In June this year, First Lady Melania Trump’s communications director, Stephanie Grisham, told CNN about the now-infamous “I Really Don’t Care” jacket:
“It’s a jacket. There was no hidden message. After today’s important visit to Texas, I hope the media isn’t going to choose to focus on her wardrobe.”
In an interview tonight, Melania Trump contradicted her own comm director telling Tom Llamas of ABC News she wore the jacket, “For the people and for the left-wing media who are criticizing me. And I want to show them that I don’t care.”
At a ceremonial swearing in at the White House last night, Donald Trump falsely claimed that newly-installed Justice Brett Kavanaugh had been “proven innocent” of the allegations of sexual misconduct brought against him by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.
Trump claimed the allegations were based on “lies and deceptions.”
Said Trump:
“On behalf of our nation, I want to apologize to Brett and the entire Kavanaugh family for the terrible pain and suffering you have been forced to endure. Those who step forward to serve our country deserve a fair and dignified evaluation, not a campaign of personal and political destruction based on lies and deception.
“What happened to the Kavanaugh family violates every notion of fairness, decency and due process. In our country, a man or a woman must always be presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.
“And with that, I must state that you, sir, under historic scrutiny, were proven innocent.”
The Trumpster literally can’t stop himself from lying, as if by saying something over and over again he can create his own reality.
President Trump: “On behalf of our nation, I want to apologize to Brett and the entire Kavanaugh family for the terrible pain and suffering you have been forced to endure.” https://t.co/Xbm6NsUopPpic.twitter.com/gsoNBLYVae
Earlier this week, the president of the United States stood before a crowd and openly mocked Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.
In a breathtaking lack of decorum or civility, Donald Trump told his followers that Ford testified that she didn’t remember hardly any details surrounding her alleged sexual assault by soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Now This put Dr. Ford’s testimony next to Trump’s crass rally display.
And speaking of remembering, Charles Ludington, Lynne Brookes and Elizabeth Swisher, who attended Yale University from 1983 to 1987 with Kavanaugh, penned an op-ed for the Washington Postdenouncing Kavanaugh’s lies during his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee about his drinking.
They should know – they were his drinking buddies.
We were college classmates and drinking buddies with Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh. In the past week, all three of us decided separately to respond to questions from the media regarding Brett’s honesty, or lack thereof. In each of our cases, it was his public statements during a Fox News TV interview and his sworn testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee that prompted us to speak out.
We each asserted that Brett lied to the Senate by stating, under oath, that he never drank to the point of forgetting what he was doing. We said, unequivocally, that each of us, on numerous occasions, had seen Brett stumbling drunk to the point that it would be impossible for him to state with any degree of certainty that he remembered everything that he did when drunk.
Donald Trump lies about being late to meet the Queen of England
At last night’s rally for Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, the Trumpster claimed that the ‘fake news’ erroneously reported he had been 12 minutes late for his meeting with Queen Elizabeth, despite the fact that news cameras captured the monarch waiting for the president to arrive.
“I landed and I’m on the ground and I’m waiting with the king’s and the queen’s guards. I’m waiting. I was about 15 minutes early and I’m waiting with my wife and that’s fine. Hey, it’s the queen, right? We can wait. But I’m a little early.
“So I then go up and meet the queen and she is fantastic. We then go up and we have tea. And I didn’t know this it was supposed to last for 15 minutes but it lasted for like an hour because we got along. We got along!
“So here’s the story by the fake news. ‘The president was 15 minutes late for the Queen!’ Wrong.”
As Donald Trump accepted the nomination as the Republican candidate for president in 2016 at the Republican National Convention, he surprised many by including LGBTQ Americans in his speech.
In a halting, awkward cadence which made clear he had never uttered the phrase “L-G-B-T-Q” in his life, Trump promised to “do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens.”
Now, in his new book The Briefing: Politics, The Press, and The President, former White House press secretary Sean Spicer shares how Team Trump was focused on a step-by-step plan to woo anti-Trump delegates – the “Never Trumpers” – who had signed a petition prior to the Republican convention.
People.com, which obtained a copy of Spicer’s book in advance of it’s release, shares the details of how the Trump campaign dismantled the “Never Trumpers” and added that one sentence to Trump’s speech as what People calls “nothing more than empty payback for a political favor.”
Spicer recalls the process saying, “[Trump campaign chairman Paul] Manafort and his lieutenants went one by one down the list of people who had signed the petition and persuaded them to remove their signatures.”
Manafort and his cohorts apparently used all kinds of methods to pick off their targets which Spicer describes as “alternating between carrot and stick and sometimes bat, even, at one point, conveniently making the convention’s parliamentarian unavailable to keep the opposition from formally submitting their petition.”
Finally, there was one last delegate left to convert to Trump Land – Washington, D.C. delegate Robert Sinners. Sinners, it seems, wanted the Trumpster to support LGBT rights.
Senior Trump communications advisor Jason Miller, who would later resign from Team Trump over a sordid sex scandal, was sent to do the deal.
“Jason assured Sinners that Trump would be the most ‘inclusive’ candidate the Republican Party ever had,” Spicer writes.
“This is your moment, Robert,” Miller told Sinners, according to the book. “You can deliver this.”
Sinners then reportedly signed “a form that officially removed his name from the petition,” and the deal was done.
“Jason told Sinners Donald Trump’s acceptance speech would acknowledge the LGBT[Q] community, which no other Republican acceptance speech had done,” Spicer writes. “And it did.”
And so it came to be that in July 2016 at the Republican National Convention, speaking about the 49 victims of the mass shooting at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida, Donald Trump said, “As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology.”
He would go on to say at campaign rallies that he would be “much better for the gays” than Hillary Clinton.
He even tweeted about his loyalty to our community.
Thank you to the LGBT community! I will fight for you while Hillary brings in more people that will threaten your freedoms and beliefs.
Of course, the sad facts are Trump has been the worst president in modern history in terms of LGBTQ rights.
The Trump administration has, among many things, announced policies that would kick 1,200 HIV+ military service members out just because of their HIV status; deny transgender Americans the ability to serve in the military; has failed to acknowledge Pride Month two years in a row; reversed course on Obama-era guidance that protected transgender people in the workplace; and shown support for anti-gay baker Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cake Shop which discriminated against a gay couple seeking a cake for their wedding celebration.
According to The Hill, the ACLU has called Trump “the most anti-LGBT administration in at least a generation.”
Watch below as People recaps Donald Trump’s faux ‘support’ for the LGBTQ community.
The White House has chosen to post a oh-so-slightly edited version of the press conference with Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin the Helsinki summit.
The new White House version omits one sentence from a Reuters reporter asking Putin if he wanted Trump to win the 2016 election.
Rachel Maddow highlighted the edit during her broadcast Tuesday night.
Here’s the original transcript unedited:
Putin: “Options abound. And they all can be found in an appropriate legal framework.”
Reuters: “Mr. President, did you want President Trump to win the election? And did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?
Putin: “Yes, I did. Yes, I did.”
Now, here’s the version the White House has posted
Putin: “Options abound. And they all can be found in an appropriate legal framework.”
Reuters: “And did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?
President Vladimir Putin: “Yes, I did. Yes, I did.”
Things that make you go ‘hmmm….’
Now, why edit just that one little question? Shouldn’t the White House be presenting history as it actually happened?
White House edits video to remove question about whether Putin wanted Trump to win. pic.twitter.com/ExlsHNlgF8
Donald Trump took to Twitter today to, yet again, lie and contort facts.
In his post, the Trumpster seems to be gloating that he “Just won lawsuit filed by the DNC and a bunch of Democrat crazies trying to claim the Trump Campaign (and others), colluded with Russia.”
“They haven’t figured out that this was an excuse for them losing the election,” he added.
Now, there was a court case filed against Trump, but that’s about the only nugget of truth in his tweet.
The case was not brought by the Democratic National Committee but by two DNC donors and a former staffer.
The trio allege that Trump’s 2016 campaign conspired with Russian agents and WikiLeaks to publish emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee.
Trump didn’t ‘win’ the case, it was dismissed by federal Judge Ellen Huvelle on the grounds that, in her opinion, the case belonged not in federal court but in New York state courts where alleged meetings between campaign staffers and Russian agents are said to have taken place.
The judge pointedly wrote that her ruling was “not based on a finding that there was no collusion between defendants and Russia during the 2016 presidential election.”
Rep. Jim Jordan, a powerful Republican congressman from Ohio, has been accused of turning a blind-eye to sex abuse during his tenure as an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State University.
In April, the university began an investigation into allegations that Dr. Richard Strauss, who served as the team doctor, sexually abused team members from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s.
Strauss died in 2005.
Jordan, who served as assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State from 1986 to 1994, has publicly denied any knowledge of the abuse.
But his denials have been called out as lying by former members of the wrestling team.
Three former Ohio State wrestlers have come forward saying it was “common knowledge” that the doctor regularly showered with the athletes and touched them inappropriately during appointments. They say its impossible Jordan would not have known about the abuse. One player says he told Jordan about the abuse himself.
Former head coach Russ Hellickson, Jordan’s mentor, said in a recent video — made by Mike DiSabato, a former wrestler — that Hellickson had told Strauss that he was being too “hands on” with students.
DiSabato, whose allegations against Strauss prompted Ohio State to open its investigation, called Jordan a “liar.”
“I considered Jim Jordan a friend,” DiSabato said. “But at the end of the day, he is absolutely lying if he says he doesn’t know what was going on.”
DiSabato said he reached out to Jordan this year, before going to the university, to tell Jordan that he planned to go public with his allegations. Jordan told him to “please leave me out of it,” DiSabato said. “He asked me not to get him involved.”
Another former wrestler, Dunyasha Yetts, told NBC News he informed Jordan himself about an awkward incident with the doctor in the mid-1990s.
“I remember I had a thumb injury and went into Strauss’ office and he started pulling down my wrestling shorts,” he said. “I’m like, what the f— are you doing? And I went out and told Russ and Jim what happened. I was not having it. They went in and talked to Strauss.”
According to Yetts, he and his teammates went to Jordan several times about Strauss.
“So it’s sad for me to hear that he’s denying knowing about Strauss,” he said. “I don’t know why he would, unless it’s a cover-up. Either you’re in on it, or you’re a liar.”
“Congressman Jordan never saw any abuse, never heard about any abuse, and never had any abuse reported to him during his time as a coach at Ohio State,” a spokesman for Jordan wrote in an email to NBC News.
After the NBC News story was published, Jordan’s rep added: “He has not been contacted by investigators about the matter but will assist them in any way they ask, because if what is alleged is true, the victims deserve a full investigation and justice.”
Another Ohio State wrestler, former UFC world champion Mark Coleman, has come forward telling the Wall Street Journal Jordan was aware of, but didn’t respond to, the allegations of sexual misconduct.
“There’s no way unless he’s got dementia or something that he’s got no recollection of what was going on at Ohio State,” Coleman said in an interview Friday.
DiSabato, however, has forwarded to NBC News an email he sent Jordan on April 24 asking Jordan to “give your full attention to the information attached to this email.”
“We [are] watching you, “ wrote DiSabato. “You have the platform to cut through the double talk, placation and finger pointing.”
Jordan never responded.
Based on testimony from athletes in 15 varsity sports over the years, DiSabato estimates Strauss sexually assaulted and/or raped around 1,500/2,000 athletes at OSU from 1978 through 1998.
Jordan is a staunch ally of Donald Trump and is rumored to be a contender for Speaker of the House after Paul Ryan retires early next year.
Regarding the Ohio State scandal, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Thursday, “I believe him 100 percent.”
For all the Trump supporters who say they’ve never heard Donald Trump lie, this is for you.
On June 27, 2018, Donald Trump tweeted: “HOUSE REPUBLICANS SHOULD PASS THE STRONG BUT FAIR IMMIGRATION BILL, KNOWN AS GOODLATTE II, IN THEIR AFTERNOON VOTE TODAY, EVEN THOUGH THE DEMS WON’T LET IT PASS IN THE SENATE. PASSAGE WILL SHOW THAT WE WANT STRONG BORDERS & SECURITY WHILE THE DEMS WANT OPEN BORDERS = CRIME. WIN!”
NOTICE ALL THE CAPS LETTERS? That means he really, really means it.
HOUSE REPUBLICANS SHOULD PASS THE STRONG BUT FAIR IMMIGRATION BILL, KNOWN AS GOODLATTE II, IN THEIR AFTERNOON VOTE TODAY, EVEN THOUGH THE DEMS WON’T LET IT PASS IN THE SENATE. PASSAGE WILL SHOW THAT WE WANT STRONG BORDERS & SECURITY WHILE THE DEMS WANT OPEN BORDERS = CRIME. WIN!
Then, this morning, just three days later, the Trumpster tweeted, “I never pushed the Republicans in the House to vote for the Immigration Bill, either GOODLATTE 1 or 2, because it could never have gotten enough Democrats as long as there is the 60 vote threshold. I released many prior to the vote knowing we need more Republicans to win in Nov.”
I never pushed the Republicans in the House to vote for the Immigration Bill, either GOODLATTE 1 or 2, because it could never have gotten enough Democrats as long as there is the 60 vote threshold. I released many prior to the vote knowing we need more Republicans to win in Nov.
