With Donald Trump coming off his latest mini-Nuremberg rally, this seems like a good morning to take a look at that other Nazi in the White House. No, not Bannon. And no, not Sessions. He’s just a racist.
I’m talking about Dr. Sebastian Gorka. Gorka is a “Muslim expert” whose theories about Muslims sound like they were born in 13th century witch hunts, or perhaps discerned in the entrails of goats . Gorka puts his lurid fantasies forward with a level of arrogance and condescension that makes Donald Trump seem like the soul of modesty, never hesitating to tell people with decades of on the ground experience just how wrong they are about evil, evil Muslims.
But political science professor Andrew Reynolds at the University of North Carolina noticed something about “Doctor” Sebastian Gorka.
I started digging and it didn’t take long to find out that Gorka is a fraud – a charlatan of the most brazen hue – a snake-oil salesman whose supposed Ph.D dissertation would have never passed muster in America or Britain and to put the cherry on the cake was approved by a fraudulent panel of examiners.
Based on the dates of Gorka’s supposed PhD, it seems he may not have even attended the school from which he acquired the degree. And the listed examiners on his dissertation panel were friends of his, two of them without doctorates of their own. It’s not even clear that Gorka studied anything to do with political science or religion.
In sum, Gorka’s Ph.D is about as legitimate as if he had been awarded it by Trump University. Facts matter, but so does the gathering, synthesizing and creation of knowledge that is what we call ‘education.’ If you fake a Ph.D you are faking your credentials.
So, as it turns out, “Dr” Sebastian Gorka is a real Nazi, but a fake doctor. This has been another lesson in: Don’t mess with academics, because those guys know how to do research.
Okay, time to read some pundits.
Bernie Sanders and Mark Jacobson teamed up for a Climate March message.
According to a study published Monday by the National Academy of Science, climate change is already causing severe weather events like prolonged droughts, record-high temperatures, and rising sea levels because of melting Artic sea ice. And while everyone will be affected by climate change, the people who had least to do with causing the problem will be impacted the most, including low income families and communities of color across America.
That is why we must aggressively transition our energy system away from fossil fuels and toward clean, renewable energy solutions like energy efficiency, solar, wind and geothermal energy, and electric vehicles.
Fortunately, the market is driving heavily toward renewables. As a combination of conservation and oversupply of sources leads to a rapid crash in energy prices, the situation is increasingly favorable to wind and solar even without any government subsidies. Nuclear and coal can’t compete, and gas may find that it drops from the picture as quickly as it rose.
No matter what agenda President Trump and his administration of climate deniers push, it is clear that jobs in clean energy like wind and solar are growing much more rapidly than jobs in the coal, oil and gas sectors. The number of workers maintaining wind turbines in the US is set to more than double between 2014 and 2024, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Around the world, more than 9.4 million people already work in the renewable energy sector. These are the jobs of the future.
Francis Fukuyama provides an early preview of how Trump will look in the history books.
At the 100-day mark, it seems clear that the system is working properly and that Trump is more likely to go down in history as a weak and ineffective president than as an American tyrant. Apart from the appointment of Neil M. Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, he has failed to carry through on any of his major campaign promises such as stopping Muslim immigration or building his “big, beautiful” wall. His most abject failure was the effort to replace Obamacare with the American Health Care Act, which had to be withdrawn for lack of votes. This absence of winning (is it called “losing”?) unfolded even as the Republican Party controls both houses of Congress and the presidency.
But … but … he’s dropped lots and lots of health, environmental, and safety regulations. Making America sicker, dirtier, and more dangerous again. Just like he promised.
This does not mean, however, that Trump will be an inconsequential president. His main legacy will be a highly negative one: the first president to undermine a whole series of informal norms about American government. He and his family have not even pretended to avoid conflicts of interest after taking office. Meanwhile, the administration is rolling back transparency laws as it loads its staff with former lobbyists, despite its “drain the swamp” slogan.
Trump’s major accomplishment will be as the guy who called his predecessor “sick” and chanted “lock her up” about his rival for the position. Naked hate, crudeness, arrogance and disrespect. That’s the Trump legacy.
Nicholas Kristof has a rundown of some 100-day “accomplishments.”
1. Trump has had the worst beginning of any president since, oh, perhaps William Henry Harrison (who died a month after his inauguration). Trump has had no legislative triumphs, and he has by far the lowest public approval of any new president in polling history. Large majorities say he is not honest, does not keep promises and does not care about ordinary people.
Honestly, the best way to get Trump out of office? Make sure his next 100 days are as unsuccessful as the first 100. No matter what Trump says, he knows he’s a loser.
2. Trump distinguishes himself in one area: incompetence. The debacle of the travel ban was followed by the collapse of the G.O.P. health care bill, and I doubt we’ll ever see passage of a tax reform package, a health bill or even a major infrastructure spending bill. Trump has made no trips abroad (at this juncture, Barack Obama had visited nine countries), and he has fewer than half as many nominees confirmed for senior positions as Obama did at this point.
There’s a dozen of these. Collect them all.
Dana Milbank goes dangerously deep into Trump’s head.
Here’s one genuine achievement of the Trump administration’s first 100 days: The president, it seems, has come to realize he is in over his head.
“This is more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier,” he told Reuters in an interview this week. “I do miss my old life. I like to work so that’s not a problem, but this is actually more work.”
I can empathize. Having Donald Trump as president has been hard on all of us.
I’ve already aged more than one of those “look how young the president looked at the start of his term!” pictures.
So what does he do now that he is in a job that is so hard running a government that is so big? He pretends. He has developed an elaborate fantasyland in which everything goes according to plan. All of the following statements, which I have assembled with an assist from the work of Post Fact-Checkers Glenn Kessler and Michelle Ye Hee Lee, are Trump’s own words; none is entirely true.
This administration is running like a fine-tuned machine. No administration has accomplished more in the first 90 days. [Rep.] Elijah Cummings [D-Md.] was in my office and he said, “You will go down as one of the great presidents in the history of our country.” He said “you will be the greatest president in the history of this country.”
As you might be noticing, nearly every pundit punning felt compelled to do a 100 days post this morning, and many of them consist of lists of non-accomplishments. Milbanks is particularly good for remembering some of the whoppers Trump has told to cover up his ineffectiveness.
Kathleen Parker would rather go to war than read another “Trump’s first 100 days” piece.” So she wrote one instead.
Donald Trump couldn’t be more relieved than this columnist for the end of the blasted first 100 days.
One more quantitative analysis of his (lack of) accomplishments or his (mis)deeds during this period would have put at risk the sanity of the Western world. It’s over, done, finis — thanks be to whatever deity gets you through the night — and now we can relax into a possibly “major, major conflict with North Korea,” as suggested by the president during a recent Reuters interview. Whew.
It doesn’t help that idiots like me started running 100 day bits a week ago, which totally didn’t happen because, even though I write a column where the week number is on the front of the thing pretty much every week, I still managed to miscount.
I confess as well to having been somewhat obsessed with this president, but I wonder how it could have been otherwise? He’s a scary dude, y’all.
Not necessarily insane, but potentially dangerous. His loose lips may have had no rival in presidential history. Thus, when he casually mentions that a conflagration with the crazier-than-thou Kim Jong Un may be imminent, I’m a tiny bit terrified.
Don’t worry. Just think of his record of actually doing any of the things he promised for the first 100 … I mean, for that period just ended.
Frank Bruni has a nominee for the worst single thing in that … time period not to be mentioned again.
One hundred days, too many of them filled with needless drama and gratuitous insult, and still I remember the first full one. Still it makes me cringe.
That was when Donald Trump visited and made remarks at the C.I.A. He had fences to mend with the American intelligence community, whose failure to fall fawningly in line with his nascent administration had prompted him to compare them to Nazis. He stood before a wall of stars that commemorated lives sacrificed for country.
And then he completely apologized and made a moving speech filled with complete sentences and a disarming sense of boyish concern … or maybe I was watching a Hugh Grant movie at the time. What about Trump?
He lied, saying that the media had invented his feud with the agency. He lashed out at suggestions that his inaugural crowds hadn’t been the biggest and most orgiastic. To top it all off, he crowed about how often he’d claimed the cover of Time magazine, because who isn’t fascinated by that? Who doesn’t want a running tally? Whose heart doesn’t beat faster when Trump yet again ponders the glory of Trump?
Yeah, it was appalling. But here, in the midst of the appall-calypse, I’m not sure I could pick one best worst. There are just too many to chose from.
Michael Gerson on Trump’s ability to excel at underperforming.
As we cross the finish line of President Trump’s first 100 days, no leader in recent memory has benefited more from low expectations. A more typical president who tumbled from an approval rating in the high 60s to one in the low 40s would be in a political crisis. Trump’s current performance is only a slight dip from his divisive norm. A president with pretensions of rhetorical coherence would be embarrassed by gaffes and mediocre speeches. For Trump, gaffes and inarticulateness are part of the package. A president with high standards of integrity would be mortified by a brewing scandal that seems to involve smarmy aides and a foreign government. For Trump, well, what would you expect?
Frankly, my bar was lower. I’m pleasantly surprised to find most of my atoms still grouped together at this point.
Much of Trump’s 100-days defense could have been employed by the pharaoh who ruled after the one in the book of Exodus. The cattle haven’t all died. We’ve seen less fiery hail. And pestilence has been kept to an acceptable minimum.
But you can’t dismiss the boils and frogs. I mean, have you looked at the in this White House?
The New York Times on Trump’s return to the altar of the NRA.
President Trump eagerly repaid his campaign debt to the National Rifle Association on Friday by appearing at its annual convention in Atlanta. Last year, candidate Trump benefited greatly from the N.R.A.’s endorsement and $30 million worth of campaign support; the N.R.A., in turn, relished Mr. Trump’s fear-inducing agenda, which led to greater arms sales among more and more ordinary Americans.
Now that gun sales have plummeted, Trump does need to think of something he can do to reward the NRA with what counts—dollars. My best guess at how Trump will push up gun sales: Liberal Season.
Michelle Goldberg on hate ala Trump.
One hundred days into his administration, President Trump has few legislative achievements to his name. But he has forced liberals to experience the near-apocalyptic revulsion that conservatives have often felt toward Democratic presidents. In doing so, he has unwittingly created a new movement in American politics, as Democrats channel the sort of all-encompassing outrage that has long fueled grass-roots conservatism.
For decades, Democrats have envied the Republicans’ passionate, locally attuned base. It turns out that what Democrats were missing was a sense of existential emergency. Mr. Trump has provided it.
For the sheer quality of hate, it probably doesn’t matter that one side was created by careful feeding from Fox and talk radio while the Trump hatred is actually justified.
Objectively, there’s no comparison between the conservative demonization of Mr. Obama and the progressive case against Mr. Trump. People on the right saw Mr. Obama as a Kenyan-born secret Muslim with a hidden agenda to hobble American power and a health care reform plan to establish “death panels.” None of that is true.
People on the left believe that Mr. Trump has incited hatred against minorities, and boasted about grabbing women by their genitals. Democrats think that the president and his family are blatantly profiting off the presidency and that he welcomed the help of a hostile foreign power during the election. All this is grounded in fact.
I’d like to think that Trump hate tastes as sweet as spring honey — with just a touch of orange blossom.
Keen-eyed observers, and even very-un-keen-eyed observers, will note that this week lacks the “Week whatever” infographic I’ve been making since Jan 20. That’s because 1) I wanted to grab something from CompoundChem for the March for Science, 2) I was not wanting to talk any more about “first 100 days” bit, and 3) Someone in the comments last week wished for the chemistry graphics to return.
But be warned, this is a temporary hiatus. The home-grown graphics will return.