The Chaos Report

Yes, Trump Actually Did Say That…

 

And we don’t believe the deep ideological rift that catapulted Trump to power is really at play anymore. It’s become much more a matter of fealty:

Either:

1. You believe our President is a lunatic.
2. You’re in the cult.
3. Or both.

Here’s the clip:

Trump was specifically referring to tariffs he’s placed on various countries, and how he cowed the European Union–“they sound nice, but they’re rough“–into paying him a visit today. One day after he provided short-term financial relief to U.S. farmers already hurt by retaliation to his tariffs on China, even though those tariffs are still really in their infancy. The mid and long-term relief? That’ll apparently come when China surrenders. Right.

We were just going to play you that clip and let you be on your way today. Because really, once the President comes out and says out loud that reality is subjective, what more is there to say…?

• And then we saw, to its credit, the VFW had more to say, referring to another part of this same riff by the President, where he calls out the “fake media” and many in the crowd jeer, as he’s trained his crowds to do.

Here’s the VFW’s response:

• And then we noticed Trump had taken his thesis for a ‘test drive’ earlier in the day in this one astounding Tweet:

 

• And then we found six Democratic Senators led by Oregon’s Ron Wyden, but not a single Republican, co-sponsoring a bill to mandate paper ballots in all federal elections. Those paper ballots could be scanned into a computer, but they would create a physical record of the original vote. So in the event questions were raised about hacking, an audit could be conducted easily.

This has been a priority for Wyden for some time, and we think an extremely reasonable one, especially now that Special Counsel Mueller’s team has offered indictments backed by scads of evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. This is true whether you believe it had an impact on the outcome or not, and whether you believe there was possibly “collusion” or not.

So how about getting behind that Mr. President, if you’re so tough on Russia?

 

• And then we happened upon this Tweet from the Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey.

Actually, we checked. And while this may have been true at the time of Dawsey’s Tweet, right now they’re #1 & #3. “Girl, Wash Your Face: Stop Believing the Lies About Who You Are so You Can Become Who You Were Meant to Be” (which still does seem to speak to the situation in its own way) is #2.

 

• And then we came across this new report from the Pew Research Center finding Republicans’ support for the F.B.I. has plunged since the President started bashing them, to a less than 50% approval rating. Meanwhile 72% of Republicans have a favorable view of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, while 72% of Democrats view ICE unfavorably.

 

• And then we remembered we’ve been meaning to link to this analysis from Andrew Sullivan in New York Magazine, which is tangentially related anyway, so this is as good a time to as any. We touched on this theme a little while ago when we asked whether the Marshall Plan would’ve been possible under Trump. This expands on Trump’s relationship with the world very thoroughly, and makes a lot of sense, at least to us…

 

Phew!

This will never end, will it?