Trump continues to announce as fact – even in official statements that are obviously by written by someone else (who knows how to write) – things he doesn’t and can’t possibly know.

President-elect Donald J. Trump acknowledged the possibility on Friday that Russia had hacked a variety of American targets, including the Democratic National Committee, after an almost two-hour meeting with the nation’s top intelligence officials.

Mr. Trump asserted that the hacking had no effect on the outcome of the election.

That. He can’t know that.

If he weren’t so stupid, he would realize how stupid it makes him look to make such ridiculous claims. But he is, so he doesn’t.

In a statement issued after the president-elect was briefed by senior American intelligence and law enforcement officials, Mr. Trump said: “While Russia, China, other countries, outside groups and people are consistently trying to break through the cyber infrastructure of our governmental institutions, businesses and organizations including the Democrat National Committee, there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election including the fact that there was no tampering whatsoever with voting machines.”

He not only states it, he overstates it. “Absolutely no effect” – how the fuck would he know that? He wouldn’t, of course, and he doesn’t, yet he says it, thus revealing yet again what a thicko he is.

It brings me out in a rash, this kind of brainless confidence of knowing things one can’t possibly know.

Jeff Sharlet on Facebook:

I’d almost forgotten the time Dan Coats, Trump’s pick for National Intelligence Director — the man to whom 16 intelligence agencies report — called me an “enemy of Jesus.”

Well, I didn’t hear him do it, but the source seemed solid. It was, I think, 2004, and I’d been invited to speak at the University of Potsdam, near Berlin, in a series sponsored by the U.S. embassy. My subject was “the Family,” the secretive fundamentalist organization of which Coats, unbeknownst to me at the time, is a member. When I arrived, my German host told me there’d been a little problem: the ambassador — Dan Coats — had blocked funding for my talk. “He said,” my host said, in thickly accented English, “you are an ‘enemy of Jesus.'”

My host was one of those deadpan Germans. He didn’t smile. I said, “You’re joking.”

“Yes,” he said, still unsmiling, “that is what I thought, too.” Apparently, the Germans had gone back and forth a couple of times with the embassy, unable to believe this was serious. And apparently the embassy personnel were plenty embarrassed about it, too. But that was Coats’ ruling, so it stuck. Fortunately for me, the university picked up my tab.

Later I’d learn from the late David Kuo, a Bush official who’d also been a Family member, though ambivalent enough about it in his last years to be relatively open with me, that one of Coats’ Family initiatives, in collaboration with then Senator John Ashcroft — also a Family member, his entire career shaped by his affiliation — had been to insert the idea of “charitable choice” into the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, as I wrote in my 2008 book THE FAMILY,

“allowing religious groups to win government funding without separating out their religious agenda—into the 1996 welfare-reform bill. The theory behind faith-based initiatives grew out of the work of scholars and theologians schooled in traditions that could hardly be considered fundamentalist, or even conservative. But its implementation was in many senses the logical result of the Family’s decades of ministry to Washington’s elite combined with the increasingly established power of populist fundamentalism: a mix of sophisticated policy maneuvers and the kind of sentimentalism that blinded many supporters to the fact that faith-based initiatives, no matter how well intended, are nothing less than “the privatization of welfare,” as the faith-based theorist Marvin Olasky put it in a 1996 report commissioned by then-Governor Bush. Such an outcome satisfied elite fundamental- ism’s long-standing belief in the relationship between laissez-faire economics and God’s invisible, interventionist hand, and populist fundamentalism’s desire for public expressions of faith, preferably heartwarming ones. The goal, Senator Coats declared, was the ‘transfer of resources and authority . . . to those private and religious institutions that shape, direct, and reclaim individual lives.'”

That’s right — the man running the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus, working in concert with the new fundamentalist director of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, and the lunatic Islamophobe Gen. Mike Flynn, believes in the “transfer of resources and authority” to private religious institutions.

Like, for instance, the Family? Presiding over the 1987 National Prayer Breakfast, the strange annual ritual created by the Family to “consecrate” the nation to Jesus (and attended by the president, much of congress, and numerous heads of state), Coats declared “This is just the visible part of the prayer breakfast movement.” He seemed to think it a point of pride that an event of such civic importance was mostly, as the behind-the-scenes leader of the movement puts it, “invisible.”

Of course, I’m sure Coats, a longtime extreme culture warrior, supports many other religious organizations, too. Don’t worry — he’ll spread the “resources and authority” around.

It’s important to note, when one considers men such as Coats and organizations such as the Family, that this is not a conspiracy. They’re not breaking the law. They’re making the law. It is, as Coats says, “a movement.” One secularists and liberals have long ignored, misunderstood, or scoffed at. Now, under perhaps the most personally impious president since Eisenhower, it’s coming fully into its own.

But here’s the bright side. Our new National Intelligence Director may have big plans, but it’s very possible that he won’t be terribly effective at executing them. This is, after all, a man who considered Dan Quayle as his mentor. I’ve been told that Quayle, in turn, thought of Coats as very promising, but — how to say? — sometimes a little slow on the uptake.

Horrifying enough?

Trump talked to the Times on the phone this morning.

Mr. Trump spoke to The New York Times by telephone three hours before he was set to be briefed by the nation’s top intelligence and law enforcement officials about the Russian hacking of American political institutions. In the conversation, he repeatedly criticized the intense focus on Russia.

“China, relatively recently, hacked 20 million government names,” he said, referring to the breach of computers at the Office of Personnel Management in late 2014 and early 2015. “How come nobody even talks about that? This is a political witch hunt.”

Ahhh yes, it’s a “political witch hunt,” because what valid reason could there possibly be to object to Russia’s meddling with the recent election?

In congressional testimony on Thursday, the intelligence officials rejected Mr. Trump’s longstanding skepticism about Russia’s cyberactivities and told lawmakers they had unanimously concluded that the Russian government used hacks and leaks of information to influence the American election.

It’s not “skepticism.” It’s denialism. It wasn’t skepticism when the tobacco CEOs said nicotine is not addictive, it’s not skepticism when anti-vaxxers babble about autism and mercury, it’s not skepticism when right-wing think tanks say global warming is bogus plus besides it’s a good thing. It wasn’t skepticism when Trump kept insisting that Obama wasn’t born in the US. Trump doesn’t do skepticism, he does assertion and denial.

Mr. Trump, who has consistently expressed doubts about the evidence of Russian hacking during the election, did so again on Friday. Asked why he thought there was so much attention being given to the Russian cyberattacks, the president-elect said the motivation was political.

“They got beaten very badly in the election. I won more counties in the election than Ronald Reagan,” Mr. Trump said during an eight-minute telephone conversation. “They are very embarrassed about it. To some extent, it’s a witch hunt. They just focus on this.”

Says the liar who was a noisy birther for years, and who said the Central Park five are guilty in October, despite the physical evidence that exonerated them.

Mr. Trump said he was looking forward to his meeting Friday afternoon about the hacking with Mr. Clapper; James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director; and other intelligence officials. He said that Mr. Clapper “wrote me a beautiful letter a few weeks ago wishing me the best.”

From Trump the liar to Trump the narcissist – the whole point of people is whether they say nice things about Trump or not.

It will be interesting to see what lies he tells after the intelligence briefing, which I believe is in progress now.

Trump has been sneering and jeering at intelligence experts for days. This morning there was a hearing.

Senate Republicans and Democrats defended on Thursday the findings by the American intelligence community that Russia interfered in the United States election, during a spirited hearing before the Armed Services Committee just as President-elect Donald J. Trump has questioned foreign involvement.

Some highlights from the hearing:

■ Intelligence officials said Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, should not be given credibility.

■ In a comment aimed at Mr. Trump, the director of national intelligence said there was a difference between “skepticism” and “disparagement” of the findings.

That actually sums up the problem with Trump’s way of “thinking” in general: it’s all attitude and no inquiry. Skepticism is based on reasons, while disparagement is just emoting.

The hearing arrived at an explosive moment. Mr. Trump has continued to express doubts about Russia’s interference in the election, placing him at odds with the intelligence agencies he will soon command and with several leading members of his own party.

Plus of course there’s the obvious fact that he’s an interested party. He’s making it clearer every moment that he will always do what he considers good for him, Donald Trump, rather than fretting about any such triviality as what’s good for the people he’s supposed to be serving. He’s sneering at the claims about Russia’s hacking because they make him look bad, period end of story.

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, has made no secret of his belief that Russia was responsible for the election-related hacking, and his recent travels will not have eased his concerns about Russian aggression. He just returned from a New Year’s tour of countries that see themselves as threatened by Russia: Ukraine, Georgia and the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Yes but who cares about them when Donald Trump’s reputation is at stake?

Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, was the first to take direct aim at Mr. Trump, wondering aloud “who benefits from a president-elect trashing the intelligence community.”

Mr. Clapper said pointedly that there was “a difference between healthy skepticism” — a phrase Vice President-elect Mike Pence used in defending Mr. Trump’s criticism of the intelligence agencies — and “disparagement.”

“The intelligence community is not perfect,” Mr. Clapper added. “We are an organization of human beings and we’re prone sometimes to make errors.” But he referred to the wall of stars in the C.I.A. lobby commemorating the deaths of agency officers on duty and said the agencies’ efforts to keep the country safe are not always appreciated.

Ms. McCaskill said there would be “howls from the Republican side of the aisle” if a Democrat had spoken about intelligence officials as Mr. Trump has.

“Thank you for that nonpartisan comment,” Mr. McCain joked as she wrapped up.

Meanwhile Trump is on Twitter calling Senator Schumer a “clown.” Yes really.

Amy Davidson at the New Yorker explains why Trump failed to be enthusiastic about the Republicans’ move to kill the Office of Congressional Ethics.

The G.O.P. representatives were absolutely correct in thinking that the Trump years are shaping up to be a bitter farce, in terms of good government, and a tragedy in other ways—bereft, for example, of real efforts to improve the lives of the most vulnerable Americans. What they were confused about was the part that they are expected to play. This became clear on Monday night, as critics from all sides pelted the congressmen with their own absurdity, and, the next morning, when Trump began to tweet.

“With all that Congress has to work on, do they really have to make the weakening of the Independent Ethics Watchdog, as unfair as it,” Trump began, continuing in a second tweet, “may be, their number one act and priority. Focus on tax reform, healthcare and so many other things of far greater importance! ‪#DTS.”  “DTS” stands for “Drain the swamp,” one of the companion chants to “Lock her up!” during the Presidential campaign. It hasn’t been looking all that drained. What’s most telling about Trump’s tweet, and the possible source of the congressmen’s confusion, is that Trump is not objecting to the idea of “weakening” the watchdogs; he is just annoyed that the congressional Republicans are doing it on what he considers to be his time. They don’t have their priorities straight. This is not an office that would ever go after him, so why are they wasting his political capital crippling it? In the world as seen from Trump Tower, that’s practically political embezzlement.

Ah, of course. I didn’t think of that, and I did wonder why he was raining on their parade. How silly of me – it wasn’t about him, so of course he rained.

Don’t bother having any sympathy for Paul Ryan, she adds.

That is no reason to feel sorry for Ryan, who has lived by and fortified this culture. There were moments during the campaign when Ryan was critical of Trump. But in its last days he campaigned for Trump by name. Ryan seems to have his own gold-painted fantasies of what that means. He talks frequently about how much “Donald” likes his ideas. If, in his focus on getting Trump’s help in dismantling the safety net, he let himself be exposed to a day of humiliation, he can’t be surprised. Nor does he deserve much credit for his late effort, with the reversal of the rule change, to salvage his dignity. Indeed, by doing it so quickly after the Trump tweets he has made himself look all the more like the President-elect’s messenger, or maybe his intern.

Or his valet.