Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Thou art more deranged, and intemperate.

He hasn’t failed yet, so I’m not assuming he ever will.

Nope, me neither. Whenever I hear people talk about how quickly he is going to get impeached or forced to resign, it sounds to me like more of the same kind of thinking that led people to predict that he would never make it past the primaries, and later that he would never actually get elected. As I have previously stated, I won’t be the least bit surprised if he is able to serve for 8 years only to be replaced by some of his deplorable offspring (or someone equally bad).

First of all, the same traits that make Trump so abhorrent to any halfway decent person – his authoritarianism, his bigotry, his corruption, his dishonesty, his egotism, his fascism, his greed, his hatred, his ignorance, his journalist-bashing, his knowledge-bashing, his lability, his misogyny, his narcissism, his obnoxiousness, his pettiness, his queerphobia, his racism, his sadism, his temper-tantrums, his ugliness, his vulgarity, his word-salads, his xenophobia, his yeti-behavior, and the zombie-like manner in which he acts out every baser impulse without the involvement of any higher brain functions – are precisely the things that those who voted for him find so appealing about him in the first place. Even if he fails to deliver on most of his promises (and so far he has in fact delivered to an alarming degree) they’re not going to hold it against him as long as he hates the same people that they hate.

Second, even if his approval ratings are record low compared to other presidents (but still a lot higher than they ought to be), as we have seen, he doesn’t need a majority to win. In fact, he doesn’t even need the largest minority. Thanks to the ridiculous and undemocratic winner-takes-all principle, theoretically all he needs to do is to get one more vote than the candidate who got the second most votes in a the red states as well as a few “swing states”, and It doesn’t matter if the other candidate got 100% of the votes in the blue states. Of course it doesn’t help things that the whole electoral college system is inherently rigged in favor of white people in rural areas to begin with, and with widespread gerrymandering and voter-suppression going on (selectively closing down polling stations in areas dominated by democrats, passing ID requirements specifically targeting black and latino voters etc.), need I say more?

Third, even if most Americans agree that Trump needs to go, it doesn’t necessarily mean they agree on much else, let alone enough to unite behind a common candidate in sufficient numbers to challenge the walking orange sewage-pipe. American liberals, lefists and progressives are nothing if not divided, and the fact that they all hate Trump doesn’t automatically lead to political change as long as they hate each other even more.

Honestly he really does have one hell of a fucking nerve.

https://youtu.be/uFU2BSqvvjE

I mean to me they’re not even people, it’s so so sad, I mean morality’s just gone, um, morality’s flown out the window, we deserve so much better than this as a country…

Morals. Morality. Morals.

Trump cheats contractors and workers out of money he owes them.

Trump attacks people on Twitter, thus inspiring some o-f his millions of followers to pile on Trump’s targets.

Trump has been accused of various forms and degrees of sexual assault many times.

Trump settled fraud claims against his “university” – really just a seminar to teach real estate tricks – for $25 million before he took office.

Trump charged his son hugely inflated prices for charity events at his golf club.

From what one can tell by combing the news sources, Trump has never done a moral thing in his life. He demands loyalty from others but provides none himself. He bullies, he abuses, he exploits, he takes revenge; he cheats, he lies, he insults. He’s morally beneath contempt.

Eric Trump has a fucking nerve.

So the hearings have begun, and Coats, Rogers and McCabe all refused to answer some of the questions, without being able to offer any legal justification for doing so.

Senators flashed anger on Wednesday as the Trump administration officials repeatedly refused to answer questions about whether the president had tried to interfere with the Russia investigation.

Senator Angus King, an independent of Maine, pressed Mr. McCabe on why he would not comment on conversations he may have had with Mr. Comey about his interactions with Mr. Trump. Mr. McCabe said he could not discuss anything “within the purview” of the Justice Department investigation being run by Robert S. Mueller III, who was appointed special counsel last month.

“Why does the special counsel get preference and not this committee?” Mr. King said, revealing senators’ intensifying concerns over the conflicting needs of the separate congressional and federal investigations into Russian interference.

Mr. King then turned his attention to Mr. Coats and Mr. Rogers, who refused answer in detail questions about reports that Mr. Trump had asked them to publicly or privately undermine the F.B.I. investigation.

Mr. Rogers said he had asked the White House whether it was invoking executive privilege to keep him from discussing possible related conversations with Mr. Trump, but had not gotten a response. Presidents have in the past cited the privilege to try to prevent Congress from seeking information about internal conversations in the executive branch.

Mr. Coats struggled to respond when Mr. King turned to him, the senator’s frustrations with the witnesses apparent.

“You swore that oath to tell us the truth,” Mr. King said, demanding the “legal basis” for Mr. Coats’ decision not to comment.

“I’m not sure I have a legal basis,” Mr. Coats said, adding that he would be happy to discuss it further in a closed-door session.

Oh well as long as there’s no legal basis, that’s fine then. Just go with your gut.

David Leonhardt on Trump’s contempt for the rule of law.

Even amid bitter fights over what the law should say, both Democrats and Republicans have generally accepted the rule of law.

President Trump does not. His rejection of it distinguishes him from any other modern American leader. He has instead flirted with Louis XIV’s notion of “L’état, c’est moi”: The state is me — and I’ll decide which laws to follow.

How does Trump scorn the law? Let Leonhardt count the ways.

LAW ENFORCEMENT, POLITICIZED. People in federal law enforcement take pride in trying to remain apart from politics. I’ve been talking lately with past Justice Department appointees, from both parties, and they speak in almost identical terms.

They view the Justice Department as more independent than, say, the State or Treasury Departments. The Justice Department works with the rest of the administration on policy matters, but keeps its distance on law enforcement. That’s why White House officials aren’t supposed to pick up the phone and call whomever they want at the department. There is a careful process.

That’s what I and no doubt others have been learning over the past few weeks (which makes it all the more dubious that Kennedy made his brother Attorney General). Trump’s behavior with Comey was way over the line.

The attorney general, Jeff Sessions, is part of the problem. He is supposed to be the nation’s head law-enforcement official, but acts as a Trump loyalist. He recently held a briefing in the White House press room — “a jaw-dropping violation of norms,” as Slate’s Leon Neyfakh wrote. Sessions has proclaimed, “This is the Trump era.”

Like Trump, he sees little distinction between the enforcement of the law and the interests of the president.

Then there’s Trump’s habit of attacking the courts.

Trump has tried to delegitimize almost any judge who disagrees with him.

His latest Twitter tantrum, on Monday, took a swipe at “the courts” over his stymied travel ban.

“We need the courts to give us back our rights,” he said, as if the courts had taken them away. It’s all very coup-y.

It joined a long list of his judge insults: “this so-called judge”; “a single, unelected district judge”; “ridiculous”; “so political”; “terrible”; “a hater of Donald Trump”; “essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country”; “THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE!”

“What’s unusual is he’s essentially challenging the legitimacy of the court’s role,” the legal scholar Charles Geyh told The Washington Post. Trump’s message, Geyh said, was: “I should be able to do what I choose.”

Wouldn’t you think he would have educated himself on all this between the election and the inauguration? If he were anyone other than himself, I mean?

TEAM TRUMP, ABOVE THE LAW. Foreign governments speed up trademark applications from Trump businesses. Foreign officials curry favor by staying at his hotel. A senior administration official urges people to buy Ivanka Trump’s clothing. The president violates bipartisan tradition by refusing to release his tax returns, thus shrouding his conflicts.

He doesn’t accept the idea of equality.

The larger message is that people who support him are fully American, and people who don’t are something less. He tells elaborate lies about voter fraud by those who oppose him, especially African-Americans and Latinos. Then he uses those lies to justify measures that restrict their voting. (Alas, much of the Republican Party is guilty on this score.)

And there’s the kingdom of lies problem.

TRUTH, MONOPOLIZED. The consistent application of laws requires a consistent set of facts on which a society can agree. The Trump administration is trying to undermine the very idea of facts.

It has harshly criticized one independent source of information after another. The Congressional Budget Office. The Bureau of Labor Statistics. The C.I.A. Scientists. And, of course, the news media.

Fake news, enemies of the people, yadda yadda.

The one encouraging part of the rule-of-law emergency is the response from many other parts of society. Although congressional Republicans have largely lain down for Trump, judges — both Republican and Democratic appointees — have not. Neither have Comey, the F.B.I., the C.B.O., the media or others. As a result, the United States remains a long way from authoritarianism.

Unfortunately, Trump shows no signs of letting up. Don’t assume he will fail just because his actions are so far outside the American mainstream.

He hasn’t failed yet, so I’m not assuming he ever will.

Greg Sargent at the Post points out the Trump’s rages at people in his own branch of government have a strong whiff of authoritarianism.

Trump appears worryingly unable to contemplate his own role in bringing about the special counsel. The firing of FBI Director James B. Comey led to reports that Trump allegedly demanded Comey’s loyalty and to Trump’s admission that he fired Comey over the Russia probe. This revealed that the Justice Department’s memo providing Trump his initial rationale for the firing (Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton probe) was bogus. Which led to the special counsel.

No no, it was a Stab in the Back.

Both Comey and Sessions enraged Trump because in some manner or other, they failed to show a level of loyalty to Trump that would have trumped (as it were) legitimate processes. Comey kept publicly validating the Russia investigation (which Trump dismisses as nothing but “Fake News”) and would not make it disappear by stopping leaks about it. Sessions recused himself to display (nominal) independence, which Trump somehow interpreted as a lapse into weakness that led to the special counsel, further affirming the probe’s weightiness.

Students of authoritarianism see a pattern taking shape

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history at New York University who writes extensively on authoritarianism and Italian fascism, told me that a discernible trait of authoritarian and autocratic rulers is ongoing “frustration” with the “inability to make others do their bidding” and with “institutional and bureaucratic procedures and checks and balances.”

That’s been visible in Trump from the very first days, when he was raging about crowd sizes and yelling at CIA agents about his…crowd sizes.

Trump expects independent officials “to behave according to personal loyalty, as opposed to following the rules,” added Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale University who wrote “On Tyranny,” a book of lessons from the 20th century. “For Trump, that is how the world is supposed to work. Trump doesn’t understand that in the world there might truly be laws and rules that constrain a leader.”

That’s one of the most hateful things about him – that thinking everything is about him and that he always comes first no matter what. He has no interest in or loyalty to anything that’s not about him. It’s a hideous quality. It’s also of course dangerous in a head of state, but it’s worth underlining the character problem.

Snyder noted that authoritarian tendencies often go hand in hand with impatience at such constraints. “You have to have morality and a set of institutions that escape the normal balance of administrative practice,” Snyder said. “You have to be able to lie all the time. You have to have people around you who tell you how wonderful you are all the time. You have to have institutions which don’t follow the law and instead follow some kind of law of loyalty.”

In short you have to have a hell on earth.

No one human being merits all that. We can be amazing collectively, but no one person is fit for worship. Shakespeare was an amazing guy but a big part of that is because he built on the work of other amazing people. He was part of human collective amazingness. Whoever painted the Lascaux caves? Probably inspired by predecessors.

Furthermore, Trump is mad at his racist Attorney General. Aw. Not because he’s racist, of course, but because he didn’t lie down in front of the nearest approaching locomotive for Trump’s sake.

Those tweets yesterday made this visible to the public.

In private, the president’s exasperation has been even sharper. He has intermittently fumed for months over Mr. Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from the investigation into Russian meddling in last year’s election, according to people close to Mr. Trump who insisted on anonymity to describe internal conversations. In Mr. Trump’s view, they said, it was that recusal that eventually led to the appointment of a special counsel who took over the investigation.

He expects people who work for him to defy the law and ethical rules.

David B. Rivkin Jr., a lawyer who served in the White House and Justice Department under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, said Mr. Trump clearly looked at the case from the lens of a businessman who did not get his money’s worth.

“He’s unhappy when the results don’t come in,” Mr. Rivkin said. “I’m sure he was convinced to try the second version, and the second iteration did not do better than the first iteration, so the lawyers in his book did not do a good job. It’s understandable for a businessman.”

And that’s why a business person with zero experience of government or public policy or law or anything relevant to being president should not run for president. What’s understandable for a (corrupt and dishonest) businessman is not understandable for a president.

The frustration over the travel ban might be a momentary episode were it not for the deeper resentment Mr. Trump feels toward Mr. Sessions, according to people close to the president. When Mr. Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, Mr. Trump learned about it only when he was in the middle of another event, and he publicly questioned the decision.

A senior administration official said Mr. Trump has not stopped burning about the decision, in occasional spurts, toward Mr. Sessions. Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who was selected by Mr. Sessions and filled in when it came to the Russia investigation, ultimately appointed Robert S. Mueller III, a former F.B.I. director, as special counsel to lead the probe.

In fact, much of the past two months of discomfort and self-inflicted pain for Mr. Trump can be tied in some way back to that recusal. Mr. Trump felt blindsided by Mr. Sessions’s decision and unleashed his fury at aides in the Oval Office the next day, according to four people familiar with the event. The next day was his fateful tweet about President Barack Obama conducting a wiretap of Trump Tower during the campaign, an allegation that was widely debunked.

BFFs no more.

Adam Liptak and Peter Baker at the Times spare a thought for Trump’s lawyers.

In a series of Twitter posts Monday that continued into the evening, Mr. Trump may have irretrievably undermined his lawyers’ efforts to persuade the Supreme Court to reinstate his executive order limiting travel from six predominantly Muslim countries, according to legal experts.

Saying he preferred “the original Travel Ban, not the watered down, politically correct version” he had issued in March, Mr. Trump attacked both the Justice Department and the federal courts. He also contradicted his own aides, who have suggested he was causing a pause in travel, by calling the order “what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN!” He said it would be imposed on “certain DANGEROUS countries” and suggested that anything short of a ban “won’t help us protect our people!”

He did the thing lawyers want their clients not to do: he blabbed. The first thing lawyers tell their clients is SAY NOTHING. Donnie doesn’t do Say Nothing.

Still, some administration supporters said the court should not consider the tweets. While looking beyond the letter of the order might be appropriate in domestic policy, the president has a freer hand in foreign policy, said David B. Rivkin Jr., a lawyer in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush. “As a constitutional matter, as a legal matter, it should make absolutely no difference,” he said of the president’s extracurricular messaging.

Last week, lawyers in the solicitor general’s office filed polished briefs in the Supreme Court. They urged the justices to ignore incendiary statements from Mr. Trump during the presidential campaign, including a call for a “Muslim ban.” The court should focus instead on the text of the revised executive order and statements from Mr. Trump after he had taken the inaugural oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution,” the briefs said.

Mr. Trump, his lawyers said, was now a changed man, alert to the burdens and responsibilities of his office.

“Taking that oath marks a profound transition from private life to the nation’s highest public office, and manifests the singular responsibility and independent authority to protect the welfare of the nation that the Constitution reposes in the president,” they wrote.

Ah no. No no. No no no no. That’s what you’d expect but it’s absolutely not what happened. That’s why we’re all so amazed. It never stops being amazing how completely he has not changed, how entirely the huge responsibilities of the office have not forced him to grow up.

On Twitter early Monday, though, Mr. Trump appeared to say that the latest executive order was of a piece with the earlier one, issued in January, and with his longstanding positions.

In calling the revised order “politically correct,” Mr. Trump suggested that his goal throughout had been to exclude travelers based on religion. And in calling the revised order “watered down,” he made it harder for his lawyers to argue that it was a clean break from the earlier one, which had mentioned religion.

Other than that, they were very helpful.

Mr. Trump’s adversaries certainly welcomed his tweets.

“It just adds to the mountain of already existing evidence that the government has had to ask the court over and over to ignore,” said Omar Jadwat, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents people and groups challenging the law. “Blinding the courts to a reality that everyone else is aware of is never an attractive position, but is especially problematic when you have to ignore in real time what’s being said by the president of the United States.”

Neal K. Katyal, who represents Hawaii in a separate challenge to the order, said there was a yawning gap between Mr. Trump’s tweets and his lawyers’ filings.

“The president’s statements, before, during and after his inauguration, continually demonstrate what his so-called travel ban is really about,” Mr. Katyal said. “It’s not surprising his story and his tweets don’t match up with what the solicitor general has been trying to say in court.”

The latest in Donnie.

Yesterday everyone was pointing and laughing at his tweets screaming that what he wants is a BAN god damn it not some politically correct intermediate step but A BAN A BAN A BAN. People were laughing because now the courts can just point at his tweets and say “unconstitutional”; job done.

So of course he said it again, to make sure.

That's right, we need a TRAVEL BAN for certain DANGEROUS countries, not some politically correct term that won't help us protect our people!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017

Good job, Don. You’re awesome at this.

The FAKE MSM is working so hard trying to get me not to use Social Media. They hate that I can get the honest and unfiltered message out.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017

Actually no. As journalists I’m pretty sure it’s pure gold to them. I know it is to me as a blogger. But as citizens? That’s another story. You shame and degrade us all every day with your disgusting xenophobic eruptions. That’s not a media thing, it’s a citizenship thing.

During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology. Leaders pointed to Qatar – look!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017

Uh huh, and you also planted big wet sloppy kisses on Saudi Arabia, which does more funding of Islamism than anyone else.

Sorry folks, but if I would have relied on the Fake News of CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, washpost or nytimes, I would have had ZERO chance winning WH

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017

Tsss. Not if you “would have” – if you had. Lordy. At least get an aide who can write basic English to proofread your tweets.

At any rate, we take note of your preference for Fox & Friends over the Washington Post and the New York Times, and we laugh a bitter laugh at your assumption that we would recoil in horror at the thought of your having no chance to win the election.

But you’re right, of course. If Fox “News” didn’t exist you wouldn’t be in the White House.

Trump’s people, saving face, are saying he has decided not to invoke executive privilege to stop Comey testifying. Ha. He can’t, so they’re saying he decided not to. We can see you, Donnie.

“The president’s power to assert executive privilege is well established,” principal deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters during the daily press briefing. “However, in order to facilitate a swift and thorough examination of the facts sought by the Senate Intelligence Committee, President Trump will not assert executive privilege regarding James Comey’s scheduled testimony.”

Which being interpreted is, in order to not look like a hapless fool when he invokes executive privilege and everyone laughs, Donnie won’t assert executive privilege regarding Comey’s tell-all.

Earlier, the White House had said that Trump was considering the use of executive privilege to halt Comey’s testimony, essentially arguing that he is afforded an expectation of privacy in conversations he may have had with a government official.

But then people told him that he’d blown that by talking publicly about the conversations himself.

I suspect a lot of people will be watching those hearings.

The Toronto Star is keeping a tally of all Trump’s falsehoods. He made 19 of them in the speech on withdrawing from the Paris Accord.

“And exiting the agreement protects the United States from future intrusions on the United States’ sovereignty and massive future legal liability. Believe me, we have massive legal liability if we stay in.”

Source: Speech on Paris climate accord

In fact: The agreement does not create any legal liability, independent experts in environmental law have told various publications.

“Of course, the world’s top polluters have no affirmative obligations under the Green Fund, which we terminated.”

Source: Speech on Paris climate accord

In fact: This is so misleading that we’re calling it false. The U.S. itself is one of the world’s top polluters, and nobody at all has any affirmative obligations under the Green Climate Fund. Trump creates the impression that the fund treats the U.S. more harshly than others though this is not the case.

“And nobody even knows where the (Green Climate Fund) money is going to. Nobody has been able to say, where is it going to?”

Source: Speech on Paris climate accord

In fact: There is a detailed list of funding recipients on the Fund’s very own website. Click the “Browse Projects” button and you can read all about them – a hydro project in Tajikistan, a flood management project in Samoa, a project to help farmers in Sri Lanka’s dry zone, and many more.

Politico reports in that monster-Trump piece that the failed casino tycoon ignored what his own National Security people urged him to say at NATO in favor of bullying them the way he’d always wanted to.

[T]he president also disappointed—and surprised—his own top national security officials by failing to include the language reaffirming the so-called Article 5 provision in his speech. National security adviser H.R. McMaster, Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson all supported Trump doing so and had worked in the weeks leading up to the trip to make sure it was included in the speech, according to five sources familiar with the episode…

It was not until the next day, Thursday, May 25, when Trump started talking at an opening ceremony for NATO’s new Brussels headquarters, that the president’s national security team realized their boss had made a decision with major consequences—without consulting or even informing them in advance of the change.

Well you see he’s the boss. That’s all there is to it really. He’s the boss, he can do whatever he wants to, and they can’t tell him what to do. It’s nursery school with nuclear weapons.

Added a senior White House official, “There was a fully coordinated other speech everybody else had worked on”—and it wasn’t the one Trump gave. “They didn’t know it had been removed,” said a third source of the Trump national security officials on hand for the ceremony. “It was only upon delivery.”

The president appears to have deleted it himself, according to one version making the rounds inside the government, reflecting his personal skepticism about NATO and insistence on lecturing NATO allies about spending more on defense rather than offering reassurances of any sort; another version relayed to others by several White House aides is that Trump’s nationalist chief strategist Steve Bannon and policy aide Stephen Miller played a role in the deletion.

He does what he wants. Nobody can stop him. We’re fucked.

This may be the worst photo of Trump as prez that I’ve seen so far – it’s like something out of a nightmare.

Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

It’s interesting and I think meaningful that there are so many photos of him of that kind. It’s interesting that his face so readily and often takes up that enraged hostile belligerent expression – that hideous anti-human hate-engorged snarl.

That’s not a good human being.