monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

The Assads have massacred their people for decades and had huge smoints of illegal chemical weapons,

they're changing the subject to Assad or whatever squirrel they can point to.

Obama and his SoS Clinton lied about Assad.

They lied about Gadaffi,

and illegally invaded that nation on "humanitarian" grounds.

The most advanced nation in north Africa now has slave trading in the streets.

By no means their first use.

. They are not equipped to think logically,

you too, joint

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. They are not equipped to think logically,

Former government workers? I agree. Their brains turned to mush a while ago. Now would you like to produce real proof about Assad's recent attacks or not?

A panel on MSNBC’s All In discussed some of the memorable news stories of 2018 on Monday, mocking President Donald Trump over an October article from The New York Times that revealed that much of the president’s fortune came from his father’s money and dodging taxes.

Although Trump has often described himself as a self-made millionaire, the Times reported how the president actually gained the equivalent of $413 million in present-day dollars starting from the age of 3. Trump and his siblings also enabled their parents to evade taxes and significantly increased their family’s wealth, according to the investigative article.

Joy Reid, who hosts the MSNBC program AM Joy, pointed out during the Monday panel discussion that the president was actually terrible at managing the inherited funds. “My favorite part about the $413 million story is somebody who inherited $413 million managed to be $900 million in the hole,” she said.

“That’s the thing,” Chris Hayes, the host of All In, said. “There’s the fraud, the debunking this myth, there is the fact that this was basically daddy’s little welfare case.”

“Also the fact he’s a serial failure and the deals keep having to be bailed out by dad,” he added.

Fordham University Professor Christina Greer chimed in, pointing out that people from Trump’s home city New York have long known the president to be a “grifter and lie and cheat.”

“What we also understand, what we now know, is he inherited a criminal enterprise,” Princeton Professor Eddie Glaude added.

Trump’s own version of his story is that he received a loan of just $1 million from his father to start his own real estate venture. The Times article alleged the amount was significantly higher and that the Trump siblings actually engaged in tax fraud to hide money they inherited.

Charles J. Harder, an attorney for the president, denied the report entirely at the time.

“The New York Times’s allegations of fraud and tax evasion are 100 percent false, and highly defamatory,” Harder said in a statement to the newspaper. “There was no fraud or tax evasion by anyone. The facts upon which the Times bases its false allegations are extremely inaccurate.”

In her Monday comments on the story, Greer argued that Americans are now seeing the Trump family’s “fraud” on a national and international level. Trump is “doing this to the global economy,” the professor said. “He’s bluffing, he’s blustering,” she added.

He never supports his claims

The president said he had awarded a contract "at a great price" for a 115-mile section of wall in Texas.

Does anyone know what kind of wall/fence, where and what this "great price" is?

They are stultifyingly and defiantly stupid....and proud of it.

President Donald Trump's frustration with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is ratcheting up further after markets suffered their worst Christmas Eve drop ever despite Mnuchin's attempts to calm Wall Street, according to a source close to the White House.

The source told CNN that Mnuchin could be in "serious jeopardy" with Trump, who regularly rages at Cabinet members he feels have made mistakes, before he cools off.

Trump nevertheless vouched for Mnuchin publicly, shifting blame for the market volatility to the Federal Reserve instead.

"Yes, I do," Trump said Tuesday when asked whether he had confidence in Mnuchin. "Very talented, very smart person."

But the source painted a different picture of Mnuchin's standing behind the scenes.

"Mnuchin is under the gun," the source said.

The Treasury secretary left Washington for a Christmas holiday in Mexico's Cabo San Lucas as the federal government shut down over the weekend, while Trump canceled his own planned trip to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida and remained cooped up in the White House over the holiday, absorbing a flood of negative news about the markets.

Mnuchin aides have been scrambling to find economic data to help their boss calm Trump down, but Trump was said to be unhappy with what Mnuchin was telling him, this source said.

An administration source dismissed the latest round of rumors that the secretary's continued tenure was on the line.

"This is nonsense," they said.

Over the weekend, the secretary spoke by phone with the President several times, including after a brutal trading day on Christmas Eve resulting in a 653-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, according to the administration source. The two men spoke on a variety of issues, including the government shutdown and an update on the status of trade talks.

Mnuchin, a former investment banker and film financier, has long been one of Trump's closest advisers, dating back to his time working with Trump on the 2016 presidential campaign. Still, sources have previously told CNN that Trump was upset with Mnuchin over his advice to appoint Jerome Powell as Federal Reserve chairman. Trump has criticized Powell and the Fed for increasing interest rates, subjecting Powell to the kind of scathing public critique that is common for senior Trump appointees but which threatens the political independence of the worlds most powerful central bank.

Wall Street has been exceptionally volatile all December, with investors already jumpy about signs of a global slowdown repeatedly spooked by Trump's own comments. The slide started in earnest with the President's own tweets following his announcement of a trade deal with Beijing, in which he suggested he may yet impose radically higher tariffs if he's not happy with negotiations.

Mnuchin turned heads in Washington and Wall Street with his attempts to calm the markets over the weekend in an attempt to head off a plunge.

Mnuchin tweeted on Saturday that he had spoken with Trump and issued a quote that he attributed to the President denying Trump had suggested firing Powell. Two sources previously told CNN that Trump had begun polling advisers on whether he has the legal authority to fire Powell.

Mnuchin then spoke with the heads of major US banks on Sunday and issued a statement that evening saying the banks had "ample liquidity."

But his efforts to calm markets that have been volatile for weeks appeared to fail on Monday.

The Dow dropped by 2.9% and the S&P 500 fell 2.7%, the biggest drops ever for the two indexes on Christmas Eve. That same day, Trump fired off a series of tweets, including one attacking the Federal Reserve.

On Christmas Day, Trump said he remained confident in Mnuchin but was still unhappy with the Fed.

"They're raising interest rates too fast," Trump said of the central bank.

CNN's Kevin Liptak contributed to this report.

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They are stultifyingly and defiantly stupid....and proud of it.

No. I am not a bitter older woman who thinks talk like that is not condescending and hateful. I know it is both of those things.