Trump’s Braintrust (Fox News) is Pushing Him to Declare a National Emergency to Get His Border Wall

Posted by on January 11, 2019 at 12:07 pm. 4 Comments :

The presidency of Donald Trump has distinguished itself for its hostility to the media and the Constitution’s protection of a free press. His tedious whining about “fake news” and his Stalinist references to the media as “the enemy of the people” are evidence of his desire to poison the public’s minds in order to suppress criticism of him and his administration.

Donald Trump, Fox News

That said, no president has ever been more closely intertwined with a media enterprise than Trump is with Fox News. Before his election he was a regularly scheduled contributor to Fox and Friends with a segment called “Mondays with Trump.” He limits his interviews to Fox News on a nearly exclusive basis. His administration is infested with former Fox News staffers. They include: Deputy Chief of Staff, Bill Shine, who was the president of the network before being fired for mishandling incidents of sexual harassment; ambassador to the United Nations nominee, Heather Nauert, a former Fox host; National Security Advisor, John Bolton, an ex-Fox contributor.

In addition, Trump employs current Fox News anchors as his de facto cabinet, getting advice on everything from the economy to military engagements, to taxes and more. Sean Hannity is reported to talk with the President almost every night before bedtime. Lou Dobbs is often on conference call during Oval Office meetings. Jeanine Pirro is a favorite consultant on legal matters. And Trump is frequently live-tweeting whatever he happens to be watching on Fox, day and night.

Recently, Trump was prepared to sign a bipartisan bill to keep the government open. But when Fox Newsies heard that it didn’t provide funding for his idiotic vanity wall, they went berserk. Subsequently, Trump reversed course, and now we find ourselves in what is about to become the longest government shutdown in history. Which makes it all the more troubling that many of Trump’s Fox faves are now imploring him to declare a national emergency as a tactic to fund the wall that has nothing to do with any emergency, and that most Americans oppose. For instance, as reported by Media Matters:

Sean Hannity: So, with the president speaking, I’m guessing he’s going to declare a national emergency. […] victims of crime happening in this country, that should be enough of a national emergency.

Lou Dobbs: This is the president of the United States. He says a wall should be built; that it’s a national emergency. At that point, the nation should rally behind him. […] It is a national emergency, it is a crisis, and there could be no rational disputation of that.

Lou Dobbs (again): I really believe that the way forward here is for him to declare a national emergency, and simply sweep aside the recalcitrant left in this country.

Stuart Varney: I think this total refusal to negotiate has pushed the president to the point where he has to declare an emergency on the border.

Rush Limbaugh: And so they empowered the executive branch with the National Emergencies Act. He can confiscate private businesses, if he wants. All he has to do is declare it a national emergency.

Gregg Jarrett: The National Emergency Act authorizes the president to declare an emergency, and nobody can second-guess him. He has unfettered authority. […] he can use the military, redirect them for construction of an unauthorized project, whatever it is, the president wants it to be. That can be the barrier wall, and nobody can stop him from doing it.

Bob Bianchi (Fox guest): To me, politically, it makes perfect sense. [for Trump to] invoke my powers as the president under the National Emergency Act and under one of these sub-acts that allows me to move funds around to build this border wall.

Tom Fitton (on Tucker Carlson Tonight): It is a national emergency when we have a thousand plus miles of unsecured border in our southern area without any ability to figure out who’s coming across. We know the terrorists are targeting [the] southern border.

Considering how gullible Trump is, and how easily influenced he is by his Fox News brain(?) trust, it’s a foregone conclusion that he’ll declare a national emergency. However, contrary to the ravings of Trump and Fox, he does not have unfettered authority to do so. It will undoubtedly be challenged in court. And since the facts don’t support any claim to a crisis, he’ll almost certainly lose. In the meantime, millions of people are hurt and the nation is stifled by Trump’s ignorance and ego. Hopefully that can all be avoided by Congress waking up and doing the right thing. But given the abdication of its civic duty, Mitch McConnell’s Senate has to be considered a long shot.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

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Trump’s Border Wall Scam: Who’s Benefiting from at Least Four Payments for the Same Wall?

Posted by on January 10, 2019 at 1:04 pm. 1 Comments :

There is a peculiar familiarity to Donald Trump’s pitch for his useless vanity wall on the southern border. Anyone who has seen a classic film about smarmy con artists will recognize the scheme that Trump is employing. Essentially he is seeking to get paid many times over for a single item. None of the victims of this scam will receive anything of value for their money.

Donald Trump, Border Wall

That’s precisely what Trump is doing. And he even reiterated it on Thursday morning as he left for a visit to the scene of the crime in Texas. His comments to the press swung between utterly dishonest and frighteningly incoherent. But in the end they were self-serving and disrespectful to the American people who suffer the burdens of his ignorance and hostility.

Notable in this tantrum were Trump’s denials that he ever said that Mexico would pay for the wall directly. He seems to think that because he didn’t specify that Mexico would pay by check, that he never meant that they would be responsible for paying directly at all. But when you repeatedly ask your cult rally followers “Who’s gonna pay for the wall?” and then join them in responding that “Mexico will pay for the wall,” that has only one meaning.

Additionally Trump actually did make statements that Mexico would pay directly. In fact, they are still on his website in a PDF position statement that says: “It’s an easy decision for Mexico: make a one-time payment of $5-10 billion to ensure that $24 billion continues to flow into their country year after year. There are several ways to compel Mexico to pay for the wall.”

More to the point, Trump has been making the case that the wall is either already being paid for by Mexico, or soon will be, for some time. In fact, he says explicitly that the wall is being paid for “many, many times over.” Let’s take a look at these alleged remittances:

Trump: “If we had the wall we would have tremendous savings. I really believe the barrier or wall would pay for itself every three or four months, and maybe even better than that.”

Here Trump is implying that savings from law enforcement activities amounts to payment for the wall. Of course those savings are in no way the result of any payments received from Mexico, directly or otherwise. What’s more, if Trump thinks that his wall is going to eliminate drug trafficking, and the costs associated with it, he’s dumber than we thought. After all, ninety percent of illegal drugs come into the country through legal ports of call. And by the way, so do most undocumented immigrants. His wall doesn’t address any of that. But then there’s also this:

Trump: “When I said Mexico will pay for the wall in front of thousands and thousands of people, obviously they’re not gonna write a check, but they are paying for the wall indirectly many, many times over by the really great trade deal we just made.”

No, they aren’t. That isn’t how trade deals work. Mexico pays nothing via these deals. It is the private businesses on both sides of the border who incur both the costs and benefits as stipulated in the agreement.

The problem with Trump’s arguments is that he’s admitting to financial fraud. It is illegal to request and receive payments from multiple sources for a single product. For instance, you can’t sell your car to six different people, collect all their money, and leave town. But the history of Trump’s remarks on payment for the wall indicate that he’s seeking compensation directly from Mexico, and also via law enforcement savings, and also by businesses engaged in trade. And finally by the American people, who he’s holding hostage to his ludicrous demands by shutting down the government.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

That’s at least four payees for a single wall. How many times does he want to get paid for this boondoggle? And who’s getting all the extra money? And why is he even asking American citizens to foot the bill – and suffer the Trump Shutdown – when he says he has already secured payment?

The answers to these questions are likely out of reach because Trump will never provide them, or he will engage in a rambling, incomprehensible filibuster until people stop asking. But the bottom line is that, by his own admission, there is no need to get funds from taxpayers, and Trump’s efforts to do so are both immoral and unlawful.


Crybaby Trump’s Fear and Whining Loses to Pelosi and Schumer in Nielsen Ratings

Posted by on January 9, 2019 at 6:04 pm. NO Comments :

The most prominent character flaw of Donald Trump (among so many) is his dangerously malignant narcissism. He has an ego so large and fragile that its collapse could produce a tsunami big enough to wipeout much of the civilized world. The evidence of this is often revealed in his frequent bragging about things he undeservedly takes credit for, and his whining about failures for which he refuses to take any responsibility.

Donald Trump, Loser

Naturally, any poll that he can strain something positive out of, he will feature prominently on his Twitter feed. And among the surveys that he most likes to promote are those taken by Nielsen Media Research. Trump just gets giddy with excitement when he excels in the ratings. So the results of his Oval Office speech on Tuesday night are likely to bring a storm of rage due to his defeat at the hands of his Democratic foes, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer.

When Trump finds out that more people watched The Pelosi/Schumer Show than his pathetic babbling about steel barriers and beheadings, he may have a stroke. Sure, some Fox News viewers tuned out after he signed off. But the audience increased for the other cable networks enough to exceed the total for his audience. And the combined post-Trump total for MSNBC and CNN surpassed the number of viewers on Fox.

NETWORK TRUMP SCHUMER/PELOSI
FOX NEWS 8,221,000 7,864,000
MSNBC 4,025,000 4,461,000
CNN 3,390,000 3,742,000
TOTALS 15,636,000 16,067,000

If Trump was hoping to command a large audience of dimwits he could persuade with his oozing charm, he failed bigly. Not only did he give a presentation that induced narcolepsy, it lead to a Wednesday afternoon meeting with Democrats where Trump stormed out in a huff upon hearing that he still wasn’t gonna get the wall he wanted from Santa. Then he tweeted an insolent and incoherent message:

Trump seems to think that by agreeing to reopen the government, he’s entitled to total subservience from Democrats who still oppose the wall for a host of legitimate reasons. Those reasons don’t disappear because Trump finally behaves responsibly and Congress does the job they’re paid to do. And the wall isn’t his reward for releasing a hostage nation from his aspiring authoritarian grip.

There’s no way that Trump can win this argument because he’s relying only on an infantile insistence that everyone bow down to his demands. But Republicans in the Senate are already starting to fall away as they realize that deliberately hurting their constituents is bad politics. So it’s only a matter of time before Trump caves in with some face saving resolution that still denies him his precious wall.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.


What’s the Real Reason Trump Gave that Yawner from the Oval Office? (Hint: Think Russia)

Posted by on January 9, 2019 at 9:54 am. 6 Comments :

On Tuesday night Donald Trump gave a much anticipated address from the Oval Office, his first as President. There was rampant speculation about what he might say. Some pundits wondered if he might take the opportunity to declare a national emergency in order to reallocate federal funds to his idiotic and useless vanity wall. Others just considered it a ploy to get the public to pressure Congress to pay his ransom for reopening the government.

Donald Trump, Subway

As it turns out the speech was a tiresome affair that featured Trump solemnly reciting from his TelePrompTer and sniffling as he has been known to do after snorting Adderall. There was nothing that could be called newsworthy. Trump offered no solutions to the shutdown impasse. He made no overtures to Democrats on border security legislation. There wasn’t anything different about this speech than what he’s been saying for the past three weeks on this subject. And of course, that means he was repeating the same old lies that he and his surrogates (including Surrogate-in-Chief Mike Pence) have been foisting on the public since the Trump Shutdown began.

So there was no reason for this speech to be carried live by the news networks. No news value would have been lost by delaying it for half an hour so that it could be fact checked – a practice that should be in effect for everything Trump says or does. What the speech did contain was Trump’s now tedious routine of fear mongering and blame shifting to Democrats.

He amped up the emotionally charged fears of violence allegedly committed by undocumented immigrants with examples that included murders, rapes, and even beheadings. Never mind that this immigrant population is far less likely to commit these or any crimes than are native born citizens. The purpose of this overtly racist argument, as employed by Trump and his shills on Fox News, is to demonize people who are largely peaceful and law abiding.

So why did Trump take the extraordinary step of demanding primetime television access to the nation in order to bore them with rote repetitions of his commonplace cult rally ravings? He must have known that there was nothing in his remarks that would change anyone’s mind. Nor would it move the needle on resolving the shutdown problem. The only thing that it would be certain to do is dominate the news cycle for a short period of time. And therein lies a clue to what might have been his true intention.

Absent this speech, the most prominent stories that came out the same day concerned the ongoing investigations into Trump’s collusion and conspiracy with Russia. One of those stories featured the chairman of his presidential campaign, Paul Manafort, who was found to have been sharing proprietary polling data with a suspected Russian intelligence operative. That information corresponds with the sort of data used by Russia to interfere with the election, and links Trump’s campaign to the Russian conspiracy more closely than ever before.

The other story concerned the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, who famously met with Manafort, Don Jr, Jared Kushner, and others, in Trump Tower. That was the meeting where they discussed acquiring “dirt” in the form of stolen emails from Hillary Clinton and her associates. Veselnitskaya was indicted yesterday for obstruction of justice in a case that revealed her close ties to the Kremlin.

Given the bombshell quality of these stories, it would have been a fortunate coincidence if something else arose that might distract the media and the public from focusing on them. Could Trump have been tipped off about these impending legal disclosures? Perhaps by Manafort or his lawyers who have already been discovered to have secretly briefed Trump’s legal team And might Trump have had an incentive to schedule a rare Oval Office address that was completely devoid of substance in order to execute that distraction? Can anyone supply another reason why the President would embarrass himself with that empty televised spectacle that was the oratorical equivalence of dropping his pants on the subway to draw attention away from a worse crime?

Who knows with this president? This might be a step too deep into conspiracy theory. But it is well within the bounds of plausibility for a president who is openly considering a declaration of a national emergency – which does not exist – just so he can build a wall that most Americans don’t want. It is not far-fetched for someone who lies with such ease about things as easily verifiable as whether past presidents told him that they should have built a wall; or that 4,000 suspected terrorists were caught crossing the southern border; or that Democrats request that Trump change his wall construction from concrete to steel.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

None of those things were true. And that tendency for flagrant falsification is what makes anything possible with this president. Including a plot to wave a shiny Oval Office speech in front of the press to get them to ignore the fact that he’s pantless. But fortunately, it doesn’t seem to have worked. The other stories are still being sell covered (less so on Fox News) and are likely to make headlines on Wednesday and beyond. So Trump embarrassed himself, and wasted the nation’s time, in vain. The only problem with that is that it might make him more likely to actually declare a national emergency, out of anger and/or vengeance, in order to distract from the failure of this distraction. Stay tuned.


How Does VP Mike Pence Respond to Conclusive Evidence of Trump’s Lies? With Even More Lying!

Posted by on January 8, 2019 at 1:42 pm. 6 Comments :

On Tuesday evening Donald Trump will deliver his very first Oval Office address to the American people. And the critical subject matter that necessitates this extraordinary and urgent communication just happens to be a “humanitarian and national security crisis” that is being fabricated from thin air by Trump and his team of propaganda fabulists.

Mike Pence, Donald Trump

There is no credible evidence of a crisis at the southern border. By every metric that is measurable, undocumented immigration, drug trafficking, gang members, violent crime, etc., the incidence of illegal activity has been steadily declining for several years. But since Trump is badly losing the PR war for his idiotic and useless vanity wall, he has decided to take his case directly to the public. Which is a pretty terrible idea considering his historically low approval and the fact that he’s regarded by most Americans as untrustworthy. Even less trustworthy than the media that he despises.

Just who does Trump think he will convince that a wall that is decidedly unpopular, and the equally out of favor government shutdown he engineered to force Congress to pay for it, is really a great idea that everyone should embrace? If Trump thinks that his innate (albeit imaginary) charm will win over converts, he is going to be wallowing in a deep trench of disappointment.

Consequently, The administration sent their secret charisma weapon, Vice-President Mike Pence, out to save the day for Trump and company. He was interviewed by Jonathan Karl of ABC News. And one question in particular really hit the sweet spot for determining whether Trump’s TV ploy can succeed or not (video below):

Karl: How can the President’s word be trusted on this when he has said so many things that are just not true about this crisis? He said that Barack Obama had a ten foot wall built around his house here in Washington. You know that isn’t true. He said that some of his predecessors told him that they wanted to build a wall. But all four living presidents have now put out statements saying that they never had any such conversation with the President. And then you saw Sarah Sanders say that nearly 4,000 terrorists come into the country every year, and that’s not true either.

How can the American people trust the President when he says this is a crisis when he says things over and over again that aren’t true?

Pence: Well, the American people aren’t as concerned about the political debate as they are concerned about what’s really happening at the border. And that’s what the President’s been focusing on.

So Pence is spinning Trump’s flagrant dishonesty as “political debate”? This tells you something about how Republicans regard politics. And the absurdity of his contention that nobody cares about Trump lying is evident in Trump’s dismal approval polling.

When Karl tried to press Pence on the credibility question again, Pence launched into his robo-lie that 4,000 “known or suspected terrorists” were apprehended, still falsely implying that the southern border was their point of origin. Then he continued on auto-pilot with assertions about drugs pouring into the country, being deliberately deceitful about the fact that the vast majority come in by air or through valid checkpoints. And at this point you might be wondering what any of this have to do with the question about Trump’s lying? But finally, Pence painted Trump’s pathological fibs as simply his “passion” to “protect the American people”:

Pence: “The passion you hear from President Trump, his determination to take this to American people, as he will tonight in his national broadcast from the oval office, comes from his deep desire to do his job to protect the American people. And we’re gonna continue to carry that case forward until the Democrats in Congress come to the table and start negotiating. Not just to end the government shutdown, but to address what is an undeniable crisis at out southern border.”

It’s cute how Pence tries to evade the topic by shifting to a “blame the Democrats” posture, despite Trump being the immovable object who refuses to compromise, or even agree to the legislation that he previously agreed to. But Pence’s assertion of “an undeniable crisis” is especially ridiculous. That’s going to be a tough sell considering that even people like Fox News senior judicial analyst, Andrew Napolitan, denies it. He also denies that Trump has any legal right to move forward with his wall by declaring a national emergency. When his Fox colleague Maria Bartiromo asked this directly, Napolitano told her that:

“In a word, no. That’s not me saying no, because the Supreme Court said no when Harry Truman attempted to do that. […] the Supreme Court has made it very clear, even in times of emergency, the president of the United States of America cannot spend money unless it has been authorized by the Congress.”

None of this will prevent the circus that is going to unfold tonight for Trump’s Oval Office Reality TV episode. And his likely incoherent, lie-riddled speech won’t change the mind of a single viewer. Except for those who are finally disgusted enough by his ignorance and dishonesty and refuse to be further exploited by it. For Trump, this clown show is a lose-lose.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.


It’s ‘A Sad Day in America’ Trump Whines, as He Yells at ‘Crazed Lunatics’ in the Media

Posted by on January 7, 2019 at 1:33 pm. 3 Comments :

It’s as predictable as the sun rising over lobbyists at Mar-a-Lago. Whenever Donald Trump’s anxiety swells his otherwise empty cranium, he lashes out at the press with hollow insults and reckless characterizations as “enemies of the people,” a line he stole from Joseph Stalin. And now as the Trump Shutdown enters its sixteenth day, Trump is realizing that he has no leverage over the Democrats in Congress, and the American people oppose his vanity wall and the political stunts he employs to secure funding for it.

Donald Trump

Consequently, in his regularly scheduled morning tweetstorm, Trump focused intensely on the press that he despises so vehemently. It was a particularly harsh assault that was riddled with flagrant falsehoods and figments of his tortured imagination. He began, however, with some good old-fashioned (and undeserved) bragging about himself:

What Trump apparently means by “success” is the fact the government that he hates is shut down and hundreds of thousands of Americans are not working, or they are working and not being paid. It’s a condition that Trump absurdly said he can relate to. Really? Then he veers off to accuse the media of being “crazed lunatics who have given up on the TRUTH!” That might be a more convincing criticism if Trump weren’t the most dishonest president in history who has told more than 7,500 lies since his inauguration. But he wasn’t through:

Once again, Trump’s idea of “tremendous success” is a stock market that is down over 3,000 points in the last quarter, and was in the red for the year for the first time in a decade. His administration is crumbling with terminations and defections that have resulted in there being six cabinet members who are serving in an “acting” capacity because he can’t find any credible people who will work for him. He also asserts, without any factual basis, that the press is making up sources and publishing fiction.

But Trump is right that this is “a sad day in America.” In fact, it’s been a sad couple of years. That may change now that Democrats have the majority in the House of Representatives and there is some real oversight into Trump’s criminal activities. That, of course, is a big contributor to Trump’s ballooning anxieties. And it’s why he’s escalating attacks like these:

Trump is desperately trying to turn the American people against the free press so that they will dismiss reports of his collusion and conspiracy with Russia, his financial corruption, his unlawful initiatives, his submissive foreign policy, and his obstruction of justice. He’s fighting a losing battle on those grounds as most polls show that majorities of the people trust the media more than they trust Trump.

As if to affirm his own untrustworthiness, Trump posted a couple more tweets that were blatantly deceitful. In one he quoted Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) as seemingly siding with Trump’s contention that he can declare a state of emergency as a means of funding the border wall:

However, Trump left out the second part of Smith’s comment wherein he hammered the President saying:

“…but primarily it’s been done to build facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq. In this case, I think the president would be wide open to a court challenge saying, where is the emergency? You have to establish that in order to do this. Beyond that, this would be a terrible use of Department of Defense dollars.”

In the other tweet, Trump went after the New York Times for correctly reporting that his statements regarding the removal troops from Syria changed drastically in a number of days. Unfortunately for Trump, the record of his original statements is preserved in his own Twitter feed:

Finally (we wish), Trump announced that he will “Address the Nation on the Humanitarian and National Security crisis on our Southern Border,” in a televised speech this Tuesday evening. We can expect this to be a thorough rehashing of the lies he has been telling for weeks in his defense of shutting down the government and begging the American people to pay for what he promised would be paid for by Mexico. And never mind that Trump has since insisted that the wall would pay for itself in a year, and that it would be paid for by the USMCA trade deal (that has not been ratified) So it’s actually being paid for twice, but he’s still asking taxpayers to fork over funds for it.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

The media, however, should take a strong look at refusing to air this blatant propaganda by Trump. These Reality TV-style affairs are generally devoid of news and infected by Trump’s pathological lying. There is no reason they can’t be monitored and aired later with the fact checking that will surely be necessary. The media is under no obligation to grant scarce airtime to liars so that they can dispense fictional and self-serving distortions of reality.

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And Here’s the Very First Contestant for ‘Stupidest Comment By a Fox News Shill’ for 2019

Posted by on January 6, 2019 at 2:51 pm. 1 Comments :

We are only six days into 2019 and we already have a contestant for “Stupidest Comment of the Year By a Fox News Shill.” The lucky winner is a veteran of the State TV Network who has contributed more than his share of idiocy in past years. And even though the year is young and there are no other contestants, this will be difficult to beat as the year goes forward.

Fox News, Brit Hume, Donald Trump

Brit Hume is currently a senior political analyst for Fox News. Prior to that he was the anchor of their signature evening newscast, “Special Report.” He is still seen frequently on Fox as a commentator and a member of news panels. But this Sunday morning he was triggered by an article in the Daily Beast that reported Donald Trump’s remarks to the press as he was departing for Camp David. Trump was asked whether he related to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who he has thrown out of work via his “Trump Shutdown” – the political tantrum he’s throwing to try to get his idiotic vanity wall on the southern border. Trump replied that:

“I can relate, and I’m sure that the people that are on the receiving end will make adjustments, they always do, and they’ll make adjustments. People understand exactly what’s going on. But many of those people that won’t be receiving a paycheck, many of those people agree 100 percent with what I’m doing.”

Let’s aside the absurdity of Trump’s response that he can in any relate to the tribulations of people living paycheck to paycheck. And never mind the fact that he’s shown zero consideration for these innocent victims of his ego-driven fetish for a useless and racist wall. And don’t even bother trying to figure out where Trump got the idea that the federal workers who are suffering and risking losing their homes agree that it’s all worth it to construct a wall that will accomplish nothing.

What bothered Hume was the notion that the author of the article wasn’t giving Trump the credit he deserves for the sacrifices he’s making:

First of all, it isn’t true that Trump accepts no salary as president. He does accept it, and then donates it to the federal treasury or some agency thereof. So Trump still gets the tax write off benefit for making a $400,000 charitable gift. That’s very different than declining the salary.

However, the larger point that Hume is woefully blind to is that foregoing the salary hardly translates into Trump being able to relate to the federal workers who are undergoing severe financial hardships. Trump was born into wealth and never had to struggle to make ends meet. He has millions (he says billions) of dollars in assets and whether or not he takes the presidential salary has no bearing on his welfare. Hume seems to think that Trump is experiencing the very same kinds of trials that the federal employees are. Does he really believe that?

What’s more, Trump’s refusal to pocket his salary doesn’t mean that he isn’t making any money from his stint in the White House. In fact, he’s making more than any other president in history. That’s because from day one he has monetized the presidency for his personal benefit. He schedules conferences by the government and the Republican Party at his hotels. He spends his vacations at his resorts (i.e. Mar-a-Lago, Bedminster, etc.) where the government pays the accommodations of dozens of staffers and Secret Service agents. He has even earned hundreds of thousands of dollars renting golf carts to his security detail when he’s on the links.

Of course, every president incurs costs for travel and vacations. But none of them have paid those costs directly to themselves. Until Donald Trump. And we haven’t even gotten to the money he makes from foreign governments and operatives who are lodging at his hotels for the stated purpose of incurring his favor. That’s potentially a violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, which is an impeachable offense.

It’s beyond insane for Trump to suggest that he can relate to people that have been involuntarily furloughed at one of the most expensive times of the year (holidays and taxes). Trump doesn’t have to worry about keeping his residence. He doesn’t have to worry about paying for medicine or healthcare. He isn’t troubled with expenses caring his children or their schooling. He won’t have any problem buying groceries or clothing. I wonder if Hume, the author of this tweet, is aware of any of that.

So even if Trump wants to pretend that he understands, or can imagine how it feels, he simply cannot relate to it. And sadly, that’s representative of how most of the Trump Republican Nationalist Party regards these matters. So for posting this asinine tweet, Hume shows that he can neither relate nor understand, And for that he takes the lead for this year’s Stupidest Comment.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.


Shocker: Trump Embraces Obama and Clinton on Immigration, But Wildly Misquotes Them

Posted by on January 6, 2019 at 10:52 am. NO Comments :

The Trump Shutdown continues into its fifteenth day with no sign of resolution. Trump is actually becoming even more cemented into an increasingly bizarre stance that makes less sense every day. His raving tantrums on Twitter are filled with nonsense and lame memes that utterly fail to advance the dialog. Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi and the new Democratic majority in Congress are ignoring his plaintive and desperate whining.

Donald Trump, Immigrant, Child

Trump’s recent comments claim that the idiotic vanity wall he’s so obsessed with will save billions of dollars. In addition to that, he insists that the new trade agreement (USMCA, which has not been ratified by the Senate) will effectively result in Mexico paying for the wall (or fence, or steel slat, or gold-tasseled drapery, or whatever). So the cost is being covered twice, but Trump is still demanding that Americans pay for it. He also claims that most of the people hurt by the shutdown support his position on the wall. But also that they are mostly Democrats. So he thinks that most Democrats are on his side of the great wall debate.

No one who has been paying attention really expects Trump to make sense anymore. It’s a given that he’s out of his mind and unfit for the office of a president (or a chicken coop). But on Sunday morning Trump went a bridge too far by embracing two of his most hated political foes: President Obama and Hillary Clinton.

You have to wonder what his Deplorables will think about him elevating the people that they have been trained to despise so vehemently for the past two years. Now Trump is hailing their vision and advocacy of rational immigration reforms. There’s just one problem. Trump is totally misrepresenting what both of them said and believe on the subject. For instance, here is what Obama went on to say after the out-of-context excerpt Trump posted. He was speaking in support of a 2006 immigration reform bill in the Senate:

“The bill the Judiciary Committee has passed clearly strengthens enforcement. To begin with, the agencies charged with border security would receive new technology, new facilities, and more people to stop, process, and deport illegal immigrants.”

Notice that there is nothing about a wall. He is advocating what all Democrats still want twelve years later: border security via smart reforms that actually address the problem. Not a wall that ignores the fact that the vast majority of undocumented immigrants enter the country through valid checkpoints.

Obama went to say that “while security might start at our borders, it doesn’t end there.” He made the case for an earned path to citizenship saying that “we must allow undocumented immigrants to come out of the shadows and step on a path toward full participation in our society.” That’s hardly the policy that Trump and his Republican Nationalist Party are proposing.

As for Clinton, Trump also misrepresented her remarks made during the 2016 presidential campaign. Although she was somewhat open to “a barrier,” her full answer to a question from a voter quickly diverted to our need to deal with undocumented immigrants already in the country:

“I do think you have to control your borders. But I think that it’s also true that we need to do more to try to, number one, deal with the people who are already here, many of whom have been here for decades.”

Clinton explicitly mocked the notion of a wall at one point saying that it wouldn’t solve the problem. “I don’t care,” she said, “how tall the wall is or how big the door is.” She went on to advocate for providing more resources to the immigrants’ countries of origin in order to improve living conditions, reduce crime, and obviate the need for them to leave in the first place.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

If Trump was really interested in a rational, workable solution he would adopt the positions taken by Obama and Clinton, rather than distorting what they said for cheap political points. That would be the way out of the Trump Shutdown and relief for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who are the innocent victims of Trump’s ego-driven wall fetish. That is, if he actually cared about them.


Stop the Presses: Donald Trump Tells a Flaming Whopper, Takes Journalist ‘Totally Out of Context’

Posted by on January 5, 2019 at 11:27 am. 1 Comments :

As Donald Trump warned us all in an ominous Christmas Eve tweet, “Throughout the ages some things NEVER get better and NEVER change.” The truth of that is abundantly evident in the tweets that Trump continues to post in this new year. His fetish for an idiotic vanity wall, that will do nothing but waste money, took up much of Trump’s Saturday morning. And naturally, his whining was filled with lies, insults, and blame for anyone but himself.

Donald Trump

However, after his regularly scheduled manic tweetstorm, Trump decided to return to an old favorite obsession, lashing out with his Stalin-inspired portrayal of the press as “the enemy of the people.” In this episode, Trump is caught (again) regurgitating what he just saw on Fox News. He tweeted that:

Of course, that is a wholly dishonest characterization of what Abramson said. And we know this because Abramson tells us herself in this Twitter reply. And she elaborated in an interview with the Associated Press, rebuking Fox News (and by extension, Trump) for having taken her “totally out of context:”

“Jill Abramson, the former editor of The New York Times, said Thursday that Fox News took her criticism of the newspaper’s Trump coverage in her upcoming book ‘totally out of context’ for a story that appeared this week.” […]

“She said in an email interview with The Associated Press that the Fox article’s author, ‘Media Buzz’ host Howard Kurtz, had ignored compliments that she had for the Times and The Washington Post.

“‘His article is an attempt to Foxify my book, which is full of praise for The Times and The Washington Post and their coverage of Trump,’ she wrote in the email.”

So Trump’s tweet unsurprisingly misrepresented the truth. Although, he did say that Abramson was “100% correct,” so presumably that includes her praise for the paper and her remarks that “the depth and intensity of its accountability coverage of Trump ‘was masterful.'” Trump failed to mention that in his tweet.

The problem with reporting on this President is that there is so much negative news that simply being honest and accurate can appear to be biased. But it isn’t the fault of journalists that Trump lies every time he opens his mouth, or that his presidency is rife with corruption and criminal malfeasance. And it isn’t the fault of reporters that Trump’s incoherent press avails sound more like the ravings of a street-walking schizophrenic screaming absurdities at bewildered passersby and the occasionally unfortunate pigeon.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Covering Donald Trump means reporting when he tells lies that have long ago been debunked. It means holding him accountable for his own contradictions. It means disclosing his attempts to deceive and distract from whatever failure is maddening him at the moment. And it means unflinchingly publishing reports about the crimes that he, his associates, and his family have committed. And if Trump, Fox News, and his Deplorable cult followers think that’s biased, too bad? It’s more important to tell the truth than to pacify the fragile sensitivities of politicians and their patsies.


The GOP Outrage Over Rashida Tlaib is Overflowing with Hypocrisy – Trump has Said Much Worse

Posted by on January 4, 2019 at 11:22 am. 3 Comments :

The new Congress has been gaveled into session by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and it is already making progress on the issues that the American people have wanted addressed, but were suppressed by the Republican Nationalist supplicants to Donald Trump. First up is ending the Trump Shutdown. But also on the list of priorities is election reform, restoring fairness to taxes, infrastructure funding, and the long overdue oversight of Trump’s criminal campaign and administration.

Donald Trump

So what is the biggest issue for the GOP? A new congresswoman said a naughty word. Rep. Rashida Tlaib was speaking to group of supporters Thursday evening and dropped an F-bomb when referencing her intention to seek the impeachment of Trump for his many crimes. Her language was raw and, by conventional standards, inappropriate for a public servant. And that sentiment was expressed by nearly every leader on the Democratic side of the aisle. But that didn’t stop Republicans from gasping in horror and fainting from the sheer shock of such insolence.

However, one of the big differences between Democrats and Republicans is that Democrats will criticize themselves when they deserve it. Republicans will defend the most disgusting behavior rather than condemn a fellow Republican, especially Donald Trump. After all, Trump is the guy who bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy” but still got the GOP nomination for president. And that’s not all. Trump currently has fifteen instances of F-bombs on his Twitter feed, Including this one:

And Trump has not been shy about uttering profanities of all varieties in public. Here is a speech Trump gave that had multiple profanities. Pay particular attention to how he referred to his intention to levy tariffs on China:

In addition, Trump has recently tweeted some raw insults aimed at Democrats he is clearly afraid of. He referred to the new chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, as “Adam Schitt.” And that was followed a few weeks later by a tweet where he called Sen. Richard Blumenthal “the dick.”

Of course, there has been almost no criticism of Trump by his GOP colleagues for bellowing out the very same words that Republicans are now in such a tizzy about because a freshly minted Democrat said them in a private gathering. The GOP is less a political party than it is a cult where there leader is incapable of any wrongdoing. But the same behavior by their foes is a capital offense. This is how the GOP wants to start the new year with new leaders in Congress. And it’s an obvious attempt to distract the public from the government shutdown, and other failures, that they are wholly responsible for.

As for the underlying issue of impeachment that inspired Rep. Tlaib’s comments, that is something that is going to unfold in due time no matter what Trump has to say about it. Special counsel Robert Mueller is getting closer to releasing a report with his findings. And prosecutors in New York, Maryland, Washington, D.C., California, and other states are also investigating Trump for potentially impeachable crimes. Which has lead to Trump posting another of his plaintive whines that he’s innocent of everything:

There is so much wrong with that it’s hard to know where to begin. First of all, Trump was elected with only 46.1% of the vote, and with three million fewer votes than his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Secondly, there is abundant evidence of collusion and/or conspiracy with Russia by Trump and his closest associates and family (and no collusion by Democrats).

What’s more, the first two years of Trump’s presidency has been rife with failure. He’s driven up the national debt by more than two trillion dollars. The stock market suffered it’s first negative year in a decade. There has been little or no progress on any foreign policy objective. The Climate crisis is getting perilously close to the point of no return. America’s roads and bridges are crumbling. The nation is more divided than ever. And of course, his idiotic vanity wall is still a figment of his diseased imagination.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

But by all means, let’s forget about all of that pull out our hair over some cursing by an excited new congressperson. And in the meantime, continue to keep the government shut down, forcing hundreds of thousands of Americans to go without pay for untold weeks or months. All because Trump’s ego is too fragile to cope with the reality that no one wants his stupid, racist wall. Yeah, that’s the ticket. And that’s exactly how the GOP is proceeding. There is no better proof that they couldn’t care less about this nation or its citizens.