What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[CountDeMoney]

Sean Spicer: Assad is worse than Hitler, because Hitler didn't even use chemical weapons on his own people.

https://twitter.com/ABC/status/851861601556627457

What he was trying to convey was that they only used them indoors.

IT'S A PASSOVER MIRACLE

[Tamas]

At least we will burn in a nuclear fire laughing.

[Monoriu]

Sean Spicer: Assad is worse than Hitler, because Hitler didn't even use chemical weapons on his own people.

https://twitter.com/ABC/status/851861601556627457

I am surprised that a professional press officer struggles with words the way he does.  These guys should be masters of words but Holocaust centres? 

[derspiess]

Eric Trump Says Syria Strike Was Swayed By 'Heartbroken' Ivanka

Enjoy your foreign policy being dictated by how much atrocities affect the president's daughter. 

Because women are all soft and mushy and stuff.... so their foreign policy will be driven by emotions not thinking. More reason we don't want a woman in the White House. #thingsmisogynistssay

Note: Not aimed at Larch. Just pointing out what will likely be said about this.

Or women are heartless battleaxe bitches. Misogynists have all their bases covered.

[derspiess]

Sean Spicer: Assad is worse than Hitler, because Hitler didn't even use chemical weapons on his own people.

https://twitter.com/ABC/status/851861601556627457

I am surprised that a professional press officer struggles with words the way he does.  These guys should be masters of words but Holocaust centres? 

Right up there with Polish Death Camps.

[The Brain]

Polish Death Camps? Even the Nazis had limits.

[CountDeMoney]

Holocaust Centers Resorts & Casino.

[Eddie Teach]

Eric Trump Says Syria Strike Was Swayed By 'Heartbroken' Ivanka

Enjoy your foreign policy being dictated by how much atrocities affect the president's daughter. 

Because women are all soft and mushy and stuff.... so their foreign policy will be driven by emotions not thinking. More reason we don't want a woman in the White House. #thingsmisogynistssay

Note: Not aimed at Larch. Just pointing out what will likely be said about this.

Or women are heartless battleaxe bitches. Misogynists have all their bases covered.

Is that going to be engraved on your tombstone?

[Razgovory]

Sean Spicer: Assad is worse than Hitler, because Hitler didn't even use chemical weapons on his own people.

https://twitter.com/ABC/status/851861601556627457

"Holocaust Centers" 

Dude always comes across like a teenager that hasn't studied for the oral exam.

He's a bit over his head, which actually makes him one of the most competent people in the White House.

[jimmy olsen]

 That quote by Frum

https://inews.co.uk/opinion/donald-trumps-foreign-policy-u-turn-assad-syria-scare-us/

Even in the whirlwind world of Donald Trump, last week's events were mind-blowing. It began with the 45th president of the United States welcoming a brutal dictator to the White House and praising his guest for doing "a fantastic job in a very difficult situation". Never mind the uncomfortable reality that Abdel Fattah al-Sisi grabbed power in a coup and oversees a regime that has killed hundreds of Egyptians, jailed thousands more and routinely uses torture.

No wonder Sisi, rightly barred from such meetings by Barack Obama, expressed admiration for Trump's "unique personality". The visit highlighted how the new US president seems unconcerned by human rights, happy to hobnob with autocrats who share his determination to crack down on radical Islamic extremism. The short-sighted move oozed obvious symbolism, coming so soon after ousted ex-president Hosni Mubarak was freed from prison. 'What else will Trump see on television? Will he discover Russia is fighting in Ukraine, see the horror stories of South Sudan or find out that Islamist militants are in Mali?'

How far away those hopes of freedom expressed by the Arab Spring six years ago now seem, when an Egyptian leader with more blood on his hands than Mubarak is greeted with gusto by the supposed leader of the free world. Trump also dropped human rights conditions on sale of fighter jets to Bahrain, infuriating pro-democracy campaigners. And formally abandoned calls for Syria's president Bashar al-Assad to step down. "With respect to Assad, there is a political reality that we have to accept," said press secretary Sean Spicer on 31 March.

Clearly this was Trump's attempt to send a signal to the Syrian regime and its Russian allies that US policy was shifting. Forget atrocities and human rights: Trump would happily deal with the region's hardmen. The Syrian stance was underscored by his secretary of state Rex Tillerson and his ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley. It followed the "America First" nationalism and isolationist rhetoric heard on his campaign trail. Trump sees pictures, acts.

Days later, the emboldened Syrian dictator sanctioned use of chemical weapons and we saw a poison gas attack on Khan Sheikhoun. We can presume the move was cleared with Russia since it brokered the 2013 deal with Assad to remove such weaponry. Vladimir Putin now looks either a fool or a knave, so the Kremlin's lie machine was cranked up to spit out claims that the ghastly images of dead children were fake news. 'Most terrifying of all is the ease with which Trump switched policy in emotional response to these images'.

When Trump saw these pictures and carnage on cable news, he told his advisers of "awful" footage from Syria and ordered a military strike in retaliation. It is alarming that this infantile president reportedly relies on Fox News and wants more pictures in his intelligence briefings. It is even more scary that this implies he was previously unaware of Assad's savagery, despite the barrel bombs, the chilling images of deadly torture, the many testimonies of victims and the responsibility for many more deaths than the rebels.

But perhaps most terrifying of all is the ease with which Trump switched policy in emotional response to these images. There will be endless talk of him exceeding his powers and whether this was a Machiavellian ploy to divert attention from his administration's links to Moscow. And this is not to argue his reaction was necessarily wrong, especially since use of chemical weapons is so unacceptable – merely to wonder at the installation of such a naive US president who will make an instant U-turn on key policy after seeing disturbing pictures on television.

The scariest possibility? That he honestly believes it all. Trump fiercely opposed intervention in Syria during the election campaign as well as endlessly firing off angry tweets on the issue. "To our very foolish leader, do not attack Syria – if you do many bad things will happen & from that fight the US gets nothing," he told Obama four years ago amid the last debate over Assad's use of chemical weapons.

Yet what makes this flip-flopping more frightening then simple hypocrisy is that Trump might actually believe what he says at the time. "He sees, he feels, he acts," as former Bush speechwriter David Frum put it so succinctly.

Now Tillerson suggests Assad must be removed from power. He is right – but this is no way to run foreign policy, based on what the boss happens to catch on cable news rather than slow grind of diplomacy and difficult decisions. We must wait to see if the legacy of those 59 cruise missiles is a renewed push for peace – or at least slowing the bloodshed – in this cruellest of conflicts. More likely US policy will stay largely the same, assisting the Kurds while Assad and his Russian allies slowly throttle the government's other foes.

Next up: North Korea Looming ahead is the challenge of another maverick leader, Kim Jong-Un, whose fascist regime in North Korea is developing nuclear arms that will threaten the US and just used a banned nerve agent to eliminate one of his enemies.

Yet what else will Trump see on television? Will he discover Russia is fighting in Ukraine, see the horror stories of South Sudan or find out that Islamist militants are in Mali? Perhaps he might even learn that Syrian refugees flee because they are trapped between the bloodstained dictator he just bombed and religious bigots he despises.

The positive spin from last week is that Trump is learning to look beyond American self-interest and his simplistic approach to the world before taking office. This would be in keeping with moderating of his approaches to Nato, the Iran nuclear accord and Israeli settlement-building.

Sadly the negative spin is all too believable: that with Trump in the White House, the world sits on a rollercoaster with US foreign policy able to flip on the emotional whims and television watching of the planet's most powerful person.

[jimmy olsen]

22 point swing in that Kansas race tonight. Wasn't enough to win that race, but a swing like that on a national level would gut the House GOP.

[jimmy olsen]

Not looking good for Trump
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/04/fisa-warrant-carter-page/522744/

The Trump Official The FBI Was Investigating

Carter Page would be the first known candidate advisor to be directly monitored during a presidential campaign as a possible agent of a foreign power.

Matt Ford
| Apr 11, 2017


A Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge approved a secret warrant request by the FBI to monitor Trump advisor Carter Page last year, the Washington Post reported Tuesday. Page would be the first known member of a presidential campaign to be targeted by a FISA court warrant, an extraordinary move for a federal law-enforcement agency to undertake during an American general election.


Multiple news outlets had reported in recent months that the FBI sought at least one FISA warrant targeting someone in Trump's orbit during the presidential campaign. The Post is the first to identify Page, a national-security advisor for the Trump campaign, as the warrant's target. No formal charges have been filed against Page, and he has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing or impropriety.

The warrant's existence is also likely to fuel claims by Trump allies that the president's campaign was illicitly spied upon by the Obama administration. Page told the Post that its reported existence "confirms all of my suspicions about unjustified, politically motivated government surveillance" and compared himself to Martin Luther King, Jr., who was repeatedly harassed by the FBI during the civil-rights movement.

But the warrant cuts both ways for Trump. Applying for one suggests federal investigators had strong suspicions about Page's ties to Russian officials. And to obtain the warrant, the Justice Department would have persuaded a federal judge serving the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court—often simply referred to as the FISA court—that investigators had probable cause to believe a Trump campaign official was either acting as an agent for a foreign power or knowingly aiding one.

Congress created the FISA court in 1978 to place judicial restraints on American intelligence services after a series of domestic spying scandals in the early 1970s. The court is unlike any other tribunal in the American legal system: Its proceedings are secret and non-adversarial, with only Justice Department lawyers presenting evidence to a single federal judge. The judges themselves are selected by Chief Justice John Roberts from among the ranks of the federal judiciary.

The court's secretive nature has long drawn skepticism from civil-liberties advocates, especially after Edward Snowden's mass-surveillance revelations in 2013. Among the documents Snowden released to the public was a FISA warrant authorizing the FBI to obtain all telephone metadata from every U.S. customer of a Verizon subsidiary. The disclosure prompted lawsuits by the ACLU asking federal courts to block the surveillance order.

According to the Post, part of the FBI's warrant application relied on Page's reported contacts with a Russian intelligence official in 2013, contact Page himself recently acknowledged to BuzzFeed News. It's not clear if Page knew he was speaking to an intelligence official at the time.

The Post also reported that application's collection of Page's contact with Russian officials included ones that haven't been publicly disclosed before. FISA warrants typically last for 90 days but can be renewed; the FISA court reportedly renewed the warrant targeting Page "at least once," the Post reported. It's not clear whether the FBI's surveillance of him is still ongoing.


Page joined the Trump campaign's national-security team in March. Campaign officials have since downplayed his role, which effectively ended in September as reports of Page's ties to Russian officials began to circulate in the press. But his presence proved controversial even before then. His perceived pro-Russian stances drew scorn from the wider foreign-policy establishment, which also generally shunned Trump before he secured the Republican nomination.

In one memorable episode last July, Page, with the Trump campaign's assent, traveled to Moscow to give a commencement address at the New Economic School. He denied meeting with any Russian officials under sanctions by the U.S. government at the time.

Page is one of multiple Trump advisors whose ties to Russia came under intense scrutiny during and after the 2016 election. In January, U.S. intelligence agencies publicly concluded that the Russian government used cyberthefts against Democratic Party organizations and Hillary Clinton's inner circle to undermine her presidential campaign for President Trump's benefit. Trump has denied that he or his campaign played any role in the disclosures, which he frequently cited on the campaign trail as proof of Clinton's untrustworthiness.

FBI Director James Comey told Congress last month that his agency was conducting a counterintelligence investigation into the Russian hacking of Democratic campaign servers last year. Part of that investigation, he told legislators, included probing "the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia's efforts." The House and Senate Intelligence Committees are also conducting their own probes into Russian interference.

The specter of those investigations has roiled the nascent Trump administration. In February, Trump fired National Security Advisor Michael Flynn for lying to Vice President Mike Pence about conversations with Sergey Kislyak, Russia's ambassador to the United States, during the transition. A few weeks later, Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from overseeing the FBI's Russia investigation after failed to disclose his own conversations with Kislyak last year, having testified to the Senate in his confirmation hearing that he had no contact with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign.

Rep. Devin Nunes, the chair of the House intelligence committee and a former Trump transition official, also recused himself from the Russia inquiry less than a week ago because of an ethics investigation into whether or not he broke the chamber's rules governing classified information. Nunes had come under fire for suggesting that he had seen documents showing Obama officials had abused their authority to glean information on the Trump transition; CNN reported Tuesday night that other officials on the committee reviewed the documents and saw nothing improper.

Nunes was widely seen as attempting to justify the unproven charges by Trump that Barack Obama illegally spied on him during the transition. The president himself first leveled the allegations that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower in an explosive series of tweets in March, but offered no proof to support them.

Comey later told Congress in an unusual statement that he had "no information" to support those specific claims.

[CountDeMoney]

That quote by Frum

What a bunch of bullshit.  Donald J. Trump does not possess the capacity for that level of human empathy.  He just doesn't.  Never has. 

[CountDeMoney]

22 point swing in that Kansas race tonight. Wasn't enough to win that race, but a swing like that on a national level would gut the House GOP.

Big fucking deal.  Horseshoes and hand grenades.

[Grinning_Colossus]

There seems to be a real gulf between the people who see Trump as a sociopath and those of us who view him as an animalistic monkey man, the American id taken fleshy human form.
He lives in an eternal now, and my god does he feel. Overcome by the intensity of every moment, he feels far more than you or I, with our coping mechanisms and our deadening internalized norms and executive functions. He feels and so much that he habitually absorbs the emotions of those around him.