Trump won't leave them swinging deserves what they get. Because he has quite a history of doing just that, and no one at that level is going to be important enough to his future to waste a pardon on.

[fraurosena]

He only succeeds at looking like the petulant child that he is, and the 'I don't want to be here' vibe is just oozing out of him.