January 17th, 2017 - January 17th, 2017. 429-429 days since the Nov 8, 2016, election of some rich asshole, no.45, and 359-359 days since the Jan 20th inauguration.
Shutdown drama grips the Capitol
BY MELANIE ZANONA - 01/17/18 07:04 PM EST
House Republican leaders are within striking distance of securing enough GOP votes to pass a stopgap spending bill to prevent a government shutdown, which would shift the funding fight to the Senate.
But they aren’t out of the woods just yet. Many members of the House Freedom Caucus are vowing to oppose the spending measure unless leadership commits to putting a conservative immigration bill on the floor and boosting defense spending, which could make Thursday’s floor vote on the continuing resolution (CR) a nail-biter.
Still, rank-and-file lawmakers and GOP leaders alike expressed confidence throughout Wednesday that their party would find the votes necessary to carry their legislation through the House.
Rep. Mark Walker (R-N.C.), chairman of the Republican Study Committee, estimated in the afternoon that the whip count for the short-term funding bill was “somewhere between 210 and 215” votes.
Leadership can only afford to lose 21 Republican votes and pass the funding bill without Democratic support, according to the majority whip’s office.
The House CR, which would fund the government through Feb. 16, includes a six-year extension of funding for the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP). It would also delay three ObamaCare taxes, something that was added to attract more conservative support.
“There’s still some work to do, but I think it will pass,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), a top appropriator, said Wednesday.
Passage of the bill would shift pressure from House Republicans to Senate Democrats in the shutdown fight.
While Senate Democrats have been taking a tough line, it could be hard for the party to block a bill that was passed out of the House and includes CHIP funding.
Democratic senators up for reelection in red states are particularly wary of forcing a government shutdown over immigration.
The White House expressed support for the House's continuing resolution Wednesday, which could help sway some undecided Republicans.
Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and his top lieutenants feel they are moving in the right direction, but they have little room for error as most Democrats are vowing to oppose any spending bill that doesn’t include relief for immigrants who came to the United States illegally as children.
Leaders gave themselves a safety valve in case things don’t go according to plan on Thursday. late Wednesday evening, the House Rules Committee granted lawmakers the authority through Saturday to bring any bill to the floor the same day that it is considered by the Rules panel – a process meant to speed up a measure’s consideration in the House.
Chief Deputy Whip Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), who is acting as the GOP’s top vote counter this week, was seen furiously working the House floor Wednesday night rounding up the votes for the continuing resolution. He huddled with Freedom Caucus members, House Armed Services Committee members and Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.).
The Freedom Caucus, a group of roughly 30 conservative hard-liners, has railed against the short-term funding patch — the fourth since September — and expressed skepticism over broader immigration negotiations on Capitol Hill.
Some Freedom Caucus lawmakers are putting pressure on leadership to pass an immigration measure authored by Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and Freedom Caucus member Raúl Labrador (R-Idaho) in exchange for their support on the CR.
"We're making progress, yet still, at this point, if the vote were to happen today, there's not the votes to fund it with Republican-only votes," said Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, as he emerged from a meeting with McHenry in the Speaker's office on Wednesday evening.
The Goodlatte legislation, which has attracted support from both the conservative and moderate wings of the GOP conference and has buy-in from key committee chairmen, includes more conservative immigration priorities than are expected to be included in any bipartisan deal on the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
“We don’t wanna get rolled by the Senate on DACA and the budget,” said Freedom Caucus member Rep. Dave Brat (R-Va.).
Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas), another lead sponsor on the Goodlatte bill, said a commitment from leadership on his immigration bill could help win more support for the stopgap bill.
“That certainly would help, in terms of whipping votes on the CR,” McCaul said.
But leadership, while supportive of the Goodlatte approach, has so far resisted calls to put the bill on the floor. It’s unclear whether the legislation could pass the House, and even if it does, it’s likely dead on arrival in the Senate. There is also concern the vote could roil the sensitive, high-level negotiations on a bipartisan DACA deal.
“We’re working on the Goodlatte bill,” said Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy(R-Calif.), when pressed by The Hill on whether leadership has committed to a floor vote yet.
Some Freedom Caucus members are also pushing leadership to fund the Pentagon at higher levels for the rest of the 2018 fiscal year and pass a short-term CR for the rest of the government — an idea favored by some defense hawks, but that went nowhere during the previous debate over a CR.
Both Reps. Bradley Byrne (R-Ala.) and Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), two members of the House Armed Services Committee, said Tuesday night they may vote against the CR because it harms military readiness and puts U.S. troops at risk.
Meadows acknowledged that a full year of funding for the Pentagon is unlikely to be added to the CR at this point, but said money for defense spending anomalies and a pay raise for the troops could help sway some members into the "yes" column.
If some Freedom Caucus members band together with enough defense hawks, they could tank GOP leadership’s strategy to avert a government shutdown.
Other Republican votes could also be hard to get. Curbelo has also threatened to vote against the CR without a DACA deal in place, while Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) is a perennial “no” vote on short-term funding bills.
Still, GOP leadership may be able to pass the funding bill without boosting defense spending or promising a vote on Goodlatte’s immigration bill.
A Republican leadership aide said that vote counters were pleased with where things stood as of Wednesday evening, noting that conversations were still ongoing.
The growing sense is that most of the GOP conference will end up grudgingly supporting the CR because it’s better than the alternative, which would either be shutting down the government or giving leverage to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
And Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), who represents a large swath of the federal workforce, told WJLA he would ultimately support the CR if he were the decisive vote to keep the government open. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) expressed a similar sentiment.
“We’ll build support, and we’ll get there. We always get there,” Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), a member of the Republican whip team, told reporters Wednesday morning. “Sometimes, some of my friends want to make it more exciting than it has to be.”
House Republicans may also be eager to hand off the political football to the Senate, where the fate of a CR is less certain. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) vowed to oppose a CR, while Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) is undecided, meaning support from at least 10 Democrats will be needed to overcome a filibuster.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said the House continuing resolution seems like it should be “a rather attractive package” for Democrats.
"I'm certainly going to take up what the House sends us. The Democrats in the Senate have been very consistent in clamoring for addressing the children's health care program. This does it with a six-year reauthorization,” McConnell said.
"I believe we have a good chance of passing it,” he said.
Trump: 'I get more exercise than people think'
BY BRANDON CARTER - 01/17/18 09:10 PM EST
President Trump said in a new interview Wednesday that he gets “more exercise than people think” after Trump’s White House doctor said he would recommend Trump exercise more.
“I get exercise. I mean I walk, I this, I that,” Trump told Reuters. “I run over to a building next door. I get more exercise than people think.”
Trump said that he also gets exercise on the golf course, even though he usually uses a golf cart to traverse the course because walking the entire course takes up time.
Trump told the Reuters reporters that “most of us could lose a couple of pounds.” He then surveyed the reporters in the interview and told them they were in “pretty good shape.”
The results of Trump’s first physical exam as president were released by the White House on Tuesday.
Trump’s White House doctor, Navy Rear Adm. Dr. Ronny Jackson, declared the president is in “excellent” health. Jackson fielded questions at Tuesday’s White House press briefing for roughly an hour.
Trump was listed at 75 inches tall and weighing 239 pounds, according to the exam results.
Jackson said he is recommending Trump up his dose of Crestor, a cholesterol-lowering drug, and is working with nutritionists and his medical team to design a better diet and exercise plan for Trump, whom he said could stand to lose 10 to 15 pounds.
Jackson said that Trump’s “overall health is excellent,” adding that the president had mostly normal results on several tests of his cholesterol and heart health.
“His cardiac performance during his physical exam was very good, he continues to enjoy the significant, long-term cardiac and overall health benefits that come from a lifetime of abstinence from tobacco and alcohol,” Jackson said.
“All data indicates the president is healthy and will remain so for the duration of his presidency," he added.
the rich asshole calls immigration proposal 'horrible'
BY JORDAN FABIAN - 01/17/18 03:45 PM EST
President the rich asshole bashed a bipartisan immigration proposal on Wednesday, raising fresh doubts about Congress’s ability to strike a deal to save protections for young immigrants living illegally in the U.S.
In an interview with Reuters, the rich asshole called the Senate proposal “horrible” on border security and “very, very weak” on reforms to the legal immigration system.
“It’s the opposite of what I campaigned for,” the rich asshole said.
the rich asshole is positioning himself with conservatives in the Republican Party who say the bipartisan compromise falls well short of what is needed to fix the nation’s immigration system.
But the comments could lengthen the impasse in Congress, where lawmakers are scrambling to pass a fix for the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which the rich asshole scrapped last year.
Democrats are demanding that Congress pass protections for recipients of the program, who are allowed to live and work in the U.S. without fear of deportations.
But the rich asshole expressed confidence both sides could work out a deal.
“Time is running out,” he said.
The DACA program will begin winding down on March 5.
The immigration talks reached an abrupt impasse late last week, after the rich asshole made vulgar comments about Haiti, El Salvador and African nations in an Oval Office meeting with a bipartisan group of lawmakers, some of whom had crafted a specific plan.
the rich asshole has denied that he called the nations “shithole countries,” but said the U.S. must not accept high levels of immigration from countries with high crime and poverty rates.
The bipartisan plan would offer many young immigrants a pathway to citizenship in exchange for billions of dollars in border-security measures and tweaks to the visa system.
the rich asshole has called for replacing the current family-based system with a merit-based one and demanded an end to the diversity visa lottery, which allows people from countries with low immigration rates to apply to U.S. visas. He also wants money for his proposed wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Those items are contained in a GOP measure co-authored by Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), an immigration hard-liner.
The president’s comments have caused whiplash on Capitol Hill.
Just days earlier, he hosted Republican and Democratic lawmakers at the White House for an extraordinarily public negotiating session where he said he would sign virtually any immigration bill they put on his desk.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Wednesday he would not put an immigration bill on the floor for a vote until the rich asshole declares what proposal he supports.
"I'm looking for something President the rich asshole supports, and he's not yet indicated what measure he's willing to sign. As soon as we figure out what he is for then I would be convinced that we were not just spinning our wheels,” he told reporters.
The White House on Wednesday announced it supports the short-term bill.
the rich asshole said a government shutdown “could happen” by Friday, when government funding runs out. He reiterated he will blame Democrats if the government shuts down.
CNN’s Chris Cuomo slaps down White House press aide: Focus on white supremacists if you’re worried about terrorism
CNN's Chris Cuomo (left) and White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah (right). Image via screengrab.
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While interviewing White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah, CNN’s Chris Cuomo blasted the aide and the administration he serves for focusing on violence committed by people born outside the United States when the deadliest perpetrators are white supremacists.
“You’re cherry picking cases to create a general rule,” Cuomo told Shah as the White House aide brought up the Lower Manhattan terrorist attack by a Uzbek Muslim that killed eight people in October 2017.
“We’re making a serious point that illegality does not breed safety,” Shah retorted, bringing up the murder of Kate Steinle, a white woman killed by an undocumented immigrant who was later acquitted — a popular right-wing talking point that’s led to anti-Latino harassment.
Cuomo, however, wasn’t having it.
“What you do with the rhetoric is you try to paint a picture about these people that is inaccurate,” the host said.
“If you were really worried about who’s killing people in the name of terror in this country, you’d be focused on white supremacists. That’s your biggest threat,” Cuomo retorted. “Ask the intel community — they’ll tell you the same thing.”
Cuomo’s comments came just a day after the Justice Department released a joint report with the Department of Homeland Security that appeared to skew terrorism statistics to inaccurately portray most acts of terrorism on US soil as committed by people born outside the country. The DOJ/DHS report was followed by a study released by the Anti-Defamation League that found in 2017, white supremacists killed more people than members of any other extremist groups, and that the number of white supremacist murders rose more than 150 percent since 2016.
Watch Cuomo take down Shah below, via CNN:
the rich asshole vows to campaign intensively for Republicans, may avoid primaries
President some rich asshole addresses the nation on the South Asia strategy during a press conference at Conmy Hall on Fort Myer, Va., Aug. 21, 2017. (DoD photo by Army Sgt. Amber I. Smith)
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President some rich asshole said on Wednesday that he plans to devote much of his time this year to helping Republicans maintain control of the U.S. Congress, but suggested he may stay out of divisive intra-party primary fights.
“I am going to spend probably four or five days a week helping people because we need more Republicans,” the Republican president said in an interview with Reuters. “To get the real agenda through, we need more Republicans.”
the rich asshole indicated he would avoid endorsing candidates in Republican primaries, as he did last year in Alabama’s Senate race, when the incumbent he endorsed was defeated by a hard-line conservative challenger, and would likely focus on the November general election in which Democrats are trying to wrest control of Congress from the Republicans.
“It’s hard sometimes. Sometimes you really like three candidates – that’s a very tough position to be in. But we have places where I like all of the candidates,” the rich asshole said. “But I will be very much involved with – beyond the primaries – with the election itself, very very much.”
the rich asshole is scheduled to travel to western Pennsylvania on Thursday in support of Rick Saccone, the Republican candidate in a special election to replace Republican U.S. Representative Tim Murphy, who resigned in October amid a sex scandal.
Thirty-four seats in the Senate and all 435 seats in the House of Representatives will be contested in November’s midterm elections. Democrats need to add a net total of two seats to assume control of the 100-seat Senate and 24 seats to take over the House.
Fractious Republican primary battles already are developing in states including Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin, where some of the candidates are backed by Steve Bannon, the rich asshole’s former chief political strategist who he fired last August.
Before Bannon had a public falling-out with the president over the former adviser’s comments in a new book about the rich asshole White House, the expectation had been that Bannon’s involvement might tempt the rich asshole to interject himself into some those fights.
Now that appears much less likely.
SELLING THE TAX BILL
the rich asshole said he will tout during the campaign the Republican-backed tax overhaul law passed by Congress last month that slashed taxes for corporations and the rich while offering a mixed bag of tax changes to other Americans, a measure he argued would grow in popularity with voters as they see their taxes reduced in pay checks.
The bill also opened up part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to private oil drilling and repealed a provision of the Affordable Care Act, dubbed Obamacare, that imposed a fine on people who did not obtain health insurance.
“Those were very, very big things,” the president said. “I think they’ll be very, very popular on the campaign trail.”
He also plans to tout the performance of the stock market.
“If the Democrats won the election, the stock market would have gone down 50 percent from where it was,” the rich asshole said.
the rich asshole’s help could cut both ways for Republicans. In Reuters/Ipsos polls, the rich asshole’s approval rating nationally has largely remained below 40 percent. His presence on the campaign trail could boost turnout of Democratic voters who want to register their disapproval of him.
Democrats won an upset victory in conservative Alabama last month after Roy Moore, the candidate who beat the rich asshole-backed incumbent Senator Luther Strange in the primary and was later backed by the president, lost to Democrat Doug Jones.
In November, the rich asshole-backed Republican candidate Ed Gillespie lost the Virginia governor’s race to Democrat Ralph Northam.
the rich asshole can help Republicans in other ways than campaigning. He remains the party’s most prodigious fund-raiser.
CNN’s Erin Burnett and GOP pundit corner transition aide arguing the rich asshole’s ‘fake news’ cry doesn’t embolden dictators
"Weekly Standard" editor Bill Kristol (left), CNN host Erin Burnett (middle) and former the rich asshole transition communications dir. Bryan Lanza (right). Image via screengrab.
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Despite a growing number of Republicans condemning President Donald the rich asshole for his dangerous attacks on press freedoms, a former aide to his transition tried to claim the president’s “fake news” epithet had nothing to do with dictators using it — and was summarily smacked down by a CNN host and conservative commentator.
“I have conversations with people overseas, sometimes there are pretty crazy conspiracy theories thrown out there, and the first thing they say to delegitimize reality, sometimes, is ‘fake news,'” host Erin Burnett said during the Wednesday night interview. “The term ‘fake news,’ we all know who thought of it.”
She listed off the instances of the term being used by dictators for her guests, The Weekly Standard‘s chief editor Bill Kristol and former the rich asshole transition communications director Bryan Lanza: by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and even a Russian foreign ministry “fake news” website.
“I’m uncomfortable with it,” Lanza admitted. “But at the end of the day what the president is doing here in the U.S. matters a little bit more than sort of the interpretation of his words in the international community.”
“He’s criticizing the media,” the former communications director said. “No one is free of criticism.”
Burnett then turned to Kristol, who said that although “media can take care of themselves,” the rich asshole’s claim that two former FBI agents found to have exchange text messages critical of him are “traitors” are beyond the pale.
“It’s an unbelievable kind of abuse of rhetoric, and dangerous,” Kristol said. “You don’t really want people calling other people in the government traitors when there is no charges against them.”
“Doesn’t [the rich asshole] bear some responsibility for the fact that dictators around the world in closed governments that don’t allow for open elections are now using his term to demean and deride and dismiss every kind of story they don’t like?” Burnett asked Lanza.
Watch below, via CNN:
‘He’ll be in contempt either way’: Former Watergate prosecutor explains why Bannon will be forced to talk
some rich asshole and Richard Nixon (Composition / RawStory)
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Ousted White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s claims of executive privilege run counter to judicial rulings in the Watergate scandal that forced President Richard Nixon from office, MSNBC’s “All In” explained Wednesday.
“The whole understanding of executive privilege is misunderstood here,” former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks declared.
“First of all, executive privilege only counts if the president is receiving policy or political advice. It does not count if he’s talking about how to characterize an illegal meeting or how to cover-up a crime,” she continued.
“That’s the very clear holding of the tapes case in Watergate, they said that we were entitled to those tapes because the conversations were not about policy or politics — they were about crimes,” Wine-Banks reminded.
“I would imagine if this is tried in front of Mueller, that it will end up in court and the court will rule that this does not apply, that there is no executive privilege and that the witness is going to have to answer the questions,” Wine-Banks predicted.
“You’re saying given the holding in the Watergate case, that the privilege can’t be used to cover-up the possible evidence of a crime, there’s no way that that would fly with Mueller or if the courts — if Bannon were to try that with Mueller,” anchor Chris Hayes asked.
“Exactly, it is very clear in terms of a criminal case. The court said that in such a case, it is, I hate to use the word trumped but basically the criminal prosecution is more important and trumps any claim of executive privilege,” Wine-Banks replied.
“So it’s very, very clear and it doesn’t matter whether the witness is subpoenaed or comes in voluntarily…he cannot avoid answering questions, he will be in contempt either way” Wine-Banks explained.
Watch:
House intel Republican: Steve Bannon told the committee that Russia inquiries are an attempt to ‘delegitimize’ the rich asshole’s election
Steve Bannon speaking at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
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A Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee said former White House aide Steve Bannon pushed back on the panel’s questioning in part because he viewed it as an attempt to “delegitimize” President some rich asshole’s election.
As Politico reported Wednesday evening, Rep. Steve King (R-NY) said he has considered issuing a contempt citation for Bannon if the recently-fired Breitbart executive continues to shirk the committee’s questions.
“I have contempt for Bannon anyway,” King told Politico.
Rep. Tim Rooney (R-FL), one of the managers of the intelligence committee’s probe, corroborated King’s assessment of Bannon’s testimony, saying the one-time the rich asshole campaign manager told the panel their investigation is an attempt “to decertify the last election.”
In an interview with Fox News after Bannon’s appearance before the committee, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) said the former White House aide attempted to invoke a type of executive privilege “that doesn’t exist and that no one’s ever heard of before.”
‘Great work, President Sh*thole’: Internet piles on the rich asshole after he botches the rollout of ‘Fake News Awards’
some rich asshole and Jeb Bush following the CNN debate (Photo: Screen capture via video)
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some rich asshole on Wednesday attempted to dole out his not-at-all-anticipated “Fake News Awards”—but instead linked to a webpage that did not work.
It was a fairy-tale ending to a story nobody wanted to read in the first place, and Internet users were quick to pile on the president for his epic self-own.
Read below:
The link doesn't work.
"The site is temporarily offline, we are working to bring it back up. Please try back later." twitter.com/realDonaldTrum…
Trump moves delayed media awards to an RNC-run site, which promptly crashes #andscene twitter.com/realDonaldTrum…
Here’s the cached version. It’s a damn fundraising poll. We’ve been robbed! webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache…
It's a fine-tuned machine, folks twitter.com/justinsink/sta…
Apparently the fake news awards are... fake? Crashing the GOP.com site? Just a fundraising event and that’s why they require going to the party website? twitter.com/realdonaldtrum…
that this link is broken is too perfect twitter.com/realdonaldtrum…
Aaaand the @GOP website goes down. Zero irony here. twitter.com/realDonaldTrum…
Well, except web traffic. We can't overcome a large volume of web traffic, but, the rest, yes. twitter.com/realDonaldTrum…
And the winner is... pic.twitter.com/SAYiMpoGtF
"the rnc has good servers" is fake news twitter.com/realDonaldTrum…
And the FAKE NEWS winners are...gop.com/the-highly-ant…
DC's hottest club is 404 Error. It has everything. Broken links. FAKE NEWS. A strangely perfect metaphor for this presidency and the complicit @GOP. twitter.com/realDonaldTrum…
Bannon ‘slipped up’ during hearing — and revealed inside information about Trump-Russia meeting: report
Steve Bannon and Donald Trump (Composite / RawStory)
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Former Trump political strategist Steve Bannon reportedly offered new details about his conversations with fellow Trump administration officials about Donald Trump Jr,’s 2016 meeting with Russian intelligence officials during his testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday.
Sources tell Axios that Bannon “made one conspicuous slip up” during his testimony this week where he “admitted that he’d had conversations with Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer and legal spokesman Mark Corallo about Don Junior’s infamous meeting with the Russians in Trump Tower in June 2016.”
This was a key mistake, and sources say that both Republicans and Democrats hammered Bannon for admitting to having these conversations during his time in the White House and then quickly clamming up when asked followup questions about them.
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) was particularly aggressive with Bannon and grilled him about his description of Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with Russian officials in Trump Tower as “treasonous.”
“Gowdy asked Bannon whether he would consider it treason for somebody close to him to approach Wikileaks’ Julian Assange to get opposition research on Hillary Clinton,” writes Axios reporter Jonathan Swan. “Bannon replied that such a scenario would be bad judgment. Then Gowdy produced emails from a Cambridge Analytica employee — the Trump campaign data firm closely affiliated with Bannon — boasting of just such contacts with Assange.”
Corey Lewandowski refuses to answer House intel questions about the time after he left Trump campaign
Corey Lewandowski (CNN/YouTube)
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One of Donald Trump’s former campaign mangers reportedly refused to answer any questions posed by the House Intelligence Committee that center on the time since he left the campaign.
As flagged by Bloomberg’s Billy House on Twitter, Trump’s controversial former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski wouldn’t answer questions pertaining to the time after he was fired from the Trump campaign in late June 2016. He also would not answer questions about whether he’d spoken to the president about his testimony.
As CNN’s Manu Raju noted, Lewandowski’s refusal to answer the House Intelligence Committee’s questions are in direct contrast to the testimony of Rick Dearborn, the White House’s deputy chief of staff for legislative affairs who also testified before the committee on Wednesday. The former campaign manager also said he was “unprepared” to answer the questions the panel posed, and would return to answer them more thoroughly.
Schiff says Corey Lewandowski refused to disclose any information to the committee AFTER he left the campaign in 2016. Told panel he was “unprepared” and would come back another time
Why Trump's alleged affairs with erotic stars aren't hurting him on the right
BY JEET HEER
January 17, 2018
Before the 2016 election, Donald Trump’s legal team and his allies in the press went to extraordinary efforts to suppress stories linking the candidate to porn stars, yet it turns out that their diligence was unnecessary since Trump’s affinity for the world of smut has turned out to have a negligible political effect.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal revealed that in October 2016, Trump lawyer Michael Cohen arranged for $130,000 to be paid to porn actress Stephanie Clifford (who goes under the stage name Stormy Daniels) to keep quiet about an extramarital affair she had with Trump in 2006, a year into his marriage to Melania. On Tuesday, CNN reported that Fox News reporter Diana Falzone had filed a story that same October which provided most of the details in the Journal report, including confirmation of the sexual relationship between Clifford and Trump as well as emails about the non-disclosure settlement she reached with Trump’s lawyers. Falzone’s story was spiked by her superiors. This resembles a similar case from 2016, when the National Enquirer, whose owner David Pecker is a Trump supporter, paid a Playboy model $150,000 for rights to a story about an affair with Trump—and never published it.
In trying to muzzle these stories, Cohen, Fox News, and the National Enquirer were all acting on the assumption that Trump would take a political hit for tawdry sex scandals, especially if they involves a porn actress or Playboy model. Yet there is no reason to think this assumption is true. As the details of these stories eventually became public, they provoked only widespread indifference. “In any other administration, evidence that the president paid hush money to the star of ‘Good Will Humping’ during the election would be a scandal,” New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg noted. “In this one it has, so far, elicited a collective shrug.”
The silence on the left is easily explained by scandal overload. There are so many reasons to be outraged by Trump that an extramarital affair with a porn actress seems trivial, even within the realm of his sexual behavior; the allegation that Trump assaulted porn actress Jennifer Drake in 2006, for instance, is much more serious.
But the silence on the right is more perplexing. Trump is, in the words of National Review’s Kevin Williamson, “the porn president.” Or, as Times columnist Ross Douthat called Trump in 2016, “a Playboy for president.” Both sobriquets carry the ring of truth. Trump, a longtime friend of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, has lived the libertine lifestyle celebrated in pornography. But Williamson and Douthat’s angst doesn’t seem to be widely shared among their fellow defenders of traditional values.
Trump’s ascendency over the Republican Party marks a little noticed, but real shift in American politics: Social conservatives, who once led the crusade against smut, have made their peace with a porn-saturated culture.
Pornography was a political hot button topic from the 1960s until the 1990s, when changes in censorship law and new technologies like video recording made erotic imagery much more pervasive. Along with opposing abortion and gay rights, being anti-porn was one of the key organizing principles of the religious right. In 1997, Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell spoke for many social conservatives when he told CNN, “pornography hurts anyone who reads it, garbage in, garbage out. I think when you feed that stuff into your mind, it definitely affects your relationship with your spouse, your attitude towards life, morality.” But today, Jerry Falwell’s son, Jerry Falwell Jr., is one of Donald Trump’s biggest supporters. (In 2016, he was photographed at Trump’s office in front of a framed copy of a Playboy cover featuring Trump.)
The shift from Falwell’s relentlessly anti-porn position to Falwell Jr.’s indulgence of Trump was made possible because of a wider shift away from the older anti-porn crusades, which perhaps peaked with the Reagan administration’s release of the Meese Report in 1986, which made a dubious effort to link pornography with violent crime. The religious right’s anti-porn push in the last decades of the twentieth century took place at a time when porn was mostly distributed through videotapes and magazines. It was possible to imagine that consumer boycotts could suppress porn. That became far less realistic after the rise of the internet.
Even during the height of anti-porn fervor, there was a small but significant minority of conservatives who were much friendlier to pornography, largely on libertarian grounds. As National Review founder William F. Buckley admitted in 1966, Hugh Hefner had a utilitarian theory of ethics “to which such modern ‘conservatives’ as Ayn Rand seem fully to subscribe.” Hefner’s hedonism also appealed to many conservatives outside the ranks of Rand’s movement. At Buckley’s own magazine there were prominent voices who, echoing the aristocratic libertinism of the eighteenth century, argued that male sexual license was perfectly compatible with traditionalism. The novelist D. Keith Mano, who described himself as a “Christian pornographer,” was a frequent contributor in the 1970s to both Playboy and National Review. In both his fiction and reportage (sometimes touching on the demimonde of strip clubs and cable access porn shows) Mano gustily embraced the sexual free-for-all of the 1970s. Other National Review writers, notably Guy Davenport and Theodore Sturgeon, also dabbled in literary erotica.
Writing in Partisan Review in 1985, National Review senior editor Jeffrey Hart argued“ there is no reason why art cannot deal with erotic experience,” adding, “I have before me the March 1979 issue of Playboy, with a characteristic centerfold depicting one Denise McDonnell. She is without doubt a beautiful human being... I am certainly not sorry this photograph exists.” Hart’s position seemed a decidedly minority one in 1986, when Jerry Falwell Sr. was at the height of his influence. But over time, more conservatives have come around to Hart’s way of thinking. This shift was influenced by the rise of feminism and LGBT rights, which made the cultural ideal found in Playboy seem quaint in its unquestioning acceptance of heterosexuality and traditional gender norms. This is why some conservative websites mourned the death of Hugh Hefner last year: The Federalist’s publisher, Ben Domenech, wrote that Hefner’s work celebrated “the sexual complementarity that has bound men and women together since the dawn of time.”
As Douthat noted in 2016, there was a natural alliance between Trumpism and the porn-loving anti-feminism of the internet age. According to Douthat, “among men who were promised pliant centerfolds and ended up single with only high-speed internet to comfort them, the men’s sexual revolution has curdled into a toxic subculture, resentful of female empowerment in all its forms.” This subculture found its hero in Trump: “This is where you find Trump’s strongest (and, yes, strangest) fans. He’s become the Daddy Alpha for every alpha-aspiring beta male, whose mix of moral liberation and misogyny keeps the Ring-a-Ding-Ding dream alive.” This aligns with Goldberg’s observation, from a liberal perspective, that “Trump has reconciled reactionary politics with male sexual license.”
It’s easy for liberals to decry the hypocrisy of Republicans, the putative party of family values, embracing Trump as its avatar. But there is no real hypocrisy here. The core value is patriarchy, which can take different forms. There is an older patriarchy which wears the mask of chivalry, and offers women protection in exchange for submissiveness. But the age of chivalry is no more. We now have raw patriarchy, which asserts its rights through naked displays of power. And the president, with his porn star mistresses, his boasting of sexual assaults, and even his phallic tweets about the size of his nuclear button, is the perfect leader for conservatives’ post-chivalric world.
Jeet Heer is a senior editor at the New Republic.
Trump Declares That He’s A Better World Leader Than Obama Because He Passed The Cognitive Test
There has probably never been a time in our history when the public has been so concerned over a so-called president’s mental health. And again today we’re reminded why as Donald Trump ventures into an alternate reality without a babysitter. The White House doctor released his findings of the 71-year-old former reality show star’s health and no one believes that he’s in ‘excellent health’ including experts in the field. Trump reportedly asked Dr. Ronny Jackson to do a cognitive test and to our surprise, he’s fit to hold office – allegedly.
And look how hard this ten-minute test is to pass:
I’ve administered this test many many times and it is a test for very basic cognitive functioning...things like draw a clock or write down this sentence I say or fold this paper in half....NOT solve the worlds nuclear problems
Only a ‘stable genius’ could pass that.
On Wednesday, Trump bragged about his score on the cognitive test, then suggested that he scored higher than his predecessors.
In an interview with Reuters, the former reality show star blamed former Presidents Obama, George W. Bush and Clinton for failing to solve the nuclear threat from North Korea, and he touted the cognitive test as the reason he’s successful in solving the world’s problems (LOL).
“I guess they all realized they were going to have to leave it to a president that scored the highest on tests,” Trump said in the interview.
We aren’t aware that Trump’s predecessors took such a test. That’s probably because, even though we differ with some of them politically, they weren’t batshit crazy.
“Russia is not helping us at all with North Korea,” Trump said during an Oval Office interview with Reuters. “What China is helping us with, Russia is denting. In other words, Russia is making up for some of what China is doing.”
Well now! Trump has been warned about Russia since before he took the oath of office and now it’s dawned on him that the hostile foreign country is not besties with the United States. You see how quick he is to pick up on important issues like that an entire year after taking office?
On Tuesday, Dr. Jackson stunned the world by saying that Trump performed well and in the cognitive test and that there was “no indication” that he had any cognitive issues.
Jackson then dismissed scrutiny over the Trump’s mental state, calling it “tabloid psychiatry.”
“People shouldn’t be making those kind of assessments about the president unless they have the opportunity to get to know him and examine him,” he insisted.
But, even as amateurs in the field, while witnessing Trump lashing out at foreign powers on Twitter, we can determine that he’s just not right in the head.
As for his physical health, experts in the field disagree with Jackson. Trump has heart issues. On a positive note, Trump has been declared fit for office, meaning that he can’t plead insanity in court later on down the road.
Meanwhile, Trump’s obsession and jealousy of President Obama is on display for the world to see.
In the heat of his unlikely presidential campaign, some rich asshole declared himself free of the “shackles” of the Republican Party, promising to “fight for America the way I want to” and insisting he would never wish “to be in a foxhole with a lot of these people.”
Yet a year into his presidency, the rich asshole has tightly tethered himself to that same Republican establishment and all but outsourced his agenda to its leaders in Congress. The “populism” so often cited as a major part of the rich asshole’s victory has rapidly proved more rhetorical than real: On the one-year anniversary of his inauguration, the rich asshole will be packing for a trip to Switzerland with much of his wealthy Cabinet to attend the annual Davos conference, a glittery gathering of the global elite.
“To me, populism was the Bannon position,” said Larry Kudlow, referring to the former White House strategist, now pariah, Stephen K. Bannon. “But the rich asshole never bought into it.” Kudlow, a former Reagan administration official and commentator, has occasionally advised the rich asshole.
Establishment Republicans, including some who have feuded with the rich asshole, ended the year closer to him.
"The three areas where success has been achieved — on judicial nominations, on regulations and on tax policy — he's right in the center of mainstream Republican politics, isn't he?" said Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, a Republican who has been one of the rich asshole’s fiercest critics yet recently traveled with him on Air Force One after they united behind the tax-cut legislation.
The rich asshole who vowed to upend the Republican Party remains a force on Twitter and at campaign rallies, rattling many, including world leaders, and redefining the boundaries of presidential behavior. Yet as much as the rich asshole has reshaped the office of the presidency in style and language, he has shape-shifted when it comes to most policy issues.
The one big exception remains on immigration, where the rich asshole has powerfully backed the faction of the GOP — once a small fringe — who want to restrict not only illegal immigration, but legal entry to the U.S. the rich asshole suggested bipartisan flexibility just days ago in a meeting with congressional leaders of both parties, telling them, “I’ll sign whatever immigration bill they send me.” Two days later, he shot down a compromise measure on the subject, with an expletive.
With historically low popularity, the distraction of a widening investigation into his campaign’s Russia ties and possible obstruction of justice, and, not least, his lack of government experience and loose grasp of policy details, the rich asshole has depended far more than he likely ever anticipated on those he long castigated as architects of a rigged system.
Many Republicans harbor doubts, a few publicly, about the rich asshole’s fitness for office and his damaging effect on the party’s brand. Yet almost all seem to have decided that he is the necessary vehicle for their policy agenda, particularly after he abandoned his occasional soak-the-rich talk to sign their $1.5-trillion tax-cut bill — a measure that dramatically reduced corporate taxes, lowered rates for top earners and raised the threshold for paying taxes on multimillion-dollar inheritances.
“At this point, it just appears that candidate the rich asshole was a part in a play, and Donald played candidate the rich asshole rather well. And now he’s playing another role,” said Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the right-leaning Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of “The Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism.”
Many of those who feared the rich asshole might redefine the party in his populist-nationalist image – anti-Wall Street, anti-immigration, anti-free trade and neo-isolationist — find themselves likening his economic policy to date to that of past party leaders.
“This was never a ‘punish the rich’” tax plan, said Kudlow. “He’s not a ‘punish the rich’ guy. Just the opposite. He wants to reward.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican who months ago drew the rich asshole’s blame for the party’s failure to overturn President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, grinned widely earlier this month as he stood beside the president at Camp David, where they plotted the party’s next moves with other Republican congressional leaders.
“From a right-of-center point of view, 2017 was the most consequential year in the many years that I’ve been here in Congress,” McConnell said, employing a bit of Trumpian hyperbole and ignoring the setbacks and unfulfilled promises.
The proposals that are the rich asshole’s biggest departures from the traditional Republican course — on immigration, trade and a “trillion-dollar” infrastructure plan — remain works in progress. In those areas, the rich asshole has elevated ideas once limited to the party’s fringe.
Just five years ago, Republican leaders’ “autopsy” on losing the 2012 presidential election concluded that the party was jeopardizing its future by alienating the growing population of Latinos, and “must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform.” Yet the rich asshole won the next contest by doing just the opposite.
As president he’s embraced an effort to reduce legal as well as illegal immigration, opposes a system for uniting relatives, and proposes financial, education and skills criteria as requirements for legal entry. His early order sharply restricting immigration from some mostly Muslim-majority countries survived legal setbacks, in moderated form.
More recently he’s told nearly 300,000 Salvadorans, Haitians and Nicaraguans, who’ve long had temporary residency, to leave by next year; many have children born here as U.S. citizens. He ordered an end by March to protections from deportation for about 700,000 so-called Dreamers who came to this country illegally as children, though his order has been blocked temporarily in the courts. And he has privately railed against taking in any people from Haiti and what he called “shithole” African countries.
On another signature issue, the rich asshole has not yet followed through on promises to kill trade deals and punish China as a currency manipulator. The North American Free Trade Agreement remains in force after more than 20 years. the rich asshole still threatens to kill it if he is unsatisfied with the result of renegotiations with Mexico and Canada but has repeatedly pushed back the deadline for negotiations. In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, he said no action would take place until after the Mexican presidential election, scheduled for July 1.
the rich asshole’s withdrawal from the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was a bipartisan initiative of his two predecessors, but largely dead by the time the rich asshole took office, has been his most consequential move on trade. Formally quitting the pact cheered blue-collar supporters but worried economists and foreign policy analysts who say China is usurping American influence in the region.
While the Republican Party was long committed to free trade, it did have a growing faction of protectionists. the rich asshole has tipped the balance in their favor.
Lanhee Chen, a pro-trade Republican and former policy advisor to Mitt Romney, now at the conservative Hoover Institution, said, “What the rich asshole has done is not so much shifted the party but given voice to a part of the party” on immigration and trade.
“One of the things that the rich asshole’s election may have exposed,” Chen added, “is that there are a lot more Americans that are hard-edged on immigration than you think.”
He and other traditional conservatives have been more surprised that the rich asshole moved their way so swiftly on other economic policy, jettisoning promises to make his fellow wealthy Americans pay more taxes. Most notably, the rich asshole abandoned efforts to close a loophole known as carried interest which lets hedge fund managers pay lower rates. Not only did the rich asshole forgo that fight, he also pushed in final negotiations to lower rates on top earners even further.
Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and the rich asshole ally who generally gives him credit as a transformational figure, said, “There’s not enough up side to be worth the effort” to move the Republican Party on taxes. “It goes against the whole core culture of the party.”
the rich asshole and his allies now argue — echoing supply-siders back to Reagan’s time — that the tax cuts will help the middle class as the benefits for the wealthy and businesses are more widely shared. Also, they point to increases in the standard deduction and a larger credit for parents. Yet independent analyses show that, over time, even more of the tax cuts’ benefits will go to high earners and corporations.
“This is the biggest political bait-and-switch I’ve ever seen,” said Jared Bernstein, a top economic advisor in the Obama administration.
Bernstein said the rich asshole largely let congressional Republicans write the bill — a contention that Republicans have been happy to confirm.
The administration “basically let the four horsemen over here drive it,” said Corker, referring to Republican leaders McConnell and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin and the chairmen of the House and Senate tax-writing committees.
12:38 a.m. ET 01-17-2018
President the rich asshole appears remarkably healthy for a 71-year-old man who doesn't eat well or exercise, and he aced a rudimentary cognitive ability test (you can take it yourself here), according to Dr. Ronny Jackson, the White House doctor appointed by former President Barack Obama in 2013. But not everyone is buying Jackson's assessment that the rich asshole is 6-foot-3 and weighs 239 pounds, giving him a barely sub-obesity body mass index (BMI) of 29.9. MSNBC's Chris Hayes came up with the name:
The main argument seems to be that since muscle weighs more than fat, the rich asshole can't possibly weigh the same as professional athletes of roughly the same build. One example of many:
Sports Illustrated compiled many other the rich asshole vs. athlete visual comparisons. Did the commander in chief order Jackson, a two-star Navy admiral, to tip the scales, so to speak? Some "girthers" are putting their money where their doubts are.
I will give 100 thousand dollars to Trump's favorite charity if he will step on an accurate scale with an impartial medical professional, okayed by both of us. For real. #Girther #GirtherMovement
Others doubt that the rich asshole is actually 6-foot-3.
Reminder that earlier physicals decades ago put Trump height at 6’2”. The 6’3” height makes a difference on his BMI from overweight to obese twitter.com/alivitali/stat…
The "girthers" already have counter-girthers, including Fox News analyst Brit Hume.
Because he was listed as an inch shorter earlier. Please. BTW, I’m the same height and am a bit overweight at 190. He looks to me about 50 pounds heavier than I am.
The Hume conversation ended on kind of a strange note, but that's par for the course in 2018. Peter Weber
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