[Update @ 0649: This headline just popped into my inbox—Chief Environmental Justice Official at EPA Resigns, With Plea to Pruitt to Protect Vulnerable Communities.]

So, I read the news yesterday and the headline above was the first thought that came to my mind after I read that President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency head, and more to the point, former attorney general for Oklahoma, Scott Pruitt said:

I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that [Carbon Dioxide is] a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. But we don’t know that yet … We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.

Pruitt, who in his former job sued the EPA (I wonder how House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte feels about such frivolous suits?) 14 times clearly care more about serving his corporate masters than he does the American people.

Facts no longer matter in this case. Remember that the tobacco industry managed to suppress the links between the use of tobacco and various cancers for more than 50 years. Articles like the one cited above or the email I received from 350.org this morning are only preaching to the choir. The scales of justice are being tilted by billions of petrodollars on one side and the existential survival of modern society (and possibly the human race) on the other.

We can no more reason with the climate deniers (at least not until Mar-A-Lago disappears under the waves) than we can a petulant child.

Mass resistance is the only tactic that may work. Get started here, and here and here…

Need inspiration? Start here, and here and here…

A few years ago, during Black History Month, one of my students of Anglo-Saxon lineage asked: Why don’t we have have White History Month? I replied, We do, they’re called January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December at which point several of the non-Anglo-Saxon students in the room exchanged fist bumps and high fives.

I understand. When for all your history you’ve been on top (literally, in many cases) any change that threatens that privileged space is scary. I got another lesson on how scary the world has become for white privileged males like myself yesterday when Mary Jo sent me Danuta Kean’s Women’s history month promotion sees bookshop ‘silence men’s voices’ from The Guardian. Kean writes:

A bookshop in Ohio has made a graphic illustration of the position of female writers by leaving only books by women visible to its customers. The change, made to mark women’s history month, has provoked an angry reaction in some quarters, with accusations of sexism and censorship.

Eight members of staff at Loganberry Books in Cleveland turned the spines and covers of books by men to face the wall in the shop’s 10,000-title fiction section. Harriett Logan, the bookstore’s founder and owner, told the website Heat Street the intention was to illustrate how women’s voices were drowned out.

“In essence [we are] not just highlighting the disparity but bringing more focus to the women’s books now, because they’re the only ones legible on the shelf,” she told the online magazine. She added that although she had conceived the display to make a point, when completed it had an even stronger impact than she had expected.

Good on Logan. I’ve shopped several times at Loganberry books (although I must confess, I buy most of my books from Mac’s Backs) Just as people afraid of change see the phrase: Black Lives Matter and see White Lives Don’t Matter so, apparently did people discover Logan’s promotion and see a threat to their own safe space. Kean continues:

The shop has divided opinion online. Novelist Susan Petrone tweeted: “If @loganberrybooks had just done another display for #WomensHistoryMonth, nobody would be talking about gender disparities,” while thriller writer Joe Hill, son of Stephen King, tweeted: “Wouldn’t it be interesting to try this with your own TBR pile for a while? Might try it with mine.”

However, not all reactions were positive, with complaints that Logan should be running a “men’s history month” [See above, JH] to balance the promotion, and that the display was not about women’s voices, but about “hating men”. Editor and writing coach John Ettorre tweeted: “Simply unbelievable. Promoting women’s voices by symbolically silencing men’s. By an independent bookstore! Shame on you, Harriett.” He added: “Did they settle on this path after deciding burning books by men was just too over the top? I’m stunned.” [Emphasis mine, JH]

Logan responded to Ettorre’s comments by inviting him to the shop. “Come visit,” she tweeted back. “It is quite striking—eye opening. and, obviously, temporary.”

Some complained the move was a form of censorship that “insulted customers” and made it difficult for them to find an item. “This dumb broad is why so many women-run businesses go belly up,” one poster replied to a comment on Heat Street about the practicality of the display.

I’ve known John Ettorre as a writer, blogger and fellow supporter of Cleveland’s Blogfather and journalism treasure Roldo Bartimole for more than a decade and I’m also stunned. I did not think that John would write such a tone-deaf message. His tweet puts him in nefarious company, as a read of the comments on the Heat Street illustrate.

The shame, John, is on you, not Harriett.

That lawsuits—like the one from infamous Stella Liebeck—are only filed by greedy ne’er do wells seeing fast money in suing big corporations with deep pockets hoping for go-away money, is a matter of dogma among a large segment of economically disadvantage (i.e. not on the Forbes’ 400 list) Americans. The dogma, of course, is pure bullshit. The disadvantaged, or as John Steinbeck labeled them, the temporarily embarrassed, want to keep their options open so that some slacker doesn’t take their money when they get rich.

Right.

Ralph Nader, writing in Bad Bob Goodlatte Blocks Your Day In Court, details how temporarily embarrassed Republicans in Congress–like Ohio’s Rep. Jim Jordan (OH-04)—are voting to keep the riff raff out of their handler’s courts.

Why does House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (Rep. VA) want to fast-track legislation overhauling civil litigation that protects all Americans—including those in his Congressional District, who simply wish to have their day in court when wrongfully injured or cheated by the very corporations to whom Chairman Goodlatte is beholden? Does he distrust judges and juries that have fairly adjudicated disputes for years? Does he hate the American people?

As with many issues, it is about campaign money from the big business members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its cruel chief, Tom Donohue. But it is also about being inebriated with the secure power that gerrymandered electoral Continue Reading »

So, I haven’t paid a great deal of attention to Milo Yiannopoulos in much the same way I rarely notice other drama queens and attention sluts. Matt Taibbi, however, writing in Milo Yiannopoulos Isn’t Going Away for Rolling Stone, makes an important point in his conclusion:

A dynamic that all good swindlers understand is that once you’ve gotten a person to make one embarrassing decision, it’s easier to get him to make the next one. A person who loses 10 grand trying to buy the Brooklyn Bridge is a good bet to spend 20 more chasing the loss. Con artists call this “reloading.”

The Trump phenomenon has been like this. Megachurch moms and dads across the country grit their teeth when the “grab them by the pussy” tape came out, quietly convincing themselves that “locker-room talk” was less horrifying than a Hillary Clinton presidency.

When they cast their votes weeks later, it was like a secret transgression that bound them to the new leader. This counter-intuitive brand of politics is very effective. It’s why no one should be too quick to put this week’s seeming fiasco with CPAC in the Republicans’ loss column.

One would think the last thing you’d want to do if your intent was to hold a fragile Republican coalition together is pitch Milo Yiannopoulos as a defender of family values. Why would the Mike Pence crowd ever rally behind a Brit with frosted hair who brags about getting blowjobs from priests? It seems preposterous.

But watch it work. A week from now, the same conservatives who are beating their breasts about Yiannopoulos now will go crawling back into the Trump camp to fight the hated liberals on a dozen other issues. They will look weak and indecisive, and privately will be demoralized, while the Trump/Bannon/Milo crew will look like poker players who won a bluff. It’s always about the next news cycle with these people.

Trolling doesn’t take brains. But it works, and it will keep working, until we learn to see through the provocations in real time.

I’m not sure failing to see through the provocations is the challenge here. I think we see the provocations, we just don’t invest the time to take a few deep breaths because in the time those breaths take, the story has morphed and moved on and we have a new provocation to process. Over the years I’ve learned that trolls understand how to avoid questions by asking other, often unrelated questions, of their own. They behave like Ritalin-deprived adolescents unable to focus more than 30 seconds on thoughts that don’t fit their personal happiness narrative.

Crafting a response in real time presumes that the provocateur gives a shit about the response.

Milo, and his ilk don’t.

They just need to believe that they matter.

Dan Brady used to be a man of the people.

Now he’s servant of the anti-people. A stooge.

Fallen deeply for the Establishment he once made his reputation by opposing.

Nothing could be worse.

Here is his quiet spanking of civic protest of the Quicken Arena give-away:

“It’s become very clear that after listening to our friends who we like and who we agree with, that they have very little understanding of what the county presently does and how it spends its money,” Brady said at a meeting on the give-away of city AND county money to billionaire Dan Gilbert of the Cleveland Cavilers.

Talk about spin.

Stomping on what little civic action there is in this town is an act of treachery.

I’ve written about Brady and his opposition to deals just like this one.

Here’s one 1989 situation under a headline: Brady bristles Forbes.

I wrote:

Dan Brady continues to be the single council member who directly questions the authority of Council President George Forbes. He does it in a rather quiet manner. Sometimes simply asking a question.

Forbes bristles each time.

Brady fought Forbes’s dictatorship.

I say this because now is the time for some strong political leadership. Brady, the County Council, toady County Executive Armond Budish, the hapless Kevin Continue Reading »

More than a ten or so years ago, when Cleveland’s blogger scene was much tighter than today, Henry Gomez was known as one of the good guys. Cleveland journalism is diminished by his loss, but I can’t say I’m surprised that he’s moving out and up.

In fact, I’m surprised that the move took this long.

Now I have a reason to read BuzzFeed.

My favorite class in Journalism School was Dr. Dru Evarts’ Media And The Law. We spent a lot of time in that class on the two most important topics for any journalist: libel and slander.

When I first heard this weekend about President Donald John Trump’s accusation that President Barack Hussein Obama directed the tapping of Trump’s private office phones in Trump Tower, I immediately asked: did the sitting president just libel his predecessor?

Phil McCausland, reporting in Analysis: Does Obama Have Grounds to Sue Trump for Libel? for NBC News, writes:

President Donald Trump’s newest pivot might be his way to divert attention from his own Russia troubles by leveling a Watergate-level conspiracy allegation at former President Barack Obama.

But this latest assertion that Obama ordered illegal surveillance of Trump Tower during the 2016 election — tweeted without evidence — could get the president into some legal hot water.

Although the law provides a great deal of leeway for political speech, that protection is not all encompassing. And because of the way Trump has leveled unsubstantiated accusations at Obama, he may have libeled his predecessor.

“He’s basically stating that Mr. Obama committed crimes, and to state that somebody has committed a crime when it’s false is clearly defamatory,” said Benjamin Zipursky, who teaches defamation law at Fordham University Law School in New York.

“The question is: Is there enough evidence of serious reckless disregard to send that case to a jury?” Zipursky added. “I don’t know what a court would decide on that, but there is some evidence of recklessness.”

Does the president know that he can’t just make shit up?

That President Donald John Trump lied about President Barack Hussein Obama having Trump’s offices in Trump Tower tapped is disturbing, but not scary. What is scary is that the President of the United States believes that his offices were tapped because of a bit of fake news he heard second (third? fourth?) hand via Breitbart News.

Fake news has real world, possibly catastrophic, consequences. Michael Schmidt, reporting in Comey Asks Justice Dept. to Reject Trump’s Wiretapping Claim for The New York Times, writes:

The FBI director, James B. Comey, asked the Justice Department this weekend to publicly reject President Trump’s assertion that President Barack Obama ordered the tapping of Mr. Trump’s phones, senior American officials said on Sunday. Mr. Comey has argued that the highly charged claim is false and must be corrected, they said, but the department has not released any such statement.

Mr. Comey, who made the request on Saturday after Mr. Trump leveled his allegation on Twitter, has been working to get the Justice Department to knock down the claim because it falsely insinuates that the F.B.I. broke the law, the officials said.

A spokesman for the FBI declined to comment. Sarah Isgur Flores, the spokeswoman for the Justice Department, also declined to comment.

Mr. Comey’s request is a remarkable rebuke of a sitting president, putting the nation’s top law enforcement official in the position of questioning Mr. Trump’s truthfulness. The confrontation between the two is the most serious consequence of Mr. Trump’s weekend Twitter outburst, and it underscores the dangers of what the president and his aides have unleashed by accusing the former president of a conspiracy to undermine Mr. Trump’s young administration.

The White House showed no indication that it would back down from Mr. Trump’s claims. On Sunday, the president demanded a congressional inquiry into whether Mr. Obama had abused the power of federal law enforcement agencies before the 2016 presidential election. In a statement from his spokesman, Mr. Trump called “reports” about the wiretapping “very troubling” and said Congress should examine them as part of its investigations into Russia’s meddling in the election.

Glenn Kessler, reporting in Trump’s ‘evidence’ for Obama wiretap claims relies on sketchy, anonymously sourced reports for The Washington Post outed the fake news:

President Trump’s explosive allegation that former president Barack Obama wiretapped him is based on—what?

That has been the question ever since Trump sent provocative early-morning tweets over the weekend, because he and his staff have provided no evidence.

At The Fact Checker, we require the accuser to provide the evidence for a dramatic claim. We asked Saturday and received no answer.

However, in calling for a congressional investigation of apparent Russian meddling in the election to also look into Trump’s allegation, White House press secretary Sean Spicer on March 5 referred to “reports concerning potentially politically motivated investigations.” That suggests the tweets were based on media reports, not information the president might have received from inside the government.

Our colleague Robert Costa has reported that White House aides have internally circulated an article on Breitbart titled “Mark Levin to Congress: Investigate Obama’s ‘Silent Coup’ vs. Trump.” Breitbart is a right-leaning news organization that is a rather unreliable source of information. Often the material that is published is derivative and twisted in misleading ways.

However, a White House spokesman told The Fact Checker that the White House instead is relying on reports “from BBC, Heat Street, New York Times, Fox News, among others.” He provided a list of five articles.

Of course, as Jon Schwarz reported in If Trump Tower Was Wiretapped, Trump Can Declassify That Right Now for The Intercept, the President has an easy answer:

If in fact Trump Tower was wiretapped during the 2016 presidential campaign, as President Trump claimed in several tweets Saturday morning, he can do much more than say so on twitter: Presidents have the power to declassify anything at any time, so Trump could immediately make public any government records of such surveillance.

According to a report in the BBC, citing unnamed sources, a joint government task force was formed in spring of 2016 to look into an intelligence report from a foreign government that Russian money was somehow coming into the U.S. presidential race. In June the Department of Justice, part of the task force, asked the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court for a warrant to intercept electronic communications by two Russian banks.

However, the BBC’s report says, the FISA court turned the application down.. The Justice Department then asked again in July with a more narrowly drawn request, which was again turned down. Justice then made a third request for a warrant on October 15, which was granted.

None of this involves wiretapping Trump Tower. However, it is possible that Trump picked that up from a Breitbart article that in turn relied on a Heat Street piece that claimed the warrant was issued because of evidence of links between a “private server in Donald Trump’s Trump Tower” and a Russian bank. In fact, the server in question, set up by a marketing company hired by Trump, was physically located in Philadelphia.

I see the hand of Steve Bannon and his handlers in all this.

I’m reminded of the scene in Broadcast News where Albert Brooks plays the intelligent Cyrano to William Hurt’s pretty but dumb Christian as he sits in his living room, feeding the news to the on-air Hurt’s talking head mouthing the news. There is a Howdy Doody/Charlie McCarthy quality to the delivery as Brooks realizes that what he says is being repeated on national television.

Steve Bannon now, apparently, has the same power. Bannon can make shit up and reliably depend upon the hapless President tweeting whatever silly message he wishes to send.

If that doesn’t scare the holy fucking shit out of you, you’re lost.

So, in speaking to the Conservative Political Action Conference on 24 February, President Donald John Trump said:

We have authorized the construction, one day, of the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines. And issued a new rule. This took place while I was getting ready to sign. I said, who makes the pipes for the pipeline? Well, sir, it comes from all over the world, isn’t that wonderful? I said, nope, it comes from the United States or we’re not building one. American steel. If they want a pipeline in the United States, they’re going to use pipe that’s made in the United States, do we agree? [Emphasis mine.]

Except when they don’t. From the Associated Press, reporting in Keystone, Dakota Access pipelines won’t use US steel despite Pres. Trump’s pledge, writes:

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Friday that’s due to language in a presidential directive Trump issued in January. The directive applies to new pipelines or those under repair. Sanders said it would be hard to do an about-face on Keystone because it’s already under construction and the steel has been acquired.

Do think the fact that much of the already purchased steel traces back to a Russian company plays at all in this?

Hmmm?

Just as too many Americans (and other people living in the largest industrial nations) farcically respond the grocery store when asked where does food come from, I think that those same people would respond the faucet if you asked them where their water comes from. Here in Cleveland my students are too often surprised to discover that their drinking water comes from Lake Erie. They think that that reality is nasty and they tell me that they’re sticking to bottled water.

We are too out of touch with our world. Indigenous peoples don’t have that problem and we need to listen to them.

Alex Paullin, reporting in A Harmonious Resistance Creates Global Solidarity for Standing Rock for National Geographic, writes:F

or more than a year, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has been at war with natural gas’s close comrade, Energy Transfer Partners, over the development of the controversial $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline, which has frequently been referred to as “DAPL.” (Many resistance members call it “the Black Snake.”) The approved project designs developed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and supported by the U.S. Government, have allowed ETP to push all the way through the state of North Dakota down to the edge of the Missouri River.

Despite their clear-cut plans, an unanticipated tribe of Native Americans sparked a spiritual resistance residing within the Sacred Stone and Oceti Sakowin campgrounds. The movement gained public attention and increased energy due to the high risk of a pipeline burst. If a leak were to occur, it could then contaminate drinking water for millions of people. As you can see, no longer was this just a local issue, environmental and human rights activists filed in from all over the world calling themselves the “Water Protectors.”

We don’t understand how little water in the world is actually potable and that the costs of cleaning up contaminated water can be astronomical. Protecting what we have is far cheaper than cleaning up the mess after we allow corporations to spit in our soup.

I couldn’t resist, and not because resistance is futile…

No one, at any level of government or business should be allowed to use ANY public servers.

Full stop.

I spewed coffee when I read:

Vice-president Mike Pence used a personal email account to discuss security issues as governor of Indiana and was hacked last summer, it was reported on Thursday.

Pence’s AOL account was compromised [Emphasis mine, JH]…

We’ve got idiots…

Yes, former Senator (and if there is justice, soon to be former United States Attorney General) Jeff Session channeled his inner President Bill Clinton yesterday before he resigned over recused himself from investigations into exactly how the Russian government sought to influence the 2016 presidential election in the United States.

Matt Ford, reporting in ‘I Have Recused Myself From Matters With the Trump Campaign’ for The Atlantic magazine, writes:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Thursday he would recuse himself from overseeing the federal investigation into alleged Russian interference in the presidential election, citing the advice of his staff.

“I believe those recommendations are right and just,” he said. “Therefore I have recused myself from matters with the Trump campaign.”

The move comes less than 24 hours after The Washington Post revealed Sessions had spoken with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States, on two separate occasions during the campaign. That appeared to contradict assertions made by Sessions to the Senate Judiciary Committee twice during the confirmation process.

For his part, President Donald John Trump is standing behind his man, in answer to the question: Do you still have confidence in your attorney general Jeff Session, the president responded—total.

In the continuing Trumpian manner, however, Trump is already raising a wall of ignorance. Reporting in The Washington Post, Karoun Demirjian ledes:

President Donald Trump says he ‘‘wasn’t aware’’ that his attorney general—former Sen. Jeff Sessions–had contact with the Russian ambassador during last year’s White House campaign.

Who knew?

No, seriously, who knew?

Allow me to state the obvious: President Donald John Trump has a Russia problem. The not so obvious, at least to Trump and his supporters, is that the problem, like a certain third-rate burglary, will not go away. This morning we learn that another member of Trump’s team, this time the nation’s top cop, has been caught in a lie.

Sabrina Siddiqui, reporting in Sessions did not disclose meetings with Russian ambassador during Trump campaign for The Guardian, writes:

Donald Trump’s attorney general Jeff Sessions twice spoke with the Russian ambassador to the United States during the presidential campaign.

The Washington Post, citing justice department officials, first reported that Sessions met with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak once in September 2016, when US intelligence officials were investigating Russian interference in the presidential election, and once in the summer of that year.

It was communications with Kislyak that led to the firing of Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, in February.

A spokeswoman for Sessions confirmed that the meetings took place, but provided a statement from the attorney general saying they were not related to the election campaign.

So, the two most obvious questions have to be: precisely what were the meetings about, and will Sessions, like National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, set a new record—the president does love records—for shortest tenure as an Attorney General of the United States (currently held by President Richard Nixon’s third attorney general: Elliot Lee Richardson who served only five months?

Again, the Russia problem is not going away.

Reader Response—From a midshipman at the Naval Academy who “thought you might be interested in hearing a reaction to the President’s speech from an officer in training”

I was profoundly disturbed by the moment surrounding the exaltation of Senior Chief Owens and his widow. Most news analysis marked it as the highlight of the speech. Even someone like Van Jones said it “was one of the most extraordinary moments you have ever seen in American politics, period.”

The full context of the situation makes this all very disturbing to me. Hours before the speech, Trump blamed “the generals” for the SEAL’s death. The country lost a highly trained special operator and a multi-million dollar aircraft while at the same time killing civilians and collecting intelligence of questionable value. Yet Trump considers questioning the efficacy of the mission to be unAmerican and disrespectful to the SEAL’s memory.

I worry what this means for my friends and those who I will lead. Are we simply offerings to “American greatness,” to be slaughtered on the altar in far-off lands so our mothers and widows can be glorified on national television in this perverse ritual in our civic religion? Are we to become the pious, saintly martyrs in Bannon’s crusade against the Mohammedans? Nobody in that room could do anything but clap.

I think what happened was the full maturation of what Fallows calls “The Chickenhawk Nation.” We will continue to honor veterans with major league baseball games at the Naval Academy and at the Superbowl, and give the DoD (their contractors) an increase in the defense budget nearly the equal to the size of the entire defense budget of Russia. Yet this administration will at best not rethink American grand strategy in the War on Terror, and at worst, they will undermine the mechanisms that have prevented major-power war for 70 years.

While I certainly consider my 11 years of service to be an offering to the nation that has granted me so much, I never felt I was treated like a simple offering by any of those above me, and certainly not by the two presidents, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan—under whom I served.

There is much to mock about President Donald John Trump’s first attempt at being presidential, beginning with the absurdly low bar he set for himself. One moment seems to have struck me differently than many of the pundits. That moment came when he shamefully used the heroism and sacrifice of Chief Petty Officer Ryan Owen by inviting Owen’s grieving widow to the sit in the First Lady’s box so that, like a failed vaudevillian waving an American flag, Trump could divert criticism of his failure by turning the cameras on Owen’s widow.

This was a shameful moment for our president.

President Harry S Truman is famous for his The Buck Stops Here sign on the oval office desk and President Barack Hussein Obama echoed that sentiment seven years ago when, following intelligence shortcomings led to a failed Christmas Day bombing plot on a Detroit-bound airliner, President Obama stood up and told the nation that:

Ultimately, the buck stops with me. As president, I have a solemn responsibility to protect our nation and our people, and when the system fails, it is my responsibility.

In 1980, following the failure of the mission to rescue hostages in Iran, President Jimmy Carter told the nation:

It was my decision to attempt the rescue operation. It was my decision to cancel it when problems developed in the placement of our rescue team for a future rescue operation. The responsibility is fully my own.

How did Trump respond? Paul Waldman, writing in The pundits are wrong. Trump’s handling of the Ryan Owens affair was contemptibly cynical tells us:

With Carryn Owens invited to the speech and the tribute to her husband being written, the President went on “Fox and Friends” that morning and passed the buck for the raid, blaming it on the Obama administration and the military. “This was a mission that was started before I got here. This was something they wanted to do,” he said. “They came to see me, they explained what they wanted to do—the generals—who are very respected, my generals are the most respected that we’ve had in many decades, I believe. And they lost Ryan.”

They, not I, not even we, for fuck’s stake, lost Ryan.

Only hours later, Trump chose to hide behind the tears of a grieving widow and brag, fucking brag, that the standing ovation he had orchestrated was some kind of record he could take credit for. Waldman details the moment:

As the applause went on and Carryn Owens stood weeping, Trump offered what in the tiny, narcissistic world he exists in is the highest form of praise: “And Ryan is looking down, right now, you know that. And he’s very happy, because I think he just broke a record,” referring to the length of the ovation.

What exactly is that supposed to mean? Owens set the “Longest Applause for Dead Servicemember In Joint Speech to Congress” record? What kind of person could possibly think that would matter to anyone? Oh, right—Donald Trump.

What kind of asshole does that? Oh, right: President Donald John Trump.