This is a daily or weekly record of the Trump presidency so hopefully future generations will learn what happens when you elect an narcissistic, thin skinned, racist, xenophobic, misogynistic unqualified buffoon in a position of power where he has access to nuclear codes.
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Original link
https://horroroftrumpaspotus.blogspot.com/
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Twitter feed https://twitter.com/RealDbagDJTrump
Sunday, September 24, 2017
September 19th, 2017 - September 23, 2017. 311-315 days since the Nov 8, 2016, election and 242-246 days since the Jan 20th inauguration.
(CNN)When President some rich asshole took the stage in Alabama on Friday night to rally support for Sen. Luther Strange, you could tell he was in the mood to make some noise -- and some news.
His hopes for repeal and replace of the Affordable Care Act had been dealt a near-fatal blow just hours before when Arizona Sen. John McCain announced he would not support the latest iteration of the legislation. His one-time senior strategist -- Steve Bannon -- as well as some of his other allies (including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and his own Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson) were fighting hard for Roy Moore, the man trying to oust Strange in Tuesday's Republican runoff. A handful of recent poll numbers had shown the rich asshole's image improving -- albeit slightly -- with voters.
And, as he almost always does in these situations, the rich asshole played perfectly to type -- delivering an 80-minute rambling defense of his administration with a series of asides, tangents, stories and I-probably-shouldn't-say-this-but-I-will-anyway-isms.
I went through the whole speech and picked out the 64 lines that stood out to me. They're below.
1. "I love this place. And you know we set every record in Alabama."
It's not totally clear what exact records the rich asshole is referring to here. It could be a record for largest crowd to attend a political rally? Those records aren't really kept. Although the rich asshole did say during the Republican primary process that 32,000 people attended his rally in February 2016 -- the largest crowd, he claimed, to attend any political rally in the campaign to date. Local police estimated the crowd as half the size the rich asshole said. the rich asshole might have also been talking about the raw number of votes he got in the state as a record? He received 1,318,255 -- more than any previous Republican nominee.
2. "You have some football games tomorrow."
True! Alabama plays Vanderbilt in Nashville. Auburn plays Missouri in Columbia.
3. "He's only been there for, what, 34 years or something like that, right?"
the rich asshole is talking here about Alabama Republican Sen. Rich Shelby, who undoubtedly loves the fact that the President reminded a big crowd of people who don't love Washington politicians that Shelby has been in office for more than three decades.
4. "He's doing a good job. He is doing a good job."
This is the rich asshole on Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The man he called "beleaguered." The man he called an "idiot." The man he said should resign after Sessions recused himself from the Russia probe and a special counsel was created to deal with the investigation. Same dude.
5. "It's going to happen. It's going to happen quickly. Quickly. Better."
the rich asshole on the efforts to rebuild after the hurricanes that hit Texas and Florida. Things are going to be rebuilt. Better. And quickly. Quickly better. Better quickly.
6. "We are going to take care of the bad people."
Tougher. Stronger. Better. (the rich asshole did not make clear how we are going to take care of the bad people.)
7. "We are going to win. Believe me."
Well, I'm convinced!
8. "Rocket Man should have been handled a long time ago."
9. "This should have been handled eight years ago and four years ago and, honestly, and 15 years ago and 28 years ago and 25 years ago"
Twenty eight years ago, Kim Jong Un was 5.
10. "Little Rocket Man."
"Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids / In fact, it's cold as hell."
11. "He is watching us like he never watched anybody before. That I can tell you."
The unstable dictator of a rogue nation is watching the US more closely than ever before. This is, according to the rich asshole logic, a good thing.
12. "Maybe something gets worked out. And maybe it doesn't."
Some people say we will have another world war with nuclear weaponized countries. Others don't. Man, I can't wait to see how this cliffhanger ends!
13. "Well, maybe something gets worked out and maybe it doesn't."
Yes, you literally just said that.
14. "Nobody is going to mess with our people. Nobody is going to play games."
the rich asshole loves to play tough guy. He loves to insist that nothing bad is ever going to happen to the US while he's in charge. And that all of our enemies -- and even some of our longtime allies -- need to be woken up to the fact that there's a new sheriff in town.
15. "I made a friend in China."
Good to hear. Friends are a good thing. Maybe the best thing.
16. "He may be smart. He may be strategic. And he may be totally crazy."
Same.
17. "I have a lot of friends. And some of them say, 'Do you mind if I go to the other candidate?' Really, you can."
This begins a looooong story the rich asshole tells about Strange and his loyalty. But the President begins the story by noting that lots of his friend are for Roy Moore -- and he's totally fine with that!
18. "I'm on the phone screaming at people all day long, for weeks."
It's hard to imagine why the rich asshole's lobbying efforts on the first repeal and replace bill didn't work ...
19. "That was a totally unexpected thing. Terrible. Honestly, terrible."
the rich asshole on McCain killing the last repeal and replace effort. Worth noting here that McCain has brain cancer. And that the rich asshole has praised him as a patriot for returning to Washington in the summer to take part in the health care debate.
20. "I said if I lose this election, maybe I'll end up moving to Alabama or Kentucky."
The chances of some rich asshole ever moving to Alabama and Kentucky are roughly the same as the chances of Kentucky beating Alabama in football this year.
21. "If Crooked Hillary got elected, you would not have a 2nd Amendment, believe me."
the rich asshole knows this isn't true. Clinton, in the campaign, said these exact words: "I do not want to repeal the 2nd Amendment." He said this same thing throughout the campaign despite fact check after fact check calling it a lie. What the rich asshole is doing is purposefully playing on conservatives' fears that Democrats would somehow outlaw guns if they had the chance.
22. "You got to speak to Jeff Sessions about that."
As the rich asshole riffed on the false idea that Clinton would have seized all guns in the country, the crowd began the now-familiar "Lock her Up!" chant. To which the rich asshole responded that they would need to talk to the nation's top law enforcement official about that. Good times.
23. "So with Luther, I have a list, and one of the names is Luther Strange."
the rich asshole STILL has not told the Luther Strange story he promised about 1,000 words ago.
24. "I don't know him. I met him once."
the rich asshole's lack of a relationship with Strange is an odd thing to highlight given that the rich asshole is in Alabama telling people to vote for the incumbent senator.
25. "That is the tallest human being I've ever seen. I am tall, I've never seen that. Should be on the New York Knicks."
the rich asshole, as he likes to remind you, is pretty tall at 6-foot-2. (Same height as me!) Strange is 6-foot-9. Kristaps Porziņģis, the Knicks' tallest player, is 7-foot-3.
26. "That's why I call him Big Luther. Everyone is calling him Big Luther."
27. "Well, Mr. President, could you have dinner with my wife, myself, my family, my uncles, my cousins, and I like to talk to you about it?"
The full effect of this quote has to be seen, not heard. the rich asshole appears to be affecting a southern accent as he recounts how members of Congress who are wavering on health care speak to him when he calls. On a related note: the rich asshole is not a gifted mimic.
28. "They love you and they want to have dinner with you. They want to have breakfast with you and lunch. Then, after you're finished with them, how about we'll go out for a picnic someplace on the White House lawn."
the rich asshole describing another conversation with a senator who wanted him to have a series of meals with their family who love him before voting for health care. And, yes, the rich asshole was still sort of doing the southern accent here, too.
29. "I think his wife is fantastic, but I said, 'Do I have to have dinner with you and your wife?"
Look, I love Mrs. Strange. I just have absolutely no interest in having dinner with her. Like, none.
30. "That was, like, really horrible thing. Honestly. That was a horrible, horrible thing that happened to the Republican Party."
the rich asshole is back to McCain and his "no" vote at "3 in the morning."
31. "He doesn't even know Mitch McConnell. He was just there for a few months, and they put that mantle around his neck."
32. "I see he is down in the race by a lot, and I said, 'Man, that's really unfair.'"
the rich asshole is setting himself up as the Strange savior here. Man, he was getting doors blown off but that I swooped in and suddenly he's back to be competitive. [pats self on back repeatedly]
33. "The last thing I want to do is be involved in a primary, OK? I could be sitting home right now getting to watch some of the games tomorrow."
Kind of a weird thing to say, no?
34. "I think you're going to come back and kick everyone's ass and you're going to do great."
Presidential! Related: I'm only good at two things in this life: Kicking ass and being snarky. And I'm almost all out of snarky ...
35. "The worst. Fake news. They won't show this. They'll say, some rich asshole spoke before a small crowd in Alabama last night. It was a small crowd."
Cable TV always shows the shots of the rich asshole's crowds -- including last night. But why let facts get in the way when you can throw partisan red meat to the crowd?
36. "Very unenthusiastic crowd."
In the second paragraph of the CNN story on the rally, the crowd is described as "raucous." So ...
37. "But they don't show the crowd."
[narrator voice] They do.
38. "They said she wore high heels, going to go into the floods with her high heels. But she has become very popular."
the rich asshole is right about this. Some in the media did make a big deal out of the fact Melania the rich asshole was photographed wearing high heels to get on the plane to visit Houston and the victims of Hurricane Harvey. But she changed into tennis shoes -- making the whole "she's out of touch!" thing a total misfire. Related: Melania the rich asshole is the most popular the rich asshole, but that's not exactly a massive accomplishment.
39. "And I might have made a mistake. And I'll be honest, I might have made a mistake."
This is totally incredible. While at a last-minute campaign rally for Strange, the rich asshole admits he might have made a mistake in endorsing Strange. Yes, really.
40. "And I told Luther, I have to say this, if his opponent wins, I'm going to be here campaigning like hell for him."
See, so I probably shouldn't have made this Strange endorsement because if he loses, people will say it's bad for me. But, I don't really care because I'll campaign for Roy Moore too. Same difference!
41. "Missile defense, you know, when you hear those two words."
the rich asshole is delivering an ode to missile defense here. He also says how important those words are.
42. "As long as I'm president, you are going to have so much money spent here."
Drain the Swamp! Drain the Swamp!
43. "I think we won because of the military. I think we won because of the vets. I think we won because of the evangelicals."
In truth, he won because of the white working class vote in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
44. "And he won't only be great, he'll be the tallest senator in the history of the United States."
Vote for Strange! He's tall! Also, the rich asshole does love to see a good record broken -- especially on his watch.
45. "Shelby is pretty tall too, by the way."
The Internet doesn't appear to know how tall Richard Shelby is. But having seen him in person I am going to ballpark it at 6-foot-1.
46. "Four-star marine. That's good."
the rich asshole loves his generals -- especially the heavily decorated ones (like John Kelly, who he is referring to here) or ones with cool nicknames like James "Mad Dog" Mattis, who is the rich asshole's secretary of defense.
47. "The wall is happening, folks. Believe me."
Is it, though? Also, is Mexico still paying for it, or nah?
48. "So you have the concrete wall. That's what I do best. That's what I do best. That is what I really do."
some rich asshole: He does concrete walls best.
49. "They have catapults. They throw it over the wall, and it lands and it hit somebody on the head."
Um, what? Drug dealer catapults is a thing now?
50. "I can tweet, 'That was a false story, boom, boom, boom.'"
The the rich asshole presidency, in one quote.
51. "Wouldn't you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, 'Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. He is fired. He's fired!'"
This comment -- as you might guess! -- has caused a huge amount of controversy already. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell released a statement Saturday morning rejecting the rich asshole's comments as divisive. And a number of prominent NFL players have also responded; "The behavior of the President is unacceptable and needs to be addressed," tweeted Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman. "If you do not Condemn this divisive Rhetoric you are Condoning it!!"
52. "Total disrespect of our heritage, a total disrespect of everything that we stand for. Everything that we stand for."
Interesting use of "our heritage" here.
53. "They are ruining the game, right? They are ruining the game. Look, that's what they want to do. They want to hit. They want to hit."
the rich asshole comes down firmly on the side of those who want football to continue on as it always has -- despite the overwhelming evidence that the sport is producing a generation of men with CTE and other brain illnesses.
54. "You know what's hurting the game more than that? When people like yourselves turn on television and you see those people taking the knee when they are playing our great national anthem."
There's very little actual evidence that suggests the handful of players refusing to stand during the national anthem is having an adverse impact on TV ratings.
55. "Isn't it a little weird when a guy who lives on 5th Avenue in the most beautiful apartment you've ever seen comes to Alabama and Alabama loves that guy?"
That is weird! Also, "most beautiful apartment."
56. "Did people call you Big Luther before he met the rich asshole? You know, I brand people."
[narrator voice] Yes, they did.
57. "The electoral college is a very special thing."
The election was 319 days ago.
58. "To me, winning the popular vote is easier."
The election was 319 days ago.
59. "I call it the Russian hoax. One of the great hoaxes."
The FBI, CIA, NSA and the former Director of National Intelligence all say Russia not only attempted to interfere in our election but did so to help the rich asshole and hurt Hillary Clinton.
60. "Any Russians in the audience? Are there any Russians in the audience? I don't see too many Russians."
This is the standard the rich asshole argument against the idea of Russia involvement in the election. But that's not the claim! The claim is that Russians -- through a variety of means -- sought to influence the narrative around the two candidates in ways that were good for the rich asshole and bad for Clinton. It's totally meaningless whether there are any Russians in the audience in an Alabama crowd.
61. "Look at all those red lights. Ay yai yai. It's always fun to see a red light."
the rich asshole is talking about the lights on the TV cameras that show they are broadcasting him. the rich asshole LOVES to be on TV.
62. "If I have to wait for two seconds, I go crazy."
some rich asshole on patience.
63. "I'm taking a big risk because if Luther does not make it, they are going to go after me."
This Alabama election, like all things, is about some rich asshole first, second and last.
64. "Thank you, Alabama. I love you. Thank you. I love you, Alabama."
And, in conclusion, thank you Alabama. And I love you. But mostly thank you. Also, I love you.
As part of his continuing war on black athletes, President some rich asshole withdrew his invitation to Golden State Warriors superstar Stephen Curry to visit the White House via Twitter.
Less than 24 hours after the rich asshole called former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick a “son of a b*tch,” the rich asshole went after the popular Curry who had indicated that he might not attend a White House ceremony celebrating the NBA champion Warriors.
“Going to the White House is considered a great honor for a championship team. Stephen Curry is hesitating, therefore invitation is withdrawn!” the rich asshole tweeted.
Friday night Curry told reporters that he is not a fan of the idea of NBA team visiting the White House, saying, “I don’t want to go.”
You can see the tweet below along with Curry addressing the press:
some rich asshole continued his war of words against black professional athletes as the president doubled down on his demands that private companies fire those showing insufficient respect.
“If a player wants the privilege of making millions of dollars in the NFL, or other leagues, he or she should not be allowed to disrespect…our Great American Flag (or Country) and should stand for the National Anthem,” President the rich asshole tweeted.
“If not, YOU’RE FIRED. Find something else to do!” the President of the United States insisted.
President some rich asshole shot out a trio of testy tweets on Saturday afternoon, attacking NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell over his support of players who protest the U.S. national anthem and also condemning Senate Democrats and Sen. John McCain for their rejection of the Graham-Cassidy Bill — the latest GOP attempt to strike down the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
He reacted to reports that Iran has test-fired a new missile by accusing them of being in league with North Korea.
Goodell shocked some observers by taking the side of the players in the rich asshole’s broadside on Friday night against NFL team members who take a knee rather than stand in support of the national anthem.
Steve Tisch and John Mara, owners of the NY Giants issued a statement condemning the irresponsible and impudent tweets made against NFL players, by some rich asshole. They called the rich asshole’s act “inappropriate” and more importantly, “divisive”.
In the joint statement issued this Saturday, Mara and Tisch said:
“Comments like we heard last night from the president are inappropriate, offensive and divisive. We are proud of our players, the vast majority of whom use their NFL platform to make a positive difference in our society.”
The peaceful protest against social injustices started by Colin Kaepernick in 2016, has been adopted by several other players who kneel down during the national anthem. Just as a reminder of how it all started, here is what Kaepernick said about his protest:
“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”
the rich asshole has been shitting on Twitter ever since He wants his supporters (read, the privileged parasites of America) to “leave the stadium” in protest of the protests expecting that surely “things will stop” that way. And then, recently he took some laxatives and let it flow:
“… our Great American Flag (or Country) and should stand for the National Anthem. If not, YOU’RE FIRED. Find something else to do!”
Well, does the President even know ‘firing’ people, not the kind he does in the Middle East, does not work that way? Anyway, next he went on to attack NFL commissioner Roger Goodell:
“Roger Goodell of NFL just put out a statement trying to justify the total disrespect certain players show to our country. Tell them to stand!”
None of this monkeying around (sorry monkeys) seems to have the desired effect on the protestors and the Giants owners have taken a stand. Whether the rich asshole will be able to threaten the players into ending their peaceful protests, or whether he’ll try to buy some of them off, we don’t know. But what we know is, people are speaking up against racial discrimination and social crimes in America.
John McCain survived brutal torture and six years as a prisoner of war during Vietnam. If some rich asshole thinks he can intimidate him, he should think again.
On Friday, the Arizona senator released a statement announcing his intention to vote against the Graham-Cassidy bill that Republicans have introduced to repeal Obamacare.
The bill would strip healthcare from 30 million Americans, and turn Medicaid into a block grant program that would cease to exist after a few years. The bill also gives states the power to obtain waivers so that insurance companies can discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions. America’s healthcare system would be thrown into dire chaos, and the rich asshole is absolutely okay with that.
McCain is not.
The issue is too important, and too many lives are at risk, for us to leave the American people guessing from one election to the next whether and how they will acquire health insurance. A bill of this impact requires a bipartisan approach.
Senators Alexander and Murray have been negotiating in good faith to fix some of the problems with Obamacare. But I fear that the prospect of one last attempt at a strictly Republican bill has left the impression that their efforts cannot succeed. I hope they will resume their work should this last attempt at a partisan solution fail.
I cannot in good conscience vote for the Graham-Cassidy proposal. I believe we could do better working together, Republicans and Democrats, and have not yet really tried. Nor could I support it without knowing how much it will cost, how it will effect insurance premiums, and how many people will be helped or hurt by it. Without a full CBO score, which won’t be available by the end of the month, we won’t have reliable answers to any of those questions.
And for that, the rich asshole viciously attacked McCain.
First off, block grants are not enough to cover all the people who desperately need healthcare. In fact, it limits funding to the point where state officials will have to decide who gets care and who doesn’t to avoid using up the grant money on expensive treatments, which sounds a lot like a death panel.
Second, Lindsey Graham’s friendship with McCain does not mean they vote the same, as Graham made clear on Twitter.
Obamacare has its flaws, but those flaws can be fixed easily with bipartisan legislation. McCain understands this and he understands that repealing Obamacare would leave tens of millions of Americans without healthcare, including millions of conservatives in red states.
some rich asshole is an asshole. He wants to kill a major healthcare law just because it is known as Obamacare and because he is desperate for major legislation to sign. He hasn’t even actually read the damn bill, which medical organizations and the healthcare industry agree is terrible.
Besides, if the rich asshole wanted McCain’s vote so much he should have thought of that before criticizing him for being a POW.
President the rich asshole told a crowd at a rally for Alabama Senate candidate Luther Strange (R) on Friday night that they should "pick up and leave" NFL games if they see players kneeling during the national anthem.
"When people like yourselves turn on television and you see those people taking the knee when they are playing our great national anthem – the only thing you could do better is if you see it, even if it's one player, leave the stadium," the rich asshole suggested. "I guarantee things will stop."
"Luther and I and everyone in this arena tonight are unified by the same great American values. We're proud of our country. We respect our flag," he continued.
"Wouldn't you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, 'Get that son of a b---- off the field right now,'" he continued, adding, "'He is fired.'"
the rich asshole has previously blasted NFL player Colin Kaepernick, who gained notoriety after he kneeled during the national anthem to protest the treatment of people of color in the U.S.
The president slammed Kaepernick earlier this year, saying he is a free agent because of his refusal to stand during the national anthem.
some rich asshole responds to 'deranged' barb by branding Kim Jong Un a 'madman'
The US President launches an early morning tweetstorm by vowing to test his North Korean rival "like never before".
21:56, UK,Friday22September2017
some rich asshole has hit back at Kim Jong Un after the North Korean dictator called him "deranged" in a bullish statement.
The US President responded with an early morning tweet, saying: "Kim Jong Un of North Korea, who is obviously a madman who doesn't mind starving or killing his people, will be tested like never before!"
Mr Kim had said the UN speech - which was boycotted by North Korean diplomats - was "the most ferocious declaration of war in history".
He said North Korea's nuclear programme would continue and that Pyongyang would consider the "highest level of hardline countermeasure in history" against the US.
"He is unfit to hold the prerogative of supreme command of a country, and he is surely a rogue and a gangster fond of playing with fire, rather than a politician."
The order boosts the US Treasury's ability to clamp down on individuals and companies that finance and facilitate trade with the reclusive state.
President the rich asshole said the measures would "cut off sources of revenue that fund North Korea's efforts to develop the deadliest weapons known to humankind".
The order came as European Union ambassadors agreed on draft sanctions against North Korea, including a ban on investments in the country and on EU exports of oil.
the rich asshole’s desperation to convince people that the Great Liberal Media Conspiracy Against Him is real is getting way out of control. On Twitter earlier, he cried that nobody was asking about the media’s totally biased coverage of Hillary during the election. He also claimed at a rally a while back that the press was turning their cameras off during his speech because they didn’t want their audiences to hear what he had to say. CNN made him look stupid for that. Then tonight, in Alabama, he did it again, and CNN made him look even worse for it.
He said, “Fake news. They won’t show this,” referring to his obsession with his crowd sizes. He then went on to say:
“They’ll say ‘some rich asshole spoke before a small crowd in Alabama last night. It was a small crowd. A very unenthusiastic crowd. It was a terrible evening.’”
CNN had split the screen between him and his crowd before he started this diatribe. Seriously – he said this while CNN was showing his crowd. Watch below:
the rich asshole might be able to convince his fans that the media is dishonest, but anyone who can actually think can see just how badly he’s embarrassing himself whenever he talks about the “fake news” media. Give it up, Donnie. We see right through you.
DON'T MISS STORIES. FOLLOW RAW STORY! President some rich asshole is considering a new order to replace his soon-to-expire travel ban on people from six Muslim-majority countries that would be tailored on a country-by-country basis to protect the United States from attacks, U.S. officials said on Friday.
With the current ban on people from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen due to expire on Sunday, the rich asshole was given recommendations by Elaine Duke, the acting homeland security secretary, but has not yet made a decision on the details of any new order, the officials told reporters.
Miles Taylor, counselor to Duke, said she recommended to the rich asshole “actions that are tough and that are tailored, including travel restrictions and enhanced screening for certain countries.” Taylor declined to say which or how many countries would be targeted, including the status of the six countries covered by the current ban.
White House spokesman Raj Shah said that while “we can’t get into decision-making,” the next step will be a presidential proclamation setting out the new policy. He declined to say when that would come, including whether the rich asshole would act before the existing ban expires.
The American Civil Liberties Union, the rights group that mounted one of the legal challenges to the March order, expressed skepticism about the rich asshole’s forthcoming action. “This looks to be the rich asshole administration’s third try to make good on an unconstitutional campaign promise to ban Muslims from the United States,” ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said.
the rich asshole’s six-nation travel ban was laid out in a March 6 executive order that was blocked by federal courts before being allowed to go into effect with some limits by the U.S. Supreme Court in June.
Under the recommendations the rich asshole is weighing, there would be restrictions on U.S. entry that differ by nation, based on cooperation with American security mandates, the threat the United States believes each country presents and other variables, Taylor said. He did not specify the nature of the restrictions, but said that after being imposed they could be lifted “if conditions change.”
The legal question of whether the existing ban discriminates against Muslims in violation of the U.S. Constitution, as lower courts previously ruled, will be argued before the Supreme Court on Oct. 10. Officials declined to say how the proposed change in policy could affect the upcoming Supreme Court case.
The March travel ban and an earlier January one that targeted the same six countries as well as Iraq are some of the most controversial actions taken by the rich asshole since assuming office in January.
Critics have called the policy an unlawful “Muslim ban,” accusing the Republican president of discriminating against Muslims in violation of constitutional guarantees of religious liberty and equal protection under the law, breaking existing U.S. immigration law, and stoking religious hatred.
the rich asshole, who has promised that “radical Islamic terrorism” will be “eradicated,” wrote on Twitter on Sept. 15: “The travel ban into the United States should be far larger, tougher and more specific-but stupidly, that would not be politically correct!”
WORLDWIDE REVIEW
The expiring ban blocked entry into the United States by people from the six countries for 90 days and locked out most aspiring refugees for 120 days to give the rich asshole’s administration time to conduct a worldwide review of U.S. vetting procedures for foreign visitors. The existing refugee ban expires on Oct. 24.
Taylor said American officials in July notified every foreign government of requirements for the minimum cooperation the United States needs to validate traveler identities to ensure they do not represent a national security threat. Those countries were given 50 days to respond.
People from countries that did not meet the requirements may not be allowed to enter the United States or may face other travel restrictions, Taylor said. Most countries met those requirements or agreed to work toward meeting them, Taylor added.
“At the end of the day, some countries were still unable or, worse yet, deliberately unwilling to comply with the new baseline that we laid out,” Taylor said.
the rich asshole, who promised as a candidate to impose “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” has said the soon-to-expire ban was needed to protect the United States from terrorism.
“We need to know who is coming into our country,” Taylor said. “We should be able to validate their identities and we should be able to confirm that our foreign partners do not have information suggesting such individuals may represent a threat to the United States.”
While the rich asshole’s January and March orders were quickly blocked by federal courts, the expected new restrictions might be harder to challenge because they are the product of a worldwide review process examining vetting procedures of foreign countries, legal experts said.
(Reporting by Yeganeh Torbati and Lawrence Hurley; additional reporting by Susan Heavey, Jeff Mason and Andrew Chung; writing by Will Dunham; Editing by Bill Trott and Jonathan Oatis)
President the rich asshole Just Called Colin Kaepernick A ‘Son Of A Bitch’ (DETAILS)
the rich asshole just reminded the nation of exactly who he is yet again, this time condemning the exercise of free speech rights with stronger words than he used when Heather Heyer was murdered in Charlottesville by a terrorist.
While stumping for a Republican candidate in Alabama, the rich asshole decided it would be appropriate to attack players who exercise their first amendment rights by kneeling during the anthem, most famously Colin Kaepernick. Calling him a “son of a bitch” in what was clearly a dog whistle to his racist supporters, the rich asshole went off for several minutes, using the power of the presidency to bully private citizens for peacefully expressing their opinions, as well as to advocate for economic punishment in the form of job losses.
You can watch the video below, via NBC’s Twitter account:
Social media users immediately erupted in rage at the incredibly unpresidential behavior the rich asshole put on display:
These comments come as little surprise from a president who sparked worldwide outrage when he blamed “many sides” for the terrorist attack in Charlottesville, a statement many saw as victim-blaming and tantamount to support for the white nationalist perpetrators.
the rich asshole, who is supported by a small fraction of the country, is desperate not to lose the only people who actually like him. With recent reports showing core supporters abandoning him over an alleged DACA deal reached with Democrats, the rich asshole knows he needs to cozy up to his racist base, and that’s what this was about. Despite the “economic anxiety” myth that still pervades mainstream media (the rich asshole supporters, on average, are better off than the rest of the country), racism is an excellent metric of whether or not someone is a the rich asshole supporter — and, incidentally, whether or not they support football players exercising their right to kneel.
The most offensive thing to the “American values” of free press, free speech, democracy, and equality for all citizens continues to be the wannabe despot occupying the White House. the rich asshole, if you had any sense of decency or loyalty to your nation at all, you’d resign. First from the presidency, and then entirely from public life.
DON'T MISS STORIES. FOLLOW RAW STORY! President some rich asshole’s legal defense fund is being paid by a handful of wealthy donors including a billionaire investor, a property developing in need of U.S. visas and a Ukrainian-born billionaire with connections to Russian oligarchs, said The Wall Street Journal on Friday.
These donors, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) pay into an account held by the Republican National Committee (RNC). In the last month, the account paid out $300,000 to attorneys for some rich asshole’s private legal fees and an additional $200,000 for his son, Donald, Jr.’s lawyers.
A spokesperson for the RNC told the Journal that the expenses will be detailed in its September report. In August, the RNC legal fund raised $280,000 and $700,000 in July.
The arrangement is legal, but sets off a number of alarm bells, said Common Cause chairman Paul Ryan — no relation to Speaker of the House Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) — especially regarding what some of these big-money donors may want in return.
“Big-dollar special interest fundraising to pay the president’s legal bills most certainly raises the threat of corruption,” said Ryan. “Lots of donors to the RNC are looking for access and influence. A big check for the president’s legal bills is one more way to do it.”
Some Republicans are squeamish, though, about donating to the party only to have their money go to defending the rich asshole in court. Typically, the RNC legal fund is used to pay for electoral recounts and other legal expenditures associated with running Republicans for office.
“One of the potential impacts is that it could harden some donors against wanting to give additional dollars,” said GOP strategist Kevin Madden.
RNC spokeswoman Cassie Smedile sought to tamp down anxious donors fears that the president is draining the party’s coffers by stipulating that the attorney fees “have been paid with funds from a pre-existing legal-proceedings account and do not reduce by a dime the resources we can put toward our political work.”
Among the president’s financial saviors are shipping magnate Richard Uihlein and his wife Elizabeth ($200,000), investor Charles Schwab ($100,000), Home Depot CEO Bernard Marcus and his wife Wilma, shadowy billionaire Robert Mercer and others including Ukrainian-born billionaire Len Blavatnik, who has donated copiously to the legal fund.
“The contribution from Mr. Blavatnik came during the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s probe of U.S. intelligence agencies’ findings of Russian meddling in the U.S. election,” the Journalreported, “a month before the Justice Department appointed a special counsel to oversee its probe of Russian interference — which subsequently prompted some rich asshole to hire a private legal team.”
Blavatnik is a friend and business partner of Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg — a close ally of the Kremlin and one of the richest men in Russia.
With Two Tweets the rich asshole Took A Giant Leap Closer To Leaving The White House In Handcuffs
With two tweets about the Russia scandal on Friday, some rich asshole gave investigators more information that brought them closer to potential criminal charges.
With two tweets about the Russia scandal on Friday, some rich asshole gave investigators more information that brought them closer to potential criminal charges.
These are not the tweets of an innocent man. some rich asshole is trying to blame Facebook for Russia’s election interference while changing the subject to Hillary Clinton and the media. The distractions and excuses are techniques that are used by guilty people who are trying to deflect attention from their own crimes.
There is one question that the rich asshole and his defenders have never been able to answer. If the Russia scandal is a hoax, why did the President fire James Comey to kill the investigation? the rich asshole has admitted multiple times that he fired Comey over Russia, but firing the FBI Director would never have been necessary if the rich asshole was innocent.
the rich asshole’s claims fail to clear the bar of basic common sense, which suggests that an innocent person would welcome an investigation because it would clear their name and end any questions about their legitimacy.
Investigators are examining these tweets because the rich asshole is drawing a map for them. He is telling them that his crimes are linked to Russia. There is nothing legally preventing law enforcement from charging the rich asshole with a crime that was committed before he took office. The presidency is not a gift of lifetime immunity. The prevalent idea is that the president can only be impeached, but this has never been challenged.
If the rich asshole were to be indicted at the state level, that if convicted he could try to remain president from behind bars at least until Congress removed him from office.
the rich asshole’s tweets are bringing him closer to being led out of the White House in disgrace.
Objectively, some rich asshole’s presidency is flailing. Regardless of what you feel about his core politics and policy, the rich asshole administration is caught in a cycle of scandals of its own creation. the rich asshole fired FBI Director James Comey, with the possible intent of quashing an FBI probe into his campaign. He gave away intelligence secrets to the Russians, potentially endangering a foreign agent embedded with ISIS. (And wait ... there’s more!)
The start of the rich asshole administration has been riddled with more scandals than any presidency of recent memory. And yet the rich asshole still enjoys high support among his base: 85 percent of the rich asshole voters approve of the job he’s doing, a recent Morning Consult poll found.
If you’re looking for an explanation for why the rich asshole’s support is so solid among his base — and why it will remain so stubbornly high — read this piece by the Associated Press, where the reporters asked the rich asshole supporters how they’re handling the wave of scandals.
“I tuned it out,” Michele Velardi, a 44-year-old in Staten Island, told the AP of the recent news. “I didn’t want to be depressed. I don’t want to feel that he’s not doing what he said, so I just choose to not listen.”
This line is extremely revealing. It shows a psychological tendency we’re all susceptible to. That tendency is called “motivated ignorance,” and it’s an extremely powerful force in American politics. It’s also one of the keys to understanding why political discourse can be so irrational.
Politics is about establishing a shared sense of reality with like-minded people. It’s not about facts.
Here’s a simple truth: We find inconvenient political facts to be genuinely unpleasant. Psychologists theorize that’s because our partisan identities get mixed up with our personal identities — which would mean that an attack on our strongly held beliefs is an attack on the self.
“The brain’s primary responsibility is to take care of the body, to protect the body,” Jonas Kaplan, a psychologist at the University of Southern California, told me earlier this year. “The psychological self is the brain’s extension of that. When our self feels attacked, our [brain is] going to bring to bear the same defenses that it has for protecting the body.”
And researchers have seen what this immune system looks like in action.
A recent study presented 200 participants with two options. They could either read and answer questions about an opinion they agreed with — the topic was same-sex marriage — or read the opposing viewpoint.
Here’s the catch: If the participants chose to read the opinion they agreed with, they were entered into a raffle pool to earn $7. If they selected to read opposing opinion, they had a chance to win $10.
A majority — 63 percent — of the participants chose to stick with what they already knew, forgoing the chance to win $10. Both people with pro-same-sex marriage beliefs and those against it avoided the opinion hostile to their worldview at similar rates.
In another test, the researchers (essentially) asked participants to rate how interested they were in learning about alternative political viewpoints compared with activities like: “watching paint dry,” “sitting quietly,” “going for a walk on a sunny day,” and “having a tooth pulled.”
The results: Listening to a political opponent isn’t as awful as getting a tooth pulled, but it’s trending in that direction. It’s certainly a lot worse than taking a leisurely stroll.
“People on the left and right,” the study concludes, “are motivated to avoid hearing from the other side for some of the same reasons: the anticipation of cognitive dissonance and the undermining of a fundamental need for a shared reality with other people.”
The upshot: We avoid uncomfortable opinions and facts in the same way we avoid going for a root canal or taking out the trash. And we do it to maintain a sense of camaraderie and shared reality with our political teams.
Our brains are more interested in protecting our political groups than finding out the truth
This “fundamental need for a shared reality with other people” all too often overshadows incentives to weigh evidence or to be objective when it comes to political discussions.
This is the dark truth that lies at the heart of all partisan politics. We automatically have an easier time remembering information that fits our worldviews. We’re simply quicker to recognize information that confirms what we already know, which makes us blind to facts that discount it. It’s the reason why, paradoxically, as we learn more about politics and politically charged issues, we tend to become more rigid in our thinking.
“People are using their reason to be socially competent actors,” Dan Kahan, a psychologist at Yale, told me earlier this year. Put another way: We have a lot of pressure to live up to our groups’ expectations. And the smarter we are, the more we put our brainpower to use for that end.
Critical thinking and reasoning skills evolved because they made it easier to cooperate in groups, Elizabeth Kolbert explains in a recent New Yorker piece. We’ve since adapted these skills to make breakthroughs in topics like science and math. But when pressed, we default to using our powers of mind to get along with our groups.
Not helping: it’s easier than ever to avoid uncomfortable information
Velardi, the rich asshole supporter in the AP story, avoided the news by averting her eyes (and ears). But if you’re a regular consumer of conservative media, you don’t have to.
Vox’s Alvin Chang tracked how conservative news sites have been covering the recent the rich asshole controversies. And they largely have been avoiding the topic or obscuring the details.
“Even amid some of the most troubling presidential news in decades, a huge portion of this country is having a very different experience of these events, and repeating it over and over,” Chang writes. “Our collective memories — and, in turn, our shared culture — are being splintered.“
This is a key point that many people miss when discussing the “fake news” or “filter bubble” problem in our online media ecosystems. Avoiding facts inconvenient to our worldview isn’t just some passive, unconscious habit we engage in. We do it because we find these facts to be unpleasant. And as long as this experience remains unpleasant, and easy to avoid, we’re just going to drift further and further apart.
These scandals seem likely to keep growing. And new ones may pop up. But know that it will take a lot for the rich asshole’s supporters to abandon him. Why? They’re human.
Charles Ventura, USA TODAYPublished 8:48 p.m. ET Sept. 21, 2017 | Updated 10:00 a.m. ET Sept. 22, 2017
Merriam-Webster found itself at a loss for words when President the rich asshole famously tweeted "covfefe" earlier this year. But on Thursday, the online dictionary was up to task and redeemed itself when social media needed it the most.
In response to the rich asshole's combative U.N. General Assembly speech against North Korea and his decision to ramp up economic pressure on the reclusive nation, Kim Jong Un called the rich asshole a "mentally deranged dotard" who is “unfit to hold the prerogative of supreme command of a country."
Shortly after Kim's statement, Twitter tossed the question to Merriam-Webster, asking for dotard's definition:
"The word as used today commonly means 'a person in his or her dotage,'" Merriam-Webster said shortly after the word went viral, adding that dotage: "is a state or period of senile decay marked by decline of mental poise and alertness."
Dotard, Merriam-Webster said, comes from "the Middle English word doten (meaning 'to dote'), initially had the meaning of 'imbecile' when it began being used in the 14th century."
the rich asshole is playing with nuclear war. He has no idea what he's doing, and it's becoming clear people may die as a result.
President some rich asshole Friday morning unleashed an unhinged Twitter rant, attacking Republicans even thinking about blocking ObamaCare repeal, the "Russia hoax" and "Crooked Hillary," and North Korea's Kim Jong-un.
Attacking Kim Jong-un in a war of words is dangerous – not only for the rich asshole, but for all Americans, and ultimately, the entire world.
Rather than be strategic, thoughtful, or even a mature adult, some rich asshole has engaged with the North Korean totalitarian dictator as if he were a business or political opponent. Actually, worse, some rich asshole has engaged with Kim as a child on the playground.
the rich asshole went ballistic last month when he threatened North Korea with "fire and fury like the world has never seen," in response to a news report Pyongyang had successfully miniaturized a nuclear warhead to fit in an ICBM.
And on Tuesday the rich asshole stood before world leaders an embarrassed Kim, calling him "Rocket Man," which was just infantile.
Thursday, Kim struck back, verbally, in a statement calling the rich asshole a "dotard," "deranged," a "rogue and a gangster," suggesting he is behaving like a "frightened dog," and promising to punish him with fire.
the rich asshole, who's never not responded to an insult, Friday morning hit back.
When you're the leader of the free world, sometimes not responding, especially to a juvenile attack, makes you look stronger. But some rich asshole is an immature idiot, and this puerile but escalating war of words will have life-and-death consequences if it continues.
the rich asshole also on Friday morning attacked Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), who is refusing to vote for the latest and worst version of TrumpCare, the Graham-Cassidy bill to "repeal and replace" ObamaCare. Senator Paul is a no, and some of the other Republicans who have previously stopped ObamaCare repeal are wavering.
This was the rich asshole's message to the early Friday morning:
the rich asshole likely doesn't know or doesn't care, but "the Republican who saved ObamaCare" isn't a bad title. The majority of Americans support ObamaCare, and six out of ten last month said it was good the Senate failed in its efforts to repeal and replace it.
The President, clearly running scared, also lashed out at the "Russia hoax," which he and everyone else know is anything but. Even his intelligence agencies, his nominee to become ambassador to Russia, and experts the world over know Russia interfered in our election. He also renewed his attack on "Crooked Hillary," and the "dishonest Media."
President some rich asshole continued his war of words with Kim Jong-un early Friday morning, calling the North Korean leader a “madman” and stating he “will be tested like never before!”
He then attacked the Russia investigation, Facebook and Hillary Clinton.
On Thursday, Kim Jong-un referred to the rich asshole as a “frightened dog,” before stating: “Far from making remarks of any persuasive power that can be viewed to be helpful to defusing tension, he made unprecedented rude nonsense one has never heard from any of his predecessors. A frightened dog barks louder.”
Unsurprisingly, the rich asshole used Twitter to respond in kind, tweeting, “Kim Jong Un of North Korea, who is obviously a madman who doesn’t mind starving or killing his people, will be tested like never before!”
Tensions between the two countries have grown since the rich asshole threatened to destroy North Korea during a speech to the United Nations earlier in the week, leading North Korea to float the idea of testing a hydrogen bomb over the Pacific Ocean as a show of strength. the rich asshole later turned his focus on the Russia investigation, specifically calling out Facebook
White House staffers are sending out resumes and preparing to flee the chaos of the rich asshole administration.
Morale has plummeted amid the widening Russia investigation and the personnel changes at the top, which has left staffers without allies in an administration characterized by mistrust, reported Politico.
“There will be an exodus from this administration in January,” said one Republican lobbyist, who has personally heard from five officials looking to leave. “Everyone says, ‘I just need to stay for one year.’ If you leave before a year, it looks like you are acknowledging that you made a mistake.”
“There will be an exodus from this administration in January,” said one Republican lobbyist, who has personally heard from five officials looking to leave. “Everyone says, ‘I just need to stay for one year.’ If you leave before a year, it looks like you are acknowledging that you made a mistake.”
Turnover is always high for White House political positions, which call for long hours in a high-stress, competitive environment — regardless of the president — but staffers usually wait until after an election to jump ship.
“There is no joy in Trumpworld right now,” said one adviser in close contact with staffers. “Working in the White House is supposed to be the peak of your career, but everyone is unhappy, and everyone is fighting everyone else.”
About 23 staffers have already left the White House since January, including chief of staff Reince Priebus, chief strategist Steve Bannon, national security adviser Michael Flynn, deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh, communications directors Mike Dubke and Anthony Scaramucci, and press secretary Sean Spicer.
“I would say about anybody looking to leave that they are probably having a hard time keeping up with President the rich asshole,” one senior White House official told Politico. “You sign on for this, and you’ve got to be ready to go.”
The constant turnover in the White House is scaring away Republicans and top policy experts, who fear the chaos and scandals will destroy their own reputations.
“Some people are a little nervous that corporations will hold their time in the rich asshole White House against them, particularly companies like Google or Uber or tech players,” said one GOP strategist who has fielded calls from staffers looking to leave.
Science-denier the rich asshole surprised by super-hurricanes predicted by science
the rich asshole laments string of warming-fueled superstorms: "It’s just one after another”
MARINE ONE, WITH PRESIDENT THE RICH ASSHOLE ABOARD, FLIES OVER AREAS HIT BY HURRICANE IRMA, SEPTEMBER 14, 2017. CREDIT: AP/EVAN VUCCI
“It’s just one after another” this hurricane season, President some rich asshole said Wednesday.
Although the rich asshole has denied the science linking hurricanes to climate change, he was unwittingly pointing out one of the most serious consequences of his policies to kill climate action: The rise of simultaneous “unnatural” disasters.
“As climate change continues, by any reasonable expectation we will see more storms like Harvey and Irma and the chances for these to occur simultaneously also will increase,” Dr. Greg Holland, a leading U.S. expert on the connection between hurricanes and climate change, warned last week.
The country is going to face more and more scenarios where we have to simultaneously deal with devastation in Texas, Florida, and islands in the Caribbean — as well as the East Coast. A 2013 NOAA study found that under the business-as-usual CO2 emissions scenario, by mid-century the Jersey shore could see yearly Sandy-level storm surges from Atlantic City to Cape May.
And that’s just the coastal storms. Last week, the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) reported an astounding two million acres of land were ablaze in the West, as the country suffers one of its worst wildfire seasons ever.
“This one in particular has been a longer season,” NIFC’s Chris Wilcox told NPR. “It really hasn’t stopped since the fall of 2016.”
The science explaining how climate change drives worse wildfires and longer wildfire seasons has been well documented, and this summer record-smashing heat waves created ideal conditions for wildfires.
As the planet continues its human-caused global warming, scientists tell us we will see more super-hurricanes and more massive wildfires — along with more extreme heat waves, extreme droughts, and Dust-Bowlification. That means more simultaneous record-smashing disasters, and they won’t just be happening in the United States. They’ll be happening all around the world at the same time, meaning more and more countries will be focused on dealing with their own catastrophic impacts from climate change, and less willing and able to help other countries when they get hit by a warming-fueled disaster.
Worse, the rich asshole’s efforts to undermine domestic and global climate action mean that worst-case scenarios become more likely, with more off-the-charts disasters and more simultaneous disasters.
the rich asshole himself tweeted that Harvey caused “historic rainfall” and “unprecedented” flooding.
And after Irma rapidly intensified to a Category 5 superstorm the rich asshole tweeted “Hurricane looks like the largest ever recorded in the Atlantic!” Irma smashed the record for the “longest sustained 185-mph winds” — not just in the Atlantic but anywhere in the world.
But the rich asshole changed his story last week when a reporter asked at a press gaggle on Air Force One, “Mr. President, the severity of these storms — the one in Florida, the one in Texas — has that made you rethink your views of climate change?”
It seems the only thing that can curb the rich asshole’s propensity for touting everything as the “biggest” is his unwillingness to concede that climate change is occurring.
the rich asshole, who was returning to D.C. after seeing Hurricane Irma’s impact on Florida, changed his tune, falsely claiming, “Well, we’ve had bigger storms than this.” He elaborated, “So we did have two horrific storms, epic storms. But if you go back into the ‘30s and ‘40s, and you go back into the teens, you’ll see storms that were very similar and even bigger, okay?”
Nope and nope. We had a bigger storm than Irma just five years ago. It was named Sandy, and it was the largest hurricane — in terms of diameter — ever recorded in the Atlantic. Irma had the highest, most prolonged wind speeds. The highest cumulative energy (accumulated cyclonic energy) for a single storm was Hurricane Ioke in 2006.
And as for whether or not we had “very similar” storms a century ago, an analysis last week shows that Harvey was in reality an unimaginable never-before-seen once-in-25,000 year storm.
With Maria, the rich asshole was back in superlative mode, saying yesterday as the storm devastated Puerto Rico, “I’ve never seen winds like this.”
Somehow the rich asshole simultaneously believes these are — and are not — the biggest storms we ever seen. No wonder Politico reported that “the rich asshole administration officials huddled at the White House on Wednesday” to develop “a game plan for communicating its position on climate change.”
Politico noted, “Officials also discussed how to combat the public perception that the administration is out of touch with climate science, sources said.” Where could the public get such a perception? Probably just by listening to the president.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller has requested phone records related to an Air Force One meeting where some rich asshole reportedly “personally dictated” a misleading statement about a clandestine meeting between members of his campaign and an emissary of the Russian government, Politico reports.
That statement–which the rich asshole’s son, some rich asshole Jr., had to clarify on three separate occasions–is believed to be integral to Mueller’s investigation into whether the rich asshole campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential election. Mueller is also investigating whether the rich asshole committed obstruction of justice by firing former FBI Director James Comey, according to sources familiar with the probe.
In addition to phone records from that Air Force One meeting, Mueller is also requesting documents related to a May 3 press briefing by Sean Spicer, where the former White House spokesman insisted the president had confidence in Comey. the rich asshole fired Comey less than a week after that briefing.
U.S. President Donald Trumps reacts as he attends a joint news conference with French President Emmanuel Macron at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, July 13, 2017. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
DON'T MISS STORIES. FOLLOW RAW STORY!
President some rich asshole said on Thursday the United States would be adding more sanctions on North Korea.
Tensions have escalated in recent weeks over Pyongyang’s missile and nuclear weapons program, despite intense pressure from world powers.
“We will be putting more sanctions on North Korea,” the rich asshole said in response to a question at a meeting with Afghan president Ashraf Ghani.
On Afghanistan, the rich asshole said the U.S. military was doing more leading than fighting.
(Reporting by Steve Holland; Writing by Yara Bayoumy; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)
Donald J. Trump won North Carolina by 3.6 percentage points, despite many projections pointing to Hillary Clinton taking the state. But if Thomas A. Farr had had his way, Trump margin of victory would have certainly been bigger. Now, the lawyer with a history of working on voter suppression efforts is set to receive a reward for his diligent if ultimately unsuccessful efforts with a plum federal judgeship.
Farr has helped defend restrictive voting laws in North Carolina, part of a wider Republican effort that critics say disenfranchises African-Americans and the poor (supporters say that stricter laws will protect against election tampering, though they have not be able to point to widescale ballot-box abuses). Trump, who has repeatedly made unfounded accusations of voter fraud, nominated Farr in July to the Eastern District in North Carolina, the longest judicial vacancy in the nation.
On Wednesday morning, Farr was one of several nominees to receive a hearing at the Senate Judiciary Committee. Thom Tillis, the Republican Senator of North Carolina, presided over the hearing. The hearing consisted of two panels, the first of which was devoted entirely to Allison H. Eid, a nominee to the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver. Farr was on the second panel, on which there were three other nominees. Looking somewhat like a rumpled law professor, he spoke for about 12 minutes of the 160-minute hearing.
Tillis had the first question: “What type of advice would you give other attorneys?”
Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota, asked Farr about his work on behalf of legislation that would restrict voting access, particularly to people of color. Farr disagreed, answering her question calmly and articulately, without any evidence of ideological fervor.
“People see things differently,” he said.
Since the GOP has solid control of Capitol Hill, Farr’s nomination will withstand the vociferous opposition of liberal groups.
Farr did not respond to a Newsweek request for comment. Nor did Tillis. But a former associate, Carter Wrenn, disagrees with assessments of Farr as a partisan. “Tom Farr is a responsible lawyer,” says Wrenn, a Republican operative who has known Farr for many years. “The law is gonna be Tom Farr's guide, not politics.” Wrenn adds that Farr is “broadly respected” by his peers.
But not by detractors of the current administration. “Trump’s nomination of Farr is the latest example of this administration’s contempt for voting rights and judicial independence,” says Vanita Gupta, who headed the civil rights division of the Department of Justice under President Obama and now heads the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, an advocacy group. Indeed, Farr’s ascent is a sign of how mainstream—and successful—voter suppression efforts have become, little more than 50 years after the Voting Rights Act prevented the kind of restrictive practices that became common throughout the South after Reconstruction.
The Voting Rights Act suffered a severe curtailment in the summer of 2013, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down key provisions in the law. “While any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions,” said Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. That effectively allowed for states to enact more restrictive voter laws without having to a fear a rap on the knuckles from the federal government.
But by then, North Carolina—which wasn’t one of the nine states that had sued the federal government to lift Voting Rights Act-related oversight—was already on its way to passing what would later be called by election expert Richard L. Hasen “the most sweeping anti-voter law in at least decades.” The legislation was introduced by the Speaker of North Carolina’s House of Representatives. “We are here to announce that after a deliberate and transparent process, we will be filing a voter ID bill today that protects the integrity of the ballot box and respects the sanctity of the right to vote,” said the legislator, whose name was Thom Tillis, now a North Carolina senator, the very one who just months ago praised Farr as “one of the best legal minds in America.”
Like other “election integrity” laws, North Carolina’s seemed to violate the 14th Amendment, which declares it unconstitutional to “impose an undue burden on a fundamental right. The New York Times described the legislation at the time of its passage: “It shortens the early voting window, bans same-day registration during early voting and prohibits paid voter registration drives. Counties will not be able to extend voting hours in cases of long lines, or allow provisional voting if someone arrives at the wrong precinct.”
The Department of Justice sued, backed by the NAACP and the League of Women Voters. To defend itself, Tillis and his fellow legislators hired a prominent Raleigh lawyer with the firm Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart, which specializes in labor and employment law. The lawyer who would fight for North Carolina’s voter suppression law was Tom Farr.
When North Carolina’s voter suppression law finally went to court in 2015, Farr said that race simply didn’t figure into the legislation: “How can there be unequal opportunity when all voters have the right to register 25 days before the election? The statute itself is facially neutral?” he told NPR. But the Fourth Circuit disagreed, striking down the law in the summer of 2016, just months before the presidential election. In a strongly-worded decision, the court decreed that the law’s “provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision.” In the spring of 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal.
This was not Farr’s first experience with voter suppression. In 1990, North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms—a conservative to friends, a racist to foes—was facing a re-election challenge when he and state Republicans tried an unconventional tactic. They mailed 150,000 postcards to residents of heavily African-American districts. “The postcards warned that residency requirements were strict and vote fraud was punishable by imprisonment,” The New York Times reported at the time. The DOJ sued Helms. For his defense, he selected Farr. The case ended two years later with a consent decree.
"The so-called civil rights bureaucrats left us no choice but to accept this agreement,” said Wrenn at the time (he has since renounced the work he did for Helms during that time.)
It is unclear how long Farr has been with Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart, but he is currently listed there as a “shareholder,” suggesting extended service to the large firm. His work in private practice has come under scrutiny, too, since the nomination to a federal judgeship. A letter from the Black Congressional Caucus to the Senate Judiciary Committee opposing the nomination charges that Farr “championed eliminating legal protections for employment discrimination.” It also points to his representation of Avis, the rental car company, which was defended by Farr against charges of racial discrimination.
Farr has also been involved in North Carolina’s gerrymandering efforts, which again favor Republicans.
Kristine Lucius, a vice president for policy at the Leadership Conference, says that the Farr appointment to the Eastern District is “beyond cruel irony.” That seat was vacated in 2005 and remained unfilled throughout the presidency of Barack Obama, who attempted to nominate two African-American women to the district, which is about 27 percent African-American.
The nominations were blocked by Senator Richard M. Burr, the North Carolina Republican. In 2016, for example, Burr accused Obama of making a “making a brazenly political nomination” with the selection of Patricia Timmons-Goodson. Burr, however, does not think the Farr nomination is political. “His wealth of experience will serve North Carolina well,” Burr said of that nomination.
Lucius notes that nominations like that of Farr pose one of the greatest dangers from the Trump administration. She says 108 judgeships remain open for Trump to fill; that is exactly double the number of nominations Obama had when he took office in 2009. And since Trump is largely uninterested in details, he is likely to outsource nominations to conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation.
At the same time, she points to several recent court rulings that have found that racial discrimination at the ballot box remains a reality of the American political system.
“It still happens,” she says. “It’s still going on.” In fact, it may only get worse in the coming years.
CNN’s Chris Cuomo roasted the rich asshole’s past dealings with Manafort on CNN Thursday during an interview with Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT), in which Himes speculated that Manafort might have engaged in a quid-pro-quo arrangement with Russian officials in exchange for them helping the rich asshole’s presidential campaign.
“I think that’s a story that’s going to be told,” Himes predicted.
Cuomo wouldn’t go that far, but he did say that the rich asshole seems to constantly hire shady individuals with ties to Russian oligarchs.
“At a minimum, a man who promised to drain the swamp seems to have surrounded himself with some big alligators,” he said.
Manafort, whose home was raided this past summer as part of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, has become a central figure in the probe. the rich asshole fired Manafort as his campaign manager last summer after multiple reports shed light on his connections to a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine.
By Elizabeth C. Tippett, Assistant Professor, School of Law, University of Oregon.
President Trump on Sept. 19 gave his inaugural speech to the United Nations General Assembly, where he characterized North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un as a “rocket man on a suicide mission.” He also threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea if necessary to defend America or its allies. He even hedged a little, noting “hopefully this will not be necessary” because “that’s what the United Nations is all about.”
While some observers expressed shock and dismay about the deterioration of presidential norms, others (including other world leaders in attendance) seemed to barely react to “Trump being Trump.”
The subdued response may have been a stoic display of diplomatic calm, the core competency of those responsible for unraveling international crises. Or, more dangerously, is it a sign we’re growing complacent about the president of the United States thumbing his nose at legal, international, and ethical norms?
A marketing theory that describes how consumers respond to persuasive messaging – the kind you get from a repeated ad for soap or a politician on the stump – offers some clues, and some hope.
Over the last several years, I have been working with social scientists to understand how consumers respond to medical information in attorney advertising. In the course of these collaborations, I learned that consumers respond to persuasive messages – including a president’s – in a much more complex way than you might expect.
Consumers are sophisticated
In 1994, marketing professors Marian Friestad and Peter Wright wrote a landmark paper that changed the way researchers thought about how consumers respond to persuasion.
Previously, researchers tended to assume that consumers approached persuasive messages somewhat passively. Scholars knew that consumers responded differently depending on whether they had a high high or low engagement in the marketing message. But they were less interested in how they engaged with those messages.
Friestad and Wright placed consumers at the center of their model. They believed that consumers are sophisticated in how they process persuasive messages, bringing to bear their knowledge of the subject matter, the source of the information and their knowledge about persuasion tactics. If consumers believe that the source is untrustworthy, or that the advertiser is trying to use a deceptive tactic against them, they can respond by discounting or ignoring the message.
This graphic illustrates the marketing model developed by Friestad and Wright using a 1793 engraving by Vernet.Venet, Friestad and WrightFor example, say a woman spots her boyfriend arm in arm with another woman. After confronting him, she will assess his proffered explanations in light of what she knows about him (something called “agent knowledge”) and how men usually try to explain their way out of such predicaments (known as “persuasion knowledge”). If the boyfriend insists that he has never met the woman, according to the Friestad and Wright model, she would then “cope” with his persuasion attempt by disbelieving his explanation. Friestad and Wright also described the moment at which consumers realize an advertiser is trying to persuade them as a “change of meaning.” An illustration of this is the moment you realize a co-worker who is complimenting your new hairstyle wants to ask for a favor and is not being merely friendly or just making idle chit chat.
According to Friestad and Wright, we are constantly updating our knowledge about persuasion tactics and the reliability of different sources, partly based on folk knowledge and partly our own experience. Their model also explains why people respond differently to the same message at different points in time. The next time you see the flattering co-worker, you’ll be more skeptical of his compliments – and maybe those you receive from others in the office as well.
Acclimating to the commander-in-tweets
The Friestad and Wright model offers a useful way to think about how a nation adapts to a president prone to exaggeration, accusation, and outright lying.
For better or worse, we don’t interpret Trump’s statements the same way we did a year or two ago. We apply what we have learned about Trump as a person and his arsenal of persuasion tactics.
This tweet is Trump doubling down after being accused of lying. That one is Trump trying to appear powerful or unpredictable. The next is Trump trying to appeal to his base after seeming to take a moderate position on an issue. And sometimes a Trump tweet is just a tweet, or, for lack of a better word, covfefe.
In other words, we are more conversant in Trump-ese.
A picture of golfers next to a forest fire went viral on social media as a symbol of complacency in a crisis. But as the photographer explained, the golfers were not as close to the fire as the picture suggests.
Similarly, a more muted reaction to Trump’s inflammatory statements is more complex than it seems. Once Trump is viewed as an unreliable or dishonest messenger, we respond by discounting the message. It ends up in the same mental category as a beer commercial.
Separating the wheat from the chaff
Of course, a president’s words matter. We can hope that North Korea will recognize the speech as mere saber rattling though some experts expect the reaction will take the form of missile tests.
That doesn’t make Trump’s bizarre approach to diplomacy less reckless, especially coming from someone with unilateral authority to launch a nuclear strike. And not everyone approaches the president’s words with similar levels of skepticism. When a president falsely equates civil rights demonstrators with neo-Nazis, it emboldens white extremists.
Nevertheless, increased familiarity with Trump’s persuasive style affords some cognitive space for decision making by his listeners. Like the beer commercial, we can recognize the persuasion tactics and consciously decide how to respond – whether that means by calling it out, ignoring or discounting the message, or focusing on other issues of public importance.
That’s not complacency. That’s democracy at its best.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Elizabeth C. Tippett made a contribution to the Hillary Clinton campaign in the 2016 election.
The Trump administration is drafting a new policy to quickly deport more than 150,000 child migrants from Central America who arrived alone in the U.S. illegally, creating a new class of undocumented migrants.
The Department of Justice and Homeland Security is drawing up a policy proposal in a series of memos, according to two sources with knowledge of the internal debate who spoke to the Miami Herald.
As it stands, the plan would allow for teens and children who arrived in the U.S. illegally by themselves to be put on a fast track to deportation when they turn 18. Most of these children have traveled thousands of miles alone from Central American countries, including Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, to escape violence and poverty.
The policy wouldn’t allow the teens to plead their case before an immigration judge.
The discussions follow controversy within the government about Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, a program implemented by Barack Obama, which protects children brought to the country illegally by their parents from deportation.
Speaking about the new policy plans, a former U.S. Justice Department official told the Herald, “The concern is that most people at DOJ know this will likely be viewed as illegal and do not want to have to defend this in court if they can avoid it.”
Current law “doesn’t give the administration a lot of flexibility with how to deal with unaccompanied children,” said a U.S. official familiar with the internal debate about the policy. “This administration still has its hands somewhat tied with what it can do with that population,” that person said. Read more: What is going to happen to the DREAMers after Donald Trump’s DACA decision?
Immigration has proven to be a key policy area for Trump's supporters and many in his team, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Earlier this month President Donald Trump sparked controversy with his decision to end DACA.
The DACA program currently gives two-year work permits to nearly 800,000 young people who were brought to the U.S. illegally by their parents, offering them a reprieve from deportation. Trump has encouraged Congress to act and pass a law that would make the program permanent, as part of a wider agenda to push through other immigration reforms.
Trump’s DACA decision has drawn criticism from high profile members of the Catholic church, including Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York, who said ending the program is unfair, as well as the president’s right-wing supporters who say he is going back on his promises to crackdown on illegal immigration.
The new policy around unaccompanied children is part of the Attorney General's efforts to avoid creating a another protected group of illegal immigrants like those under DACA, the Herald's sources said.
The arrival of unaccompanied children and families from Central America peaked in 2014. In the year between October 1, 2013 and September 30, 2014 U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) says it encountered 67,339 unaccompanied children.
At the height of the influx in June 2014, 27,000 people, including unaccompanied children and families, crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Three months later the number dropped below 5,000 following crackdowns by the U.S. and Mexico governments.
More than 150,000 children have been referred by Homeland Security to the Office of Refugee Resettlement since that time. The program cares for unaccompanied children after they are caught at the border by officials and either places them in shelters, with sponsors, or relatives in the U.S.
About 63 percent and 73 percent of the unaccompanied youth who arrive at the border are between 15 and 17 years old, making a large group of those who are in the U.S vulnerable to deportation if the administration moves ahead with the policy.
“For a growing population of migrants deported from Mexico and the United States to Central America, the conditions upon return typically are worse than when they left, setting up a revolving-door cycle of migration, deportation, and remigration,”according to the nonprofit Migration Policy Institute. The group advocates better programs to reintegrate those who are deported to their home country.
If the Trump administration decides to move ahead with the policy proposal it will it will likely meet similar opposition to Trump’s travel ban on people coming to the U.S. from six Muslim-majority nations. Elements of the ban have been blocked by federal courts and a legal case against the policy will be heard in the U.S. Supreme Court this fall.
The new policy on unaccompanied minors could be blocked by the courts almost immediately, said Leon Fresco, the former head of the Office of Immigration Litigation at the Justice Department during the Obama administration.
The question is, Fresco said, “whether the administration wants to add this to the travel ban, sanctuary cities, Byrne Jag grants, and DACA repeal to the issues they would want the Supreme Court to have to decide this year.”
Posted with permission from Tribune Content Agency
WASHINGTON — Another connection has emerged between Donald Trump and Felix Sater, the Russian emigre and ex-con who has become a key figure in widening investigations into ties between Trump associates and Russian figures.
Trump plays down his relationship with Sater, despite growing evidence of links between the two, including recently published emails detailing how Sater worked with a top Trump Organization lawyer on a planned Moscow property deal as late as 2016, during the presidential campaign.
McClatchy's investigation now shows that a trusted Trump security aide hired in 2015 had intimate knowledge that Sater, twice convicted, had a criminal past and underworld connections.
Before he became Trump's bodyguard, Gary Uher was an FBI agent involved in a complex deal to bring Sater back from Russia in the late 1990s. The resulting plea deal allowed Sater to avoid prison time in a Wall Street probe by serving as a government informant until his sentencing in 2009. During much of the time that he was a secret informant, Sater was a Trump Organization business associate, working on projects in New York, Florida and Arizona.
It's not clear if Sater and Uher maintained an active relationship. Sater declined comment, and Uher did not respond to multiple requests for a response.
But the new information raises more questions about Trump's ties to the Russian-born felon, Sater, and those in Sater's orbit. "This latest revelation adds yet another connection between Trump and Russian criminals," said Kathleen Clark, a Washington University law professor in St. Louis, who specializes in government ethics and national security law.
The Trump Organization did not respond to detailed questions about the two, and whether its executives or Trump himself were aware of Uher's role in Sater's federal plea deal.
But court documents from almost two decades ago, obtained by McClatchy, show that Uher played an important part in Sater's decision to return from Russia.
Uher was a young FBI agent when he helped persuade Sater to stay out of U.S. prison by cooperating in an operation that uncovered a $40 million scam by criminally connected Wall Street firms. Numerous members of the New York-area Mafia were eventually sent to prison.
FBI veterans loosely divide agents into two categories: the brainy, whose talents tend toward pursuing paper trails, and the brawny, who prefer to be out on the street and can be more inclined to be part of a security detail.
Tall, thick and imposing, Uher fell into the latter category.
"He was a good agent," recalled Lewis Schiliro, an expert on organized crime who at the time was the assistant director of the FBI's New York office. He referred to the late 1990s as "a really wild time" for Russia-linked crime.
Recent court documents obtained by McClatchy show that Uher, after leaving the bureau, was referred to the Trump Organization in 2015 by Bernard Kerik, the former New York police commissioner and onetime nominee to head the federal Department of Homeland Security. Kerik withdrew his nomination and was imprisoned in 2010 after pleading guilty to tax fraud and making false statements in a federal bribery probe.
Kerik is also a former business partner of high-profile Trump surrogate Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor.
Uher said in a court deposition that he and Kerik had known each other since the early 1980s in New Jersey, when Kerik trained Uher in the Passaic County Sheriff's Department.
The December 2016 deposition came after Uher briefly made headlines in the early days of Trump's campaign. He and other members of Trump's security detail were accused in a lawsuit of roughing up protesters in front of Trump Tower during a book signing in September 2015.
Uher indicated in the deposition that he had worked for both the campaign and the Trump Organization, reporting directly to Keith Schiller, who headed security for the organization and went on to a similar position at the White House this year. (Schiller left that post this month.)
Uher appears to no longer work for either the Trump campaign or Trump Organization, though his current employer's website touts those past positions.
Oshirak Group International, headquartered in suburban Virginia, shows a picture of Uher on its website and lists him as director of law enforcement. The first item on his website bio cites his work as "Body guard for Donald Trump and family."
Disclosure records show Uher's work for the Trump campaign, which paid him and a company he worked forcalled XMark LLC.
Uher was paid a total of $44,920 by the Trump campaign for security work and travel expenses between June 2015 and January 2016, according to Federal Election Commission records.
XMark LLC, which is run by another former FBI agent, was paid more than $500,000 for security-related services by the Trump campaign as recently as March 2017.
Uher's work for the campaign occurred just as Sater was scouting potential real estate deals for Trump in Russia.
Sater derailed his early career as a trader on Wall Street when he went to prison in 1993 for slashing a man in a bar fight.
After he emerged, having lost his brokerage license, Sater joined childhood friends Gennady Klotsman and Salvatore Lauria in a criminal stock-manipulation scheme through two brokerage companies: White Rock Partners & Co. and State Street Capital Markets Corp.
Sater and Klotsman left the business in 1996, moving to Russia and working in telecommunications, including with AT&T.
While Sater was in Russia, New York City police stumbled on a Manhattan storage locker belonging to him that held weapons and documents revealing details of the stock manipulation scheme.
And that's where Uher and Sater's lives seem to have first intersected.
As an FBI agent, Uher worked closely with a government informant named Lawrence Ray. In a 2000 affidavit, Ray said he was dispatched to Russia by the FBI to lure Sater home. McClatchy has corroborated much of what Ray testified to in the affidavit.
A convict who has served prison time, Ray had business interests in Russia. He was eventually charged in the same investigation that swept up Sater and associates.
Ray was also close friends with Kerik, frequently dropping his name to associates. The relationship soured, according to media reports, after Kerik refused to testify on Ray's behalf in the same stock-fraud probe involving Sater.
Ray later turned over documents to investigators in the prosecution of the politically connected Kerik, which stemmed partly from gifts Kerik accepted from a Mafia-linked construction company called Interstate Industrial, where Ray worked at the time.
During the same period as Kerik's legal woes, Sater was a government informant. He also became a top executive at the real estate company Bayrock Group. Located two floors down from the Trump Organization in Trump Tower, it worked on a number of Trump-themed projects, including Trump SoHo in Manhattan.
After leaving Bayrock because of news reports about his criminal past, Sater nonetheless would maintain Trump Organization ties, as a "Senior Advisor to Donald Trump," according to a business card he carried in 2010.
In 2013, Trump would say of Sater in a Florida court deposition: "If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn't know what he looked like."
Sater for his part has frequently touted his connection to Trump. In fact, emails that recently surfaced in the course of the investigation into possible Trump campaign collusion with Russia show that Sater had plenty of back and forth about possible deals with Trump Organization lawyer Michael D. Cohen — whom he has known for decades — on a potential Trump real estate project in Russia in late 2015 and early 2016.
In one email, Sater exclaims to Cohen, "Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it."
the rich asshole campaign chair Paul Manafort (Photo: Screen capture)
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In 2012, former the rich asshole campaign chairman Paul Manafort recruited a New York law firm to help a Kremlin-backed Ukrainian leader get away with jailing his top political rival — and now that firm is being grilled by the feds.
The New York Times reports that the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom was recently questioned by federal investigators over its work on behalf of Viktor Yanukovych, the former Kremlin-backed president of Ukraine, who fled to Russia amid political turmoil in 2014.
“The request comes at a time when Mr. Manafort, his work for Mr. Yanukovych’s party and for Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs as well as the handling of payments for that work have become focal points in the investigation of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, and connections between Russia, some rich asshole and his associates,” the Times reports.
The law firm worked on drafting a report that offered justification for Yanukovych’s decision to jail Yulia Tymoshenko, the former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, whom he defeated in presidential elections in 2010. According to the Times, the final report featured conclusions that “provided a counterpoint to international critics who said that Mr. Yanukovych’s government had prosecuted and convicted… Tymoshenko on corruption charges in 2011 for political reasons and without sufficient evidence.”
For a quarter of a century, I was a major part of the conservative movement. But like many on the right, in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory I had to ask some uncomfortable questions. The 2016 presidential campaign was a brutal, disillusioning slog, and there came a moment when I realized that conservatives had created an alternate reality bubble—one that I had helped shape.
During the 2016 election, conservatives turned on the principles that had once animated them. Somehow a movement based on real ideas—such as economic freedom and limited government—had devolved into a tribe that valued neither principle nor truth; luminaries such as Edmund Burke and William F. Buckley Jr. had been replaced by media clowns such as Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos. Icons such as Ronald Reagan—with his optimism and geniality—had been supplanted by the dark, erratic narcissism of Donald Trump. Gradualism, expertise and prudence—the values that once were taken for granted among conservatives—were replaced by polls and ratings spikes, as the right allowed liberal overreach in the Obama era to blind them to the crackpots and bigots in their midst.
Some have argued that the election was a binary choice, that Hillary Clinton had to be defeated by any means. I share many of their concerns about Clinton, but the price was ruinous. The right’s electoral victory has not wiped away its sins. It has magnified them, and the problems that were exposed during the 2016 campaign haven’t disappeared. Success does not necessarily imply virtue or sanity. Kings can be both mad and bad, and the courtiers are usually loath to point out the obvious—just look at Caligula or Kim Jong Un.
Today, with Trump in office, the problems of the right are the problems of all Americans. And the worst part of it is that we—conservatives—did this to ourselves.
Donald Trump is the president we deserve.
Off the Wall
There was a time when we deserved better. And had it, too.
On June 12, 1987, President Reagan was in West Berlin to deliver a powerful message to the evil empire, the USSR. His Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, had branded himself as a benign peacemaker, and Reagan wanted him to prove it. More than two decades earlier, East German Communists had erected the Berlin Wall to keep defectors from fleeing the eastern part of the city, and the barrier remained, physically and symbolically dividing the two sides. With two panes of bulletproof glass separating him from a crowd of roughly 20,000, Reagan stood with East Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate behind him and uttered the words that have come to define part of the greatness of his presidency. “If you seek peace,” Reagan said, “come here, to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
The speech was vintage Reagan. His words championed freedom and unity, capitalism and strength. He saw America as “a shining city upon a hill,” as he put it in a later speech, an ebullient description that captured the source of his popularity. And though he personified much of what conservatives loved about America—our positivity, grit and determination—Reaganism was always about the country, not the man. He was our president, not our “dear leader.”
Almost three decades after Reagan’s speech in Berlin, Trump delivered a very different message in Manhattan. On June 16, 2015, he made a dramatic entrance at Trump Tower, descending into the lobby on an escalator to the sounds of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.” And with the cameras rolling, the reality-TV star announced he was running for president. The country was in real trouble, he said, in part, because Mexicans are sneaking across the border. “They're bringing drugs,” he snarled. “They're bringing crime! They're rapists!” There was only one solution, Trump explained: “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.”
With anger and bravado, Trump had declared war against Reaganism (the Gipper had been pro-immigration too)—and some people loved the brash new candidate for it.
This shift took many by surprise. In the 1980s, after Reagan became the face of the right, conservatives seemed like a united, monolithic force (especially to liberals who never really listened to what we had to say). The truth is, we have long been a jumble—a contentious collection of disparate, often querulous factions: libertarians, evangelicals, traditionalists, chamber of commerce types. As far back as the 1950s, there have been deep fissures in the movement. We called ourselves conservative, but supported the creative destruction of capitalism; we championed limited government, but also traditional values. We were the party of freedom, but also national security, law and order.
Over the past 50 years, conservative leaders had sought to knit together those ideological strands. It hasn’t always been easy. In the 1960s, Buckley, the conservative author and founder of the National Review, went to war with both the far-right libertarian writer Ayn Rand and the extreme anti-Communist crackpots at the John Birch Society. Those divisions and others carried over into the Richard Nixon era in the 1970s. It wasn’t until the early 1980s that Reagan managed to control these contradictions with a combination of charisma and competent governance.
Trump, however, exploited such divisions for his own gain. He tapped into something disturbing that we had ignored and perhaps nurtured—a shift from freedom to authoritarianism, from American “exceptionalism” to nativism and xenophobia. From his hard line on immigration and rebuttal of free trade to his strange fascination with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump represented a dramatic repudiation of the values that had once defined the movement.
If Reagan were alive, he would hardly recognize his party—or the walls it had erected.
Birther of a Nation
In between Reagan and Trump, there were signs of deep dysfunction in the conservative ranks, moments when the right seemed on the verge of losing it—from outbursts of anti-Semitism during Pat Buchanan’s unlikely surge in 1992 to Sarah Palin’s embarrassing ascendancy to the GOP ticket in 2008.
But the real turning point came with the election of Barack Obama and the rise of the Tea Party. While many of its discontents can be traced to the Bush years—Medicare Part D, changes to immigration policy and the big-bank bailouts—the Tea Party did not gain traction until after Obama’s victory. The timing fueled suspicion that the movement had more to do with the new president’s race—and party affiliation—than his policies, yet the early days of the Tea Party defied easy categorization. Despite the caricatures and repeated attempts by the left to portray them as dangerous or bigoted, Tea Party rallies were generally orderly events—and extraordinarily diverse. As the writer John Avlon put it in his book Wingnuts: Extremism in the Age of Obama, attendees at a typical rally included “libertarians, traditionalists, free-marketers, middle-class tax protesters, the more-patriotic-than-thou crowd, conservative shock jocks, frat boys, suit-and-tie Buckley-ites and more than a couple of requisite residents of Crazytown.”
The Tea Party soon became the face of the conservative movement, firing up a base that had been defeated and demoralized. As Avlon noted, the movement marked an aggressive shift in tactics, as some conservatives decided to “mimic the confrontational street theater of the far left they had spent decades despising. Civility was the first calculated casualty.” At rallies, signs comparing Obama to Hitler began popping up (as they had on the left with George W. Bush), while literature appeared skewering “Obama’s Nazi health plan.” Legitimate concerns over rationing health care morphed into overheated rhetoric about “death panels.” All of this was dramatically accelerated by the rise of a perpetual outrage machine that included scam PACs and even the venerable Heritage Foundation, pushing the GOP into increasingly extreme and untenable positions, which ultimately led to a futile government shutdown.
Few on the right pushed back against these excesses. “In this environment,” Avlon noted, “there are no enemies on the right and no such thing as too extreme—the more outrageous the statement, the more it will be applauded.” Even after Representative Joe Wilson was censured for yelling “You lie!” at Obama during a speech on health care in 2009, many on the right hailed the South Carolina Republican as a hero.
In the lead-up to the 2012 presidential election, this shift toward vulgarity and bluster accelerated. But perhaps the defining moment occurred on March 23, 2011, when Trump made an appearance on The View. Few at the time thought he had a real interest in—or shot at—the presidency. But polls indicated he was popular, and he was flirting with the idea. Wearing his trademark dumpy blue suit and long red tie, the New York real estate mogul launched into what today feels like a typical stump speech. “We’re not going to be a great country for long if we keep going the way we’re going right now,” he said. Trump was friendly and cordial, cracking jokes and holding Whoopi Goldberg’s hand. But when the conversation turned to Obama, it grew heated. “Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate?” Trump whined. “If you’re going to be the president of the United States…you have to be born in this country.”
The birther canard—that Obama was born in Kenya or somewhere abroad—didn’t start with Trump. (And despite his false claims, it didn’t start with Hillary Clinton either.) But perhaps more than any other figure, Trump proliferated birtherism, took the lie from the lunatic fringes of the internet and brought it to the mainstream. After his appearance on The View, he went further, implying to Laura Ingraham, the conservative commentator, that the president might secretly be a Muslim. After Obama produced his birth certificate in April 2011, Trump briefly acknowledged his legitimacy, then quickly seemed to recant, saying that “a lot of people do not think it was an authentic certificate.” In doing so, he soaked up some much-desired publicity, which arguably helped him launch his 2016 campaign.
Not everyone on the right bought into birtherism. Some, such as talk show host Michael Medved, slammed the conspiracy theory. “Birtherism, he said, “makes us look weird. It makes us look crazy. It makes us look demented. It makes us look sick, troubled and not suitable for civilized company.”
But many leading Republicans either stayed silent or refused to denounce such an outrageous lie. One reason for their reluctance: A Public Policy Poll in February 2011 found that birthers had become a majority among likely Republican primary voters—51 percent said they did not think Barack Obama was born in the United States. Birtherism was not a fringe idea in the GOP. The poll also suggested, as Steve Benen noted in Washington Monthly, that “candidates hoping to run sane campaigns will be at a disadvantage in the coming months.” Republican voters who doubted Obama’s legitimacy tended to gravitate to candidates like Palin, Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee (all of whom would play key roles in Trump’s 2016 campaign).
In private, conservatives who knew better justified their return to the dark fringes on the grounds that it fired up the base and antagonized liberals. Or as Palin put it so memorably in 2016, “It’s fun to see the splodey heads keep sploding.” The result was a compulsion to defend anyone attacked by the left, no matter how reckless, extreme or bizarre. If liberals hated something, the argument went, then it must be wonderful and worthy of aggressive defense. So conservatives embraced the likes of Christine O’Donnell, a failed Senate candidate who ran a curious ad denying rumors she was secretly a witch. They defended Todd Akin, a former Missouri congressman who said female victims of “legitimate rape” rarely get pregnant. We treated these extremists and crackpots like your obnoxious uncle at Thanksgiving: We ignored them, feeling we could contain them or at least control their lunacy.
We were naive. By failing to push back against the racist birther-conspiracy theory—among other harmful, batty ideas—conservatives failed a moral and intellectual test with significant implications for the future.
We failed it badly.
Safe Spaces and Angry White Men
There is, of course, another side to the story of how the right lost its mind.
Decades of liberal contempt, including the almost reflexive dismissal of conservatives as ignorant racists, had created deep antipathy on the right. And during the Obama years in particular, many conservatives felt attacked. First there was the massive stimulus package, which threatened to balloon the national debt. Then the Democratic Congress rammed through Obamacare with the barest of partisan majorities. These moves came at a time when conservatives felt their free speech and religious liberty were under assault, when the Internal Revenue Service was targeting Tea Party groups, and on university campuses activists began enforcing their demands for ideological conformity, complete with lists of microaggressions, trigger warnings and safe spaces. Later, Democrats began dismantling the filibuster, while Obama, frustrated by gridlock in Congress, started issuing a dizzying array of executive orders on issues ranging from immigration to clean power.
The right distorted and exaggerated all of these issues. But Democrats seemed to act as if their success were preordained, not merely by history but by demographics, assuring themselves that as America became younger and more diverse, it would deliver one liberal win after another. Not content with winning historic victories on gay marriage, some progressives called their opponents bigots, deriding their religious faith as hatred and discrimination. The goal was not tolerance but to drive out dissent. Or so it seemed to many conservatives, especially evangelicals, who came to feel they were not simply losing the culture war; they were being dismissed by a country they no longer recognized.
During the 2016 campaign, for instance, commentators on the left expressed legitimate concern that Trump was encouraging violence at some of his rallies. At the same time, conservatives were inundated with stories, links and video clips of protesters chanting “What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want it? Now!” and “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon.” But on cable television, they watched their concerns about law and order denounced as racial “dog whistles.”
As the Democrats became a party dominated by a highly educated, urban elite, its traditional blue-collar base felt increasingly disenfranchised. Many called them “angry white men” without really asking if they had legitimate reasons to be angry. The left, for instance, embraced the notion of “white privilege,” even as white working-class America entered a period of acute decline, as blue-collar workers faced devastating job losses and a mounting opioid crisis.
The alienation of center-right voters was especially unfortunate because the excesses on the left pushed many small-government conservatives into an unnatural alliance with the authoritarian and nationalistic right.
Cementing that alliance: the newly emboldened right-wing media—a place where facts became malleable and loyalty mattered far more than truth.
The Fake News Revolution
Since the 1950s, conservatives have criticized the bias and double standards of the mainstream media. And much of the criticism has been deserved. Conservatives may exaggerate media bias, but they do not imagine it. The double standards made for daily fodder on my radio show for the past 23 years.
During much of that time, I was proud to be part of the conservative media. I frequently shared the latest column by Charles Krauthammer or set up topics by reading a Wall Street Journal editorial on the air. Other hosts provided a broad forum for conservatives to share their views. Sure, we had our problems, our excesses—particularly during the Bill Clinton years. But I genuinely believed we were helping people become savvier, more sophisticated analysts of current affairs.
During the Obama era, however, we crossed a line. The right’s echo chamber didn’t just remain silent about the crackpots in our ranks, it embraced them, exploiting their insanity for clicks and ratings. Take Matt Drudge. His site, the Drudge Report, consistently ranks as one of the top five media publishers in the country, often drawing more than a billion page views a month. Media critic John Ziegler describes him as the tacit “assignment editor” for conservative talk radio, right-leaning websites and a significant portion of Fox News.
But at some point in the past decade, Drudge began linking to Infowars, a website run by Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist extraordinaire. On his site, Jones has suggested that the U.S. government was behind the September 11 attacks, the Oklahoma City bombing and the Boston Marathon explosions. He would be hilarious if people didn’t take him so seriously. And in linking to his stories, Drudge broke down the wall separating the full-blown cranks from the mainstream conservative media, injecting a toxic worldview into the right’s bloodstream.
Evidence of that toxicity came on the campaign trail on May 3, 2016. Months before the GOP convention, as Trump was competing against Ted Cruz for his party’s nomination, the birther in chief used yet another conspiracy theory to his advantage. This one was about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the bogus theory that Cruz’s father was involved in it. “His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald's being—you know, shot,” Trump said, citing a story in the National Enquirer, a fake news tabloid owned by his ally David Pecker. “That was reported, and nobody talks about it.… It’s horrible.”
Trump not only got away with this gambit; he doubled down, embracing Jones by appearing on his show. The Donald also enlisted the help of Breitbart bloviator Steve Bannon as his campaign strategist—a man who had turned his website into a platform for the hate-mongering “alt-right.”
Never mind that these sites were pushing fake news and Pravda-style propaganda—that was the point. By then, conservative media—from Fox News to Rush Limbaugh—had convinced their audiences to ignore and discount anything that came from the mainstream press. The cumulative effect had destroyed much of the right’s immunity to false information. The media’s dramatic failure to get the election right made it easier for conservatives to ignore anything outside their bubble. So it should have come as no surprise when false stories—blasted out by Russian interests and others—became a major campaign issue. “The American Right,” Matthew Sheffield wrote on the American Conservative website, “has become willfully disengaged from its fellow citizens thanks to a wonderful virtual-reality machine in which conservatives, both elite and grassroots, can believe anything they wish, no matter how at odds it is with reality.”
The proliferation of hoaxes—and the number of gullible voters who believed them—should have inspired introspection among conservatives. It didn’t. Those of us who were slow to join the bacchanal were denounced as sellouts, traitors or elitists. Under the withering fire of social media trolls, one GOP politician and commentator after another fell into line.
Those who didn’t faced the wrath of their base. When Paul Ryan denounced Trump’s statements about a Mexican-American judge presiding over a case about Trump University, he was hit with an avalanche of opprobrium from many of his fellow conservatives. They believed winning the election was more important than pushing back against racial animus. They were wrong.
By Trump’s inauguration, the GOP had morphed from the party of the right to the party of the Donald. Conservatives who had previously agreed that Russia posed a global threat pivoted to embrace Putin as an exemplar of white Christian civilization; Tea Party activists who had railed against deficit spending accepted calls for a massive stimulus; the party of free markets endorsed protectionism and an economic policy that seemed driven by personal fear and favor; constitutionalists watched silently as the rule of law was undermined and norms of public integrity ignored. After Trump won the presidency, activists who had clamored to “burn it all down” suddenly pivoted to demand party loyalty and virtual lockstep support of policies, even when they conflicted with fundamental principles or contradicted what Trump had previously said.
A movement once driven by ideas during the Reagan era—back before the advent of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News—now found itself dominated by Kardashian-like hosts, intellectually dishonest shills, cynical careerists and alt-right bullies. Recent debates among conservatives, one commentator on Twitter quipped, “show[ed] the nuanced differences between a YouTube comments section and a chain email to your grandfather.” This has paralleled a surge in the anti-intellectualism in American life, perhaps aided by compromises among the people whose judgment and ideas I once relied upon and trusted.
Thomas Aquinas warned of the dangers of the “man of one book.” This now seems quaint. We live in an age where political leaders such as Trump no longer read books at all. They just watch television and tweet, rallying supporters with outrage and misspellings.
This is the covfefe we created.
Confessions of a Recovering Liberal
In the 1970s, I was a liberal, until I looked around and decided I no longer wanted a part of what that had come to mean. I hated the left’s smugness, its stridency and dogma. I also felt many of the well-intentioned social programs seemed to hurt the very people they were designed to help. My decision came slowly, but it was liberating to break free from the cant of tribal politics and its tendentious talking points.
My circumstance today feels familiar. If the conservative movement is defined by the nativist, authoritarian, post-truth culture of Trump and Bannon, I want no part of it. So once again, I am an ideological orphan.
Despite the demands that conservatives obey the new regime, precisely the opposite is needed. Rather than conformity, conservatism needs dissidents, contrarians. It needs people who believe in things like liberty, free markets, limited government and personal responsibility—but who have no obligation to defend the indefensible or rely on alternative facts. It needs people who can affirm that Trump won the election fairly and freely but recognize the gravity of Russia’s interference in the campaign. It needs those can support tougher border controls and still be appalled by the cruelty and incompetence of the president’s immigration bans. It needs those who applaud Trump’s support for Israel but are still thoroughly appalled by his slavish adulation of Putin and his flirtation with France’s Marine Le Pen.
This position will be a lonely one; we may lose some friends. But conservatives have a long history of being out of step with the spirit of the age. It’s worth remembering that conservative spokesmen like Buckley were actively opposed to Nixon during Watergate, well before he stepped down. Today, there are no “Nixon conservatives,” short of maybe Roger Stone.
Paul Manafort is planning to leave the country soon, after he was reportedly notified that he will be indicted by federal prosecutors working for special counsel Robert Mueller.
The former campaign chairman for President some rich asshole has been targeted by investigators probing alleged Russian interference in the U.S. election, and a New York Times report revealed he had continued lobbying on behalf of foreign interests.
Right around the time Manafort’s home was raided before dawn by federal agents, the newspaper reported, he started working for groups allied with Iraq’s Kurdish minority to promote a referendum for independence that’s officially opposed by the U.S.
Federal prosecutors warned Manafort afterward that they planned to indict him — and the former campaign chairman began making plans to travel overseas.
Manafort has traveled to the Kurdistan region since he was approached by an intermediary for the Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani’s son, the newspaper reported.
Humiliated by terrible reviews of his UN speech, the rich asshole blames Obama and the Clintons
SEPTEMBER 20, 2017
The world shamed the rich asshole for his speech to the United Nations. the rich asshole responded by attacking his usual scapegoats on Twitter.
some rich asshole’s speech to the United Nations was, by any measure, a complete disaster.
the rich asshole’s address earned bad reviews at home, too. Journalists panned the speech as “menacing” and “needlessly offensive.” Hillary Clinton thundered that the speech was “dark and dangerous,” and former Obama press secretary Josh Earnest condemned the speech for having no “coherent strategy.”
But the rich asshole is not able to accept criticism. Which is why he took to Twitter Wednesday morning to claim that it is actually the Clintons who are to blame for tensions in North Korea:
In fact, while Bill Clinton’s efforts to thaw relations with North Korea did ultimately break down, North Korea’s first nuclear test occurred under George W. Bush.
And while the previous three presidents did threaten defensive action against North Korea, none of them ever baldly stated they would “totally destroy” the country. the rich asshole has dangerously and needlessly escalated tensions to a new level.
the rich asshole did not stop there. He went on to retweet a supporter accusing President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton of “in effect” giving nuclear weapons to North Korea through “appeasement,” despite the fact that, again, North Korea had nuclear weapons before either took office, and the Obama administration spent eight years choking North Korea with sanctions.
It is clear that the rich asshole’s basic instincts to engage in reckless bellicosity, latch on to anything and anyone who praises him, and blame others for his ineptitude are never going to change. His behavior in the aftermath of his U.N. debacle is typical form.
The rich asshole blocks woman with stage 4 cancer on Twitter after she criticized his latest health care plan
On Wednesday morning, President the rich asshole tweeted out his support for the so-called Graham-Cassidy health care bill that would allow insurers to discriminate against people with preexisting conditions and could cause tens of millions to lose coverage.
In the hours before the rich asshole posted that tweet, his account blocked a woman with stage 4 cancer who has spoken out about the dangers of Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare.
Following a restless night, Laura Packard, a Las Vegas-based self-employed consultant, found out she’d been blocked by the president.
“I didn’t sleep too well because of the cancer,” she told ThinkProgress by phone. “But I don’t know if he just woke up on the wrong side of the bed today or what.”
Packard, who has Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, has regularly been tweeting at the rich asshole about health care and other topics at least since the election. The day before she was blocked, she put the president on blast for supporting a bill that would jeopardize the lives of people like her who rely on Obamacare exchanges for coverage.
As ThinkProgress detailed earlier this week, under Graham-Cassidy, a 40-year-old diagnosed with metastatic cancer “could expect to pay a $140,510 surcharge on their annual health premium, effectively making many families choose between being bankrupted by their insurance company or being bankrupted by their hospital bills.” Packard is 41.
“I cannot afford [a $141,000 premium] and I suspect most people cannot,” Packard said.
These comments come as little surprise from a president who sparked worldwide outrage when he blamed “many sides” for the terrorist attack in Charlottesville, a statement many saw as victim-blaming and tantamount to support for the white nationalist perpetrators.
the rich asshole, who is supported by a small fraction of the country, is desperate not to lose the only people who actually like him. With recent reports showing core supporters abandoning him over an alleged DACA deal reached with Democrats, the rich asshole knows he needs to cozy up to his racist base, and that’s what this was about. Despite the “economic anxiety” myth that still pervades mainstream media (the rich asshole supporters, on average, are better off than the rest of the country), racism is an excellent metric of whether or not someone is a the rich asshole supporter — and, incidentally, whether or not they support football players exercising their right to kneel.
The most offensive thing to the “American values” of free press, free speech, democracy, and equality for all citizens continues to be the wannabe despot occupying the White House. the rich asshole, if you had any sense of decency or loyalty to your nation at all, you’d resign. First from the presidency, and then entirely from public life.
Featured image via video screenshot
Kim Jong Un calls Trump a mentally deranged U.S. dotard. Searches for 'dotard' are high as a kite. merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dot…
Dustin Miller 
U.S. President Donald Trumps reacts as he attends a joint news conference with French President Emmanuel Macron at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, July 13, 2017. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
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President some rich asshole said on Thursday the United States would be adding more sanctions on North Korea.
Tensions have escalated in recent weeks over Pyongyang’s missile and nuclear weapons program, despite intense pressure from world powers.
“We will be putting more sanctions on North Korea,” the rich asshole said in response to a question at a meeting with Afghan president Ashraf Ghani.
On Afghanistan, the rich asshole said the U.S. military was doing more leading than fighting.
(Reporting by Steve Holland; Writing by Yara Bayoumy; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)
Felix Sater (Youtube)
the rich asshole campaign chair Paul Manafort (Photo: Screen capture)
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In 2012, former the rich asshole campaign chairman Paul Manafort recruited a New York law firm to help a Kremlin-backed Ukrainian leader get away with jailing his top political rival — and now that firm is being grilled by the feds.
The New York Times reports that the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom was recently questioned by federal investigators over its work on behalf of Viktor Yanukovych, the former Kremlin-backed president of Ukraine, who fled to Russia amid political turmoil in 2014.
“The request comes at a time when Mr. Manafort, his work for Mr. Yanukovych’s party and for Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs as well as the handling of payments for that work have become focal points in the investigation of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, and connections between Russia, some rich asshole and his associates,” the Times reports.
The law firm worked on drafting a report that offered justification for Yanukovych’s decision to jail Yulia Tymoshenko, the former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, whom he defeated in presidential elections in 2010. According to the Times, the final report featured conclusions that “provided a counterpoint to international critics who said that Mr. Yanukovych’s government had prosecuted and convicted… Tymoshenko on corruption charges in 2011 for political reasons and without sufficient evidence.”
Paul Manafort (Photo: Screen capture)
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Paul Manafort is planning to leave the country soon, after he was reportedly notified that he will be indicted by federal prosecutors working for special counsel Robert Mueller.
The former campaign chairman for President some rich asshole has been targeted by investigators probing alleged Russian interference in the U.S. election, and a New York Times report revealed he had continued lobbying on behalf of foreign interests.
Right around the time Manafort’s home was raided before dawn by federal agents, the newspaper reported, he started working for groups allied with Iraq’s Kurdish minority to promote a referendum for independence that’s officially opposed by the U.S.
Federal prosecutors warned Manafort afterward that they planned to indict him — and the former campaign chairman began making plans to travel overseas.
Manafort has traveled to the Kurdistan region since he was approached by an intermediary for the Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani’s son, the newspaper reported.
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