Trump 47: The Covidiot's Traveling Circus Is Back On The Road

[WiseGirl]

So which part is law & order? Blackmailing a senator? Using the language of a mob boss in his briefing? Killing the people you're supposed to represent by mishandling COVID?

Edited July 14, 2020 by WiseGirl
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[GreyhoundFan]

Because he was so busy "managing" the pandemic and economic collapse...

"White House lawyer gives Trump extra time to file his personal financial disclosure forms, the second extension since May 15"

Spoiler

President Trump has been granted a second 45-day extension to file his personal financial disclosure forms, which will give the American public its only detailed look at the president’s private business interests, according to a letter released by the White House.

The forms are supposed to detail Trump’s income, debt, stock holdings and outstanding loans for 2019. They were originally due May 15, but Trump got an extension until the end of June.

On June 29, Scott Gast, deputy counsel to the president, granted Trump a second extension, until Aug. 13, according to the letter. Federal law allows only two such extensions.

Gast’s letter said that the extension was given for “good cause,” but did not specify what that cause was. A White House spokesperson said Trump “has a complicated report, and he’s been focused on addressing the coronavirus and other matters.”

Trump appears to be the only president since 2001 to need an extension for his financial disclosure filing. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama filed all of theirs on time, according to archived documents.

“Past presidents moved heaven and Earth to release their reports on the May 15 deadline, partly because they wanted to send a message that government ethics matters,” said Walter Shaub, a former head of the Office of Government Ethics, which reviews the financial disclosures.

Shaub resigned his post in July 2017, after criticizing Trump’s approach to ethics rules. A frequent Trump critic on social media, he is now a senior adviser at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit watchdog organization.

Because Trump still owns hundreds of private businesses, even while in office, his financial forms are unusually complicated. His 2019 filing was 88 pages. Obama’s last filing, in 2016, was eight pages.

For the public, Trump’s filings have provided a valuable — and rare — insight into the president’s ongoing partnerships, loans and income streams. Trump still owns the Trump Organization, although he says he has given day-to-day control to his eldest sons.

In 2018, for instance, Trump’s disclosure forms showed he had repaid his former lawyer Michael Cohen more than $100,000 for “expenses” the previous year. That was an apparent reference to Cohen’s payment of $130,000 in hush money to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels — who claimed she had an affair with Trump — just before the 2016 election. Trump had previously said he was unaware of the payments.

Last year, Trump’s disclosure forms showed that his Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida had lost 10 percent of its revenue. That seemed to signal how much Trump’s divisive rhetoric had hurt his bottom line — after his remarks about white-supremacist marchers in Charlottesville caused big-spending clients to pull their galas from the venue.

Trump’s next disclosure forms, whenever they appear, will not contain any data for 2020. So they will not provide new details about how the president’s businesses have been affected by the coronavirus pandemic.

But they should show whether Trump’s businesses rose in 2019, despite the drag caused by the president’s political brand. On June 12, Trump’s son Eric Trump — now the day-to-day leader of his father’s businesses — had promised the news would be good.

The Trump Organization “had one of the BEST years in the HISTORY of the Organization in 2019 . . . (which they will soon see in our upcoming financial disclosures),” Eric Trump wrote on Twitter.

Two weeks after that tweet, President Trump got his second extension to file the documents. Eric Trump declined to comment about the second extension.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Updated info: "Trump’s company has received at least $970,000 from U.S. taxpayers for room rentals"

Spoiler

The U.S. government has paid at least $970,000 to President Trump’s company since Trump took office — including payments for more than 1,600 nightly room rentals at Trump’s hotels and clubs, according to federal records obtained by The Washington Post.

Since March, The Post has catalogued an additional $340,000 in such payments. They were almost all related to trips taken by Trump, his family and his top officials. The government is not known to have paid for the rooms for Trump and his family members at his properties but it has paid for staffers and Secret Service agents to accompany the president.

The payments create an unprecedented business relationship between the president’s private company and his government — which began in the first month of Trump’s presidency, and continued into this year, records show.

The records show that taxpayers have now paid for the equivalent of more than four years’ worth of nightly rentals at Trump properties, including 950 nights at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., and 530 nights at the president’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida, according to a Post analysis.

Trump still owns his business, though he says he has given day-to-day control to his eldest sons. Last year, Eric Trump said that when government officials visit Trump properties with the president, they are charged “like 50 bucks.”

But in the 1,600 room rentals examined by The Post, there were no examples of a rate that low.

Instead, the lowest room rate was $141.66 per night, for each of the rooms in a four-room cottage in Bedminster. The highest rate was $650 per night for rooms at Mar-a-Lago.

The Post asked the Trump Organization to provide an example where it had charged the government a rate low enough to match Eric Trump’s claim.

The company did not respond.

Trump has visited his own properties 250 times since taking office — though not since March 8, as the covid-19 pandemic shuttered many Trump properties and consumed his presidency. Neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump administration has provided a full accounting of how much taxpayer money has been paid to Trump’s companies since Inauguration Day 2017.

The Post has attempted to compile its own accounting, using hundreds of pages of federal spending documents obtained from public-records requests. In recent weeks, The Post added new data on spending by the Defense and State departments, and newly released data on spending by the Secret Service in 2019 and 2020.

The data is still incomplete. But it makes clear that Trump has received an unprecedented amount of payments from his own government.

“It’s not just that there’s a huge amount of money being spent: we have no idea how much the actual figure is,” because the records are released slowly and piecemeal, said Jordan Libowitz, of the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “We don’t know what’s happening . . . only that the taxpayers are footing the bill for it.”

Before Trump, the only recent president or vice president to charge rent to his own Secret Service protectors was former vice president Joe Biden, according to records and interviews with the staff of former presidents and vice presidents.

Biden, now Trump’s presumptive Democratic opponent in the 2020 election, charged rent for a cottage near his home in Delaware. The rent, which was listed in public spending records at the time, totaled $171,600 over six years.

Trump’s company exceeded that total on March 17, 2017, records obtained by The Post show. He had been in office for less than two months.

As president, Trump is exempt from conflict-of-interest rules that prohibit other federal employees from steering government business to their private companies.

The Constitution bars presidents from taking additional payments from the federal government, beyond his salary. But Trump’s lawyers have argued that this was not intended to prohibit business transactions, like hotel room rentals. Legal challenges from Trump’s critics are moving slowly through the courts.

In the meantime, records show there have been hundreds of transactions where Trump is, in essence, both the buyer and seller. His company sends the bills. His government pays them, with little disclosure to the public at the time.

“This is the perfect transaction” for someone who wanted to exploit it, said Don Fox, who was acting head of the Office of Government Ethics from 2011 to 2013. “You get to not only set the price: you get to ensure that the buyer pays that price, no matter what it is.”

Trump’s company has downplayed concerns about these payments by saying it only charges the government “at cost.”

“If my father travels, they stay at our properties for free — meaning, like, cost for housekeeping,” Eric Trump said in a Yahoo Finance interview last year. The rate, he estimated, was about $50 a night.

To see if Trump’s company was living up to that professed standard, The Post tallied all the available records that showed Trump’s company charging Trump’s government for room rentals.

That search turned up more than 1,600 nightly room rentals. They began in the first month of Trump’s term.

In February 2017, for instance, Trump hosted Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for a weekend at Mar-a-Lago. That weekend, at least three different federal agencies paid for hotel rooms inside Trump’s club:

●The Secret Service paid for three rooms for two nights each, records show. Trump’s club charged them $650 per night, according to two people who saw unredacted versions of the receipts. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment on the matter.

●The State Department paid for six rooms for two nights each. Trump’s club charged them $520 for some, and $546 for others, the records show. On the receipts, Mar-a-Lago labeled $546 as the “rack rate,” an industry term for the normal rate offered to guests, without discounts.

Later, the club gave the State Department partial refunds for some of its purchases, to reduce the rate to $396.15 per night. But it’s unclear from the records if these payments for the Abe visit were affected. The State Department did not answer questions submitted by The Post.

●The Defense Department also paid $1,469 for rooms at the club that weekend. But it’s unclear how many they rented, or what rate they paid. A Pentagon spokesperson said no more details could be located.

In all, the government paid Trump’s company $11,000 for hotel rooms that weekend. None of the rates, however, appeared to match Eric Trump’s description.

In the years that followed, the lowest rate for any rental on record was for the rooms in Trump’s Bedminster cottage: $141.66. But that was not for a standard hotel room that needed to be cleaned very day.

Instead, the Secret Service paid to rent the whole cottage — three bedrooms and a living room — to store equipment and provide sleeping space for agents. Because the equipment was difficult to move, the Secret Service paid by the month, even on days when Trump wasn’t there.

The cottage itself didn’t actually require much housekeeping, said Victorina Morales, who worked as a Bedminster housekeeper at the time. The agents were private and only had her clean it one to three times a week. “They took out their own trash,” she said.

The highest rate that The Post found was the $650 charged to the Secret Service at Mar-a-Lago in early 2017.

Other room rates fell in between. In Washington, where Secret Service agents rented a room for 137 nights to guard Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin while he lived in the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, the rate was $242 per night.

In the most recent records obtained by The Post — showing payments from the Secret Service to Mar-a-Lago in 2019 and early 2020 — the club appeared to be charging $396.15 per night.

During Trump’s most recent holiday vacation, for instance, the Secret Service was charged $32,484.30 — exactly enough for 82 room nights at that rate.

Hotel industry experts have said that all these figures far exceed the typical operating cost of hotel rooms — the sum of expenses for housekeeping and toiletries. That figure, experts have said, typically falls between $50 and $80 per night at luxury hotels.

“I wouldn’t expect it to be north of $100,” said Chris Anderson, a professor at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration.

The Trump Organization has not responded to questions about how it calculated the rates it charged to the government.

In several other cases, the government released documents showing what it had paid to Trump properties — but redacted the rates it was charged per night. When Eric Trump visited the Trump Turnberry course in July 2017, for instance, Trump’s club charged the Secret Service $6,802.33 for hotel rooms.

Documents released by the Secret Service redact the rate that was charged per room. The redaction was marked with a code indicating that the information “could disclose techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"If you aren’t filled with rage at Trump, you aren’t paying attention"

Spoiler

Let me take you for a moment to a fantasy land. In this place, the coronavirus pandemic was bad for a couple of months but now it is largely under control. If you lived there you’d still be a little uncertain about going to a concert or a movie, but your life would have largely returned to normal.

You wouldn’t have lost your job; the government would have had a comprehensive support program that kept unemployment low. You’d be able to see your family and friends without fear. Your children would be returning to school in September. There would be some precautions to take for a while longer, but there would be no doubt that the pandemic was on its way to being defeated.

To us here in the United States, this picture seems magical, like a dispatch from the far future. But it isn’t. It’s the situation that exists right now in many of our peer countries around the world. And the fact that our situation is so different? That shouldn’t just make you feel disappointed, or anxious, or upset.

It should make you enraged. That is the proper response to where we find ourselves today.

Let’s begin with the situation in other countries. Here are new case totals from Monday for a few of our peer countries:

• France: 580
• UK: 564
• Spain: 546
• Germany: 365
• Canada: 299
• Japan: 259
• Italy: 200
• Australia: 158
• South Korea: 52

And the United States? 55,300.

Some of these countries were in extremely bad shape for a time, but with sane leadership and a population willing to work together, they’re in the process of defeating the pandemic. But not us.

There are many reasons we have experienced this catastrophe (and it quickly became two catastrophes, an economic crisis added to the public health crisis), but one stands above all others: President Trump.

Is there a single aspect of his response to this pandemic that has not been a miserable failure? For weeks he ignored warnings and denied that the pandemic would be a problem. He didn’t prepare the equipment and systems we’d need to respond.

We have no national testing strategy — still! There is no national contact tracing program. Trump turned over the effort to coordinate the distribution of supplies to his incompetent dolt of a son-in-law. He responded to efforts by governors to impose strong lockdowns by berating them and calling for their states to be “liberated.” For months he not only refused to wear a mask but also belittled those who did, successfully turning a vital public health tool into a polarized political issue.

And he demanded that everyone around him echo his insane claims that everything is under control and the pandemic is being vanquished. It was a month ago that Vice President Pence pathetically proclaimed that “we are winning the fight against the invisible enemy,” and the administration’s great success was “cause for celebration.”

And now, rather than working harder to contain the pandemic, the White House has begun a furious campaign to discredit the federal government’s chief infectious-disease specialist, Anthony S. Fauci, who has had the temerity to admit that things aren’t going well. Trump himself has clearly decided that he’s bored of worrying about the pandemic, so he’ll stop trying to do anything about it. With over 135,000 Americans dead and counting.

How can you look at what has happened to us and not be enraged?

Just consider the economy: the tens of millions of people unemployed, the millions who have lost health coverage, the tens of thousands of businesses going under, the tens of millions of people who could soon be evicted. None of it had to happen. In other countries it hasn’t. But it happened to us.

Or think of the millions of children who will wind up losing a year or maybe more of their lives, without the opportunity to be educated, to build and sustain friendships, to just be kids.

Even if you’re lucky enough not to have gotten sick or lost a loved one, you’re the victim of a robbery. Trump stole so much from all of us — our time with friends and family, our mental health, even our faith that our country could meet a challenge.

Don’t let him get away with saying that it would have been worse were it not for him, or that we only have so many cases only because we’re doing more testing. Those are lies.

Anger is often toxic in our political lives. But there are times when our leaders — or in this case, one leader in particular — ought to be the target of every bit of anger we can muster. To give him anything less is an affront to the truth. To let our anger dissipate into a miserable resignation is to give him a kind of forgiveness he doesn’t deserve.

Before the pandemic, Trump was one of the worst presidents in our history. But now he has laid waste to our country, with his unique combination of incompetence and malevolence — and he’s not done yet. Once we finally rid ourselves of him, it will take years to recover. But as we do, we should never for a moment forget what he was and what he did to us. And we should never stop being angry about it.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Because of course he did: "Trump uses Rose Garden event for extended campaign-like attack on Biden"

Spoiler

President Trump on Tuesday held a Rose Garden event under the guise of punishing China over its crackdown on Hong Kong, delivering a lengthy diatribe against Democratic rival Joe Biden in a display that resembled a campaign speech at the White House.

The president began his rambling 54-minute opening statement by announcing that he had signed congressional legislation that authorizes his administration to enact sanctions on banks that do business with Chinese officials and an executive order to revoke Hong Kong's special economic trading status. But he glossed over the specifics and said nothing about the pro-democracy protests in the city as he pivoted swiftly to his attacks on Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

Trump lambasted Biden’s record on Beijing, casting the former vice president and longtime senator from Delaware as soft on China during its rise to become the second-largest economy in the world. He faulted Biden for initially opposing his administration’s decision to shut down some flights from China over the coronavirus, and he inaccurately stated that Biden “sided with China” on its handling of the pandemic — even though Biden had sounded alarms months ago as Trump was still praising Chinese President Xi Jinping.

And he suggested that Biden has been critical of the United States while rooting for China’s economic success, citing a July 4 video message during which Biden stated that U.S. history was “no fairy tale.”

“Joe Biden’s entire career has been a gift to the Chinese Communist Party,” Trump said.

“He said the idea that China is our competitor is really bizarre. He’s really bizarre,” the president said. “Nobody’s ripped us off more than China the last 25-30 years — nobody close — and he says China’s not a problem? He wants to take it all back now. He wants to be Mr. Tough Guy.”

Trump didn’t stop there, adding an attack on Biden’s son Hunter, recycling a false portrayal of a business arrangement he had pursued with a private equity firm years ago while his father was serving as vice president. It was the latest in a long effort by Trump to hurl misleading or unfounded accusations at the Bidens — including the attempts to pressure Ukraine that led to his House impeachment in December.

“Where’s Hunter?” Trump said, repeating a question he asked at a news conference last fall that became a popular meme among his conservative supporters. “He’s unemployed, he didn’t have a job, and all of a sudden he’s making a fortune?”

White House aides had announced the Rose Garden event, which was not initially on Trump’s public schedule, as a news conference, and the president fielded a handful of questions from reporters. But his real motive appeared to be his attacks on Joe Biden — a stunning display of partisanship in an exquisitely manicured setting that presidents have traditionally considered off-limits for direct and extended political attacks.

In addition to the Bidens, Trump insulted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), calling her “not talented,” and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), mocking him for having a “good base” of liberal supporters but failing to win the presidency in two campaigns.

The Biden campaign struck back by blasting an email “fact check” to reporters while the president was still talking, accusing Trump of failing to “get tough on China’s government when it mattered most” during the early outbreak of the coronavirus, which originated in the city of Wuhan, at a time when he was pursuing a trade deal with Beijing. The pandemic has killed more than 133,000 Americans and put millions out of work.

“Donald Trump is busy trying to rewrite his miserable history as president of caving to President Xi and the Chinese government at every turn,” the Biden campaign wrote in the email, “but try as he may, Trump can’t hide from a record of weakness and bad deals that consistently put China first and America last.”

Trump’s job-approval ratings have tumbled in recent weeks amid his handling of the pandemic and his response to the racial justice protests that have roiled American cities. Having once hoped to center his reelection campaign around a strong economy, the president has struggled to find a new message while Biden has surged to a significant lead in national polling and a narrower lead in key battleground states.

The two have sparred over China, and some Trump advisers have urged the president to pivot from his attacks on liberal protesters for desecrating statues of U.S. historical figures, including Confederate leaders, to go after Biden’s record on China instead.

Trump dumped almost an hour’s worth of opposition research against his Democratic rival with less than four months to go before the election, hitting him over immigration, energy policy and the environment.

“There’s probably never been a time when candidates are so different,” Trump said. “We want law and order. They don’t want law and order.”

The president said he had asked some of his “people” for a list of Biden’s platform issues before proceeding to read out several liberal policy proposals.

The list mirrored a lengthy Twitter thread posted last week by Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr., in which he described the “Biden-Sanders” agenda as “insane.”

Much of Trump’s summary of Biden’s policy proposals was false or misleading. For example, the former vice president has not proposed “government health care for all illegal aliens” as the president claimed.

“Joe Biden is pushing a platform that would demolish the U.S. economy,” Trump said.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

A good one from Dana Milbank: "Trump’s window is closing"

Spoiler

President Trump’s window is closing.

All signs suggest it’s closing on his presidency because of his world-class incompetence with the coronavirus pandemic, the protracted economic collapse that resulted, and the increasingly overt racism Trump has embraced.

But it also appears the window is closing on his connection to reality, if it hasn’t already. Trump called a news conference Tuesday evening in the Rose Garden, where President John F. Kennedy met the Project Mercury astronauts, and where Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat met to make peace — and used that hallowed ground to launch an hour-long diatribe against Joe Biden, attributing a platform to his Democratic opponent that bore hardly any resemblance to anything occurring in the real world.

Biden would “incentivize illegal alien child smuggling,” Trump announced.

He would “abolish immigration enforcement," “abolish our police departments” and “abolish our prisons, I guess.”

Biden’s party is even “calling for defunding of our military,” Trump alleged.

And, yes, Biden’s energy plan “basically means no windows” in homes or offices by 2030, he said, and “cold office space in the winter and warm office space in the summer.”

Um, Biden would abolish windows?

“I’m not making this up!” Trump said, mid-jeremiad. (Actually, he was.)

He alleged that Democratic mayors possibly “wouldn’t mind” if terrorists “blow up our cities.”

“We could go on for days,” he said after 40 minutes. Indeed, the only limitation was Trump’s, and his staff’s, imaginations.

Previous incumbents have used the “Rose Garden strategy” — that is, using the trappings of the presidency to campaign for reelection — but Trump’s reinterpretation of that approach was downright bizarre. After his attempt at a comeback rally in Tulsa turned into a disaster, and he canceled his New Hampshire rally because of a rainstorm on a perfectly dry evening, Trump seems to have decided to hold campaign rallies in the Rose Garden, with the White House press corps as captive audience.

In the same week Trump reached the milestone of 20,000 false or misleading statements, as documented by The Post’s Fact Checker, the president seemed determined to recite them all in a single appearance. To call it stream-of-consciousness is too serene: Trump’s brain was shooting the rapids, hitting rocks, tumbling down falls.

He started with an announcement about Hong Kong; bounced to Biden’s infrastructure plan; swerved to the pandemic; careened to the swine flu of 2009; lurched to Ukraine and Burisma (“Where is Hunter?”); wobbled into the stock market; detoured to “AOC” (“a young woman not talented in many ways"), “Bernie" and Nancy Pelosi; floated into Maine fisheries; listed into the “tremendous fraud” of mail-in voting (“a mailman was indicted someplace”); and took on water with a claim about “criminals pouring into our country” — from Europe.

Every now and again, his thoughts would return to the paper in front of him, and he would read some other fantastic allegation against Biden, so absurd it seemed to surprise even Trump. “Oh, I didn’t notice that,” he said, reading an allegation that Biden has plans to rejoin the Paris climate agreement but make it “worse than it was.”

“We did this very quickly,” Trump explained at one point as he read through the imaginary Biden agenda.

Who would have guessed?

Trump’s instability seemed to have been set off by Biden himself, who earlier Tuesday did the very opposite of what Trump did: He delivered a reasoned and measured speech about his infrastructure plans, hewing closely to the teleprompter and taking no questions, and eschewing liberal favorites from the Green New Deal. “Look, these aren’t pie-in-the-sky dreams,” Biden said. “These are actionable policies.”

Confronted with an opponent who is conspicuously reasonable, Trump has pretended he is running against somebody else. He has tried to brand Biden as senile and corrupt, and his allies have tried to brand the presumptive Democratic nominee a sexual predator and a pedophile.

“Joe Biden’s entire career has been a gift to the Chinese Communist Party,” Trump alleged.

Biden “never did anything but make very bad decisions.”

“Last Independence Day, Biden attacked the United States.”

“Biden is pushing a platform that would demolish the U.S. economy.”

“He wants to kill American energy!”

He has “the most extreme platform of any major party nominee by far in American history.”

“It’s worse than Bernie’s platform it’s gone so far right,” Trump said, mixing up his directions.

Maybe some in the MAGA crowd will believe that. They’ll also believe that “thousands of people in New York died because of poor management” by Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) and that Trump’s decision to stop flights from China saved “2 to 3 million lives” (“a number that we’re actually working on”).

Asked whether his extraordinary Rose Garden tirade was a sign that he thinks he might lose, Trump’s answer included references to his electoral college win in 2016 and the fact that "we’re making swabs [in] a beautiful big new factory.”

Beautiful, that is, until Biden takes away all its windows.

 

[fraurosena]

Daddy thought he'd join his dearest daughter, despite all the backlash she's receiving.

Goya doesn't realize yet that ETTD.

[AmericanRose]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Because of course he did: "Trump uses Rose Garden event for extended campaign-like attack on Biden"

  Reveal hidden contents

President Trump on Tuesday held a Rose Garden event under the guise of punishing China over its crackdown on Hong Kong, delivering a lengthy diatribe against Democratic rival Joe Biden in a display that resembled a campaign speech at the White House.

The president began his rambling 54-minute opening statement by announcing that he had signed congressional legislation that authorizes his administration to enact sanctions on banks that do business with Chinese officials and an executive order to revoke Hong Kong's special economic trading status. But he glossed over the specifics and said nothing about the pro-democracy protests in the city as he pivoted swiftly to his attacks on Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

Trump lambasted Biden’s record on Beijing, casting the former vice president and longtime senator from Delaware as soft on China during its rise to become the second-largest economy in the world. He faulted Biden for initially opposing his administration’s decision to shut down some flights from China over the coronavirus, and he inaccurately stated that Biden “sided with China” on its handling of the pandemic — even though Biden had sounded alarms months ago as Trump was still praising Chinese President Xi Jinping.

And he suggested that Biden has been critical of the United States while rooting for China’s economic success, citing a July 4 video message during which Biden stated that U.S. history was “no fairy tale.”

“Joe Biden’s entire career has been a gift to the Chinese Communist Party,” Trump said.

“He said the idea that China is our competitor is really bizarre. He’s really bizarre,” the president said. “Nobody’s ripped us off more than China the last 25-30 years — nobody close — and he says China’s not a problem? He wants to take it all back now. He wants to be Mr. Tough Guy.”

Trump didn’t stop there, adding an attack on Biden’s son Hunter, recycling a false portrayal of a business arrangement he had pursued with a private equity firm years ago while his father was serving as vice president. It was the latest in a long effort by Trump to hurl misleading or unfounded accusations at the Bidens — including the attempts to pressure Ukraine that led to his House impeachment in December.

“Where’s Hunter?” Trump said, repeating a question he asked at a news conference last fall that became a popular meme among his conservative supporters. “He’s unemployed, he didn’t have a job, and all of a sudden he’s making a fortune?”

White House aides had announced the Rose Garden event, which was not initially on Trump’s public schedule, as a news conference, and the president fielded a handful of questions from reporters. But his real motive appeared to be his attacks on Joe Biden — a stunning display of partisanship in an exquisitely manicured setting that presidents have traditionally considered off-limits for direct and extended political attacks.

In addition to the Bidens, Trump insulted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), calling her “not talented,” and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), mocking him for having a “good base” of liberal supporters but failing to win the presidency in two campaigns.

The Biden campaign struck back by blasting an email “fact check” to reporters while the president was still talking, accusing Trump of failing to “get tough on China’s government when it mattered most” during the early outbreak of the coronavirus, which originated in the city of Wuhan, at a time when he was pursuing a trade deal with Beijing. The pandemic has killed more than 133,000 Americans and put millions out of work.

“Donald Trump is busy trying to rewrite his miserable history as president of caving to President Xi and the Chinese government at every turn,” the Biden campaign wrote in the email, “but try as he may, Trump can’t hide from a record of weakness and bad deals that consistently put China first and America last.”

Trump’s job-approval ratings have tumbled in recent weeks amid his handling of the pandemic and his response to the racial justice protests that have roiled American cities. Having once hoped to center his reelection campaign around a strong economy, the president has struggled to find a new message while Biden has surged to a significant lead in national polling and a narrower lead in key battleground states.

The two have sparred over China, and some Trump advisers have urged the president to pivot from his attacks on liberal protesters for desecrating statues of U.S. historical figures, including Confederate leaders, to go after Biden’s record on China instead.

Trump dumped almost an hour’s worth of opposition research against his Democratic rival with less than four months to go before the election, hitting him over immigration, energy policy and the environment.

“There’s probably never been a time when candidates are so different,” Trump said. “We want law and order. They don’t want law and order.”

The president said he had asked some of his “people” for a list of Biden’s platform issues before proceeding to read out several liberal policy proposals.

The list mirrored a lengthy Twitter thread posted last week by Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr., in which he described the “Biden-Sanders” agenda as “insane.”

Much of Trump’s summary of Biden’s policy proposals was false or misleading. For example, the former vice president has not proposed “government health care for all illegal aliens” as the president claimed.

“Joe Biden is pushing a platform that would demolish the U.S. economy,” Trump said.

 

Trump dumped almost an hour’s worth of opposition research against his Democratic rival with less than four months to go before the election, hitting him over immigration, energy policy and the environment.

This made me cringe, since Trump wasn't 'hitting him' on anything - more like making up lies he thought would fire up his base.

I'm glad to hear the Biden campaign didn't just take it quietly, at least.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s ‘law and order’ is a code for maintaining personal power"

Spoiler

It’s laughable, really, that President Trump is presenting himself as the candidate of “law and order” in the 2020 presidential campaign. His record in office has been one of illegality and disorder.

Trump’s presidency has been a sustained attack on our traditional conception of the rule of law in America. He has sought increasingly to govern by executive mandate — on immigration, foreign policy, health care, and environmental and economic policy. He defies Congress and the courts almost on a weekly basis.

Trump’s contempt for the law was obvious in his granting of clemency last week to his campaign crony Roger Stone. The best summary came from Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who just eight years ago was the presidential nominee of a Republican Party that hadn’t surrendered its values: “Unprecedented, historic corruption: an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president.”

And yet Trump postures as the tough guy who will protect the nation. Since the beginning of June, he has tweeted or retweeted the phrase “law and order” 33 times, often just the three words, in capital letters, with an exclamation point. Democrats sometimes make it easy for him by pushing slogans such as “Defund the Police” or “Abolish ICE” that Trump then uses to play on public fears.

Glenn Kessler, The Post’s Fact Checker, noted Tuesday that the Trump campaign has spent $6.7 million to run an ad in 12 battleground states that claims: “Joe Biden’s supporters are fighting to defund police departments. Violent crime has exploded. You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.” In awarding the ad four Pinocchios, Kessler noted that the former vice president had actually said in early June, “No, I don’t support defunding the police.”

Biden, the presumptive Democratic candidate, shouldn’t cede this ground. He should make the case that real law and order are impossible without social justice. Conservatives shouldn’t own this theme any more than they do the American flag. A lawful and orderly America is also one that advances racial and economic equality.

Trump’s populism involves a sleight of hand. He’s the billionaire who claims he’s standing up for the little guy, even as he advocates tax policies rewarding the rich. He claims to be the champion of the military and law enforcement, even as he undermines the independence of both.

Trump is about raw power — the kind that comes from ignoring the rule of law. That’s what he shares with strongman presidents such as China’s Xi Jinping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan. None of them let rules or past practices get in the way of exercising their political will. When Erdogan declares that the Hagia Sophia won’t be a museum anymore but a mosque, the rationale for this usurpation is simple: Because I can.

Watching Trump and his fellow rule-breakers at work, we’re reminded what a thin membrane the rule of law really is. Just on the other side is the domain of power and plunder, where every political action is a test of strength — where might makes right, as the aphorism goes. That has been Trump’s code in his business life, and now in his presidency.

America isn’t Colombia or Mexico. But if you’ve ever watched the Netflix drama “Narcos,” you can see how hard it is to restore the rule of law once it breaks down. When judges and politicians are intimidated into silence and ignore illegality, it requires very brave people to wrest back control.

I’ve worked abroad as a journalist in countries where the rule of plunder applied. In such places, where people are prey to warlords and fixers, and courts have collapsed, the law vanishes and extremists provide their own version of order.

Two snapshots. It’s June 2011 in Khost, Afghanistan, and Brig. Gen. Mark Martins is showing me a map of the Afghan districts that don’t have government judges or prosecutors; then he shows me a map of districts where the Taliban is strong. They’re the same map. Or it’s October 2003 in Fallujah, Iraq, and Sheik Khamis Hassnawi is explaining to me what will happen if American troops leave quickly and the extremists take over: “The strong will eat the weak and people will start killing each other in the streets,” he says.

Those ravaged, lawless states are not America. But the next time you hear Trump talk about law and order, remember that it’s a code for maintaining his personal power. Three words that Biden should embrace: law, order and justice.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

A good read:

 

[fraurosena]

36 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

A good read:

 

Bummer, I can only read the first paragraph... 

[47of74]

 

[AnywhereButHere]

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/14/politics/trump-administration-coronavirus-hospital-data-cdc/index.html?fbclid=IwAR3QvCrvbZtLh-y0fdDeNI33TUyzVQj-lUDtNFLtyC4C9EviW7urg1hdC1o

Because this is a totally awesome idea. ?I guess completely controlling the narrative is another way to get those numbers down, folks!

Quote

Washington (CNN)Hospital data on coronavirus patients will now be rerouted to the Trump administration instead of first being sent to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed to CNN on Tuesday.

The move could make data less transparent to the public at a time when the administration is downplaying the spread of the pandemic, and threatens to undermine public confidence that medical data is being presented free of political interference.

Michael Caputo, the assistant secretary for public affairs at the department, confirmed the change first reported by The New York Times earlier in the day, saying in a statement that the "new faster and complete data system is what our nation needs to defeat the coronavirus and the CDC, an operating division of HHS, will certainly participate in this streamlined all-of-government response. They will simply no longer control it."

"The CDC's old hospital data gathering operation once worked well monitoring hospital information across the country, but it's an inadequate system today," Caputo said in the statement.

The Times said hospitals are to begin reporting the data to HHS on Wednesday, noting also that the "database that will receive new information is not open to the public, which could affect the work of scores of researchers, modelers and health officials who rely on C.D.C. data to make projections and crucial decisions."...

 

 

[Cartmann99]

Donald Trump plans to travel to West Texas for campaign fundraiser despite COVID spike

Quote

WASHINGTON – Already under fire for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, President Donald Trump plans to hold a campaign fundraiser this month in one of the nation's top hot spots: Texas.

Trump is scheduled to travel to West Texas on July 29 for a "Permian Basin Special Event," a three-part series of fundraisers to be held in Odessa. Donors will choose from a $100,000-per-person "roundtable" meeting, a $50,000-per-couple photo opportunity, and a $2,800-per-person luncheon with the president, according to an invitation reviewed by USA TODAY. 

"Additional details will be provided upon RSVP," the invitation says.

Article is six days old, so things could change before the 29th.

[fraurosena]

18 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Daddy thought he'd join his dearest daughter, despite all the backlash she's receiving.

Goya doesn't realize yet that ETTD.

Instead of backing down, Trump decided to take it up a notch and use the Resolute Desk as a prop for a commercial.

 

[47of74]

He almost put a fornicate in there too. Wouldn’t have blamed him if he did. 

[JMarie]

Mary Trump will be on Rachel Maddow’s show tonight. I don’t think they’ll be swapping lemon square recipes.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Mary Trump says the U.S. has devolved into a version of her ‘incredibly dysfunctional family’"

Spoiler

Mary L. Trump, President’s Trump’s niece, said that watching the country’s leadership devolve into “a macro version of my incredibly dysfunctional family” was one of the factors that compelled her to write her book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.”

In an interview Wednesday with The Washington Post, Mary Trump said she blames “almost 100 percent” her grandfather, Fred Trump — the family patriarch whom she describes as a “sociopath” in her 214-page memoir of sorts — for creating the conditions that led to Trump’s rise and, ultimately, what she views as his dangerous presidency.

Much like in her extended family, Mary Trump said, a similar dynamic is now playing out on the national stage, with Trump simultaneously possessing “an unerring instinct for finding people who are weaker than he is,” while also being “eminently usable by people who are stronger and savvier than he is” and eager to exploit him.

Her book — which was published Tuesday and became an instant bestseller based on advance orders alone — so worried her family that the president’s brother unsuccessfully tried to block its publication in court. Unlike the bevy of other books critical of Trump, this is the only one written by a family member with firsthand knowledge of the Trump clan, and Mary Trump, who earned a doctoral degree in psychology, uses that background to analyze her uncle and his pathologies.

Assessing the current moment, in which Trump has amplified racism and stoked the flames of white grievance and resentment, Mary Trump said that the president is “clearly racist,” but that his behavior stems from a combination of upbringing and political cynicism.

“It comes easily to him and he thinks it’s going to score him points with the only people who are continuing to support him,” she said.

Mary Trump said that growing up in her family, her experience was one of “a knee-jerk anti-Semitism, a knee-jerk racism.”

“Growing up, it was sort of normal to hear them use the n-word or use anti-Semitic expressions,” she said.

Mary Trump, who is gay, added dryly, “Homophobia was never an issue because nobody ever talked about gay people, well, until my grandmother called Elton John” a slur.

Within the Trump family, Fred Trump was the chief enabler. But now in the White House, Mary Trump said, she says the blame starts with Trump’s daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law Jared Kushner — both senior advisers — but expands more broadly to include his “chiefs of staff who went along thinking that they could have some kind of influence, only to find that they didn’t” and even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) who is “perfectly willing to put up with all sorts of egregious behavior to get his own agenda through.”

Mary Trump, 55, has long been estranged from her family following a dispute over inheritance, among other things, and is hardly a Donald Trump supporter. She was an unabashed supporter of Hillary Clinton in 2016, and said she plans to vote for former vice president Joe Biden in November, although she supported Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) in the Democratic primaries.

The campaign declined to comment and the White House did not respond to request for comment.

She opens the book recounting a family dinner at the White House in April 2017, ostensibly to celebrate the birthdays of the president’s sisters, and writes of her family’s stunted dynamic unfolding at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., for instance, offered a toast not for his aunts but for his father, “a sort of campaign speech.”

In the interview, Mary Trump said at the time she found it striking that Trump Jr. felt the need “to prop up his father.”

“I’m not entirely sure why someone in Donald’s position, certainly at that time, needed propping up, but he got it anyway,” she said.

At the same dinner, Mary Trump recounts the president turning to Lara Trump — his son Eric’s wife, who had been in a relationship with him for almost eight years at the time — and saying, “I barely even knew who the [explicative] she was, honestly” until she gave a campaign speech supporting him in Georgia.

In the interview, Mary Trump said that no one in the family tried to correct the president or defend Lara Trump; instead, she explained, “people laughed. That’s what we do.”

But the moment was revealing of how the president operates, she said. “It’s sort of his way of making the story bigger, more interesting, but also kind of owning you if you don’t correct him, or he’s aware that you’re aware that he’s lying,” she said. “And it’s a game and that’s how that night felt.”

Asked about the perception by some that Ivanka Trump is in some ways a steadying force on her father, Mary Trump said that was not her assessment of her cousin in the slightest.

“I think she’s the one who disproves that on an almost-daily basis,” Mary Trump said. “She doesn’t do anything. She spouts bromides on social media, but either she tries to have an impact and fails, or just isn’t interested in having an impact. I can’t think of one thing she’s done to show that she’s moderate or a moderating influence.”

In the book, Mary Trump also recounts an anecdote that Trump enlisted a smart kid named Joe Shapiro to take the SATs for him. Although Trump was friends with a man named Joe Shapiro at the University of Pennsylvania, the two met once Trump was already in college and had transferred to Penn from Fordham. And both Shapiro’s sister and widow told The Post that in addition to the incorrect timing, he never would have taken a test for anybody, including Trump.

Asked about the discrepancy, Mary Trump said she was not referring to the Joe Shapiro who Trump met in college, but to another “Joe Shapiro from the neighborhood.”

“I am confident in my source, who is somebody close to Donald,” she said.

In the book, Mary Trump paints a grim and even devastating portrait of both her grandfather and uncle, and she said that nothing Trump has done since taking office has shocked her.

When pressed, she said that not even the president’s incendiary — at times racist and misogynistic — language, or even his immigration policy separating children and families at the nation’s southern border has surprised her. “No, the more divisive, the better, the cooler,” she said, explaining what she views as the president’s ethos.

Mary Trump writes that she considered coming forward to try to stop Trump’s election during the summer of 2016, and ultimately decided against doing so — a decision she doesn’t regret, in part because she believes nothing could have prevented his election then.

Now, however, she is hoping the fortuitous timing of her book — which was originally scheduled for release in April — could help impact the November election. And either way, she said she wants to feel like she did her small part to warn the nation about what she views as the dangers of her uncle.

“I’d seen enough in the last few years to know that no one thing is going to make a bit of difference,” she said. “This is going to be — using the expression loosely — death by a thousand lashes, right, and maybe in this case it’s going take a million lashes, so it’s more about adding to the record of egregious things that have happened and for which there has been no accountability.”

She continued: “But more than that, I also felt a responsibility to make sure that people are as informed as possible when November comes, because I do not believe that was the case in 2016 at all.”

For now, she said she views this book as her small bit of activism and prefers not to focus on the November election — or the possibility that Trump could win reelection.

If that happens, she said with a laugh, “I may be in the Caribbean.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"It’s hard to say what’s worse about Trump’s wall: The incompetence or the corruption"

Spoiler

PRESIDENT TRUMP, no stickler for bureaucratic procedure, had no qualms about pushing the Army Corps of Engineers to award a major construction contract for his border wall to a North Dakota firm whose chief executive repeatedly went on Fox News to tout the project and his company’s ability to build it. That presidential meddling, now the subject of a Pentagon investigation, worked out nicely for Fisher Sand & Gravel, which won $1.7 billion in border wall contracts — despite having virtually no track record in construction.

Now, the president is bashing a segment of the wall in Texas that Fisher built as a showcase private project that, according to engineers who have examined photographs of the erosion at its base, is at risk of falling into the Rio Grande. “It was only done to make me look bad, and [perhaps] it now doesn’t even work,” Mr. Trump tweeted Sunday.

It may not work, but it was hardly done to embarrass the president. Both Tommy Fisher, the firm’s eponymous chief executive who lobbied for wall contracts, and a conservative nonprofit group that launched the project on private land with money raised online, are vociferous supporters of the president. The board of the nonprofit, called We Build the Wall, includes Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist.

Mr. Trump’s wall is a troubled vanity project. Just 200 miles have been built — not the 500 he promised would be complete by the end of this year — and most of that is replacement for existing segments that were shorter or run-down. Smugglers have sawn through and climbed over parts of the new barrier.

It’s hard to say which looks worse for the president — the massive waste of money that has been diverted from Pentagon construction projects to build his porous wall, or the corruption that has marked the process. The Defense Department’s inspector general’s office announced in December it was investigating whether inappropriate influence was a factor in a $400 million contract awarded to the Fisher firm. In addition to the president’s intervention in the contract, pressure was also applied by Sen. Kevin Cramer, a North Dakota Republican who received at least $24,000 in campaign contributions from Mr. Fisher and his relatives when he ran for office in 2018.

Even after the Pentagon launched its investigation, further large contracts went to Fisher to build parts of the wall in Arizona. Yet as the nonprofit journalism group ProPublica and the Texas Tribune reported, Fisher’s initial wall-building venture — a three-mile segment right along the Rio Grande, finished just months ago, mainly at the firm’s own expense — is in danger of toppling as a result of erosion from rainwater runoff at its base, according to a half-dozen engineering and hydrology experts. U.S. Attorney Ryan Patrick, the top federal prosecutor for the Southern District of Texas, called the venture a “scam” and sued the firm.

Undeterred, the administration is considering approval of other private barrier-building projects as components of Mr. Trump’s wall. The Rio Grande is a river, but given more time, Mr. Trump may turn it into a swamp.

 

[AnywhereButHere]

The wall should topple over into the Rio Grande, and form a bridge. Now wouldn't that be ironic... ?

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump just shook up his campaign. But the GOP can’t shake up what it really needs to: Trump."

Spoiler

President Trump on Wednesday night offered perhaps his first concrete acknowledgment of the trouble his 2020 reelection campaign faces, demoting campaign manager Brad Parscale and replacing him with Bill Stepien.

But when it comes to what ails the Trump campaign — and the Trump presidency — the answers are hardly so simple. And Republicans who might take heart in this personnel change have plenty of reason for continued pessimism, in light of recent events.

The 2020 election is nigh, and virtually all signs are bad for the GOP. Trump trails both nationally and in every closely decided 2016 swing state. The continued coronavirus pandemic, largely quashed in many Western European countries, is resurgent here in ways that both reflect poorly on Trump’s handling of it and rob him of his supposed electoral silver bullet: the economy. And polls and GOP strategists suggest Trump is not just struggling but also dragging down GOP congressional candidates across the country.

The question for Republicans is: What do you do about it? The answer, apparently, is that there’s not much, largely by virtue of three-plus years spent conveniently humoring a president who provided them power, but whose antics now threaten it.

The GOP’s bargain with Trump has always been an uneasy one. Many congressional Republicans have clearly been unhappy about the headaches the Trump presidency has inflicted — from his tweets to his penchant for stoking racism and politically suspect culture wars to his myriad politicizations of the legal issues surrounding him.

Occasionally, Republicans have spoken out. Sometimes they have thoroughly denounced him — and in the process completely marginalized themselves inside the newly Trumpian Republican Party, with the few who dared to do so often heading for the exits. But more often, they’ve held half of their tongues. They’ve hoped to send a message to the president while also recognizing that doing so threatens that very tenuous bargain they struck with a man for whom ideology and principles take a back seat to power and the base.

The thing about that approach is it’s a great way to keep the coalition intact and pursue policy priorities while you have governing power. Trump gave them two Supreme Court justices and tax cuts, most notably. Even after Democrats took the House in the 2018 midterm elections, Trump wielded his executive power in ways that the GOP simply can’t replicate without a Republican president.

But now they’re staring down that alternative. And given their accommodations of Trump for three-plus years, they’ve left themselves little in the way of any ability to arrest that trajectory, both because Trump simply doesn’t listen and because they haven’t forced him to listen by pressing their concerns about his leadership in any consistent way.

They’ve continued trying — in much that same subtle way as before.

Republican leaders in recent weeks have begun pushing for a more forceful stand on masks during the coronavirus, for instance. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) at one point argued that Trump could turn mask skepticism on a dime, by virtue of his devoted base. Trump has responded by relenting somewhat and wearing a mask publicly for the first time. But he still declines to offer the patriotic case for masks that many Republicans want, even as several GOP governors have been forced to mandate them.

Republicans have also in recent days shunned Trump’s and the White House’s attacks on Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s foremost expert on infectious diseases. “We don’t have a Dr. Fauci problem,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said Tuesday. “We need to be focusing on doing things that get us to where we need to go.” Graham added: “I think any effort to undermine him is not going to be productive, quite frankly.” As with masks, the White House appears to have given a little bit on Fauci, disowning its previous attacks on him, but Trump on Wednesday offered muted comments rather than a full-throated endorsement of Fauci.

Trump’s effort to shove kindling beneath debates about the Confederate flag and statues has also been met with either derision or crickets by his fellow Republicans. Even Southern Republicans like Graham and Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) gently urged moving the debate beyond the divisiveness of the flag, and Mississippi Republicans joined with Democrats to remove it from their state flag.

In none of these cases, though, have they effected a full course correction.

Trump’s mode is — as it has always been — to lean into culture wars as a means of stoking his base. He won in 2016 with an extreme and divisive message, after all, so why not stick with what worked?

The problem is that doesn’t appear to be working today. He benefited in 2016 because his opponent, Hillary Clinton, wound up being just as historically unlikable as he was, and people who disliked both of them broke strongly for Trump. In 2020, Trump’s opponent Joe Biden isn’t so unpopular, and those same people who dislike both candidates are breaking strongly in the other direction — for the Democrat. A poll Wednesday of the vital swing state of Pennsylvania reinforced this.

In the meantime, Trump has shown no appetite for adjusting his messaging on the coronavirus, which he continues to downplay and for which he has provided almost nothing in the way of a plan in recent weeks — beyond “we should reopen schools.” And even that appears to be either a giant miscalculation or a terribly ineffectual rollout. A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday shows just 29 percent of registered voters approve of his handling of reopening schools, versus 61 percent who disapprove. That 2-to-1 negative review is worse than his overall approval numbers.

To the extent this was a political plan, it’s apparently a pretty bad one.

Trump’s lack of a focus on the virus is also a startling contrast to his continued focus on things like Confederate symbols and liberal boycotts of Goya Foods (whose executive recently praised Trump). Trump delivered a rambling and remarkably campaign-oriented Rose Garden speech Tuesday in which he hit many of the same old talking points without showing any inclination to adjust course — or weighing in much on the virus.

In other words, there is nothing to suggest he truly appreciates — in any sense of the word — the worries Republicans have about his fate. (Even at the same event, he rebutted his bad poll numbers by pointing to anecdotal support from boaters and bikers — as if that reflects the broader populace.) He will apparently keep doing what he’s been doing for years, either because he doesn’t believe that he’s in a bad spot or he doesn’t have another mode beyond constant provocation.

Republicans who have hoped against hope that he would do something different will apparently have to just keep on hoping, because they have put themselves in no position to compel him.

Some of them might take heart in Parscale’s demotion. Their problems stretch far beyond that, though. And they may have only themselves to blame.

 

[47of74]

3 hours ago, JMarie said:

Mary Trump will be on Rachel Maddow’s show tonight. I don’t think they’ll be swapping lemon square recipes.

Oooooh lemon squares. Perfect for after the potater salad lunch. 

[fraurosena]

This is a really good thread by law professor Jennifer Taub who listened in on the hearing today in the Trump vs Vance case (the one the SCOTUS ruled on last week).

Unrolled version here.

[GreyhoundFan]

"The weird masculinity of Donald Trump"

Spoiler

Nobody cares what Roseanne Barr thinks, generally, but a few weeks ago, a one-minute video circulated online that seemed even more bizarre than her usual bizarre: “Hear me when I say this,” she told her phone’s camera as she paced around a hotel suite. “Trump is, in my opinion, the first woman president of the United States.”

However you’d expected her to end the sentence, it wasn’t that. Theories abounded: Was Roseanne trying to court Trump’s diminishing female base by saying that Trump was so great for women that he might as well be one? Was it akin to the 1990s declaration that Bill Clinton was the nation’s first black president?

Donald Trump bears very little in common with any actual woman I know. But, oddly, he has a lot in common with the basest, most unfair stereotypes of femininity. He is ruled by feelings rather than facts. He is fickle, gossipy and easily grossed out. He uses florid language, like “beautiful” and “perfect,” and says he and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un “fell in love.” He deals with adversity like a Mean Girl with a burn book, via insults and freeze-outs. For any Neanderthal who has ever feared electing a female president because what if she’s too cranky when she’s on her period — congratulations. For approximately 1,300 days, you have had a menstruating man in the Oval Office.

It’s preposterous, not to mention insulting to women, to say that Trump is womanly. But it’s nearly as preposterous, not to mention insulting to men, to say that he’s manly.

The traditionally accepted positive characteristics of masculinity, i.e. stoicism, modesty and self-discipline, do not in the slightest resemble a person who goes online at midnight to tweet his own approval ratings, or whose staff has resorted to creating video clips of cheering supporters to bolster his mood. Self-sacrifice? When provided with a simple and easy way to protect the lives of millions of Americans in a pandemic that has killed 130,000 of us, it took the president four months to wear a mask.

Donald Trump is not our first female president. But we’re now approaching either the end of his presidency or the midpoint. Roseanne Barr’s weird video is as good a reason as any to reflect on the president’s gender. Does he really represent masculinity, or is he. . . well, what is he, exactly?

A new book came out Tuesday, purporting to answer at least some of this. “Too Much and Never Enough” takes armchair psychologists’ speculative analysis of Trump’s psyche one step further: The author is an actual psychologist and, more importantly for these purposes, she is the president’s niece. In the book, Mary L. Trump, daughter of the president’s older brother, Fred Jr., blends her clinical training with personal observations and anecdotes, all toward the goal of revealing unparalleled familial dysfunction.

As a source of gossip, the book is. . . eh. If you’ve read any thoroughly reported profiles of President Trump in the past five years, none of the stories will surprise you, and some of Mary Trump’s grievances come off as gratuitously vindictive or petty. So what if the president was a bad gift-giver at Christmas. Isn’t everyone’s uncle?

“Too Much and Never Enough” is a little more interesting as a psychological study. The thesis is that Donald Trump’s father never loved his children (was, perhaps, incapable of love), that Fred Sr. belittled his oldest son because Fred Jr. wasn’t enough of a “killer” — and that Donald, the second-oldest boy, was so terrified of the same ostracization that he cultivated the swagger necessary to avoid scorn and live up to his father’s values. Her grandfather “short-circuited Donald’s ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion,” Mary Trump writes. “By limiting Donald’s access to his own feelings and rendering many of them unacceptable, Fred perverted his son’s perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it.”

Fred Sr.’s family values, as described by Mary, involved a combination of never showing weakness, preying on the perceived weakness of others, winning at all costs and never apologizing or admitting fault. Fred Sr. saw these characteristics as manly, but, really, these are funhouse-mirror reflections of those classic masculine ideals: Stoicism becomes a lack of empathy, strength becomes cruelty, authoritativeness become authoritarianism. If someone hits you, you hit back becomes a belief that everyone is hitting you all the time — that negative feedback is never constructive criticism but only vicious personal attacks that must be repaid in kind. The truth is hitting. Other people’s opinions are hitting. Even the briefest lull in a tidal wave of compliments is hitting.

“He makes his vulnerabilities and insecurities your responsibility,” Mary Trump writes of her uncle. “You must assuage him, you must take care of him. . . he has suffered mightily, and if you aren’t doing all you can to alleviate that suffering, you should suffer, too.”

It’s such an old story. A neglected boy must play-act as manly to win his father’s approval. And he does it so well that, eventually, the costume just becomes his clothes and then, finally, his skin.

A male friend of mine told me that he thinks a lot about 10 particular seconds of a 2016 Trump rally in West Virginia. In this clip, Trump puts on a hard hat. He crooks his arms in a kind of a hybrid muscleman flex/double thumbs-up/Fonzie “eyyyyy” pose. He puckers his lips and pantomimes shoveling coal.

There’s a lot going on. His lip pucker seems intended to approximate a laborer’s grimace, but it looks like Kardashian duckface. His shoveling looks like background choreography in a Dick Van Dyke musical. A neutral observer would not conclude that Trump is fit for a mine. But it is, in its own stylized way, a very good performance of masculinity — Kabuki-like, it hits all the broad markers of traditional manliness with hyperreal gestures whose meaning, at least, is clear: I want to be manly like you.

The crowd loves it. They cheer and cheer.

Masculinity, after all, is in the eye of the beholder.

What does Donald Trump’s funhouse-mirror performance of manhood say about what his supporters see reflected back at them? During the 2016 presidential campaign, the merchandise at Trump events was designed to evoke testosterone. As read a series of hoodies and T-shirts: “Finally, a president with some balls.” You could have written this off as a dig at Hillary Clinton, except for the “Finally,” which implied that Barack Obama, and probably George W. Bush, were also deficient in this manner. Trump, to millions of voters, represented not just a candidate but a paragon of manliness: the most manly manliness seen in decades.

Multiple essays have since been written expressing bafflement over this. “In the 20th-century tradition, strong men didn’t complain about their circumstances,” wrote John Harris in Politico. “Trump is relentless in whining about his burdens.” In the Atlantic, writer Tom Nichols asked, “Why don’t the president’s supporters hold him to their own standard of masculinity?” Nichols describes his own working-class upbringing and the men who shaped it, instilling values of hard work, modesty and willingness to take responsibility. “And yet, many of these same men expect none of those characteristics from Trump, who is a vain, cowardly, lying, vulgar, jabbering blowhard,” he writes.

Perhaps the mistake Harris and Nichols are making is positioning their analysis “in the 20th-century tradition.” Gender norms have shifted and broadened since then. Traits of stoicism and self-reliance are not only the purview of men, and, moreover, we’re having overdue discussions about whether they should be the purview of anyone. Maybe cooperation is better than strict self-reliance. Maybe emotions are healthy. Maybe this is true regardless of gender.

The 21st century has sought new expectations for men and new responsibilities: to listen, to yield, to accommodate, to check their hormonal impulses and be held accountable. Looked at one way, this is necessary and dignified. This is adulthood.

Looked at by others, it’s emasculating: When I have talked with Trump-supporting men — specifically the ones who call him “a real man” or “strong” — they’re not referring to any illusions that he is taciturn or chivalrous. Rather, the source of his masculinity is that he fights these 21st-century expectations with every bone in his body. He “tells it like it is,” and he “doesn’t take crap from [“liberals,” “social justice warriors,” “feminazis,” “cucks,” “the mainstream media”].

His complaining, his insults, his pouting, his neediness, his histrionics, his jagged, self-centered emotionalism — none of it is beside the point. It’s what makes him a real man.

Plenty of folks still view masculinity in the traditional, strong and silent way. Plenty view it in a new, expanded way — masculinity includes nurturing, tenderness, etc. But I can’t help but wonder whether there’s a branch of Trump supporters for whom the new primary characteristic of masculinity is resentment.

Take evangelical voters, for example. “Their whole idea of militant masculinity was formed in reaction against feminism and more recently against so-called political correctness,” historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez said in a Vox interview recently, discussing her new book about why evangelical Christians tend to support Trump. “That has been just such a powerful enemy for white evangelicals who feel oppressed by these new standards of behavior. And I think Trump really succeeds by not following any of those rules of civil discourse.”

They hear a chorus of voices telling them, Grow up. They hear Trump — short-circuited and stuck in his own wounded adolescence — saying, Oh yeah? Make me. Then they buy a T-shirt.

Oddly, reading “Too Much and Never Enough” might leave you feeling kind of bad for the president. You might end up mourning the little boy who was raised to be not a man but rather an unfinished, unfinishable vanity project. You might end up wishing someone could go back in time and show him how many different ways there were to be a man. Or, much more to the point, a successful, worthy human.

Trump attempted to stop his niece’s book from being published; the whole matter had to go to court, before the legal system ruled in Mary Trump’s favor. It’s not clear what President Trump feared the book would reveal, but one can make an educated guess: that it would make him look like a weak man.

What it actually reveals would probably be much more distressing to him. It doesn’t make him look like a weak man. It just makes him look like a scared boy.

 

[fraurosena]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Plenty of folks still view masculinity in the traditional, strong and silent way. Plenty view it in a new, expanded way — masculinity includes nurturing, tenderness, etc. But I can’t help but wonder whether there’s a branch of Trump supporters for whom the new primary characteristic of masculinity is resentment.

I love the article, but I don't agree that the new primary characteristic of Trumplican masculinity is resentment. It's bullying.

Being a bully, pushing others around, making them do whatever you want, strong-arming, throwing almighty tantrums, name-calling, taunting, denigrating those who disagree with him, and using any and all means at your disposal to get your way, is what they perceive to be the signs of a strong and therefore masculine man.