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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
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WASHINGTON — Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California postponed an official trip to Europe and Afghanistan due to security concerns on Friday after President Trump grounded her military flight and divulged the itinerary, and her aides said the administration leaked plans for her and the lawmakers accompanying her to fly commercially.
“In light of the grave threats caused by the president’s action, the delegation has decided to postpone the trip so as not to further endanger our troops and security personnel, or the other travelers on the flights,” Drew Hammill, Ms. Pelosi’s deputy chief of staff and communications director, said in a statement.
Mr. Hammill said that the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service had raised its threat assessment for the trip overnight after Mr. Trump announced in a letter to Ms. Pelosi on Thursday that he was revoking her use of a military aircraft to make the journey, which she was to have begun that afternoon. The update indicated “that the president announcing this sensitive travel had significantly increased the danger to the delegation and to the troops, security, and other officials supporting the trip,” he said in the statement.
It was the latest turn in a bitter tit-for-tat between Ms. Pelosi, who requested on Wednesday that Mr. Trump postpone his State of the Union address scheduled for Jan. 29 in light of the continuing partial government shutdown, which she said raised security concerns given that federal employees charged with protecting the attendees were not being paid. The president struck back the next day, saying that with government workers not receiving their paychecks, he was asking her to delay what he branded a “public relations event.”
Since when are they reluctant to make statements that we are likely to later learn were false?
Imagine you were charged with choosing an artifact to put in a time capsule so that future Americans could understand the current government shutdown. This is an unrealistic scenario, of course. No single item can explain the current moment, and moreover, there’s no reason to believe that the shutdown is actually going to end.
But, playing along with the game, your best bet would be this Donald Trump tweet from Friday morning: "Border rancher: “We’ve found prayer rugs out here. It’s unreal.” Washington Examiner People coming across the Southern Border from many countries, some of which would be a big surprise."
It offers a succinct window into the president’s mind and approach to the shutdown: an obsession with border security. A dubious anonymous source. Assertions that are unproven at best and likely bogus. A reliance on right-wing media. Anti-Muslim sentiments. Xenophobia. It is the total package; it’s just that the package is a booby trap.
The story to which Trump refers, but does not link, was published in the Washington Examiner on Wednesday. Even by the standards of what the president is willing to employ for political purposes, the article is shockingly thin.
To sum up: The Examiner has a single unnamed source, with no obvious qualification beyond proximity to the border, passing along second- and third-hand information, some of which seems recycled from debunked memes.
It’s doubtful that Trump checked any of this out. The president has demonstrated a long-running inability to sort truth from fiction, and he often shares bogus claims, even though he has the full power of the executive branch available to him to determine what is real. He appears not to read, and certainly not with any kind of rigor, which may make it harder for him to spot the many holes in the Examiner piece.
bullied him into shutting down the government when he was on the verge of compromising in late December. The Examiner story buttresses his insistence that the border needs more security, and it preys on xenophobia and on anti-Muslim sentiment in particular.
This is all quite helpful for his political messaging. Trump’s attitude toward the shutdown appears to be that it is better to be victorious than to be correct. His problem is that he is neither at this moment.
Senorman
Well-known Member
Since now, because they finally realize the end is in sight.
“Property monopolized or in the Possession of a few is a Curse to Mankind. We should preserve not an Absolute Equality.—this is unnecessary, but preserve all from extreme Poverty, and all others from extravagant Riches.” John Adams, 1765
http://www.masshist.org/publications/adams-papers/index.php/view/PJA01d064 (Adams Papers Digital Edition - Massachusetts Historical Society)
http://www.masshist.org/publications/adams-papers/index.php/view/PJA01d064 (Adams Papers Digital Edition - Massachusetts Historical Society)
4. The president's family is potentially in lots of legal trouble.The BuzzFeed report also says that Cohen kept the Trump children up to date on his plans, which was hinted at in the earlier court filings around Cohen's guilty plea concerning his lies to Congress. ...
5. Trump's incoming attorney general already said it's a crime. This week, attorney general nominee Bill Barr appears to have already boxed himself in. While much of the questioning around Barr focused on how, when, and what he might make public from a still-theoretical “Mueller Report,”senator Amy Klobuchar zeroed in on what Barr would consider troublesome behavior by the occupant of the White House: “The president persuading a person to commit perjury would be obstruction, is that right?” Barr’s answer was simple: “Yes.” ...
6. Trump's defense team is rattled. Lastly, the president’s TV lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, tried unsuccessfully to move the goalposts of the investigation this week. After months of endlessly repeating the phrase “no collusion,” Giuliani tried to tell CNN’s Chris Cuomo that he’s only meant there was no personal collusion by the president himself—he can’t speak for the rest of the campaign: “I never said there was no collusion between the campaign, or people in the campaign. I said the President of the United States. There is not a single bit of evidence the President of the United States committed the only crime you can commit here, conspiring with the Russians to hack the DNC.” ...
Putting it all together, unfortunately, we’re still left with this: The president should almost hope that Robert Mueller concludes he’s a Russian agent, because the alternative might be even worse. As I wrote earlier this week, a lifetime ago in this investigation given Thursday’s new bombshell, “We’ve reached a point in the Mueller probe where there are only two scenarios left: Either the president is compromised by the Russian government and has been working covertly to cooperate with Vladimir Putin after Russia helped win him the 2016 election—or Trump will go down in history as the world’s most famous ‘useful idiot,’ as communists used to call those who could be co-opted to the cause without realizing it.”
Thursday’s revelations—lending new weight to both the obstruction and collusion questions—clear that the answer might be, simply, “Both, all of the above.”
