Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

We now know what the president knew and when he knew it. He knew that COVID-19 was a mortal threat to untold numbers of Americans and elected to do nothing about it. We know, in fact, that he knew at least as early as the first week in February of this year. That was when he admitted, on tape no less, to writer Bob Woodward, that he knew what was coming. Then, he lied to our faces repeatedly, just as any true psychopathic killer would. This is who he is. I've been saying it for months. It didn't take any stroke of genius on my part, just a bit of perception. He is what he is. Once you know what he is, his actions or lack thereof can only be interpreted in one way. Still, a lot of people who are smart enough to know better chalked up what Trump said to stupidity. Not me. Even a stupid person, when faced with the ever-growing crisis of a pandemic, doesn't do the wrong thing or make the wrong decision every single damn time. A person that does that is doing it deliberately. A person who puts the premature deaths of tens of thousands of people and then hundreds of thousands in motion is a mass murderer, a serial killer, a psychopath. For Christ's sake, stop trying to pass this asshole off as just a narcissist!

President Psychopath did everything to actively prevent the government from responding to the crisis. He had the warnings and silenced the CDC. He'd already literally thrown away the government's pandemic response playbook. He didn't issue timely orders for more testing kits. He didn't immediately issue orders for more PPE. He didn't issue orders for the manufacture of additional hospital equipment. He even shipped PPE reserves to China. He deliberately wrecked any possible federal response. Then he played games with state governors who didn't praise him and watched the virus spread. All the while, he lied right to our faces. "Like a miracle, it will go away." People trusted that. Thousands of them died.

The blood of nearly 200,000 Americans is on Trump's hands and that's just the "official count." That blood is also on the hands of the entire White House staff, the cabinet who has repeatedly failed to invoke the 25th Amendment, congressional goons like Gym Shower Jordan, Traitor Devin Nunes, and Louis Gohmert, and, last and most prominently, the blood soaked Moscow Mitch McConnell and all of his gang of $enators who could have so easily voted to remove their Dear Leader from office and sent him off to the scrapheap of history. They could, infact, do it today, but they are complicit at best and as sick as Trump is at worst. None of them have ever moved to protect this country. Merely voting them out of office will never be enough.

Trump and his gang of sociopathic miscreants and psychopathic dirtbags all knew what was coming. They were privy to the intelligence. They knew way before Trump spilled the beans to Woodward. They knew way before Woodward could ever confirm it. They said nothing. They even made jokes about wearing masks and criticized fellow politicians and citizens who did and asked them to do so as well. They set forth a lethal pattern of behavior that is still being followed across the nation. Case in point: South Dakota, where a homicidal maniac of a Governor named Kristi Noem decreed that no masks need be worn at Trump's disturbing mockery at Mt. Rushmore, at the huge annual Sturgis motorcycle rally, and then the South Dakota State Fair which just ended on Labor Day. Each event was a super-spreader event of the kind that Trump dreams of. Well done, Governor Noem! Are you cruisin' for a Trump Medal of Freedom? You won't get it Kristi, at least not before your idol gets his Nobel and his ugly mug carved on your mountain.

Trump had options. He could save lives or he could be the instrument of human misery and death. He chose the latter. He is what he is.

Americans Are Largely Unaware That, As A Country, We're Doing Worse And Worse-- And There Is No Political Solution In Sight... At Least Not For The Next Few Years

In his NY Times column yesterday, that the U.S. is #28... and dropping. And he wasn't talking about soccer. He wrote that "The newest Social Progress Index... finds that out of 163 countries assessed worldwide, the United States, Brazil and Hungary are the only ones in which people are worse off than when the index began in 2011. And the declines in Brazil and Hungary were smaller than America’s." It's worth noting that Brazil and Hungary have also elected fascist-type leaders similar to Trump.

The index, inspired by research of Nobel-winning economists, collects 50 metrics of well-being-- nutrition, safety, freedom, the environment, health, education and more-- to measure quality of life. Norway comes out on top in the 2020 edition, followed by Denmark, Finland and New Zealand. South Sudan is at the bottom, with Chad, Central African Republic and Eritrea just behind.

The United States, despite its immense wealth, military power and cultural influence, ranks 28th-- having slipped from 19th in 2011. The index now puts the United States behind significantly poorer countries, including Estonia, Czech Republic, Cyprus and Greece.

...The United States ranks No. 1 in the world in quality of universities, but No. 91 in access to quality basic education. The U.S. leads the world in medical technology, yet we are No. 97 in access to quality health care.

Make sense of the moment.

The Social Progress Index finds that Americans have health statistics similar to those of people in Chile, Jordan and Albania, while kids in the United States get an education roughly on par with what children get in Uzbekistan and Mongolia. A majority of countries have lower homicide rates, and most other advanced countries have lower traffic fatality rates and better sanitation and internet access... and lags in sharing political power equally among all citizens. America ranks a shameful No. 100 in discrimination against minorities.

The data for the latest index predates Covid-19, which has had a disproportionate impact on the United States and seems likely to exacerbate the slide in America’s standing. One new study suggests that in the United States, symptoms of depression have risen threefold since the pandemic began-- and poor mental health is associated with other risk factors for well-being.

That's what neoliberal policies have wrought-- and what Trumpism has exacerbated. If if we get rid of Trump, we still have one of the worst examples of neoliberalism in American politics sitting in the Oval Office. Dartmouth economist David Blanchflower told Kristof that "Rising distress and despair are largely American phenomenon not observed in other advanced countries." Kristof suggests we "wake up, for we are no longer the country we think we are."

You think Trump is going to resign or even seriously consider resigning? It would be a smart move for him, since he could make a deal with Pence-- who would get to be "president" for a couple of months or weeks-- to pardon him and his churlish family. But he won't. He'll fight to the last second and then refuse to give up the White House until Biden pardons him. How's that possible? In David Remnick's words, "Trump is who he has always been, and the details that we learn with every passing day merely fill in the portrait with sharper focus and more lurid colors. The man who lied about the nature of the novel coronavirus to the American people (but confided in Bob Woodward) is the same man who, as a real-estate huckster, used to say that the best way to hype a new building was to 'just give them the old Trump bullshit.' Deception is his brand." It's worth reading Remnick's take on RAGE-- the nightmare presidency that doesn't want to let us wake up from. "As he proves almost daily, Trump is capable of saying or doing anything to win. And if he doesn’t win, the presumption that he will hand over power without some sort of duplicity is far from assured."

Trump’s Presidency has been appalling–– but not unpredictably so. That he would bring misery and division to this country should have been obvious from the start. Flagrantly corrupt and instinctually autocratic, he immediately set about threatening democratic values and the rule of law, while encouraging autocrats abroad and white nationalists at home. He has aroused hatred for the free press and slimed the patriotism of everyone from John McCain to John Lewis. It is a painful thing to say, but the evidence assaults us daily: Trump is a miserable human being. Ask his sister, a retired federal judge; in a taped conversation with the President’s niece, she refers to him as "cruel." It is the rare adviser or satrap who leaves the White House and does not hasten to write a memoir or speak to the press with the intention of sounding a common alarm, that Trump poses a threat to national security even more profound than the news-weary public can imagine. Woodward reports that the former director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, came to believe, more and more, that the Russians had something on Trump. "How else to explain the President’s behavior?" Woodward writes. "Coats could see no other explanation."

“So you just had to deal with it,” Woodward quotes Mattis as saying, about the situation inside Trump’s White House. “It was, how do you govern this country and try to keep this experiment alive for one more year?” Mattis says he resigned only when Trump went “beyond stupid to felony stupid” and made an abrupt decision to withdraw troops fighting ISIS.

Trump’s reaction to the book has been Trumpian. He gave Woodward eighteen interviews, often calling Woodward at home at night just to deepen the hole he began to dig at more formal sessions in the Oval Office. Woodward taped the conversations with the President’s knowledge. But, as a way to cover all bases, Trump tweeted last month, “The Bob Woodward book will be a FAKE, as always, just as many of the others have been.” And, of course, he has now tried to pick at the critical thread that the reporter should have published his remarks about the dangers of covid-19 earlier. “Bob Woodward had my quotes for many months,” Trump tweeted Thursday morning. “If he thought they were so bad or dangerous, why didn’t he immediately report them in an effort to save lives? Didn’t he have an obligation to do so? No, because he knew they were good and proper answers. Calm, no panic!”

The executive in charge of saving lives was, and is, Donald Trump, not Bob Woodward. And the President’s delays and denials insured that the American response, compared with that of other nations, would be tragic. William Haseltine, the chairman and president of access Health International and a world-renowned biologist, told CNN, “How many people could have been saved out of the hundred and ninety thousand who have died? My guess is a hundred and eighty thousand of those. We have killed a hundred and eighty thousand of our fellow-Americans because we have not been honest with the truth.”

...Early in his term, there were moments when Trump would seemingly abandon his customary venom and wildness and do something ordinary, such as read a bland speech from a prepared text. The spectacle would be so striking that we’d hear commentators say such things as, “This is the night that Donald Trump became President of the United States.” Meaning that there was half a chance that he would now behave somewhere within the bounds of sanity and decency. There was never any chance of that happening. Trump is who he has always been. The rest is details. And he is not going anywhere until he’s compelled to do so.

Did Trump Calculate The Cost Of 200,000 American Lives In Terms Of Paper Growth On Wall Street?

At least 100 times in the last couple of years, I started a post with something like "well, now he's really lost his mind." I find myself having to stop doing that and changing it to something else-- as I'm doing right now. I mean how many times can you say that? And I almost did it again yesterday when I saw this tweet. Doesn't anyone tell him-- John Pavlovitz aside-- that he sounds like a drug-addled madman?

As Glenn Kessler noted in the Washington Post, if Trump's trying to not spark panic, what's his reelection campaign based on? And it doesn't stop there. In the tweet above the drug-addled madman chastises Woodward for not exposing him earlier. Anyone in the country can make that argument... except one obese, orange-hued psychopath. The Post's Margaret Sullivan reported that "Woodward said his aim was to provide a fuller context than could occur in a news story: 'I knew I could tell the second draft of history, and I knew I could tell it before the election.' (Former Washington Post publisher Phil Graham famously called journalism 'the first rough draft of history.') What’s more, he said, there were at least two problems with what he heard from Trump in February that kept him from putting it in the newspaper at the time: First, he didn’t know what the source of Trump’s information was. It wasn’t until months later-- in May-- that Woodward learned it came from a high-level intelligence briefing in January that was also described in Wednesday’s reporting about the book. In February, what Trump told Woodward seemed hard to make sense of, the author told me-- back then, Woodward said, there was no panic over the virus; even toward the final days of that month, Anthony S. Fauci was publicly assuring Americans there was no need to change their daily habits. Second, Woodward said, 'the biggest problem I had, which is always a problem with Trump, is I didn’t know if it was true.'... But why not then write such a story later in the spring, once it was clear that the virus was extraordinarily destructive and that Trump’s early downplaying had almost certainly cost lives? Again, Woodward said he believes his highest purpose isn’t to write daily stories but to give his readers the big picture-- one that may have a greater effect, especially with a consequential election looming. Woodward’s effort, he said, was to deliver in book form 'the best obtainable version of the truth,' not to rush individual revelations into publication. And always with a particular deadline in mind, so that people could read, absorb, and make their judgments well before November 3. 'The demarcation is the election.'"

So the Regime is now trying to persuade whatever is left of Trump's moron base that it is Woodward who caused the deaths of 200,000 Americans, not Trump. Kessler began his article with Trump's quote from Wednesday: "I don’t want people to be frightened. I don’t want to create panic." Presumably he wasn't thinking of panic on the streets of London, Birmingham, Carlisle, Dublin, Dundee, Humberside or Leeds as much as panic on the floor of the New York stock exchange.

Who is going to fall for the new Trump trope that "he was trying to keep the nation calm by not revealing how much he knew about the dangerous nature of the novel coronavirus?" Kessler:

A cynic might suggest that Trump wanted to keep things calm because he was concerned that a plunging stock market would harm his chances for reelection. But let’s lay that aside for the moment and consider Trump’s explanation that he does not want to create panic.

That might be news to the President Trump running for reelection. His YouTube video channel is filled with apocalyptic images of violence, economic despair and disaster. So are the president’s speeches and news availabilities, including at the same venue where he said he did not want to create panic.

Here’s a sampling, drawn mainly from our database of Trump’s false and misleading claims:

“Radical justices will erase the Second Amendment, silence political speech and require taxpayers to fund extreme late-term abortion. They will give unelected bureaucrats the power to destroy millions of American jobs. They will remove the words ‘under God’ from the Pledge of Allegiance. They will unilaterally declare the death penalty unconstitutional, even for the most depraved mass murderers. They will erase national borders, cripple police departments and grant new protections to anarchists, rioters, violent criminals and terrorists.”
— Sept. 9

“Joe Biden and the radical, socialist Democrats would immediately collapse the economy. If they got in, they would collapse it. You’ll have a crash the likes of which you’ve never seen before. Your stocks, your 401(k)s.”
— Sept. 7

“Biden wants to surrender our country to the virus, he wants to surrender our families to the violent left-wing mob, and he wants to surrender our jobs to China-- our jobs and our economic well-being.”
— Sept. 7

“Biden’s strategy is to surrender to the left-wing mob, which is exactly what he’s doing-- I don’t think he even knows what he’s doing-- and give them control over every lever of power in the United States government. But when you surrender to the mob, you don’t get freedom; you get fascism. That’s what happens in all cases. You take a look at Venezuela. Look what-- look what’s going on there and other places.”
— Aug. 31

“Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children. Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our Founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.”
— July 4

“In Joe Biden’s America, rioters, looters and criminal aliens have more rights than law-abiding citizens, and that’s true.”
— June 20

“The entire Democratic field supports deadly sanctuary cities, which release dangerous criminals to terrorize your communities right here in North Carolina, believe it or not.”
— March 2

“Every major Democrat running for president has pledged to eliminate gas-powered automobiles and destroy the U.S. auto industry forever.”
— Dec. 18

Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, pinned a tweet back in early March. I'm sure Tweeter-in-Chief, for whom Twitter is a one-way street, never read it:

This week Hanage decided to use a Twitter thread to make some comments about it and Trump's claims about why he lied about the pandemic. "In an emergency, it is reasonable and responsible to minimize panic. However this is not done by denying the existence of the emergency-- at best that delays the panic and at worst it magnifies the panic once the truth becomes clear. Instead earn trust. Honestly present the reality of the situation and reassure people that you are working to control it and minimize the fallout. Work with expert risk communicators. When it comes to preparing, listen to experts who know more than you. Use whatever time you have to collect the resources people will need-- remember their safety is your responsibility. Be responsive. Recognize that mistakes will be made and learn from them. Don't be distracted. Support those who are suffering and those who are working to minimize suffering. Know that it is a marathon, not a sprint. Failing to prepare for a real threat is not responsible. Playing down a real risk that you know is real is not preventing panic. It's negligence."

Will RAGE Mean Anything To Trump Supporters?

I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but do Trump supporters read books? The release of Woodward's book, right on top of The Atlantic's revelations about what Trump thinks of American military servicemembers, should be the coup de grâce. But we've all lost track of the instances that were the straw that broken the camel's back. They never are and never will be. Not the stuff from Michael Cohen, from Trump's niece, from Michael Wolff, from Brandy Lee, from Amanda Carpenter, Tim Alberta, Arlie Russell Hochschild, Phil Rucker and Carol Leonid, Jonathan Karl, Doug Wead, Neal Katyal, Alan Grayson, John Lithgow, Sarah Kendzior... So, as much as I am looking forward to reading Rage, I don't expect the revelations-- which were all over the news yesterday-- are going to change the minds-- the lizard brains-- of the hardcore 38-40% of voters who are addicted.

However... with all the TV channels-- even Fox-- running the tapes, maybe some of the congressional Republicans will... nah. Carl Bernstein termed Trump's lies about the virus "homicidal negligence." Where does that leave knee-jerk Trumpist governors Ron DeSantis (R-FL), Greg Abbott (R-TX), Brian Kemp (R-GA), Bill Lee (R-TN), Henry McMaster (R-SC), Kristi Noem (R-SD), Doug Ducey (R-AZ), Kim Reynolds (R-IA), Kevin Stitt (R-OK), Tate Reeves (R-MS), Kay Ivey (R-AL), Doug Burgum (R-ND), Mike Parson (R-MO), Gary Herbert (R-UT), Chris Sununu (R-NH)...

Chris Cillizza tackled the question many of us are asking: Why, why, why would the President grant Woodward so much access? And why would the famously denial-prone Trump allow Woodward to tape the conversations so that there can be no doubt about a) their authenticity or b) what he actually said? Obviously, it's all wound up in the sick Trump psyche.

For all the attacks he lobs at the media, there is NO president who has more closely followed how he is covered and treated by the press than Trump. And it's not even close. He is a voracious consumer of cable news as well as print newspapers. Cable TV has long been the lens through which he views the world and, since being elected president, the way that he analyzes-- in real time-- how he thinks he is doing.

That obsession with perception has naturally lead Trump into forever hunting out ways to cement his legacy in office. Whether that's the almost farcical attempt to buy Greenland or his fascination with the possibility of his face being added to Mount Rushmore, Trump has shown a unbending focus on creating and preserving his legacy. (Trump thinks like a real estate developer; he goes big!)

Aside from those attempts to secure a legacy in stone-- literally!-- Trump regularly uses campaign rallies, supposed policy speeches and his Twitter feed to promote the idea that he really deserves to be considered as one of the best presidents ever.

"I've always said I can be more presidential than any president in history except for Honest Abe Lincoln, when he's wearing the hat," Trump said in 2019. In a speech at the United Nations in 2018, Trump said that "in less than two years my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country." (The audience laughed.)

...Woodward is writing the history of each president as it happens. He is the most recognizable and famous political journalist in the country. When Bob Woodward says he wants to write about you-- even if you are a billionaire businessman or the president of the United States-- you are flattered. And you see opportunity, because if you can convince Woodward that the coverage of you is unfair and biased and that you are really doing a great job, well, then, maybe history starts remembering you the way you want it to.

...Trump has two Achilles heels in politics and life. The first is that he cares so desperately about how people think of him and remember him that he is willing to do almost anything to impact his legacy. The second is that he believes far too much in his own ability to persuade. Woodward (and the book he has produced) cuts at both of the heels.

Which means that Trump was essentially poking at his own weakest spots with every single word he uttered to Woodward. And yet, he couldn't stop himself.

Here are some reports of particularly damning revelations from the book, aside from the web of lies he wove about the coronavirus to deceive the public:

1- Dan Coats, a former very conservative Republican senator from Indiana who Trump hired and fired as director of national intelligence told Woodward that could not shake his "deep suspicions" that Putin "had something" on Señor Trumpanzee, seeing "no other explanation" for the president’s behavior. Coats and his staff examined the intelligence regarding Trump’s ties to Russia "as carefully as possible" and that he "still questions the relationship" between Trump and Putin despite the apparent absence of intelligence proof... "To him, a lie is not a lie. It's just what he thinks. He doesn't know the difference between the truth and a lie."

2- Trump spilled the beans to Woodward on a top secret new nuclear weapon, a very grave breach of national security. "I have built a nuclear-- a weapons system that nobody’s ever had in this country before. We have stuff that you haven’t even seen or heard about. We have stuff that Putin and Xi have never heard about before. There’s nobody-- what we have is incredible."

3- Former Defense Secretary James Mattis, who referred to Trump as "dangerous" and "unfit" with "no moral compass," told Woodward that Trump took foreign policy actions that showed adversaries "how to destroy America. That's what we're showing them. How to isolate us from all of our allies. How to take us down. And it's working very well."

4- Fauci was willing to go on record calling Trump's leadership on the virus "rudderless," saying his "sole purpose is to get reelected," and noting that "his attention span is like a minus number."

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Once in a while, I like to use a tweet for a Midnight Meme Of The Day. Some are just too good to ignore. Such is the case with the one above from @PoliteMelanie.

Bob Woodward has now given us fascinating looks into the administrations of 9 presidents. Fear might be the last one for any one of a number of reasons but despite past presidents occasionally denying the contents of Woodward's books about their time in the White House, the things presented Woodward's books have always proven to be true and they have stood the test of time. The truth will outlast Trump and his Republicans. The bigger question is will the United States and its citizens.

If you have the misfortune of having a relative who is still a Trump supporter, even now, you may want to choose a copy of Fear to give them this upcoming holiday season. They will love the title just for the name alone, since fear is exactly what makes Trumpies tick. Just make sure you say "Merry Christmas" no matter what their religious upbringing and, don't forget to make it the audio book version. And, find a way to program it so it not only can't be turned off but each attempt will make it play louder!

How To Be A Dickhead By Donald J. Trumpanzee

I still haven't bought a copy of Fear-- but I plan to... for a plane ride to Istanbul. Meanwhile I'm depending on Rachel Maddow and, yesterday on Greg Sargent in the Washington Post-- Another big Woodward reveal: Trump’s bottomless bad faith and nonstop lying. He reminds us that there's more to Woodwards book than just Señor Trumpanzee's "raging, volatile temperament, his erratic mind-changing, and his startling lack of knowledge or curiosity about complex domestic and global policy problems." And Sargent has noted that the portrait that emerges is of a man "who is mentally and intellectually unfit to serve as president."

But there's more: "Trump’s nonstop lying, his utter contempt for legal and governing process, and his bottomless bad faith in developing rationales for extremely consequential decisions. These sorts of traits-- unlike Trump’s temperament and incuriosity-- are not usually looked at as evidence of his unfitness for this office. But they should be." Yes, they should-- and I hope Ted Lieu, Pramila Jayapal, Jamie Raskin, Steve Cohen or Karen Bass decides to read Sargent's column into the record when the committee the five of them are on-- the House Judiciary Committee-- gets around to the investigation that comes before the actual impeachment.

CNBC at a look at the book from their unique perspective, starting with Señor T's blatant campaign lies about balancing the federal budget and lowering the national debt. Woodward pointed out that once he won, Trump's approach was dangerous and quickly slapped down by his chief economic advisor, Gary Cohn.

"Just run the presses-- print money," Trump said, according to Woodward, during a discussion on the national debt with Gary Cohn, former director of the White House National Economic Council.

...Cohn was "astounded at Trump's lack of basic understanding," Woodward writes.

...The president also floated an idea for making money from the recent rise in interest rates, according to Woodward.

"We should just go borrow a lot of money, hold it, and then sell it to make money," Trump reportedly said.

The president also made clear that he was not pleased by the Federal Reserve's current policy toward moving interest rates back to historical levels after suppressing them during the decade that followed the 2008 financial crisis. Cohn said he supported the Fed's move to raise rates.

Trump then told Cohn that he wouldn't pick him to be Fed chair, according to the book.

"That's fine," Cohn said, Woodward reports. "It's the worst job in America."

Meanwhile ABC News reported that Fuck Up, Jr. confirmed that Fuck Up, Sr. (yes, the illegitimate "president") doesn't trust most of his White House staffers any more. The dysfunctional White House took a fall from dysfunctional to non-functioning. Fuck-Up, Jr. told ABC News the number of people in the White House that his father can trust is smaller than he’d like. It's almost like the title of Woodward's book was forward-looking.

“I think there are people in there that he can trust, it's just-- it's a much smaller group than I would like it to be,” Trump Jr. said in an interview aired Tuesday on ABC’s Good Morning America.

“It would be easier to get things done if you’re able to fully trust everyone around you,” he said. “I think that’s a shame.”

Donald Trump Jr. said he believes the controversial New York Times op-ed penned by an anonymous senior administration official was written by a “low-level person,” and that the Justice Department should investigate the author.

“This is very low level person who will throw their name on an op-ed, and basically subvert the vote of the American people who elected my father to do this job,” Trump Jr. said, calling the editorial “pretty disgusting” and “sad.”

“Listen, I think you're subverting the will of the people. I mean, to try to control the presidency while not the president. You have millions and millions of Americans who voted for this,” he said when asked whether any laws were broken.

Why is this White House such a mess? I think Team Axios hot on it yesterday-- The Trump Rules of Life and Leadership. "Leadership books," they wrote, "are filled with calls for brutal candor, hiring people more talented than yourself, and collaboration as a force multiplier. But the "Trump lessons of leadership, like his approach to the presidency, are radically and ruthlessly different. Here are the Trump Rules, distilled from conversations we have had with countless people close to the president, some of whom have studied him for years" Here it is-- a 7-step guide to how to fail at life and be known as an absolute dickhead to everyone you come in contact with:

1- Your brand should piss someone off. The worst thing you can be is milquetoast, bland. He wants some people to have a viscerally negative response to him and what he’s doing, because he bets that’s going to harden support on the other side.
2- Crisis is a powerful weapon-- fire it indiscriminately. "Forget planning," a source said. "Wake up every morning, survey the battlefield, let your gut instinct lead you to a crisis to exploit, bet that no one else can thrive in the chaos the way you can. Ratchet up the pressure until everyone else's pipes burst."
3- You can create your own truth. Just keep repeating it.
4- Accuse the accuser. A source who's spent hundreds of hours working with Trump puts it this way: "He has a history of accusing people of whatever he’s being accused of. Collusion? Democrats colluded on the dossier! Blue wave? Red wave coming!"
5- Fear trumps friendship. Trump wants his inferiors to fear him and hold him in awe. He likes watching them duke it out in front of him.
6- Loyalty trumps talent. Case in point: Michael Cohen. No serious person would employ Michael Cohen as their personal attorney... a point Trump has belatedly acknowledged himself. But as Cohen used to say, he'd "take a bullet" for Donald Trump. Oops.
7- Never admit you are-- or did-- wrong.  Trump’s #MeToo advice, per Bob Woodward's Fear: "You’ve got to deny, deny, deny and push back on these women. If you admit to anything and any culpability, then you’re dead."

Ever work for someone who lived life by following those rules? I did-- and, yes, it's as horrific as you might guess.

Are Trump's Torrents Of Lies Dangerous? Oh, Yes

Everybody knows Trump lies his ass off every single day-- everybody, that is, except for his 2-digit IQ supporters strung out on pharmaceuticalsl... about a third of the country's voters. Thanks largely to hate talk radio and Fox, they believe everything he says. Most of what he says barely matters; it's just hot air, empty braggadocio and utter nonsense for his dumbed down, early manipulated base-- like this random chimp talk from early yesterday morning:

He's obsessed with Fear, Bob Woodward's book, now a #1 best seller, thanks-- at least in part-- to Trump bleating and whining about it so obsessively. Yes, he'll write (obviously find someone to write) the "real book."

But sometimes his lies do matter and his moron supporters don't-- like in instances of national security. During his TV interviews over the weekend, Woodward got to the heart of the real problem with his bullshit and gas-lighting: "I’ve never seen an instance when the President is so detached from the reality of what’s going on. This has not been treated seriously enough. Some of the things Trump did and does jeopardize the real national security... People better wake up to what's going on." During the CBS interview about the book-- which will hit the stores today-- Woodward talked about what he contends was the most dangerous moment of Trump's nuclear standoff with North Korea.

"He drafts a tweet saying 'We are going to pull our dependents from South Korea-- family members of the 28,000 people there,'" Woodward said on "CBS Sunday Morning," referring to families of US troops stationed on the Korean peninsula.

The tweet never was sent because of a back-channel message from the North Koreans that they would view it as a sign the US was preparing to attack, according to CBS.

"At that moment there was a sense of profound alarm in the Pentagon leadership that, 'My God, one tweet and we have reliable information that the North Koreans are going to read this as 'an attack is imminent.'"

...Kim recently expressed his "unwavering faith" in Trump, and the US president on Sunday praised the North Korean for staging a huge military parade in Pyongyang without the customary display of nuclear missiles.

But the earlier brinkmanship between the two nuclear-armed states-- including Trump's threat September 19, 2017 to "totally destroy North Korea"-- had sent tensions soaring.

In his book, Woodward portrays the US president as uninformed and impulsive to the point of recklessness, with White Houses aides at times removing documents from his desk to keep him from taking rash actions.

The dotard is so obsessed with keeping his base persuaded that he's single-handedly saved America from Korean nuclear annihilation that he keeps lying about his "accomplishments" in Singapore. Kim is obviously manipulating him as easily as he manipulates the imbeciles who want to believe him in Mississippi.

Monday, NBC reported that, despite what Trump says in his self-glorificating tweets, North Korea is still building nukes-- and U.S. government is talking it seriously even if the senile coot in the White House isn't. Courtney Kube reported that as Señor Trumpanzee "issues a steady stream of praise for Kim Jong Un in interviews and on Twitter, a steady stream of evidence that North Korea is still making nuclear weapons has pushed his administration to take a much more aggressive stance toward Pyongyang."

The newest intelligence shows Kim's regime has escalated efforts to conceal its nuclear activity, according to three senior U.S. officials. During the three months since the historic Singapore summit and Trump's proclamation that North Korea intends to denuclearize, North Korea has built structures to obscure the entrance to at least one warhead storage facility, according to the officials.

The U.S. has also observed North Korean workers moving warheads out of the facility, the officials said, though they would not speculate on where the warheads went.

...U.S. intelligence assesses North Korea could produce five to eight new nuclear weapons in 2018, according to three current and former senior U.S. officials. That pace is virtually identical to their assessment of the regime's production of about six per year prior to the Trump-Kim summit.

...The Trump administration has launched what it calls a "maximum pressure" campaign against North Korea in response.

Public rhetoric, meanwhile, has a different tone. After his June meeting with Kim in Singapore Trump said, "There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea."

Trump tweeted a "thank you" to Kim on Thursday for proclaiming his "unwavering faith" after a South Korean official reported Kim wanted to denuclearize before the end of Trump's first term. The South Korean official said Kim emphasized "that he has never said anything negative about President Trump."

"We will get it done together!," tweeted Trump.

Friday morning, Fox News aired a taped interview with Trump in which he insisted, "Kim Jong un said very nice things. He said we want to get denuclearization during the Trump administration."

On Sunday, North Korea held its annual Foundation Day military parade to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the founding of the nation on Sept. 9. In past years, the Kim regime has used the parade to show off missiles and new technology.

This year, however, North Korea did not display any ICBMs. On Twitter, President Trump said “experts” were heralding the absence as a sign of the Kim regime’s “commitment to denuclearization.” He thanked Kim and called the lack of missiles a “very positive statement.”

“We will both prove everyone wrong! There is nothing like good dialogue from two people that like each other!”

The government insists Trump is personally directing all their push-back against North Korea. I guess that sounds better than what it actually is. Is there a simple English word that Trump supporters would understand for coup d'état ? Maybe "Deep State?"

Can Someone Be Intentionally Deceitful And Deluded At The Same Time? Absolutely-- And Putin Put Him In The White House

Frank Schwartz knows Trump far more intimately than almost anyone writing about him-- and he detests him. It's always worthwhile hearing what he has to say about the orange-hued baboon. But while Schwartz was on CNN, Bob Woodward, of Fear fame, was doing his first TV interview since the book came out with CBS News' David Martin. It's impossible to imagine you're following the Trump saga without watching it. "You look at the operation of this White House," said Woodward, who has looked at the operation of many White Houses, "and you have to say, 'Let's hope to God we don't have a crisis.' People who work for him are worried ... that he will sign things or give orders that threaten the national security or the financial security of the country or the world."

Martin asked Woodward how White House staffers, like Gary Cohn and Rob Porter were able to steal documents dangerous to the country off the chimp's desk and get away with it. "He doesn't remember," said Woodward, describing a senile old coot. "If it's not on his desk, if it's not immediately available for action, it goes away... In the eight others," he said, referring to the 9 White Houses he's written about, "I never heard of people on the staff in the White House engaging in that kind of extreme action"-- basically unelected officials intentionally thwarting the actions of the elected president (albeit for the sake of the country)... but still exactly the opposite of what White House aides are hired to do.

The boastful asshole, hoping Mattis' military service would somehow rub off on him, bragged at one of his deranged rallies that "We are going to appoint 'Mad Dog' Mattis as our Secretary of Defense. "The president surrounded himself with generals-- active duty and retired-- all of whom had served in Afghanistan. But before he decided on a new Afghan strategy, he insisted on meeting with enlisted men who had served there as well... In a meeting the next day, he lashed out at the generals: "I don't care about you guys," he said to Mattis, Joint Chiefs Chairman General Joseph Dunford, and then-National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster. Woodward: "'The soldiers on the ground could run things much better than you,' he says to Mattis and Dunford, and there is a 25-minute dressing down of the generals and senior officials." Sir Bone-spurs (AKA, the king of genital warts and veneral disease) has persuaded himself he's the toughest guy in the room-- any room, every room. America may be; he's not anything more than a transparent coward and bully, a terrible-- and very dangerous-- combination.

When Economic Adviser Gary Cohn was upset over the president's reluctance to condemn white supremacists for the violence in Charlottesville he went into the Oval Office to resign. According to Woodward, "Trump said, 'You can't resign. I need you to do tax reform.' He said, 'If you leave, this is treason.' And Trump talked him out of resigning."

Afterwards, Chief of Staff John Kelly, who had been in the room, pulled him aside: "Cohn wrote this down, 'quote from General Kelly: If that was me I would have taken that resignation letter and shoved it up his ass six different times.'"

...Woodward quotes harsh criticism of the president from some of his closest advisers. Chief of Staff Kelly called his boss an "idiot."  Secretary of Defense Mattis said the commander-in-chief acted like, and had the understanding of, "a fifth- or sixth-grader."

Both men have denied saying such things. And the president continues to denounce the book at every turn. At a rally Friday night Mr. Trump said, "These guys that write books and they put phony quotes out all over them-- totally phony quotes. I mean, totally, like, fraudulent books. They're, like, fraudulent books!"

"He says the quotes are just not the way he speaks and the quotes are fabricated. What do you say to that?"

"He's wrong, and my reporting is meticulous and careful."

In a second interview with CBS' Sunday Morning, Woodward said he had multiple sources for every claim in the book: "Multiple interviews with key witnesses. One person I interviewed nine times, and the transcripts of those conversations are 700 or 800 pages."

"700-800 pages for one person?"

"Yes, sir."

"How many people did you interview?"

"Over a hundred. I would say that maybe half of those are key people."

The theme of Woodward's book-- that aides fear what the president might do if allowed to follow his impulses-- received an unusual confirmation last week, when the New York Times published this anonymous article written by a person described as "a senior official in the Trump administration."  "I work for the president, but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations."

"I have no idea who it is. It's very important, who it is. It's very important whether this is somebody who witnessed and participated. And quite frankly, if there was a person in the White House or the administration who wanted to tell me what's in that op-ed piece, I would say, 'Okay, name me who was there. What is the specific incident?' As you know, from having read my book, the dates and times and participants. I wouldn't have used it."

"Too vague?"

"Well, too vague, and does not meet the standards of trying to describe specific incidents. Specific incidents are the building blocks of journalism, as you well know."

Fear: Trump in the White House is Woodward's 19th book, and he says reporting it took him deeper inside a working White House than he's ever been before.

"This one was in the belly of the beast."

"And what did you conclude about the beast?" "That people better wake up to what's going on."

Trump Is Now Doing Damage Control With Southern Voters He Managed To Offend

The Dotard Inquisition

Señor Trumpanzee has been mocking Jeff Sessions as a dumb southerner for some time, thinking no one "outside" would pick up on his bigotry and that his "dumb" supporters in Alabama, the Florida Panhandle, Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, Mississippi, Arkansas and southern Missouri would ever figure out that a snob he is and that what he says about Mexicans publicly is what he says about them behind their backs. It would be fatal for him if they do-- which is why he's been shrieking on Twitter than Bob Bernstein is a Democratic operative and a purveyor of "fake news"-- lies like everything else Trump uses to manipulate his base, especially "dumb" southerners.

Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that Southern Republican senators-- usually Trump's most lock-step ass-kissing enablers and rubber-stamps-- were pushing back. Several explicitly defended Jeff Sessions from the Trump attacks exposed in Fear, Woodward new book. Trump's mockery of southern accents has been an ongoing disgrace that has gone largely unnoticed. Woodward wrote that the illegitimate "president" privately called Sessions a "traitor," saying: "This guy is mentally retarded. He’s this dumb Southerner… He couldn’t even be a one-person country lawyer down in Alabama."

Johnny Isakson (R-GA), obviously seething: "I’m a Southerner. People can judge my intellect, my IQ, by my product and what I produce rather than what somebody else says. We’re a pretty smart bunch. We lost the Civil War, but I think we’re winning the economic war since then… I’m not gonna get into name-calling because I don’t think you should be allowed to call names-- including the president."

 Richard Shelby (R-AL), a long-time friend and colleague of Sessions noted that it would be politically stupid of Trump to denigrate Southerners since they hugely helped elect the president in 2016. "Well, I’m sure I’ve got that accent, wouldn’t you think?... I guess the president-- he says what he thinks... I think the president’s probably got a lot of respect for the South. I hope so. He did well there. Without the South, he wouldn’t be the president of the United States... "I think that’s strong words. I think Sessions is a very smart man and a man of integrity. I would disagree with the president on that."

Trump has been on Twitter calling attention to Woodward's book-- likely making it a best seller-- and defending himself in ways that it will be hard to believe by anyone who isn't already brainwashed by his cult of personality.

But Republican incumbents and and open red seat candidates in the South didn't need this new bullshit from Trump. Barbara Comstock (R-VA), Andy Barr (R-KY), Mark Harris (R-NC), John Culberson (R-TX), French Hill (R-AR), Maria Salazar (R-FL), Will Hurd (R-TX), Karen Handel (R-GA), Denver Riggelman (R-VA), Carol Miller (R-WV), Pete Sessions (R-TX), Scott Taylor (R-VA), Carlos Curbelo (R-FL) and Dave Brat (R-VA) are all in tough districts and none them can afford to lose a couple of points based on Trump being perceived as being a snob against the South. If a percentage point or two is shaved off anyone's totals because people who take offense stay home, these candidates will be even more certain to be defeated in November.

Señor Trumpanzee Finally Gets His Witch Hunt

The most dysfunctional and chaotic regime in American history is now breaking down entirely, as Trump sets employees against one another, like some Orwellian nightmare. They are scouring Bob Woodward's new book, Fear, line by line to see if they can identify anyone who has been disloyal to the would-be Führer. Speaking of which, in 1934 there was no going back for Germany when Hitler changed the Reichswehreid, the military pledge , to the Führereid. The original:

I swear loyalty to the Reich's constitution and pledge, that I as a courageous soldier always want to protect the German Reich and its legal institutions, (and) be obedient to the Reichspräsident and to my superiors.

The shiny new authoritarian version:

I swear by God this holy oath, that I want to offer unconditional obedience to the Führer of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler, the commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht, and be prepared as a brave soldier to risk my life for this oath at any time.

Trump is going batshitcrazy over the Woodward book and is lashing out in every direction. CNN reported that "he's privately on a mission to determine who did-- and didn't-- talk to Woodward." Who's going to stop him? Lindsey Graham? Chuck Grassley? Ben Sasse? I wouldn't count on it.

Two officials who have spoken directly to the President say he is pleased with the denials offered by chief of staff John Kelly and Defense Secretary James Mattis.

In Trump's eyes, what makes or breaks aides who are reported to have made disparaging comments about him is how strongly they push back on the accusations.

But he is also taking note of the silence from several other former administration officials.



"He wants to know who talked to Woodward," one of the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity amid the highly tense atmosphere in the West Wing in the wake of the book.

The search for leakers inside the administration contrasts with the White House's defense that the book was fueled by "disgruntled employees," offered by press secretary Sarah Sanders and others.

One source close to the White House said people inside the administration are "frustrated because they know it's true."

Trump has talked openly with allies about his suspicion that former national security adviser H.R. McMaster cooperated, suggesting that McMaster likely turned over his notes to Woodward. The President has aired a similar belief about Gary Cohn, the former chief economic adviser.

Both men, of course, play key roles in the book.

The President is directing the response strategy personally, officials say, in consultation with top communications official Bill Shine and other aides. At this point, it seems unlikely that anyone is immediately fired because of the book, one official says, because that would "lend credence to a book he is trying to discredit."

...[T]he White House's emerging strategy to push back against Woodward's reporting seems to be going after those former officials suspected of sharing documents and stories, according to several people familiar with the game plan.

"You don't discredit Bob Woodward. You discredit the motives of the people" who provided the information, one person said.

Evidently caught off guard by the level of detail in the book, White House officials were soliciting advice from allies on how to respond to the book as recently as this weekend, a person familiar with those conversations said. One Republican who Trump doesn't think of as an ally-- although he votes for all Trump's crap, is Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse. He was on the Hugh Hewitt Show today: "The drama of this op-ed, the drama of the Woodward book, the drama of the Omarosa tapes, the drama of Cohen, the drama of Manifort, the drama of just the three-ring circus that is the White House almost every day, I think that it exhausts the American people. And I know that the founders would regard anything like this as you know, really unhelpful. You don’t run the country as a soap opera."

White House Push-Back Against Woodward's Book Is... Pretty Anemic

The Diplomat by Nancy Ohanian

You may have noticed that yesterday, Bob Woodward's book leaked and some of Trump's top aides made some very disparaging remarks about his stupidity and his character that make him sound as unfit for any office as many of us suspected all along.

Although many of the people Woodward interviewed, like Gary Cohn, Reince Priebus, Rob Porter, John Dowd, Steve Bannon, have jumped ship-- or were pushed overboard-- Chief of Staff Bill Kelly, John Kelly and others are still hanging around the White House, although probably not for long. Woodward was quoted as saying that Trump was "unhinged" and that "he's an idiot. It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in Crazytown. I don’t even know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I’ve ever had."

At a National Security Council meeting on Jan. 19, Trump disregarded the significance of the massive U.S. military presence on the Korean Peninsula, including a special intelligence operation that allows the United States to detect a North Korean missile launch in seven seconds vs. 15 minutes from Alaska, according to Woodward. Trump questioned why the government was spending resources in the region at all.

“We’re doing this in order to prevent World War III,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told him.

After Trump left the meeting, Woodward recounts, “Mattis was particularly exasperated and alarmed, telling close associates that the president acted like-- and had the understanding of-- ‘a fifth- or sixth-grader.’”

Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal p.r. man, scurried over to CNBC and told them "That’s the kind of disloyalty that leads to you leaving, not staying and undermining the president." He said the leakers "should be questioning why they are there” and said they should "get another job." Too late to fire Gary Cohn who was worried about Trump's judgment, reported the NY Times and took a letter from Trump's desk authorizing the withdrawal of the U.S. from a trade agreement with South Korea, according to Bob Woodward's new book. Cohn told an associate that Trump never realized it was missing." We're still in the trade deal.

Moments later, Huckabee's daughter tried to sound authoritative, saying "This book is nothing more than fabricated stories, many by former disgruntled employees, told to make the President look bad." Well, if that was their motivation, they certainly succeeded-- spectacularly.

Jonathan Chait had a somewhat different take than Sarah and Rudy: Everybody in the White House Considers Trump an Idiot. He refers to the book as "tales from the court of the mad king." A case could be made-- and Trump makes it-- that everyone in the U.S. except the Southerners he disparages as "dumb hicks," considers Trump and idiot, not just the people working for him.

Woodward confirms that Trump’s former secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, described him as a “fucking moron,” a fact that has been reported previously. He adds several more officials to the list of people who have blurted out this obvious conclusion.

...Jay Sekulow, tried to argue to Robert Mueller that Trump could not be asked to give an interview because he is a compulsive liar. They literally explained to Mueller how they conducted a mock interview with Trump, and he was so unable to tell the truth that they considered him mentally disqualified from testifying:

Jay Sekulow went to Mueller’s office and re-enacted the mock interview. Their goal: to argue that Trump couldn’t possibly testify because he was incapable of telling the truth.

  “He just made something up. That’s his nature,” Dowd said to Mueller.

It seems somehow unfair to let somebody remain on the job as president because he’s such a compulsive liar he can”t be allowed to testify under oath.

...However dumb and crazy you might think Trump is, the reality always turns out to be even worse.

Bizarrely, Trump didn't tweet about Woodward's book yesterday, at least not 'til the evening, when his self-control dissipated-- and not 'til he got written statements from some of his team. (I wonder who actually wrote the statements.) But that was  probably because, in his reptilian little mind, he didn't want to turn him into another Omarosa. Too late, Señor T; Bob Woodward is already more famous than that-- and way, way more credible (than either of you).