Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

Usually wrong but never in doubt

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

“Squeaker” McCarthy

The GOP couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

In my day, never was longer.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

I really should read my own blog.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

You are here: Home / Politics / Crazification Factor / And shorty got low low low low

Reader Interactions

114Comments

  3. 3.

    Frankensteinbeck

    The base still loves him. They worship him. He is sticking it to the browns and telling everyone who ever told them they weren’t inherently superior that we’re not the boss of him. But I’m hoping A) enough mushy people or non-extreme bigots will reach a point they can’t tolerate anymore, and mostly B) he’s pissing off people with any liberal tendencies SO BAD that the politically disconnected have become connected and will stay that way.

  4. 4.

    Ronnie Pudding

    Trump’s support among his base – and among self-identified Republicans – is never going to drop. The issue will be how much the GOP shrinks.

  5. 5.

    ? Martin

    I think he lost Chuck Todd a long time ago.

    He does seem to be holding on reasonably well with Republicans, which I have to assume means that any Republican that doesn’t approve has become a Democrat.

  8. 8.

    jl

    Patraeus out of consideration. Wanted his own staff and some assurance of coherent policy.
    Man, these military big shots are real prima donas, aren’t they? Who do they think they are? They aren’t rich. How many resort complexes and golf courses have they run, anyway?

    Apparently there is some Trump appointee named McFarland who is allowed to dictate terms for everything and is nixing the requests. I have no clue who she is.

    https://twitter.com/nycjim/status/832793903032049664

  12. 12.

    Yarrow

    @jl: He also wanted to “impose discipline on the process.” I think discipline goes against Trump’s usual way of doing things.

  13. 13.

    Roger Moore

    He won’t really have to start worrying until his approval among Republicans gets close to 50%. That’s when R Congresscritters are going to start wondering if they’d do better by attacking him than by standing by him.

  14. 14.

    Kurt Montandon

    The 27%ers (remember that term?) will back Trump right down to his eviction after Impeachment. They only care about oppressing non-whites, gay-bashing, gun-fondling, and corporate profit worshiping at any expense.

  15. 15.

    efgoldman

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    he’s pissing off people with any liberal tendencies SO BAD that the politically disconnected have become connected and will stay that way.

    So far, he’s unleashed a tide of activism and involvement that I’ve never seen before – and I was already an adult during the Vietnam protests.

  18. 18.

    jl

    @? Martin: Saw this Pew research piece on history of recent presidential approval ratings. I am less impressed by 84% GOP approval rating. Seems like GOPers always have about 80+ percent approval of their successful candidates. Didn’t help HW or Dub much.after they messed up.

    In First Month, Views of Trump Are Already Strongly Felt, Deeply Polarized
    http://www.people-press.org/2017/02/16/in-first-month-views-of-trump-are-already-strongly-felt-deeply-polarized/

    Edit: what I notice is very low approval rating for Frump among independents compared to anyone going back to Reagan.

  21. 21.

    Mary G

    @jl: When even the guy that’s still on probation for actually doing the thing you slammed your opponent for doing when she didn’t won’t work for you, you are in the gutter. I hope he does hire Bolton, because it would serve him right.

  23. 23.

    efgoldman

    @Mike in NC:

    Maybe Chuck Todd got so buried in hate mail that he finally decided that he had to stop playing “both sides do it”.

    Maybe he’s seeing CBS eat NBC’s lunch, dinner and midnite snack on the lying and incompetence. Or maybe his bosses are.

  25. 25.

    mai naem mobile

    @jl: KT McFarland had some bit position during Reagan and was a FOX pundit. El Dumbo 45,no doubt, thinks she looks like the position because of how she looked on teevee. Thank god El Dumbo didn’t have to vote for FDR because he would have thought he didn’t look presidential and Eleanor was a 6 not a ten. I still cannot get over people voting for this man child RainMan moronic asshole conman.

  27. 27.

    khead

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    But I’m hoping A) enough mushy people or non-extreme bigots will reach a point they can’t tolerate anymore

    Gonna be a while before we get there. Not enough folks are paying attention yet. You got it right with “The base loves him” with respect to the press conference.

  30. 30.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @jl: She is apparently a Trump family connection who is being given this job so that she can be an ambassador in a couple of years.

  31. 31.

    danielx

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    And won’t get it, because there is but one King Donald I…and…he…does…share…power.

    Most especially with anyone who could in any way appear more competent than he, which would not be an achievement requiring a lot of intellectual heavy lifting. Forget the NSA position for a minute; Donald Trump will never tolerate a strong White House chief of staff because such a person would be a threat to his ego.

    He is emotionally unable to tolerate subordinates who are perceived as more competent/stronger than he is, which – again – does not set a very high bar.

  32. 32.

    efgoldman

    @Kurt Montandon:

    The 27%ers (remember that term?) will back Trump right down to his eviction after Impeachment.

    Roughly a quarter of those polled supported Tricksie Dicksie Nixie when he got on the helicopter.

  33. 33.

    scav

    Here are some additional takes on the Gallup poll. This one has breakout by party and for multiple presidents (via NBC) and a pure temporal comparison of presidents (Gallup).

    Comparing the trend lines in that last is interesting.

  35. 35.

    jl

    @mai naem mobile: OK, thanks. So, Frump appointed this McFarland person on non-existent qualifications and is now letting her run the NSC like a loony and incompetent convenience store manager. Makes sense in Frumpworld..

  37. 37.

    Mike in NC

    This past week USA Today polled readers and it gave Caligula a 55% Republican approval and 13% Democratic approval, where I was expecting more like 90%R and 5%D.

  38. 38.

    SiubhanDuinne

    Trump’s approval rating is converging downwards towards the crazification factor.

    Oh, how I would love him to plateau out at 27%.

  41. 41.

    Sab

    @NotMax: The base is all that’s left in the party. My mother was a rocksolid Republican from when she voted for Eisenhower until she wouldn’t vote for Shrub. She voted for Obama. I miss her every day but I am so glad she didn’t live to see Trump.

  42. 42.

    ? Martin

    @scav: You want to know something really scary? At some point Trump will ask how Bush got his approval up to 90% and why can’t we do that too? What the fuck do you think his flunkies like KT McFarland and Bannon and Miller will tell him?

  44. 44.

    Mary G

    Just read an article on K.T. McFarland, the stumbling block that Harward and Petraeus refused to work with. She is batshit insane and mean.

    “If I Had One Word to Describe My Sister, It Would Be ‘Evil,'” Says McFarland’s Brother

    Her other brother had AIDS and she refused to go see him when he was dying.

    “Shortly after she discovered Mike had aids, she wrote her parents lengthy, angry, almost Gothic letters in which she outed her brother, blamed her father for his troubles as well as those of her and her other siblings, and cut off contact with her parents.”

    “Have you ever wondered why I have never had anything to do with Mike and have never let my daughters see him although we live only fifteen minutes away from each other?” she wrote. “He has been a lifelong homosexual, most of his relationships brief, fleeting one-night stands.”

    What a terrible human being she is.

  45. 45.

    efgoldman

    @Mary G:

    I hope he does hire Bolton, because it would serve him right.

    But would it serve US right? Bolton is fucking crazy. I can easily imagine him cooking data and going off on his own to start a war.

  47. 47.

    frosty

    Not converging, which would imply leveling out and approaching an asymptote. No, what I see is better described as “plunging”.
    .

  49. 49.

    Roger Moore

    @danielx:

    He is emotionally unable to tolerate subordinates who are perceived as more competent/stronger than he is, which – again – does not set a very high bar.

    But I thought he was the smartest, most competent person in the universe. He couldn’t possibly be worried about subordinates being more competent than he is, since he’s so perfect and everything.

  51. 51.

    jl

    @SiubhanDuinne: Dub got down to 22 percent. Trump can beat that easy. Remember that the toxic goof hasn’t been able to get around to actually doing anything yet. Sure, a vile but botched and stayed executive order, and some executive orders that do much less than advertised.

    I think he will completely botch every single thing he tries to do, from what we’ve seen so far.

  52. 52.

    ? Martin

    @SiubhanDuinne: He’ll go lower. Mark my words. This is pretty much the height of his competency, when he still has a lot of Obama holdovers and career civil service people. They’ll keep leaving, Trump will keep hiring the functionally insane, and the civil service staff that are willing to jump into the flaming dumpster will statistically be pretty shit. He’s still in his honeymoon with the public and media, the quasi-sensible Republicans that joined on thinking they could bring order will discover they can’t and leave, and it’s only a matter of time before some shit hits some fan and rather than get the clusterfuck that was the Katrina response, we’ll get nothing from an agency that has been gutted to the studs filled with people that got the job because they once hooked Trump up with a hot fuck.

  53. 53.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @efgoldman:

    Were you working in radio during the Watergate hearings/impeachment/resignation? I was runnng afternoon board/hosting afternoon concert at that time, and my main memories are listening tensely for NPR’s cue that they were about to break away or the day’s hearings were about to conclude. I usually had a couple of short musical selections cued up, as well as two or three varied lengths of PSA carts, to fill the time until All Things Considered came on the air. There was nothing predictable about those days, and NPR gave us very little notice.

  54. 54.

    efgoldman

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Incoherent rage. I just lost it. I can’t even.

    That’s really, really not like you. Remember the old Roman saying: Illegitimi non carborundum
    Have a vanilla brandy

  55. 55.

    Yarrow

    @Mary G: Holy crap. She’s a right piece of work. I know families can be complicated but that’s certifiable crazy right there. The mean kind of crazy.

  61. 61.

    Yarrow

    @scav: That’s very interesting. Looks like Trump is the only president on the board (starts with Truman) to start out with approval ratings less than 50%.

  62. 62.

    efgoldman

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Bolton will say no over McFarland

    This whole clusterfuck reminds me of one of my favorite Shel Silverstein songs/poems.

    It’s just because — Liz got around to Nicky Hilton,
    And Michael Todd and Wilding…that made three.
    And she got around to Fisher,
    And she got around to Burton,
    So I’m certain that she’ll get around to me.
    So I’m sittin’ here just waitin’ in the drugstore
    As confident and happy as can be,
    And I never go on dates.
    I just sit right here and wait,
    ‘Cause I know she’s got to get around to me.
    Someday, I know she’s got to get around to me!

  64. 64.

    Roger Moore

    @Yarrow:

    Looks like Trump is the only president on the board (starts with Truman) to start out with approval ratings less than 50%.

    Of course all but one of the others started out with a majority of voters being willing to vote for them.

  65. 65.

    Yarrow

    Stuff like this pisses me the hell off:

    Trump’s sons Donald & Eric will be in Dubai Saturday to open Trump golf course. We’ll pay the Secret Service costs. https://t.co/jz4L7RDxfT pic.twitter.com/wNALPhhyJQ— Jim Roberts (@nycjim) February 18, 2017

    Why is this sort of thing not getting attention?

    Related: Are Trump’s properties, including the rebranded hotel chain Scion, being boycotted effectively? Has anyone seen any data on that?

  68. 68.

    Another Scott

    @efgoldman: Pretty good recollection.

    Gallup had Nixon at 24% approval in August 1974.

    That graph is kinda interesting. He wasn’t that far from 25% approval for nearly a year before he resigned, but the percentage of people who said he should resign rose month by month (except for a brief dip) for over a year.

    IOW, people hated him for a long time, but it still took a long time before he was forced to go.

    HTH.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  69. 69.

    efgoldman

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    Were you working in radio during the Watergate hearings/impeachment/resignation?

    No, I was more or less running a small record company.
    I had stereo components in my office, and a local college station ran gavel to gavel hearings. Plus PBS did a recap every night.

  70. 70.

    efgoldman

    @Ruckus:

    he knows he’s full of shit.

    I honestly don’t think he does. He is the least self-aware person I’ve ever seen – considerably less than my granddaughter.

  72. 72.

    Ruckus

    @Another Scott:
    Nixon was a clusterfuck of epic proportions but this is so far beyond that, that new words will have to be invented to describe how big and exactly what kind of clusterfuck it is.
    I’m just wondering if enough people will finally notice that government is not the problem, shitty republican government is the problem.

  74. 74.

    ? Martin

    @Ruckus: Boy, it’s pretty rapid. The Comey meeting today is big. Intelligence committee met with him for 2 hours, wouldn’t even acknowledge they met with Comey. Wouldn’t tell their own staff they met with Comey. About the only comment we have from the meeting is this:

    Warner also said the committee has put in place a process to ensure the White House does not destroy documents lawmakers need for their investigation.

    If I had to guess, they have something on Trump. There are no leaks on this, and everything else has leaked like crazy.

  75. 75.

    Ruckus

    @efgoldman:
    Oh he knows. He would never admit it, to anyone, including himself. But he knows.
    I volunteered as a mental health counselor for nearly 4 yrs, we were trained to tell the difference between someone who just needed someone to act as a sounding board and someone who is not normal and some one who is dangerous. But one thing was always clear if someone is basically functional, they know. They may lie about everything to everyone (sound familiar?) including themselves, but they know. And while he is a lot of messed up in the head (a whole fucking lot of messed up) he is functional. Not much more than that now but still functional. He knows. But he has been getting away with lying about everything for so long that there is no way he can do anything else. I’d bet that’s why he ran, that and having to prove that he’s better than the black man that actually is about a million billion percent better than him, as a human being and at everything else.

  76. 76.

    West of the Rockies (been a while)

    Anyone see Real Time tonight? I’m not a violent man, but I would smile if something terrible, really terrible happened to Yia Mopotopolis or whatever the hell his name is.

  78. 78.

    Sab

    My sister in Asia (she has been there since last summer) just texted me that the news there from here is weird and terrible and she hopes it isn’t true. Sigh. I told her my dog died.

  80. 80.

    danielx

    @Roger Moore:

    But I thought he was the smartest, most competent person in the universe. He couldn’t possibly be worried about subordinates being more competent than he is, since he’s so perfect and everything.

    Well, of course, but remember i said ‘perceived’. Such perceptions can only come from (naturally) biased/lying/fake media sources. Precisely because of such misconceptions, those who are perceived to disagree with the smartest, most competent etc must be presumed to be not only wrong but egregiously, willfully, treasonably* wrong. That being the case, why would that smart, competent leader keep such people around, or hire them in the first place?

    Damn I’m good. These miserable fascist bastards should be paying me.

    *Should be a word if it’s not.

  82. 82.

    eyelessgame

    I do want to know what’s up with Rasmussen. They’re always right-angled but they’re just polling a completely different country than Gallup is.

  83. 83.

    Doug R

    Why are we so fixated on his base? There’s WAY more of us than them. We started with at least 2.8 MILLION more.

  87. 87.

    Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)

    When I lived in Honduras, I shared a big house with a bunch of other teachers. Most of us were kids in our middle 20’s, though there was one guy who was 42. Anyway, at the beginning of year two, there was a new teacher, a 55 year old woman named Peggy who was in the house with us. There were four bedrooms. The 42 year old guy had one, Peggy had another, two 26 year olds who had gotten married the weekend before they had come down had another and I shared the last one with another 25 year old guy. I was kind of put out because only the 42 year old and I had been there the year before, so we should have had our same rooms as the year before. He got his, but Peggy got there a day or two before I did and took my old room, which was the best room, since it was on the northeast corner and the two outer walls were screens starting about three feet up from the floor all the way to up the ceiling. I fucking loved that room. I still miss it.

    Anyway, Peggy, it turned out, was hard to live with. She liked bossing us around, and, as young, clueless kids, we were less than enthusiastic about being told what to do all the time. One day she came in as I was making lunch after school and told me I was making my sandwich the wrong way. I told her I didn’t care, and she seemed pissed off by my answer. That was what she was like, always trying to get us to do everything her way.

    Well, one Friday night, it began raining. It rains hard down there. Like you know how here when you look out at a thunderstorm and say, “there’s no way it could ever rain any harder.”? Well, that’s what it does, only it does it for three days without stopping. Anyway, that evening, we were all at the house hanging out, and most of the other teachers, who were almost all also our age, were at the house, and we were drinking beer and playing music, and the two guys who played guitar were playing and we were making up songs about the headmaster, and I had some guaro, and we were mixing that with orange juice, and we were all having a great old time.

    And then Peggy comes down, and she asks if she can have a drink. We had seen her earlier that afternoon, out with two Americans she had met, and they were having lunch, and we saw them drinking wine, and when she came in and asked for a drink, she was already a little buzzed, we could tell. And we were thinking, “Aw, yeah, Peggy’s cutting loose! Maybe she’ll lighten up! This is great!” So we all had a great old time. And then when we went to bed, she had trouble getting up out of her low slung seat and we had to help her up, and we were laughing about how she was maybe at last going to fit in a little.

    And then the next morning Saturday, it was still raining. And we were all still stuck inside. And she came down that afternoon, still drunk, and had another. And we were laughing about how, yeah, now we’re all going to get along now that Peggy has learned at last how to have some fun. And then came Sunday. And Peggy was still drunk. And still wearing the same clothes she had had on Friday. And we began to wonder what the hell was going on. And on Sunday night, I was the last one to bed, and I was in the kitchen brushing my teeth, since that’s where the water bottle was and I didn’t even brush my teeth out of the tap, and Peggy came down and asked if I still had any guaro left, and wanted to know if she could have some. And it really kind of took me off my stride, a Sunday night, we had a week of school beginning in the morning and she was asking for guaro. And I was too knocked off my stride to do anything but give it to her.

    And then on Monday, she didn’t show up to school, as by then we had been thinking she wouldn’t. So after school, we all went straight home (it had stopped raining early that morning t find out whether Peggy was all right, and when we got there, she was gone. We went in her room and found four bottles of vodka in the trash, empty. So by now, we knew this was kind of a huge deal. There were three of us who had come home. The other two, the married kids, went out on their bikes to look for Peggy, since her bike was gone and we were worried she’s get hurt riding around drunk, and I went to school to get the headmaster and tell him what was happening and bring him to the house. Turns out the chaplain that year was a 59 year old guy who was a recovering alcoholic, so he came, too.

    We got back to the house, and they’d found Peggy, still wearing Friday’s clothes, as she was coming back with her bike basket full of more liquor. They were up in her room with her when we got there. SO Sam the chaplain went up to see here while the rest of us waited downstairs, and he came back about five minutes later and told us that she told him that he could go fuck himself, and that A.A. could go fuck itself. So Orlando, the headmaster, went up and told her that she could stay on if she didn’t drink, or she could leave and go back to Florida and drink, but she couldn’t stay if she wanted to drink. So she asked him how soon she could leave. And he took her downtown to the American Airlines office and changed her ticket, and the next morning she left and went back home. (And I got my room back that afternoon when I came home from school.)

    So, of course, as we had learned, she was an alcoholic who had just stopped but had never gotten any help. And we had no clue. None of us had grown up with drinkers, so we didn’t know what we were doing when we gave her her drinks on Friday. Sam later told us that dry drunks, as he called them, often feel like they have to tightly control everything around them to keep from falling back into their own ways. That was why she was so hard to deal with. And the situation she had gotten herself into was about the worst she could have chosen for somebody with her problems.

    But the thing that I always think about is what it was like that weekend. We watched somebody who seemed to be basically functional, if rather tightly wound, slowly degenerate before our eyes. I always said it was like one of those vampire movies where at the end the vampire dies, and you watch him wither and crumble into dust, aging hundreds of years in only a few seconds. That was what it was like.

    Anyway, I feel like this last month has been kind of like that weekend. I feel like we’ve been watching somebody come apart before our eyes. You can almost see the vampire’s skin sag and rot away, watch his hands crumble to dust and blow away, watch him shrivel and writhe as he becomes a heap of powder. I don’t think he can keep going much longer.

    I know this was a long post, but I’ve just been struck by this, and I felt like putting it into words.

  93. 93.

    Ruckus

    @Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
    Actually the Republican president has been falling apart for a long time. He has an addiction but it’s to his real life, the one inside his head. He projects, lies, bullshits everyone to make up for his lack of, well humanity. And because of this he can’t ask for help. A substance addict can, if motivated, stop abusing the substance. A person lacking basic humanity has no mechanism to understand the problem. He knows he has one, he knows what to do to try to cover up his deficiencies, but he has no point of reference to tell what not being an addict is like. He doesn’t know what sober is, let alone how to get there.

  95. 95.

    danielx

    @jl:

    Dub got down to 22 percent.

    Gospel. But remember – like anybody would forget – that just about any president starts off with a considerable fund of good will and takes a while to become unpopular. I mean, it took a while before Bush fils was generally perceived as a fucking incompetent, because he had reasonably competent people around him. ( Yeah, competent – nothing about their integrity, mind.) The shitgibbon started off with a handicap in both popularity and competent staffers and he’s done nothing in a month but worsen it with unforced errors every day that goes by. Sweet tidy bowl jesus skipping across the blue water, I don’t think there is a word yet for how low Trump’s approval level can go.

  97. 97.

    West of the Rockies (been a while)

    @Chet Murthy:

    And yet, somehow, wingers dug it… they thought he opened a can of whoop ass and was just as witty and pithy as could be.

  100. 100.

    jl

    @Ruckus: I gave Trump somewhat more credit for stability discipline and intelligence. I thought there was a good chance he would take a year or so before he started falling apart. I thought the guy would be dragged down by his own BS schemes blowing up in his face But he has suffered nothing but self-inflected damage since the night he won the election.

    All he had to do was make noises he was going to fulfill some of his promises to the knucklehead ‘he don’t mean the crap’ voter (he could always smooth the way for the GOP Congress to undo any of that later) and do standard GOP dog whistles to his base.

    On the other hand, if Frump did get involved in a corrupt deal to, say, help out Vlad in keeping his obsolete petro-oligarch economy tottering along for a few more years for some campaign help, it doesn’t make any difference, if Comey and some others in the IC are willing and able to do their jobs.

    But, it is a mess, since best we can hope for is to manage a crippled president, or Pence, with rabid GOP Congress. but they seem just as dysfunctional as Frump, so far. We have to hope that God continues to look out for drunks, fools and the United States.

  101. 101.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    @jl:

    How many resort complexes and golf courses have they run, anyway?

    Ever been on a military base? The all have golf courses*.

    *At least those that are the size that can accommodate a golf course, LA AFB doesn’t have a golf course.

  102. 102.

    jl

    @danielx: Well, I misread the graph. Bush bottomed out briefly at 28 percent. Truman is the winner for lowest approval ratings, at around 24 percent, due I Think to stalemate in Korea.

  103. 103.

    ? Martin

    JWGOP: Comey must have scared the hell out of them, as I sense, for the first time, some resolve from GOP members.

    John McCain and Kasich’s strategist.

    Here are the members of the Select Intelligence Committee that were on the briefing. Leadership was there as well:

    Republicans
    James Risch Idaho
    Marco Rubio Florida
    Susan Collins Maine
    Roy Blunt Missouri
    James Lankford Oklahoma
    Tom Cotton Arkansas
    John Cornyn Texas

    Democrats
    Dianne Feinstein California
    Ron Wyden Oregon
    Martin Heinrich New Mexico
    Angus King Maine
    Joe Manchin West Virginia
    Kamala Harris California

    As committees go, that’s a somewhat comforting lineup. Cotton is, of course, certifiably insane, but the rest aren’t horrifying. Proud to see my two senators in there. Keep an eye on Harris – see if the other Dems elevate her.

  104. 104.

    jl

    @jl: Of course, could be that Frump has been used by a flock of corrupt flunkies. Until his antics after he was elected, I would not credit him with the requisite gullibility, ignorance and stupidity. But, having seen this jackass kick himself in the face daily since his election, I believe he is that gullible, ignorant and stupid now.

    The guy is psych basket case. If I were elected president, I wouldn’t give rat’s ass what anyone said for good six months. I would think ‘Eff you, i’m god damned US president and I am on my damn honeymoon.’ And I would be as calm and serene and sober as any human could be. I would out-Obama Obama on that front.

  106. 106.

    jl

    @Mike J: Whew… thanks. I guess I remembered that 22% from someplace else. But, I am a Truman fan, and Dub takes away one his records? Not good.

  107. 107.

    Major Major Major Major

    @jl: I finally realized after I read the phrase at Lawfare, “malice tempered by incompetence”, regarding the Muslim ban: the reason I’ve been so confused is because Trump breaks Hanlon’s razor. It’s not a question of malice OR incompetence, he’s both.

  108. 108.

    danielx

    Andy Borowitz
    6 hrs ·

    I am taking a Trump-style unbiased Internet poll. Answer the following question:

    Do you agree that no Facebook post about Donald Trump is complete without the hashtag #youfucker and anyone who disagrees with that is a horrible, very bad person and very unfair?

    Why yes, now that you mention it.

  112. 112.

    Ruckus

    @Major Major Major Major:
    It’s actually incompetence combined with his personality disorder, which works out to malice towards everyone because his basic incompetence is the trigger of his personality disorder. He’s caught in the vortex of his incompetence and narcissism.

  113. 113.

    Shalimar

    @Omnes Omnibus: Very late to the thread, but i don’t understand how making K.T. McFarland the assistant to the NSA would prepare her for a job as an ambassador. We have several hundred ambassadors. Just give her the ambassadorship to a minor country and promote her from there.

  114. 114.

    artem1s

    @Chet Murthy:

    I remember during his campaign, he looked like he was enjoying it. Not at that presser. Something’s changing, that’s fer sure.

    His shtick isn’t playing anymore. Narcissist feed off the validation they get from other people. They are addicted to it. And then they need to up the dosage to keep getting the same high. That’s when they start pushing the envelope with risky behavior: lying, sabotage, mental abuse, drug abuse, anything they can get away with. Anything that gets them attention. Anything that let’s them believe they are in control. Anything that let’s them believe they are tricking everyone. But they also need their victims to believe, unquestioning. If someone questions them in any way, they become enraged. If their audience doesn’t respond with admiration and praise, they become enraged. Once they have been questioned they get more and more desperate to get that ‘high’ again. So they get more outrageous. Now he can’t even get a ‘high’ from his risky behavior because he’s starting to understand that no one is falling for it. It’s taking more and more energy for him to keep up appearances.

    the rally this weekend is only to get him some validation from people who aren’t questioning him. But he has to know they are paying people to show up, and when the next people’s march draws more protestors, even these rallies will become an irritant rather than a fix. He’s on a downward spiral. If we are lucky the bad polls, the media questions, and the investigations, will keep him going downward. Most important thing to happen in the last week has been the media openly calling out the lies. If he starts to get wind of the Ryan and the GOP working behind his back and abandoning him, even better. Watch for public displays of anger and rage, that’s the key. I haven’t seen him completely lose control yet, at least not since the debates, but he’s coming close.

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