Tag Archives: priebus

Donald Trump Remains Puzzled About West Wing Chaos

Mother Jones

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It’s time for the latest Donald Trump pivot. The Wall Street Journal reports that the crisis in Syria “has sharpened Mr. Trump’s desire to cut some of the drama out of his West Wing.” He’s finally going to get presidential!

President Donald Trump is considering a major shake-up of his senior White House team, a senior administration official said Friday….In recent days, he has talked to confidants about the performance of chief of staff Reince Priebus and has asked for the names of possible replacements….Another top aide who could be removed or reassigned in a shake-up is Steve Bannon, chief strategist, who has been sparring with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and one of his closest advisers.

In fairness, Trump can’t fire himself, but is he really so clueless that he doesn’t realize the infighting springs directly from his own chaotic personality, not from the folks around him? If he provided clear direction on both policy and communications—and stopped tweeting random crap all the time—things would calm down fast.

But he’ll never figure that out.

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Donald Trump Remains Puzzled About West Wing Chaos

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BREAKING: Donald Trump Played Golf This Weekend

Mother Jones

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The sad thing about this tweet is that it really would be news if Donald Trump was at the White House working this weekend:

But no: Trump played golf at his club in Virginia this weekend, so it’s not clear what Fox was up to here. Perhaps they meant to say that by 5:26 pm on Sunday, Trump was back in the White House.

Normally, I’d suggest that everyone cool it with the golf snark. We’ve now had four consecutive presidents who have taken endless grief every time they hit the links, and it’s pretty stupid. Let ’em golf if they want to. But there are two differences with Trump. First, the guy really does play a ton of golf. You’d think the first few months of a new presidency would be a busy time, but Trump has played 12 rounds of golf, mostly at Mar-a-Lago, in only ten weekends. That’s more than he played before he was president. Second, like an embarrassed drunk, he’s now trying to hide his golf addiction. This weekend marked the second in a row in which his press office tried to pretend that Trump was “meeting with people” at the club, only to have Trump’s golfing exposed, as they must have known it would be, by someone with a cell phone tweeting out pictures. Why do they bother with such flimsy and easily exposed lies?

And while we’re on the subject of Trump, I’d like to note that he’s hit the quadfecta I predicted on Thursday. He has now blamed all four of the following for the failure of Trumpcare:

Paul Ryan, for insisting on doing health care before tax reform and then being unable to shepherd the bill through the House.
The Freedom Caucus, for voting against his bill.
Democrats, for…being the opposition party, I guess.
Obama, for deliberately designing Obamacare to fail in 2017.

Apparently Reince Priebus is also taking some heat from within the White House, because he’s pals with Ryan and was supposed to know about all this congressional hoo ha. But it’s not clear if Trump himself blames Priebus for anything.

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BREAKING: Donald Trump Played Golf This Weekend

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White House Offers Excuse For Improper Behavior: The FBI Started It

Mother Jones

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The White House has an official excuse for asking the FBI to debunk a New York Times story about Trump campaign aides having frequent contacts with Russian intelligence officials. Here it is: They started it. That is, the FBI approached them, not the other way around.

I guess that’s appropriate for the Trump administration, which is best thought of as an overgrown kindergartner. However, First Read isn’t sure this defense does them any favors:

This White House explanation raises the question: So what’s worse — the White House asking the FBI to publicly knock down a story, or the FBI pulling aside a top White House official to comment on the big story of the day? Just ask yourself: If you substituted Clinton’s and Lynch’s names for Priebus’ and McCabe’s, would the congressional hearings already be scheduled?

Yep. And if an FBI official really did pull aside Reince Priebus to whisper in his ear that the Times story was wrong, that still suggests an improper relationship between the FBI and the White House. In any case, First Read goes on to suggest that the Times wasn’t all that wrong anyway. Here is Ken Dilanian:

“NBC News was told by law enforcement and intelligence sources that the NYT story WAS wrong — in its use of the term ‘Russian intelligence officials.’ Our sources say there were contacts with Russians, but that the US hasn’t confirmed they work for spy agencies. We were also told CNN’s description of Trump aides being in ‘constant touch’ with Russians was overstated. However, our sources did tell us that intelligence intercepts picked up contacts among Trump aides and Russians during the campaign.

Of course, the Times may have different sources telling them different things. One way or another, it appears that Trump aides were in periodic contact with Russian officials during the campaign, and the only questions are: (a) were they intelligence officials? and (b) how often did they talk? Considering Trump’s bizarre fixation on Vladimir Putin and his administration’s obvious panic over this story, a good guess is that there really is something there they want to keep under wraps.

And just for a final comical effect, after asking the FBI to leak information to the press, Trump himself then took to Twitter to complain about the FBI being unable to stop leaks:

Do you laugh or cry? We’re going to be asking ourselves that a lot, I think. Only 204 weeks to go.

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White House Offers Excuse For Improper Behavior: The FBI Started It

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Here’s a Quick Reference Explainer of Trump’s Inner Circle

Mother Jones

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With the announcement of son-in-law Jared Kushner as “senior advisor to the president,” the inner circle of Donald Trump’s White House has now taken shape. For those of you who want to understand the role each member plays, here’s a quick reference:

Jared Kushner = Rasputin
James Flynn = Dick Cheney
Reince Priebus = H.R. Haldeman
Steve Bannon = Louis Howe
Mike Pence = Cardinal Mazarin
Kellyanne Conway = Baghdad Bob
Sean Spicer = Ron Ziegler
Mick Mulvaney = David Stockman

Any questions?

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Here’s a Quick Reference Explainer of Trump’s Inner Circle

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Former RNC Chairman Michael Steele Announces He Will Not Be Voting for Donald Trump

Mother Jones

Former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele has added his name to a growing list of Republican figures disavowing Donald Trump, announcing on Thursday that he will not be voting for his party’s presidential candidate next month.

“I will not be voting for Clinton,” Steele said at the Mother Jones 40th anniversary dinner. “I will not be voting for Trump either.”

He singled out Trump’s first remarks disparaging Mexicans as rapists and criminals as the moment that party leaders such as current RNC Chairman Reince Priebus and House Speaker Paul Ryan should have stepped in to oppose Trump’s views.

“The chairman has the responsibility to provide law and order, in the sense that you want to inflect party discipline and instill party discipline where you need it,” he said, speaking from his experience as the party chair from 2009 until 2011.

He went on to describe Trump as the voice of the frustration of the “racist” and “angry” underbelly of America and noted, “I was damn near puking during the debates.”

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Former RNC Chairman Michael Steele Announces He Will Not Be Voting for Donald Trump

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Republicans Are Still Totally Wrong About ISIS

Mother Jones

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On Monday, Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley made an astute observation about ISIS in an interview with Bloomberg.

“One of the things that preceded the failure of the nation-state of Syria, the rise of ISIS, was the effect of climate change and the mega-drought that affected that region, wiped out farmers, drove people to cities, created a humanitarian crisis that created the…conditions of extreme poverty that has led now to the rise of ISIL and this extreme violence,” said the former Maryland governor.

Republicans were quick to seize on the comment as an indication of O’Malley’s weak grasp of foreign policy. Reince Priebus, chair of the Republican National Committee, said the suggestion of a link between ISIS’s rise to power and climate change was “absurd” and a sign that “no one in the Democratic Party has the foreign policy vision to keep America safe.”

Here’s the thing, though: O’Malley is totally right. As we’ve reported here many times, Syria’s civil war is the best-understood and least ambiguous example of a case where an impact of climate change—in this case, an unprecedented drought that devastated rural farmers—directly contributed to violent conflict and political upheaval. There is no shortage of high-quality, peer-reviewed research explicating this link. As O’Malley said, the drought made it more difficult for rural families to survive off of farming. So they moved to cities in huge numbers, where they were confronted with urban poverty and an intransigent, autocratic government. Those elements clearly existed regardless of the drought. But the drought was the final straw, the factor that brought all the others to a boiling point.

Does this mean that America’s greenhouse gas emissions are solely responsible for ISIS’s rise to power? Obviously not. But it does mean that, without accounting for climate change, you have an incomplete picture of the current military situation in the Middle East. And without that understanding, it will be very difficult for a prospective commander-in-chief to predict where terrorist threats might emerge in the future.

The link between climate and security isn’t particularly controversial in the defense community. Earlier this year, President Barack Obama called climate change an “urgent and growing threat” to national security. A recent review by the Defense Department concluded that climate change is a “threat multiplier” that exacerbates other precursors to war, while the Center for Naval Analysis found that climate change-induced drought is already leading to conflict across Africa and the Middle East.

In other words, O’Malley’s comment is completely on-point. If Priebus and his party are serious about defeating ISIS and preventing future terrorist uprisings, they can’t continue to dismiss the role of climate change.

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Republicans Are Still Totally Wrong About ISIS

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The Science of Why Republicans Are Dead Wrong About Climate Change and National Security

Mother Jones

At last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, GOP chairman Reince Priebus had some strong words about how President Barack Obama prioritizes threats to national security.

“Democrats tell us they understand the world, but then they call climate change, not radical Islamic terrorism, the greatest threat to national security,” he said. “Look, I think we all care about our planet, but melting icebergs aren’t beheading Christians in the Middle East.”

The comment came after the president, in a lengthy interview with Vox, said that the media often overplays the danger of terrorism relative to climate change. It’s not the first time Obama has made a point along those lines. In his State of the Union address in January, he said that “no challenge poses a greater threat to future generations” than climate change. A few weeks later, in his 2015 national security strategy, the president referred to global warming as an “urgent and growing threat” to national security.

But while Priebus’s jab earned him a hearty round of applause at CPAC, new research indicates that his iceberg comment doesn’t hold water.

For the last couple years, Middle East experts have pointed to the ongoing civil war in Syria as a prime example of how climate change can contribute to violent conflict. The country’s worst drought on record arrived just as widespread outrage with President Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorial regime was reaching critical mass; as crops failed, an estimated 1.5 million people were driven off rural farms and into cities. While grievances with the Assad regime are many, from economic stagnation to violent crackdowns on protesters, the impacts of the drought were likely the final straw.

The narrative in Syria fit perfectly with what many top military leaders, including at the Pentagon, were beginning to project: In parts of the world where tensions are already high, the impacts of natural disasters and competition for resources are increasingly likely to ignite violence. A 2013 study by analysts at Princeton found that in some parts of the world, global warming could lead to a 50 percent increase in conflict by mid-century.

But in Syria, there was some uncertainty about whether that drought in particular was a product of man-made climate change. In other words, is the climate-driven conflict there merely representative of what might happen more often in the future, or is it an actual consequence of burning fossil fuels?

An answer to that question was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Colin Kelley, a geographer at the University of California-Santa Barbara, found that a multiyear drought as severe as the one that hit Syria from 2007 to 2010 was made two to three times more likely because of climate change, compared to natural variability alone.

The study is the first to examine a century’s worth of precipitation and temperature data for the Fertile Crescent (the lush region surrounding the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that was hit hardest by the drought) for clues about a possible human fingerprint on the recent drought. Sure enough, the data shows that “three of the four most severe multiyear droughts have occurred in the last 25 years, the period during which external anthropogenic forcing has seen its largest increase.” Here’s the relevant data from the study:

Kelley et al, PNAS 2015

The lines in both charts proceed chronologically, starting at 1900, with a tick mark every 20 years. In the top chart, a regional warming trend is clearly visible, with the red box highlighting the recent period where temperatures were consistently above the long-term average. The bottom chart shows the Palmer Drought Severity Index, a standard metric for measuring drought in agricultural areas that combines temperature, precipitation, and soil moisture data (lower numbers are more severe). The brown boxes show droughts (where the PDSI is below the long-term trend) of at least three years.

The study also includes data from a model that compared two sets of projected temperatures in the Fertile Crescent, one with greenhouse gas influence and one without. The observed record matches closely with the greenhouse gas model, suggesting that climate change played a critical role in shaping conditions in the region.

“The bottom line is, what we’re trying to show is that these trends are due to the climate change signal,” Kelley said of the charts above. “There’s no natural signal for that.”

In other words, Kelley said, there’s a clear line of causation from human-caused greenhouse gas emissions to the deaths of 200,000 Syrians in the civil war.

With that said, Kelley added that there are a number of other factors at play here. The impact of the most recent drought was made worse by the fact that it came on the heels of two other severe droughts, so groundwater supplies were already low and farmers already struggling. Moreover, Assad’s predecessor and father, Hafez al-Assad, instituted a system of agricultural policies that encouraged farming in water-scarce areas, setting farmers there up to be highly vulnerable to future drought. And it’s impossible to know how the drought would have affected the political climate in the absence of Assad’s other unpopular practices; it’s possible that a more stable government would have been able to better weather the drought.

Still, the study carries important implications for the future of the region, said Francesco Femia, co-director of the Center for Climate and Security. The climate trends highlighted in this study indicate that replacing Assad won’t be enough to secure stability in the region.

“If or when the conflict in Syria comes to an end, will its farmers and herders be able to regain their livelihoods?” Femia said. “Given the continued instability and a forecast of increased drying in the region, this issue should be better integrated into the international security agenda.”

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The Science of Why Republicans Are Dead Wrong About Climate Change and National Security

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