Wishful spinningâŚsheesh! the king has no clothes and everyone knows it!
T getting ready for his physical tomorrowâŚWith his pal, Dr. Ronny Jackson, he should be fine. (With those âgenesâŚâ wow!)
He passed and Dr Ronny Jackson was not his docâŚosteopath Dr Sean Conley said he is good for 2 years. Forecasting is hard to do.
Another one of Trumpâs hollow boasts exposed. The sad thing is that his base will never pick up this part of the story, and knowing them, they will get it in their heads that Trump actually won a Nobel prize.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe nominated U.S. President Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize last autumn after receiving a request from the U.S. government to do so, the Asahi newspaper reported on Sunday.
The report follows Trumpâs claim on Friday that Abe had nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize for opening talks and easing tensions with North Korea.
The Japanese leader had given him âthe most beautiful copyâ of a five-page nomination letter, Trump said at a White House news conference.
Trump is loud and clear on this point. He is pushing for state control of the press â just like in Russia, China, and North Korea.
His tweet:
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
Nothing funny about tired Saturday Night Live on Fake News NBC! Question is, how do the Networks get away with these total Republican hit jobs without retribution? Likewise for many other shows? Very unfair and should be looked into. This is the real Collusion!
This from a person who hurls insults on a near daily basis.
The Guardianâs reporting including some choice responses:
Donald Trump has savaged Saturday Night Live as a âtotal Republican hit jobâ while calling for âretributionâ and an investigation of the show after another unflattering portrayal of the president by Alec Baldwin.
Baldwin reprised his role as Donald Trump with blonde wig, characteristic pout and exaggerated imitation of the presidentâs speech-making style, for the showâs cold open on Saturday. This time the sketch parodied the presidentâs press conference in which he announced a national emergency over his plans to build a border wall with Mexico.
âWe need wall. We have a tremendous amount of drugs coming in through the southern border, or the âbrown lineâ as many people have asked me not to call it,â said Baldwin.
âYou all see why I gotta fake this emergency, right? I have to because I want to. Itâs really simple. We have a problem. Drugs are coming into this country through no wall.
âWall works, wall makes safe. You donât have to be smart to understand that â in fact itâs even easier to understand if youâre not that smart.ââŚ
Trumpâs talk of âretributionâ drew criticism, with lawmakers and journalists suggesting the threats violated core democratic principles. The Democrat Congressman Ted Lieu tweeted: âOne thing that makes America great is that people can laugh at you without retribution.â
Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for the New York Times, said that while such language had become commonplace âitâs worth remembering that no other president in decades publicly threatened âretributionâ against a television network because it satirized himâ.
Whatâs next? Will the President demand censorship of political cartoons that feature unflattering caricatures of him?
Hereâs the sketch in case you havenât caught it yet. Hilarious and spot on.
More unhinged twitter rantingsâŚthis time after Rep Adam Schiff, newly head of House Intelligence said collusion âin plain sightâ today.
Trump Circulates Limbaugh Quote Calling for Mueller Investigators to âBe in Jailâ
President Trump took to Twitter on Sunday to apparently circulate a call for the jailing of those who investigate him, including Special Counsel Robert Mueller. ââThese guys, the investigators, ought to be in jail. What they have done, working with the Obama intelligence agencies, is simply unprecedented,ââ Trump wrote, quoting conservative pundit Rush Limbaugh. ââThis is one of the greatest political hoaxes ever perpetrated on the people of this Country, and Mueller is a coverup.ââ He later added, in his own words, that âThe Mueller investigation is totally conflicted, illegal and rigged! Should never have been allowed to begin, except for the Collusion and many crimes committed by the Democrats. Witch Hunt!â
The presidentâs tweets came hours after House Intelligence chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) said Sunday that thereâs âevidence in plain sightâ that Trump colluded with Russia. âAll of this is evidence of collusion, and you either have to look the other way to say it isnât or you have to have a different word for it, because it is a corrupt dealing with a foreign adversary during a campaign,â Schiff told CNNâs Dana Bash.
I believe his exam included a colonoscopy, where intitially alarmed that there was something (polyp?, malignancy?) found but was later reported it was only HannityâŚ
Iâve already lost too many brain cells exploring Tâs personality, his impetuous nature and what drives him (His need for adulation #SeeNarcissism, Power and Money)
In case you need to see more, thereâs an A & E Documentary 3 part series on The Trump Dynasty.
New York, NYâJanuary 14, 2019â A&E Network will premiere the six-hour documentary series âBiography: The Trump Dynastyâ drawing from first-hand accounts and never-before-seen archival footage that examine the life and heritage of the 45th President of the United States. As part of the networkâs award-winning Biography series, the documentary spans three generations of the Trump family saga and offers an in-depth exploration of the influences that shaped Donald Trumpâs personality, celebrity, and ambition in business and politics. â Biography: The Trump Dynastyâ premieres Monday, February 25 at 9PM ET/PT and airs over three consecutive nights.
âThe Biography brand has always strived to document and explore the lives and stories of our nationâs modern presidential leaders in order to better understand our countryâs past, present and future,â said Elaine Frontain Bryant, Executive Vice President and Head of Programming for A&E Network. ââBiography: The Trump Dynastyâ is a timely and compelling examination of the people, events, and experiences that have shaped our current president, and in turn, this unique moment in recent American history.â
From the Klondike Gold Rush of the 1890s to the origins of a New York real-estate empire, the documentary provides an all-encompassing view of the Trump family that has rarely been seen. The series delves into Donald Trumpâs childhood in Queens, his risky move into the world of Manhattan real estate and the creation of a landmark residential skyscraper on Fifth Avenue, his notoriety as a best-selling author and reality television star, and the lead up to his 2016 presidential campaign.
The President can give anyone top secret security clearance, so why did he lie? Why does he lie at all?
President Trump ordered his chief of staff to grant his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, a top-secret security clearance last year, overruling concerns flagged by intelligence officials and the White Houseâs top lawyer, four people briefed on the matter said.
Mr. Trumpâs decision in May so troubled senior administration officials that at least one, the White House chief of staff at the time, John F. Kelly, wrote a contemporaneous internal memo about how he had been âorderedâ to give Mr. Kushner the top-secret clearance.
The White House counsel at the time, Donald F. McGahn II, also wrote an internal memo outlining the concerns that had been raised about Mr. Kushner â including by the C.I.A. â and how Mr. McGahn had recommended that he not be given a top-secret clearance.
The disclosure of the memos contradicts statements made by the president, who told The New York Times in January in an Oval Office interview that he had no role in his son-in-law receiving his clearance.
ConfoundingâŚthis power play, and not kosher move on Tâs part.
But the clearance had been held up in part over questions from the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. about his foreign and business contacts, including those related to Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Russia, according to multiple people familiar with the events.
Must be that Jaredâs (and Tâs) success depends on giving away the storeâŚ
and perhaps T lied so as not to admit to something publicly that Kelly, McGahn, FBI, CIA had said no to. Unreal.
Here he isâŚin one speech and with one mission to be polarizing, and heâs coming up with 10 different personalities. Read this WaPo piece
He lambasted and lampooned his rivals. He exaggerated and ballyhooed his record. He riddled his remarks with contradictions, shoddy statistics and falsehoods. And he embroidered it all with a fake Southern accent, curse words and bouts of extravagant pantomime.
For two hours and five minutes last weekend, President Trump dazzled his supporters and appalled his critics with a mind-spinning, free-associating performance that neatly encapsulated his singular standing as a polarizing cultural figure.
Even for a politician who never seems to stop talking, the tour-de-force performance at the Conservative Political Action Conference â the longest speech of Trumpâs presidency â stands apart as a road map to understanding the 45th presidentâs id. It also offers a preview of the cacophonous 2020 campaign to come.
The Entertainer
Iâm in love, and youâre in love. Weâre all in love together.The Fighter
Every day, my presidency will defend American families.The Victim
I spent my New Yearâs all by myself.The Bully
Robert Mueller never received a vote.The Expert
Not like $200 million. Thatâs a lot. This is 200 with a B:billion. Two hundred billion.The Auditor
Think of this: We spent $7 trillion in the Middle East and we canât land with the lights on. Twenty years later.The Braggart
What weâve done together has never been done in the history â maybe of beyond our country, maybe in the history of the world.The Fabulist
We had a rally at the airport where 55,000 people showed up to the airport.The Rebel
But I care. And people care. People care.The Pundit
Those red hats â and white ones. The key isnât the color. The key is what it says.
I thought it was well done. Part three was really revealing of actions he has taken in the past that are in question today such as claiming a net worth in Forbes that was actually his fathers. He has a crediblity gap (in many areas) but he really needs to explain how he went from a $4B dollar bankrupt state in the mid 90s and then viola - buy golf courses with cash in 2006âŚCash? really? Maybe this will be the what finally turns his bas against him if what was shown in books and this documentary are further revealed through Congressional investigations that hopefully include more on his adult childrens misdeeds as well.
President Trump has just a 6 percent win rate defending his administrationâs polices in court, two thirds of these cases violate to the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and in at least 12 cases lost due to the Presidents own erroneous twitter comments that undermine his policies. The average âwin rateâ for such cases is usually 70 percent.
âWhat they have consistently been doing is short-circuiting the process,â said Georgetown Law Schoolâs William W. Buzbee, an expert on administrative law who has studied Trumpâs record. In the regulatory cases, Buzbee said, âthey donât even come closeâ to explaining their actions, âmaking it very easy for the courts to reject them because theyâre not doing their homework.â
Two-thirds of the cases accuse the Trump administration of violating the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), a nearly 73-year-old law that forms the primary bulwark against arbitrary rule. The normal âwin rateâ for the government in such cases is about 70 percent, according to analysts and studies. But as of mid-January, a database maintained by the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law shows Trumpâs win rate at about 6 percent.
(âŚ)
Contributing to the losing record has been Trump himself. His reported comments about âshithole countries,â for example, helped convince U.S. District Judge Edward M. Chen in San Francisco that the administrationâs decision to end âtemporary protected statusâ for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Central America, Haiti and Sudan was motivated by racial and ethnic bias.
At least a dozen decisions have involved Trumpâs tweets or comments.
Trump lie #eight thousand and something:
The truth:
And hereâs a more legible version of the letter as posted by the WaPo.
Another SurpriseâŚNOT!
NEWS
Trump is the worldâs worst cheat at golf, players and celebs say
By Gavin Newsham
March 30, 2019 | 8:40am
Donald Trump plays at his International Golf Links course in Aberdeenshire, Scotland in 2012.Getty Images
Sixteen of the last 19 US presidents have played golf â and now, in Donald John Trump, the nation can finally boast the very best of them all.
Well, thatâs what heâd like you to believe.
âTo say âDonald Trump cheatsâ is like saying âMichael Phelps swims,ââ writes Rick Reilly in the new book âCommander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trumpâ (Hachette Book Group), out Tuesday. âHe cheats at the highest level. He cheats when people are watching and he cheats when they arenât. He cheats whether you like it or not. He cheats because thatâs how he plays golf ⌠if youâre playing golf with him, heâs going to cheat.â
Reilly, a former Sports Illustrated columnist who has played with Trump in the past, spoke to dozens of players â both amateur and professional â to recount some of the presidentâs worst cons on the course, starting with his declared handicap of 2.8.
In laymanâs terms, the lower the handicap, the better the player. Jack Nicklaus, winner of a record 18 major golf titles and generally considered the greatest golfer in the history of the game, has a handicap of 3.4.
Nicklausâ handicap is listed on the same Golf Handicap and Information Network website used by Trump, where players post their scores.
President Trump with Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus.Twitter
âIf Trump is a 2.8,â writes Reilly, âQueen Elizabeth is a pole vaulter.â
Shortly after he became president, Trump played with Tiger Woods, the current world No. 1 Dustin Johnson and the veteran PGA Tour pro Brad Faxon. Given the quality and profile of his companions, you might have thought Trump would have been on his best behavior. Not so.
On one hole, Trump dunked a shot into the lake, but as his opponents werenât looking he simply dropped another ball â and then hit that into the water, too.
âSo he drives up and drops where he shouldâve dropped the first time and hits it on the green,â recalls Faxon.
The actor Samuel L. Jackson has also witnessed the underhanded methods Trump employs, according to Reilly.
âWe clearly saw him hook a ball into a lake at Trump National [Bedminster, New Jersey],â he says, âand his caddy told him he found it!â
Are we surprised?
As the saying goes - âDifferent strokes for different folks.â
And some strokes are just not worth counting.
If you can overvalue a property by several hundred percent when applying for a loan, you sure as hell can undercount a few miss hits on the golf course.
/sarc
T will always do the counter punch firstâŚthatâs in his DNAâŚalways hit out. Obviously, this preoccupation has left us without a focused leader.
Lots of wo/man hours spent on writing about his idiocy. WTF
During a Republican retreat at Camp David last year, President Trump seemed particularly enthralled as Gary Cohn, then his chief economic adviser, delivered a briefing on infrastructure. The president impressed the assembled lawmakers with his apparent interest in the presentation, nodding along and scribbling furious notes.
But Trumpâs notes âhad nothing to do with infrastructure,â journalists Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer write in their new book, âThe Hill to Die On.â
Instead, Trump had scrawled âSloppy Steveâ atop his index card, followed by âcopious notesâ criticizing Stephen K. Bannon, his former chief strategist whom he had fired several months earlier.
âAs Cohn had detailed his plans to rebuild Americaâs roads, the president was writing down how he wanted to trash Steve Bannon the next time someone asked him about it,â the authors write, in one of buzzy scenes that pepper the book.
Iâm viewing the tragic ongoing shock and awe from a safe distance, but still it pains. I wonder, sometimes, just how you all there must bear it.
Iâm going to refer to this article in Vox which describes two of the most recent out bursts from your president.
President Donald Trump made two remarkably authoritarian comments on Friday, first urging Congress to âget rid of judgesâ â specifically, immigration judges â and later demeaning the entire media as the âENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!âBut in a sign of how normalized the behavior of this president has become, neither remark amounted to much more than a blip on the news radar.
Trump made his comment about immigration judges during a question-and-answer session with reporters before departing the White House for a photo opportunity along the southern border in California.
âCongress has to act,â Trump said. âThey have to get rid of catch and release, chain migration, visa lottery, they have to get rid of the whole asylum system because it doesnât work, and frankly, we should get rid of judges. You canât have a court case every time somebody steps foot on our ground.â
Trumpâs comments marked the second time this week he has urged Congress âto get rid of judgesâ â a proposal that, thankfully, for those of us who value checks and balances, has little chance of gaining traction now that Democrats control the House.The president, however, is not even trying to hide the fact heâd like to have the power to summarily deport migrants and asylum seekers, and has already demonstrated a willingness to try and seize emergency powers toward that end.
Later, while Air Force One was on its way to California, Trump posted a tweet in which he characterized the entire âpressâ as âtruly the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!ââŚ
âŚThe president says a lot of ugly stuff, and much of it can safely be tuned out. Still, Trumpâs comments on Friday highlight how unprecedented the current state of affairs is for our country. The president aspires to being an authoritarian ruler and isnât really trying to hide it.
Regardless of whether you take Trumpâs comments literally or merely seriously, they are disturbing. Judges are a vital part of the rule of law, and the free press is important in any democracy. Those values were mostly taken for granted in this country, but should not be any longer.
my bold
But as depressing and alarming as these two utterances are, they merely represent the tip of a veritable mountain of hateful speech.
When complaining about the Flores legal settlement that governs treatment of migrant children and families, he blamed âJudge Flores, whoever you may beâ. But the settlement is actually named after Jenny Flores, a 15-year-old girl from El Salvador whose 1985 detention by [US immigration] enforcement (then known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service) was the subject of a class-action lawsuit. Flores was being held in a facility with adult men and women, and was regularly strip-searched. Human rights attorneys sued on her and other minorsâ behalf.
His ignorance and complete lack of empathy make this sort of statement horrific in the extreme.
If he really wanted to ease the current pressure of migrants seeking asylum, then he should be looking at helping to address, in a humanitarian way, the causes that lead people to leave their homeland, and their loved ones, in search of safety elsewhere. His current response, of cutting aid programmes, will merely exacerbate the problem he rails about.
This is dated Oct 2018âŚstill very true today.
"In my life, I have watched John Kennedy talk on television about missiles in Cuba. I saw Lyndon Johnson look Richard Russell squarely in the eye and and say, âAnd we shall overcome.â I saw Richard Nixon resign and Gerald Ford tell the Congress that our long national nightmare was over. I saw Jimmy Carter talk about malaise and Ronald Reagan talk about a shining city on a hill. I saw George H.W. Bush deliver the eulogy for the Soviet bloc, and Bill Clinton comfort the survivors of Timothy McVeighâs madness in Oklahoma City. I saw George W. Bush struggle to make sense of it all on September 11, 2001, and I saw Barack Obama sing âAmazing Graceâ in the wounded sanctuary of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
"These were the presidents of my lifetime. These were not perfect men. They were not perfect presidents, god knows. Not one of them was that. But they approached the job, and they took to the podium, with all the gravitas they could muster as appropriate to the job. They tried, at least, to reach for something in the presidency that was beyond their grasp as ordinary human beings. They were not all ennobled by the attempt, but they tried nonetheless.
"And comes now this hopeless, vicious buffoon, and the audience of equally hopeless and vicious buffoons who laughed and cheered when he made sport of a woman whose lasting memory of the trauma she suffered is the laughter of the perpetrators. Now he comes, a man swathed in scandal, with no interest beyond what he can put in his pocket and what he can put over on a universe of suckers, and he does something like this while occupying an office that we gave him, and while endowed with a public trust that he dishonors every day he wakes up in the White House.
"The scion of a multigenerational criminal enterprise, the parameters of which we are only now beginning to comprehend. A vessel for all the worst elements of the American condition. And a cheap, soulless bully besides. We never have had such a cheap counterfeit of a president* as currently occupies the office. We never have had a president* so completely deserving of scorn and yet so small in the office that it almost seems a waste of time and energy to summon up the requisite contempt.
"Watch how a republic dies in the empty eyes of an empty man who feels nothing but his own imaginary greatness, and who cannot find in himself the decency simply to shut up even when it is in his best interest to do so. Presidents donât have to be heroes to be good presidents. They just have to realize that their humanity is our common humanity, and that their political commonwealth is our political commonwealth, too.
Watch him behind the seal of the President of the United States. Isnât he a funny man? Isnât what happened to that lady hilarious? Watch the assembled morons cheer. This is the only story now."
- Charles Pierce
Interesting insights into the chaos surrounding T 'n co - See Hub & Spokes reference, where T will assign the same thing to multiple people, because there is no chief-of-staffâŚjust Nick Mulvaney, who says things publically (my take).
Jonathan Swan, Alayna Treene19 hours ago
Scoop: Former White House counsel Don McGahn off the record
Don McGahn, who has kept his head down since leaving as White House counsel, shared some off-the-record thoughts on Thursday in a lunch with about 40 senior Republican Senate aides.
Details: âI spent the last couple of years getting yelled at,â he said, per two sources at the lunch, held in the Capitolâs Strom Thurmond room. âAnd you may soon read about some of the more spirited debates I had with the president.â McGahn didnât explicitly mention Muellerâs report, but sources in the room said they understood him to be referring to it when he said this.
Why it matters: McGahn was part of key conversations Muellerâs team scrutinized when determining whether Trump obstructed justice â a decision Mueller declined to make.
McGahn was invited as part of a regular series of off-the-record lunches. Mitt Romneyâs staff served Mexican food. And while McGahn mostly praised Trump, he also hinted at the brutality of his tenure, according to sources who were there.
- McGahn said the president runs the White House with a âhub and spokes model,â often assigning the same task to multiple people. The point, per sources in the room, is that there is no chief of staff in the usual sense.
- Trump doesnât trust one person as a gatekeeper, per McGahn. He dislikes intermediaries. And no member of staff is empowered because Trump is the hub and he makes the decisions; all the senior aides are spokes.
McGahn said a big part of his job as White House counsel was to deregulate and rein in the âadministrative state.â
- He said he did that by writing deregulatory executive orders and picking judicial nominees who wanted to limit the power of federal agencies.
- He talked about Trump nominating judges who agree that the courts have given too much flexibility to federal agencies to interpret laws and enforce regulations.
- McGahn said they looked for potential judges who wanted to reconsider the âChevron deference,â which requires the courts to defer to federal agenciesâ âreasonableâ interpretations of ambiguous laws.
- McGahn said Trumpâs judges will spend 30â40 years unwinding the power of executive agencies.
McGahn marveled to the group about what Trump can get away with.
- He said Trump could do something thatâs â180 degrees oppositeâ of what McGahn advised â but it somehow works. âIf it was 179 degrees, it wouldnât work,â McGahn said, according to the sources.
- He said Trump usually takes the conservative side of any given debate â but makes decisions so fast that it was important for McGahn to get to Trump quickly before he announced a decision potentially based on bad information.
- If Trump says something publicly, he said, itâs hard to pull him back.