Trump Shows his Contempt for the Military

Weather was no obstacle for the leaders of France and Germany for honoring the war dead.

Donald Trump avoided serving in the military during the Vietnam War using multiple deferments for "bone spurs' even as he went on to play on sports teams in college. It was the first of many actions demonstrating Trump's contempt for the members of the U.S. military despite disingenuous claims to the contrary.  Today is Veterans Day and the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, a war that was the result of uncontrolled nationalism and ultimately was supposed to end all wars.  As western leaders gather to remember the millions of fallen soldiers in that brutal and totally avoidable war, Trump stayed away citing "bad weather" even though other leaders found the weather to be no obstacle to their attendance.  Trump's pretense of honoring the military is even worse that that of most Republicans who are trigger happy and always too eager to send members of the military to their deaths - perhaps why a record number of veterans ran for office this year as Democrats. A column in the Washington Post looks at Trump ongoing contempt for the members of the military.  Here are excerpts:

It seems that soldiers who were captured aren’t the only ones that President Trump doesn’t like. He also apparently doesn’t care much for the ones who died for their country.

On Saturday afternoon, the president was scheduled to attend a ceremony at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, where 2,289 U.S. soldiers are buried — a small part of the 116,000 Americans who gave the last full measure of devotion during World War I. It was the sort of solemn occasion that U.S. presidents have considered an integral part of their duty at least since the Gettysburg Address. But Trump couldn’t be bothered.

The White House explained that bad weather grounded the helicopters that Trump and his entourage were planning to take. Yet somehow bad weather did not prevent French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel or Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from attending outdoor ceremonies commemorating the end of World War I that afternoon. Somehow bad weather did not stop Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and retired general John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, from attending the very ceremony that Trump could not make.

Rather than make the hour-long drive (Aisne-Marne is only 55 miles from Paris), the low-energy president remained behind at the U.S. ambassador’s residence. It’s not as if he didn’t sacrifice anything, however. Odds are that his room didn’t have Fox News. So he was probably reduced to watching CNN all afternoon. If the New York dating scene was Trump’s personal Vietnam, this was his personal Verdun.

Trump is right that he and the Republican Congress have increased defense spending — it has gone from roughly $600 billion to $700 billion a year — but he’s wrong to blame Obama alone for the lower levels during his presidency. The budget-squeezing sequestration process was a bipartisan initiative designed to cut the deficit without tax increases. What Trump doesn’t understand is that showering money on the armed forces doesn’t mean that he respects or supports what they do.

Trump shows what he really thinks of the troops by using them as political props. He deployed 5,600 troops just before the midterm elections to guard against the supposed threat posed by a few thousand unarmed refugees hundreds of miles from the U.S. border. . . . . Conveniently enough, Trump and his friends at Fox essentially stopped speaking about the caravan once the votes were cast. But, as the New York Times reports, the troops are still in the field, without electricity or hot meals — or a mission. They will likely spend Thanksgiving away from their families.

Naturally, Trump will not bother to visit them, even though there is no risk in traveling to Texas. He still has not visited U.S. troops deployed to a war zone — although he has spent 72 days at Mar-a-Lago and 58 days at his Bedminster, N.J., golf club.

So much for Trump’s conceit that he is pro-military. It has about as much factual foundation as his claim not to know his newly appointed acting attorney general. He has no understanding of what soldiers do or the honor code by which they live. His idea of military service is marching in a parade — and he is peeved he couldn’t have one in Washington this Veterans Day. Through his words and deeds, the commander in chief shows his contempt for the men and women in uniform.

With many friends and neighbors in the military - and a son-in-law who was wounded in Afghanistan - I know first hand what members of the military do and live with.  Trump as no clue and no doubt sees these honorable individuals as "little people" who are simply beneath him.  Very, very disgusting - just like everything else about this foul and toxic individual.

P.S. The Atlantic has a series of poignant photos of WWI battlefields as they look today.  The images are here.

Jared Kushner Used Private Email Account for White House Business

In addition to lies and insanity, another hallmark of the Trump White House is hypocrisy. Der  Trumpenführer ranted throughout the 2016 presidential campaign about "crooked Hillary" and called for her prosecution.  Now, in a story that broke a around 3:330 this evening by Politico, it turns out that Jared Kushner, a/k/a "Prince Jared," has been using a private email account to conduct official White House business on a regular basis:

Presidential son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner has corresponded with other administration officials about White House matters through a private email account set up during the transition last December, part of a larger pattern of Trump administration aides using personal email accounts for government business.

POLITICO has seen and verified about two dozen emails.  “Mr. Kushner uses his White House email address to conduct White House business,” Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Kushner, said in a statement Sunday. 

Note that per the article, Kushner is apparently note the only individual using a private personal account to conduct official business.  Like Clinton, Kushner said he did so as a "matter of convenience," although given some of Kushner's questionable - and initially unreported - meetings with Russian operatives and BFF's of Vladimir Putin, one has to wonder what other business might have been conducted using the account.  If we use Trump's standard for Clinton on his son-in-law, then Kushner should be looking at prison time.  The deliciousness of Trump's hypocrisy is off the charts.  Here are highlights from the Washington Post's story on the breaking story:

President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner has used a private email account to conduct and discuss official White House business dozens of times, his lawyer confirmed Sunday.

Kushner used the private account through his first nine months in government service, even as the president continued to criticize his opponent in the 2016 presidential election, Democrat Hillary Clinton, for her use of a private email account for government business. Kushner several times used his account to exchange news stories and minor reactions or updates with other administration officials.

Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, set up the private account before Donald Trump moved into the White House and Kushner was named a senior adviser to the president in January. Once in the White House, Kushner used his private account for convenience from time to time — especially when he was traveling or using a personal laptop, according to two people familiar with his practice. A person who has reviewed the emails said many were quickly forwarded to his government account and none appear to contain classified information.

Clinton offered a similar explanation in 2015 when it was revealed that she set up a private email account as her exclusive means of email communication when she was secretary of state. Clinton also said she opted for private email “as a matter of convenience.” She insisted that she never shared classified information on her private account or tried to sidestep the federal law that requires that official government communications are preserved. Kushner’s use of a private account was first reported Sunday by Politico.

Trump repeatedly blasted Clinton during the 2016 campaign for her email practices — and has continued to do so for many months after defeating her in the race to the White House.

“What the prosecutors should be looking at are Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 deleted emails,” Trump said in West Virginia in early August. 

The president had a similar refrain in mid-July, when his son Donald Trump Jr. faced questions about a meeting he had with a Russian lawyer during the campaign after he was offered incriminating information about Clinton.

Lowell declined to answer questions about how it was determined that none of the emails contained classified information. Clinton also claimed none of her emails contained classified information, but later reviews founds hundreds contained secret information and a small handful contained top secret material.

People familiar with his communications said former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and former senior adviser Stephen K. Bannon also used private email accounts from time to time, including in their exchanges with Kushner. It’s unclear if these officials forwarded emails to their White House accounts, said one White House official.

It would appear that special prosecutor Robert Mueller and Congressional committees investigating Russiagate have more things to subpoena and review.  Again, Trump's hypocrisy is stunning.

White Supremacists Got What they Wanted with DACA Rescission

Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions - a man who refused to prosecute KKK members for lynching a black man when he and I both lived in Mobile - made the announcement today for a cowardly Donald Trump indicating that the Obama administration executive order protecting undocumented individuals brought to America as children would be rescinded.  Given Sessions' unbridled racism, it a wonder he didn't have an organism while making the announcement. Placing 800,000 mostly non-white individuals at risk of deportation is a dream come true for Sessions, Trump's white supremacist supporters and a host of racist Republican officials. Yes, Sessions sought to dress the decision up with legal arguments, but the real hope is that Congress will fail to act and then these individuals can be deported.  Driving home I heard Kris Kobach, the Secretary of State of Kansas, a vociferous immigrant hater in my view, and a Trump supporter, claim that families would not be broken up as a result.  His solution was to have entire families  return to the parents countries of origin, including U.S. born children.  That's right, he's perfectly fine with the defacto deportation of U.S. citizens who would have to wait until age 18 to return to America.  Why? Because - although he won't say it directly and engages in legal mambo jumbo - most would be Hispanics and other non-whites.  That's the Reality of what today's Republican Party stands for.   I hope I'm proven wrong and Congress reverses this ruthless policy, but I will not be holding my breath.  As for the evangelical Christians who support this administration, this merely further confirms that they are truly horrid people who need to be shunned by decent and moral people.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the Democrats who see through Trump's charade as I do. Here are excerpts:

Democrats, dismayed but not surprised by President Trump’s decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, were quick to issue statements of condemnation and offer up legislative fixes. They were also bolder than they’d been in the past to make a heavy accusation: The president, in the wake of deadly neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville, was giving white supremacists what they wanted.

“It is clear that the president eliminated DACA to advance his xenophobic agenda,” Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) said in a statement. “This repeal aligns with the interests not of the 78 percent of Americans opposed to deporting these young people, but of un-American anti-DACA white supremacist leaders like Richard Spencer. Spencer has called himself a former ‘mentor’ to close Trump adviser, Stephen Miller, who urged the president to end the program.”

Conyers, who is in line to run the House Judiciary Committee if Democrats retake the House, was one of several Democrats who invoked racists, Charlottesville, or both, to describe the president’s decision as a sop to bigots.

 

“The president is breaking apart families and bruising our economy,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said in his statement. “And on the heels of Charlottesville, he is signaling to champions of hate and bigotry that their voices matter most.”

Rep. Luis V. Gutiérrez (D-Ill.), the House’s main advocate for DACA, singled out White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, saying in a statement that he’d been lied to about the fate of the program. Then he went further, accusing Kelly of siding with white supremacists.

“General Kelly is a hypocrite who is a disgrace to the uniform he used to wear,” Gutiérrez said. “He has no honor and should be drummed out of the White House along with the white supremacists and those enabling the president’s actions by ‘just following orders.’ ”

The final hypocrisy is Sessions and  Kobach whining about "protecting the Constitution and the rule of law" when Trump utterly ignores the Emoluments Clause and other legal norms and Kobach and his Republican cohorts seek to disenfranchise minorities and are waging a homophobic war on the LGBT community, particularly those who are transgender. 

Russiagate: Blood in the Water?

Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, has been in Saudi Arabia where he has bowed to the Saudi King - Fox News edited that visual from its coverage - and participated in a sword dance - an all male and sinister performance, and had hos Secretary of State criticize Iran for human rights abuses while ignoring the reality that Saudi Arabia is as bad or worse in this regard.  A column in the Washington Posted noted all this as follows:

It was a very strange place to speak out against Islamist extremism. Although Saudi Arabia is afraid of some forms of Islamist extremism, it supports others. Saudi Arabia sponsors extremist Wahabi mosques and imams all over the world; Osama bin Laden was a Saudi citizen, as were 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers.

Tillerson talking about human rights in Iran. Yes, Americans are often hypocritical about where and when they promote human rights. But to denounce human rights in Iran while standing in Saudi Arabia, a place where there is no political freedom and no religious freedom, brought hypocrisy to a whole new level. Better not to have said anything at all. 

As with all things Trump, the hypocrisy was stunning.  Meanwhile at home, many have a sense that there is now blood in the water so to speak in terms of Russiagate.  A column in the New York Times looks at this circumstance and the growing list of questions that require truthful and complete answers:

Donald Trump has left the country for his first foreign trip as president and what he has left behind is a brewing crisis that appears to deepen by the day, and even the hour.

There is a sense that blood is in the water, that Trump’s erratic, self-destructive behavior, aversion to honesty and authoritarian desire for absolute control may in some way, at some point, lead to his undoing and that the pace of that undoing is quickening.

Last week Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein took the extraordinary step of naming former F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller as a special counsel to oversee the investigation of ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, and “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.”

This was a significant ratcheting up. This is a criminal inquiry, by an independent operator who is well respected. The investigation is now largely insulated from politics.

But that has not stopped Trump from whining in a tweet, “This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!”

Not only is this a laughable assertion that could only be uttered by someone who isn’t a student of history or a reader of books, but it also resurfaces one of Trump’s most vexatious qualities: perpetual wallowing in self-victimization and the shedding of his own tears for a spurious suffering that only exists in the muddle of his mind.

You are not being unfairly targeted; instead your above-the-rules, beyond-the-law sense of privilege is being tested and found insufficient. It will not immunize you against truth and justice.

There are very serious questions here, ones that include but are not limited to collusion. They also now include the possibility of treason, obstruction of justice and making false statements.

It is increasingly clear that there is more to know than we now know.

There is more to know about former National Security Adviser Michael T. Flynn’s activities, and who knew what about those activities and when. There is more to know about the president’s interactions with James Comey and the reason for Comey’s firing. There is more to know about the true extent of contact between Trump associates and the Russians.

Did the president have inappropriate conversations with Comey, then director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in an effort to exculpate himself and mitigate inquiries about Flynn? . . . One of these men is lying. And while I am no fan of Comey — his buzzer-beating hijinks with Hillary’s email just before the election helped hand this country over to Trump and his cabal of corruption — I am more prone to believe him than Trump, a proven, pathological liar.

The crisis isn’t limited only to Trump.

Did Vice President Mike Pence not know that Flynn was under investigation by the F.B.I. for lobbying on behalf of Turkey until “March, upon first hearing the news”? How can that be when, as The New York Times reported last week, Flynn “told President Trump’s transition team weeks before the inauguration that he was under federal investigation for secretly working as a paid lobbyist for Turkey during the campaign, according to two people familiar with the case.” Pence led the transition team.

How can Pence claim ignorance when Representative Elijah E. Cummings, ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent Pence a letter on Nov. 18, explicitly spelling [it] out . . . . 

It isn’t possible Pence knew nothing. I believe Pence is a liar like his boss.

We knew that Pence was a liar when during the vice-presidential debate he repeatedly claimed that Trump had not in fact said things that he was recorded on television saying.
The only difference between the two is delivery. Trump is bombastic and abrasive with his lies. Pence cleverly delivers his with earnestness and solemnity. But a lie is a lie.

The whole White House crew must be fully investigated and held to account. It is time for justice to be served and honor restored. The dishonest must be dislodged. 

Is the Trump Tax Story Finally Swaying Voters?

Personally, I find it difficult to understand how any sane and decent person can be supporting Donald Trump who I view as little better than a con-man who has payed a rigged system to better himself, typically at the expense of others.  Thankfully, the release of a part of his tax return that suggests that he may not have paid federal taxes for years seems to be doing two things in the minds of some voters: (i) showing Trump to be a parasitic freeloader, and (ii) dispelling the myth that he is a consummate businessman.  Skilled businessmen do not lose $900 million in a good economy.  A piece from the Washington Post looks at some of the reverberations in Ohio, a swing state, and Pennsylvania.  Here are excerpts:

The revelations about the Republican nominee’s taxes gave Clinton a fresh opportunity. In conversations around Toledo, many voters said they were offended by Trump.

“It’s disgusting,” said Steve Crouse, 65, the owner of Toledo’s downtown Glass City Cafe and a separate printing business. “As a businessman, he’s got that right to do that. It’s the way the laws were set up. But it’s not right. I would feel guilty if I didn’t pay anything. It’s flat-out cheating the government. You’re using all the roads, the fire department, the police, so you should pay for that.”

On his way into church, at the suburban parish he shares with Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), Fred Glynn, 63, said that Clinton’s support of abortion rights made her impossible to accept. But the tax story, which he had just seen on CNN, added to the reasons he would have to reject Trump.

“How can he not pay income taxes?” he asked. “He talks about helping people, but he doesn’t pay income tax? That’s helping everybody. It’s like the situation in Florida, where he didn’t pay taxes on his golf course. The school suffered from that.”

Separating Trump from his rhetoric by casting him as a dishonest and bumbling tycoon had been key to Clinton’s fight back, but for months, it didn’t penetrate. A TV spot that showed David Letterman revealing the China labels on Trump’s branded clothing didn’t move poll numbers. Clinton got little lift from a rally at the failed Trump Taj Mahal casino at Atlantic City.

[T]he tax returns gave Clinton an argument that would not have worked against Romney: that Trump’s swagger covered up a record of business failure. In the 24 hours since the tax leak, the $916 million loss has proven the toughest aspect for Republicans to spin.

“He ain’t that good,” said Alex Pickett, 52, while waiting for a bus that would take him to a downtown church. “Can’t be that good if he lost that much money.”

On Sunday afternoon, at a bar near Toledo’s resilient Chrysler complex, the size of Trump’s loss was a punch line. As the Cleveland Browns blew a game against the Redskins, Ron Amborski, 57, marveled at what he had just seen on Sunday talk shows.

“Rudy Giuliani called Trump a genius at least 12 times,” Amborski said. “Talk about overcompensating. ‘He’s a genius businessman! He made a genius comeback!’ I thought, ‘Man, if this was a drinking game, I’d be hammered.’ ”