Three from Slate - "Trump Sticks it to his Advisors", "Best Thing is for Trump to Keep Talking", and

[NRaleighLiberal]

"Trump's Phoenix Rally was an Embarrassing Therapy Session"

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/08/trump_s_phoenix_speech_was_unhinged_and_unsurprising.html

The president’s Phoenix rally went off the rails within minutes. Why did I expect anything else?

by Jim Newell

PHOENIX—For about 10 minutes it seemed that President Trump might give a normal political speech at the Phoenix Convention Center on Tuesday night. After all, Trump had given a classic example of a normal political speech the previous night—an announcement that he would send additional troops to an endless theater of combat—and it was met with strong “reviews,” as military escalation always is, regardless of the president.


All day we had been getting signals that Trump was pleased with his reviews and might opt for a personal-record two consecutive days of restraint. Earlier in the afternoon, a White House spokesperson told reporters aboard Air Force One that Trump would not use the rally to pardon controversial former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, as had been rumored. Trump also had not brought up his hatred of Arizona Republican Sen. Jeff Flake since a tweet last week, and he did not invite former state Sen. Kelli Ward—the far-right challenger to Flake that Trump had mentioned positively last week—into his entourage for the trip. Perhaps Trump would back off trying to unseat a reliable Senate Republican vote who has criticized him (in a book, no less!). And maybe, just maybe, he would finally put to rest his hedging over whether “some very fine people” had chanted Nazi slogans at the Charlottesville, Virginia, torch-wielding white supremacist rally.

Stuck in traffic? Burn your tongue eating soup? Trump would probably tell you those are the media’s fault, too.
This is how I thought the event might go through the first 10 minutes of Trump’s rally speech, when he was reading off of the teleprompter. But then the next hour happened.

A normal political speech was not what Trump wanted to deliver. Nor was it what the thousands in the crowd waited in line for hours in 108-degree heat to hear. Nor was it what the dozen or so protest groups marched in that same heat to protest. A normal political environment is not something that this drowning country’s political culture can sustain for two consecutive nights. And so, after 10 minutes, Trump initiated the chaos that we can’t kick, a guttural laundry list of grievances all received with the ferocious cheers that normalcy can’t buy.

snip - more at the link above

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/08/trump_s_phoenix_speech_was_awful_he_should_keep_talking.html

No one is better at exposing the president for the hateful fraud that he is than Trump himself.

by William Saletan

One thing you discover as a parent is that what you do is more important than what you say. If you curse at drivers, your kids don’t learn that drivers are stupid; they learn to curse. If you hit your kids, they don’t learn that it’s wrong to do what you hit them for; they learn that it’s OK to hit.

William Saletan
WILLIAM SALETAN
Will Saletan writes about politics, science, technology, and other stuff for Slate. He’s the author of Bearing Right.

The same is true of being president. At a rally last night in Phoenix, President Trump talked about unity, selflessness, racial healing, and the rule of law. Then he made clear that he doesn’t believe in any of these things.

“Our movement is a movement built on love. It’s love for fellow citizens,” said Trump. He went on: “We are all on the same team. We are all Americans.” Then Trump spent most of the speech attacking his teammates. Twelve times, he called the media “dishonest,” “crooked,” or “sick.” “They’re bad people,” he concluded. “And I really think they don’t like our country.” He derided “all of the Democrats in Congress” (“They obstruct, that’s all they do”), Arizona Republican Sen. Jeff Flake (“Nobody knows who the hell he is”), TV pundits (“lightweights … that nobody ever heard of”), CNN (“pathetic”), and executives who have withdrawn from White House business councils to protest Trump’s remarks about Charlottesville, Virginia (“I remember the ones that did”). In a gesture that echoed his mockery of a disabled reporter, the president lowered a hand to ridicule the shortness of “little George Stephanopoulos.”

Trump talked about unity, selflessness, racial healing, and the rule of law. Then he made clear that he doesn’t believe in any of these things.
Trump talked about serving others. “Washington is full of people who are only looking out for themselves,” he declared. “But I don’t come to Washington for me.” Then he boasted of how many bills he had signed, claiming—without even mentioning what the bills were about—that no president had done as much as he has. He bragged about his post-Charlottesville statements (“The words were perfect”), his speech Monday night on Afghanistan (it “got great reviews”), his coinage of “extreme vetting” (“I came up with that term”), and businessmen who, according to Trump, have been asking him for lunch dates. Trump said of his critics: “I went to better schools than they did. I was a better student than they were. I live in a bigger, more beautiful apartment. And I live in the White House, too.”

snip - more at the link above

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/08/trump_s_phoenix_rally_was_an_embarrassing_therapy_session.html

The president is caught in a vicious cycle of failure and rage.

by Jamelle Bouie

For more than an hour, at a Tuesday night rally in Phoenix, the president of the United States—the most powerful elected official in the world—complained about the news media. That president—whose actions touch millions of lives—recounted (inaccurately) his response to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, framing himself as a victim of “fake news.” The president—who commands an arsenal of incomprehensible destructive power—angrily obsessed over the press for its coverage of his statements and speeches, giving a petulant rant the imprimatur of the Oval Office.


Put simply, the president threw a tantrum, blaming the media for a steady stream of self-inflicted wounds that have damaged his standing with key Republicans and destroyed it with a majority of voters. Indeed, this performance in Phoenix illustrates why, in a recent survey of voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, more than 6 in 10 respondents called him an “embarrassment.” When a president behaves this way, publicly wallowing in anger and frustration, it is embarrassing.

It was embarrassing for the president to hold such a self-congratulatory event given his thin record of achievement. President Trump has little to show for his seven months in office—his agenda is stillborn. And barring sudden changes in his skill and aptitude for the job, it will stay that way. As the year comes to a close and the midterm elections begin to loom, Congress will lose its appetite for serious (and potentially controversial) legislation. Unless Trump acts now, he’ll lose his window for accomplishing real things. At this moment, the president should be searching for ways to move the ball forward. Instead, he was on stage, complaining to his most die-hard supporters.

It was still shocking to see Trump’s full id on display.
It was embarrassing that the president, in pursuit of his petty grudge against a news media that fails to fawn over him, would rehash his statements on Charlottesville, omitting his equivocation toward and outright defense of white supremacists, as if his statements hadn’t aired on live television. “The truly dishonest people in the media and the fake media, they make up stories,” said Trump. "They don't report the facts. Just like they don't want to report that I spoke out forcefully against hatred, bigotry, and violence and strongly condemned the neo-Nazis, the white supremacists, and the KKK.” Giving us a glimpse into his psyche, he then bragged that he attended “better schools” than the press, had “better grades,” and lived in a “bigger, more beautiful apartment.”

snip - more at the link

[Warpy]

1. That last one is really on point

and points out our best hope, that when enough people he can't fire tell him no, that he'll blow a major fit and if he lives through it, will pick up his marbles and go home, resigning in disgust.