Month: January 2018

Politics and Reality Radio: Whether Trump Is Mentally Ill May Be the Wrong Question; A Former Prosecutor on Wrongful Convictions

This week, Joshua Holland talks about the #TrumpShutdown.

Then we’re joined by Richard Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry and director of the Psychopharmacology Clinic at Weill Cornell Medical College, who says that speculation about Trump’s mental health miss the point given that anyone can see he’s unfit for office.

Then we welcome Mark Godsey, a legal scholar at the University of Cincinnati School of Law and co-founder of the Ohio Innocence Project. Mark discusses his new book, Blind Injustice: A Former Prosecutor Exposes the Psychology and Politics of Wrongful Convictions.

Playlist:
Southern Culture on the Skids: “Nitty Gritty”
Eek-a-Mouse: “Long Time Ago”
The Wedding Band: “Lonely Hearts”

As always, you can also subscribe to the show on iTunes, Soundcloud or Podbean.

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The very best thing about Trump’s first year in officeby digby

For me anyway. Trump is the first president since Dwight D. Eisenhower not to visit California in the first year in office.
Think about that. It’s the most populous state in the union — and he even has a golf club here here in LA at which he could make one of his regular personal appearances and pocket the money.

He knows the protests would be enormous. He knows we loathe him with every fiber of our beings.

It makes me proud to be a Californian.

That picture above was taken last May at Trump’s Palos Verdes golf course here in LA.

A group calling itself “Indivisible San Pedro” corralled the crowd, which included babies as young as 1½, young children and retirees, to a public park nestled within the golf course around 9 a.m.

It took the flash mob about 15 minutes to form the 30-foot-tall letters, after which they sang “God Bless America,” said Peter M. Warren, a retired journalist and member of the group.

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Just kiss his ring it’s all he cares aboutby digby

People are figuring this out. But since he’s so unstable and stupid, it probably won’t work anyway:

As South Korea presses ahead with efforts to bring a large North Korean delegation to the Winter Olympics in PyeongChang next month, it is willingly agreeing to North Korea’s demands.

But Trump, a former businessman who prides himself on being a masterful negotiator, is claiming — and getting — most of the credit for the sudden burst of Olympics-related diplomacy between the two Koreas.

During a Jan. 4 phone call in which the South Korean leader briefed the American president on the plans for talks with North Korea, Trump asked Moon to publicly give him the credit for creating the environment for the talks, according to people familiar with the conversation.

(In these conversations, Trump calls his counterpart “Jae-in” — an unimaginable informality in Korean business etiquette. Moon calls Trump “Mr. President.”)

He is Moon’s superior, obviously. And he demands respect. That is what he meant when he said he would have the world respect America again. What could go wrong?

Later that night, Trump tweeted that the talks wouldn’t be happening “if I wasn’t firm, strong and willing to commit our total ‘might’ against the North.”

At a news conference six days later, Moon agreed Trump deserved “huge credit” for the talks.

This is what he wants. And in some cases it’s the best way to get to a decent policy. But since he’s a mercurial moron, there’s no way to know if it’s going to stick.

And the damage this charade does to our country is substantial. Forcing everyone to pretend the King is “winning” just to survive opens the door to the kind of palace intrigue we are seeing with Tom Cotton, Stephen Miller and John Kelly manipulating him for their own authoritarian purposes.

You may think Trump is essentially a buffoon. They aren’t. They are something much, much darker.

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Approval at year oneby digby

The latest ABC/Washington Post poll:

A year in the presidential spotlight hasn’t been kind to President Donald Trump: His approval rating is the lowest in modern polling for a president at this point, with deep deficits on policy and personal matters alike. Strikingly, the public divides evenly on whether or not he’s mentally stable.

That question aside, a lopsided majority, 73 percent of those polled, rejects Trump’s self-assessed genius. Seventy percent say he fails to acquit himself in a way that’s fitting and proper for a president. Two-thirds say he’s harming his presidency with his use of Twitter. And 52 percent see him as biased against blacks — soaring to 79 percent of blacks themselves.

Just 36 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s job performance, while 58 percent disapprove, essentially unchanged since midsummer. Next lowest at one year was Gerald Ford’s 45 percent in 1975; average pre-Trump approval — since Harry Truman’s presidency — is 63 percent.

Women are especially critical of Trump in this poll, produced for ABC News by Langer Research Associates: A mere 29 percent approve of his work, vs. 44 percent of men. And a remarkable 55 percent of women doubt Trump’s mental stability.

Americans more likely to blame Trump, Republicans if government shuts down: Poll
Trump’s signature achievement, the new tax law, is unpopular; 60 percent say it favors the wealthy (even most well-off Americans say so), and the public by a 12-point margin, 46 to 34 percent, says it’s a bad thing for the country. At the same time, a majority celebrates his most prominent failure, on Obamacare; 57 percent say the program’s continuation is a good thing.

A vast 87 percent support the DACA immigration program that Trump ended and whose fate in Congress is uncertain — including two-thirds of strong conservatives, three-quarters of evangelical white Protestants and as many Republicans, core Trump groups. And 63 percent overall oppose a U.S.-Mexico border wall, essentially unchanged since before the 2016 election.

As reported Friday, Trump — and his party leaders — also are at greater risk in the government shutdown, with Americans 20 points more likely to say they’d blame Trump and the Republicans in Congress than the Democrats in Congress.

In a controversy that continues to cloud his presidency, half of Americans think members of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign colluded with Russia to try to influence the election. About as many, 49 percent, think Trump himself obstructed justice in the Russia investigation.

Trump’s gone from 11 points underwater in job approval last spring to 22 points today, a shift that occurred by July and has stabilized since. That’s a vast swing from his 12 predecessors, who averaged 29 points to the positive after a year in the White House.

Four previous presidents — Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Truman – were at 51 to 53 percent approval after one year; Bill Clinton saw 56 percent and the rest ranged from 63 percent (Richard Nixon) to 83 percent (George W. Bush, after 9/11). Ratings at one year don’t predict a career trajectory. That said, a score in the 30s, this early in a presidency, is uncharted territory.

Indeed just six of the past 12 presidents ever went as low or lower in approval as Trump is now — Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson, Nixon, Carter and both Bushes — and all but Truman, much later in their presidencies.
[…]
Compared with the first ABC News/Washington Post poll of his presidency, in April, Trump is less popular generally across the board, but especially among college graduates (-11 points, to 31 percent approval), residents of the Northeast and West regions (-9 and -8 points, respectively) and whites -8 points, vs. no change among nonwhites, who started so low).

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This is what more looks like
by Tom Sullivan

On Monday here at Hullabaloo, I wrote about the 1st Democratic Candidates Conference (DemCanCon) that took place last weekend outside Washington, D.C.

I met lots of what one trainer called “mom & pop” candidates: people who finally had enough and filed for office for the first time. Most have no idea what they’ve gotten into, but this conference offered to get them up to speed. About 250 attendees. A small, but enthusiastic group from 24 states.

After finding out where they were from and what they were running for, I asked what help (post-primary) they could expect from the local parties in their districts.

The question generally drew a pregnant pause, a sigh, and perhaps an eye roll.

They were from Maryland, Virginia, New York, Indiana and elsewhere. Almost without exception the same reaction.

It’s why I wrote my For The Win get-out-the-vote primer for county officers.

Firsthand experience is behind it.

2006:

I visited a western NC county a week ahead of the congressional election (yes, Heath Shuler was top of the ticket that year) to check on their preparations. What had they done? What else did they need to do? What did they need from us?

“We’re done,” they said.

Excuse me?

“We called through the phone list and put out the signs.”

They saw us looking sideways at each other.

“You mean, you want us to do … more?“

Yes. On Election Night, more suddenly looked pretty good.

2008:

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2014:
An experienced election protection attorney from Boston was in our headquarters on GOTV Weekend. On Election Day, he walks up 3 hrs before the polls close and says with some admiration, “I’ve never seen an operation like this.”

When the polls closed, the county picked up two state legislative seats in a year when Democrats across the country got the shit kicked out of them.

2016:
Volunteers arrived in a 15-passenger van from Nashville on GOTV weekend. One had come from as far away as Memphis (IIRC). They’d given up on Tennessee and wanted a chance to help flip North Carolina blue.

After sizing up the place, one visitor said, “We don’t have anything like this.”

And isn’t that the problem?

I explained it to candidates at DemCanCon this way.

If you’re not in a swing state, especially if you’re in a more rural county in not-a-swing-state (including blue states), Barack Obama isn’t parachuting in a team from Michigan Avenue to show you how to do a high-energy, months-long, countywide GOTV and electioneering effort. The governor’s race doesn’t show up out there. The U.S. Senate race doesn’t set up out there.

Want to know one reason why Democrats get no traction in the Plains States? I tried to email Kansas, South Dakota, and Montana counties yesterday and got pissed off. The white counties in otherwise red-shaded states are either unorganized or have no email or Facebook contact information on the state party websites (and probably not even a Facebook page not listed there). That’s 40 percent of Kansas counties, half of Montana, and 70 percent of South Dakota. That’s counties, not population, naturally. Okay, very rural, low-density areas I have the luxury of not trying to organize. And maybe it is because there are no Democrats out there. Even so. Those states elect U.S. senators. If Democrats don’t show up to play, they forfeit. Look at south-central Georgia.

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So, I don’t want to hear “This is the most important election of our lifetime” again. Ever. Because if you think short-term, you never invest in the future. As they say around the office, “Why is there never time to do it right, but always time to do it over?” Democrats do it over — and over — on a two-year cycle, in many places starting each time from scratch.

Turnover from the DNC on down, plus killing off the 50-state strategy, keeps local teams from building over time. State parties teach local committees to pull poorly targeted call lists from VoteBuilder, pat them on the head, and send them on their way. Not good enough.

I’m sending links to county chairs across the country, bypassing state-party bottlenecks and concentrating on places Democratic muckety mucks ignore. It’s a lead a horse to water effort. For The Win is not comprehensive, nor meant to be. We just need to lower the bar to higher performance.

To borrow from a movie speech, I’m doing it because there’s nobody else to do it right now. If there were somebody else to do it, I’d let them do it, but there’s not. So I’m doing it.

Many local committees don’t do more because they don’t know what more looks like. This is what more looks like.

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

Saturday Night At The Movies
*On this day of massive national protest , it seemed like a good night to re-run this one —

Incident on Christopher Street: Stonewall Uprising

By Dennis Hartley

Si se puede: Stonewall rioters, 1969


It isn’t nice to block the doorway
It isn’t nice to go to jail
There are nicer ways to do it
But the nice ways always fail

-Malvina Reynolds
In the wee hours of June 28, 1969 the NYPD raided a Mafia-owned Greenwich Village dive called the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay bar on Christopher Street. As one of those policemen recalls in the new documentary, Stonewall Uprising, the officers were given “…no instructions except-put them out of business.” Hard as it might be for younger readers to fathom, despite the relative headway that had occurred in the civil rights movement for other American minorities by that time, the systemic persecution of sexual minorities was still par for the course as the 60s drew to a close. There were more laws against homosexuality than you could count. The LGBT community was well-accustomed to this type of roust; the police had no reason to believe that this wouldn’t be another ho-hum roundup of law-breaking deviants. This night, however, was to be different. As the policeman continues, “This time they said: ‘We’re not going, and that’s that.’ It was a war.” More than a war; it in fact proved to be the catalyst for a movement.

Exactly how this spontaneous act of civil disobedience transmogrified into a game-changer in the struggle for gay rights makes for a fascinating history lesson and an absorbing film. Filmmakers Kate Davis and David Heilbroner take an Errol Morris approach to their subject. Participants give an intimate recount of the event and how it changed their lives, while the several nights of rioting (from initial spark to escalation and immediate aftermath) are effectively recreated using a mixture of extant film footage and photographs (of which, unfortunately, very little exists) with dramatic reenactments.

Davis and Heilbroner also take a look back at how life was for the “homophile” community (as they were referred to in the media at the time). It was, shall we say, less than idyllic. In the pre-Stonewall days, gays and lesbians were, as one interviewee says, the “twilight” people; forced into the shadows by societal disdain and authoritarian persecution. As you watch the film, it becomes hard to believe that these folks were living in America (you, know, that whole land of the “free” thingie). The excerpts from a “CBS Reports” news special from 1967 (“The Homosexuals”) are particularly telling of the era. “2 out of 3 Americans look upon homosexuals with disgust, discomfort, or fear,” a grim-faced Mike Wallace intones. From the same program, an “expert” posits that “Homosexuality is, in fact a mental illness, which has reached epidemiological proportions.” (Hide the kids!) Prior to seeing this film, I had never heard of the goings-on in California’s Atascadero State Hospital in the 50s and 60s, where gay inmates were given “cures” straight out of A Clockwork Orange (or the Guantanamo handbook, for that matter). Lobotomies, sterilizations, and even castrations were involved (one interviewee refers to the facility as “The Dachau for Queers”). Gee, what do you suppose those Stonewall patrons were all so pissy about? Why didn’t they just go live in Russia?

Perhaps not so surprising are the recollections that the media wrote off the incident as an aberration; little more than a spirited melee between “Greenwich Village youths” and the cops (“Homo Nest Raided, Queen Bees Are Stinging Mad”, the N.Y. Sunday News headline chuckled the following day). The film culminates in the story of the first commemorative marches the following year, which were more furtive and politically charged affairs than the relatively festive and celebratory street parties that the pride parades have become (not that there’s anything wrong with that, to paraphrase Seinfeld).

I think this film is an important reminder that when it comes to civil rights, America is not out of the woods yet. Not just for the LGBT community (Prop 8 being an all-too-recent memory) but with Arizona’s SB 1070 darkening Ms Liberty’s doorstep as well. And do I need to remind you about teabagger-fueled vitriol? Stonewall might seem like ancient history, but its lessons are on today’s fresh sheet. The struggle goes on…and the moving closing comments by some of the documentary’s interviewees would seem to bear this out “It was the only time I was in a gladiatorial sport…where I stood up in,” says one participant, tears welling in his eyes, “…I was a man.” And there is no sugarcoating the means to the ends, either. A female interviewee confides, “As much as I don’t like to say it, there’s a place for violence. Because if you don’t have extremes, you don’t get any moderation.” Gladitorial sport? A place for violence? Standing up for what’s right? That is “so gay.” And as another interviewee points out, that’s so…American.

Note: The film is currently in limited release around the country, but I noticed that it is a PBS American Experience production, so you’ll want to keep an eye on your TV listings!

Previous posts with related themes:

Milk
Outrage
William Kuntsler: Disturbing the Universe

239 pounds of jelloby digby

Well, if there’s one thing we’ve learned in the past year it’s that the presidency actually is important. This Washington Post tick-tock of the last two weeks of “negotiations” is just mind-boggling:
After the president ordered cameras out of the Cabinet Room that day, the group delved into the details. Kirstjen Nielsen, Trump’s homeland security secretary, and her staff passed out a four-page document on the administration’s “must haves” for any immigration bill — a hard-line list that included $18 billion for Trump’s promised border wall, eliminating the diversity visa lottery program and ending “extended family chain migration,” according to the document, which was obtained by The Washington Post.

But one person seemed surprised and alarmed by the memo: the president.

With Democrats and Republicans still in the room, Trump said that the document didn’t represent all of his positions, that he wasn’t familiar with its contents and that he didn’t appreciate being caught off-guard. He instructed the group to disregard the summary and move on, according to one of the lawmakers in the room, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.

“It’s like the wedding where someone actually stands up and objects to the wedding,” the lawmaker said. “It was that moment.”

That meeting nearly two weeks ago, and the president’s ambivalence, marked the beginning of yet another period of Trump-fueled tumult that helped push the federal government into a shutdown at midnight Friday. Pinging from one upheaval to the next — while clearly not understanding the policy nuances of the negotiation — Trump clashed at different times with Democrats and members of his own party, who grew increasingly exasperated with the president even as they sought to cast blame on the other side.

“I’m looking for something that President Trump supports,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in public frustration at one point late in the negotiations. “And he’s not yet indicated what measure he’s willing to sign.”

Trump is a self-proclaimed dealmaker who has struggled to close critical deals as president — an unreliable negotiator who seems to promise one thing only to renege days, or even hours, later. He boasts of being “flexible” and has few core ideological convictions, yet often seems torn between his desire for a bipartisan “win” and the pull of the nationalist populism he ran on. In politics, he resembles at times an amateur jazz musician — moody and improvisational, but without the technical chops to hold a piece together.

In the end, the early weeks of 2018 have felt eerily similar to those of 2017, as upheaval has consumed the president’s agenda and message — including the shutdown battle, a tell-all book chronicling a president at sea and news of a payout before the 2016 election to a porn star alleging an affair with Trump.

“Negotiating with President Trump is like negotiating with Jell-O,” Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) complained on the Senate floor Saturday, some 12 hours into the shutdown. “It’s next to impossible.”

This account of Trump’s divisive role in shutdown negotiations is based on interviews with more than a dozen lawmakers, White House advisers, government aides and Trump confidants, most of whom requested anonymity to discuss private negotiations.

The talks seemed to begin with promise. Trump loved the positive press he received from the Cabinet Room meeting-turned-reality-show on Jan. 9. He hoped to be the bipartisan dealmaker who could both keep the government open and provide legislative protections for “dreamers,” the nearly 800,000 young immigrants facing deportation after Trump announced an end to Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, according to an outside adviser

“The construct that always works for the president is saying, ‘Bush couldn’t get it done, Obama couldn’t get it done, but I can get it done,’ ” said Jason Miller, a former Trump campaign adviser. “That is his sweet spot.”

Two days into the negotiations, on Jan. 11, Trump the negotiator seemed to signal he was ready to deal — inviting Sens. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) to the White House to present their ideas for a compromise to stave off a shutdown.

But when Durbin and Graham arrived, they found an angry president, surrounded by hawkish immigration opponents and no longer amenable to the deal he’d praised in phone calls just hours earlier. At one point, Trump dismissed immigrants from African nations as coming from “shithole” countries and wondered why he had to allow them into the United States. He also said he would prefer people from countries such as Norway. The racially charged remarks reported by The Post thrust the president into yet another controversy of his own making and further complicated the shutdown talks.

Despite his vocal frustration, Graham continued to try to work with Trump, turning a televised Senate hearing with Nielsen the following week into a personal appeal to the president.

“So Tuesday, we had a president that I was proud to golf with, call my friend, who understood immigration had to be bipartisan, you had to have border security,” Graham said, referring to the initial Jan. 9 meeting and addressing Nielsen as if speaking directly to Trump. “But he also understood the idea that we had to do it with compassion.”

Graham flung his arms apart and concluded: “Now I don’t know where that guy went. I want him back.”

Trump, meanwhile, viewed Graham’s increasingly public criticisms as disloyal, according to one outside adviser.

Within Trump’s broader orbit of outside friends and confidants, however, there was growing concern that a shutdown would offer only “downside for the Republicans,” said another informal adviser who recently spoke with Trump.

This adviser added that some allies worried Trump was making poor political decisions and would struggle with the optics of a shutdown — including images of Trump and some of his advisers departing for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this coming week.

“That’s the Democrats’ ad: Your government closes, and Trump does a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago, and half the Cabinet goes to Davos,” the adviser said, referring to a scheduled event at Trump’s private Florida club Saturday night.

About a week out from a possible shutdown, Trump, too, was becoming frustrated. He groused that his staff had “failed him” by not reaching a better compromise on Capitol Hill. And morale among mid-level staff in the West Wing and Eisenhower Executive Office Building had plummeted, two people familiar with the mood inside the White House said.

As the shutdown loomed, the president grew more erratic. In the first week, he set off a 101-minute scramble after tweeting that Congress should vote against a foreign surveillance bill that his own White House was championing after watching a segment on “Fox and Friends.” This past Thursday, he did it again — taking to Twitter to suggest that the Children’s Health Insurance Program should not be included in any short-term spending bill. The stance directly contradicted the strategy of congressional Republicans, who were attempting to use CHIP to lure reluctant Democrats into supporting the plan.

A White House official called it “deja vu.”

The president, however, did not seem to fully grasp just how problematic his CHIP tweet was for his own party. Minutes after tweeting his criticism, Trump spoke by phone with McConnell, according to people familiar with the conversation. Trump praised the Republican bill, showed no reluctance when McConnell explained his plan to forge ahead with it and made no mention of his tweet, these people said. Trump also reassured House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) that he liked the bill as it was.

The whole episode left congressional leaders puzzled: Why, they wondered, would the president tweet something negative about their legislation and rattle Republican lawmakers without ever raising concerns with them — and then act as if nothing had happened?

Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.), speaking to reporters Friday night about his general frustrations with the process, said that “our country was founded by geniuses, but it’s being run by idiots.”

Meanwhile, Trump had also begun feuding with his chief of staff, John Kelly, who had helped impose discipline in the White House and shared many of Trump’s more conservative immigration views. But he and Nielsen had also been privately complaining about Trump’s campaign promise to build a wall on the southern border as ill-advised and “silly” since their early days in the administration, when Kelly was secretary of homeland security and Nielson was his senior adviser, according to a person familiar with their discussions.

Against that backdrop on Wednesday, Kelly told lawmakers in a private meeting that Trump had “evolved” on his view of the wall and that some of the more hard-line immigration policies Trump had pushed for during the campaign were “uninformed.” He repeated the general message in a television interview the same day.

The president was furious and pushed back against his chief of staff in a series of tweets the next day without directly naming him. “The Wall is the Wall,” he wrote. “It has never changed or evolved from the first day I conceived of it.”

The final 24 hours before the shutdown played out in a dizzying series of private huddles, frenzied phone calls and belligerent public pronouncements from both sides. Through it all, the president remained mercurial and unreadable even to those ostensibly negotiating with him.

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), head of the conservative Freedom Caucus, said Trump called him Thursday to say he wanted the House to debate a more conservative immigration bill being proposed by Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.). But the president also said he did not want a shutdown. “He mentioned that several times,” Meadows said.

And Trump — who has previously told associates a shutdown might be good for him politically — complained that he would be blamed for any outcome. Shutdowns, he concluded, never help the people in charge.

[‘Pulling at his strings’: Lawmakers vie to sway Trump in immigration fight]

He made an impromptu call Friday to Schumer and invited him to the White House, worrying congressional Republican leaders and aides who feared, in the words of one, that they were “about to get hosed.”

Many Republicans relished the spot Schumer was in — torn between liberals positioning for a 2020 presidential race and centrists facing reelection in 2018 in conservative states — and wanted to keep him under pressure.

Over cheeseburgers in the private dining room just off the Oval Office, Trump and Schumer discussed a comprehensive deal that would include an immigration component and keep the government open, along with disaster relief and budget caps. Schumer signaled he would be open to considering funding for Trump’s border wall and providing more defense spending, but he wanted the president to agree to a five-day measure to keep the government open to give both sides time to negotiate something longer term.

At one point, Schumer asked Trump to tweet in favor of a short-term bill to pressure others, officials said. The top Senate Democrat left the meeting buoyed, telling others that Trump seemed willing to strike a deal.

But as the day wore on, McConnell urged Kelly to not give in. Worried White House aides began making calls to their counterparts on the Hill, assuring them that Trump wouldn’t “give away the store,” in the words of one top Republican aide. The president summoned Meadows and Rep. Raúl R. Labrador (R-Idaho), another member of the Freedom Caucus, to the Oval Office for a long meeting, even as aides to Trump and Schumer discussed possible deals in writing.

Trump called Schumer a few hours later and said he understood there was a deal for a three-week measure to fund the government — the first that Schumer had heard of any such deal, according to one person familiar with the issue. At another point, Kelly called Schumer, telling the Democrat that his immigration proposal was too liberal and would not work for the administration.

Schumer wondered aloud to his members about what, exactly, had changed.

“What happened to the President Trump who asked us to come up with a deal and promised that he would take heat for it?” Schumer asked on the Senate floor shortly after the government shutdown had begun at midnight. “What happened to that president? He backed off at the first sign of pressure.”

The carnage unfoldsby digby

A year ago Donald Trump gave the darkest, cruelest most cynical inaugural address in American history. And he has lived up to its promise. It’s perfectly fitting that on the first anniversary, the government has shut down over the issue of mass deportation of hundreds of thousands of Latinos.
That’s what he ran on and that’s what he wants to do.

Here’s how he frames the DACA issue today:

Democrats are holding our Military hostage over their desire to have unchecked illegal immigration. Can’t let that happen!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 20, 2018

That’s right. The DREAMers are now “unchecked illegal immigration.”

He has been all over the map on the DREAM kids. But in the end there is only one constituency that matters to him:

California is challenging the integrity of the union, not in order to help its citizens, but on the behalf of a foreign population that has no right to be here in the first place #Tucker @FoxNews— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) January 20, 2018

Trump may have gone through dozens of staffers in this first year. But his base, as represented by Fox News, is solidly behind him. And they set the agenda.

As The Daily Beast’s Sam Stein wrote on twitter:

It’s probably not an overstatement to say that the length of the government shut down depends largely on a Sunday evening meeting between a select few people: the producers of Fox & Friends

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Trump’s twitter: year one
by digby

It remained one of his main methods of communication and it gets him into more trouble than anything else:

Trump’s use of Twitter has taken the presidency to a new, more divisive place. Here’s my report for @CNN‘s special anniversary coverage https://t.co/RPzYZKC8Mx

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) January 20, 2018

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Get out your “Fire and Fury”
by digby

Michael Wolff was on Real Time with Bill Maher last night. Maher asked him if there was something in the book that nobody’s asked him about in all his appearances:

Instead of telling Maher about something that he did put in the book, Wolff slyly teased a White House anecdote that he apparently didn’t feel comfortable including. There was one story about Trump that he kept hearing, but couldn’t confirm, even by his questionable standards.

“I didn’t have the blue dress,” Wolff said, referring to the evidence that damned Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

“It’s about somebody’s he’s fucking right now?” Maher asked, excitedly.

“Yes,” Wolff replied, but he refused to elaborate. “You just have to read between the lines,” he said, adding, “Now that I’ve told you, when you hit that paragraph, you’ll say bingo.”

I don’t know who it is although most people are pointing to the above passage in the book as the likely choice. I’ve certainly wondered about that …

And it might be bullshit. But considering Trump’s history, it also could easily be true. He knows JFK and Clinton had affairs in the White House and he’s got an image to maintain…

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