Posts Tagged ‘
Trump ’
Nov 7th, 2017 10:41 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Greg Sargent at the Post on Trump’s nonsense about the Texas slaughter:
(I know, I’m harping on it, but Trump’s disgusting cynical frivolity about this cries out for obsessive finger-pointing.)
It has become an Internet meme that Donald Trump favors extreme vetting for arriving immigrants, but not for would-be gun buyers, and today in South Korea, Trump was confronted by a question about this contrast. It produced a useful answer — one that once again illustrated the deep rot of bad faith at the core of his approach to difficult policy questions.
You can see that bad faith when he closes his eyes. He’s taking a second to think up a way to sell the lies.
It’s being widely
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Nov 7th, 2017 10:13 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Trump said if there had been “extreme vetting” of the guy who slaughtered all those people in Texas, “you would have had hundreds more dead.” You can watch him close his eyes while he pretends to think. You can see him end triumphantly with his cherished cliché “the great state of” Texas.
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Tags: Trump
Nov 7th, 2017 10:01 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Trump, today, at a press conference in South Korea:
Reporter: You’ve talked about wanting to put extreme vetting on people trying to come into the United States, but I wonder if you would consider extreme vetting for people trying to buy a gun.
Trump: Well…you know you’re bringing up a situation that probably shouldn’t be discussed too much right now, we could let a little time go by, but it’s ok if you feel that that’s an appropriate question.
Trump a week ago, immediately after a perp in a truck killed eight people and injured more in lower Manhattan:
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Nov 6th, 2017 2:23 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Trump says it’s not a guns situation. Nope nope nope. Not at all. It’s a bats in the belfry situation. It’s a MenTal HeAlth SituAtion. That’s what it is. The guy was cray cray. Nothing to do with guns at all. Could just as well have been a poisoned amuse-bouche. Could have been flung rocks. Could have been a rabid dog smuggled in under his coat. It just happened to be a semi-automatic rifle. Totally random.
Asked at a press conference in Tokyo what policies he might support in response to the shooting, Mr Trump said preliminary reports suggested the gunman was “a very deranged individual, [with] a lot of problems.”
Actually he said “a lot of problems over … Read the rest
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Tags: Trump
Nov 5th, 2017 1:05 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
The sleaze rolls on.
Trump stopped in Hawaii on his way to Japan.
But on his way back to the airport, Trump made another stop — this time at the Trump Hotel in Waikiki.
According to White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump wanted to greet the employees and thank them for their hard work in making the Trump Hotel a “tremendously successful project.”
Oh did he. Is that what he wanted to do. But the trouble is, he’s the chief executive, and he’s supposed to be doing that job, not promoting his own business on our time and our money, and not using his public service job to make more money go into his bank account.
This
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Tags: Trump
Nov 5th, 2017 9:59 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Trump gave a talk to American troops in Japan this morning, wearing a bomber jacket. Sure, Bone Spurs, that’s all it takes to look Military. His words at many points did not match his actions.
“No one — no dictator, no regime and no nation — should underestimate, ever, American resolve,” Mr. Trump said, having shed his suit jacket for a leather bomber jacket as he addressed hundreds of fatigues-clad women and men. “You are the greatest threat to tyrants and dictators who seek to prey on the innocent.”
But he is a tyrant and dictator. He bullies and lies to the press, he’s working to suppress voting, he demands loyalty to himself from people who are supposed to be … Read the rest
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Nov 3rd, 2017 9:09 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The Post goes into contortions to say it politely:
President Trump on Friday pressured the Department of Justice — and specifically the FBI — to investigate Hillary Clinton, ticking through a slew of issues involving the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee and her party, and urging law enforcement to “do what is right and proper.”
Trump’s advocacy for criminal probe of his political opponent marked a significant breach of the traditional boundaries within the executive branch designed to prevent investigations from being politicized.
In other words Trump’s rant was completely deranged and trampled all over the norms that prevent total breakdown and internecine war and corruption.
In his Thursday radio interview, Trump said, “You know, the saddest thing is, because
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Nov 3rd, 2017 8:29 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Narcissism plus total incompetence plus grotesque overconfidence=what could go wrong?
President Trump says: “I’m the only one that matters” in setting U.S. foreign policy, thus downplaying the importance of high-level jobs such as the assistant secretary of state, which is currently vacant.
“Let me tell you, the one that matters is me,” Trump said in an interview that aired on Fox News on Thursday night. “I’m the only one that matters, because when it comes to it, that’s what the policy is going to be. You’ve seen that, you’ve seen it strongly.”
He was talking to some fool on Fox News, in his 700th interview with Fox News, which he advertised on his deranged Twitter, intermixed with 700 other … Read the rest
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Tags: Trump
Nov 2nd, 2017 9:03 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Jennifer Rubin (a conservative) on Trump’s attack on the US justice system:
When Trump pops off about the defects of our justice system with no understanding of what he is saying, he underscores his unfitness and undermines one of the great jewels of American democracy, the court system. For Trump to slander the courts as a “joke” gives aid and comfort to our enemies (both terrorists and thug-ocracies such as Russia). It is a regrettable but natural continuation of his indefensible slurs about “so-called judges.” Unfortunately, Republicans have been too cowardly to take him on, even rhetorically on this point. Nevertheless, one cannot ignore his unwillingness to defend the Constitution, of which courts are a part, in blatant disregard
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Nov 1st, 2017 3:24 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
The Guardian on the White House press briefing today:
15:20
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders is holding a press briefing. She denies that the president was going the “political route” by attacking Chuck Schumer on Twitter this morning.
“The president’s not blamed senator Schumer. He doesn’t believe that the senator is responsible for the attack,” says Huckabee Sanders.
5:22
Huckabee Sanders is asked about the president’s willingness to “send him to Gitmo.”
She basically makes clear that that was something the president just said but there’s no thinking behind it:
He supports or would support that but he wasn’t necessarily advocating for it.
‘I believe we would consider this person to be an enemy combatant, yes,” Huckabee Sanders said.
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Tags: Trump
Nov 1st, 2017 12:24 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Trump thinks it’s all so unfair.
Trump, meanwhile, has reacted to the deteriorating situation by lashing out on Twitter and venting in private to friends. He’s frustrated that the investigation seems to have no end in sight. “Trump wants to be critical of Mueller,” one person who’s been briefed on Trump’s thinking says. “He thinks it’s unfair criticism. Clinton hasn’t gotten anything like this. And what about Tony Podesta? Trump is like, When is that going to end?” According to two sources, Trump has complained to advisers about his legal team for letting the Mueller probe progress this far. Speaking to Steve Bannon on Tuesday, Trump blamed Jared Kushner for his role in decisions, specifically the firings
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Nov 1st, 2017 11:56 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Trump seized the opportunity to fling more mud in the direction of the US system of laws.
President Trump said on Wednesday that he would consider sending the suspect arrested after the terrorist attack in New York to the American prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and called on Congress to cancel a longstanding immigration program that he blamed for allowing the man into the country.
Or hey, why not put the suspect on a ship and tell the crew to throw him overboard in the middle of the Pacific?
The president’s comments came at the beginning of a cabinet meeting a day after an immigrant from Uzbekistan plowed a pickup truck along a crowded bicycle path in Manhattan, killing eight
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Nov 1st, 2017 9:27 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Trump’s fun game for today is pretending that Saipov’s slaughter and maiming yesterday are the fault of Chuck Schumer because IMMIGRATION.
As details emerged about the incident, prominent right-wing commentators and news outlets seized on an ABC7 story reporting that alleged attacker Sayfullo Saipov had come to the United States from Uzbekistan under a State Department program known as the Diversity Visa Lottery.
That story is unconfirmed, but Trump appeared off base in his criticism of Schumer. The program originated in part in a bill introduced by the New York Democrat in 1990; but Schumer was also among a group of lawmakers who later sought to drop the visa protocols assailed by Trump.
Still, Schumer was singled out as the
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Oct 31st, 2017 8:58 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Greg Sargent at the Post says Trump and his enforcers are attempting to put together another “Saturday Night massacre,” i.e. another case of a criminal president firing the people who are investigating his crimes.
Let’s be clear on what’s happening in our politics right now. President Trump and his media allies are currently creating a vast, multi-tentacled, largely-fictional alternate media reality that casts large swaths of our government as irredeemably corrupt — with the explicitly declared purpose of laying the rationale for Trump to pardon his close associates or close down the Russia probe, should he deem either necessary.
We often hear that Trump and his allies are trying to “distract” from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s intensifying investigation.
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Oct 29th, 2017 12:23 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Don’t do it to me, do it to her, to her, TO HER.
President Trump’s frustration at the investigations into his campaign’s ties with Russia boiled over on Sunday, as he sought to shift the focus to a litany of accusations against his 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton, a day before the special counsel inquiry will reportedly produce the first indictment in the case.
Great plan, except for the fact that Clinton does not hold any elected office or other official post, so she’s not in a position to toss the whole country into the fire the way Donald Noimpulsecontrol Trump is.
In a series of midmorning Twitter posts, Mr. Trump said Republicans were now pushing back against the
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Oct 29th, 2017 9:24 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Now Trump is inciting violence.
On Sunday morning, President Trump expressed frustration that his campaign is under investigation over possible ties to Russia’s plot to influence the 2016 election but that his former opponent Hillary Clinton is not facing the same level of scrutiny.
In four tweets sent over 24 minutes, Trump wrote: “Never seen such Republican ANGER & UNITY as I have concerning the lack of investigation on Clinton made Fake Dossier (now $12,000,000?), the Uranium to Russia deal, the 33,000 plus deleted Emails, the Comey fix and so much more. Instead they look at phony Trump/Russia, ‘collusion,’ which doesn’t exist. The Dems are using this terrible (and bad for our country) Witch Hunt for evil politics, but
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Oct 28th, 2017 11:24 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Oh gawd.
President Donald Trump had a Halloween event with reporters’ children in the Oval Office on Friday, expressing shock that the press “produced such beautiful children.”
“I cannot believe the media produced such beautiful children,” Trump said. “How the media did this, I don’t know.”
He pointed to members of the press and asked the kids, dressed up in Halloween costumes, if they knew who the reporters were.
“They’re the friendly media,” Trump said. “That’s the press.”
He looked over at one of the kids to his left.
“Are you crying for me sweetheart?” he asked.
He added “these are beautiful, wonderful children,” asking if they are “going to grow up to be like your parents?”
He expressed
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Tags: President Nightmare, Trump