Category: Not Factual

Trump singles out Mitt Romney in post-acquittal Twitter-rant

President Donald Trump isn’t letting up on Sen. Mitt Romney during his post-acquittal victory lap.

Four days after the end of his impeachment trial, the president spent a sunny Sunday in D.C. continuing a weekend tweetstorm against the proceedings and his perceived foes — particularly targeting Romney, the lone Republican who voted to boot him from the White House.

The president retweeted assertions that Romney “stabbed Trump in the back” by joining Democrats in attempts to overturn the 2016 election, and that the Utah senator was connected to unsubstantiated claims that Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, was corruptly involved with the Burisma Holdings energy company in Ukraine.

“Mitt Romney is tied to Hunter Biden’s Burisma corruption. This is why he’s bent over backwards for the media with this show ‘guilty’ vote,” read a Trump retweet of the website Big League Politics’ post. “He doesn’t want this story EXPOSED!”

Neither the president nor Big League Politics offered any proof that Romney had been involved with Burisma or Hunter Biden.

The president also fired off his own anti-Romney tweets. “Romney hurt some very good Republican Senators, and he was wrong about the Impeachment Hoax. No clue!” he wrote based off a tweet that Romney’s real damage would be to Senate Republicans in tough reelection races.

He later pulled in Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a red-state Democrat who was considered to be a swing vote on impeachment and whom Trump labeled “weak & pathetic” after Manchin’s vote to convict.

“They are really mad at Senator Joe Munchkin in West Virginia,” the president wrote. “He couldn’t understand the Transcripts. Romney could, but didn’t want to!” This seemed to be a reference to a readout of the July phone call between Trump and the Ukrainian president that led to the impeachment inquiry.

Trump’s 50-plus tweets and retweets on Sunday included criticism of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for ripping up a copy of his State of the Union speech, and encouragement for Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin to find out “who started the Ukraine ‘collusion’ narrative.” The senators have pledged to investigate Hunter Biden’s business activities, even after the impeachment trial’s completion.

Appearing on “Face the Nation” on Sunday morning, Graham directly addressed Trump about the origins of the government’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election: “If he’s watching the show, here’s what I would tell the president: I’m going to get to the bottom of the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] process, because it was an abuse of power at the Department of Justice and the FBI.”

[Politico]

Trump Insists Real Photo Revealing His Fake Tan Is Fake

Last night, an especially grotesque photo of President Trump began to circulate online. The image, taken by photographer and apparent Trump enthusiast William Moon, showed the sunset-lit president with the wind sweeping his hair back, revealing an especially striking contrast between whatever fake tan or coloration he uses and the ghostly pallor of the skin bordering his hair:

Moon also posted an even more disturbing black-and-white version:

The photo became an instant meme, and so irked Trump that he insisted it was “fake news,” and complained that his opponents would do “anything to demean” him:

Some suspect the images were altered, but Moon posted other photos from the scene, and after comparing his with press-pool shots of the moment, it seems apparent that the wind did indeed expose the fault line in Trump’s orange coloring:

https://www.instagram.com/p/B8SEry-pySm/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

It is of course hilarious that Trump would complain that he is being demeaned on the basis of his appearance. He has spent his entire career as a celebrity put-down artist, sexual harasser, and politician who relentlessly demeans his targets based on their bodies. He is especially cruel to women, having called his former lover Stormy Daniels “Horseface,” mocked Carly Fiorina as ugly (“Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?” Mr. Trump said during an interview with Rolling Stone magazine. “I mean, she’s a woman, and I’m not supposed to say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?”), and belittled such targets as Heidi Cruz, Rosie O’Donnell, and many others.

Trump likewise has mocked Jerry Nadler as fat; sundry opponents, like Marco Rubio, Adam Schiff, and Michael Bloomberg, as short; and had a period of fixating on the allegedly narrow size of Schiff’s neck.

Trump himself places more importance on appearance than any president in history, and perhaps any powerful person who does not work in modeling, television, or film. He staffs his administration in large part based on their appearance. He blocked a second term for Janet Yellen in part because she was too short, initially hesitated to hire John Bolton due to his mustache, and constantly praises the officials surrounding him because they look like they come from “central casting” — the job criteria he most values.

Yet Trump himself is not a central-casting pick for his job. (He was cast for the role of president in Sharknado 3, but he was tabbed to play himself, and tragically turned down the offer at the last minute because he decided to run for real president.) Despite being a tall, white male — the traditional American cultural norm for his position — his appearance is nonetheless anything but “presidential.”

He has to avoid wind, or guard against it by wearing a hat, lest it turn his combover into comic, flapping yellow wings:

As for his orange color, Trump is clearly aware that it creates a strange look, but he oddly blames it on newfangled light bulbs, and seems to believe that rolling back bulb efficiency standards will make his skin look normal again.

Trump’s superficiality is the main problem. That a president would bully others based on their appearance, and select his aides on their looks, is one of his many utterly disqualifying character traits. But as bad as it may be that the president does this, what tips it from the infuriating to the absurd is the fact that the body-shamer-in-chief is also quite possibly the most ridiculous-looking president in American history.

[The New Yorker]

Trump claims Pelosi ripping speech was ‘illegal’

President Trump claimed Friday that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) committed a crime by ripping up a copy of his speech at the State of the Union on Tuesday evening, a claim that was immediately disputed as false by legal experts. “I thought it was a terrible thing,” Trump told reporters at the White House before departing for a speech in North Carolina. “It’s illegal what she did. She broke the law.” Trump asserted that Pelosi was barred from ripping up the speech because it is an official document, later calling it “very illegal.”

Glenn Kirschner, a legal analyst and former federal prosecutor, disputed Trump’s claim, telling The Hill that a photocopy of a speech is not an official record.

“The federal law prohibiting the destruction of public records or government documents does not apply,” Kirschner said in a text message.

“No prosecutor with half an ounce of common sense would ever charge this case,” said Elie Honig, another legal analyst. “The law isn’t meant to criminalize destruction of copies of ceremonial documents.”

Trump on Friday also described Pelosi’s action as “very disrespectful to the chamber, to the country.”

Pelosi has said she tore up the speech in order to protest the “falsehoods” contained in the president’s State of the Union address and that she felt “very vindicated” by doing so.

The president’s remarks on Friday were his first public reaction to Pelosi’s ripping of his speech at the conclusion of his State of the Union address on Tuesday evening.

The president told reporters Friday that he didn’t know Pelosi ripped the copy of his speech until members of Congress remarked about it as he left the chamber.

White House aides have repeatedly criticized Pelosi for the move in recent days, though none have suggested her actions were illegal. White House counselor Kellyanne Conway told Fox News on Wednesday that she believed Pelosi should be censured.

“I think it shows you how petty and peevish and partisan the Democratic Party has come,” Conway said on Fox News. “And for all the people out there who fancy themselves the armchair psychiatrist trying to analyze certain people, they ought to shift their craft over to Nancy Pelosi.”

Trump has regularly attacked Pelosi over his impeachment by House, but their relationship plummeted to a new low this week following the State of the Union and the president’s acquittal in the impeachment trial by the GOP-controlled Senate.

When Trump entered the House chamber before his remarks, Trump also appeared to snub Pelosi, not taking her hand as she reached out to shake his as is customary at the beginning of the president’s joint address to Congress.

During two separate appearances on Thursday — including one at the National Prayer Breakfast when the House Speaker was sitting just feet away — Trump took a shot at Pelosi for invoking religion during his impeachment.

“Nancy Pelosi is a horrible person. And she wanted to impeach a long time ago,” Trump said during remarks from the East Room Thursday afternoon, disputing Pelosi’s claim that she prays for him. “She may pray, but she prays for the opposite. But I doubt she prays at all.”

[The Hill]

Reality

The assertion is rich given Trump’s well-documented penchant for ripping papers into tiny pieces after he’s done reading them. Politico reported in 2018 that White House aides could not convince the President to break his paper-ripping habit, so it became the job of career staffers in the records management office to tape official documents he’s torn into bits back together.

This all came from a tweet from conservative bullshit artist Charlie Kirk.

According to a fact check from the Tampa Bay Times:

The statute in question deals with the “concealment, removal, or mutilation generally” of records and reports. It sets a penalty for anyone who “conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, or destroys” any government record “filed or deposited with any clerk or officer of any court of the United States, or in any public office, or with any judicial or public officer of the United States.”

The statute also says that any person with “custody” of a government record cannot “willfully and unlawfully” conceal, remove, mutilate, obliterate, falsify or destroy it.

“The point of the statute is to prevent people from destroying records in official repositories like the National Archives or in courts,” said Georgetown Law professor Victoria Nourse.

Pelosi is in the clear, experts said, because her copy of Trump’s speech wasn’t a government record.

Media

‘Where’s the Whistleblower?’ Trump launches new attacks on impeachment as trial nears conclusion

President Donald Trump attacked the impeachment process as closing statements began in his Senate trial.

The president apparently watched the start of closing statements by House managers, who argued that evidence showed Trump should be impeached, and complained the constitutional process was unfair.

“I hope Republicans & the American people realize that the totally partisan Impeachment Hoax is exacty that, a Hoax,” Trump tweeted. “Read the Transcripts, listen to what the President & Foreign Minister of Ukraine said (‘No Pressure’). Nothing will ever satisfy the Do Nothing, Radical Left Dems!”

Trump then renewed his call to produce the whistleblower whose complaint launched the impeachment inquiry.

“Where’s the Whistleblower? Where’s the second Whistleblower? Where’s the Informer?” Trump tweeted. “Why did Corrupt politician Schiff MAKE UP my conversation with the Ukrainian President??? Why didn’t the House do its job? And sooo much more!”

[Raw Story]

Trump shares then deletes tweet praising Chiefs for representing ‘Great State of Kansas’

President Trump tweeted and then deleted a message congratulating the Kansas City Chiefs for representing the “Great State of Kansas” after the team’s victory at the Super Bowl in Miami on Sunday night.

“Congratulations to the Kansas City Chiefs on a great game, and a fantastic comeback, under immense pressure,” Trump wrote in the since-deleted tweet. “You represented the Great State of Kansas and, in fact, the entire USA, so very well. Our Country is PROUD OF YOU!” 

Shortly after deleting the tweet, Trump shared a similar message praising the team and “the Great State of Missouri” after it secured a 31-20 victory against the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday. The Kansas City Chiefs are based in Kansas City, Mo.

“Congratulations to the Kansas City Chiefs on a great game and a fantastic comeback under immense pressure. We are proud of you and the Great State of Missouri,” he tweeted. “You are true Champions!”

[The Hill]

Trump’s Super Bowl interview was 8 minutes of pettiness and empty braggadocio

Presidents giving interviews before Super Bowls has become a tradition — Barack Obama fielded questions about Benghazi and his detractors; Donald Trump has answered questions about immigration and the turnover on his staff.

While the questions can be tough, given the spirit of the day, these interviews aren’t always the most rigorous of exercises. But Trump found himself before an exceptionally friendly interviewer this time around, sitting down with Fox News’s Sean Hannity ahead of the game between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers.

Their conversation was less of an interview than an opportunity for the president to attack his enemies unchecked for just over eight minutes — railing against Democrats who impeached him, making bizarrely incorrect claims about the 2020 Democratic presidential field, and even making height jokes about former New York City mayor of and presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg.

When asked about whether he’d be able to work with Democrats following his impeachment, Trump replied that he wasn’t sure, saying, “I see the hatred — they don’t care about fairness, they don’t care about lying,” a statement that could not be heavier with irony given Trump’s own well documented difficult relationship with the truth.

Hannity nodded as Trump went on, saying, “the whole thing was nonsense,” that it was “very, very unfair,” and that “my family suffered because of all this, and many other families suffered also.”

Trump did not address his role in pressuring Ukraine to dig up dirt on his political rivals, or the White House’s refusal to cooperate in the impeachment inquiry. Instead, he accused Democrats of impeaching him in hopes of brightening their 2020 prospects, saying, “They just want to win; it doesn’t matter how they win.”

In a lightning round, in which Hannity encouraged the president to say the first thing that came to mind, Trump attacked Democratic presidential candidates.

“Look at Sleepy Joe, what’s going on with him? He’s having a hard time,” Trump said of former Vice President Joe Biden. He accused Sen. Elizabeth Warren of being a liar, saying, “I call her ‘Fairy Tale’ because everything’s a fairy tale … this woman can’t tell the truth.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders, Trump claimed, is a “communist” who got married in Russia. The claim prompted Hannity’s only attempt to correct the president; the Fox News personality reminded him that Sanders actually took a trip to the then-Soviet Union shortly after his marriage, and that he wasn’t married there.

Trump did, however — as he has recently done on Twitter — claim the Democratic National Committee is not being fair to Sanders, seeming to reference reports of some disquiet among certain Democrats about Sanders’s recent rise in the polls by claiming the Democratic Party is “rigging it against him,” echoing discord following the 2016 Democratic primary.

He had perhaps his harshest words for Bloomberg. He again criticized the DNC while speaking of Bloomberg, arguing it was unfair the party changed the debate rules in a manner that seems to benefit the mayor, before attacking Bloomberg for being short. (Bloomberg is about 5-foot-8.)

“He wants a box for the debates, why should he be entitled to that?” Trump said. “Does that mean everyone else gets a box?”

He leveled similar attacks against Bloomberg Sunday morning on Twitter, writing, “Many of the ads you are watching were paid for by Mini Mike Bloomberg. He is going nowhere, just wasting his money, but he is getting the DNC to rig the election against Crazy Bernie.”

Bloomberg’s campaign responded with a statement that reads: “The president is lying. He is a pathological liar who lies about everything: his fake hair, his obesity, and his spray-on tan.”

The president did make some positive statements — about himself.

He claimed that thanks to his hard work, “there’s a revolution going on, I mean a positive revolution,” particularly among minority communities, whose lives he said have become better under his watch.

He also took credit for a strong economy, for having done a “tremendous job” assisting China in its fight against the coronavirus, and summed up his time in office like this: “Nobody’s made achievements like we’ve made, so many different things.”

These sorts of statements aren’t new, or even unexpected from the president — he talks like this all the time on Twitter, at his rallies, and at press conferences. However, this marks the first time he has been able to deliver such statements unchecked before such a large and diverse audience — everyone watches the Super Bowl, not just Trump fans or journalists.

It also isn’t surprising that Hannity — who is good friends with Trump — did not try to correct him, except for his remark about Sanders. But the fact that this all ought to have been expected does not make it any less disturbing that the president of the United States was given almost 10 minutes to address the nation, and spent it not answering pressing questions of national concern but attacking his rivals in incredibly petty ways.

[Vox]

Donald Trump Tweets His Defense by Attacking AOC

President Donald Trump’s lawyers, who launched his defense at his impeachment trial in the Senate Saturday morning, have claimed that they will respond substantively to Democrats’ methodical case for why the president should be removed from office. But shortly before the Senate convened for the first day of the White House defense, the president teed up the proceedings with a tweet strong on name calling and short on evidence. 

His targets include two lawmakers, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Rep. Alexandra  Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who have no role in the impeachment trial. Trump also posted tweets quoting Fox Business News host Lou Dobbs praising him. 

Trump’s defenders thus far have not disputed the facts of the case against him. Senate Republicans have complained about comments by Democratic impeachment managers and launched attacks on President Obama’s foreign policy and other topics that are at best tangental. Trump’s lawyers on Saturday have said they will focus on Vice President Joe Biden’s actions related to Ukraine in 2016, and that the president did “nothing wrong. White House counsel Pat Cipollone promised in his opening remarks that Trump’s team will focus on evidence that the House impeachment managers did not include. But their boss appears to have another strategy.

[Mother Jones]

Trump doubles down on his promise to ‘save’ Social Security a day after suggesting he was open to cuts in the program

President Trump sought to defend his Social Security record in a Thursday afternoon tweet, accusing Democrats of wanting to “destroy” it and pledging he would “save” it — only a day after he suggested he was open to overhauling it alongside Medicare. 

Trump said: “Democrats are going to destroy your Social Security. I have totally left it alone, as promised, and will save it!”

The comments came only a day after he suggested in a CNBC interview that he was open to overhauling both social safety-net programs, saying it was “the easiest of all things” and it would happen at the “right” moment after the election. 

White House spokesperson Judd Deere defended the administration’s record on entitlements in an email to Business Insider on Wednesday, saying, “With no benefit cuts, President Trump is keeping his commitment to the most vulnerable Americans especially those who depend on Medicare and Social Security.”

Deere added: “His budgets have proposed more savings to mandatory programs than any President in history, including lowering drug costs, eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse, and getting people off welfare and back to work.”

Trump faced significant criticism from Democrats after his remarks on the entitlement programs aired on CNBC. Both Social Security and Medicare are highly popular with voters.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, a leading presidential candidate, said in a Wednesday tweet that Trump “lied” about his 2016 campaign pledge to guard both programs from cuts.

And Sen. Elizabeth Warren, another frontrunner, also pounced, saying she would “fight” to expand Social Security instead.

[Business Insider]

Trump Just Called Climate Scientists ‘Foolish Fortune Tellers’

Despite a growing mountain of evidence that shows the world is careening towards a climate catastrophe, symbolized this month by the devastating bushfires in Australia, President Donald Trump thinks that “this is not a time of pessimism, this is a time for optimism.”

In his remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Tuesday morning, Trump spent the vast majority of his speech reeling off a laundry list of economic indicators that showed just how strong the U.S. economy is. But he finished his address by attacking climate change activists and scientists who have been raising the alarm about the plight of the planet.

“Fear and doubt is not a good thought process,” Trump said. “Because this is a time for tremendous hope and joy and optimism in action. But to embrace the possibilities of tomorrow, we must reject the perennial prophets of doom, and their predictions of the apocalypse.”

Trump once again repeated the lie that the U.S. has “the cleanest air in the world” when, in fact, his administration has made the air quality in the U.S. worse. According to the Environmental Performance Index, a metric from environmental scientists at Yale and Columbia, the U.S. ranks 10th when it comes to clean air quality.

Trump also said that today’s climate scientists are simply repeating errors of the past when “foolish fortune tellers…predicted an overpopulation crisis in the 1960s, mass starvation in the 70s, and an end of oil in the 1990s.”

Climate change is a hot topic at Davos this year, and an hour before Trump took the stage, Greta Thunberg, the 17-year-old Swedish activist who the U.S. president has criticized for her outspoken opinions and “anger management issues,” told the world’s elite that they have done “basically nothing” to avert a climate catastrophe.

“Pretty much nothing has been done since the global emissions of CO2 has not reduced,” Thunberg said. “If you see it from that aspect, what has concretely been done, if you see it from a bigger perspective, basically nothing, it will require much more than this, this is just the very beginning.”

Trump labeled activists like Thunberg “alarmists” who are simply seeking “absolute power to dominate, transform and control every aspect of our lives.”

“We will never let radical socialists destroy our economy, wreck our country, or eradicate our liberty,” Trump added.

Thunberg said the world needed to pay attention to the findings of the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which shows that in order to have the best chance at keeping the rise in global temperatures to under 1.5 degrees, countries must limit carbon emissions to a collective 420 gigatons.

She added that people often assume that “future generations will somehow suck hundreds of billions of tonnes of CO2 out of the atmosphere, even though such technology doesn’t exist yet.”

One of those people appears to be Trump, who made a cryptic reference to some unknown scientific breakthrough that would solve the current crisis.

“We’re continuing to work on things that you’ll be hearing about in the near future,” Trump said. “You’ll be hearing about it but we have found the answers to things people said, would not be possible certainly not in a very short period of time.”

[Vice]

Trump to New York City: If a storm comes, don’t look at me, get a mop!

New Yorkers worried that global warming might flood the city should get mops, President Trump says.

The Queens native — famed for supporting walls that keep immigrants out — on Saturday ripped the idea of a seawall to protect the city from calamities like 2012′s Hurricane Sandy, which caused massive devastation.

“A massive 200 Billion Dollar Sea Wall, built around New York to protect it from rare storms, is a costly, foolish & environmentally unfriendly idea that, when needed, probably won’t work anyway,” Trump tweeted. “It will also look terrible. Sorry, you’ll just have to get your mops & buckets ready!”

A seawall is one of five proposals considered by the Army Corps of Engineers to protect the greatest city in the world from storms that could become more frequent with climate change.

Besides the Mexican border wall, Trump is also fine with seawalls that protect one of his golf courses in Ireland.

Trump last year changed his official residency from New York to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla. He hasn’t said whether he’d like a seawall to protect the oceanfront portion of that property.

[New York Daily News]

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