TRUMP is seriously dangerous

[SonicG]

I wholly believe the military might need to step in at some point and those generals will serve as point men for restoring "order"...

In the second Nixon term they were prepared to do just that.

I truly think they are there to prevent a rash nuclear launch by Herr Trump, but not to avert a constitutional crisis. If you want to be a true believer about it all, then there has been a lot of behind the scenes intelligence information sharing making the military aware of what is coming down the pike as far Mueller's investigation, or they are simply scared of the livewire that Fox News screaming "coup" is dangling around...Either way, constitutional crisis equals military stepping in...

[seemslikeadream]

Trump has increased US military involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen....and

The 'bloody-nose option'? Trump eyes action on North Korea in 2018
https://www.yahoo.com/amphtml/news/bloo ... ssion=true

Sarah Kendzior: Trump Likely To Be Threatening, Blackmailing Republicans
By Susie Madrak
12/22/17 5:38am

1 hour ago by Susie Madrak706

Joy Reid asked Sarah Kendzior, expert on authoritarian regimes, about Republicans who strongly opposed Trump, yet now flatter him.

"You wrote about Lindsey Graham explicitly, he is somebody who has admitted he was hacked by the Russians, had strong opinions of Russiagate. What are the not-so-innocent explanations for why he's changed?" Joy Reid asked.

"There's always the explanation of careerism, opportunism, that's a typical aspect of politics, we shouldn't rule that out. That can go hand in hand," Kendzior said.

"But we do know the RNC was hacked, we don't know what happened with those emails, we know that Lindsey Graham's personal emails were also hacked. And Trump has a long track record of blackmailing and threatening who he sees as his political opponents. That goes back throughout his entire career, especially in terms of his lawyers, whether Roy Cohn in the 1980s, Michael Cohen during the election.

"And so I think it's possible that some of these GOP players might be greedy and opportunistic and are also being blackmailed or threatened. There's also the issue, I think, of contamination in the sense of the Russia investigation. We know that there are a number of shady donors, a lot of dirty money, some of it stemming from Russian oligarchs who donated to the GOP campaign, and that certain individuals may not want to be investigated for their role in taking that kind of money.

"Lindsey Graham is one of those people, I think a number in the GOP are worried about that, so yeah, I think what concerns me most is that they seem afraid, the seem unable to stand up for themselves, They lack all dignity. Trump has berated them, insulted them. He's gone after their wives and family members saying terrible things, and yet they prostrate themselves to him.

"What kind of leader are you, what kind of man are you? That's something that does have me concerned."

Of course he's blackmailing them! Getting dirt on his rivals from the Russians is one of the things Christopher Steele wrote in his famous dossier. Remember?

[Karmamatterz]

I truly think they are there to prevent a rash nuclear launch by Herr Trump, but not to avert a constitutional crisis. If you want to be a true believer about it all, then there has been a lot of behind the scenes intelligence information sharing making the military aware of what is coming down the pike as far Mueller's investigation, or they are simply scared of the livewire that Fox News screaming "coup" is dangling around...Either way, constitutional crisis equals military stepping in...

Are people off on Christmas break and sitting around smoking weed?

[seemslikeadream]

Are people off on Christmas break and sitting around smoking weed?

no

Trump Plans for Nuclear Arsenal Require $1.2 Trillion
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40745

The 'bloody-nose option'? Trump eyes action on North Korea in 2018
https://www.yahoo.com/amphtml/news/bloo ... ssion=true

and yes

[seemslikeadream]

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.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/23/us/p ... d=tw-share

[seemslikeadream]

ENVIRONMENT
Meet the Most Dangerous Man on Earth
We're all now immersed in an evolving Trumpocalypse.
By Tom Engelhardt

/ TomDispatch December 25, 2017, 7:44 AM GMT


Let’s start with the universe and work our way in. Who cares? Not them because as far as we know they aren’t there. As far as we know, no one exists in our galaxy or perhaps anywhere else but us (and the other creatures on this all-too-modest planet of ours). So don’t count on any aliens out there caring what happens to humanity. They won’t.

As for it -- Earth -- the planet itself can’t, of course, care, no matter what we do to it. And I’m sure it won’t be news to you that, when it comes to him -- and I mean, of course, President Donald J. Trump, who reputedly has a void where the normal quotient of human empathy might be -- don’t give it a second’s thought. Beyond himself, his businesses, and possibly (just possibly) his family, he clearly couldn’t give less of a damn about us or, for that matter, what happens to anyone after he departs this planet.

As for us, the rest of us here in the United States at least, we already know something about the nature of our caring. A Yale study released last March indicated that 70% of us -- a surprising but still less than overwhelming number (given the by-now-well-established apocalyptic dangers involved) -- believe that global warming is actually occurring. Less than half of us, however, expect to be personally harmed by it. So, to quote the eminently quotable Alfred E. Newman, "What, me worry?"

Tell that, by the way, to the inhabitants of Ojai and other southern California hotspots -- infernos, actually -- being reduced to cinders this December, a month that not so long ago wasn’t significant when it came to fires in that state. But such blazes should have been no surprise, thanks to the way fire seasons are lengthening on this warming planet. A burning December is simply part of what the governor of California, on surveying the fire damage recently, dubbed “the new normal” -- just as ever more powerful Atlantic hurricanes, growing increasingly fierce as they pass over the warming waters of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico on their way to batter the United States, are likely to be another new normal of our American world.

In the wake of the hottest year on record, we all now live on a new-normal planet, which means a significantly more extreme one. Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that the political version of that new normal involves a wildly overheated, overbearing, over-hyped, over-tweeted president (even if only 60-odd percent of us believe that he could truly harm us). He’s a man who, as the New York Times reported recently, begins to boil with doubt and disturbance if he doesn’t find himself in the headlines, the focus of cable everything, for even a day or two. He’s a man who seems to thrive only when the pot is boiling and when he’s the center of the universe. And what a world we’ve prepared for such an incendiary figure! (More on that later.)

We're all now immersed in an evolving Trumpocalypse. In a sense, we were there even before The Donald entered the Oval Office. Just consider what it meant to elect a visibly disturbed human being to the highest office of the most powerful, potentially destructive nation on Earth. What does that tell you? One possibility: given the near majority of American voters who sent him to the White House, by campaign 2016 we were already living in a deeply disturbed country. And considering the coming of 1% elections, the growth of plutocracy, the blooming of a new Gilded Age whose wealth disparities must already be competitive with its nineteenth-century predecessor, the rise of the national security state, our endless wars (now turning “generational”), the increasing militarization of this country, and the demobilization of its people, to mention only a few twenty-first-century American developments, that should hardly be surprising.

Could Donald Trump Be the End of Evolutionary History?

Recently, as I was mulling over the extremity of this Trumpian moment, a depiction of evolution from my youth popped into my head. Sometimes back then, such illustrations, as I remember them, began with a fish-like creature flippering its way out of the water to be transformed into a reptile, but this one, known as the "March of Progress," started with a hunched over ape-like creature. What followed were a series of figures that, left to right, grew ever more Homo-sapiens-like and ever more upright to the last guy, a muscular-looking fellow walking oh-so-erectly.

He, of course, was a proud specimen of us and we -- it went without saying at the time -- were the proud end of the line on this planet. We were it, progress personified! Even in my youth, however, we were also in the process of updating that evolutionary end point. At the height of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the fear of another kind of end, one that might truly be the end of everything, had become a nightmarish commonplace in our lives.

One night almost 60 years ago, for instance, I can still vividly remember myself on my hands and knees crawling through the rubble of an atomically devastated city. It was just a nightmare, of course, but of a sort that was anything but uncommon for those of us growing up then. And there were times -- especially during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 -- when those nuclear nightmares left the world of dreams and pop culture for everyday life. And even before that, if you were a child, you regularly experienced the fear of obliteration, as the air raid sirens wailed outside your classroom window, the radio on your teacher’s desk broadcast warnings from Conelrad, and you “ducked and covered” under your flimsy desk.

With the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, such fears receded, though they shouldn’t have, since by then, in a world of spreading nuclear states, we already knew about “nuclear winter.” What that meant should have been terrifying. A perfectly imaginable nuclear war, not between superpowers but regional powers like India and Pakistan, could put so much smoke, so many particulates, into the atmosphere as to absorb sunlight for years, radically cooling the planet and possibly starving out most of humanity.

Only in our moment, however, have such nuclear fears returned in a significant way. Under the circumstances, more than half a century after that March of Progress imagery became popular, if we were to provisionally update it, we might have to add a singularly recognizable figure to the far right side of that diorama (appropriately enough): a large but slightly stooped man with a jut-chin, a flaming face, and a distinctive orange comb-over.

Which brings us to a straightforward enough question: Could Donald Trump prove to be the end of evolutionary history? The answer, however provisionally, is that he could. At a minimum, right now he qualifies as the most dangerous man on the planet. He might indeed be the final stopping spot (or at least the person who pointed the way toward it) for human history, for everything that led to this moment, to us.


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What Rough Beast, Its Hour Come Round at Last...?

Whatever you do, however, don’t just blame Donald Trump for this. He was simply the particularly unsettling version of Homo sapiens ushered into the White House on a backlash vote of dissatisfaction in 2016. When he got there, he unexpectedly found powers beyond compare awaiting him like so many loaded guns. As was true with the two presidents who preceded him, he automatically became not just the commander-in-chief of this country but its assassin-in-chief; that is, he found himself in personal control of an armada of drone aircraft that could be sent just about anywhere on Earth at his command to kill just about anyone of his choosing. At his beck and call, he also had the equivalent of what historian Chalmers Johnson once called the president’s own private army (now, armies): both the CIA irregulars Johnson was familiar with and the U.S. military’s vast, secretive Special Operations forces. Above all, however, he found himself in charge of the planet’s largest nuclear arsenal, weaponry that he and he alone could order into use.

In short, like this country’s other presidents since August 1945, he was fully weaponized and capable of singlehandedly turning this planet, or significant parts of it, into an instant inferno, a wasteland of -- in his incendiary phrase in relation to North Korea -- “fire and fury.” On January 20, 2017, in other words, he became the personification of a duck-and-cover planet (even though, as had been true since the 1950s, there was really nowhere to hide). It made no difference that he himself was woefully ignorant about the nature and power of such weaponry.

And speaking of planetary infernos, he also found himself weaponized when it came to a second set of instruments of ultimate destruction about which he was no less ignorant and to which he was even more in thrall. He brought to the Oval Office -- Make America Great Again! -- a nostalgia for his fossil-fuelized childhood world of the 1950s. Weaponized by Big Energy, he arrived prepared to ensure that the wealthiest and most powerful country on the planet would clear the way for yet more pipelines, fracking, offshore drilling, and just about every other imaginable form of exploitation of oil, natural gas, and coal (but not alternative energy). All of this was intended to create, as he proclaimed, a new “golden age,” not just of American energy independence but of “energy dominance” on a planetary scale. And here's what that really means: through his executive orders and the decisions of the stunning range of climate deniers and Big Oil enthusiasts he appointed to key posts in his administration, he can indeed ensure that ever more greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels will enter the atmosphere in the years to come, creating the basis for another kind of apocalypse.

On the promotion of global warming in his first year in office, it’s reasonable to say, with a certain Trumpian pride, that the president has once again made the United States the planet’s truly “exceptional” nation. In November, only five months after President Trump announced that the U.S. would withdraw as soon as possible from the Paris climate agreement to fight global warming, Syria (of all countries) finally signed onto it, the last nation on Earth to do so. That meant this country was truly... well, you can't say left out in the "cold," not on this planet anymore, but quite literally exceptional in its single-minded efforts to ensure the destruction of the very environment that had for so long ensured humanity’s well-being and made the creation of those illustrations of evolutionary progress possible.

Still, you can’t just blame President Trump for this either. He’s not responsible for the ingenuity, that gift of evolution, that led us, wittingly in the case of nuclear weapons and (initially) unwittingly in the case of climate change, to take powers once relegated to the gods and place them in our own hands -- as of January 20, 2017, in fact, in the hands of Donald J. Trump. Don’t blame him alone for the fact that the most apocalyptic moment in our history might come not via an asteroid from outer space, but from Trump Tower.

So here we are, living with a man whose ultimate urge seems to be to bring the world to a boil around himself. It’s possible that he might indeed be the first president since Harry Truman in 1945 to order the use of nuclear weapons. As Nobel Prize winner Beatrice Fihn, director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, recently commented, the world might be only “a tiny tantrum” away from nuclear war in Asia. At the very least, he may already be helping to launch a new global nuclear arms race in which countries from South Korea and Japan to Iran and Saudi Arabia could find themselves with world-ending arsenals, leaving nuclear winter in the hands of... well, don’t even think about it.

Now, imagine that amended evolutionary chart again or perhaps -- in honor of The Donald’s recent announcement that the U.S. was recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital -- call to mind poet William Butler Yeats’s words about a world in which “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,” while some “rough beast, its hour come round at last” is slouching “towards Bethlehem to be born.” Think then of what a genuine horror it is that so much world-ending power is in the hands of any single human being, no less such a disturbed and disturbing one.

Of course, while Donald Trump might represent the end of the line that began in some African valley so many millennia ago, nothing on this planet is graven in stone, not when it comes to us. We still have the potential freedom to choose otherwise, to do otherwise. We have the capacity for wonders as well as horrors. We have the ability to create as well as to destroy.

In the phrase of Jonathan Schell, the fate of the Earth remains not just in his hands, but in ours. If they, those nonexistent aliens, don’t care and the planet can’t care and the alien in the White House doesn’t give a damn, then it’s up to us to care. It’s up to us to protest, resist, and change, to communicate and convince, to fight for life rather than its destruction. If you’re of a certain age, all you have to do is look at your children or grandchildren (or those of your friends and neighbors) and you know that no one, Donald Trump included, should have the right to consign them to the flames. What did they ever do to end up in a hell on Earth?

2018 is on the horizon. Let's make it a better time, not the end of time
https://www.alternet.org/environment/me ... -man-earth

[seemslikeadream]

The president of the United States is not well. That is an uncomfortable thing to say, but it is an even worse thing to ignore.

Incoherent, authoritarian, uninformed: Trump’s New York Times interview is a scary read

The president of the United States is not well.

Ezra KleinDec 29, 2017, 1:40pm EST
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The president of the United States is not well. That is an uncomfortable thing to say, but it is an even worse thing to ignore.

Consider the interview Trump gave to the New York Times on Thursday. It begins with a string of falsehoods that make it difficult to tell whether the leader of the free world is lying or delusional. Remember, these are President Donald Trump’s words, after being told a recording device is on:

Virtually every Democrat has said there is no collusion. There is no collusion. And even these committees that have been set up. If you look at what’s going on — and in fact, what it’s done is, it’s really angered the base and made the base stronger. My base is stronger than it’s ever been. Great congressmen, in particular, some of the congressmen have been unbelievable in pointing out what a witch hunt the whole thing is. So, I think it’s been proven that there is no collusion.

It almost goes without saying that literally zero congressional Democrats have said that there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. Zero.

What key Democrats are actually saying is closer to the opposite. On December 20, for instance, Sen. Mark Warner, the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and thus the Senate Democrat leading the investigation into collusion, said, “despite the initial denials of any Russian contacts during the election, this Committee’s efforts have helped uncover numerous and troubling high-level engagements between the Trump campaign and Russian affiliates — many of which have only been revealed in recent months.”

Nor is Trump’s base strengthening, or even holding steady. In a detailed analysis of Trump’s poll numbers, FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten concluded that the president is losing the most ground in the reddest states:

In states where Trump won by at least 10 points, his net approval rating is down 18 percentage points, on average, compared to his margin last November. In states that were decided by 10 points or less in November, it’s down only 13 points. And it’s down 8 points in states Clinton carried by at least 10 points.

The fact that Trump has lost the greatest number of supporters in red states is perhaps the clearest indication yet that he is losing ground among some form of his base, if you think of his base as those who voted for him in November.

CNN took a different angle on the same question and also found slippage among Trump’s base. It looked at the change in Trump’s approval ratings from February to November among the demographic groups that formed the core of Trump’s electoral coalition — in every group, there’d been substantial declines. Trump’s numbers have fallen by 8 points among Republicans, by 9 points among voters over 50, by 10 points among whites with no college, by 17 points among white evangelicals. “It has become increasingly clear that even his base is not immune,” CNN concluded.



As for Trump’s contention that “it’s been proven that there is no collusion,” it’s hard to even know how to begin responding to that. In recent months, Trump’s former campaign manager and national security adviser have both been charged with crimes by Robert Mueller, and the investigation is not just ongoing but apparently widening in its scope and ferocity. Yet here is Trump’s take:

I saw Dianne Feinstein the other day on television saying there is no collusion. She’s the head of the committee. The Republicans, in terms of the House committees, they come out, they’re so angry because there is no collusion. So, I actually think that it’s turning out — I actually think it’s turning to the Democrats because there was collusion on behalf of the Democrats. There was collusion with the Russians and the Democrats. A lot of collusion.

Sen. Feinstein has not said that she, or any of the ongoing investigations, has concluded that there was no collusion. What she has said is that investigators believe Trump may have obstructed justice in his efforts to derail inquiries into collusion:

The [Senate] Judiciary Committee has an investigation going as well and it involves obstruction of justice and I think what we're beginning to see is the putting together of a case of obstruction of justice.

It speaks to Trump’s habits of mind, to the sycophantic sources from which he prefers to get his news, that he heard something Feinstein said and has come to believe she has absolved him — yet misses the actual thing she said that threatens him.

It would be comforting, on some level, to believe that Trump is simply lying, that he is trying to convince us of what he knows to be untrue. It is scarier to believe that Trump is delusional, that he has persuaded himself that Democrats have said things they’ve never said, that his base has strengthened when it has actually weakened, that it’s really his opponents under investigation for collusion, that his campaign has been cleared of wrongdoing when the circumstantial case for collusion has only grown stronger.

But that is far from the end of the interview.

Trump: “I have absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department”

A few paragraphs later, for instance, Trump offers this chilling comment when asked about Hillary Clinton’s emails (which, amazingly, we are somehow still talking about in December 2017):

NYT: You control the Justice Department. Should they reopen that email investigation?

TRUMP: What I’ve done is, I have absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department. But for purposes of hopefully thinking I’m going to be treated fairly, I’ve stayed uninvolved with this particular matter.

Read Trump’s phrasing carefully: “I have absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department.” It’s a statement that speaks both to Trump’s yearning for authoritarian power and his misunderstanding of the system in which he actually operates.

And it’s followed by something yet scarier. “For purposes of hopefully thinking I’m going to be treated fairly, I’ve stayed uninvolved with this particular matter,” he says.

President Donald Trump Arrives At Walter Reed National Military Medical Center Chris Kleponis-Pool/Getty Images
Here, Trump offers insight into his own thinking. He appears to believe that he is engaged in some explicit or implicit quid pro quo with the Department of Justice: He doesn’t fire Jeff Sessions, demand prosecution of his political enemies, or whatever it is he imagines doing with his “absolute right,” so long as they treat him and his associates “fairly,” which likely means protecting him from Mueller’s investigation.

Imagine reading this comment on transcripts from Richard Nixon’s tapes. It would be the kind of comment that would leave us glad Nixon was forced from office, chilled that such a man ever occupied the presidency at all.

The interview, of course, is not done.

TRUMP: It’s too bad Jeff recused himself. I like Jeff, but it’s too bad he recused himself. I thought. … Many people will tell you that something is [inaudible].

NYT: Do you think Holder was more loyal to …

TRUMP: I don’t want to get into loyalty, but I will tell you that, I will say this: Holder protected President Obama. Totally protected him. When you look at the I.R.S. scandal, when you look at the guns for whatever, when you look at all of the tremendous, ah, real problems they had, not made-up problems like Russian collusion, these were real problems. When you look at the things that they did, and Holder protected the president. And I have great respect for that, I’ll be honest, I have great respect for that.

Read that again. Trump’s premise in this section appears to be that President Obama engaged in a wide array of criminal, undemocratic, and negligent behaviors but his attorney general protected him from justice. And Trump’s conclusion is that Obama’s attorney general did his job well. To Trump, the attorney general doesn’t serve the country, or the Constitution, but the president.

Trump does not know what he doesn’t know, and he overestimates what he does know

At this point, the interview moves towards policy topics, and Trump relaxes into self-flattery:

I know more about the big bills. … Than any president that’s ever been in office. Whether it’s health care and taxes. Especially taxes. And if I didn’t, I couldn’t have persuaded a hundred. … You ask Mark Meadows [inaudible]. … I couldn’t have persuaded a hundred congressmen to go along with the bill. The first bill, you know, that was ultimately, shockingly rejected ... I know the details of taxes better than anybody. Better than the greatest C.P.A. I know the details of health care better than most, better than most. And if I didn’t, I couldn’t have talked all these people into doing ultimately only to be rejected.

In psychology, there’s an idea known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. It refers to research by David Dunning and Justin Kruger that found the least competent people often believe they are the most competent because they “lack the very expertise needed to recognize how badly they’re doing.” This dynamic helps explain comments like the one Trump makes here.

Over the course of reporting on the Trump White House, I have spoken to people who brief Trump and people who have been briefed by him. I’ve talked to policy experts who have sat in the Oval Office explaining their ideas to the president and to members of Congress who have listened to the president sell his ideas to them. I’ve talked to both Democrats and Republicans who have occupied these roles. In all cases, their judgment of Trump is identical: He is not just notably uninformed but also notably difficult to inform — his attention span is thin, he hears what he wants to hear, he wanders off topic, he has trouble following complex arguments. Trump has trouble following his briefings or even correctly repeating what he has heard.

This is all perfectly evident if you listen to Trump discuss policy in public even momentarily. For instance, in this same New York Times interview, he tries to explain how he’s changed Obamacare:

So now I have associations, I have private insurance companies coming and will sell private health care plans to people through associations. That’s gonna be millions and millions of people. People have no idea how big that is. And by the way, and for that, we’ve ended across state lines. So we have competition. You know for that I’m allowed to [inaudible] state lines. So that’s all done.

Now I’ve ended the individual mandate. And the other thing I wish you’d tell people. So when I do this, and we’ve got health care, you know, McCain did his vote.

... We’ve created associations, millions of people are joining associations. Millions. That were formerly in Obamacare or didn’t have insurance. Or didn’t have health care. Millions of people. That’s gonna be a big bill, you watch. It could be as high as 50 percent of the people. You watch. So that’s a big thing. And the individual mandate. So now you have associations, and people don’t even talk about the associations. That could be half the people are going to be joining up. … With private [inaudible]. So now you have associations and the individual mandate.

I can, with some effort, untangle what Trump might have been trying to say here, but it’s so incoherent, so suffused with half-related ideas and personal obsessions (why did Trump feel the need to bring up McCain’s vote?), that it’s hard to say for sure.

President Trump Speaks On The Passage Of The GOP Tax Plan At The White House Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
At best, Trump is saying something that is comprehensible but incorrect. He signed an executive order making it easier to form association health plans, which are health plans formed by groups of small businesses, and making it easier for those plans to skirt Obamacare’s insurance regulations and to contain small businesses from multiple states.

As of now, and Trump doesn’t seem to realize this, it’s just an executive order — the rules defining and implementing it have not been written, so it is not yet happening, and we don’t know how it will work in practice, much less how many people may eventually sign up. Nor does the order get rid of the prohibition on selling insurance across state lines for most people — it’s only for this one kind of plan which can include members in multiple states, and which will only serve a tiny minority of the health insurance market.

Whatever Trump is saying, it does not reveal much familiarity with health policy, or even with the status and limits of his own actions. And yet Trump believes himself, on policy, to be the most informed president in American history. As the Dunning-Kruger effect suggests, he doesn’t know how much he doesn’t know, and that, combined with his natural tendency toward narcissism, has left him dangerously overconfident in his own knowledge base.

Speaking of narcissism:

We’re going to win another four years for a lot of reasons, most importantly because our country is starting to do well again and we’re being respected again. But another reason that I’m going to win another four years is because newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if I’m not there because without me, their ratings are going down the tubes. Without me, The New York Times will indeed be not the failing New York Times, but the failed New York Times. So they basically have to let me win. And eventually, probably six months before the election, they’ll be loving me because they’re saying, “Please, please, don’t lose Donald Trump.”

What is one even to say about this? Is it a joke? If so, why is Trump taking this opportunity to make it? Is it an attack on the media? Is it Trump finding another way to compliment himself, to give himself credit for the media’s success?

Imagine how we would react to literally any other president speaking like this. Trump has bludgeoned us into becoming accustomed to these kinds of comments but that, too, is worrying.

This is the president of the United States speaking to the New York Times. His comments are, by turns, incoherent, incorrect, conspiratorial, delusional, self-aggrandizing, and underinformed. This is not a partisan judgment — indeed, the interview is rarely coherent or specific enough to classify the points Trump makes on a recognizable left-right spectrum. As has been true since he entered American politics, Trump is interested in Trump — over the course of the interview, he mentions his Electoral College strategy seven times, in each case using it to underscore his political savvy and to suggest that he could easily have won the popular vote if he had tried.

I am not a medical professional, and I will not pretend to know what is truly happening here. It’s become a common conversation topic in Washington to muse on whether the president is suffering from some form of cognitive decline or psychological malady. I don’t think those hypotheses are necessary or meaningful. Whatever the cause, it is plainly obvious from Trump’s words that this is not a man fit to be president, that he is not well or capable in some fundamental way. That is an uncomfortable thing to say, and so many prefer not to say it, but Trump does not occupy a job where such deficiencies can be safely ignored.

Listen: Ezra Klein on the case for impeachment

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... york-times

[BenDhyan]

Trump is right about the FBI

Paul Callan December 30, 2017

(CNN)The ferocity of President Donald Trump's recent attacks on the integrity of the FBI has sent shock waves through an agency accustomed to public adulation in recent years. Sadly, much of the presidential criticism of the bureau may be entirely legitimate.
The FBI has traditionally enjoyed a highly favorable reputation among a majority of the nation's citizens. Despite controversial programs that sometimes employed illegal forms of surveillance and enforcement methods -- such as those used on black citizens lawfully protesting racial segregation, individuals in the "red scare" of the 1950s and long-haired students and others protesting the war in Vietnam during the 1960s and '70s -- this reputation endured.
And American presidents continued to steadfastly defend the bureau -- that is, until now.

The tradition of presidential support was unquestionably grounded at least partially in the fear of J. Edgar Hoover's rumored 50-year political skeleton "dossier," which would undoubtedly make the controversial "Steele dossier" look like child's play.
But Hoover is gone now, and President Trump's persistent attacks have the potential to inflict long-lasting reputational damage to the nation's preeminent law enforcement agency. These criticisms focus largely on FBI fumbles and missteps in the Hillary Clinton and Trump/Russia investigations, which the President suggests were deliberate attempts to sabotage his election and administration. Trump supporters and possibly the President himself say they see the workings of a conspiratorial "deep state" liberal-embedded bureaucracy fiercely resisting any conservative change.
Sources: FBI deputy director to retire

Some of Trump's recent criticisms of the agency relate to the alleged activities of FBI special agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page. An investigation by the Justice Department's inspector general revealed that the two exchanged text messages strongly indicative of anti-Trump and pro-Clinton bias while Strzok played a critical role in the Clinton investigation and a subsequent lesser role in Mueller's Trump/Russia probe. (A CNN reporter, in a news article after the text message controversy erupted, wrote that an attorney for Strzok did not respond to a request for comment, and Page could not be reached for comment.)
In addition, the President continues to call the Russia investigation a "witch hunt" and to castigate the agency's deputy director, Andrew McCabe, for alleged "bias" and incompetence.

Last Saturday, the President tweeted that former FBI Director James Comey, whom he fired, is a "liar" and called him "leakin' James Comey."

Trump also issued a clearly derogatory "Wow" comment regarding the unexplained reassignment of the FBI's general counsel, James Baker, reportedly a close friend of Comey's.

The President may have been angered by reports that McCabe was backing Comey's claim that the President made a loyalty demand and requested leniency for his former national security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, who is now a convicted felon awaiting sentencing under federal indictment.
When news of the text messages between Strzok and Page came to light against the backdrop of claimed McCabe improprieties, it became harder to just dismiss all of Trump's FBI conspiracy claims as delusional -- though many of his critics do.

Strzok was one of the FBI's top counterintelligence agents supervising the investigation of Clinton's controversial email problems. He subsequently joined Robert Mueller's Trump/Russia investigation, and the question lingers as to why his obvious anti-Trump prejudice was not uncovered in his job interview for the position with Mueller.

Why didn't McCabe warn Mueller of Strzok's likely bias, which he should have known from his own day-to-day conversations with Page and Strzok at FBI headquarters? Page reportedly worked for McCabe, who certainly also had frequent contact with Strzok -- again, the FBI's No. 2 counterintelligence agent.
This assessment is admittedly speculative, but it is speculation grounded in common sense.

Strzok was abruptly removed from the Mueller investigation in mid-summer of 2017. It seems that he had exchanged a series of 375 text messages with Page, clearly documenting their joint revulsion at all things Trump. The President is variously described as a "loathsome human," an "idiot" and a "d*uche," while they describe the prospects of the President's election as "terrifying

The shocking aspect of the Strzok/Page discussions about the "terrifying" possibility of Trump's election is that some of those discussions may have taken place, according to one of Strzok's texts in "Andy's Office."

CNN has reported that the text was presumably referring to the office of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe in August of 2016. Page had previously opined, according to the texts: "There's no way he gets elected." Strzok, however, texted that even if Trump's election is a long shot, "I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy's office ...that there's no way he gets elected -- but I'm afraid we can't take that risk. It's like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you're 40."

The most benevolent interpretation of this Strzok statement, as suggested by The Wall Street Journal, is that Strzok was advocating a fast and aggressive pursuit of the Russia investigation "because some of Mr. Trump's associates could land administration jobs and it was important to know if they had colluded with Russia," according to the Journal's story.

But there is more. Strzok was the FBI agent who changed the language used by former Director Comey in his controversial July 5, 2016, public statement clearing Clinton of criminal charges regarding her handling of classified materials. Strzok changed the final draft wording of Comey's statement from "grossly negligent" (which is commonly used in criminal cases) to the softer, non-criminal "extremely careless" wording.

Trump supporters would point to this as evidence that Strzok, the FBI's No. 2 counterintelligence agent, appears to be executing a plan within the FBI to clear Clinton and then destroy Trump's candidacy with the Russia investigation.

Causing further headaches for FBI brass, we now know that Deputy Director McCabe's wife, Jill McCabe, an unsuccessful Democratic 2015 candidate for the state senate in Virginia, had received approximately $700,000 in campaign contributions from then-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe's political action committee and the state's Democratic Party. While this didn't violate any laws or FBI protocols, the association looks unseemly for an agency conducting an investigation with potentially historic implications.

McAuliffe had been the campaign chairman of Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign and has been described by onlookers as being "as close as family" to the Clintons.

While McCabe's wife certainly has a right to run for office, her acceptance of hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from sources with clear links to the Clintons was a red-flag warning that should have caused McCabe to recuse himself from any involvement in any Trump/Hillary related investigations. He had no business calling any of the shots in these sensitive probes that would likely influence the outcome of the presidential election. The FBI has stated that that McCabe acted in accordance with stated agency protocols while his wife was running for office.

McCabe remains a very important figure in the unfolding Mueller investigation; the latest reports are that McCabe may be a key witness backing Comey's claim that the President had improperly asked him to terminate the Flynn investigation. McCabe's credibility, however, may now be compromised by the facts and circumstances regarding Strzok's text messages, the meetings in "Andy's Office" and the political contributions given to McCabe's wife.

While I rarely agree with much of what the President does or says regarding legal issues, this time he's got it right. The FBI's reputation has been severely damaged not by the President's criticism but by a systematic failure of the bureau's leadership.

The field agents of the FBI should still retain the trust of the American people. Their honor and dignity has not been compromised; but the bureau's leadership ranks require a prompt and thorough house cleaning by the new director, Christopher Wray. The bureau's leadership has forfeited the reputation of a cherished American institution.

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/12/29/opinions/fbi-leadership-to-blame-for-tarnished-reputation-callan-opinion/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_topstories+%28RSS%3A+CNN+-+Top+Stories%29

[Morty]

10 wild claims about Trump's White House from the upcoming book 'Fire and Fury'

A new book about President Donald Trump contains bombshell claims about Trump's first year in office from current and former White House aides.

In "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," author Michael Wolff reports that Trump never wanted to be president, and that first lady Melania Trump wept with sorrow on election night.

A former campaign aide describes trying to teach Trump about the Constitution, only to have him grow bored after the Fourth Amendment.

Christina Wilkie | @christinawilkie

President Donald Trump did not want to win the election. First lady Melania Trump wept with sorrow on election night. Former Trump campaign advisor Sam Nunberg tried to explain the Constitution to the candidate, but only made it to the Fourth Amendment before Trump got bored.

These are just a few of the bombshell claims in "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," author Michael Wolff's new book chronicling the first year of Trump's presidency, from the final days of the 2016 campaign to October of the following year.

The book will hit shelves Jan. 9, but New York Magazine on Wednesday published an adaptation of some key sections. NBC News has also obtained an advance copy of the book. Here are some of the wilder claims to emerge so far:

1. Trump expected to lose the presidential race to Democrat Hillary Clinton and had already planned to return to private life after the campaign was over. Wolff explains what Trump was thinking toward the end of the campaign:

Once he lost, Trump would be both insanely famous and a martyr to Crooked Hillary. His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared would be international celebrities. Steve Bannon would become the de facto head of the tea-party movement. Kellyanne Conway would be a cable-news star. Melania Trump, who had been assured by her husband that he wouldn't become president, could return to inconspicuously lunching. Losing would work out for everybody. Losing was winning.

2. One of Trump's earliest campaign aides tried to educate the candidate about the Constitution, but Trump grew too bored to make it past the Fourth Amendment:

Early in the campaign, Sam Nunberg was sent to explain the Constitution to the candidate. "I got as far as the Fourth Amendment," Nunberg recalled, "before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.

3. Trump did not especially like moving into the White House. The president and first lady sleep in separate bedrooms, and Trump prohibits White House housekeepers from picking up things he throws on the floor.

[Trump] retreated to his own bedroom—the first time since the Kennedy White House that a presidential couple had maintained separate rooms. In the first days, he ordered two television screens in addition to the one already there, and a lock on the door, precipitating a brief standoff with the Secret Service, who insisted they have access to the room. He ­reprimanded the housekeeping staff for picking up his shirt from the floor: "If my shirt is on the floor, it's because I want it on the floor." Then he imposed a set of new rules: Nobody touch anything, especially not his toothbrush. (He had a longtime fear of being poisoned, one reason why he liked to eat at McDonald's—nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade.) Also, he would let housekeeping know when he wanted his sheets done, and he would strip his own bed.

4. Trump's daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner struck a deal over who would get to run for office first.

Between themselves, the two had made an earnest deal: If sometime in the future the opportunity arose, she'd be the one to run for president. The first woman president, Ivanka entertained, would not be Hillary Clinton; it would be Ivanka Trump.

5. Some of Trump's closest allies, including Rupert Murdoch, were stunned by his lack of understanding on issues of policy. Following a meeting with tech executives during the 2016 transition, Trump reportedly called Murdoch and said he would expand H1-B visas in order to help the industry.

Murdoch suggested that taking a liberal approach to H-1B visas, which open America's doors to select immigrants, might be hard to square with his promises to build a wall and close the borders. But Trump seemed unconcerned, assuring Murdoch, "We'll figure it out."

"What a f--king idiot," said Murdoch, shrugging, as he got off the phone.

6. Trump seemed angry on his Inauguration Day, according to the book. He fought with his wife and was annoyed that notable celebrities did not want to attend, The New York Magazine excerpt says.

Trump did not enjoy his own inauguration. He was angry that A-level stars had snubbed the event, disgruntled with the accommodations at Blair House, and visibly fighting with his wife, who seemed on the verge of tears. Throughout the day, he wore what some around him had taken to calling his golf face: angry and pissed off, shoulders hunched, arms swinging, brow furled, lips pursed.

7. Bannon, who has repeatedly warned about China's growing influence and economic power, drew parallels between the world's second-largest economy and Nazi Germany, according to a book excerpt.

China's everything. Nothing else matters. We don't get China right, we don't get anything right. This whole thing is very simple. China is where Nazi Germany was in 1929 to 1930. The Chinese, like the Germans, are the most rational people in the world, until they're not. And they're gonna flip like Germany in the '30s. You're going to have a hypernationalist state, and once that happens, you can't put the genie back in the bottle.

8. Wolff reports that a spokesman for Trump's legal team left the job because he feared possible obstruction of justice related to a statement drafted aboard Air Force One that defended Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with a Russian lawyer in June 2016.

Mark Corallo was instructed not to speak to the press, indeed not to even answer his phone. Later that week, Corallo, seeing no good outcome-and privately confiding that he believed the meeting on Air Force One represented a likely obstruction of justice-quit. (The Jarvanka side would put it out that Corallo was fired.)

9. The book says top Trump aides questioned his intelligence in colorful terms. The revelations follow reports that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a "moron" last year.

For Steve Mnuchin and Reince Priebus, he was an 'idiot.' For Gary Cohn, he was 'dumb as sh-t.' For H.R. McMaster he was a 'dope.' The list went on.

10. Wolff also writes at length about former Goldman Sachs executive Gary Cohn, who leads the president's National Economic Council. Cohn has privately disagreed with Trump a number of times in the past year. But an April email that, Wolff writes, circulated around the White House "purporting to represent the views of Gary Cohn" takes this to a new level:

It's worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns. Trump won't read anything - not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored. And his staff is no better. Kushner is an entitled baby who knows nothing. Bannon is an arrogant prick who thinks he's smarter than he is. Trump is less a person than a collection of terrible traits. No one will survive the first year but his family. I hate the work, but feel I need to stay because I'm the only person there with a clue what he's doing. The reason so few jobs have been filled is that they only accept people who pass ridiculous purity tests, even for midlevel policy-making jobs where the people will never see the light of day. I am in a constant state of shock and horror.

Shortly after excerpts of the book were published on Wednesday, the White House released a statement from the president, in which he said, "Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind."

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the book was "filled with false and misleading accounts from individuals who have no access or influence with the White House."

A spokeswoman for the first lady said, "Mrs. Trump supported her husband's decision to run for President and in fact, encouraged him to do so. She was confident he would win and was very happy when he did."

Wolff says he interviewed more than 200 people, including senior White House staff members, over 18 months to gather information for the book. New York Magazine, which published a version of the book excerpts, said Wolff had "no ground rules placed on his access" while he prepared the book.
Christina WilkiePolitical Reporter for CNBC.com

[seemslikeadream]

The lines about her being more Trump's daughter and Ivanka being more his wife was attention grabbing

Ivanka Reveals the Truth About Trump’s Hair–And Mocks It, Too

The mystery of Trump’s hair has been solved by his daughter Ivanka, who reportedly joked about his scalp surgery and the epic, spray-assisted struggle to control his follicles.

Betrayed by his own daughter.

Forget North Korea. Forget talk of treason and alleged collusion with the Russians. Forget the size of his fingers and the size of his nuclear button.

If President Donald Trump is sensitive about one thing, it is the strange mass of matter—human or otherwise—that adorns the top of his head.

Is this hair real? A comb-over? How much of it is there? Where does it begin? Where does it end? What is its true color? Is it really a domesticated pet? Does it bite?

The mystery of Donald Trump’s hair (“style” would be an over-reach), so long contested, may have finally been solved by his daughter Ivanka Trump—at the same as she reportedly mocks her father’s hair affair to friends.

As reported by Michael Wolff in his new book about President Trump’s first year in office, Fire and Fury: Inside Trump’s White House, we learn that it is Trump’s beloved daughter that leads the chorus of those who mock the Trump ‘do’ (or ‘don’t’).

“She treated her father with a degree of detachment, even irony, going so far as to make fun of his comb-over to others,” Wolff writes, as extracted in New York magazine. “She often described the mechanics behind it to friends: an absolutely clean pate—a contained island after scalp-reduction ­surgery—surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray.”

So, Trump has had surgery on his head because he thought it was too big, and yet his fingers remain so frustratingly small? The hair would not be bidden or calmed. It stayed like determined Triffids, then surrounded the pate and laid it to siege. Be warned, Rocket Man: Trump fought back.

If only Trump could unite the country with the same, determined focus as he diligently gathers those disparate clumps and strands of hair together every day.

From every corner of his allegedly surgically altered scalp he carefully marshals them, and then in one dramatic move he sweeps as much as he can back and fixes it in place.

Every morning, Trump is his own Sixties housewife, wrestling his bouffant to prettified submission.

The only method of control for these wanton tendrils: spray, and more spray.

Ivanka Sassoon wasn’t done.

“The color, she would point out to comical effect,” Woolf continues, “was from a product called Just for Men — the longer it was left on, the darker it got. Impatience resulted in Trump’s orange-blond hair color.”

This would explain why Trump’s hair flows like the world’s maddest orange river, north, south, east, and west; the reason for its many tones of white, blonde, and orange.

It also explains why Trump’s hair goes left, right, front, and back: a rollercoaster ride that even the greatest brains at Six Flags could not construct.

This also explains Trump’s hair’s only minimal capitulation to natural forces. Wind is its declared enemy: it will not move for wind. When the wind comes, the Trump hair hunkers down. On the rare occasion the wind has not been briefed about his presence beforehand and comes at him too strong, Trump's hair explodes in all directions: he could be Tippi Hedren's stunt double in the most intense scenes of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.

Trump’s hair lusts after, it needs—more than Joanie needed Chachi and Oreos need milk—a plush, windless interior, preferably one whose golden cherubs and railings and shiny picture frames match and reflect Trump's flowing peak of whipped and calmed orange.

According to his daughter, Trump’s hair is under as much siege as his White House. But at least Ivanka’s explanation—even if it was done to mock her father to others—offers a persuasive physical explanation to one of the more alarming wonders of the modern world.

When my former colleague Justin Jones and I investigated this hair-tugging mystery in 2015, we were met with a frosted-tipped wall of silence. But many who spoke to us for that article knew at least elements of the truth: the spraying, the dye jobs, the daily, desperate tugging to get the Trump rug into place.

Trump once pulled on his crowning glory in front of a Telegraph journalist. It’s real, it’s not a hairpiece, he insisted. And now these shattering follicle-based revelations, from the joking mouth of his very own daughter: the struggle on top of Donald Trump’s head is indeed real.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/ivanka-re ... ia=desktop

trump has his own bedroom, with a lock that even his wife can't access.
Only person allowed into the room in the morning is Ivanka.

Inside Trump’s Secret Bedroom in the White House

By Polipace Staff January 3, 2018
One of the strangest things revealed today was that Donald Trump has his own bedroom, having transformed two rooms of the White House into separate bedrooms, with his wife being forced to sleep in a separate room, locked out.

According to insiders, Trump has transformed what was the “living room” in the Presidential Residence into his own bedroom, with no one, including his wife and son having any access to the bedroom. As part of this, he has refused to allow White House staff to regularly clean the room.

He even yelled at some of the staff for picking his dirty shirts up off the floor to wash them, insisting, “If my shirt is on the floor, it’s because I want it on the floor.” He also barred housekeeping from touching his toothbrush out of fear of being poisoned, a fear which Wolff also claims explains the president’s affinity for McDonald’s because “nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade.”

In fact, after Melania arrived in the White House, he ordered that a special lock that could only be controlled by him, be installed in the room – which the Secret Service immediately rejected as unsafe, requiring them to also have access to the lock.

Making this even weirder, only his daughter Ivanka Trump is allowed in his bedroom in the morning, when Trump strips his own bed, refusing to allow White House staff to even touch the covers. It’s noted that Ivanka often comes in early in the morning to “wake up” the President.
http://polipace.com/2018/01/03/inside-t ... ite-house/

I think we need a new thread

trump is toast

[norton ash]

Even brain-damaged old boars can be dangerous when cornered. Bring a net.

[seemslikeadream]

handcuffs and/or straight jacket also

Hope Hicks fled the room after Trump called her ‘the best piece of tail’ Lewandowski will ever have: report

Bob Brigham
Bombshell reports from Michael Wolff’s new Fire and Fury book continued to roil President Donald Trump’s White House as even more revelations are reported.

MSNBC anchor Chris Jansing, reading from the book live on air, revealed yet another shocking detail, this one about White House Communications Director Hope Hicks and former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.

“We know that Steve Bannon believes that he is the person who helped Donald Trump survive the infamous Billy Bush tape,” Jansing noted.

“Right,” Politico report Josh Dawsey agreed.

“So obviously, he was elected president, he got by that,” Jansing noted. “We’re in a very different sort of set of beliefs right now, America has changed its tune on the treatment of women.”

“And there is a quote in here about, Hope Hicks and Corey Lewandowski, who, according to the book, had an on and off again romantic relationship, and he was, of course, fired in 2016 for clashing with Trump family members,” Jansing reminded.

“And this is what the book says “Hicks sat in Trump Tower with Trump and his sons, worried about Lewandowski’s treatment in the press and wondering aloud how she might help him. Trump, who otherwise seemed to treat Hicks in a protective and even paternal way, looked up and said, ‘Why? You’ve already done enough for him. you’re the best piece of tail he’ll ever have’ sending Hicks running from the room,” Jansing read.

“Well, Trump Tower is known, and in the White House, as being a pretty crass place, the president frequently curses and using off-color sayings, you obviously heard the “Access Hollywood” tape and his comments there,” Dawsey noted.
https://www.rawstory.com/2018/01/hope-h ... CJ.twitter

[seemslikeadream]

"You Can’t Make This S--- Up": My Year Inside Trump's Insane White House

4:00 AM PST 1/4/2018 by Michael Wolff


Luke McGarry

Author and columnist Michael Wolff was given extraordinary access to the Trump administration and now details the feuds, the fights and the alarming chaos he witnessed while reporting what turned into a new book.
Editor’s Note: Author and Hollywood Reporter columnist Michael Wolff’s new book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (Henry Holt & Co.), is a detailed account of the 45th president’s election and first year in office based on extensive access to the White House and more than 200 interviews with Trump and senior staff over a period of 18 months. In advance of the Jan. 9 publication of the book, which Trump is already attacking, Wolff has written this extracted column about his time in the White House based on the reporting included in Fire and Fury.

I interviewed Donald Trump for The Hollywood Reporter in June 2016, and he seemed to have liked — or not disliked — the piece I wrote. "Great cover!" his press assistant, Hope Hicks, emailed me after it came out (it was a picture of a belligerent Trump in mirrored sunglasses). After the election, I proposed to him that I come to the White House and report an inside story for later publication — journalistically, as a fly on the wall — which he seemed to misconstrue as a request for a job. No, I said. I'd like to just watch and write a book. "A book?" he responded, losing interest. "I hear a lot of people want to write books," he added, clearly not understanding why anybody would. "Do you know Ed Klein?"— author of several virulently anti-Hillary books. "Great guy. I think he should write a book about me." But sure, Trump seemed to say, knock yourself out.

Since the new White House was often uncertain about what the president meant or did not mean in any given utterance, his non-disapproval became a kind of passport for me to hang around — checking in each week at the Hay-Adams hotel, making appointments with various senior staffers who put my name in the "system," and then wandering across the street to the White House and plunking myself down, day after day, on a West Wing couch.

The West Wing is configured in such a way that the anteroom is quite a thoroughfare — everybody passes by. Assistants — young women in the Trump uniform of short skirts, high boots, long and loose hair — as well as, in situation-comedy proximity, all the new stars of the show: Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer, Jared Kushner, Mike Pence, Gary Cohn, Michael Flynn (and after Flynn's abrupt departure less than a month into the job for his involvement in the Russia affair, his replacement, H.R. McMaster), all neatly accessible.

The nature of the comedy, it was soon clear, was that here was a group of ambitious men and women who had reached the pinnacle of power, a high-ranking White House appointment — with the punchline that Donald Trump was president. Their estimable accomplishment of getting to the West Wing risked at any moment becoming farce.

A new president typically surrounds himself with a small group of committed insiders and loyalists. But few on the Trump team knew him very well — most of his advisors had been with him only since the fall. Even his family, now closely gathered around him, seemed nonplussed. "You know, we never saw that much of him until he got the nomination," Eric Trump's wife, Lara, told one senior staffer. If much of the country was incredulous, his staff, trying to cement their poker faces, were at least as confused.

Their initial response was to hawkishly defend him — he demanded it — and by defending him they seemed to be defending themselves. Politics is a game, of course, of determined role-playing, but the difficulties of staying in character in the Trump White House became evident almost from the first day.

"You can't make this shit up," Sean Spicer, soon to be portrayed as the most hapless man in America, muttered to himself after his tortured press briefing on the first day of the new administration, when he was called to justify the president's inaugural crowd numbers — and soon enough, he adopted this as a personal mantra. Reince Priebus, the new chief of staff, had, shortly after the announcement of his appointment in November, started to think he would not last until the inauguration. Then, making it to the White House, he hoped he could last a respectable year, but he quickly scaled back his goal to six months. Kellyanne Conway, who would put a finger-gun to her head in private about Trump's public comments, continued to mount an implacable defense on cable television, until she was pulled off the air by others in the White House who, however much the president enjoyed her, found her militancy idiotic. (Even Ivanka and Jared regarded Conway's fulsome defenses as cringeworthy.)

Steve Bannon tried to gamely suggest that Trump was mere front man and that he, with plan and purpose and intellect, was, more reasonably, running the show — commanding a whiteboard of policies and initiatives that he claimed to have assembled from Trump's off-the-cuff ramblings and utterances. His adoption of the Saturday Night Live sobriquet "President Bannon" was less than entirely humorous. Within the first few weeks, even rote conversations with senior staff trying to explain the new White House's policies and positions would turn into a body-language ballet of eye-rolling and shrugs and pantomime of jaws dropping. Leaking became the political manifestation of the don't-blame-me eye roll.

The surreal sense of the Trump presidency was being lived as intensely inside the White House as out. Trump was, for the people closest to him, the ultimate enigma. He had been elected president, that through-the-eye-of-the-needle feat, but obviously, he was yet … Trump. Indeed, he seemed as confused as anyone to find himself in the White House, even attempting to barricade himself into his bedroom with his own lock over the protests of the Secret Service.

There was some effort to ascribe to Trump magical powers. In an early conversation — half comic, half desperate — Bannon tried to explain him as having a particular kind of Jungian brilliance. Trump, obviously without having read Jung, somehow had access to the collective unconscious of the other half of the country, and, too, a gift for inventing archetypes: Little Marco … Low-Energy Jeb … the Failing New York Times. Everybody in the West Wing tried, with some panic, to explain him, and, sheepishly, their own reason for being here. He's intuitive, he gets it, he has a mind-meld with his base. But there was palpable relief, of an Emperor's New Clothes sort, when longtime Trump staffer Sam Nunberg — fired by Trump during the campaign but credited with knowing him better than anyone else — came back into the fold and said, widely, "He's just a fucking fool."

Part of that foolishness was his inability to deal with his own family. In a way, this gave him a human dimension. Even Donald Trump couldn't say no to his kids. "It's a littleee, littleee complicated …" he explained to Priebus about why he needed to give his daughter and son-in-law official jobs. But the effect of their leadership roles was to compound his own boundless inexperience in Washington, creating from the outset frustration and then disbelief and then rage on the part of the professionals in his employ.

The men and women of the West Wing, for all that the media was ridiculing them, actually felt they had a responsibility to the country. "Trump," said one senior Republican, "turned selfish careerists into patriots." Their job was to maintain the pretense of relative sanity, even as each individually came to the conclusion that, in generous terms, it was insane to think you could run a White House without experience, organizational structure or a real purpose.

On March 30, after the collapse of the health care bill, 32-year-old Katie Walsh, the deputy chief of staff, the effective administration chief of the West Wing, a stalwart political pro and stellar example of governing craft, walked out. Little more than two months in, she quit. Couldn't take it anymore. Nutso. To lose your deputy chief of staff at the get-go would be a sign of crisis in any other administration, but inside an obviously exploding one it was hardly noticed.

While there might be a scary national movement of Trumpers, the reality in the White House was stranger still: There was Jared and Ivanka, Democrats; there was Priebus, a mainstream Republican; and there was Bannon, whose reasonable claim to be the one person actually representing Trumpism so infuriated Trump that Bannon was hopelessly sidelined by April. "How much influence do you think Steve Bannon has over me? Zero! Zero!" Trump muttered and stormed. To say that no one was in charge, that there were no guiding principles, not even a working org chart, would again be an understatement. "What do these people do?" asked everyone pretty much of everyone else.

The competition to take charge, which, because each side represented an inimical position to the other, became not so much a struggle for leadership, but a near-violent factional war. Jared and Ivanka were against Priebus and Bannon, trying to push both men out. Bannon was against Jared and Ivanka and Priebus, practicing what everybody thought were dark arts against them. Priebus, everybody's punching bag, just tried to survive another day. By late spring, the larger political landscape seemed to become almost irrelevant, with everyone focused on the more lethal battles within the White House itself. This included screaming fights in the halls and in front of a bemused Trump in the Oval Office (when he was not the one screaming himself), together with leaks about what Russians your opponents might have been talking to.

Reigning over all of this was Trump, enigma, cipher and disruptor. How to get along with Trump — who veered between a kind of blissed-out pleasure of being in the Oval Office and a deep, childish frustration that he couldn't have what he wanted? Here was a man singularly focused on his own needs for instant gratification, be that a hamburger, a segment on Fox & Friends or an Oval Office photo opp. "I want a win. I want a win. Where's my win?" he would regularly declaim. He was, in words used by almost every member of the senior staff on repeated occasions, "like a child." A chronic naysayer, Trump himself stoked constant discord with his daily after-dinner phone calls to his billionaire friends about the disloyalty and incompetence around him. His billionaire friends then shared this with their billionaire friends, creating the endless leaks which the president so furiously railed against.

One of these frequent callers was Rupert Murdoch, who before the election had only ever expressed contempt for Trump. Now Murdoch constantly sought him out, but to his own colleagues, friends and family, continued to derisively ridicule Trump: "What a fucking moron," said Murdoch after one call.

With the Comey firing, the Mueller appointment and murderous White House infighting, by early summer Bannon was engaged in an uninterrupted monologue directed to almost anyone who would listen. It was so caustic, so scabrous and so hilarious that it might form one of the great underground political treatises.

By July, Jared and Ivanka, who had, in less than six months, traversed from socialite couple to royal family to the most powerful people in the world, were now engaged in a desperate dance to save themselves, which mostly involved blaming Trump himself. It was all his idea to fire Comey! "The daughter," Bannon declared, "will bring down the father."

Priebus and Spicer were merely counting down to the day — and every day seemed to promise it would be the next day — when they would be out.

And, indeed, suddenly there were the 11 days of Anthony Scaramucci.

Scaramucci, a minor figure in the New York financial world, and quite a ridiculous one, had overnight become Jared and Ivanka's solution to all of the White House's management and messaging problems. After all, explained the couple, he was good on television and he was from New York — he knew their world. In effect, the couple had hired Scaramucci — as preposterous a hire in West Wing annals as any — to replace Priebus and Bannon and take over running the White House.

There was, after the abrupt Scaramucci meltdown, hardly any effort inside the West Wing to disguise the sense of ludicrousness and anger felt by every member of the senior staff toward Trump's family and Trump himself. It became almost a kind of competition to demystify Trump. For Rex Tillerson, he was a moron. For Gary Cohn, he was dumb as shit. For H.R. McMaster, he was a hopeless idiot. For Steve Bannon, he had lost his mind.

Most succinctly, no one expected him to survive Mueller. Whatever the substance of the Russia "collusion," Trump, in the estimation of his senior staff, did not have the discipline to navigate a tough investigation, nor the credibility to attract the caliber of lawyers he would need to help him. (At least nine major law firms had turned down an invitation to represent the president.)

There was more: Everybody was painfully aware of the increasing pace of his repetitions. It used to be inside of 30 minutes he'd repeat, word-for-word and expression-for-expression, the same three stories — now it was within 10 minutes. Indeed, many of his tweets were the product of his repetitions — he just couldn't stop saying something.

By summer's end, in something of a historic sweep — more usual for the end of a president's first term than the end of his first six months — almost the entire senior staff, save Trump's family, had been washed out: Michael Flynn, Katie Walsh, Sean Spicer, Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon. Even Trump's loyal, longtime body guard Keith Schiller — for reasons darkly whispered about in the West Wing — was out. Gary Cohn, Dina Powell, Rick Dearborn, all on their way out. The president, on the spur of the moment, appointed John Kelly, a former Marine Corps general and head of homeland security, chief of staff — without Kelly having been informed of his own appointment beforehand. Grim and stoic, accepting that he could not control the president, Kelly seemed compelled by a sense of duty to be, in case of disaster, the adult in the room who might, if needed, stand up to the president … if that is comfort.

As telling, with his daughter and son-in-law sidelined by their legal problems, Hope Hicks, Trump's 26-year-old personal aide and confidant, became, practically speaking, his most powerful White House advisor. (With Melania a nonpresence, the staff referred to Ivanka as the "real wife" and Hicks as the "real daughter.") Hicks' primary function was to tend to the Trump ego, to reassure him, to protect him, to buffer him, to soothe him. It was Hicks who, attentive to his lapses and repetitions, urged him to forgo an interview that was set to open the 60 Minutes fall season. Instead, the interview went to Fox News' Sean Hannity who, White House insiders happily explained, was willing to supply the questions beforehand. Indeed, the plan was to have all interviewers going forward provide the questions.

As the first year wound down, Trump finally got a bill to sign. The tax bill, his singular accomplishment, was, arguably, quite a reversal of his populist promises, and confirmation of what Mitch McConnell had seen early on as the silver Trump lining: "He'll sign anything we put in front of him." With new bravado, he was encouraging partisans like Fox News to pursue an anti-Mueller campaign on his behalf. Insiders believed that the only thing saving Mueller from being fired, and the government of the United States from unfathomable implosion, is Trump's inability to grasp how much Mueller had on him and his family.

Steve Bannon was openly handicapping a 33.3 percent chance of impeachment, a 33.3 percent chance of resignation in the shadow of the 25th amendment and a 33.3 percent chance that he might limp to the finish line on the strength of liberal arrogance and weakness.

Donald Trump's small staff of factotums, advisors and family began, on Jan. 20, 2017, an experience that none of them, by any right or logic, thought they would — or, in many cases, should — have, being part of a Trump presidency. Hoping for the best, with their personal futures as well as the country's future depending on it, my indelible impression of talking to them and observing them through much of the first year of his presidency, is that they all — 100 percent — came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.

At Mar-a-Lago, just before the new year, a heavily made-up Trump failed to recognize a succession of old friends.

Happy first anniversary of the Trump administration.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ ... se-1071504

[Luther Blissett]

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1r_yKgm ... rmQDj/view

[Elvis]

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1r_yKgmO5HKS06-gwczkYFY1yRufrmQDj/view

Thanks! Juicy stuff!

In a way, it's like a Stephen King novel.