If you take any one moment from the Trump Show out of context, it’s striking. But together, Trump’s antics are now banal. He says, tweets, and does weird things. He gets attention. He pisses people off while thrilling others. Tonight, he even managed to attract attention and garner praise for slightly dialing it down. But speeches are supposed to be tools to help do the work of actually being president — learning about the issues, making decisions about trade-offs, and collaborating to get things done.
Amid the nonstop and increasingly tedious theatricality, Trump is only ever performing the role of the president; he’s never doing the job.-- and --
You can’t parse a president who doesn’t sweat the details.
In a normal address of this sort, the role of a policy reporter is to serve as a kind of translator. Having spent days, weeks, and months following policy debates in Washington, we are able to catch the quick references in the president’s speech and understand them in fuller context. In that spirit, for example, I might note that Trumps’ reference to creating “a level playing field for American companies and workers” appears to be a move toward endorsing a controversial corporate income tax reform that big exporters like but retail chains hate.
The problem is that to draw that conclusion would require us to believe the speech went through a traditional drafting process. That the Treasury secretary and the National Economic Council director and the legislative liaison staff all briefed the president on the meaning of the line, and that he therefore made a coherent, deliberate effort to embrace this plan.
But here’s another theory. The speech seems to be largely the product of tensions between Reince Priebus’s traditional Republican Party ideology and Steve Bannon’s populist nationalism. Priebus is close to Paul Ryan, who likes the controversial tax reform. But one interpretation of the tax reform idea is that it’s protectionist trade policy, which Bannon likes. So the two of them may have put the line into the speech even though Senate Republicans and the Trump administration economic team seem to think it’s a bad idea.
The premise of taking a close look at these speeches to read the tea leaves, in short, is that the president actually understands the policy issues facing him and cares about the words he’s speaking. With Trump, that’s far from true. He doesn’t like to read briefing books or make hard choices. His words about clean air or infrastructure or anything else are completely meaningless until we see real plans. And there’s no real indication that we ever will. The show is an increasingly meaningless spectacle.
bury me with this screencap pic.twitter.com/gU5cTlf48O— crumb dumpster (@xylodemon) February 28, 2017
These groups—Klansmen, neo-Nazis, white nationalists—did more than talk and meet and march. They plotted to turn their hatred into violence. “They laid plans to attack courthouses, banks, festivals, funerals, schools, mosques, churches, synagogues, clinics, water-treatment plants, and power grids,” reports the Southern Poverty Law Center. “They used firearms, bombs, C-4 plastic explosives, knives, and grenades.”
It would be all too easy to turn away from this reality, or consign it to the distant past. But Milano turned his camera lens directly toward it. For many, these images will be shocking. Others will be more saddened than surprised. But thanks to his work, we are all met with the direct evidence that white supremacist groups are thriving in America.This goes on not more than 2 hours south of my place:
'Good luck Great Britain'— Jelle Simons (@jelle_simons) February 27, 2017
Carnival in Germany. pic.twitter.com/sNRjfHEmNG
Back on February 18, CBS News’s Major Garrett reported that Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as secretary of the Navy was likely to withdraw from consideration.
If the press secretary habitually tells obvious lies (like about Inauguration Day crowd sizes) or says plausible-sounding things that later turn out to be false (like indignantly denying Garrett’s story), then he ends up like the proverbial boy who cried wolf. When there’s a crisis — a natural disaster, a foreign war, a terrorist attack, a bank panic, an epidemic, anything — the Trump administration, like all previous administrations, is going to want to credibly convey accurate information to the public. But it’s not clear it will be able to.45* and Company lie to us a lot - seems like all the time, actually. Either they're lying by design, or because they're incompetent so they're doing it just because one guy has no fucking clue what the other guys are doing or saying, or all of the above, or all of the above plus any variety and combination of other reasons.
Srinivas Kuchibhotla, aged 32, died following the shooting in a crowded Kansas City bar, while Alok Madasani, also 32, was injured. Ian Grillot, a 24-year-old American who jumped to the defence of the two men, was also shot.
Witnesses told police the shooter shouted "get out of my country" before opening fire in Olathe.
Officers have charged 51-year-old Adam Purinton with murder and attempted murder following the incident on Wednesday.-and-
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said any attempt to connect the president's rhetoric on immigrants to the tragedy in Kansas "would be absurd."Just another isolated incident that can't possibly be connected to all the others.
How has this not gone viral 😂 pic.twitter.com/wQQHhKa73X— Mr. Jameson Neat (@MrJamesonNeat) February 26, 2017
