The Trump Presidency

I think Trump is severely disabled by his narcissism and poor decision making and management skills.

 

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The Secretary of State is Rex Tillerson, Exxon's CEO. That is not a silver lining - that is a serious problem, one of the major downsides of electing a Republican to high office in the US.

You are depending on everybody learning to get their estimations of actual US policy from the Vice President?

Pence is a fundamentalist mediocrity, knows less about NATO than Trump does (Trump has, after all, been dealing with Russia and NATO for a while), and isn't running the darkside like Cheney was (Bannon and Tillerson split that job).

 

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#PresidentPuppet | #WhatTheyVotedFor​

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No puppet. No puppet.

Donald Trump is not yet accustomed to bill-signing ceremonies. The president, just a month into his term, walked into a room in the White House last week to sign a measure backed by the coal industry, said a few words, smiled for the cameras, and turned to leave the room.

An aide had to remind Trump to actually sign the bill into law.

(Benen↱)​

There's your puppet.
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Notes:

Benen, Steve. "Trump, GOP lawmakers scrap Stream Protection Rule". msnbc. 21 February 2017. msnbc.com. 21 February 2017. http://on.msnbc.com/2m8ZYWG

 

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I have the personal misfortune of being physically right in the middle of it - some will go out of business...

‘Trump Effect’ Hurting Local Businesses In Palm Beach - http://miami.cbslocal.com/2017/02/20/trump-effect-hurting-local-businesses-in-palm-beach/
Trump's Frequent Visits Disrupt Palm Beach Life And Businesses - http://www.npr.org/2017/02/17/51575...visits-disrupt-palm-beach-life-and-businesses​

The stories are on local news everyday - from adding a helipad at Mar-A-Lago to closing down the waterways offshore from the "Southern White House".

 

Buy hey, you have the joy of knowing your sacrifices, and your pain and suffering will help Trump relish in the glory of his birthright and divine nature.

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- The Cult of Trump

 

#DonnyChrist | #WhatTheyVotedFor​

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Click for personality cult.​

Steve Benen↱ is good at what he does, but it shouldn't be this easy to pile on:

"Amazing" is a generous word under the circumstances. Nixon's California home came to be known as the "Western White House," and Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush spent a considerable amount of time during their presidencies at their respective ranches. But in each of those cases, presidents had private properties where they had private homes. Trump's business operation, on the other hand, now charges $200,000 a person to join a club where members can gain access to the president, members of his team, and a front-row seat to foreign-policy talks in the wake of a North Korean missile launch.

The club's managing director conceded to the Times that Trump's presidency "enhances" club membership – which may help explain the increase in entrance fees – adding, "People are now even more interested in becoming members."

This remains, in other words, an ethical nightmare. A president who refuses to divest from his many business ventures still owns a for-profit enterprise, in which undisclosed people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for exclusive access – and the facility itself openly acknowledges the financial benefits of exploiting Trump's presidency.

How many lobbyists or agents of foreign governments are signing up? We don't know – because Mar-a-Lago doesn't disclose its membership list.​

But wait ... there's more!

• • •​

There is always something to be said about once too often to the well, but, I mean, you know, President Trump―and, when we get right down to it, Republicans―really do just make it easy. Like Benen↱, a couple days ago:

I'll gladly concede that this White House's falsehoods are so numerous, giving deceptive information about the president's golf game hardly registers. For that matter, the president's own lies are often so serious, it's hard to get too worked up about this latest misstep.

But even with those caveats in mind, it's an odd thing to lie about. Have we really reached the point at which Trump World is so accustomed to pushing bogus and misleading information that even the president's golfing is fair game?​

By the way, does Donald Trump fish?

No reason. Just curious.

I wonder when he's going to start (ahem!) performing "miracles".
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Notes:

Benen, Steve. "Trump's for-profit enterprise isn't the 'Southern White House'" msnbc. 20 February 2017. msnbc.com. 22 February 2017. http://on.msnbc.com/2lwczUe

—————. "White House forced to reverse course on Trump's golfing" msnbc. 20 February 2017. msnbc.com. 22 February 2017. http://on.msnbc.com/2mmdTs1

 

Mister, you some funny clown, but you cain't walk on water.
By the way, what's up with how you wanna date yo' daughter?

 

#StandBesideHer | #AndGuideHer​

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The lede from The Hill↱:

An undocumented immigrant diagnosed with a brain tumor while under Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody was returned to a detention center from a Texas hospital, her lawyers said.​

The detail:

The woman, a Salvadoran national identified only as Sara, was released from Huguley Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas, and taken to Prairieland Detention Center against her will, according to her lawyers.

"She told us they tied her hands and ankles in her condition," Melissa Zuniga, a member of Sara's legal team, told The Hill. "She's complaining of a lot of pain."

Zuniga said Sara, 26, was cut off from communication with her family and lawyers, even after the hospital and ICE had cleared Sara's mother for unrestricted phone access.​

The runaround, via the Daily Beast↱:

As of press time, she can't talk to her lawyers or family. Sara's lawyers are based in New Jersey, near where some of her extended family lives. They said they've also been blocked from speaking to her on the phone because of ICE rules limiting communication with hospitalized detainees––despite what they believe is a situation of medical urgency.

Danielle Bennett, an ICE public affairs officer, provided The Daily Beast with this statement:

“Requests by family members to visit ICE detainees who have been hospitalized are permitted but must be approved in advance with ICE and the appropriate consulate,” she said. “ICE is currently reaching out to the family's attorney to explain the process.”

With scant information about her health situation, Sara's family members fear the worst: that she could lose consciousness or die before they can get through ICE's process.

In hopes of helping Sara, her lawyers asked Fatma Marouf―an attorney who heads Texas A&M's Immigrant Rights Clinic―to try to gather more information about her health. Marouf told The Daily Beast that she went to Huguley Hospital on Tuesday afternoon, where two guards tried to stop her from entering Sara's room. The guards told her Sara was on a no-contact list and couldn't communicate with anyone―period.

Marouf told The Daily Beast that she entered Sara's room over the guard's objections.

“They couldn't physically stop me from talking to her,” Marouf said. “I went over to her and I just said, 'We want you to know that your family is working to get you out, and there are attorneys working on your case.'”

She then asked Sara how she was doing.​

And one last note from The Hill:

Sara told Zuniga she was given a CD with her medical records at the hospital, and instructed by doctors not to turn them over to ICE. The CD was taken from Sara upon her return to the detention center, Zuniga said.​

I don't know about anyone else, but I was raised to a better "America" than this.

Remember, this is #WhatTheyVotedFor. This ... cruelty ... this utter devastation ... is what they voted for.

No, President Trump, you cannot steal away the American Promise.

You cannot abscond with Liberty and Justice for All.

Don't get me wrong; you can abscond all you want. But the Republic, the One Nation, stays; you just can't have it.

We sometimes stumble along the fraught path 'twixt here and our more perfect union, but you cannot have Justice, and you cannot have the Blessings of Liberty secured for ourselves and our posterity. The symbols of your disgrace will be the sacrificial lambs we can never afford to forget.
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Notes:

Bernal, Rafael. "Lawyers: ICE detainee with brain tumor removed from hospital". The Hill. 22 February 2017. TheHill.com. 22 February 2017. http://bit.ly/2m9Qv4O

Woodruff, Betsy. "Undocumented Woman With a Brain Tumor Locked Up by ICE". The Daily Beast. 22 February 2017. TheDailyBeast.com. 22 February 2017. http://thebea.st/2m9YGyd

 

#sexualobsessions | #WhatTheyVotedFor​

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A note on disappointment: Unlike Republican disappointment, the reason queer voters aren't especially disappointed in President Trump's betrayal of his campaign rhetoric is that we generally weren't stupid enough to believe him.

That is to say, a Republican candidate for president. Uh-huh. Okay, maybe as a businessman, Mr. Trump, you'll listen to the business community you seem to be so jealous of when they tell you to move past these conservative identity politics.

Okay, right. Never mind.

Besides, we really didn't expect him to win. For the most part, our fears of a Trump presidency were hedged by the proposition that our American neighbors just couldn't possibly sink so low, or be so stupid.

At the end of the day, a Trump voter either supports the bigotry or has a reason to say they're okay with it.

 

dance | spiral | downward

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The problem with asking what is going on in the White House is that there really isn't any not-impolite way of asking; the implications pretty much hemorrhage into the blank spaces in and between the letters and words.

When Donald Trump unveiled his Muslim ban, the president made it seem as if he were responding to a national security crisis in need of immediate attention. When the administration's policy failed in the courts, Team Trump scurried to come up with a quick solution.

More recently, however, the White House's schedule has slowed quite a bit. After Trump vowed he'd see his opponents “in court”―a phrase apparently intended to signal new judicial appeals―Trump's lawyers quietly moved in the opposite direction. When the administration decided to move forward with a new, revised policy, Trump said we'd see his executive order “toward the beginning or middle, at the latest” of this week.

Yesterday, the White House said the new policy would be unveiled next week.

In the meantime, Team Trump's plans to unveil proposals on health care reform and tax reform haven't just been delayed; CNBC reported yesterday those plans have been scrapped altogether.

(Benen↱)​

Delay this, shelve that. Bluster and braggodocio are what they are―i.e., a certain variable quantity of relatively temperate exhaust―but a common attribute among all the people I ever called boss―and, I would expect, something President Trump ought to understand well enough―is the idea that after a while it doesn't matter why. Anecdotally, I once had a boss who would get frustrated and literally stamp a foot while fuming, "It's always bad news! All you ever do is tell me what's wrong!" And what do you do except shrug your way through that part of the meeting wherein the assistant is supposed to be telling the manager what problems are occurring in the store. Somebody didn't come in. These lights are out. We need to call for HVAC. The special order from Sorrento isn't arriving until Monday. The new codes aren't in the POS. Honestly, that was the meeting we had every day when my boss arrived, and eventually I would hear about how it's always bad news. Because, you know, honestly, there's a reason those meetings never started with, "Tell me about all the stuff I absolutely don't need to worry about".

And, you know, I figure some of these business minds are among Trump voters. Some of them should probably be getting sick of all the flaccid excuses.

Still, we ought to be somewhat sympathetic; after all, the moral of the story here is that conservatives ought to be able to fuck up and fuck everyone and if anyone has a problem with it they need to fuck off for hurting a conservative's fucking feelings. So let us acknowledge, then, that governing is hard, and the Bannon administration likely had no idea what it was getting into. Which, in turn, means we need to have a heart; maybe the president's ejaculations of bluster and boast are premature, because let's face it, given the magnitude of Donald Trump's self-love, the last thing he really wants to be is exactly what he is, the worst bad joke Republicans have ever pretended to accidentally tell. Oh, well. At least he gets to be superlative. The actual Aristocrats sketch would probably be both, more useful and entertaining.
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Notes:

Benen, Steve. "Abandoning policy plans, Trump's 'fine-tuned machine' stalls". msnbc. 23 February 2017. msnbc.com. 23 February 2017.

Bors, Matt. "President Bannon?" Daily Kos Comics. 9 February 2017. DailyKos.com. 23 February 2017. http://bit.ly/2lvu6gZ

 

It will be interesting to see if Lt. Gen. McMaster will be able to regain control of The White House National Security Council. Bannon is clearly running the show for now, and that can only result in catastrophe. The US isn't yet Russia. The politicization of national security didn't end well in Russia. It has never ended well anywhere.

Hopefully, eventually there will be enough sane and competent people around Trump to compensate for Trump's grand incompetence, ignorance and general lack of intelligence.

The admiral tells it like it is. Trump is a threat to our democracy. Hell, Republicans are a threat to our democracy! Trump keeps saying stupid and very dangerous things. Unfortuantely, regardless of what happens, I don't think that will change.

The odd thing is there is a "yuge" gap between what Trump's appointees are saying and what Trump has and is saying. So who do you believe, Trump or his appointees?

https://www.yahoo.com/news/bin-lade...dia-attack-threatens-democracy-143623267.html

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Trump attempted to use the FBI to suppress the revelations of Trump's Russian contacts.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cn...k-down-recent-trump-russia-stories/index.html

 

CNN so wanted that story. Did you see that byline?

 

I did. It is a long one.

 

Trump's job approval rating drops to 38% at a time when it should be at its zenith. This doesn't bode well for Trump's presidency, and there is no reason for optimism at this point.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/320670-q-poll-trump-approval-hits-new-low

 

But after all his transgressions, he is still POTUS....he is still in office... why?

 

The Republican Party controls Congress. He will be in office as long as his presence helps the Republican Party agenda, or his loyalists dominate the Republican vote.

 

or until a crisis occurs of such a magnitude that clearly demonstrates to the USA and world generally, just how inadequate his administration is to the task. Perhaps.

And no doubt that crisis is on the horizon.. so it is really a wait and see game I guess...

 

That did not remove Reagan (S&L, Mexican immigration, lobbying boom, the early stages of the climate change mess) or W&Cheney (re-elected after the Iraq Invasion, plus others too numerous to list). It would be hard to imagine realistic failure more complete than W's - his re-election was by a larger margin.