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The Trump presidency

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Congressman Fortenberry holds a contentious townhall meeting:

Fortenberry addresses hundreds in Town Hall

I don't think the media really got the feel of it. There really weren't that many "diverse opinions." There were a lot of people there. It was loud, but no one was particularly rude to him. Someone in crowd yelled "everyone for single payer stand up!" About 95% of the people there stood up. I still don't think he got it. If he goes back to Washington and offers anything other than single payer, he won't be representing the crowd that was there. Even after that he was still trying to sell the GOP plan. He came off as rather tone deaf.

I did see one yelling match between two men almost come to blows. There were enough cops there that they could have handled an outright riot so I wasn't too worried, although it would have been nearly on top of me. I saw a couple of the cops move into position to jump on it if it escalated. Both men yelled at each other a bit and it looked like it was going to go to blows. A woman said "This is Nebraska, we don't act like that!" And, they both backed off and melted into the crowd.

I do have to give Fortenberry points for holding a town meeting. He had to know it wasn't going to be a friendly crowd. Our other representation has avoided the voters and instead has stuck to meetings with business groups and holding fundraising dinners.

<edited to add>

The Daily Kos did a better job of reporting what really happened:

Know What Makes Nebraskans Confrontational? Threaten to Take Away Their Obamacare!
 
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On Bloomberg Trump’s Counties Lose Out to Clinton’s in GOP Health Tax Cuts
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Those in the top 0.1 percent of incomes would get an average tax cut of about $197,000, raising their after-tax incomes by 2.6 percent, according tothe Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution. Those totals include both the Medicare and investment taxes.

“It seems to be pretty much a giveaway to the well-off,” said David Albouy, an economics professor at the University of Illinois who studies geographic tax inequality.

Awaiting Cuts

Other Trump voters in Racine County say they don’t like that the wealthy may be first to secure a tax cut, but they’re giving the new president the benefit of the doubt that they’ll eventually see lower taxes, too.

“You would think they would be more for the lower-income people,” said David Fiskum, 62, a retired small business owner dining at a hamburger restaurant in the city of Racine. “I wish they had a better bill than what they’ve proposed.”

The western Michigan county of Manistee, which gave Trump 54.9 percent of the vote, also reflects the potential disparity. Of 11,440 returns filed in 2015, only 50 (0.4 percent) had incomes high enough to pay the 0.9 percent Medicare tax.

The county, which Obama won in 2012 with 52.2 percent of the vote, was one of those that helped Trump win Michigan as he became the first Republican to do so since 1988.

Ray Franz, the Manistee County Republican Party chairman and a former state representative, said he’s “disappointed in the Republican Party and Republican leadership” for the health-care bill that’s been put forward.
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That's almost what these 1% folks shell out on a daughter's wedding.
 
On Bloomberg Why Robert Shiller Is Worried About the Trump Rally
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Despite the well-timed publication of his book “Irrational Exuberance” just as the dot-com bubble peaked in early 2000, the Yale University economist had warned (with caveats) that shares might be overvalued as early as 1996. Investors who bought and held an S&P 500 fund in the middle of that year made about 8 percent annually over the next decade, while those who invested at the start of 2000 lost money. The S&P 500 sank 49 percent from its high in March 2000 through a bottom in October 2002. The index has gained 6 percent this year, with futures slipping 0.1 percent before the open of U.S. exchanges on Tuesday.

What Shiller will say now is that he’s refrained from adding to his own U.S. stock positions, emphasizing overseas markets instead. One factor that makes him cautious on American shares is the S&P 500’s cyclically-adjusted price-earnings ratio: While the metric is still about 30 percent below its high in 2000, it shows stocks are almost as expensive now as they were on the eve of the 1929 crash.

“The market is way over-priced,’’ he says. “It’s not as intellectual as people would think, or as economists would have you believe.’’
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Hey what's not to like Bannon says the 30s were a period of "tremendous energy".
 
On Trumpcast The Plot Against America

A podcast, looking at the parallels to Roth's book.
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Fascism as the great simplification and the Rothian resistance to simplicity.
 
On Empty Wheel Are Covert Ops Spinning Free from Presidential Findings (Again)?
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If Trump delegates more authority for targeted killing while at the same time moving more of it back into CIA’s hands, that likely means more covert targeted killings will happen without the kind of close involvement that occurred for much (though not all) of Obama’s Administration.

There are two problems with that. First, it makes it more likely the CIA will discount political consequences of individual operations — not because the CIA is not politically savvy (in areas like this they’re more savvy than the Reality Show president), but because they will be able to deny any screw-ups.

It also makes it more likely the White House and CIA will end up in mutual recriminations the next time there’s a really unpopular strike, with CIA officers bearing the brunt of Trump’s abdication of the role he’s supposed to play in covert operations.

There’s recent precedent for such a problem: the torture program, where the Finding signed by George Bush (crafted by Dick Cheney) let CIA set its own policy, which left the CIA without cover when the shit started hitting the fan.

I assume the CIA is well aware of the risks of such a structure (though Gina Haspel’s elevation to Deputy Director after being a key player in many of the worst parts of the torture scandal may make her less worried about the risks, given that she has ultimately been protected). But the men and women at the implementing stage of such a policy shift may not have much leeway to fight it.
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This is a return to Bush era policies and we have to remember much of the spook community often agreed with those. The CIA does tend to be rather less careful with things like Drone strikes than the Pentagon. On the other hand Langley folk are often nervous about being hung out to dry after policy changes as has happened in the past.

Trump's tendency to delegate in the GWOT may have sensible aspects after all he knows bugger all about this stuff. Obama with a lawyerly concern for dodging legal problems was certainly was guilty of micromanagement at times. However Trump's also appears set on making damn sure the buck does not stop at his desk. No cock up will ever be The Donald's fault no victory possible without his wise leadership. It's the way he is in business as well.
 
On The Atlantic Council The Trump-Putin Honeymoon Is Over, But the Marriage Was a Sham
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But as the Atlantic Council’s Ariel Cohen notes, “The shortest honeymoon ever is over.” The Russian military has significantly ramped up its fighting in eastern Ukraine, it continues to strengthen its mission in Syria, and tensions are again mounting between Washington and Moscow. The Russian media has been instructed to reduce its coverage of Trump and to avoid being too complimentary of him. Anti-Americanism is back in vogue.

However, it is a mistake to think that the Kremlin is unhappy with current events. The Russian government’s love affair with Trump had more to do with fostering anti-Americanism than with seeking rapprochement. Russian media coverage reflects this. A careful study of the Kremlin-controlled media, working in both English and Russian, shows that the Russian media was never pro-Trump, but it was anti-Clinton. Trump received mostly neutral treatment, mixed with positive and negative coverage, while the Kremlin spread conspiracy theories and attacked Clinton’s policies. Russian articles about Trump tended to spread the narrative that the United States is a failing democracy and the game was rigged against any politician, like Trump, who did not view Russia as the enemy. They even warned that the establishment would likely find a way to sabotage Trump’s success. In this way, many articles that were “pro-Trump” were really just anti-Clinton, as Clinton was painted as a member of the establishment by both the Russian media and the Trump campaign.

But the Kremlin’s narrative about Trump was formed when Clinton had a commanding lead in the polls. In all likelihood, they never expected him to win. This means that the Kremlin has to find a new narrative to attack the United States. The anti-Americanism that is resurfacing in the Russian media now is just a return to form.

In an interesting twist, the Russian media is now warning that American society is fraying and a constitutional crisis may be brewing. Kiselyov used his TV show on March 5 to voice concern about what is happening in America. Partisanship and controversy are tearing the country apart, he said. “America is in the grips of hatred,” he warned viewers, a situation made more worrisome because of its culture of “free-flowing firearms.”
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My bold, this will perplex alt-right Puntinists, like those are bad things???
 
Rachel Maddow is claiming to have Trump's tax returns and will reveal all tonight.

*eta* from 2005. So... hmmmm
 
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Fear of Diversity Made People More Likely to Vote Trump
And economic populism might not win them back.

While race and racial attitudes have been and continue to play an important role in support for Republican presidential candidates, fears about growing racial diversity appear to be uniquely important to support for Trump compared to previous Republican candidates.

In the 2016 election, the traditional Democratic advantage among low-income people was deeply diminished. Corporations, long seen as the enemy for progressives, are increasingly seen as allies on issues like immigration and LGBT rights. Unions, once the backbone of the Democratic Party, have waned in influence, and many found their members receptive to Trump’s message.

. . . throughout history, divides within the working class have been more salient than divides between the working class and the rich. Race, gender, immigration status, and religious status have served as such wedges.
 
On The Hill Tillerson: UN Human Rights Council must reform or US will leave
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Tillerson added that the U.S. would keep participating in the 47-member council's ongoing session while U.S. officials would “reiterate our strong principled objection to the Human Rights Council’s biased agenda against Israel.”

Multiple State Department aides told Foreign Policy that U.S. withdrawal from the council is not imminent but remains a real possibility.

“If they don’t make these reforms, we’re going to question the value of our membership,” a senior aide to Tillerson said. "We’re not taking withdrawal off the table. Our aim is to fix the organization.”
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In Politico Trump rejects push to oust NSC aide
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The conversation followed weeks of pressure from career officials at the CIA who had expressed reservations about the 30-year-old intelligence operative and pushed for his ouster.

But Cohen-Watnick appealed McMaster’s decision to two influential allies with whom he had forged a relationship while working on Trump’s transition team — White House advisers Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner. They brought the matter to Trump on Sunday, and the president agreed that Cohen-Watnick should remain as the NSC’s intelligence director, according to two people with knowledge of the episode.

The incident raises questions about just how much autonomy Trump is giving to McMaster, who was tapped last month as national security adviser amid questions about whether he’d have full staffing authority over the NSC.

It also highlights ongoing tensions between the CIA and Trump aides who are skeptical of the agency, feeding into concerns expressed by the president and his allies about the intelligence community.
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One of Flynn's DIA people. The DIA and CIA aren't exactly best buddies.
 
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On Politico Is Trump Sabotaging Obamacare?
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There is no evidence for Trump’s bizarre Twitter claim that Obamacare was intentionally designed to implode after President Obama left office, but it’s true that some insurers were abandoning the exchanges even before Trump’s election. An estimated 32 percent of America’s counties had only one insurer writing policies for the exchanges this year, up from just 7 percent last year. This was partly because the market for Americans who don’t get covered at work has always been a brutal business, and partly because sabotage-minded congressional Republicans killed “risk corridor payments” that were supposed to reimburse insurers with sicker-than-expected customers. But even though premiums in several states rose sharply last year, S&P concluded that the market would stabilize in 2017, because enough young and healthy consumers would buy insurance to keep insurers on the exchanges and avoid a dreaded death spiral.

Trump has scrambled those conclusions. After a campaign in which his promises to get rid of Obamacare were some of his biggest applause lines, the mere fact of his election created new uncertainty. Humana has already announced that it’s withdrawing from the exchanges, leaving several Tennessee counties with no insurer at all. And Trump’s constant apocalyptic warnings of Obamacare’s inevitable collapse are further complicating the calculus for insurers who might otherwise be inclined to give it another shot. It’s hard to say how much of their thinking will be driven by the market, Trump’s over-the-top negativity, and the furor over the repeal bill, but in this climate, it will be tough for them to commit to the exchanges—and those that do commit might jack up their premiums to hedge their bets.

“If the insurers don’t get certainty soon, there’s going to be a dramatic exodus even if Congress does nothing,” says Kathleen Sebelius, who was President Obama’s Health and Human Services secretary during the law’s passage. “They need stability, or they’ll just leave.”
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On Wolf Street Why No One’s Going to Drain this Swamp
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The top 20 performers:

Who is Number 1? Goldman Sachs? Wells Fargo? Nope. The National Association of Realtors (NAR). It’s trying to get the government to inflate the housing market in myriad ways, for instance by dominating the mortgage industry, including guarantees and mortgage-backed securities, thereby subsidizing mortgage rates. It’s all about Realtors making more money because commissions are fatter if extracted from higher home prices. And the NAR is very concerned that the government might be cracking down on pandemic money laundering in the housing sector.

The NAR gave more than twice as much as the next guy in line, namely a quant hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, followed by another hedge fund, Paloma Partners, followed by another hedge fund, Elliot Management, followed by the banking trade association, American Bankers Association.
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That's swampy in a very bad way. I mean we should have figured out by now Real Estate profiteers are really systemically dangerous pond slime.
 
In The New Yorker Being Indian in Trump’s America
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The incitement sixteen years ago was 9/11. Today it is Donald Trump. The President’s nationalistic rhetoric and scapegoating of racial others, not to mention his habitual reliance on unverified information, have sown panic among immigrants. I’ve often asked myself lately whether I’ve been right to suspect that people were looking at me differently on the street, at airports, or in elevators. Whenever a stranger has been kind to me, I have wanted to almost weep in gratitude. Unlike when I first arrived here, distance no longer offers any reprieve from these feelings. The Internet delivers ugly fragments of report and rumor throughout the day, and with them a sense of nearly constant intimacy with violence.

Soon after Kuchibhotla’s murder, a commentator in India pointed out a grave irony: in the run-up to the 2016 election, a number of right-leaning American Hindus supported Trump’s candidacy, not only with donations but also with elaborate prayer ceremonies to propitiate the gods. The more conservative of these people—those who backed the rise of a hypernationalist Hindutva ideology in India through the nineties—have made common cause with American conservatives, who share their view of Islam as the enemy. Trump’s fear-mongering found a ready echo in the ultraright-Hindu heart. But to the homegrown racists emboldened by that same fear-mongering, the Hindu-G.O.P. alliance makes no difference. Purinton’s question for Kuchibhotla and Madasani in the bar in Kansas was not whether they were Muslim but whether they were in the country illegally. (They weren’t.) A week later, in a Facebook post, Kuchibhotla’s widow framed the question as Purinton perhaps really meant it: “Do we belong here?” And this week, a possible answer came from Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, when an Indian-American woman confronted him at an Apple store. “It’s such a great country that allows you to be here,” Spicer told her. His interlocutor was an American citizen, but that didn’t seem to register. (Not white, not quite.)

An Indian man in the Midwest once told me that every time an American shakes his hand and says, “I love Indian food,” he wants to respond, “I thank you on behalf of Indian food.” He might just as well thank the American on behalf of—take your pick—spelling bees, lazy “Slumdog Millionaire” references, yoga and chai lattes, motels, software moguls, Bollywood-style weddings, doctors and taxi drivers, henna, Nobel laureates, comedians, the baffling wisdom of Deepak Chopra, and Mahatma Gandhi. But perhaps it’s time he reminded the American of something, too. The man who shot Gandhi, in 1948, was neither Muslim nor Sikh nor a foreigner. He was a disgruntled member of the majority, like Purinton, and had once belonged to India’s most nationalistic party—the same party that, just today, told Indians in the United States to stop worrying for their safety.
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On TAC Trump the Militarist
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The solution to Wright’s “Jekyll/Hyde” puzzle was offered by Stephen Wertheim a few weeks ago in a valuable op-ed that finally placed Trump in the correct foreign policy camp. Wertheim objected to labeling him or anyone else an “isolationist,” and went on to say this:

[Isolationist] is often an unfair label, but it’s especially nonsensical when it comes to the current commander in chief: Trump is no isolationist, whether caricatured or actual. Rather than seeking to withdraw from the world, he vows to exploit it [bold mine-DL]. Far from limiting the area of war, he threatens ruthless violence against globe-spanning adversaries and glorifies martial victory. In short, the president is a militarist.​
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He may have hit on something there. Trump's idea of a Great America is essentially an extractive bully that uses it's economic and military heft in a great zero sum game. Perhaps a lot of this is crowd pleasing bluster but selecting victims to humiliate for political profit is a successful part of Trump's schtick.
 
He's having a rally in Nashville - complete with orchestra and choir - Adolf would have approved..
 
On DefenceNews Sources: Mattis, Ricardel clashed over Pentagon appointees
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Sources who support Mattis have grown increasingly vocal about frustrations with Mira Ricardel, a top defense voice on the Trump campaign who also served as a part of the defense transition team for the administration. Ricardel is positioned at the Office of Presidential Personnel and has been a vital part of the nominee review process, including conducting personal interviews with perspective nominees.

A number of sources, including one inside the administration, said Mattis and Ricardel have directly clashed over nominees. Two of those sources speculated that Ricardel had hoped for a Pentagon position when the transition ended, perhaps as the undersecretary of defense for policy.

But where supporters of Mattis see Ricardel as a roadblock to progress, those on the Trump team view her as a loyal soldier who is looking out for the interests of the President.

“She’s extremely well respected and liked at the White House,” one administration source said. “The White House thinks she’s done great work in a difficult situation."

It now appears Ricardel will be moving out of the OPP position soon. The administration source said she is in line for a senior position with the Department of Commerce that deals with the national security world.

Sources from the Pentagon say that the move comes after a major clash with Mattis, with one source familiar with the discussions going so far as to say that “Mattis told the White House either Mira goes, or he walks. They blinked.”

The administration source, a Trump loyalist, denied that and defended Ricardel, saying that the clashes with Mattis should be seen as a “badge of honor," as Ricardel has held the line against "politically unacceptable" candidates.
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Yuwipi Woman said:
Welcome to Prosperity Theology.
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Meanwhile, progressive faith groups like the UUs that aren't following the fundamentalist Christian party line on Trump are finding themselves open to attack. I suspected this would happen.

Progressive faith communities face their own wave of hate
“This administration has given…a kind of legitimacy to acts of hate.”

However, these are just the faith communities that Democrats need to link with to give a space and sense of belonging to Christians alienated by the cult of Trump dominating many congregations.
 
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CRI said:
Meanwhile, progressive faith groups like the UUs that aren't following the fundamentalist Christian party line on Trump are finding themselves open to attack. I suspected this would happen.

Progressive faith communities face their own wave of hate
“This administration has given…a kind of legitimacy to acts of hate.”

However, these are just the faith communities that Democrats need to link with to give a space and sense of belonging to Christians alienated by the cult of Trump dominating many congregations.
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Yes, it does happen. The UU Church in our city has lost gay pride banners and such. I imagine they consider themselves luckier than this congregation in 2008:

The Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church Shooting

I doubt if they'll be deterred by mere vandalism, but they might be by murder.
 
hmmmm

Trump just got paid $15.8 million by a businesswoman connected to a Chinese intelligence front group

When a Chinese American businesswoman who sells access to powerful people recently purchased a $15.8 million penthouse in a building owned by President Donald Trump, the deal raised a key question. Was this a straightforward real estate transaction, or was this an effort to win favor with the new administration? The woman, Angela Chen, refused to discuss the purchase with the media. The White House and the Trump Organization would not comment on it. Further investigation by Mother Jones has unearthed a new element to the story: Chen has ties to important members of the Chinese ruling elite and to an organization considered a front group for Chinese military intelligence....
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In a development that can only heighten the distrust between American and Russian authorities on cybersecurity, the Justice Department on Wednesday charged two Russian intelligence officers with directing a sweeping criminal conspiracy that broke into 500 million Yahoo accounts in 2014.

The Russian government then used the information it obtained from the intelligence officers and two others named in the indictment — a Russian hacker and a Kazakh national living in Canada — to focus on foreign officials, business executives and journalists, federal prosecutors said. The targets included numerous financial executives, executives at an American cloud computing company, an airline official and even a casino regulator in Nevada.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/15/technology/yahoo-hack-indictment.html
 
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