Hello, Vlad - Donnie Calling

I'm tapering off on current events now - but I feel I have to post this for the record.



The long summary from CNN, horrifying but predictable, is here - well worth your time to read it. Excerpt:

In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America's principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials -- including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff -- that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations.

The calls caused former top Trump deputies -- including national security advisers H.R. McMaster and John Bolton, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and White House chief of staff John Kelly, as well as intelligence officials -- to conclude that the President was often "delusional," as two sources put it, in his dealings with foreign leaders. The sources said there was little evidence that the President became more skillful or competent in his telephone conversations with most heads of state over time. Rather, he continued to believe that he could either charm, jawbone or bully almost any foreign leader into capitulating to his will, and often pursued goals more attuned to his own agenda than what many of his senior advisers considered the national interest. . . .

One person familiar with almost all the conversations with the leaders of Russia, Turkey, Canada, Australia and western Europe described the calls cumulatively as 'abominations' so grievous to US national security interests that if members of Congress heard from witnesses to the actual conversations or read the texts and contemporaneous notes, even many senior Republican members would no longer be able to retain confidence in the President.

In other words, the alleged leader of the free world is that big, dumb, conceited, hateful, fifth-grade braggart, the brown-noser, the school-yard bully, the creep that nobody liked except a couple of his partners in crime.

Is anyone surprised? The tapes and transcripts of those calls, if ever released, will be a bigger scandal than the Watergate tapes ever were.

I wonder when the public will get to hear or see them.


Bonus, 7/1/20: This just out from the Lincoln Project: