President Trump is engulfed in Ukraine scandal and impeachment probe, as Dems ramp up their strategy. Tony Schwartz, ‘Art of the Deal’ co-author, joins MSNBC’s Ari Melber on why President Trump ‘sees the world as against him at all moments,’ and the pressure from the damning testimony from his own staff. Schwartz argues Trump has a ‘self-destructive impulse’ and his ‘paranoid’ creates a ‘vicious cycle’ that makes everything ‘he fears’ become ‘true.’ Aired on 10/24/19.
Trump turns the G-7 into the G-6 vs. G-1
February 2016, I warned in an article co-written with economist Benn Steil that “a Trump presidency threatens the post-World War II liberal international order that American presidents of both parties have so laboriously built up — an order based on free trade and alliances with other democracies. His policies would not make America ‘great.’ Just the opposite. A Trump presidency would represent the death knell of America as a great power.”
.. In just the past few weeks, he has taken a giant step toward destroying the global system that the United States created after 1945.
.. Trump has now exited three major treaties — the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear accord — and thrown into doubt the future of another — the North American Free Trade Agreement — while launching a reckless trade war against our closest allies.
.. Trump continued to push his irrational idée fixe that the United States — the richest nation in the world — has been victimized by its friends.
.. Trump looks like a defendant who has just been found guilty by a jury of his peers.
.. Justin Trudeau did not mince words, calling the U.S. tariffs “insulting” and saying: “Canadians, we’re polite, we’re reasonable, but we also will not be pushed around.”
.. Larry Kudlow accusing Trudeau of a “betrayal” and Peter Navarro saying there’s a “special place in hell” for the Canadian prime minister.
.. No U.S. officials have ever spoken this way about any U.S. ally, ever. These are the kind of words that normally precede military action.
.. Trump seems amazed to discover that the European Union (gross domestic product: $17.1 trillion), Japan ($4.8 trillion), and Canada ($1.6 trillion) — which together produce more than the United States ($19.3 trillion) — will not be pushed around as easily as the contractors he has gotten used to stiffing.
.. add Russia. This was a bizarre suggestion, given that Russia is not only an international outlaw but also an economic pygmy whose GDP does not even rank in the top 10.
.. If the G-7 were to expand, it should include India and Brazil, both democracies that have larger economiesthan Russia’s.
.. invasion of Ukraine — an act of aggression for which Trump perversely blames President Barack Obama — and it has done nothing since 2014 to deserve readmittance. Instead, its meddling in U.S. elections its and war crimes in Syria demand more punishment.
.. Trump is doing precisely what Putin hoped would happen when he helped Trump get elected.
.. A new poll finds that only 14 percent of Germans consider the United States a reliable partner, compared with 36 percent for Russia and 43 percent for China. That the citizens of one of America’s staunchest and most important allies now look more favorably upon our illiberal foes is a testament to Trump’s unrivaled wrecking abilities.
.. none of those disputes called into question the fundamental unity of the West in the way that Trump’s stupid and self-destructive actions do. The Atlantic alliance was born in Canada in 1941 and may well have died there in 2018.
How Sane Is Sam Nunberg? How Sane Are Any of These People?
Sam Nunberg appeared on CNN, and towards the end of a wild and wide-ranging interview with Jake Tapper, he seemed to ask the host for legal advice on whether he should comply with a subpoena from special counsel Robert Mueller.
“Do you think I should cooperate? Should I spend 80 hours going over my emails, Jake?” Nunberg asked.
.. It’s really rare for an interview subject to ask a journalist for legal advice — and speaking as a journalist, I’d say it’s an astonishingly bad idea too.
.. “I’m not a Donald Trump fan, as I told you before, okay? He treated me like crap,” and, “Trump may have very well done something during the election with the Russians, and if you find it out if he did that, I don’t know. If he did that, you know what, it’s inexcusable.”
.. It is not often we get to watch, live on television, a man simultaneously risk contempt of court and antagonize the one man who can pardon him.
.. CNN’s Erin Burnett awkwardly told Nunberg on-air that she could smell alcohol on him; Nunberg denied he had been drinking.
.. Page is the strange kind of man who is smart enough to get a master’s degree from Georgetown University and become an energy consultant with Merrill Lynch, but not smart enough to bring a lawyer with him when he testifies to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the House Intelligence Committee, or Mueller’s grand jury.
.. In October, Page agreed to appear on the program of MSNBC’s Chris Hayes — light-years away from being a “friendly interviewer” — and his answers were so breathtakingly forward that Hayes was left in disbelief: “I genuinely hope, Carter, that you are innocent of everything, because you are doing a lot of talking.”
.. Perhaps we could push aside Nunberg and Page and give the award for most self-destructive former Trump adviser to Steve Bannon, who invited Michael Wolff into the White House to gather material for his book Fire and Fury and seemed to think he could trash the president’s children on the record and live to tell the tale.
.. a president who
- announces new trade tariffs without informing his own staff,
- runs an ongoing campaign of public humiliation against his own attorney general,
- tweets furiously about what he sees on cable news, publicly fumes in the morning about Alec Baldwin’s impersonation of him on Saturday Night Live.
It’s as if the White House mess is serving Tide Pods... Ed Markey claimed, without any evidence, that a “grand jury has been impaneled up in New York” to investigate the Trump campaign’s ties to the Russians... Congressman Ted Lieu speculated that a Republican campaign staffer’s suicide was secretly a result of foul play stemming from a conversation with former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn... People are asking, “How sane is Nunberg?” How sane are any of these people? How are cable-news networks supposed to assess the mental health of a former presidential aide when the baseline for “sane” has been adjusted downward so rapidly?