Tag: Donald Trump unfit to serve as president

Pelosi: Trump should be removed immediately

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Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday that Washington policymakers should act immediately to remove President Trump from office just two weeks before his term ends, citing “seditious” acts related to the president’s role in encouraging the assault on the U.S. Capitol a day earlier.

Pelosi joined Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y) in calling on Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment to oust Trump without delay. 

Short of that, she said, the House will impeach him for a second time. Continue reading.

Watch Trump’s ’jaw-dropping’ interview with Axios on HBO

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump was interviewed by Axios reporter Jonathan Swan and the clip aired Monday evening on HBO.

There were a number of eyebrow raising exchanges.

Continue reading.

Trump official despairs at his train wreck Chris Wallace interview

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump’s already-infamous Fox News interview with Chris Wallace is causing fresh headaches for the president’s re-election campaign.

In an interview with The Daily Beast, a senior Trump official said that there was no “rational reason” for the president to do an interview with Wallace, who is widely regarded as one of the sharpest and best-prepared interviewers in the news media.

Another Trump ally, when asked by The Daily Beast why the president volunteered to be grilled by Wallace, simply responded, “I don’t f*cking know.” Continue reading.

Trump struggles to say what he would do with another term for second time in a week

WASHINGTON — It was a do-over of a softball question, but President Donald Trump still seemed to struggle to answer what he would do with a potential second term in an interview that aired Wednesday evening.

The President said he hadn’t heard the criticism of his answer the last time he was asked the question, by Fox News’ Sean Hannity, but said there was still “more to do” in his next term, again without naming any concrete policy goals.

“We’re going to make America great again. We’re doing things that nobody could have done,” the President told Sinclair’s Eric Bolling, before listing achievements from his first term.

At one point, Trump said, “We’ve got to bring back our manufacturing,” before immediately claiming he already had, saying he had “brought it back very big.” Continue reading.

Trump’s focus scattered amid multiple crises

The Hill logoPresident Trump is facing a convergence of crises that threaten to derail his reelection hopes, yet he has receded from public view and his focus has been elsewhere in recent days.

The president has not held a public event since Friday, and his tweets in recent days have focused extensively on television ratings and threats against those who deface monuments.

Meanwhile, several states are facing a resurgence in coronavirus cases that public health experts warn could quickly spiral out of control. Continue reading.

Trump is going buck wild with racism — and it’s only going to get worse

AlterNet logoRacism is all he’s got.

Everything else Donald Trump was going to run on this summer and fall has evaporated. The “booming” economy? (Which he inherited from Barack Obama in the first place.) The U.S. has the worst unemployment rate since the Great Depression and the situation is about to get exponentially worse as unemployment benefits expire. And no, “reopening” is not a solution, since the data makes clear that consumers have little interest in shopping or eating out during a pandemic.

And then there was Trump’s plan to hold big rallies to make himself look like he’s got momentum, while Joe Biden campaigns in responsible ways that don’t spread the coronavirus. Not only was that plan sociopathic, it’s also not working. Trump’s big comeback rally in Tulsa was a hilarious failure, with only a third of the arena filled. Now Trump has canceled a rally in Alabama, citing coronavirus fears. It’s just as likely that the campaign was scared of more empty seats — even some of his most ardent followers would rather root for him at home rather than risk getting sick. Continue reading.

President Trump is ‘near-sadistic’ in phone calls with women leaders: report

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump’s phone calls with foreign leaders sounded like his combative, meandering coronavirus press briefings — free of facts but packed with conspiracy theories, fantasies and gut hunches derived from social media rumors and the perspectives of Fox News personalities, according to a new report from CNN’s Carl Bernstein.

In tones reminiscent of his contentious coronavirus conference calls with U.S. governors, Trump regularly boasted vaingloriously and flattered strongman adversaries while at the same time bullying top allies, most specifically women whom Trump often insulted directly in calls that officials described as “near-sadistic,” Bernstein reported.

Bernstein, who drew from four continuous months of interviews with a number of former top White House and intelligence officials, reported that top Cabinet advisers thought Trump’s calls were “delusional” and posed a threat to national security. Continue reading.

Trump Officials Didn’t Want to Tell Him About the ‘Russian Bounties’

Trump doesn’t like intel outside his comfort zone, and officials are reluctant to push information in person that he’ll resist. The chance he’ll read the briefs? “Basically zero.”

The Trump administration has for years gathered intelligence about foreign powers, including Russia and Iran, that use financial means to support and encourage armed militants in Afghanistan, according to six current and former U.S. intelligence and national security officials. And, those officials said, the president has been briefed about those wide-ranging efforts.

One current senior national-security official and two other former officials familiar with intelligence gathering in Afghanistan said the Trump administration has closely tracked ways in which Iran uses cash to support militants in the Haqqani Network who have killed U.S. soldiers.

But when intelligence emerged earlier this year that Russia had concocted a specific plan to pay bounties to mercenaries to kill American soldiers, intelligence and national-security leaders did not brief the president in person. A person with knowledge of the situation says that although they are aware that the intelligence has circulated in the White House and within Trump’s own national-security apparatus, they were unaware of any direct, face-to-face briefing that the president had received. Continue reading.