Working Together We Are Great

Sometimes, reading about our current partisanship, I begin to wonder about the future of our great experiment in democracy.

Then I read a story like this:

Read the Washington Post, A riptide swept away a Florida family. Then beachgoers formed a human chain.

Trump's Big CON: Is This the Beginning of the End of Trump?

UPDATE: "That quaking beneath your feet is from shock waves in Washington where tipping points are merging with other tipping points to create the Mother of All Tipping Points.

Not only did Donald Trump Jr. meet with a Russian attorney who, he was told, had damaging information about Hillary Clinton, but also there are emails indicating that he knew in advance that the opposition research was part of the Kremlin’s effort to help Donald Trump become president.

If that’s not collusion, it seems at least 'collusioney,' a newly minted term surely destined to erase all memory of Monday’s exhaustively used 'nothing-burger.'

Smoking guns don’t need to be nearly this hot to capture Washington’s attention, but these latest revelations should be enough to make every American take a deep breath. Whether Trump Jr. is merely stupid is yet to be determined, but he wasn’t alone in that meeting. Joining him were his brother-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Paul J. Manafort, then Trump Sr.’s campaign manager, who is known to have had business dealings in Russia for a number of years. . .

The fact that the alleged opposition research was part of Russia’s war on Clinton, as indicated in one of the emails, would have raised flags for most people — no, make that for all but these people. I’m confident that, if the nice Ace Hardware man who recently helped me select a mailbox were to receive such an email, he’d contact the FBI as soon as possible.

Which, obviously, is what Junior, Manafort and Kushner should have done.

Thus, we can presume that all three knew better than to attend such a meeting. After all, it could well have been a trap — and I’m not sure it wasn’t. But to the inexperienced minds of Kushner and Trump Jr., the calculation may have been as simple (and feeble) as: Why not? Defeating Clinton was in the national interest, wasn’t it? And the Trumps have (or had) no pique with Russia.

Trump Jr.’s claim that he didn’t tell his father about the meeting rather strains credulity, don’t you think? Ditto [the Russian lawyer Natalia] Veselnitskaya’s claim that she has never worked for the Kremlin and has no idea what all the fuss is about. She was here to lobby against American legislation that her client finds objectionable.

In an exclusive interview Tuesday with NBC News, Veselnitskaya said she never had any 'damaging or sensitive information about Hillary Clinton. It was never my intention to have that.' Asked where Trump Jr. could have gotten that idea, she responded, 'It is quite possible that maybe they were longing for such an information. They wanted it so badly that they could only hear the thought that they wanted.'

More shock waves are doubtless coming. Meanwhile, we know for certain: When a Russian lawyer meets privately with the future president’s son, his son-in-law and his campaign manager on a third-party promise of Clinton-disabling intel, it’s hard to say the Trump campaign had nothing to do with Russia. For now: Collusioney.

Read the Washington Post, This is the mother of all tipping points.

Or the end of the beginning?

"Every great American scandal follows a similar arc, historians say. One side smells nefarious behavior. The other side contends there’s no there there. Shreds of evidence and whispers of proof energize one side and appall the other. This goes on for a long time.

Sometimes, the scandal talk fizzles out. And sometimes, something comes along that changes everything — the smoking gun.

When Donald Trump Jr. said 'I love it' to the prospect of scoring nasty information from friendly Russians about Hillary Clinton in June of last year, did that constitute a smoking gun?

In one America, the answer was a pretty solid yes. Slate, Politico, Vanity Fair and some Democrats straight-out declared the president’s son’s email the 'smoking gun' in the investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to take down the Clinton candidacy. Many other news organizations hedged a bit, attaching a question mark to the smoldering term.

But in Trump Country, the gun wasn’t smoking — it was just one more toy gun masquerading as the real thing, just one more burst of the same noise that has been cluttering up this presidency since its inception.

Al Baldasaro, a six-term Republican member of New Hampshire’s legislature and an early Trump backer, said on a radio show last summer that Clinton should be 'put in the firing line and shot for treason' over her role as secretary of state during the 2012 attacks on two U.S. compounds in Benghazi, Libya.

Now, Baldasaro sees not treason but normal behavior. In politics, he said, 'People come to us all the time with stuff on our opponents. . . . I don’t think there’s anything there. It’s a typical witch hunt. Some media are keeping it alive, making money off this.' . .

From the Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s through Watergate in the 1970s and the stream of -gates that have followed in the decades since, American political scandals have followed a distinct pattern, said David Dewberry, a professor at Rider University who wrote a book called 'The American Political Scandal: Free Speech, Public Discourse, and Democracy.'

'Scandals are stories, cliffhangers that play out in real time,' Dewberry said. 'You have two sides, one saying this is not important and the other saying we know there’s documented proof of wrongdoing. With Donald Trump Jr.’s email, this is the point where this scandal has changed.'

But that doesn’t mean that this email is the smoking gun — the one piece of evidence that produces instant consensus that something unacceptably wrong has taken place.

'This is not the [Watergate] tapes, this is not the blue dress from the Clinton scandal' in 1998, Dewberry said. 'We still don’t know from this email if President Trump did anything.' . .

But in the operatic structure of political scandals, the 'I love it' email might eventually be seen as the first appearance of the prop that turn outs to be vital to the denouement of the story.

In most political scandals, the search for a smoking gun fails to result in any such dramatic find. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. News databases are jammed full of quotations from defenders of Bill and Hillary Clinton through the years, insisting that 'there is no there there' regarding allegations about purported scandals in Arkansas, the White House, Benghazi, the Clinton Foundation and the former secretary of state’s email server. . .

All of which led Alistair Cooke, the late longtime BBC commentator on American affairs, to say that the eternal hunt for smoking guns was a classic bit of misdirection. 'We’ve been conducting the wrong kind of search,' Cooke said in a 1996 piece. 'The object in question is the body of the constitution. When we find it with a hundred stab wounds, there’s no point in looking for a smoking gun.'"

Read the Washington Post, Is Donald Trump Jr.’s ‘I love it’ email a smoking gun or a distraction?

Trump's Big CON: He Is Our Savior (NOT)

"Somewhere over the Atlantic, as Air Force One was hurtling toward Poland, President Trump opened the door and threw out America’s values. In Warsaw, he delivered a speech a parakeet could have swiftly mastered — 'That’s trouble, that’s tough,' he called the 1939 dual invasion of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union. He then moved on to Hamburg to issue his first presidential pardon, this one to Vladimir Putin for interfering in the election, and finally departed Europe having left America’s moral and political leadership behind. Maybe he’ll send for it.

The Wall Street Journal called the president’s Warsaw address 'Trump’s Defining Speech' because of its 'affirmative defense of the Western tradition.' Like much of the conservative press, the Journal cited his statement that 'The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.' But the speech was neither defining nor persuasive. Instead, it was Trump once again mounting an imaginary horse and sallying forth to slay the Muslim hordes. This time he conflated Warsaw 2017 with Vienna 1529, when the advancing Muslim Ottomans were turned back. The question is not whether the West has the will to survive but whether it has the wit to deal with Trump."

Read the Washington Post, On his trip abroad, Trump left America’s values behind.

Read also:

Trump's Big CON: He Saved Us, Hallelujah, and

Trump's Big CON: 'I Saved Us From China'. 

Trump's Big CON: BREAKING NEWS: The Donald is a Russian Agent

UPDATE X: BREAKING NEWS (NOT), Trump Lies!!

"But the New York Times reports that Trump personally signed off on a statement that Trump Jr. released over the weekend, as reports of the meeting first surfaced, that told a very misleading story about what happened at it:

    As Air Force One jetted back from Europe on Saturday … participants on the plane and back in the United States debated how transparent to be in the statement, according to people familiar with the discussions.

    Ultimately, the people said, the president signed off on a statement from Donald Trump Jr. for The Times that was so incomplete that it required day after day of follow-up statements, each more revealing than the last.

The statement from Trump Jr. that the president signed off on only said that the meeting was primarily about 'a program about the adoption of Russian children.' This was before the Times disclosed that according to sources who had seen the email chain, it revealed that the meeting was really about sharing material about Hillary Clinton that came from the Russian government. That forced another statement from Trump Jr., in which he conceded that he had been offered information about Clinton but suggested he had no idea what the source of the information was. That last suggestion, of course, was blown up by the emails themselves. . .

[I]n the larger scheme of nonstop lies coming from Trump and the White House — including about the Russia probe — signing off on this statement might seem like a routine lie, at least relatively speaking.

Whatever the legal relevance of this email chain turns out to be, this is the first time we have concrete confirmation of the Trump campaign’s willingness, or even eagerness, to collude with Russia’s efforts to tip the election, one that involved his son, son-in-law (Jared Kushner), and then-campaign chair (Paul Manafort). If the Times’ reporting is accurate, Trump is now directly implicated in an active effort to mislead the country about concrete, known facts that illustrate beyond doubt his campaign’s eagerness to conspire with Russia’s efforts to sabotage our democracy.

This is the case, at a minimum. And it is plausible that lots more will be coming out about these collusion efforts. But the president’s and White House’s handling of this chapter suggests they are hoping to lie their way through it all, one day at a time, one lie at a time, and don’t have any real way to cope with just how serious it is likely to become."

 Read the Washington Post, How Trump may have helped Donald Jr. lie about his explosive Russia meeting.

UPDATE IX: Searches for Donald Trump Jr., collusion, and treason all spiked yesterday.

Compared to searches for other terms, "[l]ike, say, barbecue grilling, the U.S. Constitution or Taylor Swift . . . treason [was] more popular on the Web than any of those topics — . . . , for the first time ever."

Read the Washington Post, For 8 minutes, Don Jr. was a bigger deal than his dad.

UPDATE VIII: "Donald Trump Jr. just shared emails that appear to confirm he knew about Russia's intent to help his father win before he took a meeting with a Russian lawyer.

The New York Times reported — and Donald Trump Jr. appeared to confirm — that he agreed to a meeting with a Russian lawyer who had damaging information on Hillary Clinton after getting an email that the Russian government was trying to help his father win the election."

Read the Washington Post, Donald Trump Jr. may have crossed the legal line on collusion.

UPDATE VII:

"Mark Berman
@markberman

Updated Trump Jr. timeline:

March: I had no mtgs
Sat: I did, about adoption
Sun: I was expecting dirt on Hillary
Mon: And it's no big deal pic.twitter.com/HiNQiJlEYY
:40 AM - 10 Jul 2017 "

UPDATE VI: More proof of colluding: the same day The Donald Jr. met with the Russian agent, The Donald "sent his 1ST tweet about Hillary's '33,000 emails", asking Clinton "where are the 33,000 emails you deleted".

UPDATE V: No wonder The Donald doesn't like the media:

"Last night, the New York Times reported: 'Before arranging a meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer he believed would offer him compromising information about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. was informed in an email that the material was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy, according to three people with knowledge of the email.'"

Read the Washington Post, Email to Donald Trump Jr. could be a smoking gun, as Russia connections deepen.

Read also the Washington Post:

Donald Jr.’s meeting is a legal game-changer,

The Trump campaign’s attempted collusion,

Donald Trump Jr.’s lawyer is a Juilliard-trained trombonist who plays in a symphony and defends mobsters, and

Is Mike Pence betting it will all come crashing down on Trump?

Finally, because I think we'll be talking about this soon, read the Washington Post, In the Russia probe, could Trump pardon himself?

UPDATE IV: Of course, I'm sure The Donald has an explanation:

"Who among us hasn't met a Russian lobbyist offering dirt on our enemies as a pretext to talk sanctions, forgotten it, then lied about it?", and

"Stranger things have happened, but it would be odd to tell all these lies *and fire the FBI Director* if you’d done nothing wrong."

Of course, even some who might otherwise agree with The Donald think it stink, such as Ted Cruz's former communications director: "So Don Jr. is openly admitting his father's campaign was willing to accept help from the Russians to damage HRC. Seems pretty big."

UPDATE III: After Trump accepted Rutin word that Russia did hack the election,  "Trump wrote: 'Putin & I discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit so that election hacking, & many other negative things, will be guarded … and safe.'

This drew immediate ridicule and scorn from across the political spectrum."

Read the Washington Post, Trump aides learn the perils of speaking for a president who changes his story.

That ridicule and scorn included:

"Partnering with Putin on a "Cyber Security Unit" is akin to partnering with Assad on a "Chemical Weapons Unit".

And from the article:

"'It is not the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard, but it’s pretty close,' Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said on NBC’s 'Meet the Press.'

'I'm sure that Vladimir Putin could be of enormous assistance in that effort since he is doing the hacking,' Sen. John McCain joked on CBS’ 'Face the Nation.'

'This is like the guy who robbed your house proposing a working group on burglary,' Ash Carter, who was secretary of defense when the Russians meddled last year, said on CNN’s 'State of the Union.'"

Read also the Daily Mail, 'This is like building an anti-terrorism task force with ISIS': Trump's 'cyber security unit' with Russia is attacked from all sides, as Democrats say 'we might as well mail our ballot boxes to Moscow'.

UPDATE II:  And like the meeting with Vnesheconombank, or VEB, which was no normal bank,the meeting was with someone, Natalia Veselnitskaya, who "represents business executives close to the Russian government and is a leading opponent of sanctions imposed because of Russian human rights abuses — sanctions that are also opposed by Vladimir Putin."

Read also the Washington Post, Here’s the big problem with the Trump camp’s latest spin about Donald Trump Jr.

And now Trump accepts "Putin’s denial of interfering in our 2016 president elections" and wants to move forward!?!

Honestly, Trump and his minions are too stupid to be in their positions.

UPDATE:  Read the Washington Post, 5 big questions after the bombshell about Donald Trump Jr. and the Russian lawyer, which asks:

"1. Why is seeking opposition research from a Kremlin-backed lawyer not a Very Bad Thing — in and of itself? . .

2. Were there other similar contacts with Russians (or other foreign nationals)? . .

3. What specific information was this Kremlin-tied lawyer pitching? . .

4. How did President Trump not know about this? . .

5. Why has the White House failed to get its story straight on so many occasions? Has nobody done a forensic review?"

During the election, Trump publicly urged Russia to hack Clinton's emails and release them.

But Trump denies that he colluded with Russia. Now we know differently.

Read the Washington Post, Donald Trump Jr. met with Russian lawyer during presidential campaign after being promised information helpful to father’s effort.

And there are numerous times Trump and others lied about contacts with the Russians.

Read the Washington Post, Donald Trump Jr. just contradicted a whole bunch of White House denials of Russian contacts, which states:

"Donald Trump Jr. acknowledged Sunday that he met with a Russian lawyer who had promised damaging information on Hillary Clinton in June 2016.

The news, which was first reported by the New York Times, represents the most direct suggestion to date of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and it is the first indication that someone from President Trump's inner circle met with Russians during the campaign. Trump Jr. also brought then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Trump's son-in-law and now-top White House adviser Jared Kushner to the meeting.

But the information isn't just troubling because it suggests the Trump campaign sought out the help of Russians to win the presidency. It also contradicts a number of claims made by the White House, the campaign and Trump Jr. himself — claims made as recently as this weekend. For an administration and campaign that have repeatedly denied contact with Russians and had their denials blow up in their faces, it's yet another dubious chapter."

Read also the Washington Post, Here are the times that Trump allies have denied or obscured links to Russian agents.

Read also:

Trump's Big CON: What's He Hiding: Is Trump a Russian Agent?,

Trump's Big CON: What's He Hiding: Is Trump a Russian Agent? (Cont.),

Trump's Big CON: What's He Hiding: Is Trump a Russian Agent? (Cont., Part 2),

Trump's Big CON: What's He Hiding: Is Trump a Russian Agent? (Cont., Part 3),

Trump's Big CON: The Comey Conspiracy and Russian Agent Coverup, and

Trump's Big CON: The Comey Conspiracy and Russian Agent Coverup by the Republi-CON Party (Cont.).

Trump's Great Strength: He Knows How to Connect to People

I've always thought The Donald had an exceptionally high EQ (although I think he misuses it).

And he know how to connect.

Read the Washington Post, This linguist studied the way Trump speaks for two years. Here’s what she found., which stated:

"Trump is a 'unique' politician because he doesn’t speak like one, according to Jennifer Sclafani, an associate teaching professor in Georgetown University’s Department of Linguistics.

'He is interesting to me linguistically because he speaks like everybody else,' said Sclafani, who has studied Trump’s language for the past two years. 'And we’re not used to hearing that from a president. We’re used to hearing somebody speak who sounds much more educated, much smarter, much more refined than your everyday American.' . .

Sclafani, who recently wrote a book set to publish this fall titled 'Talking Donald Trump: A Sociolinguistic Study of Style, Metadiscourse, and Political Identity,' said Trump has used language to 'create a brand' as a politician.

'President Trump creates a spectacle in the way that he speaks,' she said. 'So it creates a feeling of strength for the nation, or it creates a sense of determination, a sense that he can get the job done through his use of hyperbole and directness.'

The features of Trump’s speech patterns include a casual tone, a simple vocabulary and grammar, repetitions, hyperbole and sudden switches of topics, according to Sclafani.

As for the criticism that Trump sounds erratic when he changes subjects in the middle of a speech or sentence, Sclafani said that “this is something that we all do in everyday speech.”

'It’s just unusual to hear it from a president speaking in a public, formal context,' she added."

Trump's Big CON: TrumpTrade Might Kill Ya

"The first known shipment of cooked chicken from China reached the United States last week, following a much-touted trade deal between the Trump administration and the Chinese government.

But consumer groups and former food-safety officials are warning that the chicken could pose a public health risk, arguing that China has made only minor progress in overhauling a food safety regime that produced melamine-laced infant formula and deadly dog biscuits."

Read the Washington Post, The dark side of Trump’s much-hyped China trade deal: It could literally make you sick.

Trump's Big CON: It's All About the Show (The Trump Family Show)

UPDATE VIII: It's all about building the family brand, and dynasty.

"Though Trump's oldest daughter has repeatedly said she tries to steer clear of politics, she found herself thrust into a political maelstrom Saturday when she briefly filled in for her father at a table of world leaders when he left the room for other meetings.

A grainy photo of Ivanka, taken by a member of Russia's delegation, showed the president's daughter seated between British Prime Minister Theresa May and Chinese President Xi Jinping at a massive table during a G-20 working session on 'Partnership With Africa, Migration and Health.'"

Read the Washington Post, Trump defends his daughter Ivanka’s breach of diplomatic protocol.

As stated below: To the con man, it not whether it is actually true, or good, or works, it is the show that is most important, style and form over substance.

The essence of Trump is the show.

So why does Ivanka have an office in the White House, or take her Dad's seat at a table during a G-20 working session of world leaders?  Not because of her qualifications, because she looks good in the Trump family show.

Remember: it's all 'bout the show, 'bout the show, stupid people!!! (Repeat til you get it).

UPDATE VII:  And what's wrong with keeping it all in the family?

Nepotism "is, in fact, 'a beautiful thing.' . .

But calling nepotism “a beautiful thing” and saying it's actually beneficial is really testing the bounds of what's been politically and socially acceptable."

Read the Washington Post, The Trumps’ war for nepotism.

UPDATE VI:  Trump is like his many voter, a man of pictures, not words.

"The man is a TV viewer, not known to be interested in books. "

Read the Washington Post, The president of visuals.

UPDATE V:  "Why don’t we just stitch him a red cape, put him in spandex, affix a stylized “S” to his chest and be done with it?

SuperJared has taken flight.

He’s President Trump’s point man with the Chinese, having finalized the details of the big meeting at Mar-a-Loco later this week. . .

Kushner’s to-do list, not Tillerson’s, contains the small, pesky item of brokering a durable truce between the Israelis and the Palestinians. “If you can’t produce peace in the Middle East, nobody can,” Trump said to the 36-year-old real estate scion, who has absolutely no background in diplomacy, from the stage of an inaugural party.

The precise strategy is under wraps. . .

Mere details! Just leave things to Kushner. He’ll figure it out in those down moments when he’s not supervising the brand new Office of American Innovation, whose modest ambition is a full-scale reorganization of the federal government that makes it more efficient.

But Kushner’s many mandates aren’t a laughing matter. They’re a reflection of some of Trump’s most unsettling traits as president, and Kushner is a symbol of his delusions.

Trump’s overreliance on Kushner illustrates the extraordinary premium he places on loyalty. Kushner’s status as a visionary is entirely disputable: His real-estate company was a birthright, not a start-up, and as an article by Charles Bagli in The Times this week demonstrated, one of Kushner’s key acquisitions, the skyscraper at 666 Fifth Avenue, turned into an albatross. . .

The president seems to see certain people as exempt from the laws of gravity, and he has accorded Kushner a place snug beside him in that pantheon. He keeps telling us that he can predict the future, and he keeps telling himself that Kushner can juggle more than even the most seasoned, brilliant White House aides of yesteryear pulled off. Kushner doesn’t seem to be quibbling.

I’m told by insiders that when Trump’s long-shot campaign led to victory, he and Kushner became convinced not only that they’d tapped into something that everybody was missing about America, but that they’d tapped into something that everybody was missing about the two of them.

Kushner was reborn with new powers, and to the heavens he ascended.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane!

It’s ridiculous."

Read The New York Times, Jared Kushner, Man of Steel. 

UPDATE IV: "Kushner hadn’t served a day on a school board before Trump put him in charge of, you know, America. Near as I can tell, his sole achievement in his young life — much like his wife’s — is to have spent his parents’ money on cool stuff, like some buildings and a once trendy newspaper you’ve never read. . .

I’d be willing to give Jared and Ivanka the benefit of the doubt — even absent any obvious humility or aptitude for their jobs — if they were willing to entirely divest themselves from competing interests, as Cabinet secretaries do. They won’t, because it’s not their way to sacrifice for any greater good, and because they have an evident disdain for those who devote their lives to bettering the country.

To the Trump-Kushner axis, those people are just suckers who don’t have what it takes to get rich, or at least to be born that way.

The privileges they inherited are theirs to keep while they meddle around with policies that affect the rest of us. The honor, I guess, is all ours.

Read Yahoo, Jared and Ivanka ask what their country can do for them.

UPDATE III:  Trump is creating a dynastic, insular White House.

There is his daughter, who is now an 'official' employee.

Read the Washington Post, Ivanka Trump to become official White House employee.

As noted below, why is Ivanka  an 'official' employee in the White House?  Not because of her qualifications, because she looks good.

Now his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who was given a 'new office and several vanity projects, mant that exist' "primarily to put Kushner in the same room with people he admires whom he wouldn’t have had access to before, glossing government agencies in the process with a thin veneer of what appears to be capitalism but is really just nihilistic cost-cutting designed to project the optics of efficiency. If the outside experts have good advice, it will be heeded only where it reinforces what the administration would do anyway. And anyone who volunteers to carry out the administration’s agenda may be handed wholesale control of an area of government where their domain expertise isn’t just low, but nonexistent."

Read the Washington Post, I worked for Jared Kushner. He’s the wrong businessman to reinvent government.

Read also the Washington Post, How President Trump could use the White House to enrich himself and his family and Jared Kushner’s White House job may be legal. But history shows it’s a bad idea.

UPDATE II:  "Even if Trump 'wins' and the bill passes, this whole process has been an utter disaster from start to finish. The media analysis is already being framed in a way that will obscure this from view. And Trump himself is determined not to learn the right lessons from the whole mess — no matter what happens."

Read the Washington Post, Even if Trump ‘wins,’ this health-care mess has been a horrendous disaster.

UPDATE:  You must read this great anlysis about Trump winning the election and now having to fulfill his promise to save us from Obamacare.

Read the Washington Post, Trumpcare: How we got from ‘wonderful’ to widely panned, which in part notes;

"After Thursday’s embarrassing failure to round up enough votes for passage of the GOP-sponsored American Health Care Act, the White House insists the House vote on a bill that:

    Knocks 24 million people off coverage
    Increases the costs for many older, rural voters
    Removes requirements to include 10 basic items (e.g. pediatric care)
    Cuts Medicaid by $880 billion
    Is silent on selling insurance across state lines

How did this happen? How did the populist president who appealed to 'the forgotten' men and women wind up with a bill that’s so harmful to his base, something that is aimed at cutting and de-federalizing Medicaid and giving huge tax cuts to the rich?

One is tempted to say Trump never intended to make good on his promises. Perhaps he always planned on betraying his base and was interested only in big tax cuts for the rich. The man who conned customers into buying inferior products (a 'university' education, vodka, steaks) may simply have said whatever he thought people wanted to hear — with no intention of following through.

There is, however, a more nuanced explanation. Trump, he admits, never thought he would win the presidency. He never cared for nor developed detailed policies, because he saw the race as a giant media show in which substance was irrelevant. He never dreamed he would actually have to figure out what 'terrific' insurance looked like. He was candid when he said recently that “nobody [i.e. Trump] knew health care could be so complicated.” He really had no idea what he was doing."

Let me repeat that most important point; "He really had no idea what he was doing."

Trump is the dog who caught his tail, now what!

To the con man, it not whether it is actually true, or good, or works, it is the show that is most important, style and form over substance.

The essence of Trump is the show.

So why does Ivanka have an office in the White House?  Not because of her qualifications, because she looks good.

Don't believe me, watch as she poses in the video from the Washington Post, Ivanka Trump’s West Wing job isn’t just unethical. It’s also dangerous.:



I especially like her thinking man pose at 0:58 seconds in the video.

The Donald also knows how to put on a show, see him "behind the wheel of a truck at the White House on Thursday, as he met with truckers during a health-care event":



The truck has to do with health care, but it big and powerful, an image that the Donald love to cultivate.

So is the GOP health care plan good or bad, does it work and do what Trump, promised?

No, but Trump doesn't care, The Donald wants a "win".

Read The New York Times, Trump the Dealmaker Projects Bravado, but Behind the Scenes, Faces Rare Self-Doubt, which notes that:

"A president who prefers unilateral executive action and takes intense pride in his ability to cut deals finds himself in a humbling negotiation unlike any other in his career, pinned between moderates who believe the health care measure is too harsh, and a larger group of fiscal conservatives adept at using their leverage to scuttle big deals cut by other Republican leaders. . .

Crashing on the shoals of Congress marks Mr. Trump’s first true encounter with legislative realities and the realization that a president’s power is less limitless than it appears, particularly in the face of an intransigent voting bloc. Mr. Trump is not used to a hard no — but that was the word of the week. . .

If Mr. Trump has any advantage in the negotiations, it is his ideological flexibility: He is more interested in a win, or avoiding a loss, than any of the arcane policy specifics of the complicated measure, according to a dozen aides and allies interviewed over the past week who described his mood as impatient and jittery. Already, he has shown that flexibility by going back on campaign promises that no one would lose coverage when the Affordable Care Act was replaced and he would not cut Medicaid."

Read also the Washington Post, Trump’s health care ultimatum is straight out of ‘The Art of the Deal.’ It just might work.

Read also Trump's Big CON: It's All About the Threatre.

Trump's Big CON: "More Coal Jobs"

UPDATE IV:  "In terms of raw numbers, though, there’s another industry that has fared even worse. Compared to January 2009, there are 35,600 fewer coal miners. But over that period there are also 198,400 fewer department store employees. . .

Far less of Trump’s core base of support is negatively affected by a stumbling coal industry than a crumbling department store chain. But department stores don’t carry the cultural weight that coal mining does, particularly to Trump and his base of support. As with so many other aspects of the United States these days, the political utility of the people who are negatively affected makes an enormous difference in how much political leaders care."

Read the Washington Post, Why is Trump more worried about coal miners than department store employees?

UPDATE III:  "The coal-mining jobs that President Trump thinks were destroyed by government regulation — adopted to combat air pollution and global warming — were actually lost to old-fashioned competition from other American firms and workers. Eastern coal mines lost market share to Western coal, which was cheaper. And natural gas grew at coal’s expense because it had low costs and lower greenhouse-gas emissions.

[So those 50,000 jobs Trump promised, it will be] closer to 1,000."

Read the Washington Post, What really happened to coal?

UPDATE II:  Read the Washington Post, The entire coal industry employs fewer people than Arby’s, which notes that:

"The point isn't that coal jobs don't matter — they matter to the people who have them and to the communities they support, especially as they typically pay far more than do jobs in the retail and service industries, But if you're looking to make a meaningful increase in the number of jobs available to U.S. workers, bringing back coal jobs isn't going to do it.

Of course, part of the fixation on coal is because mining has always loomed large in the American imagination. There's something mysterious and ennobling about the dangerous endeavor to extract valuable commodities from deep within the earth, something that's missing from, say, used-car sales or ski-lift operation."

 

UPDATE:  "[T]he number of miners began a steep decline after World War II, and especially after 1980, even though coal production continued to rise. This was mainly because modern extraction techniques — like blowing the tops off mountains — require far less labor than old-fashioned pick-and-shovel mining. The decline accelerated about a decade ago as the rise of fracking led to competition from cheap natural gas.

So coal-mining jobs have been disappearing for a long time. Even in West Virginia, the most coal-oriented state, it has been a quarter century since they accounted for as much as 5 percent of total employment.

What, then, do West Virginians actually do for a living these days? Well, many of them work in health care: Almost one in six workers is employed in the category “health care and social assistance.”

Oh, and where does the money for those health care jobs come from? Actually, a lot of it comes from Washington.

West Virginia has a relatively old population, so 22 percent of its residents are on Medicare, versus 16.7 percent for the nation as a whole. It’s also a state that has benefited hugely from Obamacare, with the percentage of the population lacking health insurance falling from 14 percent in 2013 to 6 percent in 2015; these gains came mainly from a big expansion of Medicaid. . .

Now think about what Trumpism means for a state like this. Killing environmental rules might bring back a few mining jobs, but not many, and mining isn’t really central to the economy in any case. Meanwhile, the Trump administration and its allies just tried to replace the Affordable Care Act. If they had succeeded, the effect would have been catastrophic for West Virginia, slashing Medicaid and sending insurance premiums for lower-income, older residents soaring. . .

It’s almost certain that the job losses from Trumpcare cuts would have greatly exceeded any possible gains in coal.

So West Virginia voted overwhelmingly against its own interests. And it wasn’t just because its citizens failed to understand the numbers, the reality of the trade-off between coal and health care jobs.

For the striking thing, as I said, is that coal isn’t even the state’s dominant industry these days. “Coal country” residents weren’t voting to preserve what they have, or had until recently; they were voting on behalf of a story their region tells about itself, a story that hasn’t been true for a generation or more.

Their Trump votes weren’t even about the region’s interests; they were about cultural symbolism. . .

So it’s incredible, and terrifying, to think that we may really be about to do all of that because Donald Trump successfully pandered to cultural nostalgia, to a longing for a vanished past when men were men and miners dug deep."

Read The New York Times, Coal Country Is a State of Mind.

"With coal miners gathered around him, Trump signed an executive order rolling back a temporary ban on mining coal and a stream protection rule imposed by the Obama administration. The order follows the president’s campaign promise to revive the struggling coal industry and bring back thousands of lost mining jobs in rural America.

'I made them this promise,' Trump said, 'we will put our miners back to work.'

But industry experts say coal mining jobs will continue to be lost, not because of blocked access to coal, but because power plant owners are turning to natural gas. . .

Paul Bledsoe, a lecturer at American University’s Center for Environmental Policy, an Interior official under President Bill Clinton, called Trump’s attempt at job creation 'sheer nonsense.' Coal’s decline is too steep.

'No company will bid on new leases when there’s already a glut of unwanted coal on the market,' Bledsoe said. 'Trump’s false promise that he can bring back coal is really exposed as so much coal dust and mirrors by this executive order, since utilities will continue to use natural gas instead of coal.'"
Read the Washington Post, Trump promised to bring back coal jobs. That promise 'will not be kept,' experts say. 


Read also Trump's Big CON: "More U.S. Manufacturing Jobs"

Trump's Big CON: The Generals Decide How to Fight

"A few days after President Donald Trump gave his Pentagon chief the unilateral authority last month to send thousands of American troops to Afghanistan at his own discretion, the White House sent classified guidance that effectively limits the number of forces."

Read the Wall Street Journal, White House Limits Pentagon on Afghan Troop Level.

Remember: it's all 'bout the show, 'bout the show, stupid people!!! (Repeat til you get it).

Trump's Big CON: His Newest Republi-CON Media CONplex Enabler

Watch out Hedgehog News, Trump and his Republi-CON's sycophants have a new member.

"One America News is an obscure TV channel struggling to emerge from the cellar of the cable ratings, but it is nonetheless one of President Trump’s favorite media outlets. It’s not hard to see why: On One America newscasts, the Trump administration is a juggernaut of progress, a shining success with a daily drumbeat of achievements. . .


[S]ince its inception in 2013, and especially since Trump began his march to the White House, One America’s owner, Robert Herring Sr., a millionaire who made his money printing circuit boards, has directed his channel to push Trump’s candidacy . . .

OAN, based in San Diego, made its first splash in the opening weeks of the Trump campaign, when the channel became the first to carry Trump’s campaign speeches live and in full — a decision followed quickly by the owner’s directive that other candidates’ rallies not be given the same treatment, according to internal emails.

Since then, OAN has become a reliably sympathetic voice of the administration’s goals and actions. Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, has a deal to appear regularly on the channel. The network’s White House reporter, Trey Yingst, has become an administration favorite who was called on at the daily news briefings 27 times in Trump’s first 100 days in office. On Friday, OAN won a seat in the White House briefing room, albeit in the back row and shared with the BBC."

Read the Washington Post, An inside look at One America News, the insurgent TV network taking ‘pro-Trump’ to new heights.

The Donald just love his sycophants.

Read also Trump's Big CON: His Enablers.

Trump & The Repuli-CON's Big CON: Fiscal Responsibility

"Republicans finally seem to be figuring out that taking health care from the poor to pay for tax cuts for the rich isn’t exactly popular.

Indeed, less than 20 percent of people support the Senate’s plan, which would do just that. It has been enough to make some Republicans start considering what for them is the ultimate heresy: What if they didn't cut taxes as much as possible for wealthy investors? What if, instead, they used some of that money to cover a couple million more people and keep costs down a little more for everybody else — kind of, you know, like Obamacare does?

Now, as big a positional shift as that would be on health care, it actually wouldn't be one on taxes. That's because whatever taxes Republicans don't cut in their health-care bill, they can cut in their tax reform one.   . .

Why would they do that when it would mean their tax cuts would have to be temporary? Because it turns out that they can change the definition of 'temporary' to something that's a lot closer to permanent. The trick is that although their tax cuts have to be paid for past the budget window, there's nothing that dictates the length of that budget window. It's 10 years now, but it could be 15 or 20 or even 30 years if they wanted it to be — and some of them, like Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (Utah), do.

Not paying for their tax cuts would really solve their problem for how to pay for their tax cuts. Republicans could stop trying to throw 15 million people off Medicaid to cover the cost of cutting the tax on investment income from 23.8 to 20 percent for people making $250,000 or more. Or trying to come up with any tax loopholes they'd be willing to close — something that has eluded them so far — let alone a few trillion dollars' worth of them. Instead, they could get back to their Bush-era basics: passing a deficit-financed tax cut and then announcing how much they hate deficits whenever Democrats win back the White House. After all, why go through the unpleasant business of paying for things when you could skip all that and still get tax cuts that would last until almost the middle of the century?

Or, as Republicans call it, fiscal responsibility."

Read the Washington Post, Republicans say they might not cut taxes for the rich. Don’t believe them.

Trump's Big CON: His Mental Fitness is Our Greatest Threat

UPDATE:  "During a national security panel at last week's Aspen Idea Festival, retired general David Petraeus offered what the panel's host labeled perhaps the most robust defense of the Trump administration's foreign policy yet.

Then Petraeus was asked about Trump personally, and things took a turn.

As political affairs scholar David Rothkopf noted in an op-ed he wrote for The Washington Post on Tuesday, he asked Petraeus — after Petraeus argued that Trump had surrounded himself with a solid team that was instituting a measured, continuity-based foreign policy with plenty of successes — whether Trump himself was fit to serve as president.

Petraues's response was decidedly not 'yes.' Instead, he said Trump's fitness for the office was actually 'immaterial.'

I went back to the video to see if some context was missing from Rothkopf's op-ed. There isn't: It's as damning as it sounds. Here's a guy whom Trump considered nominating for secretary of state putting a pretty good face on the Trump administration — and then being unable to say whether the president is a mentally fit commander in chief. . .

This is a dance that many a Trump defender has been forced into — arguing that things aren't as bad with Trump as some would have you believe, and then punting when being asked to vouch for Trump personally. The latter is a much more difficult thing to do, because it means you are attaching your expertise to Trump's unpredictability and whatever he might do in the future.

But it's also important to emphasize just how low a bar this is. The fact that Petraeus can't even say that Trump is a fit commander in chief speaks volumes. And Petraeus seemed to be going out of his way on the panel to argue that U.S. foreign policy and national security are on the right path. He said repeatedly that we shouldn't get bogged down in Trump's 'discordant' tweets and public comments and should focus on actions. . .

[T]he argument from Petraeus seemed to be that Trump himself can only do so much damage and that the people around him would keep him in check — implying that Trump was, to his credit, allowing them to keep him in check. This is what some of Trump's biggest critics have hoped would be the case, and Petraeus suggested their wishes were coming true.

Then he was offered the chance to come out and say what he really meant. His nonresponse spoke volumes."

Read the Washington Post, David Petraeus’s damning nonresponse on Trump’s fitness to serve.

"Last week, at the Aspen Ideas Festival, I moderated a panel on U.S. national security in the Trump era. On the panel, former CIA director David H. Petraeus offered the most robust defense of President Trump’s foreign policy that I have heard. Central to his premise were two facts. First, he argued that Trump’s national security team was the strongest he had ever seen. Next, he argued that whereas President Barack Obama was indecisive to the point of paralysis, such as in the case of Syria, Trump is decisive.

Toward the end of the conversation, we turned to Trump’s erratic behavior and I noted that for the first time in three decades in the world of foreign policy, I was getting regular questions about the mental health of the president.

I asked Petraeus, a man I respect, if he thought the president was fit to serve. His response was, 'It’s immaterial.' He argued that because the team around Trump was so good, they could offset whatever deficits he might have. I was floored. It was a stunningly weak defense.

That is where we are now. The president’s tweeting hysterically at the media is just an element of this. So too is his malignant and ever-visible narcissism. The president has demonstrated himself to have zero impulse control and a tendency to damage vital international relationships with ill-considered outbursts, to trust very few of the people in his own government, and to reportedly rant and shout at staff and even at the television sets he obsessively watches.

Whether he is actually clinically ill is a matter for psychiatric professionals to consider. But when you take the above behaviors and combine them with his resistance to doing the work needed to be president, to sitting down for briefings, to reading background materials, to familiarizing himself with details enough to manage his staff, there is clearly a problem. Compound it with his deliberate reluctance to fill key positions in government and his wild flip-flopping on critical issues from relations with China to trade, and you come to a conclusion that it may be that Trump’s fitness to serve as president is our nation’s core national security issue.

Not only does the president diminish the office with his pettiness; he also shows disregard for constitutional principles including free speech, freedom of religion and separation of powers, and he operates as though he were above ethics laws. Daily he shows he lacks the character, discipline, intellect, judgment or respect for the office to be president of the United States."

[T]he stark reality is that objective analysis reveals that we have never before seen a president so unfit for office. Even President Richard Nixon at his moments of darkest paranoia was a professional public servant who understood the office and the stakes associated with it. One might, on this Independence Day week, have to go back to King George III to find a head of state who so threatened America. But there is no precedent for one whose character is so obviously ill-suited to the presidency."

Read the Washington Post, The greatest threat facing the United States is its own president.

Trump's Big CON: He Has No Plan, But Could He Tweet Us Into Nuclear War?

Other than claiming "It won't happen!", Trump has not plan or strategy regarding North Korea.

So his "reaction to North Korea’s missile test was to immediately reach for his phone and sound off with chest-thumping statements on Twitter.  This is a very reckless reaction, and one that risks miscalculation by adversary and ally alike. . .

Trump’s vague, blustery words, unattached to any strategy and without any plan to back up whatever he did mean, will undermine both our deterrence and our reassurance, which we have spent decades building. This could lead to miscalculation by North Korea or our allies. Such miscalculation could lead to war: Trump could literally tweet us into a nuclear war.

We know that Kim Jong Un is thin-skinned and will probably take Trump’s comment about 'this guy' as a personal insult. Or Kim may be confused — after all, just a few months ago, Trump said he would be 'honored' to meet with Kim under the right circumstances. To be clear, I don’t care at all about Kim’s feelings. But I do care about whether an offhand, hotheaded remark could provoke Kim to take actions that would have real consequences. Picking a Twitter fight with a nuclear-armed dictator is not wise — this is not reality TV anymore.

The White House has sent mixed messages about whether it wants Trump’s Twitter statements to be considered official statements. But it doesn’t matter how the White House wants to spin them — our adversaries and allies alike attach great weight to his every word, and they may calculate decisions based on what Trump says on Twitter.

Bluster and chest-thumping may feel good — but it will not make us safer. The threat posed by North Korea is serious, urgent and reaching a critical point. It requires a real, coordinated strategy in which the president works in concert with his national security team to protect the country." {Emphasis added.]

Read the Washington Post, How President Trump could tweet his way into nuclear war with North Korea.

Somebody needs to take The Donald's phone away!! NOW!!!

Read also the Washington Post:

Trump warns of ‘severe’ consequences for North Korea as Russia, China balk at tough U.S. talk, and

How to avoid the War of Trump’s Mouth, which offers the following advice that Trump would be wise to take:

"Of all the wars with odd names — the War of Jenkins’ Ear comes to mind — the potential one with North Korea may take its rightful place. It could be called the War of Trump’s Mouth for all the stupid and inconsistent things he has said about both China and North Korea. He needs to get the former to squeeze the latter, but he has gone about it the wrong way. China cannot be hectored.

China is the key here. It wants, above all, to keep North Korea as a buffer between it and South Korea. It does not want the regime in the north to collapse, sending thousands of refugees its way or uniting the two Koreas — and so talk in Washington of regime change is both counterproductive and just plain dumb. China prefers to live with Kim Jong Un rather than the chaos his collapse would cause in the region.

China also demands respect. . .

If China is going to tighten its noose around North Korea, it will be because it wants to avoid a war. Therefore, it has to believe that Trump is serious when he rattles his saber. But it’s hard to take Trump seriously about so many things. As China well knows, Trump early on seemed willing to abandon the one-China policy and recognize Taiwan, which Beijing considers a breakaway province. Trump backed off that pretty fast when China glowered its disapproval.

In many years and more than 50 trips to China, Henry Kissinger learned how much the Chinese crave respect and value patience. In all likelihood, they feel Trump shows little of either. He needs to lay off the tweets and slow down. Lives, not votes or ratings, are at stake."

Expect Trump to says soon: 'Nobody knew foreign policy could be so complicated'.

Trump's Big CON: His Secret Plan to Defeat ISIS

"Remember presidential candidate Donald Trump’s secret plan to defeat the Islamic State? And his boast that he knew more than the generals did about the Islamic State (thus implying he’d replace them once in office)? More campaign rhetoric crashing on the rocks of reality: The Trump administration just endorsed the core elements of former President Barack Obama’s counter-Islamic State plan, and Trump has decided that Obama’s generals weren’t so bad, either."

Read Foreign Policy, Trump’s ‘Secret Plan’ to Defeat ISIS Looks a Lot Like Obama’s.

Read also the Washington Post, Pentagon plan to defeat ISIS looks very much like Obama’s approach, which notes:

"The Pentagon is putting the final touches on a promised new counter-Islamic State strategy for Syria and Iraq, and it looks very much like the one the Obama administration pursued, according to senior defense officials."

Trump's Big CON: 'I'm the Jobs President'

UPDATE III:  "Mr. Trump himself declared upon taking office that his policies would produce 4 percent annual growth, and just this week said on Twitter to affirm that 'things are starting to kick in now.' . .

But the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s widely followed GDP Now expects the second-quarter growth figure to come in at 2.7 percent, more than a full percentage point below where it was in May, and a decline even since the beginning of the week. The New York Fed’s Nowcast is even more bearish, with an estimate of 1.9 percent for the quarter just ended and 1.6 percent for the current quarter."

Read The New York Times, Hopes of ‘Trump Bump’ for U.S. Economy Shrink as Growth Forecasts Fade.

UPDATE II:  "President Trump is touting data on the economy, telling his supporters that things are getting better for American workers. Not all professional forecasters share that enthusiasm, though, and many of them believe that this is about as good as it is going to get.

According to the average forecast among analysts surveyed by Bloomberg News, U.S. employers combined will add 165,000 workers to their payrolls a month this year, on net. That would be the slowest pace for hiring since 2010. Under President Barack Obama last year, the economy produced an average of 187,000 jobs a month.

When the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes its monthly report on hiring Friday morning with figures for June, data on the labor market will be available for the first half of the year. Through May, the average pace was 162,000 new employees a month.

That is slower than not only last year, but also the year before, when the economy added 226,000 jobs a month on average. In 2015, the monthly pace averaged 250,000."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s job growth nightmare: His first year could be slower than Obama’s last.

UPDATE:  AS A candidate for the White House, Donald Trump blasted the Ford Motor Company for planning to shift production of its leading compact car, the Focus, to Mexico. He even went so far as to threaten a huge tariff on any and all U.S. cars formerly produced in this country that might be exported from Mexico back into the United States. After Mr. Trump’s election, Ford seemed to cave by announcing it would not be building the cars in Mexico after all.

So what are we to make of the surprising facts that Ford now plans to make the Focus in President Trump’s other trade nemesis — China — and that the Trump administration’s response is, essentially, “whatever”? Ford’s move just “shows how flexible multinational companies are in terms of geography,” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross observed. You don’t say! . .

Is it too much to hope that the federal government will stop purporting to micromanage specific business-location decisions using either threats or bribes?"

Read the Washington Post, Ford’s shift to China offers the Trump administration a lesson in economics.

"Five months ago at a Boeing factory in South Carolina, President Trump proclaimed, 'We are going to fight for every last American job.'

On Thursday, workers at the North Charleston plant learned they’d soon face layoffs."

Read the Washington Post, Trump visited this Boeing factory to celebrate jobs. It just announced layoffs.

Read also:

Trump's Big CON: "More Coal Jobs", and

Trump's Big CON: Trump Lied About Stopping Jobs From Moving Overseas.

Trump's Big CON: The 'I Want The Credit, Don't Blame Me' President, Cont.

"Samsung unveiled plans Wednesday morning to open a new appliance factory in South Carolina, a move the electronics giant said will create 954 jobs in the Palmetto State over the next three years.

At a Washington event with company executives, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross praised the company for opening the $380-million plant in Newberry County and promoted President Trump's economic agenda, which includes nudging global firms to expand their manufacturing operations on American soil.

'President Trump and the Department of Commerce will continue to support these kinds of investments,' he said before news cameras at a hotel near the White House.

However, the Samsung deal was in the works before the election. The Commerce Department, meanwhile, was not directly involved in the negotiations, a department representative said. . .

Samsung first considered setting up shop in the United States about three years ago, the company said, and started talks with South Carolina last fall."

Read the Washington Post, Trump official celebrates a new Samsung factory that was planned before the election.

Read also:

It's HER Fault,

Trump's Big CON: The 'I Want The Credit, Don't Blame Me' President,

Trump's Sycophant Gingrich's Big CON: Political Hatred and Violence is the Other Party's Fault, and

Trump's Big CON: 'It's Obama's Fault'.

Trump's Big CON: He is The Middle School Bully President

UPDATE II:  The pushback starts:

"Thirty years ago, as Donald Trump gave what is widely considered to be the first campaign speech of his career, he criticized one country above all for cheating the United States in trade: Japan.

On Thursday, Japan took on the mantle of the global rules-based trading system, as it sidestepped a failing trade agreement with the United States to forge a historic new pact with the European Union.

Leaders from Japan and the European Union on Thursday announced their agreement in principle on the broad strokes of a trade deal that will cover nearly 30 percent of the global economy, 10 percent of the world's population and 40 percent of global trade.

The deal crafts a trading bloc roughly the same size as that established by the North American Free Trade Agreement, a 1994 deal between the United States, Mexico and Canada.

Coming on the eve of the Group of 20 meeting of global leaders in Hamburg, Germany, the announcement appeared to be a calculated rebuke of both the United States, which has spurned global trade agreements in favor of more protectionist policies under President Trump, and Great Britain, which voted to leave the European Union last year. . .

The deal will be a heavy blow to American producers of these goods, by making U.S.-made goods relatively more expensive and less competitive in the major markets of Japan and Europe.

Read the Washington Post, Japan and Europe counter Trump with colossal trade deal.

UPDATE:  Remember when Trump shoved a fellow NATO leader aside on his first summit.

He should expect pushback at this week's Group of 20 summit, not only will The Donald meet his master, he will get pushback from other world leaders.

Read the Washington Post, At G-20 summit, it looks more and more like Trump against the world.

"Trump is known for his tendency to deny his role in controversial events. . . While the nation is waiting to learn the truth about what Trump has or has not said and done, his stubborn denial reveals a lack of social reasoning typical of aggressive children.

Public accounts or explanations of negative events provide us with important insights about social-cognitive maturity. . .

Not only does Trump flatly deny almost every accusation leveled against him, but he also claims no personal responsibility for problems. Instead he blames others, most recently the media and the White House staff. Refusal to accept personal responsibility and a tendency to blame others are indeed trademarks of aggressive children. In fact, our research shows that aggressive children are much quicker to infer hostile intent in ambiguous situations and lash out in revenge. Blaming others is a self-enhancing defense mechanism: It protects positive self-views.

In addition to protecting his ego, Trump also tries to enhance his self-worth. What makes him look childlike are his unsubstantiated claims about his popularity. Despite the verifiable evidence, he repeatedly refers to his unprecedented electoral college victory and the unmatched size of crowds at his inauguration.

Trump’s use of self-enhancement tactics also helps explain why he feels he has been treated worse and more unfairly than any other president in history. Despite their (short-lived) popularity, most bullies are hypersensitive to negative feedback — and ironically feel mistreated.

Revealingly, in his interview with his biographer Michael D’Antonio, Trump says he is the same person as he was in first grade. He may well also be very similar to the person he was in middle school: Indeed, there are many parallels between Trump’s behavior and the facts and findings of developmental science on social reasoning and behavior."

Read the Washington Post, I study the psychology of adolescent bullies. Trump makes perfect sense to me.

Trump's Big CON: North Korea Will Not Develop a Nuclear Weapon Capable of Reaching the U.S., "It Won't Happen!"

UPDATE II:  Maybe The Donald left that secret plan at the golf course.

Early on July 4th, "Trump was spotted at his golf club in Virginia - his 36th day at a golf course as president".

Must be, because he promised he "would rarely leave the White House because there’s so much work to be done".

UPDATE:  How does a buffoon become president?

A political media allows an ignoramus to pontificate on things he knows nothing about. 

Here is a case study:

"We forget sometimes that President Trump’s political rhetoric was forged not over years of policymaking or in discussions with experts on foreign policy and domestic issues, but in weekly phone interviews with “Fox and Friends.” Before he declared his candidacy, the real estate developer and TV personality would appear on the program every Monday morning, weighing in on the issues of the day as the hosts offered their now-familiar lack of criticism of his musings. . .

[The timeline of The Donalds ignorant statements]

But, then, he’s already given himself an out on talking about what he intends to do. During a news conference in February, Trump insisted to reporters that, in essence, his plans for North Korea were none of their business.

'I don’t have to tell you. I don’t want to be one of these guys that say, ‘Yes, here’s what we’re going to do.’ I don’t have to do that. I don’t have to tell you what I’m going to do in North Korea,' he said. 'I don’t have to tell you what I’m going to do in North Korea. And I don’t have to tell you what I’m going to do with Iran. You know why? Because they shouldn’t know. And eventually, you guys are going to get tired of asking that question.'

The president’s current conundrum is twofold. First, there’s no easy solution. Second, Trump promised that there was one.

Had his policy been crafted by a team other than Fox’s early-morning talk show hosts, that second problem might not exist."

Read the Washington Post, Trump has never had a plan for dealing with North Korea.

His plan reminds me of the many other so-called secret plans he has.

But this plan may lead to a war in which millions of people are killed.

The Donald play a tough American President on American TV, but I guess North Korea hasn't been watching the show.

"Donald Trump made a bold pronouncement in the weeks before he became president that is not aging well.

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump

North Korea just stated that it is in the final stages of developing a nuclear weapon capable of reaching parts of the U.S. It won't happen!
5:05 PM - 2 Jan 2017

The U.S. government confirmed last night that North Korea successfully tested an intercontinental ballistic missile, crossing a chilling threshold and underscoring Trump’s failure to change the trajectory of dictator Kim Jong Un’s nuclear program over the past six months."

Read the Washington Post, Missile test underscores the failure of Trump’s naive approach to North Korea., which noted that:

"If [Trump] "thought a show of force would deter North Korea, he thought wrong. If anything, the president’s previous saber-rattling has only driven the regime to accelerate its efforts to build a nuclear weapon capable of striking the mainland United States. . .

Trump administration officials have been saying for months now that 'the era of strategic patience is over,' a reference to Obama’s approach, but no one has explained what exactly will replace it."

Next up: It's Obama's fault!!

Read also Trump's Big CON: It's All About the Show, North Korea Edition.

Trump's Big CON: As the 'Repeal and Replace Fraud Shows, Life Is Not All Dessert, No Vegetables

UPDATE:  "With the Republican campaign to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act now set to enter its final, frenzied push, the Indianopolis Star reports that the Indiana GOP attempted a stunt that was supposed to provide Republicans with more ammunition against the law. But the stunt went awry:

    The Indiana Republican Party posed a question to Facebook on Monday: 'What’s your Obamacare horror story? Let us know.'

    The responses were unexpected.

    'My sister finally has access to affordable quality care and treatment for her diabetes.'

    'My father’s small business was able to insure its employees for the first time ever. #thanksObama'

    'Love Obamacare!'

    'The only horror in the story is that Republicans might take it away.'…

    By 8:30 a.m. Tuesday, the Indiana GOP’s post collected more than 1,500 comments, the vast majority in support of Obamacare. . .

[W]hile the rate of pro-ACA postings should obviously not be taken as a scientific indicator of public opinion, this episode also neatly captures another larger truth about why it is proving so hard for Republicans to repeal the law: It has helped untold numbers of people, and the GOP bill would largely reverse that.

This is admittedly a simple and obvious point, yet the extraordinary lengths to which Republicans are going to obscure this basic reality continue to elude sufficient recognition. If you think about it, pretty much every major lie that President Trump and Republicans are telling right now to get their repeal-and-replace bill passed is designed to cover it up."

Read the Washington Post, A GOP stunt backfires, and accidentally reveals a truth Republicans want hidden.

"'Cutting taxes' is a perpetually appealing prospect for voters, but taking away the things those taxes pay for is far more fraught. And as Republicans consider whether their health-care bill puts their anti-tax philosophy into practice, the route they take will say a lot about who’s really in control of their party. . .

It’s an [situation for the] party that used Obamacare repeal as its unifying standard for years, but there's a gap between campaigning and governance. 'Getting government out of people’s lives' is a popular piece of rhetoric, but “getting government benefits out of people’s hands” is far harder."

Read the Washington Post, Republicans face a moment of truth on taxes.

Trump's Big CON: The Puppet Will Meet His Master

UPDATE II:  "Foreign ministries around the world are filled with anticipation over what will happen when Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump meet for the first time at the G20 summit. But veteran U.S. spies who’ve studied manipulation tactics, particularly from their Russian counterparts, are confident they know what’s going to unfold.

Putin, a former KGB operations officer, will not just be practicing interpersonal diplomacy, they say. He’ll be putting his tradecraft as a spy to work. His main asset: Trump’s massive, delicate ego.

It won’t just be the expected flattery, from the spies’ perspective, though flattery is key to dealing with the “sociopathic narcissist” tendencies one ex-CIA interrogator sees in Trump. Putin is likely to stoke Trump’s ire, encourage him against his perceived enemies and validate his inclinations – particularly the ones that move U.S. policy in the directions Putin wants."

Read the Daily Beast, How Ex-Spies Think Putin Will Sucker ‘Sociopathic Narcissist’ Trump. 

UPDATE:  Read the Washington Post, Phone taps, power plays and sarcasm: What it’s like to negotiate with Vladimir Putin, which notes: "As President Trump prepares for his first face-to-face meeting this week with Putin, in Hamburg, those who have negotiated with the Russian leader caution that Trump must be ready for a shrewd, well-prepared and implacable adversary."

Read also the Washington Post, With friends like Putin, who needs enemies?, which correctly notes:

"American presidents have a long history of trying to play personal politics with Russian leaders. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was convinced that he could charm Joseph Stalin. Ronald Reagan trusted his rapport with Mikhail Gorbachev to such an extent that he imagined the two of them joining to eliminate all nuclear weapons. Bill Clinton spent long chunks of quality time with Boris Yeltsin. And George W. Bush, of course, believed that he was 'able to get a sense of [Putin’s] soul.'

This faith in the power of schmoozing has deep roots in American politics, where a lot depends on negotiation, dialogue and dealmaking. But Moscow doesn’t work that way. Russia’s long authoritarian traditions condition it to views its relations with other countries in terms of pure power.

Russia does not have friends. It has competitors and it has vassals. Vassals are countries that pay rhetorical tribute to Moscow and follow its lead on everything that matters — usually because they are deeply dependent on Russia for security, economic support or energy supplies. It’s no coincidence that its current vassal states — such as Belarus, Armenia and Kazakhstan — are themselves corrupt autocracies, which makes it easier for the Kremlin to work with them.

Competitors, by contrast, are to be combated or tolerated. Toleration is possible but it always comes at a price. Most importantly, such a competitor must effectively eschew any criticism of Russia’s domestic affairs and pledge to respect Russia’s freedom of action within its sphere of influence abroad. Once this principle is established, the two rivals can cooperate on other issues where they share common interests. This is the sort of relationship Russia cultivates with its frenemy China, and it is, presumably, how the Kremlin envisages its ideal policy toward the United States under Trump.

Putin wants Washington to accept its role as a meddler in Russia’s self-declared sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. . .

Putin also wants the United States to lift the sanctions imposed in retaliation for Russia’s annexation of Crimea, thus restoring Russia’s freedom to act within the post-Soviet space as it sees fit. . .

Meanwhile, Moscow continues to evade responsibility for its interference in the U.S. presidential election. . .

So yes, we could certainly have a closer relationship with Russia if we wanted one — what Trump might even call a 'friendship,' though Putin wouldn’t look at it that way. But such a deal would come at a huge cost. It would jolt our already shaky ties with our allies, allow Russia license to continue undermining Western democratic institutions and call into question our commitment to our own democratic values — not to mention it would reward Assad for the deaths of about half a million of his own citizens.

Russia doesn’t want us to be its friend; it wants us to be its enabler. Trump may be incapable of understanding this (and if he is, the result could be a disaster). But the rest of us should never forget it."

UPDATE:  "Putin, a former KGB officer who specialized in what the Russians call “political technology,” is the arch manipulator—“deft at psyching people out” as a former U.S. official put it—and his meetings with foreign leaders are frequently notable occasions. Putin brought his Labrador, Konni, to his first meeting with Angela Merkel, who has a lifelong fear of dogs. In his first meeting with Nicholas Sarkozy, he personally threatened to 'smash' the French leader 'to pieces,' leaving him dazed and confused in the press conference that followed. Famously, Putin bonded with George W. Bush over their shared Christianity by telling him a story about how his crucifix was blessed by his mother in Jerusalem and was subsequently the only item to survive a fire in the family Dacha. This tale infamously prompted Bush to say he saw into Putin’s soul. . .

Trump is no ordinary president. He is unique in every way. He is unique ideologically in that he is the only U.S. president to object to the postwar liberal international order, especially on trade, alliances and values. He is unique temperamentally, becoming a sycophant when praised and an enemy when slighted. His foreign counterparts will remember how he was manipulated by Saudi Arabia into siding with Riyadh against Qatar over the objections of his secretary of state. And he is unique in how he processes information. He has a short attention span, a limited interest in detailed briefings and a fondness for cable news. The pattern is fairly clear by now. Most of the time, his mainstream advisers can box him in, but it is hardest when he is center stage, either in a crisis or on a foreign trip. Poland and Hamburg provide the next test. "

Read Politico, Trump Wants a Do-Over in Europe.

The Donald will soon meet Putin.

But "Mr. Trump’s advisers have yet to devise a set of talking points for the closely watched meeting, a process made all the more difficult given the cloud of suspicion hanging over the president and his own propensity to go off-script.

It is rare and potentially risky for an American president to go into such a consequential meeting with another world leader — particularly one like Mr. Putin, a forceful and persuasive figure — with so little preparation on what policy objectives he wants to pursue, said Michael A. McFaul, who served as the United States ambassador to Russia under President Barack Obama.

'Mr. Trump may not be preparing in terms of deliverables or outcomes that he seeks, but you can bet that Mr. Putin is,' said Mr. McFaul, who as the chief Russia specialist at the National Security Council in 2009 prepared Mr. Obama for his first meeting with then-President Dmitry A. Medvedev of Russia.

'The big danger with Trump and his instincts is that he often defines a ‘good meeting’ or a friendly encounter as a positive outcome of a meeting with a head of state, and with Putin — where we have a big agenda, and a lot of it’s adversarial — he’s got that backward,' Mr. McFaul said."

Read The New York Times, Trump to Meet With Putin at G-20 Gathering Next Week.

Read also the Daily Beast, Spies Fear Trump’s First Meeting With Putin, which states:

"Moscow believes its leader, ex-spy master Vladimir Putin, can extract major concessions from President Donald Trump when the two meet for the first time next week, European officials tell The Daily Beast.

The officials say their intelligence indicates Putin thinks he can outmaneuver Trump at the G-20 summit, playing on promises of cooperation on areas like counterterrorism to win concessions like a reduction in the raft of sanctions against Russia."

In other words, Our Child President is about to get spanked.

Read also Trump's Big CON: He is Putin's Puppet.