President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

It is a viable presidency from the moment he's sworn in, let alone after nine months.

 

Good idea. We'd all be better off if Trump took a nap.

 

One thing we learned today is that the New York Times, their executive editor Dean Baquet, and their sources are full of shit.

How many other stories they told us had multiple credible sources were as false as this one?

Attacks from folks such as Priebus prompted New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet to issue this defense: “The Times had numerous sources confirming this story. Attacking it does not make it less true.”

 

Well, first, it is about some of those things. But I'll get back to that in a sec.

Second, I've long believed Trump was a total boob on foreign policy. That's his true weakness, though to the extent he controls anything that happens in the world, I dunno. He clearly knows very little, is incurious about what he doesn't know, has a 7-year-old's grasp of diplomatic etiquette, and will either get us dragged down into an even bigger quagmire in the Middle East or play to, at best, a draw. If you want to make an argument that Donald Trump could get us all blown up and Pence wouldn't, if that's the bar, well, you can set it there and it suddenly becomes a different conversation because, for you, it's nuclear war vs. no nuclear war. At that point, the debate isn't whether Trump triggers nuclear war, but whether any one person would ever bring that about. I say this because, to this point, the idea of total deterrence has actually worked. We haven't had a world war. We've dicked around with a lot of proxy wars - even one that lost us 58,000 people, God rest their souls - but no world war.

So when you say "existential threat," you are weighing the inability of every wicked world leader (including Nixon) to bring about world war because of total deterrence against Trump's apparent ability to do so because of...what?

Third, my bar for American people - that Trump is offensive to sensibilities - is much more accurate, IMO, than your "existential threat" bar. The actual bar may be your bar - I don't think it is - but, even if it actually was, y'know, nobody's doing fallout shelter tests today in the schools.

I'm not mischaracterizing the broad opposition to Trump.

Critics think he's an ass, a bully, a boob, a bull in a china shop, an unrefined man, a wholly ridiculous person, and it is this that rankles most Americans against him, certainly reporters, and very certainly political wonks, because it runs counter what they've come to know as a politician in America: Even for all the negative things that come with a polished bullshit artist, the bullshit artistry nevertheless gives off the impression of mannered control, and it's this impression that allows us to go on with our consumer-driven, distraction-filled, self-actualizing days. What's more, journalists and Washington wonks know it's bullshit, and get to know these bullshit artists on a level their constituents don't, and so it just sort of flows along in a stream like that. Everything's a dog whistle. Everything's a code. Nobody stands for anything except standing wherever they need to stand so as to please one faction or avoid the displeasure of another. It's also so calculated and fake, and when the end result of all that gloss is, say, a piece of shit health care system - be it Obamacare or what's about to replace it - then I do not particularly care how polished these privileged super-strivers come off. I like a coach who wins a press conference. But the great coach wins the actual games.

Trump is an antigen. He is not polished, and though he's full of shit, it's not the pleasurable kind of badinage we've come to expect. I do not like him either. I do not like his...Trumpiness. But I also do not think that all my reasons are as legitimate as some others, and I can also acknowledge that the politicians he beat out - Cruz, Rubio, Jeb, Clinton - couldn't give three shits about the people who put Trump in office. Couldn't give three shits about most of us, to be frank.

Which is why Trump's there. Trump was fully and entirely himself during the campaign. He won anyway. His winning is a referendum on several things, including the efficacy of Fox News and talk radio, but it was also a referendum on how people feel about politicians, and some of that feeling can be traced back to just how shitty they've been at running the country on every level.

That includes Mike Pence.

 

Too bad there isn't a such thing as an electoral morning-after pill, to flush the mutated monster embryo out before it begins to grow.

An extra-bloody period, a messy discharge, then the whole mess could be flushed down the toilet of America's memory.

 

If a lowly community organizer can learn on the job, I don't think it's out of the question to expect the same from a massively successful international business mogul.

 

A few weeks ago in one of my classes, I bummed a coin from a student so I could flip it to see which group went first with its presentation. Female student, hijab-wearer, garden-variety Texas suburban accent ... pretty standard fare for where I teach. I glanced at the coin she gave me and it was a 50-dirham piece (about 10c) from Qatar. A bit of a double-take I did ...

 

Not in Texas.

 

In the aftermath of the false Times article, after which Deputy Director McCabe told the White House the story was not true, the media tried to make a scandal out of the fact that the WH asked the FBI to publicly refute the story.

And, when they declined, they tried to imply that it was because the story was true.

Well, the story wasn't true. The FBI knew this. The White House knew this.

What did the Times know, and when did they know it? Why did they stand by the story, that they should have known was false?

 

He's on the air now, huh?