monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

We've got to outlaw the entire Democratic Party. It's the only way to put a stop to their endless witch hunting.

(...)

The women I know — of all ages — have responded by and large with a mixture of slightly horrified excitement (bordering on titillation) as to who will be the next man accused and overt disbelief.

Publicly, they say the right things, expressing approval and joining in the chorus of voices that applaud the takedown of maleficent characters who prey on vulnerable women in the workplace.

In private it’s a different story. “Grow up, this is real life,” I hear these same feminist friends say. “What ever happened to flirting?” and “What about the women who are the predators?” Some women, including random people I talk to in supermarket lines, have gone so far as to call it an outright witch hunt.

(...)

Perhaps even more troubling is that we seem to be returning to a victimology paradigm for young women, in particular, in which they are perceived to be — and perceive themselves to be — as frail as Victorian housewives.

(...)

In an author's note at the beginning of "Fire and Fury," Wolff says that in many instances, he allowed his sources to present conflicting versions of the truth and hopes the reader can judge their veracity, as he has "settled on a version of events I believe to be true."

"Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another," Wolff writes, according to a copy of the book obtained by The Washington Post. "Many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue."

In April 2017, on the eve of South Korean presidential elections, the president gave an interview to Reuters that punched two sensitive points. He threatened to rip up the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement. “It is unacceptable, it is a horrible deal made by Hillary,” he said. “It’s a horrible deal, and we are going to renegotiate that deal or terminate it.” In that same interview, Trump demanded a billion-dollar payment for a high-altitude missile defense system. That demand reneged on an agreement reached by Trump’s own administration, by which the South Koreans provided the land for the system and the United States provided the weapons. It probably will not surprise you to learn that the free-trade agreement was not, in fact, negotiated by Hillary Clinton. Most of the work was done under President George W. Bush. The agreement then stalled in Congress after the Democratic victories of 2006, until President Obama’s trade negotiators revised it to provide more advantages for U.S. automakers. Accurate or not, Trump’s comments sent South Korean stock and currency markets into a tumble.

Trump’s pique with South Korea might be explained by an embarrassment he had suffered in the country two weeks earlier. Apparently misunderstanding a Pentagon briefing, Trump had boasted in an April 12 Fox Business interview that he was personally and immediately sending a “very powerful” “armada” into Korean waters to menace North Korea. That armada—the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson and support vessels—was then photographed thousands of miles away heading in the opposite direction, passing between the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra en route toward India. Trump’s mistake was criticized by South Korean politicians and mocked in the South Korean media. The Reuters interview may have been payback.

That interview had the unintended effect of helping to boost the more U.S.-skeptical of the South Korean presidential candidates in the May 9 election. In midsummer, speaking at his New Jersey golf retreat without a single South Korean present, Trump promised to visit “fire and fury like the world has never seen” upon North Korea. In September at the United Nations he warned that he might “totally destroy North Korea,” adding “Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and his region.”

As a candidate for president, South Korea’s Moon Jae In had opposed the deployment of missile defenses, urging negotiation with the North instead. Now as president, this conciliation-minded leader—already inclined toward skepticism of the United States—daily confronts a new strategic reality: His country’s most important security partner seems determined to confirm every negative attitude about the U.S. held by nationalist South Koreans. The Moon government has responded with a flurry of overtures toward the North.

Together, Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump are enabling the North Korean nuclear program to evolve into a mighty diplomatic weapon against U.S. interests, separating South Korea from the United States, incentivizing the South to placate the North. Together, Kim and Trump are depriving the U.S. of conventional military options—because there is no non-nuclear option against the North without the support of the South. Between 2015 and 2017, South Korean confidence in the United States to do the right thing in international affairs has dropped by a startling 71 points in a Pew survey. Only 17 percent of South Koreans have confidence in Donald Trump—less than half the number that trust China’s Xi Jinping.

And who is Xi’s best publicist? Why, Donald Trump himself. Trump has often told the world that it is China, not the United States, that has the most leverage over North Korea. He tweeted in 2013, “North Korea is reliant on China. China could solve this problem easily if they wanted to but they have no respect for our leaders.” And as president too, he has looked to China first and foremost to sway North Korea. He tweeted in July 2017: “Perhaps China will put a heavy move on North Korea and end this nonsense once and for all!”

The thought is bound to occur to South Koreans increasingly wary of Trump’s protectionism, unpredictability, and bellicosity: If indeed it is China that can control the North, maybe it is to China not the United States that South Koreans should look for security?

In a May 30 op-ed, White House senior advisers Gary Cohn and H.R. McMaster sought to assure the world that “America First” does not mean “America alone.” In the Korean peninsula, however, increasingly that’s just what Trump has wrought. Trump’s warlike boasting is steadily leading the United States toward the starkest and most extreme dilemma: The only policies remaining will be a unilateral nuclear strike upon the North—or humbly submitting to a new Chinese-led security order in Northeast Asia.

The author of a controversial book on Donald Trump's White House has defended his reporting, saying that he "absolutely" stands by everything he wrote and that the US president has no credibility.

Michael Wolff, who spent months in the White House while researching the book, was responding to the president's claims that it was "full of lies".

Mr Wolff told NBC's Today show that Mr Trump's staff "all say he is like a child".

The book has now gone on sale early.

Mr Trump's lawyers had tried to block publication of Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, alleging it contained many falsehoods.

But Mr Wolff said the president had "less credibility than perhaps anybody who has ever walked on Earth at this point".

He added that White House staff described the president as childlike because "he has the need for immediate gratification. It's all about him... This man does not read, does not listen. He's like a pinball just shooting off the sides".

The book cites former top aide Steve Bannon as describing a meeting at Trump Tower in New York between a Russian lawyer and Trump election campaign officials, including Mr Trump's son Donald Jr, as "treasonous".

Both Mr Trump Jr and his father strongly deny any collusion took place.

It also portrays Mr Trump as being surprised at winning the presidency.

Mr Wolff said it was "extraordinary" that the president of the US would try to stop publication of his book, a move that "the CEO of a mid-sized company" would not attempt.

Mr Trump said he had not given Mr Wolff access to the White House nor spoken to him for the book.

Mr Wolff responded: "What was I doing there if he didn't want me to be there? I absolutely spoke to the president... It was not off the record."

Asked if attempts to block the book's publication, and the attendant publicity, had helped sales, he smiled and said: "Where do I send the box of chocolates?"

A Politico story published on Friday claims that an anecdote published in the New Yorker during the 2016 presidential campaign about New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie fetching McDonalds for Donald Trump was made up. But Ryan Lizza, the original reporter, is standing by his story.

“One Republican told me that a friend of his on the Trump campaign used Snapchat to send him a video of Christie fetching Trump’s McDonald’s order,” Lizza reported at the time, a claim that instantly went viral.

The nugget came from a single, anonymous source, but many outlets ran with the story, referring to Christie as Trump’s “unpaid McDonald’s delivery intern” and an “errand boy” on the campaign.

The response forced Christie’s office to release a statement denying the charges, calling the story a “bit of sleaze” and “pure trash.” But the on-the-record denial only helped fuel coverage of the salacious anecdote.

Former Trump aide Sam Nunberg told Politico’s Josh Dawsey he was the one to leak the embarrassing story about Christie. Nunberg, who was fired by the Trump campaign admitted to Dawsey he made up the entire incident as part of a larger attempt by Trump’s campaign to embarrass Christie.