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All your base are belong to Tunch.

This is how realignments happen…

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Saul Alinsky is my co-pilot

I personally stopped the public option…

Gastritis Broke My Calculator

Lighten up, Francis.

Mission Accomplished!

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense.

This is a big f—–g deal.

This blog will pay for itself.

Han shot first.

Usually wrong but never in doubt.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity.

Shock troops for the Unitarian Jihad.

What fresh hell is this?

Militantly superior in their own minds…

How has Obama failed you today?

Not all heroes wear capes.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Word salad with all caps

Reality always wins in the end.

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Captain Courageous (Largely Outsourced To Mr. Pierce)

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Charles Pierce said it all about what Trump and his acting (of course) Navy Secretary did to the captain of the USS Theodore Roosevelt.

The Roosevelt, you’ll recall is the aircraft carrier that suffered a coronavirus outbreak while on deployment. It is essentially impossible able to isolate infectious patients on naval vessel.  US carriers are huge–the Roosevelt is 335 meters long (inevitably: more than three football fields), but it’s full of stuff, and there’s not actually that much space to put people, especially folks who need to be kept well away from everyone else.

Its captain, Brett Crozier, asked, then begged his superiors for permission to get the sick sailors off his ship, and to quarantine the carrier for the time necessary to ensure that the infection would not sweep through his whole crew, inevitably killing some of them.

Captain Courageous (Largely Outsourced To Mr. Pierce

Pierce quotes the letter Crozier wrote to command:

This will require a political solution but it is the right thing to do. We are not at war. Sailors do not need to die. If we do not act now, we are failing to properly take care of our most trusted asset — our Sailors…Removing the majority of personnel from a deployed U.S. nuclear aircraft carrier and isolating them for two weeks may seem like an extraordinary measure…This is a necessary risk. Keeping over 4,000 young men and women on board the TR is an unnecessary risk and breaks faith with those Sailors entrusted to our care.

Nothing happened until Crozier’s letter leaked to The San Francisco Chronicle. (It’s not now and may never be known who leaked it; possibly Crozier himself.) Once that letter became public, two things followed. As Pierce writes,

Almost immediately, acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly acted like any acting secretary of anything in this administration* can be expected to act. He initially refused Crozier’s request and then, when the public heat came down, he allowed the afflicted member of the crew to be brought ashore. Then, on Thursday, he relieved Crozier of his command.

Modly’s explanation is a masterpiece of Trumpian malign weaselry:

Captain Crozier had allowed the complexity of his challenge with COVID breakout on the ship to overwhelm his ability to act professionally…(Pierce’s emphasis.)

There’s not much to add. Adam and others on this blob more closely connected to the military than me can chime in, but I’m quite sure that there is no way Crozier didn’t understand what would follow from his decision to protect his crew.  A career on the fast track to flag rank is now dead.

Crozier is the kind of leader I would want if  I or anyone I cared about had to go into harm’s way.  His subordinates agree.

Donald Trump does not:

A Navy commander’s written alarms about a coronavirus outbreak aboard his aircraft carrier “looked terrible,” President Donald Trump said Saturday, as he praised military leaders who removed the USS Theodore Roosevelt’s top officer from his post.

A) I hope that military voters take note.  And B):  That Trump and his criminal, and criminally incompetent administration have made a ritual sacrifice of Captain Crozier is not just an act of petty and petulant vengeance.  It measurably weakens US national defense.

We cannot rid ourselves of these malignancies a moment too soon.

Image: J. W. M. Turner, The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838.

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The Idiot

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There is nothing like helping a friend. Barring it involving moving a body*, it’s usually a sign of Being A Good Person. However… I have learned that this is not necessarily a sign of being a smart person.

Yes, I did lift those. Yes, that’s a heavy band around my legs. Yes, those are velvet shoes.

A few days ago, I went with a friend to their parents’ house, which is being sold, as their father passed last year and it’s become too much for their mother. To say the family dynamic is stressful is a classic case of “My Culture Has a Case of the British Understatementitis”, so I wanted to be there for them. There was also a car. A car that has sat in the garage for about 3 months and is now an ex-running car. The desire was to jump the car, use it to take beloved furniture back to friend’s own home, possibly eat some pizza in a furniture laden home. The best laid plans, juicers, something something, I got distracted, maybe it was important, maybe not.

There’s a surprising amount of time lifting things for no reason on my calendar. & Looking like a Flashdance extra.

Said car is a luxury vehicle. As in, a Lexus. Did I mention it’s a 2017 Lexus SUV? Someone had to stay in the vehicle to steer the non-running thing & someone had to push. Being a clever person, I was not about to steer a car I have no clue about, with friend’s expensive car too close, and possibly lose control, crashing expensive SUV into parents’ house or a neighbor’s house. I’m not saying I’m disaster prone, I’m saying I have a tendency to defy statistics.

Piece o’cake!

So, your pal pushed a 4 ton vehicle about 20 feet. It charged up, was driven back into the garage. It died again. So, I did the feat of strength, again. We did some what was needed, we went back to our respective homes. All was well!

Until… I woke up the next day with the most incredible pain in my left shin, ankle & foot. I’ve been laid up for a couple of days and can only walk moderate distances with a cane. I have no idea what happened, so don’t ask me. It seemed really simple at the time. I did push the thing, it moved, I kept pushing until we had the space we needed. Why my body didn’t signal, “Girl, you crazy? Call AAA!”, i dunno. I’m breaking down the scar tissue and slowly regaining mobility, but that was, in hindsight, probably stupid. But good intentions? Ah, well. I can take loving well, if not wisely. Open thread, laugh at my pain, but remember, I did move an suv.

“You’re supposed to be smarter, WTF.” “Forget it, Odo. Mom can’t even hunt.”

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Lisa Page is done being quiet

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I understand the argument when people say Trump isn’t the worst president ever — or even the worst this century. In terms of body count through pointless military actions and the number of lives ruined through financial malfeasance and mismanagement, Trump doesn’t come close to George W. Bush (yet).

But Trump is in a class by himself in his willingness to recklessly gin up rage against entire groups of people and tell outrageous lies that endanger individuals. He eagerly and often does both for political gain, to get himself off the hook or to paint himself as less sleazy by comparison to others. It’s grotesque and repellent, and, as far as I know, it’s unmatched in US history. In this way, Trump has exposed countless people to crackpots and mobs and has caused death and mayhem, though not at scale…so far.

Two of his favorite targets are former FBI lawyer Lisa Page and agent Peter Strzok. Trump defames them not because they engaged in official misconduct (investigations turned up indiscreet behavior but nothing illegal) but rather because they were critical of Trump in text exchanges, which Trump latched onto as evidence of a “deep state” conspiracy. Trump has relentlessly mocked the two and called for their jailing, just like the tinpot authoritarian he aspires to be.

Trump’s behavior toward Page and Strzok is particularly disgusting to me because they aren’t public figures. The way he leers about “lovely Lisa” and lingers over the word “lovers” when talking about Page and Strzok at his hate rallies is grotesque because no one deserves to have their private business publicly mocked by a foul, degenerate hypocrite like Trump. (It’s also jarring to me because I once found it impossible to imagine Trump using the word “lovers” outside the context of a food order in which it immediately follows the word “meat.”)

Anyway, after remaining silent and hoping in vain that Trump would move on, Page has had enough of the shitgibbon’s shit, as she says in an interview with Molly Jong-Fast in The Daily Beast. Here’s an excerpt where Jong-Fast describes why Page decided to speak out:

I asked her why she was willing to talk now. “Honestly, his demeaning fake orgasm was really the straw that broke the camel’s back,” she says. The president called out her name as he acted out an orgasm in front of thousands of people at a Minneapolis rally on Oct. 11, 2019.

Ugh. That’s just so many shades of fucking cringe.

I hope Ms. Page gets some measure of relief from breaking her silence and highlighting the many ways Trump and his nasty sycophants have subverted our federal law enforcement institutions. The whole interview is worth a read.

Open thread.

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Today’s Public Relations Fail

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South Dakota, like a lot of other rural states, has a meth problem. Today they rolled out a campaign to deal with it.

Evidently nobody along the way said, um, that could be taken in two ways.

The negligence here is cruel. Let us hope those are models in those photos, and not real people who thought they were helping to deal with South Dakota’s drug problem.

How does something this bad happen? Lack of diversity? An ad agency just in it for the money?

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Nevertheless, he persisted…

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This would be career-ending for a normal president, but we live in the Nothing Matters era [The Post]:

President Trump has been ordered by a New York State judge to pay $2 million to a group of charities, settling a lawsuit alleging Trump misused his foundation for personal and political gain, according to a court document filed on Thursday.

The case, brought against Trump and his three eldest children by the New York State Attorney General’s office last year, alleged that the foundation had misspent funds and ignored their oversight duties under New York charity laws…

The lawsuit was filed in June and it alleged “persistently illegal conduct” at the foundation.

Since it’s Trump, and everyone already knows he’s a scammer, this isn’t even the lead story. The top tabs at The Post are about a top diplomat saying “Giuliani was engaged in a campaign ‘full of lies and incorrect information’” and John Bolton’s alleged willingness to testify before Congress if a judge clears it. Interesting times!

Anyway, Trump is a lazy fuck who’s probably lolling around in his short-hemmed, white terry-cloth bathrobe with the karate sleeves and live-tweeting Fox News right now. But he is a persistent criminal, albeit of the low-energy variety.

On a more personal note, is it just me, or is this week an endless shit-parade? I can’t fucking believe it’s only Thursday! Anyhoo, open thread.

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Campus Speech Police (Open Thread)

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I don’t post about football games here anymore because I got sick of all the whining and trolling. But here we have a college football story that intersects with politics and free speech on campus, so I’m making an exception.

As you may have heard, Trump, having been thunderously booed at the Nats game and then again at some sort of cage match combat thingie at Madison Square Garden, is flying around the country on the taxpayers’ dime in search of a sporting event he can crash without being publicly humiliated.

The Heart of Dixie would seem a good bet, no? So Trump is crashing a high-stakes SEC game this weekend: the University of Alabama Crimson Tide vs. the Louisiana State University Tigers. Should be a helluva game, football-wise.

But the University of Alabama Student Government Association must’ve seen a weekend forecast with a chance of boos because they sent this around:

I went to an SEC football school and have attended games in SEC stadiums virtually every year since college, and I have never seen non-disruptive behavior in the student section. Disruptive is normal, is what I’m saying. But apparently security will be deployed throughout the student section to ensure no one hurts Twitler’s extra-dainty feelings, on pain of losing their tickets for the season.

Surely the people who meep endlessly about PC thought police on campus will stand up for these students’ right to self expression, right? **crickets** **crickets** **crickets**

Anyhoo, I’m hoping Tigers and Tide alike can link arms in unity and boo the ever lovin’ fuck out of Trump before one team seizes control of the SEC West. The campus cops can’t kick them all out. To paraphrase some Twitter wag, let Trump seek a hero’s welcome at the Gutbucket, Arkansas Tractor Pull and Hawg Wallop.

Open thread!

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The Worst People

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Donald Trump is a dim-witted conman, but like any half-bright male baboon, he knows how to dominate rivals. Our long national nightmare of governance by a lesser primate (any random baboon would be a VAST improvement) is interspersed with darkly comic glimpses of arrogant fanatics and sundry knaves being ritually humiliated for disobedience and/or publicly shitting in their own hats when commanded to do so by a corrupt and ridiculous buffoon.

Secretaries of State Tillerson and Pompeo illustrate the two options admirably. Tillerson gave up being a powerful executive of a rapacious multinational polluter to take orders from an absurd cocksplat, endure serial humiliations and then get fired while on the toilet. In the final analysis, he may have escaped the Trump orbit less ignominiously than his successor, who has publicly shat his hat: [The Times]

WASHINGTON — As President Trump’s first C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo was briefed by agency officials on the extensive evidence — including American intercepts of conversations between participants — showing that Russian hackers working for the government of Vladimir V. Putin had interfered in the 2016 American presidential campaign. In May 2017, Mr. Pompeo testified in a Senate hearing that he stood by that conclusion.

Two and a half years later, Mr. Pompeo seems to have changed his mind. As Mr. Trump’s second secretary of state, he now supports an investigation into a discredited, partisan theory that Ukraine, not Russia, attacked the Democratic National Committee, which Mr. Trump wants to use to make the case that he was elected without Moscow’s help. “Inquiries with respect to that are completely important,” Mr. Pompeo said last month. “I think everyone recognizes that governments have an obligation — indeed, a duty — to ensure that elections happen with integrity, without interference from any government, whether that’s the Ukrainian government or any other.”

Mr. Pompeo’s spreading of a false narrative at the heart of the Ukraine scandal is the most striking example of how he has fallen off the tightrope he has traversed for the past 18 months: demonstrating loyalty to the president while insisting to others he was pursuing a traditional, conservative foreign policy. Mr. Pompeo, 55, now finds himself at the most perilous moment of his political life as veteran diplomats testify to Congress that Mr. Trump and his allies hijacked Ukraine policy for political gain — and as congressional investigators look into what Mr. Pompeo knew of the machinations of Mr. Trump and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer.

Pompeo is evil, but he’s not stupid. He knows this crackpot “Ukraine framed Russia” conspiracy theory is garbage. But there he is, outsourcing U.S. foreign policy to Sean Hannity and treating the professionals he led at two separate federal organizations as extras in the Trump Show. Here’s hoping the cowardly, careerist fuckbucket gets a send-off that makes Tillerson’s toilet firing look like a gold Rolex retirement ceremony.

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Cowgirl Up (Open Thread)

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I’d find the struggle to beat back this attempted hijacking of U.S. democracy by a white supremacist, patriarchal, authoritarian, oligarchical cabal more pleasant if our opponents weren’t such whiny fucks. Sweet Baby Jeebus, these entitled shitheads not only want us to hand over our freedoms, prosperity and legal protections, they want us to do it with a fucking smile.

Trump is said to be in a nonstop rage about the impeachment threat. He thought he beat the rap when his crooked AG lied about the conclusions of the Mueller report and the baying media pack jumped on that rhetorical squirrel, and now Trump is whining about not being allowed to have a “normal” presidency, what with all these crimes tumbling out of the closet and sparking new investigations.

The obvious retort is, “Stop being such an obvious fucking criminal and act like a president.” But rather than trying to jam the man into the mold, Trump’s simpering toadies are breaking the mold to piece it together around the man. Barr, for example, is trying to placate the puling orange infant by trotting all over the globe (on our dime!) and rendering America even more ridiculous abroad by questioning incredulous foreigners about the alleged conspiracy waged by US intelligence agencies against Trump.

Fox & Friends is pulling babysitting duty stateside, generously applying butt-balm each morning. Here’s a recent glob:

Good God – and the audience for this is the “fuck your feelings” people? Speaking of fucking feelings, a sad trombone of a man is experiencing them:

What an embarrassment to the great state of Florida and, more importantly, the Gator Nation. We want them to do their fucking jobs and protect us, though to be honest, a little self-immolation would be entertaining in lieu of that.

Does Putin whine all the time? I don’t know for sure since I don’t speak the language, but I suspect not. Our authoritarian wannabes and their hapless lackeys need to cowgirl up if they’re going to pull this shit off.

Open thread.

ETA: Holy shit!

Cowgirl Up (Open Thread)Post + Comments (187)

Kellyanne Conway cc’s the provost!

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If you’re up for a Dynasty-style beat-down in the ornamental pond, listen to the audio of this call.

Prediction: additional wigs will be snatched. Open thread!

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The Big Reveal

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Last night when I was cooking and waiting for the baseball game to start, I got a news alert from CNN on my phone about some Giuliani fuckery. Since that’s always amusing and I had a few minutes while waiting for the cheese on my eggplant parm to reach the ideal golden brown state, I read the article, all the way to the end, where CNN buried the lede:

Josh Marshall noticed that buried lede too.

show full post on front page

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Women Spilling the Tea

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When asked earlier this week what she was saying to Trump in the photo he posted on Twitter (which she subsequently used as the background photo on her own Twitter page), Pelosi said she was probably asking why “all roads lead to Putin.”

Pelosi isn’t the only woman who’s telling the truth. In a podcast interview, Hillary Clinton spilled more piping hot beverages than a wildly ill-advised first-grade class field trip to the Russian Tea Room:

In a conversation on former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe’s podcast, Clinton suggested the Russians are leveraging a number of top U.S. politicians. She suggested Russia had kompromat on Trump. She accused 2016 Green Party nominee Jill Stein of being a “Russian asset.” And she suggested Russia might back Gabbard as a third-party candidate.

“They’re also going to do third-party again,” Clinton said. “I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on someone who’s currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.”

“And that’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she’s also a Russian asset,” Clinton said. “Yeah, she’s a Russian asset — I mean, totally. They know they can’t win without a third-party candidate. So I don’t know who it’s going to be, but I will guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most needed.”

At another point in the interview, Clinton wagered that Russia does in fact have some compromising material on Trump, suggesting that’s why so many of Trump’s decisions have erred in a pro-Russian direction.

“I don’t know what Putin has on him, whether it’s both personal and financial,” Clinton said. “I assume it is.”

The endless scandal shit-storm that is the Trump administration is numbing. This week, two iconic women — one the most powerful elected official in the Democratic Party and the other the popular vote winner in the last election — accused the president of being under the control of a foreign autocrat, and it wasn’t even the lead story in a major daily.

Open thread.

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Emoluments (Open Thread)

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U.S. Constitution Emoluments Clause:

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

Breaking news from The Post:

President Trump has awarded the G-7 Summit of world leaders to his own private company, scheduling the massive gathering for next year at his Trump Doral resort outside Miami, the White House said Thursday.

That decision will bring hundreds of diplomats, media and security personnel to Trump’s financially struggling resort — where profits fell 70 percent after Trump entered politics. These events typically fill the host resort, bringing large payments for rooms and meals, and providing global publicity.

This appears to be the first time in American history that a president has given such a massive contract to himself. Trump still owns the Doral resort, and can draw profits from it, though his company has said they will not over-charge the government.

Can this be another article of impeachment? Trump on the site selection:

“They [Trump aides] went to places all over the country, and they came back and they said, ‘This is where we’d like to be.’ It’s not about me. It’s about getting the right location.”

Uh-huh. Everyone knows how pleasant inland Miami is during the summer, which is also hurricane season.

Open thread.

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Y’all…

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A poorly socialized fifth-grader with an underdeveloped vocabulary and delusions of grandeur sent a letter on White House stationery to the president of Turkey:

Unfortunately, that fifth-grader is the President of the United States. We are so fucked.

Also, Trump had a meltdown in a meeting with House leaders and went off on Pelosi, whom he called “a third rate politician” and accused of being a commie. Pelosi characterized it as follows:

An overgrown child has the nuclear codes, and he’s having a pants-soiling tantrum. But I’m sure everything will be fine!

Open thread.

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Fraud Guaranteed (Open Thread)

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More crimes come to light! [ProPublica]:

Documents obtained by ProPublica show stark differences in how Donald Trump’s businesses reported some expenses, profits and occupancy figures for two Manhattan buildings, giving a lender different figures than they provided to New York City tax authorities. The discrepancies made the buildings appear more profitable to the lender — and less profitable to the officials who set the buildings’ property tax.

For instance, Trump told the lender that he took in twice as much rent from one building as he reported to tax authorities during the same year, 2017. He also gave conflicting occupancy figures for one of his signature skyscrapers, located at 40 Wall Street.

I’m neither a lawyer nor an accountant, but that looks a lot like frauding while presidenting…

In other news, another Giuliani-Trump-RNC associate was nabbed attempting to board an international flight* at JFK:

“Oh, for Pete’s sake! He’s fleeing the interview!”

This is going to end up with gumshoes kicking in the door at a Trump hotel while Trump tries to hoist his ass out the window, isn’t it?

*ETA: Looks like Correia was in arrivals, not departures, and he may have flown to New York to turn himself in, so, not as suspicious as Rudy’s other Florida clowns’ apprehension. But still — busted!

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Grotesque Jerry Springer (with Nukes)

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This is so unspeakably grotesque that I can scarcely believe it actually happened, and in the Trump era, that’s saying something. A 19-year-old British motorcyclist, Harry Dunn, was killed in August by an American wrong-way driver who subsequently fled the country under cover of diplomatic immunity. Dunn’s grieving parents are in the U.S. trying to get justice for their son, and Trump lured them to the White House for a mind-bogglingly gross reality TV show surprise:

The Dunn family, now in the United States to drum up support to send [Anne] Sacoolas back to the U.K. to face justice, had accepted an “urgent” invitation by the White House from National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, to visit Donald Trump in Washington, D.C. Trump, it seems, thought he could convince the Dunns to meet the woman who killed their son, and would do so by opening a side door through which she would walk. The whole scene would be captured by a pool of photographers who had been summoned for the meeting.

The Dunns refused to meet Sacoolas and said they felt “ambushed” when Trump told them the woman who killed their son was in the next room. Ya think?

It’s long been obvious that Trump is incapable of experiencing normal human emotions, so it’s easy enough to believe he’d regard the Dunn’s tragic situation as an opportunity to gain good press for himself, much as he and his horrible wife grabbed a photo op in Texas using an infant who’d been orphaned by a Trump-supporting white nationalist.

But the Dunn incident signals there’s no one left in the building who can recognize a disaster in the making and talk Trump out of these ghoulish impulses, if only to avoid the PR fallout. It’s sociopaths, all the way down.

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