Donald J. Trump, The First Snapchat President, Playing Russian Roulette With America And The World

The temptation to compare what we’re seeing these first few weeks of Trump’s presidency to Nixon and Watergate is irresistible. Via the UK Independent:

Carl Bernstein, whose reporting with Bob Woodward and Ben Bradlee helped expose the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, has told his 26,000 Twitter followers: “The most dangerous ‘enemy of the people’ is presidential lying – always. Attacks on the press by Donald Trump [are] more treacherous than Nixon’s.”

Apparently questioning Trump’s mental stability, Bernstein added: “Real news (not fake) is that Donald Trump is trying to make conduct of the press the issue instead of egregious (and unhinged) conduct of POTUS [President of the United States].”

Donald Trump’s brain and his way of doing business have been the human forerunner of Snapchat for his entire 40 years in public life. We just didn’t know to call it that. Thoughtlessness and statements and insults spill out of him, have their desired effect, then disappear from his head within seconds, replaced by the next round. They may linger and do damage like unexploded land mines for everyone else, but for him they’re just stepping stones to the next snap. In coincidentally perfect Art of the Deal symmetry, SNAP is now available for public investment as a stock the same week that the minute-to-minute transactional simplicity of Donald Trump is collapsing all around him.

I’ve been waiting, as have many, for the collective weight of all the lying to be like that unavoidable bullet pass to the face that implants “Spalding” on your cheek. The reality, the pain, it hurts… but you dare not cry. It feels a bit different this time. However, there have been dozens of moments of “this is it… this is a line he crossed that he’ll finally never recover from” the past two years, so nothing is certain. Will the gutless, spineless propaganda machine on behalf of Trump at Fox that generates these kinds of fake fair and balanced headlines fend off the dogs, as in the past:

Mistake or Misunderstanding? Jeff Sessions defuses media uproar, recuses himself from probe

I doubt it this time. Misunderstanding? Sure….

I believe this is how the Greatest Con Ever Sold spun out of Trump’s control:

Always remembering that he hides his tax returns because they surely show business and financial relationships with Russia that truly would have killed his candidacy and possibly those deals and future deals themselves, Trump went down a dangerous road where he thought he couldn’t lose. As initial feelers of support came from Putin and Co, he allowed and encouraged that support via the nonstop Wikileaks Democratic email reveals, looked the other way while associates and subordinates like Paul Manafort, Jeff Sessions, and Michael Flynn kept the highway clear with meetings… and in the end, the winkidink on sanctions. No problem, Trump must have thought, since there was no way he’d win the general election anyway and no one investigates a loser’s tactics. But why worry since his business/financial relations with the Russian regime would be hugely strengthened by the comraderie fortified during the losing-but-noble campaign. In other words, I’ll either be president, or I’ll be even richer than I am. A Donald win-win…. for Campaign Trump or the Trump Organization. Of course we now can see that the either/or analysis turns out to be a false choice, since Trump is shamelessly using the office of the presidency to not only be president, but to get rich. That easily explains his admiration for and his reluctance to criticize Putin and Mother Russia.

Josh Marshall puts out an important piece on Michael Cohen, Trump’s secretive lawyer, consigliere and his real conduit to Russia and Ukraine.

Trump has repeatedly insisted he has no loans from the Russia and no ‘deals’ in Russia. There is no specific evidence to refute his claims. But Trump’s real need has been for investment capital and wealthy people to purchase units in his luxury projects or those to which he licenses his name. And there is voluminous evidence for both.

Press attention has tended to focus on people like Carter Page and Paul Manafort and Mike Flynn. But Cohen plays a far more central role in this era of Trump’s business history than these others. He is also the only one who shows up clearly acting as a go-between to the President for someone trying to shift administration policy to reduce or eliminate sanctions on Russia.

Like Watergate, it will get down to Howard Baker’s famous question, “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” Except this time, it will not take several years to get the answer.

TRUMP QUITS “CAMPAIGN,” ADMITS SLOGAN IS STUPID AND “AMERICA HAS ALWAYS BEEN PRETTY GREAT.”

White Suburb, MI (AP)- Donald Trump threw in the towel over the weekend following his compassionate and timely distribution of much-needed Play-Doh to flood-ravaged Louisiana, ending the biggest con of his career… a fraudulent Screen Shot 2016-08-21 at 9.16.24 AM “campaign” for a job he never really wanted, never dreamed he might actually attain, and knew all along he was unqualified for–President of the United States. A body of thought has been emerging that Trump is tanking the election…. losing on purpose for a post-November world of a Trump mega-media venture; thus the suicidal hiring of the alt-right, racist, super-hateful Breitbart guy, Stephen Bannon. Following the airing of his first campaign ad, which shows illegal immigrants running wild in a crime-ridden, dark, disturbing country under Hillary Clinton… contrasted with a Trump-led sunny, law-abiding, happy “(Morning In) America” homeland, Trump admitted it really was one, big, scam.

Two clues emerged the past few days indicating that Trump, unbeknownst to his most ardent supporters, would soon be returning officially to the Democratic Party. First was the stellar performance of the US Olympic team in Rio de Janeiro. Trump had pre-planned and prepared a series of brilliant tweets that were to have connected the anticipated failure of the American athletes to Hillary Clinton and President Obama, under whom we “never win anymore… not in trade, not with our decimated military, and not in the Olympics. Sad.” This strategy, insisted upon by former campaign CEO and Russian liaison Paul Manafort, backfired spectacularly when the United States team performed magnificently. Manafort had insisted that this strategy had worked when he was advising president Sergei Danislovsky, dictator for life of Obfuscaristan, when he was running for office in 1997. Trump fired Manafort when it became numerically impossible for the United States to not be great at the Games, undermining the plan.

The second clue that Trump was a Manchurian Republican intent on losing was his consistent use of the phrase, “Democratic” Party, instead of the preferred slur “Democrat” Party. Long used by Republican politicans, operatives, and especially radio talk jockeys like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Michael Savage, “Democrat” Party indicates you are a true hater, a part of the club, you wish to reach back to the ugly days of Tom DeLay and Richard Nixon, who used the word with impunity and style, inspired by Joe McCarthy and even Wendell Wilkie before him. To not use “Democrat Party” is to show an inexcusable degree of respect and to signal that you’re not on the Republican team. In Wisconsin last week while ordering black people to vote for him, (see his book, “The Art of the Seduction,”) Trump said, “The Democratic Party has failed and betrayed the African-American community,” In Michigan he said, “The inner cities of our country have been run by the Democratic Party for 50 years. Their policies have produced only poverty, joblessness, failing schools, and broken homes. It is time to hold Democratic Politicians accountable for what they have done to these communities. It is time to hold failed leaders accountable for their results, not just their empty words.” The King of Insult Politics…. the man who knocked out more than 15 opponents in the primary portion of the campaign with a non-stop General Sherman-style march of misogyny, anger, hate, racism, unapologetic bile… now can’t call the opposition the Democrat Party? Pathetic. Weak. Over. See Trump say Democratic here:

The Greatest, Yugest, Most Unconventional Convention Continues… It’s ConCon!

There is ComiCon, DragonCon, GeekGirlCon…. all kinds of conventions for like-minded people, but we’ve never seen anything like Trump’s Political ConCon, for the self-deceptive people who think the guy’s in it for them. Screen Shot 2016-04-25 at 11.13.40 AM

Predicting the next dissociative behavioral move by Donald Trump has been a fool’s game all along and is now taken off the boards. No more wagering, kids. The accompanying inability or unwillingness to challenge this man and expose the truth of him by most of the media (with few exceptions) makes them unindicted co-conspirators in his ascension to the nomination. If he complains the delegate system is “rigged,” it must be true. If he accuses Cruz and Kasich of “collusion” to dare to try to stop him, it must be true. No matter what nickname he attaches to anyone, repeat it for him and force the bullying victim to deny. Play his game. Let’s have a fair and balanced discussion of everything Donald Trump vomits out of his mouth.

Trump’s run-from-the-gut, fantasy-pseudo-policy, blitzkrieg and belittle-the-opponent primary strategy has worked well for him. His party popularity ceiling of 35-49% tops was breached in New York State when he got 60%, proving once and for all that New Yorkers… certainly the Republican primary ones… are as insular and provincially stupid as the hayseeds they believe live elsewhere. At least the Democratic voters didn’t automatically pick the guy with the heavy Brooklyn accent just because he had a heavy Brooklyn accent. Nice discretionary skills there.

Suddenly though, last week Trump decided to hire some fixer from the Republican Book of Blue Bloods– somebody named Paul Manafort, veteran of the Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush and John McCain campaigns. That meant the end of his Screen Shot 2016-04-25 at 11.16.59 AM former campaign chief, Casey “Big Lebowski,” the amateur guy who almost went to Riker’s Island for grabbing the female reporter’s arm. He was humanely beheaded by a hooded supermodel and dumped into the East River, near the area where most dead mobsters reside. Manafort, who may be a bigger liar than Trump himself, wanted the big boys in the party suits to realize that it was time to submit to the unstoppable, unbearable likeness of Trump. He winked and told them not to worry.

“He gets it,” Mr. Manafort told RNC members. “The part that he’s been playing is now evolving into the part that you’ve been expecting. The negatives will come down, the image is going to change.”

It’s hard to decide how to take Manafort’s take on his boss. What does Trump “get” here? That he needed to be a 100% Mussolini-style fraud to the primary voters to secure the nomination, only to reveal what a wonderful, reasonable, studious, well-informed, principled, non-bigoted, non-racist, non-misogynistic, uniter of all peoples who never threatens nuclear war, no longer saying he’d dismantle the entire post-war framework of relationships we have with our friends?

I have squandered my resistance
For a pocketful of mumbles,
Such are promises
All lies and jest
Still, a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest.

Lying right to Chris Wallace’s face, Manafort went on “Fox News Sunday” to say he was not referring to the candidate’s core beliefs, just his 9-month Don Screen Shot 2016-04-25 at 11.18.47 AM Rickles/Andrew Dice Clay act. So Trump believes all this crap? Which is it?

“We were talking about evolving the campaign, not the candidate,” Mr. Manafort said. He sought to convince a skeptical Wallace that he was referring to how Mr. Trump talks to cheering followers at campaign events versus “when he’s giving speeches on policy, settings that are not rally-oriented.”

The syllogistic slop is, therefore, this: Trump is not his campaign and the campaign is not Trump, believe me.

His new campaign guy is now out there trying to convince the 70% of Americans who have said they would never, under any circumstances, vote for Trump… trying to convince them that they should join Trump’s solid Republican core of followers (the one’s who’d be ok with him murdering someone on Fifth Avenue in broad daylight). That core will have been officially betrayed by Trump; everything they liked him for… politically incorrect, tells the truth, the nationalistic/nativist rhetoric, birtherism against Obama and Cruz, it’s whites getting screwed, China and Mexico eating our lunch, hey, hey, ho, ho-all the Muslims have to go, more guns, more military….. Mr. Manafort, do you mean it was all performance art…. a stunt, shtick, acting, a scripted reality show from Trump, Inc?

This will become the ultimate test for the Trumpanistas, the support-at-all-costs crowd. Nothing can or would shake their allegiance to him, they say. But betrayal of the very reasons you liked him even before you met him…. and now a public admission he’d been lying to you about everything… has got to count for something, doesn’t it? Or maybe it doesn’t.

You have to play it from the other angle, too. Since Manafort is a campaign pro, a professional fixer/liar/spinner, you can assume he’s lying about Trump “getting it.” The very idea that Trump has the capacity or predilection to change his approach to campaigning all the way to November is absurd and is a desperation lie based on his towering negatives with the general electorate right now. That Trump has forever, it seems, explicitly claimed his ability to be or not to be “presidential,” as if that behavior is like turning on a faucet, should have been enough, long ago, to sufficiently reveal the fake that he is. Ronald Reagan was an actor who became a politician. Trump is an actor who is remaining true to his craft and knows nothing except what he sees on the shows.

Trump has hoodwinked and swindled his way pretty damn far in this process. But he’s admitting he’s been a phony all along, or he’s really the bombastic, thoughtless jerk that he’s shown himself to be. He is like the philandering, drinking, gambling, abusive husband, who at the moment of reckoning with his crying wife, says, “but I can change… honest honey…. I WILL change…. I promise… that really wasn’t me.” Your mom and your best friend and Ann Landers would tell you to throw the bum out (counseling is not an option!). But the afternoon talkshows were around for decades before the first “reality shows” hit the air. One of their staple theme shows was often “Why Do Women Like the Bad Boys?”