November 28th, 2017 - November 30th, 2017. 379-381 days since the Nov 8, 2016, election of some rich asshole, no.45, and 311-313 days since the Jan 20th inauguration.
Nothing ‘to lose’: White House officials warn ‘quick-triggered’ the rich asshole will go further off the rails
some rich asshole speaking with supporters at a campaign rally at the Prescott Valley Event Center in Prescott Valley, Arizona (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
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If you think the last few days of President some rich asshole’s presidency have been crazy, watch out. You ain’t seen nothing yet.
White House officials expect the increasingly emboldened president to become even more outrageous in the coming months, especially if Republicans manage to pass a major tax reform bill, reported both Axios and the Washington Post.
“Officials tell us the rich asshole seems more self-assured, more prone to confidently indulging wild conspiracies and fantasies, more quick-triggered to fight than he was during the Wild West of the first 100 days in office,” reported Mike Allen for Axios.
the rich asshole, who overcame a never-ending deluge of scandals during his campaign, hasn’t faced any pushback from the GOP congressional majority.
“If there are consequences for his actions, the rich asshole does not seem to feel their burden personally,” reported the Post‘s Philip Rucker and Ashley Parker. “The Republican tax bill appears on track for passage, putting the president on the cusp of his first major legislative achievement. the rich asshole himself remains the highest-profile man accused of sexual improprieties to keep his job with no repercussions.”
The president has this week attacked individual media figures by name, called for the boycott or investigation of others, re-tweeted virulently anti-Muslim videos posted by a British fascist, cast doubts on the “Access Hollywood” tape he has already admitted was real, and again pressured the Department of Justice to bend to his will.
Allen, a longtime Washington insider, suggested the president would become even more unrestrained if Roy Moore, whom he’s endorsed despite multiple allegations of child molestation, wins election to the U.S. Senate in Alabama.
“the rich asshole has internalized the belief that he can largely operate with impunity, people close to him said. His political base cheers him on,” the Post reported. “Fellow Republican leaders largely stand by him. His staff scrambles to explain away his misbehavior — or even to laugh it off. And the White House disciplinarian, chief of staff John F. Kelly, has said it is not his job to control the president.”
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) said this week that the rich asshole was “one of the best presidents I’ve served under,” and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) praised the president’s efforts on the tax reform bill.
Alex Castellanos, a GOP campaign consultant, said the rich asshole’s hardcore supporters like his aggressively unhinged behavior.
“A strong daddy bear is what a lot of voters want,” he said. “Right or wrong, at least he’s fighting for us.”
He said the highly polarized political environment gave the rich asshole plenty of room to operate however he pleases.
“In an intensely polarized world, you can’t burn down the same house twice,” Castellanos added. “What has some rich asshole got to lose at this point?”
London Mayor Sadiq Khan: the rich asshole’s promotion of ‘vile extremists’ is a ‘betrayal’ of relations with the UK
London Mayor Sadiq Khan, some rich asshole -- (screenshots)
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London Mayor Sadiq Khan on Thursday hammered President some rich asshole for promoting anti-Muslim propaganda videos produced by far-right hate group Britain First.
In a statement published Thursday morning, Khan said that many British citizens view the rich asshole’s promotion of a “vile extremist group” as a “betrayal of the special relationship between our two countries.”
Khan went on to express astonishment that the rich asshole would promote such videos, and said that the British government should rescind its offer for the president to visit the country.
“It beggars belief that the President of our closest ally doesn’t see that his support of this extremist group actively undermines the values of tolerance and diversity that makes Britain so great,” he said. “After this latest incident, it is increasingly clear that any official visit from President the rich asshole to Britain would not be welcomed.”
Read the whole statement below.
UK reeling as the rich asshole upbraids Theresa May over her rebuke of anti-Muslim tweets
British Prime Minister Theresa May visited US President some rich asshole at the White House in January. (AFP/File / Brendan Smialowski)
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Britain was reeling Thursday after US President some rich asshole castigated Prime Minister Theresa May over her rebuke to him for posting anti-Muslim tweets, but the government sought to play down the row.
Plunging headlong into a high-profile spat with one of America’s closest international partners, the rich asshole suggested May focus on defending Britain rather than criticising him after he retweeted anti-Muslim videos from a British far-right group.
“@Theresa_May, don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom. We are doing just fine!” the rich asshole tweeted late Wednesday.
the rich asshole had to delete an earlier tweet with the same message after he used the wrong Twitter handle for May, instead tagging @theresamay, who is reportedly a 41-year-old mother from Bognor Regis with just six followers.
There were calls for the rich asshole’s planned state visit to Britain, which has been highly controversial ever since May extended the invitation at her first meeting with him at the White House in January, to be cancelled.
– ‘Betrayal of special relationship’ –
London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who has been involved in a series of spats with the rich asshole, said it was “increasingly clear that any official visit at all from President the rich asshole to Britain would not be welcomed”.
He said the rich asshole’s actions were “a betrayal of the special relationship between our two countries”.
“The prime minister of our country should be using any influence she and her government claim to have with the president and his administration to ask him to delete these tweets and to apologise to the British people.”
the rich asshole drew fierce condemnation at home and abroad for retweeting three incendiary anti-Muslim videos posted by Jayda Fransen, deputy head of the British far-right group Britain First, who has been convicted of a hate crime.
– the rich asshole was ‘wrong’ –
May said through a spokesman that the rich asshole was “wrong” to promote the “hateful narratives” of the group.
Local Government Minister Sajid Javid said the rich asshole had “endorsed the views of a vile, hate-filled racist organisation that hates me and people like me. He is wrong and I refuse to let it go and say nothing.”
But the immediate response from the government after the rich asshole’s rebuke appeared muted.
“In the end, our relationship with the United States has a longevity to it that will succeed long after presidents come and go,” Education Secretary Justine Greening said.
“This is a president that behaves unlike any other in the nature of the tweets he puts out. I don’t believe that should be able to undermine an overall important relationship with our country,” she said on BBC Radio.
Ann Coulter, a right-wing US commentator who is followed by the rich asshole on Twitter and may have inspired his retweets, defended him in an interview with BBC radio.
“I think he has only given as good as he gets. I think he has been verbally attacked from the mother country for a lot longer than he has been attacking Britain.”
Coulter said she had not researched Fransen’s background before retweeting.
“People retweeting videos are not researching the bios of the people who sent the video,” she said.
the rich asshole’s interventions in British politics have strained the so-called “special relationship”.
He has infuriated British authorities with his tweets on terrorism in Britain.
Before the rich asshole’s latest missive, the White House had scrambled to limit the fallout, saying that even if the anti-Muslim videos were misleading, the president was pointing out a real problem.
“The threat is real, and that’s what the president is talking about,” said White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders.
– ‘Facts do matter’ –
One of the videos falsely claims to show a Muslim migrant beating up a Dutch boy on crutches.
The Dutch embassy in Washington took the unusual step of publicly criticising a sitting US president on Twitter.
“@realDonaldTrump Facts do matter. The perpetrator of the violent act in this video was born and raised in the Netherlands. He received and completed his sentence under Dutch law.”
Another video is described as showing an Islamist mob pushing a teenager off a rooftop, without any context — it appears to be footage filmed during unrest in Egypt in 2013. A man was executed for his role in the teen’s death.
The third video allegedly depicts a Muslim smashing a statue of the Virgin Mary.
Britain First hailed the rich asshole for his support.
The group was formed in 2011 and is known for picketing outside mosques. It has run and lost in several British and European parliament elections.
Christopher Ruddy, a good friend of the president and a conservative media baron, has spoken. When asked to comment on President the rich asshole’s bizarre and troubling compulsion to deny what he had already admitted, to believe wholeheartedly in conspiracy theories, to cling to his repellent birtherism and, recently, to insist that the voice on that notorious “Access Hollywood” tape is not his, Ruddy lost his own mind, mixing metaphors and proper nouns. the rich asshole, in the end, renders his defenders stupid.
“I’m not a presidential historian, but I think many other presidents have written and shaped their own myths,” Ruddy, who had just spent part of Thanksgiving weekend with the rich asshole at Mar-a-Lago, told the New York Times. “Look at what happened with John Kennedy. If you read Theodore White’s books on it, he was given a story line about Camelot. I don’t think President the rich asshole has gone that far —he’s not describing this as Camelot,” he said. No, it’s more like “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
Ruddy is right about not being a presidential historian. The rest of the statement, however, makes no sense. It was not John Kennedy who applied the term Camelot to his tenure in the White House; it was the newly widowed Jacqueline Kennedy who used it in an interview with the journalist and author Theodore White. It was an inspired piece of branding, and while it has since been ridiculed, there is no doubt that it has also stuck. In any case, it’s not a lie.
That cannot be said about the rich asshole. His insistence that it is not his voice on the “Access Hollywood” tape is simply not true. He himself has admitted it’s him and has apologized for what he said. This is a wholly different category of the rich asshole lie. He is not merely exaggerating — as he did about the height of one of his buildings — but compulsively denying the undeniable. It is deeply troubling behavior.
The New York Times also reports that the rich asshole cannot let go of his insistence that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Last year, and under considerable pressure, the rich asshole reluctantly renounced that claim. Now, he’s back at it, clinging to that obsession as he also does to the insistence that his inaugural crowd was the biggest in history or that he would have won the popular vote had not a gazillion illegal immigrants materialized at the polls for Hillary Clinton. There is absolutely no evidence that anything like that happened. But for the rich asshole there need not be.
Is the rich asshole delusional? As a minor in psychology lo these many years ago in college, I am hardly qualified to make such a diagnosis. But as the shrinks say, he sure “presents” as one. He babbles inanities to aides in the White House and visitors to Mar-a-Lago, which has taken on the aspect of yet another Florida sanitarium. He tenaciously clings to a reading of events that are factually not true and which he himself has denied. There is something wrong with the man.
Does it matter? It must. If not now, then soon. If not soon, then eventually. Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) likened the rich asshole to Winston Churchill, who like any politician — or any spouse, for that matter — did not always tell the truth. But Churchill always knew the truth, whatever he might have told others or the British people. That is not the case with the rich asshole. He operates with facts of his own in a world of his own. He makes fools of his friends, enemies of critics and truth out of lies. He may not be danger to himself, but he is to the rest of us. On a daily basis, he makes an increasingly strong case for removal.
the rich asshole Sells Tax Plan With False Claims
WASHINGTON — At a Wednesday afternoon rally in Missouri, President the rich asshole played up what he called the “biggest tax cuts in history” and boasted about economic growth “in a nonbraggadocious way.”
“In fact, they’re going to say the rich asshole is the opposite of an exaggerator,” he said of his rosy projections, in a speech full of exaggerations and falsehoods. Here’s an assessment.
He is wrong that “for years, they haven’t been able to get tax cuts, many, many years since Reagan.”
President Ronald Reagan, who enacted a major tax cut in 1981 and lowered tax rates again in 1986, was hardly the last president to have done so. President Bill Clinton signed the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997. President George W. Bush enacted two major tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. The stimulus passed under President Barack Obama included hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts, and Mr. Obama later extended the Bush tax cuts with the American Tax Payer Relief Act of 2012.
He inaccurately suggested the plan wouldn’t help the wealthy.
some rich asshole insisted that the tax bill is “not good for me” or the wealthy. Referring to Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, the president said: “I keep hearing Schumer, ‘This is for the wealthy!’ If it is, my friends don’t know about it.”
That is not supported by most analyses of the tax plans being considered in Congress.
Under the Senate plan, every income level would receive a tax cut in 2019, but people earning $20,000 to $30,000 annually would face a tax increase the next year, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation. By 2027, most people making under $75,000 each year would see a tax increase, while those making more would continue to receive a tax cut.e reading the main story
Under the House plan, every income group would see tax cuts through 2027, but the richest one-fifth of Americans would receive 56 percent to almost 75 percent of the cuts, according to the Tax Policy Center.
Based on his 2005 tax return, some rich asshole himself could save more than $1.1 billion under the White House tax framework, according to an analysis by The New York Times, and the same amount under the House plan, a tax expert at Marcum L.L.P. told NBC.
He falsely called the current plan the “biggest tax cut in the history of our country, bigger than Reagan.”
some rich asshole has repeated this claim at least a dozen times since October, but it has not been true of any of the tax plans released in Congress or outlined by his administration.
A 2013 Treasury Department report assessed the size of major tax bills either as a percentage of the economy, by the reduction in federal revenue or in inflation-adjusted dollars. The 1981 Reagan tax cut is the largest under the first two metrics. It was equivalent to 2.9 percent of gross domestic product and reduced federal revenue by 13.3 percent. The 2012 Obama tax cut amounted to the largest cut in inflation-adjusted dollars: $321 billion a year.
For some rich asshole’s tax cut to exceed the Reagan cuts as a share of G.D.P., the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates it would need to cost roughly $6.8 trillion over 10 years. To have a larger effect on revenue, it would need to cost $5.7 trillion. No version of the current tax cut plan meets those benchmarks.
The budget blueprint that Republicans released in mid-October, the bill passed in the House in November and the bill currently being considered in the Senate all amount to a tax cut of about $1.5 trillion over 10 years. This would place as the 12th-largest as a share of the economy.
He falsely suggested that the stock market was previously flat.
some rich asshole spoke of tepid growth before he took office. “In all fairness, the stock market was going this way,” he added, drawing a flat line with his hand. The stock market has hit record highs under some rich asshole, but the uptick began after the financial crisis in 2008.
The link he drew between market performance and G.D.P. growth also contradicts his own comments. On Wednesday, some rich asshole said the economy was “doing terribly” at 1.2 percent G.D.P. growth, which occurred in the first quarter of this year. But during that quarter, he jubilantly posted on Twitter about the stock market’s “longest winning streak in decades.”
He exaggerated when he said a 3.3 percent growth was the “largest increase in many years.”
The Commerce Department adjusted its estimate of G.D.P. growth to 3.3 percent in the third quarter of 2017 from a previous estimate of 3 percent. This is the largest increase in about three years, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The economy grew at 3.2 percent in the first quarter of 2015 and at 5.2 percent in the third quarter of 2014, and the increase was larger than 3.3 percent in five other quarters under Mr. Obama.
the rich asshole Sends Crazy-Time Tweet To The Wrong Account After Losing His Sh*t Over World Leader’s Remarks
some rich asshole retweeted fake news videos in the early hours of the morning and for that, he was widely condemned. The White House responded to say that it doesn’t matter if the former reality show star posted fake videos about Muslims because “the threat is real!” Scary, huh? A backlash ensued after the rich asshole retweeted three times from a woman who was convicted of a hate crime in the U.K.
The current occupant of the White House is upset because British Prime Minister Theresa May responded to the rich asshole’s widely condemned retweets this morning, saying, “It is wrong for the president to have done this.” In a statement, Downing street further said, “Britain First seeks to divide communities by their use of hateful narratives that peddle lies and stoke tensions. They cause anxiety to law-abiding people.”
Members of British Parliament also condemned the rich asshole’s retweets.
So naturally, the rich asshole lashed out on Twitter at our ally’s leader. The problem is that he tweeted to the wrong Theresa May, a person who only has 6 followers, causing that Twitter user to receive nearly 9,000 notifications.
We took a screen capture because we knew (and he did) the Dotard would delete it.
Here’s the rich asshole’s full tweet to the totally wrong person.
Finally, the rich asshole tweeted the correct Theresa May, writing the same message: “Don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom. We are doing just fine!”
.@Theresa_May, don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom. We are doing just fine!
Wrong! We are not doing ‘fine’ when the so-called leader of the free world tweets to the wrong world leader, even though he is addicted to Twitter and still cannot tweet correctly. And now that he has corrected his tweet, he sounds just as idiotic as he did this morning when he started tweeting out fake videos in order to promote his ban on Muslim countries.
What a fuckin’ moron.
The White House justified some rich asshole's promotion of anti-Muslim propaganda videos, even as evidence has surfaced that at least one of them is a complete fabrication.
(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
At least one of the anti-Muslim videos that some rich asshole tweeted may be a complete fabrication, but the White House – which has railed against fake news – believes that is perfectly acceptable.
The video labeled “Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches” that the rich asshole tweeted was investigated by Dutch authorities, who determined that the assailant was neither Muslim nor a migrant.
Another video the rich asshole pushed claims to show an “Islamist mob” pushing a boy off a roof and beating him to death. But what the video doesn’t show is that the assailant, Mahmoud Ramadan was later arrested, tried, and executed for the murder in Egypt.
Despite these facts, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said it was acceptable for the rich asshole to promote fake videos. She told the press, “Whether it’s a real video, the threat is real. His goal is to promote strong border security and strong national security.”
She also claimed that the tweets aid border security because they prompted reporters to ask her about the issue.
the rich asshole has made allegations of “fake news” one of the central issues of his failing presidency. Just hours before Sanders’ statement, the rich asshole was again floating unsubstantiated allegations of “fake news” about the press.
The decision to use the presidency to promote these fake videos has endangered Americans. the rich asshole’s support of this propaganda – produced by the hate group Britain First – has also created an international incident.
British prime minister Theresa May released an official statement condemning the rich asshole.
“British people overwhelmingly reject the prejudice of the far-right, which it is the antithesis of the values that this country represents: decency tolerance and respect,” her spokesman said. “It is wrong for the President to have done this.”
The spokesman also specifically called out the group the rich asshole promoted, noting, “Britain First seeks to divide communities through their use of hateful narratives which peddle lies and stoke tensions. They cause anxiety to law abiding people.”
But some rich asshole is committed to bigotry. And despite his empty rhetoric on “fake news,” he has promoted a fake video his underlings are now trying to justify it.
the rich asshole told Kellyanne Conway to criticize Doug Jones on Fox
Jessica Kwong
Posted with permission from Newsweek
President Donald Trump reportedly gave his counselor Kellyanne Conway personal approval to criticize Alabama Senate candidate Doug Jones on “Fox and Friends” last week, an appearance that a former White House ethics chief says violated federal law.
Trump put Conway up on television after venting that Jones, a Democrat, has gotten an easy ride in the race because so much media attention has focused on sexual allegations against his opponent Republican Roy Moore, POLITICO reported on Wednesday. Trump, who has not explicitly endorsed Moore, was frustrated that more pressure wasn’t being applied on Jones ahead of the December 12 election.
Ding ding ding! We have a winner. @politicoalex says POTUS put Kellyanne Conway up to advocating against Doug Jones because the Moore allegations were giving Jones an easy ride. That, my friends, is the very definition of a Hatch Act violation. politico.com/story/2017/11/…
Walter Shaub, who was director of the Office of Government Ethics under former President Barack Obama, highlighted Trump’s apparent role in a tweet on Wednesday morning and wrote, “That, my friends, is the very definition of a Hatch Act violation.”
The Hatch Act states that employees in the executive branch are prohibited from using their official authority or influence to affect the outcome of an election. Last Wednesday, Shaub filed a complaint with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which is responsible for investigating Hatch Act violations, stating that Conway the day prior had appeared in front of the White House in her official capacity advocating against Jones.
On television, Conway said a vote for Jones was also a vote against Trump’s tax reform plan.
“I’m telling you that we want the votes in the Senate to get this tax bill through,” she said. "I just want everybody to know Doug Jones, nobody ever says his name and they pretend that he’s some kind of conservative Democrat in Alabama and he’s not.”
At the time it was not clear what or who had prompted Conway to criticize Jones, but it was not the first time she may have violated the Hatch Act. Conway early this year offered what amounted to be an advertisement on Fox News for the clothing line of the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump.
In a Washington Post op-ed on Monday, Shaub said that Henry Kerner, chief of the Office of Special Counsel, has taken an oath to enforce the Hatch Act and, “His willingness to pursue this slam-dunk case will tell us whether he has any intention of fulfilling that oath.”
“If he does seek to hold Conway accountable, his penalty recommendation will tell us how vigorously he intends to go about fulfilling that oath,” Shaub wrote. “We should all watch what Kerner does next.”
WATCH: the rich asshole mocks Asian allies of the United States as his tax reform speech goes off script
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President some rich asshole on Wednesday mocked allies of the United States, accusing them of not contributing towards their own national defense.
the rich asshole said during a speech on tax reform that his trip to Asia was a “tremendous success.” But he complained that the U.S. military was defending some wealthy countries in the region.
“I say why are we defending them? We love them. I won’t mention names. But there are a lot of them. We love them, they’re wealthy.”
“It’s going to change, folks. We’re going to defend them but they’re going to treat us fairly and they’re going to pay for their defense,” the rich asshole continued. “Does that make sense?”
“When I was in Asia, I spoke to a couple of the countries about it and they looked like this,” the rich asshole said, imitating an Asian leader. “You know what this is? Hmm-hmm. That means they know they’re getting away with murder and they got to start helping us out. Okay?”
Watch video below:
Notorious bigot celebrates after the rich asshole shares her anti-Muslim hate videos
some rich asshole (Photo: Screen capture)
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Jayda Fransenharassing a Muslim woman in front of her four young children, celebrated on Wednesday morning after learning that President some rich asshole had shared her anti-Muslim videos.
“THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, SOME RICH ASSHOLE, HAS RETWEETED THREE OF DEPUTY LEADER JAYDA FRANSEN’S TWITTER VIDEOS!” wrote Fransen on her Twitter account. “SOME RICH ASSHOLE HIMSELF HAS RETWEETED THESE VIDEOS AND HAS AROUND 44 MILLION FOLLOWERS! GOD BLESS YOU RICH ASSHOLE! GOD BLESS AMERICA!”
THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, DONALD TRUMP, HAS RETWEETED THREE OF DEPUTY LEADER JAYDA FRANSEN'S TWITTER VIDEOS! DONALD TRUMP HIMSELF HAS RETWEETED THESE VIDEOS AND HAS AROUND 44 MILLION FOLLOWERS! GOD BLESS YOU TRUMP! GOD BLESS AMERICA! OCS @JaydaBF@realDonaldTrump pic.twitter.com/BiQfQkTra9
The videos in Jansen’s tweets purportedly show, among other things, Muslims destroying a statue of the Virgin Mary and beating a Dutch boy in crutches.
Jansen is the deputy leader of the far-right Britain First party, which was founded by former members of the British National Party, a neo-fascist party founded in the 1980s.
During her time as an activist, Jansen has become notorious for holding pro-Christian demonstrations outside of mosques in her country. Last year, she was fined roughly £2,000 (USD $2,680) for following a Muslim woman around and yelling at her about Muslim men committing rape in front of the woman’s four children.
Specifically, she told the woman that Muslim women must wear hijab because Muslim men “cannot control their sexual urges,” which is “why they are coming into my country raping women across the continent.”
Here’s how the rich asshole will ultimately betray his own voters — and he’s already begun
Supporters of Republican rich asshole take a photograph together as they wait inside the Tampa Convention Center before a town hall meeting on March 14, 2016 in Tampa , Florida (AFP Photo/Brian Blanco)
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This post first appeared at TomDispatch.
Among the stranger features of the 2016 election campaign was the success of some rich asshole, a creature of globalization, as an America First savior of the white working class. A candidate who amassed billions of dollars by playing globalization for all it was worth — he manufactured clothes and accessories bearing his name in low-wage economies and invested in corporations eager to outsource — won over millions of voters by promising to keep jobs here in the US.
Admittedly, only a third of his voters earned less than $50,000 a year and cultural and racial resentment, not just economic grievances, drove many of them to the rich asshole. Still, in an ever more economically unequal America, his populist economic message resonated. It helped him win the presidency by peeling off white working-class votes in key regions, particularly the industrial Midwest. Now he’s stuck with his populist narrative, and here’s the problem for him: it’s not likely to work — not given the economic realities of this planet, not for long anyway.
Fading Economic Hegemony
In the Oval Office, as on the campaign trail, the rich asshole’s refrain remains that the economic woes of American workers, including stagnant wages and job insecurity, are the fault of predatory Asian and Mexican exporters, aided and abetted by inept past presidents who inked lousy trade deals. During campaign 2016, he promised to kick down doors abroad and force countries running surpluses, notably China, to buy more from the United States or face huge tariff hikes. He railed against companies that relocate production abroad, depriving Americans of jobs.
the rich asshole’s economic nationalism is, of course, a con job. He did, however, effectively employ the demagogue’s artifice, which invariably lies in crafting simplistic answers to complicated questions and creating plausible scapegoats for complicated problems. In fact, workers in industries the United States dominated for decades are in distress because of irreversible historic changes and the absence, thanks to a staggeringly lopsided distribution of wealth and political power in America, of progressive policies that would better prepare them to cope with the changes that have occurred in the international economy.
But first, a little history.
For nearly three decades after World War II, the United States dominated the global marketplace in big-ticket industries like steel, automobiles, passenger aircraft, shipbuilding and heavy machinery. That hegemony was bound to fade. As a start, America’s postwar economic primacy owed much to the ravages of that global conflict. After all, the industrial bases of Japan and Germany lay in ruins. Wartime allies Britain and France faced long, arduous recoveries. But the economies of those industrialized, technologically advanced countries were bound to recover — and by the mid-1970s they had. By then, America’s near-monopoly was ending.
Between 1965 and 2010, the share of the national market held by America’s steelmakers and carmakers plunged from nearly 90 percent to 45 percent. By the 1970s, they were already complaining about an influx of “cheap imports” and lobbying Washington to enact countermeasures. Now regarded as the ultimate free trader, President Ronald Reagan would indeed oblige them. In 1981, for instance, he limited Japanese automobile sales in the US, while hiking tariffs tenfold on motorcycle imports to save Harley-Davidson. European and Japanese steel companies would soon face similar restrictions.
Seen in historical perspective, Washington’s reaction to trade competition was hardly unique. Britain, too, had preached free trade during its economic heyday — until, that is, its imperial predominance began to wane. In the 19th century, the zenith of British free trade cheerleading, the United States relied heavily on protectionism to ensure the growth of its nascent industrial base. As its economic power expanded, however, its own version of such cheerleading began. Now, China is fast becoming an economic superpower. Unsurprisingly, at conclaves like the Davos World Economic Forum at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, President Xi Jinping is predictably starting to sound more like Adam Smith than Karl Marx, just as some rich asshole’s speeches during his November whirlwind trip through Asia are coming to resemble 19th-century American rationales for protectionism.
Since the 1970s, workers in places like Detroit, Bethlehem and Peoria have faced another challenge: a range of new sources of competition, especially the “Asian tigers” like South Korea and Taiwan. Once considered inferior, their products have by now become a hallmark of quality, making South Korean or Japanese cars, cell phones, computers and television sets ubiquitous in this country.
Now, China, which took the top spot in world trade from the US in 2013, is poised to do what Japan, South Korea and Taiwan already did here (cars included). And India waits in the wings.
These historical trends suggest that President the rich asshole’s protectionism is already doomed. The point isn’t that international trade always benefits American workers; it doesn’t. Trade, national or global, redistributes wealth, especially because the largest and most successful companies have long ceased to think in terms of national markets. They set up shop wherever it’s most profitable, using complex global supply chains. When it comes to Apple’s iPhone, for instance, more than 200 suppliers worldwide provide parts for final assembly in China. Good infrastructure and a workforce with skills that match corporate requirements matter. Yet wage differentials aren’t irrelevant either; that’s partly why China, Mexico and Vietnam have attracted massive amounts of job-creating investment — and why India, too, has begun to do so.
The relevant question isn’t whether the global economy can be redesigned to protect American workers — it can’t — but what their government will do to help them to gain the skills needed to compete effectively in a rapidly changing marketplace. Reforming public education might be a good place to start (but don’t look to some rich asshole to do it). If American workers are to do better in the global marketplace, this country’s public schools must ensure that their students graduate with the math, science and other skills needed to get decent jobs. That, however, would mean attacking the inequality that’s increasingly been built into the public education system (as into so much else in this society).
Education: The Zip Code Premium
Education: The Zip Code Premium
Horace Mann, the 19th-century American educator, referred to public schooling as “beyond all human devices… the great equalizer of the condition of men, the balance wheel of the social machinery.” Since the early years of the republic, Americans have embraced the idea that schooling is critical in helping individuals realize their aspirations and in guaranteeing equality of opportunity. In principle, there has been a consensus that economic circumstances beyond the control of children shouldn’t block their way into the future. In practice, it’s been quite a different story, partially because of how public schools are funded.
Local property and business taxes are the largest source of support for them, so kids born into a community crammed with pricey homes and thriving businesses will attend well-funded public schools that attract good teachers with decent working conditions and salaries. Such students are more likely to have smaller classes, more guidance counselors, nurses and psychologists, more computers per pupil, better textbooks and instructional equipment, richer curricula and better libraries.
In addition to local taxes, which provide 45 percent of public school funds, state revenues provide another 46 percent and federal assistance an additional 9 percent. Some state governments also offer extra money to poorer school districts, but not enough to begin to close the gap with more affluent ones. In any case, those funds have been falling since 2008. Additional federal support doesn’t come close to leveling the playing field.
The United States is one of the few countries in the 35-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a grouping of wealthy nations, in which central government funding plays such a limited role in reducing disparities between schools. In those countries, national budgets provide, on average, more than 50 percent of school funding.
Public schools in affluent communities have another advantage. Thanks to their incomes, professional qualifications, social networks and experience, the parents of students in such schools are far more capable of raising private money to supplement school budgets, which means extra educational equipment and instructional materials, and more staff. Most such private fundraising is done by parent-teacher associations (PTAs), which tend to be more active and more successful in affluent communities. (Indeed, poor districts may lack PTAs altogether.)
Consider a typical California example. In Hillsborough, where the median family income is $229,000, the school district raised an extra $1,500 per student; in Oakland, where median income was just under $58,000, it was only $100 per student. Similarly, in wealthy northwest Washington, DC, four elementary schools raised $300,000 apiece in one year, sums unthinkable for schools in Washington’s poorer communities like those east of the Anacostia River, where the median household income is $34,000. Such differences are the norm nationally.
It’s true that PTA funding — $245 million in 2010 (an increase of 300 percent since 1990) — looks like a drop in the bucket compared to total government spending on kindergarten-through-12th-grade education ($603 billion in 2013). That, however, misses the point, since the private funding is so concentrated in wealthy neighborhoods.
Money can’t fix everything, but it counts for a lot in an ever more unequal society. And there’s overwhelming evidence that the educational success gap between the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans and the rest has been growing for decades — unevenly since the 1940s, at an accelerated rate since the 1970s, and by 30 percent to 40 percent between 1991 and 2010. If you want graphic proof of how the income-achievement divide matters, it’s easy to find: students in schools with greater resources (including wealthy parents), for example, regularly do better on standardized tests and essentially any other metric of academic achievement.
And remember, student performance in high school increases the likelihood both of college attendance and success once there. All of this indicates the obvious: that one way to improve the economic prospects of American workers would be to ensure that the public school system provides all students with the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in a global economy that privileges people who have solid technical know-how. Channeling more funds to schools in poorer communities would, however, require sacrifices from the segments of society that our “populist” president really represents. So perhaps you won’t be surprised to discover that, though Education Secretary Betsy DeVos favors “school choice,” neither she nor her boss seems to have the slightest interest in doing anything about the growing inequalities and inequities of public education, which the rich asshole’s cherished “base” of working and lower-income people need the most. In fact, cuts in his education budget total about $10 billion and target a raft of programs that help poor and working-class families.
Missing: Worker-Friendly Policies
Missing: Worker-Friendly Policies
Once employed, workers will face challenges throughout their lives that their parents, let alone grandparents, couldn’t have imagined. No matter what some rich asshole does about trade pacts and tariffs, companies will continue to shift production overseas to stay ahead of their competitors, which means that well-paying manufacturing jobs in America will continue to disappear. They will also export some of what they make abroad back to the United States, increasing job insecurity and driving down wages. the rich asshole’s rants won’t reverse this well-established trend.
Add in one more thing: automation, robotics, self-driving vehicles, artificial intelligence and e-commerce will continue to reduce the role of human labor in the economy, even as they create new jobs with skill premiums. Those with high-end jobs (banking, the law, scientific research and medicine, among others) will, of course, continue to earn significant incomes, but workers without a college education in the service sector, which already accounts for nearly 80 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, will find it ever tougher to get higher-paying jobs with decent benefits. This in turn means they will have an even harder time saving for retirement, paying for their childrens’ educations, liquidating accumulated debts or covering the cost of medical care.
So what to do?
A progressive tax code that actually favored those in the rich asshole’s base and others like them would be one way to start to rectify the situation, but that’s a pipe dream in this era. The two versions of the rich asshole-backed tax “reform” bill now in Congress tell us everything we need to know about who will gain and who will lose in his populist America. They couldn’t be more wildly regressive.
Take corporate taxes. To skirt the present 35 percent tax on corporate income, American companies have stashed $2.6 trillion in overseas tax havens like Ireland, Luxembourg, Bermuda and the Netherlands, among other places. If the tax bill passes, corporations will be able to bring that money home and pay only 12 percent in taxes on it, a bonanza for corporate America. It’s been argued that such companies will then invest the repatriated funds here, creating new jobs, but the tax plan offers them absolutely no incentives to do so and imposes no penalties if they don’t. Oh, and that proposed corporate tax cut will be permanent.
More generally, the truly wealthy have particular reason to celebrate. By 2024, the legislation eliminates the estate tax, which only they now pay. Though it provides less than 1 percent of federal revenues, scrapping it would shrink those revenues by $269 billion over a decade. That exceeds the annual budgets of the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention combined.
There’s more: 47 percent of the gains from the proposed tax cuts will benefit the wealthiest 1 percent of taxpayers, while the prospective bill won’t touch the biggest financial burden carried by young middle- and working-class Americans: college loans. Student debt, which has ballooned by $833 billion since 2007, now totals $1.45 trillion. (The average monthly payment: $351.)
Republican tax policies further skew wealth distribution toward the richest 0.1 percent. Big tax cuts that favor this exclusive group are also likely to reduce government revenue, increasing the odds of further spending cuts to programs that benefit workers.
Take job retraining. The United States currently devotes a pitiful 0.05 percent of its gross domestic product to worker retraining, ranking 21st out of 29OECD countries for which data is available. And prospective budget cuts suggest that there will be no improvement on this front (where the president has already proposed a 40-percent cut21-percent cut planned for the Department of Labor will, for instance, slash several job training and employment assistance programs, affecting nearly 3 million people. And here’s one for your no-good-deed-goes unpunished file: the rich asshole plans to eliminate the Appalachian Regional Council (ARC), which since 1965 has provided job retraining to coal miners while reducing poverty and boosting high-school graduation rates significantly. Ninety-five percent of the counties the ARC covers voted for the rich asshole.
It’s the same story when it comes to apprenticeships, widely and successfully subsidized in countries like Germany to create a skilled working class. By contrast, the United States now spends a paltry $95 million on such programs, and while the rich asshole has called for 5 million additional apprenticeships in the next five years, a tenfold increase, he’s suggested no additional funding for such a program. Consider that the definition of not putting your money where your mouth is.
A partnership among community colleges and companies, supplemented by federal funds, could create nationwide apprenticeship programs that would benefit workers and companies. Furthermore, nearly 90 percent of those who complete apprenticeships not only land jobs but earn an average yearly salary of $50,000 — nearly 12 percent above the national median wage. Two million American manufacturing jobs will remain unfilled during the next decade for want of adequately trained workers.
Modernizing the nation’s decrepit infrastructure could create a range of new jobs (as it did in the New Deal era of the 1930s). But the federal government’s supposed role in President the rich asshole’s much-vaunted infrastructure “plan” to revamp the country’s disintegrating roads, rail lines, bridges, ports, dams, levees and inland waterways is to “get out of the way”; it will, that is, be confining its contribution to the trillion-dollar plan to $137 billion (mainly in tax credits), though experts reckon that revamping the country’s infrastructure would actually require a $4 trillion investment over a decade. Private investors will undoubtedly cherry-pick the most profitable projects and so will get a windfall from this tax subsidy. American workers, not so much. Sad!
Fake Populism
the rich asshole demands investigation of dead intern linked to ‘low ratings Joe Scarborough’ in Twitter rampage
some rich asshole (Screenshot/ABC News)
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President some rich asshole’s epic Twitter rampage continued on Wednesday when he demanded an investigation into an “unsolved mystery” surrounding MSNBC host Joe Scarborough.
“So now that(sic) Matt Lauer is gone when will the Fake News practitioners at NBC be terminating the contract of Phil Griffin?” the rich asshole asked. “And will they terminate low ratings Joe Scarborough based on the “unsolved mystery” that took place in Florida years ago? Investigate!”
The “unsolved mystery” the rich asshole is referring to revolves around Lori Klausutis, a 28-year-old intern who was found dead in Scarborough’s office in 2001 back when he was still a Florida congressman.
A medical examiner concluded that Klausutis had suffered from heart problems that caused her to faint and fatally hit her head on a desk, where she was found dead hours later. Both police and the medical examiner said they found no evidence of foul play, or that Klausutis’ death was a suicide. There has never been any evidence linking Scarborough to her death.
Scarborough subsequently responded to the rich asshole’s tweets by simply noting that the president’s mental health seems to be in a less-than-ideal state.
“Looks like I picked a good day to stop responding to the rich asshole’s bizarre tweets,” Scarborough wrote. “He is not well.”
Looks like I picked a good day to stop responding to Trump's bizarre tweets. He is not well. twitter.com/joenbc/status/…
British hate group promoted by the rich asshole busted deleting pro-Putin posts from Facebook page
the rich asshole's relationship with Moscow has stalked the first year of his presidency, with key former aides under a US investigation for alleged collaboration with the Kremlin. (SPUTNIK/AFP / Mikhail KLIMENTYEV)
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Britain First, an anti-Muslim hate group whose videos were promoted by President some rich asshole on Twitter Wednesday morning, has deleted Facebook posts in which it heaped praise on Russian President Vladimir Putin.
BuzzFeed has found that the pro-Putin messages posted by Britain First included headlines such as “GO PUTIN! Russian president’s popularity on rise in Czech Republic” and “VIDEO: Putin backs our Brexit.”
“The posts variously described Putin as a ‘no-nonsense leader’ whose party was updating laws ‘to reflect the country’s traditional values,’ noted that ‘Vladimir Putin’s popularity in the Czech Republic has surged and could now be higher than that of Angela Merkel,’ and was ‘getting tough on terror,'” BuzzFeed reports. “One post, which was shared on the site’s Facebook page two days after the EU Referendum vote, also specifically noted Putin backed ‘our Brexit’ because ‘no-one wants to feed weak economies.'”
However, it seems that those posts were deleted at some point over the last year, although it’s still not clear why.
Kremlin propagandists throughout the 2016 presidential campaign created multiple dummy Facebook and Twitter accounts with the goal of both promoting the rich asshole’s candidacy and stoking ethnic divisions within the United States. BuzzFeednotes that the UK is in the process of conducting an inquiry into how Russian bots might have influenced the 2016 vote in favor of leaving the European Union.
Even some of the rich asshole’s prominent allies are appalled that he’s now promoting neo-fascist propaganda
some rich asshole (Photo: Gage Skidmore/Wikipedia)
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In an early morning Twitterstorm, President some rich asshole retweeted a pro-fascist activist in Britain, who published videos of an alleged Muslim attacking non-Muslims.
Dutch media claimed that the culprit involved wasn’t a Muslim. Nor was he a migrant. Rather he is a 16-year old Dutch boy from town of Edam-Volendam. He was reportedly arrested on May 13, one day after the incident happened.
According to a Washington Post reporter, “one of the rich asshole’s anti-Muslim videos is from July 2013 in Egypt, following the military coup of President Morsi, which prompted protests/clashes throughout the country.”
My colleague @ahauslohner flags that one of Trump's anti-Muslim videos is from July 2013 in Egypt, following the military coup of President Morsi, which prompted protests/clashes throughout the country. hrw.org/news/2013/07/0…
New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman asked how the rich asshole found these tweets, saying she doesn’t think he did so alone.
Did he find these himself? Seems unlikely. twitter.com/wpjohnwagner/s…
“Yeah, someone might want to tell whoever is running the rich asshole’s Twitter account this morning that retweeting Britain First is not great optics,” Paul Joseph Watson, InfoWars’ editor-at-large tweeted.
He wasn’t alone. @AG_Conservative proclaimed, “No one spreads more fake news than the rich asshole.”
No one spreads more fake news than Trump. twitter.com/erikvoeten/sta…
Washington Free Beacon reporter Alex Grisold tweeted another concerning information about the woman that the rich asshole was “obsessively” retweeting this morning. The story was from, Jayda Frasen, who was convicted of religiously aggravated harassment in November 2016 after she abused a woman wearing a hijab.
The woman Trump obsessively retweeted this morning twitter.com/gideonresnick/…
Even former the rich asshole ally Piers Morgan asked “what the hell are you doing,” after the president retweeted the woman.
“What the hell are you doing retweeting a bunch of unverified videos by Britain First, a bunch of disgustingly racist far-right extremists? Please STOP this madness & undo your retweets.”
Good morning, Mr President @realDonaldTrump - what the hell are you doing retweeting a bunch of unverified videos by Britain First, a bunch of disgustingly racist far-right extremists?
Please STOP this madness & undo your retweets.
WATCH: UK Parliament members condemn the rich asshole for sharing racist hate videos on Twitter
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Members of Parliament in the United Kingdom on Wednesday condemned President some rich asshole for sharing racist hate videos sent out by a notorious UK-based anti-Muslim bigot.
Reacting to the news that the rich asshole had shared anti-Muslim videos posted on Twitter by bigoted activist Jayda Fransen, Labour MP Stephen Doughty slammed the president for showing his followers “inflammatory” videos intended to stoke ethnic hatred. Doughty’s statement condemning the rich asshole was met with several shouts of “Hear, hear!” by fellow MPs, with one MP shouting out that the rich asshole’s tweets were “disgraceful.”
After Doughty’s speech, Labour MP Yvette Cooper rose to note that Jansen had “already been convicted of hate crime in this country,” and called on the government’s home secretary or foreign secretary to formally condemn the president for his promotion of bigotry.
Watch the video below.
the rich asshole Spent The Night Retweeting A White Supremacist Convicted Criminal
While most of us were sleeping, some rich asshole spent his night retweeting a white supremacist who was convicted in the UK for harassing a Muslim woman in front of her two young children. Jayda Fransen was arrested in October during a neo-Nazi rally for violating terms of her bail. Fransen, Deputy Director of Britain First is thrilled to have been retweeted three times by the so-called president of the United States. the rich asshole even retweeted a video of a boy on crutches being murdered, just in case you haven’t had enough gore in your life.
The former reality show star’s retweets even stunned Paul Joseph Watson, Infowars editor-at-large who suggested the move was “not great optics.”
Even Infowars thinks the rich asshole went too far. Let that sink in for a moment.
Here’s a screen capture of the snuff film the rich asshole retweeted.
Fransen was super excited that the rich asshole shared her anti-Muslim videos to his 44 million followers and went all caps in her tweet.
“THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, SOME RICH ASSHOLE, HAS RETWEETED THREE OF DEPUTY LEADER JAYDA FRANSEN’S TWITTER VIDEOS!” Fransen tweeted. “SOME RICH ASSHOLE HIMSELF HAS RETWEETED THESE VIDEOS AND HAS AROUND 44 MILLION FOLLOWERS! GOD BLESS YOU RICH ASSHOLE! GOD BLESS AMERICA!”
THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, DONALD TRUMP, HAS RETWEETED THREE OF DEPUTY LEADER JAYDA FRANSEN'S TWITTER VIDEOS! DONALD TRUMP HIMSELF HAS RETWEETED THESE VIDEOS AND HAS AROUND 44 MILLION FOLLOWERS! GOD BLESS YOU TRUMP! GOD BLESS AMERICA! OCS @JaydaBF @realDonaldTrump
the rich asshole cult member Piers Morgan was shocked by the retweets, too. “Good morning, Mr President @realDonaldTrump – what the hell are you doing retweeting a bunch of unverified videos by Britain First, a bunch of disgustingly racist far-right extremists?” he tweeted. “Please STOP this madness & undo your retweets.”
Good morning, Mr President @realDonaldTrump - what the hell are you doing retweeting a bunch of unverified videos by Britain First, a bunch of disgustingly racist far-right extremists?
Please STOP this madness & undo your retweets.
The video of the man being pushed off of a rooftop was filmed in Egypt during the 2013 overthrow of president Mohamed Morsi and the man complicit of the crime was hanged after being found guilty, according to BuzzFeed News.
When British Labour Party politician Jo Cox was murdered by a far-right terrorist, he shouted, “This is for Britain”, “keep Britain independent”, and “Britain first” as he attacked her.
Cox’s husband responded to the rich asshole’s retweets, writing, “the rich asshole has legitimised the far right in his own country, now he’s trying to do it in ours. Spreading hatred has consequences & the President should be ashamed of himself.”
the rich asshole just promoted a woman who was convicted of a hateful act in Britain, much to the distress of a widowed man whose wife’s murder shocked the world. Either the rich asshole doesn’t know how to Google or he’s a hateful bigot — or both. You choose.
the rich asshole Retweets Inflammatory Islamophobic Videos
The tweets came from a British far-right leader with a history of spreading hoaxes.
President some rich asshole on Wednesday retweeted a series of overtly Islamophobic videos shared by a controversial British far-right activist, drawing swift condemnation.
The videos, posted by Britain First deputy leader Jayda Fransen, claim to show violent crimes committed by Muslims. Britain First is widely known in the U.K. for spreading Islamophobic and racist videos, including many proven to be fake.
the rich asshole’s endorsement of the videos was denounced by the British government, with Downing Street saying the president was “wrong” to retweet videos from a group that “peddles lies” and is “overwhelmingly rejected” by the British public.
Fransen’s first tweet shows a boy beating another boy on crutches. The caption says: “Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches!” Yet the video’s original caption, released with the video in May on a Dutch website, mentioned neither race nor religion. And the 16-year-old pictured in the video was in fact not a migrant but born in the Netherlands, local media reported. He and another 16-year-old who shot the video were charged for provoking the fight.
A second video appears to show a man destroying a Virgin Mary statue. An Iranian news site claims the man shown in the video belongs to the al Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra. The site says the video dates to 2013 and was taken in a church in a northwestern Syrian town.
The third video shows a group of men, including one who appears to wear the flag of the self-described Islamic State, throwing another man off a roof. France 24 shared the video in 2013, saying it appears to show a mob of angry men chasing down a teenager in Alexandria, Egypt.
Fransen reacted with delight to the rich asshole’s retweets.
THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, DONALD TRUMP, HAS RETWEETED THREE OF DEPUTY LEADER JAYDA FRANSEN'S TWITTER VIDEOS! DONALD TRUMP HIMSELF HAS RETWEETED THESE VIDEOS AND HAS AROUND 44 MILLION FOLLOWERS! GOD BLESS YOU TRUMP! GOD BLESS AMERICA! OCS @JaydaBF@realDonaldTrump
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended the rich asshole’s retweets, saying topics raised by the videos are “real threats we have to talk about.”
Asked whether the videos themselves were real, Sanders said simply that “the threats are real ― no matter how you look at it.
“His goal is to promote strong border security and strong national security,” she said of the president.
the rich asshole’s tweets appear to continue a swerve away from reality in recent days, with him questioning the legitimacy of the “Access Hollywood” tape that caught him bragging about sexual assault and reviving his debunked birther lie that former President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S.
Advocacy groups lambasted the rich asshole’s Twitter activity.
“These are actions one would expect to see on virulent anti-Muslim hate sites, not on the Twitter feed of the president of the United States,” Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a statement. “the rich asshole’s posts amount to incitement to violence against American Muslims. His actions should be condemned by all American political and religious leaders, regardless of their party or faith.”
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, warned that the rich asshole’s spreading of the videos would “embolden bigots.”
Brendan Cox, the husband of slain British parliamentarian Jo Cox, accused the rich asshole of legitimizing the far right in the U.S., and now in the U.K.
Britain First is “damn-near a terrorist organization” that resembles white supremacist groups in the U.S., Southern Poverty Law Center spokeswoman Heidi Beirich told HuffPost.
Britain First’s list of inflammatory actions includes burying a pig on the site of a proposed mosque, and advocating banning Islam in the U.K. following the November 2015 Paris terror attacks. The group describes itself as “a patriotic political party and street movement that opposes and fights the many injustices that are routinely inflicted on the British people.”
“We want our people to come first, before foreigners, asylum seekers or migrants and we are overtly proud of this stance,” the group says in its mission statement. “We want British jobs for British workers and will make sure that our workers come first.”
The group seeks to “restore Christianity as the bedrock and foundation of our national life” and “make Britain a beautiful country once again where you can leave your door unlocked and your children can play in the streets.”
Fransen was arrested earlier this month for a summer speech in Belfast. She and Paul Golding, another Britain First member, were charged in September with causing religiously aggravated harassment for posting videos online during a gang rape trial.
Early Wednesday morning, the rich asshole spammed a bunch of video retweets from Jayda Fransen, a British extremist who terrorizes Muslim communities.
(AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
some rich asshole is well known for consuming and spreading extremist content from fringe sources to his supporters on social media.
But on Wednesday morning, he outdid himself by retweeting three anti-Muslim videos from an overt fascist.
Jayda Fransen is the deputy leader of Britain First, a far-right U.K. political party which advocates a complete shutdown of immigration, and is known primarily for its heinous attacks on Muslims.
She argues British police should be allowed to shoot Muslims, and has claimed the hijab was only invented because Muslim men are unable to stop themselves from raping any woman they see. She also has ties to Jacek Miedlar, a notorious anti-Semitic priest in Poland.
One of the distinguishing features of Fransen’s party is its so-called “Christian patrols,” in which they send mobs into Muslim neighborhoods to terrorize residents. These incidents resulted in Fransen’s arrest and criminal conviction for “religiously aggravated harrassment” after she screamed insults at a woman in a hijab in front of her children.
Britain First has also been accused of inspiring the man who murdered Jo Cox, a member of Parliament, in a knife attack last year.
It is likely that the rich asshole picked up the Fransen tweets from Ann Coulter, who had retweeted them herself on Tuesday afternoon.
the rich asshole’s endorsement did not go unnoticed by Fransen, who immediately thanked him for elevating her extremist group:
THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, DONALD TRUMP, HAS RETWEETED THREE OF DEPUTY LEADER JAYDA FRANSEN'S TWITTER VIDEOS! DONALD TRUMP HIMSELF HAS RETWEETED THESE VIDEOS AND HAS AROUND 44 MILLION FOLLOWERS! GOD BLESS YOU TRUMP! GOD BLESS AMERICA! OCS @JaydaBF@realDonaldTrump
And shortly after tweeting out these three propaganda videos, the rich asshole had the gall to demand a boycott of “fake news CNN”:
Evidently, there is no person too vile or too hateful for the rich asshole to promote. His lack of any morals or personal filter is a constant humiliation to our nation’s moral standing.
The Birther’s Back: the rich asshole Reportedly Reignites Racist Lie About Obama
The former president was born in the United States, period.
President some rich asshole is reportedly reviving the racist “birther” conspiracy theory, which claims that President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States.
the rich asshole has been questioning Obama’s birth certificate in “closed-door conversations,” according to The New York Times, which cited an unnamed senator as being part of one such discussion.
The newspaper reported:
“some rich asshole’s journeys into the realm of manufactured facts have been frequent enough that his own staff has sought to nudge friendly lawmakers to ask questions of some rich asshole in meetings that will steer him toward safer terrain.”
the rich asshole was for years one of the leading voices in the birther movement, a racist conspiracy theory that questioned the legitimacy of the nation’s first black president.
He dropped the issue toward the end of the presidential campaign last year.
“President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period,” he said in September, then he blamed his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton for the conspiracy theory, a claim that has been debunked.
He never apologized to Obama for spending years questioning both his place of birth and eligibility to be president with statements such as this one:
An 'extremely credible source' has called my office and told me that @BarackObama's birth certificate is a fraud.
Obama was born in Hawaii on Aug. 4, 1961. Two Honolulu newspapers printed birth announcements at the time, and Obama has released both his “short-form” and “long-form” birth certificates.
The report comes days after the paper said the rich asshole was privately suggesting that the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape is a fake. That’s the recording released last year in which he bragged about grabbing women by the genitals.
“When you’re a star ... you can do anything ... grab them by the pussy,” the rich asshole said.
He apologized for his comments last year but also dismissed them as “locker-room talk.”
In its latest report, the Times said the rich asshole is also blaming fraud for the fact that he lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes.
the rich asshole still privately questions Obama's birth certificate: report
BY JACQUELINE THOMSEN - 11/28/17 09:10 PM EST
President the rich asshole is still privately questioning the authenticity of former President Obama’s birth certificate, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
A senator, who asked not to be named, told the newspaper that the rich asshole is having difficulty moving on from his past claims that Obama wasn’t born in the United States.
the rich asshole led the "birther" movement against Obama, claiming for years that the former president was born outside of the U.S.
Obama eventually released his birth certificate to counter the rich asshole’s claims.
the rich asshole said that Obama was born in the U.S. during a campaign stop last year.
the rich asshole advisers reportedly told The New York Times that the rich asshole has continued to talk about conspiracy theories that aren’t based in fact since taking office.
The newspaper first reported last week that the rich asshole has been questioning the authenticity of the “Access Hollywood” tape that features audio of him bragging about groping and kissing women without their consent.
the rich asshole acknowledged that it was him on the tape when it was first released last year and apologized for the comments.
Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders refused to say if the rich asshole thinks the tape is fake at a press briefing Monday.
“The president addressed this, this was litigated and certainly answered during the election by the overwhelming support for the president and the fact he's sitting here in the Oval Office today,” Sanders said Monday.
“He's made his position on that clear at that time, as have the American people in support of him.”
the rich asshole reacts to Matt Lauer firing with calls to punish NBC and Comcast for ‘fake news’
some rich asshole at the NBCUNIVERSAL 2015 Winter TCA Press Tour at The Langham Huntington Hotel (Shutterstock)
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President some rich asshole reacted to news of Matt Lauer’s firing by launching yet another attack against media organizations.
The “Today” show host was fired Tuesday for “inappropriate workplace behavior,” and the rich asshole called for the firing of executives at NBC News and their parent company Comcast for reporting he doesn’t like.
“Wow, Matt Lauer was just fired from NBC for ‘inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace,'” the president tweeted. “But when will the top executives at NBC & Comcast be fired for putting out so much Fake News. Check out Andy Lack’s past!”
Fox News has been pushing stories recently that suggest NBC News, which is led by chairman Lack and president Noah Oppenheim, passed on reports about sexual misconduct by movie producer Harvey Weinstein.
Lack has publicly sparred with the rich asshole, the former star of NBC’s “Apprentice” reality show, over his attacks on media organizations.
the rich asshole: 'We will handle' North Korea missile launch
BY JORDAN FABIAN - 11/28/17 03:54 PM EST
President the rich asshole on Tuesday expressed confidence following North Korea’s latest missile launch, saying “it’s a situation we will handle.”
"We will take care of it,” the rich asshole told reporters at the White House. “It is a situation that we will handle."
The president said he would not alter his stance on North Korea in response to the launch.
“Nothing changed. Nothing changed,” the rich asshole said, adding he is keeping “a very serious approach.”
the rich asshole's comments came after U.S. military officials confirmed that North Korea had launched a ballistic missile, its first such launch since September.
Defense Secretary James Mattis said that the intercontinental ballistic missile went "higher, frankly, than any previous shots" North Korea has taken.
Mattis said that North Korea's continued effort to develop weapons "endangers world peace, regional peace and certainly the United States."
The missile was fired at dawn local time on Wednesday from an area north of Pyongyang and flew eastward before falling into the Sea of Japan.
The Pentagon said the missile posed no threat to North America or any U.S. territories or allies and that the U.S. remains "prepared to defend ourselves and our allies from any attack or provocation."
The launch directly defies the rich asshole's repeated demands that the country curb its burgeoning nuclear program.
Updated: 4:11 p.m.
the rich asshole, next to empty chairs, tears into Dems for skipping meeting
BY JORDAN FABIAN - 11/28/17 04:06 PM EST
President the rich asshole tore into Democratic leaders on Tuesday for skipping a legislative strategy session at the White House.
the rich asshole said he is “not surprised” that Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) decided not to attend, accusing them of being “all talk” and “no action.”
“Now it’s even worse. Now it’s not even talk. Now they’re not even showing up to the meeting,” the rich asshole said.
The president spoke at the White House, flanked by two empty chairs with placards for Schumer and Pelosi.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) sat at opposite ends of a long table inside the Roosevelt Room.
Ryan said it was “very regrettable” his Democratic counterparts decided not to attend the meeting.
McConnell said he could not recall turning down an opportunity to meet with a president at the White House, though he and other GOP leaders caught flak for declining such an invitation from former President Barack Obama in 2010.
the rich asshole spoke after setting off a new round of partisan squabbling ahead of a planned meeting with congressional leaders to discuss a plan to avert a government shutdown.
The president tweeted Tuesday morning that he did not “see a deal” with Democrats on a spending bill. That caused Schumer and Pelosi to abruptly pull out of the meeting.
"Given that the president doesn’t see a deal between Democrats and the White House, we believe the best path forward is to continue negotiating with our Republican counterparts in Congress instead," the two leaders in a joint statement.
The president said he would blame Schumer and Pelosi if the government shuts down.
"If that happens, I would absolutely blame the Democrats,” he said.
The saber rattling among the rich asshole and congressional Democrats raised fears that a shutdown is becoming more likely.
The current funding bill expires on Dec. 8, leaving Congress less than two weeks to work out a deal or approve a stopgap bill to buy more time for talks.
Leaders have not even agreed to spending levels for an omnibus funding bill. Complicating matters, Democrats are demanding that a measure that would allow certain young undocumented immigrants to continue to live and work in the U.S. be included.
They want to provide a fix for people who benefitted from the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, an Obama-era initiative that the rich asshole cancelled earlier this year.
“If it happens, it's going to be over illegals pouring into the country, crime pouring into the country, no border wall, which everybody wants,” the rich asshole said of a possible shutdown.
The president has previously said he wants to help immigrants who benefit from the DACA program. “Congress now has 6 months to legalize DACA (something the Obama Administration was unable to do),” he tweeted in September. “If they can't, I will revisit this issue!”
At the same time, the rich asshole voiced optimism that the Senate would pass its tax reform plan.
"I think we’re in a very good position in terms of meeting we just had with Republican senators. I think we have tremendous support — unanimous vote on the tax bill — I think we’re going to get it passed," the rich asshole said.
The president spoke after meeting with Senate Republicans at the Capitol. Later in the afternoon, the Senate Budget Committee passed the tax plan on a party line vote, paving the way for the bill to reach the floor.
Updated: 4:47 p.m.
Pelosi: the rich asshole relegated Ryan and McConnell to props in empty-chair stunt
BY JOHN BOWDEN - 11/28/17 04:53 PM EST
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) blasted President the rich asshole on Tuesday for leaving two chairs empty for herself and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) at a legislative strategy session at the White House, accusing him of making GOP leaders into political props.
In a tweet Tuesday afternoon, the California Democrat said the president was "more interested in stunts than in addressing the needs of the American people."
".@realDonaldTrump now knows that his verbal abuse will no longer be tolerated," tweeted Pelosi. "His empty chair photo opp showed he’s more interested in stunts than in addressing the needs of the American people. Poor Ryan and McConnell relegated to props. Sad!"
.@realDonaldTrump now knows that his verbal abuse will no longer be tolerated. His empty chair photo opp showed he’s more interested in stunts than in addressing the needs of the American people. Poor Ryan and McConnell relegated to props. Sad!
Pelosi and Schumer backed out of the meeting Tuesday after the rich asshole tweeted earlier in the day that he didn't think it was likely a deal could be reached with Democrats.
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) attended the meeting, separated from the president by one empty chair each to indicate the Democrats' absence.
"Meeting with 'Chuck and Nancy' today about keeping government open and working," the rich asshole tweeted earlier Tuesday. "Problem is they want illegal immigrants flooding into our Country unchecked, are weak on Crime and want to substantially RAISE Taxes. I don’t see a deal!"
Instead, the two leaders released a joint statement indicating they would negotiate with Republicans in Congress rather than meet with the rich asshole.
"Given that the President doesn’t see a deal between Democrats and the White House, we believe the best path forward is to continue negotiating with our Republican counterparts in Congress instead," they said.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders responded to Pelosi and Schumer in a statement, accusing them of "pettiness" and "political grandstanding."
“The president’s invitation to the Democrat leaders still stands and he encourages them to put aside their pettiness, stop the political grandstanding, show up and get to work,” Sanders said in a statement. “These issues are too important.”
the rich asshole’s tweets backfire as top Dems in Congress abandon budget meeting
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) speaks to the crowd at the 2013 Iowa Democratic Party Jefferson Jackson Dinner in Des Moines, IA (Gregory Hauenstein/Flickr)
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The top two Democrats in the U.S. Congress said they would not meet with President some rich asshole on Tuesday as planned after he said he does not think he can reach a deal with them on legislation to fund the government.
“Given that the president doesn’t see a deal between Democrats and the White House, we believe the best path forward is to continue negotiating with our Republican counterparts in Congress instead,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said in a joint statement.
the rich asshole Supporters Object To Prince Harry’s Recent Engagement For Terrible Reasons (TWEETS)
Great Britain’s Buckingham Palace announced yesterday that Prince Harry, the youngest son of Diana, Princess of Wales, had gotten engaged. A royal engagement is always big news in the United Kingdom, but this one also hit home in the United States too, because Harry’s now-fiance is American actress Meghan Markle, best known for her roles as Rachel Zane in the legal drama series Suits, as well as special agent Amy Jessup in the sci-fi thriller Fringe.
The British royal family no longer holds anywhere near as much clout as it once did, now essentially relegated to mere tabloid fodder, but while many were expressing their happiness online for one of the Windsor’s most beloved members, quite a few the rich asshole supporters expressed their dissatisfaction at the prince’s choice. You see, Markle is biracial, her father being Caucasian and her mother African-American, and in the minds of many deplorables, this is a bad thing.
It’s completely irrelevant that Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh and husband of the reigning Queen Elizabeth II, is half-Greek, because that is pretty much white. However, when news broke of Prince Harry’s engagement to Markle, white supremacists from across the United States and around the globe took to Twitter, because in their twisted minds, disturbing the racial purity of the British royal family is not a good thing, despite the fact the fact it has been going on for centuries. Here is but a mere sample:
It's all smiles on TV but in private the #QUEEN is figuring out how to stop #PrinceHarry from destroying the #royalbloodline with mixed race #royalwedding #godsavethequeen $fb $twtr $goog #MAGA
Totally unsuitable as a Royal bride. Prince Harry is marrying a left wing dindu. By Royal Princess standards she’s practically a prostitute. blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/11/prince…
#PrinceHarry is the biggest CUCK in britain he is gonna marry an avarage-looking chick that rode the kok-carousel throughout her 20s WHAT A LOSER Prince Harry Royal Wedding Royal Family Kensington Palace
The bastard cuck is marrying an older half African woman #MeganMarkle #PrinceHarry #14Words We must secure img.4plebs.org/boards/pol/ima…
But when it comes to the American racists letting their opinions be known, is it the princess-to-be’s color that is the issue, or is it the fact that their idol has been snubbed from any Royal celebration that is causing the real pain? That’s right, Prince Harry has made it quite clear that President some rich asshole is not welcome at his wedding, despite the bride being a United States citizen. Barack and Michelle Obama, on the other hand, will more than likely be welcomed with open arms.
Both Harry and especially his mother, Princess Diana, are well-known for their humanitarian work and according to a close source, the prince is “not a fan” of the rich asshole. “Harry thinks the president is a serious threat to human rights,” the source continued, but there might be a lot more to it than just that.
When Princess Diana split from her husband, Prince Charles, in 1992, a palace aide claims that the rich asshole was “relentless” in his pursuit of Diana, a claim backed up by British TV journalist and friend of the princess, Selina Scott. Scott said that the rich asshole “bombarded Diana at Kensington Palace with massive bouquets of flowers,” adding that he gave Diana “the creeps,” a fact the rich asshole representatives obviously deny. Then there were these tweets from some rich asshole when Princess Kate Middleton, wife of Harry’s brother, Prince William, was illegally photographed by paparazzi sunbathing topless in her backyard in 2012:
Meghan Markle has also been a critic of the President, calling him “misogynistic” and once even threatened to leave the US if he became president, so she would most likely be fine with the rich asshole’s non-attendance at her wedding, but his supporters won’t take too kindly to him being shunned.
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