Thread: President Donald Trump

I hope he is out. As you point out though, he is lighting as many fires as he can before he leaves including avoiding science they don't like.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/24/polit...nce/index.html

Originally Posted by raycarey

it could be argued that's their strategy.

i'm not saying it started out as their strategy...but it very well could be now.

everything is spiraling out of control and some in the administration have decided to use it to their advantage to further their agenda...before it's all over

there are 3 cabinet members (pruitt, zinke, carson) who would have been out on their asses at any other time in US political history...but their corruption and incompetence is hidden by the greater corruption and incompetence of the president.

i suppose pruitt might finally get the axe this week, but he should have been gone a long time ago.

ronny jackson is officially toast.

it will be interesting to see if pruitt survives through the weekend.

good luck with this, spanky:

President Donald Trump on Thursday sought to distance himself from longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen, claiming the New York attorney currently under federal criminal investigation is “really a businessman” who handles only “a tiny, tiny little fraction” of his legal work.

“Let me just tell you, Michael is in business — he is really a businessman, a fairly big business, as I understand it,” Trump told the hosts of "Fox & Friends" in a phone interview. “I don't know his business, but this doesn't have to do with me. Michael is a businessman. He has got a business. He also practices law.”


The president insisted he is “not involved” in a pending civil lawsuit brought against Cohen by porn star Stormy Daniels that seeks to void a $130,000 “hush money” deal Cohen allegedly cut to try to suppress her story of a sexual encounter with Trump in advance of the 2016 presidential election.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/...istance-555127

^The big thing to come from that interview is this bit:

“Michael would represent me, and represent me on some things. He represents me, like with this crazy Stormy Daniels deal, he represented me”

Because remember when a few weeks back he categorically denied having any knowledge whatsoever of Cohen's actions re: Daniels.

Trump obviously doesn't. Habitual liars always have problems remembering their lies.

Originally Posted by AntRobertson

^The big thing to come from that interview is this bit:

“Michael would represent me, and represent me on some things. He represents me, like with this crazy Stormy Daniels deal, he represented me”

Because remember when a few weeks back he categorically denied having any knowledge whatsoever of Cohen's actions re: Daniels.

Trump obviously doesn't. Habitual liars always have problems remembering their lies.

Yes he really put his foot in it there.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...stormy-daniels

when the feds raided cohen's home, office and hotel room, they seized 16 cell phones.

16.

and two of them were blackberrys.

does anyone think cohen is tech savvy enough to have wiped those phones to a degree that the FBI couldn't recover the data?

trump is so fcuked.

In what is surely a first for a news network, the hosts of Donald Trump’s favorite variety show, Fox & Friends, hurriedly ended an interview with the president Thursday morning as Trump began ranting about Robert Mueller and threatening to seize control of the Justice Department. The phoner began pleasantly enough, with Steve Doocy, Brian Kilmeade, and Ainsley Earhardt tossing the president a softball question about his wife: April 26 is Melania Trump’s birthday, a “very, very special day,” the president explained, though the First Lady apparently didn’t get much beyond the shout-out she received on air. “Maybe I didn’t get her much,” Trump admitted nervously, when Kilmeade asked. “I got her a beautiful card. You know, I’m very busy.”The conversation went downhill from there, slowly devolving into ever-longer bouts of furious ranting, as the president was asked about the scandal surrounding his allegedly prescription-happy personal doctor, Ronny Jackson (an “unblemished record,” he said), conservative YouTube celebrities Diamond and Silk (“beautiful women”), and James Comey (“a leaker and a liar”). He praised Kanye West, lamented that Shania Twain had backed away from defending him, congratulated the Republican Party on doing “the thing” in the Civil War, and complained about his treatment on CNN (“I don’t watch them at all,” Trump insisted).

Doocy, Kilmeade, and Earhardt endured the deluge heroically, fidgeting slightly at times, and offering small laughs as they encouraged the president and tried to keep him on track. The interview went off the rails, however, when the Fox hosts asked Trump about the Russia investigation dogging his presidency, and whether he would agree to interview with Mueller:

“Well, if I can. The problem is that it’s such a—if you take a look, they’re so conflicted, the people that are doing the investigation. You have 13 people that are Democrats, you have Hillary Clinton people, you have people that worked on Hillary Clinton’s foundation. They’re all—I don’t mean Democrats. I mean, like, the real deal. And then you look at the phony Lisa Page and [Peter] Strzok and the memos back and forth and the F.B.I.—and by the way, you take a poll at the F.B.I. I love the F.B.I.; the F.B.I. loves me. But the top people at the F.B.I., headed by Comey, were crooked.”

“You look at the corruption at the top of the F.B.I.—it’s a disgrace,” Trump continued, practically yelling, as the Fox hosts stared ahead nervously. “And our Justice Department—which I try and stay away from, but at some point I won’t—our Justice Department should be looking at that kind of stuff, not the nonsense of collusion with Russia. There is no collusion with me, and everyone knows it.”

The hosts exchanged furtive glances as they simultaneously began interrupting the president, insisting that they were out of time, even as Trump continued to shout over them. “Right, all right,” Kilmeade said. “All right,” Earhardt interjected. “O.K.” “We’d talk to you all day but it looks like you have a million things to do,” Kilmeade added. Earhardt smiled: “Thank you so much for being with us.”

As the Fox & Friends control room may have guessed, Trump’s burning anger could come at the expense of his current legal-defense strategy. With Mueller reportedly investigating the president and his associates for obstruction of justice in the Russian collusion probe, Trump’s lawyers have urged him to stay quiet about the special counsel’s work and allow his investigation to go forward. By impugning the F.B.I. and threatening to intervene at the Justice Department, Trump may have just given his adversaries more legal ammunition. He may also have undermined his case in more roundabout ways: at another point, he referred to his longtime lawyer Michael Cohen as having done a “tiny, tiny little fraction of my legal work”—an apparent attempt to distance himself from Cohen, who he admitted represented him in “this crazy Stormy Daniels deal.” Michael Avenatti, Daniels’s lawyer, immediately called the admission a “gift from the heavens” and “hugely damaging”: not only did Trump’s statement suggest he was aware that Cohen had paid hush money to Daniels, it also undercut Cohen’s argument that his communications with Trump, recently seized by the F.B.I., are protected by attorney-client privilege.

Federal prosecutors have argued that Cohen—who is being investigated by the Southern District of New York—is barely a lawyer, and therefore has little evidence to support the contention that his files should be kept out of the F.B.I.’s hands. And indeed, it took next to no time for prosecutors to use Trump’s interview as evidence. Less than two hours later, lawyers from the S.D.N.Y. told a federal judge they no longer objected to a third party determining whether certain documents from the Cohen raid were protected by attorney-client privilege—a claim that Cohen has made vociferously—arguing that if Cohen only conducted a “tiny, tiny little fraction” of legal work for the president, it would ”suggest that the seized materials are unlikely to contain voluminous privileged documents.” One wonders how Trump’s own lawyers, who joined Cohen’s argument last week, are feeling about their client pouring napalm on their defense.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018...ends-interview

45 is rapidly coming unglued. The press has got him calibrated 100%. Throw out the slightest slight at 45 and he takes the bait like a hungry trout.

Originally Posted by Norton

45 is rapidly coming unglued.

i look forward to his meltdown if/when donald jr or jared is indicted.....and while very unlikely it would be amazing to watch his response to ivanka being perp walked into a federal court house.

about those 16 (!) phones...

Either Cohen is working very hard in the lowrises, keeping McNulty and Bunk off of Stringer and Avon’s trail, or he had all those phones to deal with his various troublesome clients who couldn’t seem to stay out of trouble.

Tweet of the day:

For Trump’s lawyers this must be like watching your toddler play in traffic.

Originally Posted by raycarey

i look forward to his meltdown if/when donald jr or jared is indicted.....and while very unlikely it would be amazing to watch his response to ivanka being perp walked into a federal court house.

Have we noticed all 3 have become near invisable of late. I have. I think they see daddy dearest is not someone who is not wise to be too close too at the moment.

we all know that Trump is going to walk out of it, free

he has mossad agents working to protect him

Originally Posted by Norton

Have we noticed all 3 have become near invisable of late. I have.

Jared in particular.

He has gone from the man with the plan to bring peace to the Middle East to the Invisible Boy.

^
apparently he's got something brewing with prison sentencing reform.


but that could just be about self-interest.

For Many, Life in Trump’s Orbit Ends in a Crash Landing

WASHINGTON — Another day, another casualty. Or two.

By the time the sun set Thursday, Dr. Ronny L. Jackson was a failed cabinet nominee whose life had been picked apart for public consumption, and Michael D. Cohen was back in court facing possible criminal prosecution.

A ride on President Trump’s bullet train can be thrilling, but it is often a brutal journey that leaves some bloodied by the side of the tracks. In only 15 months in office, Mr. Trump has burned through a record number of advisers and associates who have found themselves in legal, professional or personal trouble, or even all three.

Half of the top aides who came to the White House with Mr. Trump in 2017 are gone, many under painful circumstances, either because they fell out with the boss or came under the harsh scrutiny that comes with him. Some of the president’s longest-serving aides have left with bruises. His son and son-in-law have hired lawyers and been interrogated. Even his lawyers now have lawyers as they face inquiries of their own.

Proximity to Mr. Trump has been a crushing experience for many who arrived with stellar careers and independent reputations yet ended up losing so much. Rex W. Tillerson ran the world’s largest energy company. David Shulkin was a respected doctor and a “high priest” of the medical world. Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster was an admired warrior. So was John F. Kelly. Jeff Sessions held a safe seat in Congress. So did Tom Price. Now all of them are known for unhappy associations with Mr. Trump.

All of them, of course, had varying degrees of responsibility for the troubles that would ultimately befall them. But like Dr. Jackson and Mr. Cohen, they have all emerged from the other end of Mr. Trump’s world deeply damaged. And their collective fate serves as a cautionary tale for those who might otherwise be tempted to join the president’s team but worry that they, too, might pay a price that would be too costly


Mr. Trump expressed outrage on Thursday about the toll exacted on some people close to him. Dr. Jackson, the White House physician and rear admiral who withdrew as nominee for secretary of Veterans Affairs after accusations of drinking on official trips and badgering his staff, is “an incredible man” whom Democrats were “trying to destroy,” Mr. Trump said on “Fox & Friends.”

The president attributed it to the toxic atmosphere of the capital, saying he warned Dr. Jackson. “I did say welcome to Washington,” he said. “Welcome to the swamp. Welcome to the world of politics.”

Mr. Trump likewise said that Mr. Cohen, his longtime lawyer who paid $130,000 to Stephanie Clifford, the pornographic film actress known as Stormy Daniels, before the 2016 election and now faces a federal investigation, is “a great guy” who “did absolutely nothing wrong” in that matter.

But as he has with other advisers who have gotten in trouble, the president also distanced himself, suggesting that Mr. Cohen was in trouble for business dealings separate from any legal representation he had done for Mr. Trump. “I’m not involved, and I’ve been told I’m not involved,” he said.

Over many decades, people who have entered Mr. Trump’s circle have discovered that they are bit actors in a movie he sees himself starring in.

“People are not people to him, they are instruments of his ego. And when they serve his ego, they survive, and when they don’t, they pass into the night,” said Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter on “The Art of the Deal,” Mr. Trump’s first book. “Ultimately, the fate of anyone who casts their lot with Trump is — you are passing through. And I just can’t think of anybody for whom it is not true.”

Jack O’Donnell, the former president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, and a vocal critic of his former boss, said many people have cycled through his world remarkably quickly without leaving much of an impression on Mr. Trump.

“This is an individual who completely lacks compassion and empathy, and therefore the recycling of people, people crashing and burning, it means nothing to him,” Mr. O’Donnell said. “He might put on a public frown for a day because he’s upset that, in his mind, the admiral got railroaded out. But Trump couldn’t care less about the admiral.”

The president tapped Dr. Jackson because he had come to like him and was impressed by him even though he had little management experience to run the government’s second-largest department. Shortly after his selection, several senior White House officials warned Dr. Jackson that it was a bad idea and that it was likely to end poorly.

But Mr. Trump is a transactional person, and many have made transactional decisions to work for him understanding the risks. For some, it is a sense of public service and duty to country. For others, it is a calculation that the return on investment will be worth it. Indeed, Mr. Cohen has attracted enormous attention over the years as he built business ties because of his affiliation with Mr. Trump.

Some who have come and gone managed to benefit from the experience in their own way despite the ordeal. Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary who was mocked on “Saturday Night Live” and maligned by the president and the news media, nonetheless has received lucrative speaking contracts and has a book coming out in July. Mr. Tillerson and Gary D. Cohn, the former national economics adviser, lost power struggles, but both still have hundreds of millions of dollars to console themselves, and friends say no one should feel sorry for them.

Still, former advisers like Michael T. Flynn, Paul Manafort and Rick Gateshave all been charged with or pleaded guilty to crimes and are looking at prison time.

Others worry they may face the same fate. Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency whose spending and security practices were spotlighted Thursday at a contentious House hearing, may yet lose his job.
Other presidents have seen associates get caught up in investigations or scandals that were highlighted or magnified because of their closeness. Plenty of advisers, aides and friends of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton met untimely ends to their political careers or even went to prison, and critics of both presidents often said they did not seem to care about the consequences to those around them.

The closer someone gets to a president, the harsher the spotlight can be. Many who seek the power and stature of the White House somehow convince themselves that their own foibles or misdeeds will not be exposed, only to learn otherwise, or become intoxicated by their new positions of influence and exercise poor judgment. And Washington can be especially unforgiving. “Here, ruining people is considered sport,” Vincent W. Foster Jr., a longtime Clinton friend and aide, wrote before killing himself in 1993.

Several people who have been close to Mr. Trump over the years say that he is exceptionally good at rationalizing his own behavior to himself, and compartmentalizing the types of personal catastrophes that would leave other people emotionally ravaged.

“I think that loyalty has always been a one-way street with Trump, and he doesn’t really care about the wreckages he engenders as long as he comes out where he wants to be,” said Tim O’Brien, a biographer who was sued by Mr. Trump over a book reporting that Mr. Trump had inflated his net worth.

“Ronny Jackson’s reputation would never have been in play had the president not put him up for this job,” Mr. O’Brien said, adding that in Mr. Trump’s mind, the issue is, “Ronny was great, but Washington is a snake pit.”

Michael D’Antonio, another Trump biographer, said, “Anyone who engages with the president and, before that, with him as a business person, had to practice self-defense even if they were his allies.”

“All that matters to him,” he added, “is what you say and do in the moment in front of him.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/26/u...e=sectionfront

The Don must be doing a good job as his haters just concentrate on him rather than his policies. Must be painful seeing the economy doing well.

I'm guessing that anyone that listened to the last five minutes of fox and fuckwits' phone call with the "president" would clearly see the guy has serious emotional issues that deter him for being effective as anything other than rush limbaugh's replacement.

the whole rant.....

Originally Posted by uncle junior

the whole rant.....

I wonder at what point that rant's like this start getting serious attention for America? The republican's apparently don't care if their party leader sounds like a delusional crackhead going through detox.

^ i doubt he could pass a mental health test. He can't stay on point and just rambles incoherently. Sounds manic.

They don't care as he won the election against all odds without even the support of large parts of the party establishment.

Originally Posted by buriramboy

They don't care as he won the election against all odds without even the support of large parts of the party establishment.

LOL...isn't that what makes it scary?