The Times details Trump’s avoidances and lies.

President Trump on Saturday condemned thebloody protests in Charlottesville, Va., but did not specifically criticize the white nationalist rally and its neo-Nazi slogans beyond blaming “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.’’

Mr. Trump made the comments to reporters after initially tweeting a statement in language so vague that he omitted mention of Charlottesville…

…

The president, who has spent much of the past two days threatening North Korea and congressional Republicans on Twitter and in other public statements, remained silent on the violence for most of the morning even as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, Mr. Trump’s wife, Melania, and dozens of other public figures condemned a march by

Childe Pinhead has been making yet more threats at North Korea. It’s worked beautifully so far, so why would he stop?

President Trump made fresh threats of force Friday against North Korea, writing on Twitter that the U.S. military is “locked and loaded” and later telling reporters that the isolated country would “truly regret it” if it attacks Guam or any other U.S. territory.

“This man will not get away with what he’s doing, believe me,” Trump said of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, whose nation, in open defiance of the United Nations, has been developing nuclear weapons capable of reaching the United States. “I hope that they are going to fully understand the gravity of what I

Dear god.

Trump gets a Big Special Treat twice a day, prepared for him by his handlers.

Twice a day since the beginning of the Trump administration, a special folder is prepared for the president. The first document is prepared around 9:30 a.m. and the follow-up, around 4:30 p.m. Former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and former Press Secretary Sean Spicer both wanted the privilege of delivering the 20-to-25-page packet to President Trump personally, White House sources say.

These sensitive papers, described to VICE News by three current and former White House officials, don’t contain top-secret intelligence or updates on legislative initiatives. Instead, the folders are filled with screenshots of positive cable news chyrons (those lower-third headlines and crawls),

So Trump’s idiot outburst at North Korea wasn’t even planned. It was his very own Awesome Idea on the spur of the moment.

President Trump delivered his “fire and fury” threat to North Korea on Tuesday with arms folded, jaw set and eyes flitting on what appeared to be a single page of talking points set before him on the conference table at his New Jersey golf resort.

The piece of paper, as it turned out, was a fact sheet on the opioid crisis he had come to talk about, and his ominous warning to Pyongyang was entirely improvised, according to several people with direct knowledge of what unfolded. In discussions with advisers beforehand, he had not run the specific

Will Trump’s idiot bombast get us all killed? Who knows.

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson played down the threat. “I think Americans should sleep well at night, have no concerns about this particular rhetoric of the last few days,” he said.

Oh well, if Rex Tillerson says it, there’s nothing to worry about.

Kidding.

Mr. Trump’s stark comments went well beyond the firm but measured language typically preferred by American presidents in confronting North Korea, and indeed seemed almost to echo the bellicose words used by Mr. Kim. Whether that message was mainly a bluff or an authentic expression of intent, it instantly scrambled the diplomatic equation in one of the world’s most perilous regions.

Trump is trying to get a nuclear war going, but meanwhile it’s interesting to learn that he’s been sending little mash notes to Mueller.

President Trump has publicly called the widening federal investigation into Russia’s election meddling a “witch hunt.” But through his lawyer, Trump has sent private messages of “appreciation” to special counsel Robert Mueller.

“He appreciates what Bob Mueller is doing,” Trump’s chief counsel John Dowd told USA TODAY in an interview Tuesday. “He asked me to share that with him and that’s what I’ve done.”

Trump’s legal team has been in contact with Mueller’s office, and Dowd says he has passed along the president’s messages expressing “appreciation and greetings’’ to the special counsel.

“The president has

Trump is fine with Fox and Friends sharing classified information, and by “classified information” I mean classified information about North Korea’s missile activity.

President Trump on Tuesday used Twitter to amplify a Fox News report, based on anonymous sources, that U.S. spy satellites had detected North Korea loading two cruise missiles on a patrol boat on the country’s coast in recent days.

Without adding any comment of his own, Trump, who regularly decries leaks to the media, retweeted to his more than 35 million followers a link to the day-old story, which was featured Tuesday morning on “Fox & Friends,” a program on the Fox News network.

Erm…doesn’t that seem like the kind of classified information that you really … Read the rest

Joan Vennochi at the Boston Globe points out that Trump has a considerable nerve sneering at Richard Blumenthal when he himself successfully avoided the draft altogether.

Just about a year ago, Donald Trump — the presidential candidate who received a draft deferment for bone spurs and called avoiding sexually transmitted diseases his “personal Vietnam” — mocked Gold Star parents who questioned what he knew about sacrifice.

So it’s no surprise that as president, Trump would feel free to attack Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut for misrepresenting his military record. Compared with attacking the parents of an army captain killed in Iraq, that barely registers as outrageous.

It still registers as pretty dang outrageous though. This is 1) a grown man … Read the rest

Tweeter Donald is being especially disgusting today.

The failing @nytimes, which has made every wrong prediction about me including my big election win (apologized), is totally inept!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 7, 2017

The Trump base is far bigger & stronger than ever before (despite some phony Fake News polling). Look at rallies in Penn, Iowa, Ohio…….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 7, 2017

…and West Virginia. The fact is the Fake News Russian collusion story, record Stock Market, border security, military strength, jobs…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 7, 2017

… Supreme Court pick, economic enthusiasm, deregulation & so much more have driven the Trump base even closer together. Will never change!

— Donald

Trump says “JOBS JOBS JOBS.” Trump says “Hire American.” Trump says we gotta stop letting all these foreigners in, especially the ones seeking low-skill jobs. Trump says Make America Great Again.

Trump seeks to hire workers for Mar-a-Lago.

President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club needs to hire 35 waiters for this winter’s social season in Palm Beach, Fla.

Late last month, the club placed an ad on page C8 of the Palm Beach Post, crammed full of tiny print laying out the job experience requirements in classified ad shorthand. “3 mos recent & verifiable exp in fine dining/country club,” the ad said. “No tips.”

The ad gave no email address or phone number. “Apply by fax,” it said. The ad also

So Trump thanked a bot.

Over the weekend, President Trump RT’d a shout-out of praise from a woman on Twitter named Nicole Mincey.

Around the same time, I noticed that Mincey’s tweets had been showing up high in Trump’s twitter threads. And as I mentioned in this tweet from Saturday evening, while I wasn’t sure whatever details there were about her, the accounts had all the tell-tale signs of a grift, most notably because of the stylized personal presentation and the focus on a Trump store where this woman – probably better to call her a “persona” – sold all manner of low-tier Trump shirts, hats, hoodies, etc.

This person showing up high in Trumps tweet threads does not

I missed this the other day: the White House eventually admitted that Trump was the source of the first statement on Junior’s meeting with the Rooshians.

The White House has confirmed Donald Trump played a role in drafting a misleading statement about his son’s meeting with a Russian lawyer.

On Tuesday, the press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, contradicted Trump’s attorney, Jay Sekulow, who said the president had had no involvement.

“The statement that Don Jr issued is true,” Huckabee Sanders said at the daily press briefing. “There is no inaccuracy in the statement. The president weighed in as any father would.”

Oh sure, any father who had financial and perhaps even more sinister ties with Russia would issue a … Read the rest

Let’s go back to February 16 to revisit Trump’s fury over “leaks” about his tantrums and train-wrecks.

President Trump said Thursday that he had personally directed the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation and determine who was responsible for what he said were illegal leaks that have unfairly damaged his fledgling administration.

“I’ve actually called the Justice Department to look into the leaks,” Mr. Trump said during a contentious, 75-minute news conference at the White House. “Those are criminal leaks.”

No law forbids a president from making [to make] a criminal referral to the Justice Department, but it is unusual for a president to direct the agency to open a criminal investigation into his perceived opponents or to

Grand jury? What grand jury? Never mind that: it’s all about THE LEAKS.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Friday that the Justice Department has more than tripled the number of leak investigations compared with the number that were ongoing at the end of the last administration, offering the first public confirmation of the breadth of the department’s efforts to crack down on unauthorized disclosures of sensitive information.

Sessions made the announcement at a long-anticipated news conference with his deputy, Rod J. Rosenstein, as well as Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and National Counterintelligence and Security Center Director William Evanina.

Yeah, man. Never mind all the ethics violations. Never mind the torrent of lies. Never mind That Meeting. Never … Read the rest

Down into the muck they go.

On Wednesday, for reasons known only to whatever critters inhabit the ravines and gullies of the presidential cortex, they trotted [Stephen] Miller out to talk about the administration’s new proposal to limit legal immigration. Miller is not equipped to be the public face of a phony real estate scam, let alone the executive branch of the government of the United States. Jim Acosta of CNN asked him a question. It did not go well.

Transcript via Adweek:

Acosta: This whole notion of they have to learn English before they get to the United States, are we just going to bring in people from Great Britain and Australia?

Miller: I have

Sanders was forced to admit that those fantasy “phone calls” of Trump’s were not real, actual, happened in real life phone calls, but phantasmagoria from his distracted brain.

Has President Trump told you about the time the head of the Boy Scouts called to say his was the best speech ever delivered to the more than century-old organization? What about when the president of Mexico picked up the telephone to let him know that his tough enforcement efforts at the border were paying off handsomely?

The anecdotes, both of which Mr. Trump told over the last week, were similar in that they appeared to be efforts to showcase broad support for the president when his White House has been mired