The Trump thread: All things Donald

[_priapism]

Puncturing that mystique rattles Trump. And he hates it.

#Resist

The DNC needs a daily talking point about a huge Trump failure (there are 100’s of examples) and then have the candidates each bring that failure up repeatedly throughout the day.  Bring up Trump University 20 times today.  Mention Trump steak sauce 20 times tomorrow.  Mention his bankruptcies 20 times the day after that...

Trump’s head will explode.

[psiberzerker]

[Athos_131]

Another Trump nominee goes down in flames. This is a big one.

Well, that certainly didn’t take long:

Trump announced Friday that Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Tex.), his embattled pick to lead the nation’s intelligence community, was withdrawing from consideration and would remain in Congress.

The lawmaker was facing intense questions about padding his résumé and a lack of experience, which led to a lukewarm reception on Capitol Hill.

Trump said he would announce a new pick for director of national intelligence shortly.

In tweets, Trump said that Ratcliffe was being treated “very unfairly” by the media.

The fault, as always, lies with Trump’s opponents and the media. The “unfair” treatment to which Trump refers was likely this story in The Post, which showed that Ratcliffe’s claims about his experience were seriously exaggerated.

Ratcliffe had asserted that “as a U.S. Attorney, I arrested over 300 illegal immigrants on a single day.” But that was false: He didn’t arrest them; the relevant operation ended up charging only 45 poultry workers with low-level offenses; and people involved in it “could not recall Ratcliffe playing a central role.”

This comes after stories showing that his claims to have tried terrorism cases were also inflated.

The office of DNI has existed only since 2005, and before Trump’s election had been filled by people with long careers of service in the military, the intelligence world or both. President George W. Bush appointed Mike McConnell, a Navy vice admiral who had been the director of the National Security Agency. President Barack Obama appointed James R. Clapper Jr., an Air Force lieutenant general who had run the Defense Intelligence Agency.

But those claims of Ratcliffe’s work stoppin’ terrorists and ropin’ illegals were almost the entirety of his qualifications for the job, other than six months sitting on the House Intelligence Committee.

It’s good news that Ratcliffe’s nomination went down. But there’s a sobering undercurrent to what just happened. Ratcliffe largely crashed and burned because of that lack of qualifications and evidently not because of the actual reason Trump selected him, which is at least as bad.

As we all know, Trump chose Ratcliffe because Trump viewed him as being entirely qualified for the post — as Trump envisioned it. At former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s hearings, Ratcliffe spun out Trump’s biggest lies about the Russian attack on our election and efforts by law enforcement to get to the bottom of it.

Ratcliffe downplayed Mueller’s finding that Trump engaged in extensive and likely criminal efforts to impede that investigation. He also fed the conspiracy theory that Democrats were the real colluders with Russia and that the investigation was illegitimate. Ratcliffe worked up great conviction while doing this — that is, he put on a great show, from Trump’s perspective — which surely impressed him greatly.

At stake was the basic question of whether Trump would be able to continue corrupting our institutions to serve his own interests. As DNI, Ratcliffe would have been able to continue propping up this alternate narrative of the Russia investigation — something that could potentially expose the next election to more foreign attacks on Trump’s behalf.

After all, the fact that outgoing director Daniel Coats kept warning about the seriousness of the threat to our democracy was a chief source of tension in his relationship with the White House.

By contrast, Ratcliffe disputes the very finding that Russia wanted to help elect Trump. This, even though that’s what Mueller found and even though a Senate Intelligence Committee report just lent more support to the intelligence community’s conclusion along these lines, while also underscoring that there are even greater reasons for concern about the next round of sabotage.

So it was hard to imagine Ratcliffe taking it seriously if and when that sabotage began in earnest. And, with Attorney General William P. Barr busy investigating the investigators — that is, searching for evidence to support Trump’s narrative that Russian interference was no biggie and that the bigger crime was the investigation itself — Ratcliffe would have been well positioned as DNI to help with that.

The problem here is that none of these reasons are why Trump yanked the nomination. Indeed, just this week, Trump again repeated that the whole idea of Russian interference is a hoax:

https://twitter.com/evanmcmurry/status/1157026841170833408

However, the fact that this continues to be Trump’s view actually helps set the threshold for what Democrats should demand from the next nominee: not just that he actually be qualified for the post but that he unequivocally not subscribe to Trump’s Russia alt-narrative and takes the need to defend our political system seriously.

“That John Ratcliffe was even nominated speaks to the deep disregard for America’s national security at the core of this rotten administration,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a big proponent of election security, said Friday.

One last thought: A number of Twitter wags suggested that Trump should nominate Rep. Will Hurd — the Texas congressman who just announced his retirement — for the post:

https://twitter.com/DougHeye/status/1157354550019461120

Everyone, of course, understands this to be clever trolling, precisely because Hurd — like Coats — took the Russian attack on our democracy seriously. Yes, Hurd echoes the standard GOP talking point that Mueller found “no collusion,” but Hurd also says that “Russia continues to erode our democracy” and that we must continue “to strengthen election security.”

What’s morbidly ironic about this is that a different Republican president actually might have considered nominating someone like Hurd. But we all know that under Trump, this is just a big, knee-slapping joke.

In the end, this whole affair underscores Trump’s contempt for the very idea that there are any government functions that should be above his personal needs.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Talking like Trump in the workplace can cost your employer money and get you fired

While President Trump’s remark that four congresswomen of color should “go back” to their ancestral countries was rightly condemned as racist and wrong, similar comments by others have generated far more serious consequences.

Language like Trump used is against the law in the workplace. Supervisors or colleagues who target co-workers with verbal abuse, and organizations that allow it, can end up in court, facing big fines.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) cites words similar to Trump’s in a previously issued document explaining employment harassment based on national origin:

“Ethnic slurs and other verbal or physical conduct because of nationality are illegal if they are severe or pervasive and create an intimidating, hostile or offensive working environment, interfere with work performance, or negatively affect job opportunities. Examples of potentially unlawful conduct include insults, taunting, or ethnic epithets, such as making fun of a person’s foreign accent or comments like, ‘Go back to where you came from,’ whether made by supervisors or by co-workers.”

When Trump tweeted that Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.) and Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” he used the kind of racially offensive language that has led to hefty fines, as EEOC employment discrimination cases have shown.

The congresswomen can’t complain to the EEOC because Trump isn’t their boss — he has no authority over the legislative branch and the congresswomen, though he sets the tone for the government and appoints the head of the EEOC.

Private sector employees have successfully taken action against those who make or tolerate similar comments. A Federal Insider review of EEOC documents shows the agency has won lawsuit settlements on behalf of employees in at least a dozen cases over the past decade, in part because a supervisor or colleague said “go back” to an employee in a bigoted context.

According to EEOC documents, the settlements that hit employers the hardest include:

● A 2010 agreement with Elmer W. Davis Inc., a Rochester, N.Y., roofing contractor, to pay $1 million to African American employees because “they were constantly subjected to racial slurs by their white foremen” including ‘All n----rs should get on a boat and go back to Africa.’ ”

● A 2012 agreement with Delano Regional Medical Center, in Delano, Calif., to pay $975,000 because Filipino American hospital staffers suffered a “hostile work environment,” including “humiliating threats of arrest if they did not speak English and were told to go back to the Philippines.”

● A 2009 agreement with Wheeler Construction Inc., in Phoenix to pay $325,000 because of verbal harassment against two employees that included telling them to go back to Mexico. One of the employees was born in the United States (as were three of the four congresswomen Trump targeted).

● A 2011 agreement with New York University, described by EEOC as “the largest private university in the United States and one of New York City’s ten biggest employers,” to pay $210,000 because a library mailroom supervisor “regularly addressed the employee, a native of Ghana, with slurs such as ‘monkey’ and ‘gorilla’ and insults such as ‘go back to your cage.’ ”

● A 2011 agreement with Simon Property Group, a national real estate company that owned a Caesars Palace shopping mall in Las Vegas, to pay $125,000 because a white housekeeping shift leader called Latino employees racial slurs including “ ‘tacos,’ and ‘burritos’ and repeatedly told them to ‘go back to Mexico.’ ”

● A 2010 agreement with the Sahara Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas to pay $100,000 because “Sahara’s supervisors and coworkers continuously belittled and harassed Ezzat Elias . . . because of his Egyptian heritage. The alleged harassers openly and continually subjected Elias to derogatory comments, such as ‘Go back to Egypt.’ ”

The law applies to all employees in the private and public sectors, but supervisors should be held to a higher standard. James M. Eisenmann, former executive director of the Merit Systems Protection Board, a quasi-judicial agency that protects against prohibited personnel practices in the federal workplace, said a supervisor who used Trump’s language could face discipline ranging from a verbal warning to termination.

“The level of discipline, of course, would depend on the severity and frequency of this conduct and whether the supervisors had engaged in similar conduct in the past,” he said. “Indeed, an agency could be held liable if it fails to discipline the supervisor and he engages in subsequent similar misconduct in the future.”

The White House did not respond to requests for comment. All three EEOC commissioners were unavailable to answer questions, according to an agency spokesperson, even by email. That includes the chair, Janet Dhillon, a Trump appointee who was first asked for comment on July 24.

When EEOC sued Marion’s Cleaners in Metairie, La., last year in a “go back to Mexico” case, Rudy Sustaita, the agency’s regional attorney for the Houston District Office, said “no person deserves to be verbally and physically accosted and humiliated merely because of being born in a particular country or being of a particular race.”

It’s a lesson for Trump.

I for one, encourage all Trumpers to go right up to their employers and emulate their hero in the most sincere form of imitation imaginable.

#Resist

[psiberzerker]

Talking like Trump in the workplace...

Including "Grab them by the pussy."  I agree with the rest of the article, I'm just adding yet another incredibly bad example.  Not just racism, but also sexism.

[_priapism]

The rantings of a madman.

[psiberzerker]

Is it me, or can you actually see the exact point where the hairpiece in chief took his phone back from his speech writer, and finished the post?

[funguy]

I can't see it in these pics but I can easily imagine it. As someone in the campaign here in NH, I am really happy to have found this thread.  FYI, I am a Delaney campaigner. More later.

[psiberzerker]

I can't see it in these pics but I can easily imagine it.

The sentence structure is different, but here's one change that should be obvious to anyone that watches the news, or late-night comedy:

Just last year, he was willing to glass the entire peninsula, and ordered half of the Pacific fleet in to postition to protect our ally, before he became such good friends with a megalamaniacal despot with guns pointed at Seoul.



These guns

"Stop, or Seoul gets it!"  ~Kim Jong Un.

That's why we didn't do anything.  They literally have thousands of guns pointed at the head of South Korea.

Now, they're continuing to develop Short Range Ballistic Missiles, to update their Cold War (Korean War) era mobile Howitzer technology, and we're all of a sudden best buddies, because "rocketboy" threatened to bombard a civilian target, and capital of freedom until we withdrew.

Funny, but he didn't say anything about that on Twitter.  "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em?"

[Athos_131]

Hush-Money Probe Gathered Evidence From Trump’s Inner Circle

The Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office has gathered more evidence than previously known in its criminal investigation of hush payments to two women who alleged affairs with Donald Trump, including from members of the president’s inner circle.

Prosecutors interviewed Hope Hicks, a former close aide to Mr. Trump and White House communications director, last spring as part of their campaign-finance probe, which ultimately implicated the president in federal crimes.

They also spoke to Keith Schiller, Mr. Trump’s former security chief. Investigators learned of calls between Mr. Schiller and David Pecker, chief executive of the National Enquirer’s publisher, which has admitted it paid $150,000 to a former Playboy model on Mr. Trump’s behalf to keep her story under wraps.

In addition, investigators possess a recorded phone conversation between Mr. Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen and a lawyer who represented the two women.

The prosecutors’ campaign-finance investigation is based on the theory that the secret payments to keep women quiet were illegal contributions, because they were intended to influence the election. New details of the investigation—gleaned from interviews with 20 people familiar with the probe and from nearly 1,000 pages of court documents—show prosecutors had gathered information about Mr. Trump’s alleged involvement in the payments weeks before Mr. Cohen asserted it in open court.

Mr. Cohen, in pleading guilty last August to charges that included campaign-finance violations, said he arranged the payments at Mr. Trump’s direction. Prosecutors in December implicated the president in the campaign-finance crimes, identifying him as the “Individual-1” who directed and coordinated the payments to the two women. Mr. Cohen is scheduled to begin a three-year prison sentence next month for lying to a bank, lying to Congress, tax evasion and campaign-finance violations.

Mr. Trump has denied the women’s claims of sexual encounters and has denied wrongdoing. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal in October, he declined to address whether he had ever discussed hush-money payments with Mr. Cohen during the 2016 campaign. Jay Sekulow, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, declined to comment for this article.

Mr. Trump, asked Wednesday whether he was aware that prosecutors had spoken to Mr. Schiller, said: “I have no idea.”

What federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York might do with the information they’ve gathered on Mr. Trump couldn’t be determined. The office has proceeded in adherence to a Justice Department policy that sitting presidents can’t be indicted. Prosecutors have given no indication they would seek to charge Mr. Trump after he leaves office.

It is possible nothing more will come of it. “A lot of cases sit around for years,” said Peter Zeidenberg, a former Justice Department prosecutor now at law firm Arent Fox LLP, who isn’t involved in the investigation. Speaking of the evidence, he said, “They’re going to hang onto it,” but added: “They could decide that they don’t have enough evidence, or it’s not a prosecutable case.”

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan got involved in February 2018 when special counsel Robert Mueller transferred to their office the parts of his investigation of Mr. Cohen that were unrelated to Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Weeks earlier, the Journal had revealed Mr. Cohen’s $130,000 payment of hush money made to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. The report fueled the expansion of the probe of Mr. Cohen’s business affairs to include a campaign-finance investigation.

The Southern District delved into his emails and bank records, scrutinizing transactions in and out of a shell company Mr. Cohen created called Essential Consultants LLC.

Before the handoff to New York, Mr. Mueller had obtained Mr. Cohen’s emails dating to at least January 2016 and had subpoenaed his accountant, Jeffrey Getzel, for documents related to Mr. Cohen’s businesses. But Mr. Cohen’s lawyers resisted letting the Mueller team see Mr. Cohen’s Trump Organization email account, citing attorney-client privilege. Mr. Mueller’s office didn’t push the issue.

The Southern District investigators and the Federal Bureau of Investigation went to great lengths to hide the existence of their investigation of Mr. Cohen. Agents, for instance, asked federal judges to direct an email provider not to notify Mr. Cohen of search warrants the prosecutors were seeking.

The agents sought historical location data for cellphones used by Mr. Cohen, including for the month in late 2016 when he arranged a payment to Ms. Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford. Investigators obtained authorization for surveillance that let them see phone numbers of calls dialed and received on the cellphones.

And they quietly hatched a plan for the extraordinary step of raiding the office of a president’s lawyer. That was necessary, Manhattan federal prosecutors argued in a public court filing, because without a search warrant, certain records “could have been deleted without record and without recourse for law enforcement.” New York investigators also wanted access to Mr. Cohen’s Trump Organization email account.

Lanny Davis, an attorney for Mr. Cohen, said, “The speculation by the SDNY prosecutors...about the possibility of destruction of evidence is just that—and without a scintilla of factual basis and absurd. Mr. Cohen has never and would never destroy evidence in anticipation of a search.”

Investigators crafted a detailed search warrant, explaining why they had probable cause to suspect Mr. Cohen’s home, office, hotel room and safe-deposit box contained evidence of crimes. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein approved the search-warrant application.

The raid, in the early morning of April 9, 2018, was the first public revelation of the Southern District’s investigation. Among the items seized, said a person familiar with the matter, was a recording of a September 2017 phone call between Mr. Cohen and Keith Davidson, then a lawyer for Ms. Daniels.

The phone call was sparked by an inquiry to Mr. Davidson from a City National Bank client manager, asking about funds the lawyer had transferred to Ms. Daniels.

That was the payment to Ms. Daniels to keep her from publicly asserting she’d had a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump. Mr. Davidson told the bank the money had been wired into his account from Essential Consultants to pay a settlement.

He then called Mr. Cohen, worried that the bank’s singling out of the payment might mean the transaction was under federal investigation. Mr. Cohen, who recorded the conversation, didn’t indicate he was alarmed.

The agents’ raid put the recording in the hands of federal investigators.

In the months after the raid, investigators interviewed Ms. Hicks and Mr. Schiller. They asked Ms. Hicks about her contacts with Mr. Pecker, the CEO of American Media, publisher of the National Enquirer.

Prosecutors also asked at least one other witness whether Ms. Hicks had coordinated with anyone at American Media concerning a Journal article on Nov. 4, 2016—days before the election—that revealed American Media had paid $150,000 for the rights to former Playboy model Karen McDougal‘s story of an alleged affair with Mr. Trump. The National Enquirer never ran an article about her allegations, a practice known in the tabloid world as “catch and kill.”

Ms. Hicks called Mr. Pecker in November 2016 as she was crafting a response to an inquiry from the Journal. Mr. Pecker told her American Media was issuing a statement saying it had paid Ms. McDougal to contribute articles.

Ms. Hicks was one of Mr. Trump’s closest aides from the beginning of the 2016 campaign and served as a top White House adviser until she left in March 2018, less than three months before she met with Southern District investigators.

Ms. Hicks now is chief communications officer at Fox Corp . Fox Corp and Wall Street Journal parent News Corp share common ownership.

Mr. Schiller served as security chief for the Trump Organization for more than a decade before joining the White House as director of Oval Office Operations. He left in September 2017.

Investigators were aware he had spoken by phone to Mr. Pecker, and they wanted to know if Mr. Schiller ever handed the phone to Mr. Trump. The Journal couldn’t determine what investigators learned.

In July 2018, investigators sat down with Mr. Pecker, already aware of past conversations between him and Mr. Trump. Mr. Pecker met with Southern District investigators regularly for the rest of the summer, telling them Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump were involved in the payment scheme.

Mr. Pecker testified before a grand jury in August, less than a week before Mr. Cohen’s guilty plea and public accusation of Mr. Trump in hush-money payments. Mr. Pecker received immunity, and his company reached a non-prosecution agreement with the government.

Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s longtime chief financial officer, also testified before a grand jury last summer. He too received immunity, meaning his words wouldn’t be used against him as long as he told the truth.

Since then, prosecutors have examined discrepancies between his account and Mr. Cohen’s. Mr. Cohen told them Mr. Weisselberg had a deeper involvement in the hush payment to Ms. Daniels than Mr. Weisselberg had indicated.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Remember when Yellow Wall mocked Barack Obama for crying over Sandy Hook?

#Resist

[Lois]

So very sad ...

Does Trump have even one redeeming quality?
By Michael A. Cohen Globe Columnist, July 31, 2019, 11:14 a.m.

With Donald Trump there is no bottom.

Mere weeks after attacking four Democratic congresswomen of color and saying they should “go back” to where they came from, he took to Twitter to launch yet another racist diatribe against Baltimore congressman Elijah Cummings and the residents of his congressional district.

It reminds me of the one indisputable and remarkable fact about the president: He doesn’t have a single redeeming quality.

I realize this might sound like hyperbole. Everyone has at least one good thing you can say about them, right?

But try as I might, when it comes to Trump the cupboard is empty.

First and foremost, he’s not a nice person. He’s mean, unpleasant, and regularly insults, demeans, and attacks anyone and anything that doesn’t provide him with constant veneration. He calls political leaders “crazy,” “low IQ,” “dumb as a rock,” “very dumb,” a “loser,” and for some, like Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, hurls racist epithets at them. He derides their physical appearance and makes up juvenile nicknames for them.

He lies not some of the time or most of the time, but all the time. According to The Washington Post’s “Fact Checker,” Trump has lied approximately 11,000 times since he took office.

He’s a well-documented racist and misogynist. More than 20 women have credibly accused him of assaulting them, which includes allegations of rape. He makes bigoted and racist comments about immigrants. He regularly attacks African-American politicians, journalists, and sports figures and uses words like “infested” to describe their communities. He praises and employs white supremacists and refuses to condemn neo-Nazis. He has kind words for sociopathic dictators and authoritarian leaders, primarily because they say nice things about him.

He’s even mean to children.

He has no discernible moral core. He’s devoid of integrity, empathy, and selflessness. He’s vain and self-centered. He never takes responsibility for anything, and blames everyone else for his mistakes. Even the quality that he seems to venerate more than any other — strength — is one that he consistently fails to uphold. He is a bully who attacks the weak and vulnerable and he can’t even be relied on to keep his word or stand firm in a negotiation.

He’s not intelligent or insightful. Everything he seems to know about politics and public life he’s gleaned from watching Fox News. He doesn’t read books, or go to the movies, and spends much of his time watching television. The only hobby he appears to have is golf, and he is legendary for cheating at it. He’s not funny, and he hardly ever laughs.

He has the diet of a 14-year-old boy, and eats his steaks well done and drenches them in ketchup.

He’s incompetent at his job. He appears to have no understanding of how the federal government, of which he is the chief executive, works; how laws are passed; how the economy functions; and he is seemingly unable to differentiate between the three branches of government. There is hardly a political norm or tradition that he hasn’t violated. He has no respect for democracy or the Constitution.

He doesn’t even appear to like dogs, and he’s the first occupant of the White House in more than 120 years who doesn’t have one.

He surrounds himself with bootlickers and enablers. He has no loyalty to those who work for him. Anyone with even a scintilla of ability or integrity has long since stopped working for him. All this might have something to do with the fact that he appears to be a lousy boss.

He’s even bad at the thing that brought him to public attention — being a businessman. He regularly lost money, including as an owner of a casino, which I didn’t think was possible. He short-changed contractors, treated his employees badly, and has declared bankruptcy six times. He had a ghost writer pen a book titled “Art of the Deal” to showcase his alleged ability to negotiate deals — and yet he’s actively bad at negotiating deals, both in business and in politics. Perhaps the only thing he’s been successful at is being a reality star and con man (remember Trump University).

But since the benchmark here is “redeeming quality,” he gets no points for that.

Then there is the fact that he is corrupt, a serial law-breaker, and is actively profiting from his presidency. According to the Mueller report, he has repeatedly and brazenly broken the law — including obstructing justice on 10 separate occasions. Before he was president, he engaged in a scheme to avoid paying his taxes and is possibly guilty of committing tax fraud. We know that he engaged in a conspiracy to subvert campaign finance laws during the 2016 campaign.

To be sure, there are other disreputable public figures in American political life. I was no fan of the 43rd president, George W. Bush. But at least one could say that he appeared to be a good father and his wife seemed to like him (also his AIDS initiative saved millions of lives).

Not the case with Trump. His kids are as morally deficient as he is. The only adult exception appears to be his daughter Tiffany, who, not surprisingly, was largely raised by her mother. His wife Melania doesn’t appear to be a big fan either — which is not surprising since he cheated on her with a porn actress, just as he cheated on his first two wives.

From all appearances, Trump doesn’t have any actual friends.

At the 2016 Republican National Convention his family members gave speeches speaking approvingly of him. They spoke of what a good and caring person he was and yet they could not point to any specific anecdotes highlighting those qualities.

The one positive thing I can remember about Trump is a January 2016 Republican debate in which he criticized Ted Cruz for attacking his “New York values” by pointing to the city’s response to the 9/11 attacks. And then this week, Trump claimed falsely that he was at Ground Zero after 9/11 and compared himself to a first responder. So no points for that.

This is far from a complete list. Trump’s list of iniquities could go on for thousands of more words. But as far as coming up with a positive attribute: That page is and will remain blank. Somehow, in a country of 320 million people, the American electorate found a way to elect one of our singularly worst citizens as president.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2019/07/31/does-trump-have-even-one-redeeming-quality/INEdr9vtn1uv0ef9L7dw1O/story.html

[Athos_131]

Trump Can't Even Get the Names of the Cities Where People Died Right

In a nauseating address Monday morning after mass shootings in Ohio and Texas claimed at least 29 lives over the weekend, President Trump blamed video games, mental illness, and disembodied “hatred.” He also couldn’t even manage to get the city where one massacre took place correct.

“May God bless the memory of those who perished in Toledo,” Trump said, referring to the shooting at a Dayton, OH bar that left at least nine dead early Sunday morning.

https://twitter.com/marcusgilmer/status/1158383987376762880

#Resist

[Athos_131]

This Is Donald Trump's Legacy

“These are sick people,” White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said in an interview on ABC this Sunday, after a pair of mass shootings—one perpetrated against Latinx people by a far-right, anti-immigrant extremist with a manifesto—again raised the question of whether or not Donald Trump is to blame for all of this.

“You cannot be a white supremacist and be normal in the head,” Mulvaney said. “These are sick people. You know it, I know it, the president knows it. And this type of thing has to stop. And we have to figure out a way to fix the problem, not figure out a way to lay blame.”

This was the second time in two weeks that Mulvaney had to go on the morning shows to defend his boss from charges of racism; last week, it was about Trump’s attack on Rep. Elijah Cummings and the city of Baltimore. On Monday, after blaming the fake news media for the shootings, Trump gave a speech at the White House on the shootings in which he said that “in one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy,” with all of the enthusiasm of a hostage forced to give a video statement.

The problem is white supremacy itself. It is what the economy and social hierarchy of this country was founded on. It has been here since even before there was an official United States. It is a global issue, one manifesting itself in events like Brexit, the election of far-right xenophobes (including Trump) across the Western world. And it has always, since the beginning, been fueled by mass violence—from slavery, colonialism, and genocide through to the mass terror of Jim Crow and the KKK and onward to the killings of the last decades: Christchurch, the Tree of Life shooting, Anders Breivik’s mass murder of 77 people in Norway, and the Oklahoma City bombing, and countless other massacres, as well as all of the near misses.

White supremacy isn’t a problem that can be “fixed,” only mitigated. Donald Trump has been the opposite of mitigation. He confirmed at his very first campaign event that his presidency would be rooted in a racist scapegoating of immigrants for all of America’s ills, and that’s been the running theme ever since. It’s manifested itself not just in his rhetoric, which has included giving cover to people waving the flag of white supremacy in Charlottesville, but also in policy, as his administration has rather pointedly abandoned fighting domestic terrorism and instead focused on keeping Muslims and immigrants from Mexico and Central America out of the country. Those who are in American custody right now are locked away in cages in violation of their human rights.

The El Paso shooter wrote in his manifesto that his views “on automation, immigration, and the rest predate Trump and his campaign for president.” That may be true, but he carried this attack out during Trump’s presidency. That distinction matters.

These problems have always existed, but Trump has exacerbated them. What’s more is that this emboldening is going to be the lasting effect of his presidency. Trump could lose next November. Democrats could undo his tax cuts, his attacks on poor and vulnerable people everywhere. They could pack the courts to offset Trump and Mitch McConnell’s attempts to remake the federal judiciary. They could not only ditch Trump’s racist immigration policy, but remake the immigration process into something more closely resembling a system worthy of human dignity. They could finally take some kind of action on gun control to make these sorts of massacres less common, or at least more difficult to carry out.

They could do all of these things, and have popular support for all of them, and it wouldn’t scratch the surface of dealing with this Pandora’s box that Trump has opened. In fact, it would likely provoke an even stronger reaction from the far-right. When you take into account the coming effects of climate change, and automation, and the fact that Latinx population growth is going to keep happening in some form despite the administration’s best efforts, and that a remaking of the American and global economy is the only adequate way to deal with any of these problems, it’s hard to imagine a world in which fascist and white supremacist rage is not perpetually boiling over.

Trump or no Trump, 8chan or no 8chan, this is just how it’s going to be from now on: an increasing number of young, white American (or European) men encouraged to exercise their fury at the idea that they might be “replaced.” This is Donald Trump’s legacy, and every indication thus far is that he’s perfectly fine with that.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

You wouldn’t think it’d be so hard for Trump to look in a mirror

Given what a narcissist our president is, you wouldn’t think he would find it so hard to look in a mirror.

It tells you how low our expectations have sunk for Donald Trump that when he addressed the nation Monday in the wake of the horrors that occurred over the weekend in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, it was considered commendable that he could bring himself to actually utter the words “white supremacism” and “domestic terrorism.”

But in calling upon “our nation” to condemn these poisonous forces “in one voice,” he only underscored how unwilling he has been to do that in his own.

This, after all, is the same president who did not hide his amusement when a supporter at a May rally in Panama City, Fla., called out “shoot them” in response to one of his diatribes about “these people” coming over the border illegally.

“Only in the Panhandle can you get away with that statement,” the president said in tones of affirmation for such a twisted mind-set. “Only in the Panhandle.”

That is the unfiltered Trump. We see him over and over, juicing conspiracies and fear among his most devoted supporters, reveling for hours in their adoration.

The less authentic version appeared Monday in the White House’s Diplomatic Reception Room. He strained for just under 10 minutes to get out the words that had been written for him on a teleprompter.

Though his remarks had been carefully scripted, there was a malfunction somewhere, either in his brain or on the screen in front of him, or possibly both. Trump closed by asking God to “bless those who perished in Toledo,” a city 150 miles from where nine people died early Sunday, when the sound of gunfire interrupted a summer night in a peaceful neighborhood of restaurants and bars.

In his speech Monday, Trump blamed video games and social media and “the glorification of violence in our society.”

But when it comes to the instruments with which that glorification is translated into tragedy, he offered syntactically challenged imagery pulled from the talking points of the National Rifle Association: “Mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger, not the gun.”

Trump did not even go so far as he had suggested he would in a tweet earlier in the day, when he mentioned the possibility of rallying Democrats and Republicans behind strong background checks on purchasers of firearms.

As it happens, bills to expand federal background checks on gun sales and extend the review period to 10 days, from three, were passed in February by the House. They are sitting in the Senate awaiting action, though none is likely, given that the White House has threatened to veto.

In his tweet, Trump raised the possibility that he might be willing to consider tighter background checks — a sensible move to make sure that guns are not finding their way into the hands of dangerous people — if it could be combined with immigration legislation.

Thus, even as Trump acknowledges that new gun laws could save lives, he is willing to hold those lives hostage to his border wall.

Authorities have yet to name the motives of the two young men alleged to have been responsible for the carnage over the weekend.

But in the case of the one who allegedly opened fire in an El Paso Walmart, there is a manifesto linked to him and written shortly before that echoed some of the hateful themes that Trump has sounded about an “invasion” of immigrants. Would Trump have been blaming video games and social media if the ideology the shooter espoused was that of the Islamic State?

While it is true that white supremacy has festered in the fetid corners of the Internet, and represents a darker side of the American character that goes back to the nation’s earliest years, Trump has brought racism into the mainstream. He has glorified intolerance, even made it sound like a form of patriotism.

Whether this kind of toxicity is what exists in the president’s heart, or is merely a cynical play to gin up his base, is irrelevant. What is important is that Trump has proved himself incapable of changing. He is not the person to pull a shattered, bewildered country together and unite it behind a renewed sense of purpose.

“America will rise to the challenge,” he said near the end of Monday’s speech. “We will always have and we always will win.”

Winning. That is one of Trump’s favorite words. It is how he defines everything he does. Shortly after his address, the cable networks updated the death toll from the weekend’s mass shooting from 29 to 31.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Trump’s speech was like a hostage video

The president called the city Toledo.

The city where, in the wee hours of Sunday morning, a shooter with an assault-style rifle gunned down nine people before getting killed by police. Nine people, who seconds earlier were spending a Saturday night with friends and loved ones in Dayton, Ohio’s entertainment district, celebrating the end of one week and the beginning of a new one.

Yes, Dayton, Mr. President. Not Toledo.

Trump spoke Monday morning to address a nation traumatized by two mass shootings over the weekend. First, there was the horror in El Paso where a alleged white supremacist opened fire at a Walmart and killed 22. The victims included Jordan Anchondo, who died shielding her two-month old baby. Her husband Andre died too.

And then, hours later, came the mass murder in Dayton. “We are sickened by this monstrous evil,” said the president on Monday. We need, he said, to “find the courage to answer hatred with unity, devotion and love.”

Nice sentiments. Too bad Trump said them in a flat voice, like he was recording a hostage video. And then, on the final reference, he referred to the city where the second shooting occurred as Toledo. Nothing shows how much you care more than misstating the name of the city where nine people died in a mass shooting, especially after you read it right from the teleprompter only minutes earlier.

Trump is literally the last person who can bring comfort to the grieving, never mind solve the problem of gun violence in the United States. Our president is a failure as both a human being and a leader. We’ve seen it demonstrated time and time again.

Trump has spent the better part of a decade inciting anger and hate. He’s our bully in chief. He went from pushing racist birther theories about President Barack Obama to calling Mexican and other Hispanic immigrants “rapists” and “animals” and “thugs.” He referred to migration to the United States as an “infestation” and “invasion.”

At a rally in the Florida Panhandle in May, Trump asked the crowd, “How do you stop these people?” A man in the crowd answered, “Shoot them.” Trump didn’t miss a beat. “Only in the Panhandle can you get away with that statement.” The crowd cheered widely.

This is hardly the behavior of a man concerned about the impact of his words. It’s certainly not the behavior of someone who should be taken seriously when he says “In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy” and “Hate has no place in America.”

If Trump was truly concerned about the violence his rhetoric unleashed, he would apologize, and then try to do what he could to make sure stuff like this doesn’t happen again. He would, for instance, call for expanded gun control. But no. The rest of the speech was the same warmed-over pablum we always hear from the right after a mass shooting. Trump was slightly more animated as he pushed the canard that mass shootings could be solved by doing “a better job of identifying and acting on early warning signs” and discussed “grisly video games” and called for a reform of “mental health laws to better identify mentally disturbed individuals who may commit acts of violence.”

Please. There are mentally ill individuals who play violent video games in other countries too — people who spend too much time on the Internet imbibing violent rhetoric. There is only one country where this stuff is potentially implicated in mass shootings. The reason for this is because our nation lacks effective gun control, and the man in charge inflames the situation with dehumanizing language. That is Donald Trump, who can’t even be bothered to remember what city a mass murder occurred in. There are no words he can say to make this go away. He owns it.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Cesar Sayoc, who mailed explosive devices to Trump’s critics, sentenced to 20 years in prison

Cesar Sayoc, a fanatical supporter of President Trump who last year mailed explosive devices to prominent Democrats and media figures, was sentenced Monday to 20 years in prison after a judge concluded that Sayoc hated his victims but had not meant to kill them.

Prosecutors had sought a life sentence for the 57-year-old former pizza deliveryman and strip club worker whose “campaign of terror,” they said, coincided with the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections. In all, he mailed 16 inoperative pipe bombs targeting, among others, former president Barack Obama, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and the New York offices of CNN, acting out his paranoid delusions and intense adoration for Trump.

“I am beyond so very sorry for what I did,” Sayoc told U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff. “Now that I am a sober man, I know that I was a sick man. I should have listened to my mother, the love of my life.”

Prosecutors and defense lawyers spent much of Monday’s hearing wrangling over how dangerous the packages truly were to those who handled them.

“What counts is what he did, and what he intended at the time that he did it,” Rakoff said, calling Sayoc’s actions “by any measure horrendous.”

The judge concluded that Sayoc, “though no firearms expert, was fully capable” of building a functioning bomb if he had wanted to do so. “He hated his victims,” the judge added, “but did not wish them dead, at least not by his own hand.”

Sayoc’s defense lawyer Ian Marcus Amelkin pushed for a 10-year sentence, saying he was using large quantities of steroids when he became obsessive in his support for Trump, consuming conspiracy theories from Fox News and elsewhere that fed his rising paranoia.

“It is impossible to separate the political climate and his mental illness when it comes to the slow boil,” Marcus said.

Marcus said that Trump’s rhetoric in office contributed to Sayoc’s beliefs, noting that the prosecution — working for Trump’s Department of Justice — failed to make mention of the president in its prosecuting documents.

Prosecutors downplayed Trump’s rhetoric as a cause.

“He’s offered a whole slew of excuses blaming politicians, politics and the news media” for his actions, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Jane Kim. She said Sayoc’s goal was to “deter and chill political activity.”

Rakoff broadly agreed with Kim’s assessment, saying that he “wasn’t particularly impressed” by the defense team’s claims about the influence of Trump or others, calling that a “sideshow.”

Rakoff said Sayoc’s mental state provided a stark example of “how dysfunctional life, even in our great society, can sometimes be.”

Sayoc’s sentencing comes just two days after the massacre of nearly two dozen people inside a Walmart in El Paso, a horrific act of violence allegedly undertaken out of anger toward immigrants. Several Democrats seeking to challenge Trump in the 2020 election have connected the president’s rhetoric to Saturday’s bloodshed.

The Sayoc case began weeks before the 2018 congressional elections. The suspicious packages prompted a nationwide manhunt, a trail of evidence pointing investigators to the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., area and, eventually, to Sayoc, who lived out of a white van plastered with pro-Trump images. He worked as a DJ or bouncer at strip clubs, and was once charged with threatening the local power company.

After his arrest, Sayoc pleaded guilty in March to 65 counts. Officials said he targeted current and former government officials across the country. In addition to Clinton and Obama, he sent devices to former vice president Joe Biden, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), former CIA director John Brennan, former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., actor Robert De Niro, Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), former attorney general Eric Holder, billionaires George Soros and Thomas Steyer, and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.).

At Sayoc’s guilty plea, he insisted that the devices were “intended to look like pipe bombs,” but that he did not mean for them to detonate. Pressed by the judge to explain further, Sayoc added, “I was aware of the risk that they would explode.”

Federal officials called the wave of potential explosive devices a “domestic terror attack” and accused Sayoc of endangering numerous lives. Prosecutors said Sayoc began searching for the homes of some people targeted as early as last July and continued into the fall.

The first package was found Oct. 22, and the investigation and anxiety grew as more devices were identified in the days that followed. CNN’s New York offices were evacuated when a package addressed to Brennan was found in the mail room, a situation that played out on live television. Other packages were soon found in Florida, Delaware and California.

Within days, authorities closed in on Sayoc outside an auto supply store in Plantation, Fla., after finding what Christopher A. Wray, the FBI director, said was a fingerprint on one of the envelopes containing a device. Wray also said there were potential DNA matches connecting Sayoc to some of the devices.

While none of the devices detonated, Wray said they were “not hoax devices.” Authorities have described them as “improvised explosive devices,” and they said that each of the 16 devices was placed in a padded envelope and filled with explosive material and glass shards meant to function as shrapnel. Outside of each was a photograph of the intended victim with a red “X” marking, officials said.

#Resist

[_priapism]

Dow is down 700 points today.  So much winning.  “Trade wars are easy.”  Since when do we take economic advice from a certified loser, who’s pushed every business he’s ever touched into insolvency or bankruptcy?

[psiberzerker]

Dow is down 700 points today.  So much winning.  “Trade wars are easy.” 

You mispeled whining again.

[Lois]

Trump is working hard to crash the economy before the election.

Trump cannot win a trade war against a dictatorship.  What do they care if a few people starve, or even lots of them?  They've had people starving before.

Trump is not in the same position, American farmers can and will be hurt by this trade war.  And it won't stop once the trade war is over.  Once the Chinese establish new suppliers when they go elsewhere for thier products, who knows if they will come back and buy from American farmers again.