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Month: August 2019

Definitely not racist

Published by digby on August 23, 2019

Definitely not racist

by digby

For some reason a lot of people seem convinced that expressing views like this is a political winner:

Jean Cramer, a candidate for the Marysville City Council in Michigan, sent shockwaves through a Thursday forum when she answered a question about diversity by saying that she wants to “keep Marysville a white community as much as possible.”

According to the Port Huron Times-Herald, the other candidates reacted viscerally, one citing her Syrian immigrant father.

“I don’t even know that I can talk yet, I’m so upset and shocked. My father was a hundred percent Syrian, and they owned the Lynwood Bar. It was a grocery store at that time. So basically, what you’ve said is that my father and his family had no business to be in this community,” said Mayor Pro Tem Kathy Hayman.

When given a chance to clean up her statements at the end of the forum, Cramer expanded on her racist remarks.

“As long as, how can I put this? What Kathy Hayman doesn’t know is that her family is in the wrong,” she told the Times-Herald. “(A) husband and wife need to be the same race. Same thing with kids. That’s how it’s been from the beginning of, how can I say, when God created the heaven and the earth. He created Adam and Eve at the same time. But as far as me being against blacks, no I’m not.”

Even this guy came to understand that speaking like this in public wasn’t a winning platform:

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I wouldn’t trust this crazy man to mow my lawn

Published by digby on August 23, 2019

I wouldn’t trust this crazy man to mow my lawn

by digby

James Fallows has a written a viral piece about Trump’s unraveling that’s worth reading in its entirety. He notes that he wrote many pieces about Trump’s unfitness before the election but steered clear of “medicalizing” his behavior out of respect for the rules set forth by the medical profession. After this week’s unhinged presidential performance he makes this observation:

But now we’ve had something we didn’t see so clearly during the campaign. These are episodes of what would be called outright lunacy, if they occurred in any other setting: An actually consequential rift with a small but important NATO ally, arising from the idea that the U.S. would “buy Greenland.” 

Trump’s self-description as “the Chosen One,” and his embrace of a supporter’s description of him as the “second coming of God” and the “King of Israel.” His logorrhea, drift, and fantastical claims in public rallies, and his flashes of belligerence at the slightest challenge in question sessions on the White House lawn. His utter lack of affect or empathy when personally meeting the most recent shooting victims, in Dayton and El Paso. His reduction of any event, whatsoever, into what people are saying about him.

Obviously I have no standing to say what medical pattern we are seeing, and where exactly it might lead. But just from life I know this:

  • If an airline learned that a pilot was talking publicly about being “the Chosen One” or “the King of Israel” (or Scotland or whatever), the airline would be looking carefully into whether this person should be in the cockpit.
  • If a hospital had a senior surgeon behaving as Trump now does, other doctors and nurses would be talking with administrators and lawyers before giving that surgeon the scalpel again.
  • If a public company knew that a CEO was making costly strategic decisions on personal impulse or from personal vanity or slight, and was doing so more and more frequently, the board would be starting to act. (See: Uber, management history of.)
  • If a university, museum, or other public institution had a leader who routinely insulted large parts of its constituency—racial or religious minorities, immigrants or international allies, women—the board would be starting to act.
  • If the U.S. Navy knew that one of its commanders was routinely lying about important operational details, plus lashing out under criticism, plus talking in “Chosen One” terms, the Navy would not want that person in charge of, say, a nuclear-missile submarine. (See: The Queeg saga in The Caine Mutiny, which would make ideal late-summer reading or viewing for members of the White House staff.)

Yet now such a person is in charge not of one nuclear-missile submarine but all of them—and the bombers and ICBMs, and diplomatic military agreements, and the countless other ramifications of executive power.

If Donald Trump were in virtually any other position of responsibility, action would already be under way to remove him from that role. The board at a public company would have replaced him outright or arranged a discreet shift out of power. (Of course, he would never have gotten this far in a large public corporation.) The chain-of-command in the Navy or at an airline or in the hospital would at least call a time-out, and check his fitness, before putting him back on the bridge, or in the cockpit, or in the operating room. (Of course, he would never have gotten this far as a military officer, or a pilot, or a doctor.)

There are two exceptions. One is a purely family-run business, like the firm in which Trump spent his entire previous career. And the other is the U.S. presidency, where he will remain, despite more and more-manifest Queeg-like unfitness, as long as the GOP Senate stands with him.

(Why the Senate? Because the two constitutional means for removing a president, impeachment and the 25th Amendment, both ultimately require two thirds support from the Senate. Under the 25th Amendment, a majority of the Cabinet can remove a president—but if the president disagrees, he can retain the office unless two thirds of both the House and Senate vote against him, an even tougher standard than with impeachment. Once again it all comes back to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.)

Donald Trump is who we knew him to be. But now he’s worse. The GOP Senate continues to show us what it is.

They are accomplices. And they should be held accountable.

Why do I sense they will just go on as if nothing happened?

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The obituary David Koch deserves

Published by digby on August 23, 2019

The obituary David Koch deserves

by digby

From Brian Kahn at Gizmodo: Ding Dong:

David Koch is dead.

The billionaire died this week at age 79 of causes yet unknown. While he certainly enjoyed the fruits of his labors to deregulate U.S. industry and reduce taxes on the super-wealthy like himself, he will never have to experience the consequences of his biggest achievement: putting the entire planet on the brink of crisis in the service of enriching himself and a few other fossil fuel billionaires. And we, the people and future generations who are going to live with the fallout, will never see him or the small cadre of wealthy conservatives who funded decades of climate denial face any form of justice.

Koch’s death was first reported by the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer Friday morning and confirmed by his surviving brother, Charles, shortly thereafter. The two brothers were tied as the 11th richest people on the planet on the Forbes 100, with an estimated net worth of $50.5 billion each. They amassed so much wealth in part through business savvy—you likely don’t go a day without coming in contact with something made by some subsidiary of their privately owned Koch Industries conglomerate—and in part because they spent a comparative pittance of that fortune on turning our political system into a fucking nightmare. Funding astroturf groups like Americans for Prosperity and conservative politicians has led to widespread deregulation and huge tax breaks for their businesses, allowing them to take an even bigger share of the pie.

The Koch Brothers Are Very Proud of Getting Republicans to Destroy the Environment

The Koch brothers and their network of rich donors have basically bought and paid for the…Read more

If ratcheting up inequality were all the Kochs did, they would still be arch-villains. But the Koch brothers’ businesses from fossil fuel extraction and refining to petrochemical and fertilizer production all rely on being able to emit carbon pollution with abandon. In the 1990s, as the world moved toward an awakening on climate change and the need to address it, the Koch machine moved to block any regulations or price on carbon that would cut into their profits by funding doubt and denial. Greenpeace estimates the brothers spent $127 million from 1997 to 2017 funding 92 organizations that muddied the waters on climate change, a move that helped make international efforts to combat climate change, like the Kyoto Protocol, worthless. They funded a network of overlapping climate denial organizations to kill a 2009 bill that would have created a cap and trade system, a very business-friendly climate solution they rejected on principle.

Now David Koch is dead. And he will never have to live with the consequences of his actions, all of which were for, I don’t know, making a point as part of some libertarian 101 seminar or maybe just plain old greed. (You could can argue the two are synonymous). Ditto for the other largely anonymous small cadre of conservative billionaires and fossil fuel executives who have peddled climate denial over the years all while making the problem worse by extracting more poison from the ground and putting it in the atmosphere. They’ll likely die long before things get really bleak, and the profits they made as one of the biggest market failures in human history will almost certainly ensure their descendants are insulated from the worst impacts.

If David Koch and his brother hadn’t funded denial—as Charles is likely to continue to do—it’s possible that the world would have taken steps to drawdown carbon pollution decades ago. If the world began cutting emissions in 2000, it would have had to do so at a rate of 4 percent per year to keep warming under the 1.5 degree Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) threshold. Starting today means “monumental” cuts. If we don’t do anything for 10 years, we’re in deep trouble. All the funding Koch kicked in for arts and cancer research won’t matter if the world burns down, a thing that’s actively happening to the Amazon rain forest on the same week he passed away.

There’s more at the link. It’s devastating and rightly so. I normally don’t slam people when they die, but this many may well end up being one of the most destructive human beings in human history.

Here’s Chris Hayes’ opening last night on the Amazon fire:

Kahn concludes his scathing piece with this:

There is deep injustice in David Koch’s death. Journalist Kate Aronoff has made the case that fossil fuel executives should be tried for crimes against humanity. Those trials—if they happen—would be unlikely to snare some of the biggest perpetrators of those crimes because they too will already be dead. Climate change is a form of violence that will largely affect people with little power to address it or relatively little role in creating it. Death is an escape hatch for David Koch while the rest of us are left scrambling for the emergency brake before we go over the cliff.

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So much winning

Published by digby on August 23, 2019

So much winning

by digby

“Officials are not explaining what legal or moral authority the President has to make that order,” CNBC’s @EamonJavers reports from the White House after Trump tweeted an “order” for US companies to find an alternative to doing business in China. https://t.co/OdCTXe6sWC pic.twitter.com/ZQtm73psEO

— CNBC (@CNBC) August 23, 2019

President Donald Trump on Friday said he was ordering “our great American companies” to “immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.”

Trump also said he was ordering all U.S. postal carriers, including FedEx, Amazon, UPS and United States Post Office, “to SEARCH FOR & REFUSE all deliveries of Fentanyl from China (or anywhere else!).”

And Trump said that he will respond this afternoon to China’s newest round of tariffs on U.S. goods.

The White House did not immediately respond when asked if the announcement, delivered in a four-part Twitter thread Friday morning, constituted an official order from the president.

It was not immediately clear how, or under what authority, the president could implement these declared orders, or whether he had already done so.

Equities sunk to session lows shortly after Trump’s tweets. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 435 points, or 1.6%, while the S&P 500 slid 1.7% and the Nasdaq Composite dove 2%.

Trump’s tweets followed another missive against Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell, who had just pledged to “act as appropriate” to sustain the U.S. economy amid the “deteriorating” global economic outlook.

In an apparent response, Trump tweeted: “Who is our bigger enemy,” Powell or Chinese President Xi Jinping?

Earlier Friday, China had announced it would slap retaliatory tariffs of 5% and 10% on roughly $75 billion in U.S. imports. The newly announced import taxes represented the latest escalation in the increasingly fraught U.S.-China trade war, as well as a direct response to Trump’s plan to impose duties on $300 billion worth of China’s goods by mid-December.

Top trade advisors Robert Lighthizer and Peter Navarro were reportedly near the Oval Office just before the president sent his latest tweets. A source later told CNBC that Trump was meeting with his trade team Friday.

Trump was scheduled to leave for France on Friday night to participate in the multilateral G7 summit this weekend.

The president had long declared Xi a friend, and had repeatedly said he blames past U.S. leaders, not China, for the unfair trade situation between the two economic superpowers.

Trump held that line even after talks between the two sides’ negotiators broke down in May. “My respect and friendship with President Xi is unlimited,” he said at the time.

But after China’s new round of tariffs, and Powell’s apparently unsatisfying remarks at an annual central bank event in Jackson Hole, Trump’s tune changed.

“As usual, the Fed did NOTHING! It is incredible that they can ‘speak’ without knowing or asking what I am doing, which will be announced shortly,” Trump tweeted.

“I will work ‘brilliantly’ with both” a strong dollar and a weak Fed, Trump assured, before adding: “My only question is, who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi?”

Trump has ripped Powell relentlessly in recent weeks, as some investors have started to flash concerns that the economy could be headed for a slowdown. He has publicly pressured Powell to lower interest rates by a full percentage point, despite maintaining that the economy is “strong and good.”

In his remarks Friday morning, Powell did not say specifically where he thought rates should go. But he promised that the Fed “will act as appropriate to sustain the expansion,” a phrase he has used several times in the recent past.

Trump continued to rail against China as the busy morning progressed. “Our Country has lost, stupidly, Trillions of Dollars with China over many years. They have stolen our Intellectual Property at a rate of Hundreds of Billions of Dollars a year, & they want to continue,” Trump said.

“I won’t let that happen!” Trump wrote. “We don’t need China and, frankly, would be far better off without them.”

After claiming he was ordering U.S. firms to look for alternatives to China, Trump added, “I will be responding to China’s Tariffs this afternoon.”

The U.S. has already slapped 25% tariffs on $250 billion worth of Chinese imports. In early August, Trump announced he would impose 10% tariffs on the rest of the Chinese imports to the U.S. — roughly $300 billion worth of goods — by Sept. 1.

Trump says, “I always find a way to win” …

Indeed he does. By cheating.

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Beyond the fringe by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on August 23, 2019

Beyond the fringe
by Tom Sullivan

Patrick Byrne’s rambling, half-hour tale of deep-state conspiracy, spies, romance, and “Men in Black” Thursday night on CNN could only have been more unhinged if he had given it in 90-degree heat on the White House lawn with a helicopter idling loudly in the background.

The newly former (as of yesterday) CEO of Overstock.com told Chris Cuomo on “Cuomo Prime Time” a disjointed tale of being recruited by “X, Y, and Z” at the FBI to stay close to Maria Butina, to the point of encouraging a romantic relationship with her. The Russian woman now serving a prison sentence for conspiracy to act as a foreign agent sought to build contacts with Hillary Clinton, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Donald Trump. She arranged a secret meeting between Don Jr. and Russian banker Aleksandr Torshin at a 2015 NRA convention in Tennessee (and/or at some other meeting in Kentucky), Byrne claimed as he bobbed around the shot.

News flash: Byrne also claims Butina was being groomed by key oligarchs to be president of Russia.

In an earlier (and oddly consistent) interview with Fox News, Byrne had named John Carlin, Andrew McCabe, and James Comey as officials “X, Y, and Z” who had “hijacked” the FBI from the top to turn a counterintelligence effort into political espionage. Peter Strzok was their “errand boy.” But Republicans are wrong, Byrne told Cuomo. The Russians were definitely up to something. Just what was hard to make out from Bryne’s bonkers interviews. Nor was Byrne’s point.

CNN reports:

Asha Rangappa, a former FBI official and CNN legal analyst, said elements of Byrne’s claims about how the FBI encouraged his initial efforts to build a relationship with Butina line up with how the bureau would typically run a counterintelligence investigation.

But she said she was skeptical about his claim that the bureau later encouraged him to have a “romantic relationship” with Butina.

CNN Business obtained comment on Byrne’s account from officials at the Department of Justice:

Byrne had shared information concerning the early days of the Russia investigation in a meeting earlier this year with Justice Department officials, a US official said, confirming his account in last week’s statement.

Justice officials found aspects of Byrne’s story to be believable in part because he shared operational details that were not widely known, the US official said. The official would not say who Byrne met with and what specifically was discussed.

Naturally, the “Deep State” fringe will be all over this story this morning. Nothing so far from Dons Sr. or Jr.

After the chosen one’s “increasingly untethered to reality” statements to the press, one wonders after Byrne’s interviews if the acting president’s personal manias are contagious. He might be the one who needs to be in isolation.

Of course Trump invited himself

Published by digby on August 23, 2019

Of course Trump invited himself

by digby


He invited himself to Denmark and then had a temper tantrum and canceled after they’d already spent a bunch of time and money:

Speaking to reporters on the White House’s South Lawn in late July, President Donald Trump revealed that he was “looking at” a stop in Denmark after an upcoming trip to Poland to attend a World War II commemorative ceremony.

For officials in Copenhagen, the comment came as a surprise. Although it is customary in Denmark for there to be a standing invitation for the U.S. president—and though officials in both countries had been discussing the possibility of an American delegation visiting—no formal invitation had actually been extended to Trump, according to two senior Danish officials and an individual who works closely with the Trump administration in Copenhagen.

By the next day, Queen Margrethe II had issued the invite, and the White House had officially announced the president’s plans to visit the country.

Over the subsequent days, much planning went into preparing for the president’s visit, which was supposed to include meetings with high-level officials from Denmark, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands. It was designed to be a decadent affair: the Queen’s staff was in the midst of ordering the crystal for the tables and flowers for the palace for the big state dinner with Trump. Danish business leaders had finalized plans for roundtable discussions with White House officials about increasing investments in the U.S. Officials in the country’s ministry of foreign affairs were preparing talking points to promote increased cooperation between the U.S. and Denmark in the Arctic.

But the frenetic planning came to a stop this past week, when Trump abruptly canceled the trip after being publicly rebuffed for his proposal that the United States buy Greenland from Denmark.

Class all the way.

The upcoming G7 meeting should tackle the crisis in the Amazon

Published by digby on August 22, 2019

The G7 meeting should tackle the crisis in the Amazon

by digby

Brazil’s Trump and Trump himself are unlikely to be moved by this I’m afraid:

Data from the National Institute of Space Research showed an 84% year-on-year increase in forest fires in 2019, many caused by loggers incentivized by the government’s disdain for environmental oversight. While Bolsonaro relishes criticism of his attitude toward the Amazon — jokingly referring to himself as ‘Captain Chainsaw’ — his supporters in the agricultural sector fear a backlash from consumers both in Brazil and abroad.

Germany and Norway have already suspended their contributions to a rain forest preservation fund, and polls indicate that even among Bolsonaro’s own voters there is overwhelming support for stronger measures to combat illegal deforestation.

“In terms of environmental management we’re witnessing a disaster,” Jairo Nicolau, a political science professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, said. “It’s not about just a different policy. We’re seeing total disorganization in an area in which there was a culture of continuity from one government to the next.“

On Thursday morning, a day after he had baselessly accused foreign NGOs of lighting fires to discredit his government, Bolsonaro instructed his Twitter followers to read a thread by his adviser, Felipe Martins.

In the 11-part post, Martins criticized the mainstream media’s “irresponsible disregard for basic data” and stated that over 60% of Brazil is covered by native vegetation, while only 29% is used for agriculture. Martins also wrote that Brazil has some of the most stringent environmental legislation in the world and has a larger share of territory under environmental protection than any other country worldwide. He adds that there is a “clear long-term, downward trend” in deforestation.

While the percentages of land used for agriculture and covered in vegetation Martins cites are roughly true, World Bank data show that there are at least 20 counties that maintain more forest as a proportion of their territory than Brazil, including Japan, Sweden and the Congo.

The statement’s omissions are also significant. Brazil is the country that deforests at a faster rate than any other, according to the research NGO World Resouces Institute.

*Sigh*

This G7 is going to be a real doozy.

“I’ll have no choice but to release them into the countries from which they came”

Published by digby on August 22, 2019

“I’ll have no choice but to release them into the countries from which they came”

by digby

It’s a good thing that he is “the chosen one” and “King of the Jews” because the president of the United States does not have the power to do that.


In case you were wondering what this is all about:

With a bizarre threat to “release” terrorists into France and Germany, President Trump is pressing America’s European allies to bring home and put on trial their citizens captured while fighting for ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

Publicly elevating an issue that has bedeviled senior officials at the Pentagon and the State Department for months, Trump said he would order the transport of some 2,000 captured fighters back to their home countries if “Europe doesn’t take them”—something that would almost certainly be legally impossible.

“We’re holding thousands of ISIS fighters right now. And Europe has to take them. And if Europe doesn’t take them, I’ll have no choice but to release them into the countries from which they came. Which is Germany and France and other places,” the president told reporters on Wednesday.

Later, in a speech to a veterans group in Kentucky, Trump said that European allies “say to us, ‘Why don’t you hold them in Guantanamo Bay for 50 years and spend billions and billions of dollars holding them’.”

Related: The Many Loopholes in ‘ISIS Is Defeated’
Related: ISIS Is ‘Waiting for the Right Time to Resurge’: CENTCOM Commander
Related: All ISIS Has Left Is Money. Lots of It.
If true, the suggestion would be a remarkable reversal for European leaders, who have spent close to two decades criticizing the United States for human rights abuses at the naval detention facility.

“And I’m saying, ‘No, you gotta take ‘em’,” Trump said.

In the past, senior Trump administration officials have emphasized that the United States is not holding the captured fighters. The U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, is holding around 2,000 suspected foreign fighters in northeastern Syria, with American security support.

These foreigners are among 9,000 ISIS fighters currently held by the SDF. Just under a thousand are believed to be European. A small but unknown number are believed to be from the United States.

The Kurdish group is also holding around 70,000 ISIS wives and children, around 10,000 of whom are believed to be from places other than Syria and Iraq.

U.S. officials have been urging allies—largely unsuccessfully—to take back and try their own citizens. But European governments, concerned that the kind of battlefield evidence they have about the fighters won’t prove admissible in domestic courts, have so far resisted calls to repatriate either the men or their wives and children. The situation is straining the SDF’s capacity, and the U.S. has already been forced to call in surveillance support to help put down a jailbreak from a detention facility in Derik, in northeastern Syria.

Some countries—notably, France—have allowed their citizens to be tried in Iraq, where the courts provide minimal access to lawyers and typically mete out a hanging sentence on scanty evidence. (France does not have a death penalty.)

The United States has taken back and charged a handful of its own fighters, most recently a 23-year-old man born in Dallas now charged with providing material support to ISIS.

But the group of fighters pose significant challenges. In 2017, the United States held a U.S.-Saudi citizen for over a year in military detention because officials were certain in the intelligence that indicated he was an ISIS fighter, but believed that it wouldn’t be admissible in an Article III court. Charging him in federal court, they feared, would lead to his release. Civil rights advocates argued that to hold him indefinitely without charge violated his constitutional rights as a citizen.

Still, it is widely agreed that the SDF cannot hold the fighters indefinitely. In addition to the strain on its security resources, the group is not an internationally recognized sovereign government. It’s not clear that the group is even legally able to carry out law-of-war detention.

In other words, the threat to release ISIS fighters into the streets of France and Germany is just another incidence of Trump waving his tiny hands in Europe’s face, trying to insult them in order to make himself feel like a big man and pretend that he’s economically responsible.

Same old, same old.

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They’re sending in the Trumpette women’s auxiliary

Published by digby on August 22, 2019

They’re sending in the Trumpette women’s auxiliary

by digby

Trumpettes and their Dear Leader

Realizing that traditionally Republican white women are deserting the GOP en masse, they are dispatching female Trump hacks to persuade them that women should believe him instead of their lying eyes:

President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign will dispatch more than a dozen female surrogates on Thursday to some of the most important 2020 battleground states in its first major push to mobilize suburban women — a critical voting bloc that revolted against Republican candidates as recently as the midterm elections last fall.

Campaign officials have billed the cross-country events as both a celebration of women’s suffrage — Sunday marks the 99th anniversary of the adoption of the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote — and a coordinated effort to train pro-Trump women to become effective volunteers in their communities. As of Tuesday, a campaign official involved with the planning said about 2,000 attendees were expected across the gatherings in 13 states.

“From coast-to-coast we will mobilize and organize to reelect President Trump and give him another four years in the White House,” Katrina Pierson, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said in a statement.

It’s the first test for the Trump campaign’s women’s coalition — a mash-up of the president’s most loyal female supporters, ranging in background from pageant queens and YouTube personalities to Christian podcasters and political wives — and it comes as the Trump administration grapples with warnings of a possible recession that could make the coalition’s message of women’s economic empowerment a tougher sell next November. Trump and his allies have repeatedly pointed to the women’s unemployment rate, which has hovered between 3.5 and 4 percent since last summer, and the inclusion of a paid family leave plan in the latest White House budget as evidence that American women have benefited from his policies.

“I’m just going to be very direct with people: It’s a complete scam, a hoax, that we’re going into recession,” said Tana Goertz, an Iowa campaign staffer and former “Apprentice” contestant. Goertz will host around 50 women outside Des Moines on Thursday as part of the Trump campaign’s “Evening to Empower.”

Trump campaign spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany, who will host an event in the Atlanta suburbs, added: “The media narrative is always designed to be negative toward the president. There is simply no denying that the economic fundamentals of this economy are strong.”

Sure Kayleigh.  That’s going to work.

Trump’s numbers with women are abominable and bringing out some other women to tell them they aren’t seeing what they’re seeing is about as lame as it gets.

The latest Quinnipiac poll doesn’t break out suburban women, but it finds that only 34 percent of women overall approve of the job Trump is doing, compared with 61 percent who disapprove; among white women, only 40 percent approve while 56 percent disapprove. 

A new NBC News poll is more precise on this point. The good folks at NBC sent me these numbers: Among suburban women, Trump’s rating is 36 percent approve to 61 percent disapprove. And suburban women prefer a generic Democratic candidate to Trump by 61 percent to 32 percent.

Meanwhile, in the new Politico/Morning Consult poll, Trump’s approval among women is 39 percent, while 58 percent disapprove, 46 percent strongly. And among suburbanites, Trump’s approval is 43 percent, while 56 percent disapprove, 43 percent strongly. Put those together, and you probably have really bad numbers among suburban women — with a lot disapproving strongly.

I can’t imagine why these women loathe him so much. But I just have a feeling that they aren’t going to be persuaded to change their minds if Kayleigh McEnany tells them the fake news is hiding the good news about the economy.

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Yes, he thinks he’s a god

Published by digby on August 22, 2019

Yes, he thinks he’s a god

by digby

… and a hero.

At the event in Louisville, Kentucky, Trump singled out for praise WWII veteran and Medal of Honor recipient Woody Williams.

“Thank you, Woody. You’re looking good, Woody. Woody’s looking good,” Trump said.

“That was a big day, Medal of Honor. Nothing like the Medal of Honor,” he continued. “I wanted one, but they told me I don’t qualify, Woody. I said, ‘Can I give it to myself anyway?’ They said, ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’

Sure, it was a “joke.” But on a day that he retweeted that “The Jewish people in Israel love him like he’s the King of Israel,they love him like he is the second coming of God…” and told the press that he’s “the chosen one” it appears that Trump is having a megalomaniacal breakdown.

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