What did Donald Trump do today?

He laid the groundwork for taking Putin's side against Ukraine.

Trump has been anxious to slap his brand on various diplomatic agreements happening between other countries during his second term—and sometimes the branding is quite literal. But he has had no luck in bringing peace to the war between Russian and Ukraine, a conflict where the United States actually has a direct interest, in part because his personal preference to support the Putin regime is at odds with the side of the war the United States is actually on. (Trump also loathes Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose resistance to being strongarmed by Trump into ginning up a fake "investigation" into the Biden family led to Trump's first impeachment.)

Putin, for his part, has been alternating between outright mockery of Trump and what might be charitably described as shining him on. Last week, in a particularly humiliating gesture, he presented Trump's envoy with a medal honoring the service of a young American man who had died fighting for Russia, and whose mother is a CIA official, with instructions to deliver it to her. 

For a while, it seemed as though Trump was starting to grasp that Putin was not even really pretending to negotiate in good faith: he expressed irritation toward Putin, someone he normally has unstinting praise and apparently genuine respect for. But for now, the spell seems to be holding, and this week, Putin will hold a summit meeting with Trump. 

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, was not invited, although international outrage over that fact has led the White House to at least float the idea of a last-minute change of plans.

But whether or not Ukraine receives a token invitation, both Trump and the Putin regime have made clear that the purpose of the meeting is to align Moscow and Washington in order to present an ultimatum to Kyiv. And it looks very much like Trump will be accepting the Putin position without serious opposition: this morning dispatched surrogates to the Sunday morning talk shows to explicitly argue that Russia had "earned" the territory it captured during its invasion. Repeating Trump's own self-branding that he is a "peacemaker," NATO Ambassador Matthew Whitaker responded to Zelenskyy's insistence that Ukraine would not simply allow itself to be carved up this way:

WHITAKER: No big chunks or sections are going to be just given that haven't been fought for or earned on the battlefield. …We need this war to end. We could save thousands of lives with a deal. I think that by both sides communicating by President Trump meeting in Alaska on Friday, with either one or both of the combatants, I think this is, uh, exciting.

Russia has "earned" approximately 25% of Ukraine's territory, killing at least 13,000 civilians in the process, as well as about 80,000 of its soldiers. It launched a war against Ukraine in 2014 after Ukrainians deposed a Russian puppet government, seizing the Crimean peninsula, and escalated it in 2022 with an unprovoked invasion of the remainder of the country.

Vice-President JD Vance, meanwhile, delivered a line that Trump himself has been reluctant to say, most likely because of his enormous personal and political debt to Putin: the United States is "done" helping Ukraine defend itself. 

This would be only the second time in American history that the United States has abandoned an ally in the middle of a war. (The first time happened under Trump, too.)

Why does this matter?

• By Trump's logic, Saddam Hussein "earned" Kuwait, Hitler "earned" everything from Poland to France, the Soviet Union "earned" everything on its side of the Iron Curtain… 

• Presidents who are captive, for whatever reason, to the interests of a foreign power aren't fit for office, and this is why. 

• Betraying an ally like this is disgraceful.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He "joked" with a dictator about illegally staying in power after his term ends.

Trump has spent much of his second term desperately looking for some kind of peace deal he can claim he has brokered, in order to burnish his case for the Nobel Peace Prize he feels he deserves. This has created an opportunity for other nations, who can curry favor with him by "nominating" him. Five countries have done so already, extracting favors in the process. The most recent two countries to do, Azerbaijan and Armenia, allowed Trump to "negotiate" a cease-fire this week, although it had been in the works for years. 

Today, Trump gave Ilham Aliyev, the leader of Azerbaijan, a tour of the White House. Aliyev is a dictator who has held power by force and sham elections for 22 years, and whose family has been in de facto control of the country since the early 1990s. When he told Trump how long he had been in office, Trump replied that that made him "tough and smart"—the same kind of openly admiring language he's used to describe China's Xi Jinping and North Korea's Kim Jong-un for their ability to remain in power.

Trump took the opportunity to show Aliyev a White House office crammed full of "Trump 2028" merchandise, and teased his own plans to cling to power:

TRUMP: You know you're not allowed to run, uh, a — the — so — I mean — 'cause everyone —

ALIYEV: [laughter]

TRUMP: I'm 28 points higher than everyone—

ALIYEV: [laughing] I know. 

TRUMP: The — the — it's funny, so this drives them crazy, look. [Holds up a "Trump 2028" hat]. "Four more years." So that's sorta cool.

The "28 points" number is nonsense: with barely one in three Americans approving of his performance, only one president has ever been this unpopular at this point in their term, and it was Donald Trump in 2017. 

Trump frequently "jokes" about remaining in power after his second term ends, or "wonders" about whether the 22nd Amendment really applies to him. In reality, Trump tried to stay in power in 2020 even after he knew he'd lost a fair election to Joe Biden (according to his own Attorney General), first through frivolous lawsuits, then by attempting to corruptly influence state officials, and finally by inciting a violent insurrection against Congress in an attempt to prevent them from certifying Biden's win.
 

Why does this matter?

• Americans get to choose their own government whether the president likes it or not. 

• It shouldn't be this easy for a dictator of a tiny country to manipulate the President of the United States.  

What did Donald Trump do today?

He ordered still more "criminal" investigations into his political enemies.

Trump has spent his entire political career vowing to use the power of the state to get revenge against the people he thinks of as his enemies. During his first term, his efforts were at least partially thwarted by career prosecutors at the Justice Department and political appointees who refused to completely abandon the DOJ's tradition of independence and political neutrality. But purging the Justice Department ranks of anyone who had shown even the slightest bit of "disloyalty" to Trump was a top priority on his return to office, capped off by installing his personal defense lawyers in the top three roles.

Today, news broke that he has succeeded in getting the DOJ to open investigations into at least two more of the people on his enemies list. New York State Attorney General Letitia James is being "investigated" for successfully suing the Trump Organization for nearly a third of a billion dollars in fraud. Trump has also ginned up an investigation against California Sen. Adam Schiff, whose criticism of Trump seems to get under the skin more effectively than most. Schiff supposedly claimed two different residences as his "primary" one for mortgage purposes, although this is not in and of itself illegal or unethical.

There's a not-too-subtle thread connecting Trump's attacks on James and Schiff: the suit that James won was over Trump's illegal and deceptive valuation of his properties—telling banks they were worth a great deal while at the same time telling tax officials they were worth less. 

Last week, Trump demanded and got an investigation into former Special Counsel Jack Smith, who investigated and brought federal charges against Trump for his theft of highly classified documents after leaving office, and his role in inciting a violent insurrection against Congress on Jan. 6th, 2021, in a last-ditch attempt to stay in power after losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden. (Trump remains liable for prosecution on those matters if and when he leaves office.)

As legal analysts noted today, essentially everything Schiff and James has done has been a matter of public record and, in the case of James's lawsuits, already approved by multiple courts. Neither is likely to result in any prosecution, but that is probably not the endgame. As a political matter, Trump benefits from any distraction from his own overwhelming association with the Epstein scandal. Ironically, given that he and those helping him break the law while in office remain liable for prosecution if and when he leaves office, he also benefits from promoting the idea that all prosecution of political figures is based in corruption. 

Trump is a convicted felon. 

Why does this matter?

• The leader using the justice system to settle personal scores is what happens in tinpot dictatorships. 

• Nobody is above the law in a democracy. 

What did Donald Trump do today?

He opened the door to some funding for science, as long as his political minders approved of it.

Trump released an executive order today establishing litmus tests for politically acceptable scientific research, and empowering his appointees to overrule the expert panels that—until Trump's second term began—were in charge of making decisions about which studies to fund.

Trump appointees like HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have already been open about substituting their judgment for scientifically literate experts where cutting-edge medical research is concerned. But Trump's order mandates that his appointees reject anything they consider politically unacceptable—or think he would—regardless of how strong the expert consensus is in favor of it. 

Trump's idea of installing political minders in research labs has been tried before: in fact, it is an inevitable aspect of scientific research in totalitarian regimes. One particularly close analogy is the Soviet Union under Stalin. Entire fields of research like cybernetics were deemed ideologically offensive by the state and banned. Others, like quantum mechanics or relativity in physics, or most of the social sciences, were permitted only after they had been "camouflaged" in ways that flattered the philosophy of dialectical materialism that was central to Soviet communism. (One thing Trump's order and Soviet commissars have in common is an obsession with seeing Marxism everywhere they look.)

Even then, Soviet scientists were at risk of being caught in political (and sometimes literal) crossfire. In one particularly notable example, Lysenkoism—a form of evolutionary theory that had already been discredited in the Soviet Union and abroad—was elevated to official state doctrine because of its originator's political connections to Stalin. Thousands of scientists who dissented from it lost their positions, and in some cases were jailed or executed as enemies of the state. Because the core idea behind Lysenkoism was incompatible with reality, its adoption effectively halted all progress in agricultural research in the famine-plagued Soviet Union for two decades.

Trofim Lysenko (left) addressing Soviet leaders including Stalin (right) at the Kremlin in 1935.

Lysenkoism had one other significant consequence: it provided the United States with a major victory in the Cold War, as dissident Soviet scientists defected. A similar "brain drain" is already beginning as American researchers accept offers to work in politically stable countries.

Why does this matter?

• Virtually every scientific and technological advance since the 1940s has roots in the American system of science funding built around never, ever doing exactly this. 

• Dictators never tolerate dissent, and they never make exceptions for science.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He convened a political meeting to tell the Justice Department how to shield him from the Epstein scandal—and then canceled it when he got caught.

Tonight, senior officials from the FBI, the DOJ, and the White House are meeting with Vice-President JD Vance to coordinate their political strategy over the scandal that has resulted from Trump's refusal to make good on a campaign promise to release details of the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking ring. Trump and Epstein were close friends for many years, and Trump has steadfastly refused to offer anything but kind words towards Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's convicted co-conspirator in their child sex trafficking operation. He's also repeatedly refused to rule out a pardon or commutation of her sentence.

UPDATE: As of 8 P.M., the meeting has reportedly been canceled, because of the leak that it was happening. The official White House statement is that no such meeting was ever planned, but at the same time sources inside the administration are confirming that it had been set up and then canceled for fear of negative publicity.

Maxwell met with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche last week, and—incredibly—was upgraded to a comparatively luxurious minimum-security "honor dorm" prison in Texas, after her lawyer made clear that she expected to be rewarded for what she said in the interview.

Maxwell was also charged with perjury over lies she told under oath to protect Epstein during a 2016 civil trial. But today, there are reports that Trump is angling for ways to officially reveal Maxwell's assertions to Blanche that she never directly observed Trump engaging in wrongdoing. That appears to be a main part of the agenda for the executive branch summit at the VP's residence tonight.

Outside of a Trump presidency, it is extremely unusual for Justice Department officials to have any contact with the White House about ongoing cases, much less to get their stories straight in order to benefit a sitting president. When former president Bill Clinton had a chance meeting at an airport with then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch in 2016, it was an enormous political scandal, because of the implication that Clinton might have been trying to lobby Lynch on behalf of Hillary Clinton, who was running for president. 

Trump himself went nuclear on the campaign trail over that brief encounter, hyping it as an unprecedented scandal and evidence of a shadowy conspiracy against him.

Even in Trump's first term, there were lines that the attorneys general he handpicked for personal loyalty to him wouldn't cross. Jefferson Sessions recused himself when evidence of Trump's connections to Russian election interference on his behalf became impossible to ignore, allowing a deputy to appoint a special prosecutor. Bill Barr, who was willing to creatively edit that special prosecutor's report to soften its assessment of Trump's complicity, nevertheless quit rather than be involved in Trump's increasingly desperate and unlawful attempts to cling to power after the 2020 election.

But with Blanche and Bondi—both of whom served as Trump's personal defense attorneys in his criminal trials and impeachments—there has been no such reluctance. They and FBI Director Kash Patel have openly embraced Trump's philosophy that the government's law enforcement power is his personal sword and shield, to protect him from any accusations of wrongdoing and punish his enemies. 

Virginia Giuffre was employed as a 16-year-old "masseuse" at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in 2000, and in one of Trump's most recent versions of the story of his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, it was Epstein's "stealing" Giuffre that soured their relationship. (In reality, Trump continued to associate with Epstein at least through 2007.) Epstein and Maxwell raped and trafficked Giuffre, who took her own life earlier this year. Her family released this statement today:

We understand that Vice President JD Vance will hold a strategy session this evening at his residence with administration officials. Missing from this group is, of course, any survivor of the vicious crimes of convicted perjurer and sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein.

Their voices must be heard, above all. We also call upon the House subcommittee to invite survivors to testify. As Virginia Roberts Giuffre's siblings, we offer to represent her in her stead and we hope the administration takes our call to action seriously.

Why does this matter?

• The only "strategy" that the DOJ should care about where child sex trafficking rings are concerned is bringing everyone associated with them to justice.  

• The law does not exist to serve and protect Donald Trump exclusively.  

• At this point, it's pretty much impossible to think of an innocent explanation for Trump's actions over the Epstein scandal.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He said that undocumented immigrants were "naturally" bred to do farm labor.

To hear Trump tell it, there is plenty of labor available to harvest crops on American farms, because he has implemented an elaborate process by which undocumented workers are arrested, detained, deported, somehow given "schooling and learning," and then brought back into the United States as guest workers. 

No such process exists, although Trump has been claiming that it already does. It's not clear whether he understands that this isn't true.

In reality, thanks to ICE crackdowns that specifically targeted agricultural workers, combined with the sudden domestic oversupply thanks to other countries' retaliatory tariffs, crops are rotting in the fields for lack of harvesters even as prices are crashing through the floor. The result is a spiraling debt crisis for American farms that rivals the one from Trump's first term, which required a massive taxpayer bailout.

Trump addressed the subject again today in an interview on CNBC, and he had this to say about the largely Latino population of farmworkers that he is simultaneously trying to drive out of the country and anxious to have work:

TRUMP: We can't let our [farm owners] not have anybody, uhh — you know, these are very, uhh — these people, they're, they're — you can't replace them very easily. You know, people that live in the inner city are not doing that work, they're just not doing that work. And They've tried, we've tried, everybody tried. Uh, They don't do it. These people do it naturally. Naturally. I said what happens if they get into — a farmer, the other day, what happens if they get a bad back. He said, "They don't get a bad back, sir, because if they get a bad back, they die." I said, "that's interesting, isn't it?"

Trump has never really tried to hide his belief that people are "naturally" suited to one kind of life or another based on their race: Jews as "Shylocks" and accountants, Latinos as farm workers and hotel housekeepers and rapists, and so on. 

 As journalist Ashton Pittman and others noted, this is exactly the same kind of racist taxonomy that was used to justify enslaving Africans and their Black American descendants: the idea that the whole race had been built specifically to bear up under brutal labor:

Trump is right about one thing, though: farm labor is physically demanding, dangerous, and brutally hard on bodies of any race. Undocumented workers contribute tens of billions of dollars to Social Security and Medicare every year in the form of payroll taxes, but cannot receive any benefits from them.

Why does this matter?

• Even by Trump standards, this is some racist shit. 

• A U.S. President who sounds exactly like a Confederate Presidency is unfit for office in the 21st century.  

What did Donald Trump do today?

He walked back a plan to exempt cities he doesn't like from FEMA aid the same day he got caught with it.

On Friday, in a statement governing disaster relief aid, the Department of Homeland Security posted rules requiring states and cities to rewrite their own internal policies to conform with Trump's anti-immigrant policies, attacks on gender and minority equality, and foreign policies. Failure to do so would, according to the DHS, render any such location ineligible for disaster relief.

States enjoy sovereignty under the United States Constitution and are not required to govern their own internal affairs according to the president's whims.

Reuters reported on the language this morning, and on its obvious consequence: Trump could simply refuse to provide urgent disaster relief for any place he wanted to punish for political reasons. This is something he's explicitly threatened to do before—and he has, at times, carried out that threat. 

Within hours, Homeland Security walked back the new policy. 

It is possible that Trump himself didn't specifically know about the details of the plan. In fact, it is possible that Trump doesn't know that "he" backed down the moment there was reporting about it, either. Even more so than in Trump's first term, he seems content to delegate much of his actual responsibility to political attack dogs, cronies, or anyone willing to put money in his pocket.

But many of the people Trump put in charge of the executive branch were affiliated with Project 2025, a blueprint for radically reshaping American government so politically toxic that Trump denounced it on the campaign trail and swore he had nothing to do with its "bad ideas." Project 2025 calls for gutting FEMA and other forms of disaster aid.

Why does this matter?

• Political litmus tests to decide whether Americans' lives are worthy of being saved in an emergency is evil even by Trump standards. 

• It is not "discrimination" to disagree with Donald Trump about anything. 

• Policy that can't survive a single day exposed to the light is bad policy. 

• No matter how much he wishes he was, Donald Trump is not a king.
•  

What did Donald Trump do today?

He was very angry very late at night and had to post about it.

Just shy of 2 A.M. this morning, Trump posted this to his private microblogging website:

The very wonderful and talented Lara Trump, whose show is a big ratings success, put racist sleazebag Charlamagne "The God" (Why is he allowed to use the word "GOD" when describing himself? 

[N.B.: Trump appears to be trying to say that Lara Trump had Charlamagne as a guest on her Fox News weekend show.] 

Can anyone imagine the uproar there would be if I used that nickname?). He's a Low IQ individual, has no idea what words are coming out of his mouth, and knows nothing about me or what I have done - like just ending 5 Wars, including a 31 year bloodbath between Republic of the Congo and Rwanda, where Seven Million people have died, and there was no end in sight. He didn't know that, or India and Pakistan or, wiping out Iran's nuclear capabilities, or closing the horrendous open Border, or creating the greatest economy, where prices and Inflation have come way down, and where STUPID and CORRUPT JOE BIDEN set the record for doing the Worst Job as President, EVER. But this dope, Charlamagne, would vote for Sleepy Joe or Kamala? Remember, one year ago our Country was DEAD, now it's the "HOTTEST" Country anywhere in the World. MAGA!!!

There's a lot to unpack here, but it ends in a familiar place: Trump's Epstein cover-up.

Charlamagne Tha God is the stage name of Lenard Larry McKelvey. He adopted the handle as he rose through the hip-hop equivalent of the shock DJ ranks, where oddball names like "Bubba the Love Sponge" or "Wolfman Jack" are common. We don't have to wonder what would happen if Trump compared himself to God, because he's done it many times.

"Low IQ individual" is one of Trump's favorite insults, although one he's very selective about deploying. Here is a gallery of the people he's on record as calling that name:

 
Recently, Trump has been claiming to have "ended" a varying number of wars, usually around five or six. In most cases, the United States has had literally nothing to do with it, and where Trump has actually tried to impose a cease-fire through diplomatic force of will, the results have been deeply embarrassing. This is, by all accounts, part of his campaign to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, something he has been seething about for years because President Obama has one and he doesn't. In fact, Trump pines so openly for that recognition that "nominating" him for the prize seems has become a favorite way for governments looking to manipulate him to curry favor.

But Charlamagne's spot with Lara Trump didn't make Trump mad because he talked about about IQ scores or Nobel prizes. The main thrust of it was his prediction that traditional conservatives would retake control of the Republican Party from Trump. He noted that the very core of Trump's base is already furious with him over his cover-up of the Epstein scandal and his courting of a quid pro quo with Epstein's main accomplice, the convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.

Maxwell was transferred last Thursday to a minimum security, high-privilege "honor dorm" prison camp, in flagrant violation of Bureau of Prison rules for someone convicted of sex crimes against children. The transfer happened shortly after she spoke for nine hours with representatives of the Trump DOJ. The ranking person on the scene was Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, whose previous job was serving as Trump's own criminal defense attorney. Maxwell's attorney made clear that she expected to be rewarded for saying the right things.

Trump has adamantly refused to rule out pardoning Maxwell, and has reiterated several times that he has every right to do so.

Why does this matter?

• There is only one possible reason any president would so stridently protect his right to pardon someone in a criminal child sex trafficking scheme conducted by close friends of his. 

• Assuming telling the truth is off the table, the smart thing for Trump to do now would be to stop drawing attention to the Epstein scandal, which he doesn't seem capable of doing. 

• Thinking that people of color are intellectually inferior is racism. 

• Agitation and emotional instability that becomes worse late in the day is not a sign of good cognitive health.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He got his bluff called on tariffs yet again, this time by India.

Trump has been at pains recently to at least appear to be trying to exert some influence over the Putin regime, which has been embarrassing him by refusing to even entertain his plans for a Trump-branded peace treaty. (Putin believes, probably correctly, that Russia can defeat Ukraine outright as long as the Trump administration keeps the United States from providing aid to its ally.)

But because Trump is personally and financially beholden to Russia, he's also been unwilling or unable to do anything about it. Earlier this week, he hit on a novel solution: sanction another country for doing business with Russia. Or, more accurately, he promised to punish Americans who do business with India because India does business with Russia As part of his blizzard of tariff announcements on Wednesday, he said on his private microblogging site that there would be an additional unspecified "penalty" tax imposed on American consumers of Indian goods as long as India buys Russian oil.

Trump said yesterday that he had "heard" that India was complying with his demands.

Today, the Indian government chose what has become the dominant strategy in dealing with Trump's seemingly random and rarely executed trade decrees: they called his bluff. The oil trade isn't between the two national governments, but private companies, and Indian officials told reporters today that they had no intention of interfering in the long-term contracts that Indian companies had made to import Russian oil. 

In other words, Trump was essentially demanding that India nationalize its oil industry in order to comply with a policy he announced in a late-night tweet.

To be sure, the extra taxes Americans pay on imported goods because of Trump's tariff decrees are, to some extent, going into effect. U.S. consumers are already seeing the effect of triple the former tax collection on everything from the raw materials used in housing construction to groceries to pharmaceuticals to cell phones. At least until a court says otherwise—something that seems fairly likely in the next few months—Trump's words have real consequence.

But the "deals" he's announced involving vague promises of foreign investment have mostly been shams and, without exception, have no legal effect. The real intention seems to be to allow Trump to save face and burnish his image as a "dealmaker."

Why does this matter?

• It's hard to bluff when no one takes you seriously. 

• Americans' economic security is more important than making Donald Trump look like a tough negotiator. 

• A president who wanted to punish the Putin regime would punish the Putin regime.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He fired the person who brought him bad news about the effect of his choices on the economy.

There was absolutely terrible jobs news today: not only did the country barely add any jobs in July, but the initial projections for May and June were much too high. In other words, the United States is now in the third month of an abrupt labor slump that started almost exactly when American businesses started having to deal with the fallout from Trump's trade war.

 

Trump's response was to fire the head of the bureau that generates those statistics, Erika McEntarfer, and claim that she was a Biden appointee and therefore out to get him with "RIGGED" numbers.

The kind of manipulation Trump is imagining would be impossible to do. The data gathered by the federal government related to the economy come from a wide variety of different sources outside of the government itself and is plugged into publicly available formulas to generate the top-line numbers. Tampering with all of these numbers at the source would be impossible, and changing them after the fact would be easy to detect.

But there is another way that a malicious actor could undermine confidence in the federal government's economic statistics—that is, besides simply declaring that the numbers were "RIGGED" like Trump did and hoping people believed him. If the government collected less information, and had fewer staff to process and report on what they did collect, then the results it generated would become less certain and easier to manipulate. (That's especially true if the president publicly fired anyone who brought him numbers he didn't like.)

Trump ordered the Bureau of Labor Statistics to radically scale back its data collection relating to inflation and unemployment almost immediately after taking office. He also disbanded an expert advisory committee on economic statistics, and ordered changes to how key financial indices like the Consumer Price Index were calculated.

Trump knows a thing or two about fudging numbers, even ignoring the fact that he was convicted of 34 felony counts related to faking the numbers in his business records to cheat banks and evade taxes. He campaigned in 2016 on the lie that the Obama administration was concealing 42% unemployment—meaning that about twice as many people were unemployed as during the Great Depression, and only he had noticed. After he took office and the first monthly jobs report showed that he had inherited Obama's excellent numbers, he claimed that they had suddenly become real.

Why does this matter?

• If you wanted to sabotage the American economy once and for all, you'd make sure nobody could trust anything the American government said about it. 

• Making the numbers look better for Donald Trump won't help Americans who have actually lost their jobs or can't find work.

• Convicted felons who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

• Killing the messenger who dares to bring you bad news is what dictators do. 

• Screaming "it wasn't my fault" every time something goes wrong isn't what a leader does.