I’ve read a lot about this, including Rep. Dingell’s response. It’s heart-wrenching, and the one good thing I can say about it is that it was not well-received at least.
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Heartwarming exchange between Rep. Debbie Dingell and CNN’s Kate Bolduan as they address Trump’s nationally televised insult that her husband may be in Hell
As a counterpoint to Trump’s vile smears against Debbie Dingell and her late husband, watch as she responds with grace and dignity and has a quiet moment of healing with Bolduan. It will help restore your faith in humanity – a remedy that we seem to find ourselves in need of almost everyday under this Administration, bereft as it is of any moral compass.
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The favorable ratings for T have never gone higher than perhaps 48 % at some point (IMHO) but they remain at 44%. The latest WSJ/NBC news poll is indicating that there is a deepening disapproval rating for T, beyond the growing economy.
His combative style, unrelenting ‘mouthing off’ has taken a toll on the nation. Let’s hope this downward trend continues to lower the boom on him.
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In a normal environment, that kind of economic satisfaction and optimism should translate into a presidential job-approval rating of well over 50%—perhaps even 60%. Yet Mr. Trump’s job-approval rating stands at just 44%.
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Yet a stunning 48% of those surveyed say they are certain to vote against Mr. Trump for re-election, regardless of whom the Democrats nominate to oppose him.
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And an even 50% say they are “very uncomfortable” with Mr. Trump as a presidential candidate.
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…just 35% say the country is moving in the right direction. More than half, 56%, say the nation is off on the wrong track.
President Trump likes to say—and his followers often echo the sentiment—that his slashing, pugilistic style is necessary for him to succeed.
Yet there is mounting evidence that the opposite may be true: He would be having a more successful presidency, and stand on an easier path to re-election, if not for the ample doubts about his personality created by his relentlessly combative approach.
The freshest set of evidence comes in the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. That survey finds broad satisfaction with the economy, good readings on the kind of year 2019 has been, and receding fears of an economic downturn.
A few data points illustrate the sentiment. When asked what the most important story of 2019 was for them personally, Americans cited the economy more than anything else. The share who called 2019 one of the best years for the U.S., or at least an above-average year, stood at 34%—the highest reading on that question in the past three decades.
Certainly Republicans and Trump voters are far more likely to give 2019 a high grade than are Democrats and those who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. But more than a quarter of independents also called 2019 an above-average year, a reading that almost certainly reflects positive economic sentiments.
Moreover, Americans see fewer clouds on the horizon. Nearly 4 in 10 think the U.S. will get better in the next year, while just 23% say it will get worse. The share of Americans overall who see a recession in the next year has dropped to 28% from 33% earlier this year.
In a normal environment, that kind of economic satisfaction and optimism should translate into a presidential job-approval rating of well over 50%—perhaps even 60%. Yet Mr. Trump’s job-approval rating stands at just 44%.
Similarly, a president overseeing this kind of public confidence in the economy ought to be a prohibitive favorite to be re-elected. Yet a stunning 48% of those surveyed say they are certain to vote against Mr. Trump for re-election, regardless of whom the Democrats nominate to oppose him.
And an even 50% say they are “very uncomfortable” with Mr. Trump as a presidential candidate.
What can account for such a remarkable gap between economic satisfaction and unease with the president overseeing it? That is a complicated question, of course, but much of the answer certainly lies with the nature of Mr. Trump himself.
The president stokes anger as a way to keep his political base galvanized behind him, and aligned against his political foes. He seems to create controversy as a way to keep his foes off-guard and steer the national conversation.
This leads him, and the country, to some dark places. The best recent example came in Mr. Trump’s now-infamous attack at a Michigan rally last week of both a dead man—former Democratic Rep. John Dingell, the longest-serving member of the House—and his widow, the current Rep. Debbie Dingell. Beyond just attacking the late Rep. Dingell, the president suggested that perhaps he now resides in hell.
Mr. Trump spoke, of course, on the day House Democrats voted to impeach him, and his aides cited his anger over that development as an explanation. White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham explained that the Dingell attack was an example of Mr. Trump’s well-known view of himself as a “counterpuncher.”
Certainly Democrats, with their visceral and oft-expressed antipathy toward the president, provide him plenty to punch back against. Mr. Trump and those around him point to not only impeachment but to three years of relentless charges of Russian influence on the president as both explanation and justification for the president’s combative style.
Mr. Trump won the Republican nomination and became president by tapping into a combination of anxiety, anger and a sense of grievance many Americans feel toward the financial and political ruling class. Yet stoking that mood of anger and grievance from the perch of the presidency has distinct downsides. Perhaps the best illustration comes from another data point in the new Journal/NBC News poll.
For three decades, the survey has regularly asked Americans whether they think the country is moving in the right direction, or is off on the wrong track. Usually, sentiment on that question reflects the state of the economy.
Yet today, despite economic growth, a strong stock market and low unemployment, just 35% say the country is moving in the right direction. More than half, 56%, say the nation is off on the wrong track.
The partisan polarization on this question, as on so many others, is more stark than it has ever been. The explanation for such a mood isn’t to be found in the economy, but rather in a fraught political environment.
WSJ/NBC poll for week of Dec. 14 - 17
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“Strong economy” is rather misleading here. They talk about that constantly, but this “strong economy” is mostly major corporations.
Farmers are floundering, and truckers, and miners, and manufacturers, and really the majority of people in the middle class and below. This strong economy is not paying off for most Americans, and people hate being told how well things are doing while they’re struggling to make ends meet.
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Trump cranks unhinged Twitter rants up to 11
President Donald Trump retweeted a video message on Friday morning with a hashtag referencing a fringe pro-Trump conspiracy theory known as QAnon.
The tweet included a video of a woman praising Trump’s approach to urban poverty and included the hashtag #WWG1WGA, which stands for the QAnon slogan "Where we go one, we go all."
Followers of the conspiracy believe that, among other things, the world is run by a satanic cabal of elites and pedophiles led by Hillary Clinton and the so-called deep state who Trump will eventually expose and defeat.
Trump has promoted dozens of QAnon conspiracy accounts, and followers of the conspiracy have shown up at his campaign rallies and appeared in his ads.
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More Twitter craziness this weekend:
President Donald Trump retweeted an attack that included an unsubstantiated name of the intelligence community whistleblower at the heart of the Ukraine scandal as part of a series of rants and conspiratorial posts overnight.
Trump or someone with access to his Twitter account removed the retweet Saturday morning.
Other retweets were also reversed, including pro-Trump and anti-Democrat memes from suspicious-looking Twitter accounts. But his whistleblower-related post was the most noteworthy because nearly every public official involved in the impeachment inquiry agreed that the identity of the original complainant should be protected.
Trump has shared more than 100 posts about the whistleblower since September, almost entirely critical, but until this week he had refrained from sharing any content directly pointing to a person’s name.
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According to the Trump Twitter Archive, which tracks every post from the President, he shared 55 posts on Friday, mostly by retweeting pro-Trump accounts, some of them obscure.Many of the accounts are anonymous or semi-anonymous, with names including such phrases as “Trump Lady,” “America First” and "pet lovers for Trump."
Some of the accounts show signs of being run by spam operations, but others appear to be genuine, passionate Trump supporters.
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He also retweeted people calling Democrats “rats” and videos claiming to prove “collusion between DNC & Ukraine during 2016 Presidential campaign.” There has been no evidence of collusion between the Democratic National Committee and Ukraine in the last election.Vox’s Aaron Rupar, who closely tracks the President’s public comments, wrote on Twitter Friday night, "The President of the United States has, today alone, retweeted 2 QAnon fan accounts, a Pizzagate account, an account that compared his following to a cult, and an account that described Obama as ‘Satan’s Muslim Scum.’ And this insanity isn’t even a blip on the news radar."
And here’s a fascinating (and scary) weekend-read from the NYT that takes a deep dive into Trump’s wacko Twitter rants:
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Rage tweeting, seeking retaliation by naming the whistleblower, and in citing his conspiratorial base #Qanon to get on this crazy train…all thug-like behavior. (thx @Keaton_James. T’s tweets and bizarro behavior)
A Gangster in the White House
The president tweeted the name of the presumed whistle-blower in the Ukraine scandal—demonstrating that he is unrepentant and determined to break the law again.
Amid a two-day binge of post-Christmas rage-tweeting, President Donald Trump retweeted the name of the CIA employee widely presumed to be the whistle-blower in the Ukraine scandal. On Thursday night, December 26, Trump retweeted his campaign account, which had tweeted a link to a Washington Examiner article that printed the name in the headline. Then, in the early hours of Friday morning, December 27, Trump retweeted a supporter who named the presumed whistle-blower in the text of the tweet.
This is a step the president has been building toward for some time. The name of the presumed whistle-blower has been circulating among Trump supporters for months. Trump surrogates—including the president’s elder son—have posted the name on social media and discussed it on television. Yet actually crossing the line to post the name on the president’s own account? Until this week, Trump hesitated. That red line has now been crossed.
Lawyers debate whether the naming of the federal whistle-blower is in itself illegal. Federal law forbids inspectors general to disclose the names of whistle-blowers, but the law isn’t explicit about disclosure by anybody else in government.
What the law does forbid is retaliation against a whistle-blower. And a coordinated campaign of vilification by the president’s allies—and the president himself—surely amounts to “retaliation” in any reasonable understanding of the term.
While the presumed whistle-blower reportedly remains employed by the government, he is also reportedly subject to regular death threats, including at least implicit threat by Trump himself. Trump was recorded in September telling U.S. diplomats in New York: “Basically, that person never saw the report, never saw the call, he never saw the call— heard something and decided that he or she, or whoever the hell they saw—they’re almost a spy. I want to know who’s the person, who’s the person who gave the whistle-blower the information? Because that’s close to a spy. You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”
Trump’s tweeting in the past two days was so frenzied and the sources quoted were so bizarre—including at least four accounts devoted to the Pizzagate-adjacent conspiracy theory QAnon, as well as one that describes former President Barack Obama as “Satan’s Muslim scum”—as to renew doubts about the president’s mental stability. But Trump’s long reticence about outright naming the presumed whistle-blower suggests that he remained sufficiently tethered to reality to hear and heed a lawyer’s advice. He disregarded that advice in full awareness that he was disregarding it. The usual excuse for Trump’s online abusiveness— he’s counterpunching —amounts in this case not to a defense but to an indictment: Counterpunching literally means retaliating, and retaliation is what is forbidden by federal law.
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UPDATE: The CNN article says Trump deleted his announcement of the whistleblower’s name. But that’s not true. It’s still there for his 68 million followers to read (along with the accusation of perjury). I’m not going to link to it, but it is there – a retweet posted on the morning of Dec. 27 and still up as of this writing in evening of the 28th. Shame. Shame. Shame.
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#FileUnderT’sForeverMadness
I was doing some other research on a reporter I liked, Sydney Schanberg who wrote for many newspapers in New York City, as well as the reporter depicted in The Killing Fields. I read his columns mid 80’s when I lived there. Of course, T was known as a braggadocio (boastful or arrogant behavior), a con, and to me, an idiot.
Schanberg got it right…and exposed T for what he was/is…someone who emitted a lot of ‘smoke,’ lied to sound more like he wanted to be and hid behind lawsuits.
History with The Donald repeats itself, and repeats…and it is a reminder that he’s been doing this ‘lie and repeat’ behavior for a looooong time.
The stakes could not be any higher and the situation is very real knowing he has got the power, but not the faith of the nation. He’s got to go.
#NewYear’sResolveT’sGonnaBeGone
On September 14th, 1987 Schanberg published a Newsday editorial entitled “Donald Trump-Public-relations master” in which he wrote, sarcastically, “The part I like best about Donald Trump is his deep and abiding concern for the homeless and the poor”. He called Trump a “public-relations virtuoso”, described an ongoing feud with Koch who Trump called a “moron” and “a jerk”, provided numerous instances of Trump’s claims of superior intellect (“It would take an hour and a half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles. I think I know most of it anyway”), and he warned “He can deny all he wants any designs on the White House, but Trump has the kind of instincts that are perfect for the age we live in-the age of stage smoke and magic mirrors and imagery.…In short, he sees the kind of men we admire and elect these days and he naturally asks: Why not me?”. Schanberg ended the piece with, “In an age where smoke is everything, Donald Trump can blow it with the best of them”. (from: Schanberg, S. Donald Trump-public-relations master. Finger Lakes Times (from Newsday). September 14, 1987 page 4.)
From Wiki - on Schanberg Sydney Schanberg - Wikipedia
Article from 1/24/2006
In a world of genocide, terrorism, global warming, and the Asian bird plague, what would the press do for levity without Donald Trump? Take a look at his latest comedy routine. Trump — about whom the only certainty is that he lacks the tiniest smidgen of an acquaintance with the truth — has filed a libel and slander lawsuit against a reporter for writing a book that Trump says is untruthful.
The reporter is Timothy O’Brien of The New York Times. His book, which debuted in late October, is TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald (Warner Books). The lawsuit charges that O’Brien has defamed Trump by writing that the real estate promoter and full-time celebrity, who boasts that he’s a billionaire many times over, “was not remotely close to” a net worth of even $1 billion.
The suit contends that Trump provided O’Brien with all his financial documents and gave the reporter hours to pore over them. O’Brien says the documents he was shown were marginal or useless in determining net worth. He says Trump refused to let him see any pertinent documents specifically his tax returns, bank statements, an accounting of his debts, and his casino reports to New Jersey’s Division of Gaming Enforcement.
In the past, Trump has publicly laughed off his critics, including myself. Somehow, O’Brien’s downgrade of his wealth struck at Trump’s visceral essence: his value system of measuring himself solely by his publicized net worth.
Anyway, the suit says the O’Brien book has cost Trump, in just the three months since it came out, a minimum of $2.5 billion. Those are the damages Trump seeks “in no event less than $2.5 billion.” Trump’s lawyers give no details on how this disaster has occurred. On the other hand, we should recall that Trump has gone into corporate bankruptcy (on his casino “empire”) twice, first in the ’90s and again in 2005.
The arithmetic, however, is interesting. The Forbes annual list of the 400 richest Americans placed Trump at No. 83 in its latest tally and set his net worth at $2.7 billion. If he has suddenly lost at least $2.5 billion and the book is still causing havoc then Trump must be close to busted.
Oddly, in his lawsuit, Trump offers only the Forbes list which is viewed by financial analysts as anything but scientific as evidence of his billionaire status. Yet in 1990, in Surviving at the Top , here is what Trump wrote about the validity of the list: “It always amazed me that people pay so much attention to Forbes magazine. Every year the Forbes 400 comes out, and people talk about it as if it were a rigorously researched compilation of America’s wealthiest people, instead of what it really is: a sloppy, highly arbitrary estimate of certain people’s net worth.”
Since I have periodically chronicled Donald’s adventures over the years, a sampling of the history might help us better understand him.
1980: Donald was demolishing the Bonwit Teller building on Fifth Avenue and 56th St. to make way for Trump Tower. He promised to save two 15-foot-high Art Deco friezes on the building’s facade and donate them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But when it became clear that saving the sculptures would be costly, Donald destroyed them instead. “My biggest concern,” he explained, pretending to honor the truth, “was the safety of the people on the street below. If one of those stones had slipped, people could have been killed.”
1983: Donald tried to drive the tenants out of 100 Central Park South so he could raze the 15-story building and put up a skyscraper. He failed to empty the building because the city sued him for cutting the building’s “essential services” and refusing to repair “defective conditions with life-threatening potential.” Professing his good faith, Donald made an offer to the city to temporarily house homeless people in the 14 apartments that he had been able to empty. City officials saw this for what it was, a scare tactic to drive out the rest of the tenants, and they rejected it.
1984: In an interview with The Washington Post, Donald offered himself for the post of nuclear arms negotiator with the Soviet Union. Describing himself as a master deal maker, he said all he would have to do is get “updated” on the subject. “It would take,” he said, “an hour and a half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles. I think I know most of it anyway.”
1986: 100 Central Park South again. The tenants had won their case the building couldn’t be demolished and they were staying. Donald, piqued, sued their law firm for engaging in an “illicit scheme of commercial blackmail.” A federal judge swiftly threw out the suit.
1987: Donald called Mayor Ed Koch a “moron.” Koch responded, “Piggy, piggy, piggy.” In Trump’s 1987 book, The Art of the Deal , he wrote: “I don’t do it for the money. I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form.”
1989: Donald reportedly went to wife Ivana’s plastic surgeon to remove flab from his chin and waist by liposuction. He also went for hair transplants and scalp reduction to disguise his creeping baldness.
1990: Donald was overextended with debt. His casinos were defaulting on bond interest. He divorced Ivana, and his business was essentially in the control of his creditors, who kept him on for his celebrity name and gave him an allowance.
1991: Donald displayed his new wife-to-be, Marla Maples, at a prizefight at his Taj Mahal casino. The crowd chanted, “Mar-la! Mar-la!” Donald beamed. A writer from Esquire was with them, doing a profile on him. Referring to the press, Donald told the writer, “You know, it really doesn’t matter what they write, as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.”
And so on. But you get the idea: Trump presents himself as a class act who always tells the truth and keeps himself in the public eye by bullying people regularly with frivolous lawsuits.
At the start of his career in hype and carnival barking, the press fawned over him; he made great copy. It’s refreshing that reality has finally crept into the coverage.
Another species of reality crept in on December 12, 2005 when O’Brien did a book signing at Coliseum Books on 42nd Street. As the event drew to a close, according to a witness, a man approached O’Brien at the signing table, leaned over, and told him quietly that if he didn’t stop doing publicity for the book, “we’re going to get you.” The man was Marc E. Kasowitz, Trump’s lead lawyer in the lawsuit.
Asked by The Voice if he was at the book signing, Kasowitz said, “No comment.” Asked about the remark the witness overheard, he said: “I never said that to anybody” and then he laughed nervously.
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It’s easy to dismiss QAnoners as a bunch of kooky conspiracy theorists, but the sad, scary fact is, they’re becoming more and more mainstream within his base.
Keep in mind that Donnie himself is being impeached because he pushed crazy conspiracy theories of exactly the sort QAnon pushes. There is really no daylight between them and them.
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And scary to consider there is an actual “flat earth movement” with a significant following (CNN).
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And the fact that he used to pose as his own publicist in phone interviews is just shameful. Even if we’ve heard this all before, it’s fitting to stop and recall every now and then that Trump could really be considered the “Father of Fake News.” If you’ve never listened to the surviving fake interview tape, here it is. Click on the video at the top of the article which is actually the audio of the call accompanied by photos. 100% Trump – bragging a mile-a-minute, but wait, Trump’s not really bragging because that’s not Trump at all; it’s actually a guy named John Miller who is praising Trump! NOT.
Personally, I’ve always despised people who brag and avoid them like the plague – so it’s especially disturbing to me that 63 million Americans voted for this boorish braggart.
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Yes…no more idiot-proofing necessary. He’s the real crazy deal. Dumbed down supporters think it is sport or perhaps contrarian enough to piss of the ‘elite’ to be with T.
Reality Check…It is just plain nuts.
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Dead on. This is the heart of it. While there are those who really believe he doesn’t lie or only tells the truth, a significant portion KNOWS he lies and love it, because he’s lying to the people they hate, and about them. Popular culture the world over celebrates tricksters, grifters, and con men to a certain extent, and Americans especially love their vigilantes. The GOP has for a long time sold itself as anti-government, standing up to the man, when in fact they ARE the man. They capitalize on this image, and Trump especially, turning that lying into a bizarre merit because they can’t separate deceit in the name of justice or protecting people from deceit in the name of garnering power or protecting oneself. So long as he’s lying to their enemies, that’s fine. But surely he won’t lie to them, right?
::sighs::
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A portrait in courage…
President Trump in a tweet on Sunday bemoaned the “stigma” of impeachment as Speaker Nancy Pelosi prepares to send House-passed articles of impeachment against him to the Senate as early as this week.
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Portrait of a REAL president.
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New book portrays Trump as erratic, ‘at times dangerously uninformed’ 
“A Very Stable Genius” — a 417-page book named after Trump’s own declaration of his superior knowledge — is full of similarly vivid details from Trump’s tumultuous first three years as president, from his chaotic transition before taking office to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation and final report.
[…]
In spring 2017, Trump also clashed with Tillerson when he told him he wanted his help getting rid of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a 1977 law that prevents U.S. firms and individuals from bribing foreign officials for business deals.
“It’s just so unfair that American companies aren’t allowed to pay bribes to get business overseas,” Trump says, according to the book. “We’re going to change that.”
The president, they go on to explain, was frustrated with the law “ostensibly because it restricted his industry buddies or his own company’s executives from paying off foreign governments in faraway lands.”
[…]
Anthony Scaramucci, who served as Trump’s communications director for just 11 days, recounts the president’s response when he asks him, “Are you an act?”
“I’m a total act and I don’t understand why people don’t get it,” Trump replies, according to Scaramucci.
[…]
Some details are more harmless than disconcerting. Early in his presidency, Trump agrees to participate in an HBO documentary that features judges and lawmakers — as well as all the living presidents — reading aloud from the Constitution. But Trump struggles and stumbles over the text, blaming others in the room for his mistakes and griping, “It’s like a foreign language.”
[…]
Trump was “verbally and emotionally abusive” toward then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, the book reports, and routinely complained she was not doing enough about illegal immigration and the border.
According to the book, “He made fun of her stature and believed that at about five feet four inches she was not physically intimidating. ‘She’s so short,’ Trump would tell others about Nielsen. She and Kelly would try to make light of it. Kelly would rib her and say, ‘But you’ve got those little fists of fury!’”
[…]
The duo opens one chapter with the case of Rob Porter — the former White House staff secretary who was ultimately pushed out of his job amid allegations of domestic abuse from his two ex-wives. After a photo surfaces on the Internet of Colbie Holderness, one of his ex-wives, sporting a black eye that she alleges Porter gave her, Trump offers a competing theory.
“Maybe, Trump said, Holderness purposefully ran into a refrigerator to give herself bruises and try to get money out of Porter?” they write.
[…]
Some of the modest details in the book end up having larger consequences. After Trump bungles his India-China geography and seems to dismiss the threat China poses to India, for instance, the authors write that “Modi’s eyes bulged out in surprise.”
“Modi’s expression gradually shifted, from shock and concern to resignation,” they continue, adding that one Trump aide concludes Modi probably “left that meeting and said, ‘This is not a serious man. I cannot count on this man as a partner.’ ”
After the meeting, the aide explains to them, “ ‘the Indians took a step back’ in their diplomatic relations with the United States.”
Omg, he’s such a fraking nightmare. 
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This is T. This is what he does to people who disagree with him, or tell the truth. He smears them. He will not be crossed…because T carries an armory of defenses and bully tactics.
And more examples on John Bolton, Les Parnas, Anthony Scaramucci, Gordon Sondland, Lt. Col. Vindman (someone he does not remember), McMasters (former NSC head), Tillis (Sec of State), Omarosa, Michael Cohen, Steve Bannon.
No one scares President Trump as much as people who used to work for him. They know the truth about him, and some of them tell it. When they do, Trump denies it and smears them.
It’s amazing how many people have turned on Trump in just his first term. He is a man who prizes loyalty above all else, and yet one toady after another has betrayed him.
John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, is the latest. According to The New York Times , Bolton’s unpublished manuscript claims that Trump sought “to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens.” In response, Trump said that Bolton is trying “to sell a book,” and Trump’s defenders began smearing Bolton.
Jenna Ellis, one of the president’s attorneys, tweeted that “it is so sad that so many are willing to sell out America, our Constitution, truth, their integrity, and our great president just to score a book deal or five minutes of fame.” An editor at The Federalist said Bolton is just “mad Trump fired him for leaking and trying to start new wars.” Anonymous White House officials sniped to the Times that Bolton was a “disgruntled former
employee.”
…
That’s another favorite dodge. Trump, who claimed to have “the world’s greatest memory,” quickly forgets people when they tell the truth about him.
After Lev Parnas, the Rudy Giuliani associate who helped open doors in Eastern Europe, implicated the president in the Ukraine scandal, Trump said, “I don’t know him at all.” There are multiple pictures of them together. ABC News also released audio of a conversation in which Trump told Parnas and other associates to fire U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanowitch.
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When Trump doesn’t forget you, he insults you, fires you, and insults you again. Yovanovitch, making his claim of ignorance even more implausible.
…
After Trump divulged highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in May 2017, H.R. McMaster, one of the few honorable people to work for the president, denied it to reporters. In that moment, McMaster became McServant.
…
Trump hates the truth because he can’t control it.“Truth has a despotic character,” Hannah Arendt observed in 1967. "It is therefore hated by tyrants, who rightly fear the competition of a coercive force they cannot monopolize … Unwelcome facts possess an infuriating stubbornness that nothing can move except plain lies."
After the release of Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury , in which Steve Bannon is quoted as saying that Donald Trump Jr.'s infamous Trump Tower meeting was “treasonous,” Trump tweeted that Bannon "cried when he got fired and begged for his job. Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone."
It’s worth remembering, when Trump smears his former employees, that he hired them. He hired them not on merit but because they flattered him. “I often think of people by the way they treat me,” Trump told Howard Stern in 2013.
…
and Omarosa
Asked why she was hired, former White House press secretary Sean Spicer said, “She was very loyal to the president.” The president’s then-personal lawyer Michael Cohen said she had “admired and respected President Trump for over a decade.”
This is the same Michael Cohen who defended Trump for 12 years as his attorney, only to turn on him in an effort to reduce his prison sentence. In February 2019, he testified before Congress and called Trump a “racist,” a “cheat,” and a “conman.” Then he went to prison, like many other people who have worked for Trump.
Cohen became “a different person,” Trump said. He was “a fine person with a wonderful family” in April 2018, a “Rat” in December 2018, and a “Bad lawyer and fraudster” in March 2019.
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Trump is acting more like Mussolini every day
How shameful. Strutting and preening while bullying the free press.
This is what facism looks like.
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T was going in to a word-fusion tumble and Fox shifted away.
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