Month: January 2018

Trump’s “problem” is already worse than Reagan’s “problem” at its worst.by digby

I wrote a long form piece about Trump, Reagan and the 25th Amendment for DAME Magazine today.
Here’s the opening:

Michael Wolff’s new book about the Trump administration Fire and Fury has been the talk of the nation for days now. And there’s a good reason for it beyond the colorful gossip and palace intrigue. It is the first long-form look at the Trump White House to confirm that the crude, inept, unqualified president we see with our own eyes and ears is even worse behind the scenes. It’s not that we ever really doubted his persona is authentic, but it was always possible that the administration was functioning on some basic level of professional competence simply because well … it’s the presidency of the United States. By pulling back the curtain, this book leaves no doubt that there is something very wrong with Donald Trump. What Wolff does not do is give us any clue about what might be done about it.

The book makes clear that the people who work closest with Trump believe he is incompetent and temperamentally unfit. He is routinely referred to by people who work in the West Wing and know him well as a “crazy,” “idiot,” “moron” who has the attention span of a small child and is totally incapable of processing information or conducting a serious conversation.

And according to this piece in Politico by Susan Glasser, foreign leaders are equally scathing in their assessment of the capabilities of the American president. The words they use to describe him are slightly different than those used by the people close to Trump, but only because for them the stakes are so high: “catastrophic,” “terrifying,” “incompetent,” and “dangerous.”

Over their year of living dangerously with Trump, foreign leaders and diplomats have learned this much: The U.S. president is ignorant, at times massively so, about the rudiments of the international system and America’s place in it, and in general about other countries. He seems to respond well to flattery and the lavish laying out of red carpets; he’s averse to conflict in person but more or less immovable from strongly held preconceptions. And given the chance, he responds well to anything that seems to offer him the opportunity to flout or overturn the policies endorsed by his predecessors Barack Obama and George W. Bush.

Or, as his close associates in the United States would put it, “He’s like a child.”

Whether Trump’s behavior is attributable to intellectual, personality, and character defects or is a sign of a serious clinical illness is unknown. But we do know that just since the first of the year he has taunted North Korea’s unstable leader and called for his defeated political opponents to be jailed. He threatened to use a “military option” in Venezuela. He has picked a Twitter fight with nuclear-armed Pakistan for reasons that are completely obscure. He gave an interview to The New York Times just before the first of the year that was so unhinged it sounded as though he might be drunk and he does not drink. He is getting worse.

Please click over and read the rest at DAME. I don’t know if you know the real story of Reagan and the reasons they talked about invoking the 25th but if not you may find this interesting. There was a lot more to it than is popularly known. And the GOP covered it up as usual.

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What you really need to do is go back to the 1930s …by digby

A Kansas GOP rep justifies keeping marijuana illegal because back in the 1930s:

“African Americans, they were basically users and they basically responded the worst off to those drugs just because of their character makeup, their genetics and that.”

He didn’t use the “N” word so at least we’ve seen some progress.

However, you’ll not the casualness with which he says it and the non-reaction from the others in the room. This is normal conversation among a whole lot of white people in this country.

That’s guy was not born in the 30s. He was probably born in the 50s, definitely lived through the 60s. He knows he’s a racist. There’s no excuse.

By the way, marijuana prohibition was always racist. And apparently, despite the fact that tens of millions of white people use it, it still is.

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“Oh, are you happy you voted for me. You are so lucky I gave you that privilege.”by digby

What the hell???

Pres. Trump at farm convention: "Oh, are you happy you voted for me. You are so lucky that I gave you that privilege." https://t.co/rlIkaIjkU9 pic.twitter.com/OZLbvXhX9i— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) January 8, 2018

Pardon me while I lose my lunch.

I wish I understood why his followers love this inane bragging. It’s so immature and ridiculous, that I literally cringe when I hear it. They, on the other hand cheer wildly as if they are subjects desperate to please the Sun King. It’s so servile and submissive and just plain humiliating.

I find this narcissism deeply offensive and it still freaks me out a little bit, even after all this time. Maybe it’s just me …

This was weird too:

"I support a bill that includes crop insurance, unless you don't want me too." — Trump to the Farm Bureau pic.twitter.com/pVBIfP2LFO— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) January 8, 2018

Honestly, I don’t even know what that was. He did his little Mussolini strut afterwards so maybe he was kidding? But where’s the joke?

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Oh no! White men are being discriminated against in silicon valley?by digby

Poor, poor conservative patriarchs. Their lives are a living hell:

The author of a controversial memo that sparked debates about gender and diversity at Google sued his former employer on Monday, alleging that the company discriminates against politically conservative white men.

James Damore, who was fired in August for internally circulating a manifesto that argued Google’s gender pay gap was the result of genetic inferiority, said in a lawsuit filed in Santa Clara Superior Court that the search giant “singled out, mistreated, and systematically punished and terminated” employees that deviated from the company’s view on diversity. Damore and a second plaintiff, David Gudeman, another former Google engineer, are seeking class-action status for anyone that identifies as conservative, Caucasian, or male.

Get this:

The men are being represented by Harmeet K. Dhillon, the Republican National Committee’s committeewoman for California.

If you doubted the GOP has taken sides on the issue of women’s equality, this should clear that up.

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He be lazyby digby

He hasn’t even finished the first year.This is usually the most most active period of any administration the time in which everyone is working madly to get up to speed and get the biggest items on the agenda done before the first mid-term election.
Trump has taken more vacation time than any president at this point in his first term. Way more:

I don’t think I have to remind you of all the times Trump basically called Obama a lazy black man for playing golf, do I?

And now there’s this:

According to private schedules of President Trump’s time at the White House obtained by Axios’s Jonathan Swan, large chunks of each day are reserved for something called “executive time.” Theoretically, this means time set aside for the chief executive to take care of business outside of the constraints of formal meetings. In practice, it’s a lot of watching TV and using Twitter.

“The schedule says Trump has ‘Executive Time’ in the Oval Office every day from 8am to 11am,” Swan writes, “but the reality is he spends that time in his residence, watching TV, making phone calls and tweeting.” Executive time later in the day is often spent watching TV in the dining room adjacent to the Oval Office.

Swan walks through the private schedule for one Tuesday.

8 a.m. to 11 a.m.: Executive time
11 a.m.: Meeting with Chief of Staff
11:30 a.m.: Executive time
12:30 p.m.: Lunch
1:30 p.m.: Executive time
2:45 p.m.: Meeting with National Security Adviser
3:30 p.m.: Executive time
3:45 p.m.: Meeting with head of presidential personnel
4:15 p.m.: End of day

That’s 5½ hours of executive time over the course of an 8¼-hour workday.

He watches TV, tweets and talks to his friends all day.

And, by the way, he goes up to the residence and gets in bed by 6:30 with some cheeseburgers and his three big TVs and gets back on the phone chatting up friends who all compare notes and leak to the press.

This is not a presidency. It’s a 12 year old on summer vacation.

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Yes, mass deportation is on the table. It always was.by digby

With all the new ICE hires, I guess we can call them the new Deportation Force:

They number upwards of 250,000.

They’ve lived legally in the United States for nearly two decades.

And now, they have less than two years to leave, find another legal way to stay or face deportation.

The Department of Homeland Security announced Monday it is ending “temporary protected status” for Salvadorans.

Here’s a look at some of the key events and issues at play:
It started with an earthquake.

The 7.7-magnitude quake that struck El Salvador in January 2001 was the worst to hit the country in a decade. Then, two powerful quakes shook the country the following month.
Neighborhoods were buried. Homes collapsed. More than 1,100 people were killed. Another 1.3 million were displaced.
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The devastation spurred a decision that March by then-US Attorney General John Ashcroft: Immigrants from El Salvador who’d been in the United States since February 2001 could apply for temporary protected status, or TPS, which would protect them from deportation and allow them to get work permits. It was an 18-month designation.

Now, it’s been nearly 17 years. Time after time, officials from different administrations have determined conditions in El Salvador hadn’t improved enough for migrants with TPS to return. On Monday, the Trump administration said it decided to end protections effective September 9, 2019.
Estimates differ for exactly how many immigrants the decision will affect. There were 263,282 Salvadoran TPS beneficiaries at the end of 2016, according to the latest statistics provided to CNN by US Citizenship and Immigration Services. Activists and experts have put the number of Salvadorans who could lose protections closer to 200,000, noting that official statistics likely include people who are no longer in the program because their immigration status has changed or they have left the United States.

Immigrant rights advocates say it is unfair and cruel to end TPS for Salvadorans who’ve built lives, paid taxes, contributed to the economy and raised families for nearly two decades in the United States. They also argue that violence and widespread poverty make it unsafe for migrants to return to El Salvador.

The racists who insists that they leave have no good reason for it other than that thee word “temporary” is in the program that allows them to live here and that means they have to go. Just because. They aren’t criminals and they aren’t on welfare. They’re working, going to school,joining the military, contributing to the nation’s wealth and security in the same way all of us good “natives” are. But they have to go. And if we can empty this nice white country of everyone who looks like them and b uild a wall to keep them out forever, then everything will be perfect.

We know how the president feels about all these damned immigrants:

Five months before, Mr. Trump had dispatched federal officers to the nation’s airports to stop travelers from several Muslim countries from entering the United States in a dramatic demonstration of how he would deliver on his campaign promise to fortify the nation’s borders.

But so many foreigners had flooded into the country since January, he vented to his national security team, that it was making a mockery of his pledge. Friends were calling to say he looked like a fool, Mr. Trump said.

According to six officials who attended or were briefed about the meeting, Mr. Trump then began reading aloud from the document, which his domestic policy adviser, Stephen Miller, had given him just before the meeting. The document listed how many immigrants had received visas to enter the United States in 2017.

More than 2,500 were from Afghanistan, a terrorist haven, the president complained.

Haiti had sent 15,000 people. They “all have AIDS,” he grumbled, according to one person who attended the meeting and another person who was briefed about it by a different person who was there.

Forty thousand had come from Nigeria, Mr. Trump added. Once they had seen the United States, they would never “go back to their huts” in Africa, recalled the two officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss a sensitive conversation in the Oval Office.

This is what they love about him.

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The Real Housewives of 1600by digby

I wrote about the Trump-Bannon soap opera for Salon this morning:

As we go into week two of the “Fire and Fury” extravaganza, the narratives are starting to take shape. The first, and in my view, most important story is that Michael Wolff’s book indicates that this family of misfits who eventually became the Trump administration may have thought they were doing a national brand promotional tour instead of running for office. In the course of that, they may have given some of their “customers” in foreign countries the idea that they were open for business. We knew they were corrupt, but this is the first time we’ve understood that the Trump family and its hangers-on went into this whole thing cynically, just looking to make a quick buck.

The second narrative is that the president is losing his marbles. This assumes he was ever carrying a full bag in the first place, which I’m not sure is true. As a result, we are hearing a lot of talk about the 25th Amendment and mental health evaluations. Proving that he isn’t the sharpest pin in the voodoo doll, President Trump tweeted a series of inane statements about being a “stable genius” and then followed up with this:

I’ve had to put up with the Fake News from the first day I announced that I would be running for President. Now I have to put up with a Fake Book, written by a totally discredited author. Ronald Reagan had the same problem and handled it well. So will I!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 7, 2018

Reagan might be the wrong example to bring up. Administration officials reportedly considered invoking the 25th Amendment in 1987 because Reagan was showing signs of dementia, which his family later acknowledged he had while in the White House. So, yes, if you think that having people around you keep your deteriorating condition a secret is “handling it well,” he did do that.

I would imagine this narrative will continue, because it’s a real problem and it’s going to get worse. Trump has already had more vacation time than any other president in history and appears to spend most of his days in front of the TV.

But the “Fire and Fury” soap opera that has the political world riveted is the big cat fight between Steve Bannon and Donald Trump. Everyone is asking what will become of Breitbart News and whether Bannon can still serve as the de facto leader of the “alt-right” without his partnership with Trump. Most importantly, who will side with whom? Will the Breitbart crew stick with Bannon or Trump? Will Trump be able to keep the base happy without Bannon and Breitbart? The audience is on the edge of its seats.

Since much of Trump’s national celebrity was created by way of his reality TV show “The Apprentice,” that makes a natural lens through which to view the shallow lunacy of his presidency. Last May, when we first began to understand just how dysfunctional this administration really was, Sarah Ellison of Vanity Fair wrote a long article about the growing feud between Bannon and Jared Kushner. She spoke with Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, the producer of the reality show parody “UnReal” who said Trump was “eerily similar” to her lead character, the antihero Quinn King. Ellison wrote:

Like King, Trump has a knack for expressing shocking sentiments that others may recoil from, Shapiro told me. And, like all great reality-TV personalities, Trump and many of his staff are “sound-bite machines” who share certain qualities: megalomania, a delusion of grandeur, a willingness to say anything, and little regard for what anyone else thinks: “They are this functionally dysfunctional ramshackle group of people who have come together through their own extremes.”

That does sound familiar, doesn’t it?

Ellison characterized Bannon as “The Man with the Dark Past,” Stephen Miller as “The Young Attention Seeker,” Kellyanne Conway as “Cheerleader Gone Wrong,” Ivanka as the “No-BS Heiress” and Kushner as “The Crafty In-Law.” But I think this is the wrong reality series. Trump was an early adopter with “The Apprentice” and then “Celebrity Apprentice,” and his shows featured many of the genre’s tropes. But it was basically a game show with him as the host. Surely, Trump’s true reality-show role is as a Queen Bee Real Housewife.

Think about it. The “Real Housewives” shows are about wealthy minor celebrities desperate for airtime, who behave like children and say ridiculous things for effect. Mostly they’re about people feuding with one another, each taking turns being the witch and the victim from one season to the next. They are obsessed with the media but complain about it all the time and say it’s full of crap, even as they feed the beast and gossip about each other. If that doesn’t describe Trump’s White House, I don’t know what does.

This is the narrative we see at work with Trump and Bannon right now. They’ve been quietly feuding off and on, trying to keep the relationship alive, knowing they need each other to keep their mutual fans happy. Bannon had been whispering to the media for some time that Trump had “lost a step,” and his disdain for Jared Kushner and Ivanka was hardly a secret. But Bannon’s “Fire and Fury” comments were brutal and Trump got angry. How dare “Sloppy Steve” criticize Donald Jr.?

You see, in “Real Housewives” land, kids are supposedly off-limits. But they are often dragged into the storylines so a Housewife can take on the role of “mother bear” and self-righteously demand that her adversary and former friend apologize. If the other Housewife wants to be accepted back into the group she must take her medicine and endure ostracism for a time (although she’ll have secret allies who speak to her on the sly), and then apologize, probably more than once. Then when the next season begins she’ll be back in the fold.

This process for Steve Bannon began over the weekend with his statement taking back his comments about Don Jr. and promising to continue to support “Trumpism” all over the globe. According to Axios, Don Jr. will “graciously accept the apology,” but the president still wants his surrogates to “bury Steve” and is working the phones telling people that they have to choose. It looks like this feud will extend into next season. How exciting! But I’d still bet real money they’ll be Lucy and Ethel again in the end.

In all seriousness, there are important issues being discussed in relation to Wolff’s book and that’s a good thing. The question of Trump’s fitness for office is of major concern, and it’s past time this “open secret” is no longer kept secret. Because as much as his administration may resemble a really good season of a “Real Housewives” franchise, it’s not actually a reality show. It’s reality. And it’s a very bad season indeed.

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If you can keep it
by Tom Sullivan

Ubiquitous Town exhibition. A re-interpreted version of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi. Iida Lanki via Pinterest.

As more pedantic conservatives enjoy reminding people, the United States is not a democracy. It is a republic, they’ll say, eliding Benjamin Franklin’s admonition, “if you can keep it.”

While the sitting president’s fitness for office may be getting a lot of press, “if you can keep it” should have us all concerned. What Will Bunch dubs “Hitler Lite” behaviors — attempts at book banning and investigating old political adversaries (Hillary Clinton) and such — are worrisome enough. Add a reality-show president turning the White House into an actual reality show and Washington is coming to resemble a fresh staging of Ubu Roi.

Bunch worries more about actual policy changes the administration is able to crank out while POTUS keeps everyone distracted by his latest acting-outburts.

Lifting the ban on offshore drilling, for one, as we have discussed. But also Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ desire for returning to the days of Reefer Madness.

Bunch writes:

… Jeff Sessions, after a lifetime devoted to “states rights” when it comes to stuff like black people voting, now supports sweeping federal authority to upend marijuana legalization in states like Colorado, Washington and now California that, coincidentally, voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Aside from the fact that nearly three-quarters of Americans favor legalization of pot, Sessions’ move could divert life-saving resources from the opioid crisis and “resume the mass-incarceration regime that has been so destructive in so many communities.”

The administration on Friday delayed a rule, Bunch notes, that would have strengthened enforcement of the Fair Housing Act to combat segregation.

But such rules promulgated by Obama give encouragement to the slaves, one supposes. So, under a Trump administration, as a Hollywood pharaoh once ordered, the name of Obama must be “stricken from every book and tablet, stricken from all pylons and obelisks” in the land, and erased from the memory of men.

What else gets erased in the process poses a bigger problem. While the madness of the king is a concern, neither the press nor the public should let their attentions be diverted by Fake News Awards, volatile tweets, and other such Trumpian nonsense. There’s more circus going on outside the center ring.

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

Ivanka’s little meeting
by digby

Ike Kaveladze

Marcy Wheeler has a really interesting tea leaf reading today:

In this post, I argued that Natalia Veselnitskaya’s story about her June 9 Trump Tower meeting with Don Jr, Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner seemed designed (with help from one time Trump and current Agalarov lawyer Scott Balber) to downplay the role of Agalarov employee Ike Kaveladze[…] 

The LAT story convinces me I’m right. The basic story is that Mueller has called at least one of the attendees at that meeting back for a second interview; for a number of reasons, it is highly likely that person is Rinat Akhmetshin. The self-interested defense lawyers who are the source of the story suggest that this must be because Mueller is pursuing an obstruction case, not a collusion case.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has recalled for questioning at least one participant in a controversial meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in June 2016, and is looking into President Trump’s misleading claim that the discussion focused on adoption, rather than an offer to provide damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

Some defense lawyers involved in the case view Mueller’s latest push as a sign that investigators are focusing on possible obstruction of justice by Trump and several of his closest advisors for their statements about the politically sensitive meeting, rather than for collusion with the Russians.

But the far more interesting part of the story is that Mueller wants details about Ivanka’s actions that day, because, the story explains, she ran into Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin by the Trump Tower elevator.

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LAT makes it clear (presumably based on Akhmetshin’s story) that the Ivanka exchange happened on their way out of the meeting with Jr and the others.

It occurred at the Trump Tower elevator as the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and the lobbyist, Rinat Akhmetshin, were leaving the building and consisted of pleasantries, a person familiar with the episode said.

According to Veselnitskaya, she arrived with Akhmetshin, Kaveladze, and her translator; Jr and Manafort were in the board room when she arrived.

I came to the meeting with Anatoly Samochornov, a translator, Irakly Kaveladze, a lawyer of my client who helped to arrange for the meeting, Rinat Akhmetshin, my colleague who was working with me on the Prevezon case. We were met by a big, stout man who introduced himself as Rob and escorted us on the elevator to the boardroom. I saw two men in the boardroom – one of them introduced himself as Donald Trump Jr., while the other did not introduce himself.

She says she met with Kaveladze before the meeting.

I met him personally first on June 9 shortly before the meeting.

We had a phone call and met at a café, I do not remember where and at what café.

Though, admittedly, every single thing she says about Kaveladze is sketchy[…]

Nowhere in Veselnitskaya’s story addresses how or in whose company she left the meeting.

But the LAT report suggests she left with Akhmetshin. The report mentions nothing about the presence of Goldstone or Kaveladze, waiting at the elevator, chatting up Ivanka.

So did the two Agalarov employees stay later, which would leave them in a room alone with Don Jr and Paul Manafort?

What an excellent question.

And what’s most important about Marcy’s close reading here is the fact that this isn’t necessarily all about obstruction of justice. The facts show that the conspiracy investigation is just as live.

I will just remind everyone that Donald Trump made some very curious comments the very next day when he won the California primary in which he said that he would shortly be making a major speech laying out all the crimes and corruption of the Clintons.

He never gave that speech. I wonder if anyone’s ever asked him why?

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What lunatic, where? by digby

Eddie Scarry at the Washington Examiner asks why “dementia Trump” hasn’t been seen in public. Oh my God.

Roy Edroso responds in the only possible way:

Dementia-Trump has been the only Trump I’ve seen, excepting those rare occasions when his handlers glue him to a teleprompter — when he still sucks, but less crudely, causing the media dummies to swoon over him. Speaking of which, Scarry again:

But he’s also delivered dozens of speeches off teleprompters, proving he can actually read… 

Now that is one hell of a defense — though it fails to account for the possibility that the cue-cards contain pictograms rather than words. 

Then Scarry has the nerve to print a partial transcript of an interview in which Trump sounds like a mentally impaired geriatric, and commenting, “That doesn’t read like a mentally impaired geriatric’s interview,” a maneuver I call the Hinderaker Fawn-and-Fleer.

More at the link.

These wingnuts are engaging in pure gaslighting. Trump is an addled, ignorant and psychologically unfit fool in public and has been from the beginning of the campaign. This is not in dispute. The only question has ever been is whether his mentally impaired geriatric demagoguery was an act designed to entertain the masses in service of his iconoclastic, populist agenda. After a year in office it’s clear that it wasn’t. He is just as nutty, immature and stupid as he seems.

But speaking of the Hinderacker Fawn-and Fleer (which you should read)  I cannot help but recall this perfect example of absurd, obsequiousness by the very same writer:

“It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can’t get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.”

Gosh, it seems like Republicans keep electing presidents who are  kind of … stupid. And it’s getting worse. They’re now electing people whose own White House consider to be childlike and dangerous.

One would think it would be embarrassing after a while but they don’t seem to mind at all.

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