Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon join a long list of people Donald Trump doesn’t know about.
Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas
“I don’t know those gentleman. Now, it’s possible I have a picture with them because I have a picture with everybody. I don’t know them, I don’t know about them, I don’t know what they do.”
Jeffrey Epstein
“I knew him like everybody in Palm Beach knew him, I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you.”
Michael Flynn
“It now seems the General Flynn was under investigation long before was common knowledge, It would have been impossible for me to know this.”
Roger Stone
“Now you know Roger didn’t work for me in the campaign, Roger Stone didn’t work on the campaign, except way, way at the beginning, long before we’re talking about… Roger is somebody that I’ve always liked, but a lot of people like Roger. Some people probably don’t like Roger, but Roger Stone’s somebody I’ve always liked. … Roger wasn’t on my campaign except way at the beginning.”
Stormy Daniels
“I had nothing to do with her. So she can lie and she can do whatever she wants to do.”
George Papadopoulos
“I don’t know Papadopoulos. I don’t know him, I saw him sitting, in one picture, at a table with me. That’s the — that’s the only thing I know about him. I don’t know him. But they got him on — I guess, a couple of lies, is what they’re saying.”
“Few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George, who has already proven to be a liar.”
Paul Manafort
“I didn’t know Manafort well. He wasn’t with the campaign long.”
“I know Mr. Manafort — I haven’t spoken to him in a long time, but I know him. He was with the campaign, as you know, for a very short period of time, relatively short period of time.”
Michael Cohen
“He’s been a lawyer for me. Didn’t do big deals, did small deals. Not somebody that was with me that much, They make it sound like I didn’t live without him. … He was somebody that was probably with me for about 10 years. And I would see him sometimes, but when I had deals and big deals I had outside lawyers, and I have a lot of inside lawyers, too, in addition to Michael.”
Vladimir Putin
“I don’t know him. I met him a couple of times. I met him at the G-20. I think we could probably get along very well.”
One of the enduring strengths of the republican form of government is the number of voters that do not commit suicide in the long months leading up to major elections :<)
One of the most depressing strengths….
But it is coming to an end. Not fast enough but sure enough.
“Ever get the growing sense that the Republican Party itself — not just Trump — is showing some real fear beneath all their amoral power-grabbing? That they’re also acting like a highly threatened animal, fangs and claws bared, facing an enemy that might kill it?
They are. That enemy is… time. And the repulsiveness of Donald Trump is only accelerating what’s coming, as younger voters (and today’s teens and tweens, watching this mess and waiting for their own 18th birthdays) reject Trump and turn away from the Trump-enslaved GOP in historic numbers.
The Atlantic isn’t the first to publish an essay on the coming political transformation of America thanks to our young people. But Ronald Browenstein’s piece here, The GOP’s Demographic Doom, is brand new, and it’s a strong one. Subtitle: “Millennials and Gen Z are only a few years away from dominating the electorate.”
It’s true. They are. Kos’ diary yesterday about the 1,000,000 new voters in Georgia is one bellwether. Many of that million new GA voters are younger voters. Another bellwether is Arizona, poised to narrowly flip blue this November as it grows ever more diverse. And the biggest is Texas, which will probably come very close to flipping blue this time. Texas will probably be the absolute #1 battleground state for 2024.
The Atlantic is behind a paywall, and I have to tell you — if you subscribe to just a few publications these days, I’d put them in the Top 5. They’ve just been terrific this past few years. But here are several key paragraphs from Browenstein’s piece:
‘ Trump is eroding the Republican Party’s position with younger voters at precisely the same time as the massively diverse Millennials and Generation Z are poised to become the largest voting bloc in the electorate, as new research released this week shows. That prospect presents both a near- and long-term danger for the GOP. The immediate problem is that polls nationally and in key swing states show Joe Biden positioned to significantly expand on Hillary Clinton’s margin among younger voters, even as many more of them are signaling they intend to vote than did in 2016.'”
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/10/24/1989170/-Atlantic-The-GOP-s-Demographic-Doom
EMike,
Don’t tease. That would be cruel. I’ve been waiting for this since 1968 when we were first snookered. I saw it coming a mile away and was just reassured not to worry. They had worked the numbers and had it all sewn up.
Trump Had One Last Story to Sell. The Wall Street Journal Wouldn’t Buy It
NY Times – October 25
By early October, even people inside the White House believed President Trump’s re-election campaign needed a desperate rescue mission. So three men allied with the president gathered at a house in McLean, Va., to launch one.
The host was Arthur Schwartz, a New York public relations man close to President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr. The guests were a White House lawyer, Eric Herschmann, and a former deputy White House counsel, Stefan Passantino, according to two people familiar with the meeting.
Mr. Herschmann knew the subject matter they were there to discuss. He had represented Mr. Trump during the impeachment trial early this year, and he tried to deflect allegations against the president in part by pointing to Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine. More recently, he has been working on the White House payroll with a hazy portfolio, listed as “a senior adviser to the president,” and remains close to Jared Kushner.
The three had pinned their hopes for re-electing the president on a fourth guest, a straight-shooting Wall Street Journal White House reporter named Michael Bender. They delivered the goods to him there: a cache of emails detailing Hunter Biden’s business activities, and, on speaker phone, a former business partner of Hunter Biden’s named Tony Bobulinski. Mr. Bobulinski was willing to go on the record in The Journal with an explosive claim: that Joe Biden, the former vice president, had been aware of, and profited from, his son’s activities. The Trump team left believing that The Journal would blow the thing open and their excitement was conveyed to the president.
The Journal had seemed to be the perfect outlet for a story the Trump advisers believed could sink Mr. Biden’s candidacy. Its small-c conservatism in reporting means the work of its news pages carries credibility across the industry. And its readership leans further right than other big news outlets. Its Washington bureau chief, Paul Beckett, recently remarked at a virtual gathering of Journal reporters and editors that while he knows that the paper often delivers unwelcome news to the many Trump supporters who read it, The Journal should protect its unique position of being trusted across the political spectrum, two people familiar with the remarks said.
As the Trump team waited with excited anticipation for a Journal exposé, the newspaper did its due diligence: Mr. Bender and Mr. Beckett handed the story off to a well-regarded China correspondent, James Areddy, and a Capitol Hill reporter who had followed the Hunter Biden story, Andrew Duehren. Mr. Areddy interviewed Mr. Bobulinski. They began drafting an article.
Then things got messy. Without warning his notional allies, Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and now a lawyer for President Trump, burst onto the scene with the tabloid version of the McLean crew’s carefully laid plot. Mr. Giuliani delivered a cache of documents of questionable provenance — but containing some of the same emails — to The New York Post, a sister publication to The Journal in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Mr. Giuliani had been working with the former Trump aide Steve Bannon, who also began leaking some of the emails to favored right-wing outlets. Mr. Giuliani’s complicated claim that the emails came from a laptop Hunter Biden had abandoned, and his refusal to let some reporters examine the laptop, cast a pall over the story — as did The Post’s reporting, which alleged but could not prove that Joe Biden had been involved in his son’s activities.
While the Trump team was clearly jumpy, editors in The Journal’s Washington bureau were wrestling with a central question: Could the documents, or Mr. Bobulinski, prove that Joe Biden was involved in his son’s lobbying? Or was this yet another story of the younger Mr. Biden trading on his family’s name — a perfectly good theme, but not a new one or one that needed urgently to be revealed before the election.
Mr. Trump and his allies expected the Journal story to appear Monday, Oct. 19, according to Mr. Bannon. That would be late in the campaign, but not too late — and could shape that week’s news cycle heading into the crucial final debate last Thursday. An “important piece” in The Journal would be coming soon, Mr. Trump told aides on a conference call that day.
His comment was not appreciated inside The Journal.
“The editors didn’t like Trump’s insinuation that we were being teed up to do this hit job,” a Journal reporter who wasn’t directly involved in the story told me. But the reporters continued to work on the draft as the Thursday debate approached, indifferent to the White House’s frantic timeline.
Finally, Mr. Bobulinski got tired of waiting.
“He got spooked about whether they were going to do it or not,” Mr. Bannon said.
At 7:35 Wednesday evening, Mr. Bobulinski emailed an on-the-record, 684-word statement making his case to a range of news outlets. Breitbart News published it in full. He appeared the next day in Nashville to attend the debate as Mr. Trump’s surprise guest, and less than two hours before the debate was to begin, he read a six-minute statement to the press, detailing his allegations that the former vice president had involvement in his son’s business dealings.
When Mr. Trump stepped on stage, the president acted as though the details of the emails and the allegations were common knowledge. “You’re the big man, I think. I don’t know, maybe you’re not,” he told Mr. Biden at some point, a reference to an ambiguous sentence from the documents.
As the debate ended, The Wall Street Journal published a brief item, just the stub of Mr. Areddy and Mr. Duehren’s reporting. The core of it was that Mr. Bobulinski had failed to prove the central claim. “Corporate records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show no role for Joe Biden,” The Journal reported.
Asked about The Journal’s handling of the story, the editor in chief, Matt Murray, said the paper did not discuss its newsgathering. “Our rigorous and trusted journalism speaks for itself,” Mr. Murray said in an emailed statement.
And if you’d been watching the debate, but hadn’t been obsessively watching Fox News or reading Breitbart, you would have had no idea what Mr. Trump was talking about. The story the Trump team hoped would upend the campaign was fading fast. …
Trump’s falsehoods: Are they lies, self-deceptions, or something more frightening?
via @BostonGlobe – Errol. Morris – October 29
Years ago I was filming at a mental hospital. One of the patients offered an important distinction: “There are two kinds of people. There are the insane and the out-sane.” At the time I found it funny. I still do, but I’m not sure why. Is it because the word “out-sane” doesn’t really mean anything? Who are the out-sane and what distinguishes them from the insane? Are they the people who aren’t in asylums but should be? Could they be us? My current interpretation is that the man meant there are as many insane people outside as inside. And many of the insane people outside should be inside.
In 2017, I was interviewed by The Daily Beast about a movie I had just made about my friend Elsa Dorfman.
DB: I’d be remiss in not asking you about our current political reality. What do you make of President Trump? And would you like to get him in front of the Interrotron [i.e. the cinematographic system Morris uses for interviews]?
EM: I’ve had Trump in front of the Interrotron. I interviewed him 15 years ago for a piece that ran at the beginning of the Oscars. I had him speaking about Citizen Kane. [His advice to Charles Foster Kane? Get yourself a different woman.]
DB: Anything you’d like to ask him now?
EM: I’d like him to seriously consider retirement.
DB: I don’t think you’re alone in feeling that way.
The interview was done more than three years ago. In the interim, the situation has gotten much worse. We have been treated to his chaotic Muslim travel ban; his “good people on both sides” encouragement of fascist terror groups — neo-Nazis, Proud Boys, QAnon enthusiasts; innumerable violations of the Constitution; the capricious firing of honest civil servants and military personnel; more than 225,000 American deaths due to his totally bungled handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. The list has become so very long. Now it has become almost a horrifying, incomprehensible blur.
You can read all about it in the cornucopia of tell-all books that spill out from this administration. There are even summaries of the tell-all books, for those who can’t deal with the sheer number of them or wish to see them compared and contrasted. Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury,” John Bolton’s “The Room Where It Happened,” Mary Trump’s “Too Much and Never Enough,” Michael Cohen’s “Disloyal,” Bob Woodward’s “Rage” … So many, in fact, that they too have become a horrifying, incomprehensible blur. I’m at the point where I have become suspicious of people trying to make sense out of Trump. There may be no point in trying.
There’s a scene I love in Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove.” It’s the climactic scene in the War Room. General “Buck” Turgidson (George C. Scott) is reading to President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers).
GBT: General Ripper called Strategic Air Command headquarters shortly after he issued the go code. I have a portion of the transcript of that conversation if you’d like me to to read it.
PMM: Read it!
GBT: Ahem . . . the Duty Officer asked General Ripper to confirm the fact that he had issued the go code, and he said, uh, “Yes gentlemen, they are on their way in, and no one can bring them back. For the sake of our country, and our way of life, I suggest you get the rest of SAC in after them. Otherwise, we will be totally destroyed by Red retaliation. Uh, my boys will give you the best kind of start, 1,400 megatons worth, and you sure as hell won’t stop them now. So let’s get going, there’s no other choice. God willing, we will prevail, in peace and freedom from fear, and in true health, through the purity and essence of our natural fluids. God bless you all.” And he hung up.
GBT: Uh, we’re, still trying to figure out the meaning of that last phrase, sir.
[Muffley demands to see the transcript. He reads it silently.]
PMM: There’s nothing to figure out, General Turgidson. This man is obviously a psychotic.
GBT: Well, I’d like to hold off judgment on a thing like that, sir, until all the facts are in. …