A Man Who Is His Own Communications Director Has a Fool for a Boss

.. and it sounds like Trump's going to do just that. Trump's Communications Director, Mike Dubke, is taking my advice and resigning after only three months:

Immediate changes are planned for White House messaging, including:

• Sean Spicer will stay as press secretary, but will do fewer on-camera briefings (although he's on-camera today at 2 p.m.)

• More briefings will be on-record but off-camera.

• Trump is likely to travel more — at least once a week, some top officials hope.

• Trump may take a few questions from the press when he's on the road, and will take more questions when he's appearing at photo ops with foreign leaders.

 

• An official explained why Trump will do more of the talking for the White House: "He says things exactly the way he wants them to be said."

 

• Translation: When he says it, he can't second-guess his staff.

Bossie and Lewandowski have outside business that could make joining WH complex. But POTUS wants to be surrounded by campaign staffers now

— Alex Isenstadt (@politicoalex) May 30, 2017

He likes David Bossie and Corey Lewandowski because they're pugnacious in a way Sean Spicer and Sarah Huckabee-Sanders can't credibly be. This also means he's closing ranks. That really can't be good for him. He's already way short-staffed his administration and the number of people he feels he can trust to work for him is shrinking. This is following the "war room" model strategy that's been rumored for the last few days:

President Donald Trump has been aggressively working the phones since returning this weekend from his foreign trip, talking to friends and outside lawyers as he obsesses over the deepening investigations into his aides and Russia.

Two White House officials said Trump and some aides including Steve Bannon are becoming increasingly convinced that they are victims of a conspiracy against Trump's presidency, as evidenced by the number of leaks flowing out of government — that the crusade by the so-called “deep state” is a legitimate threat, not just fodder for right wing defenders.

Still, Trump and his aides are starting to take the probes more seriously, seeking to establish a communications team dedicated to dealing with questions around the probe and beefing up his legal representation. And they've become more rattled by the idea that they don't know where the scandals are headed and who may be ensnared next.

“The more people talk to him about it, the more he obsesses about it,” said one outside adviser who is close to the president. The White House did not respond to requests for comment as to how Trump was spending his day after returning from the nine-day foreign trip the night before. 

This is starting to feel like the final act of Macbeth, which is an analogy that author Anthony Cappo made, somewhat ironically, on the same fateful day the Comey letter put Trump into office:

This is the tragedy Trump threatens to play out now.  I used to fear a Trump presidency and all the destruction—both domestically and internationally—it would bring. Now I fear the aftermath of a Trump loss. His supporters seem to be in no mood to accept a losing electoral verdict, to acquiesce to the “rigged system.” And Trump is stoking the flames, threatening to keep the nation “in suspense” as to whether he is going to accept the election results. He seems perfectly ready to bring the whole “estate o’ th’ world” down with him. If Trump continues to question the legitimacy of the election, the consequences could be unpredictable. We could be in for a post-election full of sound and fury, and maybe worse.

Let's see... Giuliani, Bannon, and Kushner are the witches, Hillary is Duncan, Obama is basically Banquo's Ghost, Putin is Lady Macbeth, and Trump seems to be on the verge of going (even more) mad. And Birnam Wood (the intel community) is clearly moving towards the White House.

Who will be MacDuff? Is James Comey not of woman born? How about Angela Merkel?

Just please don't cast Pence or Ryan as Malcolm. I wouldn't buy tickets to  that show.

The Daily Combover - May 29, 2017

Happy Memorial Day! Whether you celebrate Memorial Day, Remembrance Day, Anzac Day, or Armistice Day the meaning is the same. The day commemorates the fallen soldiers who died to protect your nation.

This is the 47th Memorial Day celebration in the United States which follows a little over a century of a similar holiday known as Decoration Day. As is tradition, the President gives a Memorial Day speech to honor the troops -- those currently or formerly engaged in wartime and peacetime activities.

This particular Memorial Day, the President's speech had a glaring omission. Three days prior, a Nazi stabbed several people to death on a train, killing two men that tried to interfere with him as he verbally abused some young Muslim women on the train. One of the dead was a 53-year old decorated army veteran, Ricky John Best, and the other was a 23-year old graduate student, Taliesin Myrddin Namkai Meche.

For three days, Trump was silent. And yes, he was traveling in the air through a portion of that time but as Tony Posnanski pointed out:

Trump's tweets today...

4 About Fake News
1 Congratulating a man who assaulted a reporter
1 About Europe trip

0 Denouncing Portland attack

— Tony Posnanski (@tonyposnanski) May 28, 2017

The media backlash forced the White House to act. Official @potus Tweeter, Dan Scavino, wrote the following this morning:

The violent attacks in Portland on Friday are unacceptable. The victims were standing up to hate and intolerance. Our prayers are w/ them.

— President Trump (@POTUS) May 29, 2017

And the media went along with it and said that Trump finally wrote the Tweet. Here at the Daily Combover, we know better. We know the Fontange Fuhrer is incapable of goodness and compassion. We don't conveniently forget that Trump's former golf caddie, Dan Scavino, is the @potus Tweeter. We also don't see a single message from Trump's official handle, @realdonaldtrump, talking about the latest victims of Nazi terrorism. Instead he gave us a trio of generic Memorial Day tweets:

Honoring the men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice in service to America. Home of the free, because of the brave. #MemorialDay🇺🇸

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 29, 2017

Today we remember the men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice in serving. Thank you, God bless your families & God bless the USA!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 29, 2017

I look forward to paying my respects to our brave men and women on this Memorial Day at Arlington National Cemetery later this morning.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 29, 2017

Don't fall for the lies.

Catch you on the flip side.

Open Thread -- Memorial Day Edition

Just got home from my Memorial Day Weekend vacation. How was yours?

Earworm of the Afternoon -- Too Much

The Times Isn't Doing Any Better Today

Shockingly, the New York Times didn't change its ways in the 24 hours after I railed against them...

From DougJ at Balloon Juice:

Just now, the Times ran this ridiculous tongue bath of Kushner (via):

His preppy aesthetic, sotto voce style and preference for backstage maneuvering seemingly set him apart from his father-in-law — but the similarities outweigh the differences. Both men were reared in the freewheeling, ruthless world of real estate, and both possess an unshakable self-assurance that is both their greatest attribute and their direst vulnerability.

Mr. Kushner’s reported feeler to the Russians even as President Barack Obama remained in charge of American foreign policy was a trademark move by someone with a deep confidence in his own abilities that critics say borders on conceit, people close to him said. And it echoes his history of sailing forth into unknown territory, including buying a newspaper at age 25 and developing a data-analytics program that he has said helped deliver the presidency to his father-in-law.

He is intensely proud of his accomplishments in the private sector and has repeatedly suggested his tenure in Washington will hurt, not help, his brand and bottom line.

What is this about? Presumably it’s about cultivating Kushner and his people as surrogate, but, seriously…what the fuck? Other self-respecting papers don’t give their hand-jobs this publicly.

Well, Doug, some people are into that sort of thing...

But I don't, NYT, so can you please stop before I call the authorities?

What I'm Following This Week -- Week of 5/29/2017

This week might be a slow blogging week; I'm going to be on the move a lot.

• Trump's infrastructure plan: It's going to be a total sop to corporations and will accomplish little good for the people. Will the Democrats take it seriously?
• #TrumpRussia: What's going on with the War Room Trump is supposedly assembling? Does the abundance of Twitter blocking his account did last night having something to do with it? Also, what happens with Kushner?
• Will there be more fallout from Trump's time in Europe?
• What's up with the fugue state video?
• Will we see more of Hillary? I was glad to see her last week and I'm looking forward to seeing what she does next.

Have a week, people.

Non Sequitur

In the last hour, Trump (or presumably a staffer, because it's plain writing) fired off three tweets about Memorial Day. But in the middle, he tweeted this:

North Korea has shown great disrespect for their neighbor, China, by shooting off yet another ballistic missile...but China is trying hard!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 29, 2017

"but China is trying hard!" I don't know what he even means, but it seems to me that, per what we've heard about discussions with his lawyers, they're trying to get him to cut out his tweeting, so they're doing it for him, but he's still jumping in with his nonsensical crap. That's not a dam that's gonna hold.

TGC Digest -- Week of 5/22/2017

What you may have missed on TGC this week:

Monday

The Daily Combover - May 22, 2017 -- The symbolism of Trump's time in the Middle East.

Tuesday

More #TrumpRussia Testimony -- Not very good news for Trump.

Contacts and Interactions -- Trey Gowdy didn't think the John Brennan testimony was significant. Spoiler: It was.

The Daily Combover - May 23, 2017 -- Ari tells us what Trump's aspirational budget would actually cut. It's a lot. A WHOLE lot.

Wednesday

A Failed Exorcism --Seems like the Pope would've rather had anyone visit other than Trump.

What a Monster! -- Hillary is clearly the mom of Satan.

The Daily Combover - May 24, 2017 -- Trump and Duterte are buddies!

 

Thursday

Just Plain Embarrassing -- The election results are all Trump has to hang his hat on with his really small hands.

Body Slam Greg Gianforte -- The Republicans defend Gianforte, because they're terrible people.

The Daily Combover - May 25, 2017 -- Jesus, Trump's trip was terrible!

Friday

Trump's Playing with Fire -- I made a prediction that came through in like eight hours.

The Daily Combover - May 26, 2017 -- Trump really was a laughingstock in Europe.

Not Going to Make an "I Went to Jared" Crack -- OK, I basically did. But how can you not? Dude's in deep crap.

#HRC46 -- #ImStillWithHer, goddammit. That's the Hill I'm going to die on.

 

Saturday

In Which I Advise Trump's Advisors -- This one was fun to write. And also, probably, good advice!

Late Night Track -- Pigs (Three Different Ones)

Roger Waters - Pigs (Three Different Ones) (US... by chongsavell


Hmmm... doesn't seem to like Donald Trump all that much.

Has The NYT Forfeited Its Place As the Paper of Record?

I'm not going to entirely rehash my disdain for the New York Times; I've done it enough. But I found some irony in an article the NYT published today about what the press is facing:

@NathanLerner @ManMet80 Awful, but I can't help noticing that NYT has highest ratio of "knew it could happen/could've done something but didn't" of any major pub.

— Great Consolidation (@tgconsolidation) May 28, 2017

Am I saying we shouldn't bail out the NYT if it and its reporters need defending against the creeping anti-media, proto-fascist attacks? Of course we should. My point is that once their asses are out of the fire, we should stop pretending they should be treated like they belong on the front lines. They're the boy who didn't cry wolf when there was a pack of them bearing down on the village.

The Times should've realized that freedom of the press was in peril from the minute Trump won the nomination, if not quite a bit before, and sounded the alarm at that point. But they didn't. This is a true story from my time volunteering for Clinton, along with a lesson the Times didn't learn after the election:

But the level of obsequiousness it takes for someone [Times reporter Maggie] Haberman who Trump referred to by name as a "third-rate reporter" and about whom a friend of hers told me a month or so that she worried for her safety because of the things Trump said regarding her to open with a polite, "I’d like to thank you for being here" is just mind-boggling. Historians will need to coin a special term for that sort of treatment as they conduct a post-mortem on this era.

With the exception of the Washington Post (probably because Trump banned them from his appearances for a while), most of the rest of the mainstream press wasn't that much better than the Times during the election, particularly CNN and its inclusion of Trump surrogates that did nothing but lie being mostly held in the same esteem as those telling the truth.

Most of the major publications that I follow have learned some lessons from the 2016 election.

CNN has done a good jo for making up for their sins. They often appear to have Trump surrogates on just to ridicule them. Conservatives don't appear to get an equal number of slots on their panels anymore, and it's made the news much more informative.

MSNBC is a mixed bag -- they've got Reid, Hayes, and Maddow still going strong, but don't seem to be committed to those sorts of voices, no matter how popular they are.

And the Washington Post has been excellent; I in fact subscribed to them last week, and I haven't paid for access to a traditional news publication in at least 15 years.

But the Times? Still blowing it. Their parroting the clearly untrue party line about Kushner is irresponsible:

The Times was not able to report the detail about using Russian secure communications facilities for the secret channel but neither did it dispute that part of the story. The key detail in the Times story is an alternative version of why Kushner and Flynn were trying to do this.

It is unclear who first proposed the communications channel, but the people familiar with the meeting said the idea was to have Mr. Flynn speak directly with a senior military official in Moscow to discuss Syria and other security issues. The communications channel was never set up, the people said.

The three people were not authorized to discuss the December meeting and spoke on the condition of anonymity. The White House declined to comment on Friday night.

If this explanation were proposed by anyone else I would say it was absurd on its face. But it comes under the bylines of three of the Times’ best reporters. Is this credible?

I would say it is not a credible explanation, at least if by that we mean an explanation of some legitimate activity.

The NYT has had some issues with being "incredible" (in the negative sense) in the past. What I'm wondering is just how many times they can do that while stiff being the first place millions of people, including lots of liberals and moderates, look to for news.

Scott Lemieux cites a piece by Daniel Davies from the Iraq War period concerning credibility in media and government:

There’s nothing wrong with reporters printing the administration line, per se, but given that these people lie about everything unless a claim can be corroborated it really needs to be approached with a great deal of skepticism, skepticism that is notably lacking in the story. Davies is again relevant here:

Fibbers’ forecasts are worthless. Case after miserable case after bloody case we went through, I tell you, all of which had this moral. Not only that people who want a project will tend to make innacurate projections about the possible outcomes of that project, but about the futility of attempts to “shade” downward a fundamentally dishonest set of predictions. If you have doubts about the integrity of a forecaster, you can’t use their forecasts at all. Not even as a “starting point”. By the way, I would just love to get hold of a few of the quantitative numbers from documents prepared to support the war and give them a quick run through Benford’s Law.

Application to Iraq This was how I decided that it was worth staking a bit of credibility on the strong claim that absolutely no material WMD capacity would be found, rather than “some” or “some but not enough to justify a war” or even “some derisory but not immaterial capacity, like a few mobile biological weapons labs”. My reasoning was that Powell, Bush, Straw, etc, were clearly making false claims and therefore ought to be discounted completely, and that there were actually very few people who knew a bit about Iraq but were not fatally compromised in this manner who were making the WMD claim. Meanwhile, there were people like Scott Ritter and Andrew Wilkie who, whatever other faults they might or might not have had, did not appear to have told any provable lies on this subject and were therefore not compromised.

The Times really is a Jekyll and Hyde publication. They break some of the most important stories in the world, and yet they've helped Republicans cover up bombshells and attacked Democrats for no good reason. I have some theories as to why, but it's safe to say that they're not coming at the news from the right perspective when we see ads like this:

Why should the paper want to be part of the story? When that happens, we get crap like this which, in this case, resulted in the election of the exact person who would be extremely dangerous to their existence and to the safety of their reporters.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Josh Marshall, the publisher of Talking Points Memo (which is essentially the "paper" of record for this shitty blog as far as I'm concerned), is downright bashful about a small opportunity to say that he waded into history, and it's rather endearing... I would not use the word "endearing" to describe the Times at all.. Except for maybe Paul Krugman; he just looks like a teddy bear!