H.R. McMaster out as Trump's National Security Adviser, will be replaced by John "bomb the hell out out everybody" Bolton.

I am pleased to announce that, effective 4/9/18, @AmbJohnBolton will be my new National Security Advisor. I am very thankful for the service of General H.R. McMaster who has done an outstanding job & will always remain my friend. There will be an official contact handover on 4/9.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 22, 2018

Courtesy of the New York Times:

Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the battle-tested Army officer tapped as President Trump’s national security adviser last year to stabilize a turbulent foreign policy operation, will resign and be replaced by John R. Bolton, a hard-line former United States ambassador to the United Nations, White House officials said Thursday. 

General McMaster will retire from the military, the officials said. He has been discussing his departure with President Trump for several weeks, they said, but decided to speed up his departure, in part because questions about his status were casting a shadow over his conversations with foreign officials. 

The officials also said that Mr. Trump wanted to fill out his national security team before his meeting with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un. He replaced Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson with the C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo, last week. 

Officials emphasized that General McMaster’s departure was a mutual decision and amicable, with none of the recrimination that marked Mr. Tillerson’s exit. They said it was not related to a leak on Tuesday of briefing materials for Mr. Trump’s phone call with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

"They said it was not related to a leak on Tuesday of briefing materials for Mr. Trump’s phone call with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia." In other words that is EXACTLY what it is about.

(I just assume now that the truth is always the opposite of whatever the Trump White House says that it is. Real time saver. )

So now another grown up is out the door, leaving Trump surrounded by sycophants and conspiracy theorists.

And this new addition is DEFINITELY going to make things even more inane inside this White House.

John Bolton worked for the Bush Administration and was well known for wanting to bomb just about everybody, and who as Ambassador to the UN spent all of his time undermining it and shitting on its agenda.

After the Russians hacked the DNC, Bolton put forward the theory that it was a false flag operation orchestrated by President Obama.

You know, because THAT makes sense. 

Bolton also has ties to Cambridge Analytica, and once appeared in an advertisement for a pro-gun Russian group with ties to the NRA.

Fox News contributor, with ties to Cambridge Analytica, the NRA, and Russia.

Oh yeah, he is going to fit into this clown car just fine.

New reporting suggests that Trump is preparing to kick both National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, and Chief of Staff John Kelly to the curb.

Courtesy of WaPo: 

President Trump has decided to remove H.R. McMaster as his national security adviser and is actively discussing potential replacements, according to five people with knowledge of the plans, preparing to deliver yet another jolt to the senior ranks of his administration. 

Trump is now comfortable with ousting McMaster, with whom he never personally gelled, but is willing to take time executing the move because he wants to ensure both that the three-star Army general is not humiliated and that there is a strong successor lined up, these people said. 

The turbulence is part of a broader potential shake-up under consideration by Trump that is likely to include senior officials at the White House, where staffers are gripped by fear and un­certainty as they await the next move from an impulsive president who enjoys stoking conflict. 

For all of the evident disorder, Trump feels emboldened, advisers said — buoyed by what he views as triumphant decisions last week to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum and to agree to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The president is enjoying the process of assessing his team and making changes, tightening his inner circle to those he considers survivors and who respect his unconventional style, one senior White House official said.

When this news hit the airwaves Sarah Huckabee Sanders responded with a tweet. 

Just spoke to @POTUS and Gen. H.R. McMaster - contrary to reports they have a good working relationship and there are no changes at the NSC.

— Sarah Sanders (@PressSec) March 16, 2018

Essentially this is how you know a story is accurate, when Sanders denies it is accurate.

You may recall that in the past the White House has also denied that Reince Priebus, Steven Bannon, and Rex Tillerson were about to be fired.

But don't think the drama stops there.

Courtesy of CBS News: 

The man brought in last summer to impose order in the White House, chief of staff John Kelly, may also be on the way out, according to congressional and administration sources. 

Sarah Huckabee Sanders has not yet had the chance to deny/confirm this news yet, but it is pretty clear that Trump wants to do away with anybody with an ounce of competence in his administration, so I think this news is likely pretty accurate.

I wonder which Fox News talking head he will tap to replace him?  

Donald Trump is looking to clean house and replace his senior staff with people who will not try to rein him in. Uh oh!

Courtesy of Vanity Fair:  

With the departures of Hope Hicks and Gary Cohn, the Trump presidency is entering a new phase—one in which Trump is feeling liberated to act on his impulses. “Trump is in command. He’s been in the job more than a year now. He knows how the levers of power work. He doesn’t give a fuck,” the Republican said. Trump’s decision to circumvent the policy process and impose tariffs on imported steel and aluminum reflects his emboldened desire to follow his impulses and defy his advisers. “It was like a fuck-you to Kelly,” a Trump friend said. “Trump is red-hot about Kelly trying to control him.” 

According to five Republicans close to the White House, Trump has diagnosed the problem as having the wrong team around him and is looking to replace his senior staff in the coming weeks. “Trump is going for a clean reset, but he needs to do it in a way that’s systemic so it doesn’t look like it’s chaos,” one Republican said. 

Sources said that the first officials to go will be Chief of Staff John Kelly and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, both of whom Trump has clashed with for months. On Tuesday, Trump met with John Bolton in the Oval Office. When he plans to visit Mar-a-Lago next weekend, Trump is expected to interview more candidates for both positions, according to two sources. “He’s going for a clean slate,” one source said. Cohn had been lobbying to replace Kelly as chief, two sources said, and quit when he didn’t get the job. “Trump laughed at Gary when he brought it up,” one outside adviser to the White House said. 

Next on the departure list are Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Trump remains fiercely loyal to his family, but various distractions have eroded their efficacy within the administration. Both have been sidelined without top-secret security clearances by Kelly, and sources expect them to be leaving at some point in the near future.

"He doesn't give a fuck."

Okay this article legitimately made my legs shake.

I think it is safe to say that Donald Trump is clinically insane.

And the only hope for this nation is that the people around him exert some control over his impulses.

If he simply fires those that are doing that, and replaces them with sycophants afraid to correct him or raise objections to his lunatic ravings, we are seriously fucked here.

Robert Mueller better put his investigation on the fast track because as long as Trump is in office this whole country, if not the entire world, remain in serious danger.

Trump White House finally accepts that Russian interference in the 2016 election is real. Now what?

Courtesy of Mediaite:  

A day after it was announced that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities for interfering in the 2016 presidential election, the president’s national security adviser said that it Russia meddling was abundantly clear. 

“As you can see with the FBI indictment, the evidence is now really incontrovertible and available in the public domain, whereas in the past it was difficult to attribute for a couple of reasons,” National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster said at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday. 

He added, “Whereas in the past, it was difficult to attribute for a couple of reasons. First, technically it was difficult. But then also you didn’t want to divulge your intelligence capabilities. Now that this is in the arena of a law enforcement investigation, it’s going to be very apparent to everyone.”

Before this of course Trump and his lackey's kept refusing to completely accept the findings of the intelligence agencies.

Now that it is laid out in those indictments made public yesterday it appears they have no real choice.

Of course Trump's response to this was to totally misread (Or more likely mishear.)  the indictments as vindicating him of collusion.

Russia started their anti-US campaign in 2014, long before I announced that I would run for President. The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong - no collusion!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 16, 2018

As I pointed out yesterday that is not true.

Mr. Trump, you told the Russians you'd be running for president in Moscow in November 2013—and indeed it was that declaration that led to the anti-U.S. campaign in early 2014. Cohen had made clear by mid-2013 you were running; you confirmed it to the Agalarovs and Yulya Alferova. https://t.co/UyjT9QMqbE

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) February 16, 2018

But that has not stopped a number of Trump flunkies from appearing on cable news shows to make that same ridiculous claim.

And since this indictment did not include allegations of collusion, Fox News has decided to take a victory lap:

Boom. The Democratic Trump-Russia collusion narrative is dead.

Now if you have been paying attention to this Mueller investigation, as I have, you may have noticed that Mueller seems to like to allow the Trump folks to get way out on a creaky limb right before he takes an axe to it.

So I would not be at all surprised if nothing noteworthy happens this weekend, allowing the Right Wing spin machine to work its magic, and that sometime next week Mueller drops the other giant loafer right on their pointy little heads.

Donald Trump is demanding a strategic plan for a preemptive attack against North Korea. The Pentagon is worried that if they provide one, he will actually use it.

I want to blow something up.

Courtesy of the New York Times:  

The White House has grown frustrated in recent weeks by what it considers the Pentagon’s reluctance to provide President Trump with options for a military strike against North Korea, according to officials, the latest sign of a deepening split in the administration over how to confront the nuclear-armed regime of Kim Jong-un. 

The national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, believes that for Mr. Trump’s warnings to North Korea to be credible, the United States must have well-developed military plans, according to those officials. 

But the Pentagon, they say, is worried that the White House is moving too hastily toward military action on the Korean Peninsula that could escalate catastrophically. Giving the president too many options, the officials said, could increase the odds that he will act. 

The tensions bubbled to the surface this week with the disclosure that the White House had abandoned plans to nominate a prominent Korea expert, Victor D. Cha, as ambassador to South Korea. Mr. Cha suggested that he was sidelined because he warned administration officials against a “preventive” military strike, which, he later wrote, could spiral “into a war that would likely kill tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Americans.”

Donald Trump is desperate to find something to change the narrative away from these Russian investigations. 

It is folly to believe that he would not allow the death of thousands in order to accomplish that goal.

Megalomaniacs do not see people as human beings, they see them as a means to an end.

Trump's National Security Adviser says he has the intelligence of a "kindergartner."

Courtesy of Buzzfeed:

National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster mocked President Trump’s intelligence at a private dinner with a powerful tech CEO, according to five sources with knowledge of the conversation. 

Over a July dinner with Oracle CEO Safra Catz — who has been mentioned as a candidate for several potential administration jobs — McMaster bluntly trashed his boss, said the sources, four of whom told BuzzFeed News they heard about the exchange directly from Catz. The top national security official dismissed the president variously as an “idiot” and a “dope” with the intelligence of a “kindergartner,” the sources said. 

A sixth source who was not familiar with the details of the dinner told BuzzFeed News that McMaster had made similarly derogatory comments about Trump’s intelligence to him in private, including that the president lacked the necessary brainpower to understand the matters before the National Security Council. 

Both Oracle and the Trump administration heatedly denied the comments that Catz later recounted.

Keep in mind that just last month Rex Tillerson, Trump's Secretary of State, was also reported to have called Trump "a moron."

At this point I am ALWAYS going to believe other sources as opposed to officials in this White House simply because lying seems to be job one with them.

And in addition to that we can all see for ourselves that Trump is a fucking moron, so how could we not think that members of his cabinet also see that he is a fucking moron?

We have seen numerous reports in the past that Trump is surrounded by babysitters whose job it is to keep him from destroying his presidency, or the country, from within.

I tend to give a lot more validity to those rather than assurances from this White House that it a giant love fest and that everybody respects the president and admires the job he is doing.

P.S. You knew this was coming.

right-wing conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney just blasted out an email w/subject line: "H.R. McMaster Unfit to Serve Following Pattern of Insubordination to President." Cites BuzzFeed story as example. pic.twitter.com/k84tFMwMpg

— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) November 20, 2017

So predictable.

Donald Trump defends sharing classified information with Russia, and now we know where he got that information.

So Erdogan you wanna hear some classified information? I know some. And I can share it cause I'm the president.

Courtesy of the New York Times:  

A day after his advisers disputed a news article about the conversation, the president focused instead on justifying what he did and blaming those who disclosed it. In a series of early-morning posts on Twitter, he said he had the “absolute right” to give “facts pertaining to terrorism and airline flight safety” to Russia’s foreign minister and ambassador. 

Asked about the conversation by reporters during a later appearance with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey, Mr. Trump again did not deny providing the information, but he instead cast it as an attempt to collaborate with Russia in the war against the Islamic State. “We’re going to have a lot of great success over the coming years, and we want to get as many to fight terrorism as possible,” he said.

I don't see how he is going to "have a lot of success over the coming years" after he is removed from office.

In other news, also by the New York Times, we now know where that information that Trump spilled to those two Russian spies originated: 

The classified intelligence that President Trump disclosed in a meeting last week with Russian officials at the White House was provided by Israel, according to a current and a former American official familiar with how the United States obtained the information. The revelation adds a potential diplomatic complication to the episode. 

Israel is one of the United States’ most important allies and a major intelligence collector in the Middle East. The revelation that Mr. Trump boasted about some of Israel’s most sensitive information to the Russians could damage the relationship between the two countries. It also raises the possibility that the information could be passed to Iran, Russia’s close ally and Israel’s main threat in the Middle East.

Currently Israel is refusing to confirm or deny that they were the source of the classified data, which of course is more or less an admission that they were.

This is especially bad news as Israel is one of America's closest allies in dealing with turmoil in the Middle East.

But hey here is national security adviser, Gen. H. R. McMaster, to explain why none of this is Trump's fault.

BREAKING: NSA McMaster: “The president wasn’t even aware of where this information came from." https://t.co/zewlw83osz

— NBC Nightly News (@NBCNightlyNews) May 16, 2017

Yeah how can the president be expected to keep classified information secret, if he does not even KNOW who provided that classified information?

I mean come on, what is he a mind reader?

Oh god, we are so fucked!