The Trump thread: All things Donald

[Athos_131]

President Trump has made 1,950 false or misleading claims over 347 days

#Resist

[Lois]

President Trump has made 1,950 false or misleading claims over 347 days

#Resost

This is what happens when you believe faux news. The man is a disgrace.

[Jed_]

My button is bigger?  Really?  It’s just so Freudian.

[Katiebee]

Well, he also holds the record for spending 1/3 of his first year in golf courses. That’s a first. No other POTUS has ever spent so much time away from his duties. Yep Make America Great Again.

[Katiebee]

"I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God."

My father pointed me to the oath he swore a few decades ago, and remarked that he had never been released from it. He also said he felt that the first enjoinder was being envoked by the actions of the current POTUS.

He said that any elected official who took on the behavior of someone like Kim Jung-Un, was probably an enemy of the Constitution.

[Athos_131]

Given all the Russian smoke, Trump is probably an enemy of The United States of America.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Trump Tower meeting with Russians 'treasonous', Bannon says in explosive book

There Is No Honor Among Thieves

These guys are going to eat each other.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

From the, "It Takes One To Know One" desk:

Ex-aide Bannon has lost his mind - Trump

#Resist

[Lois]

And we all knew it was just a matter of time before they started stabbing each other in the back.  It's in their nature.

[Northwest]

...

Dear Fucking Lunatic: An open letter to Donald Trump

December 29, 2017

Like most of you, I read Donald Trump’s recent New York Times interview with mouth immutably agape. Then I read this part:

“Yeah, China. … China’s been. … I like very much President Xi. He treated me better than anybody’s ever been treated in the history of China. You know that.”

And fuck me sideways with John Holmes’ fossilized dick, that was quite enough. I'd long since surpassed my recommended yearly allowance of crazy, and as if prodded by some divine imprimatur, this open letter to our “president” poured like incandescent dung from a Chernobyl reindeer’s asshole:

Dear Fucking Lunatic,

I read with interest your recent interview with The New York Times. I couldn’t get past the bit about your being the most popular visitor in the history of fucking China — a country that’s only 2,238 years old, give or take.

Do you know how fucking insane you sound, you off-brand butt plug? That's like the geopolitical equivalent of “that stripper really likes me” — only 10,000 times crazier and less self aware.

You are fucking exhausting. Every day is a natural experiment in determining how long 300 million people can resist coring out their own assholes with an ice auger. Every time I hear a snippet of your Queens-tinged banshee larynx farts, I want to crawl up my own ass with a Union Jack and claim my sigmoid colon for HRH Queen Elizabeth II.

We are fucking tired. As bad as we all thought your presidency would be when Putin got you elected, it’s been inestimably worse.

You called a hostile, nuclear-armed head of state “short and fat”? How the fuck does that help?

You accused a woman — a former friend, no less — of showing up at your resort bleeding from the face and begging to get in. You, you, YOU — the guy who looks like a Christmas haggis inexplicably brought to life by Frosty’s magic hat — yes, you of all people said that.

You attempted — with evident fucking glee — to get 24 million people thrown off their health insurance.

You gave billions away to corporations and the already wealthy while simultaneously telling struggling poor people that you were doing exactly the opposite.

You endorsed a pedophile, praised brutal dictators, and defended LITERAL FUCKING NAZIS!

Ninety-nine percent of everything you say is either false, crazy, incoherent, just plain cruel, or a rancid paella of all four.

Oh, by the way, Puerto Rico is still FUBAR. You got yourself and your family billions in tax breaks for Christmas. What do they get? More paper towels?

Enough, enough, enough, enough! For the love of God and all that is holy, good, and pure, would you please, finally and forever, shut your feculent KFC-hole until you have something valuable  — or even marginally civil — to say?

You are a fried dick sandwich with a side of schlongs. If chlamydia and gonorrhea had a son, you’d appoint him HHS secretary. You are a disgraceful, pustulant hot stew full of casuistry, godawful ideas, unintelligible non sequiturs, and malignant rage.

You are the perfect circus orangutan diaper from Plato’s World of Forms.

So happy new year, Mr. Pr*sident. And fuck you forever.

Oh, and Pence, you oleaginous house ferret. Fuck you, too.

Sincerely,

Everyone

https://www.1001reasons.com/single-post/2017/12/29/Dear-Fucking-Lunatic-An-open-letter-to-Donald-Trump

[Lois]

Yes, and it is all just so sad.

As U.S. Retreats From World Stage, China Moves To Fill The Void

New Yorker journalist Evan Osnos says Chinese leaders think of President Trump as a "paper tiger" who makes promises he can't deliver and who can be "managed" with flattery.

More here:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/08/making-china-great-again

https://www.npr.org/2018/01/03/575288560/journalist-as-u-s-retreats-from-world-stage-china-moves-to-fill-the-void

[Athos_131]

"You Can’t Make This S--- Up": My Year Inside Trump's Insane White House

This is hilarious or terrifying or both.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

It's Been an Open Secret All Along


#Resist

[Athos_131]

Trump lawsuit over White House book 'nonstarter,' legal experts say

#Resist

[Lois]

It's Been an Open Secret All Along


#Resist

We need to see safeguards put in place to ensure people like Trump cannot run for pulic office in the future.

[Athos_131]

Obstruction Inquiry Shows Trump’s Struggle to Keep Grip on Russia Investigation

#Resist

[Athos_131]

All this changes nothing for me.

After Trump the next guy I wanna see jailed in this whole fiasco is Bannon.

#Resist

[joan1984]

"...people like Trump..." ?

You mean American Citizens of age?

[Athos_131]

"...people like Trump..." ?

You mean American Citizens of age?

She probably means racists, misogynists, and pedophiles.

The sort of people you support.

[Athos_131]

Trump is desperate to protect himself. But from what?

Why was President Trump so frantic to ensure that his attorney general would shield him against the inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 election?

For all the unsettling questions swirling about Trump in recent days, this may turn out to be the most important and, for the president, the most ominous. The more information that emerges about Trump’s mania to keep Jeff Sessions in control of the investigation and his fury when the attorney general chose to step aside, the more perilous the president’s legal situation appears.

In that sense, a report by the New York Times’s Michael S. Schmidt may end up being more damaging for Trump than his portrayal in Michael Wolff’s new book. If Schmidt’s reporting is accurate, three consequences follow:

First, White House counsel Donald McGahn must go, because, at Trump’s direction, he improperly pressured Sessions not to step aside from the Russia probe. That Sessions resisted McGahn’s lobbying is laudable but irrelevant. The White House counsel represents the office of the presidency. He isn’t the president’s personal pit bull — his “Roy Cohn,” in Trump’s reported lament. Leaning on the attorney general to remain in charge of a criminal investigation that touches on the president is not part of the White House counsel’s job description.

Second, Sessions may need to go, because he oversaw or directed a public smear campaign against the sitting FBI director, James B. Comey. Schmidt writes that Sessions “wanted one negative article a day in the news media about Mr. Comey, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting” between a congressional staffer and a Sessions aide seeking dirt on Comey. The Justice Department flatly denies this account. But if it turns out to be true, that conduct is far beyond what is appropriate for the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.

Third, the Schmidt report edges Trump himself even closer to having obstructed justice. Whether special counsel Robert S. Mueller III would bring a criminal case on those grounds, there is no doubt that obstructing justice can be the basis for impeachment.

Let’s back up. There are two possible explanations for Trump’s persistent refusal to acknowledge the reality of Russian meddling and his anger over the resulting criminal investigation. The more benign is that he is so insecure that he cannot tolerate any insinuation that his victory is tainted and his presidency illegitimate. The more worrisome is that Trump knows he or those around him have something to hide.

Schmidt’s depiction puts another thumb on the scale of that interpretation. As Schmidt writes, after Sessions’s recusal, “the president erupted in anger in front of numerous White House officials, saying he needed his attorney general to protect him. Mr. Trump said he had expected his top law enforcement official to safeguard him the way he believed Robert F. Kennedy, as attorney general, had done for his brother John F. Kennedy and Eric H. Holder Jr. had for Barack Obama.”

Which raises the question: Protect him from what?

Perhaps merely the stain of an ongoing criminal investigation; see explanation one, above. Some support for this interpretation comes in the form of Trump’s evident disdain for the proper boundaries between a president and his Justice Department. In the most charitable interpretation, Trump felt aggrieved at being investigated for “made-up problems like Russian collusion” and counted on Sessions to make that go away.

But the more persuasive interpretation, based on the totality of the amassed evidence and the new revelations, is that Trump understood Mueller’s investigation as an existential threat. The ferocity of his opposition, as underscored by the new report of ordering McGahn to help keep Sessions in place, lends credence to this view. So do other aspects of Trump’s conduct: demanding Comey’s loyalty; asking him, on the investigation of fired national security adviser Michael Flynn, to “let this go”; drafting a misleading statement about the purpose of Donald Trump Jr.’s 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer peddling dirt on Hillary Clinton.

And, of course, firing Comey, based on the laughable justification that his public statements during the campaign were unfair to Hillary Clinton. Now, with Schmidt’s story, we learn that the initial letter that Trump drafted to justify Comey’s firing — notwithstanding previous denials by the White House — began by explicitly pointing to the “fabricated and politically motivated” Russian investigation.

The lengths to which Trump seems willing to go to shut down this probe and to hide his tracks suggest that something more than his fragile ego is at stake here.

#Resist