7/28/17: GOP Senators stay up way past Mitch McConnell’s
bedtime to put the finishing touches on their latest Trumpcare plan. The
“replace” part of “repeal and replace” is finally ready. John McCain has made a
special trip back from Arizona, following an operation for a cancerous tumor
behind his left eye.
Trump himself has called him – finally –
a hero.
At 1:24 a.m. McCain strides across the
well of the Senate. His vote is called by the clerk – and McCain turns one
thumb down.
“No,” he says.
Trumpcare is still dead. And Trump is
back to hating the hero.
*
NORTH KOREA caps a truly terrible day
when it launches another long-range missile, this one capable of hitting the West Coast of the United States. Clearly,
there are no good choices, moving forward.
Trump blames previous administrations for
leaving him to deal with a mess. With this guy, the buck never stops on his
desk.
The buck stops in the past.
___
7/29/17: The planet is burning. North Korean
missiles threaten the continental United States. The Tweeter-in-Chief responds
in a powerful Twitter rampage. Ten times he taps away furiously. At 6:07 a.m.
he begins his day with another complaint about the Russian “witch hunt.”
Trump also insists that the Senate must
go to a 51-vote rule on everything so the GOP can pass any legislation it
wants. He doesn’t like the 60-vote rule required to pass various bills in the
upper house.
At 6:39 a.m., he’s riled and ready to get down to running the country exactly the way he wants. The Republicans
have a 52-48 margin in the Senate. So do the math, people! He complains: “....8
Dems totally control the U.S. Senate. Many great Republican bills will never
pass, like Kate’s Law (see: 6/25/17) and complete Healthcare.
Get smart!”
Later, Trump complains about “our foolish past leaders” because they couldn’t
get China to help rein in North Korea. At 6:35 p.m. he brings a long tweeting
day to an end, admitting his disappointment with China: “...they do NOTHING for
us with North Korea, just talk. We will no longer allow this to continue.”
___
7/30/17: The steamy bromance between Putin and
Trump, making headlines as recently as July 7, reaches a sad denouement.
In the face of new congressional sanctions, Putin expels 755 American diplomats.
7/31/17: As not predicted by Anthony Scaramucci,
new White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly fires Anthony Scaramucci. (See
7/28/17.)
____________________
“We’ll handle North Korea. We’ll be able
to handle North Korea. It will be handled. We handle everything.”
President
Trump
____________________
A Rasmussen opinion poll has Trump’s
approval rating at 39%, his disapproval rating at 61%. In Trumpistan, of
course, this qualifies as “Fake News” because
no one who voted for Trump likes it.
Again, those of us who possess semi-adequate
reasoning skills might note: four days after Trump’s inauguration, Rasmussen
was the one poll that had him rated most favorably: 57% approval, 43%
disapproval.
A Gallup poll on July 31 also shows Trump
down, 37%-59%.
In other words: more and more Americans
are coming to realize Trump is the D.C. equivalent of the Wizard of Oz.
Speaking of frauds, during an afternoon
cabinet meeting, the president tells reporters not
to worry about North Korea. In his usual lucid fashion, he explains, “We’ll
handle North Korea. We’ll be able to handle North Korea. It will be handled. We
handle everything.”
Who says this man can’t handle complicated policy!
*
LAST, BUT DEFINITELY NOT LEAST, the Washington
Postcites several
sources aboard Air Force One when discussion turned to how to handle
revelations about Don Jr.’s meeting with the Russian lawyer. Aides,
the Post reports, wanted to release a truthful statement, to
get out in front of the story.
No dice said the Liar-in-Chief.
Trump personally dictated a statement in which Trump Jr. said that he
and the Russian lawyer had “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of
Russian children” when they met in June 2016. This is according to multiple
individuals with knowledge of the deliberations.
That false statement, issued to the New
York Times as it prepared an article, emphasized that the subject of
the meeting was “not a campaign issue at the time.”
According to the Post top
advisers are worried that the
president’s actions leave him vulnerable to allegations of a cover-up.
“This was…unnecessary,” said one of the
president’s advisers, who like most other people interviewed for this article
spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal
deliberations. “Now someone can claim he’s the one who attempted to mislead. Somebody can argue the president is saying
he doesn’t want you to say the whole truth.”
Think Watergate.
BLOGGER’S NOTE (6/28/22): See: 7/7/18 for initial developments
related to the story, and 7/8/17 for the first denial. Also, keep in mind that
when Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer in the meeting was indicted on
unrelated charges, she fled to Russia. She’s never coming back. Unless Trump
gets reelected in 2024.
BLOGGER’S NOTE #2 (July 5, 2022): It’s fun
to go back and look at what Trump first said about people he hired – and what
he said after they realized he was in way over his head and offered up criticism.
In the clip on North Korea, he predicts that General Kelly, “will go down, in
terms of the position of chief-of-staff, as one of the greats ever.”
Honorable men and women, like Gen. Kelly soon ran afoul of a boss with no other guiding principle than self-interest.
After Gen. Kelly stepped
down from his post, Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham went to bat for the
president. “I worked with John Kelly,” she told reporters,
“and he was totally unequipped to handle the genius of our great President.”
(See: 10/26/19.)
Gen. Kelly spoke up again during Trump’s first impeachment,
defending Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who had testified that the president
placed personal interest ahead of U.S. national security, in demanding Ukraine
investigate the Biden family. We teach young officers “to always tell the truth, to tell truth
to power,” Kelly said. Col. Vindman “ did
exactly what we teach them to do from cradle to grave.”
When Vindman heard Trump tell
President Zelensky he wanted to see the Biden family investigated, that was like
hearing “an illegal order.” “We teach them, ‘Don’t follow an illegal order. And
if you’re ever given one, you’ll raise it to whoever gives it to you that this
is an illegal order, and then tell your boss.’”
Now it was Kelly’s turn to face President Trump’s
wrath. “When I terminated John Kelly, which I couldn’t do fast enough, he knew
full well that he was way over his head. Being Chief of Staff just wasn’t for
him,” the president tweeted. Kelly, he continued, “came
in with a bang, went out with a whimper, but like so many X’s, he misses the
action & just can’t keep his mouth shut, which he actually has a military
and legal obligation to do.”
It’s interesting to note that the president
claims he couldn’t get rid of the general “fast enough.” Kelly took the White
House job on July 31, 2017. He remained in his position until January 2, 2019. None of Trump’s three other chiefs-of-staff (Reince Priebus, Mick
Mulvaney, and Mark Meadows) lasted even a year. (See: 2/13/20.)
August 1, 2017: In really
“Fake News,” a book by Senator Jeff Flake (R-Az.) is reviewed in the
“failing,” faking New York Times.
“Volatile unpredictability is not a
virtue,” Flake asserts, with the president in mind. “We have quite enough
volatile actors to deal with internationally as it is without becoming one of
them.” He denounces the “embrace of ‘alternative facts’ at the highest
levels of American life,” noting that it “creates a state of confusion,
dividing us along fissures of truth and falsity and keeping us in a kind of
low-level dread.”
“Under our Constitution,” Flake adds,
speaking to colleagues in Congress,
…there simply are not that many people who are in a
position to do something about an executive branch in chaos. Too often
we observe the unfolding drama along with the rest of the country, passively,
all but saying, “Someone should
do something!” without seeming to realize that that someone is us.
___
8/2/17: In another stunning, xenophobic
development, the Trump administration announces plans to
cut legal immigration in half. From now on Trump spokesman Stephen Miller
tells reporters, the Statue of Liberty is a pigeon roost on an island in New
York Harbor.
The Statue of
Liberty is a pigeon roost.
Only those immigrants who have important
skills and can speak English fluently are wanted.
This plan is grotesque for many reasons.
For starters, many avid Trump supporters won’t realize, but their own ancestors
would have been blocked from immigrating back when America was great. All those
millions of starving Irish in the 1840s? Low skill people. Spoke Gaelic.
Who else would have been kept out? How about Friedrich Trump, first of his line
to reach these shores. According to his
grandson, our president, on arrival
Friedrich knew almost no English.
All his life he spoke German primarily.
Know who else wouldn’t have made it, had
this new policy been in effect a century ago? Stephen Miller’s great
grandfather, a Jew fleeing pogroms in Russia, and speaking Yiddish, would have
been barred. Sam Glosser
was his name. He passed beneath Lady Liberty’s torch around 1903. Most East
European Jews in those days went straight to work in the sweatshops of the New
York City garment industry, low-skilled workers, earning low pay.
Virulent anti-Semitism was common at the
time. A New York newspaper referred to people like Glosser as “slime” being “siphoned upon us from the Continental mud
tanks.”
*
THE WHITE HOUSE finally acknowledges that
the president did “weigh in” on the original and completely disingenuous
statement issued in Don Jr.’s name, about the meeting he forgot with a Russian
lawyer, on a topic he couldn’t remember, with god knows how many
participants.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders tells reporters the president was only helping his son,
which “any father would do.”
That is, any father who might be trying to hide a trail that seems to hint at collusion with
agents of a foreign enemy.
(Your
humble blogger soon learns that “collusion” is not a term found in U.S. legal
statutes and therefore has no meaning in this context. The President of the
United States, however, never really gets it.)
8/3/17: Trump heads for Bedminster, New Jersey
for the first extended vacation of his presidency. He plans to relax for
seventeen days, perhaps hob-knobbing with buddies at his exclusive golf club.
Ironically, in 2011 a peeved Citizen
Trump tweeted a series of complaints, including this, about President Obama:
It may be hard for Trump supporters to
grasp, but their hero’s vacation, 17 days, is longer than Obama’s:
17 -10
7 days longer
Check my math if you disagree.
___
8/4/17: The president is on vacation. In a sign
of how crazy even Republicans think he is, the Senate decides to remain “in
session” even if almost all 100 members are away on vacation.
Every three days a member must go to the
floor, bang a gavel, and announce his or her presence. This “pro forma” action,
lasting less than a minute, means the
Senate is technically in session. That means the president can’t fire the
Attorney General, appoint someone else, and have the new A.G. fire Special
Counsel Robert Mueller, powers the president possesses if the Senate is in
recess.
___
8/5/17: Trump claims in a tweet that under his leadership gains against ISIS
have accelerated.
Let’s step back a few months. Remember
when he labeled planners
for the battle to retake Mosul in Iraq, “a group of losers” for
announcing plans to soon begin the fight, instead of making a sneak attack?
Eventually the second largest city in Iraq was retaken by Iraqi forces, backed
by American air and artillery, with only two U.S.
personnel killed (vs. thousands of Iraqi casualties).
This was just
as President Obama intended.
Trump also tweets: “The United Nations
Security Council just voted 15-0 to sanction North Korea. China and Russia
voted with us. Very big financial impact!” This is indeed good news (similar to
the approach used by Obama to isolate Iran) but let’s not forget all the times
right-wingers assailed the U.N. and said what the organization really wanted was to
rule the world.
Right-wingers believe U.N. forces plan to take over America.
8/6/17: Experts are more and more concerned by
the president’s ludicrous understanding of foreign policy. Max Boot, a
lifelong conservative, tells Robin Wright, a reporter for The New Yorker:
“He seems as clueless today as he was on January 20.”
And that was stunningly clueless.
_____________________
“It’s like Trump is captain of the Titanic,
but he’s actually aiming for the iceberg—and we’re all in danger of going down
when the vessel hits.”
Former C.I.A. Director and four-star Air Force
General Michael Hayden
_____________________
“Trump has an appalling ignorance of the current world, of history, of previous
American engagement, of what former presidents thought and did,”
Geoffrey Kemp says. He worked in the Ford and Reagan administrations.
“The president has little understanding
of the context and even less interest in hearing the people who want to deliver
it,” Michael Hayden, former C.I.A. director tells Wright. “He’s
impatient, decision-oriented, and prone to action. It’s all about the present
tense. When he asks, ‘What the hell’s going on in Iraq?’ people around him have
learned not to say, ‘Well, in 632…’”
He doesn’t want to listen. He’s got
better things to do.
“American leadership in the world – how do I phrase this, it’s so obvious, but
apparently not to him – is critical to our success, and it depends eighty per
cent on the credibility of the president’s word,” John McLaughlin tells Wright.
McLaughlin worked at the C.I.A. under seven presidents, from Richard Nixon to
George W. Bush, and ended up as the agency’s acting director.
Eliot A. Cohen, who worked for Bush 43,
puts it bluntly:
Trump is completely
irredeemable. He has a feral instinct for self-survival, but he’s
unteachable. The ban on Muslims coming into the country and building a wall,
and having the Mexicans pay for it, that was all you needed to know about this
guy on foreign affairs. This is a man who is idiotic and bigoted and
ignorant of the law.
Former C.I.A. director Hayden gets the
last word. “It’s like Trump is captain of the Titanic, but he’s
actually aiming for the iceberg—and we’re all in danger of going down when the
vessel hits. Today, Hayden warns, “the most disruptive force in the world… is
the United States of America.”
___
8/7/17: Trump must be feeling good. Day 200 of
his presidency kicks off with an early start. He’s out of the White House,
“that dump,” as he calls it. He has an imaginary friend with the Boy Scouts who
called him to say his speech to the boys was the best speech ever. Everyone
loves him, including Ivana, Marla, and Melania. Also Madonna. And Vice
President Jesus! VP Jesus is definitely not planning, just in case
Trump has to seek asylum in Russia, to run in 2020.
At 5:58 a.m. President Trump posts his first tweet for the day: “The Trump base is far bigger
& stronger than ever before (despite some phony Fake News polling). Look at
rallies in Penn, Iowa, Ohio.......”
The
actual polls are grim. GOP leaders know it. RealClearPolitics this
morning shows Trump with an average “favorable rating of 38.7 % across ten
polls. His unfavorable rating stands at 56.2 %.
Is
it possible, President Trump believes his base is growing because he’s counting
Russians?
8/8/17:
The president takes a
tough tone with North Korea. “North Korea best not make any more threats to the
United States,” he tells reporters visiting him (as is so often the case) at
one of his golf courses. “They will be met with fire and fury like the world
has never seen.”
____________________
“They will be met with fire and fury, and frankly power the
likes of which this world has never seen before.”
President Trump
____________________
Speaking of Kim Jong-un, Trump insists, “He has been very
threatening beyond a normal state, and as I said, they will be met with fire
and fury, and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen
before.”
The North Koreans quickly respond: “It is a daydream for the
U.S. to think that its mainland is an invulnerable Heavenly kingdom.”
The North conducted its first nuclear test in 2006.
More recently, the North threatened South Korea and 23,500
U.S. military personnel stationed there.
At the first sign of any offensive move by our side, Kim Jong-un promises large
parts of the USA “will be reduced to ashes and flames.” North Korean missiles
will “turn Washington, the stronghold of American imperialists and the nest of
evil, and its followers, into a sea of fire.”
(Did he just promise to drain the swamp?)
___
8/9/17:
A draft report of a major scientific study due on climate change is leaked to
the press. Government scientists fear that the Trump administration will
whitewash it if they don’t get it out.
“Evidence
for a changing climate abounds.”
The draft states that “evidence for a changing climate
abounds, from the top of the
atmosphere to the depths of the oceans.”
Alas, the report is headed to a White House committee chock
full of political hacks. By the time E.P.A. head Scott Pruitt gets done the
report will be reduced to one sentence: “Coal is freaking awesome!”
___
8/10/17: TheNew
York Times and other “Fake News” outlets report that the F.B.I. has
conducted a search of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s home. Legal
experts say this is a signal from Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller to
Manafort, indicating the investigation is heating up.
Already under fire for his role in a secret meeting
including Donald Jr., Jared Kushner, and shady Russian operatives offering dirt
on Hillary Clinton, Manafort may face charges under the federal Bank Secrecy
Act.
___
8/11/17:
President Trump clearly seems himself as a young Clint Eastwood, only with nukes. If North Korea wants a fight,
he’s ready to challenge Kim Jong-un to make his day. He’s feeling frisky and
he’s ready to send troops to Venezuela. “Venezuela is not very far away,” he
tells reporters, “and the people are dying. We have many options for Venezuela,
including a possible military option if necessary.”
“Locked
and loaded,” including nukes.
As for North Korea, President Clint insists U.S. forces are
ready to fight. We’re “locked and loaded.”
On Guam, an American possession and home to an important
U.S. military base, which would be a prime target in case of war, people are
worried. Guam’s Office of Civil Defense passes out flyers titled “Preparing
for an Imminent Missile Threat” to aid residents in readying for
nuclear attack.
If North Korean missiles are launched, inhabitants will
have fourteen minutes to take cover. They are instructed to head for
the nearest underground concrete bunker. If they find themselves outside,
unable to reach safety, they should go “flat on the ground” and cover their
heads. If they survive, they should shower with plenty of soap and water to remove
radioactive contamination.
“Locked and loaded,” sounds a lot cooler if you’re not
thinking about nuclear warfare. (See: 8/12/17.)
8/12/17:
Who’s worried about a nuclear holocaust! Not President Trump! Taking time
out from a busy schedule, he calls Governor Eddie Calvo of Guam and
offers reassurance
(sort of). North Korea has threatened to bracket the island with long-range
missiles to prove its strike capability. Trump tells Calvo not to sweat. “We
are with you 1000 percent…. Don’t worry about a thing.”
Our clueless commander-in-chief congratulates the governor
for “becoming extremely famous….All over the world they’re talking about Guam.”
“Tourism…” Trump continues in his inimitable, tone-deaf
style, “I can say this…you’re going to
go up ten-fold, with the expenditure of no money….It just looks like a
beautiful place.”
Sadly, the island won’t look like a beautiful place if it
suffers a direct hit from a nuclear weapon.
*
CLOSER TO HOME, a march in Charlottesville, Virginia,
involving neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan types turns violent.
Blame
on both sides.
One of the marchers, a 20-year-old from Ohio, decides to
prove his love for the white race by plowing his
2015 Dodge Charger into a crowd of counter-protesters. Nineteen are injured, five critically. Heather Heyer, 32, is
killed.
At her funeral, her father will say she was there to protest
peacefully and “to put down hate.”
In his first comments on the tragedy, Trump makes it crystal
clear he can see equal blame
on “both sides.” Pretty much everyone in America (not counting professional
bigots) is stunned by his stance.
___
8/13/17:
Chastened by a firestorm of negative reaction to his “both sides” comment, the
president refrains from tweeting for an entire day. He does provide links to
tweets by others, including one from the Governor of Guam.
The Governor says he has never felt safer than he does now, with
Trump “at the helm.” (See: 8/11/17.)
___
8/14/17:
Trump continues to take heat for his response to Charlottesville. Aides
convince him to try a do-over.
All they ask is that he read a
prepared statement without going off the rails. “As Americans, we condemn the
recent violence in Charlottesville and oppose hatred, bigotry, and racism in
all forms,” he reads, looking like a schoolboy reciting a story about why he
should not grab female classmates in inappropriate places.
He finishes with a flourish:
No matter the color of our skin or our
ethnic heritage, we all live under the same laws, we all salute the same great
flag, and we are all made by the same almighty God.
We are a Nation founded on the truth
that all of us are created equal. As one people, let us move forward to
rediscover the bonds of love and loyalty that bring us together as Americans.
Mission Accomplished. Trump sounds like an actual
president. (See: 8/15/17.)
___
8/15/17:
Okay: Mission not Accomplished.
In the Marine Corps we had a saying about people who f**ked
up needlessly. “He stepped on his own dick,” we’d say.
Somebody
should shoot the president with a tranquilizer dart!
Trump does just
that in a wild, unscripted exchange in the lobby of Trump Tower. The president
is there to talk about a plan to spend heavily on infrastructure. He even has a
cool chart that aides want him to display.
Aides don’t
expecthim to take questions. He does. Before anyone can
shoot him with a tranquilizer dart, he goes rogue.
He’s mad about Charlottesville – but not because a young
lady was killed and nineteen injured. He’s mad because the press is mean. He
insists he waited to condemn the neo-Nazis until he “had all the facts.”
Okay, let’s see what he does with those facts. Asked about
the “alt-right,” and whether he condemns them, Trump replies combatively. He
demands that the reporter who asked the question, define what “alt-right”
means.
Trump still can’t admit these groups are different. “What
about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right,” he
adds angrily. Then he launches into an elaborate defense of hate groups who, in
his view, were unfairly attacked. He even points out that the “alt-left” groups (a term he just made up) lacked
a permit. Those neo-Nazis, boy, what solid citizens.
