Month: March 2018

“That’s his problem, not mine”

by digby

This piece in the New Republic called “The Madman Summit” just about sums it up:

Donald Trump made his first appearance last Saturday night at the annual Gridiron Dinner, where the president customarily delivers a humorous speech to assorted journalists and Washington luminaries. Trump’s speech was characteristically logorrheic, a discursive string of bullying insults against Joe Biden (“I would kick his ass”) and Elizabeth Warren (“I didn’t like that Pocahantas”) that, in retrospect, contained gleaming diamonds of meaning. At one point, he broke the atmosphere of strained bonhomie with what appeared to be a serious discussion of the North Korea question. “I won’t rule out direct talks with Kim Jong-un,” he said. “I just won’t.” He then delivered his only genuinely funny joke of the evening: “As far as the risk of dealing with a madman is concerned, that’s his problem, not mine.”

It is funny, yes, but in a way that makes one queasy. On Thursday, the White House shocked the world with the announcement, made with zero fanfare by a South Korean official, that Trump would be holding direct talks with Kim within two months. Trump accepted Kim’s offer of talks seemingly on a whim; it had been conveyed to him earlier that day by the South Korean official, Chung Eui-yong, who had met with Kim in Pyongyang on Monday as part of an ongoing thaw between the two Koreas that began with the North’s participation in the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics. In an instant, the escalating tensions between Trump and Kim over the past year had evaporated, insults (“little rocket man”) and counter-insults (“mentally deranged dotard”) were forgotten, and the United States and North Korea were on a pell-mell track to diplomacy.

This should be a cause for relief. Instead it has led to confusion, bitter recriminations, and the unpleasant lurching sensation that has become so familiar in the turbulent flight of this presidency. Diplomats are appalled that Trump has done the whole thing backwards: Leaders usually meet at the end of a painstaking diplomatic process, coming together at the top of the mountain of spadework done by armies of anonymous bureaucrats. The United States has conducted virtually no preparatory work for this effort; in fact, the administration’s top North Korean expert resigned in February, “reportedly in frustration at being kept out of key policy meetings,” according to NBC News. It was only a few weeks ago, after all, that Vice President Mike Pence refused to stand to honor the North-South joint delegation at Pyeongchang, suggesting that the chill between the U.S. and the North was as frosty as ever.

Furthermore, it appears Trump has left some significant players out of the loop. The New York Times report on the talks contains this disturbing sentence: “Mr. Trump also plans to call President Xi Jinping of China.” China’s response to all this might be important, yes. It is only North Korea’s closest ally, one keen on keeping a buffer between itself and the U.S.-aligned South.

In contrast, Kim appears to be acting with great deliberation. He has initiated every step of this process, from the initial overture to South Korean President Moon Jae-in that resulted in the Olympics breakthrough, to the latest olive branch to Trump. Analysts have swooped down in droves to remind the public that North Korea has long desired a face-to-face meeting between its leader and a sitting American president, since it would be a mark of legitimacy and respect, a propaganda coup that would shrink the world’s colossus down to the size of its feistiest rogue state. When you account for the fact that North Korea is unlikely to wind down its nuclear program—the ultimate goal, for the U.S., of the talks—then it becomes clear that Trump may have fallen into a trap that Kim has laid, like a cackling Bond villain, with utter transparency. “Kim played Moon and is now playing Trump,” an Obama-era national security aide told the Times.

There seems to be little doubt that, in a battle of wits, the president would lose.

No doubt at all.

But maybe something positive will happen by sheer accident. You never know.

Catching up with Trump’s fixer

Department of Peace
by Tom Sullivan

The next president of the United States should reserve space on the mantle for a Nobel Peace Prize. The last president got his in the wake of George W. Bush. The next follows Donald J. Trump.

The world this morning tries to wrap its head around the prospect of the “mentally deranged U.S. dotard” bringing his bigger button to a summit meeting with “Little Rocket Man.” Trump has accepted an invitation to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to discuss, among other things, “permanent denuclearization” of the Korean peninsula.

South Korean national security adviser Chung Eui-yong made the announcement to reporters last night outside the White House:

“I told President Trump that in our meeting, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said he’s committed to denuclearization. Kim pledged that North Korea will refrain from any further nuclear or missile tests. He understands that the routine joint military exercises between the Republic of Korea and the United States must continue. And he expressed his eagerness to meet President Trump as soon as possible. President Trump appreciated the greeting, and said he would meet Kim Jong-un by May to achieve permanent denuclearization.”

Reports say the North Korean offer came not in a letter, but by telephone. A case of diplomatic telephone, Axios notes, with all the potential to lose meaning in the handoffs.

For some reason, there is much skepticism about the meeting actually taking place or that anything good will come of it.

Foreign Policy columnist Jeffrey Lewis observed in a tweet such a meeting is a longstanding goal of of Pyongyang: “This is literally how the North Korean film ‘The Country I Saw’ ends. An American President visits Pyongyang, compelled by North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs to treat a Kim as an equal.”

The reality show U.S. president may have accepted a role on Kim’s reality show.

Commenting on Trump’s “head-snapping display of incoherence,” former Weekly Standard contributor Max Boot writes in the Washington Post that talks are better than an exchange of missiles, but:

Moon and Kim have, for their own reasons, snookered the credulous American president into a high-profile summit that is likely to end in disaster one way or another. Kim is evidently willing to suspend his nuclear and missile tests while the talks are under way, but this is a minimal concession that can easily be reversed. He is most likely willing to do even that much only to buy time for his engineers to finish developing a nuclear warhead that can fit on an ICBM capable of reaching the U.S.

The Post’s David Ignatius runs through a list of Trump’s foreign policy messes created just one year into his term. Ignatius agrees talks beat “duck and cover,” but likens Trump to Wile E. Coyote, “Trump doesn’t seem to understand why the dynamite stick keeps blowing up in his hand.”

Adding to the prospects for failure, is anyone left in the State Department to waste their time trying to prepare Trump for summit where he’ll do whatever his gut tells him anyway?

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

Mainstreaming the alt-right, Part 765

by digby

Come on …

The term “globalist” has been used at the White House at least three times this week in reference to an outgoing Jewish Trump administration official, raising some eyebrows because the word is increasingly used in xenophobic and anti-Semitic contexts.

The word came up on Wednesday when a reporter asked White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders whether a similar candidate will take the place of Gary Cohn, the outgoing director of President Donald Trump’s National Economic Council.

“He was a noted free trader, a globalist. Will the president seek another globalist, another free trader?” Fox News reporter John Roberts asked.

This followed Mick Mulvaney, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, using the word “globalist,” in quotation marks, to describe Cohn in a statement that was tweeted by his department on Tuesday.

Mulvaney’s statement also noted that he was surprised to get along with Cohn, who he said ended up being “one of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with.”

The third instance came during a Cabinet meeting on Thursday, when Trump lauded Cohn as “a globalist,” while adding, “but I still like him.”

“He’s been terrific,” Trump said. “He may be a globalist, but I still like him. He’s seriously globalist, there’s no question, but you know what, in his own way he’s also a nationalist because he loves our country.”

The term can be used to describe someone who has universal or open-world beliefs, particularly in regard to trade or public policies, but it can carry a more sinister meaning for members of the far right.

Sure, but the man who popularized the term in Trump’s White House was Steve Bannon and I think we all know what he meant:

For the anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi members of the so-called “alt-right” white supremacist movement, “globalist” is a euphemism for “Jew.” It refers to the longstanding conspiracy theory about an international Jewish cabal working to undermine the traditional white family and Western culture by pushing for immigration and diversity.

A glossary of extremist language published by The New York Times places “globalism” among terms like “alt-right,” “antifa” and “cuck.”

“For the far right, globalism has long had distinct xenophobic, anti-immigrant, and anti-Semitic overtones,” the article states. “It refers to a conspiratorial worldview: a cabal that likes open borders, diversity and weak nation states, and that dislikes white people, Christianity and the traditional culture of their own country.”

I don’t think Trump knows this. But neither do I think he would care if he did.

I’m sure Stormfront enjoyed the jabs at Cohn, though. Trump is their guy for a reason.

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Surprise! He vetoed Miss Universe contestants from what he calls shithole countries

by digby

It’s been reported before that Trump had veto power over the finalists and winners in the Miss Universe pageant and he used it, often to help him nudge the government of the winner to help him with a business deal. He always uses whatever levers he has at his disposal to enhance his personal profit and Miss Universe is no exception. Neither is the US presidency.

However, he is also a stone cold racist with a strong white nationalist aesthetic. This is yet another excerpt from the Isikoff-Corn book, Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump:

Specifically, one former Miss Universe staffer tells them that Trump would personally “make changes” to the list of finalists “if there were too many women of color” on it.

Another former Miss Universe staffer similarly tells them that Trump would weed out candidates who were too “dark-skinned.”

“He often thought a woman was too ethnic or too dark-skinned,” the staffer explains. “He had a particular type of woman he thought was a winner. Others were too ethnic. He liked a type. There was Olivia Culpo, Dayanara Torres [the 1993 winner], and, no surprise, East European women.”

One former staffer does say, however, that Trump could be persuaded to change his mind about a woman of color being worthy of his pageant “by telling him she was a princess and married to a football player.”

Recall the New Yorker piece about the Playboy model Karen McDougal:

On the night of the Miss Universe pageant McDougal attended, McDougal and a friend rode with Trump in his limousine and the friend mentioned a relationship she had had with an African-American man. According to multiple sources, Trump remarked that the friend liked “the big black dick” and began commenting on her attractiveness and breast size.

His imagination runs in one direction.

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The right is now openly promoting Russian oligarchs

by digby

The Daily Caller is publishing op-eds by Russian oligarch and Putin crony Oleg Deripaska. An excerpt:

The ever-changing “Russia narrative” in American politics is today’s “Wag the Dog” scenario. Technology and the disintegration of evidence-based journalism permit a surprisingly small number of individuals to destroy bilateral or multilateral relations. Their motivation in shifting from an inconvenient reality into their desired reality is power and military-industrial commercial interests.

When I attended the Munich Security Conference in February, the extraordinary, coordinated message of a panel of U.S. senators was summarized by moderator Victoria Nuland, former assistant secretary of state under President Barack Obama, as: “Deep State-proud loyalists giv[ing] broad reassurance about continuity.” One of the panelists, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), said: “What the Breitbart crowd would call the ‘Deep State’ is what many of us would call ‘knowledgeable professionals.’” The panel’s uniform message was essentially: Ignore Donald Trump and increase your defense budget to 2 percent, because the generals who are ‘operationalizing policy’ remain in charge.

When you owe the world $18 trillion, the only way to get them to “pay 2 percent for defense” is to manufacture a boogeyman. Russian novelist and pacifist Leo Tolstoy observed: “There is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people.”

What has been inelegantly termed the “Deep State” is really this: shadow power exercised by a small number of individuals from media, business, government and the intelligence community, foisting provocative and cynically false manipulations on the public. Out of these manipulations, an agenda of these architects’ own design is born.

Unfortunately, I am personally familiar with this group. Before they moved to their current, bigger ambitions of reversing the U.S. presidential election results, they scurrilously attacked me and others from the shadows for two decades. The various story lines and roles they have created for me don’t survive close scrutiny and are internally inconsistent, yet they simply follow the “Wag the Dog” playbook: We don’t need it to prove to be true. We need it to distract them.

There’s more but it made my head hurt.

It’s out in the open which is refreshing. The American right wing is blatantly promoting Russian autocratic kleptocracy. They are innocent of all wrongdoing. It’s the US that is the evil empire now. That’squite a turnaround for the American right, I must say…

Trump did excuse Putin’s killing of journalists and political rivals by saying that “we kill people too” so this is all in keeping with that worldview. It’s all good, I guess.

Just … wow.

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Trump and the “hot for teacher” act

by digby

This excerpt from Michael Isikoff and David Corn’s new book called Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump is intriguing:

In June 2013, Trump arrived in Las Vegas to preside over the Miss USA contest, which was owned by the Miss Universe com­pany. Goldstone, Aras Agalarov and Emin were in town for the event. Emin posted a photo of himself outside Trump’s hotel off the Vegas strip wearing a Trump T-shirt and boasting a hat exclaim­ing “You’re Fired!” — the tagline from Trump’s hit television show, “The Apprentice.” Trump had yet to meet the Agalarovs. But when they finally got together in the lobby of his hotel, he pointed at Aras Agalarov and exclaimed, “Look who came to me! This is the richest man in Russia!” (Agalarov was not the richest man in Russia.)

On the evening of June 15, the two Russians and their British publicist were planning a big dinner at CUT, a restaurant located at the Palazzo hotel and casino. Much to their surprise, they received a call from Keith Schiller, Trump’s longtime security chief and confidant, informing them that his boss wanted to join their party. Sure, they said, please come.

At the dinner for about 20 people in a private room, Emin sat between Trump and Goldstone. Aras Agalarov was across from Trump. Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal attorney who acted as the businessman’s consigliere, was on the other side of Goldstone. Also at the table was an unusual associate for Trump: Ike Kaveladze, the U.S.-based vice president of Crocus International, an Agalarov company. In 2000, a Government Accountability Office report identified a business run by Kaveladze as responsible for opening more than 2,000 bank accounts at two U.S. banks on behalf of Russian-based brokers. The accounts were used to move more than $1.4 billion from individuals in Russia and Eastern Europe around the globe in an operation the report suggested was “for the purpose of laundering money.” His main client at the time was Crocus International. (Kaveladze claimed the GAO probe was “another Russian witch-hunt in the United States.”)

Trump was charming and solicitous of his new partners. He asked Aras what kind of jet he owned. A Gulfstream 550, Aras answered. But the Russian billionaire quickly noted that he had a Gulfstream 650 on order. “If that was me,” Trump replied, “I would have said I was one of only one hundred people in the world who have a Gulfstream 650 on order.” It was a small Trumpian lesson in self-promotion. And Trump, proud of himself, turned to Goldstone to emphasize his point: “There is nobody in the world who is a better self-promoter than Donald Trump.”

After the dinner, part of the group headed to an after-party at a raunchy nightclub in the Palazzo mall called the Act. Shortly after midnight, the entourage arrived at the club. The group included Trump, Emin, Goldstone, Culpo, and Nana Meriwether, the outgoing Miss USA. Trump and Culpo were photographed in the lobby by a local paparazzi. The club’s management had heard that Trump might be there that night and had arranged to have plenty of Diet Coke on hand for the teetotaling Trump. (The owners had also discussed whether they should prepare a special performance for the developer, perhaps a dominatrix who would tie him up on stage or a little-person transvestite Trump impersonator. They nixed that idea.)

The group was ushered to the owner’s box, where Emin had an unusual encounter. Alex Soros, the son of George Soros, the bil­lionaire philanthropist who funded opposition to Putin, was there as Meriwether’s date. Emin started chatting with Soros and invited him to visit him in Moscow. “You should know,” Soros replied, “I’m no fan of Mr. Putin.” And, he added, he was a big admirer of Mikhail Khodorkovsky — the oligarch turned Putin critic then serving time in a Siberian prison. Emin laughed it off.

The Act was no ordinary nightclub. Since March, it had been the target of undercover surveillance by the Nevada Gaming Con­trol Board and investigators for the club’s landlord — the Palazzo, which was owned by GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson — after complaints about its performances. The club featured seminude women performing simulated sex acts of bestiality and grotesque sadomasochism — skits that a few months later would prompt a Nevada state judge to issue an injunction barring any more of its “lewd” and “offensive” performances. Among the club’s regular acts cited by the judge was one called “Hot for Teacher,” in which naked college girls simulate urinating on a professor. In another act, two women disrobe and then “one female stands over the other female and simulates urinating while the other female catches the urine in two wine glasses.” (The Act shut down after the judge’s ruling. There is no public record of which skits were performed the night Trump was present.)

Obviously, it doesn’t mean that the Moscow incident mentioned in the Steele dossier happened. But I could easily see Trump sitting with Agalarov around the table watching the tableau and telling him that he’d love to see someone do that to Obama, hahaha… Maybe it clearly turned him on, who knows? But it’s certainly something that someone like Agalarov would make note of if they were looking for ways to compromise a thoroughly corrupt rich American with obvious political ambitions.

Update: An Instagram of Trump at the club that night

International Women’s Day at the White House

by digby

The president did that more women are working and are making more money by way of acknowledging the day.

Stormy Daniels has more work than she can handle. And she’s probably about to come into some serious money. So yeah, at least one women is benefiting from Trump’s presidency.

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When bragging about the presidents big hands get you into trouble

by digby

Ooops:

Sarah’s Fatal Lapse: “I can share that the arbitration was won in the president’s favor.” pic.twitter.com/PwqLiySk4R

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 8, 2018

President Donald Trump is upset with White House press secretary Sarah Sanders over her responses Wednesday regarding his alleged affair with porn star Stormy Daniels, a source close to the White House tells CNN.

Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, filed suit against
On Wednesday, Sanders told reporters that the arbitration was won “in the President’s favor.” The statement is an admission that the nondisclosure agreement exists, and that it directly involves the President. It is the first time the White House has admitted the President was involved in any way with Daniels.

“POTUS is very unhappy,” the source said. “Sarah gave the Stormy Daniels storyline steroids yesterday.”

It’s very unfair for the president to blame her for saying what was obvious. But I can’t feel sorry for her. She is a truly awful press secretary who lies as easily as she breathes. That she mistakenly told the truth yesterday doesn’t absolve her even if Trump is even worse.

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