The Trump thread: All things Donald

[Jed_]

 2018 March For Life happens today in Washington, DC.  

Over 100,000 Catholics, others, expected for the March and Expo. Constitution Avenue will close for the March and event.

The Annual event will be addressed by President Donald J. Trump, on video from the Rose Garden. (Another first for a sitting U.S. President, by this Administration.)

http://marchforlife.org/march-life-2018/rally-march-info/

http://marchforlife.org/march-life-2018/expo/

I did not see that, however across the nation today there are women’s marches including a very large one in DC.  One issue that has always been important to the vast majority of women is legal and safe access to abortion.  No one disputes that every abortion is a tragedy, but we cannot go backwards in progress for women’s rights.

To quote the late great and brilliant George Carlin (he had many versions of this quote from his standup routines):
‘Have you noticed that most of the women who are against abortion are women you wouldn’t want to fuck in the first place?‘

[joan1984]

Pity you did not see that, as I posted it in General Discussion so all could see.

It had vanished in a short while, and I later discovered it buried in the debris of what passes for a current President of the United States catchall thread.

Perhaps mentioning the President's name in the news about the 2018 March for Life caused it to be dismissed in some way, and relegated to this thread.

The Women's March, complete with knitted 'pussy hats', on the Anniversary of President Trump's Inauguration Day, is centered in Las Vegas in 2018, since there is no political advantage to WashingtonDC, (DC being a all Democrat, all the time, in every election, ever, location.) Nevada has promise for 2018 elections, is what I read about why Las Vegas matters to women this year.

Flights to Las Vegas cost less, with near constant deals from U.S. cities. Also, not so many women booked well in advance for Washington DC as last year, when some actually expected a different election result, and Inauguration.

Alas, their goal was not to be. Not then, not ever. Not ones to waste a no refund reservation and flight plan, the Women's March was ginned up in 2017.

And so, today some celebrate the tragedy of abortion as a privacy right, as if there were a Right To Privacy somewhere in the U.S. Constitution.

Abortion on demand! Free (paid for by someone else)!

Viva Las Vegas! Avoid the Mandalay parking lot!

Cheers!

 2018 March For Life happens today in Washington, DC.  

Over 100,000 Catholics, others, expected for the March and Expo. Constitution Avenue will close for the March and event.

The Annual event will be addressed by President Donald J. Trump, on video from the Rose Garden. (Another first for a sitting U.S. President, by this Administration.)

http://marchforlife.org/march-life-2018/rally-march-info/

http://marchforlife.org/march-life-2018/expo/

I did not see that, however across the nation today there are women’s marches including a very large one in DC.  One issue that has always been important to the vast majority of women is legal and safe access to abortion.  No one disputes that every abortion is a tragedy, but we cannot go backwards in progress for women’s rights.

To quote the late great and brilliant George Carlin (he had many versions of this quote from his standup routines):
‘Have you noticed that most of the women who are against abortion are women you wouldn’t want to fuck in the first place?‘

[Northwest]

"...buried in the debris of what passes for a current President of the United States..."

That was my favorite part. Thanks for posting.

[Katiebee]

The level of obliviousness is always impressive.

[Northwest]

The level of obliviousness is always impressive.

Damn you! I was going to say that.

[Athos_131]

Jared Kushner Is China’s Trump Card

Kushner had an interim clearance that gave him access to intelligence. He was also added to a list of recipients of the President’s Daily Brief, or P.D.B., a top-secret digest of the U.S. government’s most closely held and compartmentalized intelligence reports. By the end of the Obama Administration, seven White House officials were authorized to receive the same version of the P.D.B. that appeared on the President’s iPad. The Trump Administration expanded the number to as many as fourteen people, including Kushner. A former senior official said, of the growing P.D.B. distribution list, “It got out of control. Everybody thought it was cool. They wanted to be cool.”

Some people in the office of the director of National Intelligence questioned the expansion, but officials who reported to Trump didn’t want to risk irritating him by trying to exclude his son-in-law and other new additions. David Priess, a former C.I.A. officer who delivered the P.D.B. during the George W. Bush Administration and is the author of “The President’s Book of Secrets,” said that Kushner’s situation was unprecedented: “Having studied the President’s Daily Brief’s six-decade history, I have not come across another case of a White House official being a designated recipient of the P.D.B., for that length of time, without having a full security clearance.

Why does a man who can't recall what foreign contacts he made have access to classified information?

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Trump's dealmaker image tarnished by U.S. government shutdown

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Trump’s 24-year-old drug policy appointee was let go at law firm after he ‘just didn’t show’

A former Trump campaign worker appointed at age 23 to a top position in the White House’s drug policy office had been let go from a job at a law firm because he repeatedly missed work, a partner at the firm said.

While in college, late in 2014 or early in 2015, Taylor Weyeneth began working as a legal assistant at the New York firm O’Dwyer & Bernstien. He was “discharged” in August 2015, partner Brian O’Dwyer said in an interview.

“We were very disappointed in what happened,” O’Dwyer said. He said that he hired Weyeneth in part because both men were involved in the same fraternity, and that the firm invested time training him for what was expected to be a longer relationship. Instead, he said, Weyeneth “just didn’t show.”

In a résumé initially submitted to the government, Weyeneth said he worked at the firm until April 2016. When an FBI official called as part of a background check in January 2017, the firm said Weyeneth had left eight months earlier than the résumé indicated, O’Dwyer said.

A spokesman at the Office of National Drug Control Policy — where Weyeneth, 24, is deputy chief of staff — said Weyeneth was unavailable for comment. In replies to The Post, the White House did not address questions about Weyeneth’s work at the law firm.

An administration official previously said that Weyeneth revised his résumé to correct “errors.” In a revised résumé, Weyeneth said he worked at the law firm from November 2014 to August 2015. Details of his time there and the circumstances of his departure have not been previously reported.   

A Jan. 14 Post story detailing Weyeneth’s rapid rise at the drug policy office, or ONDCP, prompted 10 Democratic senators on Wednesday to write President Trump. The lawmakers, including Sens. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), expressed “extreme concern” about Weyeneth’s promotion and unfilled drug policy jobs.

“You have claimed that the opioid epidemic is a top priority for your administration, but the personnel you have staffing these key agencies — and the lack of nominees to head them — is cause for deep concern,” the letter said.

Following his graduation, in May 2016, Weyeneth served as a paid member of Trump’s presidential campaign and then as a volunteer with the transition, arranging housing for senior administration officials. He worked closely with Rick Dearborn, now White House deputy chief of staff.

Weyeneth’s only professional experience after college and before becoming an appointee was working on the Trump campaign and transition.

After being contacted by The Post about Weyeneth’s qualifications and inconsistencies on his résumés, an administration official on Jan. 12 said Weyeneth will return to the position he initially held at the agency, as a White House liaison. The official said that Weyeneth has been primarily performing administrative work, rather than making policy decisions, and that he had “assumed additional duties and an additional title following staff openings.”

On his résumés, Weyeneth revised dates relating to job assignments, and he cut the number of hours he claimed he had volunteered at a monastery in Queens while at St. Johns from 275 to 150. A third résumé, provided by the White House, does not mention volunteer work at the monastery.

Weyeneth left unchanged a portion of his résumés that indicated he had a master’s degree from Fordham University, though a university official told The Post he has not finished his coursework. Weyeneth also left unchanged an assertion that he served for three years as vice president of Kappa Sigma. That claim was contradicted by a fraternity spokesman, Nathan Glanton, who told The Post that Weyeneth was vice president for only 18 months.

Weyeneth was named to the liaison job at ONDCP in March, after a brief stint at the Treasury Department. In the months following, seven of 11 political appointees assigned to the office left, including a person who was serving as general counsel and acting chief of staff. Amid the turnover and vacancies, Weyeneth was promoted to deputy chief of staff in July, according to his LinkedIn page. He also assumed some of the chief of staff’s responsibilities, internal documents show.

An administration official said Friday that Weyeneth remains deputy chief of staff as the search for a replacement continues.

#Resist

[Katiebee]

The incompetent being led by the unfit. The only way to describe most Trump appointees.

[Athos_131]

A President Not Sure of What He Wants Complicates the Shutdown Impasse

WASHINGTON — When President Trump mused last year about protecting immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children, calling them “these incredible kids,” aides implored him privately to stop talking about them so sympathetically.

When he batted around the idea of granting them citizenship over a Chinese dinner at the White House last year with Democratic leaders, Mr. Trump’s advisers quickly drew up a list of hard-line demands to send to Capitol Hill that they said must be included in any such plan.

And twice over the past two weeks, Mr. Trump has privately told lawmakers he is eager to strike a deal to extend legal status to the so-called Dreamers, only to have his chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and senior policy adviser, Stephen Miller, make clear afterward that such a compromise was not really in the offing — unless it also included a host of stiffer immigration restrictions.

As the government shutdown continued for its second day on Sunday, one thing was clear to both sides of the negotiations to end it: The president was either unwilling or unable to articulate the immigration policy he wanted, much less understand the nuances of what it would involve.

Both sides have reason to be confused. Each time Mr. Trump has edged toward compromise with Democrats, he has appeared to be reined in by his own staff, which shares the hawkish immigration stance that fueled his campaign. And Republican leaders, bruised by past experience with a president who has rarely offered them consistent cover on a politically challenging issue, are loath to guess at his intentions.

The result has been a paralysis not only at the White House but on Capitol Hill, complicating the chances for an ultimate resolution of how to protect hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants, the problem underlying the shutdown. And it has raised questions not only about Mr. Trump’s grasp of the issue that animated his campaign and energizes his core supporters, but his leadership.

“There’s a real sense that there’s a disconnect between the president and his staff on immigration issues, and people on all sides are seeking to exploit that disconnect,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist who advised Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, one of Mr. Trump’s rivals, in his 2016 bid for the White House. “This is what happens when you have a president who is not clear and consistent on what he will accept: It emboldens all parties to take positions that they won’t compromise.”

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, suggested that Mr. Trump was in the thrall of extremists on his staff pulling him back from more moderate instincts on immigration.

“His heart is right on this issue; I think he’s got a good understanding of what will sell, and every time we have a proposal, it is only yanked back by staff members,” Mr. Graham told reporters on Capitol Hill on Sunday. “As long as Stephen Miller is in charge of negotiating immigration, we are going nowhere. He’s been an outlier for years.”

Mr. Miller, 32, has been the ideological architect behind much of Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda and a tart-tongued and unapologetic true believer in the president’s “America First” approach to the issue. A former aide to Attorney General Jeff Sessions when he was in the Senate, he cut his teeth on Capitol Hill as a lonely gladiator against bipartisan efforts to overhaul the immigration system and provide a pathway to citizenship for roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants.

The White House had a tart retort for Mr. Graham, a onetime opponent of Mr. Trump who in recent months seemed to be growing close to the president.

“As long as Senator Graham chooses to support legislation that sides with people in this country illegally and unlawfully instead of our own American citizens, we’re going nowhere,” said Hogan Gidley, a White House spokesman. “He’s been an outlier for years.”

The intraparty spat unfolded while Mr. Trump spent the weekend at the White House out of sight and off the airwaves, unusually disengaged, except for some phone calls, for a president who enjoys the limelight.

His only comment on the situation came on Twitter on Sunday morning, when he vented his frustration as the shutdown threatened to bleed into the workweek, complicating his plans for a trip on Wednesday to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and the run-up to his first State of the Union address on Jan. 30.

“If stalemate continues, Republicans should go to 51% (Nuclear Option) and vote on real, long term budget, no C.R.’s!” Mr. Trump said on Twitter, using the abbreviation for a continuing resolution, legislation to temporarily extend government funding.

He was referring to filibuster rules in the Senate, which effectively require a three-fifths vote, or 60 senators, to advance major legislation, rather than a simple majority. Republicans have 51 seats.

And he took a tone far different from the one he used this month in pitching a “bill of love” to address immigration, posting on Twitter that, “The Dems just want illegal immigrants to pour into our nation unchecked.”

Underscoring that hard-line position, his campaign released a TV advertisement featuring an undocumented man who killed two police officers, and saying Democrats who refused to support a government funding measure without progress toward an immigration deal were “complicit in every murder committed by illegal immigrants.”

Those who know the president best argue that leaving the legislative haggling to his staff is merely the style of an executive used to delegating the small stuff to his underlings.

“The misconception is that the president does not know what he does not know. In my experience, the reality is that the president knows what he does not know and does not think he needs to know it,” said Sam Nunberg, a former campaign adviser. “He’s a C.E.O. The tiny details are for his staff.”

But Mr. Trump is also a showman who is intensely focused on pleasing the audience in front of him at the moment, a habit that some confidants believe has led to misunderstandings about what the president is actually willing to accept in any deal. He often leaves people with the impression that he agrees with them, stressing whatever position is convenient at the time.

Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that presses for less immigration, said Mr. Trump had maintained his tough line on the issue despite occasionally talking about a compromise.

“He seems to make commitments that he is not going to keep,” Mr. Krikorian said. “His inclinations are hawkish on immigration, but he seems to like to be agreeable to people and nod his head when he’s at a meeting and people are saying things, and try to make a deal.”

Mr. Krikorian said that he did not subscribe to the “Svengali theory” of the White House that cast Mr. Miller as a puppet master on immigration, but that it often fell to him and Mr. Kelly to explain the nuances of certain terms or proposals to a president unfamiliar with them. The chief of staff alluded to that dynamic in a closed-door meeting with Democratic lawmakers last week and later in an interview with Fox News, enraging Mr. Trump.

Immigration advocates hold a darker view.

“The president should trust his instincts and cut a deal,” said Kevin Appleby, the senior director of international migration policy at the Center for Migration Studies. “He is president and should not be the puppet of a few immigration restrictionist staffers, including his chief of staff. The perception is that they have total control over him, to the detriment of the nation.”

Mr. Kelly, a retired four-star general who headed the United States Southern Command and was Mr. Trump’s first homeland security secretary, has emphasized immigration enforcement inside the country rather than policing the borders while Mr. Trump has indicated that is not as high a priority for him.

On Sunday, Mr. Kelly fielded most of the calls from Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, and the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin. The president was urged for a second day to step back from the fray, and for a second day he vented to aides that he wanted to do more to get involved.

Yet when Mr. Trump has become engaged, he has sometimes created problems for himself and his party.

Mr. Trump has demonstrated confusion over time about the details of immigration policy, including during a televised meeting in the Cabinet Room this month with lawmakers of both parties.

When Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said she wanted a “clean DACA bill,” Mr. Trump quickly agreed, only to have Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the majority leader, pipe up to explain that meant accepting a stand-alone bill to legalize a group of undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, without any security measures or other conditions the president had cited as priorities.

During a closed portion of that meeting, Mr. Trump snapped at staff members for handing out a sheet of paper he had not seen before that included an elaborate plan for border security.

“The president looked at it and said: ‘Who did this? This is way too much. I didn’t approve this,’” Mr. Graham said on Sunday.

At that same session, he added, Mr. Trump had talked about a request of $18 billion for border security, and said he could build a wall for less.

“So what does the White House staff do a couple days later? They pitch a proposal for $33 billion,” Mr. Graham said. “That’s just not credible.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Watchdog group files complaint against Trump campaign over reported payout to Stormy Daniels

In a pair of federal complaints, Common Cause, a nonprofit government watchdog group, argued that the settlement amounted to an unreported in-kind contribution to Trump's campaign. The group called on the Justice Department and Federal Election Commission to investigate.

These complaints focused on the Wall Street Journal's report earlier this month that Trump's longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen, had negotiated a secret $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels, the porn star, not long before the presidential election in 2016. The Washington Post has not independently verified that settlement, which is said to have been finalized as Trump was facing numerous accusations of sexual misconduct from women during the final weeks of the campaign.

This settlement should have been considered a campaign expense “because the funds were paid for the purpose of influencing the 2016 presidential general election,” Paul S. Ryan, a campaign finance expert at the group, said in a letter addressed to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein.

The pair of complaints filed by Common Cause said that the source of the $130,000 payment remains unknown, but they added that regardless of where it originated — even “if Donald J. Trump provided the funds” — the money was aimed at affecting the election and then never reported.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Power and Integrity at the FBI: Chris Wray Stands Up to the President and the Attorney General

#Resist

[Athos_131]

 "  Russia,  Russia , Russia  "

Sessions Is Interviewed in Mueller’s Russia Investigation

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Michigan man allegedly threatened to gun down CNN employees

#Resist

[Northwest]

Michigan man allegedly threatened to gun down CNN employees

#Resist

Yup. I waiting to see if Joan shows up today, of it goes quiet from that quarter.

[Jed_]

Michigan man allegedly threatened to gun down CNN employees

#Resist

And screaming at CNN employees about fake news.  Now I wonder who inspired him to make that false accusation?

[joan1984]

Michigan man allegedly threatened to gun down CNN employees

#Resist

Sometimes you feels like a nut, sometimes you don't.

[Northwest]

Nope; it wasn't Joan. We're good.

[Athos_131]

Sometimes you feels like a nut, sometimes you don't.

This isn't the first time you've supported violence against the media.

#Resist

[Jed_]

Michigan man allegedly threatened to gun down CNN employees

#Resist

Sometimes you feels like a nut, sometimes you don't.

You can’t just dismiss him as a nut, when Trump tells his base a free press is the enemy of the people, and the guy uses Trump’s favorite phrase ‘fake media’ and Trump’s favorite target of that baseless label CNN.