Trump 27: Happy Holidays Orange Menace

[47of74]

Agent Orange should really listen to Walter Sobchak;

 

[Howl]

Related to SCROTUS, but is anyone following how the explosive allegations in Fire and Fury are being handled on Fox?  I'm assuming they are pre-emptively denigrating Wolff, but there's a lot of damage to be contained, so maybe they will focus on the Steele dossier and reports that the FBI is now investigating the Clinton Foundation. 

[fraurosena]

Well, I've got the book, and I'm busy reading it. I'll let you all know what I think of it as soon as I've finished. I'm on page 42 right now and so far there's nothing that wasn't in one of the released excerpts yet. I'm a pretty fast reader, so maybe I'll be able to check in with my findings before I go to bed. 

[AmazonGrace]

30 minutes ago, Howl said:

Related to SCROTUS, but is anyone following how the explosive allegations in Fire and Fury are being handled on Fox?  I'm assuming they are pre-emptively denigrating Wolff, but there's a lot of damage to be contained, so maybe they will focus on the Steele dossier and reports that the FBI is now investigating the Clinton Foundation. 

Not watching but if Fox News Twitter is anything to go by it's Clinton. Clinton, Obama, weather, evil black teenager, Clinton, Trump slams lying book,  Clinton, weather, Clinton. 

 

Ivanka, economy, Clinton, tax cuts. NFL ratings. Potus has learned on the job. Clinton. 

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/01/05/trump-slams-phony-book-as-distraction-from-russia-collusion-hoax.html

Even the article about the book reverts to Clinton eventually. 

Napolitano in the video is saying Trump has no libel case and Bannon can't be sued for NDA at least while he was employed by the government because the government isn't supposed to restrict your speech. 

[Howl]

Nobody is suing anybody, because stuff will ooze out in the lawsuit that is worse than anything in the book;  we're talking about lancing a massive boil on the ass of all things Trump.  

Plaintiff: We're suing to prove that Donald J. Trump is not a fucking moron, although the book alleges that every single individual with personal contact came to that exact conclusion. 

 

[AmazonGrace]

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/05/trump-media-feedback-loop-216248

I’ve Studied the Trump-Fox Feedback Loop for Months. It’s Crazier Than You Think.

By MATTHEW GERTZ

January 05, 2018

On Tuesday night, I, along with many Americans, was shocked when President Donald Trump tweeted that his “Nuclear Button” is “much bigger & more powerful” than North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un's.

Having spent the past three months monitoring Trump’s Twitter feed professionally, I also had a good sense of why this spectacle was unfolding. After watching a recording of the previous few minutes of Fox News, my hunch was confirmed: The president was live-tweeting the network’s coverage.

Spoiler

Everyone has a theory about Trump’s hyperaggressive early morning tweetstorms. Some think they are a deliberate ploy the president uses to distract the press from his administration’s potential weaknesses, or to frame the public debate to his liking. Others warn his rapid shifts from one topic to another indicate mental instability.

But my many hours following the president’s tweets for Media Matters for America, the progressive media watchdog organization, have convinced me the truth is often much simpler: The president is just live-tweeting Fox, particularly the network’s Trump-loving morning show, Fox & Friends.

It’s no secret, of course, that the president likes to tweet about what he sees on TV. Thanks to diligent reporting from the White House beat, we know Trump often watches several hours of cable news each day via the “Super TiVo” he had installed at the White House. And journalists at CNN, the Washington Post, New York magazine, among others, have compiled lists of Trump tweets they believe were inspired by Fox.

But here’s what is shocking: After comparing the president’s tweets with Fox's coverage every day since October, I can tell you that the Fox-Trump feedback loop is happening far more often than you think. There is no strategy to Trump’s Twitter feed; he is not trying to distract the media. He is being distracted. He darts with quark-like speed from topic to topic in his tweets because that’s how cable news works.

Here’s what’s also shocking: A man with unparalleled access to the world’s most powerful information-gathering machine, with an intelligence budget estimated at $73 billion last year, prefers to rely on conservative cable news hosts to understand current events.

I have long known that the president is a Fox & Friends superfan—well before he ran for office, he had a weekly guest spot on the program for years, and since his election, he has regularly held the program’s co-hosts up as model journalists. But one morning in October, a colleague pointed out that Trump had tweeted an endorsement of a book minutes after the author, appearing on Fox & Friends to promote the work, praised him. Curious if there was a pattern, I examined the rest of the president’s tweets from that morning, and found that several others seemed to line up with the program, reacting or commenting on various topics raised by the broadcast—from kneeling NFL players to negotiating with Democrats over immigration—without ever explicitly mentioning the show itself.

The results were so striking that my morning routine quickly became a shadow of the president’s. I check Trump’s Twitter feed on my way into the office every day. If the president is tweeting—those tweets often beginning soon after Fox & Friends’ 6 a.m. start—when I get to my desk I pull up footage from Fox’s programming on our internal video archive, frequently comparing it with footage from CNN and MSNBC. I use Twitter as my notepad, sharing my reasoning with my followers as I go. When I change my mind about whether a Trump tweet corresponds to a particular segment, I explain why and show my work. Around 9 a.m., when Fox & Friends’ co-hosts sign off, the president usually moves on to the business of running the most powerful nation in the history of the world, and I can move on as well. (Well, until the next tweet.)

Sometimes the president’s tweets don’t correspond to cable news coverage—his boasting about the economy, for example, is usually untethered from the news cycle. Other times, they echo cable news explicitly. For example, Trump might identify a guest who was just on Fox & Friends, quote from a caption that appears on the screen, or even tag the program’s Twitter handle, making my task easier.

And sometimes the tweets fall into a gray area, covering the same broad topic as Fox’s programming but without any specific identifiers. Then I need to fall back on inference, and in those cases, it helps when Trump has tweeted several times over the morning. Do the topics of a series of tweets match the order Fox discussed them? Does one tweet in a series have a strong tie to the network, suggesting that the other tweets were also reactions to Fox?

On Tuesday morning, for instance, on his first morning back in Washington after an 11-day vacation, the president tweeted what I believe were five consecutive tweets based on Fox’s programming, though he specifically referenced Fox & Friends in only one of them. His tweet urging the imprisonment of Huma Abedin followed a Fox segment on the former Hillary Clinton aide. When he tweeted that “it was just reported” there had been no commercial aviation deaths in 2017, and took credit, the report he cited was from Fox & Friends.

 

But not all of the Trump tweets match with Fox segments that praise the president and thrash his perceived enemies. There are some random ones, too.

Remember that strange moment in October when Trump tried to tweet happy birthday to the country music artist Lee Greenwood? He tagged the wrong handle, deleted the tweet, and sent out a corrected version while the rest of Twitter tried to figure out what was going on. The event is easier to understand if you know that about an hour before Trump sent his initial tweet, Fox & Friends reported it was Greenwood’s birthday:

 

Trump may not be trying to divert the media, but the media definitely gets distracted. Trump’s morning tweets upend the news cycle, with cable news producers and assignment editors redistributing time and resources to cover his latest comments. Statements from the president are inherently newsworthy. But the result is certainly a positive one for Fox: The network’s partisan programming gets validation from the president, and forces the rest of the press to cover Fox’s obsessions whether they are newsworthy or not.

In December, Mediaite put the co-hosts of Fox & Friends at the top of its “Most Influential in Media” list, pointing out “the topics they cover essentially set the national agenda for the rest of the day.” Mediaite is not wrong. Soon after White House counselor Kellyanne Conway congratulated the co-hosts for the designation during an interview on the show, Trump weighed in, urging the “many Fake News Hate Shows” to “study your formula for success!” He had been watching.

I had been, too.

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

@AmazonGrace -- I was literally just posting that article. It's amazing, isn't it?

[fraurosena]

Ugh. The book is boring. I'm now in chapter 6 (life happened in the meantime and I got distracted for quite some time and didn't get as much reading done as I originally anticipated).

Nothing new is being revealed. The salacious details were in the excerpts, I suspect, and the rest is just 'filler' with stories we already know or at least have surmised long ago. It's more detailed, but not eyebrow-raising stuff. So I'm going to call it quits for now. Tomorrow I've got a rather busy schedule, but maybe I can finish reading in the evening. I hope things get better, but so far, I'm afraid it's a dud.

[onekidanddone]

8 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Trump was right to hope he’d lose"

  Reveal hidden contents

The White House is being used to stage some kind of dark, dystopian comedy in which all the humor is of the gallows variety. Somebody tell me how we survive three more years of this oppressive, exhausting show.

The revelations about the Trump administration from journalist Michael Wolff are, if true, stunning, jaw-dropping, gobsmacking — but also pretty much what many in Washington expected. The craziness and dysfunction were obvious from the beginning. Wolff simply documents what others say privately about an administration that is dangerously erratic and incompetent.

The central problem, according to Wolff’s forthcoming book, “Fire and Fury,” is President Trump himself. Voters elected to the nation’s highest office a man who is unfit to do the job, who has proved unworthy of the public trust and who seems, to be blunt, increasingly unbalanced.

It is of some comfort, I suppose, that there are people around Trump who are aware of his flaws — who describe him with words such as “crazy” and “stupid” and “moron,” according to Wolff’s reporting. We have to hope that family members, staff members, political allies and longtime friends can serve as guardrails to keep Trump from driving us all off some cliff.

But that is not an acceptable risk for the world’s greatest economic and military power to run. We’ve made it safely through almost a year, but at some point our luck is going to run out.

As Wolff tells the story, after the election he proposed to Trump that he be allowed to write a fly-on-the-wall account of the administration’s early days. Trump “seemed to say” that would be okay, so Wolff began a routine of coming to the White House, installing himself on one of the couches in the West Wing lobby and latching on to senior staff members as they walked by.

No competent White House communications shop would have given such access to any journalist, let alone one known in New York media circles as a shark among sharks. Day after day, Wolff feasted.

Clearly Wolff’s principal source was Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s political guru who served as a high-ranking White House adviser before being ousted in a palace coup. Bannon is quoted as describing the meeting Donald Trump Jr. convened with a Kremlin-tied Russian lawyer as “treasonous” and painting extremely unflattering portraits of Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Perhaps it was this material about Trump’s family that sent the president into such a rage Wednesday, issuing a statement blasting Bannon — it said that when Bannon was fired, “he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.” The White House has loudly disputed the book’s veracity and, on Thursday, a Trump attorney sent a cease-and-desist notice to Wolff and his publisher seeking to stop the book’s publication on Friday and threatening possible charges, including libel.

When the president calms down, someone should point out to him that the legal threat unwittingly gives credence to Bannon’s version of events.

An excerpt of Wolff’s book published by New York magazine opens on the day of the election, with senior officials of the Trump campaign — including campaign manager Kellyanne Conway — preparing for what looked like certain defeat. Around 8 p.m. Eastern, however, it became clear that Trump might actually win. Wolff writes that Donald Jr. “told a friend that his father, or DJT, as he calls him, looked as if he had seen a ghost.”

Wolff writes that Melania Trump “was in tears — and not of joy.” The first lady’s office issued a statement Wednesday maintaining that she was in fact happy when her husband won the presidency.

About the president, Wolff writes: “There was, in the space of little more than an hour, in Steve Bannon’s not unamused observation, a befuddled Trump morphing into a disbelieving Trump and then into a horrified Trump. But still to come was the final transformation: Suddenly Donald Trump became a man who believed that he deserved to be, and was wholly capable of being, the president of the United States.”

But he is not capable. This whole administration is based on a desperate delusion.

On Tuesday, the president of the United States taunted North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who has a nuclear arsenal: “Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”

You can decide whether to laugh or cry. Or perhaps scream.

I'll go with cry and scream.

A random thought here:

If he really want'ed to boost his ratings he would resign. If he (oh please Rufus no) in until 2020 and the country is a total shambles he will get crushed in the election.  If he quits he acts the martyr and then blame Pence.

[PreciousPantsofDoom]

On 04/01/2018 at 10:54 AM, AnywhereButHere said:

@GrumpyGran I was reading your last paragraph in the same tone as the opening credits to SOAP. Does anyone remember that show?

Not that any of this is funny, but it does feel like we’re in some surreal tv show with a constant refrain of “what could possibly happen next”. 

Haha! I was totally reading it like they did on Soap. And I totally agree about the what could possibly happen next feel to all of this.   It's still bizarre to know that this is real, and not some sort of over the top soap opera parody.

[iweartanktops]

He is completely unhinged. I bought the book this morning, but haven't started it yet. 

[47of74]

They got Faux Spews on here at the Y and while the sound is off it looks like the giggling couch tumors are picking Wolff apart. I’m getting the book this evening. The banner says his credibility is now questionable.

 

[JMarie]

The book seems pretty credible, according to the guy who wrote a biography of Trump in 2016.

http://www.cnn.com/2018/01/05/opinions/much-of-wolffs-trump-book-rings-true-opinion-dantonio/index.html

Quote

In a super-salesman, this habit was amusing. In a president, it is both frightening and dangerous. But while the distortion obscures Trump, it doesn't make him invisible and Wolff has spotted the outlines of his target. Among the broad strokes that seem accurate to me, based on my experience as a biographer of Trump and other sources:

Trump often fails to deal with the subject at hand, preferring to tell and retell anecdotes and stories that sound rehearsed. (He did this with me, many times.)

Trump is bored by briefings and uninterested in details. (He has long shown this trait.)

Trump demands extreme personal loyalty. (Also a Trump hallmark.)

Trump's leadership has created a battle royale environment with White House factions in constant conflict. (Consider the news of the past year.)

Trump believes "expertise" is "overrated." (He has said so to me.)

Sadly, Wolff's reporting on the disparaging things the President says about women and his effort to understand the appeal of white supremacy also seem true to the man.

 

[Cartmann99]

On 1/4/2018 at 5:35 PM, GreyhoundFan said:

"We’re rushing toward the breaking point"

  Reveal hidden contents

Can our government function normally when President Trump tweets about his “button” being bigger than that of an armed adversary? Can there be business as usual when the word “insane” is being applied with increasing frequency to his actions, and when one of his most loyal supporters has called a meeting between Russian operatives and Trump campaign officials “treasonous”?

Only a few days into the new year, there is a striking disconnect in the nation’s capital between the ordinary and the mind-boggling — between the sorts of transactions politicians routinely make to keep the country running and displays of the irrational, the abusive and the menacing emanating from the White House.

There has been an inclination over the past year in both politics and journalism to separate Trump’s tweets and other outbursts from the realities of governing. The idea is that his eruptions are either (a) largely irrelevant forms of his letting off steam or (b) signs of a brilliance beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. What looks to most of us like madness is cast as genius in setting up enemies, signaling his base or distracting us from one thing or another.

But we are past the time when we can believe any of this. Trump is, without question, doing enormous damage to the United States’ standing in the world, and his strategy for political survival is rooted in a willingness to destroy our institutions.

While the news on Wednesday understandably focused on Stephen K. Bannon’s treason comments in a new book by journalist Michael Wolff, 2018 has already produced two remarkable essays explaining the genuine threat the president poses to the nation’s foreign policy interests.

Susan Glasser, writing in Politico, offers frightening detail about how Trump’s stunning lack of knowledge and his indifference to his own obliviousness have led diplomats to label him “insane,” “catastrophic,” “terrifying,” “incompetent” and “dangerous.” Glasser concludes: “When it comes to Trump and the world, it’s not better than you think. It’s worse.”

And Evan Osnos’s carefully reported and much-discussed article in the New Yorker demonstrates how Trump’s policies — but also his pathological focus on himself, his ignorance, and his astonishing susceptibility to flattery — have profoundly weakened the United States’ position in Asia and played into Chinese President Xi Jinping’s reach for international power.

Osnos cites a Chinese think tank’s observation that the Trump administration is a collection of hostile “cliques,” the most powerful of which is the “Trump family clan.” And its analysis uses a term from feudal China, “jiatianxia,” to define Trump’s approach. It means “to treat the state as your possession.”

This insight cuts to the heart of the peril the president represents to our democracy and the rule of law.

On the second day of the year, Trump called on the Justice Department to “finally act” against Huma Abedin, a Hillary Clinton aide, and also against James B. Comey, the FBI director he fired. And by referring not to the Justice Department but to the “Deep State Justice Dept,” Trump continued to push back against all others investigating him, treating them as if they were a band of spies and traitors.

Directing the prosecution of political enemies is a habit of autocrats. As Benjamin Wittes, my Brookings Institution colleague, wrote recently, Trump is “normalizing for an entire political movement the politicization and weaponization of law enforcement and intelligence.” Is this the legacy the Republican Party wants?

In the midst of all this, Republicans and Democrats in Congress go about their business, trying to negotiate a budget agreement to avoid a shutdown and, in the Democrats’ case, trying to protect the “ dreamers” and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

And, who knows, maybe we can manage with a kind of split-level politics. While we sit back and wait on special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to issue his findings, we pray that regular governance will be possible because there is no other choice.

Yet doing so means continuing to absorb Trump’s blows to our system and to our country’s influence around the globe. It also requires great faith in our capacity for restoration despite the readiness of the president’s allies to place his survival above the health of our polity.

The United States does have extraordinary gifts for self-correction. But we must face the fact that Trump is accelerating us toward the breaking point. No matter how confident we are in our resilience, we should not imagine otherwise. Not even Mueller has a button on his desk he can press to get us out of this without scars.

Dumpy "family clan"... kind of sounds like a fourth-rate music group.

Does the Rodrigues family still perform, or do they just shill Plexus now?

[JMarie]

Canada's unemployment rate is at a 40 year low.  How long until Trump claims this as one of his victories?

(he'll probably claim to be president of Canada for this one little thing)

[Rachel333]

Wow...

 

[AmazonGrace]

This jedi level response

[Destiny]

This jedi level response

I replied with a very nice thank you to the Orange Menace for the reminder to buy the book.
Protip: Mark’s tweet is like 150% funnier if you read it in his Joker voice. You’re welcome. :-P

[47of74]

Couldn’t find the box last night. Might go the Amazon route.

[AmazonGrace]

I read ‘Fire and Fury’ so you didn’t have to, President Trump

By Alexandra Petri January 5 at 8:24 PM
 

Spoiler

The more you think about Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury,” the funnier it gets. This could only have happened in the Trump White House. The Obama White House, say what you will about it, would not have let someone just sort of randomly wander in, maybe with Stephen K. Bannon but then again maybe not, and start taking notes — largely because Bannon would not have been allowed into the Obama White House unless he were on some sort of official tour and, even in that case, they would have tried to move him along pretty quickly.

But also, only a White House organized as poorly as the Trump White House would ever have permitted this. Wolff said he “certainly said whatever was necessary to get the story,” which appears to have been “hello.” Compared to this, the Titanic was a tight ship.

I have read the whole book, and I could have done without hearing Bannon’s quoted description of how his sphincter responded to various news, but, you know, I guess we just have to think about Bannon’s anatomy all the time now. That is the world we live in.

 

“Fire and Fury” exists in a universe we already know well, where President Trump has no idea what is happening at any time and is constantly demanding to be fed and soothed, like a Tamagochi. But it adds one unexpected twist: What if Bannon actually was a star and mastermind, like he said? And what if it turned out that everyone around Trump was very, very worried any time he tried to do or say anything? And that the “sylph-like” Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump hovered on the edge of everything spinning a sinister web, then flew into the web, then got stuck, and Bannon laughed and laughed because he was right? The rest of the book falls into the genre of Juicy Mean Assertions About Trump That I Have No Reason NOT to Believe.

Just to give you a sense of the general flavor of the thing, so you do not have to read it (you, like Trump, may be “post-literate,” a terrifying new Orwellian term the book coined that makes it sound as if we are moving right on the evolutionary scale instead of left):

In the corner of Trump’s office sat Steve Bannon, like Drosselmeier, flapping his wings and cackling. He did not look so hot, because he was going through everything Trump had said and looking for clues in it, but now he had a flawless 18-point plan which he had written on a white board for all to see. Jared had tried this, too, but he had gotten bored halfway through because he was a mental lightweight and wanted to go try on another suit. Trump was sitting on the floor trying to glue two televisions to one another so that the personalities on them would appear to kiss. This, he felt, would solve the Middle East. Then he ate six hamburgers, which he had sent Reince Priebus, wearing a full face of unflattering powder, to retrieve for him, in case they contained poison. Paul Ryan was a nobody and Bannon disliked him. Who were Steve Miller and Hope Hicks, and what were they doing there? Nobody knew!

 

It goes on in this vein for some time. You get the sense, reading it, that the author had to listen to Bannon talk a good deal, which some would call “access” and others would call “a thing that has probably happened to chairs.” At some point, a form of Stockholm Syndrome seems to kick in because Bannon is described as being superbly literate and possessing magnetism. This may be true in the Trump sense where what you possess is not the thing itself, but a poorly informed person’s idea of the thing — be that brains, beauty or wealth. The book also notes that Bannon hopes he will be the president next, plus he recently went on an all-sushi diet and has lost 20 pounds.

The most bizarre parts of the story are the parts we already knew. Can you believe what Trump said after Charlottesville? Can you believe that he tweets with no filter all the time? Can you believe that he doesn’t understand how jokes work? Can you believe his inner circle wasn’t thrilled that he won the election, and that he loves to golf? Can you believe that he is paranoid and eats badly? Can you believe his White House is full of intrigue and also a huge mess? Have you been reading the news at all for the past year?

Just in case there were any doubt about the assertions the book includes, the Trump White House is trying to shut it down. So.

 

 

[AnywhereButHere]

 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/politics/trump-says-hes-like-really-smart-a-very-stable-genius/2018/01/06/f4daa4ae-f2e2-11e7-95e3-eff284e71c8d_story.html

well, this just settles it then. He’s a very, stable genius. He says so himself. Argument over. 

Quote

President Donald Trump wants people to know he's "like, really smart" and "a very stable genius."

He's taking to Twitter to defend his mental fitness and boast about his intelligence.

It's his latest pushback against a book that portrays him as a leader who doesn't understand the weight of the presidency. In the book, former aide Steve Bannon questions Trump's competence.

Trump's having none of it.

He says critics are "taking out the old Ronald Reagan playbook and screaming mental stability and intelligence."

Trump says "my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart."

He says going from successful businessman to reality TV star to president on his first try "would qualify as not smart, but genius .... and a very stable genius at that!"

There’s really no commentary needed, is there? 

[AmazonGrace]

Well I had my doubts but I shoulda just asked the man himself.

Of course he lied about it being his first try.

http://www.tvguide.com/news/donald-trump-presidential-campaign-timeline/

 

 

[onekidanddone]

8 hours ago, JMarie said:

Canada's unemployment rate is at a 40 year low.  How long until Trump claims this as one of his victories?

(he'll probably claim to be president of Canada for this one little thing)

Please Canada if you build a wall to keep the TDs out, can you tell me the password. I promise if I come visit, I'll be respectful.

[47of74]

19 minutes ago, AnywhereButHere said:

 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/politics/trump-says-hes-like-really-smart-a-very-stable-genius/2018/01/06/f4daa4ae-f2e2-11e7-95e3-eff284e71c8d_story.html

well, this just settles it then. He’s a very, stable genius. He says so himself. Argument over. 

There’s really no commentary needed, is there? 

I saw that too.  Yeah, man baby is so stable, isn't he?  As he shows repeatedly on twitter.

I think Mark Hamill nailed it too... 

 

[apple1]

Wow - those tweets. (Even for him). I had to go look for myself. Just wow.