DDT Doesn’t Always Win

While Hurricane Harvey continues to destroy a large part of Texas and surrounding areas, Dictator Donald Trump (DDT) moves toward his personal disaster. Despite adamant claims that he had no business dealings with Russia during his campaign, he signed a “letter of intent” on October 28, 2015 to build a Trump Tower in Moscow and ask for money from a Russian bank—four months after he declared his candidacy.  Then-Trump Organization Chief Counsel Michael Cohen said that he told DDT three times about the Moscow proposal.

Other Russian issues:

• Special counsel Robert Mueller has joined N.Y. AG Eric Schneiderman. Three reasons: DDT cannot pardon state crimes; Schneiderman can continue the investigation if DDT fires Mueller; and DDT can’t take information from Schneiderman.
• Felix Sater, Russian-born real estate broker involved in Trump businesses, wrote emails in 2015 to set up a deal for a Moscow Trump Tower and promised that he can get Putin to “get Donald elected.”
• Cohen wrote Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, for help.
• Rinat Akhmetshin, Russian lobbyist and “former” spy, appeared before special investigator Robert Mueller’s grand jury on August 11. He had attended the meeting with Donald Trump, Jr. and others, including Paul Manafort and DDT’s son-in-law Jared Kushner,to get “dirt” on Hillary Clinton before the presidential election. Jr. may be testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee this coming week. (DDT called its chair, Chuck Grassley (R-IA), to tell him how much he loves ethanol, important to Grassley’s constituency.)
• Mueller has sent Paul Manafort more subpoenas.
• DDT’s deputy chief of staff, Rick Dearborn, tried to arrange a meeting in June 2016 between DDT’s campaign and Putin. Dearborn was also working for then Sen. Jeff Sessions while he received $28,000 from DDT’s campaign.
• DDT campaign adviser George Papadopoulos also emailed campaign officials in March 2016 about arranging meetings with Russians.
• Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) will vote in favor of the releasing the Senate Judiciary Committee testimony of Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson on the DDT dossier about Russian connections. With his support, the Democrats may be successful in this action.
• Officials at the CIA Counterintelligence Mission Center are carefully watching CIA director, Mike Pompeo, out of concern that he may protect DDT at the cost of the Russian—and DDT—investigation.

DDT’s pardon for “Sheriff Joe”:

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) may have gotten a spinal implant—or is just fed up with DDT attacking him—when he disagreed with the presidential pardon for former Multnomah County (AZ) Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Ryan’s speaker, Doug Andres, said that “the speaker does not agree with the decision.”

When DDT pardoned “Sheriff Joe,” he probably didn’t know that an acceptance of the pardon is an admission of guilt of the crime, according to the 1915 Supreme Court ruling in Burdick v. United States. Arpaio cannot be tried for that crime again, but the pardon may leave him open to hundreds of civil suits. He had intended to appeal the court’s decision.

Blocking a federal judge’s ruling that enforced the Constitution for a person who swore to defend the Constitution shows DDT’s open contempt for the U.S. Constitution. Over 150 people, mostly current and former judges and lawyers, protested outside the Sandra Day O’Connor U.S. Courthouse in Phoenix (AZ) in well above 100 degrees against the pardon.The judge, Susan Bolton, has ordered DOJ to file a memo and scheduled a hearing for October 4 when the pardoning team may argue why Arpaio deserves to be pardoned. The prosecution can argue publicly about his extensive crimes, including his concentration camp (Arpaio’s words), inmate torture, refusal to investigate sex crimes against Latina children, and women shackled while giving birth. Another issue is the 160 people who died in his jails with no reason for abusive guards and missing oversight.

DDT retweeted a lie from Fox’s Katie Pavlich that President Obama had pardoned Chelsea Manning, who “gave U.S. enemies state secrets,” according to Pavlich. In fact, President Obama commuted Manning’s sentence after she had served seven years. Journalist Pavlich complained that the media was “squabbling” about the difference between “pardon” and “commute.”

Differences with staff and world leaders:

• The President of the United States typically speaks for the nation, but Secretary of State said that DDT “speaks for himself” about “the American people’s values or the commitment … to advancing those values and defending those values.” Tillerson was responding to a question about the United Nations’ criticism regarding DDT’s response to Charlottesville (VA) and the White House’s “failure at the highest political level to unequivocally reject and condemn the racist violent events and demonstrations.”
• Last week, chief economic advisor Gary Cohn said that the White House “can and must do better” to condemn racist groups and should “do everything we can to heal the deep divisions that exist in our communities.”
• Defense Secretary James Mattis told troops that they needed “to hold the line until our country gets back to understanding and respecting each other and showing it.” After that he announced that transgender troops in the military can serve pending the results of a study “which will contain the steps that will promote military readiness, lethality, and unit cohesion, with due regard for budgetary constraints and consistent with applicable law.” LGBT groups Lambda Legal and OutServe-SLDN have joined the ACLU, Human Rights Campaign, National Center for Lesbian Rights, and GLAD to sue the government because of DDT’s rejection of transgender service members. DDT will have to prove that transgender people in the military affects “our readiness, ability to fight, and lethality.”
• Payment for “the wall” is still a bone of contention. In January, DDT knew that Mexico wouldn’t pay for the wall when he begged Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto to not tell anybody because it would make him look bad. Recently, DDT tweeted that Mexico would pay, and its foreign ministry answered, “Our country will not pay, under any circumstances, for a wall.” DDT is also whining that Mexico, along with Canada, is being “very difficult” about NAFTA after DDT called Mexico “one of the highest crime nations in the world.”
• During his press conference with Finland’s Sauli Niinisto this week, DDT talked about the “purchasing large amounts of our great F-18 aircraft from Boeing [and] lots of other military equipment.” Niiniso denied the purchase.

Good news from Arizona:

Seven years after a racist state school superintendent closed down a popular Tucson Mexican-American Studies program that kept students in school, U.S. District Judge A. Wallace Tashima ruled that the ban was enacted with discriminatory intent. Created in 1998, the Tucson program focused on Mexican-American history, literature, and art. Participating students outdid the other students in grades and standardized test results. The part of a law banning classes for students of a specific ethnic group was struck down. Tasimo had harsh words about former state education leaders Tom Horne and John Huppenthal who helped pass the law in 2010.:

“Additional evidence shows that defendants were pursuing these discriminatory ends in order to make political gains. Horne and Huppenthal repeatedly pointed to their efforts against the MAS program in their respective 2011 political campaigns, including in speeches and radio advertisements. The issue was a political boon to the candidates.”

More good news:

• Opposing DDT, the Republican National Committee passed a resolution “condemning the violence and racist beliefs” of “abhorrent white supremacist demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017, that led to loss of life and numerous injuries.” The resolution also cited the founding of the GOP “in the struggle against slavery and a rejection of the racial beliefs underlying the institution of slavery.”
• The DOJ withdrew its warrant for 1.3 million visitor records to a site protesting DDT’s inauguration. District of Columbia Superior Court Chief Judge Robert E. Morin approved a new warrant with more limits with the requirement that the data not be disseminated outside the DOJ and will supervise the government.
• A federal court unanimously struck down Texas’ unconstitutional voter ID law because it discriminated against Latinos and blacks and violates the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The state must redraw its districting maps before the 2018 election, and the federal government may start overseeing the state’s voting procedures. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has put a hold on the court ruling until September 5.
• Judge Orlando L. Garcia of United States District Court for the Western District of Texas temporarily blocked Texas’ ban on so-called sanctuary cities supposed to go into effect tomorrow. The law allows police to question the immigration status of anyone and threaten fines, jail, and removal from office for officials. The state’s largest cities—including Houston—are suing to strike down the law.
• The DOJ support for a lawsuit against DDT’s religious liberty executive order claims that the order doesn’t allow churches and other religious groups to take political action that other charities cannot.
• DDT rejected requests from coal magnate Robert Murray and billionaire Carl Icahn despite their huge donations to his campaign. Murray wanted to use emergency powers to keep coal-fired power plants open, and Icahn wanted a change to an EPA ethanol rule to profit his oil refining company. Icahn resigned from DDT’s administration. Murray is suing John Oliver for his reporting on the coal mine owner. (Catch this clip before Murray succeeds with his gag order!) Will Jim Justice, coal billionaire and West Virginia governor turned Republican from Democrat recently, get his $4.5 billion annually to pay utilities $15 per ton for Appalachian coal burned?
• The American Legion adopted a resolution Thursday urging the federal government to allow Department of Veterans Affairs doctors to discuss and recommend medical marijuana in states where it’s legal.
• Illinois has become the tenth state—20 percent of the nation—to adopt automatic voter registration in just two years since Oregon became the first state with this registration procedure.

The stock market is still climbing, but board members and executives at the top six U.S. banks are now consistently selling their own banks’ shares.

Another cover to post at DDT’s golf courses from Germany’s Der Spiegel.

[The article, “Das wahre Gesicht des Donald Trump”: “The true face of Donald Trump.”]

DDT: ‘Danger to the World’

A White House strategy for keeping Dictator Donald Trump (DDT) in line while he traveled the world was to keep him so busy that he didn’t have time to get to his Twitter. The authoritarianism, opulence, and subservience in the Middle East also delighted  him. By last Thursday, however, his keepers had largely gone back to the United States, and he was in Europe where his favoritism of Russian was not as popular as in Saudi Arabia. In Brussels, where he attended the NATO summit, the familiar DDT showed up, with the customary picture of an unstable and embarrassing bully.

Perhaps no image demonstrates DDT’s superior attitude better than his pushing aside Montenegro Prime Minister Dusko Markovic, representing a country which will join NATO in June to the displeasure of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. It has to be seen to be believed! In his speech he  whined about NATO allies not paying their share and snarked about the expense of the new NATO building. Notable also is the way that DDT rejected the U.S. press. News about him—and there was plenty—came from the foreign press. Many people here and abroad will agree with Germany’s highly-respected Der Spiegel newspaper description of DDT:

“Donald Trump is not fit to be president of the United States. He does not possess the requisite intellect and does not understand the significance of the office he holds nor the tasks associated with it. He doesn’t read. He doesn’t bother to peruse important files and intelligence reports and knows little about the issues that he has identified as his priorities. His decisions are capricious and they are delivered in the form of tyrannical decrees.

“He is a man free of morals. As has been demonstrated hundreds of times, he is a liar, a racist and a cheat. I feel ashamed to use these words, as sharp and loud as they are. But if they apply to anyone, they apply to Trump. And one of the media’s tasks is to continue telling things as they are: Trump has to be removed from the White House. Quickly. He is a danger to the world.”

It’s not as if his comments were unscripted, the way that other DDT insults are. In a prepared speech in the ceremony to dedicate the new NATO headquarters, he talked about terrorism such as the Manchester bombing just three days earlier:

“These grave security concerns are the same reason that I have been very, very direct … in saying that NATO members must finally contribute their fair share.”

DDT is demanding that NATO members pay two percent of their GDP as a “bare minimum.” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg (left with DDT) was polite about DDT’s comments, but a senior diplomat said:

 

“This was not the right place or time. We are left with nothing else but trying to put a brave face on it.”

DDT also told the organization to limit immigration in its goals and failed to commit to its founding Article V rule, mandating that an attack against one ally is an attack against all. He is the only president who has not specifically endorsed the agreement. The only time that NATO has invoked Article V since its founding in 1949 was when the United States was attacked on 9/11. Over 1,000 NATO soldiers were killed in George W. Bush’s war against Afghanistan. DDT made his comments to NATO while standing next to wreckage from the Twin Towers. Last year, he had threatened to abandon the organization if they didn’t pay more while he was catering to Russia, a non-NATO member. Some current NATO countries were in the Soviet Union; Putin called its “a major geopolitical disaster of the century.”

NATO members did not respond well to DDT, as the above photo shows. France’s new president, Emmanuel Macron went so far as to swerve away from him to first greet Germany’s Angela Merkel and others before DDT.

DDT’s continuing ignorance was on full display at the NATO summit. For example, he told Jean-Claude Juncker, EU president that “the Germans are bad, very bad” and said that he plans to stop the sale of their cars in the U.S. Yet he was told at least 11 times when Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, visited the U.S. that the EU makes trade deals, not individual EU countries. Even if he stopped the sale of German cars in the U.S., many people here would lose their jobs because the U.S. manufactured German 281,519 vehicles in the first four months of 2017. In a meeting with Belgium’s prime minister, Charles Michel, DDT complained about the difficulty of building golf resorts in the EU.

NATO members have a more serious reason for their response to DDT. As he actively encourages racist nationalists in the U.S and allies himself with Putin to bring down Europe, he is also willing to start a war to regain popularity. This approach has already been seen in his preemptive bombing of Syria when he searched for a greater support from people in the U.S. He also has exhibited a pattern of carelessness about intelligence that can endanger the rest of the free world.

From Brussels, the U.S. leader moved his disaster to Italy where he met with other members of the G7, the seven major advanced economies as reported by the International Monetary Fund. These countries represent more than 64% of the net global wealth ($263 trillion). Russia was a member of G8 for seven years until the country was ejected for annexing Crimea. DDT threatened them with backing out of the Paris Agreement, a position that he has taken off and on since he began campaigning. This action would put the U.S. on a par with Nicaragua and Syria, the only two countries that did not sign the agreement. DDT has said that the U.S. will not work to slow down climate change if it costs the country money. Withdrawing from the agreement will make China a leader in global environmental policy and new green technologies.

While DDT is making America “great” again by removing regulations, China is on its way to be the world leader in efficiency standards for coal-fired power plants while that nation shifts to renewable energy as shown in this issue brief. While the nation’s new coal-fired power plants are cleaner than any in the U.S., its emission standards are stricter than U.S. ones. China’s air quality is on a political par with economic growth and corruption. If the U.S. doesn’t improve its regulations, all the coal plans would be illegal to operate in China by 2020.

Another argument DDT started with G7 leaders was about migration and famine. He wants only a short reference to the first and to eliminate a five-page statement recognizing migrants’ rights and their positive contribution. The Italian plans on human movement and food security were intended to be the centerpiece of the summit which was in Taormina (Sicily) to symbolize the concern for refugees’ plight. DDT offered its own statement on a “take-it-or-leave-it” basis affirming “the sovereign rights of states to control their own borders and set clear limits on net migration levels as key elements of their national security.” He also wants refugees to be settled close to their home countries, letting him off the hook to take the “Muslims.”

By the ninth day of his whirlwind trip, DDT was fed up. He didn’t even bother to listen to a translation of the G7 speech from his host, Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni  The man who brags about his stamina was unable to walk 700 yards for a photo shoot; he had to wait for a golf cart. Four of the seven leaders of the G7 are attending their first summit. The only bright spot DDT gave the other six leaders is that he showed up; as usual, he gets a very low bar of performance.

DDT described his trip as “historic,” an accurate word for the way that he pandered to the Middle East for oil and money for his friends while he alienated NATO and G7 allies. At home, however, the attitude toward Islam is same-o, same-o. Rex Tillerson refused a request from the State Department’s Office of Religion and Global Affairs to host an Eid al-Fitr reception as part of Ramadan celebrations, a custom for almost 20 years.

Back home, DDT faces increasing pressure—Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate the Russian collusion, a son-in-law in trouble, falling already bad approval ratings, legislative problems to get his tax reform through, the 2018 elections, and his Twitter addiction. White supremacist Steve Bannon is running the “war room” to protect DDT from criminal charges.

Conservatives who complained about a $12,000 dress that Michelle Obama wore to a state dinner probably won’t bat an eye at the Melania Trump’s $51,000 floral coat and matching $1,630 purse by Dolce & Gabanna. The 2015 median household income in the U.S. was $55,775, meaning that half the households in the U.S. have an income comparable to or less than what Melania Trump paid for a casual jacket and purse.

A bit of humor: an illustrated tale of Emmanuel Macron’s handshake with DDT.

 

 

German Chancellor Angela Merkel recovered from her DDT NATO experience with a joy-filled breakfast meeting with President Obama and an event at the Brandenburg Gate. The former president was invited a year ago to celebrate the 500^th anniversary of the birth of the Protestant Reformation.