Category Archives: Donald Trump

Expect South Parks next season to be heavy on fart jokes, to clear the air after a season that became much more Donald Trump-concentrated than the creators had intended, Matt Stone and Trey Parker told Bill Simmons or words to that effect on his The Bill Simmons Podcast.live early this morning.

Where we were going with the thing, its all about how girls [have been] slighted, Parker explained of the wrapped Season 20. Girls have been marginalized in South Park too, just because we do all the voices and its hard for us to have people come in at 3 in the morning and change all the lines.

We were heading down this whole path [with] this big boy-girl war going on, and everyone thinks, OK well hooray, Hillarys gonna be president. And that means that Bill Clinton is the first gentleman. That to us was the most ironic, coolest thing to focus onThats where the whole season was going and thats what really got torn apart. Garrison was supposed to come back and just start teaching again and all this stuff and we were now just locked in to this other [timeline].

Theyd prepared an episode, dubbed The First Gentleman to follow Election Night, based on expectation Hillary Clinton would win. Tuesday night, around 8 PM, they knew they had to blow up that episode.

Surveying their options, Go black was what we talked about, Stone said, adding they also mulled airing The First Gentleman episode as-is, as a sort of document for history.

We called [former president of Viacom Music and Entertainment] Doug Herzog and said, We cant get the show done. Its just really screwed up, and sorry, Stone continued. And he was like, Im at The Daily Show, everyones crying, Ill call you back, or something like that. His world was like, everyone was coming to him saying, We cant do this tonight.

I think [Herzog] would have been okay with us just going black, but it was also nice for at least real die-hard South Park fans to air an episode, Parker chimed in. Everyone was so shell-shocked, and it was like you didnt want to see that the world had changed. You wanted to be like, Okay, this horrible thing has happened, and [Trump] has been elected president, [but] South Parks still on the air. The sun is still rising. Waters still clear.

The episode, named Oh Jeez, aired November 9.

As to where the show goes from here Simmons referenced how Saturday Night Live has adjusted to a Trump presidency Parker said that show is doing better than ever because of it, but its like now every week Im seeing a headline about how SNL ripped on the Trump administration this week. Theyve become that show.

That was part of the bummer for us about [last] season; we didnt want to make it a big Trump thing, and we kept thinking it was gonna go away and we didnt want to get caught up in just being a political show, he continued. Theres plenty of good political comedy out there. We like to dabble in that and do that one week, but then the next week we want to do fart jokes. We love to change tones. And its interesting, cause now people are [saying], OK, well lets see how you deal with Trump this coming season. No one ever said, Oh, the new seasons coming, how you gonna deal with Obama in this season? Were not that show and we never were.

If not that, what will they do next season, Simmons asked.

Responded Parker: Fart jokes.

Simmons also asked, in re Trump, the two if they can remember in the last two decades somebody who almost couldnt be parodied because he was a parody.

Again, Parker responded:

If you have like a little monkey and its running himself into the wall over and over and youre like, Thats funny, but how am I gonna make fun of the monkey running himself into the wall? I can discuss the monkey running himself into the wall, I can copy the monkey running into the wall, but nothings funnier than the monkey just running himself into the wall.

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'South Park' Creators Skirt Donald Trump Next Season Because Monkey Running Into Wall Can't Be Made Funnier - Deadline

Are you a foreign despot who has just purged his opposition or authorized a deadly war against your nation's drug dealers? Normally, you would expect at least a mild rebuke from the leader of the free world. Depending on how egregious your violations, maybe even a tough speech from the Rose Garden or a U.S.-sponsored United Nations resolution.

Not anymore. In the Donald Trump era, it's springtime for the world's authoritarians. Or at least that's how it seems. Consider some of Trump's recent statements.

He told Bloomberg News on Monday that he would be "honored" to meet with North Korea's Kim Jong Un under the right circumstances. Last week, we were on the brink of war with Kim's Hermit Kingdom. But now, Trump is holding out the prospect of a deal. All of that is fine, but since when would an American president be honored to meet with a boy-tyrant who presides over a gulag state?

Then there was Trump's invitation to Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte this week to visit the White House. He's the guy who said last summer, "Just because you're a journalist doesn't mean you're exempted from assassination if you're a son of a bitch."

Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, last month orchestrated a constitutional referendum that could keep him in power for the next dozen years and further consolidate the powers of the chief executive. The vote was widely criticized by human rights groups and outside observers as a further nail in the coffin of Turkish democracy. Not Trump. He called Erdogan after the vote to congratulate him on the victory.

From Russia's Vladimir Putin to Egypt's General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Trump has gone out of his way to butter up foreign leaders who have trampled over the rights of their citizens. One gets the sense that if Trump was alive during the era of Mongol conquests he would probably proclaim Genghis Khan was "one smart cookie with a big heart."

It's clear that much of this is improvisational. After the first 100 days, all of us are getting used to a president who says and tweets whatever is on his mind, regardless of how it coheres with his administration's foreign policy. We saw this previously when it came to Russia's political influence operation last year. Trump this weekend told CBS News that he still wasn't sure Russia was behind the hacking of leading Democrats (even though he had acknowledged as much before his inauguration).

At the same time, White House officials tell me it would be a mistake to conclude that Trump doesn't care at all about human rights. "He has a strategy and his strategy is to develop personal relationships to avoid criticizing publicly people with whom he is trying to build a relationship and with whom he is negotiating," Michael Anton, the National Security Council spokesman, told me Tuesday. Anton added that Trump does raise human rights concerns privately with world leaders. He pointed to Egypt's decision to release six humanitarian workers, including one U.S. citizen, from an Egyptian prison as an example of how Trump's private diplomacy with Sisi got results.

White House officials also pointed to Trump's brief meeting in February with Lilian Tintori, the wife of imprisoned Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez. Trump tweeted a photo of himself with Tintori and Vice President Mike Pence from the White House right after the Treasury Department issued an order to freeze the assets of Venezuela's vice president for drug trafficking. On Friday Venezuela announced it would no longer be participating in the Organization of American States after the U.S. pressed that body to condemn their government's recent repression of peaceful protests.

White House officials also tell me Trump has asked his national security cabinet to focus on human rights in its policy review on Cuba. Finally, Trump should get some credit for doing something his predecessor never did attacking the Syrian regime. He ordered the strikes on a Syrian air base after the U.S. intelligence community concluded the regime had used sarin gas in an attack on a rebel-controlled area, violating Syria's own 2013 agreement with Russia and the U.S. to give up its chemical weapons.

All of that is well and good. But any argument that Trump really cares about human rights or democracy in foreign policy is undermined by his sweet words for Duterte, Erdogan, Sisi and China's leader, Xi Jinping.

Past presidents have also looked the other way at times for authoritarian allies. And often presidents who made support for human rights a rhetorical priority didn't back up those words when it came to policy. Remember that President Barack Obama was critical of Sisi's military coup in 2012, but he never cut off military aid to Egypt afterward. Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton's secretary of state, handed a basketball signed by Michael Jordan to Kim's father on her 2000 visit to North Korea.

The difference is that when former presidents cozied up to authoritarians, there was a strategic purpose. Obama needed Egypt to be stable while its neighbor Libya descended into civil war. Clinton wanted North Korea to agree to a deal to abandon its long-range missile program. Franklin D. Roosevelt needed Stalin to defeat Hitler. With Trump, it's unclear whether his obsequiousness to despots is part of a larger plan, or just popping off.

"The challenge is to know if there is a strategy behind these peculiar openings to foreign authoritarians," Timothy Naftali, a professor of history at New York University and former director of the Nixon Presidential Library, told me. "Donald Trump has so far been incapable of articulating a foreign policy approach, let alone a strategy."

Naftali held out hope that National Security Adviser Gen. H.R. McMaster has a strategy, and that Trump is an imperfect spokesperson for it. "But at the moment there is no reason to believe that he is inviting Duterte to this country, except to annoy political elites," he said.

Bolstering Naftali's argument is that Duterte's first response to Trump's invitation was to say he was probably too busy to visit the White House. Usually invitations to a head of state are better choreographed.

That said, it's also possible that Trump understands that Duterte, who threatened to kick the U.S. military out of his country in October, needs courting. It's worth remembering that the Obama administration last fall encouraged the Philippines to settle its dispute with China over artificial islands in the South China Sea directly, even after an international tribunal ruled in favor of the Filipinos. If Duterte concludes his government is too toxic for the West, it will drive him into China's arms.

A similar argument can be made for China and Turkey. If Turkey can be enticed to play a more constructive role in Syria's civil war, if China can be persuaded to pressure North Korea on its nuclear program, then why muddy the diplomacy with boilerplate about political prisoners?

There is, though, another way. Here it's instructive to go back the Philippines. In 1986, another Republican president, Ronald Reagan, faced another Filipino strongman in Ferdinand Marcos. The two had developed a close relationship going back to when Reagan was governor of California. But after it became clear that Marcos had engaged in widespread election fraud in the 1986 election and that his military was defecting to his opposition, Reagan insisted his old friend step down.

Reagan did this in the twilight of the Cold War, when the Soviets and the Americans fought all over the world for influence in weaker countries. There was a strong argument that national interests should prevail over human rights in the Philippines in 1986, too. And yet the U.S. was rewarded for Reagan's foresight in 1988, when the elected government granted the U.S. an interim agreement to keep U.S. military bases on the islands.

Trump could learn a lot from Reagan when it comes to his new authoritarian friends. Statecraft often demands leaders choose between interests and values. But America is an exceptional nation. Sometimes its interests are best served by advancing the principles of its founders.

Bloomberg View

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg View columnist. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

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Donald Trump's peculiar obsession with authoritarian leaders - Chicago Tribune

As people analyze the flurry of rambling misstatements, outright lies and flip-flops coming from the toupeed totalitarian sitting in the Oval Office, credible voices who once giggled at Donald Trumps antics have stopped laughing and started asking a very serious question:

Is the president of the United States suffering from dementia or Alzheimers?

Rice University history professor and leading presidential historians Douglas Brinkley analyzed Trumps interviews from over the last few days. Brinkley, who has read hundredsif not thousandsof transcripts and presidential interviews, concluded that Trump seemed to have a confused mental state, the likes of which he has never seen. It seems to be among the most bizarre recent 24 hours in American presidential history, Brinkley told Politico magazine.

If Douglas Brinkley is not the top presidential historian in the world, then Jon Meacham is certainly in the running for that title. During an appearance Monday on MSNBCs Morning Joe, Meacham and host Joe Scarborough had a conversation about the latest White House fiascoes. Scarborough said Trump was mumbling, he was rambling around, incoherent, and then just sort of quit talking. Walked off.

This conversation is significant for two reasons: Scarborough has a long relationship with Trump, and during the transition and early days of Trumps presidency, Scarborough made numerous trips to both Trumps home and his Mar-a-Lago estate. The second reason is that Scarboroughs words reflect his own personal experienceScarboroughs mother suffers from dementia.

My mothers had dementia for 10 years, Scarborough remarked concerning Trumps wondering why no one ever asks about the Civil War. That sounds like the sort of thing my mother would say today.

Even more troubling is the fact that Trumps medical records, released during the campaign, are basically a cursory exam, filled with hyperbole, written by a family friend who is a gastroenterologist. Oh yeah, we also have that time he went on Dr. Oz.

Donald Trump is the oldest man ever to be sworn in as president, surpassing the record held by Ronald Reaganwho died in 2004 after a battle with Alzheimers disease. According to the Alzheimers Association, people who have a parent, brother or sister with Alzheimers are more likely to develop the disease.

At the time of his death in 1999, Fred Trumpthe father of Donald Trumphad suffered from Alzheimers for six years.

Michael Harriot is a staff writer at The Root, host of "The Black One" podcast and editor-in-chief of the daily digital magazine NegusWhoRead.

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Does Donald Trump Have Dementia? - The Root

Forbes

Donald Trump Has Been Lying About The Size Of His Penthouse Forbes During the presidential race, Donald Trump left the campaign trail to give Forbes a guided tour of his three-story Trump Tower penthouse -- part of his decades-long crusade for a higher spot on our billionaire rankings. Gliding through his gilded home, ...

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Donald Trump Has Been Lying About The Size Of His Penthouse - Forbes

U.S. officials haverepeatedly (and falsely) claimed that North Korea is on the verge of having the capability to carry out a nuclear strike on U.S. soil. And the Trump White House has done little to tamp down media speculation about nuclear war, perhaps because the hype plays to its advantage.

In fact, President Trumps rhetorical brinksmanship has some resemblance to the governing style of Kim Jong-un, the North Korean dictator whom Trump recently called a pretty smart cookie. A population that feels threatened by mass violence tends to line up behind its protector. Exaggerated beliefs about North Koreas nuclear capabilities serve to justify Americas own provocations. These include Foal Eagle, a military exercise carried out on North Koreas doorstep by U.S. and South Korean forces every spring since 2002.

The North Korean missile thats drawnthe most speculation is called the KN-08. It has only been tested twice. Both tests ended in failure. Nevertheless, NBC has offered advice on what Americans should do in case of a nuclear strike. Fox News reported on Hawaiis emergency attack plans. Trump himself tweeted that North Korea is in the final stages of developing a nuclear weapon that could hit the United States. Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., the head of Pacific Command, told Congress last week that Kim Jong-un is clearly in a position to threaten Hawaii today. Those who watched the full hearing know that Harris also said that current missile defense systems are sufficient. But you wouldnt know it from the headlines:

There is a problem with this scenario. The North Korean missiles that are theoretically capable of reaching Hawaii do not work. Nor do manyother key componentsof the countrys arsenal. Last Friday, two days after Harriss warning, North Korea tried to launch a medium-range ballistic missile. It was not mounted with a nuclear warhead its unclear whether North Korea is actually capable of mounting a working nuclear bomb onto a working missile. The missileflew 22 miles, never leaving North Korean airspace, before exploding into harmless pieces. An earlier April test failed just after liftoff. North Koreaslast halfway successful test, in March, got four medium-range Scud missiles to the Sea of Japan, but no new capabilities were demonstrated, according to one expert analyst. A fourth test of a single Scud missile, in early April, spun out of control after going only a fraction of its range, according to an anonymous official quoted by Reuters.

North Koreas launch-failure rate has been extraordinary high since the Obama administration stepped up cyberwar efforts in 2014, the New York Times noted. Trump has dodged the question of whether a secret U.S. cyber campaign against North Korea might be responsible for the latest test failures, though he has claimed that Obama was outplayed in his dealings with Pyongyang.

Trumps attempts to stoke U.S. fears about North Koreas nuclear capabilities began during the transition, with this tweet:

Propaganda from the North Korean government is far more aggressive, promising the destruction of U.S. cities:

The North Koreans want to sell the world on the idea that theyre a serious threat. Not six months or six years from now, but today. The U.S. media has been eager to take this end-of-the-world meme one step further, drawing comparisons to the Cuban missile crisis and suggesting that the face-off between Trump and Kim has the world teetering on the brink of apocalypse. This terrifying narrativecertainly drives traffic:

But there is little evidence to suggest it is true.

This week, with the threat of war firmly established, Trump backed off. He even suggested that he might meet with Kim. I would be honored, he told Bloomberg on Monday. Im telling you under the right circumstances I would meet with him. We have breaking news.

War on Monday, peace on Tuesday, with the news cycle dominated by the presidents ever-shifting whims.

On Korea, Trumps manipulation of the media serves to conceal how little difference there is between his policy and the so-called failed policies of his predecessors. Underneath his tough talk, Trumps approachappears identical to Obamas use sanctions and diplomatic pressure to prod North Korea to the negotiating table, even as a covert cyber campaign undermines Pyongyangs capabilities. Theres been a lot of bluster and declarations, giving the appearance that we have a new sheriff in town, Prof. Richard Samuels, who directs MITs Center for International Studies, told me. In fact, it looks like the old policy of strategic patience may still be in place.

Weve been here before. Consider this statement: North Korean technicians are reportedly in the final stages of fueling a long-range ballistic missile that some experts estimate can deliver a deadly payload to the United States. This was the first sentence of a Washington Post op-ed written by William Perry and Ashton Carter, two former secretaries of defense. Their words echoed Trumps tweet: The final stages.

But thatop-ed was published more than 10years ago, in 2006. Perry and Carter were writing about a missile called the Taepodong. Today, North Korea experts are still speculating about the possibility that the Taepodong could be deployed in an emergency, although they caution that such a weapon would represent more of a political statement than an operational capability since it would suffer from significant problems. Compare that to what Perry and Carter wrote for popular consumption in 2006, and one might be persuaded that North Koreas nuclear program is running backward.

Of course, it is true that North Korea could kill hundreds of thousands of people in Tokyo and Seoul with short-range missiles and artillery. That has always been the case, going back decades. And another North Korean missile, the Musudan, was successfully tested last yearafter five consecutive failures. The Musudan flew 250 miles, but the sharp launch angle suggests the potential for greater range.Kims regime has successfully tested land-based nuclear bombs and has rapidly accelerated the rate of ballistic missile tests. Whether or not he could succeed in detonating a missile-mounted nuclear warhead over Japan or South Korea is unknown; the possibilityis too catastrophic to be ignored.

These facts arent enough for Trump. Having won the presidency as an America-first isolationist who denigrated U.S. alliances and misrepresented his own position on the Iraq War, the prospect of Seoul and Tokyo in flames was insufficient. He had to put Honolulu and Seattle into play as well.

Another example of symbiosis between Trumps vague warnings and the medias hair-trigger alarmism took place over the weekend, when CNN published this map, misrepresenting a possible future threat as a clear and present danger:

The New York Times was slightly more restrained. They used a dotted line and qualified the threat as potential.

Last week, I spoke with a congressional staff member who has drilled down into what we actually know about the KN-08 and a variant, the KN-14. Whats the timeline? said the staff member, who asked not to be identified when discussing intelligence matters. Thats the million-dollar question. Is it 2020? Is it earlier? Among the intelligence community, there are differing estimates. Some folks think its a question of months. Others say its a three- or four-year time frame. The big thing thats missing in the debate is that North Korea has never successfully tested an ICBM [long-range ballistic missile]. The question is what we can do to stop that from happening. A lot of folks dont think pre-emptive strikes are the way.

Its the intelligence communitys job to be pessimistic. The more that the CIA and NSA know about the KN-08, the KN-14, and other low-probability threats, the easier it will be for the U.S. to protect the Korean peninsula without going to war. But theres a difference between making hard-nosed threat assessments and inflating them to drum up the prestige of an insecure leader. Thats not the art of the deal. Thats the art of dictatorship.

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North Korea Wants to Convince the World It Can Nuke Hawaii. Donald Trump Is Happy to Oblige. - The Intercept