Trump II

[Adam L]

This is typical of the mindless speculation that occurs when people who have no clue as to what is actually happening starts wild guesses. Spread this kind speculation around and you end up with a lot of people with really hairbrained ideas about what Trump is or isn't doing.

[stamper]

This is typical of the mindless speculation that occurs when people who have no clue as to what is actually happening starts wild guesses. Spread this kind speculation around and you end up with a lot of people with really hairbrained ideas about what Trump is or isn't doing.

I think they are commenting on what is on the TV or press. An entitlement to do so, otherwise they won't know who to vote for.

[Rob C]

Well, today we had Mr T and the Israeli saga.

Wonder what the next episode will bring; isn't it fun trying to keep up with who might be the next best friend!

Rob C

[Schewe]

This is typical of the mindless speculation that occurs when people who have no clue as to what is actually happening starts wild guesses. Spread this kind speculation around and you end up with a lot of people with really hairbrained ideas about what Trump is or isn't doing.

What are you talking about and to whom? What you wrote is, um, ambiguous (at best).

[Schewe]

Then there's this...

ROBERT REICH: WHAT DID TRUMP KNOW OF THE RUSSIAN PLOT?

The American public deserves to know the answers to at least the first five of these questions, and will then make a judgment on the sixth:

1. Why didn’t President Donald Trump act sooner to fire National Security Adviser Michael Flynn ?

2. What, if anything, did Trump authorize Flynn to tell the Russians before the inauguration ?

3. What other contacts did Flynn and other Trump aides have with Russia before the election?

4. Did Flynn or other Trump aides know of or cooperate with Russia in interfering in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf?

5. If so, did Trump know about or encourage such cooperation?

Which leads inevitably to the last question:

6. If Trump knew or encouraged, will he be impeached?


A mural depicts Donald Trump blowing marijuana smoke into the mouth of Vladimir Putin on the wall of a restaurant in Vilnius, Lithuania on November 23. Robert Reich asks: What did Trump know about his campaign's constant contacts with Russian spies, and did he encourage the contacts?
SEAN GALLUP/GETTY

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

When everything else fails, blame Russia.

Lost the election. Tried the popular vote bitching and moaning. Didn't work. Tried a recount. Didn't work. Tried to flip electoral votes, ended up losing them more than winning.

Russia is the last hope.

[Alan Goldhammer]

When everything else fails, blame Russia.

Lost the election. Tried the popular vote bitching and moaning. Didn't work. Tried a recount. Didn't work. Tried to flip electoral votes, ended up losing them more than winning.

Russia is the last hope.

Russia is a convenient scapegoat but have you listened to any of his press conferences recently?  For some reason they come on when I'm in the car and I listen out of fascination.  He got a rather involved question today from an Israeli journalist and started right off telling the reporter what a wonderful victory he had in the Electoral College and how he proved all the pundits wrong.  Hey, I got over the election results the day after I voted but I guess our President needs to keep repeating it.  Perhaps he is insecure.  I also liked his response last week at the joint PC with Prime Minister Abe when he started riffing on health care and how Obamacare is just terrible for the economy (funny that the stock market under Obama was not reflective of this at all) and that his plan would provide better and cheaper coverage (this I cannot wait to see!!!).  As an American I want our President to succeed but I'm increasingly thinking this guy is like Lt. Commander Queeg, sitting there rattling his marbles.

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

... He got a rather involved question today from an Israeli journalist and started right off telling the reporter what a wonderful victory he had in the Electoral College and how he proved all the pundits wrong.  Hey, I got over the election results the day after I voted but I guess our President needs to keep repeating it...

Yes, that is indeed regrettable.

I have a feeling that the victory surprised him, as if he never actually expected to become a president. It reminds me of Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. The legend has it, if I remember it right, that he started a new religion as a bet with his drinking buddies. I have a nagging suspicion that Trump said one day "You wanna bet I can run for president and win?"

[Schewe]

Russia is the last hope.

I'm ok impeaching him if he collided with his broman Putan. We'll see...

But yeah, he shouldn't be president and he's actually behaving like he doesn't want to be. Pretty sure he didn't think he would be. Pretty sure the world didn't think he would be, or wanted him except apparently Russia.

[Schewe]

Well, this is funny (unless you are a hardcore Trump loyalist)

Watch How the Real Sean Spicer Compares to Saturday Night Live's Parody

Melissa McCarthy has him down pat :~)

[Alan Goldhammer]

Yes, that is indeed regrettable.

I have a feeling that the victory surprised him, as if he never actually expected to become a president. It reminds me of Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. The legend has it, if I remember it right, that he started a new religion as a bet with his drinking buddies. I have a nagging suspicion that Trump said one day "You wanna bet I can run for president and win?"

I have a couple of good Republican friends (I don't discriminate ) who were close to the campaign and they said that the election night returns stunned him.  He fully expected to lose as they thought that they had lost Florida as well as the three rust belt states that they won. 

FWIW (and coming from a lifelong Dem and one who is very active in the party) I saw this coming in late 2015.  It was almost as if it was a coronation of Queen Hillary and she never recovered from what happened when Sanders contested the primaries.  She was never my candidate, really wanted Amy Kloubachar to run but Clinton preempted anyone else who would have won.

[Farmer]

Russia isn't the last hope - it was raised during the campaign but the media failed to push the issue.  Russia is only the "last" in so much as it's the last of the many major stumbles so far.  Lost a top advisor (and Trump is complaining that he would have weathered it if not for someone leaking the facts...yeah, that's exactly the standard you want to set for your national security advisor), despite a Congress and Senate majority, couldn't get confirmation on DoL Secretary, has a press secretary who, I kid you not, states on his Twitter profile "horrible speller".  Really?  When your job is the communicate?  I know he probably intends it as a joke, but it's hardly confidence inspiring.  Multiple misnaming of foreign leaders, including in official press releases, no apologies when he gets the name wrong.

No, not the last, unfortunately.

[pegelli]

Russia is the last hope.

Don't think so, I think Trump is perfectly capable of self destruction without Russia's help 

[Chris Kern]

Lost a top advisor (and Trump is complaining that he would have weathered it if not for someone leaking the facts...yeah, that's exactly the standard you want to set for your national security advisor), despite a Congress and Senate majority, couldn't get confirmation on DoL Secretary, has a press secretary who, I kid you not, states on his Twitter profile "horrible speller".  Really?  When your job is the communicate?  I know he probably intends it as a joke, but it's hardly confidence inspiring.  Multiple misnaming of foreign leaders, including in official press releases, no apologies when he gets the name wrong.

Yup: it's definitely unpresidented.

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

...man with clearly a mental disorder as your president?

Ahmm... about that, from the horse's mouth:

Most amateur diagnosticians have mislabeled President Trump with the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. I wrote the criteria that define this disorder, and Mr. Trump doesn’t meet them. He may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn’t make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder.

The source should be respectable, I hope, at least for some: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/opinion/an-eminent-psychiatrist-demurs-on-trumps-mental-state.html

[Schewe]

Ahmm... about that, from the horse's mouth:

Yep...in the opinion piece (not NYT reporting) the author says:

"Bad behavior is rarely a sign of mental illness, and the mentally ill behave badly only rarely. Psychiatric name-calling is a misguided way of countering Mr. Trump’s attack on democracy. He can, and should, be appropriately denounced for his ignorance, incompetence, impulsivity and pursuit of dictatorial powers.

His psychological motivations are too obvious to be interesting, and analyzing them will not halt his headlong power grab. The antidote to a dystopic Trumpean dark age is political, not psychological."

Well, that's not a ringing endorsement of our President huh?

Did you hear about today's press conference? He thinks his electoral vote was the widest margin since Reagan (Clinton, Bush and Obama beat that total) and the the Travel Ban release was very smooth and the courts are wrong (the 9th circuit has lots of problems). He claims there's no chaos in the White House and everything is running like a ‘fine-tuned machine’. Huh?

Let's see, Flynn is fired, the Labor Secretary nominee Andrew Puzder withdraws and the guy Trump asked to be national security adviser Robert S. Harward, the retired vice admiral and former Navy SEAL, on Thursday turned down the post. The Travel ban is squashed in court–twice and he is at war with both the mainstream media/fake news (except Fox News) and the Deep State. And Russia is just a ruse...

He's sounds like the captain of the RMS Titanic ordering the band to keep playing to try to avoid panic...how did that work out? (truth be told he did help the crew to save 705 survivors–)

Yeah, maybe he's not insane but even this shrink thinks he a danger...dystopic Trumpean dark age

[laughingbear]

Folks outside of the US might not have seen this press conference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00d5zUFeeEk

It is worth watching in deed. Michael Moore commented on twitter:

Never have I been unable 2 fall asleep simply because of watching a press conference. That was the most disturbing thing I've ever seen onTV

I think, what's the difference between Caligula Trump and Sultan Erdogan? Approx 5,217 miles DC-> Istanbul, the rest is marginal, at best.

[laughingbear]

Makes me wonder... does he prepare the 63 million Trumpets for a change of the 1st amendment?

[Farmer]

Oh, we've all seen it - I was just surprised that it was on the News and not the Comedy Channel.

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

Ahmm... about that, from the horse's mouth:

Well, one of the horses anyway.

The source should be respectable, I hope, at least for some: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/opinion/an-eminent-psychiatrist-demurs-on-trumps-mental-state.html

The problem with that is that the diagnosis of mental illnesses is not an exact science. In fact, the Diagnostic Manual of Mental Illnesses is periodically rewritten, and indeed Allen Frances played a prominent role in earlier versions but he started opposing the now current DSM-5 since 2010 with a blog. According to Wikipedia, "He spoke out against the overuse of psychiatric medications—particularly in children; a general trend towards global diagnostic inflation—pathologizing normality; the intrusion of the pharmaceutical industry into psychiatric practice; and a premature attempt to move psychiatry to an exclusively biological paradigm without scientific justification".

So, while he may have good reasons to do so, we must also see his latest statements a bit in in that light. A number of his colleagues as we have read earlier, although they (correctly) won't call it a diagnosis, do point out that his public behavior does match the points on a checklist that would lead to the diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. I'll leave it to the experts in the field to decide.

At any rate, it seems highly problematic to have a person with his personality running the ship. He (or rather his advisor Bannon) seems destined to disrupt other parts of the world in order to come out on top himself. The situation in Israel, the situation in Turkey and Crimea (and potentially the Baltics), the situation in the Middle East and Africa, the return to hostility towards Iran, the breaking up of trade agreements, the discrimination on basis of Faith or origin, the contempt and marginalization of the Judiciary, his under-rating of security concerns by using insecure phones for communication, the internal struggle with the national security services, his undisclosed personal/business ties and dependencies with foreign powers, the contempt for science (and other more factual information), the dismissal of environmental concerns, the list goes on.

Cheers,
Bart