Trump 43: King of Chaos

[47of74]

Lol.

[fraurosena]

Here we see the repercussions of Mulvaney’s confession at work. 

 

[fraurosena]

This epitomizes what he thinks about women. 

 

[fraurosena]

Somebody is miffed he won't be able to prop up his failing golf club by holding the G-7 there. 

I'm surprised they allow me to give up my $400,00 Plus Presidential Salary!  What is the logic in this statement? Does he think keeping his salary is what his rivals want him to do? And that he (supposedly) donates it hurts them somehow? Owkayyyy...

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is an interesting, albeit unsettling article; "What If Trump Wins?"

Spoiler

President Donald Trump has a lot riding on 2020. If he loses, he won’t just quietly resume his carefree snowbird lifestyle, albeit with millions of new Twitter followers. He’ll be dogged by big legal bills as he fends off criminal investigations in multiple jurisdictions.

But what if he wins?

The election is more than a year away, his possible impeachment over the widening Ukraine scandal is far from resolved, and, yes, numerous polls show the president trailing nearly all of his likely Democratic opponents. But impatient politicos are already gaming out a scenario that is hardening into conventional wisdom: Trump is impeached by the House, acquitted by the Senate and re-elected on November 3.

The prospect of four more years has already captured the fevered imaginations of Democrats and never-Trump Republicans. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi predicted, “The reelection of Donald Trump would do irreparable damage to the United States.” Even the president’s own supporters envision an emboldened incumbent who pulverizes political norms with a vigor, to borrow the president’s go-to line, the likes of which the world has never seen.

Trump himself isn’t saying much about what a second term would really look like. Scripted legislative agendas are not how he rolls. Still, if his first term has taught us anything, Trump as a lame duck would be anything but unifying. Indeed, the civil war that the president has predicted could well be visible in the hostile crowds hectoring each other on the Mall in January. After that? What does a bruised but unbowed Trump do with his political capital? What does an enraged Democratic opposition bring to bear that it hasn’t already?

There’s only one way to answer these questions: the POLITICO Time Machine.

For the uninitiated, we used it once before in April 2016, when Trump wasn’t even the Republican nominee yet and when most people insisted he still had no chance of winning the White House. But our band of armchair time travelers already foresaw the looming possibility that the unorthodox novice could well be impeached if he ever took office. Our prognosticators weren’t so far off, given how fast Democrats started investigating Trump once they took the House majority halfway through his first term.

OK, sure, we were a little wide of the mark in predicting Trump would reopen Alcatraz and the World War II-era internment camps to house suspected Islamic extremists. And back in early 2016, no one saw Russia, much less Ukraine, emerging as the centerpiece of the impeachment inquiry. But, boy, did our brain trust nail it on predictions about Trump skirting Congress to pay for his border wall; a full-blown civil war brewing inside the intelligence community; and presidential approval numbers collapsing faster than a Greenland glacier.

To further fine-tune the conventional wisdom, we reconvened the Time Machine travelers and added a bunch more to the roster—25 people who know Trump world and GOP and Democratic politics—and asked them: What’s in store for Washington and the nation if Trump defies the odds to hold onto the White House?

“We will have entered an era of authoritarianism,” warned John Dean, the former Richard Nixon White House lawyer whose public testimony about Watergate helped lead to the president’s resignation.

That’s just left-wing hysteria, said Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House and outspoken Trump ally. “No. I don’t think Trump will be emboldened. I think Trump will be Trump. I think Trump is emboldened every morning. He goes, ‘I’m a billionaire. I’ve got the White House, Air Force One and Marine One. And I’m commander in chief. What’s part two?’ All these guys who spent three years shooting at me and I’m still in the building and they’re not.’”

But even some Trump supporters foresee the chance that Trump might test the boundaries of presidential power with bad results.

Former George W. Bush White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, a card-carrying establishment Republican who once criticized the president but now largely supports him, said a reelected Trump has the potential to take things too far. “I think it’d be very much like the first term with the risky exception that having survived impeachment and having been elected by the people he might feel like the guard rails are even farther away from the road he travels. I’d hope he’d realize the guardrails are there for a good purpose and if he drives too fast [he’ll] crash through them.”

At a Rose Garden press conference in early 1999 after the Senate acquitted him, President Bill Clinton responded to a question about whether he could “forgive and forget” by saying, “I believe any person who asks forgiveness has to be prepared to give it.” According to Bob Woodward’s account in his book, Shadow, a reporter then shouted to the president as he was walking away asking whether he’d be vindictive toward the Republicans who’d just impeached him. Clinton didn’t turn around.

Trump “won’t keep walking,” Fleischer predicted. “He’ll run back to the mic.”

So what would Trump say? We’ll let the Time Machine do the talking.

***

The time is January 2021. The election has left the nation a psychological mess and a sulfurous cloud of election meddling by foreign hackers hangs over the still-contested results. Trump’s Ukraine scandal ultimately spared him but it wounded Joe Biden enough to give Elizabeth Warren the nomination. Once again, though, the result came down to the Electoral College, but even closer than in 2016. Warren, like Hillary Clinton four years earlier, took the popular vote by a resounding margin. But this mixed verdict has done nothing but further entrench the battle lines of a civil war that has become more than just a metaphor.

The weeks after Election Day were ugly. Protests in New York, Washington, San Francisco and a dozen other cities turned violent, the byproduct of a tangled mass of disgruntled pink-hatted Democrats, MAGA supporters, left-wing antifa and far-right Proud Boys. People have been killed. The president chalked up the discord to urban blight. And then he imposed curfews and directed the National Guard to patrol the streets over the protests of governors and mayors.

On January 20, Trump takes the oath of office, vowing in the shadow of the Capitol for the second time that he would “to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The scene is unlike anything before in the country’s history. What’s always been a high-security event takes on a militaristic tone, with Trump ordering U.S. troops onto the streets of Washington as a show of force to deter more riots. His family surrounds him, along with a loyal base of congressional Republicans who but for a few defectors hung on during his first four years and most notably voted to keep him in office and defeat impeachment. Democrats, still seething at Trump’s flagrant constitutional violations, boycott the event en masse, the first time in modern history this has happened. Their seats are given away in a lottery open to Trump supporters.

Something else is notable, too. The four living ex-presidents, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter join George W. Bush in a protocol-busting protest. They skip Trump’s inaugural ceremony and accept Carter’s invitation to hand out meals at a Washington, D.C., homeless shelter.

After the inaugural parade, which includes tanks for the first time in a half-century, the president goes into the White House, takes out a hand-written enemies list of people who work for him and makes Jared Kushner fire everyone on it. The casualty list includes Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson. Mike Pompeo and Mark Esper resigned before the election, having been blamed by Trump for the Ukraine mess. Steve Mnuchin is the only original Cabinet secretary still in Trump’s good graces.

A new crop of loyalists gets hired, including now-former Reps. Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan and Doug Collins, as well as Lindsey Graham, who steps down from the Senate to become the new Defense secretary. Brad Parscale moves from campaign manager to serve as White House chief of staff—but only after Trump leaves Mick Mulvaney’s former job open for six months. Trump promises his longtime adviser Stephen Miller an appointment to run the Homeland Security Department in an acting capacity during the close of the second term, when Senate confirmation won’t matter for a lame duck administration. And the president also raids his reelection campaign for new staff, believing they will be more loyal than the Frankenstein crew from the Republican National Committee that he hastily assembled in 2017.

“You don’t work to reelect a man you hate to get into the White House,” observes Michael Caputo, a longtime Trump adviser who agreed to join us on our time traveling experiment and says the 2020 campaign represents a real bounty for faithful, Trump-believing worker bees.

Next comes the score settling. “Trump totally unburdened and 100 percent politics all the time. Payback is hell,” predicted one of the Republicans close to the White House who insisted on anonymity because of their current job.

As Washington freezes through the end of winter, Trump moves his administration temporarily to Mar-a-Lago. He’s golfing six days a week with the likes of celebrity admirers Rush Limbaugh, Kid Rock and Tiger Woods but finds time between rounds to lob Twitter grenades at anyone who crossed him during his first four years in office. Republicans are not spared as Trump draws a bull’s-eye on the half-dozen senators who voted to convict him at the impeachment trial. He hounds Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to remove Ben Sasse from the Banking, Judiciary and Intelligence committees. He scouts out 2022 GOP primary challengers for Richard Burr and Lisa Murkowski. And he seethes that he doesn’t have more ways to deliver payback to Susan Collins or a certain Mormon senator from Utah.

“Romney is lucky he’s running for reelection in 2024,” said Sam Nunberg, another former Trump campaign aide from 2016 who is riding shotgun in our time machine and sees an election cycle four years into the future as far enough away to spare the 2012 GOP presidential nominee from Trump’s ultimate payback.

Trump keeps trying to goose his government into action as the summer of 2021 arrives. He’s starting to sweat the U.S. economy in the months after the long-anticipated recession became official that April with the second consecutive quarter of negative growth. He tweets 10 times a day about how Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell is responsible. He gives one of his remaining first-term holdovers, national economic adviser Larry Kudlow, one more chance to pitch a middle-class tax cut in the hope that can turn things around.

Trump also leans in harder on his Justice Department. First, he orders Robert F. Kennedy’s name removed from the building headquarters in Washington and replaces it with Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and personal lawyer to the president whom Trump has installed as the director of his revamped and celebratory Voice of America. Then Trump threatens to fire Attorney General William Barr and every U.S. attorney in the country if criminal charges are not filed by Thanksgiving against any holdovers from the Obama administration who had a role in the original 2016 Russia investigation.

Trump cancels the annual turkey pardoning event and replaces it with a ceremony to give the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn and Roger Stone. All three former 2016 campaign aides had been sentenced to jail for crimes tied to special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, but Trump thinks he’s got room to maneuver now that he’s safely in a second term and decides to wipe their records clean.

Confounded and depressed by the 2020 election results, Democrats can’t figure out how to respond to every new example of Trump defying Congress. “The infighting. The blaming. The everything. Whoo!” Democratic operative James Carville says of his party’s struggle to find itself after losing in 2020. Jim Manley, a longtime aide to Harry Reid who was with us back in 2016 the last time we zoomed off into the future, foresees a “circular firing squad” taking place in his party “with no national Democratic leader able to tamp down on the internecine warfare.”

In the House, Pelosi was a goner the moment the television networks back in November declared Trump the winner. The president had taunted her throughout the 2020 campaign for her leadership against him on impeachment. And while her party still clings to a narrow House majority, the San Francisco congresswoman decides to call it quits and hands the speaker’s gavel over to Hakeem Jeffries, a 50-year old lawmaker from a Brooklyn-Queens district that is a stone’s throw from the president’s childhood home.

Democrats still have subpoena power, but they’ve been neutered by repeated attempts to draw anything out of the president. In the summer before the 2020 presidential election, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority rendered Trump virtually impregnable with a 5-4 decision overturning its seminal Watergate ruling against Richard Nixon and instead embracing a broad range of presidential executive powers.

The focus for House lawmakers shifts from Trump’s alleged abuses of power and foreign meddling in U.S. elections to something that doesn’t quite pique Trump’s ire as much: neglect at the federal agencies across his administration. While the Constitution has no double jeopardy clause for impeachment, Democrats debate whether to hold their fire in even considering another attempt at removing him from office.

Sure, there’s all manner of agitation to try again—namely from the crop of freshman and sophomore Democrats who now hold the largest bloc of votes in the House conference. But Jeffries cuts that talk off by the summer of 2021, saying the party won’t consider another impeachment until after the 2022 midterms—and only if there’s a blue wave that causes dramatic shifts in the Senate. He argues there’s no point going to war again with a president who won’t stop talking about his new mandate or with Republicans who wouldn’t convict the president in the first term even after being presented with a “smoking gun” audio tape that was secretly stashed on an internal White House server of Trump offering to sell Alaska to Vladimir Putin in exchange for Russian hackers’ help to win a second term.

“He’s now free to do everything he wants, even if it’s clearly an impeachable offense because they’re not going to go after him two times in a row,” laments former Connecticut Rep. Chris Shays, one of four Republicans who voted against all four articles of impeachment against Bill Clinton in 1998.

With impeachment off the table, Trump tries to cut deals with a divided Congress. But he spends his political capital much faster than his aides want. He finally gets a win on a replacement for the North American trade agreement that he tore up in his first term. But that’s it. House Democrats balk at an infrastructure package. There’s nowhere close to the 60 Senate votes needed to overhaul the nation’s prescription drug laws. The resulting bickering and blaming among lawmakers kills the chances for even bigger lifts. Reforming entitlement programs is nixed during the debate over Trump’s first budget in his second term. A comprehensive immigration overhaul gets shelved in the aftermath of Mexican troops accidentally opening fire on their American counterparts outside El Paso, the resulting tensions stoked by Trump and conservative media warnings about a caravan of thousands of migrants that never materializes at the border.

As we travel further into Trump’s second term, we see that he doesn’t lose every battle in the Capitol. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, reelected in 2020 to a seventh term, continues to do his part to remake the federal courts. The Kentucky Republican clears the floor calendar to hold votes confirming more than 100 more new judges with lifetime appointments to the district and appellate circuits, and conservatives rejoice at the prospect of friendly decisions for decades to come on issues like abortion, religion, and environmental and labor policy.

On the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, two associate justices in their mid-70s at the time of Trump’s second inaugural, opt for retirement rather than risk being replaced by a Democratic president after 2025. Meanwhile, the two remaining Bill Clinton-appointed justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, maximize their cardiovascular workouts and adopt strict Mediterranean diets.

Trump doesn’t really alter his erratic, isolationist foreign policy instincts. He withdraws all U.S. troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, despite reservations even among Republicans. In Syria, ISIS has proclaimed a second modern-day Caliphate. He threatens repeatedly to pull the U.S. out of NATO, even ordering that the paperwork be drawn up but backs down as Republicans and Democrats unite to throw legislative hurdles in his way. He saber rattles on tariffs with China for all four additional years, but never closes a trade deal with Beijing; by the end of his second term, the U.S. and China have had near-skirmishes in the increasingly militarized South China Sea. Jared Kushner never actually releases the second half of his Middle East peace plan. The Iran nuclear deal collapses entirely, although Tehran doesn't immediately restart its nuclear program as it tries to rebuild its economy. Luckily, for the Iranians, China and Russia increasingly are willing to ignore U.S. sanctions and give them a financial lifeline. There also is no breakthrough on nuclear weapon talks with North Korea, though Kim Jong Un makes his first visit to the United States and joins Trump and Dennis Rodman courtside at the United Center for a Chicago Bulls game.

Trump also spends his time thinking about his legacy, and whom he wants to replace him in the White House. After dropping hints in private for months, he finally sends out a tweet on July 4, 2022, that he doesn’t support Mike Pence’s presidential ambitions. “Great guy, TREMENDOUS veep, but it’s time for some Beautiful NEW BLOOD,” he writes. Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul back out by Labor Day, and the field is cleared for Ivanka Trump to take the party’s nomination 17 months before anyone has participated in a caucus or primary.

Meanwhile, Trump takes direct control over planning for his presidential library, which in a break with tradition will include no actual presidential papers because there are none that have been preserved. He strong arms the General Services Administration to write through the lease agreement on his D.C. hotel and tells Congress he won’t consent to end a months-long government shutdown unless it amends a century-old law restricting height limits on buildings in the Capitol. When the standoff ends, construction begins immediately on a new 75-story addition to the historic building that when finished will look down on the Washington Monument and the rest of the city.

Some of our fellow time travelers aren’t entirely certain that second-term Trump will be distinguishable from first-term Trump. “He’s a category 5 tornado now,” insisted Ty Cobb, the former Trump White House lawyer who managed the president’s response to the Robert Mueller investigation. “It’s not like he’s going to break the measuring point.”

Trump himself has acknowledged how a state of perpetual scandal has reset all the meters. “It's almost become, like, a part of my day,” the president told reporters earlier this month when talking about all his interactions with lawyers.

The question is whether his opponents will finally resign themselves to his existence and find ways to adapt to his style of chaotic governance.

“This has been a war every single day since the day he won. My presumption here is that is not sustainable if he gets elected [again]. At that point it’s just too difficult to sustain,” says Gingrich. Indeed, he says he can envision a bloc of around 50 House Democrats who will eventually come around to working with a second-term Trump on issues like infrastructure or join him in a big health care push on sickle cell anemia research.

“Once they get past having to chant ‘We hate Trump!’ and ‘Impeach Trump!’, which I think will disappear if he wins reelection because it’s not sustainable emotionally, then there’s a real opportunity to put together a series of bipartisan majorities,” said Gingrich, who now lives in Rome with his wife, Callista, the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.

That was, after all, the case with Clinton, who stayed busy in his final two years after his Senate trial, signing more than a dozen big laws, including a major banking deregulation plan later blamed for sparking the subprime mortgage financial crisis.

“We went back to work,” Trent Lott, the Senate majority leader during the 1999 impeachment trial, said in an interview. “It was a different time, different people, different media, quite frankly.”

While our time machine travels did not envision more impeachments in Trump’s future beyond what’s coming today in his first term, anyone watching the current battles can’t help but acknowledge the ever-present possibility that he could get pulled through the process again. Doug Holtz-Eakin, who in 2008 worked as a top adviser to John McCain’s presidential campaign, said he would see “little upside” for Democrats to keep trying to impeach a second-term Trump.

But he wouldn’t rule it out entirely, either. “The only way I could imagine a second impeachment would be if there was a clear, serious violation of national security laws,” he said.

There are those who clearly will never adjust to Trump, and who see the president serving four more years as a real threat to the country’s constitutional balance.

“As someone who has been in this business for more than 50 years in Washington, I cannot tell you how troubled I am by these prospects that the entire structure of the government system that’s operated for my lifetime and probably for a century before seems to be crumbling,” said Philip Allen Lacovara, a former Watergate prosecutor who made the winning argument in that unanimous 1974 Supreme Court case that helped lead to Nixon’s resignation.

“The very fact that people in the executive branch figure that they can simply put a thumb in the eye of Congress when they’re asked for information day after day after day after day, not on particularly controversial or sensitive single subject inquiries, that really is changing the fundamental nature of the government,” Lacovara added. “And the typical voter who is concerned about other things is simply not aware of this. And if Trump gets another four years to codify, institutionalize and embed this attitude it’s going to be very hard for Congress to reassert any effective control and oversight. I think that’s the real risk.”

Trump’s critics also worry that, given four more years in office, the president's unconventional ways could have other long-lasting effects on society. “Young people will grow up thinking that’s the way politics is,” said Shays. “So many of the things our Founding Fathers believe in will just go out the window.”

To Trump supporters, including the ones who came along on our time machine ride, all the talk about the end of democracy sounds laughable. “We said the same thing in 2012. ‘The stakes are just so high,’” Nunberg said of the fears surrounding a second Obama term. “We were fine.”

America, Trump’s supporters argue, is much more durable than the president’s critics acknowledge—even if he wins two terms. “It drives me crazy,” Fleischer said, “when people think Donald Trump’s tweets somehow are stronger than James Madison’s handwriting.”

 

[fraurosena]

emolument
/ɪˈmɒljʊm(ə)nt,ɛˈmɒljʊm(ə)nt/

a salary, fee, or profit from employment or office

See also The Title of Nobility Clause

Quote

Clause 8. No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

IN GENERAL

In 1871 the Attorney General of the United States ruled that: “A minister of the United States abroad is not prohibited by the Constitution from rendering a friendly service to a foreign power, even that of negotiating a treaty for it, provided he does not become an officer of that power . . . but the acceptance of a formal commission, as minister plenipotentiary, creates an official relation between the individual thus commissioned and the government which in this way accredits him as its representative,” which is prohibited by this clause of the Constitution.2014

 

[fraurosena]

It always leads back to Putin.
 

 

[Becky]

21 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

This is an interesting, albeit unsettling article; "What If Trump Wins?"

  Reveal hidden contents

President Donald Trump has a lot riding on 2020. If he loses, he won’t just quietly resume his carefree snowbird lifestyle, albeit with millions of new Twitter followers. He’ll be dogged by big legal bills as he fends off criminal investigations in multiple jurisdictions.

But what if he wins?

The election is more than a year away, his possible impeachment over the widening Ukraine scandal is far from resolved, and, yes, numerous polls show the president trailing nearly all of his likely Democratic opponents. But impatient politicos are already gaming out a scenario that is hardening into conventional wisdom: Trump is impeached by the House, acquitted by the Senate and re-elected on November 3.

The prospect of four more years has already captured the fevered imaginations of Democrats and never-Trump Republicans. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi predicted, “The reelection of Donald Trump would do irreparable damage to the United States.” Even the president’s own supporters envision an emboldened incumbent who pulverizes political norms with a vigor, to borrow the president’s go-to line, the likes of which the world has never seen.

Trump himself isn’t saying much about what a second term would really look like. Scripted legislative agendas are not how he rolls. Still, if his first term has taught us anything, Trump as a lame duck would be anything but unifying. Indeed, the civil war that the president has predicted could well be visible in the hostile crowds hectoring each other on the Mall in January. After that? What does a bruised but unbowed Trump do with his political capital? What does an enraged Democratic opposition bring to bear that it hasn’t already?

There’s only one way to answer these questions: the POLITICO Time Machine.

For the uninitiated, we used it once before in April 2016, when Trump wasn’t even the Republican nominee yet and when most people insisted he still had no chance of winning the White House. But our band of armchair time travelers already foresaw the looming possibility that the unorthodox novice could well be impeached if he ever took office. Our prognosticators weren’t so far off, given how fast Democrats started investigating Trump once they took the House majority halfway through his first term.

OK, sure, we were a little wide of the mark in predicting Trump would reopen Alcatraz and the World War II-era internment camps to house suspected Islamic extremists. And back in early 2016, no one saw Russia, much less Ukraine, emerging as the centerpiece of the impeachment inquiry. But, boy, did our brain trust nail it on predictions about Trump skirting Congress to pay for his border wall; a full-blown civil war brewing inside the intelligence community; and presidential approval numbers collapsing faster than a Greenland glacier.

To further fine-tune the conventional wisdom, we reconvened the Time Machine travelers and added a bunch more to the roster—25 people who know Trump world and GOP and Democratic politics—and asked them: What’s in store for Washington and the nation if Trump defies the odds to hold onto the White House?

“We will have entered an era of authoritarianism,” warned John Dean, the former Richard Nixon White House lawyer whose public testimony about Watergate helped lead to the president’s resignation.

That’s just left-wing hysteria, said Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House and outspoken Trump ally. “No. I don’t think Trump will be emboldened. I think Trump will be Trump. I think Trump is emboldened every morning. He goes, ‘I’m a billionaire. I’ve got the White House, Air Force One and Marine One. And I’m commander in chief. What’s part two?’ All these guys who spent three years shooting at me and I’m still in the building and they’re not.’”

But even some Trump supporters foresee the chance that Trump might test the boundaries of presidential power with bad results.

Former George W. Bush White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, a card-carrying establishment Republican who once criticized the president but now largely supports him, said a reelected Trump has the potential to take things too far. “I think it’d be very much like the first term with the risky exception that having survived impeachment and having been elected by the people he might feel like the guard rails are even farther away from the road he travels. I’d hope he’d realize the guardrails are there for a good purpose and if he drives too fast [he’ll] crash through them.”

At a Rose Garden press conference in early 1999 after the Senate acquitted him, President Bill Clinton responded to a question about whether he could “forgive and forget” by saying, “I believe any person who asks forgiveness has to be prepared to give it.” According to Bob Woodward’s account in his book, Shadow, a reporter then shouted to the president as he was walking away asking whether he’d be vindictive toward the Republicans who’d just impeached him. Clinton didn’t turn around.

Trump “won’t keep walking,” Fleischer predicted. “He’ll run back to the mic.”

So what would Trump say? We’ll let the Time Machine do the talking.

***

The time is January 2021. The election has left the nation a psychological mess and a sulfurous cloud of election meddling by foreign hackers hangs over the still-contested results. Trump’s Ukraine scandal ultimately spared him but it wounded Joe Biden enough to give Elizabeth Warren the nomination. Once again, though, the result came down to the Electoral College, but even closer than in 2016. Warren, like Hillary Clinton four years earlier, took the popular vote by a resounding margin. But this mixed verdict has done nothing but further entrench the battle lines of a civil war that has become more than just a metaphor.

The weeks after Election Day were ugly. Protests in New York, Washington, San Francisco and a dozen other cities turned violent, the byproduct of a tangled mass of disgruntled pink-hatted Democrats, MAGA supporters, left-wing antifa and far-right Proud Boys. People have been killed. The president chalked up the discord to urban blight. And then he imposed curfews and directed the National Guard to patrol the streets over the protests of governors and mayors.

On January 20, Trump takes the oath of office, vowing in the shadow of the Capitol for the second time that he would “to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The scene is unlike anything before in the country’s history. What’s always been a high-security event takes on a militaristic tone, with Trump ordering U.S. troops onto the streets of Washington as a show of force to deter more riots. His family surrounds him, along with a loyal base of congressional Republicans who but for a few defectors hung on during his first four years and most notably voted to keep him in office and defeat impeachment. Democrats, still seething at Trump’s flagrant constitutional violations, boycott the event en masse, the first time in modern history this has happened. Their seats are given away in a lottery open to Trump supporters.

Something else is notable, too. The four living ex-presidents, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter join George W. Bush in a protocol-busting protest. They skip Trump’s inaugural ceremony and accept Carter’s invitation to hand out meals at a Washington, D.C., homeless shelter.

After the inaugural parade, which includes tanks for the first time in a half-century, the president goes into the White House, takes out a hand-written enemies list of people who work for him and makes Jared Kushner fire everyone on it. The casualty list includes Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson. Mike Pompeo and Mark Esper resigned before the election, having been blamed by Trump for the Ukraine mess. Steve Mnuchin is the only original Cabinet secretary still in Trump’s good graces.

A new crop of loyalists gets hired, including now-former Reps. Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan and Doug Collins, as well as Lindsey Graham, who steps down from the Senate to become the new Defense secretary. Brad Parscale moves from campaign manager to serve as White House chief of staff—but only after Trump leaves Mick Mulvaney’s former job open for six months. Trump promises his longtime adviser Stephen Miller an appointment to run the Homeland Security Department in an acting capacity during the close of the second term, when Senate confirmation won’t matter for a lame duck administration. And the president also raids his reelection campaign for new staff, believing they will be more loyal than the Frankenstein crew from the Republican National Committee that he hastily assembled in 2017.

“You don’t work to reelect a man you hate to get into the White House,” observes Michael Caputo, a longtime Trump adviser who agreed to join us on our time traveling experiment and says the 2020 campaign represents a real bounty for faithful, Trump-believing worker bees.

Next comes the score settling. “Trump totally unburdened and 100 percent politics all the time. Payback is hell,” predicted one of the Republicans close to the White House who insisted on anonymity because of their current job.

As Washington freezes through the end of winter, Trump moves his administration temporarily to Mar-a-Lago. He’s golfing six days a week with the likes of celebrity admirers Rush Limbaugh, Kid Rock and Tiger Woods but finds time between rounds to lob Twitter grenades at anyone who crossed him during his first four years in office. Republicans are not spared as Trump draws a bull’s-eye on the half-dozen senators who voted to convict him at the impeachment trial. He hounds Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to remove Ben Sasse from the Banking, Judiciary and Intelligence committees. He scouts out 2022 GOP primary challengers for Richard Burr and Lisa Murkowski. And he seethes that he doesn’t have more ways to deliver payback to Susan Collins or a certain Mormon senator from Utah.

“Romney is lucky he’s running for reelection in 2024,” said Sam Nunberg, another former Trump campaign aide from 2016 who is riding shotgun in our time machine and sees an election cycle four years into the future as far enough away to spare the 2012 GOP presidential nominee from Trump’s ultimate payback.

Trump keeps trying to goose his government into action as the summer of 2021 arrives. He’s starting to sweat the U.S. economy in the months after the long-anticipated recession became official that April with the second consecutive quarter of negative growth. He tweets 10 times a day about how Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell is responsible. He gives one of his remaining first-term holdovers, national economic adviser Larry Kudlow, one more chance to pitch a middle-class tax cut in the hope that can turn things around.

Trump also leans in harder on his Justice Department. First, he orders Robert F. Kennedy’s name removed from the building headquarters in Washington and replaces it with Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and personal lawyer to the president whom Trump has installed as the director of his revamped and celebratory Voice of America. Then Trump threatens to fire Attorney General William Barr and every U.S. attorney in the country if criminal charges are not filed by Thanksgiving against any holdovers from the Obama administration who had a role in the original 2016 Russia investigation.

Trump cancels the annual turkey pardoning event and replaces it with a ceremony to give the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn and Roger Stone. All three former 2016 campaign aides had been sentenced to jail for crimes tied to special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, but Trump thinks he’s got room to maneuver now that he’s safely in a second term and decides to wipe their records clean.

Confounded and depressed by the 2020 election results, Democrats can’t figure out how to respond to every new example of Trump defying Congress. “The infighting. The blaming. The everything. Whoo!” Democratic operative James Carville says of his party’s struggle to find itself after losing in 2020. Jim Manley, a longtime aide to Harry Reid who was with us back in 2016 the last time we zoomed off into the future, foresees a “circular firing squad” taking place in his party “with no national Democratic leader able to tamp down on the internecine warfare.”

In the House, Pelosi was a goner the moment the television networks back in November declared Trump the winner. The president had taunted her throughout the 2020 campaign for her leadership against him on impeachment. And while her party still clings to a narrow House majority, the San Francisco congresswoman decides to call it quits and hands the speaker’s gavel over to Hakeem Jeffries, a 50-year old lawmaker from a Brooklyn-Queens district that is a stone’s throw from the president’s childhood home.

Democrats still have subpoena power, but they’ve been neutered by repeated attempts to draw anything out of the president. In the summer before the 2020 presidential election, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority rendered Trump virtually impregnable with a 5-4 decision overturning its seminal Watergate ruling against Richard Nixon and instead embracing a broad range of presidential executive powers.

The focus for House lawmakers shifts from Trump’s alleged abuses of power and foreign meddling in U.S. elections to something that doesn’t quite pique Trump’s ire as much: neglect at the federal agencies across his administration. While the Constitution has no double jeopardy clause for impeachment, Democrats debate whether to hold their fire in even considering another attempt at removing him from office.

Sure, there’s all manner of agitation to try again—namely from the crop of freshman and sophomore Democrats who now hold the largest bloc of votes in the House conference. But Jeffries cuts that talk off by the summer of 2021, saying the party won’t consider another impeachment until after the 2022 midterms—and only if there’s a blue wave that causes dramatic shifts in the Senate. He argues there’s no point going to war again with a president who won’t stop talking about his new mandate or with Republicans who wouldn’t convict the president in the first term even after being presented with a “smoking gun” audio tape that was secretly stashed on an internal White House server of Trump offering to sell Alaska to Vladimir Putin in exchange for Russian hackers’ help to win a second term.

“He’s now free to do everything he wants, even if it’s clearly an impeachable offense because they’re not going to go after him two times in a row,” laments former Connecticut Rep. Chris Shays, one of four Republicans who voted against all four articles of impeachment against Bill Clinton in 1998.

With impeachment off the table, Trump tries to cut deals with a divided Congress. But he spends his political capital much faster than his aides want. He finally gets a win on a replacement for the North American trade agreement that he tore up in his first term. But that’s it. House Democrats balk at an infrastructure package. There’s nowhere close to the 60 Senate votes needed to overhaul the nation’s prescription drug laws. The resulting bickering and blaming among lawmakers kills the chances for even bigger lifts. Reforming entitlement programs is nixed during the debate over Trump’s first budget in his second term. A comprehensive immigration overhaul gets shelved in the aftermath of Mexican troops accidentally opening fire on their American counterparts outside El Paso, the resulting tensions stoked by Trump and conservative media warnings about a caravan of thousands of migrants that never materializes at the border.

As we travel further into Trump’s second term, we see that he doesn’t lose every battle in the Capitol. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, reelected in 2020 to a seventh term, continues to do his part to remake the federal courts. The Kentucky Republican clears the floor calendar to hold votes confirming more than 100 more new judges with lifetime appointments to the district and appellate circuits, and conservatives rejoice at the prospect of friendly decisions for decades to come on issues like abortion, religion, and environmental and labor policy.

On the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, two associate justices in their mid-70s at the time of Trump’s second inaugural, opt for retirement rather than risk being replaced by a Democratic president after 2025. Meanwhile, the two remaining Bill Clinton-appointed justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, maximize their cardiovascular workouts and adopt strict Mediterranean diets.

Trump doesn’t really alter his erratic, isolationist foreign policy instincts. He withdraws all U.S. troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, despite reservations even among Republicans. In Syria, ISIS has proclaimed a second modern-day Caliphate. He threatens repeatedly to pull the U.S. out of NATO, even ordering that the paperwork be drawn up but backs down as Republicans and Democrats unite to throw legislative hurdles in his way. He saber rattles on tariffs with China for all four additional years, but never closes a trade deal with Beijing; by the end of his second term, the U.S. and China have had near-skirmishes in the increasingly militarized South China Sea. Jared Kushner never actually releases the second half of his Middle East peace plan. The Iran nuclear deal collapses entirely, although Tehran doesn't immediately restart its nuclear program as it tries to rebuild its economy. Luckily, for the Iranians, China and Russia increasingly are willing to ignore U.S. sanctions and give them a financial lifeline. There also is no breakthrough on nuclear weapon talks with North Korea, though Kim Jong Un makes his first visit to the United States and joins Trump and Dennis Rodman courtside at the United Center for a Chicago Bulls game.

Trump also spends his time thinking about his legacy, and whom he wants to replace him in the White House. After dropping hints in private for months, he finally sends out a tweet on July 4, 2022, that he doesn’t support Mike Pence’s presidential ambitions. “Great guy, TREMENDOUS veep, but it’s time for some Beautiful NEW BLOOD,” he writes. Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul back out by Labor Day, and the field is cleared for Ivanka Trump to take the party’s nomination 17 months before anyone has participated in a caucus or primary.

Meanwhile, Trump takes direct control over planning for his presidential library, which in a break with tradition will include no actual presidential papers because there are none that have been preserved. He strong arms the General Services Administration to write through the lease agreement on his D.C. hotel and tells Congress he won’t consent to end a months-long government shutdown unless it amends a century-old law restricting height limits on buildings in the Capitol. When the standoff ends, construction begins immediately on a new 75-story addition to the historic building that when finished will look down on the Washington Monument and the rest of the city.

Some of our fellow time travelers aren’t entirely certain that second-term Trump will be distinguishable from first-term Trump. “He’s a category 5 tornado now,” insisted Ty Cobb, the former Trump White House lawyer who managed the president’s response to the Robert Mueller investigation. “It’s not like he’s going to break the measuring point.”

Trump himself has acknowledged how a state of perpetual scandal has reset all the meters. “It's almost become, like, a part of my day,” the president told reporters earlier this month when talking about all his interactions with lawyers.

The question is whether his opponents will finally resign themselves to his existence and find ways to adapt to his style of chaotic governance.

“This has been a war every single day since the day he won. My presumption here is that is not sustainable if he gets elected [again]. At that point it’s just too difficult to sustain,” says Gingrich. Indeed, he says he can envision a bloc of around 50 House Democrats who will eventually come around to working with a second-term Trump on issues like infrastructure or join him in a big health care push on sickle cell anemia research.

“Once they get past having to chant ‘We hate Trump!’ and ‘Impeach Trump!’, which I think will disappear if he wins reelection because it’s not sustainable emotionally, then there’s a real opportunity to put together a series of bipartisan majorities,” said Gingrich, who now lives in Rome with his wife, Callista, the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.

That was, after all, the case with Clinton, who stayed busy in his final two years after his Senate trial, signing more than a dozen big laws, including a major banking deregulation plan later blamed for sparking the subprime mortgage financial crisis.

“We went back to work,” Trent Lott, the Senate majority leader during the 1999 impeachment trial, said in an interview. “It was a different time, different people, different media, quite frankly.”

While our time machine travels did not envision more impeachments in Trump’s future beyond what’s coming today in his first term, anyone watching the current battles can’t help but acknowledge the ever-present possibility that he could get pulled through the process again. Doug Holtz-Eakin, who in 2008 worked as a top adviser to John McCain’s presidential campaign, said he would see “little upside” for Democrats to keep trying to impeach a second-term Trump.

But he wouldn’t rule it out entirely, either. “The only way I could imagine a second impeachment would be if there was a clear, serious violation of national security laws,” he said.

There are those who clearly will never adjust to Trump, and who see the president serving four more years as a real threat to the country’s constitutional balance.

“As someone who has been in this business for more than 50 years in Washington, I cannot tell you how troubled I am by these prospects that the entire structure of the government system that’s operated for my lifetime and probably for a century before seems to be crumbling,” said Philip Allen Lacovara, a former Watergate prosecutor who made the winning argument in that unanimous 1974 Supreme Court case that helped lead to Nixon’s resignation.

“The very fact that people in the executive branch figure that they can simply put a thumb in the eye of Congress when they’re asked for information day after day after day after day, not on particularly controversial or sensitive single subject inquiries, that really is changing the fundamental nature of the government,” Lacovara added. “And the typical voter who is concerned about other things is simply not aware of this. And if Trump gets another four years to codify, institutionalize and embed this attitude it’s going to be very hard for Congress to reassert any effective control and oversight. I think that’s the real risk.”

Trump’s critics also worry that, given four more years in office, the president's unconventional ways could have other long-lasting effects on society. “Young people will grow up thinking that’s the way politics is,” said Shays. “So many of the things our Founding Fathers believe in will just go out the window.”

To Trump supporters, including the ones who came along on our time machine ride, all the talk about the end of democracy sounds laughable. “We said the same thing in 2012. ‘The stakes are just so high,’” Nunberg said of the fears surrounding a second Obama term. “We were fine.”

America, Trump’s supporters argue, is much more durable than the president’s critics acknowledge—even if he wins two terms. “It drives me crazy,” Fleischer said, “when people think Donald Trump’s tweets somehow are stronger than James Madison’s handwriting.”

 

I rarely imbibe, and it's only 8:40 am, but I really feel like I need a drink after reading that.  

[fraurosena]

This impeachment thing is really getting to him.

 

But apparently it doesn't bother him as much as losing that G-7 gig for Doral. That really hit him in his fee-fees.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

He is truly unhinged: "The 41 most out-there lines from Donald Trump's Cabinet meeting"

Spoiler

(CNN)On Monday, President Donald Trump held a Cabinet meeting. And, as often happens in these meetings, he spent the first half of the gathering monologuing while taking the occasional question from the assembled reporters. His Cabinet laughed when they were supposed to laugh, but otherwise sat idly by.

I went through the transcript of Trump's comments at the top of the Cabinet meeting. They're below.

1. "We never agreed to protect the Kurds for the rest of their lives."

If you are a US ally -- like the Kurds! -- and you read this quote, what must you be thinking? Also, away we go!

2. "Let them fight themselves. Everyone said the Kurds would do very well."

Who is "everyone" here? Seriously.

3. "A relationship with the Kurds is good, and they're going to be safe."

Again, how does he make this claim based on the circumstances on the ground in northern Syria?

4. "People have been trying to make this deal for years."

Trump appears to be referring here to a 120-hour ceasefire that some members of the Turkish government said was not a ceasefire at all.

5. "They're vicious and they stick together. They don't have Mitt Romney in their midst, they don't have people like that. They stick together."

This has long been one of Trump's "compliments" for Democrats -- that they never break ranks. Like many of his claims, this one is easily proven false. Liberal Democrats broke repeatedly with Speaker Nancy Pelosi's oft-stated desire not to impeach the President. Moderate Democrats repeatedly voted with Republicans on procedural matters in the House. There are oodles more examples.

6. "This thing is all about a letter that was perfect."

I believe that he means the Ukraine call, not letter here. Remember that in that call Trump a) reminds the Ukrainian President of how much the US does for his country b) tells him it's not reciprocated and c) asks for a favor. So, yeah. Perfect.

7. "It was all about whistleblowers. You never hear -- what happened to the whistleblower? They're gone. Because they've been discredited."

To be clear: There isn't a single thing in the whistleblower complaint that has been debunked. In fact, everything that we currently know about the Ukraine call (and its aftermath) reinforces the version of events in the whistleblower complaint.

8. "Why didn't the I.G. read the letter, read the transcript? He could have gotten it, I guess, I assume."

The whistleblower law makes very clear that the inspector general of the intelligence community needs only to find the complaint credible in order to send along to the director of national intelligence. As the ICIG's office noted in a release last month: "The Inspector General of the Intelligence Community determined, after conducting a preliminary review,that there were reasonable grounds to believe the urgent concern appeared credible."

9. "The whistleblower gave a false account. Now we have to say, well, do we have to protect somebody that gave a false account?"

There is zero -- REPEAT: ZERO -- evidence that the whistleblower's complaint, either in part or in whole, was false. Again, based on all public information, the whistleblower's complaint has been bolstered, not weakened.

10. "So was there actually an informant? Maybe the informant was Schiff. It could be Shifty Schiff. In my opinion, it's possibly Schiff."

OK, so what the President of the United States is accusing the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee with being an informant for the whistleblower? I think? Also, the evidence for this charge is what exactly?

11. "Why didn't he say that he met with the whistleblower? He knew all about the whistleblower. Why didn't he say?"

Well, this isn't true. Again. The whistleblower met with a staffer on the Intelligence Committee to go over the proper way to file a complaint. This is not unique and happens regularly. The staffer then briefed Schiff on the issues raised by the whistleblower.

12. "We may have to get in wars, too, OK? We may have to get in wars."

OK. Got it. Good note.

13. "I have to fight off these -- these lowlifes at the same time, I'm negotiating these very important things that should have been done during Obama and Bush and even before that, all right?"

The "lowlifes" Trump is referring to, I think, are House Democrats who are pursuing the possibility that he abused his office for his own personal political gain. But, yeah, why are they bothering him????

14. "Great place. Great state, Texas. Tough state. They -- they're tough."

Uh huh. OK.

15. "It'd be much easier for me to let our soldiers be there, let them continue to die."

The heights of empathy on display here. Bigly.

16. "There are times to fight, and there are times not to fight."

"You've got to know when to hold 'em/Know when to fold 'em/Know when to walk away/And know when to run." -- Kenny Rogers

17. "I give away my presidential salary. They say that no other president has done it. I'm surprised, to be honest with you."

You should be surprised! Because this isn't true! Both Herbert Hoover and John F. Kennedy gave up their presidential salaries, according to CNN's Daniel Dale.

18. "I'm very good at real estate, very, very good; much better than you even understand."

Wow, that is good!

19. "When you see my financials, which I'll give at the right time, you'll say, 'Man, he was much better than we even thought.'"

Know why we haven't seen just how tremendous Trump is at real estate? Because he has refused to turn over even a single year of his tax returns -- the first president in the post-Watergate era to take that path.

20. "But I'm very good at real estate."

Yes, you just said that.

21. "It's new. It's been totally rebuilt. It's new. Everything's good. It's got massive meeting rooms, unlimited for security because it's on, you know, hundreds of acres."

Yes, this is the President of the United States using his political platform to promote a property he a) owns and b) profits from. NOTHING TO SEE HERE!

22. "Best location, right next to the airport, Miami International, one of the biggest airports in the world. Some people say it's the biggest, but one of the biggest airports in the world."

[narrator] Miami isn't even one of the 20 biggest airports in the world.

23. "It would have been the greatest G7 ever."

Too bad! Also, can't wait for the less great G7!

24. "I don't run my business. I actually put all the stuff in trusts. They run -- and I didn't have to do that, but -- under no obligation to do it."

[narrator] There are still a LOT of questions about that.

25. "I don't know if you know George Washington, he ran his business simultaneously while he was president."

I mean, I don't know Washington personally. Mainly because he died 220 years ago.

26. "Hey, Obama made a deal for a book. Is that running a business? I'm sure he didn't even discuss it while he was president, yeah. He has a deal with Netflix. When did they start talking about that? That's only, you know, a couple of examples."

Obama made a Netflix deal and a book deal after he left office. So, not the same. At all. And if Trump has evidence -- as he suggests -- that Obama was negotiating his book deal in office, then he should provide said evidence.

27. "George Washington, they say, had two desks. He had a presidential desk and a business desk."

You know what they said about George Washington? That he wasn't a businessman. He was a business, man.

28. "I don't think you people, with this phony Emoluments Clause."

This "phony" emoluments clause is in a little document I like to call the Constitution.

29. "I would say that it's cost me anywhere from $2 billion to $5 billion to be president -- and that's OK -- between what I lose and what I could have made. I would have made a fortune, if I just ran my business."

The evidence to back up this claim? Oh, none.

30. "I was doing it really well. I have a great business, I have the best properties."

Totally normal stuff here!

31. "Most of the stuff that I have -- because now, instead of having 100% of the market that loves you and they love your brand and it's luxury and it's great, now you have 50% of the market."

So, prior to running for president, Trump believes 100% of the market loved him? OK, got it!

32. "So it's cost me between $2 billion and $5 billion. And if I had it to do again, I'd do it in an instant. Because who cares? If you could afford it, what difference does it make?"

"And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything." -- Donald Trump

33. "So whether I lost $2 billion, $5 billion, more or less, doesn't make any difference to me. I don't care. If you're rich, it doesn't matter."

"And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything." -- Donald Trump

34. "I go into these massive basketball arenas -- like in Dallas, where the Mavericks play -- and fill it up and set a record. I've set a record almost every place I've been, because we just need a little small stage. "

On what is Trump basing these attendance records? Absolutely no idea.

35. "And I take less than musicians because they have bands. I don't have a band. I set the world record for somebody without a guitar, OK? I don't have bands, right?"

Honestly, same.

36. "And I've had great polls. I've had my best polls now."

Current Trump job approval in Gallup weekly tracking: 39%.

37. "North Korea's -- I like him, he likes me. We get along. I respect him, he respects me."

Donald Trump on dictator Kim Jong Un. Sure. OK.

38. "I don't think it'll be as exciting, and I don't think it'll be as good. It'll cost the country a fortune because it's very expensive."

This G7 is going to be off the hook!

39. "They thought I may get some promotional value. I need promotional value so badly, right? I don't need promotion."

E-m-o-l-u-m-e-n-t-s

40. "I have the strongest economy in the history of our country, OK?"

Nah, dog.

41. "Would you like to stay for Larry's remarks? Because he's a great, great remark-maker."

'Ight, imma head out.

 

[fraurosena]

So Nancy Pelosi tweeted this:

Of course, the tangerine toddler can't stop himself from attacking her. Note how he doesn't respond to anything she's said, and this is all he could come up with. 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

The sheer numbers are staggering. In less than three years in office, there are more than 2,500 conflicts of interest.

[fraurosena]

23 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

The sheer numbers are staggering. In less than three years in office, there are more than 2,500 conflicts of interest.

 Yikes, that's 2,5 conflicts of interest per day since he took office!

On the information of this tracker alone you could write up articles of impeachment. 

But you know what's even more mind-boggling than the staggering amount the tracker contains? The fact that these are only the ones that CREW has been able to find because they are public information. You can bet that there are many more that aren't public knowledge...

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Cue a major twitter meltdown: "Anonymous author of Trump ‘resistance’ op-ed to publish a tell-all book"

Spoiler

The author of an anonymous column in the New York Times in 2018, who was identified as a senior Trump administration official acting as part of the “resistance” inside the government, has written a tell-all book to be published next month.

The book, titled “A Warning,” is being promoted as “an unprecedented behind-the-scenes portrait of the Trump presidency” that expands upon the Times column, which ricocheted around the world and stoked the president’s rage because of its devastating portrayal of Trump in office.

The column described Trump’s leadership style as “impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective,” and noted that “his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.”

The author of the column, which was titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” and published Sept. 5, 2018, was known to the Times but identified only as a senior official in the Trump administration. The person has still not been publicly identified.

Trump lashed out at the anonymous author after the column’s publication. The president questioned both whether the author existed and whether the author had committed treason. He also demanded on Twitter that the Times turn over “the GUTLESS anonymous person” to the government “at once.” The Times did not.

The forthcoming book will list the author as “Anonymous.” Although the person does not reveal their identity in the book, they will discuss the reasons for their anonymity, according to people involved in the project.

“Picking up from where those first words of warning left off, this explosive book offers a shocking, firsthand account of President Trump and his record,” reads a statement about the book’s release.

The book will be published Nov. 19 by Twelve, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing/Hachette Book Group. It comes during a treacherous period for Trump, as the House continues its fast-moving impeachment inquiry into allegations that the president abused his power.

The author is being represented by Matt Latimer and Keith Urbahn of Javelin, the same literary agents who represented fired FBI director James B. Comey and former White House aide Cliff Sims — still a Trump ally — for their memoirs from their time in the Trump administration. The book was acquired by Sean Desmond, Twelve’s publisher.

People involved in the project said that both Twelve and Javelin have verified that the book’s author is the same person who wrote the Times column but would not share the author’s identity with The Washington Post.

“There obviously will be those who want the author to reveal themselves publicly, but there are good reasons for that not to happen,” Latimer said. “The author feels their identity is almost irrelevant because there is scarcely a sentiment expressed in this book that is not shared by numerous others who have served and continue to serve this administration at its highest levels.”

There is no modern historical parallel for a firsthand account of a sitting president written in book form by an anonymous author. Many senior government officials, including some who served in the Trump administration, have written books under their own names. Many more have shared information with journalists on the condition of anonymity, perhaps most famously the official known as Deep Throat who was a key source for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s reporting in The Post on the Watergate scandal.

The 1996 publication of “Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics” caused a sensation in part because of the anonymity of its author, who was later revealed to be columnist Joe Klein. The book was a work of fiction, although its characters and events mirrored Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign.

Latimer said the anonymous author of “A Warning” did not take an advance and intends to donate some of the royalties to nonprofit organizations that focus on government accountability and supporting truth-tellers in repressive countries, including the White House Correspondents’ Association.

“The author could have received a seven-figure advance for writing this book,” Latimer said. “But ‘A WARNING’ was not written for financial reasons. The author sees this as an act of conscience and of duty, which is why the author refused any advance and is donating a substantial portion of any royalties to charities that protect those seeking the truth around the world.”

 

[fraurosena]

13 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Cue a major twitter meltdown: "Anonymous author of Trump ‘resistance’ op-ed to publish a tell-all book"

  Reveal hidden contents

The author of an anonymous column in the New York Times in 2018, who was identified as a senior Trump administration official acting as part of the “resistance” inside the government, has written a tell-all book to be published next month.

The book, titled “A Warning,” is being promoted as “an unprecedented behind-the-scenes portrait of the Trump presidency” that expands upon the Times column, which ricocheted around the world and stoked the president’s rage because of its devastating portrayal of Trump in office.

The column described Trump’s leadership style as “impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective,” and noted that “his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.”

The author of the column, which was titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” and published Sept. 5, 2018, was known to the Times but identified only as a senior official in the Trump administration. The person has still not been publicly identified.

Trump lashed out at the anonymous author after the column’s publication. The president questioned both whether the author existed and whether the author had committed treason. He also demanded on Twitter that the Times turn over “the GUTLESS anonymous person” to the government “at once.” The Times did not.

The forthcoming book will list the author as “Anonymous.” Although the person does not reveal their identity in the book, they will discuss the reasons for their anonymity, according to people involved in the project.

“Picking up from where those first words of warning left off, this explosive book offers a shocking, firsthand account of President Trump and his record,” reads a statement about the book’s release.

The book will be published Nov. 19 by Twelve, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing/Hachette Book Group. It comes during a treacherous period for Trump, as the House continues its fast-moving impeachment inquiry into allegations that the president abused his power.

The author is being represented by Matt Latimer and Keith Urbahn of Javelin, the same literary agents who represented fired FBI director James B. Comey and former White House aide Cliff Sims — still a Trump ally — for their memoirs from their time in the Trump administration. The book was acquired by Sean Desmond, Twelve’s publisher.

People involved in the project said that both Twelve and Javelin have verified that the book’s author is the same person who wrote the Times column but would not share the author’s identity with The Washington Post.

“There obviously will be those who want the author to reveal themselves publicly, but there are good reasons for that not to happen,” Latimer said. “The author feels their identity is almost irrelevant because there is scarcely a sentiment expressed in this book that is not shared by numerous others who have served and continue to serve this administration at its highest levels.”

There is no modern historical parallel for a firsthand account of a sitting president written in book form by an anonymous author. Many senior government officials, including some who served in the Trump administration, have written books under their own names. Many more have shared information with journalists on the condition of anonymity, perhaps most famously the official known as Deep Throat who was a key source for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s reporting in The Post on the Watergate scandal.

The 1996 publication of “Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics” caused a sensation in part because of the anonymity of its author, who was later revealed to be columnist Joe Klein. The book was a work of fiction, although its characters and events mirrored Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign.

Latimer said the anonymous author of “A Warning” did not take an advance and intends to donate some of the royalties to nonprofit organizations that focus on government accountability and supporting truth-tellers in repressive countries, including the White House Correspondents’ Association.

“The author could have received a seven-figure advance for writing this book,” Latimer said. “But ‘A WARNING’ was not written for financial reasons. The author sees this as an act of conscience and of duty, which is why the author refused any advance and is donating a substantial portion of any royalties to charities that protect those seeking the truth around the world.”

 

Kellyanne? It would explain so much about her and George...

Edited October 22, 2019 by fraurosena

[GreyhoundFan]

One more addition to tonight's likely tweetstorm: "Just in time for skating season, Trump’s company scrubs his name from N.Y. ice rinks"

Spoiler

NEW YORK — At two of President Trump’s oldest businesses — a pair of ice rinks in Central Park, which Trump has run since the 1980s — Trump Organization employees did something unusual in the past few weeks.

They started removing the Trump name.

Now, as skating season begins, the president’s name is gone from the boards around each rink, where large red “TRUMP” signs once surrounded skaters. It is mostly gone from the desk where visitors rent skates: There, the white tarp used to hide the Trump name wasn’t quite big enough for the job, so a “T” still sticks out.

And where the president’s name remains, it is largely relegated to the fine print. The welcome sign out front of one rink used to say “Trump” at the top; now the name is at the very bottom, under the phone number. “Operated by the Trump Organization,” the sign says.

Trump’s company still runs these two ice rinks. For them, then, the changes in branding mark a milestone: For the first time since Trump took office, two of Trump’s own businesses seem to be trying to downplay their connection to his name.

“It’s a complete rebranding,” said Geoffrey Croft, of the watchdog group NYC Park Advocates. These rinks, which once shouted the president’s name, now barely mention it. “They’ve taken [the name] off everything. Off the uniforms, everything.”

Trump has run the rinks since the 1980s, under a concession from the city of New York. The rinks actually played a major role in the creation of Trump as a national celebrity: in the 1980s, he took over a languishing city-run renovation project and famously finished the rink himself, on time and under budget.

Officially, the two rinks have other names: Wollman Rink in the southern part of the park, and Lasker Rink at the park’s northern end. But Trump displayed his name as prominently — or more prominently — than the official names.

The two rinks had been heavily branded with the Trump name through last winter’s skating season. But this summer, a city spokeswoman said, the Trump Organization decided to make a change.

“The Trump organization notified us in late August that they planned to change the on-rink branding,” Crystal Howard, a spokeswoman for the city parks department, said in an email message. She said the city did not ask for the change and that the company did not explain why it did it.

When a Washington Post reporter visited Wollman Rink on Tuesday, the only prominent appearance of the Trump name was on the Zamboni ice-resurfacing machine. Employees weren’t sure if it would stay there, either. Croft, the parks watchdog, said an employee had told him it would come off.

The Trump Organization did not respond to questions about the change.

When the Post reporter visited the rink this week, one employee theorized that the decision was made because the Trump branding was driving some customers away.

“I do believe that’s the answer. It was hurting business,” the employee said. The employee spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. “A lot of the schools, you know, liberal private schools up here, come to parties up here. That was a big income earner up here Monday and Tuesday night.”

The New York Post reported on one instance of that in early 2017: a skating party at the Wollman Rink for children from the elite Dalton School was canceled, the paper reported, after some parents refused to let their children go to a rink emblazoned with Trump’s name.

Trump built an empire on branding, leaving his name on dozens of hotels, buildings and golf courses. Since Trump took office, his name has been removed from three hotels and six Manhattan residential buildings. But those were other people’s buildings, whose owners had paid to license the Trump name.

The ice rinks, by contrast, are run directly by Trump’s company. The change is their decision, the city said. The Post has not identified any other instances in which the Trump Organization voluntarily removed so much Trump-branded signage from any property.

These ice rinks are — like many other Trump properties — marooned in a liberal city, far from the rural and exurban voters whom Trump relies on as a politician. In 2015, Trump quickly reversed his public image, from a hotel owner who courted urban elites to a hard-right politician who denounced them.

But unlike Trump’s hotels in New York, Chicago and Doral, Fla., the Trump-branded ice rinks had not suffered declines since Trump ran for office.

In fact, their income had risen about 12 percent from 2015 to 2018, according to figures provided by New York City. That was roughly in line with trends at other popular rinks in the city.

“I’m not going to not go because it’s Donald Trump . . . even though I hate him and I don’t want him to be my president,” said Amy Townsend, 57, a visitor from Los Angeles who was walking in the park this week. She also said that even a Trump-branded ice rink wouldn’t dissuade her from skating: “If I want to ice skate in this beautiful area, I’m going to do that.”

The Wollman Rink played a significant role in the creation of Trump as a local and national celebrity. In the 1980s, the city was mired in an over-budget, long-delayed renovation project.

Trump, then known as a playboy real estate developer, offered to take the project over. He did, and finished it ahead of schedule. In return, Trump got the valuable concession to run the rink — and a national reputation, as a businessman who talked big and got results.

“This is the first time he’s famous not for his nightlife, but for improving urban civic life,” said Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University.

“You know what this tells me?” Moss said of the removal of the Trump-branded signs. “He’s a businessman. He knows the name Wollman [Rink] is better without Trump.”

 

[WiseGirl]

And this just in...always follow the money. 

[WiseGirl]

Once again wtf

[GreyhoundFan]

In another case of crap you couldn't make up if you tried: "Trump lawyer: Trump can’t be prosecuted for shooting someone"

Spoiler

A lawyer for Donald Trump argued in federal court on Wednesday that the president could shoot someone on 5th Avenue in New York City and not be prosecuted.

The lawyer, William Consovoy, was responding to a question by Judge Denny Chin of the Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, who asked, “What’s your view on the 5th Avenue example? Local authorities couldn’t investigate? They couldn’t do anything about it?”

“I think once the president is removed from office, any local authority — This is not a permanent immunity,” Consovoy said.

“Well, I’m talking about while in office,” Judge Chin continued.

“No,” Consovoy interrupted.

“That’s the hypo[thetical]. Nothing could be done — that’s your position?” the judge pressed.

“That is correct. That is correct,” Consovoy responded.

The exchange came as lawyers were arguing in the 2nd Circuit in New York over a subpoena for Trump’s tax returns as part of a Manhattan county criminal investigation involving the president.

Trump filed suit in New York last month to block the grand jury subpoena. It was dismissed by a federal district judge who said he had no jurisdiction to intervene in a state court proceeding.

 

[fraurosena]

More evidence of how American taxpayers are being shafted by this administration.

 

[fraurosena]

As his impeachment draws inevitably nearer, and removal from office seems ever more probable, Trump is amping up the favors he still owes Putin. 

Point in case:

 

[fraurosena]

In case anyone was wondering which side Trump is on...

Trump’s D.C. hotel abruptly cancels Christian aid group’s Kurdish solidarity event

Quote

A Christian aid group that planned a gathering to honor and pray for the Kurdish people at President Trump’s hotel in Washington were told by hotel staff this week that the event was canceled, according to two members of the aid group.

The event, called “A Night of Prayer for the Kurds,” was to be hosted by Frontier Alliance International (FAI), a religious nonprofit group that provides medical help in the Middle East, including to the Kurds, according to its website.

In recent weeks, Trump pulled U.S. soldiers out of northern Syria, paving the way for an invasion by Turkey that targeted Kurdish forces. The fighting has prompted a flood of Kurdish refugees out of Syria — and caused a political headache for the president, who has been accused by Republicans and Democrats alike of abandoning U.S. allies in the region.

The aid group’s founder, Dalton Thomas, said the reasons behind the cancellation were “hazy.”

“All we know is they canceled,” Thomas, who is in Saudi Arabia, said via text message.

A second official with the religious group, administrator Charlene Struebing, said Trump International Hotel staff expressed “security concerns.” Critics of FAI’s decision to hold its event at the Trump hotel had planned to protest outside, she said.

“They said they’ve gotten a lot of security concerns and they couldn’t accommodate enough security,” Struebing said. “I think it’s more related to people protesting our event than it was anything we were doing.”

The Trump Organization did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A D.C. police spokeswoman said the department “has not received any information regarding potential security threats or concerns with this event.”

During Trump’s presidency, his hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue has become a favorite hangout for his Republican allies and a venue for conservative events and conferences. Attorney General William P. Barr has booked a holiday party for 200 people at the hotel in December that could generate more than $30,000 in revenue for Trump’s business.

FAI leaders said their goal was not to fund the Trump Organization but rather to use the venue to raise awareness about the Kurdish plight and transcend partisan differences. Still, the backlash to their choice of venue was swift.

“We’ve been bombarded with emails and responses on social media and phone calls of people who are understandably confused by why we would choose to do [the event] at this location, at Trump hotel, which is owned by the president who made this decision that is causing so much bloodshed and turmoil right now for the Kurds,” Thomas said in an online video that was posted Sunday.

Thomas and another leader of the group, Joel Richardson, explained that the intention was to show “honor and respect and humility” for the office of the president while also being “honest about what’s taking place” with the Kurds.

“We’re commanded as followers of Jesus to pray for and honor leaders. And so this is the approach we’ve chosen to do that,” Richardson said in the video. “We are going to, if you will, the president’s living room, and we’re doing our best to have an honoring, respectful, family discussion.”

He added that since “every news story somehow ends up being all about Trump” that it would be good publicity for the issue.

After the cancellation, Thomas said: “It’s their prerogative to cancel.”

“I think it’s a shame they used that prerogative though as this was an opportunity for the Trump administration,” he added. “It seems as though they set out to ‘[snatch] defeat from the jaws of victory’ this month on everything.”

Thomas said that the Trump Organization had refunded the group’s money and that FAI now planned to hold the event at the Grand Hyatt Washington hotel on Sunday.

 

[fraurosena]

Lying about people crying, when you know there is video evidence. 

 Colorado?  

[fraurosena]

Wut? 

So much to unpack here.

1. Why is the print out put in an embossed envelope?
2. Why print outs of tweets? It it because he doesn't read the comments on Twitter because the majority is critical and his ego can't handle them?
3. Why does he write on the print out and take a photo of it to post on Twitter? Why not like or comment on the post itself?
4. Why the big signature on the print out by the way? 
5. 'Best Wishes'... it's a print out, not a Hallmark card.
6. Less said about the accounts the better...

 

Edited October 23, 2019 by fraurosena