POLITICS
The Wildest Moments From ‘Fire And Fury,’ The rich asshole Book Everyone Is Talking About
Why the rich asshole eats so much McDonald’s, and what his daughter has to say about his hair.
WASHINGTON ― Journalist Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury drew outsize attention this week, when excerpts were released that featured members of President some rich asshole’s administration openly questioning his mental stability, as well as explosive comments from his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon.
the rich asshole and the White House unleashed attacks against Bannon and threatened legal action against Wolff and his publisher. The book ended up being released on Friday, four days ahead of its scheduled publication date.
Here are some especially notable claims from the book to hold you over until you read the full thing.
the rich asshole told former Fox News chairman Roger Ailes that son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner would “work out” the Russia issue.
According to Wolff, Ailes warned the rich asshole about “potentially damaging material” coming up about the ties between his campaign and Russian officials.
Shortly after the election, his friend Ailes told him, with some urgency, “You’ve got to get right on Russia.” Even exiled from Fox News, Ailes still maintained a fabled intelligence network. He warned the rich asshole of potentially damaging material coming his way. “You need to take this seriously, Donald.”“Jared has this,” said a happy the rich asshole. “It’s all worked out.”
Kushner, who has been tasked with a rather large array of tasks as a White House senior adviser, has faced plenty of scrutiny in the multiple investigations into whether the rich asshole’s campaign colluded with Russia last year.
Bannon told top the rich asshole policy adviser Stephen Miller to use “the internet” as he drafted the administration’s famous immigration executive order.
The book paints an unflattering picture of Miller, who is responsible for shaping much of the rich asshole’s platform ― particularly his anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy proposals. Miller knew little about policy or military matters, the book says.
Bannon “sent him to the Internet to learn about and to try to draft the [executive order],” according to Wolff.
the rich asshole’s daughter Ivanka told her friends about the secrets of her father’s hair.
She treated her father with some lightness, even irony, and in at least one television interview she made fun of his comb-over. She often described the mechanics behind it to friends: an absolutely clean pate—a contained island after scalp reduction surgery—surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray. The color, she would point out to comical effect, was from a product called Just for Men—the longer it was left on, the darker it got. Impatience resulted in the rich asshole’s orange-blond hair color.
the rich asshole has a conspiratorial reason for his frequent consumption of McDonald’s food.
He had a longtime fear of being poisoned, one reason why he liked to eat at McDonald’s — nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade.
the rich asshole is a “post-literate” TV junkie.
the rich asshole has repeatedly claimed that a busy schedule and strong work ethic keeps him from watching much television. “Primarily because of documents,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One in November. “I’m reading documents. A lot. And different things. I actually read much more — I read you people much more than I watch television.”
According to Wolff’s book, the rich asshole has three TVs in his White House bedroom, hardly reads and struggles to process information.
the rich asshole didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semiliterate. (There was some argument about this, because he could read headlines and articles about himself, or at least headlines on articles about himself, and the gossip squibs on the New York Post’s Page Six.) Some thought him dyslexic; certainly his comprehension was limited. Others concluded that he didn’t read because he just didn’t have to, and that in fact this was one of his key attributes as a populist. He was postliterate—total television.
As Bannon told Wolff: “[the rich asshole’s] a guy who really hated school … And he’s not going to start liking it now.”
“Everybody was a leaker”: former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, Bannon, Kushner — even the rich asshole.
In their efforts to “influence the president and undermine” each another, Bannon, Priebus and Kushner created a kind of “paralysis” within the White House that led to each of the advisers turning to the media, Wolff writes.
The constant leaking was often blamed on lower minions and permanent executive branch staff, culminating in late February with an all-hands meeting of staffers called by Sean Spicer—cell phones surrendered at the door—during which the press secretary issued threats of random phone checks and admonitions about the use of encrypted texting apps. Everybody was a potential leaker; everybody was accusing everybody else of being a leaker.Everybody was a leaker.
At least some of the information about the inner workings of the White House came directly from the rich asshole, Wolff writes.
the rich asshole accusing the Obama administration of “wiretapping” the rich asshole Tower was a “turning point” for White House staff.
In a series of tweets on March 4, 2017, the rich asshole accused former President Barack Obama of surveilling him, offering no evidence to support the claim. “This is McCarthyism!” the rich asshole wrote, adding that Obama was a “Bad (or sick) guy!”
It was a turning point. Until now, the rich asshole’s inner circle had been mostly game to defend him. But after the wiretap tweets, everybody, save perhaps Hope Hicks, moved into a state of queasy sheepishness, if not constant incredulity.Sean Spicer, for one, kept repeating his daily, if not hourly, mantra: “You can’t make this shit up.”
the rich asshole had no interest in repealing Obamacare — or health care in general. A man of many phobias, however, he once lied so as not to be pegged obese.
the rich asshole had little or no interest in the central Republican goal of repealing Obamacare. An overweight seventy-year-old man with various physical phobias (for instance, he lied about his height to keep from having a body mass index that would label him as obese), he personally found health care and medical treatments of all kinds a distasteful subject. The details of the contested legislation were, to him, particularly boring; his attention would begin wandering from the first words of a policy discussion.
During one particular healthcare discussion, the rich asshole reportedly asked of his aides: “Why can’t Medicare simply cover everybody?”
Privately, Kellyanne Conway rolls her eyes at the rich asshole’s antics.
White House counselor Kellyanne Conway — arguably the rich asshole’s most loyal defender — has what Wolff describes in the book as a “convenient On-Off toggle.”
In private, in the Off position, she seemed to regard the rich asshole as a figure of exhausting exaggeration or even absurdity—or, at least, if you regarded him that way, she seemed to suggest that she might, too. She illustrated her opinion of her boss with a whole series of facial expressions: eyes rolling, mouth agape, head snapping back. But in the On position, she metamorphosed into believer, protector, defender, and handler.
the rich asshole has multiple theories that former President Richard M. Nixon was framed for the Watergate scandal.
the rich asshole was reportedly reminded of the famous wiretapping scandal as the FBI’s Russia probe unfolded, and compared James Comey to John Dean, who was instrumental in unraveling the Nixon administration’s cover-up.
The president has “several revisionist theories” about Watergate and how Nixon was framed, the book says.
After a perceived win against Ivanka the rich asshole over the Paris climate agreement, Bannon declared, “The bitch is dead.”
Wolff says the president’s plan to back out of the Paris agreement, announced in early June, was the move Ivanka the rich asshole “had campaigned hardest against in the White House.” Bannon, who had fought repeatedly against Kushner and Ivanka the rich asshole’s White House influence, had supported the withdrawal.
“Score,” Bannon said. “The bitch is dead.”
Bannon called some rich asshole Jr.’s meeting with Russian operatives “treasonous,” and suggested the rich asshole himself met with the foreign officials on the same day.
Wolff outlines four imagined scenarios justifying the meeting in the rich asshole Tower on June 9, 2016, ranging from outright plotting by the rich asshole campaign to mere amusement at the prospect of playing dirty campaign tricks on Hillary Clinton. Regardless of the reason, Wolff states that “practically nobody” doubted the rich asshole himself was not aware of the meeting.
“The chance that Don Jr. did not walk these jumos up to his father’s office on the twenty-sixth floor is zero,” Bannon said, according to Wolff. “Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”
the rich asshole’s presidency might end with impeachment, according to Bannon.
Bannon said “it just brings the impeachment closer” if the rich asshole were to fire Mueller.
There’s a “33.3 percent chance that the Mueller investigation would lead to the impeachment of the president, a 33.3 percent chance that the rich asshole would resign, perhaps in the wake of a threat by the cabinet to act on the Twenty-Fifth Amendment (by which the cabinet can remove the president in the event of his incapacitation), and a 33.3 percent chance that he would limp to the end of his term,” the former adviser said.
Bannon said he certainly doesn’t believe the rich asshole will last eight years.
“He’s not going to make it,” he said. “He’s lost his stuff.”
ALSO ON HUFFPOST
Why is Fire & Fury having such an impact? Drew Magary writes it’s because Wolff was willing to throw decorum away and torch his access—and more journalists should do the same.
I’m gonna begin this post with the same disclaimer that needs to come with every post about Michael Wolff, which is that Wolff is a fart-sniffer whose credibility is often suspect and who represents the absolute worst of New York media-cocktail-circuit inbreeding. But in a way, it’s fitting that our least reliable president could finally find himself undone at the hands of one of our least reliable journalists.
All of Wolff’s excerpts from Fire & Fury so far (the book was rushed into stores today) read like jayvee fan fiction. They read like a pilot that Steve Bannon himself wrote, pitched to Hollywood, and had rejected 17 times over. They read, in short, like bullshit. And yet…Wolff has audio. He’s got hours upon hours of audio. Not only that, but the book has already caused legitimate upheaval in the administration, opened a permanent rift between President the rich asshole and Bannon, AND it confirms what we have all always known to be true: that the president severely lacks the cognitive ability to do this job, and that he is surrounded at all times by a cadre of enablers, dunces, and outright thieves. As much as I wanna discredit Wolff, he got receipts and, more important, he used them. Wolff got it all. Wolff nailed them.
And look how he did it. He did it by sleazily ingratiating himself with the White House, gaining access, hosting weird private dinners, and then taking full advantage of the administration's basic lack of knowledge about how reporting works. Some of the officials Wolff got on tape claim to be unaware that they were on the record. Wolff denies this, but he's very much up front in the book's intro about the fact that he was able to exploit the incredible "lack of experience" on display here. In other words, Wolff got his book by playing a bunch of naive dopes.
Thank God for that. Wolff has spent this week thoroughly exploiting the rich asshole and his minions the same way they've exploited the cluelessness of others. And he pulled it off because, at long last, there was a reporter out there willing to toss decorum aside and burn bridges the same way the rich asshole does.
Everyone around some rich asshole is too polite to some rich asshole. Democrats, foreign dignitaries, underlings… all of them. And the White House press is perhaps the worst offender. From the media pool playing along with Sarah Sanders during press conferences—conferences where Sanders openly lies and pisses on democracy—to access merchants like Maggie Haberman doling out the rich asshole gossip like so many bread crumbs, too many reporters have been far too deferential to an administration that is brazenly racist, dysfunctional, and corrupt. And for what purpose? It’s clear to me that Haberman and the like aren’t saving up their chits for just the EXACT right time to bring this Administration down. No, the only end goal of their access is continued access, to preserve it indefinitely so that the copy spigot never gets shut off. They are abiding by traditional wink-wink understandings that have long existed between the government and the press covering it.
But Wolff didn’t do that. He did not engage in some endless bullshit access tango. No, Wolff actually USED his access, and extended zero courtesy to the rich asshole on the process, and it’s going to pay off for him not just from a book sales standpoint, but from a real journalistic impact. I am utterly sick to death of hearing anonymous reports about people inside the White House “concerned” about the madman currently in charge of everything. These people don’t deserve the courtesy of discretion. They don’t deserve to dictate the terms of coverage to people. They deserve to be torched.
the rich asshole ascended into power in part because he relied on other people being too nice. It’s fun to rampage through the china shop when the china shop owner is standing over there being like, “SIR, that is not how we do things here!” If the rich asshole refuses to abide by the standard (and now useless) “norms” of the presidency—shit, if he doesn't even KNOW them—why should ANYONE in the press adhere to needless norms of their own? They shouldn’t, and it appears that Michael Wolff was one of the few people to instinctively grasp that, and I hope more White House insiders follow his lead. Sometimes you need a rat to catch a rat.
2018 is only five days old and these are all of the ridiculous things that have already happened
We're off to a good start.
Welcome to the first week of the rich asshole’s America 2018.
January 1 was a relatively quiet day in the news cycle. The following day, however, was filled with a barrage of breaking news on, dare we say, foreign policy?
In response to Kim Jong-Un’s New Year’s Day speech where the North Korean leader referenced his nuclear “button,” President the rich asshole tweeted, “Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”
The week continued with Attorney General Jeff Sessions breaking his boss’ promise to leave marijuana legalization up to the states. US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley threw a party reception for countries that didn’t condemn the United States’ decision to officially recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
The biggest bombshell of the week was Michael Wolff’s newly-published book, Fire and Fury: Inside the rich asshole’s White House, and the chaos it unleashed within the administration. The book features scathing comments from top aids about the rich asshole White House. the rich asshole’s lawyers tried to stop the book from being published by filing cease and desist letters to former White House Chief Strategist Stephen Bannon, Wolff and his publisher, Henry Holt and Co.
That’s not all. Check out more of the week’s drama in the video above.
the rich asshole’s voting commission failed, but the GOP’s war on voting rights still threatens 2018 elections
Don't be fooled; the administration isn't abandoning its deceitful effort.
News earlier this week of President some rich asshole’s abrupt disbanding of his Advisory Commission on Election Integrity appeared at first blush to be a profound progressive victory, one that acknowledges how much of a farce the panel was from its inception.
But don’t be fooled; the administration isn’t abandoning its deceitful effort to target the millions of people — primarily African Americans, immigrants, and other people of color — whoTrump falsely claimed should not have voted in the 2016 presidential election.
“It’s certainly a good thing that this ill-conceived commission has been disbanded,” Ezra Rosenberg, co-director of the Voting Rights Project at the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told me in an interview. “But we’re still going to have to watch them because it seems from the statements coming from the White House that they’re still going to be looking for voter fraud where it doesn’t exist.”
The myth of voter fraud is primarily a Republican-driven idea at the federal and state levels of government. Voter ID laws have been passed in nearly half of the nation’s states since 2010. State laws have gone so far as cutting back on polling places and hours in minority communities and purging voter rolls to limit eligible voters from casting a ballot.
To date, no federal laws have been put in place to limit voting rights and the courts have soundly rejected many of the state restrictions. But that hasn’t stopped the rich asshole administration from trying to impose a federal effort to limit voting rights.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, there is a long history in the United States of suppressing minority voting rights — including poll taxes and all-white primaries — set up ostensibly to prevent voter fraud that wasn’t occurring in the first place.
It’s easy to understand why this administration and its far-right allies would persist with a snipe-hunt for fraudulent voters. The gathering signs of a Democratic blue wave has begun to wash over the political landscape, largely driven by opposition to the rich asshole and his GOP enablers. According to Amy Walter at Cook Political Report, voters aren’t happy with the president and his policies, and they’re itching to return to the polls to express it. She writes:
In 2016 we made the mistake of rationalizing away the prospect of a the rich asshole victory. He was too unorthodox. He couldn’t possibly sustain momentum through the grueling primary campaign. We should not make same mistake in 2018. Sure, a lot can change between now and next November. And, Democrats have a narrow path to 24 seats — even with a big wave or tailwind. But, do not ignore what’s right in front of us. A wave is building.
Still stinging from losing the popular vote in last year’s presidential election, the rich asshole and his voter suppression allies are only backing up to take a running start at preventing some Americans from legally exercising their right to vote.
Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said in a statement that the White House “continues the false narrative” of voter fraud. “The sham commission was a political ploy to provide cover for the president’s wild and unfounded claims of mass voter fraud, and to lay the foundation to purge eligible voters from the rolls,” she said.
This time around, the administration is employing different tactic — cloaking its search for mystery voters under the cover of hunting terrorists. In Wednesday’s executive order that dissolved the commission, the rich asshole passed its work to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) which has as its primary charge the ferreting out of foreign enemies of the state and protecting the nation from terrorist attacks.
In a statement accompanying the order, the rich asshole portrayed the decision as a cost-cutting move, but acknowledged he failed to garner support from state officials for his commission. “Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today I signed an executive order to dissolve the commission, and have asked the Department of Homeland Security to review these issues and determine next courses of action,” the statement said.
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, vice chair of the now-defunct commission, portrayed the president’s executive order as a “tactical shift” and that officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would scour state voter rolls looking for people who vote illegally.
This effort is as unlikely to be any more productive than the commission, largely because ICE isn’t equipped for the task, said Ari Berman, a senior reporter for Mother Jones.
“ICE has scant experience in this area and the databases Kobach wants DHS to use… are not designed for that purpose and do not automatically reveal the status of immigrants who become US citizens, which means thousands of noncitizen who are subsequently naturalized could be mistakenly tagged as illegal voters,” Berman wrote this week.
Far worse, Berman argued that ICE would conduct its activities outside public scrutiny, the same flaw that doomed the original the rich asshole voter commission. “To the extent that they are now hoping to conduct their activities shrouded in secrecy, that’s deeply troubling,” Berman quoted Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “Moving this commission over to DHS would be an abuse of the agency’s power.”
Rosenberg said the White House seems to be conflating the mission of defending the country against terrorists with illegitimate security concerns involving voter fraud. Truth of the matter, there is virtually no evidence that people are voting illegally across the country, he said, pointing to studies that show it’s more likely for a person to be struck by lightening than to find a case of voter fraud.
In fact, a frequently cited study conducted by Justin Levitt, a constitutional law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, found that there were only 31 credible cases of voter impersonation from 2000 to 2014 out of more than 1 billion votes cast.
Levitt also noted that voter ID laws, such as those promoted by the rich asshole, have blocked thousands of people from voting in the states that put them in place. For example, a study by the University of Wisconsin revealed the state’s voter ID law stopped or inhibited some 23,000 people from voting in the 2016 election. Of course, those blocked were in places such as Milwaukee County and Madison’s Dane County with large voting populations of African Americans and other people of color.
Rosenberg said that the commission might have gotten away with imposing restrictions on voting rights if not for the watchdog demands of civil rights activists over the commission’s activities. “It was that scrutiny that was forced upon the commission that successfully led to the need for transparency which caused the commission to fail,” he said, promising that the administration’s new tactic won’t go unchallenged by the civil rights community.
“It’s a lie, a myth that people are voting illegally,” Rosenberg told me. “But the rich asshole seems intent on pressing forward and we’re going to continue to watch and challenge them at every turn to protect people’s voting rights.”
After insisting Congress wouldn’t interfere in Russia investigation, Paul Ryan does just that
The House speaker backed House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes' attempts to subpoena the FBI for documents.
Only two months after promising that he would not allow Congress to interfere in the ongoing Russia investigation, House Speaker Paul Ryan on Wednesday reportedly backed colleague Devin Nunes in his attempts to subpoena the FBI for documents related to the matter.
According to a CNN report, Ryan met with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray this week to discuss Nunes — chairman of the House Intelligence Committee — and his repeated requests to view documents connected to the infamous Steele Dossier, which is comprised of myriad damning and salacious allegations against President the rich asshole, some of them unverified. Sources who spoke to the outlet said that the meeting was “initiated at Rosenstein’s request” and was intended to “gauge where they stood with the House speaker in light of the looming potential contempt of Congress showdown,” which centers on the Justice Department’s hesitance at releasing certain classified documents to committee members.
During Wednesday’s meeting, Ryan reportedly backed Nunes. He declined to side with Rosenstein and Wray, who had asked that Nunes “narrow the scope of [his] document request,” according to Politico.
The Justice Department had previously agreed to allow Nunes, Ryan, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff (D-CA), and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi access to certain classified documents in October. Neither Ryan nor Nunes attended that viewing; according to Fox News, two Republican and two Democratic staffers did.
Ryan was reportedly unmoved by the Justice Department officials’ arguments on Wednesday, and it became increasingly clear that the two men “wouldn’t have his support if they proceeded to resist Nunes’ remaining highly classified requests.”
A spokesperson for the speaker’s office told CNN that Ryan “always expects the administration to comply with the House’s oversight requests,” but did not elaborate further.
The move is a departure from Ryan’s earlier promises not to let Congress interfere in the ongoing Russia investigation.
In an interview with Fox News Sunday on November 5, asked whether he would allow the Mueller investigation to be “curbed or stopped,” Ryan responded,
I’ve said all along: we need to let these career professionals do their jobs, see it through. So no, I don’t think [Special Counsel Mueller] should be stepping down, and I don’t think he should be fired. The president has made clear he’s not going to be doing that.
.@SpeakerRyan to Chris on Special Counsel Robert Mueller: "I don't think he should be stepping down and I don’t think he should be fired."
He added, “We’re not going to interfere with his investigation. The investigation will take its course, and we will let it take its course.”
Although CNN’s sources have claimed that Wednesday’s talks “did not involve details of the separate Russia investigation” led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, attempting to discredit the Steele dossier is one of many methods conservatives in Congress have used to try and undermine Mueller’s efforts, and the facts of each separate probe are inextricably linked.
The Republican-led House Intelligence Committee has previously pressured Fusion GPS — the research firm that produced the rich asshole dossier — to reveal its financial records, which they claim could prove it was part of a Democratic effort to discredit the president and the faulty basis for the Russia investigation itself. Fusion GPS co-founders Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch have insisted that the dossier did not trigger Mueller’s investigation, but that it simply corroborated information the Justice Department already had.
The dossier is not the only basis for Mueller’s ongoing investigation. But some of its claims — specifically alleged “hotel deals and land deals” between the rich asshole and members of the Kremlin, according to The Guardian’s Luke Harding — have partially informed the special counsel’s efforts.
As CNN reported this week, the FBI has also decided to allow Intelligence Committee members to interview several individuals with ties to both Fusion GPS and Mueller’s team, including FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok and FBI Attorney Lisa Page. A series of private text messages between the two became a source of scrutiny late last year after Republicans claimed it showed inherent bias against the rich asshole among Mueller’s team. Strzok and Page are no longer part of the Russia investigation and were dismissed from the probe after their messages — sent during the 2016 election, long before Mueller’s investigation ever began — were first discovered last summer.
Nunes himself has become a subject of criticism from Democrats who believe the Intelligence Committee chairman is “doing the work of the White House.”
“It’s more of the same problem we saw early in the investigation, when the chairman had difficulty removing himself from his role during the campaign of being a proxy for the White House,” ranking Democrat Schiff said during an interview with MSNBC in December.
Schiff was referring to Nunes’ earlier decision to step away from the committee’s Russia inquiry, following an ethics investigation into his decision to share information with the White House before briefing his colleagues in April.
Nunes and his fellow Republicans were also criticized recently for reportedly holding secret meetings on the Steele dossier for weeks, without telling their Democratic colleagues.
Speaker Ryan’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
This story has been updated to clarify the Justice Department’s reason for meeting Speaker Ryan (to ask that Nunes narrow the scope of his document request).
the rich asshole wants $18 billion from Congress — not Mexico — to build wall
Perhaps people really were just chanting about a metaphor at the rich asshole rallies.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the rich asshole administration will seek to spend almost $18 billion to build about half of the long-promised wall between the United States and Mexico.
The only problem is that they will be asking Congress, and therefore the American taxpayer, for the money, instead of Mexico — as some rich asshole promised his supporters dozens of times over the presidential campaign.
The funding would unfold an expansion and replacement of 700 miles of wall or fencing over ten years. This, combined with the existing 654 miles of fencing between the United States and Mexico would result in 970 miles of the 2,000-mile border. The request occurred as the White House and Congress negotiate a solution to the problem the rich asshole created when he decided to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
At nearly every single campaign rally, the rich asshole would call from the podium, “We’re going to build a wall and who’s going to pay for it?” to be answered with an exultant roar from the crowd: “Mexico!”
Yet in a private phone call in January, shortly after being sworn in, the rich asshole told Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto that Mexico paying for the wall is “the least important thing that we are talking about, but politically this might be the most important [thing we] talk about.”
Publicly, the rich asshole has held fast to the idea that Mexico would pay for the wall “through reimbursement/other” — whatever that means:
But to some in Congress, the whole notion of Mexico paying for the wall was just a metaphor, not something that would actually happen.
“I think it’s another bit of campaign rhetoric,” Rep. Francis Rooney (R-FL) said in August. “It’s highly unusual, but I don’t think that anyone during the campaign seriously thought that Mexico would pay for that wall even though we all desperately believe the wall’s a metaphor for border security.”
the rich asshole, from the outset of his campaign, used the specter of threats from Mexico to justify the need for the wall, and the injustice of bad trade deals to underline the justification for Mexico to pay for its construction. His description of the wall became more absurd last year. In July, the rich asshole called for a solar-powered wall that should be see-through. “There is a very good chance we could do a solar wall,” he said, neglecting to mention that this would require an additional multi-billion-dollar power line in a very remote area of the country.
This is not the first time that the rich asshole administration asked Congress to help fund a border wall. Earlier last year, it requested, and the House approved, a bill that contained $1.6 billion in funding for a small portion of fencing and wall along small sections of the southern border.
Partially because the construction of the wall will require large seizures of private land, there is no solid estimate for how much it will actually cost.
Mexico has repeatedly refused to pay for any wall, but officials there offered to send aid to victims of Hurricane Harvey in Texas last year.
New allegation could mean big trouble for Jeff Sessions
Did the Attorney General obstruct justice?
A recent report about President the rich asshole’s struggle against the Russia investigation and Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ recusal from the investigation contains an anecdote that could be evidence that Sessions has tried to obstruct justice.
The New York Times outlines in the piece Thursday night that four days before former FBI director James Comey was fired by the rich asshole in May of 2017, one of Sessions’ aides approached a Congressional staffer to ask whether he had damaging information about Comey. The question was, as the Times writes, “part of an apparent effort to undermine the FBI director.”
Sessions wanted one negative article per day in the news about Comey, according to the report, which cites an unnamed source with knowledge of the meeting between the Sessions staffer and the Hill staffer. (A Justice Department spokeswoman flatly denied that Sessions ever sought dirt on Comey, telling the Times, “This did not happen and would not happen… Plain and simple.”)
When the story dropped Thursday night, Times reporter Michael Schmidt tweeted it out mentioning the anecdote about Sessions looking for dirt on Comey, which former White House counsel for President Obama and now board chair of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington Norm Eisen retweeted, adding, “[T]ranslation: our reporting shows possible conspiracy to obstruct justice as well as possible obstruction itself.”
translation: our reporting shows possible conspiracy to obstruct justice as well as possible obstruction itself twitter.com/nytmike/status…
Since the rich asshole has taken office, the phrase “obstruction of justice” has been a favorite of Washington politicos, often applied to the fact that the rich asshole fired Comey while Comey was actively investigating the president and his campaign.
A former federal prosecutor recently described the buzzy phrase to The Washington Post as “impeding or otherwise instructing an official proceeding or the due administration of justice with an improper motive.” Some examples, he said, may include preventing witnesses from testifying, keeping certain evidence from coming to light, or simply telling someone to say or not to say certain things as part of an investigation.
Another important piece, the prosecutor said, is that the person who’s been accused of committing obstruction of justice “has to have the specific intention of actually impeding that ongoing federal investigation or Congressional inquiry.”
At the time Sessions sought to plant negative stories about Comey, Comey was still leading the FBI’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and whether the rich asshole campaign had colluded with the Kremlin. At that point, the rich asshole had also sought confirmation from Comey several times that the rich asshole himself wasn’t being investigated and asked him to end the investigation into General Michael Flynn, who served as his National Security Adviser before resigning. Sessions’ efforts to find dirt and plant negative stories about Comey — if he did, in fact, attempt to do so — were efforts at the very least to undermine Comey’s credibility as the head of the investigation and thus discredit the Comey’s possible findings. It’s also possible that Sessions’ alleged actions constitute obstruction of justice.
Despite — or, perhaps, because of — Sessions’ potentially illegal efforts to undermine Comey, however, the Times reporting also reveals that Sessions tried to resign from his role as Attorney General. After the rich asshole fired Comey, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Special Counsel Robert Mueller. When the rich asshole learned of the appointment, he reported blew up “erupted” at Sessions and demanded Sessions’ resignation.
But when he received the letter the next day, the rich asshole sent it back with a handwritten note at the top saying, “Not accepted.”
During his presidential campaign, some rich asshole promised he’d be the “greatest jobs president God ever created.” And as his administration has become increasingly embroiled in scandal during the first year of his presidency, the rich asshole has routinely fallen back on bragging about the allegedly unbelievable job creation he’s overseen.
But there’s just one problem — according to the latest jobs data, 2017 saw the most anemic job growth in America since Obama’s first term, when the economy was pulling out of the Great Recession he inherited from George W. Bush.
“U.S. job gains slowed by more than forecast in December, wage growth picked up slightly and the unemployment rate held at the lowest level since 2000, adding to signs of a full-employment economy,” Bloomberg reported. “The job gains, while less than forecast, bring the 2017 total to 2.06 million jobs — below 2016.”
According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 2.06 million jobs created last year were actually the fewest in a year since 2011. Here’s the year-by-year breakdown of jobs added since then.
Even the rich asshole’s favorite TV network — Fox News, which largely covers him uncritically — acknowledges that average monthly job gains during the rich asshole’s first year were the least since 2010.
Average Monthly #Job Gains
-by year
•2017: 171,000
•2016: 187,000
•2015: 226,000
•2014: 250,000
•2013: 192,000
•2012: 179,000
•2011: 174,000
•2010: 88,000#JobsReport
With an underwhelming job creation record, the rich asshole’s economic brags of late have mostly been about the stock market.
But the percentage of Americans who own stock is at a historic low — according to research Gallup conducted in 2016, “slightly more than half of Americans (52 percent) say they currently have money in the stock market, matching the lowest ownership rate in Gallup’s 19-year trend.”
In short, stock market gains aren’t necessarily benefiting working-class Americans, and the latest jobs data shows that wages aren’t rising much either. And while the rich asshole is in the habit of touting how the Republican tax cut bill will juice the economy, nonpartisan analyses have concluded that the vast majority of the benefits will accrue to the top one percent.
And as is the case with job creation, the rich asshole’s first-year record with regard to the stock market underperformed Obama’s.
Increase in Dow under:
- Obama from Jan 20, 2009 to Jan 4, 2010: 33.2%
- Trump from Jan 20, 2017 to Jan 4, 2018: 26.5%
Increase in S&P under:
- Obama from Jan 20, 2009 to Jan 4, 2010: 40.7%
- Trump from Jan 20, 2017 to Jan 4, 2018: 20.0% twitter.com/realdonaldtrum…
The 2017 jobs numbers also indicate that the rich asshole is misguided in his oft-professed belief that rolling back regulations creates jobs.
During the Obama years, the rich asshole routinely argued that government data showing the job market steadily pulling out of the Great Recession were fake — he called the BLS’ unemployment rate “one of the biggest hoaxes in American modern politics.” But in March, then-Press Secretary Sean Spicer clarified that while the numbers “may have been phony in the past,” they are “very real now.”
In other words, the rich asshole has already foreclosed the possibility of dismissing his unimpressive job creation record as fake news. Sad!
Michael Wolff on the rich asshole's Legal Response: "He’s Proving the Point of the Book"
The 'Fire and Fury' author said of the rich asshole sending him a cease and desist demand: "Where do I send the box of chocolates? Not only is he helping me sell books, but he's proving the point of the book."
Michael Wolff is standing by his new White House tell-all about some rich asshole, including the book's explosive anecdotes about the president from his former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon. "I am certainly, absolutely in every way comfortable with everything reported in this book," he said on Friday's Today show.
Speaking out for the first time since excerpts of Fire and Fury: Inside the rich asshole White House were made public earlier this week, the author told NBC News' Savannah Guthrie on Friday morning that "100 percent" of the people around the rich asshole question his intelligence and fitness for office, including Bannon, who "evolved" and ultimately came to the conclusion that the rich asshole is unfit to fulfill his duties as president.
Early excerpts of his book were released by New York magazine and GQ, and Wolff wrote a column about his year inside the White House for The Hollywood Reporter. (The author is a contributor for THR). The book was originally slated to publish on Jan. 9, but was moved up to Friday "due to unprecedented demand."
Echoing some of the most shocking claims made in his book, Wolff said on the Today show that the rich asshole's senior officials say he's a "moron, an idiot. Actually, there's a competition to get to the bottom line here of who this man is. Let's remember, this man does not read, does not listen. So he's like a pinball just shooting off the sides."
The one thing they have in common, he said, is that they all compare him to a child: "He has a need for immediate gratification; it's all about him."
That applies, according to Wolff, to the rich asshole's cease and desist demand.
the rich asshole's personal lawyers sent Wolff and the book's publishing house an 11-page letter demanding that Wolff and Henry Holt & Co. refrain from further publication of the book and any excerpts or summaries of the contents. the rich asshole also asked for an apology and a complete retraction.
"Where do I send the box of chocolates? Not only is he helping me sell books, but he’s proving the point of the book," said Wolff, calling the rich asshole's attempt to stop the sale of the book "extraordinary." Adding, "This has not happened from other presidents, would not even happen from a CEO of a midsize company."
Saying he still has sources inside the White House, Wolff claimed that when the rich asshole sent the letter, "I know everybody was going, 'We should not be doing this. This is not smart.' He just insists. He just has to be satisfied in the moment."
Quoting Bannon from his book, Wolff told Guthrie plainly of his findings about the rich asshole: "He lost it."
After first releasing a statement about what was revealed about Bannon in the book — including the former White House advisor describing some rich asshole Jr.'s infamous meeting with Russians at the rich asshole Tower as "treasonous" — the rich asshole responded directly to Wolff on Twitter Thursday night.
Calling the book "phony," the rich asshole said he authorized "zero access" to Wolff and turned down his interview requests "many times." the rich asshole wrote, referencing Bannon as well, "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!"
Admitting that he flattered his way into getting the unprecedented access, Wolff told Guthrie on Friday, "I certainly said whatever I needed to get the story." He says he has recordings and notes — though he wouldn't say if he planned to release any tapes — from his work on the book and in direct response to the rich asshole, said: "I absolutely spoke to the president. Whether he realized it was an interview or not, I don't know. But it certainly was not off the record."
Adding, "I spoke to him after the inauguration. 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."
As for his credibility being questioned, Wolff referenced his body of work and repeated that he stands by "absolutely everything" in the book: "My credibility is being questioned by a man who has less credibility than perhaps anyone who has ever walked on Earth at this point."
Book fury hits the rich asshole where it hurts most -- his image
(CNN)Nothing means more to some rich asshole than his image.
He got rich by selling his name, plastering it on buildings, hotels, casinos and golf resorts, and he transferred his tough guy "You're fired" persona to politics, building a personality cult as an ultimate winner and tough-talking President.
The President senses good angles when on camera, and he's obsessed with polls, the size of his crowds and the flattery dished out by foreign leaders.
But as Washington consumes a sensational West Wing exposé by journalist Michael Wolff, the rich asshole is being forced to watch as his prized image is ripped to shreds.
When a presidency is anchored so fundamentally on an image, as it is with the rich asshole, rather than a long history of political achievement or ideological consistency, any deterioration of that image can be especially perilous. For the rich asshole, who may be more conscious of how he is perceived than any politician in history, the mockery is likely to be especially painful.
Wolff, in some cases using on-the-record quotes, sketches an image far removed from the one constructed by the rich asshole.
It's a picture of a President who knows little of policy details and cares less and appears not to perceive the vast responsibilities of his role.
Sometimes, this version of the rich asshole appears fragile and out of control, prone to emotional and impulsive reactions, and seems lonely in the White House. Wolff also claims the rich asshole never really wanted the job of President at all.
Some of Wolff's reporting has been corroborated. But several errors have been identified. Former campaign CEO and White House adviser Steve Bannon, who is widely quoted and is now estranged from the rich asshole as a result, has not denied comments attributed to him, however.
The storm unleashed by the book, "Fire and Fury," is a political nightmare for the White House.
But even as it raged, the rich asshole was, as always, conscious of how his image is playing.
After details of the book leaked Wednesday, he released a statement saying Bannon "had very little to do with our historic victory" in 2016, characteristically claiming that his success is always his work alone.
Then on Thursday, in a brief appearance before the cameras, the rich asshole showed he had already noticed Bannon's flattery on Breitbart radio, in his only comment so far on the book: "He called me a great man last night," the President said.
Sources told CNN on Wednesday that the rich asshole was especially aggravated by Bannon's assault on his family. There is a particularly cutting assessment of the President's daughter Ivanka the rich asshole in the book.
"She was a nonevent on the campaign. She became a White House staffer and that's when people suddenly realized she's dumb as a brick. A little marketing savvy and has a look but as far as understanding actually how the world works and what politics is and what it means -- nothing," Bannon was quoted as saying by Wolff.
No father would stand for such talk about his daughter. But for the rich asshole, his family is especially important, because it's an extension of himself, and his brand.
"He doesn't like attacks on the image of the rich asshole family, on the integrity of his children," the rich asshole biographer and CNN contributor Michael D'Antonio said. "At the end of the day, he's really concerned about his image, himself and how he is being portrayed."
A delayed response
Spicer on time in the rich asshole White House 18:29
the rich asshole's image is under siege, and "Fire and Fury" seems certain to widen the perception between the version of himself that the President wants America to see and the one that emerges from behind-the-scenes reports.
After a slow start Wednesday, when the White House seemed almost as staggered as the rest of Washington about Bannon's betrayal, the rich asshole aides and friends sprang to his defense in a belated damage control effort.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders blasted the book as "tabloid gossip," and pointedly pushed back at suggestions by Wolff that the rich asshole did not want to win the election in 2016.
"If you guys know anything, you know that some rich asshole is a winner and he's not going to do something for the purpose of not coming out on top and not coming out as a winner," she said. "That's one of the most ridiculous things."
the rich asshole's lawyers fired off cease and desist letters to Bannon and to Wolff's publisher. the rich asshole friends Anthony Scaramucci and Christopher Ruddy toured cable news television studios to defend the President.
The publisher, for its part, responded by moving up the release date to Friday.
But any day when the White House has to rebut questions about the President's mental stability is hardly a good one.
And the rich asshole team's attempt to discredit Wolff faces another complication: the fact that his book broadly tends to corroborate many themes that have arisen in existing news reports about the rich asshole's personality.
In October, for instance, Republican Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee raised questions about the rich asshole's temperament by describing his White House as an "adult day care center."
Last April, Axios quoted senior administration officials as saying there was a need to keep "smart, sane people around the rich asshole to fight his worst impulses."
Ex-aide: the rich asshole knows the Constitution 01:24
And questions about the rich asshole's focus and struggle to master policy details have been around as long as his presidency.
After the initial failure of an Obamacare repeal effort last March, a senior congressional source told CNN that "staff was for details, the rich asshole was for closing," adding that when it came to the intricacies of the bill, the President "didn't know, didn't care or both."
Sam Nunberg, a former campaign aide to the rich asshole, is quoted in "Fire and Fury" as saying he was sent to explain the Constitution to the candidate -- and got only as far as the Fourth Amendment "before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head."
Nunberg, appearing on CNN's "Erin Burnett OutFront" on Thursday, did not deny the anecdote but suggested nuance was missing from Wolff's account, saying as that as a candidate who was also running a business, the rich asshole had "a ton of things to do."
By MATTHEW GERTZ
January 05, 2018
On Tuesday night, I, along with many Americans, was shocked when President some rich asshole tweeted that his “Nuclear Button” is “much bigger & more powerful” than North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un's.
Having spent the past three months monitoring the rich asshole’s Twitter feed professionally, I also had a good sense of why this spectacle was unfolding. After watching a recording of the previous few minutes of Fox News, my hunch was confirmed: The president was live-tweeting the network’s coverage.
Everyone has a theory about the rich asshole’s hyperaggressive early morning tweetstorms. Some think they are a deliberate ploy the president uses to distract the press from his administration’s potential weaknesses, or to frame the public debate to his liking. Others warn his rapid shifts from one topic to another indicate mental instability.
But my many hours following the president’s tweets for Media Matters for America, the progressive media watchdog organization, have convinced me the truth is often much simpler: The president is just live-tweeting Fox, particularly the network’s the rich asshole-loving morning show, Fox & Friends.
It’s no secret, of course, that the president likes to tweet about what he sees on TV. Thanks to diligent reporting from the White House beat, we know the rich asshole often watches several hours of cable news each day via the “Super TiVo” he had installed at the White House. And journalists at CNN, the Washington Post, New York magazine, among others, have compiled lists of the rich asshole tweets they believe were inspired by Fox.
But here’s what is shocking: After comparing the president’s tweets with Fox's 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. There is no strategy to the rich asshole’s Twitter feed; he is not trying to distract the media. He is being distracted. He darts with quark-like speed from topic to topic in his tweets because that’s how cable news works.
Here’s what’s also shocking: A man with unparalleled access to the world’s most powerful information-gathering machine, with an intelligence budget estimated at $73 billion last year, prefers to rely on conservative cable news hosts to understand current events.
I have long known that the president is a Fox & Friends superfan—well before he ran for office, he had a weekly guest spot on the program for years, and since his election, he has regularly held the program’s co-hosts up as model journalists. But one morning in October, a colleague pointed out that the rich asshole had tweeted an endorsement of a book minutes after the author, appearing on Fox & Friends to promote the work, praised him. Curious if there was a pattern, I examined the rest of the president’s tweets from that morning, and found that several others seemed to line up with the program, reacting or commenting on various topics raised by the broadcast—from kneeling NFL players to negotiating with Democrats over immigration—without ever explicitly mentioning the show itself.
The results were so striking that my morning routine quickly became a shadow of the president’s. I check the rich asshole’s Twitter feed on my way into the office every day. If the president is tweeting—those tweets often beginning soon after Fox & Friends’ 6 a.m. start—when I get to my desk I pull up footage from Fox’s programming on our internal video archive, frequently comparing it with footage from CNN and MSNBC. I use Twitter as my notepad, sharing my reasoning with my followers as I go. When I change my mind about whether a rich asshole tweet corresponds to a particular segment, I explain why and show my work. Around 9 a.m., when Fox & Friends’ co-hosts sign off, the president usually moves on to the business of running the most powerful nation in the history of the world, and I can move on as well. (Well, until the next tweet.)
Sometimes the president’s tweets don’t correspond to cable news coverage—his boasting about the economy, for example, is usually untethered from the news cycle. Other times, they echo cable news explicitly. For example, the rich asshole might identify a guest who was just on Fox & Friends, quote from a caption that appears on the screen, or even tag the program’s Twitter handle, making my task easier.
And sometimes the tweets fall into a gray area, covering the same broad topic as Fox’s programming but without any specific identifiers. Then I need to fall back on inference, and in those cases, it helps when the rich asshole has tweeted several times over the morning. Do the topics of a series of tweets match the order Fox discussed them? Does one tweet in a series have a strong tie to the network, suggesting that the other tweets were also reactions to Fox?
On Tuesday morning, for instance, on his first morning back in Washington after an 11-day vacation, the president tweeted what I believe were five consecutive tweets based on Fox’s programming, though he specifically referenced Fox & Friends in only one of them. His tweet urging the imprisonment of Huma Abedin followed a Fox segment on the former Hillary Clinton aide. When he tweeted that “it was just reported” there had been no commercial aviation deaths in 2017, and took credit, the report he cited was from Fox & Friends.
Taking a time-out from Trump's vacation tweets to track today's.
Left, Fox & Friends, 6:24 am
Right, Trump, 7:48 am pic.twitter.com/uQQXeAtOf4
Left, Fox & Friends, 8:17 am
Right, Trump, 8:44 am pic.twitter.com/DY7vcQ7uLq
"It was just reported"
Left, Fox & Friends, 7:24 am
Right, Trump, 9:13 am pic.twitter.com/4vc65VKyju
"It was just reported"
Left, Fox & Friends, 7:24 am
Right, Trump, 9:13 am pic.twitter.com/4vc65VKyju
Left, Fox & Friends, 8:26 am
Scalise: "You can go to my website and see a list of dozens and dozens of companies that are giving bonuses to workers."
Right, Trump, 8:49 am pic.twitter.com/vjVrqdI0ol
Left, Fox & Friends, 8:26 am
Scalise: "You can go to my website and see a list of dozens and dozens of companies that are giving bonuses to workers."
Right, Trump, 8:49 am pic.twitter.com/vjVrqdI0ol
Many of the president’s most vicious tweets, which often baffle observers because they seem to come out of nowhere, make more sense when you realize that they are actually his responses to Fox’s programming. This rule can apply to his attacks on the NFL:
To his claim that the Uranium One deal posed a scandal for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama:
Based on that gap, I'm assuming the first two Trump tweets happened when he watched segments that came earlier in the show (coming).
To several of his attacks on the FBI:
Because Trump TiVos, and because Fox has been running similar segments throughout the morning, it's hard to match perfectly. I can't say for sure which one he was watching when he tweeted. But:
But not all of the rich asshole tweets match with Fox segments that praise the president and thrash his perceived enemies. There are some random ones, too.
Remember that strange moment in October when the rich asshole tried to tweet happy birthday to the country music artist Lee Greenwood? He tagged the wrong handle, deleted the tweet, and sent out a corrected version while the rest of Twitter tried to figure out what was going on. The event is easier to understand if you know that about an hour before the rich asshole sent his initial tweet, Fox & Friends reported it was Greenwood’s birthday:
The timing, by the way, doesn’t always perfectly line up. That’s because, from my observations, the rich asshole also uses his DVR vigorously, often starting at the beginning of a program even if it started hours before he sits down to watch it, then fast-forwarding through commercials and segments that don’t interest him.
Left, Fox & Friends, 6:07 am
Right, Trump, 7:15 am pic.twitter.com/JpUA2w9gtT
Left, Fox & Friends, 6:18 am
Jack Keane: "I think most of us are pretty disappointed because the Chinese envoy was just in North Korea after the president's visit."
Right, Trump, 7:25 am pic.twitter.com/c6d1SFSCw3
Here's the video of Fox military analyst Jack Keane saying that the Chinese envoy was unsuccessful, which appears to have spurred Trump's tweet. pic.twitter.com/fJ3Ij7ELcN
Looks like some fast-forwarding happened after the NK tweet, he must have skipped much of the next hour.
Because this is the next one.
Left, Fox & Friends, 7:47 am
Stuart Varney says Dow will clear 24,000 as soon as the market opens, calls it the "Trump rally."
Right, Trump, 8:05 am pic.twitter.com/SmhL4D4W9E
the rich asshole may not be trying to divert the media, but the media definitely gets distracted. the rich asshole’s morning tweets upend the news cycle, with cable news producers and assignment editors redistributing time and resources to cover his latest comments. Statements from the president are inherently newsworthy. But the result is certainly a positive one for Fox: 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.
In December, Mediaite put the co-hosts of Fox & Friends at the top of its “Most Influential in Media” list, pointing out “the topics they cover essentially set the national agenda for the rest of the day.” Mediaite is not wrong. Soon after White House counselor Kellyanne Conway congratulated the co-hosts for the designation during an interview on the show, the rich asshole weighed in, urging the “many Fake News Hate Shows” to “study your formula for success!” He had been watching.
I had been, too.
FFS.
Left, 7:04 am, Kellyanne Conway praises Fox & Friends for being #1 on most influential in media list, thanks them for helping admin "get our message out" by providing a "platform.
Right, Trump, 7:45 am. mediamatters.org/blog/2017/12/2…
Explosive: the rich asshole praised Hope Hicks for having the best piece of TAIL in Washington!!! Friday, 5 January 2018
A new book about the rich asshole’s chaotic administration has revealed how the rich asshole showered Hope Hicks with praises, telling her matter of fact how she had ” the best piece of tail.”
The comment about Hope Hicks having the best piece of tail will cause further controversy and even could damage the President’s reputation even further. the rich asshole is fast becoming well known for dirty talk ever since his Access Hollywood tape in which he said he grabs women by the Pussy.
The new revelation that the rich asshole joked about tail with a female staffer just goes to show that the rich asshole has failed to learn from the Access Hollywood tape controversy and will probably never learn.
White House communications director, Hope Hicks, fled a room in the rich asshole Tower after then-candidate the rich asshole made a crude comment about her relationship with his former campaign manager, a new book reveals.
In the book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the rich asshole White House,” written by Michael Wolff, he reveals Hicks and Corey Lewandowski, who was fired in 2016 for clashing with the rich asshole’s family, had an on-and-off romantic relationship that ended badly.
Wolff recounts one moment when Hicks was sitting with the rich asshole and his sons in the rich asshole Tower, worrying about how Lewandowski would be portrayed in the media how she could help him after his firing.
“the rich asshole, who tried to console Hope Hicks, looked up and said, ‘Why? You’ve already done enough for him. You’re the best piece of tail he’ll ever have’” the rich asshole told Hicks, according to the book, who fled the room.
He has said even more sexually provocative things on the Howard Stern show in the past.
The book, Fire and Fury by journalist Michael Wolff has opened the lid on the sordid activities, drama and misadventures plaguing the rich asshole administration. the rich asshole and his lawyers engineered a last minute legal remedy to stop the book from being published and sent threats of legal action targeting book sellers and publishers not to let the book out. Instead, the rich asshole’s legal threats have had the opposite effect- Wolff’s book has debuted as the number 1 best seller on Amazon and other bookseller lists.
some rich asshole’s Weird Video Briefing Becomes Bonkers New Meme
“Leaning hard into the 1984 vibe here.”
President some rich asshole is being mercilessly mocked after he appeared via a taped video message at Thursday’s White House press briefing.
Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders began the briefing by playing pre-recorded footage of the rich asshole boasting about his tax code rewrite onto two screens. But as many media outlets have noted, the president was likely nearby in another room at the same time.
The bizarre situation did not go unnoticed online, with many people likening the rich asshole’s appearance to a movie villain. They also reimagined photos of the briefing in various amusing ways. Here’s a sampling of the humorous responses:
Sarah Huckabee Sanders just thanked a video recording of Trump as if he was actually there.
The bizarre situation prompted other folks to ask why the rich asshole didn’t deliver the briefing in person:
1/5 To the best of my recollection, @realDonaldTrump has held exactly ONE press conference in the last year that wasn't with another head of state or a Cabinet head to share the brunt of questions. ONE. This is not normal and this is not acceptable.
Dec 29, 2017 7:22pm EST by Aldous J Pennyfarthing
Like most of you, I read some rich asshole’s recent New York Times interview with mouth immutably agape. Then I read this part:
“Yeah, China. … China’s been. … I like very much President Xi. He treated me better than anybody’s ever been treated in the history of China. You know that.”
And fuck me sideways with John Holmes’ fossilized dick that was quite enough. I'd long since surpassed my recommended yearly allowance of crazy, and as if prodded by some divine imprimatur, this open letter to our “president” poured like incandescent dung from a Chernobyl reindeer’s asshole:
Dear Fucking Lunatic,
I read with interest your recent interview with The New York Times. I couldn’t get past the bit about your being the most popular visitor in the history of fucking China — a country that’s only 2,238 years old, give or take.
Do you know how fucking insane you sound, you off-brand butt plug? That's like the geopolitical equivalent of “that stripper really likes me” — only 10,000 times crazier and less self-aware.
You are fucking exhausting. Every day is a natural experiment in determining how long 300 million people can resist coming out their own assholes with an ice auger. Every time I hear a snippet of your Queens-tinged banshee larynx farts, I want to crawl up my own ass with a Union Jack and claim my sigmoid colon for HRH Queen Elizabeth II.
We are fucking tired. As bad as we all thought your presidency would be when Putin got you elected, it’s been inestimably worse.
You called a hostile, nuclear-armed head of state “short and fat.” How the fuck does that help?
You accused a woman — a former friend, no less — of showing up at your resort bleeding from the face and begging to get in. You, you, YOU — the guy who looks like a Christmas haggis inexplicably brought to life by Frosty’s magic hat — yes, you of all people said that.
You attempted — with evident fucking glee — to get 24 million people thrown off their health insurance.
You gave billions away to corporations and the already wealthy while simultaneously telling struggling poor people that you were doing exactly the opposite.
You endorsed a pedophile, praised brutal dictators, and defended LITERAL FUCKING NAZIS!
Ninety-nine percent of everything you say is either false, crazy, incoherent, just plain cruel, or a rancid paella of all four.
Oh, by the way, Puerto Rico is still FUBAR. You got yourself and your family billions in tax breaks for Christmas. What do they get? More paper towels?
Enough, enough, enough, enough! For the love of God and all that is holy, good, and pure, would you please, finally and forever, shut your feculent KFC-hole until you have something valuable — or even marginally civil — to say?
You are a fried dick sandwich with a side of schlongs. If chlamydia and gonorrhea had a son, you’d appoint him HHS secretary. You are a disgraceful, pustulant hot stew full of casuistry, godawful ideas, unintelligible non sequiturs, and malignant rage.
You are the perfect circus orangutan diaper from Plato’s World of Forms.
So happy new year, Mr. President. And fuck you forever.
Oh, and Pence, you oleaginous house ferret. Fuck you, too.
Sincerely, Everyone
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