Month: September 2018

That monkey comment wasn’t an accident

by digby

Recall that President’s Trump’s poodle Ron DeSantis was widely condemned for saying that he didn’t think his African American opponent for the governorship of Florida should be allowed to “monkey up” the state.

If you lie down with racist dogs you get racist fleas

Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), a gubernatorial nominee who recently was accused of using racially tinged language, spoke four times at conferences organized by a conservative activist who has said that African Americans owe their freedom to white people and that the country’s “only serious race war” is against whites.

DeSantis, elected to represent north-central Florida in 2012, appeared at the David Horowitz Freedom Center conferences in Palm Beach, Fla., and Charleston, S.C., in 2013, 2015, 2016 and 2017, said Michael Finch, president of the organization. At the group’s annual Restoration Weekend conferences, hundreds of people gather to hear right-wing provocateurs such as Stephen K. Bannon, Milo Yiannopoulos and Sebastian Gorka sound off on multiculturalism, radical Islam, free speech on college campuses and other issues.

“I just want to say what an honor it’s been to be here to speak,” DeSantis said in a ­27-minute speech at the 2015 event in Charleston, a video shows. “David has done such great work and I’ve been an admirer. I’ve been to these conferences in the past but I’ve been a big admirer of an organization that shoots straight, tells the American people the truth and is standing up for the right thing.”

The Florida gubernatorial campaign is one of the marquee races of 2018, pitting DeSantis, a Trump acolyte and lawyer in the Navy Reserve, against Andrew Gillum, the mayor of Tallahassee, who would become the state’s first African American governor. President Trump has endorsed DeSantis, and Gillum is backed by progressive leader Bernie Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont. In less than two weeks since the primary, race has become a central issue in the nation’s largest battleground state.

The Freedom Center covered DeSantis’s expenses for the 2017 conference at a luxury resort in Palm Beach, according to disclosure forms he filed as a member of Congress.

Fellow speakers included a former Google engineer who was fired after arguing that “biological causes” in part explain why there are relatively few women working in tech and leadership; a critic of multiculturalism who has written that “,Europe is committing suicide” by welcoming large numbers of refugees and immigrants; and a British media personality who urged the audience to keep the United States from becoming like the United Kingdom, where “discrimination against whites is institutionalized and systemic.”

Requests to the campaign and the congressional office to interview DeSantis was declined. A spokeswoman for the congressman, Elizabeth Fusick, provided a statement that described DeSantis as “a leader in standing up for truth and American strength.”

“He appreciates those who support his efforts and is happy to be judged on his record,” Fusick said. “He does not, though, buy into this ‘six degrees of Kevin Bacon’ notion that he is responsible for the views and speeches of others.”

Yeah, well:

Last May, after DeSantis lamented the “four liberals” on the Florida Supreme Court who overturned the death sentence of a man convicted of raping and murdering a child because the decision had not been unanimous, a DeSantis supporter suggested “bring[ing] back the hanging tree.”

When the Tampa Bay Times asked for clarification on DeSantis’s position on the issue, the campaign said it stood by the “hanging tree” comment.

“Ron thinks that Floridians should be forgiven for having some pretty strong and not at all politically correct feelings about what should happen to this animal. Let’s be clear; we’re talking about someone who kidnapped, raped and murdered an 11-year-old girl,” the campaign said in a statement. “The Florida Supreme Court’s decision was appalling and demonstrates once again why we need someone like Ron DeSantis, who stared down terrorists while serving in the Navy in Iraq and at the terrorist detention center in Guantanamo Bay, to appoint constitutionalists who will apply the law correctly.”

DeSantis was also recently outed as the former moderator of a Facebook groupthat was a hotbed for racist memes and posts.

That last is really the put-away shot. He and the GOP Senate candidate in Virginia were both moderators of this racist Facebook group. You don’t join such a group much less help run it if you are not a stone cold racist. That is what he is.

By the way, he’s very close to Trump, defending him against the Russia investigation as if he is personally implicated. That’s because he is.

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The Emperor has a lovely wardrobe and he wears it so well

by digby

Sycophants on parade:

Former Trump aide @OMAROSA Manigault Newman reveals new audio from Oct. 2017 of what she says is Pres. Trump speaking to his communications team about alleged campaign finance violations on the part of the Hillary Clinton campaign. https://t.co/kv965e6siJ pic.twitter.com/bVHOfoHirq

— The View (@TheView) September 10, 2018

Omarosa Manigault Newman released a new audio recording of President Donald Trump in an appearance on ABC’s “The View,” in which the president “crashed” a meeting of White House communications staffers and talked to them of how it was Hillary Clinton who was linked to collusion with Russia.

The meeting took place in October of 2017, Manigault Newman said.

“I think Hillary is getting killed now with Russia. The real Russia story is Hillary and collusion,” Trump said during the recording before talking about the amount that a law firm was paid to gather opposition research on the president.

The firm, Perkins Coie, was working on behalf of Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, and hired Fusion GPS in 2016. Fusion GPS subcontracted with former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele to collect information, and he eventually produced a dossier that outlined Trump’s ties to Russia.

In the recording, Trump says that “somebody told me it was $9 million they spent on the phony report,” and alleges that it was a campaign finance violation.

“So the whole Russia thing, I think, seems to have turned around. What do you think Sarah?” Trump is heard, directing his question at Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who replies, “Absolutely.”

If he were a normal president I would think he was giving his communications staff their marching orders in a way that provides plausible deniability. But he doesn’t need to be this subtle. He tweets his marching orders to them every single day.

He was just looking for reassurance. And he got it.

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Lyin’ Trump on trade

by digby

Trump blathered ignorantly over the weekend about forcing Ford to bring its manufacturing back to the US.

“Ford has abruptly killed a plan to sell a Chinese-made small vehicle in the U.S. because of the prospect of higher U.S. Tariffs.” CNBC. This is just the beginning. This car can now be BUILT IN THE U.S.A. and Ford will pay no tariffs!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 9, 2018

Ford responded:

It would not be profitable to build the Focus Active in the U.S. given an expected annual sales volume of fewer than 50,000 units.

CNN explains:

The Trump administration has imposed tariffs on $50 billion worth of Chinese goods, including some automobiles, in a move Trump has touted as necessary to punish Beijing for what he says are its unfair trade practices and intellectual property theft. China has retaliated in kind, and Washington and Beijing have continue to ratchet up threats of more tariffs.

Ford spokesman Michael Levine said the Focus Active is built in Europe. The company had plans to begin making the vehicle in China in the latter half of 2019 and exporting them to the US market.

But Ford said last month that it was scrapping that plan because Trump’s tariffs would make the cars too expensive.

The company also reaffirmed that it has no plans to start making the car on US soil. It will continue to sell the vehicle outside the states.

If the U.S. sells a car into China, there is a tax of 25%. If China sells a car into the U.S., there is a tax of 2%. Does anybody think that is FAIR? The days of the U.S. being ripped-off by other nations is OVER!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 9, 2018

China has actually imposed a 25% tariff on top of the usual 15% because of Trump’s trade war. US is charging 2.4% plus 25% on top also because of Trump’s trade war.  He is an imbecile who has no clue about tariffs and apparently nobody can teach him … or stop him.

CNBC auto reporter Phil LeBeau said on MSNBC earlier today:

[How to deal with the fact that the president doesn’t understand the cause and effect of tariffs] is a good question.

This is the reason you rarely hear from auto executives. Why? Because a) they’re worried that the minute they say something it will be misconstrued and b) they are worried they’ll become a target for the Trump administration.

As a result, you rarely hear from auto executives. I would say the last year and a half is one where you get a lot of “we can’t really talk, here’s what’s going on, you understand our position.”

Think about that. American auto executives are terrified of the US president tweeting some nonsense or enacting punitive measures because he has no clue what he’s talking about. He’s a wrecking ball who has one dim idea that makes little sense, based upon made up statistics, and if anyone challenges him he sees it as a personal betrayal and sets out to destroy them.

If populists want the government to take an active role in regulating the markets to the benefit of the working man it would seem to me to be a requirement that the person making those decisions not be a cretinous moron.

*Standard disclaimer: tariffs can be a very useful tool, but trade is complicated and in the hands of an imbecile, they do more harm than good.

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Bannon’s latest play

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

Here’s a story that won’t merit a lot of discussion in the American press because our political circus and culture war is so loud and raucous that we can’t hear much else:

Sweden headed for a hung parliament after an election on Sunday that saw the popularity of the nationalist Sweden Democrats surge, as one of Europe’s most liberal nations turns right amid fears over immigration.

Sweden is a social-democratic nation with excellent services, benefits and a very high standard of living. Most Swedish citizens have traditionally held very liberal views on just about everything. But the far right made big gains in this year’s election because of immigration and, frankly, race. That’s what right-wing “nationalism” in 2018 comes down to. Welcome to our world.

Sweden isn’t the first European country to go this way in recent years. Hungary, Austria, Italy and (in its own manner) Britain have taken rightward turns, and those political movements are picking up steam all over the world. I won’t try to analyze the reasons for this. There are hundreds of people trying to sort out where all this is coming from. Let’s just say there are tectonic forces at play, from migration caused by war, economic dislocation and climate change to income inequality, corruption and God knows what else. But regardless of the reasons, there is no doubt that something is afoot and it’s gaining ground.

Here in the United States, our version of this phenomenon is Trumpism, an especially cartoonish form of the right-wing nationalism we see elsewhere. Donald Trump is a ridiculous celebrity with a simple-minded set of talking points he’s been spouting for decades, along with some recently acquired hate-radio tropes deployed to get his followers excited. Nonetheless, Trumpism is best understood as a variant of the global “alt-right” movement devoted to martial chauvinism, authoritarianism, anti-liberalism, nativism and racism. Perhaps the primary exponent of the current U.S. iteration is former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who is also the former chairman of Breitbart News and now a propaganda filmmaker.

Bannon’s last foray into electoral politics didn’t end well when he went down to Alabama to stump for Judge Roy Moore in his ill-fated Senate race. You may recall that his pitch was almost entirely a series of attacks on the Republican leadership:

Steve Bannon: “There’s a special place in hell for Republicans who” don’t support Roy Moore. #alsen #alpolitics pic.twitter.com/p2NnbGSMh5

— American Bridge (@American_Bridge) December 12, 2017

Bannon has been traveling all over Europe the past few months, making contacts and forming alliances with the various right-wing movements across the Atlantic, observing how they become dominant in their respective conservative coalitions and forming a new organization he calls “the Movement.” Now he has rushed back to the U.S. to join the midterm fray, hoping to foment the paranoia and grievance that defines both Trump and his followers and to reframe the November election as a war for survival.

This weekend saw the release date of Bannon’s new film, “Trump@War.” It portrays the Democrats and the media as allied against Donald Trump and, by association, his followers. This strategy goes hand in hand with Bannon’s recent proclamation that the Republicans need to run on impeachment.

There’s good reason to believe Bannon is doing at least some of this in order to get back in Trump’s good graces, but according to Jonathan Swan at Axios, it isn’t working. Or at least it hasn’t up until now. However, the second front in Trump’s war may prove to be more fruitful. In an interview with Reuters over the weekend, Bannon described the New York Times’ recent anonymous op-ed by a senior administration official as an attempted “coup” and compared Trump to Abraham Lincoln, which he knows the president loves:

“What you saw the other day was as serious as it can get. This is a direct attack on the institutions,” Bannon said during a flying visit to Italy. “This is a coup, okay … This is a crisis. The country has only ever had such a crisis in the summer of 1862 when General McClellan and the senior generals, all Democrats in the Union Army, deemed that Abraham Lincoln was not fit and not competent to be commander in chief,” Bannon said. “There is a cabal of Republican establishment figures who believe Donald Trump is not fit to be president of the United States. This is a crisis.”

He also claimed that he’s not a “conspiracy guy,” which will come as a surprise to anyone who’s read his writings or watched his films.

Bannon is a white nationalist propagandist who has openly proclaimed that he wants to create chaos and blow up the existing world order and start over. If he had never been involved with the Trump campaign and hired into the White House he would probably be dismissed as a pseudo-intellectual Alex Jones. But the imprimatur of his association with the president gives him credibility in foreign capitals and could very well be influential in the Trump White House once again if this spirited defense against virtually everyone — the Democrats, the media and the GOP establishment — convinces Trump that he’s a loyal soldier after all.

The fight between Trump and the Democrats is a natural political battle, and Trump has repeatedly insisted that he views the media as his enemy. But the ongoing leaking from Trump insiders and the anonymous op-ed could represent a tremendous opportunity for Bannon to flog his crusade against the Republican establishment, which he has considered to be Job One since his Breitbart days.

But he may have been spending too much time in Europe lately. Bannon has apparently failed to notice that if at one point there was a civil war within the Republican Party, the establishment has unconditionally surrendered. No Republican with any institutional power has done a thing to stop Trump. Some insiders have leaked self-serving stories to the press in order to reassure waffling suburban Republicans that they needn’t worry about Trump blowing up the world. That looks a lot like an effort to help the party keep control and further empower his administration.

Sure, Trump is a crude demagogue. But Republicans have been priming the resentments of their white racist base for decades. How much of a surprise can this really be? The program he’s enacting is their program, which they can’t bring themselves to oppose no matter how crazy he sounds. They’re just worried about losing those voters who find Trump to be too boorish. He doesn’t understand that you’re supposed to dog-whistle this stuff so you don’t humiliate the nice suburban Republicans in front of the neighbors.

Bannon has said that the far-right European parties are about a year ahead of the United States. He’s got that wrong. The European right may be getting its mojo back after a long hiatus, but the American right has been pushing a racist, nationalist politics for decades. It’s just talking about it more openly now.

The Money Laundering Question

by digby

David Leonhardt in the New York Times brings up the elephant in the room:

Donald Trump has a long history of doing what he thinks is best for Donald Trump. If he needs to discard friends, allies or wives along the way, so be it. “I’m a greedy person,” he has explained.

It’s important to keep this trait in mind when trying to make sense of the Russia story. Trump’s affinity for Russia, after all, is causing problems for him. It has created tensions with his own staff and his Republican allies in Congress. Most voters now believe he has something to hide. And the constant talk of Russia on television clearly enrages Trump.

He could make his life easier if only he treated Vladimir Putin the way he treats most people who cause problems — and cast Putin aside. Yet Trump can’t bring himself to do so.

This odd refusal is arguably the biggest reason to believe that Putin really does have leverage over Trump. Maybe it’s something shocking, like a sex tape or evidence of campaign collusion by Trump himself. Or maybe it’s the scandal that’s been staring us in the face all along: Illicit financial dealings — money laundering — between Trump’s business and Russia.

The latest reason to be suspicious is Trump’s attacks on a formerly obscure Justice Department official named Bruce Ohr. Trump has repeatedly criticized Ohr and called for him to be fired. Ohr’s sin is that he appears to have been marginally involved in inquiries into Trump’s Russian links. But Ohr fits a larger pattern. In his highly respected three-decade career in law enforcement, he has specialized in going after Russian organized crime.

It just so happens that most of the once-obscure bureaucrats whom Trump has tried to discredit also are experts in some combination of Russia, organized crime and money laundering.

It’s true of Andrew McCabe (the former deputy F.B.I. director whose firing Trump successfully lobbied for), Andrew Weissmann (the only official working for Robert Mueller whom Trump singles out publicly) and others. They are all Trump bogeymen — and all among “the Kremlin’s biggest adversaries in the U.S. government,” as Natasha Bertrand wrote in The Atlantic. Trump, she explained, seems to be trying to rid the government of experts in Russian organized crime.

I realize that this evidence is only circumstantial and well short of proof. But it’s one of many suspicious patterns about Trump and Russia. When you look at them together, it’s hard to come away thinking that the most likely explanation is coincidence.

Consider: The financially rickety Trump Organization, shunned by most mainstream banks, long relied on less scrupulous Russian investors. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Donald Trump Jr. said a decade ago. “We have all the funding we need out of Russia,” Eric Trump reportedly said in 2013. And what was the rare major bank to work with Trump? Deutsche Bank, which has a history of illegal Russian money laundering.

Trump also had a habit of selling real estate to Russians in all-cash deals. Money launderers like such deals, because they can turn illegally earned cash into a legitimate asset, usually at an inflated price that rewards the seller for the risk. One especially dubious deal was Trump’s $95 million sale of a Palm Beach house to a Russian magnate in 2008 — during the housing bust, only four years after Trump had bought the house for $41 million.

Then there is Trump’s paranoia about scrutiny of his businesses. He has refused to release his tax returns. He said that Mueller’s investigation would cross a red line by looking into his finances. When word leaked (incorrectly) that Mueller had subpoenaed Deutsche Bank’s records on Trump, he moved to fire Mueller (only to be dissuaded by aides). Trump is certainly acting as if his business history contains damaging information.

Leonhardt speaks with Adam Schiff who wants to investigate all this in the ew congress.

This movie goes into it:

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Raw material
by Tom Sullivan

Now that you have dispatched your morning texts, calls, e-faxes, whatevs to your senators demanding they stop Judge Brett Kavanaugh from ascending to the highest court in the land, consider another reason for doing it. Besides what he’s likely to do to women’s rights. (Should you require more motivation, I echo Michael Tomasky’s recommendation that if you haven’t read the Slate post by Lisa Graves, a Democratic Senate staffer who wrote some of those stolen emails, take a couple of minutes.)

Grover Norquist in his heyday dreamed of rolling back the 20th century and returning America not to the 1950s, but to the McKinley era. William Grieder wrote about Norquist’s vision:

Governing authority and resources are dispersed from Washington, returned to local levels and also to individuals and private institutions, most notably corporations and religious organizations. The primacy of private property rights is re-established over the shared public priorities expressed in government regulation. Above all, private wealth–both enterprises and individuals with higher incomes–are permanently insulated from the progressive claims of the graduated income tax.

Industrial giants would be free at last (again) to strip-mine the economy, plunder natural resources, and re-establish the natural order of land barons and serfs.

With Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, new Gilded Age corporate behemoths will have the protection of the Supreme Court for another generation, as they have for the last. Valued at $1 trillion, Amazon is one, writes Kelly Weill for Daily Beast. The one-time online bookstore is now everywhere. After acquiring Whole Foods, Amazon now sells groceries its employees cannot afford to eat:

“In the last three years we have experienced layoffs, job consolidations, reduced labor budgets, poor wage growth, and constantly being asked to do more with less resources and now with less compensation,” Whole Foods workers in a pro-union group wrote in a letter to colleagues, which was shared with The Daily Beast.

The letter took aim at Amazon CEO Bezos, describing “majority of his workers” as living “paycheck to paycheck.”

More than one in ten of Amazon’s fulfillment center employees in Ohio are eligible for SNAP benefits. (Amazon argues those employees work part-time.) Ohio celebrated the center as a boon for job creation and handed Amazon over $17 million in tax breaks, with $125 million more on the way.

West Licking Fire Station 3 makes runs to the Amazon.com Inc. warehouse 20 miles east of Columbus about once a day to treat employees (more often during the holiday season). “Shortness of breath. Chest pains. Myriad minor injuries,” the fire district administrator told Bloomberg last fall. The company pays no property taxes to support the service. Locals do.

via GIPHY

The drive for profit über alles gets better, Weill writes:

Workers at Amazon fulfillment centers elsewhere have complained of dangerously hot facilities and impossible deadlines that left employees peeing into garbage cans and water bottles to avoid taking bathroom breaks. White-collar Amazon workers complained of a similar ethos at their desk jobs. In a 2015 New York Times report, corporate employees complained of punishing workloads and saw “nearly every person” crying at their desk, 80-hour work weeks, and a competitive work environment that encouraged employees to sabotage their colleagues.

The American Dream, baby.

Sen. Bernie Sanders has proposed the Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act (Stop BEZOS Act) to tax such employers for every dollar of public subsidy their employees receive. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s solution seems less like a band-aid, but neither seems viable in the short term.

“Amazon is raising a generation of precarious workers and that is against everything our union stands for,” Stuart Appelbaum, president of the RWDSU, told The Daily Beast in a statement. “We will not back down until Amazon workers are treated with dignity and respect.”

Whole Foods said it was receptive to employee concerns—but emphasized those rights on an individual, not a collective basis.

Fodder. Grist. Raw material. Inputs. Human “resources” is the worst.

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

One tweet away from Armageddon

by digby

When a simpleton runs the world:

According to Woodward, the president is obsessed by the fact that the U.S. pays $3.5 billion a year to station troops in South Korea as a first line of defense against the North. “I don’t know why they’re there,” he said at one meeting. “Let’s bring them all home.” At another meeting, Secretary of Defense James Mattis starkly why the U.S. has 28,000 troops in Korea: “We’re doing this in order to prevent World War III.”

“The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.” – President Trump at the United Nation, Sept. 19, 2017

The standoff with North Korea has been eased, for the moment, by the Singapore Summit, which brought together two leaders who had been trading nuclear threats and schoolyard insults.

Trump: “‘Rocket Man’ is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.”

The president later made that “Little Rocket Man” on Twitter, which he told Rob Porter “may be my best ever.” When Porter asked if it might provoke Kim, according to Woodward, the president replied, “It’s leader versus leader, man versus man, me versus Kim.”

The most dangerous moment of the standoff, Woodward says, came when the president went to work on another tweet: “He drafts a tweet saying ‘We are going to pull out dependents from South Korea … Family members of the 28,000 people there.'”

That tweet was never sent, because of a back channel message from North Korea that it would regard a pullout of dependents as a sign the U.S. was preparing to attack. “At that moment there was a sense of profound alarm in the Pentagon leadership that, ‘My God, one tweet and we have reliable information that the North Koreans are going to read this as an attack is imminent,'” Woodward said.

I wonder how that happened, exactly?

I mean, does the president draft foreign policy tweets and have people look them over? How did it come to pass that he never sent it? Did someone rush in with the “back channel” news that it would start World War III? Maybe the book answers that question. I hope so because I think we are all under the impression that Trump runs his twitter feed as he sees fit, with some assists from his social media guys who send out the odd endorsement tweet or anodyne public announcement. If he actually drafts them and circulates them it would be nice to know what that process is.

Anyway, assuming this is true, it’s scary as hell. Trump’s obsession with what he calls “wasting money” is based upon his total ignorance about …. well, everything. He came up with one big idea — that America is being screwed by other countries — about 30 years ago and is too goddamned dumb to ever learn anything else.

Recall this:

According to Woodward, Trump at one point asked his military leaders why the United States couldn’t just withdraw from the Korean Peninsula. They explained to him that it would mean we wouldn’t know about North Korean missile launches for 15 minutes rather than learning about them almost instantly, within seven seconds. This is the flap that led Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to reportedly suggest Trump was intellectually and temperamentally akin to “a fifth- or sixth-grader.”

What The Washington Post’s story Tuesday didn’t detail, though, is that this exchange didn’t happen early in Trump’s presidency; it came on Jan. 19, 2018 — almost exactly one full year into it. It came months after North Korea had threatened an attack on Guam, a U.S. territory in the Pacific Ocean. It also came a couple months after North Korea said it had developed a nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that could reach the continental United States.

What got Mattis’s goat, according to the book, was that he felt like they’d had this exact conversation many times before, and Trump refused to either remember or process it. As Mattis explained the reasons for a U.S.-South Korean alliance, Trump repeatedly returned to the idea that the United States is running a trade deficit with South Korea — suggesting the alliance was hurting the American economy. Mattis tried to explain that having troops in South Korea was actually the most cost-effective — and effective, period — means of preventing World War III. Trump, who often seems to misunderstand what exactly a trade deficit means, wouldn’t have it.

“But we’re losing so much money in trade with South Korea and others,” Trump pushes back at one point, according to Woodward.

At another: “We’re spending massive amounts for very rich countries who aren’t burden-sharing.”

And at another: “I think we could be so rich if we weren’t so stupid. We’re being played [as] suckers, especially NATO.”

Trump would argue this was merely him “question[ing] everybody and everything,” but it didn’t seem to come off that way to Mattis. According to Woodward’s reporting, it seemed to be Trump asking the same dumb middle-school-esque questions for the millionth time. And it drew a curt rebuke from Mattis that took those in the room aback.

The president of the United States is a stupid, spoiled rich heir to a fortune who never, ever picks up a tab, who tips like a miser and treats anyone without money like a servant. We all know people like that. That’s the vision he has for America. Only, in this case, he’s going to end up getting us all killed.

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The youngs aren’t having it

by digby

Trumpism, that is:

A contestant in the Miss America pageant says President Trump “has caused a lot of division” in the nation. Madeline Collins, Miss West Virginia, was asked an onstage question Friday night about what she feels is the most serious issue facing the nation.

“Donald Trump is the biggest issue our country faces,” she said. “Unfortunately he has caused a lot of division in our country.”

The interview responses were limited to 20 seconds and Collins did not go into additional detail. The Miss America Organization rejected a request from The Associated Press to make Collins available for an interview after Friday night’s competition had ended.

She did not win the interview contest. That honor went to Miss Massachusetts Gabriela Taveras, whose question dealt with how Americans traveling abroad should interact with people in other countries. She said it is important to let people in other nations know that, “We as Americans are supporting them and that we are there to help them.”

From Massachusets to West Virginia, (and everywhere else) the kids are espousing traditional American ideals and seeing Trump for what he is. It makes you feel just a little bit optimistic.

It’s not just “the left” that hates Donald Trump, Mick

by digby

… unless 53.4% of the country is “the left”

The New York Times reports that Republicans think they can win because they have more money even though everyone knows that Trump is an albatross around their necks.

A pair of top Republicans acknowledged in a private meeting on Saturday that the party was battling serious vulnerabilities in the midterm elections, including what one described as widespread “hate” for President Trump, and raised the prospect that Senator Ted Cruz of Texas could lose his bid for re-election because he is not seen as “likable” enough.

The two Republican leaders, Mick Mulvaney, the federal budget director, and Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chairwoman, assured party officials and donors at a closed-door event in New York City that the right would ultimately turn back a purported “blue wave” in November. Mr. Mulvaney also questioned whether Democrats could marshal support from outside the left, criticizing them as a party defined solely by opposition to Mr. Trump.

But Mr. Mulvaney and Ms. McDaniel also offered an unusually raw assessment of their own party’s strengths and weaknesses in the midterm elections. They pointed to the burning energy among Democratic voters and the dozens of open House seats, where Republican incumbents decided not to seek re-election, as fearsome obstacles to retaining control of Congress. And Mr. Mulvaney suggested Republicans would fare better if they could “subtract” the president’s divisive persona from voters’ minds, and stress instead that the country is in a “pretty good” condition.

“You may hate the president, and there’s a lot of people who do, but they certainly like the way the country is going,” Mr. Mulvaney said, adding of voters: “If you figure out a way to subtract from that equation how they feel about the president, the numbers go up dramatically.”

Trump’s not going to like that. He’s not going to like that one bit. In fact, it might just make him wonder if Mulvaney is one of those who spoke with Woodward. Or maybe even penned that NY Times piece. After all, he sure doesn’t sound very loyal …

He then went on to say that the Resistance is nothing compared to the Tea Party so that have created a “movement of hate” and they’ll lose.

McDaniel said that money is what makes people vote and the Democrats don’t have enough money to win but the Republicans do and that money will always beat enthusiasm. Or something. Also they have better “data and digital” which they think will make up for motivated Democrats voting in droves. I’ll bet.

Mr. Mulvaney reminded his audience of the party’s shocking defeat in a special election for the Senate in Alabama last year, and seemed to imply that Mr. Trump remained bewildered by the victory of Senator Doug Jones, a Democrat.

Mr. Jones won in an upset over Roy S. Moore, the former chief judge of the Alabama Supreme Court, who confronted multiple allegations of sexual predation and child sex abuse in the final weeks of the race.

“The president asks me all the time, ‘Why did Roy Moore lose?’” Mr. Mulvaney said. “That’s easy. He was a terrible candidate.”

If by “a terrible candidate” you mean a molester of underage girls, that’s correct. But obviously, Trump doesn’t see a problem with that or he wouldn’t have to ask.

Jesus…

Mr. Mulvaney’s comments about Mr. Cruz represent perhaps the most candid admission by a senior Republican that Mr. Cruz, a first-term lawmaker who battled Mr. Trump for the presidential nomination in 2016, is actually facing a fight for his political life. He is being challenged by Representative Beto O’Rourke, a maverick Democrat who has raised enormous sums of money online.

Public polling has shown the two men locked in a close race, but with Mr. Cruz holding a consistent advantage.

Other Republicans have been just as hopeful about the election in Florida, where the party has nominated Gov. Rick Scott, a former hospital executive with a vast personal fortune, to challenge Senator Bill Nelson.

The two men have been effectively tied in the most recent polls.

Still, Mr. Mulvaney’s freewheeling comments appeared intended more to reassure allies than to alarm them, and he insistently played down the possibility of a Democratic takeover. “Wave elections are extraordinarily rare,” he said, though there have been several in the last dozen years.

Haha. “Extremely rare” except for the last dozen years.

At the same conclave of Republicans on Saturday, one of the party’s key Senate candidates, Mike Braun, a wealthy former Indiana state legislator who is running against Senator Joe Donnelly, a Democrat, framed the stakes of the election in grimmer terms.

At a forum for Senate candidates, Mr. Braun pleaded with party donors to put up the money needed for Republicans to defend their control of the Senate, warning that if the party did not govern successfully under Mr. Trump it could face a long political winter.

“We’ve got four to six years to get this right, and if we don’t, it’ll go the other direction, demographically and all those other things that point negatively for us,” Mr. Braun said, in comments captured on a second recording. “We’ll be miserable for 15 to 20 years.”

Hmm. I guess “getting this right” means somehow stopping the demographic changes that point negatively for them? What does that mean?

Oh right …

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