Terrible headline (“the reluctant hawk”) but some choice quotes:
Privately, he complained to aides that the media’s fixation on the Mueller probe was hobbling his effort to woo Putin. “I can’t put on the charm,” the president often said, according to one of his advisers. “I’m not able to be president because of this witch hunt.”
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Trump advisers were reluctant to even raise the topic of Russian interference in the election, which Trump equated with Democrats’ efforts to undermine his victory. “It’s just kind of its own beast,” a senior national security official said. “It’s been a constant from Day One.”
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The poisoning in Britain in early March of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, with a nerve agent upped the tension between Trump and his advisers.
Initially, the president was hesitant to believe the intelligence that Russia was behind the attack — a fact that some aides attributed to his contrarian personality and tendency to look for deeper conspiracies. To persuade him, his advisers warned that he would get hammered in the press if he was out of step with U.S. allies, officials said.
He was insistent that the poisoning in the English city of Salisbury was largely a European problem and that the allies should take the lead in moving against Russia.
Even if there was no collusion, he’s a fucking horror show of a president who wants to suck up to dictators and strongmen while leaving our allies out to dry.
Conservatives think running the country like a business is what we need.
Now we see that running businesses means ignoring advice, only playing to appearances, and lying/stonewalling/denying literally every single thing that could be construed as negative, and running from the top down like a tin pot dictatorship.
This will help bury the fantasy that “business” is either wiser or more efficient than government, and we should hold every conservative’s feet to the fire when they claim this from now on.
The ol’ “If I ran my business like we run this country” canard. That one is a great signifier in conversation for when you’re talking to someone whose entire understanding of public policy theory has been formed by listening to talk radio.
While I heartily support the notion that wanting a president who runs the country like a business is stupid - being a politician in a democracy is fundamentally different than being a CEO - it’s worth pointing out that Trump is a really shitty businessman (and is known to be such by other businessmen.) Economists have calculated he’d be worth more now if, back in the day, he’d simply taken his inheritance and put it in a mutual fund.
I would change the moral of the Trump Era from this:
to this:
“This will help bury the fantasy that rich people are either smarter or more morally superior than anyone else, and we should hold every conservative’s feet to the fire when they claim this from now on.”
Donnie was able to become famous as a business genius because he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and able to spend huge sums over the years promoting his brand, which is a polite euphemism for lying about the fact he was merely a dumbass who just happened to have a lot of money. The same is true of the DeVoses, the Kochs, etc. etc.
Did we already talk about this? Not that there’s a lot to talk about, because it seems like standard operating procedure over there, and largely a reminder to others about what could happen to them.
A Russian investigative journalist who wrote about the deaths of mercenaries in Syria has died in hospital after falling from his fifth-floor flat.
Maxim Borodin was found badly injured by neighbours in Yekaterinburg and taken to hospital, where he later died.
Local officials said no suicide note was found but the incident was unlikely to be of a criminal nature.
However, a friend revealed Borodin had said his flat had been surrounded by security men a day earlier.
Vyacheslav Bashkov described Borodin as a “principled, honest journalist” and said Borodin had contacted him at five o’clock in the morning on 11 April saying there was “someone with a weapon on his balcony and people in camouflage and masks on the staircase landing”.
[…]
In recent weeks, the journalist had written about Russian mercenaries known as the “Wagner Group” who were reportedly killed in Syria on 7 February in a confrontation with US forces.
Last week, the outgoing head of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, said that “a couple hundred” Russian mercenaries died in the clash in Deir al-Zour province. The mercenaries were apparently taking part in an attack by pro-Syrian government fighters on the headquarters of a US ally, the Syrian Democratic Forces.
