In the days after the election of Donald Trump, the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd "flinched" as she typed out the words "President Trump". 

"It's still impossible to wrap your mind around the fact that the flashy, blingy, boasting, belittling, mendacious, megalomaniacal, shambles huckster once known in New York as the 'short fingered vulgarian' is now the 45th president of the United States," Dowd went on to write in her book about the 2016 presidential race, The Year of Voting Dangerously. 

But now two years later Dowd, who is in Australia for the Antidote festival of ideas, claims to be "less pessimistic than most Americans" about Mr Trump's ascendancy. 

Up until last week, when Mr Trump's former lawyer and confidant Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to eight charges including violating campaign finance laws and tax fraud, he could well have been re-elected, she said. 

"I feel that Donald Trump has actually been a revivifying force," Dowd told an audience at Melbourne's NGV on Sunday evening. 

"He has instilled a lot of energy into a lot of [institutions and movements] that had been moribund: feminism, liberalism, Sunday chat shows, Stephen Colbert ... journalism."

Thanks to Mr Trump, she said, a growing number of women were now entering state houses and congress. "He's also put several women [authors] on the bestseller list ... not to mention he's revived bars and shrinks."

Read more :

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-27/maureen-dowd-on-donald-trump-and-metoo-melani/

Baby boomers rebelled against those over 30. Meet the Millennials who are rebelling against their own generation.

A young black man who goes by “Mike Nificent” on YouTube and who voted for Obama twice had once bought the racial divisiveness of identity politics. But no more. He says he used to trust CNN telling him that Republicans don’t like black people, that “it’s open season on black men . . . to make me believe I was a victim.”

By 2016 that all changed. He was out of college and moved from progressive Minnesota to Republican Florida. He got a job and encountered white people and Trump supporters. The moment of rebellion is a beautiful thing.

Step one: He didn’t like the political bullying. “(In Minnesota) I encountered social justice warriors. Free speech was shunned . . . they really didn’t want you speaking freely. Those things had me pulling away from the Democrat party.”

Step two: He got out of the fake news information bubble. “I looked into stuff for myself, I decided I’m gonna think for myself, to be clear minded.”

He shook off the emotional hysteria the Left relies upon and began to think more rationally. Trump Derangement Syndrome struck him as ludicrous.

“After Donald Trump won, everyone was losing their minds,” he says in the video. “It was like Chicken Little . . . America is over, we’re going to war with North Korea, you’re going back to Africa, they’re going to ship everyone out of the country. I realized, there’s more emotion than logic on the Left. There’s not a lot of critical thinking. There’s not a lot of just common sense.”

Step three: realizing white people and Trump supporters were not the evil racists he was told to fear. He was working and not encountering racism among the deplorables. “That propaganda, that hyperbolic rhetoric . . . saying every pro-Trump rally is a white supremacist rally… The more I am around white people and people who vote for Donald Trump, I realize the media has bamboozled me . . . .”

Step four: away from college and the liberal enclave, his basic American values of patriotism, personal responsibility and pragmatism come to the fore. He liked and shared Trump’s American patriotism. Along with 20 percent (Rasmussen says 38 percent) of his fellow black men, he liked what Trump was accomplishing.

“I saw a lot of success in his presidency and they wouldn’t give him credit.… …I am all about personal responsibility, individual liberty…I believe in the Constitution, I love America. I’m proud, I’m patriotic, I love the President, I love what he’s doing. I’ll hold him accountable if he does something I don’t like, but I’ll also give him credit. …Walking away from the left was one of the greatest decisions I’ve made in my life.”

A gay Millennial man named Justin living in the Bay Area echoes many of these same themes about halfway into his video. He rejects the thought police, stands up to political bullying, has started looking into things himself, and realizes Trump supporters do not hate gays.

Read more:

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/26/millennials-are-breaking-free-from-th...

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WASHINGTON — President Trump so alarmed his defense secretary, Jim Mattis, during a discussion last January of the nuclear standoff with North Korea that an exasperated Mr. Mattis told colleagues “the president acted like — and had the understanding of — a ‘fifth or sixth grader.’”

At another moment, Mr. Trump’s aides became so worried about his judgment that Gary D. Cohn, then the chief economic adviser, took a letter from the president’s Oval Office desk authorizing the withdrawal of the United States from a trade agreement with South Korea. Mr. Trump, who had planned to sign the letter, never realized it was missing.

These anecdotes are in a sprawling, highly anticipated book by Bob Woodward that depicts the Trump White House as a byzantine, treacherous, often out-of-control operation — “crazytown,” in the words of the chief of staff, John F. Kelly — hostage to the whims of an impulsive, ill-informed and undisciplined president.

The New York Times obtained a copy of the book, “Fear,” which will be published next Tuesday by Simon & Schuster.

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/04/us/politics/woodward-trump-book-fear.html?

“ ’There is literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to the next,’ a top official complained to me recently, exasperated by an Oval Office meeting at which the president flip-flopped on a major policy decision he’d made only a week earlier,” the column continued.

Trump, according to the column, likes autocrats like Vladimir Putin more than traditional US allies.

“Take foreign policy: In public and in private, President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations,” the writer said.

But other administration officials keep Trump’s preference for strongmen in check.

“Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest of the administration is operating on another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and punished accordingly, and where allies around the world are engaged as peers rather than ridiculed as rivals,” the column continued.

“On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin’s spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his national security team knew better — such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable,” the official said.

“This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.”

Read more:

https://nypost.com/2018/09/05/anonymous-white-house-official-im-working-...

Read from top... Unfortunately the "steady state" is totally wrong and Trump is right on Russia. But I would not be surprised if the revelations by the "steady state" are not a ploy to actually reveal that people are working against President Trump — even when he has common sense, especially on Russia, the Skripals and other hot issues. I know it's hard to read "Trump" and "common sense" in the same sentence, but all this nonsense about "steady state" shows that "some" official(s) is(are) deluded about their own self-importance. Between say Macron and Putin, the choice is clear: one has napoleonic delusions and lives in his own French-Bouillabaissed mind, the other one wants to have decent relations, while not being shafted.

The old state of "steady as she goes" is crap and, though it is promoted through the Western mass media, it has been fake news, is fake news and will be fake news.

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President Trump’s year of lies, false statements and misleading claims started with some morning tweets.

Over a couple of hours on Jan. 2, Trump made false claims about three of his favorite targets — Iran, the New York Times and Hillary Clinton. He also took credit for the “best and safest year on record” for commercial aviation, even though there had been no commercial plane crashes in the United States since 2009 and, in any case, the president has little to do with ensuring the safety of commercial aviation.

The fusillade of tweets was the start of a year of unprecedented deception during which Trump became increasingly unmoored from the truth. When 2018 began, the president had made 1,989 false and misleading claims, according to The Fact Checker’s database, which tracks every suspect statement uttered by the president. By the end of the year, Trump had accumulated more than 7,600 untruths during his presidency — averaging more than 15 erroneous claims a day during 2018, almost triple the rate from the year before.

read more:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/12/30/year-unprecedented-de...

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A lot of these "lies, false statements and misleading claims" are mostly dependent of opinionation. The WaPo is also full of 'opinionated" shit as well — and trump gets pleasure at stirring the pot with his own brand of crap. Obama did not have this kind of attention though he lied as much as Trump had tweets.... But he was more charming with the deceit. For many people. Trump does not lie but says things that are uncomfortable.