Trump 43: King of Chaos

[fraurosena]

I'm surprised nobody remembered to mention his WALL. 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

From the wonderfully snarky Alexandra Petri: "A guide to the stages of Trump denial"

Spoiler

Welcome. Everything is fine.

You are probably experiencing a sort of seasick sensation. Your mouth tastes like corn chowder, although you have not eaten corn chowder in years. You feel groggy and unsettled, and your temples throb. This is only natural. This is the feeling of a principle leaving the body. It will pass in time.

First, think very hard about where you are. Are there certain principles that you have, or remember having? Not everything is a principle. “I want Republicans to be in charge of the White House” is certainly a preference, but it is not a principle. A principle can be very big, like wanting secure elections for our democracy. Or it can be very small, like not wanting the president to threaten to execute for treason a particular person who has not done treason. Or it can be medium-sized, like not wanting the president to use the nation’s prestige for personal gain. Think of that principle. Take a deep breath and think back to when you last remember asserting it out loud. It may have been in the course of argument, or in the course of throwing suspicion on your opponent, but that still counts. Do you remember? Maybe you said something like “Hillary Clinton betrayed this country and ought to be locked up!" That’s close enough. We’ll take that.

The next stage is easier. Take another deep breath and think about the first time you saw somebody assert, in print, that Donald Trump had violated this principle. What was your response? Probably you said that it was fake news. This is normal. You may even have appeared on cable news to make this assertion. If you went so far as to say that the president would never do that and added that the Deep State leakers were just trying to make him sound like an idiot, you may be experiencing greater discomfort now. But it is important to try to think of what you said. It was probably a pretty stern denial, wasn’t it? Do you have it?

Good. Now think of where you were when the president just flat-out admitted he had done or said that very thing. Do you remember how you felt? Some people start to pretend they have not actually seen a newspaper or TV in days, do not know what a newspaper is and are about to go on a prolonged vacation from which they might never return. That is perfectly normal. This is the mind’s way of buying time. Others experience grinding headaches. Still others feel nothing at all, merely a kind of leaden emptiness. Presented with items that formerly delighted them — procedural triumphs, for instance — they simply sit mute, blinking.

Next comes a phase I feel confident you experienced, during which you attempted to pretend the president was joking. This wasn’t pleasant for you or for anyone who witnessed it. This is the moment when your dignity levels dropped to such a critical point that your body had to start devouring from other reserves — smugness, partisanship, ill temper — simply to get you through the week’s cable shows. Breathe. Do not dwell too much on this. Your body was still adjusting.

Next came the finger-pointing phase during which you tried to insist it was someone else who had really done something wrong. You developed a set of slippery scales during this time, while your spine lost most of its original shape. You sprouted gills and sank into the mud and buried yourself in it. It made some of your suits fit oddly. But you got through it, didn’t you? You kind of loved the wonderful, cool mud in which you found yourself. It was your new home.

Then, at last, you discovered your courage. You found suddenly you could say or do anything. This is the feeling of the principle leaving the body. You found yourself saying that even if it were newsworthy (which it was not), what the president did was a very brave and good thing to do, that the real story was the Democrats who did a much milder version of it previously (then, it was still bad). The real story here is the people who are trying to take down the president. The president was right to do what he did. Also, he smells wonderful.

That is the stage where you are now. On the whole, I think, you will be much more comfortable. Don’t you feel better?

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"‘Me! Me!’: An aggrieved Trump spins an alternate reality as impeachment probe escalates"

Spoiler

President Trump paced. He pointed. He parried — jokingly shaking one reporter’s hand and blocking another’s iPhone with his own. 

But then came the denouement, a sudden shift into the aggrieved alternate reality that has consumed him since House Democrats launched their impeachment inquiry into Trump urging his Ukrainian counterpart to dig up dirt on a political rival.

“I feel there was in the 2016 campaign — there was tremendous corruption against me,” said Trump, transforming himself — a man who has now publicly asked no fewer than three foreign countries (Russia, Ukraine and China) to look into his political opponents — into the victim of corrupt behavior.

And he was just getting started.

“I was investigated, I was investigated, okay?” he said, before pointing at himself — two rapid-fire taps to his right breast — and adding: “Me! Me!”

He barked at the media that it was he who ran, he who won, he who was investigated, before accusing the assembled press: “You won’t say that, will you?”

Finally, he began wrapping up: “I was investigated. I was investigated. And they think it could have been by U.K. They think it could have been by Australia. They think it could have been by Italy. So when you get down to it, I was investigated by the Obama administration.”

“By the Obama administration,” he concluded, shouting now, and using both hands to point at himself, “I was investigated.”

It was unclear, exactly, to which unfounded, unproven theory Trump was referring.

Perhaps he was incorrectly claiming that Barack Obama’s administration was investigating him. In fact, the FBI opened investigations into several of his campaign aides — including Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, both foreign policy advisers — but not actually Trump himself.

 Or maybe he was conflating Christopher Steele — a former British intelligence officer who during the 2016 campaign compiled a dossier of damaging information on then-candidate Trump — with the British government itself. 

But either way, Trump was angry, and his rambling question-and-answer session seemed to convey an essential truth: That he considers it fair game for him ask foreign governments to investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter — who, Trump claimed again with no evidence, were the perpetrators of “tremendous corruption.”

The president has long been comfortable with conspiracy theories. His political rise was abetted by the racist lie of birtherism — the false claim that Obama was not born in the United States. But ever since special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia probe, and now amid the throes of an impeachment inquiry, Trump seems to have moved into a split-screen reality — one in which he is the hero who has, as he tweeted Thursday, the “absolute right” to do just about anything he pleases.

And his South Lawn session Friday again laid bare the incongruity between actual facts and what the president espouses.

Trump repeatedly insisted that he was not worried about Biden as a possible 2020 rival — “I don’t care about Biden’s campaign, but I do care about corruption,” he said — a claim undermined by the fact that Trump fixated on Biden, mentioning the former vice president more than two dozen times. 

The president as caped anti-corruption crusader is also undermined by his own previous behavior. He refused to condemn and was slow to dismiss some of his own Cabinet officials, including former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt and former interior secretary Ryan Zinke, amid ethical lapses and controversy. Unlike previous presidents, both Democratic and Republican, Trump has often expressed admiration and fondness for dictators, rather than pressuring them to improve their record on human rights. 

He again claimed his phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — during which he asked that the Ukrainians dig up dirt on Biden as “a favor” — was “perfect,” and that when he released notes from the conversation, the reaction was positive.

“They say, ‘Wow, this is incredible,’ ” Trump said. “We’re very proud of that call.”

In fact, even some of his Republican allies have been reticent to publicly defend the content of the call, and on Friday, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), a former GOP presidential nominee, criticized Trump in a duo of tweets.

“When the only American citizen President Trump singles out for China’s investigation is his political opponent in the midst of the Democratic nomination process, it strains credulity to suggest that it is anything other than politically motivated,” Romney wrote. “By all appearances, the President’s brazen and unprecedented appeal to China and to Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden is wrong and appalling.”

Trump also falsely claimed that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said the president’s phone call with Zelensky was “wonderful.” Though McConnell did defend Trump in a statement to Politico, saying the Democrats had “already overplayed their hand” by using the phone call to launch an impeachment inquiry, he was hardly effusive about Trump’s conversation with Zelensky.

The president also accused Hunter Biden of taking “a billion and a half dollars out of China.” He seemed to be referring to the sum of money that a private-equity company based in China had said it hoped to raise. Hunter Biden became a board member of the firm, BHR Partners, in 2013, and later acquired a 10 percent interest in the entity overseeing the fund — but his lawyer has described Trump’s allegations against him as “a gross misrepresentation of Mr. Biden’s role with BHR.”

Turning his attention to Mueller’s Russia investigation, Trump described that probe as “perfect.”

“We went through two years of Mueller, and that came out like a 10,” the president said. 

Even many of Trump’s most stalwart allies, however, privately are unlikely to describe Mueller’s investigation and subsequent report as having been ideal for the president.

Though Mueller determined that current Justice Department policy prevented him from concluding whether Trump committed a crime, he did lay out possible evidence of obstruction of justice by the president in his final 448-page report and noted that “while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

Trump did, however, utter at least one thing that seemed to be unambiguous.

“I’ve been president now for almost three years, and I’ve been going through this for almost three years,” he said. “It’s almost become like a part of my day.”

 

[Ozlsn]

17 hours ago, SassyPants said:

He just went on a sweaty rant before getting on his helicopter. The theme of the day “corruption.” I had to mute it. He just feeds his base; telling them what they want to hear.

I... don't think that word means what he thinks it means.

[Ozlsn]

8 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Finally, he began wrapping up: “I was investigated. I was investigated. And they think it could have been by U.K. They think it could have been by Australia. They think it could have been by Italy. So when you get down to it, I was investigated by the Obama administration.”

Can I just say the Australian part of this amazingly bizarre conspiracy theory is utterly hilarious to a large percentage of the population here? I mean of all people they could have accused they went with Alexander Downer?!?! The man is a political blueblood, part of a family dynasty on the right-wing side of Australian politics. There is a Canberra suburb named after them ffs  (and yes, I do find the idea of a suburb named 'Downer' pretty amusing.) He is a former (very unsuccessful) Liberal (our major conservative right-wing party) leader, and was Foreign Minister for God knows how long. Yes he has apeared in fishnet stockings for charity, totally torpedoed his own leadership by making a poorly timed and inappropriate joke and was/is occasionally regarded as a bit of a private school buffoon on some levels but he's pretty much the last person I'd expect to try to help Hillary Clinton win anything from an election to a chook raffle.

[fraurosena]

What has Mitt Romney done to make Trump use some more swear words in his tweets?

I'll have to look it up, but I can imagine what it is: Romney has officially endorsed the impeachment inquiry, or something equally damning.

[fraurosena]

I also see that this impeachment thing is really getting to him...

The logical fallacies in this tweet are so seriously stupid.

1. It's a whistleblower. There is nothing so-called about it.

2. It was not a perfect phone call. Far, far from it. Why else the need to hide it away on the sooper sekrit computer?

3. It was not 'way off' (single apostrophes, dammit). Put the transcript and the complaint side by side and they are eerily similar.

4. Oh wow, you are right! I don't believe Schiff and Pelosi ever thought you would release such a damning transcript. So yes, you got them by surprise. And they are ever so grateful.

5. They got caught? Caught doing what? Their actual jobs? Like holding you to account? 

6. This is a fraud against the American people! Are you confessing your crimes... again?

[laPapessaGiovanna]

This should be added to the list of his crimes.

 

[thoughtful]

1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

'way off' (single apostrophes, dammit)

While I certainly agree with you that Trump is an idiot, this is a regional different, not just him being an asshole.

The only use I was ever taught for single quotes was for a quote inside a quote. I was also taught that commas or periods go inside the quote marks.

It's like the "or" vs. "our" spellings (color, neighbor, etc.) - just one of those differences between countries.

https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2011/08/punctuating-around-quotation-marks.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_marks_in_English

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s calls with foreign leaders have long worried aides, leaving some ‘genuinely horrified’"

Spoiler

In one of his first calls with a head of state, President Trump fawned over Russian President Vladimir Putin, telling the man who ordered interference in America’s 2016 election that he was a great leader and apologizing profusely for not calling him sooner.

He pledged to Saudi officials in another call that he would help the monarchy enter the elite Group of Seven, an alliance of the world’s leading democratic economies.

He promised the president of Peru that he would deliver to his country a C-130 military cargo plane overnight, a logistical nightmare that set off a herculean scramble in the West Wing and Pentagon.

And in a later call with Putin, Trump asked the former KGB officer for his guidance in forging a friendship with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un — a fellow authoritarian hostile to the United States.

Starting long before revelations about Trump’s interactions with Ukraine’s president rocked Washington, Trump’s phone calls with foreign leaders were an anxiety-ridden set of events for his aides and members of the administration, according to former and current officials. They worried that Trump would make promises he shouldn’t keep, endorse policies the United States long opposed, commit a diplomatic blunder that jeopardized a critical alliance, or simply pressure a counterpart for a personal favor.

“There was a constant undercurrent in the Trump administration of [senior staff] who were genuinely horrified by the things they saw that were happening on these calls,” said one former White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private conversations. “Phone calls that were embarrassing, huge mistakes he made, months and months of work that were upended by one impulsive tweet.”

But Trump’s July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky went beyond whether the leader of the free world had committed a faux pas, and into grave concerns he had engaged in a possible crime or impeachable offense. The release last week of a whistleblower complaint alleging Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate his political rivals as well as the release of a rough transcript of the July call led to House Democrats launching an impeachment inquiry against Trump.

The Ukraine controversy has put a renewed focus on Trump’s un­or­tho­dox way of interacting with fellow world leaders in diplomatic calls.

Critics, including some former administration officials, contend that Trump’s behavior on calls with foreign leaders has at times created unneeded tensions with allies and sent troubling signals to adversaries or authoritarians that the United States supports or at least does not care about human rights or their aggressive behavior elsewhere in the world.

Joel Willett, a former intelligence officer who worked at the National Security Council from 2014 to 2015, said he was concerned both by the descriptions of a president winging it, and the realization that the president’s behavior disturbs and frightens career civil servants.

“What a burden it must be to be stuck between your position of trust in the White House and another obligation you may feel to the American people to say something,” he said.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment Thursday or Friday.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a Trump ally, said the president speaks his mind and diverges from other presidents who follow protocol. Graham said he saw nothing distressing in the president’s July 25 call with Zelensky and said he expected it to be worse, partially given his own experience with Trump on the phone.

“If you take half of my phone calls with him, it wouldn’t read as cleanly and nicely,” he said, adding that the president sounded like a “normal person.”

This story is based on interviews with 12 former or current officials with knowledge of the president’s foreign calls. These officials had direct involvement in the calls, were briefed on them or read the transcripts afterward. All spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the president’s private conversations with world leaders.

The first call Trump made that set off alarm bells came less than two weeks after his inauguration. On Jan. 28, Trump called Putin for what should have been a routine formality: accepting a foreign leader’s congratulations. Former White House officials described Trump as “obsequious” and “fawning,” but said he also rambled off into different topics without any clear point, while Putin appeared to stick to formal talking points for a first official exchange.

“He was like, ‘Oh my gosh, my people didn’t tell me you wanted to talk to me,’ ” said one person with direct knowledge of the call.

Trump has been consistently cozy with authoritarian leaders, sparking anxiety among aides about the solicitous tones he struck with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Putin.

“We couldn’t figure out early on why he was being so nice to Russia,” one former senior administration official said. H.R. McMaster, the president’s then-national security adviser, launched an internal campaign to get Trump to be more skeptical of the Russians. Officials expressed surprise in both of his early Putin calls at why he was so friendly.

In another call, in April 2017, Trump told Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who had overseen a brutal campaign that has resulted in the extrajudicial killings of thousands of suspected drug dealers, that he was doing an “unbelievable job on the drug problem.”

Trump’s personal goals seeped into calls. He pestered Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for help in recommending him for a Nobel Prize, according to an official familiar with the call.

“People who could do things for him — he was nice to,” said one former security official. “Leaders with trade deficits, strong female leaders, members of NATO — those tended to go badly.”

Aides bristled at the dismissive way he sometimes addressed longtime U.S. allies, especially women.

In a summer 2018 call with Prime Minister Theresa May, Trump harangued the British leader about her country’s contribution to NATO. He then disputed her intelligence community’s conclusion that Putin’s government had orchestrated the attempted murder and poisoning of a former Russian spy on British soil.

“Trump was totally bought into the idea there was credible doubt about the poisoning,” said one person briefed on the call. “A solid 10 minutes of the conversation is spent with May saying it’s highly likely and him saying he’s not sure.”

Trump would sometimes make commitments to foreign leaders that flew in the face of U.S. policy and international agreements, as when he told a Saudi royal that he would support their country’s entry into the G-7.

“The G-7 is supposed to be the allies with whom we share the most common values and the deepest commitment to upholding the rules-based order,” the former official said.

Russia was kicked out of the group in 2014 for violating international law when it invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea. Trump has publicly advocated for Russia to be allowed back in. Saudi Arabia, which oppresses women and has a record of human rights abuses, wasn’t a fit candidate for membership, the former official said.

Saudi Arabia was not admitted to the group.

Calls with foreign leaders have often been highly orchestrated events in past administrations.

“When I was at the White House, there was a very deliberative process of the president absorbing information from people who had deep substantive knowledge of the countries and relationships with these leaders. Preparation for these calls was taken very seriously,” Willett said. “It appears to be freestyle and ad-libbed now.”

Trump has rejected much of the protocol and preparation associated with foreign calls, even as his national security team tried to establish goals for each conversation.

Instead, Trump often sought to use calls as a way to befriend whoever he was talking to, one current senior administration official said, defending the president. “So he might say something that sounds terrible to the outside, but in his mind, he’s trying to build a relationship with that person and sees flattery as the way to do it.”

The president resisted long briefings before calls or reading in preparation, several former officials said. McMaster, who preferred providing the president with information he could use to make decisions, resigned himself to giving Trump small notecards with bulleted highlights and talking points.

“You had two to three minutes max,” said one former senior administration official. “And then he was still usually going to say whatever he wanted to say.”

As a result, staff fretted that Trump came across ill-informed in some calls, and even oafish. In a conversation with China’s Xi, Trump repeated numerous times how much he liked a kind of chocolate cake, one former official said. The president publicly described the dessert the two had in April 2017 when Trump and Xi met at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort as “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake you have ever seen.”

Trump preferred to make calls from the residence, which frustrated some NSC staff and West Wing aides who wanted to be on hand to give the president real-time advice. If he held the call in the Oval Office, aides would gather around the desk and pass him notes to try to keep the calls on point. On a few occasions, then-Chief of Staff John F. Kelly muted the call to try to get the president back on track, two officials said.

Tim O’Brien, a Trump biographer and critic, said the calls fit Trump’s style as a business leader.

“When he had to get on calls with investors on a publicly traded company, they had to worry that he would break securities laws and lie about the company’s profits,” O’Brien said. “When he would go and meet with regulators with the casino control commission, his lawyers were always worried under oath, in a public setting, that he would say something that would be legally damaging.”

Though calls with foreign leaders are routinely planned in advance, Trump a few times called Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron unannounced, as if they were friends, a former administration official said.

After some early summaries of Trump calls with the leaders of Mexico and Australia leaked to the press in 2017, the White House tightened restrictions on who could access the transcripts and kept better track of who had custody of copies. For example, Vice President Pence still received a courtesy copy of any foreign-leader call, but his staff now had to sign off when they transported it to his office and also sign off when they returned or destroyed the document.

Some former officials said that over time staff became used to the oddity of some calls even if they still found them troubling.

“People had gotten really numb to him blurting out something he shouldn’t have,” one former national security staffer remarked.

But officials who had served in the White House through the end of 2018 were still shocked by the whistleblower complaint about the effort to “lock down” records of Trump’s July 25 call. The complaint said White House officials ordered the transcript moved into a highly secure computer system, known as NICE, which is normally reserved only for information about the most sensitive code-word-level intelligence programs.

“Unheard of,” said one former official who handled foreign calls. “That just blew me away.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[thoughtful]

Here's what Romney said:

"By all appearances, the President’s brazen and unprecedented appeal to China and to Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden is wrong and appalling," Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, tweeted Friday.

"When the only American citizen President Trump singles out for China’s investigation is his political opponent in the midst of the Democratic nomination process, it strains credulity to suggest that it is anything other than politically motivated," Romney wrote.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-impeachment-inquiry/romney-blasts-trump-wrong-appalling-call-china-probe-bidens-n1062536

And I do know the difference between "difference" and "different," but didn't see the riffle in my previous post until it was too late!

[fraurosena]

2 hours ago, thoughtful said:

While I certainly agree with you that Trump is an idiot, this is a regional different, not just him being an asshole.

The only use I was ever taught for single quotes was for a quote inside a quote. I was also taught that commas or periods go inside the quote marks.

It's like the "or" vs. "our" spellings (color, neighbor, etc.) - just one of those differences between countries.

https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2011/08/punctuating-around-quotation-marks.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_marks_in_English

And so I've learned something new today. 

The way I was taught the difference between single and double quotation marks was that double quotation marks always signify something somebody says/said. In other words, they signify speech. The single apostrophe is to signify quoting written words/phrases, and yes, also to signify the quote within a quote.

It's quite fascinating how these things differ between countries. Then again, I should've known better. I have some books in German where speech is signified by > these < which took some getting used to. 

[thoughtful]

12 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

I have some books in German where speech is signified by > these < which took some getting used to. 

I can imagine a mathemetician who'd never seen that thinking "More and less than what?"

Or a musician - "Do I accent something, or get softer then louder while reading this?"

Or a cat lover - "Cute whiskers!"

?

This conversation reminds me of a wonderful article from Verbatim Quarterly called "Never Ask a Uruguayan Waitress for a Little Box: She Might Apply Her Foot to Your Eyelet," which was about idioms and words that are innocent in one Spanish-speaking country, but vulgar in another.

It can't be found online, but more "Um, that doesn't mean the same thing here" fun can be:

http://www.uees.edu.ec/pdfs/webzine/Dontfthegrass.pdf

[fraurosena]

23 minutes ago, thoughtful said:

I can imagine a mathemetician who'd never seen that thinking "More and less than what?"

Or a musician - "Do I accent something, or get softer then louder while reading this?"

Or a cat lover - "Cute whiskers!"

?

This conversation reminds me of a wonderful article from Verbatim Quarterly called "Never Ask a Uruguayan Waitress for a Little Box: She Might Apply Her Foot to Your Eyelet," which was about idioms and words that are innocent in one Spanish-speaking country, but vulgar in another.

It can't be found online, but more "Um, that doesn't mean the same thing here" fun can be:

http://www.uees.edu.ec/pdfs/webzine/Dontfthegrass.pdf

Oh, that article gave me some good laughs! Bienvenidos los Coños... 

It reminds me of Dutch and Flemish, which, despite subtle differences of expression, are essentially the same language. Those subtle differences though!

The best example?

The word the Flemish use to say 'to fuck' is the same word we Dutch use to say 'to poop'. 

[thoughtful]

24 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

The word the Flemish use to say 'to fuck' is the same word we Dutch use to say 'to poop'. 

I assume folks are aware of that, or there would be people wondering why all of the Flemish erotic literature involves shit!

 

[GreyhoundFan]

A good one from Dana Milbank: "It was never about ‘America First.’ It’s always been Trump first."

Spoiler

At the core of the impeachment inquiry — indeed, at the core of almost every complaint about this president — is one simple truth: Donald Trump is not a patriot.

I don’t question that on some level he loves his country. I just know that he loves himself more. Again and again, he has harmed the nation’s interests to further his own.

Geopolitical archrival China, fighting us in a trade war, now knows that to secure good relations with the U.S. administration, it should produce dirt on Trump’s prospective Democratic opponent. That’s not in the national interest (it’s flatly against the law). It’s in Trump’s personal interest.

Likewise, Trump temporarily left Ukraine without U.S. military assistance against Russian aggression while requesting a “favor” — furnish dirt on that same political opponent, Joe Biden. That compromised national security for Trump’s electoral purposes.

Trump and his underlings also sought help from allies Britain, Italy and Australia in debunking special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s findings on Russian election interference.

The use of government powers for Trump’s interests happens everywhere. Attorney General William Barr, after misleading the public about the Mueller report’s conclusions on Trump’s culpability, launched, at Trump’s request, a major effort to discredit officials who investigated 2016 election interference.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, at Trump’s behest, revived an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s long-ago emails.

Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani spearheaded the effort to solicit political dirt from Ukraine .

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin ignored the law in refusing access to Trump’s tax returns — blocking Congress from knowing about Trump’s foreign entanglements.

Trump has encouraged everybody from Vice President Pence on down to patronize his resorts and is now seeking to host the Group of Seven at his Florida golf resort. The General Services Administration ignored constitutional concerns to allow Trump to benefit personally from a government lease.

Trump even pressured federal meteorological officials to rescind weather advice that contradicted his — much as he pressured the National Park Service to falsify inauguration attendance.

Trump has many undesirable attributes: He lies, he chases conspiracy theories, he’s racist, he abuses power, he’s cruel. The common thread — a unified theory of Trump, if you will — is that the man who promised an “America First” agenda is instead pursuing a “Trump First” agenda. This is the Me Presidency.

Why pursue a debunked conspiracy theory absolving Russia of helping him in the 2016 election? Same reason he formed a commission to find popular-vote fraud: He wants to erase the perception that his presidency is illegitimate.

Why does he give succor to white nationalists? Same reason he befriends strongmen: These people love him, so they must be “very fine people,” as Trump said after Charlottesville.

Why does he constantly lie to boost himself and use his public office to boost his private fortune? As was once said of General Motors: What’s good for Trump is good for the country.

He softened on North Korea after its dictator flattered him in “love letters.” He let nationalist Benjamin Netanyahu have free rein in exchange for such things as naming a fictitious Israeli village after Trump. He blew up an international communique and canceled a trip to Denmark because of perceived personal slights. He shoved a prime minister blocking him from the front row of a photo.

Questioning another American’s patriotism (Trump routinely accuses critics of “treason”) can be an ugly business. I’ve reserved this for two: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) (who happily has since retreated from his refusal to protect U.S. elections from foreign tampering) and Trump.

Calling a genuine war hero, John McCain, a “loser,” resisting honors for him at death and continuing to attack him posthumously is not patriotic.

Using the gravestones of fallen U.S. troops as a backdrop when you attack your political opponents on foreign soil is not patriotic.

Attacking Gold Star parents is not patriotic.

Avoiding the wartime draft by claiming bone spurs and then boasting that eluding STDs was your “personal Vietnam” is not patriotic.

Taking over the nation’s Independence Day celebration (after a similar attempt at Veterans Day) to honor yourself is not patriotic.

Skipping a military memorial in Europe because it’s raining and a Veterans Day memorial at Arlington National Cemetery because you’re busy is not patriotic.

Defending Vladimir Putin’s murder of journalists by saying, “ You think our country is so innocent?” is not patriotic.

Telling the Russian government you don’t care that it interfered in U.S. elections, and siding with Russia’s denials over the conclusions of U.S. intelligence is not patriotic.

Sharing intelligence secrets with a foe and inviting election help from foreign governments is not patriotic.

McCain, a great patriot, spoke often of serving a cause greater than self. Trump has no such cause.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"‘If the president is doing it . . .’: How Trump took swearing mainstream"

Spoiler

“BULLSHIT” is all over the place. Any child could have looked at a TV on Wednesday afternoon and seen the forbidden word superimposed across Wolf Blitzer’s tie: “SEETHING TRUMP ACCUSES REP. SCHIFF OF TREASON, DENOUNCES IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY AS ‘BULLSHIT.’ ”

The Washington Post published “bullshit” at least five times that day and obviously continues to do so. So did other news organizations as they reported on an especially angry and profane rant by President Trump.

If the word emanated from almost any other person, it would be considered not fit for repetition, let alone mass broadcast, under the puritanical standards of decency this country is supposedly based on. But because this particular instance of “bullshit” issued from the leader of the United States, it can and possibly even must be shared verbatim with the world.

“It is newsworthy that he wrote it and tweeted it out, and we should show and say it because the president sent it out just that way,” an internal CNN memo advised on Wednesday, according to the New York Times.

Before Trump’s “bullshit,” there was his “shithole countries,” and before that, there was “grab them by the pussy” — all disseminated and debated in public as if they were the names of tax bills. Not to mention Trump’s rallies, where cusses fall from his mouth liberally. The Washington Post takes a cautious approach to profanity but decided early in the administration that the vulgar utterances of the president or his spokespeople should be reported in full.

Democrats are swearing, too, now, as if in retaliation. “F-- me,” Rep. Tim Ryan (Ohio) wrote in an Aug. 5 tweet about the president, who had just misidentified the site of a mass shooting. (Ryan left the vowel out, if that makes it any more decorous.)

Presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke routinely drops f-bombs when he talks about gun violence, and his campaign sells T-shirts quoting his curses. Cory Booker’s campaign manager tweeted a screenshot of a text of Booker swearing about Trump, as if we needed to see it that badly.

The Democratic National Committee reportedly warned the candidates not to curse at last month’s televised debate. Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg both said “damn” anyway.

The Parents Television Council, which historically has been concerned with cleaning up Hollywood and Super Bowl halftime shows, is urging news broadcasters to be mindful of the words they quote when children might be watching.

“We are also calling on our elected and appointed officials across the political spectrum to recognize the exemplary role they play for children and to tone down the profanity and to use smarter words,” the council’s president, Tim Winter, said in a statement to The Post. “Perhaps our nation can use this sudden infatuation for harsh profanity as a learning moment and identify words that can more precisely identify our sentiments.”

Perhaps, but it feels more as if we’re drifting toward the rhetorical hellscape imagined in the movie “Idiocracy,” in which President Camacho begins his State of the Union address: “Sh--. I know sh--’s bad right now.”

Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter thinks our sweary public discourse reflects evolving standards of decency as much as the president’s potty mouth.

“What genuinely registers as profane to most Americans is now slurs rather than references to bodily matters such as sex,” he said. “It’s natural that serious public figures will use the classic four-letter words ever more to signal authenticity. But Trump’s unmonitored speech has mainstreamed such words in the media even faster of late, in that the urgency of reporting the appalling things he says requires that ‘shithole country’ and ‘I’m fucked’ end up all over the news.”

No other president has cursed like Trump: publicly, constantly and even somewhat creatively, as when he dubbed Rep. Adam B. Schiff, the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, “little Adam Schitt.”

His predecessors were hardly altar boys, but they tended to swear sparingly or exclusively in private. Abraham Lincoln liked to tell a joke about George Washington’s effect on an Englishman’s bowels. George W. Bush was once caught on a hot mic calling a reporter a “major league asshole,” and Barack Obama joked to the U.S. women’s soccer team: “Playing like a girl means you’re a badass. Perhaps I shouldn’t have used that phrase.”

The White House tapes that helped bring down Richard Nixon were full of curses and racial slurs, but it notably took congressional intervention and a subpoena before the public could hear any of them. Trump just gives his profanity away — freely seeding it across the cultural landscape.

“This is very different. We’re coming to a point where it’s not unusual at all to hear politicians and TV hosts cursing,” said Julian Zelizer, a presidential historian at Princeton University. “If the president is doing it, that becomes totally legitimate, totally normalized. There’s no hot mic needed because they’ll just do it right in your face.”

 

[AmazonGrace]

Alexandra Petri and feedback from Niinistö

(Fjords are Norway, not Finland but never mind)

Spoiler

 

Some feedback from the Finnish president on his visit to the United States

Your president was rather heated, and not in the salutary way one is in a sauna. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

By Alexandra Petri

Columnist

October 3

President Sauli Niinisto! Thank you for visiting the United States and President Donald J. Trump on the 100th anniversary of U.S.-Finland diplomatic relations. Can you spare a minute of your time to tell us what you thought so we can improve the experience for future visitors?

Please rate your visit on a scale from 1 to 5 stars.

3 stars

What were some highlights of your stay?

I enjoyed the museums very much. I visited several, and they were all well lit, clean and informative. I liked that they were free, just like the population is under democracy.

I do not think that either of those things should change. If possible, keep both aspects.

I also enjoyed the chairs. I sat on a chair that was large and bright yellow, with arms, and although the arms did not provide as much protection of my personal space as I had hoped and I briefly suffered a surprise touch upon the knee (something Moominpappa would have addressed even more sternly than I did), it was not the chair’s fault. I still basically liked the chair. It was clearly not the work of Alvar Aalto, but it was a good chair.

 

Do you have any feedback as to how your stay could be improved?

Well, I have to say, I would perhaps have done certain things slightly differently. For instance, it was clear that President Trump had many things he wanted to get off his chest, primarily about someone named Adam Schiff, but also about the governor of California? I found this unseemly emotional outburst off-putting. I would not have asked him to stand there while I had an emotional outburst. To me, a more seemly way of showing disapproval would be to purchase and then quietly hand them a Marimekko design that is in an unpleasing color — although, such a Marimekko design does not exist?

I do not understand why it was necessary for me to sit there silently like an Artek daybed (although even when they are silent, Artek daybeds make statements). He kept yelling about a perfect conversation, but if it was anything like the conversation we had, I would say it was not perfect. A perfect conversation, to us in Finland, is one in which the freedom of the press is respected and people do not shout, say inaccurate things about the European Union and give the press mean nicknames. We reserve this kind of saltiness for our licorice.

Also, I would say, it is embarrassing for a leader to hector his press and call them fake. It makes him look bad, and it is uncomfortable. It seemed as though this was the kind of thing you would want to save for later, when you were alone, after you were not trying to impress people anymore. Indeed, I started to wonder: Does he know that I am here? I am just sitting here like the "J" in “fjord” or the many treasures of Helsinki: I am there, but nobody thinks about me. I began to feel that I had blended into the chair, but then he placed his hand on my knee, so I knew I had not been forgotten.

In Finland, we are proud of our free press. The United States, too, should be proud. They should not let this man insult one of the things that should be a source of national pride. Does he do this to Tiffany lamps and the Grand Canyon?

I kept thinking, should I say something? Then the president yelled at a reporter for not directing his question to me, but when he did direct the question to me, the president interrupted and made it difficult for me to answer. On the whole, it was confusing.

I would say in the future, if the purpose of the visit is that you will be unexpectedly called upon to defend the European Union as an institution and then sit very still while the president does some personal yelling, you should specify this more clearly on the invitation so that a leader can decide for themself whether it is worth it to visit.

How likely are you to recommend the United States to a friend or colleague?

Not very.

Is there any other feedback you would like to leave?

I would like to tell Donald Trump to go to Helsinki.

 

 

[fraurosena]

Trump has now enabled genocide. This will mean the slaughter of the Kurdish people, who up till now have been staunch allies. And it will mean ISIS can once again flourish in the region. 

Way to go, GOP, for facilitating these appalling atrocities. It shows the world that America is not to be trusted at all. 

 

[formergothardite]

I am so upset about what they are doing to the Kurdish people. I feel helpless. What can we do? My representatives will ignore me. But a genocide is going to happen. I feel like we should be able to do something. 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[fraurosena]

13 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

Yeah, I predicted he would eventually say something like "They made me do it!"

It isn't going to fly though. No matter what anybody tells you to do, if it's a crime then you are liable for it. Because you could -- and should! -- have said "No".

[fraurosena]

I guess having genocidal blood on his tiny hands isn't such a great feeling, so he's on the screaming defensive. But like Lady Macbeth, no amount of washing will ever get them clean again.