monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Also at Saturday's meeting, the US delegation delivered a letter from Mr Trump for Mr Kim. It is unclear what it contained.

The voice, if I had to guess, belongs to that of a white American male in late middle age. The accent is faintly Southern, the manner taunting but relaxed. It’s also familiar: I’m pretty sure he’s left a message on my office number before. But the last voice mail left almost no impression. Not this time.

“Hey Bret, what do you think? Do you think the pen is mightier than the sword, or that the AR is mightier than the pen?”

He continues: “I don’t carry an AR but once we start shooting you f—ers you aren’t going to pop off like you do now. You’re worthless, the press is the enemy of the United States people and, you know what, rather than me shoot you, I hope a Mexican and, even better yet, I hope a n— shoots you in the head, dead.”

He repeats the racial slur 10 times in a staccato rhythm, concluding with the send-off: “Have a nice day, n— lover.”

He doesn’t give his name. His number is blocked.

The call dates from the end of May, right after I had published a column defending ABC’s firing of Roseanne Barr for a racist tweet. “Perhaps the reason Trump voters are so frequently the subject of caricature,” I wrote, “is that they so frequently conform to type.”

Four weeks later, a gunman storms into a newsroom in Annapolis, Md., and murders five employees of the Capital Gazette.

The alleged killer in the Annapolis shooting does not appear to have acted from a political motive. But the message I got in May was the third time I’ve been expressly or implicitly threatened with violence by someone whose views clearly align with Donald Trump’s. Otherwise, the only equivalent threat I’ve dealt with in my career involved a Staten Island man who later went to prison for his ties to Hezbollah.

Which brings me to the July 20 meeting between Trump and two senior leaders of The Times, publisher A.G. Sulzberger and editorial page editor James Bennet. As Sulzberger later described the encounter, he warned the president that “his language was not just divisive but increasingly dangerous,” and that characterizations of the news media as “the enemy of the people” are “contributing to a rise in threats against journalists and will lead to violence.”

Sulzberger’s warning had no effect. Nine days after what was supposed to be an off-the-record meeting, the president tweeted that he and Sulzberger “spent much time talking about vast amounts of Fake News being put out by the media & how that Fake News has morphed into phrase ‘Enemy of the People.’ Sad!”

By now, it almost passes without comment that the president of the United States not only violates the ground rules of his own meetings with the press, but also misrepresents the substance of the conversation.

Also nearly past comment was the president’s remark, in a follow-on tweet, that the media were “very unpatriotic” for revealing “internal deliberations of our government” that could put people’s lives at risk. That’s almost funny considering that no media organ has revealed more such deliberations, with less regard for consequences, than his beloved WikiLeaks.

What can’t be ignored is presidential behavior that might best be described as incitement. Maybe Trump supposes that the worst he’s doing is inciting the people who come to his rallies to give reporters like CNN’s Jim Acosta the finger. And maybe he thinks that most journalists, with their relentless hostility to his personality and policies, richly deserve public scorn.

Yet for every 1,000 or so Trump supporters whose contempt for the press rises only as far as their middle fingers, a few will be people like my caller. Of that few, how many are ready to take the next fatal step? In the age of the active shooter, the number isn’t zero.

Should that happen — when that happens — and journalists are dead because some nut thinks he’s doing the president’s bidding against the fifth column that is the media, what will Trump’s supporters say? No, the president is not coyly urging his supporters to murder reporters, like Henry II trying to rid himself of a turbulent priest. But neither is he the child who played with a loaded gun and knew not what he did.

Donald Trump’s more sophisticated defenders have long since mastered the art of pretending that the only thing that matters with his presidency is what it does, not what he says. But not all of the president’s defenders are quite as sophisticated. Some of them didn’t get the memo about taking Trump seriously but not literally. A few hear the phrase “enemy of the people” and are prepared to take the words to their logical conclusion.

Is my caller one of them? I can’t say. But what should be clear is this: We are approaching a day when blood on the newsroom floor will be blood on the president’s hands.

The network's communications team responded to Trump's tweet, suggesting that if Trump was watching CNN, it must have been because first lady Melania Trump was choosing the channel.


"Sounds like (first lady Melania Trump) had the remote last night," the network tweeted. "We hope you both saw the incredible work of (LeBron James)."

The tweet also included the hashtag "#BeBest," a reference to the first lady's campaign to crack down on cyberbullying and support American youth.

On the NYR Daily this week, investigative reporter Murray Waas published a story revealing what he called “the most compelling evidence we yet know of that Donald Trump may have obstructed justice.” Trump’s lawyers have argued that the president was unaware Michael Flynn was under criminal investigation when he pressured FBI director James Comey to “see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” and thus he could not have broken the law. But confidential White House documents, which Waas has seen, show that Trump did in fact know Flynn was under investigation.

The night our story broke, Lawrence O’Donnell opened his program on MSNBC with a segment on Waas’s story, and the following day, Trump tweeted furiously demanding that Attorney General Jeff Sessions end “this Rigged Witch Hunt,” Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

Waas, a veteran journalist who also covered the Bush administration’s push for war in Iraq, is understandably reluctant to reveal too much about his sources or how he reported his latest story, but I asked him why the current administration leaks so much to the press.

“There is no loyalty in this White House,” he told me. “And there’s also less idealism. Compare this administration to say that of Barack Obama, where most of the staff loved the president, and if they didn't, they at least respected him and believed in their mission. There isn't much of that in this White House. So they talk to reporters. And then there’s the fact that they work for a president who will throw them under the bus, and not think twice about doing it. Former New York Times editor Howell Raines said the Trump administration is ‘a hospice where reputations go to die.’ So I'm sure that some of them talk for reasons of survival, too. There’s a great piece in Axios about this, where one leaker says, ‘To cover my tracks, I usually pay attention to other staffers’ idioms and use that in my background quotes. That throws the scent off me.’”

(...)

Then charge Trump and present the evidence.

Besides being a veteran, I do care what the poem says. It's a shame you don't.

It's already unravelling.

Construction executive tops Pence-endorsed congresswoman in Tennessee gubernatorial primary

Although the Senate race is poised to be exceptionally hard fought and will draw most of the political attention in Tennessee in the coming months, Thursday’s most heated competition was concentrated in Republicans’ primary for governor. The staggeringly expensive contest renewed tensions about the direction of the party in a state that has long embraced moderate conservatives in the mold of Howard Baker, the longtime senator, and more recently Mr. Corker and Mr. Haslam.

“There’s been this battle for a long time between the pragmatists and the purists,” said John G. Geer, a political scientist and the dean of the College of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

Powerful Republicans worried that nominating a hard-right conservative like Ms. Black would jeopardize their prospects of defeating a candidate like Mr. Dean, who could find substantial support among independent voters.

Mr. Lee’s victory, though, was something of a relief to many party leaders.

Although Mr. Lee has expressed support for the president — “I fully support Donald Trump, voted for him, went to his inauguration,” he said in one advertisement — he depicted himself as having softer edges than some of his rivals.

Quote:

Red China losing the trade war

This is your Red China on Obama: "China’s stock market overtook Japan’s in late 2014, then soared to an all-time high of more than $10 trillion in June 2015."

This is your Red China on President Trump: "Chinese equities and the nation’s currency have taken a beating this year amid a trade spat with the US, a government-led campaign to cut debt and a slowing economy."

Any questions?

The quotes are from Focus World News, an Indian news service.

"China just lost its ranking as the world’s number two stock market," Focus World News reported.

I had it up to here with this sneering from elitists.

I replied, "Hahaha. You really believe Americans elected an infant as president. Meanwhile, the economy booms and peace is breaking out. You Never Trumpers are so childish. You cling to your wrong call like Linus and his security blanket."

Meanwhile, China is about to capitulate in the trade war because Chairman Xi needs to export to the U.S. to keep his nation afloat, and himself in power.