Donald trrump

What makes a good liar? It’s a harder question to answer than you might think, partly because it’s a harder and more complex thing to accomplish than you might think. Let me begin by acknowledging that I do not have a satisfactory answer to the question. Nevertheless, as an aficionado of the sport, I admire from afar expert practitioners. And I was reminded just a few days ago that we have in our midst a grand master of mendacity. In his speech in Milwaukee on Friday, Barack Obama demonstrated once again his effortless, masterly deployment of deceit. Again, I do not say that we groundlings have been vouchsafed all the inner workings of the mechanism. But one thing is clear from Obama’s performance: brazenness is key.

This morning Matt Drudge tweeted, ‘A segment on Fox News this morning where hosts laughed and joked their way through a discussion on political impact of terror was bizarre. Not even 48 hours since blood flowed at synagogue? Check your soul in the makeup chair!’ A new Gallup poll indicates that one week before the midterms, a number of voters may also be checking out from supporting Donald Trump. His numbers dropped from a 44 per cent approval rating a week ago to 40 per cent. Trump has made the elections a referendum on himself, which means that he has bet the house, so to speak, on whether or not the GOP retains the Senate and House. If it does, he emerges as America’s strongman.

Independence of mind is nowadays in short supply among the commentariat. Certain big background concepts have been propagated thoroughly enough that everyone knows just what to write as soon as anything happens. If there’s any doubt — or worse, any resistance — wave upon wave of goodthink browbeating will put a quick end to it. And if that fails, a dissenter’s sheer sense of futility may do the trick. What’s the point of insisting that two and two is four when everyone else in the clever class insists it’s five? Edmund Burke never gave up.

‘This “bomb” stuff,’ as Donald Trump referred to it this morning on Twitter, took a new turn with the arrest of Cesar Sayoc, a Floridian who is suspected of trying to spread something other than sunshine across the US. He stands accused of mailing pipe bombs to a variety of leading Democratic politicians as well as CNN. Trump, always attentive to his own needs and wants, had been lamenting the fact that attempted bombings had stolen media attention from what he referred to as the GOP’s ‘momentum’ for the midterm elections. By the afternoon he was venting in the East Room of the White House.

Seven days before the Brexit referendum, the Labour MP Jo Cox was out campaigning for Britain to remain in the European Union, when she was shot, stabbed and murdered by a far-right maniac shouting ‘Britain First’. People were shocked, and shock instantly turned to rage. This is what happens, they said, when you fan the flames of right-wing extremism. Pundits pointed at a provocative UKIP poster that showed a queue of migrants from the developing world and said, in Trumpian capitals, BREAKING POINT. That was a clear incitement to violence, they said. The whole political/media class thought that was that. The staff at Vote Leave (the official, pro-Brexit campaign, who hadn’t put out that poster) were despondent.

Donald Trump, only a few hours ago seen as a master manipulator in the run-up to the midterm elections, has lost the narrative, at least for now. ‘This egregious conduct is abhorrent to everything we hold dear and sacred as Americans,’ he said today. ‘I just want to tell you that in these times we have to unify, we have to come together and send one very clear, strong, unmistakable message that acts or threats of political violence of any kind have no place in the United States of America.’ When Trump is reduced to issuing such emollient statements, he is decidedly on the backfoot.Tonight Trump is scheduled to attend a rally in Wisconsin. Media scrutiny will be more intense than ever.

Poor Paul Manafort. His defense attorney Kevin Downing asked if he could appear in his street clothing rather than a dark-green prison jumpsuit for his sentencing on Friday. Manafort, who has spent millions on bespoke suits, has always placed a premium on his public appearance. Judge T.S. Ellis III, however, was having none of it: ‘This defendant should be treated no differently from other defendants who are in custody post conviction.’Another former Donald Trump associate also got kicked in the shins this week, but the source wasn’t a federal judge. Instead, it was Trump who delivered the blow, dismissing his old chum and confederate Michael Cohen as a nobody.

Geronimo! Elizabeth Warren, whom President Trump has repeatedly mocked as ‘Pocahontas,’ has now issued the results of a DNA test indicating that she does indeed have Native American ancestry going back some 6-10 generations. A video released by Warren shows her receiving the news from one Carlos Bustamante, a professor of genetics at Stanford University. According to Bustamante, ‘The facts suggest that you absolutely have a Native American ancestor in your pedigree.’ Trump has been fixated with Warren’s heritage.This was supposed to be his new ‘birther’ issue. In Iowa last week, he observed that he would like to ‘finally get down to the fact as to whether or not she has Indian blood.’ Why this was the case he did not indicate.

Shortly after yesterday’s outlandish Oval Office episode, several national political reporters under age 40, such as the New York Times’s Jonathan Martin and the Washington Post’s Ashley Parker, claimed total ignorance of Kanye West’s discography — as though impressed with themselves for being oblivious to one of American pop culture’s most titanic figures of the past decade and a half. Maybe they’ve really somehow never heard ‘Jesus Walks,’ ‘Gold Digger,’ or ‘Power,’ which would cast slight doubt on their ability to gauge the political sentiments of the population they purport to cover. Or maybe they just feel compelled to throw Kanye down the memory hole now that he’s taken up with Donald Trump.

For all the encomiums she delivered to Trump and his coterie today, Nikki Haley delivered an unexpected blow to the Trump White House by announcing her resignation. Her announcement caught Trump flatfooted, coming after the previous evening’s revelries at the White House, where he turned a ceremony for newly minted Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh into a political pep rally that is likely to further enrage his detractors and opponents. The sudden defection of one of his big stars is exactly the kind of television programming that Trump loathes, particularly on the eve of the November midterm elections, which Politico says look increasingly ominous for Republican control of the House of Representatives.

Donald Trump celebrated the confirmation of the second Supreme Court justice of his presidency at the Kansas Expocentre in Topeka on Saturday evening, in a typically boisterous rally meant to boost Republicans running in the state. But all is not well in the land of Oz. Kansas, thought to be a deep-red state which went for Trump in 2016 by more than 20 per cent, nonetheless is posing problems for GOP candidates running in November. The legacy of former governor Sam Brownback, one of the least popular governors in the nation, may be having an impact on the race, despite having left office in January to become Trump’s Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom.

Watch out, Twitter — Donald Trump doesn’t need you anymore. He now has his own Presidential Alert system that can send messages right to every cell phone in the country. Twitter allowed Trump to bypass the traditional media when he wanted to; the service is a sterling example of ‘disintermediation’ and the direct connection that can now be established between celebrities and the public. But with his new text alerts, Trump can well and truly speak directly to people without any fear of censorship by a tech zillionaire. Or at least he could if the Presidential Alert system actually were such a thing, and not just a 21st-century analogue to the dowdy old Emergency Broadcast System that used to transmit a beep to TVs and radios once a month.

Senator Mitch McConnell was right. Brett Kavanaugh will become a member of the Supreme Court. Senators Flake and Collins are already making reassuring noises about the new FBI report. But will his investiture help the GOP?The investigation demanded by Flake and others has proven not to have investigated very much. Mark Judge and a few other of Kavanaugh’s high school cronies were interviewed. Kavanaugh himself was not. Nor was Christine Blasey Ford. Senator Charles Grassley says about the FBI report that ‘there’s nothing in it that we didn’t already know.’ That was by design. Federal gumshoes found what the White House wanted them to find.

Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona is a man on a mission. His goal: to turn back the clock and bring the Republican Party back to its roots, to a time before Donald Trump hijacked American politics and cloaked the GOP with a populist, anti-establishment veneer. Indeed, ‘make Republicans great again’ may make for a decent slogan in the event he tosses his hat in the 2020 scrum. Flake knows from experience how powerful and intoxicating the tribalism engulfing American politics has become. Relatively popular with his constituents with an immaculate record as a fiscal conservative, Flake has represented the state of Arizona in one way or another since the early 2000s.