Trump's Big CON: Our President Queeg

"Back in 1951, Herman Wouk published the definitive book about the Trump administration. He set it in the 1940s, during the war in the Pacific, aboard a destroyer-minesweeper skippered by a paranoid man with a compulsion to blame others for his mistakes. . .

We have many such similarities with Trump. Maybe the most psychologically egregious occurred right after the inauguration when he sent out Sean Spicer to lie about the size of the crowd. This was seemingly a small matter, but the inability to distinguish between the trivial and the consequential is, we now know, a Trump character malfunction.

In Queeg’s case, the telling incident has to do with some missing strawberries. The captain orders an investigation and has the ship laboriously searched for a nonexistent duplicate refrigerator key. 'They laughed at me and made jokes, but I proved beyond the shadow of a doubt, with geometric logic, that a duplicate key to the ward room icebox did exist,' Queeg says when he takes the stand at the court-martial of his mutinous officers.

But the actual mutiny is yet to come. It occurs when the Caine gets engulfed by a typhoon. Queeg seems unsure how to handle the boat in the storm. He does not come around into the wind, and the ship starts to founder. It is then that his officers take over — mutiny. They had already researched Article 184: 'It is conceivable that most unusual and extraordinary circumstances may arise in which the relief from duty of a commanding officer by a subordinate becomes necessary.'"

Read the Washington Post, The definitive book about the Trump administration was written in 1951.

Trump's Big CON: President Chaos!

"Some are born catastrophic, some achieve catastrophe, and some have catastrophe thrust upon them.

So far President Trump falls only in the first two of those three buckets. For that, my fellow Americans, we should all be very, very grateful.

Gratitude may not feel terribly warranted right now. Over the past four long months, we have endured scandal after scandal, crisis after crisis, from this White House.

To wit: a national security adviser who was a foreign agent for an authoritarian country and who put the kibosh on a military action that that authoritarian country opposed; the sharing of highly classified intelligence with the Russian government; multiple administration and campaign officials who 'forgot' to mention earlier meetings and other contacts with Russian officials; attacks on the independence of the federal judiciary; multiple indications (including comments from Trump himself, on camera) that suggest potential obstruction of justice; and so on.

Frankly, it’s exhausting.

But here’s the bright side. These have all been all self-inflicted wounds. Perhaps mortal ones, for the Trump presidency, but self-inflicted nonetheless.

Our saving grace — as a country and, perhaps, as a planet — is that so far the United States has not experienced any major external shocks. Woe betide us when the Trump administration is tasked, as it inevitably will be, with handling a crisis not of its own making."

Read the Washington Post, On the bright side, Trump has created all this chaos himself.

Trump's Big CON: 'Woe Unto Me!'

"President Trump believes he is being persecuted, and that is a frighteningly dangerous mind-set for a man with such vast power.

Amid a week of dizzying developments on multiple fronts, Trump gave a graduation speech Wednesday at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy portraying himself as a victim, unfairly besieged by those who would destroy him.

'No politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly,' Trump said. That is an absurd claim that cannot be taken seriously, of course, but it does give a sense of how the president feels about the scrutiny he faces."

Read the Washington Post, Trump thinks he’s under attack. That’s very dangerous.

The Donald should remember: "Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!"

Trump's Big CON: The Score Card of False or Misleading Claims & Promises Kept

UPDATE VI:  Read also Trump's Big CON: There is a Database of the Lies.

UPDATE V:  "Perhaps no politician is a bigger flip-flopper than Donald Trump. During the 2016 campaign, we counted flip-flops on four issues, but in some cases (H-1B visas and the minimum wage), Trump flip-flopped so often that it was just about impossible to determine his actual policy position.

After Trump won the electoral college vote while losing the popular vote, he flip-flopped on the unique American system of electing presidents. Whereas he had once called the electoral college 'a disaster for a democracy,' he began to celebrate it as 'genius.'

The pattern has continued during his presidency. It’s hard to keep up with all of Trump’s changes in position, but here are some major ones in recent weeks."

Read the Washington Post, President Trump, the king of flip-flops.

UPDATE IV: Trump's M.O.: watch fake news, tweet false statements, repeat.

Read the Washington Post, You’ll never guess who tweeted something false that he saw on TV, which notes it is " unusual for a president to spend two hours watching television news programs in the morning."

UPDATE III:  It isn't just Trump, the whole party lies.

Read the Washington Post, This lawmaker’s bio touted a business degree. It was actually a Sizzler training certificate.

UPDATE II:  "At this point it’s easier to list the Trump officials who haven’t been caught lying under oath than those who have. This is not an accident.

Critics of our political culture used to complain, with justification, about politicians’ addiction to spin — their inveterate habit of downplaying awkward facts and presenting their actions in a much better light than they deserved. But all indications are that the age of spin is over. It has been replaced by an era of raw, shameless dishonesty.

In part, of course, the pervasiveness of lies reflects the character of the man at the top: No president, or for that matter major U.S. political figure of any kind, has ever lied as freely and frequently as Donald Trump. But this isn’t just a Trump story. His ability to get away with it, at least so far, requires the support of many enablers: almost all of his party’s elected officials, a large bloc of voters and, all too often, much of the news media.

It’s important not to indulge in an easy cynicism, to say that politicians have always lied and always will. What we’re getting from Mr. Trump is simply on a different plane from anything we’ve seen before.

For one thing, politicians used to limit their outright lies to matters not easily checked — hidden affairs, under the table deals, and so on. But now we have the man who ran the Miss Universe competition in Moscow three years ago, and who declared just last year that 'I know Russia well,' then last month said, 'I haven’t called Russia in 10 years.'

On matters of policy, politicians used to limit their misrepresentations of facts and impacts to relatively hard-to-verify assertions. When George W. Bush insisted that his tax cuts mainly went to the middle class, this wasn’t true, but it took some number-crunching to show that. Mr. Trump, however, makes claims like his assertion that the murder rate — which ticked up in 2015 but is still barely half what it was in 1990 — is at a 45-year high. Furthermore, he just keeps repeating such claims after they’ve been debunked.

And the question is, who’s going to stop him?"

Read The New York Times, Goodbye Spin, Hello Raw Dishonesty.

UPDATE:  "Trump’s agenda is not just unpopular; it is being undermined by flimsy rationales and policy confusion and incompetence."

Read the Washington Post, Trump faces a huge problem, and Bannon’s con-artistry cannot make it disappear.

"Throughout President Trump’s first 100 days, the Fact Checker team will be tracking false and misleading claims made by the president since Jan. 20.

Read the Washington Post, 100 days of Trump claims, which notes that in "the 33 days so far, we’ve counted 132 false or misleading claims."

Read also the Washington Post, Trump Promise Tracker, "tracking the progress of 60 pledges he made during his campaign — and whether he achieved his goals."

Trump's Big CON: 'I Can Win in Afghanistan'

"Why are we still there? We went into Afghanistan after 9/11 to get Osama bin Laden and to punish the Taliban for harboring al-Qaeda. Now bin Laden is dead; al-Qaeda is dispersed; the Taliban has been battered. Afghan civilians have been killed, wounded or displaced in increasing numbers. The United Nations reports that there were more than 11,000 war-related civilian casualties last year, and 660,000 Afghans were displaced, adding to the country’s massive refugee crisis.

The war has now cost us over $1 trillion, making it the second-costliest U.S. war, after World War II. In fiscal year 2017, the war will cost about $50 billion, nearly a billion every week. We’ve lost over 2,350 soldiers, with 20,000 more suffering injuries. And as Trevor Timm of the Guardian noted, in a couple of years, there will be soldiers fighting in Afghanistan that weren’t even born at the time of 9/11.

We’re no longer fighting to defeat an enemy; we’re engaged in “nation-building.” Good luck with that. . .

The military has no strategy for victory, merely a plan to avoid defeat. After 15 years, no president wants to accept defeat. Yet a feature of Trump’s campaign was his scorn for the United States wasting $6 trillion in Middle Eastern wars we 'don’t win.' He ought to read his 2013 tweet: 'We should leave Afghanistan immediately. No more wasted lives. If we have to go back in, we go in hard & quick. Rebuild the US first.'"

Read the Washington Post, The U.S. will never win the war in Afghanistan.

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

UPDATE IV:  "What would it take for Republican politicians to finally turn on, or even gently criticize, the current president?

For context, here’s an example of righteous fury one Republican congressman levied at President Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama.

'There’s no way any of us can excuse what the president did yesterday,' said Peter King (R-N.Y.).

The unforgivable sin that triggered this rebuke?

Wearing a tan suit.

Other unacceptable scandals of the Obama administration vociferously condemned by right-wing politicians and pundits: asking for mustard on a burger, putting his feet on his desk, standing under an umbrella held by a Marine, playing too much golf.

By contrast, here are some of the actions Trump has undertaken that have not caused most Republican officials to abandon their support, or even offer especially sharp criticism (if any criticism at all): multiple attempts at a Muslim ban, boasts about sexual assault, mocking people with disabilities, attacking a Gold Star family, making baseless claims that Obama wiretapped him, making baseless claims that 3 million people voted illegally, comparing the intelligence community to Nazis, firing the FBI director investigating his campaign, betraying a critical ally by sharing highly classified information with the Russians."

Read the Washington Post, What would it take for Republican politicians to finally turn on Trump?

UPDATE III:  "It’s quite easy to image how the applause-starved, ego-driven president let the cat out of the bag. 'In his meeting with [Russian Foreign Minister Sergei] Lavrov, Trump seemed to be boasting about his inside knowledge of the looming threat,' The Post reports. ''I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every day,' the president said, according to an official with knowledge of the exchange.' Trump behaves like a child, prone to boasting and exaggeration to make himself look bigger. Unfortunately, this child with no impulse control or grasp of what he is doing is our commander in chief. . .

The enabling needs to end; otherwise, Republicans will as culpable as Trump for the potential parade of reckless, stupid and/or illegal actions yet to come."

Read the Washington Post, The fallout from Trump’s blabbing to the Russians.

UPDATE II:  "It was this last piece of news [about disclosure of highly classified intelligence to the Russians] that led me to form a hypothesis:

Daniel W. Drezner
@dandrezner

I think we need to consider the possibility that Trump's White House is populated by morons. https://twitter.com/acosta/status/862641882983215105 …
7:49 AM - 11 May 2017

Somehow the hard-working staff at Lawfare managed to write a pretty comprehensive assessment of what this latest story means. The whole thing is worth reading, but this is the part that stood out to me:

    Trump’s alleged screw-up with the Russians reveals yet again what we have learned many times in the last four months: The successful operation of our government assumes a minimally competent Chief Executive that we now lack. Everyone else in the executive branch can be disciplined or fired or worse when they screw up by, say, revealing classified information or lying about some important public policy issue. But the President cannot be fired; we are stuck with him for 3 1/2 more years unless he is impeached, which remains a long-shot.

The president is a vainglorious clown trying to act like a world-historical figure and revealing himself to be a bad salesman. His staff lacks both the competence and the ability to rein him in. And now he has gone from puzzling allied nations to alienating them.

After nearly four months as president, there is little evidence of growth or change from the president. There is only the beclowning. For the United States, the next few years will be nothing better than an exercise in damage control."

Read the Washington Post, The continued beclowning of the Trump administration.

UPDATE:  YOU MUST:

Read the Washington Post, Trump doesn’t embody what’s wrong with Washington. Pence does., which I republish in full:

"When history holds its trial to account for the Donald Trump presidency, Trump himself will be acquitted on grounds of madness. History will look at his behavior, his erratic and childish lying and his flamboyant ignorance of history itself and pronounce the man, like George III, a cuckoo for whom restraint, but not punishment, was necessary. Such will not be the case for Mike Pence, the toady vice president and the personification of much that has gone wrong in Washington.

On any given day, Pence will do his customary spot-on imitation of a bobblehead. Standing near Trump in the Oval Office, he will nod his head robotically as the president says one asinine thing after another and then, maybe along with others, he will be honored with a lie or a version of the truth so mangled by contradictions and fabrications that a day in the White House is like a week on LSD.

I pick on Pence because he is the most prominent and highest-ranked of President Trump’s lackeys. Like with all of them, Pence’s touching naivete and trust are routinely abused. He vouches for things that are not true — no talk of sanctions between Mike Flynn and the Russians, for instance, or more recently the reason James B. Comey was fired as FBI director. In both instances, the president either lied to him or failed to tell him the truth. The result was the same: The vice president appeared clueless.

I don’t feel an iota of sympathy for Pence. He was among a perfidious group of political opportunists who pushed Trump’s candidacy while having to know that he was intellectually, temperamentally and morally unfit for the presidency. They stuck with him as he mocked the disabled, belittled women, insulted Hispanics, libeled Mexicans and promiscuously promised the impossible and ridiculous — all that “Day One” nonsense like how the wall would be built and Mexico would pay for it.

I also have little sympathy for Sean Spicer, who plays the role of a bullied child. Trump routinely sends him out to lie to the American people, which he has done ever since his insistence that the inaugural crowd was bigger than the photos showed. He persists at his job even though Trump broadly hints that he will soon fire him. When Spicer is gone, he will be easily replaced. Washington is full of people who have no honor and no pride, either.

I think of Steven Mnuchin, the treasury secretary, and Wilbur Ross, at Commerce. What possessed them to back Trump for the GOP nomination? Didn’t they know the sort of man he is? Did they think a lower tax rate and fewer regulations are worth risking American democracy and our standing in the world? When they watched the bizarre way Trump sacked Comey, were they proud of their candidate?

The swamp that Trump kept mentioning in the campaign is not really one of tangled bureaucratic mangroves, but of moral indifference. Washington always had a touch of that — after all, its business is politics — but Trump and his people have collapsed the space between lies and truth. The president uses one and then the other — whatever works at the time.

The president cannot be trusted. He cannot be believed. He has denigrated the news media, not for its manifest imperfections but for its routine and obligatory search for the truth. He has turned on the judiciary for its fidelity to the law and, once, for the ethnic heritage of a judge. Trump corrupts just about everything he touches.

From most of the Republican Party comes not a whisper of rebuke. The congressional leadership is inert, cowed, scurrying to the White House for this or that ceremonial picture, like members of the erstwhile Politburo flanking Stalin atop Lenin’s mausoleum. They are appalled, but mute. They want to make the best of a bad situation, I know, and they fear the voters back home, but their complicity ought to be obvious even to them.

America is already worse off for Trump’s presidency. He was elected to make America great again, but his future is more like other nations’ sordid past. His own party has been sullenly complicit, showing how little esteem many politicians place in our most cherished values, not the least of them honesty and dignity. For all of them, an accounting is coming. When they are asked by history what they did during the Trump years, the worst of them will confess that they bobbled their heads like dumb dolls, while the best will merely say they kept their heads down."

Who will be "added to the heap of unhappy people who cast their lots with Trump and were repaid with misery.

Trump entities have filed for bankruptcy protection six times. Investors, lenders and workers took hits — and Trump moved on. Trump was caught on tape boasting to Billy Bush about sexually assaulting women — and Billy Bush lost his job. Corey Lewandowski and Paul Manafort poured themselves into Trump’s campaign and were unceremoniously dumped.

The carnage has increased since Trump came to Washington. National security adviser Michael Flynn is out and potentially in legal trouble. The FBI’s Comey arguably handed Trump the election — and learned of his dismissal from TV. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein tarnished his sterling reputation in just two weeks.

As my Post colleague Abby Phillip documented, Vice President Pence has been “unflagging in his loyalty,” only to be made “the public face of official narratives that turn out to be misleading or false.” Trump humiliated Steve Bannon by publicly downplaying their association. Trump repaid House Speaker Paul Ryan’s loyalty by winking at calls for Ryan’s ouster. Attempts to defend Trump by aides Reince Priebus and Kellyanne Conway and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have left them sounding clownish.

Trump takes what he can from each of his aides and allies and then moves on. "

Read the Washington Post, Trump has sucked the lifeblood out of Sean Spicer.

Read also the Washington Post:

McMaster and Tillerson are complicit in Trump’s dishonesty, so must they resign?,which notes:  "In one fell swoop, Trump revealed his abject unfitness and exposed McMaster, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and deputy national security adviser Dina Powell — all who personally attempted to knock down the story — as dishonest hacks."

Trump is dangerously incompetent, which stated:

"Given his many business failures, the only realms in which Trump has proven himself adept are those of popular manipulation and treachery, along with the related arts of show business. No doubt he will use them in the coming days to mislead and scapegoat his way out of accountability. . .

Republicans who savagely attacked Hillary Clinton over the petty email server scandal will now show where their true concerns lie — with party or with country. No agenda is worth pretending this presidency is good for the nation."

Trump's Big CON: To Evangelicals: I Will Protect You'

"Even in an era of marriage diversity, it remains the most unlikely match: President Trump and his loyal evangelical base. In the compulsively transgressive, foul-mouthed, loser-disdaining, mammon-worshiping billionaire, conservative Christians 'have found their dream president,' according to Jerry Falwell Jr.

It is a miracle, of sorts. . .

The essence of Trump’s appeal to conservative Christians can be found in his otherwise anodyne commencement speech at Liberty University. 'Being an outsider is fine,' Trump said. 'Embrace the label.' And then he promised: 'As long as I am your president, no one is ever going to stop you from practicing your faith.' Trump presented evangelicals as a group of besieged outsiders, in need of a defender.

This sense of grievance and cultural dispossession — the common ground between The Donald and the faithful — runs deep in evangelical Christian history. . .

Evangelicals have become loyal to a leader of shockingly low character. They have associated their faith with exclusion and bias. They have become another Washington interest group, striving for advantage rather than seeking the common good. And a movement that should be known for grace is now known for its seething resentments."

Read the Washington Post, Trump is evangelicals’ ‘dream president.’ Here’s why.

Trump's Big CON: LOCK HIM UP!!

UPDATE IV:  "Another day, another damning news story about President Trump and Russia that Republicans can’t immediately (or perhaps ever) defend. And Republicans’ frustration with having to deal with this is showing, bigly."

Read the Washington Post, Republicans’ extreme frustration with Trump, in one congressman’s middle finger.

Sorry Republi-CONs, the truth does not change after you give it the middle finger.

UPDATE III:  Who is to blame for the current Child President?

Republi-CONs, who refuse to acknowledge the truth.

But the truth always wins.

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s careening toward an inevitable showdown with an undeniable truth.

UPDATE II:  "Just about every Watergate cliche has relevance. The coverup really is worse than the crime. Don’t bet against the FBI. When there is concrete evidence of obstruction (the memo, the firing) it is very hard for the president’s party to stick with him."

Read the Washington Post, Comey may have gotten his man.

UPDATE:  "So why did the president ask his vice president and attorney general to leave the room?

The New York Times reports — and the Washington Post and other news organizations confirm — that President Trump, at a meeting with then-FBI Director James B. Comey the day after national security adviser Michael Flynn resigned, asked Vice President Pence and Attorney General Jeff Sessions to leave him and Comey alone in the Oval Office.

At which point Trump, according to a contemporaneous memo written by Comey, asked the FBI director to drop the Flynn probe. 'I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,' Trump told Comey, according to the memo as reported by the Times. 'He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.'"

Read the Washington Post, Trump made Pence and Sessions leave before he talked to Comey. What was he hiding?

First the disclosure of classified information to Russia.

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s disclosures to the Russians might actually have been illegal.

Now the attempt to obstruct justice.

Read the Washington Post, Notes made by former FBI director Comey say Trump pressured him to end Flynn probe.

What goes around comes around.

Trump's Big CON: Is Trump a Russian Agent? (CONt., Part 3)

UPDATE IV:  "It is not at all surprising to learn that — during a conversation that shouldn’t have been happening, one that was photographed by a Russian journalist who shouldn’t have been there — the president revealed details of an ongoing intelligence operation. Once again, this was not part of a deliberate plan. Instead, it happened because the president is a braggart who wanted to show off his access to “great intel” and to impress his important guests.

All of this was not only predictable — it was also predicted. Read, again, the statement issued by 50 prominent Republican national security experts issued last August. Note that it was not “pro-Clinton” or left-wing, or even ideological at all. It simply pointed out that Trump — a man who would not, under normal circumstances, ever be given a high-level security clearance — was unfit to be president. Here is the central section:

    In our experience, a President must be willing to listen to his advisers and department heads; must encourage consideration of conflicting views; and must acknowledge errors and learn from them. A President must be disciplined, control emotions, and act only after reflection and careful deliberation. A President must maintain cordial relationships with leaders of countries of different backgrounds and must have their respect and trust. In our judgment, Mr. Trump has none of these critical qualities. He is unable or unwilling to separate truth from falsehood. He does not encourage conflicting views. He lacks self-control and acts impetuously. He cannot tolerate personal criticism. He has alarmed our closest allies with his erratic behavior. All of these are dangerous qualities in an individual who aspires to be President and Commander in-Chief, with command of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

Read the Washington Post, The experts were right: Trump isn’t fit to be president.

UPDATE III:  "Hypocrisy watch: Trump slipping secrets to Russia is ironic because a major reason that he became president was Hillary Clinton’s private email server. As a candidate, the president constantly said her mishandling of sensitive information was disqualifying. 'This is really, if we bring it up, this is like Watergate, only it’s worse, because here our foreign enemies were in a position to hack our most sensitive national security secrets,' Trump said at a rally last September. 'We can’t have someone in the Oval Office who doesn’t understand the meaning of the word ‘confidential.’' (Philip Bump rounds up a bunch more examples like this.)

The president tweeted dozens of times last year about Clinton’s mishandling of classified information:

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrumpHillary Clinton should not be given national security briefings in that she is a lose cannon with extraordinarily bad judgement & insticts.7:57 PM - 29 Jul 2016 · Denver, CO

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrumpThe real scandal here is that classified information is illegally given out by "intelligence" like candy. Very un-American!7:13 AM - 15 Feb 2017

He even quoted Comey in this one from last July:

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrumpCrooked Hillary Clinton and her team "were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information." Not fit!6:12 AM - 6 Jul 2016  

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s chaotic White House once again makes a bad story worse.

UPDATE II:  "For the second time in a week, President Trump is in hot water — this time for sharing highly classified information with Russia during an Oval Office meeting last week. And for the second time in a week, he stepped forward to defend himself in an entirely unhelpful and contradictory way."

Read the Washington Post, Trump just threw his top advisers under the bus … again.

Read also the Washington Post, The White House isn’t denying that Trump gave Russia classified information — not really.

UPDATE:  "President Trump appeared to acknowledge Tuesday that he revealed highly classified information to Russia — a stunning confirmation of a Washington Post story and a move that contradicted his own White House team after it scrambled to deny the report.

Trump's tweets tried to explain away the news, which emerged late Monday, that he had shared sensitive, “code-word” information with the Russian foreign minister and ambassador during a White House meeting last week, a disclosure that intelligence officials warned could jeopardize a crucial intelligence source on the Islamic State. . .

Trump's tweets undercut his administration's frantic effort Monday night to contain the damaging report. The White House trotted out three senior administration officials — national security adviser H.R. McMaster, deputy national security adviser Dina Powell and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson — to attack the reports.

The president's admission follows a familiar pattern. Last week, after firing FBI Director James B. Comey, the White House originally claimed that the president was acting in response to a memo provided by Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein.

But in an interview with NBC's Lester Holt, Trump later admitted that he had made the decision to fire Comey well before Rosenstein's memo, in part because he was frustrated by the director's investigation into possible collusion between his presidential campaign and the Russian government."

Read the Washington Post, Trump acknowledges ‘facts’ shared with Russian envoys during White House meeting.

Is Trump a Russian agent (albeit an unwitting agent -- Putin has the kompromat to control Trump, and Trump knows it since he knows his own compromising financial and personal information)?

Or just really, really stupid?

I say both, but you decide.

Read the Washington Post, Trump revealed highly classified information to Russian foreign minister and ambassador, which noted that:

"In his meeting with Lavrov, Trump seemed to be boasting about his inside knowledge of the looming threat. 'I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every day' . . .

Trump went on to discuss aspects of the threat that the United States learned only through the espionage capabilities of a key partner. He did not reveal the specific intelligence-gathering method, but he described how the Islamic State was pursuing elements of a specific plot and how much harm such an attack could cause under varying circumstances. Most alarmingly, officials said, Trump revealed the city in the Islamic State’s territory where the U.S. intelligence partner detected the threat. . .

Trump has repeatedly gone off-script in his dealings with high-ranking foreign officials, most notably in his contentious introductory conversation with the Australian prime minister earlier this year. He has also faced criticism for seemingly lax attention to security at his Florida retreat, Mar-a-Lago, where he appeared to field preliminary reports of a North Korea missile launch in full view of casual diners.

U.S. officials said that the National Security Council continues to prepare multi-page briefings for Trump to guide him through conversations with foreign leaders, but that he has insisted that the guidance be distilled to a single page of bullet points — and often ignores those.

'He seems to get in the room or on the phone and just goes with it, and that has big downsides,' the second former official said. 'Does he understand what’s classified and what’s not? That’s what worries me.'"

Bragging and freelancing, typical characteristics of Trump, a psycho-narcissistic con man

Read also:

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

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

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

Trump's Big CON: He's Not Very Smart or Curious

UPDATE II:  "As my colleague Julia Ioffe reported, and Politico’s Susan Glasser confirmed, the Russians had been pressing hard for an in-person meeting with Trump, 'a man who is now known for starkly reversing his positions if exposed to in-person pleasantries.' . .

Throughout his campaign for president, Trump repeatedly mocked Obama’s prowess as a negotiator, saying the U.S. was getting rolled in trade deals and diplomacy alike. He promised he would be very tough, taking a much harder line with allies and adversaries alike, and said he would renegotiate the nuclear deal with Iran. Given how much he has conceded in his discussions so far, it’s a wonder Tehran isn’t practically panting for Trump to follow through."

Read The Atlantic, Foreign Leaders Have Realized Trump Is a Pushover.

UPDATE: "As a policy leader, Trump is unique among recent presidents. He doesn’t lead on policy. Normally a president who wants action on health care would try to unite the caucus by putting forth his own substantive ideas and getting legislators to support them. Trump never had a substantive proposal and never showed any command of the details involved, so he could not play that role. He forcefully pushed House Republicans to vote on something, anything, but he didn’t help resolve differences among them.

The system is adapting to the vacuum at its heart. . .

Trump is giving an entirely new meaning to 'Rose Garden strategy.' His goal is successful votes and Rose Garden ceremonies, with the content of those victories subcontracted. Trump, no doubt, views this as a strong executive focusing on the big picture. But this is not the result of management theory. It is the only possible choice for a chief executive who is being introduced to substantive issues and debates for the first time and seems to find them tedious. 'Nobody knew health care could be so complicated,' Trump said at one point, in a statement more fitting to a congressional intern.

It is useful, even necessary, for outsiders to arrive in periodic political waves. It is part of the way that democracies renew themselves without coups and violence. But this kind of outsider perspective is precisely what Trump is not providing.

Some of the reason is just the swift, merciless education provided by reality. Yes, Middle East peace is just 'as difficult as people have thought.' No, building a wall across a continent isn’t really possible. Yes, health-care policy is complicated. . .

This is the price of Trump’s emptiness. On major economic issues, he has not produced policy that tilts toward the needs of the working class. He has not rallied his party to address these problems in practical ways. Instead, he has outsourced his policy priorities and thus outsourced his political uniqueness.

During the presidential election, we heard, time and time again, that Trump is not a politician and would do what he said he’d do. The two points are actually in tension. Because Trump knows little about governing and less about policy, he can’t do what he said he’d do. And this only adds to the sum of American cynicism."

 Read the Washington Post, Why Trump can’t do what he said he’d do.

"It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about President Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence."

Read the Washington Post, Trump has a dangerous disability.

So why is The Donald not very smart or curious?

Because psycho-narcissistic con men never are.

Trump is a Psycho-Narcissistic Con Man (CONt., Part 2)

I just have to repeat an earlier post, with slight modifications, mostly adding the newest statement from The Donald, then the latest evidence that Trump is a psycho-narcissistic con man.

"Trump is an incredible narcissist.

Read the Washington Post, Trump can’t stop saying things that aren’t true, which notes:

"President Trump thinks he invented a term “a couple of days ago” that he has been using for months and that economists have for more than a century, and it wasn't even the least accurate thing he said in his latest interview.

Now, everyone is understandably laughing at Trump's history of the phrase “priming the pump.” That, of course, is the long-standing idea that the government should fight recessions by cutting taxes and increasing spending. It really entered the lexicon in the 1930s — that's the first time the Economist used the term — but it goes back to at least 1916. Trump, though, has some alternative facts. 'Have you heard that expression used before?' he asked the Economist, before explaining that 'I haven't heard it ... I came up with it a couple of days ago and I thought it was good.' This is puzzling. First off, Trump's question doesn't make any sense on its own terms. How could they have heard of it if he just came up with it? And second, how could he think he just coined it when he used the very words 'priming the pump' back in March and December?

Who knows.

But the bigger point is that Trump doesn't show any more ability to distinguish fact from fan fiction when it comes to his policies, either. He said in the interview, for example, that his health-care plan means that 'we're going to have much lower premiums, and we're going to have much lower deductibles.' This is false. . .

It's no different with taxes. Trump has claimed that he will 'massively' cut taxes for the middle class, but even the most generous analyses conclude the opposite — he'd help the rich much more than anybody else. . .

This is the kind of thing that only works as long as your plans haven't passed. Because once they do, there's no hiding from the fact that what you said would happen is the opposite of what is actually happening.

Not that Trump would necessarily notice."

That is a incredibly revealing, and scary, interview.

Read also:

Trump is a Psycho-Narcissistic Con Man, where I first noted that Trump is a psycho-narcissistic con man and

Trump is a Psycho-Narcissistic Con Man (Cont.).

Trump's Big CON: The Beginning of the End

UPDATE:  Trump doesn't know it, but he is done.

"It’s the moment Stephen Colbert has been waiting for.

CBS’s “Late Show” host has spent months eviscerating President Trump on television, clearly trying to provoke a reaction.

It didn’t work. Until Thursday."

Read the Washington Post, Stephen Colbert gleefully responds to President Trump calling him a ‘no-talent guy’.

Better yet, watch it:

I got this from a Southern "conservative", who got it from social media:

In the past, when the President needed to be protected, the Secret Service would say "Get down Mr. President."

Now they say "Donald Duck!"

If conservatives, his core supporters, are telling jokes about The Donald, it's only a matter of time.

Watch for Republi-CONs to realize the utter seriousness of the situation and start to abandon The Donald.

Or it might be Hedgehog News.

In either case, it's the beginning of the end.

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

UPDATE V: Trump must go!

Read the Washington Post, Trump reportedly sought a loyalty pledge from Comey. The FBI says this ‘leads to tyranny.’

UPDATE IV:  "Possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign was once little more than a conspiracy theory, but not anymore. The only way to make sense of this week’s stunning events is to conclude that there is something that President Trump desperately wants to hide. . .

Trump claims to have no business ties with Russia. But in the past, his sons have reportedly bragged about a flood of Russian money boosting the Trump Organization’s fortunes. Trump could settle the question by fully disclosing his finances, including his tax returns. Why the secrecy?

If Trump wanted to end this scrutiny by firing Comey, he may have had the opposite effect. Ask yourself one question: Have you ever seen a coverup with no underlying crime? Neither have I."

Read the Washington Post, Trump seems to be staging a coverup. So what’s the crime?

As I noted before, Trump is trying to hide that he is a Russian agent, he "may be an unwitting agent, but Putin has the kompromat to control Trump, and Trump knows it since he knows his own compromising financial and personal information."

And the more the FBI learns, the more it appears, there was nothing unwitting about it.

At the very least, Trump has been helping Russian mobsters launder dirty money.

UPDATE III:  "This was always the main question: Would President Trump go beyond mere Twitter abuse and move against institutions that limit his power?

By any reasonable standard, we now have an answer.

Trump’s official rationale for firing FBI Director James B. Comey — that the president was suddenly seized with outrage at the shocking treatment of Hillary Clinton by the FBI during the election — is false in a typically Trump-like way. It requires his supporters to demonstrate their loyalty by defending the indefensible. This is apparently the manner in which Trump identifies true believers. They must be willing, when instructed, to say that 2+2=5. On cable television.

In fact, according to media accounts, Trump has been in a spittle-flinging rage since Comey’s March 20 testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, in which he confirmed the existence of an investigation of Russian influence on Trump’s inner circle. On May 2, Trump tweeted that the 'Trump/Russia story' is 'phony.' On May 9, Trump fired Comey. The president removed a perceived threat, threw an active FBI investigation into chaos and raised the prospect of a Trump stooge being appointed in Comey’s place. (The correct answer is 4.)

All of this is consistent with — even mandated by — Trump’s contempt for institutions. He has called the FBI investigation process 'rigged.' If the system is dirty, only a fool would not play by the same rules. This is the logic of conspiratorial disdain for government. An independent, nonpolitical FBI? What a joke. It is all political. And politics is power. And power is making people do what you want, or destroying those who get in your way. The gospel according to Nixon. . .

Republicans often talk of judicial restraint; less, recently, of presidential restraint. Presidential limits are often found in norms, not laws — what Lord Moulton called 'obedience to the unenforceable.'

But Trump seems to take pleasure in throwing acid into the face of convention. In his calls to lock up his electoral opponent; in his wink and a nod toward violence at his rallies; in his groundless accusations of being spied upon by his predecessor; in his Twitter taunting of congressional leaders; in his bold and obvious lies; in his dehumanization of migrants and refugees. Grace, dignity, empathy, integrity and kindness are stripped away, leaving the emperor naked but incapable of shame. Trump is the spendthrift of our public character, squandering an inheritance he does not understand or value."

Read the Washington Post, The real test of our tolerance for Trump comes now.

UPDATE II:  Trump can't stop talking.

And since he's not very smart, it only means trouble.

Read the Washington Post, Trump said he was thinking of Russia controversy when he decided to fire Comey.

UPDATE:  Speaking of inconsistent explanation for firing Comey:

Read the Washington Post, Trump says he was going to fire ‘showboat’ Comey regardless of recommendation.

Read also the Washington Post, President Trump just decimated the White House’s entire Comey narrative, which stated:

"I wrote Wednesday that the White House’s explanations for firing James B. Comey were crumbling. Well, President Trump just exploded them.

In one fell swoop, Trump totally contradicted his three top spokespeople and offered a polar-opposite version of events than they had provided.

After they had spent the past 45 hours emphasizing that this was a decision Trump arrived at after receiving a memo and recommendation from Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, Trump just blurted out that he was going to fire Comey all along. Basically, he admitted the memo was a ruse and a political ploy. . .

It’s clear that the White House wanted to use Rosenstein’s credibility, built up over three decades in law enforcement, to make this decision look apolitical. This made it seem like it wasn’t just the president unilaterally firing the guy who was investigating his 2016 campaign's ties to Russia. This was actually a talking point and narrative that was intended to protect Trump.

But then Trump himself told us the truth."

"Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation. . .

[Yet] Sessions consulted with the president and coordinated the firing of James Comey. . .

Sessions may have some explanation for why he chose to participate in the firing of Comey. But the attorney general may now be in considerable legal peril."

Read the Washington Post, Jeff Sessions is in deep trouble, and here’s why.

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

UPDATE IV:  During the campaign I sometimes wondered whether The Donald was a staged caricature of the Democratic imagination of the typically stupid and hypocritcal Republi-CON politician.

Now I'm beginning to believe Republi-CONs really are that stupid.

"The pictures from the Oval Office on Wednesday — published by a Tass photographer, as no U.S. media were present — are jolly and good-humored. President Trump, who fired his FBI director a day earlier, is grinning for the cameras and shaking hands with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, and the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov. They, too, smile and laugh, relishing the many ironies of the moment.

Have a close look at those happy faces; keep the images in your head. Then turn your attention just for a moment to the story of Ildar Dadin, an unusually brave young Russian. Dadin was arrested in Moscow in 2015, one of the first to fall victim to a harsh new Russian law against dissent. His crime was to have protested peacefully and repeatedly, mostly by standing silently in the street with a sign around his neck.

Dadin was sentenced to three years in prison in Karelia, the northwestern province that was once home to the White Sea Canal, one of the most infamous prison camps in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Far away from the capital, he discovered that torture, of a kind also practiced in Stalin’s Soviet Union, was still in use. In Karelia, guards throw a prisoner into an isolation cell as soon as they arrive, Dadin has written, 'so that he understands straight away what hell he’s got into.' Later, he was hung up by his arms, which were handcuffed behind his back. Others in Karelian prisons were beaten on the soles of their feet, drenched with water and left in the cold, beaten on the back and stomach. . .

Neither Trump, nor Lavrov, nor Kislyak is remotely interested in the fate of Dadin or Dmitriev, if they have even heard of them, which seems unlikely. Nor are any of them much interested in the fate of Dan Heyman, the West Virginia reporter arrested recently for persistent questioning of Tom Price, the health and human services secretary. Due process, rule of law, all of the dull rules and procedures that deliver justice are uninteresting to men who believe in personalized power unconstrained by traditions, institutions or constitutions. Look at how pleased they were to see one another — and compare those pictures with Trump’s stiff and awkward news conferences with democratic leaders such as Germany’s Angela Merkel or Britain’s Theresa May.

I know that investigations should continue, but let’s be clear: Russia would have needed no inducements or collusion to support Trump’s election campaign. His personality is the kind they understand, his cynicism and his dishonesty are familiar, his greed is the same as their greed. Above all, his lack of respect for the law is their lack of respect for the law. Trump fired the FBI director to get him off his television screen; Russian police lock up dissidents to get them out of public view. No, it’s not the same thing. But it’s not that different either.

Read the Washington Post, Don’t forget those smiling images of Trump and the Russians.

UPDATE III:  "Republicans wound up with Trump as their president by marinating themselves in a stew of half-truths, conspiracy theories and self-delusion. They are doing so again as they desperately grab for excuses and explanations to account for egregiously inappropriate behavior. When the Senate majority leader and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal sound indistinguishable from Sean Hannity in their specious rationalizations, you know the right is intellectually and morally exhausted."

Read the Washington Post, Here are the three dumbest defenses of Comey’s firing.

Read also the Washington Post, The White House explanations for Comey’s firing are crumbling before our eyes.

Then read also the Washington Post, Mitch McConnell may be making the most important mistake of his career, which states:

"Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is one of the shrewdest politicians of his generation. But by speaking Wednesday on the Senate floor in defense of President Trump’s firing of FBI Director James B. Comey, McConnell made what is likely to stand as the most important mistake of his long political career.

The Kentucky Republican, who is measured and calculating about everything, should have known better. He chose to ally himself with a man who becomes unhinged whenever the subject of his campaign’s possible collusion with Russian interference in our election arises.

Removing the leader of the nation’s top law-enforcement agency while he was in the middle of an investigation that could touch the president should — no matter what your view — call forth seriousness, sobriety and thoughtfulness. When critics can legitimately wonder if it is part of an effort to obstruct justice, a president would do well to treat the matter in a reflective way."

UPDATE II:  "For all the talk about the unusual nature of President Trump’s decision to fire James Comey, it actually fits comfortably into a well-established pattern that has defined this presidency from its very first day. Trump makes an emotional, impulsive assertion or decision — and then his underlings are forced into a wild scramble to produce a rationale or justification for it.

In this pattern, the decision or assertion often originated in the same place — deep in the recesses of Trump’s entangled megalomania and sneaking dread of the illegitimacy of his presidency. And the Comey firing, it turns out, may not be an exception to this."

Read the Washington Post, The White House’s laughable spin about Comey now lies in smoking ruins, which notes Trump's pathological obsession with the manner and margin of his election victory, and Comey's failure to support him on that issue.

You might remember, during the election Trump's pathological obsession was about the size of  his hands.

Read also the Washington Post, Why Trump expected only applause when he told Comey, ‘You’re fired.’, which highlights examples of how:

"Donald Trump has always acted in the moment, with little regard for the past and proud contempt for the way things are usually done" . . . [and]

"His family coat of arms, a regal symbol featuring a lion and a knight’s helmet, carries this Latin motto: 'Numquam Concedere.'

'Never Concede.'"

UPDATE:  After all the inconsistent explanations by the The Donald and his sycophant, still confused?

It will all be perfectly understandable after you read the Washington Post:

Comey sought more resources for Russia probe days before he was fired by President Trump, officials say and

 With Comey’s dismissal, the Russia investigation will soon be run by Trump allies, which notes that:

The intelligence agencies’ directors will be Trump appointees . . .

The Justice Department leaders are Trump appointees . . . [and]

Trump’s party controls Congress

The Donald fired FBI Director James Comey, who was, among other things, investigating a connection between Trump's campaign and Russia.

Why?

Because as I noted before, Trump is a Russian agent, he "may be an unwitting agent, but Putin has the kompromat to control Trump, and Trump knows it since he knows his own compromising financial and personal information."

And the more the FBI learns, the more it appears, there was nothing unwitting about it.

Read the Washington Post:

From Clinton emails to alleged Russian meddling in election: The events leading up to Comey’s firing,

Firing FBI director Comey is already backfiring on Trump. It’s only going to get worse., which noted the "[t]o put it mildly, the optics of firing Comey are terrible. Trump looks like he does not actually want to get to the bottom of Russia’s interference in the U.S. election and the potential wrongdoing of his own staffers."


The weird moment on Colbert’s show that captured our political whiplash, which noted The Donald's freudian slip:

"It will go down in history as having a museum-worthy second paragraph: 'While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.' . .

It is rare for a single sentence to so thoroughly encapsulate one man’s current psyche, and to become such an immediate artifact of the time in which it was written. The letter was grandiose and insecure, highly specific but provided no checkable details. Trump used it to defend himself against Comey’s firing before anybody had asked for a defense."

Trump surrogates are trying to explain Comey’s firing. It’s not going well.

Trump has crossed a once-unthinkable red line, which noted that:

"Since President Richard Nixon forced the resignations of the attorney general and deputy attorney general in 1973 in protest to his order to dismiss a special prosecutor investigating the White House, all senior Justice Department officials have known that there could come a time when they would stand before history and face a defining test: Would they have the courage to say no to a president determined to subvert the bedrock independence of federal law enforcement?

On Tuesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein failed this test. By providing President Trump with the cover to fire FBI Director James B. Comey, they betrayed the Justice Department’s long-standing tradition of independence. In doing so, they sent a message to every career prosecutor and investigator working beneath them that they put the president’s personal and political interests ahead of the department’s integrity."

Did Trump already blow his own cover story about Comey’s firing?, which lists the inconsistent explanations for the firing.

Read also:

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

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

Trump's Big CON: It's All About the Show, Health Care Edition

UPDATE II:  "Republicans have fanned across the talk shows to defend the bill, but what they have really revealed is that they can’t defend it without spewing all sorts of lies and distortions about what’s actually in it. . .

Republicans are broadly sidestepping any defense of what their bill actually does. . .

Untold numbers of people with preexisting conditions will be more vulnerable to losing coverage, financial ruin and, in certain cases, possibly death. Millions of lower-income people will lose coverage. Instead of arguing that these things are worth the trade-off of doing away with the mandate and the high-end taxes, Republicans who support the bill continue to deny that those things will happen at all, in the face of all evidence and expert analysis to the contrary."

Read the Washington Post, The health bill is a total disaster. That’s why Republicans keep lying about it.

Read also The New York Times, Republicans Party Like It’s 1984, which notes:

"[T]he Orwell-level dishonesty of the whole effort. As far as I can tell, every word Republicans, from Trump on down, have said about their bill — about why they want to replace Obamacare, about what their replacement would do, and about how it would work — is a lie . .

Trumpcare breaks every promise Republicans ever made about health. Deductibles will rise, not fall, as insurers are set free to offer lower-quality coverage. Premiums may fall for a handful of young, healthy, affluent people, but will rise and in many cases soar for those who are older (because age spreads will rise), sicker (because protection against discrimination based on medical history will be taken away), and poorer (because subsidies will go down).

Many people with pre-existing conditions will find insurance either completely unavailable or totally out of their financial reach.

And Medicaid will be cut back, with the damage worsening over time.

The really important thing, however, is not just to realize that Republicans are breaking their promises, but to realize that they are doing so with intent. This isn’t one of those cases where people try to do what they said they would, but fall short in the execution. This is an act of deliberate betrayal: Everything about Trumpcare is specifically designed to do exactly the opposite of what Trump, Paul Ryan and other Republicans said it would." 

UPDATE:  "House Republicans have been so fixated on passing anything that they now find it hard to defend their handiwork without resort to exaggeration, deflection and flat-out dishonesty. There is a surefire way to tell they are not accurately representing the bill: Fellow GOP senators want no part of it."

Read the Washington Post, GOP grownups debunk fake AHCA defenses. 

"There have been a slew of stories about Trump’s indifference to what was in the health-care bill. What he said he wanted repeatedly on the campaign trail isn’t what was passed, but that didn’t keep Trump from telling a Rose Garden audience on Thursday afternoon that the legislation would do things that outside analysis made clear that it wouldn’t. Of all the things we should have foreseen from a Trump presidency, this, in hindsight, is among the most obvious: Trump was more consistent about his desire to win than he was about what those wins would entail. His policy specifics are generally things championed by others: immigration by Stephen K. Bannon, child-care by Ivanka Trump. The thing Trump wanted to accomplish was to win. . .

There seems to have been a collective sense among the caucus, powered in no small part by the White House, that the win was the important thing. The New York Times reports that Chief of Staff Reince Priebus was twisting every arm in sight in an effort to secure a passing majority, so much so that his famously warm relationship with fellow Wisconsinite Paul Ryan was strained. Kane reports that the positions of the House speaker and other Republican leaders were perceived as being in jeopardy if they couldn’t close the deal. With stakes like that, 217 becomes more important than 24 million — 217 votes was a stronger motivation than the 24 million people who would be uninsured in 2026 thanks to the bill’s passage. . .

It’s certainly not a coincidence that this episode occurred in a moment of unprecedented partisanship. A lot of Republicans across the country likely shared Trump’s attitude: The win was more important than what was won, especially since the win was a victory over the hated Obamacare.

The broader point can be made more simply. Why did Republicans have a Rose Garden ceremony to celebrate a bill moving out of one of the two chambers of Congress? Because the bill wasn’t the point. The passage was."

Read the Washington Post, It’s easy to win if you don’t care what you’ve won. 

Trump's Big CON: Trumpcare is a Mirage

UPDATE:  "President Trump claimed a victory Thursday after the House approved a more free-market approach to health care.

Then he capped it off by praising a country with government-run, universal health care.

Alongside Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull at an event in New York, Trump reflected on what the House had just done. He took the occasion to bash Obamacare as being terrible, and then he turned to Turnbull.

'We have a failing health care — I shouldn't say this to our great gentleman and my friend from Australia,' Trump said, as The Post's Abby Phillip reports, "because you have better health care than we do."

Australia's health-care system is run by the government. It's essentially a single-payer, Medicare-for-all system that is available to everyone, with private insurance also available. (They even call it 'Medicare.')

Consider this merely the latest evidence that Trump, in his heart of hearts, wants single-payer health care.  . .

And some see the current debate eventually winding up with single-payer."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s forbidden love: Single-payer health care.

The Donald's comments caused Bernie Sanders, an staunch advocate of single-payer systems, to erupt in laughter.

"Trumpcare's two big mirages. The first is that it absolutely covers people with preexisting conditions. It doesn't. It lets states opt out of the Obamacare rules protecting the sick and then lets them set up high-risk pools that wouldn't have enough money. It's hard to say how much worse off people with preexisting conditions would be, but it seems pretty clear that they would be. The health-care consultancy Avalere, for one, estimates that even in the best-case scenario, only 25 percent of people with preexisting conditions would be covered under this Republican plan.

The second is that Trumpcare is a health-care bill. It's not. It's a trillion dollar tax cut for the top 2 percent that's paid for with a trillion dollars of health-care cuts for the poor and middle class. Or, as Trump would call it, “something terrific.” He just left out that that's only for people making $200,000 or more.

Not being rich is the ultimate preexisting condition."

Read the Washington Post, Republicans’ plan to protect sick people has a long history of not protecting sick people.

Read also  the Washington Post, How being a mom could become a ‘preexisting condition’, which notes that the "Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, estimated that a woman seeking maternity care under the GOP’s current plan could face surcharges up to $17,000."

Trump's Big CON: Like Any Good Con Man, Just Saying Whatever He Can to Get a Reaction

"President Trump is a man containing multitudes. As such, the go-to method of explaining who he is and what makes him tick often involves metaphors.

Lots of metaphors. . . 

[Susan Sarandon said:]

'He reminds me of, like, your drunk uncle at a wedding who gets up and starts talking and just loves the crowd and just goes on and on and on and says whatever he can to get a reaction.'"

Read the Washington Post, The many metaphors that describe Donald Trump.

Trump's Big CON: “Hire American” Pledge

"So much for President Trump’s 'Hire American' promise.

Just two weeks after Trump signed an executive order vowing to crack down on a program designed to import high-skilled foreign labor, a provision slipped into the budget compromise with Democrats this week could double the number of visas for low-wage, seasonal workers such as those in the landscaping, forestry and hospitality industries.

The guest worker visa, known as the H-2B, is the exact kind that helps Trump staff his Mar-a-Lago golf resort."

Read the Washington Post, Despite Trump’s “Hire American” pledge, budget bill would dramatically expand the number of foreign workers.

Trump's Big CON: How Does He Do It?

UPDATE:  "Is Trump nuts, ill-informed or a liar — or all three?"

Read the Washington Post, When is it okay to say the president might be nuts?

No, The Donald is not "nuts".  As noted before, Trump is a psycho-narcissistic con man, who happens to be President.

By pandering to fear, anger and hatred.

"For those who claim that Donald Trump has been pasteurized and homogenized by the presidency, his sour, 100th-day speech in Harrisburg, Pa., was inconvenient.

Trump used his high office to pursue divisive grudges (Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer is a 'bad leader'), to attack the media (composed of 'incompetent, dishonest people') and to savage congressional Democrats ('they don’t mind drugs pouring in'). Most of all, Trump used his bully pulpit quite literally, devoting about half his speech to the dehumanization of migrants and refugees as criminals, infiltrators and terrorists. Trump gained a kind of perverse energy from the rolling waves of hatred, culminating in the reading of racist song lyrics comparing his targets to vermin. It was a speech with all the logic, elevation and public purpose of a stink bomb.

On a selection of policy issues (Chinese currency manipulation, NATO, the North American Free Trade Agreement), Trump has been forced to accommodate reality. But those who find the president surprisingly “conventional” must somehow dismiss or discount this kind of speech, which George Wallace would have gladly given as president. They must somehow ignore the children in the audience, soaking up the fears and prejudices of their elders. They must somehow believe that presidential rhetoric — capable of elevating a country — has no power to debase it.

It is not sophisticated or worldly-wise to become inured to bigotry. The only thing more frightening than Trump’s speech — arguably the most hate-filled presidential communication in modern history — is the apathetic response of those who should know better."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s 100th-day speech may have been the most hate-filled in modern history. 

Trump's Big CON: His Tax Reform Bamboozle

UPDATE IV:  "President Trump is planning on cutting taxes, and his advisers have been arguing that he does not need to reduce federal spending at the same time. Instead, they say, reduced taxes will pay to stimulate the U.S. economy, so the government will not have to borrow more money to make up the difference.

Economists aren't buying it, according to a new survey conducted at the University of Chicago."

Read the Washington Post, Survey: Just 5 percent of economists believe Trump’s big tax promise.

UPDATE III:  "After almost 100 days in office, President Trump has finally found his forte: one-page tax plans.

That's how long his first one was last September, and how long his new one was Wednesday. There's a reason for this. If you compare them side-by-side, you can see that Trump's two main innovations this time around are using bullet points and offering less specificity. Everything else is just about the same. . .

[T]the biggest difference is that the first edition of Trump's plan was merely wildly implausible, while the slightly updated second one is actually impossible."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s new, one-page tax plan is the same as his old, one-page tax plan.

UPDATE II:  "From the start, members of the administration have offered inconsistent explanations of how the tax plan would affect the middle class."

Read the Washington Post, If Trump has a tax plan, his advisers can’t agree on what it is.

But who cares about the middle class, Trump & friends get ma$$ive tax cuts!!

UPDATE:  Some people just ignore the lies, don't mind being bamboozled, and love the con man.

"The lies that tumble from Trump himself are unprecedented in scope, audacity and frequency. The Post fact-checking team documented more than 400 false or misleading statements as of Day 91 of his presidency. Other administration members have taken their cues from this,  particularly press secretary Sean Spicer, who set the tone early on by lying about Trump’s inaugural crowd sizes and accusing the press of falsely diminishing them. Yet to Trump voters, not only does this reality not exist at all; such critical media scrutiny of him and his administration also is a sign that he’s doing something right — that he’s on their side, and the news media is the enemy."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s lies are working brilliantly. This new poll proves it.

To bamboozle is to: deceive · delude · hoodwink · mislead · take in · dupe · fool · double-cross · cheat · defraud · swindle · gull · hoax · bamboozle · entrap · con · bilk · diddle · rook · put one over on · pull a fast one on · pull the wool over someone's eyes · take for a ride · shaft · flimflam · sucker · snooker · cozen · illude · chicane.

And that about sums up The Donald's latest con.

Read the Washington Post:

Trump again overpromises, underdelivers on tax ‘plan’, which states that;

The "White House had promised to roll out a 'tax plan' Wednesday. Instead of a fully developed plan, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and senior adviser Gary Cohn put out a one-page sheet with bullet points, something you might see as a first draft of a campaign white paper. Worse yet, as we anticipated, Mnuchin and Cohn wound up getting grilled on whether President Trump, who stands to save millions (via, among other things, elimination of the alternative minimum tax), would release his tax returns. Mnuchin was emphatic: 'The president has no intention.' He falsely asserted, 'The president has released plenty of information and I think has given more financial disclosure than anybody else. I think the American population has plenty of information.' He and Cohn had no specifics about the savings for voters by tax bracket or about the expected increase in the debt. . .

This is classic Trump — all flash and big talk, with very little substance. His economic team plainly was not prepared to provide anything approaching a detailed 'plan,' but now Republicans’ actual tax plan, if they ever come up with one, will be judged in comparison with a cotton-candy plan that could never become law. Trump did “accomplish” one thing — he reminded us he has concealed his taxes and may stand to reap enormous tax savings as a result of his plan. This hardly seems like populism."

Trump, in new tax plan, promises to do what Reagan couldn’t, which noted that:

At the center of President Trump’s plan to significantly cut taxes on businesses and individuals is a promise to stimulate extraordinary economic growth, so much so, his advisers say, that the plan would pay for itself.

If he succeeds in keeping that promise, Trump will have accomplished something his tax-cutting Republican predecessors were unable to do, say economists and tax policy experts from both parties. . .

But in the experience of two other Republican presidents, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, tax cuts produced an uneven record of prompting economic growth. And in both instances, reductions in taxes were unable to pay for themselves, instead leaving the nation to deal with increasing federal debt."

How Trump’s tax proposal could impact his own business empire, which points out that the proposal:

"[C]ould prove to be a windfall for the Trump Organization, the private umbrella company for hundreds of Trump real estate, licensing and other companies, many of which qualify as pass-through businesses.

Trump has refused to release his tax returns, making it impossible to know how much his businesses could save on taxes. . .

A copy of Trump’s tax return from 2005 suggests that a tax cut similar to the one Trump is proposing could have lowered his tax obligation by potentially tens of millions of dollars in a single year."

Trump tax plan roundup, which also noted that:

The "Trump tax plan, such as it is — it’s 'less than 200 words and contain[s] just seven numbers' . . . is a massive sprinkling of the old supply-side, trickle-down fairy dust that very few budget wonks will endorse, regardless of their political stripes . . . "that no feasible tax reform in this country will raise economic growth to 3 percent on a sustained basis given our current demographics . . . [but the proposal would, according to the] Upshot’s Neil Irwin . . . benefit the president himself and his family: 'It is striking how many of the affect the president and his family. He is a high-income earner. He receives income from 564 business entities, according to his financial disclosure form, and could take advantage of the low rate on 'pass-through' companies. According to his leaked 2005 tax return, he paid an extra $31 million because of the alternative minimum tax that he seeks to eliminate. And his heirs could eventually enjoy his enormous assets tax-free. . . [and it is striking] the extent to which Trump continues to push policies that totally disregard the working-class people who helped him get elected. First it was a health-care plan that kicked 24 million off the insurance rolls. Now it’s a tax cut that delivers almost all its goodies to the nation’s wealthiest households."