Brontoforumus

I'll believe "trump's team is collapsing and everyone in the white house is super sad" when it actually collapses

because it's not impossible that it becomes an eternal recurrence where each day is worse than the previous one forever

Math checks out

Well, it's not about Trump having no support - there'll always be assholes who'll cheer for him no matter where he ends up - it's about the fact that no one truly QUALIFIED to defend him on serious legal charges is willing to do so. That makes it much more likely that his legal team during any potential impeachment or subpoena proceedings will essentially be Guiliani and a half dozen Lionel Hutzes.

It's strange watching the sinking ship abandon the rat.

zaratustra wrote:I'll believe "trump's team is collapsing and everyone in the white house is super sad" when it actually collapses

because it's not impossible that it becomes an eternal recurrence where each day is worse than the previous one forever

right?

shit, the village voice hung on for three years

It seems like the anti-Cruz attack ads should remind everybody that Trump insulted Cruz's wife and father and Cruz just smiled and kissed his ass. End with something along the lines of "Ted Cruz won't stand up for his own family. How can you expect him to stand up for you?"

I realize that turning "he supports Donald Trump" into a liability, in Texas, is a tricky proposition. But I think it can be done.

Comedy Galaxy Brain Take time:

So one of the many many many comments about what's sure to turn into a wacky internal witch hunt in the White House was that the atom-bomb NYT op-ed (which is almost certainly a deliberate provocation of Trump. Well, that and someone fishing for a book deal) mentioned the word "Lodestar" which is a word frequently used by Mike Pence. This has led to many commentators theorizing about whether the author is someone in Mike Pence's orbit.

Now, I'm not saying that Mike Pence wrote this - we still have no real indication about that.

But imagine if the secret ringleader of the internal WH saboteurs is Mike Pence.

Oh and there was this terrifying tale out of Woodward's book, which was quickly swamped by the op-ed story:

The only reason NAFTA is still in effect is because Gary Cohn literally stole the paperwork to cancel it off Trump's desk and he never noticed - and so completely forgot he'd demanded them.

The exact same thing happened to South Korea's free trade treaty with the US. This happened MULTIPLE TIMES.

Speculative question:

Is Trump's going to beat Johnson, Filmore, Pierce, Buchanan, and Harding in the rankings? Or is failure to prevent the Civil War going to keep Filmore, Pierce, and Buchanan down at the very bottom?

I mean, I gotta think he's going to at least beat Johnson and Harding.

The thing with the men usually mentioned as possible worst presidents, is that if they were removed from the circumstances in which they made bad choices in one way or another, it's possible that they could have had unremarkable, largely harmless terms. But there is no aspect in which Trump has demonstrated even a hint of competence. It's like he won a competition for "person least suited to running a country". I can't imagine a situation he couldn't fuck up.

I wouldn't trust him to run a dollar store. I wouldn't trust him to run a food cart. I wouldn't trust him to change a diaper. I wouldn't trust him with watching someone else change a diaper. I wouldn't trust him to mow a lawn. Imagine an impeccably mowed lawn, and then imagine someone telling you Trump did it on his own. You wouldn't believe them. The aftermath of Trump mowing a lawn is half a square meter of mowed lawn, two cheeseburger wrappers flapping in the wind, and an upturned lawnmower on fire with half a dozen Neo-Nazis roasting marshmallows over it.

Trump isn't just a contender for worst president, he's a contender for worst human.

Yeah, I'd definitely say he's the least-functional non-deceased human to have ever held the office (so far, lol). Easily worse than than Pierce's haunted, alcohol-soaked tenure.

In the Worst Humans to be President race the original champion was Jackson. War criminal and proud of it, that's what he used to say.

Trump would be happy to be one too... if he could remember how for more than 10 minutes or convince anyone to actually carry out his orders.

I'm not even kidding. Woodward's book claims Trump wanted to assassinate Assad and Mattis straight up ignored him and then he (as the pattern shows over and over) forgot.

I'd just like to thank the American political machine for still having some kind of functioning immune system.

The op/ed is the latest shiny object that's distracting the press from more important stories. (Hey guys, they've still got kids in cages. Remember when you covered that nonstop in June? They're still doing it. Maybe you should start covering it again.)

I can appreciate the schadenfreude in knowing that it's making Trump apoplectic and sowing further chaos in his administration. And I can appreciate the fun of trying to guess who wrote it.

But come on.

I hate to agree with the Republican response to this, but even a stuck clock occasionally finds a nut. Whoever wrote the op/ed -- if they really have such a strong moral objection to what Trump is doing, they should resign and go public.

And of course if their goal were really to covertly undermine Trump...they wouldn't announce it in the goddamn New York Times.

So the real motivation here...well, I can see two goals.

One is, they know that eventually, having "worked for the Trump White House" on their resume is going to be incredibly toxic to their future prospects. So they write this editorial now, so later they can say "I wrote that! See? I was on your side all along! Hire/vote for me!"

And the other is, well, it's gonna drive Trump crazy, make him lash out, increase his paranoia, and sow even more mistrust in the people working for him.

Bannon used this tactic all the time: leak something to the press, and then drive Trump into a frenzy trying to figure out which of his advisors are leaking to the press. Whoever did this is using that same playbook. The Trump Administration is rife with infighting and backbiting, his various advisors are all trying to undermine one another, and feeding his paranoia and mistrust is the easiest way to do that.

The NYT editorial team was played like a fiddle. Apart from everything else, the op-ed has "blatant provocation" over it in gaudy neon letters large enough to even impress Trump.

If it was someone actually important enough to raise eyebrows that wrote it, I feel like resigning and then doing a tell all without being anonymous would be more effectual.