Trump at 58% approval in Tennessee. So glad hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars are going to be begging ignorant people to “pick me” because I am most like Emperor Imbecile. None of this is defensible.

Lol that baby blimp is glorious in the sky. Props.

I know were about 12 hours removed, but I'd like to jump in and say **** Gohmert and **** Gowdy and the rest of the GOP ****s who took part in that hearing yesterday. It was another incident in a long line lately that made me embarrassed to be a citizen of this piece of **** country. I'd gladly die now if a meteor came and pushed the entirety of the southern US into the center of the earth and wiped out all of the deplorable ****s who vote these scumbags into office.

Not infrequently, I run into casual observers of politics who say something to the effect of, “why isn’t Trump being prepped not to say XYZ.” These comments are especially frequent when Trump says something stupid when traveling abroad.

That sort of comment badly misses the point imo. I’m sure people are prepping Trump. But a lot of those people are *******s themselves who have terrible ideas about what the right thing to do is. But even if those people were well intentioned, prepping Trump isn’t very effective for a variety of reasons. A huge part of the problem, of course, is Trump’s personality. He has too big an ego, and too short an attention span, to endure extensive prep. And part of the problem is a lack of intelligence and advanced age. Younger and smarter guys like Obama are able to absorb and assimilate information much more effectively than someone like Trump.

A less appreciated factor was Trump’s lack of knowledge on day 1. It is much easier to absorb preparation if you have a high baseline level of knowledge that serves as a framework on which you can hang new information.

Even less appreciated is how impossible it is to comprehensively prep a president on every thing that he should not say or do when traveling abroad. You simply can’t anticipate every situation or question that a US president may encounter.

So what happens in practice? Trump gets plenty of advice during prep. A lot of that advice is bad because of the people Trump has surrounded himself with. He absorbs only half of what he is told, and he willfully disregards half of what he absorbs because he is an arrogant dickhead. And pretty frequently, either because of bad judgment or circumstance, he winds up talking or tweeting extemporaneously about issues on which he has not been specifically prepped.

The final product is a president with bad intentions and a huge ego who ends up just mashing buttons without a plan when traveling abroad. And after it happens, we inevitably are treated to dissembling, iimplausible reinterpration, and vague claims about 4D chess from Trump himself and his traveling band of apologists and admirers.

Case in point: Ronald Reagan. And he was good at taking direction.

Most of you aren't old enough to remember the "gaffes" as they were generally called, but they were underplayed by the media. See On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency

Trump has other problems like being a hypersensitive socially inept impulsive ahole and is compelled to say idiotic things more often than any other human.

Idk if Trump should really be characterized as having a huge ego. He's a selfish narcissist for sure, but he's really effing insecure - CROWD SIZE! BIGGEST WIN EVER! I AM SMART! - he knows those things aren't true. I think this is part of what his supporters like though. He's not really all that elite in a lot of ways - he's dumb, but he just claims to be elite and everyone else can suck it. People perceive someone like Obama as having a huge ego, and while he doesn't go around telling people he's all that smart, he is and he surely knows it. Trumpkins love Trump for being the selfish racist dumb guy who just says he's smart and says his selfish racism is a whole lot of loving America or something that they can pretend is decent.

Do not congratulate.

https://twitter.com/CookPolitical/st...62474681143296

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/...72506470649857

The idea of Trump negotiating a trade deal or understanding trade deal negotiations is as plausible to me as Trump personally writing a legal brief appealing an unfavorable court decision.

https://twitter.com/mkraju/status/1017772211699109888

https://twitter.com/ABC/status/1017762869381754881

Anyone got any clues as to what this could possibly be about?

He also called the Sun interview fake news, despite the fact that The Sun published the audio along with the article.

Could be nothing (e.g., caught some Canadian pill smuggler). Could be something (e.g., Jared Kushner perp walk).

My money’s on indictments.

Party's over. Time to get the toilet paper out of the trees and phone the neighbors to apologize for the loud music last night.

Yesterday Muller filed 100 blank subpoenas, no idea what that means or if it’s even related to Russiagate.

Yeah for the Fbi lovers!

Here is Dirty Pete’s lover Lisa. Va va voom!

Something Trump could have said...

I agree with all this. My main point was that there is a negative synergy between all of Trump's flaws as a human being and his sheer lack of knowledge or expertise. In other words, his shortcomings are multiplicative, not additive.

This always makes me chuckle for some reason.

If I'm the judge I'm like, "Here's ONE blank subpoena, take yo ass to Kinko's MF'er."

Clerk's office handles subpoena's. They are for the manafort trial, and it's just to ensure they have enough for all the witnesses they might possibly call, and you need like 4 per witness.

Looks like he's much more popular in Scotland

Would love to be a fly on the wall when he meets the royals.
tens of thousands (many say millions) marching in protest.