Trump, May 2017: 100 days of [unintelligible]

poor hr mcmaster, who could have foreseen working for trump would turn him into a laughing stock

hey, he just wanted to kill stuff! he didn't sign up for this mess.

i mean he kinda did tho

like, literally

'Cool, got a job where I'm going to be in direct contact with a herpes-infected penis everyday, sure hope I don't contract herpes.'

Gonna be fun!

WH schedule update: McMaster briefing at 11:30 & Spicer is a now a gaggle OFF-CAMERA

— Steve Kopack (@SteveKopack) May 16, 2017

Cannot parse that fuc

a gaggle OFF-CAMERA

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/6A0bhAsAyGY/maxresdefault.jpg

that's a gaggle ON-CAMERA surely

if a gaggle honks in the forest and

Getting a bit tired of Old Lunch's endless paraphilic fantasies over here

sean spicer making goose sounds at the top of his lungs would be a significant improvement in white house communications

hot lunch more like amirite

Erickson in more detail about how he knows one of the sources:

http://theresurgent.com/i-know-one-of-the-sources/

What sets this story apart for me, at least, is that I know one of the sources. And the source is solidly supportive of President Trump, or at least has been and was during Campaign 2016. But the President will not take any internal criticism, no matter how politely it is given. He does not want advice, cannot be corrected, and is too insecure to see any constructive feedback as anything other than an attack.

So some of the sources are left with no other option but to go to the media, leak the story, and hope that the intense blowback gives the President a swift kick in the butt. Perhaps then he will recognize he screwed up. The President cares vastly more about what the press says than what his advisers say. That is a real problem and one his advisers are having to recognize and use, even if it causes messy stories to get outside the White House perimeter.

a gaggle OFF-CAMERA

So many metaphors:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJC6Vv0-QlY

some of the sources are left with no other option but to go to the media, leak the story, and hope that the intense blowback gives the President a swift kick in the butt. Perhaps then he will recognize he screwed up. The President cares vastly more about what the press says than what his advisers say

Is this like that thing where married people are annoyed with each other and use their kids to talk to each other?

"You might want to tell YOUR FATHER that we DON'T APPRECIATE having to sift through dirty underpants to find the clean ones."

"Well, you can tell your mother that if SOMEONE were to occasionally sort the laundry correctly, then we might not be having this problem."

You'd think if your boss is so dangerously incompetent he leaks classified intel to our rivals you'd do more than rat him out to the press in hopes of correcting his behavior. Like, wouldn't you want him ... gone?

depends on whether youd have to go with him, what youre getting away with under him and whether to give two shits about the company

leaking classified information to russia

if the president says it, it is unclassified

"our rivals"? man, the CNN worldview gettin funnier by the minute

I know one of the sources. And the source is solidly supportive of President Trump, or at least has been and was during Campaign 2016.

ah, so a fucking idiot then?

if the president does it, it is moronic

somewhere, George W. Bush is feeling like a towering intellectual and statesman right now

don't make me post that photo of Bush in the tub

somewhere, George W. Bush is feeling like a towering intellectual and statesman eating a crayon right now

Your sentence doesn't negate the earlier sentence.

dubya better at just ignoring confidential information....

don't know if we covered this tweet yet, but this is some next level zen from the ol' Trumpster:

I have been asking Director Comey & others, from the beginning of my administration, to find the LEAKERS in the intelligence community.....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 16, 2017

Wasn't that a Robert Redford movie?

i'm choosing to believe the capitalised LEAKERS as trump's admission that the piss tape is real

and it's spectacular

who's gonna stop those L.A. Leakers?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9-amGYJ2mw

They've had access to way too much EXCLUSIVE HEAT and they must be silenced.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywoR8psubDE

i remember the LA Leakers did a Nate Dogg retrospective mixtape.....

I would like that mixtape to be the Democrat's candidate in 2020 tbh

President Trump is doing this on purpose so he can find the leaker. Who knows what information he shared. It might even be false information. I would rather believe in Trump than the liberal fake media. Only Alex Jones has the scoop...

I can't even tell whether online commenters are trolling anymore.

Alex knew the truth until he ate that bowl of chili.

oh man McMaster is bombing this

McMaster's briefing is very interesting. To wit:

1. The information Trump shared is readily available to anyone with Google, but is to sensitive to discuss in specifics

2. The leaks are a threat to national security, but it's cool to share with the Russians

3. Trump did indeed make a spur of the moment decision to share this info, no prior plan

4. Trump didn't even know where the information came from, so chill out about all this worry over compromising sources

*too sensitive

"wholly appropriate"

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C_9N_nVVYAIYlo_.jpg

nice

http://i.imgur.com/qSzsKKR.gif

#BREAKING: Trump will give a speech on Islam in Saudi Arabia, @AFP is reporting

— Sara Hussein (@sarahussein) May 16, 2017

oh good

what did the President not know, and when did he not know it?

everything, always?

who the fuck even is going to write that speech? there are like zero non-terrifying options.

xp

i missed the mcmaster thing, but from tpm:

Then there was a key revelation just before McMaster left the podium.

He said this: “I should just make maybe the statement here that the president wasn’t even aware where this information came from. He wasn’t briefed on the source or method of the information either.”

To me this is not at all surprising. Sometimes even the President doesn’t learn about sources and methods unless there’s a specific need. Often it’s just not relevant in terms of what the President needs to know. Even normal Presidents get gobs of information every day about different parts of the world. But Trump isn’t normal. We know he insists on extremely toplined briefings. Just the most essential bullet points. So on its own, I don’t find this hard to believe.

McMaster’s point seemed to be that President Trump was not even in a position to reveal sources and methods because he didn’t know them. This is too cute by half. No one ever suggested he did. All the reporting has suggested that Trump revealed details from which sources and methods could be inferred.

The possibility this does raise is that Trump simply didn’t realize the information he mentioned was that sensitive or really, really secret. We simply don’t know.

i'm guessing the new story from trump will be that it wasn't his fault because he didn't know it was sensitive information in the first place. in that case, i wonder who will get scapegoated and fired. not him, obviously

who the fuck even is going to write that speech? there are like zero non-terrifying options.

my sources say that steve bannon has had multiple wet dreams about writing a speech about islam to be delivered by a US president in saudi arabia

Trump will probably just ad lib the speech, possibly show off the election map to his Muslim friends

maybe this would be a good time for bannon to persuade trump to ramp up the west's war with islam, world war 3, which bannon believes is already underway. he said that at at a skyped-in speech to a conference at the vatican not that long ago, so i'm assuming he still believes it, and now would be a perfect time to create a new distraction in the form of a world war