"A Hundred Days of Trump"-- A Hundred Days of America's Biggest Asshole

On April 29th, Donald Trump will have occupied the Oval Office for a hundred days.

For most people, the luxury of living in a relatively stable democracy is the luxury of not following politics with a nerve-racked constancy. Trump does not afford this.

His Presidency has become the demoralizing daily obsession of anyone concerned with global security, the vitality of the natural world, the national health, constitutionalism, civil rights, criminal justice, a free press, science, public education, and the distinction between fact and its opposite.

The hundred-day marker is never an entirely reliable indicator of a four-year term, but it’s worth remembering that Franklin Roosevelt and Barack Obama were among those who came to office at a moment of national crisis and had the discipline, the preparation, and the rigor to set an entirely new course. Impulsive, egocentric, and mendacious,

Trump has, in the same span, set fire to the integrity of his office. Trump has never gone out of his way to conceal the essence of his relationship to the truth and how he chooses to navigate the world.

In 1980, when he was about to announce plans to build Trump Tower, a fifty-eight-story edifice on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street, he coached his architect before meeting with a group of reporters. “Give them the old Trump bullshit,” he said. “Tell them it’s going to be a million square feet, sixty-eight stories.” This is the brand that Trump has created for himself—that of an unprincipled, cocky, value-free con who will insult, stiff, or betray anyone to achieve his gaudiest purposes. “I am what I am,” he has said.

But what was once a parochial amusement is now a national and global peril. Trump flouts truth and liberal values so brazenly that he undermines the country he has been elected to serve and the stability he is pledged to insure. His bluster creates a generalized anxiety such that the President of the United States can appear to be scarcely more reliable than any of the world’s autocrats.

When Kim In-ryong, a representative of North Korea’s radical regime, warns that Trump and his tweets of provocation are creating “a dangerous situation in which a thermonuclear war may break out at any moment,” does one man sound more immediately rational than the other?

When Trump rushes to congratulate Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for passing a referendum that bolsters autocratic rule in Turkey—or when a sullen and insulting meeting with Angela Merkel is followed by a swoon session with Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, the military dictator of Egypt—how are the supporters of liberal and democratic values throughout Europe meant to react to American leadership?

Trump appears to strut through the world forever studying his own image. He thinks out loud, and is incapable of reflection. He is unserious, unfocussed, and, at times, it seems, unhinged. Journalists are invited to the Oval Office to ask about infrastructure; he turns the subject to how Bill O’Reilly, late of Fox News, is a “good person,” blameless, like him, in matters of sexual harassment.

A reporter asks about the missile attack on Syria; he feeds her a self-satisfied description of how he informed his Chinese guests at Mar-a-Lago of the strike over “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen.”

Every Day of the Trump Presidency Is a Hellish Game of Ethics Whac-A-Mole

Since the inauguration, Trump Hotels have drawn gobs of lobbyist cash, both foreign and domestic, and the Trump Organization is considering opening a second hotel in Washington. During the same time period, the Chinese government has approved at least five trademarks for Ivanka Trump, though both parties claim everything is on the up-and-up. Three of those approvals were granted after Ivanka Trump and Kushner dined with Chinese President Xi Jinping. (Where were they dining? At Mar-a-Lago, of course!)

This is the Whac-A-Mole problem of the Trump presidency. There are so many bad things going on at once—so many minor corruptions and shady deals and strings that if tugged will surely lead to more evidence of self-dealing—that it’s impossible to concentrate on one at a time.

The flagrant, prima facie corruption of the Trump administration is so transparent and so all-encompassing that, perversely, it’s impossible to get people to care about it. The most pressing threat to our democratic norms isn’t Russia’s meddling in the election, it’s the endless stream of details of political corruption becoming white noise, proving each day that our system isn’t equipped to deal with officials who cannot be shamed or embarrassed into voluntarily avoiding the appearance of impropriety.

 

Look, here’s a piece in the New York Times on Jared Kushner’s financial ties to an Israeli mogul whose billionaire uncle is under investigation for bribery and money laundering. If reporters whose jobs are to follow this stuff can’t keep up, how are citizens supposed to?

Chomsky on the GOP: Has Any Organization Ever Been So Committed to Destruction of Life on Earth?

I mean, has there ever been an organization in human history that is dedicated, with such commitment, to the destruction of organized human life on Earth? Not that I’m aware of. Is the Republican organization—I hesitate to call it a party—committed to that? Overwhelmingly. There isn’t even any question about it.

Take a look at the last primary campaign—plenty of publicity, very little comment on the most significant fact. Every single candidate either denied that what is happening is happening—namely, serious move towards environmental catastrophe—or there were a couple of moderates, so-called—Jeb Bush, who said, "Maybe it’s happening. We really don’t know. But it doesn’t matter, because fracking is working fine, so we can get more fossil fuels." Then there was the guy who was called the adult in the room, John Kasich, the one person who said, "Yes, it’s true. Global warming’s going on. But it doesn’t matter." He’s the governor of Ohio. "In Ohio, we’re going to go on using coal for energy, and we’re not going to apologize for it." So that’s 100 percent commitment to racing towards disaster.

Then take a look at what’s happened since. The—November 8th was the election. There was, as most of you know, I’m sure, a very important conference underway in Morocco, Marrakesh, Morocco. Almost roughly 200 countries at the United Nations-sponsored conference, which was—the goal of which was to put some specific commitments into the verbal agreements that were reached at Paris in December 2015, the preceding international conference on global warming. The Paris conference did intend to reach a verifiable treaty, but they couldn’t, because of the most dangerous organization in human history. The Republican Congress would not accept any commitments, so therefore the world was left with verbal promises, but no commitments. Well, last November 8th, they were going to try to carry that forward. On November 8th, in fact, there was a report by the World Meteorological Organization, a very dire analysis of the state of the environment and the likely prospects, also pointed out that we’re coming perilously close to the tipping point, where—which was the goal of the—the goal of the Paris negotiations was to keep things below that—coming very close to it, and other ominous predictions. At that point, the conference pretty much stopped, because the news came in about the election.

And it turns out that the most powerful country in human history, the richest, most powerful, most influential, the leader of the free world, has just decided not only not to support the efforts, but actively to undermine them. So there’s the whole world on one side, literally, at least trying to do something or other, not enough maybe, although some places are going pretty far, like Denmark, couple of others; and on the other side, in splendid isolation, is the country led by the most dangerous organization in human history, which is saying, "We’re not part of this. In fact, we’re going to try to undermine it." We’re going to maximize the use of fossil fuels—could carry us past the tipping point. We’re not going to provide funding for—as committed in Paris, to developing countries that are trying to do something about the climate problems. We’re going to dismantle regulations that retard the impact, the devastating impact, of production of carbon dioxide and, in fact, other dangerous gases—methane, others.

OK. So the conference kind of pretty much came to a halt. The question—it continued, but the question was: Can we salvage something from this wreckage? And pretty amazingly, the countries of the world were looking for salvation to a different country: China. Here we have a world looking for salvation to China, of all places, when the United States is the wrecking machine that’s threatening destruction, in—with all three branches of government in the hands of the most dangerous organization in human history.

And I don’t have to go through what’s happened since, but the—in general, the Cabinet appointments are designed to—assigned to people whose commitment and beliefs are that it’s necessary to destroy everything in their department that could be of any use to human beings and wouldn’t just increase profits and power. And they’re doing it very systematically, one after another. EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, has been very sharply cut. Actually, the main department that’s concerned with environmental issues is the Department of Energy, which also had very sharp cuts, particularly in the environment-related programs. In fact, there’s even a ban on posting and publishing information and material about this.

And this is not just at the national level. The Republican Party, whatever you want to call it, has been doing this at every level. So, in North Carolina, a couple of years ago, where the Legislature, mostly thanks to gerrymandering, is in the hands of the Republicans, there was a study. They called for a study on the effect of sea level rise—on what sea level rise might be on the North Carolina coast. And there was a serious scientific study, which predicted, in not—I forget how many years—not a long time, about roughly a meter rise in sea level, which could be devastating to eastern North Carolina. And the Legislature did react, namely, by passing legislation to ban any actions or even discussion that might have to do with climate change. Actually, the best comment of this—I wish I could quote it verbatim—was by Stephen Colbert, who said, "If you have a serious problem, the way to deal with it is to legislate that it doesn’t exist. Problem solved."

Trump’s Proposed Tax Plan Could Cost the Government $6 Trillion While Benefitting Himself and Super Rich

President Donald Trump will outline major tax cuts for Americans Wednesday that could take trillions of dollars away from the federal government over the next decade and lump it on to the national debt.

The president will be "pretty broad in the principles" of tax reform that he lays out with more details coming in the summer, his director of legislative affairs, Marc Short, told the Associated Press. But what it boils down to is major hikes in the amount people can deduct from their taxes and large cuts for small businesses and corporations.

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New Trump Tax Plan Would Aid Billionaires, Add Trillions to Deficit

The White House on Wednesday outlined a tax plan that would add trillions of dollars to the U.S. deficit while overwhelmingly benefiting the wealthiest corporations and individuals—including President Trump. The skeletal plan, which the White House unveiled as a single-page document, would lower the corporate tax rate to 15 percent—though corporations rarely pay the current rate of 35 percent. Trump’s plan would also end the estate tax, referred to by opponents as the "death tax." This is White House economic adviser Gary Cohn.

Gary Cohn: "We’re going to repeal the death tax. The threat of being hit by the death tax leaves small business owners and farmers in this country to waste countless hours and resources on complicated estate planning to make sure their children aren’t hit with a huge tax when they die. No one wants to see their children have to sell the family business to pay an unfair tax."

IRS statistics show the estate tax is paid by just the wealthiest 0.2 percent of Americans. Trump’s tax plan would also end the alternative minimum tax, a move that would benefit the richest Americans, including President Trump. A leaked 2005 tax return shows Donald Trump paid out $36.6 million in federal income taxes that year—most of it due to the alternative minimum tax. At the White House, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the president would not make his tax returns public, even though Trump previously said he would release the returns after a "routine audit."

Reporter: "My second question is: Will the president release his tax returns, so that Americans—"

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin: "The president has no intention. The president has released plenty of information, and I think he’s given more financial disclosure than anybody else. I think the American population has plenty of information on this."

Trump’s tax proposal would also lower the capital gains tax rate and would decrease the number of income tax brackets from seven to just three, while lowering the tax rate for the wealthiest individuals by nearly 4 percentage points. The plan was blasted by congressional Democrats, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, who called it a "wish list for billionaires." We’ll have more on Trump’s tax plan after headlines with James Henry of the Tax Justice Network.

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"A Land Grab by the Ruling Elites": Trump's Tax Plan Derided for Benefiting the Rich

Republicans exempt their own health insurance from their latest health care proposal

Republican legislators want to keep popular Obamacare provisions for themselves and their staff, while they repeal the law for everyone else.

The GOP Steals a SCOTUS Seat

GOP assholes!

It’s official—the rules were changed, a 51-vote majority would suffice to nominate a Supreme Court justice, and 49-year-old Neil M. Gorsuch has officially been confirmed as the 113th justice of our nation’s highest judicial body, where he will sit, presumably, from now until the day he dies.

This is the final result of a process that began when Republicans refused to hold even a committee hearing for Merrick Garland, Obama’s nominee, based on a rather flimsy argument that a president shouldn’t appoint a justice in an election year, despite heaps of examples of that exact outcome. In retaliation, Senate Democrats ran a successful filibuster against Gorsuch yesterday, to which their Republican counterparts responded by changing the rules so that 60 votes were no longer required to confirm. And today, the process ended with a 54-45 vote in favor of Gorsuch.

This so-called “nuclear option” worked, technically, but it also made it plain that a seat was stolen, and called the legitimacy of both the judicial and legislative branches into question—at a time when the executive branch is dealing with its own legitimacy issues. This is, without a doubt, a low point in the history of American politics.

And Gorsuch is a rightwing extremist, in contrast to Garland, who is a moderate centrist.

GOP motherfuckers.

Trump the Hypocrital Asswipe

Trump is currently at Trump International Golf Club in Florida, his 15th trip to the golf course in 11 weeks. Trump in 2013 tweets: "PresObama is not busy talking to Congress about Syria..he is playing golf ...go figure"

Trump bombs Syria because of poison gas attacks on children...

-- won't take Syria refugees from Assad

-- previously criticized Obama for wanting to take military action against Assad  after the 2013 gas attack.

-- attacks on an airfield didn't prevent planes from taking off and bombing Syrians again

Trump Loves Saddam Hussein

In an October exclusive with NBC's Chuck Todd, Trump asserted that the Middle East would be better off today if Moammar Gadhafi of Libya and Saddam Hussein were still in power. "It's not even a contest," Trump told Meet the Press. Trump continued to push this idea at a rally in Franklin, Tennessee, telling the crowd that despite Hussein's "vicious" rule in Iraq "there were no terrorists in Iraq" while he ruled.

"You know what he used to do to terrorists?" Trump polled the Tennessee crowd. "A one day trial and shoot him…and the one day trial usually lasted five minutes, right? There was no terrorism then."

Trump didn't just praise Hussein for keeping terrorists at bay, but seemed to tacitly accept the dictator's use of chemical weapons. During a December rally in Hilton Head, South Carolina, Trump took a cavalier attitude toward Iraq's use of chemical weapons under Saddam.

"Saddam Hussein throws a little gas, everyone goes crazy, 'oh he's using gas!'" Trump said. Describing the way stability was maintained in the region during that time, Trump said "they go back, forth, it's the same. And they were stabilized."