Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

In my day, never was longer.

Let’s finish the job.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

You cannot shame the shameless.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

Everybody saw this coming.

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

People are complicated. Love is not.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

T R E 4 5 O N

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Second rate reporter says what?

Bark louder, little dog.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

You are here: Home / Politics / Trumpery / Dolt 45 / Late Night Open Thread: Impotent Outrage All Over the Trump Compound

Late Night Open Thread: Impotent Outrage All Over the Trump Compound

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DougJ linked to this Washington Post article, but it’s too schadenfreudelicious not to share more:

… Trump enters week seven of his presidency the same as the six before it: enmeshed in controversy while struggling to make good on his campaign promises. At a time when White House staffers had sought to ride the momentum from Trump’s speech to Congress and begin advancing its agenda on Capitol Hill, the administration finds itself beset yet again by disorder and suspicion.

At the center of the turmoil is an impatient president increasingly frustrated by his administration’s inability to erase the impression that his campaign was engaged with Russia, to stem leaks about both national security matters and internal discord and to implement any signature achievements…

Gnawing at Trump, according to one of his advisers, is the comparison between his early track record and that of Obama in 2009, when amid the Great Recession he enacted an economic stimulus bill and other big-ticket items…

Trump, meanwhile, has been feeling besieged, believing that his presidency is being tormented in ways known and unknown by a group of Obama-aligned critics, federal bureaucrats and intelligence figures — not to mention the media, which he has called “the enemy of the American people.”…

Trump was brighter Sunday morning as he read several newspapers, pleased that his allegations against Obama were the dominant story, the official said.

But he found reason to be mad again: Few Republicans were defending him on the Sunday political talk shows…

Gosh, Lord Smallgloves wonders why the GOP apparatchiks he tore up and climbed over to reach the Oval Office aren’t loyal? ‘Tis a puzzlement!

Much more chewy detail at the link. Betting line among the Media Village courtiers seems to be that Reince Preibus (speaking of party apparatchiks) is next off the sledge, but there’s so many weird characters in Trump’s train, there’s always another plot twist.

Not to mention the Rosencrantz & Guilderstern characters, such as a certain foundational Nixon-alumni ratfvcker, who (per Esquire) “Forgot Other People Can Read His Tweets“[warning: possibly NSFW]:

Longtime Donald Trump ally and advisor Roger Stone had a very public meltdown on Twitter Saturday night, tweeting vulgar and insulting things about CNN commentator Ana Navarro, politics writer Yashar Ali, and, of course, Hillary Clinton. Some of those tweets have been deleted, while others remain on his account as of Sunday morning…

Reader Interactions

89Comments

  1. 1.

    amk

    Even his idol hitler didn’t hit the roof and lose his marbles till the end.

    If teann has any self-respect, they should shitcan the pos called stone out of all their shows.

  2. 2.

    Steeplejack

    You know, I’m starting to think Trump might not be very good at running a business.

    Trump never was a businessman, in the sense of “running a business.” He was a deal-maker, with a small group of assistants, enablers and lawyers to support his (apparently incompetent) wheeling and dealing. And all that is hitting the fan now as he (consciously or unconsciously) has set up the same structure in the White House. But you can’t run a gigantic enterprise like the federal government the same way you do a sketchy real-estate operation. Trump is incapable of delegating, and so the whole operation is imploding in palace intrigue.

  5. 5.

    max

    @Mustang Bobby: What would it take to get either Trump or Stone shipped off to Walter Reed for a psych evaluation?

    The initiative of the Vice-President and the consent of the Speaker of the House plus the President Pro-Tem of the Senate. (i.e. everyone in the line of succession before the Secretary of State.)

    max
    [‘The vampyres are dying for blood tax cuts for rich people, and that comes first.’]

  12. 12.

    marcion

    ok, you’re right, I take it back. he’s got the competence of Carter, meshed with the paranoia of Nixon, the ethics of Warren Harding, the vocabulary of Dubya, the horndogness of Clinton, and as a cherry on top has an ego that would make Teddy Roosevelt go, “damn, son”.

    oh and the racial sensitivities of Woodrow Wilson

    E: throw in some Buchanan and Hoover flavored incompetence too and we might have a Recipe for a Trump

  14. 14.

    Sab

    @marcion: Especially the racial sensitivities of Wilson, I do think Carter was more competent and Harding was less corrupt.

  15. 15.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    @Sab: Carter was not a bad President, I remember those years. The Right Wing Noise Machine has demonized him to elevate St. Ronnie. The one place the marcion might and only slightly may have a point is that President Carter was detail oriented, probably a product of starting his professional life as a Nuclear Engineer(detail’s kind of important there).

  16. 16.

    marcion

    Recipe for a Trump:

    1 part cotton candy (for the hair)
    3 parts Cheetos (for that special skin tone)
    3 parts pink slime (to represent his soul)

    Grind cheetos into dust like the hopes and dreams of a million regretful WWC voters going “whocoudanode?”. Mix with pink slime and stir the pot like an ill-considered Tweet. Place cotton candy on top and let dissolve slowly like the GOP’s conscience and integrity. Place in microwave and nuke ISIS back into the stone age or maybe just for 5 minutes. Serve with vodka

  18. 18.

    Sab

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: Sorry. I agree. I liked and admired Carter a lot even when he was president. I do think he was weak on delegating, but I agree about the RW noise machine.

  19. 19.

    marcion

    I wasn’t alive for Carter so most of what I have to go on is the general impression I got that he wasn’t really ready for prime time and his admin had some infighting

  22. 22.

    Mustang Bobby

    @max: I have been a big fan of 2th Amendment Section 4 solutions for a while now. My question is who will initiate it and follow through? Trump has surrounded himself with toadies, sycophants, and people who agree with his paranoia nutsery. So who’s going to make the call?

  23. 23.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    @Ruckus: Heh, teh Google is our friend.

    ETA: Now that I have a car, I’m going to try to go to the place where the first message on the internet was sent later today. I also have to get a license plate frame at the student store.

  28. 28.

    Patricia Kayden

    Trump is floundering badly because he’s an incompetent know-nothing who should have never been elected, but somehow it’s the Black guy’s fault. President Obama will always be the convenient boogeyman for Trump’s inability to get his act together. Shadow government, indeed.

    P.S. If President Obama brought down the Birther-in-Chief, who would blame him?

  29. 29.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    @Sab: I’m a relative youngin’, my choices were Carter(my vote), Anderson, or St. Ronnie.

    ETA: Ted Kennedy did come and speak on campus before the CA primary, I still have my Kennedy button. I still voted for Jimmy in the primary.

  31. 31.

    Sab

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: My first vote was McGovern Nixon. As usual the real vote was the primary and I blew that badly. However, I still think Jimmy Carter is an amazingly decent human being.

  33. 33.

    Mustang Bobby

    @Sab: Same here; McGovern in 1972. My first actual vote in an election was the Ohio primary in April 1972 for Ed Muskie, but by the time my vote was in he’d dropped out of the race thanks to Nixon’s ratfvckers.

  34. 34.

    Anne Laurie

    @Sab:

    All you old farts were too young too vote when I first voted

    . If it helps, I missed the chance to vote for Carter by one week.

    (Of course, that meant my first vote in a presidential election was for John Anderson, so maybe it’s just as well… )

  35. 35.

    ThresherK

    Trump also is not Harding.

    Two quotes:

    I can handle my enemies. It’s my friends who keep me pacing the floor at night.

    And per WGH’s father IIRC,

    If you were a woman you’d always be in the family way. You can’t say “No”.

  36. 36.

    Sab

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: Nope. My family seems to stable on our feet well into our seventies. By the way, this may be hilarious to you but to me as someone already old waiting for her retirement when her dad is in his nineties this ain’t so funny.

  42. 42.

    Sab

    @Sab: Sorry to sound snarky. My dad is on a walker at age 92. We also have a hereditary ataxia that will probably kick in in a couple of years. My mother was on a walker at 70. Kept herself in shape and everything but the genetics overwhelmed her. Not looking forward to a walker in my seventies but that is what is coming.Fucking hate these healthnut libtards who think you can solve all health problems by eating and exercise. I do both but it won’t help in the long run.

  44. 44.

    Sab

    My perennial question: do I kill threads, or do I comment when they are already dead.

  45. 45.

    low-tech cyclist

    I was 20 when Nixon resigned so I remember the Carter years quite well. A decent man with some good instincts (e.g. considering human rights, rather than propping up every ‘anti-communist’ tinhorn dictator in sight), but a stranger to Beltway politics when elected, and in over his head.

    Before 9/11 I thought that Dubya was going to be the GOP’s Carter, but showed his true colors both on and after 9/11, and turned out to be worse than Nixon, let alone Carter. And Trump makes Dubya look good by comparison.

    But even as we acknowledge that last truth, we need to remember that Dubya was a big step on the way to Trump, in the evolution of a party that has been increasingly separating itself from reality for some time. With Trump, the divorce is complete.

  46. 46.

    RM

    @Sab: I’m starting to think I’m the actual baby here. I voted for Al Gore my senior year of high school. Despite being super tempted by Nader I sucked it up, much good it did us.

  47. 47.

    Pangloss

    Nice graph by Krugman today, which sums up what I’ve been saying since 2011 government shutdown:

    “But the broader Republican quagmire — the party’s failure so far to make significant progress toward any of its policy promises — isn’t just about Mr. Trump’s inadequacies. The whole party, it turns out, has been faking it for years. Its leaders’ rhetoric was empty; they have no idea how to turn their slogans into actual legislation, because they’ve never bothered to understand how anything important works.”

    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/opinion/a-party-not-ready-to-govern.html

    They are a party that only knows what it’s about by demanding the opposite of what Democrats want. It doesn’t have the intellectual curiosity to craft effective policy. When their loudest and most urgent complaint is that the other party instituted one of their policies, you know they’ve got nothing left as an organizing principle but hatred of the Democrats.

  50. 50.

    patrick II

    Trump was brighter Sunday morning as he read several newspapers, pleased that his allegations against Obama were the dominant story, the official said.

    This stuck out to me. Trump’s total disregard and actual obliviousness for the seriousness of the charges he levied against President Obama. He gives no thought to the seriousness and impact of his accusations on another person for the comparatively trivial pursuit of creating a distracting headline. Of course a FOX “on the street” series of interviews showed Trump supporters assuming Obama’s guilt this morning. To Trump the former president’s reputation is just one more lever to use for his own purposes — the damage he does doesn’t enter into the equation.

  52. 52.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    @ThresherK:

    If you were a woman you’d always be in the family way. You can’t say “No”.

    ? I don’t know how to say no to this, Lord, show me how to say no to this. ?

  54. 54.

    Amir Khalid

    @patrick II:

    Trump’s total disregard and actual obliviousness for the seriousness of the charges he levied against President Obama.

    Not to mention Trump’s complete indifference to whether there is any truth to his accusations. He said during the campaign that his base loved him bringing up the birther issue, even though it had bee debunked many times overby then; he cared only that it whipped them up, that it was an effective demagogic weapon against Obama and any candidate running on Obama’s legacy.

  55. 55.

    Joyce H

    @patrick II:

    This stuck out to me. Trump’s total disregard and actual obliviousness for the seriousness of the charges he levied against President Obama. He gives no thought to the seriousness and impact of his accusations on another person for the comparatively trivial pursuit of creating a distracting headline

    It struck me too. He simply can’t seem to grasp that things are DIFFERENT when you’re president! When you’re just a famously crass and vulgar rich man, you can make all sorts of unfounded charges, and get a lot of interviews.People might ask the basis for your charge, but you can just brush it off and say you’ll reveal all later. But now, geez, do the same thing, and everybody gets all up in arms, DEMANDS to know the evidence, criticizes you for making the accusation… guy just wants to have some fun and these spoilsports go and make a Federal Case out of it! (‘Uh, Mister President, YOU made a Federal Case out of it by making the accusation while holding the office that you hold.’ ‘HUH?’)

  56. 56.

    low-tech cyclist

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    @patrick II: I agree it’s disgusting, but Obama’s been though almost 10 years of this; his reaction was to just brush it off his shoulders.

    Sure does say a world about the comparative maturity levels of the two, doesn’t it?

  58. 58.

    MattF

    There’s a little syllogism I’ve been pondering lately.

    1) Can’t help recalling that the job of the Nixonian ‘plumbers’ was to stop leaks.
    2) I’ll bet that there have been ‘discussions’ in the WH about that– and I’ll bet that there have been, um, proposals from certain sources to wiretap everyone who might be involved.
    3) That, in turn, would lead to an informational response from the lawyers– “That’s illegal” and from the political crew– “That’s dangerous”.
    4) Which, in turn, would lead Mr. Narcissism/Projection to the conclusion that, therefore, Obama must have done it.

    QED

  59. 59.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    And then we have this headline from today on-line WaPost: “In the era of Donald Trump, Germans debate a military buildup”. I’m sure the rest of Europe will feel real good about this. It’s not like the Germans ever attacked any of their neighbors.

  60. 60.

    low-tech cyclist

    @Pangloss:

    They are a party that only knows what it’s about by demanding the opposite of what Democrats want. It doesn’t have the intellectual curiosity to craft effective policy. When their loudest and most urgent complaint is that the other party instituted one of their policies, you know they’ve got nothing left as an organizing principle but hatred of the Democrats.

    Well, there are some things that they’d be for or against, regardless of the Dems. Lower taxes on the rich, less regulation of big corporations, no restrictions of any sort on gun rights.

    But on the whole, you’re right. This is a party that’s divorced itself from reality, and making actual policy involves grappling with reality.

    Last fall, one of my hobbyhorses was to point out that Trump had lots of slogans but no policies – no ‘how’ to make real the ‘what’ he claimed he wanted to accomplish. But in a way, he really masked the extent to which the entire GOP was in the same place.

    When their leading ‘policy wonk’, Paul Ryan, routinely proposes budgets that only work with the help of magic asterisks that say, “we’ll save hundreds of billions by cutting loopholes in the tax code” without naming any of them – if Ryan is the best they can offer, they’re helpless to actually craft policy. And that IS the best they can do, apparently.

  64. 64.

    Davebo

    @low-tech cyclist:

    My first thought is will Donald be able to survive a year of this insulted followed by outrage endless loop but then I remembered he’s been living that most of his life and is still kicking.

  65. 65.

    Mai naem.mobile

    The problem with the Freedumb caucus and Teabagger types believe the RW media. McConnell,Kasich and the old fart GOPrs realize the RW media is just to brainwash the base and get the base riled up. Jason Chaffetz was on Wolf Blitzer a few weeks ago talking about Dolt 45s conflicts of interest. Chaffetz made a comment about Obama making all this money per his tax return. He seemed to really believe that something nefarious was up with Obama having so much money. Blitzer even told Obama had made money from writing his books. Ive seen the how did Obama get so much money story on RW media. That Obama wrote two bestsellers was well known when he was elected.

  66. 66.

    henqiguai

    @?BillinGlendaleCA(#24): Your response to #22

    @Mustang Bobby: Psst, I think you meant 25th amendment.

    I think he actually meant Article II Section 4 – Impeacment.

    ETA: And then at #26 he (damn you M. Bobby!!!) affirms *your* position.

  67. 67.

    SFAW

    @Sab:

    do I kill threads, or do I comment when they are already dead.

    I think you got a lotta catching-up to do before you can match JR in WV, Ruckus, or yours truly. But I’m sure we’ll be happy to cede the title to you.

    You amateur.

  69. 69.

    XTPD

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: My vote for HRC in November was the first time I was eligible for the presidential election. (I would’ve voted Obama in 2012, but was 17 at the time).

  74. 74.

    Nora

    Carter was my first presidential election vote, and I remember that horrified sinking feeling when they were already announcing that Reagan had won the election by the time I was voting (I was living in Madison, Wisconsin, at the time).

    NOTHING compared to how I felt on November 9, 2016, of course.

  76. 76.

    karen marie

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: Me too. I think the ragging on him is undeserved. It continues because the GOP couldn’t stand the contrast of a decent, competent man against their shitshow of Nixon, then Ford.

  78. 78.

    BCHS Class of 1980

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: To be fair, Trump is Carter in the narrow sense of “Doesn’t know how DC works, knows that they hate him, and tries to run the executive branch with a few trusted advisers.” In intellect, he is between W and post-dementia Reagan; in character, well below Nixon.

  79. 79.

    Olivia

    My first vote was for McGovern. You had to be 21 to vote in 1968 and I wasn’t quite.

  80. 80.

    Seth Owen

    Funny. I was an Anderson voter, too! That’s what, FOUR on this thread? How did he lose?

  81. 81.

    Librarian

    My first vote was also in 1980, for Carter. I liked Anderson, but even back then I knew voting third party was not a good idea.

  84. 84.

    J R in WV

    I AM perfectly willing to be reading a thread I haven’t gotten around to in a timely way, and to make comments as I read along. Maybe goofy, but what the hell, I get the last word that way, right? OK…

  85. 85.

    LeonS

    @marcion: Not sure we have anything to compare his willingness to sell out our country to another country. A new low! How lucky are we to live to see that.

  87. 87.

    Tehanu

    @Olivia:

    My first vote was for McGovern. You had to be 21 to vote in 1968 and I wasn’t quite.

    Me too! And the last fight I ever had with my dad — longtime Democrat and union member — was when I found out he’d voted for Nixon in ’72 because he thought McGovern was some kind of hippie. He later admitted he’d been wrong and never fell for Republican crapola again, thank goodness.

  88. 88.

    Olivia

    In 1956 my mom voted for Eisenhower and I was so upset because Nixon seemed like a horrible ugly man. Even as a 6 year old, I was a good judge of character. 8>D . She always voted Democrat after that, though

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