The Only Win Donald Trump Wants is His

"I'm not saying the're rooting for Ameica to lose," the former press secretary to President George W. Bush states, "but they're not saying America wants to win."

Dana Perino on Democrats and Iran: “I think they are trying to separate themselves so much from Donald Trump that, I’m not saying they are rooting for America to lose.. but they are not saying America wants to win.”pic.twitter.com/MQ27X0jpda

— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) May 26, 2026

Donald J. Trump on October 30, 2022 tweeted on Truth Unsocial "Our Country is Rigged, Crooked, and Evil."  During the first Cabinet meeting of his second term, on February 26, 2025, Trump stated "our country has gotten bloated, fat, and disgusting". The day after speaking to mainland Chinese president Xi Jinping in mid-May, Donald remarked on Untruth Social "When President Xi very elegantly referred to the tremendous damage we suffeed during the four years of Sleepy Joe Biden and the Biden Administration and on that score, he was 100% correct."

Sure sounds like a President who wants America to win! Not.  Nor is it only words which confirm Trump's preference that the USA decline or as Perino might put it, not to win. On Wednesday, January 24, 2024, Donald 

privately pressured Senate Republicans to “kill” a bipartisan deal to secure the U.S. border because he doesn’t want President Joe Biden to chalk up a win ahead of the 2024 presidential election, according to a source familiar with the tenuous negotiations on the package.

Trump directly reached out to several GOP senators on Wednesday to tell them to reject any deal, said this source, who requested anonymity to speak freely. The GOP presidential frontrunner also personally reached out to some Senate Republicans over the weekend, the source told HuffPost.

“Trump wants them to kill it because he doesn’t want Biden to have a victory,” said the source. “He told them he will fix the border when he is president… He said he only wants the perfect deal.”

If the perfect deal- nearly impossible- had been achieved, it still woldn't have been perfect in Trump's eyes. As a zero-sum devotee, Donald doesn't want anything good for the other because he assumes that would be bad for him. And of course, Donald Trump is the only cause Donald Trump is interested in. Hence, he supports only what is bad for whomever or whatever he considers his adversary, irrespective of whether it is good, or a win, for this country.

Dana Perino can only speculate about motives of Democrats. We know what Donald Trump's motive always is, and it's he, not us.

Share |

Making It Up

On January 7, MSNBC anchormen/women/persons David Shuster and Tamryn Hall were discussing Rush Limbaugh's recent treatment for chest pains in Queens Hospital in Hawaii. After playing a tape of Limbaugh saying "Real reform of the health care system would involve nothing like we have done in the House and Senate: Cost control, increasing access to health care," Hall commented "Is Rush kind of changing his tune? At first it was nothing was wrong with our system, and now he is bringing up what the Democrats have said all along: It's a cost issue."

This really got Rush's dander up and he claimed

Now, the real funny thing in this sound bite was that they quote me as saying, "There's nothing wrong with the US health care system," but what I was talking about in Honolulu was private health care. I got private health care.

As the video (below, but choppy) indicates, Limbaugh at the press conference upon his discharge stated

The treatment I received here is the best that the world has to offer. Based on what happened here, I don't think there is one thing wrong with the American health care system. It is working just fine, just dandy and..... I got no special treatment.

Nothing in there about his care having specifically been "private health care." Nothing about the private sector, the public sector, fee for service, insurance companies; only "the best that the world has to offer," a system "working just fine, just dandy" and not just for him ("no special treatment.")

Perhaps Rush Limbaugh, inexperienced at speaking into a microphone, singularly inarticulate, and unfamiliar with health care issues (well, that part may be true), really had intended to talk solely about "private health care," as he claimed.

Or maybe he was lying. This is not so extraordinary in GOP-land. On November 24, former Bush 43 press secretary Dana Perino told Sean Hannity "we did not have a terrorist attack on our cuntry during President Bush's term" (video way below). On the December 27 edition of CNN's State of the Union, veteran GOP operative Mary Matalin imagined "I was there, we inherited a recession from President Clinton, and we inherited the most tragic attack on our own soil in our nation's history." On Matalin's calendar, September 11, 2001 preceeded January 20, 2001.

Now along comes former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who on ABC's Good Morning America on January 8 asserted "We had no domestic attacks under Bush; we've had one under Obama."

As tristero notes January 8 on Digby's Hullabaloo blog, there are the complicating matters of the anthrax terrorism, Richard Reid, the July 4, 2002 on El Al at LAX, and attacks on abortion clinics in 2001, 2005, 2006, and 2007. And those do not include the attack on the World Trade Center and related effort to hit Congress with a plane, which thankfully ended in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Presumably, Giuliani did not consider the 9/11/01 incident a "domestic attack" or forgot about it. He was only mayor of New York City at the time.

There is a point to the sarcasm. Rudy Giuliani did not forget, nor is his definition of a "domestic attack" idiosyncratic. He is not stupid, crazy, or being ironic. He was l-y-i-n-g.

And as if to confirm that impression: minutes earlier, at 3:33 p.m., CNN's Rick Sanchez read a release he received at that moment from a spokesman for Mr. Giuliani, who claimed the latter had been "clearly talking post-9/11 about Islamic attacks on our soil." Post 9/11? Clearly?

It's not just Rush, or about health care, anymore.

Superficial Idea

Anyone remember Babe Dahlgren?

Of course you don't, even if, unfortunately, you are a Yankees fan. Dahlgren is the fellow who replaced baseball legend and Hall of Famer Lou Gehrig at first base in 1939. Still, we can't quite shake Dana Perino, who replaced as President George W. Bush's press secretary the late Tony Snow, certainly not the equal to Gehrig in longevity, but a giant at his position.

Perino posts at The Corner on National Review Online relative to the Governor Sanford affair:

While I am not able to explain, I do think I know the answer to all of this: Elect more women. No woman I know has the time for such trysts, nor do I know any who say the desire one. They’re too busy trying to keep all the plates spinning at home, at work, and at the gym to make sure none fall and break.

She is partially correct- she is "not able to explain," because there is no sensible explanation. In fact, her prescription makes no sense, given that electing someone precisely because she (or he) has little time for the job is counter-intuitive and reflects little concern for the position she (or he) would be assuming.

There is, as you are thinking now, a better, and more global, reason to reject Perino's thinking. As blogger Kate Klonick, inspired by the words of the 37th president, writes (posts?)

That argument strikes me as awfully similar to that made by Richard Nixon, in his recently released tapes. “I don’t do it because I’m for women,” he said to then GOP Chairman George H.W. Bush, about supporting women for election. “But I’m doing it because (a) woman might win some place where a man might not.” Doesn’t seem like the Republican backing of women in office is any less utilitarian now than it was then.

As for Mrs. Perino's remark that she knows of no women who "desire" to have "such trysts," one (rhetorical) question jumps to mind: wasn't the individual with whom the South Carolina governor having a "tryst" a woman?

On McClellan

You've heard some of the prominent members of the Bush administration, past or present, criticize former press secretary Scott McClellan for the revelations in his new book "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception."

Karl Rove (former Deputy Chief of Staff and chief strategist): "First of all, this doesn't sound like Scott. It really doesn't. Not the Scott McClellan I've known for a long time. Second of all, it sounds like somebody else. It sounds like a left-wing blogger. Second of all, you're right. If he had these moral qualms, he should have spoken up about them."

Dan Bartlett (former White House counselor): "Scott McClellan was not the press secretary. He was the deputy press secretary who dealt with domestic issues. So, he would not have even been really have access to the types of meetings and deliberations that the president participated in."

Dana Perino (White House spokeswoman): "Scott, we now know, is disgruntled about his experience at the White House. For those of us who fully supported him, before, during and after he was press secretary, we are puzzled. It is sad. This is not the Scott we knew."

Ari Fleischer (former White House press secretary): "I'm just scratching my head about this book. There are just parts of here that just do not sound like Scott McClellan. So it's got his name on it, and Scott knows that, he's said the chips will fall will they may. ... But on principle and on policy, this doesn't make any sense to me because if it did, I think Scott would have expressed it privately and repeatedly."

The attacks on McClellan have one thing in common: no one denies what he said- no one has said that it is simply not true. Fleischer comes closest- it "doesn't make any sense to me" obviously comes from someone not in a position to know one way or another. One of Rove's remarks is the most amusing: "if he had these moral qualms, he should have spoken out about them." Here the rhetorical question of MSNBC's David Shuster is appropriate: "are Administration officials trying to do with McClellan what officials did to war critic Joe Wilson?" And to the attacks upon Scott McClellan because he participated, however unwittingly, in the Administration's coverrup, MSNBC's Chris Matthews asked "what's wrong with a whore escaping the whorehouse?"

But I give the Bushies some credit for their response to Scott McClellan's charges: in choosing not to deny categorically the accusations, they displayed an uncharacteristic reluctance to lie.