The Donald is Putin's Puppet

UPDATE XVII:  Now obstruction of justice and coverup.

Read the Washington Post, White House adviser asked FBI to dispute Russia reports.

It's déjà vu Nixon all over again!

And like Nixon, Trump doesn't like it.

Read the Washington Post, The big news is not the FBI leaks. It’s what’s in the leaks.

UPDATE XVI:  "The Trump-Russia file, which concerns fundamental questions of national security, is far more deserving of close scrutiny by Congress, the media, law enforcement, and the public than any of the White House’s many other alleged misdeeds. And the Flynn phone calls are only the beginning, not the end, of the scandal in question."

Read Foreign Policy, Donald Trump’s Russia Scandal Is Just Getting Started.

UPDATE XV: Read the Washington Post, Why Flynn was undone by a phone call, which notes:

"The call may not necessarily be the smoking gun, the ultimate 'proof' that there was a quid pro quo: 'You help us with the election, we help you by lifting sanctions.' But it sure looks like it could be.

That explains why Flynn lied about the call to the vice president, and to the press. That explains why — although he has known about this issue for many weeks — the president did not fire Flynn earlier. That also explains why the president has expressed regret about the leak of the transcript of the call but not about the fact that Flynn made the call in the first place. That also explains why Flynn resigned."

UPDATE XIV:  "President Trump's national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn . . . had discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with Moscow's ambassador in Washington prior to Trump's inauguration. Flynn, according to intelligence sources, likely signaled that the question of sanctions would be revisited by a more friendly Trump administration.

The discussions suggest a worrying level of collusion between a key figure in the new administration and the Kremlin. . .

Flynn's dealings with Russia aside, there are even deeper ties that connect the current administration to the Kremlin.

First, there surely is more to come on the extent of Russian involvement in last year's election, with law enforcement agencies in the United States increasingly certain that Moscow actively worked to help Trump win. The Russian establishment, including close Putin allies, publicly basked in Trump's victory. Now, some Pentagon officials say they have 'assumed that the Kremlin has ears' inside the White House ever since Trump's inauguration, according to controversial former counterintelligence official John Schindler.

Beyond the intrigues of spies, though, there's also a clear ideological affinity."

Read the Washington Post, Beyond Flynn, other ties bind the White House to the Kremlin. 

UPDATE XIII: Read CNN, Intel chiefs presented Trump with claims of Russian efforts to compromise him.

Read also The New York Times, Trump Briefed on Claim That Russia Had Secrets on Him.

BTW, this story has more corroboration than Republi-CON pizzagate or the birther scam.

UPDATE XII:  The Donald is ever the consummate con man.

Read the Washington Post, Trump alleges delay in his briefing on ‘so-called’ Russian hacking; U.S. official says there wasn’t one.

UPDATE XI:  The Donald's ode to Putin:



Listen to the lyrics, or read them here. This song foretells The Donald's relationship with Putin.

UPDATE X: In Europe in the 1930s "there was throughout [the land] a generalized crisis of legitimacy. Large numbers of people felt dispossessed, disenfranchised, disconnected from dominant social institutions. The political party system, and . . . government more generally, were regarded as corrupt and oligarchic. Such an environment was fertile ground for a ‘mob mentality,’ in which outsiders . . . could be scapegoated and a savior could be craved: 'The mob always will shout for 'the strong man,' the 'great leader.' For the mob hates the society from which it is excluded, as well as [government] where it is not represented.'

And a society suffused with resentment, according to Arendt, is ripe for manipulation by the propaganda of sensationalist demagogues: 'What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part . . . Totalitarian propaganda thrives on this escape from reality into fiction . . . [and] can outrageously insult common sense only where common sense has lost its validity.' Cynicism. Contempt for truth. Appeal to the craving of the masses for simple stories of malevolent conspiracy."

Read the Washington Post, How Hannah Arendt’s classic work on totalitarianism illuminates today’s America.

Sounds a lot like America today.

UPDATE IX:  "Put his campaign rhetoric, tweets and appointments all together, and we’re getting a sense of U.S. foreign policy under Donald Trump. The president-elect has consistently signaled that he wants to be accommodating toward Russia and get tough on China. But that sees the world almost backward. China is, for the most part, comfortable with the U.S.-led international system. Russia is trying to upend it. . .

Keep in mind that China’s view of the world over the past two decades has been fundamentally benign, having grown to wealth and power in that period. Putin, by contrast, believes that the end of Soviet communism in 1989 was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century” and that Russia has been humiliated ever since. His goal appears to be to overturn the U.S.-created international order, even if this means chaos.

The question is, why would an American president-elect help Moscow achieve that goal?"

Read the Washington Post, Vladimir Putin wants a new world order. Why would Donald Trump help him?

The answer: simply to get elected. Winning elections is the only thing  Republi-CONs care about, principle no longer matters.

Read also The New York Times, Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?, which argues convincingly that The Donald show classic dictatorial tendencies. 

The more that this is analyzed, the scarier it get.

UPDATE VIII:  "Russia’s secret hacking against Democratic Party officials threatened the integrity of the U.S. political system. And President-elect Donald Trump shouldn’t have criticized the CIA after its analysts told Congress about the Kremlin’s efforts. Trump, unbelievably, seemed to be taking a potential adversary’s side against his own nation’s intelligence professionals. . .

[N]o doubt the Russians wanted to hurt Clinton and help Trump. In Russia’s eyes, he said, Clinton had sought to undermine President Vladimir Putin after the 2011 parliamentary elections and to foment 'color revolutions' in areas of Russian influence. Trump, by contrast, had lauded Putin, suggested lifting sanctions and belittled NATO."

Read the Washington Post, Trump is playing a risky spy game.

UPDATE VII: "Trump has repeatedly expressed a soft spot for an oppressive dictator, Vladimir Putin, who is challenging American interests at every turn. As a candidate, Trump publicly invited Russia to hack his opponent’s emails. Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, resigned amid reports that he had represented pro-Russian interests as a lobbyist. Trump’s choice for national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, seems to be a Russophile and has appeared on Russia’s propaganda network.

In 2008, Donald Trump Jr. admitted that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.” President-elect Trump has consistently refused to be fully transparent about his finances.

Before the presidential vote, the American intelligence community determined that the Russian government directed the illegal hacking of the Democratic National Committee and other political figures. Now the CIA, according to reporting in The Post, has shared with Congress its finding that Russia intervened with the intent of swinging the election toward Trump. And Trump — instead of expressing concern about an act of cyberwar — has essentially come to Russia’s defense and launched an ad hominem attack on the U.S. intelligence community. . .

[I]f the CIA interpretation is correct, this is not just one provocation among many. If Putin actually helped elect an American president more favorable to Russian interests, it is surely the largest intelligence coup since the cracking of the Enigma code during World War II. And it is arguably a bigger deal — more on par with, say, German intelligence helping elect Charles Lindbergh president."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s dangerous diss of the CIA.

UPDATE VI: "Good Lord. We are about to inaugurate as president a man whose election, according to the CIA, was aided by a Russian intelligence operation. Try as we might, we cannot pretend this didn’t happen.

We can’t ignore outrageous interference by an adversarial foreign power because President-elect Donald Trump’s actions question his own legitimacy, or at least his fitness to hold the nation’s highest office, virtually every day. . .

Our president is supposed to be chosen in polling places across the United States — not behind the imposing walls of the Kremlin."

Read the Washington Post, Trump is assembling an anti-government. Did Russia help get him here?

UPDATE V:  "You would think the stunning news that the CIA had concluded Russia hacked the Democrats to help President-elect Donald Trump win the election, followed by Trump’s insulting dismissal of 17 intelligence agencies finding that Russia was responsible — which in turn was followed by news he intended to nominate as secretary of state an unqualified chief executive with exceptionally close ties to Vladimir Putin (and who opposed sanctions) — would have stirred outrage and deep concern among Republicans, who used to pride themselves on their national security chops. You would be wrong. . .

[W]hy are these Republicans so silent? I mean, this is a really big deal.

Read the Washington Post, Republicans need to get out from under their desks.

I can only image the outcry if Russia had hacked the Republi-CONs to get HRC elected. Is there any doubt there would be impeachment proceedings.

UPDATE IV:  "The flood of 'fake news' this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation.

Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia. . .

Some players in this online echo chamber were knowingly part of the propaganda campaign, the researchers concluded, while others were 'useful idiots' — a term born of the Cold War to describe people or institutions that unknowingly assisted Soviet Union propaganda efforts.

The Russian campaign during this election season, researchers from both groups say, worked by harnessing the online world’s fascination with 'buzzy' content that is surprising and emotionally potent, and tracks with popular conspiracy theories about how secret forces dictate world events.

Some of these stories originated with RT and Sputnik, state-funded Russian information services that mimic the style and tone of independent news organizations yet sometimes include false and misleading stories in their reports, the researchers say. On other occasions, RT, Sputnik and other Russian sites used social-media accounts to amplify misleading stories already circulating online, causing news algorithms to identify them as 'trending' topics that sometimes prompted coverage from mainstream American news organizations."

Read the Washington Post, Russian propaganda effort helped spread 'fake news' during election, experts say.

Read also the Washington Post, Americans keep looking away from the election’s most alarming story.

UPDATE III:  "Former CIA director Michael Morell endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and blasted GOP rival Donald Trump, accusing him of becoming an unwitting agent of Russian President Vladimir Putin in an op-ed on Friday. . .

He noted that Putin is a trained intelligence officer, and he suggested that the Russian leader has been using Trump's personality for his own gain. In the primaries, Morell said, Putin 'played upon Mr. Trump's vulnerabilities' by complimenting him.

Among the traits Morell said would make Trump a 'danger' to national security: 'his obvious need for self-aggrandizement, his overreaction to perceived slights, his tendency to make decisions based on intuition, his refusal to change his views based on new information, his routine carelessness with the facts, his unwillingness to listen to others and his lack of respect for the rule of law.'"

Read the Washington Post, In endorsing Clinton, ex-CIA chief says Putin made Trump his 'unwitting agent'.

UPDATE II:  At the same time, his VP pick said "If it is Russia and they are interfering in our elections, I can assure you both parties and the United States government will ensure there are serious consequences."

Read the Washington Post, Pence: Consequences if Russia is interfering in U.S. election.

So while Pence understands the seriousness of the possibility that a foreign power is directly interfering in the U.S. presidential election, Trump is encouraging the interference.

Pence should withdrawal as Trump's VP.

UPDATE:  "Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Wednesday said he hoped that Russia would hack into Hillary Clinton’s email server to find “missing” messages and release them to the public."

Read the Washington Post, Trump urges Russia to hack Clinton's emails and release them publicly.

Donald Trump is dangerously insane!

"Donald Trump never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like — until now.

He has dabbled in, among other things, the notion that President Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya, that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered and that Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the JFK assassination.

But on one topic, Trump is conspicuously incurious: the suggestion that he is complicit in a plan by Vladimir Putin to influence the U.S. election."

Read the Washington Post, A Trump-style speculation on the GOP and Putin, which lists the many troubling connections between Putin and The Donald.

Trump's (and the Republi-CON's) Big CON: "I/They Will Replace Obamacare"

UPDATE IV:  "The Republican effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act is not going well, in large part because it turns out that making sweeping changes to a system that encompasses one-sixth of the American economy turns out to be rather more complicated than they imagined. Their backtracking has an interesting character to it, in particular how they’ve been gobsmacked by the transition from shaking their fists at the system to being responsible for it.

Up until November, they had been pursuing a strategy they got straight from Marx and Lenin, but now that they’re in power, it suddenly looks like a terrible idea. Here’s the latest fascinating pirouette they’re undertaking:

    House Republicans and the Trump administration on Tuesday filed a joint motion seeking to delay lawsuit proceedings that threaten to undo President Barack Obama’s health care law, the Affordable Care Act. . .

    Yet in the absence of an Obamacare replacement plan, the outcome the GOP initially sought threatens to upend the insurance marketplace and jeopardize coverage for millions of people.

Just to be clear, Republicans are asking the court to delay their own lawsuit pretty much indefinitely, because they’ve become terrified of what would happen if they succeed. In this case, it concerns government subsidies to pay out-of-pocket costs for people with low incomes.

 Read the Washington Post, Republicans suddenly realize burning down the health-care system might not be a great idea.

UPDATE III:  "Covering preexisting conditions without an individual mandate guarantees a death spiral."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s health-care plan has already been tried. It was a disaster.

UPDATE II: This is a must read article, The New York Times, The G.O.P. Health Care Hoax, which notes:

"This week, President-elect Donald Trump and congressional Republicans began to dismantle Obamacare, and here are the details of their replacement plan:

—— —- —- —- - —— —- —— —- - —- —- — —— —- —— —- —- —- — — - - - - —— —- —- —— —- —- —- - —— —- —— —- - —- —- — —— —- - —- —- — - —- —- — —— —- - —- —- — - —- —-

That captures the nonexistent Republican plan to replace Obamacare. They’re telling Americans who feel trapped by health care problems: 'Jump! Maybe we’ll catch you.'

This G.O.P. fraud is called 'repeal and delay.' That means repealing the Affordable Care Act, effective in a few years without specifying what will replace it.

If the Republicans ran a home renovation business, they would start tearing down your roof this month and promise to return in 2019 with some options for a new one — if you survived.

And survival will be a real issue. The bottom line of the G.O.P. approach is that millions of Americans will lose insurance, and thousands more will die unnecessarily each year because of lack of care. . .

Americans spend two or three times as much on health care as a share of G.D.P. as other industrialized countries but get worse outcomes. American children are 75 percent more likely to die in the first five years of life than British or German children, according to World Bank data, and American women are twice as likely to die in pregnancy as Canadian women. The reasons have to do partly with American poverty, and partly with the high number of uninsured.

Trump would have you believe that he will keep the popular parts of Obamacare, such as the ban on discriminating against pre-existing conditions, while eliminating unpopular parts like the mandate. That’s impossible: The good and bad depend on each other.

The Trump approach would be like trying to amputate a dog’s rear end so you wouldn’t have to clean up its messes. It just doesn’t work that way."

UPDATE II:  Read also the Washington Post, Republicans are about to feel Obama’s pain on Obamacare — and he knows it.

UPDATE: I've discussed and explained Obamacare extensively. Read the posts.

The only feasible alternatives to Obamacare are single payer (AKA medicare) or government run health care (which isn't that bad, ask anyone in the military).

Which is the reason that Republi-CONs developed the plan that we now call Obamacare. Just ask Romney.

Read the Washington Post, How Democrats can defeat the repeal of Obamacare.

The inability to explain this simple fact shows how inept Democrats are.

"[T]he whole idea of 'repealing' the ACA has been something of a scam."

Read the Washington Post, Are Trump and the Republicans really going to repeal Obamacare?

Trump's Big CON: The News Media Lies About 'Honest Trump'

Trump, like Jefferson, doesn't like the news media looking into his 'affairs'.

"When Jefferson wrote to 17-year-old John Norvell, urging him to avoid a career in journalism, he was embittered by reports spread by his political opponents that he had slept with Sally Hemings, one of his slaves. Today, most historians believe she was the mother of six of his children. So this is a case where 'fake news' turned out to be true."

Read the Washington Post, Fact-checking President Trump’s rally in Florida.

Trump's Big CON: He Ignores the 'Forgotten Man'

Corporate tax reform "would do a lot for Wall Street and the well-connected, and do nothing for Main Street and what Trump called the 'forgotten men and women' of the country.

Populism is just another alternative fact of the Trump administration."

Read the Washington Post, Trump talks a lot about the ‘forgotten man,’ but so far he’s just helping Wall Street.

Trump's Big CON: Voters' Fantasies About the Collide With Reality

UPDATE III:  "Let’s not mumble or whisper about the central issue facing our country: What is this democratic nation to do when the man serving as president of the United States plainly has no business being president of the United States?

The Michael Flynn fiasco was the entirely predictable product of the indiscipline, deceit, incompetence and moral indifference that characterize Donald Trump’s approach to leadership.

Even worse, Trump’s loyalties are now in doubt. Questions about his relationship with Vladimir Putin and Russia will not go away, even if congressional Republicans try to slow-walk a transparent investigation into what ties Trump has with Putin’s Russia — and who on his campaign did what, and when, with Russian intelligence officials and diplomats. . .

[T]he Trump we are seeing now is fully consistent with the vindictive, self-involved and scattered man we saw during the 17 months of his campaign. In one of the primary debates, Jeb Bush said of Trump: 'He’s a chaos candidate and he’d be a chaos president.' Rarely has a politician been so prophetic. . .

As a country, we now need to face the truth, however awkward and difficult it might be. "

Read the Washington Post, Admit it: Trump is unfit to serve.

UPDATE VII: [N]ow things have gotten real, and all indications are that the people in charge have no idea what they’re doing, on any front.

In some ways this cluelessness may be a good thing: malevolence may indeed be tempered by incompetence. It’s not just the court defeat over immigration; Republican ignorance has turned what was supposed to be a blitzkrieg against Obamacare into a quagmire, to the great benefit of millions. And Mr. Trump’s imploding job approval might help slow the march to autocracy.

But meanwhile, who’s in charge? Crises happen, and we have an intellectual vacuum at the top. Be afraid, be very afraid."

Read The New York Times, Ignorance Is Strength.

UPDATE VI:  "About a century before Trump was born, P.T. Barnum was drawing crowds and headlines with his large personality and ego, skilled dealmaking and shameless hoaxes. Both men are known for skirting around the truth, using exaggeration and in some cases, downright lies to garner attention (and in Barnum’s case, ticket sales). Their careers, in some ways, followed similar paths — both entrepreneurs dealt in land development and entered politics, and both used their entrepreneurial pursuits to become household names appealing to the common man. Both suffered the financial blows of bankruptcies and court fights. . .

Barnum [once] wrote. 'Put on the appearance of business, and generally the reality will follow.' . .

'Barnum was loud, brassy, full of bombast, vulgar, childish, surely just a little crooked — the ultimate, delightful phony from a delightfully phony era,' wrote David McCullough in a 1973 review of a biography of the man. 'If Barnum’s game was a shell game, nobody minded — so long as he was inventive about it, so long as he had a sense of humor.'

Barnum launched his fame with a hoax. In 1835, he purchased Joice Heth, a blind slave who claimed she was the 161-year-old former nurse of George Washington. Crowds lined up in New York and other parts of New England to see the woman, who Barnum advertised as 'one of the greatest natural curiosities ever witnessed,' according to an obituary of Barnum in the New York Times. After the woman’s death the following year, the truth came out in a public autopsy that she was likely no older than 80. But even then, Barnum reaped the benefits, staging the public autopsy and charging 50 cents for admission. . .

But 'the bogusness of Joice Heth did not matter,' wrote Barnum biographer Irving Wallace. 'Barnum gradually came to be more admired than resented, for the people desperately needed what he had to offer.' . .

The two showmen wrote books on similar topics with surprisingly similar titles; Barnum’s 'The Art of Money Getting' and Trump’s 'The Art of the Deal.'"

Read the Washington Post, Out goes P.T. Barnum’s circus. In comes — Donald Trump.  

UPDATE V:  Read the Washington Post, One chart shows how Obama’s job performance compares with his predecessors.

This is the chart:

Then the Washington Post, How Donald Trump could create a financial crisis. 

 

UPDATE IV:  Read the Washington Post, In final jobs report of Obama administration, U.S. economy adds 156,000 new jobs in December, which notes that "[t]he report marks the 75th straight month of job growth — the most extended streak the country has seen since 1939." 

UPDATE III:  "Trump loves to play the reality TV host promising next week's big reveal, but he never has the goods".

Read Salon, Donald Trump’s reality TV bamboozle: A political style shaped by "The Apprentice".

UPDATE II: Read Reuters, Jobless claims fall to near 43-year low. , which notes "[i]nitial claims for state unemployment benefits dropped 28,000 to a seasonally adjusted 235,000 for the week ended Dec. 31, the Labor Department said on Thursday. That was close to the 233,000 touched in mid-November, which was the lowest level since November 1973."

Read also:

Obama the Socialist Failure, More Proof,

Obama the Socialist Failure: Lower Unemployment, Deficits, Gas Prices and Inflation (What More Could He Do To Destroy America) and

Obama's Failure to Fulfill Republi-CON Predictions.

UPDATE:  "[E]conomic recovery, rebuilt auto industry, 15 million new jobs, less foreign oil, cheap gas, more clean energy, fewer troops overseas, Osama bin Laden dead, agreements on climate change and Iran’s nukes, higher incomes, less poverty, same-sex marriage legalized, millions more insured. . .

But Americans thought the country was on the wrong track, and voters demanded change. They rejected Obama’s handpicked successor in favor of the man who led the campaign challenging Obama’s legitimacy as a natural-born American.

Read the Washington Post, The farewell message Obama wishes he could give: 'You’re welcome!'

So-called pro wrestling is a long time fantasy entertainment of Americans.

"Donald Trump is running the nation’s show now, [former pro wrestler Shane 'The Franchise'] Douglas thought — an all-American entertainer, just like himself. . .

He added: 'The fans don’t care if this is all real or fake, but they want to be entertained, and they don’t want to be insulted.'

Trump’s critics look at the president and see a con man — someone who has made a lot of empty promises to struggling Americans, and those nostalgic for a time and place that may never really have existed. They see steps like encouraging the Carrier heating and air conditioning company to keep a few hundred jobs in Indiana as stunts, and fully expect Trump’s supporters to feel nothing but disappointment once they see it for what it really is."

Read the Washington Post, Every pro wrestler respects a good shtick. That’s why this one voted for Trump.

Another fantasy is about to take charge of government, and time will tell.

Trump's Big CON: He's a Foreign (and Domestic) Policy Weakling

UPDATE: "Trump looks weaker, less effective and even more ridiculous than anyone might have anticipated — and it happened surprisingly quickly, too."

Read the Washington Post, Donald Trump is suddenly looking like a very weak autocrat.

First, Trump put Iran “ON NOTICE,” then did nothing.

Then he impulsively claimed to renounce a long-standing One China policy after he promised to review Taiwan's status and bring China "to heel", only to cower recently to Chinese demands to reaffirm the policy.

Now he "looked both weak and incompetent", saying little in response to North Korea’s missile tests after claiming earlier the ICBM test "won’t happen".

"Trump ran for president boasting of his supposedly legendary negotiating and management skills while promising that he alone could fix the problems ailing the country. But three weeks into his presidency, a combination of inexperience, lack of attention to detail and an engaged opposition inside and outside the government have left him as the weakest new president in modern American history.

Trump’s governing style to date can only loosely be called management. He makes decisions quickly, often without consulting relevant experts or even his own appointees. He reads almost nothing, at most a few bullet points—often ripped straight from cable TV—that cannot possibly capture the nuance of complicated policy issues. When his hastily considered decisions backfire in inevitable ways, he doubles down and attacks any critics who point out either the folly or impracticability of his orders.

As with the bellowing Wizard of Oz, however, those boisterous attacks merely hide the weakness of the man behind the curtain, weakness that has already been exploited by both his staff and outside interests. . .

Trump’s rolling circus of chaos has also confounded the press, which can barely dig into one major controversy before a new one erupts.

But for all the president’s authoritarian tendencies and unwillingness to respect traditional norms and institutions, his inability to moderate his mouth, effectively manage the government or successfully negotiate with foreign leaders have left his presidency wounded and weakened. He will undoubtedly manage some successes over the coming months, but the character flaws that have been so evident throughout his public life have so far proved largely debilitating inside the Oval Office."

Read Politico, Donald the Weak, which noted "Trump may aspire to be a strongman, but he's proving to be an exceptionally ineffectual president."

Trump's Big CON: A Déjà Vu Nixon Presidency

UPDATE: "Trump’s genius as a manager is apparent only to himself. He is inattentive and dishonest. He insults rather than consults and has spent an inordinate amount of time at his golf courses. Already he has reversed himself on the one-China policy and has sent mixed signals about Russia. He trashes trade agreements as if ending them will reverse globalization, and he responds to complexity with tweets. He would deal with Chicago’s murder rate by sending in the feds. To do what exactly?

We wait in vain for the promised pivot. It will not happen. At the age of 70, Donald Trump is not about to grow up. He ran a dishonest and tawdry presidential campaign. He continues to disparage John McCain’s heroism and public service, characterizing him as a loser. In spirit, it is no different than his criticism of the Gold Star parents of Humayun Khan, who lost his life while serving in Iraq. Trump felt that while the Khans had sacrificed, so had he — in building a business. If there is a Guinness Book of Narcissism, this is in it.

[Trump is like Nixon, who] assembled a coterie of zealots who were itching to make (domestic) war on anyone and everyone. For a time, the old Nixon was forgotten. A new one was declared. Supposedly gone was the mudslinger of yore, the pol with the twitchy insecurities and a metastasizing inventory of resentments. But the old Nixon was always lurking."

Read the Washington Post, Trump, like Nixon, is incapable of change.

"There is a wide gap, a chasm even, between what the administration has said and what it has done. There have been 45 executive orders or presidential memoranda signed, which may seem like a lot but lags President Barack Obama’s pace. More crucially, with the notable exception of the travel ban, almost none of these orders have mandated much action or clear change of current regulations. So far, Trump has behaved exactly like he has throughout his previous career: He has generated intense attention and sold himself as a man of action while doing little other than promote an image of himself as someone who gets things done.

It is the illusion of a presidency, not the real thing."

Read Politico, President Trump Has Done Almost Nothing.

Trump's Big CON: He Won't Be Draining the Swamp, Quite the CONtrary

UPDATE IX:  More evidence that 'Draining the Swamp' is a CON job.

Read the Washington Post, Trump transition email shows initial effort to oust all inspectors general.

And don't forget "Trump had gone from bashing bankers before Nov. 8 to turning his cabinet into a Goldman Sachs reunion after it."

UPDATE VIII:  "While campaign donors often are tapped to fill comfy diplomatic posts across the globe, the extent to which donors are stocking Trump’s administration is unparalleled in modern presidential history, due in part to the Supreme Court decisions that loosened restrictions on campaign contributions, according to three longtime campaign experts.

The access and appointments are especially striking given Trump’s regular boasting during his campaign that his personal fortune and largely self-funded presidential bid meant that he would not be beholden to big donors, as many of his rivals would."

Read Politico, Trump rewards big donors with jobs and access.

UPDATE VII:  "President-elect Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to 'drain the swamp' in Washington of corruption, but now that he’s preparing to move into the White House, Newt Gingrich said the Manhattan real estate mogul is looking to distance himself from that message.

'I'm told he now just disclaims that. He now says it was cute, but he doesn't want to use it anymore,' the former House Speaker and close Trump adviser said of the 'drain the swamp' message in an NPR interview published Wednesday morning."

Read Politico, Gingrich: Trump backing away from 'drain the swamp'.

So that makes it official, it was all a CON job.

UPDATE VI: "On Tuesday, Trump said his sons would run his company, building what he says is a clear wall between his private business and public power. On Wednesday, his children had seats at the table of one of his biggest policy meetings yet, attended by the country’s top tech-industry elites and Trump Cabinet nominees. Also around the table: bottles of Trump Natural Spring Water, the president-elect’s water brand."

Read the Washington Post, On the day Trump said he’d clarify his business dealings, his conflicts of interest look thornier than ever.

Trump canceled a long planned press conference to address his business dealings and conflicts of interest scheduled to take place the day after the aforementioned policy meeting. Too busy nurturing future deals I suppose.

UPDATE V:  Read the Washington Post, Trump isn’t draining the swamp. He’s creating his own cesspool.

UPDATE IV:  "So can we stop pretending that Trump’s campaign 'populism' was anything other than just one more con?

It isn’t just the next Treasury secretary. This morning on CNBC, Mnuchin outlined his people-centered plan for the country’s economy.

“Our number one priority is tax reform,” he said. “We think by cutting corporate taxes we’ll create huge economic growth and we’ll have huge personal income so the revenues will be offset on the other side.”

At last, a Republican administration that believes in the wonder-working power of tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy! If only George W. Bush had known about that, we would have had spectacular growth through the 2000s and the Great Recession never would have happened. Oh wait — this is exactly the economic program Bush pursued, to such disastrous effect. . .

You may remember Trump’s closing ad of the campaign, in which he said, 'Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American people' over images of Wall Street, piles of money, financiers like George Soros, and other symbols of established power and wealth. 'It’s a global power structure,' he went on, 'that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.'

So in order to take on that global power structure, Trump is hiring a bunch of billionaires and Wall Street tycoons, cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy, scaling back regulatory oversight of Wall Street, and offering an infrastructure plan that consists mostly of tax breaks to corporations to encourage them to build projects that they’ll then charge the public tolls in order to use. . .

Republicans have always struggled with a quandary presented by their economic ideology, which is that it’s difficult to get majority support for a set of policies intended to shower benefits on a small portion of the population. When they argue about it explicitly they use a kind of rhetorical redirection, claiming that cutting rich people’s taxes isn’t really about rich people at all, but is actually intended to help the middle class and even the poor. The rich themselves are merely a vehicle to accomplish this noble end, unselfishly accepting the government’s largesse on behalf of their lessers.

Needless to say, there are only so many people you can persuade with that argument. So in order to compensate, Republicans have complemented their economic case with a menu of social issues with which they can demonize their opponents. Those Democrats hate America, Republicans would say, they’re weak, they don’t love God the way you do, they want to take your guns, they want to force your kids to get gay abortions. Often enough, it worked. . .

But now, Trump is filling up his administration with, guess what, Washington politicians and representatives of the economic powers-that-be, whose top priorities are tax cuts, deregulation, and destroying the safety net, including the privatization of Medicare. The idea that they’ll be laboring to serve the interests of the working class is a joke. Yet it’s a joke people somehow keep telling with a straight face."

Read the Washington Post, Can we stop pretending that Trump is a ‘populist’ now?

UPDATE III: "Throughout the presidential campaign, Donald Trump’s relationship with Wall Street ran hot and cold. On the podium, he sounded a populist battle cry — heaping disdain on elites and tarring his opponents by their associations with Wall Street. But behind the scenes, Trump assembled a gang of financiers, bankers and ex-bankers to advise his campaign.

Now, he is drawing on that same set of highflying, high-net-worth individuals to captain his new administration. There was Betsy DeVos, a billionaire investor and a heavyweight political donor, whom Trump nominated as his education secretary. There was Wilbur Ross, another billionaire investor, said to be Trump’s pick to become commerce secretary.

On Wednesday, Trump named another member of America’s elite for a position in his Cabinet.

Steve Mnuchin, a hedge fund chairman and 17-year Goldman Sachs alum, is Trump’s pick for treasury secretary."

Read the Washington Post, Trump said hedge funders were ‘getting away with murder.’ Now he wants one to help run the economy.

UPDATE II:  "If fighting corruption in D.C. is the reason you voted for Trump, well, you got played. . .

Maybe Trump will prove to have fantastic policies that make America great again. But for the next four years, Trump’s supporters will not be able to make the claim that he’s fighting corruption in Washington. If anything, Trump, his family and his cronies appear poised to leverage the power of the federal government to enrich themselves. And anyone who tells you differently is selling you something. "

Read the Washington Post, Donald Trump will not be draining any swamps as president.

UPDATE:  Read the Washington Post, On conflicts of interest, Trump may be worse than Clinton.

Trump promised "to 'drain the swamp' — to eliminate the culture of self-dealing, conflicts of interest and pay-to-play that has infested government. There was no issue more central to Trump’s campaign or to his attacks on (“Crooked”) Hillary Clinton. To allow his children to run his businesses would be the most egregious conflict of them all. Every decision by an agency of the federal government and every administration policy would be scrutinized for the benefits it bestowed on a Trump property or business. Every diplomatic move would be examined to see if there were a financial quid pro quo, perhaps a favorable renegotiation of a foreign bank loan or resolution of regulatory issues involving Trump’s foreign properties. Any bill, be it tax reform or regulatory reform, likely would have some impact on one of his businesses. Inevitably, there will be instance after instance in which Trump or someone working for Trump or legislation Trump favored wound up enriching Trump. That is the essence of corruption. The presidency would become the biggest swamp of them all."

Read the Washington Post, The Trump team’s ethical swamp.

Read also the Washington Post, Bernie Sanders: Trump already breaking campaign promise to ‘drain the swamp’.

Trump's Big CON: 'I Reduced the Cost of the F-35 by $600 Million'

"Lockheed already had planned cost reductions. In a Dec. 19 briefing . . .  the head of the Defense Department’s F-35 Joint Program Office, Air Force Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan, announced costs would come down 'significantly.' The next stage in the F-35 program’s low-rate initial production was a new batch of 90 airplanes, called Lot 10. Bogdan had estimated that Lot 10 planes would cost “somewhere on the order of 6 to 7 percent per airplane” less than Lot 9 planes.

Between 6 to 7 percent comes out to a cost reduction of between $6.1 million and $7.1 million per plane, or between $549 million and $630 million for a full lot of 90 planes, The Washington Post’s Aaron Gregg reported. This cost reduction is already reflected in the Air Force’s budget.

Aviation Week’s Lara Seligman noted that Trump overstated his role. The average unit price has been decreasing for years, and Bogdan repeatedly has announced his intention to lower the cost of the jets, Seligman wrote."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s claim taking credit for cutting $600 million from the F-35 program.

Trump's Big CON: 'God Stopped the Rain for My Speech'

UPDATE:  "I don’t believe that President Trump was lying when, the day after he swore the oath of office, he told a roomful of CIA employees that the crowd at his inauguration 'looked like a million, a million and a half people' and 'went all the way back to the Washington Monument.' I don’t believe he was lying when he recounted that the rain 'stopped immediately' when he began delivering his inaugural address and that 'it poured right after I left.' And I don’t believe he was lying when, on Monday, he repeated in front of lawmakers his post-election falsehood that 3 million to 5 million illegal ballots cost him the popular vote.

Instead, Trump was doing something far worse.

Lying, as defined by philosopher Harry Frankfurt, is an act undertaken intentionally to obscure the truth . Liars look at the truth and go in the other direction; but in doing so, they recognize implicitly that there is such a thing as the truth and such a thing as its opposite.

Trump, however, often operates without any connection to the truth. For him, truth is not an enemy so much as an irrelevance. As a real estate developer and cultural figure, his routine spouting of falsehoods could be comparatively harmless, even entertaining. As president, however, his disregard for the truth could easily become disregard for democratic norms and the rule of law. . .

Trump’s habitual disregard for the truth raises serious questions about his presidency: How will it affect his ability to carry out the duties of his office? And what is the relationship between disregard for truth and disregard for law? . .

Both truth and law provide constraints on human action, binding us to the facts of the world and to certain agreed-upon norms of behavior. In that way, they limit our freedom, yet they also create the shared space within which we interact with one another. . .

In a sense, Trump and his post-truth team have embraced the same post-structuralist critique of the notion of stable truth that the American right has railed against for the past 30 years. Shortly after the election, Trump supporter Scottie Nell Hughes defended his false claims about illegal voting by asserting that “there’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts.” She was arguing, however incoherently, that Trump supporters and opponents are each entitled to their own versions of what is true.

But this comparatively democratic vision of a world without truth is not quite what Trump seems to have in mind. He wants to make up the “alternative facts” and impose them on the rest of us, as well. And so, for example, Spicer not only berated the press for accurately reporting attendance at Trump’s inauguration, he also provided the administration’s version of reality and angrily demanded that reporters adhere to that reality. . .

In the simplest terms, a conception of truth outside what the government tells us to be so is foundational to democracy because it allows us to stand up against power. It’s also necessary to lay the groundwork for any kind of democratic deliberation among citizens. After all, if we cannot persuade one another to agree with reference to some shared system of meaning, the only thing left is to compel agreement through force — which is to say that there’s a potentially dangerous relationship between sustained disregard for truth in political leaders and authoritarian coercion."

Read the Washington Post, Can a president who disregards the truth uphold his oath of office?

Read also the Washington Post, In China, torture is real, and the rule of law is a sham.

Trump is a psycho-narcissistic delusional con man.

"The most worrisome moment for me in a very ominous week was not President Trump’s bizarre rant about crowd size, his bogus claims about election fraud or his moves toward bringing back torture, blocking refugees and provoking a trade war with Mexico.

The most troubling moment was when he spoke about the weather.

'It was almost raining,' the new president told CIA workers in Langley, recounting his inaugural address, 'but God looked down and he said, we’re not going to let it rain on your speech. In fact, when I first started, I said, oh, no. The first line, I got hit by a couple of drops. And I said, oh, this is too bad, but we’ll go right through it. But the truth is that it stopped immediately. It was amazing. And then it became really sunny. And then I walked off and it poured right after I left. It poured.'

Really sunny? I was there for the inaugural address, in the sixth row, about 40 feet from Trump, and I remembered the exact opposite: It began to rain when he started and tapered off toward the end. There wasn’t a single ray of sunshine, before, during or after the speech. . .

I rehash this weather history because it’s not subject to debate. This is tantamount to Trump declaring black is white or day is night. It was overcast, and he declared that it was “really sunny.”

This disconnect from reality is my biggest fear about Trump, more than any one policy he has proposed. My worry is the president of the United States is barking mad.

Last summer, observing a series of Trump falsehoods that were easily disproved, I wrote that these may not be deliberate 'lies,' that Trump 'may not be able to tell fact from fiction.' He didn’t just spout conspiracy theories about Muslims celebrating in New Jersey on 9/11, or about a U.S. general who executed Muslim prisoners with bullets dipped in pig blood. He often claimed he never said or did things contradicted by his own previous words and actions: that he didn’t 'know anything about David Duke,' that he 'never mocked' a disabled reporter, that he opposed the Iraq invasion 'loud and strong' from the start, and so forth.

'More than anyone else I have ever met,' Tony Schwartz, Trump’s ghostwriter for 'The Art of the Deal,' told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer at the time, 'Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.'

My Post colleague Jennifer Rubin, a conservative blogger, picked up on this theme in an important post this week, recalling Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Tex.) description of Trump as somebody who 'doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies' and 'his response is to accuse everybody else of lying.'

Rubin raised the prospect that Trump might eventually need to be declared unfit to serve under the 25th Amendment if he can’t 'separate what he wants to believe and what exists.'

That’s why his assertion that it was 'really sunny' during his inaugural address is so terrifying. . .

When Trump caused international havoc with tweets about China, North Korea and others, there was speculation that he was pursuing the “madman theory” to unsettle adversaries by making them think he’s crazy.

He’s doing such a convincing job of it that I worry being a madman isn’t Trump’s theory but his reality."

Read the Washington Post, In Trump’s mind, it’s always ‘really sunny.’ And that’s terrifying.

I'm starting to think Trump doesn't last four years. The question is whether he leave office voluntarily, or has to be removed. 

Trump's Big CON: 'Only I Can Protect Us From Terrorism'

UPDATE IV:  "I am not surprised by President Donald Trump’s antics this week. Not by the big splashy pronouncements such as announcing a wall that he would force Mexico to pay for, even as the Mexican foreign minister held talks with American officials in Washington. Not by the quiet, but no less dangerous bureaucratic orders, such as kicking the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff out of meetings of the Principals’ Committee, the senior foreign-policy decision-making group below the president, while inserting his chief ideologist, Steve Bannon, into them. Many conservative foreign-policy and national-security experts saw the dangers last spring and summer, which is why we signed letters denouncing not Trump’s policies but his temperament; not his program but his character.

We were right. . .

[In the end Trump]will fail most of all because at the end of the day most Americans, including most of those who voted for him, are decent people who have no desire to live in an American version of Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, or Viktor Orban’s Hungary, or Vladimir Putin’s Russia. . .

There is nothing great about the America that Trump thinks he is going to make; but in the end, it is the greatness of America that will stop him."

Read The Atlantic, A Clarifying Moment in American History.

UPDATE III:  "The more you look at [Trump’s executive order on immigration], the more clearly un-serious it is in addressing any real problem. It's Breitbart-like boob bait for the bubbas."

UPDATE II:  "Trump came to power promising that masterful leadership would replace the 'stupid' kind. This action was malicious, counterproductive and inept — the half-baked work of amateurs who know little about security, little about immigration law and nothing about compassion. . .

When Ronald Reagan spoke on foreign policy, tyrants sat uneasy on their thrones and dissidents and refugees took heart. When Donald Trump speaks on foreign policy, tyrants rest easier and dissidents and refugees lose hope."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s half-baked travel ban is a picture of American shame.

UPDATE:  "The seven nations targeted for new visitation restrictions by President Trump on Friday all have something in common: They are places he does not appear to have any business interests.

The executive order he signed Friday bars all entry for the next 90 days by travelers from Syria, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia and Libya. Excluded from the lists are several majority-Muslim nations where the Trump Organization is active and which in some cases have also faced troublesome issues with terrorism."

Read the Washington Post, Countries where Trump does business are not hit by new travel restrictions.

"President Trump first pitched a ban on Muslims more than a year ago, proposing it in the wake of the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif., in December 2015. He revived the idea after the Orlando club massacre last summer. And when Trump announced Friday that he was suspending travel from seven Muslim-majority countries, his order mentioned the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks three times.

No one involved in those attacks was born in the countries Trump’s order included. . .

The list of countries the ban affects also did not include countries where people behind several other attacks in recent years — along with high-profile plots that were not carried out — were born. . .

Yet the list of countries included in the ban — Syria, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia and Libya — leaves out countries tied to extremist attackers or plots."

Read the Washington Post, Trump and his aides keep justifying the entry ban by citing attacks it couldn’t have prevented, which includes this graph:

Trump's Big CON: Voter Fraud

UPDATE II:  Does this surprise anyone?

Read the Daily Mail, President Trump's voter fraud expert who he cites for his claim that 'millions of people voted illegally' is registered in THREE states.

UPDATE:  "Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law and one of his closest White House advisers, is registered to vote in both New Jersey and New York, while White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer is on the rolls both in Virginia and his home state of Rhode Island, according to elections officials and voting registration records."

Read also the Washington Post, It turns out Jared Kushner and Sean Spicer are also registered to vote in two states.

LOCK THEM UP!

"President Trump says he will launch an investigation into his baseless claims of widespread voter fraud. But one of the potential areas he highlighted for probing — voters who are registered in two different states — appears as though it would snag his own top adviser.

Trump tweeted Wednesday morning that his 'major investigation into VOTER FRAUD' would be 'including those registered to vote in two states.'"

Among those registered to vote in two states:

• Trump's daughter, Tiffany Trump, 
• Trump's Treasury secretary nominee Steve Mnuchin, and 
• Trump's chief White House strategist, Stephen K. Bannon.

Read the Washington Post, Donald Trump’s definition of ‘voter fraud’ appears to include his own daughter and top adviser.

All I can say is LOCK THEM UP!

Trump's Big CON: 'I'm an Environmentalist'

UPDATE:  "From the start of his short, truculent and unabashedly populist inaugural address, President Trump called out the Washington establishment . . .

He painted a dystopian picture of the United States and promised: “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”

Trump is about to discover that he can’t simply order up the change he wants. In his first two days in office, Trump has appalled the CIA’s professionals and declared open war on the media. His inauguration sparked some of the largest women’s demonstrations ever in the nation’s capital and across the world. Only two of his Cabinet appointees joined him in office, the rest struggling to overcome questions about financial conflicts of interest, ideological extremism and simple competence. . .

Trump’s Cabinet is composed of various establishments. A large portion is drawn from the Davos class, the international bankers and chief executives who gather each year in Switzerland to celebrate the global system that has been rigged so effectively to their benefit. Six of Trump’s leading economic aides come from Goldman Sachs, the investment bank that previously supplied the treasury secretaries under Presidents Clinton (Robert Rubin) and George W. Bush (Henry Paulson), architects of the corporate trade system that Trump promises to upend.

Trump has shown himself a master at populist stunts — such as cowing Carrier to save 700 or so jobs — and at populist rhetoric. Nationalist posturing and racial signaling — on immigrants, on African Americans, on Muslims — can provide red meat to his movement. But the jobs aren’t coming back. Coal won’t revive without massive subsidy. His Republican Congress and Davos Cabinet aren’t going to embrace a robust industrial policy or a plan to rebuild America. Tax cuts and deregulation will shaft the very people Trump promises to help. Real billionaires in both parties — George Soros and Michael Bloomberg — have called Trump a con man. But even a good con can’t last forever. It won’t be long before working people catch on to Trump’s game and we start seeing lawn signs saying 'Dishonest Donald.'

Read the Washington Post, Why Trump’s con can’t last forever.

"'I’m a very big person when it comes to the environment. I have received awards on the environment.'
— President Trump, remarks during a meeting with business leaders, Jan. 23 . . .

Are there any facts to support this claim to environmental fame?

The Facts

The short answer is: No. Media outlets and environmental groups have tried to find evidence of this claim since 2011 but have come up short. We could not readily find references to Trump’s environmental awards in news coverage over the past 10 years. We checked with the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund, the Environmental Defense Fund and the Sierra Club, and none had any record of Trump’s environmental awards.

In fact, environmentalists have criticized many of Trump’s projects." 

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s unsupported claim he has ‘received awards on the environment’.

The more he talks, the sooner people will realize that Trump is a con man.

The Republi-CON Ethics CON

UPDATE III:  "While all eyes were focused on failed House efforts to eliminate the Office of Congressional Ethics — the only independent watchdog with jurisdiction over House members — Republican congressmen led by Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) quietly succeeded on another dubious ethical front: They adopted a rule designating records created, generated or received by a member’s congressional office 'exclusively the personal property' of that member and granting members 'control over such records.'

Making congressional records the personal property of members seems tailor-made for the next lawmaker who, like former congressman Aaron Schock (R-Ill.), hopes to evade criminal responsibility by barring access to material allegedly showing how he misspent public funds."

Read the Washington Post, A new House rule is a gift to lawmakers trying to hide criminal acts.

UPDATE II:  "Rep. Tom Price last year purchased shares in a medical device manufacturer days before introducing legislation that would have directly benefited the company, raising new ethics concerns for President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for Health and Human Services secretary.

Price bought between $1,001 to $15,000 worth of shares last March in Zimmer Biomet, according to House records reviewed by CNN.

Less than a week after the transaction, the Georgia Republican congressman introduced the HIP Act, legislation that would have delayed until 2018 a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) regulation that industry analysts warned would significantly hurt Zimmer Biomet financially once fully implemented."

Read CNN, Trump's Cabinet pick invested in company, then introduced a bill to help it.

UPDATE:  "For two weeks now, the majority leadership in the new Congress and the incoming Trump administration have been conducting a war on ethics. This has ranged from the effort to cripple the Office of Congressional Ethics to the Senate’s rush to confirm President-elect Donald Trump’s nominees before their financial conflicts disclosures were complete to Trump’s own inadequate plan to address his ethical problems.

The latest front involves the Office of Government Ethics and its director, Walter Shaub Jr., who has had the temerity to speak up against Trump’s plan to deal with his conflicts of interest as 'meaningless.'

Both of us, former ethics counsels for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, respectively, have worked with Shaub, a career public servant who, in our experience, provided nonpartisan and wise advice. Now, Shaub is being pilloried — and may be at risk of losing his job — for doing just that, and asserting correctly that Trump’s approach 'doesn’t meet the standards .?.?. that every president in the last four decades has met.'"

Read the Washington Post, Just when you thought the Trump ethics disaster couldn’t get worse, it did.

"House Republicans, overriding their top leaders, voted on Monday to significantly curtail the power of an independent ethics office set up in 2008 in the aftermath of corruption scandals that sent three members of Congress to jail.

The move to effectively kill the Office of Congressional Ethics was not made public until late Monday, when Representative Robert W. Goodlatte, Republican of Virginia and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, announced that the House Republican Conference had approved the change. There was no advance notice or debate on the measure.

The surprising vote came on the eve of the start of a new session of Congress, where emboldened Republicans are ready to push an ambitious agenda on everything from health care to infrastructure, issues that will be the subject of intense lobbying from corporate interests. The House Republicans’ move would take away both power and independence from an investigative body, and give lawmakers more control over internal inquiries.

It also came on the eve of a historic shift in power in Washington, where Republicans control both houses of Congress and where a wealthy businessman with myriad potential conflicts of interest is preparing to move into the White House."

Read The New York Times, With No Warning, House Republicans Vote to Gut Independent Ethics Office.

Notwithstanding his comments, I'm betting Trump had something to do with this.

Trump's Big CON: 'Mine's Bigger/Better/Awesomer Than Everyone Else's'

UPDATE VII:  "President Trump has not been in office for a week, but already’s he wilting under the pressure. 'President Donald Trump is the first elected president in Gallup’s polling history to receive an initial job approval rating below the majority level,” Gallup reports. “He starts his term in office with 45% of Americans approving of the way he is handling his new job, 45% disapproving and 10% yet to form an opinion. Trump now holds the record for the lowest initial job approval rating as well as the highest initial disapproval rating in Gallup surveys dating back to Dwight D. Eisenhower.'

That reality — the rotten poll numbers, the low turnout at his inauguration, the massive turnout at worldwide protests, his widely panned appearance at the CIA and his press secretary Sean Spicer’s disastrous debut with the White House press corps on Saturday — seems to have thrown the narcissistic ex-mogul into an emotional tailspin. . .

[A]s events unfolded on Friday and Saturday 'Trump grew increasingly and visibly enraged.' We know two things from this: 1.) He’s an emotional train wreck before much of anything has happened and 2.) Those close to him already started spilling the beans, perhaps to exonerate themselves and perhaps to communicate to their boss through the media. Trump’s ire simply confirms what we already knew, namely that his insatiable need for approval and his rage when he does not receive it make for an alarmingly unpresidential demeanor. . .

The picture suggests an unhinged president, too many weak aides and an administration that cannot control itself, let alone coverage of its breakdowns. To repeat, nothing much of substance, certainly no major policy defeat, has yet occurred. One shudders to think what will happen when setbacks do occur.

Trump’s inability to acknowledge his own lack of support prompts him to seek refuge in 'alternative facts' — to lie to himself and others. . . 'Days after being sworn in, President Trump insisted to congressional leaders invited to a reception at the White House that he would have won the popular vote had it not been for millions of illegal votes … Two people familiar with the meeting said Trump spent about 10 minutes at the start of the bipartisan gathering rehashing the campaign. He also told them that between 3 million and 5 million illegal votes caused him to lose the popular vote.' The obsession with replaying the election and concocting a phony excuse for losing the popular vote reminds us that despite mockery for constant lying, Trump cannot help himself. He lies because reality won’t conform to his narcissistic view of the world."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s emotional tailspin was predictable.

UPDATE VI:  What a narcissistic con man!!

Read the Washington Post, Trump names his Inauguration Day a ‘National Day of Patriotic Devotion’.

UPDATE V:  "It matters that the crowd for the Women’s March on Washington was far bigger than that for President Trump’s inauguration. The new president often boasts of having started a great movement. Let it be the one that was born with Saturday’s massive protests.

If size is important, and apparently to Trump it is, there was no contest. The Metro transit system recorded 1,001,613 trips on the day of the protest, the second-heaviest ridership in history — surpassed only by ridership for President Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009. By contrast, just 570,557 trips were taken Friday, when Trump took the oath of office.

Those are the true facts, not the 'alternative' ones the administration wants you to believe. A president obsessed with winning began his term by losing."

Read the Washington Post, Trump inspired a movement, all right.

UPDATE IV:  "If America had a parliamentary system, Donald Trump — who spent his first full day in office having a temper tantrum, railing against accurate reports of small crowds at his inauguration — would already be facing a vote of no confidence. But we don’t; somehow we’re going to have to survive four years of this.

And how is he going to react to disappointing numbers about things that actually matter?

In his lurid, ghastly Inaugural Address, Mr. Trump portrayed a nation in dire straits — “American carnage.” The real America looks nothing like that; it has plenty of problems, but things could be worse. In fact, it’s likely that they will indeed get worse. How will a man who evidently can’t handle even the smallest blow to his ego deal with it?

Let’s talk about the predictable bad news.

First, the economy. . .

A second front on which things will almost surely get worse is health care. . .

On a third front, crime, the future direction is unclear. The Trump vision of an urban America ravaged by 'the crime and the gangs and the drugs' is a dystopian fantasy: Violent crime is, in fact, way down despite highly publicized recent murder increases in a few cities. Crime could, I suppose, fall further, but it could also rise. What we do know is that the Trump administration can’t pacify America’s urban war zones, because those zones don’t exist.

So how will Mr. Trump handle the bad news of rising unemployment, plunging health coverage, and little if any crime reduction? That’s obvious: He’ll deny reality, the way he always does when it threatens his narcissism. But will his supporters go along with his fantasy? . .

Mr. Trump made big promises during the campaign, so the risk of disillusionment is especially high.

Will he respond to bad news by accepting responsibility and trying to do better? Will he renounce his fortune and enter a monastery? That seems equally likely.

No, the insecure egomaniac-in-chief will almost surely deny awkward truths, and berate the media for reporting them. And — this is what worries me — it’s very likely that he’ll try to use his power to shoot the messengers.

Seriously, how do you think the man who compared the C.I.A. to Nazis will react when the Bureau of Labor Statistics first reports a significant uptick in unemployment or decline in manufacturing jobs? What’s he going to do when the Centers for Disease Control and the Census Bureau report spiking numbers of uninsured Americans?

You may have thought that last weekend’s temper tantrum was bad. But there’s much, much worse to come."

Read The New York Times, Things Can Only Get Worse.

Read also The New York Times, White House Pushes ‘Alternative Facts.’ Here Are the Real Ones. and ‘Alternative Facts’ and the Costs of Trump-Branded Reality.

UPDATE III:  "From his speeches to his tweets, Trump does not speak truth. Instead, he speaks in two modes. One, he says what his audience wants to hear, and two, he does his 'Art of the Deal' shtick, trying to put perceived enemies and negotiating opponents back on their heels.

Mode one is particularly easy to see; it’s what he does in front of crowds. He tells coal workers he’ll bring their jobs back. He tells those unhappy with their health insurance that his plan will provide more coverage for less money. He reassures the New York Times editorial board that he’s a moderate on climate change ('I’m looking at it very closely').

He can’t bring back coal jobs; he’s got no plan for better health insurance, in no small part because it’s impossible to provide more comprehensive coverage while spending less. Days after his meeting with the Times, he nominated Scott Pruitt, an avowed enemy of climate policy, to head the Environmental Protection Agency.

His inaugural speech was full of populist rhetoric about helping those who’ve been on the wrong side of globalization and inequality. He boldly asserted that 'every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs, will be made to benefit American workers and American families.'

How likely is that? . .

Mode two is obvious in tweet-shaming China, threatening to punish companies that offshore jobs, 45 percent tariffs, the wall that he still claims Mexico will pay for, and most recently, falsely accusing the press of dishonestly reporting the size of the crowd at his inauguration. The idea here is that when actual negotiations on these matters commence, his opponents, which clearly include the media, will already be playing defense. That may or may not be an effective strategy — my guess is that it gets old pretty quickly — but that’s what’s going on.

I don’t believe a word he says, and neither should you. . .

But how can we possibly figure out what he’s really up to?

For one, as alluded to above, you look at who he’s surrounding himself with, which, contrary to his populist campaign, are Wall Street bankers, education privatizers (Betsy DeVos), anti-safety-net advocates (Ben Carson), and business-oriented globalizers (Rex Tillerson). It’s unclear whether he’ll listen to them — for the most part, their unifying theme is that they’re really rich and were loyal to him during the campaign — but I have an easier time seeing this crew cutting taxes on the wealthy and regulations on business/finance than lifting the living standards of the working class. (And note that, thus far, their announced agenda is all the former and none of the latter.)

Read the Washington Post, Breaking news: You can’t believe what President Trump says.

UPDATE II:  "All White Houses spin and try to pressure the media into reporting stories their preferred way. But [Trump's obsession with the crowds size at his inauguration] looks like something considerably more: A concerted effort to erode the core idea that the news media is legitimately playing its role in informing the citizenry. If the media challenges or factually debunks the fabricated, Trump-aggrandizing narrative that is coming out of the Trump White House, it will respond by simply repeating relentlessly that the fabricated story-line is the truth. Needless to say, there cannot be any shared agreement on facts or reality, except on the ones that the Trump White House has validated. This is why the most important thing about Spicer’s statement is the word 'period.' When the Trump White House declares what the truth is, the discussion is over.

This is not a conventional dispute over the facts. It is not about 'relations' between the press and the White House. It is about truth and power. The message this is designed to send is that Trump has the power to declare what the truth is, and the news media does not. The Trump White House is maintaining this posture while telling enormous, demonstrable lies, but no matter — according to the new White House Ministry of Disinformation, the truth is what Donald Trump says it is. Bank on it: This will hold true even when Donald Trump contradicts Donald Trump.

Remember the larger context: For many months during the campaign, Trump not only told lies to a degree that was unprecedented in volume and egregiousness; his staff also mostly refused to engage fact checkers at all when they questioned his claims, showing he felt no obligation whatsoever to back them up. And then, even when they were widely debunked, he simply kept on repeating them. Then, and now, this was, and is, an assertion of the power to declare what the truth is regardless of what is empirically, demonstrably true.

Anyone who is not considering the possibility that this may be an outgrowth of Trump’s well-established authoritarian streak is missing what may be happening here. As libertarian writer Jacob Levy has written, Trump may be experimenting with a time-tested tactic, in which a leader 'with authoritarian tendencies' will regularly lie in order to get others to internalize his lies, as 'a way to demonstrate and strengthen his power over them.' It is hard to say how deep Trump’s authoritarianism runs and how it will impact his presidency. But this is something worth being prepared for. What’s more, all of this cannot be disentangled from Trump’s unprecedented conflicts of interest and lack of transparency about them. . .

Have we mentioned that this thin-skinned megalomaniac now controls the nuclear codes?"

Read the Washington Post, Dear media: The Trump White House has total contempt for you. Time to react accordingly.

Trump clearly has a little man complex, and I'm guessing that this does not end well for the country.

UPDATE: Of course, Trump's "alternate facts" are always 'bigger, better, more awesome'.

Read the Washington Post, The perfect meme for the ‘alternative facts’ era: #seanspicersays.

Part of Trump's con job is perpetuating the lie that his is bigger, better, more awesome than whatever comparison is being made.

And did anyone really think it would end after the election or inauguration?

Read the Washington Post, The traditional way of reporting on a president is dead. And Trump’s press secretary killed it.

Trump's Big CON: 'I Wrote the Speech'

UPDATE II:  Did Trump plagiarize a comic book villain in his speech?

Read the Daily Mail, Did Trump quote Batman super-villain BANE in his inauguration speech? Comic book fans point out eerie similarity in landmark speech.

UPDATE:  Trump is so obviously a con man that nothing he says should be believed. Consider:

"For all the frequency of his communication and his victory, you’d think President-elect Donald Trump would easily make himself understood. 'Blunt talk' was his strength, we were told. Since the election, however, never have so many aides, nominees and supporters have had to clarify so frequently, so much of what the president-elect says (either in interviews or tweets).

Both Vice President-elect Mike Pence and U.N. Ambassador nominee Nikki Haley on Wednesday had to assure us that Trump didn’t mean that NATO was obsolete when he said NATO is, well, 'obsolete.' Health and Human Service secretary nominee Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) had to explain that health-care insurance for 'everybody' doesn’t mean actual coverage; in the Trump administration that means 'access' for everybody to some type of coverage. When Trump said he had a health-care plan ready to go, he really meant Price would come up with something. Pick a topic and almost every Trump pronouncement gets reinterpreted or dumped. Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway seem to do nothing but explain what Trump meant to say.

The act, frankly, has gotten old. Trump says what he means; the problem remains that he doesn’t know what he is talking about. His impulsive, vague notions about putting America first were sufficient in the campaign to beat a rocky opponent (with help from James Comey and WikiLeaks). Since then, Trump apparently has not bothered to learn much about the world or even what certain phrases ('health care for everybody') mean in the context of grown-up policy discussions. Either that, or he really does intend to destroy NATO, enable Russian President Vladimir Putin, create universal guaranteed health-care insurance, slap tariffs on China, etc. You see the optimistic interpretation remains that he lacks the requisite knowledge and/or the language skills to explain policy positions. . .

Recording accurately and holding him to account for his statements drive Trump up the wall — and onto Twitter where he can attack others instead of explaining with a modicum of detail what he believes. He doesn’t believe much of anything we suspect."

Read the Washington Post,  ‘What Trump meant to say. . .’

And the obvious interpretation is that The Donald is a con man. 

"Of course the picture is all bullshit — as are the words that Donald Trump tweeted out with it on Wednesday: 'Writing my inaugural address at the Winter White House, Mar-a-Lago, three weeks ago. Looking forward to Friday.'

We know it is bullshit because of the way Trump is bending the notepad up at the corner, as if to conceal that nothing is written on it. We know it is bullshit because he seems to be sitting at the receptionist’s desk at Mar-a-Lago and 'writing' with a Sharpie. (Have you ever tried to do that?) We know it is bullshit because three weeks ago, at the time he was supposedly writing the speech, his transition team announced that Stephen Miller, the Trump aide who wrote most of his major speeches during the campaign, is crafting this one as well, possibly with Steve Bannon. . .

But there is something so obviously phony about the speechwriting photo, as if Trump and one of his kids staged and shot the scene on the spur of the moment in between rounds of golf. A man who famously does not like to read and whose books are all ghostwritten, a man whose aides are often frustrated by his inability to focus on one subject for more than a minute or two at a time, is not a person who is going to sit down and write a speech for his presidential inauguration."

Read Salon, Donald Trump’s claim that he’s writing his own speech isn’t just BS — it’s flimsy, transparent B.S., which notes that the "photo of Trump 'writing' his speech on a blank notepad is just lazy, even for authoritarian propaganda."

Trump's Big CON: 'America is a Rotten Place'

UPDATE:  Read also the Washington Post, Trump’s inaugural address offers nothing to soothe the worst fears about him.

"President Trump delivered a campaign speech, not an inaugural address today. That he and his staff do not understand the difference goes to the heart of his insufficiency as a leader. Addressing a shockingly sparse crowd, he painted a picture of a hellish America that can only be restored by turning inward, deciding the world is a burden and our allies are thieves."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s America is a rotten place.

So why such a "dark, false and frightening" vision?  As the article notes:

"Does he see America as a decimated, destroyed and weak country? Apparently yes — or he would like us to believe so in order to, in a year or so, declare how everything has improved. . .

There has never and will not be a better Trump. His vision is dark, false and frightening. He leads by stoking nativism, protectionism (which actually makes us poorer) and seething resentment. God help us all."

Trump's Big CON: 'Universal Health Insurance For Everyone'

UPDATE II: The still unanswered question is who is being conned by Trump, all Americans or just rabid Republi-CONs?

One solution to Trump's promise of 'universal health insurance for everyone' is 'Medicare for All'.

Read Forbes, Trump's Stealth Health Plan Could Be 'Medicare For All'.

If that happens, it will be the Republi-CON party that got conned by Trump.

UPDATE:  Read also the Washington Post, The magnitude of the health-care calamity Republicans are about to cause is becoming clear.

"We should begin with the assumption that nothing Trump says can be taken at face value; the “plan” that he claims is being devised could be no more real than the secret plan to defeat the Islamic State he used to claim that he had formulated. But that’s not the point. What matters is this: Donald Trump just emphatically promised universal health coverage. That’s an absolutely gigantic promise, and it’s one that Republicans have no intention of keeping. . .

That’s because the Republican plan, in whatever final form it takes, will absolutely, positively not cover everyone. Universal coverage isn’t even one of their goals. Republicans believe it’s much more important to get government as far away from health care as possible. In place of the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid and subsidies for the purchase of insurance that have extended coverage to 20 million more people than used to have it, they’ll be offering some tax credits and health savings accounts, which would be very good for the healthy and wealthy, but not so great for other people.

They call this 'universal access,' which is meant to sound like 'universal coverage' but is actually nothing of the sort. The truth is that there are really only two ways you can achieve universal coverage: by having the government cover everyone in some form of single-payer, or with a set of extremely coercive mandates to carry coverage, much more coercive than the ones in the ACA. Republicans would rather pluck out their own eyes than agree to either one of those. So the trick is to make the public think they won’t take away coverage from tens of millions of people, while doing just that.

That requires some rhetorical subtlety, which is something Trump is just not capable of. . .

But Trump says whatever comes into his head, and whatever seems like it might be popular."

Read the Washington Post, Donald Trump may have just destroyed the Republican effort to repeal Obamacare. 

Trump's Big CON: Mexico Won't Pay For His 'Great Wall'

UPDATE II: First 'they'll pay', now 'we'll be paid back'.

Read USA Today, Trump says U.S. will be 'paid back' for Mexico wall.

Trump is ever the bamboozling CON man.

UPDATE:  Read also the Washington Post, Trump just said his ‘Great Mexican Wall’ is happening. He’s playing you again.

"President-elect Donald Trump may ask Congress for American tax dollars to pay for a border wall with Mexico, breaking a major campaign promise, according to multiple reports late Thursday".

Read Market Watch, U.S. taxpayers may end up paying for Trump’s border wall with Mexico.

Read also Vanity Fair, Trump Admits Taxpayers Will Pay for His “Great Wall” After All.