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Month: November 2018

Trumponomics for dummies

Published by digby on November 28, 2018

Trumponomics for dummies

by digby

Jonathan Chait reads the new exercise in professional bootlicking by Larry Kudlow, Stephen Moore and Arthur Laffer called Trumponomics so you don’t have to. (Not that you would.) Apparently, it is an expose on how sycophants talked the dotard into adopting their wing-nut extremism with over-the-top flattery and lies.  Not that it was hard, mind you. He is a  rich moron and he loves tax cuts, which is one issue on which they all agree.

This stands out, however:

Trump himself refused to accept an end to the deductibility of interest payments. “Look, I’ve spent my whole life doing real estate deals,” he tells them, “Every one of them was financed by debt. I hate this idea.” 

Here they reveal Trump killing a reform solely because it would negatively impact his own business. This scene comes just five pages after they credulously cite Trump promising that the tax cut won’t benefit him personally.

This is fine. No biggie.

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Do they have guns too? by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on November 28, 2018

Do they have guns too?
by Tom Sullivan

“We are in very deep, very dark waters,” cautions Jared Yates Sexton Toronto’s Globe and Mail. Shaken by the U.S. border agents teargassing migrants at a border crossing outside Tijuana, the associate professor at Georgia Southern University assesses how Donald Trump’s America looks to the rest of the world:

Whether it was the prejudiced Muslim travel ban, the persecution of transgender Americans, the sowing of racial animus, his inspiration of neo-Nazis and murderous assassins or his partnering with homicidal despots, the sad truth is that, no matter how we want to deny it or wish it wasn’t so, this is who we are now.

On the wrong side of history. Aligning ourselves more with Russia, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia than our erstwhile European allies and NATO, we are no longer the good guys:

We can no longer even lay superficial claim to being leaders on human rights, as we’ve given a blank cheque to homicidal dictators.

We can’t even champion democracy, as our own elections are swayed by disenfranchisement efforts targeted at minority populations.

That in itself is more than enough creepy for one week. What Sexton found even creepier was the notes from Trump supporters who view securing the border as a kind of biblical struggle. Old Testament, of course, with Trump as a kind of warrior-king, flawed, but chosen of God to defend the new Promised Land:

This is, of course, an extension of that unholy amalgam of Jesus Christ, Ayn Rand, and Horatio Alger that passes for Christianity for a lot of Americans, with an unhealthy dose of white nationalism now added to the mix. In the Lone Star State, the famously conservative Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) reversed a recent decision to remove Hillary Clinton and Helen Keller from a list of persons about which students might need to know something. But the members made sure to add materials that reflected “Christian Americanism … the belief that America is an essentially Christian nation in which the Bible should be normative for law and public policymaking.”

Luke Bretherton and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins argue for the Guardian that while religion and populism can work together for liberalizing a country. (The civil rights movement, Solidarity in Poland, and Bishop William Barber II’s revived Poor People’s Campaign are just a few.) But the mixture is unstable:

Religiously and democratically, these movements are polar opposites to the sort of nationalistic populism embodied by Trump. Theologically speaking, ideologies like Trumpism are idolatrous: they sacralize an earthly thing – the nation-state – and ultimately end up legitimizing the sacrifice of humans, nature and the integrity of faith itself to a worldly project of political salvation. Trump is elevated to a Christ-figure who will redeem the “true” or “real” people to the exclusion of all others. In prophetic populism, by contrast, the people are seen as a force that can break the bonds of domination so that all may flourish, especially the weakest and marginalized. The people become a beacon of democracy for all peoples.

But that’s not what Sexton was hearing.

Peter Laarman wrote about Trump’s white nationalism at ReWire.News a few weeks ago. The distinction between that and “nationalistic populism” is a fine one if there is one:

The white nationalism of the Tea Party and now of Trump Time represents an enormous and “authentic” expression of the main spiritual current in American history, which … is about subjugation and supremacy and greed—and not, in fact, about hope and change. White domination has always been, and still is, America’s middle name.

That’s nice. Do they have guns too or just ropes and hoods?

He “doesn’t like that aggression at all”

Published by digby on November 28, 2018

He “doesn’t like that aggression at all”

by digby


Trump’s latest interview in which he talks about his brilliance and his “gut”:

In a wide-ranging and sometimes discordant 20-minute interview with The Washington Post, Trump complained at length about Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome H. “Jay” Powell, whom he nominated earlier this year. He argued that rising interest rates and other Fed policies were damaging the economy — as evidenced by GM’s announcement this week that it was laying off 15 percent of its workforce — though he insisted that he is not worried about a recession.

“I’m doing deals, and I’m not being accommodated by the Fed,” Trump said. “They’re making a mistake because I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.”

He added: “So far, I’m not even a little bit happy with my selection of Jay. Not even a little bit. And I’m not blaming anybody, but I’m just telling you I think that the Fed is way off-base with what they’re doing.”

Trump also dismissed the federal government’s landmark report released last week finding that damages from global warming are intensifying around the country. The president said that “I don’t see” climate change as man-made and that he does not believe the scientific consensus.

“One of the problems that a lot of people like myself, we have very high levels of intelligence but we’re not necessarily such believers,” Trump said. “You look at our air and our water, and it’s right now at a record clean.”

As for the apparent incursion into Ukraine by Russia:

“That will be very determinative,” Trump said. “Maybe I won’t have the meeting. Maybe I won’t even have the meeting. . . . I don’t like that aggression. I don’t want that aggression at all.”

I’m reminded of this outright lie when he spoke to Omarosa about her firing:

“Nobody even told me about it. You know, they run a big operation but I didn’t know it. I didn’t know that. Goddamn it. I don’t love you leaving at all,”

By the way, Trump refused to talk about Mueller and Manafort today. Odd, don’t you think?

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State TV scripted interviews with Trump administration officials. Surprised?

Published by digby on November 27, 2018

State TV scripted interviews with Trump administration officials. Surprised?

by digby

The Daily Beast reports that Fox and Friends scripted interviews with corrupt Trump administration official Scott Pruitt in a shockingly blatant fashion:

Former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt was clearly taken aback last year when occasional Fox & Friends fill-in host Ed Henry grilled him about a number of ethical scandals facing his administration.

And Pruitt had a good reason to be surprised. In past interviews with President Trump’s favorite cable-news show, the then-EPA chief’s team chose the topics for interviews, and knew the questions in advance.

In one instance, according to emails revealed in a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the Sierra Club and reviewed by The Daily Beast, Pruitt’s team even approved part of the show’s script.

They have the goods. It’s a stunner.

Steve M at NMMNB notes that this isn’t the first time and likely is anything but unusual:

Here’s an example from my archives: In 2015, the ISIS magazine Dabiqidentified some U.S. political figures as enemies of the caliphate. One was former senator Rick Santorum. Santorum subsequently appeared on Fox & Friends, where he had this exchange with host Steve Doocy. (Apologies for the wingnutty tweet below, but it’s the only working source I could find for the video.)

DOOCY: You know, it’s one thing if The New York Times quotes you, or we quote you on Fox, but when ISIS quotes you, what did you think?

SANTORUM: Well, the difference is ISIS actually quoted me accurately, composed — compared to The New York Times, which is sort of a remarkable comment on the state of the media today.
Notice how Santorum slips and says “composed” before correcting himself and saying “compared.” That’s not a mistake you’d make if you had a brain freeze and couldn’t remember the word you meant to use. It’s not a mistake you’d make if you stumbled over the pronunciation of the word “compared.”

It is, however, a mistake you might make if you were momentarily misreading a scripted line from a Teleprompter.

An an interview by a real journalist, the interviewee isn’t supposed to know the questions in advance, and is expected to answer spontaneously. But this was clearly a prepared exchange. And it’s a classic Fox exchange — the story is about ISIS, but Doocy and Santorum make it about the right’s real enemy, the non-conservative part of America, specifically the hated American “liberal media.”

I suspect this happens a lot at Fox.

Agreed.

There was also this instance, from Megyn Kelly:

Then, the day before the first presidential debate, Mr. Trump was in a lather again, Ms. Kelly writes. He called Fox executives, saying he’d heard that her first question “was a very pointed question directed at him.” This disconcerted her, because it was true: It was about his history of using disparaging language about women.

She doesn’t speculate where the leak came from. (She reports. You decide.) But that’s another unambiguous takeaway from this book: Parts of Fox — or, at the very least, Roger Ailes, the network’s chairman until July, when he was given the boot after several allegations of sexual harassment were made against him — seemed to be nakedly colluding with the Republican presidential nominee.

I do think the one fallacy of most analysis about this issue is the idea that Trump is running Fox News as his personal propaganda outfit. The truth is that Fox is running the White House. In the end it’s impossible to know where one begins and the other ends but since Trump gets all his inormation from the network, they are the ones who are really in the driver’s seat.

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Manafort action all over the place

Published by digby on November 27, 2018

Manafort action all over the place

by digby

Manafort’s plea deal fell apart because he apparently lied to the prosecutors after he made the deal. This is not a shock since he violated his bail agreement earlier and ended up in jail because of it. He’s not good at following instructions. The question is why he kept lying and there is good reason to believe we will find out when Mueller files his report to the court upon sentencing (if it isn’t sealed pending other indictments.)

There’s also a bunch of new Manafort news out there, much of which is inviting skepticism among the people who follow the story closely so I’ll reserve judgment. However, it’s worth noting. The Guardian reported today that Manafort had multiple meetings with Julian Assange in the Ecuadoran embassy before and after he joined the Trump campaign, most importantly in March of 2016 when he had just joined the Trump campaign and the Russian hacking operation was being implemented. Who know if it’s true. Stay tuned.

CNN is also reporting that Mueller has been investigting a meeting between Manafort and the Ecuadoran government in 2017, whih had been reported before as a pitch for some business venture but perhaps indicates something else.

Josh Marshall notes that he met with the Ecuadoran governments on the same day that Trump fired Comey which may be coincidence but is intriguing nonetheless. He also noted that the Guardian story is datelines Quito Ecuador, indicating that the Guardian leak may becoming from there. It’s speculative but interesting.

I would just remind everyone that Rick Gates, Paul Manafort’s protege and right hand man for decades, including the Trump campaign and he remained with Trump after Manafort was exiled, including during the transition and was frequently in the White House after the inauguration has been cooperating with Mueller for months. He knows what Manafort knows.

This is quite the do-si-do:

If anyone is surprised that Manafort is a terrible liar, here’s an illustration of how he does it:

In case you were wondering:

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President Trump: “I happen to be a tariff person because I’m a smart person, OK?”

Published by digby on November 27, 2018

President Trump: I happen to be a tariff person because I’m a smart person, OK?

by digby

The president talks about tariffs and threatens GM, saying “you’re playing around with the wrong person.” Oh my God:

President Trump: I happen to be a tariff person because I’m a smart person, OK? We have been ripped off so badly by people coming in and stealing our wealth. The steel industry has been rebuilt in a period of a year because of what I’ve done. We have a vibrant steel industry again, and soon it’ll be very vibrant. You know, they’re building plants all over the country because I put steel – because I put tariffs, 25 percent tariffs, on dumping steel.

Mr. Davis: Right. Right. Would you – would you think – what do you advise – what do you advise U.S. business to do, given that they are now faced with the tariffs they are, tariffs go up on January 1? You’re talking about the rest of the imports going to 10 percent … 

President Trump: Well, what I’d advise is for them to build factories in the United States and to make the product here. And they have a lot of other alternatives. But if you look, there’s been no increase in inflation despite the tariffs, so all of these little – all of the things you heard about, Bob, are – have turned out to be false. We’re – we’re taking in billions of dollars. We’re creating tremendous numbers of jobs. Like in the steel industry, we were – we were almost out of the business and now we have – you know, thousands of jobs are being created. And we’re going to have our own steel industry, which is a very important industry. You don’t want to be – you know, you don’t want to be buying your steel from China, let me put it that way. But –

Mr. Davis: Let me ask you also, I mean, so you gave advice to the – to U.S. business. What advice would you give to the Chinese who are trying to decide how to deal with you?

President Trump: Make a fair deal. The only deal that would really be acceptable to me – other than obviously we have to do something on the theft of intellectual property, right – but the only deal would be China has to open up their country to competition from the United States. As far as other countries are concerned, that’s up to them. I’m interested in the United States. They have to open up China to the United States. Otherwise, I don’t see a deal being made. And if it’s not made, we will be taking in billions and billions of dollars.

Mr. Davis: OK.

President Trump: And what will happen, Bob, is a lot of the things we buy from China we’re going to make in this country.
[…]
Mr. Davis: You like – any comment on the – GM shutting its plants, laying off employees?

President Trump: Yeah. I think GM ought to stop making cars in China and make them here. And I think it was a big mistake for GM to do that. I think they forgot where they came from.

Mr. Davis: Uh-huh. Anything that you plan to do? Is there anything you can do?

President Trump: Well, it’s one plant in Ohio. But I love Ohio. And I told them: You’re playing around with the wrong person. And Ohio wasn’t properly represented by their Democrat senator, Senator Brown, because he didn’t get the point across. But we will all together get the point across to General Motors . And they better damn well open up a new plant there very quickly. You know, they haven’t closed – they’re reallocating it, it’s called. And I said, because their Cruze car isn’t selling, OK? They make a car called Chevy Cruze. And it’s not selling well. So I said: Then put a car that is selling well in there but get it open fast.

Mr. Davis: And when you say, “you said,” did you have a talk with – who were you talking with?

 President Trump: I spoke with Mary Barra, the head of General Motors last night. I said: I heard you’re closing your plant. It’s not going to be closed for long, I hope, Mary, because if it is you’ve got a problem.

 Mr. Davis: Uh-huh. OK. And did she answer you?

 President Trump: She just sort of said we’re trying to get something – you know, it’s being reallocated. You understand that, right?

 Mr. Davis: Yeah. Yeah.

 President Trump: So she told me: The car’s not selling. I said, so maybe you got to make a better car.

 Mr. Davis: Mmm hmm. And also –

President Trump: And that has nothing to do with tariffs, you know. That has nothing –

Mr. Davis: No, no, no. I know. It’s just the – we don’t get a chance to –

President Trump: You know, a lot of times people like to blame tariffs when they’re doing badly. So they’re doing badly. And they say, oh, let’s blame tariffs, you know, because they don’t know what they’re doing. So they’re doing badly. And they’ll say: Let’s blame tariffs. Why not? (Laughs.)

Mr. Davis: Right. Right.

President Trump: So, anyway. No, it had nothing to do with tariffs.

Aside from the avalanche of lies, he makes it very obvious that he has no idea what he’s talking about. Literally. Trade is his passion, his raison d’etre and yet he’s obviously completely clueless about what tariffs are and how they work.

And he thinks he can strongarm GM into doing his bidding. I don’t know the mechanism. Is he planning to seize the company? Impose martial law on its plants? What executive power does he have to make General Motors do what he wants it to do?

He also doesn’t know the difference between tariffs and interest rates:

President Trump: So but what I’m saying is that I am very happy with what’s going on right now. We’ve only used a small portion of what we have to use because I have another $267 billion [in imports] to go if I want, and then I’m also able to raise interest rates. And we have money that is pouring right now, pouring – 

Mr. Davis: When you say interest rates, do you mean – do you mean tariffs, as opposed to interest rates? 

President Trump: I’m sorry, the rate, the 25 percent rate – 

Mr. Davis: Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK. 

President Trump: Without even doing any more. 

Mr. Davis: Yeah. 

President Trump: We have money that is pouring into our treasury right now, and on January 1 it’ll become much more so. And here’s the story: If we don’t make a deal, then I’m going to put the $200 — and it’s really $67 — billion additional on at an interest rate between 10 and 25 depending.

Since he believes allies write checks to the US to pay for “protection” why wouldn’t he think “money is pouring into our treasure on an interest rate between 10 and 25.” It’s gibberish but then most of what he says is gibberish. 

I think the reason he was never invested in the stock market is that he doesn’t understand it.

But he’s a business genius. He says so all the time. He had a TV show. So he must be.

Update: Vox has a nice explainer about all the stupid he spewed in that interview.

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It’s all transactional by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on November 27, 2018

It’s all transactional
by Tom Sullivan

Non-political people just adopt a sports team or follow around their favorite band.

“A longing for validation is underrated as a political motivator,” explains Michelle Goldberg, exploring the seamy side of political social climbing.

Exhibit A is the “tawdry, shallow memoir” of a Jewish former employee of the Christian right:

It’s not exactly a secret that politics is full of amoral careerists lusting — literally or figuratively — for access to power. Still, if you’re interested in politics because of values and ideas, it can be easier to understand people who have foul ideologies than those who don’t have ideologies at all. Steve Bannon, a quasi-fascist with delusions of grandeur, makes more sense to me than Anthony Scaramucci, a political cipher who likes to be on TV. I don’t think I’m alone. Consider all the energy spent trying to figure out Ivanka Trump’s true beliefs, when she’s shown that what she believes most is that she’s entitled to power and prestige.

Baron’s book, “Life of the Party: A Political Press Tart Bares All,” is useful because it is a self-portrait of a cynical, fame-hungry narcissist, a common type but one underrepresented in the stories we tell about partisan combat. A person of limited self-awareness — she seemed to think readers would find her right-wing exploits plucky and cute — Baron became Reed’s communications director because she saw it as a steppingstone to her dream job, White House press secretary, a position she envisioned in mostly sartorial terms. (“Outfits would be planned around the news of the day,” she wrote.) Reading Baron’s story helped me realize emotionally something I knew intellectually. It’s tempting for those of us who interpret politics for a living to overstate the importance of competing philosophies. We shouldn’t forget the enduring role of sheer vanity.

Goldberg includes other Trump-era figures, “the immoral and the amoral,” whose politics she sees as more transactional than ideological, and frustratingly insincere.

Confirming Goldberg’s take, Rep. Mia Love (R-Utah) in her concession speech Monday told supporters her eyes were opened by the president’s blaming her loss on being insufficiently fawning towards him:

Trump’s comments about her and her overall experience during the election “shine a spotlight on the problem Washington politicians have with minorities and black Americans,” she continued. “It’s transactional. It’s not personal.”

His/their relationship with the law and the Constitution is also transactional, and more about social power and status than principle.

Immigration opponents’ insistence migrants seek asylum the “right” way (at an American embassy or consulate, they insist wrongly) echoes T-party howls from a 2012 recount a Democrat here won by 18 votes. T-partiers objected to counting votes of college students, even though Symm v. United States settled that question in 1979.

GOP activists argued students’ votes shouldn’t count because the students didn’t really live at their school addresses. The Board of Elections chair read them the statute aloud from the code book. They were unfazed. The law should be what they wanted it to be. What the law actually said didn’t matter.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services states (emphasis mine): “To obtain asylum … you must be physically present in the United States. You may apply for asylum status regardless of how you arrived in the United States or your current immigration status.”

Immigration opponents do not care what the law actually says. The law is supposed to be what they feel it should be. The law carries weight only so long as it serves them.

As if to reinforce the point, Axios reporter Jonathan Swan told MSNBC on Sunday the president flies into a rage when staffers tell him what he wants to do about immigrants violates the law. Trump is “raging hot angry at Kirstjen Nielsen,” staffers tell Swan:

Swan noted that Trump doesn’t want to hear anyone say that he can’t do something. In fact, every time someone says “the lawyers won’t allow it,” the president is more likely to do it anyway to prove he can.

“So when you hear ‘legalistic,’ he goes into a rage,” Swan continued. “And he doesn’t want to hear it. He wants to hear, ‘No, it’s our land. It’s our border, blunt force, stop them.’ And whenever [Nielsen] comes back with, ‘Well, Mr. President, there are these laws,’ he shuts down. He’s frustrated.”

Posturing about the rule of law, then, is another example of the affect Goldberg perceives:

In many ways, the insincere Trumpists are the most frustrating. Because they don’t really believe in Trump’s belligerent nationalism and racist conspiracy theories, we keep expecting them to feel shame or remorse. But they’re not insincere because they believe in something better than Trumpism. Rather, they believe in very little. They are transactional in a way that makes no psychological sense to those of us who see politics as a moral drama; they might as well all be wearing jackets saying, “I really don’t care, do u?”

Not if it does not preserve or enhance their standing, no.

Update:

As I was saying,