Trumpenstan

The President of the United states is saying if you don’t send him money, you’re not a patriotic American. And he’s taking names. Literally. By David Badash New Civil Rights Movement (1/9/19) The Trump presidency has been little more than an extension of his presidential campaign, starting when he filed papers for re-election the day he was sworn in to office. So perhaps it comes as no surprise that literally minutes after delivering his first primetime Oval Office address to the nation on what he labeled the “crisis” at the border, Trump was fundraising off his speech. President George W….

  [Editor’s Note: This interview with form Bush campaign adviser Rick Wilson is an insightful, challenging and at times funny no-holds-barred assessment of the existential risk of the Trump administration and those who enable his destructive behavior. He also provides some spot-on assessment of the democratic party weak-kneed political malpractice. — Mark L. Taylor] Commonwealth Club (11/1/18) Rick Wilson is a seasoned Republican political strategist and self-proclaimed infamous negative ad maker. His regular column with The Daily Beast is a must-read in the political community, and he’s widely published in The Washington Post, Politico and The Hill. In Everything Trump…

  By Noor Al-Sibai The Raw Story (10/8/18) A New Yorker reporter who covers the president’s many financial scandals revealed Monday how deep the “criminal enterprise” ran by Fred Trump went — and why Donald Trump could soon be in huge trouble. Although the New York Times‘s report analyzing decades and hundreds of thousands of documents of Trump family dealings uncovered massive tax fraud, “the story’s not over,” writer Adam Davidson told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. Though the Times acquired the mountain of data that led to the bombshell investigative article, its reporters “don’t have subpoena power” — but prosecutors do. “It’s not that they found one time…

Politics & Prose (1/27/18) David Cay Johnston discusses his book, “It’s Even Worse Than You Think” at Politics and Prose on 1/24/18. Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, has been covering Trump since 1988. In June 2015, he was the first national journalist to write about a possible Trump presidency and in his 2016 bestselling The Making of Donald Trump he gave a comprehensive account of Trump’s business practices, associates, and family background. Now Johnston follows up that profile with a detailed analysis of the Trump administration’s first one hundred days. He shows how Trump’s policies are affecting ordinary people’s…

“If you ever got impeached.”   Link to 4-Minute Video (Commoner Call cartoon by Mark L. Taylor, 2018. Open source and free for non-derivative use with link to www.thecommonercall.org )

  Trump Is A Laughing Stock. But If We Weren’t Laughing, We’d Be Crying By Michael H Fuchs The Guardian (9/25/18) For the rest of the world, President Donald Trump’s America is a laughing stock, not a leader. That was the takeaway from Trump’s speech to the 2018 United Nationsgeneral assembly. Trump opened his speech the same way he opens his campaign rallies, TV interviews, and probably conversations with every visitor he meets: “In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.” The response from the leaders assembled in the room?…

“‘I had sex with that,’ I’d say to myself. Eech.” — Stormy Daniels’ reaction every time she saw Trump on television, Full Disclosure (2018). By Dominique Jackson The RawStory (9/18/18) Stormy Daniels’ forthcoming book entitled Full Disclosure provides intense details about her time with President Donald Trump. On Tuesday, Daniels lawyer, Michael Avenatti, told CNN’s Jim Acosta that people would be a fool to continue to call Daniels a liar. “She’s included a lot of the details relating to Donald Trump because she’s tired of being called a liar,” Avenatti said. “She has been called a liar by Sarah Sanders repeatedly, by…

  By Brandy X. Lee The Conversation (9/6/18) Bob Woodward’s new book, “Fear,” describes a “nervous breakdown of Trump’s presidency.” Earlier this year, Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” offered a similar portrayal. Now, an op-ed in The New York Times by an anonymous “senior White House official” describes how deeply the troubles in this administration run and what effort is required to protect the nation. None of this is a surprise to those of us who, 18 months ago, put together our own public service book, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.” My focus…

Trump’s Pecker Spouts Off Pecker In A Vise Pecker Problem Plagues Trump Pecker Testes Trump’s Patience ***** EXTRA, EXTRA! National Enquirer Insider Exposes All! By Maxwell Strachan The HuffPost (8/23/18) By the time David Pecker arrived at American Media Inc. in the late 1990s, Jerry George already found himself firmly entrenched in the tabloid empire. Hired by the National Enquirer’s late publisher Generoso Pope Jr. in 1985, George went on to work at the Enquirer and its parent company, AMI, for 28 years, earning the titles of senior editor and West Coast bureau chief before eventually leaving the company in…

The Russian asbestos company Uralasbest operates a giant asbestos mine in the Ural Mountains is marketing its wares with President Trump’s image.   By Ryan Bort Rolling Stone (8/7/8) Some of President Trump’s most cartoonishly evil policy initiatives have come at the expense of the environment. In the past few months alone, his administration has lifted a ban importing big-game hunting trophies, sought to repeal California emissions standards and released a plan to gut the Endangered Species Act. It’s all done in the name of unmitigated capitalism, to which the president clearly feels the environment is beholden. So too, apparently, is the health of…

  First Lady’s Parents Become U.S. Citizens Thanks To ‘Chain Migration’ By Scott Neuman NPR (8/10/18) First lady Melania Trump’s Slovenian-born parents were sworn in as U.S. citizens Thursday, benefiting from a path to citizenship known as family-based immigration that the president and others have derisively dubbed “chain migration.” Viktor and Amalija Knavs, both in their 70s, attended a private swearing-in ceremony in Manhattan, according to their lawyer, Michael Wildes, who said the couple had “travailed a wonderful journey” to become Americans. “This golden experiment, these doors that are in America, remain hinged open to beautiful people as they have…

  A Neuroscientist Explains How Trump Supporters Are Easily Hoodwinked Because Of This One Psychological Problem By Bobby Azarian Raw Story (4/7/18) There’s no doubt that Donald Trump has said many things that would have been political suicide for any other Republican. And almost every time he made one of these shocking statements, political analysts on both the left and the right predicted that he’d lose supporters because of it. But as we have clearly seen over the past year, they were dead wrong every time. Trump appears to be almost totally bulletproof. The only thing that might be more…

  By Chris McGonigal The HuffPost (7/25/18) Nothing shows the president’s support for American workers like making Trump 2020 swag in China. Photos released by Reuters on Wednesday show a Chinese factory making flags for President Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign. Since March, Jiahao Flag Factory, located in Fuyang, Anhui province, has made approximately 90,000 of the flags for use at Trump campaign events, according to Reuters. The flags reportedly cost about $1 apiece, a price that is likely to go up after Trump’s tariffs on China kick in. The campaign’s suppliers are likely trying to get these prices while they can,…

  (Commoner Call cartoon by Mark L. Taylor, 2018. Open source and free for non-derivative use with link to www.thecommonercall.org ) *****   “The President of the United States of America is an office which imposes a vast, consequential responsibility on the person who holds it to represent America’s values to the world. If those values are liberty, equality, freedom, the rule of law, and the Constitution, Trump is failing on every front. If they are the values of the thug, the tyrant, the bully, the circus freak third-world tinpot? “Then he’ll get his pledge pin any day now.” —…

  “I may be wrong, I mean I may stand before you in six months and say, ‘Hey I was wrong.’ I don’t know that I’ll ever admit that, but I’ll find some kind of an excuse.” — Donald Trump ***** “It is truly remarkable how Donald Trump, being in such a strong negotiating position, has managed to get so little from the North Koreans.”  By Evan Osnos The New Yorker (6/13/18) “Honestly, I think he’s going to do these things,” President Trump told reporters in Singapore on Tuesday night, after signing a page of loose declarations with Kim Jong Un. “I may stand…