Trump, July 2017: Tweet more

fuck yeah

🐦[Part of Trump’s strategy, as we have seen confirmed, is to make things appear chaotic to confuse the enemy. And it works beautifully.
— Bill Mitchell (@mitchellvii) July 31, 2017🕸]🐦

yessssss

sure bill, let's look at all the incredible achievements trump's orchestrated-chaos strategy has helped secure

*crickets*

half expect Trump to start saying "liberals wanted to repeal the Affordable Care Act and I helped keep it!" and wouldn't be surprised if half of em believe it

sure bill, let's look at all the incredible achievements trump's orchestrated-chaos strategy has helped secure

prevented new FBI building from being built

Would it actually be good if Kelly fails to establish order and Trump just kept firing people? Each of the people mentioned would likely be replaced with someone as bad or worse. And the more chaos there is the more likely it might be for Trump to do something impulsive and irreversible--probably militarily.

A crazy white house could mean more than just a stalled Republican agenda.

I don't really know what to hope for except impeachment and the permanent death of the Republican Party.

everything will be fine as long as there's not some sort of international crisis to deal with, like, i don't know, if the hilarious north koreans successfully tested intercontinental missiles

Or if Russia started ejecting diplomatic staff in retaliation for sanctions.

I know, crazy, right?

can see Trump considering a N. Korean strike on the west coast - on the one hand we didn't vote for him so who cares if we are all incinerated; on the other hand, no Twitter. hmm tough call.

I was hoping they'd release the tape in retaliation.

can't say I really give a fuck about expelled diplomats tbh

xp

Wow was Ted Cruz disloyal to his very capable director of communication. He used him as a scape goat-fired like a dog! Ted panicked.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 23, 2016

I find it impossible to predict Trump's behavior. In hindsight it always makes sense -- it's driven by personal animus or attention craving -- but this can play out in a million different ways. There are a million different destructive things he couls do.

I find it intensely distressing that DeVos is flying so far under the radar. Who even knows what nefarious shit she's up to.

iirc alarming the d.o.e. staffers who are still around with her lack of knowledge of education policy or interest in managing an organization she can't just donate into submission

re: there always being a trump tweet saying the thing he just did is dumb

Because his Twitter feed is and always has been heavily cued off Fox News https://t.co/DPqk23i2oU

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) July 30, 2017

meanwhile:

BREAKING: Alabama sheriff: Escaped inmates tricked guard into opening door by covering its number in peanut butter.

— The Associated Press (@AP) July 31, 2017

I'd imagine things could really quiet down now that there is a military guy less than six months from active duty running things in the WH. I got to think this is the grown ups taking control. It could get strange in a different way now.

DeVos can't do a whole lot of permanent damage without control of the funding - she can issue guidelines and tweak rules and stuff but it's really Congress that runs the Dept of Education, doles out the money, sets goals, etc.

Don't get me wrong she's horrible and incompetent and the Dept of Education (as with so many others) will be a zombie organization trying to do its best without any coherent or capable leadership, but in the cabinet the biggest threat to America is by far the lone guy who knows what he's doing: Jeff Sessions.

Sessions can effectively put people in jail, kick them out of the country, encourage state violence etc.

Scott Pruitt also knows what he's doing

eh sort of. he's also a moron who's essentially at war with his own agency, I don't think Sessions has any such problems with his Dept of Justice underlings

Just a hopeful heads up, my next door neighbor is an EPA lawyer, so we have been picking his brain about things. He, who incidentally helped unionize the office, says things aren't as bad as they seem, though obviously that can change. He says they have been dealing directly with various elected officials of every stripe, Democrats and Republicans alike, and that Pruitt is in over his head. That is, it is impossible to make broad dictates to a bureaucracy of thousands. In the meantime, no politician wants to see, for example, the drinking water polluted, or the Great Lakes ruined. They have apparently been quietly doing the right thing behind the scenes.

yeah I have a buddy who's in a regional EPA office out here and he has a similar "everyone is keeping their head down, hoping they don't get fired, and just trying to actually do their job" sorta take on it

nearly every trump-appointed cabinet member is at war with their own agency. i can't speak to DOJ but i doubt they're happy. meanwhile, feckless scott pruitt keeps bumbling along:

But Pruitt has already carried out an impressive list of corporate favors: He rejected the advice of EPA scientists and approved the use of millions of pounds of a toxic pesticide that causes neurological damage in children; in a gift to Big Coal, he delayed tougher ozone air-pollution rules; he plotted to kill Obama's signature climate accomplishment, the Clean Power Plan, designed to put America on track to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 32 percent by 2030; he rescinded the Clean Water Rule, allowing countless streams and rivers to be exempted from pollution controls; he undermined regulations on the release of mercury, a potent neurotoxin, from power plants and other sources; and he submitted a budget that would wipe out more than a third of the funding for the agency, including cutting money for scientific research in half.

obviously all that shit is bad, we're just arguing over who's the worst iirc

lol @ Arpaio tho. here's hoping the correctional officers are "not to be too nice to him" when they put him in the clink.

not to mention the other prisoners.

xpost

i was reacting to the idea that sessions was "the lone guy who knows what he's doing", but okeydokey

guess arpaio won't be joining the cabinet any time soon

i dunno, it was just a misdemeanor, so he'll probably get sentenced to a super hard slap on the wrist

Trump will pardon him

Shame nobody's going to pardon the environment or any of the other systems that aren't going to easily repair once this circus leaves town.

Arpaio shouldn't be jailed, should just be pulled over every day for the rest of his life by Arizona police

He should be forced to eat spoiled lunchmeat every day and never have air conditioning.

I don't know if Arby's would be willing to hire him

Arbiaio's

.@dougmillsnyt took this photo of Anthony Scaramucci on Monday as John Kelly, the new White House chief of staff, met with President Trump. pic.twitter.com/wZ5Zwjz37H

— The New York Times (@nytimes) July 31, 2017

lol butthurt

A great day at the White House!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 31, 2017

as a friend just wrote on FB, "The Mooch will be the Kato Kaelin of this story. It's too bad we'll be telling this story standing around a garbage can fire in a post-apocalyptic hellscape."

a fate foretold

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/reliable-source/wp/2017/07/31/anthony-scaramucci-erroneously-listed-as-dead-in-the-new-harvard-law-alumni-directory/

has trump said anything about the expelling of diplomats?

Doesnt look like it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/president-trump-silent-on-russia-after-putin-announced-expulsion-of-us-diplomats/2017/07/31/35a99ce6-7611-11e7-9eac-d56bd5568db8_story.html?utm_term=.b751e654d1a7

oops that link may not work, stupid papers and their effing paywalls

Anderson Cooper on that Trump tweet about Obama's three-chiefs-of-staff-in-three-years: "Trump's tweets are like greeting cards--there's one for every occasion."

Oops:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-dictated-sons-misleading-statement-on-meeting-with-russian-lawyer/2017/07/31/04c94f96-73ae-11e7-8f39-eeb7d3a2d304_story.html

On the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Germany this month, President Trump’s advisers discussed how to respond to a new revelation that Trump’s oldest son had met with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign — a disclosure the advisers knew carried political and potentially legal peril.

The strategy, the advisers agreed, should be for Donald Trump Jr. to release a statement to get ahead of the story. They wanted to be truthful, so their account couldn’t be repudiated later if the full details emerged.

But within hours, at the president’s direction, the plan changed.

Flying home from Germany on July 8 aboard Air Force One, Trump personally dictated a statement in which Trump Jr. said he and the Russian lawyer had “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children” when they met in June 2016, according to multiple people with knowledge of the deliberations. The statement, issued to the New York Times as it prepared a story, emphasized that the subject of the meeting was “not a campaign issue at the time.”

The claims were later shown to be misleading.

Over the next three days, multiple accounts of the meeting were provided to the media as public pressure mounted, with Trump Jr. ultimately acknowledging that he had accepted the meeting after receiving an email promising damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of a Russian government effort to help his father’s campaign.

The extent of the president’s personal intervention in his son’s response, the details of which have not previously been reported, adds to a series of actions that Trump has taken that some advisers fear could place him and some members of his inner circle in legal jeopardy.

etc.

“He refuses to sit still,” the presidential adviser said. “He doesn’t think he’s in any legal jeopardy, so he really views this as a political problem he is going to solve by himself.”

nice work by bannon last week

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/07/27/scaramucci-show-unloads-nasty-attacks-to-oppostion-party/

that's how you get someone fired in this whitehouse

yeah but Kelly will take care of this.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/31/politics/kelly-comey-phone-call-angry/index.html