Tag Archives: realdonald

Donald Trump Doubles Down on Boorish Temper Tantrums

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

President Trump was busy during his early morning “Fox & Friends” time. Around 6 am there was this:

First he deliberately undermines his own Justice Department by needlessly calling his immigration EO a “travel ban.” Why? Because he got criticized for accidentally doing this over the weekend, and by God, that means he needs to double down. Having done that, he then proceeds to slam the Justice Department as if they worked for someone else. If he wanted them to stay with the original travel ban, he should have told them to. If he wussed out, it’s his fault, not theirs.

It’s worth noting, by the way, that we’re now in the fifth month of Trump’s childish refusal to go ahead with new travel regulations while we wait for the courts to rule on his temporary travel ban that was meant to give him time to write new travel regulations.

Then, after a bit of random whining, Trump decides to go back to the well on the mayor of London:

Even for Trump, this is close to unbelievable. His original tweet about this yesterday was a lie, and would have been wildly inappropriate even if it weren’t. The city of London had just been hit by a deadly terrorist attack! Trump got blasted for this breathtaking display of churlishness, of course, and that meant he had to hit back today even more boorishly in front of the whole world. Because Donald Trump never, ever, backs down from anything, no matter how stupid.

Holy hell. 43 months to go.

View this article:

Donald Trump Doubles Down on Boorish Temper Tantrums

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Donald Trump Doubles Down on Boorish Temper Tantrums

Donald Trump Is the World’s Biggest Asshole

Mother Jones

In the wake of a deadly terrorist attack in London, our president decided the best thing to do was revive his personal feud with the mayor of London:

Here’s what Sadiq Khan actually said:

Khan was obviously telling Londoners not to be alarmed about the increased police presence they would see today. Fox News carried it, so I’m sure Trump heard the whole statement.

Five years ago Dick Cheney set a new world record for being an asshole. Donald Trump now holds that record.

View original article:  

Donald Trump Is the World’s Biggest Asshole

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Donald Trump Is the World’s Biggest Asshole

Trump "Witch Hunt" Is, Naturally, the Greatest in American History

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Poor President Trump:

This makes sense. If Trump is going to be the victim of a witch hunt, you just know it has to be the greatest of all time.

And we’d like to help make it even greater! We’ve already met our goal for matching gifts from the Glaser Progress Foundation, which will kickstart our muckraking fund to investigate the Trump-Russia connection. But we want to keep going. Our overall goal is $500,000, and we’re getting close to that. Read more about it here. Or go straight to the donation page here. If Trump wants a witch hunt, let’s give it to him.

Continue reading:

Trump "Witch Hunt" Is, Naturally, the Greatest in American History

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump "Witch Hunt" Is, Naturally, the Greatest in American History

Trump Continues His Love Affair With the Egyptian President

Mother Jones

Have you noticed that everyone is paying less attention to President Trump’s tweets lately? I suppose it’s finally started to sink in that his tweets are just performance art for his fans, not an indication of any actual policy views. Plus, Trump’s tweets have gotten kind of boring. Maybe he lost his appetite for them after his random ejaculation about Obama wiretapping him—which he apparently intended only to distract the press for a day or two—turned into a massive, multi-month debacle for the entire Republican establishment.

Today, though, we got this:

Um, yeah. I’m sure we can count on that great humanitarian Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to respond effectively and prudently:

Late Sunday night, President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi called for a three-month state of emergency….The army chief-turned-president also dispatched elite troops across the country to protect key installations and accused unidentified countries of fueling instability, saying that “Egyptians have foiled plots and efforts by countries and fascist, terrorist organizations that tried to control Egypt.”

As always, we’re left to wonder why Trump loves el-Sisi so much. Is it because Trump is an unusually brutal foreign policy realist? Because he likes anyone that kicks butt on the Muslim Brotherhood? Because Obama didn’t like el-Sisi? Because Netanyahu does? It’s all a mystery.

Continue at source: 

Trump Continues His Love Affair With the Egyptian President

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump Continues His Love Affair With the Egyptian President

How the Ebola Crisis Helped Launch Donald Trump’s Political Career

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In July 2014, as the largest Ebola outbreak in history was ravaging West Africa, Donald Trump took to Twitter to complain that two sick American health workers were being flown back to the United States for treatment. “Ebola patient will be brought to the U.S. in a few days—now I know for sure that our leaders are incompetent,” wrote the future leader of free world. “KEEP THEM OUT OF HERE!” Over the months that followed, Trump would tweet about the outbreak more than 50 times.

Trump’s social-media outbursts were among the earliest shots fired in the political war over Ebola. The timing of the Ebola outbreak could not have been more propitious for Republicans, many of whom echoed Trump’s calls for a temporary travel ban. In the run-up to the 2014 midterm elections, the specter of a lethal African virus being spread through the United States by migrants stoked fears not only among the GOP base, but also among many voters who leaned Democratic. By October, two-thirds of respondents to a Washington Post/ABC News poll said they favored restricting travel from Ebola-affected countries.

I thought about Trump’s Ebola tweets last year as I was completing a memoir about my work treating Ebola in rural Liberia at the height of the outbreak. By early 2016, the Republican presidential primaries were dominating the headlines, and Ebola had long since faded from the front page. But the two events seemed connected to me; it was clear the outbreak had taken its toll on public debate.

St. Martin’s Press

The naked and brutal nativism on display at right-wing political rallies obviously had much deeper roots than Ebola. But from my standpoint, the outbreak helped legitimize a kind of language previously relegated to the fringes of American politics. Looking back on the campaign, I firmly believe Ebola was one of the key events that made Trump’s candidacy possible.

Insofar as Trump expresses a coherent political philosophy, those expressions can be found not in policy papers or major addresses, but in his tweets. When examining Trump’s tweets on the Ebola outbreak, the main features of his approach are plainly evident. It’s all right there: The shallowness, willful ignorance, mean-spiritedness, and empty boasting infuse every 140-character burst. And Trump’s views on the issue received massive media attention. His tweets were written up everywhere from Breitbart to USA Today to Mother Jones. He elaborated on them in his regular Fox News appearances.

Trump’s very first tweet is as clear a display as one could imagine of the kind of arch-nativism that would animate his campaign and the first few months of his presidency. It came on July 31, in response to news that two American medical workers infected with Ebola were being airlifted out of West Africa to the United States for advanced care in the most secure conditions (so-called Biosafety Level 4 facilities). Right from the start, he highlighted the central animus of his foreign policy in an all-caps summary, even when, as in this case, THEM might be US citizens.

Health officials assured the public that Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol—the doctor and nurse who had braved the outbreak to serve at a hospital on the outskirts of Monrovia—posed little risk of spreading the disease in the United States. But Trump wasn’t satisfied. “The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back,” he wrote on August 1. “People that go to far away places to help out are great—but must suffer the consequences!” In other words, the Ebola fighters’ “greatness” didn’t override Trump’s desire to see them suffer because of their selfless actions.

By that time, it was clear that the outbreak was overwhelming the governments of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, and that without substantial international help, the virus would likely spread unchecked across borders. It could turn what was already a substantial regional problem into a profoundly more complicated (and expensive) international crisis. And it meant that resource-wealthy nations needed to provide help to contain the spread.

Trump certainly didn’t want to treat Ebola patients in the United States, but he did initially seem to agree that Americans should provide some sort of medical assistance to the affected countries. “A doctor on NBC Nightly News agreed with me—we should not bring Ebola into our country through two patients, but should bring docs to them,” he wrote on August 4. It was a bizarre statement for someone who just three days earlier had said that doctors who put themselves in harm’s way should be left to “suffer the consequences.” By September, he seemed to have changed his mind entirely about sending help. “Can you believe that the U.S. will be sending 3000 troops to Africa to help with Ebola,” he wrote. “They will come home infected? We have enough problems.”

Listen to Steven Hatch discuss the Ebola crisis on a recent episode of our Inquiring Minds podcast:

Trump wasn’t simply calling for patients infected with Ebola to be excluded from the country. In one August tweet, he wrote, “The U.S. must immediately stop all flights from EBOLA infected countries or the plague will start and spread inside our ‘borders.’ Act fast!” Two days later, he extended his proposed travel ban to all of West Africa. “The bigger problem with Ebola is all of the people coming into the U.S. from West Africa who may be infected with the disease,” he wrote. “STOP FLIGHTS!”

The Ebola panic in the United States reached new heights in early October, after an infected Liberian man named Thomas Eric Duncan entered the country. He was symptom-free at the time of his flight but became ill several days after arriving. He sought treatment at a Dallas hospital, which led to two nurses contracting the virus. Trump, who would spend much of the 2016 campaign portraying immigrants as rapists and murderers, used the opportunity to imply that Duncan came to the United States with sinister motives. “The Ebola patient who came into our country knew exactly what he was doing,” Trump tweeted. “Came into contact with over 100 people. Here we go—I told you so!”

The Duncan chapter was without any question the low point in the US Ebola story. Multiple mistakes occurred not only in Dallas, but in Liberia as well, as Duncan slipped through the screens designed to prevent people exposed to the virus from leaving the country. (He had accompanied the daughter of his landlord to a hospital in Monrovia, and she later died of the disease.) Nearly everything that could have gone wrong with Duncan did go wrong. Nevertheless, the only people who contracted the disease from him were the two nurses who cared for him. They, in turn, passed it along to no one. Duncan died, but both nurses made full recoveries.

An Ebola infection on US soil certainly isn’t a trivial matter, but it was by no means the calamity that Trump, along with tens of millions of his fellow Americans, assumed it was. Public health experts, including Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, repeatedly called for calm, arguing that the United States was well prepared to contain the virus and that closing down borders would simply make the outbreak harder to manage. President Barack Obama echoed these statements. Trump accused the CDC of lying about the threat posed by the disease. He portrayed Frieden’s and Obama’s leadership as feckless, even though Frieden’s assessment would prove to be considerably more accurate than Trump’s.

Trump’s tweets reached a fever pitch on October 23 and 24, when Craig Spencer, a returning doctor who had treated Ebola patients in Guinea, fell ill with the disease in New York City. According to Spencer’s account, the moment he became symptomatic he isolated himself and informed public health authorities. Before he became symptomatic, he was a threat to no one, and once he did, his isolation ensured that he was not a threat. If Duncan’s situation was a worst-case scenario, Spencer’s was exactly how the experts had hoped to deal with travelers from the affected countries.

This did not stop Trump from becoming unhinged, tweeting about the incident seven times in two days. He railed against what he regarded as the foolishness of US policy and accused Spencer of being “selfish” for having the temerity to eat at a restaurant prior to becoming ill. That a billionaire who has never made any appreciable personal sacrifices for others could have the chutzpah to make such charges is revealing. It also foreshadowed his temper tantrums against the family of Humayun Khan, a Muslim US Army captain of Pakistani descent who died trying to thwart a car bombing in Iraq. Trump publicly attacked Khan’s parents last year after they criticized his anti-Muslim rhetoric.

But if Trump’s outbursts against Spencer reveal his weird personal accounting of what constitutes altruism, his final Ebola tweet was a clear portent of future policy. On November 10, just as the news of the West African outbreak was starting to recede, he repeated his dire warnings of the threat of Ebola on US soil by noting that an infected person can spread it to two others “at a minimum.” He then added, “STOP THE FLIGHTS! NO VISAS FROM EBOLA STRICKEN COUNTRIES!”

On the campaign trail, Trump infamously called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” ostensibly in an effort to prevent terrorism. Once in office, he issued executive orders suspending immigration by refugees and citizens of several majority-Muslim countries. Perhaps given enough time, new circumstances will allow him to revisit his 2014 threat and add sub-Saharan Africa to the list.

Trump’s Ebola tweets are useful not only for their ability to illuminate how subsequent events that shocked the political establishment came to be, but also because they provide a clear road map for how he will respond to the next biological crisis. Ebola may have been the most dramatic such crisis of the past generation, but others have also generated substantial alarm. The swine flu pandemic of 2009, the avian influenza outbreaks in East Asia, and the SARS epidemic are just a few of the cases that have required international cooperation.

How will Trump deal with these unforeseen hazards? Will his instinct to resort to border-closing as a first-line policy lead to more suffering? Will his penchant for denigrating people who choose to serve others intimidate health care workers who might otherwise volunteer in such moments? Will he continue to reject any form of scientific expertise?

We’re not even 100 days into the new administration, but the evidence so far is not reassuring. Whatever the next biological agent, Trump may well take a dangerous situation and make it worse—both abroad and at home.

See the article here: 

How the Ebola Crisis Helped Launch Donald Trump’s Political Career

Posted in alo, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How the Ebola Crisis Helped Launch Donald Trump’s Political Career

Our Dishonest President — Part 1 of 1 Million

Mother Jones

Oh man. Here’s the lead editorial in the LA Times this morning:

This could go on forever. The online version suggests that it’s only four parts, finishing up on Wednesday, but who knows what we’ll find out between now and then? By 2020—or however long Trump lasts—this could end up being a thousand-part editorial.

And while we’re on the subject, a federal judge has ruled that it’s OK for a lawsuit to go forward accusing Trump of inciting violence at one of his campaign rallies last March. That’s sure something you don’t see every day. But Wikipedia tells me the judge is some notorious Obama appointee, so he’s probably taking direction from the same folks who ordered Trump wiretapped. As the president puts it:

Yessir. Find the leakers, and we’ll probably also find out who’s pulling the strings of this so-called judge.

View the original here:

Our Dishonest President — Part 1 of 1 Million

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Our Dishonest President — Part 1 of 1 Million

Can We Believe Anything That Comes Out of the White House Press Office?

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Behold our White House press office at work:

Sunday: White House spokesman Sarah Huckabee Sanders tells reporters that President Trump “played a couple of holes” today.

Monday: Pro golfer Rory McIlroy says he played 18 holes with Trump. “He probably shot around 80. He’s a decent player for a guy in his 70’s!”

Monday evening: The White House releases a new statement: “He intended to play a few holes and decided to play longer.”

Obviously this doesn’t matter in any cosmic sense. Who cares how much golf Trump plays? But it’s yet another indication that the White House press operation will blithely lie about anything. Is there really any point to having a press office these days?

Excerpt from:

Can We Believe Anything That Comes Out of the White House Press Office?

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Can We Believe Anything That Comes Out of the White House Press Office?

Donald Trump Just Attacked Another Judge

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Good morning.

Last night, a federal judge in Seattle issued a sweeping stay against Donald Trump’s “Muslim Ban.” Soon after, US Customs informed airlines that they could go back to doing things the old way and the State Department announced that it was halting all attempts to implement the immigration executive order.

Seeing all of this, this morning Donald Trump woke up and decided to launch an attack on the judge.

This isn’t the first time he’s attacked a federal judge, and it probably won’t be the last.

More: 

Donald Trump Just Attacked Another Judge

Posted in FF, GE, Green Light, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Donald Trump Just Attacked Another Judge

Donald Trump Is a Serial, Compulsive Liar

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Donald Trump, eight days ago:

Donald Trump, in a legal filing five days later, as reported by the Washington Post’s Philip Bump:

Trump is a serial, compulsive liar. Soon he will be president of the United States.

Jump to original:  

Donald Trump Is a Serial, Compulsive Liar

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Donald Trump Is a Serial, Compulsive Liar

Here’s a Preview of How Donald Trump Could Use Hurricane Matthew to Attack Hillary Clinton

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have announced they are pausing their campaign events while they wait to see if Hurricane Matthew, the Category 4 storm now barreling through the Caribbean, makes landfall in the United States Thursday evening. That doesn’t mean either presidential candidate is expected to remain idle as the storm continues to intensify. In fact, both campaigns are reportedly trying to figure out how to effectively demonstrate strength, without appearing to exploit a potential catastrophe for political points.

Clinton is already taking some heat, after it was revealed her campaign purchased television spots on the Weather Channel ahead of the storm. Trump has so far restricted himself to sending best wishes to residents, urging them to remain safe. But a glimpse of his past remarks during times of disaster offer a preview of how he could respond should Matthew hit land. In the past, he has used hurricanes and other natural disasters as opportunities to attack President Barack Obama and re-up his favorite conspiracy theories:

While it remains to be seen if Trump will stick to his current restraint, if this year has taught us anything, it’s that Trump’s inflammatory statements and his self-congratulations are his most predictable trait. And then, of course, there’s his generosity.

Excerpt from: 

Here’s a Preview of How Donald Trump Could Use Hurricane Matthew to Attack Hillary Clinton

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here’s a Preview of How Donald Trump Could Use Hurricane Matthew to Attack Hillary Clinton