The Official Donald Trump inauguration thread

[rmt]

Had it been the Hillary administration that Times reporter would have sent an email first to Hillary's team asking if it was okay and if any changes would need to be made.

Yep. The Dems and MSM in lockstep - America is used to the well-vetted, optics-driven, smooth operation put out for the last 8 years - not the in your face, unadulterated thoughts that come out of Trump's mouth.

[boutons_deux]

not the in your face, unadulterated thoughts that come out of Trump's mouth.

After a "decent interval", after Repugs get him to sign all their bills, get their 5-4 SCOTUS, they'll vote with the Dems to impeach him, to get Pence.

The emoluments suit today will probably take many months, then Trash will be in in the trash dump.

Just because Trash's "thoughts" are unadulterated doesn't mean they have any value, because they don't, except for you rightwingnutjob sheeple.


Robert Reich

https://www.facebook.com/RBReich/posts/1445206565491935

January 21 at 9:23am ·

I had breakfast recently with a friend who's a former Republican member of Congress. Here's what he said:

Him: Trump is no Republican. He’s just a big fat ego.

Me: Then why didn’t you speak out against him during the campaign?

Him: You kidding? I was surrounded by Trump voters. I’d have been shot.

Me: So what now? What are your former Republican colleagues going to do?

Him (smirking): They’ll play along for a while.

Me: A while?

Him: They’ll get as much as they want – tax cuts galore, deregulation, military buildup, slash all those poverty programs, and then get to work on Social Security and Medicare – and blame him. And he’s such a fool he’ll want to take credit for everything.

Me: And then what?

Him (laughing): They like Pence.

Me: What do you mean?

Him: Pence is their guy. They all think Trump is out of his mind.

Me: So what?

Him: So the moment Trump does something really dumb – steps over the line – violates the law in a big stupid clumsy way … and you know he will ...

Me: They impeach him?

Him: You bet. They pull the trigger.

[Thread]

After a "decent interval", after Repugs get him to sign all their bills, get their 5-4 SCOTUS, they'll vote with the Dems to impeach him, to get Pence.

The emoluments suit today will probably take many months, then Trash will be in in the trash dump.

Just because Trash's "thoughts" are unadulterated doesn't mean they have any value, because they don't, except for you rightwingnutjob sheeple.


Robert Reich

https://www.facebook.com/RBReich/posts/1445206565491935

January 21 at 9:23am ·

I had breakfast recently with a friend who's a former Republican member of Congress. Here's what he said:

Him: Trump is no Republican. He’s just a big fat ego.

Me: Then why didn’t you speak out against him during the campaign?

Him: You kidding? I was surrounded by Trump voters. I’d have been shot.

Me: So what now? What are your former Republican colleagues going to do?

Him (smirking): They’ll play along for a while.

Me: A while?

Him: They’ll get as much as they want – tax cuts galore, deregulation, military buildup, slash all those poverty programs, and then get to work on Social Security and Medicare – and blame him. And he’s such a fool he’ll want to take credit for everything.

Me: And then what?

Him (laughing): They like Pence.

Me: What do you mean?

Him: Pence is their guy. They all think Trump is out of his mind.

Me: So what?

Him: So the moment Trump does something really dumb – steps over the line – violates the law in a big stupid clumsy way … and you know he will ...

Me: They impeach him?

Him: You bet. They pull the trigger.

- "Promises, promises."

- Ernie "The Cat" Ladd

[Thread]

Down goes TPP!!!

[Splits]

[TheSanityAnnex]

HILLARY

[Trill Clinton]

[boutons_deux]

Watch Trump’s cabinet pick humiliate him by admitting his inaugural crowd was tiny

Mick Mulvaney, whom Trump selected to head his Office of Management and Budget, was forced to humiliate his new boss on live TV.

During his confirmation hearings before the Senate Budget Committee, Rep. Mulvaney (R-South Carolina) admitted that President Trump’s inaugural crowd was smaller than President Obama’s. Senator Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) began the exchange with Mulvaney by referencing a past description of the South Carolina Congressman by Senator Tim Cotton (R-Arkansas) as a “bold truth-teller.”

To test Mulvaney’s ability to tell the truth, Sen, Merkley had an aide show two photos of the U.S. Capitol side-by-side. One photo was from January 20, 2009, when President Barack Obama was being sworn in for his first inauguration.

The second photo was of President Trump’s inauguration, taken on January 20, 2017, at the same angle. Mulvaney smiled as Merkley asked him which crowd was bigger, first acknowledging that the question was not in direct relation to the Office of Management and Budget.

After the aide showed the two photos, Senator Tim Kaine (D-Virginia), who is seen sitting on Sen. Merkley’s right, struggles to maintain his composure during the savage exchange, stifling a smile while sipping on his water.

http://usuncut.com/politics/trumps-c...ck-humiliated/

[boutons_deux]

Trump turned on the television to see a jarring juxtaposition — massive demonstrations around the globe protesting his day-old presidency and footage of the sparser crowd at his inauguration, with large patches of white empty space on the Mall.

With enraged spittle flying in all directions, Trump ordered his team to war with his ancient enemy, the facts.

Over the objections of his aides and advisers — who urged him to focus on policy and the broader goals of his presidency — the new president issued a decree: He wanted a fiery public response, and he wanted it to come from his press secretary.

It was Trump’s day one test, and saying that he failed would be an insult to failure.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/0...28Daily+Kos%29

[TheSanityAnnex]

[Th'Pusher]

And yet he still lost the popular vote by 3M. Lotsa red in rural America.

[baseline bum]

And yet he still lost the popular vote by 3M. Lotsa red in rural America.

No, Trump won it by 2 million cuz of s

[DarrinS]

Popular vote count is the political version of a participation trophy.

[baseline bum]

Popular vote count is the political version of a participation trophy.

Why is Trump trying so hard to claim he won it then?

[DarrinS]

Why is Trump trying so hard to claim he won it then?

Because he's a thin-skinned narcissist.

[baseline bum]

Because he's a thin-skinned narcissist.

Or he's a fascist just making up to try to claim a mandate from the people. It's why he keeps claiming he won in a landslide.

[Thread]

Or he's a fascist just making up to try to claim a mandate from the people. It's why he keeps claiming he won in a landslide.

The old fascist spear in the ground. Adolf will be next. He always is.

[rmt]

Popular vote count is like winning the most points in tennis but losing more sets.

[boutons_deux]

Popular vote count is like winning the most points in tennis but losing more sets.

Hillary lost the EC by 80K votes. some ing historic Trash landslide, huh?

[CosmicCowboy]

Hillary lost the EC by 80K votes. some ing historic Trash landslide, huh?

[boutons_deux]

She Russian-American, Jewish, lesbo, very tough, a great writer

therefore, you redneck assholes just tl;dnr

==============

The Styrofoam Presidency

Americans who witnessed Donald Trump’s inaugural weekend can now fully grasp its meaning.

Throughout the campaign, anyone who watched Trump could see that he used a different aesthetic vocabulary than any candidate in living memory:

his bullying was shameless,

his hatred was naked,

his disregard for decency and decorum was gratuitous.

He mocked a disabled reporter,

he humiliated women in a wide variety of ways, and

he made highly ritualized occasions such as the presidential debates and the Al Smith dinner painful to watch.

Most important, he lied constantly, blatantly, and inconsistently, stripping words of their meaning.

Still, hope somehow persisted that the fact of becoming president would somehow elevate Trump—as though his aesthetics were not a reflection of his entire political self but merely a style that could be dropped when the occasion demanded it.

But when the inauguration came, Trump, for twenty-four hours, not only trampled on some of the most hallowed public rituals of American power; he made a spectacle of it.

He defiled the inauguration with a speech that was not only mean and meaningless but also badly written, pitched to the basest level of emotion and intelligence.

“We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength, and confidence of our country has disappeared over the horizon” was how he summed up the American foreign policy legacy: a zero-sum game in which a penny spent—whether on the Marshall Plan or an ill-conceived war—is a penny lost.

“For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have born the cost” is how he summed up the work of all the men and women who have come before him,

in effect the entire political history of the country, which he declared to be over: “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”

Having dismissed the political past, he offered, by way of vision, the future of a fortress under siege: a walled country that puts itself first, the way a self-help manual might advise you to “put yourself first,” convention and consideration for others be damned.

Trump marked his first moments in office by wielding power vengefully:

the head of the D.C. National Guard lost his job at noon, and

between festivities the new president signed an executive order to begin undoing his predecessor’s singular achievement, the Affordable Care Act.

He swept the White House website clean of substantive content on climate policy, civil rights, health care, and LGBT rights,

took down the Spanish-language site, and

added a biography of his wife that advertises her mail-order jewelry line.

At the same time, as Trump moved through the day, he repeatedly turned his back on his wife.

He immediately degraded the look of the oval office by hanging gold drapes.

The extended ritual of the inauguration conveys an understanding of the importance of the office of president and awe and pride in the miracle of the repeated peaceful transfer of power. The ceremony, the concert, the lunch, the parade, the balls, and more—

all of this serves to create a nationwide mood of celebration and self-congratulation.

Trump had no use for any of it:

the magnanimity,

the generosity,

the awe (unless it’s inspired by him personally),

the pride (unless it’s his own),

the aspiration.

Indeed, the single quality he displayed repeatedly was his lack of aspiration. Take his speech.

Better yet, take the cake.

On Saturday it emerged that the inaugural-ball cake that Trump and Vice President Mike Pence cut with a sword was a knock-off of President Obama’s 2013 inaugural-ball cake. Obama’s was created by celebrity chef Duff Goldman. Trump’s was commissioned from a decidedly more modest Washington bakery than Goldman’s, and the transition-team representative who put in the order explicitly asked for an exact copy of Goldman’s design—even when the baker suggested creating a variation on the theme of Goldman’s cake.

Only a small portion of Trump’s cake was edible; the rest was Styrofoam (Obama’s was cake all the way through).

The cake may be the best symbol yet of the incoming administration: much of what little it brings is plagiarized, and most of it is unusable for the purpose for which presidential administrations are usually intended.

Not only does it not achieve excellence: it does not even see the point of excellence.

On Saturday, Trump went to the CIA and stood in front of a wall honoring the memory of agents who died in the line of duty, failed to acknowledge the location, and lied to the faces of the people gathered, provoking an unprecedented rebuke from outgoing CIA chief John Brennan.

He lied uninventively, stupidly, embarrassingly—“Trust me, I’m like a smart person,” he said.

he did all of this in language that was offensive to the mind and the ears, and in clothes offensive to the eyes. His advisers and cabinet picks sport the same aesthetics:

Kellyanne Conway’s coat inspired jokes about what happens when the gays refuse to dress you, and

Betsy DeVos’s subliterate tweet (about the “historical” inauguration) inspired mockery of the incoming education secretary’s ignorance — as did her performance during her Senate hearing on Tuesday.

Sometimes vastly different processes yield surprisingly similar results.

Trump is staging an assault on America’s senses that feels familiar to me—not because he admires Putin (though he does) or because he is Putin’s puppet, but because they seem to be genuinely kindred spirits.

It might take a long time to understand why we have come to enter the age of a kakistocracy, but evidently we have.

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/01...mp-aesthetics/

[Thread]

Hillary lost the EC by 80K votes. some ing historic Trash landslide, huh?

40K if she'd a won 40 of that 80.

Solly Cholly.

[boutons_deux]

WaPo: Trump Demanded Photos From Park Service Head To Prove Crowd Size

President Donald Trump demanded that the acting National Park Service director produce additional photographs of crowds at his inauguration to prove his claims about attendance numbers, according to a report published Thursday by the Washington Post.

In a phone call the day after his inauguration, Trump personally ordered acting National Park Service director Michael T. Reynolds to produce additional photographs of crowds at the ceremony, according to the report citing three anonymous sources with knowledge of the conversation.

The President thought that the photographs might prove that press had deliberately underreported crowd sizes at his inauguration.

Reynolds obtained additional aerial photographs of the ceremony for Trump, but these did not prove the President's claims of "a million, a million and a half" attendees, according to the Washington Post.

Trump also berated Reynolds on the call about a post retweeted by the National Park Service's official Twitter account. The original tweet, later taken down, compared the crowd size at Trump's inauguration to Obama's in 2009.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewir...+%28TPMNews%29

Trash simply cannot see reality with his self-delusion blinding him.

He saw Muslims celebrating in the streets of NJ after 9/11!

[spurraider21]

[boutons_deux]

 I Was at Trump’s Inauguration. It Was Tiny.

If it wasn’t for the thousands of protesters, the day would’ve had no life at all.

So here’s the straight truth from someone who walked every inch of the inaugural ground on Friday. This was the smallest inauguration I’ve ever seen.

I was tweeting that and saying it on camera to Democracy Now! during the day on Friday before I heard those observations justified by both aerial shots and Metro rider statistics.

I said it because I saw the empty stands that were supposed to be filled with throngs of Trump supporters.

I said it because I saw how easy it was to ride public transportation and drive into downtown.

I said it because of the surprisingly sparse smatterings of red baseball caps as well as my conversations with local souvenir salespeople who were overloaded with “Make America Great Again” merchandise that wasn’t moving. It was obvious.

The people just weren’t there.

The fear of waning enthusiasm among the Trump faithful is real and well-founded. Not only does he enter office with the lowest approval ratings in the history of recorded numbers for an incoming president; not only does a significant majority dislike the way he has handled the transition; but

his base supporters are looking at his appointment of billionaires, Goldman Sachs parasites, and DC swamp-dwellers and already wondering if

they were sold a false bill of goods.

I spent a good part of Friday looking for people in red #MAGA caps and speaking to them. I cannot say loudly enough how different their mood was from the 2001 and 2005 people with whom I spoke at the Bush/Cheney inaugurations.

The Bush supporters were confident, ready to argue and even fight.

The famously pugnacious Trump supporters were unsure, confused by the small turnout, and disoriented about how to respond to being on security-checkpoint lines and finding themselves outnumbered by chanting protesters.

Walter, a Trump supporter from Virginia, said to me, “This isn’t what I thought it would be. I thought this was going to be like our version of Woodstock. Instead I’m just cold.”

Susan from West Virginia said to me, “On the plus side, I guess it can’t get worse. And I’m still glad we’re going to get the Supreme Court. But today—this is sad.”

Raymond from West Virginia shrugged his shoulders and said, “I thought it would be like one of his rallies. Instead, it’s this.”

(Raymond then asked if I was Jewish. I said yes and he said “Just checking.”

I said, “C’mon Raymond! Even your anti-Semitism sounds demoralized.” He looked down, sadly.)

https://www.thenation.com/article/i-was-at-trumps-inauguration-it-was-tiny/