President Donald Trump's Final Days...

[Devius]

Hustler Magazine founder Larry Flynt offered $10 million for information that could lead to President Donald Trump's impeachment.

Flynt bought a full-page advertisement in Sunday's edition of the Washington Post to announce the reward.

"The attempt to impeach Donald Trump will strike many as a sour-grapes plot by Democrats to overturn a legitimate election," the advertisement reads. "But there is a strong case to be made that the last election was illegitimate in many ways — and that after nine tumultuous months in office, Trump has proven he's dangerously unfit to exercise the extreme power accrued by our new 'unitary executive.'"

The advertisement calls out Trump on a series of issues, including his reaction to the Charlottesville rallies, his appointing of family members to positions and his take on global warming.

"Impeachment would be a messy, contentious affair, but the alternative — three more years of destabilizing dysfunction — is worse," the advertisement reads.

Details:
http://www.abc15.com/news/national/l...-dirt-on-trump

[tsunamiSD]

George Will: Trump is turning and turning in a widening gyre

With eyes wide open, Mike Pence eagerly auditioned for the role as Donald Trump’s poodle. Now comfortably leashed, he deserves the degradations that he seems too sycophantic to recognize as such. He did Trump’s adolescent bidding with last Sunday’s pre-planned virtue pageant of scripted indignation — his flight from the predictable sight of players kneeling during the national anthem at a football game. No unblinkered observer can still cling to the hope that Pence has the inclination, never mind the capacity, to restrain, never mind educate, the man who elevated him to his current glory. Pence is a reminder that no one can have sustained transactions with Trump without becoming too soiled for subsequent scrubbing.
A man who interviewed for the position that Pence captured, Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, is making amends for saying supportive things about Trump. In 2016, for example, he said he was “repulsed” by people trying to transform the Republican National Convention from a merely ratifying body into a deliberative body for the purpose of preventing what has come to pass. Until recently, Corker, an admirable man and talented legislator, has been, like many other people, prevented by his normality from fathoming Trump’s abnormality. Now Corker says what could have been said two years ago about Trump’s unfitness.
The axiom that “Hell is truth seen too late” is mistaken; damnation deservedly comes to those who tardily speak truth that has long been patent. Perhaps there shall be a bedraggled parade of repentant Republicans resembling those supine American Communists who, after Stalin imposed totalitarianism, spawned the gulag, engineered the Ukraine famine, launched the Great Terror and orchestrated the show trials, were theatrically disillusioned by his collaboration with Hitler: You, sir, have gone too far.

*****


Inside the ‘adult day-care center’: How aides try to control and coerce Trump

When Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) described the White House as “an adult day-care center” on Twitter last week, he gave voice to a Trumpian truth: The president is often impulsive, mercurial and difficult to manage, leading those around him to find creative ways to channel his energies.
Some Trump aides spend a significant part of their time devising ways to rein in and control the impetuous president, angling to avoid outbursts that might work against him, according to interviews with 18 aides, confidants and outside advisers, most of whom insisted on anonymity to speak candidly.

One defining feature of managing Trump is frequent praise, which can leave his team in what seems to be a state of perpetual compliments. The White House pushes out news releases overflowing with top officials heaping flattery on Trump; in one memorable Cabinet meeting this year, each member went around the room lavishing the president with accolades.
Senior administration officials call this speaking to an “audience of one.”
One regular practitioner is Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who praised Trump’s controversial statements after white supremacists had a violent rally in Charlottesville and also said he agreed with Trump that professional football players should stand during the national anthem. Neither issue has anything to do with the Treasury Department.
Former treasury secretary Larry Summers wrote in a Twitter post, “Mnuchin may be the greatest sycophant in Cabinet history.”

******

For Trump, “Consequences Are Piling Up” with Republicans in Washington

Shortly after noon on Tuesday, after a morning in which President Trump challenged Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s I.Q. in an interview and insulted Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Corker’s diminutive stature in a tweet, I went to meet Ed Rogers, a lobbyist and lifelong Republican. “There’s fires all around,” Rogers told me, even before I sat down.A couple of days earlier, Corker had gone public with an interview in the Times about President Trump, and Corker’s warning that Trump could put the country “on the path to World War III” seemed to have unleashed at least a few other Republicans to register varying degrees of disgust, dismay, fury, and disappointment about the perilous state of affairs in the Trump White House. Rogers, it turned out, was among them.

When I met Rogers, at his usual table in the back of the room at Tosca, the expensive but understated Italian restaurant across the street from his lobbying firm, where he goes to lunch almost every day, he was in no mood to defend Trump. The constant tweeting, the personal attacks on his own team, were taking a toll. “Every week!” Rogers said. “It’s surreal.” Then he paused, almost groaning when he asked, “Why does it have to be this way?”Republicans, I observed, seemed to be finding life under Trump a lot harder than Democrats, and Rogers agreed. “You want to be loyal,” he said. “You want to be a good member of the team.”
Rogers cited his partner Barbour’s dictum for surviving Washington under this volatile new President—sometimes Trump’s gonna help, sometimes he’s gonna hurt—before asking, “When is he going to help? Life is all about the net, not the gross. Where’s the help?” The confirmation of the Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, last spring, often cited as one of Trump’s major accomplishments, “seems like a long time ago,” Rogers said. “And is the totality of Trump still a net plus? Is it going to be a net plus?”

*****

Voters Think Trump Owns His Obamacare Sabotage, Republican Politicians Agree

Trump is basically confessing to lighting the fuse to blow up Obamacare, pointing at the dynamite, and saying “look at that smoldering mess Democrats made.” This is consistent with his past rhetoric on the topic. "I think we're probably in that position where we'll let Obamacare fail. We're not going to own it. I'm not going to own it," Trump said in July.

So… will this work? It’s certainly possible that Trump’s message will resonate with his base. His ability to create an alternate universe and vilify innocents should never be underestimated. But there’s been some polling on this question of whether or not voters will ultimately consider Republicans and President Trump responsible for a system they control and are now intentionally sabotaging. And it’s not great for Trump.

On the key point of who “owns” health care, 60 percent of respondents in the Kaiser poll said it was Trump and Republicans and 28 percent said it was Obama and Democrats.

Though Republican leadership will attempt to spin this decision as one for freedom and liberty, a handful of Republicans have acknowledged that ending these subsidy payments is bad news. Earlier this year, Republican Senate leaders essentially begged Trump to continue issuing the cost saving reduction payments. Chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, Sen. John Thune, literally said in August: "I hope the president will continue to make those payments.” Chairman of the Senate health committee, Sen. Lamar Alexander, said this earlier this year: “Without payment of those cost-sharing reductions, Americans will be hurt.” And last night, Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen tweeted: "Cutting health care subsidies will mean more uninsured in my district.”

*****

Trump’s Mindless Nihilism

The trouble with reactionary politics is that it is fundamentally a feeling, an impulse, a reflex. It’s not a workable program. You can see that in the word itself: it’s a reaction, an emotional response to change. Sure, it can include valuable insights into past mistakes, but it can’t undo them, without massive disruption. As any Burkean conservative will tell you, the present is what you work with. “Home is where you start from,” in T.S. Eliot’s words. The reactionary, like the progressive, never fully grasps this, cannot see the connections that require that present actions are most effective when they build on what is, rather than what was, or, for the progressive, what could be.

Trump is careening ever more manically into a force of irrational fury. I watched his infomercial with Hannity Wednesday night and see a sharp decline even from his previously unhinged and malevolent incoherence. He riffed for a while on how the rise in the stock market since he came to office somehow halves our national debt. He asserted, like an American Erdogan, that no citizen can disrespect our flag, anthem, or country … or else. He claimed that the economy — which a year ago was a “total disaster” — is now a staggering overnight success. He boasted of unemployment numbers he described as fraudulent only months ago. In his interview earlier this week with Forbes, he sounds like someone so stoned he can barely parse a sentence, let alone utter a coherent thought, and whose utter indifference to reality still staggers.
But it’s the impossible reactionary agenda that is the core problem. And the reason we have a president increasingly isolated, ever more deranged, legislatively impotent, diplomatically catastrophic, and constitutionally dangerous, is not just because he is a fucking moron requiring an adult day-care center to avoid catastrophe daily. It’s because he’s a reactionary fantasist, whose policies stir the emotions but are stalled in the headwinds of reality.

[steamjon]

Originally Posted by Devius

Hustler Magazine founder Larry Flynt offered $10 million for information that could lead to President Donald Trump's impeachment.


Details:
http://www.abc15.com/news/national/l...-dirt-on-trump

Something like that could make Trump very angry, he might put Flynt in a wheelchair. Oops too late, someone beat him to it

[Meini Again]

Pres Trump ~ when asked why he didn't mention the death of "4 Green Berets" blamed Obama for never 'writing nor speaking' to families of slain soldiers.

When questioned further in his ad-hoc speech in the Rose Garden..he backtracked quickly...transferring blame to others, as usual, by saying thats what he was told..Obama and other, many other, Presidents didn't write or phone slain servicemen's families. But he said he did both

And his letters went out...OR...would go out...today...or perhaps tomorrow etc...etc...

Since the 4 Serveicemen were killed in Africa, Trump has not mentioned them. In Tweets or in Statements.

In the 10 days since...he has spent 5 Days Golfing at his resorts.Tweeting about Obama / Clintons / GOP Losers ...and so on....

If the reporters in the Rose Garden had guts,perhaps one of them might have asked if he knew ANY NAME of the slain Berets.

Doubt he would...and doubt reporters have those guts ~ anymore....

[steamjon]

Originally Posted by Meini Again

In the 10 days since...he has spent 5 Days Golfing at his resorts.Tweeting about Obama / Clintons / GOP Losers ...and so on....

Too busy tweeting rather than be bothered to write letters to the families. Heck someone else writes the letters all he needs to do is sign them.

If 'Killary' would had been elected his supporters would had blamed her for their deaths.

[philll_77]

Originally Posted by Meini Again

Pres Trump ~ when asked why he didn't mention the death of "4 Green Berets" blamed Obama for never 'writing nor speaking' to families of slain soldiers.

Didn't Drumpf call POWs "losers"? Seems to regard the dead the same way.

[steamjon]

Originally Posted by philll_77

Didn't Drumpf call POWs "losers"? Seems to regard the dead the same way.

Well Trump is a winner.

He spent all those years dodging the draft so he would never end up in a POW camp.

[hound dog]

Such empathy and sympathy from the commander in chief to a grieving widow, whose husband was killed carrying out operations authorized by him.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...cid=spartanntp

Trump cares about nothing and no one but Trump, and he's only interested in others to the extent they can help him achieve his personal goals, getting richer. He isn't fit to be commander in chief, IMO.

[Arturo2nd]

Originally Posted by steamjon

Well Trump is a winner.

He spent all those years dodging the draft so he would never end up in a POW camp.

Despite his best efforts, he will presumably wind up in a cemetery like the rest of us.

[Meini Again]

Sessions, Tillerson and McConnell are abject 'Losers' to borrow a word from Pres Trump.

If Trump is EVER removed from Office, we have the prospect of a multiple liar to replace him. Pence has run errands to aquire some 'status' amongst the bedrock 32-38% Trumpists, but his background of Lying must go against him.

This may be History repeating itself

Nixon wasn't allowed to consider Resignation,by the GOP stalwarts... whilst a more dangerous figure to replace him was his VP ~ Spiro Agnew.
So he went, and the softest, most dense puppet was elevated to VP ~ Ford.

So dumb he can’t fart and chew gum at the same time.

- - as LBJ said of him

These days..... Pence ? As long as he's a lackey and puppet, I doubt Pres Trump will turn on him. And as long as Pres Trump can hold onto the mid-30% he has a workable defence.

Against the GOP backroom/stalwarts, who must be looking at mid-term threats from Bannon, let alone 2020.