After his Montana speech filled with ridiculous claims, the same lies, and the usual stand-up shtick, Trump tweeted even more of the same absurdities.
There wasn’t much he could do, considering the Pruitt resignation and its bizarre resignation letter.
And the new head of WH comms, Bill Shine, probably had not a lot to say, considering it’s technically his first day on the job and there weren’t any current sex crimes to cover up (yet). His wife, Darla is a piece of work herself, an anti-vaxxer who herself was groped by Roger Ailes, so the taint of Fox News travels well to the WH.
It was a long flight to New Jersey so Trump fired off three nonsense tweets, and perhaps Trump will get a round of golf in tomorrow, #121. The morning tweets should be interesting as will the ones after the round of golf.
In late June, Vanity Fair reported that Darla Shine was concerned that her husband would open up their family to scrutiny by taking a position at the White House. Multiple news organizations confirmed eight days ago that Bill Shine was joining the Trump administration, but Darla Shine’s Twitter account wasn’t deleted until Thursday. Her Twitter feed has been archived by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine several times in the last six years.
In a tweet that HuffPost reviewed but did not screenshot before she deleted her account, Shine wondered how producers were going to make a film about Ailes with actress Charlize Theron playing journalist Megyn Kelly.
In her book, Kelly accuses Ailes of making frequent comments involving sexual innuendo, intimidating her into silence by mentioning how powerful he was and trying to forcibly kiss her. Shine insinuated in her tweet that Kelly’s accusations against Ailes weren’t credible and that his harassment amounted to an “awkward hug.”
In May 2018, Shine tweeted a screenshot, not visible in the Internet Archive, that read, “What a joke this is. Bill Shine built #FOXNEWS everyone currently there knows he was never accused of sexual harassment but too afraid to speak up. So glad my husband isn’t a liar. Karma gets everyone in the end.”
www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Back in actual reality, Trump’s trade nonsense is now being more closely examined and the diaspora crime model followed by Russia and China further reminds us how organized crime is as it always has been, another instrument of state policy.
Economists are nearly unanimous that trade between nations isn’t a “war” in the sense that one country wins and another loses. “Every president since F.D.R. has acknowledged that free trade is a win-win,” said Daniel J. Ikenson, director of the center for trade policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “But President Trump sees it as a zero-sum game with the trade deficit the scorecard. That’s an absurd approach.”
Even if it is seen as a zero-sum game, the United States would come out substantially ahead in a zero-tariff world. That is because, on average, its tariffs are lower than those of its major trading partners — so it would be a net winner if all tariffs vanished.
[...]
“Using tariffs as a bargaining chip makes no sense,” Mr. Ikenson said. “They’re just a tax on the consumer. They invite retaliation.”
That Mr. Trump is simultaneously threatening all of our major trading partners is also puzzling. “I was always taught that if you spread yourself over a dozen fronts, you end up losing on all of them,” Mr. Feulner said. “Why not go after China first, and then turn to whoever you think is the next troublemaker? We’ve caused them all to band together.”
The thing is, organized crime functions de facto as an additional tariff system, however informal, and a politician compromised by organized crime simply adds to the problem. (The term vigorish originates from the Russian word for winnings, выигрыш vyigrysh.) And to Putin, Trump means “America is winning(s) again”.
Trump’s pathology as a wannabe criminal only amplifies the policy imperfections, since his identity as a free-trader only implies that normal operations include criminality like his notions of deals include shake-downs and money laundering.
The problem is that the cost of doing governance is not identical to the “cost of doing business”.
