Overheard

Trump's America:

• Traitors writing foreign policy
• Racists writing immigration policy
• Thieves writing economic policy
• Flat-Earthers writing science policy
• Vax Deniers writing healthcare policy
• A hired goon heading up the DOJ

And one fucking moron

to rule them all

In Their Own Words

On Water And A Duck's Back

Trump shrugs off lifetime of scandals

For the third straight election, tens of millions of Americans will vote for a candidate who boasts an encyclopedia of scandals — personal, political and criminal — unprecedented in any corner of public life.

Why it matters:

Donald Trump has defied political gravity. He has survived the unsurvivable, normalized the abnormal and bulldozed through every red line drawn by his predecessors. And yet he just might win — again.

Driving the news:

Days before the election, Trump's former chief of staff, retired four-star Gen. John Kelly, went on the record to warn that the former president is a "fascist" who would rule like a dictator.

"He commented more than once that, 'You know, Hitler did some good things, too,' " Kelly alleged to The New York Times, choosing to speak out after Trump floated using the U.S. military against political enemies.

Kelly, who left the White House in December 2018, also told The Atlantic that Trump wanted the kind of military generals Hitler had — generals who he said were "totally loyal to him."
Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement that Kelly "has totally beclowned himself with these debunked stories he has fabricated."

What they're saying:

Kelly's comments have landed like virtually every Trump scandal of the past eight years — drawing outrage from Democrats and liberal pundits, shrugs and spin from Republicans.

"It's kind of par for the course. Unfortunately, with a guy like that, it's kind of baked into the vote at this point," New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, a moderate Republican who has endorsed Trump, told CNN in response to the Hitler allegations.

Fox News' Brian Kilmeade argued: "I can absolutely see him go, 'It'd be great to have German generals that actually do what we ask them to do,' maybe not fully being cognizant of the third rail of German generals who were Nazis."

The big picture:

Pull any one of these 10 Trump scandals out of a hat and apply it to any other politician — or even just a typical American. More likely than not, it would end their career.

1. Trump was found guilty on 34 felony counts in New York for paying illegal hush money to a porn star, making him the first former president to be charged, convicted and potentially sentenced to prison.
2. He refused to concede the 2020 election, and spread baseless claims of voter fraud that inspired a violent mob to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He's been indicted twice on charges of trying to overturn the election.
3. He was indicted on federal charges of illegally retaining classified documents that included nuclear secrets, leading to an FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. (The case was dismissed but could be reinstated upon appeal.)
4. He was impeached twice — once for his actions on Jan. 6 and once for withholding military aid to pressure Ukraine's government to investigate his political opponents.
5. He has publicly praised dictators and sided with Vladimir Putin over U.S. intelligence agencies that assessed that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election.
6. He was found liable of sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll, and has been accused of sexual misconduct by at least 25 other women. He was caught on tape in 2005 bragging about grabbing women by their genitals.
7. He and his company were ordered to pay $350 million in a New York civil fraud trial for artificially inflating his net worth to secure favorable loan terms.
8. He placed full-page ads in The New York Times in 1989 calling for the death penalty for five Black and Latino teenagers who were wrongfully convicted of raping a jogger in Central Park. He has refused to apologize.
9. He promoted the racist conspiracy theory that Barack Obama, the nation's first Black president, wasn't born in the United States.
10. He made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims during his four years in office, according to Washington Post fact-checkers.
11. Zoom in: He hasn't seemed to slow down in the four years since. In recent weeks, Trump has lied about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Ohio, called Jan. 6 "a day of love," and attended a 9/11 memorial with a 9/11 truther.

Between the lines:

At this point in his career, it's hard to envision a scandal that could shake Trump's grip on the Republican Party.

In the eyes of Trump's most loyal supporters, the media has lost all credibility by engaging in yearslong "witch hunts" attempting to take him down.

For the rest of his voters, it boils down to a more practical calculation: Trump's policies, especially in contrast to a Kamala Harris presidency, are worth the price of his character.
The bottom line: Trump "has survived more scandals than any major party presidential candidate, much less president, in the life of the republic. Not only survived but thrived," writes The New York Times' Peter Baker.

"He has turned them on their head, making allegations against him into an argument for him by casting himself as a serial victim rather than a serial violator."

Whoa

In case you're wondering what the fuck this is

There are probabilities

It Was A Stunt

The guy is nothing but smoke and mirrors.

Trying to put Kamala down, he took a dump on everybody who works at a fast food joint like McDonalds. He can't help himself. He just doesn't give one empty fuck about people.

He just wants what he wants in the moment, and he doesn't care who he fucks over trying to get it.

The Unraveled Rally

First off - the pillow ad is real?

$14.88  I thought it was just a meme somebody came up with. It's not a dog whistle - it's a goddamned fog horn.

There's no hiding it. And they're not trying to hide it.

Fun With Jimmy

Kimmel ran a great piece a day or two ago. I'll start this at my favorite spot.

A Sales Guy

Trump is the kinda of salesman I was taught never to be.

He's a chameleon. Whatever you like, that's his favorite thing - for now. Whatever you don't like, that's the worst thing in the whole wide world - for now.

When something changes (and it always does), he'll reverse his position immediately. It's all or nothing, and everything is all and only one way, or all and only the other way. It's kind of Manichean, but with absolutely no commitment to Right-and-Wrong.

If Trump was a Dungeons & Dragons character, he'd be Chaotic Neutral. Using you to achieve his ends, or punishing you for some imagined slight by ignoring you after he's wheedled his way into your confidence, or defaming you in the media, or murdering you on 5th Ave in broad daylight - it's all the same to him.

What he deems the necessity of the moment is going to drive his actions.

My first sales gig, I was working for a very smarmy VP who told us to buddy up with our prospects and clients because "It's hard to say no to a friend, and even harder to fire one."

Like what they like. Do what they want to do. Be who they want you to be.

It's pretense. It's false. It's a fucking lie - and nobody is smart enough to keep track of the bullshit for very long. You will be found out, and if you have any sense of honor, you'll end up at the bottom of a bottle to dull the pain of all that cognitive dissonance, or doing something else - anything else - for a living.

I left that first gig, and got crazy stupid lucky enough to end up working for a guy who taught us to be truth-tellers. "Anybody who can't stand to hear the truth is not somebody you want for a customer anyway. Figure out how to say the unpleasant stuff in as nice a way as possible, but don't you fuckin' lie to these people. I'll bounce you outa here so fast your feet won't touch the ground."

Donald Trump never learned how to tell the truth, and refuses to know the value of it.

Are we still wondering about why he said the whole "suckers and losers" thing?

A lost Trump interview comes back to life

The yet-to-be-president holds forth on strength, friendship, dealmaking, public service and building violations.

One evening in February 1989, my Watergate reporting partner Carl Bernstein bumped into Donald Trump at a dinner party in New York.

“Why don’t you come on up?” Carl urged me on the phone from the party, hosted by Ahmet Ertegun, the Turkish American socialite and record executive, in his Upper East Side townhouse. “Everybody’s having a good time,” he said. “Trump is here. It’s really interesting. I’ve been talking to him.”

Carl was fascinated with Trump’s book, “The Art of the Deal.” Somewhat reluctantly, I agreed to join him, in large part, as Carl often reminds me, because I needed the key to his apartment, where I was staying at the time.

“I’ll be there soon,” I told him.

It had been 17 years since Carl and I first collaborated on stories about the Watergate burglary on June 17, 1972.

Trump took a look at us standing together, and he came over. “Wouldn’t it be amazing if Woodward and Bernstein interviewed Donald Trump?” he said.

Carl and I looked at each other.

“Sure,” Carl said. “How about tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” Trump said. “Come to my office at Trump Tower.”

“This guy is interesting,” Carl assured me after Trump was gone.

“But not in politics,” I said.

I was intrigued by Trump, a hustler entrepreneur, and his unique, carefully nurtured persona, designed even then to manipulate others with precision and a touch of ruthlessness.

The Trump interview, taped on a microcassette and transcribed with a typewriter, was deposited into a manila envelope with a copy of Trump’s book and eventually lost in piles and piles of records, interview notes and news clippings. I am a pack rat. For over 30 years, Carl and I looked for it.

I joked with President Trump about “the lost interview” when I interviewed him in the Oval Office in December 2019 for the second of my three books on his presidency, “Rage.”

“We sat at a table and we talked,” Trump recalled. “I remember it well.” He said I should try to find it because he believed it was a great interview.

Last year, I went to a facility where my records are stored and sifted through hundreds of boxes of old files. In a box of miscellaneous news clippings from the 1980s, I noticed a plain, slightly battered envelope — the interview.

It’s a portrait of Trump at age 42, focused on his real estate deals, making money and his celebrity status. But he was hazy about his future.

“I’m really looking to make the greatest hotel,” Trump told us in 1989. “That’s why I’m doing suites on top. I’m building great suites.

“You ask me where I’m going, and I don’t think I could tell you at all,” Trump said. “If everything stayed the way it is right now, I could probably tell you pretty well where I’m going to be.” But, he emphasized, “the world changes.” He believed that was the only certainty.

He also spoke about how he behaved differently depending on whom he was with. “If I’m with fellas — meaning contractors and this and that — I react one way,” Trump said. Then he gestured to us. “If I know I have the two pros of all time sitting there with me, with tape recorders on, you naturally act differently."

“Much more interestingly would be the real act as opposed to the facade,” Trump said about himself. I wondered about “the real act.”

“It’s an act that hasn’t been caught,” Trump added.

He was constantly performing, and, that day, we were the recipients of his full-on charm offensive.

“It’s never the same when there’s somebody sitting with you and literally taking notes. You know, you’re on your good behavior, and frankly, it’s not nearly as interesting as the real screaming shouting.”

Trump also appeared preoccupied with looking tough, strong.

“The worst part about the television stuff when we do it is they put the makeup all over you,” Trump said. “This morning I did something and they put the makeup all over your face and so do you go up and take a shower and clean it off or do you leave it? And in the construction business, you don’t wear makeup. You got problems if you wear makeup.”

We asked Trump to take us through the steps of one of his real estate deals. How are they done?

“Instinctively, I know exactly,” he said immediately. “I cannot tell you what it is, you understand. Because instinct is far more important than any other ingredient if you have the right instincts. And the worst deals I’ve made have been deals where I didn’t follow my instinct. The best deals I’ve made have been deals where I followed my instinct and wouldn’t listen to all of the people that said, ‘There’s no way it works.’

“Very few people have proper instincts,” he said. “But I’ve seen people with proper instincts do things that other people just can’t do.”

Is there a master plan?

“I don’t think I could define what the great master plan is,” he said, referring to his life. “You understand that. But it somehow fits together in an instinctual way.”

The cassette from the 1989 interview. (Maansi Srivastava for The Washington Post)
Iasked about his social conscience. Could it “lead you into politics or some public role?”

“To me, it’s all very interesting,” he said. “The other week, I was watching a boxing match in Atlantic City, and these are rough guys, you know, physically rough guys. And mentally tough in a sense, okay. I mean, they’re not going to write books but mentally tough in a certain sense.

“And the champion lost and he was defeated by somebody who was a very good fighter but who wasn’t expected to win. And they interviewed the boxer after the match, and they said, ‘How’d you do this? How’d you win?’

“And he said, ‘I just went with the punches, man. I just went with the punches.’ I thought it was a great expression,” Trump said, “because it’s about life just as much as it is about boxing or anything else. You go with the punches.”

To look back over Trump’s life now — his real estate deals, presidency, impeachments, investigations, civil and criminal trials, conviction, attempted assassination, campaign for reelection — that is exactly what he has done. Go with the punches.

Donald Trump with welterweight rivals Marlon Starling, left, and Mark Breland, right, at a New York news conference on March 15, 1989, to announce they will fight a month later at the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City. (Marty Lederhandler/AP)
“People ask me and they might ask you guys, you know, where are you going to be in 10 years? I think anybody that says where they’re going to be is a schmuck,” Trump added. “The world changes. You’ll have depressions. You’ll have recessions. You’ll have upswings. You’ll have downswings. You’ll have wars. Things that are beyond your control or in most cases beyond people’s control. So you really do have to go with the punches and it’s bad to predict too far out in advance, you know, where you’re going to be.”

At the time, he was almost obsessed with critical news headlines about him losing deals.

“You make more money as a seller than you do as a buyer,” Trump explained. “I found that to be a seller today is to be a loser. Psychologically. And that’s wrong.

“I’ll tell you what. I beat the s--- out of a guy named Merv Griffin,” Trump said. Griffin was a television talk show host and media mogul. “Just beat him. And, you know, he came in — you talk about makeup. He came in with makeup and he was on television, you know, he comes into my office. He made a deal to buy everything I didn’t want in Resorts International,” Trump said. “I kept telling him no, no, no, no, and he kept raising the price, raising the price, raising the price. All of a sudden, it turns out to be an incredible deal for me. An unbelievable deal.

“Plus,” Trump added, “I got the Taj Mahal, which is the absolute crown jewel of the world.” He was referring to the Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, not the sacred mausoleum in India.

“The point is that people thought I lost,” he said. “So what’s happened is there’s a mood in the world for the last five years that if you’re a seller, you’re a loser, even if you’re a seller at a huge profit.”

Donald Trump stands next to a genie lamp at the grand opening of the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City on April 5, 1990. (Mike Derer/AP)

I asked Trump, when you get up in the morning, what do you read? Whom do you talk to? What information sources do you trust?

“Much of it is very basic,” Trump said. “I read the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. I read the Post and the News, not so much for business, just to sort of I live in the city and you know, it’s reporting on the city.” The New York Post covered Trump almost obsessively.

“I rely less on people than I do just this general flow of information,” he said. “I also speak to cabdrivers. I go to cities and say, what do you think of this? That’s how I bought Mar-a-Lago. Talking to a cabdriver and asking him, ‘What’s hot in Florida? What’s the greatest house in Palm Beach?’”

“Oh, the greatest house is Mar-a-Lago,” the cabdriver said.

“I said where is it? Take me over.” Trump then added, “I was in Palm Beach, I was in the Breakers, and I was bored stiff.”

Trump eventually bought Mar-a-Lago for $7 million.

“I talk to anybody,” he said. “I always call it my poll. People jokingly tell me you know that Trump will speak with anybody. And I do, I speak to the construction workers and the cabdrivers, and those are the people I get along with best anyway in many respects. I speak to everybody.”

Trump claimed he bought 9.9 percent of a casino company, Bally Manufacturing, and in a short period of time made $32 million. He then said he spent “close to 100 million dollars on buying stock” in Bally, which led to a lawsuit against him. The lawyers for the other side wanted Trump’s records.

“They were trying to prove that I did this tremendous research on the company, that I spent weeks and months analyzing the company,” Trump said. “And they figured I’d have a file that would be up to the ceiling. So they subpoenaed everything, and I end up giving them virtually no papers. There was virtually no file. So I’m being grilled, you know, so-called grilled by one of their high-priced lawyers.”

Trump impersonated the lawyer: “How long did you know about this, Mr. Trump? And when?”

“In other words, they’re trying to say like this is this great plot,” Trump said. “I said, I don’t know, I just started thinking about it like the day I bought it.”

The lawyer was incredulous. “Well, how many reports did you do?”

“Well, I really didn’t, I just sort of had a feeling.”

“They didn’t believe that somebody would take 100 million bucks and put it into a company with virtually no real research,” Trump said. “Now I had research in my head, but beyond, you know, they just had not thought that happens. And the corporate mind and the corporate mentality doesn’t think that happens. Those are my best deals.”

Carl asked Trump whether he ever sees himself in a public service role.

“I don’t think so, but I’m not sure,” Trump said. “I’m young. In theory, statistically, I have a long time left. I’ve seen people give so much away that they don’t have anything when bad times come.”

He said he was setting up a Donald J. Trump Foundation. “When I kick the bucket — as the expression goes — I want to leave a tremendous amount of money to that foundation. Some to my family and some to the foundation. You have an obligation to your family."

Trump spoke about “bad times” as if they were inevitable. “I always like to sort of prepare for the worst. And it doesn’t sound like a very particularly nice statement,” he said. “I know times will get bad. It’s just a question when.”

He brought up his 281-foot yacht, which was originally owned by Saudi businessman and arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. Trump had renamed it Trump Princess. “To build new today would cost 150 to 200 million dollars. If you guys want, we’ll go on it or something. ... It’s phenomenal. If you read Time magazine, I do nothing but float around on this boat all day long. It’s not the way it is.”

Who is your best friend? I asked.

He listed some names of businessmen and investors, people who worked for him, that neither Carl nor I recognized, and his brother Robert. “In, I guess all cases, business-related,” he said. “Only because that’s the people I deal with."

“But friendship is a strange thing. You know, I’m always concerned with friendship because I’ve seen — sometimes you’d like to test people. Right now everybody wants to be my friend for whatever reason. Okay, for the obvious reasons.

“Sometimes you’d like to test them and say one day, just for a period of a week, that Trump blew it. And then go back and call ’em up and invite ’em to dinner and see whether or not they show up. I’ve often wanted to do that. Take a period of a month and let the world think that I blew it just to test whether or not in fact the friends were friends."

“I’m a great loyalist. I believe in loyalty to people. I believe in having great friends and great enemies. And I’ve seen people who were on top who didn’t stay on top and all of a sudden the same people that were kissing their a-- are gone. I mean like gone.

“One example was a banker. He was really a great banker, for one of the big banks — Citibank. And he was in charge of huge loans to very substantial people.

“He made a lot of people rich loaning money and he called me like two years after the fact. He said, you know, it’s incredible, the same people that were my best friends, that were calling me up all the time and kissing my a-- in every way, I can’t even get through to ’em on the telephone anymore. ... When he left the bank, they wouldn’t take his calls anymore.

“I would.”

Trump described his strategy of refusing to pay fines for the violations he received from property inspectors.

“From day one, I said f--- them,” Trump said of the inspectors.

“When I was in Brooklyn, inspectors would come around and they’d give me a violation on buildings that were absolutely perfect,” Trump recalled. “I’d say, ‘F--- you.’ And they’d give me more violations. And more. And for one month it was miserable. I had more violations — and they were unfounded violations. But they give it because what they wanted was if you ever paid ’em off, they’d always come back. So what happened to me, in one month they just said, ‘F--- this guy, he’s a piece of s---.’ And they’d go to somebody else.”

“The point is if you fold, it causes you much more trouble than it’s worth,” Trump said.

“You can say the same thing with the mob. If you agree to do business with them, they’ll always come back. If you tell ’em to go f--- themselves — in that case, perhaps in a nicer way. But if you tell them, ‘Forget it, man, forget it, nothing’s worth it,’ they might try and put pressure on you at the beginning but in the end they’re going to find an easier mark because it’s too tough for them. Inspectors. Mobs. Unions. Okay?”

This was Trump’s basic philosophy.

Carl asked, who are your greatest enemies?

“Well, I hate to say because then you’re just going to go and interview ’em. I hate playing the role of a critic.”

Trump in fact loved it. “The obvious one is Ed Koch,” he said. “Ed Koch was the worst mayor in the history of New York City.”

Thirty-five years later, Trump still criticizes opponents with the same exaggerated effect. “Joe Biden is the worst president in the history of the United States,” he said after President Biden announced in July that he would not be seeking reelection.

Even in 1989, Trump’s character was focused on winning, fighting and surviving. “And the only way you do that,” he said, “is instinct.”

“If people know you’re a folder,” he said, “if people know that you’re going to be weak, they’re going to go after you.”

Trump said it was “a whole presentation.”

“You’ve got to know your audience, and by the way, for some people, be a killer, for some people, be all candy. For some people, different. For some people, both.”

Killer, candy or both. That’s Donald Trump.

What a remarkable time capsule, a full psychological study of a man, then a 42-year-old Manhattan real estate king.

I never expected Trump to become president or a defining political figure of our time. The same instincts I reported on during his presidency were just as much a trademark of his character back in 1989. Here, in this interview 35 years ago, we see the origin of Trumpism in the words of Trump himself.

Press Poodles

A few points:

• It ran for one day at WaPo
• Where the fuck was this, Bob?
• You've done this before - what were you waiting for this time?

5 key revelations from Bob Woodward’s new book

Trump, Putin, Biden, Netanyahu and other world leaders in secretive, off-the-cuff moments revealed in “War.”

Bob Woodward’s “War,” set to be released next week, is the author and Washington Post associate editor’s fourth book since Donald Trump’s upset victory in 2016.

The new book opens the aperture to reveal how a years-long political contest between Trump and President Joe Biden — and now Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee — has unfolded against the backdrop of cascading global crisis, from the coronavirus pandemic, to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, to the escalating conflict between Israel and Iran-backed proxies in the Middle East. At the book’s end, Woodward concludes that Biden, mistakes notwithstanding, has exhibited “steady and purposeful leadership,” while Trump has displayed recklessness and self-interest making him, in Woodward’s estimation, “unfit to lead the country.”

That determination is based on a series of key revelations. Below are some of the book’s main findings. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign issued a statement attacking the book and saying, “None of these made-up stories by Bob Woodward are true.”

1. Trump sent American-made coronavirus tests to Putin

When Trump was president in 2020, he sent coveted tests for the disease to Russian President Vladimir Putin during a crippling shortage in the United States and around the world.

As the book explains, Putin was petrified of contracting the deadly illness. He accepted the supplies but cautioned Trump not to reveal that he had shared them, concerned for the political fallout that the U.S. president would suffer.

“Please don’t tell anybody you sent these to me,” Putin said to Trump, according to Woodward.

Woodward reports that Trump’s reply was: “I don’t care. Fine.”

“War” also suggests that Trump and Putin may have spoken as many as seven times since Trump left the White House in 2021. On one occasion, this year, Trump sent an unnamed aide away from his office at his Mar-a-Lago Club so he could conduct a private phone call with Putin, according to the book.

A campaign official, Jason Miller, was evasive when Woodward asked him about the contact, eventually offering, “I have not heard that they’re talking, so I’d push back on that.”

2. Biden’s profanity-laced outbursts about Putin and Netanyahu

“War” portrays Biden as a careful and deliberate commander in chief, but combustible in private about intractable foreign leaders — especially Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Biden called Putin the “epitome of evil” and remarked to his advisers, about his Russian counterpart, “That f---ing Putin.”

The intelligence community believed racial animus — namely the idea that Ukrainians were a lesser people than the Russians — was a significant factor in Putin’s designs on Ukraine, as “War” explains. The book quotes Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, saying of Putin, “He is one of the most racist leaders that we have.”

Biden’s anger toward Netanyahu boiled over in the spring of 2024, Woodward reports, as Biden concluded that the Israeli prime minister’s interest was not actually in defeating Hamas but in protecting himself. “That son of a b----, Bibi Netanyahu, he’s a bad guy. He’s a bad f---ing guy!” Biden reportedly told advisers.

3. Harris’s two-track approach with Netanyahu

Harris delivered high-profile remarks after a July face-to-face meeting with Netanyahu, shortly after she became the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. She seemed to separate herself from Biden’s approach to Israel’s war in Gaza by speaking forcefully about the costs of the military campaign and pledging to “not be silent” about Palestinian suffering.

Her public tone surprised, and infuriated, Netanyahu because it marked a contrast with her more amicable approach during the private conversation the two had shared, Woodward reports. The book quotes the Israeli ambassador in Washington, Michael Herzog, saying: “She wants to be tough in public. But she wasn’t as tough privately.”

The episode is one of several in the book about Harris, who appears as a loyal No. 2 to Biden but hardly influential in major foreign policy decisions.

4. Frantic de-escalation in the face of possible Russian nuclear use

Woodward details some of the stunning intelligence capabilities that allowed Washington to foresee Russian plans for an all-out war against Ukraine in early 2022, including a human source inside the Kremlin.

This insight, however, got the Biden administration only so far as it sought to foreclose Russia’s nuclear option. In the fall of 2022, that option seemed like a live one, as U.S. intelligence agencies reported that Putin was seriously weighing use of a tactical nuclear weapon — at one point, assessing the likelihood at 50 percent.

An especially frantic quest to bring Moscow back from the brink came in October of that year, when Russia appeared to be laying the groundwork for escalation by accusing Ukraine of preparing to detonate a dirty bomb. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin flatly denied Russia’s accusations in a phone call with the Kremlin’s defense minister, Sergei Shoigu. Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, instructed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s team to summon the International Atomic Energy Agency to absolve themselves immediately. And Biden called out Russia’s apparent scheme publicly while privately leaning on Chinese President Xi Jinping to emphasize to Putin the dire consequences of nuclear use.

5. The pervasive influence of the Saudi crown prince

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known by his initials MBS, is not a major figure in the book but looms large at critical junctures, with key assessments of him delivered by Democrats and Republicans alike.

Mohammed, currently the prime minister of Saudi Arabia, matters greatly as the de facto ruler of the Arab world’s wealthiest country. He cultivated close ties to Trump, who made Riyadh his first foreign stop as president. So, too, he has been crucial to matters of significant interest to Biden, especially oil supplies and the prospects of normalized relations with Israel.

Woodward summarized Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s perception of the crown prince this way: “MBS was nothing more than a spoiled child.”

One of the Saudi royal’s important interlocutors has been Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.). The Republican senator kept Biden’s aides apprised of Mohammed’s perspective on the possible normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, according to Woodward, and also kept the gulf leader in communication with Trump. During a March visit to Saudi Arabia recounted in the book, Graham proposes to the crown prince that they call the Republican presidential candidate. Mohammed proceeds to conduct the conversation over speakerphone.

On an earlier trip, Graham had asked the crown prince to contact Sullivan, so the senator could inform them both about a discussion with Netanyahu.

“Hey, I’m here with Lindsey,” the Saudi royal reportedly announced to Sullivan over the phone.

Mr Olbermann would like a word.

A Guy

... after my own heart.

Rational Boomer

By Design

One of the little maneuvers that Trump is using is tried-n-true.

1. Fuck something up
2. Wait
3. Point at it and say, "Oh look - it's fucked up - lemme fix that for ya."

Among my favorite examples is when Manuel Noriega needed to do an election, and he knew it wouldn't go well for him, and he knew one of the consequences was that he'd be in prison for a good long time.

So he sent his goons out on election day to steal &/or stuff ballot boxes, and harass voters, etc. When all this was reported, he claimed the election was bad and the outcome couldn't be trusted, and that he, being all patriotic and very interested in justice and blah blah blah - he would stay on as president to get the whole thing straightened out, and maybe we can do another election sometime down the road.

 With Trump, I think I see the same kind of game being played in his Election Interference (Jan6) case before Tanya Chutkan in DC.

He petitions the court for various things in order to delay the trial. Now that certain issues have been resolved, and Smith has filed a superseding indictment, and the thing seems to be back on track, Trump is beefing about how it's too close to election day, and going forward with it would be - say it with me now - Election Interference.

I truly hope all of that is as obvious - and as boring - to everybody as it seems to me.

Further, on a slightly different note, there are at least 77 witnesses referenced in Smith's new filing, along with 6 co-conspirators.

That's a whole big bunch of witnesses.

Read the full filing here

A question: If Trump claims to have been acting in his official capacity, and he was working on his campaign stuff from the oval office, then maybe he can smarm his way out of the main charges because of immunity, but wouldn't he be smarming his way into a shitload of Taft Act violations?

Read Jack Smith’s unsealed court filing that says Trump ‘resorted to crimes’ after 2020 election

Donald Trump laid the groundwork to try to overturn the 2020 election even before he lost, knowingly pushed false claims of voter fraud and “resorted to crimes” in his failed bid to cling to power, according to a newly unsealed court filing from prosecutors that offers new evidence from the landmark criminal case against the former president.

The filing from special counsel Jack Smith’s team offers the most comprehensive view to date of what prosecutors intend to prove if the case charging Trump with conspiring to overturn the election reaches trial.

Though a months-long congressional investigation and the indictment itself have chronicled in stark detail Trump’s efforts to undo the election, the filing cites previously unknown accounts offered by Trump’s closest aides to paint a portrait of an “increasingly desperate” president who while losing his grip on the White House “used deceit to target every stage of the electoral process.”

“So what?” the filing quotes Trump as telling an aide after being advised that his vice president, Mike Pence, had been rushed to a secure location after a crowd of violent Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 to try to prevent the counting of electoral votes.

“The details don’t matter,” Trump said, when told by an adviser that a lawyer who was mounting his legal challenges wouldn’t be able to prove the false allegations in court, the filing states.

The brief was made public over the Trump legal team’s objections in the final month of a closely contested presidential race in which Democrats have sought to make Trump’s refusal to accept the election results four years ago central to their claims that he is unfit for office.

The issue surfaced as recently as Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate when Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, lamented the violence at the Capitol while a Republican opponent, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, refused to directly answer when asked whether Trump had lost the 2020 race.

The filing was submitted, initially under seal, following a Supreme Court opinion that conferred broad immunity on former presidents for official acts they take in office, a decision that narrowed the scope of the prosecution and eliminated the possibility of a trial before next month’s election.

The purpose of the brief is to persuade U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan that the offenses charged in the indictment were undertaken in Trump’s private, rather than presidential capacity, and can therefore remain part of the case as it moves forward. Chutkan permitted a redacted version to be made public even though Trump’s lawyers argued that it was unfair to unseal it so close to the election.

Though the prospects of a trial are uncertain, particularly in the event that Trump wins the presidency and a new attorney general seeks the dismissal of the case, the brief nonetheless functions as a roadmap for the testimony and evidence prosecutors would elicit before a jury.

“Although the defendant was the incumbent President during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one,” Smith’s team wrote, adding, “When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office.”

Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung called the brief “falsehood-ridden” and “unconstitutional” and repeated oft-stated allegations that Smith and Democrats were “hell-bent on weaponizing the Justice Department in an attempt to cling to power.” Trump, in a separate post on his Truth Social platform, said the case would end with his “complete victory.”

The filing alleges that Trump “laid the groundwork” for rejecting the election results before the contest was over, telling advisers that in the event he held an early lead he would “declare victory before the ballots were counted and any winner was projected.”

Immediately after the election, prosecutors say, his advisers sought to sow chaos in the counting of votes. In one instance, a campaign employee, who is also described as a Trump co-conspirator, was told that results favoring Democrat Joe Biden at a Michigan polling center appeared accurate. The person is alleged to have replied: “find a reason it isnt” and “give me options to file litigation.”

Prosecutors also alleged that Trump advanced claims of fraud despite knowing they were false, describing how he told others that allegations of election regularity made by attorney Sidney Powell were “crazy” and referenced the science fiction series “Star Trek.” Even so, days later, he promoted on the platform then known as Twitter a lawsuit she was about to file.

In demonstrating his apparent indifference to the accuracy of the election fraud claims, prosecutors also cite an account of a White House staffer who after the election overheard Trump telling his wife, daughter and son-in-law on Marine One: “It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.”

The filing also includes details of conversations between Trump and Pence, including a private lunch the two had on Nov. 12, 2020, in which Pence “reiterated a face-saving option” for Trump, telling him, “Don’t concede but recognize the process is over.”

In another private lunch days later, Pence urged Trump to accept the results of the election and run again in 2024.

“I don’t know, 2024 is so far off,” Trump told him, the filing states.

Prosecutors say that by Dec. 5, the defendant was starting to think about Congress’ role in the process.

“For the first time, he mentioned to Pence the possibility of challenging the election results in the House of Representatives,” it says, citing a phone call.

But Trump “disregarded” Pence “in the same way he disregarded dozens of court decisions that unanimously rejected his and his allies’ legal claims, and that he disregarded officials in the targeted states — including those in his own party — who stated publicly that he had lost and that his specific fraud allegations were false,” prosecutors wrote.

Pence chronicled some of his interactions with Trump, and his eventual split with him, in a 2022 book he wrote called “So Help Me God.” He also was ordered to appear before the grand jury investigating Trump after courts rejected claims of executive privilege.

Prosecutors also argue Trump used his Twitter account to further his illegal scheme by spreading false claims of election fraud, attacking “those speaking the truth” about his election loss and exhorting his supporters to travel to Washington for the Jan. 6, 2021, certification.

They intend to use “forensic evidence” from Trump’s iPhone to provide insight into Trump’s actions after the attack at the Capitol.

Of the more than 1,200 Tweets Trump sent during the weeks detailed in the indictment, prosecutors say, the vast majority were about the 2020 election, including those falsely claiming Pence could reject electors even though the vice president had told Trump that he had no such power.

That “steady stream of disinformation” in the weeks after the election culminated in his speech at the Ellipse on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, in which Trump “used these lies to inflame and motivate the large and angry crowd of his supporters to march to the Capitol and disrupt the certification proceeding,” prosecutors wrote.

His “personal desperation was at its zenith” that morning as he was “only hours from the certification proceeding that spelled the end,” prosecutors wrote.

At some point, Trump will be gone - but once he's gone, this shit ain't over.

Vance was picked for a reason. Stay sharp.

Dads

Overheard:

Tim Walz is the dad so many of us lost to Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and Donald Trump.

Rudy Giuliani’s Daughter: Trump Took My Dad From Me. Please Don’t Let Him Take Our Country Too

“Nothing I have experienced prepared me for the very public and relentless implosion of my father’s life,” writes Caroline Giuliani, announcing her support for Kamala Harris.

Iam constantly asking myself how America is back here, even considering the possibility of electing Donald Trump again, after all of the damage he has caused, both in office and since. While Kamala Harris has gained extraordinary momentum by infusing this election with vitality and hope, I worry that too many Americans remain disconnected from the visceral, psychologically draining memory of Trump’s deeply destabilizing presidency. If enough people truly remembered what that chaos felt like, another Trump term wouldn’t even be on the table. But for those open to seeing the bare and unvarnished truth, there are unmistakable reminders of Trump’s destructive trail all around us, and it has broken my heart to watch my dad become one of them.

As Rudy Giuliani’s daughter, I’m unfortunately well-suited to remind Americans of just how calamitous being associated with Trump can be, even for those who are convinced he’s on their side. Watching my dad’s life crumble since he joined forces with Trump has been extraordinarily painful, both on a personal level and because his demise feels linked to a dark force that threatens to once again consume America. Not to disregard individual accountability in the slightest, but it would be naive for us to ignore the fact that many of those closest to Trump have descended into catastrophic downward spirals. If we let Trump back into the driver’s seat this fall, our country will be no exception.

My dad and I have a cartoonishly complicated relationship. But he is still my father, and despite his faults, I love him. I’ve seen him experience surreal heights, and, now, unfathomable lows. The last thing I want to do is hurt him, especially when he’s already down. Plus we never know how much time we have left with our parents. The totality of that makes this the most difficult piece I’ve ever written. Yet this moment and this election are so much bigger than any of us.

From reproductive rights and the economy, to foreign and environmental policy, we need experienced, sane, and fundamentally decent leaders who will fight for us instead of against us—who will safeguard our democracy rather than dismantle it. And as a recently engaged-to-be-married, 35-year-old who hopes to feel more joyous than fearful about the potential of becoming a parent myself, I need to advocate for a future worth bringing children into, which is why I am voicing my adamant support for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.

I’ll never forget the night my dad told me he was considering becoming Trump’s lawyer. I was with him at the Grand Havana Room, a cigar bar at the top of 666 Fifth Avenue, an address too fitting given the unholy alliance my father was about to enter into.

Surrounded by thick smoke and powerful men, I ugly-cried for a few minutes, then spent the next three hours making my vehement case to my father that he not go down this morally perilous path.

It was extremely rare for my dad to tell me he was going to do anything before actually doing it, so this moment of connection with him also felt like a cosmic opportunity to do my part to limit the spread of Trump’s sinister shadow. I held nothing back. I voiced all of my concerns about Trump’s open racism, rampant misogyny, and total lack of empathy. I even told my dad that I already felt ashamed of my last name whenever I saw headlines connecting him with Trump, and that this escalation would only deepen that feeling. For the rest of that night, I held onto hope that a daughter’s emotional entreaty might actually sway a father.

That fantasy was dispelled the next morning when a news story popped onto my feed: Rudy Giuliani was going to work for Donald Trump. The pit I felt in my stomach then was a warning, but I had no idea how much destruction my father would come to face due to his one-sided fealty to a con-man. Growing up in Gracie Mansion, I always knew I had a privileged life. But a particular set of challenges came along with being Rudy Giuliani’s daughter, and by that point in my life, I had mostly learned how to navigate them.

But nothing I have experienced prepared me for the very public and relentless implosion of my father’s life.

As someone who overcame a deeply ingrained eating disorder and has worked through various other manifestations of anxiety and depression, I’m no stranger to processing complicated feelings. But this new albatross left me floored by a potent mix of fear, anger, confusion, and sadness that often had me crying over my dad, and for him, at the same time. I always saw flaws in my dad that people blinded by his celebrity couldn’t see, but on some level, the absurd scale of his success and notoriety also made it hard to believe that anything could actually take him down. I spent a lot of my life wishing my father had less power. But I never wanted it to happen like this. And selfishly, the deeper my dad gets stuck in the quicksand of his problems, the more fleeting our opportunities to connect as father and daughter become. After months of feeling the type of sorrow that comes from the death of a loved one, it dawned on me that I’ve been grieving the loss of my dad to Trump. I cannot bear to lose our country to him too.

I know that some people may question whether I truly care about my father, since another Trump presidency could theoretically mitigate some of the problems he’s facing. It distresses me to think that my dad might even wonder this. But if you zoom out, Trump being the president was the worst thing that ever happened to my dad, to my family, and to our nation’s modern history. The consequences will only be more severe—and irreversible— a second time around. Thanks to the extremist Supreme Court he stacked, Trump would take office with full immunity: no checks on his power whatsoever. If the president isn’t going to be subject to the law like every other citizen, which remains incomprehensible to me, then our president had better have a moral compass. A 34-time convicted felon who’s been found liable for sexual abuse, tries to steal elections, and demeans people based on their race, sexuality, disability status, and gender falls remarkably short of the bar we must set for ourselves as a country. Fortunately, we have another choice in this election: a life-long public servant who has spent her career upholding justice and fighting for those who cannot fight for themselves.

The Supreme Court’s immunity ruling was a huge blow to the structure of our democracy, and Trump has made it clear that he intends to continue ravaging our noble experiment until there is nothing left of it. The aspiring autocrat has told his supporters that this is the last time they’ll ever have to vote because “it’ll be fixed after that.” There’s no good way to spin that. Whether he means that elections will be fixed, elections will be eradicated, or that the country will be permanently “fixed” due to the demolition of institutions and policies that ensure checks and balances on power, it’s clear that he’s a narcissist in pursuit of authoritarian rule. A democracy by definition cannot be fixed or calcified. It must have the flexibility to change according to the wishes of its people, not the despotic dreams of one. Listening to those wishes, even when it seemed inconceivably late for President Joe Biden to pull out, is exactly what led to Kamala Harris being on the top of the ticket. Her rapid rise is a literal manifestation of citizens’ voices being heard, which is exactly the type of consideration and respect all Americans will get if she is elected.

Beyond the existential importance of this election, I am also voting for Harris because she is the only candidate who cares about my rights as a woman. The reversal of Roe v Wade was a shocking and horrifying “accomplishment” of Trump’s that has already resulted in the unforgivable and unnecessary deaths of innocent women like Amber Nicole Thurman. Seeing Republican state officials enact draconian abortion bans and threaten fertility care is incredibly personal for me. As a woman in my 30s struggling with long-covid-related health issues, there’s a possibility that my soon-to-be husband and I will need to rely on surrogacy or fertility treatments if we want to have children of our own. Having the means to even consider surrogacy is a tremendous privilege that I do not take lightly, but it also stirs up many complex and challenging emotions. So I’ve spent the last couple of years talking to countless women about their fertility journeys. Witnessing their strength has been inspiring, and it has also made it clear that fertility struggles necessitate tremendous courage and grace. So the fact the Roe reversal has given states the leeway to make the IVF process even more uncertain is a disgrace. And hearing Trump flip-flop on the issues of abortion and IVF only makes me trust him less – if that’s even possible – because his lies are so clearly politically motivated. He’s already caused irreparable damage, and I don’t believe for a second that he won’t cause more.

Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, which would “explicitly reject the notion that abortion is health care” and require the Department of Health and Human Services Department to preclude doctors and nurses from being trained to perform abortions, but his insincere denial so clearly stems from his growing political insecurity. Project 2025’s contributors include several high-ranking officials from Trump’s first administration, and one of Project 2025’s authors, Russell Vought, was secretly recorded acknowledging that Trump is in fact “very supportive” of what they do. I believe it, because everything in Project 2025, from eradicating the Department of Education and FEMA, to decimating unions and reinstating schedule F so that the administration can hire and fire government employees for political reasons, is woefully in line with the malfeasance and backsliding that Trump has already proven he stands for. It is a dictator’s playbook—one he didn’t have before. Trump will be much more effective a second time around, and I don’t see how our world can survive it.

We live at a crossroads in history, where the future of not only our democracy but our planet is at stake. Trump’s first-term position on the Climate Crisis was to call it a hoax while stripping away climate regulations and giving the fossil fuel industry everything they wanted and more. His second-term agenda, which we can foresee through his grotesque Project 2025 playbook, will only accelerate the damage he’s already done. My dream of becoming a mom, coupled with the difficult health journey I’ve been on over the last few years, has me constantly grappling with our increasingly toxic and dangerous environment. But I do feel hope. Because Kamala Harris understands the grave danger of climate change. As only the second presidential candidate in history to be endorsed by Scientific American, she’ll be a champion for our children’s futures by reinstating the United States as a member of the Paris Agreement and continuing to fight for renewable energy policy. We’ve seen remarkable progress on this issue under the Biden/Harris Inflation Reduction Act. Trump would roll it all back. Kamala Harris is our only chance for a better future.

Even though the last few years have been some of the most difficult of my life on a personal level, I’m grateful to live in a country that came together once before to fire a burgeoning tyrant. Watching Harris reignite the torch that Biden selflessly passed to her has filled me with optimism and pride. She has the experience, intelligence, and fortitude to lead us to a brighter future, and seeing her hold Trump accountable in the debate only further confirms her ability to defend us from our most dangerous enemies, domestic and foreign. But even with all the incredible momentum the Harris/Walz ticket has generated, we still have to work hard to ensure a victory for our future. We live in a two-party system, and no candidate will appeal to every voter on every issue.

If for whatever reason you choose to sit this election out or lodge a protest-vote for a third-party candidate, make no mistake: you are voting for Donald Trump.

Take it from me, Trump destroys everything he touches. I saw it happen to my family. Don’t let it happen to yours, or to our country. Kamala Harris will guide us into a brighter future, but only if we unite behind her. On November 5th, I’ll be voting for that future. For justice, stability, and democracy. And I sincerely hope you’ll cast your ballot for Kamala Harris, too.