Anything New? The Daily, Hourly Craziness of Donald J. Trump (Part IV)

PICKING UP WHERE WE LEFT OFF,  in Part III, we find that the President of the United States is still nuts.

We will continue the sorry saga in Part V. 

I am predicting it won’t be getting any better.

Once again, we seize the nettle, and describe his daily doings, through September 11, 2018:

SKIPPED A FEW DAYS

THE TRUMP ARCHIVE

7/23/18: Trump wakes early, satisfied in the knowledge he has threatened war with Iran. Naturally, he turns to tweeting, because that’s what he does best. Plus, he wants to vent.

At 5:13 a.m., the president issues a call to fans to warm up their TVs: “Tom Fitton on @foxandfriends at 6:15 A.M. NOW! Judicial Watch.” 

“Fake News” is any news Trump doesn’t like.

The Department of Justice has just released a 400-page document explaining why four FISA warrants were issued in 2016 and 2017 allowing intelligence agencies to surveil one Mr. Carter W. Page. Trump and his allies know the book-length document undercuts every claim that the Russian investigation is a witch hunt. The president also knows none of his fans are going to plow through it or try to get to the truth.

At 5:30 a.m. we get this:

So we now find out that it was indeed the unverified and Fake Dirty Dossier, that was paid for by Crooked Hillary Clinton and the DNC, that was knowingly & falsely submitted to FISA and which was responsible for starting the totally conflicted and discredited Mueller Witch Hunt!

At 5:52, 6:01 and 6:09 a.m. Trump starts quoting from Fox News. For the sake of brevity, let’s just say his tweets sound like this: “Blah, blah, WITCH HUNT, blah, blah, blah.”

For variety, Trump tweets out a fresh attack on the media, because, to put it bluntly, the only news he thinks should be allowed is Fox News, not “Fake News.” “Fake News” is any news Trump doesn’t like. Frankly, the President of the United States doesn’t like any news unless it’s syrupy praise.

This time, we have a series of four posts over the course of seventy minutes 7:25 to 8:35 a.m.). This does leave a sensible human being wondering what the hell the president does with most of his time. Highlights of those tweets include, “Corrupt media,” “Japan is happy, all of Asia is happy.” “The Amazon Washington Post has gone crazy,” and the paper “loses a fortune.”

Swear to god, if you follow Trump’s Twitter feed, you think your eyeballs might melt. Based on the timing of his posts, Trump has just spent three hours tweeting and eating Rice Krispies.

He finishes with a flourish—threatening to use the Department of Justice to bring an antitrust suit against one of his harshest critics. He’s sick of the media using “anonymous sources—which don’t exist.” But he says “many feel” an antitrust suit should be brought. Who are these “many” people?

                                                             

No one knows.

It’s a game Trump loves to play. Criticize the media for using anonymous sources. Pray the base is too dumb to notice. Use anonymous sources (or perhaps non-existent sources) and tweet.

Take this typical post from July 18, after virtually the entire world mocked his performance in his press conference with Putin:

So many people at the higher ends of intelligence loved my press conference performance in Helsinki. Putin and I discussed many important subjects at our earlier meeting. We got along well which truly bothered many haters who wanted to see a boxing match. Big results will come!

Who were those people who loved his performance? Couldn’t Trump name them in a follow-up tweet? Something tells me one was Inspector Gadget. The second was J. Edgar Hoover. Agent 99 was the third.

*

TRUMP WRAPS UP another busy day by announcing that he’s going to revoke the top-secret security clearances of several former leaders of the U.S. intelligence community.

My god, have they been leaking secrets…to the Russians!!!! Those bastards! How low will they go?

Oh. They’re critical of the president.

As usual, Trump’s half-baked plans are so dumb he threatens to revoke the top secret clearances of two critics (James Comey and Andrew McCabe) who…don’t have top secret clearances.

Getting inside Trump’s head a very difficult voyage.

John McLaughlin, former Acting Director of Central Intelligence under George W. Bush, is asked during an interview to comment. Can he explain Trump’s thinking regarding the Russians and the Mueller investigation? “Well, you know, getting inside Donald Trump’s head is not only an unpleasant voyage, but a very difficult one…” he admits. Then, almost wistfully, McLaughlin trails off.

7/24/18: Trump announces via Twitter that his trade policies are the best trade policies since Hawley-Smoot (1928). “Tariffs are the greatest! Either a country which has treated the United States unfairly on Trade negotiates a fair deal, or it gets hit with Tariffs. It’s as simple as that - and everybody’s talking! Remember, we are the ‘piggy bank’ that’s being robbed. All will be Great!”

A few hours later the Trump administration announces plans to offer $12 billion worth of “temporary relief” to farmers who are already being hurt by retaliatory tariffs implemented by other countries. An official for the U.S. Department of Agriculture calls this a “one-time” program to help producers of soybeans, cotton, sorghum, wheat, dairy and hog products get by.

Once again, a stupid tweet passes for Trump policy. NBC notes that even Republicans don’t like this move. Sen. Ben Sasse said the president’s policies are “going to make it 1929 again.”

Sen. Corker of Tennessee calls the idea “welfare” for farmers. And we all know how much Republicans hate welfare.

We know Trump likes to say NBC is “Fake News.” So let’s quote Republicans, via Politico’s reporting:

“This is becoming more and more like a Soviet type of economy here: Commissars deciding who’s going to be granted waivers, commissars in the administration figuring out how they’re going to sprinkle around benefits,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). “I’m very exasperated. This is serious.”

“Taxpayers are going to be asked to initial checks to farmers in lieu of having a trade policy that actually opens and expands more markets. There isn’t anything about this that anybody should like,” said Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 3 GOP leader. He suggested the new spending might need to be offset by cuts in other funding areas.

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) said “this bailout compounds bad policy with more bad policy.” 

The frustration was shared by House Republicans. Rep. Dave Reichert of Washington, who chairs a subcommittee on trade, said the policy might be helpful to farmers in the short term but that it does little to preserve market access lost due to tariffs. “Some in the ag community, they say, ‘That’s great, thank you for the help’ — except that the problem then becomes we’ve lost the market, so how do we get the market back?” he said. “That’s the question.”

*

TRUMP ENDS ANOTHER WILD DAY with a stunning admission. He finally realizes the Russians do hack U.S. elections. It only took two years for the Slow-Learner-in-Chief to work this all out.

He announces his discover in a tweet. “I’m very concerned that Russia will be fighting very hard to have an impact on the upcoming Election,” he cries. “Based on the fact that no President has been tougher on Russia than me, they will be pushing very hard for the Democrats. They definitely don’t want Trump!”

Yeah. Why would they be happy to keep the Crimea? 

And why would they be happy to see Trump end sanctions, which he has said he’s willing to consider? How much dough is currently beyond reach of various Russian oligarchs and corrupt Russian firms? It would be hard to overestimate how much loot they have stashed away in other countries. Often, laundered money has been used to buy assets like jewelry, fine art, vintage cars and multiple mansions.

Cough, cough.

Luxury apartments in Trump Tower (New York).

Consider the divorce case of one such oligarch, who sold out his stake in the Russian gas producing company Nortgas and moved to Great Britain. He and his ex-wife are now arguing about assets, including their favorite boat. Farkhad Akhmedov decided to use some of the cash he spirited out of Russia, before sanctions were in place, to buy a little pleasure craft. 

The oligarch's canoe.

A yacht with anti-missile defenses!

A nine-deck beauty (above), with a crew of 50, two helipads for choppers, a 65-foot swimming pool, a mini-submarine and, yes, anti-missile defenses, the 380-foot Luna is worth an estimated $500 million.

Now a judge has ordered the oligarch to turn over the helm to his ex-wife as part of a $635 million settlement.

How rich are these oligarchs? Mr. Akhmedov and his wife are sitting on a $1.51 billion fortune.

If you look at a list of crooked billionaires drawn up by the U.S. Treasury Department, as part of last year’s sanctions package, you notice names that will be familiar to those who follow the Mueller probe. Akhmedov is on the list. So is Aras Agalarov, who helped set up the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016. Also making an appearance on that list: Sergei Gorkov, a banker with whom Jared Kushner met secretly in early 2017; Dmitry Rybolovlev, who bought—at a highly-inflated price—a Palm Beach mansion from Donald J. Trump a decade ago; and Viktor Vekselberg, who had a secret meeting with Michael Cohen at Trump Tower in January 2017.

The list keeps growing when you do a little cross-checking. It includes Igor Sechin, Chief Executive Officer of Rosneft, with whom it is alleged Trump campaign adviser Carter Page met in Moscow (Page at first denied meeting  any top Russians; but he later admitted he did). Also listed is Roman Abramovich, a Russian billionaire and owner of the Chelsea Football Club. Abramovich is known to be a close friend of Ivanka Trump and her husband. As Newsweek recently reported, “In 2014, the Kushners spent four days in Russia after Abramovich’s wife, Dasha Zhukova, invited them.” Let’s not forget Oleg Deripaska, an aluminum magnate alleged to have ties to Russian crime syndicates. Deripaska has a lengthy history of business ties to Paul Manafort and Rick Gates (the former currently ensconced in jail; the latter cooperating with the Mueller investigation and therefore not presently behind bars).

Last, but not least, throw in Sergey Ivanov, last seen sitting at a table with General Michael Flynn, Vladimir Putin, and Jill Stein, of the Green Party—at a celebration in Moscow in December 2015.

7/25/18: One of Trump’s first tasks every morning is to tweet. At 7:34 a.m. we learn what is foremost in his mind: The revelation—on tape—that he discussed how to go about paying off a Playboy Bunny. 

How do we know about this tape? The “Fake News” folks at CNN have released it, via Trump’s old personal lawyer’s new lawyer, Lanny Davis. Talking heads on cable news spend the day debating the legal ramifications. The bottom line is clear. Trump and Michael Cohen, his lawyer at the time, can be heard discussing how to pay the Bunny to keep her mouth shut.

Trump is not shocked to be discussing infidelity.

It’s routine.

He may not be guilty of any crimes in the matter, but as for “exculpatory,” which his current lawyer Horndog Rudy says the tape is, someone should probably ask Mrs. Trump what she thinks.

At any rate, the president is up early and ready to tweet!

What kind of a lawyer would tape a client? So sad! Is this a first, never heard of it before? Why was the tape so abruptly terminated (cut) while I was presumably saying positive things? I hear there are other clients and many reporters that are taped - can this be so? Too bad!

Might we add, this taped conversation took place only weeks before the 2016 election. When the Wall Street Journal reported on a secret payment to a Playboy Bunny, back in those days, Hope Hicks, speaking for the Trump campaign, denied that anyone on Team Trump knew anything about any payment.

Hope Hicks lied.

*

ON CAPITOL HILL, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sits down before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Senators wish to express their concern. Does Trump really support NATO? What did he say in his private meeting with Putin in Helsinki? Is North Korea still a nuclear threat?

Also, will tariffs hurt chicken farmers?

That last question really did come up. Pompeo responded by saying the tariff wars were going exactly to plan. Chicken prices might fall now but a boom was coming, you could bet.

Pompeo did a commendable job outlining his efforts to keep us safe, although he often sounded like he was working for some other president. Everyone knew the process of negotiating with North Korea would be difficult. But his boss has already declared North Korea no longer a nuclear threat. Pompeo admitted “there is an awful long way to go” in getting North Korea to denuclearize. He pledged only that negotiations would not “drag out to no end.”

Just pretend Trump didn’t say it.

As for NATO, Secretary Pompeo suggested we all pretend Trump never said he couldn’t see why we had to defend other members of the alliance, even though he said on Fox News that he couldn’t see why we’d ever have to defend Montenegro. Who cared if Montenegro was in NATO?

(At least one British paper described Trump’s stance in that matter as blowing a giant hole in the key NATO principle.)

Finally, Pompeo insisted that the U.S. position has never changed, regarding Russia’s illegal annexation of the Crimea.

The U.S. strongly opposes it.

On the other hand there have been reports that Trump told leaders at the G-7 summit that he could see the Russians keeping Crimea because most of the people there speak Russian. This led reporters aboard Air Force One to quiz the president on his position. Did he still support the idea of sanctions against Russia? Or might he accept the Russian move into Crimea as part of some grand bargain?

“We’re going to have to see,” he responded.

Meanwhile, we know Anatoly Antonov, Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. said last Friday that during their Helsinki summit Trump and Putin discussed a possible referendum in separatist-leaning eastern Ukraine. That could mean additional loss of territory for the Ukraine, additional gains for Putin—and all the result of his aggressive actions. Plus, maybe the U.S. would ease up on sanctions.

Putin would be well-paid for all the money he and his hackers invested in defeating Hillary Clinton.

*

FINALLY, WE LEARN that around 3 a.m. a man with a pick ax vandalizes Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

So, there’s some good news.

7/27/18: After weeks of bobbing and weaving, the president’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, appears poised to turn on his old boss. First, a tape was leaked (see: 7/25/18), showing that in the months leading up to the 2016 election, Candidate Trump knew all about a secret payoff to keep a Playboy Bunny’s story about his and her affair out of the press. 

Trump knew about the June 2016 meeting with Russians.

  

Now multiple sources confirm that Cohen is prepared to state that Trump knew about the infamous secret meeting at Trump Tower in June 2016.

Naturally, the president’s response to this threat comes Friday morning in three tweets (6:26, 6:38 and 6:56 a.m.).

Again, we will summarize—because if we combined all Trump’s tweets into one book—it would be a very long and very stupid book. So: “highly conflicted Robert Mueller and his gang of 13 Angry Democrats,” “rigged Witch Hunt,” “stupid and unfair to our Country” and one that bears repeating:

.....I did NOT know of the meeting with my son, Don jr. Sounds to me like someone [Cohen] is trying to make up stories in order to get himself out of an unrelated jam (Taxi cabs maybe?). He even retained Bill and Crooked Hillary’s lawyer. Gee, I wonder if they helped him make the choice!

That allusion to taxis relates to possible tax evasion by Cohen, related to business in New York City.

Not that Trump would ever dodge taxes, himself.

In what will likely shape up as a battle of he said-he said, the American public may be forced to decide which fellow to believe. It’s a tough call. Both Cohen and Trump are truly shady characters.

Then again, as recently as April, the president bemoaned an F.B.I. raid on Cohen’s office—called it “disgraceful”—“an attack on our country”—and insisted Cohen was a “good man.” It was terrible what the “Fake News” New York Times was doing to this fellow, the president wailed. Cohen was “a fine person with a wonderful family…who I have always liked & respected.”

In May, Rudy Giuliani went to bat for Trump’s aggrieved lawyer pal. It was unclear at that point if Cohen would flip. Rudy was all roses and chocolates. Cohen, he said, was an “honest, honorable lawyer.”

On July 8, Giuliani chimed in again. Would Cohen flip on his boss, a reporter inquired? No sweat, Rudy responded, “I have no concern that Michael Cohen is going to do anything but tell the truth.” 

Now that it appears Cohen is preparing to flip the tune Trump and his tootling band want to play has changed.

From “Star Spangled Banner” to “The Rogue’s March.”

In an almost laughable interview on CNN, Giuliani sets out to trash Cohen’s reputation. Horndog Rudy, famous for cheating on assorted wives, says the rat has been “lying for years.” Cohen’s a “pathological liar.” He’s “not creditable.” He’ll put out “a string of lies.” Cohen is “an incredible liar.” And this time you can totally believe Rudy G., a man of his word.

If you love Trump—and you’d like to believe Cohen is the biggest liar in the club—you must ignore the fact that Don Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort “forgot” they ever had a meeting with the Russians. Then you must pretend Don Jr., with help from dad, never drafted and signed off on a false letter about the purpose of the meeting. Next, tell yourself that Jay Sekulow, a lawyer for Team Trump, never insisted “The president didn’t sign off on anything. He was coming back from the G-20 [summit in Europe]. The statement that was released on Saturday was released by Donald Trump Jr., I’m sure in consultation with his lawyers. The president wasn’t involved in that.”

Next, pretend Mr. Sekulow never repeated this claim two times, to complete a rare liar’s trifecta.

Finally, pay no attention to the fact that Press Secretary Pinocchio assured reporters her boss could not tell a lie even if he tried. In terms of that misleading letter, “The president weighed in, as any father would, based on the limited information that he had,” Sanders said. “He certainly didn’t dictate, but like I said, he weighed in, offered suggestions like any father would do.”

That was also a lie.

Okay, we’ve all been lying.

How do we know? In January 2018, in a confidential letter to Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Sekulow and John Dowd, another Trump lawyer (since kicked off the team) admitted: Okay, we’ve all been lying. Trump did dictate that misleading letter. Well, what can you do! He’s president.

He can pardon himself.

7/28/18: Trump heads for Bedminster, New Jersey to spend another weekend at one of his ritzy, private golf clubs.

Besides tweeting and lying, golfing is what he does best. Remember when he said, if elected, he’d be too busy working for the American people to take a day off?

Too busy working!

  

7/29/18: Trump is still at Bedminster, but he’ll be back at the White House around 7:30 p.m., just in time to don his jammies, grab his remote, and watch TV.

Back in Washington, Horndog Rudy is making the Sunday talk show rounds. He insists again that the tape of the president and Cohen talking about payoffs to a Playboy Bunny puts Trump in the clear. No laws were broken, Rudy claims.

As for Cohen, who now plans to turn on his old boss, Giuliani calls him a “pathological manipulator.”

Jesus.

Trump hired the guy. How terrible is Trump’s judgment??

*

SINCE TRUMP has nothing much to do on a lazy Sunday, he decides to tweet about a meeting he had nine days earlier with A. G. Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times. Here’s how the president describes the conversation:

Had a very good and interesting meeting at the White House with A.G. Sulzberger, Publisher of the New York Times. Spent much time talking about the vast amounts of Fake News being put out by the media & how that Fake Newshas morphed into phrase, “Enemy of the People.” Sad! 

Sad, it is. Just not for the reasons the president thinks.

Trump’s fury—aimed squarely at the free press and the First Amendment—finally boils over. A series of four ominous tweets follows in rapid order. Once again, we’ll just dig out the key phrases: “the media - driven insane by their Trump Derangement Syndrome,” “Very unpatriotic! Freedom of the press also comes with a responsibility to report the news...accurately,” “I will not allow our great country to be sold out by anti-Trump haters,” and “Fake News.”

This marks the first time the president says he won’t allow the free press to continue to hold him to account.

The president’s deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric.

Sulzberger has seen enough. The New York Times has no choice but to respond. First, the paper notes, the meeting was held at the request of the White House. Second, discussion was off the record, as Trump requested. Now, the president has revealed the discussion and mischaracterized what was said. Sulzberger provides his side of the story in a blunt statement, which should be quoted in full:

My main purpose for accepting the meeting was to raise concerns about the president’s deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric.

I told the president directly that I thought that his language was not just divisive but increasingly dangerous.

I told him that although the phrase “fake news” is untrue and harmful, I am far more concerned about his labeling journalists “the enemy of the people.” I warned that this inflammatory language is contributing to a rise in threats against journalists and will lead to violence.

I repeatedly stressed that this is particularly true abroad, where the president’s rhetoric is being used by some regimes to justify sweeping crackdowns on journalists. I warned that it was putting lives at risk, that it was undermining the democratic ideals of our nation, and that it was eroding one of our country’s greatest exports: a commitment to free speech and a free press.

Throughout the conversation I emphasized that if President Trump, like previous presidents, was upset with coverage of his administration he was of course free to tell the world. I made clear repeatedly that I was not asking for him to soften his attacks on The Times if he felt our coverage was unfair. Instead, I implored him to reconsider his broader attacks on journalism, which I believe are dangerous and harmful to our country.  

*

HERE IT SEEMS WORTHWHILE to note that the president is not the first powerful leader who has made it clear he would love to stifle critics. (See: 7/25/18.) 

Consider similar complaints about the free press from another powerful elected official. Reading an opposition newspaper, this leader explained, caused a “fury” to rise inside him. This paper was a “concentrated solution of lies,” a “delusive welter of words.” The enemy of the people was obvious: “the brutal daily press, shunning no villainy, employing every means of slander, lying with such a virtuosity that would bend iron beams, all in the gospel of a new humanity.” The free press was a “villainous poisoner” of the people’s minds. (See also: 7/4/18.)

And when he came to power, that leader, Adolf Hitler, made it clear he would reshape the press to serve his needs.

Postscript: If you check Trump’s Twitter feed, as I did in early February 2020, you can see how many times the word “enemy” appears. The list is instructive. Before taking office, Trump used the word “enemy” to describe China seven times. So far, so good. Taliban and ISIS fighters were the “enemy” too (five mentions). Okay. Okay. Then, “Obama is our worst enemy.”

Okay, nuts.

It’s instructive what happens once Trump takes office. Suddenly, he has a new Enemies List. At one point, “McCain emboldens our enemy.” The Taliban is still our enemy—in a single tweet. Russia is never mentioned once. Nor is Kim Jong-un. Jay Powell, Trump’s own pick to head the Federal Reserve, is called an “enemy” twice. Like: Jay Powell is worse than Kim Jong-un? Or Vladimir Putin?

President Trump does get it right on occasion. Assad and the Syrians he calls our “enemy” four times.

But who does is the great “enemy” today? What group threatens America most? Neo-Nazis? Sexual predators? Child traffickers? Russians bent on hacking the 2020 election? China, ever expanding its reach in the Pacific?

No. In 45 tweets, the “Fake News” people are described as the “enemy of the people.” And God only knows how many times Trump has said the same on TV. It is the greatest attack on a free press since the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed in 1798, making it illegal for anyone to criticize the president or members of Congress. Perhaps Trump fans take all their other rights for granted—save only the Second Amendment and their right to say, “Merry Christmas” willy-nilly. But history provides warning. We almost lost our freedoms in our nation’s infancy.

The free press was nearly stifled less than twenty years after the U.S. Constitution was adopted.

Trump supporters fail to see it. Or they are too busy cheering Trump’s attacks. In fact, many of them are all in on the president’s attack. They believe what he shouts. They accept his fury. They insist Trump has every right to attack those who criticize him. But once you lose the free press—once our side loses it—and once they agree our side should lose it—you will never get it back.

Not even for yourself.

Then, frankly, under every future president, including anyone on our side with similar authoritarian instincts, you will be screwed.

Forty-five tweets.

7/30/18: The battle to bolster the crumbling credibility of President Trump continues to falter. In one poll a majority of Americans, 54 percent, now believe he acted illegally or unethically in dealing with the Russians during the 2016 campaign. Only 36 percent think he did not.

A strategy session on June 6 to discuss meeting with Russians.

Sensing growing danger on several fronts, Horndog Rudy turns up once again on Fox News. He’s there for one reason: to trash the reputation of Michael Cohen. Rudy explains that he has been listening to dozens of tapes that Trump’s former lawyer secretly made. Suddenly, it hits him, he tells the hosts of Fox & Friends. “I’ve got a scoundrel on my hands.”

Most rational Americans assume he means the scoundrel is Trump. Most rational Americans aren’t watching Rudy on Fox.

Giuliani decides to mention a new report, which hasn’t appeared yet in print or on TV. Apparently, Cohen is prepared to tell investigators that that Don Jr., Jared, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, “and possibly two others,” attended a strategy session on June 6, 2016, in which they discussed plans for the meeting scheduled for June 9, with agents of the Russian government. No one has ever heard of this June 6 meeting before and Rudy is at pains to say the president wasn’t there. Nevertheless, Giuliani is clearly implying that the meeting occurred. Otherwise, there would be no need to stress that then Candidate Trump wasn’t there.

A few hours later, realizing he’s made a mess on TV, Rudy calls Fox News and tries to explain his explanation. This time he gets Harris Faulkner on the phone. Oh, no, he tells her, he wasn’t unclear. He has been saying all along that there was no collusion. But if there was (and there wasn’t), it won’t matter.

Because collusion is no crime!

How does Old Horndog know? He has been looking through the federal statutes just to be sure.

For once, Giuliani gets his facts straight. But if “collusion” is no crime, “fraud” and “conspiracy” are. The Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus, for example, gives this definition first, for the word “collude:” “come to an understanding or conspire together, esp. for a fraudulent purpose.”

If we go to “conspiracy,” the Oxford Dictionary has this as the first definition: “a secret plan to commit a crime or do harm, often for political ends; a plot.” One of the synonyms listed: “collusion.”

Rudy now insists no such meeting—as he says Cohen was about to allege occurred on June 6—ever occurred. He tells Ms. Faulkner, who is clearly baffled by Rudy’s verbal dance, that he contacted the lawyers of four of the six men supposedly involved. All said the story, if it does come out, would be untrue.

Of course, lawyers always claim their clients are innocent up to the moment juries decide they’re not, and often long after.

Regardless, Old Horndog goes on to say that the Mueller probe is not entitled to ask his client, the President of the United States, any questions about “obstruction of justice.” Why not? Rudy insists that the U.S. Constitution gives any president the right to remove the head of the F.B.I.

Again, that’s true.

No power to thwart investigation if the president is subject.

The Constitution does not give a president or any other member of the federal government the right to act in such a way as to thwart an investigation into possible criminal behavior in which they are subject.

7/31/18: The President of the United States unleashes a Twitter blizzard to bring July to a close. He posts 19 times, the first coming at 5:14 a.m., indicating that Trump may be having increasing trouble sleeping.

At 6:58 a.m., he announces: “Collusion is not a crime, but that doesn’t matter because there was No Collusion (except by Crooked Hillary and the Democrats)!”

Eventually, carpal tunnel syndrome puts an end to his maniacal tapping and the president wraps up a busy day by flying off to a campaign rally in Florida. There he blasts the free press again.

The crowd turns ugly, chanting “CNN sucks! CNN sucks!” They boo Jim Acosta, the CNN reporter on the scene, and shout expletives.

All you need are a few brown shirts and a cool, stiff-arm salute, and Trump and his mob are ready to go.

August 1, 2018: The President of the United States walks up to the line where the rule of law ends, and authoritarianism begins. He stomps across the line and waits to see what kind of reaction he stirs. In a series of tweets, Trump makes it clear. He’s more than ready to trample the U.S. Constitution if he must to protect himself.

You can blow giant holes in Trump’s Twitter logic any time you please; but his most avid supporters don’t care. Logic is for liberal wimps. And they don’t appear to care about the Constitution, either. They believe in Orange Leader. What if Orange Leader does break the law! They shout. They salute. When Orange Leader calls out Jim Acosta, a reporter for CNN at a rally, as he did Tuesday night, they bay. “It felt like we weren’t in America, anymore,” Acosta says later. Trump, he tells conservative commentator S. E. Cupp, “is whipping these crowds up into a frenzy, to the point where they really want to come after us.”

“I think it’s been dangerous for some time,” he adds, saying he’s afraid somebody is “going to get hurt.”

Mussolini, Mugabe, Trump.

It’s fine if you don’t like CNN. I don’t like Fox News. But the danger is this. We have a president who is happy to stir the mob. Trump’s not Hitler yet and I have faith the American people—including 90% of the MAGA crowd—would wake in time to stop him if the need arose. Still, the president does achieve the level of a Mussolini or a Mugabe if he can pull off his next move.

We can say this. We can say it again. The people in the red MAGA hats won’t hear the message because they don’t want to hear.

Increasingly, they want to yowl. Trump knows it and so stomps his foot well over the line in a tweet:

..This is a terrible situation and Attorney General Jeff Sessions should stop this Rigged Witch Hunt right now, before it continues to stain our country any further. Bob Mueller is totally conflicted, and his 17 Angry Democrats that are doing his dirty work are a disgrace to USA!

Stop and think about what Trump has just tweeted. He wants the Department of Justice to shut down an investigation into his campaign. He doesn’t want Mueller to pursue evidence of Russian meddling in a U.S. election. He doesn’t want investigators to discover whether American citizens (“known and unknown,” as one recent indictment reads), broke the law. He doesn’t want us to find out whether persons “known and unknown,” possibly working for him, helped a hostile power undermine democratic norms.

Trump wasn’t done undermining the rule of law. All kinds of goofy and dangerous tweets followed:

Paul Manafort worked for Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole and many other highly prominent and respected political leaders. He worked for me for a very short time. Why didn’t government tell me that he was under investigation. These old charges have nothing to do with Collusion - a Hoax!

(Good grief: You gave him the job as your campaign manager. You should have done due diligence your bloato orange self.)

Looking back on history, who was treated worse, Alfonse Capone, legendary mob boss, killer and “Public Enemy Number One,” or Paul Manafort, political operative & Reagan/Dole darling, now serving solitary confinement - although convicted of nothing? Where is the Russian Collusion?

(Capone was a tax cheat. So is Manafort! Does this president know any history? He’s probably a tax cheat, himself. See his use of the word “enemy,” 7/29/18.)

We could explain again why this is wrong. We could spell it out with blocks for Trump fans. It doesn’t matter if Manafort worked for Reagan. He’s charged with a wide array of crimes since then. That includes witness tampering in 2018.

(Trump defenders like to say these are “process crimes.” In other words: No big deal.)

And, of course, Manafort hasn’t been convicted. Good god. Let’s try it with blocks:        H-E…I-S…N-O-W…O-N…T-R-I-A-L. I-F…C-O-N-V-I-C-T-E-D…H-E…C-O-U-L-D…S-P-E-N-D…T-H-E…R-E-S-T…O-F…H-I-S…L-I-F-E…I-N…J-A-I-L. 

IIn this free country that’s how the courts work. We shouldn’t shout, “Lock her/him up!” until evidence has been gathered, juries seated, lawyers engaged, witnesses called, and verdicts rendered.

(See, for example, shouting crowds at numerous Trump campaign rallies, including rallies since he took office.)

*

REALIZING HOW MUCH Trump’s call for the Attorney General to shut down the Mueller probe sounds like obstruction of justice, the president’s lawyers quickly walk back his words.

Oh, don’t worry, they say, the President of the United States isn’t really saying he’s above the law.

A tweet is not an order.

“It’s not a call to action,” Horndog Rudy explains. The most powerful man in the world is merely venting. Mr. Trump really, truly wants the legal process to play out. “He’s expressing his opinion, but he’s not talking of his special powers he has” as president, Mr. Giuliani says.

Giuliani adds that the fact Trump made his statements on Twitter, “a medium that he uses for opinions,” is proof what he said should not be taken as an order.

Jay Sekulow serves up the same dish in an interview on TV. The president “doesn’t feel that he has to intervene in the process, nor is he intervening,” he explains.

Finally, Press Secretary Pinocchio comes to Trump’s defense. “The president is not obstructing,” she tells the White House press corps.

“He’s fighting back.” 

8/2/18: Paul Manafort gets pummeled in court. Did Trump’s onetime campaign manager launder tens of millions of dollars in cash? It seems so. Did he avoid paying taxes whenever he could? Yes. Did he live a lavish lifestyle, while doing the bidding of Putin and his allies in the Ukraine? Yes!

Manafort paid a pretty price for this jacket. It's still ugly, though.

Testimony shows Manafort once spent $21,000 for a watch. He shelled out $15,000 for an ostrich skin coat, $9,500 for a vest to match. He spent $900,000, at one store, in just five years on suits, $450,000 for landscaping at one of his seven homes and millions more on renovations for a home he gave a daughter. Manafort often liked to pay his bills with drafts on Cyprus banks.

The reason would seem clear. “Cyprus is, effectively, the money-laundering country of choice for criminals from Russia,” Bill Browder, a leading critic of Vladimir Putin tells reporters. “And the reason … is because the Cypriot authorities turn a very active blind eye to the money-laundering.”

How extensive is the spider’s web of cash woven by criminal types working through Cypriot banks? According to the Dallas Morning News, when the Panama Papers leaked in May 2016 (revealing massive tax evasion by many of the world’s wealthiest individuals), the Bank of Cyprus was cited 4,657 times.

Why might this worry the President of the United States? Consider who organized a group of investors to buy the Bank of Cyprus for $1.3 billion in 2014. That organizer would be none other than Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross. Who co-chaired the bank with Mr. Ross, who stepped down only to join the cabinet in 2017?

The Morning News reports:

Ross’s first co-chair was Putin appointee Vladimir Strzhalkovsky, a former KGB agent and long-time associate of Putin. In 2015, Strzhalkovsky was replaced by Maksim Goldman, is [sic] director of strategic projects at Viktor Vekselberg's Renova Group and sits on the board of Rusal.

Just for fun, consider the shady possibilities revealed in the sentences above. Putin’s name appears in the Panama Papers. So does President Trump’s. Actually, his name appears 3,540 times; although there may be some plausible explanation why “Trump” turns up as often as it does.

End to sanctions worth billions.

The Guardian, a leading British paper, has examined the leaked documents and has detailed a complex $2 billion money trail that leads straight back to Putin. Vekselberg is currently under sanction by the U.S. government, which means he’s blocked from getting his mitts on an estimated $1.5-$2 billion dollars in assets. Rusal, a company which exports aluminum, is owned by Oleg Deripaska, and in April was also placed under sanctions by the Treasury Department. Deripaska and Paul Manafort have a long history of working on all kinds of questionable deals.

We also know that Manafort (who, for some odd reason, agreed to work for Trump for free) possessed something of immense potential value during the 2016 campaign. In an email to a Russian intermediary, Manafort offered to keep Deripaska informed on what positions Trump was planning to take regarding sanctions on Russia. Here one might surmise that Manafort would be working hard to steer Trump in a direction the Russians would want him to go in order to end those sanctions—perhaps for the right price. “If he [Deripaska] needs private briefings we can accommodate,” Manafort wrote in a July 7, 2016 email, sent to Konstantin Kilimnik.

Who is Kilimnik? His name surfaced again in March when Mueller’s team was wrapping up a case against a Dutch lawyer, Alex van der Zwaan. Zwann’s crime: lying to the F.B.I. about dealing with Kilimnik.

Zwaan wasn’t the only man dealing with Kilimnik during the campaign. As Bloomberg explained last spring:

Now, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has fleshed out another detail. [Rick] Gates said he knew Kilimnik was a onetime Russian military intelligence officer, according to a Tuesday court filing. The FBI is even more direct: Agents believe he has “ties to a Russian intelligence service and had such ties in 2016,” according to the [court] filing.

You can call all of the above “Fake News” if you like. But there’s more we already know and likely a great deal more that Mueller and his team have uncovered in the last fifteen months.

We’ve all heard the cliché about the duck. Let’s try this instead. If it walks like a skunk, hisses like a skunk and emits a noxious gas like a skunk, it’s a skunk. The fundamental question Mueller must answer in weeks to come: Does President Trump have a white stripe down his back?

If it walks like a skunk...

8/3/18: It’s just another day of “Fake News” in Trumpistan. We already know what the president thinks. Paul Manafort, whose trial continues, is being victimized by federal investigators gone wild.

And reporters are mean!

We read in the “Fake News,” that Cindy Laporta, Manafort’s former accountant (testifying under limited immunity) admits in court she filed false tax returns in her client’s name. She says she reported $900,000 in income for Manafort as a loan, meaning the money wouldn’t be taxed. Philip Ayliff, who handled Manafort’s taxes till he retired and passed the job to Laporta, testified that he had never been told by his client that he had multiple offshore bank accounts—although Manafort had numerous chances to reveal their existence in the years Ayliff did his tax work.

*

UNITED NATIONS EXPERTS on freedom of expression have warned that President Trump’s continued attacks on the free press are increasing the risk of violence against journalists.

Raise doubts about verifiable facts.

This isn’t “Fake News.” The story is reported by, among others, The Independent, a British newspaper, The Times of India, Newsweek, Reuters, the BBC, Axios, CBS, CNN, Google, Pen America and many other media outlets.

Says the U.N.:

His [Trump’s] attacks are strategic, designed to undermine confidence in reporting and raise doubts about verifiable facts.

These attacks run counter to the country’s [the United States’] obligations to respect press freedom and international human rights law.

We are especially concerned that these attacks increase the risk of journalists being targeted with violence.

Even worse, experts warn, Trump fires up his mob without any plausible evidence he can cite:

Each time the President calls the media “the enemy of the people” or fails to allow questions from reporters from disfavoured outlets he suggests nefarious motivations or animus. But he has failed to show even once that specific reporting has been driven by any untoward motivations.

In his most recent attacks, the president has escalated his rhetoric. Now members of the free press are “horrible, horrendous people,” “sick people.” The “fake, fake, disgusting” journalists must be stopped. (See: 7/29/18; 8/5/18.)

*

EVENING COMES. Trump has dinner, heads for his room, dons his monogramed Art of the Deal pajamas and settles down in bed to watch some of his favorite shows on TV. Unfortunately, while channel surfing, he catches Lebron James on Don Lemon’s show on CNN. James has just donated millions to fund a school in Akron, Ohio, for 240 needy kids. But Lebron has been critical of the president in the past, and now, talking to Lemon, is so again.

We all know by now that the president won’t be able to let it go. And he fires off a tweet: “Lebron James was just interviewed by the dumbest man on television, Don Lemon. He made Lebron look smart, which isn’t easy to do. I like Mike!”

Okay, Trump likes Michael Jordan. Finally, one African American he doesn’t feel a burning need to insult.

8/4/18: Trump wakes early, gazes out his window and admires his big, beautiful golf course. It’s the weekend. Once again, the president has hunkered down at Trump National Golf Course in Bedminster, New Jersey. This makes 138 days since taking office that he has bedded down at one of his courses.

His schedule for the day lists “Out-of-Town Travel Pool Call Time” till 1:45 p.m. That means the president can do whatever he wants most of the day, binge on Fox News, twiddle his thumbs, or lie abed scratching his nuts.

At 4:15 p.m. he boards a plane and heads for Ohio to do a rally in support of a candidate for the House of Representatives locked in a tight race.

“This will be his legacy. Insulting Americans.”

Meanwhile, reaction to the president’s latest Twitter insult begins to come in. Michael Jordan, himself, starts the rout early, dunking the metaphorical ball over the president’s fat, orange, empty head. “I support L.J. He’s doing an amazing job for his community,” he says.

For the president, it only gets worse. J. J. Sullinger, who played basketball at Ohio State a decade ago, has this to add: “Lol! He's attacking LeBron’s intelligence days after he opened a school that guarantees free college education for at risk youth, all the while his [Trump] University settled out of court for Fraud?!!!???”

Benjamin Watson, a longtime veteran in the NFL, responds:

No matter what #POTUS does for our economy, foreign relations or religious freedom THIS will be his legacy. Insulting Americans. We may disagree on policy, but we must always gravitate toward decency and respect. Leaders lead in word AND deed. We should expect and demand BOTH.

And then the tomahawk jam: The First Lady “posterizes” the President of the United States.

Mrs. Trump’s spokeswoman issues the following statement in her name:

It looks like LeBron James is working to do good things on behalf of our next generation and just as she always has, the First Lady encourages everyone to have an open dialogue about issues facing children today. As you know, Mrs. Trump has traveled the country and world talking to children about their well-being, healthy living, and the importance of responsible online behavior with her Be Best initiative. Her platform centers around visiting organizations, hospitals and schools, and she would be open to visiting the I Promise School in Akron.

You read that right. The First Lady just said she’d be willing to visit Lebron James’ school.

Lebron James' new "I Promise School."

8/5/18: A check of the president’s vacation schedule shows he’ll have all day to hit the links. There are no public events on tap and Trump can putter around Bedminster all day if he wants.

What to do with all that time hanging heavy on his hands? He could read the Constitution. He could read a book. He could read a policy paper. Not going to happen. The man does not read.

Suddenly, a light bulb flickers dimly in his head. Why not tweet! Anyone he’d like to insult today?

Reporters! Of course:

The Fake News hates me saying that they are the Enemy of the People only because they know it’s TRUE. I am providing a great service by explaining this to the American People. They purposely cause great division & distrust. They can also cause War! They are very dangerous & sick!

Is this fool hinting that his supporters should go to war against reporters? The man is losing his marbles. (See: 8/29/18.)

*

TRUMP DECIDES to tout the joys of tariffs. Once again, he boils down complicated economic issues into tweets. He says if other countries “don’t want to be taxed” they can start building their products in the United States. This protectionist approach means foreign goods will cost more compared to American-made goods. The American consumer will pay more if he or she wants to buy—for example—a dustpan, electric drill or set of grill tools made in China.

(This blogger cites these items from bitter experience, since he tries hard to buy U.S.-made products and not, in buying Chinese, support a communist regime.)

President Twitter Thumbs claims tariffs will help bring down the federal deficit. “Because of Tariffs,” he tweets, “we will be able to start paying down large amounts of the $21 Trillion in debt that has been accumulated, much by the Obama Administration.” 

Yes, yes. We know. Obama did it. In Obama’s last five fiscal years (2013-2017) deficits ran: $679 billion, $485 billion, $438 billion, $585 billion and $665 billion. Fiscal Year 2017 is listed under Obama, since policies are set the previous year.

Trump promises to erase $19 trillion federal debt in eight years.

Along came Trump, businessman extraordinaire. In April 2016 he sat down for an interview with the Washington Post. Trump warned that a “massive recession” was coming. It was a “terrible time” to invest in stocks. (See: 12/17-21/18.)

The businessman extraordinaire was wrong. Stocks continued to go up.

No matter. Trump had a plan. His plan was fantastic. He promised if elected he’d get rid of the entire $19 trillion federal deficit (which then existed) “over a period of eight years.” How would he pull a magic money rabbit out of a MAGA cap? He was going to do it through trade deals: “I’m renegotiating all of our deals, the big trade deals that we’re doing so badly on.”

Lo, it came to pass. The businessman extraordinaire was sent to Washington to drain the swamp and fill the federal coffers. Trump put his plan in place. He cut taxes as promised, save for the fact that he did not raise them on the “very rich” as he had said he would. That would have meant the businessman extraordinaire and most of his cronies and all of family members, except Barron, would have had to pay higher taxes, too. The economy added jobs—as he said it would—although at a slightly slower pace than under Obama during his last five years as president.

The unemployment rate did fall, and the federal deficit began to…

WTF!

Fiscal Year 2018 is Trump’s first budget baby and the baby is noticeably fat, like Orange Leader, himself.

The deficit is expected to surpass $800 billion.

*

WHAT ELSE was the president tweeting about while on vacation? You had the obligatory howls about “Fake News.” But one howl turned into a bizarre tweet-admission. Trump’s thick digits tapped furiously at his phone:

Fake News reporting, a complete fabrication, that I am concerned about the meeting my wonderful son, Donald, had in Trump Tower. This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics - and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!

What makes this tweet so telling? This is the infamous meeting in June 2016 in Trump Tower. This was the meeting that was unknown until The New York Times revealed in July 2017 that it occurred.

That would be the “Fake News” New York Times.

Don Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort were all at the meeting. None of them revealed it. Don Jr. decided to lie about the purpose of the meeting. The “Fake News” folks caught him again. A letter was fabricated aboard Air Force One to disguise the purpose of the meeting. The “Fake News” reported that the President of the United States helped draft that deceptive letter. Team Trump insisted the president would never! In January 2018, the president’s lawyers admitted, yes, President Trump’s fingerprints were all over that lying letter.

Now seven months later you had the president admitting to all those lies but insisting they didn’t matter. What Don Jr. had done was never illegal.

Besides, everyone does it.

Postscript: I decided to do a little “Fake News” digging myself. I went back to July 12, 2017. News of Don Jr.’s emails, showing he met with Russians to get dirt on Hillary, had just broken in the press. Christopher Wray, Trump’s choice to head the F.B.I., was answering questions in a Senate confirmation hearing.

Clearly upset, Senator Lindsey Graham read parts of the emails, including one where Don Jr. is told the Russian visitors will have the goods on Clinton. If that’s true, he responds, “I love it.”

This exchange between Graham and Wray followed:

“Should Donald Trump Jr. have taken that meeting?” Graham inquired. Wray said he didn’t know the details and was not in position to speak.

“You want to be director of the F.B.I., pal. So here’s what I want you to tell every politician: If you get a call from somebody suggesting that a foreign government wants to help you by disparaging your opponent, tell us all to call the F.B.I.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham to Christopher Wray, Trump nominee to become Director of F.B.I

 “Well, let me ask you this: If I got a call saying the Russian government wants to help Lindsey Graham get re-elected, they’ve got dirt on my opponent, should I take that meeting?”

Wray admitted he would want Graham to consult with “some good legal advisers before you did that.”

 “Should I call the F.B.I.?” Graham continued.

“I think it would be wise to let the FBI know,” Wray responded.

“You want to be director of the F.B.I., pal,” Graham said with a hint of anger. “So here’s what I want you to tell every politician: If you get a call from somebody suggesting that a foreign government wants to help you by disparaging your opponent, tell us all to call the F.B.I.”

A smile flickered on Wray’s face. He scanned the senators on the panel. “To the members of this committee,” he said, “Any threat or effort to interfere with our election, from any nation state, or any non-state actor, is the kind of thing the FBI would want to know.”

“Alright, so I’ll take it we should call you—that’s a great answer,” Graham beamed.

8/6/18: Republicans hope to turn the midterms into a referendum on the economy. But their tax cuts are far less popular than hoped. In a Monmouth University poll only 34% of Americans approve of the cuts, while 41% disapprove. Nearly a quarter of Americans “are not sure how they feel.”

There’s more bad news for the GOP. A Quinnipiac poll asks respondents if they feel proud to have Trump as president—embarrassed—or don’t know. Only 31% say they are proud. That figure is inflated by the 69% of Republicans who don’t mind a pussy-grabbing president who locks up children along the border.

Almost half of all Americans, 49%, choose “embarrassed.” That includes most white men with college degrees (54%) and most women (55%). More than half of Americans, ages 18-49, say they’re embarrassed. So are six in ten Hispanics and three of four African Americans.

Quinnipiac also posed this:

15. Who do you trust more to tell you the truth about important issues: President Trump or the news media?

No surprise: 77% of Republicans trust Trump more; 81% of Republicans still believe Congress is going to replace Obamacare with something better and 95% still think Mexico is going to pay for the wall.

(Okay: those last two are jokes.)

Pretty much the rest of American trusts the media more.

Finally, how do Americans feel about the free press and the First Amendment? Quinnipiac asks:

16. Which comes closer to your point of view: the news media is the enemy of the people, or the news media is an important part of democracy?

A plurality of Republicans muffs the question. By 42 to 35 percent they pick “enemy of the people.”

No other group is close. Americans, generally, 65%, say the media is “part of democracy.”

*

TRUMP DECIDES to tweet about the crisis in California, where horrific fires are burning out of control. Trump decides to help by attacking the Democratic governor:

Governor Jerry Brown must allow the Free Flow of the vast amounts of water coming from the North and foolishly being diverted into the Pacific Ocean. Can be used for fires, farming and everything else. Think of California with plenty of Water - Nice! Fast Federal govt. approvals.

Devoid of empathy.

Sadly, as was true after Hurricane Maria pulverized Puerto Rico, the president shows he is devoid of empathy.

He also gets into a muddle on facts. The Los Angeles Times runs a story carrying this headline: IN A STRIKINGLY IGNORANT TWEET, TRUMP GETS ALMOST EVERYTHING ABOUT CALIFORNIA WILDFIRES WRONG.

A reporter explains:

…The likeliest explanation for his take on water is that he’s confused by the demands for more irrigation water he’s hearing from Republican officeholders in the Central Valley. They’re the people who grouse about water being “wasted” by being diverted to the ocean, rather than into their fields.

Their demands have nothing to do with the availability of water for firefighting….

“The idea that there isn’t enough water is the craziest thing in the world,” says Peter Gleick, president emeritus of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security in Oakland. “There’s absolutely no shortage.”

What did Trump miss? Pretty much every essential point. People are dying. He doesn’t care. People have lost everything as homes and businesses burn to the ground. He doesn’t care. Climate change is causing increasing problems round the world. The president doesn’t understand.

The Times is blunt:

What [Trump] overlooked, plainly, is the increasing agreement among experts that intensifying climate change has contributed to the intensity of the wildfire season. California’s woodlands have been getting drier and hotter. As my colleagues Rong-Gong Lin II and Javier Panzar reported over the weekend, “California has been getting hotter for some time, but July was in a league of its own.”

How hot? This summer the surface temperature of ocean waters off San Diego was the hottest recorded in 102 years. Death Valley had the hottest month every recorded on the planet, with an average daily high of 108.1°. Statewide, the average nighttime low was 64.9°, the hottest for a month since 1895.

In a second story the Times quotes all kinds of scientists. Or, as Trump and his fans might put it, they push “Fake News.”

“In the past, it would just be kind of once in a while—the odd year where you would be really warm,” state climatologist Michael Anderson said.

But the last five years have been among the hottest in 124 years of record keeping, Anderson said.

“That’s definitely an indication that the world is warming, and things are starting to change,” said Anderson, who manages the California Department of Water Resources’ state climate program. “We’re starting to see things where it’s different. It’s setting the narrative of climate change

On July 6, all-time temperature records were set at UCLA (111), Burbank and Santa Ana (114), and Van Nuys (117). Chino hit 120 degrees, the highest ever recorded at an automated surface observing system in the Ontario, Riverside or Chino areas.

It was the warmest July on record in Fresno; for 26 consecutive days that month, temperatures reached or exceeded 100 degrees—the longest continuous stretch on record, said Brian Ochs, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Hanford. (Maximum temperatures have continued to top 100 through the first several days of August.)

Of particular concern is how overnight temperatures continue to climb. The years with the top six warmest summertime minimum temperatures in California — defined as June through August — in descending order, are 2017, 2015, 2014, 2006, 2016 and 2013….

“We are seeing the impacts of climate change now,” said Nina Oakley, regional climatologist for the Western Regional Climate Center in Reno. “This is certainly it. It’s happening.”

The effects are felt far beyond the record books. When the mercury hit 113, Redding tied its temperature record for July 26—the day the Carr fire raced out of control and began killing people.

It was one day among months of above-average temperatures that had dried out the brush to such a degree that it helped fuel the blaze’s ferocious spread.

Take a look at a map of the world’s temperatures years ago, and an old heat wave would be obvious to spot—just one spot on Earth that’s anomalously warm, said Neil Lareau, assistant professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Nevada, Reno. Now, “in pretty much the vast majority of the globe, it’s hotter than normal,” he said.

That’s the science. But we are stuck with a president who would rather tweet than study the topic in detail.

Or: study at all.

SEE IF YOU CAN SPOT THE TREND BELOW:

8/7/18: A federal judge blocks the Trump administration’s latest plan to ban transgender individuals from serving in the U.S. military. A lawsuit against the move was brought by several individuals, including persons currently serving in the U.S. Army, Air Force and Coast Guard.

Once again, we should list all the Trumps who have served bravely under the Stars and Stripes in the last 133 years:

1.      

Okay, that would be NONE.

8/8/18: Speaking of courts, Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY), the first member of Congress to endorse Trump for president gets handcuffed and hauled off to jail. Collins, who sat on the health subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, just so happened to be a major investor in an Australian company, Innate Immunotherapeutics Limited. Innate had one product, MIS416, an experimental drug for treating multiple sclerosis. Collins not only sat on a committee that might help the drug with FDA approval, he sat on the company board.

The keen-eyed observer is probably thinking: This sounds like a conflict of interest! That’s because it is.

Collins nearly choked on his baked beans.

On June 22, 2017, prosecutors allege, Collins was attending a picnic—at the White House, no less—when he got a call from someone with the company. MIS416 had failed a clinical trial.

The “value” of the drug was essentially zero.

Collins nearly choked on his baked beans. He had to decide. What should a congressman with inside information do? Take his lumps or make sure someone else took them? He called his son seven times in five minutes. Six calls went to voicemail. The seventh went through. Brief conversation followed.

On the morning of June 23, Cameron Collins, his son, sold 500 shares of Innate. Over the course of the next few days he placed 53 sell orders. Cameron’s fiancée, Lauren Zarsky, sold her shares. So did her father, Stephen Zarsky. Mr. Zarsky’s wife, daughter and brother all dumped Innate.

Mr. Zarsky alone avoided $144,000 in losses and stuck some unwitting chump, without insider info. Cameron Collins dodged $570,000 in losses as Innate fell in five days by more than 90 percent. Both men have been charged in the insider trading scheme.

Rep. Collins has been freed on promise to post $500,000 bond. Meanwhile, he has assured constituents you can’t keep a good congressman down. Stock prices? Yes. But not Chris Collins, who you should vote for in November, if you want him to help President Trump drain the swamp!

8/9/18: Can we all shout together: “Chain migration must be stopped!”

The president insists chain migration is the worst. Chain migration allows one immigrant to come to this country legally. That immigrant becomes a citizen. (Somehow, many Trump fans think this is terrible, too, at least when the new citizen’s skin is some color other than white.) The new citizen then sponsors relatives to come. Those relatives qualify for green cards and may, in five years or so, become citizens themselves. According to Trump, this is awful because these new Americans sponsor adult children or even parents to come to the States.

According to Laura Ingraham, on Fox News, we can’t allow this to continue. Ingraham highlights the danger:

In some parts of the country, it does seem like the America that we know and love doesn’t exist anymore.

Massive demographic changes have been foisted upon the American people and they’re changes that none of us ever voted for and most of us don’t like.

From Virginia to California, we see stark examples of how radically in some ways the country has changed. Now, much of this is related to both illegal and in some cases, legal immigration that, of course, progressives love.

Let’s tease out her meaning. Once upon a time there was an America we could “love.” Now there are changes “most of us don’t like.” These are changes “we see.”

What prompts Ingraham to turn fear into words? She’s upset about a Democratic candidate for Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who expounds socialist views. People like Ocasio-Cortez, that “we see,” will ruin America.

Even legal immigration may mean America won’t be the America “we love” for much longer.

David Duke, of K.K.K. fame, loves Ingraham’s monologue.

To give you some idea who Ingraham’s target audience is, consider who rallies behind her on Twitter. Her argument seems so on point, according to David Duke, that he has to tweet support. “One of the most important (truthful) monologues in the history of MSM,” he says.

And who is Duke? He ran as a Republican for governor of Louisiana in 1991. He didn’t win. He ran as a Republican for the U.S. Senate in 2016. He still didn’t win. Duke is also a former grand wizard of the K.K.K. and, to the day he dies, likely to remain a K.K.K. man at heart.

What then can “we see,” assuming we look through the eyes of people like Ingraham, Duke and the current President of the United States? We don’t want immigrants who look like this:

Ocasio-Cortez: Too brown for Ingraham and Duke.

Hakeem Olajuwon: Too Muslim.

Alix Idrache (graduating from West Point): Too Haitian.
President Trump says Haitian immigrants bring AIDS.

Lance Cpl. Diego Velazquez Valdiva, takes oath of citizenship, Kandahar, Afghanistan.
Too Mexican for Trump.

Still too "Mexican:" Staff Sgt. Martin Alonso Balcazar takes the oath of allegiance
as a new citizen in 2016.

Tung Nyguyen doesn't look like the America Ingraham used to love.

Too funny looking in a Muslim turban for Trump and his base.
Capt. Kamal Kasi is acutally a Sikh.

We want immigrants, as even the president has said himself, who look like this: 

Trump actually said we'd be better off with more immigrants from Norway.
Ever wonder why?

And these guys are okay, too (as we shall read below): 

The parents of the First Lady.

Posthumous citizenship for 111 U.S. service members K.I.A.

Again, it’s a shame the president never bothers to read. We knew a decade ago how much immigrants helped to keep America great. It’s too bad the Commander-in-Chief can’t keep it straight.

By February 2008, the U.S. military could report that 65,033 foreign-born men and women were serving under the Stars and Stripes. That included 20,328 non-citizens but did not include the 111 who had already been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, fighting for a flag that people like Ingraham, Trump and Duke don’t believe they’re fit to have drape their coffins.  Those hundred-odd heroes had been posthumously granted citizenship in return for their lives.

(By 2013, 284 foreign-born service members had been killed in the global fight against terror.)

Of course, Ingraham might not like the America she “sees.” President Trump might not like it any more than he liked the idea of serving his country back when he was young and had his chance.

Let’s consider a few immigrants who did:

One officer who decided to use his talent and skill in service to our national security was Army Chief Warrant Officer Suresh Krause. In Sri Lanka, where Krause was born, the two official languages are Tamil and Sinhalese, both of which are considered “critical” languages for recruitment purposes by the U.S. Army.

Krause joined the U.S. military to contribute another skill that was a passion from an early age — flying — telling family members the Christmas before his death that he planned on serving as a pilot in the Army for 20 years.

Krause’s story is similar to that of many talented and ambitious immigrants. He came to America at age 14 after being adopted by his aunt and uncle. As a young man, Krause tried to take advantage of the opportunity his parents gave him. Krause, who teachers describe as a “math genius,” displayed incredible talent in aeronautics, going on to graduate from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. After graduation, he became an officer in the U.S. Army, where he distinguished himself once again. During his military career, Krause earned several prestigious awards, including the Army Commendation Medal, National Defense Service Medal, Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, and NATO Medal, for his valor and leadership on the front lines.

Krause was ultimately killed while piloting a Black Hawk helicopter in Kandahar, Afghanistan. His uncle, Brody Schmidt, described his decision to enlist as an act of gratitude for the nation that took him in. “This is not his native soil,” Schmidt said at the time, “But in his heart of hearts he bled U.S.A. blood.” Following his death, former Representative Mary Bono Mack helped Krause obtain his U.S. citizenship. “Simply becoming an American citizen wasn’t enough for Suresh,” Mack stated, “He wanted to defend his adopted home, as well… In the end, Suresh Abayasekara Krause was as American as you can get.”

Next:

Sgt. Pamela Osborne, who was born in Jamaica, is one foreign-born member who made her mark on the U.S. Army. Osborne moved to Miami at age 14 with two goals: to become a U.S. citizen and to serve her adopted country as a solider in the military. She enlisted in 2001, shortly before September 11. “She loved what she did,” her husband has said. Even after being diagnosed with a medical condition that could have resulted in her leaving the military, she kept going. As she explained to her husband at the time, “I’m going to serve my country, to protect my country.” Osborne passed away in the service of her fellow soldiers. On October 11, 2004, after spending the morning in church, Osborne headed out to deliver supplies to another enlisted service member and vehicle mechanic, Pvt. Anthony Monroe of Bismarck, North Dakota.

Both were killed when rocket fire hit their camp in Baghdad. “Sgt. Osborne was always ready to help soldiers,” one of her colleagues wrote on a tribute page after her death, “She was a credit to the United States, and I’m lucky to have known and served with her.”

Finally, Trump and his kind might open their eyes a little wider and “see” all the colors of true Americans:

Army Sgt. 1st Class Tung Nguyen is one immigrant who died in service in recent years after a long and celebrated career in the U.S. Army. Nguyen joined the military shortly after graduating from high school. During his 20 years of service, Nguyen rose steadily through the ranks. In 1992, he qualified as a Green Beret, becoming a part of U.S. Army Special Forces, a prestigious unit designed for special and unconventional operations. He was given several other accolades as well, including two Meritorious Service Medals, two Army Commendation Medals, and four Army Achievement Medals.

Nguyen’s decision to serve led naturally from his experiences early in life. As a young boy living in South Vietnam, he was surrounded by a tradition of military service. He grew up hearing stories from the front lines of the Vietnam War, a battle in which many of Nguyen’s family members fought against communist forces. At the age of 11, Nguyen fled his native Vietnam, finding refuge and a stable home with a foster family in Tracy, California. Once there, his interest in serving his new country continued. Nguyen died during a small arms fire in Iraq in 2006. Following his death Nguyen was awarded the Bronze Star, Purple Heart, Iraq Campaign Medal, and Combat Infantryman Badge posthumously.

In his last conversation with his mother, while reflecting on his life, service, and accomplishments, Sergeant Nguyen continued to show a great level of dedication and gratitude to the United States. He ended the conversation thanking her for “letting him go to America.”

*

FOR A LIST of all the times the president has railed against “chain migration,” go to his Twitter Archive, type “chain migration” under “search” and see what idiotic sentiments pop up:

Nov 1, 2017: CHAIN MIGRATION must end now! Some people come in, and they bring their whole family with them, who can be truly evil. NOT ACCEPTABLE!

Nov 2, 2017: Congress must end chain migration so that we can have a system that is SECURITY BASED! We need to make AMERICA SAFE!

Feb 6, 2018: We need a 21st century MERIT-BASED immigration system. Chain migration and the visa lottery are outdated programs that hurt our economic and national security.

Now, just for fun, try to guess who was sworn in as American citizens on this fine summer day!

Melania Trump, first link in a chain.

It was the First Lady’s parents, Viktor and Amalija Knavs. And how did they get to the head of the line to immigrate to the United States? Were they admitted because of special merit? Do they have special skills in demand in the United States? Were they ready to serve under the U.S. flag?

Viktor was listed as early as 2007 as having residence at Mar-a-Lago. In Slovenia, Viktor Knavs (now 73) worked as a chauffeur and car salesman. Amalija Knavs (now 71) was a pattern maker at a textile factory.

How about Melania?

She was admitted to the U.S. under a program that allows people with extraordinary abilities to cut the line. According to the Washington Post, “She has not provided details about how she proved to the U.S. government that she qualified to receive a green card for her ‘extraordinary ability,’ a category generally reserved for highly accomplished people such as ­Nobel Prize winners.”

Apparently, she was awarded her green card because America had a critical shortage of models.

Melania’s older, “under-the-radar” sister, Ines, also immigrated to the U.S. One Florida philanthropist, who met her at Mar-a-Lago in 2005, described her “as a lovely person, and extremely creative.” Apparently, Ines is an artist; but the First Lady doesn’t care to talk about her. Ines lives quietly “in a Trump-owned apartment in the same Upper East Side building that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump called home” before they headed off to D.C. to help drain the swamp.

And if Laura Ingraham was worried about a “socialist” Democrat like Ocasio-Cortez, she might want to consider Melania’s father. Growing up in what was Yugoslavia, he joined the Communist Party.

White House spokeswoman Hope Hicks once assured reporters that Melania’s dad was never a “card-carrying” member.

Still, shouldn’t Fox News be warning about him?

The First Lady’s parents made their first trip to America in February 2004. Now, fourteen years later, they are as American as you and I. (Assuming you’re not a Russian hacker trying to disrupt my blog.)

Yet, in his State of the Union address last February the president warned:

Under the current broken system, a single immigrant can bring in virtually unlimited numbers of distant relatives. Under our plan, we focus on the immediate family by limiting sponsorships to spouses and minor children. This vital reform is necessary, not just for our economy, but for our security and our future.

The First Lady has declined to comment about her parents’ new status; and we don’t know if she, her son Barron, who is close to his grandparents, or even the president celebrated in any way.

We do know this. The president howled again during a recent news conference that the danger of “chain migration” was manifest. “You bring one person in, you end up with 32 people,” he said. “You come in and now you can bring your family and then you can bring your mother and your father, you can bring your grandmother,” he grumbled on another occasion.

This was a terrible situation—and now that Melania’s family was safely arrived—it had to be stopped.

In any case, congratulations to the First Lady’s parents, two newly-minted Americans; and no harm done.

Except to the president’s logic.

8/10/18: The Mendocino fire, largest in California history, is burning out of control. More than 305,000 acres have been reduced to ash. The ninth largest fire and the twenty-eighth largest in state history are also active and only partially contained. Combined, the three fires have charred 905 square miles. By comparison the total land area of Rhode Island is 1,045 square miles.

As the Los Angeles Times reports, “The fires in July and August have been fueled by record-setting heat, which has left brush bone dry and highly flammable.”

At least 40 lives have been lost.

Yet, at the pinnacle of the Trump administration you have a science moron in the Oval Office. Technically, one devastating fire season does not prove climate change is real. One terrible year followed on the heels of another (2017) provides a more compelling warning. In fact, the thirty largest fires in California history have all ignited in a hotter, drier landscape since 2002. With higher temperatures the norm, vegetation is drier and far more likely to burn. It’s not hard to figure out.

You can label climate change “a hoax” as our idiot president does. You can listen to the vested interests that push policies friendly to Big Oil and Big Coal, who claim the science is fuzzy. You can’t deny facts: 2018 is on pace to be the fourth hottest year, globally, ever recorded. The four hottest years will be the last four. Seventeen of the hottest eighteen have occurred since 2001.

You can pretend that climate change isn’t happening, but you have a huge pile of evidence you have to ignore.

“It’s a shift we are all living together.”

“It’s not a wake-up call anymore,” Cynthia Rosenzweig, who heads the climate impacts group at NASA’s Goddard Institute, said of global warming and its toll last week. “It’s now absolutely happening to millions of people around the world.”

Kim Cobb, a professor of earth and atmospheric science at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, offered grim warning. “What we’re seeing today is making me, frankly, calibrate not only what my children will be living but what I will be living, what I am currently living.”

Trump and his climate-denier advisers only bury their heads deeper in the golf course turf. The interests of Big Oil and Big Coal get unfettered play in this administration. And we do gain a few jobs in the coal industry as a result. That’s good for miners and all sympathy to those who still struggle to find work. Unfortunately, hundreds of millions of Americans, born and yet unborn, and billions round the globe, are going to pay a price for inaction today.

May through July 2018 marked the hottest comparable period in the history of the lower 48 States. 

   

Dropping fire retardant on a California inferno.

8/11/18: President Trump is enjoying what the White House calls a “working vacation” at his private golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

True: a Trump “working vacation,” is hard to distinguish from a regular Trump “work day.” We know the president has already spent nearly a fourth of his time in office at his private golf clubs.

Also, Trump’s “work” seems to consist of tweeting angry denials about having colluded with Russians and hurling insults at people he hired himself. First, there’s Omarosa, the former star of The Apprentice, who for some unfathomable reason was rewarded with a place on the White House staff. (Cost to taxpayers: $179,700 per year.) Now, having been fired, she’s about to release a highly critical book chronicling life behind the scenes in the Trump administration. Early releases hint she’s going to say Trump is a racist, a bigot, a misogynist and a blithering idiot.

Also, she made tapes.

To say that Omarosa is not the most reliable witness, or even a likeable one, would be to understate the case. Still, it’s amusing to consider the president’s response. Asked Saturday if he felt betrayed by his reality star friend, Trump placed an open hand at the side of his face, as if to keep his response secret. With the cameras running he said: “Lowlife. She’s a lowlife.”

The president wasn’t just mad at one lowlife who had written a book. It’s titled Unhinged, in case you want to rush right out and get a copy today. He was furious with several people he hired himself.

After lunch, a president increasingly worried about an investigation which is coming closer to the Oval Office door, went on the attack again. This time the problem was Jeff Sessions, the man Trump selected to head the Department of Justice. Another pair of tweets was required:

The big story that the Fake News Media refuses to report is lowlife Christopher Steele’s many meetings with Deputy A.G. Bruce Ohr and his beautiful wife, Nelly. It was Fusion GPS that hired Steele to write the phony & discredited Dossier, paid for by Crooked Hillary & the DNC....

....Do you believe Nelly worked for Fusion and her husband STILL WORKS FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF “JUSTICE.” I have never seen anything so Rigged in my life. Our A.G. is scared stiff and Missing in Action. It is all starting to be revealed - not pretty. IG Report soon? Witch Hunt! 

So there it was. Trump says it’s a witch hunt although his F.B.I. director says it’s not. Omarosa is a lowlife—but Trump put her on his White House staff. And Jeff Sessions is a coward.

The only person we should trust is President Donald J. Trump.

8/12/13: The president has no public events scheduled for the day. He’s still on vacation at Bedminster.

This is his 144^th day as president spent at one of his private golf courses. The man does need his rest.

Tweeting can be exhausting, after all. By the end of the day, Trump will have hammered away on Twitter 4,306 times since taking the oath of office.

Working hard, you see. 

8/13/18: White House aide Stephen Miller comes under attack from an unexpected direction.

In case you don’t know, Miller is the leading architect of administration policies on immigration and has pushed for an array of limits, including limits on legal immigration. Chain migration, for example, must be ended (save for the First Lady’s family). The “zero tolerance” policy, separating parents and children seeking asylum at the border, leading to children barely old enough to talk being locked up in cages, was a brilliant Miller idea. Last year, the number of refugees allowed to enter legally was cut to the lowest level in four decades. That total was capped at 45,000, even though a coalition of American religious groups had hoped to see at least 75,000 admitted. Miller’s fingerprints were all over the restrictive policy.

Now the Trump Team is advancing plans to reduce the flow even further—to 25,000 refugees per year. One former administration official told reporters that with Miller whispering sweet anti-immigrant nothings in his ear, Trump has considered going as low as 5,000.

Why has Miller been so keen on the idea of cutting immigration? And why is Trump so happy to listen?

Politico recently explained. Miller was not “deterred” by the child separation disaster, one GOP source said.

“He is an adamant believer in stopping any immigration, and the president thinks it plays well with his base.”

Miller was distraught in the aftermath of the zero tolerance fiasco, said two Republicans close to the White House. He considered zero tolerance an essential component to his efforts to deter immigration. For his troubles, he got heckled at D.C. restaurants, prompting him in one instance angrily to pitch $80 worth of takeout sushi into a trash bin.

Protesters showed up at his apartment complex chanting, “Stephen Miller/ You’re a villain/ Locking up/ innocent children.”

Now Miller is taking heat from his family. In an editorial, his uncle David S. Glosser lays down the story of Miller’s roots. Glosser begins: “Let me tell you…about Stephen Miller and chain migration.”

In the face of “violent anti-Jewish pogroms and forced childhood conscription in the Czar’s army” a Russian Jew named “Wolf-Leib Glosser, fled a village where his forebears had lived for centuries and took his chances in America.”

He set foot on Ellis Island on January 7, 1903, with $8 to his name. Though fluent in Polish, Russian, and Yiddish he understood no English. An elder son, Nathan, soon followed. By street corner peddling and sweat-shop toil Wolf-Leib and Nathan sent enough money home to pay off debts and buy the immediate family’s passage to America in 1906. That group included young Sam Glosser, who with his family settled in the western Pennsylvania city of Johnstown, a booming coal and steel town that was a magnet for other hard-working immigrants.

The family set out in dogged pursuit of the American Dream. My Irish ancestors did the same. Your ancestors probably did too. First, they sold goods out of a horse-drawn wagon. Next was the purchase of a Johnstown haberdashery. Over the years, the Glossers built up an entire chain of supermarkets and discount department stores. The family business “was big enough to be listed on the AMEX stock exchange and employed thousands of people over time.”

What does this have to do with Miller? His mother was a Glosser and the sister of the editorialist.

David Glosser is harsh in assessing his nephew’s anti-immigrant stance:

I shudder at the thought of what would have become of the Glossers had the same policies Stephen so coolly espouses—the travel ban, the radical decrease in refugees, the separation of children from their parents, and even talk of limiting citizenship for legal immigrants—been in effect when Wolf-Leib made his desperate bid for freedom.

The Glossers came to the U.S. just a few years before the fear and prejudice of the “America First” nativists of the day closed U.S. borders to Jewish refugees. Had Wolf-Leib waited, his family would likely have been murdered by the Nazis along with all but seven of the 2,000 Jews who remained in Antopol [the Glosser’s ancestral village].

I would encourage Stephen to ask himself if the chanting, torch-bearing Nazis of Charlottesville, whose support his boss seems to court so cavalierly, do not envision a similar fate for him.

Glosser goes on to describe the president’s story. Friedrich Trump, his grandfather, left Germany to avoid military service and came to the U.S. in 1885.

(Avoiding serving your country! It’s a Trump Family tradition.)

Trump’s mother “fled the poverty of rural Scotland for the economic possibilities of New York City.”

And today, two like-minded men, Miller and Trump, are working in tandem to slam the door to America on people who would come here for the same reasons their own ancestors did.

8/14/18: The prosecution rests in the Manafort trial. They finish with allegations of a shady loan deal, worked out between a Chicago banker named Stephen Calk and the defendant in the case.

In the months leading up to and following the 2016 election, Manafort managed to obtain $16 million in loans from Calk’s Federal Savings Bank, even though Manafort was essentially broke. The two often emailed back and forth. Two weeks after Trump won the presidency Manafort suggested he could get the banker a post in the administration. How would Calk like to be Army secretary, he asked?

Calk wasn’t going to be picky—and he wasn’t going to be known for spelling prowess whatever role he won. In an email to Manafort he listed “perspective rolls” he’d have an interest in filling. Those prospective roles included Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of Commerce, or head of Housing and Urban Development. Secretary of the Army was only his sixth choice.

Calk added that he might enjoy becoming an ambassador, listing 19 countries where he’d be happy to serve.

In other words, evidence appeared to show that loans to Manafort were part of an illicit quid pro quo. Top executives at Federal Savings Bank originally refused to give Manafort any money at all. Calk, as founder and majority owner, overruled them and signed off on the deal. Sadly for Calk, he never got a post in the Trump administration and his bank lost $11.8 million too.

In a final insult, prosecutors have suggested Calk may be a co-conspirator involved in other crimes.

*

Speaking of crimes—the president is back from vacation and “hard at work” at the White House. At 11:15 his busy day begins with an intelligence briefing, which for a president with a notoriously short attention span probably involves sock puppets to illustrate key points.

An hour later, he’ll have lunch with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

After that, Trump will be done with business for the day and have time to digest, tweet and nap.

Meanwhile, the president is worrying about the spreading taint of the Russia investigation and legal battles on multiple fronts. Summer Zervos’ civil case, involving charges of sexual harassment and defamation, looms. Michael Avenatti remains a thorn in his side and claims to have three new clients who say they had affairs with Trump but were paid to keep quiet during the election. Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer, is ready to flip; and he has tapes. Now Omarosa has turned. And she has tapes too! Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser, says he expects to be indicted in the Russia investigation soon.

Even the Attorney General has failed to protect the president as he believes an Attorney General should.

Up early and tweeting by 5:59 a.m., Trump starts the day with a series of attacks on everyone involved in the Russia investigation.

Then he takes a break to blast Omarosa, a woman he handpicked for a coveted spot on his staff.

True. Omarosa is a strange piece of work. But if you thought the president had an ounce of dignity left you’d be wrong. “When you give a crazed, crying lowlife a break,” he tweets, “and give her a job at the White House, I guess it just didn’t work out. Good work by General Kelly for quickly firing that dog!”

A dog? He gave that dog an annual salary of $179,700 and kept her around as long as what she said about him was “GREAT.”

Trump said that himself.

Having listened to a healthy dose of Fox & Friends, as per his morning routine, Trump lashes out at Jeff Sessions again. Everyone at the F.B.I. and the Department of Justice and on Special Counsel Mueller’s team is out to get him. He tweets: “‘They were all in on it, clear Hillary Clinton and FRAME Donald Trump for things he didn’t do.’ Gregg Jarrett on @foxandfriends If we had a real Attorney General, this Witch Hunt would never have been started! Looking at the wrong people.”

We should all trust the president! Of course, to do so we would have to assume that Robert Mueller, James Comey, Jeff Sessions, Christopher Wray, and Rob Rosenstein are all shady characters. Mueller is a lifelong Republican. The last three, Trump appointed himself. We would have to assume that all the heads of U.S. intelligence who worried the Russians were hacking the election, the four FISA judges, all Republicans, who signed warrants to surveil individuals working in the Trump campaign, and all the agents at the F.B.I. working on the Mueller probe were making evidence of collusion up.

Then we would have to pretend collusion—which is “conspiracy” by another name—is not a crime.

8/15/18: With the jury headed out to deliberate in the trial of Paul Manafort, the president finds himself in a sour mood.

Manafort’s defense presented zero witnesses on his behalf, in large part because he’s a major crook and they probably have only one chance. In cross-examination they did their best to make the case that Rick Gates, the prosecution’s star cooperating witness, was an even bigger crook.

So the jury shouldn’t believe Gates.

That position was undercut by a parade of more than two dozen prosecution witnesses, including Manafort’s tax preparers, accountants, and even his banker friends. All agreed that Paul never saw a dollar he wasn’t ready to steal and then park, tax free, in one of his 31 secret foreign bank accounts.

If Manafort can get a hung jury, likely his best hope, the president is sure to insist that such an outcome proves the Mueller probe is a “witch hunt” for sure. The obvious flaw in that argument is this: Both men worked on the Trump 2016 campaign. Both are accused of all kinds of major crimes. Gates, himself, has admitted they were in contact with at least one individual they knew was a former Russian intelligence agent during the time they worked on the campaign.

Nevertheless, relying on the blissful ignorance of many of his followers, Trump tweets again today:

The Rigged Russian Witch Hunt goes on and on as the “originators and founders” of this scam continue to be fired and demoted for their corrupt and illegal activity. All credibility is gone from this terrible Hoax, and much more will be lost as it proceeds. No Collusion!

“Conspiracy,” is the word he really means.

*

The Congressional Budget Office releases its revised predictions for the remainder of this year and for the decade to come. The U.S. economy is expected to grow by a healthy 3.1 percent in 2018.

Expect the president to tout that fact.

Any president would.

Unfortunately, once the “sugar high” of the big GOP tax cuts begins to fade, the CBO predicts growth will slow to 2.4 percent in 2019 and then flat-line for the rest of the decade to follow.

As for the federal deficit, which Trump promised to erase in eight year if elected, it will only grow.

The CBO predicts the following deficits (see page four of the linked report) for Fiscal Years:

2018: $ 804 billion

2019:  $ 981billion

2020:  $1.008 trillion

2021:  $1.123 trillion

2022:  $1.276 trillion

2023:  $1.273 trillion

2024:  $1.244 trillion

2025:  $1.352 trillion

2026:  $1.320 trillion

2027:  $1.316 trillion

2028:  $1.526 trillion

In other words, good luck younger Americans! Trump and the Republicans, who once claimed they cared about deficits, and cared about you, are now going to stick you with the tab.

8/16/18: In the face of the president’s unrelenting attacks and claims that the media are “the enemy of the people,” the editors of the Boston Globe make the decision to fight back. The Globe coordinates a nationwide response. More than 350 newspapers agree to publish editorials critical of Trump’s stance.

Those papers include some of the greatest in the nation, some with as few as 4,000 subscribers.

Marjorie Pritchard of the Globe explains why their stand matters: “Our words will differ. But at least we can agree that such attacks are alarming.

“I hope it would educate readers to realize that an attack on the First Amendment is unacceptable. We are a free and independent press, it is one of the most sacred principles enshrined in the Constitution.”

Among organizations that come to the support of the Globe are the American Society of News Editors, the Press Association, the New England Newspaper and Press Association and the Radio Television Digital News Association.

The American Society of News Editors  says it has no choice but to join the protest: “Publications, whatever their politics, could make a powerful statement by standing together in the common defense of their profession and the vital role it plays in government for and by the people.”

A list of those supporting the call includes several papers the president routinely attacks as “Fake News.” The New York Times, alone, has exposed Trump and his aides in a series of blatant lies (see: 8/5/18).

The Houston Chronicle, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Miami Herald and Denver Post all pen editorials. So do smaller papers, including The Oakridger (Tennessee) and the Griggs County Courier and Steele County Press (North Dakota). The Philadelphia Inquirer joins the fray. The Kansas City Capital-Journal, one of the few papers to endorse Trump in 2016, also takes the side of a free press.

The supposed purveyors of “Fake News” are everywhere. The Martha’s Vineyard Times and Dallas Morning News join the fight. The Bangor Daily News in Maine, the Duluth News Tribune in Minnesota, the Yankton County Observer in South Dakota, and the Bennington Banner in Vermont throw their weight behind the protest. So does the Valencia County News-Bulletin in New Mexico. Editors at that paper are clear. “We are not the enemy,” they insist. “We are the people.”

The honor roll in support of the First Amendment proves long. It includes the Chicago Sun-Times and the Hartford Courant, the Boise Weekly and the Wilbur Republican (Nebraska), the Star News (North Carolina) and the Grand Forks Herald (North Dakota). The Tucson Sentinel and Arizona Daily Sun represent their state. The Akron Beacon Journal, Athens News and Columbus Dispatch, all Ohio publications, Oregon’s Portland Press Herald and Louisiana’s Slidell Independent all take a stand.

A sampling of editorials should make the danger clear to all but the dumbest Trump fans. The Des Moines Register explains:

The true enemies of the people — and democracy — are those who try to suffocate truth by vilifying and demonizing the messenger. 

The response to that cannot be silence. 

…Lesley Stahl, the Emmy award-winning “60 Minutes” correspondent, recently talked about her November 2016 interview with the current president — his first after winning the election. She asked him if he planned to stop attacking the press, something he did repeatedly during his campaign.

“He said, ‘You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all, so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you,’” Stahl said. 

Take a moment to let the implications of that statement soak in. 

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch also offers fair warning: “Trump is inflicting massive, and perhaps irreparable, damage to democracy with these attacks.”

The Swift County Monitor News (Minnesota) insists, as do others, that Trump’s words will lead to attacks on journalists—what you might see in places like Russia, Myanmar or Venezuela, where the free press is only a dream.

The Forward, a preeminent Jewish paper writes:

More than 300 news organizations around the country, large and small and in-between, are publishing simultaneous editorials in support of a free press — a pillar of our Constitution enshrined in its very First Amendment, persistently under attack by the most potent symbol of our democracy, the president of the United States.

… Jews, like other Americans, depend on the press to hold the powerful accountable and, as a religious minority, to stand up for our rights in this raucous, pluralistic society….

Rather than oppose a man, we wish to uphold a principle and appeal to other Americans to do the same. When journalists are harassed for what they publish and demeaned for what they ask; when they are ridiculed, beaten up, even murdered for simply doing their jobs, then all America suffers. We are not here only to say nice things about this or any other president. We are here to report the truth as best we can, so that an informed public can make its wisest decisions.

The Hays Free Press (Texas) offers similar caution:

A dangerous drift began with a few catchy words tossed out, catchy, but thoughtless, and dangerous. Talk of “fake news” and calling journalists “enemies of the people” were terms once used only by dictators. A free and independent press has guarded democracy since its beginning, sometimes at a high cost. It’s not perfect, but it’s far superior to controlled or censored news.

…What would happen if all news outlets just stopped suddenly? What would happen is newspapers ONLY printed one side of the story – the side being promoted by the government?

E.B. White probably described it best in his volume published in 1944.

The United States, almost alone today, offers the liberties and the privileges and the tools of freedom. In this land the citizens are still invited to write their plays and books, to paint their pictures, to meet for discussion, to dissent as well as to agree, to mount soapboxes in the public square, to enjoy education in all subjects without censorship, to hold court and judge one another, to compose music, to talk politics with their neighbors without wondering whether the secret police are listening, to exchange ideas as well as goods, to kid the government when it needs kidding, and to read real news of real events instead of phony news manufactured by a paid agent of the state. This is a fact and should give every person pause.

Government spokespersons from all entities try to give their side of the story; that’s what they are paid to do. But that is only one side of the story, and giving them free rein without questioning is not good for our country – or our freedom.

The final word for today goes to the Kansas City Star:

Not even President Richard Nixon, whose original “enemies list” of the 20 private citizens he hoped to use his public office to “screw” included three journalists, tried to incite violence against reporters. While stewing privately about Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as “enemies…trying to stick the knife right in our groin,” not even Nixon tagged the lot of us, Soviet-style, as “enemies of the people.” Nor did even he dare to take on the idea that our free press is worth protecting.

Donald Trump swore on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible to uphold the Constitution. And the First Amendment’s guarantee that “Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” implies that no branch of government will do so.

Perhaps most chilling of all, the Star notes that Trump’s rants are having a toxic effect.

Citing a recent poll by IPSOS, they worry that 44 percent of Republicans “said Trump should have the autocrat’s power to shut down news outlets” if he liked.

*

I was so horrified by that number I decided to go straight to the poll. Among other findings, IPSOS reported: “Some of the limits of public support for freedom of the press are made stark with a quarter of Americans (26%) saying they agree ‘the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior,’ including a plurality of Republicans (43%).

Even though the Star was off by a point—likely a typo and not “Fake News”—it should be clear to all—and clearly for many Trump supporters it is not. If our current president can curtail a free press today, the door will be thrown open for every future president to goose step down the same path.

That way, my fellow Americans, tyranny comes.

8/17/18: The Petty President revokes the security clearance of John Brennan, former head of the C.I.A. According to White House press secretary Pinocchio Sanders, all is right in the world. Brennan, she tells reporters, has been making “wild accusations” against the Trump administration.

(I will leave it to you to consider the irony of her statement.)

Sen. Bob Corker, a Republican, calls it the kind of move you see in a “banana republic.” But most GOP leaders are silent or mildly supportive. Sen. John Kennedy says Brennan was being a “butthead.”

The president is clear about why he does it—and why he plans to revoke the security clearances of others.

Brennan is a critic. So are the others. And Trump can’t abide critics or criticism. He’s not even sure he likes reality very much.

Naturally, Sean Hannity and the usual sycophants support the move. Lou Dobbs, clearly in need of sedation, explains,

John Brennan…has lost his security clearance. And the Swamp hates that. President Trump took away Brennan’s clearance because of Brennan’s “erratic conduct and behavior.” Brennan has been publically attacking Mr. Trump even while he was still director of the C.I.A. Viciously so. And Brennan has broken with tradition and civility: He is the first former intelligence agency head to absolutely politicize his public service, trying to monetize that service, to inject himself into Presidential politics, and to recruit the heads of other intelligence agencies to attack the President of the United States.

Again, even the most obtuse person in America should probably pick up on the absolute irony of Dobbs defending Trump from vicious attacks, and breaks with “tradition and civility.”

This attempt to punish critics may not bother Dobbs or any of the other dupes at Fox News. But it bothers quite a few former C.I.A. officials and leaders in U.S. intelligence. You know: the people who try to keep the country safe. First, a dozen former top officials at the C.I.A. sign a letter criticizing the move.

They warn:

We feel compelled to respond in the wake of the ill-considered and unprecedented remarks and actions by the White House…We know John to be an enormously talented, capable and patriotic individual who devoted his entire adult life to the service of this nation.

The president’s decision,

…has nothing to do with who should and should not hold security clearances—and everything to do with an attempt to stifle free speech [emphasis added]. You don’t have to agree with what John Brennan says (and, again, not all of us do) to agree with his right to say it, subject to his obligation to protect classified information.

So, add an attempt to curtail free speech to Trump’s repeated attacks on a free press. (See: 8/16/17.)

The original signers include C.I.A. Directors who served every president since Ronald Reagan: William Webster (Reagan and George H.W. Bush), George Tenet (Bill Clinton and George W. Bush), Porter Goss (George W.), Michael Hayden (George W. and Obama), Leon Panetta and David Petraeus (Obama) and former C.I.A. Deputy Directors John McLaughlin, Stephen Kappes, Michael Morell, Avril Haines, David Cohen and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

(You can read their letter here.)

As afternoon fades to evening, Brennan’s support grows. A thirteenth top official, Bill Gates, signs.

Gates was C.I.A. director under George H. W. Bush and Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush.

He stayed on in that role under President Obama.

8/18/18: The New York Times reports that White House Counsel Don McGahn has been cooperating with the Mueller investigation.

According to sources, McGahn has met with investigators on three occasions, and answered questions for 30 hours.

The Times writes that McGahn and his lawyer, William A. Burck, grew concerned when Trump and his lawyers at the time John Dowd and Ty Cobb (there are a lot of lawyers in this story, so pay close attention) allowed McGahn to speak to investigators without claiming executive privilege. They “feared Mr. Trump was setting Mr. McGahn up to take the blame for any possible illegal acts of obstruction…so he and Mr. Burck devised their own strategy to do as much as possible to cooperate with Mr. Mueller and to demonstrate that Mr. McGahn did nothing wrong.”

To understand McGahn’s concern we need to go back almost a year.

On a crisp autumn day last September, Dowd and Cobb were overheard babbling over lunch at a fine outdoor dining facility in the nation’s capital. That establishment just so happened to be located right next door to the D.C. offices of The New York Times. Ken Vogel, a new reporter, found himself seated close enough to hear the pair discussing their legal strategy.

Cobb was warning about a White House lawyer he considered “a McGahn spy.” McGahn, he told Dowd, had “a couple documents locked in a safe” that he’d really like to get his mitts on.

When that story leaked, McGahn is said to have decided it was time to go talk to Robert Mueller.

If the president is innocent—and, technically, he still is—he shouldn’t have much to worry about even if McGahn does have documents.

Still, we know McGahn threatened to quit on one occasion when Trump ordered him to fire…Special Counsel Mueller.

Not that the president was every trying to obstruct justice!

Still, erring on the side of caution, McGahn has been talking to prosecutors. He has told people close to him he’s anxious to “avoid the fate of the White House counsel for President Richard M. Nixon, John Dean, who was imprisoned in the Watergate scandal.”

As for his orange-tinted boss, I think we can all remember what happened to President Richard M. Nixon.

Told the American people: "I am not a crook."
He was.

8/19/18: Did you know that in protest against the president’s decision to revoke John Brennan’s security clearance (see: 8/18/18), Admiral William H. McRaven, the former commander of the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command, who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, has requested that Trump also revoke his security clearance?

In an editorial in the “Fake News” Washington Post, which has the nerve to let an actual human being put words on paper, McRaven writes:

Dear Mr. President:

Former CIA director John Brennan, whose security clearance you revoked on Wednesday, is one of the finest public servants I have ever known. Few Americans have done more to protect this country than John. He is a man of unparalleled integrity, whose honesty and character have never been in question, except by those who don’t know him.

Therefore, I would consider it an honor if you would revoke my security clearance as well, so I can add my name to the list of men and women who have spoken up against your presidency.

Like most Americans, I had hoped that when you became president, you would rise to the occasion and become the leader this great nation needs.

A good leader tries to embody the best qualities of his or her organization. A good leader sets the example for others to follow. A good leader always puts the welfare of others before himself or herself.

Your leadership, however, has shown little of these qualities. Through your actions, you have embarrassed us in the eyes of our children, humiliated us on the world stage and, worst of all, divided us as a nation.

If you think for a moment that your McCarthy-era tactics will suppress the voices of criticism, you are sadly mistaken. The criticism will continue until you become the leader we prayed you would be.

Can we hear an “Amen!”

8/20/18: Nearly 200 former intelligence officials, F.B.I agents, U.S. district attorneys, ambassadors and military officers sign a letter condemning President Trump’s decision to strip former C.I.A. head John Brennan of his security clearances. (See: 8/18/18 and 8/19/18.)

They explain their position in a letter to the press:

All of us believe it is critical to protect classified information from unauthorized disclosure. But we believe equally strongly that former government officials have the right to express their unclassified views on what they see as critical national security issues without fear of being punished for doing so.

Our signatures below do not necessarily mean that we concur with the opinions expressed by former CIA Director Brennan or the way in which he expressed them. What they do represent, however, is our firm belief that the country will be weakened if there is a political litmus test [emphasis added] applied before seasoned experts are allowed to share their views.

Ha, ha. Trump doesn’t care about “the country.” He’s a petty little fellow and can’t stand criticism.

8/21/18: If Donald Trump seems rattled lately (see his Twitter feed for evidence) it’s no surprise.

Friday, Special Counsel Robert Mueller filed an eye-popping sentencing document related to former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, related to the ongoing Russian investigation.

Now news breaks this afternoon. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer has pled guilty to bank fraud, tax evasion and violating campaign finance laws. Two of his eight felonies were—according to Cohen—carried out during the 2016 campaign at the behest of “a candidate for federal office.”

That would be none other than Mr. Donald J. Trump.

If that news isn’t bad enough, Trump suffers another stinging defeat when former campaign manager Paul Manofort is convicted on eight assorted felonies of his own.

Personally, this blogger is not ready to start singing, “Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead!” But if Cohen and Manafort both start cooperating with investigators, and it is expected Cohen soon will, it’s safe to say a tornado is brewing round the White House. And the president might need to look out for courthouses landing on his head.

*

Ignoring the felonious pair for a moment, this had already been a bad week for President Trump. Consider the case of George Papadopoulos, which came to an end (we think) just last week.

The sentencing document in his case is available online.

You may need to refresh your memory, of course. Papadopoulos, billed by Trump as a foreign policy adviser during the campaign, was interviewed by the F.B.I. in January 2017, a week after Trump took office. He was arrested in July of that year and pled guilty to a single count of perjury in October 2017. At the time of his plea we were told he had been a cooperating witness for months—and there were hints that he might have been wearing a wire to help investigators in the White House.

Team Trump began dissembling as soon as the plea deal became known. “George Who?” everyone from Trump down to Kellyanne Conway suddenly wondered.

The president responded via Twitter at the time—because of course he did. He called any idea that members of his campaign had been colluding with Russians “Fake News.” He rolled out his “I’m Rubber, You’re Glue” Defense and blamed Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the Ghost of Christmas Past for any problems in his campaign. “Few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George,” he claimed, “who has already proven to be a liar. Check the DEMS!”

Michael Caputo, a top adviser to the campaign, was even more forceful in his response to the Papadopoulos deal. “The leaders of the Washington office of the campaign didn’t even know who he was until his name appeared in the press,” Caputo insisted. “The guy was—he was the coffee boy. I mean, you might’ve called him a foreign policy analyst [no, Trump called him that], but, in fact, you know, if he was going to wear a wire, all we’d know now is whether he prefers a caramel macchiato over a regular American coffee in conversations with his barista. He had nothing to do with the campaign.”

(The veracity of these denials was undercut when a picture of Papadopoulos sitting in a high level meeting with Trump and the rest of the campaign team was posted and no signs of an order from Starbucks were seen in his hands.)

The coffee boy in a picture posted by the Trump campaign!

So let’s see how such claims hold up now that the sentencing document has been issued. It begins:

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

v.

GEORGE PAPADOPOULOS

“The government submits this memorandum in connection with the sentencing of George Papadopoulos scheduled for September 7, 2018. On October 5, 2017, Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to one count of making false statements in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1001(a).”

Of course, we already know the drill. If Trump fans read even the first sentence, we can expect many of them to start slobbering about some “perjury trap” that snapped closed on poor George’s right foot.

One lie! He only told one lie! Does a poor “coffee boy” deserve to go to jail for that! Of course not! And do we really want the president going into the same lion’s den, where “17 angry Democrats” await, ready to chew off both legs and maybe other favorite presidential appendages, to boot?

What “trap” did Papadopoulos step into? The sentencing document is clear:

The defendant’s crime was serious and caused damage to the government’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The defendant lied in order to conceal his contacts with Russians and Russian intermediaries during the campaign [emphasis added here and below] and made his false statements to investigators on January 27, 2017, early in the investigation, when key investigative decisions, including who to interview and when, were being made.

…the defendant repeatedly lied throughout the [January] interview in order to conceal the timing and significance of information the defendant had received regarding the Russians possessing “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, as well as his own outreach to Russia on behalf of the campaign. The defendant’s false statements were intended to harm the investigation, and did so.

In other words, Papadopoulos lied about contacts with Russians. He lied in January 2017, at the start of the investigation.

Why?

Why would a simple “coffee boy” perjure himself if all he did was ask other members of Team Trump, “One lump of sugar, or two?

“And do you take cream?”

Simply put, Papadopoulos didn’t want investigators to know he had been riding a broom during the campaign. Nor did he want them to know who told him to mount that broom and fly off to meet suspicious characters—who “happened” to be Russians—who “happened” to have dirt on Hillary Clinton.

You know: Exactly the kind of people and information that would help throw the election to Trump.

Meaning…..

This would be the essence of collusion…and we all know, if we can pick up a dictionary and use the guide words, that collusion is really the same as “conspiracy.”

And “conspiracy” is most definitely a crime.

*

The sentencing document makes clear that F.B.I. agents repeatedly warned Papadopoulos not to lie. “The defendant said he wanted to help the agents with their investigation” and “proceeded to answer questions, and to lie, for more than two hours.”

[Papadopoulos] lied about his contacts with Russians and Russian intermediaries during the course of the campaign to minimize both his own role as a witness and the extent of the campaign’s knowledge of his contacts…while serving as a policy advisor to the Trump campaign, the defendant met a professor of diplomacy in London (the “Professor”) who introduced the defendant to a Russian woman (the “Female Russian National”) and to a Russian national connected to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (the “Russia MFA Connection”). The Professor told the defendant that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails,” and the defendant had a series of communications over a period of months with the Professor, the Female Russian National, and the Russia MFA Connection in which they discussed arranging a meeting between Russian officials and the Trump campaign.

Here, any open-minded human being would be forced to pause a moment and ponder. Caputo (he of the “coffee boy” comment), helped set up a secret meeting with a representative of the Russian government and Roger Stone, another Trump adviser, in May 2016. Caputo now admits that the Russian agent was offering dirt on Hillary. And, strangely enough, Caputo “forgot” about that meeting till June 2018.

Stone “forgot,” too, until Caputo “remembered.”

Then both men promised they were going to be good patriots and go back and correct any testimony they might have provided Congress, such as when they insisted they had never met with any Russians during the campaign.

It also slipped Stone’s mind, until the “Fake News” people jogged his memory, that the Russian wanted $2 million to share the dirt he possessed.

Yes. Who could possibly remember that!

And while we’re on the subject of Russians, let’s not forget the meeting Team Trump held in June 2016 with Russians—promising dirt on Hillary—which the president and his cronies now insist was plain old American politics. Everyone does it—talks to hostile foreign powers during elections.

You, the typical reader of this blog, just can’t remember any other examples, because as far as anyone has ever reported, there have never been any.

No matter! The president now insists that meeting was totally legit. This explains why none of the representatives from his campaign who attended (Don Jr., who later lied about the purpose of the meeting, Paul Manafort, America’s newest felon, or Jared Kushner) ever admitted that the meeting occurred until, again, the “Fake News” people at The New York Times blew their cover in July 2017.

So a sensible person had to ask. What else had the campaign been up to and why was the “coffee boy” trying so hard to lead investigators astray? Papadopoulos didn’t step inadvertently into a “perjury trap.”

He lied with abandon:

With respect to timing, the defendant acknowledged that the Professor had told him about the Russians possessing “dirt” on Clinton, but he stated multiple times that this occurred before he joined the Trump campaign and that it was a “very strange coincidence” to be told of the “dirt” before he started working for the campaign. [That was a lie.]

…the defendant met the Professor for the first time on or about March 14, 2016, after the defendant had already learned he would be a foreign policy advisor for the Trump campaign; the Professor showed interest in the defendant only after learning of his role on the campaign; and the Professor told the defendant about the Russians possessing “dirt” on Clinton in late April 2016, more than a month after the defendant had joined the campaign.

Agents asked if the defendant had ever “received any information or anything like that from a Russian government official.”

Papadopoulos had to know he was in jeopardy; but he continued to try to lie his way out of a jam:

The agents asked the defendant: “going back to the WikiLeaks and maybe the Russian hacking and all that, were you ever made aware that the Russians had intent to disclose information ahead of time? So before it became public? Did anyone ever tell you that the Russian government plans to release some information, like tell the Trump team ahead of time[,] that that was going to happen?” The defendant responded, “No.” The agents then skeptically asked, “No?” The defendant responded: “No, not on, no not the Trump [campaign], but I will tell you something and – and this is . . . actually very good that we’re, that you just brought this up because I wasn’t working with Trump at the time[.] I was working in London… with that guy [the Professor].”

In other words, the coffee boy was lying to cover up for the campaign.

The defendant also made false statements in an effort to minimize the extent and importance of his communications with the Professor, including by referring to the Professor as “a nothing” who was “just a guy . . . talk[ing] up connections or something,” even though the defendant understood the Professor to have substantial connections to high-level Russian government officials and that the Professor spoke with some of those officials in Moscow before telling the defendant about the “dirt.”

The defendant also falsely told the FBI that he met the Female Russian National before he joined the campaign, that he had “no” relationship at all with her, and that the extent of their communications was her sending emails—“Just, ‘Hi, how are you?’ . . . That’s it.” In truth, however, the defendant first met the Female Russian National on or about March 24, 2016, after he had joined the campaign; he believed that she had connections to high-level Russian government officials and could help him arrange a potential foreign policy trip to Russia; he informed the campaign of his beliefs regarding her connections; and during the campaign he emailed and spoke over Skype on numerous occasions with her about the potential trip to Russia.

The defendant also did not reveal his extensive interactions with the Russia MFA Connection, including over Skype, even though he was asked if he had met during the campaign with any Russian nationals or “[a]nyone with a Russian accent.”

Papadopoulos knew he was making connections with Russian government agents. He knew they were going to give the campaign dirt on Clinton. He informed the campaign about his connections.

He kept lying:

On at least a dozen occasions during the interview, the defendant falsely insisted that his interactions with the Professor took place before the defendant joined the Trump campaign. At various points during the interview, the defendant said the interactions took place “prior to even talking to anybody on Trump”; they had “nothing to do with Trump”; “this was before I even got with-with Trump”; “I wasn’t even on the Trump team”; “that wasn’t even on the radar”; “I wasn’t even on the orbit of Trump at the time”; and “This isn’t like [the Professor’s] messaging me while I’m in April with Trump or something.”

Eventually, Papadopoulos hired a lawyer. In February 2017 he spoke with the F.B.I. a second time.

He was offered a chance to “correct his false statements” but chose not to. Meanwhile, he “deactivated his Facebook account that contained communications with the Professor and the Russian MFA Connection and obtained a new phone.”

Unfortunately, Papadopoulos’s lies interfered with the investigation. The F.B.I. had located the Professor in in Washington, D.C.

….approximately two weeks after the defendant’s January 27, 2017 interview. The defendant’s lies undermined investigators’ ability to challenge the Professor or potentially detain or arrest him while he was still in the United States. The government understands that the Professor left the United States on February 11, 2017 and he has not returned to the United States since then.

Something tells me we’re not going to see “the Professor” in these parts again, any time soon.

The defendant’s lies also hindered the government’s ability to discover who else may have known or been told about the Russians possessing “dirt” on Clinton. Had the defendant told the FBI the truth when he was interviewed in January 2017, the FBI could have quickly taken numerous investigative steps to help determine, for example, how and where the Professor obtained the information, why the Professor provided the information to the defendant, and what the defendant did with the information after receiving it.

What was the “coffee boy” really up to during the campaign? Prosecutors note that in the hours following his first F.B.I. interview, Papadopoulos was unfazed. As far as he knew, his lies had worked and he expected to be repaid for his efforts. The sentencing document notes that on that very same day he began talking to other members of the campaign about a future high-level position,

with the National Security Council, the State Department, or the Energy Department. On January 27, 2017, in the hours after being interviewed by the FBI, the defendant submitted his biography and a description of work he did on the campaign in an effort to obtain a position as a Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Energy Department.

Now, instead, he was headed for jail.

8/22/18: Well, I think we can all agree: President Trump is finally draining the swamp. Just as he promised!

Papadopoulos has been drained! (See: 8/21/18.)

And Omarosa has been yanked from the muck, although we should mention that Trump did hire the “wacky and deranged” woman. We, the taxpayers, then forked out $179,700 per year in salary even though she was “vicious, “not smart” and “a lowlife.”

Still, consider her drained!

Then, with the help of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York—and can we mention that the Southern District is led by a Trump-appointed Republican district attorney—he saw two more alligators carted off to jail.

Okay, technically, all Trump did was watch and tweet. Still! Serious progress! Alligator #1, Michael Cohen, pled guilty to eight felony counts.

Alligator #2, Paul Manafort, was convicted by a jury on eight felony counts of his own. And he faces a second trial on fresh charges in a month.

But wait, there’s more!

Fill the swamp first. Then drain it.
Manafort mug shot.

CNN reports that two more alligators have been arrested. In fact, CNN, “Fake News,” “so disgusting,” according to the president, has the nerve to file a report based on court documents!

Yes, more court news!

Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter and his wife, Margaret, routinely—and illegally—used campaign funds to pay personal bills big and small, from luxury vacations to kids’ school lunches and delinquent family dentistry bills, according to a stinging 47-page indictment unsealed Tuesday.

Hunter, if you may not remember, was the second member of Congress to endorse Trump for president, which is kind of ironic, I think all Americans can agree.

The first to endorse, Rep. Chris Collins, was charged with insider trading and arrested a few days ago. (See: 8/8/18.)

Charges against Mr. and Mrs. Hunter include wire fraud, falsifying records, campaign finance violations and conspiracy. An investigation by the Department of Justice lasted more than a year, during which Rep. Hunter maintained he was innocent and that Mrs. Hunter was a lovely woman.

Okay, maybe it was true. She couldn’t balance a checkbook.

(More on that below.)

CNN was kind enough to post a copy of the indictment for all Trump fans and GOP backers to read.

According to prosecutors, the Hunters were funding a lavish lifestyle, one they could not afford. So they “knowingly conspired with each other” to convert campaign funds for personal use.

There was, for example, the $14,000 family trip to Italy. And the $6,500 family trip to Hawaii. The couple used campaign cash for all kinds of sleazy purposes. They spent $600 to buy an airline ticket for their pet rabbit—because, going to Italy without the bunny? Can’t have that!

In one particularly egregious case they purchased personal clothing at a golf course (please, please, let it be a Trump course!). Then they falsely reported to Rep. Hunter’s campaign treasurer that they had purchased “balls for the wounded warriors,” according to the federal indictment.

Mrs. Hunter was given a campaign credit card—even though she had no formal role on the campaign at the time. Finally, at her husband’s urging, she was paid as campaign manager. Mr. Hunter told his treasurer, who objected, that the family needed “the extra money that would come from her salary.” One reason the couple needed the money: Over the course of a seven-year period they overdrew their personal bank accounts 1,100 times, resulting in $37,761 in “overdraft” and “insufficient funds” fees.

*

For some reason, the president decides he really needs to comment on the recent convictions of Cohen and Manafort.

“Your favorite president,” as Trump sometimes styles himself, considers the cases of the two felons and starts to tweet. First, he slams Cohen:

“If anyone is looking for a good lawyer, I would strongly suggest that you don’t retain the services of Michael Cohen!”

(This is the lawyer he trusted for more than a decade to do his dirtiest work.)

As for Manafort, he garners the president’s sympathy in a pair of heartfelt tweets: 

I feel very badly for Paul Manafort and his wonderful family. “Justice” took a 12 year old tax case, among other things, applied tremendous pressure on him and, unlike Michael Cohen, he refused to “break” - make up stories in order to get a “deal.” Such respect for a brave man!

A large number of counts, ten, could not even be decided in the Paul Manafort case. Witch Hunt!

(We later learn that had it not been for one holdout on the jury, Manafort would have been convicted on all eighteen counts!)

As for Cohen, who did agree to cooperate with federal prosecutors, which normal law-abiding Americans would normally consider a good thing—Trump insisted that the two felonies he pled to were “not a crime.”

In fact, they are crimes. Know how the president could have told? Cohen was charged with them as crimes. Cohen pled guilty in court.

See how easy it is!

Later, Trump puts out a heads up for his most loyal, but perhaps not particularly astute fans. He will be appearing on Fox News in the morning. And this will allow him a chance to tap dance around a few unpleasant facts.

He tweets: “I will be interviewed on @foxandfriends by @ainsleyearhardt tomorrow from 6:00 A.M. to 9:00 A.M. Enjoy!”

(See: 8/23/18.)

*

At an afternoon press conference, Press Secretary Pinocchio is asked to comment on all the new crime-related news. “The president has done nothing wrong,” she insists. “There are no charges against him. There is no collusion.”

True, as far as it goes: no charges yet.

As for “collusion,” can someone please buy a dictionary and mail it to the White House as soon as possible?

The address:

President Donald J. Trump

c/o Press Secretary Pinocchio

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Washington, D.C.

 20050

*

The president stays up late on this momentous drain-the-swamp-you-filled-yourself kind of Washington, D.C. day. Perhaps sleep evades him as he considers his own fate. Ten minutes after midnight he hits the caps button once again and tweets: “NO COLLUSION - RIGGED WITCH HUNT!”

Then he turns in for the night.

8/23/18: As promised, the president sits down for a softball chat with Human Bobble Head Doll, Ainsley Earhardt, of Fox News. (See: 8/22/18 in the archive which follows.)

Apparently, he’s fixated on her shapely legs. When she asks him how he thinks he’s doing as president, Trump is quick to reply. “I’d give myself an A+.” Earhardt’s empty head wobbles on its spring.

It appear she agrees.

The job of a Fox News commentator when Trump talks:
Listen and grin.

Trump can’t see it, because he’s a delusional nut job. But his grades are getting worse by the hour. He says again that Paul Manafort is a guy for whom he has “great respect.” Manafort worked for years for Ukrainian politicians who were in the pocket of Vladimir Putin. And Manafort has now been convicted on charges of hiding $30 million dollars in offshore bank accounts to avoid paying taxes.

And Trump has “great respect” for the guy?

(Of course, for all we know, Trump’s a tax-evader himself. We do know multiple members of his cabinet have availed themselves of offshore accounts in tax havens like the Isle of Man and the Cayman Islands.)

Trump again expresses his anger with his Attorney General. Why did Jeff Sessions recuse himself in the Russia investigation! Trump can’t believe it! “What kind of man is this?” he fumes.

Bobble Head Ainsley wobbles her empty head.

Trump informs her that he only knew about the payoffs to the porn star and the Playboy Bunny at a “later time.”

If the Bobble Head could actually think, she would have asked, just when that would have been.

Or: she could have asked, “Mr. President, you said on Air Force One, that you didn’t know anything about the payments? Why should all our catatonic viewers at Fox News believe you now?”

Trump implies that the “Justice” Department is crooked and rigged and unfair and run by members of the Deep State. This includes his own pick to lead the Department, Mr. Jeff Sessions. Prosecutors, he grumbles, just put people on the stands who are going to lie.

Bobble Head Ainsley smiles.

She could ask, “Mr. President, Paul Manafort was convicted on eight felony counts. The jury heard evidence against him and decided he was a gigantic crook. Are you saying you have no faith in the U.S. justice system?”

She doesn’t ask.

What do you expect? She works for Fox News.

We can assume the president enjoys their little chat a great deal, what with Ainsley’s sweet looks and vacuous interview style.

*

The day only goes downhill from there. Once again, we have fresh court news! Prosecutors in the Southern District of New York grant immunity to David Pecker—who is almost certain to testify against the president and back up Michael Cohen’s accusations of felonious behavior by Trump. (See: 8/22/18.)

Pecker runs American Media—which publishes multiple supermarket tabloids—and played a key role in “capturing and killing” the story of Karen McDougal. She’s the Bunny who alleges she had a lengthy affair with Donald J. Trump while he was married to the current First Lady.

Even more worrisome, for the president, there are hints that there were more than two hush money payments.

There may be several more women out there with sleazy stories to tell.

In any case, Attorney General Sessions soon fires back at the Boss. As he heads for a meeting at the White House, he releases the following statement:

While I am Attorney General, the actions of the Department of Justice will not be improperly influenced [emphasis added] by political considerations. I demand the highest standards, and where they are not met, I take action. However, no nation has a more talented, more dedicated group of law enforcement investigators and prosecutors than the United States. I am proud to serve with them and proud of the work we have done in successfully advancing the rule of law.

Allow me to explain to loyal Trump fans. Here you have the Attorney General of the United States making it clear that he believes the president is trying to improperly influence current investigations. Also, Trump fans, you should probably quit whining about all the evil Democratic lawyers involved in the Mueller investigation. The Southern District of New York is headed up by Geoffrey S. Berman.

Trump appointed him to that job.

In other words, Sessions is defending the integrity of his Department; and he is warning Trump. He will uphold the rule of law.

Multiple Republican lawmakers now warn the president not to fire Sessions, which would certainly be seen by thinking human beings, and maybe even Bobble Head Ainsley, to be a blatant attempt to obstruct justice. You can read all about it in the “Fake News” Washington Post, which has the audacity to quote Senators John Cornyn, Susan Collins and Orrin Hatch on the matter.

And what was the meeting about, which brought Sessions to the White House on this fine late summer day? The topic was prison sentencing reform.

I think we can guess why Trump suddenly cares.

According to Mr. Pecker there was no sense voting for Hillary.
She was going to be dead soon.

8/24/18: Diplomacy is still a bitch! Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is forced to call off his trip to North Korea. This decision comes after President Trump realizes Kim Jong-un still has all his nuclear weapons and doesn’t seem anxious to give them up. China, Trump tweets—because all complex foreign policy can be settled by tweets—is not helping resolve the standoff.

Still, he adds, “I would like to send my warmest regards and respect to Chairman Kim. I look forward to seeing him soon.”

Trump does love authoritarians.

8/25-26/18: The president spends the weekend relaxing (again) at a private golf club. Normally, for weekend getaways he favors his club in Bedminster, New Jersey. On this particular occasion he stays at his Trump National Golf Club in Potomac Falls, Virginia, not far from Washington.

It turns out to be a relaxing two days, since no members of his circle of relatives and/or close advisers gets arrested.

Trump also has time to kick back, watch Fox News, tweet about stories he watched on Fox News, and claim via Twitter that he is totally innocent of all wrongdoing whatsoever. And, by the way, if he’s not, he has already made it clear. He believes he has the power to pardon himself.

Not that he’s worried.

8/27/18: The sun rises over the nation’s capital. Flags are raised and then lowered to half-staff across the city. Sen. John McCain, who passed away Saturday, is being honored. Flags are lower at the Washington Monument, at Arlington Cemetery at the Vietnam Memorial and on Capitol Hill.

Observers note that flags over the White House are not at half-staff. Donald J. Trump, the smallest man, emotionally, ever to hold our highest office, has balked. He does not care to honor the hero who spent five-and-a-half years in a North Vietnamese prison.

Where was Trump during those years (1967-1973) when McCain was being routinely tortured? The future president was nursing sore feet (which kept him out of the draft) on the ski slopes at Aspen.

The president is up and tweeting early, however. He has kind words for...Jim Brown. Brown is a former star fullback of the Cleveland Browns. Trump thanks him for his “wonderful words and support.”

Brown is not a war hero. He did, however, once spend a day in jail and pay a $500 fine for choking a golf partner.

Trump also compliments….Tiger Woods, because the famous golfer wouldn’t criticize him when reporters asked him for an opinion.

Trump says Woods “is very smart.”

Woods is not a war hero. But he once “suffered” in jail, after pulling his sports car halfway off the side of a road and passing out, partly because he had a cocktail of banned substances in his bloodstream.

Also, like Trump, as a husband he proved to be a serial cheater.

Veterans’ groups were quick to catch the slight to John McCain and a storm of criticism gathered. The commander of the American Legion issued the following statement: “On behalf of the American Legion’s two million wartime veterans, I strongly urge you to make an appropriate presidential proclamation noting Senator McCain’s death and legacy of service to our nation, and that our nation’s flag be half-staffed through his internment.” Leaders of the AMVETS, a group which represents more than 20 million veterans, blasted the president. “It’s outrageous that the White House would mark American hero John McCain’s death with a two-sentence tweet, making no mention of his heroic and inspiring life,” said National Executive Director Joe Chenelly in a statement.

He continued:

And by lowering flags for not one second more than the bare minimum required by law, despite a long-standing tradition of lowering flags until the funeral, the White House is openly showcasing its blatant disrespect for Senator McCain’s many decades of service and sacrifice to our country as well as the service of all his fellow veterans.

The president, whose father never served this country, who never served himself, and whose children (so far) have not spent a single moment of their privileged lives in harms’ way (not counting trying to stay one step ahead of federal investigators), now showed the same guts he displayed in 1967. He backed down like the abject coward he has always been and always will be. Down came the flag over the White House. After refusing for days to do so, Trump issued a statement in McCain’s honor, noting, “I respect Senator John McCain’s service to our country.”

We know he doesn’t really.

*

In other news, involving the kind of freedoms which McCain fought to protect, a panel of federal judges again rules that North Carolina’s congressional map is unconstitutional. That is: it is drawn in so partisan a fashion as to violate the rule of “one man, one vote,” under the law. Currently, Republicans—who drew the map—hold 10 of the state’s 13 seats in Congress.

This is the third time the courts have stepped in and ordered the North Carolina legislature to redo its map.

Unfortunately, the map they came up with for 2016, while it looks better than the 2014 version it replaced, allowed Republicans to poll 2.4 million votes vs. 2.1 million for Democrats and still gain 10 of 13 seats. This result was aided greatly by packing tens of thousands of extra Democratic votes into three districts, the First, Fourth and Thirteenth. As a result, for every 700,000 Democratic voters in North Carolina you have one representative in Congress.

For Republican voters the number is one for every 240,000.

How was such a wondrous result achieved? GOP state lawmaker David Lewis, who chaired the redistricting effort that gave the state the 2016 map, admitted in court:  “I acknowledge freely that this would be a political gerrymander, which is not against the law. I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats. So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country.”

Or, to put it another way: Rep. Lewis didn’t much care if most of the citizens of his state got representatives they preferred. Lewis wanted to ensure that he and his pals continued in power.

The 2016 map wasn't quite so obvious in its intent; but it worked just the same way.

8/28/18: The “Fake News Media” folks acquire a recording of the president talking to a dinner gathering of Christian leaders at the White House the previous evening. First, he tells them he got rid of a law that forbids churches and charitable organizations from engaging in political campaigns.

Only he hasn’t. The law remains on the books.

Next, he ratchets up his nut job rhetoric. Having warned earlier that if he is ever impeached, the stock market will crash, he now says if Republicans lose the midterms there will be literal hell to pay for our country. “The level of hatred, the level of anger is unbelievable,” he says. “Part of it is because of some of the things I’ve done for you and for me and for my family, but I’ve done them. … This Nov. 6 election is very much a referendum on not only me, it’s a referendum on your religion, it’s a referendum on free speech and the First Amendment.”

If the GOP loses, the Democrats “will overturn everything that we’ve done and they’ll do it quickly and violently, and violently. There’s violence. When you look at Antifa and you look at some of these groups—these are violent people.”

The president wraps up the evening by singing one of his greatest hits. He says he saved Christmas. “Little thing—Merry Christmas. You couldn’t say Merry Christmas,” Trump insists. Not till he took office. “I’m telling you—when I started running I used to talk about it and I hate to mention it in August, but I used to talk about it. They don’t say Merry Christmas anymore.”

Trump added, to applause: “They say Merry Christmas a lot right now. It’s all changed. It’s all changed.”

So let me say, in that same spirit, “Merry Christmas and hope yo get a subpoena in your stocking, Mr. President.” 

Most of us, including most of us liberals, have been saying, “Merry Christmas,” all along, if for no other reason than force of habit. You and those who believe this silly fable can say “Merry Christmas” every time you answer the phone, or sing in the shower, or when your children head off to school every morning.

No one on our side cares. No one our side is trying to stop you. We only think, that at times, it is appropriate—as when greeting a Jewish or Muslim friend in December—not to throw, “Merry Christmas!” in their faces.

As for violence, we’re going to beat your orange ass at the ballot box in November. We’re not going to resort to violence.

And we won’t need any help from Vladimir Putin and all those other Russians to do it. (For real threats of violence: see 8/29/18.)

*

Speaking of Christians, a real Christian, former President Jimmy Carter, offers his opinion of the current occupant of the White House. “I think it’s well-known that the incumbent president is very careless with the truth,” Carter tells reporters.

“I think I went through my campaign and my presidency without ever lying to the people or making a deliberately false statement, and I think that would be a very worthwhile thing to reinsert into politics these days.” 

Also, while we’re on the topic, it might be nice if Trump could make an effort to honor the Seventh Commandment.

You know: less adultery!

Carter isn’t the only one who thinks Trump is a serial liar. A Survey Monkey poll of 4,362 adults finds that 62 percent of all Americans, including 38 percent of Republicans, believe Michael D. Cohen when he alleges Trump knew about illegal hush money payments to silence two women.

"Merry Christmas," to all Trump fans.

8/29/18: The F.B.I. arrests Robert Chain, 68, a California man and big fan of President Trump. 

Chain has placed fourteen threatening calls to the Boston Globe in just twelve days. Chain’s right-wing fury is touched off when the newspaper organizes a protest against Trump, citing his attacks on a free press. (See: 8/16/18.)

To catch the flavor of his calls, one, on August 16, should suffice. Chain starts with a quote from his hero, Donald J. Trump:

You’re the enemy of the people [he tells a reporter who answers the phone], and we’re going to kill every fucking one of you. Hey, why don’t you call the F, why don’t you call Mueller, maybe he can help you out buddy. Still there faggot? Alright, why, you going to trace my call? What are you going to do motherfucker? You ain’t going to do shit. I’m going to shoot you in the fucking head later today, at 4 o’clock. Goodbye.

Might I add, Chain should have ended with a rousing “Merry Christmas” to end this little chat. (See: 8/28/18.)

Robert Chain: big Trump fan and ready to murder reporters.

*

As for the president, Trump is still busy trying to cover up the fact that the Russians hacked Hillary Clinton’s emails—that his campaign encouraged them to do so—and that a power hostile to our national interests helped swing the election in his direction. In a pair of tweets (on August 28) he insists:

Report just out: “China hacked Hillary Clinton’s private Email Server.” Are they sure it wasn’t Russia (just kidding!)? What are the odds that the FBI and DOJ are right on top of this? Actually, a very big story. Much classified information!

Hillary Clinton’s Emails, many of which are Classified Information, got hacked by China. Next move better be by the FBI & DOJ or, after all of their other missteps (Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Ohr, FISA, Dirty Dossier etc.), their credibility will be forever gone!

Apparently, Trump is referring to a story he heard about in the Daily Caller, one which relied on anonymous sources. (We all know how much President Trump hates anonymous sources.)

The F.B.I. now issues a response. “The FBI has not found any evidence the [Clinton] servers were compromised.”

As usual, Trump is either lying or he’s delusional.

Maybe both.

8/30/18: Good god, can someone please tell the president to drop the phone and stop tweeting!

The man is losing his marbles.

In fact, marbles start flying early Friday morning when he attacks CNN (and gets his facts wrong again) at 5:50 a.m.:

The hatred and extreme bias of me by @CNN has clouded their thinking and made them unable to function. But actually, as I have always said, this has been going on for a long time. Little Jeff Z has done a terrible job, his ratings suck, & AT&T should fire him to save credibility!

If you follow Trump’s Twitter feed as I do, mainly for comic relief, it pays to do a little fact checking whenever you can. So I decide to check the claim about CNN’s ratings being in the tank. I do what the president could do himself. He has all morning, after all, to lounge about and tweet.

According to TVNewser,

Per Nielsen data, CNN had its third-best 2Q since 1996 in total day among total viewers, and among adults 25-54. Only Q2 2017 and Q2 2003 (Iraq War) were better quarters for CNN across the 24-hour day….This marks the 8th straight quarter and longest quarterly streak in over 22 years (since Q4 1995) that CNN is a top 10 cable network among total viewers in total day.

It is true, that Fox News, the Trump-Is-The-Greatest-President-Ever network, does have better ratings than CNN.

It is also true that over the years Americans have been content to watch reruns of Friends so often they can recite the dialogue. Americans actually tune in to watch Judge Judy, Big Brother and The Apprentice. That shows you how much ratings prove about the intelligence of the average viewer.

By the way, has anyone seen Omarosa lately? Didn’t Trump give her a high-paying position in the White House?

Next, Trump attacks NBC. This time he implies that he did not say on tape what he clearly said on tape in a famous interview with Lester Holt. That was the time he admitted firing James Comey because of the Russia investigation.

You heard his words. You saw his lips moving. Don’t believe your eyes or ears. They are lying.

Even for Trump, this is a bizarre line of defense; but it’s not really out of character. One is reminded of the time he hinted that the voice on the Access Hollywood tape wasn’t his—or when he said, on Air Force One that he knew nothing about hush money payments to a porn star or Playboy Bunny. His former personal lawyer recently released a tape (from September 2016) proving he did.

And just last week, Trump admitted to Bobble Head Ainsley (see: 8/23/18), that okay, he did know about the payments; but “only later.” Naturally, the Fox News babe let the Liar-in-Chief slide on that claim.

Anyway, Trump denies the obvious:

What’s going on at @CNN is happening, to different degrees, at other networks - with @NBCNews being the worst. The good news is that Andy Lack(y) is about to be fired(?) for incompetence, and much worse. When Lester Holt got caught fudging my tape on Russia, they were hurt badly!

Trump isn’t even close to being done tweeting. Next, he channels his inner fascist. We can’t believe the media, he insists. We can only believe him!

Our Great Leader!

I just cannot state strongly enough how totally dishonest much of the Media is. Truth doesn’t matter to them, they only have their hatred & agenda. This includes fake books, which come out about me all the time, always anonymous sources, and are pure fiction. Enemy of the People!

At 6:20 he does find time to tweet good news about the financial markets continuing their climb. We can give him that—although we of a liberal mind do not believe the rule of law is ever for sale.

Twenty-four minutes pass. Trump may be taking time to eat a bowl of Fruit Loops, while fantasizing about Bobble Head Ainsley Earhardt, luscious host of his favorite morning news show.

The Tweet Storm resumes.

For the next ninety minutes it’s a tirade about “Fake News” people, out to get him and Trump insisting he has done nothing wrong. Allow me to translate Trump Talk into plain English:

Trump Talk: “Ivanka Trump & Jared Kushner had NOTHING to do with the so called ‘pushing out’ of Don McGahn.The Fake News Media has it, purposely,so wrong! They love to portray chaos in the White House when they know that chaos doesn’t exist-just a ‘smooth running machine’ with changing parts!”

Plain English: On Wednesday, the president announced via Twitter that McGahn would be leaving his job as White House chief counsel this fall. McGahn learned of his impending exit the same way everyone else did—when Trump tweeted the news. This comes eleven days after we learn (via the “Fake News Media”) that McGahn has been cooperating with the Mueller “witch hunt.” That cooperation includes sitting down to chat with investigators for a total of 30 hours.

Ivanka must be worried.

If the right people flip (Michael Cohen has already done so; Paul Manafort could soon follow), her husband, First Son-in-Law Jared Kushner, may be implicated in a conspiracy involving Russians, offering dirt on Hillary Clinton, in an effort to throw the 2016 election to her father.

Collusion might not be a crime—which is a stupid argument Trump and his fans like to trot out daily. But that’s like randomly insisting “constipation” is not a crime.

It’s not.

Conspiracy is.

Why are Trump and his aides so worried lately? We know that investigators have broken encrypted messages on Cohen’s phone. We know Cohen has tapes from September 2016. He has already pled guilty to a pair of felonies, which he claims Trump asked him to commit. We know the tapes prove Trump knew about the felonious payments, whether or not he directed Cohen to commit them. We have long known that Manafort was one of three participants in the Trump Tower meeting with Russians in June 2016. Jared was there. So was Don Jr. We know that Roger Stone had another interesting meeting with a Russian who offered dirt on Hillary, but wanted Stone to hand over $2 million to get it. We know Stone later “forgot” about that meeting; and we know he now predicts he and Don Jr. are likely to be indicted.

Don Jr., Jared and Paul all met with Russians; and then all three "forgot" it.
The "Fake News" people proved they met and proved why.

Trump Talk: “The only thing James Comey ever got right was when he said that President Trump was not under investigation!” 

Plain English: Comey did say that, way, way back in 2017. That was before Trump fired him because of the Russian investigation. That was before General Flynn agreed to cooperate with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. That was before the “Fake News Media” proved in July 2017 that the Trump Tower meeting had occurred. That was before the president drafted a misleading letter, claiming the meeting was all about adoption.

It wasn’t.

The fact that Flynn has not yet been sentenced indicates he is still cooperating.

Rick Gates, who worked on the Trump 2016 campaign through its duration, is also cooperationg.

And don’t forget Cohen.

TT: “I am very excited about the person who will be taking the place of Don McGahn as White House Councel! I liked Don, but he was NOT responsible for me not firing Bob Mueller or Jeff Sessions. So much Fake Reporting and Fake News!”    

PE: Trump has repeatedly expressed his burning desire to end the Mueller investigation. And in June the president made clear what he thought of his Attorney General, tweeting his wrath:

The Russian Witch Hunt Hoax continues, all because Jeff Sessions didn’t tell me he was going to recuse himself...I would have quickly picked someone else. So much time and money wasted, so many lives ruined...and Sessions knew better than most that there was No Collusion!

Or: “constipation!” Again: Collusion is a bogus construct. “Conspiracy” is what we’re talking about.

TT: “Wow, Nellie Ohr, Bruce Ohr’s wife, is a Russia expert who is fluent in Russian. She worked for Fusion GPS where she was paid a lot. Collusion! Bruce was a boss at the Department of Justice and is, unbelievably, still there!” 

PE: You say, “Collusion!” I say, “Constipation!”

You have to be an idiot to get sucked in by Trump’s vacuous arguments. Nellie Ohr had a job. She can speak Russian. A company that deals with Russians hired her. She was “paid a lot.”

Trump was paid a lot to run his company. His sons and son-in-law are paid a lot. What point is the president trying to make here?

Maybe he thinks Nellie needs another big tax cut?

Bruce Ohr, Nellie’s husband, did have contacts with Christopher Steele, author of the Steele dossier. Many claims in that dossier are as yet unproven. (We can only hope the reputed “pee tape” will someday be revealed.)

Here’s the key point Trump fans miss—and Trump hopes they keep missing. Steele was not working for the Russian government. The Russians who met with Don Jr. and Jared and Paul Manafort at Trump Tower in June 2016 were. You know: the meeting those three hid for over a year. Steele is on a hit list compiled by Vladimir Putin.

And Steele previously helped the F.B.I. expose massive corruption at the highest levels in international soccer.

The Steele dossier claimed, for example, that Carter Page had gone to Moscow to talk to Russian officials.

Page first denied, but later admitted he did.

The dossier claims that Cohen was in Prague in the fall of 2016 to try to work out a deal to cover up any contacts between the Trump campaign and assorted Russians. This is still in dispute. But if Mueller has evidence he did—or Cohen flips and admits he was—the nooses will be tightly knotted around several White House necks.

TT: “The Rigged Russia Witch Hunt did not come into play, even a little bit, with respect to my decision on Don McGahn!”

PE: Sure, sure. We all believe that. No constipation! Not counting the 62% who believe Cohen is telling the truth about the felonies he committed at your behest. If we don’t count Republicans—who would believe President Obama murdered the Easter Bunny if Sean Hannity said so on his nightly show—roughly four of every five Americans think the president is a lying sack of poo poo.

In other polls we find that CNN is more trusted to tell the truth than the president (50 percent to 43 percent), that the Washington Post and New York Times are more trusted (a 9 point lead) and ABC, CBS and NBC are more trusted by the public than Trump, by 11 points.

That same poll finds that while Republicans approve of the president’s incessant tweeting, Democrats (no surprise) do not. More to the point, in understanding where the American public stands: three-fourths of pure independents (those who lean neither left nor right) disapprove of his tweeting. The top descriptors they chose: “undignified,” “mean” and “dishonest.”

8/31/18: At this point, if federal investigators caught Donald J. Trump with a conical hat on his head, a book of spells in his hands, and a bubbling vat of noxious ingredients cooking in the Oval Office, his Helen Keller-like fans would still insist he had nothing to do with witchcraft.

Friday, prosecutors bring another witch to justice. That witch, like several others recently, pleads guilty and agrees to cooperate with authorities. This time the man in the tall black hat is W. Samuel Patten, heretofore a little-known Republican lobbyist. What makes Patten interesting in this whole “Russia story” is that he has long had ties with Paul Manafort (the convicted felon).

Like Manafort, Patten worked secretly for a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party, backed by Vladimir Putin (of course). In the process he earned a cool million dollars plus for his services. If the Russians killed a few thousand Ukrainians in attacks on their country, Patten couldn’t be bothered.

Hey: a million dollars plus!

Patten later worked for Cambridge Analytica, the now-bankrupt company which is under investigation both here and in Great Britain, which had deep ties to the Trump campaign in 2016.

Patten also formed a company with Konstantin Kilimnik, a former Russian intelligence agent (naturally).

Kilimnik was indicted along with Manafort recently, in another federal investigation. This time the charges were conspiracy and obstruction of justice, with a spritz of witness-tampering. Both men are scheduled to stand trial starting September 24; but Kilimnik will apparently decline to attend.

He has fled to Russia (where else).

Patten pled guilty to funneling a secret $50,000 donation from foreign sources to the Trump Inaugural Committee—which is, for obvious reasons, illegal. That crime may not seem like much to Trump’s Hellen Keller supporters. But Patten copped to a single felony, while admitting to several.

In theory he has to know about bigger crimes and more of them or he would not have merited a plea deal.

Is there anything else that smells fishy in regards to the Trump Inaugural Committee? It was led by two men, Elliott Broidy, a bigtime Republican financier, aided by Rick Gates (now also a convicted felon). A year ago the “Fake News Media” revealed that Broidy had agreed to pay $1.6 million in hush money to a Playboy Bunny who claims he impregnated her Bunny self. That Bunny went on to have an abortion (because, of course, Republicans want to overturn Roe v. Wade).

Who set up that lucrative deal? It was Michael D. Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer (now a felon), who is cooperating with prosecutors.

And why might that be relevant? There have been hints that Broidy actually took the fall for the president in the case of the aborting Bunny. That is: the child was his. So it should be fun to see how that story plays out in weeks or months to come.

Patten is currently free on bail. He had to surrender his passport and may face five years in prison unless he cooperates fully.

*

In related “witch hunting” news, Senators Richard Byrd (R-NC) and Mark Warner (D-VA) issue a bipartisan statement Friday.

Their committee sent a “criminal referral” to federal authorities, involving Patten, but related to an entirely different matter.

9/1/18: Much of the nation mourns the passing of Sen. John McCain, who fought for his country during the Vietnam War. Former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama are invited to give eulogies.

The Big Orange Buffoon in the White House is unwelcome at the services. And instead, he heads off Saturday for one of his private golf courses.

Meaghan McCain, the senator’s daughter, speaking first, rebukes the president without naming him. “We gather to mourn the passing of American greatness—the real thing, not cheap rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice he gave so willingly,” she says, “nor the opportunistic appropriation of those who live lives of comfort and privilege while he suffered and served.”

Her implicit comparison of her father’s service to that of the sitting president, a man who used five draft deferments to avoid ever putting himself in harm’s way, could not be more pointed.

Politico describes the scene:

John McCain’s “America does not boast because she has no need to,” [his daughter] said. “The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again because America was always great.”

The line drew sustained applause from within the cathedral, including from many service members in uniform.

President Bush speaks later and he is equally clear. Without mentioning the current occupant of the White House, Bush lays out the differences between McCain, the war hero, and Trump.

“He was honest, no matter whom it offended. Presidents were not spared,” Bush says of McCain.

He was honorable, always recognizing that his opponents were still patriots and human beings. He loved freedom with the passion of a man who knew its absence. He respected the dignity inherent in every life, a dignity that does not stop at borders and cannot be erased by dictators.

Perhaps above all, John detested the abuse of power, could not abide bigots and swaggering despots.

Obama admits he was surprised when McCain called him not long before he died and asked him to speak at the funeral service. Again, a former leader cut down Trump without spelling it out.

Said Obama:

So much of our politics, our public life, our public discourse, can seem small and mean and petty. Trafficking in bombast and insult and phony controversies and manufactured outrage, it’s a politics that pretends to be brave and tough but in fact is born of fear. John called on us to be bigger than that. He called on us to be better than that.

…He understood that if we get in the habit of bending the truth to suit political expediency or party orthodoxy, our democracy will not work.

No doubt, if President Trump was watching, he had to be fuming. Naturally, he spent a good part of his day tweeting.

9/2/18: The president will spend the day at the White House, relaxing after a hard day of tweeting and golfing Saturday.

His fingers, no doubt are weary after tweeting, 19 times on Saturday, alone.

He could get busy and try to speed the process of reuniting the 497 children separated from their parents along the border, some only five years old and younger, many of the torn from mothers and fathers months ago.

Nah, too much effort.

Let’s tweet!

9/3/18: It’s Labor Day, a day to honor the working men and women of the nation.

Last week the president announced that 1.8 million federal workers would have to forego a scheduled 2.1% pay raise in October.

The man who just blew a gigantic hole in the federal deficit (see: 8/15/18) informed Congress that the nation could not afford to pay it. “We must maintain efforts to put our nation on a fiscally sustainable course, and federal agency budgets cannot sustain such increases,” he said.

Billionaires and multimillionaires, the nation’s fattest cats? Yes, what America really needed most—and Republicans in Congress and the fat cat in the Oval Office delivered—were tax cuts for the richest.

As Trump once said to all the other chunky cats at Mar-a-Lago, after he pushed through those cuts, “You all just got a little richer.”

Actually, the fat got a lot fatter! Trump and almost every member of his immediate family got tax cuts estimated to be worth millions. We have to estimate the president’s windfall because no one has ever seen his tax returns, which are eternally under audit. Hedge fund managers, all the Walton siblings, and every Trump cabinet member with cash stashed in offshore bank accounts—and there are several cabinet members who do stash cash—love those cuts. One estimate puts the tax savings for each of the two main Koch brothers at $1.0 to $1.4 billion annually.

As for those federal workers, they can do without a raise.

*

Or, maybe not! Less than 24 hours later, having announced that the nation could not afford a small raise for federal workers, Republicans awoke to the fact that this was not the best look politically, heading into midterms. To the untrained eye it appeared the GOP cared more for billionaires than they did for the “little guy,” which is true.

They do.

They just don’t want the coal miners, truck drivers, waitresses and plumbers who voted for Trump to get wise to the scam.

With Republicans up for re-election suddenly sounding the alarm, Trump quickly started to buckle. “I’m going to be studying, you know, the federal workers in Washington that you’ve been reading so much about,” he told reporters the day after saying there’d be no raise. “People don’t want to give them any increase. They haven’t had one in a long time,” he offered in way of mitigation. “People” didn’t want to give them a raise. It isn’t Trump’s fault! It never is. But he cares about those workers. Yes, he does! They haven’t had a raise “in a long time.”

“I said I’m going to study that over the weekend,” he tells reporters. “It’s a good time to study it—Labor Day. Let’s see how they do next week. But a lot of people were against it. I’m going to take a good hard look over the weekend.”

Federal workers: stay tuned.

Fat cats: Go buy bigger yachts! You will need them to visit your offshore bank accounts in the Cayman Islands. You know: the place where you stash cash so you don’t have to pay taxes and support those “freeloading” workers who chase down Mafia types at the F.B.I., man Visitors’ Centers at National Parks or help college students apply for federal loans. Trump is in the White House. GOP lawmakers are bought and paid for and all is right in the world.

9/4/18: Just when you think Trump might make it through an entire day without trampling on the rule of law, he puts on golf spikes and starts taking divots out of the U.S. system of justice.

First, he puts his fat orange thumb on the Twitter button and pushes down hard on the scales of justice. This time he’s upset about the indictments of two Republican members of Congress.

That means it’s time to insult Attorney General Jeff Sessions and vilify the Department of Justice:

Two long running, Obama era, investigations of two very popular Republican Congressmen were brought to a well publicized charge, just ahead of the Mid-Terms, by the Jeff Sessions Justice Department. Two easy wins now in doubt because there is not enough time. Good job Jeff......

 ....The Democrats, none of whom voted for Jeff Sessions, must love him now. Same thing with Lyin’ James Comey. The Dems all hated him, wanted him out, thought he was disgusting - UNTIL I FIRED HIM! Immediately he became a wonderful man, a saint like figure in fact. Really sick!

And there in one tidy package you glimpse the “beauty” of President Twitter Thumbs and his tweets.

In just 95 words, without checking grammar, employing “logic” any fifth grader could demolish, the President of the United States manages to:

1.    Undercut faith in the Department of Justice

2.    Sow doubt about the fairness of the courts

3.    Show disrespect for the rule of law

4.    Hint that Obama still can’t be trusted

5.    Avoid mentioning the indicted men by name

6.    Avoid talking about why they were indicted

7.    Label Comey a liar (and hope his fans aren’t keeping track of all the president’s lies, which are bountiful)

8.    Call Democrats “sick” (a favorite ploy)

9.    Insult Sessions without having the nuts to fire him

It’s a dump truck of stupidity; but there are a stunning number of Trump lovers who swallow it down.

(Note the “retweets” and “likes” when I checked at 9:22 this morning.)

I know it probably won’t dent their thinking; but let’s try to sort this out in sensible fashion. We know, for starters, that the Department of Justice is run by a Republican appointed by President Trump.

Trump can remove Jeff Sessions—and we know he burns to do so. He doesn’t dare, at least till after midterms. If he were to fire Sessions now, most Americans, including sensible people among his supporters, would see it as increasingly clear proof of intent to obstruct justice.

Sessions gets it first. Trump puts a stooge in his place: Devin Nunes, maybe? The stooge fires Special Counsel Robert Mueller. The “witch hunt” is ended.

No more annoying rule of law!

Indeed, even on the president’s favorite cable news channel, where logic often goes to die, real journalists are increasingly restive. Brit Hume, senior political analyst at Fox, quickly counters Trump’s pair of tweets with one of his own: “Will DJT never learn that an attorney general’s job is not to play goalie for a president or his party, or any party for that matter?”

Amen.

I might also point out to rabid Trump fans that Obama is not some Muslim, born-in-Kenya, steal-all-your-guns boogieman. That would require a great expenditure of words and the logic would still be lost upon them.

Nevertheless, I would be remiss if I failed to point out that the Department of Justice regularly investigates politicians of all stripes.

Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) was indicted on fourteen felony counts in April 2015, when Obama was seated in the White House. Menendez managed to survive a trial, however.

In most cases the Department of Justice gets its man or woman. Prosecutors indicted Sheldon Silver, a powerful Democratic New York State legislator in 2015. This time they managed to prove that Silver was a bribe-taking bum, who pocketed millions of dollars over a period of ten years. Silver survived a first trial, only to be convicted in a second this past May.

You can easily look this up. Trump could himself, save for the fact he has the intellectual curiosity of a clam.

If you’d like to be both appalled and amused go to Wikipedia for a list of “American federal politicians convicted of crimes.”

Under Mr. Obama, the Department of Justice went after miscreants in bipartisan fashion. Anthony Weiner, a Democrat, was convicted after sending pictures of his weenie to a 15-year-old girl. Rick Renzi, a Republican, was acquitted on 15 felony charges! At last, an innocent politician….or, not. He was found guilty on 17 other felony counts. Dennis Hassert, a former Republican lawmaker, was convicted of paying off a wrestler he had sexually assaulted when Hassert was coaching in high school. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL), scion of a famous clan, was nailed for misusing $750,000 in campaign funds. Trey Radel (R-FL) got busted for possession of cocaine. Chaka Fattah (D-PA) ran up an impressive total of 23 felony counts. Michael Grimm (R-NY) pled guilty to a single count of felony tax evasion. In return, he avoided trial on nineteen additional counts and was sentenced to eight months in jail.

Still, if you like audacity, all hail Mr. Grimm! Fresh out of the slammer, he decided to run for Congress again in 2018. Alas, for those of us who like to make fun of the Republican Party, Grimm went down to defeat in a June primary.

It’s not hard to understand any of this, really.

We want the Department of Justice to go after as many crooks in government as they can find and convict them when the evidence merits.

The two congressman indicted, but not named by Trump in his tweets, are Chris Collins (see: 8/8/18) and Duncan Hunter (see: 8/22/18). I suspect the president didn’t want to name them because some of his supporters might google their names and not come away impressed.

Collins has been accused of insider trading—and just to give you a taste—he and a few in-laws and relatives are accused of dumping stock they owned just before the price plunged. Collins and his crew kept losses to a minimum and suckers got stuck with stock that promptly lost 90% of its value.

Hunter was indicted—along with his wife—and charged with misusing campaign funds, the same crime with which the Democrat Jesse Jackson Jr. was charged, when Obama was in office. Among their felonious indiscretions, the Hunters are accused of using $600 in campaign cash to fly their pet bunny along on a family vacation. That vacation was also paid for with campaign donations.

The U.S. system of justice is arguably the best ever designed in the long history of mankind. Still, problems abound. It’s a system of men and women not just laws and therefore lacking perfection. Innocent individuals have been convicted of murders and sent to death row. Illegal immigrants do sneak into our country and some do commit heinous crimes. See, for example, the tragic story of Mollie Tibbetts. Native-born Americans also commit heinous crimes. They shoot down concert goers in Las Vegas, mow down church members in Sutherland Springs, and massacre teachers and children at Sandy Hook Elementary School. In our system of justice even the most terrible criminals are accorded the fairest possible trials. Real criminals sometimes get off when a dozen jurors can’t be positive they committed crimes they likely committed. Police have been known to plant evidence. Prosecutors have suppressed exculpatory material. A crime lab technician forged test results. Poor defendants are often ill-served by bad lawyers, including one barrister who repeatedly fell asleep during his client’s trial. Rich white people generally get off with light sentences while darker individuals get carted off to jail.

More than two thousand men and women, convicted of crimes in recent years, have been set free when new DNA evidence has exonerated them. Those two thousand plus individual spent an average of 8.8 years behind bars.

In the same way, Collins and his pals, and Mr. and Mrs. Hunter, may ultimately prove innocent. Yet the rule of law requires they be indicted if evidence indicates crimes have been committed.

So, you see, you can learn a great deal about how the U.S. courts function if you’re not too lazy to read.

You won’t learn anything—and you usually end up dumber—if you are gullible enough to fall for most of the president’s tweets.

*

Speaking of ending up dumber, with public attention directed toward late summer picnics and last chances to go swimming, Rudy Giuliani announces that once Special Counsel Mueller completes his investigation and reports to Deputy Attorney General Rob Rosenstein, the White House will assert executive privilege.

In other words, the President of the United States will endeavor to suppress any findings so the public never sees them.

*

The president tucks himself into bed after another bad day. When he turns on the TV he can’t escape the news. All the cable channels are reporting on Bob Woodward’s new book, Fear: Trump in the White House.

The book is due out September 11.

So far, the details revealed are far from unflattering for the man watching television.

According to CNN, Woodward quotes White House Chief of Staff John Kelly as saying of Trump after one staff meeting: “He’s an idiot. It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in Crazytown. I don’t even know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I’ve ever had.”

Woodward also writes about the efforts of the president’s lawyers to prepare him for a possible meeting with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. The president can’t get through a 30-minute mock session without exploding. John Dowd, at the time head of his defense team, finally warns him never to sit down and testify under oath. “There’s no way you can get through these [talks]. ...Don’t testify. It’s either that or an orange jump suit.”

Dowd, Kelly and others have denied saying what Woodward quotes them as saying; but if we go back to Watergate days, we know Mark Felt, the F.B.I. agent who tipped off Woodward and Bernstein constantly, denied repeatedly that he was their famous source, known as “Deep Throat.”

Woodward describes the president as lonely and increasingly paranoid, often watching hours of TV in the White House residence.

And Trump often sounds, in Woodward’s telling, exactly how you think Trump would sound behind closed doors. The president describes Reince Priebus, his first chief of staff, as “a little rat. He just scurries around.”

Trump isn’t interested in the details of foreign policy. He doesn’t care about the positions of our allies, about diplomatic niceties, or even the subtleties of our enemies’ negotiating positions. In considering the nuclear standoff with North Korea, he shrugs off advice from top advisers. “This is all about leader versus leader. Man versus man. Me versus Kim,” he replies.

In the same way, Trump goes off on his generals when they try to explain the complexities of the fighting in Afghanistan. “You should be killing guys. You don’t need a strategy to kill people,” he fumes. Woodward says it was after this that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson declared: “He’s a fucking moron.”

CNN continued its review:

Woodward also quotes an unnamed White House official who gave an even more dire assessment of the meeting: “It seems clear that many of the president’s senior advisers, especially those in the national security realm, are extremely concerned with his erratic nature, his relative ignorance, his inability to learn, as well as what they consider his dangerous views.”

In a January 2018, Defense Secretary James Mattis is described as explaining why the U.S. has a large troop presence in South Korea. “We’re doing this in order to prevent World War III,” he tells the president. Afterwards, he tells a close associate Trump has the understanding of a “fifth or sixth grader.”

Trump’s tweets are a constant source of concern to his aides. The president sometimes orders printouts of his most popular tweets and studies them instead of diving more deeply into matters of healthcare or environmental policy. White House staffers try to intervene but they can’t stop President Twitter Thumbs. Priebus, the “little rat,” refers to the presidential bedroom, where Trump often goes to tweet, as “the devil’s workshop” and calls the early morning hours and Sunday night, when Trump often vents via Twitter, “the witching hour.”

Perhaps Priebus comes closest to describing the dysfunction that typifies this administration. The White house, he tells Woodward, is filled with “natural predators at the table.” “When you put a snake and a rat and a falcon and a rabbit and a shark and a seal in a zoo without walls, things start getting nasty and bloody.”

Axios and other media outlets review the book with similar results. “After Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad launched a chemical attack on civilians in April 2017, Trump called Mattis and said he wanted to assassinate the dictator. ‘Let’s fucking kill him! Let’s go in. Let’s kill the fucking lot of them,’ Trump said, according to Woodward.” His top military advisers had to convince him that would be a bad move and, under U.S. law, illegal.

9/5/18: The president wakes up in a sour mood, knowing that the highly critical book by Bob Woodward is being widely reviewed by the “Fake News” media. At least three members of the administration quoted have already denied saying what they are quoted as saying.

The problem is that the quotes cited so far sound exactly like Trump sounds at campaign rallies, during off-the-cuff talks and when he’s off on a Twitter rampage. Woodward’s Trump is the Trump we’ve seen daily the last two years. Woodward, for example, claims that behind closed doors Trump has called Attorney General Jeff Sessions “mentally retarded” and “a dumb Southerner.”

Trump decides to defend himself in a tweet. When he tweets no reporter can ask him hard follow-up questions. So he serves up this nugget for fans: “I said NEITHER, never used those terms on anyone, including Jeff, and being a southerner is a GREAT thing. He [Woodward] made this up to divide!”

The problem, if anyone cares to check is that we have tapes that belie the president’s disclaimers. We have all seen the famous video where he mocks a handicapped reporter, mimicking his lack of coordination. Newsweek notes that Trump called a golf instructor “mentally retarded” during a taped appearance on the Howard Stern show in 2004. On another occasion, again on tape, he called a reporter who questioned his business acumen “retarded.”

We can also check his Twitter feed or play back his words at campaign rallies. This is a man who often refers to people he doesn’t like as “lowlifes,” “pigs” and “animals,” who calls foes “low I.Q.” or “dumb as a rock.” So his comments on Sessions, as quoted by Woodward, are perfectly in keeping.

*

The president’s mood is not improved when late in the afternoon The New York Times prints an anonymous editorial by an individual the newspaper says is a “top official” in the Trump administration. The title is: “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.”

Key passages include:

President Trump is facing a test to his presidency unlike any faced by a modern American leader.

It’s not just that the special counsel looms large. Or that the country is bitterly divided over Mr. Trump’s leadership. Or even that his party might well lose the House to an opposition hellbent on his downfall.

The dilemma—which he does not fully grasp—is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.

The author rarely faults Trump’s policies—rather questioning his fitness as a man to hold high office:

…we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.

That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.

The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.

…Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.

If what the writer says sounds chilling, he or she offers some solace. Top White House aides are doing everything they can to mitigate the damage done by an “erratic” president. “It may be cold comfort…but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.

The president may cuddle up to Putin and other authoritarian leaders; but top aides work every day to contain the damage.

The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.

Senator John McCain put it best in his farewell letter. All Americans should heed his words and break free of the tribalism trap, with the high aim of uniting through our shared values and love of this great nation.

We may no longer have Senator McCain. But we will always have his example — a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue. Mr. Trump may fear such honorable men, but we should revere them.

There is a quiet resistance within the administration of people choosing to put country first. But the real difference will be made by everyday citizens rising above politics, reaching across the aisle and resolving to shed the labels in favor of a single one: Americans.

Almost as soon as the editorial is posted, Trump rushes out to respond, and proves he’s not unhinged by acting unhinged. He blasts, “The New York Times and CNN and all these phony media news outlets.” His political opponents are in favor of “disaster and crime.” It’s the “failing New York Times” that he’s mad about. These media people, “They don’t like Donald Trump and I don’t like them, because they’re very dishonest people.” He calls the editorial writer “gutless” for writing anonymously.

“We’re doing a great job. The poll numbers are through the roof,” he insists, “our poll numbers are great, and guess what, nobody is going to come close to beating me in 2020 because of what we’ve done.”

(We have seen the numbers, below. They are not “great.” They are not “through the roof.” They are not good. They are not even fair.)

Part of his impromptu performance involves whipping out a paper from an inner pocket of his suit jacket. It’s a list of his accomplishments which he proceeds to read in a loud, aggrieved tone.

He brags about adding “four million jobs” to the economy—which is true, as far as it goes, but pretty much a continuation of what Obama was doing, starting in 2011, once the Great Recession ended.

Trump keeps turning his back on reporters to address comments to a bank of sheriffs there at the White House for some ceremony. When he attacks the free press they clap like idiots with badges.

Eventually Trump stomps out of the room, refusing to take any questions. Jesus. What a performance.

*

In fact, there are several problems in regard to the president’s defense of his behavior, not the least of which is proof of his past behavior. His problems are only compounded by the display of behavior that follows as he finishes out a bad day.

Having fled the presence of reporters, Trump quickly retreats to his private residence. This is where he goes when he wants to whine and tweet and feel sorry for himself. Naturally, he posts a clip of his own performance, now just ended. Half-an-hour later he issues a one-word tweet.

“TREASON.”

If you care about the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law you have to wonder. Who does the president accuse of treason—a crime punishable by death?

Is the president accusing The New York Times of treason, for operating as the free press always does? Is he calling the anonymous author treasonous—because he expressed opinions that pissed him off?

Treason occurs only in wartime. So the president sounds either ignorant and angry or totally irrational.

A second, equally ominous tweet comes at 6:40 p.m.: “If the GUTLESS anonymous person does indeed exist, the Times must, for National Security purposes, turn him/her over to government at once.”

Turn that person over for what? Expressing opinions?

Turn them to face what? Arrest? Summary execution.

And which is it? Trump says the story is “fake news.” So, does the source exist?—because if the source does exist—what the source says should shock all Americans for what this editorial proves.

At 10:22 p.m. the President of the United States tweets one last time before heading for bed: “I’m draining the Swamp, and the Swamp is trying to fight back. Don’t worry, we will win!”

The problem with that argument is immediately clear. The man or woman who wrote that piece in the paper—that person Trump brought to the swamp. And that person thinks rightly that Trump is nuts.

*

Meanwhile, Gina Loudon, a member of President Trump’s media advisory board appears on Sean Hannity’s show. Clearly, her job is to help calm Fox News viewers who might be starting to catch on to the possibility that the president they love is, frankly, a little bit crackers. We can probably assume the president is watching because Fox is the only channel he approves and Hannity is his close personal friend. Loudon is author of the book Mad Politics, and now on the show she and Sean totally agree that Trump is the best president of all time!

Loudon (whose book you figure Trump won’t read because Trump won’t read) tells Hannity, “My book actually uses science and real data and true psychological theory to explain why it is quite possible that this president is the most sound-minded person to ever occupy the White House.”

Once again, when I go to Amazon to check out Loudon’s book, I am reminded that the policy of Fox News is to reach as many male viewers as possible not through the intellect but through the loins. When click on Amazon to get a picture of the cover of Loudon’s book, the second reviewer I see gives the work five stars and titles his review: “Amazing endorsements and smoking hot author.”

I think to myself: Maybe Loudon could send the president a copy and he could lie in bed and gaze upon the cover with lust and…

Let’s face it. We all suspect Melania is sleeping in a separate bedroom at night. 

Smoking hot author--or how to get Trump to pick up a book.

9/6/18: We know the president insists the dishonest media employs made up sources to attack him.

As the sun rises once more over Washington, I think we can assume the president will be calm and the mood at the White House will be “business as usual, let’s just keep on making America great.” Because the scathing editorial in The New York Times on September 5 was just “Fake News.”

Or not.

Trump is reportedly in a rage. His temper is “volcanic.” There’s pandemonium at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

There is talk among aides of hitching up everyone in the White House to lie detectors, including Ivanka.

The hunt for the person who talked to the Times is on—and the president is said to have a list of a dozen prime suspects.

As the hours pass the denials pile up. “I didn’t write it,” Vice President Jesus is first to claim. And we know that man cannot tell a lie, because if he does, he fears he will burn in hell for all eternity and be stuck spending untold centuries with a flaming Donald J. Trump by his side.

The initial betting, even on Las Vegas betting sites, is that the anonymous author is really Mike Pence. The writer has used the word “lodestar,” a word the vice president often uses in speeches. It’s an unusual word to employ.

“Not mine,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tells reporters. He’s traveling in India and it has to be embarrassing to have to address the topic.

Defense Secretary James Mattis is innocent. A Pentagon spokesperson says, “It was not his op-ed.”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions says, through a spokesman, he didn’t write it. In his heart you figure he wishes he had.

By evening at least 24 cabinet members, ambassadors, and other top administration officials have insisted they never put pen to paper. Even Melania issues a statement, saying the author of the piece is “sabotaging” the country.

A spokesman for E.P.A. Administrator Andrew Wheeler says there is no way Wheeler would criticize the president. He “supports President Trump 100% and is honored to serve in his Cabinet. He also believes whoever wrote the op-ed should resign.” Besides, Wheeler is too busy writing new rules so that chemical companies can poison the nation’s water and coal companies can pour pollution into our air to be bothering about whether his Boss is a nut case.

Pundits spend the day weighing possibilities. Who wrote it? Should the author have come out publically? Is this “gutless” and “shameful” behavior? Is the writer a “quiet hero” sounding an alarm.

At least one expert points to a key passage:

The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.

The phrase “not moored” seems to hint that the writer is familiar with nautical terms, perhaps someone who served in the Navy.

Still, the bottom line is obvious. Someone working at the top of the administration thinks the man in charge at the White House is a pyromaniac.

The fires he sets must be doused.

9/7/18: George Papadopoulos, the first member of the Trump campaign to be sentenced to jail, gets off easy, with 14 days behind bars.

Trump fans will imagine that this proves there’s “no there there” in the Russia investigation. George, the convicted felon and purported “coffee boy” might beg to differ. In court, he explains to the judge why he lied to the F.B.I. during the early stages of the investigation. He was a young man working for the Trump campaign. “I was surrounded by important people. I was young and ambitious and excited.”

His lawyer, Thomas M. Breen tries to shift blame from his client to the president. “The president of the United States hindered this investigation more than George Papadopoulos ever could,” Mr. Breen argues in court.

In addition to two weeks in jail, Papadopoulos is ordered to pay a $9,500 fine and perform 200 hours of community service.

More ominously—for Trump fans—a prosecutor tells the judge that Papadopoulos’ failure to cooperate fully in the initial stages of the investigation forced the prosecution to pour through more than 100,000 emails and other communications. That means investigators have been digging deep in the pile of manure that was the Trump campaign. Naturally, when asked about the case by reporters aboard Air Force One, during a trip to Fargo, N.D., Trump tries to act nonchalant. “I see Papadopoulos today; I don’t know Papadopoulos, I don’t know,” the president says.

“They got him, on I guess, on a couple of lies.”

For his part, Papadopoulos tells the judge he felt the Mueller investigation was legitimate, the investigators fair-minded. He was paying for his mistakes. That’s all he knew. “And if anyone else made mistakes, they’re going to have to pay a price, too.”

9/8/18: In case you missed the story, the good jobs report for August masks a hideous reality.

How do I know? Have I been reading “Fake News?” I admit I subscribe to the “failing New York Times” seven days a week.

But a front page story in the Times on Friday focused on the positive aspects of the report. “The American economy’s stamina was showcased Friday as the government reported that wages in August sprinted forward at their fastest pace since the recession ended and that the job creation streak extended to 95 months.”

The “enemies of the people” at the Times added: “the jobless rate remained under 4 percent, near territory not seen since the 1960s; and average hourly earnings rose by 10 cents, up 2.9 percent from a year earlier.”

Well, you cannot fool me with fake good news! I am going to quote Donald J. Trump, the greatest president ever, previously the greatest businessman ever to walk the earth, or any other planet, assuming their might be life in distant corners of the galaxy—such as Giant Ferret Women! If such creatures did exist and ever saw the president they would definitely want to mate! That sexy orange coif, those saggy jowls, that lumpy body! We all know the president’s hair looks like a ferret crawled atop his cranium and died.

Wait. Where was I? Ah. The economy!

As I was saying, these are supposedly boom times. Jobs in the coal mines are on the rise. Lawyers are in demand! Practically every member of the Trump administration has lawyered up. The president is keeping platoons of defense lawyers busy on a half-dozen fronts.

I am not fooled.

Friday the White House was touting the August jobs report as “blockbuster” good news. Press Secretary Pinocchio said Americans should run out in November and vote Republican in the midterms like lemmings.

Pay no mind if the President of the United States stomps on the rule of law every time he turns around! The man produces jobs!

Or so he claims—and also doesn’t claim.

Yes. The economy added 201,000 jobs last month. Yes. Non-farm wages are up, year-over-year, 2.9%. That’s the best yearly gain since 2009.

You still can’t fool me. I am going to quote someone Trump loyalists will find impossible to dispute. This man has made the bad news clear. He has warned that tens of millions of Americans still remain without jobs. They live underground, occasionally sticking their heads out of doors, like Punxsutawney Phil, desperately looking for work. There are no jobs to be seen and they retreat to their loungers to await the coming of boom times.

Who says? Donald J. Trump says. And who am I to imagine that this great man might ever lie?

(Okay, true, in a recent Quinnipiac poll, 60% of Americans said they thought the president was not honest and only 32% said he was. I am guessing that latter figure did not include Melania.)

In February 2016, with Obama holding the fort, Trump appeared on Fox News and made it clear to host Sarah Palin (remember her) that the nation’s employment situation was dire. “Well, if you really looked, Sarah, at the economy it’s been terrible,” Trump claimed. “We have 93,000,000 people out of work. They look for jobs, they give up, and all of a sudden, statistically, they’re considered employed.”

There might be fools who believed the good monthly jobs reports issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics back in those days.

Not Trump.

Those good monthly numbers—which Candidate Trump called “rigged”—showed that once the Great Recession ended in late 2010, the economy added jobs 76 months in a row, under Obama.

In January 2017, Sean Hannity blasted Obama one last time as he left office. It burned his ass, Hannity said, to listen to the outgoing president boast about the healthy economy as he returned to civilian life. Hannity was wise to the scam. The state of the economy was not good:

Well, facts, they paint a much different picture. Now, what is actually true, he oversaw the precipitous decline of the American economy, that’s a fact. And here’s why. Under President Obama we have seen the lowest labor participation rate since the 70s, 95 million of your fellow Americans are out of the labor force, he didn’t mention that tonight…”

So there you had it. Facts! Hannity facts! Trump facts! Holy-shit-facts!!!! Somewhere north of 90,000,000 Americans were desperate for work. Trump was warning voters not to elect Hillary. If they did the economy would crash, just as it had in 2008—because of Obama—when President George W. Bush was in office. The good jobs numbers that had been pouring forth from the Bureau of Labor Statistics since late 2010, Trump insisted, were faked.

First, he claimed the real unemployment rate was 15%. Then he said it was 18 to 20 percent. On August 11, 2015, when the official rate was 5.4%, Trump insisted “it’s probably 40%.”

Trump was fuzzy about exact numbers. He often is. No matter! By August 30, he had the rate nailed down. “The real number,” he told a reporter, “I saw a number that could be 42 percent, believe it or not.”

Believe it or not!

In September 2015, Candidate Trump said the unemployment number was either 24% or 42%.

You had to wonder: Is Donald dyslexic?

In October he said it was 32%.

By the start of 2016, he was claiming the Bureau of Labor Statistic had “cooked the books.” The jobs reports were “phony.” In February Trump revealed the truth. The unemployment rate was 35%! Or maybe 42%! It was awful either way.

In August 2016 he scoffed at the official unemployment rate. “The 5 percent figure is one of the biggest hoaxes in modern politics.”

“Hoax.” Where have we heard that word of late?

Even after he won election Trump couldn’t be fooled—and neither could his loyal fans. “The unemployment number, as you know,” Trump told reporters in December 2016, “is totally fiction.”

Then he took charge. The Trump jobs boom began! Or so we were told. But Donald J. Trump himself, with the able assistance of Hannity and the rest of the hosts at Fox News, had tipped this liberal off. The numbers coming out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics had to be wrong.

Here are the shocking facts—as revealed by Donald J. Trump! Starting from that figure of 93,000,000 unemployed, which he posited at the end of 2016, the Bureau reported that in January 2017, 259,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy. The official unemployment rate stood at 4.8 percent.

When the jobs report for February 2017, Trump’s first full month in office, was good, Press Secretary Sean Spicer said the numbers might have been phony in the past. Now they were “very real.”

Only this liberal knew math! I had listened to Candidate Trump and his sidekick, Gelled Hair Sean.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics said 200,000 jobs were added in February 2017. The Bureau claimed the unemployment rate ticked down to 4.7 percent. But I was using Trump’s figures because I knew Trump never lies. He just can’t do it. He is the modern equivalent of George Washington with his little hatchet, facing a cherry tree of facts. He cannot cut it down and say he didn’t. And by his figures more than 92.5 million Americans still had to be seeking work!

I’m not crazy. I can’t deny addition and subtraction.

The economy has continued to add jobs every month since Trump took charge. The streak of 95 positive monthly job reports has continued through 2018, meaning that Trump, if we listen to right-wing “real news,” has kept the economy humming since late 2010. In nineteen full months since he first took office 3,583,000 jobs have been added to the U.S. economy (February 2017-August 2018).

Well, you still can’t fool me. I have a calculator and I know how to punch the buttons. As of now, Trump can claim he has been adding 188,579 jobs per month. And the unemployment rate has officially dropped to 3.9 percent. But I was not born yesterday. I was born in 1949. I’m old. You can’t trick me again—like when I thought Obama was adding jobs 76 months in succession.

If we subtract jobs all the jobs created under Trump, from the number of Americans who Trump and Hannity said were crying out for work (we’ll use Trump’s lower estimate), then we find:

  93,000,000 Americans looking for work (December 2016)

  -    259,000 jobs added in January 2017 (Obama in office for 19.5 days)

  - 3,583,000 jobs created since

 

  89,158,000 Americans still looking for work!

In other words, since I have listened to Hannity and Lou Dobbs and all the other angry right-wing nuts, I know the horrible truth. The official unemployment rate can’t be right. The numbers must be “rigged.”

By Trump’s own math, we know more than 89,000,000 Americans are still pounding the pavement, crying out, “Work! Work! We need work!”

In fact, the situation is even worse than we imagine. In January 2017, when Trump took office, the Labor Participation Rate was 62.9 percent, having fallen from 65.7 percent in January 2009, when Obama took office.

Remember! Hannity was pissed. He blamed the decline all on Obama.

Lord, have mercy. As of August 2018, the rate is only 62.7 percent. It hasn’t budged in almost two years.

So I am going to try to estimate the true unemployment rate, using the kind of math Trump employed when Obama was in office. I am going to figure the rate is 39%. Or maybe 26%, or some other scary number, like 102%. Frankly, I don’t know. But it can’t possibly be as low as 3.9%.

Because I know math and I listened to Trump.

And Trump can’t fool Trump.

9/9/18: As recently as last week, Trump claimed his poll numbers were “through the roof.” A poll from Quinnipiac seems to lead us to question that assessment. First, Trump has a 38% approval rating in the poll. That’s with 7 out of 10 Americans saying the economy is “excellent” or “good.”

True, Republicans remain loyal, with 84% approving of the job he’s doing. But 54% of all Americans disapprove.

The internals give us some idea why Trump’s ratings remain low: by a margin of 55% to 28%, Americans believe the author of the anonymous New York Times editorial and not the denials of Trump.

That editorial basically indicates that the president is nuts and officials in his administration have to constantly monitor his behavior like he’s a child with matches and a five gallon can of gasoline in his room.

Other key findings:

57% of Americans do not think Trump has good leadership skills.

55% don’t think he cares about “average Americans”

65% don’t consider him level-headed

51% still think he is intelligent (not exactly a stellar showing); even I think he’s “intelligent,” in a kind of criminal mastermind way

55% believe Robert Mueller is conducting a fair investigation (32% think he’s not)

And: did voters think the president was honest? Only 32% said yes, and 60% said no (up 6 points since July). Only 5% of Democrats, 29% of Independents, 28% of women, 28% of white men with college degrees and 26% of Americans, ages 18-34, believe Trump is an honest man.

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A second polls shows Trump and the GOP could be in trouble in November. According to a CNN/SSRS survey, the president’s approval rating has dropped to 36%, fueled by a precipitous decline among independents (from 47% to 31% in recent weeks). Only 37% of Americans answer yes when asked if Trump “cares about people like you.” And only 32% say Trump is “honest and trustworthy.” By contrast 65 percent of all adults thought the president was not.

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Speaking of poll numbers, Sen. Ted Cruz finds himself in a surprisingly tight reelection race for the U.S. Senate.

It probably doesn’t help that even other Republicans say that in the deep red state of Texas, Cruz just isn’t “likeable” enough.

Suddenly worried about his job, Cruz hits back at his Democratic rival. He warns that if Beto O’Rourke is elected the End Times are nigh. Liberals like O’Rourke, Cruz says, “want us to be just like California, right down to tofu and silicon and dyed hair.”

No one knows how liberals will go about making conservatives dye their hair and get breast implants. But this is the terrible future, in which liberals will also make it impossible for real Americans to say, “Merry Christmas” whenever they want.

9/10/18: The president is up early studying complex policies regarding Afghanistan, Iran, Syria and North Korea.

I’m joking, of course!

At 6:03 a.m. he’s already tweeting, which means he’s tweeting the usual nonsense: “The GDP Rate (4.2%) is higher than the Unemployment Rate (3.9%) for the first time in over 100 years!”

It wouldn’t be hard to check the facts before tweeting. The problem is that this would require an intellectual effort the president is unwilling to make.

So he gets the facts wildly wrong.

From the end of World War II, until the early 80s, this combination of high GDP growth and low unemployment was frequently to be seen. The rate of GDP growth compared to the unemployment rate was higher under Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush six quarters in twelve years. Clinton did it five times during eight years in office, George W. Bush twice. In his last full quarter as president, Bush and the GOP managed to kick the GDP into an 8.4% decline and unemployment rose to 6.9%, headed for a high of more than 10%, as the economy spiraled.

Naturally, when the White House was called on to correct the mistake, no one dared admit Trump just tweets stupid shit. Kevin Hassett, a top White House economic adviser, told reporters he could not explain how the president got his information wrong. As far as facts go, Hassett said he didn’t know “from the initial fact, to what the president said, I don’t know the whole chain of command. But what is true is it’s the highest [quarterly GDP increase] in ten years. And at some point, somebody probably conveyed it to him adding a zero, and they shouldn’t have done that.

Ten years, a hundred. Who cares!

Hassett assured reporters that he and other “geeks” at the White House deeply appreciated it when the press caught them in errors and gave them a chance to correct their mistakes. They wanted to get the facts straight.

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This wasn’t the first time in recent weeks that the White House got its facts tangled in hopeless knots. Just last month  Press Secretary Pinocchio was forced to apologize when it became clear her claim that President Trump was a hundred times better at creating jobs than President Obama ever had been proved a tiny bit off. During a press briefing she told reporters:

This president since he took office created 700,000 new jobs for African-Americans. After eight years of President Obama in office, he only created 195,000 jobs for African-Americans. President Trump in his first year and a half has already tripled what President Obama did in eight years.

That would be an amazing feat, almost as amazing as Sanders’ feat of blasting simple addition to smithereens. It turns out once again—if one is not too lazy to check facts—that Bureau of Labor Statistics show 3.2 million jobs for African-Americans were created during Obama’s eight years in office.

Sanders eventually corrected her error. But it was too late to stop her nose from growing another inch.

CNBC posted the following chart:

9/11/18: The entire coast of South Carolina is under a mandatory evacuation order as Hurricane Florence, a Category 4 storm churns toward landfall. Florence has been picking up added strength as it passes over Atlantic waters that in some areas are three degrees warmer than normal.

And if you imagine humanity can’t seriously degrade its environment you don’t know your history or current events.

As scientist have predicted, warmer air means more moisture remains suspended. The result: more intense rain storms. Consider, for example, Hurricane Harvey, which dumped a record 51.88 inches of rain on the Houston area in what experts described as a “once-in-a-thousand-years flood.”

Consider a second warning sign as waters off Florida heat up. Hotter waters are a perfect breeding ground for the growth of harmful microorganisms. As of today, a “red tide” of toxic algae, stretching 130 miles along the Florida Gulf Coast has remained in place since November 2017. Toxins released by the algae kill fish, manatees, sea turtles and other marine mammals. The sight and smell of rotting fish and other sea creatures littering the sands keeps tourists away.

Like President Trump, Florida Governor Rick Scott thinks there are far too many regulations protecting the environment. Now he has been forced to declare a state of emergency for seven counties “where waterways and coastlines are filled with putrid fish floating in brass-colored water.”

“Red tides” also create breathing problems for humans.

And they are increasingly common, just as scientists predicted they would become as oceans round the world heat up. An even worse “red tide” blanketed South Florida for seventeen months from 2004 to 2006.