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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
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A federal judge in California temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s plan to exempt companies with religious or moral objections from an Obamacare requirement that employers include free contraception in their health-care plans, though the ruling only applies in 13 states.
U.S. District Judge Judge Haywood Gilliam in Oakland, California, on Sunday issued a preliminary injunction against the Affordable Care Act exemption, ramping up the culture war triggered by President Donald Trump’s attempt to extend "religious freedom" rights from churches to companies. The rules are set to take effect Monday.
When he was first considering a run for the presidency in 1999, Donald Trump called conservative Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan “a Hitler lover.” But on Sunday night, Trump quoted a passage from an article Buchanan wrote in support of a border wall last week.
“America’s southern border is eventually going to be militarized and defended or the United States, as we have known it, is going to cease to exist. And Americans will not go gentle into that good night,” Buchanan wrote in a Jan. 11 article for CNS News titled, “Memo to Trump: Declare an Emergency.”
That is the portion of the article Trump quotes in his tweets. Just a few paragraphs down, though, Buchanan explains that the real emergency at the border is not about crime or drugs—it’s about America becoming less white.
“The more multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural, multilingual America becomes—the less it looks like Ronald Reagan’s America—the more dependably Democratic it will become,” Buchanan wrote. “The Democratic Party is hostile to white men, because the smaller the share of the U.S. population that white men become, the sooner that Democrats inherit the national estate.”
In the article the president quoted from, Buchanan urged Trump to “declare a national emergency, shift funds out of the Pentagon, build his wall, open the government” and charged that Democrats oppose the wall because “they have a demographic and ideological interest in changing the face of the nation.”
“The only way to greater ‘diversity,’ the golden calf of the Democratic Party, is to increase the number of women, African-Americans, Asians and Hispanics, and thereby reduce the number of white men,” Buchanan wrote.
That diversification, according to Buchanan, is how America, “as we have known it, is going to cease to exist.”
I guess Donald Trump was eager to counter the impression in Michael Wolff’s book that he is irascible, mentally small and possibly insane. On Tuesday, he allowed a bipartisan session in the White House about immigration to be televised for nearly an hour.
Surely, he thought that he would be able to demonstrate to the world his lucidity and acumen, his grasp of the issues and his relish for rapprochement with his political adversaries.
But instead what came through was the image of a man who had absolutely no idea what he was talking about; a man who says things that are 180 degrees from the things he has said before; a man who has no clear line of reasoning; a man who is clearly out of his depth and willing to do and say anything to please the people in front of him.
He demonstrated once again that he is a man without principle, interested only in how good he can make himself look and how much money he can make.
Yes, he has an intrinsic hostility to people who are not white, particularly when they challenge him, but as a matter of policy, the whole idea of building a wall for which Mexico would pay was just a cheap campaign stunt to, once again, please the people in front of him.
Trump is not committed to that wall on principle. He is committed only to looking good as a result of whatever comes of it. Mexico is never going to pay for it, and he knows it. He has always known it. That was just another lie. Someone must have stuck the phrases “chain migration” and “diversity lottery” into his brain — easy buzzwords, you see — and he can now rail against those ideas for applause lines.
The brain of Homo sapiens has a fatal attraction to secrets. What we see before our eyes is never sufficient; we want to know what lies behind it, what explains it, what’s the deeper meaning. The compulsion to get beneath the surface of things lies at the heart of what makes some people scholars or scientists. It’s also at the heart of what makes some people conspiracy theorists. More to the point, it explains why so many are excited by recent “revelations” about President Trump and his relationship with Vladimir Putin, even though they are telling us nothing new.
The reporters’ diligence is to be commended, and every detail adds nuance. But the truth is that Trump’s connection to Putin has been out in the open for years, long before he decided to run for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. He has lavished praise on the Russian leader, in many forms of media, since at least 2013, when he speculated on Twitter that Putin might become his “new best friend.” His business relationships with Russia and Russians go back even further, to a 1987 trip to Moscow, which Trump said he made at the invitation of the then-Soviet ambassador. Kremlin state media has been openly promoting him and his political views since at least 2014, when Trump gave an interview to Fox News extravagantly praising the Sochi Winter Olympics.
During the election campaign, Trump openly hired, as his campaign manager, a man who had spent most of the previous decade promoting Russian interests in Ukraine. He openly called for Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s email. He openly echoed the Russian state media’s slogans and conspiratorial language all the way through the latter part of his campaign, claiming, for instance, that President Barack Obama https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/stop-saddling-obama-with-creating-the-islamic-state/2018/07/18/71d21c7c-8937-11e8-9d59-dccc2c0cabcf_story.html (created the Islamic State)terrorists and that Hillary Clinton would start https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/why-is-trump-suddenly-talking-about-world-war-iii/2016/10/28/be44cc0e-9d24-11e6-a0ed-ab0774c1eaa5_story.html?utm_term=.638434f8aa7e (World War III).
Throughout this period, Russia backed him with a sophisticated online campaign designed to inspire his voters and put others off from voting at all. Some of that campaign has been revealed by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, but some of it was visible to anyone who read English-language Russian state media such as Sputnik or RT. Since his inauguration, Trump has https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-revealed-highly-classified-information-to-russian-foreign-minister-and-ambassador/2017/05/15/530c172a-3960-11e7-9e48-c4f199710b69_story.html?utm_term=.e7803b92e641 (shared U.S. secrets) with the Russian foreign minister in the Oval Office, appeared cowed by the Russian president at a https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/07/17/trumps-helsinki-disgrace-caps-a-destructive-european-trip/?utm_term=.6b3d2484f0ad (Helsinki news conference), if not frightened of him, and https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-has-concealed-details-of-his-face-to-face-encounters-with-putin-from-senior-officials-in-administration/2019/01/12/65f6686c-1434-11e9-b6ad-9cfd62dbb0a8_story.html?utm_term=.ca9263fe7377 (repeatedly sought) to meet Putin without officials present or even, at one point, his own translator.
The question, then, is not why the FBI launched a counterintelligence investigation into Trump in the days after he fired James B. Comey as FBI director, as the New York Times revealedFriday, but why are we surprised? And why did it take so long? Why didn’t it begin in 2013 or 2014? Why didn’t it begin, for that matter, in 1987? Nor should anyone be surprised to learn, as The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-has-concealed-details-of-his-face-to-face-encounters-with-putin-from-senior-officials-in-administration/2019/01/12/65f6686c-1434-11e9-b6ad-9cfd62dbb0a8_story.html?utm_term=.ca9263fe7377 (reported) over the weekend, that Trump has failed to give a proper accounting of his meetings with Putin to any of his State Department officials, any of his intelligence officers, anyone at all. Of course he hasn’t: His relationship with Russia is perverse and peculiar — we can all see that — so he doesn’t want anyone to learn anything more about it.
Still, the vigil awaiting Mueller’s final report continues, as if it were going to tell us something revolutionary and new. The human brain loves secrets, and we trust “confidential” information from hidden sources more than information that appears before our own eyes. So, yes, bring on more evidence, which will reveal more of what we already know.
One hundred years after U.S. soldiers killed and maimed hundreds of Sioux men, women and children at the Wounded Knee massacre, Congress formally apologized in 1990 by expressing its “deep regret on behalf of the United States.”
On Sunday night, President Trump used that same massacre as a punchline in his latest broadside against Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the Democratic presidential hopeful whom he regularly calls “Pocahontas” in jeering reference to her claims of American Indian heritage.
Trump’s tweet came amid another extraordinary late-night Twitter barrage as the president — battered https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/americans-blame-trump-and-gop-much-more-than-democrats-for-shutdown-post-abc-poll-finds/2019/01/12/9c89aff2-16a9-11e9-90a8-136fa44b80ba_story.html (by public blame for the ongoing government shutdown) and https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-has-concealed-details-of-his-face-to-face-encounters-with-putin-from-senior-officials-in-administration/2019/01/12/65f6686c-1434-11e9-b6ad-9cfd62dbb0a8_story.html (new bombshells) about his https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/01/12/why-fbi-mightve-thought-trump-could-be-working-russia/?utm_term=.7f3ed46e1902 (links to Russia) — also lashed out at Post owner Jeffrey P. Bezos and quoted from a racially charged immigration column by Pat Buchanan.
President Trump is wielding the U.S. oil production boom and low gasoline prices as a shield against criticism over his relationship with Russia as Robert Mueller continues his probe and Democrats ramp up their inquiries.
"'Gas prices drop across the United States because President Trump has deregulated Energy and we are now producing a great deal more oil than ever before.' @foxandfriends But this is bad news for Russia, why would President Trump do such a thing? Thought he worked for Kremlin?"
My thought bubble: Russia doesn't need high oil prices as much as some other petro-states, notably Saudi Arabia. And Trump's tweet this morning is claiming way too much credit for U.S. crude oil output and gasoline prices, which currently average around $2.25 per gallon.
Reality check:
- U.S. oil production is indeed at record levels of well over 11 million barrels per day. But the increased level is largely thanks to the shale boom that began around a decade ago as producers used advances in fracking and horizontal drilling to unlock new supplies.
- The oil industry has welcomed Trump's deregulatory efforts, but they're not currently a major driver of total U.S. production.
- Gasoline prices, meanwhile, largely reflect oil prices set on global markets, though the U.S. output surge is among the factors putting downward pressure global crude prices — and hence gasoline prices.
President Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials, current and former U.S. officials said.
Trump did so after a meeting with Putin in 2017 in Hamburg that was also attended by then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. U.S. officials learned of Trump’s actions when a White House adviser and a senior State Department official sought information from the interpreter beyond a readout shared by Tillerson.
The constraints that Trump imposed are part of a broader pattern by the president of shielding his communications with Putin from public scrutiny and preventing even high-ranking officials in his own administration from fully knowing what he has told one of the United States’ main adversaries.
As a result, U.S. officials said there is no detailed record, even in classified files, of Trump’s face-to-face interactions with the Russian leader at five locations over the past two years. Such a gap would be unusual in any presidency, let alone one that Russia sought to install through what U.S. intelligence agencies have described as an unprecedented campaign of election interference.
Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is thought to be in the final stages of an investigation that has focused largely on whether Trump or his associates conspired with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign. The new details about Trump’s continued secrecy underscore the extent to which little is known about his communications with Putin since becoming president.
After this story was published online, Trump said in an interview late Saturday with Fox News host Jeanine Pirro that he did not take particular steps to conceal his private meetings with Putin and attacked The Washington Post and its owner Jeffrey P. Bezos.
Former U.S. officials said that Trump’s behavior is at odds with the known practices of previous presidents, who have relied on senior aides to witness meetings and take comprehensive notes then shared with other officials and departments.
Trump’s secrecy surrounding Putin “is not only unusual by historical standards, it is outrageous,” said Strobe Talbott, a former deputy secretary of state now at the Brookings Institution, who participated in more than a dozen meetings between President Bill Clinton and then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s. “It handicaps the U.S. government — the experts and advisers and Cabinet officers who are there to serve [the president] — and it certainly gives Putin much more scope to manipulate Trump.”
