Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

I would try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

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

If rights aren’t universal, they are privilege, not rights.

Bark louder, little dog.

Republicans: “Abortion is murder but you can take a bus to get one.” Easy peasy.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. do not touch it.”

Giving in to doom is how we fail to fight for ourselves & one another.

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

Disappointing to see gov. newsom with his finger to the wind.

“But what about the lurkers?”

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

People are complicated. Love is not.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / Friday Morning Open Thread: Trump Goes to Davos

Friday Morning Open Thread: Trump Goes to Davos

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Politico, “The buffoon presidency”:

However much the typical Davos habitué disagrees with Trump’s rhetoric on free trade and global integration, these are supremely practical types. One year into Trump, they are accommodating themselves to a changed power reality.

Across the spectrum, it seems evident that the pleas of Trump critics in the United States — don’t normalize an abnormal presidency — have been rejected by the government and industry leaders who congregate at the World Economic Forum’s annual gathering in the Alps…

Aside from Trump’s incendiary bluster, many say, the actual consequences of his presidency have been more agreeable (or less disagreeable) than they feared a year ago. This is especially true in business circles, where people note that both the U.S and European economies are purring nicely.

There is a wider group of people, dominated by political types, who say the Trump presidency is just as offensive as they always thought but has come with an alluring benefit: The chance for other nations to fill a power vacuum left by a U.S. retreat from global leadership…

Hey, cry the Trumpistas, who let *that* chick in here?!?…

Malala Yousafzai, the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, used the stage at the World Economic Forum on Thursday to send a message to President Trump and other powerful men on the state of gender equality in today’s world.

When asked what her message to “someone like Trump” would be, Yousafzai, the 20-year-old women’s empowerment activist, said she was “so disappointed to see that people in high positions talk about women in unequal terms and do not accept them as equals.”

Responding to another question about Trump’s record on women’s rights and the allegations of harassment and abuse that have been leveled against him, Yousafzai replied that ″it is just shocking for a second to believe that this is actually happening . . . I hope that women stand up and speak out against it.”…

Much more to their taste: Elain Chao, aka Mrs. Mitch McConnell:


*That’s* the big-gauche-untrainable-man-baby enablers everyone recognizes!

… A year ago, this group had been mortified by Trump’s election and the rise of populism around the world. But the destabilizing President who once seemed like an existential threat now seems more like a harmless diversion. A year after Trump’s election raised the prospect of revolution, the elites have regained their confidence. The revolt had been put down, stock markets are up, and globalism is making a comeback.

“The phenomenon of Trump is no longer interesting to people,” said Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian whose book about tyranny Trump helped send shooting up the best-seller list. Over his shoulder, I spotted former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry entering the reception we were attending. “A year ago, everyone thought Trump was just fascinating,” Snyder added. “I spend a lot of my life in Europe, and what I see is that the Europeans have moved on. America no longer matters.”…

To repeat myself: THANKS, REPUBS!

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Reader Interactions

80Comments

  2. 2.

    Mary G

    @rikyrah: Good morning, rikyrah! Of course they like him, he stole $1.5 trillion from us for them. He looks ever more unhealthy every time. And all the old white guys with the one Asian wife is nauseating.

  4. 4.

    Daoud bin Daoud

    “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

  8. 8.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    A year ago, this group had been mortified by Trump’s election and the rise of populism around the world. But the destabilizing President who once seemed like an existential threat

    Oh c’mon. these people were mortified by drumpf because he’s a disgusting low life from the outer borough. they never felt threaten by him economically.

  11. 11.

    Mary G

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: I wasn’t talking about you and Madame Bill!

    Sorry for my bad phrasing, it was more like the token woman is the token minority (human floor wax and dessert topping!) plus married to the turtle to boot gets on my last feminist nerve.

  15. 15.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    This is especially true in business circles, where people note that both the U.S and European economies are purring nicely.

    Thanks Obama.

    If it wasn’t for him, we’d be in the 10th year of the The Great Bush Depression

  23. 23.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    I still can’t get over how Drumpf tried to get a museum to lend him a van Gogh so he could tell visitors his owned one.

    con-man to the bitter end.

  26. 26.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    @Chyron HR: Oh, that’s a joke. I remember in 2007/2008 when the usual suspects primaried Nancy Smash with Cindy Sheehan and she got 10% of the vote in hippie san francisco.

  30. 30.

    Baud

    WaPo

    DAVOS, Switzerland — Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said Thursday that the rise of automation will not significantly diminish jobs in the United States, and that the country will double down on retraining efforts to help workers who have been displaced by robots.


    “Technology doesn’t just shrink jobs,” he told reporters gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “It changes the nature of jobs.”


    Ross invoked skeptics of the past who also feared shifts in the way people work — “Luddites trying to keep factories from opening,” he called them.

    Advanced manufacturing positions, he said, will replace some of the older roles that disappear.
He said preparing for this labor transformation is one of the Trump administration’s top priorities.


    “One of the big themes that the president, and especially Ivanka Trump, has is how you train . . . young people so they can be properly assimilated into the new technologies,” Ross said, referencing the president’s elder daughter and White House adviser, who has pushed for more spending on science and technology education.

  33. 33.

    debbie

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    NPR interviewed the editor of Commentary (some conservative rag) who totally decimated Ron Johnson, basically calling him and his compatriots bug-eyed conspiracy theorists.

  37. 37.

    gene108

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    The Know Nothing Party was never this popular. And they didn’t have so much institutional support from the media.

    The people, who support Trump think he’s done a super job making America respected again, after his predecessor destroyed our world standing.

    They are immune to the reality we are no longer a superpower. Bush, Jr and Trump have proven the U.S. to be too unstable a country, with regards to what we will do to be taken seriously again. Always lurking in the back of the rest of the world’s collective mind will be “sure this Democratic President seems nice, but what if he or she is followed by a Republican? I don’t think I can trust this country.”

  39. 39.

    debbie

    @p.a.:

    There are in fact dollar stores. Places where you buy cheap stuff for a dollar. They’re the updated version of dime stores, what with inflation and all.

  41. 41.

    Immanentize

    @debbie: I love this whole world!

    PS. I encouraged my son to take a (film) photography class last year. He really lived it, watching the bits of silver swim around on plastic….

  44. 44.

    debbie

    @Immanentize:

    Yes, it is fun. Back when I took photography classes, the best part was mucking around in the darkroom. What better than to have been a fly on the wall of Ansel Adams’ darkroom!

  48. 48.

    Jeffro

    I still wanna know where the money came from…you know, the $130,000 funneled through a Delaware corporation to pay off the prOn star Trumpov had an affair with a few months after his third wife bore his fifth child??

    So does Eugene Robinson:

    Wait, back up a minute. We just zoomed past a story that would have been a five-alarm scandal for any other administration, with weeks of screaming front-page headlines: “The president and the prOn star.”

    The Wall Street Journal had the scoop on Jan. 12: “A lawyer for President Donald Trump arranged a $130,000 payment to a former adult-film star a month before the 2016 election as part of an agreement that precluded her from publicly discussing an alleged sexual encounter with Mr. Trump, according to people familiar with the matter.”

    The porn star in question is a woman named Stormy Daniels. The alleged affair took place in 2006, a year and a half after Trump married his third wife, Melania, and just months after their son, Barron, was born.

    Whoa. You’d think that Trump’s supporters in the evangelical Christian movement would finally call him out for his loose — or nonexistent — morals. Instead, however, they have suddenly turned into a bunch of Left Bank cafe intellectuals, scoffing at silly American Puritanism as they sip absinthe and flick ashes from their unfiltered Gauloises.

    “We kind of gave him, all right, you get a mulligan. You get a do-over here,” said Tony Perkins, president of the right-wing Family Research Council. For the full effect, imagine that quote spoken in a heavy French accent. A doo-ovair.

    That part actually made me laugh out loud at the breakfast table. A doo-ovair. LOL

    Where did the cash come from? One thing we learned about Trump during the campaign is that he is loath to spend his own money whenever he can spend somebody else’s instead. And one thing we learned from Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” is that another Trump lawyer “took care” of “a hundred” women during the campaign, at least according to Stephen K. Bannon, the campaign’s chief executive.

    Let’s assume Bannon was exaggerating and “a hundred” could mean “several.” If I were special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, I’d want to know how much money was paid in total to the women, and I’d want to make sure that no campaign funds were used, since that would be illegal.

    Remember the context: On Oct. 8, 2016, The Post reported on and published the “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump boasted of sexually harassing and assaulting women. A little more than a week later, according to the Journal, Trump’s lawyer created the shell company that was allegedly used as a conduit for money to buy Daniels’s silence.

    Something tells me that Mueller’s all-star team of white-collar prosecutors will find out whether any other phantom companies were formed, whether any other paramours were paid to keep quiet and where any such money might have come from.

    Please, FSM, make it so.

  50. 50.

    danielx

    @rikyrah:

    Good morning!

    @raven:

    GOP Missouri Senate candidate Courtland Sykes dished up some enlightening comments about women’s rights this week, saying he expects “a home-cooked dinner every night at 6” and opposes “nail-biting manophobic hell-bent feminist she-devils.”

    Do I take it that some poor woman is actually married to this douche canoe?

    ETA: just wondering if there are any domestic violence skeletons lurking in his closet. Also too, he may be shocked to find out that teenage girls often do not fit the parental mold.

  51. 51.

    NotMax

    Somebody’s gonna be mighty jet lagged for the SOTU.

    FSM only knows what drugs they’ll pump him full of to seem alert.

  52. 52.

    Baud

    @danielx:

    opposes “nail-biting manophobic hell-bent feminist she-devils.”

    Remember when Hillary called bigots deplorable and that was beyond the pale.

  59. 59.

    danielx

    @Baud:

    I do. But you know how it is….all together now, and with feeling!

    IOKIYAR!

    BTW, there is a complementary acronym courtesy of Paul Krugman:

    IACIYAD – it’s a crime if you’re a Democrat.

  61. 61.

    NotMax

    Few bravos in Davos.

    “I’m curious to hear what he’s going to say,” a woman from Belgium said, referring to Trump’s speech on Friday. “He’ll say America First and America Great.” The same attendee predicted that Trump’s reception might be cold, unlike that of French president Emmanuel Macron, who received a standing ovation.

    It could be worse. Some attendees from Africa are talking about walking out during Trump’s speech to protest his derision of African countries as “shitholes.” Source

  65. 65.

    danielx

    I feel like celebrating…first time I’ve gotten more than two hours of sleep at a stretch in three weeks. Yay!

  66. 66.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @danielx: More like he’s the one who gets the beating. Guys who talk like this are ALWAYS compensating. See Pence and “Mother”.

  67. 67.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    Reading this I don’t get were they “won over by Trump” it’s comes across like they think he’s cute and harmless. Like a small dog that barks a lot. He shows up for one day, makes a speech, that doesn’t sound like any deal making is being done.

  69. 69.

    danielx

    @NotMax:

    Got that right…had two things go wrong at once, and oh joy to have at least one of them clearing up on its own. Of course I have a lumbar MRI to look forward to on Monday…

  71. 71.

    MomSense

    @debbie:

    When my youngest was very little we passed a store called Dollar Tree and he said something like, wouldn’t it be better if the tree grew hundreds.
    So cute. I think of that every time I drive past it.

  72. 72.

    a thousand flouncing lurkers (was fidelio)

    @raven: It’s hard to tell whether he’s real or a piece of satirical performance art.

  74. 74.

    KickBoxBanana

    people note that both the U.S and European economies are purring nicely.

    As if Twitler has anything to do with that and/or it somehow justifies him literally getting away with adultery, sexual abuse, using the presidency for personal gain and to settle scores among other things.

    Such a sickening quote.

  75. 75.

    Raoul

    what I see is that the Europeans have moved on. America no longer matters.

    I was far from the only one, but I did pretty regularly say things to this effect a year ago. The Trump election signals, among many things, the turning point where the US as the top global hegemon has ended. The global rich Davos set don’t care where their wealth comes from, and can be rich and powerful from any base, jetting about in their private Gulfstreams and BBJs with intercontinental reach.
    But for millions of Americans, when the chickens really come home to roost as we lose it as the leading economic superpower, things may not be so easy. Britain’s end-of-empire era was pretty shitty. The 1950s — 70s were grim for our cousins. We can expect similar, I think.

  76. 76.

    Chris

    However much the typical Davos habitué disagrees with Trump’s rhetoric on free trade and global integration, these are supremely practical types. One year into Trump, they are accommodating themselves to a changed power reality.
    …
    Across the spectrum, it seems evident that the pleas of Trump critics in the United States — don’t normalize an abnormal presidency — have been rejected by the government and industry leaders who congregate at the World Economic Forum’s annual gathering in the Alps…
    …
    Aside from Trump’s incendiary bluster, many say, the actual consequences of his presidency have been more agreeable (or less disagreeable) than they feared a year ago. This is especially true in business circles, where people note that both the U.S and European economies are purring nicely.

    I think it’s pretty simple: a year ago, world elites might have been a little worried about the populist noises Trump was making, but by now, they’ve seen enough of him to know that he’s a very small, stupid, easily flattered and even more easily bribed popinjay. In other words, a type of national leader that they’re very used to dealing with. He’s not going to be leading any kind of jihad against them. He’s not an American Castro, just an American Batista, and while they might not have expected to see that in their lifetime, they’re perfectly comfortable dealing with it.

  77. 77.

    Chris

    @gene108:

    They are immune to the reality we are no longer a superpower. Bush, Jr and Trump have proven the U.S. to be too unstable a country, with regards to what we will do to be taken seriously again. Always lurking in the back of the rest of the world’s collective mind will be “sure this Democratic President seems nice, but what if he or she is followed by a Republican? I don’t think I can trust this country.”

    Abigail Nussbaum at LGM has made this point a few times. After Bush, people were relieved and willing to turn the page and write off the previous eight years as temporary insanity prompted by post 9/11 PTSD. The country electing Trump so soon after that disaster proves that it wasn’t a fluke, that there really is something in the water of the American electorate, and that it’s no longer possible to deal with it as before.

  78. 78.

    Sloane Ranger

    @Raoul: Actually the 50’s and 60’s were pretty good with full employment, the end of rationing and the availabilty of luxury goods to a wider section of the populace. The 70’s and 80’s, however, were abysmal. I would not wish those on anyone.

  79. 79.

    Chris

    @Sloane Ranger:

    Honestly, the British probably had the best transition out of superpower status you can expect. Sure, they lost almost all their colonies, but standard of living for their citizens improved in every conceivable way, probably up to and including physical security, given NATO and The Bomb. And while they may no longer be the superpower, they’re still among the world’s great powers, both military and economic. They weren’t conquered, broken, and disarmed like the Germans and Japanese. They didn’t devolve into a minor player like the Spanish or Austrians or Turks. If post-superpower status for us is anything like it was for the British, well, we could do far worse.

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