Trump 27: Happy Holidays Orange Menace

[Destiny]

1 minute ago, onekidanddone said:

She's lived state side for decades and now lives in Idaho because Florida was too full of Democrats. She and her husband are Jewish.  I wanted to ask her if she thought being such staunch TTs would protect them.  Protect them from the Bannons and Gorkas?  Just what did she think  "Jews will not replace us" means? 

Ah. all mine either still live there or moved here in the last few years. I somehow end up with PR friends. Sure, some of them are  through BFF, but not all of them. I dont really know how it happened that I have so many friends that live there. 

[laPapessaGiovanna]

I got 13/15 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/23/who-said-it-donald-trump-or-buddy-from-elf

[GreyhoundFan]

@laPapessaGiovanna -- so did I! Pretty good, considering I've never seen the movie "Elf".

[formergothardite]

I got them all right, but I have seen Elf about 5 million times. 

[GrumpyGran]

41 minutes ago, laPapessaGiovanna said:

I got 13/15 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/23/who-said-it-donald-trump-or-buddy-from-elf

12 out of 15. I have seen ELF but I wasn't really paying attention. Horrifying that we have to actually think about which one would have said it.

[Destiny]

10/15, though I’ve never seen Elf.

[47of74]

I got 10/15.   I hadn't really seen Elf.  It was on at the local coffee shop / bar I like to hang out at but the volume was all the way down and I wasn't paying attention.

[laPapessaGiovanna]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

@laPapessaGiovanna -- so did I! Pretty good, considering I've never seen the movie "Elf".

I saw it once and not in English. But I may be checking American political news a bit too obsessively.

[47of74]

2 minutes ago, laPapessaGiovanna said:

I saw it once and not in English. But I may be checking American political news a bit too obsessively.

Last time I was in the motherland I was getting ready to head out and explore Rome I had the TV on in the hotel room and they were playing Matlock.  In Italiano.  I duly made note of that fact on Facebook and almost immediately got a "what the hell are you doing, you are in Rome and you're watching TV?" response from one of my friends.

[GreyhoundFan]

"5 things Trump did this week while you weren't looking"

Spoiler

A frenetic, noisy year in Washington came to an end this week as Republicans successfully passed their first major legislation of the term, an overhaul of the tax code. President Donald Trump cheered its passage, and Congress escaped town on Thursday after barely avoiding a government shutdown, ending the year on a rare quiet note.

With 2018 approaching, many of Trump’s senior White House aides are reportedly getting ready to pack up their desks. But elsewhere in his federal agencies, political officials are still just getting started: They’re reviewing Obama-era rules and actively implementing a new conservative agenda across the government. This week, quiet as it seemed, was no exception. From the withdrawal of new housing rules intended to better prepare for climate change to the Environmental Protection Agency’s approval of a controversial herbicide, here’s how Trump’s administration changed policy this week:

1. HUD abandons Obama-era rules on floods
In October 2016, the Department of Housing and Urban Development took a major step to address the risks of climate change on the housing market with a new proposed rule that required that any building in a flood plain even partly financed by HUD to be built on higher ground. The rule was in response to an executive order from President Barack Obama requiring HUD to issue rules so that federally owned or managed buildings could better withstand severe storms.

But this week, HUD reversed course. It officially withdrew the Obama-era rule, citing Trump’s executive orders requiring agencies to review and repeal costly regulations. The news is a setback for environmentalists and a victory for homebuilding companies, which said the Obama-era rule would raise prices and hurt low-income homeowners and renters. HUD also withdrew four other proposed rules issued during the Obama era, including one on demolishing public buildings.

2. The trade war with Canada continues
During the first 11 months of Trump’s presidency, trade relations between the United States and Canada have been surprisingly hostile. The two sides have clashed over renegotiatin the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the U.S. has issued trade sanctions on Canadian lumber. And there are no signs that the relationship is going to improve.

One big flash point has been costly new duties levied against planes made by the Canadian aircraft-maker Bombardier, which Boeing has accused of unfairly benefiting from government subsidies in a $5.6 billion deal last year to sell regional jets to Delta. Since the Commerce Department proposed roughly 300 percent duties in September, Canadian and European leaders have spent the past few months heavily lobbying against them. This week, the agency announced its final figure: 292 percent, slightly reduced but still a giant amount.
Bombardier has a chance to derail the trade sanctions: The International Trade Commission, an independent agency, must rule in early 2018 whether its practices actually harmed any U.S. manufacturer. (If not, Commerce said, the duties would be terminated.) In the meantime, as trade negotiators enter a crucial part of the NAFTA renegotiations, trade relations between the U.S. and Canada are going in the wrong direction.

3. EPA says a controversial herbicide is not harmful to humans
For the past few years, a debate has been raging over Monsanto’s use of glyphosate, the main ingredient in Round-Up, the top-selling weed killer sprayed on millions of acres of crops across the globe every year. Environmentalists and consumer groups have argued that the ingredient is toxic and petitioned the European Union and the United States to ban it, which would deal the company a major financial blow. Monsanto has aggressively disputed those claims, arguing that there is no evidence that glyphosate is dangerous to humans.

This week, EPA came down clearly on Monsanto’s side. In a draft risk assessment, the agency said that glyphosate likely does not cause cancer and that there are "no other meaningful risks to human health when the product is used according to the pesticide label.” The finding contradicts a 2015 report from the World Health Organization, which found that glyphosate was a “probable carcinogen.” But more recently, the evidence has begun to swing in the company’s favor: Last month, a long-term study on glyphosate found no firm link between the herbicide and cancer, a finding that Monsanto has used to dispute the 2015 WHO report.

The EPA finding, which is just a draft and will now go through a 60-day comment period, means Monsanto is on something of a winning streak. Late last month, the EU voted to renew glyphosate’s license for five years, a major defeat for environmentalists who lobbied for a ban or strict limitations on use of the chemical. EPA will consider a similar renewal for glyphosate’s use in the U.S. in 2019. Its assessment this week spells good news for Monsanto when that review happens.

4. A (very) new era at Elizabeth’s Warren’s financial agency
After Richard Cordray stepped down as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the watchdog agency first proposed by Elizabeth Warren after the financial crisis, he set off a minor firestorm by attempting to install his deputy as acting director, hoping his Obama-era regulatory and enforcement priorities would survive a little longer. Trump went a very different direction: He installed the deregulatory hawk Mick Mulvaney, his White House budget chief, as acting director.

Mulvaney immediately paused all ongoing enforcement and regulatory actions. And on Thursday, the CFPB announced that it intends to reconsider pieces of its 2015 rule, mandated under Dodd-Frank, that requires mortgage lenders to submit data on their borrowers’ race, ethnicity, sex, income and age, as well as pricing and underwriting standards, an effort to crack down on discriminatory practices in the housing market. The CFPB also will stop penalizing mortgage lenders that submit inaccurate data, as long as the errors were not “material.”

The agency also said it intends to amend its 2016 rule on prepaid cards, which companies sometimes use instead of paychecks. The rule was intended to simplify a patchwork of state laws and protect consumers from fraud and abuse, including by mandating greater disclosures on overdraft limits. It was sharply criticized by financial firms as overly broad and difficult to implement. It’s unclear whether this action is a direct result of Mulvaney’s arrival; the CFPB had already found problems with its initial rule and delayed its implementation to next April. Either way, it’s clear that a new, conservative era has arrived at the CFPB.

5. EPA takes next step to rewrite the Clean Power Plan
On October 16, 2017, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt announced that his agency was officially going to repeal the Clean Power Plan, the Obama-era rules that imposed strict limits on greenhouse gas emissions. It was a decisive blow for perhaps Obama’s greatest effort to combat climate change and was cheered by conservatives and oil and gas companies who had slammed the Obama-era proposal. This week, Pruitt took the next step to rewrite the rule, issuing an “advanced notice of proposed rulemaking” to give the public a chance to comment on what a new rule should look like. In particular, the agency said that a new would rule likely focus on just coal-fired plants, not the broader power system.

The agency also left one big question unanswered: Whether it will attempt to challenge the Supreme Court ruling that required the agency to regulate greenhouse gases. Many conservatives have asked Pruitt to challenge that ruling, known as the endangerment finding, but many lawyers and industry experts believe such a challenge would be futile. In the regulatory document, the EPA walks through the endangerment finding but says “nothing” in the document “should be construed as addressing or modifying the prior findings.” Whether Pruitt intends to actually challenge the endangerment finding—or will slowly issue a new rule—remains unclear.

How depressing.

[Cartmann99]

18 hours ago, Destiny said:

He may want to consider starting with not talking shit before the meetings if he wants to be bipartisan. Just a suggestion.

Happy holidays Donald. The advice is free.

Unfortunately, the odds of him following your wise advice are about the same as zombie Ed McMahon showing up at my house with a million dollar check from Publisher's Clearing House.

[WiseGirl]

12/15 for Elf quiz. Horrifying that Buddy sounds more reasonable than orange one.

@GrumpyGran I was hoping Melanie could slip his damn phone into the ocean or something.

[GreyhoundFan]

Lucky Florida...NOT! "With one tweet, Trump inserts himself into Florida’s GOP gubernatorial primary"

Spoiler

President Trump on Friday unexpectedly weighed in on the 2018 governor’s race in Florida, talking up the potential candidacy of U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), a tea-party conservative and an outspoken critic of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into ties between Russia and the Trump campaign.

DeSantis, who recently introduced Trump at a campaign-style rally in Pensacola, is poised to join a competitive Republican field in the race to succeed Gov. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who is term-limited.

If he runs, DeSantis would likely join two hopefuls with closer ties to the Republican establishment: Florida Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam, who previously served a decade in Congress, and Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran.

Another GOP candidate, Jack Latvala, recently announced his resignation from the state Senate as the result of a sexual harassment scandal and is expected to exit the race.

“Congressman Ron DeSantis is a brilliant young leader, Yale and then Harvard Law, who would make a GREAT Governor of Florida,” Trump said on Twitter. “He loves our Country and is a true FIGHTER!”

The tweet was sent out shortly after Trump landed in Florida en route to his Mar-a-Lago estate, where he is spending the holidays.

It appears the tweet was prompted by a Fox News segment featuring DeSantis that was playing on televisions in the cabin of Air Force One toward the end of the flight.

A White House official said DeSantis had been working Trump hard for an endorsement “on several fronts.”

This official, who requested anonymity to speak more candidly, said Trump personally likes DeSantis but “has no idea who else is in the race or what it looks like.”

The decision was not particularly strategic, this person said, and highlights some of the flaws in the president’s political operation.

DeSantis, 39, accompanied Trump on Air Force earlier this month to the rally in Pensacola, where he introduced the president and borrowed several of his rhetorical flourishes, including “fake news,” “drain the swamp” and “making America great again.”

“This guy is working his tail off for you guys and for the American people,” DeSantis told the crowd.

In a statement Friday, DeSantis said he was “grateful to have the President’s support and appreciate what he has done — from appointing great judges to recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital to signing a pro-growth tax cut — to get our country back on track. As an Iraq veteran, I’m especially appreciative of his efforts to support our military and our veterans.”

In Congress, DeSantis put forward a measure last summer that would have halted funding for Mueller’s probe after six months and limited his investigation to matters that occurred after June 2015, when Trump launched his campaign.

DeSantis has criticized the probe into possible collusion with Russia as a “fishing expedition.”

John McKager “Mac” Stipanovich, a longtime Florida Republican consultant, said Trump’s shout-out on Twitter could give DeSantis a boost in a field where the well-funded Putnam is considered the front-runner.

“His Trump cred will put him in good stead,” Stipanovich said. “DeSantis would be a viable candidate in a Republican primary if he can raise the money.”

But Stipanovich added that being too close to Trump could hurt the GOP nominee in the general election in a state that Trump carried last year but where more voters disapprove of his job performance than approve, according to recent polls.

“He may be eating poison candy from which he’ll die in November,” Stipanovich said of DeSantis.

DeSantis, who was elected in 2012 to Florida’s 6th congressional district, announced in 2015 that he would run for the U.S. Senate seat held by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who initially did not file for reelection in 2016 because of his Republican presidential bid.

DeSantis withdrew from the race after Rubio ended his White House bid and announced he would run for reelection.

During his tenure in Congress, which ended in 2011, Putnam ascended to a leadership position and voted for changes to immigration policy and other issues that have since become liabilities in Republican primaries. As a gubernatorial candidate, he has been trying to position himself further to the right on several issues.

Trump, who plans to play an active role in the 2018 elections, has inserted himself into Republican primaries on other occasions.

In Alabama’s GOP primary for Senate this year, Trump endorsed and held a rally for Sen. Luther Strange (R), an establishment candidate who lost to former judge Roy Moore. Trump enthusiastically supported Moore in this month’s special election, which he lost.

Trump also traveled to South Carolina in October for a fundraiser to benefit South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R).

McMaster, a stalwart of South Carolina politics for the past three decades, was elevated to governor in January when Trump picked Nikki Haley to serve as ambassador to the United Nations. McMaster is now facing a primary challenge from a well-funded candidate, lawyer Catherine Templeton, who has cast herself as the insurgent in the race.

 

[Cartmann99]

2 hours ago, 47of74 said:

Last time I was in the motherland I was getting ready to head out and explore Rome I had the TV on in the hotel room and they were playing Matlock.  In Italiano.

That's such a bizarre picture to me. It would be like if I woke up tomorrow with Queen Elizabeth's accent instead of my own. 

[AmazonGrace]

I got 12 out of 15 (never seen Elf).

Dear Rufus I hate this man so much.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/23/us/politics/trump-immigration.html?smid=tw-share

TL; DR: the president of the USA is a flaming racist.

Spoiler

 

Stoking Fears, Trump Defied Bureaucracy
to Advance Immigration Agenda

The changes have had far-reaching consequences, both for the immigrants who have
sought to make a new home in this country and for America’s image in the world.

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR and JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVISDEC. 23, 2017

WASHINGTON — Late to his own meeting and waving a sheet of numbers, President Trump stormed into the Oval Office one day in June, plainly enraged.

Five months before, Mr. Trump had dispatched federal officers to the nation’s airports to stop travelers from several Muslim countries from entering the United States in a dramatic demonstration of how he would deliver on his campaign promise to fortify the nation’s borders.

But so many foreigners had flooded into the country since January, he vented to his national security team, that it was making a mockery of his pledge. Friends were calling to say he looked like a fool, Mr. Trump said.

According to six officials who attended or were briefed about the meeting, Mr. Trump then began reading aloud from the document, which his domestic policy adviser, Stephen Miller, had given him just before the meeting. The document listed how many immigrants had received visas to enter the United States in 2017.

 

Quote

 

More than 2,500 were from Afghanistan, a terrorist haven, the president complained.

Haiti had sent 15,000 people. They “all have AIDS,” he grumbled, according to one person who attended the meeting and another person who was briefed about it by a different person who was there.

 

Forty thousand had come from Nigeria, Mr. Trump added. Once they had seen the United States, they would never “go back to their huts” in Africa, recalled the two officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss a sensitive conversation in the Oval Office.

 

Spoiler

 

As the meeting continued, John F. Kelly, then the secretary of homeland security, and Rex W. Tillerson, the secretary of state, tried to interject, explaining that many were short-term travelers making one-time visits. But as the president continued, Mr. Kelly and Mr. Miller turned their ire on Mr. Tillerson, blaming him for the influx of foreigners and prompting the secretary of state to throw up his arms in frustration. If he was so bad at his job, maybe he should stop issuing visas altogether, Mr. Tillerson fired back.

Tempers flared and Mr. Kelly asked that the room be cleared of staff members. But even after the door to the Oval Office was closed, aides could still hear the president berating his most senior advisers.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, denied on Saturday morning that Mr. Trump had made derogatory statements about immigrants during the meeting.

“General Kelly, General McMaster, Secretary Tillerson, Secretary Nielsen and all other senior staff actually in the meeting deny these outrageous claims,” she said, referring to the current White House chief of staff, the national security adviser and the secretaries of state and homeland security. “It’s both sad and telling The New York Times would print the lies of their anonymous ‘sources’ anyway.”

While the White House did not deny the overall description of the meeting, officials strenuously insisted that Mr. Trump never used the words “AIDS” or “huts” to describe people from any country. Several participants in the meeting told Times reporters that they did not recall the president using those words and did not think he had, but the two officials who described the comments found them so noteworthy that they related them to others at the time.

The meeting in June reflects Mr. Trump’s visceral approach to an issue that defined his campaign and has indelibly shaped the first year of his presidency.

How We Reported This Story

The Times conducted over three dozen interviews with current and former administration officials, lawmakers and others close to the process.

Seizing on immigration as the cause of countless social and economic problems, Mr. Trump entered office with an agenda of symbolic but incompletely thought-out goals, the product not of rigorous policy debate but of emotionally charged personal interactions and an instinct for tapping into the nativist views of white working-class Americans.

 

Like many of his initiatives, his effort to change American immigration policy has been executed through a disorderly and dysfunctional process that sought from the start to defy the bureaucracy charged with enforcing it, according to interviews with three dozen current and former administration officials, lawmakers and others close to the process, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail private interactions.

But while Mr. Trump has been repeatedly frustrated by the limits of his power, his efforts to remake decades of immigration policy have gained increasing momentum as the White House became more disciplined and adept at either ignoring or undercutting the entrenched opposition of many parts of the government. The resulting changes have had far-reaching consequences, not only for the immigrants who have sought to make a new home in this country, but also for the United States’ image in the world.

“We have taken a giant steamliner barreling full speed,” Mr. Miller said in a recent interview. “Slowed it, stopped it, begun to turn it around and started sailing in the other direction.”

It is an assessment shared ruefully by Mr. Trump’s harshest critics, who see a darker view of the past year. Frank Sharry, the executive director of America’s Voice, a pro-immigration group, argues that the president’s immigration agenda is motivated by racism.

“He’s basically saying, ‘You people of color coming to America seeking the American dream are a threat to the white people,’” said Mr. Sharry, an outspoken critic of the president. “He’s come into office with an aggressive strategy of trying to reverse the demographic changes underway in America.”

A Pledge With Appeal

Those who know Mr. Trump say that his attitude toward immigrants long predates his entry into politics.

“He’s always been fearful where other cultures are concerned and always had anxiety about food and safety when he travels,” said Michael D’Antonio, who interviewed him for the biography “The Truth About Trump.” “His objectification and demonization of people who are different has festered for decades.”

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Friends say Mr. Trump, a developer turned reality TV star, grew to see immigration as a zero-sum issue: What is good for immigrants is bad for America. But he remained conflicted, viewing himself as benevolent and wanting to be liked by the many immigrants he employed.

Over time, the anti-immigrant tendencies hardened, and two of his early advisers, Roger J. Stone Jr. and Sam Nunberg, stoked that sentiment. But it was Mr. Trump who added an anti-immigrant screed to his Trump Tower campaign announcement in June 2015 in New York City without telling his aides.

“When do we beat Mexico at the border? They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity,” Mr. Trump ad-libbed. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems,” he continued. “They’re bringing drugs; they’re bringing crime; they’re rapists.”

During his campaign, he pushed a false story about Muslims celebrating in Jersey City as they watched the towers fall after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York. He said illegal immigrants were like “vomit” crossing the border. And he made pledges that he clearly could not fulfill.

“We will begin moving them out, Day 1,” he said at a rally in August 2016, adding, “My first hour in office, those people are gone.”

Democrats and some Republicans recoiled, calling Mr. Trump’s messaging damaging and divisive. But for the candidate, the idea of securing the country against outsiders with a wall had intoxicating appeal, though privately, he acknowledged that it was a rhetorical device to whip up crowds when they became listless.

Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, whom Mr. Trump consults regularly on the matter, said it was not a stretch to attribute Mr. Trump’s victory to issues where Mr. Trump broke with a Republican establishment orthodoxy that had disappointed anti-immigrant conservatives for decades.

“There’s no issue on which he was more unorthodox than on immigration,” Mr. Cotton said.

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“We have taken a giant steamliner barreling full speed,” the adviser Stephen Miller said of Mr. Trump’s immigration efforts. “Slowed it, stopped it, begun to turn it around and started sailing in the other direction.” Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Ban Restarts Enforcement

Mr. Trump came into office with a long list of campaign promises that included not only building the wall (and making Mexico pay for it), but creating a “deportation force,” barring Muslims from entering the country and immediately deporting millions of immigrants with criminal records.

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Mr. Miller and other aides had the task of turning those promises into a policy agenda that would also include an assault against a pro-immigration bureaucracy they viewed with suspicion and disdain. Working in secret, they drafted a half-dozen executive orders. One would crack down on so-called sanctuary cities. Another proposed changing the definition of a criminal alien so that it included people arrested — not just those convicted.

But mindful of his campaign promise to quickly impose “extreme vetting,” Mr. Trump decided his first symbolic action would be an executive order to place a worldwide ban on travel from nations the White House considered compromised by terrorism.

With no policy experts in place, and deeply suspicious of career civil servants they regarded as spies for President Barack Obama, Mr. Miller and a small group of aides started with an Obama-era law that identified seven terror-prone “countries of concern.” And then they skipped practically every step in the standard White House playbook for creating and introducing a major policy.

The National Security Council never convened to consider the travel ban proposal. Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary at the time, did not see it ahead of time. Lawyers and policy experts at the White House, the Justice Department and the Homeland Security Department were not asked to weigh in. There were no talking points for friendly surrogates, no detailed briefings for reporters or lawmakers, no answers to frequently asked questions, such as whether green card holders would be affected.

The announcement of the travel ban on a Friday night, seven days after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, created chaotic scenes at the nation’s largest airports, as hundreds of people were stopped, and set off widespread confusion and loud protests. Lawyers for the government raced to defend the president’s actions against court challenges, while aides struggled to explain the policy to perplexed lawmakers the next night at a black-tie dinner.

White House aides resorted to Google searches and frenzied scans of the United States Code to figure out which countries were affected.

But for the president, the chaos was the first, sharp evidence that he could exert power over the bureaucracy he criticized on the campaign trail.

“It’s working out very nicely,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office the next day.

At a hastily called Saturday night meeting in the Situation Room, Mr. Miller told senior government officials that they should tune out the whining.

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Sitting at the head of the table, across from Mr. Kelly, Mr. Miller repeated what he told the president: This is what we wanted — to turn immigration enforcement back on.

Mr. Kelly, who shared Mr. Trump’s views about threats from abroad, was nonetheless livid that his employees at homeland security had been called into action with no guidance or preparation. He told angry lawmakers that responsibility for the rollout was “all on me.” Privately, he told the White House, “That’s not going to happen again.”

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Demonstrating in January against the detention of travelers and refugees by border officials at Kennedy International Airport. The announcement of a travel ban set off widespread confusion and loud protests. Credit Christopher Lee for The New York Times

Forced to Back Down

Amid the turbulent first weeks, Mr. Trump’s attempt to bend the government’s immigration apparatus to his will began to take shape.

The ban’s message of “keep out” helped drive down illegal border crossings as much as 70 percent, even without being formally put into effect.

Immigration officers rounded up 41,318 undocumented immigrants during the president’s first 100 days, nearly a 40 percent increase. The Justice Department began hiring more immigration judges to speed up deportations. Officials threatened to hold back funds for sanctuary cities. The flow of refugees into the United States slowed.

Mr. Trump “has taken the handcuffs off,” said Steven A. Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies, an advocacy group that favors more limits on immigration.

 

Mr. Obama had been criticized by immigrant rights groups for excessive deportations, especially in his first term. But Mr. Camarota said that Mr. Trump’s approach was “a distinct change, to look at what is immigration doing to us, rather than what is the benefit for the immigrant.”

The president, however, remained frustrated that the shift was not yielding results.

By early March, judges across the country had blocked his travel ban. Immigrant rights activists were crowing that they had thwarted the new president. Even Mr. Trump’s own lawyers told him he had to give up on defending the ban.

 

Attorney General Jeff Sessions and lawyers at the White House and Justice Department had decided that waging an uphill legal battle to defend the directive in the Supreme Court would fail. Instead, they wanted to devise a narrower one that could pass legal muster.

The president, though, was furious about what he saw as backing down to politically correct adversaries. He did not want a watered-down version of the travel ban, he yelled at Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, as the issue came to a head on Friday, March 3, in the Oval Office.

It was a familiar moment for Mr. Trump’s advisers. The president did not mind being told “no” in private, and would sometimes relent. But he could not abide a public turnabout, a retreat. At those moments, he often exploded at whoever was nearby.

As Marine One waited on the South Lawn for Mr. Trump to begin his weekend trip to Palm Beach, Fla., Mr. McGahn insisted that administration lawyers had already promised the court that Mr. Trump would issue a new order. There was no alternative, he said.

“This is bullshit,” the president responded.

With nothing resolved, Mr. Trump, furious, left the White House. A senior aide emailed a blunt warning to a colleague waiting aboard Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland: “He’s coming in hot.”

Already mad at Mr. Sessions, who the day before had recused himself in the Russia investigation, Mr. Trump refused to take his calls. Aides told Mr. Sessions he would have to fly down to Mar-a-Lago to plead with the president in person to sign the new order.

Over dinner that night with Mr. Sessions and Mr. McGahn, Mr. Trump relented. When he was back in Washington, he signed the new order. It was an indication that he had begun to understand — or at least, begrudgingly accept — the need to follow a process.

Still, one senior adviser later recalled never having seen a president so angry signing anything.

 

As a candidate, Mr. Trump had repeatedly contradicted himself about the deportations he would pursue, and whether he was opposed to any kind of path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. But he also courted conservative voters by describing an Obama-era policy as an illegal amnesty for the immigrants who had been brought to the United States as children.

 

During the transition, his aides drafted an executive order to end the program, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. But the executive order was held back as the new president struggled with conflicted feelings about the young immigrants, known as Dreamers.

“We’re going to take care of those kids,” Mr. Trump had pledged to Senator Richard J. Durbin during a private exchange at his Inauguration Day luncheon.

The comment was a fleeting glimpse of the president’s tendency to seek approval from whomever might be sitting across from him, and the power that personal interactions have in shaping his views.

In 2013, Mr. Trump met with a small group of Dreamers at Trump Tower, hoping to improve his standing with the Hispanic community. José Machado told Mr. Trump about waking up at the age of 15 to find his mother had vanished — deported, he later learned, back to Nicaragua.

“Honestly,” Mr. Machado said of Mr. Trump, “he had no idea.”

Mr. Trump appeared to be touched by the personal stories, and insisted that the Dreamers accompany him to his gift shop for watches, books and neckties to take home as souvenirs. In the elevator on the way down, he quietly nodded and said, “You convinced me.”

Aware that the president was torn about the Dreamers, Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, quietly reached out in March to Mr. Durbin, who had championed legislation called the Dream Act to legalize the immigrants, to test the waters for a possible deal.

After weeks of private meetings on Capitol Hill and telephone conversations with Mr. Durbin and Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican supportive of legalizing the Dreamers, Mr. Kushner invited them to dinner at the six-bedroom estate he shares with his wife, Ivanka Trump.

But Mr. Durbin’s hope of a deal faded when he arrived to the house and saw who one of the guests would be.

 

“Stephen Miller’s presence made it a much different experience than I expected,” Mr. Durbin said later.

C

Confronting the ‘Deep State’

Even as the administration was engaged in a court battle over the travel ban, it began to turn its attention to another way of tightening the border — by limiting the number of refugees admitted each year to the United States. And if there was one “deep state” stronghold of Obama holdovers that Mr. Trump and his allies suspected of undermining them on immigration, it was the State Department, which administers the refugee program.

At the department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, there was a sense of foreboding about a president who had once warned that any refugee might be a “Trojan horse” or part of a “terrorist army.”

Mr. Trump had already used the travel ban to cut the number of allowable refugees admitted to the United States in 2017 to 50,000, a fraction of the 110,000 set by Mr. Obama. Now, Mr. Trump would have to decide the level for 2018.

At an April meeting with top officials from the bureau in the West Wing’s Roosevelt Room, Mr. Miller cited statistics from the restrictionist Center for Immigration Studies that indicated that resettling refugees in the United States was far costlier than helping them in their own region.

Mr. Miller was visibly displeased, according to people present, when State Department officials pushed back, citing another study that found refugees to be a net benefit to the economy. He called the contention absurd and said it was exactly the wrong kind of thinking.

But the travel ban had been a lesson for Mr. Trump and his aides on the dangers of dictating a major policy change without involving the people who enforce it. This time, instead of shutting out those officials, they worked to tightly control the process.

In previous years, State Department officials had recommended a refugee level to the president. Now, Mr. Miller told officials the number would be determined by the Department of Homeland Security under a new policy that treated the issue as a security matter, not a diplomatic one.

 

When he got word that the Office of Refugee Resettlement had drafted a 55-page report showing that refugees were a net positive to the economy, Mr. Miller swiftly intervened, requesting a meeting to discuss it. The study never made it to the White House; it was shelved in favor of a three-page list of all the federal assistance programs that refugees used.

At the United Nations General Assembly in September, Mr. Trump cited the Center for Immigration Studies report, arguing that it was more cost-effective to keep refugees out than to bring them into the United States.

“Uncontrolled migration,” Mr. Trump declared, “is deeply unfair to both the sending and receiving countries.”

 

Border wall prototypes in San Diego. The disorganization that marked Mr. Trump’s earliest actions on immigration have given way to a more disciplined approach that has yielded concrete results. Credit Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York Times

More Disciplined Approach

Cecilia Muñoz, who served as Mr. Obama’s chief domestic policy adviser, said she was alarmed by the speed with which Mr. Trump and his team have learned to put their immigration agenda into effect.

“The travel ban was a case of bureaucratic incompetence,” she said. “They made rookie mistakes. But they clearly learned from that experience. For the moment, all of the momentum is in the direction of very ugly, very extreme, very harmful policies.”

By year’s end, the chaos and disorganization that marked Mr. Trump’s earliest actions on immigration had given way to a more disciplined approach that yielded concrete results, steered in large part by Mr. Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general. As secretary of homeland security, he had helped unleash immigration officers who felt constrained under Mr. Obama. They arrested 143,000 people in 2017, a sharp uptick, and deported more than 225,000.

Later, as White House chief of staff, Mr. Kelly quietly persuaded the president to drop his talk of Mexico paying for the wall. But he has advocated on behalf of the president’s restrictionist vision, defying his reputation as a moderator of Mr. Trump’s hard-line instincts.

In September, a third version of the president’s travel ban was issued with little fanfare and new legal justifications. Then, Mr. Trump overruled objections from diplomats, capping refugee admissions at 45,000 for 2018, the lowest since 1986. In November, the president ended a humanitarian program that granted residency to 59,000 Haitians to since a 2010 earthquake ravaged their country.

 

As the new year approached, officials began considering a plan to separate parents from their children when families are caught entering the country illegally, a move that immigrant groups called draconian.

At times, though, Mr. Trump has shown an openness to a different approach. In private discussions, he returns periodically to the idea of a “comprehensive immigration” compromise, though aides have warned him against using the phrase because it is seen by his core supporters as code for amnesty. During a fall dinner with Democratic leaders, Mr. Trump explored the possibility of a bargain to legalize Dreamers in exchange for border security.

Mr. Trump even told Republicans recently that he wanted to think bigger, envisioning a deal early next year that would include a wall, protection for Dreamers, work permits for their parents, a shift to merit-based immigration with tougher work site enforcement, and ultimately, legal status for some undocumented immigrants.

The idea would prevent Dreamers from sponsoring the parents who brought them illegally for citizenship, limiting what Mr. Trump refers to as “chain migration.”

“He wants to make a deal,” said Mr. Graham, who spoke with Mr. Trump about the issue last week. “He wants to fix the entire system.”

Yet publicly, Mr. Trump has only employed the absolutist language that defined his campaign and has dominated his presidency.

After an Uzbek immigrant was arrested on suspicion of plowing a truck into a bicycle path in Lower Manhattan in October, killing eight people, the president seized on the episode.

Privately, in the Oval Office, the president expressed disbelief about the visa program that had admitted the suspect, confiding to a group of visiting senators that it was yet another piece of evidence that the United States’ immigration policies were “a joke.”

Even after a year of progress toward a country sealed off from foreign threats, the president still viewed the immigration system as plagued by complacency.

 

“We’re so politically correct,” he complained to reporters in the cabinet room, “that we’re afraid to do anything.”

Matthew Rosenberg and Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.

 

 

[47of74]

Fuck face has taken to twitter again to show that five year olds have better impulse control and maturity than him.

Quote

President Trump tore into Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe in a series of tweets on Saturday amid news that the law enforcement official would retire in the spring.

Trump, who has gone after McCabe in the past over his wife's ties to prominent Democrats, tweeted that the No. 2 FBI official is "racing the clock to retire with full benefits."

"How can FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, the man in charge, along with leakin’ James Comey, of the Phony Hillary Clinton investigation (including her 33,000 illegally deleted emails) be given $700,000 for wife’s campaign by Clinton Puppets during investigation?" the president tweeted. 

"FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is racing the clock to retire with full benefits. 90 days to go?!!!" Trump said in another tweet. 

 

[JMarie]

23 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"“Welch’s Grape Jelly with Alcohol”: How Trump’s Horrific Wine Became the Ultimate Metaphor for His Presidency"

  Reveal hidden contents

‘I thought you needed something good to drink,” the server said, slipping two glasses of deep-ruby-red wine in front of me and my guest. My guest was a nationally known wine expert. The server wanted to apologize for the wines I had made my guest taste for the previous 90 minutes, which the server had brought to the table with mystified, foot-dragging reluctance.

We had come to the main restaurant of the Trump International Hotel, in Washington, D.C., to taste as many of the 11 wines bearing the Trump Winery label as we could. A few weeks later I again sampled Trump wines, this time at the suburban-mall-style Trump Grill—open only for lunch—in the basement of Trump Tower, in New York City. The red-marble and cheap-looking-dark-wood restaurant features views of busloads of Japanese and middle-American tourists trooping past the open-plan tables to the bathrooms. On the way they are obliged to pass by a shop, visible from the tables, featuring Trump T-shirts and baseball caps. The otherwise very nice servers at the Grill tend to run from the table if you ask questions about the few Trump wines on the menu. When I ate there recently, one server did promise to get me some information; after a while, he returned bearing postcards of wine bottles and scenes of Trump Winery, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Trump wines are in fact hard to find except online; the winery’s Web site charges $18 to $54 a bottle for most of what it sells. Several calls I made to the Charlottesville office to find places to buy Trump wines yielded only the two restaurants I’ve mentioned and a chain called Total Wine, which claims to be “the country’s largest independent retailer of fine wine” and has 173 stores in 21 states, most of them in suburbs. (A representative of Trump Winery says the wines are distributed to retailers and restaurants in approximately 25 states.)

This is not what you might expect from “one of the largest wineries in the United States,” as Donald Trump called it in a bizarre aside during a press conference following the deadly Charlottesville riots, in mid-August. Trump Winery isn’t even the largest winery in Virginia, going by the standard industry measurement of cases produced per year: at about 45,000, it is behind two other Virginia wineries that each produce 60,000 cases. Trump Winery’s claim, on its Web site, that it has the most acres planted in Vitis vinifera, the classic species of wine grape, of any East Coast vineyard, is also way off, according to the fact-checkers at PolitiFact. (Trump has 210 acres; Pindar, on Long Island—Long Island!—has 500, and produces almost double the number of cases.) In his press conference after Charlottesville, the president also called himself the owner of the Charlottesville winery. He certainly was the man who initially bought it, years ago, when he acquired it on the cheap from a bankrupt friend. But the owner today is his son Eric.

In using the family winery to deflect questions about white supremacy after the deadly riots, the president did manage to plug yet another Trump product. A surprised nation wondered: How’s the wine?

Thus my invitation to the visiting wine expert, who is known for his bloodhound nose and encyclopedic knowledge of the world’s wines, and who actually likes Virginia wines. The Trump International, hard by the White House, occupies the Old Post Office building, with a glorious, soaring, sumptuously restored Romanesque-revival interior. Before the hotel became the reason people can now pronounce the word “emoluments,” its restaurant was a prime spot for power lunches. The renowned José Andrés was in the process of designing a new restaurant to go into the space when the not-yet-Republican-nominee referred to Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers, and Andrés, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Spain, pulled out of the deal. The Trump Organization sued him for breach of contract, and the case got as far as a pre-inauguration deposition of the president-elect before it was settled out of court. Andrés has been conspicuously quiet about the president even as he showed up the administration by efficiently serving thousands of meals to Puerto Ricans without power or water in the wake of Hurricane Maria.

Now the restaurant is operated by David Burke, a New York chef and restaurateur, as a standard steak house. It serves stubbornly cold and hard popovers as a giveaway and large, overpriced portions of bland tuna tartare; Maryland crab cakes that taste of nothing other than pepper; and dull steaks. In contrast to the cheesy Trump Grill, in Manhattan, the fittings seem opulent, the service is professional, and the restaurant is fully staffed and overseen by a director of food and beverages who has the bluff heartiness of Sydney Greenstreet. The place brings to mind the grim bonhomie of Maxim’s in occupied Paris.

I certainly surprised and probably irritated the server by asking for each of the three Trump wines on the menu and also to see if there were any more kinds in the cellar. We drank through as many as we could get. With an anything-to-oblige-a-visiting-fireman shrug, the server turned up Trump wines not on the menu, and also analogous non-Trump wines for fair-comparison purposes, with my expert guest commenting on each one.

The Trump version of Chardonnay? “Oaked up,” my friend said. “Sweet. Too much residual sugar. Harvested too ripe. Flabby. Really clumsy. Goes with the cuisine.” Expensive too: $68 a bottle at the restaurant for the 2015, $22 on the Web site for the 2016.

What about the 2015 Trump Meritage, a blend of red grapes that are “sourced,” meaning trucked in from the West Coast. The label calls it “American red wine”; it sells for $30 on the Web site. My guest tasted the Meritage: “Welch’s grape jelly with alcohol. A terrible, fumy, alcoholic nose. If I served you that on an airline you’d be mad.” (A buyer at a well-known Washington wine shop I later asked to evaluate the wines—he once sold Trump vodka, produced from 2005 to 2011, because he liked it—took one sip of the Meritage, wanted no more, and said, “Grocery-store wine.”) My guest went on, “They’re lying about the alcohol on the label.” He knew this, he explained, by a strange method of marching his two front fingers down his chest after he swallowed, saying that when he could feel the alcohol down to his belly button he knew it was 14 percent alcohol, which is what the label said. But this wine pushed his fingers below the belt. He knew the Meritage was 15 percent—and a 1 percent variance, oddly, is permitted on labels. “This’ll rip you,” he said.

We tried Trump Winery’s far more expensive New World Reserve, made from a similar blend of red grapes but all grown in Charlottesville. The bottle has the words “estate bottled” and “Monticello” on the front and sells for $54 on the Web site. It was better than the Meritage. A server also brought us a glass of Trump Winery’s sparkling blanc de blanc, a calling card of any Virginia winery. “It’s fine,” my friend said. “No reserve, by which I mean flavors that keep unwinding like an onion skin. It doesn’t offend. I’d get drunk on it at a wedding.” He paused. “Let’s be honest. I’d get drunk on anything at a wedding.”

I managed to engage my friend and one server in a discussion of Virginia wines, which both admitted could be decent or, in the case of a few wine-makers, much better than decent. But the server did everything possible in the course of a long meal to steer us away from Trump wines. The idea had been to impress a famous guest, and serving him products from Trump Winery was not the way to do it. “We sell these,” the server said with a theatrical eye-roll, taking in the collection of glasses that by then were crowding our table, “because we have to.”

Why wine—and why Charlottesville? Not because Donald Trump likes wine: he is a teetotaler. The official answer is that he was helping out an old friend in her moment of financial duress, giving new life to a dream project that had tanked just a decade after she poured into it much of her estimated $100 million divorce settlement. Patricia Kluge, raised in Iraq, the daughter of a British father and a mother who was half Chaldean and half Scottish, had married John Kluge, a self-made billionaire, in 1981, when she was 33 and he was 67. They bought up land in horsey Charlottesville, a short drive from Jefferson’s Monticello, and built a 45-room, 23,500-square-foot Georgian-style mansion where they entertained lavishly, using the golf course, the five lakes they constructed, and the game preserve they stocked. In 1990 they divorced, and nine years later, with her third husband, Patricia Kluge established a winery bearing her name. Her ambitions were simple: to make the best wine in the world.

Gabriele Rausse, the affable, Italian-born director of gardens and grounds at Monticello, worked as the Kluge wine-maker for the first 10 years, 1999 to 2009, and then consulted unpaid for an additional year and a half after Patricia Kluge went broke in the wake of the mortgage crisis. He recently recalled that when, at the outset, Kluge said she wanted to charge a stupendous $450 a bottle, “I told her, ‘If you put my name on it, you can charge $4.50. If you hire the best wine-maker in France as a consultant, you can try to charge $450.’ ” So he put her in touch with a famous wine-making friend from Champagne, and, Rausse recalls, she paid him “a crazy amount of money.” Word got out in the nascent local wine industry, which Rausse had helped build after arriving in Charlottesville, in 1976. That was a time when local wines left a lot to be desired. The first bottles he made, in 1978, he couldn’t give away: friends kept passing them along to other friends, fruitcake-style. The millions Kluge poured into her vineyard, Rausse said, made other wine-makers step up their game.

Now 72, Rausse is both frank and philosophical. “She was shooting for quality,” he says. “Her main mistake was that she wanted the best Cabernet Sauvignon in the world, but it needs four to five years to take off. She sold it right away, because she was short of money. It was a constant contradiction.” (A source close to Kluge says financial considerations played a part only after the financial crisis.) Even so, the wines, particularly the sparkling blanc de blanc, had some success, including being served at Chelsea Clinton’s wedding.

The real reason Trump helped out his old friend was the chance to buy the estate for a predatory price, so laughably low that the bank which had seized the house kept refusing his offers. So he went around them, buying 217 acres that surrounded the mansion—in effect, the front lawn—from the trustees for Kluge’s adopted son; then the 776-acre vineyard for $6.2 million, plus $1.7 million in equipment and leftover wine; then the mansion itself, for $6.5 million. Kluge had initially put the mansion alone on the market for $100 million. At the time of the sale, Rausse recalls, “she said, ‘Gabriele, don’t worry—he’s my friend.’ ” And, indeed, Trump hired Kluge as director of the winery. A year later, he fired her. Kluge, who now sells jewelry, called Town & Country’s Sam Dangremond last August to dis the wines after Trump made his preposterous claim about the winery’s size. “The wine is not good anymore,” she told Dangremond. “I have had several people in Palm Beach lament that it’s the only wine they have on the menu at Mar-a-Lago.” She did credit the official owner and current president of the winery for keeping up the grounds: Eric “is doing a great job at maintenance,” she said.

Rausse is still friends with the wine-makers and managers at Trump Winery, who include Monticello veterans. And he acknowledges the increased demand for the wine, even if it means buying grapes from other parts of the country to make it. “All my wine is made in Virginia,” mostly from grapes he grows himself, he says. (He produces 2,000 cases a year under his own name and consults for other Virginia wineries in addition to holding down his Monticello day job.) Rausse long ago bought land for a house just half a mile from the Trump Winery, and recounted a story of a tanker truck recently pulling into his driveway to ask directions. “The driver said, ‘I have 15,000 gallons of wine I need to bring to Trump, and I’m lost,’ ” Rausse recalled. His son pointed the driver down the road. It’s easier to “source” finished wine than it is to source grapes, especially when the truck has to come cross-country. Rausse, too, is careful to give credit to Eric Trump. “I’ve met the son three or four times,” he told me. “He is a person in control of himself. The father is not, in my opinion.”

A month after the Charlottesville riots, I spent a day at Monticello moderating panels on race and food—a theme I had chosen months before, as honorary chair of an annual event called the Heritage Harvest Festival. During a brief break I decided to sneak over to the Trump Winery, whose gates I had passed on previous trips, a short 20-minute drive away. Would my Park Slope-dwelling stepdaughter like to accompany me beyond the gates? “With a sledgehammer, maybe,” she replied. I instead took a young woman from Monticello who was a frequent drinker of Virginia wines and had happily visited the winery under the previous regime.

Eric Trump is certainly doing a good job of keeping up appearances: the rolling hills are emerald and manicured. As you drive in you can see three mansions in the far distance—but you can’t stroll beyond the patio outside the tasting room itself unless you rent the houses for catered affairs. No tours of the winery, either, though a young woman working there mentioned various events throughout the year that would include them. You can, however, stay in the 45-room main house, which has been converted into a hotel, where rooms range from $250 to $650 a night, depending on the season.

At the winery, two long bars, one on an enclosed patio where lunch is also served, offer tastings of four or five Trump wines, with the single wineglass you’re allowed to use presented to you at the end as a souvenir. We opted for the deluxe tasting, which a young woman led us through by rote. It ends with a wine called Cru, a Chardonnay fortified with brandy, which is “unique to Trump Winery” and, according to Rausse, started when he salvaged defective Chardonnay that had been stored in a faulty tank, and that Patricia Kluge refused to throw out, by distilling it and then adding grape juice at the next harvest. (Sources close to Kluge dispute the origin story; a Trump Winery representative says the current method is to mix fresh grape juice and Chardonnay brandy and age it in wooden barrels.) Cru sells for $34 a bottle as an aperitif to sip before dinner, when apparently buyers mistake the mud I tasted for depth. The young woman and an associate behind the counter radiated the freckled freshness of the sorority sisters they may have been—a common look in Charlottesville, and my similarly enthusiastic young guest talked with them about the fact that they had all visited and enjoyed the same tasteful tasting room back when it was Kluge Estates. The women who conducted the tastings had the forced cheer of cult members who never meant to sign up.

The cheer finally cracked when my guest asked them how business changed before and after the election. “Last summer was crazy,” one young woman said, meaning 2016. “Not now. Suddenly it’s political.” So customers want to talk politics? “Sometimes,” she said carefully. Her friend practically poked her in the ribs. “Constantly,” she said. “She’s sugarcoating. They want to talk at you, not to you.” The friend surveyed the predictably white, very casually dressed customers. “They’re tourists now,” she said. “They don’t want to drink. They want to say they were here.”

Even in the still-stunning setting, the wines suffer in isolation. The Viognier, the Virginia state specialty, was clean but tasteless; the rosé was water, the Chardonnay, the Cabernet, and the Meritage, alcoholic and sweet. At best the wines, such as the sparkling blanc de blanc and the Viognier, are, as my expert friend said, inoffensive; at worst, like the Cru, they demand to be spat out. “At the end of the day Trump wines suck,” my visiting friend said as our Washington dinner came to a close. “But they give a lot of good and loyal people paychecks.”

As we left, the young woman who’d guided us through the tasting handed me my glass, with a surprisingly discreet white decal of the winery’s name and logo—just a capital T. I’ll use it to toast this jobs program, but find something else to swallow.

I don't drink wine, but even if I did, you couldn't convince me to drink toddler swill.

If you think about it, it's actually kind of odd that Trump owns a winery (given his anti-alcohol stance).  Yes, there's a resort there, but there's lots of non-winery resorts for him to corrupt.

[MarblesMom]

On 12/22/2017 at 6:39 PM, GreyhoundFan said:

Flabby. Really clumsy.

It's like looking into the magic mirror from Romper Room - that IS the Donald.

[Gobsmacked]

9/15. I watched elf once. I've had wine.

[GrumpyGran]

7 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

In a statement Friday, DeSantis said he was “grateful to have the President’s support and appreciate what he has done — from appointing great judges to recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital to signing a pro-growth tax cut — to get our country back on track. As an Iraq veteran, I’m especially appreciative of his efforts to support our military and our veterans.”

Seriously, Dumpy is the world's biggest slut. But shouldn't DeSantis be re-thinking this?

Who knows, with a Dumpy endorsement for the eventual Republican candidate and a YUGE influx of Puerto Rican citizens, maybe Florida will be celebrating the election of a Democratic governor at Christmas next year!

[47of74]

Scarborough pointed out what the conservative reaction would have been if Presidents Obama or Clinton did what Fuck Face did today;

Quote

"Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough said Saturday that Democratic presidents, like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, would have faced swift backlash from GOP lawmakers if they criticized the FBI in the same vein as President Trump.

"If Bill Clinton or Barack Obama slandered the FBI or any law enforcement officers the way Trump does, conservatives would have raised holy hell," the MSNBC host tweeted. "Now most are accomplices with their silence. Good luck in 2018, boys."

The comments from Scarborough, a vocal Trump critic, followed on the heels of a series of tweets from Trump targeting top FBI officials on Saturday, including Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and former Director James Comey.

Trump suggested that McCabe may have been compromised in his capacity at the agency by political influence and that Comey was responsible for leaking information to the press. 

Here's the Scarborough tweet

 

[GrumpyGran]

4 minutes ago, 47of74 said:

Scarborough pointed out what the conservative reaction would have been if Presidents Obama or Clinton did what Fuck Face did today;

Here's the Scarborough tweet

 

Has he said anything about that same FBI stopping a terrorist attack in San Francisco? Probably not since 1. it was the FBI, and 2. the guy was a good old white boy from America.

[47of74]

2 minutes ago, GrumpyGran said:

Has he said anything about that same FBI stopping a terrorist attack in San Francisco? Probably not since 1. it was the FBI, and 2. the guy was a good old white boy from America.

Yeah if it had been a minority we'd be hearing about this for the next month not only from der Trumpenführer, but the shitstream media as well.  Since it was a white dude neither have much interest in talking about this guy.

I see fuck face was so worried about state media he called Murdoch before 21st Century Fox was sold to Disney

Quote

President Trump reportedly called 21st Century Fox executive chairman Rupert Murdoch ahead of Disney’s announcement that it would purchase of much of his company to make sure the deal wouldn’t impact Fox News.

According to a New York Times report published Saturday, Trump made the call before news of the sale emerged earlier this month.

The president frequently watches Fox News and often tweets about the network’s coverage of his administration.

Murdoch reportedly assured Trump that the network would not be impacted by the sale.

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]