Category: News of the Day

This week, Justin Amash, a Republican representative from a pro-Trump district in Michigan, broke ranks with his caucus by stating the obvious. He tweeted (of course):

The response was immediate and predictable, with members of the House Freedom Caucus condemning him,  followed by the almost instantaneous primary challenge to Amash.  It is this kind of challenge that explains why no Republican will (successfully) defy Trump. The experience of Mark Sanford has been seared into their political flesh like the Mark of the Beast.

It’s exactly why Lindsay Graham, not so long ago one of Trump’s harshest critics and staunchest allies of Trump’s bête noire, John McCain, is now among the most unctuous sycophants in Trumpworld.

Over at CNN, there was some absurd and misplaced hope that Amash represented a crack in the dam or some such nonsense, and everything would be different now. If only. Slate was more realistic.

Here at GOML, the only real question was, “What insult-nickname would Trump come up with for Amash?” So many are already taken, but Tweety has a seemingly inexhaustible supply. Mayor Pete, for example, became “Alfred E. Neuman”, which no one saw coming. Biden is now “Sleepy-Creepy”, which coming from the Pussy-Grabber-In-Chief is just surreal.

If Trump doesn’t come up with something especially unique and cruel for you, he probably just isn’t that worried about you, and Amash seemed to fall into that category. He’s only got the catch-all “Lightweight Loser” so far, which is what Trump calls everybody that disagrees with him on anything.

I don’t really know how someone who has succeeded in getting elected to Congress can be a “loser”, but the word seems to have its own definition and parameters for Tweety.

So what do you think -will Amash have a job in Washington in 2020?

The Times, Are They a-Changin’?

Did you ever wonder how the President of the United States could stand up in front of a group of servicemen deployed in Iraq and say, “You just got one of the biggest pay raises you’ve ever received. You haven’t gotten one in more than 10 years — more than 10 years. And we got you a big one. I got you a big one”, when absolutely nothing in that statement is true?

Or how he could tell White House reporters , “We’re putting in a resolution some time in the next week and a half to two weeks [and] we’re giving a middle-income tax reduction of about 10 percent,”  when no such legislation was pending and no lawmakers, Democrat or Republican, have any idea what he’s referring to?

These are just a couple of recent examples out of many thousands where Trump just made shit up, blathered or tweeted it, and has not only never been held accountable or even seriously questioned, but has gained politically while being supported by FoxNews and Republican lawmakers.

It’s baffling to anyone who expects the president to speak the truth as he understands it, or at least a deftly-spun version of it. It’s baffling to someone with principles, or someone who has any shame at all. It’s baffling to just about everyone except career grifters, pathological liars, and Donald Trump.

Once you fully understand that Trump has no principles or shame, and is a career grifter as well as a pathological liar, it’s possible to see the bizarre genius in his method.

It doesn’t matter to Trump if there is no actual pay raise or tax cut. What matters  is that the people who are ultimately disappointed by the broken promise will understand that he isn’t the bad guy in this story. It’s someone else’s fault, you see, because Trump tried his best to deliver. He stood right in front of us and told us he would do these things. He fought for them. If he lost the fight, he can’t be blamed – he’s our hero and standard-bearer. It was Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, or Crooked Hillary, or that foreign-born illegitimate Muslim “president” that preceded him. Trump was the only one who ever tried to do the right thing! The liberals and the fake news media and George Soros conspired against him so they can implement their anti-American agenda!

Trump is ultimately going to win this silly “border wall” fight. Even if he loses. The important thing is to be seen as fighting hard against the forces that want to destroy America. And when the government finally does re-open, with or without his $5.7 billion, he’ll claim victory, insist the wall is already built and that Mexico paid for it, and so on. To his staff, he’s already said, “the country will not remember the shutdown, but it will remember that he staged a fight over his insistence that the southern border be protected.”

The brilliance of Trump is that he knows exactly which buttons to push and how to push them. And he doesn’t care who gets hurt or what’s best for the country or whether our system of government survives or if our position in the world is diminished to  pariah/rogue state/laughingstock. He only cares that, in the end, he “wins”.

Earlier this week, there was a disturbing story about blatant racism in a GM plant in Ohio, complete with “whites only” bathrooms, nooses hung in the shop, wide use of the “n-word” during the workday, and all manner of threats and intimidation. This isn’t the Jim Crow south we’re talking about here, but the modern, corporate, industrialized heart of America. In 2019.

There’s a tendency for us here in the Northeast, or elsewhere in the Blue States, to shrug this situation off as an outlier, and believe that most Americans see it as abhorrent. This is where Trump has us beat. He knows this thinking is pervasive. He knows that just under the surface, the majority of Americans have no particular problem with the culture in that GM plant, but are too savvy to let on. Trump knows he can appeal to these people and how to do it.

It’s coming into sharper focus now exactly how and why Trump allowed Steve Bannon and the “alt-right” to influence him so strongly during the campaign and in the first year of his presidency. He heard what they were saying and understood the power of the message. He saw they were on to something big, and even if the most egregious manifestations of it cried out for his condemnation, he never capitulated.

Don’t believe me? Watch this clip from “American History X”, where the Edward Norton character whips up his disciples into a mini-Kristallnacht rampage against a Korean storekeeper.

The language, arguments, imagery, sense of grievance and “white nationalism” is exactly what comes through in Trump’s rhetoric about the southern border and the threats to “our country”. It could have been written by Steve Bannon and recited by Trump verbatim in any of his MAGA speeches about “The Wall”.

Every president we’ve ever had until the current one, from whatever part of the political spectrum, understood that this thinking is a low-grade infection that has always been present in the American body politic. And every one understood the importance of pushing back against it. It’s been 50 years since this kind of thing has represented a remotely viable political platform on the national stage (I’m thinking now of George Wallace in 1968), but even then it was thoroughly, if not unanimously, repudiated by the vast majority of Americans.

Something has changed. We are being led by a demagogue, a career grifter and pathological liar. Even if the Republicans in congress come to their senses and finally push back, a horrifying reality has been revealed: 60 million Americans thought and still think a Trump administration is a good thing. When he is finally dragged, kicking and screaming, from the Oval Office, they will still be our neighbors.

…to Afghanistan!

One thing you have to admit about President Donald J. Trump is that he has never wavered from his one overarching, bedrock principle: Look Out For Number One!

He doesn’t pussyfoot. He doesn’t flip-flop. He doesn’t waffle. What you see is what you get. Cover your own ass if you want to win and winning is all there is. There are no other issues or principles that matter.

A new poll shows that the Tweeter’s approval ratings in the three key rust belt states that gave him the presidency have not budged. He’s still their guy.

Nothing matters to these people except “Obama is a Muslim” and “Lock Her Up”. Don’t bother reminding them of the Tweeter’s solemn pledge to get us out of the Afghan quagmire, tweeted (what else?) over and over again for years:

Yesterday, a breathless nation awaited his long-promised brilliant plan for defeating al Qaeda and the Taliban, and was rewarded with a bold new policy: Into the Quagmire! It’s the only way! Kabul or Bust! More troops for the generals! More fodder for the cannons! Any reports of my abandoning the platform I was elected on are Fake News!

Of course, this announcement was made in the brilliant Trumpian style of pre-blaming others for its eventual failure.  He said he had always relied on his instincts in the past, had been hugely successful doing so, and that his instincts had been to get out of Afghanistan. But “his generals” had now claimed this was wrong and so he will reluctantly follow their advice.

Perfect. If, somehow, doing the same thing we’ve been doing fruitlessly for 16 years now magically produces positive results, then Trump’s a genius and a visionary and the best leader we’ve ever had. If it produces nothing but more body bags and years of grief for everyone involved, well, Trump is still a genius and a visionary – remember those instincts of his? The generals are to blame and will certainly pay with a good, public, career-ruining Twitter-shaming at the appropriate time.

Winning!

Best of all, no one now remembers or cares about the events of last week. It was only a few days ago that we all realized we had reached a historical inflection point and that Trump had to go.  He couldn’t bring himself to unambiguously criticize Nazis. Completely unprecedented and inappropriate for an American president of any party.  Remember? That was the straw that broke the camel’s back! No? OK, then. Never mind.

And if you don’t remember last week, I won’t bother trying to remind you of the week before. That was when the world was going to end because Trump recklessly dared the North Koreans to do something in Guam. Fire and fury, baby.

Tweety is winning. And all you losers who want to doubt him can just go home to Loserville and enjoy your loserpalooza.

Only 200 days into the current administration and we are apparently on the brink.  Another brilliant accomplishment for the man-baby!

The last time talk of nuclear strikes was so public and scary was in October, 1962.  The Soviet Union had installed missiles in Cuba, and President Kennedy had to figure out what to do about it.  He understood that the greatest threat he faced during the crisis was the accidental triggering of an action because of a misunderstanding, a misperception, or a miscommunication.  He was very careful with the words he used and strictly controlled the messages coming from others in his administration.

He had read Barbara Tuchman’s “The Guns of August” not long before, a book which focuses on how WWI got started, and the thought of just how easy it was to blunder into war was very much on his mind.  He asked his generals how many Americans would die  if a single missile struck the U.S., and was told 600,000.  He immediately pointed out that this was more than all the casualties of the Civil War, and that we hadn’t come close in 100 years.

J.F.K. had served with distinction in the Navy in WWII, and was a serious student of war, history, and the presidency.  He had a lot to draw on to make the important decisions needed, and he succeeded in averting war and getting the missiles out of Cuba.

Donald J. Trump, on the other hand, brags of never having read a book, successfully dodged military service, and demonstrates over and over that he knows little of war, history or the presidency.

The bluster that’s been coming out of North Korea has rarely been taken seriously in recent years, and Kim Jong Un has been regarded as an eccentric, somewhat comical pariah.  But with Tweety carrying the nuclear football, things have changed.  His “leadership style” is the same as that of Kim Jong Un. They both “value” unpredictability and will say anything.  In the case of Donald J. Trump, his “thoughts” almost always take the form of 140-character tweets, and they are never validated or vetted by anyone else beforehand.  Tweet first, ask questions later is the rule he has lived by.

This is an excellent recipe for the accidental triggering of nuclear war.  But unlike incendiary tweeting on other subjects, there will be little opportunity for walking it all back, “explaining” what was really meant, or blaming others as is his wont (there is already some viral disinformation blaming Bill Clinton for North Korea’s nuclear program).

I would imagine there are very few Europeans, for example, who would say there is any difference between Trump and Kim at this point – neither can be trusted and neither seems to be making any more sense than the other.

In 200 days, Trump has managed to reduce the status of President of the United States to the level eccentric, somewhat comical pariah.

But in the mind of the man-baby, “standing up” to Kim in this way is a unique “accomplishment”, and completed faster than anyone else in history!  Best of all, talk of Russian meddling in the election has been knocked off the internet, and everyone knows your approval ratings get a huge bump when you start a war!

Well done.

CNN is really milking this Comey testimony thing. For days, they’ve had a permanent “countdown” displaying how many seconds are left before the Big Show.  Ratings! Revenue! Spectacle!

It’s pretty pathetic. I’m going to risk my reputation as the present-day Nostradamus and predict that when we finally hear what Comey has to say, it will be absolutely nothing you don’t already know. Yes, the “news” outlets will go crazy all day tomorrow and for a few days after, assuming the man-baby doesn’t come up with some huge distraction, wilder even than “tapped my wires”. But, as for Comey,  there’s no there there.

First of all, Comey’s primary concern is his reputation for being incorruptible, non-partisan, fair,  and, above all, not vindictive. This requires him to make no overtly anti-Trump statements or statements that could be deemed to be self-serving in refuting what the man-baby has spammed us with for weeks, even including the made-up exculpatory verbiage in the termination letter he sent to Comey. Remember that stuff about having assured Trump on three occasions that he wasn’t under investigation?

Second, we already know Comey’s version of events from various other sources. And it’s a highly believable, even obvious, account. Trump tried to influence him to drop the Flynn/Russia investigation, thereby committing the crime of Obstruction of Justice, an impeachable offense. Shocker.

And last, his testimony can never live up to the absurd advance hype it’s getting, no matter what. Maybe it won’t be as disappointing and deflating as Rachel Maddow’s “We’ve got Trump’s tax forms, tune in at 10:00” debacle, but I can promise you it won’t be worth the wait. Stop licking your chops. You’re going to remain hungry after this feast.

But this doesn’t mean there isn’t a little red meat for you in today’s news to keep you satisfied, at least until lunch. Let’s try this one from Forbes: How Donald trump Shifted Kids-Cancer Charity Money Into His Business.

The ABC News version says:

According to IRS filings, the Eric Trump Foundation in 2012 spent $59,085 on its annual Golf Invitational fundraiser held at the Trump National Golf Club in Westchester County, New York — money that skimmed from donations to St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital. Those expenses ballooned to $230,080 in 2013 and to $242,294 in 2014, according to the filings. It is unclear from these tax forms how much of those payments went to the Trump Organization.

Forbes reported that in 2011, costs for Eric Trump’s golf tournament fundraiser tripled because his father realized that the organization had not been charging for the event and there were no bills to prove it. The Foundation declined to provide Forbes with an itemized list of expenses for the tournament.

Charity experts told Forbes that the amount paid to the Trump Organization for a golf tournament fundraiser for St. Jude’s “defy any reasonable cost.”

This, of course, is further proof of the value of seeing Trump’s tax returns, but I guess that ship has sailed. No one who understands this needs to see this new evidence, and anyone who does need to see it isn’t listening and doesn’t care.

It does remind me once more of what Michael Bloomberg, someone who certainly knows,  said about Trump: 

Trump is who he is. He wants and needs to stiff everyone. Even kids with cancer.

It had to happen.

Is there no one who can get Trump to stop tweeting? We’ve been asking this question since long before the election, and for a long time the answer has been quite clear. No, there is no one can who convince the man-baby that he would be much better off, and even enjoy higher approval ratings, if he could just control himself a little better. Not Hope Hicks, Kellyanne Conway, or Sean Spicer.  Not even Jared or Ivanka, those two phantoms who allegedly have the strongest influence on him.

But he just can’t do it. Saying that he’s “impulsive” doesn’t describe what we’re seeing here. It’s more like a schizophrenic toddler with Tourette’s.

It’s often been noted that his tweets are craziest when he’s alone. At night before bed or when he’s just woken up in the morning is the real danger zone. There’s no one around to stop him then. Maybe it would be different if his spouse lived with him. Who has a greater interest in keeping your foot out of your mouth and the power to do it? Remember the strong and effective influence exerted by  Rosalynn Carter or Nancy Reagan?  It wasn’t a bad thing.

Sooner or later, Trump was going to make an international joke out of himself (and, thereby, all the rest of us), with some completely incoherent or accidental tweet. Last night was the night.

Obviously, he hit “Send” before he meant to, probably while trying to correct what he’d written, but that’s exactly the point. He’s the President of the United States. Every word he says has the potential to move markets, dominate the international news, impact global alliances, or even start wars. He can’t be carelessly, accidentally, or even impulsively hitting “Send” any more than he can “Launch” or “Strike” or “Detonate” or whatever it actually says on that red button on the “nuclear football”.

And he didn’t delete it for hours, prompting speculation that maybe he’d had a medical episode of some sort.

Almost immediately, #COVFEFE was trending on social media and all kinds of great jokes and memes were speeding around the internet. Check some of them out here. Trump is an international laughingstock. Again.

Coincidentally, the talent pool for new hires is also running dry. No one wants to work for this guy. Would you? Not knowing whether what you say today will be contradicted or undermined tomorrow? Knowing for sure that you’ll be fired at some point? The number of people who are willing to sign up for Mr. Trump’s Wild Ride now is tiny, and few competent pros are among them. Trump only really trusts family members, and they’re already all on the payroll.

What a mess.

“She doesn’t have the stamina to be president.” That’s what Trump repeatedly said of Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail back in September.  Click on this for a smile:

Hillary replied,

“As soon as he travels to 112 countries and negotiates a peace deal, a cease fire, a release of dissidents, an opening of new opportunities in nations around the world, or even spends 11 hours testifying in front of a congressional committee he can talk to me about stamina.”

This week, the man-baby ventured out of Mar-a-Lago for his first trip abroad, a perfect opportunity to impress us with his superior stamina. Well, as with all things Trump, it didn’t quite work out that way.

In Trump’s inspirational speech to the Muslim world, he stupidly referred to “Islamic extremism” when he should have said “Islamist extremism”, a difference his predecessor Barack Obama understood well.

Obama refused to use the expression “Islamic terrorism” for very good reasons, and FoxNews and Trump never stopped criticizing him for it. “How can we address the problem if we can’t even name it?” they howled. He won’t say the words because he romanticizes Islam, they said.

In using this expression that he has used so often before, Trump thereby offended the entire Muslim world (again!), something which his predecessor tried not to do. It isn’t helpful, Obama often explained. It makes things worse.

Well, now Trump’s White House is back in damage control mode as usual. Why did Trump use this foolish phrase? Does he not understand the distinction between “Islamic”, which describes things related to the religion, and “Islamist”, which describes an often violent political movement? No, no, of course he understands that. All that criticism of Obama was months ago. Ancient history. You can’t seriously be bringing that up now, can you?!

Well, why then? Are you ready? He was “exhausted”!  Apparently he lacks stamina! Unbelievable.

After one lousy plane ride, in which he had an entire 747 to himself with a full Trump-size bed to sleep in.

Today, our President will sign one of his fantastic, unbelievable, huge, beautiful, better-than-anyone-else’s Executive Orders. He doesn’t seem to understand that these orders do not automatically become the law of the land when he signs them, but then there’s so much he doesn’t understand. In his mind, an Executive Tweet has the power of an Executive Order, which has the power of a bill passed unanimously by both the House and Senate and upheld by the Supreme Court.

But it doesn’t work that way. At least not yet.

Christian conservatives will be visiting the White House today, and Trump intends to celebrate the occasion by delivering on his promise, repeated during the campaign and after inauguration, to “totally destroy” what’s known as the Johnson Amendment, a ban on churches and other tax-exempt organizations supporting political candidates that was proposed by Lyndon Johnson in 1954 and agreed to without discussion or debate.

With the Johnson Amendment, according to the IRS website, tax-exempt organizations “are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office”.

Because it’s written in the tax code, fully repealing the Johnson Amendment will require an Act of Congress. Does this make me feel any better in the Trump era? I’ll get back to you on that.

Even in the dark pre-history of 1954, when we were still trying to decide whether schools should be segregated by race, lawmakers understood the idea that the separation of church and state was one of the most important pillars of our democracy. Does it seem too much to say that this is really the thing that most clearly separates us from the Islamic Republic of Iran? Or the Taliban?

The NPR site has a nice little Q and A on what it’s all about. Basically, it’s about money and political advantage. Surprised?

I’ll boil it down for you this way: if something seems to benefit Republicans in general and Trump in particular, they will make it so.

And if they have to shred the constitution to do it, or if it has unintended consequences down the line, or if it ultimately ruins the good thing we’ve got going here in the good old U. S. of A., well, so be it. They’ll have theirs.

If you want to hear some intelligent opinion and analysis about Trump, Russia, Putin, and the American political landscape, you can’t do better than this podcast, a conversation between Sam Harris and Anne Applebaum.

There are so many important insights and ideas therein, I shouldn’t try to summarize them. Give it a listen – you won’t be sorry.

A small sampling of what is covered and illuminated:

The audacity, scale, and frequency of Trump’s lying, meant, in the end, to discredit the very idea of truth.

The tactic of dividing the country into warring factions: those who agree with and supported him, and the losers who don’t and didn’t.

The distraction and misdirection that is the congressional hearings aiming to find the “smoking gun” of Trump campaign collusion with Putin.

The damage already done to American “soft power” in the world, i.e. the influence we exert by the examples of our free press, social discourse, and government institutions that have functioned for the citizens before the elites.

The moral equivalence seen and even stated by Trump between our system and the totalitarian, authoritarian, and oligarchical alternatives. If we are no better, why would people elsewhere in the world aspire to our system and values?

What can be said to Trump supporters to influence their views?

What can be said to Trump detractors to ease the pain?

“Many secrets, no mysteries” refers to the nature of Trump’s relationship with Putin’s Russia. In the end, it doesn’t matter if Trump is heavily invested in Russian businesses, whether Russia is heavily invested in Trump’s business, whether Flynn. Manafort, Bannon, Kushner, Gorka, or anyone else in the Trump inner camp actually coordinated anything with anyone in Russia. It’s an unimportant detail which may remain a secret.

But there is no mystery that Trump greatly admires Putin, and that is the important thing to understand. What is it that Putin has achieved? What makes him a figure for Trump to emulate? For starters, Putin has shown how to manipulate the media in Russia and abroad, and thereby mold public opinion in Russia and abroad. He has shown how to crush dissent.

But most importantly for Trump, Putin has shown how to blend politics and business to achieve personal enrichment. Putin may now be the richest man in the world.  This is what Trump admires above all and wants to achieve for himself. This is why our democracy is at a critical inflection point. This is already understood by anyone paying attention. It’s not a mystery.

It’s getting ridiculous. Not to mention dangerous and psychotic.

Again, something blathered on FoxNews is immediately re-blathered by the Trump administration, and, again, causes big problems. No vetting, no consultation with anyone who would know, no counting to ten before repeating it. If it comes from FoxNews, it’s true and good enough to be instantaneously repeated to the world, backed by the full faith, gravitas, and power of the President of the United States, also known as the guy who could press a button and blow us all up (assuming someone on FoxNews “reported” that it would be a good idea).

Judge Andrew Napolitano, on FoxNews, asserted that Barack Obama used GCHQ, (Government Communications Headquarters, the signal intelligence agency of the U.K.) to spy on Donald Trump before he became president.

GCHQ

Yesterday, Sean Spicer repeated the claims:

“Three intelligence sources have informed Fox News that President Obama went outside the chain of command – he didn’t use the NSA, he didn’t use the CIA, he didn’t use the FBI and he didn’t use the Department of Justice – he used GCHQ. He’s able to get it and there’s no American fingerprints on it,” 

GCHQ immediately repudiated the claim as “nonsense, utterly ridiculous, and should be ignored.”

Spicer and General H. R. McMaster, who replaced the disgraced foreign agent Michael Flynn as US National Security Adviser, have now apologized to the GCHQ about this.

First, it should be Donald Trump doing the apologizing, not his surrogates. He could easily say something like, “Sean means well, but sometimes gets too enthusiastic in his loyalty and commitment to us. I fired him today. Please excuse the faux pas. Kiss kiss, are we all good now?”

Second, when will Spicer throw in the towel on his own? When does defending the indefensible become too difficult? Or too amoral?

Finally, is there no one in the White House to tell Trump we’d like to be friends with the U.K.? Or Germany? Or Australia, Mexico, and all our other historic allies? Or is it just going to be Putin all the way down?

Today, Trump will meet with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and attempt to put “their differences” aside. What differences, you ask? Well, the man-baby has said she was “ruining Germany”, that she would lose her election despite being the heavy favorite, and that “the German people are going to end up overthrowing this woman. I don’t know what the hell she’s thinking.”

Merkel, for her part, would like to preserve the important alliance between the U.S. and Germany.

What would prompt the tiny-handed one to say such egregiously stupid things?

I told you @TIME Magazine would never pick me as person of the year despite being the big favorite They picked person who is ruining Germany

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 9, 2015

Yup. That’s it. Definitely a good reason to totally screw up our relationship with one of our most important allies.

Two months in, three years and ten months to go. Make America Great Again.

By far the worst “defense” yet offered for Trump’s crazy accusation that Obama illegally “tapped” his phones comes from Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. It amounts to, “The media should be ignoring this clown.” Asked about the accusations, Nunes said,

“The president is a neophyte to politics — he’s been doing this a little over a year. I think a lot of the things he says, I think you guys sometimes take literally.”

First of all, I wish someone would explain to me what the options are for “taking” a 140-character message from the President of the United States, if we aren’t to take it literally. Figuratively? Allegorically? Ironically? Medically? Also, we’ll need some guidelines to help us apply the correct method to any given tweet.

Just for the record, here again is the thing we’re not supposed to take literally.

How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017

Second, the idea that we need to cut Trump a little slack on this kind of thing because he has only been in politics for a year is preposterous. How many years does it take to learn not to blurt out paranoid fantasies like a deranged toddler? Ten? If the guy hasn’t learned it by age 70, guess what?

But what I really love is the Republican double-speak of taking something that is obviously a major weakness and presenting it as a strength, at the same time as blaming others for not correctly understanding it as a strength in the first place.

Trump continues to place his supporters in Congress and elsewhere in the position of having to defend the indefensible. And, for some reason, no one seems to mind very much. All part of Making America Great, I guess.

Ya just gotta laugh. Here’s something that will help. It’s a clip from five months ago, which, in Trump-time, is the Paleolithic period:

As everyone knows by now, your president yesterday accused his predecessor of “Tapping his wires”.  The #wiretapping hashtag blew up on Twitter with at least as many people calling for Obama’s arrest as those pointing out how absurd it all is.

It is unclear where exactly the man-baby got this idea, but many have suggested he was re-acting to this piece on Breitbart, in which Mark Levin accused the Obama administration of using “police state” tactics to undermine the Trump campaign.

Of course, in the true Trump style, there was no vetting of the information, no consultation with the security agencies, no thought of the consequences of tweeting, not even a quick call to Jared or Ivanka to see what they thought. Just a direct, impulsive pipeline from the Breitbart website to the President’s twitter. It’s a pretty scary situation.

There’s really not much more to be said about this incident, shocking as it may be. To the rational among us, there are two possibilities: Trump believes this nonsense implicitly and lets the tweets fly, in which case he is stupid and insane, or he doesn’t believe it and lets the tweets fly anyway, in which case he is evil and insane. In all cases, this business is further proof of the obvious: Donald J. Trump is not fit to possess the nuclear codes.

But the weird thing is that from a political perspective the whole thing affirms Trump’s brilliance as a demagogue. First, he correctly assumed that it made no difference to his admirers whether the nonsense in question was true or not. It was true enough the second it came out of his twitter. The pitchforks and torches were brought out instantaneously.

Second, it had the desired effect of getting the Jeff Sessions lying-under-oath problem off the front pages, at least for a few days. As Trump has so often shown, the easiest way to get past a scandal is to create a bigger one.

And finally, it further serves to divide the populace and entrench their already dug-in loyalties, and his faction is powerful enough to get him the presidency. He also knows that there were more people who voted for him just to punish Hillary Clinton and the “libtards” than  there were people who thought he would do anything that actually needed doing. This is what they meant when they said they “wanted their country back”, and this is why political discourse in this country is ruined and will stay that way for decades.

The most interesting thing to me, though, is that the incident proves that Trump is completely unfit for the role of Chief Executive, not simply because he’s crazy/dangerous and insane, but because his “management style” is never going to change. That style never actually succeeded in business and can’t possibly succeed in government.

This article lays it out beautifully, and can be summarized by this quote:

“He’s not a great manager. He’s a performance artist pretending to be a great manager.”

The Trump “organization” has never been an organization in the business sense at all. There was no board of directors, no hierarchical organization chart, no independent auditors – just Donald surrounded by a very small clique of family members. As his interests grew internationally, nothing changed, and no new levels of management were created. Trump made all decisions impulsively, and they often went wrong.

His true genius is in deflecting blame onto others.

Trusting your own gut and never consulting experts may or may not serve a family business, particularly as failure affects so few people. But it can’t possibly work in the job we’ve given him now. He is now charged with directing the largest organization in the world, and his lack of management expertise is really showing.

From the article:

Trump’s company, despite his grandiose portrayals of a sprawling empire, always at base was a mom-and-pop entity, and what Trump managed throughout his lengthy professional career was principally a core group of barely more than a dozen executives housed on the 26th floor of Trump Tower. Until now. As president, Trump sits at the top of a massive bureaucracy not of his own making, a complex hierarchy designed to help him handle the most information-intensive, crisis-driven job in the world. He appears to be struggling to adapt. Hundreds of positions remain vacant, key posts have been declined by wary nominees, poorly vetted picks have withdrawn or been rejected, and the day-to-day functioning of the West Wing has become its own running news story.

So the moment of Trump being “presidential” has passed. It didn’t last very long and, really, was anybody fooled? You’re setting the bar for “presidential” pretty low when all the guy has to do is read some complete sentences off a teleprompter. The hard part, actually writing the complete sentences, has already been done by someone else, Stephen Miller I suppose.

Anyway, Trump almost immediately snapped out of the uncomfortable role of “leader” with some tweets about Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer meeting with Russians, and, as could be expected, demanded an investigation. This is the usual thing of Trump distracting from and attempting to neutralize something real, in this case Jeff Sessions lying under oath, with something either totally made-up or totally inconsequential.

We should start an immediate investigation into @SenSchumer and his ties to Russia and Putin. A total hypocrite! pic.twitter.com/Ik3yqjHzsA

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 3, 2017

I hereby demand a second investigation, after Schumer, of Pelosi for her close ties to Russia, and lying about it. https://t.co/qCDljfF3wN

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 3, 2017

It works well enough to galvanize his 60 million into accepting the false equivalence and thereby changing the dynamic of the whole thing. But if that’s all there was to say about his “pivot”, I wouldn’t bother writing anything.

No, this morning he really outdid himself. At 6:35 A.M, he was up and already tweeting absurd conspiracies theories. We’re all getting used to the POTUS tweeting everything now.  He’s already been told the obvious: that he could take a giant step towards being “presidential” while greatly reducing the chances of shooting himself in the foot just by putting the stupid Twitter down. Permanently. Not gonna happen.

And doing it before breakfast?  He’s kidding, right? I mean, there was a moment when we thought that maybe the people around him would filter and vet his tweets.  Maybe Hope Hicks?  Someone. Then the use of Twitter might at least seem like a new tech version of real executive communications.  But first thing in the morning?  No, clearly Trump was thrashing around in a sleepless torment over how to deal with his enemies, who are many and surround him at all times. He got up and reached for his phone and blasted this out:

Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017

It’s really just too ridiculous. He’s kidding, right? Please tell me he’s kidding.

The man-baby’s hands seemed even tinier this morning.

Yesterday, a federal appeals court panel of three judges unanimously refused to reinstate Trump’s executive order  banning travel from seven Muslim countries.  The bleating and tweeting began immediately.

SEE YOU IN COURT, THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 9, 2017

Trump quite clearly does not understand our tripartite system of government and the separation of powers it requires. He does not recognize the authority of any person or institution to  question his “mandate” or even his judgement as President/Emperor/King.

Anyone who dares question him obviously has “political” motives.

If the U.S. does not win this case as it so obviously should, we can never have the security and safety to which we are entitled. Politics!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 8, 2017

All I can say here is that I really hope this does go to the Supreme Court and that they unanimously uphold the appeals court. Any other result certainly will be evidence of politics destroying our system.

In recent days, we have seen that we can’t rely on the republican congress to assert its own power, independence or integrity (ha!). The approving of all Trump’s cabinet picks so far, as preposterously unqualified and inappropriate as they may be, shows this clearly.

The press has been neutralized, including, and perhaps especially, the newspaper of record, the Failing New York Times.

There’s really nothing left between us and idiocracy but the courts. Maybe a supreme court decision defining the limits of presidential power, or, as everyone would certainly refer to it, “a rebuke”, would stem the awful tide of Trump’s bullying.

See you in court.

Three weeks ago, #Trump told us his health care plan was just about ready –  “all but finished”, he said. “It’s very much formulated down to the final strokes. We haven’t put it in quite yet but we’re going to be doing it soon. We will have insurance for everybody. It will be in a much simplified form. Much less expensive and much better and much lower deductibles”.

Sounds great, man-baby!

It all came as a big surprise to Republicans in congress. They hadn’t heard word one about it, apparently. Not to worry, though. We’ve forgotten all about it now. Three weeks ago is the paleolithic era in the sped-up world of the man-baby. Promises, accusations, recriminations, Executive Orders, feuds – they all fly by at the speed of Twitter and are immediately lost in the ether, replaced by some new craziness.

Does anybody really care? Does anybody expect the “truth”? Will anybody ever hold him to any of it? No, no, and no way.

Did a health care plan even exist, other than in his own imagination? Who can say. Remember, in his “Birther” heyday in 2011 he said with complete sincerity and conviction that he had investigators in Hawaii that had found unbelievable evidence regarding Obama’s real origins. “They cannot believe what they are finding”,  he said on TV.  He’d reveal it all in a couple of days, he said.

He never revealed anything. “They” found nothing because there was nothing to find and because “they” didn’t exist, any more than the P.R. man “John Miller” did. It’s hard to know whether it’s all “lying” or something else. Does a delusional person “lie”?

Anyway, I started writing this because I was reading about our recent “successful” raid in Yemen, where a Seal Team 6 member was killed and three were injured, where civilians including some children were killed, and where we purposely abandoned a $75 million aircraft.  Mind you, I read about it in the “failing New York Times” so it’s “fake news” to begin with.

But the man-baby tells us it was a success, so it I guess it was. From the article:

Mr. Trump on Sunday hailed his first counterterrorism operation as a success, claiming the commandos captured “important intelligence that will assist the U.S. in preventing terrorism against its citizens and people around the world.”

“Important intelligence” sounds good, maybe even better than his health care plan or his birther evidence. Maybe he’ll tell us what it is soon. Or maybe we’ll forget all about it after a few more crazy tweets.

Here are some candidates from this morning: