It is NOT NORMAL for the president to order the firing of the special counsel who is investigating the links between his campaign and Russia.
Source: The New York Times.
It is NOT NORMAL for the president to order the firing of the special counsel who is investigating the links between his campaign and Russia.
Source: The New York Times.
It is NOT NORMAL for the president to ask the acting FBI Director how he voted in the 2016 presidential election. It is also NOT NORMAL for the president to be angered by the fact that the acting FBI Director’s wife received money from a political action committee affiliated with the minority party during a run for the Virginia state Senate two years earlier.
Source: the Washington Post.
The presidential Twitter feed continues to be NOT NORMAL. To be specific, this week it was NOT NORMAL for the president to
Source: the presidential Twitter feed.
It is NOT NORMAL for the president to bestow “fake news awards” on journalists who made mistakes, wrote an editorial with a prediction that proved to be wrong but contained no factual errors, or tweeted and then deleted a misleading photo from a personal account. The final “fake news award” was bestowed on “RUSSIA COLLUSION” (the president does love his Caps Lock button) without naming a particular journalist; as I’ve said in the past, an investigation that has yielded two plea agreements and the indictments of two former members of the president’s campaign staff is not “fake news.”
Sources: Vox, the actual Fake News Awards.
It is NOT NORMAL for the president to claim (even jokingly) that he was more suited to handle the North Korea crisis than his predecessors because he had attained a perfect score on a test whose intent was to evaluate whether or not he had dementia. It is distressing to me that the president may not understand the difference between a medical diagnostic and an I.Q. test.
Source: Reuters
The presidential Twitter feed continues to be NOT NORMAL. To be specific, this week it was NOT NORMAL for the president to
(However, I am encouraged in that I think he went a whole week without mentioning “Crooked Hillary.” Baby steps!)
Source: the Presidential Twitter feed. Scroll to the appropriate dates.
It is NOT NORMAL that the entire state of Hawaii was erroneously notified that a ballistic missile was headed their way. It is further NOT NORMAL, and equally concerning, that the president did not interrupt his golf game to provide the people of that state with any reassurances and in fact, had still failed to address concerns about the incident but had managed to tweet about “Fake News” several times. Look, I don’t care how much the president plays golf, but I don’t think it’s asking too much that he pause his game to deal with an unfolding situation. And I don’t think his lackluster response to this situation sends a good signal to Kim Jong Un or any other world leaders about how the United States might handle a real crisis. (I am also baffled by the White House statement that the mistaken alert was a “state exercise,” when the state itself is saying it was just an accident, and I would really like someone to clear that up.)
Source: the Washington Post.
It is NOT NORMAL that the president reportedly paid an adult film star $130,000 so that she would not talk to the press about a sexual encounter.
Source: CNN.
It is NOT NORMAL for the president to call African nations “shithole countries,” and how sad it is that we are at the point at which that has to be stated explicitly. (And ordinarily I wouldn’t use profanity on my page, but it’s a direct quote from the president of the United States, so here we are.) It is NOT NORMAL for the president to be so openly racist that he asks why Congress would propose accepting immigrants from Haiti and Africa rather than Norway. It is NOT NORMAL that the president said “Why do we want people from Haiti here?” It is NOT NORMAL that the African Union and African ambassadors to the United Nations have had to demand an apology from the president of the United States for his overt racism and xenophobia. It is NOT NORMAL that two Senators from the president’s party claim to “not recall” the president’s language even though others in the room had gone on the record about the conversation.
Sources: the New York Times, Vox, NBC News.
It is NOT NORMAL, and should be deeply concerning, for the president to give a rambling and at times incoherent interview to the Wall Street Journal. In particular, it is NOT NORMAL for the president to say that “I probably have a very good relationship with Kim Jong Un of North Korea,” to whom he has not spoken and whom he has dubbed “Little Rocket Man.” It is also NOT NORMAL for the president and his press secretary to vehemently insist that the president was misquoted and continue to do so several hours after the Wall Street Journal posted an audio clip from the interview that clearly demonstrates the accuracy of their transcript.
Sources: the Wall Street Journal, Politico.