Month: February 2019

Yer President’s id is running wild

by digby

“These guys, the investigators, ought to be in jail. What they have done, working with the Obama intelligence agencies, is simply unprecedented. This is one of the greatest political hoaxes ever perpetrated on the people of this Country, and Mueller is a coverup.” Rush Limbaugh— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2019

The Mueller investigation is totally conflicted, illegal and rigged! Should never have been allowed to begin, except for the Collusion and many crimes committed by the Democrats. Witch Hunt!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2019

The president is agreeing with Rush Limbaugh that Mueller and the other investigators should be jailed. I guess they’ll string them up next to Hillary Clinton and the cast of Saturday Night Live which he also threatened with “retribution” today:

Nothing funny about tired Saturday Night Live on Fake News NBC! Question is, how do the Networks get away with these total Republican hit jobs without retribution? Likewise for many other shows? Very unfair and should be looked into. This is the real Collusion!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2019

It’s the President’s Day long weekend. I’m sure the founders would be so proud of where we’ve come.

I agree with this:

2. The usual response to this stuff is "Trump is a blowhard. He's not actually going to arrest Mueller. His threats are a sign of weakness, not authoritarianism." But in fact, a president making threats undermines democracy in a number of ways even if not acted on.— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) February 18, 2019

4. Let's be optimistic & say only 30% of population believe full Trumpian line. Still, for 30% to buy into an unhinged conspiracy theory with no basis in fact (that Mueller & his team are criminals) is a big problem.— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) February 18, 2019

I take this seriously because it’s scary as hell to have an arrogant, fascistic imbecile in the most powerful job on earth saying things like this for the very reason Jeet Heer spells out.

I don’t know if you can put this evil genie back in the bottle and it’s terrifying.

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So now the “Deep State” conspiracy includes Chief Justice John Roberts

by digby

I would think this was a right wing Overton Window tactic except that it’s Lou Dobbs so it’s obviously just stupid:

Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs has called for newly confirmed Attorney General William Barr to launch an investigation into Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts for his role in the special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.

“Let me be very clear, I’m not suggesting he’s the villain,” Dobbs said of Chief Justice Roberts on Thursday during a segment of Lou Dobbs Tonight. “He’s one of, I think, many suspects that should be investigated thoroughly by William Barr.”

Barr will replace ousted Attorney General Jeff Sessions after being confirmed by the Senate on Thursday by a vote of 54 to 45. Barr previously served in the role of attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration.

The comment came while Dobbs was discussing the latest revelation that former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe ordered the investigation into whether Donald Trump obstructed justice, an inquiry the White House slammed as “completely baseless.”

McCabe said that the order came out of concern that the president would try to undermine the special counsel’s probe into Russian election meddling and possible collusion with his campaign.

“I was very concerned that I was able to put the Russia case on absolutely solid ground, in an indelible fashion,” McCabe told CBS’s Scott Pelley in an interview that will air in full on Sunday. “That were I removed quickly, or reassigned or fired, that the case could not be closed or vanish in the night without a trace.”

The Fox Business host said that Trump has been “hounded, harassed attacked, assaulted” during the investigation, which he called a “conspiracy.” He also accused McCabe of creating “out of whole cloth this ridiculous narrative” without sufficient evidence.

“The only, unlawful acts in this thing have been revealed to be the acts of the investigators. These corrupt excuses for public servants sitting on the most – two of the most of prestigious organizations in our government,” he said.

The attention then turned to Chief Justice Roberts, a reliably conservative figure on the high court appointed by former President George W. Bush, who has chosen all of the judges currently serving in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Dobbs went on to call Roberts a “liberal” based on his judicial appointments on the FISA circuit. The court is responsible for issuing warrants allowing surveillance of American citizens who are suspected to be working as foreign agents.

In 2016 the FBI was granted a monumental FISA warrant to spy on Trump’s former election campaign adviser Carter Page. At the time the warrant was one of the strongest pieces of evidence that indicated a Trump adviser was in touch with Russian agents during the 2016 campaign, but Republicans claimed that the warrant had been improperly obtained.

“This is a chief justice who put all left-wing judges into those FISA courts. It looks like a complicity that goes beyond. And only for the sake of appearances should, at the very least, no chief justice put all liberals onto any court,” Dobbs added.

This is what they’ve come to.

I really hope that Lindsey Graham’s new  “Lock her up – FISA” hearings will feature some Democrats bringing this up. It’s important for the American people to know just how batshit crazy these right wingers have become.

Is Graham angling to oust the majority leader?

by digby

I sure looks like it:

Trump's emergency declaration for border wall funds could cut money for projects like a Kentucky middle school.

Graham: "It's better for the middle school kids in Kentucky to have a secure border. We'll get them the school they need, but right now we've got a national emergency" pic.twitter.com/Vty1rbx979— CBS News (@CBSNews) February 17, 2019

I’m guessing Mitch’s constituents might disagree with that.

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Dancing as fast as he can for decades

by digby

just in — a source at the Trump International Golf Club in Palm Beach just texted me this photo taken a short time ago.

omelette bar: pic.twitter.com/eWqMbdRTwW— J.D. Durkin (@jiveDurkey) February 16, 2019

Timothy O’Brien has been watching Trump for many years:

Hanging on a wall behind the omelet bar at President Donald Trump’s golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida — where the commander in chief apparently stopped for a bite on Saturday after declaring a national emergency the day before — is an old, framed poster. It’s from an ad campaign Walgreens once ran featuring the president back when he was the sorcerer of “The Apprentice.”

In white block letters on the poster, next to a photo of Trump cocking his index finger at the camera and shouting in full “You’re fired!” mode, is a question: “CAN YOU WALK THE WALK?”

It’s likely that versions of this query still run through the president’s mind — and that he often finds himself coming up short, despite his public bravado and the loopy, ill-informed self-assurance he displays during pivotal moments such as his national emergency speech in the Rose Garden. That explains why he constantly spins his narratives toward success even in the face of obviousfailures. To admit defeat is to admit he’s not walking the walk.

To that end, the White House released a document on Friday titled “President Donald Trump’s Border Security Victory” a day after Congress passed a spending bill that didn’t fund the border wall Trump demanded. The memo described the bill as a “legislative win” for Trump and outlined his intention to take executive action (and end-run Congress and the Constitution) by raising funds for the wall unilaterally.

It was inevitable that Trump would refuse to be stymied by Congress, and that he would take a victory lap regardless of what happened in the real world. In that context, his border-wall machinations are only partially about appeasing conservative pundits or his political base; for the most part, they’re about appeasing his sense of himself. He’s been doing this sort of thing his entire life: Spinning victory yarns from incontrovertible losses was a hallmark of his troubled business career.

Back in the early 2000s, his casino company, Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts, was in familiar territory: mismanaged, saddled with debt it had trouble repaying, and ultimately forced into bankruptcy. The enterprise had to be restructured, and Trump saw his stake in the company reduced. “I don’t think it’s a failure; it’s a success,” he told the Associated Press after his casinos filed for bankruptcy protection in late 2004. “It’s really just a technical thing.”

None of that amounted to failure, he also assured me at the time, because he still had a (much smaller) ownership stake after the bankruptcy. “It’s a successful deal,” he told me. “You’ll never write that, but it’s a great deal.”

“The only thing bad about it is I get some unsophisticated press that says, ‘Trump went into bankruptcy,’” he added. “Somehow the B-word [bankruptcy] never caught on very well in this country. But the smartest people in the country call me and say, ‘How the [expletive] did you pull that off?’”

Warren Buffett, who actually is one of the smartest people in the country, made fun of Trump’s business failures during a film and a live skit he performed in at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting in 2005. An actor played a sobbing Trump, distraught over bad headlines about his bankruptcy, and he was gently consoled on stage by a sympathetic Buffett — until Buffett realized that someone as self-made and successful as he is actually has nothing in common with Trump, and the skit ended.

Trump told me he wasn’t insulted by Buffett’s satire: “It’s kind of an honor to be included in one of his movies.” He also told me that he didn’t think that Buffett’s vast wealth and investment prowess made him any more successful than him. “Yeah, well, he’s running a public company and he’s, like, a hundred years old,” Trump explained. “You know, I’m a [expletive] smart guy.”

This kind of stuff can be found even further back. In 1983, Trump bought into the nascent United States Football League. Although the USFL was trying to avoid a head-on confrontation with the National Football League by playing in the spring and was trying to keep a cap on salaries to keep its budgets reasonable, Trump pushed the league into fall play, began tossing out lavish salaries, and spearheaded an unsuccessful antitrust lawsuit against the NFL. The USFL, and Trump’s franchise, the New Jersey Generals, collapsed in 1986.

“The USFL wasn’t a big deal,” Trump told me several years after his football franchise cratered. “It was a small deal. I didn’t lose.”

Trump blamed his fellow USFL owners for the debacle rather than acknowledging any of his own missteps, in much the same way he has blamed others in the GOP for his lack of border wall funding. He also was indifferent (then as now) to the impact his fumbling had on those around him.

“None of it ever seemed to matter to Trump. It was just a little investment that didn’t work out too well, so he moved on to the next thing,” said Mike Tollin, who made a documentary about the USFL, in an interview with the Washington Post. “Didn’t matter that hundreds of people lost hundreds of jobs, from the peanut vendors to ticket takers on up.”

In a similar fiasco, Trump overpaid for the Eastern Air Lines Shuttle in 1989, using borrowed money and bringing no previous experience running an airline to the deal. He rechristened it the Trump Shuttle and then proceeded to make a number of operational errors, including installing gold-plated fixtures and other private-jet features that made little sense for a no-frills airline. Trump lied in one of his books, 1990’s “Trump: Surviving at the Top,” that the Shuttle under his management was profitable. “I’m glad I saved it. I’m proud of the way it’s been improved. It is now the best,” he also wrote

The Trump Shuttle went bankrupt in 1992.

“I got out at a good time. I walked away saying, ‘I’m smart,’” Trump later told the Boston Globe of his ill-fated Shuttle venture. “It was a great experience. I enjoyed it.”

And then there was Television City, a major Manhattan project that Trump torpedoed because he was mired in debt and couldn’t effectively negotiate with local residents and city officials. “I’ll sit back and wait until things get bad in the city, until construction stops and interest rates go up,” Trump bragged to the Chicago Tribune in 1989 about his standoff with local officials, foreshadowing the certitude he would later project about his border wall. “And then I’ll build it. But I will build it.”

Because Trump was unable to develop Television City or pay the property’s debt back, his banks forced him to sell it in 1994. He wound up with a lucrative stake in property someone else controlled, but he missed out on becoming a truly major New York developer.

“That was one of the great deals that I made,” Trump told Maine’s Press Heraldin 2016 in an interview about Television City. “One of the best real estate deals.”

Trump brought this same brio to his presidential run. “If I’m president, there won’t be stupid deals anymore,” he said during one of the Republican debates in early 2016. “We will win on everything we do.”

You only really succeed at things by working hard and focusing on details, however, and as the Wall Street Journal’s Michael Bender noted Friday in a meticulously reported account, Trump and his team neither prioritized building a border wall nor assigned someone to be the White House’s point person on the project for most of the president’s first two years in office. Bender’s reporting pulls the legs out from one section of the White House victory proclamation issued Friday, which noted that Trump “was elected partly on his promise to secure the Southern Border with a barrier and, since his first day in office, he has been following through on that promise.”

It was only after Trump recognized in January that he was being consumed by a government shutdown he set in motion — and that he had been politically emasculated by a woman to his left (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) and to his right (pundit and firebrand Ann Coulter) — that he fully embraced a border wall as his last stand. Now that he’s declared in a Rose Garden speech that building such a thing actually might not be due to an emergency (“I didn’t need to do this, but I’d rather do it much faster,” he said) but that he’s wiser in the ways of the world (“I never did politics before, now I do politics,” he said), what can we expect next?

Trump is cornered and outmaneuvered, so we’re likely to get more of the same as he continues to test the Constitution and the boundaries of presidential authority: constant spinning about winning, even when the losses are apparent.

Before the midterm Trump admitted that the GOP might lose the House. And he explained to his ecstatic followers that it was all good:

“We’re doing very well and we’re doing really well in the Senate but could happen. And you know what you do? My whole life. You know what I say? Don’t worry about it. I’ll just figure it out.”

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The caravan, the caravan! Runferyerlives!

by digby

Presidents typically invoke emergency powers to impose sanctions on foreign individuals, groups or nations that threaten national security, though they have also been used domestically amid public health crises and to regulate exports.

Since the National Emergencies Act was passed in 1976, seven presidents have declared dozens of national emergencies, and 32 are still active.

By the way, the one other “military” emergency was 9/11. The non-existent border crisis is just like that.

Well, no, It’s not.

Jack Goldsmith makes a case that this really isn’t that big of a departure from previous “national emergencies” at least on a constitutional basis. The congress has stupidly delegated a ton of discretion to the executive over the past few decades and they have used it, sometimes even for crass political purposes. The administration Goldsmith worked for, the Bush administration practically declared themselves to be a monarchy in pursuit of the “unitary executive.”

Goldsmith argues that president needs these powers in a time of legislative gridlock and I’ll have to give that some thought. I’m generally not of the “strong executive” bent but I can see how the nation could become paralyzed in the event of a real emergency if it depended upon a dysfunctional congress. On the other hand, look at the dysfunctional presidency and … oy vey.

In any case, Goldsmith’s broader point is important:

Despite the legal ordinariness of what Trump has done here, the context in which he acts, and the way he acts, makes the situation seem, and in fact be, much worse.

Trump is acting in perhaps the most divisive contexts in American politics, one filled with severe anxiety or worse on all sides, and one exacerbated by Trump’s scorched-earth approach and by the longest-ever government shutdown as a result of this very issue. Any unilateral presidential action in this context is bound to be controversial.

Making a bad situation worse, Trump, as is his wont, is purposefully creating a large drama that includes flouting conventional norms associated with presidential power. His press conference announcing the declaration of emergency was a doozy that contained numerous statements that smashed norms of presidential etiquette. But perhaps none more so than this one:

I could do the wall over a longer period of time. I didn’t need to do this. But I’d rather do it much faster. And I don’t have to do it for the election. I’ve already done a lot of wall for the election. 2020. And the only reason we’re up here talking about this is because of the election—because they want to try to win an election, which it looks like they’re not going to be able to do.

Here Trump did two things in connection with the exercise of emergency powers that presidents never do.

First, in stating that he “didn’t need to do this,” Trump acknowledged what so much of the run-up to his proclamation makes clear: there is no necessity in his action, and thus no “emergency” in the ordinary language sense of the term. As noted above, this is typically true of emergency declarations. But presidents don’t admit it, much less celebrate it. They tend to make emergency declarations in ways that do not highlight that the entire modern law of emergency power rests on the fiction that emergency powers can be invoked in the absence of what we normally think of as an emergency.

Second, in clumsily denying that the emergency declaration is about politics and the 2020 election, Trump confirmed what many people think: It is about politics and the 2020 election. That acknowledgment heightens and for many will confirm suspicions about mixed motives, pretext, and the like.

Trump is not by a mile the first president to invoke executive power aggressively for political purposes. But he might be the first plausibly to be seen to exercise emergency powers openly for political purposes. In this regard, as in many regards, Trump is undisciplined in his lack of hypocrisy. As I explained a few years ago:

A corollary to Trump’s shamelessness is that he often doesn’t seek to hide or even spin his norm-breaking. Put another way, he is far less hypocritical than past presidents—and that is a bad thing. Hypocrisy is an underappreciated political virtue. It can palliate self-interested and politically divisive government action through mollifying rhetoric and a call to shared values. Trump is bad at it because he can’t “recognize the difference between what one professes in public and what one does in private, much less the utility of exploiting that difference,” Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore have noted in Foreign Affairs. He is incapable of keeping his crass thoughts to himself, or of cloaking his speech in other-regarding principle.

This is a counterintuitive idea. Many people see Trump as hypocritical since he often says one thing and does another (including things that he criticized his predecessor for). But he is profoundly not hypocritical in this sense: As in his border wall announcement, he is often guileless in asserting power, and doesn’t try to hide the tension between his political aims and his asserted constitutional justifications. This is one of Trump’s most remarkable and persistent norm violations. “The clearest evidence of the stability of our values over time is the unchanging character of the lies … statesmen tell,” Michael Walzer famously noted. “They lie in order to justify themselves, and so they describe for us the lineaments of justice. Wherever we find hypocrisy we find moral justice.” Walzer might have added that when we see in our statesmen an absence of hypocrisy in a contested context where principle normally matters, an absence of moral justice creeps in.

Trump’s lack of hypocrisy in the current context is harmful for at least two reasons.

First, it will hurt him in court. His acknowledgement that his emergency is not “real,” and his openly political motivations, will make it harder for judges—and especially the Supreme Court justices whom he said during the press conference he hopes would rule his way—to uphold his order. This is so in part for doctrinal reasons: The president’s integrity and truthfulness, and the possibility that he is acting pretextually based on an illicit motive, will be front and center in this litigation. And it is so in part for what might be called political or atmospheric reasons. Courts don’t like to be seen as pawns asked to indulge obvious fictions in the exercise of executive power in controversial contexts. But that is the situation the courts are now in.

These elements were, of course, present in the travel ban litigation that Trump in the end won. Trump in a blunt, ungainly way asked the Supreme Court to once again bail out his poorly rolled-out and controversial Executive proclamation, and he did so in a way that stripped away the fictions that normally accompany emergency powers. Acknowledging that there is much legal analysis yet to be done, the justices will have a harder time upholding this proclamation due to Trump’s performance. If the Supreme Court on top of its travel ban ruling follows a traditional legal analysis and also affirms Trump’s emergency action concerning the wall, it risks setting a super-bad precedent for openly opportunistic and pretextual presidential emergency action going forward. But to reach another result the Court might have to put a serious dent in presidential authority that will adversely affect future presidents who legitimately need this authority. Trump has put the Court in a terrible position.

The second reason Trump’s actions are harmful is that the broader legitimacy of the presidency that wields such vast powers over so many lives depends on presidents who present and exercise those powers with at least a modicum of decorum, modesty and attention to rule-of-law values. As I have argued in two books, one of the great mistakes of the George W. Bush presidency was the tendency to act on the basis of an open desire to expand presidential powers—something most of the main players, including President Bush, later regretted. Trump’s performances make the performances of the Article II chest-thumpers in the Bush administration seem restrained by comparison. To be clear, the Bush team invoked Article II powers in substance much more aggressively than Trump. But their public rhetoric, while damaging to the presidency, was not, I think, as damaging as the impact of Trump’s openly politically self-regarding rhetoric. This is a hard thing to prove or even know for sure. But it is not necessary to decide whether the Bush or Trump rhetorical strategy was worse to know that Trump’s corrodes the presidency.

Trump’s utter lack of hypocrisy in the aggressive exercise of presidential power is a clarifying moment for the nation. His inability to withhold his private motivations, combined with his willingness to push the presidential envelope in controversial ways, combined with his unsteady grasp of his office and worrisome judgment in wielding his massive powers, has shined the brightest of lights on how much power Congress has given away, and how much extraordinary power and discretion presidents have amassed. After Trump, and due to him, there will be a serious reckoning with this constitutional arrangement like no time since the 1970s, and possibly ever in American history. Whether the Congress and the nation can do anything about it is another matter. I have my doubts.

I’ve been talking about the rights’ total rejection of the concep of hypocricy for over a decade. Trump didn’t invent it.He just took it to its natural conclusion.

Hypocrisy is not a good thing. But it at least preserves the ideals we hope to live by — the old “hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.” That’s all gone now. We are living through the normalization of authoritarianism. Trump didn’t start. But he’s turbo-charged it.

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He begged for the Nobel Nomination

by digby

Trump laments: "I'll probably never get" Nobel Peace Prize like Obama pic.twitter.com/Jzb86B3uI4— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) February 15, 2019

Jesus H. Christ…

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe nominated U.S. President Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize last autumn after receiving a request from the U.S. government to do so, the Asahi newspaper reported on Sunday.

Has there ever been a more shameless leader in world history? What in the hell were they thinking?

The report follows Trump’s claim on Friday that Abe had nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize for opening talks and easing tensions with North Korea.

The Japanese leader had given him “the most beautiful copy” of a five-page nomination letter, Trump said at a White House news conference.

The U.S. government had sounded Abe out over the Noble Peace Prize nomination after Trump’s summit in June last year with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the first meeting between a North Korean leader and a sitting U.S. president, the Asahi said, citing an unnamed Japanese government source.

A spokesman for Japan’s Foreign Ministry in Tokyo said the ministry was aware of Trump’s remarks, but “would refrain from commenting on the interaction between the two leaders.”

The White House had no immediate comment when contacted by Reuters.

The Nobel Foundation’s website says a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize may be submitted by any person who meets the nomination criteria, which includes current heads of states. Under the foundation’s rules, names and other information about unsuccessful nominations cannot be disclosed for 50 years.

The wingnuts are having a fit over Joe Boden saying that America is an embarrassment over its immigration nonsense. (Coming from the party that blindly supports a man who announces daily that the US has been a hellhole for decades.)

This is embarrassing.

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Bye bye Heather

by digby

I don’t know the real story here, but this isn’t it;

President Trump’s pick to be the next United Nations ambassador withdrew from consideration Saturday, the State Department said.

The department’s spokeswoman, Heather Nauert, had been tapped to succeed Nikki Haley at the United Nations, but her name was never formally sent to the Senate for confirmation.

“Today Heather Nauert withdrew herself from consideration for the nomination of U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. The President will make an announcement with respect to a nominee for U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations soon,” deputy spokesman Robert Palladino said in a statement.

The withdrawal is related to the employment of a nanny who was in the country illegally, said three people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter.

But according to a person familiar with Nauert’s situation, the nanny was in the country legally. She was a Jamaican national employed by Nauert and her husband 10 years ago. The Nauerts paid her salary in cash. When they discovered she was not paying taxes, they insisted the tax bill be paid, the person said.

Come on:

Amid a partial government shutdown sparked by President Donald Trump’s demand for $5.7 billion toward the construction of a barrier on the U.S.-Mexico border, about a dozen Latino workers at a Trump golf club were fired because they were undocumented immigrants, according to a report from The Washington Post.

The workers and their attorney told the Post that they were fired from their jobs at the Trump National Golf Club Westchester – located in Briarcliff Manor, New York – after the company conducted an audit of the immigration documents it had been given and determined that theirs were fake.

A Trump Organization human resources executive called them in one at a time to deliver the news, they said. Six of them said they were fired on Jan. 18. They told the Post that the move was unexpected and that they were not given any severance pay.

Most of the workers told the Post they were from Mexico and had acquired fake immigration documents after they entered the U.S. on foot. They said the Trump Organization did not look closely at those papers when they were hired.

Clearly hiring undocumented workers isn’t a deal breaker in this administration.

We’ll find out what the real reason Nauert dropped out was eventually. This certainly wasn’t it.

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On a scale of Trump
by Tom Sullivan

Vice President Mike Pence in his address to the Munich Security Conference on Saturday sent world leaders greeting “from the 45th president of the United States of America, President Donald Trump.” He paused for applause, his eyes turned down to the podium through 5 seconds of stony silence before continuing. Trump finally achieved what he has long wanted. “They” weren’t laughing at “us” anymore.

Ivanka Trump is the only person in audience who doesn’t applaud after Angela Merkel points out the absurdity of Trump claiming German cars are a national security threat pic.twitter.com/Op11wls73R— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 16, 2019

German Chancellor Angela Merkel addressed the conference first, sharply critical of Trump’s handling of international security matters. “[U]nleashing a stinging, point-by-point takedown of the administration’s tendency to treat its allies as adversaries,” the Washington Post reports, adding that the international order once led by the United States “has collapsed into many tiny parts.”

Merkel highlighted the absurdity of Trump calling BMWs a threat to U.S. security when the German firm’s largest factory is in South Carolina and exports to China.

The audience applauded, grinning. Seated among them, Ivanka Trump did not.

Pence’s reception in Munich echoed the cold one he received earlier at the U.S.-called conference on Middle East security in Warsaw, Poland. Originally billed as a conference of the anti-Iran coalition, the conference script shifted to general Middle East matters. Fred Kaplan writes, “Few were fooled; most Europeans, to the extent they attended at all, sent lower-level diplomats rather than heads of state or foreign ministers—a clear signal that they assumed no important decisions or remarks would be made.”

OMG — Pence was visibly shook in Poland when he received absolutely no reaction to what was clearly supposed to be an applause line about how "the time has come for our European partners to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal." pic.twitter.com/biRxARZkcM— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 16, 2019

The sitting president attended neither conference and went golfing at Mar-a-Lago after declaring a national emergency over funding for his border wall.

Trump began his week in El Paso, TX reciting familiar lies about violent gangs of drug dealers and human smugglers, and denial of data indicating there is no crisis.

“Just remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” Trump told the crowd when he was not trying to downplay the size of an upbeat counter-rally organized nearby by Beto O’Rourke. It’s always about size.

Commenting on Trump’s “official” height of 6-foot-3 confirmed in a memorandum from his doctor, a bemused Rachel Maddow displayed a series of images of men 6-foot-2 who appear taller beside him.

At his Rose Garden press conference on Friday, Trump again cited unsubstantiated claims of an immigrant invasion, bristling at reporters question his assertion of fact by fiat. And with a childish, sing-song delivery, he complained how he would have to fight to have his order upheld in the courts.

How does one even evaluate the week on a scale of Trump? What does one do with a president who likes to sign documents with personalized Sharpies and hold them up for the camera, “Look, Ma!” style? What does one do with a president best left at a low table in the corner with some crayons, construction paper, a pair of blunt-nosed scissors, and a jar of paste?

Saturday Night at the Movies

Vote for the future

by digby

This is an interesting data point:

It has flown under the radar a bit, masked perhaps by the switch of millions of Barack Obama’s voters into Mr. Trump’s column, but in 2016 Mr. Trump did not receive support from a large segment of voters who pulled the lever for Mitt Romney in 2012. In fact, our data shows that 5 percent of Romney 2012 voters stayed home in 2016, while another 5 percent voted for Mrs. Clinton. These voters tended to be female, nonwhite, younger and more highly educated — the very voters Republicans feared would be alienated by a Trump victory when he was seeking the party’s nomination.

Most strikingly, one-third of 2012 Romney voters who were under 40 in 2016 did not vote for Mr. Trump, but rather stayed home, voted for Mrs. Clinton or voted for a third-party candidate. Among the under-40 Romney voters who supported Mr. Trump in 2016, 16 percent appear to have defected from the party to vote for a Democratic House candidate in 2018. Of course, we don’t know how they will vote in 2020, but what this means is that in the past two elections Republicans may have lost more than 40 percent of Romney voters born after 1976.

Republican House candidates performed worse among 18- to 39-year-olds than they have in decades. The voters Mr. Trump and his party lost in 2016 and 2018 represent the future of American politics. If the Republican Party becomes the party of the past — that is, of aging white men with less education — it could make winning elections increasingly difficult.

Democrats win when they embrace the future with optimism and energy. All the Democratic presidents of my lifetime won on that basis. From JFK to Carter to Clinton to Obama, it was always about aspiration for progress not a retreat to the past. These numbers speak to the opening for another successful presidential race if the Democrats choose someone who can carry that message.

By the way, there are many millions of older people who actually love their kids and think everybody’s kids on the whole planet deserve a better world. They’ll vote for progress too.

BTW: Data also shows, unfortunately, that a lot of younger males aren’t getting this memo. It’s almost all women who are moving toward the Democrats.