LOL this picture

 

Trump's lips have muscle memory.  He's spent too much time sucking on a straw...or something.

Hilarious

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

Jesus, he looks like shit

Oh, wait.  He IS shit.

He has the best colors

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

The tan - it's getting worse

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

Dear god

Yes, it's real.

We've remarked on this before, but it's never been so obvious.

The photo has had the saturation level turned up, but here's one that hasn't:

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

UPDATE:

No.

He'll start carrying one of those transparent umbrellas that comes down over your shoulders to go out in public.  And dropping it behind him when he steps into the helicopter.

UPDATE:

What the maid knows

Remember those undocumented housekeepers at Trump's golf club who ratted him out?  They have more to say.

It was important for Sandra Diaz to be invisible.

Before entering the Trump family villa, she would tie back her hair, pull on latex gloves and step into delicate paper shoe coverings. She knew not to wear makeup or perfume that might leave the faintest trace of her presence.

As Donald Trump’s personal housekeeper, Diaz was dealing with a fussy celebrity owner who presided like a monarch over the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster long before he was elevated to president. She was an immigrant from Costa Rica working illegally for Trump with a fake Social Security card she had bought for $50. Being invisible was her life’s work.

[...]

Moving quickly through the two-story house in the mornings, Diaz carried out Trump’s fastidious instructions. In his closet, she would hang six sets of identical golf outfits: six white polo shirts, six pairs of beige pants, six neatly ironed pairs of boxer shorts. She would smear a dollop of Trump’s liquid face makeup on the back of her hand to make sure it hadn’t dried out.

  WaPo

It's makeup?? I guess that explains the seeming absence of a tanning bed in the White House, but it doesn't explain those perfectly goggle-shaped white areas around his eyes. I thought that might be from spray-on tanning stuff, but hand-applied makeup?? (More about this later.)

The years of service that Diaz and other undocumented immigrant housekeepers, cooks, landscapers, greenskeepers, waiters, bellhops, farm hands and caddies devoted to the Trump Organization have given them a remarkable vantage point into the unvarnished lives of the now-first family.

[...]

Their recollections also show how Trump’s entrance into presidential politics — denouncing illegal immigrants as criminals and job-stealers — upended their lives and prompted some of them to publicly confront their former boss.

Over the past year, The Washington Post has spoken with 48 people who had worked illegally for the Trump Organization at 11 of its properties in Florida, New Jersey, New York and Virginia. These workers spent years — and in some cases nearly two decades — performing the manual labor that keeps Trump’s resorts clean and their visitors fed.

This story is based on interviews with these workers, many of whom were fired or walked away from their jobs after media reports about their employment.

[...]

The Post sent White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham a list of the anecdotes that former undocumented employees told about the Trumps’ private quarters at Bedminster and his in-laws.

“The assertions made for this story are not only false, they are a disgusting attempt at invading the privacy of the First Family,” Grisham wrote in response. “This is not journalism — it is fabricated tabloid trash.”

Yeah, yeah.

Grisham did not specify which details were inaccurate. She also declined to answer questions about Trump’s longtime employment of undocumented workers and how it squares with his rhetoric about illegal immigration.

The Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment.

[...]

There were three questions nearly every immigrant who worked for him was asked as Trump strolled the grounds of his resorts and golf clubs inspecting their work. “Your name. How much time you’d been there. And if you like it,” said Margarita Cruz, a housekeeper. This banter often ended with Trump pulling out $50 and $100 bills for tips.

This transactional relationship of discreet service for long hours and often low pay began to evolve as Trump entered politics on the promise to keep out the upward-striving immigrant workers who crumbed his table and scoured his toilets. When Trump referred to some Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists, when he vowed to wall off the U.S.-Mexico border to prevent an immigrant “invasion,” the worry and anger began to build in the kitchens and laundry rooms of his properties.

[...]

So one day, Diaz, along with Victorina Morales, her successor as Trump’s housekeeper at Bedminster, decided to be seen.

When they spoke in articles in The Post, the New York Times and other publications beginning last December, it was not for money — as some of their shocked and frightened colleagues assumed — or really for politics, they said, but to highlight what they consider a glaring hypocrisy.

Trump, despite his rhetoric, had long employed illegal immigrants, and they were the living proof.

[...]

A year later, Diaz and Morales no longer work for Trump. No one is known to have been deported because of the women’s actions, and there is no evidence of legal repercussions for Trump or his company. But the pair have endured the anger of friends and colleagues who say they have betrayed a code of silence that permeates the nation’s underground economy.

They say it was worth it.

[...]

[T]he undocumented workers were often left to perform the most intimate and personal work. Those who cooked and served Trump knew that he liked his cheeseburgers well-done and his Diet Coke in small glass bottles with a plastic straw that no one could be seen touching.

Trump loved Tic Tacs. But not an arbitrary amount. He wanted, in his bedroom bureau at all times, two full containers of white Tic Tacs and one container that was half full.

WTF?

The same rule applied to the Bronx Colors-brand face makeup from Switzerland that Trump slathered on — two full containers, one half full — even if it meant the housekeepers had to regularly bring new shirts from the pro shop because of the rust-colored stains on the collars. A special washing machine in the laundry room was reserved for his wife Melania Trump’s clothing.

What's with the half-full shit? I can't even imagine what that's about.

Donald Trump liked Irish Spring bar soap in his shower. But his housekeepers quickly learned not to throw out his soap even if it had worn down to the tiniest sliver: Trump decided when he wanted something discarded. When that happened, with clothes or newspapers, he would toss them on the floor.

So somebody has to bend over to pick up his trash.

A regular recipient of Trump’s castoff clothing was Melania’s father, Viktor Knavs, Diaz and Morales said.

“They’re the same size and everything,” Morales said.

That's really demeaning. Hand-me-downs from the rich relatives.

But, Trump drew the line at the MAGA hat on the golf course...

One day in 2013, Viktor Knavs went out to play golf wearing one of Trump’s discarded red baseball caps. When Trump spotted him on the fairway, he blew up, and he ordered his father-in-law, in front of other golfers, to remove the hat and get off the course. Diaz and Morales were in the villa when Knavs returned, threw the hat on the ground and cursed Trump.

[...]

“Nobody could wear the red hat but [Trump],” Diaz said.

“The whole world saw what Trump had done to his father-in-law,” Morales added. “[Knavs] was very embarrassed.”

[...]

Knavs and his wife, Amalija Knavs, were favorites of the Bedminster staff, even if much was lost in translation from Slovenian to Spanish. Amalija Knavs would often cook breakfast in the villa for Melania while Trump regularly ate breakfast in the clubhouse.

Her parents, apparently, are considered on the same level as the help.

The White House did not make the Knavses available for comment.

You have to go through the White House to get to talk to them???

This Post article is actually more about the repurcussions and results of the two undocumented workers going public. It's not only a gossip fest. I'm just feeling less than noble this morning.

So, read the whole thing for the concern about immigrants.

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

He always seems to be telling a story as a fish

Fish mouth, flappy fish fins.

Seen on Vox Twitter

Such a lovely couple.

I like this picture

It shows how weirdly Trump stands, as if he's trying to make his package look smaller by tucking it back.  Yeah, I know.

But also, because it looks like the guy down front in the glasses is massaging the black man's head.

Plus, it looks like they took all three four black people in the room and put them right up front.  He's not racist.

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

UPDATE:  More of the stance.

A creep either way

Also, he could never be a normal man.

Good genes

Gearing up for his coming physical: putting the infamous Ronny Jackson on his medical advisory team and lying about his fake tan.



1) Who are they kidding?  What genetic condition causes reverse raccoon eyes?
2) Is "good genes" code for Aryan?

Mr. Trump has adhered to one constant: a conspicuously sun-kissed glow, one that has shone like a stoplight against Washington’s graying backdrop.

[...]

The official line from the White House, as with other matters surrounding the president’s physical health and appearance, is that Mr. Trump’s glow is the result of “good genes,” according to a senior administration official who would speak only on the condition of anonymity.

And, O.K., a little powder — a translucent one, not a bronzer — which the president applies himself before television appearances, the official said.

  NYT

He also is reported to do his own hair. Why is he afraid to let anyone near his head? Some sense might be transmitted somehow?

A taxpayer-funded White House makeup artist has volunteered her services, but she has not gotten close enough to try, according to two people who have overheard such discussions. A half-dozen current and former aides and people close to Mr. Trump say he has long been self-sufficient in matters of grooming.

[...]

Mr. Trump has repeatedly documented the act of self-styling his coif, a process he has not strayed from in decades. His system includes a Head & Shoulders shampoo and an hourlong air-drying of the strands while he peruses newspapers or watches television. And tweets.

[...]

Does Mr. Trump use a tanning bed, as a talkative makeup artist said in 2016 and Omarosa Manigault Newman, a former aide, claimed in a tell-all book? (Ms. Manigault Newman wrote that an usher was fired for mishandling transport of the contraption.)

I'm going to have to say, the answer is "yes". If he won't let anyone near his head, it's unlikely that he would let anyone spray his face.

Mr. Trump’s former boarding school classmates have described him as a fan of ultraviolet rays, someone who would pop a tanning bulb into a light socket to go “to the beach.”

[...]

But according to three people who have spent time in the White House residence, no such bed or spray-tan booth exists in a hidden nook of the residence, a cranny of the East Wing or a closet on Air Force One. Two senior White House officials insisted that no such apparatus exists.

Bullshit. And did these visitors search out the entire White House? He absolutely has a device. The only people who have pale pink rings around their eyes like that are people who have been wearing goggles. I'd say look in his personal bedroom or bath. It may be part of the reason he has "executive time" until 11 am.

In the White House residence, where Mr. Trump enjoys giving tours to his supporters, there exists an array of hair sprays on a shelf in his remodeled bathroom.

Remodeled. There's a secret closet.

Dr. Tina Alster, a top Washington dermatologist who said she had treated officials in every White House, including this one, posited that the president, whom she does not treat, was using tanning creams or sprays to achieve his look.

“He looks more orangy than he does tan,” a telltale sign, Dr. Alster said.

That's true, too. Maybe he's gotten very good at applying something evenly. But that's tricky. Plus, the goggles. You can't apply cream that well around goggles, and if you sprayed, they'd get covered and you couldn't see.

Certainly Mr. Trump, who has long taken antibiotics to treat rosacea, a condition that can make the skin appear rosy and ruddy, is attentive to how he looks on television. He has complained that his skin and hair appear too yellow or orange on the screen, according to one person familiar with his views.

Stop tanning, or simply change the skin tone setting on your TV. Rosacea is also a condition that can occur with long term drinking. Just saying.  I know they say Trump doesn't drink.  Maybe.

As a result, events in the White House are now more dimly lit than in previous administrations. The president has also become a fan of natural light, like the setting of the White House Rose Garden, where Mr. Trump chose to announce the end of the government shutdown in 40-degree weather.

That's some serious vanity. But he's heavily insulated.

That comment about going to the beach by using a tanning bulb comes from this Washington Post article:

In elementary school, Donny impressed classmates with his athleticism, shenanigans and refusal to acknowledge mistakes, even one so trivial as misidentifying a popular professional wrestler. No matter his pals’ ridicule, one recalled, he doubled down, insisting wrestler Antonino Rocca’s name was “Rocky Antonino.”

[...]

Even Trump has acknowledged the similarities between himself as an adult and when he was the boy whom friends alternately referred to as “Donny,” “The Trumpet” and “Flat Top” (for his hair).

[...]

Even Trump has acknowledged the similarities between himself as an adult and when he was the boy whom friends alternately referred to as “Donny,” “The Trumpet” and “Flat Top” (for his hair).

“When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same,” the 70-year-old presumptive Republican nominee once told a biographer. “The temperament is not that different.”

  WaPo

No shit.

His face crowned by a striking blond pompadour, young Donald commanded attention with his playground taunts, classroom disruptions and distinctive countenance, even then his lips pursed in a way that would inspire future mimics.

[...]

“Who could forget him?” said Ann Trees, 82, who taught at Kew-Forest School, where Trump was a student through seventh grade. “He was headstrong and determined. He would sit with his arms folded with this look on his face — I use the word surly — almost daring you to say one thing or another that wouldn’t settle with him.”

[...]

A fierce competitor, Trump could erupt in anger, pummeling another boy or smashing a baseball bat if he made an out, two childhood neighbors said. In school, he misbehaved so often that his initials became his friends’ shorthand for detention.

[...]

When Donald was 13, his father abruptly sent him to a military boarding school, where instructors struck him if he misbehaved and the requirements included daily inspections and strict ­curfews.

“He was essentially banished from the family home,” said his biographer, Michael D’Antonio. “He hadn’t known anything but living with his family in a luxurious setting, and all of a sudden he’s sent away. That’s a rough way to start out in life.”

Except that's not how he started out. He started out by being a dick that even his parents couldn't stand. His siblings didn't get sent off to military school.

[His] mother, Mary, a Scottish immigrant, relished attention, thrusting herself to the center of social gatherings. She also loved pageantry, spending hours watching on television the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth.

Mary Trump suffered a hemorrhage after [the birth of her youngest] that forced doctors to perform an emergency hysterectomy. She also developed an abdominal infection that required several more surgeries, during which she nearly died.

At one point, Fred Trump informed his daughter that her mother “wasn’t expected to live, but I should go to school and he’d call me if anything changed,” Maryanne Trump once told Gwenda Blair, who authored a detailed history of the family

[...]

Fred Trump, with his thick mustache and hair combed back, was a stern, formal man who insisted on wearing a tie and jacket at home. A conservative Republican who admired Barry Goldwater, Fred Trump and his wife forbade their children from cursing, calling each other by nicknames and wearing lipstick.

Good genes, indeed. (I had to read that last line twice to understand the Trump parents weren't calling each other by nicknames and wearing lipstick.)

Dennis Burnham was four years younger and lived around the corner from Donald. He inherited his own impression of his neighbor from his mother, who warned that he should “stay away from the Trumps.”

“Donald was known to be a bully, I was a little kid, and my parents didn’t want me beaten up,” said Burnham, 65, a business consultant in Texas.

Once when she left Dennis in a playpen in a back yard adjoining the Trumps’ property, Martha Burnham returned to find Donald throwing rocks at her son.

[...]

For kindergarten, Donald went to the private Kew-Forest School.

[...]

“We threw spitballs and we played racing chairs with our desks, crashing them into other desks,” recalled Paul Onish, a classmate, describing himself and Trump as “probably the two worst.”

[...]

In his neighborhood, Donald and his friends were known to ride their bikes and “shout and curse very loudly,” said Steve Nachtigall, who lived nearby. Nachtigall said he once saw them jump off their bikes and beat up another boy.

“It’s kind of like a little video snippet that remains in my brain because I think it was so unusual and terrifying at that age,” recalled Nachtigall, 66, a doctor in New Jersey. “He was a loudmouth bully.”

[...]

After he yanked her pigtails, Sharon Mazzarella hit Donald over the head with her metal lunch pail as she followed him down the stairs outside the school. “I must’ve been quite annoyed,” Mazzarella said of the incident, which she described as her only memory of Trump.

In his memoir, “The Art of the Deal,” Trump wrote that his main focus as a youngster was “creating mischief.” As a second-grader, he wrote, he “actually” gave his music teacher a black eye because “I didn’t think he knew anything about music, and I almost got expelled.”

None of Trump’s childhood friends recall the incident or Donald talking about it then. Asked about the punch recently, Trump said, “When I say ‘punch,’ when you’re that age, nobody punches very hard.”

At a 2009 reunion, Kass said, the teacher, Charles Walker, told him that Trump had never struck him. But Walker, who died last year, claimed no affection for Trump. In the final stages of his life, according to his son, Charles Walker learned that Trump was considering a presidential bid.

“When that kid was 10,” Peter Walker recalled his father telling family members gathered at his bedside, “even then he was a little s---.”

[...]

By sixth grade, Donald’s power as a right-handed hitter [playing baseball] was enough that fielders shifted to left field when he batted. “If he had hit the ball to right, he could’ve had a home run because no one was there,” said Nicholas Kass, a schoolmate. “But he always wanted to hit the ball through people. He wanted to overpower them.”

[...]

After once making an out, Donald smashed neighbor Jeff Bier’s Adirondack bat on the pavement. The bat cracked, Bier said, but Trump did not apologize.

According to the story, Fred Trump didn't send his son to military boarding school because he was a nasty bully, but because he found out he'd been sneaking into Manhattan by train with a friend.

[At the military academy, i]nstead of his father, Donald’s new taskmaster was Theodore Dobias, a no-nonsense combat veteran who had served in World War II and had seen Mussolini’s dead body hanging from a rope.

Dobias, who died recently, would smack his cadets with an open hand if they ignored him, students recalled. He set up a boxing ring and forced students with poor grades and disciplinary problems to fight each other.

“At the beginning, he didn’t like the idea of being told what to do, like make your bed, shine your shoes, brush your teeth, clean the sink, do your homework,” Dobias said in an interview last fall, referring to Trump. “We really didn’t care whether he came from Rockefeller Center or whatever. He was just another name.

[...]

“He wanted to be number one. He wanted to be noticed. He wanted to be recognized. And he liked ­compliments.”

[...]

By senior year, Trump was known for bringing stylish women to campus and showing them around. “They were beautiful, gorgeous women, dressed out of Saks Fifth Avenue,” recalled classmate George White.

[...]

A month after senior year started, Trump faced a crisis. One of his platoon sergeants shoved a plebe, Lee Ains, against a wall because the freshman was too slow snapping to attention. At the time, the academy was already dealing with a serious hazing incident and was sensitive to new allegations of abuse. The administration reassigned Trump as a battalion training officer.

Ains said the academy concluded that Trump had not monitored his officers “as closely as he should have.”

Trump described his reassignment as a promotion. “I did a good job and that’s why I got elevated,” he said.

The authors are calling this attitude confidence.

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

This story is based on reporting for “Trump Revealed,” a broad, comprehensive examination of the life of the presumptive Republican nominee for president. The biography, written by Post reporters Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher [is] a collaboration with more than two dozen Post reporters, researchers and editors.

UPDATE:

The Face of Derangement

His Own Worst Enemy

President Trump now finds himself exactly where he doesn’t want to be: under investigation by a dogged, highly respected prosecutor who owes him no personal or political loyalty. And the president has only himself to blame.

[...]

Trump let off some steam Thursday morning by issuing a couple of angry statements on Twitter: “They made up a phony collusion with the Russians story, found zero proof, so now they go for obstruction of justice on the phony story. Nice.” And then: “You are witnessing the single greatest WITCH HUNT in American political history - led by some very bad and conflicted people!”

Someone please take away his phone.

  WaPo

No don't. This is the best train-wreck of my lifetime - even better than Watergate.

Not for the first time, Trump gives a false impression of what’s really going on. He pretends there has already been a finding that there was no collusion between anyone involved in his presidential campaign and the Russian attempt to meddle in our election. No such conclusion has been reached.

The truth doesn't get in Donald J. Trump's way!

[Regarding t]he possibility that Trump may have obstructed justice in his repeated efforts to quash the investigation. How could any prosecutor fail to pursue this line of inquiry? Trump fired FBI Director James B. Comey, sent out spokespeople and surrogates with a far-fetched cover story to explain the dismissal, and then told NBC’s Lester Holt that the real reason for the firing was Comey’s pursuit of the Russia investigation. Trump also bragged to visiting Russian diplomats that getting rid of Comey relieved him of “great pressure because of Russia.”

Those very public actions and statements alone cry out for investigation.

[...]

Attention is focused on the question of obstruction simply because so much of Trump’s campaign to deep-six the investigation has been conducted openly, at full volume.

[...]

As Trump still struggles to acknowledge, the U.S. intelligence community is fully convinced that Russia carried out an attack on our democracy. We need to know what happened so that we can ensure it never happens again. Why would the president object to a thorough investigation — unless he had something to hide?

I can't think of any reason. At one point, someone made him put out an official statement (written by someone other than Trump, undoubtedly) that said he welcomed and the country needed a thorough investigation. In truth, he's obviously desperate to prevent that and incapable of seeing how he's actually insuring it.

Just an observation appropo only of a conversation I had yesterday with my sister about his use of a tanning bed...that nose is going to fall off like a crock-potted chicken tail if he doesn't lay off. The chin is looking a little iffy, too. And it just occurs to me that as bizarre as his reverse raccoon splotchy tan is concerned, perhaps it really is a much better look than his natural baby lizard skin color.

Those eyes. Creeeeeepy.

With Apologies to Reptiles

This reptile is your president.

Shudder.