We talked last week how hideous Trump looked at the state dinner with Queen Elizabeth wearing his clearly borrowed white tie and tails, and now we have at least part of the story.  Ismet Dil, whose company has provided formal wear to presidents for over a century, says that he doesn’t recognize the suit that His Orangeness was wearing and has no idea where it came from.  Dil said, “This is my profession. It’s not right.” Saville Row tailors analyzed the suit for it’s legion of flaws:

I personally just can’t stop laughing at this clown, especially when he dresses like a clown.

UPDATED:

We all saw it last week, Trump suddenly tweeting that he’s going to slap tariffs on all Mexican imports if Mexico doesn’t immediately stop illegal immigration into the US.  He tanked stocks from manufacturers to grocery distributors, probably after he leaked the announcement to his cronies so they could short those stocks to make a tidy sum.  Remember Carl Icahn dumping steel stocks just before Trump announced the steel tariffs?

Anyway, negotiators between the US and Mexico were supposedly in feverish negotiations to come to a border security deal, and yesterday, with great fanfare, Trump announced on the Twitter machine that he has cut a last minute deal with Mexico.

Then he announced that Mexico has committed to purchase large quantities of American produce:

All that is great, except for one thing.  The deal he breathlessly announced yesterday was negotiated with Mexico…wait for it…last March.  Some provisions in the agreement date back to December.  This negotiation has been completed for months.

So let’s recap – Trump creates a gigantic economic crisis by demanding Mexico do what it has already agreed to do.  He costs the US economy billions of dollars (probably creating a profit opportunity for his buds).  He ratchets up the rhetoric during the D-Day commemoration, even while sitting in the US cemetery in Normandy. He berates Mexico, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, and even Bette Midler (I still haven’t figured that one out).  Then, with great fanfare, he announces that he’s saved the day by forcing Mexico to agree to a deal that had already been done.

Folks, this is gaslighting in its purest form.  Lie and create a problem that doesn’t exist.  Then lie again, claiming to have fixed a problem that really wasn’t a problem in the first place.  Then take credit for fixing the problem that didn’t exist.

Jesus.

UPDATE:

Trump also lied about a new farm deal.  This morning, he tweeted, “MEXICO HAS AGREED TO IMMEDIATELY BEGIN BUYING LARGE QUANTITIES OF AGRICULTURAL PRODUCT FROM OUR GREAT PATRIOT FARMERS!”

Three Mexican officials say, nope, no farm deal was negotiated; in fact, Mexico has no agricultural conglomerate to even do that.  Another day, another lie.

Look, I get it. With the massive discontent in America today and a criminally culpable, corrupt, clueless, classless clown as an opponent, it feels like we could nominate a ham sandwich and take over the White House in 2020. This has led to a record number of ham sandwiches seeking the Democratic nomination for President: 24, at last count. We’re going to review them all between now and the first debate, so at least you’ll have heard of them.

Who DEY?

Maurice “Mike” Gravel is the son of French Canadian immigrant parents, one of whom arrived in the US literally 109 years ago. Yes, Mike is OLD: 89 years old. He’s long been a proponent of liberal and libertarian causes: anti-war, pro-pot, pro-“direct democracy” (think Athens ca 500 BCE). As a Senator from Alaska, he read the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional record in 1971, a seriously heroic and historic act of citizenship for which I’ll always honor him. Since losing his Senate primary in 1980, this is his second quixotic campaign for President trying to air his issues. He has stated he has no intention of winning a primary, he just wants to be in the debate. Not even that’s happening, so far.

Andrew Yang is the son of Taiwanese immigrant parents. After a brief stint as a corporate lawyer, he worked in a couple of startups, until founding Venture for America, which sought to train and place future entrepreneurs in communities often underserved by entrepreneurs. His efforts were twice recognized by the Obama Administration. His platform centers on what he calls “Human-Centered Capitalism” which is a form of social capitalism with universal basic income (UBI) as its cornerstone. He calls his UBI “The Freedom Dividend” because it polls better with conservatives. In a field dragged left after 2016, policies alone will not be enough to distinguish him in the debates.

Marianne Williamson was born in 1952 to an immigration lawyer and a homemaker. She has studied theater and philosophy at Pomona College. She dropped out to become a cabaret singer. She then became inspired by a book called A Course in Miracles which the author claimed was internally dictated to her by Jesus. She ran a metaphysical bookstore and coffee shop, lectured and wrote about A Course in Miracles, then got a boost in her career when one of her self-help books was featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show in 1992. She’s been vociferously active in a lot of liberal causes, ran and lost as an Independent for Congress in CA-33 in 2014, and so is naturally running for President in 2020. Her signature issue is Love, and her platform is agreeing with other candidates’ good ideas, which will be boring in the debates.

Wayne Messam, the son of Jamaican immigrants, was born in 1974. He attended Florida State where he studied football. He worked for a pharmaceutical company, quit, and started a general contracting construction business. He became a City Commissioner and then the Mayor of Miramar, Florida, famous for having the same name as the San Diego Naval Air Station in the movie Top Gun. His signature issue is forgiving student loan debt. He also dislikes guns, thinks the Paris Accords are good, wants a path to citizenship in immigration reform, and wants to repeal Trump’s tax cuts. He is the President of the National Black Caucus of Local Elected Officials, and so is naturally running for President of the United States. His deep resume and bold thoughts have not yet qualified him for the debates.

Fun fact: Messam was on the Cincinnati Bengals practice squad, for a time, and thus it’s appropriate that we end this “Who Dey?” group of wannabes, has-beens, never-wases, also-rans and contenders on that note.

new phone who dis?

Anyone who bases their judgment on facts knew they were lying from the start.  In fact their entire strategy is based on massive lying.  What am I talking about? Voting.  Republicans figured out a long time ago that their demographic (old, white, angry) is shrinking.  Historically, this is a relatively recent phenomenon, started when the GOP went nuts after Goldwater lost in ’64.  Ultra conservative voices began rising during that time, really more Libertarian and Bircher, and when Reagan beat Carter, the calcification of the party really set in.  From those days to today, the GOP has pushed the entire country farther and farther to the right, pushing everyone not white, not old, not nuts out of the tent.  Trump’s takeover of the party has completed the calcification, adding white supremacy as just another adjective to describe the base.

The GOP base is so demographically narrow that it simply cannot fairly win anymore.  As the country becomes more diverse, our population is moving away from the radicalism and obvious insanity that is now the party.  So, how can they win on a national scale?  It’s two pronged: by keeping the base continuously whipped up and raging about dark-skinned people, and, of course, by cheating.  A lot.

That cheating comes in the form of radical gerrymandering and voter suppression.  Gerrymandering is a fact of life and several cases have been consolidated at the SCOTUS, but, unless Roberts has a sudden fit of rationality, I don’t have much hope.  Voter suppression, though, is just as insidious; keeping Americans from being represented in the Congress, the very basis of our republic.  Voter ID laws have been pushed now for twenty years, based on the lie that there is massive voter fraud occurring during our elections (by dark skinned people) that simply doesn’t exist.  Trump used that same blatant lie to explain away him losing the popular vote in 2016 by 3 million votes.

One of the Republicans pushing this lie is Chris Kobach, a white nationalist (who won’t admit it) and former Kansas Secretary of State.  Kobach was behind faked voter fraud studies in Kansas, and pushed anti-Muslim policies as well as strict voter ID laws.  After he lost the election for governor in 2017, he became an advisor to Trump, bringing his radical ideology to the WH.  And it’s not good.  In 2017 he lead Trump’s bogus voter integrity committee that quietly folded in 2018 after it couldn’t find one shred of evidence of massive voter fraud and being stopped by the states in amassing private data about voters.

One of the tactics Kobach pushed to Trump was adding a citizenship question to the US Census questionnaire.  Sounds benign, right?  Hardly.  The question is specifically designed to scare people who may have members of the family who are not citizens, have a green card, or are undocumented.  Why?  To undercount these populations and disproportionally increase representation to the GOP base (old and white).  Seats in state houses and in the US House are at stake.  Trump and crew have been lying about the reason for adding this question from the very first moment.  Their problem though, is that they’ve now been caught lying to Congress about it.

It turns out that Kobach pushed the citizenship question to the Trump campaign in 2016, long before Wilbur Ross claimed it was introduced in early 2017.  Yesterday, Elijah Cummings, chair of the House Oversight and Reform committee, disclosed details of a closed door interview with Kobach last Monday where he revealed this new detail.  Now we know why Trump has desperately been trying to expand executive privilege over even those who don’t actually work for him, but who just talked to him.  That effort failed and the administration is caught now in yet another lie.

So, Kobach lied until last Monday.  Wilbur Ross lied and stonewalled the House, likely earning a contempt of Congress vote just like Bill Barr did for refusing to testify.  This episode is yet another page in the encyclopedia of lies told by this administration.  Hopefully we can use this lie to shut down another of the GOP’s efforts to win by cheating.

OK, so here’s how bad it is for the Koch brothers….they’re looking for Democrats to support.  That’s right folks, the Kochs hate Trump so badly and understand the damage he is doing to their agenda that they are rebranding Americans for Prosperity as non-partisan.  In previewing the shift at their annual conference earlier this year, Charles Koch said,

“This attitude of holding against others who have different beliefs is tearing our country apart.”

Translation – “We can no longer buy politicians who have sold their souls to Trumpland, so we’re retreating to the middle until we can get rid of Trump and have more successful purchases of politicians.”

When the Kochs retreat, you know that Trump’s takeover is complete.  The conservative wing will have to shed themselves of the cancer that has metastasized in the WH themselves.  Until the invertebrates in Congress manage to stand up, their entire party will be strangled by His Orangeness.  Until that happens, the Kochs will be “non-partisan”.

Yesterday, world leaders gathered in Normandy to commemorate the 75th Anniversary of D-Day. As we’ve already discussed, Trump took the opportunity to make it all about him, including full on insulting of Robert Mueller and Nancy Pelosi on national television with the graves of heroes in the background.  No other politician would have even dreamed of doing that.

As part of the ceremony, world leaders who had gathered signed a proclamation that was intended to be an historic document.  What did Trump do?  I’ll give you one guess…

His Orangeness signed the proclamation at the TOP, when all others signed where you’re supposed to.  God help us until we can rid ourselves of this menace.

props to Sandridge