Trump 30: Donald Trump and the Deathly Comb-Over

[Howl]

Pat Buchanan, what can I say.  He is identified as a "paleoconservative".   He's not stupid and on occasion in the past and this week,  I have come across something he's written that is totally on target about foreign affairs and has a sane take on history.  I highly recommend this blog post, which discusses why torpedoing Obama's Iran deal is a terrible, awful, horrible idea: 

Is president working to assemble a war cabinet?

Spoiler

 

The last man standing between the U.S. and war with Iran may be a four-star general affectionately known to his Marines as “Mad Dog.”

Gen. James Mattis, the secretary of defense, appears to be the last man in the Situation Room who believes the Iran nuclear deal may be worth preserving and that war with Iran is a dreadful idea.

Yet, other than Mattis, President Donald Trump seems to be creating a war cabinet.

Trump himself has pledged to walk away from the Iran nuclear deal — “the worst deal ever” — and reimpose sanctions in May.

His new national security adviser John Bolton, who wrote an op-ed titled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran,” has called for preemptive strikes and “regime change.”

Secretary of State-designate Mike Pompeo calls Iran “a thuggish police state,” a “despotic theocracy,” and “the vanguard of a pernicious empire that is expanding its power and influence across the Middle East.”

Trump’s favorite Arab ruler, 32-year-old Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman, calls Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei “the Hitler of the Middle East.”

Bibi Netanyahu is monomaniacal on Iran, calling the nuclear deal a threat to Israel’s survival and Iran “the greatest threat to our world.”

U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley echoes them all.

Yet Iran appears not to want a war. U.N. inspectors routinely confirm that Iran is strictly abiding by the terms of the nuclear deal.

While U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf often encountered Iranian “fast attack” boats and drones between January 2016 and August 2017, that has stopped. Vessels of both nations have operated virtually without incident.

What would be the result of Trump’s trashing of the nuclear deal?

First would be the isolation of the United States.

China and Russia would not abrogate the deal but would welcome Iran into their camp. England, France and Germany would have to choose between the deal and the U.S. And if Airbus were obligated to spurn Iran’s orders for hundreds of new planes, how would that sit with the Europeans?

How would North Korea react if the U.S. trashed a deal where Iran, after accepting severe restrictions on its nuclear program and allowing intrusive inspections, were cheated of the benefits the Americans promised?

Why would Pyongyang, having seen us attack Iraq, which had no WMD, and Libya, which had given up its WMD to mollify us, ever consider given up its nuclear weapons — especially after seeing the leaders of both nations executed?

And, should the five other signatories to the Iran deal continue with it despite us, and Iran agree to abide by its terms, what do we do then?

Find a casus belli to go to war? Why? How does Iran threaten us?

A war, which would involve U.S. warships against swarms of Iranian torpedo boats could shut down the Persian Gulf to oil traffic and produce a crisis in the global economy. Anti-American Shiite jihadists in Beirut, Baghdad and Bahrain could attack U.S. civilian and military personnel.

As the Army and Marine Corps do not have the troops to invade and occupy Iran, would we have to reinstate the draft?

And if we decided to blockade and bomb Iran, we would have to take out all its anti-ship missiles, submarines, navy, air force, ballistic missiles and air defense system.

And would not a pre-emptive strike on Iran unite its people in hatred of us, just as Japan’s pre-emptive strike on Pearl Harbor united us in a determination to annihilate her empire?

What would the Dow Jones average look like after an attack on Iran?

Trump was nominated because he promised to keep us out of stupid wars like those into which folks like John Bolton and the Bush Republicans plunged us.

After 17 years, we are still mired in Afghanistan, trying to keep the Taliban we overthrew in 2001 from returning to Kabul. Following our 2003 invasion, Iraq, once a bulwark against Iran, became a Shiite ally of Iran.

The rebels we supported in Syria have been routed. And Bashar Assad — thanks to backing from Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and Shiite militias from the Middle East and Central Asia — has secured his throne.

The Kurds who trusted us have been hammered by our NATO ally Turkey in Syria, and by the Iraqi Army we trained in Iraq.

What is Trump, who assured us there would be no more stupid wars, thinking? Truman and LBJ got us into wars they could not end, and both lost their presidencies. Eisenhower and Nixon ended those wars and were rewarded with landslides.

After his smashing victory in Desert Storm, Bush I was denied a second term. After invading Iraq, Bush II lost both houses of Congress in 2006, and his party lost the presidency in 2008 to the antiwar Barack Obama.

Once Trump seemed to understand this history.

 

 

[Cartmann99]

It's nice when the president recognizes holidays. I bet he'll spend a nice quiet day contemplating the miracle of Easter, and enjoying the loving embrace of his family:

He must be back from church already. I bet he has a great message to share with us all on this Easter Sunday:

Wasn't that uplifting?

[CTRLZero]

43 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

Wasn't that uplifting?

FORE!

On another topic, I really enjoyed Jim Carrey's art and political commentary.  I've taken up painting as a hobby* and am getting ideas for painting my next protest march signs.  They will be the most beautiful and best protest signs...

*I'm really bad, lol.

[AmazonGrace]

Quote

Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump

These big flows of people are all trying to take advantage of DACA. They want in on the act!

 

Rufus bless, this man is really and truly a moron.

 

From https://www.uscis.gov/archive/consideration-deferred-action-childhood-arrivals-daca

You could have been eligible for DACA if you:

Quote

 

 Were under the age of 31 as of June 15, 2012;

Came to the United States before reaching your 16th birthday;

Have continuously resided in the United States since June 15, 2007, up to the present time;

Were physically present in the United States on June 15, 2012, and at the time of making your request for consideration of deferred action with USCIS;

Had no lawful status on June 15, 2012;

Are currently in school, have graduated or obtained a certificate of completion from high school, have obtained a general education development (GED) certificate, or are an honorably discharged veteran of the Coast Guard or Armed Forces of the United States; and

Have not been convicted of a felony, significant misdemeanor,or three or more other misdemeanors, and do not otherwise pose a threat to national security or public safety.

 

I don't know if his wall will help in case people are arriving in time machines.

[Destiny]

So Easter. Much President. Wow. :/

[onekidanddone]

1 hour ago, Destiny said:

So Easter. Much President. Wow. :/

Yea. Nice way to walk in Christ's spirit by threatening the refugee a d immigrants. Because hey, Jesus was all about the hate.

Then I saw this and smiled just a little

 

[GreyhoundFan]

To go along with the tweet posted by @onekidanddone -- "This Trump legal defeat may force Trump to decide: His presidency or his businesses?"

Spoiler

In a decision with far-reaching implications for President Trump, a federal court ruled this week that a lawsuit could go forward claiming he unconstitutionally received foreign emoluments — that is, monies from foreign governments explicitly prohibited by the Constitution — from his hotel in Washington. The Associated Press reported:

A federal judge Wednesday allowed Maryland and the District of Columbia to proceed with their lawsuit accusing President Donald Trump of accepting unconstitutional gifts from foreign interests, but limited the case to the president’s involvement with the Trump International Hotel in Washington.

U.S. District Judge Peter J. Messitte’s ruling dismissed other sections of the lawsuit that raised concerns about the impact of foreign gifts to the president from Trump Organization properties outside of Washington.

Maryland and D.C. accuse the president of violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution, which bans the president and other federal officials from accepting gifts from foreign governments as well as U.S. states. Specifically, they allege nearby businesses have been subjected to increased competition as a result of the foreign traffic to the Trump Hotel.

The litigants were delighted with the ruling. (“Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh said ‘we won the first round. It’s a very clear decision that Donald Trump is not above the law and has to be held accountable to the emoluments clause.’ D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine … tweeted: ‘We have standing to hold Pres. Trump accountable for violating the Constitution.’ ”)

If Maryland and the District are successful, Trump may be ordered to do something he has so far avoided and which spineless Republicans have refused to demand — namely, disclose what his businesses receive from foreign governments, and either permanently jettison his ties to those operations or reject payments and other things of value from foreign governments (e.g. trademarks in China). Congress could of course choose to approve Trump’s receipt of his emoluments, but House and Senate Republicans — who like the rest of us don’t actually know what Trump’s businesses receive from what sources — have been loath to do that.

Moreover, if a Democratic Congress is elected, it can choose explicitly to disallow Trump’s receipt of foreign emoluments, setting up a possible constitutional clash. If either Congress or a court holds that Trump must give up certain parts of his operations (or segregate any monies and other valuable offerings from foreign governments), he may finally need to decide whether the presidency is worth giving up parts of his financial empire. Moreover, before a final decision on his retention of foreign emoluments, either Congress or litigants (in one of three cases currently ongoing) could demand a raft of financial records exposing for the first time Trump’s finances, including his tax returns.

I talked about the ruling with Norman Eisen, a former chief ethics lawyer for the Obama administration and chairman of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which is serving as outside counsel for the plaintiffs, and constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe, counsel in a separate case brought in New York by CREW and private litigants, which was dismissed last year but is on appeal. Here is our conversation (edited for sake of clarity and length).

RIGHT TURN: Can Trump make an interlocutory appeal (i.e. appeal right now before a final decision in the case)?

EISEN: The DOJ [Justice Department] can request an interlocutory appeal, but it is up to the courts whether to allow it. Interlocutory appeals are the exception to the norm, and the DOJ will bear the burden of showing an interlocutory appeal is justified. Also, even if an interlocutory appeal is heard, that does not necessarily stay the proceedings below. The DOJ will also have to ask for such a stay and will bear the burden of showing that a stay is warranted.

RT: Why did this case make it past the first hurdle and not the New York case? Will the New York case be appealed?

TRIBE: We are appealing the decision in the Southern District of New York dismissing our suit there. One reason for the different results is that Judge Messitte considered but rejected as wrong some of the grounds Judge Daniels erroneously gave for dismissing the SDNY case. In particular, Judge Messitte correctly rejected Judge Daniels’s conclusion that because Trump’s patrons chose to stay at his hotel, there was nothing a court could do to redress the injuries caused by the emoluments violations; he also rejected Judge Daniels’s conclusion that only Congress, and not the courts, could enforce the foreign emoluments clause. Judge Messitte’s rejection of these key conclusions from Judge Daniels suggests that the appeals court in New York could similarly reject those arguments. Further, the cases involve different plaintiffs, and as Judge Messitte recognized, the District of Columbia and the state of Maryland are not typical litigants: They are afforded “special solicitude.” That means a lower hurdle to jump to prove standing.

RT: What is the significance of suing in Trump’s personal capacity?

EISEN: At oral argument, Judge Messitte recognized the emoluments clauses present a unique question among constitutional provisions. Unlike nearly all other provisions which involve the exercise of government authority, the emoluments clauses govern the public and private behavior of officers as an obligation of their office. Adding a claim against the president in his personal capacity helps ensure that the court will be able to reach the full scope of the his transgressions and maximizes the chance of success as the case proceeds.

RT: When does discovery start? Will you seek tax returns? Depose Trump? What other Trump associates will you want to depose (Trump’s children, Felix Sater, Michael Cohen)?

EISEN: We are deliberating over a discovery plan. At this time we cannot comment on it other than to say the plaintiffs will certainly seek extensive business records that allow us to understand the scope of the president’s constitutional violations. We believe we can move quickly through discovery once it begins.

RT: Are you asking him to disgorge emoluments received to date? Injunctive relief beyond that?

TRIBE: D.C.’s and Maryland’s complaint asks for only declaratory and injunctive relief, which means only relief going forward. Neither the District of Columbia nor the state of Maryland are seeking damages for past harms.

RT: How does this affect the third case brought by roughly 200 representatives and senators?

TRIBE: This decision provides favorable and well-reasoned precedent holding that a court may consider a suit for injunctive relief against the president when he violates his constitutional duties. While the suit brought by members of congress is differently framed than either the SDNY suit or the one brought by D.C. and Maryland, hopefully Judge Messitte’s thoughtful opinion will provide persuasive authority on those issues which do overlap between the cases.

If Dumpy understood this, I'm sure he'd have a major twitter meltdown.

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

"‘Tired of the wait game’: White House stabilizers gone, Trump calling his own shots"

Spoiler

PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Trump began the past workweek cutting into steaks at the White House residence on Monday night with his political soldiers, including former advisers Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, strategist Brad Parscale, and son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner.

He ended it dining on the gilded patio of his Mar-a-Lago estate with eccentric boxing promoter Don King, who said he vented to the president about the Stormy Daniels saga. “It’s just utterly ridiculous,” King said he told a nodding Trump on Thursday evening as the president began his holiday weekend in Palm Beach.

Nowhere to be seen was John F. Kelly, the beleaguered White House chief of staff and overall disciplinarian — nor were the handful of advisers regarded as moderating forces eager to restrain the president from acting impulsively, who have resigned or been fired.

The gatherings neatly illustrated an inflection point for the Trump presidency. Fourteen months into the job, Trump is increasingly defiant and singularly directing his administration with the same rapid and brutal style he honed leading his real estate and branding empire.

Trump is making hasty decisions that jolt markets and shock leaders and experts — including those on his own staff. Some confidants are concerned about the situation, while others, unworried, characterize him as unleashed.

The president is replacing aides who have tended toward caution and consensus with figures far more likely to encourage his rash instincts and act upon them, and he is frequently soliciting advice from loyalists outside the government. As he shakes up his administration, Trump is prioritizing personal chemistry above all else, as evidenced by his controversial selection of Navy Rear Adm. Ronny L. Jackson, the White House physician, to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“The president is in an action mood and doesn’t want to slow-roll things, from trade to the border to staffing changes,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. “He wants to make things that he’s been discussing for a while happen. He’s tired of the wait game.”

This dynamic — detailed in interviews with 23 senior White House officials and outside advisers, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer candid assessments — is evident in multiple realms.

Trump is domineering his strategy regarding the expanding investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, in effect acting as his own lawyer. He is clamoring to reject the counsel of his attorneys and sit for an interview with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, whom he has maligned by name.

On policy, Trump is making sudden decisions without much staff consultation, wagering that they will pay dividends — accepting North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s invitation for a face-to-face meeting and threatening to veto before ultimately signing the most recent government spending bill.

On the stump, Trump is an improvisational showman. He swooped into the working-class Ohio town of Richfield on Thursday to pitch his infrastructure plan but diverged from his script to deliver surprise commentary on a medley of issues. He threatened to delay a newly renegotiated trade deal with South Korea and announced that the United States may soon withdraw troops from Syria.

The president’s unbridled eruptions continued Saturday in a pair of tweets hammering Amazon.com and falsely stating that “the Fake Washington Post” was acting as a lobbyist for the retail behemoth. The Washington Post operates independently of Amazon, though the newspaper is owned by Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon.

All the while, Trump is trying to keep in touch with the cultural zeitgeist. Trump called Roseanne Barr to congratulate her on the success of ABC’s “Roseanne” revival. “Look at Roseanne!” Trump bellowed in Ohio. “Look at her ratings!”

Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former New York mayor and longtime Trump friend, said the president is entering a new phase: “It took time for the president to discover how far he could move things and find the pieces that fit. Now, he sees he has an open field.”

To many beyond the White House, the Trump White House appears dangerously dysfunctional. Theodore B. Olson, a Republican former solicitor general, declined to join Trump’s legal team in the Russia matter.

“I think everybody would agree this is turmoil, it’s chaos, it’s confusion, it’s not good for anything,” Olson recently told anchor Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC. “We always believe that there should be an orderly process, and of course government is not clean or orderly — ever. But this seems to be beyond normal.”

But people close to the president offer a different view.

“I don’t see anything under siege; I see it as the Big Red Machine,” incoming National Economic Council director Larry Kudlow said, referring to the championship Cincinnati Reds baseball teams from the 1970s. “The only people under siege are reporters who don’t like President Trump — and those guys need some significant therapy. I could recommend some awful good people in New York.”

A quartet of senior West Wing aides who spent several hours a day with the president and were considered stabilizing forces are gone. Hope Hicks’s last day as communications director was Thursday. Gary Cohn was replaced as chief economic adviser by Kudlow. H.R. McMaster was dismissed as national security adviser. And Rob Porter departed as staff secretary amid allegations of spousal abuse.

Outside the West Wing Rex Tillerson often challenged Trump as secretary of state, but the president fired him and nominated as his successor CIA Director Mike Pompeo. He is known for agreeing with Trump, as is John Bolton, the incoming national security adviser.

“This is now a president a little bit alone, isolated and without any moderating influences — and, if anything, a president who is being encouraged and goaded on by people around him,” one Trump confidant said. “It really is a president unhinged.”

Other than Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, the lone remaining enforcer is Kelly. But his power as chief of staff has been diminished. Officials said the days of Kelly hovering in the Oval Office morning to night and screening the president’s calls are over. Trump is largely circumventing Kelly’s strict protocols.

The president recently reached out to some people Kelly had sought to excommunicate, calling former communications director Anthony Scaramucci to banter about politics and inviting Lewandowski and Bossie to dinner in the residence.

“He’s rotating back to the people who actually like him and is more willing to take advice from those people,” Scaramucci said. “They’re more honest with him, and he’s more comfortable with them.”

Allies said Trump is reverting to the way he led the Trump Organization from his 26th-floor office suite at Trump Tower in Manhattan. There, staffers were functionaries or lawyers, and many of his advisers were outside the company — rival business leaders, media figures and bankers. Back then, Trump controlled his orbit himself from behind his cluttered desk, relying on assistant Rhona Graff to field calls.

Trump has welcomed friends to the White House recently, including former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who visited Tuesday and met with Bolton, among others. And the president has turned to outside surrogates to carry his messages. After consulting with Trump, Newsmax chief executive Christopher Ruddy went on ABC’s “This Week” on March 25 and revealed that Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin was expected to be removed. Trump fired him three days later.

“It was the direction [Trump] was always bound to take,” said Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign official. “The phone book at the White House was filled by complete strangers. . . . But now he knows how the White House operates, and he’ll operate it himself.”

Ascendant in the West Wing are advisers who play to Trump’s gut: Kudlow on tax cuts and deregulation, Bolton on a muscular approach to foreign affairs, Peter Navarro on protectionist trade policies, Stephen Miller on crackdowns on undocumented immigrants and Kellyanne Conway on an open press strategy and tangling with reporters.

Like Conway, Bolton and Kudlow are seasoned cable news commentators who share Trump’s hard-charging instincts and have no illusions about his governing style. Officials said they are expected to cater to the president’s wishes and seek to avoid the internal knife fights that have befallen many a Trump aide.

Kudlow has told Cohn’s top deputies that he would like them to stay on in their posts, a gesture that West Wing aides described as a reflection of Kudlow’s respect for Cohn’s operation as well as his understanding of the difficulties he would probably encounter if he attempted an overhaul.

Kudlow, 70, is a generational peer of Trump and a staple of the New York business elite to which Trump has long aspired. Kudlow has privately told associates that the president has asked him to be an energetic salesman on television — by acting as a principal, with speeches and road trips — for the Republican-authored tax law ahead of the midterm elections, as opposed to functioning as a behind-the-scenes manager, according to people who have spoken with him.

“He’s squaring up his economic policy with the right adviser for him,” Giuliani said. “Gary was really good, but I don’t know if Gary ever embraced the Trump economic ideas. He was more of a traditional Democrat or moderate Republican. Kudlow is a real cheerleader for the tax cuts in a way Gary never was, although he helped get them passed.”

Bolton, meanwhile, has told allies that he may make major changes on the National Security Council staff but has been careful not to reveal his plans until he formally takes over later this month. He has been working to appear as a team player — touting his bond with Pompeo and lunching Tuesday with McMaster — despite his reputation as a sharp-elbowed bureaucratic brawler, officials said.

Trump has been frustrated by news stories of White House tumult and has ordered aides to contest the notion that there is chaos. He also has vented frequently about the $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill, griping that Congress did not fully fund his promised U.S.-Mexico border wall and labeling Republican congressional leaders “weak negotiators.”

Meeting with advisers Monday in the Oval Office, Trump was alerted to a new CNN poll that showed his approval rating at 42 percent nationally, up 7 percentage points since February. Trump joked that CNN, which he generally views as hostile to him, paid for a survey that pleased him, according to officials briefed on the conversation.

Another issue that has drawn Trump’s ire — although he has not engaged publicly — is Daniels, the adult-film actress who alleged having a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006 and was paid $130,000 to sign a nondisclosure agreement shortly before the 2016 election. She and her attorney have not kept their silence, however, and the president has been bothered by the headlines they have generated.

The Daniels saga came up as Trump ate dinner Thursday night at Mar-a-Lago with his wife, Melania, and other family members. King — who is so controversial because of his 1967 manslaughter conviction (he was later pardoned) that he was barred from speaking at the 2016 Republican National Convention — joined the president and griped about the media.

“The top story, number one, is Stormy Daniels,” King said he told Trump. “I told him it’s utterly ridiculous. I just came back from Hamburg, Germany, and they were just laughing at us.”

King said that Trump nodded in approval and told him, “It’s meaningless.”

“If he denies it happened, that’s what it is,” King said. “Who cares what he does with some lady?”

“The president,” King added, “is a guy who we call in the vernacular of the ghetto, S.K.D., something kinda different.”

I don't know if it's sad or scary that Dumpy is taking advice from Don King. Actually, it's probably both.

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Howl]

Sweet Rufus, that New Yorker cover!  Holy schmoley.  Could be blown up to billboard size?  Just wondering.  I may have to buy a hardcover copy. 

[AmazonGrace]

Happy Easter from the Trump family!

 

The face on that bunny is all of us.

[onekidanddone]

45 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

Happy Easter from the Trump family!

 

The face on that bunny is all of us.

Is that Sean Spicer standing next to him?

[formergothardite]

1 hour ago, AmazonGrace said:

The face on that bunny is all of us.

Melanie looks miserable. I'm surprised she is even agreeing to be in the same location as he is. 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Gobsmacked]

I'm in Scotland, all I know of  White House is what is shown on TV and Proffessor  Google.

It certainly looks a great building. Sadly Dumpy McFuckface devalues the building and its traditions with every breath he draws with in its walls. 

I Have every digit i possess crossed for the mid-term elections. The rest of the (sane) world is with you. 

[Don'tlikekoolaid]

Trump is not fit to be President of a great country like the USofA.  Just stating the obvious.  The good people of the World want him gone.  Hope it happens soon.

[onekidanddone]

10 minutes ago, Don'tlikekoolaid said:

Trump is not fit to be President of a great country like the USofA.  Just stating the obvious.  The good people of the World want him gone.  Hope it happens soon.

What the bloody fuck is "tippy top"? Can't anybody, anybody at all who works around him see how he is just getting worse. More garbled, more impulsive. His speech patterns are unraveling bigly signs of some mental issues, yet the Repubs just sit back and do nothing.

Do I need to start bugging my elected officials to remind them what a cluster fuck this is?

[GreyhoundFan]

4 hours ago, Gobsmacked said:

I'm in Scotland, all I know of  White House is what is shown on TV and Proffessor  Google.

It certainly looks a great building. Sadly Dumpy McFuckface devalues the building and its traditions with every breath he draws with in its walls. 

I Have every digit i possess crossed for the mid-term elections. The rest of the (sane) world is with you. 

The WH is a beautiful building, both inside and out. Before the tours were cut way down (following September 11), I had the opportunity to go inside several times, mostly at Christmas. What really shines through is the pride the permanent employees take in making it lovely.

I'm surprised Twitler hasn't melted down about this: "Chris Christie betrays Trump defenders’ remarkably dim view of the president’s intellect"

Spoiler

Lost in the debate over whether President Trump should talk to Robert Mueller is this: The arguments against him doing it often betray a remarkably dim view of Trump's intellect.

To his credit, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie was rather blunt Sunday in making the case for Trump refusing the interview. Christie said flatly on ABC's “This Week” that he worried Trump wouldn't be able to stop himself from committing perjury (comments start at 8:47 in video above):

He should never walk into that room with Robert Mueller. Because in the end, one of the things that makes the president who he is, is that he’s a salesman. And salesmen, at times, tend to be hyperbolic. Right, and this president certainly has tended to do that.

That’s okay when you’re on the campaign hustle. That’s okay when you’re working on Congress. It is not okay when you’re sitting talking to federal agents because, you know, 18 USC 1001 is false statements to federal agents. That’s a crime. That can send you to jail.

This kind of argument has become rather common when it comes to Trump, but let's step back for a second and focus on what Christie is really saying: He is saying that not only is Trump prone to hyperbole because he's a salesman but that Trump can't be trusted to tell the truth even when not doing so constitutes a felony. Christie is basically suggesting that a 71-year-old man who happens to be the president of the United States can't differentiate well enough between truth and fiction (or what Trump himself has called “truthful hyperbole").

Others who have argued that Trump shouldn't talk to Mueller have danced around this point a little more artfully. Christie has said in the past that he didn't think the evidence warranted an interview with a sitting president. White House lawyer Ty Cobb and others have alluded to the prospect of a “perjury trap” — the possibility that the interview could basically be an elaborate setup to get Trump to make a false statement.

And some aides have anonymously acknowledged that Trump just isn't good with details or the truth. Post contributor Daniel Drezner has been keeping a running tally of aides talking about Trump as if he's a toddler.

But Christie on Sunday basically came out and said what everyone is saying behind closed doors. In the debate over whether Trump is a habitual fabulist or just a strategic one, Christie seems to be coming down on the side of the former. He seems to confirm that Trump doesn't really know what the truth is.

We still don't know whether Trump will grant the interview. But his personal attorney John Dowd reportedly left Trump in part because of frustration with the president's insistence on testifying and apparent concern that Trump might perjure himself. Other lawyers, it seems, may have similar concerns about walking into a situation in which Trump may soon explode the case by talking to Mueller.

At its core, that requires a pretty amazing lack of confidence in the man who has been entrusted to lead our country. And the more Trump supporters like Christie feel compelled to come out and say stuff like this publicly, the more scared you will know they are.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Donald Trump isn’t Winston Churchill. He’s Neville Chamberlain."

Spoiler

Donald Trump has a thing for Winston Churchill. One of Trump’s first acts as president was to restore a Churchill bust to a prominent place in the Oval Office. By doing so, he was aligning himself with a long-established Republican fixation with the World War II-era British leader. American conservatives have turned Churchill into a cult figure, whom they love to cite as an exemplar of principled resistance to tyranny.

Which, of course, he was. Yet President Trump’s attempt to co-opt Churchill’s legacy is looking more perverse by the day. The United States is currently confronting a dictator who has seized territory from his neighbors by force, who is openly striving to undermine liberal democracy around the world, and who defies long-established rules of international behavior. Now Russian President Vladimir Putin stands accused of authoring a brazen attack in Britain against one of his opponents.

And Trump’s response? It can only be described as appeasement.

It is bad enough that Trump had the gall to congratulate Putin on his recent sham victory in the Russian presidential election. Now we learn Trump used the same phone call to invite Putin to Washington for a summit meeting, as has been confirmed by a Kremlin spokesman. It is worth pointing out that Trump made the call to Putin on March 20, 16 days after the former Russian double-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were attacked with a nerve agent at their home in southern England. The poison used had the potential to sicken a large number of people but, evidently, the Russians had zero concerns about collateral damage.

By the time Trump made his generous overture to the Russian president, Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain had already made clear that the trail of responsibility for the attack led straight to Putin. The British were well on their way to drumming up support among their allies for a series of retaliatory measures against the Kremlin, a campaign that has now resulted in the largest expulsion of undeclared Russian intelligence officials since the Cold War. Twenty-nine countries have now taken part — including the United States, which moved to expel 60 Russian diplomats on March 26.

The charitable-minded might take this as evidence the president is seeing the error of ways, finally capitulating to the reality that Putin is a foe of everything the United States holds dear. But Trump has studiously avoided any public endorsement of his administration’s action against the Russians — merely the latest in a lengthy string of cases in which he has conspicuously avoided any criticism of Putin.

Now, to make matters worse, we have learned the U.S. expulsions are not quite what they were made out to be. On March 29, Russian state television reported that a U.S. official had quietly given the Kremlin an exemption: the Russians are welcome to replace those 60 who were expelled whenever they wish, thus effectively transforming what was supposed to be a harsh deterrent into a minor inconvenience. “The doors are open,” the U.S. official is reported to have said. (The British, by contrast, explicitly closed off this option, thus limiting the size of the Russian diplomatic delegation for the foreseeable future.) A reporter followed up with the State Department, which confirmed the report.

So will Trump’s offer of a summit bear fruit? Perhaps not. But the mere fact he made it is already an appalling concession.

It bears repeating: Today’s Russia fits the very definition of an aggressive, revisionist power. Four years ago, Russian forces invaded and annexed Crimea, which belongs to neighboring Ukraine. This was the first time since World War II that a European power has seized territory by force. Moscow continues to wage an undeclared war against Ukraine, sponsoring breakaway territories in the eastern part of that country. (Russia is also behind several other “frozen conflicts” around the former Soviet Union, actively aiding separatists in countries where it wants to retain sway.) And Putin is still using influence operations and cyberattacks to sow chaos in western democracies, often by supporting politicians and parties that aim to cause division and fear.

That the Kremlin continues to indulge in such behavior clearly shows that it does not have any incentive to stop. And why should it? Like the ill-fated appeaser Neville Chamberlain, Trump believes that the best response is to pander to the man who has shown that he has no interest in observing the current rules-based order. Any top-level “talks” with Putin that do not begin, at minimum, with a Russian commitment to return Crimea to Ukrainian control, to observe the sovereignty of Russia’s neighbors, and to cease subversive activities in the West, will merely reward him for his transgressions.

Let’s be clear: Vladimir Putin is not Adolf Hitler. The Russian president is not a genocidal maniac bent on conquering the world. Yet if Churchill taught us anything, it is that we cannot expect a trouble-making dictator to change his ways by encouraging his worst tendencies. Extending invitations and fudging punishments will get us nowhere. Deterrence is the only way forward.

 

[Howl]

6 hours ago, formergothardite said:

Melanie looks miserable. I'm surprised she is even agreeing to be in the same location as he is. 

Are you sure that's not a plywood cutout?  

5 hours ago, Gobsmacked said:

I'm in Scotland, all I know of  White House is what is shown on TV and Proffessor  Google.

It certainly looks a great building. Sadly Dumpy McFuckface devalues the building and its traditions with every breath he draws with in its walls. 

I Have every digit i possess crossed for the mid-term elections. The rest of the (sane) world is with you. 

Thank you for your good wishes.  We certainly need it! 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[fraurosena]

7 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Vladimir Putin is not Adolf Hitler. The Russian president is not a genocidal maniac bent on conquering the world.

I wouldn't be too sure about this statement. It's well known that Putin kills off his opponents, and it doesn't matter where in the world they may be when he does it. The latest example is Sergei Skripal, who was attacked by having a nerve agent smeared on the doorknob of his home in Salisbury, England. Putin hasn't devolved into full blown genocide... yet. But that could only be a matter of time.

Putin may not be Adolf Hitler. But he could very well be another Joseph Stalin. Who, I should remind you, was much, much worse than Hitler. Stalin was responsible for the deaths of 20 to 25 million people.

As to his desire to conquer the world... well, Putin has his fingers in a great many pies all over the world. He's already begun, by overtly annexing Crimea. And let's be brutally honest here. He's also covertly busy annexing the US... and has made good headway so far. There's not much standing in his way right now either, so he will continue his efforts unopposed until he's fully succeeded.

The only thing that could stop him now, is a blue wave. Votes matter. Your vote matters. 

[fraurosena]

If only...