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Month: June 2018

Friday Night Soother

Published by digby on June 2, 2018

Friday Night Soother

by digby

Look at it.  LOOK AT IT!!!

A rare Crowned Lemur was born at NaturZoo Rheine, Germany on May 7. This is the first time this species has reproduced successfully in this zoo.

The birth took place during daytime within the habitat called “Lemur-Forest”. The exhibit is also home to Ring-tailed Lemurs and Red-bellied Lemurs. All the co-inhabitants were separated to provide the birthing female with the least disturbances as possible. Later, she moved to the indoor-room, where she stayed for a few days to ensure full bonding with her baby and to allow time to get accustomed to her new maternal role. After a week, she was successfully reunited with the male Crowned Lemur and the other species in the exhibit.

Crowned Lemurs (Eulemur coronatus) are listed as “Endangered” by the IUCN. In Madagascar they are threatened by habitat destruction and hunting. European Zoos are cooperating within a coordinated breeding-programme (EEP) to maintain an “insurance population” of these lemurs, which in future might provide animals for re-stocking or release in their native range.

There are currently some 80 Crowned Lemurs in European zoos. The baby born at NaturZoo Rheine will contribute to this hopefully growing population.

The sex of the newborn is still unknown, and it might take several more weeks to determine. Male and female Crowned Lemurs are sexually dichromatic, with different pelage coloration especially on the head.

According to staff at NaturZoo Rheine, it doesn’t matter if there is a ‘prince’ or a ‘princess’ in their midst: either would be considered precious like crown-jewels.

Even more Lemur babies!

Ten years ago, Cotswold Wildlife Park’s interactive Lemur exhibit, “Madagascar”, officially opened to the public. On the exhibit’s anniversary, the Park’s Primate team is thrilled to announce the birth of a Collared Lemur, bringing the total numbers of Lemur breeding successes to 55 since the Madagascar exhibit officially opened a decade ago. Visitors can see the tiny newborn in the exhibit it shares with a troop of 18 other free-roaming Lemurs and nine Madagascan Birds.

To highlight the plight of the world’s most endangered Lemurs, Cotswold Wildlife Park will dedicate 26th May – 3rd June 2018 to ‘Lemur Week’. Its aim is to raise awareness and funds for the Park’s conservation projects helping to save the world’s most threatened Lemurs from extinction.

As part of ‘Lemur Week’, visitors will have the chance to name the new Collared Lemur baby, as well as take part in a variety of Lemur-themed activities. Read more about the Park’s conservation projects here: https://www.cotswoldwildlifepark.co.uk/conservation/.

Who Else Did Cohen Threaten And Pay Off? @spockosbrain

Published by Spocko on June 1, 2018
Who Else Did Cohen Threaten And Pay Off? 

by Spocko

It’s fun to mock Michael Cohen’s threats to Tim Mak. “He sounds like a third rate mob guy!”
Sam Seder, Michael Brooks and Alex Pareene did a good job of it on The Majority Report show today.

But listening to this recording really disturbed me.  For Trump threats work. Intimidation works. Threats are part of Trump’s business model. They are a key component of his negotiations. Winners and losers are determined by who has the upper hand when it comes to threats. The person who can threaten others most successfully wins.

After listening to Cohen and reading the article closely. I wondered:
1) Who else was intimidated?
2) Who else was paid off?
3) What types of intimidation were used?
4) Were there threats of violence?
5) How many of these threats were at Trump’s direction? 
6)  How much did Trump know about the implementation of the threats?”

Remember the Donald Trump rape lawsuit right before the election that went away? The accuser claimed he raped her when she was 13 back in 1994.

Reading the story at the time I remember thinking, “Who and what convinced her to drop the case?”

In the NPR Story Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign aide, defends Cohen.

“People like to paint him as some kind of a thug out of New York. He’s an attorney and he knows what he’s talking about,” said Caputo. “And I think while he might push the bounds of propriety in some people’s eyes … Michael sees the line and doesn’t cross it. “

Really? How do we know he didn’t cross “the line?” Whose definition of “the line” are we using here? Caputo’s?

We know that Cohen used “arrogance and bullying and threats and intimidation.”

Avenatti described how Cohen pressured Daniels into signing a document. Avenatti alleged in a March court filing that as news stories about the NDA were beginning to emerge in January, Cohen “through intimidation and coercive tactics, forced [Daniels] into signing a false statement” denying a previous sexual relationship with Trump.

Sam Nunberg, a political adviser close to Trump says Trump cultivated an aggressive environment and that Cohen “was supposed to say and act the way Donald wanted him to act.” (“I’m just following orders.”)

Powerful people get away with criminal acts by avoiding evidence of their connection to those criminal acts. We have all watched enough police procedurals to know to say things like, “Don’t tell me how you did it. I don’t want to know.”

In the world of politics the old phrase, “plausible deniability” is used to protect the top guy. What if the top guy can’t deny something based on hard evidence?

Smart, powerful people don’t put anything in writing, especially details of ordering an illegal act. They don’t want to know the details of an illegal act.  They talk in code because they know they are involved with illegal acts. When Tony Soprano asks Silvio,  “Did you take care of the thing with that girl from the place?” he knows that he is being recorded.

What evidence do we have that Trump is smart? Does he moderate his comments when it comes to his vindictiveness? We know he is, but what does he actual SAY about how to carry out his vindictiveness?

So what happens when law enforcement gets evidence that the client knew about the threats and even suggested them? What happens when the general public hears these threats directly?
When you have a history of getting away with threats, what do you do if you are on the verge of being caught?   It depends on how much power and money you have.

Trump knows he will be busted someday. Here is what he is doing now to control the damage to himself.

1) Granting pardons. “I will make that illegal thing you did go away. Trust me.”
2) Focusing on what are normal legal threats. “It was just saber rattling. It’s a bluff, just part of negotiation for deals.”
3) Redefine normal. “This is a standard business practice. It’s no big deal. Everybody does it.”
4) Play the Joker card. “I say a lot of outrageous things. I’m joking! I don’t expect people to do exactly what I say.”
5) Blame the other guy. “Hey if he broke the law that’s on him!”
6) Play the victim card. “This is a unfair! It’s a witch hunt. I’m the victim here!”

Threats Work In Multiple Ways

Some people think they wouldn’t be intimidated by a Michael Cohen. They have the truth, the law and God on their side. Great. Good for you, but threats scare the crap out of me. Legal threats, financial threats, threats against employment, threats against my family and their employment, vague future threats and physical threats. I’m easily intimidated.  I don’t have money for lawyers, bodyguards and a PR response team. Most people don’t. Trump knows this.

Trump has a long history of screwing people over financially. “Don’t like how I forced you to cut your price by 30 percent? Sue me!” How else does he want to hurt people?

Did Trump tell Cohen to have someone hurt? Killed? 

What lines didn’t Cohen cross for Trump?  Did Trump order lines to be crossed?

Let’s say, hypothetically, that we hear Trump ordering intimidation, legal threats, coercion and maybe physical violence.  What next?

  1. Expect there will be scores of people who will work to define legality, intention and the definition of words and phrases. Alan Dershowitz will be quoted a lot.
  2. Watch for lots of non-related whataboutisms “Well Obama ordered the bombing of…  “
  3. The media will include allegations and lies about Democratic candidates actions. “The Clinton campaign and George Soros hired thugs to…
  4. There will be acceptance and ADMIRATION for illegal acts. Especially ones that didn’t lead to prison time. This will be surprising to some but it is actually one of the things the base LIKES about Trump. They mock the left for not knowing how to do it.
     “Business people play hardball like this all the time. This is just the cost of doing business.” 

And of course their all time favorite distraction line, “But the Clintons…

The rich and powerful have multiple tools to avoid getting caught and punished. If they can’t avoid getting caught, they work to set the expectations of what is normal and acceptable.

What’s the counter to this cynical narrative?

  • Reject the normalization of intimidation tactics in business and politics
  • Demand that illegal acts be prosecuted now! ( Don’t wait until mid-terms and the replacement of complicit Republicans. Put the Republicans on the defensive NOW for accepting illegal acts.

Laws need to be fixed, repealed or recreated. Things that were illegal before and are legal now, can be made illegal again. Start talking about what those law are and WHY they are necessary NOW. 


What Was The Intent Of The Bullying and Threatening?

Why people do things matter. I don’t like to just focus on legality, since sometimes people break laws for noble reasons. Sometimes people say and do things for the good of their country, their family or their beliefs. Some even break laws that we generally agree with. But they might have an important, understandable reason or noble purpose for doing this. Laws were still broken and consequences accepted but a reasonable person could understand why. .

So let’s look at the intimidation actions that Trump ordered or accepted. “What were the reasons these acts were carried out? Who benefited? Were they for a noble cause?”

Some crises bring out the best in people. Others bring out the worst. What happens next isn’t just about how Trump reacts, it’s about how the Republicans in power act when they hear the voice of a man ordering a retaliation on another for his own selfish reasons.

—

I wrote this June 1, 2018 4:30 PDT. With time traveling it’s not good to reveal too much too soon. So I try to be either one hour early, 24 hours early or 6 days early with my “predictions.” so people can put them in context when they happen. Also, I get a cookie from Karoli when I’m right.

The UAE connection again

Published by digby on June 1, 2018

The UAE connection again

by digby

This thing just gets weirder and weirder:

White House Senior Adviser Jared Kushner’s longtime friend, Richard Gerson, has become a person of interest to Special Counsel Robert Mueller due to Gerson’s possible involvement in two meetings with Trump emissaries and foreign officials, according to a Friday NBC report.

Gerson was reportedly in the Seychelles in January 2017, near the time that Erik Prince met with officials from Russia and the United Arab Emirates, including Prince Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan. Gerson himself reportedly met with Prince Mohamed and communicated with businessman George Nader, a cooperating witness in Mueller’s investigation, who initially set up the Seychelles meeting.

A Gerson spokesman did not address the meetings with Prince Mohamed or communication with Nader, telling NBC only that Gerson was in the Seychelles for vacation and left before the Erik Prince meeting.

A month before that, Gerson reportedly met Nader when he attended a secret meeting at the Four Seasons in New York with Prince Mohamed, Kushner, former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, former White House adviser Steve Bannon and the U.A.E.’s ambassador to the U.S. Per NBC, The Obama administration only learned about the meeting after the fact, as the U.A.E. had broken protocol and not told the President that the prince was entering the country.

A spokesman for Gerson said that he was only at the Four Seasons to escort former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to the meeting to give a talk on Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Sure, that’s the ticket …

This involvement makes me think it really was something to do with Kushner and his cash flow problem. But who knows what these people were really doing?

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Master-negotiating for dummies

Published by digby on June 1, 2018

Master-negotiating for dummies

by digby


I guess this makes sense in Bizarro World:

President Trump campaigned on going hard after China for ripping off the United States on trade. Yet a year and a half into his presidency, Trump has put more tariffs on longtime U.S. allies than he has on China, his supposed “bad guy” on trade. The Trump administration announced new tariffs Thursday on the European Union, Canada and Mexico.

Almost all of the reaction has been negative. Many are calling it a political and economic mistake.

America’s allies are stunned, stocks slid on Wall Street as trade-war fears returned, and economists are warning that Americans will soon face higher prices on a wide variety of products. A slew of Republican lawmakers immediately trashed the move as bad for the economy and foreign relations.

“Europe, Canada & Mexico aren’t China. You don’t treat allies the same way you treat opponents. Blanket protectionism is a big part of why we had a Great Depression. ‘Make America Great Again’ shouldn’t mean ‘Make America 1929 Again.’ ” tweeted Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), joining an opposition that included many Republican officials and business groups.

Trump’s latest move takes the focus off China. Most countries (and U.S. lawmakers) agree with Trump that China isn’t playing fair on trade, but instead of turning the E.U. and Canada into allies in the trade fight against China, Trump is alienating them.

I think that maybe Trump (and his followers probably) simply sees this as another way he’s owning the libtards. The EU needs to knuckle under to their Dear Leader just like Mexicans, Blacks and Californians do. His supporters think he’s outmaneuvering China in some wily way that will end up benefiting them because Trump is just that clever.

Trump is telling our allies to get in line and kiss his big, beautiful hands.

I hope nobody thinks this is isolationism. It’s something else that starts with an “I”.

Update — Krugman on this mess:

So, the trade war is on. And what a stupid trade war it is.

My regular column for tomorrow is about health care, but I felt I needed to weigh in on this idiocy, and not just on Twitter.

The official – and legal – justification for the steel and aluminum tariffs is national security. That’s an obviously fraudulent rationale, given that the main direct victims are democratic allies. But Trump and co. presumably don’t care about telling lies with regard to economic policy, since that’s what they do about everything. They would see it as all fair game if the policy delivered job gains Trump could trumpet. Will it?

OK, here’s the point where being a card-carrying economist gets me into a bit of trouble. The proper answer about the job-creation or -destruction effect of a trade policy – any trade policy, no matter how well or badly conceived – is basically zero.

Why? The Fed is currently on a path of gradually raising interest rates, because it believes we’re more or less at full employment. Even if tariffs were expansionary, that would just make the Fed raise rates faster, which would in turn crowd out jobs in other industries: construction would be hurt by rising rates, the dollar would get stronger making U.S. manufacturing less competitive, and so on. So all my professional training wants me to dismiss the jobs question as off-base.

But I think this is a case where macroeconomics, even though I believe it’s right, gets in the way of useful discussion. We do want to know whether the Trump trade war is going to be directly expansionary or contractionary – that is, whether it would add or subtract jobs holding monetary policy constant, even though we know monetary policy won’t be constant.

And the answer, almost surely, is that this trade war will actually be a job-killer, not a job-creator, for two reasons.

First, Trump is putting tariffs on intermediate goods – goods that are used as inputs into the production of other things, some of which themselves have to compete on world markets. Most obviously, cars and other durable manufactured goods will become more expensive to produce, which means that we’ll sell less of them; and whatever gains there are in primary metals employment will be offset by job losses in downstream industries.

Playing with the numbers, it seems highly likely that even this direct effect is a net negative for employment.

Second, other countries will retaliate against U.S. exports, costing jobs in everything from motorcycles to sausages.

In some ways this situation reminds me of George W. Bush’s steel tariffs, which were motivated in part by hubris: the Bush administration thought of America as the world’s unchallengeable superpower, which we were in military terms; they failed to recognize that we were by no means equally dominant in economics and trade, and had a lot to lose from trade conflict. They quickly got schooled by an angry European Union, and backed down.

In Trump’s case I think it’s a different kind of illusion: he imagines that because we run trade deficits, importing more from other countries than they sell to us, we have little to lose, and the rest of the world will soon submit to his will. But he’s wrong, for at least four reasons.

First, while we export less than we import, we still export a lot; tit-for-tat trade retaliation will hurt a lot of American workers (and especially farmers), quite a few of whom voted for Trump and will now find themselves feeling betrayed.

Second, modern trade is complicated – it’s not just countries selling final goods to each other, it’s a matter of complex value chains, which the Trump trade war will disrupt. This will produce a lot of American losers, even if they aren’t directly employed producing exported goods.

Third, if it spirals further, a trade war will raise consumer prices. At a time when Trump is desperately trying to convince ordinary families that they got something from his tax cut, it wouldn’t take much to swamp whatever tiny gains they received.

Finally – and I think this is really important – we’re dealing with real countries here, mainly democracies. Real countries have real politics; they have pride; and their electorates really, really don’t like Trump. This means that even if their leaders might want to make concessions, their voters probably won’t allow it.

Consider the case of Canada, a small, mild-mannered neighbor that could be badly hurt by a trade war with its giant neighbor. You might think this would make the Canadians much more easily intimidated than the EU, which is just as much an economic superpower as we are. But even if the Trudeau government were inclined to give in (so far, top officials like Chrystia Freeland sound angrier than I’ve ever heard them), they’d face a huge backlash from Canadian voters for anything that looked like a surrender to the vile bully next door.

So this is a remarkably stupid economic conflict to get into. And the situation in this trade war is likely to develop not necessarily to Trump’s advantage.

Who needs clean air?

Published by digby on June 1, 2018

Who needs clean air?

by digby

I guess all those coal miners will be happy and that’s all that matters. They are Real Americans. But they will die too …

President Trump has ordered Energy Secretary Rick Perry to take “immediate steps” to prevent the further closures of coal energy plants around the U.S., the White House said Friday.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told Bloomberg News in a statement that the president had ordered the Department of Energy to take the measures due to a national security interest in securing the power grid’s resilience.

“President Trump has directed Secretary of Energy Rick Perry to prepare immediate steps to stop the loss of these resources, and looks forward to his recommendations,” Sanders said Friday.

Sanders added that “impending retirements of fuel-secure power facilities” pose a risk to national security and prompted Friday’s actions.

The statement from the White House comes hours after Bloomberg obtained a draft memo detailing a DOE plan to order grid operators to buy electricity from coal and nuclear plants that are at risk of retiring due to cheaper energy available from renewable energy sources and natural gas.

“Too many of these fuel-secure plants have retired prematurely and many more have recently announced retirement,” the 41-page memo reads.

Look at that again: a DOE plan to order grid operators to buy electricity from coal and nuclear plants that are at risk of retiring due to cheaper energy available from renewable energy sources and natural gas.

This is insane.

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“A bigger voice than ever”

Published by digby on June 1, 2018

“A bigger voice than ever”

by digby

Dinesh D’Souza was on Fox this morning and filled everyone in on what went down with the pardon:

The president said, “Dinesh, you’ve been a great voice for freedom,” and he said that, “I got to tell you man-to-man, you’ve been screwed.”

He said upon reviewing it, he felt a great injustice had been done and that using his power, he was going to rectify it, sort of clear the slate, and he said he just wanted me to be out there, to be a bigger voice than ever, defending the principles that I believe in.

Meanwhile, here how he’s using his power today:

Here’s a little bit of what we can expect from the great voice of the people, Dinesh D’Souza:

But as Vox helpfully lays out in this comprehensive piece, that’s nothing to the years and years of odious racist, xenophobic, rightwing propaganda which finally led him to be rejected even by many conservatives.

Until now. Trump has re-made him.

I fully expect to see Rush Limbaugh given the Medal of Freedom.

I’m not kidding.

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The Russia investigation and the president’s “awesome” power

Published by digby on June 1, 2018

The Russia investigation and the president’s “awesome” power

by digby







My Salon column this morning recaps the week in Russia madness:

For a short week, there was a lot of activity in the Russia investigation but because it’s all part of the Trump circus and Roseanne and Michael Cohen it kind of turned into a muddle. A few things happened that may be of serious significance and a few others might just be diversions that don’t amount to much. It’s unknown at this point which are which.

You will recall that the buzzword on everyone’s lips last week was the president’s oh-so-clever new slogan “Spygate.” The Department of Justice had succumbed to pressure to allow the president’s henchmen to see some highly classified information about the FBI’s use of a confidential informant in the early stages of the Russia investigation. After a bit of a brouhaha, it was agreed that members of both parties should see the information and everyone waited with bated breath to see what they learned.

The Democrats immediately said it was nothing and were naturally accused of being partisan hacks by the Republicans. But on Tuesday, retiring GOP House Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) told Fox News “I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got.” He went on CBS the next day and said “When the FBI comes into contact with information about what a foreign government may be doing in our election cycle, I think they have an obligation to run it out.”

Coming from the man who grilled Hillary Clinton for 15 hours over Benghazi, it seemed to carry some weight. Suddenly Trump’s congressional supporters were unavailable for comment and Fox News personalities Bill Hemmer and Judge Andrew Napolitano backed Gowdy. In one of his dozen or so media appearances, Giuliani declared that the president still demands to see the documents before he sits for an interview with Mueller but nobody paid any attention. The Trump fever swamp is still blathering about “Spygate” as if it’s real but everyone else has moved on.

Gowdy also said this about Jeff Sessions in his CBS interview on Wednesday:

“If I were the president and I picked someone to be the country’s chief law enforcement officer, and they told me later, ‘Oh by the way, I’m not going to be able to participate in the most important case in the office,’ I would be frustrated too. There are lots of really good lawyers in the country, he could have picked somebody else!”

Gowdy’s sycophantic comment dramatically undercut his shiny new image as a “man of integrity.” If you believe in the rule of law and the justice department’s independence, it doesn’t matter if the Attorney General is personally “participating” in the “biggest case in the office” since you have a Deputy Attorney General capable of handling it. Gowdy was obviously trying to curry favor with the president after throwing cold water on his clever new slogan. And it worked. Trump ignored his comments about “Spygate” but tweeted that quote adding that he wished he hadn’t hired Sessions.

That isn’t a big secret of course. Trump has made it crystal clear that he loathes Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation because he expected him to be his Roy Cohn and be his personal bodyguard and hatchet-man as Attorney General. But as it happens on Wednesday night the New York Times reported that he had not only threatened to fire him and then demeaned him in public, clearly hoping to get him to quit, he also asked him to rescind his recusal many months after the Special Prosecutor was appointed.

On Thursday Axios reported that wasn’t the only time. Trump apparently pressured Sessions to take the Russia investigation back under his control “on at least four separate occasions, three times in person and once over the phone.” He cajoled him with promises of wingnut glory:

Trump told Sessions he’d be a “hero” to conservatives if he did the “right thing” and took back control over the Russia investigation, according to two sources with knowledge of their conversations.

Trump also told Sessions he’d be a hero if he investigated Hillary Clinton, according to one of the sources.

Sessions is reportedly being protected from Trump’s wrath by some high level Republicans in the Senate and nobody is quite sure why Sessions is enduring all the humiliation and stubbornly clinging to the office. But it is a bit clearer now why Trump’s attorney Jay Sekulow transcribed so many queries about Sessions in his list of Mueller’s possible questions to ask the president. Sessions was interviewed by the Special Prosecutor for several hours. Perhaps he had a story to tell.

Meanwhile, we also learned that former Acting FBI director Andrew McCabe took notes of a meeting with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in which he claimed that Rosenstein said Trump had asked him to use Russia as a reason for firing former FBI director James Comey in the “recommendation” Trump asked him to write. The New York Times reported last September that Trump had drafted an earlier letter in which he referenced the Russia investigation so I’m not sure what is new about this —Rudy “loose lips” Giuliani blithely admitted that Trump fired Comey because he refused to publicly clear him in the Russia investigation. Trump himself, meanwhile, tweeted this:

This may be one of the most egregious examples of “you can believe me or you can believe your lyin’ eyes” yet. After all we’ve all seen the video where he says “when I decided to just do it [fire Comey], I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won” at least a hundred times.

Finally, there was the impetuous pardon of the odious right wing provocateur Dinesh D’Souza which Trump confidante Roger Stone (and possible defendant) helpfully explained was also about Russia:

It has to be a signal to Mike Flynn and Paul Manafort and even Robert S. Mueller III: Indict people for crimes that don’t pertain to Russian collusion and this is what could happen,” Stone said. “The special counsel has awesome powers, as you know, but the president has even more awesome powers.”

That’s a sentiment our imperious president, who uses his plenary pardon power just to show he can, undoubtedly loved to hear. But it doesn’t bode well for what we used to call the rule of law. Deciding what crimes can be prosecuted wasn’t one of the president’s “awesome” powers, at least until now. And the week isn’t quite over yet.

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Rush LImbaugh: telling Trump about the Russians

McCabe

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/us/politics/rosenstein-trump-comey-firing-mccabe-memo.html

Russia not the reason he fired Comey:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-again-insists-russia-probe-was-not-the-reason-he-fired-comey-despite-previous-comments-to-the-contrary/2018/05/31/03ae6444-64ca-11e8-a768-ed043e33f1dc_story.html?utm_term=.1bebc146e277

pardon

Plenary power

Remember: Dowd offered pardons.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/28/us/politics/trump-pardon-michael-flynn-paul-manafort-john-dowd.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/05/trump-is-weaponizing-the-pardon-power/561617/

The Great Negotiator by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on June 1, 2018

The Great Negotiator
by Tom Sullivan

It has been clear from the outset of Donald Trump’s excellent adventure he is developmentally challenged, emotionally arrested, uninformed and mean. A walking id. His understanding of the world is utterly zero-sum. The rest of the world has to bow before him so he can win.

Canada and the European Union are some of America’s greatest and most faithful allies, not only in trade, but in security. So upon hearing of their response to new tariffs on steel and aluminum announced yesterday by the Donald Trump administration, this exchange from The Avengers sprang to mind:

Tony Stark : … and YOU, big fella, you’ve managed to piss off every single one of them.

Loki : That was the plan.

Tony Stark : Not a great plan.

The EU, Canada, and Mexico immediately announced retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods. The EU announced plans to take the U.S. to the World Trade Organization’s “trade court” to have Trump’s actions declared illegal.

Catherine Rampell writes in the Washington Post that his view of trade echoes the mercantilists of the 17th and 18th centuries before there was an America to be great:

Like an 18th-century mercantilist, Trump perceives no mutual gains from trade. In any transaction, he sees only a winner and a loser. And the winner is determined by who has the trade surplus.

Since there’s no way everyone could come out ahead, there’s no point in trying to create a system of rules oriented toward that outcome. Plus, he seems to believe everyone’s going to cheat anyway — including, and perhaps especially, our supposed friends.

So Trump is starting a trade war with them, labeling it a national security matter. Trade wars, as he’s told us confidently, are “good, and easy to win.”

Trump, Rampell continues, turns out to be as lousy a mercantilist as he is a negotiator. By protecting U.S. aluminum and steel, he is taxing inputs domestic manufacturers need to produce higher-value finished goods for export.

And steel and aluminum are hardly alone in this respect. In April, after Trump announced a list of 1,333 Chinese products that could be subject to tariffs, Peterson Institute for International Economics senior fellow Chad Bown found that about 85 percent of them were intermediate inputs and capital equipment.

Quoting Keynes, Rampell writes that men who fancy themselves independent thinkers are usually just slaves to some defunct economist. Trump cannot even get his anachronisms right.

Nor can the self-described dealmaker make deals. He’s proven better at breaking them than making them, John Lauinger and Pradnya Joshi write at Politico. Tony Schwartz, ghostwriter for Trump’s “The Art of the Deal,” received half the $500,000 advance and half the royalties with little haggling:

Now Trump is the president. And the people who know him and have worked with him and the experts who have studied his negotiating skills are unsurprised he’s having some trouble in his new role.

“He’s dealing with people that aren’t just trying to make money,” [biographer Gwenda] Blair said. “They’re elected politicians, heads of state, that have their own very demanding constituencies. It’s really very different than a strict dollars-and-cents motivation that he was dealing with before.”

“It takes a tremendous amount of knowledge and experience to get all these people to come together for a common goal. He doesn’t have any experience doing that,” [Bruce Nobles, the former president of the Trump Shuttle] said. “He just assumed his force of personality would cause people to forget politics. And that’s not the way it works.”

Trump just doesn’t get it, negotiation expert Marty Latz tells Politico. Trump relies on the power of positive thinking rather than on competence. If you keep saying something you will make it happen, or else spin what happens as what you wanted all along.

“If you knock Donald on his ass, he will tell you the best position to be in is on your ass,” Latz says.

With his start-up trade war, a lot of Americans who trusted Trump to cover theirs may find themselves knocked on theirs with him, and pumping their fists about how great it feels.

* * * * * * * *

For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Yo, Trump voters…

Published by digby on June 1, 2018

Yo, Trump voters…

by digby

Somebody from Alabama or South Carolina needs to go on Fox to educate the president about something important to their states
:

President Trump wants to impose a total ban on the imports of German luxury cars, according to a new report from CNBC and German magazine WirtschaftsWoche.

Several U.S. and European diplomats told the news outlets that Trump told French President Emmanuel Macron about his plans last month during a state visit.

Trump reportedly told Macron that he would maintain the ban until no Mercedes-Benz cars are seen on Fifth Avenue in New York.

Uhm:

A number of German automakers have plants in the U.S., including Mercedes-Benz in Alabama and BMW in South Carolina.

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Michael Cohen seems nice

Published by digby on June 1, 2018

Michael Cohen seems nice

by digby

You’ve read the words before, but you have to hear it to believe it:

TPM:

NPR on Thursday published a recording of a phone call between Trump fixer Michael Cohen and then-Daily Beast reporter Tim Mak, in which Cohen threatened Mak over a story he was writing.

Mak, now a reporter at NPR, included the audio as part of a report on Cohen’s history of threatening reporters with legal action.

Mak in 2015 had called Cohen for comment about President Donald Trump’s ex-wife Ivana Trump’s assertion in a divorce deposition that Trump had once raped her. Ivana Trump later said that she did not want the term to be “interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”

“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,” Cohen told Mak in the call. “And I will come after your Daily Beast and everybody else that you possibly know.”

“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?”

Your president’s personal lawyer, ladies and gentlemen.

Yesterday,in a Cohen court proceeding it was revealed that there were other tapes, possibly including the president.

I prefer to have a coke and a hot dog, myself, but you might want to lay in a nice supply of popcorn.

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