@SpeakerRyan are you ever going to grow some balls? or is this just going to go on forever?https://t.co/0uzPNld4F1
— Heisenberg Report (@heisenbergrpt) July 1, 2017
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Via Kathleen Parker for WaPo
For months, Trump watchers have wondered: What will it take?
Meaning: What would finally force Republicans to face the fact, so obvious to so many, that President Trump isn’t quite right? Not in the correct sense but in the head sense.
The answer, apparently, is Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“This is not normal,” people are finally saying in response to Trump’s latest Twitter attacks in which the president of the United States limboed under his own low bar and chastised Brzezinski and co-anchor/fiance Joe Scarborough with his usual knuckle-dragging flair. Applying his 140-character attention span, he squibbed:
“I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!”
Classic Trump.
This probably isn’t the way Brzezinski would have preferred things to go, but in Trump’s vernacular, she’s been cruisin’ for a bruisin’ for a long time. That is, she’s been calling out The Donald with everything but an engraved invitation to duel at dawn.
And, high time, I might add. For months during the early part of Trump’s campaign, “MoJo,” as the show is nicknamed, was a welcome station for the celebrity firing squad. Around Washington, people had begun referring to the morning manfest, where Brzezinski gamely serves as reluctant den mother, as “Morning Trump.” This was also the period when then-candidate Trump constantly bragged that he hadn’t spent any money on advertising – and no one wondered why. He regularly called in to the show, essentially running his campaign from Trump Tower.
Trump had ample coverage elsewhere as well. When your strength is branding and your name is the brand, there’s little challenge to getting airtime. Cable television anchors and producers not only became Trump’s unpaid marketers but also bear some of the responsibility/blame for Trump’s election. Then, things got strange. Trump won. Then Trump became even odder than usual, even according to his friends and others inclined to like him. Always fiercely competitive, obviously, as well as flawed, Trump nevertheless was able to control his worst impulses before becoming president, Scarborough and Brzezinski co-wrote in a Post op-ed Friday.
Or, perhaps, something is actually wrong with the guy. Plenty of physicians, psychiatrists and psychologists think so and have written me volumes in off-the-record diagnoses. A group of them have joined forces to co-write a book due out this fall.
It isn’t so much that The Donald always hits back, and harder, as his flacks boast. It’s that he’s so thin-skinned, such a political amateur – and so utterly lacking in the fine art of disregard – that he can’t let anything pass. This is the single greatest concern for the witted, not his idiotic tweets in the night. Impulsivity combined with narcissistic injury is a red flag to many for the man with access to the nuclear codes.
And so, as more and more Americans embrace “This is not normal” as the bumper sticker du jour, many are wondering again: Will this be it? Will the final straw be Brzezinski’s alleged badly bleeding face-lift, which she needlessly denied in the op-ed? She only tweaked some skin beneath the chin, she said. CNN’s Brian Stelter, meanwhile, has posted a photo of Brzezinski on the day in question and she shows no evidence of surgery and certainly not blood. What woman has a face-lift and goes bleeding to a famous club where tout le beau monde are partying?
To the point, is this it? My friends, don’t count on it.
Nothing will happen until GOP constituents start shouting and, remember, these are the same people Trump has taught to hate the media. Also, this is hardly the worst example of Trump’s errant charm. Yet, suddenly, his insulting Brzezinski, widely characterized as evidence of misogyny (what about “Psycho Joe”?), is supposed to send congressional Republicans into paroxysms of penitential rebuke-and-replace?
Brzezinski is wonder woman – smart, strong, wealthy – and engaged to marry her best friend. I seriously doubt she has been wounded by Trump’s pathetic second-grader taunts. But I get it. The most one can hope for these days is that enough Republican men can be shamed into defending Brzezinski, a woman many of them know personally – and who has thumbs-down power over potential guests on the show everybody in Washington watches.
Whatever works.
The misogyny, the name calling etc. is bad but what’s REALLY BAD is his (and others) program to destroy our alliances, our economy and even any progress made to improve our race relations and tolerance for others in the last 50 years. It is enough to think it is all by design. I am getting paranoid?
This line in the article is a doozy: “Or, perhaps, something is actually wrong with the guy. ”
“Perhaps”?! Kathleen has received received “volumes in off-the-record diagnoses,” from plenty of “physicians, psychiatrists and psychologists,” who “think [something is actually wrong with the guy] and have written [her] volumes in off-the-record diagnoses,” and that, together with direct evidence – not circumstantial evidence – of Trump’s outrageous conduct which she has witnessed in the last two years (let alone what’s known form the record of the last 40 years), and the best she can conclude is “perhaps, perhaps, something is actually wrong with the guy. ”
He’s mentally unstable. It’s plain to see that Trump is unable to discharge the powers and duties of the office of president. There’s literally no question about it.
So it’s Saturday, and you have to wonder whether the prudish vice president and his wife, appalled by the recent Mika and Joe debacle, are sitting around with advisors discussing if they can round up a majority of the principal officers of the executive departments in order to transmit a declaration to Orin Hatch, President pro tempore of the Senate, and Ryan, Speaker of the House of Representatives, that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office and therefore Pence shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President?
See, Amendment XXV, Sec., 4, paragraph 1.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxxv
Then Trump can be evaluated in a padded room.
We all need rest.
It would sure be great if there was a way to legally motivate these Repubs into doing what needs done! I also read up on Pence since we will eventually (with luck?) have to deal with him in the oval office. I was very alarmed at what I have read.
This wasn’t the only thing I read:
President Pence’s problems: Indiana Democrats say VP was “the worst governor we ever had”
– Murphy
The best WaPo article of the day
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2017/06/30/after-the-presidents-tweet-i-must-withdraw-my-support-for-everything-but-his-agenda/?utm_term=.2d51fae9b098
“The president has at last done the unthinkable: He has insulted a morning television personality in crude and ghastly terms and I must – in consequence of this hideous and vile breach of the dignity of the office – withdraw none of my support from his legislative agenda. (If you can call it a legislative agenda and not a ragtag collection of bad ideas quickly stapled together with a dead pigeon in the middle.)