President Donald Trump: The Thread

[StrangeSox]

Boy that North Korean leader sure is goofy and crazy and cartoony

 

 

He essentially spent all day live-tweeting Fox News yesterday. He hasn't had anything on his schedule aside from lunch since he tweeted "back to work!" nine days ago.

 

 

greg, I know you won't ever listen, but NK has nuclear weapons as a deterrent, not because they're crazy enough to launch a first-strike against the US. It's the same reason they have tons of artillery pointed at Seoul. "You hit us, we hit you back hard." The world has condemned NK, again and again, and sanctions have been ratcheting up for years. The world is also turning its back on the US and recognizing just how much US leadership has diminished around the world in the past year thanks largely to our goofy idiot cartoon leader, too.

[caulfield12]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/eric-trump-tweet...-093338507.html

Meanwhile, Eric Trump believe Ellen DeGeneres is part of the “deep state” cabal lined up to undermine his father

 

 

Referring to the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr., then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, Bannon reportedly told Wolff: "They're going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV."

 

"The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor -- with no lawyers. They didn't have any lawyers," Bannon continued, according to the Guardian. "Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad s***, and I happen to think it's all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately."

 

...According to the Guardian, Bannon told (Fire and Fury author Michael) Wolff that special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into the Trump campaign's potential ties to Russia is centered on money laundering.

 

The White House declined to comment Wednesday about Bannon's reported assertion.

 

http://edition.cnn.com/2018/01/03/politics...x.html?adkey=bn

Edited January 3, 2018 by caulfield12

[Brian]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/eric-trump-tweet...-093338507.html

Meanwhile, Eric Trump believe Ellen DeGeneres is part of the “deep state” cabal lined up to undermine his father

 

Eric Trump kinda looks like Ellen, so of course Twitter would recommend he follow her.

[StrangeSox]

Steve Bannon (!) calls the Trump Tower meeting "treasonous" and says they should have alerted the FBI immediately.

 

Yglesias pointed out last week that when Trump advisor Papadopolous drunkenly bragged about Russia having dirt on Clinton and their attempts to influence the US elections to the Australian ambassador, that ambassador immediately alerted authorities. The Trump Campaign....didn't.

[Kyyle23]

Steve Bannon (!) calls the Trump Tower meeting "treasonous" and says they should have alerted the FBI immediately.

 

Yglesias pointed out last week that when Trump advisor Papadopolous drunkenly bragged about Russia having dirt on Clinton and their attempts to influence the US elections to the Australian ambassador, that ambassador immediately alerted authorities. The Trump Campaign....didn't.

 

It puts that contentious first Trump call with the Australian PM last January in a different perspective

[StrangeSox]

The Fusion GPS founders released an editorial in the NYT today defending their firm's work and attacked Congressional Republicans for "chasing rabbits" in an attempt to set the story straight on what their company did, how Steele worked for them and when and how authorities were alerted. Goes hand-in-hand with the quotes from Bannon regarding money laundering being a major focus of Mueller's investigation and what might ultimately bring charges against Trump or his family. Trump has had very shady business dealings for decades.

 

The Republicans’ Fake Investigations

 

A generation ago, Republicans sought to protect President Richard Nixon by urging the Senate Watergate committee to look at supposed wrongdoing by Democrats in previous elections. The committee chairman, Sam Ervin, a Democrat, said that would be “as foolish as the man who went bear hunting and stopped to chase rabbits.”

 

Today, amid a growing criminal inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, congressional Republicans are again chasing rabbits. We know because we’re their favorite quarry.

 

In the year since the publication of the so-called Steele dossier — the collection of intelligence reports we commissioned about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia — the president has repeatedly attacked us on Twitter. His allies in Congress have dug through our bank records and sought to tarnish our firm to punish us for highlighting his links to Russia. Conservative news outlets and even our former employer, The Wall Street Journal, have spun a succession of mendacious conspiracy theories about our motives and backers.

 

We are happy to correct the record. In fact, we already have.

 

Three congressional committees have heard over 21 hours of testimony from our firm, Fusion GPS. In those sessions, we toppled the far right’s conspiracy theories and explained how The Washington Free Beacon and the Clinton campaign — the Republican and Democratic funders of our Trump research — separately came to hire us in the first place.

 

We walked investigators through our yearlong effort to decipher Mr. Trump’s complex business past, of which the Steele dossier is but one chapter. And we handed over our relevant bank records — while drawing the line at a fishing expedition for the records of companies we work for that have nothing to do with the Trump case.

 

Republicans have refused to release full transcripts of our firm’s testimony, even as they selectively leak details to media outlets on the far right. It’s time to share what our company told investigators.

 

We don’t believe the Steele dossier was the trigger for the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russian meddling. As we told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August, our sources said the dossier was taken so seriously because it corroborated reports the bureau had received from other sources, including one inside the Trump camp.

 

The intelligence committees have known for months that credible allegations of collusion between the Trump camp and Russia were pouring in from independent sources during the campaign. Yet lawmakers in the thrall of the president continue to wage a cynical campaign to portray us as the unwitting victims of Kremlin disinformation.

 

We suggested investigators look into the bank records of Deutsche Bank and others that were funding Mr. Trump’s businesses. Congress appears uninterested in that tip: Reportedly, ours are the only bank records the House Intelligence Committee has subpoenaed.

 

We told Congress that from Manhattan to Sunny Isles Beach, Fla., and from Toronto to Panama, we found widespread evidence that Mr. Trump and his organization had worked with a wide array of dubious Russians in arrangements that often raised questions about money laundering. Likewise, those deals don’t seem to interest Congress.

 

We explained how, from our past journalistic work in Europe, we were deeply familiar with the political operative Paul Manafort’s coziness with Moscow and his financial ties to Russian oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin.

 

Finally, we debunked the biggest canard being pushed by the president’s men — the notion that we somehow knew of the June 9, 2016, meeting in Trump Tower between some Russians and the Trump brain trust. We first learned of that meeting from news reports last year — and the committees know it. They also know that these Russians were unaware of the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele’s work for us and were not sources for his reports.

 

Yes, we hired Mr. Steele, a highly respected Russia expert. But we did so without informing him whom we were working for and gave him no specific marching orders beyond this basic question: Why did Mr. Trump repeatedly seek to do deals in a notoriously corrupt police state that most serious investors shun?

 

What came back shocked us. Mr. Steele’s sources in Russia (who were not paid) reported on an extensive — and now confirmed — effort by the Kremlin to help elect Mr. Trump president. Mr. Steele saw this as a crime in progress and decided he needed to report it to the F.B.I.

 

We did not discuss that decision with our clients, or anyone else. Instead, we deferred to Mr. Steele, a trusted friend and intelligence professional with a long history of working with law enforcement. We did not speak to the F.B.I. and haven’t since.

 

After the election, Mr. Steele decided to share his intelligence with Senator John McCain via an emissary. We helped him do that. The goal was to alert the United States national security community to an attack on our country by a hostile foreign power. We did not, however, share the dossier with BuzzFeed, which to our dismay published it last January.

 

We’re extremely proud of our work to highlight Mr. Trump’s Russia ties. To have done so is our right under the First Amendment.

 

It is time to stop chasing rabbits. The public still has much to learn about a man with the most troubling business past of any United States president. Congress should release transcripts of our firm’s testimony, so that the American people can learn the truth about our work and most important, what happened to our democracy.

 

Similarly, there are reports that Democrats on the House and Senate committees investigating possible Russian collusion and interference will be issuing minority reports detailing the numerous ways that Republicans have deliberately sabotaged the investigations in order to protect Trump.

[caulfield12]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/201...e_election.html

 

Might explain some of the touchiness with Germany/Merkel as well, since Deutsche Bank is at the epicenter of the Russian money laundering scandal....as well as significant loans to Jared Kushner ($285 million, one month before the election) and the Trump Organization.

 

Not to mention Merkel and Obama are besties.

 

 

Prediction: Don Jr. and Jared are both history. Ivanka will have to leave Washington and her WH position or get divorced.

[Brian]

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/...nald-trump.html

 

Trump didn't want to win, says NYT. Long read. Didn't get it all. Not sure what to make of it.

Edited January 3, 2018 by Brian

[Dick Allen]

Trump will be announcing the Most Dishonest and Fake News Media Awards on Monday at 5 pm. Stay close to a phone or a computer. Chicks dig big buttons.

 

This has to be Candid Camera or something doesn't it? I keep waiting for someone to pop on camera and tell everyone how much they have been played.

Edited January 3, 2018 by Dick Allen

[southsider2k5]

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/...nald-trump.html

 

Trump didn't want to win, says NYT. Long read. Didn't get it all. Not sure what to make of it.

 

This doesn't jive at all with the collusion stuff. If he didn't want to win, and didn't care if he did, why Russia?

[greg775]

greg, I know you won't ever listen, but NK has nuclear weapons as a deterrent, not because they're crazy enough to launch a first-strike against the US. It's the same reason they have tons of artillery pointed at Seoul. "You hit us, we hit you back hard." The world has condemned NK, again and again, and sanctions have been ratcheting up for years. The world is also turning its back on the US and recognizing just how much US leadership has diminished around the world in the past year thanks largely to our goofy idiot cartoon leader, too.

Please don't give me any of the North Korean "reasoning" on this matter. Cmon. Kim Jong Un wants continued power, more power. He would definitely launch a nuke at Hawaii or the mainland. You can't even pretend to think Jong Un is reasonable. I concede Trump should not be president but I'm not going to give any benefit of the doubt to the man who has at least a 40/60 chance of ending the world as we know it -- Rodman's buddy Kim.

[Kyyle23]

Please don't give me any of the North Korean "reasoning" on this matter. Cmon. Kim Jong Un wants continued power, more power. He would definitely launch a nuke at Hawaii or the mainland. You can't even pretend to think Jong Un is reasonable. I concede Trump should not be president but I'm not going to give any benefit of the doubt to the man who has at least a 40/60 chance of ending the world as we know it -- Rodman's buddy Kim.

 

It is interesting that you are living in fear of a crazy man with maybe 20 nukes that they aren’t even sure can get to Japan and are all about a crazy man with 6600 nukes that very obviously wants to use them to show everyone how cool it is.

[StrangeSox]

Please don't give me any of the North Korean "reasoning" on this matter. Cmon. Kim Jong Un wants continued power, more power. He would definitely launch a nuke at Hawaii or the mainland. You can't even pretend to think Jong Un is reasonable. I concede Trump should not be president but I'm not going to give any benefit of the doubt to the man who has at least a 40/60 chance of ending the world as we know it -- Rodman's buddy Kim.

 

The NK regime actually appears to be more rational than that. You don't have much power if you're a giant glowing crater in the ground, which is what would happen if they ever attacked anyone. He appears no less reasonable than Trump, anyway.

[StrangeSox]

This doesn't jive at all with the collusion stuff. If he didn't want to win, and didn't care if he did, why Russia?

 

"resigned to and accepting of losing" by the end of the campaign seems more accurate than "didn't want to win." An excerpt:

 

Not only did Trump disregard the potential conflicts of his own business deals and real-estate holdings, he audaciously refused to release his tax returns. Why should he? Once he lost, Trump would be both insanely famous and a martyr to Crooked Hillary. His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared would be international celebrities. Steve Bannon would become the de facto head of the tea-party movement. Kellyanne Conway would be a cable-news star. Melania Trump, who had been assured by her husband that he wouldn't become president, could return to inconspicuously lunching. Losing would work out for everybody. Losing was winning.

 

Shortly after 8 p.m. on Election Night, when the unexpected trend -- Trump might actually win -- seemed confirmed, Don Jr. told a friend that his father, or DJT, as he calls him, looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania was in tears--and not of joy.

 

There was, in the space of little more than an hour, in Steve Bannon's not unamused observation, a befuddled Trump morphing into a disbelieving Trump and then into a horrified Trump. But still to come was the final transformation: Suddenly, Donald Trump became a man who believed that he deserved to be, and was wholly capable of being, the president of the United States.

 

which matches up with this somewhat famous snapshot from election night as the results came in:

 

[southsider2k5]

"resigned to and accepting of losing" by the end of the campaign seems more accurate than "didn't want to win." An excerpt:

 

 

 

which matches up with this somewhat famous snapshot from election night as the results came in:

 

 

lmao. The headline of the article is quite literally

 

Donald Trump Didn't Want to Be President

[StrangeSox]

More excerpts:

 

Most presidential candidates spend their entire careers, if not their lives from adolescence, preparing for the role. They rise up the ladder of elected offices, perfect a public face, and prepare themselves to win and to govern. The Trump calculation, quite a conscious one, was different. The candidate and his top lieutenants believed they could get all the benefits of almost becoming president without having to change their behavior or their worldview one whit. Almost everybody on the Trump team, in fact, came with the kind of messy conflicts bound to bite a president once he was in office. Michael Flynn, the retired general who served as Trump’s opening act at campaign rallies, had been told by his friends that it had not been a good idea to take $45,000 from the Russians for a speech. “Well, it would only be a problem if we won,” ­Flynn assured them.

 

lol how'd that work out for you buddy?

 

Ann Coulter making sense here:

As much as the president himself, the chief of staff determines how the Executive branch — which employs 4 million people — will run. The job has been construed as deputy president, or even prime minister. But Trump had no interest in appointing a strong chief of staff with a deep knowledge of Washington. Among his early choices for the job was Kushner — a man with no political experience beyond his role as a calm and flattering body man to Trump during the campaign.

 

It was Ann Coulter who finally took the president-elect aside. “Nobody is apparently telling you this,” she told him. “But you can’t. You just can’t hire your children.”

 

“He’s a bomb thrower,” said Ailes. “And a strange little f***er. But you need him. Who else is good on Israel? Flynn is a little nutty on Iran. Tillerson just knows oil.”

 

“Bolton’s mustache is a problem,” snorted Bannon. “Trump doesn’t think he looks the part. You know Bolton is an acquired taste.”

 

“Well, he got in trouble because he got in a fight in a hotel one night and chased some woman.”

 

“If I told Trump that,” Bannon said slyly, “he might have the job.”

 

I refuse to believe this is a real thing that happened but it probably is!:

After Jared and Ivanka joined them for lunch, Trump continued to cast for positive impressions of his first week. Scarborough praised the president for having invited leaders of the steel unions to the White House. At which point Jared interjected that reaching out to unions, a Democratic constituency, was Bannon’s doing, that this was “the Bannon way.”

 

“Bannon?” said the president, jumping on his son-in-law. “That wasn’t Bannon’s idea. That was my idea. It’s the Trump way, not the Bannon way.”

 

Kushner, going concave, retreated from the discussion.

 

Trump, changing the topic, said to Scarborough and Brzezinski, “So what about you guys? What’s going on?” He was referencing their not-so-secret secret relationship. The couple said it was still complicated, but good.

 

“You guys should just get married,” prodded Trump.

 

“I can marry you! I’m an internet Unitarian minister,” Kushner, otherwise an Orthodox Jew, said suddenly.

 

“What?” said the president. “What are you talking about? Why would they want you to marry them when I could marry them? When they could be married by the president! At Mar-a-Lago!”

 

The secret of the hair is revealed:

Ivanka maintained a relationship with her father that was in no way conventional. She was a helper not just in his business dealings, but in his marital realignments. If it wasn’t pure opportunism, it was certainly transactional. For Ivanka, it was all business — building the Trump brand, the presidential campaign, and now the White House. She treated her father with a degree of detachment, even irony, going so far as to make fun of his comb-over to others. She often described the mechanics behind it to friends: an absolutely clean pate — a contained island after scalp-reduction ­surgery — surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray. The color, she would point out to comical effect, was from a product called Just for Men — the longer it was left on, the darker it got. Impatience resulted in Trump’s orange-blond hair color.

 

President Angry Grandpa:

Trump, in fact, found the White House to be vexing and even a little scary. He retreated to his own bedroom — the first time since the Kennedy White House that a presidential couple had maintained separate rooms. In the first days, he ordered two television screens in addition to the one already there, and a lock on the door, precipitating a brief standoff with the Secret Service, who insisted they have access to the room. He ­reprimanded the housekeeping staff for picking up his shirt from the floor: “If my shirt is on the floor, it’s because I want it on the floor.” Then he imposed a set of new rules: Nobody touch anything, especially not his toothbrush. (He had a longtime fear of being poisoned, one reason why he liked to eat at McDonald’s — nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade.) Also, he would let housekeeping know when he wanted his sheets done, and he would strip his own bed.

 

If he was not having his 6:30 dinner with Steve Bannon, then, more to his liking, he was in bed by that time with a cheeseburger, watching his three screens and making phone calls — the phone was his true contact point with the world — to a small group of friends, who charted his rising and falling levels of agitation through the evening and then compared notes with one another.

 

Or maybe President Toddler is more accurate:

As soon as the campaign team had stepped into the White House, Walsh saw, it had gone from managing Trump to the expectation of being managed by him. Yet the president, while proposing the most radical departure from governing and policy norms in several generations, had few specific ideas about how to turn his themes and vitriol into policy. And making suggestions to him was deeply complicated. Here, arguably, was the central issue of the Trump presidency, informing every aspect of Trumpian policy and leadership: He didn’t process information in any conventional sense. He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-­literate. He trusted his own expertise ­— no matter how paltry or irrelevant — more than anyone else’s. He was often confident, but he was just as often paralyzed, less a savant than a figure of sputtering and dangerous insecurities, whose instinctive response was to lash out and behave as if his gut, however confused, was in fact in some clear and forceful way telling him what to do. It was, said Walsh, “like trying to figure out what a child wants.”

 

[StrangeSox]

lmao. The headline of the article is quite literally

 

Donald Trump Didn't Want to Be President

 

Right, I don't think it's a great headline.

[bmags]

Michael Wolff's thing seems very lazy and I think he's going to get burned for being as lazy as he was.

[Dick Allen]

Michael Wolff's thing seems very lazy and I think he's going to get burned for being as lazy as he was.

Maybe he was making an attempt at a Dishonest Media Fake News award. I'm sure they are coveted.

 

 

BTW, when is Mexico sending the check for the wall?

Edited January 3, 2018 by Dick Allen

[caulfield12]

According to the excerpts, Bannon went on to say he was certain that the Russians at the now-infamous meeting at Trump Tower were introduced to the candidate himself — directly contradicting Trump’s numerous assertions that he had no contact with Russians during the campaign.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/roy-moore-debacl...-230212676.html

 

 

Bannon/Trump Civil War just beginning...

 

And on Wednesday, in the aftermath of the Trump eruption, Republican candidates in contested primaries began to exploit Bannon as a wedge issue. Just a few months ago, Bannon’s support was sought after. But on Wednesday, it was treated as a liability.

 

Rep. Evan Jenkins, who is running against Morrissey in the Republican primary to oppose Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., called on the attorney general to “disavow” Bannon for what Jenkins called “vicious attacks on President Trump and his family.”

 

Jenkins was referring to comments by Bannon to reporter Michael Wolff in a forthcoming book. In excerpts published Wednesday morning, Bannon called a meeting during the 2016 campaign between Donald Trump Jr., Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and an informal representative of the Russian government “treasonous.”

[StrangeSox]

Sessions to rescind Obama era order that allowed legalized marijuana to flourish without federal intervention

[Quin]

Sessions to rescind Obama era order that allowed legalized marijuana to flourish without federal intervention

 

State's rights!

 

Trump's twitter account already helping to weaken the dollar, boost China's standing:

 

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/03/pakistan-ch...rumps-rant.html

 

Pakistan's central bank announced that it will be replacing the dollar with the yuan for bilateral trade and investment with Beijing.

 

US is risking it's spot on the world stage entirely so the MAGAs can have a moron "tell it like it is."

[Kyyle23]

I think Sessions going after legal weed is going to end very badly for him. Those states are making a lot of money off of it, and the police arent concerning themselves with minor possession and wasting their time

[bmags]

I think Sessions going after legal weed is going to end very badly for him. Those states are making a lot of money off of it, and the police arent concerning themselves with minor possession and wasting their time

 

On the other hand, Cory Gardner is an absolute idiot to think Sessions wouldn't be a problem for his state.

[bmags]

I keep thinking back to the debates when Trump would make hay on how none of the people on his campaign would ever talk about him the way Hillary's team spoke about her in the podesta leaks.