Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty-six. Sunrise is 6:26 AM and sunset 7:27 PM, for 13h 00m 13s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 1.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the eight hundred seventy-eighth day.
On this day in 1917, the United States Congress approves a declaration of war against Germany.
Recommended for reading in full:
David Dayen writes Nothing Trump Said Was True:
“We have compiled the accompanying statement of financial condition of Donald J. Trump,” reads part of a two-page disclaimer from the accounting firm Mazars USA. “We have not audited or reviewed the accompanying financial statement and, accordingly, do not express an opinion or provide any assurance about whether the financial statement is in accordance with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America.”
This notice, routinely attached to financial statements that Trump used to secure loans and insurance before he became president, amounted to a dry warning that nothing the businessman said was necessarily true.
As detailed in The Washington Post, Trump’s statements of financial condition for the years 2002, 2004, 2011, 2012, and 2013 contained numerous exaggerations and falsehoods. Trump claimed that his golf course in California had 55 lots ready to sell; it had 31. He said his Virginia vineyard sat on 2,000 acres; it sat on about 1,200. He added 10 stories to Trump Tower in New York. He might as well have added an aside about “my wife … Morgan Fairchild.”
Susan B. Glasser asks Is America Becoming Trump’s Banana Republic?:
“You have to look at everything through the prism of his narcissism,” [George] Conway told me. “This is all about him exercising his authority and power to be at the center of attention, and, for whatever reason, he’s decided he’s going to get the most juice out of exercising this decree on this day in this way. That’s the way he makes himself important and special; there’s an arbitrariness to it.” Isn’t that pretty much the definition of a “banana republic”? I asked.
“Yes,” Conway responded. “It would make it a banana republic.” But he went on to offer an important caveat to the remarks he made at Georgetown. “If it were not for the inherent checks and balances of the U.S. Constitution,” Conway said, “we would have a banana republic. But that also makes him an inherently weak President, because the office requires you to have the power to persuade. Ultimately, you become a powerful President only if you are able to persuade others to go along with you. His narcissism means he has to retreat to the people who worship him. He cannot reach out and persuade, like every other President tries to do. His narcissism causes him to be a weak President, and the checks and balances mean he is a weak President. And that’s why we don’t have a banana republic.”