Trump 43: King of Chaos

[fraurosena]

So pathetic. 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump thinks Biden pulled a scam in Ukraine because it’s what Trump would have done"

Spoiler

Everything President Trump accuses his opponents of doing can be understood in one of two ways: as projection or a confession.

When he accuses Democrats of manipulating the last election (an election where more Americans voted for his rival than for him, which still rankles Trump), like he did last month, saying, “Wow, Report Just Out! Google manipulated from 2.6 million to 16 million votes for Hillary Clinton in 2016 Election!” that’s the confession of someone who has been accused of trying to manipulate the last election himself. When he calls any number of intelligent Democrats (usually women) “low IQ,” that’s projection and a manifestation of the kind of intellectual insecurity that would lead someone to go to epic lengths to ensure his college transcripts are never released while also spouting easily refutable lies that he graduated at the top of his class at Wharton.

And when he suggests, baselessly, that Joe Biden threatened Ukraine on behalf of his son Hunter Biden’s business and that this ridiculous lie is evidence of systemic corruption on the part of the Biden family, it manages to be both — a confession and projection. Trump is projecting his own faults onto Biden and accusing him of abusing public office to enrich his family business.

Wanton corruption and pursuit of personal enrichment at the expense of Americans appear to be the two dominant modes of operation for the Trump family, so this should come as no surprise. No first family in modern history has so gleefully flouted the emoluments clause of the Constitution while cozying up to hostile foreign powers at the expense of American lives and for the benefit of their private businesses. It is easy to see why Trump thinks Biden must have been pulling a scam in Ukraine: It is exactly what Trump would have done.

Trump’s extreme solipsism means he cannot really conceive of anyone who’d behave any differently than he does. He has accused public servants of pursuing personal vendettas against him, even as he threatened to fire them in retaliation for perceived slights; accused the FBI, the media and Democrats at large of treason, even as he betrays the country in ways large and small; and referred to Chrissy Teigen as “filthy-mouthed” after bragging about sexually assaulting women in language that isn’t printable in a family newspaper. On some level, he believes it because he cannot conceive of anyone acting in good faith — with regard to anything. Unlike prior occupants of the Oval Office, he has no meaningful concept of public service because it involves a duty to others and sacrificing for the good of the whole. Trump sees no point in personally doing anything that does not directly benefit anyone who is not Donald Trump. His idea of sacrifice is, as he told the parents of a fallen soldier, employing people who work for him and even that he finds galling, routinely stiffing contractors on payments.

Still, Trump’s lies about the Biden family will probably gain traction with a certain constituency of Trump supporters who view the president’s feigned outrage about the imaginary misdeeds of other people as an articulation of something ineffable that they already believe about elites: that all of them are corrupt to some extent. This is also why even the supporters who will acknowledge Trump is corrupt give him a pass. They believed most of government was corrupt before Trump entered office, anyway. He may be getting rich from public office, but he is on their side, and so he cannot be any worse than what Fox News tells them Democrats are.

But of course he is. Surely he knows it on some level, so his simple messaging playbook is just the rhetorical version of a thoughtless playground taunt: I know you are, but what am I. Some part of Trump is aware he is a liar, that he is corrupt, that he clumsily tried to manipulate the last election (“Russia, if you’re listening …”) and that he and his family are presently and unabatedly abusing their positions in the White House to gain access to capital they would not have otherwise from sources hostile to U.S. interests. And he admits it via the overwrought, subliterate accusations he hurls at others.

That’s what drives Trump to suggest, with zero evidence, that former president Barack Obama should be criminally investigated for unspecified wrongdoing (or for getting a Netflix deal) or that Hillary Clinton should be locked up for having the temerity to continue to exist. Somewhere in the recesses of his consciousness, perhaps he is afraid he will be held accountable and the result will be criminal investigation and potentially, incarceration. Projection and confession. As calls for impeachment grow louder and more evidence is uncovered that Trump has done and is doing things that may or do cross any number of legal and ethical lines, the number of supposed criminals he’s identified among his opponents keep multiplying.

The whistleblower scandal he is embroiled in now may be his undoing, if it really does prompt House Democrats to take up impeachment, so the accusations are louder and more vocal. Trump has to convince himself and his supporters that his worst qualities and misdeeds are somehow eclipsed by the faults and misdeeds of others, however fictional, implausible or easily refuted by readily available evidence. He knows he can continue to be evil, as long as he is the lesser evil. To be the lesser evil, greater demons must be conjured up from thin air.

But the weakness of this particular tactic is it demonstrates how shallow Trump’s imagination is. His “everybody does it!” nihilism is not indicative of a complex and cynical worldview. Trump simply assumes everyone else does it because it is what he would do.

So if he wakes up tomorrow and accuses Joe Biden of trying to act like a tough guy, of selling out America in exchange for small-stakes business advantages and being “low IQ” — all of which Trump has already done — it will not be any reflection on Biden. (Coming soon, no doubt: Joe Biden cheats at golf!) It will just be another contour in the cartography of Trump’s own guilt and self-loathing. Projection, again, and a confession.

 

[fraurosena]

Holy moly! Trump is finally owning up to what he's done!

 

[GreyhoundFan]

It's amazing how he lies about everything. He wouldn't know the truth if it bit him in his ample ass:

 

[AnywhereButHere]

With all of this impeachment talk, you know what we're not talking about? Fucknut's taxes. Would he seriously be willing to undergo an impeachment hearing, dragging himself and many members of his govt down to divert from his tax release issue? I swear to god - this (non)administration has turned me into a whackadoodle conspiracy theorist of the oddest kind.

[formergothardite]

2 hours ago, AnywhereButHere said:

Would he seriously be willing to undergo an impeachment hearing, dragging himself and many members of his govt down to divert from his tax release issue? I

Yes. I think he would. His ultimate humiliation would be releasing his taxes so he could no longer claim to be a billionaire. 

[fraurosena]

Wanna bet it's Trump ranting:

"Total exoneration by DNI Maguire! It's a witch hunt! No quid pro quo! The Democrats are out to get me!"

[Ozlsn]

6 hours ago, AnywhereButHere said:

With all of this impeachment talk, you know what we're not talking about? Fucknut's taxes

And his detention centres.  And the broader web of his family's corruption. There is just so much with this administration it's like Whack-A-Mole. You start covering one scandal and another pops up.

[WiseGirl]

#CancelNYT but Olga has the real goods on 45.

And a little Aunt Crabby for good measure under spoiler 2. My Twitter has been exploding this past hour.

Spoiler

 

 

Spoiler

 

Edited September 27, 2019 by WiseGirl
added Aunt Crabby

[fraurosena]

The argument could be made that they are handicapped.

All snark aside, this is just atrocious behavior.

I do have to snigger a little at Fredo-dumber being made to sit in the aisle.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s company, seeking to revive a money-losing golf course in Scotland, gets approval to build 550 homes there"

Spoiler

ABERDEEN, Scotland — A local council in northeastern Scotland granted approval on Thursday to the Trump Organization to build 550 houses on pastureland and forests along a remote swath of North Sea coastline, a rare victory for the company amid declining fortunes elsewhere for President Trump’s family business.

The Aberdeenshire Council voted 38 to 24 to allow the Trump Organization’s residential development to move forward despite vocal opposition from many residents who fear it would crowd the roads and schools of their windswept village.

By winning the council’s approval, the Trump Organization is poised for one of its most ambitious foreign projects of his presidency. It is also a rescue effort of sorts for Trump’s first golf course in Europe, which has lost money each year since it opened in 2012. A second local council this week also approved the company’s plan to build a second golf course on the site.

“I’m absolutely delighted. Common sense has prevailed,” Sarah Malone, an executive vice president at the Trump Organization who oversees the Aberdeen project, told reporters after the vote. “Today’s very strong recommendation is a clear endorsement by the northeast of Scotland that the Trump development to date is already a success, and we want to build on that great foundation.”

In a sign of its confidence in Wednesday’s vote, the Trump Organization had already begun marketing the homes as part of what it called the Trump Estate, with some homes priced at more than $1.5 million.

If the Trump Organization follows through on these plans, it would turn the company into something it has not been before: a large-scale house builder. The company has built condo buildings before and sold off a few dozen houses or home lots next to other golf courses. But the company is now proposing to build a sizable suburban development, complete with the expenses of roads, streets and a school.

The outcome in Aberdeen runs contrary to the general trend for Trump’s family business. Since Trump took office, leaving day-to-day control of his company to his sons, the real estate empire’s revenue from several key properties, including his Mar-a-Lago Club and the Doral resort in Florida, has fallen.

A rare bright spot is Trump’s D.C. hotel, which has attracted business from Trump’s political allies, foreign politicians and lobbyists.

The company also has faced repeated controversies for mixing business with politics. Visiting diplomats and U.S. officials have come under scrutiny for patronizing the president’s properties. The Pentagon acknowledged spending nearly $200,000 at Turnberry, Trump’s other golf course in Scotland, over the past two years to put up U.S. Air Force crews. Trump also has proposed hosting next year’s Group of Seven conference of leading industrial nations at his resort in Doral, Fla.

On one level, the Aberdeen dispute has been about the future of a small Scottish village and comes with all the attendant not-in-my-backyard tensions. But because neighbor in question is Donald Trump, geopolitical passions have been stirred into the local brew. Amid the swirl of an impeachment inquiry and Brexit, residents of Aberdeen were handed their own chance to opine about Trump.

“My fingers are numb,” councilman Brian Topping said of the mountain of email that came his way.

Of the 2,921 households that weighed in with planning authorities, only three supported the Trump plan.

The Trump Organization’s proposal involves building 500 houses and 50 holiday cottages, plus shops, restaurants and other community facilities on its 430-acre seaside property. The development is in the village of Balmedie, a misty little burgh of about 2,500 people that could get significantly more crowded if the development comes to fruition.

Residents have blasted the plan from many directions, arguing that hundreds of new homes would clog roads, overburden schools, fail to boost the local economy, swamp sewers, harm trees and wildlife, block routes to the beach and “further devastate a once beautiful unspoiled area,” as a planning report described one line of opposition.

During Thursday’s meeting, councilors struggled to separate the normal planning process from the fact that the U.S. president was involved in this case. One councilor, Martin Ford, recused himself because of his past criticism of Trump — but not before announcing that the area’s “standing and reputation” had been damaged by association with Trump and his “incitement to violence, racism, misogyny, and environmental vandalism.”

“Mr. Ford, I think that’s wholly inappropriate,” the presiding provost scolded him. “I would ask you not to continue with that line.”

The Aberdeen course has been a contentious subject for more than a decade.

Early on, landowners fought against selling their land to Trump at the prices he offered. More recently, some hoisted Mexican flags on their property to protest the president. Trump also unsuccessfully sued the Scottish government to stop a wind farm from being built in view of his course.

For authorities, the issue this week was about what the Trump Organization wanted to build.

The Trump Organization had received approval in 2008 to build hundreds of homes as long as they also built its planned golf tourism resort, which officials hoped would enhance the local economy. The plan included a 450-room hotel, a conference center, a spa and other amenities.

That hotel has not been built and the only lodging on Trump’s property is a boutique hotel with 21 rooms. Hordes of golf tourists have so far not materialized. The golf course is closed for five months of the year during winter and is regularly blasted by inclement weather even when open.

Company executives have indicated that shifting to residential real estate is the best chance for the project’s survival.

“For long-term sustainability — this is a real estate play — we’re going to have to sell homes,” George Sorial, a former Trump Organization executive who oversaw the Aberdeen project in its early years, said in an interview earlier this year.

But by shifting to building homes instead of a big hotel, some locals believe the Trump Organization has betrayed its promise to boost the economy.

“We were promised something transformative with this development,” said Councilor Richard Thomson, who voted against the plan. “I don’t think this is it.”

The Trump Organization argued that the local economy had changed in the past decade — after the 2008 recession and the 2014 oil price collapse — and that a big hotel was no longer economically feasible.

“There is a crisis of oversupply in the northeast of Scotland,” said the Trump Organization’s Malone. “We are world leaders when it comes to building five-star hotels. You just need to look at our record. If there was a market to build a 450-bedroom hotel, we would be the first ones to do it.”

Proponents of the plan said that any new development could still provide an economic boon to the local area.

“Germany is going into recession. France appears to be in recession. Southern Europe is going into recession. And we have an American businessman who is prepared to make a multimillion- pound investment into Aberdeenshire,” said Councilor Sebastian Lane. “I think that is marvelous.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump, the TV president, finally meets a media story he can’t control"

Spoiler

Donald Trump’s presidency would have been impossible without his reality-TV fame from NBC’s “The Apprentice.”

And he is skilled at dominating the visual medium that still matters so much — even in our digital age — from his raucous rallies to his impromptu media gaggles outside a whirring helicopter to his symbiotic relationship with Fox News.

But not this week.

In a tectonic shift of media attention, every major television network — broadcast and cable alike — focused on a deeply damaging story that Trump can’t control.

On Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that impeachment proceedings would begin.

On Wednesday, Trump responded in a rambling, low-energy news conference from the United Nations, for which all three broadcast networks ditched their usual programming to take live.

Then, for hour upon hour Thursday morning, the networks did the same for the congressional testimony of acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire, who was grilled about a whistleblower’s report that puts a harsh spotlight on Trump’s urging Ukraine’s president to dig up dirt about his political rival.

“Almost like moving forward with impeachment would get people’s attention,” quipped author Jonathan Katz about the media onslaught.

At least some Americans were riveted. As one indication, Whistleblower Wednesday brought sky-high cable ratings — including on Fox, where Trump defenders were working tirelessly in prime time but where news coverage couldn’t fully avoid, or spin, the obvious.

And even those who weren’t all that interested could hardly avoid it.

It was thrust before their eyes, including on the three networks’ evening news shows, which led their 30-minute broadcasts with substantial segments — not one of which could have made Trump happy. (Those three half-hours are still appointment viewing for more than 20 million people each night, on average.)

Even in this digital age, most Americans still get their news on the tube, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center study — though that, of course, is shifting fast to digital sources, especially smartphones.

In fact, it may be the combination of the incessant online blasts and the negative television imagery that is proving so hard for Trump to control.

“Brace Yourself for the Internet Impeachment,” was the headline of a Thursday New York Times article.

“In many ways, it is a made-for-the-internet event,” wrote Kevin Roose. ‘The political stakes are high, the dramatic story unspools tidbit by tidbit and the stark us-versus-them dynamics provide plenty of fodder for emotionally charged social media brawls.”

Frustrated and angry, Trump has ramped up his customary attacks on journalists — and has acknowledged, with an edge of bitter self-pity, that things have dramatically changed.

“I used to be the king of good press,” he lamented at the U.N. news conference. “They covered me well — otherwise, I probably wouldn’t be here.”

He now favors a new adjective of disparagement.

“Much of the press . . . is not only fake, it’s corrupt,” he said at the same event.

Meanwhile, the White House has abandoned — perhaps foolishly — a traditional way it used to get its message out (and allow itself to be held accountable): the daily press briefing.

It has now been 200 days without one. The new White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, has yet to answer questions from behind the lectern — preferring, apparently, to condemn reporters in writing, whether by tweet or by op-ed in the friendly spaces of the conservative Washington Examiner.

It’s about to get worse: Impeachment hearings are sure to flood the media zone with images and words that cannot make the president look good, despite the best efforts of his loyal defenders.

In the new film “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” the disgraced lawyer to the mob — and to celebrities, including Trump — is heard speculating in an interview on how he’ll be remembered. Cohn confidently predicts that his obituary will emphasize his role as aide to the red-baiting Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy.

His voice then is spookily followed by a photograph of his New York Times obituary. He called it: “Roy Cohn, Aide to McCarthy and Fiery Lawyer, Dies at 59.”

The moment of truth for McCarthy and Cohn came in televised hearings when a lawyer for the U.S. Army shut down the senator with his damning accusation: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

Television made all the difference in 1954, as it did again almost two decades later during the televised Watergate hearings, with their disastrous effect on Richard Nixon’s presidency.

Granted, the media world looks nothing like it did in the 1950s or the 1970s.

But then again — for the president — it also looks nothing like it did two weeks ago.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"What drives Donald Trump? Greed, and greed alone."

Spoiler

There’s a common thread that stretches forward from Donald Trump’s financial scandals of the 1980s to his damning phone call with the president of Ukraine.

It’s the self-dealing.

Wherever he was, whatever his title, the president has used the powers at his disposal to enrich or otherwise benefit himself, regardless of what law, fiduciary duty or oath of office bound him to do.

Trump ran his campaign in 2016 on a single premise: greed. (Okay, two premises: greed and racism.) He boasted to his fans about his (inflated) wealth and gilded lifestyle, both products of clever deployments of his avarice. It was a trait he promised, paradoxically, that he’d apply more altruistically once elected.

“My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy,” he said at a January 2016 rally. “I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy. But now I want to be greedy for the United States. I want to grab all that money. I’m going to be greedy for the United States.”

His track record suggested that would be unlikely, perhaps impossible — in part because his life has always been about blurring lines between personal gain and professional or legal responsibilities.

This was the case when the Trump family set up a shell company called All County Building Supply & Maintenance in the early 1990s, to pretend to purchase boilers, cleaning supplies and other building equipment from (real) vendors. This middleman, which existed only on paper, then “resold” everything at an inflated price to the Trump Organization. The purpose of the shell company was to allow Trump’s father, Fred, to transfer huge cash gifts to his children as though they were ordinary business transactions. This helped the Trump family evade a 55 percent estate tax, as the New York Times reported last year.

It was also the case from the 1980s through the past presidential campaign, as Trump siphoned funds from his charity for his personal benefit. He used Trump Foundation money to settle legal disputes involving his for-profit companies, to renovate a fountain outside one of his hotels and to buy enormous portraits of himself, as my Post colleague David A. Fahrenthold documented.

It was likewise the case when his once-publicly-traded company, Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts, inflated financial results in a way that the Securities and Exchange Commission said served to mislead investors. And also when his private company allegedly provided false sales figures for real estate developments in Mexico, Panama, Toronto and New York.

And so on.

Such cases repeatedly showed that Trump had no problem draining money from bondholders, investors or tax coffers if he thought he could get away with it. They also illustrated exactly how he might govern as president: in his own interest.

Trump’s supporters shrugged off his refusal to divest from his business interests, arguing that it didn’t matter if he continued to make money while president so long as he still did right by the country. But we knew at some point he’d have to decide between a policy that benefited the country and one that benefited himself.

And we knew which choice he’d make.

So it was no surprise that his administration abruptly canceled the planned relocation of the FBI headquarters, which might have allowed the existing site to be redeveloped into a hotel that would compete with the nearby Trump International Hotel.

Or that foreign leaders and business executives have patronized this and other Trump properties around the world, in a transparent attempt to influence U.S. policy on aid, arms deals and merger approvals. In fact, during their now-infamous July 25 call, the Ukrainian president made sure to note a recent stay at a Trump property in New York.

It’s likewise shocking, but not altogether surprising, that military personnel have had unnecessary layovers at Trump’s Scottish resort. Or that Vice President Pence stayed at the president’s Irish resort while attending meetings 180 miles away. Or that the Secret Service has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars at a single Trump hotel — in Washington.

This is exactly the kind of stuff that worried those who wrung their hands about his shady, self-dealing, private-sector past.

Moreover, given Trump’s rampant small-time grifting in public, it seemed impossible to imagine he wouldn’t go after bigger fish in private — including, say, extorting a foreign power into smearing a political rival.

Trump maintains that his call with the Ukrainian president was “perfect.” And, hey, maybe he genuinely believes this. Indeed, the best defense you can give for Trump’s actions is that after all these years he has become incapable of telling the difference between his own interests and anyone else’s — and by extension, what it means to be “greedy” for himself vs. “greedy” for the United States.

Perhaps for Trump, as for France’s Louis XIV, “l’état, c’est moi.”

 

[Audrey2]

12 hours ago, fraurosena said:

The argument could be made that they are handicapped.

All snark aside, this is just atrocious behavior.

I do have to snigger a little at Fredo-dumber being made to sit in the aisle.

But they are handicapped. Apparently they can't read, suffer from delusions of grandeur, and have Donald Trump for a father/husband/father-in-law.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump told Russian officials in 2017 he wasn’t concerned about Moscow’s interference in U.S. election"

Spoiler

President Trump told two senior Russian officials in a 2017 Oval Office meeting that he was unconcerned about Moscow’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election because the United States did the same in other countries, an assertion that prompted alarmed White House officials to limit access to the remarks to an unusually small number of people, according to three former officials with knowledge of the matter.

The comments, which have not been previously reported, were part of a now-infamous meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, in which Trump revealed highly classified information that exposed a source of intelligence on the Islamic State. He also said during the meeting that firing FBI Director James B. Comey the previous day had relieved “great pressure” on him.

A memorandum summarizing the meeting was limited to all but a few officials with the highest security clearances in an attempt to keep the president’s comments from being disclosed publicly, according to the former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

The White House’s classification of records about Trump’s communications with foreign officials is now a central part of the impeachment inquiry launched this week by House Democrats. An intelligence community whistleblower has alleged that the White House placed a record of Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s president, in which he offered U.S. assistance investigating his political opponents, into a code-word classified system reserved for the most sensitive intelligence information.

The White House did not provide a comment Friday.

It is not clear whether a memo documenting the May 10, 2017, meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak was placed into that system, but the three former officials said it was restricted to a very small number of people. The White House had recently begun limiting the records of Trump’s calls after remarks he made to the leaders of Mexico and Australia appeared in news reports. The Lavrov memo was restricted to an even smaller group, the former officials said.

A fourth former official, who did not recall the president’s remarks to the Russian officials, said memos were restricted only to people who needed to know their contents.

“It was more about learning how can we restrict this in a way that still informs the policy process and the principals who need to engage with these heads of state,” the fourth former official said.

But the three former officials with knowledge of the remarks said some memos of the president’s communications were kept from people who might ordinarily have access to them. The Lavrov memo fit that description, they said.

White House officials were particularly distressed by Trump’s election remarks because it appeared the president was forgiving Russia for an attack that had been designed to help elect him, the three former officials said. Trump also seemed to invite Russia to interfere in other countries’ elections, they said.

The previous day, Trump had fired Comey amid the FBI’s investigation into whether the Trump campaign had coordinated with Russia. White House aides worried about the political ramifications if Trump’s comments to the Russian officials became public.

Trump had publicly ridiculed the Russia investigation as politically motivated and said he doubted Moscow had intervened in the election. By the time he met with Lavrov and Kislyak, Trump had been briefed by the most senior U.S. intelligence officials about the Russian operation, which was directed by Russian President Vladi­mir Putin and included the theft and publication of Democratic emails and the seeded of propaganda in social-media, according to the findings of the U.S. intelligence community.

Trump’s firing of Comey touched off an investigation into whether the president had tried to obstruct the FBI’s probe. His comments about Comey’s dismissal being a relief, which were first reported the same month by the New York Times, reinforced suspicions that Trump dismissed Comey because the FBI was investigating him.

According to the fourth former official, Trump lamented to Lavrov that “all this Russia stuff” was detrimental to good relations. Trump also complained, “I could have a great relationship with you guys, but you know, our press,” this former official said, characterizing the president’s remarks.

H.R. McMaster, the president’s then-national security adviser, repeatedly told Trump he could not trust the Russians, according to two former officials.

On some areas, Trump conveyed U.S. policy in a constructive way, such as telling the Russians that their aggression in Ukraine was not good, one of those former officials said.

“What was difficult to understand was how they got a free pass on a lot of things — election security and so forth,” this former official said. “He was just very accommodating to them.”

The former official observed that Trump has “that streak of moral equivalency,” recalling how he once dismissed a question about the assassination of journalists and dissidents in Putin’s Russia by telling Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly, “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?”

Another former official said Trump wasn’t the only one to conflate Russia’s interference in the U.S. elections with U.S. efforts to promote democracy and good governance abroad.

The president and his top aides seemed not to understand the difference between Voice of America, a U.S.-supported news organization that airs in foreign countries, with Russian efforts to persuade American voters by surreptitiously planting ads in social media, this person said.

One former senior official said Trump regularly defended Russia’s actions, even in private, saying no country is pure. “He was always defensive of Russia,” this person said, adding the president had never made such a specific remark about interference in their presence.

“He thought the whole interference thing was ridiculous. He never bought into it.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Such a baby. "Staring down impeachment, Trump sees himself as a victim of historic proportions"

Spoiler

Donald Trump is not the first American president staring down impeachment to nurse a deep sense of persecution and self-pity. But he is the first to broadcast that mentality to the world.

In the five days since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) opened an impeachment inquiry following revelations about President Trump’s conduct with his Ukrainian counterpart, Trump has been determined to cast himself as a singular victim in a warped reality — a portrayal that seems part political survival strategy, part virtual therapy session.

As Trump tells it, he is a hard-working and honorable president whose conduct has been “perfect” but who is being harassed and tormented by “Do Nothing Democrat Savages” and a corrupt intelligence community resolved to perpetuate a hoax, defraud the public and, ultimately, undo the 2016 election.

“There has been no President in the history of our Country who has been treated so badly as I have,” Trump tweeted Wednesday, some 13 hours after Pelosi’s announcement.

Victimization always has been core to Trump’s identity, both as a politician and as a real estate promoter and reality-television star. It is the emotional glue that yokes Trump to the grievance politics of the right. Many of Trump’s grass-roots followers have said they feel protective of the president in part because they also feel oppressed and ostracized by elites.

As Congress considers impeaching him over his request that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky investigate 2020 Democratic candidate Joe Biden and his family as well as an unsubstantiated theory that Ukrainians worked with Democrats to interfere in the 2016 election, Trump is claiming a broad conspiracy to erase history. He has sought to stitch together his existing narrative about the Russia investigation with the emerging probe of his Ukraine episode into a seamless “deep state” story line — in part by trying to discredit an urgent complaint about his conduct with Zelensky from an intelligence-community whistleblower.

“He’s been forecasting that the ‘deep state’ is out to get him, and there’s a way in which the narrative of the whistleblower can come to confirm all of that for his followers,” said historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on authoritarianism at New York University.

This shared sense of persecution is one reason so many Republican officeholders and conservative media personalities are defending the president — at least for now — against allegations that he abused the power of his office for personal political gain.

“At a Trump rally, central to the show is the idea of shared victimization,” said Republican strategist Steve Schmidt, a Trump critic. “Donald Trump revels in it, has consistently portrayed himself as a victim of the media and of his political opponents, and this will all be framed as an unfair effort to overturn a legitimate election. That argument will have enormous currency across right-wing media. It will be believed.”

At the heart of Trump’s case is his obsession with the 2016 election, the results of which he boasts about in historic terms despite the asterisk over Russia’s interference campaign to boost his candidacy, as well as the fact that he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton.

In the nearly three years since, Trump has tried to re-litigate his election by discounting — and, in some instances, rejecting outright — the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia interfered, and by proving that he defeated Clinton soundly in the electoral college entirely on his own superior abilities as a candidate.

“We won [the] election, convincingly. Convincingly,” Trump told reporters last week. Invoking communications between former FBI officials, he continued, “Then you had the text message on, well, if she doesn’t win, we’ve got an insurance policy. How bad was that? You know the insurance policy? That’s sort of what has been taking place over the last number of years — the insurance policy. No, there are a lot of very dishonest people. We’re the ones that played it straight.”

At the same news conference Tuesday on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, Trump reminisced about his winning strategy in 2016.

“If you go by the college, electoral college, that’s a much different race than running popular vote,” Trump said. “It’s like the 100-yard dash or the mile. You train differently. And I can’t help it that my opponent didn’t go to Wisconsin and should have gone much more to Michigan and Pennsylvania and other places. But that’s the way it is.”

Rick Wilson, another GOP strategist and Trump critic, likened the president to “the guy circling the high school parking lot in his Camaro five years after he graduated. He always wants to go back to 2016 and his victory. That’s the triumphal arc of his history. And he’s always trying to go back to having a fight about Hillary Clinton and her emails and the servers, straight from the greatest hits album.”

For instance, when Trump met with Zelensky last Wednesday, he called Clinton’s deletion of emails “one of the great crimes committed” and speculated without evidence that they “could very well” reside on a server in Ukraine.

Ben-Ghiat drew parallels between Trump’s strategy and the tactics of leaders with authoritarian tendencies past and present around the world. She said Trump’s branding of investigations against him as “witch hunts” mirrors the language used by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi to condemn probes into their conduct.

“Their cult of victimization is part of their persona,” Ben-Ghiat said. “It’s how they get support for people. It’s how they justify lashing out. A lot of their repressive agenda is against the press, the intelligence communities, anybody with investigatory capabilities.”

Trump’s aides, however, say that the president’s sense of being under siege is justified because Democrats decided long ago they wanted to remove him from office and have now settled on his call with the Ukrainian president as their best case after months of failing to rally around other rationales.

“People were talking about impeaching this president before he even got inaugurated. Now they are getting their wish,” Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, told reporters Friday. “Nancy Pelosi finally capitulated to her angry mob.”

Trump’s victim mentality has historical precedent — including with the 17th president, Andrew Johnson, who ascended after Abraham Lincoln’s 1865 assassination. He was impeached by the House, acquitted in the Senate and did not stand for election at the end of his term, having failed to win his party’s nomination in 1868.

As president, Johnson delivered diatribes laced with self-pity and indignation that he was being unfairly persecuted and not appreciated by the American people as the simple man devoted to the Constitution that he thought himself to be, according to Brenda Wineapple, a historian and author of “The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation.”

“People were shocked at the first tirade they heard and thought [Johnson] must be drunk, but he wasn’t,” Wineapple said. “It was so similar to today as to be scary. Both men felt a victimization and a sense of being martyred by a radical group of fanatics not out to save the country but out to get them.”

The media being what it was in the 19th century, Johnson’s remarks were not nearly as widely disseminated as Trump’s are today.

In the modern era, both Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton tended toward feelings of victimhood in the confidences of their families and staffs during their respective impeachment battles. Nixon resigned before facing a verdict, while Clinton was acquitted in the Senate. But neither president aired his emotions quite like Trump, who announces his grievances every few hours on Twitter and in regular media appearances.

Lanny Davis, one of Clinton’s lawyers and crisis strategists, said his client tried to keep his public comments focused on the facts of his case, although he acknowledged that the first lady implanted the notion of a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

[Seven days: Inside Trump’s frenetic response to the whistleblower complaint and the battle over impeachment]

Davis now represents Trump-lawyer-turned-critic Michael Cohen. In Trump’s situation, he said, “a strategy based on the Democrats ganging up on me or being persecuted won’t work among the people who are voting on impeachment because of the transcript of his telephone conversation. It’s his own words.”

“What do you do when you have facts that are terrible and you can’t change, can’t delete, can’t sweep them under the rug?” Davis added. “The competitive narrative that ‘the Democrats are persecuting me’ just ignores the elephant in the room.”

Trump’s attitude is shared by his personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, whose own work in Ukraine looks to figure prominently in the impeachment inquiry.

Giuliani revealed this mind-set in a phone call this past week with Elaina Plott, a reporter from the Atlantic.

“It is impossible that the whistleblower is a hero and I’m not. And I will be the hero! These morons — when this is over, I will be the hero,” Giuliani told her.

“I’m not acting as a lawyer. I’m acting as someone who has devoted most of his life to straightening out government,” Giuliani continued. “Anything I did should be praised.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[fraurosena]

3 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

 

His racism doesn’t surprise anymore. In fact, I’ve come to expect it. What I find mindboggling though, is how he can accuse the Democrats of doing nothing whilst the one doing nothing and blocking any and all House legislation from coming to the floor is MoscowMitch. Not to mention the gall of crying foul at what the Democrats are doing to him, when we all know how the Repugliklans stonewalled Obama at every turn and went out of their way to thwart and obstruct him.

[fraurosena]

“Only the best people...”

 

[Ozlsn]

7 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

“It is impossible that the whistleblower is a hero and I’m not. And I will be the hero! These morons — when this is over, I will be the hero,” Giuliani told her.

I laughed out loud at this. Oh Rudy, poor baby. A hero in his own lunchbox.

[smittykins]

Paraphrasing Stephen Colbert, he sounds like a toddler who wants a balloon.

”IwantaballoonIwantaballoonIwantaballoonIWANTABALLOONIWANTABALLOON!!!!”

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[JMarie]

On 9/27/2019 at 9:47 AM, fraurosena said:

The argument could be made that they are handicapped.

All snark aside, this is just atrocious behavior.

I do have to snigger a little at Fredo-dumber being made to sit in the aisle.

Wait, why is Tiffany there? I thought she was only trotted out  for campaign functions. And what about her law school classes? Did her dad write her a note excusing her from class?

[WiseGirl]

Aunt Crabby has a way of summing things up.