Donald Trump Presidency-Day One

[blackchubby38]

The gossip this side of the pond is that Rex Tillerson is fed up and wants to go. He was furious when Jared Kushner persuaded Daddy No 2 to support Saudi Arabia's attack on Qatar without running this major foreign policy decision by him, and as the former CEO of Exxon, organised as a company along military lines, can't cope with the multiple layers of 'authority' in the White House which to him suggests there is none -unless, as has been discussed today Kelly can introduce the much needed discipline that will make it look like the Presidency is run by adults. The rogue factor is the President himself, who shortly goes on holiday (to pocket another $10 million courtesy of the tax payer). The Twitter feeds may become the barometer of change.

I get the sense that Tillerson was going to leave before he went on vacation. But then the rumors started and that's why he came out and said that he was staying on as Secretary of State. So I'm wondering if Kelly being hired as Chief of Staff was a direct result of Tillerson possibly wanting out.

[Stavros]

Emily Maitlis has given the BBC Newsnight programme the background to her interview with Scaramouche. She was preparing a report from the White House when she realized Sean Spicer's replacement was wandering around the grounds taking selfies. She walked over and ask him if he would give them an interview and he immediately said yes without clearing it with anyone in the white building behind him and not asking in advance what questions she would be asking him. Self confidence, is one way of looking at it. Plain stupid is another. Where do they find these people?

[Fitzcarraldo]

thenib.com/normal-presidency-stuff?t=recent

[Stavros]

Another day, another revelation -when will the 'whole of the truth' about this one meeting be told? And what else is there to be revealed?

The White House has confirmed Donald Trump played a role in drafting a misleading statement about his son’s meeting with a Russian lawyer.
On Tuesday, the press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, contradicted Trump’s attorney, Jay Sekulow, who said the president had had no involvement.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...uction-justice

[broncofan]

The keywords to use: Data Laundering and the connections between the Alfa Bank in Moscow, Cambridge Analytica (based in Cambridge, UK) and SCL with the additional claims of (illegal) Russian funding in the US election campaign.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCL_Group

The claim is that elections can be swayed if you have as minute a degree of information on voters as you can get -in particular targeting the undecided -data miining is Cambridge Analytica's role; while SCL provides the 'fake news' stories that pump up the waverers to make them choose, and although admittedly a weak strategy consider the margins of victory in the swing states that defeated Hillary Clinton: for example in Michigan she lost by 10,704 votes, in Wisconsin she lost by 22,177 votes, in Pennsylvania 67,416 votes (see link from The Hill below). However, at least one source, without any backup argues that it is too odd that the swing states were won by margins of 1% or less, and claims
it points to some hacker having nudged these four states into Trump’s column by no more and no less than the one percent he needed, so as not to arouse suspicion by giving him too large of a win in any of the states he was supposed to lose. But if so, it’s the pattern of all of these states being won by the same one percent that stands out as suspicious, because that’s just not how numbers work to begin with
http://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/...-1-margin/118/
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefi...s-in-all-three
.

https://www.apnews.com/a250d1088af44a3b8b55275dc97de608

This ties Flynn to Cambridge analytica. We'll find out more about that. There's been a grand jury investigation into Flynn for some time now and of course the big news is that Mueller impaneled another grand jury.

[broncofan]

http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/3...nts-over-break

Some bipartisan agreement here. Are they finally on to him?

[fred41]

http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/3...nts-over-break

Some bipartisan agreement here. Are they finally on to him?

This opinion piece by Krauthammer in the Daily News gives some of the other examples of 'democracy' pushing back against Trump- http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/g...icle-1.3381996
Just hope this can hold up in what is only the eighth month of a Bizarro World presidency. Hard to imagine a whole term of this presidential buffoonery.

[Stavros]

This ties Flynn to Cambridge analytica. We'll find out more about that. There's been a grand jury investigation into Flynn for some time now and of course the big news is that Mueller impaneled another grand jury.

The problem with Cambridge Analytica is that when you look at who is or has been associated with it, you find the President and his team -notably Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort-, Ted Cruz, Robert Mercer, Vincent Tchenguiz, Dmitry Firtash and Stephen Bannon.

What they all have in common is the 'first mover advantage' in the latest forms of 'cyber-influence', to give it a name. In the past it was the Clinton administration that was seen to have an 'early mover advantage' when using the internet to get its messages across, particularly to those people who used it a lot, many of them young and first time voters. Communications technology has changed radically since the 1990s in terms of access both ways, and the claim -as stressed by Comey in his Senate hearing- is not that the President's team colluded with but that they co-ordinated their campaign with the Russians, as both wanted the same thing: to defeat Mrs Cliinton.

Kushner's role may emerge as another obstacle to the resolution of the 'Russia Problem' because he was in charge of the 'digital' side of the campaign that recruited Cambridge Analytica and used its methods via the Russians to smear Hillary Clinton by targeting individual voters in key precincts in States like Wisconsin and Illinois-

Kushner’s crew was able to tap into the Republican National Committee’s data machine, and it hired targeting partners like Cambridge Analytica to map voter universes and identify which parts of the Trump platform mattered most: trade, immigration or change. Tools like Deep Root drove the scaled-back TV ad spending by identifying shows popular with specific voter blocks in specific regions–say, NCIS for anti-ObamaCare voters or The Walking Dead for people worried about immigration. Kushner built a custom geo-location tool that plotted the location density of about 20 voter types over a live Google Maps interface.
http://www.newsweek.com/did-russians...rs-help-613612

A lot of this was done in the USA using data mined from the RNC, but the data from the DNC was hacked by the Russian based Guccifer network and is thus the link between the Americans and the Russians which the candidate himself appealed for when twice in one day he begged the Russians to hack the Democrats and help him defeat his American competitor for the White House. The role played by Wikileaks in this also needs more investigation.

Presidents enter the White House in their first time with baggage -usually, it is a political record as Vice-President, Governor, Senator, possibly military (Washington, Grant, Eisenhower come to mind). In this case the baggage consists of an uneven record as a businessman, a reputation for self-promotion shaped by fantasy, and the mentality of the 'win at all costs' which explains why existing links to the Russians were drafted in to help co-ordinate the campaign. It may be that the campaign looked closely at precisely where the margins of legality and illegality were and ensured they never crossed the lines; as for 'accepted' norms, the campaign joyously trashed all of them -previously unacceptable insults, abuse, ridicule, lies -these became part of the tenor of the campaign unlike anything seen or heard since the 19th century.

At some point, however, this elaborate plan to win the White House will be exposed for what it was. The sooner the better.

[Stavros]

Every week some drama seems to engulf the Presidency, to the extent that there is no speculation -wild speculation?- that this Presidency may not even last the year. In addition to various removals, the dismissal of Stephen Bannon may have been all but inevitable when the full text of his interview revealed a disagreement on North Korea with his own President, but primarily because, as the host of the show in Slumdog Millionaire barks when expressing his annoyance with contestant Jamal Malik -It's my fucking show!- the President is said to have -

fumed privately to confidants that Mr Bannon was getting too much attention. Mr Trump has also been displeased by Mr Bannon's high profile in the media, which has largely credited him as the mastermind of the Trump campaign.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...-a7901121.html

Again, the failure of health care reform, the challenge in the courts to the Muslim ban, the dismissal of FBI Director Comey and the unscripted comments on the riots in Charlottesville have so alienated supporters he needs in Congress it is hard to see what he can do to repair it.

And, now four Presidential advisory committees -on infrastructure, manufacturing, strategic policy and arts and humanities- have either been disbanded or in the case of arts and humanities, abandoned by its members who released a statement on their collective resignation among which it said:

“We cannot sit idly by, the way that your West Wing advisors have, without speaking out against your words and actions,”...“Ignoring your hateful rhetoric would have made us complicit in your words and actions.
“You released a budget which eliminates arts and culture agencies. You have threatened nuclear war while gutting diplomacy funding. The administration pulled out of the Paris agreement, filed an amicus brief undermining the Civil Rights Act and attacked our brave trans service members. You have subverted equal protections, and are committed to banning Muslims and refugee women & children from our great country.
“This does not unify the nation we all love.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017...masse-fallout/

I guess the President must now re-group, but while in the past this has been seen as a moment when his closest advisers have attempt to tighten up the White House staff, introduce more discipline and 'joined-up government' the problem that won't go away is the glaring fact that the President is incompetent, and will not be tamed by his staff, so that his freedom to tweet and give unscripted speeches and spontaneous comments is a guarantee that this farce will roll on -until someone decides enough is enough. But when? And who will make the decision? As someone who proclaims his own greatness and never loses, resignation would seem to be the logical conclusion.

[filghy2]

Anyone with progressive inclinations should be grateful that Trump is such a lazy, undisciplined, impulsive incompetent. Just imagine what a smarter, more focussed President with the same policy inclinations could achieve with majorities in both houses.