# The Trump Administration: A Clusterfuck in the Making **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [December 7, 2016, 12:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-trump-administration-a-clusterfuck-in-the-making/774070 "2016-12-07T00:25:42Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1981
**Author:** ![QuickSilver](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quicksilver/32/7832_2.png) [@QuickSilver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/QuickSilver)\ **Post date:** [December 23, 2019, 11:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-trump-administration-a-clusterfuck-in-the-making/774070/39605 "2019-12-23T23:54:36Z")
[Giuliani says he’s more of a Jew than Soros.](https://www.businessinsider.com/rudy-giuliani-says-more-of-a-jew-george-soros-report-2019-12) Who keeps leaving his ward unlocked? ---
**Author:** ![Smapti](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smapti/32/17938_2.png) [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)\ **Post date:** [December 23, 2019, 11:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-trump-administration-a-clusterfuck-in-the-making/774070/39606 "2019-12-23T23:58:53Z")
> [@Knowed\_Out](#): > > I’m visiting family in the NE Georgia mountains, and it is definitely Trump country. I stopped at a Walmart, and saw an extended-cab pickup in the parking lot. It had Trump’s profile pasted on the cab window, looking ahead. His lips were pressed together in a pout, and it sure looked like he was ready to suck cock. I doubt the truck’s owner thought it made his hero look like he played for the other team. I can top that. Just yesterday at my work I saw a guy wearing a camo baseball cap with a red-white-and-blue Punisher skull _with Trump’s hairdo on it_. ---
**Author:** ![Guest-starring\_Id](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guest-starring_id/32/21736_2.png) [@Guest-starring\_Id](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Guest-starring_Id)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2019, 2:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-trump-administration-a-clusterfuck-in-the-making/774070/39607 "2019-12-24T02:28:18Z")
“I never understood wind. I know windmills very much, I have studied it better than anybody.” - Donald Quixote ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2019, 2:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-trump-administration-a-clusterfuck-in-the-making/774070/39608 "2019-12-24T02:49:15Z")
> [@Smapti](#): > > I can top that. > > Just yesterday at my work I saw a guy wearing a camo baseball cap with a red-white-and-blue Punisher skull _with Trump’s hairdo on it_. …I hereby take offense in the name of all members of the Castiglione family, anglicized or otherwise. ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2019, 7:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-trump-administration-a-clusterfuck-in-the-making/774070/39609 "2019-12-24T07:08:25Z")
> [@elucidator](#): > > Yeah! Wayne Newton, right? > > “Psycho-shame, darlin’, psycho-shame…” That reminds me of a scene in a movie, where the character played by Jeffrey Tambor goes up to the roof and leaps to his end while that song is playing on the soundtrack. A movie with a most fitting title: _Weapons of Mass Distraction_. ---
**Author:** ![Lurking\_Quahog](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lurking_quahog/32/21274_2.png) [@Lurking\_Quahog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lurking_Quahog)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2019, 12:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-trump-administration-a-clusterfuck-in-the-making/774070/39610 "2019-12-24T12:37:01Z")
> [@Guest-starring\_Id](#): > > “I never understood wind. I know windmills very much, I have studied it better than anybody.” > > - Donald Quixote At least THAT Don was well intentioned. ---
**Author:** ![bobot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bobot/32/21622_2.png) [@bobot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bobot)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2019, 12:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-trump-administration-a-clusterfuck-in-the-making/774070/39611 "2019-12-24T12:53:27Z")
> [@Rick\_Kitchen](#): > > My Trump-hating sister bought our Trump-loving brother-in-law MAGA hat for Christmas. She ordered it from the official Trump website. It’s delayed in transit. From China. No offense, and hey it’s your family not mine, but if your sister spent money on the Trump website she doesn’t hate Trump as much as she thinks she does. ---
**Author:** ![asahi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asahi/32/8693_2.png) [@asahi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asahi)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2019, 1:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-trump-administration-a-clusterfuck-in-the-making/774070/39612 "2019-12-24T13:23:11Z")
> [@bobot](#): > > No offense, and hey it’s your family not mine, but if your sister spent money on the Trump website she doesn’t hate Trump as much as she thinks she does. Your money is probably supporting his re-election campaign and enriching his family, whether you know it or not, whether you like it or not. ---
**Author:** ![asahi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asahi/32/8693_2.png) [@asahi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asahi)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2019, 1:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-trump-administration-a-clusterfuck-in-the-making/774070/39613 "2019-12-24T13:24:17Z")
> [@QuickSilver](#): > > [Giuliani says he’s more of a Jew than Soros.](https://www.businessinsider.com/rudy-giuliani-says-more-of-a-jew-george-soros-report-2019-12) > > Who keeps leaving his ward unlocked? Yeah, and I’m blacker than Al Sharpton, too. ---
**Author:** ![DesertDog](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/desertdog/32/11503_2.png) [@DesertDog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DesertDog)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2019, 1:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-trump-administration-a-clusterfuck-in-the-making/774070/39614 "2019-12-24T13:47:44Z")
> [@bobot](#): > > No offense, and hey it’s your family not mine, but if your sister spent money on the Trump website she doesn’t hate Trump as much as she thinks she does. I think I’d throw up in my mouth [del]a little[/del] a lot if I’d done that. One small ray of sunshine. Another site I visit has banner ads before you log in and during the Obama era a lot of them were crediting him for a program that they were trying to inveigle you into doing something _now_ before it ended, refinancing mortgages or buying insurance mostly. Now, those reasons were about as specious as car dealers’ (Come on down for our Halloween Blowout!) and I’m not even sure how much Obama had to do with the program mentioned but – whatever – they all vanished after Donny Two-scoops was elected and they found some other excuse to pull the trigger on their offering, none of them having anything to do with a Trump administration program for this or that. This week, one of the re-fi companies’ banner headline was _Trump does it again, ending another Obama policy_ and recommends you refinance with them before the end of the year. Not “Trump did this, isn’t it grand?” but “Trump sticks it to Obama again.” ---
**Author:** ![margin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/65b543/32.png) [@margin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/margin)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2019, 1:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-trump-administration-a-clusterfuck-in-the-making/774070/39615 "2019-12-24T13:58:51Z")
> [@enipla](#): > > I wonder how long it would take to teach him tic-tac-toe. > > Seriously, the President of The United States of America just says what happens to pop into his head. Something that is maybe, sort of related but has absolutely nothing to do with what he _seems_ to be trying to communicate. > > And his fans go wild. I weep at how stupid our country is. > > He is the representative of our country, and has talked to Putin in private. And Collins and his ilk think this is just peachy. And he had the translator destroy his notes of the meeting. ---
**Author:** ![enipla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/54ee81/32.png) [@enipla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/enipla)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2019, 2:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-trump-administration-a-clusterfuck-in-the-making/774070/39616 "2019-12-24T14:16:35Z")
> [@margin](#): > > And he had the translator destroy his notes of the meeting. They are all a bunch of traitors as far as I’m concerned. ---
**Author:** ![margin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/65b543/32.png) [@margin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/margin)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2019, 2:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-trump-administration-a-clusterfuck-in-the-making/774070/39617 "2019-12-24T14:16:39Z")
> [@dasmoocher](#): > > Are the windmills giving birds cancer? > > Somehow, I don’t find it convincing that Trump cares about bird deaths, or anything that is detrimental to the environment in general. > > I suspect the only thing Trump knows about wind is how to break it. Trump has so many tells. “This is true.”-----it’s a lie. “Believe me.” Don’t. Somebody calls him “sir” in whatever rambling anecdote he’s flailing his way: there was no “somebody”, there was no “sir” and it’s a huge pile of bullshit. If Trump denies something, then it’s actually true. If he accuses Hillary or Obama of it, chances are good he’s either done it himself or thinks he might do it. (Then there’s the possibility whatever “it” is never happened, never existed, at all.) If Trump says something was “perfect”-----unless it was a food item----it was the opposite. And probably illegal. And he definitely did “it”, whatever it was. If he goes on a twitter tear, ranting about Dems, it means he is in fact guilty of whatever the Dems say. If he accuses a WOC of something, it’s imaginary. If he says, “People” or “Everybody” says, there’s nobody saying anything, it’s Fox News that morning. If he says, “Nobody ever did THIS before,” it means he somehow just discovered something existed for the first time because he got all the way to the end of one of his Big Boy briefings that are a whole page long and _don’t have pictures._ If he asserts something big----"I know more about ISIS than the generals do’----it means he just discovered they existed. ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2019, 5:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-trump-administration-a-clusterfuck-in-the-making/774070/39618 "2019-12-24T17:47:02Z")
I saw mention of a tweet by a Mrs. Kushner in which one of the things she was touting was called the WGDP, to which many $Ms had been diverted. So I looked up this obscure “Women’s Global Development and Prosperity initiative” that I had not heard of. No one seems to have looked at it. The family is all about grift, so there must be some sort of angle going on here (attested to by the presence of [hype](https://www.whitehouse.gov/wgdp/partners/) in total absence of salient detail), but I am struggling to suss it. Does anyone know anything about what they are playing at with this? Is it a PR stunt? ---
**Author:** ![Senegoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senegoid/32/6606_2.png) [@Senegoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Senegoid)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2019, 2:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-trump-administration-a-clusterfuck-in-the-making/774070/39619 "2019-12-25T02:44:57Z")
> [@eschereal](#): > > I saw mention of a tweet by a **Mrs. Kushner** in which one of the things she was touting was called the WGDP, . . . Who? Jared’s mother? ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2019, 3:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-trump-administration-a-clusterfuck-in-the-making/774070/39620 "2019-12-25T03:05:34Z")
> [@eschereal](#): > > I saw mention of a tweet by a Mrs. Kushner in which one of the things she was touting was called the WGDP, to which many $Ms had been diverted. So I looked up this obscure “Women’s Global Development and Prosperity initiative” that I had not heard of. No one seems to have looked at it. The family is all about grift, so there must be some sort of angle going on here (attested to by the presence of [hype](https://www.whitehouse.gov/wgdp/partners/) in total absence of salient detail), but I am struggling to suss it. Does anyone know anything about what they are playing at with this? Is it a PR stunt? [Could be beneficial, no signs that anybody’s actually doing the work to make it so.](https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/02/13/694301566/ivanka-trump-launches-50-million-program-to-empower-women-in-the-workplace) > [@](#): > > Nancy Lee, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and a former U.S. Treasury official, says the initiative could be truly transformative if it actually brings women’s issues to the forefront of all development efforts – whether that means including women in the efforts of farmers to bring food to market or inviting them to be leaders in a peace-building efforts. > > “At USAID, we’re thrilled,” said USAID Administrator Mark Green at a press briefing last week. “We’ve been working on women’s empowerment, but now we have an across-the-board interagency effort, the full force of the U.S. government behind this.” > > But some — especially development experts who have designed such initiatives — are concerned that without specific goals and more details, it’s just a political show. > > “All I’ve seen about this initiative is a whole lot of generic talk of the importance of empowering women without actually setting out a plan or a clear roadmap how to get there,” says Brett Bruen, president of the Global Situation Room and former director of global engagement in the Obama administration. > > He believes the initiative is just a way to enhance the administration’s reputation ahead of the 2020 presidential elections, especially in the wake of cuts to global women’s programs from the Trump administration. > > Last year, President Trump proposed a 35 percent funding cut for global gender-equality programs, though Congress eventually rejected the cuts. The Trump administration has also reinstated what’s known as the global gag rule to block U.S. aid money from funding any organizations that perform abortions, offer information about the procedure or support more liberal abortion laws. […] > > It has not yet been disclosed what kind of proposals will be submitted by whom for the benefit of which 50 million women. Even if USAID targets the most vulnerable women in developing countries with that fund, so far, there have been no official public stipulations to ensure that they – not elite women in those countries – will receive the rest of the aid. If we find that this funding is actually serving a useful purpose (unaccompanied by any religious coercion) for poor women, I’ll be pleasantly surprised. If it turns out to be just another source of grift and graft for the Trump family, I won’t be. ---
**Author:** ![Mundane\_Super\_Hero](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mundane_super_hero/32/6304_2.png) [@Mundane\_Super\_Hero](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mundane_Super_Hero)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2019, 3:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-trump-administration-a-clusterfuck-in-the-making/774070/39621 "2019-12-25T03:11:34Z")
Well, after all… it’s Christmas. Perhaps I wrote this that people might read it before they went to church, because it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, He who made clean water into toxic waste. He who killed the sick by denying them healthcare or even free life-saving immunizations in his Internment Camps. He who made the seeing blind and the lame judges. He who starved the hungry by cutting off their food stamps. He who raised the undead… like Rudy Giuliani. And He who told the world that He could walk on water while sinking to the very bottom of the swamp. This is the time of year when it is a comfort to sit at our tables counting our blessings, because it’s never easy or comfortable to stand up to Evil as if we were people born with spines. After all, can’t we all look into our own heart of hearts and say that we were never once raised to know better than this…? Merry Christmas. ---
**Author:** ![JKellyMap](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jkellymap/32/15880_2.png) [@JKellyMap](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JKellyMap)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2019, 12:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-trump-administration-a-clusterfuck-in-the-making/774070/39622 "2019-12-25T12:54:20Z")
> [@margin](#): > > Trump has so many tells. > > “This is true.”-----it’s a lie. > > “Believe me.” Don’t… Great post. We already know these things, but you put the together well. ---
**Author:** ![Guest-starring\_Id](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guest-starring_id/32/21736_2.png) [@Guest-starring\_Id](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Guest-starring_Id)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2019, 5:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-trump-administration-a-clusterfuck-in-the-making/774070/39623 "2019-12-25T17:20:31Z")
Seconded. ---
**Author:** ![carrps](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carrps/32/2957_2.png) [@carrps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carrps)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2019, 5:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-trump-administration-a-clusterfuck-in-the-making/774070/39624 "2019-12-25T17:55:47Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > Wonderful title on this article, though I feel like it will go over most readers’ heads: > > [Trump rails against windmills: ‘I never understood wind’](https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/475701-trump-rails-against-windmills-i-never-understood-wind) Are you thinking “wind” in the British meaning of the word “trump?” [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-trump-administration-a-clusterfuck-in-the-making/774070.md?page=1980) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-trump-administration-a-clusterfuck-in-the-making/774070.md?page=1982)