Tag: Trump narcissism

Egomaniacal Trump’s petulant actions post-impeachment highlight his position as a vengeful, lawless and corporate toad: Ralph Nader

AlterNet logoThe day after his acquittal by the Republican Party in a trial that banned witnesses, the unhinged Donald Trump gloated for over an hour on all the television networks. Trump flattered his courtiers, one by one, and fulminated against his Congressional adversaries, Hillary Clinton and ex-FBI chief James Comey.

Donald Trump’s speech degraded his office for the ages. Trump lied about himself and others and received applause from the assembled sycophants. The morning of his speech, Trump attended a prayer breakfast. Trump never goes to church to atone for his habitual, career-long violations of seven of the Ten Commandments. His hypocrisy has no bounds.

Tightening his dictatorial grip on the U.S. government, Trump pledged to destroy his opponents— from Nancy Pelosi to Adam Schiff to the “radical, socialist Democrats.” These shameful threats cannot be taken lightly. Never forget Trump saying “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as President.” Continue reading.

A historian dissects President Trump’s strange Obama complex

AlterNet logoJournalists were astonished when President Donald Trump took verbal shots at President Obama (without naming him) in a speech intended to deescalate a conflict with Iran on January 8, 2020. In that kind of international crisis, U.S. presidents ordinarily encourage a united American front. Yet Trump’s remarks had a disuniting effect. He presented a sharply negative judgment about Obama’s leadership. Trump criticized Obama’s “very defective” and “foolish Iran nuclear deal.” He claimed missiles fired by Iran at bases housing U.S. troops were financed “with funds made available by the last administration.” The statement implied that blood would be on Obama’s hands if Americans died in the bombings. Journalists said it was quite unusual for a president to lash out at his predecessor when delivering an important foreign policy message that needed broad public support.

The journalists should not have been surprised. Trump has publicly berated Barack Obama on numerous occasions. While Trump’s dislike of Obama is complex and multifaceted, his behavior at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner may reveal an important source of the hostility. Continue reading “A historian dissects President Trump’s strange Obama complex”

Trump’s 2020 campaign attacks Washington Post for reporting the president is not actually Rocky Balboa

President Donald Trump’s campaign attacked The Washington Post with a bizarre claim.

The attack occurred after the president posted a photoshopped a picture of his face on the body of actor Sylvester Stallone’s body from the movie Rocky III.

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

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The newspaper tweeted, “Trump tweets doctored photo of his head on Sylvester Stallone’s body, unclear why.”

View the complete November 29 article by Bob Brigham from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.

Trump’s Obsession With Diminishing Obama’s Role in Killing Bin Laden Isn’t New

Let’s look at the tweets.

As President Donald Trump announced the death of ISIS founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi this morning, it was impossible to avoid comparisons to President Barack Obama’s May 2011 announcement that Navy SEALs had killed Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Trump was clearly thinking about that key moment of his predecessor’s presidency as he asserted that Baghdadi had been a threat “long before I took office” and that the ISIS leader had been “the biggest one we’ve ever captured.” He also repeated the false claim that he had identified bin Laden as a threat before 9/11.

Trump’s attempts to diminish Obama’s role in taking down bin Laden aren’t new. In the years following the raid, he frequently took to Twitter to suggest that Obama was taking too much credit for getting bin Laden. The very first mention came in November 2011, in which Trump appears to sanction the waterboarding of al Qaeda leader Khalid Sheik Mohammed for the sake of gathering intelligence on bin Laden. (The Obama administration had banned this form of torture; Trump has since tried to resurrect the practice.)

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

Waterboarding KSM gave us the intelligence that lead to Bin Laden.

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Later that year, Trump went on CNN to talk about why Obama didn’t “deserve credit for killing bin Laden.” In the spring of 2012, he reiterated that point on CNBC and in a tweet that cited an article from Breitbart.
View the complete October 27 article by Kara Voght on the Mother Jones website here.

Bigger than bin Laden? 3 striking things about Trump’s announcement that Baghdadi is dead.

Washington Post logoPresident Trump announced Sunday morning that a U.S. operation in Syria led to the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State. Three things about the announcement were striking.

First is the amount of detail Trump provided — far more than to which we’re accustomed in such announcements. He talked about how long he knew about the operation, when he showed up in the Situation Room, how the operation was undertaken and how everyone died — including Baghdadi’s wives and children. He even provided some narrative of the deadly moment.

He said Baghdadi was run down in a tunnel and that he had three of his children with him. Trump said Baghdadi was “whimpering and crying and screaming all the way” before detonating a vest he was wearing.

View the complete October 27 article by Aaron Blake on The Washington Post website here.

‘You people with this phony Emoluments Clause’: Cabinet meeting turns into 71 minutes of Trump grievances

WASHINGTON — President Trump, trying to dig out from political holes of his own making, held forth for 71 minutes Monday during what was ostensibly a Cabinet meeting, but ended up being a familiar torrent of grievance, defensiveness and expansive statements about his view of his own powers.

However familiar Trump’s brash hyperbole has become, his statements to a room filled with Cabinet members, aides and reporters were still eye-catching: Trump asserted his selective regard for the Constitution to which he’d sworn an oath and casually dismissed a clause he appeared to violate in trying to award next year’s Group of 7 summit to his own Doral, Fla., golf resort.

“You people with this phony Emoluments Clause,” Trump said, rhetorically dispatching the portion of the Constitution that bars federal officials from taking emoluments, or forms of payment or profit, from any “king, prince or foreign state.”

View the complete October 21 article by Eli Stokols, Alexa Díaz on The Los Angeles Times website here.

Trump interrupted Pentagon briefing about America’s commitment to the world with bizarre rant about himself: report

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump interrupted his very first Pentagon briefing on America’s commitment to the world with a bizarre rant about himself.

Former Defense Secretary James Mattis had prepared meticulously for the July 20, 2017, meeting, and his former speechwriter Guy Snodgrass said the retired U.S. Marine Corps general appeared extremely nervous about briefing the new president for the first time, according to a new Politico feature.

“As the seconds ticked down, Mattis’ nervous energy had been palpable,” Snodgrass wrote in the article. “Unusually so. Normally stoic and deliberate with his movements, this morning he was electrified.”

View the complete October 21 article by Travis Gettys from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.

Trump can’t stop bragging to foreign leaders about his resorts

Lawmakers, and even Trump’s own staff, are questioning whether his business deals are influencing U.S. foreign policy.

President Donald Trump was sitting beside Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar in the Oval Office in March when he fondly recalled his luxury golf resort on Ireland’s west coast.

He gushed about his two tony Scottish resorts months later while standing next to French President Emmanuel Macron in France.

And in August, while meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, he first suggested that he just might bring the G-7 summit of world leaders to one of his Florida resorts in 2020. “We haven’t found anything that could even come close to competing with it,” he said.

View the complete October 20 article by Anita Kumar on the Politico website here.

Officials’ texts reveal belief that Trump wanted probes as condition of Ukraine meeting

Washington Post logoHouse investigators released numerous text messages late Thursday night illustrating how senior State Department officials coordinated with the Ukrainian president’s top aide and President Trump’s personal lawyer to leverage a potential summit between the heads of state on a promise from the Ukrainians to investigate the 2016 U.S. election and an energy company that employed the son of 2020 Democratic candidate Joe Biden.

[Read the documents: House Democrats’ letter on State Department texts]

The texts, which former special U.S. envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker provided investigators during a nearly 10-hour deposition Thursday, reveal that officials felt Trump would not agree to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky unless Zelensky promised to launch the investigations — and did so publicly. Although the texts do not mention Biden by name, congressional Democrats leading an impeachment inquiry are pointing to them as clear evidence that Trump conditioned normal bilateral relations with Ukraine on that country first agreeing “to launch politically motivated investigations,” top Democrats said in statement Thursday night.

View the complete October 4 article by Karoun Demirjian, Rachel Bade, Josh Dawsey and John Hudson on The Washington Post website here.

A Failure Of Imagination: Why We Missed Trump’s Ukraine Plotting

Try for a moment to imagine the world as it was a week ago. Before we knew that President Donald Trump put the squeeze on another country to investigate his political opponent, before we knew he wanted to involve the attorney general, or that aid may have been held up in the plotting.

Except, we did know each of those things. The president hasn’t been quiet about what he’s up to. And while we didn’t know many details, much of the hanky-panky has been happening right before our eyes.

Let’s review a few facts.

View the complete September 30 article by Eric Umansky from ProPublica on the National Memo website here.