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👑 Portrait of a President

This line stands out to me from the most recent Quinnipiac Poll 5.21.19

President Trump begins his reelection campaign in a deep hole as 54 percent of American voters say they “definitely” will not vote for him,

Excerpt

But American voters give President Donald Trump a negative 38 - 57 percent approval rating, compared to a negative 41 - 55 percent approval in a May 2 survey by the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University National Poll.

American voters give Trump mixed grades for his handling of the economy as 48 percent approve and 45 percent disapprove. He gets negative grades for handling other issues:

  • 37 - 58 percent for handling foreign policy;
  • 39 - 53 percent for handling trade;
  • 40 - 50 percent for handling the nation’s policy toward China;
  • 37 - 47 percent for handling the nation’s policy toward Iran.

Voters say 48 - 40 percent the president’s trade policies are bad for the U.S. economy, and say 44 - 36 percent that these policies are bad for their personal financial situation.

“The nation’s economy is pretty darn good and President Donald Trump’s approval numbers are pretty darn awful,” said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll. "So what to make of the good news, bad news mashup and how to correct it?

“For the moment, the disparity leaves the president on shaky re-election ground.”

President Trump begins his reelection campaign in a deep hole as 54 percent of American voters say they “definitely” will not vote for him, compared to 52 percent in an April 30 Quinnipiac University National Poll. Today, 31 percent say they “definitely” will vote for Trump and 12 percent say they will “consider voting for him.”

Definitely voting for Trump are 76 percent of Republicans, 3 percent of Democrats and 21 percent of independent voters.

Definitely not voting for Trump are 10 percent of Republicans, 94 percent of Democrats and 54 percent of independent voters.

American voters give Trump a negative 38 - 57 percent favorability rating.

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Must read character piece.

During international flights, Trump typically remains in the front cabin. He does four things, the current and former aides said: eats, watches television or reads newspapers, talks with staff and calls friends and allies back home as he zips away into foreign skies.

Trump will spend hours reviewing cable news coverage recorded on a TiVo-like device or sifting through cardboard boxes of newspapers and magazines that have been lugged aboard. He’ll summon sleeping staffers to his office at moments the rest of the plane is dark, impatient to discuss his upcoming meetings or devise a response to something he saw in the media.

Trump has long insisted that he is treated unfairly by the news media, and if he sees something on television that bothers him – “which he invariably will,” one official quipped – he instructs his staff to fix it, no matter if they are at the White House or flying over the Atlantic Ocean. Often, instead of looking over his remarks for upcoming bilateral meetings or paging through a briefing book, the President will fixate on the negative headline that day, griping that none of his predecessors has been through such treatment.

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And that’s why he’s always so ill-prepared – serving himself rather than the nation he was elected to serve.

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His bully tactics extend into marriages and pre-nups. I believe Marla Maples is the source for a few tax return leaks WTF

But before marrying, Trump needed Maples to sign a prenup. His divorce with Ivana had been a legal war. (In March 1990, Ivana sued Trump for $2.5 billion to nullify a revised version of the prenup that Trump’s lawyer, Roy Cohn, had drafted back in 1977.) Ultimately, Trump and Ivana settled for $14 million. (Ivana took the deal because her team worried Trump was going bankrupt.) In addition, Trump gave Ivana their Greenwich estate and agreed to pay $650,000 annually to support Ivanka, Eric, and Don. Jr. Trump wanted to make sure Maples couldn’t come after his money.

Convincing her wasn’t easy. “This was the big battle all along,” Maples told Vanity Fair at the time. But Trump persisted and Maples relented, telling a journalist that she would renegotiate the agreement in five years. Trump hired the lawyer Stan Lotwin to draw up terms. Maples was represented by the New York lawyer Sharon Stein. Maples tried to hold out for better terms, but Trump utterly refused to budge, the source told me. He held the line up their wedding day at the Plaza, said the source. “Marla was under duress. Donald’s position was: without the prenup he wasn’t going to get married.” With 24 hours to go before a thousand guests arrived, Maples caved.

The stringent agreement Maples signed reflected the degree of leverage Trump had over the Georgia-born beauty queen whose most valuable asset was the $250,000 engagement ring Trump bought her. “What was she going to do? She would have taken whatever he said,” Felder told me. According to the prenup, Maples surrendered any claim to Trump’s future income and inheritances. The $1 million award Trump would pay her was it. (There would be no alimony.)

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This says it all…small minded man hell bent on featuring his pomposity in lieu of heartfelt patriotism.

How small he is! Small in spirit, in valor, in dignity, in statecraft, this American president who knows nothing of history and cares still less and now bestrides Europe with his family in tow like some tin-pot dictator with a terrified entourage.

To have Donald Trump — the bone-spur evader of the Vietnam draft, the coddler of autocrats, the would-be destroyer of the European Union, the pay-up-now denigrator of NATO, the apologist for the white supremacists of Charlottesville — commemorate the boys from Kansas City and St. Paul who gave their lives for freedom is to understand the word impostor. You can’t make a sculpture from rotten wood.

It’s worth saying again. If Europe is whole and free and at peace, it’s because of NATO and the European Union; it’s because the United States became a European power after World War II; **it’s because America’s word was a solemn pledge; **it’s because that word cemented alliances that were not zero-sum games but the foundation for stability and prosperity on both sides of the Atlantic.

Of this, Trump understands nothing. Therefore he cannot comprehend the sacrifice at Omaha Beach 75 years ago. He cannot see that the postwar trans-Atlantic achievement — undergirded by the institutions and alliances he tramples upon with such crass truculence — was in fact the vindication of those young men who gave everything.

My impression here is that Europe has gotten used to Trump to the point that it is no longer strange that the American president is a stranger. In less than two and a half years Trump has stripped his office of dignity, authority and values.

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There is something so disturbing about a very small man like Trump impugning the height of the mayor of the great international city he is visiting that even 28 months of progressive inurement to his outrages feels inadequate.

America is much better than this, much better than an American president who, as the cartoonist Dave Granlund suggested, probably thinks the D in D-Day stands for Donald and spends the night of the commemoration trashing Bette Midler on Twitter.

As for the Republican Party, don’t get me started. To recover its bearings the G.O.P. would do well to recall one of its own, Eisenhower, who in that same 20th-anniversary interview said that America and its allies stormed the Normandy beaches “for one purpose only.”

It was not to “fulfill any ambitions that America had for conquest.” No, it was “just to preserve freedom, systems of self-government in the world.” It was an act, in other words, consistent with the highest ideals of the American idea that Trump and his Republican enablers seem so intent on eviscerating.

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At some point there’s just not much left to say about Trump. He’s unfit for office, disloyal to the nation, and violates his oath right in front of us over and over again. You either care enough to do something about it or you don’t.

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5 June 2019

After three people were killed in London in the space of 24 hours, Trump retweeted a tweet from right-wing commentator Katie Hopkins and said that the UK capital needed a new mayor and that Khan was “a disaster”.


Donald J. Trump :heavy_check_mark: @realDonaldTrump

LONDON needs a new mayor ASAP. Khan is a disaster - will only get worse!


Katie Hopkins :heavy_check_mark: @KTHopkins
20 hours in Stab-City UPDATE
2 stabbed to death
1 shot dead
Three stabbed - but not dead.
Wandsworth & Tower Hamlets
This is Khan’s Londonistan.
View image on Twitter
View image on Twitter

](https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1139967706424369152)

Several hours later he tweeted again, saying that Khan was ‘destroying the City of London.”

Khan is the reason I don’t feel like visiting London anytime soon.
(https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1140035545738989569)

A spokesman for the mayor said that Khan’s thoughts were “with the victims’ families. He is not going to waste his time responding to this sort of tweet.”

Just to enlighten Trump. New York and London have about the same population - just over 8 million people. The number of homicides in New York in 2017 was 290 the lowest number in years. The number of homicides in London in 2018 was 132, that was the highest its been in years.

I don’t think it is anything to do with the risk of being killed that would keep him from visiting London again.

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Now he obsesses with painting aeroplanes!

Seth Myers has a an excellent take on this:

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From T biographer Tony Scwartz

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Another version of looking at fabric swatches for hours like he did in Trump Tower…sheesh!

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The only “desperate” people are the ones that accepted a job in Trumps admin…

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How can you defend what you don’t understand?

Liberal democracy appears increasingly in the balance around the Western world, but the president of the United States doesn’t seem to even know what it is. Neither does he seem to grasp what “busing” means.

President Trump held a lengthy news conference Saturday in Osaka, Japan, during which he displayed his apparent ignorance of some very basic political terms and historical concepts.

When asked about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s comments saying Western-style liberalism was “obsolete,” Trump apparently thought this term literally referred to the western United States and Americans liberals.

Here’s the exchange (key parts bolded ):

NEW YORK TIMES’S PETER BAKER: His comments to the Financial Times right before arriving here was that Western-style liberalism is obsolete. I know you probably –

TRUMP: Well, I mean he may feel that way. He’s sees what’s going on, I guess, if you look at what’s happening in Los Angeles, where it’s so sad to look, and what’s happening in San Francisco and a couple of other cities, which are run by an extraordinary group of liberal people . I don’t know what they’re thinking, but he does see things that are happening in the United States that would probably preclude him from saying how wonderful it is. At the same time, he congratulated me, as every other leader of every other country did for what we’ve done economically, because we probably have the strongest economy we’ve ever had, and that’s a real positive. But I’m very embarrassed by what I see in some of our cities, where the politicians are either afraid to do something about it, or they think it’s votes or I don’t know what. Peter, I don’t know what they’re thinking. But when you look at Los Angeles, when you look at San Francisco, when you look at some o the other cities – and not a lot, not a lot – but you don’t want it to spread. And at a certain point, I think the federal government maybe has to get involved. We can’t let that continue to happen to our cities.

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A desire to be the center of attention has been — along with a desire for money and a desire to grab women by their private parts — Trump’s defining passion in life. It is why he has plastered his name on so many buildings and products. Why he fed the New York tabloids so many stories about himself. And ultimately why he ran for president. He didn’t think he’d win — it was just a way to get the attention he’s always craving.

Remarkably enough, Trump hasn’t become any less needy and greedy for publicity since he entered the White House. Having drunk so deeply at the well of ego gratification, he keeps coming back for ever-bigger gulps.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-fourth-of-july-salute-to-himself-will-only-hurt-him/2019/07/03/38da2564-9da8-11e9-b27f-ed2942f73d70_story.html?utm_term=.281b9a86431d#click=https://t.co/qK8ccoC2zF

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@srephenking
“Took over the airports.” Just when I think I have explored the outer limits of Donald Trump’s melting intellect, new vistas of stupidity open before me.

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And to know that T really deliberates on these nicknames…always pejorative…and quick bully words.

He’s calling AOC Eva Peron or Evita.

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The President of the United States of America tweeted that duly elected American representatives should go back to “the crime infested places from which they came”.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

—Maya Angelou

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So true.

If there’s any good that comes out of this, it’s that CNN is clearly identifying the tweets as racist in 18pt font across the top of its homepage. I’m not positive, but this may be a first for them. In the past, I recall that CNN would use euphemisms such as “racially charged” when referring to hate speech such as this from Trump. Now they are flat out calling him a racist in a banner headline. This is a turning point. Finally. Let’s draw the lines clearly. Racists vote for Trump. Now we should ask anyone who says they support Trump, “So you’re a racist, too?” Make them justify their position.

Sadly, other news outlets are continuing to equivocate.

Innocuous headline from the Wall Street Journal (and it’s buried “below the fold”):

Trump Tells Group of Democrats, Who Are Minorities, to ‘Go Back’ to Fix Problems

If you haven’t actually read the flagrantly racist tweets, this doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

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Axios gives a few highlights - this newsletter reflects on the power of T’s endorsement and the impact it has had on previous candidates…It is astonishing the power that T has…

Between the lines: Trump knows he can say whatever he likes and face no consequences from the party he has conquered.

  • The few Republicans who dared to defy him either got crushed by pro-Trump candidates in primaries (Rep. Mark Sanford), quit the party (Rep. Justin Amash) or retired (Sens. Jeff Flake and Bob Corker). One remaining critic, Sen. Mitt Romney, mostly pushes back by issuing stern but ineffectual tweets. And Sen. Ben Sasse, who used to lambaste the president, has mostly gone silent.
  • No modern president, besides George W. Bush immediately after the 9/11 attacks, has enjoyed such popularity with Republican voters.

What’s new: Tim Alberta, the chief political correspondent for Politico Magazine, has a book out this week that documents Trump’s conquest of the Republican Party — the domination evidenced above. Axios obtained an advance copy of the book, “American Carnage,” which is deeply reported and engrossing. The book reveals Trump’s delight in tormenting Republicans who he views as weak or disloyal, and it helps explain the partywide silence on days like today.

Two exclusive excerpts are especially revealing:

1. The tormenting of Diane Black

"Not everyone was lucky enough to land Trump’s support. Diane Black, the Tennessee congresswoman, was running in a crowded GOP primary to become the state’s governor.

During a meeting with several House Republicans … she pulled the president aside. ‘You really need to endorse me,’ she told him, stabbing a finger at his chest. Trump found her rude and presumptuous. ‘She got in my personal space,’ he told aides afterward. ‘Big mistake.’ …

The White House political director Bill Stepien … asked an intern to aggregate a full record of everything Black had ever said about Trump, good and bad. The list was printed out and carried over to the Oval Office.

Trump scanned the document, picking out the negative remarks, then pulled out a Sharpie. ‘Diane,’ he wrote. ‘This is NOT good!’ He furiously underlined the word ‘NOT,’ then asked Stepien to hand-deliver the document to Black. [Note: Black lost in the Republican primary race.]"

2. The tormenting of Erik Paulsen

"In one case, Trump endorsed as a means of punishment. Having heard that Minnesota congressman Erik Paulsen was distancing himself from the White House in the hope of holding his seat in the Twin Cities’ suburbs, the president stewed and asked that the political shop send a tweet of support for Paulsen — thereby sabotaging the moderate Republican’s efforts.

When his aides demurred, Trump sent the tweet himself, issuing a ‘Strong Endorsement!’ of the congressman in a late-night post that left Paulsen fuming and his Democratic opponent giddy. [Note: Paulsen lost his re-elect.]"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=BWDrHf5VpNo

Excellent 2-minute CNN video reviewing the many times Trump has made overtly racist statements. Irrefutable talking points to keep in mind the next time someone tells you Trump is not a racist.

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Daniel Dale has been an all star fact checker on T…believe him.when he says any sentence T says with the word ‘Sir’ in it is a lie/mistruth/just plain wrong.

I’ve fact-checked every word Trump has utteredsince his inauguration. I can tell you that if this President relays an anecdote in which he has someone referring to him as “sir,” then some major component of the anecdote is very likely to be wrong.

Lots of people do call Trump “sir,” of course. But the word seems to pop into his head more frequently when he is inventing or exaggerating a conversation than when he is faithfully relaying one. A “sir” is a flashing red light that he is speaking from his imagination rather than his memory.

In poker parlance, it’s a tell.

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