People who know Trump say he won’t read anything that’s not about him – so it’s hopeless trying to get him to read, say, the Constitution, or intelligence briefings, or books about foreign policy or law or human rights or economics or history or anything else of that kind. But there are apparently a few exceptions, and one of them is InfoWars. That appears to be where he got his claim that news outlets are deliberately not reporting Islamist violence.

the kernel of the idea appears to have come from — or at least been propagated by — one of his favorite news sources: the conspiracy theory website InfoWars.

As @UrbanAchievr noted after Trump’s comments, InfoWars has been barking up this tree for a while now. A sampling of its headlines:

• “FAKE NEWS: MAINSTREAM MEDIA WHITEWASHES ISLAMIC TERROR IN BERLIN: Propagandists desperate to hide the obvious” — Dec. 20
• “SCANDAL: MASS MEDIA COVERS UP TERRORISM TO PROTECT ISLAM” — July 29
• “GERMANY COVERING UP TERROR PLOTS TO PROTECT MUSLIM MIGRANTS” — June 24

And so on.

Former congressman Allen West (R-Fla.) has also pushed this idea, posting a video from InfoWars back in August under the headline, “TERROR ATTACK: Massive media cover-up.” And it’s a theme that has cropped up on other conspiracy theory and right-wing websites from time to time.

The idea of the media covering up or not fully covering terrorist attacks was around before InfoWars picked it up, though. Conservatives have long accused the media of obscuring the details and motivations of radical Islamic terrorists in an effort to downplay the role of religion.

I think there’s a little bit of truth in that – I think many in the media are cautious about how they word their reporting because they don’t want to set off attacks on Muslims as a group. That’s not a bad or sinister motivation.

This caution also prompts some editorialists to avoid discussion of Islamism as an ideology. I do think that’s a big mistake, however decent the motivations.

But that’s not the same as not reporting, and it’s just obviously not the case that Everything Is Being Hidden.

And the idea that Trump got this from InfoWars is hardly far-fetched. Many of Trump’s conspiracy theories originate or at least involve InfoWars. And Trump has made no apologies for tying himself to the website and its founder, Alex Jones. In December 2015 — in the thick of his GOP primary campaign — Trump actually appeared on Jones’s show.

“Your reputation’s amazing,” Trump told Jones on his show. “I will not let you down. You will be very, very impressed, I hope, and we’ll be speaking a lot. … A year into office, you’ll be saying, ‘Wow, I remember that interview. He said he was going to do it, and he did a great job.'”

InfoWars has helped propagate the baseless theory that millions of people illegally voted, depriving Trump of a popular-vote win. It was a major player in pushing the birther conspiracy. It was an early player in the “Hillary for Prison” game, having started selling t-shirts bearing the slogan in the fall of 2015. And it has pushed the baseless idea that Muslims cheered in the streets on 9/11.

All of these have also been embraced by Trump, and now it appears we can add one more to the list.

It’s ok, though, because he will bring millions of jobs to small towns in West Virginia. You watch.

Now Trump is accusing the news media of concealing Islamist attacks.

Speaking to the U.S. Central Command on Monday, President Trump went off his prepared remarks to make a truly stunning claim: The media was intentionally covering up reports of terrorist attacks.

“You’ve seen what happened in Paris, and Nice. All over Europe, it’s happening,” he said to the assembled military leaders. “It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported. And in many cases the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that.”

What reasons? A secret hope to see Sharia become the law of the land?

It’s true, Philip Bump points out, that not ever terrorist attack gets extensive coverage – because the news media can’t cover everything that happens, so they select. But hey, guess what – Trump himself ignored a terrorist attack just last week. It was an attack not all that far away, too – the one in Quebec – the attack on Muslims as opposed to by Islamists.

Trump has consistently seen attacks like that in Quebec — committed by a young man who espoused anti-Muslim politics and defended Trump online — as isolated incidents from mentally disturbed individuals, while attacks by Muslims are part of a broader pattern spurred by radical Islamism. He sees an institution behind attacks by Muslims that he doesn’t see behind attacks like that in Quebec or in Charleston in 2015. That helps explain why he is willing to focus the country’s anti-terrorism efforts solely on terrorism committed in the name of Islam: He doesn’t see how other threats are systemic.

Or to put it another way, he doesn’t see how other threats are rooted in poisonous ideas. I suppose that could be because he shares the poisonous ideas.

Even John Yoo, author of torture-approving memos in Bush’s Justice Department, thinks Trump is overstepping the limits on what presidents can do.

Article II of the Constitution vests the president with “the executive power,” but does not define it. Most of the Constitution instead limits that power, as with the president’s duty “to take care that the laws are faithfully executed,” or divides that power with Congress, as with making treaties or appointing Supreme Court justices.

Hamilton argued that good government and “energy in the executive” went hand in hand. In The Federalist No. 70, he wrote that the framers, to encourage “decision, activity, secrecy and dispatch,” entrusted the executive power in a unified branch headed by a single person, the president.

Woo considers himself a Hamiltonian.

But even I have grave concerns about Mr. Trump’s uses of presidential power.

During the campaign, Mr. Trump gave little sign that he understood the constitutional roles of the three branches, as when he promised to appoint justices to the Supreme Court who would investigate Hillary Clinton. (Judge Neil M. Gorsuch will not see this as part of his job description.) In his Inaugural Address, Mr. Trump did not acknowledge that his highest responsibility, as demanded by his oath of office, is to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.” Instead, he declared his duty to represent the wishes of the people and end “American carnage,” seemingly without any constitutional restraint.

While my robust vision of the presidency supports some of Mr. Trump’s early executive acts — presidents have the power to terminate international agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, for example — others are more dubious. Take his order to build a wall along the border with Mexico, and his suggestion that he will tax Mexican imports or currency transfers to pay for it. The president has no constitutional authority over border control, which the Supreme Court has long found rests in the hands of Congress. Under Article I of the Constitution, only Congress can fund the construction of a wall, a fence or even a walking path along the border. And the president cannot slap a tax or tariff on Mexican imports without Congress.

Well…if he can’t, maybe one of his helpers can? Steve Bannon for instance?

Nor can Mr. Trump pull the United States out of Nafta, because Congress made the deal with Mexico and Canada by statute. Presidents have no authority to cancel tariff and trade laws unilaterally.

Immigration has driven Mr. Trump even deeper into the constitutional thickets. Even though his executive order halting immigration from seven Muslim nations makes for bad policy, I believe it falls within the law. But after the order was issued, his adviser Rudolph Giuliani disclosed that Mr. Trump had initially asked for “a Muslim ban,” which would most likely violate the Constitution’s protection for freedom of religion or its prohibition on the state establishment of religion, or both — no mean feat. Had Mr. Trump taken advantage of the resources of the executive branch as a whole, not just a few White House advisers, he would not have rushed out an ill-conceived policy made vulnerable to judicial challenge.

But where’s the fun in that? Trump wants the fun he imagines goes with the job. He couldn’t care less what the Constitution says…despite having sworn that oath.

A successful president need not have a degree in constitutional law. But he should understand the Constitution’s grant of executive power.

He should at least have read the damn thing. I strongly doubt that Trump ever has.

More from that Times piece yesterday on Trump’s sad awakening.

Cloistered in the White House, he now has little access to his fans and supporters — an important source of feedback and validation — and feels increasingly pinched by the pressures of the job and the constant presence of protests, one of the reasons he was forced to scrap a planned trip to Milwaukee last week. For a sense of what is happening outside, he watches cable, both at night and during the day — too much in the eyes of some aides — often offering a bitter play-by-play of critics like CNN’s Don Lemon.

And, of course, it doesn’t help that he’s willfully stupid and incurious. He seems to me to have made a choice long ago – I don’t know when because I never paid attention to him until I was forced to last July – to refuse to think hard or ask questions or learn. He’s caught in a loop of his own making.

Until the past few days, Mr. Trump was telling his friends and advisers that he believed the opening stages of his presidency were going well. “Did you hear that, this guy thinks it’s been terrible!” Mr. Trump said mockingly to other aides when one dissenting view was voiced last week during a West Wing meeting.

But his opinion has begun to change with a relentless parade of bad headlines.

I’ve been offering him help with that on Twitter…but of course so have millions of other people, so he can’t really benefit from our counsel.

He ran off to Mar-a-Lago for the weekend and Steve & Reince went with him.

By then, the president, for whom chains of command and policy minutiae rarely meant much, was demanding that Mr. Priebus begin to put in effect a much more conventional White House protocol that had been taken for granted in previous administrations: From now on, Mr. Trump would be looped in on the drafting of executive orders much earlier in the process.

Looped in? So it really is Bannon who’s been writing them?

Mr. Priebus bristles at the perception that he occupies a diminished perch in the West Wing pecking order compared with previous chiefs. But for the moment, Mr. Bannon remains the president’s dominant adviser, despite Mr. Trump’s anger that he was not fully briefed on details of the executive order he signed giving his chief strategist a seat on the National Security Council, a greater source of frustration to the president than the fallout from the travel ban.

Wait. What?

Trump didn’t know Bannon had given himself a seat on the NSC? Is that what they’re reporting?

Well, never mind – Trump is busy with redecorating.

Visitors to the Oval Office say Mr. Trump is obsessed with the décor — it is both a totem of a victory that validates him as a serious person and an image-burnishing backdrop — so he has told his staff to schedule as many televised events in the room as possible.

To pass the time between meetings, Mr. Trump gives quick tours to visitors, highlighting little tweaks he has made after initially expecting he would have to pay for them himself.

Flanking his desk are portraits of Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. He will linger on the opulence of the newly hung golden drapes, which he told a recent visitor were once used by Franklin D. Roosevelt but in fact were patterned for Bill Clinton. For a man who sometimes has trouble concentrating on policy memos, Mr. Trump was delighted to page through a book that offered him 17 window covering options.

Of course he was.

The Speaker of the House of Commons has made a forthright statement on why in his view Donald Trump should not be invited to give a speech in said House. Spoiler: it’s because Trump is a bad man. Specifically, it’s because he’s racist and sexist.

“Before the imposition of the migrant ban I would myself have been strongly opposed to an address by President Trump in Westminster Hall,” Mr Bercow told MPs.

“After the imposition of the migrant ban by President Trump I am even more strongly opposed to an address by President Trump in Westminster Hall.”

Parts of the Commons erupted into rare spontaneous applause in support of Mr Bercow’s statement.

The intervention will cause headaches in Downing Street, where Theresa May has bent over backwards to rekindle the so-called special relationship with the US.

By rushing over here to visit, and by rushing to issue an invitation to Trump to pay a state visit, an invitation which is normally not issued immediately. It makes me furious that she’s doing that.

The Speaker said: “We value our relationship with the United States. If a state visit takes place, that is way beyond and above the pay grade of the Speaker.

“However, as far as this place is concerned I feel very strongly that our opposition to racism and to sexism and our support for equality before the law and an independent judiciary are hugely important considerations in the House of Commons.”

Theresa May please note.

The Speaker’s intervention is a particularly stunning development because the post is politically neutral. Mr Bercow was previously a Conservative MP before he was elected to the role; following convention he then gave up any party affiliation.

Nearly two million people signed a petition calling for Mr Trump’s state visit to be cancelled in just days after it was announced. MPs are to debate the issue in Westminster Hall.

He wants to play golf at Balmoral.

Your morning TwitterTrump.

Last night he interrupted the flow of invective with a sportsball rejoicement. Rah.

Then today it was back to business.

Any negative polls are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election. Sorry, people want border security and extreme vetting.

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

Perfect, isn’t it? Any poll he dislikes is “fake news.” Trumpian epistemology in a nutshell.

And what does he think he means by “people want”? Of course some people approve of his ban, but others don’t. He can’t tell how the numbers fall just by looking out the window.

Plus the usual thing – we already have border security and extensive vetting.

I call my own shots, largely based on an accumulation of data, and everyone knows it. Some FAKE NEWS media, in order to marginalize, lies!

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

The presidency is not about One Big Manly Man calling his own shots. It’s not a dictatorship, it’s not an absolute monarchy, it’s not being a general or an admiral. It’s not a matter of “calling shots” at all. Telling us how peremptory and autocratic he is is not the way to go. We already know he’s like that, and that it’s one of his biggest flaws.

Then of course there’s the fact that he actually doesn’t, really, not with Bannon in the room.

Then there’s the laughable claim about data. Hahahahahahaha no you don’t, dude.

Then there’s the “everyone knows it.” That’s that “they all love me” delusion again. The audience for his inauguration was HUGE. Everybody loves him. All those protests are just fake news.

Then there’s the actual misappropriation of the label “fake news,” yet again.

Then there’s the move to demonize the press, yet again.

All that in one tweet. He gets a lot of bullshit into one tweet, I’ll give him that.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/828641340313460736

He was on O’Reilly’s show yesterday, too. So he’s going to do O’Reilly every day, now? That’s going to be his response to “fake news” i.e. news that reports on his many crimes and blunders? Good plan. Very presidential.

And, to wrap up the morning’s blurts, yet another cock-wave at the Times.

The failing @nytimes writes total fiction concerning me. They have gotten it wrong for two years, and now are making up stories & sources!

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

And with that the screaming toddler closed the Twitter and went to the office.

TwitterTrump just in. I guess he slept late today.

Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 5, 2017

So the very first thing he says is that he cannot believe our system of government works the way it does work. That’s a pretty tragic admission for a head of state.

And then there’s the boneheaded error at the heart of all this, which is the fatuous belief that he has discovered the One Simple Way to prevent any and all Islamist outrages inside the US. The reality of course is that there is no One Simple Way. Anybody could decide that Islamism is the best thing ever and violence is the way to hasten it along. Anybody. If “something happens” – it will likely be the handiwork of someone born here. Blaming the judge is the equivalent of blaming The Jews for the Reichstag Fire.

And then there’s the fact that people aren’t “pouring in,” because the vetting was already strict and time-consuming.

I have instructed Homeland Security to check people coming into our country VERY CAREFULLY. The courts are making the job very difficult!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 5, 2017

The courts are doing no such thing. HS was already checking people very carefully. He really ought to STUDY UP on these things.

Then he ends gracefully with a promo for his own interview on Fox, the one where he says Our Country is as bad as Putin’s Russia.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/828344301381939200

Donnie from Queens hasn’t tweeted about this yet. That will be because it appears to be about someone else. The fact that that someone else reflects badly on him won’t cross his mind.

Even some Republicans are a little bit skeeved by Trump’s flattery of Putin.

President Trump has long been effusive in his praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin, despite criticism from Republicans and Democrats alike.

In an interview with Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly, which will air ahead of the Super Bowl on Sunday, Trump doubled down on his “respect” for Putin — even in the face of accusations that Putin and his associates have murdered journalists and dissidents in Russia.

“I do respect him. Well, I respect a lot of people, but that doesn’t mean I’ll get along with them,” Trump told O’Reilly.

O’Reilly pressed on, declaring to the president that “Putin is a killer.”

Unfazed, Trump didn’t back away, but rather compared Putin’s reputation for extrajudicial killings with the United States’.

“There are a lot of killers. We have a lot of killers,” Trump said. “Well, you think our country is so innocent?”

Hmmmmm. But yesterday he was Twitter-shouting about keeping “evil” [scare-quotes his] out of our glorious nation.

This isn’t a new line with him.

In a 2015 interview on “Morning Joe,” Trump was pressed on the same issue and gave a similar answer.

“He kills journalists that don’t agree with him,” the show’s host, Joe Scarborough, pointed out.

“Well, I think that our country does plenty of killing, too, Joe,” Trump said.

Hmmmm. Really? Bush and Obama put polonium in activists’ tea? Bush and Obama sent hit men to machine gun journalists in their own apartment buildings? I wonder why we haven’t heard anything about that.

From Nick Cohen’s extended piece on Trump and lies and the people who believe his lies:

No one in the west has seen Trump’s kind of triumph in politics since the age of the dictators. But look around your workplace and perhaps you won’t be so surprised by their victories. If you are unlucky, you will see an authoritarian standing over you. The radical economist Chris Dillow once wrote that, while the fall of communism discredited the centrally planned economy, the centrally planned corporation, with the autocratic leader who tolerated no dissent, not only survived 1989, but blossomed.

Dillow is not alone in worrying about the harm the little Hitlers of the corporation might bring. Since the crash, economists have looked as a matter of urgency at how hierarchies encourage petty tyrants to brag their way to the top. They exhibit all the symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder: a desire to dominate, overconfidence, a sense of entitlement, an inability to listen to others or allow others to speak and a passion for glory. If you want to know how they can win the votes of those around them, remember Fred Goodwin’s vainglorious decision to takeover ABN Amro. Perhaps the single worst decision in UK business history, whose consequences we are still paying for, was not opposed by a single member of the RBS board.

Narcissists in business are more likely to seek macho takeovers and less likely to engage in the hard work of innovating and creating profitable firms, the researchers found. They are more likely to cook the books to feed their cults of the personality and make, if not America, then themselves look great again. Academics from the University of California have asked the obvious question: why would rational companies let the fascism of the firm survive? Surely they ought to be protecting their businesses, as free market theory dictates, rather than allow dangerous and grasping men and women to risk their destruction.

They found what most of us instinctively know to be true: in the right circumstances, compulsive liars can create compulsive believers, as Trump has done. “Overconfident individuals attained status” because their peers believed the stories they told about themselves. It should not be a surprise that Donald Trump, Arron Banks and oligarchs backing the Russian and east European strongmen come from business. The age of the dictators never came to an end in the workplace.

We are all his Apprentices.

Why is Ivanka Trump present at official meetings? She was present at a meeting of business honchos on Friday. Why? Presidents don’t just routinely have random family members joining the gang at official meetings. Why are the rules different for Trump?

President Donald Trump convened with the heads of some of America’s largest corporations on Friday at the White House for a meeting intended to make good on the administration’s pledge to reduce regulation, promote women in the workplace, and cut taxes.

…

Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, told CNBC it had been a “fabulous meeting” and said the president “engaged forcefully” on every topic.

Steve Schwarzman, CEO of private equity firm Blackstone and chairman of the council that arranged Friday’s meeting, said the session had been “spirited intellectually” and that the members had had a “balanced discussion” about “taxes, trade, infrastructure, women’s issues, education, and how to bring home jobs in terms of training people in technology.”

Other attendees at Friday’s business huddle included members of Trump’s economic advisory council, such as JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon, Walt Disney’s Bob Iger, Wal-Mart CEO Doug McMillon, and Mary Barra of General Motors.

The meeting also included First Daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner, senior adviser to the president; as well as Vice President Mike Pence and White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon.

Why was she there?

I still want to know.

So Pence is willing to lie for Trump, and he’s willing to excuse Trump’s infantile and reckless personal attack on a federal judge. I guess we knew that, since he was willing to be his VP.

Vice President Mike Pence on Sunday defended President Trump’s personal attack on the federal judge who blocked his travel ban on seven predominately Muslim countries, saying that the president’s remarks did not risk undermining the bedrock principle of the separation of powers.

Asked about Mr. Trump’s reference on Twitter to the “so-called judge” who ordered a stay of the president’s executive order, Mr. Pence said on NBC’s “Meet the Press”: “Well, look, the president of the United States has every right to criticize the other two branches of government. And we have a long tradition of that in this country.”

Oh stop. “Criticize” is one thing, and “insult via Twitter” is quite another. Criticism is not the same thing as publicly saying a federal judge is not actually a judge but an impostor.

Asked on the ABC program “This Week” about whether Mr. Trump had failed to respect the judicial branch’s check on his authority, Mr. Pence said the president was merely “speaking his mind,” as Americans have come to expect from him.

Right, like all those times he called Senator Warren “Pocahontas,” and that time he bragged about being able to grab women “by the pussy,” and the countless insults to women, and all the rest of the toxic stew. We know. But he’s president now, so that’s an additional reason he should stop “speaking his mind” in that way – additional to the ones about not being an evil belligerent misogynist racist shit.

Critics in both parties said the president had demonstrated a lack of understanding of or a disregard for the nation’s three equal branches of government.

Or both. He appears not to understand that the judiciary can rule on his orders, and we can be pretty sure that he would carry on the same way even if he did understand.