Trump's Big CON: Товарищ Trump Colluded With a Hostile Power to Win the Election

UPDATE IV:  Товарищ Trump met with the Russians, parroted what they said, directly and publicly encouraged their hacking, assistance and interference, felt no remorse, then tried to stop the investigation.

"Clint Watts, Robert A. Fox Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, began raising alarms about Russian measures to influence the American public's political views shortly after Trump's press conference.

'Once you see both the campaign echoing the messages and themes that are coming out from RT and Sputnik News, when you see hacked materials of the DNC strategically linked and timed in terms of their release to influence the U.S. election in favor of Trump, then when you see Trump get onto stages or make prepared speeches where he refers to both Russia and Clinton's emails, it seems very ominous, in terms of maybe there was some connection between the two,' said Watts. 'At a minimum, they were at least looking or aware of those lines or influenced by Russian propaganda to be saying it almost near verbatim throughout those months.'

Whether Trump was a witting or unwitting beneficiary of Russia's efforts hasn't been proven, but as Watts sees it, Russia benefited from the way candidate Trump ran his campaign.

'The bottom line is Russian active measures were deployed to influence the U.S. election,' Watts said, referring to the effort to discredit the political system and turn voters against Clinton. 'They worked in large part because one candidate used Russian active measures to his own benefit.'"

Read NPR, Timeline Of Trump And Russia In Mid-2016: A Series Of Coincidences Or Something More?

UPDATE III:  "The key insight from a week of gobsmacking revelations is not that the Russia scandal may finally have an underlying crime but that, as David Brooks suggests, 'over the past few generations the Trump family built an enveloping culture that is beyond good and evil.' (Remember when the media collectively oohed and ahhed that, 'Say what you will about Donald Trump, but his kids are great!'? Add that to the heap of inane media narratives that helped normalize Trump to the voters.) We now see that, sure enough, the Trump legal team (the fastest-growing segment of the economy) has trouble restraining its clients, explaining away initial, false explanations and preventing self-incriminating statements. (The biggest trouble, of course, is that the president lied that this is all 'fake news' and arguably committed obstruction of justice to hide his campaign team’s misdeeds.)

Let me suggest the real problem is not the Trump family, but the GOP. To paraphrase Brooks, 'It takes generations to hammer ethical considerations out of a [party’s] mind and to replace them entirely with the ruthless logic of winning and losing.' Again, to borrow from Brooks, beyond partisanship the GOP evidences 'no attachment to any external moral truth or ethical code.' . .

Indeed, for decades now, demonization — of gays, immigrants, Democrats, the media, feminists, etc. — has been the animating spirit behind much of the right. It has distorted its assessment of reality, giving us anti-immigrant hysteria, promulgating disrespect for the law (how many 'respectable' conservatives suggested disregarding the Supreme Court’s decision on gay marriage?), elevating Fox News hosts’ blatantly false propaganda as the counterweight to liberal media bias and preventing serious policy debate. For seven years, the party vilified Obamacare without an accurate assessment of its faults and feasible alternative plans. 'Obama bad' or 'Clinton bad' became the only credo — leaving the party, as Brooks said of the Trump clan, with 'no attachment to any external moral truth or ethical code' — and no coherent policies for governing.

We have always had in our political culture narcissists, ideologues and flimflammers, but it took the 21st-century GOP to put one in the White House. It took elected leaders such as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and the Republican National Committee (not to mention its donors and activists) to wave off Trump’s racists attacks on a federal judge, blatant lies about everything from 9/11 to his own involvement in birtherism, replete evidence of disloyalty to America (i.e. Trump’s 'Russia first' policies), misogyny, Islamophobia, ongoing potential violations of the Constitution’s emoluments clause (along with a mass of conflicts of interests), firing of an FBI director, and now, evidence that the campaign was willing to enlist a foreign power to defeat Clinton in the presidential election.

Out of its collective sense of victimhood came the GOP’s disdain for not just intellectuals but also intellectualism, science, Economics 101, history and constitutional fidelity. If the Trump children became slaves to money and to their father’s unbridled ego, then the GOP became slaves to its own demons and false narratives. A party that has to deny climate change and insist illegal immigrants are creating a crime wave — because that is what 'conservatives' must believe, since liberals do not — is a party that will deny Trump’s complicity in gross misconduct. It’s a party as unfit to govern as Trump is unfit to occupy the White House. It’s not by accident that Trump chose to inhabit the party that has defined itself in opposition to reality and to any 'external moral truth or ethical code.'" [Emphasis added.]

Read the Washington Post, The GOP’s moral rot is the problem, not Donald Trump Jr.

UPDATE II: "Donald Trump Jr. is seeking to write off as a nonevent his meeting last year with a Russian lawyer who was said to have damaging information about Hillary Clinton. “It was such a nothing,” he told Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Tuesday. “There was nothing to tell.”

But everything we know about the meeting — from whom it involved to how it was set up to how it unfolded — is in line with what intelligence analysts would expect an overture in a Russian influence operation to look like. It bears all the hallmarks of a professionally planned, carefully orchestrated intelligence soft pitch designed to gauge receptivity, while leaving room for plausible deniability in case the approach is rejected. And the Trump campaign’s willingness to take the meeting — and, more important, its failure to report the episode to U.S. authorities — may have been exactly the green light Russia was looking for to launch a more aggressive phase of intervention in the U.S. election campaign. . .

And here, the deal should have been obvious to everyone. Moscow intended to discredit Clinton and help get Trump elected, and in exchange it hoped the Republican would consider its interests — in sanctions relief and otherwise. The Russian government appears to have signaled its direct involvement and real intention in advance of the meeting, presumably to avoid the possibility that its offer might be misconstrued, perhaps naively, as an innocent gesture of support and nothing more. . .

Had this Russian overture been rejected or promptly reported by the Trump campaign to U.S. authorities, Russian intelligence would have been forced to recalculate the risk vs. gain of continuing its aggressive operation to influence U.S. domestic politics. Russian meddling might have been compromised in its early stages and stopped in its tracks by U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies before it reached fruition by the late fall.

So the suggestion that this was a nothing meeting without consequence is, in all likelihood, badly mistaken."

Read the Washington Post, Trump Jr.’s Russia meeting sure sounds like a Russian intelligence operation.  

UPDATE:  The collusion centipede drops another shoe:

"The Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. and others on the Trump team after a promise of compromising material on Hillary Clinton was accompanied by a Russian-American lobbyist — a former Soviet counterintelligence officer who is suspected by some U.S. officials of having ongoing ties to Russian intelligence, NBC News has learned.."

Read NBC News, Former Soviet Counterintelligence Officer at Meeting With Donald Trump Jr. and Russian Lawyer.

Drip, drip, drip!

"Given what we know about the collusion — and there is no other word for it — between then-candidate Donald Trump’s most senior advisers and what they thought was a Kremlin-tied lawyer offering dirt on Hillary Clinton, the most shocking thing is that no one on the Trump side was shocked. The most offensive thing is that no one took offense. Trump’s son, son-in-law and campaign manager treated the offer of aid by a hostile foreign power to tilt an election as just another day at the office. “I think many people would have held that meeting,” the president affirmed. It is the banality of this corruption that makes it so appalling. The president and his men are incapable of feeling shame about shameful things.

Donald Jr. certainly doesn’t know what all the fuss is about. Instead of offering a hint of contrition, he offered a complaint that the proffered information was not particularly useful. “I applaud his transparency,” father said of son. But disclosure is not really a virtue if you are admitting highly unethical actions without apology. It is more like the public confession of serious wrongdoing, and the attempted normalization of sliminess.

The ultimate explanation for this toxic moral atmosphere is President Trump himself. He did not attend the meeting, but he is fully responsible for creating and marketing an ethos in which victory matters more than character and real men write their own rules. Trumpism is an easygoing belief system that indulges and excuses the stiffing of contractors, the conning of students, the bilking of investors, the exploitation of women and the practices of nepotism and self-dealing. A faith that makes losing a sin will make cheating a sacrament.

Republicans have sometimes employed the excuse that members of the Trump team are new to politics — babes in the woods — who don’t yet understand all the ins and outs. Their innocence, the argument goes, is proved by their guilt. This might apply to minor infractions of campaign finance law. It does not cover egregious acts of wrongdoing. Putting a future president in the debt of a foreign power — and subject, presumably, to blackmail by that power — is the height of sleazy stupidity. It is not a mistake born of greenness; it is evidence of a vacant conscience. . .

In the realm of political ethics, voters last year did not prioritize character in sufficient numbers, during the party primaries or the general election. Now we are seeing the result. " [Emphasis added.]

Read the Washington Post, An administration without a conscience.

Trump's Big CON: 'I'll Grow the Economy & Balance the Budget'

UPDATE: Obama's was bigger than Trump's, GDP growth that is!

"President Trump received his first official estimate Thursday of how his proposals would affect the economy. The results were mediocre — especially compared with the numbers for President Barack Obama while he was in office.

Trump's proposals so far would only add about 0.1 percentage points to growth in gross domestic product, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). That would increase the pace of GDP growth to just 1.9 percent a year, much slower than the 3 percent administration officials have promised.

After a decade, GDP would only be about 0.7 percent greater if Trump's proposals were enacted, the CBO predicted. Obama's plans would have expanded GDP by substantially more. For instance, the budget he put forward in 2014 would have increased overall economic activity by 2.1 percent after a decade, the CBO said at the time."

Read the Washington Post, Let’s take a look at how the CBO thinks Trump’s proposals stack up against Obama’s.

It's easy to make false promises using rosy scenarios.

"The Congressional Budget Office said Thursday that President Trump’s first budget plan would not eliminate the deficit over 10 years or expand the economy at all by 2021, casting doubt on the administration's controversial economic assumptions that were supposed to bolster key arguments for the White House’s agenda over the next year.

The CBO projected that the sweeping spending reductions on anti-poverty programs, housing, environmental protection and a number of other initiatives that the White House wants to cull back would still not be enough to eliminate the deficit by 2027.

In that year, the deficit would be $720 billion under the White House's budget, the CBO said. The White House asserted the government would have a budget surplus in 2027 if its policies were enacted, bringing in more money through revenue than it spent. That's a gap of more than $700 billion in just one year between the CBO and White House.

This contrasts sharply with the White House’s internal estimates, which argued that cutting taxes would create an economic boom that solved many of the country’s budget problems.

The White House also estimated that its budget changes would lead the economy to grow by 3 percent per year. The CBO found, however, that economic growth would average only 1.9 percent per year under the White House's plan."

Read the Washington Post, White House budget wouldn’t eliminate deficit or do much to expand economy, CBO says.

Trump doesn't read much, so it is helpful to him that the article included two graphs:

Trump's Big CON: Incompetence and Mismanagement Aggravated by Nepotism and Dishonesty, Trump, You're Fired!

UPDATE III:  So how did this happen?

"Trump’s embrace of a kind of nepotism that’s historically been more common in banana republics than the first world continues to backfire on him — creating a myriad of legal and political headaches. And they’re probably only going to get worse."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s children become bigger liabilities for the White House, complicate damage-control efforts.

 

UPDATE II:  So The Donald Jr., "received an email from an acquaintance asking explicitly whether he’d be interested in the Russian government’s help in the campaign, and instead of responding, 'Please don’t contact me again' and informing the FBI, he said, 'If it’s what you say I love it' and forwarded the email on to his father’s closest adviser (also his brother-in-law, Jared Kushner) and the campaign’s chairman, who apparently both had the same response. . .


[In addition,] Kushner forgot to list the meeting when he filled out those forms, just as he forgot to list other meetings he had with influential Russian figures — oops! I suppose he thought no one would notice. But they did, and the result is this explosion.

Not that it should be shocking to learn that Kushner screwed up. By many accounts, he’s a walking caricature of the entitled white guy who thinks the silver spoon he was born with was actually bestowed upon him as a reward for his uncommon brilliance (read here about how his father likely bought Jared’s admission to Harvard University with a well-timed $2.5 million donation). Like the Trump boys, Kushner never had to make it on his own — he was given every privilege a rich kid’s son can have, then went to work in the family business. Yet his father-in-law believes Kushner is such an extraordinary talent that he can reinvent government, reform the criminal justice system, solve the opioid epidemic and achieve peace in the Middle East."

Read the Washington Post, The Trump White House is a confederacy of dingbats.

UPDATE: "The Trumps are congenitally unable to take personal responsibility.

'In retrospect, I probably would have done things a little differently,' Donald Trump Jr. told Sean Hannity on Fox News last night.

But don’t mistake that for a mea culpa. Because it wasn’t. The president’s namesake dismissed his sitdown last summer with someone he believed to be an agent of the Russian government as 'a nothing.' . .

Trump Jr. posted on Twitter earlier in the day what he claimed was the entirety of the exchange in which he agreed to take a meeting with a 'Russian government attorney' who could provide damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of 'Russia and its government’s support' for his dad’s presidential campaign.

'The email exchange showed clearly that Trump Jr. understood he was taking the meeting as a way of channeling information directly from the government of a nation hostile to the United States to his father’s campaign,' Rosalind S. Helderman and John Wagner note. 'It is the most concrete public evidence to date suggesting that top Trump campaign aides were eager for Russia’s assistance in the campaign. [Music publicist Rob] Goldstone offered to send the information directly to Trump, who had then largely sealed the Republican nomination for president, but said that because the information was ‘ultra sensitive’ he wanted to contact Trump Jr. first instead.'

[Ironically,] Donald Sr.’s rationale for seeking the presidency was his competence as a manager. Many voters assumed that because he is rich and once hosted a successful reality-television show, Trump could effectively lead an organization. The more details that emerge about how his campaign really operated behind the scenes — and how paralyzed his White House is now — the clearer it becomes that the president is in way over his head.

Even more than in normal organizations, the person at the top of any campaign or White House sets the tone that everyone else follows. When the leader plays fast and loose with the rules and the truth, it creates a problematic culture.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who believes Trump Jr. needs to testify before Congress as soon as possible, said yesterday that no one on his 2008 presidential campaign would have ever agreed to take such a meeting. 'Another shoe drops from the centipede every few days,' the Arizona senator told The Weekly Standard. 'I can assure you the people around me would not be inclined to do that kind of thing, especially not one of my sons. 'Cause my sons — they're in the military. You know, they'd probably be court-martialed.' . .

[Trump and his family are] blaming others for problems they themselves are responsible for creating. It’s the continuation of a pattern that goes back decades."

Read the Washington Post, Trump dysfunction follows family from the campaign to the White House.

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,

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

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

"'Rookie mistake': the all-purpose defense of the Trump White House. . .

There have been enough rookie errors to send this whole team back to Double-A ball. The longer this goes on — we’re now six months into Trump’s term — the less it looks like growing pains than incompetence and mismanagement aggravated by nepotism and dishonesty.

Returning from three weeks abroad, I’ve been catching up on developments at home. These weeks, though highly abnormal by usual standards, were fairly typical of the Trump presidency. Mistakes and outrages are so common that we become numb to them. But stack three weeks of the embarrassments together and the cumulative effect makes it plain that this is amateur hour for the greatest nation on Earth".

Read the Washington Post, This is no ‘rookie mistake.’ The Trump team shouldn’t even be on the field.

The article includes a list of some of Trump's 'Rookie mistakes'.

These people are TOO STUPID to be running the country.

Trump's Big CON: BREAKING NEWS: The Donald Knew About His Son's Meeting With the Russian Agent, and It's Purpose

UPDATE V:  "When, over the past fortnight, President Trump’s ludicrous suggestion — since walked back — that the United States should form a cybersecurity operation with Russia is not the top story and the continued discombobulation of the GOP hardly makes the top five stories, one grasps the degree to which this presidency is crumbling before our eyes.

Forget achieving its pipe dream of repealing and replacing Obamacare. Never mind the silly insistence from Trump advisers Gary Cohn and H.R. McMaster that the United States really isn’t suffering from the worst decline in international prestige and power since the end of the Vietnam War. The pressing issue is now under what circumstances the presidency will collapse and whether — in layman’s, if not legal, terms — his family and campaign behaved treacherously in seeking help from a hostile foreign power. . .

[We have an] unmistakable and irremovable scandal — a web of collusion, lies and coverup — that suggests there is no way to move beyond this, no remedy or resolution that provides the Trump White House with a clean bill of legal and political health.

Republicans’ willingness to accept even national betrayal — that’s what Trump Jr. was willing to undertake, after all — will disgrace the party and its leaders for years, if not permanently. It is a party no longer capable of defending our national interests and Constitution from foreign enemies.

As an aside, the view of America from across the Atlantic is a brew of dumbfoundedness and disgust, a creeping sense that the world’s greatest democracy is in a tailspin led by a malicious crackpot. At least Americans and our European friends can agree on that." [Emphasis added.]

Read the Washington Post, Neither Trump nor the GOP will recover anytime soon.

UPDATE IV:  "The Russia scandal has entered a new phase, and there’s no going back.

For six months, the White House claimed that this scandal was nothing more than innuendo about Trump campaign collusion with Russia in meddling in the 2016 election. Innuendo for which no concrete evidence had been produced. . .

The evidence is now shown. This is not hearsay, not fake news, not unsourced leaks. This is an email chain released by Donald Trump Jr. himself. A British go-between writes that there’s a Russian government effort to help Trump Sr. win the election, and as part of that effort he proposes a meeting with a 'Russian government attorney' possessing damaging information on Hillary Clinton. Moreover, the Kremlin is willing to share troves of incriminating documents from the Crown Prosecutor. (Error: Britain has a Crown Prosecutor. Russia has a Prosecutor General.)

Donald Jr. emails back. 'I love it.' Fatal words.

Once you’ve said 'I’m in,' it makes no difference that the meeting was a bust, that the intermediary brought no such goods. What matters is what Donald Jr. thought going into the meeting, as well as Jared Kushner and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, who were forwarded the correspondence, invited to the meeting, and attended. . .

It’s rather pathetic to hear Trump apologists protesting that it’s no big deal . . .

This defense is pathetic for two reasons. First, have the Trumpites not been telling us for six months that no collusion ever happened? And now they say: Sure it happened. So what? Everyone does it.

What’s left of your credibility when you make such a casual about-face?

Second, no, not everyone does it. It’s one thing to be open to opposition research dug up in Indiana. But not dirt from Russia, a hostile foreign power that has repeatedly invaded its neighbors (Georgia, Crimea, eastern Ukraine), that buzzes our planes and ships in international waters, that opposes our every move and objective around the globe. Just last week the Kremlin killed additional U.N. sanctions we were looking to impose on North Korea for its ICBM test.

[Y]ou don’t need a lawyer to see that the Trump defense — collusion as a desperate Democratic fiction designed to explain away a lost election — is now officially dead. "

Read the Washington Post, Bungled collusion is still collusion.

UPDATE III:  "Investigators believe that as Election Day approached, Russian trolls and 'bots' flooded the social media accounts of key voters in swing states with 'fake news' and disinformation about Clinton, according to a report Wednesday by McClatchy .

How would the Russians know which voters to target, down to the precinct level, in states such as Wisconsin and Michigan? This is a question that surely will be posed to Kushner, since at the time he happened to be overseeing a sophisticated digital campaign operation that tracked voters at a granular level."

Read the Washington Post, Ivanka and Jared begin the plunge from grace, which also noted that:

"Kushner was at the meeting [Trump Jr. arranged with Veselnitskaya ], too, however, and he had oversight of the campaign’s digital operations. That could be a problem, given the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia interfered with the election and that the meddling took place largely in cyberspace.

And unlike the other participants, Kushner has an official position in the Trump administration. He serves in the White House as a senior adviser to the president with responsibility for numerous high-profile initiatives — and with a top-secret security clearance, which should be revoked immediately.

Trump Jr. says that Kushner didn’t stay long at the session with Veselnitskaya and that no damaging information about Clinton was imparted. But because he kept the meeting secret for more than a year, scoffing indignantly at the very notion of collusion with the Russians, and then twice lied about the nature of the meeting before finally coming clean, no one should believe another word that Trump Jr. says on the subject. At least, not until special counsel Robert S. Mueller III puts him under oath, which I believe is likely to happen.

At one point in his changing story, Trump Jr. said that Kushner and Manafort didn’t even know what the meeting was about. Yet he copied both of them on an email chain that begins with an intermediary’s offer of campaign help from the 'Russian government.' The proper thing to do would have been to call the FBI, but this crowd knows nothing of propriety.

The Veselnitskaya encounter was one of more than 100 meetings or phone calls with foreigners that somehow slipped Kushner’s mind when he applied for his security clearance. He revealed this one in one of his subsequent efforts to amend the form."

And there is more evidence that the purpose of the meeting was to establish a relationship between Trump and the Russian government, and everyone, including Trump, knew it.

Read the Washington Post, Sorry, Mr. President: By the time your son walked into that meeting, the damage was already done.

It's pretty clear now there was collusion and an attempted coverup.

UPDATE II: THIS IS INCREDIBLE,there may have been more than just that meeting.

"At McClatchy, Peter Stone and Greg Gordon report today that Congressional and Justice Department investigators are looking at whether the Trump campaign, and in particular its digital operation that compiled detailed data for targeting voters with campaign messaging, worked with Russian operatives to help them identify precincts where Hillary Clinton could be vulnerable.

Investigators are seeking to determine whether this coordination took place, and whether it was done with the goal of helping Russian trolls and bots target voters, via social media, with false and disparaging stories about Clinton.

To put this more simply, federal investigators are looking at whether the Trump campaign helped Russia disseminate 'fake news.'

This remarkable new revelation comes just as the Trump administration appears poised to ramp up its own campaign against the news media. Which means we are about to enter a new phase of escalation in Trump’s 'fake news' wars, in which he will counter reports about investigations into whether his campaign coordinated with Russia to spread actually fake news by calling those reports 'fake news.'  . .

The goal is obvious: To produce an army of viewers and readers who are essentially programmed to dismiss any coverage of the Russia investigation that does not immediately exonerate Trump and all members of his campaign team. In a sense, the Trump team is attempting to pull off something similar to what the Russians did during the campaign: Inundate receptive audiences with disinformation that simultaneously cements a pro-Trump narrative and wreaks havoc on the audience’s trust in real media sources.

That Russian effort — and its possible overlap with the Trump team’s strategy during the campaign — is now the target of congressional probes. As McClatchy notes, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, recently hinted that investigators are looking hard at the Russian effort to flood the zone with 'fake news.' Russians, he said, targeted women and African-Americans in Wisconsin and Michigan before the election, while 'the Democrats were too brain dead to realize those states were even in play.' Voters’ Facebook and Twitter feeds in these states were 'overwhelmed,' said Warner, with stories about Clinton being 'sick' or having stolen money from the State Department.

Did the Trump campaign help the Russians figure out who to target with these false and misleading stories? Investigators are hoping to find out. In the meantime, Trump and his allies seem ready to use the same sort of tactics — this time, spreading disparaging stories not about Clinton, but about reporters who cover the Russia investigation — and to use social media and friendly media outlets outlets to amplify them.

It’s hard to say where this will all end up. Perhaps Trump may end up sinking, and all the cries of 'fake news' in the world won’t help stop it. Or perhaps he will have some success in further damaging the image and credibility of the press in the minds of voters. Whatever happens, it’s going to get very, very ugly. Regardless of whether Trump succeeds in exonerating himself and his team, there’s little doubt that he will sow division and distrust in our institutions, in the process helping to accomplish something that was perhaps a larger goal of Russian interference than even getting Trump elected."

Read the Washington Post, We’re about to enter a whole new phase of ‘Fake News’ craziness. 

UPDATE: "But each time President Trump hits a new low — a racist outburst, a vulgar tweet, shabby treatment of women — commentators invariably state that this one will be the tipping point, the time when Republicans bail on the man who is undermining their party, and conservatism, and American values. Each time, such expectations meet the same fate: Wrong!

And this time, sure enough, the Silence of the Republicans has been profound. . .

Republicans abandoning Trump tend to be those who don’t answer to voters. Congressman-cum-MSNBC host Joe Scarborough told Stephen Colbert on Tuesday that he was quitting the GOP over officials’ refusal to disown Trump. 'What have you heard from Republican leaders today?' Scarborough asked. 'Nothing. There’s always silence.'

Alas, Scarborough didn’t object to Trump when it could have done the most good, in the early months of the campaign. His show, 'Morning Joe,' boosted Trump’s candidacy with chummy coverage and free airtime in the form of friendly call-in interviews. My colleague Erik Wemple wrote at the time that the show veered from 'journalism into the friendly confines of a morning social club.' After Trump won the New Hampshire primary, the candidate thanked Scarborough and his colleagues, calling them 'supporters,' then 'believers.'

Democratic leaders remarked Wednesday on the silent majority. If the situation were reversed, Rep. Linda T. Sánchez (Calif.) said, 'they’d be screaming to the rafters about the need for prosecutions.'

'Firing squads,' added Rep. Joseph Crowley, the House Democratic Caucus chairman from New York. 'All we’re hearing right now is crickets.'

Crickets — and a centipede that keeps dropping shoes."

Read the Washington Post, The lights go out on the Republican Party. 

 "It was June 7, 2016, and Donald Trump stood on the stage at his Westchester County, N.Y., golf club to launch his general-election race against Hillary Clinton with a big promise.

'I am going to give a major speech,' Trump declared, before his gaze drifted away from the prepared remarks on the teleprompter at the close of an unusually subdued primary-night speech. 'Probably Monday of next week. And we’re going to be discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons.

'I think you’re going to find it very informative and very, very interesting,' he added.

Hours earlier, his son Donald Jr. hit send on an email confirming a meeting with a lawyer with alleged ties to the Russian government with the promise of damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

The meeting occurred two days later on June 9 in Trump Tower, attended by Trump’s chief campaign strategist, Paul Manafort, and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. But it was a disappointment, according to Trump Jr., who said this week that the Russians didn’t have what they promised.

And the major speech about the Clintons that Trump promised never materialized." [Emphasis added.]

Read the Washington Post, ‘A million miles per hour’: Inside Trump’s campaign when Trump Jr. met with Russian lawyer.

Read also The New York Times, Conspiracy or Coincidence? A Timeline Open to Interpretation, which includes a chronology of Rusian related Trump campaign statements, actions, and events in June and July 2016, and notes:

"As a candidate, the elder Mr. Trump, who had expressed admiration of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, took positions that summer that caused head scratching. He expressed openness to lifting sanctions on Russia that were imposed after its annexation of Crimea, and suggested he might not defend NATO allies that did not spend enough money on their own security. The Republican platform at the party convention in July 2016 was crafted to keep out a call to provide arms to Ukraine to fight pro-Russian separatists."

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

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.