Month: August 2019

Dispatch from the Twilight Zone

by digby

Apparently, this is how the imbecile President of the United States conducts foreign policy:

President Trump has sent highly unusual, Sharpie-written notes to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at least twice, Axios has learned.

One missive was so odd, the Canadian ambassador double-checked with the White House to be sure it wasn’t a prank. In at least one instance, Trudeau also wrote to Trump. The exchange of handwritten notes, never before reported, was confirmed by several sources with firsthand knowledge.

The diplomatic missives include:

A torn-out Bloomberg Businessweek cover featuring a portrait of Justin Trudeau.

A back-and-forth about U.S.-Canada trade figures that culminated in Trudeau sending Trump a printout of the website of the Office of the United States Trade Representative with a smiley face beside the U.S. government figure showing America has a trade surplus with Canada (contrary to Trump’s claims).

Context: The May 1–7, 2017, issue of Bloomberg Businessweek — featuring a picture of Trudeau headlined “The Anti-Trump” — caught President Trump’s attention, according to 4 sources with direct knowledge. Trump tore the cover off the magazine and wrote on it, in silver Sharpie, something to the effect of “Looking good! Hope it’s not true!” according to these sources.

Before the White House mailed this diplomatic correspondence, it went through the normal clearance process inside the National Security Council. While some White House staff thought it was not the appropriate way to communicate with a foreign leader, they ultimately figured “it was done in good fun and would be interpreted as positive outreach,” said a source with direct knowledge of what happened. So the White House mailed the magazine cover to the Canadian Embassy in Washington.

The Canadian ambassador thought it was a prank, according to 2 sources familiar with the situation. He called the White House to check, and a White House official confirmed to the ambassador that the note was real, one of these sources said.

Months later, on Dec. 8, 2017, President Trump falsely told a rally crowd in Pensacola, Florida, that the U.S. has a trade deficit with Canada. Around that same time, Trump also mailed Trudeau a document purporting to show that the U.S. had a trade deficit with Canada, according to a source with direct knowledge.

Trump wrote in Sharpie on the document: “Not good!!” or something to that effect, the source recalled. Trump’s document only mentioned America’s deficit in the trade of goods and ignored its surplus in services (the two combined would gave the U.S. its overall surplus).

A few weeks later, Trump received a handwritten letter from Trudeau. The note, on Trudeau’s official stationery marked by the Maple Leaf, began with a friendly tone, but ended with a drop of acid.

“Dear Donald,” Trudeau wrote in the letter dated Dec. 20, 2017, according to a source with direct knowledge of its contents, which 2 other sources confirmed. “It’s been a busy year! Enjoy the Christmas holidays — you deserve it.”

“One thing,” Trudeau added. “You gave a great speech in Pensacola, but you were slightly off on the balance of trade with Canada. USTR says so! All the best for 2018, Justin.”

The second page of the letter brought the kicker. Trudeau enclosed a printout of Canada’s informational page from the website of the Office of the United States Trade Representative.

Trudeau underlined the section on the USTR website, which at the time reported that “the U.S. goods and services trade surplus with Canada was $12.5 billion in 2016.” Trudeau circled the $12.5 billion and drew a cheeky little smiley face next to it, according to a source with direct knowledge.

A Canadian government official responded to this reporting: “We’re not going to comment on whether or what paper was exchanged between our 2 countries. There was a lot of back and forth. That said, it is certainly true that there were disagreements between our 2 countries about the figures, and we repeatedly pointed to USTR and U.S. Commerce’s own figures. On your second point (the Bloomberg cover), no comment, but we don’t deny it.”

Why this matters: The U.S.-Canadian relationship is, in normal times, low-friction. But not under Trump, who views Trudeau as an irritant at best. In a conversation in the White House last year, Trump told aides he thought Canada was “the worst” country to negotiate with. “Who would think? Canada?” Trump said.

Trump now says very little about Trudeau, according to an adviser, and believes he and his trade representative Bob Lighthizer got the better of the Canadians in their trade negotiations.

Behind the scenes: Trump privately refers to Trudeau as a “wise guy,” per sources with direct knowledge. He describes Trudeau as young and cocky, and he resents it when Trudeau comments on American politics.

Trump has gleefully recounted to aides how he threatened the Canadians with auto tariffs. He says it got him a better deal on the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

Trump has also privately described Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland as “very nasty,” according to senior administration officials.

Trump was pleased with the optics of the G7 last year, an adviser said. Trump says he dominated Trudeau there, the adviser added, and loves the viral photo of himself sitting with his arms crossed as world leaders hover over him. Trump also relished leaving the summit early — snub to Trudeau, who Trump said had treated him with disrespect.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

The big picture: The president is in Year 3 of his relationships with foreign leaders, and in some cases they’ve changed substantially. Trump’s bromance with France’s 41-year-old leader Emmanuel Macron has faded, and Trump privately places Macron in a similar “wise guy” category as the 47-year-old Trudeau.

Last week, Trump chided Macron on Twitter for “purporting” to represent the U.S. in conversations with Iran.

Trump has also hammered China with escalating tariffs and increasingly tough rhetoric — a significant change from his more frequent emphasis on his close personal relationship with President Xi Jinping in Year 1.

I’m glad that I don’t have to travel globally for business anymore. I couldn’t take the embarrassment.

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Branded!
by Tom Sullivan

Liberals’ affinity of novelty means they are more open to trying new foods, new experiences, etc. A tolerance for ambiguity and disorganization makes them more flexible in problem-solving. Much of that is old news. Liberals also tend more towards complexity in speaking and writing. “Liberals lecture, conservatives communicate,” a February study’s title suggests. Those traits sometimes work against each other.

That thirst for novelty and complexity means the left has trouble crafting a direct message and repeating it. But liberals may finally be exhibiting that famous flexibility by adopting a simple message, sticking with it, and thereby sticking it to their opponents.

Digby pointed Sunday to a Washington Post story about Donald Trump’s frustration at being branded a racist:

Following a month in which he leveled racist attacks on four congresswomen of color, maligned majority-black Baltimore as a “rat and rodent infested mess” and saw his anti-immigrant rhetoric parroted in an alleged mass shooter’s statement, the risk for Trump is that the pejorative that has long dogged him becomes defining.

Being called a racist has infuriated Trump, gnawing at him in recent days as he lashes out — in tweets and in public comments — over the moniker, behavior his advisers and allies excuse as the natural reaction of anyone who does not consider himself a racist but is accused of being one.

“For them to throw out the race word again — racist, racist, racist,” Trump told reporters Friday as he departed the White House for a week-long vacation at his private golf club in Bedminster, N.J. “They call anybody a racist when they run out of cards.”

Repetition works.

Trump spent years marketing himself as a brand. He is accustomed to negatively branding adversaries and having it stick. Republicans, too, brand their opponents with simplistic messages endlessly repeated: socialism, socialism, socialism. They are accustomed to seeing those attacks go unanswered in any consistent way. Lately, however, their favored weapon is being turned against him.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is feeling that bite as well. Branded for his refusal to advance legislation to secure 2020 elections against Russian hacking, the trending hashtag #MoscowMitch has McConnell seething. He has tried hurling the epithet of McCarthyism at adversaries for using it. So far, to little avail.

Matthew Rozsa writes at Slate:

McConnell isn’t being accused of sympathy to Moscow because his opponents lack valid grounds for criticism and are resorting to a straw man fallacy. He is being accused of this because his political actions are inscrutable except as those of a man who so badly wants his party to win that he doesn’t care if Russia needs to be empowered for that to happen.

Twitter may not be a representative cross-section of America, but neither is Trump’s base. With Trump addicted to it, his base follows it. Now they are being bombarded by negative branding of both Trump and McConnell.

Even before social media took off, using relentless repetition Republicans branded Al Gore a serial fabulist. Republican delegates to the 2004 convention mocked John Kerry’s Purple Hearts by sporting purple band-aids. Naturally, Republicans expect their opponents to conform to polite norms of behavior they themselves violate with abandon. In combat that’s called asymmetrical warfare. The left, at least off Capitol Hill, no longer accepts being suckers. Social media, used effectively, is biting back.

A recent Morning Consult poll placed McConnell’s approval rating at 36 percent in Kentucky (50 percent negative), the lowest of any senator in the country.

Mitch McConnell quietly crawled back to Kentucky this weekend to hide from calls for gun reform and election security legislation.

His speech at a local event was completely drowned out by #MoscowMitch chants.

You can't hide, Senator.

Video via @wkms pic.twitter.com/92qzbF2VqS— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) August 7, 2019

There is not an app for doing that. It simply requires the left to tamp down its impulse for novelty, to adopt a simple, direct message, and to repeat it ad nauseam. Opponents’ nauseam.

The left has finally figured out they can brand the hell out of them using social media. Turns out repetition is some kind of miracle tech, huh?

Trump’s white shoe fits perfectly — and he doesn’t like it

by digby

Boo-fucking-hoo:

President Trump considers himself a branding wizard, but he is vexed by a branding crisis of his own: how to shed the label of “racist.”

As the campaign takes shape about 15 months before voters render a verdict on his presidency, Trump’s Democratic challengers are marking him a racist, and a few have gone so far as to designate the president a white supremacist.

Throughout his career as a real estate magnate, a celebrity provocateur and a politician, Trump has recoiled from being called the r-word, even though some of his actions and words have been plainly racist.

Following a month in which he leveled racist attacks on four congresswomen of color, maligned majority-black Baltimore as a “rat and rodent infested mess” and saw his anti-immigrant rhetoric parroted in an alleged mass shooter’s statement, the risk for Trump is that the pejorative that has long dogged him becomes defining.

Being called a racist has infuriated Trump, gnawing at him in recent days as he lashes out — in tweets and in public comments — over the moniker, behavior his advisers and allies excuse as the natural reaction of anyone who does not consider himself a racist but is accused of being one.

“For them to throw out the race word again — racist, racist, racist,” Trump told reporters Friday as he departed the White House for a week-long vacation at his private golf club in Bedminster, N.J. “They call anybody a racist when they run out of cards.”

The president views the characterization largely through the lens of politics, said one close adviser, explaining that Trump feels the charges of racism are just another attempt to discredit him — not unlike, he believes, the more than a dozen women who have accused him of sexual misconduct or the Russia investigation.

Many of his supporters see it the same way. “At first, they tried to use Russia, and that didn’t work,” said Don Byrd of Newton, Iowa. “Now it’s all about race — ‘He’s a racist. He’s this. He’s that.’ ”

Democrats have engaged in semantic maneuverings about just how racist they think the president is. While former congressman Beto O’Rourke and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said without hesitation that the president is a white supremacist, former vice president Joe Biden stopped short.

“Why are you so hooked on that?” Biden told reporters last week in Iowa. “You just want me to say the words so I sound like everybody else. I’m not everybody else. I’m Joe Biden. . . . He is encouraging white supremacists. You can determine what that means.”

“He is encouraging white supremacists. You can determine what that means,” former vice president Joe Biden told reporters in Iowa when asked whether he considers Trump to be racist. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)

Trump’s allies argue Democrats risk overreach in maligning the president.

“Democrats seem to forget that Trump supporters include blacks, whites, Hispanics and other minority groups who simply love this country,” said Mercedes Schlapp, a Trump campaign adviser, in a text message. “Democrats have shown their absolute disdain for the president and now they have extended their disdain to half of America.”

Some Democrats seem cognizant of the danger. At last month’s presidential debate, Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota said, “There are people that voted for Donald Trump before that aren’t racist; they just wanted a better shake in the economy.”

Yet, she, too, also felt the need to rebuke Trump. “I don’t think anyone can justify what this president is doing,” Klobuchar concluded.

[‘How do you stop these people’: Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric looms over El Paso massacre]

Trump recently called himself “the least racist person anywhere in the world,” but his history is littered with racist and racially charged comments and actions.

In 1989, Trump purchased newspaper advertisements demanding the reinstatement of the death penalty after the arrests of the “Central Park Five,” black and Latino teenagers accused of raping a jogger in New York. They were exonerated in 2002. In 2005, he pitched a culturally divisive spinoff of his popular reality television series: “The Apprentice: White People vs. Black People.”

Trump then rose to political prominence partially by championing the racist birtherism lie that former president Barack Obama was born outside of the United States. As a presidential candidate, Trump attacked a judge overseeing a Trump University case for his Mexican heritage. And once in the White House, Trump equivocated in the aftermath of a deadly white supremacist rally in 2017 in Charlottesville, saying there were “very fine people on both sides.”

Last month, Trump tweeted that four minority congresswomen known as the Squad should “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” even though three of the four lawmakers were born in the United States. He later did not stop his supporters from chanting “Send her back!” at a campaign rally where he evoked the name of one of the four, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). The Somali-born refuge became a U.S. citizen in 2000.

Trump’s rhetoric came under fresh examination last week after the alleged gunman who killed at least 22 people in El Paso echoed in what is believed to be his missive Trump’s language about an “invasion” of Hispanic migrants.

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said she has never “heard this president say or do anything” racist. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

People who know Trump have come to his defense. Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, said that, in her three years at his side, she has “never, ever, a single time heard this president say or do anything” racist. She described his reaction to being labeled a racist as “less frustration and more consternation that critics, especially those who would like to be president, resort to spewing invectives or hurling insults at the current president, instead of just arguing on the issues.”

Trump’s sensitivity about the racist sobriquet dates back decades. The Rev. Al Sharpton, a civil rights activist who has known Trump and tangled with him for many years, said the president has long understood that being called “the r-word” would damage his casino and hotel businesses and, now, his political standing.

“At one level, you’re super sensitive about the r-word, and on another level, you buy ads on the Central Park Five,” Sharpton said.

Sharpton recalled that, at the height of the birtherism debate, Trump sought to persuade him to stop calling him out for his lies about Obama’s birthplace on his MSNBC show by inviting him to a meeting at Trump Tower.

“I’m not a racist,” Sharpton recalled Trump adamantly insisting.

The two men argued and Sharpton responded, “I’m not calling you a racist, but what you are doing is racist.”

Sharpton continued to attack Trump on air.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, who has known Trump and tangled with him for many years, said the president has long understood that being called “the r-word” is damaging his reputation. (Stephanie Keith/Reuters)

Some people who have worked for Trump say the president is less concerned about the moral significance of being called a racist but focuses instead on the bottom-line implications.

“The guy sends out blatantly racist tweets,” former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci said. “White supremacist. Racist. Those labels are bad for business. . . . It means a reduction in the colors of people who want to vote for you. He’s upset about it because it’s bad for business.”

To the extent that one’s understanding of what is and isn’t racist is forged in his youth, Trump’s upbringing may be instructive. One former adviser suggested Trump believes he is more racially tolerant than his father, Fred Trump, who was reported to have been arrested in connection with a 1927 Ku Klux Klan march in New York — an arrest the president has denied as “nonsense” and “never happened.”

In the 1970s, Fred and Donald Trump both were sued by the Justice Department for discriminating against black renters in their residential properties.

Conway argued the charges of racism against Trump are over-the-top and that they are likely to help him politically because his voters could think Democratic candidates are unfairly branding them as racists, too, simply for supporting the president.

“When the elite wrist-flickers are out there demeaning and ridiculing his rank-and-file supporters — those forgotten men and women who aren’t chanting at the rallies — an insult to him is an insult to them and vice versa,” Conway said.

One such Trump supporter, Laura Capps, 39, had driven last week from Boone, Iowa, to attend the first full day of the state fair. Capps said she was exasperated when Democrats blamed Trump for mass shootings — “there were shootings under Obama, under every president” — and said they obsessed over Trump’s tweets and statements because they had nothing else to attack.

“I’ve been called a racist because I’m a Trump supporter,” Capps said. “It’s ridiculous. I’ve got a first cousin that’s married to an African American gal. So their kids are biracial, and I love them just like the rest of my second cousins.”

They all say they have a black relative these days and are very proud of the fact that they treat them just like the white ones. They obviously believe they should be congratulated for that. Even Trump likes to point out “my African American” in the crowd.

These are “the good ones” don’t you know…

Personally, I think it’s telling that these people take it so personally when Trump’s racism is pointed out.  They really should think about that a bit.

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He finds new ways to betray his oath every single day

by digby

I guess we are overwhelmed with this president’s behavior, but this is truly unprecedented. Trump is trying to get a foreign government to bar entry to American office-holders:

President Trump has told advisers he thinks Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should use Israel’s anti-boycott law to bar Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) from entering Israel, according to three sources familiar with the situation.

What he’s saying: Trump’s private views have reached the top level of the Israeli government. But Trump denies, through White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, ever giving any kind of directive to the Israelis. “The Israeli government can do what they want. It’s fake news,” Grisham said on Saturday.

Driving the news: Trump has told U.S. advisers, including senior Trump administration officials, that Israel should bar Omar and Tlaib’s entry because the two congresswomen favor a boycott of Israel, according to sources familiar with Trump’s private comments. In 2017, Israel’s parliament passed a law requiring the interior minister to block foreign nationals from entering Israel if they have supported boycotting the Jewish state.

Trump’s reaction came days after the U.S. House overwhelmingly passed a resolution to condemn the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, or BDS movement, which Omar and Tlaib support. The resolution states that the global movement to boycott the state of Israel over its policies toward Palestinians “promotes principles of collective guilt, mass punishment and group isolation, which are destructive of prospects for progress towards peace.”

Omar and Tlaib voted against the resolution.

Between the lines: Trump told confidants he disagreed with Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer’s rationale for Israel to overlook the law to let Omar and Tlaib visit Israel. Dermer said last month: “Out of respect for the U.S. Congress and the great alliance between Israel and America, we would not deny entry to any member of Congress into Israel.”

Trump said that if Omar and Tlaib wanted to boycott Israel, “then Israel should boycott them,” according to a source with direct knowledge.

Israeli officials say congressional Democratic leadership pushed Dermer to allow the congresswomen into the country. Their advocacy, per those officials, is a major reason why Netanyahu will allow the two women in. 

The Democrats had argued that if the Israeli government blocked Omar and Tlaib’s entry, then other Democratic members would cancel a planned, AIPAC-sponsored Israel trip in solidarity, these officials said.

Last week, the Israeli deputy national security adviser Reuven Azar held an interagency meeting at the prime minister’s office with representatives of the foreign, interior and strategic affairs ministries to prepare for the visit, according to Israeli officials who were briefed on the meeting. The officials added the meeting focused on how to react to anti-Israeli statements by Omar and Tlaib during the trip and whether to allow entry to people traveling with them who aren’t members of Congress and who support the boycott-Israel movement.

The big picture: Trump has spent the past month attacking Omar, Tlaib and 2 other progressive congresswomen. He suggested that the 4 women of color “go back” to where they come from, even though 3 were born in the U.S. The fourth, Omar, is a naturalized citizen from Somalia.

235 House Democrats and 4 Republicans voted for a resolution in mid-July that “strongly condemns President Donald Trump’s racist comments that have legitimized and increased fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color.”[…] 

They are scheduled to arrive on August 18th.

*sigh*

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Conspiracy Theorist in Chief

by digby

Jake Tapper rips Trump for spreading a "deranged" conspiracy theory pic.twitter.com/Ic89Nr8mGG— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) August 11, 2019

It’s fundamental to who he is. Remember, he first gained serious political traction among the Deplorables for hyping the birther conspiracy. Jake Tapper called him out explicitly today:

CNN reporter Jake Tapper blasted President Donald Trump on Sunday after the President retweeted a baseless conspiracy theory about accused child molester Jeffrey Epstein’s apparent suicide.

Tapper kicked off his morning program, “State of the Union,” with a contemptuous speech on Trump’s penchant for boosting conspiracy theories, including his retweet on Saturday night that linked Epstein’s death to Bill Clinton.

“We begin this morning with a retweet from the President of the United States,” Tapper said. “Not a message about healing or uniting the country, one week after two horrifying massacres, not about the victims of those tragedies.”

“Instead, President Trump, using his massive Twitter platform, 63 million followers, to spread a deranged conspiracy theory tying the death of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein in prison to the President’s former political rivals, the Clintons,” he continued.

After listing off various other unfounded conspiracy theories Trump has floated in the past, including birtherism and billionaire George Soros funding an immigrant invasion at the border, Tapper hit Trump for misusing his powerful influence as the country’s leader.

“President Trump could use his megaphone for anything,” the reporter said. “But the President often uses it to amplify that which is the worst of us: personal attacks, bigotry, and insane conspiracy theories.”

Tapper wrapped it up with one final declaration: “This is no longer just irresponsibility and indecent. It is dangerous.”

And his sharp-tongued assassin Kellyanne Conway is egging him on.

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Why not Madoff?

by digby

Apparently, Bernie Madoff has been hitting Trump up for a pardon too:

Bernie Madoff is asking that President Donald Trump reduce his 150-year prison sentence.… Madoff, who pleaded guilty to 11 crimes in 2009, is not asking for a pardon from the president. Instead, he is requesting clemency from Trump in the form of a sentence commutation, or reduction, according to an application filed with the Justice Department. A search of the Justice Department’s website shows that Madoff’s clemency request is “pending.”

It is not known if Trump will consider the request, or when he might do so. Madoff’s former lawyer, Ira Lee Sorkin, told CNBC he had no information about the request. The White House referred questions about Madoff’s bid for clemency to the Justice Department.

He believes his sentence was too long because it didn’t account for all the years he wasn’t swindling his clients. That’s just the kind of logic that could easily appeal to Trump. Trump believes any accountability for a right-winger or a rich guy is by definition “unfair.”

You would think the odds of Trump granting Madoff’s request are probably quite low, but given who we’re talking about, they’re definitely above zero percent! Since taking office in January 2017, Trump has issued 10 pardons that all neatly fit with his primary worldview as a Hillary Clinton–hating psychopath who thinks cheating is fine as long as the cheater is rich. Beneficiaries have included Kristian Saucier, who pleaded guilty to unauthorized possession and retention of national defense information, who argued at his sentencing that he should have received probation because Hillary Clinton didn’t go to jail for her own email scandal, which Trump obviously ate up. There was Scooter Libby, who was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice, a topic extremely close to the president’s heart. There was Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who the Department of Justice said oversaw “the worst pattern of racial profiling by a law enforcement agency in U.S. history,” which, y’know. And of course, there was millionaire Conrad Black, who was convicted in 2007 of obstruction of justice and fraud. Black received his own pardon from Trump after writing a book last year called Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other, in which Black argued that “the great majority of anti-Trump activity in the first year of his administration was devoted to falsehoods,” and that Trump is not “a racist, sexist, warmonger, hothead, promoter of violence, or a foreign or domestic economic warrior.”

This was written before his latest declaration about considering commuting Blagojevich’s sentence.

If only Madoff had been on The Apprentice, he’d be a shoo-in. But it’s not too late to write a book!

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Is Bill Barr listening?

by digby

Conway defends Trump boosting conspiracy theory about Epstein: "I think the President just wants everything to be investigated." pic.twitter.com/N8hamgyIx5— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) August 11, 2019

This woman is just plain evil:

There is some unsealed information implicating some people very high up. … I’m not saying anything beyond that. But I will say that there’s always this rush to say, ‘We need transparency, we need accountability,’ when it involves fictional accusations like collusion with Russia to swing an election.”

Conway said on “Fox News Sunday“ that Attorney General William Barr acted immediately when he learned of Epstein’s death, opening an investigation.

“I think that those victims should have justice, and they’ve been looking for justice for many, many years,” Conway said.
“Trying to connect the president to this monster from years ago, where they’re seen dancing in a video versus other people who were actively, I suppose, flying around with this monster on his island … perhaps there’s a public interest in knowing more about that,” Conway said on Sunday.

“But again, this is all speculative and it’s not for me to go further than where the DOJ and FBI are right now, but you do hear different people asking questions and they want to know who else was involved in Epstein’s crime, or even just his activities,” she added.

“Different people” are asking questions….

Anyone who welcomes this despicable piece of work into society after spreading this garbage should be shunned right along with her.

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Remember: Trump’s not the only one who loves him a tyrannical psychopath.

by digby

As we contemplate Trump’s latest betrayal of the US and its allies with his excuses for Kim Jong Un continuing to test missiles and threatening his neighbors, I’m reminded of this blast from the past.

I still think Jared Kushner should be prosecuted on espionage charges. There are people in Pelican Bay today for doing stuff like this:

Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman bragged of receiving classified US intelligence from Jared Kushner and using it as part of a purge of ‘corrupt’ princes and businessmen, DailyMail.com can disclose.

The de facto ruler of the Middle East’s largest economy is currently on a US tour which has seen him meet President Donald Trump in the White House, hold talks with a string of the country’s richest and most influential people and book the entire Four Seasons in Beverly Hills for himself and his entourage.

Sources have told DailyMail.com that the prince – known by his initials MBS – has been boasting about his close relationship with the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, and the intelligence which he has told his circle Kushner passed to him.

Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman has been boasting about his close relationship with the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner.

Kushner was said to have a late night meeting discussing intelligence with Salman in October. Kusher and Salman are pictured above with Ivanka Trump at the Murabba Palace in Riyadh last May

Relationship: Jared Kushner took part in a lunch at the White House last week which his father-in-law threw for Mohammed bin Salman

The crackdown on ‘corruption’ in the Saudi kingdom was led by MBS and began in November, days after he had met Kushner for talks in Riyadh.

But it saw allegations of torture as hundreds were rounded up, including princes from rival parts of the Saudi royal family and some of the country’s wealthiest businessmen.

DailyMail.com revealed a photograph showing the detainees sleeping on the floor of a ballroom at the Riyadh Ritz Carlton, and disclosed that some had been tortured.

The New York Times later reported that one of the detainees had died from his injuries.

Most are said to have reached ‘settlements’ with the Saudi government, and MBS himself boasted in a 60 Minutes interview that the government had regained at least $100 billion from them.

Kushner claimed through his attorney Abbe Lowell that it was a ‘false story’.

Peter Mirijanian, Lowell’s spokesman, said: ‘The alleged exchange never happened. Mr Kushner was and is well aware of the rules governing information and follows those rules.’

Despite Kushner’s denial sources have told DailyMail.com how MBS boasted in private that Kushner was the source of intelligence used in the round-up.

He also told members of his circle that the intelligence included information on who was disloyal to him. There is no way to independently verify the truth of the boast.

‘Jared took a list out of names from US eavesdrops of people who were supposedly MBS’s enemies,’ said one source, characterizing how MBS spoke about the information.

‘He took a list out of these people who had been trashing MBS in phone calls, and said ‘these are the ones who are your enemies’.

The crackdown saw allegations of torture as hundreds were rounded up, including princes from rival parts of the Saudi royal family and some of the country’s wealthiest businessmen, and brought to the Riyadh Ritz Carlton

DailyMail.com revealed a photograph showing the detainees sleeping on the floor of a ballroom at the Riyadh Ritz Carlton, and disclosed that some had been tortured. The New York Times later reported that one of the detainees had died from his injuries

‘MBS was actually bragging about it in Saudi Arabia when it happened, that he and Jared sat up until 4am discussing things, and Jared brought him this list.’

The Riyadh source said: ‘They sat for several hours together. They literally laid out the future map of the entire region, that’s why they stayed up to the early hours of the morning from the afternoon before.’

The intelligence allegedly discussed during Kushner’s visit to the Middle East last October was said to have came from U.S. wiretaps on conversations between Arab royals in hotels in London, in major U.S. cities and even on yachts docked close to Monte Carlo, a favorite playground of the super-rich.

A separate source told DailyMail.com that it was being said in the Gulf that the president’s son-in-law took a copy of information from the daily intelligence briefing provided by the intelligence community to the White House, and shared its contents with MBS.

The intelligence named several family members who were opposed to his rise, it was said.

‘Kushner got hold of an intelligence briefing,’ said the Riyadh palace source, recounting the version which originated with MBS. ‘At that time he had a high level of security clearance and had access to that. He copied it and provided its contents to MBS.

‘The CIA are doing their job by briefing the president on what is happening internationally.

‘This is a briefing by the CIA to tell the president that some members of the Saudi royal family are plotting in this and that country.

‘Kushner took that part of the briefing and flew to Saudi Arabia to impress MBS.’

Honestly, if you want to contemplate why they didn’t want to give this guy a top security clearance this might be a clue.

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And today he will probably go even lower

by digby

I think David Frum said it well:

August 10, 1969: SAN CLEMENTE, Calif.—President Nixon accused his predecessor Lyndon Baines Johnson of complicity in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Speaking with reporters on the first day of a 10-day stay at his Pacific Ocean vacation home ….

Of course, that never happened. Obviously. How could it, how dare it? But hadit happened, such an accusation—by a president, against a former president—would have convulsed the United States and the world. Today, President Trump accused his predecessor, Bill Clinton—or possibly his 2016 campaign opponent, former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—of complicity in the death of the accused sex-trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein.

Many seem to have responded with a startled shrug. What do you expect? It’s just Trump letting off steam on Twitter.

Reactions to actions by Trump are always filtered through the prism of the ever-more-widely accepted view—within his administration, within Congress, within the United States and around the world—that the 45th president is a reckless buffoon, a conspiratorial racist moron, whose weird comments should be disregarded by sensible people.
[…]
Grinning and flashing a thumbs-up over an orphaned baby? Yes, still president. Tweeting that a third-tier dictator has threatened him with more missile tests unless he halts military exercises with a U.S. ally——and that he has surrendered to that blackmail? Shamefully, still president. Accusing a former U.S. president of murder? It’s incredible, it’s appalling, it’s humiliating … but, yes, he is the president all the same.

Trump’s circle probably expects the world to sputter for a while and then be distracted by some new despicable statement or act. That is how it has gone for nearly three years, and that is how it is likely still to go. Trump is steering the U.S. and the world into a trade war and perhaps a financial crisis and recession along with it. He is wrecking the structure of U.S. alliances in Asia and his rhetoric is inciting shooting rampages against minorities. Compared to that, mere slurs and insults perhaps weigh lighter in the crushing dumpster-load of Trump’s output of unfitness for the office he holds.

But it shouldn’t be forgotten, either, in the onrush of events. The certainty that Trump will descend ever deeper into sub-basements of “new lows” after this new low should not numb us to its newness and lowness.

Neither the practical impediments to impeachment and the Twenty-Fifth Amendment process, nor the foibles and failings of the candidates running to replace him, efface the fact that this presidency shames and disgraces the office every minute of every hour of every day. And even when it ends, however it ends, the shame will stain it still.

The right is feverishly trying to connect Epstein’s death to Bill and Hillary Clinton, no matter how totally absurd that is. The president of the United States is on board. One wonders if Bill Barr is too…

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Takin’ it to the streets
by Tom Sullivan

When will Americans take to the streets? When will be abandon clicktivism and a soul-sapping diet of outrage? It seems the only practical/impractical way left to alter the trajectory of the growing dysfunction. Somewhere even now there may be a seed crystal with potential for growing into a movement capable of doing what politicians, deportations and mass-shootings cannot: forcing Donald Trump from office, closing the camps, disarming the NRA, neutering white nationalism, reforming policing. Whatever, I’m still looking, exhausted, for a spark to catch fire.

The Women’s March of January 2017 was just such an idea. The marches were worldwide and massive. Just not sustained. The Daily Beast’s Christopher Dickey examines a study in the journal Nature that finds what makes protest effective is not just size but momentum.

Erica Chenoweth and Margherita Belgioioso consider that like the formula for momentum, mass times velocity (p=mv), when “movements maintain mass and velocity, they maintain momentum.”

Sudan’s opposition, for example, employed “a combination of protests, marches, general strikes, and other forms of non-cooperation” to remove Omar al-Bashir in April after 30 years. Algeria’s “Smile Revolution” peaked with an event that mobilized under 2.5 percent of the population to topple the government there in March. The Sudan protests were also less than 2.5 percent.

The one-day Women’s March in 2017 was a bit over half those numbers but left an impression. The street protests in Puerto Rico left more than an impression. They forced the resignation of Gov. Ricardo Rosselló. But it took more than one day.

As much as a quarter of tiny Hong Kong’s population took to the streets in one of multiple days of protest there.

Dickey writes:

Again, there’s a formula. Not only are Hongkongers showing an instinctive understanding of “the physics of dissent,” they’ve added a bit of Kung Fu philosophy from the late martial arts icon Bruce Lee. When facing authority, “be water,” flowing where the power is weak or absent. The most active protesters tell each other, rather poetically, “Be strong as ice, be fluid like water, gather like dew, scatter like mist.”

Why have we not seen a similar movement congeal in the U.S. since the 1960s? One reason is geography — the sheer size of the country conspires against sustained and concentrated protests in Washington, D.C., for example. Protests led by the American left tend to become issue fairs. Every interest group and their ideological brothers want a piece of the action, join in, and dilute if not hijack the central message. If there ever was one. The possibility of being drafted, or a family member being drafted, to serve in a widely unpopular war kept Vietnam protests somewhat more focused.

Dickey adds:

Maybe the American opposition to the Trump regime really isn’t as impassioned as many rants on Twitter might suggest. Or maybe those are just onanistic ends in themselves. There’s been a lot of obvious passivity: waiting for Robert Mueller to take care of everything, or pretending that the symbolic act of impeachment will squeeze the sleaze out of office.

Certainly, by comparison with the demonstrators in other parts of the world there’s a hint of sloth and even of cowardice.

What’s missing, Dickey suggests, is the protests “have to keep coming again and again–preferably weekly, even daily.” Again, in a country this dispersed the logistics behind that are challenging.

Movements which demand not just the departure of the country’s leader but also “the expansion of rights, democracy, justice, or economic opportunity” fare better than those that simply topple the government, Chenoweth and Belgioioso explain. Where the military steps in to support the protesters, the military has a tendency not to step back out:

That said, historically speaking, movements that have used nonviolent resistance to oust long-standing autocrats from below have had a better track record than those using armed struggle in generating more democratic outcomes in the longer term. Countries in which movements have stayed engaged throughout the transitional process have fared better than those where the movements quickly demobilized after declaring victory. But the struggle for democracy, rights, and justice is rarely over when the leader departs.

That arc is long, longer than a single march or even a string of them.