Trump was supposed to feed the koi by the spoonful with PM Abe but quickly got impatient and dumped the whole box of food into the pond. pic.twitter.com/MZxNfqTRDB
— Yashar Ali ?? (@yashar) November 6, 2017
.
It’s only embarrassing, and not potentially threatening to global peace. But it is most certainly embarrassing.
(Also, rude people on twitter are highlighting Trump’s hips and using the word “diapers”, which would just about complete the toddler analogy… )
Imagine going all the way to Japan and eating a hamburger at a country club pic.twitter.com/thYetsb5K0
— Josh Billinson (@jbillinson) November 5, 2017
I’ve long said PM Abe has been one of the best wranglers of Trump and his particular requirements on the world stage. https://t.co/79AE35gHHQ
— Aki Peritz (@AkiPeritz) November 5, 2017
Trump ran for president because he wanted the power he thought came with the job, not the job that actually comes with the power https://t.co/4ic0e0qCk1
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) November 4, 2017
Major Major Major Major
Wow, that koi picture, their expressions, and what an apt metaphor.
hellslittlestangel
When The Orange Better One didn’t then urinate in the koi pond was the moment he became the president.
RobNYNY
They really are treating him like a spoiled toddler.
Amir Khalid
Re Josh Billinson’s tweet:
There’s so much to discover and enjoy in Japanese cuisine. That Japanese country club must have an excellent selection on its menu. Preferring a hamburger for lunch only reminds everyone that for a man of supposed wealth and taste, Trump is badly lacking in taste and refinement. And manners, too.
Amir Khalid
@RobNYNY:
Japanese people are polite to a fault, even a fault as big as Trump.
sukabi
@hellslittlestangel: if you zoom in on the pic, not only does it look like he’s wearing a diaper, it looks like it leaked at the fly.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
I was flipping the channels and he was answering questions at 1:15 AM Eastern time and he was exhausted. Real, real low energy. He was practically drooling.
And you know Obama held pressers in Asia all the time and he was always razor sharp (even though he had to actually do the grinding job of being president; not watching tee vee all day and night)..
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
Villago Delenda Est
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: We all were. Refreshing change, to be sure, from the bumbling deserting coward, who in contrast to Donald was refined.
CaseyL
My favorite moment of the Asian trip so far was when Moron asked Abe if maybe Japan could build some of its cars in the US so it doesn’t have to ship them over.
Moron will return to the US, find out there are about six (? maybe more?) Japanese auto plants in the US… and promptly take credit for them.
m0nty
That Vox piece is extremely dispiriting, because you know it rings true. Even after a mid-term wave, gerrymanders will mean significant GOP votes will be necessary to impeach. Nixon only resigned because he lost the numbers, but as has been said many times before in the modern era, Moderate Republicans Always Cave so relying on them to have the gumption to tap Trump on the shoulder is problematic. I suppose three of them didn’t cave on Obamacare, so there is hope.
SRW1
@Amir Khalid:
Don’t wanna offend anybody here, but at 70 years of age a putz tends to be set in his/her ways.
For Trump refinement is what they do in an oil refinery.
Ruckus
@SRW1:
It is true that most get set in their ways. It’s not a lock though, one can change. It’s just more difficult than it was at 35. There is only so much energy available and a higher percentage goes to things like the heart pumping, moving around, thought……
And of course it’s not a straight line, some have more energy at 80 than some do at 65. But that 80 yr old also probably had more energy than when either was at 1/2 those ages.
And yes I’m an old fart. Wait your turn.
Now you also brought up another interesting bit. Putzes. That throws everything out of wack. And drumpf is a wack putz, that is for sure.
gene108
@m0nty:
Impeachment requires a simple majority in the House. The President stands trial in the Senate. It takes 2/3’s Majority in the Senate to convict.
If Dems retake the House, they could impeach.
gene108
@Amir Khalid:
Trump did not get elected because of taste and refinement. He got elected because he is an incurious lout, who appeals to people, who think Obama is elitist because he thinks arugula is good for you.
clay
It’s a good thing Japanese culture doesn’t place a high value on decorum and ceremony.
SRW1
@Ruckus:
I am not that far away from 70 years of age myself and I sort of was aware that what I wrote could be taken too broadly. So I want to again emphasize the putz aspect in all of this.
Ruckus
@SRW1:
I knew that.
Last two lines. I got your point and embellished it a bit. What I really wonder is if the youngsters understand putz or is it fairly self explanatory?
Adria McDowell
Donald Trump is the president for people who think traveling to the next hollar over is like traveling to a foreign country.
J R in WV
We are so screwed. He’s going to let everyone on that side of the planet know that they can take advantage of him because he doesn’t know anything about being a leader of a great nation.
And maybe that is why he appears to be trying to drag the nation down, maybe he has a gut feeling that if it was a simpler nation his job would really be much easier.
Has he puked on Abe yet? I guess there will be more chances on this trip. If indictments are released tomorrow, I wonder what he will think about doing? Come right home to “take of things”?
I am amazed he isn’t aware that Honda, Toyota, Mitsubishi, are all made in America. I have a cousin who made seats for Honda up in Ohio, and there’s a big engine/transmission plant right here in WVA, they ship them all the way over into Kentucky. So it isn’t just parts shipped from Japan and assembled here, the build the major components right here.
What a dork.
TS
Read this in our local news –
US President Donald Trump has called the mass shooting in Texas that left at least 26 people dead a “mental health problem,” not “a guns situation”.
Trump says church attack “isn’t a guns situation” calls gunman “very deranged individual” Trump made comments from Japan — a country which in 2014 had just six gun-related deaths vs 33,000 in the US
Asked at a press conference in Tokyo what policies he might support in response to the shooting , Mr Trump said that based on preliminary reports, the gunman was “a very deranged individual, [with] a lot of problems”. He said the church attack “isn’t a guns situation” but “a mental health problem at the highest level. It’s a very, very sad event”.
Japan’s strict rules around gun ownership offer a contrast to the United States. In 2014, Japan had just six gun deaths, compared to more than 33,000 in America.
Texas Church Shooting
Other countries have mental health problems – few have mass murder by gun problems
Honus
@J R in WV: the engine plant in Buffalo, been there for twenty years. There’s also a Yokohama tire plant and NGK spark plug plant in WV. Jay Rockefeller made a trip toJapan in the 80s and brought that stuff back. In the 90s there was a significant Japanese community in Charleston. Oddly, some of the best sushi in the country was available in Charleston WV, along with family style Japanese food. There was even a little grocery near the Towne Center mall where my kids would buy Japanese Pokémon cards.
Zinsky
The man is a train wreck and the biggest embarrassment to the United States since Pee Wee Herman. As an astute observer of world politics once said, “the president of the United States, whether valid or not, represents what all Americans are like, to the rest of the world”. We are now perceived as shallow, brutish oafs who know nothing, are gun-happy and are full of hatred for anyone who isn’t a white conservative middle-aged or older male. Sad.
J R in WV
@Honus:
Yeh, we noticed how when they announced the engine just a few miles down the river, suddenly Charleston had great Japanese food.
A friend of mine, wife’s coworker, was a big Japan buff, and showed me all about sushi. Then he went to Asia and spent 30 years working over there. Got on with VOA, now is a lead reporter out of DC for VOA.
We still have great sushi here, which is a good thing. And you can get good seafood to take home and cook it or not as you wish. I was also surprised how much good sushi there is in Tucson, AZ!! Any big military town gets great sushi, because so many of our service people get stationed over there, learn about it, meet people over there, marry them, bring them home, and then the spouse is opening a restaurant with (their) home cooking, or not.
Gravenstone
Just what I wanted, to start my Monday morning with a literal /facepalm about the koi feeding. What fresh hell lies ahead after that?
CBS
I scream at T on my teevee as much as anyone, but the full video clearly shows Abe emptying the remains of his fish food into the pond first. Trump seems to follow Abe’s example. The tweet is intentionally misleading, which pisses me off too. Ugh. What a national nightmare.
cokane
hmm… fwiw, the yashar tweet is inaccurate. seems Abe dumped his box first then trump followed then they both walked off
video: http://www.afpbb.com/articles/-/3149438 it’s short
will Anne correct?
Boatboy_srq
@Amir Khalid: If his taste is so patently absent, it makes you wonder how much of his “wealth” is, too.
Boatboy_srq
@Zinsky: Pee Wee was not an embarrassment. Paul Reubens’ indecent exposure bust, though,….
Starfish
@cokane: That makes me feel better.
Matt McIrvin
@Ruckus: Ah, but now imagine that you’re none too bright to begin with and have spent most of your life as the king of an obedient crook fiefdom in New York real estate in which nobody can ever tell you no and survive.
Matt McIrvin
@J R in WV: I looked it up once and was surprised to find that my 2010 Honda Fit actually was assembled in Japan. But it’s the exception.
TomatoQueen
wrt putz knowledge, some of us will remember Alphonse D’Amato, aka Senator Pothole, referring to Chuck Schumer as a Putzhead.
LanceThruster
Team Hillary’s message to the MSM to ‘puff Trump’ worked like a charm. Playing chicken with the fate of the nation in her pursuit of power turned out to have disastrous consequences.
Heckuva job, DNC.
Bookeater (formerly JosieJ)
@Ruckus:
It’s not age so much as it is the prevalence of Yiddish in the community. Yiddish suffuses the culture here in NYC, so much so that even this Black chick from Queens grew up calling people schmucks and complaining about having to schlep everywhere! But even I knew not to call someone a putz, at least in polite company! I am old enough to remember when having called someone a putz (privately!) was the straw that finally caused enough scandal that Al D’Amato lost his seat in the Senate! (And the very fact that D’Amato–an Italian-American from Long Island–was in the habit of casually using Yiddish obscenities shows how much influence it has here.)
On edit: Ha, TomatoQueen beat me to it!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@m0nty: Should go read the Politico interview with Bouner the former speaker last week; there is no Republican party, just a lot of factions calling themselves conservatives. All Trump needs to do is alienate enough of those factions.
gammyjill
Well, in fairness to Trump (I NEVER thought I’d be writing that!) if you look at the tape of the koi feeding, it looks like Abe – after they both began spooning the food in – makes a motion and pour SOME food into the pond. Trump may have honestly misinterpreted that movement and dumped the entire box full into the pond.
My family has begun to play a new game. “The New York Times or the Onion”, where we spout actual headlines from both papers and try to guess where the Trump quote is from. It’s depressingly fun…
Frankensteinbeck
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch:
But he didn’t act like a bully, so conservatives are convinced the rest of the world thought Obama was pathetic. It’s the only kind of respect they understand. Anything else is not just false, but incomprehensible.
@m0nty:
If moderate Republicans always caved, there would be no Medicaid right now. They only mostly cave.
Chief Oshkosh
@CaseyL:
You are KIDDING me, right? Did Trump really say that?! How utterly stupid do you have to be to not…
Ah, fuck it.
Villago Delenda Est
@LanceThruster: Cripes, can you get more idiotic?
Brachiator
@Villago Delenda Est:
It’s Trump. Give him a few hours and he will come up with something.
RoonieRoo
I’m getting very depressed that our side is falling for the misleading news as we used to judge the repubs for doing. It makes me nauseous to have defend the orange nightmare. He didn’t do either of the things that people are talking about. He followed Abe’s lead on feeding the koi if you watch the whole video and fed it by the spoon full and only dumped the remainder of the box after Abe did the same thing. Second, the make the cars in the US is taken completely out of context for the whole statement and utterly misrepresents what he actually said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/11/06/does-trump-not-know-japanese-cars-are-built-in-the-u-s-only-if-you-totally-cherrypick-his-quote/?utm_term=.f6a0fea16e11
Geeze. I really thought our side was better than this.
Ruckus
@Matt McIrvin:
@Matt McIrvin:
If you are as much of a putz as drumpf, and none to bright, which he is, no you could not imagine that.
My 03 Honda Element was made in OH. The Honda Gold Wing I borrowed from them in 03 was made in Marysville, OH.
I think I will call him commander putz from now on. It is his best feature.
TenguPhule
@m0nty:
Only due to exceptional circumstances we probably won’t see again.
Now the evil fuckers are trying to work it into their abomination of a tax cut bill.
And with the insurance reimbursements cut, they may still achieve the destruction of the ACA by negation.
TenguPhule
@Gravenstone:
Come sit by me and we can cry on each other’s shoulder.
The shame is unbearable.