44th Weak of the Disastrous Donald

According to a report at Politico, aides to embattled President Donald Trump feed him data from internal polls that don’t reflect public sentiment in order to keep his spirits up — although some White House insiders call the numbers “delusional.”

Like many presidents, Trump is fascinated with how he is perceived by the public and has been known to forward polls showing support from the American public to members of Congress to keep them in line with his agenda.

The report notes that White House aides show Trump polls designed to make him feel good, according to insiders, with many of those same polls weighted towards voters who cast ballots for him in 2016 or have made their enthusiasm for Trump known.

The report goes on to state that Trump relies on internal polling that even some White House deride as “delusional” or “just not accurate,” which are described as “almost always higher than his public polling numbers.”

Confronted with one poll that showed support for Trumpcare, one senior aide commented, “I wouldn’t trust our polling on that,” but that didn’t stop the president from being disappointed when both houses of Congress failed to pass any reforms, including Trump’s promise to “repeal and replace” popular Obamacare.

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President Donald Trump's base hasn't abandoned him, but at least one poll this week found support had slipped slightly among Republicans.

The latest weekly survey from Lucid found 71.85 percent of Republicans approved of the job Trump was doing as president. That's a decent result but not exactly stellar popularity among one's own party. It also represented a more than 3 percentage point drop from the week prior, when Trump registered 75.21 percent approval among Republicans. Overall, the latest Lucid survey pegged Trump's approval rating at just 35 percent.

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As the investigation into Russian collusion builds, President Donald Trump has started paying his own legal bills, rather than using campaign donations or charging the Republican National Committee, and has created a fund to finance the legal bills of his former and current staffers—which could violate ethics laws if there’s a chance it could influence their testimonies.

After several months of the Republican Party picking up the tab, the president started paying in order to make things “even,” Trump’s attorney John Dowd confirmed on Friday to Reuters. The payments are for Trump’s personal lawyers who are helping him navigate the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and whether he obstructed justice by firing former FBI Director James Comey in May.

But it’s not just his own legal bills that he’s paying—Trump has also established a legal fund that pays for staffers who are also involved in the investigation, a method that has caught attention from the Office of Government Ethics. There is no law that bars the president from giving gifts and money to his staffers, but in the face of a tricky investigation, this case raises questions of whether Trump’s financial help will influence staffer’s testimonies, said Walter Shaub, former head of the ethics office.

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Maybe Puerto Ricans will have the last laugh after President Donald Trump’s disastrous response to Hurricane Maria: More than 156,000 Puerto Ricans have moved to Florida — a key swing state in U.S. elections — since the storm hit the island in September.

That little-known figure should make Republicans nervous. If Puerto Rican voters’ past behavior is any indication, most of the new arrivals will vote Democratic.

The number of Puerto Ricans who have moved to Florida was disclosed in a tweet from the state’s Division of Emergency Management on Nov. 14. It said the figure includes all Puerto Ricans who have moved to Florida since Oct. 3, when regular flights started to leave from the island after the storm.

It’s a much bigger exodus than had been expected, and thousands of Puerto Ricans are still moving off the island every day, most of them going to Florida, the New York area, and Pennsylvania.

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JackLuis said:

The stampede of Puerto Ricans to Florida is bad news for Trump

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t's only been a year since Donald Trump was elected president, but some people already want him out of the White House. The past 12 months have been long, dramatic and full of developments that critics say could lead Trump to end his term early—and they may be converging.

Trump's approval ratings have been tanking, hitting new lows seemingly every time another survey drops. As of Friday, Trump's average job approval rating was just over 38 percent, according to RealClearPolitics. His average disapproval rating was 57 percent, leaving him both underwater and making him the least popular president in modern history.
Related: Steve Bannon is Talking About Donald Trump's Impeachment Again

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JackLuis said:

Related: Steve Bannon is Talking About Donald Trump's Impeachment Again

"[Ryan could] break the back of the grassroots and their enthusiasm for '18, and we lose those seats, and after they swear themselves in January '19, what's the first thing they're going to do? What's the first action they're going to take against Donald J. Trump?" Bannon said. "It's going to be payback for all of this."

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The top national security official dismissed the president variously as an “idiot” and a “dope” with the intelligence of a “kindergartner,” the sources said.

A sixth source who was not familiar with the details of the dinner told BuzzFeed News that McMaster had made similarly derogatory comments about Trump’s intelligence to him in private, including that the president lacked the necessary brainpower to understand the matters before the National Security Council.

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phrodeau said:

General HR McMaster has a few unkind words to describe President Trump.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbern...ivate?utm_term=.wc0Oevv3B&bftwnews#.tnvxMNNPm

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It has been said that Newt Gingrich is “a dumb person’s idea of a smart person.” Who coined that phrase is a matter of scholarly dispute, but there is broad agreement that the sentiment is applicable. I will go further and say this characteristic of Newt’s is not just a personal foible; it establishes a model for Republican politicians and operatives since his time in Congress.

Having had the opportunity as a former congressional staffer to experience his speakership up close, it was clear to me that Gingrich had a ready opinion on every subject from aardvarks to Zoroastrianism. He was usually wrong. But through a combination of confident and aggressive assertion, citation of “facts” and “statistics” that, while specious and cherry-picked, the listener was not in any position to immediately refute, and the glibness that masquerades as eloquence, he dominated his colleagues and set the House of Representatives on its path to becoming the extremely unfunny joke it is today.

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The Republican so-called experts’ pronouncements weren’t exactly unplanned. In early 2001, just before George W. Bush’s inauguration, the Heritage Foundation produced a policy document intended to help the incoming administration choose personnel. The authors stated the following:

. . . the Office of Presidential Personnel must make appointment decisions based on loyalty first and expertise second, and the whole governmental apparatus must be managed from this perspective.

A decade and a half later, Trump’s operatives must have been impressed by one of the document’s authors, George Nesterczuk; he was nominated to become director of the Office of Personnel Management, but later withdrew his nomination, complaining about “partisan attacks” (possibly a euphemism for “careful scrutiny”).

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Hypoxia said:

Hmmm, if this gets splashed around enough to come to Tromp's attention, we could see another "You're fired!" moment. But what moron would he appoint as a replacement? Would the nation be better- or worse-off without McMaster?

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The internet was aghast after President Donald Trump continued to back embattled Republican Senate nominee Roy Moore, despite continued allegations of sexual impropriety by the conservative attorney who was twice ousted from the Alabama Supreme Court. Moore is facing Democrat Doug Jones in the December 12 special election to fill the U.S. Senate seat vacated when Jeff Sessions (R-AL) was confirmed as Attorney General.

Speaking to reporters on the South Lawn of the White House as he left Washington, DC to go to his golf properties in Florida, President Trump was asked “is an accused child molester better than a Democrat?”

“Well, he denies it,” Trump replied. “Look, he denies it. I mean, if you look at all the things that have happened over the last 48 hours, he totally denies it. He says it didn’t happen and you know, you have to listen to him also.”

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JackLuis said:

The 44th Weak of the Disastrous Donald begins with this LOL!

White House aides feed Trump ‘delusional’ higher poll numbers to keep him happy

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WandaGrabowski said:

They should feed him hard drugs.

Seriously, is anyone else wondering if the intelligence agencies are considering Trumps mental state and if there are ways, such a drugs to control him?

Is there a way to throw a net over this lunatic?

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phrodeau said:

Trump has not even seen a doctor for a physical checkup since taking office.

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sharingfantasies said:

The thing that bothers me the most is that from now until the end of time his face will be on every group picture that shows presidents. I just want to erase him from our history books and documents.

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Carper confirmed that yes, he was at a meeting with a group of Democrats, Cohn and two other White House aides when Cohn got up to take a call on his cell phone. Cohn announced that it was the president and that he’d like to join the meeting via phone.

“Which was nice,” Carper said. “Nice of him to do that. Fifteen minutes later, the president’s still talking. And I said to Gary, it was a room where we’re all sitting around this big table, and I said, ‘Gary, why don’t you do this: just take the phone from, you know, your cell phone back and just say, Mr. President, you’re brilliant but we’re losing contact and I think we’re going to lose you now, so goodbye.'”

“And that’s what he did,” said Carper. “He hung up.”

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JackLuis said:

White House adviser Gary Cohn faked bad connection in conference call to get Trump to stop talking



Wish we could just 'disconnect Trump' when he talks too much, and 'Hello this is..." is enough of his shit.

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Hypoxia said:

Would the nation be better- or worse-off without McMaster?

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After the Gulf War, ... became a research fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Consulting Senior Fellow at IISS.[International Institute of Strategic Studies; a British think tank dealing with international affairs]

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