Trump 48: Nobody Likes Me

[fraurosena]

Yeah, that different way is letting the pandemic rage on unchecked through the country, no matter how many people die, in a desperate and despicable attempt at preventing people from voting you out. That different way is to prevent any money going anywhere but into the pockets of you and your enablers.

You are truly beneath contempt.

[fraurosena]

In other words, he only found out what happened in Beirut after Macron told him, and asked him what the US was doing to help.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Sigh. "Calling it a ‘peaceful protest,’ Trump flouts coronavirus guidelines with golf club gathering"

Spoiler

BEDMINSTER, N.J. — Just before 7 p.m. Friday evening, members of President Trump's private golf club here began streaming into a gilded ballroom by the dozens. Some carried wine glasses — few wore masks.

The happy hour scene just steps from the golf course was orchestrated by Trump, who decided late Friday to hold an impromptu news conference and invite his club members to gather indoors in defiance of state restrictions aimed at slowing the spread of the novel coronavirus.

With coronavirus cases nearing 5 million in the United States and average daily deaths topping 1,000, Trump’s retreat to the confines of his private club offered him an opportunity to create a kind of alternate reality in which his presidency is not being beset by numerous crises.

After walking into the room to the sound of applause and “Hail to the Chief” playing over a loudspeaker, Trump told the crowd that newly released job numbers showed a resurging economy, the border wall was continuing to be built and executive orders were being drawn up to circumvent an intransigent Congress.

The pandemic, he told the room, “is disappearing. It’s going to disappear.”

Many in the crowd behaved as if the pandemic had already vanished, forgoing guidelines on social distancing, face coverings and avoiding nonessential gatherings.

Playing dual roles as president and business owner, Trump seemed happy to facilitate a carefree evening for his members — despite the health risks.

In the few minutes Trump spent focusing on the health crisis, he presented misleading or incomplete statistics indicating other countries were facing a new “surge” in infections and that the United States’ position as the world’s epicenter for the coronavirus was primarily due to the large number of tests being performed, an argument health experts have continuously said is incorrect.

“We’re constantly showing cases, cases, cases, cases are up,” Trump said. “Well, the reason cases are up [is] because we’re doing, one of the reasons, we’re doing a lot of testing.”

But health experts say it will take vigilant mitigation practices by the public — not positive spin or wishful thinking — to gain control of a virus that has killed at least 158,000 Americans.

Little of that was on display when Trump’s well-heeled golf club members began making their way into the grand ballroom under a light drizzle Friday. Some people had their temperatures checked at the door, many didn’t. The group of more than 100 mingled in one small section of the 5,000-square-foot ballroom, with mere inches between each person.

Asked by reporters if they had been tested for the coronavirus before the impromptu conference, no one in the crowd responded.

After reporters noted the lack of social distancing in the crowd, a club official just told the crowd to “spread out a little bit” because “the tweets are going out.” Masks were also handed out shortly before Trump arrived.

New Jersey guidelines limit most indoor gatherings to 25 people or 25 percent of a room’s capacity, whichever is lower. People are required to wear masks and maintain a distance of at least six feet.

The office of New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) referred questions about Trump’s club event to the Bedminster police and the New Jersey attorney general’s office.

“At this time we’re not going to comment on an alleged violation,” Steven Barnes, a spokesman for the attorney general’s office, said Friday. The Bedminster police did not respond to a request for comment.

Asked why he was staging an event in defiance of state guidelines, Trump denied that the gathering was unlawful. He cited an exemption that allows for indoor gatherings of up to 100 people for political events or protests.

“You have an exclusion in the law. It says peaceful protest or political activity, right?” Trump said. “And you can call it political activity, but I’d call it peaceful protest because they heard you were coming up and they know the news is fake.”

The question drew boos from the crowd and Trump’s response was greeted with applause. The president walked away as his club members continued to cheer.

But as the news conference ended, it remained unclear why Trump decided to stage the unscheduled event.

His lengthy opening statement consisted largely of a rundown of many of the things he has been saying for several weeks. He attacked presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, pledged to protect the suburbs, railed against “anarchists” in Portland, Ore., blasted Democrats in Congress, threatened legally dubious executive orders and rehashed his administration’s actions on opioids and prescription drug prices.

He promised an executive order soon that would require health insurers to cover preexisting conditions for all their customers.

“This has never been done before, but it’s time the people of our country are properly represented and properly taken care of,” he said.

In fact, it has been done before and is a central plank of the Affordable Care Act, the law enacted under President Barack Obama that the Trump administration is seeking to strike down in a case before the Supreme Court.

Members in the crowd were mostly silent through the president’s remarks, a far cry from the kind of raucous rallies he held before the pandemic. At some point between Trump’s remarks on the “favored-nations clause” for pharmaceuticals and the personnel policies at the Tennessee Valley Authority, a little girl in a yellow dress took a seat on the floor.

Before the 40-minute news conference, Trump briefly stepped out to privately address some of the members of his club, which reportedly has a six-figure initiation fee. He promised a one-of-a-kind show to the group, which included men in golf shorts and gem-tone polo shirts, women in sundresses and a smattering of children in miniaturized versions of these outfits.

“You’ll get to meet the fake news tonight. You’ll get to see what I have to go through,” he told the group, according to CNN, which pulled the audio from a hot mic. “Who’s there? Oh all my killers are there, wow. So you’ll get to see some of the people that we deal with every day.”

But the club’s ballroom, described on a company website as “lavishly decorated” with “exquisite French doors, crystal chandeliers and sconces,” struck some as a poor choice to hold a news conference in the middle of a pandemic that has decimated the economy.

“Who decided it would look good for Trump to speak to a bunch of rich Trump club members about the need to deliver unemployed Americans relief,” Amanda Carpenter, a former aide to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and a Trump critic who wrote a book titled “Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies To Us,” wrote on Twitter. “All this shows is that Trump isn’t in Washington, isn’t working on this with urgency, and is supported by wealthy loyalists who can’t be bothered with masks.”

As for the president, he has expressed no qualms about the optics of meeting with large groups of wealthy supporters at a time when so many are struggling. He is scheduled to hold fundraisers in the Hamptons and near the Jersey Shore this weekend before returning to Washington on Sunday.

And he is scheduled to hold another news conference — or peaceful protest — at his golf club Saturday afternoon.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

My word, he is insane:

 

[47of74]

17 hours ago, fraurosena said:

In other words, he only found out what happened in Beirut after Macron told him, and asked him what the US was doing to help.

 

If I was Macron I wouldn’t even bother asking fuck face for help or even telling him. Let him find out about this shit the same way everyone else does and make that odious fuck sit on the sidelines and watch as adults handle these problems. 

[GreyhoundFan]

Well, he does know bad marriages...

 

[WiseGirl]

 

[Becky]

3 hours ago, WiseGirl said:

 

This needs to be made clear and trumpeted far and wide- ads, billboards, tv chyron , headlines! The average Trump voter will hear “tax cut” and never know what it really means. 

I despise Trump, he is absolutely evil to float this in service to his campaign.  What does he care about Social Security?  

[47of74]

Steve ain’t having Fuckmuppet’s bullshit  

And oh yeah, Steve? You wanna hear colorful colloquialisms?  Come on out here to Iowa.  You’ll leave thinking NJ is positively mild. 

Edited August 9, 2020 by 47of74

[JenniferJuniper]

The New York Times is reporting that the White House has inquired about adding Trump's face to Mount Rushmore. 

I'll just leave this here as there is nothing I can think to say. I'm spent.

[GreyhoundFan]

15 minutes ago, JenniferJuniper said:

The New York Times is reporting that the White House has inquired about adding Trump's face to Mount Rushmore. 

I'll just leave this here as there is nothing I can think to say. I'm spent.

A little more info from CNN.

 

I like this reaction (animated GIF behind spoiler):

Spoiler

 

 

[JenniferJuniper]

2 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

 

  Hide contents

 

 

Okay. So long as that's how it's done!

[fraurosena]

It's not a rumor. The megalomaniac just tweeted this.

 

[formergothardite]

I hate him. I really, really hate him. And I have a very hard time being civil to his followers. 

ETA: And I realize hating someone isn't healthy, but I struggle when it comes to Trump. 

Edited August 10, 2020 by formergothardite

[onekidanddone]

5 hours ago, fraurosena said:

It's not a rumor. The megalomaniac just tweeted this.

 

Just another distraction so nobody will notice he just effectively killed social security 

[fraurosena]

1 hour ago, formergothardite said:

I hate him. I really, really hate him. And I have a very hard time being civil to his followers. 

ETA: And I realize hating someone isn't healthy, but I struggle when it comes to Trump. 

My dislike for Trump pales in comparison to my hatred for McConnell. 

The depth of MoscowMitch's treachery reaches back far before Trump was even thinking of becoming their candidate. I wiil even go so far as to say that without it, Trump wouldn't have been nominated at all.

[GreyhoundFan]

I agree with @onekidanddone that it's a distraction, but I do believe he proposed it. "Trump denies that White House asked about adding him to Mount Rushmore, but adds it ‘sounds like a good idea!’"

Spoiler

President Trump on Sunday denied a New York Times report that a White House aide had asked South Dakota’s governor about how to add another president to Mount Rushmore. But Trump also suggested he wouldn’t mind seeing his own face etched into the monument.

“This is Fake News,” Trump tweeted of the Times report. “Never suggested it although, based on all of the many things accomplished during the first 3 1/2 years, perhaps more than any other Presidency, sounds like a good idea to me!”

Trump has a long history of saying his likeness should be added to Mount Rushmore, although in public he’s generally insisted he’s joking.

His fixation with Mount Rushmore as a populist symbol, though, is undeniable. In July, he staged a gala Independence Day celebration at the South Dakota monument where he tried to capitalize on the social and political divisions riling the nation amid the novel coronavirus pandemic in a fiery speech warning of a “left-wing cultural revolution."

In the lead-up to that event, the Times reported on Saturday, a White House aide had asked the office of South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R) to spell out exactly what the process might look like to add another presidential face to the stone facade.

Per the Times, Noem responded in kind: By presenting the president with a four-foot-tall reproduction of Mount Rushmore that included Trump’s face etched in the rock next to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.

Although Trump on Sunday disputed the Times account, Noem has said in the past that Trump personally raised the question with her. In 2018, Noem, then a member of Congress running for governor, said Trump brought up the idea of adding his face to Rushmore during their first meeting in the Oval Office.

“He said, ‘Kristi, come on over here. Shake my hand,’ ” Noem said, according to the Argus Leader. “I shook his hand, and I said, ‘Mr. President, you should come to South Dakota sometime. We have Mount Rushmore.’ And he goes, ‘Do you know it’s my dream to have my face on Mount Rushmore?’ ”

Noem broke out in laughter, she told the paper — but quickly realized Trump wasn’t joking.

“I started laughing,” she said. “He wasn’t laughing, so he was totally serious.”

In 2017, Trump made similar comments at a speech in Ohio, but insisted they were in jest.

“I’d ask whether or not you think I will someday be on Mount Rushmore, but, no — here’s the problem. If I did it joking, totally joking, having fun, the fake-news media will say, ‘He believes he should be on Mount Rushmore!’ ” Trump said at the time. “So I won’t say it, okay? I won’t say.”

So would it be possible to add Trump’s face to the mountain? There’s no clear process to make it happen, The Washington Post’s Philip Bump reported in 2017, though Trump would probably have to start by getting South Dakota’s legislature and possibly Congress to sign on. Adding a new face would cost at least $64 million in labor alone, Bump calculated.

But there’s also the question of whether the rock would be stable enough to add another towering set of presidential features. Jefferson’s tribute had to be moved from its original spot due to flaws in the granite.

The staff at Mount Rushmore says any further sculpting is simply impossible.

“There is no more carvable space up on the sculpture,” Maureen McGee-Ballinger, a spokeswoman for the monument, told the Argus Leader two years ago. “When you are looking on the sculpture, it appears there might be some space on the left next to Washington or right next to Lincoln. You are either looking at the rock that is beyond the sculpture (on the right), which is an optical illusion, or on the left, that is not carvable.”

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a message from The Post about Trump’s latest reported flirtation with a spot in the rock.

When he brushes crap off by saying he was joking, I think back to an old Bill Maher show where he said that Twitler doesn't joke, he's never joked about anything.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s reality show for millionaires is a cruel trick"

Spoiler

Deprived of rallies, President Trump came up with the mind-numbing idea to hold not one but two news conferences at his exclusive country club this weekend. The audience was nearly all rich White men (able to pay several hundreds of thousands of dollars for club membership and fees) who hooted at the press and applauded Trump as a pandemic rages outside.

Consider the psychology of a person who needs to stage such events — and who convinces himself they are a reflection of his true popularity. Trump is perpetually searching for ways to convince himself that he is not a disastrous president about to lose his seat.

Consider also the image of a super-rich president with super-rich friends at an exclusive club while Americans lose eviction protections, while the $600 federal unemployment subsidy legally expires and while Republicans complain that such a tiny sum (not the double-digit unemployment) encourages laziness. It would be hard to create a more damning portrait of clueless, greedy and self-satisfied elites if you tried.

Instead of addressing the problems the pandemic still poses, Trump puts on a show by signing executive orders — or “unconstitutional slop” as Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) put it. (I trust that Sasse will join in any legal action and/or vote to disable this hooey.) For starters, the notion of an executive order to replace expired spending bills passed by Congress is nonsensical. Congress had to pass a law to achieve items such as enhanced unemployment insurance; Congress has to pass a law to continue them. Otherwise, Trump could have waved his wand months ago to accomplish whatever he thinks he is accomplishing.

Trump is first attempting to delay payroll tax collection — something that does not help the unemployed, does not eliminate the tax and does not acknowledge Congress’s prime role in tax legislation. Moreover, by this action and his stated determination to cut payroll taxes permanently, Trump has fallen into the most obvious of political traps: He’s essentially attacking funding for Social Security and Medicare.

Second, Trump says he is extending an unemployment insurance subsidy of $400. This is a cynical ploy. “He calls for $44 billion of funding from the Department of Homeland Security’s Disaster Relief Fund that is normally used for hurricanes, tornadoes and massive fires to be shifted over to unemployment,” The Post reports. Having snatched money from the military for his wall, he now robs disaster relief without authorization to pay for something entirely unrelated. Moreover, even on its own terms, it would pay for just a few more weeks of unemployment insurance.

Third, he wants to “consider” whether an eviction ban is needed. I’ll save him the trouble: yes. Meanwhile, millions of Americans face eviction while Trump studies the obvious. Landlords do not take considerations in lieu of rent checks.

Finally, Trump is deferring student loan payments — which is nice for college graduates, but does nothing to feed a single mom, give a family without income $600 to get by, help prepare K-12 schools to operate in a pandemic or keep police, firefighters, nurses and teachers from being laid off because state and local coffers are dry.

Former vice president Joe Biden responded to the phony executive emails: “This is no art of the deal. This is not presidential leadership.” He went on: “These orders are not real solutions. They are just another cynical ploy designed to deflect responsibility. Some measures do far more harm than good.”

Trump is delusional if he thinks shows at his country club will alleviate his political problem or Republicans’ surefire road to losing the Senate. The reviews are rotten; the show will be canceled in November.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

So now we continue the reality show by getting to guess whether twitler will accept the repug nomination at the White House or at Gettysburg. Some of the reactions are priceless:

 

More:

Spoiler

 

 

[fraurosena]

My guess is the blood work will show that he's pregnant.

[GreyhoundFan]

"It’s possible that Trump actually isn’t the hardest-working president in history"

Spoiler

During an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, White House trade adviser (and all-around informal spokesman) Peter Navarro was asked why President Trump spent the weekend in New Jersey instead of Washington, figuring out a deal to maintain benefits for unemployed Americans.

“Where is the president?” host Chuck Todd asked. “Why was he at his golf club all weekend? Why isn’t he negotiating? … Why isn’t he involved?”

“Look,” Navarro replied, “you have to understand this is the hardest-working president in history. He works 24/7. He can be in Bedminster, Mar-a-Lago, the Oval Office or anywhere in between.”

It is certainly interesting that Trump’s actual office comes in third on Navarro’s list of where the president might be working. But it is more interesting that Navarro is willing to claim on national television that Trump is the hardest-working president in history. He is unquestionably the hardest-working person currently serving as U.S. president, but, beyond that, all bets are off.

Why might we feel comfortable saying that? The extensive documentation of how much time Trump spends doing things that are obviously not part of his job.

The trips to his resorts

That Trump spends a lot of time at properties owned by his personal business is, like his failure to release his tax returns, a remarkable occurrence that has faded into background noise. So it’s worth putting a fine point on it when appropriate, as it is here.

The president has spent all or part of 383 days during his presidency at properties he or his private company owns. That includes all or part of 132 days at his Mar-a-Lago property in Florida and all or part of 102 days at his club in Bedminster, N.J. If you’re curious, 383 days is about 3 out of every 10 days he’s been president. On average, two days of every week are spent entirely or in part at a Trump or Trump Organization property.

Is he working when he’s there? Sure, sometimes. Over the weekend, for example, he held two odd news conferences in Bedminster, allowing club members to join the fun (and boo the reporters).

But he also spends time doing normal guy-at-a-private-resort things such as hitting up the omelet bar or enjoying personal performances by a lounge singer. That he owns the facilities, of course, expands the number of available opportunities. He’s been known to show up at weddings and fundraisers being hosted by the Trump Organization, offering a potential bit of icing for the properties’ sales pitches.

The golf

What he does most of all, though, is he plays golf. Washington Post analysis of Trump’s time at his properties suggests that he’s probably played golf on 237 separate occasions as president, nearly all at Trump properties. A separate analysis compiled by Trump Golf Count has confirmed 131 outings, occasions on which there is demonstrated evidence that Trump actually played. (The White House, for obvious reasons, doesn’t generally confirm that Trump is playing golf.)

Generally speaking, Trump spends about three hours on a round of golf, which means that he’s spent between 16 (according to the Trump Golf Count confirmations) and 30 days (by our estimate) on the links as president. Solid, 24-hour days.

Can Trump work from the course? Again, sure, at least in the sense that he can schmooze his golf partners (often Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), of late) or, if desired, make calls. But then there was that time when Trump retweeted a supporter calling out “White power!” to mock a protester and White House staffers said they couldn’t reach the president for several hours while he was playing at his course in Virginia.

While he was a private citizen and then a candidate, Trump would often mock President Barack Obama for the frequency with which he played. By August 2012, when he was up for reelection, Obama had played only 104 times — as confirmed by the White House. Given the discrepancy between Trump’s disparagement of Obama and his own golf habit, Trump has at times insisted that his golfing is simply an effort to get exercise. An expert who spoke with The Post suggested that he might want to supplement that workout regimen.

The television

The expert did suggest that Trump probably got a decent amount of exercise simply from walking between meetings. But Trump’s public schedule is often fairly light, and there’s quite a bit of evidence that his unscheduled time involves an awful lot of television.

Matt Gertz of Media Matters has tracked overlap between Trump’s tweets and cable news programming over the course of his presidency, finding that Trump tweeted about things he was watching on television nearly 1,000 times from January 2019 through June of this year. There have been days when several hours of his time are clearly spent in front of the television, as revealed by his tweets about programming.

But even without those cues, it’s obvious that Trump spends a lot of time watching television. In 2018, for example, Jonathan Swan of Axios reported that Trump would invite White House visitors to a dining room adjacent to the Oval Office where he’d had a large television installed. Why? To show them replays of his favorite speeches and even, early in his presidency, his 2016 campaign debates.

In April, the New York Times reported that Trump will, at times, watch cable news in the White House residence from 5 a.m. until nearly noon — and then turn the television back on in prime time.

Sure, Trump can work while the television is on, as he apparently must. But he’s also clearly paying attention to the programming, as evidenced, among other things, by all of those tweets.

The social media

Those tweets, of course, are their own distraction from the job at hand. This, too, is something that we by now take for granted and that deserves to be broken out as its own focal point of presidential attention.

For example, in May we took all of Trump’s tweets as president and created an interactive allowing readers to see how much time Trump had spent tweeting, depending on how long it took him to craft a tweet. This, by itself, isn’t an easy thing to determine, though at one point we realized that Trump had spent an average of more than six minutes crafting tweets written to continue a particular thought.

If we simply assume that it takes him one minute to write an original tweet, on average, and one second to retweet a tweet, then Trump spent nearly 10 solid days as president doing nothing but tweeting through mid-May. But, here: Use your own estimates. (GreyhoundFan: I chose 2 minutes 29 seconds for a tweet and 30 seconds for a retweet, which is probably low)

If it takes Trump 2 minutes, 29 seconds to write a normal tweet and 30 seconds to retweet, we can estimate that:

Trump has spent 25 days, 10 hours and 11 minutes tweeting since taking office, with 7 days, 9 hours and 31 minutes of that occurring during work hours.

Of that, 24 days, 1 hour and 23 minutes was spent tweeting original tweets.

Trump spent the most time tweeting in October 2019, when he spent 1 day, 18 hours and 28 minutes on it. That was also the month he spent the most time tweeting during work hours, 12 hours and 3 minutes in total.

Trump would certainly claim that Twitter is as essential to his work as golf is to his fitness regimen. But it’s certainly safe to assert that some tweets, such as those detailing various cable-news ratings, aren’t particularly important to the job of running the country.

It is certainly possible that Navarro is including in his assessment of Trump’s hardworking-ness all of the time the president spends doing anything at all. So, maybe Trump is the hardest-working president in the sense that he’s constantly doing something, up at 5 a.m. to live-tweet “Fox & Friends” before grabbing an omelet and playing a round with Graham.

That is not, however, the standard sense in which the term might be expected to be used.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Apparently there was a shooting outside the WH.

[47of74]

3 hours ago, fraurosena said:

My guess is the blood work will show that he's pregnant.

I know of a lawyer who said the probation officers loved to say “by the way you’re pregnant” to the men under their supervision who tried that trick. 

[fraurosena]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Apparently there was a shooting outside the WH.

Yes, there was.

The suspect is reportedly in hospital. 

He’s doing his best to prove that he really did pay someone to do his SAT exam for him.

 

[WiseGirl]

Ever notice how I start so many of my politics posts with wtf ? Here we go again, wtf