No. Just, no.

Yesterday, the White House press secretary Sean Spicer showed a more relaxed and pleasant side of himself, remarkably different from his usual white-knuckled combative stance at the podium.

He commented on the most recent Labor Department report on employment, which said that in February, 235,000 jobs were added to the US labor market, and unemployment dropped to a mere 4.7 percent. While it's a matter of debate how much of this is due to the current president, and how much is the lasting long term effect of decisions made by the previous president, it certainly is good news. The unemployment remains low, at least for now, after a 7 year streak of consecutive drops under Obama. Sure, just as many jobs were added both in February 2016 and February 2015, but it's not bad. And, well, looking closer at the statistics, the unemployment rate actually increased slightly both in December 2016 and January 2017, so it's still not quite as low as it was in November 2016 at 4.6 percent, before Donald Trump won the election and couldn't reasonably take any credit, but still: the curve hasn't turned immediately and sharply upwards under President* Trump, and that's good, right?

Graph by Ben Moore - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

The problem here for the Trump administration is that President* Trump has always slammed these Labor Department reports as "phony" and claimed that they are "total fabrications" which can't be trusted. On his campaign trail, he consistently tried to muddle the waters by saying that "actual" unemployment numbers were much higher and could be "as much as 28% or 29%, even 35%", or some other number he appeared to make up on the fly. On at least one occasion, he told a particularly whopping lie and claimed that the unemployment was actually 42 percent, which is nothing short of ludicrous. An echo of this insanely inflated figure was still heard in his address to the Congress just a couple of weeks ago, when he claimed that "94 million Americans are out of the labor force". Technically, that's true: 94 million US citizens over the age of 16 are not working. However, most of them are either retired, still in school, or spouses choosing to stay at home. Only about 11 million of those 94 million people are actually looking for a job.

During his campaign, Donald Trump had a political agenda to slam President Obama for creating an "American carnage" with nation-wide unemployment high and on the rise, and therefore he had to ignore the facts that unemployment has been dropping consistently each year since a high mark of 10 percent when President Obama took office in 2009.

Of course, one of the journalists in the press room asked the pertinent question if we should believe the statistics from the Labor Department, considering that the president had called bogus on every single one of these reports for well over a year. Spicer suddenly looked very relieved and offered this response with a broad smile that looked absolutely sincere:

“I talked to the president prior to this, and he said to quote him very clearly: They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now.”

Spicer literally said this with a laugh, and the press corps joined in the laughter. It was a moment of bonding between information worker professionals, finally agreeing over something that had long been a point of unnecessary contention. Adding to the fun was that everybody, quite possibly Spicer included, enjoyed silently mocking the President for his utterly stupid remark. For a moment, the press room seemed a little brighter and the air felt easier to breathe.

And then, unfortunately, they moved on.

I understand. They needed the laugh. It was a moment of much needed comic relief, a rare occasion where Spicer could face the press with some dignity and quote the president word for word on a sensitive issue, instead of having to think of yet another lie to tell on behalf of his delusional boss. I laughed, too. It was a nice, human moment in a room which had been sullied by fights, anger and bizarre lies for much too long. I totally get it. But we must think more carefully about it.

This is not a laughing matter. Not at all. President* Trump does not get to decide when we are to believe in government issued statistics, when we should consider it "real" and when we are to disregard it as "fake news". The Labor Department has used exactly the same methods to generate the data point for February 2017 as it has for every month for many years, and if this month's figures are reliable, they all are. If the unemployment starts to rise, we will surely see President* Trump denouncing the reports as "phony" once again. After all, it was only a month ago when the President said about his declining popularity ratings, apparently in full earnest:

 "Any negative polls are fake."

President* Trump is fickle beyond belief and shows a reckless disregard for the truth whenever he speaks. The fact that we could find a way to laugh at one of his stupid lies this once does not mean that he can get away with it. A person who wants to decide what is true and what is false, in a totally arbitrary manner based on nothing but his own opinions and his own brittle ego, is not a person fit to be the president of a democracy. Only a person with the mindset of a dictator would even try to get a monopoly on the truth. President* Trump is very obviously not fit for his job.

Deflection by reflection, objection by projection

Throughout the Trump campaign, there was a peculiar pattern to Donald Trump's knee-jerk responses and his vile slander of opponents: most of his accusations against others can be interpreted as reflections of himself. His derisive name-calling with puerile attributes include "lying Ted" and "crooked Hillary". He often calls his critics "weak", "fake" and "phony". Looking at how his first term as president has started, most of those attributes which he assigns to others are in fact applicable to himself. Perhaps the most telling moment was when Hillary Clinton, in one of the televised presidential debates, accused Donald Trump outright of being Putin's puppet. Donald Trump interrupted by responding "No puppet. No puppet. You're the puppet". This is a response at the intellectual level of a five-year-old, but let's not dwell on that. Hillary Clinton was certainly not a puppet of Putin, nor of anyone else. Donald Trump, however, has showed time and time again that he refuses to say anything even remotely negative about Putin, for unknown and inexplicable reasons. It's getting difficult to ignore that elephant in the room, and we see a slow but constant trickle of revelations around his alleged ties to Russia.

During his campaign, Donald Trump accused Hillary Clinton of being mentally unfit for the presidency. Now we see him struggling to even pretend he has what it takes for the job. Republicans built a "psychological profile" of Hillary during the campaign, but the candidate who would really have needed that profiling was Donald Trump.

There are many more examples of this, too numerous to list. Trump's pattern of projection is pervasive and consistent, so much so that it seems like a personality trait. Does this behavior extend to more than personal insults during debates? Shortly after the Russian interference with the election process started, but before it became publicly known, Trump started shouting about how the election was rigged in Hillary's favor. Could that have been an inadvertent admission that he knew it was actually being rigged in his favor?

The incumbent 45th President of the United States is lying more often than he tells the truth. We already knew that, and whenever he says "believe me" or "it's true", experience tells us that his claims are almost certain to be false. However, there could be a lesson here. When Donald Trump accuses someone else of something, we should suspect that those very accusations could apply to himself. It might be suppressed self-criticism, even a subconscious admission of guilt, or it might just be that he lacks enough imagination to make up an accusation from scratch. In any case, whenever he accuses someone of something, we should perhaps consider using the retort of an annoying child:

"I know you are, but what am I?"

Next up: OMG Aliens!!!

Investigative journalists should rightfully be considered heroes for what they have done in recent weeks to dig into the many convoluted mysteries involving Russia and President* Trump. One tell-tale sign that they are on the right track, or at least closing in on something, is that the attempts at misdirection from Trump and his apologists are now rapidly becoming ever more outlandish and desperate.

A week ago, Trump finally realized that his old ghost story about Hillary Clinton being his constant adversary didn't work any more. Therefore, he invented another bogeyman lurking behind every corner: his evil nemesis Barack Obama. When that didn't stick either, he tried to dodge the fallout by asking for a congressional investigation into his baseless allegations, but instead he made matters worse. Congress took him both seriously and literally, and honored his request. The investigation is very unlikely to find any justification for the claims of Obama having ordered wire taps on his phones in Trump Tower, but it's quite likely to turn up even more dirt on Donald Trump, and soon.

Enter the right-wing conspiracy theorists. Sean Hannity, talk show host of Fox News infamy, scrambled to the rescue of a cornered President* Trump. Hannity now hilariously tries to push a fabricated story that the CIA was behind the interference with the 2016 election, and that they shifted the blame on Russia by leaving a false forensic trail. The idea is, of course, completely bonkers when you look at the facts. It's nothing more than a desperate last-ditch attempt to divert attention from a story that's starting to become really inconvenient. The fervent and categorical denials by the Trump administration of any ties whatsoever to Russia have been proven wrong on several points, which only adds to the feeling that they have something to hide.

What's next? The Pope? The UN? The Amish? UFO:s? Look out, liberal alien overlords are hiding behind the Moon, and tapping all the phones in Trump Tower using an army of clones that would all look exactly like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton if they weren't invisible! No, no, no, don't look over there, Russia is a ruse, Donald Trump has no connections to Russia, and neither does any of the people he works with. Well, maybe some of them, but OMG ALIENS!

Hint: it's not working.

Impeachably offensive

At the Philadelphia Convention back in 1787, Benjamin Franklin noted that history had seen undesirable persons in government positions - people who in Franklin's words had "rendered themselves obnoxious". The old school way of removing such persons from office was by assassination, but Franklin wisely suggested making the US Constitution allow for a more civilized method: impeachment. Through this method, it's possible to remove from office the President, Vice President, any member of the cabinet and any federal judge, by votes and due process in Congress.

Valid grounds for impeachment are treason, bribery, or "high crimes and misdemeanors". The last of those three is not entirely well defined, but it's meant to cover acts that might not be criminal offenses as such if committed by an ordinary citizen, but constitute a breach of trust or abuse of power from a high ranking government official with special powers and special obligations. In military courts, such acts include perjury, abuse of authority, intimidation, misuse of assets, failure to supervise, dereliction of duty, unbecoming conduct, and refusal to obey a lawful order, and that definition can reasonably be applied to presidential "high crimes" as well.

An interesting fact about perjury is that it is usually taken to mean "lying under an oath of truth", but when the Constitution was written, it had the wider meaning of violation of any oath. The president and all members of cabinet, in fact any person taking a government job in the US, are sworn in by taking an oath of office, and can reasonably be considered under oath at all times. This means that lying in public about a substantial matter with the purpose of misleading, while holding any position of office for the US government, can be considered perjury.

To initiate the process of impeachment, the House of Representatives is required to first ask the Judiciary Committe to investigate whether such grounds exist, and a majority of the committee needs to decide to proceed with the matter. Formal impeachment then requires a majority vote in the House.

If a majority of the House votes for impeachment, it falls to the Senate to conduct a trial, first considering arguments and evidence from both sides and listening to the witnesses each side chooses to call, and then passing judgment. Conviction requires a two-thirds majority vote by the Senate. If considered guilty, the impeached person is immediately removed from office, while acquittal allows the person to remain. In addition to removal from office, Senate may extend the judgment to include disqualification, which bars the convicted person from holding any future government office.

Only two US presidents have ever been impeached (Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998), and both were acquitted by the Senate. Richard Nixon was heading for impeachment in 1974, but resigned before any impeachment vote was held. For both Nixon and Clinton, the "high crime" was lying in public. Nixon lied to cover up illegal wire taps against his political opponents, and Clinton lied to cover up a sexual relation with a White House intern.

President* Trump lies all the time, about matters great and small, seemingly without any qualms or hesitation, and without remorse or repentance when he is caught and called out for it. That is not normal, and it constitutes a violation of his solemn oath to "well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office".

Will we finally see this section of the Constitution being applied successfully? There appears to be some reasons already. Feel free to use the checklist below as the Trump scandal unfolds.

• Treason
• Bribery
• Perjury
• Abuse of authority
• Intimidation
• Misuse of assets
• Failure to supervise
• Dereliction of duty
• Unbecoming conduct
• Refusal to obey a lawful order

Brace for Impact

The end is near. But, fortunately, only for President* Trump and an unknown number of his associates. The world will keep going, and hopefully we will all come out of this nightmare a little wiser.

Don't Care Act

President* Donald Trump seems determined to champion the proposed Republican health care bill and negotiate it himself with Congress. Republicans are very eager to try to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, popularly referred to as "Obamacare". The official name of the new legislation is "America's Health Care Act".

Judging from how little effort appears to have been spent creating the bill, how even Republicans seem reluctant to embrace it, and how it would make millions of US citizens lose their coverage, a better name would be the "America's Don't Care Act".

Going unchecked

March 7, in an early morning Twitter rant, President* Trump made this claim:

122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!

"Gitmo" refers to the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay naval base, "GTMO", that was set up in 2002 to hold terrorist suspects. A simple fact check, one phone call away for the man commanding a small army of intelligence professionals, would have told him something different. His statement is completely false, like so many other statements he has made.

The probable cause for this particular tweet was a passage an hour earlier on Fox News, where they quoted statistics from an old National Intelligence report from September 2016. Trump assumed, without bothering to ask anyone for confirmation, that all of these 122 people must have been released during Obama's presidency. That was implied by Fox by not stating when it happened, but they never said it straight out.

The reason Fox never said it is, of course, that it isn't true. Of those 122 prisoners, 113 were released by the Bush administration, and only 9 were let out under Obama's watch.

Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, mounted a pathetic first defense a few hours later by trying to claim that "of course the President meant in totality" and referred to prisoners released either by Bush or Obama. That is completely false on its face, because that is not what the President's tweet said. The text reads "released by the Obama administration".

The next day, Spicer instead tried a different approach and said that under the Bush administration, "most of the releases" were court-ordered, while Obama had an agenda to release everybody and close the camp. Obama certainly had that goal, and he was very vocal about it, but once again, Spicer's statement is completely false. Checking the facts, the proportion of court-ordered releases from Gitmo during the Bush presidency was around 4%. Thus, not even a handful of the 113 releases were court ordered. Calling a 4% fraction "most of the releases" is, once again, completely false. Coming from the official spokesperson of the White House, it's nothing short of a deceptive and nefarious lie.

Defending a lie with more lies, and not even bothering to make any of those lies hard to reveal, does not exactly make things better for the deeply troubled Trump administration.