Month: March 2018

Chaos? What chaos?

by digby

I just thought I’d share some headlines from this afternoon in case you’ve been out of the loop:

Scoop: Kelly says Trump probably contributing to staff chaos stories — John Kelly acknowledged in an off-the-record session with reporters today that his boss, Donald Trump, is likely speculating about staff moves to people outside the White House and that reporters are then talking to those people.

Donald Trump and John Kelly Reach Truce — White House chief of staff had made cryptic comments suggesting he may have been the next senior adviser to step down — WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump and White House chief of staff John Kelly have settled on a truce, at least temporarily …

Trump jokes ‘who’s next?’ as tumult engulfs his White House — WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump consumed Thursday morning’s TV headlines with amusement. Reports of tumult in the administration were at a feverish pitch — even on his beloved Fox News — as the president reflected …

Trump decides to remove national security adviser, and others may follow … President Trump has decided to remove H.R. McMaster as his national security adviser and is actively discussing potential replacements, according to five people with knowledge of the plans, preparing to deliver yet another jolt …

Trump gives McMaster the Tillerson treatment — President Donald Trump’s national security adviser H.R. McMaster isn’t getting fired, he’s getting Tillersoned – kept in a state of perpetual limbo about his future in the administration, aware that his unpredictable boss could keep …

The Daily 202: Trump may hire multiple cable news personalities as part of shake-up

The Latest: White House says no more staff changes coming

It’s going very well. 

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“He seeks to weaken an institution that serves to constrain the abusive exercise of executive authority”

by digby

I’m glad to see someone of Tom Edsell’s stature say this in such stark terms:

More than any president in living memory, Donald Trump has conducted a dogged, remorseless assault on the press. He portrays the news media not only as a dedicated adversary of his administration but of the entire body politic. These attacks have forced the media where it does not want to be, at the center of the political debate.

Trump’s purpose is clear. He seeks to weaken an institution that serves to constrain the abusive exercise of executive authority. He has initiated a gladiatorial contest pitting the principle of freedom of the press against a principle of his own invention: freedom from the press.
[…]
The news media “have been incorporated into the political style of the governing party as fixed hate objects,” Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at N.Y.U., wrote in an email to me.

Rosen observed that the history of right-wing attacks on the media extends back through Agnew’s speeches for Nixon to Goldwater’s campaign in 1964 and winds forward through William Rusher, talk radio, and of course Fox News, which founded a business model on liberal bias.

There is an underlying strategy to Trump’s critique of the media. Rosen continued:

Trump is not just attacking the press but the conditions that make it possible for news reports to serve as any kind of check on power. Trump is the apotheosis of this history and its accelerant. He has advanced the proposition dramatically. From undue influence (Agnew’s claim) to something closer to treason (enemy of the people.) Instead of criticizing ‘the media’ for unfair treatment, he whips up hatred for it. Some of his most demagogic performances have been exactly that. Nixon seethed about the press in private. Trump seethes in public, a very different act.

[…]
In a 2017 paper, “Enemy Construction and the Press,” RonNell Andersen Jones and Lisa Grow Sun, law professors at the University of Utah and Brigham Young University, argue that Trump’s goal is fundamentally malign:

The Trump administration, with a rhetoric that began during the campaign and burgeoned in the earliest days of Donald Trump’s presidency, has engaged in enemy construction of the press, and the risks that accompany that categorization are grave.

Insofar as Trump succeeds in “undercutting the watchdog, educator, and proxy functions of the press,” they write, it leaves the administration more capable of delegitimizing other institutions and constructing other enemies — including the judiciary, the intelligence community, immigrants, and members of certain races or religions.

Jones and Sun contend that in many respects, Trump is reminiscent of Richard M. Nixon: Nixon, like Trump, accused the media of being out to get him and predicted that the press would mischaracterize his public support or the reception he received. He believed the liberal media to be biased against him personally, maintaining that he had “entered the presidency with less support from the major publications and TV networks than any president in history” and that “their whole objective in life is to bring us down.”

Unlike Trump, however, Nixon (like the country’s founders)routinely reaffirmed to both the press and the public that he conceived of the press as central to democracy. Indeed, in his first speech to the public regarding the Watergate scandal, Nixon acknowledged that “the system that brought the facts to light and that will bring those guilty to justice” was a system that included “a vigorous free press.”

Trump stands out, according to Jones and Sun, in that his administration has passed a threshold not approached by previous administrations in their tensions with the media. Trump is signaling — through his terminology, through his delegitimizing actions, and through his anticipatory undercutting — that the press is literally the enemy, to be distrusted, ignored, and excluded.
[…]

In “Asymmetric Constitutional Hardball,” Joseph Fishkin and David E. Pozen, law professors at the University of Texas and Columbia, write:

For a quarter of a century, Republican officials have been more willing than Democratic officials to play constitutional hardball — not only or primarily on judicial nominations but across a range of spheres. Democrats have also availed themselves of hardball throughout this period, but not with the same frequency or intensity.

In an email, Fishkin wrote:

As with so many things about President Trump, it strikes me that he didn’t start the fire. He got into office because it was already burning and now he’s pouring on gasoline.

In Fishkin’s view, Trump will do all he can to make the conflict between his party and the press “sharper and more intense, in the same way that he depends on and aims to intensify partisan polarization.”

Pozen warned in an email:

Accusations that the press has a political agenda can, perversely, help create an agenda which is then said to corroborate the accusations.

Pozen described Trump’s denunciation of the press as “the culmination of several decades of comparable attacks by media pundits, such as Rush Limbaugh” and he argues that Trump’s calls
to lock up one’s general election opponent, encouraging online hate mobs, lying constantly, attacking the press constantly, contradicting oneself constantly, undermining the very idea of truth are individually and in common potentially profound threats to the integrity and quality of our system of free expression.

The question is whether the news media can mount an effective check on the exercise of power when the media itself has become an object of hatred for a large segment of the electorate.

Rosen of N.Y.U. notes the cross pressures on the news media:

I think our top journalists are correct that if they become the political opposition to Trump, and see themselves that way, they lose. But they have to go to war against a political style in which power gets to write its own story.

Rosen draws attention to a September 2017 article in The Atlantic, “Trump’s War Against the Media Isn’t a War: You need two sides for that,” which quotes Marty Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post: “We’re not at war; we’re at work.” Baron is right, but for those without any understanding of — or respect for — freedom of the press, first principles can be brushed aside without a second thought.

It’s interesting that at the same time Trump is denigrating the press for “fake news” certain foreign actors who seem to like the cut of his jib have also weaponized propaganda in a way that validates his claims even though he’s wrong.

Keep in mind that this is all in service of authoritarianism and oligarchy. It’s not benign “partisan politics.” It won’t end well.

I honestly don’t know how we can work our way out of this mess. I guess we just have to hope that somehow common sense reasserts itself and the people begin to wake up. But just trying to cling to reality right now is a very daunting task.

Trump wants to kill drug dealers — unless he’s doing business with them

by digby

Trump wants to be Duterte. But maybe someone will have to ask him about this:

President Trump now chats with the leaders of China and Singapore about executing drug dealers.

But back in the 1980s, Trump helped a multi-kilo cocaine dealer escape with a minimal sentence.

And a little over a decade ago, Trump worked with a convicted pill pusher to develop Trump Tower Philadelphia, a real estate deal that also involved Don Jr. and Ivanka.

The dealer turned developer was Raoul Goldberger, aka Raoul Goldberg. He had previously been caught with a loaded gun that had been fired. He had also done time for smuggling and distributing considerable quantities of ecstasy. He would follow the Trump Tower Philadelphia dealings by being convicted of selling opioids. He remained number 46245-054 in federal prison when Trump was elected.

The cocaine dealer was Joseph Weichselbaum. He was indicted for heading a Colombia-Miami-Middle America cocaine ring in 1985, even the helicopter service owned by him and his brother Franklin was getting more than $2 million a year from Trump to ferry high rollers to and from his casinos in Atlantic City.

The charges against Joseph Weichselbaum were brought in Cincinnati, but after he pled guilty there, the case was mysteriously transferred to New Jersey for sentencing and assigned to Trump’s sister, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry. She recused herself two weeks later, reportedly in part because she and her husband had taken rides in Weichselbaum choppers.

The case was given to fellow New Jersey federal Judge Harold Ackerman, along with the implicit message that she had some connection to the defendant. Ackerman then received a September 1986 letter from the Donald himself, regarding Weichselbaum and written with full knowledge of his big-time drug dealing.

“A credit to the community… conscientious, forthright and diligent,” Trump wrote in a missive first reported by the late, great Wayne Barrett.

More minor participants in the drug ring were hit with as much as 20 years. But the kingpin Weichselbaum got just three years. He served only 18 months and then was released to a halfway house.

At the time of his sentencing, Weichselbaum was living in Trump Plaza in Manhattan in an apartment owned by Trump. The rent was a cut-rate $7,000 a month.

I’m fairly sure that he just wants to kill Latino and black drug dealers. In fact, that’s really the point. Killing white men with money is almost certainly not what he has in mind.

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Paranoia, purges and threats

by digby

Joe McCarthy and Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn

This is some fascist stuff here and I’m not kidding:

Two months into the Trump administration, a distraught State Department Iran expert named Sahar Nowrouzzadeh asked her new boss for help.

A conservative website had published an article depicting Nowrouzzadeh as a Barack Obama loyalist who had “burrowed into the government” under Trump and even had ties to the hated Iranian regime itself. Focusing on her role in the negotiation of Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran, the article was headlined, “Iran deal architect is running Tehran policy at the State Dept.”

Nowrouzzadeh emailed Brian Hook, the new chief of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, where she worked on Middle East issues, to insist that the article was “filled with misinformation.” She assured Hook that, since joining the government under George W. Bush in 2005, she had always “adapted” to shifting U.S. policy priorities — as any career government staffer is expected to do. She asked for his help in correcting the record.

Hook was already well aware of the story. The article, which appeared in an obscure online publication called Conservative Review, had caused a stir among conservative activists and incoming Trump officials who were busy trying to establish who Nowrouzzadeh was — and whether she could be purged.

According to emails obtained by POLITICO, the agitators included former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who sent the article to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s chief of staff, and a Trump official who told top Tillerson aides that Nowrouzzadeh “was born in Iran” — she was not — and that she had wept after Trump’s election.

The emails show that State Department and White House officials repeatedly shared such misleading information about Nowrouzzadeh, deriding her as an Obama cheerleader and strong advocate for the nuclear deal with Iran, which Trump had repeatedly denounced. Later, after Nowrouzzadeh was reassigned to another job, some State Department officials tried to mislead a POLITICO reporter about whether she’d completed her full tenure in Hook’s policy shop.

The exchanges provide a window into the intense suspicion — critics call it paranoia — of senior Trump officials toward the employees they inherited upon taking over the government, especially in the realms of foreign policy and national security. In one email, a staffer was described as “a leaker and a troublemaker,” while another was branded a “turncoat.”

This is reminiscent of earlier McCarthyist accusations that the State Department was riddled with communists. I think it comes from their fundamental xenophobia and mistrust of people whose job it is to speak to foreigners.

In this case there is also the basic stupidity of Trump and the people around him and the ease with which they are manipulated by actors with agendas:

Although career staffers generally observe an ethos of nonpartisanship, many Trump officials saw them as constituting a “deep state” cabal determined to sabotage the new president’s agenda. The emails also suggest that Nowrouzzadeh may have been targeted in part because of her ethnicity, which would be a violation of federal employment law.

The emails were the subject of a Thursday letter to the White House and State Department from Reps. Elijah Cummings and Eliot Engel, the top Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, respectively. The letter calls the emails, provided to Congress by an unnamed whistleblower, “extremely disturbing” and demands further documents from the Trump administration.

In the early months of Trump’s presidency, conservative media organizations such as Breitbart News and the Conservative Review published several stories singling out career civil and foreign service staffers by name. The reports often called such employees “Obama holdovers” — even though many, like Nowrouzzadeh, joined the government well before Obama took office — and urged their firing. The stories were terrifying to career employees who, in some cases, had spent decades working out of the spotlight. Nowrouzzadeh, who would not comment for this article, told Hook that she feared for her safety.

And yes, they are also thugs.

This adds up to a fascist bent that is becoming normalized. This story didn’t even cause a ripple and yet it’s actually very horrifying.

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Of course he threatened her

by digby

Susie Madrak at Crooks and Liars:

Stunning. Stormy Daniels’ attorney Michael Avenatti disclosed on Morning Joe this morning that Stormy Daniels was physically threatened regarding the NDA she signed.

Knowing Trump henchman/thug Michael Cohen’s pseudo-Godfather persona and past history, I’m gonna guess it was the classic “You won’t be so pretty if someone throws acid in your face” kind of coercion — which, if it happened before she signed, may invalidate the agreement. But we won’t know until after the 60 Minutes interview appears on March 25.

“Was she threatened in any way?” Mika asked.

“Yes,” Avenatti said.

“Was she threatened physical harm?”

“Yes.”

“Was her life threatened?”

“Again, I won’t answer that. People will have to tune in to ’60 Minutes.'”

Avenatti refused any details. He would not say whether the threat came from the president (I doubt that, he uses Cohen for that sort of thing), although when asked directly if the physical effects came from Trump, he said, “I will neither confirm nor deny.”

Michael Cohen is known for his lurid threats:

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

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

I have no doubt that he threatened Daniels. Whether they can prove it, who knows?

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I wrote about Gina Haspel, the covert CIA agent implicated in torture who Trump wants to reward by promoting her to head the CIA, for Salon this morning:

On Thursday evening ProPublica issued an important correction concerning Deputy CIA Director Gina Haspel, the woman Donald Trump has nominated to head the agency if and when current Director Mike Pompeo is confirmed as the new secretary of state. It was apparently ProPublica that first reported last year that Haspel ran the secret CIA “black site” prison in Thailand in 2002 when supposed al-Qaida detainee Abu Zubaydah was brutally tortured, and that Haspel had personally mocked the prisoner. In an extended correction signed by editor in chief Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica has now retracted those claims.

Haspel did indeed run that secret prison in Thailand, but according to this new report did not take over as director until after the Zubaydah interrogation had ended. If this new information is accurate, this was a monumental error that will likely mean that Haspel is ultimately confirmed as CIA director. We can expect the Republicans in the Senate to use this to turn her into a “fake news” victim and set her up as a patriotic martyr.

It may seem odd that the GOP would defend such an avatar of the “deep state,” considering all the mud they’ve thrown at the intelligence community over the past year. Likewise, Democrats will attack her for her admittedly murky role in the Bush-era torture program, despite the fact that they’ve been defending the community’s analysis of Russian interference in the 2016 election. That may look like shallow partisanship but it really isn’t. This tension has existed since the beginning of the Cold War.

Hawks have long seen the CIA as mainly a tool for covert action to advance American foreign policy, whether that meant toppling unfriendly regimes or propping up friendly ones. They admire and protect the clandestine service but thoroughly mistrust CIA analysis. That’s because the CIA often produces threat estimates that undercut right-wingers’ insistence on ever-expanding military spending. Back in the 1970s, as the nation was dizzy from all the revelations of CIA misdeeds ranging from revolutions to attempted assassinations, the hawks used the opportunity to challenge the CIA estimates of Soviet military capability and formed outside groups like Team B and the Committee for the Present Danger to argue for what became Reagan’s massive military buildup. Unsurprisingly their cooked estimates of Soviet power turned out to be hugely overstated and the CIA’s were much closer to reality.

Similarly, during the run-up to the Iraq war Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly pressured the CIA to back up the administration’s claims about Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. The Bush administration even created a parallel intelligence operation called the Office of Special Plans, based in the Pentagon, to provide senior government officials with raw intelligence, unvetted by intelligence community analysts. We all know how that turned out.

Meanwhile, the liberal doves have been unrelentingly hostile to the covert, unaccountable side of the CIA and other agencies, which tend to operate like a law unto themselves. They oppose the U.S. government’s interference in the internal workings of other nations, including assassinations, torture and other immoral and illegal behavior. But most liberals have tended to accept intelligence community analyses, checked by outside experts, mainly because it’s got a fairly good track record. Now that everyone has access to the international press, distortions or disinformation get challenged pretty quickly.

The divides on the Russia scandal and the Haspel nomination illustrate that old tension once again.

ProPublica’s statement explains how they got the original February 2017 story wrong through a series of misinterpretations of official comments, certain passages in a book by CIA contractor James Mitchell (one of the notorious psychologists who developed the Bush-era torture regime) and the agency’s unwillingness to address the specific charges in the story before it was published. It was only this week, after Haspel was nominated for the top job, that various sources came forward, including Mitchell, to correct the record about when Haspel took over the direction of the prison. Mitchell told Fox Business News on Wednesday that Haspel was not the “chief of base” he described in his book who oversaw the infamous Zubaydah interrogation (during which the prisoner somehow lost an eye) and made grotesque comments about his suffering.

The black site program was documented in depth by the Washington Post’s Dana Priest, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her exposés on the CIA’s secret interrogation program, and the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, both in her magazine articles and the book “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals.” Those who were intimately involved in that ugly chapter of the CIA’s history have no business running the the agency. And anyone who was involved in destroying evidence, as Haspel was, simply cannot be entrusted with the vast power of the CIA.

No one disputes that Haspel was chief of base at the Thai prison at the time another prisoner, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was waterboarded three times. When Priest first reported on the existence of the black site program in 2005, Jose Rodriguez, the head of the agency’s counterterrorism center, became concerned that videotapes of the torture of terrorism suspects would become public and reflect badly on the CIA. According to his memoir, Rodriguez ordered Haspel, who was back in Washington working as his chief of staff, to draft a cable ordering that the 92 tapes be destroyed. She did, and they were. Haspel was up to her neck in the torture program, both on the ground in Thailand and during the cover-up of the agency’s nefarious deeds.

We have never heard from Haspel about her involvement in that cover-up, but since she was destroying the evidence of her own culpability it’s doubtful she argued against it. Not that it matters. The Nuremberg defense (“I was just following orders”) shouldn’t work for the cover-up any more than the torture regime itself.

It’s unlikely there will ever be any real accountability for the depraved torture program of the post-9/11 years. George W. Bush granted immunity in 2006 to all CIA agents who worked on the program, and while Barack Obama denounced torture he said he held “a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” and let it go. We all know how Donald Trump feels about torture: He loves it. The president has repeatedly insisted that torture works and has said he would do far worse than waterboarding if he had the chance. Rewarding someone who was intimately involved in the torture program and the cover-up by handing her the reins of America’s most important intelligence agency proves he’s serious about that.

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A game of hide the privilege
by Tom Sullivan

This poster from the era of the Dawes Rolls advertised land for Native Americans prompting opportunistic white men to pay to be Indian, via Indian Country Today.

My roommate cracked up.

I said I’d told my mother about a friend who’d gotten another kid into treatment. The other kid was a junkie. She grew visibly uncomfortable at the idea that I knew people with … “problems.” She couldn’t say the word junkie.

“Problems?! Problems, man?!” my roommate burst out laughing, waving his hands about wildly.

“The guy’s a junkie! He’s got a two bag a day habit! You could say he’s got problems!!”

Then in his twenties and attending an upscale university, as a teenager in Boston he’d been a heroin user himself.

All these years later, it’s still a thing in white suburban communities that they don’t engage topics that make them uncomfortable. It’s their privilege not to.

Washington Monthly‘s Nancy LeTourneau points to a school controversy outside Milwaukee over a Martin Luther King Day assembly exercise. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported that parents in the mostly white community of Oconomowoc complained about the discussion of privilege in society:

Oconomowoc Superintendent Roger Rindo said he was directed by board members during a closed-door, executive session shortly after the Jan. 15 assembly not to allow future activities around the topic of privilege except in classrooms where it is related to a specific course and teachers can provide appropriate context.

Like the all around us kind of context?

White parents must have turned up the heat:

The timing of the board’s edict, just weeks before the February resignation of Principal Joseph Moylan, has fueled speculation that Moylan was pushed out in part for allowing the student-led exercise during the assembly Jan. 15.

Board member Steven Zimmer, a friend and supporter of Moylan, also resigned, in protest. He said last week that he “disagreed with the way board members used the MLK Day assembly to push (Moylan) out.”

The January 15 assembly included an exercise featuring a “privilege aptitude test” from the National Civil Rights Museum. The introduction explains:

The following exercise invites you to try to contemplate as to how our lives are different from the lives of others due to the privileges with which we live or privileges we have not. Each of these questions are relevant to your race, class, creed, gender, religion, or sexual orientation.

Sorry. Not allowed. What keeps this union from becoming more perfect is stifling discussion about unwritten social rules that make a mockery of “created equal.” How’s that for context?

You have to wonder what the ancestral residents of Oconomowoc might think about who is and who is not privileged.

* * * * * * * *

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

Limbaugh on Stephen Hawking’s passing

by digby

He waxed philosophical as only he can:

RUSH LIMBAUGH (HOST):  If there are questions we can ask to which we will never have the answers, then that gives me confidence that there is more than just life on Earth. What is the point of creating beings who can ponder such places if they don’t exist? Certainly the Big Bang.

Again, I’ll admit I’m just a college dropout radio guy, okay? I’m not a professional physicist. I’m not a professional scientist. I do not own a lab coat, white or light blue. So they tell me that the Big Bang is where everything began. Hawking says it’s the Big Bang and we’re still expanding.

[…]

Okay, the Big Bang. There was this whatever-size — call it a golf ball-, tennis ball-size of matter that banged and we’re all here. Where was it? Where was this glob of matter that banged that created the universe? Where was it? No, no, no. You can’t say, “It was in the void.” You can’t say it was in another dimension, parallel or otherwise, astral plane.

It had to be somewhere. Where was it? What was around it? Could you see it? Could somebody see this golf-ball-size bit of energy if they were not part of that? Could you be somewhere and see it?

Could you be somewhere and witness this Big Bang instead of being a part of it? If so, where were you? Well, since nobody could see it, how the hell do they know it really happened?

But I’m not supposed to ask that.

It’s hard for me to believe that anyone wants to listen to that idiotic drivel. But is everyone who does listen to it equally cretinous?

Well, the proof is in the pudding. Donald Trump is president. And Limabaugh remains one of the most influential political personalities in our culture. You do the calculations …

And we have to be grateful that he didn’t make fun of Hawking the way he and Trump usually mock those with physical disabilities. Of course he might have done it off the air. In fact, I’d bet money that he did.

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The Fox and Friends administration

by digby

Don’t say he didn’t warn us

On Ring of Fire with Sam Seder, we’ve been joking for weeks that Trump was going to end up staffing his administration entirely with Fox News personalities.

Uhm, well ..

Who’s next? What’s next? While Wednesday was a wee bit quieter than Monday and Tuesday, there were numerous stories about further White House shakeups to come. “We are told that there could be a ‘bloodbath,’ if not tomorrow, then Friday at the latest,” Fox’s John Roberts reported on “Special Report.” (Earlier in the day, Roberts was spotted heading to a lunch with VP Mike Pence. Maybe this is a complete coincidence, but the lunch had other W.H. reporters buzzing.)

Roberts also affirmed reporting by other outlets that H.R. McMaster could be replaced by John Bolton — who is currently a Fox News contributor.

Earlier in the day, another cable news commentator, CNBC’s Larry Kudlow, was confirmed as Trump’s pick to replace Gary Cohn…

Surprise!

Kudlow has been a mainstay of CNBC for almost 30 years. Naturally his first TV interview about the new job was with CNBC’s “Closing Bell.”

“I didn’t know” the announcement was happening on Wednesday, Kudlow said. “I wasn’t watching TV this morning. The president called and he said, ‘It’s out.’ Cuz I don’t think he was intending to put it out til tomorrow or Friday. I said ‘Oh.’ He said, ‘You’re on the air.’ He said, ‘I’m looking at a picture of you. Very handsome.’ So Trumpian!”

–> CNBC president Mark Hoffman wished Kudlow well in a memo…

“Trump TV is a pipeline for Trump hires”

Chris Hayes on “All In” Wednesday night: “Trump TV is a pipeline for Trump hires…” He pointed to Fox host turned State Dept spokeswoman Heather Nauert’s new promotion: “Despite having zero prior experience in diplomacy, Trump just installed Nauert as the acting undersecretary of the state for public diplomacy… In less than a year, Nauert has gone from ‘Fox & Friends’ to No. 4 at the State Department.”

NYT’s James Poniewozik tweeted: “I guess I owe President Trump an apology for all the remarks I made about how much time he spent watching cable TV, when in fact he was vetting future top advisers…”

Brian Lowry emails: The latest hirings/promotions invite the question: Has any president ever put more stock in people who opine on television? The closest analogy I can think of is professional football and basketball coaches, who tend to go back and forth between providing color-commentary/analysis and actual sideline gigs…

And the chaos continues…

On Wednesday Axios quoted an anonymous W.H. official saying “this is the most toxic working environment on the planet.” The WashPost’s Josh Dawsey tweeted that “officials have begun betting pools of sorts among each other on who’s getting ousted next.” He added: “Lot of people who are usually in the know are not in the know.” So take the leaks with grains of salt…

Hegseth next?

CNBC’s Jim Cramer had the scoop about his co-worker Kudlow earlier this week. Now there’s this: Fox contributor and Townhall editor Katie Pavlich says “Trump is expected to fire VA Secretary David Shulkin and is strongly considering replacing him” with Pete Hegseth, co-host of “Fox & Friends Weekend.”

These aren’t the first. Remember, he hired K.T. McFarland direct from Fox as his deputy National Security Adviser.

Could you ever have imagined something like this? It is insane.

*That report was from CNN’s Brian Stelter’s news letter.

Make ’em an offer they can’t refuse

by digby

Luca Brasi held a gun to his head, and my father assured him that either his brains or his signature would be on the contract. That’s a true story.




Trump’s new economic adviser Larry Kudlow on Trump’s tariffs, who appears to be back on his 100k a month blow habit:

“It’s a Trumpian way of negotiating. You knock them in the teeth and get their attention. And then you kind of work out a deal and I think that’s what he’s done. My hats off to him. He had me really worried. Now I’m not.”

That’s not negotiating. That’s something else entirely.

And the success of that particular “tactic” depends on the other guys not knocking you in the teeth right back. Or pulling out a gun and shooting you.

What in the hell is wrong with these people? Do they really believe that the United States is an invincible gangster state that can do anything it wants? Uhm. We’re not.

You know what happened to Luca Brasi, right?