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Month: June 2017

Emperor Troll

Emperor Troll

by digby

This is why he did it:

Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement was not really about the climate. And despite his overheated rhetoric about the “tremendous” and “draconian” burdens the deal would impose on the U.S. economy, Trump’s decision wasn’t really about that, either. America’s commitments under the Paris deal, like those of the other 194 cooperating nations, were voluntary. So those burdens were imaginary.

No, Trump’s abrupt withdrawal from this carefully crafted multilateral compromise was a diplomatic and political slap: It was about extending a middle finger to the world, while reminding his base that he shares its resentments of fancy-pants elites and smarty-pants scientists and tree-hugging squishes who look down on real Americans who drill for oil and dig for coal. He was thrusting the United States into the role of global renegade, rejecting not only the scientific consensus about climate but the international consensus for action, joining only Syria and Nicaragua (which wanted an even greener deal) in refusing to help the community of nations address a planetary problem.

The leader of the world’s only superpower, ladies and gentlemen.

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Trump’s “new deal” by @BloggersRUs

Trump’s “new deal”
by Tom Sullivan

There are hot takes aplenty this morning on President Donald Trump’s announcement yesterday that the U.S. would exit the Paris climate accord. Tesla’s Elon Musk and Disney chief Robert Iger promptly exited Trump’s business advisory council. “World unifies in dismay,” reads one headline at the Independent.

Vowing a continued commitment to the historic agreement, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told the press, “The decision of the US President to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement is extremely regrettable, and I’m expressing myself in very restrained terms.”

French President Emmanuel Macron, speaking in English, said, “I do respect this decision but I do think it is an actual mistake both for the US and for our planet.”

Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, called the decision a “bizarre attempt to restore the past” in the New York Times:

It’s a stupid and reckless decision — our nation’s dumbest act since launching the war in Iraq. But it’s not stupid and reckless in the normal way. Instead, it amounts to a thorough repudiation of two of the civilizing forces on our planet: diplomacy and science. It undercuts our civilization’s chances of surviving global warming, but it also undercuts our civilization itself, since that civilization rests in large measure on those two forces.

McKibben and others question the nominal scientific justifcations Trump gave for the announcement. But “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” was a political one. (Pittsburgh’s mayor disputes that.) The real reasons for exiting the accord incolve Trump’s decades-old obsession with the notion that other countries are “laughing at us” (him).

Another lies in Trump’s interest in a negotiating a “new deal,” a better deal, a tremendous deal Trump about which Trump can boast to his rallies:

I’m willing to immediately work with Democratic leaders to either negotiate our way back into Paris, under the terms that are fair to the United States and its workers, or to negotiate a new deal that protects our country and its taxpayers. So if the obstructionists want to get together with me, let’s make them nonobstructionists. We’ll all sit down, and we’ll get back into the deal, and we’ll make it good, and we won’t be closing up our factories, and we won’t be losing our jobs, and we’ll sit down with the Democrats and all of the people that represent either the Paris accord, or something that we can do that’s much better than the Paris accord, and I think the people of our country will be thrilled, and I think then the people of the world will be thrilled. But until we do that, we’re out of the agreement.

This is a man over his head in a job for which he is stunningly unqualified, Toonces the driving cat at the wheel of a nation. Trump pulled out of the Paris accords because cutting “deals” is the only thing he understands (or thinks he does). Trump envisions a new deal where he can get a chance personally to “win” on his terms. Fresh off embarrassing meetings with European leaders far and away his betters in capability and maturity. Trump needs to dominate them, to show Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron who’s boss with more than a jerky handshake. He’s a toddler grabbing for his security blanket. Merkel and Macron already said no deal.

Perhaps the most infuriating aspect of any Trump news is how mature, civilized women and men, being mature and civilized, feel obligated to treat Trump with the respect due his rank. And people used to call George W. Bush a “post turtle.”

Kellyanne’s Russian Doppleganger

Kellyanne’s Russian Doppleganger

by digby

I guess authoritarian propagandists are the same the world over: snotty, dismissive and threatening toward the press:

Watch the whole thing. It’s really something.

Trump’s personal lawyer knows whereof he speaks

Trump’s personal lawyer knows whereof he speaks

by digby

That’s the same Michael Cohen who said this in response to the Daily Beast printing a story about  former wife Ivana Trump’s documented accusations that her husband had raped her:

“I will make sure that you and I meet one day while we’re in the courthouse. And I will take you for every penny you still don’t have. And I will come after your Daily Beast and everybody else that you possibly know. So I’m warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting. You understand me?

You write a story that has Mr. Trump’s name in it, with the word ‘rape,’ and I’m going to mess your life up… for as long as you’re on this frickin’ planet… you’re going to have judgments against you, so much money, you’ll never know how to get out from underneath it.”

He’s one of Donald Trump’s closest confidantes and is currently under investigation for possible ties to Russia.

He’s also little better than a mobster which is obvious from that rant at a reporter.

His phony hand wringing is the kind of unctuous sanctimony the right always deploys when they see a liberal behaving as badly as they commonly do. They often can barely contain their snickers as they do it.

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He did it. One step closer to Trump’s dystopia

He did it. One step closer to Trump’s dystopia.

by digby

He didn’t have to do it. The Paris Accords were a public promise among 128 nations to work toward particular targets designed as much to give business, markets and governments some sense of how to plan for the future as it was to tackle the problem. There were no enforcement mechanisms simply the good will of all the countries that signed on to it. He’s an infantile thinker and liar so he’s either been manipulated or he’s simply tying to wave his tiny hands around for his fans. It doesn’t matter why.

Donald Trump has officially made the US, a gigantic polluter that was nonetheless leading efforts to change the trajectory of climate change, into a global environmental pariah.

And by the way, the media didn’t ask even one climate change question during all those debates. Clinton had to try to sneak in her concerns where possible but nobody in the the press paid any attention. They did find the time to repeatedly grill her about her emails, however.

And, by the way, all these Republicans parading around high-fiving do know better. (At least most of them do.) They’re just cowards and fools.

By the way, Trump spoke gibberish today. Not that it matters.

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It’s just a group of patriots

It’s just a group of patriots


by digby

I could be wrong, but this familiar fatuous excuse sounds as if Vladimir Putin is admitting the possibility of Russian involvement in the hacking of the US presidential campaign:

Shifting from his previous blanket denials, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said on Thursday that “patriotically minded” private Russian hackers could have been involved in cyberattacks last year to help the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump.
While Mr. Putin continued to deny any state role, his comments to reporters in St. Petersburg were a departure from the Kremlin’s previous position: that Russia had played no role whatsoever in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and that, after Mr. Trump’s victory, the country had become the victim of anti-Russia hysteria among crestfallen Democrats.
Raising the possibility of attacks by what he portrayed as free-spirited Russian patriots, Mr. Putin said that hackers “are like artists” who choose their targets depending how they feel “when they wake up in the morning.”
“If they are patriotically minded, they start making their contributions — which are right, from their point of view — to the fight against those who say bad things about Russia,” he added.
His remarks echoed ones by Mr. Trump, who has dismissed accusations of Russian meddling and said that the person responsible for the attack on the Democratic National Committee “could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.”
All the same, Mr. Putin stuck firmly to earlier denials that Russian state bodies or employees had been involved, an accusation leveled by United States intelligence agencies. They concluded in January that Mr. Putin himself had directed a Russian “influence campaign” involving cyberattacks and disinformation intended to tilt the November election in Mr. Trump’s favor.
“We’re not doing this on the state level,” Mr. Putin said on Thursday.
The boundary between state and private action, however, is often blurry, particularly in matters relating to the projection of Russian influence abroad. Nominally private Russian citizens have fought alongside Russian-speaking rebels in eastern Ukraine and have taken part in various campaigns to advance Moscow’s agenda in Eastern and Central Europe.
Perhaps worried that American intelligence agencies could release evidence linking last year’s cyberattacks to Russia, Mr. Putin also put forward a theory that modern technology could easily be manipulated to create a false trail back to Russia.
“I can imagine that someone is doing this purposefully — building the chain of attacks so that the territory of the Russian Federation appears to be the source of that attack,” Mr. Putin said. “Modern technologies allow to do that kind of thing, it’s rather easy to do.”
In this, Mr. Putin appeared to be repeating an argument he first made earlier in the week in an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro.
“I think that he was totally right when he said it could have been someone sitting on their bed or somebody intentionally inserted a flash drive with the name of a Russian national, or something like that,” Mr. Putin told Le Figaro, referring to Mr. Trump. “Anything is possible in this virtual world. Russia never engages in activities of this kind, and we do not need it. It makes no sense for us to do such things. What for?”
The evolution of Russia’s position on possible meddling in the American election is similar to the way Mr. Putin repeatedly shifted his account of Russia’s role in the 2014 annexation of Crimea and in armed rebellions in eastern Ukraine: He began by categorically denying that Russian troops had taken part before acknowledging, months later, that the Russian military was “of course” involved.

Why does it sound familiar?

There are no Russian troops in the Moscow-leaning Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, and there have never been, but there are Russian citizens who stand by local residents, RIA news agency quoted the Kremlin as saying on Saturday. 

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was referring to repeated accusations to Moscow by Kiev and the West of its direct military involvement in the conflict between Ukrainian security forces and pro-Russian separatists in the region.

When the Crimea invasion first happened I was skeptical about the outcry from American pundits and analysts. It all sounded like re-purposed cold war cant to my ears even though it was clear that Putin’s government was becoming aggressively authoritarian. But after the civilian airliner was shot down killing 283 civilians including 80 kids, I lost whatever sympathy I might have had. He’s a right wing kleptocratic authoritarian strongman. I’m against that no matter what country they hail from — including our own.

These comments are not believable. I don’t know why the media is saying he denied it. It sounds more like he admitted it — winking and nodding the whole way. And once more cleverly parroting Trump’s own works.

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The swamp overflows

The swamp overflows

by digby

Trump’s voters won’t care about this because when he said he would “drain the swamp” they thought he meant that he would run all the Democrats out of Washington. If it were anyone but him it would be a massive scandal:

President Donald Trump has granted waivers to at least 16 White House officials to allow them to work on issues they handled in their private-sector jobs, according to disclosures released by the White House late Wednesday.

The number of waivers granted to White House staff in the first four months of the Trump administration—the same number former President Barack Obama gave out during his eight years in office—calls further into question Mr. Trump’s campaign pledge to rid Washington of special interests and “drain the swamp.” The waivers allow officials who spent recent years lobbying the government on behalf of corporate clients to now weigh in on those same issues.

The White House posted the waivers late Wednesday after a tense back-and-forth with the Office of Government Ethics, which had requested information about the waivers in an effort to determine if the Trump administration was following federal ethics rules. Among those rules: an executive order Mr. Trump signed in January requiring former lobbyists to recuse themselves from matters on which they had lobbied for two years after their appointment.

Yet Mr. Trump has so far granted waivers to four former registered lobbyists, including Michael Catanzaro, who has spent years representing oil-and-gas companies such as Devon Energy Corp. , Koch Industries Inc., Halliburton Co. and Hess Corp. He also lobbied the Environmental Protection Agency over its greenhouse gas regulations and regulatory reform, representing industry trade groups such as the American Chemistry Council and American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers.

Under the terms of his waiver, Mr. Catanzaro—who serves as special assistant to the president for domestic energy and environmental policy—can work on some of those same issues, including the Clean Power Plan and methane regulations.

Andrew Olmem, a former registered lobbyist at Venable LLP who represented MetLife Inc., American Express Co. and other financial companies, now serves as a special assistant to the president for financial policy. Under the terms of his waiver, he can interact with his former clients on policy matters including Puerto Rico’s fiscal issues, amending the Flood Disaster Protection Act and overhauling the Financial Stability Oversight Council’s treatment of insurers.

Shahira Knight, a former lobbyist for Fidelity Investments on tax and retirement policy issues, can participate in policy discussions on that subject, her waiver says.

Two top White House advisers—chief of staff Reince Priebus and senior counselor Kellyanne Conway—were granted waivers related to their past work for the Republican National Committee and other political organizations. The waivers state that they can continue to interact with those groups in their official roles.

One waiver, which applies to all executive office of the president officials, allows them to “participate in communications and meetings with news organizations regarding broad policy matters.” Chief strategist Steve Bannon earlier this year faced a complaint from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington over his ongoing interactions with Breitbart News, his former employer.

The administration on Wednesday only released waivers for White House staff, not for officials at federal agencies. Agencies are required to disclose their waivers to the Office of Government Ethics by Thursday.

The White House earlier this month sought to block the Office of Government Ethics’s effort to obtain its waivers, eliciting an unusually forceful response from Walter Shaub, the agency’s director.

I heard Republicans on TV explaining that Trump won the election because people believed he would bring in the best people from the private sector so  it makes sense that they would be people who needed to stay in touch with business and industry. Or something.

The debasement these people are willing to endure to defend this man is astonishing. Laughable. And they seem not to realize that in this day and age everything is recorded and documented. But then if they succeed in bringing down the country or turning it into a full-fledged police state, as they seem intent upon doing, I suppose we will all have bigger problems.

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Another little bit of progress bites the dust

Another little bit of progress bites the dust
by digby

I wrote about one of the sad effects of Trump’s take-over for Salon this morning:

Back in early 2015 it looked as though America might be on the verge of a rare moment in recent times, when leaders of both parties might come together to pass an important bipartisan reform. Over several years both right and left had reached a consensus that the draconian mandatory minimum sentencing laws passed in the 1980s and 1990s had been overzealous and counterproductive. Politicians on both sides of the aisle were actually working together to eliminate many such sentences on the federal level, especially after data gathered in states like Texas and Georgia made clear that doing so could save governments money and reduce crime rates.

Even Texas Sen. Ted Cruz memorably spoke to the issue on the Senate floor:

Today, far too many young men—and in particular African-American young men . . . find themselves subject to sentences of many decades for relatively minor, nonviolent drug infractions. We should not live in a world of “Les Misérables,” where a young man finds his entire future taken away by excessive mandatory minimums

Mandatory minimum laws were mostly aimed at drug-related crimes and came about in a burst of emotional reactions to tabloid-style stories in the 1980s. Early in that decade the crack cocaine epidemic had everyone spooked, largely because opportunistic politicians stoked the story for political gain. The case that many people still remember is that of 22-year-old college basketball star Len Bias, who died of a cocaine-induced heart attack just two days after being drafted by the Boston Celtics. Facing a big midterm election, the Democratic Congress saw the public outcry as an opportunity to quickly push through the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986.

On the 20-year anniversary of Bias’ death in 2006, Eric E. Sterling and Julie Stewart wrote in the Washington Post about the effects of this ill-considered act of political opportunism:

One result was the innocuous-sounding Narcotics Penalties and Enforcement Act, which became the first element of the enormous Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, hurried to the floor a little over two months after Bias’s death. But the effect of the penalties and enforcement legislation was to put back into federal law the kind of clumsy mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses that had been done away with 16 years before. And there they remain, 20 years and several hundred thousand defendants later.

The federal prison population exploded from 36,000 in 1986 to nearly 200,000 in 2016, costing the government billions of dollars and finally leading members of both parties to realize that reform was long overdue.

And then immigration panic hit. An unknown college professor named Dave Brat unseated House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a 2014 Republican primary, and that was the canary in the coal mine. Fueled largely by talk radio and the emerging “alt-right” white nationalism of Breitbart News, Brat ran on a hardcore anti-immigration platform — in a suburban Virginia district with relatively few immigrants — and the GOP realized the issue was potent.

By 2015 the Republican majority had embarked on a new crusade: the Establishing Mandatory Minimums for Illegal Reentry Act of 2015, also known as “Kate’s Law.” It would impose a mandatory five-year minimum sentence on immigrants who illegally reenter the country after having been deported. The legislation was named after Kate Steinle, a 32-year-old woman who was shot and killed by an undocumented Mexican immigrant, Francisco Sánchez, in July of 2015 in San Francisco. (The shooting itself was likely a tragic accident.) Sánchez had been deported five times before and was wanted for a sixth deportation. “Kate’s Law” is often mentioned in the same breath as efforts to ban sanctuary cities like San Francisco.

The idea was proposed by Steinle’s parents and taken up by Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly who made it his personal crusade. Naturally, the man who so eloquently spoke out against mandatory minimums just the year before, Ted Cruz, jumped at the opportunity to co-sponsor the bill. The House passed the bill but Republicans couldn’t break the filibuster in either 2015 or 2016. The right-wing press was fit to be tied about that, as well as about the GOP’s apparent unwillingness or inability to do away with sanctuary cities.

Here’s how Breitbart described the problem:

Sanctuary cities pose a great threat to American communities already overrun by Third Worlders and their descendants and a vast network of lawlessness sprawls across the country. As many as 11 to 30 million illegal aliens, largely but not exclusively originating from the most violent and backwards nations on Earth, are currently squatting on U.S. territory.

By that time the presidential campaign was in high gear, with immigration at the top of the frontrunner’s agenda. Donald Trump endorsed Kate’s Law immediately, evoking “beautiful Kate” at all his rallies and promising to end sanctuary cities on his first day in office.

He didn’t do that. But Trump and his allies haven’t given up. The administration is working every angle to pressure cities to give up their sanctuary status. And the following tweet from May 6 shows Steve Bannon’s “white board” says “pass Kate’s Law” prominently listed under “immigration.”


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Rabbi Shmuley
✔@RabbiShmuley

With @SteveBannon in the White House on #israelindependenceday. Steve is a great, stalwart friend of the Jewish State
2:06 PM – 2 May 2017

1,1671,167 Retweets
2,3962,396 likes
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According to the Washington Times, while introducing the law in the new congress in January, Rep. Steve King of Iowa said, “Parents should never experience the heartbreak of burying their child, but the Obama administration’s commitment to lawless immigration policy has made that tragedy the new normal.”

This is nonsense, of course. It’s a tragic fact of American life that too many parents have to bury their children due to violent crime — but immigrants are far less likely to commit violent crimes far fewer of them than native-born citizens.

Kate’s Law has been hung up in the Senate, but according to the Hill, just as the mandatory minimum sentences were tucked into the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, the provisions of Kate’s Law are now attached to a border security bill that includes new money for prisons, detention centers and border agents. Whether Republicans can overcome the filibuster this time, with Trump in the White House eager to sign it, is perhaps even less likely than it was before.

But regardless of what happens with Kate’s Law or sanctuary cities, all of this immigration hysteria has completely blown up all that hard-won bipartisan effort to reform the criminal justice system. Attorney General Jeff Sessions wants to embark on a new “crime war” that will make the crusades of the 1980s look tame by comparison, and it appears we may end up making this already terrible situation even worse.

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Lying is company policy by @BloggersRUs

Lying is company policy
by Tom Sullivan

The tech reference is a bit dated now, but I used to say that if you wanted to know what Sean Hannity thinks before he thinks it, beat him to his fax machine in the morning.

On Monday it might be “Oceania is at war with Eurasia; Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.” If on Tuesday the message in the tray is “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia,” he’ll switch to saying that without blinking an eye, and maybe without even noticing.

It is something we have all noticed of eager authoritarian followers. He is a loyalist. Whatever Big Brother says he repeats to prove his fealty.

That, Matthew Yglesias suggests, is a defining characteristic of the Trump White House:

When Trump says something like he’s just learned that Barack Obama ordered his phones wiretapped, he’s not really trying to persuade people that this is true. It’s a test to see who around him will debase themselves to repeat it blindly. There’s no greater demonstration of devotion.

He is a man more interested in loyalty (to himself) than in personal integrity. Or the truth. “On Bullshit,” by Harry Frankfurt of Princeton’s Department of Philosophy (1990-2002), describes the break between the truth-teller trying to paint a picture of reality, the liar who knows the truth but hides it to deceive, and someone like the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue:

For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

Truthful hyperbole” was how in “The Art of the Deal” Trump explained what in real estate is known as “puffing.” Property descriptions like “diamond in the rough” (read: falling down), “charming” (overly decorated), or “cozy” (cramped) might be more bluntly described as deceptive marketing. Yet Trump’s endless self-promotion regarding the size of his inauguration crowd and electoral college win, etc., are not simply puffing but transparently false. Something else is going on here besides pathological narcissism, and George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen seems to have hit on it:

By requiring subordinates to speak untruths, a leader can undercut their independent standing, including their standing with the public, with the media and with other members of the administration. That makes those individuals grow more dependent on the leader and less likely to mount independent rebellions against the structure of command. Promoting such chains of lies is a classic tactic when a leader distrusts his subordinates and expects to continue to distrust them in the future.

Another reason for promoting lying is what economists sometimes call loyalty filters. If you want to ascertain if someone is truly loyal to you, ask them to do something outrageous or stupid. If they balk, then you know right away they aren’t fully with you. That too is a sign of incipient mistrust within the ruling clique, and it is part of the same worldview that leads Trump to rely so heavily on family members.

But Yglesias adds that repeating the Master’s lies serves a similar function for rank-and-file authoritarian followers. Lieutenants repeat the bullshit to demonstrate loyalty. Followers use it as a shibboleth to display their membership in the tribe:

… Trumpian bullshit serves not only as a test of elite loyalty, but as a signifier of belonging to a mass audience. One chants, “Lock her up,” at a rally not to express a desire or expectation that Hillary Clinton will serve jail time for violating an obscure State Department guideline, but simply because to be a certain kind of member of a certain kind of community these days requires the chant.

The big, beautiful wall that Mexico will allegedly pay for, the war on the “fake news” media, Barack Obama’s forged birth certificate, and now the secret tape recording that will destroy James Comey are not genuine articles of faith meant to be believed in. Their invocation is a formalism or a symbol; a sign of compliance and belonging. The content is bullshit.

Yglesias writes something Sean Hannity knows in his gut without thinking: “The loyalist is just supposed to go along with whatever the line of the day is.” The danger is that constant repetition of bullshit — sold as “alternative facts” — will break down the public’s cognitive ability for discerning truth from fiction. That ability is a prerequisite for the maintenance of democracy and liberty, which is why it has been supported from the founding of the republic. But for authoritarians, critical thinking skills are a threat to control. Thus, courses in public schools that develop them among the masses must be suppressed. Is it any wonder that access to public colleges is shrinking particularly in states controlled by Republican lawmakers?

Also disturbing is the number of supposed political leaders willing to debase themselves in service to their liege lord by repeating his bullshit. There is a seemingly endless rogue’s gallery of cable news interviews by official spokespersons and surrogates eager to demonstrate their loyalty to the leader and/or their tribe through public betrayal of the truth. Is repeating bullshit bullshit?

Frankfurt distinguishes liars from the bullshitter in lines prior to “For the bullshitter…” above. He writes:

A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about Trumpian bullshit is how many are so short on integrity as to be willing to repeat it, whether as proof of loyalty or just to “catapult the propaganda.” As Frankfurt observes, the bullshitter has no care for the truth. Trump is an “I say what’s on my mind” kind of guy, Yglesias observes. The truth values of any of it is irrelevant. But many of those willing to repeat it (Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer are two examples) may yet know what they are saying is untrue. Trump is bullshitting. His surrogates are lying because lying is company policy.