The Trump Presidency

[gillianren]

He also believes that exercise is bad for you because you have a finite amount of energy.

[Zakalwe]

To be fair, isn't he the oldest of the lot?

He's also the fattest, the dumbest, the most obnoxious and the most incompetent.Heck, it was only 700 metres of a walk!

I did laugh at this though....Macron did absolutely the right thing here in going straight to his allies and friends.

[LunarOrbit]

To be fair, isn't he the oldest of the lot?

Yeah, but he has been known to brag about how physically fit he is.

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[Glom]

To be fair, isn't he the oldest of the lot?

He's also the fattest, the dumbest, the most obnoxious and the most incompetent.Heck, it was only 700 metres of a walk!

I did laugh at this though....Macron did absolutely the right thing here in going straight to his allies and friends.

He went straight for Merkel.

France and Germany are united like never before. A thousand years of British foreign policy, to keep Europe from uniting against us, lies in ruins. Sir Humphrey would be apalled.

[Glom]

So let's recap. The election was about a woman running on a campaign of vote me just coz, expecting to walk it against a buffoonish outsider who has said all sorts of reprehensible things and acted in all sorts of reprehensible ways but is able to overperform expectations by putting forward a bunch of outlandish populist policies that can strike a chord despite being hugely expensive, pointless and quite often counterproductive.

Why does this sound so familiar?

[twik]

To be fair, isn't he the oldest of the lot?

Yes, but he boasted about how he would be a powerhouse of a president. No golfing vacations or naps for him! No sirree. Not like that elderly woman who had to sit down just because she had pneumonia.

[gillianren]

So let's recap. The election was about a woman running on a campaign of vote me just coz, expecting to walk it against a buffoonish outsider who has said all sorts of reprehensible things and acted in all sorts of reprehensible ways but is able to overperform expectations by putting forward a bunch of outlandish populist policies that can strike a chord despite being hugely expensive, pointless and quite often counterproductive.

Why does this sound so familiar?

It doesn't sound like the election I voted in.  I voted in an election where an experienced woman presented a lot of intelligent campaign proposals that no one listened to because they'd been programmed not to trust her for decades.

[ka9q]

I would think most truly competent people would have looked at his record and refused to have anything to do with him.  Especially anywhere he, personally, would be paying their salaries.

Apparently not. I have a friend who works for a gaming machine company (slot machines, video poker, etc). Their company lost a few hundred $K by agreeing to sell some of their machines to Trump's casinos in Atlantic City before they went bankrupt.

Needless to say, my friend didn't vote for Trump.

I can easily imagine how it went for many of Trump's contractors and suppliers. They figured he was too big to fail, that if the investors were willing to support his projects then they would at least get paid. Trump milked this assumption to the hilt, then ridiculed the banks for being foolish enough to believe him. An incredibly dishonest man.

[gillianren]

Covfefe.  That is all.

Side note, whoever's doing the social media for Merriam-Webster is just killing it.

[Kiwi]

Covfefe

Is there somebody here who PUH-lease has the courtesy and intelligence to explain to we non-Americans what the hell that gibberish is all about?

Is it just another in-joke about The Chump? That clown you voted in as a President?

We don't always "get" this stuff down here in the southwest Pacific. We can't figure it out and we don't always have time to.  Our country, our lives, sometimes matter a little more to us than yours. We are left wondering who is telling the truth about American politics and who is bullshitting us.

In the last hour I have wasted 20 minutes scouring past issues of my local newspaper, trying  to find a piece where somebody wrote something about some chump talking people into investing in his schemes, and when something went bust, one or two of his companies or something, he berated the banks for trusting him.

I didn't cut the article out at the time because I thought it HAD to be just another stupid, sick joke. I couldn't believe that it was the truth. Even the meanest, nastiest rich people I've heard of in my country never stooped as low as that, and in any case, there's thankfully very few of them. Surely, no-one with half a brain would vote in as their president (of a country that's a little more important to the world than Jersey), some chump, some untrustworthy, bullshitting bastard who has done that.

Is it a joke or is it not? Am I and others, on the right track or not? Is there still some honour left in the USA? Or not?

Having no luck finding the paper version of the article, but during the search, finding equally horrific articles about the Potus, I Googled the few words I remembered and didn't find it, but did find this:

...don't you get the impression that Donald Trump gets some positive pleasure out of taking people who make the mistake of trusting him for a ride?

That's from a Paul Krugman who apparently has something to do with the New York Times.  Never heard of him before. But even if he's pulling our legs three-quarters of the time, everything else he wrote in the same article about the new Chumpcare sounds to me, in my ignorance, pretty bad for many Americans. Unless it's just another joke that nobody's letting us know about.

So besides telling us what Covfefe is all about, can anyone recommend some commentator on American affairs who is worth believing?

Some interesting names from my local paper (Manawatu Standard) are:

Jennifer Rubin - "Shake-up may make things worse" - "It's Watergate on amphetamines"
David Brooks - "The talent vacuum that is the Trump administration"
Ana Palacio - "Lack of leadership creates troubles"
Karl Du Fresne - (Nah!  He's a Kiwi. But two days ago wrote an excellent piece about Vaxxing, free speech, democracy, tolerance, dissent, and sexist rants.)

The only article I liked was headlined, "Trump calls for quicker Mars trip."

Edited to add: Apologies to those who don't understand my use of Potus. Apparently it stands for President of the United States. Some months ago I read POTUS over and over and over and nobody ever bothered explaining this widely-unknown term, and I never imagined the "O" might stand for "of" because that's just not done in British English.  Nor is the upper case if the abbreviation is pronouncable, like Nasa, Unesco and Anzus. We all have our strange, illogical quirks - it makes the world interesting.

[gillianren]

We'd have to understand "covfefe" first.  The other night, somewhat after midnight, he tweeted, ""Despite the constant negative press covfefe".  Now, you'll note I'm putting the period outside the quotation marks, even though I normally follow American style guidelines and put it inside.  That's because I want to emphasize that there wasn't one on the initial tweet.  Obviously, he seems to have meant "coverage."  But he didn't finish the tweet, and he posted it.  And then I guess went to bed, because there was no follow-up for hours, and the tweet remained up the whole time.  (There's actually speculation that deleting tweets may, for him, violate federal law about preserving the President's communications, but so far as I know there's no real certainty there, and it's hardly as though this one went unnoticed.)  I had been quietly reading a book that evening, went online, and discovered perhaps a dozen or more jokes before giving up and Googling the thing myself, since none of them included any context.

All of this is weird enough--we were actually discussing the possibility of a Stalin situation, where he'd died and no one dared check on him--but initially, his press secretary made the claim that "he and a small group of people" knew what "covfefe" meant.  Which is obviously ridiculous.  Because it's not a word.  I've read that someone claims it means something in Arabic; it does not.  Another of his supporters proudly tweeted that it was proof that he doesn't focus group everything, which I suppose is true enough but not really the point here.  And because we are in desperate need for a laugh, we latched onto "covfefe" and wouldn't let go.  I maintain we don't have to; it's emblematic.

As for "POTUS," we in the US don't usually include "of" in abbreviations.  We do in this instance because that makes it--and SCOTUS, FLOTUS, and a few others--pronounceable.  (Supreme Court, First Lady.)  I'm aware of the "if it's a word, lowercase for most of it" rule in British English, but you'll understand that it took some getting used to.

And, yes, everything about the "planned" replacement for the Affordable Care Act is terrible for Americans, unless they happen to be rich.  That is true of pretty much every plan the administration has.  This includes a suggested maternity leave law that would only apply to married women.

[gillianren]

Oh, and, yes, I'm pretty sure that he's duped plenty of people and then said it was their fault for trusting them.  He's gone bankrupt repeatedly, including bankrupting a casino, which ought to be impossible to do.  They may be professional and not personal bankruptcies, but for someone who ran in no small part on his success as a businessman, that's not better.

[BazBear]

Oh, and, yes, I'm pretty sure that he's duped plenty of people and then said it was their fault for trusting them.  He's gone bankrupt repeatedly, including bankrupting a casino, which ought to be impossible to do.  They may be professional and not personal bankruptcies, but for someone who ran in no small part on his success as a businessman, that's not better.

I've heard it said (I can't recall where) that if he had invested his inheritance from daddy in moderately conservative index funds, he'd be worth far more than he is now. I can't and won't vouch for the accuracy of that statement, but it certainly rings true.

[gillianren]

I mean, we can't know without the release of his tax returns.

[Obviousman]

Do you think that somewhere, rather than rolling in his grave, Richard Nixon is cheering? That he won't top the list of 'tainted' US presidents anymore?