January 3rd, 2018. 415-415 days since the Nov 8, 2016, election of some rich asshole, no.45, and 345-345 days since the Jan 20th inauguration.

Welcome to Blunderdome: Internet can’t decide who to root for in Bannon vs. the rich asshole

BRAD REED
03 JAN 2018 AT 14:17 ET

Steve Bannon and some rich asshole (Composite / RawStory)

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President some rich asshole is now in a public feud with former White House political strategist Steve Bannon, who attacked members of the president’s family in a new book written by reporter Michael Wolff.

After Bannon said that special counsel Robert Mueller would “crack Don Jr. like an egg,” while also calling out the rich asshole son-in-law Jared Kushner for allegedly running “greasy” money laundering operations, the rich asshole hit back and said that his former campaign manager had “lost his mind.”

Given the unpopularity of both men, many Twitter users had a difficult time choosing sides in the fight — and most of them seemed to just be rooting for injuries.

Check out the best reactions below.

Manafort sues DOJ, Mueller over Russia probe authority

By Evan Perez, CNN Justice Correspondent Updated 4:02 PM ET, Wed January 3, 2018

(CNN)Paul Manafort, the former the rich asshole campaign chairman indicted on money laundering and other charges, filed a lawsuit challenging the broad authority of special counsel Robert Mueller and alleging the Justice Department violated the law in appointing Mueller.

The suit brought Wednesday in US District Court in Washington where Manafort and another former the rich asshole campaign aide are charged, challenges Mueller's decision to charge Manafort with alleged crimes that they say have nothing to do with the 2016 campaign, but rather relate to lucrative lobbying work Manafort and his deputy did for a former Russia-friendly government in Ukraine. That work ended in 2014, the suit says. Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates deny the allegations in the charges.

Trump lawyers talked with special counsel team

the rich asshole lawyers talked with special counsel team

The legal action represents a new tack in a broader effort by supporters of the President to push back on the special counsel. Some Republicans have begun publicly calling for Mueller's probe to be shut down. Manafort's attorneys have echoed the President's criticism that Mueller's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election is pursuing crimes that never happened.

The Manafort lawsuit alleges Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Mueller have unlawfully exceeded the authorities allowed under the law governing special counsel appointments. The lawsuit contends that the order Rosenstein signed to appoint Mueller "exceeds the scope of Mr. Rosenstein's authority to appoint special counsel as well as specific restrictions on the scope of such appointments."

A DOJ spokesperson responded with a statement, saying: "The lawsuit is frivolous but the defendant is entitled to file whatever he wants."

The lawsuit's focus is on a part of the Rosenstein order that says that Mueller may investigate "any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation." The Manafort lawyers say that goes beyond what the law allows Rosenstein to empower Mueller to do.

The Rosenstein order gives Mueller "carte blanche to investigate and pursue criminal charges in connection with anything he stumbles across while investigating, no matter how remote from the specific matter identified as the subject of the appointment order," the lawsuit says.

Manafort and Gates face a total of 12 criminal charges related to money laundering and failure to file federal disclosures. Both Manafort and Gates have pleaded not guilty and are scheduled to appear again before the judge in the criminal case on January 16.

the rich asshole Campaign Operative Just Filed Lawsuit AGAINST Special Counsel Mueller To END His Investigation

Sean W

January 3, 2018

Numerous sources confirm that former the rich asshole campaign chairman Paul Manafort has filed a lawsuit against special counsel Robert Mueller today in the US District Court in Washington where Manafort was charged, in an attempt to save himself from jail time.

Manafort, who has been indicted on money laundering and other charges, filed the lawsuit to challenge the “broad authority” of special counsel Mueller and is alleging that the Justice Department somehow violated the law in appointing Mueller.

Manafort’s lawsuit specifically alleges and argues that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Mueller have broken law that governs special counsel appointments. The lawsuit specifically says that Rosenstein appointing Mueller “exceeds the scope of Mr. Rosenstein’s authority to appoint special counsel as well as specific restrictions on the scope of such appointments.”

In particular, the argument of this suit focuses on Rosenstein’s order that says that Mueller may investigate “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.” Manafort is attempting to argue that this directive is illegal. In other words, Manafort and his team are arguing that Mueller had no right to discover their illegal activity.

The lawsuit says that Rosenstein’s order gives Mueller “carte blanche to investigate and pursue criminal charges in connection with anything he stumbles across while investigating, no matter how remote from the specific matter identified as the subject of the appointment order.”

From my understanding of the law, you can’t sue a prosecutor, they have immunity from this kind of suit, and you can’t sue a prosecutor if you’re a defendant in a pending case, which in my opinion, means this suit will be dismissed immediately and the lawyer that filed it will hopefully be sanctioned for such insanity. This is pure desperation as Manafort and his associate Gates are facing 12 criminal charges related to money laundering.

the rich asshole Breaks With Bannon, Saying He Has ‘Lost His Mind’

By EILEEN SULLIVAN, PETER BAKER and MAGGIE HABERMAN

JAN. 3, 2018

WASHINGTON — President the rich asshole essentially excommunicated his onetime chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, from his political circle on Wednesday, excoriating him as a self-promoting exaggerator who had “very little to do with our historic victory” and has now “lost his mind.”

In a written statement brimming with anger and resentment, some rich asshole fired back at Mr. Bannon, who had made caustic comments about the president and his family to the author of a new book about the rich asshole White House. While Mr. Bannon had remained in touch with some rich asshole even after being pushed out of the White House last summer, the two now appear to have reached a breaking point.

“Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency,” some rich asshole said in the statement. “When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.”

some rich asshole berated Mr. Bannon for the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama and said the former adviser did not represent his base but was “only in it for himself.” Rather than supporting the president’s agenda to “make America great again,” Mr. Bannon was “simply seeking to burn it all down,” some rich asshole said.

“Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was,” he added. “It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.”

The president was responding to comments attributed to Mr. Bannon in a new book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the rich asshole White House,” by Michael Wolff. The forthcoming book was obtained by The Guardian, which first reported Mr. Bannon’s jolting remarks.

In the book, Mr. Bannon was quoted suggesting that some rich asshole Jr., the future president’s son; Jared Kushner, his son-in-law; and Paul J. Manafort, then the campaign chairman, had been “treasonous” and “unpatriotic” for meeting with Russians offering incriminating information on Hillary Clinton during a June 2016 meeting in the rich asshole Tower.

“Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the F.B.I. immediately,” Mr. Bannon continued, according to the book.

According to Mr. Wolff, Mr. Bannon also predicted that a special counsel investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and any coordination with the rich asshole aides would ultimately center on money laundering, an assessment that could lend credibility to an investigation the president has repeatedly called a witch hunt. “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV,” Mr. Bannon was quoted as saying.

some rich asshole Jr. did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But he jabbed at Mr. Bannon on Twitter on Wednesday when he reposted a message noting that Alabama now had a Democratic senator. “Thanks Steve,” the younger some rich asshole wrote. “Keep up the great work.”

Mr. Bannon helped propel Roy Moore to the Republican nomination in Alabama and then stuck by him after the candidate was accused of sexual misconduct with several young women as young as age 14. At Mr. Bannon’s urging, some rich asshole decided to endorse Mr. Mooreeven after the allegations surfaced, only to be embarrassed when the Democrat, Doug Jones, won the election last year in a heavily Republican state that had not sent a Democrat to the Senate in a quarter-century.

Mr. Bannon, the architect of some rich asshole’s nationalist and populist agenda, left the White House in August to return to the far-right Breitbart News. Mr. Bannon had said he planned to back a slew of candidates in Republican primaries this year to take down establishment incumbents he saw as insufficiently conservative, even if it clashed with some rich asshole’s endorsements.

That did not seem to bother some rich asshole and indeed struck many as a way for the president to keep Mr. Bannon as an outside hammer pressuring Republican lawmakers to stay in line. But some rich asshole and Mr. Bannon have grown increasingly estranged, especially since the Alabama defeat. some rich asshole grew even more upset with Mr. Bannon about an interview with Vanity Fair late last year that painted a poor picture of Mr. Kushner, criticizing his meetings with Russians during the presidential transition.

During his Christmas break at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, some rich asshole stewed over what to say about Mr. Bannon’s comments to Vanity Fair. The president consulted with several advisers and family members about whether he should respond at all, according to three advisers familiar with the discussions. Ultimately, the president decided not to say anything publicly, as aides cautioned that it would draw more attention to Mr. Bannon’s remarks.

But accusing the president’s eldest son of treason crossed the line, even for an inner circle of aides who regularly fought and privately disparaged each other.

An excerpt from Mr. Wolff’s book, published in New York magazine on Wednesday, cites derogatory comments about some rich asshole from some of the president’s closest allies.

At least one person named in the book pushed back against it on Wednesday. Thomas J. Barrack, a friend and adviser to some rich asshole, was quoted telling a friend that the president is “not only crazy, he’s stupid.”

Reached by telephone on Wednesday, Mr. Barrack said this account was “totally false.” Mr. Barrack added, “It’s clear to anyone who knows me that those aren’t my words and inconsistent with anything I’ve ever said.” He said that Mr. Wolff never ran that quotation by him to ask if it was accurate.

Mr. Wolff was frequently seen in Mr. Bannon’s office while the Breitbart chairman was working in the White House. According to two advisers to some rich asshole, Mr. Wolff spoke with the president once, for about 15 minutes, in the first month of the administration, when some rich asshole called Mr. Wolff to thank him for his criticism of a Times article that the president did not like.

The White House on Wednesday attacked not just Mr. Bannon but the book as a whole, hoping to diminish its reporting. “This book is filled with false and misleading accounts from individuals who have no access or influence with the White House,” said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary. “Participating in a book that can only be described as trashy tabloid fiction exposes their sad desperate attempts at relevancy.”

The book presents some rich asshole as an ill-informed and thoroughly unserious candidate and president, engaged mainly in satisfying his own ego. It reports that early in the campaign, one aide, Sam Nunberg, was sent to explain the Constitution to the candidate. “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment,” it quoted Mr. Nunberg as saying, “before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.”

According to the book, neither some rich asshole nor his wife, Melania the rich asshole, nor many of his aides actually expected to win the election in November 2016 and indeed did not really want to. It describes a distraught Mrs. the rich asshole as being in tears on election night, not out of joy, and said the new president and first lady were fighting on Inauguration Day.

Mrs. the rich asshole authorized her office to rebut the book on Wednesday. “The book is clearly going to be sold in the bargain fiction section,” said Stephanie Grisham, the first lady’s communications director. “Mrs. the rich asshole supported her husband’s decision to run for president and in fact encouraged him to do so. She was confident he would win and was very happy when he did.”

Fox & Friends host delivers racist attack on Mueller grand jury

Kilmeade goes there.

MELANIE SCHMITZ JAN 3, 2018, 10:26 AM

During a segment on Fox & Friends Wednesday — President the rich asshole’s favorite morning news show — host Brian Kilmeade argued that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was not “demographically pursuing justice“ in the Russia investigation because his federal grand jury included too many black jurors. The comment was in response to a leak published in New York Post, during which an anonymous source claimed grand jury panel looked like a “Black Lives Matter rally.”

“[The source from the New York Post interview] described the jury as a–people that would appear at a Bernie Sanders rally,” Kilmeade stated, quoting the Post’s source. “So it’s not even emblematic of something that might be, perhaps, demographically pursuing justice.”

Kilmeade’s sentiment’s echoed the Post’s unnamed source, who appeared very sympathetic to the rich asshole.

The grand jury room looks like a Bernie Sanders rally. Maybe they found these jurors in central casting, or at a Black Lives Matter rally in Berkeley, [California]…. There was only one white male in the room, and he was a prosecutor.

The witness also claimed that 11 of the 20 jurors on Mueller’s panel were Black, and that two had been wearing “peace T-shirts.”

“That room isn’t a room where POTUS gets a fair shake,” they said, insinuating that more white jurors were necessary for the process to be deemed fair and credible.

Both the New York Post and Fox News, the home of Fox & Friends, are owned by News Corp media mogul Rupert Murdoch, a conservative publisher and the rich asshole ally.

Both Kilmeade’s comments on Wednesday and the incendiary Post interview are the latest in a long line of attempts by conservatives to undermine the ongoing Mueller investigation, which centers on Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, and recently handed down several charges against former the rich asshole campaign officials Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. Former foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos and the rich asshole’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn have also pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about their communications with Russian officials.

the rich asshole himself has spent much of the past year insisting that the Mueller probe is a partisan witch-hunt meant to delegitimize his victory. Many of the rich asshole’s strongest supporters have joined his effort to discredit the special counsel’s office.

In November, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) introduced a resolution calling for Mueller to recuse himself, effectively bringing the Russia investigation to a halt. Gaetz argued that Mueller was biased due to his prior involvement with the largely debunked Uranium One scandal.

One month later, congressional Republicans also called for an investigation into the Russia probe itself, arguing that the personal political beliefs of two former staffers proved the investigation had been tainted from the start. Their claim hinged on a series of private text messages from 2016 between senior FBI agent Peter Strzok and senior FBI lawyer Lisa Page, in which the two discussed their mutual dislike of then-candidate the rich asshole. Both Strzok and Page were dismissed from the case earlier in the year after the messages first came to light.

The person anonymously leaking racist attacks on the Mueller grand jury sounds a lot like the rich asshole

A tipster straight out of "central casting."

JUDD LEGUM JAN 3, 2018, 12:32 PM

On Tuesday, the New York Post published an extraordinary leak about the grand jury impaneled by Robert Mueller as part of his investigation into the the rich asshole campaign’s potential collusion with Russia.

The piece — written by Richard Johnson, a Page Six gossip columnist — quoted a source discussing the nature of the jury, even though the composition and activities of the grand jury are supposed to be secret.

“The grand jury room looks like a Bernie Sanders rally,” my source said. “Maybe they found these jurors in central casting, or at a Black Lives Matter rally in Berkeley [Calif.]”

Of the 20 jurors, 11 are African-Americans and two were wearing “peace T-shirts,” the witness said. “There was only one white male in the room, and he was a prosecutor.” Mueller was not present.

The quote drips with racism — suggesting that, unless there is a minimum number of white people in a jury room, the process is illegitimate.

And whoever leaked this tidbit to the New York Post sounds an awful lot like some rich asshole.

“Central casting” is a the rich asshole signature

The most telling aspect of the anonymous quote provided to the New York Post is the source’s use of the term “central casting.”

This term, which originated in the entertainment industry to describe someone whose appearance matches the stereotypes associated with an acting role, is a favorite phrase of the rich asshole’s.

“[Pence] has been so wonderful to work with. He’s a real talent, a real guy. And he is central casting, do we agree? Central casting,” the rich asshole told the National Governor’s Association in February in reference to his vice president.

“This is central casting. If I was doing a movie, I pick you, general,” the rich asshole said of his Secretary of Defense, General James Mattis, last January.

the rich asshole has also used the phrase to defend his plan to discriminate against certain immigrants. “But, you know, they want you to look at a woman who’s in a wheelchair, that’s 88 years old, and barely making it, and let’s say, comes out of Sweden. She’s supposed to be treated the same way as a guy that looks just like the guy that just got captured, who is central casting for profiling,” the rich asshole said in September 2016.

the rich asshole’s use of the phrase “central casting” is so pervasive that multiple articles have been written on the subject over the past year.

MSNBC took on the topic last February, reporting that the president is “preoccupied” with the term.

The same month, the New York Times also referenced the rich asshole’s fondness for the phrase, describing it as “one of his favorite accolades.”

In announcing Neil M. Gorsuch as his Supreme Court nominee during atelevised event Tuesday night at the White House, President the rich asshole rightly extolled the judge’s “brilliance,” academic credentials and qualifications, but, interestingly, he left out one of his favorite accolades: that the choice was straight out of “central casting.”

The New York Times noted the rich asshole’s predilection for the phrase again last October, in a piece discussing his choice of Jerome Powell to head the Federal Reserve.

One White House official described Mr. Powell as a “safe” choice as well as the candidate who most closely fit some rich asshole’s penchant for filling top jobs with characters from “central casting,” as he has often put it.

the rich asshole’s cozy relationship with Richard Johnson

In addition to the Trumpian speech patterns in the anonymous quote, it was also published by a reporter who has deep ties to some rich asshole.

Although Richard Johnson is now a columnist, he served as editor for Page Six from 1993 to 2010 — a publication that is famously revered by the rich asshole. Susan Mulcahy, who served as Page Six editor in the 1980s, wrote last June that the rich asshole “loves Page Six and used to have it brought it to him the moment it arrived in his office.” She described speaking to him on a regular basis during her tenure.

Johnson is on record about his close relationship to the rich asshole. Last month, he detailed their connections in a column entitled “Richard Johnson’s life with the Donald.”

In that column, Johnson revealed that he “served as a judge for the Miss Universe pageant when the rich asshole owned the franchise.” He also described a personal conversation he had with the rich asshole shortly after he won the presidential election.

Many of Johnson’s recent columns appear to rely on sources close to the rich asshole. A December 24 column, for example, provides details of a White House Christmas Party that was closed to the press. “[S]ome of the guests were so thrilled by the experience, they couldn’t maintain their silence,” Johnson wrote.

The sourcing on Johnson’s New York Post story from Tuesday leaves open the possibility that the anonymous quote did not necessarily come from someone who has served as a witness in Mueller’s investigation. Johnson writes the information about the grand jury was relayed to him from “one witness.” But he describes his conversation with “a source” without specifying whether his “source” was the “witness.”

the rich asshole has a history of being an anonymous source for stories. For years, a spokesman named John Barron would defend the rich asshole in various news outlets. It was later revealed that Barron was actually the rich asshole himself.

But of course, just because Page Six’s source sounds a lot like the rich asshole does not definitively mean it is the rich asshole. It could also be, for example, someone who has picked up the rich asshole’s speech patterns by spending a lot of time with him. the rich asshole’s adult sons, Eric and Don Jr., fall in this category.

Regardless of the anonymous quote’s origin, it certainly fits into a long pattern of efforts by the rich asshole and his allies to discredit Mueller.

And if the source of the anonymous quote hoped to spark a bigger narrative about the credibility of the Mueller investigation, it appears to be working. The anonymous tipster’s point was echoed on Wednesday morning by Brian Kilmeade, the co-host of Fox & Friends, the rich asshole’s favorite TV show. Kilmeade claimed that Mueller was not “demographically pursuing justice” because he failed to include enough white people on the grand jury.

‘They’re going to crack Don Jr. like an egg’: Bannon rips the rich asshole Jr.’s ‘treasonous’ Russia meeting

Breitbart previously defended the meeting at the rich asshole Tower.

LUKE BARNES JAN 3, 2018, 12:10 PM

Steve Bannon, President the rich asshole’s former White House chief strategist, said that some rich asshole Jr.’s meeting with a group of Russians during the 2016 election was “treasonous” and “unpatriotic”, according to an explosive new book transcript seen by The Guardian. The admission stands in stark contrast to previous comments Bannon’s own website, Breitbart, has made regarding the meeting.

Bannon was speaking to author Michael Wolff, whose upcoming book, Fire and Fury: Inside the the rich asshole White House, is based on more than 200 interviews with the president and other high-ranking members of the administration. In it, Bannon mocks the decision of the rich asshole Jr., then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner to meet Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at the rich asshole Tower for documents that would “incriminate” Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

“The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside the rich asshole Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor — with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers,” Bannon said to Wolff. “Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.” He added that he thought it likely that Robert Mueller’s probe would hone in on money laundering and said, “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV.”

On Wednesday, NBC News correspondent Peter Alexander also reported that, according to excerpts from the book, Bannon believed the rich asshole Jr. had “taken the [meeting] participants to see his father.” He quoted Bannon as saying, “The chance that Don Jr. did not walk these Jumos up to his father’s office of the 26th floor is zero.”

As the BBC’s Jon Sopel noted on Wednesday, in his recent New York Times interview, the rich asshole ridiculed the idea of collusion 23 times — an idea which this latest Bannon statement completely undercuts.

Bannon returned as executive chairman of Breitbart News last September after taking a year-long leave of absence to work for the rich asshole’s campaign — and later, the White House. During that time, his publication wrote scathing takedowns, criticizing reports that claimed the rich asshole Jr.’s Russia meeting was any sort of “smoking gun.”

On July 10 — the same day The New York Times published its story about the meeting — Breitbart wrote a piece that claimed the report was “only the latest effort by the Times to bring down President some rich asshole that relies on documents it has not seen and verified.” The next day, Breitbart described a rally outside the White House, spurred by the Times’ revelations, as “Soros-funded.” On July 14, Breitbart editor-at-large Joel Pollak described the story as “just the latest example of the solipsistic hysteria of the rich asshole’s critics, still desperate to undo the 2016 election.”

According to Axios, Bannon’s latest comments have shocked sources close to the president. Since leaving the White House, the Breitbart chairman has doubled-down on his right-wing populist agenda, campaigning for Roy Moore while continuing to attack White House insiders, particularly Jared Kushner. As Vanity Fair reported in December, Bannon blamed Kushner for giving the appearance that the the rich asshole campaign was taking meetings with foreign governments for dirt on Clinton.

“They were looking for the picture of Hillary Clinton taking the bag of cash from Putin,” Bannon said. “That’s his [Jared’s] maturity level.”

Bannon has openly criticized the Russia meeting before, telling Charlie Rose in an interview after leaving his position at the White House in September, “You know, I don’t know why people had to have meetings with other countries. I thought there was more than enough there.”

Looking past the rich asshole and his ‘powerful’ nuclear button, the Koreas thaw diplomatic relations

While President the rich asshole threatens North Korea with his "bigger and more powerful" nuclear arsenal, Pyongyang reopens a phone line with South Korea.

D. PARVAZ JAN 3, 2018, 11:33 AM

While President some rich asshole was focused on responding to Kim Jong Un’s nuclear taunts by saying the nuclear button on his desk is “bigger and more powerful” (he doesn’t actually have a button), North Korea took a key step in resuming diplomatic talks.

North Korea on Wednesday announced that it would reopen a phone line at the border village of Panmunjom, (known as the “truce village” after U.N. talks were held there in 1951 and 1953). The line is seen as a hotline to South Korea, where officials received a call from the North Wednesday afternoon, Reuters reported. No details were released about the contents of the call, which lasted 20 minutes.

The line had been closed for almost two years.

On Tuesday, just as the rich asshole was reminding North Korea that his nonexistent nuclear button “works,” South Korea proposed discussions with its neighbor on the peninsula in a move to ease tensions over Pyongyang’s ballistic missile and nuclear programs.

Reuters quotes unnamed U.S. officials who said the United States would not take these talks “seriously” unless they included North Korea walking away from its nuclear program — a condition the country has rejected as a non-starter. A spokesman for South Korean president Moon Jae-in seemed to take the call seriously, however, saying that the reopening of the hotline was “significant.”

Long worried over the rich asshole’s heated exchanges with North Korea — ranging from threatening “fire and fury” and total destruction to schoolyard name-calling — Seoul has been calling for a diplomatic solution, even if it does not include the rich asshole, who is seen there as a “liability to world peace.” Things seemed to come to a head in early December, when a foreign ministry official said war was just a matter of “when.”

China, which also shares a border with North Korea, began preparing its civilian population for nuclear fallout and started planning for refugee camps at its borders in anticipation of war.

Still, while taunting the rich asshole with his own nuclear button, Kim indicated in his New Year address that he was open to talks with South Korea and is considering allowing North Korean athletes to participate in winter Olympics in Pyongyang next month.

North Korea has been ramping up its missile tests since the summer, insisting that it has the right to a nuclear weapons program as a means of self-preservation against what it views as existential threats — joint South Korea-U.S. military exercises, as well as a heightened military protocols in Japan and China.

Although Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has, at times, indicated that the United States is open to talks with North Korea — even if it’s just about the weather — President the rich asshole has made it clear that he feels negotiations are a waste of time.

some rich asshole Didn’t Want to Be President

One year ago: the plan to lose, and the administration’s shocked first days.

By MICHAEL WOLFF

Illustrations By JEFFREY SMITH

Election Night: It “looked as if he had seen a ghost.” January 3, 2018 11:53 am

On the afternoon of November 8, 2016, Kellyanne Conway settled into her glass office at the rich asshole Tower. Right up until the last weeks of the race, the campaign headquarters had remained a listless place. All that seemed to distinguish it from a corporate back office were a few posters with right-wing slogans.

Conway, the campaign’s manager, was in a remarkably buoyant mood, considering she was about to experience a resounding, if not cataclysmic, defeat. some rich asshole would lose the election — of this she was sure — but he would quite possibly hold the defeat to under six points. That was a substantial victory. As for the looming defeat itself, she shrugged it off: It was Reince Priebus’s fault, not hers.

She had spent a good part of the day calling friends and allies in the political world and blaming Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee. Now she briefed some of the television producers and anchors whom she had been carefully courting since joining the rich asshole campaign — and with whom she had been actively interviewing in the last few weeks, hoping to land a permanent on-air job after the election.

Even though the numbers in a few key states had appeared to be changing to the rich asshole’s advantage, neither Conway nor the rich asshole himself nor his son-in-law, Jared Kushner — the effective head of the campaign — wavered in their certainty: Their unexpected adventure would soon be over. Not only would the rich asshole not be president, almost everyone in the campaign agreed, he should probably not be. Conveniently, the former conviction meant nobody had to deal with the latter issue.

As the campaign came to an end, the rich asshole himself was sanguine. His ultimate goal, after all, had never been to win. “I can be the most famous man in the world,” he had told his aide Sam Nunberg at the outset of the race. His longtime friend Roger Ailes, the former head of Fox News, liked to say that if you want a career in television, first run for president. Now the rich asshole, encouraged by Ailes, was floating rumors about a the rich asshole network. It was a great future. He would come out of this campaign, the rich asshole assured Ailes, with a far more powerful brand and untold opportunities.

“This is bigger than I ever dreamed of,” he told Ailes a week before the election. “I don’t think about losing, because it isn’t losing. We’ve totally won.”

From the start, the leitmotif for the rich asshole about his own campaign was how crappy it was, and how everybody involved in it was a loser. In August, when he was trailing Hillary Clinton by more than 12 points, he couldn’t conjure even a far-fetched scenario for achieving an electoral victory. He was baffled when the right-wing billionaire Robert Mercer, a Ted Cruz backer whom the rich asshole barely knew, offered the rich asshole’s campaign an infusion of $5 million. the rich asshole didn’t turn down the help—he just expressed vast incomprehension about why anyone would want to do that. “This thing,” he told Mercer, “is so fucked up.”

Steve Bannon, who became chief executive of the rich asshole’s team in mid-August, called it “the broke-dick campaign.” Almost immediately, he saw that it was hampered by an even deeper structural flaw: The candidate who billed himself as a billionaire — ten times over — refused to invest his own money in it. Bannon told Kushner that, after the first debate in September, they would need another $50 million to cover them until Election Day.

“No way we’ll get 50 million unless we can guarantee him victory,” said a clear-eyed Kushner.

“Twenty-five million?” prodded Bannon.

“If we can say victory is more than likely.”

In the end, the best the rich asshole would do is to loan the campaign
$10 million, provided he got it back as soon as they could raise other money. Steve Mnuchin, the campaign’s finance chairman, came to collect the loan with the wire instructions ready to go so the rich asshole couldn’t conveniently forget to send the money.

Most presidential candidates spend their entire careers, if not their lives from adolescence, preparing for the role. They rise up the ladder of elected offices, perfect a public face, and prepare themselves to win and to govern. The rich asshole calculation, quite a conscious one, was different. The candidate and his top lieutenants believed they could get all the benefits of almost becoming president without having to change their behavior or their worldview one whit. Almost everybody on the rich asshole team, in fact, came with the kind of messy conflicts bound to bite a president once he was in office. Michael Flynn, the retired general who served as the rich asshole’s opening act at campaign rallies, had been told by his friends that it had not been a good idea to take $45,000 from the Russians for a speech. “Well, it would only be a problem if we won,” Flynn assured them.

Not only did the rich asshole disregard the potential conflicts of his own business deals and real-estate holdings, he audaciously refused to release his tax returns. Why should he? Once he lost, the rich asshole would be both insanely famous and a martyr to Crooked Hillary. His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared would be international celebrities. Steve Bannon would become the de facto head of the tea-party movement. Kellyanne Conway would be a cable-news star. Melania the rich asshole, who had been assured by her husband that he wouldn’t become president, could return to inconspicuously lunching. Losing would work out for everybody. Losing was winning.

Shortly after 8 p.m. on Election Night, when the unexpected trend — the rich asshole might actually win — seemed confirmed, Don Jr. told a friend that his father, or DJT, as he calls him, looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania was in tears—and not of joy.

There was, in the space of little more than an hour, in Steve Bannon’s not unamused observation, a befuddled the rich asshole morphing into a disbelieving the rich asshole and then into a horrified the rich asshole. But still to come was the final transformation: Suddenly, some rich asshole became a man who believed that he deserved to be, and was wholly capable of being, the president of the United States.

From the moment of victory, the rich asshole administration became a looking-glass presidency: Every inverse assumption about how to assemble and run a White House was enacted and compounded, many times over. The decisions that the rich asshole and his top advisers made in those first few months — from the slapdash transition to the disarray in the West Wing — set the stage for the chaos and dysfunction that have persisted throughout his first year in office. This was a real-life version of Mel Brooks’s The Producers, where the mistaken outcome trusted by everyone in the rich asshole’s inner circle — that they would lose the election — wound up exposing them for who they really were.

On the Saturday after the election, the rich asshole received a small group of well-wishers in his triplex apartment in the rich asshole Tower. Even his close friends were still shocked and bewildered, and there was a dazed quality to the gathering. But the rich asshole himself was mostly looking at the clock. Rupert Murdoch, who had promised to pay a call on the president-elect, was running late. When some of the guests made a move to leave, an increasingly agitated the rich asshole assured them that Rupert was on his way. “He’s one of the greats, the last of the greats,” the rich asshole said. “You have to stay to see him.” Not grasping that he was now the most powerful man in the world, the rich asshole was still trying mightily to curry favor with a media mogul who had long disdained him as a charlatan and fool.

Few people who knew the rich asshole had illusions about him. That was his appeal: He was what he was. Twinkle in his eye, larceny in his soul. Everybody in his rich-guy social circle knew about his wide-ranging ignorance. Early in the campaign, Sam Nunberg was sent to explain the Constitution to the candidate. “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment,” Nunberg recalled, “before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.”

The day after the election, the bare-bones transition team that had been set up during the campaign hurriedly shifted from Washington to the rich asshole Tower. The building — now the headquarters of a populist revolution — suddenly seemed like an alien spaceship on Fifth Avenue. But its otherworldly air helped obscure the fact that few in the rich asshole’s inner circle, with their overnight responsibility for assembling a government, had any relevant experience.

Ailes, a veteran of the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush 41 administrations, tried to impress on the rich asshole the need to create a White House structure that could serve and protect him. “You need a son of a bitch as your chief of staff,” he told the rich asshole. “And you need a son of a bitch who knows Washington. You’ll want to be your own son of a bitch, but you don’t know Washington.” Ailes had a suggestion: John Boehner, who had stepped down as Speaker of the House only a year earlier.

“Who’s that?” asked the rich asshole.

As much as the president himself, the chief of staff determines how the Executive branch — which employs 4 million people — will run. The job has been construed as deputy president, or even prime minister. But the rich asshole had no interest in appointing a strong chief of staff with a deep knowledge of Washington. Among his early choices for the job was Kushner — a man with no political experience beyond his role as a calm and flattering body man to the rich asshole during the campaign.

It was Ann Coulter who finally took the president-elect aside. “Nobody is apparently telling you this,” she told him. “But you can’t. You just can’t hire your children.”

Bowing to pressure, the rich asshole floated the idea of giving the job to Steve Bannon, only to have the notion soundly ridiculed. Murdoch told the rich asshole that Bannon would be a dangerous choice. Joe Scarborough, the former congressman and co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, told the president-elect that “Washington will go up in flames” if Bannon became chief of staff.

So the rich asshole turned to Reince Priebus, the RNC chairman, who had became the subject of intense lobbying by House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. If congressional leaders were going to have to deal with an alien like some rich asshole, then best they do it with the help of one of their own kind.

Jim Baker, chief of staff for both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and almost everybody’s model for managing the West Wing, advised Priebus not to take the job. Priebus had his own reservations: He had come out of his first long meeting with the rich asshole thinking it had been a disconcertingly weird experience. the rich asshole talked nonstop and constantly repeated himself.

“Here’s the deal,” a close the rich asshole associate told Priebus. “In an hour meeting with him, you’re going to hear 54 minutes of stories, and they’re going to be the same stories over and over again. So you have to have one point to make, and you pepper it in whenever you can.”

But the Priebus appointment, announced in mid-November, put Bannon on a co-equal level to the new chief of staff. Even with the top job, Priebus would be a weak figure, in the traditional mold of most the rich asshole lieutenants over the years. There would be one chief of staff in name — the unimportant one — and others like Bannon and Kushner, more important in practice, ensuring both chaos and the rich asshole’s independence.

Priebus demonstrated no ability to keep the rich asshole from talking to anyone who wanted his ear. The president-elect enjoyed being courted. On December 14, a high-level delegation from Silicon Valley came to the rich asshole Tower to meet him. Later that afternoon, according to a source privy to details of the conversation, the rich asshole called Rupert Murdoch, who asked him how the meeting had gone.

“Oh, great, just great,” said the rich asshole. “These guys really need my help. Obama was not very favorable to them, too much regulation. This is really an opportunity for me to help them.”

“Donald,” said Murdoch, “for eight years these guys had Obama in their pocket. They practically ran the administration. They don’t need your help.”

“Take this H-1B visa issue. They really need these H-1B visas.”

Murdoch suggested that taking a liberal approach to H-1B visas, which open America’s doors to select immigrants, might be hard to square with his promises to build a wall and close the borders. But the rich asshole seemed unconcerned, assuring Murdoch, “We’ll figure it out.”

“What a fucking idiot,” said Murdoch, shrugging, as he got off the phone.

Steve Bannon, suddenly among the world’s most powerful men, was running late. It was the evening of January 3, 2017 — a little more than two weeks before the rich asshole’s inauguration — and Bannon had promised to come to a small dinner arranged by mutual friends in a Greenwich Village townhouse to see Roger Ailes.

Snow was threatening, and for a while the dinner appeared doubtful. But the 76-year-old Ailes, who was as dumbfounded by his old friend some rich asshole’s victory as everyone else, understood that he was passing the right-wing torch to Bannon. Ailes’s Fox News, with its $1.5 billion in annual profits, had dominated Republican politics for two decades. Now Bannon’s Breitbart News, with its mere $1.5 million in annual profits, was claiming that role. For 30 years, Ailes — until recently the single most powerful person in conservative politics — had humored and tolerated the rich asshole, but in the end Bannon and Breitbart had elected him.

At 9:30, having extricated himself from the rich asshole Tower, Bannon finally arrived at the dinner, three hours late. Wearing a disheveled blazer, his signature pairing of two shirts, and military fatigues, the unshaven, overweight 63-year-old immediately dived into an urgent download of information about the world he was about to take over.

“We’re going to flood the zone so we have every Cabinet member for the next seven days through their confirmation hearings,” he said of the business-and-military, 1950s-type Cabinet choices. “Tillerson is two days, Sessions is two days, Mattis is two days …”

“In fact,” said Bannon, “I could use your help here.” He then spent several minutes trying to recruit Ailes to help kneecap Murdoch.

Bannon veered from James “Mad Dog” Mattis — the retired four-star general whom the rich asshole had nominated as secretary of Defense — to the looming appointment of Michael Flynn as national-security adviser. “He’s fine. He’s not Jim Mattis and he’s not John Kelly … but he’s fine. He just needs the right staff around him.” Still, Bannon averred: “When you take out all the Never the rich asshole guys who signed all those letters and all the neocons who got us in all these wars … it’s not a deep bench.” Bannon said he’d tried to push John Bolton, the famously hawkish diplomat, for the job as national-security adviser. Bolton was an Ailes favorite, too.

“He’s a bomb thrower,” said Ailes. “And a strange little fucker. But you need him. Who else is good on Israel? Flynn is a little nutty on Iran. Tillerson just knows oil.”

“Bolton’s mustache is a problem,” snorted Bannon. “the rich asshole doesn’t think he looks the part. You know Bolton is an acquired taste.”

“Well, he got in trouble because he got in a fight in a hotel one night and chased some woman.”

“If I told the rich asshole that,” Bannon said slyly, “he might have the job.”

Bannon was curiously able to embrace the rich asshole while at the same time suggesting he did not take him entirely seriously. Great numbers of people, he believed, were suddenly receptive to a new message — the world needs borders — and the rich asshole had become the platform for that message.

“Does he get it?” asked Ailes suddenly, looking intently at Bannon. Did the rich asshole get where history had put him?

Bannon took a sip of water. “He gets it,” he said, after hesitating for perhaps a beat too long. “Or he gets what he gets.”

Pivoting from the rich asshole himself, Bannon plunged on with the rich asshole agenda. “Day one we’re moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. Netanyahu’s all-in. Sheldon” — Adelson, the casino billionaire and far-right Israel defender — “is all-in. We know where we’re heading on this … Let Jordan take the West Bank, let Egypt take Gaza. Let them deal with it. Or sink trying.”

“Where’s Donald on this?” asked Ailes, the clear implication being that Bannon was far out ahead of his benefactor.

“He’s totally onboard.”

“I wouldn’t give Donald too much to think about,” said an amused Ailes.

Bannon snorted. “Too much, too little — doesn’t necessarily change things.”

“What has he gotten himself into with the Russians?” pressed Ailes.

“Mostly,” said Bannon, “he went to Russia and he thought he was going to meet Putin. But Putin couldn’t give a shit about him. So he’s kept trying.”

Again, as though setting the issue of the rich asshole aside — merely a large and peculiar presence to both be thankful for and to have to abide — Bannon, in the role he had conceived for himself, the auteur of the rich asshole presidency, charged forward. The real enemy, he said, was China. China was the first front in a new Cold War.

“China’s everything. Nothing else matters. We don’t get China right, we don’t get anything right. This whole thing is very simple. China is where Nazi Germany was in 1929 to 1930. The Chinese, like the Germans, are the most rational people in the world, until they’re not. And they’re gonna flip like Germany in the ’30s. You’re going to have a hypernationalist state, and once that happens, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”

“Donald might not be Nixon in China,” said Ailes, deadpan.

Bannon smiled. “Bannon in China,” he said, with both remarkable grandiosity and wry self-deprecation.

“How’s the kid?” asked Ailes, referring to Kushner.

“He’s my partner,” said Bannon, his tone suggesting that if he felt otherwise, he was nevertheless determined to stay on message.

“He’s had a lot of lunches with Rupert,” said a dubious Ailes.

“In fact,” said Bannon, “I could use your help here.” He then spent several minutes trying to recruit Ailes to help kneecap Murdoch. Since his ouster from Fox over allegations of sexual harassment, Ailes had become only more bitter toward Murdoch. Now Murdoch was frequently jawboning the president-elect and encouraging him toward Establishment moderation. Bannon wanted Ailes to suggest to the rich asshole, a man whose many neuroses included a horror of senility, that Murdoch might be losing it.

“I’ll call him,” said Ailes. “But the rich asshole would jump through hoops for Rupert. Like for Putin. Sucks up and shits down. I just worry about who’s jerking whose chain.”

the rich asshole did not enjoy his own inauguration. He was angry that A-level stars had snubbed the event, disgruntled with the accommodations at Blair House, and visibly fighting with his wife, who seemed on the verge of tears. Throughout the day, he wore what some around him had taken to calling his golf face: angry and pissed off, shoulders hunched, arms swinging, brow furled, lips pursed.

The first senior staffer to enter the White House that day was Bannon. On the inauguration march, he had grabbed 32-year-old Katie Walsh, the newly appointed deputy chief of staff, and together they had peeled off to inspect the now-vacant West Wing. The carpet had been shampooed, but little else had changed. It was a warren of tiny offices in need of paint, the décor something like an admissions office at a public university. Bannon claimed the nondescript office across from the much grander chief of staff’s suite and immediately requisitioned the whiteboards on which he intended to chart the first 100 days of the rich asshole administration. He also began moving furniture out. The point was to leave no room for anyone to sit. Limit discussion. Limit debate. This was war.

Those who had worked on the campaign noticed the sudden change. Within the first week, Bannon seemed to have put away the camaraderie of the rich asshole Tower and become far more remote, if not unreachable. “What’s up with Steve?” Kushner began to ask. “I don’t understand. We were so close.” Now that the rich asshole had been elected, Bannon was already focused on his next goal: capturing the soul of the rich asshole White House.

He began by going after his enemies. Few fueled his rancor toward the standard-issue Republican world as much as Rupert Murdoch — not least because Murdoch had the rich asshole’s ear. It was one of the key elements of Bannon’s understanding of the rich asshole: The last person the president spoke to ended up with enormous influence. the rich asshole would brag that Murdoch was always calling him; Murdoch, for his part, would complain that he couldn’t get the rich asshole off the phone.

“He doesn’t know anything about American politics, and has no feel for the American people,” Bannon told the rich asshole, always eager to point out that Murdoch wasn’t an American. Yet in one regard, Murdoch’s message was useful to Bannon. Having known every president since Harry Truman — as Murdoch took frequent opportunities to point out — the media mogul warned the rich asshole that a president has only six months, max, to set his agenda and make an impact. After that, it was just putting out fires and battling the opposition.

This was the message whose urgency Bannon had been trying to impress on an often distracted the rich asshole, who was already trying to limit his hours in the office and keep to his normal golf habits. Bannon’s strategic view of government was shock and awe. In his head, he carried a set of decisive actions that would not just mark the new administration’s opening days but make it clear that nothing ever again would be the same. He had quietly assembled a list of more than 200 executive orders to issue in the first 100 days. The very first EO, in his view, had to be a crackdown on immigration. After all, it was one of the rich asshole’s core campaign promises. Plus, Bannon knew, it was an issue that made liberals batshit mad.

Bannon could push through his agenda for a simple reason: because nobody in the administration really had a job. Priebus, as chief of staff, had to organize meetings, hire staff, and oversee the individual offices in the Executive-branch departments. But Bannon, Kushner, and Ivanka the rich asshole had no specific responsibilities — they did what they wanted. And for Bannon, the will to get big things done was how big things got done. “Chaos was Steve’s strategy,” said Walsh.

On Friday, January 27 — only his eighth day in office — the rich asshole signed an executive order issuing a sweeping exclusion of many Muslims from the United States. In his mania to seize the day, with almost no one in the federal government having seen it or even been aware of it, Bannon had succeeded in pushing through an executive order that overhauled U.S. immigration policy while bypassing the very agencies and personnel responsible for enforcing it.

The result was an emotional outpouring of horror and indignation from liberal media, terror in immigrant communities, tumultuous protests at major airports, confusion throughout the government, and, in the White House, an inundation of opprobrium from friends and family. What have you done? You have to undo this! You’re finished before you even start! But Bannon was satisfied. He could not have hoped to draw a more vivid line between the rich asshole’s America and that of liberals. Almost the entire White House staff demanded to know: Why did we do this on a Friday, when it would hit the airports hardest and bring out the most protesters?

“Errr … that’s why,” said Bannon. “So the snowflakes would show up at the airports and riot.” That was the way to crush the liberals: Make them crazy and drag them to the left.

On the Sunday after the immigration order was issued, Joe Scarborough and his Morning Joe co-host, Mika Brzezinski, arrived for lunch at the White House. the rich asshole proudly showed them into the Oval Office. “So how do you think the first week has gone?” he asked the couple, in a buoyant mood, seeking flattery. When Scarborough ventured his opinion that the immigration order might have been handled better, the rich asshole turned defensive and derisive, plunging into a long monologue about how well things had gone. “I could have invited Hannity!” he told Scarborough.

After Jared and Ivanka joined them for lunch, the rich asshole continued to cast for positive impressions of his first week. Scarborough praised the president for having invited leaders of the steel unions to the White House. At which point Jared interjected that reaching out to unions, a Democratic constituency, was Bannon’s doing, that this was “the Bannon way.”

“Bannon?” said the president, jumping on his son-in-law. “That wasn’t Bannon’s idea. That was my idea. It’s the rich asshole way, not the Bannon way.”

Kushner, going concave, retreated from the discussion.

the rich asshole, changing the topic, said to Scarborough and Brzezinski, “So what about you guys? What’s going on?” He was referencing their not-so-secret secret relationship. The couple said it was still complicated, but good.

“You guys should just get married,” prodded the rich asshole.

“I can marry you! I’m an internet Unitarian minister,” Kushner, otherwise an Orthodox Jew, said suddenly.

“What?” said the president. “What are you talking about? Why would they want you to marry them when I could marry them? When they could be married by the president! At Mar-a-Lago!”

The First Children couple were having to navigate the rich asshole’s volatile nature just like everyone else in the White House. And they were willing to do it for the same reason as everyone else — in the hope that the rich asshole’s unexpected victory would catapult them into a heretofore unimagined big time. Balancing risk against reward, both Jared and Ivanka decided to accept roles in the West Wing over the advice of almost everyone they knew. It was a joint decision by the couple, and, in some sense, a joint job. Between themselves, the two had made an earnest deal: If sometime in the future the opportunity arose, she’d be the one to run for president. The first woman president, Ivanka entertained, would not be Hillary Clinton; it would be Ivanka the rich asshole.

Bannon, who had coined the term “Jarvanka” that was now in ever greater use in the White House, was horrified when the couple’s deal was reported to him. “They didn’t say that?” he said. “Stop. Oh, come on. They didn’t actually say that? Please don’t tell me that. Oh my God.”

The truth was, Ivanka and Jared were as much the chief of staff as Priebus or Bannon, all of them reporting directly to the president. The couple had opted for formal jobs in the West Wing, in part because they knew that influencing the rich asshole required you to be all-in. From phone call to phone call — and his day, beyond organized meetings, was almost entirely phone calls — you could lose him. He could not really converse, not in the sense of sharing information, or of a balanced back-and-forth conversation. He neither particularly listened to what was said to him nor particularly considered what he said in response. He demanded you pay him attention, then decided you were weak for groveling. In a sense, he was like an instinctive, pampered, and hugely successful actor. Everybody was either a lackey who did his bidding or a high-ranking film functionary trying to coax out his performance — without making him angry or petulant.

Jared offered to marry Joe and Mika. “Why would they want you,” the rich asshole said, “when I could marry them?”

Ivanka maintained a relationship with her father that was in no way conventional. She was a helper not just in his business dealings, but in his marital realignments. If it wasn’t pure opportunism, it was certainly transactional. For Ivanka, it was all business — building the rich asshole brand, the presidential campaign, and now the White House. She treated her father with a degree of detachment, even irony, going so far as to make fun of his comb-over to others. She often described the mechanics behind it to friends: an absolutely clean pate — a contained island after scalp-reduction surgery — surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray. The color, she would point out to comical effect, was from a product called Just for Men — the longer it was left on, the darker it got. Impatience resulted in the rich asshole’s orange-blond hair color.

Kushner, for his part, had little to no success at trying to restrain his father-in-law. Ever since the transition, Jared had been negotiating to arrange a meeting at the White House with Enrique Peña Nieto, the Mexican president whom the rich asshole had threatened and insulted throughout the campaign. On the Wednesday after the inauguration, a high-level Mexican delegation — the first visit by any foreign leaders to the rich asshole White House — met with Kushner and Reince Priebus. That afternoon, Kushner triumphantly told his father-in-law that Peña Nieto had signed on to a White House meeting and planning for the visit could go forward.

The next day, on Twitter, the rich asshole blasted Mexico for stealing American jobs. “If Mexico is unwilling to pay for the badly needed wall,” the president declared, “then it would be better to cancel the upcoming meeting.” At which point Peña Nieto did just that, leaving Kushner’s negotiation and statecraft as so much scrap on the floor.

Nothing contributed to the chaos and dysfunction of the White House as much as the rich asshole’s own behavior. The big deal of being president was just not apparent to him. Most victorious candidates, arriving in the White House from ordinary political life, could not help but be reminded of their transformed circumstances by their sudden elevation to a mansion with palace like servants and security, a plane at constant readiness, and downstairs a retinue of courtiers and advisers. But this wasn’t that different from the rich asshole’s former life in the rich asshole Tower, which was actually more commodious and to his taste than the White House.

the rich asshole, in fact, found the White House to be vexing and even a little scary. He retreated to his own bedroom — the first time since the Kennedy White House that a presidential couple had maintained separate rooms. In the first days, he ordered two television screens in addition to the one already there, and a lock on the door, precipitating a brief standoff with the Secret Service, who insisted they have access to the room. He reprimanded the housekeeping staff for picking up his shirt from the floor: “If my shirt is on the floor, it’s because I want it on the floor.” Then he imposed a set of new rules: Nobody touch anything, especially not his toothbrush. (He had a longtime fear of being poisoned, one reason why he liked to eat at McDonald’s — nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade.) Also, he would let housekeeping know when he wanted his sheets done, and he would strip his own bed.

If he was not having his 6:30 dinner with Steve Bannon, then, more to his liking, he was in bed by that time with a cheeseburger, watching his three screens and making phone calls — the phone was his true contact point with the world — to a small group of friends, who charted his rising and falling levels of agitation through the evening and then compared notes with one another.

As details of the rich asshole’s personal life leaked out, he became obsessed with identifying the leaker. The source of all the gossip, however, may well have been the rich asshole himself. In his calls throughout the day and at night from his bed, he often spoke to people who had no reason to keep his confidences. He was a river of grievances, which recipients of his calls promptly spread to the ever-attentive media.

On February 6, in one of his seething, self-pitying, and unsolicited phone calls to a casual acquaintance, the rich asshole detailed his bent-out-of-shape feelings about the relentless contempt of the media and the disloyalty of his staff. The initial subject of his ire was the New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, whom he called “a nut job.” Gail Collins, who had written a Times column unfavorably comparing the rich asshole to Vice-President Mike Pence, was “a moron.” Then, continuing under the rubric of media he hated, he veered to CNN and the deep disloyalty of its chief, Jeff Zucker.

“If my shirt is on the floor, it’s because I want it on the floor,” the rich asshole told the housekeeping staff.

Zucker, who as the head of entertainment at NBC had commissioned The Apprentice, had been “made by the rich asshole,” the rich asshole said of himself in the third person. He had “personally” gotten Zucker his job at CNN. “Yes, yes, I did,” said the president, launching into a favorite story about how he had once talked Zucker up at a dinner with a high-ranking executive from CNN’s parent company. “I probably shouldn’t have, because Zucker is not that smart,” the rich asshole lamented, “but I like to show I can do that sort of thing.” Then Zucker had returned the favor by airing the “unbelievably disgusting” story about the Russian “dossier” and the “golden shower” — the practice CNN had accused him of being party to in a Moscow hotel suite with assorted prostitutes.

Having dispensed with Zucker, the president of the United States went on to speculate on what was involved with a golden shower. And how this was all just part of a media campaign that would never succeed in driving him from the White House. Because they were sore losers and hated him for winning, they spread total lies, 100 percent made-up things, totally untrue, for instance, the cover that week of Time magazine — which, the rich asshole reminded his listener, he had been on more than anyone in history — that showed Steve Bannon, a good guy, saying he was the real president. “How much influence do you think Steve Bannon has over me?” the rich asshole demanded. He repeated the question, then repeated the answer: “Zero! Zero!” And that went for his son-in-law, too, who had a lot to learn.

The media was not only hurting him, he said — he was not looking for any agreement or even any response — but hurting his negotiating capabilities, which hurt the nation. And that went for Saturday Night Live, which might think it was very funny but was actually hurting everybody in the country. And while he understood that SNL was there to be mean to him, they were being very, very mean. It was “fake comedy.” He had reviewed the treatment of all other presidents in the media, and there was nothing like this ever, even of Nixon, who was treated very unfairly. “Kellyanne, who is very fair, has this all documented. You can look at it.”

The point is, he said, that that very day, he had saved $700 million a year in jobs that were going to Mexico, but the media was talking about him wandering around the White House in his bathrobe, which “I don’t have because I’ve never worn a bathrobe. And would never wear one, because I’m not that kind of guy.” And what the media was doing was undermining this very dignified house, and “dignity is so important.” But Murdoch, “who had never called me, never once,” was now calling all the time. So that should tell people something.

The call went on for 26 minutes.

Without a strong chief of staff at the White House, there was no real up-and-down structure in the administration—merely a figure at the top and everyone else scrambling for his attention. It wasn’t task-based so much as response-oriented — whatever captured the boss’s attention focused everybody’s attention. Priebus and Bannon and Kushner were all fighting to be the power behind the rich asshole throne. And in these crosshairs was Katie Walsh, the deputy chief of staff.

Walsh, who came to the White House from the RNC, represented a certain Republican ideal: clean, brisk, orderly, efficient. A righteous bureaucrat with a permanently grim expression, she was a fine example of the many political professionals in whom competence and organizational skills transcend ideology. To Walsh, it became clear almost immediately that “the three gentlemen running things,” as she came to characterize them, had each found his own way to appeal to the president. Bannon offered a rousing fuck-you show of force; Priebus offered flattery from the congressional leadership; Kushner offered the approval of blue-chip businessmen. Each appeal was exactly what the rich asshole wanted from the presidency, and he didn’t understand why he couldn’t have them all. He wanted to break things, he wanted Congress to give him bills to sign, and he wanted the love and respect of New York machers and socialites.

As soon as the campaign team had stepped into the White House, Walsh saw, it had gone from managing the rich asshole to the expectation of being managed by him. Yet the president, while proposing the most radical departure from governing and policy norms in several generations, had few specific ideas about how to turn his themes and vitriol into policy. And making suggestions to him was deeply complicated. Here, arguably, was the central issue of the rich asshole presidency, informing every aspect of Trumpian policy and leadership: He didn’t process information in any conventional sense. He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-literate. He trusted his own expertise — no matter how paltry or irrelevant — more than anyone else’s. He was often confident, but he was just as often paralyzed, less a savant than a figure of sputtering and dangerous insecurities, whose instinctive response was to lash out and behave as if his gut, however confused, was in fact in some clear and forceful way telling him what to do. It was, said Walsh, “like trying to figure out what a child wants.”

By the end of the second week following the immigration EO, the three advisers were in open conflict with one another. For Walsh, it was a daily process of managing an impossible task: Almost as soon as she received direction from one of the three men, it would be countermanded by one or another of them.

“I take a conversation at face value and move forward with it,” she said. “I put what was decided on the schedule and bring in comms and build a press plan around it … And then Jared says, ‘Why did you do that?’ And I say, ‘Because we had a meeting three days ago with you and Reince and Steve where you agreed to do this.’ And he says, ‘But that didn’t mean I wanted it on the schedule …’ It almost doesn’t matter what anyone says: Jared will agree, and then it will get sabotaged, and then Jared goes to the president and says, see, that was Reince’s idea or Steve’s idea.”

If Bannon, Priebus, and Kushner were now fighting a daily war with one another, it was exacerbated by the running disinformation campaign about them that was being prosecuted by the president himself. When he got on the phone after dinner, he’d speculate on the flaws and weaknesses of each member of his staff. Bannon was disloyal (not to mention he always looks like shit). Priebus was weak (not to mention he was short — a midget). Kushner was a suck-up. Sean Spicer was stupid (and looks terrible too). Conway was a crybaby. Jared and Ivanka should never have come to Washington.

During that first month, Walsh’s disbelief and even fear about what was happening in the White House moved her to think about quitting. Every day after that became a countdown toward the moment she knew she wouldn’t be able to take it anymore. To Walsh, the proud political pro, the chaos, the rivalries, and the president’s own lack of focus were simply incomprehensible. In early March, not long before she left, she confronted Kushner with a simple request. “Just give me the three things the president wants to focus on,” she demanded. “What are the three priorities of this White House?”

It was the most basic question imaginable — one that any qualified presidential candidate would have answered long before he took up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Six weeks into the rich asshole’s presidency, Kushner was wholly without an answer.

“Yes,” he said to Walsh. “We should probably have that conversation.”

HOW HE GOT THE STORY

This story is adapted from Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury: Inside the rich asshole White House, to be published by Henry Holt & Co. on January 9. Wolff, who chronicles the administration from Election Day to this past October, conducted conversations and interviews over a period of 18 months with the president, most members of his senior staff, and many people to whom they in turn spoke. Shortly after the rich asshole’s inauguration, Wolff says, he was able to take up “something like a semi-permanent seat on a couch in the West Wing” — an idea encouraged by the president himself. Because no one was in a position to either officially approve or formally deny such access, Wolff became “more a constant interloper than an invited guest.” There were no ground rules placed on his access, and he was required to make no promises about how he would report on what he witnessed.

Since then, he conducted more than 200 interviews. In true Trumpian fashion, the administration’s lack of experience and disdain for political norms made for a hodgepodge of journalistic challenges. Information would be provided off-the-record or on deep background, then casually put on the record. Sources would fail to set any parameters on the use of a conversation, or would provide accounts in confidence, only to subsequently share their views widely. And the president’s own views, private as well as public, were constantly shared by others. The adaptation presented here offers a front-row view of the rich asshole’s presidency, from his improvised transition to his first months in the Oval Office.

Bannon: 2016 the rich asshole Tower meeting was 'treasonous'

By Maegan Vazquez, CNN

Updated 12:46 PM ET, Wed January 3, 2018

(CNN)Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon called the 2016 the rich asshole Tower meeting between the rich asshole campaign officials and a Russian lawyer purportedly offering damaging information about Hillary Clinton "treasonous," according to a new book obtained by The Guardian.

The book, "Fire and Fury: Inside the rich asshole White House" by Michael Wolff, is based on hundreds of interviews, including ones with President some rich asshole and his inner circle. According to the Guardian, Bannon addressed the June 2016 the rich asshole Tower meeting between some rich asshole Jr., then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner and Russian operatives that was arranged when the rich asshole Jr. agreed to meet a "Russian government attorney" after receiving an email offering him "very high level and sensitive information" that would "incriminate" Clinton.

"The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside the rich asshole Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor -- with no lawyers. They didn't have any lawyers," Bannon continued, according to the Guardian. "Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad s***, and I happen to think it's all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately."

NYT: Former the rich asshole campaign adviser told Australian diplomat Russia had dirt on Clinton

Bannon also reportedly told Wolff: "They're going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV."

The White House declined to comment Wednesday about Bannon's reported assertions.

Bannon also reportedly told Wolff that special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into the rich asshole campaign's potential ties to Russia is centered on money laundering, saying that the White House is "sitting on a beach trying to stop a Category Five" hurricane.

"You realize where this is going ... This is all about money laundering. Mueller chose (senior prosecutor Andrew) Weissmann first and he is a money-laundering guy," Bannon reportedly said. "Their path to f***ing the rich asshole goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr., and Jared Kushner ... It's as plain as a hair on your face."

Bannon said he believes Kushner, the White House senior adviser and the President's son-in-law, could be convinced to cooperate if Mueller probes his financial records.

"They're going to go right through that. They're going to roll those two guys up and say play me or trade me," Bannon is reported as saying, apparently referring to the rich asshole Jr. and Kushner.

The rich asshole Tower meeting has been of intense interest to the congressional Russia investigators as well as Mueller.

the rich asshole Jr. testified before House investigators last month but would not say what he and his father discussed after reports surfaced about the meeting, citing attorney-client privilege.

the rich asshole Tower meeting with Russians 'treasonous', Bannon says in explosive book

David Smith in Washington 01-03-2018

some rich asshole’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon has described the rich asshole Tower meeting between the president’s son and a group of Russians during the 2016 election campaign as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic”, according to an explosive new book seen by the Guardian.

Bannon, speaking to author Michael Wolff, warned that the investigation into alleged collusion with the Kremlin will focus on money laundering and predicted: “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV.”

Fire and Fury: Inside the rich asshole White House, reportedly based on more than 200 interviews with the president, his inner circle and players in and around the administration, is one of the most eagerly awaited political books of the year. In it, Wolff lifts the lid on a White House lurching from crisis to crisis amid internecine warfare, with even some of the rich asshole’s closest allies expressing contempt for him.

© Getty Images Steve Bannon exits an elevator in the lobby of the rich asshole Tower on 11 November 2016 in New York City. Other the rich asshole campaign officials met with Russians there in June 2016.

Bannon, who was chief executive of the rich asshole campaign in its final three months, then White House chief strategist for seven months before returning to the rightwing Breitbart News, is a central figure in the nasty, cutthroat drama, quoted extensively, often in salty language.

He is particularly scathing about a June 2016 meeting involving the rich asshole’s son Donald Jr, son-in-law Jared Kushner, then campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at the rich asshole Tower in New York. A trusted intermediary had promised documents that would “incriminate” rival Hillary Clinton but instead of alerting the FBI to a potential assault on American democracy by a foreign power, the rich asshole Jr replied in an email: “I love it.”

The meeting was revealed by the New York Times in July last year, prompting the rich asshole Jr to say no consequential material was produced. Soon after, Wolff writes, Bannon remarked mockingly: “The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside the rich asshole Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor – with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers.

“Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad sh- t, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”

Bannon went on, Wolffe writes, to say that if any such meeting had to take place, it should have been set up “in a Holiday Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire, with your lawyers who meet with these people”. Any information, he said, could then be “dump[ed] … down to Breitbart or something like that, or maybe some other more legitimate publication”.

Bannon added: “You never see it, you never know it, because you don’t need to … But that’s the brain trust that they had.”

the rich asshole predicted in an interview with the New York Times last week that the special counsel was “going to be fair”, though he also said the investigation “makes the country look very bad”. The president and his allies deny any collusion with Russia and the Kremlin has denied interfering.Special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed last May, following the rich asshole’s dismissal of FBI director James Comey, to investigate Russian meddling in the 2016 election. This has led to the indictments of four members of the rich asshole’s inner circle, including Manafort and former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Manafort has pleaded not guilty to money laundering charges; Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. In recent weeks Bannon’s Breitbart News and other conservative outlets have accused Mueller’s team of bias against the president.

Bannon has criticised the rich asshole’s decision to fire Comey. In Wolff’s book, obtained by the Guardian ahead of publication from a bookseller in New England, he suggests White House hopes for a quick end to the Mueller investigation are gravely misplaced.

“You realise where this is going,” he is quoted as saying. “This is all about money laundering. Mueller chose [senior prosecutor Andrew] Weissmann first and he is a money-laundering guy. Their path to f--ing the rich asshole goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr and Jared Kushner … It’s as plain as a hair on your face.”

Last month it was reported that federal prosecutors had subpoenaed records from Deutsche Bank, the German financial institution that has lent hundreds of millions of dollars to the Kushner property empire. Bannon continues: “It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner sh- t. The Kushner sh- t is greasy. They’re going to go right through that. They’re going to roll those two guys up and say play me or trade me.”

Scorning apparent White House insouciance, Bannon reaches for a hurricane metaphor: “They’re sitting on a beach trying to stop a Category Five.”

He insists that he knows no Russians, will not be a witness, will not hire a lawyer and will not appear on national television answering questions.

Fire and Fury will be published next week. Wolff is a prominent media critic and columnist who has written for the Guardian and is a biographer of Rupert Murdoch. He previously conducted interviews for the Hollywood Reporter with the rich asshole in June 2016 and Bannon a few months later.

He told the Guardian in November that to research the book, he showed up at the White House with no agenda but wanting to “find out what the insiders were really thinking and feeling”. He enjoyed extraordinary access to the rich asshole and senior officials and advisers, he said, sometimes at critical moments of the fledgling presidency.

The rancour between Bannon and “Javanka” – Kushner and his wife Ivanka the rich asshole – is a recurring theme of the book. Kushner and Ivanka are Jewish. Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, is quoted as saying: “It is a war between the Jews and the non-Jews.”

the rich asshole is not spared. Wolff writes that Thomas Barrack Jr, a billionaire who is one of the president’s oldest associates, allegedly told a friend: “He’s not only crazy, he’s stupid.”

‘Trumptard snowflake’: Breitbart fans eat each other alive after Bannon calls Don Jr. ‘treasonous’

DAVID EDWARDS
03 JAN 2018 AT 12:56 ET

DON'T MISS STORIES. FOLLOW RAW STORY!

Readers of the white nationalist right-wing publication Breitbart focused their ire on one another for a change on Wednesday after it was revealed that Breitbart chief Steve Bannon called President some rich asshole’s son “treasonous” for planning a meeting with Russians during the 2016 campaign.

In a yet-to-be-published book by author Michael Wolff, Bannon reportedly slammed some rich asshole Jr. for meeting Russians in the rich asshole Tower as the 2016 campaign was underway.

“They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV,” Bannon, the rich asshole’s former chief strategist, allegedly predicted.

The news spurred thousands of angry comments at Breitbart.com, with many feeling they had to pick between the rich asshole’s Make America Great Again agenda and Bannon’s white nationalist website.

“Don Jr. epitomizes the term ‘douchebag’,” commenter mitchbetterhavemybunny wrote in one thread.

“Soros troll,” a commenter named “Don’t Call Saul” fired back.

“Russian bot,” mitchbetterhavemybunny countered.

In another thread, PNWDave asserted that “President Awesome needs to rethink his family choices for advice.”

“You need to rethink your existence and perhaps off yourself,” commenter Haywoodjbl griped.

“You should change your avatar to ‘hand job’ you seem proficient at posting and hand jobbing at the same time…lol,” PNWDave wrote back.

Commenter warmingsmorming called Bannon “the treasonous one here.”

“Kick rocks cuck. Bannon 2020!” F**kTheSystem wrote in response.

“Bannon couldn’t get elected mayor in a one person town. Get serious,” another commenter added.

“I am deleting Breitbart from my bookmarks and will never read it again. I don’t know what the hell Bannon is up to here, but it seems he has his own political ambitions. Buhbye…,” a commenter named Amy announced.

DiscusHammerus shot back: “…and then hide under the bed, trumptard snowflake. Maybe big bad librul Bannon won’t find you there.”

Within the first two hours of publication, the Breitbart article on Bannon’s remarks received over 5,000 comments. Breitbart declined to reveal the author of its report on Bannon, instead choosing to make the story anonymous.

the rich asshole’s eyes rolled back in his head as aide struggled to explain the Constitution to him: report

DAVID FERGUSON
03 JAN 2018 AT 12:43 ET

some rich asshole Drinking Water (Screen Capture)

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Among the explosive revelations in The Daily Intelligencer‘s excerpt from Michael Wolff’s new book about President some rich asshole was the fact that the rich asshole got so bored during an explanation of the U.S. Constitution that aide Sam Nunberg threw in the towel at the Fourth Amendment.

New York magazine — which hosts the Intelligencer blog — published a lengthy section from Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the the rich asshole White House in which readers learn that First Lady Melania the rich asshole wept with despair on Election Night 2016, that President-elect the rich asshole didn’t know who then-Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) was and that he was not only ignorant about the Constitution, but deeply incurious.

“Everybody in his rich-guy social circle knew about his wide-ranging ignorance,” wrote Wolff. “Early in the campaign, Sam Nunberg was sent to explain the Constitution to the candidate.”

“I got as far as the Fourth Amendment,” Nunberg told Wolff, “before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.”

Tony Schwartz — ghostwriter of the rich asshole’s biggest-selling book, The Art of the Deal — has said in the past that the rich asshole has “the attention span of a kindergartner.”

“It’s impossible to keep him focused on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes,” said Schwartz, who regrets his role in helping craft the myth of the rich asshole as a brilliant businessman.

Give President the rich asshole the Nobel Prize, Steve Bannon says

NEWSWEEK
03 JAN 2018 AT 12:37 ET

January 3, 2018

Alexander Nazaryan

Posted with permission from Newsweek

On the December night that Roy S. Moore lost the Alabama special election—handing Democrats their first Senate seat in that state in more than two decades—I sat down with Stephen Bannon in a Montgomery motel room for a wide-ranging conversation that ranged from Silicon Valley to North Korea. Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, supported Moore in the special election, and has vowed to run anti-establishment candidates in the 2018 midterm election. He calls himself a Trump “wingman” waging necessary battle against Republicans disloyal to the president, not to mention Democrats who, in many cases, want Trump removed from office. Others, however, see Bannon as a troublemaker who could squander Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress.
The following are excerpts of that conversation, lightly edited for clarity. Read my Newsweek cover story on Bannon here.
On Trump’s domestic policy: “Look at the Trump agenda. The Trump agenda is working. He is making America great again. He is getting the animal spirits flowing in America.
“This working-class, middle-class program, is a winning program. We've proved that. Now you have to deliver on it. That's why I'm so proud of President Trump. President Trump should be eligible for the Nobel Prize in Economics. He just, he's proven that economic nationalism works.”
On Trump’s foreign policy: “People understand how judicious he is in the National Security Council. This is a guy who wants to review everything, see everything, sit in meetings and bounce ideas off guys — and then wants more analysis given to him. Afghanistan took six months, that decision [to contain the terrorist threat while handing governance back to Kabul]. That's because President Trump is very methodical about going back and asking the questions that need to be asked.
“So he's the exactly opposite from the wild man trigger-puller.”
On serving as the president’s chief political strategist, in what proved to be a contentious seven months at the White House: “I'm so happy since I've been out of the White House. 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 vertical, your lanes you gotta stay in. It's not the way I roll.
On his “season of war” against the Republican establishment: “I'm 64 years old. I'm dedicating my life to this. To build this movement is my life's work. And I'm not going to be deterred. I think the country needs this. I'm having a great time.”
On running candidates who embrace his theory of economic nationalism: “Candidates have to get more imbued in that. It's not going to happen overnight, and here's one of the reasons: you can't undo 25 years of [conservative think-tanks] Heritage, Cato, and the American Enterprise Institute, right?
“One of the things I'm trying to do is get these ideas out to people so they understand them. Judge Moore has never really been an economics guy. He's more of a social conservative guy.”
On Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, whom Bannon accuses of disloyalty to Trump: “McConnell's allowed [Senator] Bob Corker [Republican of Tennessee] to come out and criticize the President, say he should be in an adult home with supervision. Tweeting that out. Calling his commander-in-chief a liar. And he doesn't have his chairmanship stripped from him? He's not reprimanded. McConnell let him go.
On the president’s infrastructure proposal: "Infrastructure is going to be very contentious. Infrastructure's not going to be a singing Kumbaya moment. There's so many innovative ways you can do it with private equity, private partnerships. I would initially limit the amount of foreign investment and foreign ownership of some of this infrastructure. I think you try to keep this as American made infrastructure.”
On Silicon Valley: "Google and Facebook oughta be public utilities. Like the gas works. They're too big for control. It's a common good. I'm an extremist when it comes to big tech. And I think the sooner we take this on, the better.”
On China: "Trump on China, he's been incredibly consistent for 40 years. And he's a hawk. Right? He understands the centrality of that issue in everything else. Remember, you had the Bush/Clinton crowd: ‘As China gets more prosperous it's going to become a liberal democracy.’ They have no intention. They're a Confucian, mercantilist, authoritative system. That works for them. I mean, it really does.”

Mark Lappin@lappinm

In #Newsweek this week:

'Make Trump Great (again): Steve Bannon says he knows how to save America, even if it means killing the Republican party'

This week's cover story in the U.S. and International Editions by @AlexNazaryan.

READ: http://www.newsweek.com/2018/01/05/steve-bannon-plan-make-america-great-again-without-trump-760683.html …

10:54 AM - Jan 2, 2018

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On solving the nuclear crisis with North Korea: "I saw today where Secretary [of State Rex W.] Tillerson is prepared to have no conditions upon talks. Bilateral talks between the United States and North Korea. I don't think that's the correct solution. North Korea is a client state of China. They don't exist without China's agreement. I think the Chinese oughta be forced to do some things. They clearly have a major say in some of the economic well-being of [North] Korea, right? And life is not that bad in North Korea. Right? It's just not.”

On his state of mind after the Moore defeat: "Totally uncowed.”

WATCH: Tea Party lawmaker flails wildly when CNN hosts ask if Don Jr’s Russia meeting was ‘treasonous’

BRAD REED
03 JAN 2018 AT 11:11 ET

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) talks with Poppy Harlow on CNN (Screen cap)

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Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) went on CNN Wednesday to talk about the Russia investigation — but he flailed wildly when asked about some rich asshole Jr.’s 2016 meeting with Russian officials to get dirt on Hillary Clinton.

When asked point-blank by CNN’s John Berman if he agreed with former the rich asshole political strategist Steve Bannon that the rich asshole Jr.’s meeting with the Russians in the rich asshole Tower was “treasonous,” Jordan refused to answer the question and tried to turn it around to implicate the FBI and Washington-based research firm Fusion GPS.

“Well, I think he’s been questioned about that meeting,” Jordan said of the rich asshole Jr. “What I want to know about that meeting is, why was the Russian lawyer meeting with Glenn Simpson, the Fusion GPS founder, both before and after the meeting some rich asshole Jr. had with the Russian lawyer? Why did that take place? I think there’s lots of questions that need to be answered.”

CNN’s Poppy Harlow was not satisfied by this answer and again asked Jordan if he agreed with Bannon’s statement that the rich asshole Jr. meeting was “treasonous.”

“What I think we need to do is get — like, look — why did they only release 375 text messages of the 10,000…”

“I just asked you a different question!” interrupted Harlow. “That’s not what we’re asking you.”

“What I’m saying is, I think there are lots — in fact, we’re doing some tweets this morning on a number of questions that need to be answered. I think there are all kinds of questions that need to be answered,” Jordan replied.

“It sounds like you don’t think it needs to be answered, about whether or not this meeting was treasonous or unpatriotic,” Harlow shot back. “Is that right?”

Watch the video below.

Comey shames Republican silence on the rich asshole’s attacks against Justice Dept and FBI

BRAD REED
03 JAN 2018 AT 10:26 ET

Former FBI director James Comey testifies during a House Intelligence Committee hearing on Mar 20, 2017 (Screenshot)

DON'T MISS STORIES. FOLLOW RAW STORY!

Former FBI Director James Comey took to Twitter on Wednesday to call out Republicans for remaining silent even as President some rich asshole publicly attacks the independence of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“Where are the voices of all the leaders who know an independent Department of Justice and FBI are essential to our liberty?” Comey asked, before adding the following historical quote from Martin Luther: “You are not only responsible for what you say, but also for what you do not say.”

Comey’s tweet was in response to the rich asshole’s Tuesday morning tweet in which he told the “Deep State Justice Dept.” that it should prosecute former Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, as well as Comey himself.

Ever since being fired by the rich asshole last year, the former FBI director has regularly used his Twitter account to subtly take digs at the president. On the day that former the rich asshole National Security Adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, for instance, Comey posted a Bible verse about letting “justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

Bannon says Mueller will use Jared Kushner’s ‘greasy’ money laundering deals to ‘f*ck the rich asshole’: report

BRAD REED
03 JAN 2018 AT 09:34 ET

Jared Kushner holds a news conference on government efficiency (Screen cap).

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In addition to slamming some rich asshole Jr. for having a “treasonous” meeting with Russian officials in 2016, former the rich asshole political strategist Steve Bannon also reportedly believes that special counsel Robert Mueller will use alleged criminal activities by the rich asshole son-in-law Jared Kushner to get to the president.

In an excerpt of journalist Michael Wolff’s new book “Fire and Fury: Inside the rich asshole White House” published by the Guardian, Bannon says that Mueller’s probe will get to the rich asshole by going after money laundering operations that purportedly run rampant at the rich asshole properties around the world.

“This is all about money laundering,” Bannon reportedly said, according to The Guardian. “Mueller chose [senior prosecutor Andrew] Weissmann first and he is a money-laundering guy. Their path to f*cking the rich asshole goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr and Jared Kushner… It’s as plain as a hair on your face.”

Bannon went on to say that Kushner’s activities would prove to be particularly problematic for the rich asshole White House.

“It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner sh*t,” he said. “The Kushner sh*t is greasy. They’re going to go right through that. They’re going to roll those two guys up and say play me or trade me.”

The Horror of a Trump Presidency

Friday, January 5, 2018

Welcome to Blunderdome: Internet can’t decide who to root for in Bannon vs. the rich asshole

Trump: ‘Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only...

Manafort sues DOJ, Mueller over Russia probe authority

the rich asshole Campaign Operative Just Filed Lawsuit AGAINST Special Counsel Mueller To END His Investigation

Fox & Friends host delivers racist attack on Mueller grand jury

Kilmeade goes there.

The person anonymously leaking racist attacks on the Mueller grand jury sounds a lot like the rich asshole

A tipster straight out of "central casting."

“Central casting” is a the rich asshole signature

the rich asshole’s cozy relationship with Richard Johnson

‘They’re going to crack Don Jr. like an egg’: Bannon rips the rich asshole Jr.’s ‘treasonous’ Russia meeting

Breitbart previously defended the meeting at the rich asshole Tower.

Looking past the rich asshole and his ‘powerful’ nuclear button, the Koreas thaw diplomatic relations

While President the rich asshole threatens North Korea with his "bigger and more powerful" nuclear arsenal, Pyongyang reopens a phone line with South Korea.

some rich asshole Didn’t Want to Be President

Bannon: 2016 the rich asshole Tower meeting was 'treasonous'

‘Trumptard snowflake’: Breitbart fans eat each other alive after Bannon calls Don Jr. ‘treasonous’

the rich asshole’s eyes rolled back in his head as aide struggled to explain the Constitution to him: report

Give President the rich asshole the Nobel Prize, Steve Bannon says

WATCH: Tea Party lawmaker flails wildly when CNN hosts ask if Don Jr’s Russia meeting was ‘treasonous’

Comey shames Republican silence on the rich asshole’s attacks against Justice Dept and FBI

Bannon says Mueller will use Jared Kushner’s ‘greasy’ money laundering deals to ‘f*ck the rich asshole’: report

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Friday, January 5, 2018

READ THE RICH ASSHOLE’S REACTION TO STEVE BANNON’S COMMENTS

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Morning Briefing

Kilmeade goes there.

A tipster straight out of "central casting."

“Central casting” is a the rich asshole signature

the rich asshole’s cozy relationship with Richard Johnson

Breitbart previously defended the meeting at the rich asshole Tower.

While President the rich asshole threatens North Korea with his "bigger and more powerful" nuclear arsenal, Pyongyang reopens a phone line with South Korea.

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Post a Comment