Trump 30: Donald Trump and the Deathly Comb-Over

[formergothardite]

9 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Is he really this delusional, just plain senile, or both?

I think both. It is obvious that he has been living in a delusional world for a very long time, but is inability to understand basic things makes me also think there is some dementia going on. 

[Cartmann99]

Opinion piece about Trump and the QAnon nonsense:

Quote

Last week Roseanne Barr — who, with the hit reboot of her show, has become one of the most prominent Donald Trump supporters in the country — tweeted that the president has freed hundreds of children a month from sexual bondage. “He has broken up trafficking rings in high places everywhere,” she wrote. (The tweet has since been deleted.)

Barr’s tweet, puzzling to the casual observer, was a reference to QAnon, an expansive, complicated pro-Trump conspiracy theory. The theory is fascinating as an artifact of our current political derangement, but more than that, it’s profoundly revealing about the lengths to which some Trump supporters will go to convince themselves that his presidency is going well.

As Paris Martineau explained in New York Magazine, QAnon was born last October, when someone claiming to have “Q” level security clearance started a cryptic thread on 4chan, the online message board and troll playground. It was titled, “The Calm Before the Storm,” a phrase Trump had recently used. Q posted hints, some in the form of questions, ostensibly meant to help clued-in Trump supporters understand what was really going on in Washington beneath the facade of chaos and incompetence. (“What is military intelligence? Why go around the 3 letter agencies?”)

From these clues, a sprawling community on message boards, YouTube videos and Twitter accounts has elaborated an enormous, ever-mutating fantasy narrative about the Trump presidency. In the QAnon reality, Trump only pretended to collude with Russia in order to create a pretext for the hiring of Robert Mueller, the special counsel, who is actually working with Trump to take down an inconceivably evil and powerful network of coup-plotters and child sex traffickers that includes Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and George Soros.

“QAnon points out that this is the beginning of the end for the Clintons,” said Jerome Corsi — a prominent proponent of the lie that Obama was born in Kenya — on a YouTube broadcast in January. He warned that the world would be forced to contend with “films of innocent children pleading for their lives while people are butchering them.” Once that happens, presumably, Trump will be revealed as a master of 12-dimensional chess who successfully distracted smirking elites with his buffoonery while he was quietly saving the world.

Some elements of the QAnon conspiracy theory — secret elites, kidnapped children — are classic, even archetypical. “In all Western culture, you can argue that all conspiracy theories, no matter how diverse, come from the idea of the Jews abducting children,” Chip Berlet, the co-author of “Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort,” told me. Stories about globalists stealing children for sex aren’t that far removed from stories about Jews stealing children to use their blood making matzo.

One twist, however, makes QAnon unusual. Conspiracy theories are usually about evil cabals manipulating world events. QAnon, by contrast, is a conspiracy theory in which the good guys — in this case, Trump and his allies — are in charge. It’s a dream of power rather than a bitter alibi for victimhood. It seems designed to cope with the cognitive dissonance caused by the gap between Trump as his faithful followers like to imagine him, and Trump as he is.

You don’t create a wild fantasy about your leader being a covert genius unless you understand that to most people, he looks like something quite different. You don’t need an occult story about how your side is secretly winning if it’s actually winning. Publicly, many right-wing politicians and pundits disdain the Mueller investigation and pretend to believe that Trump’s ties to Russia are negligible. But among part of the Trump base, the effort to explain them away appears to be creating psychic strain.

“You cannot possibly imagine the size of this,” said a Q dispatch last month. “Trust the plan. Trust there are more good than bad.” Q almost certainly doesn’t know any state secrets, but he, she, or they understand that some fervent Trump supporters require more reassurance than they’re willing to admit. Their desperate conviction that they will be proven right about Trump betrays a secret fear that they will be proven wrong.

 

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[fraurosena]

Aha! Here's the real reason for the trade war with China.

Trump’s trade war conveniently targets Ivanka’s fashion competitors

Quote

In another ethical mess, tariffs announced by the Trump administration exclude Ivanka Trump's company, but will raise costs for some of her competitors. A provision in the tariffs announced by the Trump administration will conveniently hurt Ivanka Trump’s business competitors, while leaving her company unscathed.

The arrangement highlights yet again the immense ethical problems involved in Ivanka’s role in her father’s administration. Like Donald Trump, she has refused to divest from her private holdings while employed in the White House. From her position as a senior adviser, she can influence major policy decisions and then profit from those same decisions.

China announced tariffs on American goods in response to the initial announcement on Trump tariffs. In a tit-for-tat move, heralding a trade war, the Trump administration announced tariffs on some Chinese goods.

The administration created a list of goods that would be excluded from the tariffs. Citing a desire to have “the lowest consumer impact,” the list includes goods like clothing and toys. Ivanka’s company specializes in clothing and holds trademarks in China, so it would avoid the tariffs.

But many of her competitors aren’t so lucky.

While the clothing companies themselves will not be hit by tariffs, the Washington Post reports that much of the machinery used in production of footwear and clothing will be hurt. Particularly, those companies manufacturing their goods in America will be impacted.

Rick Helfenbein, chief executive of the American Apparel and Footwear Association, told the Washington Post, “This would directly raise costs on domestic manufacturers and impact our ability to grow Made in USA.”

Conveniently, Ivanka Trump’s clothing company makes most of its products overseas. While her father has made loud proclamations about returning manufacturing to the United States, she has profited for years from foreign labor.

So companies competing against her line of clothing will face increased costs if they manufacture goods in America, while Ivanka Trump’s company dodges the tariffs and won’t see her costs go up because she outsources.

For the Trump family, the arrangement is a win-win. The same cannot be said for consumers or American businesses, including farmers.

In a recent radio interview, Donald Trump said there would be “pain” for Americans as a result of his tariff push, adding, “we may take a hit.”

But there’s no “hit” for Ivanka Trump’s company. There won’t be any “pain.” Just another convenient and unethical arrangement emanating from the White House, where decisions are being made that enrich one family while hurting millions of others.

Alex Baldwin was so right when his version of the presidunce admitted that he doesn't care about America and that his presiduncy is simply a four-year money-grab.

[mamallama]

AFAIK, NYC highrises don't have sprinklers.  I worked in a residential building built long after Trump Tower and don't recall sprinkler heads.  We also set off the smoke alarm countless times with no rain shower.  What keeps them from being death traps is that there's nothing in the main structure that burns.   It's all steel, concrete and drywall.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump bragged that his tower withstood a fire — but has been silent about the man who died in it"

Spoiler

Depending on whom you followed more closely, there were two accounts of the fire Saturday night that tore through a 50th-floor apartment in Trump Tower, President Trump’s namesake building on Fifth Avenue in New York.

The first narrative unfolded through official alerts and images from the New York Fire Department, which painted a picture of an extraordinarily challenging — and ultimately fatal — blaze to contain and extinguish.

The fire broke out just before 6 p.m. Saturday, officials said. Soon, flames could be seen making their way across the unit as dark plumes of smoke billowed upward, obstructing many of the floors above.

By the time firefighters arrived at the 50th floor of the building, they found “the apartment was entirely on fire,” New York Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro said Saturday.

Forcing their way into the unit, firefighters pulled out one person, unconscious and unresponsive, who had been trapped inside, Nigro added.

The man was taken to the hospital in critical condition, police said. He later died.

In all, six firefighters — of the roughly 200 or so who had responded — suffered minor injuries fighting the blaze, Nigro said.

For the president, however, the fire seemed first a chance to boast of the construction quality of Trump Tower on Twitter, his preferred method of communicating with the public.

“Very confined (well built building),” Trump tweeted Saturday, about an hour after the fire broke out. “Firemen (and women) did a great job. THANK YOU!”

Trump also declared that the fire had been extinguished — before it actually had been.

The fire was still not considered to be under control then because of smoke conditions above the 50th floor, Nigro said Saturday. It was brought under control shortly before 8 p.m. Saturday, about an hour after Trump’s tweet, fire officials said.

“This was a very difficult fire. As you can imagine, the apartment is quite large; we are 50 stories up,” Nigro said. “The rest of the building had a considerable amount of smoke.”

Though Trump thanked the “firemen (and women)” who responded to the blaze, his tweet made no mention of those who had suffered injuries.

At the time, the resident who had been pulled from his burning Trump Tower apartment was listed in critical condition, and officials initially said four firefighters suffered minor injuries.

Officials later announced that the Trump Tower resident had died at Mount Sinai Hospital and identified him as 67-year-old Todd Brassner, who lived in unit 50C. They also revised the count of injured firefighters from four to six.

Nevertheless, Trump’s Saturday evening tweet has remained the only comment he has made regarding the fire in his building, where he keeps an office and a residence. The White House said Saturday that the first family was not in New York when the fire broke out.

On Sunday morning, Trump posted about a half-dozen tweets on a variety of subjects, including the “rigged” investigation into Hillary Clinton and how he and Chinese President Xi Jinping would “always be friends, no matter what happens with our dispute on trade.” But he has not revisited the Trump Tower fire, even after news of Brassner’s death.

Trump, who can be notoriously unfiltered on Twitter, has built a track record of uneven responses to high-profile tragedies. Often, he has rushed to weigh in on incidents of violence, even before all the facts have emerged. Other times, his protracted silence on an issue has been head-scratching, at best, such as with the serial bombings in Austin last month.

Officials said Sunday that Brassner’s cause of death was yet to be determined and that an investigation into the fire was ongoing.

After the fire, Trump’s former opposition to a law requiring sprinklers in residential high-rise buildings came under scrutiny. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Trump lobbied against a bill that would have required sprinklers to be installed in all residential buildings in New York, backing down only after existing buildings such as his own were allowed to be grandfathered in, the New York Daily News reported.

On Saturday, Nigro confirmed to reporters to that no sprinklers were in place in the upper residential floors of Trump Tower, where the fire broke out.

Several residents also spoke of the fear and chaos that erupted after they realized their building was on fire.

“It was a very horrible experience . . . there was no evacuation system in place . . . we were at a loss of what to do. I almost fainted. I thought we would die,” Lalitha Mason, who lives on the 36th floor of Trump Tower, told the New York Post. “My husband is disabled and we were helpless. All we could do is put wet towels under the door and pray.”

There's an answer about the sprinklers in the article above.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s politics of outrage is failing him"

Spoiler

President Trump doubled down last week on his repulsive charge that immigrants from south of our border are “rapists.” It was another sign of what an appalling man he is but also an indication of how much political trouble he faces.

Trump is a demagogue who relies on the angry energy of his supporters. But he finds himself in an untenable position: No matter how many hot buttons he pushes, he cannot arouse the passion he needs on his own side to counter the determination and engagement of those who loathe him.

The upshot is a vicious cycle that could be disastrous for the Republican Party this fall. So far, Trump has failed to stir his base, but he has become, unintentionally, one of the most effective organizers of progressive activism and commitment in the country’s history.

Revulsion at Trump is now the driving force in American politics, and this petrifies the traditional GOP. Responding to the outcome of last week’s election in Wisconsin — a candidate backed by Democrats won an open state Supreme Court seat for the first time since 1995 — the normally loyal Republicans at the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page took off their gloves.

“If Mr. Trump is the main issue on Election Day in November,” the paper wrote, “all the evidence now points to an electoral wipeout like [President Barack] Obama’s in 2010 — this time against Republicans.”

Trump’s latest rape comments illustrated his obsession with pushing issues that appeal to Fox News and conservative talk radio fans at the expense of building his standing with the broader electorate. His outburst came last Thursday at a West Virginia event where he was supposed to be touting the tax cut that Republicans in Congress hope to run on.

But after calling his planned speech “boring” and tossing the pages of his text into the air, he proceeded to praise himself for his 2015 announcement speech in which he declared that Mexican immigrants were “rapists.”

Without offering any proof, he said that women coming to the United States in the so-called caravans he has been ranting about incessantly “are raped at levels that nobody has ever seen before.”

Then came the effort to create an enemy. “They don’t want to mention that,” Trump said. But he is discovering that trashing a vaguely defined “they” is not as effective as deriding and abusing flesh-and-blood foes.

If there is a rational explanation for his seemingly erratic and often outrageous behavior in recent days, it involves a calculation that the coalition he built in 2016 lacks both a clear sense of who the adversary is and a set of causes around which it can rally.

While there is some conflict in the polling about Trump, a consistent finding is that those who strongly oppose him far outnumber those who are enthusiastically for him. A Morning Consult poll last week, for example, found that overall, 54 percent of registered voters disapproved of Trump’s performance while 41 approved. More important is the fact that 41 percent strongly disapproved of him while only 19 percent strongly approved.

Seen another way, the poll showed that three-quarters of those who disapprove of Trump hold intense feelings against him; less than half of those who approve are comparably fervent in their embrace. Trump’s opponents are deeply motivated to put a check on his presidency. His supporters are discouraged and demobilized.

A fifth of the country can provide an ample audience for a cable network and a lot of radio hosts. It is not enough to win an election. In the nominally nonpartisan Wisconsin judge’s race, as Michael Tomasky noted in the Daily Beast, several counties that had moved from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016 swung back to Rebecca Dallet, the choice strongly endorsed by Democrats. And this came in a low-turnout race. In the Obama years, small turnouts benefited Republicans. The energy gap means that this pattern is now reversed.

A Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll released Friday brought home additional concrete results of this imbalance. It found an astonishing 1 in 5 Americans reporting that they had joined protests and rallies since the beginning of 2016 — and that 70 percent of them disapproved of Trump.

The dilemma for Republican politicians tempted to cut and run from Trump is that doing so might only further dispirit the party’s core and diminish Trump’s already parlous popularity. For his part, Trump knows only the politics of outrage. It is looking like a strategy with a very short shelf life.

 

[onekidanddone]

50 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Trump lobbied against a bill that would have required sprinklers to be installed in all residential buildings in New York, backing down only after existing buildings such as his own were allowed to be grandfathered in, the New York Daily News reported

I hate this man.

[GreyhoundFan]

A helpful suggestion from Aunt Crabby:

[hoipolloi]

14 hours ago, formergothardite said:

It seems like in a tall building like that fire sprinklers would be mandatory. It is rather scary if it isn't. It seems like not mandating them is just a tragedy waiting to happen. 

Don't know the specific codes or ordinances for NYC/NYS, but older buildings can be exempted from things like sprinkler systems, especially those in individual units as opposed to common areas like hallways. 

tRump is well-known for fighting stuff like that in his buildings. In this case, tRump Tower NYC, completed in 1983, got a pass for the residential floors as did other residential high-rises:

Quote

 

Fire sprinklers were not required in New York City high-rises when Trump Tower was completed in 1983. Subsequent updates to the building code required commercial skyscrapers to install the sprinklers retroactively, but owners of older residential high-rises are not required to install sprinklers unless the building undergoes major renovations.

Some fire-safety advocates pushed for a requirement that older apartment buildings be retrofitted with sprinklers when New York City passed a law requiring them in new residential highrises in 1999, but officials in the administration of then-mayor Rudy Giuliani said that would be too expensive.

 

More here on the victim of the fire.

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Rachel333]

Here's the undoctored image, which still isn't terribly flattering.

 

[CTRLZero]

Back on the Trump Tower fire:  I was surprised that some residents didn't get word that there was a fire in the building.
 

Quote

 

Some residents said they didn’t get any notification from building management to evacuate.

Lalitha Masson, a 76-year-old resident, called it “a very, very terrifying experience.”

Masson told The New York Times that she did not receive any announcement about leaving, and that when she called the front desk no one answered.

 

I don't know if this means that the residents heard an alarm, but didn't receive instructions to evacuate, but it would be a scary situation.   In our condo, in addition to sprinklers, fire extinguishers provided in each unit, and smoke detectors, there is a building-wide notification when there is a fire (so far only false alarms, thank goodness) anywhere in the building, even if the fire would in no way affect your own section of the building. 

In another story, one time we were staying in a hotel when a fire alarm sounded.  We helped evacuate a woman with mobility issues down many flights of stairs, only to learn that the front desk didn't even know the fire alarm was going off!  It's frightening how ill-prepared for disaster some of these highrises can be.

 

[AmazonGrace]

So it seems that Trump finally killed someone on Fifth Avenue.

[AmazonGrace]

Wut?

"Yeah farmers could suffer but if China thinks I give a fuck, the joke's on them ha. Anyway most farmers voted for me so they won't mind they got screwed." Is that a fair translation?

[formergothardite]

He looks like he is sulking with his arms crossed like that. 

[candygirl200413]

So is he wearing a long coat? I"m honestly confused by his get-up, especially because it's weird that he has no tailored/flattering clothing.

[AmazonGrace]

Today in Blatant Corruption: Trump org. lawyers threatened the president of Panama to make him intervene in a legal dispute. 

 

[Audrey2]

59 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

Wut?

"Yeah farmers could suffer but if China thinks I give a fuck, the joke's on them ha. Anyway most farmers voted for me so they won't mind they got screwed." Is that a fair translation?

The sad thing is, he knows that the farmers will vote for him anyway. They tend to be a very conservative biting block. They would be more concerned to see a Democrat in the White House than they would to be the losers in a trade war, as counterintuitive as it sounds. I grew up in a rural part of the Midwest, and have also seen several Trump signs in rural eastern Washington, so I know this to be so.

[Gobsmacked]

50 minutes ago, formergothardite said:

He looks like he is sulking with his arms crossed like that. 

His body language is always terrible. He is defensive all the time. Not because (IMO) he feels or knows he a complete Prat and Loser but because he is angry that he cannot get his own way. If he didn't hug/hold onto himself the way he does he would literally stomp his fit, throw things and hit walls. He is physically holding his rage in. 

[Cartmann99]

7 hours ago, Rachel333 said:

Here's the undoctored image, which still isn't terribly flattering.

 

There's custom clothing shops in the metro area that could create a wardrobe for him that fits properly.

*thinks a moment*

Oh wait, they'd expect to be paid for their labors, and he'd be a complete jackass when they needed to take his measurements or do fittings. 

Never mind....

[Cartmann99]

[Destiny]

He’s throwing an epic tantrum right now.

[onekidanddone]

27 minutes ago, Destiny said:

He’s throwing an epic tantrum right now.

We need an umbrella of protection for Muller

[Cartmann99]

We may have a very long night ahead of us....