“This Guy’s A Mobster.”

Donald Trump, by Jason Mecier.

Stating the obvious…

Henry said he would need more information about the FBI investigation and details from FISA warrants to see what was happening — but he has already been exploring Trump’s ties to organized crime.

“There’s a third camp, which is stuff I have been working on, is the organized crime,” Henry said. “This guy’s a mobster. He has all these dodgy business partners. He knew or should have known that they were involved in organized crime, money-laundering, racketeering. That’s pretty hard to deny. We see the people he’s been in business with. We see the deals over and over again. It’s in plain sight. That’s the theory I’ve been working on.”

“You could make a case on good old-fashioned criminal law — if you had a prosecutor,” he added.

Full story here.

Shoes.

As I mentioned in TNET, stopped by Goodwill briefly after pain clinic yesterday, and hit size 6.5 bingo. Usually, everything I really like is a size 9 or 4 or something. I’ll be happy when I’m in shape to wear them out and about.  (The spikes are 5 inches, and yes, I do wear those, and I love them. I like being 5′ 11″.)

© C. Ford.

“Have you heard that expression used before? Because I haven’t heard it,”

Michael Ian Black and Marc Rosenthal, A Child’s First Book of Trump.

Once again, the Tiny Tyrant displays his ignorant and narrow focus on … himself, ever so surprised that yet another thing he claims to have never, ever heard before, in all his 70something years, is something he coined, oh my yes.

President Donald Trump claimed Thursday that he coined the expression “prime the pump,” a commonly used expression in economics with origins in the 19th century.

“Have you heard that expression used before? Because I haven’t heard it,” Trump told The Economist. “I mean, I just — I came up with it a couple of days ago and I thought it was good. It’s what you have to do.”

The Twitter account for the Merriam-Webster dictionary quickly corrected the president.

Merriam Webster weighed in right away:

The phrase ‘priming the pump’ dates to the early 19th century.

Definition of PUMP PRIMING

government investment expenditures designed to induce a self-sustaining expansion of economic activity.

As usual, the Twitterati have been merciless. You can see some of the tweets here.

This is, of course, yet another example of Trump’s narcissism, and for all those who thought it was just fucking terrible of me to point out, several times, that Trump is indeed a pathological narcissist, and dangerous, along with all those qualified to so diagnose (and did), there’s an interesting piece at the Washington Post, where Trump himself brags about being a narcissist, saying it’s vital to success.

Trump’s persistent focus on himself, which he has characterized as “narcissism,” a trait he believes is vital for success in the business world, was an enduring source of humor and eye-rolling through his decades as a celebrity entrepreneur. But during his campaign, Trump said that as president he would turn the focus from himself to the American people.

Conceding that many of his vendors, employees and bankers suffered considerable losses when his businesses went through six corporate bankruptcies, Trump said that “for myself, these were all good deals. I wasn’t representing the country. I wasn’t representing the banks. I was representing Donald Trump. So for myself, they were all good deals. . . . When I was representing myself, even deals that didn’t work out were great deals because I got tremendous tax advantages. . . . I would walk away.”

As president, Trump promised, he would flip his priorities and represent the people. How would he make that pivot? “I’ll just do it,” he said.

Being a pathological narcissist, however, Trump has not made that “flip”. It’s classically narcissistic to think you’d be able to do such a thing. Full story here.

They Tricked Us!

The photo of Sergey Lavrov, Donald Trump, and Sergey Kislyak you weren’t supposed to see. CREDIT: Russian Foreign Ministry Photo via AP.

In a stark illustration of the sheer idiocy of the regime, the Tiny Tyrant is having an overwrought tantrum over Russia publishing photos of the “secret” meeting yesterday, in which uStates press was barred, but Russian press was allowed. There was a cameraman there. With a camera. What did they think they were going to do with the photos? Paste them in their fan book? The incoherent scream tumbling from the white house is “they tricked us!” I have news you for ya, fellas. If that’s tricking you, you deserve it, with bells on.

On Wednesday, President Trump met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at the White House. Now the administration is “furious” that TASS, the Russian state-owned news agency, has published photos of the meeting.

There’s no shortage of theatrics leading up to the White House’s reactions.

First, the meeting was only supposed to be with Lavrov. Only Lavrov was scheduled to be in attendance, and only Lavrov was mentioned in the official White House readout of the meeting. Thus, it’s only because of the Russian agency’s photos that the public knows Kislyak was also present.

The White House shrugged off Kislyak’s presence, noting there’s nothing suspicious about meeting with an ambassador in the Oval Office.

Jim Acosta: Official pushed back on critics who slammed Kislyak in Oval: “It is ridiculous to say that an ambassador can’t meet with the president…”

But this ignores a significant amount of context. The meeting took place the morning after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, who was investigating alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. That firing came at the recommendation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had supposedly recused himself from the investigation because he didn’t disclose meetings he had with Kislyak while he was serving as a Trump campaign surrogate.

With little believable explanation available for why Trump fired Comey except for his role the Russian investigation, it’s particularly conspicuous that Kislyak would then be in the Oval the very next day. Moreover, an ambassador meeting with the President is far more suspicious when the White House seems to intentionally try to hide it. And now the administration is “furious” that TASS published photos that are the only way anyone even knows Kislyak was present for the meeting.

A second aspect of the theatrics is the fact that when journalists were eventually invited into the Oval, neither Lavrov nor Kislyak were present. Instead, Trump was unexpectedly meeting with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

The optics of this are rather incredible. Many lawmakers and pundits had spent much of the previous 24 hours comparing Trump’s firing of Comey to President Richard Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre,” when he fired an attorney general and a deputy attorney general because they wouldn’t remove the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal. Kissinger was not implicated in Watergate, but it was still rather surprising Trump would have a surprise meeting with the man who served as Nixon’s Secretary of State and National Security Adviser. They discussed “Russia and various other matters,” according to the pool report.

The rest of this most interesting story of incompetent stealth and tantrums is at Think Progress.