A list of guests it suggested should no longer be booked
What?!
Ashley Parker and Josh Dawsey in The Post:
President Trump and his allies signaled Monday that they intend to use the broad conclusions of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation — which found no criminal conspiracy with Russia to influence the 2016 election — to forcefully attack perceived opponents they say unfairly accused the president of wrongdoing.
The targets are diffuse, ranging from specific Democratic lawmakers to the media more generally. White House counselor Kellyanne Conway called on House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) to resign immediately, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) urged Schiff to relinquish his committee chairmanship. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said he planned to investigate what he dubbed “all of the abuse by the Department of Justice and the FBI” during the 2016 presidential election. And the Trump campaign sent a memo to television hosts and producers that included a list of guests it suggested should no longer be booked because they “made outlandish, false claims” on air.
Emphasis added.
Who do they think they are?!
In addition to Graham, other Trump allies have begun to call for investigations into some of the president’s rivals, including former president Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. “Time to investigate the Obama officials who concocted and spread the Russian conspiracy hoax,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) tweeted Monday.
Yes, sure, get Obama locked up; that’ll happen.
Amid all the finger-pointing, there was at least one person toward whom the president seemed to have changed his tone. After months of berating Mueller on Twitter and elsewhere for overseeing a “witch hunt” staffed by “angry Democrats,” the president took a more measured stance toward the special counsel Monday.
Asked by a reporter whether he believed Mueller had behaved “honorably,” Trump responded, simply, “Yes, he did.”
Naturally.
Well that’s something I really didn’t need to read on my lunch break… Goodbye peace of mind…
I have long maintained that in any given nation, each party right across the political spectrum is in itself a microcosm of the regime and society it seeks to create. Trump clearly prefers the US Republican Party and the wider government structures and institutions as a top-down dictatorship rather than a ‘base-up’ democracy, and the GOP membership at least, is happy to comply. Though, to give Trump his due as a career ignoramus, the issues that concerned the US Founding Fathers are floating so far over his head he might as well be standing at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.
But that, I think is why he has so little trouble relating to despots and authoritarians like Kim Jong-Il of Korea and Vlad Putin: latest in a long line of Russian antidemocrats stretching back through Josef Stalin to Ivan the Terrible.
Wow. Does that mean that climate-change deniers, anti-vaxx nutjobs, Gwyneth Paltrow, naturopaths, homeopaths, birthers, Sandy Hook “truthers”, psychics, creationists, mediums, UFOlogists and peddlers of “the secret” will no longer be given any time on national television? That sounds amazing!!
Yet another example of why Trump is not a political genius of any kind. He’s completely overplaying his hand.
Yeah, but his base will love it. He doesn’t realize, I suspect, how many Republicans are uneasy with him, because they keep their mouths shut so they don’t annoy his base. Perhaps, if those Repubs can’t bring themselves to vote for a Democrat, it might be time for them to sit it out…but they’re so afraid a Democrat will win if they do. How far does Trump have to go before their revulsion meter kicks in once and for all, not just as a vague nauseated feeling, but as an overwhelming “I’ve got to stop swimming in the sewage” feeling? I hope, for our sakes, he gets to that level of overreach soon.
For Republicans, the Bill of Rights begins and ends at 2, apparently.