Anything New? The Daily, Hourly Craziness of Donald J. Trump (Days 1-90; Year II)

HAVING CHRONICLED President Trump’s  first year in office, in four detailed posts, we begin anew.

(Go to any of these: link, link, link and link.)

As expected, the chaos and incompetence mount. The danger to the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law increases.

TRUMP ARCHIVE

1/20/18:  Trump begins the second year of his reign with his government shuttered. Luckily, he still has a functioning iPhone. This means he can still issue his all-important tweets.

Mostly he tweets about how terrible Democrats are (ten posts since the witching hour shutdown on January 19). A second favorite topic is tweeting links to Fox News and praise of himself (seven). Two links to son Eric’s feed include effusive and unbiased praise for Dad.

“People have seen a year that’s incredible, that’s been filled with nothing but the best for our country, America…” Eric insists.

Eric is just happy because—so far—Special Counsel Mueller has not called on him to testify in the Russian investigation.

1/21/18: As breakfast time approaches in Washington D.C., Trump can take solace knowing all Americans and all peoples round the globe love him. He knows this to be true because he binge-watches Fox News. Did you realize, for example, that Brad Blakeman gave the president excellent marks for his first year on the throne? Trump believes we all should know. “Thank you to Brad Blakeman on @FoxNews for grading year one of my presidency with an “A” - and likewise to Doug Schoen for the very good grade and statements,” he tweets.

Year Two begins with Congress unable to pass a budget. There are warnings that the deficit for 2018 may surpass $1 trillion. The U.S. Treasury reports it will borrow $441 billion during the first quarter of this year. This kind of deficit spending used to bother GOP “fiscal hawks.”

Now Paul Ryan pecks for corn and clucks like a hen.

Meanwhile, the reputation of the United States has suffered grievously in a year under Trump. To be more precise: It has reached the lowest level ever recorded. According to Gallup, respect for America was 48 percent during President Obama’s final year in office. Under Trump it stands at 30 percent.

Respect has fallen by at least 10 percentage points in countries normally our allies. These include Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan and South Korea. And approval fell by 40 points in Norway. That’s where the president says all the best potential immigrants live!

With the government shut down, all the White House toadies are making the cable news rounds, blaming Democrats. According to Kellyanne Conway, Democrats hate the U.S. military.

A message for Cadet Bone Spurs.

Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois fights back. (Duckworth lost both legs in 2004, when the helicopter she was piloting was shot down near Taji, Iraq.) In a speech in the House of Representatives, she responds to the president’s claims that Democrats hate the military:

I will not be lectured about what our military needs by a five deferment draft-dodger. And I have a message for Cadet Bone Spurs: If you cared about our military, you’d stop baiting Kim Jong-un into a war that could put 85,000 American troops and millions of innocent civilians in danger.

Am I the only one secretly hoping Trump will offer up some furious tweet-insult in response? Perhaps he might say: “Duckworth is no hero. I like people who don’t get shot down and lose both legs.”

You know he might.

Some people sacrifice for their country. Other people are Trump.

1/22/18: The GOP-controlled Congress manages to rack up an average approval rating of 15.8%. Most Americans agree that House Speaker Ryan has no more spine than a bowl of butterscotch pudding.

1/23/18: Immigration talk is all the rage in Washington. Trump’s right-wing base hates immigrants because immigrants want to kill Americans with saws, hammers, shovels and garden tools.

Let’s take a trip to Texas—where they really, really, really need a wall!

“Texas lives on immigrant labor. Our economy is the way it is partly because cost of living is cheap and the reason for that is labor is cheap.”

Jeff Nielsen, Houston Contractors Association

Look closely and you notice something odd. Texas government is dominated by the GOP. Texas has a GOP governor. The GOP controls the Texas House of Representatives and the Texas Senate. The state has two Republican U.S. senators and Republican-gerrymandered congressional districts ensure Republicans send 25 GOP representatives to the U.S. House of Representatives vs. 11 Democrats. And yet undocumented workers are employed all over the state.

Despite what Trump & Co. would have you believe, they aren’t killing people. They’re laying brick, finishing drywall and shingling homes. According to the Houston Chronicle, 400,000 construction jobs in Texas are filled by undocumented workers.

Why?

They work for half what American workers might demand (see, Polish workers: 11/27/17). Jeff Nielsen, executive vice president of the Houston Contractors Association, is blunt. “Texas lives on immigrant labor. Our economy is the way it is partly because cost of living is cheap and the reason for that is labor is cheap.”

(I found that 400,000 number so surprising, I decided to recheck my sources. The sources agree.)

A Pew study completed in 2014 estimated that 1 in every 12 Texas jobs was filled by an undocumented worker. They were hired mostly by GOP-leaning business owners, almost all of whom would argue what we what we need most if we want to help real American workers would be massive tax cuts for businesses! Tax cuts would allow them to hire more workers!

This is the GOP sucker’s bet.

This is the GOP sucker’s bet. A GOP president insists he’s going to build a big, beautiful wall to keep illegal immigrants out. GOP lawmakers, local, state and federal, talk about helping the real American worker and many of those real American workers vote for GOP candidates because, hey, Democrats want to “take away all their guns.” Democrats want to make “war on Christmas” and let transgender individuals invade bathrooms. Meanwhile, GOP business types drive wages down for American workers by hiring the undocumented.

Also: they ship jobs overseas for fun.

  

Not all undocumented immigrants want to kill you.

Postscript: Might I add, as a card-carrying liberal, that I believe Donald J. Trump is a sack of excrement when he hints that all Mexican immigrants are rapists and murderers and jaywalking psychos. I figure the average person from Mexico, entering the U.S. legally or not, is pretty much the same as the average native-born citizen. I figure the average immigrant in 2018 has the same motivation my equally-reviled Irish immigrant ancestors had in 1846.

I taught American history for decades. I don’t forget that my ancestors were supposedly a “threat” to traditional American values.

Why?

They were Catholic. 

The Irish were going to turn control of the U.S. government over to the Pope.

1/24/18: Donald J. is packing a bag, getting ready for his trip to Davos, Switzerland, where he will deliver a big speech at the economic summit. The First Lady is not packing her sexy undergarments—or anything else.

She isn’t going. She has a sudden “scheduling conflict.” That conflict is known as Stormy Daniels, the porn star.

Speaking with reporters later in the day, Trump is asked if he’s ready to talk to Robert Mueller. He assures them, “I‘m looking forward to it, actually. I would do it under oath,” he adds. “I would like to do it as soon as possible.”

Hearing the news, Mitch McConnell faints dead away.

A chorus of right-wing voices howl. Rush Limbaugh warns that same night: “Don’t do it,” he tells the president. “I don’t care what format. I don’t care what circumstance. Don’t do it. There’s nothing to gain. Especially if they’re off the ‘collusion’ business, there’s nothing to gain by talking to Mueller.”

1/25/18: The New York Times reports that the president wanted to fire Robert Mueller last summer. This makes Sean Hannity furious. On his nightly show he calls the story “Fake News.” His sources cannot confirm the Times story. Boy does that piss Hannity off! He warns loyal Fox News fans the Times is “trying to distract you.” Trump would never think of firing….wait….what?

Hannity is informed that, yes, Fox sources are confirming the story. What can a right-wing shill do in this situation?

Hannity quickly cuts to a car chase.

1/26/18: The Big Topic on cable news is the “perjury trap” which it seems the president might step into if he talks to Robert Mueller.

One right-wing thinker who is taking no chances regarding the perjury trap would be Patrick Buchanan. He warns that Trump must avoid the trap at all cost. “If the president's legal team lets Trump sit for hours answering Mueller’s agents, they should be disbarred for malpractice.” Yes. Trump should avoid answering questions. That is a good strategy, for any crook.

1/27/18: Trump insists Democrats don’t want a DACA deal to protect the Dreamers. (These are the 800,000 young undocumented men and women who were perfectly safe under an Obama-era executive order which was terminated five months ago by Donald J. Trump.)

Also, Trump insists Democrats want millions of murderers to storm across the border to kill red-blooded white Americans wearing $19.95 MAGA hats.

Finally, he wants Congress to set aside $25 billion to build a wall along the border with Mexico.

1/28/18: The president devotes part of his day to arguing with the rapper Jay-Z on Twitter. Who could make this up! Trump wants all the credit for the lowest “Black Unemployment” levels ever recorded.

This chart, published by FactCheck, shows who gets most credit for the decline since 2009—after the economy crashed under President George W. Bush. Hint: that individual’s initials would be B. O.

See also: Bureau of Labor Statistics.

1/29/18: The president tweets congratulations to new Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. Trump’s previous choice to head HHS had to resign after sticking taxpayers for a million dollars’ worth of unnecessary charter flight costs.

In other words, Trump drains the swamp—fills it—and drains it again. Then he fills it all over.

What makes Azar such a fine pick? During his five years at Eli Lilly, that drug company tripled the price of insulin, a life-saving drug millions of Americans living with incurable type-1 diabetes must inject every day.

For even more fun, read up on 300 federal and state fines, totaling $35.7 billion, levied on Big Pharma companies, between 1991 and 2015. Many of those fines had to do with defrauding Medicare.

In any case, I think we can all agree. The drug companies only push products because they want us to live longer, happier lives, with more boners per man. Buy some Viagra today! This is why Big Pharma worked so hard to send 20.8 million pain pills to one town in West Virginia, with a population of 2,900! Those people had a lot of pain, as in 7,142 pills per person—including babies.

Drug overdose deaths skyrocket.

1/30/18: Trump supporters try out a brand-new argument in the Mueller investigation. The president should refuse to answer questions. He has absolutely nothing to hide. So why bother to testify!

Chris Christie, former least-popular Governor of New Jersey ever, says Trump should button his lip. “I don’t think the President of the United States—unless there are credible allegations, which I don’t believe there are—should be sitting across from the special counsel. The presidency is different. I don’t think they should do that.”

Who will decide if allegations are credible?

Trump.

Meanwhile, Trump delivers his second State of the Union Address. He doesn’t insult anyone. So, it looks like a huge success. It also turns out to be the third longest in history, partly because Trump talks really slowly so dimwitted Americans can follow his logic-no-logic speech. In eighty minutes, the president uses 5,146 words. That would be roughly 64 per minute, half normal speed.

Fox News is excited, however, because in his address Trump uses the word “America” 82 times.

I can top that right here: America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America.

Why not: American.

I win 84-82.

This apparently, if Fox liked me, would prove I was a great American, myself.

The blogger enlisted in the Marines in 1968.

1/31/18: Remember the famous Trump Tower meeting with Don Jr. and other Trump campaign officials, with a bunch of Russians, to get dirt on Hillary Clinton?

You might remember, even though no one in the meeting did.

Hicks was contemplating obstruction of justice.

The New York Times reports that Mark Corallo will soon talk with Mueller’s investigators. Corallo, once spokesman for the president’s legal team, will describe a previously undisclosed conference call with Trump and White House aide Hope Hicks. Hicks, he has told colleagues, made it clear during the call that emails Don Jr. had sent and received about the meeting “will never get out.” Only a few people received them, she said. So....couldn’t they just, um….

Hearing this, Corallo feared Hicks was contemplating obstruction of justice. Soon after, the president supervised the drafting of a statement that obscured the purpose of that meeting—which to reasonable people might sound like potential grounds for—yes—a charge of obstruction of justice.

According to two people with knowledge of the discussion, “Mr. Trump was insistent about including language that the meeting was about Russian adoption.” Don Jr. then insisted on one change. The final statement read:

It was a short introductory meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to stop by. We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at that time and there was no follow up.

Don Jr.’s change was to include the word: “primarily.” But it wasn’t. The meeting was primarily about gathering dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Corallo has been covering his ass for some time now. He related his concerns after the call to three colleagues, who later gave the story to the Times. The paper summed it up. 

Corallo:

told colleagues he was alarmed not only by what Ms. Hicks said—either she was being naïve or was suggesting that the emails could be withheld from investigators —but also that she had said it in front of the president without a lawyer on the phone and that the conversation could not be protected by lawyer-client privilege.

Corallo was apparently so concerned by the call with the president and White House Babe Hicks he notified White House lawyers, jotted down notes to memorialize it and shared concerns with Steve Bannon.

   

Hicks may have obstructed justice.

February 1, 2018: Trump is feeling good about his State of the Union Address. He is feeling so good he decides to tweet. First, he says 45.6 million people watched, which is true. Then he asserts that was the largest audience in history. Like so much of what he says this is untrue. It’s less than watched George W. Bush’s first speech in 2002 (51.7 million) or his second in 2003 (62 million). It’s less than listened to Obama’s first State of the Union Address in 2009 (48 million). And it is way less than watched Bill Clinton’s State of the Union Addresses.

*

MEANWHILE, IMMIGRATION is in the news. Did you realize the president has revoked Temporary Protective Status for 200,000 Salvadorians living legally in this country? More than half arrived before 1990. Now they may have to return to a country they barely remember.

Did you know they have 193,000 children (combined), born in the United States, and therefore citizens?

Too bad they’re not Norwegians (see: 1/11/18).

If they were, we can bet “I’m-the-least-racist-person-you-know” Trump would find some way to make it possible for all to remain.

New Mexico “Teacher of the Year” is a Dreamer

While we’re on the topic, did you know 9,000 Dreamers, now at risk of being deported, are working as teachers in this country? That includes New Mexico “Teacher of the Year,” Ivonne Orozco.

2/2/18: Rep. Devin Nunes releases a three-and-a-third-page memo, proving that all those who work for Trump are innocent lambs and all top officials with the F.B.I. and Department of Justice are crooks.

According to Nunes, in 2016, one member of the Trump campaign, Carter Page, was placed under a FISA warrant without cause. This proves that General Flynn and George Papadopoulos, who have already pled guilty, are innocent!!! Also, Paul Manafort and Rick Gates shouldn’t stand trial. As for Don Jr. and Jared, this means the secret meeting they had with Russian agents no longer matters.

It probably stings a little when the largest newspaper in his home district, the Fresno Bee, labels Nunes, “Trump’s stooge.”

2/3/18: Trump wakes up in a sunny mood. According to no less a legal authority than himself, the Nunes memo proves that he is innocent of all wrongdoing regarding Russia. He tweets:

This memo totally vindicates “Trump” in probe. But the Russian Witch Hunt goes on and on. Their was no Collusion and there was no Obstruction (the word now used because, after one year of looking endlessly and finding NOTHING, collusion is dead). This is an American disgrace!

2/4/18: The president withdraws Kathleen Hartnett White’s name from consideration to head up the Council on Environmental Quality. Even Senate Republicans have concerns about her qualifications. In 2014, for example, White touted the virtues of fossil fuels. She argued that that they helped end slavery because they “dissolved the economic justification” for it.

“The gas of life.”

Later, White said producing more carbon dioxide and releasing it into the atmosphere was good news—because carbon dioxide was “the gas of life.”

White also claimed that climate change regulation was a conspiracy pushed by communists. 

2/5/18: Trump loves to talk about all the stock market gains since he took over. But today the market bombs, dropping 1,175 points. This forces the president to fall back on his other favorite tweeting topic: Insults!

One tweet allows him to call five people liars. What are all five lying about? The Russian investigation:

Little Adam Schiff, who is desperate to run for higher office, is one of the biggest liars and leakers in Washington, right up there with Comey, Warner, Brennan and Clapper! Adam leaves closed committee hearings to illegally leak confidential information. Must be stopped!

*

THE U.S. SUPREME COURT allows a ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to stand.

In that decision judges ruled a gerrymandered map drawn by Republicans “clearly, plainly and palpably” violated the state constitution.

That map allowed the party to capture 13 of 18 U.S. House seats in 2012, even though Democrats polled 2.7 million votes to 2.5 million for Republicans.

In 2016, Republicans did increase their vote totals because—unlike all the whining about “rigged” elections Trump does—our elections are generally well-run. This time they polled 3.1 million votes (53% of the total). Democrats polled 2.6 million and Republicans again won 13 of 18 seats.

*

TRUMP TOPS off another busy day with a campaign-style rally in Cincinnati. In another rambling talk, he complains about the response of Democratic lawmakers during his recent State of the Union Address. He’s mad because when he said, “you have the lowest black unemployment in the history of our country,” all the Democrats didn’t rise and applaud like an audience at a Kim Jong-un speech.

Trump looked at the lawmakers’ faces. Dead silence from the Democratic side of the aisle.

“Not a smile,” he said. “Half the room is going totally crazy,” he told his audience, but the other side was giving off nothing but “bad energy.”

You’re up there, you’ve got half the room [Republican lawmakers] going totally crazy wild, they loved everything, they want to do something great for our country, and you have the other side even on positive news, really positive news like that, they were like death and un-American. Un-American.

Trump hears someone shout, hesitates and points out at the crowd.

“Somebody said treasonous,” he noted and then shrugged. “I mean, yeah, I guess, why not. Can we call that treason? Why not? I mean they certainly didn’t seem to love our country very much.”

2/6/18: The free press reveals the story of Tiffany Brown, hired by FEMA to send 30 million meals to Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria. At $5.10 per, the contract was worth $153 million. But it turns out Brown is the sole owner and employee of Tribute Contracting LLC.

Thirteen people must make 2.3 million sandwiches.

What could go wrong? Brown can start making sandwiches in her kitchen or hire a wedding caterer. She hires the caterer.

You can already guess this is not going to end well. The caterer has eleven employees. So, unless each employee, the caterer and Ms. Brown pitch in and make 2.3 million sandwiches apiece they’re going to have trouble meeting the FEMA goal.

In fact, by the time FEMA orders Brown to stop work—because the contract is canceled and people in Puerto Rico are probably dead from starvation—Tribute has managed to ship 50,000 meals.

The caterer reports having another 75,000 stored in a warehouse. But Brown has been unable to find proper shipping. In terms of screw-ups, this is a good one, with Brown also failing to include the heating portion of what FEMA has contracted for her to provide: “self-heating meals.”

You may recall when Trump gave himself the highest possible grades on his efforts to deliver hurricane relief. Trump said he got a 10 out of 10. He was doing A+ work. General Kelly gave the president two gold stars to stick on his Presidential Briefing Book.

Sadly, this fiasco was not the only blemish on the Trump report card. Consider the less-than-stellar work performed by Bronze Star L.L.C. The company, formed only in August, contracted to send 500,000 plastic tarps and 60,000 rolls of plastic sheeting to Puerto Rico and do it for $30 million. When FEMA finally realized Bronze Star wasn’t getting the job done the company had shipped a grand total of 0 tarps and 0 rolls of plastic sheeting. (See: 2/5/18.)

2/7/18: Great news! A top aide is leaving his White House job and there are no allegations he met with Russians or secretly jetted to Moscow or took any big payoffs from friends of Vladimir Putin!

The aide in question is Rob Porter, who unfortunately does have two ex-wives who went public with accusations of domestic abuse. A third woman made similar claims but asked that her identity remain secret.

Naturally, when these allegations surfaced, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly was quick to…come to Porter’s defense!

“Rob Porter,” Kelly told reporters, “is a man of true integrity and honor, and I can’t say enough good things about him. He is a friend, a confidante and a trusted professional. I am proud to serve alongside him.”

In other words, these attacks were just more faaaaaaaaaake……

Uh…Porter’s second ex-wife reveals an emergency restraining order issued in 2010 against him. After the couple separated, she says Porter returned to her apartment, smashed a glass door to gain entry and left only when he heard her call 911 and provide her name and address.

And…umm…Porter’s first ex-wife describes him as “verbally, emotionally and physically abusive,” pretty much the Terrible Husband Trifecta. To support her claims, she provides reporters with a picture of herself, sporting a black eye and swollen cheek, taken during her marriage.

After hearing Kelly defend Porter, his second ex has this to add: “Rob is in fact charming and intelligent and diligent and extremely good at his job.”

Okay…that line is definitely going to show up on Fox Newwwwwwwww….

“And, in capital letters, abusive and manipulative and toxic in his personal relationships,” she adds.

At least Porter did a good job for Trump. Picture of Porter's ex.

*

STILL, YOU MIGHT ARGUE that Donald J. Trump is getting the hang of picking the right people for the right jobs. After all, Porter is better than Carl Higbie, who had to leave his post in January.

We all know how much the president wants to clamp down on illegal immigrants pouring into this country, each and every one, intent on doing us harm. Also: taking jobs in hotels and making beds

And picking strawberries.

Bring a gun. Let’s shoot illegal immigrants.

Higbie had some great ideas about how to curb the tide and you can see why his ideas might have appealed to Trump, who just happens to be a big fan of Norwegian immigrants, who just happen to be white. In an episode on a radio show, ironically called Sound of Freedom, Higbie had this to say:

What’s so wrong with wanting to put up a fence and saying, “hey, everybody with a gun, if you want to go shoot people coming across our border illegally, you can do it for free.” And you can do it on your own, and you’ll be under the command of the, you know, National Guard unit or a Border Patrol, I think stick a fence six feet high with signs on it in both English and Spanish and it says “if you cross this border, this is the American border, you cross it, we’re going to shoot you.”

For added fun click this link to CNN, which is running sound clips from various Higbie hate-filled rants.

2/8/18: Despite the racism at the heart of the current administration, I think all Americans can celebrate the stock market boom.

Am I right!

Alas, for the second time in a week, the market bombs, dropping 1,033 points for the day.

Of course, we are not saying all Trump supporters are racists and Nazis, but those who are racists or love racists and Nazis have an odd affinity for Trump. Exhibit S (we have had a lot of exhibits) involves Arthur Jones.

Mr. Jones is probably going be the 2018 Republican nominee to run for office in the Third Congressional District in Illinois. On his campaign website, Jones, 70, has a section dedicated to Holocaust conspiracy theories. The Holocaust, he claims, is “nothing more than an international extortion racket.”

Jones is your guy if you like:

A)    Former members of the American Nazi Party.

B)     A guy who ran for mayor of Milwaukee as candidate for the National Socialist White People Party.

C)    President Trump.

Standing shoulder to shoulder with Trump.

According to Jones, regular Republicans are a “bunch of wimps.” Unlike those wimps, Jones says he stands “shoulder to shoulder philosophically” with Trump. What is this “philosophy” Jones feels that he and the president share?

What we call civilization today is a product of white genius. I don’t believe in this doctrine of racial equality. Go out in nature and you don’t find equality anywhere. You found the leaders and the led. You find the predator and the prey. There is no such thing as equality.

If you’d like to compare Higbie’s (see: 2/7/18) and Jones’s ideas with Hitler’s check out this link.

2/9/18: Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, tries out a fresh new argument in regard to climate change. He’s probably tired of denying climate change is real and having the rest of the world mock his position.

Hey, Pruitt says, maybe climate change will be good! “We know that humans have most flourished during time of warming trends,” he says in an interview.

I think there are assumptions made that because the climate is warming, that that necessarily is a bad thing. 

Do we really know what the ideal surface temperature should be in the year 2100, in the year 2018? That’s fairly arrogant for us to think that we know exactly what it should be in 2100.

(Sound of thousands of scientists smacking thousands of foreheads.)

*

SPEAKING OF DUMB, the president decides to weigh in on the story of Rob Porter, who has just been booted from the White House in the wake of domestic violence accusations.

“I found out about it recently and I was surprised by it,” Trump tells reporters. “We certainly wish him well. It’s obviously a very tough time for him. He did a very good job while he was in the White House. We hope that he will have a wonderful career.”

Still, there’s hope, the president adds: “He says he’s innocent, and I think you have to remember that. He said very strongly yesterday that he’s innocent, but you’ll have to talk to him about that.” (See: 2/7/18.)

2/10/18: R.I.P. Tea Party movement. Hang up your tri-corner hats. When Obama was in office, you thought deficit spending was a total disgrace.

Now you have your own boy in office—or seated on the throne, if you prefer. The GOP controls both houses of Congress and the “power of the purse” is firmly in Speaker Paul Ryan’s hands.

Four years: four trillion in new debt.

The projected budget deficit for 2018 now stands higher than for any year since 2012, when the U.S. economy was recovering from the Great Recession. If we also look at projected deficits for 2019-2021, the four-year total of $4 trillion would be significantly larger than the deficits ($2.852 trillion) rolled up during President Obama’s last five years. Of course, to be fair, the deficits in Obama’s first term were worse—and, again, to be fair, Obama inherited a mess.

2/11/18: In Congressional testimony, the heads of six U.S. intelligence agencies assure lawmakers that the Russians meddled in the last election. Dan Coats, head of National Intelligence, is emphatic. Of course, the Russian interfered in the election, he says. He warns they will try it again. “There should be no doubt that Russia perceives that its past efforts have been successful and views the 2018 midterm U.S. elections as a potential target for Russian influence operations. Frankly, the United States is under attack.”

Finally, panel members ask F.B.I. Director Wray, one of the six witnesses, about recent White House explanations for the delay in firing Rob Porter (see: 2/9/18). Trump officials have been claiming they could not act because Porter’s background check was incomplete. Wray says the Agency completed a preliminary check last March. They submitted a full report last July. Someone working for the president asked for follow-up information in November 2017. This was supplied.

Porter kept working at the White House.

Porter continued to handle highly classified material despite lacking the requisite security clearance.

When the story broke (the free press doing what the free press does best) everyone working in the White House appeared befuddled or stunned.

Press Secretary Pinocchio Sanders insisted top officials did the best they could, knowing what little they knew. “The process for the background was ongoing,” she told reporters, “and the White House had not received any specific papers regarding the completion of that background check.”  The whole truth, Pinocchio said, only came out a few hours before Porter was fired.

*

WHITE HOUSE speech writer David Sorensen also gets canned after his ex-wife accuses him of domestic abuse. On this bleak day for Trump & Co., she appears on TV to make clear she had no wish to speak publicly. But she had to make her case. Her husband had thrown her into walls. He put a lighted cigarette out on the back of her hand. He drove over her foot with a car.

Drain that swamp!

2/12/18: An entire day passes. Trump does not issue a single stupid tweet. This fuels rumors that he is being held hostage by Chief of Staff John Kelly, but this appears to be “Fake News.”

In the real world, I am thinking it might be fun to read the Democratic response to the half-assed Nunes Memo (see: 2/3/18). The House Judicial Committee has voted unanimously to release the rebuttal.

Unfortunately, Mr. Trump has said—like his tax returns—the rebuttal will probably never see the light of day.

This means I have time to consider all the walls we need and all the illegal immigrants who want to kill me. (Also: opioids, as we shall see.) Let’s consider Trump’s new budget proposal which would balloon the federal deficit, but insure we had the cash to build a big, beautiful wall.

Ready to fight Redcoats.

As a patriotic America, I am going to capitulate and say, yes, we need lots of walls. The more walls the better. Since we have one of the highest murder rates of any advanced nation in the world, here’s what we should focus on when we talk about improving infrastructure. Forget roads and bridges. Last week, down in Kentucky, a deranged gunman shot and killed his parents, girlfriend, her mother and finally himself. If you watch a lot of Fox News you probably assume the killer was a Mexican or a dark-skinned Muslim from Somalia. Joseph Nickell was not an illegal immigrant and was, in fact, blatantly white. He did own a lot of guns. I believe this proves the National Rifle Association’s argument that the more guns we own the safer we become.

You know their motto: “A gun in every hand means we’re ready to fight Redcoats whenever they land.”

Anyway, we know Republicans are never going to do anything to improve gun safety in this country. That means we need walls. We need walls around our homes. Each home should have a wall twenty feet high, with only one opening for egress and exit. Forget windows. Windows are for liberal snowflakes. Also, we might want to add moats. This would protect us from being murdered by illegal immigrants and all the other heavily armed psychopaths roaming our streets.

We will need to build individual walls around students’ desks in schools. Kentucky suffered another horrific school shooting last month. This time two students were killed and sixteen wounded. This proves—does it not—that more guns can only make us safer! If all those unarmed students had been carrying defensive weaponry and teachers had had AR-15’s and maybe bullet-proof vests, they might have returned fire and then everything would have been great!

We also need walls around our churches. I believe Jesus said that. Think of the slaughter of the innocents in Charleston, South Carolina and Sutherland Springs, Texas. We need to fear illegal immigrants who want to plunk down in our church pews and start illegally praying. Okay, true. Both those heinous crimes were the work of native-born Americans, armed to the teeth.

Since our elected leaders will do nothing about gun violence—because even universal background checks would somehow spell the irrevocable demise of the Second Amendment—we’re going to need walls. Think of all the jobs a serious wall-building program would generate.

The economy would boom.

The time for bipartisan action is at hand. Congress should appropriate all the necessary funds to build walls around concert venues. Of course, the Las Vegas killer was native-born, too. He also owned a shitload of guns. True enough, but I think this just proves that guns don’t kill people.

Lack of walls does.

We need walls. We need walls around movie theaters. We need walls to protect college campuses. We need walls at places where we work. We need walls at nightclubs and cafeterias. We need walls to protect us on baseball fields, in airports and at the hospital. We need walls to save us at malls. We need walls to surround Pike County in Ohio and Harris County in Texas.

And don’t forget! We could use some moats.

2/13/18: Tuesday turns out to be a bad day for The Donald. Michael Cohen, his personal lawyer, admits he paid Stormy Daniels—the porn star—$130,000! Don’t worry, though. Cohen paid out of his own pocket. He was not reimbursed. “The payment to Ms. Clifford was lawful,” he explains, “and was not a campaign contribution or a campaign expenditure by anyone.”

(Note to self: Find lawyer who will pay my legal expenses out of pocket, assuming I ever incur $130,000 in porn-star-payoff expenses.)

If Trump would lie to his wife would he lie about Russians?

If Cohen was telling the truth, that would mean no campaign finance laws were violated—which would be a good thing if you’re a lawyer and don’t want to be disbarred. Still, you paid a porn star for silence. This would not be good if you were President Buffoon and you were trying to convince the American people that you would never lie about dealing with Russians.

Also, if you were the First Lady, you might not think who paid the porn star and how was the issue.

You’d be thinking: Porn star! My husband’s lawyer paid off a porn star!

WTF!!!!!

2/14/18: Valentine’s Day! Donald ♥’s Melania. Donald really loves Donald ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

Donald + Donald = ♥.

Ms. Daniels.

*

SUDDENLY, THE DAY TURNS UGLY. At 2:21 p.m., a 19-year-old Florida man walks into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Armed with a military-style AR-15, he opens fire, spraying bullets in all directions. In a little more than six minutes he kills fourteen students and three teachers and leaves fourteen wounded.

According to Fox News the shooter casts aside his weapon and blends in with fleeing students.

By 2:28 he has exited the building.

This is the third massacre in the United States, involving military-style weapons in six months. Last October a killer in Las Vegas poured fire into a crowd at a country music festival. Relying on an arsenal of ten AR-15’s and other military-grade firepower, well-stocked with 100-round magazines, intent on inflicting maximum human destruction, he was able to fire thousands of rounds before police could locate his shooting position in a hotel room thirty-two floors above. This firepower allowed him to kill 58 and wound 422 human beings.

(That toll does not involve those who were injured trying to flee; it includes only those struck by bullets.)

“Now is not the time.”

Sadly, but predictably, Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress did nothing at the time. Well: besides offering “thoughts and prayers.” Press Secretary Pinocchio told reporters the next day that “now is not the time” to have a debate about guns in America. Sen. Milksop McConnell concurred. “What is clear now,” he said, “is that this is a moment for national mourning and prayer.”

Sen. John Cornyn of Texas wasn’t focused on the guns and blood. Cornyn was angry because Democrats were “politicizing” the shooting. This, he proclaimed, was “beyond disgusting.”

He probably forgot all the times Republicans “politicized” the gun debate and warned that President Obama was going to take away all the guns—even though he never took away any—and even though paranoid gun lovers rushed out and bought another 150 million guns while he was in office.

Cornyn must have forgotten the times Candidate Trump “politicized” the debate, warning that if Hillary were elected the Second Amendment would be dead.

In November 2017, a gunman, armed again with a military-style Ruger AR-15, the weapon of choice of modern mass murderers, shot up a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, killing 26.

More “thoughts and prayers” were offered by the man in the Oval Office and Republicans in Congress.

Now was still not the time for a discussion about guns. Thoughts and prayers would have to suffice.

Now a third massacre stuns the nation. It’s not quite like Sandy Hook, which was even more terrible (December 2012). In the aftermath of that slaughter right-wing crazies “politicized” the discussion in repulsive ways. Cornyn probably forgets that too. Alex Jones first claimed the killing was an inside job, pulled off by the government to raise a “false flag” and justify taking away citizens’ guns. Later, he claimed the Sandy Hook story was “a hoax.” No one had seen any bodies.

The “massacre” had been staged.

(One might wonder what kind of ghoul would want to see the riddled bodies of six-year-old children and their teachers.)

It hadn’t been the “right time” to talk about gun massacres in July 2012, either. That was when another heavily armed man, supplied with military-style firepower and large magazines, killed and wounded 58 in an Aurora, Colorado theater.

It wasn’t the “right time,” when a terrorist used the same kind of firepower to attack the Pulse Night Club in Orlando, Florida in 2016. The toll in that massacre: 49 dead, 58 wounded.

It was, however, always the “right time” according to Republicans, often heavily funded by the N.R.A., to talk about the Second Amendment. It was always the “right time” to shout that any restrictions on gun purchases would mean an end to all our cherished freedoms. It was always the “right time” to howl that anyone who offered up contrary opinions hated the Constitution and hoped tyranny would prevail. It was always the “right time” to offer up stupid pro-gun arguments. Stones can kill people, gun-lovers proclaimed. Did we want to outlaw stones?

What about cars and knives?

Hell, I could do better than that. I could argue that there are all kinds of options for those intent on perpetrating mayhem. Baseball bats and crowbars can kill! And pitchforks! Did we want to disarm farmers? Don’t forget croquet mallets. You could run down a victim with a riding lawnmower. And mulch them. A fork to the throat might do the job. Did we want to outlaw cutlery?

The only way to stop a bad guy with a fork or stone or riding mower was a good guy with a fork or stone or riding mower, we were told. Americans had to buy more guns (and keep mower blades sharp) if they expected to be safe.

They bought those guns, just as the N.R.A. claimed would be prudent, but they found too late, they were not safe.

You could dodge a psychopath on a riding mower. You could run from a man with a stone. If someone attacked you with a fork you could parry with a fork—or maybe brain them with a dining room chair.

You could not easily stop an armed killer with an AR-15. Kindergartners at Sandy Hook were torn apart in a hail of fire. The shooter in Las Vegas fired from a position hundreds of feet above. He could have had a giant pile of stones and couldn’t have done much damage to anyone save some unlucky individual directly below. At Stoneman Douglas one of the wounded was hit five times and survived. Another victim was struck nine times and did not.

Now was the time to discuss guns in America.

And what made it different this time was that’s exactly what many of the teen survivors decided to do.

Naturally, faced with all the carnage and pain and tears, the right-wing crazies decided the best defense was to claim the left had coached the students and their parents to attack the Second Amendment.

Holy fuck.

The Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate the arms of the militia.

Speaking of Melania, did you know her parents, Viktor and Amalija Knavs, have been living in the United States for more than a year? You might be asking yourself how they entered the country and how long they plan to stay. Are they on tourist visas and have they asked for extensions? Could it be they have IR-5 visas which mean they have become permanent legal residents? Will they ever go home or is this the dreaded “chain migration” Trump and his base purport to hate?

Reporters for the Washington Post and other news outlets seek clarification from the First Lady’s spokesperson and from the White House.

“No comment,” is the response.

Did you know Melania’s father was once a member of the Communist Party?

Now you do.

2/15-3/5/18: The last half of February and the opening days of March have not been kind to our beloved President Trump. (I’ve been on vacation and will provide highlights to catch up with my blog.

First, Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team continue to push the investigation into Russian meddling during the last election. This is the same meddling the president has long insisted never occurred. How could he be so sure when every U.S. intelligence agency said the Russians were involved? Trump said he asked Vladimir Putin if he interfered. Putin said no.

Considering the president’s “I-trust-Vlad” stance, it no doubt came as a shock to many Trump True Believers when, a few days ago, Mueller indicted thirteen Russians and three Russian organizations for meddling in the campaign. Charges included conspiracy, identity theft and failing to register as foreign agents.

Mueller also charged that several Russians, posing as Americans, “communicated with unwitting individuals” associated with Trump campaign “to seek to coordinate political activities.”

At best, individuals associated with the campaign were unwitting tools. They might not have been crooks. They were definitely fools.

  

*

AS FOR JARED KUSHNER, the free press keeps digging up evidence of questionable behavior. It turns out that Joshua Harris, founder of Apollo Global Management, met at the White House with Kushner to discuss tax and fiscal policy.

How nice of Harris to visit!

How nice of him to later provide the Kushner Group, Jared’s family business, with a tidy little loan: $184 million.

Still, the president’s son-in-law, who owes $1.2 billion dollars on a single property in Manhattan and may not be able to meet liabilities, wasn’t done with “affairs of state.” Time to pave the Swamp with gold!  Michael Corbat, chief executive of Citigroup, also visited the White House for a chat. Just like that, Corbat okayed a $325 million loan for the Kushner Group.

*

MOVING ON, we come to climate change. In Trumpistan, climate change is not a problem. According to E.P.A. head Scott Pruitt if the entire earth starts warming like a Dutch oven it might turn out to be good news! (See: 2/9/18.)

Temperature extremes seen in the Arctic only twice before.

Let’s hope so, since the U.S. Geological Service just reported spring was arriving much earlier this year across wide swathes of the country. Almost the entire West Coast, large parts of Arizona and New Mexico and virtually all of Kentucky and Virginia and parts of many other states recorded spring-like temperatures fifteen to twenty days ahead of schedule.

True: deniers can look at the map below and say, “Not so fast. Look, the Deep South has a delayed start to spring!”

This is true. Sadly, if a denier took the time to read the whole story, said denier would note that the overall trend is clear. Early springs are a sign of a changing climate and they are coming with increasing regularity. Who says? Scientists. “We’ve known for over a decade now that climate change is variably advancing the onset of spring across the United States,” the USGS warns. 

Meanwhile, the Danish Meteorological Institute weighed in with what liberals call facts. Large stretches of the Artic have experienced temperatures 45 degrees above normal in recent weeks. The sun set in the Arctic in October in case you forget how it works at the top of the world. It won’t rise again until later this month. Yet the region is much warmer than normal. Worse, such extremes have been seen only twice before. Once was last year. The other was 2011.

It’s a bit of a trend.

At the same time, warm air flowed across much of Alaska last week and temperatures 40 degrees above normal were recorded. Even young conservatives are getting worried and 23 chapters of College Republicans have joined a conservative coalition “calling for national action to fight climate change.”

“Adult leaders have not acted efficiently or effectively on this issue,” one College Republican leader explained, “and we are stepping forward to fill the void.”

Trump’s head? That void?

*

ON FEBRUARY 16, with half the Valentines’ Day chocolates still left in Melania’s box, The New Yorker reports on another alleged affair involving her husband in 2006. This time the target of Donald’s affection was a Playboy Bunny named Karen McDougal:

McDougal, a slim brunette…had been named Playmate of the Year, eight years earlier. In 2001, the magazine’s readers voted her runner-up for “Playmate of the ’90s,” behind Pamela Anderson. At the time of the party [at the Playboy Mansion where they met], Trump had been married to the Slovenian model Melania Knauss for less than two years; their son, Barron, was a few months old. Trump seemed uninhibited by his new family obligations.

McDougal later wrote that Trump “immediately took a liking to me, kept talking to me - telling me how beautiful I was, etc. It was so obvious that a Playmate Promotions exec said, ‘Wow, he was all over you—I think you could be his next wife.’”

Can we all agree—liberal and conservative alike—that the First Lady cannot possibly be pleased?

Ms. McDougal dressed for success.

*

A FEW DAYS LATER, Rachel Cooks reasserted a claim she made during the 2016 campaign. Twelve years ago, she says Trump forcibly kissed her in front of an elevator on the twenty-fourth floor of Trump Tower.

Naturally, the Orange Buffoon had to up and tweet:

A woman I don’t know and, to the best of my knowledge, never met, is on the FRONT PAGE of the Fake News Washington Post saying I kissed her (for two minutes yet) in the lobby of Trump Tower 12 years ago. Never happened! Who would do this in a public space with live security...... 

....cameras running. Another False Accusation. Why doesn’t @washingtonpost report the story of the women taking money to make up stories about me? One had her home mortgage paid off. Only @FoxNews so reported...doesn’t fit the Mainstream Media narrative. 

Naturally, Trump had to flip a few details—putting the incident in the lobby, where even a serial groper would have known enough to be wary—and then cited his own propaganda organization to back him up.

*

HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT Secretary Ben Carson is the latest denizen of the swamp to run into trouble. A whistleblower reveals that rules were broken, and unauthorized monies spent to redecorate his office after he took over at HUD. The highlight was a luxurious dining room set, with the tab for $31,000 to be picked up by taxpayers. The whistleblower claims Carson’s wife overruled objections about the spending and that she was demoted for taking a stand.

Once the story broke—don’t you just hate all this “Fake News”—Secretary Carson insisted he had done nothing wrong. He assured reporters he was going to ask for “God’s guidance to do what is right.”

Later, he claims, “I was as surprised as anyone to find out that a $31,000 dining set had been ordered.”

As a reliable, if reluctant taxpayer, might I say I am as surprised as anyone that Carson’s wife would be so clueless as not to tell him about the whistleblower’s objections or the fancy new table he was about to receive. Let me further note that I wouldn’t need to ask God to help me decide what to do. And even if I did consult God, I doubt He would suggest I demote the whistleblower in revenge.

*

CARSON WASN’T the only Trump appointee to get his hand slapped for lavish spending. Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin was blasted by his own agency’s inspector general. The matter at hand was a 10-day European trip Shulkin and his wife took in the summer of 2017—which Shulkin first claimed he paid for himself.

In a 97-page report the inspector disagreed. He outlined “a number of serious derelictions.” Shulkin had “improperly accepted Wimbledon tickets” and turned an aide into a “personal travel concierge” to plan “high tea” and “Roman baths” during the trip, at the request of Shulkin’s wife, a Philadelphia dermatologist. The inspector general found that Shulkin’s chief of staff altered an email to make it appear “that Secretary Shulkin would be receiving an award” in Denmark, so his wife’s $4,300 airline ticket would be paid by the U.S. government.

Actually, it would be paid for by suckers like me, who didn’t vote for Trump, and suckers like you, if you did.

Here, I might point out that in criticizing Trump and his swindler’s crew, I almost never quote Democrats, which would be like shooting catfish in a cereal bowl.

Let’s turn to Republican Congressman Mike Coffman, instead. Coffman is a veteran of the Gulf and Iraq Wars. He says he’s “deeply offended” by Shulkin’s antics and calls for him to step down. “He’s really part of the culture of corruption that too often defines this [Veteran’s Affairs] organization. I just don’t think that he has the moral authority to clean it up.”

Regardless, Mr. and Mrs. Shulkin will always have their memories of those high teas and Roman baths.

*

SPEAKING OF FLYING FOOLS, let’s not forget E.P.A. head and Chief Climate Denier Scott Pruitt. It turns out any time Pruitt flies—and he flies more often than Mary Poppins—he goes first- or business-class.

Why fly cheap if taxpayers are footing the bill?

Last June, Pruitt flew business-class, round-trip to Italy, at a cost to taxpayers of $7,000. CBS reported that the price for his ticket was “several times the cost of what was paid for other staffers who accompanied him on the trip.” They all sat in coach. Yet Pruitt claims he must fly at the front for “security reasons.” Pruitt is the first E.P.A. head ever to set up a full-time security detail to protect him, 24/7, from tree huggers and crying babies in the backs of planes.

Pruitt “also flew round trip between Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and LaGuardia in New York on a shuttle flight costing $1,641.53. By contrast, the ticket for a staffer who flew with him cost $238.40.”

(This would seem to indicate Pruitt isn’t worried about staffers being attacked or deafened by screaming children.)

On yet another occasion, Pruitt stuck taxpayers with a bill for $14,285.71 so he could take an 83-minute flight on a private jet, from Tulsa to Guymon, Oklahoma, in his home state. According to Google maps, the 326-mile trip by car would have taken just over five hours.

So, let me say, as a patriotic American, that the next time Pruitt wants to travel, I volunteer to chauffer him at a cost of $500 per hour in my car. That would mean savings of thousands for the federal government right there.

Pruitt might even keep me busy in retirement because the man dearly, dearly loves to travel. One trip, via private jet, from Cincinnati to New York City, cost $36,069.50. A ticket on a commercial flight the same day could have been had for $350. One estimate puts the total cost to taxpayers for all his unnecessary private and first-class flights by Pruitt at $200,000.

Other members of the Trump team who find themselves under a travel cloud include Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin inquired about using a military jet to fly to Europe for his honeymoon. (At least that request was denied.)

And we might add: these esteemed gentlemen will have to keep jetting all over the world if they expect to break the record set by HHS Secretary Tom Price, who stuck taxpayers for nearly a million dollars in charter flight expenses before the president decided he had to be canned.

To add insult to injury, Price’s hand-picked choice to lead the Center for Disease Control and Prevention was recently fired after it was shown she traded heavily in drug and tobacco stocks.

*

NEXT, LET’S TALK about the president’s response to the Florida school shooting on February 14. For starters, there was his weird meeting with survivors of the Parkland slaughter and victims of earlier massacres. That was the meeting where Trump required a cheat sheet, prepared for him by White House Babe Hicks, to remind him to show human emotions, such as empathy.

One admonition called upon the president to occasionally say, “I hear you,” to those who had suffered irretrievable loss.

No Medal of Honor winners in the GOP, either.

In general, Trump appeared totally clueless in the wake of the bloodbath. He said he was for raising the age to buy a rifle to 21. Then he backed away. He told Republican lawmakers they were afraid of the N.R.A.—which is true. Then he met with N.R.A. lobbyists and said he had a great time. He said armed teachers would do better protecting schools because they cared for students more than armed police officers. Teachers, he said, could shoot it out with intruders and put an end to school shootings with ease.

Trump felt compelled to label the armed school resource officer who failed to rush into the building and confront the shooter at Stoneman Douglas “a coward.” The president said the man “choked.”

Trump also faulted several Broward County deputies who remained outside as the shooting unfolded. They “weren’t exactly Medal of Honor winners,” he grumbled. “The way they performed was frankly disgusting. The way they performed was really a disgrace.”

Then again, there was no doubt in his mind what would have happened if he had been there that day. During a talk at the White House with state governors, Trump draped himself in the mantel of hero. “You don’t know until you test it, but I think, I really believe I’d run in there, even if I didn’t have a weapon, and I think most of the people in this room would have done that too.” 

Yes, despite bad feet—which kept from running into rice paddies in Vietnam—Trump would have rushed in, unarmed, to save the day. 

Trump needs a reminder to show empathy.

*

“CHARACTER IS DESTINY,” the Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said. For Trump and his minions this is clearly the case. When you cram the White House with bullies, wife-beaters and foul-mouthed louts, people notice.

Trump finishes behind Buchanan in presidential ratings.

Consider results from a recent Quinnipiac poll: 61% of Americans said they did not like Trump as a person.

Only 3 in 10 said they did.

Even worse, only 1 in 5 Americans (18%) believe the president has been faithful to his third wife.

One final poll deserves attention. According to 170 historians, Trump does not rate as one of our greatest presidents, no matter how many times he says he gets an A+ for the work he’s done. In a poll conducted for Presidents’ Day, Donald J. displaced James Buchanan on the list, moving him up a notch. That means Trump now nails down last place. That means there’s nowhere to go but up for the man historians labeled the “most polarizing” chief executive ever.

Every subgroup in the survey, including self-identified conservative and Republican historians, had Trump in the bottom five.

Still, there’s always “hope,” if Trump wants to keep a grip on power. This week the Communist Party was poised to alter the Chinese constitution and allow Xi Jinping to serve as president for life. Trump seemed to like the idea of Xi ruling until he died and when he talked about it during lunch at Mar-a-Lago his fat cat friends agreed. Here’s how Fox News told the tale:

“He’s now president for life. President for life. And he’s great,” Trump said, according to a recording obtained by CNN. “I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll give that a shot someday.”

Trump’s remarks were reportedly met with laughter and applause during a luncheon for Republican donors at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

Pause for a moment to think how Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly (before he got banned for sexually assaulting a bevy of beautiful co-workers) would have responded if Obama had made such comments.

“Obama loves communism!” they would have screamed.

“Obama said a dictator was ‘great.’ He wants to be a dictator, too!

They’d have gone berserk.

3/6/18: We learn that George Nader, a Lebanese American gentleman, is cooperating with Mueller. Nader often works as an adviser to Crown Prince Mohammed and the United Arab Emirates. He normally travels in rarified circles.

Media reports say he was stopped by F.B.I agents after landing at Dulles International Airport in January. They handed him a subpoena, relieved him of his electronic devices and questioned him for two hours.

This meant he missed his connecting flight to…Mar-a-Lago…where he had hoped to help the president celebrate his first year in office.

What did the F.B.I. want to know? And what is Mueller asking Nader about now? One possibility is that Nader funneled money from the U.A.E. into the Trump campaign. That would be flagrantly illegal.

Nader also attended a meeting in the Seychelles Islands (population: 94,677) in January 2017. If you’re like me, you’re going to have to Google the islands to find out where they are. Nader found them. So did Erik Prince, brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, founder of Blackwater Security, and at the time an informal adviser to the Trump transition team.

Who else flew to the islands, just because they are so conveniently located for visiting? Kirill Dmitriev—representing Vladimir Putin.

You can probably guess where this is going. Dmitriev managed a powerful Russian trust fund, sanctioned by President Obama.

According to The New York Times, Nader has since been questioned repeatedly about a variety of meetings, including at least one with Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon at the White House.

Mr. Prince has denied any secret deals were discussed during this meeting. Oh, no. He just happened to run into Dmitriev, and they had a friendly drink.

In the Seychelles.

(The Mueller Report proves that Prince was lying when he said he just happened to meet Dmitriev for a drink. The meeting had been arranged by Nader, at Dmitriev’s request. Nader later gets indicted for sex trafficking of a minor; see: 6/4/19.)

3/7/18: In more bad news for Trump and his circle, Sam Nunberg, who pretty much got the whole Trump campaign off the ground in 2015, has agreed to testify before a Grand Jury on Friday.

On Monday, Nunberg, who had been subpoenaed as part of the Mueller investigation, was threatening to rip up the subpoena on national TV. He wasn’t going to “waste 80 hours of his time” complying with a records request. He said Mueller would be crazy to arrest him. On sober second thought, however, he decided he would cooperate, because Mueller wouldn’t be crazy to arrest him.

Also, Nunberg said he would soon be entering rehab.

The bad news for Trump? Mueller is seeking documents and electronic records, from November 1, 2015, till the present, involving Nunberg and:

Steve Bannon

Michael Cohen

Rick Gates

Hope Hicks

Corey Lewandowski

Paul Manafort

Carter Page

Keith Schiller

Roger Stone

And…President Trump!

You can see why this might bother the whole duplicitous crew. Gates has pled guilty. Manafort is under house arrest. Hicks just quit her post after investigators grilled her for nine hours. Cohen is in the news for arranging a payoff to a porn star.

Schiller has admitted he was “on guard” outside Trump’s hotel room in Moscow on a night in 2013 when his boss was offered the warm company of five prostitutes to share his bed. If you missed that story because all you do is binge on Fox News and fantasize about finding Hillary’s emails, Schiller says nothing illicit occurred. Around 2 a.m. he claims he wandered off to his room for a snooze.

And we know Trump would never sleep with high-end prostitutes.

Right?

3/8/18: Another crazy day in Trumpistan: The New York Times reports on possible witness tampering by the president.

Also: We have fresh news involving Stormy Daniels, the porn star currently trying to sue the Orange Buffoon.

Pinocchio Sanders.

Perhaps you watched Press Secretary Pinocchio Sanders yesterday, as she went through her daily contortions. Her job was to make it sound as if the Buffoon was as innocent, when it comes to Ms. Daniels, as a virgin lamb in the meadow. Had Trump ever had an affair with Stormy? Never. Who then paid the $130,000 settlement to her? Trump? No. Why was Stormy paid to begin with? Pinocchio didn’t wish to comment. Did Trump know about the payment? Why, who would think it! Pinocchio tried to claim the porn star was lying—because Trump had just won an “arbitration” case in which his lawyers blocked Daniels from speaking out about her story.

By the way, court documents, including a settlement agreement, show Daniels could be sued for damages in excess of $1 million if she revealed images, emails or other evidence she might have which would support her claims.

Evidence! Damn it! (See also: 1/26/18.)

So, to recap: Trump didn’t pay to shut up Stormy. His lawyer paid out of his own pocket. Trump didn’t know about the settlement. Stormy was lying. But if Stormy had proof she would be sued if she revealed it—even though she couldn’t because the affair never happened.

Finally, Trump knew all about the “arbitration” case, even though he had no idea what he was suing Daniels to stop her from talking about. (See: 4/26/18.)

Really, with Trump in the White House, never a dull day is passed. Did you know a friend of the president, David Pecker, publisher of the National Enquirer, allegedly paid another $150,000 for a story Karen McDougal, a former Playboy Bunny, had written about an affair with Trump?

Pecker’s decision to pay but bury the story to help his pussy-grabbing pal also came during the lead up to the 2016 election.

That might also turn out to be illegal. (See: 12/13/18.)

McGahn could prove to be a key witness against the president.

SWITCHING TOPICS, Reince Priebus, Donald McGahn and the two men’s lawyers, were concerned enough about Trump’s approaches to them, since both are potential witnesses in the Russian investigation, to report questionable contacts to Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Priebus’s contact seems fairly benign.

McGahn’s encounter is more problematic and occurred this past January—after he had already given sworn testimony—and after The New York Times ran an article about Trump’s attempt to fire Mueller in June 2017.

Based on talks with people who had been briefed on both meetings, the Times reported yesterday:

After the article was published, the White House staff secretary, Rob Porter, told Mr. McGahn that the president wanted him to release a statement saying that the story was not true, the people said.

Mr. Porter, who resigned last month amid a domestic abuse scandal, told Mr. McGahn the president had suggested he “might get rid” of Mr. McGahn if he chose not to challenge the article, the people briefed on the conversation said.

Mr. McGahn did not publically deny the article, and the president later confronted him in the Oval Office in front of White House chief of staff, John F. Kelley, according to the people.

The president said he had never ordered Mr. McGahn to fire the special counsel. Mr. McGahn replied that the president was wrong and that he had in fact asked Mr. McGahn in June to call the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, to tell him that the special counsel had a series of conflicts of interest that disqualified him for overseeing the investigation and that he had to be dismissed.

Or to put it plainly, if McGahn is correct, then the Buffoon asked him to lie about what had happened last summer.

In legal circles that sounds just like attempted witness tampering.

(We learn when the Mueller Report is finally released that the president did indeed ask McGahn to fire Mueller.)

3/9-3/12/18: Last week ended on a high note for President Trump. The stock market gained more than 430 points and February job numbers were excellent, with 313,000 jobs added to the economy.

The labor participation rate ticked up 0.3 percent, to 63.0 percent, which also indicates an economy in good health.

Normally this humble blogger might credit the president for his success. Alas, this humble blogger cannot forget the countless times when Obama was adding jobs and digging the country out of the Great Recession and Citizen Trump liked to claim 93 million Americans lacked jobs.

That claim was so dumb you had to wonder how anyone could be dumb enough to believe it.

Oh, yeah, Sean Hannity did—only jacking it up a little, to 95 million.

*

CONTINUING with the “good news,” the GOP-controlled U.S. House Intelligence Committee has released its long-anticipated report. Yes. The Russians did interfere in the election.

Trump excited…IN CAPS.

And no, the House report said, the Russians didn’t care who won. (The F.B.I. and C.I.A. would demur.) “We disagree with the narrative that they were trying to help Trump,” the head of the House committee said.

The President of the United States was thrilled with these “findings.” Monday, he tweeted, all in caps:

THE HOUSE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE HAS, AFTER A 14 MONTH LONG IN-DEPTH INVESTIGATION, FOUND NO EVIDENCE OF COLLUSION OR COORDINATION BETWEEN THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN AND RUSSIA TO INFLUENCE THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION.

This might impress Trump’s addle-brained fans; but those of us who have even a tenuous grip on reality understand this panel wasn’t going to find evidence of anything it didn’t want to find.

And it didn’t want to find dirt on Trump’s hands.

*

ON SATURDAY, March 10, the president speaks at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, in support of Rick Saccone, running in a special congressional election. In a rambling speech, Trump decides to attack the free press again. This time he labels Chuck Todd, host of Meet the Press, a “sleepy son of a bitch.”

*

A NERVE GAS AGENT is employed to poison a former Russian double agent and his daughter in Salisbury, England. Prime Minister Theresa May blames the Russian government for what she calls an “indiscriminate and reckless” act, one which left hundreds of bystanders and first responders subject to contamination.

Asked if the White House is willing to condemn Russia, Press Secretary Pinocchio can only respond, three times, saying the U.S. supports Great Britain, our ally. The word “Russia” is frozen from her lips.

Traveling overseas, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson responds much more pointedly Monday night.

This is a really egregious act. It appears that it clearly came from Russia. Whether it came from Russia with the Russian government’s knowledge is not known to me at this point…It will certainly trigger a response I’ve become extremely concerned about Russia…What we’ve seen is a pivot on their part to be more aggressive. And this is very, very concerning to me and others that there seems to be a certain unleashing of activity that we don’t fully understand what the objective behind that is.

Naturally, on Tuesday morning, the president decides this would be a perfect time to fire… Tillerson.

And the classiest way to do it would be to tweet the news: “Mike Pompeo, Director of the CIA, will become our new Secretary of State. He will do a fantastic job! Thank you to Rex Tillerson for his service!”

In a speech to State Department employees later the same day, Tillerson explains that he had been called by the Orange Buffoon—three hours after seeing the tweet—to be officially told he was canned. In his farewell, Tillerson warns diplomats that “much work remains to respond to the troubling behavior and actions on the part of the Russian government,” and says Russia could face “greater isolation on their part, a situation which is not in anyone’s interest.”

Trump’s response to the poisoning is more restrained. One might call it cowardly. “As soon as we get the facts straight, if we agree with them,” he tells reporters, “we will condemn Russia or whoever it may be.”

It could have been anyone. It could have been Monaco. Or Malta! Or some 400-pound guy sitting on his couch in Madagascar!

*

SPEAKING OF FIRINGS, the week got off to a rocky start for Johnny McEntee, Trump’s personal aide and close friend of the Trump family. McEntee was fired Monday and escorted out of the White House without being allowed to collect personal belongings.

Allegedly, he was axed “because he is currently under investigation by the Department of Homeland Security for serious financial crimes.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that those crimes involve “online gambling” and “mishandling” of taxes.

Fortunately, if you’re going to be drained from one swamp it’s nice to land in the muck of another.

McEntee is immediately hired to work on the Trump reelection campaign.

*

IT IS SAFE TO SAY that as the time comes to think of Trump serving a second term, we can predict the National Rifle Association will be backing him all the way. In the wake of the horrific Parkland, Florida massacre, Trump briefly jumped the reservation. He called on Congress to raise the age to buy rifles, particularly the kind of assault rifle used in the Parkland shooting, to 21. He called for legislation to implement near-universal background checks before purchasing guns, a move first proposed in 2013, in the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook.

Within days Trump began backing away from his own ideas. He saw his own portly shadow and beat a retreat.

“Not much political support (to put it mildly),” he tweeted Monday morning, in reference to the proposals he had briefly advanced.

Apparently, he has been watching too much Fox & Friends and not listening to enough NPR. According to a survey conducted by the latter, there was “widespread bipartisan support for a range of gun-control policies,” including:

·       requiring background checks for all gun buyers (94 percent)

·       adding people with mental illnesses to the federal gun background check system (92 percent)

·       raising the legal age to purchase guns from 18 to 21 (82 percent)

·       banning bump stocks (81 percent)

·       banning high-capacity ammunition magazines that hold more than 10 rounds (73 percent) and

·       banning assault-style weapons (72 percent).

Naturally, the N.R.A. opposes federal action to force all states to raise the age to buy a rifle to 21.

On the other hand, the N.R.A. favors federal action to force all states to honor concealed carry permits issued to citizens who might be traveling from states where it is legal to carry to states where it is not.

3/13/18: Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) breaks with House Intelligence Committee colleagues and says evidence they gathered clearly shows Russia worked to undermine Hillary Clinton and help Donald J. Trump in 2016. Russian meddling was “motivated in whole or in part by a desire to harm her candidacy or undermine her Presidency had she prevailed.” (See: 3/9/18.)

3/14/18: Wednesday, the president awakes, vigorously scratches his crotch, and clicks on the TV. He wants to see how the special election in Pennsylvania Congressional District 18 turned out. Tuning in to Fox & Friends, he wonders if he’s in store for good news or bad. Imagine his pleasure when Steve Doocy explains that Conor Lamb, the likely winner, “ran as a Republican.”

“Melania,” Trump shouts in the direction of the bathroom, “did you know Conor Lamb was a Republican?”

He forgets Melania is now sleeping in a separate bedroom (see: 2/13/18). Rumor has it she has a sign posted on the door: “Go sleep with Stormy, #POTUS, you pussy-grabbing Lard Ass.”

It takes the president a moment to refocus. Trump knows he can’t lose, regardless of the outcome of the special election. Lamb, who he labeled “Lamb the Sham” on Saturday, during a campaign rally for Rick Saccone, is—like Saccone—really a Republican!

That explains why the GOP spent $10 million in an effort to defeat him. (On Fox News this somehow makes sense.)

Brian Kilmeade, the other male member of the Three Stooges, outlines all the reasons Democrats should be worried. Lamb ran away from Democratic leadership! He didn’t dare take on Trump! Naturally, the president is lapping up all this propaganda. Ainsley Earnhardt agrees. Lamb “has more of a Republican agenda than he does a Democratic agenda.” This goes to show you that Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer need to sweat the midterms in November.

Sitting up in bed, Trump throws a fist in the air. “I am the greatest POTUS ever!” he shouts. For a moment he loses his train of thought.

God, Ainsley has sweet legs. I’d like to grab some of that!

He refocuses. The Stooges agree that polls showed Lamb winning by six points just a few days ago; but he won by only two tenths of a percent. That shows you how much success Trump had when he went to Pennsylvania to campaign for Saccone. And how about a shout out for Don Jr. and Vice President Jesus, who both visited Pennsylvania 18 to push for Saccone!

Truly, they must be rejoicing at the Republican National Committee today. Trump carried the district by 20 points in 2016. Now, a Democrat a Republican, Conor Lamb carries Pennsylvania 18 by roughly 600 votes.

FUN FACT: Based on my experience, talking to Democrats, I find they don’t hate America. They also do not hate God. (They do wonder how it is Republicans always insist God is on their side, even though they are completely divided in terms of which religion God likes best—choices including Baptist, Catholic, Evangelical, Methodist, Mormon, Presbyterian and many, many, many more.)

Democrats also support the U.S. Constitution but loath the president because they believe he does not.

Can you guess which party Lamb, in red tie, belongs to?

3/15-21/18: Donald J. Trump hits a tough patch. True, the employment picture is good, especially for high-priced lawyers. (You could argue Trump is keeping the legal profession fully employed all by himself.)

Now we learn that Trump wants Congress to pass laws to allow for the execution of bigtime drug dealers.

Which bigtime drug dealers?

I think we all know who he’s talking about. Probably John Kapoor, a well-known drug “king pin” who once made the Forbes 400 list as one of the richest men in America. Founder and CEO of Insys, Kapoor’s pharmaceutical company has been one of the leading pushers of opioids for years. Last October, Kapoor was arrested on charges of racketeering, conspiracy and fraud.

What about Dr. Michael Kostenko?

He wrote more than 40,000 prescriptions for opioids in just two years. In one week, the West Virginia doctor managed to write 325 prescriptions—totaling an astonishing 19,000 pills. 

*

THE PRESIDENT finds time in his busy schedule to call Shirtless Strongman Vladimir Putin to congratulate him on winning reelection—in a contest in which leading opposition candidates were barred from running.

Donald

♥’s

Vladimir

Yes, indeed. The President of the United States congratulated the man accused of ordering spies to use a nerve agent in an attempted assassination on British soil. This is the same leader who backs Russian mercenary forces in Syria, which led recently to a bloody confrontation with U.S. troops and allied forces. (Luckily, U.S. forces called in air strikes and managed to kill as many as 500 Russians and Syrians with no loss of life on our side.

Senator John McCain responds:

[An] American president does not lead the free world by congratulating dictators on winning sham elections. And by doing so with Vladimir Putin, President Trump insulted every Russian citizen who was denied the right to vote in a free and fair election to determine their country’s future, including the countless Russian patriots who have risked so much to protest and resist Putin’s regime.

Later, Pinocchio Sanders admits that Trump did not mention Russian meddling in the 2016 election during his call.

Apparently, he and Vlad talked about office pools and March Madness. Putin is picking Trump University to win it all.

*

WHEN IT COMES to dictators and autocrats the current occupant of the White House has a soft spot for anyone who takes the law into his or her own hands. Trump has commended Egypt’s brutal president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, known for killing 800 protesters in a single day and jailing tens of thousands of dissidents, for doing “a fantastic job.” Trump also told reporters President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines was doing “an unbelievable job on the drug problem” in his country when that “job” involved the extra-judicial murder of more than 12,000 Filipinos.

In fact, when Trump visited Manila he laughed along with Duterte when the latter referred to reporters as “spies.”

Trump might call all of this “Fake News” but this news has been widely reported by media outlets and the president is routinely quoted to bolster these tales. His lips move. Stupid shit pours out.

Now, scumbag leaders are following his lead. According to Reuters, Duterte recently closed down one news site, calling it “a fake news outlet” that had been “throwing trash and shit all along.”

In Malaysia, Prime Minister Najib Razak accused opponents of using the media to spread “fake news” after reporters broke a story about widespread corruption involving a state-supported investment fund. The “fakest news” of all would be revelations that $681 million “mysteriously” ended up in Najib’s personal account. 

“Fake news is like poison or a gun and it can kill our beautiful society.”

Cambodian official

Prime Minister Hun Sen of Cambodia also cited Trump’s attacks on “fake news” to justify his decision to shut down an independent newspaper, the Cambodia Daily, which had criticized his rule.

Reuters explained:

In his latest attack on Saturday, he backed Trump for announcing “fake news” awards. “I think President Donald Trump has correctly created an award that he just announced in recent days, the Fake News Award,” he said. “And in Cambodia there is also this type of media.”

One Cambodian government official defended such tactics: “Everyone, including ordinary citizens, has to fight against fake news because fake news is like poison or a gun and it can kill our beautiful society.”

Someone should get that guy a slot on Sean Hannity’s show.

Speaking of: Did you know Vladimir Putin allegedly has a hit list of people he’d like to bump off? Sergei Skripal, recently poisoned, made that list.

Guess who else Vladimir wants to murder?

Christopher Steele: the guy behind the Steele dossier, the file that hints at all kinds of perverse links between Trump, Trump aides, and assorted Russians.

Trump's pal.

*

MICHAEL COHEN, attorney for Donald J. Trump, files an unprecedented legal brief in federal court. It’s a complicated legal maneuver, meant to keep Stormy Daniels, the porn star quiet; but what makes it interesting is that Cohen must now name his client in the case. That client, heretofore known in court documents only as “David Dennison,” is Donald J. Trump.

You can’t make this up. (See: 3/7/18.)

The President of the United States is operating, for legal purposes, under a fucking assumed name!

For a time, it looked like gagging the porn star (legally only) had worked. The 2016 election came and went. No one heard a peep from the porn lady. The parties to the original settlement, a tightly written non-disclosure agreement (NDA) included “Peggy Peterson” (Daniels) and “David Dennison.” That agreement stipulated a penalty of $1 million any time “Peterson” broke silence. Once the free press started digging, it became obvious who “Dennison” was.

Now Donald/David and Cohen were claiming that Ms. Clifford had repeatedly violated the NDA and accrued $20,000,000 in damages.

*

SATURDAY MORNING, the president sleeps in late. His first tweet comes at 10:00 a.m. and his heart hardly seems in it. “Happy #StPatricksDay” is all he taps. You could argue, however, that he was showing restraint because he refrained from calling Ireland a “shithole” country.

*

EARLY SUNDAY MORNING, the Orange Buffoon tunes in to watch his favorite cable news show. As usual, Fox News shapes whatever “reality” it is the president sees. At 7:02 a.m. he tweets: “Wow, watch Comey lie under oath to Senator G when asked ‘have you ever been an anonymous source...or known someone else to be an anonymous source...?’ He said strongly ‘never, no.’ He lied as shown clearly on @foxandfriends.”

Yes. Clearly. On Fox & Friends. At this point, I think if the hosts of that show claimed bagels were sentient, Trump would tweet agreement.

Twenty minutes later, denies—via Twitter—that notes former F.B.I. official Andrew McCabe says he took after meetings with the president exist. “Spent very little time with Andrew McCabe,” Trump tappity-taps on his phone. “But he never took notes when he was with me. I don’t believe he made memos except to help his own agenda, probably at a later date. Same with lying James Comey. Can we call them Fake Memos?”

You can call them “fake memos” if you want. In court, a judge will most likely call them “evidence.”

*

TRUMP STARTED the next week the same way he ended the last, tweet-raging about the Russia investigation. We can assume his mood did not improve as the hours passed. The stock market took a tumble after it was revealed Facebook was duped into allowing a data-mining operation to steal the personal information of 50,000,000 users. What was the name of the company that did the mining? Cambridge Analytica. Who used that firm during his or her campaign for president?

Trump.

Christopher Wylie, who helped start the company before turning whistleblower, described how stolen data could be used in any political campaign: 

Cambridge Analytica will try to pick at whatever mental weakness or vulnerability that we think you [the voter whose data has been mined] have and try to warp your perception of what’s real around you. If you are looking to create an information weapon, the battle space you operate in is social media. That is where the fight happens.

What kind of sleazy rats run Cambridge? Of course, there’s a Russian-American, Professor Aleksandr Kogan, involved! Kogan lied to Facebook, the site says, and got a digital foot in the door.

Ukrainian girls “are very beautiful. I find that works.”

Channel 4 News in Britain, where Strategic Communications Laboratories Group (SCL), the parent company of Cambridge, is located, recently began investigating company practices. An undercover reporter “posing as a fixer for a very wealthy client” from Sri Lanka was sent to seek help from Chief Executive Alexander Nix of SCL. Here’s how Nix explained [punctuation follows the British rule] the way the company worked, all for the right price:

In one exchange, when asked about digging up material on political opponents, Mr Nix said they could “send some girls around to the candidate’s house”, adding that Ukrainian girls “are very beautiful, I find that works very well”.

In another he said: “We’ll offer a large amount of money to the candidate, to finance his campaign in exchange for land for instance, we’ll have the whole thing recorded, we’ll blank out the face of our guy and we post it on the Internet.”

Offering bribes to public officials is an offence under both the UK Bribery Act and the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Cambridge Analytica operates in the UK and is registered in the United States.

…Mr Nix told our reporter: “…we’re used to operating through different vehicles, in the shadows, and I look forward to building a very long-term and secretive relationship with you.”

Along with Mr Nix, the meetings also included Mark Turnbull, the managing director of CA Political Global, and the company’s chief data officer, Dr Alex Tayler.

Mr Turnbull described how, having obtained damaging material on opponents, Cambridge Analytica can discreetly push it onto social media and the internet.

He said: “… we just put information into the bloodstream of the internet, and then, and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again… like a remote control. It has to happen without anyone thinking, ‘that’s propaganda’, because the moment you think ‘that’s propaganda’, the next question is, ‘who’s put that out?’.”

Mr Nix also said: “…Many of our clients don’t want to be seen to be working with a foreign company… so often we set up, if we are working then we can set up fake IDs and websites, we can be students doing research projects attached to a university, we can be tourists, there’s so many options we can look at. I have lots of experience in this.”

In the meetings, the executives boasted that Cambridge Analytica and its parent company Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL) had worked in more than two hundred elections across the world, including Nigeria, Kenya, the Czech Republic, India and Argentina.

As expected, a spokesman for the British company denied any illegal activities had occurred.

And, just for fun, who do you imagine worked with Cambridge on this side of the Atlantic, possibly in an illegal way, to shape the 2016 election? How about one-time Trump campaign manager Cory Lewandowski!

Not to mention—but, yes, him, too—“Sloppy Steve” Bannon.

Signs of trouble for the president multiplied all week. Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain, Republicans who still have scruples, warned Trump, who has none, not to fire Mueller. “If he tried to do that, that would be the beginning of the end of his presidency, because we’re a rule of law nation,” Graham explained. Rep. Trey Gowdy, famous for leading the Benghazi investigation and by no means a “hardened Democrat,” said if Trump was innocent, he “should act like it.”

He isn’t and he isn’t.

Even cowardly Republicans began sniffing enough shit to realize it was time to watch where they stepped. Speaker Ryan mustered up a tiny fragment of courage and had a spokesperson say: “As the speaker has always said, Mr. Mueller and his team should be able to do their job.”

Postscript: Cambridge Analytica registered as a limited liability corporation in Delaware in 2013. Cambridge is essentially a shell company, holding intellectual property rights, but with almost all work for clients carried out in the United Kingdom by people like Mr. Nix. The company is owned by Robert Mercer and his family, rich conservative mega-donors.

According to The New York Times, during the 2016 campaign, Cambridge shared office space with Trump’s San Antonio-based digital operation and took credit for his election success.

On November 9, 2016, Nix explained, “We are thrilled that our revolutionary approach to data-driven communications played such an integral part in President-elect Donald Trump’s extraordinary win.”

Trump’s campaign paid Cambridge $5.9 million in five separate payments and has since tried to deny any links.

Last October, Newsweek questioned that stance. “Donald Trump’s campaign blatantly downplayed the role data firm Cambridge Analytics played in helping the president win last year and even ignored the campaign’s own boasts following the election after the firm was linked to a collusion effort with Russians.”

*

TUESDAY, MARCH 20, Trump’s single tweet for the day was in celebration of an event I suspect most Americans who do not own harvesters do not know about. “Our Nation was founded by farmers,” he tippity-tapped. “Our independence was won by farmers. And our continent was tamed by farmers. Our farmers always lead the way -- we are PROUD of them, and we are DELIVERING for them! #NationalAgricultureDay”

A Playboy Bunny files suit.

I waited anxiously all afternoon, hoping the president would tweet again. Perhaps: “Our farmers produce asparagus and Brussels sprouts and foods I despise. I did not boink the porn star! NO COLLUSION!”

I thought that would be cool.

By the time Trump settled in for dinner, we knew a Playboy Bunny had filed suit asking the right to tell the story of a ten-month affair she allegedly conducted with Citizen Trump in 2006. During the 2016 campaign she was preparing to sell her story when the National Enquirer swooped in and bought up rights for $150,000. But the company that owns the magazine never intended to publish it because, let’s face it, that magazine has high standards of journalism.

The owner is also a close friend of Donald J. Trump and this was standard practice at the Enquirer, to help friends, using what was called “capture and kill” to bury the story and keep the Bunny quiet.

Now the Bunny says other promises made to her were not kept and she should have the right to take back her tale and make it public.

Her tale.

She’s already made her tail public.

*

REMEMBER WHEN Trump said he was ready to testify under oath in the Russia probe? Realizing how much trouble the president has telling the truth or even remembering what lies he told ten minutes ago, Ty Cobb, one of his lawyers, quickly intervened. “Mr. Trump was speaking hurriedly and intended only to say that he was willing to meet. He’s ready to meet with them, but he’ll be guided by the advice of his personal counsel,” Cobb said. That was in January.

Today we hear rumors Cobb is on the way out and John Dowd, a second Trump lawyer may resign. Dowd has told others he feels he has no way to control his client.

At any rate, with big globs of feces hitting the fan, a fresh legal strategy has emerged. First, throw even bigger globs at investigators. Second, hire a new set of lawyers and get rid of any who might have scruples.

Did we mention that media sources have now revealed that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has subpoenaed documents from the Trump Organization—even though we all know there is absolutely nothing fishy going on—involving: 1) any member of the Trump clan, at least not Barron; 2) Russians; 3) money laundering; 4) Russians; 5) porn star payoffs; 5) Playboy Bunnies; 6) still more Russians.

*

THE U.S. SUPREME COURT considers a plea from Pennsylvania Republicans to block a new map of congressional districts drawn up by state judges.

The old map was ruled unconstitutional in February by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. That map had allowed the GOP to capture 13 out of 18 Congressional seats in 2012, even though they received fewer total votes from actual people in the state.

Twice the president has tweeted about how unfair the new map is. On February 20 he offered this assessment:

Hope Republicans in the Great State of Pennsylvania challenge the new “pushed” Congressional Map, all the way to the Supreme Court, if necessary. Your Original was correct! Don’t let the Dems take elections away from you so that they can raise taxes & waste money!

Four days later he was flailing away on his iPhone again: “Democrat judges have totally redrawn election lines in the great State of Pennsylvania. @FoxNews. This is very unfair to Republicans and to our country as a whole. Must be appealed to the United States Supreme Court ASAP!”

Luckily, there are three co-equal branches of government and the court turns down the appeal in one sentence: “The application for stay presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court is denied.” Not one member of the highest court in the land agreed with President Trump.

*

WE ALSO LEARN that U.S. food and soft-drink companies are working hand-in-cookie-jar with the Trump administration to limit the ability of Mexico and Canada, under NAFTA rules, to warn consumers about the dangers of junk food. Of course, they want no part of warning labels on American products. Meanwhile obesity has doubled in at least 73 countries, since 1980.

There had been talk of using easy-to-understand symbols like colors or shapes to warn consumers. Chile, for instance, began in 2012 requiring black stop-signs on certain packaging.

The Office of the United States Trade Representative, leading talks, is trying to head off any move to put warnings on sugary drinks and fatty foods.

In fact, if Trump and his business cronies have it their way, a Milky Way will end up with a label that reads: “Come on, buy me! You’re not obese! You just happen to have a 56-inch waist!”

In 1980, the Center for Disease Prevention and Control estimated that 5.53 million Americans had type-2 diabetes. By 2014 that number had jumped to 21.95 million. This led to 14 million emergency room visits and 79,535 early deaths that year alone. In other words, have another super-sized Coke at McDonalds and we’ll see you in the emergency room.

You're fine. Have another cheeseburger!

*

FOR TWENTY-FIVE YEARS, John O. Brennan served with the C.I.A. He left government service briefly, then returned, heading the Agency from 2013 to 2017.

In theory, of course, he could be just another liar picking on poor Donald J. Trump.

Under the sway of Vladimir Putin.

After Trump ordered F.B.I. Deputy Director Andrew McCabe fired days before he was scheduled to retire, Brennan tweeted this response:

When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but will not destroy America...America will triumph over you.

So, if you watched Fox, you had to figure: 1) McCabe was a liar; 2) James Comey was a liar; 3) Brennan was a liar; 4) and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was a liar.

A fifth “liar,” retired four-star General Barry R. McCaffrey, had harsh words for Trump the same day.

“Reluctantly,” he tweeted, “I have concluded that President Trump is a serious threat to US national security. He is refusing to protect vital US interests from active Russian attacks. It is apparent that he is for some unknown reason under the sway of Mr Putin.”

McCaffrey? What does he know? All he has are three Purple Hearts, two Silver Stars for valor, and two Distinguished Service Crosses to his name.

Brennan attacked Trump again on MSNBC. “I’m saying that perhaps the Russians have something and that’s why Mr. Trump is concerned.” He could not say what that “something” might be.

This made everyone in conservative La La Land sad. On her nightly show, Laura Ingraham was aghast. Kim Strassel, a guest, said Brennan should have made these charges “back when he was in office.” Strassel was ignoring the fact that Brennan could not have predicted how much of a threat Trump would be as leader-in-reverse of the Free World, since he was replaced the day Trump was inaugurated. 

3/22/18: John Dowd, lead lawyer in the president’s dealings with the Mueller investigation resigns.

Dowd’s replacement will be Joseph diGenova—famous for floating the theory on Fox News that evil forces inside the F.B.I. and Justice Department are working to frame Donald J. Trump.

Ironically, just eleven days earlier, Trump employed a pair of tweets to attack the “Fake News” people at The New York Times:

The Failing New York Times purposely wrote a false story stating that I am unhappy with my legal team on the Russia case and am going to add another lawyer to help out. Wrong. I am VERY happy with my lawyers, John Dowd, Ty Cobb and Jay Sekulow. They are doing a great job and.....

...have shown conclusively that there was no Collusion with Russia..just excuse for losing….The writer of the story, Maggie Haberman, a Hillary flunky, knows nothing about me and is not given access.

So, Haberman had lied. She had said Dowd was on his way out. Now, what do you know?

Dowd is out.

It is also announced that National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster will be leaving that post. Just three weeks earlier, Trump had insisted that talk of his leaving was “Fake News.” McMaster had caused friction with his boss in part because he said proof Russia meddled in the election was “incontrovertible.” If this were baseball, the score would read: Fake News 2, Trump 0.

*

THE EVENING ENDS with a “bang” (if you will pardon the word) when Anderson Cooper interviews Karen McDougal, former Playboy Playmate of the Year. McDougal explains in detail that she had a ten-month long affair with “Art of the Cheat on Your Wife Deal” Trump, back in 2006-2007. She mentions that the first time they had sex he offered to pay her, which took her aback.

She’s sorry now, she tells Cooper. She’s sorry she helped Trump cheat on his third wife. In one creepy exchange she describes being spirited through a back entry, into Trump Tower and ushered up to Donald and Melania’s penthouse suite. She says it made her feel bad and she asked to leave. You wonder: Was Trump going to ask her to be “intimate” and defile his marital bed?

The White House denies, pro forma, that this affair occurred.

3/23/18: The president wakes early. He clicks on Fox News. All the Fox babes and Fox pundits are calling the new $1.3 trillion spending bill to fund the government for Fiscal Year 2019 terrible. Trump considers taking decisive action, which he never thought of the night before. White House officials had announced the president was going to sign.

Time to tweet!

I am considering a VETO of the Omnibus Spending Bill based on the fact that the 800,000 plus DACA recipients have been totally abandoned by the Democrats (not even mentioned in Bill) and the BORDER WALL, which is desperately needed for our National Defense, is not fully funded.

GOP leaders in Congress are left scrambling to deal with an impending government shutdown. At 11:38 the president announces, again via tweet: “News conference at the White House concerning the Omnibus Spending Bill. 1:00 P.M.” 

Get that veto pen ready!

No one inside the White House has any idea what the Orange Buffoon is going to do, including the Buffoon.

Just after 1:00 p.m., the president appears at the podium for a rambling discourse on why he is going to sign the bill after all, even though the bill is “ridiculous” and “terrible” and, well, what can he do? He needs the money to fund the military—which you figure he must have known all along. Well, don’t blame him for what will soon turn into a huge deficit for the coming fiscal year.

He’s only President of the United States.

What Congress should do, he explains to a listening nation, is give up the “power of the purse,” and allow him to line-item veto any elements of funding legislation he doesn’t like. Alas, someone needs to explain to him that this matter has already been decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In Clinton v. City of New York (1998), the court considered a law passed with GOP backing in Congress and approval from President Bill Clinton, to allow presidents to do just that. In a 6-3 ruling, the high court declared the law unconstitutional.

Trump plucks adviser from the ranks of televised bombast.

On Friday Trump also selects John Bolton to be his third National Security Adviser. Bolton is the latest individual, almost tromping on the heels of Joseph diGenova, to be plucked from the ranks of televised bombast to join this dysfunctional administration. You have, for example, Larry Kudlow, new chief White House economic advisor, and former Fox Business host, a man famously incorrect in insisting the housing bubble in 2007 was not about to burst. He said people who said it was hadn’t “done their homework.” Whereas, he had!

How much does Trump love Fox News? He considered Judge Jeanine Pirro, a Fox host, for Attorney General. Three Fox hosts were approached about becoming the next White House Communications Director, including Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Kimberly Guilfoyle. He plucked diGenova off a Fox show—and made him his lawyer—but diGenova lasted two days.

At any rate, in the spirit of bipartisanship, I would like to suggest another choice. President Trump should appoint Sean Hannity Undersecretary of Hair Gel in the Department of Homeland Security.

Need another suck up in the Trump administration?
Why not this guy?

*

RETIRED ADMIRAL and former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe James Stavridis, writing in Time, explains his sorrow at seeing H. R. McMaster step down as Trump’s second National Security Adviser.

A man so lacking in principles as Donald J. Trump.

McMaster, he notes, never wanted the job in the first place.

As Stavridis puts it, McMaster is “a good judge of character” and had doubts about working with a man so lacking in principles as Donald J. Trump.

Like a good soldier, when the job offer came from the president, McMaster saw it as if he had received orders. He would do what he could. He would try to ensure the nation remained safe.

Like a good soldier, “he shouldered the pack and stepped into the White House to do what he could to create at least part of a guardrail system around this mercurial and unstable President.”

Stavridis goes on to lambast Trump’s national security approach:

This is a President who loves and revels in chaos. For a national security team, that gives birth to the worst quality of all from an international and especially an allied perspective: inconsistency. Trump has famously said he doesn’t want our enemies to know what we are thinking; the problem is, neither do our friends nor even, it seems at times, do we ourselves.

3/24/18: Hundreds of thousands of mostly young Americans join the “March for Our Lives” in the nation’s capital. They gather to demand action to stem the bloody tide of gun violence that stains America red. There are “sibling marches” in 800 towns and cities, including 390 congressional districts.

New York City marchers number 175,000. Paul McCartney is there to remember John Lennon, gunned down by a deranged individual forty years ago.

The teens who did so much to organize the marches and fuel them with passion lead the way. More than a thousand kids from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where the most recent massacre occurred, attend D.C. events. Survivors of the slaughter speak eloquently. Emma Gonzalez reads the names of the 17 who died at her school. Then she stands in silence for six minutes and twenty seconds, the exact length of time it took one unbalanced young man, armed with an AR-15 to kill or wound 34 of Gonzalez’s teachers and classmates.

“I have learned to duck from bullets before I learned to read.”

Edna Chavez

Students from across the nation, who have witnessed the scourge of gun violence play out, speak up. Edna Chavez, 17, from Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, tells the crowd about her brother, Ricardo, who was shot and killed. “I have learned to duck from bullets before I learned to read,” she explains. Then she leads the crowd in a chant: “Ricardo! Ricardo!”

Trevon Bosley, a high school student from Chicago who also lost a brother, addresses the crowd. “I’m here to speak for those youth who fear they may be shot while going to the gas station, the movies, the bus stop, to church or even to and from school. I’m here to speak for those Chicago youth who feel their voices have been silenced for far too long.”

Other marchers in D.C. and at other locations include parents who lost six-year-old sons and daughters at Sandy Hook and Lauren Milgram, 12, herself a survivor of that heinous attack.

Finally, Martin Luther King Jr.’s granddaughter steps to the mike. “My grandfather had a dream that his four little children would not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” nine-year-old Yolanda Ree King explains. “I have a dream that enough is enough. That this should be a gun-free world.”

“Period,” she adds.  

*

THAT MUCH is a utopian dream, but you can hardly fail to be impressed with the spirit of the young who wish to make America a better, safer place to live. Well: unless you speak for the N.R.A.

The N.R.A. weighs in with this: “Today’s protests aren’t spontaneous. Gun-hating billionaires and Hollywood elites are manipulating and exploiting children as part of their plan to DESTROY the Second Amendment and strip us of our right to defend ourselves and our loved ones.”

In a video clip released the day before, an N.R.A. representative, Colion Noir, criticizes the Parkland survivors and what he calls “a march for their lies.” Apparently, the Second Amendment is the only amendment Noir likes. “To all the kids from Parkland getting ready to use your First Amendment to attack everyone else’s Second Amendment at your march on Saturday, I wish a hero like Blaine had been at Marjory Douglas High School last month.”

Blaine, in this case, would be Blaine Gaskill, the school resource officer who quickly shot and killed another school shooter at Great Mills High School in Maryland earlier in the week.

He continues angrily, “Because your classmates would still be alive and no one would know your names. And because the media would have completely and utterly ignored your story the way they ignored his.”

You could easily pick holes in his response. You could start by noting that these kids undoubtedly wish no one knew their names—because their names are written in blood and they speak for dead friends. You could note that none of the leaders of the “March for Our Lives” had suggested disarming police. You could google “Gaskill” and find 200,000 stories that mentioned him by name.

Then you could mull the unspeakable tragedy of Jaelynn Willey 17, shot in the head and left brain dead by an armed classmate before Officer Gaskill could respond. You could ask if perhaps that didn’t prove the Parkland survivors had a point. 

Postscript: I think you might convince almost all who marched Saturday that it would be great to have armed school resource officers—and let’s be blunt, that means “police”—in every American school. In many cases, you’d probably need more than one per building to be safe.

There are an estimated 90,000 schools in the United States, so the Big Orange Buffoon could argue that we would be creating at least 90,000 new jobs if he sent cops into every school.

Say: $50,000 per year and the tab comes to $4.5 billion annually.

Of course, young Americans, and old, might still get massacred at the mall, at church, in a theater or while attending a country music concert.

The N.R.A. would very much prefer you don’t think about that.

Exercising First Amendment rights: March 24, 2018.

3/25/18: With less than three hours to go, before Stephanie Clifford (a.k.a. Stormy Daniels) does her interview on 60 Minutes, I check Trump’s Twitter feed. He last banged away on the keys at 8:45 this morning: “President Donald J. Trump Proclaims March 25, 2018, as Greek Independence Day: A National Day of Celebration of Greek and American Democracy” 

Did you know there was a day to celebrate “Greek and American Democracy?” I am guessing you did not.

The ancient Greeks used white slaves.

Donald J. Trump if Donald J. Trump had giant boobs

Meanwhile, the Tweeter-in-Chief, who never seems happier than when he’s insulting critics and enemies, who labels any unflattering story “Fake News,” has never dared tweet about Stormy.

He has not called her a “liar,” like so many other women who have accused him of sexual assault. He has not labeled a single appearance by Stormy’s lawyer or Ms. Clifford “Fake News.”

Something tells me she’s got the goods on our boy Don. And something tells me the president is hoping neither the First Lady nor Barron, his young son, tunes in tonight. There are rumors Stormy may in fact possess evidence, possibly a dress stained with Donald’s “seed.”

This would blow White House denials of an affair to Kingdom Cum.

Ms. Clifford is, of course, a shameless self-promoter, a media-savvy performer, only out to make a buck. That makes her the equivalent of Donald J. Trump if Donald J. Trump had giant boobs.

3/26/18: Monday, the latest issue of The New Yorker arrives in the mail. If you haven’t heard the hullabaloo over the cover, you may not know conservatives are furious over the “body-shaming” of the president. There is outrage at Fox News over the “repulsive” depiction of poor Trump.

First, we should note that Fox, in a story highlighting negative “reader reaction” to the cover, seemed to cite “reader” reaction from people who never actually read the magazine. “Shame on you for doing this to anybody, not just the president,” says one reader. Fair enough. A second “reader” proclaims, “Your readers are snobs.” Apparently, he or she is tired of being a snob him- or herself. But bonus points for being self-aware? Another “reader” insists the magazine is “turning into the Mad Magazine” of “urban elitists.” A fourth goes off the deep end, citing the cover as sad evidence of “liberal deep state minds at work, only hurting the future of our country, it [sic] citizens and their own families! What goes around comes around.”

What goes around comes around? Does that mean the artist who did the cover is going to end up fat and repugnant?

Liberals attack a leader incapable of shame.

Suddenly, we of a liberal bent were supposed to feel shame because we had attacked a leader who has proven incapable of shame. This is the man who insults others on a daily, almost hourly, basis. We were supposed to feel sorry for Donald J. Trump, who said a woman who accused him of sexual assault wasn’t pretty enough to warrant attack—not that he attacked anyone. We were supposed to forget he said he couldn’t imagine voting for Carly Fiorina, because, “look at that face.” We should feel bad about body-shaming the man who labeled a Miss Universe winner who gained “a massive amount of weight,” at least in his eyes, a “Miss Piggy.”

Please.

Fox hosts like Bill O’Reilly claimed racism was no longer an issue in America. But they never balked when one conservative called Mrs. Obama “an ape in heels” or a second said he hoped she’d go back to Africa where she belonged and “live in a cave” and maybe have sex with gorillas. Nor is the right concerned now when Alex Jones says he’d enjoy killing a few liberals.

A “nasty” magazine cover?

That’s too much! 

This kind of image was once quite common. Fox News never cared. 

Postscript: Even dimwits who pass for pundits at Fox News should be able to remember what happened when Obama was in office. No one at the network expressed shock when Ted Nugent said Mr. Obama should suck on his machine gun or took umbrage when Trump invited Nugent to the White House soon after taking office.

3/27/18: The president is having trouble finding topflight lawyers to defend him in the Russia investigation. Trump, however, is telling loyal fans he can hire any lawyer he wants, including Perry Mason, Matlock or Saul Goodman, from Better Call Saul. Aides decide not to tell him those are all fictional lawyers.

*

PROOF THAT THE 1% around the world have more money than they can spend (but still need tax cuts!): The Asian arowana, popular with fish-collecting enthusiasts, can sell for $300,000. Known as the “long yu,” or “dragon fish,” in Chinese, most go for a few hundred dollars. The most “attractive” can go for tens of thousands—including that aforementioned arowana, sold reputedly to a Chinese communist official. Kenny Ng, a premier cosmetic surgeon—for fish—operating in Singapore will give your arowana an eyelift ($90) or a chin-lift ($60) if you think it might help.

Of course, in desperate times—say if you were trapped in your house by zombies—the fish might save your life.

You could always eat it if you were starving.

This is probably more than you can say for Barbara Streisand and her dogs, Miss Violet and Miss Scarlett. Both are cloned from her now deceased pet, Samantha, a Coton de Tulears breed.

Cost per clone: $50,000.

Then again, I guess, if you were desperate, you could make Miss Violet breakfast and save Miss Scarlett for lunch.

Assuming, again: zombies. 

My owner needs a big tax break.

*

CLEARLY, WHAT THIS COUNTRY needs is for Attorney General Sessions to be tougher on crime!

Procured confessions in more than a dozen murder cases.

Consider the case of Nevest Coleman, arrested and convicted in 1994 for murder and rape. Coleman, 25, had two children, attended church regularly, had no previous criminal record and worked on the Chicago White Sox ground crew.

Well, off to prison you go, scumbag. Coleman just happens to be African American, I should note.

Twenty-three years later, what do you know! DNA evidence not available at the time of his arrest proves Coleman was innocent. A suit filed on his behalf against the city, Cook County and members of the Chicago Police Department alleges he was coerced into confessing and punched in the face. “Some of the detectives named in the suit procured confessions in more than a dozen murder cases in which charges were dropped or the defendant was acquitted at trial, the Chicago Tribune reported in 2001.” Semen samples from the victim were tested in 2016, after the case was reopened and proved to belong to a serial rapist, who had attacked three more women after Coleman was sent to jail.

This makes Coleman one of 2,192 men and women (representing more than 19,000 lost years) who had sentences overturned, many on the basis of irrefutable DNA evidence. Almost half of all those wrongly imprisoned individuals (1,019) “just happen” to be African American.

Coleman walked out of prison into the arms of his now-adult children. The last time he walked free they were 2- and 3-years-old.

The White Sox did give him his old job back.

Oops! Wrong guy in jail! Oopsie.

3/28/18: The president starts off Hump Day in a chipper mood, even if Melania is hiding out at Mar-a-Lago and avoiding him like he’s a leper.

Trump believes he’s making progress on the question of North Korea. Even this Trump-phobic blogger is willing to say this may be true.

China cannot relish the idea of war erupting on its doorstep. For that reason, the Chinese may lean hard on North Korea.

Normally, a fair-minded person might credit the B.O.B. in this matter—and not refer to Trump as the “Big Orange Buffoon.”

Stuck with an Iran-like nuclear deal.

Unfortunately, this blogger has enough brain cells left to recall Trump’s stupid comments regarding the foreign policy of his predecessors. He thinks that the Iraq War was a disaster. I agree. Still, he has chosen John Bolton, one of the cheerleaders for the 2003 invasion, as his third National Security Adviser.

As for North Korea, let’s say Trump does manage to get a deal. Imagine that Kim Jong-un agrees to “denuclearize.” What will that mean? Who will enforce the pact? How will inspections be handled, to ensure the North Koreans honor the deal? Will they give up their stockpiles of nuclear material? Will they destroy the medium and long-range missiles they possess, tear up their launch facilities and fill in all their underground research and testing facilities?

Even if Kim Jong-un agrees to denuclearize, what will Trump end up with? An Iran-like nuclear deal, I suspect.

3/29/18: The Mueller “WITCH HUNT,” as Donald calls it, continues…even though nobody who ever worked for or currently works for Mr. Trump ever did anything wrong or even thought about doing anything wrong. Besides, why can’t the president just pardon everyone involved?

In recent “Fake News,” we learn:

Rick Gates, Paul Manafort’s right-hand man, has admitted he knew an individual he was communicating with regularly, during the 2016 campaign, had ties to Russian intelligence.

Mueller now believes Manafort also knew. You can find these nuggets in recently released court documents.

Next, the “Fake News” people report that Trump’s personal lawyer, John Dowd, floated the idea of presidential pardons to Manafort and Michael Flynn, who like Gates, has plead guilty and is cooperating with the Mueller team.

Legal experts agree. Any discussion of pardons should have been handled not by Trump’s personal lawyer—representing Trump, the individual—but by White House Counsel Don McGahn—representing the office of the President of the United States, and in adherence to the United States Constitution.

Of course, none of this proves either collusion with the Russians—or criminal intent since. It just looks that way.

In Congress, that realization appears to be having an effect. Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina has joined Democratic colleague Chris Coons of Delaware in a call to pass legislation to protect the Mueller investigation and ensure the truth is ferreted out. In a joint statement, the two men explain: “We have heard from constituents—Republicans, Democrats, and Independents alike—who agree that Special Counsel Robert Mueller should be able to conduct his investigation without interference. This should not be a partisan issue.”

*

AUBREY O’DAY makes tabloid headlines of her own, hinting broadly that she also had an affair with Donald J. Trump…in this case, Don Jr. The former contestant on The Apprentice had previously floated the idea that a song she wrote, “DJT” was about the young Pussy-Grabbing Jedi.

Now, with people wondering why Don Jr. and his wife are divorcing, rumors are swirling. BuzzFeed runs a story based on O’Day’s social media footprint. In 2011 she was tweeting about waking up in a room filled, wall-to-wall, with her favorite flowers, white lilies. “U gave me a garden of love baby,” she cooed.

“Will he still love me when he’s free?” she wondered that December. Or would he go back to “the poison?”

In the spring of 2012, she was “Heading 2 my fav sushi spot in the city w my ny bff, then sprinting 2 the Trump 2 get back in bed w/my babe...or maybe I’ll just stay in bed.” In fact, by May, she had so many “homies at the Trump” she could rely on them to give her warnings “on all the enemy creatures.”

By October, with her romance suddenly on the rocks (apparently because Don Sr. stepped in to quash the love) poor Ms. O’Day was trashing the clan in general. In one tweet she said: “Ted Bundy’s lecturing on feminism… no, wait, it’s just Trump talking the morality of marriage.”

(Bundy was a serial killer.)

Sources say, at one point, with his wife pregnant with their third child, Don Jr. told her he would be leaving her for Aubrey; but that plan was derailed when Sr. stepped in and told Jr. “to knock it off.”

On Election Night 2016, with Donald J. Trump Sr. sweeping to victory, O’Day tweeted pointedly once more: “[M]y story I didn’t tell is worth millions now.”

Trump men have a penchant for bimbos.

3/30/18: Anything new with the Mueller investigation? Friday, as first reported by The Guardian, a British newspaper, Trump campaign figure Ted Malloch, was intercepted at the Boston airport after a flight from London.

Malloch was separated from his wife, served a subpoena, and had his cellphone confiscated by the F.B.I.

Why would Malloch—who most Americans, including this dedicated blogger, have never heard of before—be of interest to the Mueller investigation? Malloch has close ties with Nigel Farage—who has close ties with Julian Assange of WikiLeaks—who helped expose the damaging Clinton/Democratic National Committee emails—which helped the Big Orange Buffoon get elected.

In an email response to the Guardian story, Malloch,

described himself as a policy wonk and defender of Trump, [and] said the FBI also asked him about his relationship with Roger Stone, the Republican strategist, and whether he had ever visited the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has resided for nearly six years.

It turns out Malloch was “floated in media reports as a possible US ambassador to the EU,” in 2016. European officials, “alarmed by the possible pick and his lack of diplomatic credentials, openly criticised Malloch, particularly after he compared the EU to the Soviet Union.”

It probably didn’t help his chances of landing the post once it turned out he had padded his resume. Malloch claimed, variously, that he had been “a fellow at Wolfson and Pembroke colleges at Oxford, that he had been called a ‘genius’ by Margaret Thatcher, and that he was the ‘first’ to coin the phrase ‘thought leadership.’” None of these claims were…technically …true.

A “psycho,” “a cocaine addict” and a “lying asshole.”

So why might this matter? Mueller’s team is digging into links between the Trump campaign and Russia—particularly possible links between Trump surrogates, through WikiLeaks, to Russians.

What we begin to see is a potential merry-go-round of problems for Trump and his pals. Did Roger Stone knowingly communicate with Russian agents—such as Guccifer 2.0? It seems he did. Did Stone work with or through WikiLeaks, which might mean working with or through Russians, to ensure the release of Clinton and Democratic Party emails to damage her campaign? Did Malloch help? Where does Strategic Communications Laboratories Group (SCL), the London-based data-mining company and Cambridge Analytica, its American arm, fit into this scheme? (See: 3/15-21/18.)

Who has ties to SCL? It turns out Michael Flynn, already cooperating with the Mueller investigation, was on the SCL payroll.

Finally, we learn this week, that Stone is nervous. Thursday night, Sam Nunberg, once the brains behind the Trump run for president, said during a television interview that Stone had tried to “curry favor with Trump by suggesting he had met with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange prior to the 2016 presidential election.”

“He’s always trying to ingratiate himself to Trump,” Nunberg continued. “I don’t care about Trump. It’s irrelevant to me if I have a relationship with him again. Roger does. They have a long relationship.” 

Stone has denied in all kinds of ways, in all kinds of places, that he had prior knowledge of coming leaks of emails that would damage Clinton. And, no, he never worked with Assange to make it happen. Now, Nunberg was claiming Stone told Trump he met with Assange. This did not sit well with Stone, who quickly took to Instagram to blast his former friend and ally.

Nunberg, he said, was a “psycho,” “a cocaine addict” and a “lying asshole.”

3/31/18: In a recent poll only 33% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 approve of the job the president is doing.

Luckily for Republicans, people in this age bracket turn out to vote at far lower rates than old codgers with walkers.

More ominously, for the GOP, 47% of that demographic say they’re paying greater attention to politics since Trump was elected. More than 7 in 10 say Trump “doesn’t reflect my personal values.” What! No pussy grabbing! No hating on Mexicans! No banning LGBT soldiers from the military!

Make America Great Again, c. 1960.

Come on young people! Make America Great Again, c. 1960, when America was 90% white, interracial marriage was illegal and you could ban people of skin tones you didn’t like from eating in your restaurant.

Also, women knew their place, which, among other things, meant no opportunities in sports.

But lots of chances to be secretaries!

Other poll findings paint a grim picture for President Trump. Six in 10 young Americans think he’s “mentally unfit,” 62 percent believe he’s “generally dishonest” and 63 percent consider him “a racist.” Almost 7 in 10 favor a pathway to legal status for DACA recipients and others brought to the country illegally as children.

Finally, 6 in 10 young Americans want the government to take steps to address climate change. This probably has something to do with the fact that all the old people who don’t believe in climate change, like the president himself, will die off relatively soon. The young know they may be stuck living on a planet where the damage becomes acute. Perhaps, with that depressing future in mind, 55 percent of those polled favor legalization of recreational marijuana.

April 1, 2018: Time for an April Fools’ joke. Here we go: A porn star and a 62-year-old businessman (a future president) walk into a bungalow. The businessman drones on about himself. Finally, the porn star grows tired, orders him to drop his trousers and spanks him with a copy of Forbes magazine. The businessman’s picture is on the cover. Then they have uninspired sex.

A decade later the porn star sues the President of the United States….

Wait. That’s real?

Okay, try this. A right-wing banshee named Ann Coulter sashays into a bar. Three Trump supporters are drinking in a corner booth. She walks up to the first guy, swats his red MAGA hat off his head and says, “Did you know Trump is a shallow, lazy ignoramus?”

The Trump guy replies…

No. Really? She said that? She said that because Trump might give up his idea to build the big, beautiful wall?

A “mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration.”

Lt. Col. Ralph Peters

Damn. Let’s try a Fox News joke. Once upon a time there was a network that hated everything government did. No one on the network trusted President Obama, not even if all he did was scramble eggs and add Swiss cheese. Then a new leader took over and began lashing out at the free press. Fox News loved him! Isn’t that hysterical! A purported news organization sucking up to an enemy of the First Amendment! That would be the best April Fools’ jooooooo…

Are you kidding? Fox News really does support Trump?

Is Fox now nothing more than a propaganda outlet for the Trump administration? We report. You decide.

A longtime Fox News analyst sharply criticized the network, denouncing the outlet as a “propaganda machine” devoted to President Trump, and saying that it was “wittingly harming our system of government for profit,” in a stunning internal email announcing his exit from the company.

Ralph Peters, a US Army lieutenant colonel who served as a military analyst for Fox News, said he felt “compelled to explain” his departure from the company to colleagues, before skewering the network he has called home for years. Peters had been telling friends that he planned on leaving the network in a “nuclear” fashion, one of those friends told CNN.

“Four decades ago, I took an oath as a newly commissioned officer. I swore to ‘support and defend the Constitution,’ and that oath did not expire when I took off my uniform, Peters wrote in the letter sent to a handful of colleagues. “Today, I feel that Fox News is assaulting our constitutional order and the rule of law, while fostering corrosive and unjustified paranoia among viewers. Over my decade with Fox, I long was proud of the association. Now I am ashamed.”

In the letter, which was first reported on by BuzzFeed and confirmed by CNN, Peters said that he believed Fox News “degenerated from providing a legitimate and much-needed outlet for conservative voices” to morphing into a “mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration.”

Peters cited the Fox News opinion hosts’ relentless attacks on the FBI, Justice Department, intelligence agencies, and other branches of government. He said he believed Fox News was knowingly causing harm to the country in exchange for profit.

Who reported this story, cited above? Was it the “Fake News” Washington Post? Nope. It was Fox News.

4/2/18: Trump wakes up excited. He’s looking forward to the White House Easter Egg Roll. Aides inform him there will be Bunnies.

The Big Orange Buffoon is disappointed when festivities kick off and all he sees are little kids.

He was expecting Playmates.

Not the Bunny he was hoping to see.

  

*

YOU MAY RECALL that during his campaign Candidate Buffoon insisted we needed to “open up our libel laws” and make it easier to sue. A dozen women or more had accused him of sexual misconduct.

“All of these liars will be sued when the election is over.”

He was going to act quickly one he took office. “All of these liars will be sued when the election is over,” Trump promised.

Today, he may be sorry he ever suggested the change. Courts have found over the years that calling someone a liar can be an insult, an opinion, or hyperbole. Those are forms of free speech protected by the First Amendment. You can call the coach of the Cincinnati Bengals a “major loser.” That would qualify as protected speech. Cheryl Jacobus, a political consultant, tried to sue Trump for defamation, for saying just that about her. A New York appeals court tossed her case. Such “vague and simplistic insults,” said the judge, did not rise to the level of defamation.

Okay. Sure. The judge said the president was “simplistic.” But you can’t take the Buffoon to court just because he’s a buffoon.

In the same way, in 1985, a real estate developer sued an architecture critic, after the critic said one of the developer’s buildings would be an eyesore, “an atrocious, ugly monstrosity.” That too was opinion, therefore free speech. The developer—one Donald J. Trump—lost his case.

The president may now face legal jeopardy, not involving Russians. Summer Zervos, once a contestant on The Apprentice, was one of many to accuse Trump of sexual misconduct during the campaign.

Trump responded bluntly. “To be clear, I never met her at a hotel or greeted her inappropriately,” he said, as Zervos claimed. Trump issued tweets directed at Ms. Zervos specifically. At times he called all accusations against him “total lies” and “totally phony stories.” Now the judge charged with handling Zervos’s suit for defamation has ruled that absolute denials can be classed as “assertions of fact” and may represent grounds for a libel judgment.

What this means is Trump may have to sit and be deposed.

Statements from other women may be admitted as evidence to bolster Zervos’s case. Or, as an article by the American Bar Association put it in 2016, “a libel bully” may end up a “libel loser” instead.

(The president’s lawyers continue to drag this case out, hoping Zervos will run out of money and go away. Or, maybe Trump will pardon himself.) 

Zervos is suing for defamation.

4/3/18: Speaking of “Fake News,” let’s see how the stock market is doing. If the market is up Trump and loyal Trumpsters claim all credit is due him. When the market was down in the past—for stretches under Obama—it was always the fault of the black guy in the White House.

Consider a few Trump tweets:

Nov 7, 2012: The stock market and US dollar are both plunging today. Welcome to @BarackObama’s second term. 

If the market goes up—and you aren’t even president, but you’re a candidate—then all credit to you:

Jun 28, 2016: “@arnold_ziffel: @AnnCoulter also can’t help but notice the stock market’s reaction as @realDonaldTrump was speaking. #UPUPUP”

Once Trump wins election and has his presidential index finger on the Twitter button, the tweets begin to flow. Trump is a stock market hero!

Feb 16, 2017: Stock market hits new high with longest winning streak in decades. Great level of confidence and optimism - even before tax plan rollout!

Aug 3, 2017: Business is looking better than ever with business enthusiasm at record levels. Stock Market at an all-time high. That doesn’t just happen!

Nov 29, 2017: Looks like another great day for the Stock Market. Consumer Confidence is at Record High. I guess somebody likes me (my policies)! 

In the next tweet, Trump appears to be quoting a fan, but doesn’t identify who that might be:

Jan 14, 2018: “President Trump is not getting the credit he deserves for the economy. Tax Cut bonuses to more than 2,000,000 workers. Most explosive Stock Market rally that we’ve seen in modern times. 18,000 to 26,000 from Election, and grounded in profitability and growth. All Trump, not 0...

“All Trump, not 0 [sic],” apparently means, any rise in the Dow is due to Trump, whereas Obama never helped the markets at all.

So, let’s recap. When stocks go up, Trump gets credit. And Obama was terrible for stocks.

It’s easy to check. The Dow Jones closed at 8,281 on January 16, 2009, the last trading day before Obama took office. By then, the market had plunged nearly six thousand points from a high in 2007 (14,164). This left Barack Obama to deal with a real mess, dwarfing the imaginary mess Trump says he inherited.

The Dow bottomed out at 6,547 in March, having lost more than half its value.

Under Mr. Obama the market quickly (and thankfully) recovered, ending 2009 at 10,428. That would represent a gain, from Inauguration Day 2009 to New Years’ Eve 2009, of 25.9%.

By April 5, 2010 (the first trading day after Easter weekend), the Dow stood at 10,974. Starting from Inauguration Day to April Fools’ Day, the market had risen a shade under 32.5%.

Of course, conservatives never give Obama credit if they can avoid it. As mentioned, they like to claim that all the gains from the moment Trump was elected should be chalked up to Trump and the “optimism” he brings to the market. Suppose a gracious liberal (such as I) gives Trump and Trump fans that break—credits our current president with all gains from November 8, 2016, when the market closed at 18,333—and computes stock increases from that point.

The Dow finished today at 24,033.

That means the market is up 31.1%, giving Trump the best starting point and more than three extra months to pump up the gains.

It’s not as good as the 32.5% rise under Obama, to the same point in his first term, but it’s not bad.

*

THE PRESIDENT of the United States continues his assault on the First Amendment. He starts this day at 5:38 a.m., tweet-bitching again: 

The Fake News Networks, those that knowingly have a sick and biased AGENDA, are worried about the competition and quality of Sinclair Broadcast. The “Fakers” at CNN, NBC, ABC & CBS have done so much dishonest reporting that they should only be allowed to get awards for fiction! 

Trump caps his attacks during a press conference with leaders of three Baltic republics later the same day. Keep in mind: Those three nations spent fifty years under the iron thumb of the Soviet Union. In that half-century their people never enjoyed a single day of press freedom.

Once again, the President of the United States mocks the American free press, telling the president of Latvia to pick a “Baltic reporter” to ask a question.

“Pick a reporter, please,” Trump says to Latvian President Raimonds Vejonis. “A Baltic reporter ideally. Real news, not fake news.”

4/4/18: Since the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas the president has done nothing to address concerns of survivors and parents who visited the White House. (See: 2/14/18.)

Well, who needs more gun legislation! This great nation leads the world in number of guns in private hands, something like 300 million. And people keep buying more every time talk of gun control is mentioned. This is why, with so many guns in individual hands, we are the safest nation in the world and also happen to be one of the leading advanced nations when it comes to murder rates. So, to be even safer, we need to spend a few billion dollars on a big, beautiful border wall.

Jermon Perry might still be alive if he had had a gun.

If only we had that wall—or if only Jermon Perry had had a gun—he might be alive today. Had he been armed he would have had the chance to shoot the assailant pointing a pistol at his head. Jermon might be attending elementary school next year, had he had a concealed carry permit. Jermon was shot and killed by his 7-year-old brother, who found his father’s gun while looking in drawers for candy.

We all need guns!

What is the solution for every gun problem? Seventeen teachers and students slaughtered at Stoneman Douglas? Buy more guns! You say Jacob Burdette, 25, shot and killed his mother and her boyfriend—with a gun she bought? She should have bought more guns. You are driving down Interstate 5 and something about your maneuvering enrages another driver. He shoots but misses. You should have had a gun, should have kept one hand on the wheel and returned fire. Buy guns!!! A woman shoots three co-workers at YouTube headquarters in Bruno, California. If those co-workers had all been packing heat, everything would have been great. You are about to commit suicide? Of all types of attempts, those involving firearms end in fatalities 82.5% of the time. Drugs or poison (1.5%). Ha. Not good enough. Jumping? Still not the best way to end it all (34.5%). If you intend to kill yourself, you need guns!

Playing with your own pistol—and you shoot yourself dead? Should have had an AR-15 to protect yourself from yourself.

4/5/18: Recently, the president announced the tariff war with China was on. He was going to slap those foreign bitches with tariffs on $50 billion in imports. Today, however, the war is off. Senior Trump economic advisor Larry Kudlow tells reporters, “We’re not in a tariff war.”

As evening falls, the Big Orange Buffoon announces plans to slap tariffs on another $100 billion in Chinese goods.

The trade war is on again.

4/6/18: The stock market begins the day by plunging 700 points on growing fear of a trade war with China.

It ends the day down 572.

Shortly after the market closes, the Treasury Department announces sanctions on 17 Russian officials, 12 companies, 7 Russian oligarchs and 6 Lords-a-Leaping. Among the sanctioned: Oleg Deripaska and eight of his companies.

Lots of Russians with suspicious ties to Trump and his pals.

Can we find any connection to anyone in the Trump 2016 campaign? Yes, we can! But not, “Yes, we can,” in the Obama sense. Deripaska and campaign manager Paul Manafort had been doing business for years prior to Trump’s run for the money…uh… run for the presidency. Alexander Torshin, also sanctioned, worked through the N.R.A. to set up a meeting with Don Jr. during the campaign. A third gentleman on the list is Suleiman Kerimov, accused of smuggling cash into France in suitcases, $20 million at a time, and laundering it by buying villas.

Why might that ring alarm bells in Trumpistan? NPR explains:

The Treasury Department’s singling out of Kerimov for allegedly smuggling cash out of Russia followed a report this week by CNN that said Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller’s office has been interdicting wealthy Russians as they fly into the United States in order to interview them about potentially transporting cash.

If Russia funneled money to American political campaigns or organizations as part of its attack on the 2016 election, one way it might have done so is by simply smuggling paper dollars in order to avoid electronic transfer records.

Foreign contributions are barred in U.S. elections…

One way in which illicit money allegedly moves out of Russia is via real estate. A rich person buys property in the West—in London, New York or South Florida—without living in it. Instead, hot real estate markets in those places make it simple to resell a condo or a mansion and free up legitimate cash. In Kerimov’s case, he was allegedly using this scheme in the south of France when he was arrested in Nice last year.

In 2008, Donald Trump sold an estate he had purchased for around $42 million in Palm Beach, Fla., to Russian tycoon Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95 million.

Who else was on a January 2018 Treasury Department list for possible sanction? Rybolovlev was one! Aras Agalarov, who helped broker a meeting (originally kept secret) with Don Jr. in Trump Tower, was another. Sergei Gorkov, a Russian banker who met with Jared Kushner during the transition period before Trump took office, was a third. Gazprom, a Russian oil company and Rosneft Oil, tied to Carter Page, the Trump aide who became a target of the FISA court, would make four and five.

There are so many potentially corrupt links and conflicts of interest in this story it takes Politico seven charts to include them all.

*

AT 9:44 P.M., I SETTLE in front of the TV and try a little channel surfing. I catch Sean Hannity bitching about how the left hates Trump and never gives him a fair shake.

It makes Hannity sick, he tells three guests, knowing “this president” has created “3,000,000 jobs.”

Once again, being a fact-based liberal, I check the Bureau of Labor Statistics Monthly Jobs Report. Trump is enjoying a solid start to 2018. I may look at news with a left-of-center slant. But the math is the math is the math.

Gertrude Stein said that.

The March jobs report is relatively weak: 103,000 jobs added to the economy. The first official report for a month is “preliminary” and can change, up or down, but usually not by much.

Let’s see how Trump has done so far, starting January 20, 2017, when he took office. We’ll give him 11/31^st’s of that month’s job gains. Then we’ll total up jobs added from February 2017 through March 2018. Not bad, President Buffoon. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in just under fourteen-and-a-half months you have added 2,625,903 jobs.

Not quite Hannity’s “3,000,000.”

Still, not bad.

We now look to see how Obama fared when it came to adding jobs. For simplicity’s sake we’ll work backward from January 2017. We’ll give Obama 19/31^st’s of that month’s job gains, the same as Trump. (I’m not splitting January 20, since Trump took over at noon. We’ll just ignore that day and call it a tie.) Next, we can work backward, fourteen months: December 2016 to November 2015.

We pull out the calculator and the total is—2,933,903 jobs created in the last fourteen and 19/31^st’s months, under Trump’s predecessor.

Now, let’s Google: “Sean Hannity credits President Obama with creating jobs” and see what we find.

Okay: Nothing.

I did find this, however, which I definitely found amusing: 

*

ONE GUY we can say is definitely adding jobs, is E.P.A. head and Swamp Creature Scott Pruitt. Pruitt who protects our air and water, at least in theory, has had to hire a twenty-person security team to protect him from…mountain lions, maybe? That’s twenty jobs right off the bat; and a twenty-first goes to Samantha Dravis, who serves as associate administrator at the agency. Sadly, that job ends Wednesday when Dravis resigns under a cloud. But what fun while it lasted! Dravis got to fly first class, all over God’s creation, at taxpayer expense, just like her boss.

Flexible hours at taxpayer expense.

Dravis was always safely by Pruitt’s side, what with twenty security personnel keeping angry taxpayers at a distance. Also, the hours were flexible, to say the least. One Democratic congressman recently sent a letter to the Inspector General of the E.P.A, alleging that Dravis had not come to the office “for much if not all of the months of November 2017-January 2018.” 

4/7/18: Trump decides to do a radio interview on WABC, a New York City station. He tells his hosts he’s now wildly popular. He cites a daily poll, done by Rasmussen several days before, putting his approval rating at 51%. But that’s not all. Trump insists way more people secretly love him.

His real approval rate, according to him, is seven or eight points higher.

Sadly, Trump fails to notice, or doesn’t care to admit, but the Rasmussen poll falls back into negative territory Friday, giving him a 47% approval rating, vs. a 52% disapproval rating. So: there’s that.

In the generic ballot, which asks voters if they would prefer Democrats or Republicans to control the next Congress, Democrats have a 7.5-point advantage. Not a single poll—and there have been more than 150 since the Buffoon plunked down in the Oval Office—has shown the public with a preference for the GOP in the coming midterms.

4/8/18: On CNN (Donald J. Trump’s least favorite cable news channel), Republican Senator Susan Collins offers a vote of “no confidence” for embattled Swamp Creature Scott Pruitt.

“On policy grounds alone, I think Scott Pruitt is the wrong person to head the EPA,” Collins tells Jake Tapper (Trump’s least favorite cable news host).

Of course, you know who loves what Pruitt is doing? Charles and David Koch! And, what do the Koch brothers like to do—besides donate hundreds of millions to Republican politicians?

They like to run a company that refines petroleum and manufactures all kinds of wonderful chemicals.

As Pruitt and the Trump administration see it, you could give a bucket of any chemical the Koch brothers manufacture to children to drink. And it wouldn’t harm them a bit, other than the fact they might start to glow in the dark. And that’s why we have an E.P.A. To help the Koch brothers out.

*

THE CRY-BABY-IN-CHIEF takes a second hit from a Republican senator Sunday morning, this time from John McCain.

According to the senator, the president’s recent talk of withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria has “emboldened” Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and led him to order a chemical weapons attack Saturday.

Here’s how McCain put it:

President Trump last week signaled to the world that the United States would prematurely withdraw from Syria. Bashar Assad and his Russian and Iranian backers have heard him, and emboldened by American inaction, Assad has reportedly launched another chemical attack against innocent men, women and children, this time in Douma.

Trump wasn’t about to stand for such criticism and promptly turned to Twitter. Whose fault was this attack?

Once again, the buck stopped not on his desk but conveniently, more than fourteen months in the past. “If President Obama had crossed his stated Red Line In The Sand,” Trump whined, “the Syrian disaster would have ended long ago! Animal Assad would have been history!” 

Trump’s has now had fourteen months to get rid of Animal Assad.

He can’t do it either.

Trump had different ideas about Syria when all he did was tweet.

Also, we might note that Trump’s position has changed since Obama left office and now he’s stuck dealing with harsh realities on the ground. In happier times, when all Trump had to do was grab women by the pussy and tweet, he had different ideas about getting the American military bogged down in Syria and the Middle East.

Sep 5, 2013: AGAIN, TO OUR VERY FOOLISH LEADER, DO NOT ATTACK SYRIA - IF YOU DO MANY VERY BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN & FROM THAT FIGHT THE U.S. GETS NOTHING! 

Sep 5, 2013: All former Bush administration officials should have zero standing on Syria. Iraq was a waste of blood & treasure.

Sep 9, 2013: Don’t attack Syria - an attack that will bring nothing but trouble for the U.S. Focus on making our country strong and great again! 

4/9/18: The day starts badly (at least for President Trump), when F.B.I. agents bearing search warrants raid the office, home and New York City hotel suite of his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. 

Not the people you want visiting your lawyer's office.

“All the people who would know the worst about you.”

This is not a good look for the President of the United States, or even a mafia don. The Chicago Tribune and every reputable news outlet in America pick up the story. “This search warrant,” former U.S. attorney Joyce White Vance tells a reporter, “is like dropping a bomb on Trump’s front porch.”

The Tribune elaborates:

Mark Zaid, a Washington lawyer, said the seizure of Cohen’s records “should be the most concerning for the president.”

“You can’t get much worse than this, other than arresting someone’s wife or putting pressure on a family member,” he said. “This strikes at the inner sanctum: your lawyer, your CPA, your barber, your therapist, your bartender. All the people who would know the worst about you.”

We already know there’s plenty of “the worst” to learn about the man in the Oval Office. Naturally, Trump deals with this fresh problem the same way he deals with almost every other problem he faces as Commander-in-Chief:

The president spent much of Monday afternoon glued to the television. Aides said Trump watched cable news coverage of surprise raids on Cohen’s Manhattan office, home and hotel room by FBI agents, who took the lawyer’s computer, phone and personal financial records after a referral from Mueller.

According to reporters, Trump puzzled over how to respond much of the day. Finally, he realized what really mattered.

Trump “won’t like that Cohen is in the crosshairs, but you have to remember: He’d prefer the heat be on Cohen than on him,” said one of the president’s advisers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share a candid assessment. “His goal will be to figure out how much vulnerability he has [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted].”

Trump wasn’t worried about damage to the country. He was only worried about his orange ass.

First, he went after Jeff Sessions, the man he chose for his post. Speaking to reporters, the president vented. “The Attorney General made a terrible mistake when he did this and when he recused himself, or he should have certainly let us know if he was going to recuse himself, and we would have used a—put a different attorney general in,” Trump said. “So he made what I consider to be a very terrible mistake for the country but you’ll figure that out.”

Keep this in view. Trump believes the job of the Attorney General is to protect him from investigation. If Trump gets in legal trouble, it’s somehow “a very terrible mistake for the country.”

The president calls Michael Cohen a “good man.”

Trump continued angrily:

So I just heard that they broke into the office of one of my personal attorneys, a good man and it’s a disgraceful situation. It’s a total witch-hunt. I’ve been saying it for a long time. I’ve wanted to keep it down. We’ve given I believe over a million pages worth of documents to the special counsel. They continue to just go forward and here we are talking about Syria, we’re talking about a lot of serious things with the greatest fighting force ever and I have this witch-hunt constantly going on for over 12 months now and actually much more than that. You could say it was right after I won the nomination it started. And it’s a disgrace, it’s a real disgrace. It’s an attack on our country in a true sense. 

Not really, Mr. President. First, they didn’t “break in” to the office. They executed a warrant. Second, it’s not about the documents you turned over—it’s a warrant aimed at gathering evidence authorities have probable cause to believe your lawyer may hide or destroy. Third, it’s not “an attack on our country,” in “a true sense” or any of the other senses.

This was a raid in pursuit of evidence of possible crimes.

Still, Trump wasn’t finished ranting. “It’s an attack on what we all stand for so when I saw this and when I heard it, I heard it like you did,” he tells reporters, “I said that is really now in a whole new level of unfairness.”

He kept babbling:

They found no collusion whatsoever with Russia, the reason they found it is there was no collusion at all. No collusion. This is the most biased group of people, these people have the biggest conflicts of interest I’ve ever seen. Democrats all—or just about all, either Democrats or a couple of Republicans that worked for president Obama. They’re not looking at the other side. They’re not looking at the Hillary Clinton horrible things that she did and all of the crimes that were committed…. They only keep looking at us so they find no collusion and then they go from there and they say well, let’s keep going and they raid an office of a personal attorney early in the morning and I think it’s a disgrace. 

Let’s stop for a moment to poke around in this reeking pile of elephant dung. This raid is not a “disgrace.” This raid is not about Democrats. Robert Mueller, who referred the matter to authorities in New York, has always been a Republican. The F.B.I., which conducted the raids, is led by Christopher Wray, a Republican. Last, but not least, Geoffrey S. Berman, acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who signed off on the search warrants, is a Republican.

He’s a member of the Republican National Lawyers Association.

In fact, Berman donated to Trump’s 2016 campaign! Trump personally interviewed him for and appointed him to his current position.

The rule of law protects us all.

This is not hard to grasp, even if all you do is click on Infowars to get all your news. The rule of law—first enshrined in the Magna Carta in 1215—back when kings believed they had the power to rule with impunity, protects us all from abuse by government officials. We need to guard against the subversion of the rule of law by this president and any other president to come.

4/10/18:  Trump wakes up angry as he often does. He can’t manage to kill the Stormy Daniels story. His personal lawyer just got raided. His pal, Vladimir, is causing problems in Syria.

Naturally, his first order of business is to tweet: “Apr 10, 2018: Attorney–client privilege is dead!”

As usual, Trump doesn’t have his facts straight. This much is true. The F.B.I. did seize documents and records involving communications between Trump and Cohen. But now special agents at the Bureau will have to peruse these materials and make sure attorney-client privilege is not undermined. Unfortunately, if you’re the president, attorney-client privilege is not protected in cases when attorney and client are conspiring to commit new crimes.

Next, Trump decides to watch a tape of Lou Dobb’s performance on Fox Business Network, Monday night.

“This is now a man that has to be brought under control, it would seem to me,” Dobbs says not in reference to Cohen or Trump, but Special Counsel Mueller. “Frankly, I can’t imagine, because each of us has to come to terms with our own heart and conscience—I would fire the SOB in three seconds if it were me.”

Yes, Lou, we know you would. It’s increasingly clear. You’re ready to thrust out your right arm and salute.

Get your armband ready.

4/11/18: I think we can assume the president spent another restless night in the West Wing. It turns out Trump is fuming about “an attack on our country in a true sense,” and by that we mean...by North Korea?

Russia?

No…we mean the F.B.I. raid on his lawyer, Michael Cohen.

What do we know about the gentleman in question? We know Cohen has been referred to as Trump’s “pit bull.” We know Cohen likes to compare himself to Tom Hagan, lawyer for the Corleone family in The Godfather. We know he has threatened Trump’s enemies in the past. He has worked the boss out of legal jams related to shady business deals and paid out of his own pocket (or so he claims) to silence porn stars who might have dirt on Trump. We know in December 2015, with Trump already running for president, that Mr. Cohen was excited to see a news story quoting Vladimir Putin, saying Trump was “talented” and “very colorful.”

Viewing the world through green-colored glasses.

Cohen viewed that story through the same lens anyone who works for Donald J. Trump would. Namely: green-colored glasses. This was a chance to cash in! Cohen emailed a friend who had been talking extensively with the Russians in an effort to close the deal and build a Trump Tower in Moscow. “Now is the time,” Cohen told Felix Sater, that friend. “Call me.”

In those days, Sater—a convicted felon—was working on drumming up Kremlin support. More emails and phone calls flew back and forth. Negotiations progressed to a point where Candidate Trump signed a letter of intent to build in the Russian capital. Then the business deal stalled.

Cohen reached out to the Russians again in January 2016.

Now remember: His boss is running to become the President of the United States. And what is the focus here?

Money.

That January, he contacted Vladimir Putin’s private secretary to ask about getting a tower built. Alas, according to Cohen, nothing lucrative could be arranged. “I decided to abandon the proposal less than two weeks later for business reasons,” he said, “and do not recall any response to my email.”

Again, don’t miss the point. Trump and his personal lawyer and his felonious friend would have happily worked with Vladimir Putin, the kleptomaniacal leader of a nation ranked first or second on a list of our implacable foes. The moral questions didn’t matter. The money just wasn’t right.

$$$$$

In addition, we now learn that the president had to be talked down from the White House roof Tuesday—not to mention last December, as well. The raids aimed at his lawyer left Trump in a rage.

Trump spent the day glaring at the television and steaming over how to respond to news of this raid. He might, for example, allow the investigations to continue, potentially clearing his name. After all, if the whole investigation is a “witch hunt” he has nothing to hide because witches can’t fly. Or he could just fire everyone he can—and maybe a few people he legally can’t.

In the wake of the Cohen raids, Trump was filled with self-pity. He threatened to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. He would put some hack—maybe Judge Jeanine Pirro—in his place. Then the hack would fire Mueller. Trump would fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions and F.B.I. Director Christopher Wray.

According to one White House source, behind the scenes the president was acting like a loon. Asked by reporters on Monday if he intended to fire Mueller, Trump responded, “We’ll see what happens. …Many people have said ‘you should fire him,’” he claimed. Then he went with the clincher: “Again, they [the investigators] found nothing and in finding nothing, that’s a big statement.” 

Of course, if we’re being honest no one knows yet what the F.B.I. has found—including the F.B.I.

What we do know is that to get a search warrant, agents would have to prove to a judge that they had “probable cause” to suspect crimes were being or would soon be committed if they did not quickly act. (See: 4/12/18; 4/26/18; 5/4-5/18; 5/7/18 and  7/2/18 for comparison):

*

TUESDAY, PINOCCHIO SANDERS tells reporters at the daily press briefing that she hates her job lying for Trump and would rather work for the D.C. Sewer Department than keep up the charade.

Seriously, she says the president believes he had the power to fire Mueller. If Trump told Sanders he had the power to levitate the Pentagon, she would go out like a parrot and squawk agreement.

For once there were rumblings among Republicans, however gingerly they decided to speak. Sen. Charles Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, was at the forceful end of the spectrum. “It would be suicide for the president to want to talk about firing Mueller,” he warned.

Sen. Milksop Mitch McConnell was waiting to be enrolled in the Witness Protection Program and could not be reached for comment.

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan gave it all up and announced he would retire at the end of his term.

Sen. Joni Ernst, of Iowa, a veteran, and someone from whom you might expect a little courage, punted when it came to upholding the U.S. Constitution. “No,” she said, she didn’t see why the Senate should pass legislation to protect Mueller from being fired, “because I don’t think the president’s going to do it—and do you think the president would sign that legislation?”

Ha, ha, good one Sen. Ernst. “Checks and balances” are passé.

Other Republicans at least had something to offer. Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana gave the president the benefit of the doubt and said he thought Trump was “too smart” to get rid of Mueller. “I think it would provoke some sort of reaction by Congress. I think he knows that,” Kennedy said. Besides, Kennedy added, “the president can’t just fire Mr. Mueller. He’s got to direct Mr. Rosenstein to fire him, and I don’t think Mr. Rosenstein would do it.”

Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn said firing Mueller wouldn’t do the president any good. “The facts will come out one way or the other.” Mueller and his team would be expected to compile a report, even if he were fired, and that report would be made public, whether to exonerate Trump or not.

Finally, when I called my own Republican senator, Rob Portman, and left a message, I got a lengthy email response. In a key paragraph, Portman provided the kind of response that gave a shred of hope:

I supported the Justice Department’s decision to appoint a special prosecutor to oversee the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential elections. Former FBI Director Robert Mueller is well qualified to oversee this probe and I continue to support his efforts to fully investigate this issue. Determining the extent of Russian efforts to influence our democratic process is a matter of national security and is far more important than partisan politics. Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation should be allowed to run its full course, and he should remain in charge.

In the House of Representatives, however, abject cowardice has been more the rule of the day.

These lawmakers have elections to win every other year—and what matters most to them is 2018—not 1215, when, in the Magna Carta, the English enshrined the rule of law. A bill to protect Mueller, sponsored by Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN.) has the backing of almost every Democratic member of the House. One Republican, Rep. Walter Jones of North Carolina, is supporting the bill.

In theory, this would be the chance for all members of the House to prove we still have three coequal branches of government and that two are working to protect fundamental principles.

Sadly, it’s not happening with these cowards and clowns. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL.), one of the head clowns on the House Judiciary Committee, has been calling, instead, for a panel to bring in Attorney General Sessions, Deputy A.G. Rosenstein and Special Counsel Mueller to explain the thinking behind their investigative efforts. “I think the president is very frustrated,” Gaetz explains.

There it is in a terrifying nutshell. If the president is frustrated, then the guiding principles laid down by the Founding Fathers in 1787, including the belief that no man is above the law, may be swept aside. 

This Founding Father would not be amused.

  

4/12/18: Fresh details continue to surface regarding F.B.I. raids on Michael Cohen’s office, home and hotel suite. For example, we learn the warrants also included a safety deposit box.

Who’s your daddy?

There are hints that law enforcement officials believe Trump’s lawyer may have coordinated the release of Hillary Clinton’s hacked emails for the same day the Access Hollywood tape broke.

Questions abound. Did this release involve coordination with Russian entities which may have been involved in the hacks? (See: 4/14/18.) Was a $150,000 payment from a Ukrainian businessman to Candidate Trump (funneled through Trump’s charitable foundation), in return for a 20-minute skyped “speech” by Trump, influence buying by a foreign entity in the lead-up to the election?

It looks surprisingly similar to the $150,000 that ended up in the hands of Karen McDougal, the former Playboy Playmate, around that same time.

Well, then, how about a joke to lighten the mood?

New York Times Reporter: Who’s your daddy?

Little Boy: Donald J. Trump.

Times reporter: Who’s your mommy?

Little Boy: Daddy’s housekeeper; but don’t tell Melania. The doorman got $30,000 so he’d keep his mouth shut.

The raid on Cohen’s office has shaken loose the story of another hush payment. A Trump Tower doorman confirms he was paid $30,000 in days leading up to the 2016 election, not to talk about a housekeeper and Donald J. Trump’s love child.

What this all means, if you try to sort it out, is that possible crimes committed include: bank fraud, wire fraud, multiple campaign finance violations, ethical lapses serious enough to get Cohen disbarred and, most serious of all, an on-going conspiracy to cover up all the other crimes.

Who might be involved in a criminal conspiracy? Donald J. Trump, as both citizen and president.

4/13/18: Am I the only one who remembers when Fox News hosts were outraged because France refused to join the U.S. in the misadventure that would become the 2003 invasion of Iraq? In those days, at the urging of GOP lawmakers, a certain potato side dish in the congressional cafeteria would henceforth and forevermore be referred to as “Freedom Fries.” I think we can all agree, nothing says, “Let’s tackle serious issues,” quite like Congress acting decisively regarding menu nomenclature.

Now I would like to note that France joined us in bombing Syria this week, as did the ever-dependable Brits. I would also add that for ten years, thousands of French troops served beside U.S. fighting men and women in the bloody mountains and barren plains of Afghanistan.

I don’t know if they were served “Freedom Fries” at base cafeterias or not.

4/14/18: I admit I am tragically confused. I am having the devil of a time deciding whom I can trust. Do I put my faith in President Payoff, his personal lawyer and Lou Dobbs? (See: 4/12/18.)

Or should I believe people like Rod Rosenstein and Robert Mueller, who are overseeing an investigation into possible crimes committed by President Payoff and some of his very best pals?

Apparently, if you want to get paid to keep your mouth shut the man to see is Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. We now know Cohen has been involved in at least four payoffs so far.

The whopper of all hush money payments.

First, he worked out a deal to silence porn actress Stormy Daniels—who had a one-night stand with Trump. Cost: $130,000.

Second, Cohen helped broker a deal to silence Karen McDougal, the Playboy Bunny who claims a ten-month affair with Trump. Cost: $150,000.

Third, the doorman came cheap. Cost: $30,000.

Fourth, the whopper of all hush money payoffs, coughed up not to help Trump but allegedly paid by one of the top fund raisers for the Republican National Committee. This payoff went to silence a second Playboy Bunny.

Cost: $1.6 million!!

According to the Wall Street Journal, Cohen may also have stepped in several years back to squelch a developing story involving Donald J. Trump, Jr.

In 2013 US Weekly magazine had a credible source alleging an affair between Jr. and Aubrey O’Day. When writers called the Trump Organization for comment, Cohen went ballistic and threatened to sue. He would sue the magazine. He would sue the reporters. He would sue their mothers and their household pets. Was money paid perhaps to Ms. O’Day, also, to keep her quiet? (See: 3/29/18.)

No one knows.

What lessons can we glean from the settlements above? I think we can all agree this proves the Republican Party is still the party of “family values.” At least none of these payoffs went to lesbians or gays! I mean, standards, right! Should that doorman have held out for a bigger payday? Again, I think we can say he sold his story cut-rate. And do we know? Could that pregnant housekeeper, like so many domestics in America, have been an undocumented worker?

We know Trump’s top advisers and rejected cabinet nominees have a shown a fondness for undocumented types.

We know Trump loves hiring the undocumented, as well.

*

SO, WHO SHOULD I TRUST, in the context of the Russia investigation? Former F.B.I head James Comey, who said this week that Trump was a person “untethered to the truth?” Or Trump, man of multiple hush money payments, who cheated on his first wife, cheated on his second, and cheated on his third with—at minimum—Daniels, McDougal and possibly the house cleaner?

Can I believe the president when he calls Comey a “slimeball” and labels Rosenstein and Mueller “lowlifes?”

Or would I be wise to distrust Trump?

It turns out the fourth payoff went to a Bunny impregnated by Elliott Broidy. Broidy was (until the news hit Friday) a major fund-raiser for Trump and deputy finance chair for the Republican National Committee. A current member of that same committee, perhaps not for much longer, is Michael Cohen. A third pillar of conservative respectability and the finance chairman for the RNC was Stephen Wynn. Wynn exited after multiple women came forward to accuse him of forcing them to have sex. This included one victim who turned up pregnant but was paid $7.5 million to take a long hike.

In searching for truth, how can a simple blogger and concerned citizen separate the sheep from the sex-crazed goats? Broidy was vice chairman of Trump’s inaugural committee. Last October, Broidy and Trump met at the White House to discuss subjects of great interest to the United Arab Emirates, for whom Broidy sometimes works. Leaders of the U.A.E. hoped Trump would fire Secretary of State Rex Tillerson—which he soon did—because they felt he was too friendly with their neighbor and rival Qatar.

Then, just for fun, the U.A.E. signed a deal with Circinus, L.L.C., Broidy’s security company, and paid out at least $200 million.

At the time, Broidy was working closely with George Nader, an adviser to the U.A.E. Nader, a Lebanese American businessman, was once charged with child pornography in the U.S. but dodged conviction on a technicality. Then he got convicted in the Czech Republic and spent a year in the slammer. Nader recently made news when he was stopped by F.B.I. agents at the Boston airport, slapped with a subpoena, and promptly decided to cooperate with the Mueller investigation.

There are allegations—as yet unproven—that Nader may have steered Emirati cash to…of course…the Trump campaign in 2016.

I tell you. How do I decide? Trust Trump? Trust Comey and Mueller and Rosenstein and guys like that?

Maybe this will help.

Broidy has been in the headlines before, although not for anything as titillating as banging a Playboy Bunny at a high per-bang rate. In 2009 he was forced to plead guilty when it was proven he made at least $1 million in illegal gifts to New York State officials in order to win a $250 million pension fund deposit for an investment firm he oversaw. According to The New York Times those gifts included “trips to Israel and Italy, payouts to official’s relatives and girlfriends and an investment in one relative’s production of a low-budget movie called Chooch.”

Now, to make my decision all the more difficult, on Friday, the RNC (yes, the same crew who brought you all kinds of sexual abuse), kicked off a campaign to prove James Comey is the liar who threatens America most.

Here’s a screenshot of the RNC link:

*

FINALLY, GUESS WHO may in fact have taken a trip to Prague in 2016, as reported in the Steele dossier, the dossier which according to everyone who ever worked for Trump is filled with lies?

Hint #1: This man once claimed, “I have never been to Prague in my life.”

Hint #2: Christopher Steele, who compiled the dossier, said sources warned him this man who traveled in secret to Prague was involved in a conspiracy to coordinate ties with the Russians to help the Trump campaign.

According to McClatchy, Mueller’ team has uncovered evidence that Michael Cohen traveled first to Germany. This would show up on his passport. He then crossed the Czech Republic border by train, which would not.

Again, I think my dilemma is clear. If Mueller has evidence Cohen was in Prague and Cohen says he was never in Prague, well, who do I believe??? The guy in charge of paying off porn stars, or the former head of the F.B.I. and a decorated war hero? That would be the guy once confirmed by a U.S. Senate vote of 100-0. Did you know the U. S. Senate could agree, 100-0 on any topic, including: If an asteroid the size of Sri Lanka was speeding toward Planet Earth and NASA could launch a rocket to stop it, NASA should? Well, in Mueller’s case, they did.

Cohen has repeatedly waved around his passport to "prove" he never traveled to Prague.

*

I SUPPOSE the enablers at Fox News might argue that Trump and the RNC crew salvaged a fig leave of dignity when Broidy went to great pains to point out, even though the Bunny he impregnated decided to have an abortion, it was her decision. Not his. “At the end of our relationship,” he said, “this woman shared with me that she was pregnant. She alone decided that she did not want to continue with the pregnancy and I offered to help her financially during this difficult period.”

So, I guess the only question left would be: What happened to the pregnant Trump housekeeper? Did she keep her baby? If so, is there another little Trumpling out there somewhere, running around?

If the housekeeper was undocumented, could the little tyke be DACA eligible?

Or did the housekeeper abort?

(Blogger’s note, 2/4/20: The allegation that Cohen traveled to Prague has never been proven; and while he later admitted to numerous crimes, he continued to deny he had visited the Czech Republic for any such purpose.) 

Will pay $1.6 million for chance to boink a Playboy Bunny.

4/15/18: If Trump is draining the swamp it isn’t staying drained long. E.P.A. chief and Swamp Creature Scott Pruitt is currently accused of receiving a sweetheart apartment rental deal in D.C. for himself—and his daughter—from the wife of a lobbyist for the natural gas industry.

I think we can all agree that nothing says, “I care more about the environment” than getting a sweetheart deal from a lobbyist in the fossil fuel industry.

A cool $3 million in flying costs.

As a bonus, we also know Pruitt has put together a 20-person security team to protect himself—from people who want to save endangered fish. Cost of that detail and all the flying Pruitt and his guards and friends are “required” to do, in just one year in office, is an estimated $3,000,000.

What else do we know about Pruitt? We know he spent $43,000 for a soundproof booth for his office, so his communications would be secure, even though the E.P.A. already had a similar booth, so long as Pruitt didn’t mind riding the elevator down a couple of floors. We know he demoted or fired several people at the E.P.A. who questioned his spending habits. We know he liked to have his government-paid drivers turn on sirens and flashers when he was on the way to a restaurant or a ball game.

We know he requested a $100,000 per month private jet club membership and asked to be provided a bulletproof limousine. (Those requests were denied.)

We know Pruitt asked if he could raise the salaries of two top aides, Sarah Greenwalt and Millan Hupp. Greenwalt would go from $107,435 to $164,200 yearly, Hupp from $86,460 to $114,590. Those requests were denied. Someone at the agency then used a little-known trick and raised their pay regardless, although Pruitt says he had no idea how this happened. Maybe poltergeists?

Finally, Pruitt spent $40,000 to fly to Morocco for a meeting about…well, try to guess! Trees? Clean air? Saving endangered fisheries? Discussions on climate change? No! Pruitt flew all that way, with Samantha Dravis (see: 4/6/18) at his side, accompanied by his phalanx of guards, because he wanted to talk to Moroccan officials about why their nation should burn more liquefied natural gas.

In the meantime, Pruitt is planning to “protect” the environment by slashing truck and automobile tailpipe emission and mileage regulations. “This is certainly a big deal. The result,” Robert Stavins, director of the Harvard program on environmental economics, warns, “will be more gas-guzzling vehicles on the road, greater total gasoline consumption, and a significant increase in carbon dioxide emissions.”

Because, you know what America really needs?

More smog!

*

LET’S STOP AND PONDER clean air and water for a moment—or a world lacking in same.

We now have in the Oval Office a science moron. Trump does not read. Trump watches television. Lots of television. He watches Fox News. Because the president is intellectually lazy, and because he gets his news from other science morons, he believes climate change is a hoax.

Trump will never grasp essential historical facts.

Because Trump is singularly obtuse, it is unlikely he will ever grasp essential historical facts. Human beings, he will never understand, are really good at ruining the environment. Head for the outskirts of any large U.S. city and what do you see? Trash Mountain. It’s the city dump, increasing annually in height and breadth. Think humanity can’t destroy its habitat? We have a field of plastic debris swirling in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. A combination of currents has trapped an estimated 80,000 metric tons in what scientists now call “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.”

It’s twice the size of Texas.

That’s not an aberration. Did you know farm runoff (pesticides and fertilizers) enters the Mississippi River and flows into the Gulf of Mexico? Did you know this runoff creates a “dead zone” at the mouth of the river, where oxygen in the water is depleted and sea life cannot survive? That zone is the size of New Jersey—including former Governor Chris Christie.

Try to find the Aral Sea on a world map. If you’re like Trump, you can’t. But look fast. Once the fourth largest lake in the world, decades of water diversion for cotton farming destroyed the Aral Sea.

By 2014 most of the lake had dried up. 

You can go back in history and find plenty of examples of civilizations that wrecked the environment and collapsed. The Fertile Crescent of ancient times is today mostly desert. The Biblical “cedars of Lebanon” vanished. The Kushites who ruled the Upper Nile and once conquered Egypt took it on the environmental chin and watched their world collapse. The Khmer people who built Angkor Wat suffered a similar fate. The Mayan civilization in Central America rose to great heights and crashed.

You could go back forty years to a time when the world awakened to the danger from chlorofluorocarbons in products like aerosol hairspray. Naturally, Trump, for whom hair spray is as essential as cheeseburgers, has denied this was ever a problem. Yet, four decades ago, humanity came close to ruining the earth’s ozone layer. No one knew it was happening till it was almost too late. We were saved, again, by science—in the form of NASA satellites gathering data.

We got lucky that time.

Chlorofluorocarbons have been heavily regulated since. The damage remains. Each summer a hole in the ozone the size of North America forms over the Antarctic. Luckily it doesn’t form over North America. The increase in ultraviolet rays reaching the surface of the earth would increase every man, woman and child’s chances of developing skin cancer if it did. Now, only penguins and plankton pay a price.

Did you know scientists believe one fourth of the ocean’s reefs are already damaged beyond repair? And did you know why?

Rising water temperatures.

Climate change.

Did you know scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported last year that sea ice at both the North Pole and the South Pole had declined to the lowest levels ever seen? An extra area equal to 790,000 square miles of ocean surface was ice free, equal in size to two Mexico’s.

You can look all this up if you’re not too lazy. The ten hottest years ever recorded, globally (according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA), are now, in order: 2016, 2015, 2017, 2014, 2010, 2005, 2013, 2009, 1998 and 2007. You can turn off Fox News, where climate change deniers go to spout, and go to NASA websites and study the facts.

Or you can do what the Big Orange Buffoon does: Watch hours and hours of television daily and tweet. 

A majority of Americans have never heard of Scott Pruitt.

*

PERHAPS YOU HAVEN’T been paying attention to the people Trump wants to put in charge of guarding the environment. If you haven’t, you should. Pruitt and his business buddies are hell bent on slashing regulations that protect us all and protect the future for our children and our children’s children.

In a recent poll, however, a majority of Americans could not say who Pruitt was.

Consider, then, Andrew R. Wheeler, a former lobbyist for Murray Energy, the largest coal-mining company in America. He has been tapped to serve as Pruitt’s deputy at the E.P.A. Wheeler previously worked for Senator “Snowball” Jim Inhofe, who once insisted, because he could pack a snowball in Washington D.C. in January, that climate change couldn’t be real.

And dare we forget Kathleen Hartnett White, a former Texas environmental regulator? (Texas is pretty much famous for not regulating the environment—unless forced to when something blows up.)

Ms. White was originally Trump’s moron pick to head up the Council on Environmental Quality.

This would be akin to asking the president to serve as your marriage counselor.

White once called belief in global warming “a kind of paganism.” As for CO₂, White wasn’t worried about it building up in the atmosphere. CO₂, she liked to say, was “the gas of life on this planet.”

Choice for Council on Environmental Quality plagiarizes answers.

What went wrong for Ms. White in her appearance before a U.S. Senate committee? First, it turned out most of the written answers she supplied had been cut and pasted, word for word, from answers previously submitted by Swamp Creature Pruitt and another Swamp Creature nominee, during earlier hearings.

Second, once White started talking, you could understand why she tried to cheat her way through.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI.) asked her to estimate how much of the excess heat from climate change was being soaked up by the oceans. It’s an important question. If the oceans are currently absorbing most of the heat, the dangers of climate change are being masked. If the oceans and atmosphere both begin to warm up fast scientists predict catastrophic results.

White replied that she didn’t know—but said there were many opinions and “no right answer.”

This is the preferred fossil fuel industry answer. What it really means, is we don’t care. So, let’s keep burning as much coal and oil as we can.

So, Whitehouse set a trap. He asked if there was a “serious scientific opinion that it’s below 50 percent.” White said yes.

“Wow,” said Whitehouse.

Actually, NOAA has been clear about this for years:

More than 90 percent of the warming that has happened on Earth over the past 50 years has occurred in the ocean….Though the atmosphere has been spared from the full extent of global warming for now, heat already stored in the ocean will eventually be released, committing Earth to additional warming in the future. 

Whitehouse wasn’t done. He trapped White again. He wondered if she agreed water expands as it warms—a phenomenon that children learn about in sixth grade science class.

“I do not have any kind of expertise or even much layman’s study of the ocean dynamics,” White admitted.

She might as well have had a note taped to her back by some prankster that read, “Kick me! I’m an idiot!”

Senator Edward J. Markey (D-MA.) had heard all he could stand. “Your positions are so far out of the mainstream,” he informed White, “they are not just outliers, they are outrageous. You have a fringe voice that denies science, economics and reality.”

Trump’s kind of gal.

(White’s nomination was withdrawn when it became clear even GOP senators would balk at confirmation.)

4/16/18: Some days you don’t know whether to be terrified by what Trump is doing or doubled over with laughter. Yesterday, lawyers for the president and lawyers for his lawyer tried to block release of any information gathered in the recent F.B.I. raids on Michael Cohen’s home, offices, etc.

Lots of Bunny boinking goin’ on.

It turns out Cohen has had only three legal clients in the past year. One would be Trump. Second would be Elliott Broidy. Both have been accused of boinking Playmate Bunnies despite the fact they, the boinkers, were married at the time of the Bunny boinking. The third client turns out to be none other than Sean Hannity, noted pillar of conservative rectitude at Fox News.

We don’t know yet, what Cohen might have been doing for Hannity, what he might have been fixing for the Fox host. Hannity says it was nothing—just a little idle chit and chat. He may be telling the truth. Considering the company he’s keeping, you can’t be blamed if you have a smidge of doubt. I, for one, will readily admit I hope it turns out another Playboy Bunny has been boinked.

That would be comical, for sure.

4/17/18: Would it be kosher if this liberal blogger mentioned the projected federal deficits for the next several years?

According to the Congressional Budgeting Office, the deficit for 2018, which falls almost totally on Trump & Co.’s heads, is projected to reach $804 billion, even with the U.S. economy operating at a healthy pace.

Worse still, projected deficits for the coming years “have increased markedly” since CBO studies completed last summer. Congress’s own budget scoring body is warning lawmakers they are over-spending wildly. With a Republican president gripping the levers of power, at least when not grabbing the ladies, and Republicans in control of House and Senate, we have seen minimal effort to stem the red ink tide. The deficit for 2019 is projected to be “just under” $1,000,000,000,000. 

Republican fiscal fakery.

4/18/18: We learn again today. The Trump administration has no idea what the Trump administration is doing. Sometimes we’re getting out of Syria quick. Sometimes we’re hitting Syria with missiles and talking tough. Most of the time, the president is focused on insulting James Comey and couldn’t care less how many of his own people Bashar al-Assad slaughters.

A promise like a Trump wedding vow.

Sometimes, U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley says we’re going to increase sanctions on Russia. Sometimes the White House says, yeah, we are. Then the White House says, no, we’re not, and the reason Haley said we were was that Ms. Haley got “confused.” Clearly, this is better than admitting Trump is a loon.

Cue the idiocy! Out steps National Economic Council Director and new Head Presidential Cheerleader Larry Kudlow to explain to reporters. Kudlow chooses to ignore reports that it was the president himself who stomped the brakes and suddenly canceled plans—already announced by the White House—to sanction the Russians. It was easy to sort out, said Larry. Haley “got ahead of the curve,” Kudlow told reporters. “She’s done a great job, she’s a very effective ambassador. There might have been some momentary confusion about that.”

Ah, poor Nikki Haley, the little lady—she was the problem—it wasn’t President Bloato’s fault!

Clearly, getting blamed for the idiocy of others did not sit well with U. N. Ambassador Haley. “With all due respect,” she replied in a statement obtained by Jake Tapper on CNN, “I don’t get confused.”

In fact, I think we can already see that any promises that might be made to foreign countries by this president are to be trusted to about the same degree as a Donald J. Trump wedding vow.

4/19/18: Today a Playboy Bunny escapes from a non-disclosure agreement (allegedly involving illegal backdoor dealings by Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen) brokered with the National Enquirer.

A lot of different Bunnies figure in the story of this administration. So pay attention. This Bunny is Karen McDougal. She claims she carried on a ten-month affair with Trump back in 2006. Now, in court, McDougal has managed to win the right to talk about her story—and, if possible, make as much money as she can.

(In part, it appears the National Enquirer and its lawyers caved in court—because if they kept fighting, Cohen and others, possibly Donald J. Trump himself, might have been forced to give depositions.)

Okay, don’t get the Bunnies mixed up. We are not talking about the Bunny impregnated by sleazebag Republican fund raiser and Trump pal, Elliott Broidy. (See: 4/14/18 and 4/16/18.)

Nor do we mean the Bunny trainee who went on to become a federal judge (more on her in a moment).

We mean the latest Bunny to tell her tale.

Let’s be honest and just say: This is Trumpistan and anything is possible. Of course, there’s another Playboy Bunny in the news! This time, we’re talking about Barbara Moore, Miss December 1992, who says she had an affair with Trump in 1993. And can I be the first, right here, to say, “Well, thank god, at least the First Lady wasn’t in the picture in those days.”

So…Trump wasn’t cheating on any wife.

Then again, he was engaged to Marla Maples at the time, who would soon become his second wife, and Maples was already pregnant with their child, a baby they would later name Tiffany.

If you would like to read all about what Moore calls a “steamy” affair you can click the link (above) and see what Moore told the British tabloid, the Daily Mail. She has all kinds of pictures from visits to Mar-a-Lago. It appears she took pictures of every room in the house, and stuck her head in the broom closet and opened the dresser drawers for a peek. She has photos of herself with the cook—in a bikini by the pool—ascending the steps—and one of the younger Big Orange Buffoon, flexing his Buffoon muscles.

Moore says she came forward now because her name appeared in one of the legal documents filed in Karen McDougal’s case.

Believe it or not, another Bunny was also outed in the documents; but she’s not talking yet.

For the president, I suppose you could say there’s good news and bad news in her story. First the good: Moore says Trump was a great lover and a gentleman. She even believes he’s a great president.

(I think we can safely assume Trump was not attracted to Moore because of her impressive intellect.)

The bad news—proven once again—is that Trump is a serial liar.

Moore has few regrets about her affair; but she did admit she had no idea there was already another woman in his life. “But at the time I didn’t know he was with someone else, let alone engaged to Marla Maples and it was only recently I learned she was pregnant at the time.”

This had “shocked” her, she said.

The DailyMail.com reached out to the White House for comment. “A source familiar with the matter said the president said these are more false accusations.”

In other words, you had to add Moore to the incredible list of people who for no reason whatever tell lies about Trump. That list would include nearly two dozen women who have accused him of sexual improprieties, a couple of thousand students at Trump University who claim they were scammed, scores of undocumented Polish workers who insist they were cheated out of wages, and pretty much every person at the top of the Department of Justice and the F.B.I.

Do you know what the motto of the F.B.I. is? It’s worth considering, for purposes of comparison: “Fidelity. Bravery. Integrity.”

Ms. Moore in more clothes than normal.

If you’d care to read even more about the previous sexual escapades of our current president, you can go to the article and indulge. Moore goes into detail about how they met, how they flirted and how excited she was to meet the famous businessman in the flesh.

In all the flesh.

“I thought that we were dating and I was special.”

“I was intimate with him the first night. Yes,” she says.

And it was really…I felt special. I felt like he was very passionate with me and we both felt a chemistry. I was surprised he was older, I’d never been with an older man before, but he was good, a really good lover. He was kissing my neck, being really attentive. And you know, the sex was normal, he didn’t ask me to do anything weird at all.

That, at least, is a relief.

“I felt like it was love-making, not just a one-night stand,” Moore continued. “And I didn’t feel like I was a piece of meat or anything. I just felt really admired and adored. He was very loving.”

The next morning, she was embarrassed to “do the walk of shame back to her room in the sparkly gold dress she was wearing from the night before.”

Never fear, Ms. Moore. Donald is a gentleman—at least in terms of how he treats whatever woman he is boinking at the time. He “gave me an overcoat and called a security guard up to his suite. I felt like, wow, this guy really is nice. He’s a gentleman. He was a complete gentleman the whole time.”

Moore was invited to Mar-a-Lago. Trump played golf part of the time and she watched, and they rode around in a golf cart and had sex. (Not in the golf cart, I don’t mean.) “I would make him laugh. And I remember him taking a lot of pictures of me. The whole thing was a whirlwind, a fantasy come true,” Moore says today.

Did we mention Trump was already engaged and the woman he was going to marry was carrying his child????

Moore does have a lot of pictures—and the Daily Mail notes that these pictures still have the date stamps, for example, “April 25, 1993,” in lower right corners.

After her dreamland visit to Mar-a-Lago, Moore and Trump regularly spoke over the phone. Moore says she’d regularly call him and came to be on first name terms with his two personal assistants, Rhona and Norma. (Rhona Graff was Trump’s executive assistant. Norma Infante Foerderer was his long-time personal assistant.) In an old phone book Moore dug out of her attic an entry under T shows Donald Trump’s phone numbers entered in pencil.

“I definitely felt like our relationship was getting stronger. And, and that’s when he invited me to New York to the Trump Tower and I just thought that, you know, we were an item. I thought that we were dating and I was special.”

She flew to New York and hung out in his penthouse and had sex. She came back to the city again in the summer, this time for a photo shoot. Another Playmate told her she should call her “boyfriend.” Moore did and Trump invited both young women over. Trump said he was tired after a long flight and didn’t want to go out—and we assume be seen and reported to Marla.

Moore picks up the story once more:

We had a couple of glasses of champagne and Donald was laying on his back, on his bed with his arms up and we were just sitting on the corner of his bed talking and chatting. Then he goes “come here” and I just started to hug him and we started kissing and my friend was still there. We just went at it and it was like she just didn’t exist.

At this point, you may want to stop reading or get a wastebasket in case your gag reflex kicks in. As “things turned steamy,” the Daily Mail reports, “the friend retreated but only as far as a chair in the corner of the room. She sat and watched as Moore and the billionaire had sex. Moore smiles at the naughty moment.”

That’s probably all you need to know about Trump, the gentleman. There was “giggling and it was playful,” Moore insists. It didn’t bother her that the other young woman was watching “because we were such good friends.”

She hadn’t expected to have sex with a witness—but she was “really young and it’s just what happened.”

Then a key detail, as related by the Daily Mail: “Throughout the illicit affair Moore says it never once occurred to her that Trump might be engaged to another woman. And not for a second did Moore think Trump was two-timing her with another woman, let alone engaged to someone.”

Even when her aunt living in New Jersey, who was working in New York as a fit model, passed comment that she thought Trump was dating someone called Marla, Moore ignored it.

“I suppose I trusted him because we talked almost every day, but my aunt was right. I never ever thought that he was seeing anybody else that didn’t even cross my mind.

I was very young and I just thought this is my guy right now.”

Their “relationship” fizzled out in September 1993. On October 13, Tiffany Trump was born. That December, Moore’s “gentleman” married Maples, in a lavish ceremony in front of a thousand guests.

Moore adds, finally, that she and her daughter both voted for Trump in 2016. “I love him as our president. I love him because it’s funny to me when he kind of puts his foot in his mouth…I think he’s doing a great job and there’s more to come. I feel safe with him in charge.” 

*

WHAT ABOUT THE Bunny trainee who became a judge? By happenstance, it turns out Judge Kimba Wood, currently hearing motions in the case involving F.B.I. raids on Michael Cohen’s office, home, hotel suite and safety box, once entered the Playboy Bunny training program on a lark.

She was in college and needed money, but only lasted a week. Prancing around in skimpy outfits wasn’t her style, no matter the pay.

I think we can all agree this story would be even cooler if she had posed nude sometime in the past.

But no.

All Judge Wood has been doing lately is denying motions by Trump’s legal team to quash evidence that may have turned up in the raids.

If Cohen is in legal jeopardy, then so is his boss.

(Disclaimer: A second Playboy Bunny, Elke Jeinsen, later told the British tabloids that she did watch Moore and Trump have sex. The story has never gained much traction in the American media, save on the pages of Hollywood Life—and, for once, it may be Trump is innocent.)

4/20/18: Besides bingeing on Fox News and wondering if Melania will dump his fat ass for lying about porn stars and Playboy Bunnies, what is the President of the United States up to today? He’s fuming every time he hears the name “James Comey.” He rages every time he thinks about Comey’s memos, which Comey says outline conversations he and Trump had about the Russia investigation.

Trump hints he has tapes. Comey hopes so.

For months, Trump insisted those memos didn’t exist. He insists Comey never took notes while they were together!

Comey just made them up later to cover his F.B.I. butt.

In fact, at one point, Trump went for a kind of lying-sack-of-presidential-poop bluff. He could prove Comey was lying:

Several weeks passed. Trump laid low. Apparently, he was laying in wait to catch Comey in a “perjury trap” of his own. (See: 1/26/18.)

Okay. No.

Trump finally admitted he was stuffed with moose dung. If there were tapes….um, he didn’t have any.