Trump 45

[Audrey2]

2 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Again the faux sarcasm defense...

 

Translation: President Obama got a Nobel Prize. I know the words Nobel Prize because Obama got it and I want one too. 

Had Michelle Obama's book becoming one of Pulitzer Prize, Trump would either be demanding a Pulitzer for himself or one for Melania.

[HerNameIsBuffy]

14 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Again the faux sarcasm defense...

 

So instead of thinking he is ignorant about the prize given for writing and how to spell Nobel he wants us to think he's ignorant for randomly capitilizing adjectives mid sentence?  Got it.

[AmericanRose]

Well, if it wasn't obvious before... you know, I'm really okay with no longer being the 'United' States. I don't think there even needs to be a war about it.

[Xan]

8 hours ago, AmericanRose said:

Well, if it wasn't obvious before... you know, I'm really okay with no longer being the 'United' States. I don't think there even needs to be a war about it.

I'm with you.  I'm even willing to move to be around like-minded people.  Let's give the Trumpies a few states and let them mismanage their way into a hole.  Hell, they can secede if they want.  If my state lost its Trump contingent, the average IQ would go up at least 15 points.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump Chief of Staff Says His Main Concern Is Trump Eating Enough"

Spoiler

The Trump presidency has featured a stream of shockingly brutal coverage of the president’s inability to do his job, at least as every other modern president has defined the role. A recent New York Times account of Trump’s workaday routine is probably one of the gentler treatments of the subject. It lacks many of the most brutal details from past such stories, such as Trump’s refusal to digest briefing materials, inability to concentrate on substance or understand it when explained to him, and habit of interrupting and diverting White House staffers who actually are trying to work. (CNN reported this weekend that Trump’s irregular appearance at coronavirus task force meetings “often throws the meeting well off its assigned agenda and frequently centers on how his performance is being viewed in the media or in polling.”) Instead, it rather straightforwardly describes his routine of watching television and talking on the phone, sandwiched around a 90-minute to two-hour televised session of self-praise.

For whatever reason, though, this particular Times story infuriated the president. Trump lashed out at the Times in a series of tweets:

Perhaps dissatisfied with this rebuttal, Trump dispatched his aides to feed a counter-narrative to the conservative New York Post. The Post’s authorized account of Trump’s work habits begins, “President Trump’s schedule is so packed amid the coronavirus crisis that he sometimes skips lunch, his aides told the Post — refuting a report that the commander-in-chief spends his days obsessing over TV coverage and eating fries.” But the story does not so much refute the Times account as reframe the facts in a more flattering way.

The Post story quotes from Trump’s loyal aides commending his work ethic, without directly challenging the facts in the Times account. Several of them praise his tireless habit of calling them at all hours of the day, including one recent 3:19 a.m. phone call. Of course, nobody has accused Trump of enjoying unusually high or even adequate levels of sleep.

Likewise, Trump’s eating habits, a point upon which the Times barely touches, is the subject of obsessive attention by the Post. “I can tell you that the biggest concern I have as a new chief of staff is making sure he gets some time to get a quick bite to eat,” says Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. “There are times when lunch isn’t even a thought,” says another official, who is anonymous, perhaps out of embarrassment at having their name attached to such a sycophantic quote. “A lot of time, there’s either no time for lunch or there is ten minutes for lunch.”

It’s not clear why ensuring adequate presidential access to food would be Meadows’s highest priority at this time. If Trump is indeed working himself so hard he is skipping meals, the effect of this undernourishment is not yet visible.

Most of the rest of the story is given over to treating phone calls and television-binging as serious work. Trump is known to jabber constantly with Republican allies ranging from rich people to the hosts of his favorite Fox news programs. Meadows describes this for the Post as diligent presidenting: “Normally, he will get six or seven calls from members [of Congress] or business leaders or community leaders, so oftentimes what he will do is go up to the residence and have the White House operator literally do back-to-back calls.”

More comically, his aides spin his obsessive television-watching as strategic media monitoring — “like a linebacker watching tape,” one anonymous underling explains. “How else are we going to know what’s being said and what’s being reported out there?”

It’s more like a linebacker refusing to watch tape or even to listen to the dumbed-down summaries of the tape that his coaches try to read to him, and instead spending hours listening to sports-talk radio and frequently calling in to berate the hosts and insist he is actually the greatest linebacker of all time.

If it was actually necessary for the White House to have a fine-grained understanding of what cable news is saying about Trump minute by minute — and to be clear, it is not necessary — they could have an aide watch the shows and provide the president with regular summaries. You don’t have to assign that job to the president of the United States. The White House position is that there is literally no other way — “How else are we going to know” — for the administration to know what the media is saying than to have the president personally devote most of his waking hours to binge-watching cable.

Um, he could go without eating for weeks...

[Becky]

If the most important task of the White House chief of staff is feeding the president, something is waaayyy wrong. 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is so true: "Trump wants the military to glorify himself, not serve the nation"

Spoiler

Waitman Wade Beorn, a combat veteran of Iraq, is a Holocaust and genocide studies historian, a senior lecturer in history at Northumbria University in Newcastle, England, and the author of “Marching Into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus.” He is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point.

The emperor’s new clothes are a military uniform. In the past week or so, President Trump, losing his public relations battle against the coronavirus, has cloaked himself in the mantle of commander in chief by announcing that the military’s preeminent pilots would perform those fly-bys that he said he “can’t get enough of,” declaring that the graduating class of the U.S. Military Academy would return to it so that he can deliver a commencement address; and calling for a reprise of his 2019 Fourth of July military extravaganza on the Mall.

“I want to see those shows,” Trump said of the Thunderbirds and the Blue Angels, who will fly over New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania at midday Tuesday in the first of the events that will combine the skills of the two squadrons. Of his Independence Day pageant, Trump noted that even though it was pouring last year, that “didn’t bother the pilots, didn’t bother the military,” and “we’re going to be doing that again on July Fourth.” (As a former Army officer, I can tell you that it’s not fun for soldiers to participate in these things; they have to work on a rare holiday and spend days and often nights of hard work preparing behind the scenes.) As for the U.S. Military Academy graduation, he commented that he didn’t care for the look of a ceremony with social distancing — he prefers the “nice and tight” look — but that he had done the commencement addresses at the other service academies and “I’m doing it at West Point.”

In all these anticipated events of martial showmanship — all announced at coronavirus task force briefings ostensibly intended to update the American public on the pandemic — the common denominator is the president’s desire to appropriate the military as a symbol not of the nation but of himself. Trump seeks not to honor those in uniform by displaying them and their weaponry in front of the nation, but to glorify himself by placing the military in the background, regardless of the cost. At a time of unprecedented loss and disruption to all aspects of American life, the president’s obsession with military adoration is objectively wasteful and dangerous: Whether they are Blue Angels or academy cadets, the armed forces do not exist to provide photo ops for Trump.

The Pentagon paints the flyovers as a way “to thank first responders, essential personnel, and military service members as we collectively battle the spread of COVID-19,” according to a memo obtained by The Washington Post. But with the president stealing a march on the Pentagon by announcing the events himself first, the gesture seems foremost to signify his own power. After all, how many of the people being honored will get the chance to be inspired by these demonstrations, given the importance of their lifesaving work and the fact that the aeronautical thank-yous will avoid flight paths that would make it easy for people to congregate? Moreover, these flights cost $60,000 an hour. The cost of Trump’s military-inspired Fourth of July celebration is unknown, but certainly any amount of money devoted to such things is poorly spent at this juncture, and elite pilots’ lives are always at risk in these daring demonstrations.

Some military displays are more important than others. A U.S. Military Academy graduation is one. I remember my own. With all my things packed away, I left an empty barracks room to march up to the football stadium. Sitting in the hot sun listening to then-vice president Al Gore speak, most of us were just waiting to hear the words “class dismissed!” from the cadet first captain. A U.S. Military Academy graduation celebrates grit, persistence and achievement. The U.S. Military Academy represents the entire country, with admissions apportioned more or less geographically. Those who go there are a diverse group of men and women united by a desire to serve. The cadets have all struggled in their own ways in a difficult and competitive environment. Graduation is also a moment of thanksgiving for families who are proud of their cadets and in some ways went through their trials with them. Yet in this pandemic, the joyful throngs of parents and new lieutenants are very real health hazards to all involved.

A true leader would forgo the privilege and publicity of a U.S. Military Academy commencement address in the interests of the troops’ welfare. The Air Force Academy already held commencement exercises, with cadets seated six feet apart and parents watching at home. The Naval Academy chose to cancel graduation altogether. But this year was Trump’s turn to speak at the oldest and most storied of the academies, and he appears unwilling to give up the backdrop of 1,000 cadets and the million-dollar view of the Hudson Valley. As the academy’s superintendent, Lt. Gen. Darryl A. Williams, weighed the pros and cons of various options, the president again got there ahead of time with the news, announcing that he would be speaking. Given the necessary mitigation measures, it probably won’t feel much like a celebration. As U.S. Military Academy graduate, Lt. Gen. (retired) Mark Hertling, former commander of the Army in Europe, wrote in an op-ed for CNN, it’s more like mandatory fun for a president to fulfill his “political desires,” and that “the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.” The muted graduation event will be little more than a campaign rally with the cadets’ big day as background and footnote.

And at what cost? Cadets would have had to return to the academy to finish their academic work, move out of their barracks rooms and complete out-processing procedures unique to students who also become lieutenants and join the army after graduation. But Trump is adding burdens by requiring all cadets to be there at the same time and most likely for longer periods, with all the expenses associated with supporting the corps, from laundry to mess hall staff to food. The academy is more than a school; it is a working Army base with military police and other active-duty soldiers who would need to be on duty to support not only graduation but also the intensive security procedures associated with a presidential visit (not to mention civilian law enforcement). The academy historically has adapted to accomplish its mission even in times of crisis. During both the First and Second World Wars, the U.S. Military Academy accelerated graduations — sometimes with classes graduating within months of each other — and reduced the time spent there to three years from four. In the midst of a pandemic, there is simply no good reason to hold a ceremony and risk the lives of all involved.

Yet, there is a reason: Trump, a man who avoided military service, insulted Gold Star parents, pardoned war criminals and mocked a decorated veteran and prisoner of war as a loser. The president seeks to surround himself by military pomp to lend the appearance of strong leadership. It is the emptiest of gestures. The military parades he favors are, historically, the purview of dictators. They symbolize not just military power, but military power subservient to a supreme leader, be it the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin or North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Military pageantry in the United States, like the homecoming parades after Operation Desert Storm in 1991, honor service members, not the president, and they are more about people and less about weaponry. A Blue Angels flight through the clouds may seem innocuous, if extravagant, but what happens when Trump orders other Navy pilots, similarly skilled, to “shoot down and destroy” an adversary, as he did via tweet in reference to any Iranian gunboats caught harassing our ships? And what if it’s not for national security, but to distract from a national disaster and to pander to his base?

The president’s reflexive turn to military ceremony may seem superficial, but it betrays a more serious threat to the critical partnership between civilian leaders and the military as well as the role of the commander in chief. He simultaneously undermines their authority and professional expertise. Perhaps Trump’s unilateral willingness to seek a militaristic solution to his pandemic failures should not be surprising. After all, based largely on his whim, a Space Force has made its debut as a branch of the armed services, costing billions to establish and appearing to be largely redundant, another entry in Trump’s “catalog of bad ideas.”

The archetypal observer of American society, Alexis de Tocqueville, noted in the 1830s that “the President of the United States possesses almost royal prerogatives which he has no opportunity of exercising.” That was before Trump.

 

[AnywhereButHere]

3 hours ago, Becky said:

If the most important task of the White House chief of staff is feeding the president, something is waaayyy wrong. 

I don’t know... Maybe they figure if his hands and mouth are full of burgers, he can’t be Tweeting or talking. Important job right there!

[GreyhoundFan]

How very true:

 

[Audrey2]

Yeah, give me Keiffer Sutherland in Designated Survivor any day!

[GreyhoundFan]

This is a good piece from Margaret Sullivan: "Trump has played the media like a puppet. We’re getting better — but history will not judge us kindly."

Spoiler

Traditional journalism is under siege, NBC News chief Andy Lack wrote this week: President Trump continues to “put the bully in bully pulpit,” and the coronavirus crisis has taken a toll.

“But we’re winning,” proclaimed the headline of Lack’s piece published on NBCNews.com, which argues that news organizations, because they are still able to tell citizens the truth of what’s going on in the country, are victorious.

I wish I could agree.

Even if you get past the objectionable notions of “winning” and “losing,” I very much doubt that history will judge mainstream journalism to have done a terrific job covering this president — including in this difficult moment.

On the contrary, the coverage, overall, has been deeply flawed.

Those flaws were on full display over the past few days, just as they have been every day since a real estate mogul/reality TV star grandly descended a goldtone escalator into the marble atrium of Trump Tower on June 16, 2015, to announce his presidential campaign.

For nearly five years, the story has been Trump. And, in all that time, the press is still — mostly — covering him on the terms he dictates.

We remain mesmerized, providing far too much attention to the daily circus he provides.

We normalize far too much, offering deference to the office he occupies and a benefit of the doubt that is a vestige of the dignified norms of presidencies past.

And day after day, we allow him to beat us up. And then we come back for more.

“Front Row at the Trump Show,” is the name of ABC News White House correspondent Jonathan Karl’s best-selling new book. The current president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, Karl is well-respected, smart and experienced. But if there was ever a self-own, it’s right there in that title: president as vaudeville performer, journalist as rapt audience.

“Trump has been able to make it all about him, and the press — with some notable exceptions — too often allows him to turn the coverage into a carnival,” said Tim O’Brien, a Trump biographer, former New York Times business reporter and columnist at Bloomberg Opinion.

“You can’t let the person you’re covering set the terms of the coverage, but that’s exactly what he has done.”

Every day — sometimes every hour — there’s some new craziness to distract us.

Here is Trump suggesting that ingesting disinfectants may cure the coronavirus. Here he is trashing reporters on Twitter who won Pulitzer Prizes by talking about revoking their Nobel Prizes — but misspelling it as “Noble.” Here he is claiming he will somehow punish reporters by not having his near-daily briefings — and then changing his mind, as a press aide quips that reporters should be kept on their toes.

Journalists are whipsawed. The public tunes out in disgust or regrettable credulity. And meanwhile, a nation has become inured to the fact that U.S. cases of coronavirus are about to pass 1 million, and that at least 56,000 Americans have died of covid-19.

And then we come back for more, writing headlines that somehow combine the words “Trump” and “strategy.” Or ponder in cable-news panels whether he’s turned the corner and started acting more presidential. Or downplay the sheer madness of the disinfectant idea with a news alert and related story politely stating that “some experts” call it dangerous.

Is this winning? Only in the sense that a verbally abused spouse is winning if she manages to get the kids off to school after another sleepless night.

Granted, there has been great journalism over the past five years. There have been outstanding investigations, trenchant analyses, important day-to-day coverage.

In recent weeks, both The Washington Post and the New York Times published investigative reports about the failures of the Trump administration to heed early warnings and act quickly enough to protect the nation against the virus’s ravages. Both news organizations also undertook deep analyses of his recent briefings, showing how Trump dominates the discussion, instead of the medical experts, presidential monologues chock full of bragging and misinformation and precious little empathy.

There has been plenty of other good work, too, providing valuable insight, such as Michael Kruse’s recent Politico article “Donald Trump’s Greatest Escape,” which looks back at the real estate developer’s near financial collapse in 1995. Kruse persuasively suggests that Trump is a political Houdini who has been training his whole life to survive today’s political challenges, no matter how much it may appear that he’s finally met his match.

And the best news organizations have become more blunt, when warranted, about calling out Trump’s lies, racism and failures of leadership.

But in the big picture and as a whole, we’ve never quite figured out how to cover Trump for the good of citizens. We’ve never really fully changed gears despite Trump’s constant, norm-busting behavior. Determined to do our jobs — dutifully covering the most powerful person in the world — we keep coming back for more:

Beat reporters file into the briefing room, sometimes to be publicly insulted and disparaged as “fake news” or “a terrible reporter.”

Television’s live coverage of briefings continues at many news organizations — allowing Trump to dominate the late-afternoon airwaves, day after day, with torrents of misinformation and narcissistic bragging.

As Fintan O’Toole recently summed it up in the Irish Times: “It is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behavior has become normalized. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show anymore.”

He added, pointedly: “For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.”

Someday, we’ll get some perspective on how the press has contributed to this mess — just as we can now look back on the news coverage of the run-up to the Iraq War and clearly see the sins committed then by most of Big Journalism: the shameful lack of skepticism, the foolish granting of anonymity to deceptive and self-interested sources.

When we have that distance, what I suspect we’ll see is a candidate and a president who played the media like a puppet while deeply damaging the public’s trust in the press as a democratic institution. Someone who dazzled us with his show, while acting constantly in his own self-interest as we willingly — almost helplessly — magnified his message.

We’ll figure out what happened and why. And we’ll know what to call it. But it won’t be “winning.”

 

[fraurosena]

Apparently Brian Williams said something that really got to him.

Off to find out what triggered him...

[fraurosena]

Proof of the veracity of CNN reporting he shouted at his campaign manager:

Here’s a link to the article he’s referring to:

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/04/29/politics/donald-trump-brad-parscale-campaign-coronavirus/index.html?__twitter_impression=true

[fraurosena]

Somebody is really rattled about his polling numbers... 

 

[47of74]

Cardinal Dolan sold his soul to Fuck Face along with the rest of the church.  

Quote

Without a whimper from any of his fellow bishops, the cardinal archbishop of New York has inextricably linked the Catholic Church in the United States to the Republican Party and, particularly, President Donald Trump.

It was bad enough that Cardinals Timothy Dolan of New York and Sean O'Malley of Boston, joined by Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez, currently also president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, participated in Trump's phone version of a campaign rally on April 25. With hundreds of others on the call, including Catholic educators, the bishops were once again masterfully manipulated. They previously gave Trump certain campaign footage when they delivered Catholics to his speech at the March for Life rally in Washington early in the year.

Now Trump will have Dolan's language from the call, telling everyone that he considers himself a "great friend" of Trump, for whom he expressed mutual admiration as "a great gentleman." The cardinal went on to say that he was "honored" to lead off the comments on the call.

The whole cringe-worthy exchange (yes, Trump did self-describe as "the best" president "in the history of the Catholic church") was made worse the next day when Dolan provided more campaign footage from inside St. Patrick's Cathedral in announcing that the president was "worshiping with us," purportedly livestreaming the Mass at the White House

Talk about tone deaf at an epicenter of the pandemic which was made worse by Dolan’s speshul guest. 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is a good one: "Need something to love about Trump? Watch him humiliate his most loyal hacks."

Spoiler

If you’re a Democrat, American politics is hard to watch right now. The coronavirus crisis is hurting Americans, your presumptive presidential nominee is unable to campaign in any traditional sense, and the president you loathe holds near-daily news conferences full of misleading boasts and misinformation.

But there’s one reliable source of joy, and President Trump himself delivers it: He consistently humiliates Republicans who are foolish or unprincipled enough to throw in their lot with him. The shameless lackeys who cast aside integrity and principled conservatism to curry favor with the president are constantly rewarded with his derision. It’s a perfect confection of schadenfreude and karma, and Trump’s skill at serving it is probably his best quality.

Nearly every general, political operative, business executive, policy wonk or politician who has gone to work for the Trump administration has debased himself — by defending an indefensible policy or corrupt act, trying to explain some bonkers presidential tweet or having the rug pulled out from under him. Any pompous mandarin who enters Trump’s orbit departs with a sullied image and a diminished reputation. No one ever comes out ahead by doing business with a con artist.

The latest example comes from Georgia, courtesy of Gov. Brian Kemp. Trump has repeatedly called for a swift reopening of the American economy, even if it leads to an avalanche of coronavirus deaths. In the days before Kemp’s April 19 announcement that he would allow some nonessential businesses to reopen within a week, Trump tweeted calls to “LIBERATE” several states in which right-wing protesters were demanding an end to stay-at-home orders. Axios reports, “Trump, in general terms, had offered support to Kemp in their previous phone calls, leading Kemp to believe the president had his back on his plan.” Then Trump reversed himself and threw Kemp under the bus in a press briefing. “It’s just too soon … because safety has to predominate,” the president said.

Kemp, whom Democrats especially despise because he purged voters from the rolls when he was Georgia’s secretary of state, should have known better than to think Trump had his back — or anyone else’s. He also should have known better than to count on constancy from a leader who has already reversed himself repeatedly on almost every aspect of the pandemic.

You’d think that Republicans would have learned by now not to trust Trump, who has churned through countless acolytes who have left the White House on bad terms. Consider them the political equivalent of all those lenders, tenants and contractors Trump cheated in his real estate business, or the fans he defrauded with his bogus Trump University.

The first wave of Republicans to degrade themselves carrying water for Trump appeared during the 2016 campaign. Jeff Sessions, a longtime nativist, was the first senator to endorse Trump. His reward was appointment as U.S. attorney general. But in showing a few basic professional norms while in that role, Sessions disappointed Trump. Recusing himself from the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian interference enraged the president. Trump began to insult Sessions publicly, calling him “weak” and “ineffective” — and privately calling him worse epithets, according to journalist Bob Woodward. Ultimately, Trump fired Sessions and replaced him with Matthew G. Whitaker, a more pliant loyalist.

Other Trump campaign flunkies weren’t lucky enough to get a job from him in the first place. Then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani shamelessly flacked for Trump and served his needs in 2016. Giuliani went on TV to defend Trump when few would after the Access Hollywood tape of Trump boasting about committing serial sexual assault came out. Christie was Trump’s opening act on the campaign trail, leading the New Yorker to describe him as Trump’s “manservant.” Trump repaid them with disdain. As Time noted in an article on Christie, “He has been publicly humiliated by Trump, who audibly told him in a rally to ‘get on the plane and go home’ and mocked him for eating too many Oreos.”

Christie was fired from his role as head of Trump’s transition team, and neither he nor Giuliani got jobs in the administration. More recently, Trump brought Giuliani on as an unpaid personal attorney whose embarrassing performances on television spinning wild conspiracy theories on Trump’s behalf have destroyed what was left of the reputation of the man once known as “America’s Mayor.”

Even the rare Republican apostate may be someone who already got burned by Trump. Take Mitt Romney, the only Republican senator to vote for convicting Trump in his impeachment trial. During the 2016 primaries, Romney vociferously opposed Trump’s candidacy, describing Trump as “a phony” who was “playing the American public for suckers.” But as soon as Trump won, Romney became a sucker himself, placing a fulsome, congratulatory phone call to the president and praising Trump to the press as he auditioned for secretary of state. “Aides (to Trump) said Romney would have to grovel to be considered and so he did, gushing over the man who had derided him as a ‘loser’ who ‘choked like a dog’ in his 2012 campaign,” columnist Margaret Carlson reported during the 2016 transition period. “Romney said that by getting elected Trump ‘did something I tried to do and was unsuccessful in.’ ”

Perhaps Romney should have remembered his own earlier warning about Trump: “His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University.” As any veteran Trump observer could have told Romney, Trump was probably just pretending to consider the former Republican presidential nominee to make him supplicate.

In retrospect, Romney should consider himself lucky that he was passed over for the Cabinet post. Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, had to deal with the highhanded meddling of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. In one particularly demeaning instance, Kushner took the Mexican foreign secretary to dinner in Washington and Tillerson only found out his counterpart was in town when they happened to be in the same restaurant. The sabotage of Tillerson culminated in Trump firing him while he was on a diplomatic trip in Africa. White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly then shared with reporters that Tillerson, who was sick with a stomach bug, had been on the toilet when he got the news.

The list of supposedly savvy veteran Washington players who went to work in the Trump administration only to be belittled and undermined by the president, then dumped unceremoniously, is too long to detail individually here. Examples include former national security adviser John Bolton, former director of national intelligence Daniel Coats and former defense secretary Jim Mattis.

Trump’s congressional allies also get burned, especially if they suggest he is capable of growth or maturation. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) infamously claimed after she voted against convicting Trump of impeachable offenses that Trump “has learned from this case” and he “will be much more cautious in the future.” When asked about Collins’s comments, Trump embarrassed her by declaring he had nothing to learn because he’d done nothing wrong in the first place. Then he went on a rampage of retribution against anyone in the administration who had testified against him. It was exasperating for liberals to watch Collins, a supposed moderate from a swing state, pretend to think Trump would change. But at least they got to chuckle in satisfaction when Trump promptly proved her wrong.

It is, of course, more typical of liberals to feel empathy for the victims of Trump’s scams. But, unlike the working stiffs Trump often cheats, this group of political sellouts has no excuse for not knowing better. These are experienced, educated, prominent people who allowed themselves to be taken in by the lure of more wealth, prominence or power. At least they deserve what they get.

 

[fraurosena]

Is Trump gearing up to pardon Flynn and Stone? Does he think no one will care because everyone is too busy coping with a pandemic that is killing tens of thousands?

 "with Fake News CNN closely in toe..." 

 

54 minutes ago, 47of74 said:

Cardinal Dolan sold his soul to Fuck Face along with the rest of the church.  

Talk about tone deaf at an epicenter of the pandemic which was made worse by Dolan’s speshul guest. 

How does this jive with the evangelicals? Don't they despise the catholics? 

[47of74]

4 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Is Trump gearing up to pardon Flynn and Stone? Does he think no one will care because everyone is too busy coping with a pandemic that is killing tens of thousands?

 "with Fake News CNN closely in toe..." 

 

How does this jive with the evangelicals? Don't they despise the catholics? 

Well the fundies love the Catholics when they can use them to buy votes.

[GreyhoundFan]

More taxpayer money in the mango pocket: "Secret Service paid Trump’s D.C. hotel more than $33,000 for lodging to guard treasury secretary"

Spoiler

The Secret Service rented a room at President Trump’s Washington hotel for 137 consecutive nights in 2017 — paying Trump’s company more than $33,000 — so it could guard Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin while he lived in one of the hotel’s luxury suites, according to federal documents and people familiar with the arrangement.

Mnuchin, a financier from New York, lived in the Trump International Hotel for several months before moving to a home in Washington. Mnuchin paid for his hotel suite himself, a Treasury Department spokesperson said.

But during his stay, the Secret Service also rented the room next door at taxpayer expense, to screen Mnuchin’s visitors and packages, according to three people familiar with that arrangement who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

For that room, the Trump hotel charged the maximum rate that federal agencies were generally allowed to pay in 2017: $242 per night, according to the billing records. The Secret Service checked in Jan. 25, according to billing records obtained by The Washington Post, and didn’t make its last payment until June 12.

The total bill was $33,154.

The Post has identified dozens of instances where the Secret Service paid money to Trump’s businesses — spending taxpayer dollars, often with little or no disclosure at the time. Often, these payments were triggered by Trump’s own travel to his properties.

This case is different, because it was set in motion by Mnuchin, one of Trump’s top appointees. In 2017, he chose a living arrangement that produced two revenue streams for Trump’s company. One came from Mnuchin. The other came from taxpayers.

In a written statement, a Treasury Department spokesperson confirmed that the Secret Service had rented the room next to Mnuchin’s. The Post asked if Mnuchin had considered that cost to taxpayers, in deciding how long he would stay.

“The Secretary was not aware of what the U.S. Secret Service paid for the adjoining room,” the spokesperson said.

Trump still owns his business but says he has given day-to-day control to his sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. while he is in the White House. The Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment, and the White House declined to comment. The Secret Service also declined to comment, saying it would not discuss “the means and methods we utilize to carry out our protective responsibilities.”

The Constitution bars presidents from taking payments from the federal government, beyond their annual salary, now set at $400,000. But Trump — who says he donates his salary — has argued that this provision was not meant to prohibit business transactions such as a hotel-room rental.

Lawsuits challenging this practice have stalled in the federal courts.

Neither the Trump administration nor the Trump Organization has provided an accounting of how much federal agencies have paid to Trump’s company since Inauguration Day in 2017. The Post has sought to compile its own, using documents obtained via public-records requests.

The Post has identified more than 170 payments from the Secret Service to Trump properties, totaling more than $620,000. In many cases, the Secret Service was paying to rent hotel rooms at Trump’s properties to accompany the president while he traveled. The actual total is likely to be higher, because the records released so far largely date from 2017 and 2018.

The $33,154 payment to Trump’s D.C. hotel was already known. The Secret Service had not explained why it had spent the money.

But recently, in response to a public records request from The Post, the Secret Service released hotel bills that show the answer: a single, very long stay.

“Arrival Date: 01/25/2017,” reads a five page-long bill from the Trump hotel to the Secret Service, released after a public-records request. “Room Number: 531.”

Room 531 itself is nothing unusual: a standard room with two queen beds, according to a former Trump hotel employee and internal Trump hotel documents obtained by The Post.

But it happens to adjoin one of the hotel’s jewels: the 2,000-square-foot Franklin Suite, with marble bathrooms, a dining table for six and views across to the Environmental Protection Agency building. In recent days, even with the hotel largely empty because of the novel coronavirus pandemic, the Franklin Suite was listed at $8,300 per night.

That was Mnuchin’s suite in 2017, according to one former Trump hotel staffer. The Treasury Department spokesperson said Mnuchin did stay in a suite at the hotel but could not recall the suite’s name. The spokesperson said Mnuchin negotiated a discounted rate with the hotel manager but declined to disclose that rate.

The Secret Service, which has protected treasury secretaries for decades, took Room 531 to screen packages, visitors and laundry, according to two people familiar with the arrangement, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of sensitivity about security protocols.

People familiar with Secret Service practices said that was standard procedure when an official stayed in any hotel. During the Clinton administration, for instance, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin lived in the Jefferson Hotel near the White House for years, and the Secret Service used the room next door, according to news reports.

The difference, in this case, is that Mnuchin and the Secret Service were paying for rooms in a hotel owned by the same president who had appointed Mnuchin.

“Normally, you would deliver any deliveries to the Secret Service and then they would give it to the person under protection,” the former Trump employee said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to stay on good terms with a former employer.

The rate, according to the newly released documents, was $242 per night for every night of the 137-night stay.

The Trump Organization did not respond to questions about how that rate was chosen. One possible reason: For much of 2017, $242 was the maximum amount that federal employees could spend on a hotel room in Washington, according to rules set by the General Services Administration.

That was less than the rates Trump’s company has charged the Secret Service for rooms at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida, which have ranged from $396 to $650. That exceeded the maximum government rate, but the Secret Service is permitted to exceed those limits while on protective duty. And the $242 rate was probably less than what Trump’s D.C. hotel might have gotten from a nongovernment customer in Washington. In 2018, for instance, Room 531 rented for as much as $616 per night, according to Trump hotel records obtained by The Post.

But for the Trump hotel it was also a steady rental at a time when only about 42 percent of rooms were occupied, according to previously released data.

“We were not anywhere near full occupancy at the hotel,” the former hotel employee said.

Mnuchin bought a $12.6 million home in Washington in February 2017 and moved out of the Trump hotel sometime in “late spring,” the Treasury Department spokesperson said. The spokesperson did not give an exact date when Mnuchin left the hotel.

For the Secret Service, the last payment on Room 531 was made June 12.

But other payments to the Trump hotel continued: The Post has identified $126,000 in additional payments from the Secret Service to the hotel between January 2017 and February 2018.

The Secret Service has not explained any of the others. But some do seem to follow the pattern from this case, with dollar amounts in multiples of the $242 nightly room rate.

For instance: On June 28, 2017 — a night when Trump visited the hotel for a fundraiser dinner — the Secret Service paid the hotel $33,638.

That is an even bigger payment than the one for Room 531. It is exactly enough to rent 139 rooms at the $242 rate.

But the Secret Service has not said what it was paying for in that case.

 

[fraurosena]

 

[47of74]

George W. Bush had something to say.  Fuck Face didn't like it.

Quote

President Trump on Sunday took aim at George W. Bush after the former Republican president issued a call to push partisanship aside amid the outbreak of the novel coronavirus.

In a three-minute video shared on Twitter on Saturday, Bush urged Americans to remember "how small our differences are in the face of this shared threat."

"In the final analysis, we are not partisan combatants. We are human beings, equally vulnerable and equally wonderful in the sight of God," Bush said. "We rise or fall together, and we are determined to rise."

In an early morning tweet on Sunday, Trump called out Bush for his failure to support him as he faced an impeachment trial earlier this year over his alleged dealings with Ukraine. He cited apparent comments from Fox News anchor Pete Hegseth, who asked why Bush didn't push for "putting partisanship aside" amid the trial.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Twitler is happy because BTs decided to boat all around Mar-a-Loco this weekend:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

WTAF?

[Xan]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

WTAF?

Trump is such an idiot.  Those photos could have been taken at any time and just recently posted.  After all, this is North Korea we're talking about.  Honest, they're not.  And, beyond that, why in the world would Crooked Donny be happy that a dictator is alive and well?

[GreyhoundFan]

Pretty sad when judges rule you are an idiot.