Moats. EU countries need more moats. by @BloggersRUs

Moats. EU countries need more moats.

by Tom Sullivan

Moats are what's needed! Moats with alligators. And walls of barbed wire. The kind that stopped Steve McQueen and his motorcycle. Guard towers with machine guns. Free travel in EU = BAD.


Steve McQueen, stopped by barbed wire in The Great Escape (1963).

After opening the NATO summit yesterday by insulting Germany and other allies, the sitting U.S. president, in an unannounced press conference in Brussels this morning, repeated with a smirk that he is a very stable genius.

"That's other people that do that. I don't. I'm very consistent. I'm a very stable genius," says president Trump when asked if his rhetoric on NATO will change in tweets. pic.twitter.com/ETmuS9Mw8B

— CBS This Morning (@CBSThisMorning) July 12, 2018
Just ahead of that news conference, Axios reported the sitting president doesn't like the paint job on Air Force One. He calls it "a Jackie Kennedy color." He wants something bolder, something "more American" in red, white, and blue. The Air Force will love it. Axios notes Donald Trump will likely have to win a second term to ride on it. The new pair of tricked-out Boeing 747s are not due to go into service before January 20, 2021.

Scoop: Trump wants tough new Air Force One paint jobhttps://t.co/A3GNCpaf41 pic.twitter.com/DGe2QdkWiB

— Axios (@axios) July 12, 2018
He wants a new, bigger bed on board too, more like the one he has on his private plane. There's no word on whether Donald Trump has asked yet for a Doomsday Machine.

Mike Allen writes:
When I told presidential historian Michael Beschloss about Trump's plans, he replied: "Why would anyone want to discard an Air Force One design that evokes more than a half-century of American history?"
The question answers itself, doesn't it?

Grand Bargain

If you have not been following Marcy Wheeler (emptywheel), you need to. The text message she revealed getting 14 hours after the 2016 polls closed that predicted Michael Flynn would be working with “Team Al-Assad” within 48 hours? It now appears it is connected to a deal for Trump to strike a “Grand Bargain” with Russian president Putin. Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the U.A.E. hope to coax Putin into pushing Iran out of Syria in exchange for acceding to his annexation of Crimea. For that, foreign players needed a cooperative U.S. president and a secret meeting in the Seychelles. Wheeler believes her mysterious source has ties to the "grand bargain":
Subsequent to my interview with the FBI, I realized certain things about publicly available information. I’ve never shared that realization with the government, but it’s a realization they undoubtedly came to on their own from the same publicly available information.

And that realization I had and the government surely also had would have changed the importance of evidence Mueller received via means unrelated to Peter Strzok.

That evidence likely implicates the President directly.
You want to be following this. Besides Ukraine, what else is the very stable genius ready to deal away next week in Helsinki?

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