Will Trump Be The American Duterte?

DWT isn't the only news source which has noted the scary similarities between Trump and Filipino authoritarian crackpot Rodrigo Duterte. This week Adrian Chen fleshed out the claims-- and fears-- for New Yorker readers: When A Populist Demagogue Takes Power. He's using a war against drugs to have anyone he wants killed with impunity-- over 3,000 since he took office in May.

A foul-mouthed, homophobic bully and compulsive liar, Duterte paints himself as a rebel opposing the Philippines' entrenched elites, who he has termed "feudal." Like Trump, he keeps promising to behave more presidentially. and sometimes he does-- for a few days.

Duterte does not, as he has put it, “give a shit” about human rights, which he sees as a Western obsession that keeps the Philippines from taking the action necessary to clean up the country. He is also hypersensitive to criticism. “Duterte’s weakness is, really, he’s a tough guy,” Greco Belgica, a Filipino politician and an ally of Duterte’s, said. “You do not talk down to a tough guy. He’ll snap.”

...Duterte thinks out loud, in long, rambling monologues, laced with inscrutable jokes and wild exaggeration. His manner is central to his populist image, but it inevitably leads to misunderstanding, even among Filipino journalists. Ernie Abella, Duterte’s spokesman, recently pleaded with the Presidential press corps to use its “creative imagination” when interpreting Duterte’s comments.

...What began as a reaction to a personal slight has led to a dramatic shift in foreign relations. Duterte has increasingly, if fitfully, signalled his intention to distance himself from the United States, the Philippines’ closest ally, in favor of China, which previous governments have viewed warily. In September, he called for the withdrawal of a contingent of U.S. military advisers and for the end of annual joint combat exercises between the two nations. (Last week, he approved limited exercises.) During a state visit to Beijing in October, he announced a “separation” from the United States. “America has lost now,” he told a group of Chinese businessmen. “I’ve realigned myself in your ideological flow. And maybe I will also go to Russia to talk to Putin and tell him that there are three of us against the world: China, Philippines, and Russia.”

As Erwin Romulo, a former editor of Esquire Philippines, told me, “There are no slow news days anymore in the Philippines.”

Duterte has an eighty-six-per-cent approval rating in the Philippines, but his break with America has proved controversial. Opinion surveys regularly find the Philippines to be among the most pro-American countries. The language of instruction in schools is English, and basketball is a national obsession. Around four million Filipinos live and work in the U.S., and the country is one of the Philippines’ most important trading partners. American interests have typically made up a large proportion of foreign investment in the Philippines. In the Manila Standard, the widely respected former President Fidel Ramos compared Duterte to the captain of a sinking ship. Even many on the Philippine left, who decry U.S. influence, worry that Duterte may be trading one imperial master for another.

Duterte’s pivot to China is a rebuke to the Obama Administration’s foreign-policy shift away from the Middle East and toward Asia. But a senior State Department official said that he thought the talk of a complete realignment with China was largely bluster. “The issue is not so much what he says—the issue is what he does,” the official said. He pointed out that the U.S. and the Philippines are so deeply entwined that it would take longer than one Presidential term to unravel their ties. “That said, if he’s absolutely determined, he could do a lot of damage to the U.S.-Philippine relationship.”

Since the overthrow of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, in 1986, the Philippines has been a democracy, if an often dysfunctional one. Duterte’s actions challenge the liberal Western values that are enshrined in the Philippine constitution. Although he styles himself a revolutionary, Duterte seems uncertain about what kind of order will replace the one he aims to overthrow, or whether he will be around to see it. He often intimates that he may not live to finish his term, whether because of overwork and age-- he is seventy-one-- or something more sinister. “Will I survive the six years?” he asked recently. “I’d make a prediction: maybe not.”

...Duterte's campaign had a rocky start. In a speech announcing his candidacy, he rambled on for more than an hour, offering an account of personally killing kidnappers and setting their car on fire, pledging to kill “up to a hundred thousand criminals” when elected, and boasting of his womanizing. “If I can love a hundred million and one, I can love four women at the same time,” he said.

Duterte’s language confirmed his image as a political outsider. “It was something people could relate to,” Pia Ranada, a reporter at the news Web site Rappler, told me. She said that Duterte came across as “the father who would protect you but also the masa leader, the populist leader who will look after your interests, who cares for you because he’s one of you.”

On the campaign trail, Duterte typically wore a plaid shirt and jeans. On the rare occasions when he wore a barong, a formal embroidered shirt, he rolled up the sleeves. He spoke not in the English-Tagalog mixture of the capital but in a creole of English, Tagalog, and Bisaya known as Davao Tagalog. At the beginning of the campaign, he ushered Ranada and another journalist into his house in Davao and showed off the traditional tabò, or water dipper, that he used to bathe. His one extravagance was a large collection of shoes, which he joked was the only thing that he had in common with Imelda Marcos.

This was not quite true. Duterte took from the Marcos years an ability to play both sides of a messy conflict. Marcos, who died in 1989, in Honolulu, is still surprisingly popular in the Philippines; most of his loyalists never lost faith, and many younger Filipinos look back at the charismatic leader with a kind of secondhand nostalgia. During the campaign, Duterte courted Marcos loyalists assiduously, making it a priority to rebury Marcos in the national Heroes Cemetery. He reportedly considered Marcos’s son, a fifty-nine-year-old senator named Ferdinand (Bongbong) Marcos, Jr., as a running mate, and he praised the elder Marcos, saying that he would have been the Philippines’ best President, “if he did not become a dictator.”



Nicole Curato, a sociologist at the University of Canberra, was doing field work in the slums of Tacloban, a provincial capital in the central Philippines, and saw the excitement inspired by Duterte’s candidacy. “It was a very do-it-yourself campaign,” she said. To attract crowds to rallies, politicians typically rely on a strategy known as hakot, in which poor Filipinos are given a free meal, a couple of hundred pesos, and a campaign shirt, and are bused from the slums to the city plaza, where they cheer for the chosen candidate. But Curato said that Duterte’s supporters borrowed money to get to the plaza themselves. Duterte is perpetually late, which meant that supporters might be kept waiting in the sweltering heat for as long as seven hours. Yet it seemed not to bother them. “People were really crazy about him,” Ranada told me. “It’s the only word for it.”

Duterte relied on an army of volunteers to publicize his campaign on social media. The Philippines has among the highest rates of social-media use in the world, in large part because millions of Filipinos employed abroad use it to keep in touch with their families. Overseas workers were a crucial segment of Duterte’s supporters. Since they were spread out all over the world, they could post pro-Duterte messages on Facebook at all hours. One of Duterte’s most rabid supporters was a pop star and sex blogger named Mocha Uson, the leader of a girl group called the Mocha Girls. When Duterte was accused of sexism, she posted on Facebook an account of how, when the Mocha Girls came to Davao, he was always a gentleman, unlike most mayors, who tried to arrange liaisons with them.

Duterte won in a landslide, earning six million more votes than Mar Roxas. Many people saw his victory as a protest against the political élite’s continuing inability to address the country’s problems. Duterte’s predecessor, the reformist Benigno Aquino III, had some success addressing corruption and introduced some economic reforms, but Filipinos saw little change in their lives: they still endured hellish commutes on crumbling roads; they continued to be victimized by crime, corrupt police, and a broken justice system; and about a quarter of them still lived in poverty. If these were the fruits of liberal democracy, many thought, perhaps it was time to try something new. “It’s a repudiation of the past six years of a regime that claims to be after good governance, participatory democracy, but really it doesn’t deliver the goods,” Curato said.

In June, Duterte held a victory party at the Davao City Crocodile Park. In a speech in front of two hundred thousand supporters, he received the loudest applause when he addressed drug dealers. “You sons of bitches,” he said. “I will really kill you.”

During Duterte’s first hundred days in office, the drug war was carried out with a distinctly Filipino mixture of high drama, mass spectacle, and enigmatic violence. In early August, in a speech at a naval base, Duterte read out a list of more than a hundred and fifty politicians and police officers who he alleged were involved in the illegal drug trade, the first of a number of “narcolists” that he released in the following months. It was a tactic from his days as mayor, when he went on his weekly television show, Gikan Sa Masa, Para Sa Masa, and read lists of names of alleged criminals and drug dealers, many of whom ended up as victims of the D.D.S.

In Duterte’s first three months as President, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, which has been monitoring the killings, listed more than fourteen hundred drug users killed by police and vigilantes. Front pages were filled with photos of the bloodstained victims, bound and gagged with duct tape, who had been shot in the head or garrotted; cardboard signs around their necks served as a warning to others. In the slums of the big cities, police carried out Operation Tokhang, or “knock and plead,” visiting the homes of people who were suspected of involvement with drugs and urging them to turn themselves in. Government reports boasted that seven hundred thousand “drug personalities” surrendered in the first two months in mass ceremonies in malls, city plazas, and auditoriums. An administration official told me that the Guinness Book of World Records expressed interest in certifying it as the biggest mass surrender of criminals in history.

From Davao, Duterte brought with him Ronald (the Rock) dela Rosa, who had served as the city’s police chief, and made him head of the Philippine National Police. The federal police are notorious for corruption, and Duterte has promised to clean up the force, calling out “ninja” cops who resell drugs confiscated in busts. But he dismissed those killed by police as “drug-crazed” maniacs who had resisted arrest, and claimed that murders attributed to the vigilantes were the result of gang wars. In August, Dela Rosa announced that the campaign had already cut the crime rate in half. The killings have done little to diminish Duterte’s popularity. “It’s part of this narrative that killing has been normalized,” Curato, the sociologist, told me. “Before, it’s the state that turns a blind eye on it, and now a broader society is also willing to just turn a blind eye on the culture of violence.” Extrajudicial killing is common enough that there’s a slang term for it: “salvaging,” which, according to the writer Jose F. Lacuna, derives from the Tagalog salbahe, meaning “wild” or “savage.”

Not long after Duterte took office, the Philippine Commission on Human Rights started a task force to investigate the extrajudicial killings. Chito Gascon, the head of the C.H.R., has warned Duterte that he risks prosecution by the International Criminal Court if he fails to halt them. In September, I met with the leader of the task force, Gwen Pimentel-Gana, at her office. Above her desk hangs a portrait of her father, Aquilino Pimentel, Jr., a Senator who was imprisoned by the Marcos regime.

Pimentel-Gana told me that in the first sixty days of the Duterte administration the commission opened more than two hundred investigations into extrajudicial killings, slightly less than half as many as were opened during the entire six years of the Aquino administration. “We now will have to tell the government,” she said, “in your fight against crime or in your fight against drugs, do not forget that lives of people are sacred.”

When I asked her whether Duterte’s rhetoric was encouraging the killings, she was equivocal: “It’s so difficult sometimes to try to interpret what he’s saying, because one time he says, ‘I’m not for human rights.’ The next time he says, ‘All those who are abusing their authority will be punished.’ ” I asked her about the difference between her tone and that of Human Rights Watch, which has declared the drug war a “human-rights calamity.” She replied brusquely. “I will talk like a Filipino, O.K.?” she said. “An ordinary worker—he goes home every night and, for the first time, when he passes through the narrow streets of his home in a shanty or what, he does not see any more drunkards or people smoking on the streets or children running around and being just left there, abandoned. He sees clean streets, peaceful at night. What would you say?”

Yet an overwhelming number of those killed in Duterte’s drug war have been poor. When asked recently about criticism from anti-poverty groups, Duterte explained that poor people are easier targets. Rich people do drugs on private jets, and “I cannot afford the fighter planes,” he said. Jose Manuel Diokno, a human-rights lawyer, told me, “Those who have a name or have some influence or hold some position who are implicated in the drug trade are given an investigation, they’re given due process. But poorer people whose names appear on the list are just simply killed.” Diokno is the dean of the law school at De La Salle University, in Manila, and the head of the Free Legal Assistance Group, founded by his father during the Marcos era to provide legal assistance to victims of martial law; his father was an opposition senator who was imprisoned for two years without charge.

We spoke on the forty-fourth anniversary of the declaration of martial law. Diokno was preparing to lead a candlelight vigil that evening. He said of that period, “A small segment of the population were branded as Communists. They were depicted as people who are godless, who have no regard for human life. The reasoning then was, since they are like that, then they are not human.” He continued, “Instead of being branded a Communist today, you’re branded a drug user or a drug addict or a drug pusher.”

As you probably already know, Duterte hates Obama. Not so, Trump. He says he can get along just fine with the President-elect. After all, they have an awful lot in common. And Duterte is giddy that Trump isn't going to be lecturing any other authoritarians about human rights. As for deporting Flipinos in the U.S.-- whose remittances account for 3% of his country's GDP-- Duterte seems to think Trump will be fair-minded about how he does that. Tuesday he told reporters that Trump's win was "a well-deserved victory... I trust in his judgment that he would be fair in the matter of the treatment of illegal immigrants. I cannot talk for the illegals because, whether President Trump or anybody else for that matter, an illegal is always an illegal.

Duterte’s volatility and willingness to castigate anyone he disagrees with earned him the nickname “Trump of the East” when he was campaigning as the alternative candidate in a presidential election he won in May by a big margin.

His warm words for Trump contrasts starkly with the abuse he poured on incumbent Barack Obama, who he told repeatedly to “go to hell” and called a “son of a bitch” for daring to voice concern about the death toll in Duterte’s drugs war.

Wanna watch some real stupid? Take a look-- you'll be seeing years of this kind of clueless crap:

2017 In Review, A Hell Bound Train Of A Year (Part 9) Donald Trump: The Mind Planet Of A Completely Bonkers President

-by Noah

The above clip, from The President Show, is satire, but the best satire has much more than a grain of truth to it. As you begin to watch it, it’s all too real. Such are the words and behavior of the 45th president of the United States. He lives in his own world, his own reality, and he’s dragging us down with it.

History is filled with examples of lunatic heads of state. Shrinks are still trying to get into the minds of people like Caligula, Nero, Henry the 8th, George the 3rd, and far more recent and even more horrid examples of humanity who made it to a position great power where they created massive mayhem and pain. The mind of Donald Trump appears to be no different.

Let’s start with this:

Trumpian Deductive Reasoning:

Comey is a liar.
Comey’s testimony “completely vindicated me.”
Therefore, it takes a liar and lies to vindicate Trump.

Right there, in those three lines, you see a creature that lacks the ability to reason his way, step by step, through life. The brain synapses are in a state of severe malfunction. Imagine if Trump was the president during the Civil War instead of Lincoln. Imagine a President Trump in the 1930s deciding that the best way to help Americans was to just hand out tax cuts to the wealthy, or suppose he was president in 1940 as WWII approached. Who would he have sided with? We are now in another era that is extremely dangerous to the future of the United States, and we have the severely mentally ill Don the Con sitting in the Oval Office, surrounded by sycophant staffers and congressional accomplices.

Trump’s mental illness is not just about his narcisism of a bigly scale. It is also the type of derangement that leads him to defend Nazis, endorse a credibly accused pedophile, appoint cabinet officials and give them the job of dismantling their department to the great harm of the country’s citizens, re-tweet Al Qaeda propaganda videos, demonstrate his envy of brutal dictators like Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines and Vladimir Putin of Russia, and fight to take away health care from millions in this country. Trump is a villain of comic book and horror movie proportions. The problem is that he is real and he’s destroying the United States Of America better and faster than Russia and China could have ever hoped for. Even worse, he has the help of the whole Republican Party and a tail-dragging media. The planet Trump; or at least his mind, lives on is not the same one as you or I.

All politicians have a bit of narcissism in them. It takes a touch of that to stand before a crowd, think you deserve to be elected, and to yell out “Vote. For. ME."

But, Trump has taken this to a whole new world. He has taken it so far that he has broken all barriers to the world of the insane. The following comes from the American Psychiatric Association “Official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders:

Narcissistic Personality Disorder/DSM-IV TR Diagnostic Criteria

Pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, lack of empathy; beginning in adulthood, indicated by five or more of the following:

1. Grandiose sense of self-imporatance
2. Fantasies of unlimited success, power, beauty, etc.
3. Believes he/she is “special”
4. Requires excessive admiration
5. Has a sense of entitlement
6. Is interpersonally exploitative
7. Lacks empathy
8. Is often envious, or believes that others are envious of him
9. Shows arrogant behaviors or attitudes

Trump scores a perfect 9. We can all fill in the examples from what we see and hear of him every day. Forget the minimum of 5 of 9. Here is something where Trump actually does get the top grade. And, by the way, the cause of Trump’s insanity doesn’t matter. Dementia? Syphilis? Brain damage. A bad father? All that matters is what is.

One of many things that bother me about Trump and his supporters is that all of us, regardless of where we are on the political spectrum, can easily recognize that North Korea’s Kim Jong-un is insane but the Republican half of America refuses to see the obvious fact that Trump is not far from North Korea’s Kim Jong-un when it comes to “the crazy.” In North Korea, Kim Jong-un demands praise from his people. Trump follows suit right here. I’ve said it here before. They are like brothers from another mother. If, as normal people do, we accept that Kim Jong-un is stark raving bonkers, why wouldn’t we admit that our own president is as well? It’s plain as day.

As I write this (Tuesday night) reports have just come in that Kim Jong-un warned that he has nukes that can reach some of our territories and a button to control them always at the ready on his desk. Trump, a man every bit as out of control, insanely took the bait and responded that his button is bigger. Have at it shrinks! When is a button more than a button?

Insecure? You bet. Massivly insecure. Think about it. Trump has his cabinet brown-nose him on live TV. When his cult-like Republican Party passed his tax scam just a few weeks ago, he held another get together just so lowlifes and fellow psychotics like Paul Ryan and his congressional accomplices could verbally fellate him in the Rose Garden on live TV. This is crazy banana republic dictator stuff. All of this adds up to a derangement that equals clinical insanity. Ask yourself how off the grid psychotic do you have to be to celebrate steeling money from 98 percent of America while fellow Americans in Puerto Rico are dying from lack of medical attention and clean water and power.



There’s a lot more to the Kim Jong-un-Donald Trump comparison. For instance both Trump and Kim Jong-un love golf. We all know how much time Trump spends golfing. He claims to have made a hole-in-one and won many championships. We’ve also heard how much he cheats to improve his score.



Not to be outdone, Kim Jong-Un has his minions spin tales of his golf exploits, including a record 5 holes in one in his very first game of golf, never mind that the true greatest golfers in the world are lucky to have one in their entire career. North Korea’s madman also had his state news organization report that North Korea had won Soccer’s 2014 World Cup! Trump has his version. It’s called FOX “News.”

Think Trump isn’t as bad? Do you think Trump can’t top that World Cup claim? How about his claim that he is responsible for the lack of any fatal commercial aircraft disasters in 2017? Well, check this out. It’s his tweet (one of them) from this morning:

Since taking office I have been very strict on Commercial Aviation. Good news-- it was just reported that there were Zero Deaths in 2017, the best and safest year on record!

That’s worldwide and he has nothing to do with flights outside the U.S. even if he could credibly claim that he had anything to do with the happy news here. Besides, one of the first things he did when he moved into the White House was to ease regulations on the airline industry, so, if anything, he was lucky, as are we all if we flew this past year.

Trump likes to give himself other trophies. Some come in the form of fake Time Magazine covers on the walls of at least four of his golf clubs. One “trophy” in particular is a faked up cover of TIME Magazine, complete with the headline claim that his TV show, The Apprentice is a “television smash” and, “Trump Is Hitting On All Fronts… Even TV!” Says Time spokesperson Kerri Chyka:

I can confirm that this is not a real TIME cover.

Apparently, the TIME cover, dated March 1, 2009, is only real in the sick mind of President Trump, or, perhaps, it’s all, just as the equally insane Kellyanne Conway would say, “alternative facts”. And, when it comes to TIME, the fake cover is not the only story. It is reported that in his own mind, Trump thinks he has been the TIME cover boy more than Richard Nixon not on the real Earth, of course, just on the one his mind lives in. Trump has almost 50 more appearances to go. Trump might get there. The fact that Nixon was forced to resign led to a lot of those covers. Even Hillary Clinton has graced the cover about 3 times as often. I be that irritates Trump bigly. The faux magazine cover was just another example of his addiction to praise and worship as if he were some fake god that rules a mythical jungle culture. His cultist followers love it. Sane people are getting wise to it.

Señor Trumpanzee is no stranger to the promulgation of fake news. During the 2016 Republican primary, he famously accused the father of Texas Senator Rafael “Ted” Cruz of being involved in the assassination of JFK in 1963. Then there’s also that thing about the inauguration attendance, and so much more. It’s a non-stop tsunami of crazy.

One wonders what other magazine covers Trump will soon be displaying. How about a copy of Sports Illustrated with Trump as the hero quarterback of the 2014 Super Bowl Champion New York Jets after he threw an NFL record 8 touchdown passes in the game. Oh, wait, the Jets haven’t been to the Super Bowl since 1969. The Jets are desperate for a quarterback, though. I’d love to see Trump in there, on the field, as the best, fastest, and strongest defensive ends and linebackers rushed at him, ready to slam his ugly puss into the mud.

Trump’s real brush with pro-football? He owned the failed New Jersey Generals of the extinct United States Football League. His bonkers stewardship of the Generals was instrumental in the failure of the entire league.

Trump thinks things like fake magazine covers and the cloying, pathetic, and obsequious praise of his cult of mental midgets like Paul Ryan and Mike Pence say how great he is but one thing they say for sure is that he is the real king of fake news. He misses the irony, of course.

I don’t even have to get into Trump’s pathological lying that his sick followers lap up like honey from the gods. We see them with virtually every tweet and every pronouncement. The list is so long that newspapers see fit to publish it. The psychotic grandiosity of it all is Trump’s taking of the Josef Goebbels “Big Lie” theory to a max that might even scare Goebbels himself.

All of Trump’s personality amounts to the actions and ravings of a madman. As Larry Wolfe’s recently released book makes clear, all of those rumors about Trump screaming and ranting around the White House are true. Reportedly, even White House staffers are bothered by his lack of both intelligence and sanity. Apparently, though, they aren’t bothered enough about Trump’s mental condition to do anything to save this country and possibly the world. His entire Republican Party is being even worse as they move to obstruct justice and pervert the Constitution and our laws.

I’m not here to officially diagnose Donald Trump. What I’m writing is what I, like you, can see: the obvious. Psychiatry is not my field but it’s safe to say that any reasonably stable and intelligent person knows a crazy person when they see one. I have enough experience with the mentally ill to know that, if you are in the room with a crazy person, they don’t have to say a word. You will know. It doesn’t even take a sixth sense. Given that, the people who deal with Trump up close and personal every day, have zero excuse for not going public just as Congress has zero excuse for not invoking the 25th amendment or calling for impeachment. Sadly, they have decided to throw their country away in the service of their wallets. What will happen the day, Senor Trumpanzee hands them all little cups of hemlock , cyanide-laced grape juice, or Drano?

To me, it’s impossible not to watch Trump speak for 2 minutes and not know what I’m looking at. That has nothing at all to do with his positions, his racism or whatever. One could agree with him on every issue and still see the obvious insanity that should have automatically, disqualified him from any public office while also qualifying him for removal from free society and placement in a facility for the deranged.

That said, why don’t I leave it to the professionals. Here is a November 30th letter from forensic psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X. Lee of the Yale School of Medicine to the New York Times:

To the editor:

I am the editor of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. We represent a much larger number of concerned mental health professionals who have come forward to warn against the president’s psychological instability and the dangers it poses. We number in the thousands.

We are currently witnessing more than his usual state of instability-- in fact, a pattern of decompensation: increasing loss of touch with reality, marked signs of volatility and unpredictable behavior, and an attraction to violence as a means of coping. These characteristics place our country and the world at extreme risk of danger.

Ordinarily, we carry out a routine process for treating people who are dangerous: containment, removal from access to weapons and an urgent evaluation. We have been unable to do so because of Mr. Trump’s status as president. But the power of the presidency and the type of arsenal he has access to should raise greater alarm, not less.

We urge the public and the lawmakers of this country to push for an urgent evaluationof the president, for which we are in the process of developing a separate but independent expert panel, capable of meeting and carrying out all medical standards of care.

When I first read the above letter, I was struck by how it covered so much of what I already felt. However, I am also struck by how reserved it is. Sure it deals with Trump’s potential for extreme violence by dancing around the idea that he has, as he himself would say, the “big button.” It also covers Trump’s being out of touch with reality.

What Bandy X. Lee’s letter doesn’t mention is Trump’s obvious incapability of anything reassembling empathy. I really hope this man never had any pets as a child. As for his treatment of American citizens, his psychosis is there for all to see, whether it’s in his overt racism, his hate for the environment, his hate for education; the later two exemplified by his cabinet appointments, the former in his words and policy preferences and the white nationalists he surrounds himself with. Then there’s his general total disregard for anyone who isn’t extremely wealthy, especially so extremely wealthy that they have no reason other than morality or patriotism to be loyal to their fellow Americans. This is clearly exemplified by his tax scam and his antipathy towards health care.

Back in December, Dr. Lee was asked to come to Washington to brief a dozen members of Congress. Incredibly, one was even a republican, although I think it’s safe to say that that republican was just attending in order to be a set of eyes and ears. Dr. Lee would not reveal the names of those who attended, but, her professional warning was clear

He’s going to unravel, and we are seeing the signs.

She added that

Trump is going back to conspiracy theories, denying things he has said before, his being drawn to violent videos… We feel that the rush of tweeting is an indication of his falling apart under stress. Trump is going to get worse and will become uncontainable with the pressures of the presidency.

It’s time to forget impeachment. The sands of the hourglass have run out. We can always learn the details of the treachery of Trump and his party and we must. It’s more important right now that he be gone or we will all be gone, as a country, maybe as much more. As Dr. Lee indicates, the tweets alone reveal that Trump is so mentally unstable that the 25th amendment should be invoked within the hour. Once Robert Mueller comes forward with his complete report, we should lock Trump up along with his entire family and all of his criminal accomplices in Congress: not that that would ever happen, but, if it doesn’t it will set a horrific precedent and, sooner are later, the country and the world will pay when the next lunatic comes along and takes over the Oval Office.

Trump Lost-- Biden Will Be A Better President Than He Was

 

On election day, reporting for NPR, Yara Bayoumy wrote about the authoritarian and fascist leaders around the world-- from Netanyahu and Viktor Orbán to Putin and Bolsonaro-- who preferred Trump and now have to contend with Biden, a typical dues-paying member of the military industrial complex. Besides Trump's "various torn-up international accords, the retreat of traditional American leadership from the global stage and the cementing of the 'America First' doctrine," he wrote, "there has been perhaps no more glaring consequence of Trump's tenure than his embrace of strongmen who largely eschewed the Western-based human rights and rules of law agenda. By figuring out relatively early how to win favor with Trump, these leaders often leveraged their close relationship with him to cement their own power at home. Some borrowed his rhetoric such as decrying 'fake news' to crack down on dissent, some appealed to his sense of pomp by throwing lavish ceremonies and others adopted his brazenly transactional approach to geopolitical dealmaking." Bayoumy forgot to mention the widespread belief that many of these-- and other-- foreign leaders were bribing Trump and his family personally.

Writing before Biden had won, Bayoumy wrote that "None of these Trump 'bromances,' whether forged for pragmatic or ideological reasons, are likely to continue with the same fervor with Biden. The 77-year-old former vice president, who has made clear his distaste for Trump's embrace of strongmen, is nevertheless the product of a traditional Democratic establishment that has also tolerated unsavory rulers in the name of preserving U.S. strategic interests. Still, if Biden wins, we can expect he'll seek to bring human rights and the rule of law as important pillars of U.S. foreign policy.

Putin

As candidate, Trump made clear his admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin. And throughout his presidency-- the Robert Mueller investigation and the ongoing Russian attempts to interfere with the election notwithstanding-- Trump has mostly refrained from severely criticizing Putin.

..."I think the very fact that Biden was Obama's vice president already makes him not a friendly figure in Russia," says Moscow-based political analyst Masha Lipman. Biden, who repeatedly highlights the importance of preserving NATO, is likely to adopt a tougher line against Russia.

The only thing that helps the Kremlin, Lipman says, is more polarization and turmoil in the United States. "Turmoil means the United States [is] weakened," she says. "This is what the Kremlin can actually benefit from, not an improvement in relations."

Xi

On the campaign trail and throughout his presidency, Trump has railed against China but has also voiced admiration for Chinese leader Xi Jinping as he tried to secure trade deals beneficial to the United States. Who could forget his January tweet praising Xi over his handling of the novel coronavirus? As the virus ravaged the West, Trump changed course, using China as a punching bag and saying his relationship with Xi has since frayed. Putting aside the leaders' relationship, the two countries are probably experiencing the worst ties in years. The Trump administration has sanctioned Chinese officials, targeted Chinese tech companies, arrested alleged Chinese spies and regularly challenges the country's claims in the South China Sea.

Biden regularly touts the tough line he took as vice president against Xi. Biden says he would force China to "play by the international rules." He frames the issue as bringing together democracies to counter "abusive economic practices." Tony Blinken, the Democrat's top foreign policy adviser, told NPR that Biden would focus on "our competitiveness, on revitalizing our democracy, on strengthening our alliances and partnerships, on reasserting our values. That's how you engage China from a position of strength." China, for its part, sees the U.S. as a declining power. In its recently revealed five-year plan, Beijing signaled it expects more American-led tariffs on its exports and more sanctions on its tech firms but that it's also confident to meet those challenges.

Netanyahu

The Israeli prime minister is one of Trump's closest allies. Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moved the U.S. Embassy there-- even though Palestinians seek part of the city for their future capital. He recognized Israeli claims to sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Netanyahu has touted his friendship with Trump in his campaigns. Trump has tweeted his support for Netanyahu and hosted him at the White House. Just a week ago, the Trump administration lifted a ban on U.S. taxpayer funding for Israeli scientific research carried out in Jewish settlements in Israeli-occupied territory. Netanyahu says, "Israel has never had a better friend."

Danny Danon, who most recently served as Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, says Biden would also be "good with Israel." Nevertheless, Biden was vice president during Obama and Netanyahu's famously frosty relationship, and it's hard to see the two leaders sharing as close a relationship as Trump and Netanyahu.

Mitchell Barak, a pollster in Jerusalem, says that a Biden administration would probably want to take a more evenhanded approach with Israel. Under Trump, ties with the Palestinian leadership broke down. "They're going to start to try and make it a little more evenhanded or to look more evenhanded. And the free lunches that we've been getting up until now-- we're going to have to pay for some of those things," Barak says. "And then Netanyahu does not have the advantage because it's going to be more of an antagonistic relationship."

Modi

The two leaders have had each other's backs even as they've both faced criticism for discriminating against minorities. When he was pressed to question Prime Minister Narendra Modi about anti-Muslim riots in India, Trump gave him a pass. "And I will say that the prime minister was incredible on what he told me. He wants people to have religious freedom," Trump said during his visit to India earlier this year.

A Biden-Harris administration is likely to voice stronger rhetoric on Modi's record on human rights, the environment and Kashmir. Still, India is seen as an important counterweight to China in the region, and Biden will not want to upset that.

"Since the George W. Bush administration, the United States has recognized India's potential as a natural balancer to China. It's been a proponent of the U.S.-India relationship due to India's strategic location, its potential as a market," says Akriti Vasudeva at the Stimson Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador

When he launched his campaign for president in 2015, Trump vilified Mexicans: "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." He also repeatedly threatened tariffs on Mexican exports. But over the years, and especially as he worked to secure the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, Trump and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador's relationship has grown closer. Critics of López Obrador say that he caved in to Trump by adopting harsher policies toward Central American migrants. But analysts say the Mexican leader didn't have much choice, particularly as he faced Trump's threats of tariffs and forcing Mexico to pay for a border wall.

...Every president since Franklin Roosevelt has visited Mexico-- except for Trump. In fact, Biden even visited then-candidate López Obrador in 2012. Biden made more trips just to Guatemala in his two terms as vice president than Trump has made to all of Latin America as president, and would likely look to work with López Obrador on immigration. As vice president, he promoted aid to Central American countries and pressured their leaders to curb corruption.

Bolsonaro

It's no surprise that the "Trump of the Tropics," as Bolsonaro has come to be known, has a close relationship with the U.S. president. They're both brash nationalists who share similar views on the coronavirus pandemic-- belittling the science, pooh-poohing the need for masks and saying the whole thing is just exaggerated. They both got COVID-19 and recovered. And they both believe shutting down the economy through lockdowns is more harmful than the virus. Bolsonaro's first international trip was to Washington, and he's since visited Trump three more times, including at Mar-a-Lago.

"It would be a sort of earthquake," says Rubens Ricupero, a former Brazilian ambassador to the United States. Biden would likely pressure Bolsonaro on the erosion of human rights protections, including for Indigenous people, but it's the Brazilian leader's positions on the Amazon that would really be scrutinized. Biden wants to join forces with other counties to create a $20 billion fund for Brazil as part of an effort to press Bolsonaro to end rising deforestation. Still, Biden would need Brazil's cooperation on Venezuela and containing China, Brazil's biggest trading partner.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan

The two leaders have had a bumpy relationship, but Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also understood the benefit of a good rapport with Trump and preying on his instincts-- particularly one that has to do with Trump's anathema of having U.S. troops in the "endless wars." With one phone call last year, Erdogan got Trump to move U.S. troops in Syria out of the way so that Turkish soldiers could attack Kurdish forces, which were U.S. allies in the fight against ISIS. Still, though Trump has called Erdogan a "good friend," he also at one point threatened to "totally destroy and obliterate" the Turkish economy.

...Turkey might find it has to rein in the adventurous foreign policy it enjoyed under Trump. Biden would also most likely pressure Turkey on its human rights record-- particularly its jailing of journalists and other critics. Significant issues also divide Ankara and Washington, including Turkey's purchase of Russian missiles.

Mohammed bin Salman

Breaking with decades of U.S. tradition, Trump chose Saudi Arabia as his first international trip as president. In Riyadh, the Saudi royal family lavished Trump and his family with an extravagant ceremony. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has since been reaping the rewards. The Trump administration has barely pressured him-- over the kingdom's air campaign in Yemen, which has killed thousands of civilians, or his crackdown on dissent. And following the 2018 killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Trump stood by the crown prince's side even as U.S. intelligence agencies assessed that the Saudi royal had approved the killing and as bipartisan lawmakers condemned him.

The former vice president has cast the kingdom as a "pariah"-- making it clear Salman would likely have a tougher time making inroads with a potential Biden administration. Biden has also threatened to stop selling arms to Saudi Arabia, a top buyer of U.S. weaponry.

"So there might be some cuts in terms of particular arms sales. There might be symbolic punishments. But the Biden administration is going to want a good relationship with Saudi Arabia despite the many problems," says Daniel Byman, a Middle East specialist at Georgetown University.

Orbán

Europe's populists, often shunned by Brussels, have found a natural ally in Trump, who shares their disdain for migrants, the media and dissent. But it's Hungary's prime minister, Orbán, who leads the pack. He was the only EU leader to endorse Trump in 2016. Four years and a White House visit later, Orbán calls Trump a friend and predicts he will win reelection. The populist leaders of Slovenia (Melania Trump's native country) and Serbia have also endorsed the president.

Previous U.S. administrations shunned Hungary, and the EU is investigating Hungary and Poland, run by another Trump-friendly government, for rule of law violations. Ivan Krastev, a political scientist who leads the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria, says the two countries have used their alliance with Trump to make it clear "that they have an alternative" to Brussels.

Biden mentioned Poland and Hungary when slamming Trump's foreign policy during a town hall last month, adding, "This president embraces all the thugs in the world." The remark angered Hungary's government, but Orbán is already casting Biden as part of the international liberal elite. "We know well American Democratic governments' diplomacy, built on moral imperialism," Orbán wrote in a recent essay in the pro-government newspaper Magyar Nemzet.

Hey! How do you talk about "the thugs of the world" without mentioning Rodrigo Duterte, Kim Jong-un, and Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, 3 more Trump cronies. Way back in late September, Foreign Policy published a piece by Paul Musgrave, a professor of political science, urging the country to confront "the record of wrongdoing left by the Trump administration, both the crimes committed in office and crimes overlooked due to his power. Grappling with the Trump post-presidency will include delicate questions about how to investigate potential criminal and civil wrongdoing committed by the president, his associates, and his family. And there is a chance the country may not be up to this task. There’s one clear precedent for worrying: President Gerald Ford’s pardon of his criminal predecessor (and tax cheat) Richard Nixon, and the subsequent elite embrace of that pardon. That means it’s important to lay out the case for why a potential President Biden should not pardon Trump for offenses committed against the United States. To be sure, Biden has pledged not to do so. Yet there have been signs that he may be going wobbly. Whereas in 2019, Biden emphasized that Trump’s actions merited scrutiny ('This guy does all these things that put us in jeopardy and he gets off?' he said to Radio Iowa), in an August NPR interview he emphasized instead that pursuing criminal charges against a former president would be 'a very, very unusual thing' and 'probably not very-- how can I say it?-- good for democracy.'" Of course Trump was a very, very unusual thing and certainly not good for democracy. No one is calling for him to be executed-- well, almost no one-- the way the Nicolae Ceaușescu was. But he should certainly be investigated and, if found guilty, punished.

The American political system has no tradition of official disgrace or damnatio memoriae. All presidents are honored, even those who were awful or, in the case of President John Tyler, disloyal. Tyler, the tenth president, not only ran a disastrous administration but ended his public life as a congressman in a brief-lived treasonous slave power. And yet even Tyler receives official remembrances, including a presidential dollar coin featuring his image.

That coin illustrates the natural arc of American political culture: institutional ignoring of the misdeeds of the powerful in the name of "healing." Yet this norm does not heal; it harms.

It makes a mockery of Americans’ belief that they have a government of laws, not of men, if those laws do not apply to the men who enforce the laws. It constitutes a denial of justice and an amnesty granted only to the powerful. Left unchallenged, this norm will protect Trump from the reckoning that the country needs.

Consider how the system dealt with Nixon.

Time has so effaced the details of Nixon’s malfeasance that he has regained a patina of statesmanship. Thus, Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, could recently tweet a favorable comparison between Nixon and Trump, arguing that that “Nixon, for all his flaws, was a conservative who abided by norms.”

Haass’s viral tweet reflects an irony that, in death, Nixon has finally been accepted by the sort of institution whose rejections kindled in him a lifelong resentment of the Eastern Establishment he tried to join. In doing so, it reflects a general amnesia about why Watergate was so bad that illustrates how far elite culture will go to forgive the crimes of the powerful.

...This revisionist history may explain why, in a 2014 CNN survey, only 51 percent of Americans reported considering Watergate a “very serious matter” that revealed unusual corruption in the Nixon White House, while 46 percent reported that the scandal was “just politics-- the kind of thing both parties engage in.”

[Alan] Brinkley’s textbook later blandly mentions that President Gerald Ford, Nixon’s successor, suffered political consequences from his decision to offer Nixon a blanket pardon for wrongdoing while in office.

Pointedly, Ford had rejected pardoning Nixon during his confirmation hearings as vice president. Once in office, though, a chorus of voices lobbied him to change his mind, claiming that neither the country nor Nixon himself might survive the trial.

Ford’s pardoning of Nixon was unpopular at the time, with 53 percent of Americans rejecting it. It has since become conventional wisdom among America’s institutional elite that Ford’s act was merciful and correct. In 2001, a panel of eminences recruited by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation honored Ford’s pardon of Nixon by giving him its Profiles in Courage Award.

...By downplaying the seriousness of Nixon’s crimes, and stopping further consequences, the pardon made it possible to reduce Watergate from the White House horrors to the break-in. It also enabled Nixon’s rehabilitation.

When Nixon died, President Bill Clinton ordered the closing of government offices “as a mark of respect for Richard Milhous Nixon.” In a cloying eulogy delivered “on behalf of a grateful nation,” Clinton praised Nixon’s legacy in domestic and foreign policy, without a single reference to Watergate or abuse of power other than the banal acknowledgment that “He made mistakes.”

The healing myth has become part of a bipartisan catechism even though its central premise-- that the pardon healed the country-- is unsupportable. In the long run, as [Elizabeth] Holtzman said, “the Nixon pardon has had terrible ramifications.” It set the stage for later pardons related to executive self-interest, including George H.W. Bush’s pardons of many figures involved in the Iran-Contra scandal.

If U.S. political culture can congratulate itself for rehabilitating Nixon, then the temptations for a Biden administration to do the same for Trump will be powerful. Doing so will let the administration move on to other priorities, sensible centrists will argue. And the next election is only two years away-- do you really want to have Trump still in the news by then?

Advocates of a pardon or other forms of clemency will point to other factors as well. They will argue that, in a polarized country, the specter of politicized prosecutions will raise the possibility that vengeful Republicans will retaliate later. And indeed, it would be disastrous for democracy were each administration to misuse prosecution against its political enemies.

Yet given what we already know about the president’s finances and conduct in office, an investigation of the Trump administration is unlikely to be politicized in any meaningful sense. It is only a refusal to prosecute that could be politicized, in the sense of being guided by political calculation rather than a commitment to the rule of law. (That would apply doubly to the idea that a pardon could help ease Trump out of the White House without strife.)

More sophisticated observers might caution that even potentially justifiable prosecutions could have deleterious effects on U.S. politics and the country’s standing in the world. The prosecutions of Brazil’s most recent presidents-- Lula, Dilma, and Michel Temer-- did much to clear the way for the election of the country’s disastrous current president, Jair Bolsonaro. Similar concerns have been raised about other prosecutions elsewhere, like Ecuador’s conviction of former president Rafael Correa, which barred him from a return to politics.

But it’s strange to argue that democracy depends on not prosecuting those who commit crimes. In France, even a prime minister caught misusing public funds may now go to jail rather than retire to a villa. And although some have criticized South Korea for prosecuting its ex-presidents (over half of whom are now in prison), measures like the Varieties of Democracy index show that Seoul’s record on liberal democracy is stronger than that of the United States.

It should not be surprising that democracy and prosecutions of former officials can go together. That is, after all, the entire point of the rule of law. Holding officials to account forms a critical part of strengthening democratic institutions. And the ballot box is only one way to do that.

That is why Biden must not waver. If a former president has never been prosecuted in American history, that’s because the last time the country had a chance to do so it was denied that opportunity. Far from being bad for democracy, a sober, lengthy, and deliberative investigation would be good for establishing a record of the rot in the Trump administration. And it would be a major boost for liberal democracy and anti-corruption efforts by demonstrating that in mature democracies, officials face consequences.

Having a president who committed crimes is not unprecedented in American history. What would be unprecedented would be to end this long national nightmare by letting them face the same justice that any other American should.

My job at Blue America is to try to figure out what a candidate will be like once he or she gets into Congress. Promises can be one thing; behavior is another. Once I figured out how to do it, we've backed candidates like Ted Lieu, AOC, Pramila Jayapal, Rashida Omar, Bonnie Watson Colemand who have become sterling members of Congress. Biden was the easiest one I ever looked at and I've predicted for decades that if he ever gets into the White House he will be one of the worst presidents in history, not like the decidedly mediocre presidents we've suffered from JFK through Obama, but more in line with the aforementioned Tyler. He won't be as terrible as Trump but...

Did Lindsey Graham's Shameless Audition And His Hissy Fits Make You Think "Alpha Male?"

Yesterday we appended most of John Pavlovitz's short essay, "Confessions of a Proud Beta Male," to Digby's Frat-Boy McDrunkFace post. I found it odd that Pavlovitz included Graham-- a bit of a flamer-- of all people, as an example of "an alpha-male." Yesterday in the NY Times, Frank Bruni featured him as the star of the saddest story in Washington. Remember when Lindsey told Fox News viewers that Trump is "a kook, crazy, unfit for office... and opportunist?" No? Watch the clip up top.

Poor Lindsey, who lives with his male lover in a lovely DC townhouse, and really doesn't want to run for the Senate again in South Carolina in 2020. He'll be 65 by then, hoping for a 3rd term from an increasingly radicalized Republican Party. Will there be an ugly primary? Will he be completely dependent on Trump for his reelection?



Talk about an opportunist! Bruni began by reminding everyone that "The battle over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court was an especially ugly episode of a reality-show presidency that degrades almost everyone swept up in it, and many characters stagger away from it looking worse than ever. That’s Senator Lindsey Graham you see at the head of the pack. That’s Graham you hear talking and talking and talking some more, in committee rooms and on stages and before the television cameras that he rushes to the way a toddler chases soap bubbles. His words are whichever ones guarantee a major role and a powerful patron, which means that these days he sounds like a more articulate echo of his golfing buddy: Donald Trump. That wouldn’t, by itself, be cause to dwell on him. Washington is lousy with lackeys, and not even the maddest of kings thins their ranks." Sad. Except for Trump, who just got the ultimate revenge. Poor Lindsey thinks Trump is going to kale him Attorney General. Sure he will... just the way he made Mitt Romney eat snails and then rejected him for the Secretary of State job. That audition Lindsey just did was horrific for most American... hilarious for Trump.

Graham is special. He really is. I can’t think of another Republican whose journey from anti-Trump outrage to pro-Trump obsequiousness was quite so illogical or half as sad, and his conduct during the war over Kavanaugh completed it. For the president he fought overtime, he fought nasty and he fought without nuance.

In so doing, he distilled our rotten politics-- its transactional nature, its tribal fury, its hysterical pitch-- as neatly as anybody in the current Congress does.

Has a diva at La Scala ever delivered an aria as overwrought as the one that Graham performed on the day when both Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee? I doubt it.

“Boy, you all want power,” Graham, who serves on the committee, railed at his Democratic colleagues, accusing them of ginning up accusations against Kavanaugh. “God, I hope you never get it.” Because Graham and his fellow Republicans exercise it so much more responsibly? Because they’re so principled themselves? I guess that’s why they minimize Russian interference in our elections; indulge Trump’s bromances with Vladimir Putin, Rodrigo Duterte and Kim Jong-un; and smile upon his mendacity, misogyny, racism and unchecked greed. They’re modeling integrity in government.

“You want this seat?” Graham said to them. “I hope you never get it.” No, Senator Graham, you do more than hope. You cheat. Let me introduce you to Merrick Garland, a figure far less partisan than Kavanaugh and thus much more deserving of a seat on the highest court in the land. You and your Republican colleagues in the Senate, every bit as desirous of power as Democrats are, crushed him, and the fact that it didn’t involve an attack on his reputation doesn’t diminish its ruthlessness.

“This is not a job interview,” Graham told Kavanaugh, soothing him. “This is hell.”

Interesting word choice. I remember when Graham used “hell” in a different context. This was back in December 2015. He was campaigning vainly for the Republican presidential nomination, saw Trump clearly and didn’t suck up to him.

“You know how you make America great again?” Graham said then. “Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.”

“If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed,” he tweeted, apparently referring to the Republican Party’s prospects in 2016. “And we will deserve it.” He called Trump the “world’s biggest jackass.” He said that choosing between Trump and Senator Ted Cruz, who survived much deeper into the party’s 2016 presidential primary than Graham did, was like deciding whether to be shot or poisoned. Trump returned these kindnesses by publicly divulging Graham’s mobile phone number and forcing him to get a new one.

There were sound policy reasons for Graham’s revulsion. At the risk of alienating some of the conservatives in South Carolina who routinely voted for him, he had pressed for sensible immigration reform, the kind that didn’t involve ethnic slurs, the forced separation of children from their parents and border walls. He was one of the Senate’s most ardent hawks, and Trump was dissing foreign military interventions, damning NATO, pimping for Putin and peddling isolationism.

There were also personal reasons for Graham’s revulsion. Graham’s closest ally and constant companion in the Senate, a man he claimed to revere beyond measure, was John McCain. And Trump, at the beginning of his campaign, bizarrely and grotesquely mocked McCain’s long, brutal years as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese. Trump’s belittling of McCain never ceased, and Graham took proper offense-- for a while. Then Trump became president, started inviting Graham to play golf and Graham parted ways with his nerve and his spine. What beautiful fairways you have, Mr. President. What a virile tee shot.

That’s the sad part I mentioned. And this is the absolutely pathetic twist: McCain, battling brain cancer, stopped spending much time in Washington, and as his health deteriorated, Graham’s ardor and cheerleading for Trump intensified. McCain, you see, wasn’t just Graham’s friend. He was his road to greater relevance. And Trump presented a veritable expressway. So Graham switched vehicles and directions, and pressed the pedal to the metal.

He went from defending Jeff Sessions to pushing him toward the exit, from sounding the alarm about Russia to hyperventilating about the Justice Department and the F.B.I., from calling Trump a “kook” to savaging the media for portraying him as one, from wanting to put Trump on a bed of nails to fluffing his pillows and smoothing his duvet. At times he gushes so much that he makes Rudy Giuliani look withholding.

Shocker of shockers: He now has a nearly open line to the president and the president in turn calls him. White House reporters routinely mention this and him. He has all the TV time that he could ever want. On Thursday he got a prime spot at The Atlantic Festival in Washington, where he was interviewed by the magazine’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. On Friday he got a big profile in the Style section of the Washington Post.

He claims that he’s serving a higher purpose by softening Trump’s stances where they sorely need softening, but that certainly hasn’t happened with immigration. He notes that he does chastise Trump occasionally.

But his smearing of Christine Blasey Ford and the Democrats who championed her was so vehement that he earned public raves from Giuliani, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Eric Trump and Sean Hannity.

They and the president are his constituency now, and his agenda? According to a few people who know him well, he’s auditioning for attorney general.

Him or Sessions? It’s like deciding whether to be shot or poisoned. And to plunder a quote from a quintessential Washington hack: God, I hope he never gets it.

World Leader? Nope

Other than nations that have transactional relationships with Trump, the whole world generally detests him. Both friends of the U.S. like the EU countries and foes of our country, like North Korea, look at him like a buffoon. Even if you don't understand German, the video above gives you an idea of what kind of esteem Germans hold the president-- especially when you compare that to how admired Barack Obama was there.

Last week Trump mouthed off about how great his relationship is with murderous Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, boasting how the U.S. would have been at war with north Korea if not for him. "I received a nice note from him recently. It was a nice note. I think we’re doing fine," referring to stalled nuclear talks with North Korea. The following day, the North Korean Foreign Ministry put out a statement saying there was no letter from Kim Jong Un and that Trump had just made it up out of thin air. "The relations between the top leaders of [North Korea] and the U.S. are not an issue to be taken up just for diversion nor it should be misused for meeting selfish purposes."

National Security Action, a Democratic organization, hired Hart Research to do a poll of voters in battleground states. Most Americans say Trump has made the U.S. less respected on the world stage. Only 31% think he's made the U.S. more respected. "Among the 16% of voters who remain undecided ahead of November’s election," wrote Axios' Dave Lawler, "59% agree that Trump is making the U.S. less respected, compared to 16% who say the U.S. is now more respected." This chart shows the share of voters who approve or are concerned about Trump's handling of key issues:

Standing up to China ranked last, suggesting Trump’s recent campaign to brand Joe Biden as "soft" on China may not resonate strongly. Especially harmful for Trump's reelection prospects is that 22% of voters in these key states say that Trump has increased the likelihood of war.

Jim Harper is a civil rights attorney contesting a gaggle of conservative Democrats for a blue seat in northwest Indiana. He noted that morning that "allies and world leaders don't take Trump seriously, and Americans know this. Now more than ever, we need international cooperation to overcome this global pandemic. Unfortunately, Trump has shredded American diplomatic credibility and, with it, our ability to lead. This is just another example of how Trump's incompetence will cost lives at home and abroad."

Eva Putzova progressives with the only opportunity for adding an Arizona progressive to Congress. She's the opposite of insular and is very aware of the danger Trump's narcissistic personality put's America in.She told me he's "made the world less safe and harmed our reputation with other countries. He has abrogated nuclear arms treaties with Russia and is developing low-yield nuclear weapons which increases the chances of them actually being used. He has increased tensions with China over his racist 'China Virus' statements related to the coronavirus. And with the exception of brutal dictators like MBS, Bolsonaro, and Duterte he is despised and disrespected by world leaders. Like his domestic policy, his foreign policy is driven by self-interest, not national interest. It is no wonder that 22% of voters in battleground states say that Trump has increased the likelihood of war. We need a President who will seek peace between nations and bring us back from the brink of armed conflict. Whether that is Joe Biden remains to be seen. A progressive Congress and progressive movement will be necessary to insure that is the case."

Lauren Ashcraft is the progressive candidate running in a congressional district that spans parts of Manhattan's East Side, Queens and Brooklyn, a unique situation. Her opponent has ignored Queens and Brooklyn-- and most of the Manhattan parts of the district, just lavishing attention on Wall Street and the wealthy neighborhoods of the Upper East Side. This morning, Lauren told me that "Trump's foreign policy has been to compliment leaders who compliment him or help him or his friends to personally profit-- an approach that is otherwise completely maniacal and without any logic or foresight. It’s time we have a new generation of leaders who won’t budge on being anti-war and anti-imperialism."

Having won his primary, history professor Liam O'Mara is running for a Riverside County congressional seat held by corrupt conservative Ken Calvert. "Our standing in the world matters, and not just with tin-pot dictators and foreign influence peddlers," he told me earlier today. "That this needs to be said at all is sad, but it does. Republican voters are always talking about keeping Americans safe-- so why do they ignore the evidence and throw out strategies proven to work? At the end of the day, it's apparently not our safety that matters, it's how 'tough' we appear, how much we push others around, and this approach to foreign policy consistently increases dangers for Americans and is objectively harmful."

"Trump, he continued, "entered office determined to hamstring the State Department, slashing the aid budget that helps us to maintain good relations and solve problems before they affect us, and attacking the diplomatic corps because it was devoted to the country and not to his personal interests. He has also repeatedly slammed NATO and the EU, maligned our close neighbours Canada and Mexico, and undermined pro-democracy forces in dozens of countries, while at the same time cozying up to dictators like Kim, lawless killers like Duterte, and overt neofascists like Bolsonaro. He has also continued the longstanding American subservience to the Saudi monarchy and the Israeli far right, in both cases ignoring core American principles and commitments to human rights. And he has pursued military action in at least eight countries that escalates the blowback risk to Americans, since military action alone will not and cannot defeat terrorism. We know what works and has worked, repeatedly and over many decades, in cases all around the world. We can spread liberty and stability, decrease the threat of terrorism and insurgencies, and strengthen economic and political ties in ways that ensure major wars are a thing of the past. And the way we do that is... pretty much the opposite of everything the GOP does in Washington. I had friends present and offering expert analysis before the Iraq War... which was promptly dismissed, with predictable and disastrous consequences. It's time we paid attention to the evidence again, and stopped letting this country be run by an organized crime family."

Trump-- A One Trick Pony With Infantile Strategies Will Be No Match For Any World Leader (Other Than Duterte)

Trump has been feuding with Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter since Carter was at Spy in the 1980's referring to Trump as a "short-fingered vulgarian," implying that he's not just a disgusting person but that he has a small penis. Trump has been obsessing over it for 30 years. If Trump was actually the owner of Vanity Fair he could hardly have done more for them than he did yesterday morning when he woke up and tweeted some typical Trump nonsense (above), calling massive attention to a restaurant review by Tina Nguyen few people would have otherwise seen, a review that suggests Trump Grill is a contender for worst restaurant in the country-- a place that serves very mediocre food "for timid people with digestive problems."

Donald Trump is “a poor person’s idea of a rich person,” Fran Lebowitz recently observed at The Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit. “They see him. They think, ‘If I were rich, I’d have a fabulous tie like that.’” Nowhere, perhaps, does this reflection appear more accurate than at Trump Grill (which is occasionally spelled Grille on various pieces of signage). On one level, the Grill (or Grille), suggests the heights of plutocratic splendor-- a steakhouse built into the basement of one’s own skyscraper... And like all exclusive bastions of haute cuisine, there is a sandwich board in front advertising two great prix fixe deals.

The allure of Trump’s restaurant, like the candidate, is that it seems like a cheap version of rich. The inconsistent menus—literally, my menu was missing dishes that I found on my dining partners’-- were chock-full of steakhouse classics doused with unnecessarily high-end ingredients. The dumplings, for instance, come with soy sauce topped with truffle oil, and the crostini is served with both hummus and ricotta, two exotic ingredients that should still never be combined. The menu itself would like to impress diners with how important it is, randomly capitalizing fancy words like “Prosciutto” and “Julienned” (and, strangely, ”House Salad”).

...[I]t was slop: as soon as I got home, I brushed my teeth twice and curled up in bed until the nausea passed.

...I reflexively want to be generous in my assessment of what the post-election Trump Grill says about the Trump presidency. Perhaps it’s a sign that Trump is in over his head, and a shallow, mediocre man who runs a shallow, mediocre business empire (and restaurant) would sink and implode, crushing the expectations of millions of his hopeful supporters. But watching Trump parade his enemies through the nearby lobby, taunting them with prestigious appointments only to cruelly humiliate them, I had to look over at the human cattle herd at the Trump Grill, overwhelming a well-meaning staff with their dreams of a meal fit for a president, and wonder if he cared about any of them, either.

I know I would never have seen that review, let alone republished it here, had it not been from Trump's early morning tweet-rage. Nor would I have seen this lovely photograph of el President-elect Señor Trumpanzee having his short fingers attended to.

And, by the way, as we've mentioned in the past, Graydon Carter is also something of a restauranteur and there's been culinary rancor between him and el Presidente-elect forever, as we see in the 2013 classic Trumpanzee tweet just above. The Waverly Inn, still going strong... and using Trump's attacks as promotional material.


UPDATE: Trumpanzee Impact On Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair broke its one-day subscription record thanks to el-Presidente-elect Señor Trumpanzee's silly, fatuous and gratuitous attack on them and their editor this week. New subscriptions increased 100 fold after Trump woke up, chopped up some Adderall, snorted it and started his maniacal tweeting.

Vanity Fair has seen a 2 percent increase in revenues YoY, and is set to be profitable in 2016, according to Condé Nast. Digital revenues are up 74 percent YoY, and make up 18 percent of the brand’s overall revenue. This is up from 11 percent of the overall revenues in 2015.

Circulation is up 2.8 percent at the magazine, according to the AAM statements for June 2015/2016. The mid-year audit posted the magazine's circulation at 1,232,588, compared to 1,197,922 in 2015.

In addition, VF.com had 14.3 million unique views in October, according to ComScore-- a 26.5 percent increase YoY.