in which the bromancer gets the week off to a good start, oh a very good start ...

The pond was delighted to come across this in Gitta Sereny's Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth:

"He always enjoyed driving a wedge between his people," Speer told me. "It was a childish pastime which he mistook for shrewd management."

And with that snap of empire dreaming and a suitable donation to the Godwin's Law swear jar, please allow the pond to start the week by finishing off it its weekend reptile reading, with another dose of "it's all good, please not the corn field, it's all good" optimism, and who better than the bromancer to deliver the goods?

Now some might think this a win-win scenario for the pond. If at some point in the not too distant future, the bromancer's rose-coloured glasses cop a blow roughly equivalent to Larry Kudlow predicting the last great recession then the pond could gloat in an unseemly fashion and say "I told ya so".

And the pond could then use this as evidence that the bromancer is a delusional doofus.

But it's actually a lose-lose situation.

The world's already in enough trouble, so there's no joy in another disaster, and for what? The pond has long known that the bromancer is inclined to barking mad musing - witness his long-time support for the onion muncher. It goes without saying he's a delusional doofus ...

Speaking of Kudlow, this came along recently, now that he's raring to go and he has a tough new plan for dealing with China:

A thought that I have is the United States could lead a coalition of large trading partners and allies against China, or to let China know that they’re breaking the rules left and right… That’s the way I’d like to see. You call it a sort of a trade coalition of the willing…

Oh dear ...

...Yet Kudlow’s “trade coalition of the willing” is exactly the plan that Trump had abolished at the start of his presidency. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, was a US-led trade agreement that includes 12 countries around the Pacific Rim, who together account for about 40% of the world’s GDP, but excludes China. Just three days after his inauguration, Trump, who had argued that the TPP could harm American manufacturing, pulled the US out of the trade deal, just as he promised on the campaign trail. (here)

Never mind, everything is looking up, everything is good, please the pond is ready for it, unleash the bromancer …

Indeed, indeed. What the United States needs is a trade coalition of the willing.

Wait, wait, the pond's irony meter has already hit eleven, and the bromancer has barely got going … is it too early for a cartoon?

Never mind, who'd have thought the pond would discover an ounce of sympathy for Rex doing his rexit, cruelly impersonated by John Goodman bleating about a moron, and denounced by the bromancer as dithering and ineffective, as if Rex boy was the heart of the problem ...

And so to a little more bromancer moonshine, singing another verse of "it's all good, no corn field this day" ...

Ah the Graudian and the NY Times and all the other usual bromancer/Donald windmills worthy of the usual reptile tilt.

But here's the thing. Once upon a time, a site like Politico was reckoned to have a Republican tilt …

These days? It's an endless rotating set of headlines attempting to deal with the Donald madness. The hapless site has jumped the shark and gone full cable Donald …

  

These stories are all easy to find, but in a way, they're irrelevant, like attempting to keep track of the latest Donald rant on twitter …

They're just another way of saying you'd have to be living on another planet to think that American politics at the moment is in any way balanced or remotely sane …

Apparently Elon Musk whisked the bromancer off to Mars in an early unpublicised attempt to demonstrate the benefit of living in an alternative universe …

Never mind Mueller and the Ruskis, the pond still has great hopes for Stormy Daniels, given yet another showing in The New Yorker here ...

...The Trump team’s response to the Clifford debacle seems to have been driven by the President’s vanity, temper, and resentment. All of those have also been on display in his larger response to Mueller’s investigation, from his firing of James Comey, the F.B.I. director—an action that exposed him to possible obstruction-of-justice charges—to his apparent desire, last week, to fire Andrew McCabe, Comey’s former deputy, just days before McCabe’s retirement, in a petty attempt to deny him his full benefits. For a man who has built a career on bluffing and intimidation, Trump is surprisingly clumsy when it comes to those tactics, and oblivious of their costs.

After all, why didn’t the President sign the agreement? Did he never intend to, or could he just not be bothered? With Trump, it can be hard to tell bad will from bad lawyering. He regularly demands that his subordinates operate in accordance with what he thinks the law ought to be, rather than what it is. This has been the case in his berating of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, for failing to make problems go away, and, last week, in reports that Trump’s lawyers were considering trying to block the broadcast, now scheduled for March 25th, of an interview that Anderson Cooper conducted with Clifford for “60 Minutes.” There is no legal rationale for such prior restraint. But it wouldn’t be the first time that the President has indicated that he believes he has, or should have, the power to silence the press. 

Then again, Trump’s circle might be trying to enforce Clifford’s confidentiality agreement not for its own sake but in order to send a message to other people, who may have signed similar agreements, about the cost of breaking them. (“In my experience, bullies have one speed and one speed only,” Avenatti told The New Yorker. “They don’t just bully one person. They bully many people.”) A hearing in the case is set for July 12th, in Los Angeles; Clifford has set up an online crowdfunding page to defray her legal costs, which may be considerable. She won’t be the only one with bills like that. In Washington these days, many people find themselves in sudden need of a good lawyer—above all, the President.

And so to the rest of the bromancer, and here, spoiler alert, the pond will note the favourite tactic of humbugging reptiles.

The routine runs thusly: "only a fool would try to defend all of Trump's actions and his many self-contradictory statements."

Only a bromancing fool would then go on to earnestly explain why the Donald is right when it matters …

What's so piquant about that last burst of Trumpian boosterism from the delusional doofus known as the bromancer?

Well the reason that the pond wasn't so keen on the TPP was the way it reinforced all of the United States usual restrictions in favour of its export content industries - the pond is well over region coding - but if that's your inclination, to revert to that earlier link ...

The TPP requires members to commit to heightened standards in areas like labor law, environmental protection, and intellectual property (IP), in addition to lowering tariffs. Former US president Barack Obama framed the TPP, one of his signature foreign-policy initiatives, as an effort to set free-trade standards in Asia ahead of China. If China were to join the partnership, it would have to crack down on all the things Trump has complained about, from dumping to stealing American IP. A revised version of the TPP was signed by 11 nations this month…

... It remains unclear to what extent Kudlow’s views will influence Trump, particularly as another trade adviser, Peter Navarro—seen by many China specialists as a protectionist extremist stuck in the 1980s—is now one of the strongest voices on trade in the White House. What’s almost certain is that Trump’s preferred way of reining in China on trade paves the way for a full-blown trade war that would eventually hurt American businesses.

Oh yes, talk about irredeemable stupidity and silliness …

Oh, it's been a good week, no cornfield for the bromancer or the pond …and this week will be even better, the pond is sure of it …