Month: November 2017

What is this corruption you speak of? by digby

This is the greatest scam ever:

Since President Trump won last year’s election, his company — the Trump Organization — has experienced an increase in one particular line of business: hosting fundraisers and receptions for Republican lawmakers.

These events have mostly happened at Trump International Hotel in downtown Washington, which opened last year. The luxe hotel has a large ballroom, two smaller banquet rooms and a BLT Prime steakhouse. It was designed to attract campaign fundraisers, even if Trump had not won the White House.

He did. And Trump made the controversial decision to maintain ownership of his businesses as president, even as he handed day-to-day control to his adult sons.

That arrangement has made 2017 a fascinating experiment: How would the fundraising circuit change now that legislators had the option of spending their campaign dollars with an incumbent president?

Between Election Day 2016 and the end of September of this year, federal political committees reported paying at least $1.27 million to Trump entities, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

Not a dollar has come from any Democrats.

Among congressional Republicans, 40 have spent campaign or leadership PAC money at Trump properties, including the D.C. hotel and other hotels and golf clubs throughout the country. The Trump Organization declined to comment.

The president’s business has not upended the established fundraising business in Washington: GOP legislators, for instance, have still spent more campaign and PAC money at the Charlie Palmer steakhouse on Capitol Hill than at all the Trump properties in 2017.

Look who is number one:

President Trump

$534,864 spent at Trump-branded properties since Jan. 1, 2017
Among Republican politicians, Donald Trump’s best customer this year — by far — has been Donald Trump.

President Trump, who began fundraising for his 2020 reelection on Inauguration Day, has spent heavily at Trump Organization properties through his campaign and two affiliated committees since Jan. 1. His campaign has paid $482,371 for rent at Trump Tower in New York. It paid $22,700 for stays at the Trump hotel in D.C. It spent $2,596 on “office supplies” from Trump Ice, a bottled-water company.

In addition, the Republican National Committee spent $176,738 at Trump properties this year, including $122,000 to host a fundraiser headlined by the president at the Trump hotel in Washington in June.

He is not spending his own money on rent and these fundraisers at his properties. He’s spending donor money at his properties. And he pockets all the profits.

I know it’s cheap to say this at this point but I really would invite everyone reading this to spend 30 seconds contemplating the shrieking and rending of garments if any other president had done this. It is unimaginable that a sitting president could do such a thing.

It’s a testament to how thoroughly dangerous and corrupt he is that whatever legal attention has been brought to bear on him thus far has been concentrated on his apparent willingness to accept the help of the Russian government in his presidential campaign and possible collusion and blackmail. Those charges are so serious that we’ve accepted this open graft as a misdemeanor.

This is what makes me so crazy about these Republicans deciding to “investigate” Clinton over the Clinton Foundation and that stupid uranium deal, claiming that she was on the take. My God. All of that has been investigated and here is zero evidence that any of it has merit. And yet they have already succeeded in making the Clinton Foundation into a nefarious, corrupt organization and the “uranium” scandal into treason.

Meanwhile, Trump is corruptly pocketing cash as president right before our eyes. Sweet scam.

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Just don’t call him deplorableby digby

Here is just one of the ways in which Trump is shoring up white nationalism as America’s default governmental structure, destroying whatever gains have been made over the past few decades. It’s not as if it ever went away, of course. But he’s unleashed the backlash with fire and fury:

President Donald Trump is nominating white men to America’s federal courts at a rate not seen in nearly 30 years, threatening to reverse a slow transformation toward a judiciary that reflects the nation’s diversity.

So far, 91 percent of Trump’s nominees are white, and 81 percent are male, an Associated Press analysis has found. Three of every four are white men, with few African-Americans and Hispanics in the mix. The last president to nominate a similarly homogenous group was George H.W. Bush.

The shift could prove to be one of Trump’s most enduring legacies. These are lifetime appointments, and Trump has inherited both an unusually high number of vacancies and an aging population of judges. That puts him in position to significantly reshape the courts that decide thousands of civil rights, environmental, criminal justice and other disputes across the country. The White House has been upfront about its plans to quickly fill the seats with conservatives, and has made clear that judicial philosophy tops any concerns about shrinking racial or gender diversity.

Trump is anything but shy about his plans, calling his imprint on the courts an “untold story” of his presidency.

Comparing the first ten months of judicial appointments by former President Barack Obama vs. Trump.

“Nobody wants to talk about it,” he says. “But when you think of it … that has consequences 40 years out.” He predicted at a recent Cabinet meeting, “A big percentage of the court will be changed by this administration over a very short period of time.”

Advocates for putting more women and racial minorities on the bench argue that courts that more closely reflect the demographics of the population ensure a broader range of viewpoints and inspire greater confidence in judicial rulings.

One court that has become a focus in the debate is the Eastern District of North Carolina, a region that, despite its sizeable black population, has never had a black judge. A seat on that court has been open for more than a decade. George W. Bush named a white man, and Barack Obama at different points nominated two black women, but none of those nominees ever came to a vote in the Senate.

Trump has renominated Bush’s original choice: Thomas Farr, a private attorney whose work defending North Carolina’s redistricting maps and a voter identification law has raised concerns among civil rights advocates.

Jeff Sessions said today that he has no black senior staff. And they’ve hired only white people, mostly men, as US Attorneys. This is the legacy.

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Trump’s excellent Asian adventure blessedly comes to a closeby digby

I wrote about Trump’s latest embarrassment in the Philippines for Salon this morning. He loves that psycho Rodrigo Duterte. Two peas in a pod:
As President Donald Trump completes his excellent Asian adventure and heads back home, he’s probably feeling a little bit of of a letdown. He’s facing the usual political maelstrom, but this time it’s not about him. Rather, it’s about former judge Roy Moore, whom Trump enthusiastically endorsed the day after Moore won the Republican Senate primary in Alabama.

As virtually everyone knows by now, Moore has been credibly accused of stalking and assaulting underage girls when he was a prosecutor back in the 1970s. It’s unclear what exactly Trump thinks about all this, since he’s been on the road, but one can imagine him feeling jealous that his King of the World tour has been overshadowed by this scandal. On the other hand, he may have convinced himself that he’s a genius for not having endorsed Moore in the first place, as if he knew he was a sexual predator with a Lolita complex all along.

Trump should be grateful that Moore has taken all the attention from his foreign trip. While the president may think it was a big success since all the leaders he met with rolled out the red carpet, the sad truth is that everyone in the world now knows that he’s an easy mark. All that pageantry is a small price to pay to impress the fool who believes he’s the world’s greatest negotiator when he’s actually a clueless sap. If the Republicans back home weren’t so enmeshed in civil war, they could have figured out the same thing and enacted their dream agenda by now. Fortunately, they’re almost as clueless as he is.

The whole trip was surreal from beginning to end, but the last leg in the Philippines, with sociopathic President Rodrigo Duterte, was downright hallucinogenic. You’ll see what I mean if you watch this video of Duterte singing a love song at a gala on Sunday night, claiming he was doing so on the orders of the United States commander in chief:

#PresidentDuterte sings #Ikaw with #PilitaCorales, upon request of @realDonaldTrump. #Asean2017 pic.twitter.com/VjGCVeOeqG

— Karen Jimeno (@AttyKarenJimeno) November 12, 2017

I have no idea what that was about either. But that weirdness is probably why they call Duterte the “Trump of the East,” a title that he apparently wears proudly.

On Monday, before their official meeting, Trump returned the compliment by saying he has a “great relationship” with Duterte and laughing when the Philippine president called the press a bunch of “spies.” (Duterte has famously declared that journalists are “not exempted from assassination,” something Trump no doubt thinks makes a lot of sense.)

According to Duterte’s spokesman, “The relationship appears to be very warm and very friendly. They’ve been very candid in their dealings, and it’s very apparent that both of them have a person who they consider as not their best friend. They have similar feelings toward former U.S. President Barack Obama.” Duterte is still nursing a grudge at Obama for criticizing his extrajudicial killing spree last year, while Trump has been insulting all former U.S. presidents throughout this trip. He has told all of his gracious hosts that he holds his predecessors responsible for every problem in the world and doesn’t blame these wonderful friends who shower him with flattery for anything they’ve done in the past. He admires them all as “strong” leaders who do the right thing by their country, unlike the lily-livered losers who were president of the United States before he came along.

Trump’s hosts smile serenely and assure him that he too is very, very strong and very, very great.

Duterte said last week he would tell Trump to “lay off” if the latter tried to talk to him about human rights, and there was some disagreement about whether that came up in their talk. Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued a statement claiming the issue was briefly discussed in relation to the drug war. Duterte’s spokesman disputed that, saying, “There was no mention of human rights. There was no mention of extrajudicial killings. There was only a rather lengthy discussion about the Philippine war on drugs with President Duterte doing most of the explaining.” Trump has made it clear that he doesn’t like to bring up unpleasant things to his strongman buddies — he’s very embarrassed having to ask his pal Vladimir about that election meddling thing — so I tend to believe Duterte’s team on this one.

Recall what Trump said in his April phone call to the Philippine president, when he complimented Duterte for doing an “unbelievable job on the drug problem . . . many countries have the problem, we have the problem, but what a great job you are doing and I just wanted to call and tell you that.” When Duterte said that drugs were “the scourge” of his nation, Trump replied, “I understand that and fully understand that, and I think we had a previous president who did not understand that.”

The drug war Duterte is waging against his own people may have claimed up to 12,000 lives, while thousands more languish in horrible conditions in prisons. Duterte himself is unstable and violent, admitting that he has personally committed murder. He has said, “Hitler massacred 3 million Jews. There are 3 million drug addicts. I’d be happy to slaughter them . . . You destroy my country, I kill you. It’s a legitimate thing. If you destroy our young children, I will kill you. That is a very correct statement.” That’s the man President Donald Trump admires so much that he sat and listened to him “explain” his methods.

According to this Washington Post op-ed by Filipino journalist Manuel Quezon III, Trump did Duterte a big favor by honoring him and “burnishing his strongman image.” Duterte has apparently been losing favor with the Filipino public and his “illiberal political agenda is running out of steam.” The Catholic Church is rebelling, the economy is faltering and his government is in crisis. Trump’s visit and his treatment of Duterte as an equal on the world stage, against the advice of regional experts, propped him up at just the right time.

Trump clearly believes his Asia trip was a huge success. And it was — for autocrats and dictators throughout the region. They took their measure of our president, and he showed them what he was made of — hot air. It’s not that he isn’t feared. Anyone can see that he is dangerous, because he is in charge of the world’s most powerful military and economy, and he is childlike and unpredictable. All these leaders are certainly planning to protect themselves from the United States and to turn Donald Trump’s ineptitude to their strategic advantage. The world is a more unstable place than it was 12 days ago.

Trump is only fulfilling his promiseby digby

They say that presidents always try to keep their promises so it’s probably not surprising that Attorney General Jeff Sessions has asked the Department of Justice to look into prosecuting the president’s political rival as the president promised to do over and over again when he ran.
Josh Marshall unpacks the story.

The story was first reported by the Post and then a short time later by the Times. It’s notable to see how each news organization has grappled with what seems to be the transparently political nature of what Sessions is doing. The Post, at least in its original version of the story, all but ignored it. The only mention is a final sentence that reads: “Sessions’s letter is likely to be seen by some, especially on the left, as an inappropriate bending to political pressure.”

The Times handling was more complicated. Remember that the Uranium One story originated in a research project sponsored by Steve Bannon, one that the Times agreed to partner with back in 2015. The second paragraph of the Times piece reads like it was cut and pasted from a Breitbart piece …

The prosecutors will examine reports of misconduct at the Clinton Foundation and the Obama administration’s 2010 decision to allow a Russian nuclear energy agency to acquire much of the United States’ uranium, among other matters, according to a letter sent to the House Judiciary Committee from a senior Justice Department official on Monday.

This is a deep distortion of what happened. The US allowed the mining subsidiary of Rosatom, the Russian nuclear energy agency, to take a majority stake of Uranium One, a Canadian company which had two mining operations in the US which together accounted for roughly 20% of US uranium production. The specifics of the deal do not allow any uranium produced in the United States to leave the United States. This is at best a distortion of what the actual deal was.

That said, the Times account is much clearer on the politics involved. The Times notes that the letter comes ten days after Trump publicly demanded that the DOJ go after Clinton. And then there’s this graf …

The decision to examine those matters raises questions about whether Mr. Trump is trying to use the Justice Department to investigate his political rivals and distract from the special counsel’s investigation into his presidential campaign. It also comes at a tenuous time for Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whom Mr. Trump has hinted to advisers he may want to fire. People close to the White House believe Mr. Sessions can stop the president from firing him by appointing a special counsel to investigate the uranium deal. Before leaving for a trip to Asia this month, Mr. Trump expressed his frustration with the Justice Department.

To not get ahead of ourselves, it is important to note that the letter in question only says that Sessions is considering the right course to take and that appointing a special counsel is just one option. But make no mistake: this is as bad as it looks. A President is demanding that federal law enforcement go after his political enemies. And federal law enforcement appears ready to comply.

I was reminded of this that I wrote about a year ago after the second debate:

For reasons that remain obscure, many pundits declared that he had performed well, suggesting that unless his head had twirled around on his shoulders and he vomited Andersen’s split pea soup all over the stage there was no way he could have failed.

He did come close to an “Exorcist” moment at one point, in claiming that Clinton had stolen the election from Sen. Bernie Sanders and saying, “I was surprised to see him sign up with the devil.” He even said she had “tremendous hate in her heart.”

Gun-totin’, Bible-autographin’, fire-beathin’
by Tom Sullivan

Judge Roy Moore, the Bible-autographing Alabamian zealot, is “poison in the Republican bloodstream,” writes Alabama political columnist Kyle Whitmire:

The man autographs Bibles. That should have been enough for anyone to accurately measure his character.

But it wasn’t enough. Nothing it seems is enough for Alabama Republicans to say, “Enough!”

He was removed from the bench once for refusing to follow the law.

But voters put him right back so he could be removed a second time.

Did he call for homosexuals to be put to death? Did he use his charity for personal gain? That’s our Roy. Did he assault young girls, lure them into his car? Never! (Or if he did, he had a good reason.)

It’s not as if Roy Moore is anything new in these parts. “These allegations should sadden everyone but surprise no one,” writes Jonathan Merritt, senior columnist for Religion News Service. Before him there were Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Ted Haggard, and others. Evangelicals love their sinner-preachers. The fallenness of their religious heroes excuses their own sins better than Christ on the cross.

After his stint in prison, Bakker is back at pastoring, as are the others after their sexual dalliances became public. Merritt cautions at The Week that if national Republicans expect evangelicals to shun Moore, they are going to be disappointed:

But if recent history is any indication, we should distrust those who most vehemently peddle hate. Check their closet and you just might find a skeleton.

Research conducted by Jeff Schimel, a psychology professor at the University of Alberta, adds quantitative support for such skepticism. In one study, subjects who showed high levels of anger were more likely to rate others as angry. When participants were told they were dishonest, they were more likely to see others as dishonest. Whenever people come to believe they possess an unacceptable trait, they are more likely to see these traits in others.

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung famously said that “everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” For Jungians, every human possesses a “shadow side” that contains all the behaviors they feel are bad or inappropriate. When our moral frameworks lead us to hide these behaviors, rather than deal with them honestly, they can lead to a sense of self-hatred. We try to repress these emotions, but they often escape in the form of anger toward others who we believe are immoral like we are.

Who would obsess opponents might commit massive (if undetectable) voter fraud? To pick one example at random.

Merritt concludes:

In the days ahead, we will likely learn whether Roy Moore is the paragon of Christian virtue he has led us to believe (unlikely!), or if his years of hatred were born out of guilt. We should not be surprised if the latter proves true. For when one uses hatred as a window through which to view others, it often turns out to have been a mirror all along.

I’m writing this down the street from Bob Jones University, the famously ultra-conservative religious college in South Carolina. The school once sought machine gun permits for security guards who protected coeds playing tennis in ankle-length skirts in the southern heat.

But BJU is the mainstream, liberal Christian academy in town, if stories are true. Tiny Bible colleges across the South send graduates to lead churches like those in rural Alabama. According to legend, boarding students at one tiny Bible college here were prohibited from even having pictures of their mothers in their rooms. Ponder that a moment.

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Focusing where it counts

by tristero

I sincerely hope that the internecine war among Democrats ends soon. Because the struggle between the victimized BLAHS and the evil BLEHS for the soul of the Democratic party is so absurdly irrelevant as to be nearly insane.*

The real problem is the Republican party. They’re planning to starve us to death. If, that is, their leader doesn’t get us all killed first:

Call it the Republican two-step: redistribute upward, then sideways. The biggest beneficiaries are corporations and the rich regardless of where they are. But under the Republican plans, half of these big cuts have to be paid for in the first 10 years (the other half will be added to the national debt, increasing it by $1.5 trillion). And these “pay-fors,” as they’re called, are predominantly aimed at blue states.

As Representative Lee Zeldin, Republican of New York, lamented, the tax bills are “taking money from a state like New York to pay for deeper tax cuts elsewhere.”

Republicans’ red-state bias may seem like just more of the same. After all, their last big legislative drive — the Senate health bill, Graham-Cassidy, which failed in September — also sought a major transfer of resources from blue states that had done a good job expanding health insurance to red states that hadn’t. Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, derided that bill as “petty politics” — “just taking the Obamacare money, keeping it and taking it from Democratic states and giving it to Republican states.”

But this nakedly partisan federalism is far from politics as usual. Parties generally try to favor segments of society that support them — and Republicans’ bias toward big business and rich donors certainly fits that pattern. Yet major efforts by a dominant party to significantly redistribute resources toward states that support it are in fact extremely rare. Indeed, one of the last standout examples dates to the decades after the Civil War, when Republicans used the proceeds of high tariffs that aided Northern industry (while hurting the solidly Democratic South) to pay generous pensions to Union veterans concentrated in Republican states.

Because the Republicans’ most prized constituencies, corporations and the rich, are actually more prevalent in blue states, the overall geographic distribution of the beneficiaries of the current Republican tax bills is mixed. But the growing signs that policies are being written to impose costs on states behind enemy lines are worrisome. A new spoils system based on state partisanship wouldn’t just poison our politics. It could also cripple our economic future.

* Replace BLAHS with the name of the 2016 Democratic candidate you believe is a saint the likes of which has never walked the earth. Replace BLEHS with the name of the 2016 Democratic candidate you think is the most hideous human being this side of Pol Pot. Choose whomever you like for either role.

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“Interesting messages coming in from Moscow”by digby

It looks like the coffee boy had a direct line to senior campaign official and current White House adviserStephen Miller

The former Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser George Papadopoulos told Stephen Miller, a senior policy adviser, in an email last April that he had received an “interesting message” from Russia — one day after learning that the Kremlin apparently had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee.

The emails were disclosed in court documents filed by the special counsel Robert Mueller’s office and unsealed late last month. The New York Times reported on Friday that Miller was the “senior policy adviser” described, but not named, in the court filings.

Miller, now a top White House policy adviser and speechwriter for President Donald Trump, was in regular contact with Papadopoulos over several months last year, the court filings show. He has reportedly been interviewed by Mueller as part of the special counsel’s investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 US election and whether the Trump campaign colluded with Moscow to influence the outcome.

The court filings say that on April 25, 2016, after “multiple conversations” with a Russian national connected to Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Papadopoulos told Miller that “the Russian government has an open invitation by Putin for Mr. Trump to meet him when he is ready,” referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“The advantage of being in London is that these governments tend to speak a bit more openly in ‘neutral’ cities,” he said.

On April 26, Papadopoulos met with Joseph Mifsud — identified in the court filings as an “overseas professor” — for breakfast at a London hotel. There, Mifsud told Papadopoulos that he had learned from high-level Kremlin officials during his recent trip to Moscow that the Russians had “dirt” on Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails,” the filings say.

Papadopoulos emailed Miller the next day.

“Have some interesting messages coming in from Moscow about a trip when the time is right,” he wrote, the court filings say.

They obviously knew about the hacking long before it was public. And they obviously knew that the Russian government was interested in helping them. The best case scenario for them is that they knew but they didn’t take it seriously and were too ignorant to understand that they needed to report such activity.

The problem is that Donald Trump keeps saying, as recently as this past week-end, that he believes the whole thing is a hoax cooked up by Democrats and hacks. He’s committed to the line that the Russians weren’t involved and he knew nothing about any of it. But there is a lot of accumulated evidence now that high ranking members of his campaign knew about Russia’s activity on his behalf. One of those high ranking members is his son and judging by his ongoing denial that Russia meddled it seems that Trump may just be willing to throw him and all the rest of them under the bus.

Speaking of Miller, I am reminded of this bit from Bill Maher on Friday on “the best people.”

The line about Miller is especially tart…

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Moore and Trump both had eyes for the young onesby digby

I’d forgotten about this one:

Donald Trump appears to have a pattern of trying to charm young girls with a line about dating him.

In a December 1992 wire brief in the Chicago Tribune, Trump is described as having spotted a youth choir singing Christmas carols at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. He asked two girls how old they were. When they said they were 14, Trump, then 46, replied, “Wow! Just think — in a couple of years, I’ll be dating you.”

On Wednesday, CBS News reported a similar scenario involving a 10-year-old girl around the same time, when Trump was between his first and second marriages.

In footage from the archives of CBS-owned “Entertainment Tonight,” Trump asks the child if she is planning to ride the escalator at Trump Tower. After she says yes, Trump turns to cameras taping a Christmas special for the show and says, “I am going to be dating her in 10 years. Can you believe it?”

In both instances, the line appears to be somewhat in jest, though the girls’ ages and recent accusations of sex assault against Trump call that into question.

What kind of man looks at a 10 year old and thinks about “dating” her? I guess we know …

Update: There was also this really creepy comment:

He loves Wikileaks. He told us so many times.by digby

Oh, lookee here:

WikiLeaks sent Donald Trump Jr. a series of Twitter direct messages between September of last year and this past summer, with the president’s son responding to a few of the messages sent ahead of November’s election, the Atlantic’s Julia Ioffe reports. The messages were turned over by Trump Jr.’s lawyers to congressional investigators. 

Why it matters: It was WikiLeaks that published emails stolen by Russian actors from Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee. In the messages to Trump Jr., WikiLeaks seems to be offering to help the Trump campaign, while seeking help in countering the perception it was aligned with Russia.

First contact, Sep. 20 

Wikileaks sent Trump Jr. a direct message that an anti-Trump PAC was about to be formed and asking for comment. 

Trump Jr.’s response the following morning, “Off the record I don’t know who that is, but I’ll ask around.” 

Another exchange, Oct. 3 

WikiLeaks: “Hiya, it’d be great if you guys could comment on/push this story.” The message included a link to Hillary Clinton’s comment that she’d like to “drone” Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder. 

Trump Jr: “Already did that earlier today. It’s amazing what she can get away with.” 

Trump Jr., minutes later: “What’s behind this Wednesday leak I keep reading about?” The message came after Roger Stone had tweeted that a damaging leak was coming. 

WikiLeaks reaches out again, Oct. 12 

WikiLeaks: “Hey Donald, great to see you and your dad talking about our publications. Strongly suggest your dad tweets this link if he mentions us (a link was included). There’s many great stories the press are missing and we’re sure some of your follows will find it. Btw we just released Podesta Emails Part 4.” 

Trump Jr.’s response: He did not message back, but tweeted out the link two days later. 

Later messages 

WikiLeaks suggested Trump Jr. leak them a year of his dad’s tax returns, in part to get ahead of any controversy and also to nullify perceptions that WikiLeaks was a “‘pro-Trump’ ‘pro-Russia’ source.” 

WikiLeaks contacted Trump Jr. on election day saying they hoped Trump Sr. would not concede if he lost. 

WikiLeaks asked Trump Jr. to tweet support for Assange becoming Australia’s ambassador to the U.S. 

After news of the Trump Jr./Russia meeting at Trump Tower emerged, WikiLeaks said they were “sorry to hear about your problems,” and requested the emails that led up to the meeting, contending publication on WikiLeaks would be better than in the Times. Trump Jr. ultimately published the emails himself hours laters. 

This doesn’t mean that other people in the Trump campaign weren’t also communicating with Wikileaks, of course. But it sure sounds like this particular line of communication was pretty active. Trump sure did love Wikileaks. He said so over and over again:

Read the whole Atlantic article. And stay tuned. This is an interesting line of inquiry. 

“Strongly suggest your dad tweets this link if he mentions us,” WikiLeaks went on, pointing Trump Jr. to the link wlsearch.tk, which it said would help Trump’s followers dig through the trove of stolen documents and find stories. “There’s many great stories the press are missing and we’re sure some of your follows [sic] will find it,” WikiLeaks went on. “Btw we just released Podesta Emails Part 4.”

Trump Jr. did not respond to this message. But just 15 minutes after it was sent, as The Wall Street Journal’s Byron Tau pointed out, Donald Trump himself tweeted, “Very little pick-up by the dishonest media of incredible information provided by WikiLeaks. So dishonest! Rigged system!”

Coincidence, I’m sure. Just like it was coincidence that the day after Junior and Kush and Manafort took the meeting with the Russian lawyer Trump announced he was going to give a big speech on all the terrible things Clinton had allegedly done. Just a coincidence.

Also, Pence:

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I’ll smash my coffee maker. That’ll show ’emby digby

Kuerig coffee and some others decided not to advertise on Sean Hannity’s show after he stood up for Roy Moore. That made Sean’s fans very angry. So they decided they would destroy their own coffee makers.
Gizmodo reports:

This predictably escalated even further and now Twitter is filled with amazing videos of right-wingers smashing their costly home coffee machines. The intent is apparently to intimidate Keurig into once again sponsoring Hannity’s show, lest he fall victim to the same fate that awaited accused abuser Bill O’Reilly.

I pulled an "Office Space" with my Keurig… Would be a shame if everyone else joined me in the Keurig Smash Challenge #BoycottKeurig #IStandWithHannity #SundayMorning pic.twitter.com/yEADeRC006— Angelo John Gage (@AngeloJohnGage) November 12, 2017

Other people who shot the videos appear to be under the impression that destroying the Keurigs will make liberals angry, instead of belly-laughing at the view of conservatives destroying their own coffee machines in a fit of impotent rage.

Join me & @AngeloJohnGage in the #KeurigSmashChallenge & learn how to crush your drives as a bonus.#BoycottKeurig#IStandWithHannity#BuyBlackRifleCoffee#MAGA pic.twitter.com/WH3unkpADI— Snoop Bailey (@vol80) November 12, 2017

Hey .@Keurig
You are no longer welcome in our house!
We support .@seanhannity
We will get our coffee elsewhere!#BoycottKeurig pic.twitter.com/2SJYZFaR76— Jake Highwell🗽 (@JakeHighwell) November 12, 2017

This video, in which a dude tosses one of the machines from a second-story balcony before shouting “Hope you’re happy, Keurig,” is a particularly good reminder that humans evolved from primates.

.@Keurig made a decision to pull ads from the @seanhannity show.

This decision is disgusting, and will not be tolerated.

Regardless of any response, I am done with you, Keurig.

You will regret this decision. #BreakYourKeurig #IStandWithHannity pic.twitter.com/qQ9BFkgzlS— Mike (@Fuctupmind) November 12, 2017

Also, here’s a person who tried to jump on the bandwagon by throwing out some trash.

Hold on…just found these hot chocolates. Got these as a gift 3 years ago #BoycottKeurig pic.twitter.com/8rJwceojX9— Right Wing and Trump (@RightWing_Trump) November 12, 2017

Love it.

Social media users getting real mad and posting videos of themselves destroying things they already own is just one of the many dumb political stunts that have increasingly become a staple of (mostly far-right) Twitter.

You’d better start advertising again or I’ll destroy my own stuff seems like a weird thing to do to me, but it certainly seems like something that Hannity’s viewers would think makes sense. After all, they watch Hannity.

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