Finally the usurper gave up his effort to insert the citizenship question into the census.

President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he is backing off his effort to include a citizenship question in the 2020 census and is instead issuing an executive order directing departments and agencies to better share data related to the number of citizens and noncitizens in the country.

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The news conference came as two federal judges refused to let the Department of Justice withdraw lawyers from a lawsuit over the Trump administration’s plans to put the citizenship question on the 2020 census form.

The administration is currently printing census forms without the question after the Supreme Court ruled late last month that Commerce Secretary Wilbur

Yesterday:

The president just tweeted an imaginary Ronald Reagan quote about him. https://t.co/MTCtzvUbog pic.twitter.com/7DLBRH44DB

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) July 8, 2019

CNN:

Trump passed along a tweet from an obscure account that called itself “The Reagan Battalion,” which appeared to be impersonating a well-known conservative account of the same name. The copycat account had fewer than 300 followers at the time Trump promoted it.

Its tweet read: “Dear weak Conservatives, never forget that you are no match for ‘we the people,’ and our president.” Attached to the tweet was a photo of Trump and Reagan shaking hands — with a supposed Reagan quote superimposed on top.

“For the life of me, and I’ll never know how to explain it,

Remember, kids, the thing to do about criticism is to stage a huge tantrum and exact whatever kind of revenge you can come up with. That always works.

The U.K. is trying to prevent a row with Donald Trump from escalating after the president froze out the British ambassador in Washington over leaked diplomatic memos.

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The row follows the publication of diplomatic cables in the Mail on Sunday newspaper in which the ambassador called the U.S. president “inept” and “incompetent.” That prompted the White House to cancel an invitation on Monday for Darroch to attend a dinner with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and the emir of Qatar, according to a U.S. official.

Yes!! Brilliant!!! So dignified and mature. Much … Read the rest

No, Trump can’t use his Twitter account as his official presidential account and still block people who say things he doesn’t like.

A federal appeals court says President Donald Trump can’t ban critics from his Twitter account. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan ruled Tuesday.

A three-judge panel agreed with a lower court judge who said Trump violates the First Amendment when he blocks critics. In May of last year, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled the president was violating the constitutional rights of Americans by blocking them and thus, making them unable to see the president’s tweets.

The latest ruling came in a case

The spectacle of Donald Trump lecturing other people on how stupid they are.

….thought of within the U.S. We will no longer deal with him. The good news for the wonderful United Kingdom is that they will soon have a new Prime Minister. While I thoroughly enjoyed the magnificent State Visit last month, it was the Queen who I was most impressed with!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 8, 2019

But wait, there’s more.

…handled. I told @theresa_may how to do that deal, but she went her own foolish way-was unable to get it done. A disaster! I don’t know the Ambassador but have been told he is a pompous fool. Tell him the USA now has the best

Trump says it’s fine for Trump to insult anyone he feels like insulting, but not the other way around. That’s Justice According to Toddlers.

Of course, there is damage to relations between the UK and the Trump White House too.

Mr Trump likes to dish out insults and criticism (remember his frequent belittling of Theresa May over Brexit, and his all out verbal attacks on the mayor of London) but he is pretty thin-skinned when the verbal arrows are aimed at him.

“Pretty” thin-skinned? He goes ballistic at the smallest criticism and even disagreement.

As the Foreign Office launched an investigation into the source of the leak to the Mail on Sunday, Mr Trump told reporters in New Jersey:

In the least surprising news ever, the UK ambassador to Washington is not impressed by the Trump administration. Someone leaked his emails to the Daily Mail.

In the messages, the UK’s ambassador Sir Kim Darroch said the White House was “uniquely dysfunctional” and “divided” under Donald Trump.

“We don’t really believe this administration is going to become substantially more normal; less dysfunctional; less unpredictable; less faction-riven; less diplomatically clumsy and inept,” he said.

Ya, neither do we. Also on the list of no hopes that: less ignorant, less corrupt, less nepotistic, less xenophobic, less rights-abusing, less authoritarian.

Although Sir Kim said Mr Trump was “dazzled” by his state visit to the UK in June, the ambassador warned that his

Trump says the teleprompter fell over right at that place and that’s why he said the sojers took over the airports in 1775. Totally the teleprompter’s fault.

President Donald Trump — who used to mock predecessor Barack Obama for using the devices during speeches — said Friday that technical problems with the teleprompter during his “Salute to America” led to his head-scratching remarks about the Continental Army securing not-yet existent “airports” during the Revolutionary War.

How does that work exactly?

Trump, speaking to reporters on the White House lawn en route to his property in Bedminster, New Jersey, acknowledged Friday he had some technical problems because of the soggy conditions during his speech.

“We had a lot of rain. I

Greg Sargent on Trump’s putsch:

The authoritarian nationalist leader typically rewrites the story of the nation in his own image. Our own homegrown authoritarian nationalist has proved particularly devoted to this fusion of national mythmaking and self-hagiography, often delivered in his own unique language of crass, gaudy spectacle.

The historians tell us that this is what authoritarian nationalists do. As Harvard’s Jill Lepore puts it, they replace history with tried-and-true fictions – false tales of national decline at the hands of invented threats, melded to fictitious stories of renewed national greatness, engineered by the leader himself, who is both author of the fiction and its mythic hero.

The authoritarian nationalists of the past didn’t have Twitter though. How Hitler … Read the rest

It gets worse. (It always does, doesn’t it.)

SCOOP: Park Service has diverted $2.5 million in fees –normally used to improve parks around the country — for Trump's July Fourth extravaganza as White House hands out VIP tickets to donors and Trump's campaign staff, W/@jdawsey1 and @DanLamothe https://t.co/zRsCtifxrW

— Juliet Eilperin (@eilperin) July 2, 2019

$2.5 million stolen from the National Parks so that Trump can say LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME. And reward donors on our dime instead of his.

This is an absolutely abhorrent waste of taxpayer money. Our nation’s troops should not be used as political props and our national parks should not be co-opted to please @realDonaldTrump. https://t.co/bF6gRdM9o9

— Rep.

Trump announces on Twitter that the Supreme Court can’t tell him what to do.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday branded as “fake” news reports that his administration was dropping plans to ask people if they are U.S. citizens on the 2020 census — despite officials in his own administration having said Monday that the question will not be asked.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and a Justice Department lawyer had both said Tuesday that the Census Bureau is in the process of printing the census questionnaire without the citizenship question.

Their statements came five days after a Supreme Court decision that effectively blocked the question being added to the 2020 census questionnaire.

The News Reports about the Department of

The BBC raises a skeptical eyebrow at Donnie Two-scoops’s wannabe-Mussolini parade.

“We’re going to have planes going overhead – the best fighter jets in the world and other planes too,” the Republican president told reporters at the White House on Monday.

“And we’re going to have some tanks stationed outside.”

He said the event will “be like no other, it’ll be special”.

You can hear them sniggering from all the way over here.

City leaders have spoken out against the idea.

“We have said it before, and we’ll say it again: Tanks, but no tanks,” the District of Columbia council tweeted on Monday.

We have said it before, and we’ll say it again: Tanks, but no tanks. (PS: The @DeptofDefense

Spoken like a true dictator.

Ahead of his expected meeting with Putin on the sidelines of this weekend’s G-20 Summit in Osaka, Japan, the president told reporters that while he expected to have a positive conversation with Putin, he would not divulge whether he will press the adversarial leader about election interference.

“I will have a very good conversation with him,” Trump said, adding, “What I say to him is none of your business.”

It is though. It’s every bit our business, and given his incompetence and criminality and profound stupidity, it’s more our business than it is his. He has no business being president, let alone talking secretively to Putin.… Read the rest

Trump blithers about Iran.

President Donald Trump said Saturday that military action against Iran was still an option for its downing of an unmanned U.S. military aircraft, but amid heightened tensions he dangled the prospect of eventually becoming an unlikely “best friend” of America’s longtime Middle Eastern adversary.

Trump also said “we very much appreciate” that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard chose not to target a U.S. spy plane carrying more than 30 people.

Yes, that’s how it’s done. Just sound like an awkward child thanking an adult for a birthday present, and everything will be fine.

“The fact is we’re not going to have Iran have a nuclear weapon,” he said as he left the White House for a weekend

Trump is finally getting his big Parade of Sojers along with a Nürnberg-style rally starring himself.

Interior Secretary David Bernhardt gave details Wednesday on a makeover of the traditional Fourth of July celebration on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. to accommodate a speech by President Donald Trump at the Lincoln Memorial.

A day after Trump officially began his re-election campaign in Florida, Bernhardt said the July 4 events will include the military parade Trump has wanted since being impressed by the July 14 Bastille Day festivities in Paris he attended in 2017.

They call him “sir,” you know. Did you know that? They do. The generals call him sir. If you ask him he’ll do a re-enactment for you.… Read the rest