Donald Trump's #MeNeither Moment

What makes Donald Trump tick is not hard to figure: Put "self-" in front of any number of words, and you've got it. Self-promotion, self-protection, self-involved, self-centered. Yeah, and whether you prefer evil in the stupid-or-evil paradigm, you have to admit that with Trump self-deception is in the mix. He really appears, at some point, to believe his own bullshit.

We knew it would come to this. What comes after "I didn't do it" -- in his world -- is #MeNeither. It's in his DNA to deny. Just as lying is the centerpiece of his stagecraft, denial is the centerpiece of his character.

Now, with people in his inner circle getting busted for domestic abuse of their women, Trump goes the equivalent of nuclear. It was one thing to deny his own culpability -- we'd almost expect that -- and it's another to declare, as with Roy Moore, Bill O'Reilly, and Roger Ailles, that "they say they're innocent, so you have to look at that." And it's still another thing to say about staffers, "It's bad for them, I feel sorry for them, careers could be ruined, they say they're innocent, what happened to due process?"

All the while, there's been plenty of due process, but that's beside the point. As with Shaggy's famous "It Wasn't Me" song, declarations of innocence don't have to make sense. With Trump, "I didn't do it, everyone is lying" is declarative enough. He said it, so it must be so.

He has his movement at last. The club is now big enough. It's time for #MeNeither. How fitting. And how disgusting.

Peoples lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation. Some are true and some are false. Some are old and some are new. There is no recovery for someone falsely accused - life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 10, 2018

Oh please. The truth is you don't give a shit about the lives of women. Your disdain for them has been coming out of your mouth for decades. Now you've got the bully pulpit, and, man, do you channel the bully. And what does your chief of staff say? #MeNeither.

Trump, you may never get your comeuppance, but we can hope that #MeToo wins out over #MeNeither and you and the GOP are run out of office. Women vote, and the word is they're pissed.

 

While the World Stands Together, America (Literally) Sits on Its Ass

Vice President Mike Pence went to South Korea to represent the U.S. at the Olympics. He got into a bitch fight with a cool and collected gay U.S. skater and sat through the entrance of a united Korean team while all other leaders in the VIP box stood and applauded. Classy.

Leading from behind. No, leading on your behind.

Slate had it right. Mike Pence is best described as a jerk:

Name: Mike Pence

Home country: United States of America

Known for: Being Donald Trump’s vice president, leading the U.S. delegation to Pyeongchang, staging walkouts of sporting events, homophobia.

Why he might be a jerk: He’s Mike Pence. Case closed!

Slate adds more to be sure. Also, while we're at it, has there ever been a vice president so characterized -- aside from being a jerk -- as not knowing anything about anything? Just wondering.

As the White House Defends a Wife Abuser, Hope Hicks Gets Off Easy

Hope Hicks, Trump's Batgirl, has been dating now-former Staff Secretary Rob Porter. Porter's a serial wife abuser, but Hicks stands by her man.

John Kelly, who thinks the world should "honor women," called Rob Porter “a man of true integrity and honor," saying "I can’t say enough good things about him. He is a friend, a confidante and a trusted professional. I am proud to serve alongside him.”

A day later he was reportedly "shocked" to learn what he'd known for months. Things slow to kick in, John?

Of course, he fits right in at a Trump White House, and we've been aware of what a horse's ass the former Marine Corps general actually is. But what explains Hope Hicks' defending Porter, other than it appears she's been shagging him? Yeah, probably that.

The Daily Beast ain't letting her get away with it.

What the hell is wrong with the White House? What the hell is wrong with John Kelly? And last but certainly not least: Why the hell is Hope Hicks getting off easy

This is not the first time Hicks has carried water for a man accused of hurting women. From her boss, the president, accused of sexual misconduct by 19 women, to rumored former boyfriend-turned-framee Lewandowski—caught on video grabbing then-Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields—to Porter, Hicks has kept her head down and professionally defended the alleged abuse of men for much of her post-collegiate 20s.

...

Apart from being Porter’s girlfriend, Hicks is the White House communications director. And the White House’s handling of the resignation of Porter should bring all of Hicks’ publicly ascribed qualities into question. No matter how dedicated and efficient the White House communications director is, the White House’s wagon-circling around Porter paints Hicks as unprofessional, unethical, and unfit.

To paraphrase a cliché, there’s a special place in hell for women who choose to use what limited power they have to protect men who hurt women. And Hicks has devoted much of her professional life to doing just that. 

Amen. Didn't know that Corey Lewandowski thing, boy, can she pick 'em or what? Turns out now the White House is trying to shift blame to Lewandowski. Great crew over there.

I've been saying for a while that Donald Trump is the great destroyer of reputations. Hang with him long enough, and you've soiled yourself for sure. Add Kelly and Hicks to the lot.

Update. When Trump turns on you, look out. Hey, Lewandowski, thought he was a friend?

A Pathological Liar Can't Help Himself. He Lies. But That's Not What Trump's Lawyers Are Worried About.

Donald Trump under oath is a shitstorm of worry for his lawyers. That he might lie? That he might tell the truth? That he might have forgotten the difference? All of the above.

The truth? What the fuck is that? But, hey, no collusion, no obstruction!

There's more than enough for Trump and his lawyers to worry about, among them the stuff we know, the stuff we suspect, and the stuff we don't know but, face it, must be out there. Trump has been wheeling and dealing -- and pretty ugly doing it -- for so long that bodies are buried all over the place, hopefully only metaphorically speaking.

I don't need to get into lists. We all know what a shitshow he's made of his campaign and presidency, so yada yada yada.

Greg Sargent -- recently my go-to guy for insight in DC -- has been following things closely, and he has a theory:

Buried in this [Times'  theory that his lawyers fear he's a pathological liar who cannot be trusted to refrain from telling falsehoods to investigators] is a hint at an important concession. It is likely Trump’s lawyers don’t simply fear Trump might lie to investigators because he helplessly cannot refrain from doing so even about trivial matters, but also that he might feel he actually has reasons grounded in self-preservation to lie to them — because he has something important to cover up.

You don't have to be a pathological liar to calculate that a truthful answer will get you in hot water or that a lie at the wrong time and place might burn your bacon. But would you want Trump to be in the hot seat and try to make the right call? To make matters worse, how do you decide what the right call is when you maybe don't know what Mueller knows? Fact is you can't because you don't.

I wouldn't want to testify either. Hell no.

But I suspect Trump has or soon will have little choice. He can say no thanks to an interview, he can negotiate favorable conditions -- why would Mueller do that? -- and he can bob and weave his way to the Supreme Court when he refuses to honor a subpoena to the grand jury. Short of another Saturday Night Massacre, he's gonna be in the hot seat eventually.

Here's the deal, though. In a interview, he can have lawyers present. Before a grand jury, he can't. Go for the interview, for pete's sake! Huh? Huh? Okay, lawyers are waiting in the hall outside the grand jury for witnesses to confer with, but Trump getting up after each question? Can't be a winning way to go about it.

Trump has stuff to cover up, plenty of stuff. (Read Sargent's article.) Mueller has enough lines of questioning to keep Trump on the stand for a week, or more. I'd go for the interview, but here I feel Trump has no choice: He's got to drag this out to the bitter end, hoping something will break his way. I doubt that will happen if only because the more this drags out, the worse it gets. Bannon will testify. What has Michael Flynn said? Papadopoulos? Rick Gates looks like he's going to roll. Can Manafort be far behind? What does Trump do when Don Jr. is brought up on lying to the feds? If Kurshner is indicted?

My gut tells me Trump cracks and goes after Mueller. His calculation will be that his base, the GOP, and Fox News will help him survive. He might make it to 2020, but beyond that he's toast. We as a nation might be able to survive that, but what if Trump decides "Hey, play the North Korea card. What choice do I have?"

That's another terrifying story.

Obvious at Last: Trump's Fantasy World Is a Strategy.

Stupid or evil is one metric. Stupid or mentally defective is another, one often applied to Donald Trump. We need a new one if Trump turns out to have a well-crafted (if evil) strategy at work.

No, he's not crafty -- he's failed too many times -- but he is determined.

It's easier on the brain to dismiss Donald Trump as addled. For one reason, it explains how nonsensical he is. Also, it's vaguely reassuring, for how much trouble can he cause if he's hopelessly incompetent? Unfortunately, we already know the answer: quite a lot.

It's another to think that his lies and near-constant stream of misinformation has a strategy to it. He actually considers his next move? He's actually consistent because he reasons his actions and statements out before he makes them? Yes, yes he does. Yikes!

I believe he has a thought-out strategy, though I can't say it's well thought-out. But if you look at all the comments he's made that show up in his books (that he doesn't write), he believes that truth is not important, but something else is.

When trying to understand the shape of his actions and words -- especially his words -- it's helpful to refer back to his notion of "truthful hyperbole." He claimed early in his career that crafting the appearance of something and actually being something were virtually the same. He liked to tell the story that he ordered his construction crew to dig dirt on one side of a building site, move it to the other and then move it back. It didn't matter if anything constructive was happening. What matters were appearances.

Of course, there's nothing truthful about this hyperbole, but Trump has never considered that as a minus. If he could control the perception, it was a plus. Reality was another story altogether.

I'm sure that's the basis of his failures as well as his successes. It's possible to build some real thing on bullshit, but with such a foundation, falling down was slightly more likely than remaining upright. The thing about Trump is he liked those odds. Throw in some manipulated tax law, some improperly supported debt, even some money laundering or playing footsie with the Russian plutocracy, and you've got a positive cash flow. Along with a ginormous inheritance from Pop and a full-out bellicose and bullying nature, Trump had what he needed to survive his own worst impulses.

But that was business, not governance. It doesn't work so well with governance because bamboozlement is not policy. So to maintain the appearance of wild success, Trump purposefully engaging in alt-reality, with a handy assist from the right wing media and the GOP proper, who both thrive on Trump's Bullshit Mountain, as Jon Stewart once famously called the Republican world built on the most preposterous set of zombie lies.

Thus is Trump's endless stream of lies and misinformation a strategy based on keeping his base happy and his enemies off-kilter. It's hard to tackle and overcome a shape shifter, and that's the point: Catch-me-if-you-can is an effective strategy until it isn't, like when you get caught.

Nunes' Memo Is a Dud, a Nothing-Burger. So How Will It Serve Trump?

It took a while for it to hit me. If the memo is a collection of omissions, distortions, and half-baked assertions, why even do it? Because it's an act of evil genius.

If at first you don't succeed, lie lie again.

Devin Nunes is a knucklehead back-bencher from Fresno who fumbled his first foray into partisan hackery. Remember his unmasking of Susan Rice's unmasking that popped and fizzled last year? How, then, does he produce this diabolical memo that has the chattering classes with gums ablazing?

As with his first scheme, he likely didn't originate it or produce it. The Susan Rice unmasking was the work of two aides in the National Security Agency who have since been dispatched by National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster. That little charade flopped when it came out that there is nothing improper or unusual about such unmaskings, and in fact what was revealed was even more damaging to the Trump crew. The stunt forced Nunes to recuse himself from his committee's investigation, a recusal he nows handily forgets.

Now comes the "Nunes" memo. But is it even his work? The congressman went on Fox News and said that he hadn't even read the FISA warrants that is the underlying centerpiece of the memo, and word is his staff played an important role in drafting it. Also, when minority member Rep. Mike Quigley asked him if the White House had a role in its creation, Nunes refused to answer, literally. Now it appears Nunes may have asked Trey Gowdy (of Benghazi fame) to write the memo.

Presumably the memo had a purpose. Those in Congress who have looked at it for a while and those in the press who have looked at it since its public release yesterday have come to conclusions that fall along partisan lines. The left finds the memo preposterously empty of fact and purposefully misleading, and the right finds it "disturbing," "alarming," "disgraceful."

To my point: The vast majority of those in the press, intelligence experts, even people in today's DOJ and FBI, all agree that it's built on misinformation and magical thinking. It's a dud that doesn't even ring remotely true. So how can it work for the GOP and, more importantly, Donald Trump?

This answer is diabolically simple: Trump's base -- now also known as the Republican base -- accept it at face value. If you don't reject it as untrue, if you simply say, "Oh my God, look what they found out about the Russian investigation! Hillary did it!", then the memo becomes a genuine weapon Trump can wield against Rod Rosenstein or anyone building a case against him or his close friends and family.

If Trump's base accepts the truthiness of the memo uncritically, if Trump's allies on Fox News act as if the memo is gospel, and if his hook-line-and-sinker GOP pols wave the document à la Joe McCarthy, then it doesn't matter if it's a dud, a nothing-burger, a total fiction. It's a prop, for heaven's sake, a cudgel to pull out now or at the final ditch.

Trump has wielded one falsehood after another after another with, dismally, no small effect. It matters not that there's little to no truth in the Nunes memo. That was never the point.

This was the point:

Judging strictly by the print coverage of The Memo, I'd say it was very possibly a doubt-sowing success for Trump and Nunes. Very little of the coverage evaluates the strength of the memo; treats it as a "Republicans say/Democrats say." pic.twitter.com/ASjrMpIIsq

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) February 3, 2018

Trump Lied Throughout His SOTU Speech. Now He Lies about Viewer Numbers. Typical.

What's with this obsession with the biggest, the best, the most? Any guesses? And when Trump is none of the above, he's forced to turn to lies, which has led to a lifetime of living in a bubble.

The most, the best, the biggest...drum roll...liar. Yes, the real Donald Trump.

He can't help himself:

Thank you for all of the nice compliments and reviews on the State of the Union speech. 45.6 million people watched, the highest number in history. @FoxNews beat every other Network, for the first time ever, with 11.7 million people tuning in. Delivered from the heart!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 1, 2018

Here Trump pulls a bit of a switcheroo by claiming the "highest number in history." Yes, Fox's number was highest in cable-news history, but Trump's numbers were well below Obama's at 48 million. Variety offers up the stats:

In total, President Trump’s address drew 45.6 million viewers across broadcast and cable, according to the final Nielsen tally. That number does not include those who live-streamed the speech.

Obama’s first State of the Union in 2010 drew 48 million viewers across broadcast and cable, while his first address before a joint session of Congress in February 2009 drew 52.4 million viewers.

Trump's first joint-session speech last year was some 12 million shy of Obama's, so Trump came up short there, too. Sad!

Note. Yeah, this kind of exercise is increasingly boring, but chronicling the on-going deception is necessary to deflect Trump's wretched narcissism toward accountability. (Snooze.)

Update. Trump's numbers were below George W. and Clinton, as well. Super Sad!