Trump had senior staff sign nondisclosure agreements. They’re supposed to last beyond his presidency. Cambridge Analytica, the shady data firm that might be a key Trump-Russia link, explained. The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has requested that a data analytics company called Cambridge Analytica turn over internal documents as part of its investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. Cambridge Analytica specializes in what’s called “psychographic” profiling, meaning they use data collected online to create personality profiles for voters. They then take that information and target individuals with specifically tailored content (more on this below).
So far there’s been a lot of speculation about the potential links between the Trump campaign and Russia, and most of the stories have orbited around the financial dealings of the Trump family and people like Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager. But this story is specifically about how team Trump, with the help of this data company, might have facilitated Russia’s meddling in the US presidential election. Just Read FBI Deputy Director McCabe's Statement Regarding His Firing By Trump... Just Read It.
Splinternews. Here Is Andrew McCabe’s Full Statement. Everyone Should Read It. – Mother Jones. Jeff Malet/ZUMA Looking for news you can trust? Subscribe to our free newsletters. Donald Trump fired former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe today. Technically, of course, it was Jeff Sessions who did the firing, but I don’t think anyone believes that it was anybody but Trump who was really at the controls. After all, it’s Trump who made up the inane conspiracy theory that McCabe was a Hillary Clinton mole during the 2016 campaign. This whole affair has been contemptible from the start. It’s possible, of course, that McCabe actually did something wrong and deserved to be fired for it.
Under the circumstances, it’s worth giving McCabe’s full statement wide and prominent publication. I have been an FBI Special Agent for over 21 years. For the last year and a half, my family and I have been the targets of an unrelenting assault on our reputation and my service to this country. No more. But looking at that in isolation completely misses the big picture. Donald Trump's Tweets As An Early 2000s Emo Song. Emo Trump vs. The New York Times. Donald Trump's Speeches As An Early 2000s Emo Song. Secret Service and White House Win Rosemary Award for Worst in Open Government in 2017 | National Security Archive. Stormy Daniels Files Lawsuit Over Trump NDA. When it comes to this White House, the fish rots from the head.
Cartoon: Trump's official presidential portrait. Politics.theonion. Trump’s Instincts on Russia, Afghanistan and Infrastructure Were Right. President Donald Trump. AFP/Getty Images To his opponents and enemies, President Donald Trump can do nothing right. His actions, intentions and conduct are offensive, mistaken and dangerous. But to his supporters and friends, the president can do little wrong.
And while his tweets and comments may be vulgar and inflammatory, in this view, only Trump can make Washington work and make America great again. Reality, like the actual state of the political views of a majority of Americans, is somewhere in between. Russia no longer trusts the United States and believes it is a danger to international stability. Despite strong denials, Russia has indeed interfered in domestic politics of other states and particularly in America’s 2016 elections.
Instead of convincing Congress of the need for a new approach toward Russia—and make no mistake, Congress sees Russia as a real enemy—Trump delayed. Regarding Afghanistan, the president’s instinct was to reduce American presence. Instincts are fine. President Trump's State of the Union Address Was Full of Lies and Half Truths. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask.
—Herman Melville, Moby Dick WASHINGTON—It was the most elaborate of charades, the most sophisticated of masquerades, that played itself out in the chamber of the House of Representatives on Tuesday night. The amount of pretense required to keep all sensible people—which is to say, any person who was not a Republican—in their chairs must have been heroic. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below All involved had to pretend that Donald Trump makes sense as a president, that his administration makes sense as a government, and that his first State of the Union address made sense as either a description of national policy, or as a rhetorical summons to national unity. Getty Images I don’t know how long the institutions of the republic can sustain this much pretense. Theslot.jezebel. White House Asks Museum For A Van Gogh, Gets A Toilet Instead. What Kind of Woman Works for Donald Trump? Theonion. WATCH: CNN creates a hilarious supercut of Trump's biggest first-year screw-ups.
Untitled. Have you ever seen a four-year-old and a two-year-old playing together with blocks? The four-year-old has the fine motor skills to be able to balance one block on top of another, slowly, meticulously building a small structure. The two-year-old doesn’t have the skills to build. Neither does it possess the patience to learn the skills. The only power it has is the power to destroy. So, the two-year-old gleefully kicks over the tower the four-year-old has so carefully constructed. “M…O…M….” Anyone with children, or even anyone who has simply watched children, will recognize this story. This little parable provides an insight into Trump’s first year in foreign policy. Trump is the two-year-old. The JCPOA deal with Iran provides a verifiable, working check on Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. It is hard to image how so much damage to America’s long-term interests could be inflicted so quickly, so widely, so deeply, and by someone who claims to want to Make America Great Again.
Taibbi: TL:DR Guide to Michael Wolff’s 'Fire and Fury' Donald Trump Is a Real-Life Fredo Corleone. “I can handle things. I’m smart! Not like everybody says, like dumb. I’m smart and I want respect!” This morning’s presidential Twitter outburst recalls those words of Fredo Corleone’s in one of the most famous scenes from The Godfather series. Trump tweeted that his “two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart,” and in a subsequent tweet called himself a “very stable genius.” Trump may imagine that he’s Michael Corleone, the tough and canny rightful heir—or even Sonny Corleone, the terrifyingly violent but at least powerful heir apparent—but after today he is Fredo forever. There’s a key difference between film and reality, though: The Corleone family had the awareness and vigilance to exclude Fredo from power. Michael Wolff’s scathing new book about the Trump White House has sent President Trump spiraling into the most publicly visible meltdown of his presidency.
The enabling and protecting not only continues. CNN panel mocks ‘executive time’ carved out in Donald Trump’s schedule: ‘Being president is easier than we thought’ John Avlon, Alisyn Camerota, Chris Cuomo and A.B. Stoddard (Photo: Screen capture) In a Monday morning “New Day” panel, CNN host Alisyn Camerota couldn’t help but laugh at President Donald Trump’s new “executive time” in the White House. Camerota walked through the fact that the unofficial schedule was leaked to Axios over the weekend and explained that this new leaked schedule is what the staff understands as Trump’s time in the West Wing.
Even Daily Beast editor John Avlon hoped that the term would catch on “First of all, say I love the new euphemism for TV watching as ‘executive time,'” Avlon laughed. “I expect this to take on like wildfire across the country. ‘I can’t. Camerota noted that being president seems to be easier than everyone thought. “I mean, I don’t know how you can be president and work that chunk of time,” she said. Avlon noted Trump “works the phones” a lot and Cuomo said that Trump has been known to “work hard” as a businessman. Commentator A.B. Taibbi: Why Michael Wolff's Book Is Good News.
Bush ethics chair perfectly schools right-wing attorney general on ethics and law: ‘Wrong! That’s just wrong!’ ‘Where do I send the box of chocolates?’ Michael Wolff thanks Trump for turning his book into a blockbuster. Untitled. The really interesting thing about Michael Wolff's new tell-all book and the furious reaction to it is that everybody is right: Wolff, Trump, Bannon et al — everyone, since the formidable theme of each belligerent is that the others are cracked, incompetent, or both. The book, Fire and Fury, portrays Trump as an unstable "buffoon who doesn’t read, can’t settle on political priorities and is unable to manage a warring cast of advisers," as the Washington Post summarizes it.
Trump now portrays Steve Bannon "as a self-aggrandizing political charlatan who has 'lost his mind.'" And virtually everyone else mired in this administration's whirling cesspool is leaking like a firehose about its insane ineptitude. Largely unmentioned in most of the Wolff book reviews is that the Three Hundred Stooges lunacy starts at the top, always has. Even Trump, in his dissociative state, has intuited that much. Michael Wolff: My Insane Year Inside Trump's White House. Loading your audio article Editor’s Note: Author and Hollywood Reporter columnist Michael Wolff’s new book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (Henry Holt & Co.), is a detailed account of the 45th president’s election and first year in office based on extensive access to the White House and more than 200 interviews with Trump and senior staff over a period of 18 months.
In advance of the Jan. 9 publication of the book, which Trump is already attacking, Wolff has written this extracted column about his time in the White House based on the reporting included in Fire and Fury. I interviewed Donald Trump for The Hollywood Reporter in June 2016, and he seemed to have liked — or not disliked — the piece I wrote. “Great cover!” His press assistant, Hope Hicks, emailed me after it came out (it was a picture of a belligerent Trump in mirrored sunglasses). The West Wing is configured in such a way that the anteroom is quite a thoroughfare — everybody passes by. Play/PauseSPACE Mute/Unmutem. Trump says Bannon ‘not only lost his job, he lost his mind’ as president’s lawyers send cease-and-desist letter. President Trump on Wednesday castigated his former chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon as a self-aggrandizing political charlatan who has “lost his mind,” marking an abrupt and furious rupture with the onetime confidant that could have lasting political impact on the November midterms and beyond.
The White House’s sharp public break with Bannon, which came in response to unflattering comments Bannon made about Trump and his family in a new book about his presidency, left the self-fashioned populist alienated from his chief patron and even more isolated in his attempts to remake the Republican Party by backing insurgent candidates. Late Wednesday, lawyers for Trump sent a cease-and-desist letter to Bannon, arguing he violated the employment agreement he signed with the Trump Organization in numerous ways and also likely defamed the president.
“You have breached the Agreement by, among other things, communicating with author Michael Wolff about Mr. Three takeaways from the new book on Trump. Donald Trump's New York Times Interview With Michael Schmidt Is the Sign of a Bigger Problem. On Thursday, El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago sat down with Michael Schmidt of The New York Times for what apparently was an open-ended, one-on-one interview. Since then, the electric Twitter machine–and most of the rest of the Intertoobz–has been alive with criticism of Schmidt for having not pushed back sufficiently against some of the more obvious barefaced non-facts presented by the president* in their chat. Some critics have been unkind enough to point out that Schmidt was the conveyor belt for some of the worst attacks on Hillary Rodham Clinton emanating from both the New York FBI office and the various congressional committees staffed by people in kangaroo suits.
For example, Schmidt’s name was on a shabby story the Times ran on July 23, 2015 in which it was alleged that a criminal investigation into HRC's famous use of a private email server was being discussed within the Department of Justice. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below This is more than simple grandiosity. WATCH: CNN hosts can’t stop laughing at Trump claim he knows ‘details of health care better than most’
On CNN’s New Day, host Alysin Camerota and Bill Weir were unable to contain their laughter at a portion of a New York Time interview with Donald Trump, where the president insisted he knew more about taxes and the GOP’s healthcare plan than anyone. Thursday evening, the Times published an interview conducted with Trump after a reporter found him unattended at his Trump International Golf Club, leading to a rambling, and at times bizarre, 30-minute interview. Among the topics covered were taxes and healthcare, with the president claiming, “I know the details of taxes better than anybody. Better than the greatest C.P.A.
I know the details of health care better than most, better than most.” Reading from the transcript, host Weir laughingly made his way through Trump’s verbatim comments, where he bumbled his way through, “And if I didn’t, I couldn’t have talked all of these people into doing ultimately only to be rejected.” “A bit of an off-ramp I wasn’t seeing. “Yeah. How Will History Judge the Trump Presidency? Presidents don’t need to be professors, but experience tells us that reading the odd book or two (or even three—a man can hope) can make a significant difference in the Oval Office. Thucydides said he wrote his histories for “those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will at some time or other and in much the same ways be repeated in the future.” If the Greek historian was right—and he usually was—Trump’s historical illiteracy may wind up being as costly as John F.
Kennedy’s grasp of the past was beneficial. When the news came on the morning of Tuesday, October 16, 1962, Kennedy’s first reaction was personal. “He can’t do this to me,” the president said as he was briefed, in bed, about Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba—an act that put nuclear weapons less than 15 minutes away from Washington, D.C. The options, as the Kennedys saw them? Eisenhower asked a crucial question. Tallying the Damage of Trump's Presidency in 2017. ‘Bad Lip Reading’ produces hilarious Trump Christmas message — and it features Melania begging for help.
‘America’s Mussolini — but stupider’: Internet rains hell on Mike Huckabee for comparing Trump to Winston Churchill. America still hasn't reckoned with the election of a reckless con man as president. The Year of Being Completely Overwhelmed by Trump - Rolling Stone. Trump judicial nominee fumbles basic questions about the law. Trump judicial nominee struggles to answer law questions Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) asked President Trump's U.S. District nominee Matthew S. Peterson law questions during a hearing on Dec. 13. Peterson struggled to answer the standard questions. (Sen. Nomination hearings for U.S. district judges tend to be dry affairs that offer little in the way of mass entertainment — in other words, they’re not typically the stuff of viral videos.
But a clip of one of President Trump’s federal judicial nominees struggling to answer rudimentary questions about the law garnered well more than 1 million views in a matter of hours on Thursday night and stoked speculation that another of the president’s nominations might get derailed. Sen. For five painfully awkward minutes, Petersen, a member of the Federal Election Commission and a lawyer with no trial experience, fumbled with Kennedy’s questions, visibly uncomfortable as the lawmaker pressed him about how things work in a federal courtroom. Civil? The Nationalist's Delusion. When you look at Trump’s strength among white Americans of all income categories, but his weakness among Americans struggling with poverty, the story of Trump looks less like a story of working-class revolt than a story of white backlash.
And the stories of struggling white Trump supporters look less like the whole truth than a convenient narrative—one that obscures the racist nature of that backlash, instead casting it as a rebellion against an unfeeling establishment that somehow includes working-class and poor people who happen not to be white. The nature of racism in America means that when the rich exploit everyone else, there is always an easier and more vulnerable target to punish. The Irish immigrants who in 1863 ignited a pogrom against black Americans in New York City to protest the draft resented a policy that offered the rich the chance to buy their way out; their response was nevertheless to purge black people from the city for a generation. “Yes,” Bush replied. 3 Ways Trump's Narcissism Is Endangering America. “Nikki Haley Stuck a Knife in His Back”: Roger Stone, a Close Trump Ally, Is Already Writing the Story of Trump’s Downfall.
What If Stuff Happened That Enabled Trump To Declare A Permanent State of Emergency In America, And Rule As Our Dictator? Bloomberg. The Daily 202: Trump solidifies control of GOP with RNC reversal on Roy Moore. The Cost of Trump's Attacks on the FBI. Trump Disbands Group That Prepared Cities for Climate Shocks. Splinternews. SNL’s Hillary Clinton Haunts (and Taunts) Donald Trump: ‘Lock Him Up!’ What Fresh Hell?: This week’s under-the-radar outrages. Jared Kushner Has Been a Very Naughty Boy.
Bloomberg. Politics.theonion. Politics.theonion. Politics.theonion. Politics.theonion. For each scene of his presidency, Trump casts a villain (or two, or three …) Inside the ‘adult day-care center’: How aides try to control and coerce Trump. Trump's Capacity for Cruelty Will Still Amaze You. “I Hate Everyone in the White House!”: Trump Seethes as Advisers Fear the President Is “Unraveling” | Vanity Fair. Trump signs order to eliminate ACA insurance rules, undermine marketplaces. Hurricane Maria: Three weeks after landfall, Puerto Rico is still dark, dry, frustrated.
The Atlantic Confirms It: We Are Living In A Kakistocracy. Trump is on track to win reelection. Donald Trump Insists Senate Investigate News Outlets, ‘Fake News’ Trump says Puerto Rico officials should be ‘proud’ more haven’t died like in Katrina. As Trump travels to Puerto Rico, the White House leaks their strategy. Trump In Puerto Rico Disgustingly Tells Puerto Ricans It’s Costing Too Much To Save Them | Addicting Info | The Knowledge You Crave.
Trump: Mass Shootings Will Stop If Americans Unite And Pray For Peace | Addicting Info | The Knowledge You Crave. Trump scoffs at 'politically motivated ingrates' after Maria. Lost weekend: How Trump’s time at his golf club hurt the response to Maria. Trump Throws A Hissy Fit At His Golf Course As Criticism Over Puerto Rico Response Grows | Addicting Info | The Knowledge You Crave. An American Tragedy of Puerto Rico. Trump gives himself high marks, while in actual Puerto Rico 'this is a people are dying story' Missing in inaction: Why hasn’t Trump ordered the military to Puerto Rico? - Salon.com. U.S. denies request for Puerto Rico shipping waiver. Internet appalled as Trump blames ‘this thing called the Atlantic’ for bungled Puerto Rico response. How Trump Has Normalized the Unspeakable. Taibbi on the Madness of Donald Trump - Rolling Stone.
Theresa May Puts On Headphones To Hear English Translation Of Trump’s Address. ‘I enjoy your ocean of tears’: GOP strategist takes victory lap around disillusioned Trump fans. The Unprecedented Trump! Aides Clip Toenails, Wash Hair Of Mumbling, Bedsore-Ridden Trump As President Enters 155th Straight Hour Of Watching Cable News. Taibbi: Trump's Assault on 'Dreamers' Might Work Politically - Rolling Stone. What Trump and his team have wrecked so far - NationofChange. From atop his Dumpster fire, raging Trump 'turning on people that are very close to him' Trump Simulates Empathy In Photo Op Trip To Houston. Looking Back On Trump's Agenda | HuffPost. ‘He’s turning on people’: Trump confidantes say the president’s mood continues to ‘darken’ under Kelly’s iron thumb.
Trump Confidante Confirms: The Donald Doesn’t Want To Be President Anymore | Addicting Info | The Knowledge You Crave. The Ol' Trump Two-Step. Trump Orders Military To Give Cops Free Grenade Launchers, Bayonets, And Tanks | HuffPost. Texans Brace For President’s Response To Hurricane. Trump struck down Obama’s flood risk regulations two weeks before Harvey. Trump Is A 19th-Century President Facing 21st-Century Problems. Der Spiegel's New Magazine Cover: The True Face Of Donald Trump. Why Trump Is Mentally Unfit to Be President: Pathology of Narcissism - Rolling Stone. Abbreviated pundit roundup: Trump blames everyone but himself for failure. What I Learned From 7 Months Of Watching The Trump White House.