Trump's Big CON: Trump's $1B Infrastructure CON

UPDATE II:  "President Trump's "$1 trillion infrastructure plan” isn't $1 trillion and it isn't a plan. It's a $200 billion plan to have a plan that hasn't advanced beyond that stage for six months now.

The administration, though, has decided that this is “infrastructure week,” so this bare outline of an actual proposal is getting touted as if it's something that required more than five minutes of thought. Which is to say that it's not that different from the rest of Trump's agenda: bullet points that seem more appropriate for a tweet than for anything else. . .

It hasn't said how it would spend the $200 billion of its own, or how it would try to get corporations to spend the $800 billion of theirs, or how much that second part would cost in tax breaks. There's nothing to analyze, because there's nothing at all.

But it's not just that Trump doesn't have much of an infrastructure plan. It's that he doesn't have much of a legislative plan to pass it either. . .

Between replacing Obamacare and lifting the debt ceiling and cutting taxes, which, despite Trump's claim to be “moving along in Congress,” doesn't even exist right now, there isn't a lot of time for Republicans to do things before election season is upon us.

Trump has really had a Potemkin presidency so far. He stages elaborate photo ops for executive orders that, with the exception of his stalled travel ban, don't actually do anything of substance. He hosts celebrations for bills that have only passed one chamber of Congress. And he makes a big show out of unveiling half-finished policies that have been that way for a while.

In other words, Trump isn't a successful president, but he plays one on Fox News.

This is due to Trump's 140-character attention span; to his unfamiliarity with, and indifference toward, policy, and to his apparent cable TV-style belief that ratings matter more than results. You can see all of this in his approach to filling the government. The assistant secretaries and undersecretaries who don't make headlines but do make policy are almost entirely absent from the Trump administration. He just hasn't bothered to nominate anyone for those spots. He's been too busy feuding with the mayor of a city that's just suffered a terrorist attack to worry about having a team in place in, say, the Treasury Department. Which is why an infrastructure proposal that should have been fleshed out months ago is still stuck in embryonic form, perpetually “a few weeks away” from being ready.

Until then, make sure to compliment the emperor — I mean president! — on his new clothes.

Read the Washington Post, Trump keeps pretending his infrastructure plan is real. It’s not.

UPDATE:  "During his campaign, Donald Trump promised to spend $1 trillion on an infrastructure program that he likened to those of the New Deal era. When Hillary Clinton called for $275 billion in infrastructure investment, the Republican nominee vowed to spend at least twice that sum.

Last month, the White House released a budget that allocated $200 billion for spurring public-private partnerships in infrastructure investment — while cutting $144 billion from direct public spending on infrastructure.

The president has yet to release the full details of his new vision for repairing America’s crumbling roads and bridges. But a report from the New York Times on Saturday suggested that Trump’s new plan for federal infrastructure spending is to reduce it".

Read New York Magazine, Trump’s Big Infrastructure Idea Is to Privatize Air Traffic Control.

"When President Trump was running for the White House last year, his advocacy of a large investment in infrastructure was often cited as evidence that he wasn’t a traditional Republican. After all, would some doctrinaire conservative propose spending a trillion dollars of taxpayer money on government projects to shore up our roads, bridges and water systems?

But there was a bait-and-switch going on, one that becomes more evident as we get closer to seeing the details. . .

The problem with what the Trump administration proposes is that while the number $1 trillion gets mentioned a lot, that’s not actually what it wants to spend. The budget proposal the White House released called for $200 billion in new infrastructure spending, but Democrats noticed that it simultaneously made over $200 billion in cuts to existing spending. For the most part, the administration wants to pass costs on to state and local governments and hope that private investors come up with the rest of the money. . .

That might save some money in the very short run, but it means that consumers keep paying, basically forever. In the traditional approach, government spends the money to build, say, a bridge, and then it’s built and it belongs to the taxpayers. There are maintenance costs, but that’s it. In the Trump approach, the government gives almost as much money in tax breaks as it would have spent building the bridge, but it belongs to the developer, who charges tolls that everyone who uses the bridge has to keep paying. . .

[In other words this] the basic structure of the plan: having taxpayers give a huge amount of money to private developers, so that those developers can then turn around and charge people even more to use the systems that get built."

Read the Washington Post, Trump will never get help from Democrats in passing his infrastructure plan. Here’s why.

Trump's Big CON: He is The Child President

UPDATE III:  "It is possible that a strong White House chief of staff could help to bring some more order to the current clown car apparatus. And if one assumes that Donald Trump is like other politicians in that he wants to be reelected, this would be the rational course of action.

That said, there are two big honking problems with Bernstein’s argument. The first one is simple: Who would agree to the job at this point? . .

But even if there was some Manic Pixie Dream Staffer just waiting in the wings to be discovered, we get to the fundamental problem with Bernstein’s proposed plan to improve the Trump administration — the president would continue to be Donald Trump. As I’ve noted previously, “The best explanation for Trump’s erratic shifts in behavior is Trump-specific.” Venues ranging from the Wall Street Journal to Vox have concluded that the president is his own worst enemy. For this new structure to exist, Donald Trump would have to sign off on it. He would have to be mature enough to recognize his own management problems. . .

For the past six weeks or so, I’ve been chronicling when Trump’s staff describes him to reporters in terms that make him seem like a truculent toddler. There’s a lot of them. The fact is, the president appears to display massive insecurities, which causes him to turn on any staffer who rises to prominence." [Link in original.]

Read the Washington Post, Why it is impossible for Donald Trump to rise to adequacy.

UPDATE II: YOU MUST:

Read the Washington Post, I wrote ‘The Art of the Deal’ with Trump. His self-sabotage is rooted in his past., which explains:

"Why does Donald Trump behave in the dangerous and seemingly self-destructive ways he does?

Three decades ago, I spent nearly a year hanging around Trump to write his first book, 'The Art of the Deal,' and got to know him very well. I spent hundreds of hours listening to him, watching him in action and interviewing him about his life. For me, none of what he has said or done over the past four months as president comes as a surprise. The way he has behaved over the past week — firing FBI Director James B. Comey, undercutting his own aides as they tried to explain the decision and then disclosing sensitive information to Russian officials — is also entirely predictable.

Early on, I recognized that Trump’s sense of self-worth is forever at risk. When he feels aggrieved, he reacts impulsively and defensively, constructing a self-justifying story that doesn’t depend on facts and always directs the blame to others. . .

Trump’s worldview was profoundly and self-protectively shaped by his father. . .

To survive, I concluded from our conversations, Trump felt compelled to go to war with the world. It was a binary, zero-sum choice for him: You either dominated or you submitted. You either created and exploited fear or you succumbed to it — as he thought his older brother had. This narrow, defensive worldview took hold at a very early age, and it never evolved. 'When I look at myself today and I look at myself in the first grade,' he told a recent biographer, 'I’m basically the same.' His development essentially ended in early childhood. . .

Trump was equally clear with me that he didn’t value — nor even necessarily recognize — the qualities that tend to emerge as people grow more secure, such as empathy, generosity, reflectiveness, the capacity to delay gratification or, above all, a conscience, an inner sense of right and wrong. Trump simply didn’t traffic in emotions or interest in others. The life he lived was all transactional, all the time. Having never expanded his emotional, intellectual or moral universe, he has his story down, and he’s sticking to it.

A key part of that story is that facts are whatever Trump deems them to be on any given day. When he is challenged, he instinctively doubles down — even when what he has just said is demonstrably false. I saw that countless times, whether it was as trivial as exaggerating the number of floors at Trump Tower or as consequential as telling me that his casinos were performing well when they were actually going bankrupt. In the same way, Trump sees no contradiction at all in changing his story about why he fired Comey and then undermining the explanatory statements of his aides, or in any other lie he tells. His aim is never accuracy; it’s domination.

Trump derives his sense of significance from conquests and accomplishments. 'Can you believe it, Tony?' he would often begin late-night conversations with me, and then go on to describe some new example of his brilliance. But the reassurance he got from even his biggest achievements was always ephemeral and unreliable — and that appears to include being elected president. On the face of it, Trump has more opportunities now to feel significant and accomplished than almost any human being on the planet. But that’s like saying that a heroin addict has his problem licked once he has free and continuous access to the drug. Trump also now has a far bigger and more public stage on which to fail and to feel unworthy.

Any addiction has a predictable pattern — the addict keeps chasing the high by upping the ante in an increasingly futile attempt to recreate the desired state. From the very first time I interviewed him in his office in Trump Tower in 1985, the image I had of Trump was that of a black hole. Whatever goes in quickly disappears without a trace. Nothing sustains. It’s forever uncertain when someone or something will throw Trump off his precarious perch — when his sense of equilibrium will be threatened and he’ll feel an overwhelming compulsion to restore it. Beneath his bluff exterior, I always sensed a hurt, incredibly vulnerable little boy who just wanted to be loved.

What Trump craves most deeply is the adulation he has found so ephemeral. This goes a long way toward explaining his need for control and why he simply couldn’t abide Comey, who reportedly refused to accede to Trump’s demand for loyalty and whose continuing investigation into Russian interference in the election campaign last year threatened to bring down his presidency. Trump’s need for unquestioning praise and flattery also helps to explain his hostility to democracy and to a free press — both of which thrive on open dissent. . .

The Trump I got to know had no deep ideological beliefs, nor any passionate feeling about anything but his immediate self-interest.

Over the past week, in the face of criticism from nearly every quarter, Trump’s distrust has almost palpably mushroomed. No importuning by his advisers would stand a chance of constraining him when he feels this deeply triggered. The more he feels at the mercy of forces he cannot control — and he is surely feeling that now — the more resentful, desperate and impulsive he becomes."

UPDATE:  "Trump is a daily reminder of why presidents need protocols and talking points. When someone as inexperienced and impulsive as Trump tries to wing it, the result is chaos or worse. The Lawfare blog, one of the most fair-minded chroniclers of national security issues, reviewed the string of Trump’s recent actions involving intelligence and asked whether he was violating his oath to “faithfully execute the Office of President.” That’s a polite way of asking whether he should be impeached.

The threat to Trump’s presidency is deepening. His credibility is unraveling, with prominent Republicans now voicing concern about his erratic, impulsive decisions. Each new revelation builds the narrative of a man who has been trying to bully or cajole intelligence and law enforcement officials since his election. As one GOP veteran told me: “There are no guardrails for this president.”

Intelligence issues have been at the center of Trump’s troubles since before the election, animated by a strange mix of anxiety, insecurity and vanity. "

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s presidency is beginning to unravel.

"At certain times Donald Trump has seemed like a budding authoritarian, a corrupt Nixon, a rabble-rousing populist or a big business corporatist.

But as Trump has settled into his White House role, he has given a series of long interviews, and when you study the transcripts it becomes clear that fundamentally he is none of these things.

At base, Trump is an infantalist. There are three tasks that most mature adults have sort of figured out by the time they hit 25. Trump has mastered none of them. Immaturity is becoming the dominant note of his presidency, lack of self-control his leitmotif. . .

The Russian leak story reveals one other thing, the dangerousness of a hollow man.

Our institutions depend on people who have enough engraved character traits to fulfill their assigned duties. But there is perpetually less to Trump than it appears. When we analyze a president’s utterances we tend to assume that there is some substantive process behind the words, that it’s part of some strategic intent.

But Trump’s statements don’t necessarily come from anywhere, lead anywhere or have a permanent reality beyond his wish to be liked at any given instant.

We’ve got this perverse situation in which the vast analytic powers of the entire world are being spent trying to understand a guy whose thoughts are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar.

'We badly want to understand Trump, to grasp him,” David Roberts writes in Vox. “It might give us some sense of control, or at least an ability to predict what he will do next. But what if there’s nothing to understand? What if there is no there there?'

Read The New York Times, When the World Is Led by a Child.

FYI, the article describes the three tasks that most mature adults have sort of figured out:

"First, most adults have learned to sit still. But mentally, Trump is still a 7-year-old boy who is bouncing around the classroom. Trump’s answers in these interviews are not very long — 200 words at the high end — but he will typically flit through four or five topics before ending up with how unfair the press is to him.

His inability to focus his attention makes it hard for him to learn and master facts. He is ill informed about his own policies and tramples his own talking points. It makes it hard to control his mouth. On an impulse, he will promise a tax reform when his staff has done little of the actual work.

Second, most people of drinking age have achieved some accurate sense of themselves, some internal criteria to measure their own merits and demerits. But Trump seems to need perpetual outside approval to stabilize his sense of self, so he is perpetually desperate for approval, telling heroic fabulist tales about himself.

'In a short period of time I understood everything there was to know about health care,' he told Time. 'A lot of the people have said that, some people said it was the single best speech ever made in that chamber,' he told The Associated Press, referring to his joint session speech.

By Trump’s own account, he knows more about aircraft carrier technology than the Navy. According to his interview with The Economist, he invented the phrase 'priming the pump' (even though it was famous by 1933). Trump is not only trying to deceive others. His falsehoods are attempts to build a world in which he can feel good for an instant and comfortably deceive himself.

He is thus the all-time record-holder of the Dunning-Kruger effect, the phenomenon in which the incompetent person is too incompetent to understand his own incompetence. Trump thought he’d be celebrated for firing James Comey. He thought his press coverage would grow wildly positive once he won the nomination. He is perpetually surprised because reality does not comport with his fantasies.

Third, by adulthood most people can perceive how others are thinking. For example, they learn subtle arts such as false modesty so they won’t be perceived as obnoxious.

But Trump seems to have not yet developed a theory of mind. Other people are black boxes that supply either affirmation or disapproval. As a result, he is weirdly transparent. He wants people to love him, so he is constantly telling interviewers that he is widely loved. In Trump’s telling, every meeting was scheduled for 15 minutes but his guests stayed two hours because they liked him so much."

Read also Trump's Big CON: Our Boy President.

Trump's Big CON: "Making Ignorance Great Again"

"Donald Trump just took us out of the Paris climate accord for no good reason. I don’t mean that his decision was wrong. I mean, literally, that he didn’t offer any substantive justification for that decision. Oh, he threw around a few numbers about supposed job losses, but nobody believes that he knows or cares where those numbers came from. It was just what he felt like doing.

And here’s the thing: What just happened on climate isn’t an unusual case — and Trump isn’t especially unusual for a modern Republican. For today’s G.O.P. doesn’t do substance; it doesn’t assemble evidence, or do analysis to formulate or even to justify its policy positions. Facts and hard thinking aren’t wanted, and anyone who tries to bring such things into the discussion is the enemy.

Consider another huge policy area, health care. . .

[Republicans] don’t study issues, they just decide, and attack the motives of anyone who questions their decisions. . .

On climate change, influential conservatives have for years clung to what is basically a crazy conspiracy theory — that the overwhelming scientific consensus that the earth is warming due to greenhouse-gas emissions is a hoax, somehow coordinated by thousands of researchers around the world. And at this point this is effectively the mainstream Republican position.

Do G.O.P. leaders really think this conspiracy theory is true? The answer, surely, is that they don’t care. Truth, as something that exists apart from and in possible opposition to political convenience, is no longer part of their philosophical universe. . .

And as health care and climate go, so goes everything else. Can you think of any major policy area where the G.O.P. hasn’t gone post-truth? Take budgeting, . . .

The president, backed by his party, is talking nonsense, destroying American credibility day by day. But hey, stocks are up, so what’s the problem?

Well, bear in mind that so far Trump hasn’t faced a single crisis not of his own making. As George Orwell noted many years ago in his essay 'In Front of Your Nose,' people can indeed talk nonsense for a very long time, without paying an obvious price. But 'sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.' Now there’s a happy thought."

Read The New York Times, Making Ignorance Great Again.

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

UPDATE IV:  The nation’s top intelligence official told associates in March that President Trump asked him if he could intervene with then-FBI Director James B. Comey to get the bureau to back off its focus on former national security adviser Michael Flynn in its Russia probe, according to officials. . .

The events involving Coats show the president went further than just asking intelligence officials to deny publicly the existence of any evidence showing collusion during the 2016 election, as The Washington Post reported in May. The interaction with Coats indicates that Trump aimed to enlist top officials to have Comey curtail the bureau’s probe. . .

A day or two after the March 22 meeting, the president followed up with a phone call to Coats, according to officials familiar with the discussions. In the call, Trump asked Coats to issue a public statement denying the existence of any evidence of coordination between his campaign and the Russian government. Again, Coats decided not to act on the request.

Trump similarly approached Adm. Mike Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, to ask him to publicly deny the existence of any evidence of coordination, as The Post previously reported, according to current and former officials. Like Coats, Rogers refused to comply with the president’s request.

Trump announced in January that he was nominating Coats to serve as director of national intelligence, responsible for overseeing U.S. intelligence agencies and for briefing the president on global developments.

In February, as tensions flared between intelligence agencies and the White House over Russia and other issues, some of Trump’s advisers floated the idea of appointing a New York billionaire, Stephen A. Feinberg, to undertake a review of the ODNI. . .

Some officials said they viewed the prospective appointment of Feinberg as an effort by White House officials to put pressure on intelligence agencies to close ranks with the White House.

Read the Washington Post, Top intelligence official told associates Trump asked him if he could intervene with Comey on FBI Russia probe.

Read also the Washington Post, Why the latest Russia news paints an increasingly grim picture for Trump, which asks:

"[W]hy did Trump feel so strongly about getting Flynn off the hook? . .

[I]t's worth noting that Trump is a notoriously fickle political operator with few true friends and bulletproof advisers. He dispatched two of his chief campaign aides — Corey Lewandowski and Paul Manafort — when it suited him. And as president he has made pretty clear his unhappiness with top adviser Stephen K. Bannon and even, according to reports this week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who was way out front of almost every other congressional Republican in supporting Trump’s candidacy. He's also distanced himself from longtime political confidant Roger Stone.

Put plainly: The president known for his 'You're fired' catchphrase as a reality TV star hasn't exactly shown that excessive loyalty is among his chief faults. Could he perhaps be uniquely loyal to Flynn for some reason? . .

If Trump isn't burdened by some strangely large amount of loyalty to Flynn, that suggests he worries about what could come of an investigation into Flynn. . .

Tuesday night's report is the latest brushstroke in what, through Trump's own doing, looks more and more like a cover-up."

And read the Washington Post, The fall of Michael Flynn: A timeline.

UPDATE III:  "Former CIA director John Brennan testified May 23 before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence about Russia’s influence on the 2016 presidential election. . . 

'I know what the Russians try to do,' Brennan said. 'They try to suborn individuals and they try to get individuals, including U.S. persons, to act on their behalf either wittingly or unwittingly.' . .

He added that Russian agencies routinely seek to gather compromising information, or 'kompromat,' to coerce treason from U.S. officials who 'do not even realize they are on that path until it gets too late.' The remark appeared to be in reference to Flynn."

Read the Washington Post, CIA director alerted FBI to pattern of contacts between Russian officials and Trump campaign associates.

UPDATE II:  "This new scoop is hugely significant because it suggests a concerted, multi-front effort by the president and top White House staff to rein in an FBI investigation in the months before Trump fired Comey."

Read the Washington Post, Comey was not the only official to resist Trump entreaties.

UPDATE:  "President Trump asked two of the nation’s top intelligence officials in March to help him push back against an FBI investigation into possible coordination between his campaign and the Russian government, according to current and former officials.

Trump made separate appeals to the director of national intelligence, Daniel Coats, and to Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, urging them to publicly deny the existence of any evidence of collusion during the 2016 election. . .

White House officials say Comey’s testimony about the scope of the FBI investigation upset Trump, who has dismissed the FBI and congressional investigations as a 'witch hunt.' The president has repeatedly said there was no collusion.

Current and former senior intelligence officials viewed Trump’s requests as an attempt by the president to tarnish the credibility of the agency leading the Russia investigation.

A senior intelligence official said Trump’s goal was to 'muddy the waters' about the scope of the FBI probe at a time when Democrats were ramping up their calls for the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel, a step announced last week.

Senior intelligence officials also saw the March requests as a threat to the independence of U.S. spy agencies, which are supposed to remain insulated from partisan issues.

'The problem wasn’t so much asking them to issue statements, it was asking them to issue false statements about an ongoing investigation,' a former senior intelligence official said of the request to Coats. . .

In addition to the requests to Coats and Rogers, senior White House officials sounded out top intelligence officials about the possibility of intervening directly with Comey to encourage the FBI to drop its probe of Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, according to people familiar with the matter. . .

Current and former officials said that Trump either lacks an understanding of the FBI’s role as an independent law enforcement agency or does not care about maintaining such boundaries.

Trump’s effort to use the director of national intelligence and the NSA director to dispute Comey’s statement and to say there was no evidence of collusion echoes President Richard Nixon’s 'unsuccessful efforts to use the CIA to shut down the FBI’s investigation of the Watergate break-in on national security grounds,' said Jeffrey H. Smith, a former general counsel at the CIA. Smith called Trump’s actions 'an appalling abuse of power.'"

Read the Washington Post, Trump asked intelligence chiefs to push back against FBI collusion probe after Comey revealed its existence.

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.

Now read the Washington Post, House majority leader to colleagues in 2016: ‘I think Putin pays’ Trump, which reports that:

After the comment was made, "House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) immediately interjected, stopping the conversation from further exploring McCarthy’s assertion, and swore the Republicans present to secrecy. . .

When initially asked to comment on the exchange, Brendan Buck, a spokesman for Ryan, said: 'That never happened,' and Matt Sparks, a spokesman for McCarthy, said: 'The idea that McCarthy would assert this is absurd and false.'

After being told that The Post would cite a recording of the exchange, Buck, speaking for the GOP House leadership, said: 'This entire year-old exchange was clearly an attempt at humor.'"

The article includes a transcripts of a recording of the conversation, and explains how it happened.

Read also:

Reuters, Trump campaign had at least 18 undisclosed contacts with Russians: sources, and

McClatchy DC Bureau, Flynn stopped military plan Turkey opposed – after being paid as its agent, and

Watch McClatchy DC Bureau, The web connecting the Trump administration to Russia .

And read also Trump's Big CON: The Comey Conspiracy and Russian Agent Coverup.

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

UPDATE: "[I]t’s worth remembering that “drain the swamp” is not just a hashtag for Trump. It was arguably one of the animating principles of his campaign, one that was embraced by his supporters with an enthusiasm that even surprised the then-candidate."

Read the Washington Post, President Trump’s commitment to draining the swamp is being tested.

Trump promised "to 'drain the swamp' — to eliminate the culture of self-dealing, conflicts of interest and pay-to-play that has infested government."

Yeah, right.

Read the latest at the Washington Post:

White House grants ethics waivers to 17 appointees, including four former lobbyists, which noted that the "rate at which the Trump White House has handed out waivers is far faster than that of the Obama administration, which issued 17 exemptions for White House appointees over eight years."

How Jared Kushner built a luxury skyscraper using loans meant for job-starved areas.

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

Trump's Big CON: He is a Russian Agent, Whether He Realizes It or Not

UPDATE III:  "Despite this presence on Wall Street, detailed in previously unreported financial records, Vnesheconombank, or VEB, is no normal bank. It is wholly owned by the Russian state. It is intertwined with Russian intelligence. And the Russian prime minister is, by law, the chairman of its supervisory board. . .

VEB and Mr. Putin are inextricably linked. . .


There are other government-controlled banks in Russia, Sberbank and VTB, but they are primarily retail banks. VEB serves a very different role, lending mostly to large borrowers, many of them politically connected.

To that end, VEB over the last decade has lent freely in ways that dovetail with government priorities and make it a tool of Russian soft power. The purse strings opened for two influential groups in particular: oligarchs building Olympic sites in Sochi and companies in Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine.

'This is not a bank,' said Karen Vartapetov, a public finance analyst at Standard & Poor’s. 'We should rather treat this bank as a government agency. It is used by the government as a tool to invest in politically and socially important but not always financially viable projects.'"

Read The New York Times, Bank at Center of U.S. Inquiry Projects Russian ‘Soft Power’.

UPDATE II:  Another argument that Trump is just a "useful idiot" to Russia.

"The Russian threat is currently inflated: A post-Communist Russia will always be a troublesome rival, but it need not be an eternal enemy, and if our presidents can maintain alliances and forge deals with dictators in Riyadh and Tehran, they can also make deals with the strongman in Moscow. But Trump pretty clearly lacks the gifts required for that kind of deal making, and instead he’s much more likely to be a mark for the Russians, who can use his desire for a kind of super-reset to sow divisions in NATO without offering much of substance in return.

So in a strategic sense I am content to have Trump’s desire for détente balked by leaks, probes and the resistance of his military advisers.

But his critics should also recognize that all those leaks and all that institutional resistance are also precisely the reasons a neophyte like Jared Kushner might have imagined that the bureaucracy should simply be bypassed, and his father-in-law allowed to hammer out his imagined bargain with Putin man to man. . .

Follow the evidence, by all means. But keep in mind that the evidence we have is still perfectly compatible with a presidential candidate and his advisers who made a foreign policy promise in the clear light of democratic debate and set out to keep it with all the wisdom, imagination and experience at their disposal — which is to say, alas, not much."

Read The New York Times, The ‘Manchurian’ President?

UPDATE:  Trump’s son-inlaw had a secret meeting with the chief executive of "Vnesheconombank, known for advancing the strategic interests of Russian President Vladi-mir Putin and for its role in a past U.S. espionage case[,] . . Sergey Gorkov, a graduate of the academy of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the domestic intelligence arm of the former Soviet KGB, who was appointed by Putin to the post less than a year before his encounter with Kushner. . .

[The bank, also know as VEB, has been] under U.S. sanctions since 2014 . . .

[After the secret meeting, flight data shows that VEB's] jet headed to Japan, where Putin was visiting on Dec. 15 and 16. The news media had reported that Gorkov would join the Russian president there. . .

Officially, VEB is Russia’s state economic development bank, set up to make domestic and foreign investments that will boost the Russian economy.

Practically speaking, according to experts, the bank functions as an arm of the Kremlin, boosting Putin’s political priorities. . .

VEB has also been used to promote the Kremlin’s strategic aims abroad, experts say, financing projects across the Eastern bloc.

'Basically, VEB operates like Putin’s slush fund,' said Anders Aslund, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Center and a Russia expert who follows the bank’s activities. 'It carries out major Kremlin operations that Putin does not want to do through the state budget.'

VEB has played a role in Russian espionage efforts in the past, serving as the cover for a Russian operative convicted last year of spying in New York."

Read the Washington Post, Explanations for Kushner’s meeting with head of Kremlin-linked bank don’t match up.

"Former FBI special agent Clint Watts, whose testimony in March laid out the most comprehensive look at the array of tools Russia used to influence our election, has a handy chart that explains a spectrum of individuals who may be of use to Russia’s intelligence services. The continuum ranges from 'natural ally' ('Trump’s alignment with nearly every Russian foreign policy objective grew in increments, eerily coinciding with the entrance of key aides and advocates into his campaign, not through his own study') to 'useful idiot' ('Russian intelligence for decades identified and promoted key individuals around the world ripe for manipulation and serving their interests. Trump, similar to emerging alternative right European politicians, spouts populist themes of xenophobia, anti-immigration, and white nationalist pride that naturally bring about a retrenchment of U.S. global influence') to 'compromised' (this would match the latest news leak that Russians thought they had compromising information on Trump’s finances) to 'Manchurian candidate' ('a deliberate plant commanded by the Russian government, aided during the campaign with both a hacking-influence campaign – equipped with key Russian advisors – and funding to help him take the White House'). . .

The more help Trump extends to Russia’s interests and the more inexplicable conduct comes to light (e.g., Jared Kushner looking for a Russian-secured channel) the harder it is to believe Trump isn’t, at the very least, a useful idiot. Months before the revelations over the last two weeks or so, Watts wrote: 'Trump’s loose style of alliances and tactical actions make him ideally suited for the 'Useful Idiot' scenario of Russian influence as he takes on advisors and positions based on perceived loyalty, yet without a clear understanding of his advisors connections to Russia. Any traditional politician would have sensed the danger implicit in surrounding oneself with people so closely connected to Putin’s intelligence agents.'

By whatever means, Russia has reaped unexpected and unparalleled benefits from Trump’s presidency. One can attribute all these individual actions to luck or coincidence, I suppose. But Trump has yet to take a single action nor have a single public interchange that harmed Russia’s interests."

Read the Washington Post, Would a spy for Russia be acting any differently?

And here is that chart:

Read also:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump's Big CON: He is the Manifestation of Republi-CON Cruelty, Recklessness and Indecency

UPDATE IV:  BTW, like much else with The Donald, it's all about the show.

"Saying that terrorist attacks like the one in London on Saturday have 'gone on too long,' Trump promised that '[a]s president, I will do what is necessary to prevent this threat from spreading to our shores and work every single day to protect the safety and security of our country, our communities and our people.' . .

[Earlier that day] he spent four hours playing golf and dining with Sen. Bob Corker and former NFL quarterback Peyton Manning at his club in Virginia. It was the second day in a row he’d golfed and, by our count, the 22nd time he’s played golf since he was elected president. He was back in the White House by 2:30 p.m. . .

[T]his was the person who, in August of last year, pledged that he was 'not going to have time to go play golf' because he was going to be working for the American people. He found time to golf less than 24 hours after 'the horrific terrorist attack on the people of London,' as he described it at Ford’s Theatre.

Trump’s comments about how he will work every single day to protect Americans must also be viewed in light of the efforts he’s made in that regard so far in his presidency. . .

He tweets like someone who finds great urgency in the threat of international terror. He doesn’t govern that way.

Read the Washington Post, Trump pledges to ‘work every single day’ to fight terror, hours after golfing with Peyton Manning.

UPDATE III:  As usual after a terrorist attack, this time in London, "our president acted like a clod, a heartless and dull-witted thug in sending out a series of tweets. . .

[It was] vintage Trump — impulsive and cruel, without an ounce of class or human decency. His behavior no longer surprises us, but it should offend and disturb us, first, that he remains the face and voice of America in the world and, second, that his fans hoot and holler, seeing this as inconsequential or acceptable conduct. We wound up with this president because millions of Republicans could not prioritize character, decency and overall fitness to serve over their mundane and frankly petty partisan wish list (28 percent top marginal tax rate!). Self-appointed religious leaders fail to see that this soullessness — not the dreaded liberal elite who insist on saying 'Happy Holidays' or refuse to countenance discrimination against gay customers — is a threat to the moral fiber of a democracy that requires a modicum of common sense and human decency to function.

Sure, Trump’s policies and rhetoric are incoherent and based on a tower of lies. Far worse, however, is his appalling character, which accelerates the erosion of democratic norms and social cohesion a diverse democracy requires. . .

The London attacks bring out the best in Britain and in Western leaders on the European continent; it brings out the worst in Trump and his followers. The former protect the soul of Western civilization; the latter drive a stake through the animating ideas that make America special."

Read the Washington Post, With his London tweets, Trump embarrasses himself — and America — once again.

Notice how Trump prompts himself and hatred after tragedy.

UPDATE II:  "The party has become “a refuge for intellectual frauds and bullies, for mean-spirited hypocrites who preach personal responsibility yet excuse the inexcusable.

Conventional wisdom says that Trump executed a hostile takeover of the GOP. What we have seen this week suggests a friendly merger has taken place. Talk radio hosts have been spouting misogyny and anti-immigrant hysteria for years; Trump is their ideal leader, not merely a flawed vehicle for their views. Fox News has been dabbling in conspiracy theories (e.g. birtherism, climate-change denial) for decades; now Republicans practice intellectual nihilism. Nearly every point of criticism raised against the left — softness on foreign aggressors, irresponsible budgeting, identity politics, executive overreach, contempt for the rule of law, infantilizing voters — has become a defining feature of the right. . .

The Republican Party no longer embodies those ideals; it undermines them in words and in deeds. It now advances ideas and celebrates behavior antithetical to democracy and simple human decency. Center-right Americans, we have become convinced, must look elsewhere for a political home."

Read the Washington Post, A week that reveals how rotten today’s Republican Party is.

UPDATE:  And read also the Washington Post, Gianforte’s victory after assaulting reporter reflects rising tribalism in American politics, which cited the article quoted above and noted:

"Many right-wing intellectuals blame Trump for corrupting the conservative movement so much that Gianforte can get away with hitting a reporter:

Charlie Sykes, a conservative former talk-show host in Wisconsin, told Karen and Bob: 'Every time something like Montana happens, Republicans adjust their standards and put an emphasis on team loyalty. They normalize and accept previously unacceptable behavior.'"

Joseph Nye Welch, "was the chief counsel for the United States Army while it was under investigation for Communist activities by Senator Joseph McCarthy's Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, an investigation known as the Army–McCarthy hearings. . .

On June 9, 1954, the 30th day of the Army–McCarthy hearings, Welch challenged Roy Cohn to provide U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. with McCarthy's list of 130 Communists or subversives in defense plants 'before the sun goes down'. McCarthy stepped in and said that if Welch was so concerned about persons aiding the Communist Party, he should check on a man in his Boston law office named Fred Fisher, who had once belonged to the National Lawyers Guild, which Brownell had called 'the legal mouthpiece of the Communist Party'. . . Welch dismissed Fisher's association with the NLG as a youthful indiscretion and attacked McCarthy for naming the young man before a nationwide television audience without prior warning or previous agreement to do so:

    'Until this moment, Senator, I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us....Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad. It is true he is still with Hale and Dorr. It is true that he will continue to be with Hale and Dorr. It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty I would do so. I like to think I am a gentleman, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me.'

When McCarthy tried to renew his attack, Welch interrupted him:

    'Senator, may we not drop this? We know he belonged to the Lawyers Guild ... Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?'

McCarthy tried to ask Welch another question about Fisher, and Welch interrupted:v
    'Mr. McCarthy, I will not discuss this further with you. You have sat within six feet of me and could have asked me about Fred Fisher. You have seen fit to bring it out. And if there is a God in Heaven it will do neither you nor your cause any good. I will not discuss it further. I will not ask Mr. Cohn any more witnesses. You, Mr. Chairman, may, if you will, call the next witness.'

At this, those watching the proceedings broke into applause."

I recall this incident to ask, when will we call out Republi-CON cruelty, recklessness and indecency? Two recent cases:

Read the Washington Post, The conservative mind has become diseased, which asks much the same:

"To many observers on the left, the initial embrace of Seth Rich conspiracy theories by conservative media figures was merely a confirmation of the right’s deformed soul. But for those of us who remember that Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity were once relatively mainstream Reaganites, their extended vacation in the fever swamps is even more disturbing. If once you knew better, the indictment is deeper.

The cruel exploitation of the memory of Rich, a Democratic National Committee staffer who was shot dead last summer, was horrifying and clarifying. The Hannity right, without evidence, accused Rich rather than the Russians of leaking damaging DNC emails. In doing so, it has proved its willingness to credit anything — no matter how obviously deceptive or toxic — to defend President Trump and harm his opponents. Even if it means becoming a megaphone for Russian influence.

The basic, human questions are simple. How could conservative media figures not have felt — felt in their hearts and bones — the God-awful ickiness of it? How did the genes of generosity and simple humanity get turned off? Is this insensibility the risk of prolonged exposure to our radioactive political culture? If so, all of us should stand back a moment and tend to the health of our revulsion.

But this failure of decency is also politically symbolic. Who is the politician who legitimized conspiracy thinking at the highest level? Who raised the possibility that Ted Cruz’s father might have been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy? Who hinted that Hillary Clinton might have been involved in the death of Vince Foster, or that unnamed liberals might have killed Justice Antonin Scalia? Who not only questioned President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, but raised the prospect of the murder of a Hawaiian state official in a coverup? 'How amazing,' Trump tweeted in 2013, 'the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s ‘birth certificate’ died in plane crash today. All others lived.'

We have a president charged with maintaining public health who asserts that the vaccination schedule is a dangerous scam of greedy doctors. We have a president charged with representing all Americans who has falsely accused thousands of Muslims of celebrating in the streets following the 9/11 attacks.

In this mental environment, alleging a Rich-related conspiracy was predictable. This is a concrete example of the mainstreaming of destructive craziness. . .

Trump is doing a kind of harm beyond anything Clinton could have done. He is changing the party’s most basic moral and political orientations. He is shaping conservatism in his image and ensuring an eventual defeat more complete, and an eventual exile more prolonged, than Democrats could have dreamed. . .

The conservative mind, in some very visible cases, has become diseased. . .

The future of conservatism now depends on its capacity for revulsion. And it is not at all clear whether this capacity still exists."

Read also the Washington Post, The GOP inherits what Trump has wrought.

Trump's Big CON: I WILL Move the U.S. Embassy From Tel Aviv to Jerusalem (Maybe Later)

"The White House announced — no real surprise to veteran Israel watchers —  that it is delaying its move of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The statement accompanying the waiver (which a president must sign to avoid the move) read in part, 'President Trump made this decision to maximize the chances of successfully negotiating a deal between Israel and the Palestinians, fulfilling his solemn obligation to defend America’s national security interests. But, as he has repeatedly stated his intention to move the embassy, the question is not if that move happens, but only when.'

On one level this is no surprise. Presidential candidates have for decades promised to move the embassy and then thought better of it when elected. Presidents come to believe that the move would somehow prejudice peace talks (of which there are none presently) or inflame Palestinians, perhaps causing an increase in violence. What is different here is that Trump repeatedly, loudly touted to really do this — unlike all those spineless pols who never carried through on their promises. He made a very big deal of it. (Ironically, he might have been able to get away with moving the embassy, say, to West Jerusalem where the Israeli Knesset, prime minister’s office and supreme court are all located.) The degree of posturing and chest-pounding on this topic was extraordinary, and seemingly endeared him to many in the U.S. Orthodox Jewish community who took him at his word. In short, he looks buffoonish in his hasty retreat (which he denies is a retreat, as he denied saying 'Israel' when giving Israeli intelligence to the Russians).

There are two reasons why an expected accommodation to reality becomes a gaffe in the hands of the Trump administration.

First, the Trump team chose to make the announcement of all days on Shavuot, one of four so-called festival holidays in the Jewish calendar . . .

Second, this comes at a time when the world is learning to disregard everything this president does and says — when the United States behaves in unpredictable and hypocritical ways. Trump seems to expect other countries (like his own cultist followers) to ignore that the emperor has no clothes. Promise? What promise? One important U.S. agreement after another — NATO, NAFTA, the Paris agreement — is called into question. Whether or not Trump alters or drops them, he is telling the world that the United States is unreliable, that nothing is ever the final word. (This is pure Trump by the way. In the business world he is infamous for inking deals and then offering to pay the other party 70 cents on the dollar. Such tactics work in New York real estate but not superpower foreign policy.)"

Read the Washigton Post, Except on Russia, Trump never keeps his word.

Trump's Big CON: It's All About the Show, Climate Change Edition

UPDATE III: Trump's decision "was partly driven by selfish political motives. . . Trump seems to realize how much trouble he is in from the metastasizing Russia story. So he sought to appeal to his political base, shrunken though it is, by re-embracing his 'nationalist' side. He said he’d pull out of the Paris agreement and, by God, he did it! Doesn’t that make him look strong?"

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s diplomacy of narcissism only makes him look weak.

UPDATE II:  "There was no need for President Trump to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement to achieve his goal of overturning the Obama administration’s global warming policy. This had already occurred through court rulings and executive orders, which effectively halted higher vehicle fuel economy standards (up to 54.5 miles per gallon) and ended the Clean Power Plan program, which pushed electric utilities to shift away from coal. Moreover, national commitments to slash emissions made in Paris are voluntary. Countries can modify or ignore them. There is no enforcement or penalty for missing targets. . .

There was little, if any, loss of national sovereignty. The Trump administration could have accepted what it liked (presumably, cheap natural gas with lower CO2?emissions) and rejected what it didn’t (say, the tougher vehicle fuel mileage standards). To make the same point slightly differently: Trump’s actions were mostly symbolic and political. They were grandstanding, intended to impress his core supporters."

Read the Washington Post, Trump ignores the messy reality of global warming — and makes it all about him.

UPDATE:  Did you enjoy the show?

The bill comes due in a generation or two.

Of course it was a quintessential Donald show, "frequently relied on dubious facts and unbalanced claims to make his case that the agreement would hurt the U.S. economy. Notably, he only looked at one side of the scale — claiming the agreement left the United States at a competitive disadvantage, harming U.S. industries. But he often ignored the benefits that could come from tackling climate change, including potential green jobs.

Trump also suggested that the United States was treated unfairly under the agreement. But each of the nations signing the agreement agreed to help lower emissions, based on plans they submitted. So the U.S. target was set by the Obama administration.

The plans are not legally binding, but developing and developed countries are treated differently because developed countries, on a per capita basis, often produce more greenhouse gases than developing countries."

Read the Washington Post, Fact-checking President Trump’s claims on the Paris climate change deal.

Read also the Washington Post, Trump's Paris speech needs a serious fact check.

Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump

I will be announcing my decision on Paris Accord, Thursday at 3:00 P.M.  The White House Rose Garden.  MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

6:05 PM - 31 May 2017

Trump's Big CON: The Cult of Trump

UPDATE II: But as a sign of future trouble, smart people don't want to work for the egomaniac.

"BuzzFeed News spoke with 20 Republican communicators and operatives, many of whom have worked on Capitol Hill and in presidential campaigns and some who have declined previous offers to join the Trump administration. Nearly all said they would be unwilling to accept an offer to replace [white House communication director Mike] Dubke.

'Hell no!' said one Republican — one of the most common types of response BuzzFeed News got from operatives. 'That would be career suicide.'

Others brought a mix of dark humor.

'That's like asking someone who just witnessed a horrific bungee jumping accident whether they would like to go next,' one Republican source responded in a text message.

'It would be only a few months on the job before tapping out the 'I want to spend more time with family' email,' another said.

One operative whose spouse works in the Trump administration dissolved into laughter upon being asked if they would want the role.

'Sorry, I’m sorry,' the source said between stifled laughs. 'Oh, you’re being serious? Oh my god, I’m crying of laughter. Why would anyone in their right mind want to be his communications director?'

Read BuzFeed, No One Wants The Big White House Job That Just Opened Up.

UPDATE:  Some have compared the 'breathless praise of Trump to North Korean exaggeration and propaganda promoting the Dear Leader, calling it 'insecure, over-the-top, Great Leader-esque.''

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s aides are starting to rival their boss when it comes to praising him.

"White House spokeswoman Hope Hicks issued a statement about President Trump on Monday that is so disconnected from reality that it reads like a parody — like something “Saturday Night Live” cooked up to mimic propaganda.

Here it is:

    President Trump has a magnetic personality and exudes positive energy, which is infectious to those around him. He has an unparalleled ability to communicate with people, whether he is speaking to a room of three or an arena of 30,000. He has built great relationships throughout his life and treats everyone with respect. He is brilliant with a great sense of humor … and an amazing ability to make people feel special and aspire to be more than even they thought possible.

Hicks composed the statement in response to a Washington Post report on Trump's habit of cutting down staffers with insults. The most jarring thing about her characterization of the president is not the inaccuracy; it's the sudden rejection of Trump's entire political brand."

Read the Washington Post, This White House statement on Trump’s ‘positive energy’ reads like a parody.

Trump's Big CON: He's Not Very Smart or Curious, and Neither is His Rich Son-in-Law

UPDATE II:  "The presidency, we see once again, is beyond Trump’s intellectual and temperamental capabilities. The Post reports, 'President Trump consumes classified intelligence like he does most everything else in life: ravenously and impatiently, eager to ingest glinting nuggets but often indifferent to subtleties.' Sorry, but a man of extraordinary ignorance who is unable to absorb nuances is going to fail as president. . .

In short, he cannot successfully fake being presidential and cannot reconcile himself to the need to listen to those who know more than he does — and are in a position to damage his presidency. As a result, debacles will continue to unfold."

Read the Washington Post, It’s the Trump presidency, not its communications staff, that’s failing.

UPDATE:  "President Trump consumes classified intelligence like he does most everything else in life: ravenously and impatiently, eager to ingest glinting nuggets but often indifferent to subtleties. "

Read the Washington Post, How President Trump consumes — or does not consume — top-secret intelligence.

It isn't a "media problem", or a staffing problem, it is an ignorant rich white guys with with zero political or government experience but confidence utterly unwarranted by actual abilities problem.

Read the Washington Post, Why the Trump administration can’t solve its biggest problems, which notes that:

"[A]lone among White House staffers, Kushner can’t be fired. But even he is not the real problem, and the problem the White House has no way to solve. That problem is, of course, the president himself.

As much as Trump complains internally about his communications staff, they can’t have any credibility when they’re told to defend Trump’s spectacular bumbling and endless waterfall of lies. The people who work on policy are hampered by the ever-shifting messages emanating from the Oval Office on what Trump wants. Just last night he tweeted, 'I suggest that we add more dollars to Healthcare and make it the best anywhere,' at a moment when Republicans are proposing to slash hundreds of billions of dollars from health-care spending.

All the crises, all the chaos, all the scandals begin with Donald Trump. He’s the one who fired Comey, then admitted on camera that he did it because of the Russia investigation. He’s the one who blurts out secrets to other governments, out of either a deep need to impress people or sheer stupidity ('You can’t say what not to say,' one person close to the White House told CNN, 'because that will then be one of the first things he’ll say'). He’s the one who rages internally against leaks, then sends out a series of tweets alleging that leaks are not leaks at all, but are in fact fabricated by news organizations, which keeps his core supporters in a state of denial and antagonizes honest journalists.

So the White House can shake itself up all it wants. How much damage the Russia scandal does will be determined not by whether the Trump administration has a good 'war room,' but by how deep it goes and whether crimes were committed — in other words, by the facts. Passing some meaningful legislation might help, but not if it’s as stunningly unpopular as what has been proposed so far. And as long as Donald Trump keeps being Donald Trump, its problems will never be over."

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

Trump is a Psycho-Narcissistic Con Man (CONt., Part 3)

UPDATE:  "Trump returns to the White House this week just as he left -- lonely, angry and not happy with much of anyone.

The presidency, Donald Trump is discovering, is not an easy or natural fit.

'"He now lives within himself, which is a dangerous place for Donald Trump to be,' says someone who speaks with the President. 'I see him emotionally withdrawing. He's gained weight. He doesn't have anybody whom he trusts.'"

Read CNN, Trump, home all alone.

Poor guy, but he only has himself to blame.

And what does he expect when he rides a golf cart to a photo op instead of walking 700 yards.

Did you notice a pattern?

While on his foreign trip, when everybody he meets tells him what a great guy he is, his ego is sated.

Back home, alone with no one to complement him, he gets angry and turns to Twitter.

Read the SFGate, Trump returns from foreign trip, goes on Twitter rant.

Read also:

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

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

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

Trump's Big CON: He's Not Lying Because It is a Performance

UPDATE III:  "Trump, unlike most politicians and, frankly, most people, will nonchalantly argue two logically inconsistent points at the same time."

Read the Washington Post, The fake news is coming from inside the White House, which compares Trump's criticism of leaks and his frequent use of anonymous sources to praise himself and denounce critics, while in office and for many decades before.

UPDATE II:  "[I]t has become obvious that Trump’s words about protecting programs like Medicaid were not 'positions' in the sense of being a stance he took based on something he believed. They were passing impulses, probably based on his reading of whoever was in the room with him at a particular moment. Once they escaped his mouth and faded into the ether, they exercised no more hold on him than a promise to release his tax returns or make Mexico pay for a border wall. If they were things Trump genuinely believed in, the White House staffers who wrote his budget would know they’d have to take them into account. But they didn’t."

Read the Washington Post, Sorry, suckers: Trump is perfectly happy to help Paul Ryan shred the safety net. 

UPDATE: Trump loved criticizing others for being tired, bowing to foreign leaders, not wearing headscarves in Saudi Arabia, refusing to say the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism”, etc.

"The issue here is that Trump scored political points on each of these topics. Now he has shifted in dramatic ways without even nodding to the changes. Meanwhile, many of his supporters who expressed outrage when Obama was president are silent."

Read the Washington Post, Trump hypocrisy continues at home and abroad.

Better than anything, this explains Trump:

"For most of his life, Donald Trump has found words to be his friends. He has used them to build his business, dramatize his achievements and embellish his accomplishments. As important, he has used them to explain away his missteps and to paper over his problems. . .

The Post’s reporters Glenn Kessler and Michelle Ye Hee Lee describe Trump as 'the most fact-challenged politician' they have 'ever encountered.' They pointed out that, after having received a whopping 59 'Four Pinocchio' ratings during the campaign, Trump in his first 100 days made 492 'false or misleading claims,' at an average of 4.9 a day. These fact checkers clarified that 'those numbers obscure the fact that the pace and volume of the president’s misstatements means that we cannot possibly keep up.' By their count, there were only 10 days in the first 100 days in which Trump did not make a false or misleading claim. . .

Trump’s approach has never been to apologize because it wouldn’t make sense to him. In his view, he wasn’t fibbing. As his sometime rival and now friend Steve Wynn, a casino tycoon, put it, Trump’s statements on virtually everything 'have no relation to truth or fact.' That’s not really how Trump thinks of words. For him, words are performance art. It’s what sounds right in the moment and gets him through the crisis. So when describing his economic policy to the Economist, he explained that he had just invented the term 'prime the pump' a few days earlier. Never mind that the phrase was coined a century ago, has been used countless times since and was in fact used by Trump repeatedly in the past year. At that moment, it seemed the right thing to say." [Emphasis added.]

Read the Washington Post, The president who cried wolf.

Trump's Big CON: A Déjà Vu Nixon Presidency (Cont.)

Read the Washington Post, Reporting from 1974 confirms: Trump and Nixon are uncannily similar, which states that “to look back at news coverage in the months before Nixon’s resignation is to find remarkable echoes. Americans in 1974 focused on the same personality traits, debated many of the same issues, and experienced the same sense of news overload and impending national nervous breakdown that seem so familiar today.’

The article notes that that Nixon and Trump are both:

Stingy and using the presidency for personal and family profit

"[D]escribed as their own worst enemies, unable to ignore a slight or let go of a grudge. Nixon was privately obsessed with revenge, ‘a battle to be fought and won, no quarter given,’ observed Post writer William Greider. Likewise, they shared a tendency to choose staffers more on the basis of loyalty than expertise, and observers debated whether working for the president would degrade those associated with him or was justified by the need to keep capable people serving their country. . .

[E]ngaged in a strange and long-standing love-hate relationship with the media — even as they sought to bypass it to speak directly to the people. . . 'For the loyalists … slanted newspapers and television commentators are out to destroy the President.'"

Have as their own worst enemy something inside themselves

From the same party whose members are grappling "with the idea that they should be loyal, that 'our fortunes are as one'"

"[A]cted with such impunity seemed like a symptom of something gone terribly wrong. As Times columnist Anthony Lewis lamented of the Nixon White House and its impact on the country, 'There is no respect for truth, and the community loses the belief that knits it together. … Americans may hesitate at what seems to some regicide, but they understand that their sickness comes from the king.'"

"[M]anaged to entangle us in another round of the same traumatic psychodrama."

Read also Trump's Big CON: A Déjà Vu Nixon Presidency.

Trump's Big CON: Ha Ha Ha, The Scams on You

UPDATE VI:  "The Trump economic team has not engaged in serious analysis or been in dialogue with those who are capable of it so they have had nothing to say in defense of their forecast except extravagant claims for their policies. Taking their supply-side perspective, do they really believe that through tax cuts and deregulation they are going to accomplish more than Ronald Reagan, who after all reduced the top tax rate from 70 to 28 percent? Between 1981 and 1988, GDP per adult grew by an average of 2.5 percent, distinctly slower than what they are forecasting. Even this figure reflects a substantial cyclical tail wind from the decline in unemployment from 7.6 percent to 5.5 percent (which from Okun’s law implies adding about half a percent to GDP growth) — something unavailable in the present context. . .

A business trying to sell stock on the basis of a document half as hype-filled as the Trump budget would be a joke. No reputable investment bank would underwrite their offering. A great mystery here is why the experienced investment bankers in senior positions in the Trump administration hold the budget of the United States to so much lower standards of integrity than they applied in their earlier lives."

Read the Washington Post, What history tells us about Trump’s budget fantasy. 

UPDATE V:  There is a unifying theme in Trump’s health care proposals and budget.  "And that theme is contempt — Donald Trump’s contempt for the voters who put him in office.

You may recall Trump’s remark during the campaign that 'I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.' Well, he hasn’t done that, at least so far. He is, however, betting that he can break every promise he made to the working-class voters who put him over the top, and still keep their support. Can he win that bet?

When it comes to phony budget math — remember his claims that he would pay off the national debt? — he probably can. We’re not talking about anything subtle here; we’re talking about a budget that promises to 'abolish the death tax,' then counts $330 billion in estate tax receipts in its rosy forecast. But even I don’t expect to see this kind of fraud get much political traction.

The bigger question is whether someone who ran as a populist, who promised not to cut Social Security or Medicaid, who assured voters that everyone would have health insurance, can keep his working-class support while pursuing an agenda so anti-populist it takes your breath away.

To make this concrete, let’s talk about West Virginia, which went Trump by more than 40 percentage points, topped only by Wyoming. What did West Virginians think they were voting for?

They are, after all, residents of a poor state that benefits immensely from federal programs: 29 percent of the population is on Medicaid, almost 19 percent on food stamps. The expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare is the main reason the percentage of West Virginians without health insurance has halved since 2013.

Beyond that, more than 4 percent of the population, the highest share in the nation, receives Social Security disability payments, partly because of the legacy of unhealthy working conditions, partly because a high fraction of the population consists of people who suffer from chronic diseases, like diabetics — whom Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s budget director, thinks we shouldn’t take care of because it’s their own fault for eating poorly.

And just to be clear, we’re talking about white people here: At 93 percent white, West Virginia is one of the most minority- and immigrant-free states in America.

So what did the state’s residents think they were voting for? Partly, presumably, they supported Trump because he promised — falsely, of course — that he could bring back the well-paying coal-mining jobs of yore.

But they also believed that he was a different kind of Republican. Maybe he would take benefits away from Those People, but he would protect the programs white working-class voters, in West Virginia and elsewhere, depend on.

What they got instead was the mother of all sucker punches. . .

So many of the people who voted for Donald Trump were the victims of an epic scam by a man who has built his life around scamming. In the case of West Virginians, this scam could end up pretty much destroying their state."

Read The New York Times, It’s All About Trump’s Contempt.

Read also the Washington Post, The White House kept contradicting itself this week on many of Trump’s biggest promises.

UPDATE IV:  "President Trump’s budget demonstrates the costs of accepting lies as a normal currency in politics, broken promises as a customary way of doing business, false claims of being 'populist' as the equivalent of the real thing and sloppiness as what we should expect from government. . .

We demean ourselves if we cynically normalize the reality that every Trump promise is meaningless claptrap aimed at closing a deal — and that the vows will be forgotten even before the ink on the agreement is dry. Many who did business with Trump learned the hard way not to trust anything he said. His supporters are being forced to learn the same dreary wisdom.

Trump lies so often that journalists tied themselves up in an extended discussion of when it was appropriate to use 'lie' and when it was better to deploy such euphemisms as 'misstatement' and 'fabrication.' We should stick to the short and simple word. Allowing Trump any slack only encourages more lying.

Although fibbing with numbers is an old trick, the etiquette of budget discussions leans toward references to 'rosy scenarios' and the like. But how can you explain a budget that counts $2 trillion in claimed economic growth twice? It’s used once to 'pay for' massive tax cuts for the wealthy, and another time to paint Trump’s budget as reaching balance in a decade.

This can’t just be careless math.

Companies that make comparable errors in their prospectuses for public offerings can face legal action. No wonder former Obama administration economic adviser Seth Hanlon called this plan 'the Bernie Madoff Budget.'

Another sign of fiscal fraud: the budget’s blithe assumption that we will hit 3 percent annual growth in gross domestic product over an extended period. That would be nice. But no respectable economic forecaster thinks this is credible. Trump is asking us to bank our country’s fiscal future on his signature catchphrase, 'Believe me.' We should know by now that we can’t.'

Martin Wolf, the Financial Times columnist, captured Trump’s ideology with precision when he called it 'pluto-populism.' It involves 'policies that benefit plutocrats, justified by populist rhetoric.'"

Read the Washington Post, The Trump scandal that has nothing to do with Russia. 

UPDATE III: A "bedrock of the Trump budget: an economic growth assumption of 3 percent . . . is sharply more optimistic than those projected in recent Obama administration budgets and by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. . .

[and the budget assumes] 'not only will we not have a recession — though we’re in the third-longest economic expansion in history — but it’s going to keep going for another 214 months.'"

Read the Washington Post, A Freedom Caucus Republican says the foundation of the Trump budget is ‘a lie’.

UPDATE II:  "Between the health-care plan it supported, its tax-reform outline and its budget, the Trump administration has demonstrated an unusual degree of intellectual dishonesty. Most administrations take liberties with economic projections and re-interpretations of campaign promises, but it is rare to see a team of advisers so blatantly and ineptly trying to conceal what they are up to. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s recent testimony in front of the Senate Banking Committee (in which he insisted that the administration was for a '21st-century Dodd-Frank' but not for breaking up banks — something akin to adopting a healthy diet but not giving up chocolate sundaes at every meal) and an interview with CNBC reveal the five major head fakes the Trump administration is trying to pull off.

First, the Trump administration refuses to acknowledge that it has reneged on its vow not to touch entitlements . .

Second, the Trump administration will not admit it is engaged in a massive giveaway to the rich. . .
Third, the Trump administration has no plausible explanation for why its policies won’t lead to a mammoth increase in the debt. . .

Fourth, the Trump administration won’t own up to the anti-growth aspect of its immigration stance. . .

Fifth, the Trump administration won’t present a budget that has a ghost of a chance of passing.

As we have pointed out, this incorporates draconian cuts that already are proposed in the “skinny” budget. That didn’t fly, nor will anything resembling this."

Read the Washington Post, The Trump team’s five major shams. 

UPDATE:  "President Trump's budget only pretends to balance itself in 10 years' time by assuming that the economy will grow at a 3 percent pace between now and then, which is somewhere between wildly optimistic and wildly implausible.

It also might be the most realistic part of Trump's budget.

Now, it was always pretty obvious that Trump was relying on rosy economic projections, but the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has figured out by just how much. It turns out that even if the economy started partying like it's 1999, that'd only be good enough to get growth back up to 2.9 percent today. Trump's budget promises are akin to when he promised to make "every dream you ever dreamed come true." And if neither of those propositions seem likely — if you don't think Trump can make things better than they were at the height of the tech bubble — well, then you clearly haven't taken enough classes at Trump University. . .

[In addition,] Trump appears to be double-counting these phony savings. . . The administration, of course, has belatedly tried to say this isn't what they're doing, but budget tables don't lie. It is what they're doing. So if you add it all up, Trump's budget is built on $5 trillion of fairy dust.

But — stop me if you've heard this before — it's actually worse than that. . .

You'd think that fake savings this big would just be a cover for the fact that there weren't any real ones, but you'd be wrong. Trump wants to turn the safety net into a few strands of string. Over the next decade, his budget would cut Medicaid by 47 percent, food stamps by 25 percent, and welfare by 13 percent. It's a reverse Robin Hood on a scale unseen anywhere other than an Ayn Rand novel. And it might be the least realistic part of Trump's budget. After all, even congressional Republicans think it's too 'draconian.'

Trump's budget is an incredible political document, a self-parodic exercise in hostility to arithmetic, economics and everyone who has the misfortune of being poor or sick. You can tell he only hires the best people."

Read the Washington Post, Donald Trump’s $10 trillion magic asterisk. 

"There are numerous Trump lies being forced out into the open right now. Trump claimed he would not touch Medicaid and simultaneously that he’d repeal Obamacare and replace it with something better for all. It was a lie for Trump to claim he wouldn’t touch Medicaid; it was a lie to suggest preserving Medicaid and repealing Obamacare were compatible; it was a lie to claim that his repeal and replace plan would result in coverage for everybody. If anything, the White House’s justifications only throw the scale and audacity of these intertwined scams, lies, and betrayals into even sharper relief.

The scam may end up running even deeper than this. One might argue Trump promised his voters something better than safety net protections: Good jobs with benefits. Indeed, as Catherine Rampell reports, the White House is defending its cuts by arguing that the true measure of success is 'the number of people we get off of those programs.' This is compatible with Trumpism’s promise to restore an old economic order via a revival of manufacturing and coal. But what if those jobs don’t ever materialize?"

Read the Washington Post, The enormity of Trump’s scam is coming into view., which asks: "Are you tired of all the winning yet?"

Trump's Big CON: Our Boy President

UPDATE:  "For months now, Trump’s vice president, secretary of state, defense secretary and national security adviser have bent over backward trying to confirm our commitment to NATO. In just one appearance, Trump undid months of work and handed Russia’s Vladimir Putin a symbolic victory. . .


Thomas Donnelly of the American Enterprise Institute argues, 'The failure to reconfirm Article V of the NATO charter — a failure to meet an explicit expectation — becomes the headline of the whole trip, especially in the context of the browbeating he administered in the speech. This trip, above all, was meant to reassure allies around the world that, after [former president Barack] Obama, the United States would again be a reliable partner.' He adds, 'Trump is not ‘leading from behind’ but kicking our allies in the [rear end].' . .

Trump lacks impulse control to such an extent that whatever flashes through his brain (Pay up, NATO! I got the intel from Israel!) comes out of his mouth. Indeed, the New York Times has reported that aides are careful in briefing not to tell him something he shouldn’t say; that apparently only increases the chances he will blurt it out. This is the behavior of a 7-year-old, not the leader of the free world.

The entire purpose of Trump’s trip was to show leadership and solidarity with allies. In flubbing his best opportunity to do so with our closest allies in our most important alliance, he reminded them, the American people and our adversaries that he is not ready for prime time."

Read the Washington Post, No, Trump can’t get through a trip without creating chaos.

One was "the boy-King of Westeros, while the other is the 45th President of the United States.

But according to Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin, Joffrey Baratheon and Donald Trump are one-and-the-same.

'I think Joffrey is now the king in America,' the multi-millionaire author said during an interview with Esquire magazine.

'And he's grown up just as petulant and irrational as he was when he was thirteen in the books', Martin added. . .

In the same interview Kit Harrington, the actor behind Jon Snow, also couldn't resist taking a dig a Trump.

He told the magazine: 'Mr. Donald Trump - I wouldn't call him President, I'll call him Mister. I think this man at the head of your country is a con artist.'"

Read the Daily Mail, Game of Thrones creator likens Trump to arch-villain Joffrey and says President is 'petulant and irrational'.

Trump's Big CON: Make Saudi Arabia (Which Supports Terrorism) Great Again

Read the Washington Post, How Saudi Arabia played Donald Trump, which stated in part:
 

"For five decades, Saudi Arabia has spread its narrow, puritanical and intolerant version of Islam — originally practiced almost nowhere else — across the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden was Saudi, as were 15 of the 19?9/11 terrorists. . .

[I]n recent years the Saudi government, along with Qatar, has been 'providing clandestine financial and logistic support to [the Islamic State] and other radical Sunni groups in the region.' Saudi nationals make up the second-largest group of foreign fighters in the Islamic State and, by some accounts, the largest in the terrorist group’s Iraqi operations. The kingdom is in a tacit alliance with al-Qaeda in Yemen.

The Islamic State draws its beliefs from Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi version of Islam. . . .

[And] Saudi money is now transforming European Islam. . .

In Kosovo, the New York Times’ Carlotta Gall describes the process by which a 500-year-old tradition of moderate Islam is being destroyed. . .

Trump’s speech on Islam was nuanced and showed empathy for the Muslim victims of jihadist terrorism (who make up as much as 95 percent of the total, by one estimate). He seemed to zero in on the problem when he said, 'No discussion of stamping out this threat would be complete without mentioning the government that gives terrorists .?.?. safe harbor, financial backing and the social standing needed for recruitment.'

But Trump was talking not of his host, Saudi Arabia, but rather of Iran. Now, to be clear, Iran is a destabilizing force in the Middle East and supports some very bad actors. But it is wildly inaccurate to describe it as the source of jihadist terror. According to an analysis of the Global Terrorism Database by Leif Wenar of King’s College London, more than 94 percent of deaths caused by Islamic terrorism since 2001 were perpetrated by the Islamic State, al-Qaeda and other Sunni jihadists. Iran is fighting those groups, not fueling them. Almost every terrorist attack in the West has had some connection to Saudi Arabia. Virtually none has been linked to Iran.

Trump has adopted the Saudi line on terrorism, which deflects any blame from the kingdom and redirects it toward Iran. The Saudis showered Trump’s inexperienced negotiators with attention, arms deals and donations to a World Bank fund that Ivanka Trump is championing. (Candidate Trump wrote in a Facebook post in 2016, 'Saudi Arabia and many of the countries that gave vast amounts of money to the Clinton Foundation want women as slaves and to kill gays. Hillary must return all money from such countries!') In short, the Saudis played Trump."