There's the photo of the Iranian rocket that exploded on its launch pad that is ostensibly highly classified, but leave it to the VSG to disseminate it to one an all on Twitter.
In 2017, Lonnie G. Bunch III, now Smithsonian Secretary, gave the VSG a private tour of the African-American History Museum. He recalls this little episode:“I’m not supposed to see stuff this good. He’s not supposed to share it. I’ve honestly never seen an image this sharp,” said Melissa Hanham, deputy director of the Open Nuclear Network and director of the Datayo Project at the One Earth Future Foundation.Hanham suspected the shot was taken from a high-altitude aerial vehicle using tracking technology, such as an RC-135S Cobra Ball or a similar aircraft.“This will have global repercussions,” said Joshua Pollack, a nuclear proliferation expert and editor of the Nonproliferation Review.“The utter carelessness of it all,” Pollack said. “So reckless.”
“The president paused in front of the exhibit that discussed the role of the Dutch in the slave trade,” Bunch writes. “As he pondered the label I felt that maybe he was paying attention to the work of the museum. He quickly proved me wrong. As he turned from the display he said to me, ‘You know, they love me in the Netherlands.’ All I could say was let’s continue walking.”
Real nice, Squirrel-Hair.
And now he's considering a tax cut commensurate to the amount raised by tariffs. Um, how about cutting out that extra step and just not impose the tariffs?
“A middle-class tax cut would be: Don’t impose the tariffs on China,” said Marc Goldwein at Comm for a Responsible Federal Budget, which advocates lower deficits, last week. “That’d be an easy middle-class tax cut Trump doesn’t even need Congress for.”
As always, it's going to be interesting to see the shills spin this, which they will.
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President Trump ended August as he began it, with a blast of angry tweets, ad-hominem insults, and bizarre fulminations that have become so standard that they no longer receive the attention they deserve—emanating, as they do, from the world’s most powerful leader. In between retweeting hurricane-preparation warnings, he spent the final day of the month attacking the “Disgusting and foul mouthed Omarosa” Manigault, his former adviser, who wrote a tell-all book about her short time in the Administration; the “Crooked Cop” James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, whom he fired; and the “even dumber” former C.I.A. director John Brennan. He bragged about low Labor Day gas prices, although they were actually lower on the Labor Day before he became President. He congratulated his friend Sean Hannity for the ratings on his Fox News “shoe.” A day earlier, he had tweeted what appeared to be a classified image from his intelligence briefing of “a catastrophic accident” at an Iranian missile-launch site, a Presidential leak of secret information on social media that would have been, needless to say, unthinkable in another Presidency.
All of this took place when Trump was supposed to be in Poland, at a somber commemoration of the beginning of the Second World War. He cancelled the trip, however, citing the need to monitor the progress of Hurricane Dorian, which was threatening Florida. Instead, he watched Fox News; tweeted nearly two dozen times before noon on Saturday, August 31st; and then motorcaded to a Trump-branded golf course for his two-hundred-and-twenty-sixth day on the links at one of his own properties since becoming President. (The statistic came from Kyle Griffin, an MSNBC producer who keeps track of this particular niche Trump metric). The Poland trip wasn’t even the first foreign visit that Trump cancelled during the month. He was supposed to have gone to Denmark earlier in August, but he refused in a fit of pique after the Danish government mocked his efforts to buy Greenland—which was, of course, another Oval Office antic that, had it occurred a few years ago, no one would have believed.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/trumps-wacky-angry-and-extreme-august-twitter?utm_medium=social&mbid=social_facebook&utm_source=facebook&utm_brand=tny&utm_social-type=owned&fbclid=IwAR14EhC9j5jAOzWIVykUHY9RKb0hXsien_0HYUzhc0ThYZ-Ldajjb394uLc
"We’ve combed Trump’s Twitter feed, interviews and other public statements since he took office. What follows is only a sampling of the striking list of things on which the president is, by his own account, an expert.
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Airplanes: “Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly. Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT. I see it all the time in many products. Always seeking to go one unnecessary step further, when often old and simpler is far better.” —March 12, 2019, Twitter
Forest management: “There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!” —November 10, 2018, Twitter
Water management: “California wildfires are being magnified & made so much worse by the bad environmental laws which aren’t allowing massive amount of readily available water to be properly utilized. It is being diverted into the Pacific Ocean. Must also tree clear to stop fire from spreading!” —August 6, 2018, Twitter
Basic human technologies: “The Democrats are trying to belittle the concept of a Wall, calling it old fashioned. The fact is there is nothing else’s that will work, and that has been true for thousands of years. It’s like the wheel, there is nothing better. I know tech better than anyone, & technology.” —December 21, 2018, Twitter
Advanced human technologies: “Having a drone fly overhead—and I think nobody knows much more about technology, this type of technology certainly, than I do.” —January 3, 2019, White House briefing
Safety: “I know more about drones than anybody. I know about every form of safety that you can have.” —January 2, 2019, Cabinet meeting
Steam-powered catapults: “You know the catapult is quite important. So, I said what is this? ‘Sir, this is our digital catapult system.’ He said, ‘Well, we’re going to this because we wanted to keep up with modern [technology].’ I said, ‘You don’t use steam anymore for catapult?’ ‘No sir.’ I said, ‘Ah, how is it working?’ ‘Sir, not good. Not good. Doesn’t have the power. You know the steam is just brutal. You see that sucker going, and steam’s going all over the place. There’s planes thrown in the air.’ It sounded bad to me. Digital. They have digital. What is digital? And it’s very complicated, you have to be Albert Einstein to figure it out. And I said—and now they want to buy more aircraft carriers. I said, ‘What system are you going to be?’ ‘Sir, we’re staying with digital.’ I said, ‘No you’re not. You going to goddamned steam. The digital costs hundreds of millions of dollars more money, and it’s no good.’” —May 8, 2017, interview with Time magazine
The 14th Amendment: “So-called Birthright Citizenship, which costs our Country billions of dollars and is very unfair to our citizens, will be ended one way or the other. It is not covered by the 14th Amendment because of the words ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’ Many legal scholars agree.” —October 31, 2018, Twitter
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Newspaper sourcing: “When you see ‘anonymous source,’ stop reading the story, it is fiction!” —August 29, 2018, Twitter
DeleteHorse-racing regulation: “The Kentucky Derby decision was not a good one. It was a rough & tumble race on a wet and sloppy track, actually, a beautiful thing to watch. Only in these days of political correctness could such an overturn occur. The best horse did NOT win the Kentucky Derby - not even close!” —May 5, 2019, Twitter
The small-truck business: “The reason that the small truck business in the U.S. is such a go to favorite is that, for many years, Tariffs of 25% have been put on small trucks coming into our country. It is called the ‘chicken tax.’ If we did that with cars coming in, many more cars would be built here.” —November 28, 2018, Twitter
USPS: “Why is the United States Post Office, which is losing many billions of dollars a year, while charging Amazon and others so little to deliver their packages, making Amazon richer and the Post Office dumber and poorer? Should be charging MUCH MORE!” —December 29, 2017, Twitter
Japanese auto-import regulations: “It’s called the bowling ball test. Do you know what that is? That’s where they take a bowling ball from 20 feet up in the air, and they drop it on the hood of the car. And if the hood dents, then the car doesn’t qualify. Well, guess what, the roof dented a little bit, and they said, nope, this car doesn’t qualify.” —March 14, 2018, fundraiser in Missouri
The economy: “I think I know about it better than [the Federal Reserve].” —October 11, 2018, to reporters
The solar system: “For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon - We did that 50 years ago. They should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!” —June 7, 2019, Twitter
Windmills: “Hillary wanted to put up wind … And they say the noise [of windmills] causes cancer.” —April 2, 2019, fundraiser in Washington
… and again: “If a windmill is within two miles of your house, your house is practically worthless. They make noise. They’re intermittent. They kill your birds. They break down all the time. You have to replace them every 10 years because they wear out. And they cost a fortune. And they need subsidy. Other than that, they’re quite good.” —August 1, 2019, rally in Cincinnati, Ohio
Article II: “Take a look at one other thing. It’s a thing called Article II. Nobody ever mentions Article II. It gives me all of these rights at a level that nobody has ever seen before. We don’t even talk about Article II.” —July 12, 2019, interview with reporters."
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/09/03/donald-trump-expert-227997?fbclid=IwAR2XLr_Y7_Lu6l2g2oTeu7xY3DLGkrvV4I6HnM5RDPhQT9C_MBT62ZknDlY
Yup. Still his "base" thinks he's great.
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