Feces, Meet Fan

Michael Flynn with Michael Flynn Jr.,
at Trump Tower during the transition

Ominous sign for the White House: Former Trump Security Advisor admitted guilt today in federal district court to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Court records indicate he was acting "under instructions from senior Trump transition officials."

Flynn is cooperating with Mueller. Said Flynn, “My guilty plea and agreement to cooperate with the Special Counsel’s Office reflect a decision I made in the best interests of my family and of our country. I accept full responsibility for my actions.” Best interests of my family ... namely, Michael Flynn Jr., who was very involved too?

Flynn was passing requests to the Russians, and the Russians were sometimes complying, like in not too vigorously protesting the Obama administration's sanctions over election meddling in certain hope of seeing those sanctions lifted under Trump.

“A very senior member of the Presidential Transition Team” asked Flynn to make contact with the Russians (and other foreign persons), and they received reports on those contacts.

Some observers now consider that Trump himself has a legal exposure problem.

Steve Bannon's Wings Clipped

On the farm we regularly clipped the wings of our laying hens -- Leghorns, usually -- who decided to fly the coop and raid the vegetable garden. That put a stop to marauding scratchers.

Trump appears to have done something similar to his most powerful laying hen, Steve Bannon. Bannon's been kicked off the National Security Council.

Haven't decided what is more startling ... the fact of Bannon's sudden demotion or the cover story the White House is telling to explain why Bannon ever got that seat on the NSC with cabinet-level people in the first place: "Mr. Bannon had been put on the principals committee to keep an eye on Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn...."

That's some chicken scratch right there, boys!

Trump put as head of the National Security Council a retired general (and agent for foreign governments) who needed to have someone keeping an eye on him? Holy crap. And the guy they chose to keep that eye on him was the man who's publicly said his goal is to dismantle government as we know it? Holy crap on a stick.

According to leakers in the White House, Bannon threatened to quit the whole clown car and let Jared Kushner drive. Bannon is now denying that. "Lately, Mr. Bannon has been conspicuously absent from some meetings," like yesterday's Trump presser in the Rose Garden.

That Bannon's demotion may be a by-product of Trump's imperial ego is just icing on this particular cake: "Mr. Bannon’s Svengali-style reputation has chafed on a president who sees himself as the West Wing’s only leading man. Several associates said the president had quietly expressed annoyance over the credit Mr. Bannon had received for setting the agenda — and Mr. Trump was not pleased by the 'President Bannon' puppet-master theme promoted by magazines, late-night talk shows and Twitter."

Ouch.

Trump Presidency: Wrapping Itself Around Its Own Axle

There's no keeping up any more. Trump and his guys are stonewalling the investigation into Russian collusion, and every day chunks of that stone wall crack, crumble, and silt down into a pile of useless dust. It'll be that slow process of dissolution that ultimately destroys this administration. Trump already seems well past his sell-by date. That Gallup tracking poll smells of soured and curdled milk.

Trump now seems desperate to distract people from the other truth: He's a loser. A loser with the magic touch: He turns others into losers too.

Sean Spicer.

Devin Nunes.

General Michael Flynn.

“If you’re not guilty of a crime, what do you need immunity for, right?”

--Donald Trump last September, at a campaign rally in Orlando 

...... 

“Mike Flynn should ask for immunity...."

 --Donald Trump, yesterday morning

Devin Nunes is the perfect deer in the headlights. Leave it to Beaver to get called up to the White House to look at some secret papers that kind of, maybe, might suggest that Trump was spied on before the election and then trot back up to the White House to brief the White House on what the White House just showed him. Devin Nunes has ruined himself. When will he join Sean Spicer as a caricature on Saturday Night Live?

Seen on Facebook recently: "Dammit, Trump should not be allowed to appoint a justice his last year in office."

Sandwich Du Jour

Ret. Vice Adm. Bob Harward, a former U.S. Navy Seal, made it into the news yesterday when the Trump people announced that he would be replacing Michael Flynn as National Security Advisor (NSA). But then Harward rejected Trump's offer. That's exactly the way smart businessmen do business, no? Make a big public announcement about quarry not yet in the bag? Then this tweet followed last night from a reporter:

Jake TapperVerified account‏@jaketapper

A friend of Harward's says he was reluctant to take NSA job bc the WH seems so chaotic; says Harward called the offer a "shit sandwich."

But, no, "this administration is running like a fine-tuned machine," Trump assured us during that bizarre press conference yesterday.

Meanwhile, the fine-tuned machine delivers the information that Michael Flynn lied to the FBI about his conversations with the Russians (not that that's the reason he was fired). In the normal universe, lying to the FBI is a felony, but not of course in Rollerball World, especially not with the Alabama mush mouth as Chief Law Enforcer.

At the press conference yesterday, Trump also said this about Michael Flynn: "...what he did wasn't wrong -- what he did in terms of the information he saw. What was wrong was the way that other people, including yourselves in this room, were given that information, because that was classified information that was given illegally. That's the real problem."

Got that? The real crime was our finding out about the collusion with Russia. And if anyone were beginning to think that maybe Flynn acted alone, without Trump's knowledge, you can let go of that fantasy. A little later in the press conference, he returned to Flynn (like a dog to its vomit): "I don't think he did anything wrong; if anything, he did something right."

He was called out for repeatedly claiming his electoral victory last November was the biggest, the yugest, the most colossal in history, and what did he say when he was caught again in that lie: "Well, someone told me." That's the way this fine-tuned machine runs -- on rumors, tales, unverified non-facts.

"The leaks are real. The news is fake," Trump said yesterday. That's a puzzler, as one of the reporters pointed out yesterday: "If the information coming from those leaks is real, then how can the stories be fake?" Trump's answer to that, verbatim, opens a universe of unexplored personal paranoia and dysfunction:

You know what it is? Here's the thing. The public isn't -- you know, they read newspapers, they see television, they watch. They don't know if it's true or false because they're not involved. I'm involved. I've been involved with this stuff all my life. But I'm involved. So I know when you're telling the truth or when you're not. I just see many, many untruthful things.

And I'll tell you what else I see. I see tone. You know the word "tone." The tone is such hatred. I'm really not a bad person, by the way. No, but the tone is such -- I do get good ratings, you have to admit that -- the tone is such hatred.

He measures his own worth -- and everybody else's -- by "ratings," by how popular he thinks he is, by a wildly exaggerated electoral college win, by screaming adoration at mass rallies. We have a really sick narcissist running this fine-tuned machine.

A Hit Dog Howls

Michael Flynn was shoved. The "sin" he confessed to is laughable: "I inadvertently briefed the Vice President Elect and others with incomplete information.”

... inadvertently... incomplete information.

"I'm sorry, Honey. I inadvertently got drunk after work last night, and I'm harboring some incomplete information on why I didn't get home until 5 a.m."

Let's be blunt: Flynn, like a good soldier, fell on his own sword rather than give up his boss as the Colluder-in-Chief with the Russians. We've got presumed treason of the highest order and a completely subverted democratic system, and what do we hear? "I inadvertently gave incomplete information." The real message: "I lied so that President Trump's involvement in Russian subversion could go undetected."

If you think that Donald Trump didn't know what Michael Flynn was doing, you're more gullible than you look.

At the moment, the only thing that makes any sense as an explanation for this bizarre behavior by Donald Trump -- the repeated, fawning praise of Vladimir Putin and the decision to allow Flynn to defenestrate himself over "incomplete information" -- is the presumption that Putin has some dirt on Trump that is so awful, it would bring down this entire administration a bare three weeks into its existence.

Which takes us back to the dossier compiled by the former British secret service agent -- that Putin has video of Trump acting like ... Trump in a Moscow hotel room, the stuff that Trump howled "fake news" about like a hit dog.

Moscow on the Potomac

Trump and Flynn, on the campaign trail
last year. Photo ABC News

There's solid, incontrovertible evidence that Trump's National Security Advisor Michael Flynn had multiple contacts with Russia's ambassador to the U.S. prior to the election and that he discussed the Obama administration's sanctions against Russia with the ambassador. The evidence is incontrovertible because intelligence agencies apparently have the tapes of those conversations.

Once the Obama administration took retaliatory action in December against Russia because of the hacking scandal, Flynn was on the phone again immediately with the Russian ambassador. Instead of its own retaliatory action against the U.S. -- expelling a few American personnel from the American embassy in Moscow, for example -- which is what everyone expected from Russia, Putin said he wouldn't respond. Trump immediately praised Putin for his forbearance.

We know that Russia was hacking (and Gawd knows what else) to help Trump win that election, and we know that Flynn was constantly reaching out to Russia, presumably either for Trump's benefit or on his orders. Now Trump is defending Flynn, and the whole thing stinks to high heaven.

I may have fallen off the turnip truck yesterday, but I didn't land on my head. We have the president that Moscow wanted, and we're only just beginning to learn the full measure of Trump's collusion in subverting the American government under Obama for the benefit of Russia.

There Are Always Casualties in Rollerball

Gen. Michael Flynn, who's clearly lusting for combustion, has put Iran "on notice." Flynn, who famously peddled the rumor that Hillary Clinton was involved in child prostitution and who is obviously therefore rash and incendiary by nature, is just visibly itching with the pleasure of bombing someone.

But don't completely despair. Flynn displayed sufficient calm to remember to blame President Obama for Iran's need to be stomped on by Trump. Mission accomplished.

The combustible Trump administration is showing off its diplomatic skills everywhere. You heard that Trump hung up on a phone call with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull over the issue of accepting -- by previous agreement with President Obama -- 1,200 refugees from the Middle East who had tried to reach Australia by boat.

That damn Obama!

He didn't hang up on the prime minister until after he had boasted about his electoral win, which apparently didn't impress Mr. Turnbull as much as it should have. You're possibly sending us "the next Boston bomber," Trump raged at Turnbull.

Trump's first covert military assault on Al Quaeda in Yemen, about which he bragged and pranced, was actually FUBAR, and the Pentagon has admitted as much. "Qaeda fighters were somehow tipped off to the stealthy advance" of the Seal 6 commando troops, and "through a communications intercept, the commandos knew that the mission had been somehow compromised."

Their knew they were compromised, yet no one in charge aborted the mission. So a village-wide firefight ensued, a member of the Navy's Seal Team 6 was killed, three others wounded, a $75 million MV-22 Osprey aircraft took a hard landing (which injured an additional three crew members) and had to be destroyed by airstrike, and an unknown number of civilians including children were killed.

And by the way, again …  it was all Obama's fault, because the mission was initially planned for a moonless night during his presidency but was not executed because the next moonless night would not occur until the Trump presidency.

"Go nuclear," Trump told Mitch McConnell, referring to the confirmation of his Supreme Court pick, but maybe he meant the whole world.

“The whole thing is scary,” said David Boaz, executive vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute. “They have no appreciation for the Constitution, much less the unwritten norms of liberal democracy.”

The Cato Institute said that.

Trump To His NSC: "Peel Me a Muslim, Would You?"

Our narcissistic president does stupid shit because someone got to him and told him something that he chooses to believe, or which tickles his fancy, which is about all the concerted cogitation that the man can expend before taking potentially disastrous steps. That's what you put into office, America.

“I have spoken, as recently as 24 hours ago, with people at the highest level of intelligence and I asked them the question: does torture work?” he told ABC reporter David Muir. “And the answer was: yes, absolutely.”

People at the highest level of intelligence is one of those dismal Trumpian bites of word salad that might mean something but probably don't, because the man wouldn't name who those "people" were. We know by now what "many people are saying" means, which is squat.

So our president it talking openly about torture and how he's inclined to do it.

With that as hors d'oeuvre, what should "spill into public view" early yesterday but a draft Executive Order advocating  the reinstatement of CIA "black sites," secret prisons around the world where we, the American commonwealth, famously tortured prisoners under the presidency of Dick Cheney. The draft Executive Order evidently came out of Trump's National Security Council (NSC) and was distributed via email (oh boy!) to NSC members. I cannot for the life of me imagine that such a thing got written and distributed without the express or tacit approval of Trump.

The Trump people are embarrassed about the leak (as they should be!), are denying that they or anybody they knew wrote the thing or caused it to be circulated, but anonymous White House sources are saying the denials are simply a lie. Trump's people are embarrassed but not Trump. He goes on national tv and brags he's up for some torture as soon as his cabinet-level guys ask for it. And it'll be the best torture, like no one has ever tortured before. The best!

Gen. Michael Flynn,
Trump's NSC advisor

Whatever happens -- and so far (at least, for public consumption) Trump's Sec. of Defense and his new CIA director say they will not participate in torture -- whatever happens and ends up coming out into public view, we have a sonovabitch as president who is capable of absolutely anything, especially depending on who was the last sonovabitch who told him something he liked hearing.

Because he himself is incapable of thinking with any human insight or foresight or just plain sight that doesn't involve gilded walls and trophy wives.

Marooned on Gullible's Island

Scalawag and Vagabond

So this happened last Sunday: A North Carolina man who read something on-line drove north to Washington, D.C., with three guns in his car (a Colt long rifle, a .38-caliber revolver and a shotgun. One early report said he also had an AR-15), found Connecticut Ave. and drove north until he got to 5037, the home of a pizza parlor named Comet Ping Pong.

He entered the restaurant fully armed and caused panic for 45 minutes. He shot off the lock to a storage room door (according to one source; another report says he fired a shot into the floor to cow everybody). He was looking to rescue child sex slaves who were allegedly making money for Hillary Clinton.

When he didn't find the child sex slaves, Edgar Maddison Welch surrendered to D.C. police. He's alive. He had the good sense to surrender by walking backward out into the street with his hands in the air. He's white. He's gullible. In his own eyes he's Moses, looking to lead the children of Israel out of Egypt.

Did you not know that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta were peddling child flesh for cash? Also indulging in a little Satanism on the side. It's #pizzagate, Baby! The fake "news" story that someone cobbled together out of "hints" in the Wilileaks-email-dump that went viral before the election, especially among the under-informed.

Outrage followed, mixed with over-the-top, life-or-death, armed-resistance-to-the-rescue fantasizing. Self-righteousness blazed forth. Take Alex Jones, for example -- a talk-show host and leader of the right-wing website Infowars:

“When I think about all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped, I have zero fear standing up against her,” Jones said in a YouTube video posted on Nov. 4. “Yeah, you heard me right. Hillary Clinton has personally murdered children. I just can’t hold back the truth anymore.”

We don't know yet where Edgar Maddison Welch, the 28-year-old resident of Salisbury, N.C., got his news, but some of his backstory has come out. According to the reporting of Marc Fisher, John Woodrow Cox and Peter Hermann:

Earlier this fall, in Salisbury, Edgar Maddison Welch saw some friends doing drugs and he started preaching at them, aggressively.

Danielle Tillman, 23, was the best friend of Welch’s girlfriend. She said she had just taken acid when Welch got upset, chanting Jesus’ name at her.

“He grabbed my hand and got in my face and was like, ‘Let the demons out of her,’ ” Tillman recalled. “It was super weird.”

Welch, known to friends as Maddison, had struck friends as a sweet young man who’d had trouble finding his way....

A few years ago, he told his hometown newspaper that through hiking, he had broken his addiction to the Internet.

But Welch had another habit. He was arrested several times on drug-possession charges and his name appeared on a forged prescription, according to police ­records. He was convicted of marijuana possession and public drinking and was sent to a ­substance-abuse program.

Friends say Welch, 28, in recent months grew far more outwardly religious. “He sees himself as someone who is a protector,” said his friend Charles Dobson, 28. “He is just a thrill-seeking guy.”

I'm not going to say that #pizzagate is a sign of the times, which heralds more to come. I'm not going to say that Trump Nation is now the Land of the Facts-Free. I'm not going to exaggerate the very real damage done to actual people by fact-free fantasies, especially in the #pizzagate case. (Get a load of the abuse the owner of Comet Ping Pong has endured; his neighboring businesses have also been threatened.)

What I am going to say is that the Trump administration is and has been a pass-through for facts-free rumors, poison-drops, rabble-rousing incitements. Forget the bilge that Trumplethinskin himself has tweeted for months and continues to tweet. Have you even looked at Breitbart, the creation of Trump's right-hand-man Steve Bannon?

More to the point of armed men seeking vigilante justice and Trump's part in creating that environment ... Do you know that Trump transition official Michael Flynn Jr., who is also close adviser to his father Michael Flynn Sr., whom Trump selected to serve as national security adviser, sent numerous posts on Twitter about the conspiracy theories of Pizzagate? Michael Senior has also been found to have an itchy Twitter finger. The Flynn boys are not that different from Edgar Maddison Welch. They just have a much bigger arsenal at their disposal.

Does nobody under the Trump influence have a shit-detector? (I exempt Mr. Trump from that question, since it's clear he's merely a manipulator and probably knows a hawk from a handsaw, and likes confusion.)

This Week in the Trump Locker Room

Jared Kushner

Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, bought the New York Observer in 2006, when Kushner was 25. The veteran editor of The Observer, Peter Kaplan, quickly soured on Kushner: “This guy doesn’t know what he doesn’t know,” Mr. Kaplan complained to colleagues at the time.

Mitt Romney

Well before the Republican National Convention, Mitt Romney said in front of cameras that if Mr. Trump became the Republican nominee, “the prospects for a safe and prosperous future are greatly diminished,” and he suggested that Mr. Trump was dangerous and unstable. He deplored Mr. Trump’s personal qualities: “the bullying, the greed, the showing off, the misogyny, the absurd third-grade theatrics.”

President Elect Donald Trump

The recently opened Trump International Hotel in Washington, which Donald Trump owns, invited representatives from local embassies to the hotel for a tour after the election to encourage them to use it when leaders from their countries visited Washington. Mr. Trump also met during the week of November 14 in his office at Trump Tower with three Indian business partners who are building a Trump-branded luxury apartment complex south of Mumbai. "There does not seem to be any sign of a meaningful separation of Trump government operations and his business operations,” said Noah Bookbinder, the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics.

General Michael Flynn

Gen. Flynn, according to Nicholas Kristof, is smart and knows the world very well, but he was fired from his last government job -- the Defense Intelligence Agency -- for incompetence. Colin Powell, former secretary of state, explained in hacked emails why Flynn was fired: “abusive with staff, didn’t listen, worked against policy, bad management.” He is regarded by many Republican and Democratic foreign policy specialists as "a kook." Colin Powell said that after his firing, he went  “right-wing nutty.” In November 2016, Flynn tweeted an obviously fake story claiming that the police had found emails linking Hillary Clinton to sex crimes with children.

General Michael Flynn

Flynn is also actually also a consultant for lobbyists. He went on an expenses-paid trip to Moscow as the guest of Vladimir Putin. He wrote an op-ed in The Hill "shilling for Turkey" without revealing that he has also taken consulting money from a company tied to Turkish president Erdogan.

President-Elect Donald Trump

The first foreign leader that Donald Trump placed a telephone call to was Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the President of Turkey. “I have a little conflict of interest ’cause I have a major, major building in Istanbul,” Trump told Stephen Bannon in an interview during the campaign. (Bannon was still running Breitbart at the time and had not yet been named Chief Strategist for Trump.) When British Prime Minister Theresa May finally got through to Trump on the phone -- she called him. He didn't call her -- Trump said, “If you travel to the U.S., you should let me know.” The Trump-May conversation lasted 10 minutes.

General Michael Flynn

For his chief of staff, Gen. Flynn chose his son, Michael G. Flynn. Michael has been aggressive on right-wing social media. He's been called "looney" for calling President Obama a communist and a fascist. He shared stories alleging top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin had a connection to the Muslim Brotherhood, pushed a conspiracy theory that Sen. Marco Rubio was a closeted homosexual who abused cocaine, and repeatedly used expletives to attack Trump's political opponents. Flynn works for his father's consulting firm, Flynn Intel Group, and he is reportedly always at his father's side.

Federal Judge John Primomo

At a U.S. citizenship ceremoney on November 17 in San Antonio, Judge Primomo, who was conducting the naturalization swearing in, lectured the new citizens: “I can assure you that whether you voted for him or you did not vote for him, if you are a citizen of the United States, he is your president. He will be your president and if you do not like that, you need to go to another country.”

16 Ways of Looking at a Mugwump

Mugwump, noun: 1. a Republican who refused to support the party nominee, James G. Blaine, in the presidential campaign of 1884. 2. a person who is unable to make up his or her mind on an issue, especially in politics; a person who is neutral on a controversial issue.
 

Kushner

1. Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son-in-law, has conducted a "purge" of certain members of Trump's transition team, starting with Gov. Chris Christie who was fired as head of the transition last Friday. Former Representative Mike Rogers of Michigan and Matthew Freedman, a lobbyist who consults with corporations and foreign governments, were also fired. Both had ties to Christie.

2. The President-elect sent a tweet very late last night insisting that everything was going smoothly. “Very organized process taking place as I decide on Cabinet and many other positions. I am the only one who knows who the finalists are!”

3. Rebekah Mercer, a major donor to Trump’s presidential campaign and member of his executive transition team, told Republican operatives that she was having difficulty finding people interested in rank-and-file administration posts.

4. Trump took his first conversations with foreign leaders without reviewing official State Department briefing materials, and he broke from diplomatic practice by delaying conversations with close U.S. allies. Trump’s first call was with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, followed by Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu. British Prime Minister Theresa May didn’t get through to Trump until almost a day later.

5. As of yesterday, officials at both the Pentagon and State Department said they have heard nothing from Trump’s transition team.

Bannon

6. Trump’s newly-named chief strategist, Steve Bannon, helped turn Breitbart News into a platform for the white nationalist alt-right. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), a possible choice for attorney general, was once turned down for a federal judgeship after several U.S. attorneys testified that he made racist comments in court. Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani’s extensive business ties to Qatar and Venezuela complicate reports that he could be chosen as secretary of state.

7. Eliot A. Cohen, a former State Department official who had criticized Trump during the campaign but said after his election that he would keep an open mind about advising him, said yesterday on Twitter that he had changed his opinion. After speaking to the transition team, he wrote, "stay away!” adding, “They’re angry, arrogant, screaming ‘you LOST!’ Will be ugly.”

8. Donald Trump and some of his family went to dinner last night at the super-expensive 21 Club in Manhattan (where you can get a ribeye for $68) and said to the well-heeled diners, "We'll get your taxes down -- don't worry about it."

9. Vice President-elect Mike Pence -- who now heads the transition after the firing of Christie -- did his own purge, reportedly dismissing the several registered lobbyists who had moved in, leaving the transition "short-staffed" but closer to Trump’s campaign promise to “drain the swamp.”

Mnuchin

10. Former Goldman Sachs partner and Trump loyalist Steven Mnuchin is the frontrunner for treasury secretary. Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions is now favored to serve as attorney general. Seen arriving at Trump Tower yesterday was one-time campaign rival Ted Cruz. Joining the national security transition team is Frank Gaffney Jr. -- labeled by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “one of America’s most notorious Islamophobes,” and who last year defended Trump’s proposed Muslim ban as “common sense.”

11. Rudy Giuliani let his freak flag fly and admitted in public that he's pretty sure he'll be picked as Secretary of State. John Bolton’s name also surfaced for that job. Republican Sen. Rand Paul immediately objected, calling Bolton “unfit” for the job. “You want to have a diplomat in charge of diplomacy. You don’t want a bomb thrower,” Paul told CNN. Then Paul lumped the former mayor of New York City in with Bolton: “I think Giuliani and Bolton are very similar. Bolton just has a more extensive cheerleading background with regard to war in the Middle East.”

12. Republicans will have a one-seat majority in the Senate, meaning any defection -- by a senator like Rand Paul -- could pose a serious roadblock to confirming Trump’s top Cabinet picks. 

13. One source with knowledge of the Trump transition described it as a "knife fight."

14. A particular challenge for the Trump transition is lack of clarity about the division of power among Reince Priebus, named Chief of Staff of the Trump White House; Steve Bannon, the Harvard-educated white supremacist and campaign Svengali; and Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, who has Trump's ear like no one else. Another source tied to the transition described the resulting confusion as "buffoonery."

Flynn

15. Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn has emerged as a leading candidate for national security adviser. Flynn was a vocal and sometimes inflamatory advocate for Trump during the campaign. At the Republican National Convention he delivered a fiery speech attacking Clinton (as being in the enemy camp, along with Barack Hussein Obama) and waving the bloody flag of "American exceptionalism." He echoed Trump's rhetoric of crushing terrorism, cozying up to Russia, and dissing NATO.

16. Trump on the campaign trail promised repeatedly not to change Medicare. Now his official website says: “modernize Medicare, so that it will be ready for the challenges with the coming retirement of the Baby Boom generation – and beyond.” "Modernize"? House Speaker Paul Ryan has a different term: "Medicare is going to have price controls.”

A nation and its Constitution are one. A nation and its Constitution and Donald Trump are one. (Apologies, Wallace Stevens!)