Living in a world that exists only in his mind

 

Brain worms?

And of course, they just let him say it without correction.

The thanks you get for asskissing

President Donald Trump has a penchant for calling out the names of key supporters at his campaign events, and a Friday rally in Ocala, Florida was no different — but he badly botched the name of one of his most vocal fans in Congress, mixing up Rep. Matt Gaetz’s name with that of Rick Gates, a former Trump aide who pled guilty to crimes related to Russian interference in the 2016 election and pro-Putin efforts in Ukraine.

[...]

Gates was sentenced to 45 days in jail, 3 years of probation, a $20,000 fine, and 300 hours of community service, a reduced sentence due to his testimony against Manafort and cooperation with the Mueller investigation. Due to the pandemic, Gates’ prison sentence has been temporarily suspended by court order.

[...]

At Friday’s rally, Trump again criticized Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who was the target of an attempted scheme to kidnap and murder her.

[...]

“And then she said it was my fault,” said Trump, about Whitmer. “It was my people that caught them. It was Trump’s fault. It’s always Trump’s fault.”

“Can it ever be, like, Rick Gates’ fault?” Trump continued, as he pointed to Gaetz, who was near the stage to Trump’s left. “I mean, eh? It’s always Trump’s fault, Rick.”

  Mediaite

I wish we had a picture of the moment that surely happened when Gaetz' face went from a beaming smile to a sad baby.

The president then launched into a short riff ranting about “shameless, wealthy, liberal hypocrites in Washington, D.C. and Silicon Valley,” saying that he didn’t “want their money” and didn’t call them and didn’t want to help them.

[...]

“We are going to win,” said Trump, “that’s why they raise money. I could raise much more money. Every call I make. Every single guy, even though they hated me, they’d all contribute. But Rick, you understand it, I don’t want to make those calls.”

People in the crowd started shouting “Matt” and “Matt Gaetz,” trying to get Trump to say the right name.

Gasp! How dare they!

Trump continued, still saying the wrong name a few more times as the crowd kept trying. “I don’t want to make those calls, right? Huh? Yeah, I know. Where is Rick? He’s here. Where is Rick? Where is Rick?”

Old Dimbulb didn't know what they were yelling, or why.

Finally, the president got the right moniker for the congressman. “So, I just want to thank everybody, and we do have some special people. Uhh, Matt, stand up. Come here, I just want to tell something. This guy, Matt Gaetz. So, Matt’s been another one of our stars.”

[...]

“How are we doing in Florida, Matt? Huh?” Trump asked. Gaetz grinned and held up his arms as the crowd cheered.

Somebody got word to him. Was he wearing an earpiece? Saying his name three times in succession to make sure you know he knows.

Poor Matt.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Jesus Christ, this guy

Is it any wonder this country is falling apart?  Or why the stock market is so volatile?  Sometimes I wonder if he's just seeing how much he can fuck things up.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Dementia?

He knows he's said the wrong word, because he amends his statement with a synonym, and then he does it again.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

What else he told the RNC donors

To prevent leaks from Trump's Friday night Mar-a-Lago speech to RNC donors, security guards made attendees put their cellphones in magnetized pouches that they carried around like purses until they left the club.

So leakers had to rely on their memories. Trump entered to Lee Greenwood’s "Proud to Be an American," then launched into one of his trademark stream-of-consciousness speeches, according to three people who were there. They said the crowd roared with laughter throughout.

  Axios

At him or because they love him?

Referring to the recent anti-Semitism controversies with Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, Trump told the donors: "The Democrats hate Jewish people." Trump said he didn't understand how any Jew could vote for a Democrat these days. Trump talked about how much he'd done for Israel, noting his historic decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Trump said if he could run to be prime minister of Israel, he'd be at 98% in the polls, according to three sources who were there.

[...]

Trump went off on what one guest called a "bizarre tangent." He described being home alone in the White House over Christmas "while the Democrats were in Hawaii."

Trump described opening his curtain to look at Secret Service agents swarming the White House lawn. "They're in the trees, on the lawn," he said. He said he saw agents wearing night vision goggles. "They're in blackface," Trump added, jokingly referring to the masks over the agents' faces. Trump joked that the agents were "in blackface" because of the masks so maybe "they have to take them away," according to two sources who were there. (The sources assumed Trump was referring to the recent controversy in which the Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam was caught in a racist costume in his 1984 medical school yearbook.)

[...]

Trump only mentioned three 2020 Democrats in his remarks: Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Trump called Biden "the dummy." He announced that he now calls Sanders "the nutty professor" instead of "Crazy Bernie." Referring to Warren's low poll numbers, Trump said he "took her out really early" and that he doesn't want to do that to anybody else.

He's fruitloops. And these people are giving money to keep him around. They're either also fruitloops or mean, nasty people. Or both.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

LOLOLOL

Now it's a different story.



Yeah, who doesn't say a CEO's first name plus their company as a way to save time and words?  It's a common practice.

Before people widely published the audio, this was his excuse:



The Putz couldn't have just admitted he misspoke?

Of course, he didn't tweet that first excuse, so maybe he figures his base won't have seen it.  Or maybe it's just because the video clearly shows him saying "Tim Apple" without a beat in between the two names to say Cook, softly or otherwise, and since he simply cannot tell the truth, he devised a different lie.

Two donors who were there told me they couldn't understand why the president would make such a claim given the whole thing is captured on video. Nobody cared, they said, and Tim Cook took it in good humor by changing his Twitter profile to Tim Apple.

"I just thought, why would you lie about that," one of the donors told me. "It doesn't even matter!"

  Axios

I have a question for the donor: why are you still giving this asshat money?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Trump's kidnap fantasy tells a tale of Trump's mental facility (or lack thereof)

"The stories he tells about workers gladly giving up their paychecks for his drowsy racist fantasies and the villains working against him are mostly just sounds he makes to keep himself interested."

“It’s not going to change a damn thing,” the President of the United States told an assemblage of news anchors at an off-the-record White House meeting some weeks ago. “But I’m still doing it.” To a certain extent, that groaning is just standard Trump shit—his signature all-caps triumphalism is balanced by an equal and opposite tendency towards teenish mopery when he doesn’t get what he wants fast enough, or hot enough, or served with proper deference.

[...]

There was some concern about that speech, because Trump had been doing that Trump thing where he gets bored and flutters his eyelids and then veers psychedelically off-script and begins drawling about some bizarre shit that no one can quite place or even parse. For a while, that meant interrupting himself to explain how smugglers bring women across borders into Texas and California and Arizona with specific types of tape over their mouths—he would list the types of tape that the smugglers used, usually mentioning that it was blue. “They get off the road and they drive out into the desert, and they come on, they make a left turn,” he told a media gaggle on January 4. “Usually it’s a left, not a right.” The Washington Post dutifully attempted to run down where Trump might have been getting this, and mostly failed. It could have been a chopped-and-screwed remix of something a border patrol agent told him, it could have been from the sequel to Sicario, some poreless beige security goblin might have leered it out from within a box next to Lou Dobbs. Joan Collins might have whispered it to him in a dream.

The “left turn” thing and the tape thing kept coming up. For weeks it went on like this—syntactically erratic tweets at unholy times of day about things no one understood, weird sneering answers to unheard questions issued while a helicopter whined a few yards away, photo opportunities in which grim-faced white people in suits or uniforms stood around behind Trump while he described the situation at the border as if recapping the plot of Cannonball Run.

But Trump read the nationally televised speech as written, which meant that it was both more egregious and more boring than usual—heavier on terms like “humanitarian crisis” than his off-the-cuff statements, with notably less action-movie color around the margins. It was the sort of performance that used to get him called “presidential” by certain clammy professional types.

[...]

On Friday, when Trump’s TelePrompter froze during a brief appearance announcing the end of the shutdown—or, anyway, announcing that it would at least be three weeks before a second one—he was left to ad-lib about illegal immigration and the wall he wants to build to stop it. He talked about the tape again.

What most bears repeating and is most readily forgotten about Trump, even after his shutdown stole paychecks from 800,000 government employees and more than a million contractors for reasons even he never seemed to understand, is that he has no idea what he’s doing.

  David Roth

That bears running on an endless loop. He really doesn't. He is simply a mass of ganglia reacting to stimuli.

There were certainly ways in which Trump’s shutdown reflected both traditional reactionary values—bullying and stiffing vulnerable working people are core to both Trump and his party—and Trump’s unique determination to leverage his every ugly belief to the max, but also there was never the sense that any of this was happening by design. On Friday, he agreed to the same deal that he rejected 35 days ago for the same reason that he rejected it then, which is that he decided it was the right thing to do. The belief, however inchoate and incoherent, is the thing.

He believes the bit about the smugglers and the duct tape because he believes it, and because he believes it now he will never stop believing it.

And belief, for Trump comes from his gut. More nerve mass reaction.

This is also true, and maybe even especially true, when Trump is obviously lying. Even before he banged his own personal left turn and began his full-tilt drive into the desert of cognitive decline, Trump was not an especially nuanced or strategic person. His mind is not what it was, and at its peak it was more of a Magic 8 Ball than a supercomputer. He can’t learn anything because he can’t listen to other people if they aren’t speaking from inside a television; he can’t remember what he hears there because he can’t really care unless it’s about him. These deficits are clear when Trump is extemporizing on furloughed workers cutting deals with the milkman or imagining cartoon coyotes piloting sedans full of duct-taped women across the Rio Grande, but they are even clearer when he tells knowing lies. The former tend to be about other people, and so tend to be both lurid and half-assed; he only really ever applies himself when the lies involve himself.

[...]

The stories he tells about workers gladly giving up their paychecks for his drowsy racist fantasies and the villains working against him are mostly just sounds he makes to keep himself interested; he might have noticed that they drew louder-than-usual hoots from the seething grandparents and dead-ender rubes at his rallies, but he also might not have. His lies, though, are more elemental. They are never anything more than the opposite of truth. If Trump keeps insisting that he’s not being investigated for his relationship to Russia in gratuitous and unconvincing ways, it’s not because he’s trying to leverage some advanced placement Dealpoint or exploit some hidden businessman’s trick or angle. It’s because he’s literally fucking being investigated for his relationship with Russia [...]

I think that pretty much nails it. And then he trots out Rudy to condition the audience for the actual reveal.

[...] and because he very much wants people to think he’s not, and because that’s honestly the best he can do because his brain is an old donut bobbing around in a toilet.

Great visual. Now go ahead and read the rest of this marvelous article.  Not much remains, but it deserves the clicks.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Totally bonkers

You can think of no reason?  Perhaps those previous three tweets just an hour earlier might be a hint at one?

P.S.  Get ready Russia. Missiles are coming.  I thought you were against telling the "enemy" what you're going to do.  You told us that was a stupid thing to do.*

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Also...





Serious answer:  Not very well.  Perhaps it was Fox News that misled him about the NYT story this morning, because he can watch TV.  Whether he even gets the TV stories straight, however, is not entirely certain.



UPDATE:



From both parties and 99% of the media.

UPDATE:



*UPDATE:

Truly, he is off his rocker

Leaks from the private fundraiser Trump just held in Missouri:

“Trudeau came to see me. He’s a good guy, Justin. He said, ‘No, no, we have no trade deficit with you, we have none. Donald, please,’ ” Trump said, mimicking Trudeau, according to audio of the private event in Missouri obtained by The Washington Post. “Nice guy, good-looking guy, comes in — ‘Donald, we have no trade deficit.’ He’s very proud because everybody else, you know, we’re getting killed.

“... So, he’s proud. I said, ‘Wrong, Justin, you do.’ I didn’t even know. ... I had no idea. I just said, ‘You’re wrong.’ You know why? Because we’re so stupid. … And I thought they were smart. I said, ‘You’re wrong, Justin.’ He said, ‘Nope, we have no trade deficit.’ I said, ‘Well, in that case, I feel differently,’ I said, ‘but I don’t believe it.’ I sent one of our guys out, his guy, my guy, they went out, I said, ‘Check, because I can’t believe it.’

‘Well, sir, you’re actually right. We have no deficit, but that doesn’t include energy and timber. … And when you do, we lose $17 billion a year.’ It’s incredible.”

  WaPo

So that's the indecipherable word salad reported by WaPo that led to the indecipherable tweet:



The one thing both tell us is that he has no fucking idea what he's talking about.

The Office of the United States Trade Representative says the United States has a trade surplus with Canada. It reports that in 2016, the United States exported $12.5 billion more in goods and services than it imported from Canada, leading to a trade surplus, not a deficit.

[...]

In his 30-minute speech to donors in Missouri, Trump made a blistering attack against major U.S. allies and global economies, accusing the European Union, China, Japan and South Korea of ripping off the United States for decades and pillaging the U.S. workforce. He also described the North American Free Trade Agreement as a disaster and heaped blame on the World Trade Organization for allowing other countries to box in the United States on trade.

Only 30 minutes?

Trump seemed to threaten to pull U.S. troops stationed in South Korea if he didn’t get what he wanted on trade with Seoul, an ally. He said that the country had gotten rich but that U.S. politicians never negotiated better deals. “We have a very big trade deficit with them, and we protect them,” Trump said. “We lose money on trade, and we lose money on the military. We have right now 32,000 soldiers on the border between North and South Korea. Let’s see what happens.”

[...]

Trump said countries can request exemptions from these tariffs but only after direct negotiations with him. The audio from the fundraiser shows how difficult these discussions could prove.

No shit. I wonder how language translators are going to present what he says.

The president was in Missouri to raise money for Josh Hawley, who is taking on Sen. Claire McCaskill (D) in November's midterm election. He called McCaskill “bad for Missouri and bad for the country.” But he barely spoke about Hawley. Instead, he talked about himself.

What a surprise.

Trump spoke as his White House tried to pick up the pieces after Democrats' apparent victory in a special election in a western Pennsylvania congressional district that Trump won by 20 points in 2016. Pollsters said the results showed how Trump was dragging down the Republican Party, but the president took none of the blame. He said the Republican candidate, Rick Saccone, would have lost by a wider margin without his support — Trump held a rally for Saccone over the weekend. And he said the Democrat, Conor Lamb, won the seat because he was “like Trump” but that Lamb would vote with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

Somebody needs to adjust his meds.

"It's called the bowling ball test; do you know what that is? That's where they take a bowling ball from 20 feet up in the air and they drop it on the hood of the car," Trump said of Japan. "And if the hood dents, then the car doesn't qualify. Well, guess what, the roof dented a little bit, and they said, nope, this car doesn't qualify. It's horrible, the way we're treated. It's horrible." It was unclear what he was talking about.

[...]

“Do me a favor: Don’t call it tax reform. It hasn’t worked in 45 years,” Trump said he told others. “You say you’re reforming taxes, that means taxes could go up.”

“I actually said, ‘Let’s call it the Tax Cut Cut Cut plan,’ ” Trump said. “I actually did.”

He added: “They thought it sounded a little hokey, so we called it the tax cut and jobs plan. I liked the first one better.”

Crackers.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

On with the book saga

Donald Trump’s lawyers threatened legal action on Wednesday night against his former right-hand man Steve Bannon, marking a fresh escalation after a day of turmoil that left the White House reeling.

A cease and desist letter accuses Bannon of violating a non-disclosure agreement by speaking about his time on Trump’s election campaign to Michael Wolff, whose new book has caused shockwaves in Washington.

  Guardian

I'm not at all surprised by a threat to sue. This is standard Trump. The "cease and desist" part is meant to stop publication of the book.  And, of course, apologize to the president.  Apparently, they sent a cease and desist to both the publisher and Bannon individually for violating prior agreements.

Charles Harder, the president’s lawyer, told ABC News that Bannon’s communications with Wolff “give rise to numerous legal claims including defamation by libel and slander, and breach of his written confidentiality and non-disparagement agreement with our clients. Legal action is imminent.”

[...]

Bannon hosted Breitbart News Tonight on Sirius XM radio as usual on Wednesday night, CNN reported, and made little reference to the acrimony. But when a caller brought up the issue, Bannon replied: “The president of the United States is a great man. You know I support him day in and day out.”

[...]

Now executive chairman of the conservative Breitbart News website, Bannon is known to be planning to throw his weight behind several candidates that share his hardline nationalist agenda.

Surely they don't want him to cease and desist from that.

“Aides thought they had more time to prepare for the book’s formal release,” the Washington Post reported on Wednesday night. “Trump spent much of the day raging about the book to top aides, officials and advisers said … As he fumed, some aides were still frantically searching for a copy of the book, and even senior aides like [Hope] Hicks had not seen it by the afternoon, officials said.”

[...]

Wolff said in an author’s note that the book was based on more than 200 interviews, including multiple conversations with the president and senior staff. But [spokeswoman Sarah] Sanders claimed that Wolff “never actually sat down with the president” and had spoken with him just once, briefly, since Trump had taken office. She dismissed the book as “trashy tabloid fiction”.

Which liar are we supposed to believe?  Reportedly, Wolff has tapes.  Darn those tapes.  Always getting Old Lard Ass in trouble.

The furious controversy consumed time and energy in the west wing just as Trump prepared for a weekend retreat at Camp David with Paul Ryan, the House speaker, and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell to discuss Republicans’ plans for 2018. The stakes could not be higher with the president’s approval rating at rock bottom and mid-term elections looming in November.

Think they'll tell him they don't need his services any more?

The Trump administration is also going to start barring White House employees and guests from using their personal cellphones at work, press secretary Sarah Sanders said early Thursday.

Sanders said in a statement that the "security and integrity of the technology systems at the White House is a top priority for the Trump administration."

  The Hill

I bet that's right.

It won't stop the leaking.

And here's that Hollywood Reporter article promised yesterday ( THR's Matt Belloni is going on CNN in a few minutes to talk about it.  You know who will be watching.  We'll be watching for the ensuing tweets.)

Excerpts:

Since the new White House was often uncertain about what the president meant or did not mean in any given utterance, his non-disapproval became a kind of passport for me to hang around — checking in each week at the Hay-Adams hotel, making appointments with various senior staffers who put my name in the "system," and then wandering across the street to the White House and plunking myself down, day after day, on a West Wing couch.

[...]

The nature of the comedy, it was soon clear, was that here was a group of ambitious men and women who had reached the pinnacle of power, a high-ranking White House appointment — with the punchline that Donald Trump was president. Their estimable accomplishment of getting to the West Wing risked at any moment becoming farce.

[...]

Kellyanne Conway, who would put a finger-gun to her head in private about Trump's public comments, continued to mount an implacable defense on cable television, until she was pulled off the air by others in the White House who, however much the president enjoyed her, found her militancy idiotic. (Even Ivanka and Jared regarded Conway's fulsome defenses as cringeworthy.)

[...]

Steve Bannon tried to gamely suggest that Trump was mere front man and that he, with plan and purpose and intellect, was, more reasonably, running the show — commanding a whiteboard of policies and initiatives that he claimed to have assembled from Trump's off-the-cuff ramblings and utterances. His adoption of the Saturday Night Live sobriquet "President Bannon" was less than entirely humorous.

  Hollywood Reporter

And therein lay his downfall, I have no doubt. One is not allowed to be more important, more famous, smarter, or more admired than The Most Notable Loser.

"How much influence do you think Steve Bannon has over me? Zero! Zero!" Trump muttered and stormed.

[...]

Jared and Ivanka were against Priebus and Bannon, trying to push both men out. Bannon was against Jared and Ivanka and Priebus, practicing what everybody thought were dark arts against them. Priebus, everybody's punching bag, just tried to survive another day.

[...]

How to get along with Trump — who veered between a kind of blissed-out pleasure of being in the Oval Office and a deep, childish frustration that he couldn't have what he wanted? Here was a man singularly focused on his own needs for instant gratification, be that a hamburger, a segment on Fox & Friends or an Oval Office photo opp. "I want a win. I want a win. Where's my win?" he would regularly declaim. He was, in words used by almost every member of the senior staff on repeated occasions, "like a child." A chronic naysayer, Trump himself stoked constant discord with his daily after-dinner phone calls to his billionaire friends about the disloyalty and incompetence around him.

[...]

"It's a littleee, littleee complicated …" [Trump] explained to Priebus about why he needed to give his daughter and son-in-law official jobs.

[...]

By July, Jared and Ivanka, who had, in less than six months, traversed from socialite couple to royal family to the most powerful people in the world, were now engaged in a desperate dance to save themselves, which mostly involved blaming Trump himself. It was all his idea to fire Comey! "The daughter," Bannon declared, "will bring down the father."

"Littleee"? So maybe he really does say "bigly".

[Anthony] Scaramucci, a minor figure in the New York financial world, and quite a ridiculous one, had overnight become Jared and Ivanka's solution to all of the White House's management and messaging problems. After all, explained the couple, he was good on television and he was from New York — he knew their world.

[...]

There was, after the abrupt Scaramucci meltdown, hardly any effort inside the West Wing to disguise the sense of ludicrousness and anger felt by every member of the senior staff toward Trump's family and Trump himself. It became almost a kind of competition to demystify Trump. For Rex Tillerson, he was a moron. For Gary Cohn, he was dumb as shit. For H.R. McMaster, he was a hopeless idiot. For Steve Bannon, he had lost his mind.

Aha! Now I see where Trump came out yesterday with the "Steve Bannon has lost his mind" bit.

There was more: Everybody was painfully aware of the increasing pace of his repetitions. It used to be inside of 30 minutes he'd repeat, word-for-word and expression-for-expression, the same three stories — now it was within 10 minutes. Indeed, many of his tweets were the product of his repetitions — he just couldn't stop saying something.

Can we add OCD to his list of mental issues?

By summer's end, in something of a historic sweep [...] almost the entire senior staff, save Trump's family, had been washed out: Michael Flynn, Katie Walsh, Sean Spicer, Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon. Even Trump's loyal, longtime body guard Keith Schiller — for reasons darkly whispered about in the West Wing — was out. Gary Cohn, Dina Powell, Rick Dearborn, all on their way out. The president, on the spur of the moment, appointed John Kelly, a former Marine Corps general and head of homeland security, chief of staff — without Kelly having been informed of his own appointment beforehand.

Okay. I have to stop here a moment. Earlier, I wondered if George Papadopoulos was the person Fusion GPS refers to when they say the Steele dossier merely confirmed things the FBI already knew from intel and "someone inside the Trump camp." Then, I wondered if it could be Bannon. Now I have a third possibility: Keith Schiller. Recall that when he left the White House it was reported that he had testified regarding the Moscow hotel room (Pee Tape) claims. Could he have been"flipped" by Mueller's team early on? He would indeed be someone who knew lots of intimate things about Trump. ??

Insiders believed that the only thing saving Mueller from being fired, and the government of the United States from unfathomable implosion, is Trump's inability to grasp how much Mueller had on him and his family.

[...]

Donald Trump's small staff of factotums, advisors and family [...] came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.

At Mar-a-Lago, just before the new year, a heavily made-up Trump failed to recognize a succession of old friends.

And there, Wolff ends the article. Somebody look into that, ok? That's a major problem.