The Trump Administration: A Clusterfuck in the Making

[Morgyn]

@Ukulele_Ike

Just curious…have previous Attorneys General jetted around the globe acting as bagmen for their presidents? It seems to me they usually stay home in D.C., tending to domestic Justice affairs.

Not that I’m aware of, but I admit to not paying a whole lot of attention to that. I think they often fly around the country, but how much call is there for them to travel overseas or have the foreign equivalents come here?

[Defensive_Indifference]

Apologies if it’s already been posted, but this article is fucking insane. It shows Trump totally unhinged, barking out impossible or plain loony orders, calling the DHS Secretary “honey” and “sweetheart”, and more. Plus this:

Privately, the president had often talked about fortifying a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a cost estimate. He wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh. After publicly suggesting that soldiers shoot migrants if they threw rocks, the president backed off when his staff told him that was illegal. But later in a meeting, aides recalled, he suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down. That’s not allowed either, they told him.

It’s not clear if he also asked for sharks with laser beams on their heads.

Shoot Migrants’ Legs, Build Alligator Moat: Behind Trump’s Ideas for Border

(sorry if paywalled; it’s the Google news link to an NYT article)

[Sicks_Ate]

@Defensive_Indifference

Apologies if it’s already been posted, but this article is fucking insane. It shows Trump totally unhinged, barking out impossible or plain loony orders, calling the DHS Secretary “honey” and “sweetheart”, and more. Plus this:

It’s not clear if he also asked for sharks with laser beams on their heads.

https://news.google.com/articles/CAIiECIVSmIiOWXDJ6o7bkzhZKAqFwgEKg8IACoHCAowjuuKAzCWrzwwt4QY?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen
(sorry if paywalled; it’s the Google news link to an NYT article)

I need a sharable, credible, non-paywalled link

[Aspenglow]

@Ukulele_Ike

Just curious…have previous Attorneys General jetted around the globe acting as bagmen for their presidents? It seems to me they usually stay home in D.C., tending to domestic Justice affairs.

None I’m aware of. Despite being in the legal field for 20 years, I don’t remember hearing much about what AGs were up to (not that I would, in a state court). I’m sure they flew abroad now and again, but not in pursuit of some personal goal of a president.

If there were some concern of illegal activity by an American citizen in a foreign country, it wouldn’t really be in the DOJ’s wheelhouse. Much more likely it would be referred to CIA, NSA, FBI or the State Department, depending on circumstances. If it isn’t American laws being broken, then generally, I don’t think the United States would even have jurisdiction.

[Defensive_Indifference]

@Sicks_Ate

I need a sharable, credible, non-paywalled link

Sorry, best I could do on my phone. It’s credible in that it goes to the NYT, but it goes through that dopey Google news link thing they do now.

[galen_ubal]

@Defensive_Indifference

Sorry, best I could do on my phone. It’s credible in that it goes to the NYT, but it goes through that dopey Google news link thing they do now.

The Hill website has an article referencing that New York Times story.

[Kimstu]

Golly.

This article is based on interviews with more than a dozen White House and administration officials directly involved in the events of that week in March. They were granted anonymity to describe sensitive conversations with the president and top officials in the government.

In the Oval Office that March afternoon, a 30-minute meeting extended to more than two hours as Mr. Trump’s team tried desperately to placate him.

“You are making me look like an idiot!” Mr. Trump shouted, adding in a profanity, as multiple officials in the room described it. “I ran on this. It’s my issue.” […]

Ms. Nielsen, a former aide to George W. Bush brought into the department by John F. Kelly, the president’s former chief of staff, was in a perilous position. […]

Mr. Trump had routinely berated Ms. Nielsen as ineffective and, worse — at least in his mind — not tough-looking enough. “Lou Dobbs hates you, Ann Coulter hates you, you’re making me look bad,” Mr. Trump would tell her […]

Now, she tried again to reason with him.

We can close the border, she told the president, but it’s not going to fix anything. People will still be permitted to claim asylum.

But Mr. Trump was unmoved. […]

“All you care about is your friends in Mexico,” the president snapped, according to people in the room. “I’ve had it. I want it done at noon tomorrow.” […]

Ms. Nielsen, who regularly found herself telling Mr. Trump why he couldn’t have what he wanted, was an obvious target. When the president demanded “flat black” paint on his border wall, she said it would cost an additional $1 million per mile. When he ordered wall construction sped up, she said they needed permission from property owners. Take the land, Mr. Trump would say, and let them sue us.

When Ms. Nielsen tried to get him to focus on something other than the border, the president grew impatient. During a briefing on the need for new legal authority to take down drones, Mr. Trump cut her off midsentence.

“Kirstjen, you didn’t hear me the first time, honey,” Mr. Trump said, according to two people familiar with the conversation. “Shoot ’em down. Sweetheart, just shoot ’em out of the sky, O.K.?” […]

On a trip to California late in the week, Mr. Trump turned to Mr. McAleenan, the Customs and Border Protection chief, with a new idea: He wanted him to stop letting migrants cross the border at all, with no exceptions. If you get into any trouble for it, Mr. Trump told him, I’ll pardon you.

Once on the ground, Mr. Trump met up with Ms. Nielsen and worked a room filled with Border Patrol agents. Start turning away migrants at the border, he told them. My message to you is, keep them all out, the president said. Every single one of them. The country is full.

After the president left the room, Mr. McAleenan told the agents to ignore the president. You absolutely do not have the authority to stop processing migrants altogether, he warned. […]

When Ms. Nielsen presented her plan to Mr. Trump at the White House, he dismissed it and told her what he really needed was a cement wall.

“Sir,” she said, “I literally don’t think that’s even possible.” They couldn’t build that now even if it would work, which it wouldn’t, Ms. Nielsen told him. The designs for steel barriers had long since been finalized, the contracts bid and signed.

The president responded that it was time for her to go […]

[BlankSlate]

Seventy-three years in a cocoon of wealth and privilege. Is Trump finally going to face a consequence?

[Happy_Lendervedder]

Oh this is rich!

@The Hill article

“You are making me look like an idiot!” Mr. Trump shouted, adding in a profanity, as multiple officials in the room described it.

At this point, it wouldn’t have surprised me if he had screamed that while wearing his own soiled underpants on his head.

[D_Odds]

“You are making me look like an idiot!” Mr. Trump shouted, adding in a profanity, as multiple officials in the room described it.

No, you sorry excuse for a three-week-old shit-stain, you make yourself look like an idiot. I’d say you make this country look like an idiot, but the truth is that the idiots who put you in office, and the idiots with (R) after their name who kowtow to your insane, incompetent, inarticulate ideas are the ones who make this country look like an idiot. You and they are an embarrassment to the human race.

[jasg]

The NYT article is titled “Shoot Them in the Legs, Trump Suggested: Inside His Border War”:and is adapted from “Border Wars: Inside Trump’s Assault on Immigration,” to be published by Simon & Schuster on Oct. 8.

If you don’t subscribe, perhaps it can be read in Private browsing mode. One of the wackiest bits was:

Privately, the president had often talked about fortifying a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a cost estimate. He wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh. After publicly suggesting that soldiers shoot migrants if they threw rocks, the president backed off when his staff told him that was illegal. But later in a meeting, aides recalled, he suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down. That’s not allowed either, they told him.

I love the “prompting aides to seek a cost estimate” report. Someone on Twitter pointed out that would be a great FOIA filing.

[mjmlabs]

That NYT article now available non-paywalled via MSN:
Shoot Them in the Legs, Trump Suggested: Inside His Border War

[JohnT]

Lol, how many sources? A dozen? “More than a dozen”?

Really, that’s the story. 12+ people coming together to impeccably source an article making him sound completely unhinged, one of those more likely than not being Sec. Nielsen.

[jasg]

I hope someone makes Trump read this!

Obama mocks GOP, jokes they want border moat

@President Barack Obama

“We have gone above and beyond what was requested by the very Republicans who said they supported broader reform as long as we got serious about enforcement,” Obama said. “But even though we’ve answered these concerns, I gotta say I suspect there are still going to be some who are trying to move the goal posts on us one more time.”

“Maybe they’ll need a moat,” Obama said mockingly to laughter from the crowd. “Maybe they’ll want alligators in the moat.”

May 2011

[SlackerInc]

I was just about to post the exact same excerpt! Jesus fucking Christ, we have a third grader in the White House. Or maybe a dimwitted dirtbag teenager like Beavis and Butthead. Spikes and snakes and alligators, that would be so dope, yo! :smack:

[Monty]

Hey, Trump is back in the news with “creative” artwork!

Trump Tries to Clap Back About Impeachment Using a Very Misleading Map of the 2016 Election

[Walken_After_Midnight]

From a February WSJ article:

In late 2017, Mr. Trump talked privately to his staff about limiting the length of new wall construction because such natural barriers as a “valley of snakes” on the border already deterred passage.

Also, here’s some secret video footage of alligator moat-testing.

[jasg]

@Walken_After_Midnight

From a February WSJ article:

Also, here’s some secret video footage of alligator moat-testing.

and for snakes, he probably wanted garter snakes because hey, they sound sexy…

[Robot_Arm]

@SlackerInc

Spikes and snakes and alligators, that would be so dope, yo! :smack:

Birds and snakes, and aeroplanes.

[ThelmaLou]

Will Trump Ever Leave the White House?
It’s a loaded question — with no obvious answer.
Opinion piece in NYTimes by Thomas B. Edsall

Since 2015, we have been worrying about how much danger Donald Trump posed to democracy. Now, with the impeachment inquiry moving forward, a new question is rapidly gaining relevance: How and when will President Trump leave the White House?

When I asked David Leege, professor of political science emeritus at Notre Dame, about political developments in the near future, his response surprised me. After noting that I had not posed the most important question, he added:We should not assume that either a 2020 election defeat or impeachment/conviction will remove Trump from the White House.
Leege elaborated:Both before Trump was elected in 2016 and during his term, he has made frequent references to “my 2nd Amendment friends”’ and increasingly the “patriots” who constitute the military.

Before you decide that this is paranoia, let me point out that Leege is an eminently reasonable scholar, a former chair of the board of overseers of the American National Election Studies and one of the founders of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. He has been a valued source of mine for years.

“The country is armed to the hilt,” Leege wrote:As president, Trump has resisted any effort to curb citizen access to guns and ammo. He puts on a modest show of concern when a particularly bad gun massacre occurs but, in the end, he sees armed citizens as a significant personal asset.

…

My bold.

I agree that Former President Trump* sees armed citizens as his personal army. I believe he thinks that if he gives the order, they will pile in their pickup trucks with their weapons, come to Washington, and surround the White House to prevent him from being removed. Frankly, I believe many of them (hundreds, but not thousands) would jump at the chance to do just that and love every minute of the drama.

This is a really long article with a lot more to say-- maybe the whole thing will be available at a free site.

Indents were in the original, but I italicized them to identify them as Edsall quoting David Leege.