There’s one simple reason why nothing said by anyone in the White House or on Trump’s cabinet can be trusted or given any credibility when it comes to criticizing him. They’re contractually prohibited from criticizing Trump, his company or his family due to the Non-disparagement agreements that the White House staff has been required to sign.
2. No Disparagement. During the term of your service and at all times thereafter you hereby promise and agree not to demean or disparage publicly the Company, Mr. Trump, any Trump Company, any Family Member, or any Family Member Company or any asset any of the foregoing own, or product or service any of the foregoing offer, in each case by or in any of the Restricted Means and Contexts and to prevent your employees from doing so.
It doesn’t matter that the White House Counsel Don McGahn told the staff signing these agreements that they were unenforceable.
Initially, McGahn told Trump he would not draft or give aides the NDAs because they were not enforceable, White House officials said. But in the end, McGahn created a document that said aides would not divulge any confidential or nonpublic information to any person outside the building at any time, according to three people who signed it.
The process, like much in the West Wing, was haphazard. Dozens of senior aides signed the documents, but some were assuaged before signing by McGahn, who said they were unenforceable. Others, however, said they were never given documents to sign.
So sure, Kelly might claim that he never called Trump an “idiot”, although that’s been reported previously and he didn’t deny saying he’d “gone off the rails to crazytown.” It doesn’t matter what Mattis says, it doesn’t matter that John Dowd now denies that there was a mock interview staged at Mueller’s offices and that he never told Trump he’d “end up in an orange jump suit.”
These denials are contractually required, they have nothing to do with the truth.
It is interesting that Kellyanne Conway has admitted that Woodward is “credible” and his book is “damaging” — but only in private even though she’s the official White House spokesperson.
The Washington Post reports that Conway has privately been telling people that “Woodward was credible and that his book could be damaging.”
Another former Trump official, who spoke with the Post on condition of anonymity, admitted that there is nothing in Woodward’s book that strikes them as untrue or implausible given their own experiences working within the Trump White House.
“I’m not sure why everyone is acting so shocked,” the official told the publication.
Yeah, we shouldn’t be shocked. And also Steve Bannon suggests Trump is superstitious and naive.
“We are going to have another financial crisis — anyone who is smart sees it’s coming,” Bannon told Errol Morris in a series of long interviews for “American Dharma”.
The political strategist claimed a “superstitious” Trump was heading for a crushing defeat in the 2016 election when he took the reins of the campaign.
– Black arts and “jujutsu” –
He admitted he relied on some PR “jujutsu” to rescue Trump after the leak of his “grab them by the pussy” remarks to Billy Bush threatened to sink the campaign.
This included bringing women who had accused Bill Clinton of rape and sexual impropriety to a crucial television debate.
But still Giuliani is already calling Woodward a liar.
It’s not exactly clear what “incident” he’s talking about — it could be someone calling Guiliani a “little baby that needs to be changed” — but this isn’t a surprising pattern.
Trump says that Woodward is a “Dem Operative” — when it’s been long known that Woodward is a Republican. His partner on Watergate, Carl Bernstein, is the Democrat. Woodward actually wrote three books about Obama.
And he claims he never called Jeff Sessions “mentally retarded”…
But then that actually wasn’t new information from Woodward about Trump’s repeated attacks and insults against Sessions and his southern accent.
It’s no secret that President Donald Trump has expressed his frustration with Attorney General Jeff Sessions more than once. According to Politico, Trump criticized Sessions lack of Ivy League education and his Southern accent, saying “that he can’t stand his Southern accent.”
Aides in the White House note that not only Sessions recusal from the Russia investigation began the rift. But that dislike has morphed into other areas. The president doesn’t like that the attorney general doesn’t have a Ivy League education and that Sessions isn’t a capable defender of the president on television — in part because he “talks like he has marbles in his mouth,” White House aides told Politico. Sessions was born in Selma, Alabama, and went to the University of Alabama.
And that’s not all.
A Huffington Post review of Trump’s interviews with shock jock Howard Stern found that Trump regularly called people “retarded,” despite the president’s denials.
What’s more, Axios reporter Jonathan Swan has backed up Woodward’s account of Trump’s insults toward Sessions, and he writes on Twitter that several Trump officials have told him that Trump does, in fact, regularly call his own attorney general “retarded.”
“His denials of his Sessions comments aren’t remotely credible,” writes Swan. “Multiple former senior officials who’ve heard similar versions of them first hand have recounted them to me.”
And then from Huckabee-Sanders we have this straw-man bullshit.
Successful at what? Not crashing the economy yet? His tariff war certainly isn’t helping U.S. companies.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce urged the administration on the eve of Thursday’s announcement not to proceed because the tariffs would hit U.S. manufacturers with higher costs, impede construction-sector growth and hurt job creation in both industries. Expected widespread retaliation from abroad would also threaten the economic momentum the administration has achieved through tax and regulatory reform, the chamber said.
U.S. steel prices are already almost 50 percent higher than those in Europe or China, and aluminum prices have been extremely volatile, the chamber added. The new tariffs “would add substantially to these challenges,” the group said.
“Months ago, the U.S. Chamber warned that alienating our strongest global allies by launching a tit-for-tat trade war would harm the U.S. economy and undermine American leadership,” Myron Brilliant, executive vice president and head of international affairs, said in the statement. “This is even clearer today.”
This has lead to layoffs and closing of manufacturing plants.
Jane Hardy, the chief executive of a company that makes lawn-care equipment, says she had to lay off 75 employees this summer because of President Trump’s trade war. As she fights to keep her southern Indiana business going, Hardy is one of several manufacturers warning the White House that, unless they see relief from the tariffs soon, job losses will mount and factory closures are likely.
Trump has repeatedly said he would protect American farmers in the trade war, last week setting aside $12 billion to help them, but he is facing pressure to extend aid to other industries if the tariffs remain in place or get extended to more products.
[...]
“We are collateral damage in this effort,” Hardy said. “We’re going to be in the same situation as the farmers of needing to save U.S. manufacturing.”
[...]
“The global steel costs have risen substantially, and in particular in the U.S., they have reached unexplainable levels,” said Whirlpool chief executive Marc Bitzer when the company reported disappointing earnings. Trump put tariffs on foreign washing machines in January thinking it would boost the fortunes of companies like Whirlpool, but the steel tariffs have canceled out the benefits.
So that’s not exactly a success, not yet. Not when Canada is ready to walk away from continued talks on NAFTA and China issues $60 Billion in retaliatory tariffs.
Trump likes to say that unemployment is the “lowest ever”, but the fact is that it has only improved by 0.8% while he’s been in the White House while it improved by 6.0% while Obama was President.
source: tradingeconomics.com
He likes to say he’s created more jobs for Black Americans than Obama did.
This president, since he took office, in the year and a half that he’s been here, has created 700,000 new jobs for African-Americans. That’s 700,000 African-Americans that are working now that weren’t working when this president took place. When President Obama left after eight years in office — eight years in office — he had only created 195,000 jobs for African-Americans. President Trump, in his first year and a half, has already tripled what President Obama did in eight years.”
But that was completely wrong because President Obama actually created 3 Million jobs for African-Americans during his Presidency, not just 195,000.
Trump’s first year in office also didn’t create as many jobs as Obama last year in office.
Trump wasn't in office yet when the Labor Department collected the data used in January 2017 jobs report, so for the sake of comparison it makes sense to exclude the first month of the year. But in the remaining 11 monthly jobs reports, employers added 1.84 million jobs, according to the December jobs report released Friday. That compares to 2.09 million jobs added in Obama's last 11 months in office.
Even if you just look at full-year numbers, the 2.06 million jobs added in 2017 falls short of the 2.24 million jobs created in 2016, Obama's last full year in office.
Trump likes to claim that wage growth is the “best ever” but that isn’t true either.
source: tradingeconomics.com
He likes to say that this quarters GDP growth rate of 4.1% is greater than anything Obama reached, but that’s a lie, particularly since the previous three quarters GDP growth was less than 3%. One good quarter, which in this case was largely driven by a panic sale in soybeans in anticipation of his tariffs, don’t really set the overall trend.
source: tradingeconomics.com
Trump likes to say that African-American unemployment is at it’s lowest point in decades, and it is but it’s also still twice as high as unemployment for whites and the wage gap between black and white citizens is increasing, not shrinking.
Although the earnings gap between the typical white and black man began narrowing from 1940, the trend stopped in the mid-1970s. Many assume that the earnings gap then stayed constant, but it has in fact widened. Today the difference is as large as it was in the 1950s.
That is one result from a recent working paper by the economists Patrick Bayer of Duke University and Kerwin Charles of the University of Chicago. Previous studies of racial wage gaps only examined those in work. That understates the problem because a staggering number of prime-age black men are not—35% compared in 2014 with 17% of whites (see chart 1). Much of this difference is due to mass incarceration. Nearly 8% of prime-age black men did not work because they were institutionalised—the vast majority in prison—compared with 1.5% of whites. The elevated rates of workforce non-participation and unemployment for black men could also be explained by employers’ reluctance to hire applicants with criminal records.
Attorney General Sessions has completely shutdown the efforts by the DOJ to enforce Civil Rights protections for the citizens against potentially biased and bigoted police policies.
In a speech before the conservative Federalist Society's National Lawyers Convention, Sessions described an internal Justice Department memo he signed prohibiting his department from issuing “improper” guidance documents. According to the document, “Effective immediately, Department components may not issue guidance documents that purport to create rights or obligations binding on persons or entities outside the Executive Branch (including state, local, and tribal governments). The document also stated the Justice Department will no longer issue guidance that “effectively bind private parties without undergoing the rulemaking process.”
Behind this bureaucratic language is an attack on the civil rights legacy of the Obama-era Justice Department. Throughout the Obama administration, the Department of Justice worked with state and local governments to protect civil rights and liberties by suggesting practical ways, for example, to eliminate gender bias in policing, legally enforce fines and fees, and dismantle the school to prison pipeline. Sessions has indicated that he may “repeal and replace” these policies, which will roll back important efforts to ensure equal protection for all under the law.
Meanwhile, the deficit which had been massively declining under Obama has now done this on track to grow back up to nearly $1 Trillion by 2019.
The CBO says that the Federal Debt is headed to the highest levels since World War II.
These are the things Trump likes to claim are his “successes”, when just about each one of these measurements isn’t nearly as good at what was already happening under Obama and many are significantly worse.
That’s without mentioning the utter chaos that his Muslim travel ban and “zero tolerance” and family separation border policies have created with almost 500 children still not reunited with them parents over a month after the deadline, then there’s the risk that his EPA policies are placing the health and lives of millions of Americans...
Using the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's own numbers, two Harvard scientists have calculated that 80,000 more lives will be lost per decade if President Donald Trump's administration fulfills its plans to roll back clean air and water protections.
The researchers, terming their tally "an extremely conservative estimate," also estimated that the repeal of regulations will lead to respiratory problems for more than 1 million people. Their essay was published Tuesday in the authoritative Journal of the American Medical Association.
And the sabotage that he’s been implementing on the Health Care system which has been driving people away from having care.
The Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit foundation focused on health-care issues, announced last week that the rate of working-age Americans without health insurance in the group’s annual survey rose to 15.5 percent, up about three percentage points since 2016. Things are worse in the 19 holdout states, such as Virginia, that have refused to expand their Medicaid programs: The rate of uninsured working-age Americans hit 21.9 percent in those areas, up nearly six percentage points over two years. Nationally, the spike has been particularly bad at the modest end of the income scale, rising nearly five percentage points since 2016 for low-income, working-age Americans.
Obamacare critics regularly describe all problems as the inevitable result of a poorly designed law. But the numbers suggest that the critics’ sabotage efforts are to blame. After impressive declines during President Barack Obama’s second term, the fund found that the uninsured rate increased in both of the years Mr. Trump has been in office. During the campaign, Mr. Trump regularly complained that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) left too many Americans uncovered. The result of nearly a year and a half of Mr. Trump’s leadership is 4 million people added to that group.
His effort to denuclearize North Korea are such a failure that even he chose not send Mike Pompeo for his latest round of meetings. He’s cancelled the Iran Nuclear deal on the theory that he could magically get a “better” one — but that hasn’t happened. He’s canceled U.S. participation in the Paris Climate Deal, but dozens of states and cities have stood up to continue pushing to reach the same goals as were laid out under Paris without the Federal Government.
On item after item it actually amazing how NOT successful Trump has been during his first year and half, there’s no genius level intellect involved here. He’s not deftly balancing the challenges of his office with skill and ease.
He’s struggling. He’s flailing. It doesn’t matter who called who what names, when. The point is that his staff is paddling as hard as they can to keep his administration off of the rocks — that’s what Woodward’s book displays. Trump isn’t nimbly navigating the rough waters of the chief of state, he’s careening from crisis to crisis with raging outbursts of frustration and near-obsession behind the scenes.
He’s barely hanging on by his fingernails.
And if his staff happens to slip up just once, and let one of his massively deluded ideas actually get implemented — heaven help all of us.
However the last thing they can do — contractually — is tell us the truth about any of that.