How stupid is Trump?

John Kelly didn't have high expectations about Donald Trump when he joined the White House as chief of staff, but he was still shocked by what he found after joining the administration.

The retired U.S. Marine Corps general joined the White House halfway through Trump's first year, and New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" about what Kelly learned about the former president and his abilities.

"So when Kelly came in as chief of staff, he thought that the problem around Trump was that he was not staffed properly and they needed to create a process around him, and that's what the chaos of the first six months of the administration was about," Schmidt said. "But when Kelly comes in as chief of staff, what he realizes is that the problem is not just the fact that there's not a process and that he's not being staffed as well as he could, but that Trump himself was the problem, that Trump was far dumber and immoral and ignorant and lazy than he ever thought he was."

"Within a few days, he becomes terrified because here he is, the top staffer to the president of the United States, and he's realizing that the president of the United States is far more limited and potentially dangerous than he ever thought, and at that point, there was no one else to call," Schmidt added. "He was -- it was just him and Trump, and he basically spends the next 18 months trying to manage Trump as much as he could."

Trump mistook rape accuser E. Jean Carroll for ex-wife Marla Maples in deposition

Former President Donald Trump recently mistook his rape accuser E. Jean Carroll for his ex-wife Marla Maples when being questioned
about a decades-old photo of him and Carroll by her attorney for a defamation lawsuit, a newly public court filing shows.

Trump’s belief that the writer Carroll was actually his second wife Maples sharply undercuts the New York real estate mogul’s repeated
claims that he would not have even had sex with Carroll because she is “not my type.”

A Florida Judge sanctioned former President Donald Trump and one of his attorneys Thursday, ordering them to pay nearly $1 million for filing what he said was a bogus lawsuit against Trump’s 2016 rival Hillary Clinton and others.

In a blistering filing, U.S. District Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks accused Trump of a “pattern of abuse of the courts” for filing frivolous lawsuits for political purposes, which he said “undermines the rule of law” and “amounts to obstruction of justice.”

“Here, we are confronted with a lawsuit that should never have been filed, which was completely frivolous, both factually and legally, and which was brought in bad faith for an improper purpose,” he wrote.

Citing Trump’s recent legal action against the Pulitzer Prize board, New York Attorney General Letitia James, big tech companies and CNN, he described Trump as “a prolific and sophisticated litigant” who uses the courts “to seek revenge on political adversaries.”

“He is the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process,” he wrote.

The ruling required Trump and his attorney, Alina Habba, to pay nearly $938,000 to the defendants in the case.

A spokesman for Trump and Habba did not immediately respond to requests for comment late Thursday.

Middlebrooks in September dismissed the suit Trump had filed against Clinton, former top FBI officials and the Democratic Party, rejecting the former president’s claims that they and others conspired to sink his winning presidential campaign by alleging ties to Russia.

The lawsuit had named as defendants Clinton and some of her top advisers, as well as former FBI Director James Comey and other FBI officials involved in the investigation into whether Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign had coordinated with Russia to sway the outcome of the election.

He said then the suit contained “glaring structural deficiencies” and that many of the “characterizations of events are implausible.”

An absolutely prototypical post by a liberal. You never once quote the primary source - Kelly - and never once give an example. The article is actually nothing but name calling.

By posting this quotation, hightor is clearly trying to establish a proposition that...

Posting an article which espouses a proposition, unless otherwise noted by you, indicates tacit endorsement by you.

John Kelly served as Donald Trump's White House chief of staff for 17 months, and after parting ways with the Republican president, the retired Marine general said very little about his former boss and place of employment.

His reticence did not last. Business Insider reported:

"John Kelly, Donald Trump's former White House chief of staff, did not mince words about his ex-boss as rioters violently stormed the Capitol on January 6, according to a new book. "If he was a real man, he would go down to the Capitol and tell them to stop," Kelly said of Trump to ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl during a phone call as the insurrection was taking place."

According to Karl's new book, "Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show," Kelly said the Jan. 6 riot was so serious, and the then-president's handling of the crisis was so indefensible, that the cabinet would've been justified in trying to remove Trump from office.

"If I was still there, I would call the cabinet and start talking about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment," Kelly told Karl. (Then-Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin also reportedly broached the subject with other cabinet members about this in January.)

What strikes me as notable about this is that Kelly got to know Trump very well. The retired general first joined the then-president's cabinet as the Homeland Security secretary, and then ran Trump's White House for a year and a half — longer than any other of Trump's chiefs of staff. If anyone got a first-hand look at how Trump works, thinks, acts, and processes information, it's Kelly.

And Kelly concluded that Trump is not a "real man" — but he was a man who should've been removed from office before the end of his tenure.

It took a while for Kelly to reach this point, though he'd taken some prior steps in this direction. Last year, for example, former Defense Secretary James Mattis, wrote a rather extraordinary rebuke of Trump, condemning the then-president for being divisive, immature, and cavalier about abusing his powers. Soon after, Kelly publicly endorsed Mattis' criticisms.

Kelly added at the time, "I think we need to look harder at who we elect. I think we should look at people that are running for office and put them through the filter: What is their character like? What are their ethics?"

By January, Kelly saw far less need for subtlety, accusing Trump of "poisoning" people's minds. Kelly added that Trump is "a very, very flawed man ... who has got some serious character issues."

It says a lot about the former president that the man who served at his side seems to hold him in barely contained contempt.

I really don't want to go into how I imagine certain members of the A2K community. I can't vocalise it without being insulting to such a degree that I would be banned for a considerable length of time.