Trump is Having an Angry Weekend

CNN's latest reporting about Trump's weekend: He's "watching TV" and "getting riled up by his sons who are encouraging him to go harder on FBI" pic.twitter.com/BlRlHzC2AB

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) February 18, 2018

I think it's a little bit astonishing that after being relatively satisfied with the Mueller indictments and Deputy AG Rosenstein's press conference, and then a nice photo op with Broward County first responders (since he and Melania were already in the neighborhood) followed with a Studio 54 disco party but, sadly, no golfing!! Trump allowed himself to get all riled up by his two large adult sons and go a-Tweeting in the most disgraceful manner.

This collection is where Trump, annoyed at his press, starts blaming others for shit. He blames Democrats for not passing DACA (they are the minority party in Congress, and he himself actually ended DACA) and not passing gun control (see also--the minority party but they tried). He blamed the FBI for not catching "all the signals sent out" by Nikolas Cruz and blames this on the focus on the Russian meddling the ine 2016 election (specifically, the "collusion") but seems unaware that with 35K employees, the FBI can do numerous things at once, and that there really is no legal way of holding someone on suspicion of being really screwed up and dangerous forever--it isn't a crime to just be screwed up and owning guns. There was little they could actually do there because maybe the laws are kind of lax regarding dangerous people getting guns?  Seriously--using the 17 dead bodies in Florida to fig-leaf the investigation into his campaign ad Russia is damn low.

He also wants General McMaster to go beyond what the indictments or what Rosenstein said and publically waive him from allegations that the election results were impacted or...various conspiracy theory bits of glurge that I term the "Trump trots". If you are familiar with the "gish gallop", the Trump trot is the same thing, only a stickier mess of nonsense delivered by Tweet by a US President.  The Democratic party or the DNC never would have colluded with Russia to...smear Hillary Clinton and install Trump--that's just a fucking stupid thing to allege. There's no sign they did anything at all to boost Hillary Clinton during the election. Also, Uranium One is just really dumb and already debunked an awful lot. The Steele Dossier is not debunked, but holds up. The rest of the tweets that burbles about "Speeches, Emails, and the Podesta Company!" is just sad. Really sad. Throwing spaghetti at the wall.

Donald Trump doesn't seem to get that he is in office right now because these bullshit things got pushed even though they should not have mattered. Trump got paid large money for Wall Street speeches, just like Hillary Clinton. His transition team and his White House staff are using private email trust me. Also his son in law Jared (let me amend this here form) Kushner is not only not supposed to have a security clearance, but is requesting lots of classified info. 

What Trump is saying is bullshit, but he isn't thwarted, because he is apparently quite peevish:

Here we go--he references the dumb "pallets of cash" thing he swears he saw on Fox News which never happened to pretend there is a scandal about the thing where the US refunded Iran money they paid us for weapons they never got. He's just a bit mistaken as to what happened there.

He insults House Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff for a thing he hasn't said. And then he disgracefully lies about his long-held position regarding Russian meddling, which has been that Trump treated it as entirely a hoax. He hasn't admitted their wrongdoing even still, is blaming everyone else in sight, and never has either brought the additional sanctions requested by Congress or suggested any other punishment. In fact, I kind of think being back on his bullshit about why the FBI is supposedly wasting their time with the Trump connection to Russian meddling is, in a very real way--more obstruction, very much along the lines of firing Comey quite obviously for his attention to Trump's Russian connections.

Although I have not ever really figured out when Trump was at his smartest, I can safely say that the experience of angry Trump is fairly dumb. The position of President is stressful enough as it is--but most likely more so for a person woefully uninformed with a staff he either distrusts or which is also incompetent and probably not suitable to be there either.

This sort of thing is very sad and transparently an admission of knowledge of guilt and rank incompetence on his part.

This TrumpWorld Grab-Bag Has Background Noise

Now, I try and say that my TrumpWorld Grab-Bag posts aren't intended to set up a case, so much as to review information that is coming to light--and I am not really pulling for a conclusion, here. It's just that sometimes, the evidence becomes so apparent that it's hard not to stay away from drawing conclusions, such as: If Donald Trump Jr. brought campaign manager Paul Manafort and digital campaign guy Jared Kushner (and also--brother-in-law) to his meetup with Natalya Veselnitskaya, then I can't imagine why candidate Trump would not have been informed. Even if this meeting wasn't necessarily fruitful--it opened the door to the campaign continuing to meet with Russians who represented themselves as having the good dirt. Because they set a precedent. They decided receiving information from a sometimes hostile power was ok. 

I want to clarify what I'm talking about when I say "hostile". Some pro-Trump arguments lead with the idea that what Trump has done could not possibly be "treason" by virtue of our not being in any declared war with Russia. I think this is a reasonable argument, but I also can't help but note that there is evidence of cyberwarfare. Russian operatives, identified as APT 28 and APT 29 ("Advanced persistent threat") have engaged in invasive attacks on the State Department in 2014, in 2015 & 2016 the DNC, and also the DCCC. They've tested out the infrastructure of our democracy and also things like our power grid. This is called "cyberwarfare"; they are doing it with the intent to disrupt our way of living and doing business. These kinds of attacks can be used to leverage individuals via kompromat or blackmail-worthy information, or they can be used by taking material out of context and weaponizing it by altering some of the data (active measures) and releasing it through friendly media sources to create influence. Doing these sorts of things are not intended for the benefit of the victimized country. Russia did not (damn near openly) support Donald Trump because they thought he'd be a brilliant US leader. They saw him as either a potential puppet, or a great stupid foil.  Because, Trump is not a professional. 

The point of cyber warfare is to disrupt--think of a better disruption of a country than a campaign to support a fake news-supporting, mainstream media deriding, race relations agitating, serial liar with vindictiveness woven into his warped idea of how government works.  Trump has expressed denial regarding the idea that Russian president Putin preferred him, but I can imagine no reality where Trump was not aware of Russian influence and Trump's behavior also suggests he either knew or suspected he was benefitting from their aid. Probably from the moment he announced he was running for POTUS. It also seems likely that his campaign knowingly used material obtained by the Russian hacks--which is something that puts Jared Kushner, who oversaw the digital operations of the campaign, in the spotlight.

It is possible that people in the Trump orbit were not entirely aware of the dire nature of the relationship between the campaign and Russia--but certainly there were enough old hands on deck who should have known this was not normal. And in the gradual release of information that clarifies this relationship, it becomes apparent that everyone must have known something was off because they kept lying about whether such contacts between the campaign and Russian representatives existed at all. It also seems significant that Trump himself,  and media apologists at, for example, Fox News, have moved on from "never happened" to "if it did, so what?" But this is dumb, because Putin is not, and is unlikely to become, a good ally to the US.  And when Trump officials like Seb Gorka suggest that getting dirt is just what campaigns do, it might be conditionally true that some people would be willing to accept the risk of foreign influence--but is that really what "high-quality" people do? 

In other news, articles of impeachment against Trump have now been filed regarding his apparent obstruction of justice. But, given the tenor of GOP response to the Trump shambles, I don't have a lot of hope this will go anywhere.

A TrumpWorld Grab-Bag Full of Interesting People

The G20 (or was it G19?) Summit in Hamburg has given us the first glimpse of President Trump's potential working relationship with respect to the guy many of us have been wondering about, Mr. Steal Your Election, Vladimir Putin. I'm just going to come out with it--it went as one would expect.  Mr. Trump has not ever unequivocally stated that he thought Russia was behind the hack of the DNC and the emails of Clinton associate John Podesta, and in fact, his Tweet just prior to meeting Putin conflated the two separate but important hacks to deride their importance:

Everyone here is talking about why John Podesta refused to give the DNC server to the FBI and the CIA. Disgraceful!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 7, 2017

Notes: no one was talking about this because the US election happened in 2016 and the hacks are not actually relevant anymore, unless somehow, world leaders are curious about how everything in the US was so shambolic as to somehow result in a Trump presidency--alleging this is not a great look for POTUS. But John Podesta didn't run the DNC, and the CIA had nothing to do with that investigation, and also, the FBI didn't need the server to uncover the DNC hack because they already knew about it. So much wrong in one Tweet? Or--so much deliberate obfuscation when Trump's war to establish his legitimacy will never end because of the Russian asterisk?

But as to the actual meeting between Putin and Trump--the warm handshake and backslap instead of Trump's usual tug-o-war approach to manual greetings? The supposedly 30 minutes scheduled that became nearly 2 1/2 hours? The lack of note-taking and the letting Russia get out their message first: that Putin expressed that he had nothing to do with the hacks and Trump accepted that, getting right under the statement the WH and US State Department wanted to make about Trump "confronting" Russia with the allegations?

It's fucking dumb, and we have no reason at all to believe Trump really pressed an issue he is pathologically incapable of dealing with publicly. He still wants to have it both ways--deny Russia had bugger-all to do with anything, and blame the previous administration for not doing more. Why would that somehow change now that he's meeting his hero, who points out the mean reporters who insults him with the kind of menace only an autocrat-lover can really appreciate?

But what can I say that doesn't sound obvious to people who know my point of view? Trump's entourage think (publicly) that Trump handled himself brilliantly.  I'd respect them more if I had a sense their nonpublic thoughts were any different. Trump never seems able to act like his ass isn't owned by Putin. He wanted his foreign policy team to provide "deliverables" and had no foreign policy "asks" of his own set up. He ended up with a possible commitment to partner on cybersecurity with a nation that is trying to hack us on the regular.  Because if I'm mugged, I want to go fight crime with my mugger. It's insulting to any functioning intelligence, is what it is.

There's more grab-bag than just Trump's conduct at G20, though. The NYT just came out with a fascinating story about Donald Trump Jr. meeting with Paul Manafort and a Kremlin-backed lawyer.  This is crazy-interesting. For one thing, most folks know what Manafort was about. But the lawyer in question, Natalia Veselnitskaya, is interesting because of a thing called the Magnitsky Act, which targets human rights abusers. Russia has done considerable lobbying to try and effect US position on this. It's not Trump Jr's first connection with dodgy Russian business.  It just seems to go to show that weird Russian connections were a family affair. But keep in mind, Magnistsky is also about money-laundering.  I feel like this will come up in future Mueller-related proceedings, in which money-laundering and assorted business contacts could feature heavily.

All this is just to say that while Trump wants to "move on" and Putin wants to "move on" from the 2016 election interference, this is not likely to happen. They still have some stuff to answer for.

A Trump Abroad

I'm not by nature a pessimistic person, which regularly shocks me--my generation is known for cynicism and snark and sarcasm. But I sometimes am hopeful about things, like maybe that the White House plans hotel bookings for the President when he does important stuff abroad so he doesn't have to schlep a room in an embassy like he was Julian Assange or something. (He's staying in Hamburg's Senate house--it's nice, and I am just being mean.) Sigh. I wish I felt better about his being out and around people, is all.

Maybe he would just give a great speech in front of a sympathetic bussed-in crowd. Maybe it wouldn't be a weird white nationalist rant about Western Civilization. Maybe he wouldn't get some historical thing, like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, really wrong. Maybe he wouldn't mention his election results. 

I also was hopeful that the US President who took an oath to the Constitution would not actually deride freedom of speech and the press which is a big thing, really. (That hope got dashed.) And if I was looking for some kind of acknowledgement that Trump understood that Russia meddled in the 2016 elections and probably was going to try it again, well, again, disappointment.  Trump basically agreed Russia could have been involved but so could anyone and anyway nothing is proven, blah blah blah. Which is itself fake news. There is a lot of consensus that meddling came from Russia to benefit Trump.  And that they will try it again. Right now, they seem to be trying out our nuclear plants. 

I would like to think that a person who put "America first" would be mad about this kind of invasive attack by any foreign government on our infrastructure--whether our electoral infrastructure upon which our faith in government might depend, or on our electric grid. That someone who was speaking for the US interest in, well, anything, had a plan.

But this self-interested SOB can't even admit that Russia is a problem. He is going to go into his meeting with Putin with a handful of people--Tillerson, Lavrov, some translators. And I don't feel good about this based on his meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak.  But maybe we will see, despite efforts to keep this meeting very closed. 

Putin's Cover Looks Like Shade

There is a certain surrealism to Russian President Vladimir Putin's defense of Donald Trump against the claims that Himself, the Donald, has been put in a difficult position due to kompromat that most probably does involve Russian call girls. Who are the best call girls. Putin argues: would it not be ridiculous for a man like Donald Trump, who has been with some of the world's most glamorous women (or lied about being with them, as he did about Carla Bruni) and who is married to an absolutely stunning woman, to have hired girls perform for him? Would that not be really weird? Sick, right?

Well, yeah. Thanks for including the details of the most lurid bits of the alleged smear in the defense, Vladi. But since it looks like the dossier was compiled by a private investigator (if former foreign intelligence agent) on behalf of a GOP candidate for oppo--this could hardly be construed as a case of the Obama Administration doing anything to delegitimize Trump. On the contrary, I think Obama and his immediate circle have tried to be appropriately available and gracious to the incoming Trump folks.  Also, the general picture about Russian interference is as old as early last summer, and doesn't seem to have Obama fingerprints in the placement of that story.

Providing a denial is as good as half-admitting to a confirmation of all the collusion. Providing a denial that makes it look like Trump is the worst human if any of it was proven correct is also priceless. And an especially great mind-fuck treatment in the event that all the blackmail tea gets spilled before Putin gets to enjoy any of it--so that he loses his investment in Trump but saves face by letting it be understood, Trump was the idiot who compromised himself.

Leaving us with a President who is still delegitimized--not by the Russian hack/WikiLeaks stuff. But because Putin just told us Trump, too, is dispensable. But for the moment, merely compromised.