Steve Bannon’s plan to make America great again
Alexander Nazaryan
Posted with permission from Newsweek
The rally in Dothan, Alabama, opened with prayer, a furious verse from Psalm 5 hurled at enemies of the Lord: “Their heart is filled with malice. Their throat is an open grave.” These messengers of malice were also presumably the enemies of Roy Moore, the former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court then running for the U.S. Senate as a Republican. Foremost among those enemies was The Washington Post, which had published the accounts of several women accusing Moore of extremely disturbing sexual misconduct. But they also included Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who’d equivocated in his support of Moore, and Richard Shelby, the senior Alabama senator who’d taken his turn as Judas by declaring on national television that he would “absolutely not” vote for the fiery jurist.
Moore is a conservative Christian, and so were many of the supporters who attended that rally on December 11, 2017, just hours before polls opened across the state. The rally freely mixed religion and politics—several radiantly blond siblings came onstage to sing, and a boy definitely not old enough to drive held the microphone and said, “I thank the Lord that Judge Roy Moore has shown us in the past that he will stand up for our beliefs, and he will stand up for Jesus Christ.”
Steve Bannon took the stage more than an hour after the rally began. Unlike many of the other speakers, Bannon did not make a pandering allusion to the University of Alabama football program: He seems to have as much interest in sports as a tweed-clad intellectual.
Bannon also did not talk about homosexuality or abortion, the two issues Moore and his supporters are exceedingly passionate about. Instead, he cast the looming election as a battle between those who believed in the “Trump miracle” and those who want him impeached. He then rhapsodized to the almost entirely white audience about “the Hispanic and black working class,” that would benefit from the Trump administration’s stringent immigration policies.
“Economic nationalism does not care what your race is, your color, your ethnicity, your religion, your gender, your sexual preference,” he said, the last of these added after a slight hesitation. Only one thing mattered: your American citizenship. “American jobs for American workers,” he said, after mentioning the black and Hispanic working class again. The notion of work as a redemptive force is central to Bannon’s thinking, as well as to his own habits. As far as I can tell, Bannon doesn’t do much but work. Whether that fact is thrilling or terrifying depends on what you think of the work he does.
Twenty-four hours later, I sat with Bannon in a hotel room on the outskirts of Montgomery. We had both spent the evening at the RSA Activity Center downtown, where the Moore campaign had its headquarters. It was a campaign coasting on confidence. When I’d run into Moore adviser Dean Young earlier in the evening, he was certain that victory was assured. So were the hundreds gathered in the downtown Montgomery ballroom. The blond siblings sang again. The speakers who’d praised Moore as a man of God the night before did it all over again. Then the returns started to come in. Older people prayed. Stunned younger people stared at iPhones.
Moore refused to concede that night, but he’d lost, and Bannon knew it. As did his many enemies. “Suck it, Bannon,” tweeted a jubilant Meghan McCain, daughter of Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and herself a prominent conservative figure.
Bannon is reviled by many on the left, but he has just as many enemies on the right. Establishment Republicans fear his renegade populist campaign will ensure that Democrats score significant victories in the 2018 midterm elections. “He’s a cancer,” Charles Sykes, the popular, Wisconsin-based talk radio host who recently left the Republican Party, told me.
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Such calumny might wilt some, but not Bannon, who described his comportment after the Moore loss as “totally uncowed.” He’d left the White House in August and in October promised a “season of war” against what he saw as the moribund Republican Party; McConnell, whom he accuses of disloyalty to Trump; and House Speaker Paul Ryan, whom he once called a “limp-dick motherfucker.”
Bannon may not be beloved, but those he’s trying to slay are also reviled in many quarters. Congress now enjoys an approval rating of 14.7 percent, according to Real Clear Politics. In August, McConnell’s approval ratings with his Kentucky constituents were 18 percent. The more Bannon is maligned by powerful but disliked Republicans, the easier it is for him to paint himself as the truth-telling insurgent out to save the GOP.
“Steve Bannon should send Mitch McConnell a fruit basket,” jokes Andrew Surabian, who worked with Bannon in the White House and now serves as his aide-de-camp. He may similarly find himself the recipient of an Edible Arrangement from Tom Perez, the Democratic National Committee chair for helping, in the eyes of many, a Democrat win in this blood-red state. The Democratic National Committee has been vowing to implement a “50-state strategy” ever since the cataclysmic 2016 election. Have the Democrats found their perfect weapon in Steve Bannon?
Two hundred and fifty people had not come to this gorgeous neoclassical ballroom to hear homilies about tax brackets. Nor had they come for the Caesar salad wraps. They had come to hear Steve Bannon.
When Bannon was introduced by Raynard Jackson, founder of Black Americans for a Better Future, the super PAC that organized the event, phones went away; backs straightened. Jackson quoted George Bernard Shaw: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.” Then Bannon the Unreasonable took the stage.
After the applause quieted, he began to speak in his customary style: allusive, free-flowing content delivered in the precise, confident cadence of a military officer (seven years in the Navy). Instead of standing at the podium, he paced the stage, dressed in a black sports jacket and black shirt. In a rare nod to sartorial decorum, his shirt was tucked into a pair of khakis. He looked like an agitated history professor crossed with a revival-tent preacher. Bannon is a practicing Catholic, but his true religion is what he calls economic nationalism. It is the principle he believes won Trump the White House and could ensure Republican domination for the next 75 years. “He’s proven that economic nationalism works,” Bannon says of the president.
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Despite that surety, Bannon can be somewhat vague regarding what, exactly, economic nationalism entails. The clearest explanation I got came from Surabian, who says Bannon’s economic nationalism has three pillars: regulatory relief for business owners, tax cuts for middle-class families and an infrastructure program for the poor. The first two are long-standing Republican dogma, while the third borrows from the Works Progress Administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. But all three require, in Bannon’s conception, a much less generous approach to both legal and illegal immigration. This thrills some and appalls others.
Bannon’s outreach to African-Americans seems calculated, at least in part, to blunt criticisms that he is either a white nationalist or a white supremacist. While he has been called those things, as well as a racist, misogynist and anti-Semite, this is by no means a complete list of his alleged transgressions. It doesn’t help Bannon’s rep that Breitbart News frequently publishes articles that, while conventionally conservative in content, are topped with incendiary headlines referencing “lesbian bridezillas” or, in the case of neoconservative Bill Kristol, a “renegade Jew.” Several of Bannon’s former colleagues have attested to his decency in credible publications. These do not appear to have had the intended effect.
Deploying a line he would repeat days later in Dothan, Bannon explained to those black conservatives gathered at the Willard that “a central thesis” of his economic nationalism was “programs that stop the destruction of the black and Hispanic working class.” He cited the billions of dollars the United States devoted to military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, asking the audience to imagine if similarly generous amounts had been lavished on Baltimore, St. Louis and Detroit. “Have we lost a sense of our priorities?” he asked.
A woman in the audience answered loudly, somberly, as at church when some collective sin has been named: “Yes!”
Later, a member of the audience asked Bannon about the lack of minorities in senior West Wing positions. “It’s inexcusable,” he answered. “Just inexcusable. You can’t defend it.”
I saw Jackson a couple of nights later, at a party for Trump campaign alumni. He is clearly glad to have Bannon as an ally. At the same time, much of his work involves convincing people that Bannon is nothing like the image of him readily available in news reports, late-night talk show monologues and social media memes. This is a task frequently complicated by the words and deeds of Bannon.
“In the media’s mind, it’s inconceivable that a black person would agree with anything that Steve Bannon had to say,” Jackson told me later. He says that while friends and business associates are initially skeptical, hearing Bannon talk invariably dispels their concerns. They are particularly intrigued by his argument that uncoupling the United States from its foreign obligations would give African-American entrepreneurs access to capital they have historically been denied. "I believe,” Jackson says, “that Steve has the ability to pull together a coalition to blow people's minds.”
One year later, Lawrence published “Twenty-Seven Articles,” in which he offered counsel to his countrymen. “Bury yourself in Arab circles, have no interests and no ideas except the work in hand, so that your brain is saturated with one thing only.”
When I visited Bannon in early December, a biography of Lawrence was one of two books in his hotel suite. “The structure of this is really very much like the Arab Revolt,” Bannon told me of the political movement he has been trying to build since he left the White House four months ago. The more practical aspects of that revolt have included his vow to run primary candidates against every Republican in the U.S. Senate except for Ted Cruz of Texas, and fielding House candidates. A war of that scale could cost well over $100 million, perhaps testing the patience (and wallets) of conservative donors who want to see electoral victories, not intellectual ones.
Bannon expressed an admiration for how Lawrence united disparate Arab factions without forcing them to cede their identity. He believes he can play a similar role for the right wing of the Republican Party, bringing together ideological tribes in a furious fight against establishment forces led by McConnell and Ryan.
For now, he is pulling together an informal alliance of conservatives who share his populist agenda. “What we're doing is reaching out to all these grassroots groups,” Bannon told me in Montgomery, “whether it's the religious right, whether it's the Tea Party groups, whether it's the Dave Bossie groups.” (Bossie is head of the conservative activist organization Citizens United and was deputy campaign manager for Trump during the 2016 presidential race.)
He concedes that Moore wasn’t an ideal candidate. In fact, Bannon initially supported Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Huntsville, who was knocked out of the primary by McConnell-aligned super PACs that spent $10 million on the race. McConnell’s candidate (and, briefly, Trump’s) was Senator Luther Strange, whom Moore defeated in a primary runoff.
“Judge Moore has never been, really, an economics guy,” Bannon said. Put more bluntly, it is almost impossible to imagine Moore and Bannon in conversation. And given that Bannon’s conversation includes frequent and dismayingly casual references to yuan-pegged petroleum pricing and the Nullification Crisis of 1832, he may find it difficult to field candidates who are able to connect with him and, at the same time, with suburban voters in Northern Virginia.
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Bannon promises a stronger race from Arizona’s Kelli Ward, who is running for the U.S. Senate. “Immigration and trade will be at the forefront of the Arizona race,” he says. Bannon is also supporting Michael Grimm, a Republican from New York City seeking to regain his seat in the U.S. House. Grimm, who spent seven months in prison for tax evasion, is seeking to replace Daniel Donovan Jr., also a Republican. In May, Donovan was one of 20 Republicans to vote against the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. In October, Bannon endorsed his challenger, with Grimm tweeting a photograph of the two men posing at the “Breitbart Embassy,” the Capitol Hill townhouse that serves as the Breitbart newsroom. Bannon also lives there.
Grimm says Bannon reminds him of his father’s family, German and Irish immigrants who worked factory jobs in Brooklyn and saw little purpose in niceties, political or otherwise. “If President Trump is not successful, we’re gonna lose our country as we know it,” Grimm says. “Nobody understands that better than Steve Bannon.” Apparently, Ryan does not share that view. Several days after Bannon endorsed Grimm, Ryan endorsed Donovan. That puts Bannon, once again, in the position of battling his own party instead of the Democrats.
What Bannon sees as principled battle, many Republicans fear is a suicide bombing. As the Republican strategist Tim Miller explains, Bannon’s influence could lead establishment conservatives to tack right, as Ed Gillespie did, in hopes of attracting Bannon’s support. (Gillespie lost in November’s race for governor in Virginia.) Conversely, Republicans unwilling to do so, but also fearing attacks from Breitbart News for moderate positions, may choose not to run.
That’s likely why, The New York Times reports, some Republicans “ intend to kneecap” Bannon “before he has the chance to recover” from the Moore loss. Rick Wilson, the veteran Republican strategist, says the GOP needs to “beat his candidates down the moment he endorses them.”
But Bannon, who calls himself a street fighter, may welcome such attacks, as they could sharpen the contrast between him and a moneyed but unpopular Republican establishment. That will, in turn, make him seem even more the tribune of the common man.
If Richard Nixon “opened” China with his visit there in 1972, Bannon is intent on closing it. To him, China’s rise is frightening but its dominance of global affairs is not yet inevitable. He believes China’s rise to superpower status has been abetted by what he calls “the Bush/Clinton crowd,” which welcomed the nation into the World Trade Organization (Clinton) and failed to recognize it as a growing geopolitical menace (Bush).
That China poses a mortal threat to American hegemony is an unshakeable article of faith for Bannon. He told me he “absolutely” endorses the hawkish views of Peter Navarro, the Death by China author whose appointment by Trump as a White House adviser signaled that a trade war was coming. Bannon thinks the war is already here, and that Americans are as slow to recognize incipient doom as the Poles were in the summer of 1939, when the Wehrmacht gathered on Poland’s western border.
“It's one-sided. They have all the forces of state power driving this,” he says. He was alluding to China’s most ambitious plans: a $1 trillion international infrastructure plan known as One Belt One Road; the introduction of the biggest and fastest mobile telecommunications network in the world; and “Made in China 2025,” an upgrade to 10 industries, including biomedicine, information technology and clean-energy generation.
But while Bannon yearns for a confrontation with China, others worry about potentially devastating effects on the American economy, citing research that a trade war could lead to millions of lost jobs and higher prices for consumers.
Trump was a protectionist long before he met Bannon. In the 1980s, he was a frequent critic of Japan, which was then in the midst of an economic expansion. “They come over here, they sell their cars, their VCRs,” Trump complained to talk show host Oprah Winfrey in 1988. “They knock the hell out of our companies.” In 2015, he launched his presidential campaign with a similar broadside against Japan, though this time without mention of VCRs. He described a national landscape resembling The Grapes of Wrath: “They can’t get jobs, because there are no jobs, because China has our jobs and Mexico has our jobs.”
Trump’s campaign manager in the early days, when his bid for the Republican nomination seemed either a joke or a publicity bid, was Corey Lewandowski, who channeled Trump’s pugnacity and bluster. Next came Paul Manafort, who piloted the campaign to Cleveland for the Republican National Convention. But by late summer, Lewandowski says, his “primary juggernaut” had been perverted by Manafort into a “general election failure.” In his refreshingly punchy new book about the campaign, Let Trump Be Trump, co-authored by Bossie, Lewandowski has a newly hired Bannon watching, aghast, as Manafort gives a television interview from the Hamptons, dressed in boating attire. Manafort was gone within days.
The man who replaced him was little known to the kinds of people who make it their business to know everyone in Washington. He’d worked for Goldman Sachs, made some conservative documentaries in Hollywood and collected millions from having purchased a share of the Seinfeld television series back catalog. Now he was running Breitbart News, a potent force on the right still obscure to readers of The New York Times. A profile in Bloomberg Businessweek showed Bannon in shorts and untucked dress shirt, looking like a mildly disgruntled couch potato.
Bannon’s elevation to campaign manager seemed to signal desperation, a reaction he recalls now with delight. “As soon as I took over, they said, ‘Oh my God, Trump's going to lose by 25 points now, they brought in the mad bomber, just to destroy his enemies on the way down.’” He does not harp on the victory over Clinton quite as much as Trump does, but he has mentioned it in every speech I’ve heard him give: in California, Alabama, Washington. For him, it is a lesson that the moribund establishment can be defeated. And must be defeated.
Campaign alumni frequently follow their victorious candidate to the White House, but not since Karl Rove arrived at the West Wing with George W. Bush has an appointment been met with so much alarm—Bannon’s new position would be chief political strategist, a press release several days after the election said. “Bannon will be the most powerful person in Trump’s White House,” wrote Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker .
So why didn’t Bannon use that power to advocate more forcefully for his populist views? Miller, who ran communications for the Jeb Bush campaign and is now one of Trump’s most vociferous Republican critics, believes those ideas were never more than an ideological Potemkin village for “cultural and racial grievance.” He says Bannon’s genius was in spotting the first shoots of that grievance in the wild ecosystem of right-wing internet news outlets.
Although Bannon reportedly sought a top tax rate “with a 4 in front of it,” the notion of a tax increase was dismissed as whimsy, “a dead cat bounce,” in the words of free-market activist Grover Norquist. Infrastructure Week, which the White House could have used to make the case for a Works Progress Administration–style plan, ended with a proposal to privatize air-traffic control. Nor did Bannon push for the kinds of smaller-scale solutions that both Republicans and Democrats could have supported: faster internet in rural communities, free community college, effective job-retraining programs, expansion of opioid-treatment programs. These would not have been revolutionary, but they would have likely been effective.
Bannon left the White House in mid-August, after clashing with national security adviser H.R. McMaster, chief economic adviser Gary Cohn and the president’s influential daughter, Ivanka Trump. (Again, by no means a complete list.) At the time, he looked miserable, exhausted.
“I'm so happy since I've been out of the White House,” he says now. “I'm just not built to be a staffer, right? In the White House, I had a lot of influence, but at the end of the day, you're a staffer. It's just a different thing. It's very hierarchical, you've got your lanes you gotta stay in. It's not the way I roll.”
Bannon continues to regularly talk with the president. But while he said that he spoke to Trump for more than 30 minutes on the day of the Alabama special election, someone with access to the White House call logs said the call was only nine minutes long.
That discrepancy may be telling. A senior White House official, who could speak only on the condition that her name not be used, told me that the relationship between Trump and Bannon has “soured,” even as media reports continue to paint Bannon as a Rasputin figure singularly capable of influencing the president. She dismissed any notion that Bannon would be advising the president on strategy for the 2018 elections. “We have no desire to engage with him in any way in ’18 on campaigns or other topics,” the official told Newsweek .
The White House official adds that Bannon’s influence on China policy has been exaggerated: “People want to credit Steve for some of the language and the rhetoric, but these are things the president has been talking about for years.”
As far as Bannon is concerned, no amount of palace intrigue can eclipse Trump’s work on the economy. Asked if Trump were an economic nationalist, he says, “Look at his policies.” He attributes Trump’s success to the protectionism that animates them both, listing the executive orders that, he believes, are going to be accelerants to the American economy, the manufacturing sector in particular: “the 301 on intellectual property, the 201 on aluminum, the 232 on steel.”
While he admits that the tax bill congressional Republicans just passed is flawed, he won’t denounce it as a giveaway to corporations and billionaires, having apparently adopted the widespread conviction of congressional Republicans that getting anything passed—no matter how unpopular—is better than passing nothing.
“President Trump should be eligible for the Nobel Prize in economics,” Bannon says. “He's proven that economic nationalism works. He’s getting the animal spirits flowing in America.”
“I’ve followed your writing for years,” Bannon told him. This stunned Kuttner, who edits The American Prospect, a progressive magazine consistently critical of Trump and the Republican Party. Nevertheless, Bannon recognized that Kuttner, like other progressives, shared his antipathy to free trade and militarism. Their many differences, especially on social issues, he appeared to ignore.
“We’re at economic war with China,” Bannon told Kuttner, in an interview that was astonishing for its incautious honesty. He promised to install China hawks at the State Department while admitting that there was “no military solution” to the standoff with an increasingly bellicose North Korea. Asked about the white nationalists who were purportedly his allies, and whom Trump had praised as “very fine people,” Bannon dismissed them as “a collection of clowns.”
Bannon was gone from the White House within two days. Even if he was already on his way out, the Kuttner interview was a middle finger thrust high into the air. It was also an intriguing reminder that there’s some overlap between the far left and the far right, at least on economic views. The political extremes bend toward each other in their antipathy to the free-market capitalism of the flattened, digitized world. Twelve percent of people who voted for Vermont’s Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, voted for Trump in the general election.
I spoke to a Democratic congressional staffer on Capitol Hill who was invited to the Breitbart Embassy because Bannon had learned of his work and was intrigued by the possibility of cooperation. The staffer, who asked that his name not be used, said he was “shocked” by Bannon’s “interest and level of respect.” They talked about populism and war. “His willingness to engage was striking. It was a surreal experience.”
"It’s obvious he could not last in the Trump administration, in part due to his opposition to wars of choice, hypermilitarism and endless U.S. occupations, and also some domestic policies where he sides more with liberal Democrats than with Republicans, including full employment, wage growth, fair trade, antitrust enforcement and serious spending on infrastructure," says the Democratic staffer, who fears being “crucified” by fellow liberals on the Hill for merely meeting with Bannon.
Bannon’s understanding that class discontent would eclipse party affiliation in the 2016 election was prescient, and even his harshest critics concede that. Steve Schmidt, a top adviser on John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, credits Bannon with seeing the shift to populism before many others did. But he calls Bannon’s economic nationalism movement “an absurdity” that will ruin the Republican Party unless McConnell and Ryan beat him down before the 2018 midterms. “The revolution he speaks of is a freak show,” Schmidt says of Bannon’s movement. “The only thing missing is someone in a Chewbacca costume next to him on a stage.”
Kuttner, too, is skeptical that Bannon can win converts from the left. “Hitler had a terrific interstate highway system,” he says. “Hitler also had a terrific welfare state. But that doesn’t mean progressives have anything in common with Hitler.” He says this not to compare Bannon to Hitler but to caution that “incidental overlap” shouldn’t be exaggerated into a bigger political confluence. Kuttner notes, like many others I spoke to, that Bannon has thus far failed to field a candidate who embraces his eclectic set of ideas. “Unless he’s planning to run for office himself, he’s mostly blowing smoke,” Kuttner says.
Bannon is planning no such run. And yet he continues to flirt with ideas that could be more attractive to the center-left than the far right. He believes, for example, that Silicon Valley has become too powerful. “Google and Facebook ought to be public utilities. I think they're too big for control. And I think that data ought to be held in trust. These ought to be regulated like utilities. Like the gas works.”
It’s an intriguing idea, one that has been wafting through liberal outlets for some time. Of course, nothing will make that idea toxic to liberals quite like an endorsement by Bannon. Democrats can only hope he doesn’t start preaching about a $15 an hour minimum wage.
One cold night in December, Bannon threw a party for Lewandowski and Bossie, who’d just published Let Trump Be Trump, their brisk account of Trump’s march to Washington. The party was held at a steakhouse across from the Fox News headquarters in midtown Manhattan. The place slowly filled with conservative luminaries, like Ann Coulter, who brushed off someone who wanted to snap her picture, and Sean Hannity, wearing a green field coat that made him look like a suburban dad. Loud and happy, Lewandowski bounded between guests. Cindy Adams, the gossip columnist, wore a white coat. An olive-oil importer told me about the proto-Trumpian culture warrior Patrick Buchanan and his collection of antique guns. I recall bacon, ample and delicious.
Bannon came near the end of the affair. When he did, the already crowded room imploded around him, as if a new gravitational field had formed. He was the star among stars. Bannon knew this, accentuating his import by dressing down for the occasion, wearing a barn coat and cargo pants, which both looked comfortable and entirely inappropriate in this room of tailored suits. True power is dressing exactly as you damn well please.
Bannon is unique among those who have left the Trump administration in that he has not attempted to trade on his association with the president for personal profit. Plenty of others have, even if their association was a lot more tenuous. Having vowed to continue fighting for Trump when he left the White House, Bannon has done just that. Losing a skirmish in Alabama is unlikely to temper his zeal. Bigger battles loom. “One of the things he does, that most of us in Washington don’t do, is he thinks in terms of history,” says Keith Koffler, the White House Dossier author who recently published an authorized biography of Bannon, Bannon: Always the Rebel. “It will be very little of a deterrent to him at all, what happened in Alabama.”
Several days after Moore’s loss, pundits and columnists were still arguing whether Bannon was to blame, what the election meant for Democrats, what it meant for Republicans, what it meant for Americans and whether it would save democracy.
Bannon, meanwhile, went to Tokyo. There, he gave an address to a conservative group, praising Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for being “Trump before Trump” by reviving Japan’s long-dormant nationalist impulses. “Japan has every opportunity to seize its destiny,” he said. But only if it stands with the United States against China.
Back home, Trump released a national security strategy that branded China a growing threat. “China expanded its power at the expense of the sovereignty of others,” the document says. “Its nuclear arsenal is growing and diversifying. Part of China’s military modernization and economic expansion is due to its access to the U.S. innovation economy, including America’s world-class universities.” If this wasn’t written by Bannon, it was inflected with his ideas.
But almost as if to underscore how much Bannon’s influence has diminished, the White House shortly thereafter appointed Susan Thornton its top East Asia diplomat. This was seen as another defeat for Bannon, who’d bragged to Kuttner that he’d have her expelled from the State Department.
So now it is winter, and Bannon is in the wilderness, tromping through the snow, preparing for numberless battles to come. He hears the crackling reports of incoming fire but doesn’t bother to duck. “I think it's one of my superpowers that I don't care what people say. I really don't.” For him, this is only the beginning of his movement, not the end: the first inning, not the ninth, as he put it to me in Montgomery, with stars falling over Alabama, Roy Moore demanding a recount, and reporters pecking away at their laptops, writing obituaries for Bannon and his revolution.
“We’re fighting on tonight,” Bannon said as aides came into his hotel room with gravid, greasy bags of Arby’s. “We’ll get up and fight tomorrow morning.”
Moore is a conservative Christian, and so were many of the supporters who attended that rally on December 11, 2017, just hours before polls opened across the state. The rally freely mixed religion and politics—several radiantly blond siblings came onstage to sing, and a boy definitely not old enough to drive held the microphone and said, “I thank the Lord that Judge Roy Moore has shown us in the past that he will stand up for our beliefs, and he will stand up for Jesus Christ.”
Steve Bannon took the stage more than an hour after the rally began. Unlike many of the other speakers, Bannon did not make a pandering allusion to the University of Alabama football program: He seems to have as much interest in sports as a tweed-clad intellectual.
Bannon also did not talk about homosexuality or abortion, the two issues Moore and his supporters are exceedingly passionate about. Instead, he cast the looming election as a battle between those who believed in the “Trump miracle” and those who want him impeached. He then rhapsodized to the almost entirely white audience about “the Hispanic and black working class,” that would benefit from the Trump administration’s stringent immigration policies.
“Economic nationalism does not care what your race is, your color, your ethnicity, your religion, your gender, your sexual preference,” he said, the last of these added after a slight hesitation. Only one thing mattered: your American citizenship. “American jobs for American workers,” he said, after mentioning the black and Hispanic working class again. The notion of work as a redemptive force is central to Bannon’s thinking, as well as to his own habits. As far as I can tell, Bannon doesn’t do much but work. Whether that fact is thrilling or terrifying depends on what you think of the work he does.
Twenty-four hours later, I sat with Bannon in a hotel room on the outskirts of Montgomery. We had both spent the evening at the RSA Activity Center downtown, where the Moore campaign had its headquarters. It was a campaign coasting on confidence. When I’d run into Moore adviser Dean Young earlier in the evening, he was certain that victory was assured. So were the hundreds gathered in the downtown Montgomery ballroom. The blond siblings sang again. The speakers who’d praised Moore as a man of God the night before did it all over again. Then the returns started to come in. Older people prayed. Stunned younger people stared at iPhones.
Moore refused to concede that night, but he’d lost, and Bannon knew it. As did his many enemies. “Suck it, Bannon,” tweeted a jubilant Meghan McCain, daughter of Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and herself a prominent conservative figure.
Bannon is reviled by many on the left, but he has just as many enemies on the right. Establishment Republicans fear his renegade populist campaign will ensure that Democrats score significant victories in the 2018 midterm elections. “He’s a cancer,” Charles Sykes, the popular, Wisconsin-based talk radio host who recently left the Republican Party, told me.
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Such calumny might wilt some, but not Bannon, who described his comportment after the Moore loss as “totally uncowed.” He’d left the White House in August and in October promised a “season of war” against what he saw as the moribund Republican Party; McConnell, whom he accuses of disloyalty to Trump; and House Speaker Paul Ryan, whom he once called a “limp-dick motherfucker.”
Bannon may not be beloved, but those he’s trying to slay are also reviled in many quarters. Congress now enjoys an approval rating of 14.7 percent, according to Real Clear Politics. In August, McConnell’s approval ratings with his Kentucky constituents were 18 percent. The more Bannon is maligned by powerful but disliked Republicans, the easier it is for him to paint himself as the truth-telling insurgent out to save the GOP.
“Steve Bannon should send Mitch McConnell a fruit basket,” jokes Andrew Surabian, who worked with Bannon in the White House and now serves as his aide-de-camp. He may similarly find himself the recipient of an Edible Arrangement from Tom Perez, the Democratic National Committee chair for helping, in the eyes of many, a Democrat win in this blood-red state. The Democratic National Committee has been vowing to implement a “50-state strategy” ever since the cataclysmic 2016 election. Have the Democrats found their perfect weapon in Steve Bannon?
In Praise of the Unreasonable
First to speak at the luncheon for black conservatives at the Willard InterContinental Hotel in Washington, D.C., was Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin. Deploying his Midwestern monotone to lethal effect, Johnson talked at length about S corporations and pass-through entities. When it came time for questions, a woman who called herself a “red-blooded black American” pleaded with Johnson to help the African-American community. He listened respectfully, mentioned some social program he was fond of, then talked about pass-through entities again.Two hundred and fifty people had not come to this gorgeous neoclassical ballroom to hear homilies about tax brackets. Nor had they come for the Caesar salad wraps. They had come to hear Steve Bannon.
When Bannon was introduced by Raynard Jackson, founder of Black Americans for a Better Future, the super PAC that organized the event, phones went away; backs straightened. Jackson quoted George Bernard Shaw: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.” Then Bannon the Unreasonable took the stage.
After the applause quieted, he began to speak in his customary style: allusive, free-flowing content delivered in the precise, confident cadence of a military officer (seven years in the Navy). Instead of standing at the podium, he paced the stage, dressed in a black sports jacket and black shirt. In a rare nod to sartorial decorum, his shirt was tucked into a pair of khakis. He looked like an agitated history professor crossed with a revival-tent preacher. Bannon is a practicing Catholic, but his true religion is what he calls economic nationalism. It is the principle he believes won Trump the White House and could ensure Republican domination for the next 75 years. “He’s proven that economic nationalism works,” Bannon says of the president.
RELATED: Republicans think Steve Bannon is a huge loser
Despite that surety, Bannon can be somewhat vague regarding what, exactly, economic nationalism entails. The clearest explanation I got came from Surabian, who says Bannon’s economic nationalism has three pillars: regulatory relief for business owners, tax cuts for middle-class families and an infrastructure program for the poor. The first two are long-standing Republican dogma, while the third borrows from the Works Progress Administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. But all three require, in Bannon’s conception, a much less generous approach to both legal and illegal immigration. This thrills some and appalls others.
Bannon’s outreach to African-Americans seems calculated, at least in part, to blunt criticisms that he is either a white nationalist or a white supremacist. While he has been called those things, as well as a racist, misogynist and anti-Semite, this is by no means a complete list of his alleged transgressions. It doesn’t help Bannon’s rep that Breitbart News frequently publishes articles that, while conventionally conservative in content, are topped with incendiary headlines referencing “lesbian bridezillas” or, in the case of neoconservative Bill Kristol, a “renegade Jew.” Several of Bannon’s former colleagues have attested to his decency in credible publications. These do not appear to have had the intended effect.
Deploying a line he would repeat days later in Dothan, Bannon explained to those black conservatives gathered at the Willard that “a central thesis” of his economic nationalism was “programs that stop the destruction of the black and Hispanic working class.” He cited the billions of dollars the United States devoted to military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, asking the audience to imagine if similarly generous amounts had been lavished on Baltimore, St. Louis and Detroit. “Have we lost a sense of our priorities?” he asked.
A woman in the audience answered loudly, somberly, as at church when some collective sin has been named: “Yes!”
Later, a member of the audience asked Bannon about the lack of minorities in senior West Wing positions. “It’s inexcusable,” he answered. “Just inexcusable. You can’t defend it.”
I saw Jackson a couple of nights later, at a party for Trump campaign alumni. He is clearly glad to have Bannon as an ally. At the same time, much of his work involves convincing people that Bannon is nothing like the image of him readily available in news reports, late-night talk show monologues and social media memes. This is a task frequently complicated by the words and deeds of Bannon.
“In the media’s mind, it’s inconceivable that a black person would agree with anything that Steve Bannon had to say,” Jackson told me later. He says that while friends and business associates are initially skeptical, hearing Bannon talk invariably dispels their concerns. They are particularly intrigued by his argument that uncoupling the United States from its foreign obligations would give African-American entrepreneurs access to capital they have historically been denied. "I believe,” Jackson says, “that Steve has the ability to pull together a coalition to blow people's minds.”
Stephen of Arabia
In 1916, the British intelligence officer T.E. Lawrence arrived on the Arabian peninsula to organize the region’s Arab natives in a revolt against the ruling Turks of the Ottoman Empire, who’d been there since the 16th century. Lawrence quickly gained renown for his grasp of what would make the Arab Revolt successful.One year later, Lawrence published “Twenty-Seven Articles,” in which he offered counsel to his countrymen. “Bury yourself in Arab circles, have no interests and no ideas except the work in hand, so that your brain is saturated with one thing only.”
When I visited Bannon in early December, a biography of Lawrence was one of two books in his hotel suite. “The structure of this is really very much like the Arab Revolt,” Bannon told me of the political movement he has been trying to build since he left the White House four months ago. The more practical aspects of that revolt have included his vow to run primary candidates against every Republican in the U.S. Senate except for Ted Cruz of Texas, and fielding House candidates. A war of that scale could cost well over $100 million, perhaps testing the patience (and wallets) of conservative donors who want to see electoral victories, not intellectual ones.
Bannon expressed an admiration for how Lawrence united disparate Arab factions without forcing them to cede their identity. He believes he can play a similar role for the right wing of the Republican Party, bringing together ideological tribes in a furious fight against establishment forces led by McConnell and Ryan.
For now, he is pulling together an informal alliance of conservatives who share his populist agenda. “What we're doing is reaching out to all these grassroots groups,” Bannon told me in Montgomery, “whether it's the religious right, whether it's the Tea Party groups, whether it's the Dave Bossie groups.” (Bossie is head of the conservative activist organization Citizens United and was deputy campaign manager for Trump during the 2016 presidential race.)
He concedes that Moore wasn’t an ideal candidate. In fact, Bannon initially supported Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Huntsville, who was knocked out of the primary by McConnell-aligned super PACs that spent $10 million on the race. McConnell’s candidate (and, briefly, Trump’s) was Senator Luther Strange, whom Moore defeated in a primary runoff.
“Judge Moore has never been, really, an economics guy,” Bannon said. Put more bluntly, it is almost impossible to imagine Moore and Bannon in conversation. And given that Bannon’s conversation includes frequent and dismayingly casual references to yuan-pegged petroleum pricing and the Nullification Crisis of 1832, he may find it difficult to field candidates who are able to connect with him and, at the same time, with suburban voters in Northern Virginia.
Related: Steve Bannon is not running for president, associates say
Bannon promises a stronger race from Arizona’s Kelli Ward, who is running for the U.S. Senate. “Immigration and trade will be at the forefront of the Arizona race,” he says. Bannon is also supporting Michael Grimm, a Republican from New York City seeking to regain his seat in the U.S. House. Grimm, who spent seven months in prison for tax evasion, is seeking to replace Daniel Donovan Jr., also a Republican. In May, Donovan was one of 20 Republicans to vote against the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. In October, Bannon endorsed his challenger, with Grimm tweeting a photograph of the two men posing at the “Breitbart Embassy,” the Capitol Hill townhouse that serves as the Breitbart newsroom. Bannon also lives there.
Grimm says Bannon reminds him of his father’s family, German and Irish immigrants who worked factory jobs in Brooklyn and saw little purpose in niceties, political or otherwise. “If President Trump is not successful, we’re gonna lose our country as we know it,” Grimm says. “Nobody understands that better than Steve Bannon.” Apparently, Ryan does not share that view. Several days after Bannon endorsed Grimm, Ryan endorsed Donovan. That puts Bannon, once again, in the position of battling his own party instead of the Democrats.
What Bannon sees as principled battle, many Republicans fear is a suicide bombing. As the Republican strategist Tim Miller explains, Bannon’s influence could lead establishment conservatives to tack right, as Ed Gillespie did, in hopes of attracting Bannon’s support. (Gillespie lost in November’s race for governor in Virginia.) Conversely, Republicans unwilling to do so, but also fearing attacks from Breitbart News for moderate positions, may choose not to run.
That’s likely why, The New York Times reports, some Republicans “ intend to kneecap” Bannon “before he has the chance to recover” from the Moore loss. Rick Wilson, the veteran Republican strategist, says the GOP needs to “beat his candidates down the moment he endorses them.”
But Bannon, who calls himself a street fighter, may welcome such attacks, as they could sharpen the contrast between him and a moneyed but unpopular Republican establishment. That will, in turn, make him seem even more the tribune of the common man.
Bannon Agonistes
The second book in Bannon’s hotel room was a bound printout of a congressional report on China. “I’m going back and getting every government document I can put my hands on on China,” he said, brandishing the thick volume. “That’s my light reading.”If Richard Nixon “opened” China with his visit there in 1972, Bannon is intent on closing it. To him, China’s rise is frightening but its dominance of global affairs is not yet inevitable. He believes China’s rise to superpower status has been abetted by what he calls “the Bush/Clinton crowd,” which welcomed the nation into the World Trade Organization (Clinton) and failed to recognize it as a growing geopolitical menace (Bush).
That China poses a mortal threat to American hegemony is an unshakeable article of faith for Bannon. He told me he “absolutely” endorses the hawkish views of Peter Navarro, the Death by China author whose appointment by Trump as a White House adviser signaled that a trade war was coming. Bannon thinks the war is already here, and that Americans are as slow to recognize incipient doom as the Poles were in the summer of 1939, when the Wehrmacht gathered on Poland’s western border.
“It's one-sided. They have all the forces of state power driving this,” he says. He was alluding to China’s most ambitious plans: a $1 trillion international infrastructure plan known as One Belt One Road; the introduction of the biggest and fastest mobile telecommunications network in the world; and “Made in China 2025,” an upgrade to 10 industries, including biomedicine, information technology and clean-energy generation.
But while Bannon yearns for a confrontation with China, others worry about potentially devastating effects on the American economy, citing research that a trade war could lead to millions of lost jobs and higher prices for consumers.
Trump was a protectionist long before he met Bannon. In the 1980s, he was a frequent critic of Japan, which was then in the midst of an economic expansion. “They come over here, they sell their cars, their VCRs,” Trump complained to talk show host Oprah Winfrey in 1988. “They knock the hell out of our companies.” In 2015, he launched his presidential campaign with a similar broadside against Japan, though this time without mention of VCRs. He described a national landscape resembling The Grapes of Wrath: “They can’t get jobs, because there are no jobs, because China has our jobs and Mexico has our jobs.”
Trump’s campaign manager in the early days, when his bid for the Republican nomination seemed either a joke or a publicity bid, was Corey Lewandowski, who channeled Trump’s pugnacity and bluster. Next came Paul Manafort, who piloted the campaign to Cleveland for the Republican National Convention. But by late summer, Lewandowski says, his “primary juggernaut” had been perverted by Manafort into a “general election failure.” In his refreshingly punchy new book about the campaign, Let Trump Be Trump, co-authored by Bossie, Lewandowski has a newly hired Bannon watching, aghast, as Manafort gives a television interview from the Hamptons, dressed in boating attire. Manafort was gone within days.
The man who replaced him was little known to the kinds of people who make it their business to know everyone in Washington. He’d worked for Goldman Sachs, made some conservative documentaries in Hollywood and collected millions from having purchased a share of the Seinfeld television series back catalog. Now he was running Breitbart News, a potent force on the right still obscure to readers of The New York Times. A profile in Bloomberg Businessweek showed Bannon in shorts and untucked dress shirt, looking like a mildly disgruntled couch potato.
Bannon’s elevation to campaign manager seemed to signal desperation, a reaction he recalls now with delight. “As soon as I took over, they said, ‘Oh my God, Trump's going to lose by 25 points now, they brought in the mad bomber, just to destroy his enemies on the way down.’” He does not harp on the victory over Clinton quite as much as Trump does, but he has mentioned it in every speech I’ve heard him give: in California, Alabama, Washington. For him, it is a lesson that the moribund establishment can be defeated. And must be defeated.
Campaign alumni frequently follow their victorious candidate to the White House, but not since Karl Rove arrived at the West Wing with George W. Bush has an appointment been met with so much alarm—Bannon’s new position would be chief political strategist, a press release several days after the election said. “Bannon will be the most powerful person in Trump’s White House,” wrote Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker .
So why didn’t Bannon use that power to advocate more forcefully for his populist views? Miller, who ran communications for the Jeb Bush campaign and is now one of Trump’s most vociferous Republican critics, believes those ideas were never more than an ideological Potemkin village for “cultural and racial grievance.” He says Bannon’s genius was in spotting the first shoots of that grievance in the wild ecosystem of right-wing internet news outlets.
Although Bannon reportedly sought a top tax rate “with a 4 in front of it,” the notion of a tax increase was dismissed as whimsy, “a dead cat bounce,” in the words of free-market activist Grover Norquist. Infrastructure Week, which the White House could have used to make the case for a Works Progress Administration–style plan, ended with a proposal to privatize air-traffic control. Nor did Bannon push for the kinds of smaller-scale solutions that both Republicans and Democrats could have supported: faster internet in rural communities, free community college, effective job-retraining programs, expansion of opioid-treatment programs. These would not have been revolutionary, but they would have likely been effective.
Bannon left the White House in mid-August, after clashing with national security adviser H.R. McMaster, chief economic adviser Gary Cohn and the president’s influential daughter, Ivanka Trump. (Again, by no means a complete list.) At the time, he looked miserable, exhausted.
“I'm so happy since I've been out of the White House,” he says now. “I'm just not built to be a staffer, right? In the White House, I had a lot of influence, but at the end of the day, you're a staffer. It's just a different thing. It's very hierarchical, you've got your lanes you gotta stay in. It's not the way I roll.”
Bannon continues to regularly talk with the president. But while he said that he spoke to Trump for more than 30 minutes on the day of the Alabama special election, someone with access to the White House call logs said the call was only nine minutes long.
That discrepancy may be telling. A senior White House official, who could speak only on the condition that her name not be used, told me that the relationship between Trump and Bannon has “soured,” even as media reports continue to paint Bannon as a Rasputin figure singularly capable of influencing the president. She dismissed any notion that Bannon would be advising the president on strategy for the 2018 elections. “We have no desire to engage with him in any way in ’18 on campaigns or other topics,” the official told Newsweek .
The White House official adds that Bannon’s influence on China policy has been exaggerated: “People want to credit Steve for some of the language and the rhetoric, but these are things the president has been talking about for years.”
As far as Bannon is concerned, no amount of palace intrigue can eclipse Trump’s work on the economy. Asked if Trump were an economic nationalist, he says, “Look at his policies.” He attributes Trump’s success to the protectionism that animates them both, listing the executive orders that, he believes, are going to be accelerants to the American economy, the manufacturing sector in particular: “the 301 on intellectual property, the 201 on aluminum, the 232 on steel.”
While he admits that the tax bill congressional Republicans just passed is flawed, he won’t denounce it as a giveaway to corporations and billionaires, having apparently adopted the widespread conviction of congressional Republicans that getting anything passed—no matter how unpopular—is better than passing nothing.
“President Trump should be eligible for the Nobel Prize in economics,” Bannon says. “He's proven that economic nationalism works. He’s getting the animal spirits flowing in America.”
The Right-Wing Liberal
Robert Kuttner was vacationing in Tanglewood, the bucolic classical music retreat in Lenox, Massachusetts, when he got an email from Bannon’s assistant, inviting him to meet at the White House, where Bannon was then employed. Unable to travel to Washington, Kuttner agreed to a phone call. “Bannon promptly called,” Kuttner wrote in an account of their exchange.“I’ve followed your writing for years,” Bannon told him. This stunned Kuttner, who edits The American Prospect, a progressive magazine consistently critical of Trump and the Republican Party. Nevertheless, Bannon recognized that Kuttner, like other progressives, shared his antipathy to free trade and militarism. Their many differences, especially on social issues, he appeared to ignore.
“We’re at economic war with China,” Bannon told Kuttner, in an interview that was astonishing for its incautious honesty. He promised to install China hawks at the State Department while admitting that there was “no military solution” to the standoff with an increasingly bellicose North Korea. Asked about the white nationalists who were purportedly his allies, and whom Trump had praised as “very fine people,” Bannon dismissed them as “a collection of clowns.”
Bannon was gone from the White House within two days. Even if he was already on his way out, the Kuttner interview was a middle finger thrust high into the air. It was also an intriguing reminder that there’s some overlap between the far left and the far right, at least on economic views. The political extremes bend toward each other in their antipathy to the free-market capitalism of the flattened, digitized world. Twelve percent of people who voted for Vermont’s Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, voted for Trump in the general election.
I spoke to a Democratic congressional staffer on Capitol Hill who was invited to the Breitbart Embassy because Bannon had learned of his work and was intrigued by the possibility of cooperation. The staffer, who asked that his name not be used, said he was “shocked” by Bannon’s “interest and level of respect.” They talked about populism and war. “His willingness to engage was striking. It was a surreal experience.”
"It’s obvious he could not last in the Trump administration, in part due to his opposition to wars of choice, hypermilitarism and endless U.S. occupations, and also some domestic policies where he sides more with liberal Democrats than with Republicans, including full employment, wage growth, fair trade, antitrust enforcement and serious spending on infrastructure," says the Democratic staffer, who fears being “crucified” by fellow liberals on the Hill for merely meeting with Bannon.
Bannon’s understanding that class discontent would eclipse party affiliation in the 2016 election was prescient, and even his harshest critics concede that. Steve Schmidt, a top adviser on John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, credits Bannon with seeing the shift to populism before many others did. But he calls Bannon’s economic nationalism movement “an absurdity” that will ruin the Republican Party unless McConnell and Ryan beat him down before the 2018 midterms. “The revolution he speaks of is a freak show,” Schmidt says of Bannon’s movement. “The only thing missing is someone in a Chewbacca costume next to him on a stage.”
Kuttner, too, is skeptical that Bannon can win converts from the left. “Hitler had a terrific interstate highway system,” he says. “Hitler also had a terrific welfare state. But that doesn’t mean progressives have anything in common with Hitler.” He says this not to compare Bannon to Hitler but to caution that “incidental overlap” shouldn’t be exaggerated into a bigger political confluence. Kuttner notes, like many others I spoke to, that Bannon has thus far failed to field a candidate who embraces his eclectic set of ideas. “Unless he’s planning to run for office himself, he’s mostly blowing smoke,” Kuttner says.
Bannon is planning no such run. And yet he continues to flirt with ideas that could be more attractive to the center-left than the far right. He believes, for example, that Silicon Valley has become too powerful. “Google and Facebook ought to be public utilities. I think they're too big for control. And I think that data ought to be held in trust. These ought to be regulated like utilities. Like the gas works.”
It’s an intriguing idea, one that has been wafting through liberal outlets for some time. Of course, nothing will make that idea toxic to liberals quite like an endorsement by Bannon. Democrats can only hope he doesn’t start preaching about a $15 an hour minimum wage.
The Fighter Still Remains
Political campaigns are like military ones, and not only for the lack of sleep. The losing faction resorts to blame and recrimination, while the winners embalm their victory in flawless amber. The House of Representatives could flip in 2018 and, under Democratic control, vote to impeach Trump. But those who fought for him in the months leading up to November 8, 2016, those happy few, will always have Wisconsin.One cold night in December, Bannon threw a party for Lewandowski and Bossie, who’d just published Let Trump Be Trump, their brisk account of Trump’s march to Washington. The party was held at a steakhouse across from the Fox News headquarters in midtown Manhattan. The place slowly filled with conservative luminaries, like Ann Coulter, who brushed off someone who wanted to snap her picture, and Sean Hannity, wearing a green field coat that made him look like a suburban dad. Loud and happy, Lewandowski bounded between guests. Cindy Adams, the gossip columnist, wore a white coat. An olive-oil importer told me about the proto-Trumpian culture warrior Patrick Buchanan and his collection of antique guns. I recall bacon, ample and delicious.
Bannon came near the end of the affair. When he did, the already crowded room imploded around him, as if a new gravitational field had formed. He was the star among stars. Bannon knew this, accentuating his import by dressing down for the occasion, wearing a barn coat and cargo pants, which both looked comfortable and entirely inappropriate in this room of tailored suits. True power is dressing exactly as you damn well please.
Bannon is unique among those who have left the Trump administration in that he has not attempted to trade on his association with the president for personal profit. Plenty of others have, even if their association was a lot more tenuous. Having vowed to continue fighting for Trump when he left the White House, Bannon has done just that. Losing a skirmish in Alabama is unlikely to temper his zeal. Bigger battles loom. “One of the things he does, that most of us in Washington don’t do, is he thinks in terms of history,” says Keith Koffler, the White House Dossier author who recently published an authorized biography of Bannon, Bannon: Always the Rebel. “It will be very little of a deterrent to him at all, what happened in Alabama.”
Several days after Moore’s loss, pundits and columnists were still arguing whether Bannon was to blame, what the election meant for Democrats, what it meant for Republicans, what it meant for Americans and whether it would save democracy.
Bannon, meanwhile, went to Tokyo. There, he gave an address to a conservative group, praising Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for being “Trump before Trump” by reviving Japan’s long-dormant nationalist impulses. “Japan has every opportunity to seize its destiny,” he said. But only if it stands with the United States against China.
Back home, Trump released a national security strategy that branded China a growing threat. “China expanded its power at the expense of the sovereignty of others,” the document says. “Its nuclear arsenal is growing and diversifying. Part of China’s military modernization and economic expansion is due to its access to the U.S. innovation economy, including America’s world-class universities.” If this wasn’t written by Bannon, it was inflected with his ideas.
But almost as if to underscore how much Bannon’s influence has diminished, the White House shortly thereafter appointed Susan Thornton its top East Asia diplomat. This was seen as another defeat for Bannon, who’d bragged to Kuttner that he’d have her expelled from the State Department.
So now it is winter, and Bannon is in the wilderness, tromping through the snow, preparing for numberless battles to come. He hears the crackling reports of incoming fire but doesn’t bother to duck. “I think it's one of my superpowers that I don't care what people say. I really don't.” For him, this is only the beginning of his movement, not the end: the first inning, not the ninth, as he put it to me in Montgomery, with stars falling over Alabama, Roy Moore demanding a recount, and reporters pecking away at their laptops, writing obituaries for Bannon and his revolution.
“We’re fighting on tonight,” Bannon said as aides came into his hotel room with gravid, greasy bags of Arby’s. “We’ll get up and fight tomorrow morning.”
some rich asshole’s mom is key to understanding the president’s deep insecurity
Mary Anne the rich asshole
Nina Burleigh
Posted with permission from Newsweek
Parishioners at the Stornoway High Church on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland still remember the dignified blonde who came back from America every summer. She walked with a formal, erect posture, provoking whispers about how she’d picked up her “airs and graces” in New York, where she’d married a rich man. But mostly they remember her speaking Gaelic as though she’d never left the island.
The woman, Mary Anne MacLeod, is the mother of Donald Trump, the aggressive rich kid turned real estate mogul turned President of the United States. And the contrast between her humble immigrants roots and the 1950s McMansion where she wound up is the key to understanding Trump’s deep insecurity.
MacLeod spent the first 17 years of her life in Tong, a fishing village on the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, closer to Iceland than to London. Though her son was raised in a mansion in Queens, she grew up among poor islanders in a two-bedroom rented cottage crammed with her and 10 siblings.
The MacLeods lived several miles from their church, on a tidal flat the locals called “the saltings.” At certain times of day, the muck turned into quicksand as the tide rose. To get to church on Sunday—a daylong affair—the family would pick their way across the flats in muck boots—a perilous journey that only fishing families would even attempt because people frequently drowned. On every other day of the week, MacLeod’s family worked hard, digging peat to burn, hauling fishing nets in the icy rain and farming meager crops they grew in the rocky soil.
Related: Who is Donald Trump’s mother?
As a girl, MacLeod saw few examples of how rich people lived. An English opium baron named Matheson had purchased the entire island in the mid-19th century and built himself a turreted gray stone Victorian castle on a plot of land overlooking Stornoway. The family’s church was on Matheson Road, a street lined with small but handsome brick mansions belonging to the families of local merchants. To distinguish themselves from their impoverished—and often fish-smelling—counterparts, residents of these mansions forbade the poor to walk on their street. That ban would have included MacLeod and her family, local residents say.
Poor islanders had been abused by the wealthy for years. In her grandparents generation, the British had expelled tens of thousands of Scottish peasants in order to empty the land for sport hunting and sheep. Thousands emigrated to North America, climbing on ships whose conditions were so bad that many perished of scurvy and other ailments before they reached land. Those left behind clung to the traditional ways—farming, fishing and speaking Gaelic at church and school—even as their English overlords tried to force their language upon them. MacLeod, for instance, did not hear much English until she enrolled in school, which was compulsory only until 8th grade.
Another crisis also pushed MacLeod’s generation to leave. She was only seven when World War I ended, but the conflict and a local maritime disaster, a winter shipwreck just yards from shore, killed 200 soldiers returning from the front, decimating the male population. That shortage of men, and the promise of a better life in America, prompted her to join her older sisters in New York in 1929. (They were married to butlers and working as maids or servants, and secured her a job when she arrived.) According to a local genealogist, all the MacLeod siblings eventually emigrated to North America, except one who remained behind and took care of the parents.
The exodus from Lewis was so dramatic in MacLeod’s generation, that the same month the 17-year-old sailed away on a steamer for New York, her local paper, the Stornoway Gazette editorialized: “Our straths and glens will soon be peopled only with middle-aged and elderly people. Most of these young people take kindly to the life of those distant lands but they never forget the ‘old folk at home.’”
The men they left behind, fed up with aristocratic landowners, staged a series of raids to seize what British authorities had promised them if they fought in World War I—their own land. Landowners gave in and granted back property to the tenant farmers in the community. Modern day island families living on this land pay rent to a public trust, not English lords.
Six years after she arrived in New York, MacLeod, the blue-eyed youngest member of her family, met a blonde, mustachioed, first-generation German-American at a party in Queens. They later married.
Fred Trump was a nobody back then, but he soon became one of the biggest home builders in suburban New York. His wife spent her adult years recreating the pomp she’d viewed from the proverbial window as a girl. Despite her lack of education and lowly roots, she liked to wear furs and be chauffeured in a Rolls Royce around plebeian Queens, New York. In his book, Trump: Art of the Deal, the New York real estate mogul wrote about her passion for the trappings of wealth. She was so enthralled by the coronation of Queen Elizabeth that her no-nonsense German-American husband begged her to turn off the TV.
Her son Donald inherited her obsession with the trappings of class and luxury—and his own insecurity about not being to the manner born. He built himself a miniature Versailles, his gold and marble triplex in Trump Tower—designed by another immigrant with queenly tastes, first wife Ivana Trump. And perhaps because his mother left Scotland with less than a high school education, he has sneered at people with academic degrees. “The most important thing I learned at Wharton was not to be overly impressed by academic credentials,” Trump wrote in The Art of the Deal. “It didn’t take me long to realize that there was nothing particularly awesome or exceptional about my classmates, and that I could compete with them just fine.” In the same book, he thumbed his nose at old money New Yorkers who didn’t like his buildings and has said he worries Ivanka “looks down on him.”
But while MacLeod had airs and graces, she never turned her back on her roots. On the contrary, she always returned to Tong, year after year, lapsing into Gaelic the minute she arrived. The islanders cite the Gaelic saying “The bird sings best in its nest” to explain her attachment. Trump, though, never came with her.
Today, the peat fields are still part of the island’s landscape, but residents are more connected to the rest of the world. Hundreds of cruise ships dock at Lewis in the summer. But the spirit of the island, population 18,500, remains community oriented: Neighbors pitch in when a family is in trouble, and they rarely lock their doors.
The people of Lewis were amused and proud of their American son, Donald, when they first learned he was a reality-TV celebrity. But after he strong-armed mainland Scots near Aberdeen into land concessions for his “best golf course in the world,” and as his political career swerved into scandal, many in his mother’s hometown grew ashamed of him. A Facebook page called Isle of Lewis Against Trump is decorated with a photograph of a Trump troll doll. “He is not proud of his mother’s humble beginnings,” said the novelist and poet Kevin MacNeil, who lives on the Isle of Lewis. “It is hard to understand how in a single generation the values of altruism, togetherness and sheer human decency were lost. Selflessness became selfishness. A supportive sense of community became a vain-glorious arrogance.”
Trump has claimed his mother came to America on a holiday and decided to stay in the big city, a story which causes islanders roll their eyes. It’s not clear whether MacLeod told her family this fib or whether it’s just another Trumpian alternative fact—like his claim that his German-American father was actually Swedish.
Trump’s older sister used to accompany their mother to Lewis, but Donald visited Tong only once while he was in Scotland while inspecting work on his golf course in 2008. Scottish journalists clocked his time on the island at 180 minutes, with just 97 seconds at the MacLeod cottage. “I feel Scottish,” he proclaimed on the tarmac, his blonde pompadour wafting vertical in the island breeze.
Beyond that slogan and his golf course, Trump seems to have little use for his mother’s humble roots. His living relatives—second cousins mostly—have stopped talking to journalists since his election. But during the campaign, one of Trump’s cousins, Mairi Sterland, told a Hebridean blogger: “I used to laugh about [being related to] Donald Trump. Now I hardly dare mention him. I’m intrigued that people will even countenance the thought that he might be president. He’s a rabble raiser. He knows how to do it. He’s in that Apprentice thing and he works it. He is outrageous. You quail at the thought of what he’s capable of.”
What would MacLeod make of her famous son now, the blogger asked? “I think his mother would be horrified,” the relative said.
The woman, Mary Anne MacLeod, is the mother of Donald Trump, the aggressive rich kid turned real estate mogul turned President of the United States. And the contrast between her humble immigrants roots and the 1950s McMansion where she wound up is the key to understanding Trump’s deep insecurity.
MacLeod spent the first 17 years of her life in Tong, a fishing village on the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, closer to Iceland than to London. Though her son was raised in a mansion in Queens, she grew up among poor islanders in a two-bedroom rented cottage crammed with her and 10 siblings.
The MacLeods lived several miles from their church, on a tidal flat the locals called “the saltings.” At certain times of day, the muck turned into quicksand as the tide rose. To get to church on Sunday—a daylong affair—the family would pick their way across the flats in muck boots—a perilous journey that only fishing families would even attempt because people frequently drowned. On every other day of the week, MacLeod’s family worked hard, digging peat to burn, hauling fishing nets in the icy rain and farming meager crops they grew in the rocky soil.
Related: Who is Donald Trump’s mother?
As a girl, MacLeod saw few examples of how rich people lived. An English opium baron named Matheson had purchased the entire island in the mid-19th century and built himself a turreted gray stone Victorian castle on a plot of land overlooking Stornoway. The family’s church was on Matheson Road, a street lined with small but handsome brick mansions belonging to the families of local merchants. To distinguish themselves from their impoverished—and often fish-smelling—counterparts, residents of these mansions forbade the poor to walk on their street. That ban would have included MacLeod and her family, local residents say.
Poor islanders had been abused by the wealthy for years. In her grandparents generation, the British had expelled tens of thousands of Scottish peasants in order to empty the land for sport hunting and sheep. Thousands emigrated to North America, climbing on ships whose conditions were so bad that many perished of scurvy and other ailments before they reached land. Those left behind clung to the traditional ways—farming, fishing and speaking Gaelic at church and school—even as their English overlords tried to force their language upon them. MacLeod, for instance, did not hear much English until she enrolled in school, which was compulsory only until 8th grade.
Another crisis also pushed MacLeod’s generation to leave. She was only seven when World War I ended, but the conflict and a local maritime disaster, a winter shipwreck just yards from shore, killed 200 soldiers returning from the front, decimating the male population. That shortage of men, and the promise of a better life in America, prompted her to join her older sisters in New York in 1929. (They were married to butlers and working as maids or servants, and secured her a job when she arrived.) According to a local genealogist, all the MacLeod siblings eventually emigrated to North America, except one who remained behind and took care of the parents.
The exodus from Lewis was so dramatic in MacLeod’s generation, that the same month the 17-year-old sailed away on a steamer for New York, her local paper, the Stornoway Gazette editorialized: “Our straths and glens will soon be peopled only with middle-aged and elderly people. Most of these young people take kindly to the life of those distant lands but they never forget the ‘old folk at home.’”
The men they left behind, fed up with aristocratic landowners, staged a series of raids to seize what British authorities had promised them if they fought in World War I—their own land. Landowners gave in and granted back property to the tenant farmers in the community. Modern day island families living on this land pay rent to a public trust, not English lords.
Six years after she arrived in New York, MacLeod, the blue-eyed youngest member of her family, met a blonde, mustachioed, first-generation German-American at a party in Queens. They later married.
Fred Trump was a nobody back then, but he soon became one of the biggest home builders in suburban New York. His wife spent her adult years recreating the pomp she’d viewed from the proverbial window as a girl. Despite her lack of education and lowly roots, she liked to wear furs and be chauffeured in a Rolls Royce around plebeian Queens, New York. In his book, Trump: Art of the Deal, the New York real estate mogul wrote about her passion for the trappings of wealth. She was so enthralled by the coronation of Queen Elizabeth that her no-nonsense German-American husband begged her to turn off the TV.
Her son Donald inherited her obsession with the trappings of class and luxury—and his own insecurity about not being to the manner born. He built himself a miniature Versailles, his gold and marble triplex in Trump Tower—designed by another immigrant with queenly tastes, first wife Ivana Trump. And perhaps because his mother left Scotland with less than a high school education, he has sneered at people with academic degrees. “The most important thing I learned at Wharton was not to be overly impressed by academic credentials,” Trump wrote in The Art of the Deal. “It didn’t take me long to realize that there was nothing particularly awesome or exceptional about my classmates, and that I could compete with them just fine.” In the same book, he thumbed his nose at old money New Yorkers who didn’t like his buildings and has said he worries Ivanka “looks down on him.”
But while MacLeod had airs and graces, she never turned her back on her roots. On the contrary, she always returned to Tong, year after year, lapsing into Gaelic the minute she arrived. The islanders cite the Gaelic saying “The bird sings best in its nest” to explain her attachment. Trump, though, never came with her.
Today, the peat fields are still part of the island’s landscape, but residents are more connected to the rest of the world. Hundreds of cruise ships dock at Lewis in the summer. But the spirit of the island, population 18,500, remains community oriented: Neighbors pitch in when a family is in trouble, and they rarely lock their doors.
The people of Lewis were amused and proud of their American son, Donald, when they first learned he was a reality-TV celebrity. But after he strong-armed mainland Scots near Aberdeen into land concessions for his “best golf course in the world,” and as his political career swerved into scandal, many in his mother’s hometown grew ashamed of him. A Facebook page called Isle of Lewis Against Trump is decorated with a photograph of a Trump troll doll. “He is not proud of his mother’s humble beginnings,” said the novelist and poet Kevin MacNeil, who lives on the Isle of Lewis. “It is hard to understand how in a single generation the values of altruism, togetherness and sheer human decency were lost. Selflessness became selfishness. A supportive sense of community became a vain-glorious arrogance.”
Trump has claimed his mother came to America on a holiday and decided to stay in the big city, a story which causes islanders roll their eyes. It’s not clear whether MacLeod told her family this fib or whether it’s just another Trumpian alternative fact—like his claim that his German-American father was actually Swedish.
Trump’s older sister used to accompany their mother to Lewis, but Donald visited Tong only once while he was in Scotland while inspecting work on his golf course in 2008. Scottish journalists clocked his time on the island at 180 minutes, with just 97 seconds at the MacLeod cottage. “I feel Scottish,” he proclaimed on the tarmac, his blonde pompadour wafting vertical in the island breeze.
Beyond that slogan and his golf course, Trump seems to have little use for his mother’s humble roots. His living relatives—second cousins mostly—have stopped talking to journalists since his election. But during the campaign, one of Trump’s cousins, Mairi Sterland, told a Hebridean blogger: “I used to laugh about [being related to] Donald Trump. Now I hardly dare mention him. I’m intrigued that people will even countenance the thought that he might be president. He’s a rabble raiser. He knows how to do it. He’s in that Apprentice thing and he works it. He is outrageous. You quail at the thought of what he’s capable of.”
What would MacLeod make of her famous son now, the blogger asked? “I think his mother would be horrified,” the relative said.
This Florida Republican directly benefitted from Russian hacks — and now he’s trying to shut down Mueller
Rep. Ron DeSantis (Facebook)
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Three Florida Republicans are helping President some rich asshole to discredit or end the special counsel probe into Russian election interference — which directly benefitted at least one of the lawmakers.
Two of those congressmen — Rep. Ron DeSantis and Rep. Matt Gaetz — accompanied the rich asshole earlier this month on Air Force One to a campaign event in Pensacola, where the president endorsed Roy Moore’s doomed Senate campaign in nearby Alabama.
Both GOP lawmakers have been calling for Mueller’s removal as special counsel, and Gaetz co-sponsored a non-binding resolution last month calling for the former FBI director to resign from the probe over alleged bias.
Since flying on the president’s jet, DeSantis and Gaetz have been joined by another Florida Republican — Rep. Francis Rooney, who this week called for a “purge” at the Department of Justice and FBI.
Their actions have renewed interest in a Wall Street Journal report in May that revealed a Florida blogger was in direct contact during last year’s congressional campaigns with Guccifer 2.0, an internet persona that U.S. intelligence agencies believe is linked to the Kremlin.
Aaron Nevins, a Republican operative who operates the low-traffic HelloFLA blog, admits reaching out to Guccifer 2.0 in August 2016 after learning hackers had broken into a Democratic committee that helps House candidates and asking for any Florida-based information.
The blogger received 2.5 gigabytes of Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee opposition research and other documents 10 days later, and he posted some of them online under a pseudonym — including five documents related to the committee’s recruitment of DeSantis opponent George Pappas.
“I don’t think you realize what you gave me,” Nevins told the hacker via Twitter direct messages. “This is probably worth millions of dollars.”
It’s not as clear whether the other two lawmakers directly benefitted from Guccifer 2.0’s data, but Gaetz was targeted last month by opposition research dumped online by HelloFLA.
The document dump came shortly after Gaetz called out a former GOP primary rival, Florida Senate budget chairman Jack Latvala, over alleged sexual harassment.
Guccifer 2.0 also released hacked data last year related to House races in Illinois, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania, reported the New York Times.
Another cache of documents targeted Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), chairman of the DCCC, who faced no serious challenger but felt the hackers wanted to send a threat to all Democratic lawmakers and candidates.
Luján sent a letter Aug. 29, 2016, to House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), to complain about one of his associated super PACs — the National Republican Congressional Committee — using hacked data against Democratic House candidates.
“The N.R.C.C.’s use of documents stolen by the Russians plays right into the hands of one of the United States’ most dangerous adversaries,” Luján’ warned. “Put simply, if this action continues, the N.R.C.C. will be complicit in aiding the Russian government in its effort to influence American elections.”
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi sent a similar letter to Ryan in early September, but the GOP leader never replied to either complaint.
The following month, October 2016, another super PAC tied to Ryan — the Congressional Leadership Fund — used stolen material in another advertisement, attacking Florida Democrat Joe Garcia, who eventually lost to incumbent Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-FL).
Former prosecutor breaks down why Mueller probe’s new direction could be bad news for Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during the II CEO Summit of the Americas on the sidelines of the VII Summit of the Americas in Panama City in this April 10, 2015 file photo. REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Files
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Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team has begun questioning Republican National Committee staffers about their data operation — and a former federal prosecutor suggests that could put Facebook under new scrutiny.
Investigators are asking RNC staffers about how the GOP coordinated with the rich asshole campaign to target voters in key swing states, and Renato Mariotti, a Democratic candidate for Illinois attorney general and a former federal prosecutor, explained what that new direction might mean.
1/ This aspect of Mueller’s investigation deserves more attention, because it’s the piece most likely to result in charges that resemble what people commonly call “collusion”—Russians and Americans working together to influence the election. twitter.com/thehill/status…
“This aspect of Mueller’s investigation deserves more attention, because it’s the piece most likely to result in charges that resemble what people commonly call ‘collusion’ — Russians and Americans working together to influence the election,” Mariotti tweeted.
He said the special counsel had previously obtained a search warrant for Facebook records, which means Mueller had evidence that convinced a judge there was a “good reason a crime occurred” during the campaign.
“That crime would likely be a foreign contribution in connection with a U.S. election, which is a crime if it is done knowingly and willfully,” Mariotti explained. “It’s also a crime for an American to knowingly aid in that effort.”
Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, wants Facebook and the rich asshole campaign’s inner circle to reveal more about their connections to Russia, which bought ads on the social network targeted to individual voters in swing states.
“I would like to have a higher confidence (Facebook has) really done the investigation of all possible Russian [connections], and some of the Russian sites were actually … started or activated outside of Russia but are were still controlled by them,” Warner told Axios last week.
Mueller’s team is now investigating whether any RNC staffers illegally coordinated with Russian efforts to sway the election toward the rich asshole, Mariotti said — and that could spell trouble for Facebook and its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg.
“We don’t know yet what Mueller will find, but if he indicted an American for aiding a Russian effort to influence the election, that would be more explosive than the charges we’ve seen thus far,” Mariotti said.
It ain’t just special counsel Bob Mueller that could take some rich asshole down
Special counsel Bob Mueller (left) and President some rich asshole (right). Images via screengrab.
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As we stumble to the end of the chaotic first calendar year of the rich asshole administration, the president’s critics have fallen into the habit of constantly monitoring American democracy’s vital signs. It’s almost as if the nation’s political institutions are hospitalized, with nurses bursting in at all hours to announce, “Just checking.”
By many reckonings, this has been a bad few weeks for the venerable patient, born 228 years ago in Philadelphia.
The Republican Senate, skipping all committee hearings, rushed through a tax-break bill filled with hand-written corrections without allowing Democrats time to read it. Michael Flynn — the president’s first national security adviser who led chants of “Lock her up” at the Republican National Convention about Hillary Clinton — pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. the rich asshole himself retweeted three vicious anti-Muslim videos that originated with a British ultra-nationalist group.
Wait, there’s more.
There was, of course, the mysterious Tweet written by the rich asshole or his lawyer John Dowd or a squirrel on the White House lawn implying that the president had known that Flynn had lied to the FBI before the rich asshole pressured former FBI Director James Comey to go easy on him. The resulting dustup prompted Dowd to insist with heavy-handed echoes of Watergate that a “president cannot obstruct justice.” Along the way, like a comedian searching for someone he hadn’t offended yet, the rich asshole declared war on the FBI claiming in a Tweet that “its reputation is in Tatters.”
Not surprisingly, the tromp, tromp, tromp of the rich asshole’s nonstop affronts to political decency have taken a toll on even moderate commentators.
In the New York Times, political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein write, “The failure of Republican members of Congress to resist the anti-democratic behavior of President the rich asshole — including holding not a single hearing on his and his team’s kleptocracy — is cringe-worthy.”
Dahlia Lithwick, Slate’s Supreme Court columnist, offered this bleak assessment: “It’s become clear that absolutely nothing will persuade the rich asshole supporters and Republicans in Congress that it’s time to disavow the president — not lying, not spilling state secrets, not abject failure in crisis management, and not openly performed corruption. Given that reality, it often feels like it wouldn’t be enough for [Robert] Mueller to hand us a smoking gun and an indictment.”
With the conservative media searching for any misstep by Mueller as a weapon to destroy his investigation, it is easy to grasp the despair of Lithwick and others. Two weekends ago, the New York Times reported that Mueller in August had dropped from his staff Peter Strzok, a top FBI investigator, for sending anti-the rich asshole text messages. A Wall Street Journal editorial responded with the claim “that Mr. Mueller is too conflicted to investigate the FBI and should step down in favor of someone more credible.”
Against this backdrop, how galling it was to see the rich asshole chortle during a fund-raising tour of New York, “Right now we’re unbeatable…And one of the reasons is what’s happening with the markets, what’s happening with business, what’s happening with jobs.”
The combination of GOP congressional majorities, a supine Republican Party and a truculent right-wing media culture have conspired to convince many liberals that the rich asshole and all that he represents are indeed unbeatable.
This continuing sense of political impotence by liberals has placed undue weight on the Mueller investigation. Every indictment, guilty plea and rumor has been measured against Watergate and the need to discover impeachable offenses. Simply proving a pattern of corruption around the rich asshole and a cavalier attitude to Russian meddling in the 2016 election won’t seem sufficient. Somehow the whole enterprise will be judged a failure if the investigation fails to prevent the rich asshole from serving out his term in the White House.
But such a Mueller-centric worldview is shortsighted. It fails to recognize the extent of the rich asshole’s political vulnerability. In the Gallup Poll, which charts presidential approval back to Dwight Eisenhower, the rich asshole hit his low point (33 percent approval) two weeks ago. The only other president who dipped below 50 percent approval in his first December in office was, believe it or not, Ronald Reagan in 1981 at 49 percent.
Mitch McConnell’s rush to ram the tax-break bill through the Senate was another sign of weakness since it was predicated on fears that Democrat Doug Jones would win the December 12 special election in Alabama. Even though McConnell inaccurately claims that every voter would save on taxes, a new Quinnipiac University Poll found that voters disapproved of the legislation by a lopsided 53-to-29-percent margin. Even more politically damaging for the Republicans is the belief by 61 percent of the electorate that the tax bill favors the rich.
By the way, these polling numbers do not have “unbeatable” written all over them. Rather the words that might better be associated with these survey statistics are “one-term president” and “former House Speaker Paul Ryan.” Without minimizing gerrymandering, respected political analysts like Kyle Kondik at Sabato’s Crystal Ball give the Democrats a 50-50 chance of winning back the House. After Roy Moore’s defeated in Alabama, there is a plausible scenario under which the Democrats could end up with a 51-to-49 Senate majority in 2019.
the rich asshole may seem like a magician with his frenzied attempts at political distraction. But voters in the cheap seats remain unconvinced by the card tricks, especially since the marked decks keep spilling onto the floor. That’s why political remedies may ultimately prove more effective in taming the rich asshole than Robert Mueller.
The views expressed are the author’s own and not necessarily those of the Brennan Center for Justice.
The 11 best and most popular Saturday Night Life skits mocking some rich asshole and his team from 2017
Saturday Night Life depictions of Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, some rich asshole and Mike Pence (Photo: Screen capture)
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This was a banner year for Saturday Night Live. While past seasons have been epic in mocking President George W. Bush, Ross Perot and Gerald Ford, this year’s portrayals of President some rich asshole’s administration will go down in the annals of television history.
Here are the best and most popular examples of SNL’s portrayals of the rich asshole and his White House from 2017.
Spicer apologized for getting relations with the press off to a rocky start, “And by ‘rocky,’ I mean the movie cos I came out here to punch you in the face. Also, I don’t talk so good.”
“I’ve been told to cut back on the gum chewing, so I’m limiting myself to one slice a day,” McCarthy said holding up a massive chunk of gum. The reference was from a bizarre profile on Spicer by Washington Post writer Ben Terris, who discovered that Spicer chews and swallows over two dozen pieces of gum daily.
2. the rich asshole takes his case to “The People’s Court”:
In previous episodes, fake Sean Spicer told the press briefing that the U.S. Appellate Courts didn’t matter, rather it was the “People’s Court” that really matter. In fact, as the previous skit joked, the “People’s Court” depicts real cases and the judge’s outcome is final. Thus, the rich asshole thought it was the perfect place to fight his legal battles.
3. The introduction of Grim Reaper Steve Bannon:
For most characters of political figures, SNL cast members exaggerate the flaws or silliness of a particular official. Spicer’s yelling, Obama’s ears, the rich asshole’s constant gestures and the strange way Jeff Sessions holds his mouth are all ways the actors have ridiculed the officials. With Bannon, however, SNL went full reaper.
4. the rich asshole “can’t wait to give it to Paul Ryan for 4 years”
No one has been lampooned more this year than Speaker Paul Ryan by compromising his conservative principles, his religious principles, indeed any principles he had left. “I’m not gay or anything, but I can’t wait to give it to Paul Ryan for four years,” the rich asshole hilariously says in this skit.
5. Sewer rat and psychopath Kellyanne Conway is so desperate to get on television she’s like the creepy clown waiting in the gutter or worse in CNN host Jake Tapper’s house.
With Anderson Cooper, a policeman had to warn the anchor that Conway attempts to lure people in all day by spouting her craziest talking points.
A Tapper portrayal, with less hair, showed a disturbing glimpse at the lengths Conway was willing to go to get on CNN.
6. In this epic segment, Alec Baldwin interviewed Alec Baldwin.
A creepy Bill O’Reilly opens his show implying “no” really doesn’t means “no,” but the interview with some rich asshole took Baldwin’s portrayal up a notch.
5. Complicit — a new fragrance by Ivanka the rich asshole
“She’s a woman who knows what she wants — and she knows what she’s doing. She’s …. complicit.”
“She’s a woman who knows what she wants — and she knows what she’s doing. She’s …. complicit.”
6. Tina Fey on how to deal with white supremacy.
The former University of Virginia student and SNL icon took a moment to speak truth to racism and eat her feelings over the horrors of the uprising from white supremacists over the last year.
7. Jeff Sessions as Forest Gump
Kate McKinnon’s portrayal of Jeff Sessions is one of the most hilarious and disturbing depictions of a leader yet. In one of her most popular skits, Sessions is shown as a kind of “Forest Gump” character talking to people on a bus bench.
Kate McKinnon’s portrayal of Jeff Sessions is one of the most hilarious and disturbing depictions of a leader yet. In one of her most popular skits, Sessions is shown as a kind of “Forest Gump” character talking to people on a bus bench.
“I was on the cover of the New York Times, you wanna see?” Sessions asked one man.
“This says you may have committed perjury,” the man responds, horrified.
“Yeah, I had a bad week,” Sessions admited.
8. Jimmy Fallon as Jared Kushner
Jared Kushner has been the rich asshole’s right-hand man with a hefty plate of issues and problems to solve. Yet, it was several months before the world even heard Kushner speak. Instead, Kushner has only been seen posing in photos and flashing his dimples. Fallon came back to his old stomping grounds with a flawless performance.
9. Vladimir Putin
The perfection of Putin’s portrayal by Beck Bennett is in it’s simplicity: costume simplicity. The shirtless actor puffs his chest and his hair and is instantly the Russian leader.
The perfection of Putin’s portrayal by Beck Bennett is in it’s simplicity: costume simplicity. The shirtless actor puffs his chest and his hair and is instantly the Russian leader.
“Many of you are marching in the streets afraid that your country is in the hands of this unpredictable man. But don’t worry… it’s not,” Putin jokes, a little too on the nose.
10. The “Morning Joe” that was a little too accurate than we wanted to admit.
11. Musical numbers that absolutely crushed it.
After the #MeToo uprising, an SNL music video of women explaining that harassment, danger, rape and threats are normal everyday “business as usual” for most women. The only way this isn’t the most depressing thing you’ll see is because it’s done like a Katy Perry video.
Welcome to hell:
Alabama officials pray to God before certifying Doug Jones and officially ending Roy Moore’s candidacy
Alabama officials praying before certifying Doug Jones as the state's next senator. Image via screengrab.
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Prior to certifying Doug Jones at the state’s next senator, top Alabama officials appeared to have a moment of prayer in their government chambers.
Video from Fox News shows the three officials — Governor Kay Ivey, Attorney General Steve Marshall and Secretary of State John Merrill — with their heads bowed in prayer, along with other staff in the room.
Watch below:
the rich asshole website error message bashes Obama’s golfing — despite president’s three straight days of playing golf
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President some rich asshole has now golfed for three consecutive days, despite the fact that he vowed to get back to work on the day after Christmas.
While there’s nothing inherently wrong with the president golfing, it does make things awkward for the rich asshole given his past relentless criticism of former President Barack Obama’s golfing habits.
Given this, the rich asshole has repeatedly downplayed or tried to conceal his own golfing exploits, despite the fact that he has hit the links in his first year more times than Obama did during his first year in the White House in 2009.
Now Washington Post data reporter Christopher Ingraham has spotted some code in the rich asshole’s website that shows it will display an error message in the event of an internal server error that bashes Obama’s golfing.
“Oops! Something went wrong,” the message begins. “Unlike Obama, we are working on fixing the problem… and not on the golf course.”
The website of Donald Trump, who has spent several days in a row at the golf course, is coded to serve up the following message in the event of an internal server error: action.donaldjtrump.com/inaugural-year…
the rich asshole administration holds highest staff turnover
Reince Priebus, Omarosa Manigault-Newman, Sean Spicer, Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka and Michael Flynn (Photos via screen captures, Gage Skidmore and the Defense Department)
Summer Meza
Posted with permission from Newsweek
President Donald Trump’s first year in office has seen a record number of staff turnover, with 34 percent of the administration resigning, being reassigned or being fired.
The high level of staff turnover, detailed in a Wall Street Journal report Thursday, is unprecedented in the last 40 years, and is especially unusual given the seniority of the staffers who have left the White House.
Administration turnover rate in the past year has been tracked by Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has tracked White House turnover for more than three decades. Her analysis shows that 21 of the 61 officials she’s tracked have left the administration or been reassigned, a much higher rate than years prior.
“That’s unprecedented to me. The first year always seems to have some missteps on staffing, often because the skills that worked well running a campaign don’t always align with what it takes to run a government,” Tenpas told the Journal. “In this case, it’s a president with no experience in government and people around him who also had no experience,” she continued. “So it’s not surprising that it’s higher than normal, but it’s still surprising it’s this high.”
The next-highest administration turnover rate was when Ronald Reagan was in the White House. In 1981, 17 percent of senior aides left Reagan’s administration.
“Not only is the percentage double, the seniority of people leaving is extraordinarily high,” said Tenpas of the Trump administration compared to Reagan’s.
Barack Obama’s turnover rate during his first year in office was 9 percent, and Bill Clinton’s was 11 percent.
Trump’s first year has been marked by several dramatic departures, like Reince Priebus, who resigned in July after the shortest tenure as White House Chief of Staff in history, and Anthony Scaramucci, who went down in flames just 10 days after he was sworn in.
Former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former chief strategist Steve Bannon and former press secretary Sean Spicer all departed from the administration in the first year as well, and have remained in the public eye since.
A senior administration official told reporters last week that the turnover rate shouldn’t be seen a sign of weakness.
“Is it a mistake to have to fire people? You’re asking, did he make a mistake in hiring them in the first place? You have to be more specific about people,” said the official.
If the Trump administration follows past trends, turnover will be even higher in the second year. According to Tenpas’s research, Reagan’s turnover jumped from 17 percent in 1981 to 40 percent in 1982. Clinton lost 27 percent of top staffers in year two, and President George W. Bush, who lost just 6 percent of senior aides in a first year, lost 27 percent of them the following year.
The high level of staff turnover, detailed in a Wall Street Journal report Thursday, is unprecedented in the last 40 years, and is especially unusual given the seniority of the staffers who have left the White House.
Administration turnover rate in the past year has been tracked by Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has tracked White House turnover for more than three decades. Her analysis shows that 21 of the 61 officials she’s tracked have left the administration or been reassigned, a much higher rate than years prior.
“That’s unprecedented to me. The first year always seems to have some missteps on staffing, often because the skills that worked well running a campaign don’t always align with what it takes to run a government,” Tenpas told the Journal. “In this case, it’s a president with no experience in government and people around him who also had no experience,” she continued. “So it’s not surprising that it’s higher than normal, but it’s still surprising it’s this high.”
The next-highest administration turnover rate was when Ronald Reagan was in the White House. In 1981, 17 percent of senior aides left Reagan’s administration.
“Not only is the percentage double, the seniority of people leaving is extraordinarily high,” said Tenpas of the Trump administration compared to Reagan’s.
Barack Obama’s turnover rate during his first year in office was 9 percent, and Bill Clinton’s was 11 percent.
Trump’s first year has been marked by several dramatic departures, like Reince Priebus, who resigned in July after the shortest tenure as White House Chief of Staff in history, and Anthony Scaramucci, who went down in flames just 10 days after he was sworn in.
Former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former chief strategist Steve Bannon and former press secretary Sean Spicer all departed from the administration in the first year as well, and have remained in the public eye since.
A senior administration official told reporters last week that the turnover rate shouldn’t be seen a sign of weakness.
“Is it a mistake to have to fire people? You’re asking, did he make a mistake in hiring them in the first place? You have to be more specific about people,” said the official.
If the Trump administration follows past trends, turnover will be even higher in the second year. According to Tenpas’s research, Reagan’s turnover jumped from 17 percent in 1981 to 40 percent in 1982. Clinton lost 27 percent of top staffers in year two, and President George W. Bush, who lost just 6 percent of senior aides in a first year, lost 27 percent of them the following year.
#ThanksObama: the rich asshole knows Obama is responsible for rosy economy but plans on taking credit anyway
Former President Barack Obama and President some rich asshole (Composite / Rawstory)
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President some rich asshole is building his 2018 messaging around the thriving economy, even though economists say the current economic trends are the result of President Barack Obama’s policies.
In fact, one economist told Politico, Republicans are pulling off an economic scam that would have them screaming about “the end of the world” if Democrats tried the same.
Politico’s Ben White and Nancy Cook spoke to three high-ranking White House officials who confirmed that the rich asshole plans on attempting to boost his dismal poll numbers by touting the success of the U.S. stock market and falling unemployment.
While this may be a canny political move, it’s built on a falsehood, said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics — a nonpartisan firm dedicated to providing unbiased economic analysis.
“If it were me, I would certainly claim the credit,” said Shepherdson — who was rated by The Wall Street Journal in 2014 as the world’s most accurate economic forecaster. “But looking at it coldly and rationally, there is very little the administration can say at this point is really down to them in terms of the economy.”
And while Republican tax cuts may spur some growth in the short term, Shepherdson explained, that growth will inevitably be hobbled as rising deficits drive interest rates upward and slow down private investment.
“You are essentially paying for this growth with over $1 trillion of borrowed money,” said Shepherdson. “Had the other guys done this, you’d have claims that they were going to bring on the end of the world by tea time.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. economy continues to grow in much the same manner as it did under former President Barack Obama. In the first 11 months of the Obama administration, the Standard and Poor’s 500 rose 37 percent. Under the rich asshole, the same index rose 24 percent. In all, the economic gains posted this year are equal to or slightly below the same indicators, which economists say are evidence that Obama’s policies are continuing to work.
“Despite the underlying similarities to Obama, the White House plans to brand the economy as the rich asshole’s doing in 2018 and sell a message that the nation is actually performing much better now, even before any impact from the tax cut bill,” said Politico. “A key piece of the rich asshole argument will be that economic prospects are even stronger now after a wave of deregulation across federal agencies in 2017.”
the rich asshole campaign adviser indicted in Mueller probe wants out of house arrest to party on New Year’s Eve
Rick Gates and some rich asshole (cnn.com)
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Rick Gates—who served as deputy to some rich asshole’s onetime campaign chairman Paul Manafort and was recently indicted on 12 counts stemming from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation—is asking a U.S. District Court judge to allow him a temporary reprieve from house arrest so he can attend a “New Year’s event.”
JUST IN: Rick Gates wants to be able to leave his house ... and go to a New Year's Eve party?
documentcloud.org/documents/4338…
Gates was ordered under home confinement and GPS monitoring back in November, and granted temporary release to vote during the Virginia elections. Later that month, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson denied Gates’ request to travel over Thanksgiving and Christmas and to drive his children to school. In her denial, Berman urged Gates to work with Mueller’s team to secure a bail package. A later request for solely Thanksgiving travel was later granted.
Earlier this month, Gates was granted court permission to leave home confinement for a weekend after securing enough collateral to make his $5 million bond conditions. Still, as Politico reports, he was ordered to keep the court abreast of “the precise times and locations of the two events” he wanted to attend.
In his request, Gates noted he was denied the chance to “take a longer trip with the family … for the New Year’s holiday” and is instead hoping to attend “events” within 60 miles of his home.
The internet mocks ‘short-fingered Vulgarian’ the rich asshole for continuing Twitter feud with Vanity Fair
some rich asshole (AFP)
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President some rich asshole gloated over Vanity Fair taking heat for a sexist joke at Hillary Clinton’s expense.
The president has long feuded with the magazine published by Condé Nast, and he took a shot Thursday morning at the company’s artistic director.
“Vanity Fair, which looks like it is on its last legs, is bending over backwards in apologizing for the minor hit they took at Crooked H,” the rich asshole tweeted. “Anna Wintour, who was all set to be Amb to Court of St James’s & a big fundraiser for CH, is beside herself in grief & begging for forgiveness!”
The puzzling tweet makes a bit more sense after “Crooked H” is deciphered as “Crooked Hillary,” the president’s insulting nickname for his campaign rival, and CH is revealed as a shortened version of the same slur.
Other Twitter users mocked the president for continuing his feud with the luxury lifestyle magazine that has mocked his small fingers and hands.
Trump pissed Vanity Fair never apologized for "Short-fingered Vulgarian" twitter.com/realDonaldTrum…
Other than himself and a few oligarchs, what is the overlap of Vanity Fair readers and the 30 percent of voters that Trump cares about?
I travelled to a forgotten town in the rust belt, where factory workers still quote zingers from Brill's Content and breaking Mediaite RSS updates can bring business to a standstill. These neglected Americans count on Trump to fulfill their plea: "Drag Anna Wintour, drag her."
Anna Wintour isn’t even the editor of Vanity Fair. Weird that Trump would lie about this.
Trump, a Manhattan media mogul billionaire, cares more about Vanity Fair than he ever will about small-town voters twitter.com/realdonaldtrum…
Trump so anxious to show off his inside knowledge of the Court of St. James that he did not bother to verify that Anna Wintour is the editor of Vanity Fair (she's not) pic.twitter.com/WrhdCuHvV1
MSNBC reporter at tax office: People with wheelchairs and crutches are rushing in to avoid the rich asshole’s tax hike
Eric Chemi (MSNBC/screen grab)
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MSNBC correspondent Eric Chemi reported on Thursday that he witnessed people on crutches and wheelchairs coming into a local tax office with the hopes of prepaying to avoid a hike built into President some rich asshole’s tax law.
Because the tax law passed by Republicans earlier this month slashes deductions on state and local taxes, many people believe that they can avoid the hike by paying next year’s taxes early.
Chemi, who was reporting from Greenburgh, New York, described a scene of mayhem at the local city hall.
“There is some amount of confusion,” he explained. “People said, ‘I don’t want to take the chance on mailing in a prepayment check so I’m coming here today to do it in person.'”
“I’ve seen people coming in here with wheelchairs, with crutches, they’ve got folding chairs to wait in line,” he added. “And so it’s havoc out here.”
Watch the video below from MSNBC.
the rich asshole rips China for alleged oil sales to North Korea
BY JORDAN FABIAN - 12/28/17 11:47 AM EST
President the rich asshole on Thursday accused China of illegally selling oil to North Korea, in violation of United Nations sanctions designed to isolate North Korea over its nuclear program.
the rich asshole took to Twitter to suggest such sales would increase the chances of an armed conflict with Pyongyang.
the rich asshole's tweet appeared to comment on a South Korean newspaper report, which said Chinese and North Korean ships were meeting at sea to hand off the oil.
“Caught RED HANDED — very disappointed that China is allowing oil to go into North Korea There will never be a friendly solution to the North Korea problem if this continues to happen!” the rich asshole tweeted.
Caught RED HANDED - very disappointed that China is allowing oil to go into North Korea. There will never be a friendly solution to the North Korea problem if this continues to happen!
The president sent the message from his golf club West Palm Beach, Fla., where he is spending the holidays.
The U.N. Security Council last week approved new sanctions designed to strictly limit North Korean imports of crude oil and refined petroleum products.
The sanctions came in response to a recent intercontinental ballistic missile test.
China denied making any oil sales to North Korea that violate U.N. sanctions.
Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman Ren Guoqiang said Thursday that Beijing is strictly enforcing the U.N. measures, according to Reuters.
“The situation you have mentioned absolutely does not exist,” Ren said when asked whether Chinese vessels were illegally providing oil to North Korea.
For months, the rich asshole has pressured China to do more to isolate North Korea in an effort to persuade leader Kim Jong Un to drop his nuclear program.
China is North Korea's biggest trading partner, providing critical supplies of food and fuel to its neighbor.
the rich asshole asks supporters to help award 'Fake News' trophy
BY AVERY ANAPOL - 12/28/17 11:44 AM EST
President the rich asshole is asking his supporters to help him award a “Fake News Trophy.”
“Americans are sick and tired of being lied to, insulted, and treated with outright condescension,” reads an email sent to supporters Thursday. “That’s why President the rich asshole is crowning the 2017 KING OF FAKE NEWS before the end of the year.
“There’s no point in pretending that some journalists are anything more than peddlers of falsehoods and liberal propaganda,” it continues.
the rich asshole has feuded with reporters and networks during his campaign and presidency, labeling unflattering coverage as “fake news.”
In November, he suggested that there should be a contest among the networks, excluding Fox News, for the “Fake News Trophy.”
In November, he suggested that there should be a contest among the networks, excluding Fox News, for the “Fake News Trophy.”
We should have a contest as to which of the Networks, plus CNN and not including Fox, is the most dishonest, corrupt and/or distorted in its political coverage of your favorite President (me). They are all bad. Winner to receive the FAKE NEWS TROPHY!
A Rasmussen poll conducted after the rich asshole’s tweet found that a plurality of Americans would award Fox News the trophy. In contrast to his attacks on CNN, ABC News and other networks, the rich asshole has been complimentary toward Fox News, praising the network and its reporters for their ratings and appearing on the network more than a dozen times for interviews.
The rich asshole campaign’s email links to a poll where participants can vote on three media stories as “fake,” “faker” or “fakest” news.
The candidates for “fakest news” are all stories that networks either retracted, corrected or apologized for, including an ABC News report that Michael Flynn would testify against the rich asshole; a CNN report that the rich asshole and his son, Donald Jr., were offered early access to WikiLeaks documents; and a Time magazine report that the rich asshole had a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. removed from the Oval Office.
“The FAKE NEWS has utterly abandoned their duty to fairly report the news to the American people,” Thursday’s email reads. “Some journalists and liberal pundits think that Americans are too stupid to see through their amateur efforts to manipulate public opinion, but THEY’RE WRONG.”
BY MELANIE ZANONA - 12/28/17 06:00 AM EST
President the rich asshole plans to put his long-awaited infrastructure package at the top of his 2018 agenda, eager to notch another legislative victory now that he’s signed a major tax overhaul.
The White House will unveil “detailed legislative principles” in January outlining the rich asshole’s infrastructure vision, which lawmakers will use as a blueprint to craft a bill while the rich asshole works to sell the idea to the public, state and local officials and members of Congress.
“We’re going to get infrastructure; infrastructure is the easiest of all,” the rich asshole said in the Oval Office last week when he signed the tax bill into law. “People want it, Republicans and Democrats.”
But the ambitious rebuilding effort could face roadblocks in both parties, with Republicans concerned about new government spending and Democrats wary of handing the rich asshole another win.
Here are five obstacles that could knock the rich asshole's infrastructure plan off course.
Democrats
While the infrastructure proposal has long been billed as one of the rich asshole’s few bipartisan initiatives, Democrats have so far balked at the rebuilding ideas floated by the White House.
The administration has proposed giving tax credits to the private sector for backing infrastructure projects and rewarding cities and states that raise their own revenue for infrastructure. The White House also plans to use $200 billion in federal seed money, along with massive permit reform, to leverage $1 trillion worth of infrastructure investment.
Democrats have slammed the public-private partnership model as a corporate giveaway that will only lead to more toll ways. They worry the administration’s proposed local incentive program will pave the way for “devolution” — or eventually handing off all federal infrastructure duties to local governments.
They also are concerned that streamlining the construction permitting process will lead to the erosion of environmental protections.
Democrats instead prefer to inject federal funding directly into the nation’s transportation system and have laid out their own competing $1 trillion infrastructure package.
With Democrats feeling cut out of the White House’s bill-writing process, they may be less inclined to come to the negotiating table. Their votes have become even more critical in the Senate after the special election in Alabama this month sent a Democrat to the upper chamber and chipped away at the GOP’s slim majority there.
It also may be difficult for Democrats to pivot toward a bipartisan infrastructure deal after a year of ugly partisan fights over health care, taxes and other contentious issues, and some in the party may be reluctant to help the rich asshole put more points on the board.
“Unfortunately, there hasn’t been much bipartisanship lately,” Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), ranking member on the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, said in a statement to The Hill. “Few outside of the administration actually know what’s going to be in the president’s plan, whether they will include highly controversial provisions, or how it will be paid for.”
Nelson is up for reelection next year.
Fiscal conservatives
An infrastructure bill was always going to be a tough sell with fiscal conservatives, who are wary of massive federal spending on transportation.
the rich asshole initially labeled infrastructure a 100-day priority, but Republicans instead pressed the White House to focus on tax reform, health care and other GOP priorities.
Some Republicans are still pushing the administration to take another crack at repealing and replacing ObamaCare in 2018.
There have also been mixed messages from congressional leaders about whether infrastructure will be a top goal for the GOP next year.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Senate Republicans should pursue more bipartisan legislation like infrastructure in the coming year.
But Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said he wants to tackle welfare and entitlement reforms next year — perhaps using a special budget process to avoid a Democratic filibuster.
The rich asshole could make an infrastructure bill more appealing to Republicans if it’s fully paid for, reforms the environmental review process and repeals labor regulations.
But all of those conditions risk pushing away Democrats from supporting the plan.
Funding offsets
One of the biggest question marks surrounding the rich asshole’s infrastructure plan is how to pay for it.
While the administration has outlined the broad contours of the rich asshole’s rebuilding proposal, there have been far less clues about how it will be funded.
One idea that seemed to be gaining traction earlier this year was to pay for infrastructure with revenue from repatriation, when corporations return earnings stored overseas and pay a lower tax rate.
But the pay-for was instead used in the GOP tax plan, dashing hopes that offshore tax reform could be used to help upgrade U.S. roads, bridges and other public works.
Another funding offset being considered by the White House is hiking the federal gasoline tax, which hasn’t been raised in more than 20 years.
But the politically risky move is almost certain to run into a buzz saw of opposition from Republicans and conservative groups.
“The administration is looking at a fuel tax,” Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Highways and Transit, told The Hill earlier this month. “But I’d like to pivot toward [vehicles miles traveled], at least in the commercial sector.”
“To be quite honest, it’s going to be quite hard to move [a gas tax increase] in the House,” Graves added.
Crowded agenda
Lawmakers are facing a daunting to-do list in the first few months of 2018, increasing the chances that infrastructure could be pushed off the agenda.
When members return to Washington next month, they will have to quickly grapple with all the sticky issues they left unfinished when passing a stopgap spending bill last week to keep the government open until Jan. 19.
House and Senate leaders will have to reach a deal on a bipartisan budget agreement, which will lay the groundwork for a massive, trillion-dollar omnibus package to fund agencies for the rest of the 2018 fiscal year.
But several other issues are complicating the budget talks, including whether to include measures stabilizing ObamaCare and providing help for undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children.
Congress will also have to raise the debt ceiling and pass another reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration before March.
And some Republicans are also pushing for entitlement reform and repealing and replacing ObamaCare, all of which could suck up the oxygen on Capitol Hill.
Midterm elections
Transportation advocates have long voiced concern that an infrastructure bill might not get over the finish line if it gets pushed back to 2018.
Part of the reason is that there are midterm elections next year. Major achievements are generally more difficult in election years because there is less time on the legislative calendar and lawmakers are more conscious of how votes might impact them in primary races and general elections.
Election-year politics could come into play with an infrastructure bill if lawmakers need to raise revenue for the package by increasing fuel taxes or user fees. Either step could prove unpopular with voters.
There could also be reluctance from lawmakers in both parties to put their name next to the rich asshole on an infrastructure bill, for fear he could drag them down in the midterm elections — especially if the rich asshole’s approval ratings continue to hover in the low 30s.
Democrats “made it very clear they could not provide us votes [on taxes] because they are afraid of their primaries,” Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.) told Fox News on Wednesday, discussing the prospects of a bipartisan infrastructure bill.
“My fear is much of today’s politics is not about policy or what’s good for society.”
BY JULIA MANCHESTER - 12/28/17 08:42 AM EST
President the rich asshole is set to host congressional leaders at Camp David early next month as Republicans prepare to defend both houses of Congress in the 2018 midterm elections.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) will stay with the rich asshole at the presidential retreat Jan. 6-7.
The summit at the presidential mountain retreat in Maryland comes weeks after the White House and the GOP-controlled Congress scored their first major legislative victory of the year with tax reform.
The tax plan lowers the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent and repeals ObamaCare's individual insurance mandate.
Republicans have boasted about the tax cuts Americans would initially receive under the plan, however, the cuts are set to expire by 2025.
Democrats have said the bill is only beneficial to the wealthy and corporations and have said they plan to use the bill's low popularity to campaign in 2018.
Reports surfaced earlier this month that McConnell has privately expressed concerns that his party could lose both chambers of Congress in 2018.
It was also reported that a number of the rich asshole's advisers expressed concerns over the midterm elections in a meeting with the president last week.
Democrats need 24 seats to flip the House and only two to take control the Senate.
BY JORDAN FABIAN - 12/28/17 10:47 AM EST
TheHill.com
President the rich asshole on Thursday attacked Vanity Fair for apologizing for a video in which a writer encouraged Hillary Clinton to take up knitting.
The president cited the apology as the latest example of what he sees as the news media’s bias in favor of Clinton and Democrats.
“Vanity Fair, which looks like it is on its last legs, is bending over backwards in apologizing for the minor hit they took at Crooked H,” he tweeted.
the rich asshole also took a shot at Anna Wintour, the artistic director of Vanity Fair publisher Condé Nast.
“Anna Wintour, who was all set to be Amb to Court of St James’s & a big fundraiser for CH, is beside herself in grief & begging for forgiveness!”
Wintour, however, is best known for editing the fashion magazine Vogue, which is published by the same company.
Vanity Fair, which looks like it is on its last legs, is bending over backwards in apologizing for the minor hit they took at Crooked H. Anna Wintour, who was all set to be Amb to Court of St James’s & a big fundraiser for CH, is beside herself in grief & begging for forgiveness!
Vanity Fair faced a major backlash from Clinton supporters on Wednesday after it published a video containing “New Year’s resolutions” for the former Democratic presidential candidate.
The video suggested she should quit politics to take up knitting or take “more photos in the woods.”
“It was an attempt at humor and we regret that it missed the mark,” the magazine said in a statement.
Wintour, a major Democratic donor, has feuded with the rich asshole since the 2016 campaign.
She said in October she would never invite the former business mogul back to the Met Gala, the famous New York City social event she chairs.
the rich asshole tweeted while at his West Palm Beach, Fla., golf club, where he has spent several days during his Christmas vacation.
Thursday marks his 87th visit to a golf club as president, according to a count compiled by NBC News.
BY JONATHAN EASLEY - 12/28/17 06:00 AM EST
some rich asshole’s unconventional presidency has roiled the media landscape, creating new dynamics that will play a major role in shaping his second year in office.
Some of the leading names in print journalism and cable news have taken an unusually adversarial approach to covering the rich asshole, leading to charges of bias and sparking a debate within the industry about whether the president is being covered fairly.
the rich asshole has responded by doing away with media interviews and press conferences almost entirely, even as he and his allies launch near-daily attacks on the media’s credibility.
Some of the leading names in print journalism and cable news have taken an unusually adversarial approach to covering the rich asshole, leading to charges of bias and sparking a debate within the industry about whether the president is being covered fairly.
the rich asshole has responded by doing away with media interviews and press conferences almost entirely, even as he and his allies launch near-daily attacks on the media’s credibility.
They’ve been given ample political ammunition from several high-profile corrections and retractions in coverage of the rich asshole, usually pertaining to the investigation into Russian election meddling. Some press critics have accused media outlets of loosening their reporting standards in a frenzy to discredit the president.
Even so, the rich asshole’s presidency has been a bonanza for the media, delivering record ratings, subscriptions and web traffic, with the president’s admirers and detractors all lapping up coverage about him.
The end result is that the rich asshole will enter 2018 — a year in which the administration faces a special counsel investigation and the potential for impeachment-hungry Democrats to take control of Congress — with perhaps the most antagonistic relationship with the media of any president in modern times.
“I don't expect the rich asshole's approach to media relations will change at all, nor should we expect the press to tire of antagonizing the rich asshole,” said Jeffrey McCall, a professor of media studies at DePauw University. “Buckle your seatbelts. 2017 was a rough ride for news consumers trying find out what was really happening in the world and 2018 will be an even greater challenge.”
Even so, the rich asshole’s presidency has been a bonanza for the media, delivering record ratings, subscriptions and web traffic, with the president’s admirers and detractors all lapping up coverage about him.
The end result is that the rich asshole will enter 2018 — a year in which the administration faces a special counsel investigation and the potential for impeachment-hungry Democrats to take control of Congress — with perhaps the most antagonistic relationship with the media of any president in modern times.
“I don't expect the rich asshole's approach to media relations will change at all, nor should we expect the press to tire of antagonizing the rich asshole,” said Jeffrey McCall, a professor of media studies at DePauw University. “Buckle your seatbelts. 2017 was a rough ride for news consumers trying find out what was really happening in the world and 2018 will be an even greater challenge.”
No media organization has been as critical of the rich asshole’s presidency as CNN.
After being accused during the campaign of fueling the rich asshole’s rise by broadcasting his speeches and rallies in full, CNN has gone wall-to-wall with programming that has been fiercely critical of the rich asshole and his administration.
Under the leadership of Jeff Zucker — who hired the rich asshole while at NBC for the highly rated reality program “The Apprentice” in 2004 — the network is running one ad campaign accusing the president of being a liar and a second that showcases its anchors lecturing administration officials.
CNN regularly taunts the White House with mocking chyrons, and its chief White House correspondent, Jim Acosta, has taken the aggressive style into the briefing room.
Acosta is one of several reporters who have become media sensations — racking up viral news clips and tens of thousands of Twitter followers — by feuding publicly with administration officials or ranting about the unique dangers of the rich asshole presidency.
CNN recently tapped journalist Brian Karem — who sometimes writes for Playboy and was little known until he had an explosive argument with press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders at a press briefing — to be a regular contributor on the network.
The combative exchanges have led to accusations of grandstanding within the Washington press corps, a charge the White House leveled when it briefly stopped broadcasting the daily press briefings.
CNN once had a reputation as the mainstream alternative to right-wing Fox News and left-wing MSNBC, but the network will head into 2018 as the poster child for what many on the right view as media bias and hysteria around the rich asshole presidency.
“CNN has always been like this, it’s just never had the spotlight on it like it does now,” said Armstrong Williams, who owns several television stations on the right-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group.
Fox News, meanwhile, was steadfastly anti-the rich asshole during the GOP primaries, but has morphed into an ally and defender of the president.
The president is known to watch the network’s unabashedly pro-the rich asshole morning show "Fox & Friends," often going to Twitter to share his thoughts about news events covered on the show.
And the rich asshole’s most influential ally in the media is Sean Hannity, whose 9 p.m. show is a nightly rundown for tens of millions of conservatives looking for coverage of the rich asshole’s accomplishments and attacks on his enemies.
Hannity and the guests on his show have questioned the credibility of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, raising allegations of conflicts of interest, political bias and corruption — attacks that have caught on among GOP lawmakers and others in the Republican mainstream.
“Fox News is reprehensible,” said Democratic strategist Andrew Feldman. “The way they’re trying to bolster the rich asshole, it feels like a propaganda media outlet from a third-world country. It’s not supposed to be that way in the U.S.”
The New York Times and The Washington Post, meanwhile, are posting record subscription numbers and basking in Beltway praise for their coverage of the Russia investigation, the White House and the administration.
“These papers are on fire and in a competition for the kinds of consequential scoops we haven’t seen since Watergate,” said George Washington University media studies professor Steven Livingston. “I think we’ll look back on this as the golden era of journalism.”
Still, both papers have dealt with accusations of anti-the rich asshole bias and faced criticism for reporting on the investigation into Russia's meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
The Post had to correct a story claiming that Russians had hacked the U.S. electric grid. Former FBI Director James Comey told Congress under oath that a New York Times story titled “the rich asshole Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence” was “almost entirely wrong.”
The press had a particularly rough stretch in early December, when ABC News suspended its top political reporter, Brian Ross, for incorrectly reporting that the rich asshole had directed his former national security adviser Michael Flynn to contact the Kremlin during the 2016 campaign.
Later that same week, CNN had to retract a story claiming that WikiLeaks had given the rich asshole’s eldest son, some rich asshole Jr., early access to stolen Democratic emails. It was one of three major reporting errors on the rich asshole–Russia connection that the outlet admitted to this year.
The president and his allies have seized on the corrections and retractions to attack the “fake news” media.
After being accused during the campaign of fueling the rich asshole’s rise by broadcasting his speeches and rallies in full, CNN has gone wall-to-wall with programming that has been fiercely critical of the rich asshole and his administration.
Under the leadership of Jeff Zucker — who hired the rich asshole while at NBC for the highly rated reality program “The Apprentice” in 2004 — the network is running one ad campaign accusing the president of being a liar and a second that showcases its anchors lecturing administration officials.
CNN regularly taunts the White House with mocking chyrons, and its chief White House correspondent, Jim Acosta, has taken the aggressive style into the briefing room.
Acosta is one of several reporters who have become media sensations — racking up viral news clips and tens of thousands of Twitter followers — by feuding publicly with administration officials or ranting about the unique dangers of the rich asshole presidency.
CNN recently tapped journalist Brian Karem — who sometimes writes for Playboy and was little known until he had an explosive argument with press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders at a press briefing — to be a regular contributor on the network.
The combative exchanges have led to accusations of grandstanding within the Washington press corps, a charge the White House leveled when it briefly stopped broadcasting the daily press briefings.
CNN once had a reputation as the mainstream alternative to right-wing Fox News and left-wing MSNBC, but the network will head into 2018 as the poster child for what many on the right view as media bias and hysteria around the rich asshole presidency.
“CNN has always been like this, it’s just never had the spotlight on it like it does now,” said Armstrong Williams, who owns several television stations on the right-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group.
Fox News, meanwhile, was steadfastly anti-the rich asshole during the GOP primaries, but has morphed into an ally and defender of the president.
The president is known to watch the network’s unabashedly pro-the rich asshole morning show "Fox & Friends," often going to Twitter to share his thoughts about news events covered on the show.
And the rich asshole’s most influential ally in the media is Sean Hannity, whose 9 p.m. show is a nightly rundown for tens of millions of conservatives looking for coverage of the rich asshole’s accomplishments and attacks on his enemies.
Hannity and the guests on his show have questioned the credibility of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, raising allegations of conflicts of interest, political bias and corruption — attacks that have caught on among GOP lawmakers and others in the Republican mainstream.
“Fox News is reprehensible,” said Democratic strategist Andrew Feldman. “The way they’re trying to bolster the rich asshole, it feels like a propaganda media outlet from a third-world country. It’s not supposed to be that way in the U.S.”
The New York Times and The Washington Post, meanwhile, are posting record subscription numbers and basking in Beltway praise for their coverage of the Russia investigation, the White House and the administration.
“These papers are on fire and in a competition for the kinds of consequential scoops we haven’t seen since Watergate,” said George Washington University media studies professor Steven Livingston. “I think we’ll look back on this as the golden era of journalism.”
Still, both papers have dealt with accusations of anti-the rich asshole bias and faced criticism for reporting on the investigation into Russia's meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
The Post had to correct a story claiming that Russians had hacked the U.S. electric grid. Former FBI Director James Comey told Congress under oath that a New York Times story titled “the rich asshole Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence” was “almost entirely wrong.”
The press had a particularly rough stretch in early December, when ABC News suspended its top political reporter, Brian Ross, for incorrectly reporting that the rich asshole had directed his former national security adviser Michael Flynn to contact the Kremlin during the 2016 campaign.
Later that same week, CNN had to retract a story claiming that WikiLeaks had given the rich asshole’s eldest son, some rich asshole Jr., early access to stolen Democratic emails. It was one of three major reporting errors on the rich asshole–Russia connection that the outlet admitted to this year.
The president and his allies have seized on the corrections and retractions to attack the “fake news” media.
While the rich asshole gave interviews to a variety of outlets after taking office, he now rarely gives interviews to outlets other than Fox News.
the rich asshole’s most recent television interview was with Laura Ingraham, a Fox News anchor, on Nov. 1. His last interview with a broadcast network was with NBC in May.
the rich asshole gave only one traditional press conference in 2017 and is the first president in 15 years not to hold an end-of-year event.
The president prefers tweeting or chatting briefly with reporters in informal settings — a trend most expect will continue in 2018, even as he remains omnipresent in the media.
“the rich asshole has used Twitter to bypass the normal press agenda-setting function and is essentially setting the agenda on his own terms through social media,” McCall, of DePauw University said. “I am not convinced the rich asshole's Twitter use is all that strategic, but it certainly has given him direct access to the citizenry and the news agenda in ways never seen before from the White House.”
the rich asshole’s most recent television interview was with Laura Ingraham, a Fox News anchor, on Nov. 1. His last interview with a broadcast network was with NBC in May.
the rich asshole gave only one traditional press conference in 2017 and is the first president in 15 years not to hold an end-of-year event.
The president prefers tweeting or chatting briefly with reporters in informal settings — a trend most expect will continue in 2018, even as he remains omnipresent in the media.
“the rich asshole has used Twitter to bypass the normal press agenda-setting function and is essentially setting the agenda on his own terms through social media,” McCall, of DePauw University said. “I am not convinced the rich asshole's Twitter use is all that strategic, but it certainly has given him direct access to the citizenry and the news agenda in ways never seen before from the White House.”
BY BEN KAMISAR - 12/28/17 02:11 PM EST
Alabama has officially certified Democrat Doug Jones's victory in the recent special Senate election, confirming that he'll be the first Democrat to represent the state in the Senate in decades.
The certification, made by top Alabama officials Thursday afternoon, comes over the protests of Republican Roy Moore, who lost to Jones by about 1.5 percentage points but claims that massive voter fraud tipped the scales.
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, Secretary of State John Merrill and Attorney General Steve Marshall signed the official certification at 1:10 p.m. on Thursday, officially declaring Jones the winner.
The official declaration brings to an end an unusual election, one that continued to make headlines for weeks after votes were cast.
Moore came in as the favorite despite his controversial history that saw him removed from the state supreme court bench twice. But accusations of sexual misconduct with teenage girls when he was in his 30s roiled the race.
That gave Jones, who made his name in the state for prosecuting two Ku Klux Klansmen who killed four girls when they bombed a black church in Birmingham during the Civil Rights movement, a new opening.
He stormed to victory with overwhelming support from black, young and female voters.
But Moore refused to concede. He first called on supporters to wait until military votes and provisional ballots were counted. But his campaign soon turned to allegations of widespread voter fraud, fundraising for an "election integrity" project and threatening to fund a recount.
The campaign filed a last-minute court appeal Wednesday asking to pause the certification to launch a larger investigation into voter fraud allegations. But Merrill told CNN on Thursday that his office had fully investigated more than 60 allegations of voter fraud and were not convinced.
Some of the allegations raised by the Moore campaign in the court filing included incidents where officials found legitimate explanations for the conduct.
For example, the complaint cites a television news interview with a man who said he and others came "from different parts of the country" to support Jones and vote for him. But Merrill spoke to that man and determined that he moved to the state last year and had an active voter registration in Alabama.
An Alabama district court rejected the Moore campaign's challenge shortly before the certification on Thursday.
Now, Jones will become the first Democratic senator from Alabama since Sen. Howell Heflin retired after the 1996 elections.
"I am looking forward to going to work for the people of Alabama in the new year," Jones said in a statement shortly after the certification.
"As I said on election night, our victory marks a new chapter for our state and the nation. I will be an independent voice and work to find common ground with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to get Washington back on track and fight to make our country a better place for all."
Since the special election was called to fill the seat vacated by Jeff Sessions, who is now President the rich asshole's attorney general, Jones will finish Sessions's term and will be up for reelection again in 2020.
BY JOSH DELK - 12/28/17 01:55 PM EST
A judge on Thursday rejected Roy Moore's attempt to block the certification of his Democratic rival Doug Jones as the winner of the Alabama Senate election earlier this month, according to The Associated Press.
Moore's lawyers filed a suit with the court late Wednesday to stop the state canvassing board from declaring Jones the winner of the race, claiming widespread voter irregularities.
Moore's team said there should be an investigation into possible voter fraud and an eventual second election.
Montgomery Circuit Judge Johnny Hardwick denied the campaign's request half an hour before the board made its final decision on the election, the AP reported.
Jones is expected to be certified as the winner later on Thursday.
The decision followed a telephone conference between the judge and the Republican candidate's legal team over the merits of the lawsuit, according to the AP.
The legal challenge came just 14 hours ahead of the board’s expected decision.
An attorney for Jones tried to block the move Thursday with a motion to the court claiming Moore had no legal ground in his complaint.
Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill said Thursday that the certification would happen despite the last-minute legal effort. Moore urged Merrill on Wednesday in the court filing to delay Jones’s official win “until a thorough investigation of potential election fraud, that improperly altered the outcome of this election, is conducted.”
Moore’s lawsuit came after he attempted to raise additional campaign money from donors to file an official complaint before the deadline, citing outstanding votes from military personnel and out-of-state ballots that had yet to be counted.
Jones will be sworn in Jan. 3 by Vice President Pence.
- This story was updated at 2:15 P.M. EST.
ALWAYS REMEMBER, NO45 SUPPORTED A CHILD MOLESTER FOR THE SENATE JUST SO HE COULD GET THE VOTE FOR THE GOP.
Moore accuser on polygraph: 'The good Lord knows he did it'
BY REBECCA SAVRANSKY - 12/28/17 02:41 PM EST
A woman who accused Roy Moore of sexual misconduct said Thursday that despite his claim that he completed a lie detector test, the "good Lord knows he did it."
"He might have forgotten about me the day I left his office, but the good Lord knows he did it," Tina Johnson said during an interview with AL.com.
"I often wondered if he remembered he did it. I remember it because it was something I would never forget."
"He didn't pinch it; he grabbed it," Johnson, who would have been 28 at the time, said.
She also said Moore repeatedly made comments about her looks and said “how pretty [she] was.”
She was one of multiple women who came forward ahead of the Alabama Senate special election to accuse Moore of sexual misconduct.
Moore repeatedly denied the allegations made against him.
Moore was defeated in the race by Democrat Doug Jones. He refused to concede the race and on Wednesday night submitted an election complaint alleging potential voter fraud that could have impacted the results enough to tip the race toward his opponent.
He also said he completed a lie detector test after the election that he argued proved the allegations against him were false.
"Also provided in the complaint is an affidavit from Judge Roy Moore stating that he successfully completed a polygraph test confirming the representations of misconduct made against him during the campaign are completely false," Moore's campaign said in a press release.
An Alabama district court on Thursday rejected the Moore campaign's challenge.
Shortly after, Alabama officially certified Jones's victory, confirming that he'll be the first Democrat to represent the state in the Senate in decades.
BY JOE CONCHA - 12/27/17 05:09 PM EST
President the rich asshole’s first year in office was a wild ride for the media.
From the inauguration on, reporters have been working at a frenetic pace to keep up with the 45th president and the policy changes wrought by his administration.
Here’s a look back at the Top 10 media stories of the year.
A June CNN report that connected the rich asshole ally Anthony Scaramucci to a Russian investment fund managed by a Kremlin-controlled bank was run and subsequently retracted.
CNN apologized to Scaramucci and said the story “did not meet CNN's editorial standards.”
The three CNN staffers who wrote the piece offered their resignations, which the network accepted.
Thomas Frank, the author of the story, Eric Lichtblau, an editor in the CNN investigative unit that ran the story, and Lex Haris, who oversaw the unit, all left CNN.
Scaramucci went on to become White House communications director.
His tenure would last just 10 days but was eventful, with both chief of staff Reince Priebus and White House press secretary Sean Spicer announcing their resignations.
Scaramucci went on to become White House communications director.
His tenure would last just 10 days but was eventful, with both chief of staff Reince Priebus and White House press secretary Sean Spicer announcing their resignations.
9.) Brian Ross of ABC News suspended
ABC News veteran Brian Ross falsely reported Dec. 1 that Michael Flynn, a former White House national security adviser, was prepared to testify that President the rich asshole had ordered him to contact the Russians during the campaign.
ABC News veteran Brian Ross falsely reported Dec. 1 that Michael Flynn, a former White House national security adviser, was prepared to testify that President the rich asshole had ordered him to contact the Russians during the campaign.
Ross later corrected the report, stating that the order to contact Russia came only after the rich asshole had won the White House, and that the conversation centered on fighting Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in Syria.
ABC News’s handling of the story, which was based on a single unnamed source, drew heavy criticism, especially after it issued a "clarification" to the report instead of a correction or retraction.
The network ultimately apologized for the “serious error” and suspended Ross for four weeks.
ABC News president: "We have taken a huge hit" and "spent this weekend getting absolutely pilloried as a news division for reporting fake news" money.cnn.com/2017/12/04/med…pic.twitter.com/l6dEulyak6
ABC News president says what "compounded" mistake was taking hours "to get our story straight," adds it was "not acceptable"money.cnn.com/2017/12/04/med…pic.twitter.com/hPdPywh3bf
There are more than seven hours between the initial bogus report and ABC’s issued correction (it’s not a “clarification”). Why? Did Ross get burned? Stonewalled by source? Did Ross stonewall his editors?
I don’t believe it was deliberate - I do think it was a terrible mistake and very sloppy journalism that impacted the market and ABC has some explaining to do and why did other news organizations repeat it??? twitter.com/ericreed18/sta…
8.) Megyn Kelly interviews Alex Jones
Megyn Kelly's interview with Alex Jones for her Sunday night news magazine program on NBC was one of the most hyped and controversial of the year, but it turned out to be a ratings flop and public relations headache for the network.
Jones, who runs the website Infowars.com, has suggested the 2012 massacre of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was a hoax.
Sponsors including JPMorgan Chase quickly pulled their ads from Kelly’s program as families of the Newtown victims implored NBC not to air the interview.
Despite the controversy, the interview aired, and Kelly won praise for pressing Jones on his suggestions that Sandy Hook was “staged” and that the grieving parents were "actors."
“All of the parents decided to come out and lie about their dead children?” Kelly asked.
Jones answered by stating he was playing “devil’s advocate.”
“I tend to believe that children probably did die there,” he said. “But then you look at all the other evidence on the other side.”
Despite the controversy, the interview aired, and Kelly won praise for pressing Jones on his suggestions that Sandy Hook was “staged” and that the grieving parents were "actors."
“All of the parents decided to come out and lie about their dead children?” Kelly asked.
Jones answered by stating he was playing “devil’s advocate.”
“I tend to believe that children probably did die there,” he said. “But then you look at all the other evidence on the other side.”
The former "Kelly File" hosted defended the decision to interview Jones, noting that the rich asshole had appeared on his show. “Our job is to shine a light," she tweeted.
According to Nielsen Media Research, "Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly" brought in an average of 3.5 million viewers for the Jones interview, finishing third behind both a repeat episode of CBS's "60 Minutes" and U.S. Open golf coverage on Fox.
7.) Roger Ailes dies at 77
After 21 years at the helm, Ailes stepped down as chairman and CEO of Fox News in July 2016. He departed the network amid a storm of sexual harassment allegations against him, including from prominent women like Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly.
Ten months after resigning from Fox, Ailes passed away in May at age 77 after taking a fall in his Florida home.
Ailes was of the most influential media figures of modern times, building Fox News into a rating juggernaut that dominated the cable news landscape.
Before his death, there was growing speculation of an Ailes comeback via the creation of a new conservative network to challenge Fox News.
"No one did more to change the media landscape than Roger Ailes, but no media executive did more to divide America," Joe Peyronnin, a former network news executive, told the L.A. Times.
"Ailes was a brilliant TV executive who saw an opportunity two decades ago to build a conservative news source and seized it," he said.
6.) MSNBC sees ratings surge
The rich asshole presidency has been a boon to the liberal news network, which had the highest ratings in its 21-year history.
”The reason this is so wild is no matter what you think of some rich asshole, he is unconventional," MSNBC President Phil Griffin told The Hill in an interview earlier this year.
"Every day, by noon, we are on to a different focus and topic. And strange things happen and we have to be on it, and fact check it, and look at the historical perspective, and see how the country is taking it all in," added Griffin, who renewed his contract with the network in May.
"The Rachel Maddow Show" helped fuel the network's success, finishing the third quarter, which ended in September, as the most-watched cable news show on television. That marked the first time an MSNBC program had finished first in the ratings, according to Nielsen Media Research.
5.) Fox News thrives despite turmoil
Fox News had long enjoyed one of the most stable programming blocs on television.
”The reason this is so wild is no matter what you think of some rich asshole, he is unconventional," MSNBC President Phil Griffin told The Hill in an interview earlier this year.
"Every day, by noon, we are on to a different focus and topic. And strange things happen and we have to be on it, and fact check it, and look at the historical perspective, and see how the country is taking it all in," added Griffin, who renewed his contract with the network in May.
"The Rachel Maddow Show" helped fuel the network's success, finishing the third quarter, which ended in September, as the most-watched cable news show on television. That marked the first time an MSNBC program had finished first in the ratings, according to Nielsen Media Research.
5.) Fox News thrives despite turmoil
Fox News had long enjoyed one of the most stable programming blocs on television.
But after losing three popular hosts — Greta Van Susteren, Megyn Kelly and Bill O'Reilly — in the span of seven months, the network had no choice but to make major changes.
Tucker Carlson filled the gaps, initially replacing Van Susteren at 7 p.m., then Kelly at 9 p.m. before finding a home at the 8 p.m. slot, where he replaced O'Reilly.
The network eventually added Martha MacCallum at 7 p.m., Laura Ingraham at 10 p.m. and Shannon Bream at 11 p.m.
Sean Hannity also returned to his old 9 p.m. spot to directly challenge the surging Rachel Maddow.
The network also named veterans Suzanne Scott its president of programming and Jay Wallace its president of news.
Exiting 2017, the 21-year-old network continues to outpace not only its cable news competition, but all of basic cable, finishing as the most-watched network on cable for the second consecutive year.
Sean Hannity also returned to his old 9 p.m. spot to directly challenge the surging Rachel Maddow.
The network also named veterans Suzanne Scott its president of programming and Jay Wallace its president of news.
Exiting 2017, the 21-year-old network continues to outpace not only its cable news competition, but all of basic cable, finishing as the most-watched network on cable for the second consecutive year.
4.) White House press briefings become must-see TV
Former press secretary Sean Spicer turned the White House briefings into a ratings smash.
Spicer’s briefings, carried live by Fox News, CNN and MSNBC, delivered an average of 4.3 million viewers out of the gate from late January into February, according to Nielsen data.
Statistics show that across Fox, CNN and MSNBC, audiences jumped by an average of 10 percentage points when Spicer appeared on screen for the briefings, even beating soap operas like "The Bold and the Beautiful" and "General Hospital."
From the beginning, the briefings were defined by confrontations between Spicer and the press corps. "Saturday Night Live" parodied the briefings with actress Melissa McCarthy playing a combative, blustering Spicer, in clips that became viral sensations.
The fireworks in the briefing room have continued under Spicer’s successor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who has repeatedly clashed with reporters like Jim Acosta of CNN and April Ryan of National Urban Radio Networks.
3.) Bill O'Reilly ousted from Fox News
Fox News cut ties with O’Reilly on April 19, ending his long reign at the network.
3.) Bill O'Reilly ousted from Fox News
Fox News cut ties with O’Reilly on April 19, ending his long reign at the network.
Pressure had been mounting after The New York Times reported that Fox News paid five women $13 million to settle sexual harassment claims against the host. After the report, more than 50 advertisers dropped “The O’Reilly Factor” in the span of three weeks.
O’Reilly called the Times story a “malicious smear” and has denied all the allegations against him.
The host did not get a chance to say goodbye to his viewers, as he was on vacation when the decision was made to end his relationship with the network.
The host did not get a chance to say goodbye to his viewers, as he was on vacation when the decision was made to end his relationship with the network.
O’Reilly’s departure marked the end of an era at Fox News. The former "Inside Edition" host had easily been the network’s biggest star for years, as “The O'Reilly Factor” was the top-rated program in cable news for 15 years straight.
Since leaving Fox, O'Reilly has started to host a nightly online program, "No Spin News," on his website, BillOReilly.com.
2.) Two veteran anchors fired over sexual harassment allegations
Two hosts of popular morning shows, Charlie Rose of CBS and Matt Lauer of NBC, were both ousted over sexual harassment allegations in 2017.
Lauer, 59, had been the highest paid host in broadcast news, earning $25 million annually. His departure came just one week after Rose was fired from CBS and PBS after several women accused the 75-year-old of sexual misconduct.
In both cases, "CBS This Morning" female co-hosts and NBC's "Today" show co-hosts broke the news to their respective audiences on the air.
“None of us ever thought we’d be sitting at this table in particular telling this story, but here we are,” said Rose's former co-host Gayle King on Nov. 21. “This is not the man I know, but I’m clearly on the side of the women who have been very hurt and very damaged by this,” she added.
"This is a sad morning for 'Today' and NBC News," Lauer's former co-host Savannah Guthrie said on Nov. 29. "We just learned this moments ago, just this morning. As I'm sure you can imagine, we are devastated, and we are still processing all of this."
A permanent replacement for Rose or Lauer has yet to be named.
Since leaving Fox, O'Reilly has started to host a nightly online program, "No Spin News," on his website, BillOReilly.com.
2.) Two veteran anchors fired over sexual harassment allegations
Two hosts of popular morning shows, Charlie Rose of CBS and Matt Lauer of NBC, were both ousted over sexual harassment allegations in 2017.
Lauer, 59, had been the highest paid host in broadcast news, earning $25 million annually. His departure came just one week after Rose was fired from CBS and PBS after several women accused the 75-year-old of sexual misconduct.
In both cases, "CBS This Morning" female co-hosts and NBC's "Today" show co-hosts broke the news to their respective audiences on the air.
“None of us ever thought we’d be sitting at this table in particular telling this story, but here we are,” said Rose's former co-host Gayle King on Nov. 21. “This is not the man I know, but I’m clearly on the side of the women who have been very hurt and very damaged by this,” she added.
"This is a sad morning for 'Today' and NBC News," Lauer's former co-host Savannah Guthrie said on Nov. 29. "We just learned this moments ago, just this morning. As I'm sure you can imagine, we are devastated, and we are still processing all of this."
A permanent replacement for Rose or Lauer has yet to be named.
1.) The war between President the rich asshole and the media
The war that began during the 2016 president campaign between the Fourth Estate and the rich asshole only escalated after he won the White House.
The president habitually refers to the media as fake news, particularly on social media, while paying close attention to how he is portrayed.
Overall, the rich asshole has written about the media more than any other topic on Twitter since declaring his candidacy, with 993 tweets critical of the press, according to an analysis by the Columbia Journalism Review.
"Over 350 tweets target a news organization, and nearly two-thirds of these tweets were posted during the pre-primary and primary periods," the publication wrote Dec. 21.
"The top targets have been The New York Times, which accounts for more than 20 percent of these tweets, and CNN, which accounts for more than 15 percent," it continues.
"Perhaps surprisingly, Fox News is the third-most targeted organization. Its references came in the pre-primary and primary periods, before the network fell in behind the rich asshole after he secured the GOP nomination."
The president and his supporters say he has been treated unfairly.
A Harvard study in June showed that coverage of the president's first 100 days, for example, included 93 percent of stories by CNN and NBC that were negative about the rich asshole and the administration. The New York Times's negative coverage of the rich asshole came in at an 87 percent clip.
CNN responded in October with a "#FactsFirst" ad campaign mocking the president for telling falsehoods.
"This is an apple," the ad's narrator begins over a photo of an apple. "Some people might try to tell you it's a banana."
"They might scream 'Banana, banana, banana,' over and over and over again. They might put 'banana' in all caps. You might even start to believe that this is a banana. But it's not. This is an apple," it continues.
The Washington Post launched a new slogan in February, shortly after the president took office: "Democracy Dies in Darkness."
The New York Times launched a "truth" ad campaign, also in February. "The truth is our nation is more divided than ever," the ads say. "The truth is alternative facts are lies," it continues.
"The truth is ... The truth is hard. The truth is more important now than ever."
A November Quinnipiac poll found American voters disapprove of media coverage of the president by a 20-point margin. However, 54 percent said they trust the media to tell the truth about important issues more than the rich asshole, while 34 percent said they trusted the president more.
The war that began during the 2016 president campaign between the Fourth Estate and the rich asshole only escalated after he won the White House.
The president habitually refers to the media as fake news, particularly on social media, while paying close attention to how he is portrayed.
Overall, the rich asshole has written about the media more than any other topic on Twitter since declaring his candidacy, with 993 tweets critical of the press, according to an analysis by the Columbia Journalism Review.
"Over 350 tweets target a news organization, and nearly two-thirds of these tweets were posted during the pre-primary and primary periods," the publication wrote Dec. 21.
"The top targets have been The New York Times, which accounts for more than 20 percent of these tweets, and CNN, which accounts for more than 15 percent," it continues.
"Perhaps surprisingly, Fox News is the third-most targeted organization. Its references came in the pre-primary and primary periods, before the network fell in behind the rich asshole after he secured the GOP nomination."
The president and his supporters say he has been treated unfairly.
A Harvard study in June showed that coverage of the president's first 100 days, for example, included 93 percent of stories by CNN and NBC that were negative about the rich asshole and the administration. The New York Times's negative coverage of the rich asshole came in at an 87 percent clip.
CNN responded in October with a "#FactsFirst" ad campaign mocking the president for telling falsehoods.
"This is an apple," the ad's narrator begins over a photo of an apple. "Some people might try to tell you it's a banana."
"They might scream 'Banana, banana, banana,' over and over and over again. They might put 'banana' in all caps. You might even start to believe that this is a banana. But it's not. This is an apple," it continues.
The Washington Post launched a new slogan in February, shortly after the president took office: "Democracy Dies in Darkness."
The New York Times launched a "truth" ad campaign, also in February. "The truth is our nation is more divided than ever," the ads say. "The truth is alternative facts are lies," it continues.
"The truth is ... The truth is hard. The truth is more important now than ever."
A November Quinnipiac poll found American voters disapprove of media coverage of the president by a 20-point margin. However, 54 percent said they trust the media to tell the truth about important issues more than the rich asshole, while 34 percent said they trusted the president more.
the rich asshole visits first responders, touts accomplishments
BY OLIVIA BEAVERS - 12/27/17 05:27 PM EST
President the rich asshole on Wednesday visited a group of first responders in Florida at West Palm Beach Fire and Rescue to thank them for their service, while also touting the passage of the GOP tax-cut plan and the rise in the stock market.
"You do a fantastic job so we just wanted to thank you very much," the rich asshole said to roughly four dozen first responders, adding that they will now be able to "go back and watch yourselves on television."
The president also took time out of the unscheduled stop to highlight the recent GOP tax-cut plan, which passed shortly before the holiday season.
“We took a big, big beautiful ship that we’re turning around, and a lot of good things are happening,” the rich asshole said, according to the White House pool report.
In addition to highlighting his administration's first major legislative win, he also noted that there is "a lot of legislation" he helped pass since taking office.
"I believe — and you would have to ask those folks who will know the real answer — we have more legislation passed, including the record was [former president] Harry Truman a long time ago. And we broke that record, so we got a lot done,” he continued.
The president then called attention to how the stock market has hit a record high dozens of times since he won the 2016 presidential election.
“So that’s something you can all be proud of. That makes you all look very smart. And your families say, ‘boy are you a great investor, right?’ When you have your numbers go up and your stocks go up, and everything else.”
“We have the all-time record for stopping ridiculous regulations, and we’re very proud of that, that’s one of the reasons stocks are up to record level," he continued.
the rich asshole also said his administration is working on "rebuilding our military" as well as provide new military equipment police departments, which he says were "depleted" under the Obama administration.
"Now you have the best military equipment and you're able to use it for the police force," the rich asshole told the first responders.
The president tweeted about his visit afterward.
Just left West Palm Beach Fire & Rescue #2. Met with great men and women as representatives of those who do so much for all of us. Firefighters, paramedics, first responders - what amazing people they are!
‘Good for comedy — bad for the world’: The best late-night drubbing of some rich asshole in 2017
Stephen Colbert giggling (Photo: Screen capture)
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The first year of President some rich asshole’s administration has been a banner year for late-night comedy. No comedy writer could have a better gift than the gaffe-prone president with a propensity for outrageous Twitter storms.
“Barack Obama was not great for comedy,” stand-up comedian Maz Jobrani told The Monthly. “the rich asshole is good for comedy and bad for the world.”
Some shows are making a name for themselves by continuing Jon Stweart’s “War On Bullsh*t,” while others are finding ways of mocking the administration through their own unique portrayals of the rich asshole.
Here are some of the best late-night drubbings of the rich asshole in 2017:
1. Stephen Colbert mocks some rich asshole for celebrating the “totally not important” first 100 days:
the rich asshole swore that the first 100 days were completely arbitrary and unimportant. Which is why he ran a national ad about it, cut a cake on Air Force One and held a big rally themes “Promises Made. Promises Kept.” Colbert noted it was much better than their original theme which was “Promises Made, Never Mind, Never Said It, Fake News, Watch Fox & Friends.”
2. In February, the rich asshole held his first “batsh*t crazy press conference” and it was so absurd Seth Meyers had to scrap his “closer look” segment to write up the hilarity:
“Being a world leader sitting with the rich asshole right now is like being a woman on a date with a guy and then his wife shows up screaming, ‘Your kids want to know where you are!’” Meyers exclaimed.
“Being a world leader sitting with the rich asshole right now is like being a woman on a date with a guy and then his wife shows up screaming, ‘Your kids want to know where you are!’” Meyers exclaimed.
3. Samantha Bee calls out some rich asshole’s obsession with urine.
Just before President some rich asshole was inaugurated, Bee celebrated the rich asshole dossier as “comedy Christmas.” After all, “it’s as the old Disney song goes: ‘A spoonful of hooker urine helps the treason claims go down.’”
4. John Oliver forced to address “reality itself,” because the president lies so much:
“We have a president capable of standing in the rain, and saying it was a sunny day,” Oliver said.
“We have a president capable of standing in the rain, and saying it was a sunny day,” Oliver said.
5. That time Colbert giggled and squealed “yay!” when the rich asshole came after him and his show:
“You see a no-talent guy like Colbert,” the rich asshole said. “There’s nothing funny about what he says. And what he says is filthy. And you have kids watching. And it only builds up my base. It only helps me, people like him…The guy was dying. By the way, they were going to take him off television, then he started attacking me and he started doing better. But his show was dying. I’ve done his show. But when I did his show, which, by the way, was very highly rated. It was high – highest rating. The highest rating he’s ever had.” (the rich asshole’s appearance actually earned fewer ratings than when Jeb Bush appeared.)
6. Seth Meyers mocking the rich asshole’s photo after signing a bill undoing President Obama’s coal-mining rule:
“Look how white that photo is,” Meyers said. “If you print that photo out you can use it again as a blank piece of paper. It’s like that old joke, ‘What has 26 thumbs and no black friends? These guys!'”
7. Samantha Bee brought back a smoking George W. Bush asking, “How do you like me now?”:
8. John Oliver sounds the alarm on liberals hoping Ivanka and Jared will be “moderating influences.”
“You may still like Ivanka—she can be appealing,” Oliver said. “And that’s frankly not by accident. She’s been trained in the art of the rich asshole branding to be as vague and likable as possible so that everyone can plausibly think that she shares their values—whether or not that’s actually true. And if that sounds like a harsh thing for me to say about her, I will point out that she’s basically shared that message in one of her books.”
WATCH: Conservative shocks CNN panel by calling for the rich asshole to reward Republicans and red states with taxpayer money
Conservative columnist John Phillips (Photo: Screen capture)
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Conservative columnist John Phillips proposed punishing Democratic-leaning states using President some rich asshole’s infrastructure bill.
“I think it’s wonderfully altruistic for him to want to get a bipartisan bill through,” Phillips said. “But, he should have Plan B ready to go, because that is likely to fall apart almost immediately. I suspect the Democrats will go into this being both greedy and difficult. the rich asshole’s going to be left holding the price tag. They’ll ask for the moon and they’ll be difficult because once you’ve been part of the resistance, it’s hard to go from saying he should be impeached to saying your bridges are irresistible.”
Phillips cautioned the president that he’ll need more GOP support than he’s anticipating.
“I would do that by spending the money in red states and when I spend money in blue states, I would make sure to target that money in districts where vulnerable Republicans are running for reelection.”
Host Dana Bash was among those shocked by the suggestion. “Wow, that be incredibly — you know — sort of blatantly political.”
Republican strategist Evan Siegfried sat with his mouth open and shaking his head. The style of villainous government sometimes referred to as despotism.
Breitbart runs a ‘hit piece’ on CNN’s Jake Tapper amid feud about Paul Ryan’s anti-Semitic House challenger
Breitbart News' logo (left, via Wikimedia Commons) and CNN's Jake Tapper (right, via screengrab).
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After disavowing a House of Representative candidate they’d previously backed and covered extensively, Breitbart ran a hit piece on CNN host Jake Tapper for daring to suggest that Wisconsin GOP House candidate Paul Nehlen was their “favorite.”
“Fake Tapper: ‘Very Fake News’ Anchor Leads Re-Ignition of CNN Scandal,” Breitbart’s Wednesday headline reads. In the article, they claimed the CNN host “falsely alleged” that Nehlen is a “Breitbart favorite,” despite their public disavowal and removal of Nehlen’s contributor page amid fallout from his most recent act of public bigotry.
The “false allegations” stem from a tweet Tapper posted Wednesday morning, hours before news broke that Breitbart had cut ties with Nehlen.
Book blaming Jews for anti-Semitism, written by the Neo-Nazi movement’s fave “academic,” being pushed by Breitbart favorite Paul Nehlen. twitter.com/pnehlen/status…
Breitbart used the falsehood-in-hindsight to take the opportunity to hammer Tapper for supposedly peddling “fake news” along with his employer.
“A series of actions by CNN operatives over the past week plus — culminating in a demonstrably false tweet about Breitbart News on Wednesday morning from Jake Tapper — have thrown the network into turmoil turning into the new year, rejuvenating a scandal that CNN had hoped was in its rear-view mirror,” one lengthy sentence from the hit piece reads.
“This is how you know Breitbart isn’t upset that the candidate they openly pushed is now more openly anti-Semitic and racist,” Tapper tweeted Wednesday afternoon. “Instead of contrition they attack and smear.”
And this is how you know Breitbart isn’t upset that the candidate they openly pushed is now more openly anti-Semitic and racist; instead of contrition they attack and smear. breitbart.com/big-government…
As of 90 minutes ago the updated CNN article has an editor's note. Nothing was "stealthily removed from the article without notifying readers." I assume CNN stands behind its current reporting? This is a hit piece on Darcy and Tapper. And Breitbart isn't accurate. #FactCheck
Soon after Breitbart ran the article, journalists and activists pointed out the hypocrisy of their claim, noting that without white supremacy’s media wing, Nehlen’s candidacy would be nil.
I’ll take your word for it.
And here is an archived page of Nehlen's four Breitbart articles, which Breitbart tried to erase, the most recent from June. web.archive.org/web/2017122601…pic.twitter.com/8byp2mNXX8
So Breitbart is attacking @jaketapper for saying that Paul Nehlen is a Breitbart favorite.
Guess what, Jake was right, no one would know this guy’s name if not for Breitbart’s non stop coverage for the last year and a half.
‘Very fine people’: Internet lambastes the rich asshole for unearthed tweet thanking Paul Ryan’s Jew-hating challenger
President some rich asshole (left, via Creative Commons) and GOP House candidate Paul Nehlen (right, via screengrab).
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In the topsy-turvy world ushered in on November 8, 2016, one adage has held remarkably true: there’s a rich asshole tweet for every situation.
So is the case for a newly-unearthed tweet sent by then-candidate some rich asshole to Paul Nehlen, the anti-Semitic GOP candidate for House Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) potentially-open congressional seat.
In the tweet, the rich asshole thanks the dairyland business executive for his “kind words,” which he said are “very much appreciated.”
In response, Nehlen responded, that it was his pleasure, and he just wants “to Make America Great Again.”
Nehlen’s infamy has grown in recent weeks as he hit the national stage for his bigoted views, culminating earlier on Wednesday when Breitbart announced they’d cut ties with the candidate they once ferociously backed over his most recent overtly anti-Semitic comments.
Naturally, it took little time for Twitter to uncover the fawning exchange between the apparent neo-Nazi and the man who became president.
“There’s always a tweet,” MSNBC producer Kyle Griffin tweeted, linking to the rich asshole’s response.
“For some reason white supremacists like @realDonaldTrump,” another person posted. “What could that reason be?”
Check out some of the best responses below.
Paul Nehlen tweeted today that he was enjoying a book written by a white supremacist that blames Jews for anti-semitism. Looks like he's one of Trump's "very fine" people. twitter.com/realDonaldTrum…
anomics
And of course Trump thanked Nehlen for kind words... 2017 in a nutshell. twitter.com/jaketapper/sta…
The "president" sucks up to a Nazi. These are dark times and @realDonaldTrump is despicable. We will remember those who are #Complicit #ComplicitGOP @SpeakerRyan @SenateMajLdrtwitter.com/realDonaldTrum…
avalanche 
I always thought that "birds of a feather flock together" & "fools seldom differ" conflicted each other. Apparently not always...#ImpeachTrump#RacistPOTUS#TrumpIsAWhiteSupremecisttwitter.com/realDonaldTrum…
oh you know, just the Nazi fake president @realDonaldTrumppraising another, actual Nazi twitter.com/realDonaldTrum…
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