Donald Trump

 NY Times - Former President Donald J. Trump has secretly spoken with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as many as seven times since leaving office, even as he was pressuring Republicans to block military aid to Ukraine to fight Russian invaders, according to a new book by the journalist Bob Woodward.

The book, titled “War” and scheduled to be published next week, describes a scene in early 2024 at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s estate in Florida, when the former president ordered an aide out of his office so he could conduct a phone call with Mr. Putin. The unidentified aide said the two may have spoken a half-dozen other times as well since Mr. Trump left the White House. The book also reports that Mr. Trump, while still in office early during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, secretly sent Mr. Putin what were then rare tests for the virus for the Russian’s personal use. Mr. Putin, who has been described as particularly anxious about being infected at the time, urged Mr. Trump to not publicly reveal the gesture because it could damage the American president politically. “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me,” Mr. Putin reportedly told him.

Common Good -  Trump says he will designate 50,000 or more senior civil servants as employees at will. Civil servants in this new “Schedule F” will be like participants of Trump’s television show “The Apprentice,” where the punchline is “You’re fired!”  \

Six days of Trump lies about the Hurricane Helene response

Daily Beast -   Former president and links enthusiast Donald Trump plans to open a second golf course in Scotland’s Aberdeenshire next summer...Trump has also been approved to build a $196 million 550-house development, which nearly 3,000 local residents objected to and a miserly three supported.

Daily Mail, UK -  The billionaire investor cochairing Donald Trump's transition team said people steering the administration during a second term will have to demonstrate loyalty 'to the man' as well as his policies. The comment by Trump Transition official Howard Lutnick, in remarks to the Financial Times, are just the latest demonstration of how Trump will try to staff an administration of purists, after fuming that some of his closest past advisors turned out to be 'RINOS' or unintelligent.

Lutnick, who heads the New York investment firm Cantor Fiztgerald, wrote off some of Trump's first-termers as insufficiently with the program.  'Those people were not pure to his vision,' he said. 'They’re all going to be on the same side.'

'And they’re all going to understand the policies, and we’re going to give people the role based on their capacity — and their fidelity and loyalty to the policy, as well as to the man,' he said. 

Salon -    Donald Trump on Monday claimed that immigrants are predisposed to becoming murderers because they have “bad genes," a racist claim belied by studies showing immigrants actually commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans. “Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States,” the former president said in an interview on “The Hugh Hewitt Show.” 

“You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now. They left, they had 425,000 people come into our country that shouldn’t be here, that are criminals,” Trump continued....

Trump has had a long obsession with genes and bloodlines, often citing superior genetics as a reason for success long before he got into politics. At an anti-immigration rally in 2020, he told the predominantly white Minnesota crowd that they have “good genes.” 

“You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe?" Trump said. He went onto reference the “racehorse theory," an idea popularized in Nazi Germany that suggests selective breeding can improve a country’s performance. In 2023, Trump said immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” echoing language used by the Nazis.

NY Times - According to a computer analysis by The New York Times, Mr. Trump’s rally speeches now last an average of 82 minutes, compared with 45 minutes in 2016. Proportionately, he uses 13 percent more all-or-nothing terms like “always” and “never” than he did eight years ago, which some experts consider a sign of advancing age.

Similarly, he uses 32 percent more negative words than positive words now, compared with 21 percent in 2016, which can be another indicator of cognitive change. And he uses swearwords 69 percent more often than he did when he first ran, a trend that could reflect what experts call disinhibition. (A study by Stat, a health care news outlet, produced similar findings.)

Mr. Trump frequently reaches to the past for his frame of reference, often to the 1980s and 1990s, when he was in his tabloid-fueled heyday. He cites fictional characters from that era like Hannibal Lecter from “Silence of the Lip” (he meant “Silence of the Lambs”), asks “where’s Johnny Carson, bring back Johnny” (who died in 2005) and ruminates on how attractive Cary Grant was (“the most handsome man”). He asks supporters whether they remember the landing in New York of Charles Lindbergh, who actually landed in Paris and long before Mr. Trump was born.

He seems confused about modern technology, suggesting that “most people don’t have any idea what the hell a phone app is” in a country where 96 percent of people own a smartphone. If sometimes he seems stuck in the 1990s, there are moments when he pines for the 1890s, holding out that decade as the halcyon period of American history and William McKinley as his model president because of his support for tariffs. More