The Trump Presidency

Or, more hopefully, these ass-weasels will be voted out of office for failing to deliver on quite literally THE keystone promise they ran on... and then Democrats can focus on fixing/correcting the damage the Republicans did to the ACA.

 

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You will be chosen for president, If Trum fit you will also fit

 

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"U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin held a second, previously undisclosed conversation during a dinner for G20 leaders at a summit earlier this month in Germany, a White House official confirmed on Tuesday."
src: Reuters
oh oh another scandal a brewing....

 

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There's always hope, but the nearest election is several months away, and the record is thirty years of consistent amnesia and obedient belief in whatever Hannity said five minutes ago. You're talking about a mass of voters who blamed Obama for the budget deficit in 2009 - and the bank bailout in 2008, the Iraq War, the various government shutdown attempts, and the failure of Congress to get anything done.

 

Yeah, that's deeply disturbing. But the Trump administration has had so many scandals people are becoming immune to them. This is all deeply disturbing stuff. I don't find the meetings in and of themselves disturbing. I find the secrecy around them deeply disturbing. I suspect Putin has Trump on the hook, and Trump is squirming. Russia undoubtedly has much on Trump, and Trump knows it. Putin is pressuring Trump to lift sanctions. Putin wants his American intelligence assets back. Putin desperately wants sanctions relief, and he wants to see a return on his Trump investment. Trump is no doubt in a tough spot.

What's troubling is the fact Trump has successfully stalled a bill in the US House of Representatives which would impose tighter sanctions and make it more difficult for Trump to lift sanctions. Trump desperately wants to give Russia its American intelligence assets back, and Putin wants them back. Trump wants to lift all Russian sanctions. I think it was part of the deal he made with Putin. But he can't. It's not politically viable. Trump has got is privates stuck in a meat grinder. That's probably why he wanted to create a private back channel communications with Russia which would circumvent American counter intelligence. Trump needs to explain to Putin why he cannot deliver his end of the bargain. Putin's got Trump over the barrel. Putin could begin releasing dirt on Trump, and Trump knows it, hence the need to placate Putin.

 

The best thing Republicans could have done with respect to healthcare was to walk away from it and let it be and hope their base forgot about it. But they didn't. Instead they decided they are going to bash their party to smithereens on the healthcare rock. They have lied about Obamacare for the last 7 plus years, and now it's time to pay for the lies. It has been a long time coming.

But healthcare is not the only problem Republicans face. Trump has made many promises upon which the party cannot deliver. Healthcare is just one of them. He has promised to eliminate the entire national debt in 8 years. Republicans face budget problems which have been exacerbated by their healthcare failure. Their healthcare bill was really a trillion dollar tax cut masked as a healthcare bill. Republicans were counting on a trillion dollar healthcare bonanza to fund their budget. And then they have to raise the debt ceiling. Republicans haven't been able to pass any of their many promises. And at this point, it appears they will be severely challenged just to keep the lights on.

For the last 8 years Republicans could act irresponsibly without consequence, because they could always count on Democrats to save their bacon, and Democrats did just that. Now Republicans control everything, the courts, Congress, and the presidency and they cannot do anything, and Democrats cannot save their bacon. Republicans can still blame Democrats, and they are. But I don't think that will help them come 2018.

 

http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/19/politics/donald-trump-interview-jeff-sessions/index.html

So Don the con basically admitted that he chose Sessions in part to obstruct the investigation...

 

It will be interesting to see what comes of this. Will Sessions resign? If he doesn't that's a rebuke of The Donald. Trump is threatening to fire Mueller again, and he wants to turn the FBI into his personal police force by taking it out of the DOJ and putting it in the White House.

 

Thing is... if he fires the person who was appointed specifically to investigate him... I mean, fuck, for anyone else, that'd be plenty to take them to task for obstruction of justice and basically lock their assets tighter than Fort Knox...

*sigh* Our country is a fucking mess...

 

We are witnessing the moral rot that has become the Republican Party.

 

Indeed... including "reassigning" scientists that have done years of good work to menial positions because you don't like the work they did...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...77740635e83_story.html?utm_term=.bac625e34088

I mean, holy fuck...

 

#governmentdoesntwork | #WhatTheyVotedFor​

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Yes, really.​

We were wrong to always attend the Republican complaint about how government doesn't work; we should have attended the pitch as a threat, instead.

I remember during one of the GOP primary cycles, either '08 or '12, some cartoonists hit on the point about Republicans saying government doesn't work, and all that; the resulting theme was job interview cartoons in which the candidate explained why the job he was applying for could not be done and should not be undertaken.

I figure if you get three cartoons in close temporal proximity, you've got an obvious point proper. It's happened a few times in the last couple years, because, you know, Republicans.

This whole sick joke about how government doesn't work? Of course it doesn't when you elect people whose existential purpose is to perform their community service by wrecking the community. It makes precisely no sense in God's Creation to willfully elect malice, and then expect sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows.

 

Spicer resigns. It looks like Trump is shaking things up at the White House, and the chaos continues. I don't think these changes will save Trump's butt. http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/21/politics/sean-spicer-resigns-anthony-scaramucci/index.html

 

Chaos itself works in Trump's favor, as well as the rest of the Republican Party's.

He's looking into the details of Presidential pardons, at the same time as he figures out how to fire Mueller. Those can be combined in a single operation, in which Trump the hero clears away the witch hunt that has tangled the US - like a pitiful, helpless giant in a web of PC and liberalism, to borrow from the Founder of the modern Republican Party http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=2490 .

who also provided Trump with some of the basis for the kind of pardoning involved.

One vocabulary of approach: https://books.google.com/books?id=OVgFZ-N6bdQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=post traumatic culture kirby&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj-7-yZkJvVAhUL04MKHX9CCbYQ6AEIJj

Trump then the berserker's political representative, in the post - W (post-traumatic) world.

 

On "Good Faith"

Ari Berman, discussing issues with Steve Kornacki, who in turn is guesting for Chris Matthews, used the phrase "good faith" in relation to Jared Kushner's repeated disclosure revisions.

Mr. Berman debuts a new show on Monday; one wonders if he intends to focus his juristic acumen for the show, or if he's just prodding the term, "good faith", because it's about time someone starts calling out the string of perfectly innocent accidental errors and omissions.

In any case, the term, which has been in play the whole time, just achieved a particular threshold in the liberal-centrist discourse. We'll have to see if it retains its conceptual mass, and therefore political gravity.

 

Typical timojin class (or, I should say, lack thereof). It is rather damming that you haven't any sort of actual rebuttal...

::Moderator edit::

Offensive content has been deleted and therefore, this post has been edited to delete the offensive comment in the quote.

 

In the news today... Trump asking if he can use executive power to pardon himself!
Must be a very worried man....

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c/o heraldsun 22nd, July 2017

 

It's been a weird cycle on this point. Meanwhile, Rachel Maddow↱ describes what might be the week's strangest strangeness.

The setup is a Bloomberg↱ piece about the Mueller investigation turning to Donald Trump's business dealings; there are a couple paragraphs, though, inviting a double-take:

John Dowd, one of Trump’s lawyers, said on Thursday that he was unaware of the inquiry into Trump’s businesses by the two-months-old investigation and considered it beyond the scope of what Special Counsel Robert Mueller should be examining.

“Those transactions are in my view well beyond the mandate of the Special counsel; are unrelated to the election of 2016 or any alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia and most importantly, are well beyond any Statute of Limitation imposed by the United States Code,” he wrote in an email.​

That is to say: Wait, wait, wait. Statute of Limitation? For what?

The hook comes after Maddow's staff apparently hounded Dowd on this point, such that he eventually responded. According to Maddow:

The President's lawyer brought up the prospect that the President's business activities are crimes, and they're beyond the statute of limitations. He brought that up, apparently unprompted, which is unusual. So, it wasn't a blind quote; it had a name attached to it, so we contacted John Dowd, today. We contacted the President's lawyer today, actually tonight, to see what that meant; to see whether there was something in particular about the President's past business transactions that made him look up the statute of limitations for certain crimes. And Mr. Dowd took our call, and he told us, quote, "We have no evidence that any of these entities"—meaning Trump business entities—"We have no evidence that any of these entities are under investigation." He then told us, quote, "I'm beginning to think it's not true. I'm beginning to wonder where the hell it came from." He then told our producer that he would never speak to him again. Quoting, he told our producer, quote, "this is the last call we'll ever have". I'm beginning to think it's not true, I'm beginning to wonder where the hell it came from, this is the last call we'll ever have.​

It's interesting because her A-block setup was predicated in part on the premise that Donald Trump and his administration are panicking—"Like, break glass in case of emergency? They were smashing the glass, last night." And Dowd is an attorney par excellence, except he's also the guy you go to when you're in freakin' trouble. Not, like, Jacques Verges, defending the worst among humanity because somebody must, but one of John Dowd's clients ended up with the longest sentence in U.S. history for insider trading. That was the day he answered a reporter, "Get the fuck out of here! That's what I've got for CNBC."

Which, in turn, is in stark contrast to the early reports intended to play the whole issue like President Trump asking questions because he's not smart enough to know the answers already.

It is, presently, really easy to get caught up in glimmers of hope; at the same time, there really are signals that people are starting to panic.

Then again, msnbc has spent most of the week panicking, so ... yeah, y'know?
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Notes:

Farrell, Greg and Christian Berthelsen. "Mueller Expands Probe to Trump Business Transactions". Bloomberg Politics. 20 July 2017. Bloomberg.com. 22 July 2017. https://bloom.bg/2ul7ToF

Maddow, Rachel. "WaPo: Intel intercepts show Sessions, Kislyak talked Trump Russia". The Rachel Maddow Show. 21 July 2017. msnbc.com. 22 July 2017. http://on.msnbc.com/2toGqRH

 

"Where there is smoke there is fire. Where there is a lot of smoke there is a bloody big inferno"

The fact that Trump has highlighted this issue about his business dealings being subject to investigation, means he is running scared. Scared perhaps, that his past will catch up with him in the MOST public of manners.

Remember no tax returns...even after promising to declare them. No actual investigation into his business dealings has been carried out thoroughly by investigative journalists either, as far as I can read.

The rat stinks really bad and we shall just have to wait and see I guess..

The psychology is fascinating!!