Trump 44: Finally on Trial

[47of74]

Yeah one would think he would learn from his past mistakes but Herr Orange is too fucking stupid to learn a goddamn thing. He has none of the self awareness that most people - outside his own Branch Trumpvidian supporters - have.

[WiseGirl]

He is being his usual embarrassment in London. Can someone take him on a tour of Tower? Get him lost in the maze at Hampton Court? Detain him for stupidity? Anything? Bueller? 

Edited December 3, 2019 by WiseGirl
Spelling

[47of74]

He is being his usual embarrassment in London. Can someone take him on a tour of Tower? Get him lost in the maze at Hampton Court? Detain him for stupidity? Anything? Bueller? 

Has anyone told him and Boorish Johnson to get a room yet?

[Alisamer]

2 hours ago, WiseGirl said:

He is being his usual embarrassment in London. Can someone take him on a tour of Tower? Get him lost in the maze at Hampton Court? Detain him for stupidity? Anything? Bueller? 

You know, I completely understand that most intelligence tests are biased towards the white male as a baseline, and aren't ever going to be completely accurate, but I'm really wishing someone would propose and pass an amendment that specifies a minimum level of intelligence and a psychological evaluation to run for president. Maybe make candidates take and pass the citizenship test taken by immigrants choosing to become American citizens. Obviously degrees and such as a pre-requisite are useless (money can buy many things) but we currently have a president who would probably lose at Jeopardy to an average third grader. He is unable to comprehend the basics of his job, unable to do the parts he does comprehend, and unwilling to let his underlings do their jobs unobstructed. 

I am just amazed at how incredibly unintelligent he seems to be. Unintelligent, uncurious, uncaring about anything but himself and his money... and just plain nasty about it. It's sad and frightening.

[fraurosena]

2 hours ago, Alisamer said:

I am just amazed at how incredibly unintelligent he seems to be. Unintelligent, uncurious, uncaring about anything but himself and his money

And he lies. He lies almost compulsively and reflexively every time he opens his mouth. Even if he knows the lies will be found out. 

Case in point:

 

More evidence of his idiocy on display:

 

[fraurosena]

But wait! There's more!

This was so stupid that his handler had tweet out a denial on his account of what he had just said to the press.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump announces Camp David for G-7 summit next year"

Spoiler

President Trump will host global leaders at Camp David next year after giving up on early plans to hold the annual summit at his private resort in Doral, Fla.

Trump made the announcement Tuesday during a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in London, where leaders are gathered for a NATO summit.

The United States is slated to host the Group of Seven meeting in 2020, and Trump had announced that he’d chosen his Florida golf resort after a supposed search for properties yielded nothing better. Criticism of the decision was swift, even from within his own party, and Trump gave in to the pressure to reverse course.

“We’re going to do it at Camp David and we’ll be doing some special things at Camp David,” Trump said. “It’s nearby, it’s close. We’re going to give really great access to the press, you’ll have great access. And we’ll have a little bit of a Washington deliverance. But it will be at Camp David, which is a place people like.”

The White House had previously panned suggestions that he host at Camp David in Maryland, as President Barack Obama had in 2012.

“I understand the folks who participated in it hated it and thought it was a miserable place to have the G-7,” acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney had said in an Oct. 17 news conference. “It was way too small. It was way too remote.”

 

[fraurosena]

21 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Trump announces Camp David for G-7 summit next year"

  Hide contents

President Trump will host global leaders at Camp David next year after giving up on early plans to hold the annual summit at his private resort in Doral, Fla.

Trump made the announcement Tuesday during a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in London, where leaders are gathered for a NATO summit.

The United States is slated to host the Group of Seven meeting in 2020, and Trump had announced that he’d chosen his Florida golf resort after a supposed search for properties yielded nothing better. Criticism of the decision was swift, even from within his own party, and Trump gave in to the pressure to reverse course.

“We’re going to do it at Camp David and we’ll be doing some special things at Camp David,” Trump said. “It’s nearby, it’s close. We’re going to give really great access to the press, you’ll have great access. And we’ll have a little bit of a Washington deliverance. But it will be at Camp David, which is a place people like.”

The White House had previously panned suggestions that he host at Camp David in Maryland, as President Barack Obama had in 2012.

“I understand the folks who participated in it hated it and thought it was a miserable place to have the G-7,” acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney had said in an Oct. 17 news conference. “It was way too small. It was way too remote.”

 

Whoah, you mean... Trump is going to do something Obama did too?  That impeachment thing must be really getting to him!

Plus the fact that there was nothing else at such short notice since the personal pocket-lining Doral option was spoiled by the uproar from the left., of course.

[fraurosena]

Ruh-roh!

 

[47of74]

Who else here is looking forward to the 2am Fuck Face Tweet Storms over this development?

Quote

The House on Tuesday passed a resolution disapproving of Russia being included in future Group of Seven (G-7) summits in a 339-71 vote on Tuesday.

The resolution was introduced by Rep. Albio Sires (D-N.J.) in August after President Trump said in August he believed Russia should be readmitted into the G-7. Russia was expelled from the G-8 in 2014 due to its occupation of territory in Ukraine.

The resolution includes language reiterating the United States’ support for Ukraine while denouncing the country’s occupation of Crimea and destabilization in the region.

The measure also condemns the “Kremlin’s assaults on democratic societies worldwide, including in the United States and other Group of Seven countries,” and calls of the leaders of the G-7 to oppose Russia rejoining the group unless it ends its occupation of “ Ukraine’s sovereign territory, including Crimea” and attacks on democracies around the world.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"The more love Always Trumpers show, the more dangerous Trump becomes"

Spoiler

You’ve heard of the Never Trumpers. That’s the president’s catchall slur for anyone who criticizes him or at least accurately attests to something unsavory he’s done.

But let’s talk instead for a moment about the true risk to our democracy: the Always Trumpers. These are people such as Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) and even the once-reasonable-sounding Rep. Will Hurd (R-Tex.), who excuse away any evidence of impeachment-worthy misdeeds no matter how damning.

The Always Trumpers represent a sprawling group of lackeys and co-conspirators, willing to aid, abet and (most importantly) adore President Trump no matter what he’s credibly accused of. Come hell or high crimes, Always Trumpers always truckle to Trump.

It doesn’t matter whether he’s extorting a desperate ally into announcing a fake investigation into a domestic political rival, compromising both that ally’s national security and ours. The Always Trumpers, many of whom were once Russia hawks, will stand by their man.

Many even cheerfully assist him in spreading Kremlin-planted propaganda.

It’s no worry that he’s encouraging war crimes and pardoning war criminals. Those onetime law-and-order fanatics now believe their lawless leader knows best.

He can betray his party’s commitment to free trade by inflicting tariffs that condemn U.S. manufacturers to recession and farmers to bankruptcy. He can then try to tidy up his trade-war mistakes with a ginormous farmer bailout, one that’s now more than twice as expensive as the 2009 auto-industry bailout that many Republicans opposed.

He can find other ways to undermine the GOP’s stated commitment to unfettered capitalism. He dictates where and how supply chains must operate, and weaponizes state power to reward companies that flatter him and punish those that don’t. Companies hoping for merger approval or tariff exemptions must kiss his ring. Or, preferably, grease his palm, with a stay at the otherwise half-empty Trump International Hotel in Washington.

Somehow, those erstwhile free marketers remain Always Trumpers.

Trump can persecute people based on their religious beliefs; he can have affairs with porn stars; he can rip nursing infants from their mothers’ breasts. Even the Bible Belters have buckled, and family-values-fixated Republicans remain perpetual pro-Trumpers, too.

Some Always Trumpers are die-hard cultists, proposing gristly punishments for the president’s perceived enemies (such as death by hanging for House Democrats who deign to exercise their constitutional oversight responsibilities). Others, such as retiring congressman and former CIA officer Hurd, were once considered moderates, or at least statesmen willing to weigh the evidence. Now even Hurd is excusing L’Affaire Ukraine, perhaps so he can preserve his own future opportunities within the GOP.

Trump has been mocked for declaring, as he did in a Monday tweet, that “The Republican Party has NEVER been so united!” The impeachment inquiry, he said of the GOP, is “bringing us even closer together!”

But given the public behavior of Republicans, Trump’s claims of unprecedented party unity appear correct. It’s hard to imagine a Republican Party of yesteryear excusing such inexcusable behavior, simply because the misbehaver is the party’s standard-bearer. (Even Richard M. Nixon lost his party’s support eventually.) Indeed, to be a Republican today is almost definitionally to be an Always Trumper. Any Republican who reveals himself to be merely a Sometimes Trumper, such as Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.), gets ejected from the party.

Similar dynamics are at play for Republican voters, too.

Conservatives who don’t approve of the president’s actions are — like Amash — simply leaving the party, with “Why I’m No Longer a Republican” cris de coeur fast becoming a hot new genre of nonfiction. Those who remain in the GOP pledge their absolute loyalty to their boss, especially voters who get their news from de-facto state media. In a recent PRRI survey, a majority (55 percent) of Republicans whose primary news source is Fox News say there is nothing Trump could do to lose their approval.

There are, of course, many reasons to worry about this kind of idolatry.

But the biggest risk is that the more unconditional love the Always Trumpers show, the more emboldened Trump becomes. And the more he escalates his democratic destruction.

Absolved for soliciting political interference from one country, in one presidential election, he asks it publicly of two countries in the next. Forgiven for politicizing law enforcement, he moves on to politicizing the military. Allowed to abuse one immigrant group, or undermine one federal agency, he adds others to his crosshairs.

Just imagine what he’ll do if not just GOP lawmakers but also the electorate affirms his behavior with four more years.

Well done, Always Trumpers. If Trump didn’t genuinely believe he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue before, you’ve convinced him he can now.

 

[fraurosena]

We’ve all been wondering how they talk about Trump when he’s not there. Well, now we know that he really is a laughingstock, and a shameful representation of the US.

 

[47of74]

Yeah and the Western Hemisphere’s distributor of two facedness called someone else two faced.

US President Donald Trump called Justin Trudeau "two-faced" Wednesday after Canada's Prime Minister was caught on camera appearing to joke about Trump wiith other world leaders at a Buckingham Palace event the night before.

"He's two-faced," Trump said, adding, "honestly with Trudeau, he's a nice guy."

The video appeared to show British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, French President Emmanuel Macron, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte having a laugh about Trump's behavior during the summit.

[fraurosena]

2 hours ago, 47of74 said:

Yeah and the Western Hemisphere’s distributor of two facedness called someone else two faced.
 

 

 

 

Trumps fee-fees are so bigly hurt, that he's thrown down his toys and is leaving the summit early.

 

[Dandruff]

4 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Trumps fee-fees are so bigly hurt, that he's thrown down his toys and is leaving the summit early.

Do they miss him terribly?  Are they begging him to please come back?

[fraurosena]

6 minutes ago, Dandruff said:

Do they miss him terribly?  Are they begging him to please come back?

Their reaction is under the spoiler.

Spoiler

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[Howl]

Kamala just demonstrated how to simultaneously nail Trump's balls to the wall while throwing massive shade: 

 

[fraurosena]

I’m no fan of Charles but I love him for this smooth move.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"How two undocumented housekeepers took on the president — and revealed his company employed illegal immigrants"

Spoiler

BEDMINSTER TOWNSHIP, N.J. — It was important for Sandra Diaz to be invisible.

Before entering the Trump family villa, she would tie back her hair, pull on latex gloves and step into delicate paper shoe coverings. She knew not to wear makeup or perfume that might leave the faintest trace of her presence.

As Donald Trump’s personal maid, Diaz was dealing with a fussy celebrity owner who presided like a monarch over the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster long before he was elevated to president. She was an immigrant from Costa Rica working illegally for Trump with a fake Social Security card she had bought for $50. Being invisible was her life’s work.

Moving quickly through the two-story house in the mornings, Diaz carried out Trump’s fastidious instructions. In his closet, she would hang six sets of identical golf outfits: six white polo shirts, six pairs of beige pants, six neatly ironed pairs of boxer shorts. She would smear a dollop of Trump’s liquid face makeup on the back of her hand to make sure it hadn’t dried out.

The years of service that Diaz and other undocumented immigrant housekeepers, cooks, landscapers, greenskeepers, waiters, bellhops, farm hands and caddies devoted to the Trump Organization have given them a remarkable vantage point into the unvarnished lives of the now-first family. They have seen poolside tantrums and holiday arguments. They’ve laughed with the in-laws and watched after the grandkids.

Their recollections also show how Trump’s entrance into presidential politics — denouncing illegal immigrants as criminals and job-stealers — upended their lives and prompted some of them to publicly confront their former boss.

Over the past year, The Washington Post has spoken with 48 people who had worked illegally for the Trump Organization at 11 of its properties in Florida, New Jersey, New York and Virginia. These workers spent years — and in some cases nearly two decades — performing the manual labor that keeps Trump’s resorts clean and their visitors fed.

This story is based on interviews with these workers, many of whom were fired or walked away from their jobs after media reports about their employment.

The Post verified workers’ employment histories by reviewing pay stubs and tax documents and, when possible, corroborating accounts with their colleagues. The workers uniformly contend that their managers were aware of their undocumented status, a topic they said came up during conversations and workplace disputes.

Trump, who still owns the Trump Organization but has left day-to-day control to his eldest sons, has said he does not know whether it employs undocumented workers.

“Well, that I don’t know. Because I don’t run it,” he told reporters in July. “But I would say this: Probably every club in the United States has that, because it seems to me, from what I understand, a way that people did business.”

The Post sent White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham a list of the anecdotes that former undocumented employees told about the Trumps’ private quarters at Bedminster and his in-laws.

“The assertions made for this story are not only false, they are a disgusting attempt at invading the privacy of the First Family,” Grisham wrote in response. “This is not journalism — it is fabricated tabloid trash.”

Grisham did not specify which details were inaccurate. She also declined to answer questions about Trump’s longtime employment of undocumented workers and how it squares with his rhetoric about illegal immigration.

The Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment.

For decades, and well into Trump’s presidency, illegal immigrants lived as Trump’s shadow family — ever present, if rarely considered. Trump had met many of them. There were three questions nearly every immigrant who worked for him was asked as Trump strolled the grounds of his resorts and golf clubs inspecting their work. “Your name. How much time you’d been there. And if you like it,” said Margarita Cruz, a housekeeper. This banter often ended with Trump pulling out $50 and $100 bills for tips.

This transactional relationship of discreet service for long hours and often low pay began to evolve as Trump entered politics on the promise to keep out the upward-striving immigrant workers who crumbed his table and scoured his toilets. When Trump referred to some Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists, when he vowed to wall off the U.S.-Mexico border to prevent an immigrant “invasion,” the worry and anger began to build in the kitchens and laundry rooms of his properties.

Trump’s undocumented workers were forced to smile at stomach-churning comments from wealthy members once he became president. “You’re still here? How come we can’t get rid of you? I’m going to call Trump, you [expletive] Mexican,” Gabriel Juarez, who had been head waiter for a decade at one of Trump’s New York golf clubs, said a member told him jokingly.

It fell to them to scrub off the anti-Trump graffiti scrawled across the mirrors in the men’s locker room at Bedminster one day, and grit their teeth through pep talks by supervisors that they said echoed the boss’s stump speeches: “Now don’t forget, let’s make Mar-a-Lago great again.”

So one day, Diaz, along with Victorina Morales, her successor as Trump’s housekeeper at Bedminster, decided to be seen.

When they spoke in articles in The Post, the New York Times and other publications beginning last December, it was not for money — as some of their shocked and frightened colleagues assumed — or really for politics, they said, but to highlight what they consider a glaring hypocrisy.

Trump, despite his rhetoric, had long employed illegal immigrants, and they were the living proof.

A year later, Diaz and Morales no longer work for Trump. No one is known to have been deported because of the women’s actions, and there is no evidence of legal repercussions for Trump or his company. But the pair have endured the anger of friends and colleagues who say they have betrayed a code of silence that permeates the nation’s underground economy.

They say it was worth it.

“How can you know something so big, how someone — who goes on national television and says something — and you know it’s not true,” Diaz explained. “Whether it’s the president or not, you have the responsibility to say no. To pass through this barrier of fear and say no.”

An intimate view

Trump and his family spent so much time at their properties — and still do — that many Trump Organization employees have stories about encounters with them. But the undocumented workers were often left to perform the most intimate and personal work. Those who cooked and served Trump knew that he liked his cheeseburgers well done and his Diet Coke in small glass bottles with a plastic straw that no one could be seen touching.

Trump loved Tic Tacs. But not an arbitrary amount. He wanted, in his bedroom bureau at all times, two full containers of white Tic Tacs and one container that was half full. The same rule applied to the Bronx Colors-brand face makeup from Switzerland that Trump slathered on — two full containers, one half full — even if it meant the housekeepers had to regularly bring new shirts from the pro shop because of the rust-colored stains on the collars. A special washing machine in the laundry room was reserved for his wife Melania Trump’s clothing.

Donald Trump liked Irish Spring bar soap in his shower. But his housekeepers quickly learned not to throw out his soap even if it had worn down to the tiniest sliver: Trump decided when he wanted something discarded. When that happened, with clothes or newspapers, he would toss them on the floor.

A regular recipient of Trump’s castoff clothing was Melania’s father, Viktor Knavs, Diaz and Morales said.

“They’re the same size and everything,” Morales said.

Knavs and his wife, Amalija Knavs, were favorites of the Bedminster staff, even if much was lost in translation from Slovenian to Spanish. Amalija Knavs would often cook breakfast in the villa for Melania while Trump regularly ate breakfast in the clubhouse.

One day in 2013, Viktor Knavs went out to play golf wearing one of Trump’s discarded red baseball caps. When Trump spotted him on the fairway, he blew up, and he ordered his father-in-law, in front of other golfers, to remove the hat and get off the course. Diaz and Morales were in the villa when Knavs returned, threw the hat on the ground and cursed Trump.

The housekeepers pieced together the story from what Amalija Knavs told them in English and what they heard from the caddies who were on the course at the time.

“Nobody could wear the red hat but [Trump],” Diaz said.

“The whole world saw what Trump had done to his father-in-law,” Morales added. “[Knavs] was very embarrassed.”

The White House did not make the Knavses available for comment.

Even before Trump became commander in chief, his arrival at one of his clubs prompted a flurry of activity. “GG-7” was the code word among employees and security personnel for his arrival at his golf club in Westchester County, N.Y, after one of his old license plates. “That means Trump’s coming up,” recalled Gabriel Juarez, the former head waiter. “Everyone was scared. Here comes the boss.”

Trump rarely shied away from his staff. He was particular about every aspect of his clubs’ appearance: from the carpets to the chandeliers to the art on the walls. During his visits, he perpetually scanned for flaws — swiping a finger along a picture frame to check for dust; eyeing the shine on a crystal chandelier.

Gabriel Sedano, a Mexican immigrant on the maintenance staff at Bedminster, recalled hanging portraits — many of Trump — around the club, with Trump at his side.

“I carried the paintings,” Sedano said. “He said where he wanted them.”

One day, Morales, 47, stood outside washing the windows of the pro shop at Bedminster. The 4-foot-11-inch Guatemalan woman couldn’t reach the top portion of the window.

“I was jumping and jumping and I saw the guys inside were laughing. I thought, ‘I don’t like that,’ ” she recalled.

Then she sensed something behind her and turned to find Trump.

“He took the rag,” she said. “And he started to clean.”

Politics seeps in

On election night in 2016 at Trump International Hotel Washington, a jubilant American chef told Wendy Reyes, an immigrant pastry chef: “We are winning! We are winning!”

Reyes felt dismay.

“You’re not going to have that same smile when you come into the restaurant and you see that nobody’s working here because Donald Trump has thrown us all out of the country,” she said she responded.

For many of Trump’s Latin American employees, this sense of isolation and discomfort grew over time.

The worry among the kitchen staff at BLT Prime, the hotel’s restaurant, was serious enough that a week before Trump took office, undocumented employees met with a manager to say they could not continue to come to work because they didn’t have legal documents and feared deportation.

“There wasn’t any problem,” the manager told them, Reyes said. “He said they had talked to the hotel and everything was going to be fine.”

BLT Prime is not owned by the Trump Organization but it operates in conjunction with the hotel. A spokesperson for the restaurant’s ownership group did not respond to a request for comment.

In fact, things got worse.

Trump’s divisive politics seeped into the culture at his resorts and golf courses. Many charities and nonprofit organizations that regularly held events at his properties began to move elsewhere, while conservative groups and causes moved in. When Trump’s family members were on the premises, they now arrived with Secret Service security details and strict new security protocols.

These changes alarmed many undocumented employees. They worried about giving their real names and fake documents to government employees. An undocumented worker on the banquet staff at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., started skipping events he found overtly political. He considered himself more liberal than the crowd and also anxious about the growing focus on illegal immigration.

“I didn’t feel comfortable working over there. That atmosphere. A lot of conservative people talking about abortion or gay marriage,” said the former employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he didn’t want to jeopardize his relationships at the club. “I got kind of tired of all these anti-immigration [events].”

At Bedminster, politics intruded in bizarre ways. Housekeepers began noticing anti-Trump messaging popping up around the club. Insults were scrawled on the mirrors of the men’s locker room. A desecrated Trump doll was found hanging in a bathroom stall used by Trump on a day he was visiting, Morales said. On the first anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, an activist art collective sneaked onto the Bedminster property at night and built a mock graveyard with headstones announcing the death of “decency” and “our future.”

“It made me afraid,” Morales said. “We began to wonder: What if someone comes and puts a bomb in here?”

Morales had witnessed her father being killed in Guatemala when she was a child and had crossed the U.S. border illegally in 1999. She had a job packing disposable diapers at a warehouse in New Jersey before being hired at Trump’s club.

Morales had not considered speaking against Trump, given her precarious status in the United States and her powerful boss. But working conditions had deteriorated, and the way Trump talked about Central Americans made her feel angry and frightened. What would stop him from rounding her and her family up and sending them back to Guatemala?

“This is bad. This is not normal,” Morales recalled thinking. “He is acting this way knowing that we are working for him inside.”

After leaving her job at Bedminster, Diaz became a permanent U.S. resident, after her daughter, a U.S. citizen, petitioned on her behalf. Her husband and son, however, remained undocumented, and Diaz wanted help getting them legal residency. She had seen Anibal Romero, an immigration lawyer, discuss such topics in videos posted on Facebook. In August, she drove to Newark and walked into Romero’s firm on Ferry Street, between a dental office and a liquor store.

Inside, a television played a news report on the Trump’s calls to end birthright citizenship.

“How incredible is this guy?” Diaz told Romero. “Can you believe I worked for him?”

The conversation turned to Diaz’s years working for Trump and her dozens of undocumented colleagues. She told him she’d been mistreated and lost out on promotions because she didn’t have a valid work permit.

Romero normally handled lower-profile cases involving migrants fighting deportation or seeking asylum.

“This isn’t the type of client that walks in on a daily basis,” he recalled. “I knew this would be a big thing.”

Romero suspected that the Trump Organization routinely employed undocumented workers in violation of federal law. He wanted Diaz, Morales and other undocumented Trump employees who became his clients to be treated as material witnesses in a possible federal crime — a designation that could protect them from being deported.

One of the meetings he arranged was with Thomas J. Eicher, an assistant New Jersey attorney general and head of the public integrity office. In early November 2018, Morales and Diaz sat for several hours with Eicher and other members of his team, describing their stories and handing over pay stubs and other evidence of their employment. As the meeting ended, Morales moved to put her fake Social Security and green cards back in her purse. Eicher said the documentation was staying, the women said.

The New Jersey attorney general’s office declined to comment.

When they got into the hallway, Morales was nearly in tears.

“Sandra, what do I do?” she said.

She would not get her protected status. And she now had to buy more fake papers to keep working — ones that wouldn’t match the ones in the Trump Organization’s files.

'Disappointed, to say the least'

After leaving Bedminster in 2014, Diaz took a job with Val Della Pello, the president of a paving company in New Jersey and a member of the Bedminster club. Diaz became his family’s personal housekeeper.

Diaz had not told Della Pello or his wife that she was planning to speak publicly about Trump.

Diaz went to their house in Bedminster a few days after an article about her appeared in the New York Times last December. Worried about how they might react, she had turned on a recorder on her cellphone before she walked in the door.

“You told us you were sick on Wednesday and you showed up on ‘Good Morning America,’ ” Della Pello told her. “We’re disappointed, to say the least.”

The Della Pellos did not respond to requests for comment. New Jersey requires only one party of a conversation to consent to a recording. The recording, which Diaz shared with a Post reporter, was an example of the furious reaction some Trump allies had to her decision to go public.

For more than 20 tense minutes, the couple grilled Diaz about her decision to speak out, at times shouting angrily at her.

“What was the purpose? Sandra, in the end, what was the purpose?” Della Pello asked her.

Diaz stood quietly in the couple’s kitchen, she recalled. She was nervous and she didn’t speak English well. She said it was not just her, that Trump had employed many undocumented workers.

“Nobody is against people coming in from any country provided they do it legally,” Della Pello said, according to the recording. “Because it has gotten out of control, okay? That is a fact. It is out of control.”

“He lied,” Diaz said quietly of Trump. “He lied.”

“Everybody lied!” Della Pello shouted. “But Sandra, everybody lied. Everybody lied. When you cross the border illegally, you lied. . . . Everybody’s been lying to suit their own personal gain or own personal prosperity one way or the other. Everybody. Everybody has. It’s called politics. So you don’t think the Obamas lie?”

For four years, Diaz had felt like a member of the Della Pello family. This was the last time they would see each other.

Della Pello did not respond to phone messages left with his company seeking an interview.

Many of Diaz and Morales’s friends and colleagues, a tightknit community of immigrants in Bound Brook, N.J., also turned against them.

“What she is doing is stabbing the others in the back,” a greenskeeper at Bedminster who was from Diaz’s hometown in Costa Rica, texted a group of colleagues after the Times article came out. “What an embarrassment that she is from my barrio.”

Her friends accused her of risking others’ jobs and setting them up to be deported.

“I also worked there a long time without papers but the most incredible thing is to see how people, when they have papers, forget how they got here,” Antonio Zuñiga, a former Bedminster greenskeeper, wrote on Facebook. “I’m sorry but people like you Doña Sandra have forgotten their principles.”

Zuñiga did not respond to requests for comment.

The friends’ fears about repercussions were soon realized.

In January, Trump’s son Eric Trump announced that as a result of news reports about the Trump Organization’s undocumented workers, the company was “making a broad effort to identify any employee who has given false and fraudulent documents to unlawfully gain employment,” and that any such people would be immediately fired.

The company began auditing the legal status of its employees at its golf courses. A top human resources executive at the company visited golf courses and called workers one by one into meetings, where they learned they were summarily fired.

A precise count of firings is unknown. The Post has confirmed at least 18 firings at five golf courses in New York and New Jersey. At Bedminster, former workers estimate that 30 to 40 more undocumented employees were not asked back this spring.

“Our employees are like family, but when presented with fake documents, an employer has little choice,” Eric Trump told The Post earlier this year.

This year, the Trump Organization also instituted E-Verify, a voluntary federal program that allows employers to check the employment eligibility of new hires. Several of the Trump properties had not been enrolled in the program when the year started, according to the E-Verify database.

The company has not said whether it audited employees’ immigration status before this year.

Undocumented people are known to have worked for the Trump Organization previously. In 1980, when Trump was just starting out as a developer, he used hundreds of undocumented Polish immigrants to demolish a building on the future site of Trump Tower. Trump said he had no idea about the illegal workers, but — after a lawsuit alleging labor violations — a judge ruled that Trump “should have known.” Trump settled the case for $1.38 million in 1998.

A cascade of consequences

For some of the workers, the ability to finally be visible has outweighed the fact that there have been significant consequences for many of their colleagues — and few legal repercussions for Trump.

“The only thing we want is to have these rights like every person who lives here,” said Margarita Cruz, who worked for Trump at his Westchester club for eight years. “To have insurance, to have benefits. And more than anything, to remove the fear — that at any moment we could be deported — from our lives.”

Over the past year, many of Trump’s former employees have had difficulty finding new jobs. Some have yet to be rehired; others work part time or sporadic day labor.

Adela Garcia, who earned about $30,000 per year as a housekeeper at the Westchester club until she was fired in January, now cleans houses in her hometown of Ossining, N.Y. But only two days a week, for a quarter of the pay. “The rent doesn’t stop,” she said. “You have to keep paying.”

Her husband, Gabriel Sedano, who had spent 14 years at the club on the maintenance staff, was also fired. He went five months without finding a new job. Eventually, a friend helped him get hired at a restaurant. But his new boss had seen him on television speaking about Trump. So the job came with a warning.

“They said, ‘Don’t get us in trouble,’ ” he recalled. “I said the only thing I want to do is work. I don’t want any problems either.”

Two months after Diaz and Morales first told their stories, Democrats in Congress invited the pair to be guests at Trump’s State of the Union address. (“Tolerance for illegal immigration is not compassionate — it is cruel,” Trump said in his speech that day in February.)

When Trump announced his campaign for a second term in June at a rally in Orlando, Diaz and Morales were there to protest and to remind people of their existence.

“We are here to show our faces not just for ourselves, but for the 11 million [undocumented] immigrants who are here in the country,” Morales said at a news conference that day.

This week, Morales and Diaz plan to attend town hall meetings of Democratic presidential candidates over three days in Las Vegas.

Despite repeated calls by Democrats in Congress, it is unclear whether the Department of Homeland Security or other agencies are investigating the Trump Organization’s use of undocumented labor.

The New York State attorney general’s office opened an inquiry and interviewed more than 20 former workers about potential wage violations at the company, but former workers say they have heard nothing in months. An official in the attorney general’s office said last month that the inquiry is ongoing but declined to offer further details.

Jorge Castro, an Ecuadoran immigrant who spent nine years as part of a roving band of stone masons who built rock walls at several Trump golf courses, filed a complaint in August with the Labor Department. He alleged that the Trump Organization did not pay him for all the hours he worked.

A Labor Department spokesperson told Romero last month that the department would not be pursuing Castro’s case.

Morales has applied for asylum and has been granted a legal work permit while that process plays out.

When Diaz finally spoke out, she felt relief, and a new sense of purpose, to be able to share her experience, but also to stand up for those immigrants whom Trump often disparages.

She became an advocate for other undocumented Trump employees, somebody who could relate to their lives and concerns. Working for Romero’s law firm, she traveled to cities up and down the Eastern Seaboard to meet dozens of her former colleagues at other Trump properties.

At one point this year, she stood in a kitchen in Charlottesville, talking to an undocumented immigrant who was still employed at Trump Winery.

The worker had spread out years of Trump Organization paystubs, tax documents and health records on a table.

To an outsider, it may have seemed counterintuitive to stockpile all this proof of illegal labor.

“Do you know why we save everything, we Hispanics?” Diaz said to a reporter who was watching.

It was the hope that one day there would be amnesty for those who had lived and worked in the United States, regardless of how they had crossed the border.

“We were always told there will be a reform, and we’ll need all our documents as proof,” she said.

“Exactly,” the winery worker said.

He was not ready to step forward with his own story. But the example of Diaz and others in Trump’s undocumented labor force had taught him to prepare for a different future. One in which he might be visible to all.

 

[Smash!]

Well you better listen to someone born in the sovietunion. Article by Garry Kasparov under spoiler

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/12/04/opinions/kasparov-trump-america-post-truth-world/index.html

Spoiler

The totalitarian Soviet Union where I grew up tried to dominate the truth, to distort it and control it. Reality was whatever the Party put out on the nightly news, or in the official newspapers, Pravda, which means "Truth" and Izvestia, which means "News."

It was increasingly obvious back then, even to communist true believers, that what we were being told didn't match the world we saw around us. As the joke went, "there is no news in the truth and no truth in the news." Eventually the disparity between truth and lies became too great; life wasn't improving and more and more information was making it through the Iron Curtain. Denying reality became too grave an insult to our dignity, an underestimated ingredient in the spirit of revolution.

I have lived through several world-changing upheavals. I'm a post-Soviet citizen; the country of my birth ceased to exist in 1991. We enjoyed less than a decade of tenuous freedom in Russia before Vladimir Putin launched its post-democratic phase. My ongoing attempts to fight that tragedy led to my exile in the United States. Now my new home finds itself locked in its own perilous battle -- a battle to avoid becoming the latest member of the post-truth world.

President Donald Trump and his Republican defenders in Congress have followed his lead in declaring war on observed reality. Critical reports are "fake news," journalists reporting the facts are "enemies of the people," a phrase from Vladimir Lenin's, debunked conspiracy theories is repeated, and public servants testifying under oath about documented events are dismissed as Never Trumpers.

Unable to change the facts, Trump and his supporters instead try to shift the debate into an alternate universe where the truth is whatever they say it is today. Trump repeats the same lies over and over, and it's hard to say which is more troubling -- that his followers don't realize that they are lies or that they don't care. Globalization and the internet may have made the world smaller, but now we're experiencing a counterattack, the regionalization of truth.

The internet was supposed to shine the light of truth into every corner of the world, breaking the authoritarians' monopoly on information. But it has also become a light-speed delivery system of lies and propaganda. The web has been chopped into pieces. Like a shattered mirror, each fragment reflects a different distorted image instead of a single reality.

Protests in Iran are difficult to follow when the regime can shut down internet access across the country. It's easier to find out about Hong Kong's pro-democracy protests in just about any country other than China thanks to their draconian censorship. Russia jails bloggers and shuts down nongovernmental organizations while flooding the country, and the world, with disinformation.

It's alarming to see America taking its own Trumpian path down this dark road. In the USSR, we didn't have a choice of which news channel to watch. Americans have limitless options, but many voluntarily confine themselves to a few like-minded sources. For Trump's followers in particular, denying reality is a badge of honor, a symbol of belonging to a defiant cult.

If you watched the impeachment hearings only on Fox News you would have thought things were going great for the President. Any phrase that might sound like it exonerated him -- and there weren't many -- was repeated over and over like a mantra. The copious and damning evidence provided may as well not have existed.

This partisan split along the lines of reality is in keeping with Trump's larger war on integrity, the rule of law, and traditional American values and allies. It's the model of regional powers and regional facts and regional values long touted by Putin and China's Xi Jinping. There is no good or evil, just business as usual with no place for moral arguments over Chinese concentration camps or Russia bombing hospitals in Syria.

American companies are also falling in line, with Apple recently changing its maps app inside Russia to show the illegally annexed Ukrainian territory of Crimea as Russian. (Google has done so for years.)

American tech giants are happy to help Putin create a false reality inside the borders of Russia. Apparently Apple and Google will stand up to the FBI, but not the FSB, aka the KGB. Software is soft power, and US companies betray the values of the nation that enabled their success by doing the bidding of dictators. Tech firms defending themselves by saying it's just business, not politics, sound a lot like the Hollywood studios that edited their movies and fired Jewish staff under Nazi pressure in the 1930s.

What's the truth? In the era of regionalized facts, it depends on where you stand, what channel you're watching, and what party you belong to. But there cannot be a red state reality and a blue state reality any more than there should be one world map inside of Russia and a different one outside. Trump is finally facing the music, and that must begin with everyone facing the facts.

 

Edited December 5, 2019 by Smash!

[GreyhoundFan]

"Unruly, pouty and boastful: A field guide for Trump’s journeys abroad"

Spoiler

WATFORD, England — President Trump often ends his foreign jaunts with a grand flourish: a solo news conference with himself playing the flamboyant diplomat, riffing on the trip, establishing dominance — and, most importantly, offering his final version of reality before blowing out of town.

That Trump slunk out of the NATO summit here Wednesday after hastily canceling his planned news conference underscored just how unsettling he found his two-day visit.

French President Emmanuel Macron had confronted Trump on areas of disagreement, and a video surfaced of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau privately mocking the American president in a huddle with Macron and other world leaders during a Buckingham Palace reception.

But in many respects, Trump’s abrupt departure was typical for a president who has routinely upended foreign visits during his first three years in office — blustering, bullying and attempting at all times to keep the world’s attention squarely on himself.

He has criticized his hosts and issued global threats. He’s hobnobbed with dictators and feuded with allies.

And, as he did this week in Watford, he has sometimes sulked when things aren’t going his way — part of the taxonomy of behaviors that make up Trump’s overseas adventures as president.

 The unruly guest

The last time Trump visited London, in June, he caused a ruckus by declaring that privatizing Britain’s National Health Service — a sacrosanct postwar creation that provides free health care to Britons — would be “on the table” for trade discussions.

The faux pas quickly became a talking point among British politicians hoping to succeed then-Prime Minister Theresa May. And Trump backtracked shortly thereafter.

“I don’t see it being on the table,” Trump said, contradicting his own comments. “That’s something I would not consider part of trade. That’s not trade.”

And on Tuesday, when asked again if he thought Britain’s health system should be part of trade negotiations with the United States, Trump acted like his previous comments didn’t exist: “I don’t even know where that rumor started.”

“If you handed it to us on a silver platter, we want nothing to do with it,” he concluded.

Trump has made similar reversals on other ventures abroad. Attending the Group of Seven summit in August in Biarritz, France, Trump seesawed over his trade war with China. First, via Twitter, he “hereby ordered” American companies out of China. Then he conceded he had “second thoughts” about the tariffs he had levied on Chinese products.

And then, only a few hours later — amid news coverage that he had backtracked and was softening his stance on China, two things he is loath to be seen as doing — he said his only second thought was not making the tariffs higher.

The presidential whipsaw triggered gyrations in stock markets and led allies to doubt the stability of American leadership.

In Britain this week, Trump managed to contradict himself again — in almost the same breath.

Asked about the video of Trudeau laughing about him behind his back, Trump criticized, then praised the Canadian leader in rapid succession.

“Well, he’s two-faced,” Trump told reporters Wednesday. “And honestly, with Trudeau, he’s a nice guy. I find him to be a very nice guy.”

Later in the day, Trump was caught on an open microphone bragging about his Trudeau put-down, remarking to another summit attendee, “That was funny when I said that guy was two-faced.”

The rule-breaker

The unofficial rule of overseas travel is that domestic politicking is supposed to stop at the water’s edge. But this week in Britain — as he has done so many times previously — Trump behaved as if he were at one of his campaign rallies rather than a statesman abroad, trashing his rivals on foreign soil.

As he and Trudeau sat in gold-colored armchairs for a bilateral meeting on trade and other weighty matters, Trump lit into one of his domestic adversaries, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), who has been leading the impeachment inquiry.

“I think he’s a maniac,” Trump said in response to a reporter’s question, as Trudeau looked on. “I think Adam Schiff is a deranged human being. I think he grew up with a complex for lots of reasons that are obvious. I think he’s a very sick man. And he lies.”

In a meeting earlier that day with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Trump described congressional Democrats as “very unpatriotic” because they were investigating his conduct. “They are hurting our country very badly,” Trump said.

Trump has used other foreign backdrops to trash his U.S. political opposition. Perhaps most striking was during his June trip to Normandy for the 75th anniversary of the D-Day invasion, where the president sat for an interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham and — as white grave markers stretched behind him to the horizon — slammed his domestic rivals.

Trump called House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) “a nasty, vindictive, horrible person” and, against the austere backdrop of the cemetery, weighed in on a host of other political issues.

The president’s violations of protocol have been legion. When Trump traveled to London in July 2018, he opened his trip by trashing his host in an interview with The Sun, a British newspaper. The president said May had screwed up Brexit negotiations by allowing European Union leaders to hold “all the cards.”

Trump’s blunt comments ricocheted across Britain and diminished and embarrassed May, whose domestic political standing already was weak. Trump later apologized for his diatribe and the two leaders appeared side-by-side at Chequers, the prime minister’s country house, where the American president told the British prime minister, “Whatever you do is okay with me.”

During this week’s trip — after the mocking video emerged — Trump kept British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Stoltenberg waiting for six minutes before finally emerging onstage Wednesday for a ceremonial handshake.

As the two leaders waited, they paced, peered backstage and, at one point, consulted with Stoltenberg’s pocket schedule. Johnson appeared perturbed, gesturing to a bank of cameras and noting, “We’re live now.”

“How are we doing? Come on!” Johnson said.

Finally, Trump strode onstage, and the three men shook hands and posed for a photo before Trump tried to exit in the wrong direction.

The alpha diplomat

The most acrimonious of Trump’s meetings here was with Macron — and from the moment the two men clasped hands in one of the forceful, extended handshakes for which they have now become known, both presidents used their physicality to try to assert dominance.

As Trump spoke, Macron spread his legs wide — a stance known as “man-spreading” — and casually leaned forward in his armchair. As Macron spoke, Trump steepled his fingers, peered around the room and made eye contact with reporters, as if to convey indifference.

Such physicality is hardly new to Trump. At his first NATO meeting, in Brussels in 2017, Trump shoved the prime minister of Montenegro to get ahead of him in line when the allies gathered for a group photo.

Montenegro’s leader dismissed Trump’s brush-past as “inoffensive,” but the physical slight was particularly symbolic in the small Balkan nation, whose leader was attending his first NATO summit after a nearly decade-long quest to join the alliance.

At the 2018 G-7 meeting in Canada, Trump grew frustrated as he sat at a table, other leaders hovering over him amid tense trade talks. He crossed his arms in defiance — a moment captured in a photograph released by the German government that went viral, a modern-day Renaissance painting for the Trump era.

Trump then reportedly stood up, reached into his suit jacket and tossed two Starburst candies onto the table.

“Here, Angela,” the president said, referring to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, according to Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, a global risk consultancy. “Don’t say I never give you anything.”

The strongman’s friend

NATO leaders were gathered for their three-hour plenary session Wednesday in Watford when, suddenly, Trump and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan ducked out and retreated for a private tête-à-tête.

The American president left a gathering of Western allies for an exclusive, half-hour audience with the most authoritarian leader in attendance — a man accused of eroding democratic norms at home. Some NATO diplomats were surprised that Trump would shirk the main event to hang out with a strongman.

A White House spokesman declined to say whether Trump confronted Erdogan over Turkey’s recent displacement and slaughter of Kurds.

“Of course it strikes everyone how much the two connect,” said one senior NATO diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the closed-door meeting. “Even physically, Erdogan would put his arm around his shoulders.”

During meetings abroad with allies, Trump frequently finds himself seemingly aligned with dictators, despots and authoritarian-minded leaders.

Ahead of the Group of Seven summit in August, Trump offered reassurances to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who had been worried the G-7 allies would gang up on him over criticism of his handling of massive fires that had been raging across the Amazon rainforest.

“Absolutely, we will be a voice for Brazil,” Trump told Bolsonaro, a far-right leader whose presidency has been polarizing at home.

The first time Trump met Russian President Vladimir Putin, at the 2017 Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, he attempted to conceal what he and Putin discussed by confiscating the notes of the official U.S. interpreter.

Later on the same trip, Trump huddled with Putin at length during a ceremonial leaders’ dinner. He had no note taker or other U.S. official present and relied only on Putin’s interpreter to understand the Russian president.

And at the G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan, this past June, Trump heaped praise on Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, describing as “a friend of mine” the leader who U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded ordered the gruesome murder and dismemberment of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.

Trump’s embrace in Osaka helped salvage the global reputation of Mohammed, preventing the crown prince from becoming a global pariah and ensuring that Saudi Arabia would remain a hub for investment.

“I want to just thank you on behalf of a lot of people, and I want to congratulate you,” Trump told Mohammed. “You’ve done, really, a spectacular job.”

The pouting traveler

As Trump retreated prematurely Wednesday to Air Force One — saying he was abruptly canceling his wrap-up news conference because he’d already fielded so many questions from reporters the day prior — he was caught on an open microphone mocking the criticism he expected to receive.

“ ‘He didn’t do a news conference! He didn’t do a news conference!’ ” Trump exclaimed, mimicking imagined punditry.

It was not the first time, however, that Trump had departed on a petulant note.

At the July 2018 NATO summit in Brussels, the president interrupted a wrap-up session about Ukraine to threaten to change America’s commitment to the alliance if other countries did not ante up more money for defense on the spot. Trump had been fuming that morning because he did not think the media had adequately captured his anger with Germany and other nations over their levels of defense spending.

Trump’s move, which many allies interpreted as signaling the possible withdrawal of the United States from NATO, triggered an emergency confab.

Afterward, many leaders looked drained, as though they had passed through a physical ordeal.

That’s how some of them had felt a month earlier when Trump stormed out of a G-7 summit in Quebec by retracting U.S. support for the joint communique that already had been agreed to in an effort to demonstrate unity among the allies.

Aboard Air Force One en route to his next stop — Singapore, for a historic summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un — Trump lashed out at the G7’s host on Twitter. He called Trudeau “meek and mild” and “very dishonest & weak” after the Canadian prime minister spoke out against the tariffs Trump had imposed against some Canadian imports.

It was, of course, not the last time Trudeau would find himself in Trump’s crosshairs. After all, the video of Trudeau and other leaders mocking the president prompted Trump’s “two-faced” dig — and may well have influenced his hasty departure from Watford.

By Thursday morning — after returning to Washington with no major agreements in hand — Trump was crowing about the trip as a great success.

“Tremendous things achieved for U.S. on my NATO trip,” Trump tweeted. “Proudly for our Country, no President has ever achieved so much in so little time.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[Smash!]

My comment for all those tweets: WTF? ???

Same topic, this time from Alexandra Chalupa

 

[fraurosena]

Do I even need to comment on his stupidity anymore, or shall I just let it speak for itself?