Trump's Big CON: Trump Has No Morality (or Principles)

 UPDATE II:  Why has The Donald been so successful, despite his lack of morality or principles?

His core supporters don't care, so he doesn't need them.

"Trump campaigned on the Palin model. In fact, he improved upon it. His identity was his trademark, rendering the constant shifts in policy goals and promises almost meaningless. His base saw in Trump what they wanted to see. Some saw a fighter who would stand up for them, others saw a vaunted truth-teller, and a few, truth be told, likely saw a potential white-nationalist hero. And he gave it to them: the image, the veneer, the blank slate upon which their deeply held dreams — for themselves as much as their country — could be written. His fans weren’t dissuaded by his past support for Democrats (including his 2016 opponent), or his lies, or his personal liberalism, or his crudeness, or his long history of mistreating small-business owners of the kind he claimed to champion, because his fans weren’t voting for Trump. They were voting for what Trump meant to them personally. . .

His popularity is cultural, not political, resilient to the notions of truth and fiction and to Trump’s own failures."

Read the Washington Post, Trump is Sarah Palin but better at it.

UPDATE:  "Seven months in, it’s clear that lying is not the disease afflicting us, just the most obvious symptom. The infection’s name is “getting away with it.”

The phrase 'getting away with it' didn’t even exist as an expression until the middle of the 19th century. It came into general use over the following few decades, coincident with the Darwinian phrase 'survival of the fittest' and Nietzsche’s 'God is dead.' In the 2012 book 'Missing Out,' in a chapter entitled 'On Getting Away With It,' psychiatrist Adam Phillips suggested we had, just in the last century, gone from regarding 'getting away with it' as immoral — perhaps a forbidden pleasure we might secretly admire, sometimes indulge, but could never approve — to its elevation to a highest-value goal.

In the chapter’s conclusion he writes, 'But what if getting away with it was a new moral principle or project? . . In this new morality — which sounds like a moral game, or a parody of the idea of morality — moral excellence would reside in being able to successfully exempt yourself from rules you have consented to. . . The Good Person would be replaced by the Impressive Person; and what would impress would be the breaking of rules without punishment. . . Where once there were the principled, now there would be the opportunists; the clever would displace the pious.' He all but foretold the election of President Trump. . .

When Trump gets away with flouting a rule, even as he pretends to consent to it, when he gets away with a lie, even as he pretends to consent to the commandment not to lie, he readily congratulates himself: by his own values — values our society broadly understands, and sometimes almost shares (sometimes in jest, sometimes in horror, sometimes with a delicious sense of trespass) — “getting away with it” is good, in and of itself. . .

The country is in a tough spot. But knowing what you’re up against is half the battle, and we know that Trump’s 'getting away with it' is a parody of morality."

Read the Washington Post, When ‘getting away with it’ is all Trump cares about.

"After a campaign gestated in birtherism, Trump was slow to condemn the likes of white supremacist David Duke, routinely spoke in coded racial language to energize a segment of people angry about the changing face of the country and condoned violence against those who disagreed with him, Trump, over the last four days, has proven that he is that same person as president.

And that person is the opposite of a leader. And that person is dangerous to this country's well-being.

Trump's comments at a press availability at Trump Tower on Tuesday not only revealed, again, his remarkable blindness to the racial history and realities of this country, but also showed his willingness to stake out morally indefensible positions as the result of personal pique.

Three days after insisting that the blame for the Charlottesville protests spurred by neo-Nazis and white supremacists lay 'on many sides,' and just a day removed from a more fulsome condemnation of those groups, Trump returned to his original position -- that this was a situation where both sides were wrong and the only people who disagreed with that were the fake news media. . .

That outcome is more than a failure of political leadership by Trump. It is a failure of moral leadership.

It is impossible -- given the last two years of Trump -- to conclude he is simply fumbling his way around on issues of race, gender and ethnic heritage. The mountain of evidence gathered suggests just the opposite: That he is purposely saying and doing things to make murky moral questions that should be crystal clear. And why is he doing it? For political gain.

That is the opposite of what being president of the United States should be. Hell, it's the opposite of what being a citizen of this country should be.

What Trump is doing is dangerous -- for our politics and for our moral fiber. To condone white supremacists by insisting there are two sides to every coin is to take us back decades in our understanding of each other. It is to undo decades worth of progress toward a freer and better country for all people.

To do so purposely to score political points or stick it in the eye of your supposed media enemies is, frankly, despicable."

Read CNN, Donald Trump's failure in Charlottesville wasn't political -- it was moral.

Trump's problem is that he has no persoanl morality.

He is guided only by personal, monetary and political gain.

Read also:

Trump's Big CON: When Loyalty Is Valued Above Principle and Honesty,

Trump's Big CON: What Might Have Been If He Only Had Ideas or Principles (Or Even Common Sense)

Trump's Big CON: What Might Have Been If He Only Had Ideas or Principles (Or Even Common Sense), CONt.

Trump's Big CON: He is a Performance Artist (AKA It's All About the Show, Explained, CONt. Part 4)

UPDATE:  "For his entire life, Trump has made grandiose promises and ominous threats — and rarely delivered on any. When he was in business, Reuters found, he frequently threatened to sue news organizations for libel, but the last time he followed through was 33 years ago, in 1984. Trump says that he never settles cases out of court. In fact, he has settled at least 100 times, according to USA Today.

In his political life, he has followed the same strategy of bluster. In 2011, he said that he had investigators who 'cannot believe what they’re finding' about President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, and that he would at some point 'be revealing some interesting things.' He had nothing. During the campaign, he vowed that he would label China a currency manipulator, move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, make Mexico pay for a border wall and initiate an investigation into Hillary Clinton. So far, nada. After being elected, he signaled to China that he might recognize Taiwan. Within weeks of taking office, he folded. He implied that he had tapes of his conversations with then-FBI Director James B. Comey. Of course, he had none.

Even now, as he deals with a nuclear crisis, Trump has made claims that could be easily shown to be false. He tweeted that his first presidential order was to 'modernize' the United States’ nuclear arsenal. In fact, he simply followed a congressional mandate to authorize a review of the arsenal, which hasn’t been completed yet. Does he think the North Koreans don’t know this? . .


'I think Americans should sleep well at night, have no concerns about this particular rhetoric of the last few days,' Tillerson said on Wednesday. This was an unusual, perhaps even unprecedented statement. The secretary of state seems to have been telling Americans — and the world — to ignore the rhetoric, not of the North Korean dictator, but of his own boss, the president of the United States. It is probably what Trump’s associates have done for him all his life. They know that the guiding mantra for him has been not the art of the deal, but the art of the bluff."

Read the Washington Post, Trump has been making ominous threats his whole life.

"This was Trump in his element: At his luxurious private golf club here in Bedminster, the cameras trained on him, his vice president and national security advisers looking on admiringly, he parried queries — at times even gleefully — like a tennis player.

Engaging with people — journalists, advisers, friends and even foes — is Trump’s lifeblood. . .

The president’s exchanges with a small pool of traveling reporters lacked the formality of a full-fledged news conference. (His last was in February.) After each answer, he made eye contact with a reporter, as if to say, 'Gimme another!'

'It was like he was a dam that had suddenly burst free and he was able to unload a lot that was on his mind,' presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said. . .

“This is what [Trump’s new chief of staff, John F. Kelly, a retired four-star Marine Corps general]  will learn very quickly, which is when you put this guy in a cage and think you’re controlling him, things like this happen,” said one Trump confidant, who requested anonymity to speak candidly.

Also watching it unfold on television was Trump biographer Tim O’Brien. The moment, he said, was vintage Trump.

'President Trump is a performance artist and he loves being on stage. .?.?. He was very much Trump unshackled and unfettered and reveling in this moment,' said O’Brien, author of the 2005 book 'Trump Nation: The Art of Being the Donald.' . .

O’Brien said Trump 'was in his element,' but added, 'I don’t think it’s a good thing. Donald Trump in his element is someone who’s living in his own private Idaho, inside his own head. He’s constantly scripting how he sees the world and his role in it.' . .

Trump lives to be in the arena himself, said Sam Nunberg, a former Trump adviser.

'He realizes that the best way for him to control his message is to be the message,' Nunberg said.

Read the Washington Post, ‘When you put this guy in a cage and think you’re controlling him, things like this happen’.

Trump's Big CON: Repeat Twice Daily: "He's So Pretty" (AKA Trump is a Psycho-Narcissistic Con Man (CONt., Part 9))

"Twice a day since the beginning of the Trump administration, a special folder is prepared for the president. The first document is prepared around 9:30 a.m. and the follow-up, around 4:30 p.m. Former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and former Press Secretary Sean Spicer both wanted the privilege of delivering the 20-to-25-page packet to President Trump personally, White House sources say.

These sensitive papers, described to VICE News by three current and former White House officials, don’t contain top-secret intelligence or updates on legislative initiatives. Instead, the folders are filled with screenshots of positive cable news chyrons (those lower-third headlines and crawls), admiring tweets, transcripts of fawning TV interviews, praise-filled news stories, and sometimes just pictures of Trump on TV looking powerful.

One White House official said the only feedback the White House communications shop, which prepares the folder, has ever gotten in all these months is: 'It needs to be more fucking positive.' That’s why some in the White House ruefully refer to the packet as 'the propaganda document.'"

Read Vice News, Trump gets a folder full of positive news about himself twice a day.

Now repeat after me:  He's so pretty!

Trump's Big CON: He's Gotta Help His Supporters Hate, Hate, Hate, CONt.

UPDATE XIII: If you had any doubt, The Donald made it clear.

Read the Washington Post:

Trump puts a fine point on it: He sides with the alt-right in Charlottesville, which explained that to Trump, marchers "defending their 'heritage'" by chanting anti-Semitic and Nazi slogans (such as bigots, racist, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and the Ku Klux Klan) are the moral equals of those "those protesting their racism, hatred and belief in the inferiority of African Americans, Jews and other minorities";

Trump’s rhetorical ricochet on Charlottesville highlights basic truths about the president, which noted that:

Trump "does not like to be told what to say. He will always find a way to pull the conversation back to himself. And he is preternaturally inclined to dance with the ones who brought him. . .

[Then he] turned to one of his favorite rhetorical tools, using casual language to strip away any definite blame, any clear moral stand, and instead send the message that nothing is certain, that everything is negotiable, that ethics are always situational. 'You can call it terrorism,' he said. 'You can call it murder. You can call it whatever you want.'";

Everyone working for Trump knows his Charlottesville response is an abomination, which stated that "the president adamantly defended his original statement that the fault lies with bigotry on 'many sides' and reiterated that 'there’s blame on both sides' for what happened. He said that the rallying white supremacists and Nazis had been treated 'unfairly' by the media, and that there 'were very fine people on both sides.'";

Trump just hit a new low, which explained that

Trump "after putting Nazis on the same moral plane as anti-Nazis, put the father of our country and the author of the Declaration of Independence on the same moral plane as two men who made war on America. Duke and white-nationalist leader Richard Spencer applauded Trump’s performance. . .

It’s more than words. The administration proposed eliminating the 'Countering Violent Extremism' program; officials argued that the effort should target only Islamist radicalization, not right-wing extremism. In June, the Trump administration canceled a grant to a group called Life After Hate, which rehabilitates neo-Nazis. 'At a time when this is the biggest threat in our country, to pull funding from the only organization in the United States helping people disengage from this is pretty suspect to me,' the group’s co-founder Christian Picciolini told me.

And now we have the spectacle of the president, in response to reporters’ questions, defending the character and motives of the neo-Nazi demonstrators in Charlottesville.

Trump, who has issued scores of tweets without benefit of accurate information, explained his initial unwillingness to single out the white supremacist who drove into a crowd of demonstrators: 'Before I make a statement, I like to know the facts.'

Trump, who has criticized others for failing to use the phrase 'radical Islamic terrorism,' declined to call the incident terrorism, dismissing the question as 'legal semantics.'

Asked about the culpability of the 'alt-right' in the Charlottesville attack, Trump replied: 'Okay, what about the alt-left that came charging them?'";

The nation can only weep, an editorial that stated:

"TUESDAY WAS a great day for David Duke and racists everywhere. The president of the United States all but declared that he has their backs.

When a white supremacist stands accused of running his car into a crowd of protesters, killing one and injuring 19, Americans of goodwill mourn and demand justice. When this is done in the context of a rally where swastikas are borne and racist and anti-Semitic epithets hurled, the only morally justifiable reaction is disgust. When the nation’s leader does not understand this, the nation can only weep. . .

That car in Charlottesville did not kill or wound just the 20 bodies it struck. It damaged the nation. Mr. Trump not only failed to help the country heal; he made the wound wider and deeper.";

President Trump must go, which argued:

"Donald Trump on Tuesday afternoon gave the most disgusting public performance in the history of the American presidency. Framed by the vulgar excess of the lobby of Trump Tower, the president of the United States shook loose the constraints of his more decent-minded advisers and, speaking from his heart, defended white supremacists and by extension, their credos of hatred. He equated with those thugs the courageous Americans who had gathered to stand up to the racism, anti-Semitism and doctrine of violence that won the cheers and Nazi salutes of the alt-right hordes to whom Trump felt such loyalty.

After several days in which Trump and his advisers wrestled with what should have been a straightforward task — condemning the instigators of the unrest that rocked Charlottesville, Va., this past weekend — Trump revealed the reason that finding those words was such a struggle. He, too, is an extremist.

No one who values the best of what the United States has stood for could watch without feeling revulsion, anger or heartbreak. . .

Every day Trump remains in office is a victory for the extremists. But in that same moment on Tuesday, Trump made it clear that to defeat the champions of hatred in the United States, he must go. That he also must go to preserve the United States’ standing in the world, to ensure the safety of our people and our way of life has also been made clear in the past week. It is now time that we follow his dangerous words with our own actions. It is why Heather Heyer was on that street in Charlottesville. We owe it to her and to ourselves to remove him from office as soon as the law permits. Trump himself has demonstrated the price of each day of delay."; and

What did you expect from Trump?, which pointed out:

"Plainly, the New York education system, Fordham University and Wharton School of Business have failed Trump, promoting him without ensuring that he possessed basic reasoning skills and a grasp of American history. But in these institutions’ defense, he is unteachable, we have learned. . .

Trump apologists have run out of excuses and credibility. He was at the time plainly the more objectionable of the two main party candidates; in refusing to recognize that they did the country great harm. They can make amends by denouncing him and withdrawing all support. In short, Trump’s embrace and verbal defense of neo-Nazis and white nationalists should be disqualifying from public service. All true patriots must do their utmost to get him out of the Oval Office as fast as possible."

Republicans, cut the outrage. It’s time to disown Trump., which suggested that:

Among other things, "Trump must be shunned and ostracized. He is not fit for polite company, let alone the presidency. He has demolished the rules of civilized behavior, and therefore should enjoy none of the ceremonial niceties that are extended to normal presidents.

Republicans’ words are insufficient and, at this point, insufferable. When we look back at this time, the only thing people will ask is: 'What did you do?' Republicans will need a better answer than 'I was outraged and gave tough quotes — on background.'

But hey, "source close to Stephen Bannon, the president’s chief strategist, said he was proud of the president’s performance Tuesday."

Read Bloomberg, Trump Drags GOP Onto Dangerous Ground, This Time Over Race.

(And don't forget Sebastian Gorka, another White House Trump aide, "who uses the platform to defend the embattled white man . . . [and] wore a medal from the Hungarian nationalist organization Vitezi Rend, a longtime anti-Semitic group that claimed Gorka as one of its own."

UPDATE XII:  Read the Washington Post, An ugly pattern is taking shape. Trump exaggerates certain threats. He plays down other ones., which states:

"Trump continually exaggerates the threat posed by immigration. . .

Trump appears to be reluctant to confront the far-right fringe threat — and the Russian threat to future elections."

The reasons are obvious.

But if you need a hint:

Read CNN, Trump has attacked just about everyone on Twitter. But not white supremacists.

Or read the Washington Post, I watched Trump all last year. His response to Charlottesville was no surprise., which notes that "[a] quiet wink at white supremacists followed by a belated condemnation fits the pattern he established in the campaign.

UPDATE XI:  Excerpts from WP, Trump acts like the president of the Red States of America:

"Compare Trump’s muted reaction to Charlottesville with his animated response last December to a similar incident in Columbus, another college town where an extremist plowed a car into a crowd of people. Abdul Razak Ali Artan, an Ohio State University student, drove a Honda sedan through a crowd outside a school building last November before emerging from the vehicle and slashing at people with a butcher knife. As president-elect, Trump flew to OSU to meet with survivors and praise the cop who shot the attacker. 'This is a great honor for me today,' Trump told reporters during the visit. 'We’re in a fantastic state that I love, Ohio.' One big difference: Artan was a Somali Muslim refugee. It's not even clear Trump has tried to call the mother of Charlottesville victim Heather Heyer. . .

In this context, Trump’s announcement that he is mulling a pardon for Joe Arpaio can be viewed as a strategic sop to mollify some of the most xenophobic elements of his nativist base. The president told Fox News in an interview published yesterday that he is 'seriously considering' a full pardon to the former Arizona sheriff, who was convicted last month of criminal contempt for ignoring a federal judge’s order that he stop racially profiling Hispanics.

'I might do it right away, maybe early this week. I am seriously thinking about it,' the president told Gregg Jarrett. He called Arpaio a “great American patriot” who has “done a lot in the fight against illegal immigration”: “Is there anyone in local law enforcement who has done more to crack down on illegal immigration than Sheriff Joe? … He doesn’t deserve to be treated this way.”

Arpaio, who remains a 'birther' and has insisted he has proof that Obama was not born in Hawaii, lost reelection last year. He was an early Trump endorser — going to Iowa for the announcement — and linked himself closely with the GOP nominee — speaking in prime time during the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. . .

In stark contrast to his caution after Charlottesville, it took Trump just 54 minutes to attack the chief executive of Merck by name on Monday morning after he resigned from the president’s manufacturing council. Kenneth C. Frazier, one of the few African American chief executives in the Fortune 500, touted the virtues of diversity in a statement. “I feel a responsibility to take a stand against intolerance and extremism,” he said. “America's leaders must honor our fundamental values by clearly rejecting expressions of hatred, bigotry and group supremacy, which run counter to the American ideal that all people are created equal.”

POTUS continued to use his social media bully pulpit to go after him last night . . .

Meanwhile, even after his speech yesterday, Trump still has not reacted publicly to a bomb that was detonated at a Minnesota mosque Aug. 5. Sebastian Gorka, a far-right nationalist on Trump’s National Security Council, defended his silence last week. 'There's a great rule: all initial reports are false,' Gorka said on MSNBC from the White House briefing room. 'You have to check them. You have to find out who the perpetrators are. … We've had a series of crimes committed — alleged hate crimes — by right-wing individuals in the last six months that turned out to actually have been propagated by the left. So let's wait and see.' (The governor of Minnesota had already declared the mosque attack as 'an act of terrorism' when Gorka said this.)

The president, of course, showed no such caution after attacks this spring in Paris and London. And don’t forget when he falsely described a casino robbery in Manila as a terrorist attack. Or his attacks on Mexican immigrants.

Finally, Trump’s botched response to Charlottesville should be viewed as another consequence of electing the first president in American history with no prior governing experience. 'Say what you will about politicians as a group, but it is striking how all of them, from Bernie Sanders to Ted Cruz, knew the right thing to say in response to Charlottesville,' writes Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University. 'Running for office repeatedly tends to hone one’s rhetorical instincts. At a minimum, most professional politicians learn the do’s and don’ts of political rhetoric. Trump’s political education has different roots. He has learned the art of political rhetoric from three sources: reality television, Twitter and ‘the shows.’ His miscues this past week can be traced to the pathologies inherent in each of these arenas.' . .


'The president is confident that his lazy musings are equal to history. They are not,' [Michael Gerson, a speechwriter for George W. Bush, wrote in a column this weekend. 'Trump could offer no context for this latest conflict. No inspiring ideals from the author of the Declaration of Independence, who called Charlottesville home. No healing words from the president who was killed by a white supremacist. By his flat, foolish utterance, Trump proved once again that he has no place in the company of these leaders.'"

UPDATE X:  Want to understand what hate can do to victim and perpetrator,

Read the Washington Post, Three years ago, the Islamic State massacred Yazidis in Iraq. Why?, which noted that:

 "A recurrent theme in my conversations with Yazidis and testimonies of female survivors is that not only foreign fighters but also local Iraqis and Syrians, both men and women, were actively involved in their rape and enslavement. In the words of a survivor, 'They did not attack us because of their ideology, but to simply have the opportunity to rape us.'

While some Sunnis from the Sinjar area tried to protect their Yazidi neighbors, many others, including godfathers of Yazidi boys who were supposed to act as their protectors, participated in the enslavement of women and the robbing of the Yazidis and looting of their properties resulting in revenge attacks after the defeat of the Islamic State."

Then read also the Washington Post, Trump’s lasting legacy is to embolden an entirely new generation of racists.

UPDATE IX:  "Republicans need to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth: Their party supported and still supports Trump, who feeds the monster of white resentment and who focuses their anger, fear and frustration on minorities.

The memes that immigrants are “stealing our jobs”; Christianity is a persecuted religion in the United States; Mexican immigrants are “murderers”; and millions of illegal immigrants voted in the election have given white nationalists rhetorical cover to propound their even more extreme racist views. Bannon and company have introduced in the Oval Office the “blood and soil” definition of nationalism, the suggestion that the media is the enemy of the people and a nonstop attack on the truth. They refused to abandon a presidential candidate who attacked a federal court judge on the basis of race, for heaven’s sake."

Read the Washington Post, Don’t argue with Pelosi on this one, Republicans.

Pelosi called Trump out, saying:

"'If the President is sincere about rejecting white supremacists, he should remove all doubt by firing Steve Bannon and the other alt-right white supremacist sympathizers in the White House.'"

UPDATE VIII:  "There should be no real difficulty in condemning Nazis, white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan. They are, for God’s sake, Nazis and white supremacists. This should not require moral courage. This is obvious. This is the moral equivalent of the text you type to prove you’re not a robot. . .

'It’s been going on for a long time in our country,' Trump said on Saturday. 'Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama, this has been going on for a long, long time. It has no place in America.'

If only. If only it had no place here. If only these statues had sprung up out of the earth on their own.

What did they think the mob was doing, gathered with torches?

Of course they gathered with torches, because the only liberty they have lost is the liberty to gather with torches and decide whose house to visit with terror. . .

Here we are in the year of our lord 2017 and the president of the United States lacks the moral courage to condemn Nazis and white supremacists. And they are not even making it difficult. They are saluting like Nazis and waving Nazi flags and chanting like Nazis and spewing hatred like Nazis. Maya Angelou was not wrong. When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Especially if what that person is telling you is 'I am a Nazi.'

Barely, after two days, he has managed to mumble that their ideology has (should have) no place in our society. Silence sells hats, I guess.

[But for Trump, ] there is nothing more pathological than the desire to be liked by everyone all the time. If you are continually attracting Nazis and white supremacists, you shouldn’t say, 'WOW, everyone LIKES ME! Great!' you should ask yourself, 'Where in my life have I gone seriously wrong?'"

Read the Washington Post, Donald Trump’s despicable words.

UPDATE VII: The Donald panders to and leverages racism. So he bears responsibility for the resulting violence.

"When does racism drive people to commit violence?

'The most likely predictor of that is exposure to a kind of ideology,' [Eric Knowles, a psychology professor at New York University who studies prejudice and politics] said. Most if not all people carry implicit biases and unexamined prejudices, he said, and some may harbor feelings of fear or resentment that they don’t express in public.

'But when people come into contact with an organized ideology that valorizes or glorifies an intergroup struggle like a race struggle — that scaffolds from people’s everyday prejudices into something altogether more violent,' he said."

Read the Washington Post, Why are people still racist? What science says about America’s race problem.

UPDATE VI:  The Donald isn't racist, he just likes to retweet racist rhetoric.

Read the Washington Post, Trump retweets right-wing provocateur known for pushing false conspiracy theories.

UPDATE V:  "Trump’s reaction Saturday to the Charlottesville hate-fest is an example of what I find so troubling. I never thought a president of the United States would hedge his bets when it came to denouncing racists and anti-Semites. There is abundant boilerplate for these incidents, whole attics of cliches, but Trump could utter not a one. Instead, he pushed out some mush about an “egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.”

On Monday, the president toughened up. 'Racism is evil,' Trump said, no doubt at the urging of his aides. He denounced 'the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.' Nice try, but three days late and many dollars short. The stain of the original statement cannot be removed. It is the authentic Trump — the genuine embodiment of a president who has both identified a rage in part of the American electorate and validated it.

America has had these moments before. The reign of Sen. Joseph McCarthy comes to mind. He was a lying opportunist who exploited a Red Scare to ruin lives and careers. But for all his villainy, he was just a senator and, in due course, the Senate took care of its own. It censured McCarthy.

Trump, however, is vastly more powerful. His tweets dominate the news cycle. His claim that 3 million to 5 million illegal immigrants voted for Hillary Clinton and deprived him of a popular-vote victory has seeped into the Republican electorate. The Post last week reported that about half of Republicans would support postponing the 2020 presidential election until the problem is fixed.

That the problem cannot be fixed because it does not exist is almost beside the point. More important is the blatant disregard for both the Constitution and tradition. We hold presidential elections every four years. Always have. The president’s term is set by the Constitution. Look it up.

Simultaneous with the delegitimization of the electoral process has been a subversion of truth. It has been reduced to just another thing — something like an alternative to the 'alternative facts' of Kellyanne Conway’s invention. Trump’s incessant attacks on the press have taken a toll. The so-called mainstream media has for years been a GOP whipping boy, but now it is not merely in opposition, it is also corrupt. 'They’re lying, they’re cheating, they’re stealing,' Trump said during a rally in October in Grand Junction, Colo. 'They’re doing everything, these people right back here.' He was pointing to the press section. . .

Beliefs that used to be found only on the fringe of the far right have entered the Republican mainstream. The furious and unbalanced hatred of Clinton, the conviction that the election was almost stolen — all this and more have been given such legitimacy by Trump that neo-Nazis can march in Thomas Jefferson’s home town, confident that they have Trump’s support. They were wrong. They only had his indifference."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s America is not mine.

UPDATE IV:  "After two days, blistering criticism from his own party and tougher anti-white-nationalist statements from the company that makes Tiki torches and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, President Trump dragged himself to the podium for a statement that specifically condemned white nationalists, neo-Nazis and other racists. He had to begin with some self-congratulations on the economy — because his accomplishments are what he really cares about. . .

He read from a teleprompter. Speaking from his heart would have been impossible, given his obvious lack of passion and willful blindness over the past couple of days. He did not mention the 'alt-right,' nor did he announce he is firing Stephen K. Bannon, who once bragged he gave the alt-right a platform at Breitbart. He did not announce any specific policy measures. He did not apologize for his moral obtuseness. This was the weakest statement he could have gotten away with, 48 hours too late. Why did it have to come to this?

The white nationalists in Charlottesville did not hide their intentions. They were there to revel in the Trump presidency, which explicitly told them it was time to 'take their country back.' Former KKK grand wizard David Duke left no confusion as to his followers’ admiration for the president:

His invocation of the president’s name and campaign rhetoric makes the president’s equivocation all the more appalling — and revealing. Whereas any normal president or politician would renounce support from neo-Nazis and white nationalists, Trump — until forced to do so — would not criticize them, let alone refuse to accept their support. . .

Not to have rejected immediately the support or to tell the neo-Nazis they misunderstood his message shocks even the most jaded Trump critics and puts President Trump in a category of one — American politicians who gladly accept support from white nationalists, neo-Nazis and the alt-right (white nationalists with intellectual pretensions).

One might conclude from Trump’s foot-dragging and obsession with stoking racial tensions (e.g. his vote fraud commission, his crusade against legal and illegal immigrants, etc.) that, despite his apologists’ protestations, his campaign message was aimed at white resentment. Trump continues to tell those who want to 'take back their country' that 'their' country is being overrun by foreigners, non-Christians, non-whites. The majority of his followers had a more benign, non-racial interpretation (take the country back from liberals, elites, urbanites, etc.), but it surely hit home and brought out from the shadows Duke and his ilk. . .

Trump’s dance with the racists is therefore inseparable from his agenda. A nativist, populist president without the support of the most extreme defenders of Christian white America would be an impossibility."

Read the Washington Post, Why Trump had to be badgered to condemn neo-Nazis.

UPDATE III:  "Before he became a presidential candidate in 2016, the Manhattan builder spent the previous five years championing the racist birther lie that Obama was not born in the United States and, therefore, in the White House illegally. Then, on June 16, 2015, Trump set the tone for his presidential campaign when he said, 'They’re rapists' when talking about immigrants from Mexico during the announcement of his candidacy. And it has been all downhill from there with a candidacy that allowed right-wing hate to feel safe quarter and a presidency that lets it grow by pretending it’s not there.

Trump, the man who is oh so quick to thunder against radical Islamic terrorism, always gets cramps in his Twitter thumbs, loses his voice or suffers amnesia when white nationalists are involved. Like that time David Duke, former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, endorsed him in February 2016, 'I know nothing about David Duke,' Trump told CNN’s Jake Tapper. 'I know nothing about white supremacists.'

'This represents a turning point for the people of this country. We are determined to take our country back,' Duke said after he slithered his way into Charlottesville on Saturday. 'We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in. That’s why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he’s going to take our country back.'

Trump doesn’t have the moral clarity needed to immediately denounce Duke and his “take our country back” white supremacy. Trump doesn’t have the moral authority needed to make such commanding words stick. He ceded that moral high ground ages ago. And Trump has neither the interest nor the care to turn his words into deeds that heal the nation, especially with white nationalists like Stephen K. Bannon, Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka just steps away from the Oval Office. Especially when he is pursuing immigration, justice and voting rights policies that further the goals of white nationalists."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s horrible and predictable response to white supremacy in Charlottesville.

UPDATE II:  Foolishly, some people thought of Nazis as "'crazy people, stupid fanatics. Unfortunately it was not so. They knew they were not strong enough to conquer a unified country, so they split Germany into small groups. They used prejudice as a practical weapon to cripple the nation.'"

Read the Washington Post, After Charlottesville violence, World War II anti-fascist propaganda video finds a new audience.

UPDATE:  "Why does Trump resist condemning white supremacy? The most obvious answer is that he’s encouraging the racism of some of his supporters, after a campaign that derived initial energy from his racist birther conspiracy theories and in many ways was framed around the narrative that white identity and white America are under siege. White nationalism is now alive and well in the White House; we are reaping the inevitable consequences. . .

[But an additional reason is that] Trump’s resistance appears rooted in part in an instinctual sense that so doing would constitute some form of capitulation. In his remarks, Trump repeated the phrase 'on many sides' in a pointed tone, as if to signal that he will not be bullied by any objection to his false equivalence or any pressure to single out anti-black racism. . .

The message that Trump surely received — one he surely continues to believe — is that there is no reason for him to capitulate to politically correct demands that he explicitly condemn racism towards any minorities. But this raises a profound problem. It is likely that Trump views this whole affair as being all about him — that is, as all about whether he will surrender to his foes. He seems incapable of grasping that amid such crises, his office carries with it certain very grave responsibilities to the American people. . .

Trump clearly recognizes no obligation to the broader public of any kind as a function of the office entrusted to him. This isn’t just racism. It’s also his megalomaniacal inability to envision that his role might require duties above and beyond his desire to deepen his bond with certain supporters (which of course is all about him) or the fact that he doesn’t want to be seen surrendering in some vague sense.

And this could have continuing consequences.  The Times reports that white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups are only emboldened by the weekend’s events, and predict that their movement is growing — which means we may see more of this going forward. Brian Beutler argues that Trump’s refusal to call them out by name may well reflect an active desire to empower these groups and, more broadly, to realize their vision. "

Read the Washington Post, Why is Trump reluctant to condemn white terrorism? It’s his racism — and his megalomania.

While fear, anger, and hatred has been a great Republi-CON campaign strategy for many years, it is, of course, a terrible governing philosophy.

And it has proven to lead to violence.

Read the Washington Post:

White House confronts backlash over Trump’s remarks on Charlottesville,

One group loved Trump’s remarks about Charlottesville: White supremacists,

‘Look at the campaign he ran’: Charlottesville mayor is becoming one of Trump’s strongest critics,

After Charlottesville: End the denial about Trump, which noted:

"It should not have taken President Trump’s disgraceful refusal to condemn white supremacy, bigotry and Nazism to make clear to all who he is and which dark impulses he is willing to exploit to maintain his hold on power. . .

There are not, as Trump insisted Saturday, “many sides” to questions that were settled long ago: Racism, anti-Semitism, discrimination and white supremacy are unequivocally wrong.

A president who cannot bring himself to say this immediately and unequivocally squanders any claim to moral leadership. . .

For make no mistake: No matter how accurate it is to say that neo-Nazis and Klansmen represent a repugnant fringe, the fact that our president has consistently and successfully exploited white racial resentment cannot help but be taken by citizens of color as a sign of racism’s stubborn durability.

The backlash to racial progress is an old American story, from the end of Reconstruction forward. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s words from 1967 speak to us still: “Loose and easy language about equality, resonant resolutions about brotherhood fall pleasantly on the ear, but for the Negro, there is a credibility gap he cannot overlook. He remembers that with each modest advance the white population promptly raises the argument that the Negro has come far enough. Each step forward accents an ever-present tendency to backlash.” This is what we saw this weekend.

The battles over Confederate monuments, in Charlottesville and elsewhere, reflect our difficulty in acknowledging that these memorials are less historical markers than political statements. Many were erected explicitly in support of Jim Crow and implicitly to deny the truth that the Southern cause in the Civil War was built around a defense of slavery. Taking them down is an acknowledgment of what history teaches, not an eradication of the past." 

Trump fires back after the CEO of Merck resigned from his manufacturing council,

Raise your hand if you are pretending to be surprised.

 Read also Trump's Big CON: He's Gotta Help His Supporters Hate, Hate, Hate.

Trump's Big CON: He's Gotta Help His Supporters Hate, Hate, Hate, Arpaio Edition

UPDATE:  "In his effort to create a reputation as 'America’s toughest sheriff,' Arpaio made blatant and illegal racial profiling the hallmark of his two decades in office. A 2011 Justice Department investigation found systemic and widespread discriminatory practices in the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO), covering both their interactions with the public and their operation of county jails. Not only were Latinos in the jurisdiction profiled, harassed, detained, and abused in myriad ways, but Arpaio also used the tools of his office to go after those who criticized him. . .

So that’s the person Donald Trump is considering making the first recipient of a pardon in his presidency: someone with a long history of racist actions and racist policies, who was finally convicted of a crime he proudly owned up to. Should anyone be surprised?"

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s first pardon: An authoritarian racist who thinks he’s above the law?

Read also the Washington Post, Trump considers pardoning Joe Arpaio, and gives racists a reassuring wink, which states:

[A]fter deploying first delay and then false equivalence, Trump finally did denounce the racists and white supremacists who chanted his name in Charlottesville last weekend. It then took him only a few hours to give those same racists and white supremacists a nod and a reassuring wink. How else should we interpret a possible pardon for the sheriff who ran the most racist department the DOJ has ever investigated?

Don’t fret, alt-righters. Trump still has your back.

He's gotta help his supporters hate, hate, hate.

And one of his earliest supporters promoted racist birther conspiracies.

Read the Washington Post, Trump says he’s considering pardon for Joe Arpaio.

Trump's Big CON: It's All About the Show, Explained, CONt. Part 3

"Every day brings new drama, but the Trump Show’s themes remain the same. He’s come to tell his people that everyone else is wrong and they are right.

'The change you voted for is happening every single day,' he proclaims, underscoring each syllable with a raised hand, as the crowd bursts into cheers. Behind him, two signs hang in the rafters of this small arena:

PROMISES MADE, reads one.

PROMISES KEPT, reads the other.

Washington is torn between paralysis and alarm. The Congress is at odds with itself and its president. The special counsel’s investigation gets hotter and hotter, and has just been taken to a grand jury. There is talk of a constitutional crisis.

Yet the Trump Show goes on.

The presidency in crisis! How can this possibly be sustained? Where will it end? What is going to happen? But the answer is right in front of us: It’s happening right now, on an endless loop. This is what’s going to happen, day in and day out—nonstop chaos, plot twists and cliffhangers, a furious, embattled president who finds new ways to shock while never seeming to change.

The show goes on. The ratings are terrific! Trump keeps campaigning for the election that happened nine months ago, determined to keep that feeling alive.

He lashes out at the Congress, including his own party’s failed health-care vote: “The Republicans and Democrats let us down on that.”

He laments the Russia investigation: 'A total fabrication.' It is, he says, 'just an excuse for the greatest loss in the history of American politics. It just makes them feel better when they have nothing else to talk about. What the prosecutors should be looking at is Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 deleted emails.'

At that, the crowd erupts into a sustained roar, and the old, gleeful chants of 'Lock her up!' can be heard.

The message to the faithful is clear enough: You are on the hook for this. An attack on me is an attack on you. To stop believing would be a betrayal.

'They’re trying to cheat you out of the leadership you want with a fake story that is demeaning to all of you,' he says. It’s us versus them, and them is everybody else.

Their T-shirts proudly proclaim their hatreds: TRUMPED THAT BITCH, DEPLORABLE ’N CHIEF, DEATH TO LIBERALS. A leering Trump head on the cartoon Calvin figure, pissing on a snowflake.

Outside, the protesters are massed on a corner, buffered by the riot police in their helmets and bulletproof vests. A middle-aged woman waves a HILLBILLIES AGAINST TRUMP sign as the afternoon’s summer storm clears.

The spectacle, by now, is deeply familiar. But it retains the power to shock.

This is the Trump show, the neverending Trump show, and we’re all still glued to our seats."

Read The Atlantic, The Trump Show Never Ends.

Read also The Atlantic, How America Lost Its Mind, which tries to answer the question:

"When did America become untethered from reality?"

Trump's Big CON: He Opposes Leaks

The Donald hates leaks, except when he loves them.

Read CNN, Trump retweets Fox News story containing classified info.

Trump's Big CON: 'I Saved Us', The Economy Edition

UPDATE III:  After just seven months in office, The Donald is claiming credit "record low" unemployment.

(You might remember that when he took office America was a 'rotten place, a decimated, destroyed and weak country'.)

"The short answer is that this is false. The unemployment rate in July was 4.3 percent. It was 4.8 percent in January, when Trump took office, so it was already rather low.

Moreover, six of the past 12 presidents could brag of an unemployment rate lower than 4.3 percent. It was as low as 4.2 percent under George W. Bush, 3.9 percent under Bill Clinton, 4.2 percent under Richard Nixon, 3.4 percent under Lyndon B. Johnson, 2.5 percent under Dwight D. Eisenhower and 2.7 percent under Harry Truman."

Read the Washington Post, President Trump’s claim that ‘unemployment is at a record low’.

Now repeat after me:  He's so pretty!

UPDATE II:  On Sunday, the Republican National Committee tweeted:

"GOP
@GOP

UNPRECEDENTED ECONOMIC GROWTH UNDER @POTUS!
7:07 PM - Aug 6, 2017

To be clear: 'unprecedented' means it has never happened before. This tweet strongly suggests that '1 million new jobs in six months' never happened before Trump took office. And that suggestion would be wrong — very wrong.

In fact, President Barack Obama actually saw slightly more jobs created in his final six months — 1.08 million — than Trump has in his first six — 1.07 million. And Obama also saw more jobs created than Trump:

    In the first six months of 2016 (1.08 million)
    In the last six months of 2015 (1.34 million)
    In the first six months of 2015 (1.37 million)
    In the last six months of 2014 (1.5 million)
    In the first six months of 2014 (1.5 million)
    In the last six months of 2013 (1.09 million)

Indeed, no matter how you slice it and what months you choose, there isn't even one six-month period after mid-2013 during which Obama didn't see at least 1 million jobs created. One million jobs in six months is not unprecedented -- it has become the norm since the recovery from the Great Recession really kicked in.

Which got me thinking: Maybe the RNC tweet meant the first six months of a presidency? Even then, though, Bill Clinton saw more jobs created -- 1.25 million — in his first six months in 1993. None other than Jimmy Carter saw twice as many created as Trump — 2.14 million — in 1977. And if you adjusted for today's population size, George H.W. Bush (about 900,000 jobs created in 1989) would also beat Trump's vaunted 1 million standard.

So three of Trump's six immediate predecessors had at least his jobs numbers in their first six months (again, population-adjusted in one of those cases). Two others — Obama and George W. Bush — began their presidencies in recessions."

Read the Washington Post, The RNC says Trump’s jobs numbers are ‘unprecedented,’ because words don’t matter anymore.

UPDATE:  "Trump hasn't actually done anything other than cut a few regulations, but he's made it sound like he's passed a new New Deal. ('No administration has accomplished more in the first 90 days,' he rather ludicrously claimed.) He brags about a 'surging economy and jobs,' despite the fact that the economy and jobs are growing at exactly the same rate as before he took office. And, after disparaging the official unemployment rate as being 'fake' and 'phony' and 'totally fiction' while Obama was president, he has apparently decided that it's 'very real now.' In other words, Trump has done nothing and has congratulated himself for the economy Obama left behind.

Well, it's not just him doing the praising. Trump's new propaganda channel is, too. "

Read the Washington Post, For the last time, Trump hasn’t made the economy any better., which included this graph:

"Every president talks up the economy. It's part of a president's job to be America's cheerleader-in-chief. But half a year into Trump's presidency, the reality is the economy is solid. It's not booming. And there's no 'Trump bump' -- yet.

'On balance, it’s hard to see a Trump bump,' says Doug Holtz-Eakin, head of the right-leaning American Action Forum and an economic adviser to many Republicans. 'The economy is solid. It’s not spectacular.'

To see how the Trump economy is really doing, look at growth, jobs, wages and business spending. All of those factors are showing no change since the days of President Obama.

Yes, more Americans are getting jobs. Hiring in July was stronger than experts expected, with a net gain of 209,000 jobs. That's good news, but the pace of hiring is a tad worse than under President Obama. The economy has added 1,074,000 jobs since Trump took office. During the same stretch last year, the economy gained 1,246,000 jobs under Obama. The fastest growing job category last month was low-paying retail jobs. Trump used to slam Obama for only creating crummy jobs. Now that's part of the Trump story, too.

'On the jobs metric, there's no Trump bump,' says Chirs Rupkey, chief financial economist at MUFG bank in New York. 'It's pretty consistent with the final year of Obama’s administration.'

As for stocks: The market is going up. It gained more than 20 percent since Trump won the election. But Wall Street is not Main Street, and about half of America has $0 in the market. Numerous studies have shown that better stock returns don't mean a turbocharged economy is on the way with more growth and higher wages for the middle class.

The stock market may be going up, but wages are not. On the campaign trail, Trump frequently decried how middle class incomes were lower now than in 2000. He promised to change that, yet the jobs report that Trump called 'excellent' showed that wages only increased 2.5 percent in the past year. That's below America's historic average and the same pace that Obama achieved."

Read the Washington Post, America’s economy is solid, but there’s no ‘Trump bump’.

Trump's Big CON: Some of His Biggest Fans Are Fake (Maybe Russian Bots), And He Likes It (AKA Trump is a Psycho-Narcissistic Con Man (CONt., Part 8))

UPDATE II:  Read also Heavy, Nicole Mincey: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know.

It seems it took little time to catfish Trump.

Imagine how gullible he is with Putin.

UPDATE:  "For President Donald Trump, life is a constant positive feedback loop, punctuated by acute instances of narcissistic injury. He famously surrounds himself with yes-men, loyal insiders, confidants, and family members. He bristles at advisers who don’t tell him what he wants to hear, like National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, whom Trump has reportedly considered exiling to Afghanistan. Long after his election victory, he has regaled lawmakers, the C.I.A., journalists, and foreign heads of state about his unlikely electoral upset, and continuously points to the size of his crowds, which he often exaggerates. (A framed, panoramic photo of his inauguration crowd hangs in the press hall of the West Wing.) Nearly every morning, he watches the relentlessly pro-Trump Fox & Friends, retweeting clips and articles from the show and responding to segments with his own commentary online. Twice a day, Vice reports, he receives a folder 'filled with screenshots of positive cable news chyrons (those lower-third headlines and crawls), admiring tweets, transcripts of fawning TV interviews, praise-filled news stories, and sometimes just pictures of Trump on TV looking powerful.' White House staff call it 'the Propaganda Document.'

The feedback loop came full circle on Saturday when Trump, ensconced in his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club for a 17-day 'working vacation,' unwittingly amplified some 'fake news' of his own by retweeting and thanking someone who appeared to be a staunch supporter on Twitter. 'Trump working hard for the American people.....thanks,' the tweet from @Protrump45 read. The account appeared to belong to a woman named Nicole, or Nicole Mincey, or BlackGirlPatriot. She claimed to be a 'black pro-Trump conservative' with a Trump merchandise retail empire. Trump acknowledged her tweet by quoting it to his 35 million followers, adding, 'Thank you Nicole!'

By the end of the weekend, however, Nicole’s account had been suspended, indicating, according to Twitter’s terms of service, that it had been deemed 'spammy' or perhaps 'just plain fake.' Twitter users had become suspicious that she was actually a bot and not a real person. Some identified her profile picture as a stock image of a woman from a Web site called Placeit, a stock photo and logo mockup company. . .

Trump is, in many ways, the living embodiment of everything Barack Obama warned against in his farewell address regarding the negative effect of social-media echo chambers. . .

For Trump, confirmation bias isn’t a byproduct, or even a feature, of the media diet he has arranged in the West Wing. It’s a way of life, perfected over a lifetime of masquerading as his own spokesperson and decorating his real-estate properties with fake Time magazines featuring his face on the cover. Retweeting and responding to a fake pro-Trump account on Twitter is just the latest manifestation of a closed feedback loop that Trump, and now a coterie of White House staffers, guard zealously. The user @ProTrump45 is gone, for now, but Trump’s tweet, which contains a blank space where Nicole’s message would be, remains a monument to his monomania."

Read Vanity Fair, Trump Falls for His Own Propaganda Machine.

Read also New York Magazine, Nicole Mincey Wasn’t a Bot, But She Wasn’t Quite Real Either and TalkingPointsMemo, The Mystery Of Nicole Mincey, which includes a discussion of 'sponsored articles')

"Early Saturday morning, President Trump tweeted his gratitude to a social-media super-fan, -Nicole Mincey, magnifying her praise of him to his 35 million followers.

Here’s the problem: There is no evidence the Twitter feed belongs to someone named Nicole Mincey. And the account, according to experts, bears a lot of signs of a Russia-backed disinformation campaign.

On Sunday, Twitter suspended the Mincey account, known as @ProTrump45, after several other users revealed that it was probably a fake, created to amplify pro-Trump content.

The incident highlights Trump’s penchant for off-the-cuff tweeting — and the potential consequences for doing so now that he holds the nation’s highest office. Even as the president has railed against multiple investigations into Russia’s meddling in U.S. politics, he may have become Exhibit A of the foreign government’s influence by elevating a suspected Russia-connected -social-media user — part a sophisticated campaign to exacerbate disputes in U.S. politics and gain the attention of the most powerful tweeter in the world.

'The president doesn’t know whether it’s a Russian bot or not,' said Clint Watt, a former FBI agent and fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, using the term for a fake Twitter account pretending to represent a real person and created to influence public opinion or promote a particular agenda. 'He’s just pushing a narrative, whether it’s true or false. This provides a window not just for Russia but for any adversary to both influence the president or discredit him.'"

Read the Washington Post, The curious case of ‘Nicole Mincey,’ the Trump fan who may actually be a Russian bot.

Trump's Big CON: He's Gotta Help His Supporters Hate, Hate, Hate

UPDATE:  "President Trump tweeted nine times this morning, attacking the 'failing' New York Times, other 'fake news' outlets (including the Washington Post), 'hoax Russian collusion,' and Richard Blumenthal, the Democratic senator from Connecticut, as a 'Vietnam con artist' who 'cried like a baby.'

Today’s string of tweets represented Trump’s most voluble social media outburst since John Kelly, a retired Marine general, became his chief of staff just one week ago, promising to restore order to a chaotic West Wing and, in particular, to push the president’s tweets 'in the right direction.' On the social media front, Kelly is — not surprisingly to anyone who has even casually observed the president’s behavior over the past two years — off to a shaky start.

Today’s Twitter flare-up would seem to suggest that Kelly is destined to fail as Trump’s law and order chief of staff because Trump’s impulsiveness cannot be constrained.

But that’s not the real reason he cannot succeed. Rather, it’s because Trump’s base, and in particular, his media and social media base, thrives on West Wing dysfunction that is rooted in what is portrayed as an existential battle between Trump’s 'nationalist' staff and advisers, and the dreaded 'globalists' in his midst. Because Trump has displayed no real interest in taming that beast, and in fact seems to relish feeding it, any effort by Kelly to slap Trump’s hand away from Twitter will have little impact on the persistent unrest roiling the White House. . .

Trump signaled his continuing gusto for dividing the world into rivalries, including between the 'fake news' and pro-Trump media. 'Fake news' is on the side of the 'establishment' and the pro-Trump media is on the side of, and possibly indistinguishable from, the burn-it-all-d0wn Bannon camp. . .

Trump still takes to Twitter like the pre-Kelly Trump. That’s because Twitter is the place where Trump goes for affirmation, the place where Breitbart’s version of events gets repeated and retweeted, giving Trump a kind of safe space from the 'fake news' about Russia investigations and legislative disasters and all of the failures of his first six months in office. . .

Trump’s fixation with competition and feuding, ultimately, is what will make Kelly’s task impossible."

Read the Washington Post, John Kelly is doomed to fail. The reason why isn’t what you think.

The Donald thrives on affirmation and flattery, and the chaos created by fear, anger and hatred are his tools.

"Since a makeshift bomb tore through a Minnesota mosque early Saturday morning, President Trump has used Twitter, his preferred platform for communicating with the American people, to rail about “fake news,” attack a Democratic senator from Connecticut and insist that he’s working hard while vacationing in New Jersey.

One topic Trump has yet to address: the mosque attack at the Dar Al-Farooq Islamic Center in the Twin Cities suburb of Bloomington, where several people were gathering for prayer. Nobody was injured, authorities said, but the attack has left the Muslim community feeling unsettled.

And Minnesotans and others are still waiting for the president to condemn the attack. . .

Silence after attacks where Muslims are the victims is not uncharacteristic for the president, who has been previously lambasted for a perceived double standard that critics claim he applies when denouncing terrorism. Attacks perpetuated by Muslims draw his attention and sharp tongue, they argue, while violence targeting Muslims is overlooked."

Read the Washington Post, Trump still has not condemned the Minnesota mosque bombing. Muslim leaders are waiting.

Trump's Big CON: Shamefully Criticizing the Military Service of Others

The Donald is at it again.

Read the Washington Post, In attacking Blumenthal, Trump opens himself to criticism over the military. Again., which notes that:

During the campaign, Trump criticized John McCain's military service, saying "He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured."

"When Trump registered for the draft at 18 in 1964, he had just graduated as a cadet from the New York Military Academy in Cornwall, where he played football and basketball.

On the campaign trail, Trump would claim it was bone spurs in both feet that prevented his service in Vietnam. His campaign said it was because of his high draft lottery number in 1969, although his medical deferment remained in place until 1972, when he received a permanently disqualifying deferment — a year before the draft ended and the war began to wind down. . .

[A] raunchy conversations with shock jock Howard Stern in 1997 revealed a particularly detached perspective on military service from the billionaire real estate magnate.

'I've been so lucky in terms of that whole world. It is a dangerous world out there — it's scary, like Vietnam,' Trump told Stern about the effort to avoid sexually transmitted diseases in the '80s and '90s, as the AIDS crisis blossomed.

'It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier,' Trump said, to laughs and egging-on by Stern.

'I'm old enough to have gone through the '70s,' Trump said.

And he was. Trump was in Manhattan in the 1970s, spinning his inheritance into real estate gold. Blumenthal was stateside in a Marine Corps uniform until 1976. McCain was a prisoner for five and a half years until his release on March 14, 1973."

Read also the Washington Post, Questions linger about Trump’s draft deferments during Vietnam War.

Trump's Big CON: "He's So Pretty", Nuclear Weapons Edition (AKA Trump is a Psycho-Narcissistic Con Man (CONt., Part 7.5))

My Mr. President, what big nuclear weapons you have!

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s bizarre brag about the nuclear arsenal doesn’t square with reality, which noted:

"President Trump tweeted a warning to North Korea on Wednesday morning. Pointing to his executive order to 'renovate and modernize our nuclear arsenal,' he said that arsenal is 'now stronger and more powerful than ever before.'

The contention in these tweets is not based in reality.

Trump, yet again, appears to be overinflating his accomplishments as president. And what's more, judging by these tweets, he doesn't seem to even understand his own nuclear arsenal or its current status.

Experts on these things make clear:

    A meaningful advance in less than seven months of the Trump administration is fantasy — there's just no way it's much different than it was when Trump took over.

    Trump doesn't appear to have done anything more than order a review of the nuclear arsenal.

    Even if we set aside the above, the arsenal simply isn't 'stronger and more powerful than ever before.'

'It’s absurd; this is like — you have to be the biggest hayseed in America to believe this,' said Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. 'There’s no point at which this statement touches reality.'"

Trump's Big CON: Staff Changes Can't Hide His Lack of Leadership, or Lies

UPDATE:  "Whit Ayres, a Republican political consultant here, likes to tell his clients that there are 'three keys to credibility.'

'One, never defend the indefensible,' he says. 'Two, never deny the undeniable. And No. 3 is: Never lie.'

Would that politicians took his advice.

Fabrications have long been a part of American politics. Politicians lie to puff themselves up, to burnish their résumés and to cover up misdeeds, including sexual affairs. (See: Bill Clinton.) Sometimes they cite false information for what they believe are justifiable policy reasons. (See: Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam.)

But President Trump, historians and consultants in both political parties agree, appears to have taken what the writer Hannah Arendt once called “the conflict between truth and politics” to an entirely new level.

From his days peddling the false notion that former President Barack Obama was born in Kenya, to his inflated claims about how many people attended his inaugural, to his description just last week of receiving two phone calls — one from the president of Mexico and another from the head of the Boy Scouts — that never happened, Mr. Trump is trafficking in hyperbole, distortion and fabrication on practically a daily basis."

Read The New York Times,  Many Politicians Lie. But Trump Has Elevated the Art of Fabrication.

White House Chief of Staff John F. "Kelly can improve White House discipline but until he is empowered to can Bannon, prompt the president to replace incompetent secretaries and senior advisers with seasoned hands, instill an atmosphere where truth and integrity are paramount and get past the scrutiny of the special counsel, his changes will be limited and wholly insufficient."

Read the Washington Post, Kelly can’t fix Trump’s biggest problems.

In other words, Kelly can't change Trump

Trump's Big CON: He Continues Obama's "Total Failure" Foreign Policies

Remember Trump's secret plan to defeat ISIS, it was a lot like Obama's.

And with North Korea, "'the Trump administration is pursuing a five-part strategy similar to the strategy undertaken by the Obama administration.'"

Read the Washington Post, Trump finally starts winning — by copying Obama, which noted that "within the Trump administration there is at least some instinct to tone down the wild talk and, ever so quietly, to bend to reality."

Trump's Big CON: Is Trump Crazy, North Korea Edition

UPDATE VII: "Of all of President Trump’s close advisers, there is one who perhaps best typifies the worst of Trump’s combative, us-vs.-them, fact-free style: Sebastian Gorka, a deputy assistant to the president who shares his views that Muslims are the enemy, bellicosity is strength and the news media are out to get the president.

For months, Gorka received heavy scrutiny over his ties to far-right, anti-Semitic groups in Hungary, leading to widespread rumors last spring that he was going to be dismissed from the White House. But not only has his White House tenure endured, he has continued to be a ubiquitous Trump surrogate in the media.

Why is Gorka still there? The best explanation is that Trump loves Gorka’s television performances, whether they are in the Trump-friendly confines of Fox News, or in the hostile territory of MSNBC or CNN, where Gorka plays the anti-'fake news' pit bull for his boss.

Gorka has been hitting the airwaves again this week, defending Trump’s unscripted 'fire and fury' bellicosity against North Korea, undercutting Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s effort to scale back the president’s rhetoric, and strongly hinting Trump is ready to go to war with Pyongyang.

'You should listen to the president,' Gorka said derisively on the BBC Radio 4’s program 'Today” this morning. 'The idea that Secretary Tillerson is going to discuss military matters is simply nonsensical.'


In Gorka’s world, only he truly understands not just what the president wants, but also that the president is right about everything. Gorka has been widely mocked by national security experts as a fringe player with scant credentials for his purported counterterrorism post. But he has a single piece of expertise that has turned him into a favorite Trump surrogate: a willingness to defend Trump against any perceived enemy, and to project Trump’s us-vs.-them mentality to the world — regardless of what more senior administration officials or anyone with actual expertise thinks. . .

West Wing aides consider Gorka’s media appearances 'an embarrassment,' his No. 1 fan is none other than Trump himself. Trump’s admiration seems to stem largely from Gorka’s eagerness to jettison any semblance of custom or charm when appearing on networks Trump considers hostile to his interests. 'Gorka’s stock has soared as President Trump has watched him on various cable channels fighting with the hosts and accusing them of being part of the 'fake news industrial complex,' ' Swan reported.

Indeed, Gorka’s willingness to disparage any media that dare question Trump is what helped make him a regular presence on Fox, where he is frequently called upon to do just that, including by Trump friend Sean Hannity. Not even the Soviet Union’s media was that bad, Gorka once told Hannity, speaking about CNN, which has become a regular target of the president himself."

Read the Washington Post, Why is Sebastian Gorka still in the White House? Because Trump loves his TV performances.

UPDATE VI:  "For those worried that President Trump might get into nuclear war with North Korea, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson provided some solace Wednesday. 'Americans should sleep well at night,' Tillerson said, tempering Trump's promise to unleash “fire and fury” on North Korea if it continued to threaten the United States. Tillerson emphasized that no conflict was imminent.

But now another Trump administration voice is suggesting that we shouldn't pay Tillerson much mind.

Sebastian Gorka appeared on BBC radio Thursday and delivered one of the most aggressive takes to date on what Trump might do — even allowing that a mere threat from North Korea could be construed as an act of war, as Trump seemed to do earlier this week. In doing so, Gorka played down Tillerson's role in all of this. . .

[W]e may be witnessing a little “Good Cop, Bad Cop” here, with the administration providing different signals to keep North Korea guessing. It's the “Madman theory” that says you want your enemies to think you're capable of anything.

But this also seems to fit into a pattern of the White House not really having its story straight and figuring things out on the fly — which would be a perilous strategy given the stakes of the North Korea situation. And it also fits into a long-running pattern of White House officials undermining one another, both privately and publicly. Having members of your staff undercut your own secretary of state doesn't seem like a great way to do business.

Read the Washington Post, More drama in Trumpland: Gorka publicly shuns Tillerson’s effort to scale back North Korea red line.

UPDATE V:  How are The Donald's entourage of sycophants defending him?

"[I]f people are reading Trump’s words in their most horrifying light, that’s only because they have come to see him as an 'unhinged madman,' but don’t worry, he really isn’t an unhinged madman. This is their defense!"

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s ‘unhinged’ presidency, perfectly captured in two sentences.

One of those sentences is:

The new White House chief of staff John F. "'Kelly is clear-eyed about the mission: it is not so much about “fixing” Trump as it is earning the President’s trust so that he can make repairs to White House operations quickly, before an international incident tests the team.'" [Emphasis in article.]

Is he too late?

UPDATE IV:  "It is humiliating for the world’s greatest superpower to disregard its president as a weird old man who wanders in front of microphones spouting off unpredictably and without consequence. But at this point, respect for Trump’s capabilities is a horse that’s already fled the barn. New chief of staff John Kelly has supposedly instilled military-style order and message discipline into the administration, but Trump is unteachable. Minimizing the havoc means getting everybody to pretend Trump isn’t really president."

Read New York Magazine, Ignore Our Crazy President, U.S. Government Tells North Korea.

UPDATE III:  So, trying to start a war isn't enough.

The Donald wants to fight

"Well, no one ever accused Trump of stopping while he was behind. His 'gobsmackingly stupid' indictment of the majority leader continued Thursday morning. He tweeted, 'Can you believe that Mitch McConnell, who has screamed Repeal & Replace for 7 years, couldn’t get it done. Must Repeal & Replace ObamaCare!' . .

[I]n a week in which much of the country is disturbed that the president lacks the gravitas, discipline and judgment to be commander in chief, Trump’s attack reinforces the idea that he is motivated by personal pique and is incapable of dispassionate strategizing. . .

[I]n Trump’s mind, the categorization of someone as friend or foe depends almost entirely on whether they support and lavishly praise him. . . In Trump’s mind, there are no excuses for defying or criticizing him."

Read the Washington Post, Trump couldn’t have picked a dumber fight.

UPDATE II:  Is The Donald's approach crazy, or crazy like a fox?

"In their first and only meeting, President Obama explicitly warned Donald Trump days after the election about the urgency of North Korea’s nuclear weapons threat.

A few weeks later, it was clear that Obama had made an impression: Trump raised the matter out of the blue in a telephone conversation with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, according to an Asia expert at the State Department who reviewed a transcript.

'What Tsai Ing-wen knows about North Korea could fill a thimble. It’s not the focus of her world,' said the official, who spoke Wednesday on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private call. 'But that brought home to me that it really got through to Trump that this was a real problem.' . .

Yet it is the increasingly bellicose, often contradictory, rhetoric from Trump himself that has marked the sharpest shift in U.S. policy toward North Korea from previous administrations. Having declared an end to the Obama era of 'strategic patience' that focused on isolating Pyongyang, Trump has failed to articulate a clear alternative. He has vacillated between courting China’s help and giving up on Beijing — and between suggesting he is opening to meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and threatening to obliterate his regime.

On Tuesday, Trump vowed in spontaneous remarks not vetted by aides that Pyongyang would be met with unprecedented 'fire and fury' if it did not stop its threats — a pledge that some outside the White House interpreted as an allusion to nuclear war.

'That wasn’t what we had in mind,' Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser for Obama, said in an interview. 'It’s clear that they got the message that this was the principal challenge for them, but they keep making statements that don’t feel like they have been informed by some deliberative process.' . .

White House aides said Trump’s focus on the issue has already paid dividends, pointing out that China, contrary to its past opposition to broad economic sanctions, voted in support of last week’s U.N. sanctions on North Korea.

But Jim Walsh, a nuclear and Asia security expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, [is] skeptical about Trump’s strategy.

'It seems to me that an impromptu nuclear doctrine without having consulted staff or allies is not really a great idea,' he said."

Read the Washington Post, Obama warned Trump on North Korea. But Trump’s ‘fire and fury’ strategy wasn’t what Obama aides expected.

UPDATE:  "I had dreams of fire and fury like the world has never seen. But now I will sleep well, because Rex Tillerson told me I should.

There is no 'imminent threat' from North Korea, the secretary of state said Wednesday. “The American people should sleep well at night.”

It was the latest and largest cleanup effort undertaken by President Trump’s aides since this administration took power. Their unorthodox message to an anxious nation and a panicky world: Don’t take seriously what the president of the United States says. . .

There have been other such cleanup actions, and there will inevitably be many more, as Trump’s advisers try to convey to the world a perverse message: Rest assured, sleep well — and pay no attention to the president’s yammering.

Read the Washington Post, The Trump cleanup patrol just had its biggest job yet.

"Hearing President Trump threatening to bring 'fire and fury' down on North Korea because of its nuclear defiance reminded me of an incident during the Cuban missile crisis. The State Department had gotten slightly ahead of the White House by mentioning the possibility of “further action” by Washington — and President John F. Kennedy was irate.

He called State Department spokesman Lincoln White to reprimand him personally and to stress the need to coordinate and calibrate all public statements. Otherwise, an already dangerous crisis could escalate uncontrollably. 'We got to get this under control, Linc,' he fumed. 'You have to be goddamn careful!'

Studying the 1962 nuclear showdown for my book “One Minute to Midnight,” I concluded that the real risk of war arose not from the conscious designs of Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev or even Fidel Castro. It stemmed from the possibility that the opposing sides could trigger a nuclear conflict that nobody wanted through miscommunication and freak accidents, which became increasingly likely at higher levels of military alert. The same is almost certainly true of the present crisis with North Korea. . .

Given the explosive rhetoric of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, it is understandable that President Trump should be tempted to respond in kind. Classic game theory teaches us that you can gain an advantage over your opponent if you can convince him that you are madder than he is. In the game of chicken, with two cars heading for a frontal collision, the driver who swerves out of the way first loses.

During the Cuban missile crisis, the 'crazy man' role was played to perfection by Castro, the only leading actor who was seriously prepared to risk a nuclear war. Patria o muerte — “fatherland or death” — was, after all, the slogan of the Cuban revolution. Assuming the role of madman has always been part of the arsenal of the weak against the strong, whether in the case of Cuba or North Korea or the Islamic State. It gives the weaker player an advantage it would not otherwise have.

Playing chicken is, however, a dangerous indulgence for the leader of a nuclear superpower. During the 1962 crisis, the two 'rational' players — Kennedy and Khrushchev — ended up making common cause against the “madman” Castro. . .

As President Trump girds for a possible nuclear confrontation with North Korea, we can only hope that he will prove to be a big man rather than a little one. Out-crazying Kim Jong Un is a scary proposition. Game theory also teaches us that, if neither driver swerves, everybody goes up in flames."

Read the Washington Post, What Trump should know about the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Trump's Big CON: Thank You Dear Leader (AKA Trump is a Psycho-Narcissistic Con Man (CONt., Part 7))

UPDATE: Read also the Washington Post, Trump says the Boy Scouts head told him his speech was the ‘greatest.’ He appears to have imagined this.

Now repeat after me:  He's so pretty!

"On Wednesday afternoon, while paddling through a week that began with press secretary Sean Spicer’s resignation and was pockmarked by Donald Trump dogging his attorney general, the White House launched a hopeful tradition: letters from children to the president, read aloud in the daily press briefing.

Four hours later, the term #PickleTruther was teeming on Twitter, and things had gotten really weird.

'My name is Dylan but every body calls me Pickle,' Wednesday’s letter began, read by spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders from her podium. 'I’m 9 years old and you are my favrit president. I like you so much I had a birthday about you. My cake was the shap of your hat.' . .

At first the detractors centered on Pickle’s request to know 'ho much monny do you have.' Was this not, folks pointed out, exactly the kind of question that the 'release your taxes' movement had been asking for months?

But then the comments became more investigative. Was it odd that the notebook paper, which theoretically arrived in the mail, didn’t seem to have the crease marks one would see on a letter folded into an envelope? Was it unusual that a young child would have spelled 'people' and 'friend' correctly, but then mixed up 'how'? What kind of 9-year-old would request a birthday party themed around a 71-year-old man?

Pickle came to represent everything the nation feared and hoped for: Was the administration a 'friend' to the American people? Was the administration trying to pull one over on us?

'The ‘kid’ who wrote the Pickle letter,' someone posted, as if they had uncovered a second set of Pentagon papers, 'has the same name as the [Vice President Pence’s] cat.'

Pickle was all of us."
 Read the Washington Post, Did a 9-year-old called ‘Pickle’ really write that letter to Trump? Yep, he’s real.

As the article noted, one of the reasons reporters initially question the authenticity of the letter was:

"During the 1980s and 1990s, reporters who were writing about Donald Trump would occasionally have their calls returned to them by a rotation of Trump Organization spokesmen: John Miller. John Baron, sometimes spelled with two r’s. The goal of each was the same — to paint their boss as suave, cool, fantastic, wonderful, the best ladies man. “Actresses, people that you write about, just call to see if they can go out with him and things,” Miller told a People magazine reporter in 1991.

Miller was, of course, Donald Trump. So were Baron and Barron — alter-egos used by the mogul to tootle his own horn in the third person. Some reporters never found out, quoting Miller in multiple news articles. Reporters who knew the ruse thought it was anywhere from playful to creepy."

Read also Trump's Big CON: Thank You Dear Leader (AKA Trump is a Psycho-Narcissistic Con Man (Cont., Part 4))