Trump's Big CON: The Truth Doesn't Matter, Just Feel Good

Says Trump: "I don’t stand by anything. I just– you can take it the way you want."

Read the Washington Post, ‘I don’t stand by anything’: Trump withers under heat from CBS News’s John Dickerson.

Because it's all about making his supporters feel good.

"Trump fans think he is winning because he yells at the press, vilifies cities run by Democrats, denies climate change and demonizes immigrants. He talks and acts like they wish they could — demeaning women, stereotyping minorities, telling off experts. (According to polling, Trump’s voters really are more amenable to racial stereotypes than non-Trump voters.) It does not matter to Trump fans if the executive orders are struck down or are mere window dressing (authorizing an agency to study something it already has the power to study). He makes them feel as if they’re winning, as if they are now more important than the experts with the facts and the courts with the laws on their side. Trump fans, the quintessential Fox News viewers, revel in the know-nothingism of a hero who reflects their anger, grievances, frustration and, yes, prejudice. . .

Saying he’s the most successful president in the first 100 days ever may sound nuts to people who look at what he’s done; it makes perfect sense to the people whom Trump makes feel better. At some point, one wonders when it will dawn on Trump’s fans that they’ve been bamboozled."

Read  the Washington Post, Trump suspends disbelief — on most everything. 

Trump's Big CON: Bad News: He Has No Values or Beliefs, Good News: He Is No Conservative

UPDATE IV: I quote at length this editorial that explains why The Donald has no values or beliefs, and is no conservative:

"After 100 days we can see clearly the many false assumptions baked into that rationale [Paul Ryan had when he endorsed then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump].

First, I don’t know what kind of policy discussion he had, but we’ve seen Trump is entirely incapable of grasping and discussing particulars. Trump was either humoring Ryan ('Yes, Paul, that’s exactly the kind of thing we would do!') or Ryan was kidding himself that Trump, lacking any real policy views, would sign whatever the Congress passed. He should have listened more critically and figured out that Trump doesn’t stand by anything and would be entirely incapable of advocating for policies Ryan wanted. In fact, Trump has never bought into Ryan’s small government, restraint-of-executive party brand of conservatism. And worse, Trump’s ineptitude and lack of self-discipline has widened the divide within the House GOP and paralyzed members from fear that Trump would let them twist in the wind over an controversial vote.

Second, in all likelihood Ryan never expected Trump to win. . .

Third, entirely absent from Ryan’s endorsement and from his rationale for supporting Trump was any recognition that character, intellect and temperament are the predicate for any acceptable, let alone successful, president. 'Sure he’s erratic, but he’ll stick with our position on health care' is the sort of unsound thinking that leads one to endorse someone manifestly unfit to govern. If he is erratic, Mr. Speaker, he’s going to undermine your efforts on health care. And he did.

Ignoring Trump’s fondness for Vladimir Putin, Ryan bought into a man whose affection for strongmen is so contrary to American values and interest that he makes President Barack Obama seem Reaganesque. Instead of Clinton, we have a commander in chief who cheers for Marine Le Pen, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Xi Jinping and Rodrigo Duterte — and compliments Kim Jong Un. We have a president who has gotten into fights with Canada, Mexico and Australia — and has shaken European leaders to their core. Ryan should have paid attention to Trump’s inferior judgment, knowledge and capacity to learn.

How did things work out for Ryan? He has signed onto a spending bill that Clinton would have liked (Planned Parenthood funding, no wall, domestic spending restored, a little bit — but not enough — defense spending). He has not gotten health-care reform. His chances of obtaining tax reform are slim. . .

By ignoring fundamental questions of competency and character, Ryan vouched for a man who echoed Russian agitprop and encouraged Russian cyber-mischief during the campaign and who continues to deny the existence of mounds of evidence proving Russian efforts to meddle with our election. Ryan enabled an administration that has a bevy of ties to Russian officials, originally hired as national security adviser a man acting as an agent for foreign governments and still employs an aide (Sebastian Gorka) with ties to Hungarian fascists. Surely Clinton, for all her faults, wouldn’t have done all that.

As for the cause of clean government, Ryan supported Trump with no assurance he wouldn’t defy the Constitution by receiving foreign monies, maintain ownership in companies creating massive conflicts of interest, hire relatives who have their own conflicts and refuse to release his taxes ever. Ryan thought Clinton would bring corruption to the White House?"

Read the Washington Post, How did Ryan’s Faustian bargain with Trump work out?

UPDATE III:  "Nobody ever said that Donald Trump was a man of firm principle. Indeed, apart from a couple of rancid ideas about race and foreigners, one struggles to find anything Trump has consistently believed over the course of his life when it comes to political issues.

But recently Trump has racked up an unusual number of flip-flops, with some interesting implications for the rest of his presidency. To begin, let’s look at what he has changed his mind about just in the last few days:

    He now thinks NATO is no longer obsolete
    He won’t label China a currency manipulator
    He now thinks the Export-Import bank should stay
    He now likes Janet Yellen and may renominate her as Fed chair
    The federal hiring freeze he ordered has now been lifted

You can look at each of these reversals and come up with an ideological interpretation. For instance, on the economic ones, you might say they represent the ascendance of the Wall Street wing of Trump’s advisers.

But what they have more in common is the maintenance of the status quo.

Here’s how it works. Trump the candidate makes all kinds of promises about radical change, blowing up the system, sweeping into Washington and remaking it from top to bottom. Many of the things he says are substantively ridiculous and born of ignorance, but none of his aides bother to tell him. Because who really cared back then? He wasn’t going to sit down for extended policy instruction, and the campaign seemed to be working pretty well anyway.

But now he’s president, and instead of just making statements he’s making policy. So when one of these issues comes up, there’s a good chance someone will say, 'Well actually sir, that could be a really bad idea.' They’ll explain why, and since Trump doesn’t really care about the substance of any of it, he’ll change his position.

In many cases, the flip-flop is a simple matter of Trump learning about something he never understood. "

Read the Washington Post, What’s really behind Donald Trump’s flip-flops. 

UPDATE II:  There is a war in the White House between "the alt-right, the white nationalist movement that [Stephen] Bannon appealed to as head of Breitbart News" and Trump's family who realize this is a deadend.

"[T]here is a gaping leadership void in the West Wing, and it’s caused by Trump’s complete lack of a clear vision or agenda. . .

Trump’s agenda, of course, was encapsulated by his campaign slogan, 'Make America Great Again.' Crucially, however, the White House is being run by people who can’t seem to agree on what 'making America great' entails. . .

Remember: It was under Bannon’s guidance as chief executive of his campaign that Trump gave an October 2016 campaign speech, claiming that Hillary Clinton 'meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special-interest friends and her donors.' His closing campaign ad evoked similar anti-Semitic imagery, showing philanthropist George Soros, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen and Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein, who are all Jewish, complete with narration about 'those who control the levers of power in Washington,' 'global special interests' and 'a global power structure.'

It was under Bannon’s tutelage that Trump believed these moves would win him the White House — and perhaps they did help him get there by appealing to at least some of Trump’s voters.

But now the 'globalists' are crucial members of Team Trump, and they are inside the White House, in the form of Kushner, Ivanka Trump, chief economic adviser Gary Cohn and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, both former Goldman Sachs executives. To Bannon’s base, the 'globalists' are the enemy: They haven’t put America’s economy or America’s interests first — so it’s hard to see how Trump will ever get these two camps to unite behind a cogent agenda, much less get them to function as a White House staff.

The problem is that Trump himself is a man without ideas or an ideology. His political instincts are more frequently driven by the likes of Bannon, and it’s obvious that Trump will be reluctant to cast Bannon aside. Yet at the same time, Trump is plainly loyal to his family. There’s no clear way for Trump to reconcile this, however, precisely because Trump does not have any clear policy agenda of his own.

Put it this way: Imagine that Camp Bannon and Camp Kushner were to somehow truly reconcile with one another. What exactly is the agenda we are supposed to believe this pair is going to implement together?

Read the Washington Post, The real reason for the White House infighting: Trump has no clear vision or agenda.

UPDATE:  "During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump summed up his approach to foreign policy this way: 'We must as a nation be more unpredictable.'

But now that he is commander in chief, anxious allies say that unpredictability might be better described as incoherence — a dangerous tendency at a moment of high tension with Russia and Syria, and with U.S. warships heading toward the Korean Peninsula.

In recent weeks, the president has held meetings with his counterparts from other countries. But in some cases, those sessions have only heightened doubts that Trump has a clear sense of what direction he intends to take U.S. foreign policy. . .

Ambiguity has always had a place in diplomacy, of course. But Trump adds to that a freestyle approach to international relations. He has a disregard for norms and protocol, an impulsive nature and a tendency toward making contradictory statements.

Compounding the chaos is the fact that those who claim to speak for Trump — Cabinet officials and top White House advisers — also have offered conflicting pronouncements on basic questions about the direction of U.S. policy. . .

In interviews over the past few weeks with a half-dozen foreign ambassadors based in Washington, most complained — diplomatically, of course — that thin lines of communication have made it difficult for them to explain U.S. intentions to officials in their home capitals. That is creating strain on traditionally solid alliances, they said.

'Nobody can tell us on Russia what the American policy is, on Syria what the American policy is, on China what the American policy is,' one ambassador said. 'I’m not sure there is a policy. They will listen to me and tell me, 'We will get back to you when there is a policy.'?' . .

'I don’t know what will happen,' one said. 'You had a president who took three months to make a decision, and now you have one who takes three seconds. It’s very worrying.' . .

While some diplomats and leaders puzzle over how to decode an opaque and often contradictory presidency, they have figured out one language to which Trump responds: flattery.

In his joint appearance with Trump, Jordan’s King Abdullah II lathered the president with praise for a 'holistic approach' to the Middle East, which he said is 'a move in the right direction.'

It was their second meeting since Trump’s election, and Trump returned the compliments, calling Abdullah a 'warrior.' Their joint news conference was the first of Trump’s presidency to be held in the Rose Garden. . .

Several added that they have tried to be creative in their approaches to the Trump administration, increasingly going outside the normal channels. Some said they have tried to leverage friendships with people in business who have ties to Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner or daughter Ivanka Trump to get access to those key members of Trump’s inner circle. . .

'The question is: Will the close allies maintain that same natural cooperation that we have had for 70 years?' one ambassador said. 'The leaders of those allies want to maintain a relationship of trust with the traditional leader of the Western world. But today we have the impression that the chair of the leader of the Western world is a little bit empty. We are reaching out to test those relationships, but we have no answer.'

Said another: 'It’s quite distressing that the Americans are so unpredictable. Unpredictability is the worst.'"

Read the Washington Post, Trump promised an ‘unpredictable’ foreign policy. To allies, it looks incoherent.

The Republi-CONs have been conned.

Whether it is Syria or health care, "inconsistency is the most consistent theme of Trump’s young presidency. During the campaign, he opposed entitlement reform, yet his health-care bill contained the most fundamental entitlement reform — moving federal Medicaid spending from an open-ended match for state spending to a capped amount per person — that Congress has recently considered. He campaigned as a tribune for the working class, yet his economic approach seems heavily tilted toward the interests of the wealthy.

This has been attacked as lying. It also indicates a complete unfamiliarity with the issues and debates at the heart of American politics. He never encountered these matters during previous government service (which he did none of). He was not forced to explain his views during primary or general election debates (a few lines from the stump speech more than sufficed). Trump was not hiding an inner sophistication. His ignorance was presented as part of an anti-establishment package — as contempt for the quibbles of smaller men.

In this context, the current palace intrigue between Bannon and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, actually matters. This is not the normal circumstance in which a president with developed policy views is influenced at the margins by a diverse group of advisers. What we are seeing is a president without settled or tested policy convictions, influenced by advisers with sharp knives and fundamentally different views of the world. On Breitbart this is described as a conflict between 'national populists' and 'liberal NYC Democrats.' It is the high-stakes struggle to provide the soul for a soulless presidency.

This inbuilt discord has turned normal West Wing tension into a red-carpeted cage fight. . .

And it should concern conservatives that neither side in the main White House conflict — ethno-nationalists or moderates related to the president — is actually conservative. It would be better for the Republican Party (and for the world) if the family were to win this contest, as it almost certainly will.

That change would make the administration marginally more humane. But it would not, for the most part, be a victory for conservative policy ideas."

Read the Washington Post, The struggle to give a soul to a soulless presidency.

Trump's Big CON: "You'd Better Start Thinking Happy Thoughts"

"Fans of old TV series may remember a classic 'Twilight Zone' episode titled 'It’s a Good Life.' It featured a small town terrorized by a 6-year-old who for some reason had monstrous superpowers, coupled with complete emotional immaturity. Everyone lived in constant fear, made worse by the need to pretend that everything was fine. After all, any hint of discontent could bring terrible retribution.

And now you know what it must be like working in the Trump administration. Actually, it feels a bit like that just living in Trump’s America.

What set me off on this chain of association? The answer may surprise you; it was the tax 'plan' the administration released on Wednesday.

The reason I use scare quotes here is that the single-page document the White House circulated this week bore no resemblance to what people normally mean when they talk about a tax plan. . .

It’s clear the White House is proposing huge tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy, with the breaks especially big for people who can bypass regular personal taxes by channeling their income into tax-privileged businesses — people, for example, named Donald Trump. So Trump plans to blow up the deficit bigly, largely to his own personal benefit; but that’s about all we know.

So why would the White House release such an embarrassing document? Why would the Treasury Department go along with this clown show?

Unfortunately, we know the answer. Every report from inside the White House conveys the impression that Trump is like a temperamental child, bored by details and easily frustrated when things don’t go his way; being an effective staffer seems to involve finding ways to make him feel good and take his mind off news that he feels makes him look bad.

If he says he wants something, no matter how ridiculous, you say, 'Yes, Mr. President!'; at most, you try to minimize the damage.

Right now, by all accounts, the child-man in chief is in a snit over the prospect of news stories that review his first 100 days and conclude that he hasn’t achieved much if anything (because he hasn’t). So last week he announced the imminent release of something he could call a tax plan."

According to The Times, this left Treasury staff — who were nowhere near having a plan ready to go — 'speechless.' But nobody dared tell him it couldn’t be done. Instead, they released … something, with nobody sure what it means.

And the absence of a real tax plan isn’t the only thing the inner circle apparently doesn’t dare tell him. . .

No, what we’re looking at here isn’t policy; it’s pieces of paper whose goal is to soothe the big man’s temper tantrums. Unfortunately, we may all pay the price of his therapy." {Link added.]

Read The New York Times, Living in the Trump Zone.

Trump's Big CON: 'I'm a Great Negotiator', Budget Edition

"[H]ere are the eight most notable areas Trump caved in his first big spending negotiation: . .

1. [E]xplicit restrictions to block the border wall.

2. Non-defense domestic spending will go up . .

3. Barack Obama’s cancer moonshot is generously funded. . .

4. The final deal trims [the EPA] budget by just 1 percent, with no staff cuts. As part of a compromise, the EPA gets $80 million less than last year, but the budget is $8 billion.

5. He didn’t defund Planned Parenthood. . .

6. The president got less than half as much for the military as he said was necessary. . .

7. Democrats say they forced Republicans to withdraw more than 160 riders. These unrelated policy measures, which each could have been a poison pill . . .

8. [T]he White House already agreed last week to continue paying Obamacare subsidies . . .

Soon after the deal was reached last night, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi quickly put out celebratory statements. But McConnell and Paul Ryan did not. . .

The bigger picture: 'Trump is a nightmare negotiating partner,' writes USA Today commentary editor Jill Lawrence, who wrote a book called 'The Art of the Political Deal.' 'The only constants with Trump are unpredictability and expediency. These are not, suffice it to say, the traditional cornerstones of getting to yes in politics.'"

Read the Washington Post, Eight ways Trump got rolled in his first budget negotiation.

Trump's Big CON: 100 Days, 499 False or Misleading Claims

UPDATE:  "President Trump remains an angry, irrational figure, someone who still must stir up hatred — against the press, against immigrants, against Democrats — to enliven his base. . .

It’s not normal to rack up a record 488 falsehoods in the first 100 days in office and to repeat the same falsehoods over and over again. It’s not normal for a president to continue to question a foreign power’s responsibility for its well-documented, comprehensive effort to sway our elections. Yes, he is still doing that despite what all his national security advisers tell him.

It’s not normal for the public to doubt whether Trump even knows what is in his own proposals. He insists Trumpcare protects preexisting conditions. He claims his taxes would go up under his plan, which lowers his rate to 15 percent (he’s a Svengali of pass-through companies) and abolishes the alternative minimum tax. It’s not normal for a president to be surprised that health care is complicated or being president isn’t easy.

It’s not normal for a U.S. president to praise and congratulate dictatorial leaders, as he does with President Xi Jinping of China ('a very good man') and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. (Good men do not lock up political dissidents.) Normal presidents do not go out of their way to cheer the leader of the National Front, a party that is still infested with anti-Semites and whose leader denied the role of France in the murder of French Jews during WWII. It’s not normal to invite for a White House visit a human-rights abuser and anti-American demagogue who has presided over thousands of extrajudicial killings in the Philippines. (Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley at her confirmation hearing correctly described extrajudicial killings under Rodrigo Duterte as a gross abuse of human rights.)

And yet Republicans in Congress and in the commentariat ignore, minimize or don’t care about all that. Great job! Give him an A! Hey, there’s Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, you know! Whatever standards — Constitutional, personal, ideological — Republicans once upheld have been thrown overboard. They cannot bring themselves to enforce the emoluments clause or compel Trump to disclose his taxes or crack down on the blatant conflicts of interest throughout his administration.

During the first 100 days the Republic has survived, but the GOP, permanently we think, has been morally compromised and intellectually corrupted, just as many of us warned. 'Everything Trump touches dies,' GOP consultant Rick Wilson is fond of saying. Trump’s victims now include a respectable Republican Party."

Read the Washington Post, This is not a normal president.

"[H]ere are the numbers for the president’s first 100 days.

    488: The number of false or misleading claims made by the president. That’s an average of 4.9 claims a day.

    10: Number of days without a single false claim. (On six of those days, the president golfed at a Trump property.)

    4: Number of days with 20 or more false claims. (Feb. 16, Feb. 28, March 20 and April 21.) He made 19 false claims on April 29, his 100th day, though we did not include his interview with 'Face the Nation,' since that aired April 30."

Read the Washington Post, President Trump’s first 100 days: The fact check tally.

Read also Trump's Big CON: The Score Card of False or Misleading Claims & Promises Kept and Trump's Big CON: When Does Trump Tell the Truth?

[Hint: "Trump tells the truth only when he cannot think of a ___."

Hint #2: It's a three letter word that begins with L.] 

Trump's Big CON: He Finally Realizes He's Not Presidental Material

UPDATE II:  And The Donald is right, he's not really presidential material. Being president is not a contrived so-called reality show where it's all about winning, which is his only obsession.

But he just doesn't get it.

"More than five months after his victory and two days shy of the 100-day mark of his presidency, the election is still on Trump's mind. Midway through a discussion about Chinese President Xi Jinping, the president paused to hand out copies of what he said were the latest figures from the 2016 electoral map.

'Here, you can take that, that's the final map of the numbers,' the Republican president said from his desk in the Oval Office, handing out maps of the United States with areas he won marked in red. 'It’s pretty good, right? The red is obviously us.'

He had copies for each of the three Reuters reporters in the room."

Read Reuters, Exclusive: Trump says he thought being president would be easier than his old life.

As noted before, Trump is a psycho-narcissistic con man.

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

UPDATE:  "[T]his president and this Congress have not a clue how to proceed. They would potentially do much more harm than good. They are prisoners of extreme ideology, unrealistic expectations and their own incompetence.

Perhaps under another president, the center-right and center-left can make progress on key issues. For the remainder of Trump’s term, however, the best-case scenario would be no new wars or new nuclear powers and the status quo at home." [Emphasis in original]

Read the Washington Post, Here’s why, even with control of everything, the GOP cannot govern.

"Donald Trump spent a great portion of 2016 insisting that being president would be easy — at least for him. HuffPost compiled a number of examples of him dismissing the problems that accompany the job as being easily dispatched. Building a wall on the border with Mexico is easy. Beating Hillary Clinton would be easy. Renegotiating the Iran deal would be easy. Paying down the national debt would be easy. Acting presidential? Easy.

To a reporter from Reuters this week, though, Trump had a slightly different assessment of the presidency.

'I love my previous life. I had so many things going. This is more work than in my previous life,' Trump said. 'I thought it would be easier. I thought it was more of a … I’m a details-oriented person. I think you’d say that, but I do miss my old life. I like to work so that’s not a problem but this is actually more work.'

It wasn’t the first time that Trump copped to the job being trickier than he anticipated. In November, NBC News reported that Trump had told former House speaker Newt Gingrich that 'This is really a bigger job than I thought.' (Gingrich’s response? “…good. He should think that.”) Then there are individual issues. “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated,” he said at one point. At another, he revealed that it took a conversation with the president of China to realize that the situation on the Korean peninsula was 'not so easy.'"

Read the Washington Post, Trump now agrees with the majority of Americans: He wasn’t ready to be president. 

So far his presidency has just seemed like a joke gone bad.  But he should resign before he harms the country.

Of course, he love the fame.

Read the Washington Post, Alone in the White House, Trump is enjoying the perks of his new home.

Trump Big CON: The Fill-In-The-Blank of His Hundred Days of Scamming the Public

UPDATE:  "As we cross the finish line of President Trump’s first 100 days, no leader in recent memory has benefited more from low expectations. A more typical president who tumbled from an approval rating in the high 60s to one in the low 40s would be in a political crisis. Trump’s current performance is only a slight dip from his divisive norm. A president with pretensions of rhetorical coherence would be embarrassed by gaffes and mediocre speeches. For Trump, gaffes and inarticulateness are part of the package. A president with high standards of integrity would be mortified by a brewing scandal that seems to involve smarmy aides and a foreign government. For Trump, well, what would you expect? . .

In a number of cases, Trump has not been cunning but credulous; not an authoritarian but a pushover. During his campaign, Trump looked down on the weak; now, it turns out, he is weak.

Ultimately, Trump is failing because he has little knowledge of the world and no guiding star of moral principle. The best of our leaders — think Abraham Lincoln — have been sure about the truth and uncertain about themselves. Trump is the opposite. His mind is uncluttered by creeds. He knows what he wants at any given moment, but it can bear little relation to the moment following. Who really believes that he would be sleepless if the wall were not built or if NAFTA ultimately survived? Who believes he would not be sleepless because of a nasty joke at his expense during a dinner party?

Without deep and thoughtful beliefs, persuasion is impossible. It is public reasoning that allows others to follow a leader’s footsteps in the snow. What has Trump done to rationally and respectfully persuade his critics?

Without deep and thoughtful beliefs, the prevailing advice is often the latest advice. For a rootless leader, in Oscar Wilde’s phrase, “passions are quotations.”

Trump clearly wants to be judged by a frenetic level of activity. But the issue at hand is direction, not momentum. It is useful to undo some past liberal excesses, as Trump has done. But negation can’t be confused with inspiration. There can be no measure of political progress without a measuring stick of political conviction. Instead, we are treated to hysterical self-praise. Appalling — but, hey, what did we expect?"

Read the Washington Post, We set a low bar for Trump. He still failed to meet it.

"President Trump surprised everyone by announcing that he'd take a break from pretending he had a [fill in the blank] plan to pretend he had a [fill in the blank] plan,  instead.

That has been the 32-word history of Trump's first 100 days. This week, those blanks are "health-care reform" and "tax reform." Last week, they were "tax reform" and "health-care reform." And the one before that, they were, you guessed it, "health-care reform" and "tax reform." The problem, you see, is that Trump doesn't know enough about what he's trying to negotiate to, well, negotiate. The result is an ouroboros of incompetence that even the most naive people inclined to take Trump's words at face value — Wall Street traders — have begun to tune out. . .

[T]he second part of the history of Trump's first 100 days:

President Trump tweeted that his [fill in the blank] plan is going to be [better/the best], that people are saying [great/terrific] things about how [great/terrific] it is, that they shouldn't believe the fake media that say [it isn't close to passing/would cost 24 million people their health insurance/would blow up the deficit], and that it's all going so well that, for now, he's going back to work on his plan to [fill in the blank]."

Read the Washington Post, The 32-word history of Trump’s first 100 days.

Trump's Big CON: 'The Simpsons,' Celebrate His Many "Accomplishments"

UPDATE III:  "For nearly a century, American presidents have played an important, if informal, role in our politics as the leader of their parties. But nearly 100 days into his term, President Trump not only has failed to provide Republicans with skilled leadership, but also seems unaware that he’s even supposed to do so. This failure could doom his presidency before it even really begins. . .

Absence of political leadership is particularly damaging to the modern Republican Party because of the intense and deep fissures running through it. The GOP was bitterly divided into at least four factions prior to Trump’s emergence, and their civil war had waged since at least the 2010 primaries. None of the existing party leaders has the stature, power or credibility to unite this group into a cohesive majority. The president’s failure to step into this fray simply makes the divisions harder to heal.

Trump was elected to change Washington and 'drain the swamp.' Our modern system won’t allow him to do that without first wading deep into the murky waters himself to corral the alligators. If the president does that by the summer months, he might yet begin to fulfill his promises and move the nation in a new direction. But if he doesn’t, he may find the swamp will have drained his power and authority by the time Congress reconvenes in the fall."

Read the Washington Post, This failure may doom Trump’s presidency before it really begins.

In other words, The Donald doesn't have the leadership skills to get the job done.

UPDATE II: "Unless he can summon a miracle, President Trump is going to reach 100 days in office without getting anything on his wish list through Congress. And the fact we're measuring his failures by this timetable is largely his fault. . .

Even the stuff Trump can do on his own — executive orders — have hit quicksand. His most significant executive orders, a travel ban and pressure on sanctuary cities, are stuck in the courts.

Trump has about exhausted his unilateral power. The rest of his agenda needs Congress to get done.

No president — no matter how much of a dealmaker  — can force Congress to pass bills. But Trump set himself up for failure in a way past presidents never have. He promised to get his priorities through Congress in a matter of months.

That was an amateur move, says pretty much anyone who knows anything about Congress. Major legislation doesn't happen in increments of weeks or months. It happens in years: Medicare, gun reform, Obamacare. These things took years, if not decades.

'He didn't grasp the reality of legislating,' [Steve Bell, a former GOP Senate budget aide now with the Bipartisan Policy Institute] said. 'It takes a lot of time.'

The fact Trump would make promises like that also suggests he doesn't have a lot of people around him who understand Congress. And that's to Trump's disadvantage on any day of his administration."

Read the Washington Post, Trump is about to be 0-4 on his legislative promises for his first 100 days. 

UPDATE: "In the outpouring of commentary on President Trump’s first 100 days in office, his greatest single achievement is almost never mentioned, which is itself a sign of what a major triumph it is: We are not talking much about whether Russia colluded with Trump’s campaign to help elect him."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s greatest single achievement almost never gets mentioned.

Read also:

Trump's Big CON: What's He Hiding: Is Trump a Russian Agent?, where I noted that Trump "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."

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

 "'The Simpsons,' of course, famously predicted a Trump presidency in an episode aired in 2000. The real estate mogul seemed to be the right comedic fit at the time, episode writer Dan Greaney told The Washington Post’s Michael Cavna. They needed a celebrity name that would sound slyly absurdist.

'He seems like a ‘Simpsons’-esque figure — he fits right in there, in an over-the-top way,' Greaney said. . .
[But] in the first show to air after Trump’s victory, 'The Simpsons' writers expressed their regret.

In the opening credits, which change every episode, Bart Simpson grimaced as he wrote on the blackboard: 'BEING RIGHT SUCKS.'"

And on Sunday, 'The Simpsons' will celebrate some of The Donalds many accomplishments after 100 days in office, such as: "lowering his golf handicap and increasing his Twitter following by 700.

'And finally we can shoot hibernating bears. My boys will love that,' the Trump character says. His wig reveals itself to be a small dog."

Read the Washington Post, ‘The Simpsons’ has a grim take on Trump’s first 100 days.

Trump's Big CON: The Donald Has Exposed the Republi-CON's So-Called 'Less Government' Hypocrisy

"Republicans tend to be more skeptical of the size of government when Democrats are in power.

But even more than that is Trump's rhetoric. While other Republicans will at least talk a good game about shrinking government, he hasn't really bothered; instead he has talked about a $1 trillion infrastructure plan and increasing government borrowing while borrowing is cheap. He gave lip service to balancing the budget as president, but as with many Trump goals, it has quickly gone by the wayside. The White House isn't even pretending that is still a goal.

And Trump's affinity for big government may be one of the truly big paradigm shifts of his presidency. He has taken in a GOP that got religion on the size of government during the Obama administration and is anxious to see what Trump's brand of populist big government can do for it -- the national debt apparently be damned."

Read the Washington Post, The era of big government is back. Thanks, Trump.

Trump's Big CON: "I’m Going to Rip Up Those Trade Deals" Edition

UPDATE III: Another broken promise.

Read the Washington Post, Trump says no plan to pull out of NAFTA ‘at this time’.

UPDATE II:  "President Trump on Wednesday said he would not label China a currency manipulator, contradicting one of the biggest economic promises he made on the campaign trail.

Trump told the Wall Street Journal that he had changed his mind because China is not currently manipulating its currency, adding that he hoped to enlist China’s help on containing the nuclear threat from North Korea."

Read the Washington Post, Trump says he will not label China currency manipulator, reversing campaign promise.

Read also the Washington Post, 3 big ways Trump is starting to sound like Obama on the economy.

UPDATE:  "President Trump, who made opposition to free trade with China and other countries a centerpiece of his campaign and has continued with tough talk since entering office, is struggling to enact policies that match his trade rhetoric. . .

[W]hile Trump has called China “grand champions” of currency manipulation as recently as February, three people familiar with the discussions say it did not appear likely that the Treasury Department would officially designate China in its semiannual foreign currency report due Saturday. . .

Trump had promised to label China a “currency manipulator” on his first day in office, but his administration has moved slowly to follow through on many of his trade-related threats. . .

Ahead of that meeting, Trump had warned of a 'very difficult' discussion “in which we can no longer have massive trade deficits and job losses.” Yet the meeting ended with the White House announcing a '100-day plan' to review the U.S. trade relationship with China. . .

[Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), said] '[t]he ‘100-day plan’ seems typical of what they do: a lot of talk, no action'. . .

Beyond China, the White House has also missed an internal mid-March deadline to begin renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada, as a draft letter that would begin the process has not been formally signed.

It also announced a mix of other relatively minor or technical measures to strengthen U.S. trade protections, but experts say those won't do much to benefit U.S. industry unless they're followed by far more substantial action. . .

On trade, the White House has launched numerous reviews but so far done little to change policy."

Read the Washington Post, Ahead of major decision, Trump is struggling to deliver on his trade promises.

You might remember from the campaign, The Donald has many plans, like his pan for ISIS, none of which he can talk about.

"[N]ow he’s president, and guess what? It turns out that he may not end up keeping that promise [about ripping up trade deals], after all . . .

This all fits in well with a pattern that we’ve seen repeated over and over as the Trump candidacy turned into the Trump presidency. Here’s how it works.

    Trump makes a grandiose promise that sounds great to at least some voters but no serious person believes.

    Trump runs headlong into reality and discovers that doing what he promised would either be impossible or disastrous.

    Trump initiates a hasty retreat from his promise."

Read the Washington Post, Another Trump promise bites the dust.

Trump's Big CON: The Con Man Bluffs A Lot

As I suggested many times, Obama should have called the Republi-CON bluff many years ago.

Trump's election left no choice.

"For the second time in two major legislative battles, the Trump White House has issued an ultimatum — only to back down.

In the health care debate, the president was going to force a House vote on the package and dare skeptical Republicans to vote against replacing Obamacare, before abandoning that plan in the face of defeat.

And now, in the government funding debate, he's backing off his previous demand that Congress approve funding for his border wall. . .

This kind of bluffing and having it called is undoubtedly something Trump is used to in the business and real estate worlds. But in the political world, you are negotiating with the same people over and over again. And the lesson of the first two big congressional debates is that when Trump says a bill must contain XYZ, he doesn't really mean it; it's just posturing. And that doesn't bode well for future Trump demands.

During the last government shutdown in 2013, when Republicans demanded defunding Planned Parenthood, they were at least willing to follow through on that demand. The government was closed for more than two weeks before the GOP relented. That served notice to Democrats that Republicans were at the very least willing to go all-in on their strategy and follow through — that they weren't bluffing when they made such demands in order for a bill to pass. And that made their threats on other things seem more legitimate.

Trump has shown no such inclination to make it so people take his demands at face value. And given what's happened in the first two legislative debates, the next time he draws a line in the sand, you can bet lawmakers know how easily it can be raked over."

Read the Washington Post, President Trump just had his bluff called — again.

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

"What we are reporting here isn't fake news. But it doesn't feel exactly like real news, either. It's in that foggy realm of Trump news in which everything is slightly ambiguous and wobbly and internally inconsistent and almost certainly improvisational and not actually grounded in what you could call “government policy.” What happened was: Trump called the International Space Station and talked to astronauts and, in passing, mentioned that he's going to send Americans to Mars, and soon, like really lickety-split. . .

It's hard to know if Trump was entirely serious (it's possible he was just joshin') or if he even has been briefed on the current NASA human spaceflight program. He may not know where Mars is. (Who does, really? You know it moves around a lot.)

[The] "NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2017, passed by Congress and signed by Trump this year . . . essentially keeps NASA on the same course it's been for years when it comes to human spaceflight — aiming at a mission to Mars with a 2033 launch. The first mission would be an orbital mission only; a later mission would attempt a landing.

NASA, understanding that Trump wants to do something big in the first term, has pondered adding astronauts to a test flight of the new Space Launch System rocket. There is very little chance that NASA is sending humans to Mars by 2024."

Read the Washington Post, Trump wants NASA to send humans to Mars pronto — by his second term ‘at worst’.

Read also the Washington Post, Will Trump echo JFK’s moonshot and vow to send humans to Mars?, which noted that "Trump understands the power of a big idea, and the leverage that can come from a cult of personality. He has been interested in John F. Kennedy’s vow to send humans to the moon."

Of course, it's a con job because he doesn't believe in science and his "budget calls for a seismic disruption in government-funded medical and scientific research. The cuts are deep and broad."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s budget calls for seismic disruption in medical and science research.

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

UPDATE II:  Read the other posts about the Trump Family Show.

Of course, the purpose of the show is to promote the Trump family and brand. The office of the Presidency give him a great way to do so.

"As NPR spelled out:

    An article on a State Department website about President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort has been removed after criticism that it was an inappropriate use of taxpayer funds.

    Critics complained that resources were being used to tout the for-profit club, which Trump refers to as the Winter White House. The club, in Palm Beach, Fla., is held in Trump’s trust, of which he is the sole beneficiary.

The State Department claimed that there was no intent to promote Trump’s property, but it was hard to see what possible other purpose it could have served. ('On the webpage about Mar-a-Lago, there was no discussion of policy. The page showed photos of the members-only club’s opulent rooms and exterior, and noted that 'When he acquired the house, Trump also bought the decorations and furnishings that [original owner Marjorie Merriweather] Post had collected over the years, preserving Mar-a-Lago’s style and taste.''

Trump had already doubled the new-membership fee for the club in January.

Jordan Libowitz of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington tells me: 'This is very troubling and further shows the extent to which the Trump businesses are intertwined with the Trump administration. Things like this add to the constant ethical questions raised by the Trump administration’s behavior when it comes to the president’s portfolio.'"

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s brazen self-promotion crosses the line.  

UPDATE:  "Trump's boast of highest TV ratings since ‘the World Trade Center came down’ was made during "a wide-ranging interview with Julie Pace of the Associated Press on April 21, [in which] President Trump yet again made many false or misleading statements."

For a "a roundup of 14 claims", read the Washington Post, Fact-checking President Trump’s Pinocchio-laden Associated Press interview.  

Trump is an incredible narcissist.

Read the Washington Post, Trump boasts of highest TV ratings since ‘the World Trade Center came down’.

That is a truly incredible, and scary, statement

Read also Trump is a Psycho-Narcissistic Con Man, which noted that Trump is a psycho-narcissistic con man.

Trump's Big CON: He's Become Irrelevant

"It is more than five months since the election, three months since the inauguration — enough time to be able to make an informed prognosis about economic and domestic policy under President Trump and the Republican Congress.

What we know, first and foremost, is that it hardly matters what Trump says because what he says is as likely as not to have no relationship to the truth, no relationship to what he said last year during the campaign or even what he said last week. What he says bears no relationship to any consistent political or policy ideology or world-view. What he says is also likely to bear no relationship to what his top advisers or appointees have said or believe, making them unreliable interlocutors even if they agreed among themselves, which they don’t. This lack of clear policy is compounded by the fact that the president, despite his boasts to the contrary, knows very little about the topics at hand and isn’t particularly interested in learning. In other words, he’s still making it up as he goes along.

What all this means, in effect, is that in terms of formulating and passing legislation, or even a budget, Trump and his White House are mostly irrelevant, except to the extent that he establishes a credible threat to veto legislation he decides not to like."

Read the Washington Post, What happens if the president doesn’t matter?

Read also the Washington Post, Wall Street is giving up on Trump.

The read the Washington Post, Democrats to Trump: You don’t have the leverage. We do., which notes that government funding is about to run out at just about the 100-day mark of Trump's presidency, and the timing is likely to show "that Trump and Republicans are making an enormous mess of governing."

Meanwhile, Trump plays golf.

Trump's Big CON: His Voters Have Been Hoodwinked

UPDATE IV: Did not-reality TV forshadow The Donald?

"On the show ['The Apprentice], Trump’s politics were rarely visible, but his methods and values certainly were. The familial favoritism, the bravado, the blame-shifting — it was all right there. The lack of evidence-based decision-making. The refusal to take responsibility for an action. That was the Trump we saw week after week. . .

Two years ago, when Trump faced television critics at a news conference for his final season of “The Celebrity Apprentice,” he was the same person we have watched during his first 100 days in office. He took credit for things he couldn’t possibly be responsible for, such as the fame of people who were on a show based on their fame. . .

Backed into a corner about blatant falsehoods — in this case, inaccurately claiming high ratings for his flailing show — Trump’s only concession was vague blame: “That’s what I was told,” he said of the ratings.

Sound familiar? Those are the words Trump used in a February news conference when challenged about his false claim that he’d secured the biggest electoral college win since President Ronald Reagan . . .

Reality television continues to be blamed for Trump’s rise, or at least used as a label to demean him: He’s a reality-TV president, not a real president. But reality TV was only a window into Trump’s behavior and methods, not the cause of them.

Reality television is, of course, still edited and produced. Could it have presented him as worse than he really is? That’s not likely. Editors who worked on “The Apprentice” said they were instructed to excise the frequent contradictions in his statements and create a coherent narrative out of often nonsensical decisions.

But even edited, sanitized Trump was the one who told a female contestant that 'must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees' on television. He was not fundamentally different from what voters saw unfiltered for more than a year during the campaign, nor from the version we’re seeing in office.

He was authoritarian, once threatening to fire any of the celebrities who said they wouldn’t vote for him. He valued loyalty to a contestant’s team over rational arguments. He replaced his trusted, experienced advisers with his children. He was reckless and persistent once set on a particular course by the latest thing to capture his attention."

Read the Washington Post, Forget 100 days — we’ve been watching this Trump for years.

UPDATE III: Trump has been hoodwinking, deceiving, tricking, fooling, cheating, defrauding, double-crossing, swindling, scamming, conning (you get the idea) in every way his whole life.

For one example, read the Washington Post, What Trump's giving to charity -- or lack thereof -- foreshadowed about his presidency.

UPDATE II:  "President Trump’s ethical sloth and financial conflicts of interest are unique in American history. (The Harding and Grant administrations were rife with corruption, but the presidents did not personally profit. Richard Nixon abused power but did not use his office to fatten his coffers or receive help from a hostile foreign power to get elected.) But it keeps getting worse.

Ryan Lizza’s stunning report reveals ample evidence that Trump misused the intelligence community and manipulated Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) to concoct a plot meant to distract from the investigation into his Russian ties . . .

On the financial side of the Trump sewer, matters are going from bad to worse. Trump never divested himself of his business holdings or released his tax returns. The extent of his conflicts of interest are therefore unknown. He has now amended the trust (showing how flimsy it is if it can be altered on a whim) to allow him to withdraw funds and to receive periodic briefings from his son Eric (who “can do that as chair of the trust’s advisory board, and told Forbes magazine last month that he plans to give his father big-picture financial briefings every quarter or so”). All this should underscore how ludicrous it is to claim separation between Trump and his business operations.

Now, the sludge has engulfed Ivanka Trump. The Associated Press reports:

    On April 6, Ivanka Trump’s company won provisional approval from the Chinese government for three new trademarks, giving it monopoly rights to sell Ivanka brand jewelry, bags and spa services in the world’s second-largest economy. That night, the first daughter and her husband, Jared Kushner, sat next to the president of China and his wife for a steak and Dover sole dinner at Mar-a-Lago, her father’s Florida resort.

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s ethical squalor is worse than you thought.

UPDATE:  Read also the Washington Post, Trump administration grudgingly faces reality on the Iran nuclear deal.

To Hoodwink is to: deceive · trick · dupe · outwit · fool · delude · inveigle · cheat · take in · hoax · mislead · lead on · defraud · double-cross · swindle · gull · scam · con · bamboozle · hornswoggle · fleece · do · have · sting · gyp · shaft · rip off · lead up the garden path · pull a fast one on · put one over on · take for a ride · pull the wool over someone's eyes · sucker · snooker · cozen

And to Trump's voters, that about sums it up.

"In the past week or so, Donald Trump has decided not to be totally Donald Trump. He has changed his positions on many issues, often by simply contradicting himself and sometimes by repudiating what he once said. However he does it, it comes down to this: If policies were gender identities, Trump wouldn’t know which bathroom to use. . .

These reversals represent nothing less than a retreat to the status quo ante — that halcyon era before Trump and his cast of mental munchkins started messing with foreign policy. The policies that now seem to be in place are ones that even former president Barack Obama might support. In fact, with the exception of hitting Syria, he did. . .

NAFTA remains in place, Obamacare is still the law of the land, tax reform ain’t coming soon, and the swamp that was supposed to be drained has been replenished with, among others, former Goldman Sachs executives — most prominently Gary Cohn, once No. 2 at Goldman and now, for much lower pay, apparently No. 2 at the White House. . .

This reversal by personnel was not triggered by unforeseen events — Syria’s use of a nerve agent, for instance. It is, instead, a strong indication that Trump’s campaign was a lie. His wooing of the American working class was insincere. For instance, he put more effort into denouncing Obamacare than he did in preparing legislation to replace it. Those who thought Trump was somehow going to pay their doctors’ bills simply got taken. They were — as were the students of Trump University — suckered.

Sooner or later, Trump’s supporters will realize they have been seduced and abandoned."

Read the Washington Post, Meet the new Trump . . . same as the old Trump?

Read also the Washington Post:

Trump’s no populist. He’s a swamp monster., which notes that "ProPublica and the New York Times reported over the weekend that the Trump administration is being populated with former lobbyists, lawyers and consultants who are making policy for the industries that had been paying them."

Trump’s true ideology has been revealed, which observed that "It's just the same old conservatism rebooted for reality TV."

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

Trump's Big CON: Repeal & Replace Was a Scam All Along

"Imagine a man who for some reason is determined to stuff a balloon into a box — a box that, aside from being the wrong shape, just isn’t big enough. He starts working at one corner, pushing the balloon into position. But then he realizes that the air he’s squeezed out at one end has caused the balloon to expand elsewhere. So he tries at the opposite corner, but this undoes his original work.

If he’s stupid or obsessive enough, he can spend a long time at this exercise, trying it from various different angles, and maybe even briefly convince himself that he’s making progress. But he’s kidding himself: No matter what he does, the balloon isn’t going to fit in that box.

Now you understand what’s happening to G.O.P. efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.

Republicans have spent many years denouncing Obamacare as a terrible, horrible, no good law and insisting that they can do much better. They successfully convinced many voters that they could preserve the good stuff — the dramatic expansion of coverage that has brought the percentage of Americans without health insurance to a record low — while reducing premiums, shrinking deductibles and, of course, doing away with the taxes on high incomes that pay for the program.

Those promises basically define the box into which they’re trying to stuff health care. . .

The only way Republicans might have been able to do what they promised would be if they had some way to make health care much cheaper. That would in effect let some air out of the balloon, and maybe make it possible to get it into the box after all. But they don’t.

The truth is that while Republicans have portrayed Obamacare as a crazy, inefficient scheme, it has in fact been much more successful at containing costs than even its proponents expected.

There are some things we could do that would probably make it even cheaper, but they would all involve moving left — say, introducing a public option, or going all the way to single-payer. The G.O.P., which is determined to move right instead, reducing the public sector’s role, has offered no reason for anyone to believe that it could do better.

All of this raises the obvious question: If Republicans never had a plausible alternative to Obamacare, if this debacle was so inevitable, what was the constant refrain of “repeal and replace” all about?

The answer, surely, is that it began as a cynical ploy; at first, the Republicans hoped to kill health reform before it really got started. And now they’ve trapped themselves: They can’t admit that they have no ideas without, in effect, admitting that they were lying all along."

Read The New York Times, The Balloon, the Box and Health Care.

As I suggested many times, Obama should have called the Republi-CON bluff many years ago.

Trump's Big CON: Where in the World Is Trump's 'Armada'?

UPDATE:  Apparently Trump didn’t lie because he "didn’t have any idea where his armada was. 'He probably saw it on TV.'

Trump, who tends to eschew security briefings, spends much of his day watching Fox News, often tweeting about what he sees. And Fox News was beating the drums of war in the days and hours before Trump spoke of his armada . . .

Trump’s many falsehoods aren’t necessarily lies; he seems not to be able to distinguish between fact and fiction, believing that whatever he says is true."

And whaever he saw lat on TV.

Read the Washington Post, Where is Trump’s ‘armada’? Apparently, wherever Fox News says it is.

"Trump administration officials on Wednesday denied misleading the public about the location of an aircraft carrier and whether it was redeployed as a show of strength against North Korea.

The whereabouts of the USS Carl Vinson, a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, and its accompanying strike group were swept up last week in an intensifying standoff between the United States and Pyongyang, which Washington has warned is risking American military action by pushing ahead with its disputed nuclear and missile programs.

As North Korea escalated its war of words with Washington, President Trump declared last week that he was “sending an armada, very powerful” toward the Asian nation. He, like other officials, made that assertion after U.S. Pacific Command’s April 9 announcement that the ship was headed from Singapore toward the western Pacific, part of a U.S. response to tensions with Pyongyang.

But news early this week that the ship at the time was actually in the Indian Ocean, thousands of miles to the southwest, triggered speculation that the Trump administration, eager to illustrate its hawkish stance on a range of national security issues, was using deceptive means to send a message to Pyongyang."

Read the Washington Post, Trump administration defends how it described ship movements amid North Korean tensions.

Read also the Washington Post, Where America’s carrier groups were as the administration talked about its ‘armada’.

Trump's Big CON: He Is a Hypocrite (A Polite Way of Saying Liar)

UPDATE: And just how does he do it?

Take China as an example: "Trump has said repeatedly that he would label China a currency manipulator — as many as a dozen times as a 2016 candidate and three times on Twitter back in 2012, according to the Donald Trump database."

Read the Washington Post, The unmistakable anatomy of a President Trump flip-flop, which explains:

"This is a nice little microcosm of Trump's repeated flip-flops and contortions. It goes a little something like this:

    Amateur politician makes big statement (in this case, that China is a currency manipulator)

    Amateur politician promises to take swift and controversial action (to label China a currency manipulator as president)

    Crowd cheers

    Amateur politician repeats promise over and over, to more cheers

    Amateur politician actually becomes president

    Amateur politician-president realizes his stance was completely impractical (given China's role in containing North Korea, among other things)

    Amateur politician-president can't understand why people would have taken him at his word in the first place"

To review more of the The Donald's many lies, see this database of Donald Trump  Speeches. Tweets. Policy.  Unedited. Unfiltered. Instantly.

"Over the last two weeks, President Trump has attacked Syria without congressional approval, ratcheted up the use of force in Afghanistan with a huge bomb, and moved to reverse the Obama administration's policy of releasing White House visitor logs.

Each of these actions runs completely counter to the views and values once espoused by Trump on Twitter. And they join an amazingly long — and growing — list of old Trump tweets that have become eerily applicable to Trump's own presidency in ways that scream 'hypocrisy.'"

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s old tweets are becoming a minefield of hypocrisy.

The article includes a list of some of The Donald's many hypocrisies.

Trump's Big CON: Reasons Republi-CON's Voted For Our President the Con Man

UPDATE:  Guess who is now endorsing the book with 250+ blank pages, saying it is a "great book for your reading enjoyment".

Read the Washington Post, Trump plugs ‘Reasons to Vote for Democrats’ book filled with blank pages.

That's right, The Donald wants his supporters to "read' blank pages. (I'm not making this up.)

I guess that's all their empty minds can understand.

Read the Washington Post, ‘Reasons to Vote for Democrats’ jumps to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list. But its pages are blank.

I posted this comment (without the links): 

This book should include a short epilogue (with actual words) titled: Reasons Republi-CONs Voted For Our President the Con Man
 
A con man is one who 'defrauds a person or group after first gaining their confidence, using confidence tricks to exploit characteristics of the human psyche such as dishonesty, honesty, vanity, compassion, credulity, irresponsibility, naïveté and greed.'

Stupid people are easily conned, for example into buying snake oil.

And to understand just how stupid a significant number of Republi-CONs are, look at how many people are paying $10 for 250+ blank pages.

So next time you try to discuss politics with someone, first ask them if they bought this book.

And remember, there is no reasoning with people this stupid.

Follow my chronicle of Trump's Big CON at NoBullU.com

Trump's Big CON: Is the Con Up?

UPDATE IV:  "The 100-day mark of the Trump presidency is approaching, and his aides are worried that the media narrative will depict his historically awful lack of accomplishments with highly unflattering levels of accuracy. But don’t tell that to President Trump. He knows the real problem is that the news media won’t acknowledge how terrific the start to his presidency has actually been in comparison with his loser predecessors:

A new Gallup poll out this morning, however, strongly suggests that an increasing number of Americans just don’t believe Trump’s spin about his presidency anymore."

Read the Washington Post, This brutal new poll shows that fewer and fewer people believe Trump’s lies.

UPDATE III:  "Everyone in Washington is trying to figure out why President Trump’s agenda has stalled on multiple fronts and why his approval numbers are swirling down the toilet. CNN’s Chris Cillizza suggests Trump’s penchant for disruption and chaos actually works against him. (I agree.) Others point to Trump’s failure to forge relationships on Capitol Hill. . .

Still others say the problem is congressional Republicans. . .

All this has some truth to it. But here’s another overarching reason for Trump’s travails: As his campaign promises are getting translated into concrete policy specifics, Americans are recoiling from the results. What’s more, this process is unmasking the disconcerting levels of dishonesty, bad faith, and lack of concern for detail and procedure that are rotting away at the core of his agenda and approach to governing, all of which is plainly working against him. . ."

The bottom line is that the ongoing translation of Trump’s agenda into policy specifics is showing that major elements of it are unpopular, or unworkable because they are premised on lies, or both.

Read the Washington Post, Why is Trump flailing? Because Americans hate his agenda, and it’s based on lies.

UPDATE II:  Trump is "inexperienced, uninformed, easily provoked and supremely confident in his own judgment. . . .

Mere incompetence would be bad enough. But foreigners trying to understand the United States must now study (of all things) the intellectual influences of White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon. His vision of a Western alliance of ethno-nationalist, right-wing populists against globalists, multiculturalists, Islamists and (fill in the blank with your preferred minority) is the administration’s most vivid and rhetorically ascendant foreign policy viewpoint. How does this affect the alliances of the previous dispensation? That is the background against which Trump’s peevishness is being viewed.

Foreigners see a president who has blamed his predecessor, in banana-republic style, of a serious crime, for which FBI Director James B. Comey testified Monday there is no evidence. They see an administration whose campaign activities are being actively investigated by the executive branch and Congress. If close Trump associates are directly connected to Russian hacking, foreigners will see the president engulfed in an impeachment crisis — the only constitutional mechanism that would remove the taint of larceny from the 2016 election."

Foreigners see a Darwinian, nationalist framework for American foreign policy; a diminished commitment to global engagement; a brewing scandal that could distract and cripple the administration; and a president who often conducts his affairs with peevish ignorance.

Some will look at this spectacle and live in fear; others may see a golden opportunity.

Read the Washington Post, The American presidency is shrinking before the world’s eyes.

And just who sees a golden opportunity?

UPDATE:  "'There’s a smell of treason in the air,' presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said. 'Imagine if J. Edgar Hoover or any other FBI director would have testified against a sitting president? It would have been a mind-boggling event.'

Brinkley, who has published biographies of such presidents as Gerald Ford, Franklin Roosevelt and Theodore Roosevelt, said of Trump’s start, 'This is the most failed first 100 days of any president.'

'To be as low as he is in the polls, in the 30s, while the FBI director is on television saying they launched an investigation into your ties with Russia, I don’t know how it can get much worse,' Brinkley said."

Read the Washington Post, President Trump faces his hardest truth: He was wrong.

Read also the Washington Post, Comey’s testimony humiliates Trump, which noted that "[t]o hear the head of the FBI in essence call the president a liar or wide-eyed conspiratorialist is bracing, if not humiliating, for the chief executive. And reflecting on the morning tweet, Trump now seems desperate, childish and vulnerable. He’s been tripped up by his own grandiose lies. At some level he must know it."

"Trump continues to vaguely believe that what he tweeted will somehow be validated later, at least in some form. But at the same time, Trump himself is growing aware that his nonstop lies — or delusions, or self-deception, or whatever you want to call all of it — are failing him. And he’s frustrated by it. This is coming to us according to people close to Trump.

The way in which Trump made those charges about Obama; the way the White House subsequently handled the mess, by demanding that Congress investigate them after an internal search that turned up nothing to back them up; the way in which Trump continues to blithely dismiss the need to get to the bottom of Russian meddling in our election — all of those things are a function of something that is seeping into pretty much everything the White House is doing these days.

This bad faith — this deep contempt for process, fact-based debate and policy reality — borders on all-corrosive. It includes a frontal assault on the news media for accurately reporting on Trump’s inaugural crowd size, in defiance of Trump/White House lies about it. It includes Trump’s explicit exhortations to his supporters to disbelieve the news media and choose their own facts and reality instead. It includes the laughably slapdash process that produced the first travel ban, and the decision to delay the second one to bask in good press from Trump’s speech to Congress, even though it was supposed to be an urgent national security matter (never mind that the substantive case for it was undercut by Homeland Security’s own analysts).

It includes Trump embracing a health plan that would leave 24 million people uninsured after promising 'insurance for everybody.' . .

[T]he FBI investigation will continue overshadowing the Trump presidency. And in the present moment, the Comey takedown — a brutal institutional debunking of one of Trump’s and the White House’s highest-visibility moments of pure contempt for norms and process — has exposed the deep rot of bad faith in a new way. And this could have consequences. It could help inspire an escalation in institutional pushback — from the courts, the media, government leakers and civil society — that exercises a further constraining effect.

If the sources who spoke to the Times are to be believed, Trump is already reportedly frustrated that his showmanship and improvisational approach to reality are failing him. One shudders to imagine how he will react to more serious setbacks."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s lies are failing him, and it is making him deeply frustrated.

Read also The New York Times, Trump’s Weary Defenders Face Fresh Worries, which noted that "it’s the obsessiveness and ferocity of Mr. Trump’s pushback against the Russian allegations, often untethered from fact or tact, that is making an uncertain situation worse. . .

there’s some evidence that the president’s magic medium is losing its effectiveness, in part because Mr. Trump’s Twitter persona seems to have shifted from puckish to paranoid."