This is a daily or weekly record of the Trump presidency so hopefully future generations will learn what happens when you elect an narcissistic, thin skinned, racist, xenophobic, misogynistic unqualified buffoon in a position of power where he has access to nuclear codes.
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Friday, January 12, 2018
January 4th, 2017 - January 5th, 2017. 416-417 days since the Nov 8, 2016, election of some rich asshole, no.45, and 346-347 days since the Jan 20th inauguration.
by Brian Stelter and Daniella Diaz @CNNMoneyJanuary 5, 2018: 8:30 AM ET
Michael Wolff says his explosive book about President the rich asshole is accurate, despite the White House's attacks. And he appreciates all the free promotion from the president.
"Where do I send the box of chocolates?" Wolff asked playfully in his first interview about the book, "Fire and Fury," which became the country's hottest book in the last two days.
"Today" show host Savannah Guthrie asked: "You think he's helping you sell books?"
"Absolutely," Wolff said, and "he's helping me prove the point of the book."
What Wolff portrays as the rich asshole's instability is one of the troubling themes of "Fire and Fury," which was supposed to be released next Tuesday. Leaks and excerpts from the book and a legal threat from one of the rich asshole's personal attorneys caused the publisher, Henry Holt, to move up the release to Friday.
Wolff cozied up to White House sources like Steve Bannon and spent months inside the West Wing last year, which is why the rich asshole's Thursday night tweet was so curious.
"I authorized Zero access to White House (actually turned him down many times) for author of phony book! I never spoke to him for book. Full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that don't exist," the rich asshole tweeted.
Wolff told "Today" on Friday that he "absolutely spoke to the president" while working on "Fire and Fury."
"Whether he realized it was an interview or not, I don't know, but it certainly was not off the record," Wolff said. "I've spent about three hours with the president over the course of the campaign, and in the White House. So, my window into some rich asshole is pretty significant."
White House aides have depicted the book as a work of fiction. In fact, some of Wolff's reporting has already been corroborated. But the book also contains some errors, according to early reviewers.
"This author is quite frankly a crackpot fake news fantasy fiction writer," deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley said on CNN's "Erin Burnett OutFront" Thursday night.
On Friday morning, Guthrie asked Wolff: "You stand by everything in the book? Nothing made up?"
"Absolutely everything in the book," he said.
Importantly, Wolff said he has receipts: "I work like every journalist works. I have recordings, I have notes. I am certainly and absolutely, in every way, comfortable with everything I've reported in this book."
Wolff has a controversial track record. He has racked up scoops over the years, but critics have at times accused him of sloppy or unethical reporting practices.
the rich asshole might have been alluding to this in his Thursday night tweet: "Look at this guy's past and watch what happens to him and Sloppy Steve!" (That's presumably Steve Bannon.)
Wolff responded on Friday morning: "My credibility is being questioned by a man who has less credibility than, perhaps, anyone who has ever walked on Earth at this point."
With "Fire and Fury," there has already been speculation that Wolff burned some of his sources, using material that was meant to be "off the record."
His own description of his reporting indicates that he capitalized on the dysfunction in and around the rich asshole White House to gain access.
While working on the book, he also publicly flattered his sources and criticized other news outlets for being too tough on the rich asshole.
On the "Today" show, he said, "I said what was necessary to get the story."
As for Thursday's extraordinary cease and desist letter from the rich asshole's personal attorney Charles Harder, the publisher responded, "We see 'Fire and Fury' as an extraordinary contribution to our national discourse, and are proceeding with the publication of the book."
The book soared to No. 1 on Amazon's best selling books list on Wednesday and has remained there ever since.
One bookstore in Washington even held a midnight release party for the tell-all.
Harder has not responded to CNN's requests for comment about the new release date or the prospect of legal action against the book.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dashed any hope President Donald Trump might have had that she would resign before the end of his term, announcing on Thursday that she had hired a full slate of clerks through 2020.
The announcement bucks ongoing speculation that Ginsburg, 84, is nearing retirement: Typically, justices planning on stepping down don't hire all of their clerks for the upcoming term.
Ginsburg's resignation would of course would be a political gift to Trump, who's so eager to fill an empty Supreme Court seat that he's released the names of potential nominees for a vacancy that doesn't yet exist. Trump is particularly anxious to see the end of Ginsburg's tenure, ever since the self-proclaimed "flaming feminist litigator" spoke out against him during his 2016 presidential campaign.
"I can't imagine what this place would be—I can't imagine what the country would be—with Donald Trump as our president," she told the New York Times that July. Later, she called Trump a " faker" and said he "really has an ego."
Trump called for Ginsburg to resign following these comments, decrying her "dumb political statements" and saying they indicated that her "mind is shot." Ginsburg eventually apologized for bashing the then-candidate, and since he's taken office, she's been more coy about her criticism of Trump and his presidency.
"We're not experiencing the best of times,” she said simply in a February interview with the BBC's " Newsnight."
Ginsburg has made it clear before that she intends to remain on the bench "as long as I can do it full steam," the Times reported.
Ginsburg's fans see the " Notorious RBG" as one of the final defenses against Trump's agenda, and often worry about Ginsburg's well-being.
"If you have any need for blood, you can have the eight or so units of A-positive that are right here in my body," a Washington Post columnist told Ginsburg in February. "There's also a gently used liver in here, lobes of it just lying around if you need them."
Justice Anthony Kennedy, 81, has also been the subject of speculation about his leaving the court—and he has not yet announced his picks for clerks. Kennedy is reportedly unlikely to remain on the Supreme Court for Trump's entire term, but also said he wouldn't retire for "at least" another year.
Ivanka Trump and husband Jared Kushner were both seen at a party at the Trump hotel in Washington Thursday night while President Donald Trump was still battling it out with former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon because of his remarks from journalist Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.
“Meanwhile, Kushner and Ivanka Trump are doing a party at the Trump hotel tonight, as the Bannon book rages on,” tweeted Maggie Haberman.
In the book, Bannon was quoted saying that Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign was “treasonous” and “unpatriotic.” He also said the president was likely involved in the meeting, too.
“The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor—with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers," Bannon reportedly said. “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."
Trump took to Twitter on Thursday night and said everything written in the book was “filled with lies.” He said Wolff did not have access to the White House.
“I authorized Zero access to White House (actually turned him down many times) for author of phony book! I never spoke to him for book. Full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that don’t exist. Look at this guy’s past and watch what happens to him and Sloppy Steve!” Trump tweeted.
I authorized Zero access to White House (actually turned him down many times) for author of phony book! I never spoke to him for book. Full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that don’t exist. Look at this guy’s past and watch what happens to him and Sloppy Steve!
Trump has also said his former right-hand man is unstable and threatened to sue both Bannon and Wolff over the book.
Bannon sharply criticized Ivanka Trump, according to Wolff. He is quoted in the book as describing the president’s daughter as “dumb as a brick,” and was previously reported to have called her the "queen of leaks," to which she responded by calling him a "fucking liar." After the salacious attacks, the bot account @TrumpsAlert said she either unfollowed or blocked Bannon.
Trump sent Bannon a cease-and-desist letter after details from the book emerged this week. Bannon left his post at the White House in August.
“Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency,” Trump said Wednesday in a statement. “When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.”
President Donald Trump has been egging on Iranian protestors on Twitter, a staggering turnaround from his predecessor’s work to keep American fingerprints off of dissent in Iran—and his approach may open the door for hard-liners in Iran to crack down on demonstrators and then blame America for the repression, experts say.
Barack Obama was much criticized by Republicans for his quiet diplomatic approach to Iran, but foreign affairs insiders say the 44th president was acting out of concern that Iran's theocratic dictatorship would cite any U.S. meddling as an excuse to tighten its grip.
It's too soon to tell if Trump's approach will bolster the fledgling push for economic and political reform in Iran or undermine it, but Iran is already sounding warning signals that it won't tolerate meddling by the U.S. commander in chief.
The U.S. had meddled “in a grotesque way in Iran's internal affairs,” Iran’s ambassador to the U.N. told U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in a letter on Wednesday. Iran’s religious and political leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei himself has posted messages calling the protests “U.S. and Zionist regime’s conspiracies against Iran.”
The Iranian government has also worked to try to limit access to social media in Iran, a critical tool for protest organizers to manage demonstrations. That's a key development, say Obama loyalists, who defended his approach when Iran faced broad anti-government protests in 2009.
Obama chose to avoid public statements, asking Twitter to continue operating in Iran despite government objections so that protestors could organize. He kept quiet when protests formed, but did warn Iran’s leaders when government forces began to crack down on the demonstrators.
“He was applying the adage, when the enemy is making a mistake, don’t get in his way,” said Daniel Russel, who served under Obama as the senior director for Asian affairs on the National Security Council, paraphrasing Napoleon. “He was making sure we didn’t taint or undermine an indigenous authentic movement by giving it Western cooties.”
Obama was concerned, according to several former national security officials, that Iran’s leadership would use any more aggressive diplomacy by the U.S. as an excuse to crack down on protestors and produce anti-American propaganda.
“He didn’t want to make it easy for oppressive forces to point to us as the evil external force that was responsible for the unrest,” Russel said.
Trump has jettisoned that approach, bounding into the middle of a protest movement that took root at the end of 2016, with maximum public posturing.
“TIME FOR CHANGE!” Trump tweeted on New Year’s Day, only one of many public statements on the protests.
Trump also directly encouraged the “fight” by protestors, telling them that “the United States will be with you” in a tweet on January 3, before deleting the tweet and choosing slightly more diplomatic language.
Some experts defended Trump’s approach, saying clear support for the protestors is critical when citizens are rising up against tyranny.
“It’s very empowering for a superpower to declare solidarity with you,” said Richard Goldberg, a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who previously advised several Republican politicians.
Goldberg said that the argument that U.S. public support for the protestors could be used by the Iranian regime is “hullabaloo.”
“That’s always been a misnomer, and a misdirection, especially from the previous administration, that if you speak out publicly about what’s going on in Iran that you helping the regime’s propaganda,” he said. “We are the United States of America. We are the most powerful nation in the world, and we can walk and chew gum at the same time.”
Despite the reoccurrence of protesters, there are some critical differences between 2009 and the current unrest. In 2009 the protests were focused in Tehran, concentrated in larger groups that could more easily be targeted by government forces. This time, the protestors are spread across the country in smaller pockets. And they’re less interested in U.S. help.
“I think the protesters are not listening as much to what the president is saying,” said Ariane Tabatabai, a professor of Security Studies at Georgetown University.
Tabatabai said that although protesters are generally ignoring Trump, the Iranian government, including Khamenei, has been listening closely.
“Khamenei is going to come out and say the U.S. is behind this no matter what we do, however when the President tweets out statements, it allows them to point to things in particular,” she said. “They don’t have to go to great lengths to justify the statements or the actions which they had to do in the past.”
The danger will come if Trump does not then back up his rhetoric with results.
“The last thing we should be doing is creating false and dangerous expectations,” said Robert Malley, who served Obama as White House Coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf region. “We could embolden demonstrators who we will inevitably abandon if the regime cracks down, and we could magnify the regime's paranoia which will make a violent crackdown all the more likely.”
Iran is failing at every level despite the terrible deal made with them by the Obama Administration. The great Iranian people have been repressed for many years. They are hungry for food & for freedom. Along with human rights, the wealth of Iran is being looted. TIME FOR CHANGE!
Malley said that there are substantial differences between 2009 and now, and that in both cases a U.S. president has limited ability to shape the impact of protests in Iran. Today's challenges mirror Trump and Obama's very different approach on Iran’s nuclear program, with Obama spending years reaching a diplomatic accord and Trump moving to back out of the deal while aggressively siding with Iran’s mortal enemy, Saudi Arabia.
“The U.S. simply lacks the influence or leverage on Tehran that it possessed, say, in Cairo, given the billions in aid and military assistance we provided to the Mubarak regime,” he said.
Trump has also rapidly escalated tensions with Iran, both by failing to certify Obama’s nuclear accord, and by including Iranian citizens in his travel ban.
Those decisions have been paired with a push by the State Department to promote democracy, Goldberg said, citing administration interest in restarting the Iran Democracy Fund, a program championed by President George W. Bush and halted by Obama. That fund spent, at times, tens of millions of dollars to create and transmit pro-democracy television and radio programing into Iran.
The combination of moves by the Trump administration has made his messages to protesters unlikely to be well received, Malley said.
“The messenger in this case is about as bad a messenger as one can imagine,” he said. “It's telling that, unlike in 2009, you’re not seeing protestors clamoring for U.S. support or help. They had expectations for Obama. They apparently have none for Trump.”
According to Wolff, the rich asshole’s attempt to block sales of his book only raised its public profile and guaranteed the massive sales it’s now experiencing.
To add insult to injury, even Breitbart News — whose chairman, Steve Bannon, is quoted throughout the book making disparaging remarks about the rich asshole and his family — has published a story that mocks the rich asshole for attempting to kill the book before it went on sale.
In an article with the headline “the rich asshole Book Ban Fails as ‘Fire and Fury’ Sales Soar,” Breitbart editor Joel Pollak writes that Wolff’s book “flew off bookshelves early Friday morning despite efforts by President some rich asshole’s legal team to stop the publication and distribution of the book.”
“Late Thursday night, lines formed at Washington, D.C. bookstores as curious patrons — and journalists looking for reportable tidbits — rushed to see what the president did not want them to read,” writes Pollak, who then quoted an editor at The Hill who called out the rich asshole’s “strange” attempt to block the book’s publication.
CNN’s Brooke Baldwin on Friday reacted incredulously to reports that some rich asshole once called White House communications director Hope Hicks the “best piece of tail” Corey Lewandowski will ever get.
That anecdote was relayed by Baldwin in the explosive book “Fire and Fury,” by journalist Michael Wolff, which described a conversation with the rich asshole that sent Hicks fleeing from the room.
“There is another excerpt, this is on Hope Hicks, former the rich asshole assistant turned White House communications director, so this is the quote on Hope,” Baldwin began, describing the anecdote. “Shortly after Lewandowski, with whom Hicks had an off-and-on romantic relationship, was fired in June of 2016 for clashing with the rich asshole family members. Hicks sat in a rich asshole Tower with the rich asshole and his sons worried about Lewandowski’s treatment in the press and how she might help him. the rich asshole, who seemed to treat Hope in a protective and even paternal way, looked up and said ‘Why, you’ve already done enough for him. You are the best piece of tail he’ll ever have,’ sending hicks running from the room.”
“I mean, again, this is Michael Wolff’s account. ‘Best piece of tail’ coming from the president? You’ve got to be kidding me!”
Joy Behar and Meghan McCain of 'The View' (Screen capture)
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On Friday, the panel on ABC’s “The View” drew Meghan McCain up short when she complained that people keep “lecturing” her about values since she joined the show.
McCain was addressing guest-host — and fierce critic of President some rich asshole — Ana Navarro’s comments on the divide in the Republican Party.
“I’ve never felt more defensive of the rich asshole’s base, I’ve never felt more conservative or more defensive of the middle of the country than I have since I started working on this show,” said McCain.
She continued, “I don’t mean that in a negative way, it’s just that I have a whole new understanding of what it feels like to sort of be lectured to about our values.”
“I think we’ve got to be less stuck on labels,” said Navarro, “and look more at the individual candidates.”
“Who’s lecturing you, Meghan?” asked Joy Behar pointedly. “Who’s lecturing you?”
“But to Ana’s point, which is such an important one,” said panelist Sunny Hostin, “when you have a choice between an alleged pedophile and a man who put KKK members in prison as U.S. Attorney of Alabama, there’s a need for people to put country before party.”
Dr. Bandy Lee — the Yale School of Medicine forensic psychiatrist who briefed Congress on the possibility that President some rich asshole is dangerously mentally ill — pushed back on Friday against charges that she is acting outside her purview by discussing the mental health of a person she has not personally treated.
Lee told Vox that the rich asshole is now in accelerating mental health crisis that intensified with special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments of former the rich asshole 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort and his aide Rick Gates as well as guilty pleas from former foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos and ousted national security adviser Mike Flynn.
the rich asshole received a certain measure of flattery and deference on his Asia trip, Lee said, which would be soothing to his constant need for flattery and reassurance. That however, “made him more volatile when he returned.”
“When he returned and faced the progress of the special counsel’s investigation, he became more paranoid, returning to conspiracy theories that he had let go of for a while. He seemed to further lose his grip on reality by denying his own voice on the Access Hollywood tapes,” she said.
Lee — who has based her decades of work in the study of violence prediction and prevention — said that the rich asshole’s recent behavior is predictive of violence.
“(T)he sheer frequency of his tweets seemed to reflect the frantic state of mind he was entering, and his retweeting some violent anti-Muslim videos showed a concerning attraction to violence. And then there were the belligerent nuclear threats this week,” she explained.
A potential nuclear holocaust isn’t the only imminent threat posed by an unstable president, Lee said. He could start conflict on many levels with a number of countries, further alienate U.S. allies or spark civil conflict in the U.S. by “laying a foundation for a violent culture that could give way to epidemics of violence.”
This is an emergency situation, Lee stressed, and professionals faced with dangerous individuals and emergencies are not diagnosing the threatening individual, but taking protective action.
“We are assessing dangerousness, not making a diagnosis. The two are quite separate: Assessing dangerousness is making a judgment about the situation, not the person. The same person may not be dangerous in a different situation, for example. And it is his threat to public health, not his personal affairs, that is our concern,” she told Vox.
“Also, once you declare danger, you are calling first for containment and removal of weapons from the person and, second, for a full evaluation — which may then yield diagnoses,” Lee explained.
With regards to the rich asshole’s willingness to undergo psychiatric evaluation, Lee said that mental health professionals are accustomed to the dilemma posed by patients who most urgently need intervention but are the least willing to accept help.
“That is the reason why in all 50 states we have not only the legal authority, but often the legal obligation, to contain someone even against their will when it’s an emergency,” she said.
“So in an emergency, neither consent nor confidentiality requirements hold. Safety comes first. What we do in the case of danger is we contain the person, we remove them from access to weapons, and we do an urgent evaluation,” she said, adding, “This is what we have been calling for with the president based on basic medical standards of care.”
MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle said that it’s a serious stretch for shadowy Republican mega-donor Rebekah Mercer to claim that she hasn’t spoken to Steve Bannon in “many months” because Bannon was Mercer’s featured guest a cocktail party in mid-October.
Mercer, said Ruhle, “said she hasn’t had contact with Bannon for many months, which I found curious because on Oct. 18 of last year, she hosted a cocktail party in her apartment on the Upper West Side of New York City.”
“Steve Bannon was a featured guest and she was very complimentary with him, introducing him all around the party and saying lovely thing about him,” she said.
The Washington Post‘s Ashley Parker said that “the split now is very real” between Bannon and the Mercers, who have been allies for years in a project to put right-wing politicians into power.
Two Republican Senators are seeking a criminal investigation against Christopher Steele, the former MI6 spy who wrote the infamous intelligence dossier that allegedly revealed deep connections between the Russian government and President some rich asshole.
The New York Times reports that “Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a senior committee member, told the Justice Department they had reason to believe that… Steele lied to federal authorities about his contacts with reporters regarding information in the dossier, and they urged the department to investigate.”
Even though the referral for investigation doesn’t recommend pressing criminal charges against Steele, the Times notes that it is the first investigative referral issued by Senate Republicans — and it isn’t against anyone who interfered in the 2016 presidential election on behalf of Russia.
“I don’t take lightly making a referral for criminal investigation. But, as I would with any credible evidence of a crime unearthed in the course of our investigations, I feel obliged to pass that information along to the Justice Department,” Grassley said in a press release.
Additionally, the Times notes that the referral “appears to make no assessment of the veracity of the dossier’s contents, much of which remains unsubstantiated nearly a year after it became public.”
President Barack Obama laughs during a meeting in the Oval Office, Jan. 24, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
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The official monthly jobs report for December 2017 was a disappointment, as the Labor Department estimated that the economy added just 148,000 jobs over the last month.
And despite the fact that President some rich asshole has bragged about his first year in office being an unqualified economic success, it turns out that average monthly job growth in 2017 was 171,000 jobs per month — which was down significantly from the 187,000 jobs per month that were added in 2016.
What’s more, the monthly average of 171,000 jobs created in 2017 was actually the lowest average monthly job growth since 2010, when just 88,000 jobs were added per month.
Fox News’ research team posted the numbers for average monthly job growth on its Twitter account — and there was deathly silence in response from the usual crowd of the rich asshole supporters.
Instead, the tweet generated lots of pointing and laughing from liberals who mocked Fox for acknowledging that job growth under the last six years of the Obama administration was stronger than during the rich asshole’s first year.
New revelations in Michael Wolff’s new book on the rich asshole White House put Attorney General Jeff Sessions squarely in the crosshairs of an obstruction of justice case.
A pair of former Obama administration officials appeared Friday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” where they broke down new details from the book Fire and Fury that may interest special counsel Robert Mueller.
“We learned two important new things about where this obstruction of justice probe may go based on this story,” said Matthew Miller, former spokesman for the Justice Department.
He said Wolff’s reporting on President some rich asshole instructing the White House counsel to talk Sessions out of recusing himself in the Justice Department’s Russia probe — where the attorney general would be a witness or potentially even a target — would be important to investigators.
“Proving intent of obstruction of justice is always a hard thing, because acts that would otherwise be legal — like firing the FBI director, for example — are illegal if you’re doing them for the purpose to thwart the investigation,” Miller said. “It now seems clear the president was trying to thwart this investigation. He wanted his attorney general to block it.
Miller said the book also demonstrated the potential scope of the White House conspiracy to impede the Russia probe, which he said appears to include the attorney general himself.
“We learned that — the Justice Department denies this, but (New York Times reporter) Michael Schmidt reports that an aide to the attorney general was up on Capitol Hill before the director’s firing asking congressional staffers to dig up dirt and get it to press about the FBI director (James Comey),” Miller said. “If that was something the attorney general was doing as part of the conspiracy to obstruct justice, if that was an overt act he took to further that conspiracy, the attorney general himself could now be a subject of that investigation.”
“That is a very difficult place for the chief law enforcement officer of the United States to be,” Miller added.
Wolff’s book also reveals that former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus kept handwritten notes that back Comey’s testimony about his interactions with the president before his firing.
“There are three reasons why those notes will be given weight by the special counsel,” said Jeremy Bash, former chief of staff to both the Department of Defense and CIA. “One is they’re handwritten, second, they’re contemporaneous, and third, they’re kind of a statement against interest. In other words, a statement against Reince Priebus’ boss, the president, basically corroborating James Comey’s testimony.”
Those notes, if Wolff accurately reported them, could also help Mueller prove an obstruction case against the president.
“The president reached out to him and said, ‘I want you to spread misinformation about the status of your investigation,’ which of course Comey said he wouldn’t do,” Bash said.
Bash said the president fired Comey only after his first attempt to obstruct justice failed.
“I think what we learned from this new reporting is that firing Jim Comey was Plan B,” Bash said. “Plan A was to keep Sessions in place and have him obstruct the investigation. Sessions had no choice, he had to recuse himself, and I think at some point we have to ask this larger question of, what does a cabinet official do when the president of the United States repeatedly asks you to do the unethical?”
Jared Kushner and Ivanka the rich asshole (Screen capture)
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Michael Wolff, the author of Fire and Fury: Inside the rich asshole White House, told MSNBC on Friday that President some rich asshole’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner are caught between their desire to support the president and their need to avoid legal consequences.
“Jared and Ivanka in their current situation,” Wolff told MSNBC, “which is a deep legal quagmire, are putting everything on the president. ‘It’s not us, it’s him.'”
the rich asshole biographer Tim O’Brien said that this is in keeping with the “clannish” nature of the rich asshole and Kushner families, pointing to Jared Kushner’s loyalty to his father Charles Kushner, when he was convicted of making illegal campaign contributions and hiring a prostitute to entrap his brother-in-law.
The idea that Ivanka the rich asshole would distance herself from her father, O’Brien said, “does not ring true to me.”
She may need to distance herself from her husband, O’Brien said, “Because Jared Kushner could be in a lot of trouble.”
File picture taken on August 11, 2017 shows White House adviser Jared Kushner listening as US President some rich asshole speaks to the press on at his Bedminster National Golf Club in New Jersey (AFP Photo/JIM WATSON)
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Norm Eisen, the former ethics czar for President Barack Obama, on Friday identified yet another a major problem for some rich asshole’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, noting the top White House aide is “headed for the pokey” if claims made in Michael Wolff’s new book are true.
if Jared encouraged Trump to fire Comey to protect Kushner family business dealings from scrutiny as Fire & Fury (p. 210-11) claims, then Jared conspired to obstruct justice & headed for the pokey. h/t @J_Insider
As Eisen notes, Wolff reports in his new book “Fire and Fury” that Kushner’s motivation for convincing the rich asshole to fire former FBI Director James Comey stemmed from a desire to protect his family’s business dealings from investigation.
In November, the Wall Street Journalreported that Kushner was instrumental in the rich asshole’s decision to fire Comey. He conferred with the president during a pivotal weekend in May at the rich asshole’s Bedminster golf club in New Jersey, and pushed for Comey’s dismissal.
That move eventually set the stage for the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller, who is in turn reportedly investigating Kushner’s businesses, as well as his knowledge of Russian interference and possible obstruction of justice.
the rich asshole biographer Tim O'Brien on AM Joy -- screen capture
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Journalist Timothy O’Brien, author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald,” on Friday argued Michael Wolff’s new book “Fire and Fury” proves that any notion of some rich asshole pivot is a pipe dream.
Host Stephanie Ruhle asked the rich asshole biographer what “impact” the book will have on the rest of the country. “I remember before President the rich asshole was elected, he would talk about the Obama administration, he would say the rest of the world is laughing at us,” Ruhle began. “What do you think the country and the world will say after this book? Will they notice?”
“I think people, the core the rich asshole supporters will always be core the rich asshole supporters,” O’Brien explained. “They’re not going to read any book and maybe any news article that’s critical of him. I think this is the kind of book that confirms what a lot of people who are concerned about the rich asshole White House already suspected.”
Ruhle asked if that means the book “doesn’t do anything.”
“If it confirms what we already think, and there are lots of people who don’t believe it, and lots of people who simply don’t care, it doesn’t actually change the game,” Ruhle said.
“It informs how other people begin to frame the the rich asshole presidency and continue to frame the the rich asshole presidency,” O’Brien explained. “There’s been this effort to sort of say, well, maybe he’ll evolve or he’ll get some adult handlers in there, and they will become more sophisticated about policy and procedure. And the reality is, it’s Romper Room.”
President some rich asshole spoke by phone with former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, a White House official said on Friday, as Romney girds for a potential run for a U.S. Senate seat in Utah.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the two men spoke by phone on Thursday night for five to 10 minutes. the rich asshole wanted to “wish him well,” the official said.
Tensions between the rich asshole and Romney date back to the 2016 presidential election campaign when Romney appealed to establishment Republicans to reject the rich asshole’s candidacy, an effort that fizzled.
In late 2016 after the rich asshole won the presidency, he briefly considered whether to pick Romney as his secretary of state but ultimately turned to Rex Tillerson for the job.
the rich asshole had lobbied U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah to run for re-election in 2018 in what was viewed as an effort to prevent Romney from running for the seat.
But Hatch announced recently he would retire, opening the door to a Romney candidacy. Romney is a resident of Utah although he spends time at his California home as well.
Romney advisers expect the former Massachusetts governor to run for the Senate seat in Utah, a strongly Republican state.
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) yells at CNN host Ana Cabrera (Screen cap).
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Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) — who has been derisively called “Putin’s favorite congressman” — melted down during a CNN interview on Friday after a reporter corrected false claims he was making on live TV.
During the exchange, Rohrabacher defended former the rich asshole campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was indicted last year for allegedly running money laundering operations on behalf of a Kremlin-backed Ukrainian oligarch.
“Anyone can be indicted for anything, especially when there’s a special prosecutor,” he said dismissively.
Reporter Ana Cabrera then interrupted him and asked Rohrabacher about whether he thought it was OK to lie to the FBI, as former the rich asshole National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and former the rich asshole foreign policy aide George Papadopoulos had both done.
“The answer is no, it’s not good to lie to anybody,” he replied, before pivoting to attack Cabrera. “It’s also not good to interrupt people when they’re trying to make a point when you’re a news person.”
Cabrera apologized to the congressman and told him she meant “no disrespect.” At this point, Rohrabacher became incredibly angry.
“No disrespect my foot!” he shouted. “You don’t respect the rich asshole, you don’t respect people who disagree with you politically!”
Fox News host Chris Wallace shot down President some rich asshole’s denials about reporter Michael Wolff’s work in the White House — which resulted in a scathing new book, Fire and Fury.
Wolff’s book reveals the chaotic inner workings of the rich asshole White House, where he spent hours at a time talking to staffers and watching the daily drama unfold in the West Wing — and the president insists he never approved the reporter’s visits.
“Here is the key question: What was Michael Wolff doing in the White House in the first place?” Wallace said. “The president said (Thursday) night he personally never approved it, but his administration approved it. You assume the president had some idea that Michael Wolff was going around the White House.”
Wolff claims he spoke to the president while reporting on the book, and Wallace said the journalist was set up to work in the White House by the rich asshole’s communications office.
“I talked to a former top senior White House official who said the word came down from the communications office early in the administration to play ball with Michael Wolff,” Wallace said. “They knew there would be a bunch of books about the first year of the the rich asshole White House, and they figured most of them would be critical and they thought that — there is a question why they thought this — they would get a fair shake from Michael Wolff.”
Staffers were required by White House communications staff to participate in the book, Wallace said.
“So the word came down to participate,” Wallace said. “People said, ‘Why did they talk to him on the record?’ They were told to. So the fact that he is there was a tremendous miscalculation on the part of the White House in the first place.”
He said the president made another mind-boggling miscalculation by attempting to block the book’s publication, which resulted in its release five days early, and threatening to sue the author.
“I’ve been around this ting time, and this isn’t the first tell-all book that came out on an administration,” Wallace said. “Damage Control 101 — the president and all of his top staff ignore the book, they don’t say a word about it and don’t give it any extra oxygen. They certainly don’t have their lawyer threaten to sue ahead of time to stop publication. The publisher, the author and Steve Bannon, which all it does is add attention to it and make it an instant best seller.”
The Fox News host offers some unsolicited advice to the president, and urged him to use the power of his office to change the subject.
“Michael Wolff will be on a publicity tour this week and talking more and more about the book and the various allegations in it, and the test for the White House and for the people around him is to change the conversation,” Wallace said. “Look, he is the president — he can do that. He needs to focus not on the book, but on his job and doing things for the American people. If they were to come out with an ambitious set of plans, agenda out of Camp David this weekend, that would be a good thing to change the subject. That’s what they need to do in the bottom line, change the subject.”
President Donald Trump boasted to people First Lady Melania Trump was his “trophy wife” and the couple often went days without seeing each other while living at Trump Tower before he was elected in November 2016, a new book claims.
The extraordinary claims about the first marriage are made in Michael Wolff’s highly-publicized new book, Fire and Fury: Inside Trump's White House, published Friday. The author reportedly conducted over 200 interviews with people familiar with the inner-workings of the Trump presidency, including former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon.
Wolff paints a solemn picture of the Trumps’ 12-year marriage, writing that the president “and Melania spent relatively little time together. They could go days at a time without contact, even when they were both in Trump Tower.”
In an excerpt published by the U.K.’s Times newspaper Friday, Wolff continues to describe the Trumps’ marriage prior to the White House being “perplexing to almost everybody around him.”
“Often she did not know where he was, or take much notice of that fact. Her husband moved between residences as he would move between rooms. Along with knowing little about his whereabouts, she knew little about his business, and took at best modest interest in it,” Wolff writes.
According to Wolff, Trump would boast to people “proudly and without irony” that Melania—his third spouse—was a “‘trophy wife.’” And though they spent little time together, Wolff claims Trump would jubilantly praise his wife’s appearance to others “often, awkwardly for her.”
The book goes on to claim that Trump was something of an absentee father to his youngest son, Barron, aged 11. Wolff says that much of the first lady’s life before the presidency was “entirely focused on her young son,” however.
In an earlier extract from Fire and Fury published by New York magazine Wednesday, Wolff says that Trump did not actually want to be president, nor did the first lady expect him to win. On election night in November 2016, he says, “Melania was in tears—and not of joy.”
The first lady’s communications director Stephanie Grisham responded in a statement: "The book is clearly going to be sold in the bargain fiction section. Mrs. Trump 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.”
Trump, for his part, branded the book it “phony” and “full of lies.”
I authorized Zero access to White House (actually turned him down many times) for author of phony book! I never spoke to him for book. Full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that don’t exist. Look at this guy’s past and watch what happens to him and Sloppy Steve!
Author Michael Wolff is seen on the set of NBC's 'Today' show prior to an interview about his book "Fire and Fury: Inside the the rich asshole White House" in New York City, U.S., January 5, 2018. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
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The author of a deeply critical book about some rich asshole’s first year in office said on Friday he had spoken with the president while working on it, contradicting the rich asshole’s assertion that he had never talked to the writer for the book and had authorized “Zero access” to the White House.
Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury: Inside the rich asshole White House” went on sale on Friday, its release pulled forward after published excerpts this week set off a political firestorm, threats by the rich asshole lawyers of legal action and an effort to halt publication.
The book, dismissed by the rich asshole as full of lies, depicts a chaotic White House, a president who was ill-prepared to win the office in 2016, and the rich asshole aides who scorned his abilities.
Wolff told NBC on Friday that he stood by his reporting and had talked to the president for the book.
“I absolutely spoke to the president. Whether he realized it was an interview or not, I don’t know, but it was certainly not off the record,” he said on NBC’s “Today” program. Wolff added that he had spoken to people who spoke to the rich asshole on a daily, “sometimes minute by minute” basis.
Asked to clarify what he meant when he wrote that the rich asshole’s entire circle questioned his fitness for office, Wolff said, “Let me put a marker in the sand here: 100 percent of the people around him … They all say he is like a child. And what they mean by that is he has a need for immediate gratification. It’s all about him.”
On Thursday evening, the rich asshole tweeted, “I authorized Zero access to White House (actually turned him down many times) for author of phony book! I never spoke to him for book.”
“Full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that don’t exist. Look at this guy’s past and watch what happens to him and Sloppy Steve!” the rich asshole added.
The early excerpts have also caused a deep public rift with the rich asshole’s former chief strategist and top campaign aide, Steve Bannon, over his comments in the book about the rich asshole and his family, shaking the Republican president’s populist movement.
BEST-SELLER ON DAY ONE
Lawyers for the rich asshole had called on the book’s publisher, Henry Holt & Co, to halt the book’s release, originally scheduled for Tuesday. Instead, it began sales early. As of Friday, “Fire and Fury” was the top-selling book on Amazon.com.
Customers in Washington lined up in bitterly cold weather to purchase a copy at KramerBooks, which began selling copies at midnight. Two bookstores, including KramerBooks, reported selling out of copies as of Friday morning at 10 a.m. ET (1500 GMT).
The White House has said the book is riddled with errors. Spokeswoman Sarah Sanders, who has called the book trash, said again on Friday that Wolff had talked only briefly to the president and did not have wide access.
“This is a guy who made up a lot of stories to try to sell books,” she said in an interview on Fox News Channel.
In a tweet on Friday, the rich asshole called the book another attempt to smear him since possible collusion by his campaign with Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 election, which a special counsel is investigating, “is proving to be a total hoax.”
“The Fake News Media (Mainstream) and this phony new book are hitting out at every new front imaginable,” the rich asshole wrote. Special counsel Robert Mueller has not announced any conclusion to his investigation.
Charles Harder, the rich asshole’s personal lawyer, in a legal notice provided to Reuters, warned on Thursday of possible claims including libel against Wolff and Henry Holt & Co and threatened to try to block publication of the book. Harder also told Reuters that “legal action is imminent” against Bannon.
Henry Holt said it had received a cease-and-desist letter from the rich asshole’s attorney but would go ahead with publishing the book.
Bannon’s reaction to the controversy has been muted. In interviews after the news broke with the conservative Breitbart News website, he called the rich asshole a “great man” and pledged continued support for the president’s agenda.
(Reporting by Makini Brice; Additional reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by Susan Heavey and Frances Kerry)
John Avlon, Alysin Camerota, Chris Cuomo, A.B. Stoddard -- CNN screenshot
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A CNN panel was alternately amused and stunned into silence on Friday morning over a revelation in Michael Wolff’s bombshell book that President some rich asshole was desperate to say something nice about the Ku Klux Klan following the Charlottesville protests that left one woman dead.
CNN New Day co-host Alysin Camerota noted, “I’m interested in what was behind the thinking in the Charlottesville stuff. Obviously that exploded and became so inflammatory when the president said, ‘Well, there are good people on both sides,’ and he didn’t want to condemn the neo-Nazis and the people who were marching for the KKK.”
“This is a little insight into how he felt about the KKK” Camerota said before reading an excerpt from the book. “‘Privately, he kept trying to rationalize why someone would be a member of the KKK – that is, they might not actually believe what the KKK believes, and the KKK probably does not believe what it used to believe, who really knows what the KKK believes now?'”
“Why else would you join the KKK? Do they have good benefits? Is there an insurance plan that goes along with it?” co-host Chris Cuomo asked as his guests — Daily Beast editor John Avlon and RealClear Politics correspondent A.B. Stoddard — began laughing.
“Why else would you join?” Cuomo asked again.
“This is insightful, A.B.,” Camerota chimed in. “He wanted to be able to say there are good people on both sides, so he’s is ruminating ‘surely they’re not as bad as we all heard. Maybe there’s something in it for everybody?'”
Guest Avlon could only reply, “Dah,” with Stoddard adding, “The KKK hands out really good swag.”
Author Michael Wolff explicitly said on Friday that President some rich asshole is declining mentally.
During his interview on NBC’s Today, Wolff was asked about two key anecdotes in his new book, “Fire and Fury: Insider the rich asshole White House.” First, Wolff had written that the rich asshole is repeating himself with repeating frequency, so that he’ll now tell the exact same story once every ten minutes instead of every 30 minutes. Second Wolff claimed that the rich asshole didn’t recognize several of his old friends during a recent trip to Mar-a-Lago.
“I will quote Steve Bannon: ‘He’s lost it,'” Wolff said of the rich asshole’s mental health.
Wolff went on to explain that, as he reported out his book, he saw the way that even the rich asshole loyalists soon came to doubt the rich asshole’s mental and temperamental fitness for the job as the first year went on.
“The transformation was, ‘We thought this presidency could work, some rich asshole is an interesting and unique character, and we might be able to do something here,'” Wolff said. “And they saw him over that time and came to the conclusion he cannot do this job.”
Republican president Mike Pence speaks to supporters at a rally in Chesterfield, Missouri (Shutterstock)
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It’s been widely reported that former White House political strategist Steve Bannon thought that some rich asshole Jr.’s infamous the rich asshole Tower meeting with Russian officials was “treasonous.”
However, author Michael Wolff also claims that Bannon worried that Vice President Mike Pence was similarly attending problematic meetings — and he worked to protect him from them because he saw Pence as a solid backup plan in the event of President some rich asshole’s impeachment.
Specifically, Bannon worried about Pence taking meetings with the rich asshole son-in-law Jared Kushner and First Daughter Ivanka the rich asshole, whom he’d decided were, in Wolff’s words, “Russia toxic.”
Bannon often boasted that his personal antagonism toward Jared and Ivanka — as well as his own hermit-like disposition — kept him safe from being caught up in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.
“I’ve never been to Russia,” Bannon told Wolff. “I don’t know anybody from Russia. I’ve never spoken to any Russians. And I’d just as well not speak to anyone who has.”
However, Bannon found that Pence was regularly taking meetings with the president’s daughter and her husband — and he tried to make sure Pence kept his distance from both of them.
“Bannon observed a hapless Pence in a lot of ‘wrong meetings,’ and helped to bring in the Republican operative Nick Ayers as Pence’s chief of staff, and to get ‘our fallback guy’ out of the White House and ‘running around the world and looking like a vice president,'” writes Wolf
Steve Bannon and some rich asshole composite image
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President some rich asshole’s former campaign chairman and fired White House chief strategist Steve Bannon has become the “new enemy” to the rich asshole’s angry online horde of followers.
Vanity Fair‘s Tina Nguyen said that the embattled Breitbart.com CEO is skating on thin ice with some of his most trusted allies. His contributions to Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury: Inside the rich asshole White House have been interpreted by the base as an act of betrayal and his many enemies are seeing this moment as the chance to dispense with Bannon altogether.
“Looks like we have a new enemy,” wrote “Shadowman3001,” the moderator of pro-the rich asshole Reddit group r/The_Donald.
In the initial airburst of revelations on Wednesday, the rich asshole’s “Make America Great Again” or “#MAGA” army dismissed the new stories as “fake news,” but as the afternoon wore on, the tide turned against Bannon.
When the rich asshole released his statement denouncing Bannon, the president’s backers had their marching orders.
“I voted for the rich asshole, I didn’t vote for Bannon,” said the highest-rated comment at Breitbart.com on Thursday, “I’ll stick with the rich asshole, thanks.” The sentiment was echoed by the vast majority of the president’s disciples.
Unfortunately for Bannon — whose already-sinking political fortunes were dealt a heavy blow by the loss of U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore — recent weeks have brought desertions by his most powerful allies.
As Nguyen noted, “The Washington Postreported the next day that his longtime patron, Rebekah Mercer, had withdrawn all her funding from his personal projects, angry at his claims that she would back his possible 2020 run for president, while another source close to both Bannon and the Mercers suggested that there had also been talk of shutting down Bannon’s film production company, Glittering Steel.”
There is even talk of firing Bannon from the helm of his “killing machine” Breitbart.com and financially defanging the website.
“My family and I have not communicated with Steve Bannon in many months and have provided no financial support to his political agenda, nor do we support his recent actions and statements,” said Rebekah Mercer to the Washington Post.
Bannon maintains that he supports the president and has carried on as usual over the last 48 hours, Nguyen said. His fate appears to be sealed, however.
“He reaped what he sowed,” said the editor of one conservative website. “If Bannon hadn’t used so many people on his climb to the top, he might have had a few hands to catch him during his fall to the bottom.”
President Donald Trump is not known for his linguistic talents—and he doesn’t seem to care: in the past he has proudly pronounced China as Ch-eye-na, Tanzania as Tan-zayn-ia and Beyonce as Beyonc-ee.
But when it came to getting China’s President Xi Jinping’s name right, Trump sought a little help from his aides. Their solution, according to Michael Wolff in the explosive tell-all book released Friday, was to tell him to think of the Communist party leader as a woman.
“The president was told to think of him as a woman and call him ‘she’,” Wolff wrote in Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.
Wolff’s controversial account of Trump’s early days in the White House explained that the aides gave the president the advice ahead of his visit to Mar-a-Lago for a two day summit with Xi in April last year.
Before the advice, Trump struggled with pronouncing the family name of China’s leader and use to call him “Mr. X - I”, reported The Guardian, who obtained the book this week, ahead of its scheduled release.
According to Wolff’s findings, Trump’s Mandarin “tutoring” was a big success with his Chinese counterpart.
“[The Chinese] were in an agreeable mood, evidently willing to humor Trump. And they quickly figured out that if you flatter him, he flatters you,” Wolff wrote.
On Thursday evening, Trump blasted Wolff’s book as “full of lies” on Twitter.
"I authorized Zero access to White House (actually turned him down many times) for author of phony book! I never spoke to him for book. Full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that don’t exist. Look at this guy’s past and watch what happens to him and Sloppy Steve!" Trump tweeted, referring to Wolff and his former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon.
I authorized Zero access to White House (actually turned him down many times) for author of phony book! I never spoke to him for book. Full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that don’t exist. Look at this guy’s past and watch what happens to him and Sloppy Steve!
A day earlier, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders condemned the book on behalf of the Trump administration.
"This book is filled with false and misleading accounts from individuals who have no access or influence with the White House," Sanders said. "Participating in a book that can only be described as trashy tabloid fiction exposes their sad desperate attempts at relevancy."
Pres. some rich asshole leaves after giving a speech about his Asia trip (Screen capture)
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As bad as thing have been so far in the White House under President some rich asshole, they soon could get even worse.
Michael Wolff’s new book Fire and Fury depicts a chaotic and dysfunctional White House where staffers fear and loathe the president, whom they regard as a vain and moody “idiot,” and those conditions have exacerbated the stress that comes with the job, reported Axios.
“More than half a dozen of the more skilled White House staff are contemplating imminent departures,” according to Axios co-founders Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei. “Many leaving are quite fearful about the next chapter of the rich asshole presidency.”
The website collected more than a dozen anecdotes from Wolff’s book, which has infuriated the rich asshole so much that aides are simply avoiding him.
the rich asshole has threatened to sue Wolff over his book, but Axios reported that his lawyers laughed at the president’s bluster.
Those anecdotes show how unprepared the rich asshole is for the presidency, and how he ignores or disregards advice and follows his instincts wherever they lead — even when he contradicts himself.
“He seemed almost phobic about having formal demands on his attention,” Wolff wrote.
Wolff described a “wackadoo” moments whenever the president rambled off topic, and staffers were forced into “intense method-acting” to pretend not to notice “what everyone could see.”
“In the rich asshole White House, policy making … flowed up.” Wolff wrote. “It was a process of suggesting, in throw-it-against-the-wall style, what the president might want, and hoping he might then think that he had thought of this himself.”
Those conditions have many staffers considering a hasty exit, although it’s not clear how attractive those jobs will be once they’re open.
some rich asshole, Pork on a Stick (Screen Capture)
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Are President some rich asshole’s tweets part of an elaborate plot to distract the American public from the numerous scandals confronting his administration — or is the reality even more terrifying?
Instead, the president is mostly reacting viscerally to whatever he happens to be watching on Fox News.
“After comparing the president’s tweets to Fox coverage every day since October, I can tell you that the Fox-the rich asshole feedback loop is happening far more often than you think,” Gertz writes. “There is no strategy to the rich asshole’s Twitter feed; he is not trying to distract the media. He is being distracted.”
What makes this particularly disturbing, says Gertz, is that the president doesn’t seem to learn about global events from his own intelligence agencies, and instead relies primarily on “Fox & Friends” as his morning intelligence briefing.
More broadly, Gertz writes that this Fox-to-the rich asshole feedback loop is an incredibly powerful tool for conservatives because it forces the mainstream press to cover the topics Fox wants them to talk about — while at the same time forcing them to at least mention Fox’s framing of particular issues.
“The network’s partisan programming gets validation from the president, and forces the rest of the press to cover Fox’s obsessions whether they are newsworthy or not,” he writes.
The rich asshole administration is preparing to release guidelines soon for requiring Medicaid recipients to work, according to sources familiar with the plans, a major shift in the 50-year-old program.
The guidelines will set the conditions for allowing states to add work requirements to their Medicaid programs for the first time, putting a conservative twist on the health insurance program for the poor.
Democrats are gearing up for a fight, likely including lawsuits, arguing the administration is trying to undermine ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion on its own after Congress failed to repeal the health-care law.
The changes represent the vision of Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), who has long worked on conservative Medicaid changes.
In a speech in November hinting at the coming changes, Verma criticized ObamaCare for expanding Medicaid to “able-bodied” adults and said that group of people should be expected to work.
“Believing that community engagement requirements do not support or promote the objectives of Medicaid is a tragic example of the soft bigotry of low expectations consistently espoused by the prior administration,” Verma said. “Those days are over.”
The work requirements would only take effect if a state chose to pursue them and applied for a waiver from the federal government. The Obama administration always rejected state applications that included work requirements, but the new guidelines from the rich asshole administration would set conditions where those applications would be approved for the first time.
There are currently nine states applying to impose work requirements.
Democrats argue the changes would result in people losing health coverage if they cannot meet the new requirements or simply if the new bureaucratic hurdles discourage people from enrolling. They say many Medicaid enrollees already work, and those that don’t often can’t because they are disabled or caring for family members or other reasons.
“If they put out guidance, that would be a watershed moment I think,” said Hannah Katch, senior policy analyst at the left-leaning Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. It would be a “fundamental change in the way that people are covered by Medicaid,” she added.
“States know better than the federal government how to address the unique needs of their people,” a CMS spokesperson wrote in an email Thursday. “That is why we support innovative efforts at the state level to enhance the lives of Medicaid recipients and help them achieve self-sufficiency.”
The details of the guidance remain unclear, but it will allow states to have work requirements approved if they meet certain conditions, sources say. The release is expected within weeks, though the exact timing is unclear.
Eliot Fishman, who was a top Medicaid official under President Obama until last January, said that he expects the guidance to be issued “imminently,” though he said he has heard it is coming soon for two months.
“The hold-up is the Administration’s correct concern that waiver approvals will be challenged legally,” Fishman wrote in an email.
Liberal groups are preparing to sue the administration over the changes, arguing that work requirements are not allowed under current law and would require congressional action. Waivers must promote the “objectives” of Medicaid to be approved under the law, and Democrats argue a change that could cause people to lose coverage fails that standard.
“The guidance is an attempt to put the administration’s preferred legal framing around the waiver approvals, in anticipation of likely legal challenge in the federal courts,” Fishman, who now works for Families USA, a liberal advocacy group, wrote in the email. “Given that the legal standard is whether the waivers ‘promote the objectives’ of the Medicaid program, that the basic objective of the program is to cover low-income people, and that these waivers will take coverage away from low-income people, they will have a tough legal case to make.”
In addition to the guidance, the administration could also announce the approvals of the work requirement applications from some states, either at the same time or shortly after.
Many experts expect Kentucky will be the first state approved.
Other states have proposed additional conservative changes to Medicaid beyond work requirements. Wisconsin, for example, is applying to require drug testing of Medicaid recipients.
Of the 9.8 million non-elderly Medicaid enrollees not working in 2016, 36 percent said illness or disability was their main reason for not working, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Thirty percent said they were caring for a family member, while 15 percent said they were going to school.
Experts at the Georgetown Center for Children and Families say that a significant number of people would lose coverage if a state imposed work requirements, in part simply due to red tape.
The center points out that Kentucky’s own estimates say 100,000 fewer people would have coverage by the fifth year of its proposal.
Verma, though, argues that working helps improve people’s lives.
“For people living with disabilities, CMS has long believed that meaningful work is essential to their economic self-sufficiency, self-esteem, well-being and improving their health,” she said in the November speech. “Why would we not believe that the same is true for working age, able-bodied Medicaid enrollees?”
Supreme Court Justice Rudy Giuliani? It was a serious idea entertained by President some rich asshole, according to Michael Wolff's explosive new book, "Fire and Fury."
the rich asshole ultimately selected Neil Gorsuch, whose successful confirmation to the highest court has been lauded by Republicans as a landmark achievement of the rich asshole's first year in office. But the President nearly took a sharp and consequential detour, according to Wolff.
Wolff writes that "before settling on Gorsuch, he (the rich asshole) wondered why the job wasn't going to a friend and loyalist. In the rich asshole view, it was rather a waste to give the job to someone he didn't even know."
As he considered various candidates, including "all his lawyer friends -- all of them unlikely, if not peculiar, choices," the rich asshole continued to be interested in the former New York mayor.
"The one unlikely, peculiar, and nonstarter choice that he kept returning to was Rudy Giuliani," Wolff wrote in the book obtained by CNN.
The President's doubts about Gorsuch, and his attraction to Giuliani as a potential alternative, did not end with Gorsuch's nomination.
The President became angry in February at reports that Gorsuch had told Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal that he found the rich asshole's attacks on the judiciary "demoralizing, "and the rich asshole considered pulling Gorsuch's nomination, The Washington Post first reported.
the rich asshole has denied the Post story.
"I never even wavered and am very proud of him and the job he is doing as a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court," the rich asshole tweeted.
Wolff's reporting adds a new wrinkle, however: that the rich asshole, once again, mulled nominating Giuliani for the lifetime post.
"the rich asshole, in a moment of pique, decided to pull his nomination and, during conversations with his after-dinner callers, went back to discussing how he should have given the nod to Rudy," Wolff writes. "He was the only loyal guy."
CNN has not independently verified all the details in Wolff's book.
Former the rich asshole campaign adviser Sam Nunberg said that he "probably" called President the rich asshole an "idiot" in a conversation detailed in a new book about the White House.
Nunberg, who was fired from the rich asshole campaign in 2015, told ABC News that the comment was sarcastic and that some of his comments in the book were taken out of context.
"I'm not out here to criticize Michael, but I think Michael used flourish — I'll put it — on the events I described," he told ABC News' "The Briefing Room" on Thursday.
The conversation between Nunberg and former chief strategist Steve Bannon is included in Michael Wolff's new book, "Fire and Fury: Inside the rich asshole White House."
"'If you can get this idiot elected twice,' Nunberg marveled, you would achieve something like immortality in politics," Wolff writes in the book.
Nunberg defended the comment as being sarcastic.
"I'm from New York and I'm very sarcastic," he said, adding that he had not yet seen that excerpt from the book at the time. "I certainly probably said that but he's by no means an idiot, at all."
The former adviser didn't deny the quotes attributed to him in the book.
"When I sat with Michael, who I like a lot, these were very casual type conversations and dinners and lunches," Nunberg said. "I'm not disputing what he writes in the totality, I'm just trying to give it a little more color."
Another portion of the book states that Nunberg had difficulty explaining the Constitution to the rich asshole.
"I got as far as the Fourth Amendment before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head," Wolff writes.
Nunberg said the exchange between him and the rich asshole took place during preparations ahead of the first Republican presidential primary debate.
"I wasn't there to teach the president the Constitution. The President had a granular understanding of the Constitution, it was good enough," he said. "It was around eight days before the first debate and I didn't want him to have any gotcha questions."
"Fire and Fury" drew quick criticism from the White House, slamming it as "sad," "pathetic" and including "numerous mistakes." the rich asshole has also reportedly threatened to sue the book's publisher.
The book's publisher, Holt & Company, moved up the book's publication date by four days to Friday over high demand.
Michael Wolff, the author of a new book that gives a behind-the-scenes account of the White House, defended his work Friday, insisting he spoke with President some rich asshole on the record and calling the commander in chief "a man who has less credibility than, perhaps, anyone who has ever walked on earth."
Wolff, in an exclusive interview on NBC's "Today," said that everyone he spoke to for the book, "Fire and Fury: Inside the rich asshole White House," described the president the same way.
"I will tell you the one description that everyone gave, everyone has in common: They all say he is like a child," Wolff explained. "And what they mean by that is, he has a need for immediate gratification. It is all about him." Wolff added that "100 percent of the people around" the rich asshole, "senior advisers, family members, every single one of them, questions his intelligence and fitness for office."
Wolff also contended that he "absolutely" spoke to the president during his reporting of the book.
"Whether he realized it was an interview or not, I don’t know, but it certainly was not off the record," Wolff said. "I spoke to him after the inauguration, yes. And I had spoken to, I mean I spent about three hours with the president over the course of the campaign and in the White House, so my window into some rich asshole is pretty significant."
the rich asshole, however, said on Twitter Thursday night that he "authorized Zero access to White House" for the author and "never spoke to him for book."
Hitting back at the rich asshole, Wolff said Friday that the rich asshole isn't one to talk when it comes to credibility.
"My credibility is being questioned by a man who has less credibility than, perhaps, anyone who has ever walked on earth at this point," Wolff said.
Wolf added that he has the evidence to back up his work.
"I work like every journalist works so I have recordings, I have notes," Wolff said. "I am certainly and absolutely in every way comfortable with everything I’ve reported in this book."
"Fire and Fury" features behind-the-scenes anecdotes from the rich asshole's White House, including details on how the most powerful men and women in Washington worked to make the rich asshole president — and then turned on one another after he took the oath of office.
Wolff writes in the book, and explained during his “Today” interview, that top aides said at various points that the rich asshole is “a moron, an idiot.”
“Actually there’s a competition to sort of get to the bottom line here of who this man is. Let’s remember, this man who does not read, does not listen. So he’s like a pinball, just shooting off the sides,” Wolff said.
Wolff also revealed how people around the president noticed an apparent decline in his mental stamina.
“In the beginning, it was like every 25 or 30 minutes, you would get the same three stories repeated," Wolff said about the rich asshole. "Now it’s the same three stories in every 10 minutes."
Wolff was then asked to elaborate on an anecdote he described in an article in The Hollywood Reporter this week in which he said the rich asshole, at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida over the winter holiday break, didn't recognize old friends.
"I will quote Steve Bannon — he’s lost it," Wolff said, referring to the rich asshole's former strategist.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, appearing on Fox News Friday morning, said it was "outrageous to make these types of accusations" about the rich asshole's mental health. It's "sad that people are going and making these desperate attempts to attack the president," she added.
Widely reported excerpts from the book have roiled Washington, including claims from Bannon that some rich asshole Jr.'s meeting with Russians at the rich asshole Tower in June 2016 was "treasonous" and "unpatriotic."
The president apparently referred to Bannon as "Sloppy Steve" on Twitter Thursday night.
Wolff’s book was released early Friday by Henry Holt, which announced a day earlier that it was pushing up the publication date due to demand.
Earlier Thursday, the rich asshole attorney Charles Harder demanded in a letter sent to Wolff and his publisher that the book not be published or disseminated. The book reached No. 1 on the Amazon best-seller list Wednesday. A copy of the letter obtained by NBC News cites defamation, libel and "actual malice" among the alleged wrongdoings in the book.
NBC News has not confirmed much of the book. Wolff has been accused in the past of suspect reporting, most notably in his 1998 book "Burn Rate." In its review, the now-defunct media journal Brill's Content cited 13 people depicted in the book as saying that Wolff invented or changed quotations and that they couldn't recall his taking any notes or recording their interviews.
·If President some rich asshole would actually sue Steve Bannon for violating a nondisclosure agreement made with his campaign, it would be great for the freedom of speech.
·That may sound strange, because the rich asshole's threatened lawsuit is precisely aimed to silence Bannon and other potential leakers who worked on the campaign. Bannon has been extensively quoted in excerpts published this week from the journalist Michael Wolff's new book, Fire and Fury: Inside the rich asshole White House.
But the rich asshole's suit would almost certainly fail, and that's why it would serve free speech. Faced with an attempt to suppress speech that is so plainly of public importance and interest, a judge would have little choice but to conclude that the First Amendment disallows enforcement of an NDA made with a presidential campaign. The legal precedent created - and publicity it received - would be a blow to the bullying use of the courts to silence speech and a boon to free expression.
Start with the rich asshole's threat. His lawyer, Charles Harder - who successfully represented Hulk Hogan in his invasion of privacy suit against the website Gawker - wrote to Bannon on Wednesday that he had breached his NDA with the rich asshole campaign by "communicating with author Michael Wolff about some rich asshole, his family members, and the Company, disclosing Confidential Information to Mr Wolff, and making disparaging statements and in some cases outright defamatory statements to Mr. Wolff about Mr rich asshole, his family members, and the Company."
What this tells us: Bannon signed an NDA with the rich asshole campaign, which in its corporate form was known as some rich asshole for President Inc. The NDA apparently prohibited Bannon - and presumably all other campaign employees who signed the same form - from disclosing confidential information.
But that's not all. The agreement also seems to have prohibited employees from making "disparaging statements" about the rich asshole or his family.
Like most such NDAs, the agreement stretched into the future, beyond the campaign. And it must have provided for money damages for talking out of school, because that's what Harder has threatened Bannon with seeking.
01-05-2018 LONDON: Barack and Michelle Obama have been invited as special guests to the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle while the rich asshole and Melania have not been invited and a Royal expert and journalist who covers the Royal family news has said “the Queen and most of the Royal family likely want the rich asshole to stay the hell away !!”
The Royal wedding has come at a difficult time for Anglo-American relations, a time when the rich asshole and British Prime Minister Theresa May nearly fell out on Twitter after firing off harsh and critical tweets at each other.
Britain also refused to support the rich asshole on his idea of moving the Israeli Embassy from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem and it has been rumoured that the rich asshole refused to send a Christmas card to Theresa May.
The Royal wedding has only complicated the already diplomatically fragile situation between the UK and the United States.
Harry is a close friend to Barack Obama and has nothing in common with the rich asshole. In fact, the rich asshole has been recorded on the Howard Stern show saying sexually disgusting things about Prince Harry’s late mother, Princess Diana and it is suspected that most of the Royal family dislikes the rich asshole’s weird behaviour and the nasty things he says.
According to a British government insider, Harry’s eagerness to invite the Obamas to his wedding could further harm international relations with the US following Theresa May’s decision to publicly blast the rich asshole on social media.
The Government source said: “Harry has made it clear he wants the Obamas at the wedding, so it’s causing a lot of nervousness.
“the rich asshole could react very badly if the Obamas get to a Royal wedding before he has had a chance to meet the Queen and this is what is going to happen. On the other hand, Prince Harry is not a politician and has no obligation to invite the rich asshole to his wedding. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle can invite or not invite whoever they want. It’s their wedding after all.”
Speculation continues that the White House could try to lobby a last minute invite for the rich asshole to avoid embarrassment.
And now, some input from the other side.
There's a reason why there are no or limited conservative viewpoints here. It's because the conservatives choose to look the other way regarding no45. They think they can get what they want and to do that, they will GLADLY look the other way, which includes treason.
President the rich asshole on Friday dissed and dismissed Michael Wolff’s newly released White House tell-all as a distraction from what he described as the unraveling Russia collusion "hoax."
“Well, now that collusion with Russia is proving to be a total hoax and the only collusion is with Hillary Clinton and the FBI/Russia, the Fake News Media (Mainstream) and this phony new book are hitting out at every new front imaginable. They should try winning an election. Sad!” the rich asshole tweeted Friday morning.
Well, now that collusion with Russia is proving to be a total hoax and the only collusion is with Hillary Clinton and the FBI/Russia, the Fake News Media (Mainstream) and this phony new book are hitting out at every new front imaginable. They should try winning an election. Sad!
Wolff’s book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the rich asshole White House,” was released Friday morning – four days before it was initially scheduled to hit the shelves. Wolff and his publisher rushed the release to seize on public interest, after the rich asshole’s personal attorneys sent a “cease and desist” letter demanding the book be retracted.
The book paints an unflattering portrait of the rich asshole and features numerous associates -- especially former adviser Steve Bannon -- trash-talking the president.
The White House has slammed Wolff and the book as "fraudulent."
“The book is mistake after mistake after mistake,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said Thursday. “I’m not going to waste my time or the country’s time going page by page correcting [the book].”
Sanders added that it was “sad,” “pathetic,” and a “fantasy,” noting that Wolff’s requests to interview the president were repeatedly denied.
“We saw him for what he was,” Sanders said Thursday. “No reason to waste the president of the United States’ time.”
But in an exclusive interview on NBC’s “Today” early Friday, Wolff claimed he did, in fact, interview the president.
“I absolutely … spoke to the president, whether he realized it was an interview or not –it certainly was not off the record,” Wolff said. “I had spent about three hours with the president over the course of the campaign and as president.”
Wolff added: “My window into some rich asshole is pretty significant.”
But the president’s tweet, pointing fingers back at Hillary Clinton, comes hours after it was revealed that the Justice Department had launched a new investigation into the potential “pay to play” politics with the Clinton Foundation during her tenure as secretary of state.
Republicans have repeatedly called for a second special counsel to investigate Hillary Clinton on a number of different issues.
Late last year, Attorney General Jeff Sessions told prosecutors to evaluate “certain issues” raised by congressional Republicans related to the Clinton Foundation, leading to speculation about the potential appointment of another special counsel.
In September, conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch said that emails from Clinton aide Huma Abedin’s account showed Clinton Foundation donors requesting and receiving favors from the State Department.
House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA, left) and House Majority Leader Paul Ryan (R-WI, right). Images via screengrab.
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House Speaker Paul Ryan signaled that he would side with Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) in a dispute between Republican lawmakers and the Justice Department over classified documents related to the Russia probe.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI director Christopher Wray asked to meet Wednesday with Ryan to determine where the House Speaker stood in the Justice Department dispute with Nunes over releasing sensitive law enforcement documents related to a salacious dossier, reported CNN.
Ryan indicated he would side with Nunes, who has threatened to hold top law enforcement officials in contempt of Congress if they did not comply with his subpoena demands, sources told CNN on Thursday.
The Justice Department has already allowed House Intelligence Committee members and staff to review some highly classified materials at a secure location, but Nunes wants to see more documents related to any payments the FBI might have made to corroborate the dossier.
Nunes had been investigated by the House Ethics Committee for allegedly releasing classified information related to the probe to the White House, but he was cleared last month and may return as head of the committee’s Russia probe.
GOP lawmakers have suggested the dossier, which was initially funded by President some rich asshole’s political opponents, initially prompted the FBI investigation of the rich asshole campaign ties to Russia.
But the New York Times reported last weekend that campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, who has since pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents and become a cooperating witness, revealed his Russian contacts in May 2016 while drinking with an Australian ambassador — who later alerted U.S. law enforcement.
Ryan made clear to Rosenstein and Wray that he would support Nunes in the dispute, multiple sources told CNN.
“The Speaker always expects the administration to comply with the House’s oversight requests,” said Ryan’s spokeswoman, AshLee Strong, but she would not provide additional details about the meeting.
The two sides reached a compromise later Wednesday to allow House Intelligence Committee members to visit a Justice Department facility to view the documents, which includes testimony from an official with ties to dossier firm Fusion GPS, FBI agent Peter Strzok, and FBI general counsel James Baker.
The committee will also be allowed to interview FBI attorney Lisa Page, who exchanged politically charged texts with Strzok, and several other officials from the law enforcement bureau.
A second batch of Strzok’s text messages will be provided to the committee next week.
The Hollywood Reporter's Michael Wolff on CNN (Screen capture)
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“Fire and Fury” author Michael Wolff on Friday thanked President some rich asshole for filing a lawsuit in an attempt to block the publication of his book.
“Where do I send the box of chocolates?” Wolff said of the rich asshole during an interview on NBC’s “Today.” “Not only is he helping me sell books, he’s helping me prove the point of the book. This is extraordinary that the President of the United States would try to stop the publication of a book. This has not happened from other presidents, would not even happen from the CEO of a mid-sized company.”
Wolff went on to say that the rich asshole’s decision to try to block his book was part of a broader pattern of disturbing behavior that even the president’s own advisers describe as childish.
“They all say he is like a child,” Wolff said. “And what they mean by that is, he has a need for immediate gratification. It’s all about him. I mean, this cease and desist letter — I still have sources in the White House, and everybody was going, ‘We should not be doing this, this is not smart.’ And he just insists, he just has to be satisfied in the moment.”
A first draft of former FBI Director James Comey’s 2016 memo announcing that the FBI would bring no charges against Hillary Clinton has been made available to the public, according to The Hill.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, had staff publish the document in full on his Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs page. The document — hosted in full here — has been visibly marked up with recommended changes. According to testimony from the FBI, those changes were suggested by “subordinates” to Comey and approved by Comey before he read them aloud on national television. RELATED: New texts between FBI agent fired from Mueller investigation and his alleged mistress show political bias
One of the more contentious changes describes the handling of Clinton’s emails and the transmission of over 100 emails via an insecure private server. Comey first wrote that Clinton and her staff were “grossly negligent” in the handling of her emails; in this case, the phrase “grossly negligent” is a principle for behavior that could be subject to misdemeanor or felony mishandling of classified information charges. However, that descriptor was changed to “extremely careless,” which functions as a synonym as well as a de-escalation of the FBI’s findings.
That said, even in the original draft, it’s evident that Comey never intended to recommend charges against Hillary Clinton or her staff. In the statement, Comey indicated that charges on misdemeanor or felony mishandling of classified information involved a mix of four criteria — “clearly intentional misconduct,” “vast quantities of materials exposed” that would reasonably support the conclusion of “intentional misconduct,” “indications of disloyalty to the United States” and/or “efforts to obstruct justice.”
“We see none of that here… I am completing the investigation by expressing to Justice my view that no charges are appropriate in this case,” Comey concluded in 2016.
While Comey originally wrote “there is evidence of potential violations of the statute proscribing gross negligence in the handling of classified information and of the statute proscribing misdemeanor mishandling,” he concluded that “we are not aware of a case where anyone has been charged solely based on the ‘gross negligence’ prohibition in the statute.”
Sen. Johnson has written a letter to current FBI Director Christopher Wray inquiring about those edits — which Johnson called “significant” — and asked whether they were part of a broader campaign to protect Clinton.
Johnson says edits to the memo are more worthy of attention in light of text messages leaked by the Department of Justice last month. The texts between FBI agent Peter Strzok and his alleged mistress, lawyer Lisa Page, got Strzok fired his position on the Clinton email investigation.
The content of the messages described President Donald Trump as an “utter idiot” and “loathsome human,” among other descriptors.
“In light of the personal animus toward then-candidate Trump by senior agents leading the Clinton investigation and their apparent desire to create an ‘insurance policy’ against Mr. Trump’s election,” Johnson wrote, the edits “raise profound questions about the FBI’s role and possible interference in the 2016 presidential election.”
Johnson also addressed an edit to the memo that appears to erase any mention of cooperation with other members of the American intelligence community — a group President Donald Trump has called “political hacks” — to determine possible national security fallout from emails transmitted via Clinton’s personal email server.
While the FBI said they failed to find “direct evidence” that Hillary Clinton’s email server was successfully penetrated, they also admitted that finding such “direct evidence” would be “unlikely.” The Bureau also concluded that “hostile actors gained access to the private commercial email accounts of individuals with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account.”
Comey originally wrote that it was “reasonably likely” that hostile actors accessed Clinton’s email account; that, too, was softened, replacing “reasonably likely” with “possible.”
Die-hard the rich asshole supporters have taken to social media to warn of consequences if some rich asshole is not invited to the forth coming wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
“Trying to humiliate our President will backfire badly and all the rich asshole’s enemies will regret why they did it. So all we ask is that common sense prevails and the rich asshole is invited to the wedding,” wrote Mary Wiggins, a self described “soccer mom” and “deplorable” on Facebook.
Allan Williams, who describes himself as a grass roots campaigner and deplorable wrote in the “the rich asshole Troopers” Facebook group that: “If they can invite Obama and Michelle to the Royal wedding then they must invite the rich asshole also. the rich asshole is the President and not Obama so it makes no sense to invite Obama and not invite the rich asshole. Surely, the rich asshole will pay back good measure for good measure. Let them try and humiliate the rich asshole, he will use his power as President of the United states to punish all his enemies and haters!”
Right-wing radio host James Olken claims the issue will affect trade deals with the United Kingdom or affect the joint training exercises of the US and UK troops. Olken said: “The royal wedding is an opportunity for the UK officials to meet the rich asshole on the sidelines of the event and share ideas, bond and forge even stronger ties. Trying to stop the rich asshole from attending the wedding will be a missed opportunity for Britain. It is actually a shame that Obama and his wife have been invited and the current President hasn’t. Obama did nothing but destroy our economy, ruin job prospects, and actually made the UK-US relationship even worse than it was. It is the rich asshole who is trying to rebuild the UK-US relationship and they are trying to sabotage him. It’s unacceptable!”
It has been reported that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle do not want the rich asshole at their wedding but at the same time the British Government is piling pressure on them to invite him.
Also, the UK public do not want the rich asshole to set foot in Britain as millions of anti-the rich asshole protesters are expected to pour onto the streets of London.
Already, the rich asshole’s state visit to the UK has been postponed three times, after whole Britain reacted badly at the news of his visit.
some rich asshole, Pork on a Stick (Screen Capture)
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Are President some rich asshole’s tweets part of an elaborate plot to distract the American public from the numerous scandals confronting his administration — or is the reality even more terrifying?
Media Matters researcher Matt Gertz has written a lengthy analysis of the rich asshole’s tweeting habits in Politico that claims that there is no grand plan in the tweets.
Instead, the president is mostly reacting viscerally to whatever he happens to be watching on Fox News.
“After comparing the president’s tweets to Fox coverage every day since October, I can tell you that the Fox-the rich asshole feedback loop is happening far more often than you think,” Gertz writes. “There is no strategy to the rich asshole’s Twitter feed; he is not trying to distract the media. He is being distracted.”
What makes this particularly disturbing, says Gertz, is that the president doesn’t seem to learn about global events from his own intelligence agencies, and instead relies primarily on “Fox & Friends” as his morning intelligence briefing.
More broadly, Gertz writes that this Fox-to-the rich asshole feedback loop is an incredibly powerful tool for conservatives because it forces the mainstream press to cover the topics Fox wants them to talk about — while at the same time forcing them to at least mention Fox’s framing of particular issues.
“The network’s partisan programming gets validation from the president, and forces the rest of the press to cover Fox’s obsessions whether they are newsworthy or not,” he writes.
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