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Month: October 2018

Just as dumb as he ever was. And just as mean.

Published by digby on October 15, 2018

Just as dumb as he ever was. And just as mean.

by digby

This painting is hanging in the White House

There were many appalling moments in Trump’s 60 Minutes interview last night, not the least of which was his comment that he knows more about NATO’s mission than James Mattis, his blithering idiocy about economics and well … everything. He’s getting worse.

He obviously did not like Lesley Stahl’s questions and he got very defensive throughout, almost surly. When he gets defensive he immediately starts bragging. This was one of the most embarrassing moments of his career.

Lesley Stahl: Okay. Changing subjects again– you are the first president of the United States who never had a political post before, nor never served in the military. You come up here, you’ve been here for almost two years, what’s the biggest surprise and what have you learned since you’ve been president?

President Donald Trump: Okay. So I always used to say the toughest people are Manhattan real estate guys and blah, blah. Now I say they’re babies.

Lesley Stahl: Who’s the toughest?

President Donald Trump: The political people. This is the most deceptive, vicious world. It is vicious, it’s full of lies, deceit and deception. You make a deal with somebody and it’s like making a deal with– that table.

Lesley Stahl: Give me an example.

President Donald Trump: Well, I don’t wanna give you an example. I’m not lookin’ to– in the meantime, nobody’s been able to do what I’ve been able to do. Remember that. When you look at taxes, you look at regulations, you look at– making deals with other countries. Nobody’s been able to do anything like this. Actually, most people didn’t even try because they knew they didn’t have the ability to do it. But it’s a very deceptive world. The other thing I’ve really learned is I never knew how dishonest the media was. I– I– and I really mean it. I’m not saying that as a sound bite. I never–

Lesley Stahl: I’d like to–

President Donald Trump: Knew how dishonest–

Lesley Stahl: I’m– I’m gonna change the subject again.

President Donald Trump: Well, no, even the way you asked me a question, like, about separation. When I say Obama did it, you don’t wanna talk about it.

Lesley Stahl: No, I’m gonna run your–

President Donald Trump: When I say I did it, let’s make a big deal of it.

Lesley Stahl: I’m gonna run your answer, but you did it four times, so.

President Donald Trump: I’m just telling you that you treated me much differently on the subject.

Lesley Stahl: I disagree, but I don’t wanna have that fight with you.

President Donald Trump: Hey, it’s okay–

Lesley Stahl: All right, I’ll get in another fight with you–

President Donald Trump: Lesley, it’s okay. In the meantime, I’m president–and you’re not.

Yes, he actually said that. He was uptight and angry. He’s so used to being fluffed by Fox that he forgot what it’s like to be interviewed by anyone else. But it got worse:

Lesley Stahl: This country is divided, polarized. Within families, there aren’t even people who can talk to each other. What does this say about where we are as a country right now, all this division and strife and–

President Donald Trump: Yeah– I think that–

Lesley Stahl: –anger?

President Donald Trump: –what’s going to happen– I think the economy’s bringing people together. It was very polarized under President Obama, unbelievably polarized under President Obama. I can see the country uniting. I can see it. We have people, Democrats, who behaved horribly during the Judge Kavanaugh– you– know what I’m saying.

Lesley Stahl: But when you won that.

President Donald Trump: –during the hearings for the Supreme Court, we had senators that behaved horribly.

Lesley Stahl: But when you won, you won. No– no one is gonna argue with that.

President Donald Trump: I won–

Lesley Stahl: You won. And then after you won, instead of saying, “Oh, let’s all come together, this is wonderful. Let’s heal all of this,” you come out and bash the Democrats.

President Donald Trump: Well, I bashed their attitude. I bashed their statements–

Lesley Stahl: But why not try to–

President Donald Trump: Because they were–

Lesley Stahl: –bring us together?

President Donald Trump: –so unfair to Judge Kavanaugh. I’ve never–

Lesley Stahl: But why not–

President Donald Trump: seen anything like it.

Lesley Stahl: –why not try and– we need to be healed. We need–

President Donald Trump: I don’t think they want to heal yet, I’ll be honest.

Lesley Stahl: Well, you don’t wanna–

President Donald Trump: I think–

Lesley Stahl: heal yet.

President Trump on his treatment of Christine Blasey Ford at rally: “It doesn’t matter. We won.”
President Donald Trump: I– I– I saw Hillary Clinton made a really nasty statement. I don’t think they wanna be healed. I do wanna heal.

Lesley Stahl: I’m n– I’m not talking about Democrat– I’m talking about the country. You go out and you go to Mississippi.

President Donald Trump: The famous Mississippi speech?

President Trump at rally in Mississippi: I had one beer. Well, you think it was, nope! It was one beer. Oh good. How did you get home? I don’t remember. How did you get there? I don’t remember. Where is the place? I don’t remember. How many years ago was it? I don’t know. I don’t know… I don’t know…

Lesley Stahl: And you mimicked Professor Blasey Ford. You mimicked her.

President Donald Trump: Had I not made that speech, we would not have won. I was just saying she didn’t seem to know anything.

Lesley Stahl: No (UNINTEL)–

President Donald Trump: And you’re trying to destroy a life of a man who has been extraordinary.

Lesley Stahl: Why did you have to make fun of her?

President Donald Trump: I didn’t really make fun of her.

Lesley Stahl: Well, they were laughing.

President Donald Trump: What I said the person that we’re talking about didn’t know the year, the time, the place.

Lesley Stahl: Professor Blasey Ford got before the Senate and– and was asked what’s the worst moment. And she said, “When the two boys laughed at me, at my expense.”

President Donald Trump: Ok, fine.

Lesley Stahl: And then I watched you mimic her and thousands of people were laughing at her.

President Donald Trump: They can do what they– I– I will tell you this. The way now Justice Kavanaugh was treated has become a big factor in the midterms. Have you seen what’s gone on with the polls?

Lesley Stahl: But did you have to–

President Donald Trump: Well, I think she was treated with great respect, I’ll– I’ll–

Lesley Stahl: And– but–

President Donald Trump: be honest with you.

Lesley Stahl: but do you think—you treated her with–

President Donald Trump: There are those that think she shouldn’t have–

Lesley Stahl: Do you think you treated her with respect?

President Donald Trump: I think so, yeah. I did.

Lesley Stahl: But you seem to be saying that she lied.

President Donald Trump: W– you know what? I’m not gonna get into it because we won. It doesn’t matter. We won.

Keep it up Trump and this 30 point gender gap will go up to 50 points.

Look at the way he shrugs at Stahl’s comment about thousands of people mocking Ford:

Honestly, how anyone could vote for this pig is beyond me.

He’s very pleased with his performance today. He couldn’t even compliment his wife for her interview over the week-end without bringing himself into it.

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What Republicans are really scared of isn’t the “left wing mob”

Published by digby on October 15, 2018

What Republicans are really scared of isn’t the “left wing mob”

by digby


 My Salon column this morning:

I hear that the angry mob is on the march getting ready to take to the streets and destroy everything God-fearing Real Americans care about. Again. This latest iteration of the perennial rightwing fear-mongering began when survivors and women’s rights activists came to Washington to protest the confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh. These frightening revolutionaries scared the bejeejuz out of Republicans and they haven’t been able to get a good night’s sleep ever since.

President Trump has taken the lead in bravely defending the good people of our nation against these vicious street fighters telling rally-goers in each of his many such events in the past week:

“You don’t hand matches to an arsonist, and you don’t give power to an angry, left-wing mob. And that’s what the Democrats have become.”

That was a scripted line, obviously. Trump could never come up with such a literary phrase. His own words are a bit more pungent: “The Dims have gone wacko!”

He pulls the “law and order” card frequently, claiming the loyalty of all police, casting them in opposition to Democrats. To a cheering group of law enforcement officers at the White House back in August, the president of the United States said, “[W]e have a little opposition called, the Democrats. I guess they just don’t mind crime. They don’t mind crime. It’s pretty sad…The Democrat Party is held hostage by the so-called resistance, left-wing haters and angry mobs….” Then he called himself their proud Commander in Chief, showing that he believes he commands the police as well as the military which isn’t true.

From the moment Trump was inaugurated and the big woman’s march was held the following day, the propaganda arm of the GOP has been pushing the idea that people protesting Trumps presidency are violent. The NRA was the first out of the gate with a series they called “the clenched fist of truth” warning their members that the left wing mob was coming for them:

Today, Trump’s loyal soldiers have lined up behind him to wring their hands and clutch their pearls over the nasty women who stormed the halls of the Senate to yell at men in elevators. They’ve never been more frightened in their lives. David French of National Review wrote that “it’s time to stop excusing, rationalizing, and minimizing behavior that is dangerous, menacing, and threatening” by which he meant people being rude to Republicans in restaurants.

None of them seemed to have been concerned about the storming of town halls back in 2010 which came with written instructions from the Tea Party organizers to “Artificially Inflate Your Numbers,” “Be Disruptive Early And Often” and “Try To “Rattle Him,” Not Have An Intelligent Debate.”

The conservative protest model was very dignified and decent:

As for descending on the capitol to take the protest to the elected officials, here was how it’s handled by respectable people.

The Tea Party protests against the Affordable Care Act were certainly aggressive, sometimes dangerous and always inexplicable. (Why people were so overwrought that the government was trying to make health care available to more people is something for future psychiatrists to figure out.)

Anyone who has observed the Trump phenomenon knows that he has a history of inciting his own followers. Recall that during the campaign at various times he said, “I’d like to punch him in the face,“”maybe he should have been roughed up,” part of the problem is no one wants to hurt each other anymore,” and “if you do (hurt him), I’ll defend you in court, don’t worry about it.” And his reference to the Charlottesville Nazi demonstration as containing “very fine people” will go down as one of the more disturbing comments made by any president in American history.

His rally goers still commonly launch into chants of “lock her up” at the mere mention of Hillary Clinton and, more recently, Dianne Feinstein. Perhaps some people think that crowds calling for the jailing of political opponents is all in good fun but it’s chilling for the president of the United States to stand smiling and nodding above them as they do it.

This current chest beating about “the angry left-wing mob” may morph into something more threatening as we get into the presidential campaign and Trump and his followers start to feel the heat of possible defeat. The NRA certainly seems prepared to take it to the next level. And sure, the Republicans hope to keep their base riled up by pretending that the “angry mob” of women in pink hats and protesters embarrassing Republicans officials in restaurants presents a threat to the nation. But Trump voting right-wingers are not afraid. They’re playing the victim to own the libs.

Republican officials are using this “angry mob” rhetoric for a different purpose: they are trying to get Democratic lawmakers to feel uncomfortable and distance themselves from their passionate supporters in the hopes that this will suppress the midterm vote. The handwringing conservative pundits are trying to make liberals in the media condemn the protesters and put them on the defensive. They want to make the Democrats condemn their own voters. So far, it’s not working.

Protests, even violent ones, are nothing new in America. Trump copped his “I am the candidate of law and order” from Richard Nixon, (who basically stole it from George Wallace) during a time of political assassinations, urban riots and massive civil rights and anti-war protests  And there are plenty of examples of similar political and social upheavals in our past, even including a very bloody civil war. The “polarization” we are experiencing in our politics is hardly unprecedented.

Considering how outrageous the president of the United States has become and how supine and accommodating the Republicans in congress have been, these first two years of the Trump administration have been remarkably serene. That’s because the supposedly dangerous “Resistance” has actually been feverishly organizing on the ground all over the country to recruit candidates and run campaigns to send Republicans packing. The “angry left-wing mob” isn’t running wild in the streets — it’s running for office. That’s really what’s got these Republicans shaking in their boots.

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The Janes: The Future of Abortion is the Past by tristero

Published by digby on October 15, 2018

The Janes: The Future of Abortion is the Past

by tristero

The Times has a terrific short documentary on The Jane Collective, a group of women in the late ’60’s/early ’70’s who performed some 11,000 illegal abortions before Roe v. Wade.

A doctor performed the abortions and charged high fees. But it turned out he wasn’t a doctor at all. He then taught the women in The Jane Collective to perform abortions themselves. They had no medical background and no medical training other than what the non-doctor provided.

Think about that. Think that that is your daughter. Think that that is yourself. This is where we’re headed again thanks to the Republicans who rammed Brett Kavanaugh onto the Supreme Court, it’s only a matter of time before Roe v. Wade is reversed.

Please don’t get me wrong. What the Janes did was necessary. But all women, if they want/need an abortion, should have access to the safest possible procedures — drugs or, if needed, operations performed openly and without stigma or judgment by trained medical personnel. Driving abortion back underground is sheer madness, fueled by hatred of women, especially poor women.

Far-fetched? by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 15, 2018

Far-fetched?
by Tom Sullivan

Something from Axios this morning gave me a shudder. Why, in a minute.

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) spoke to Axios about his new book. Sasse said:

“I had a conversation last month with one of the most senior U.S. intelligence officials, who told me that many leaders in the [Intelligence Committee] worry that we’re on the verge of a deepfakes [artificial intelligence algorithms that create convincing fake images, audio and video] ‘perfect storm.'”

“Americans are so divided right now, about who we are and what we hold in common, that there are dozens of scabs at which malevolent foreign actors can pick in their efforts to weaken us.”

Key conclusions from “Them”:

“I talk with the leaders of the U.S. intelligence community nearly every day, and most of them are deeply anxious about information operations that are currently being conducted by foreign powers, which see an unexpected opportunity to undermine Americans’ own confidence in our system, in our institutions, and in our American idea.”

“Put more bluntly: Vladimir Putin loves cable news, and the divides it helps to solidify in the American soul.

I remember how the Internet locked up the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001. I was on a paper mill site in northern New Hampshire. An old boiler man with me in the construction trailer said planes had crashed into the World Trade towers. His wife had just called the trailer. My first thought? It was an Internet hoax. But I couldn’t get anything online to load to verify the story. Pipe fitters, millwrights, and electricians outside were hunched over their radios. Everything on site ground to a halt. Everyone else in the country was transfixed, glued to their TVs watching the unfolding tragedy. The attacks shook the country to its core.

Now, recall the scene from Live Free or Die Hard in which cyber-terrorists construct and broadcast a fake film of the U.S. Capitol building exploding. People in D.C. could run into the streets and see in a moment the video was a phony. People not there (as I was not in New York City on 9/11) could not. People like me relied on accounts that spread like wildfire, that reached me in minutes via a land line. But with the Internet choked with traffic, I could not “verify” the rumor I heard by word of mouth. These days, if a cyber attack was comprehensive enough, could you even believe what you found there? Or would the fake have already done its work of dissolving external reality?

Our faith in what we learn from the news and the Internet has been so deliberately eroded since 9/11, might something upsetting and disruptive like Live Free or Die Hard happen without any physical attack at all? A cyber attack that overwhelms our information systems with unverifiable rumors of incredible violence or attacks in remote locations might (if TV is involved too) cause tremendous psychological damage (or worse). The rumor would spread in seconds, but we would spend weeks and months cleaning up the mess. Would we trust anything we heard afterwards? Conspiracy nuts don’t now.

Far-fetched?

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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.

Catch up on the soft-coup by usurpers conspiracy theory

Published by digby on October 15, 2018

Catch up on the soft-coup by usurpers conspiracy theory

by digby

I know most of my readers don’t watch Fox News (you value your sanity) so you probably don’t have any idea what they are obsessing about these days. So I thought I’d just share that one clip to give you a taste.

You can read more about this at Fox News, but do yourself a favor and take some aspirin before you do it. You’ll have a headache before you finish. They have worked themselves up into such a conspiratorial frenzy that it’s impossible for anyone to be able to follow it anymore.

They are very sad that Democrats may win and then no one will ever get to the bottom of their fantasy scandal. But Fox will stay on it. They have created an alternate universe what all this gibberish makes sense.

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The redefined presidency

Published by digby on October 15, 2018

The redefined presidency

by digby

The Atlantic’s Todd Purdham made an interesting observation about Trump:

It is a poignant paradox of Donald Trump’s ubiquitous presidency—all tweets, all the time—that a leader who prides himself as omnipresent in digital public discourse is so often absent from national life in the hundred human ways in which the country has come to expect its presidents to perform.

Latest case in point: After Hurricane Michael devastated parts of Florida’s Panhandle, Trump played host at the White House to Kanye West, who—in a ten-minute monologue in the Oval Office—dropped the F-bomb and praised Trump’s “Make American Great Again” cap as a hyper-masculine talisman that made him feel “like a guy that could play catch with his son.”

But think about it: Have we ever seen Trump play catch with his own 12-year-old son, Barron? Without question, the president dotes on his children, especially his daughter, Ivanka. But he’s an absentee father to the nation, or at least a majority of the nation. There have been no warm and fuzzy photos of Trump shopping for books or gifts, as Barack Obama and Bill Clinton did with their daughters. No images of him poring over a photo album, as Abraham Lincoln famously did with his son Tad, or tending his stamp collection, as FDR did. No visible evidence of the easy relaxation with friends and family that has become a standard part of presidential iconography.

And the absence is broader. Trump can’t readily cheer the nation in moments of triumph (championship sports teams boycott his White House). He doesn’t tenderly comfort the nation in times of tragedy (he tosses paper towels to hurricane victims, and does a double fist pump on the anniversary of 9-11). He doesn’t read books, talk movies or go to the theater, and is unwelcome at even the Kennedy Center Honors over which presidents have presided for nearly 40 years. This reality is striking, and sad: When it comes to those personal rituals of the modern presidency that Americans have long since taken for granted, Donald J. Trump is the man who isn’t there.

This is true. Trump has completely abandoned the ceremonial aspects of his job. But that makes ense. He doesn’t see himself as the leader of the whole country. He is the leader of his cult and only his cult, which hears from him via his twitter feed and Fox News.

He’s completely redefined the presidency. It’s something else now, a strange, ongoing thrill show, a political Evil Kneival stunt. Every day is another possible disaster, and every day that he survives makes him more reckless. We watch, both horrified and transfixed, waiting for him to crash and burn. The only question is how many of us spectators he takes with him.

Has he changed it forever? I guess that depends on how long he survives …

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Those families at the border? Trump says they’re “very bad people.” Of course he does.

Published by digby on October 14, 2018

Those families at the border? Trump says they’re “very bad people”

by digby

Trump’s going back to his greatest hits, this time trying to cast Democrats as getting ready to open the border so all those criminals can come flooding in and kill you:

Lesser politicians merely exaggerate or spread fear about what the opposing party would do if they took power in Congress. President Donald Trump is inventing specific pieces of legislation.

Trump’s now rallying supporters by warning them that if Democrats take back the Senate, they’ll pass a bill written by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) called the “Open Borders Bill.”

No such bill actually exists.

Here’s what Trump told a rally audience in Topeka, Kansas, on Saturday:

“Today’s Democrats have embraced radical socialism and open borders. If you don’t have borders, you don’t have a country, folks, you don’t have a country. Every single Democrat in the US Senate has signed up for the Open Borders — and it’s a bill! It’s called the Open Borders Bill! What’s going on? And it’s written by — guess who — Dianne Feinstein.”

They want to lock her up too, you’ll recall.

The true story is that there is an immigration bill that Democrats signed on to aimed at preventing family separation. It was poorly drafted and would have made it difficult for any undocumented immigrant with a child to be arrested for anything, even a felony, which wasn’t the intention.

Also somebody forgot to tell Trump and his followers that as president he would have to sign that bill for it to become law. So no boogeymen will be allowed to kill all those scared Trump voters in their beds unless he allows it.

By the way, “changing immigrant detention policy as a way to deter undocumented people from coming to the U.S. is illegal, federal courts have repeatedly ruled.”

Here’s Trump yesterday:

President Donald Trump confirmed on Saturday that he is considering a new family separation policy at the US-Mexico border because he believes the administration’s earlier move to separate migrant children from parents was an effective deterrent to illegal crossings.

Asked to respond to a report in The Washington Post that the administration is weighing a new family-separation policy, Mr Trump told reporters, “We’re looking at everything that you could look at when it comes to illegal immigration.”

Mr Trump said the soaring number of illegal border crossings is “a terrible situation” and argued that family separations likely would help scare away some undocumented migrants from trying to enter the United States.

“If they feel there will be separation, they won’t come,” Mr Trump said.

Mr Trump made his comments to reporters on the South Lawn of the White House before boarding Marine One for his trip to Kentucky, where he was scheduled to headline an evening campaign rally.

Mr Trump attributed the rise in illegal border crossings to the robust economy.

“We have people that are trying to get into our country because of how well our country is doing,” Mr Trump said. “You know, in the old days, when the country wasn’t doing well, it was a lot easier. Now everybody wants to come in, and they come in illegally, and they use children. In many cases, the children aren’t theirs. They grab them, and they want to come in with the children.”

The president later added: “You have really bad people coming in and using people. They’re not their children. They don’t even know the children. They haven’t known the children for 20 minutes. And they grab children and they use them to come into our country.”< In August the country saw a 38 per cent increase in the number of migrants arrested and charged with illegally crossing the border, Department of Homeland Security officials said.

Trump could not care less whether the courts have said you can’t change immigration law to “deter” immigrants. He’s going to do it.

You know where this is heading.

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Catching up with Trump’s secret admirers

Published by digby on October 14, 2018

Catching up with Trump’s secret admirers

by digby

It’s been a while since the media went out on an expedition to take the temperature of Trump’s most ardent fans so I know you must have been wondering how they are doing. (No?)

Normally they go to some dying steel town or rural village and sit around the diner talking to older white guys and their wives. The New York Times took a slightly different tack this time and instead of checking in with the “white working class” Real Americans they talked to some of the college educated white men who are still backing Donald Trump:

— Robert Peters and George Fidelibus walked off the 18th green at the Golf Club of Dublin, then carried pints of beer to the patio overlooking the course, which was framed by $500,000 homes.

Their conversation quickly turned to the president.

“I’m feeling better and better about him all the time,” said Mr. Peters, 63, a retired engineer, who had once been cool to Mr. Trump.

Mr. Fidelibus, 75, a retired banker in a Calloway hat, had also once been skeptical of the president’s bullying and lack of self-control.

“I’m a supporter of Trump now,” he said “He may not always say things the way most presidents before him said them, but what does it matter? They didn’t get the job done.”

As an edgy, divided nation heads into a crucial election, much of the attention is focused on the anti-Trump animus of suburban women, which seems to have gained a few degrees in intensity over the Supreme Court confirmation of Brett M. Kavanaugh.

Much less examined are their male counterparts. While recent polls show that white women with a college degree favor Democratic House candidates by a large margin, 20 points or more, white college-educated men — who focus more singularly on economic issues, according to surveys — are a potential bulwark for the president and his party. It is especially true in suburban battleground districts that are likely to help decide the next House majority.

White men without a college degree were Mr. Trump’s most reliable supporters, but they made up only 33 percent of his total vote. College-educated white men were also essential to putting him over the top.

One reason for their continued support now: White college-educated men have benefited unequally in the Trump economy. While the president’s favorite barometer of success, the stock market, is up 26 percent since he took office, individual stock ownership is concentrated among people in the upper income brackets, who are far more likely to be white. The Republican tax cut also delivered higher benefits to whites than to blacks or Latinos, according to a recent study.

Dublin is in Ohio’s 12th Congressional District, where Troy Balderson, a Republican, squeaked out a one-point victory in a special election in August. He faces the same Democratic challenger on Nov. 6.CreditAndrew Spear for The New York Times
These men, largely Trump voters whose support for him has solidified since his election, are business owners and sales executives, veterinarians and lawyers — men who largely wouldn’t be caught dead at a Trump rally chanting “Lock her up!”

They may cringe at a president who humiliates cabinet secretaries and foreign allies, and who utters a stream of easily disproved falsehoods.

But many have quietly struck a bargain with Mr. Trump: They will overlook his trampling of presidential norms because he is delivering just what they want on the economy, deregulation, immigration and foreign affairs.

“He’s tough, he’s a bully, but boy things are getting done,” said JD Kaplan, who runs a graphics business from his home on a neatly landscaped block in Dublin, an affluent suburb of Columbus. Mr. Kaplan, 63, who is a Republican activist, moved years ago from northeast Ohio’s struggling Rust Belt, where a younger brother still runs Kaplan Furniture, a store their grandfather founded.

“Whether it was Obama who started it or not, the economy’s better,” he said. “I see my brother’s businesses are doing better, my graphics business is doing better, my wife’s got a better job.’’
[…]
Interviews in August and on a recent return visit showed that while Mr. Trump is losing droves of white women with college degrees, many of their male counterparts now strongly support him.

White working class men and white middle and upper class men alike rationalize their support for Trump as being about “economics” all they want. But it’s simpler than that:

Yes, there is the odd racial minority who agrees with all those white guys. (See, this for example.) But it’s rare because most racial minorities can see that Trump’s misogyny notwithstanding, he’s also a stone cold racist. Kanye seems to feel insulated by his wealth which, to his credit, he at least earned himself.

By the way, there’s this new polling from CNN. It’s pretty meaningless overall — we’re two years out and a lot can happen between now and then. But its the kind of thing that will haunt my dreams:

The public is split over whether they think the President will win a second term — 46% say he will and 47% say he won’t. But that’s a steep improvement for him since March, when 54% of adults said they thought he’d lose his bid for a second term. The share seeing a second Trump win in the offing has risen across party lines. The increase is a bit sharper among men (up 8 points), independents (from 39% in March to 47% now) and those who are enthusiastic about voting in this year’s midterms (from 37% in March to 46% now).

Normalization? Yeah, probably.

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He’s going to clean house

Published by digby on October 14, 2018

He’s going to clean house

by digby

We know they’re all expecting him to purge the DOJ in some way after the election to neuter Mueller. This could be another area of concern:

President Trump suggested that Defense Secretary James Mattis could be one of the next administration officials to depart his Cabinet. In an interview airing on “60 Minutes” Sunday, the president said there are “some people” in his administration that he’s “not thrilled with.”

Asked by correspondent Lesley Stahl if Mattis is going to be leaving, Mr. Trump replied: “Well, I don’t know. He hasn’t told me that.”

“I have a very good relationship with him. I had lunch with him two days ago. I have a very good relationship with him. It could be that he is. I think he’s sort of a Democrat, if you want to know the truth,” Mr. Trump said of the retired Marine Corps general. “But General Mattis is a good guy. We get along very well. He may leave. I mean, at some point, everybody leaves. Everybody. People leave. That’s Washington.”

Mr. Trump dismissed reports of chaos in the White House as “fake news,” but said, “I’m changing things around. And I’m entitled to. I have people now on standby that will be phenomenal. They’ll come into the administration, they’ll be phenomenal.”

For such a pathological liar he sure isn’t very good at it. Can anyone see that and not be convinced that Mattis is on the way out?

I have no idea who he might be planning to put in at the Pentagon. All we know is that he will be terrible and things are heating up globally in ways that are unpredictable and dangerous.

But at least we have a steady hand in the National Security Council … John Bolton.

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