Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is often described as the Latin American Trump, an identification that Trump himself seemed to endorse in today’s press conference. “We have many views that are similar,” Trump enthused. The President was so pleased that he suggested, in a bizarre off-the-cuff remark, that Brazil might possibly become “a NATO ally.”
In 2010, David Frum observed that, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox.”
I was reminded of Frum’s quip when I heard that former House Speaker Paul Ryan was joining the board of directors of Fox Corporation, the newly streamlined parent company of the right-wing news outlet.
Martha Gimbel used to work at the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) and has noticed that a new report for the CEA has some unusual interns:
The Economic Report of the President has revealed that the quality of interns at CEA is much better than it was when I was there….we never got cool ones like Steve Rogers, Bruce Wayne, Peter Parker, Aunt May, and John Cleese pic.twitter.com/qELM2729os
— Martha Gimbel (@marthagimbel) March 19, 2019
The Miami Herald, which has been doing stellar reporting on this story, has found more evidence on the bizarrely light sentence Jeffrey Epstein was given in 2008 for soliciting prostitution from underage girls. According to the newspaper, “The lawyer for the 16-year-old girl who state prosecutors now say was the victim attached to the mysterious plea deal given to multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein says neither he nor his client was ever informed that it was her case that ended Epstein’s prosecution.”
Ari Fleischer has taken to Twitter to defend his former boss George W. Bush from accusations of lying America into the Iraq War. As Matt Shuham amply shows elsewhere on TPM, Fleischer was quickly and thoroughly demolished by critics. Fleisher’s hapless performance got me thinking about how the debate over the Iraq War, the most consequential American foreign policy decision in the last fifty years, is now over.
Maybe it’s just a matter of degree, but I’m not sure I’ve seen President Trump contrast as starkly as he did today his own legitimacy (63 million votes/304 electoral votes in 2016!) with what he portrays as the utter illegitimacy of the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller (“never got a vote!” as Trump put it).
His attacks on the rule of law are legion at this point, but watch him today and see if he doesn’t have a heightened sense of urgency and an alarming new tone.
We have every reason to believe that Donald Trump is the most corrupt American president since at least Warren Harding and perhaps ever. The fact that his adult sons continue to manage his business while serving as informal White House advisors is itself a major scandal. A big reason for wanting the Democrats to win back the House of Representatives in 2018 was the promise that they would do the work of oversight that the congressional GOP had avoided. But now that congressional oversight is here, we’ve entered a period of unprecedented stonewalling.
Donna Brazile, one of the preeminent political strategist in the Democratic Party and twice interim head of the DNC, is jumping on the Fox News ship, becoming a contributing writer for the right-wing cable news network. In an interview with Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker, Brazile was asked how she could reconcile her strong progressive politics with working for a network that often functions like the propaganda wing of the Republican party and is sometimes openly racist.
President Trump’s continuous badmouthing of the late Senator John McCain dominated headlines on Wednesday. The words were certainly bonkers even by Trump’s standards. “I gave him the kind of funeral he wanted, which as President I had to approve,” Trump said, falsely. “I don’t care about this, I didn’t get a thank-you, that’s okay. We sent him on the way. But I wasn’t a fan of John McCain.”
How New Zealand handles one mass shooting:
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand on Thursday announced a national ban on all military-style semiautomatic weapons, all high-capacity ammunition magazines and all parts that allow weapons to be modified into the kinds of guns used to kill 50 people at two mosques in Christchurch last week.
“What we’re banning today are the things used in last Friday’s attack,” she said, adding: “It’s about all of us, it’s in the national interest and it’s about safety.”