Month: September 2019

Sometimes, they just come right out and admit it

by digby

Heritage Foundation & ALEC founder Paul Weyrich explaining why democracy was bad for the New Right’s agenda. pic.twitter.com/ElmTvU2H9z

— Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove (@wilsonhartgrove) September 1, 2019

On the other hand, it’s been very good for the grift. The following quote is from Weyrich’s comrade in arms, Richard Viguerie, making the case that losing is good for business:

[Sometimes] a loss for the Republican Party is a gain for conservatives. Often, a little taste of liberal Democrats in power is enough to remind the voters what they don’t like about liberal Democrats and to focus the minds of Republicans on the principles that really matter. That’s why the conservative movement has grown fastest during those periods when things seemed darkest, such as during the Carter administration and the first two years of the Clinton White House.

Conservatives are, by nature, insurgents, and it’s hard to maintain an insurgency when your friends, or people you thought were your friends, are in power.

That’s when the wingnut industry makes it’s biggest profits.

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Even by his own daft metrics Trump is failing

by digby

Axios:

President Trump’s trade war has led to even bigger trade deficits with China, even though it was intended to improve the trade balance. But it’s not just China — the deficit has increased with most of our other major trade partners, too.

Why it matters: While economists agree that trade deficits aren’t a good way to measure a trade relationship, they are the metric Trump fixates on, made campaign promises about and uses to evaluate relationships with other countries.

Throughout his campaign, Trump vowed that he would wipe away the U.S.’s trade deficits: “You will see a drop [in the trade deficit] like you’ve never seen before.”

Reality check: Among the U.S.’s 15 biggest trading partners, the trade balance has moved in the wrong direction for Trump in 10 of those countries between 2016 and 2018, while the aggregate trade deficit has jumped from $503 billion to $628B.

While Trump can explain the deficit spike with China as a short-term sacrifice for long-term benefit, it doesn’t account for the wider trend.

The latest: The U.S. trade deficit in the first 6 months of 2019 is even bigger than in the last two years.

What’s going on: Trump’s tax cuts are as much to blame for the increase in the trade deficit as anything else, writes Axios Markets editor Dion Rabouin:

More money in Americans’ pockets leads to more consumption, often of Chinese-made goods.

The tax cut helped boost the value of the dollar, which makes imports to the U.S. relatively cheaper.

The big picture: Trade deficits mean we buy more from a country than they buy from us, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the relationship is unfair, writes Axios business editor Dan Primack.

For example, you have a “trade deficit” with your local grocery: you give them money and get food in return.
Between the lines: Despite the dubious merit of the trade deficit as a useful barometer of the health of a trade relationship, Trump’s obsession with the number has led to strained relations with key allies.

As Axios’ Jonathan Swan reported in 2017, the trade deficit is one of the items he always wants to be briefed on before meeting with a foreign leader.

Trump picked a fight with Justin Trudeau over the trade balance, later acknowledging that he made up numbers in arguing that the U.S. has a trade deficit with Canada. It has a surplus.

Coupled with immigration, the trade deficit has been a major source of Trump’s animus toward Mexico.

It led Trump to threaten auto tariffs on Europe.

Trump’s only frame of reference about anything is his penny-ante “deals” for real estate and branded cheap consumer goods. That’s why he sees world affairs only in terms of trade. Unfortunately, he doesn’t understand how trade works.

He’s tearing up the world on the basis of a total misunderstanding of how trade works. This is the world-historical version of a fourth grader trying to fake his way through the book report about a book he hasn’t read.

There has never been a president less prepared for the job than this man. We might as well have chosen a random teenager off the street.

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Trump’s “innovation” of whining about media bias is old as the hills

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

It looks as though the Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign is gearing up to be quite the exceptional grift. It’s unknown how much money Trump himself plans to make off all of it, but we do know that he has always thought running for president would be an excellent money-making opportunity. Way back in 2000, he told Fortune Magazine, “It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.”

As it happens, it’s not likely that his unorthodox 2016 campaign ended up netting him a profit, despite his efforts to flow as much money as possible to his hotels, clubs and private airplane. Since he was running as a self-financed candidate, he ended up spending more of his own money than he took in.

Last week multiple news organizations reported that Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale appears to have an unusual business agreement that’s providing him massive compensation compared to any other presidential campaigns. One assumes that Trump is aware of all this money flowing to Pascale. If he isn’t, there’s likely to be hell to pay. He doesn’t like his people making money off the Trump brand if he’s not getting his taste.

Parscale started off as the Trump organization’s webmaster and was promoted to digital director of the Trump campaign in 2016. That would be the only political experience he’s ever had, which may explain why the campaign would think this is a novel strategy, as Axios reports:

Look for ads, speeches and sustained attacks on Facebook and Twitter in particular, the sources say. The irony: The social platforms are created and staffed largely by liberals — but often used most effectively in politics by conservatives, the data shows. Trump successfully turned the vast majority of his supporters against traditional media, and he hopes to do the same against the social media companies.

Republicans’ internal data shows it stirs up the base like few other topics. “In the same way we’ve seen trust in legacy media organizations deteriorate over the past year, there are similarities with social media companies,” a top Republican operative involved in the effort told me. …

How tech execs see it: They know the escalation is coming, so they are cranking up outreach to leading conservatives and trying to push hard on data showing that conservative voices often outperform liberal ones.

Kvetching and complaining are hallmarks of the Trump era, with the president excelling in his leadership role of whiner-in-chief. Hardly a day goes by that he doesn’t throw a tantrum on social media about how unfair everyone is to him. So this strategy fits the Trump campaign nicely.

But let’s not pretend that it’s original. Sure, targeting social media is new, but only because social media itself is new. Conservatives have been hectoring the media for decades and they’ve been very successful at manipulating the press into second-guessing itself, at the least — and becoming outright biased at worst. Either way, this tactic convinces the media to put the focus right where Republicans want it: on angry, conservative white, men who are sure that everyone else is getting something for nothing while they do all the work. For the last four decades that has translated into the media twisting itself into pretzels to ensure that those voices are elevated above everyone else’s.

It’s true that Trump has taken this to previously unimaginable levels, calling the press “the enemy of the people” and publicly insulting reporters to their faces. But going back to the 1950s, the conservative movement has seen the utility of running against the media, which they portray as pointy-headed elites who have no understanding of the salt-of-the-earth American Everyman. National Review’s William F. Buckley famously referred to “the delinquencies of the Liberal press,” as right-wingers of the era recoiled at mainstream newsmen like Edward R. Murrow who called out anti-Communist extremism.

But it was President Richard Nixon, predictably, who raised it to an art form. The man who conceded his race for California governor in 1962 by saying to the press, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,” told his henchman H.R. Haldeman that “the press and TV don’t change their attitude and approach unless you hurt them.” He was convinced that conservatives had to create their own media to counter it.

Nixon couldn’t have guessed how successful that effort would be over the next 25 years. By 1995, as FAIR.org documented, conservatives had created a full-blown propaganda machine turbocharged by right-wing talk radio. One year later Fox News was founded, followed in a couple of years by internet phenomena like the Drudge Report. Politicians and talking heads led by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich offered up a full set of propaganda tools, including specific lists of words to use to describe the opposition.

Working in tandem with a long-term project to degrade the word “liberal,” they continued to assail the press as “the liberal media.” As Eric Alterman wrote in his 2003 book, “What Liberal Media? “, the right had perfected the strategy of the endless whine, combined with what its advocates themselves called “working the refs”:

Rich Bond, then chair of the Republican Party, complained during the 1992 election, “I think we know who the media want to win this election — and I don’t think it’s George Bush.” The very same Rich Bond, however, also noted during the very same election, “There is some strategy to it [bashing the ‘liberal’ media] … . If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is ‘work the refs.’ Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack on the next one.”

It has worked over and over and over again. After the 2004 election, for instance, the New York Times was moved to create a “conservative” beat despite years of rapt attention paid to various iterations of that faction such as “NASCAR dads” and “soccer moms.” Later in the decade, the Tea Party became a national obsession and I’m sure we all enjoyed the two solid years of reporters making pilgrimages to “Trump country” to report back on every change in the mood of the all-important Real Americans who put him in office.

Most recently, we’ve seen the painful contortions of the New York Times as it responds to the relentless bombardment of insults and charges by the president and the right-wing media by bending over backward to be “fair and balanced.”

So as you can see, Trump’s allegedly brilliant and extremely expensive campaign strategy is not new at all. Sure, Parscale and company may have succeeded in getting the tech giants to “crank up the outreach to leading conservatives” but their phony complaints have nothing to do with actual bias, and they know it. Any effort to “push hard on data showing that conservative voices often outperform liberal ones” is a waste of breath.

This strategy will probably be very successful. It usually is. Right-wingers can be highly intimidating. But if Trump thinks he’s paying top dollar for some kind of innovation, he should watch his wallet. His crack team is doing nothing different than what conservatives have been doing since he was in grade school.

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Good old Rod, still on the team after all this time

by digby

Josh Marshall responds:

In my Friday post I argued that Comey’s violation of Bureau guidelines were clearly justified by the unique moment of national crisis in which he took his actions. Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s Trump-coddling lambasting of Comey only makes any sense if you studiously, indeed militantly ignore this context. The same applies to Rosenstein even though he clearly knows the context as well or really more intimately than any of us.

I argued two points. First, the public needed to know then what the President had done, why he had fired Comey and how this fit into the larger coverup. More specifically, it made no sense for Comey to hand his memos over to his successors at the FBI or top appointees at the DOJ since he had good reason to think they themselves were or would be compromised by Trump’s corruption and on-going coverup. To this Rosenstein says that in fact “EVERY agent and prosecutor was still working on it.”

Let’s take this piece by piece.

Comey was fired because he wouldn’t drop the Russia probe. Every FBI Agent worked for James Comey. If he was fired for refusing to drop the Russia probe it certainly stood to reason that every agent’s role in the probe was under threat. Prosecutors don’t work for the FBI Director. They work for the Department of Justice. But at that stage of an investigation, in practice a similar logic applies to them.

As I said, simple logic said that their pursuit of the investigation was also under threat. If Comey was fired for refusing to drop the Russia probe then it also stood to reason that others who refused would also be fired or that they were on board with or would bend to Trump’s cover up.

But of course it goes beyond this.

Trump decided to fire Comey in that infamous rageballing weekend at Bedminster (May 6–7, 2017). He came back to Washington with his mind made up and enlisted the help of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Rosenstein to craft his justification (May 8, 2017). Rosenstein proceeded to do so (May 8–9, 2017). This point is critical. Rosenstein certainly knew that Trump was firing Comey over the Russia probe. Yet he knowingly drafted a memo with a series of pretextual justifications for Comey’s dismissal. Rosenstein’s proffered reasons were not unreasonable in themselves. But they were clearly not the actual reasons. Rosenstein knew this. In this way he made himself part of the coverup.

So not only did Comey have every reason to believe the chain of command was compromised. It in fact was compromised, as Rosenstein’s own actions show.

Now, one of the great mysteries of this whole saga remains how Rosenstein went from helping Trump advance his bad acts and coverups to appointing an outside investigator to investigate them. He remains an unexplained tangle of fidelity to the rule of law and complicity in attacks upon it. I have my theories. But of course only Rosenstein can answer that question. I’m all ears.

The fact that Rosenstein himself made the decision to appoint Robert Mueller itself provides an ample testimony that the chain of command could not credibly oversee the probe. Indeed, that is literally the premise of the decision. But again, there’s a bit more than that. The timeline and contemporaneous reporting makes clear that Rosenstein’s decision was in significant measure driven by the release of the information contained in Comey’s memos, which he had through an intermediary leaked to The New York Times. His decision came a day after the first quotes from the memos appeared in the Times.

Given President Trump’s on-going and often quite public efforts to obstruct, block and shutdown the Mueller probe it is absurd to think that any still secret investigation under the unobserved stewardship of Trump political appointees within the DOJ would have survived. Rosenstein needed the goad of those memos to create the special counsel investigation. That itself makes the point that public exposure of that information was critical.

I should add that this part of my argument doesn’t even require positive bad acts by people working for Trump in the summer of 2017. It simply requires Comey’s reasonable expectations at that moment and responsibility to the country and the rule of law. In fact, we know there were both bad acts and complicity in Trump’s bad acts and attempted subversions of the rule of law. Rosenstein’s claim simply does not hold up. He knows that better than anyone. He was there. Indeed, some of the acts were his own.

Rosenstein appointed the Special Counsel so we all sat by assuming that Rosenstein was acting in good faith even though his ridiculous letter showed that he was at least somewhat willing to help Trump with his cover-up. When he got on AirForce One and told Trump he was “on the team” and Trump pulled back from his clear intent to fire him we thought maybe good old Rod was just vamping for time. But when he stood there next to Bill Barr and backed his absurd conclusion that no obstruction of justice had taken place — even though he was personally part of it — I think we knew that we had misunderstood everything.

Barr’s subsequent actions, the firing of McCabe one day before he was set to qualify for his pension and now this IG report suggests that, at best, the Department of Justice is trying to appease a criminal in the White House under some perverse pretense of preserving “the institution” even as they help Trump destroy every last bit of integrity they once had. At worst, they are in collusion with this corrupt White House.

In fact, there’s really little doubt about Bill Barr. Whether his brain is rotted from right-wing propaganda or he has just always been a purely nihilistic partisan player, he is clearly Trump’s top henchman in the government — his Roy Cohn. He’s so arrogant that he has no problem with that perception. Rosenstein and Horowitz may be deluded or so myopic that they cannot see the big picture anymore but it’s just as likely that they are protecting the president as well.

Rosenstein has seemed to be all over the place from the beginning, obviously over his head. But Horowitz had a reputation as a straight arrow. The last part of his report read like a Bill Barr screed. For more on that, read Emptywheel’s analysis of the IG report both at her blog and at the New Republic.

This report isn’t on the level. And Rosenstain’s defensiveness reveals that he knows it.

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All the president’s enemies
by Tom Sullivan

“Now, you will behave yourselves hereafter, won’t you? Or I shall be very, very angry.”

Allies of the acting president seek $2 million for an effort to investigate reporters at the New York Times, Washington Post, and others, Axios reports this morning based on a three-page memo it obtained.

Groups listed as “Primary Targets” are “CNN, MSNBC, all broadcast networks, NY Times, Washington Post, BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, and all others that routinely incorporate bias and misinformation in to their coverage.” Including reporters and editors.

Other GOP 2020 groups will target social media platforms for alleged bias.

He wants it now

The New York Times reported in late August on this or a related effort by “a loose network of conservative operatives allied with the White House.” Four sources claimed the network is compiling dossiers of “potentially embarrassing social media posts and other public statements” from news gatherers at prominent news organizations. Also targeted are family members involved in politics, as well as liberal activists and other known opponents of the president.

The president wants impunity and he wants it now.

Not even Fox News is exempt. Donald Trump rage-tweeted his exasperation at his pet news outlet, writing “Fox isn’t working for us anymore!”

“To fact check him is to be all but dead to him,” Fox’s Neil Cavuto answered in an on-air rebuke.

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent responded over the weekend and reiterated in a tweet this morning:

The whole point here is the open declaration that something meant to be a news network should function as his personal 24/7 propaganda and disinformation outlet. It’s a double-fisted declaration of impunity: Trump must be immune from journalistic scrutiny and be permitted to operate and lie with absolute impunity, and he will publicly assert that an ostensibly journalistic institution should be entirely subservient to him with absolute, shameless impunity as well.

This is a form of insidious corruption — corruption of our discourse. All politicians shade the truth; politics inescapably involves artifice of one kind or another. But most hew to some kind of underlying belief that gaslighting voters too shamelessly treats them with a form of deep contempt; that at some point, factual reality has to matter; that journalism plays a legitimate institutional role in restraining political dishonesty; and that all this is a necessary foundation for deliberative democracy to function.

Trump demands “a form of autocratic disinformation,” Sargent writes, “designed to render fact-based deliberation and argument impossible.” He considers it his birthright. Anything less is betrayal. And he gets very, very angry when he feels betrayed.

Born into wealth, raised by the elite, boasting of powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, Donald Trump has no use for democracy if it fails to deliver glorious victory and boost his net worth. He has spent a lifetime surrounded by yes-men and fawning sycophants who laugh at every joke. They agree, smiling, at his every lie, at every uninformed opinion. They say, “Yes, sir, how high?” at every barked request. And they learn, as the imprisoned Michael Cohen did, that when he offers suggestions in code to commit crimes, they are formal orders, as from a crime boss.

Thus, his remaining janissaries plot retribution against critics. The sultan himself need not give the order. They know his mind, what there is of it.

The impudence of reporters who challenge his proclamations is galling. The ingratitude of beautiful people like, like Debra Messing, enrages him. This isn’t what he imagined — with all that power — being president would be like. With every morning’s rage-tweets he confirms his frustration with a reality he cannot dominate completely.

Trump always wanted his own planet to play with. (He can’t really play the harpsichord better than anyone else. Or at all.)

The beautiful letters beguiled him

by digby

He’s a fool. And Republican officials who know better are such cowards that they are allowing this ignoramus to do what he pleases:

As North Korea fired off a series of missiles in recent months — at least 18 since May — President Trump has repeatedly dismissed their importance as short-range and “very standard” tests. And although he has conceded “there may be a United Nations violation,” the president says any concerns are overblown.

Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, Mr. Trump explained recently, just “likes testing missiles.”

Now, American intelligence officials and outside experts have come to a far different conclusion: that the launchings downplayed by Mr. Trump, including two late last month, have allowed Mr. Kim to test missiles with greater range and maneuverability that could overwhelm American defenses in the region.

Japan’s defense minister, Takeshi Iwaya, told reporters in Tokyo last week that the irregular trajectories of the most recent tests were more evidence of a program designed to defeat the defenses Japan has deployed, with American technology, at sea and on shore.

Mr. Kim’s flattery of Mr. Trump with beguiling letters and episodic meetings offering vague assurances of eventual nuclear disarmament, some outside experts say, are part of what they call the North Korean leader’s strategy of buying time to improve his arsenal despite all the sanctions on North Korea.

The rapid improvements in the short-range missiles not only put Japan and South Korea in increased danger, but also threaten at least eight American bases in those countries housing more than 30,000 troops, according to an analysis of the missile ranges by The New York Times. Such missiles, experts say, could be designed to carry either conventional or nuclear warheads.

“Kim is exploiting loopholes in his agreements with President Trump pretty brilliantly,” said Vipin Narang, a political-science professor at M.I.T. who studies North Korean weapon advances. “These are mobile-launched, they move fast, they fly very low and they are maneuverable. That’s a nightmare for missile defense. And it’s only a matter of time before those technologies are migrated to longer-range missiles.”

President Trump says that Mr. Kim committed to him during a meeting in Singapore 14 months ago that he would refrain from testing intercontinental ballistic missiles and conducting nuclear tests while negotiations are underway, and he has kept those promises even though there have been no substantive talks since a second summit in Hanoi in February resulted in an impasse.

But North Korean state-run media made clear last week that the country feels no such limits when it comes to improving other missile technologies, saying it would never accede to the West’s demand “for disarmament under pressure and appeasement of ‘international society.’”

Nothing matters to Republicans but maintaining power. The question is whether there’s going to be a country — or a world — left for them to run after all this.

Kim Jong Un is brilliantly manipulating this narcissistic moron we have for a president. And we’re all forced to sit here and watch it happen.

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Well, well, well — they have a tiny bit of shame after all

by digby

This was the cruelest policy yet and it’s so bad that even the heartless Trump administration has had to backtrack — at least for now:

The Trump administration on Monday announced that it would reconsider its decision to force immigrants facing life-threatening health crises to return to their home countries, an abrupt move last month that generated public outrage and was roundly condemned by the medical establishment.

On Aug. 7, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, without public notice, eliminated a “deferred action” program that had allowed immigrants to avoid deportation while they or their relatives were undergoing lifesaving medical treatment.

The agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, had sent letters informing those who had asked for a renewal, which the immigrants must make every two years, that it was no longer entertaining such requests. The letters said that the immigrants must leave the country within 33 days, or face deportation.

On Monday, the agency said in a statement that while limiting the program was “appropriate,” officials would “complete the caseload that was pending on August 7.”

The statement said that deportation proceedings had not been initiated against anyone who had received the letter. However, it did not say whether it would continue to grant immigrants extensions to stay in the country or whether the program would be continued after current applications are processed.

When asked for clarification, an agency official said the agency “is taking immediate corrective action to reopen previously pending cases for consideration.”

“Whether a very limited version of deferred action will continue forward at U.S.C.I.S. is still under review. More information will be forthcoming,” said the official, who only agreed to speak on background.

USCIS is under the purview of Ken “the cooch” Cucinelli. Somehow I doubt this was reversed upon his recommendation. Indeed, he and Stephen Miller and Trump probably felt they’d come up with an excellent “deterrent” to people coming to the US for life-saving medical treatment. They should just die in their shithole countries, no doubt, as God intended.

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The dumbest mass shooting prevention program in history

by digby

I didn’t think they could be any dumber but this really takes the cake:

The Trump administration is preparing a package of legislative measures responding to a spate of recent mass shootings, aides said Monday, even as White House and congressional staffs remain far apart on the best path forward.

The package will include legislation that would expedite the death penalty for people found guilty of mass killings, Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff told reporters.

But it’s unlikely to include new provisions expanding background checks on gun sales after President Donald Trump backed off support for such steps following outcry from the National Rifle Association and warnings about the political consequences.

Mass killers are going to be deterred by the death penalty? Are they kidding?

I’m sure this will thrill his cult, however. The more death the better.

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He’s just making Ukraine an offer they can’t refuse

by digby

Tough shit Ukraine. Trumpie has his own agenda:

U.S. Vice President Mike Pence said the American people “stand with Ukraine” but that European nations should do more to help the former Soviet republic.

The U.S. has “carried the load” on Ukraine and “we’ve been proud to do that,” Pence told reporters Monday in Warsaw. “But we believe it’s time for our European partners to step forward.”

The U.S. still has “great concerns” about corruption in Ukraine, he said. Washington has been one of Kiev’s staunchest allies following Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and amid the Kremlin-backed conflict that erupted later that year.

But they might be persuaded to keep sending the aid. If Ukraine offers some help. If you know what I mean:

Pence said he discussed further aid to Ukraine during a meeting Sunday in the Polish capital with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. The vice president said he didn’t bring up the issue of potential wrongdoing by U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden or his son, who sat on the board of one of Ukraine’s biggest gas companies.

He didn’t need to did he? They understand the terms very well I’m sure.

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How normalization happens

by digby

There are many ways in which the press helps mainstream extremism. This report from the UK illustrates one of them:

With the country lurching from one political and constitutional crisis to another, you’ll be happy to know that the start of Downing Street’s daily media briefing on Monday, was dominated by one thing: Boris Johnson’s new dog!

The Jack Russell rescue pup has been the centre of attention since he entered Downing Street this morning, even as the country is bracing for another general election. The BBC Politics Twitter account has also been taking a huge amount of heat for tweeting about the dog and asking for name suggestions.

Well, BuzzFeed News has also been sent a transcript of the closed-door briefing for members of the Westminster “Lobby” on Monday morning.

Unlike the televised White House press secretary briefings in the US, the twice-daily Downing Street version is held off-camera, with journalists attributing what’s said to the “prime minister’s official spokesperson”. BuzzFeed News political reporters did not attend Monday morning’s briefing.

The first part of the briefing concerns the prime minister’s “on diary” arrangements, with journalists given the opportunity to ask questions about what’s coming up in the week.

This morning, the prime minister’s spokesperson ran through the diary items, including mentioning the dog’s arrival, and then took a few questions. It took a little over a minute for the dog to become the star of the show.

Journalist 1: Does the dog have a name?

Prime Minister’s spokesperson: I would expect the dog’s name to be revealed shortly. But I don’t have it with me. It arrived at 11 o’clock it was brought by Friends of Animals Wales to Number 10, they are a fantastic charity run by volunteers who work around the clock to make a difference to animals. The prime minister has always been a big supporter of animal welfare, has always believed that animals should get the right start in life. That’s why the government has taken such significant action in this area.

Journalist 2: Forgive me if I’ve missed this but has the PM been to Balmoral yet?

Prime Minister spokesperson: Ahh, he has not no. As you will have noticed.

Journalist 2: What’s that due to?

Prime Minister’s spokesperson: Let me check that and come back to. But certainly not. Any other questions?

Journalist 3: Just on the dog, how old is the dog?

Prime Minister’s spokesperson: Ah the dog is, a few months, three or four months. I can get the exact number at the next.

Journalist 3: Boy or girl?

Prime Minister’s spokesperson: It’s a boy.

Journalist 3: And the naming will be announced by…

Prime Minister’s spokesperson: (Laughs) Genuinely I don’t know, later on. I will check to see if I can help you out a bit more later on.

Journalist 4: Is there a breed?

Prime Minister’s spokesperson: (Inaudible)

Journalist 3: Is it toilet trained? Is it moving into the flat?

Prime Minister’s spokesperson: No, it’s a rescue puppy, as I say, it has been rescued by the charity Friends of Animals Wales and they’ve been caring for the puppy so far.

Journalist 3: Do we know if it’s toilet trained?

Prime Minister’s spokesperson: I genuinely haven’t asked.

Journalist 3: Can you ask because it’s a considerable amount of time and the prime minister’s time can’t be taken up by that.

Prime Minister’s spokesperson: (Laughs) Well I’d really love to check but I’d say that the charity have been looking after it for several weeks…

Journalist 5: One final question as to the dog, can’t believe I’m asking a dog question, who does the dog ultimately belong to? Because there’s obviously a cat, the cat will stay where it is and it’s territorial and the dog…

Prime Minister’s spokesperson: The dog belongs to the PM and Carrie Symonds.

Journalist 6: Has Larry met the dog?

Prime Minister’s spokesperson: Larry will have probably met the dog probably by now, but he hadn’t when I left.

A source in the briefing said the remaining 20 minutes of the briefing were spent on the other pressing issues of the day, including the political crisis over Brexit.

Hitler loved dogs too. Just saying.

I am the last person to say that leaders pets are off limits to the press. I’m a big fan of all the White House pets and consider Trump’s hatred of animals — and his insistence that it’s undignified for a Dear Leader such as he to be seen with one — to be among the most revealing insights into his character.

I have nothing against Johnson’s little dog. I’m sure he’s wonderful. But Johnson acquired him for a reason and the press played along — good old loveable Boris and his puppy. Never mind that he’s an anti-democratic radical in thrall to fascists.

There is a time for the press to be cutesy with politicians. This is not one of them.

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