Week seven of Lord Dampnut’s regime now gives us his Friday snit, kicking Priebus and Bannon off Air Force One resulting in a Saturday 530am tweet binge that now seems to have his lordship cornered.
Unlike other WH tendencies to focus-group messaging, Lord Dampnut seems only able to trust his own counsel much like his staff tries to keep his Android phone away from him.
The entire tweet-storm seems calculated to draw attention away from another rendezvous with rich Russians this past weekend. The real story is that “any serious investigation of #TrumpRussia will find enough intel to end Trump’s admin and send people to jail.”
E.J. Dionne thinks the Trump experiment has reached an early tipping point.
This time the stakes are raised for the possibility of some message-diverting military action.
- If he was not wiretapped, he invented a spectacularly false charge.
- And if a court ordered some sort of surveillance of him, on what grounds did it do so?
Obama, through a spokesman, said the charges were “simply false.” On Sunday afternoon, the New York Times reported that FBI Director James Comey had asked the Justice Department to publicly reject Trump’s claim. It appears that Trump issued his wild tweet storm Saturday morning largely on the basis of reports in conspiracy-minded right-wing media.
He signaled his lack of evidence first by reportedly pushing his White House staff to ransack sensitive intelligence information to find support for his claim. Then on Sunday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Trump wanted Congress to look into the matter and that the administration would offer no further comment…
The crucial issue is how all this affects our national security. But this saga also reminds us that a crowd claiming to place “America First” does not really believe its own slogan. They place only about half of America first, the part that opposed Obama and supported Trump. When it comes to the other half, they feel only contempt.
This is why Russian interference in our democracy appears to matter far less to Trump than saving his own skin. It’s also why he could compare Obama unfavorably to a foreign autocrat during the 2016 campaign. He said Vladimir Putin had been “a better leader than Obama because Obama’s not a leader” and ominously praised Putin for having “very strong control over a country.”
What do such statements have to do with American patriotism as we have traditionally understood it?
And now Trump has accused Obama of violating the law.
There will be dog-wagging...
Trouble for Trump continued to spiral over the weekend. Early Saturday, he surprised his staff by firing off four tweets accusing Obama of a “Nixon/Watergate” plot to tap his Trump Tower phones in the run-up to last fall’s election. Trump cited no evidence, and Obama’s spokesman denied any such wiretap was ordered.
That night at Mar-a-Lago, Trump had dinner with Sessions, Bannon, Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly and White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, among others. They tried to put Trump in a better mood by going over their implementation plans for the travel ban, according to a White House official.
Current military planning must be interesting given the “screw-the-pooch” outcome of the recent Yemen raid.
There would be no faster way to change the subject than to find a way to use military power in some surgical fashion.
And there is no one closer to Trump substantively than his counselor Steve Bannon, who has been using his creative energy in recent years with nonfiction agitprop to create anxiety about the need to support apocalyptic anti-globalism.
In his documentary films and his stewardship of Breitbart News, Bannon has warned against the “nihilistic destruction of everything the American people care for.”
Bannon sees the world as a cage-match clash of civilizations and has already placed his mark on the Muslim ban and the need to withdraw from international trade agreements.
E.J. Dionne even gets to the nub of Beltway wisdom that may have now reached the moment of what scientists call incommensurable, where there are just too many anomalous results from repeated hypothesis tests. In this case the upcoming months could feature domestic and foreign policy choices similar to the Lady or the Tiger.
Let us come to terms with the fact that we are playing a game of “Liar’s Poker” (see Michael Lewis’ wonderful book of the same name, about the author’s time in Wall Street, for the rules of the game) with the new Trump administration.
Granted, the stakes are merely the welfare of the country, the fate of the constitution and the soul of the nation; but still, it would behoove us to come up with a winning strategy.
"Remember Chernobyl? When news broke that the Soviet nuclear reactor had exploded, Alexander called...Instantly in his mind less supply of nuclear power equaled more demand for oil, and he was right.
His investors made a large killing. Mine made a small killing.
Minutes after I had persuaded a few clients to buy some oil, Alexander called back. "Buy potatoes," he said. "Gotta hop.
"Then he hung up.
Of course. A cloud of fallout would threaten European food and water supplies, including the potato crop, placing a premium on uncontaminated American substitutes."
“He hopped about like a small child on Christmas Eve. What he wanted from Santa was the sack. He had already accepted a better job at another firm.
He had intended to quit Salomon at the beginning of the week, but seeing he might be fired instead, he waited and held his tongue, hoping to receive a golden handshake.
The severance payments were indeed generous and based on tenure.
My friend had been with Salomon for seven years and, if fired, stood to receive several hundred thousand dollars."
Source: Liar's Poker
www.businessinsider.com/...
(#unholytrinity = Pence/Ryan/Priebus)