Stupid Donald Trump and the government shutdown he was proud to own

So, my message to Donald Trump is this.  "Stop taking advice from Ann Coulter and Russ Limbaugh". They got you into this impasse with Congress, by getting you to renege on your agreement to keep government open through the 2018-19, Christmas Holidays.

"Who will pay for the wall?" is the dumbest quote Donald Trump was ever recorded as saying- repeatedly; but, let's add another one to his growing stupidity list. 

(Donald, This is another shit hole situation you've gotten Republicans into.)

Trump also said that he is proud to own a government shut down. Well, obviously, Mexico will never pay for Trump's $5 Billion dollar disastrous border wall but, but, but....guess what else?  Yes. Donald Trump owns the disaster he said he would be so proud of causing. 

Max Boot echo opinion in The Washington Post:

President Trump has survived so many blunders that would have been the end of any other politician — from “grab ‘em by the pussy” to “shithole” countries — that you have to savor the irony that the one gaffe that may be more damaging than all the others has nothing to do with racism or sexism.

On Dec. 11, in the Oval Office, Trump told then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.): “I am proud to shut down the government for border security. . . . I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not going to blame you for it."

So now, as the shutdown entered its second month, the president owns that federal employees were waiting in food lines, like victims of the Great Depression.

Trump owned growing concerns expressed by air traffic controllers about the safety of air travel.

He owned the FBI Agents Association’s warning that the shutdown is impeding investigations into crime and terrorism — including probes of the MS-13 gang whose threat Trump has cited as a justification for his border wall.

He owned the State Department canceling a conference on — get this — border security.

He owned Agriculture Department meat inspectors and Transportation Security Administration officers calling in sick.

He owned the damage to the economy, which his own economist admits, could result in zero growth in the first quarter.

Trump’s retinue of Marie Antoinettes may not feel the pain, with daughter-in-law Lara Trump counseling federal workers to endure “a little bit of pain” and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross (reported net worth: $2.9 billion) professing himself baffled as to why workers without paychecks might need to go to food banks. But the rest of America rightly sees this as a severe crisis and it knows who to blame: the president who foolishly accepted the responsibility before launching on a catastrophic course of action with no plan and no exit strategy.

Disastrous statement from Wilbur Ross- "Let them get loans!"

According to a new Politico/Morning Consult poll, 54 percent of voters blame the president and Republicans for the shutdown, while only 35 percent blame Democrats. 

A CBS News poll shows Trump down to 36 percent approval and, in an Associated Press poll, down to 34 percent — the same level that President Richard M. Nixon hit approximately a year before his resignation.

Trump is even losing his base, with his support in the NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll down 13 percentage points among white evangelicals and 10 percentage points among Republicans.

Trump knows he is trapped on a tiny atoll that is sinking into the sea but, with water lapping around his ankles, he does not see any rescue vessel in sight. (Maybe the Coast Guard cutters are in port because of the shutdown?)

Trump cannot give up on his border-wall fantasy without looking weak and running the risk of losing his most fervent supporters (read: Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh- unelectable and not elected to advise a rat inspector).

But if he does not give up on his wall, he will alienate the rest of the electorate — including independents, whose support he needs to win another term and thus avoid indictment for another four years.

Trump has toyed with declaring a “state of emergency” to build the wall (and may still do so), but many Republicans were not willing to go along with such a blatant assault on the separation of powers.

Trump offered Democrats a pathetic deal — pay for the wall in return for three years of protection for the “dreamers” — but, with many dreamers already protected from deportation by court order, Democrats saw no reason to accede.

The president’s supporters imagine he is a manly man and a master negotiator (shirt seen at Trump rally: “Finally someone with balls”), but he has been outmaneuvered and out-muscled at every turn by a 78-year-old grandmother from San Francisco. The president conceded a humiliating defeat on Wednesday when he had to give up on his threats of marching into the House chamber, like Oliver Cromwell before the Long Parliament, to deliver the State of the Union address uninvited.

Trump has been so flummoxed by Pelosi, he can’t even come up with a hateful nickname for her — he calls her “Nancy.” A nation that sees political inexperience as a virtue must be flabbergasted to discover that someone with 32 years in elected office is better at politics than a newcomer who has been there for two years. As promised, Trump is running the government like a business. But it’s not Amazon or Apple. It’s the (now bankrupt) Trump Airlines or the Trump casinos.

So how do we get out of this endless impasse? 

It’s pointless to negotiate with a president who changes his mind by the tweet, cannot retain basic information and caters exclusively to his base. 

It’s time for congressional Republicans — that means you, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) — to stop allowing themselves to be held hostage by a president who appears hellbent on costing them even more seats in 2020 than he did in 2018. 

Cut a deal to reopen the government, increase funding for border security but not a wall, and leave Trump to rage in impotent fury to his friends at Fox News. Trump can retaliate against individual Republicans who cross him; he can’t retaliate against the entire Republican Party, at least not without committing political seppuku (aka Harikari).

MaineWriter- After the White House hate speech Donald Trump delivered today January 25, 2019, whereby he finally agreed to open the government, without accomplishing anything for the 35 days when it was closed....in my opinion, he put his unusual looking penis, described by Stormy Daniels, between his impotent ass and left the stage.

Donald Trump's racism in the face of antisemitism - Michael Cohen statement

In the post 2018 Mid Term Election news conference, Donald Trump cruelly read a list of names of candidates who lost their elections. His horrendous lie about the #BlueWave was to claim that the candidates lost their elections because they did not "embrace him". He never mentioned the negative public response to the Hollywood Access tape, to the Trump "both sides" response about Charlottesville or the heinous massacre of Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

Michael Cohen is talking about the racist "real  Donald Trump".

Donald Trump's inappropriate response to both the Charlottesville white supremicist assaults and his insensitivity to the burial of the victims of the Tree of Life synagogue massacre are consistent with the racist he really is. In fact, Trump's Twitter handle is @realDonaldTrump and nearly all of the Tweets he writes are caustic.

Mourners gathered in Pittsburgh to honor and remember the victims of the harrowing attack on the Tree of Life synagogue. 

Reported by Emily Jane Fox in Vanity Fair's  The Hive

As he awaits sentencing, Donald Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen says that he wants to clear his conscience and warn voters about what he sees as the president’s true nature.

Days earlier, while observing Shabbat, 11 Jews were murdered. Robert Bowers, the alleged suspect, later told a SWAT officer that he wanted all Jews to die. (Bowers has since pleaded not guilty.) 

The tragedy united thousands of Jews in Pittsburgh, who peacefully protested Donald Trump’s visit to the synagogue earlier this week. It also consumed a far larger constituency, which remained aghast that the alleged killer was motivated by fear fanned by the president of the United States.

Michael Cohen*, the president’s former lawyer (who plead guilty to breaking campaign finance laws, in the Robert Mueller investigation), was among those closely following the tragic story. 

Cohen is the son of a Holocaust survivor.

But, Cohen remained largely silent since the F.B.I. executed search warrants on his home, hotel room, and office this past spring. In August, he pleaded guilty to charges related to campaign-finance violations and tax fraud, and at the advice of counsel, he has not spoken publicly about his case or his relationship with the president ever since. Privately, he has been cooperating with investigators in the Southern District of New York, the special counsel’s office, and New York State. (He faces sentencing in the Southern District next month.) Yet Cohen wanted to express himself in the wake of the tragedy. Shortly after the sun rose on Tuesday, he tweeted, “In honor of those sadly being buried today resulting from #AntiSemitism #PittsburghSynagogueShooting, let’s follow the wisdom and thoughtful words of #RabbiJeffreyMyers ‘it can’t just be to say we need to stop hate. We need to do, we need to act to tone down rhetoric.’”

Like many, Cohen has observed the president’s scorched-earth campaign tactics as the midterm elections approach, and as the prospect of a Democratic House majority beckons, with its attendant promise of investigations and inquiries. 

He heard Trump’s constantly negative invocation of the migrant caravan moving through Central America; he’s noticed the president threaten to revoke birthright citizenship; he’s noted Trump’s tweet calling Florida’s African-American gubernatorial candidate, Andrew Gillum, a “thief,” without any evidence. 

He also watched Trump shirk responsibility after it was discovered that Bowers invoked the caravan in posts online ahead of the mass murder in Pittsburgh, and after one of his ardent supporters was charged last week with mailing pipe bombs to notable Democrats and other frequent Trumpian targets. (The suspect plans to plead not guilty.) On Twitter and during rallies, Trump has referred to the media as “the enemy of the people,”

blaming the free press for “the anger we see today in our society.”

That message rang hollow to those most familiar with the president and his language, including Cohen, who said he has spent the last several months quietly reflecting on his former boss and his own role in the Trump Organization. Amid the president’s recent tirades, Cohen has re-registered as a Democrat and urged people on Twitter to vote in the midterm elections, calling it possibly “the most important vote in our lifetime.” He said that events also activated within him an urge to reveal details from his tenure at the Trump Organization, during which he said the president privately uttered chilling, racist language in one-on-one conversations. On Tuesday, the day of the first funerals in Pittsburgh, he shared some of these memories.

Certainly, Cohen is aggrieved, and his credibility has been questioned by the president, his lawyers, and others. His allegations could inflame the very divisions that he’s said he wants to diffuse. Through the president’s public attacks against him, he stayed silent, as his lawyers advised, and he’s taken a risk in sharing these recollections on the record. When I asked him why he was coming forward now with such uncomfortable claims, Cohen was clear: he knew that the president’s private comments were worse than his public rhetoric, and he wanted to offer potential voters what he believed was evidence of Trump’s character and to do so in advance of the 2018 midterm elections.

During our conversation, Cohen recalled a discussion at Trump Tower, following the then-candidate’s return from a campaign rally during the 2016 election cycle. Cohen had watched the rally on TV and noticed that the crowd was largely Caucasian. He offered this observation to his boss. “I told Trump that the rally looked vanilla on television. Trump responded, ‘That’s because black people are too stupid to vote for me.’” (The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

This conversation, he noted, was reminiscent of an exchange that the two men had engaged in years earlier, after Nelson Mandela’s death. “[Trump] said to me, ‘Name one country run by a black person that’s not a shithole,’ and then he added, ‘Name one city,’” Cohen recalled, a statement that echoed the president’s alleged comments about African nations earlier this year. (White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders (aka by MaineWriter - Morticia) denied those comments at the time. She added that “no one here is going to pretend like the president is always politically correct—he isn’t.” She subsequently noted that it was “one of the reasons the American people love him.” - uhh-ahh, although 56 % do not).

Cohen also recounted a conversation he had with Trump in the late 2000s, while they were traveling to Chicago for a Trump International Hotel board meeting. “We were going from the airport to the hotel, and we drove through what looked like a rougher neighborhood. Trump made a comment to me, saying that only the blacks could live like this.” After the first few seasons of The Apprentice, Cohen recalled how he and Trump were discussing the reality show and past season winners. The conversation wended its way back to the show’s first season, which ended in a head-to-head between two contestants, Bill Rancic and Kwame Jackson. “Trump was explaining his back-and-forth about not picking Jackson,” an African-American investment manager who had graduated from Harvard Business School. “He said, ‘There’s no way I can let this black f-g win.’” (Jackson told me that he had heard that the president made such a comment. “My response to Trump is simple and Wakandan,” he said, referring to the fictional African country where Black Panther hails from. “‘Not today, colonizer!’”)

In retrospect, Cohen told me that he wishes he had quit the Trump Organization when he heard these offensive remarks. “I should have been a bigger person, and I should have left,” he said. He didn’t, he said, because he grew numb to the language and, in awe of the job, forgave his boss’s sins. 

Cohen, in fact, even defended the president publicly against charges of racism. Last year, he explicitly tweeted as much. 

Moreover, Cohen explained that he defended the president because he thought the magnitude of the office would eventually force him to be more judicious with his words. “I truly thought the office would change him,” he said. But it hasn’t, Cohen continued. In fact, he said, it has exacerbated his rhetoric.

Cohen’s claims would damage most presidents. Trump, however, survived the Access Hollywood tape in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.

In fact, incredulously, Trump's supporters stayed with him after his jarring “both sides” comment regarding the racial violence in Charlottesville, and didn’t bend when Omarosa Manigault Newman accused him of using vile racial language after she left the White House. (Trump referred to her as “that dog” after her book came out.) When Trump portrayed Brett Kavanaugh as a man under siege, his poll numbers went up. Trump seems to perform best with his base when he appears like his back is up against the wall. For Cohen’s part, he said he is hoping that people bear his words in mind as they vote (...in 2018 and in the future).

*Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump's longtime lawyer, has reached a plea deal with prosecutors.

• He entered guilty pleas to five counts of tax evasion, one count of making a false statement to a bank, one count of making an unlawful corporate contribution, and one count of making an illegal campaign finance contribution.
• Cohen is the focus of a criminal investigation in the Southern District of New York into whether he violated campaign-finance laws, committed bank fraud or wire fraud, engaged in illegal lobbying, or participated in other crimes.