I can’t even, he’s talking about interfering with the Justice Department only one week after his acquittal by the Senate Republicans.
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Incorrigible T…lies so widespread it takes up volumes of space.
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70% of T’s twitter followers are fake…bots
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Par for the course…maybe just golfing is what he should be doing. #WishfulThinking
Trump was cheered as he told the crowd that their country “will always hold a very special place in our hearts,” and said of the PM: “Everybody loves him but I will tell you this, he is very tough.” BBC News India kept a running total of the Indian words Trump managed to mispronounce, including Ahmedabad, the city where he was speaking. He reportedly referred to the Indian philosopher Swami Vivekananda as Swami Vivekamanan, and called the Vedas—ancient Hindu religious texts—“Vestas.” He also mangled the names of India’s biggest cricket stars. The BBC reports some in the crowd began leaving midway through Trump’s speech.
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Trump’s war on truth takes a dangerous turn as he attacks the media’s coronavirus coverage
This analysis is spot on. Trump’s utter lack of credibility disqualifies him from being an effective leader. As he bloviates from atop a mountain of lies, how can we have any faith whatsoever in what he is saying? We know his lies are all self-serving so why would we do what he asks us when we’re certain that it is for his benefit, not ours? From that moment in January 2017 when Trump dispatched Sean Spicer to berate the press for not backing up his false claims that his inauguration crowds were the biggest in history, I knew his Presidency would be a disaster.
Since the dawn of the Trump presidency, countless experts have warned that the president’s lack of credibility would imperil the country in the event of an emergency.
With the worsening coronavirus outbreak, those fears may be coming true.
President Trump’s political allies have made overly optimistic statements only to be contradicted by the government’s top scientists and doctors. For example, Trump claimed on Monday that the coronavirus was “very much under control in the USA.” A day later, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the virus’ spread to the US was inevitable. He said the stock market is “starting to look very good” even as the Dow was nosediving amid coronavirus anxiety.
And the president has been blaming the media for this predicament, reverting to the same tactics that he has employed ever since taking office.
On Wednesday, in a widely-criticized tweet, he claimed that CNN and MSNBC “are doing everything possible to make the Caronavirus look as bad as possible, including panicking markets, if possible.”
He misspelled coronavirus and the typo is still visible on his Twitter profile more than eight hours later.
But misspelling the name of the virus is the least of the government’s problems. President Trump has systematically undermined trust in the media and other institutions that play important roles in public health emergencies. He has explicitly said not to trust sources that he doesn’t personally approve.
He has engaged in what several columnists have called a “war on expertise.” Scientists have been among those adversely affected. Last December an investigation by The New York Times concluded that science is “under attack” by Trump appointees.
“Trump’s disdain for science and his cuts to science and public health programs have subverted preparedness for emergencies like the coronavirus,” said Michiko Kakutani, the famous literary critic and author of “The Death of Truth.”
Trump has also contradicted accurate information from government agencies, like the National Weather Service, as when he insisted that Alabama was threatened by a hurricane last year. The so-called Sharpiegate caused anger and consternation inside the federal agencies responsible for weather forecasting.
Now health agencies like the CDC are in the spotlight. High-minded warnings about breakdowns in trust and the death of truth have more impact when deaths from the coronavirus are being reported every day.
"When you learn you have a dangerous disease, you need to be able to trust your doctor. When entire populations face a dangerous public health crisis, they need to be able to trust their governments," Dr. Leana S. Wen, a visiting professor at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed last month.
That’s a problem in this environment, where trust is in short supply. Multiple polls have shown that only one in three Americans believe he is honest and trustworthy.
The President’s lies have given the public ample reason to distrust what he says – and this has negatively affected perceptions of his administration as a whole.
“This president has lied about everything from trade deficits to Russian interference in US elections. He has disparaged experts at almost every opportunity,” said Daniel W. Drezner, professor of international politics at Tuft University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and author of the forthcoming book “The Toddler in Chief.”
“At a time when people are looking to the federal government for reassurance,” Drezner said, “he will be hard-pressed to provide any.”
Ultimately, Kakutani said, Trump’s free-flowing falsehoods undermine the credibility of the government leaving the public unsure of who or what to trust.
"Truth and an informed public are essential to the functioning of a democracy – and essential, too, for a practical and reasoned response to an emergency," she said.
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I can top this.
I wish I couldn’t.
Tucker Carlson Blames ‘Diversity’ And ‘Wokeness’ For Coronavirus
The Fox News host turned to racism as the outbreak continued to spread.
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Believe me, to mangle the names of those cricket stars was a big No! No! Cricket is next to a religion.
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I have heard from a few people that they have Indian co-workers who were laughing at him the next day.
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My son-in-law is originally from Chennai and loves his cricket and football. He is now a NZ citizen. Unfortunately, for employment reasons, he and his family have been living in Western Australia for the past 9 years 
. We are fortunate to be able to make a pilgrimage to visit once or twice a year.
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W.
T.
F.
FBI LOVEBIRDS: UNDERCOVERS STARS MEET WITH PRESIDENT TRUMP IN THE WHITE HOUSE
FBI Lovebirds Stars Dean Cain and Kristy Swanson meet in advance of Lovebirds Play at CPAC
Los Angeles, CA - FBI Lovebirds: Undercovers stars Dean Cain and Kristy Swanson met with President Donald Trump in the White House just before their historic performance at this year’s CPAC.
President Trump hosted the actors along with the playwright Phelim McAleer and producer Ann McElhinney at the Oval office.
In their private meeting, Cain and Swanson and McAleer and McElhinney discussed the importance of the play with President Trump - and its upcoming historic performance at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). FBI Lovebirds: UnderCovers is the first play to be staged at CPAC in its almost 50 year history.
In a dramatized staged reading of the play Dean Cain stars as the disgraced FBI Investigator and Trump nemesis Peter Strzok and Lisa Page is played by Kristy Swanson. The two were having an extramarital affair and sent thousands of secret text messages on their work phones.
They also discussed preventing Donald Trump from getting elected - suggesting that the Russia investigation was “an insurance policy” in the “unlikely” event he would win the 2016 election. When President Trump was elected they then secretly discussed impeachment and other ways to undermine his presidency. The play, which is 100 percent verbatim, consists of the text messages and their convoluted answers to an aggressive closed door congressional inquiry into their behavior.
Strzok and Page have become frequent targets of President Trump - who has accused them of organizing a spying operation against his campaign. They have also become the butt of his jokes at various rallies sparking outrage from liberal commentators.
Dean Cain is an actor best known for playing Clark Kent/Superman in the TV series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. He has had a prolific career featuring numerous roles, including killer Scott Peterson in The Perfect Husband: The Laci Peterson Story .
Kristy Swanson is best known for her portrayal of Buffy Summers in the cult film Buffy the Vampire Slayer . She also starred in Pretty in Pink , Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Big Daddy.
It is the first time CPAC will have a play staged in their nearly 50 years as one of the top conservative conferences in the world.
The play previously premiered in DC at the The Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center. Politico labeled it “Hamilton for the MAGA crowd” and Vice News described it as “edgy…the most dangerous play in Washington.”
The play was written by Los Angeles-based Phelim McAleer who has been at the forefront of introducing the Verbatim Theater format to the United States. Verbatim Theater, popular in the UK, is “a play constructed from the precise words spoken by people interviewed about a particular event or topic.”
The critically praised verbatim play is set to go on the main stage at CPAC this afternoon at 3:30PM EST.
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He did most of the talking,” McAleer said.
McAleer said he couldn’t remember whether coronavirus came up in his discussions with the president. “It was 45 minutes,” he said, “we talked about a lot of things.”
The meeting was not listed on the president’s formal daily guidance and was only announced via a press release from New Hampshire Republican Party official with ties to James O’Keefe’s video sting operation, Project Veritas.
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Seems unnatural and definitely impossible without a little ‘assistance.’ Inquiring minds have always speculated about T’ ‘habits.’
https://twitter.com/PeterAtlantic/status/1233375429668605953?s=19
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A clever slice-and-dice portrait of T in the center of this crisis.
NYTimes: Trump Makes Us Ill
By Maureen Dowd
Donald Trump was right.
Germs are scary.
For three decades, I talked to Trump about his fear of germs. When I interviewed him at the Trump Tower restaurant during the 2016 race, the famous germophobe had a big hospital-strength bottle of hand sanitizer on the table, next to my salad, ready to squirt.
He told me about the nightmarish feeling he had when a man emerged from the bathroom in a restaurant with wet hands and shook his hand. He couldn’t eat afterward.
Today, in a stunning twist of fate, germs are infecting his presidency and threatening a bad prognosis for his re-election prospects.
Trump is the first president to use the stock market as a near-daily measure of his success — and his virility — and now the market is slumping. If you want to own it on the way up, you have to own it on the way down.
Investors, who worried when Trump began to rise in politics, soon realized that he had their backs. He was just a corporate vessel pretending to be a populist; the stock market was his sugar high.
Now Trump is learning the hard way what my fatalistic Irish mother taught me: The thing you love most is the first to go. As Mike Bloomberg points out, investors have factored in Trump’s incompetence, and that is contributing to the market cratering.
The president urged the Fed to do something soon to mitigate the stock market losses. Socialism for the rich!
The scaremonger in chief has been downplaying the possibility of a coronavirus pandemic and joining Fox News hosts in accusing the “anti-Trump” media and “Do Nothing Democrats” of scaremongering about the virus.
At the CPAC convention, Mick Mulvaney told a cheering crowd that impeachment was the “hoax of the day” and now the press thinks the coronavirus “is going to be what brings down the president.” The media, he said, should spend more time on positive stories, like the president’s “caring” relationship with his teenage son, Barron, even though White Houses usually frown on stories about young presidential offspring.
Mike Huckabee went on the attack, asserting that Trump “could personally suck the virus out of every one of the 60,000 people in the world, suck it out of their lungs, swim to the bottom of the ocean and spit it out, and he would be accused of pollution for messing up the ocean.”
On Fox, Don Jr. said the Democrats “seemingly hope” the virus kills millions to stop Trump’s winning streak. Rush Limbaugh chimed in that the media “would love for the coronavirus to be this deadly strain that wipes everybody out so they could blame Trump for it.”
There are 2,800 dead worldwide and disturbing stories showing how federal criteria delayed the diagnosis of a California woman and how federal health employees interacted with Americans who had possibly been exposed to the virus in China without proper training or gear.
Yet Trump seems more consumed with how the Democrats might blame him for a coronavirus recession than with the virus itself.Trump had tweet-shrieked at President Barack Obama about how he should handle Ebola. (“Obama should apologize to the American people & resign!”)
Yet he was so relaxed about the coronavirus threat that he spent 45 minutes Thursday chatting in the Oval with the authors of a little play called “FBI Lovebirds: Undercovers,” inspired by the texts of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. The play’s leads, Dean Cain of “Superman” fame and the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” actress Kristy Swanson, were also in the meeting. Trump joked that he’d be willing to be Cain’s understudy, the actor said. The president got together the same day with a group that included his social media boosters Diamond and Silk.
At the White House press conference, Trump preened: “Because of all we’ve done, the risk to the American people remains very low.” He later said that one day, like a miracle, the virus “will disappear.”
His top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, pushed the crisis as an opportunity: “Stocks look pretty cheap to me.”
Trump won’t be able to deflect and project and create a daft alternative narrative. The virus won’t respond to conspiracy theories from Rush Limbaugh or nasty diatribes from Sean Hannity or nicknames from Donald Trump.
This will be a deus ex machina test of Trump’s authoritarian behavior. Epidemics are not well suited to authoritarian regimes and propaganda, as we saw this week when Beijing’s use of propaganda tactics to suppress information about the outbreak failed spectacularly and when Iran tamped down news about the virus for political reasons even as it ravaged top officials.
The reality of the coronavirus spreading will reflect poorly on Trump — his cavalier dismantling of vital government teams for health response and his disdain for experts and science.
Trump tried to make federal agencies complicit on his fabulist hogwash about the size of his inaugural crowd and the path of Hurricane Dorian. It is unlikely that he will be able to keep his insatiable and insecure ego in check long enough to give the nation the facts, reassurance and guidance it needs about the infection.
Trump is already doing his orange clown pufferfish routine, acting as though he knows more about viruses than anyone, just as he has bragged that he knows more about the military, taxes, trade, infrastructure, ISIS, renewables, visas, banking, debt and “the horror of nuclear.”
He appointed Mike Pence to be point man, even though, as the famously homophobic governor of Indiana, Pence helped make the H.I.V. epidemic there worse by substituting moral pronouncements for scientific knowledge. Coronavirus Czar Pence spent Friday at a $25,000-a-plate dinner in sunny Sarasota raising money to try to win back the House, The Tampa Bay Times reported.
Trump’s history in business — he makes people feel good for a while and then it ends badly — could presage a stock market crash before he exits.
And it’s conceivable that a crash — along with hospitals being overwhelmed by the uninsured — could lead to the election of a real populist promising Medicare for All.
And that would be a very Trumpian arc indeed.
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I don’t even know what to make of this.
The Land and Water Conservation Fund was permanently reauthorized as part of the bipartisan John D. Dingell, Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act, signed into law on March 12, 2019.
And do not forget the part where Donnie is blowing up a national park and selling off large chunks of other ones.
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Yes and the one where Trump slashed the size of two pristine National Monuments in Utah (one by 85%, the other by 46%) so BP can drill for oil there – and then the Zinke adviser who orchestrated the deal left the Interior Dept. and went to work for BP in a cushy job – as a lobbyist, no less – despite that highly touted “ethics pledge” of Trump’s.
Natural treasures held in public trust for all Americans have been doled out for private exploitation and desecration just so one person can advance her career. And Trump has the gall to paint himself as a conservationist? What the 'effen F?! 
For more details see this previous post.
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With video.
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‘Zero-empathy’ Trump shows lack of emotion when told about 8-year-old boy’s family being killed in tornado
https://news.yahoo.com/zero-empathy-trump-shows-lack-230400652.html
Donald Trump has been filmed showing “zero empathy” for an 8-year-old boy during a meeting with families of Tennessee tornado victims.
The US president met with the families on Friday in the town of Cookeville as part of a trip to see the devastation caused by this week’s tornadoes.
As Trump stood in front of destroyed homes he spoke to the press about an 8-year-old boy who was carried away from his family home by a tornado, only to land alive two blocks away.
“An 8-year-old boy was ripped out, flown to a certain area and dropped off at the street two or three blocks away and they found him walking and he said ‘I just flew in the air,” said Trump in the Fox News video.
After asking ”how did his parents do?” and being informed the boy’s parents and sister had died in the storms he relayed that information to the crowd before moving on by saying “So we’re gonna go see some of the folks.”
No condolences were expressed from the president. Twitter user @mysterysolvent expressed disbelief at the way he acted.
“ARE YOU KIDDING ME??? Trump while visiting tornado victims in TN tells a story about a boy being carried by the tornado, like it’s the greatest thing he’s ever heard! Then he asks about the parents…People tell him they’re dead along with his sister. No emotion, NOTHING! Idiot!”
User @nightlypolitics echoed that statement accusing Trump of having zero empathy.
“Watch Zero-Empathy Trump Get Excited Over Tornado Deaths, ‘A Whole Family Got Wiped-Out!’ Wow what a pig” they tweeted.
https://twitter.com/NightlyPolitics/status/1236020255291408384
Wearing a hat emblazoned with “Keep America Great” Trump told the crowd at Cookeville that federal aid to help support the affected areas would be arriving “very quickly.”
“What they need. We are going to take care of what they need.” said Trump when asked about when they should expect the funding he had earlier approved.
After speaking to the press, Trump met with local families where he was applauded by some, with one man telling him “We’re a big family. We support you.” according to the video.
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