Anyone blasting President Donald J. Trump for Anthony Scaramucci’s short reign of terror as White House communications director must not have been following Trump very closely.
Trump isn’t afraid to try something different. Scaramucci is a friend who really wanted a job at the White House. Trump was clearly having problems with the White House staff, and the communications department in particular, and it appears he thought having a loyal friend who had his back in that department rather than people who supported him only because he was the Republican who won would work.
It didn’t work. Trump is no dummy despite what the mainstream media would have you believe. He saw it didn’t work and fixed it by having a Marine general show Scaramucci the door.
I don’t imagine Scaramucci had a lot to say to new White House Chief of Staff John Kelly. Scaramucci may have made a lot of money but Kelly spent a good part of his career leading men in war zones. Men like that have authority running through their veins.
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One of the reasons Trump was elected is because he is not a professional politician and had never held elective office before defeating Hillary Clinton and becoming president.
As a political novice, people have to expect him to make some mistakes. One of those was hiring Reince Priebus as chief of staff and his buddy Sean Spicer as White House press secretary.
Trump needs true believers in those positions. Priebus was part of the Republican establishment that opposed Trump right up until Trump received the Republican nomination.
Even after he received the nomination and the damaging video of Trump and Billy Bush was released Priebus didn’t stick with Trump, but came back to him when he realized Trump wasn’t going anywhere. Priebus then had no choice but to support the Republican Party candidate because Priebus was the chairman of the Republican National Committee. His job was to support Republican candidates, particularly the presidential candidate, and that was Trump. If the Republican National Convention had nominated Attila the Hun or Mother Teresa, Priebus would have worked just as hard for them. It was his job.
Trump forgave Priebus for his earlier defection, but he shouldn’t have. Priebus didn’t have the experience or the demeanor to be a successful chief of staff; the number of leaks from the White House is only one example of Priebus’ lack of control of the White House.
The fact that major legislation like the Obamacare repeal can’t even make it through a preliminary vote in the Senate is further proof that Priebus was not the man for the job.
The vote in the Senate was not to repeal Obamacare the way it was characterized in the mainstream media. The vote was to continue on the path toward repeal.
If Sen. John McCain had not decided to take revenge on Trump, and the vote had passed, it would not have repealed Obamacare, it would have led to a conference committee made up of representatives and senators to reconcile the two different bills passed by the House and the Senate in an attempt to formulate a bill that could pass both bodies. Then that new bill would have to be passed by both the House and Senate and be signed by Trump to go into effect.
What McCain’s vote did was block any attempt to repeal Obamacare from going forward. Everyone in the Senate knew exactly what they were voting on and knew that a yes vote would not have done anything but continued the process. If McCain didn’t like the bill that came out of the conference committee he could have voted against it the next time around.
By voting no last week, McCain killed the chance of an Obamacare repeal moving forward in Congress until the Republicans can find another vote.
The fault lies not with the White House alone but also with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. It is his job to get bills through the Senate. It is his most important job and one that he has failed at miserably.
Trump got rid of Priebus and now it is time for the Senate to get rid of McConnell. If the Republicans hope to maintain majorities in the House and Senate, the Republicans are going to have to take some of the actions they said they would when they were running for office.
One of the actions that just about every Republican, including McCain, promised was that Republicans would repeal Obamacare.
McCain knows that he won’t be running for reelection. He’s 80 years old, so he doesn’t have to worry about keeping campaign promises, and at this point in his career he would rather stick it to Trump and his fellow Republicans than keep his campaign promises. But most Republicans in the House and Senate are going to be running for reelection and do have to worry about keeping campaign promises.
McCain has never been a conservative and is not much of a Republican. When he won the Republican nomination for president in 2008, McCain wanted Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman to be his running mate. For some reason McCain thought he would be allowed to pick, not just any old Democrat, but the Democrat who had been Al Gore’s running mate.
So it should come as no shock that perhaps McCain’s last significant vote in the Senate would be against the Republican Party and in favor of Obamacare.
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According to the pundits, Majority Leader McConnell is playing the “long game” in politics. This is supposed to explain why he can’t get anything done in the Senate. He’s not interested in simply passing a bill to repeal Obamacare, like the Republicans have been promising for seven years, because he is looking at the “long game.” It appears that McConnell’s long game is going to result in the Republicans losing the Senate and possibly the House. Why vote for someone’s who goal is to do nothing?
The long game apparently for McConnell means that, long after he is dead, the Republicans will do something.
It was no surprise when White House Chief of Staff Priebus got canned last Friday. It seemed like every month since being appointed in January there was a new rumor that he was about to be fired, yet he hung on to the job for six months.
Trump’s choice for a replacement indicates Trump wants the White House staff to go in a completely different direction. Gen. John Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general and the former secretary of homeland security, is nobody’s patsy. Trump is certainly going to bring new order to the White House staff, particularly since everyone is going to report to Kelly.
Trump started off trying to run the White House like he ran his company, where people were allowed to come in and talk to him on their own schedules.
Trump is clearly putting a stop to the constant leaks at the top of his agenda. If a former Marine Corps general can’t stop the leaks then they probably can’t be stopped.
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The mainstream media are not even going to allow Trump to make a joke.
When he was speaking to the Boy Scouts of America, Trump said that if Obamacare wasn’t repealed he would turn to Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and say, “You’re fired.”
The “you’re fired” line was the signature line of Trump’s reality television show, and the statement got a big laugh from the Boy Scouts. It was clearly a joke. People, even presidents, tell jokes.
But since then reporters have been asking Price if he is going to be fired since the Obamacare repeal didn’t pass the Senate.
Really. It’s going too far to take what was obviously said in jest and make it into a policy statement. The media allowed former President Barack Obama to make jokes at the podium and didn’t run around interviewing people about them afterward.
The press coverage of Trump has reached the level of the absurd and it’s bad news for the media. People know that statement was a joke and it is the media trying to make it into something that it was not. People now take every bad thing reported about Trump in the media with a grain of salt and wait to see if it’s true.
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Old wives tales turn out to often be old wives tales because they are true. Nursery rhymes and children’s stories often do teach valuable lessons – like the story about the boy who cried wolf. The mainstream media used to know that lesson. The mainstream media often manipulated facts to fit their political point of view, but it refrained from making up facts to support its political viewpoint.
Unfortunately for the mainstream media, that lesson was thrown by the wayside for Trump and Hillary Clinton. The mainstream media made up facts about Trump, like he colluded with the Russians to win the campaign, and ignored detrimental information about Hillary Clinton.
Do you think that if anyone else in the universe, including Barack and Michelle Obama, had behaved like Bill and Hillary Clinton did when she was secretary of state that they would have received a pass?
Bill Clinton gave a speech in Russia where he received $500,000 and Hillary Clinton agreed to allow Russian to buy uranium mining interests in the US.
We are supposed to believe that despite the timing the two events are unrelated. People know better than that.
The House Judiciary Committee has asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate all things Hillary, including former Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former FBI Director James Comey.
Once again the mainstream media can cry all it wants about Lynch and Bill Clinton just having a conversation about their grandchildren on the tarmac in Phoenix, but the American people know that isn’t true.
What a lot of people have forgotten is that the only reason the American people know about that meeting is that a local reporter found out about it and reported it on the air. The national media had not and was not going to report on this meeting. It does make you wonder what else the mainstream media haven’t reported about Hillary Clinton.
Here’s a question that some investigator should ask: How many speeches has Bill Clinton made for $500,000 or $750,000 since Hillary Clinton lost the election and how many did he make while she was secretary of state? If he hasn’t been flying all around the world making speeches in foreign countries for obscene amounts of money since Hillary Clinton was no longer secretary of state or the presumptive next president, it would appear that is evidence in itself that he wasn’t simply being paid because he is a former US president, but because of his wife’s influence.
Also, how much money has the Clinton Foundation collected from foreign countries and companies since Hillary Clinton lost? If there was a drop in donations, that is an indication that the donations weren’t being made simply because people wanted to support the good work that the Clinton Foundation did. Someone should also investigate what good work the Clinton Foundation did. It seemed that it mainly operated as a slush fund to keep Clintonites employed between government jobs.
Finally, a separate special prosecutor might be needed simply to investigate Huma Abedin. Her secrets would probably fill a book. We might discover that she and her husband, Anthony Weiner, actually make a fitting pair.
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Al Gore, would be firmly in the nutcase category if it weren’t for the fact that he has made so much money on his nutty predictions. It is incredible that his supporters don’t care that his predictions were dead wrong.
Gore predicted that hurricane activity would increase because of global warming, but it has now been almost 12 years since the last major hurricane made landfall in the US. So much for increased hurricane activity. And the sea level continues to rise at the rate of a couple of millimeters a year, not feet like Gore predicted.
Oh, and global temperatures have not risen.
This one is particularly rich when you consider all the left-wing hoopla about how its not presidential for Trump to tweet.
The figure that 97 percent of scientists agree with the premise of global warming is apparently simply a figure that Obama came up with because it sounded good and Obama tweeted it. Obama’s tweet is now quoted all over the place as a fact.
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Although the mainstream media are completely focused on the various investigations of the Trump administration and the inner workings of the White House, Trump doesn’t appear to be worried by either one. He hates bad press, but he has to be getting used to it.
What the Trump White House keeps talking about are jobs and the economy. It’s like Trump took the phrase out of Bill Clinton’s playbook, “It’s the economy, stupid.” It got Clinton elected, and he never forgot that what keeps president’s in office is the economy – not how many chiefs of staff they have had or how many press secretaries.
When it comes down to election time, if the economy is doing well, the president or the president’s party wins. And if it isn’t doing well then the president, like Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, goes down in flames.
Bill Clinton kept a close watch on the stock market, and by that standard Trump is doing great. The stock market is hitting new record highs nearly every week, and since he was elected the Dow Jones Industrial Average has increased from 18,332 on Nov. 8, 2016 to 22,000.
It’s pretty funny that the mainstream media give Obama credit for the increase after the election until inauguration, as if a lame duck president who for eight years never got the economy rolling, suddenly, in his last months in office, did something to make the stock market take off. The stock market took off because people believed Trump would throw out the failed economic policies of Obama.
It is in many ways a self-fulfilling prophesy. If people think the economy is going to do well and they will be able to stay employed, they spend money, which boosts the economy. By the same token, if they see doom and gloom on the horizon and wonder if they will have a job next month, they pull back and spend as little as possible, bringing the economy down.
Consumer confidence is the word economists use, and Trump brought with him a great deal of consumer confidence. Trump has not been a disappointment from an economic standpoint. He has eliminated hundreds of Obama-era regulations that did nothing but make it more difficult to do business. Now, if he can ever get Congress to cooperate, the country should see a real economic boom.
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Even Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer are now admitting that the reason they lost so badly in 2016 was that they had a terrible presidential candidate whose campaign boiled down to, “Vote for me – I’m not Trump,” versus Trump: “Vote for me – I’m going to make America great again.”
“Make America Great Again” versus “I’m With Her.” The Democrats are late to the party, but they are right. Hillary Clinton ran a terrible campaign, and if the Democrats don’t banish her, they won’t do well in 2018 or 2020 either.
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In all these investigations of Republicans, where is the investigation of former Democratic National Committee Chairman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz?
Her former information technology (IT) guy and his entire family were on her payroll for far more than a typical IT employee makes. She kept paying him after his access to the congressional computer system was revoked, and the evidence is that she planned to keep paying him after he attempted to escape arrest by fleeing to Pakistan. He didn’t get to flee because he was arrested at Dulles Airport and his passport was taken away. He also has to wear an ankle bracelet, but Wasserman Schultz didn’t fire him as her IT guy until after he was arrested.
Let’s see, she was paying him far more than the job he had justified. She hired his brothers and his wife, who had already moved to Pakistan, and paid all of them for work when there is ample evidence some of them never worked. Doesn’t this look like something that needs an investigation? Maybe some major newspaper could break a couple of reporters away from the Russian collusion investigation, which isn’t going anywhere, and investigate Wasserman Schultz.
These guys had access to the emails of about 20 members of Congress and the payments from Wasserman Schultz certainly look like blackmail. Although, being a good Democrat, instead of using her own money to pay her blackmailers, she used government money. It seems that there might be a legal problem there for her as well as her former employees.
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So someone has leaked to The Washington Post that Trump wrote his son’s famous email about meeting with the Russian lawyer. It had to be someone who was on the plane with Trump when he was flying back to the US from the G20 meeting. Anyone who still worked for Trump would have to be crazy to attempt that with Chief of Staff Kelly on the job, because there is no doubt he isn’t going to put up with leaking.
So that means it was probably either former Chief of Staff Priebus or former White House Press Secretary Spicer. It doesn’t matter which one actually did the leaking, since the two are joined at the hip, but it is proof that Trump did the right thing in getting rid of both of them. The way Trump did it might not have been the best way possible, but in the end he got the job done without actually firing anyone.
