The Trump presidency

[CrabbedOne]

 

[CrabbedOne]

KC's been shamelessly plugging Ivanka's schmutter in probable violation of regs for Federal employees.

 

[CrabbedOne]

Trump voters not that wild about the separation of powers.

I'm reminded of a comment from a enthusiastic Russian peasant as the Bolsheviks rose to power: "Yes I want Communism but with a good Tsar!"

 

[J Ed]

Trump voters not that wild about the separation of powers.

I'm reminded of a comment from a enthusiastic Russian peasant as the Bolsheviks rose to power: "Yes I want Communism but with a good Tsar!"

Any similar polling for Obama in 2009 I wonder?

 

[stockwelljonny]

Good read, cheers. Fascinating detail about the Donald's Dad "Woody Guthrie, his most famous tenant, wrote about his landlord in the first literary work on a Trump, ‘Old Man Trump’:"

I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial hate
he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That colour line
Here at his
Eighteen hundred family project

Good read, cheers. Fascinating detail about the Donald's Dad "Woody Guthrie, his most famous tenant, wrote about his landlord in the first literary work on a Trump, ‘Old Man Trump’:"

 

[stockwelljonny]

Imagine what he's going to be like when then have a really big cockup on their hands.

from a draft dodger

 

[Pickman's model]

Imagine what he's going to be like when then have a really big cockup on their hands.

They do. He is the cockup

 

[chandlerp]

 

[bimble]

This administration makes lawyers look good, like plucky heroes. Boggles my little mind.

 

[Spymaster]

So at least now he's not even trying to justify the ban with the national security shit.

It's simply "I'm the president and what I say goes"!

 

[CrabbedOne]

...
“I find it rather ironic that the administration is emphasizing the need for reliable data given both the relatively robust crime data that we already have and the president’s unwillingness to accept the validity of data that doesn’t confirm his positions,” Stoughton said.

Sessions and Trump have both been vocal about their belief that the United States is currently enduring extremely high levels of crime, and have vowed to bring law and order to the nation’s cities. Murders did spike by 10 percent between 2014 and 2015 (when the most recent data is available), marking a six-year high. But that increase doesn’t reflect a broader decades-long downward trend. Nationwide there were 4.9 murders per 100,000 people in 2015; for comparison’s sake, rates peaked in the 1990s at almost 10 murders per 100,000 people.

Earlier this week, Trump falsely said that murder rates were at a 47-year high. And during his swearing-in on Thursday, Sessions described the recent uptick in crime as a “dangerous permanent trend that places the safety of the American people at risk.”

“This is more evidence of the administration’s crime-control rhetoric is designed to fuel a moral panic, even though the data continue to show that there are no dangerous permanent trends of crime increasing across the country,” Stinson said. “It is utter bullshit.”

The heart of Trumpismo: in bullshit we trust.

 

[not-bono-ever]

Trump is not a reader, obviously, doesn't have the attention span to take things in.Mrs NBE as a teacher noted this last year when he was rampaging through the primaries. He isn't a law scholar like the previous incumbents - I know it has been joked on, but it does seem that he takes his info from telly and his advisors. Imagine a president being influenced by a hate channel like FOX - It is like something out of a particularly odd Philip K Dick novel

 

[Treacle Toes]

 

[Pickman's model]

Trump is not a reader, obviously, doesn't have the attention span to take things in.Mrs NBE as a teacher noted this last year when he was rampaging through the primaries. He isn't a law scholar like the previous incumbents - I know it has been joked on, but it does seem that he takes his info from telly and his advisors. Imagine a president being influenced by a hate channel like FOX - It is like something out of a particularly odd Philip K Dick novel

as richard littlejohn would say, you couldn't make it up

 

[CrabbedOne]

Trump is not a reader, obviously, doesn't have the attention span to take things in.Mrs NBE as a teacher noted this last year when he was rampaging through the primaries. He isn't a law scholar like the previous incumbents - I know it has been joked on, but it does seem that he takes his info from telly and his advisors. Imagine a president being influenced by a hate channel like FOX - It is like something out of a particularly odd Philip K Dick novel

Infowars and Breitbart may be more Trump's thing than tame old GOP fondling FOX.

Linky.

 

[bimble]

info wars has an online shop! it's great. They have their own brand survival food parcels, fluoride-free toothpaste and body armour.
Also vitamin supplements. Including bestselling Brain Force capsules, which have many happy customers.

 

[Kaka Tim]

Trumps impotent flailing at the supreme court is quite instructive. It highlights how he is actually very shit at politics - as in the actual bit that involves getting policies into effect rather than rabble rousing.

Its a display of wilful incompetence. Trump clearly thinks that being president of the US is exactly like being a corporate CEO where he can en-act orders with a click of the fingers.

He must have been told that his immigrant/refugee ban would immediately run into legal blocs but ploughed on regardless - maybe believed that the courts would not dare say no. His team then seem to have no strategy for dealing with the inevitable court defeats other than twitter strops.

So the first few weeks of his presidency have been dominated by an ongoing furore over a law that he cant enact and which serves no purpose other than to feed his own - and his supporters - bigotry. A completely avoidable crisis which has weakened his authority and caused global revulsion.

Why does he prioritise this? Its baffling. There's no strategy here. it looks like something hes done almost on a whim, drawn up on the back of beer mat and now looks set on pushing through whilst testing the constitution to destruction. mental.
Where does he go from here? Much as he'd like to - I dont think he has the power or popular support to over ride the courts and get away with it. He needs a crises. He keeps talking up the terror threat (and the "crime wave"). I'm not sure he could successfully engineer a "false flag" op - his cabinet is leaky as hell, very slopppy on details and I cant see the the likes of the CIA playing ball even if they didn't despise the spam faced half wit.

Compare with bush's regime - rumsfelt and trump were seasoned and skilled operators with deep roots and connections within the political machinery. He has nothing like that. All he has is bannon plotting conflict and chaos and probably rubbing his hands with glee waiting for a mob with pitchforks to descend on the supreme court.

Trump is in the bunker already - and its only week 4. Lets just hope that some jihadi nut job on a killing spree doesn't gift him a high enough bodycount for him to go all "state of emergency".

 

[not-bono-ever]

I don't disagree with that but if he does move on, he will blame it on him being an outsider/ free thinker and being too dangerous for the establishment etc. Unless he is taken to the fucking cleaners with some kind of totally undeniable full on scandal, he will be agitating until he dies.

 

[Pickman's model]

 

[CrabbedOne]

If they'd drafted the "Muslim Ban" properly, made a couple of phone calls and dialed back on a Tweet storm suggesting unconstitutional intent it would have have sailed through; this wasn't hard to get right and it was an issue where the Presidency is greatly empowered. He has a right to do this. Trump just didn't get it right.

It's not unusual for a new POTUS to have difficulty starting. The shine went off Obama's "Hopey Changey thing" quickly. But this is different whole flurry of EOs has been full of vacuous content and unforced legal errors. He's made some very dubious appointments that were barely vetted. Sowed confusion among other world leaders and does not seems to be running a very loose ship in which cove's like Bannon can easily pull fast ones on him. And there's no evidence of Trump learning. He doesn't even know the basics of US treaties with Russia for instance. There's no feedback loop; anything displeasing is just "Fake News" suppressed by a barrage of obvious lies.

It doesn't look like a clever scheme to challenge the different arms of government to me. It looks like too much of Team Trump is simply from a universe incompatible with the US system. It's like Putin had been parachuted in run the US with a few thick ex-KGB necked aides. Putin would probably have made a better fist of it.

 

[petee]

Any similar polling for Obama in 2009 I wonder?

bexause ...

 

[Zapp Brannigan]

Trumps impotent flailing at the supreme court is quite instructive. It highlights how he is actually very shit at politics - as in the actual bit that involves getting policies into effect rather than rabble rousing.

Its a display of wilful incompetence. Trump clearly thinks that being president of the US is exactly like being a corporate CEO where he can en-act orders with a click of the fingers.

He must have been told that his immigrant/refugee ban would immediately run into legal blocs but ploughed on regardless - maybe believed that the courts would not dare say no. His team then seem to have no strategy for dealing with the inevitable court defeats other than twitter strops.

So the first few weeks of his presidency have been dominated by an ongoing furore over a law that he cant enact and which serves no purpose other than to feed his own - and his supporters - bigotry. A completely avoidable crisis which has weakened his authority and caused global revulsion.

Why does he prioritise this? Its baffling. There's no strategy here. it looks like something hes done almost on a whim, drawn up on the back of beer mat and now looks set on pushing through whilst testing the constitution to destruction. mental.
Where does he go from here? Much as he'd like to - I dont think he has the power or popular support to over ride the courts and get away with it. He needs a crises. He keeps talking up the terror threat (and the "crime wave"). I'm not sure he could successfully engineer a "false flag" op - his cabinet is leaky as hell, very slopppy on details and I cant see the the likes of the CIA playing ball even if they didn't despise the spam faced half wit.

Compare with bush's regime - rumsfelt and trump were seasoned and skilled operators with deep roots and connections within the political machinery. He has nothing like that. All he has is bannon plotting conflict and chaos and probably rubbing his hands with glee waiting for a mob with pitchforks to descend on the supreme court.

Trump is in the bunker already - and its only week 4. Lets just hope that some jihadi nut job on a killing spree doesn't gift him a high enough bodycount for him to go all "state of emergency".

Surely it's a power play. He will have known that the courts would take issue with such blatant disregard for constitutional law, this way he gets to say the soft liberal courts are tying his hands.

If and when the next terrorist attack happens, he gets to say that he was right and popular, scared opinion will back him. Thus rendering constitutional law irrelevant, the will of the great president Trump takes precedence.

It won't have to be a false flag op. The terrifying thing is that Trump is acting as a recruitment agent for terrorism, and is absolutely dependant on something happening. This great champion of national security wants and needs Americans to die so it's easier for him to do whatever the fuck he wants.

 

[CRI]

I can easily buy that Trump is incompetent. It doesnt mean those around him neccessarily are. look at the systemic output of "alternative facts"...very redolant of Vladisav Surkov approach in Russia.

There is also a problem with many "incompetence theories" of government because they somehow never seem so incompetent at enrichening their friends and donors.

This, absolutely, e.g.

 

[CrabbedOne]

...
One of the primary arguments Gorka laid out both in his 2016 book and in his posts for Breitbart is that the U.S. and Europe are losing the war against ISIL because political correctness prevents their leaders from addressing the religious roots of “global jihadism.”

That's an about-face from the point he made in his Ph.D. dissertation at Hungary’s Corvinus University, in which Gorka wrote that using such “inflammatory” terms does “a great disservice to law-abiding Muslims” and gives terrorists “an undeserved since of quasi religious legitimacy.”

Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, said such a focus—which the President shares—on using religious terms to discuss the threat ISIL fails to address key strategic issues.

“A phrase is a phrase,” he said. “What’s never been made clear by the Trump administration or people who share this view is how does using phrases like ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ actually translate into policy. How does using these magic words actually make a difference?”

“We certainly don’t have any analysis that points to what is effectively an issue of semantics being a significant part of why it’s been so difficult to defeat the Islamic State,” Chris Chivvis, foreign policy expert at the RAND Corporation, concurred.

Safi, of the Duke Islamic Studies Center, argued that the scholarship Gorka presented in his book was shoddy and took ISIL’s claims that they represent the true version of Islam at face value, thus fueling the group’s narrative of a war between East and West.

His book “is like reading a bad high school student’s paper that has been cribbed together from Wikipedia, and that’s with all due respect to Wikipedia,” Safi said.

“Frankly it is not only embarrassing, it is dangerous that someone like this has the ear of the President."

Another loon.

If you scratch at this nonsense the problems identified are not so much a bunch of Muslim reactionaries set on a clash of civilisations. That's actually a rather useful threat. After all we are dealing here with in the Whitehouse is a clique of anti-Muslim reactionaries equally set on a clash of civilisations. It's the liberals like Obama and Merkel facilitating for IS that are the real enemy. It's basically a Breivik minded view.

 

[CRI]

Flynn Is Said to Have Talked to Russians About Sanctions Before Trump Took Office

Throughout the discussions, the message Mr. Flynn conveyed to the ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak — that the Obama administration was Moscow’s adversary and that relations with Russia would change under Mr. Trump — was unambiguous and highly inappropriate, the officials said.

The accounts of the conversations raise the prospect that Mr. Flynn violated a law against private citizens’ engaging in diplomacy, and directly contradict statements made by Trump advisers. They have said that Mr. Flynn spoke to Mr. Kislyak a few days after Christmas merely to arrange a phone call between President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Mr. Trump after the inauguration.

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

Caps

"We have seen him in court twice, and we're two for two."

--Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson

 

[not-bono-ever]

Been brought up before, but what the fuck does Trump actually do with his days ? there is certainly no discussion of policy of strategy, do meeting of minds and the emergence of an identifiable politic.

 

[ruffneck23]

he gets up at 5am, watches the telly , gets incredibly irate, and starts tweeting

 

[Miss Caphat]

Trump voters not that wild about the separation of powers.

I'm reminded of a comment from a enthusiastic Russian peasant as the Bolsheviks rose to power: "Yes I want Communism but with a good Tsar!"

There was an online comment I came across yesterday that, in all of this, just blew my mind.

It was to the effect that the inauguration protestors should permanently lose their right to vote.

I know it's not directly related to the point you're making but, holy shit...this is where we are now? a country formed on dissent, a government formed on the principles of democracy, and this is what we've come to?

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

You know the voters are irate when even the Mormons are yelling at you:

Utah congressman bolts an hour early from constituent town hall amid 'Your last term!' chants

Its so nice to see people getting out and communicating with their Representatives. It gives me hope for the future.

<edited to add>
More videos here:

Protesters swarm Republicans at offices and Saturday town halls