Month: September 2019

Oh look. The corruption is even worse than we thought

by digby

More from Politico on Turnberry:

Since Donald Trump took office, the U.S. military has spent nearly $200,000 at the president’s luxury Scotland resort, according to figures and documents the Pentagon provided to the House Oversight Committee.

The spending, which has all occurred since August 2017, paid for the equivalent of hundreds of nights of rooms at the Turnberry resort over approximately three dozen separate stays, the committee said.

The Air Force confirmed last week that its crews had stayed up to 40 times at Trump’s property since 2015, but it has not provided a breakdown of the number of stays since Trump was elected. The figures provided to the House Oversight Committee suggest the vast majority of stays — if not all of them — have occurred since Trump took office, raising concerns among Democrats about a conflict of interest.

POLITICO first reported earlier this month that the Oversight Committee had been probing military spending at Turnberry since April to determine whether the money constituted a violation of the Constitution’s domestic emoluments clause, which prohibits the president from receiving any compensation from the federal government other than his salary.

After being elected, Trump chose not to fully divest himself from his business interests, choosing instead to put his holdings in a trust that he can receive money from at any time.

The committee’s probe has ramped up in the wake of POLITICO’s reporting on several overnight stays at the resort by U.S. Air Force crews, some of which have been multinight stays involving dozens of crew members and passengers.

The Pentagon documents showed that U.S. taxpayer funds “have been used to pay for more than three dozen separate stays involving hundreds of nights of rooms — all after the President was sworn into office,” according to a letter the committee’s chairman, Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) wrote to acting Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Wednesday.

The Democrats called the Pentagon’s response so far — about 21 pages of material turned over to the panel, but no underlying invoices or travel records — “woefully inadequate.”

But the department did reveal that the average cost of a room at Turnberry for military service members from August 2017 to July 2019 was $189, and that Turnberry expenditures during that time period “amounted to $124,578.96” — plus an “an additional $59,729.12” in unspecified charges to government travel cards.

“If both of these claims are accurate, it appears that U.S. taxpayer funds were used to purchase the equivalent of more than 650 rooms at the Trump Turnberry just since August 2017 — or the equivalent of one room every night for more than one-and-a-half years,” the congressmen wrote.

The Pentagon also provided documents reflecting charges at Turnberry that were higher than its stated average per diem allowances for hotel rooms, including 17 separate charges for $450 on June 25, 2018, 45 separate charges for around $300 on Sept. 26, 2018, and three charges for over $600 each on Nov. 18, 2018, according to the committee.

This is looking like a much bigger scandal than originally thought. It wasn’t just a couple of Airman who found themselves at Turnberry one day, wondering how they got there. This has been a systematic choice to line Trump’s pockets. I have little doubt that Trump knew all about it. He may have even ordered it, but didn’t really have to. People know he loves money. They know he favors people who try to curry favor by brown-nosing him and putting cash in his pockets. And these Air Force personnel almost certainly believed that they could get away with spending 450 a night on a hotel room at trump’s golf course because he’s the president.

It’s all madness.

Oh, and then there’s this:

They are not the resort’s only conspicuous guests. Earlier this summer, according to a staffer, a group of Saudi royals stayed at the resort for about a week at the tail end of extended travel, bringing a party of 25 people and more than a hundred pieces of luggage.

And this:

Though Trump has put his ownership interest in the Trump Organization into a trust, which is managed by his sons Donald Jr. and Eric, the president can withdraw money from it any time.

He needs access to cash while he’s in the White House to pay all the hush money, of course. What’s he supposed to do?

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The administration is test driving a dictatorship

by digby

Greg Sargent does an excellent job of laying out the DNI whistleblower story. It’s confusing and the media generally isn’t making it less so. (They seem to be being led in various directions by Intelligence sources who may or may not have their own agenda.)

This story is about to get a whole lot more media scrutiny, because it involves secretive back-channel maneuvering, a possible threat to national security and potential lawbreaking at the highest levels of the Trump administration, possibly at the direction of President Trump himself — all with a whole lot of cloak-and-dagger intrigue thrown in.

And now the mystery of Rep. Adam Schiff and the whistleblower has taken an ominous new turn, one that should only underscore concerns that serious — and dangerous — lawbreaking might be unfolding.

At the very least, we’re seeing yet another serious erosion in checks on this administration’s norm-shredding — and, as I hope to explain, there are big and important principles at stake here.

The latest development: The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has informed Schiff, the California Democrat and chairman of the Intelligence Committee, that he will not forward a whistleblower’s complaint to the committee, as required by law.

Yet the legal rationale for refusing to do this appears specious — and raises further questions as to why this is happening at all.

This all started when Schiff announced that the Inspector General at the ODNI had alerted him to a whistleblower’s complaint that had been submitted to him. Schiff noted that the IG assessed the complaint as “credible.”

But as Schiff noted, the acting Director of National Intelligence, Joseph Maguire, has not forwarded the complaint to the Intelligence Committee.

There is a process for whistleblowers in such situations, one that has been established by federal law. A whistleblower must first submit a complaint to the IG, who determines whether it’s an “urgent concern” and “credible.” If so, the DNI “shall” forward the complaint to the congressional intelligence committees.

The idea here is that this process allows a member of the intelligence community to raise concerns about potential lawbreaking or other abuses with Congress, so it can exercise oversight over those abuses, while ensuring that classified information remains protected. This is done via the independent inspector general at first, insulating the whistleblower against agency-head retaliation, which is also provided for in the statute.

In this case, Schiff announced, the inspector general notified the committee that this whistleblower’s complaint did constitute an urgent concern and is credible — yet Maguire still hadn’t forwarded the complaint and relevant associated materials to the committee.

So Schiff called on the DNI to forward the materials, and if he failed to do that, to appear before Congress on Thursday.

Now Maguire has sent a new letter to Schiff once again refusing to forward the complaint.

Maguire’s stated rationale for this is that the complaint does not meet the definition of “urgent concern” under the law, because it doesn’t concern conduct by a person in the intelligence community or activity that falls under the DNI’s supervision.

Because we don’t know what the complaint entails, it’s hard to evaluate this claim. But there are reasons for skepticism about this stated rationale.

For one thing, even if the conduct may not be under the DNI’s supervision, the New York Times quotes informed sources saying the complaint itself was filed by a member of the intelligence community. That suggests direct relevance to the DNI.

For another, the inspector general did determine that the appropriate destination for the complaint is Congress’ intelligence committees.

Margaret Taylor, senior editor of the Lawfare Blog, told me this is important because the inspector general has his own counsel, who could have determined that this complaint falls in the category of something that should be forwarded to the committees under the statute.

What’s more, Taylor argued, the statute does not give the DNI the authority to decide that something doesn’t count as an urgent concern, once the inspector general has designated it as such.

“The inspector general makes the decision as to whether it’s an urgent concern or not,” Taylor said. “Under the statute as written, the Director of National Intelligence doesn’t have the discretion to not act or get a second opinion. He just has to forward it to the intelligence committees.”

This is not ambiguous. The administration’s new Trump bootlicker is telling the congress to go to hell.

There’s a reason the statute is written this way. As Taylor points out, lawmakers wanted whistleblowers to be able to alert them — that is, Congress, with its oversight authority — to wrongdoing without the threat that agency heads will tamper with that process, say, for nakedly political reasons.

“Lawmakers decided that Congress’ oversight responsibilities could not be effectively carried out if employees are required to obtain the approval of the heads of their agency before exposing wrongdoing,” Taylor told me.

The DNI has offered another rationale as well, one that makes this potentially more troubling.

Over the weekend, Schiff told CBS News that he’d been informed by Maguire that he was not forwarding the complaint because he is “being instructed not to” by someone “above” him, a “higher authority.”

This appears to be a reference to the DNI’s suggestion, in a separate letter to the committee, that the complaint involves “confidential and potentially privileged communications by persons outside the Intelligence Community.”

“The executive branch seems to be relying on the potential assertion of executive privilege to not supply the information to Schiff,” Taylor told me. One also wonders who outside the intelligence community is being referred to here as enjoying such privileged communications.

Some Democrats think it’s no big deal if Trump and the Republicans continue to erode all checks and balances because the American people only care about themselves and their “kitchen table issues” and so the Dems will win back the presidency in 2020 on that basis and all will be fine. But it’s going to be impossible to put this genie back in the bottle. The weaknesses in our system have been exposed, the GOP is batshit crazy and the world has seen just how unreliable as a country. Sweeping all this under the rug will not work. They either take a stand and fight this right now or the other side wins even if it loses.

Update: I should add that anyone who thinks that an administration that is willing to defy the congress this way will adhere to the rules and norms governing out elections are fooling themselves. We saw how far they were willing to go in 2000 and did nothing about it. We saw what they did in 2016 and we’re wanking on the kitchen table every day. So I’m afraid we can’t act surprised if they simply steal it openly in 2020 and then stand there and say “what are you going to do about it?” They have every reason to believe we will do nothing.

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Watching Corey Crumble

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

On Tuesday the House Judiciary Committee held the first public hearing to be billed as part of an “impeachment inquiry.” The committee called former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and former White House aides Rob Porter and Rick Dearborn to testify about various episodes in the Mueller report. Unfortunately, if unsurprisingly, the White House blocked the appearances of Porter and Dearborn, saying they were “absolutely immune” from congressional testimony, a stonewalling tactic they have used with other current and former staffers who have been called to testify before Congress.

That left Lewandowski. The fact that he had never been employed by the administration forced the White House to get creative with their interference. Executive branch officials ended up informing the committee that he was only authorized to speak about what was specifically in the Mueller peport and nothing else. The White House has no authority to muzzle a private citizen who is under subpoena to appear before Congress, but Lewandowski was more than happy to follow orders.

The hearing started out rough. Lewandowski swaggered into the room from the Republican side. Two White House lawyers ostentatiously sat right behind him. There was no question about his strategy for the hearing: Hail Trump, mock the process, treat the Democratic members like lackeys and waste as much time as possible playing dumb about the Mueller report. He was quite successful, as far as it went. The committee did the usual five-minute round robin with the Republicans feeding him softballs and Democrats being irritated and flummoxed by Lewandowski’s lack of cooperation and aggressive, smug attitude. (Anyone who has ever had to deal with a sarcastic, obstreperous teenager could certainly relate.)

He put on quite a performance, refusing to answer any questions without a direct citation from the report. When he was provided with a copy, he demanded that he be directed exactly to the page and sentence in question, at which point he would finally agree that he had indeed said what it said he had said. It was absurd.

The pundits all proclaimed the first session to be a disaster, with Lewandowski declared the winner by TKO. But they may have been missing some of the forest for the trees. The committee got Lewandowski on record repeatedly saying that Mueller’s report was accurate.

And it’s important to acknowledge just what it was that he was confirming — that the president of the United States had told him to secretly inform former Attorney General Jeff Sessions to reverse his recusal on the Russia investigation, and then to limit it only to future elections. It was pretty obvious that Trump would not have tasked his former campaign manager with this mission, rather than some other member of his staff, if he hadn’t wanted it to be kept off the record. His White House counsel, Don McGahn, had already made it clear that this wasn’t kosher.

Lewandowski put his notes in a safe and didn’t follow through, telling the committee he thought it was more important for him to go on vacation with his kids. More likely he realized he was being dragged into something potentially illegal and hoped Trump would forget about it. He didn’t. At that point, Lewandowski handed off the message to Rick Dearborn who has claimed he never spoke to Sessions about it.

This was one of the 10 events in the Mueller report that most legal observers regard as prima facie evidence of President Trump obstructing justice. So despite the circus theatrics, it was fruitful to have Lewandowski on the record confirming all those details. They can clean it all up in a written article of impeachment.

As it turns out, though, the morning session with all the committee members having their say was just the warm-up act. In its vote last week, the committee had passed a rule allowing staff counsel to pose questions for half an hour in these public impeachment hearings. Barry Berke, a lawyer for the Democratic members, then took over the hearing and it was like night and day.

Most of the press has focused on the moment when Berke cornered Lewandowski by showing that he lied repeatedly on television about this incident and his interactions with the Mueller team. After much hemming and hawing his explanation was “I have no obligation to be honest with the media because they are just as dishonest as everybody else.” (Who else? )

But Berke teased out another colorful detail that has passed unnoticed. Despite the White House order that Lewandowski shouldn’t speak of any conversations with the president other than those specifically referenced in the Mueller report, it turns out that he has written a couple of books one of which is called “Let Trump Be Trump: The Inside Story of His Rise to the Presidency.” It features many conversations with the president, which the White House apparently had no objections to publishing. One of the anecdotes has Trump suggesting to Lewandowski that he might join the administration at the level of Jared Kushner to run the Russia 2016 election interference investigation.

As Berke went on with his relentless fusillade of questions, Lewandowski became increasingly distressed. He had repeatedly claimed that he had never read the Mueller report. As Berke’s 30 minutes were almost done, he asked Lewandowski whether he took the report lightly, reminding him that he had been autographing copies of the report just last week, while joking that he couldn’t sign every page where his name appeared because there were too many of them. Lewandowski became upset and said:

I’m outraged at your characterization of my statements. Never have I said that, never have I called into question the validity of the Mueller Report or alluded to the fact that I wanted Russia to interfere …

Every time one of the principal figures confirms the Mueller report, another impeachment count gets its wings.

Whereas Lewandowski had been cocky and derisive toward the members in the early session, he was crumbling after 30 minutes of solid questioning designed to show him as the weasel he is. It was the most effective line of questioning we’ve seen in a hearing in ages and it shows how important it is that Democrats allow staff lawyers to interrogate the witnesses rather than having members of Congress get cut off after five minutes, only to move on to another questioner from the other side and a completely different subject.

If you have 30 minutes to spare, give it a look:

Judiciary Committee chair Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., reminded Lewandowski that his refusal to answer questions was obstructing legitimate oversight of the president and reminded him “that Article 3 of the impeachment against President Nixon was based on obstruction of Congress.” Trump is committing new impeachable offenses every day, not the least of which is this epic stonewall.

Writing with your non-dominant hand
by Tom Sullivan

Anat Shenker-Osorio @anatosaurus

The truth will not set you free. Our insistence on the left that it should gets in the way of moving the needle on key issues. It is a hard lesson to learn for children of the Enlightenment that reason does not always win the day. It’s not how people work.

Anat Shenker-Osorio (Don’t Buy It: The Trouble with Talking Nonsense about the Economy) applies the race-class narrative to countering right-wing messaging in a new podcast series, Brave New Words.

The core principle is to address race explicitly. Avoiding talking about it for fear of being accused of practicing identity politics leaves right-wing, divide-and-conquer messaging about race expressed in dog whistles unanswered and un-neutered. A race-class formulation that acknowledges race and calls out fear-based messages “outperformed colorblind economic populism across the board,” she wrote in the Washington Post last year.

The key to moving the needle on social issues is to offer a positive vision of where progressives want to take society rather than making legal arguments and painting a picture of negative consequences of conservative policies. But it’s a little like learning to write with your non-dominant hand, Shenker-Osorio says.

People Seeking Asylum offers a compelling example of how traditional messaging misses the mark. The Australian government’s warehousing refugees in under-resourced, offshore detention centers provoked both outrage on the left and support on the right. More than half of Australia supported holding even infants indefinitely in holding centers.

The narrative echoes the immigration debate in this country. The debate was framed as dark-skinned criminals coming to take “your stuff.” Shen Narayanasamy of GetUp’s Human Rights campaigns tells Shenker-Osorio that these debates are always about race. Economics and infrastructure are surface issues used to disguise that fact. But after years of framing the issue as one of international law and human decency, this time they took a new approach.

The “Let Them Stay” campaign shifted public opinion in a matter of weeks (transcribed).

“If it had been the old way of doing it, we would have run a campaign about the numbers, how unlawful it was. It would all have been focused on how awful offshore detention was,” Narayanasamy says. Instead, they collected human stories about refugees’ experience as people. They asked detainees about their kids, about their lives, about “what it feels like to hold a newborn, what your hopes are, that they just like you and me. Speak to the essential anxieties that underpin this debate.”

“Unfortunately, you have to prove your humanity,” she continues. “The first step after you’ve been othered is to try and get the person othering you to acknowledge that you are, in fact, human.”

This proved uncomfortable for some. Why should they have to prove their humanity?

Narayanasamy explains the foundation for “Let Them Stay,” “Not don’t let them go back. Not it’s all horrible. It’s, here is a child. Here is a family. Their story is like you.” This woman likes Beyonce, etc.

“It’s all authentic memories. We spent a long time, then, talking to people about it. And this woman, you know, they were Iranian refugees, and they’d had a terrible situation, but I had to — I felt horrible — because you’re asking people, literally, who’ve been tortured and traumatized, what’s your favorite music?” Narayanasamy says.

They ran stories in Australian Women’s Weekly to illustrate people’s humanity “to a population to whom the great anxiety and the great debate was about othering them and not seeing them as human. And we just smashed it across everything.”

Public opinion sifted 15-20 percent in a month and a half, and the government relented.

Their success was not total, but human rights activists had won a victory.

Greater Than Fear examines the Minnesota campaign to push back against othering of the state’s Somali community.

Sharon Goldtzvik (Uprise, Greater Than Fear campaign) explains the challenges they faced ahead of the 2018 elections:

It’s such a tricky problem. It’s actually important to say that Muslims are not terrorists, but it’s hard to understand that staying it that way doesn’t actually change people’s minds about it. You feel like it should. You feel like making factual statements should change people’s minds. But what we know about persuasion is that that’s actually not the case. People decide much more based on emotion than they do based on straight-up facts and all kinds of other psychological factors. It’s just people are really genuinely outraged and feel like, if I just explain it and explain why it’s not true, then like people will understand it. But it’s a big problem when we do that because we’re actually handing over the conversation to our opposition. we’re letting them set the terms of what the conversation’s going to be about.

This next year is going to get ugly. The temptation will be to go toe-to-toe with opponents, to spend all our time challenging their narratives rather than selling positive a more positive vision. Instead, Shenker-Osorio insists, our goal should be “to engage our base, persuade the middle, and reveal the opposition for the outliers they are.”

Update: This USA Today article about Shenker-Osorio colleague Ian Haney López about not engaging the fight Trump wants to have.

A whiny little baby bully

by digby

And I’m not (just) talking about Corey Lewandowski:

President Donald Trump insisted on Tuesday that 2020 Democratic candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) did not, in fact, have 20,000 people attending her rally in New York City Monday night – and that even if she did, it’s not a big deal.

According to a pool report, Trump downplayed the crowd size at Warren’s rally in Washington Square Park, which her campaign estimated to be about 20,000 people–the senator’s biggest rally to date.

“Number one, she didn’t have 20,000 people,” Trump told reporters, per the pool report. “And number two, I think anybody would get a good crowd there.”

“Anybody that can’t get people standing in the middle of Manhattan in the most densely populated area of the country…anybody could do that,” he also said.

Trump, notoriously sensitive over the size of his own crowds, then claimed he gets crowds “in areas that nobody’s ever seen crowds before.”

Ok Trumpie. You get the biggest crowds. Whatever…

How embarrassing for her.

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Trump in California

by digby

People are making fun of Trump, the alleged populist, for this tweet:

That should cure a lot of economic anxiety in the rural heartland. But there was method to his madness. Trump was prepping for tonight in Beverly Hills:

President Trump has tweeted thousands of times since taking office, using the social media site to spread slogans, praise allies, condemn opponents, critique the media, issue pardons, fire Cabinet members and, among other things, threaten nuclear war.

One topic that he just can’t quit is California. Trump, who lost the state by more than 4 million votes in 2016, is returning Tuesday to raise money for his reelection campaign from supporters in San Francisco, San Diego and Beverly Hills.

To mark the occasion, The Times compiled everything the president has tweeted about the Golden State, its policies and politicians.

These California greedheads think they can buy clean air in the private sector for just themselves apparently:

The Trump administration is expected on Wednesday to formally revoke California’s legal authority to set tailpipe pollution rules that are stricter than federal rules, in a move designed by the White House to strike twin blows against both the liberal-leaning state that President Trump has long antagonized and the environmental legacy of President Barack Obama.

The announcement that the White House will revoke one of California’s signature environmental policies will come while Mr. Trump is traveling in the state, where he is scheduled to attend fund-raisers in Los Angeles and Silicon Valley.

The formal revocation of California’s authority to set its own rules on tailpipe pollution — the United States’ largest source of greenhouse emissions — will be announced Wednesday afternoon at a private event at the Washington headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency, according to two people familiar with the matter.

They are literally trying to kill us. And their own children.

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Quote of the decade

by digby

Guess who:

“We’ve been fighting against an imperial presidency for five and a half years,” he said in June 2016, after Trump had captured the nomination. “Every time we go to the floor and push back against an overreaching president, we get accused of being partisan at best and racist at worst. When we do it against a Republican president, maybe people will see that it was a principled objection in the first place. So we actually welcome that opportunity. It might actually be fun, being a strict-constitutionalist congressman doing battle with a non-strict-constitutionalist Republican president.”

Bill Kristol? David Frum? George Will, maybe?

Nope. That’s Mick Mulvaney, White House chief of staff and top sycophantic bootlicker to Donald J. Trump.

This raises a question: what kind of people are this? How are they justifying this to themselves? Do they wake up in the middle of the night sweating and shaking, realizing that they have sold their sould to this con man?

I doubt it. They were full of shit then and they are full of shit now. We have Trump to thank for finally and irrevocably revealing the void at the center of the “conservative movement” that preened and strutted for years, claiming they were the avatars of bedrock American principles. There was nothing there, ever. We can move on now.

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“Their 9/11” didn’t kill anyone

by digby

I’m not one for overwrought demands that everyone observe the sacredness of tragedy but this is just offensive:

A top State Department official told Congress Monday evening that the Saudis view the massive attack on their oil infrastructure as their 9/11, according to two congressional sources.

After a national security meeting this morning, President Donald Trump told reporters that it was “looking” like the attack over the weekend emanated from Iran but that the U.S. would wait for Saudi to conduct an investigation into the strikes.

Brian Hook, the Trump administration’s special representative for Iran, made the 9/11 during a telephone briefing on Capitol Hill about the administration’s latest thinking on the attack. Hook communicated the reaction from Riyadh and said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo would be headed to the country soon. Several individuals on the call said Hook’s update was thin, but said the administration had made available to lawmakers intelligence about the attack that they could review under a classified setting.

CNN first tweeted that Hook told Congressional staffers that the Saudis view this as “their 9/11.”

Sure, that’s fine. And I’m sure Donald Trump is very sorry for their loss. Of oil. But please:

The 9/11 reference, made less than a week after the 18th anniversary of the attack which killed over 3,000 Americans, came despite the uncomfortable fact that 13 of the 19 hijackers who attacked the U.S. on that day were Saudi citizens. Last week, the Trump administration pledged to reveal the name of a Saudi official investigated by the FBI for a possible role in the 9/11 attacks.

One of these is not “corruption”

by digby

That New York Times headline is misleading. Just because Trump callssomething “corrupt” doesn’t mean it is:

Senator Elizabeth Warren stood beneath a marble arch in New York City, telling a crowd of thousands that she would lead a movement to purge the government of corruption. Not far from the site of a historic industrial disaster, Ms. Warren described Washington as utterly compromised by the influence of corporations and the extremely wealthy, and laid out a detailed plan for cleansing it.

“Corruption has put our planet at risk, corruption has broken our economy and corruption is breaking our democracy,” Ms. Warren said Monday evening. “I know what’s broken, I’ve got a plan to fix it and that’s why I’m running for president of the United States.”

Only a few hours later, on a stage outside Albuquerque, President Trump took aim at a different phenomenon that he also described as corruption. Before his own roaring crowd, Mr. Trump cast himself as a bulwark against the power not of corporations but of a “failed liberal establishment” that he described as attacking the country’s sovereignty and cultural heritage.

“We’re battling against the corrupt establishment of the past,” Mr. Trump said, warning in grim language: “They want to erase American history, crush religious liberty, indoctrinate our students with left-wing ideology.”

You see, “corrupt establishment of the past” which wants to “erase history etc.” is not “corruption.” That’s just an expression Stephen Miller came up with.

Warren’s speech attacked actual corruption.

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Highlights of the crazy

by digby

If you’re taking a break at work today check out these highlights from the latest speech by the leader of the most powerful nation on earth:

Trump, with a straight face, says the Democrats "want us to be at the mercy of rogue regimes. That's not happening anymore."

Trump indicated *yesterday* that he's considering going to war on behalf of Saudi Arabia. pic.twitter.com/2UeNAhMiPC— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 17, 2019

Trump compliments the Mexican government — and his fans respond with loud "build the wall!" chants pic.twitter.com/qk4C5UEG9L— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 17, 2019

Trump claims that the United States had "very little, slash, no ammunition" when he took office. Seriously. He wants his fans to believe this. pic.twitter.com/P30B8m9Sxh— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 17, 2019

Trump remarks on how white Steve Cortes looks for being Hispanic, then bizarrely asks him, "Who do like more — the country or the Hispanics? He says the country … I may have to go for the Hispanics to be honest … we love our Hispanics." #wut pic.twitter.com/W37pDuKL12— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 17, 2019

The president brags about how rich and awesome he is. Normal stuff. pic.twitter.com/MpxeywSrkX— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 17, 2019

Trump craps on California for "Always complaining" and "not doing great" and not being more grateful for the border wall pic.twitter.com/qgv92q09uR— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 17, 2019

Trump's speech is derailed after he gets distracted by a fly. He sounds like a robot shutting down as he swats at it. pic.twitter.com/Gjp8nbmFSs— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 17, 2019

You know a Trump rally is starting to wind down when he promises to cure cancer and AIDS pic.twitter.com/hEcuRAynF0— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 17, 2019

Trump wants to bring back big gas-guzzling cars because he thinks they're safer than new models (they're not) pic.twitter.com/DqaFELjwkR— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 17, 2019

Trump is interrupted for the second time tonight by a protester as he crescendos to the end of his speech. He uses the disruption to take a shot at the media before forging ahead to the finish. pic.twitter.com/dUm7IkdmOm— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 17, 2019