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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
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In this post, I’ll try to make sense of the https://judiciary.house.gov/news/press-releases/house-judiciary-committee-unveils-investigation-threats-against-rule-law House Judiciary Committee sent out today.
The requests — which they’ve run by Mueller and SDNY — don’t all make sense. Generally, people are being asked for the documents they’ve already turned over (or had seized) to some investigation. A lot of this is boilerplate, though, so some people are being asked for documents they don’t have.
Alan Garten gets a request, but not Alan Futerfas, in spite of the fact that both Trump lawyers were involved in coaching June 9 meeting testimony.
It excludes some obvious intelligence targets — it doesn’t ask for documents concerning Oleg Deripaska, and Sergei Millian is not on this list — but not others — like WikiLeaks.
Ivanka Trump and Sam Patten are not included.
This is a first run of either the most important association or some surprising ones. I’ll be doing rolling updates of this after more detailed review of the request letters.
...
But if the ideological and policy fall-out is unclear now, one thing that is clear is that Trump’s thrown-together, fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants diplomacy has reached the end of the road. This is an argument I have made for a year now, both on The Interpreter and on Twitter. So at the risk of belabouring the obvious, it should be pretty apparent now that Trump has whiffed twice in summits with Kim, almost certainly because of a lack of staff preparation and presidential commitment. ...
This bureaucratic resistance was fairly predictable, but Trump approached negotiating with North Korea as he has so many other major initiatives in his career – with a mix of bluster, laziness, and media over-exposure. As with reforming health care, building his wall, or pursuing infrastructure building in the US, Trump showed once again regarding North Korea that he is just too slothful, impulsive, and disinterested in details to really do the work necessary for a major bureaucratic push. ...
And Trump just cannot do that. He is just too checked-out from his own presidency. He is too lazy, most obviously. He goes to work late, watches too much TV, does not listen to briefings, does not read, and so on. In the two years he has spoken about North Korea as president, there has been no perceptible improvement in his grasp of the issues. He is still grossly uninformed about Korea, nuclear weapons, and missile technology, and so wildly unqualified to go one-on-one with Kim Jong-un. ...
It is now apparent that Trump will not mature into the presidency and acquire these skills. Hence the next step should be to kick negotiation with North Korea down to the staff level at the State Department. Let the diplomats and technicians hammer out some small, workable trades with the North Koreans to build some basic confidence all around. Otherwise, a third summit with Kim will founder just as the last two did. Presidential whimsy and lust for recognition is not enough.
A TOON FOR THE DERANGED
https://claytoonz.com/2019/03/05/a-toon-for-the-deranged/
Sycophants of Donald Trump accuse his critics of suffering from TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome. They claim liberals, Democrats, and Never Trumpers in the Republican party react irrationally to everything Trump says and does, paying little attention to the details, his actions, and his successes. They claim people like me hate Trump just because he’s Donald Trump. It’s as if Trump hasn’t given anyone a good reason to criticize him.
The truth is, I don’t hate Donald Trump. I do dislike the man. Before he was president, he was a racist conman with little regard for anyone except himself. He’s the kind of guy who steals from charities, refuses to pay people who work for him, and starts a campaign to delegitimize a black president because of his race. He’s the kind of guy who boasts about what a great businessman he is while bankrupting a casino. He’s the kind of guy who hangs fake Time Magazine covers of himself in his golf clubs and calls members of the press while impersonating a fictional employee bragging about Donald Trump’s dating life. He’s the kind of guy who will cheat on his wife who is at home with a newborn, and then get on a bus and brag about it to another celebrity. He’s the kind of guy who seduces porn stars by showing them pictures of himself on magazine covers and comparing them to his daughter. He’s the kind of guy who says he’d like to date his daughter. Yeah, I don’t like that guy.
Who I do hate is President Donald J. Trump. I don’t suffer from TDS because I’m not irrational about it. My criticism of him has a bit more depth to it than “orange man bad.”
A hate a president who commits campaign fraud, obstructs justice, solicits help from a foreign adversary, sells his nation out to Vladimir Putin, uses the Justice Department to punish his enemies, violates the emoluments clause, seeks to divide the nation based on his hatred, throws children into cages, vilifies the weak while throwing tax cuts at the mega-rich, and calls nations where brown people come from “shitholes.” I hate a president who is illiterate and can’t stop tweeting about how he’s being victimized. I hate a president who fills government positions with unqualified people, like members of his family. I hate that he gave a security clearance to his dimwit son-in-law. I hate a president who attacks Gold Star families and POWs. I hate a president who doesn’t stop holding campaign rallies. I hate a president who encourages his supporters to commit violent acts. I hate a president who doesn’t understand tariffs, the nuclear triad, NATO, foreign policy, the three branches of government, and the U.S. Constitution. I hate a president who wants to waste billions on a stupid, useless, racist border wall as a vanity project. I hate a president who calls black athletes “sons of bitches.” I really hate a president who smears our allies while cozying up to dictators. I hate a president who gives murderers like Kim Jong Un and Muhammad Bin Salman a pass.
Orange man is bad, but orange president is dangerous.
To me, Trump Derangement Syndrome doesn’t describe his critics. It describes the cult that is his followers who ignore all the things I mentioned. It describes the people who defend Trump, and who also criticized Obama for wearing a tan suit, putting mustard on a burger, and claimed he was born in Kenya, on an apology tour, and was going to take away everyone’s guns. These are the people who attacked his wife for trying to get kids to eat more vegetables.
Now, if you really want to see derange behavior, go back to last weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference (which is less about being conservative and more about being TrumpTrumpTrumpTrumpOHMYGODTrumpTrumpTrump). Even before the deranged, incoherent, two-hour-plus rant from Trump, the derangement was off the charts. I’m talking about the entire conference’s obsessions with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
If you watched the conference, then you heard how she wants to ban cows, which means no more hamburgers. They claim she wants to ban planes. They air a video of her dancing during her college years, but they darken the lighting and try to make it ominous, as though the Breakfast Club dance is equivalent to sacrificing babies, which they also accuse her of.
The point at her socialism and compare it to Venezuela, instead of places like Norway and Canada. It’s funny they compare American socialists to strongmen who prop themselves up by building their military, while American socialists always advocate for less spending on the military. But then again, these are the same idiots who claim she wants to ban cows.
Former Trump aid and super creepy guy Sebastian Gorka said she is trying to realize Stalin’s dream of taking away all our hamburgers, which is something I didn’t know Stalin was into. Mark Meadows, the Republican who has a black friend, made the same argument about taking away hamburgers…and so did Ted Cruz…and so did Donald Trump Jr, and about 50 other participants at the conference.
You would think AOC was running for president and not six years from being old enough to qualify for the job. You would think she held a leadership position in her party. You would think she wasn’t just a freshman representative. But, the CPAC crowd is so obsessed with her that they barely have time to chant “lock her up,” or cry about emails, or scream “Benghazi!”
The conference ran for four days. Four days of this hamburger nonsense. Did they actually take apart her Green New Deal on specifics or get into actual details? Nope. Did they go after the MAN who co-sponsored the non-binding legislation? Nope. Do they even know his name? Nope. But for four days, “booga, booga, booga, no more hamburgers.”
Republicans project, like Trump criticizing Obama for not releasing his school records, yet he threatens his schools not to release his. But they don’t notice their hypocrisy. A conservative who accuses you of suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome probably has 148 AOC memes on his Facebook page, the majority of them dealing with cow farts. They’re oblivious.
Trump and his sycophants are the ones who truly are deranged. Unfortunately, they’re often successful in shaping the narrative. We can’t let the deranged set the tone or the agenda going into the next presidential election.
That would be deplorable.
https://claytoonz.com/2019/03/05/a-toon-for-the-deranged/
Sycophants of Donald Trump accuse his critics of suffering from TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome. They claim liberals, Democrats, and Never Trumpers in the Republican party react irrationally to everything Trump says and does, paying little attention to the details, his actions, and his successes. They claim people like me hate Trump just because he’s Donald Trump. It’s as if Trump hasn’t given anyone a good reason to criticize him.
The truth is, I don’t hate Donald Trump. I do dislike the man. Before he was president, he was a racist conman with little regard for anyone except himself. He’s the kind of guy who steals from charities, refuses to pay people who work for him, and starts a campaign to delegitimize a black president because of his race. He’s the kind of guy who boasts about what a great businessman he is while bankrupting a casino. He’s the kind of guy who hangs fake Time Magazine covers of himself in his golf clubs and calls members of the press while impersonating a fictional employee bragging about Donald Trump’s dating life. He’s the kind of guy who will cheat on his wife who is at home with a newborn, and then get on a bus and brag about it to another celebrity. He’s the kind of guy who seduces porn stars by showing them pictures of himself on magazine covers and comparing them to his daughter. He’s the kind of guy who says he’d like to date his daughter. Yeah, I don’t like that guy.
Who I do hate is President Donald J. Trump. I don’t suffer from TDS because I’m not irrational about it. My criticism of him has a bit more depth to it than “orange man bad.”
A hate a president who commits campaign fraud, obstructs justice, solicits help from a foreign adversary, sells his nation out to Vladimir Putin, uses the Justice Department to punish his enemies, violates the emoluments clause, seeks to divide the nation based on his hatred, throws children into cages, vilifies the weak while throwing tax cuts at the mega-rich, and calls nations where brown people come from “shitholes.” I hate a president who is illiterate and can’t stop tweeting about how he’s being victimized. I hate a president who fills government positions with unqualified people, like members of his family. I hate that he gave a security clearance to his dimwit son-in-law. I hate a president who attacks Gold Star families and POWs. I hate a president who doesn’t stop holding campaign rallies. I hate a president who encourages his supporters to commit violent acts. I hate a president who doesn’t understand tariffs, the nuclear triad, NATO, foreign policy, the three branches of government, and the U.S. Constitution. I hate a president who wants to waste billions on a stupid, useless, racist border wall as a vanity project. I hate a president who calls black athletes “sons of bitches.” I really hate a president who smears our allies while cozying up to dictators. I hate a president who gives murderers like Kim Jong Un and Muhammad Bin Salman a pass.
Orange man is bad, but orange president is dangerous.
To me, Trump Derangement Syndrome doesn’t describe his critics. It describes the cult that is his followers who ignore all the things I mentioned. It describes the people who defend Trump, and who also criticized Obama for wearing a tan suit, putting mustard on a burger, and claimed he was born in Kenya, on an apology tour, and was going to take away everyone’s guns. These are the people who attacked his wife for trying to get kids to eat more vegetables.
Now, if you really want to see derange behavior, go back to last weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference (which is less about being conservative and more about being TrumpTrumpTrumpTrumpOHMYGODTrumpTrumpTrump). Even before the deranged, incoherent, two-hour-plus rant from Trump, the derangement was off the charts. I’m talking about the entire conference’s obsessions with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
If you watched the conference, then you heard how she wants to ban cows, which means no more hamburgers. They claim she wants to ban planes. They air a video of her dancing during her college years, but they darken the lighting and try to make it ominous, as though the Breakfast Club dance is equivalent to sacrificing babies, which they also accuse her of.
The point at her socialism and compare it to Venezuela, instead of places like Norway and Canada. It’s funny they compare American socialists to strongmen who prop themselves up by building their military, while American socialists always advocate for less spending on the military. But then again, these are the same idiots who claim she wants to ban cows.
Former Trump aid and super creepy guy Sebastian Gorka said she is trying to realize Stalin’s dream of taking away all our hamburgers, which is something I didn’t know Stalin was into. Mark Meadows, the Republican who has a black friend, made the same argument about taking away hamburgers…and so did Ted Cruz…and so did Donald Trump Jr, and about 50 other participants at the conference.
You would think AOC was running for president and not six years from being old enough to qualify for the job. You would think she held a leadership position in her party. You would think she wasn’t just a freshman representative. But, the CPAC crowd is so obsessed with her that they barely have time to chant “lock her up,” or cry about emails, or scream “Benghazi!”
The conference ran for four days. Four days of this hamburger nonsense. Did they actually take apart her Green New Deal on specifics or get into actual details? Nope. Did they go after the MAN who co-sponsored the non-binding legislation? Nope. Do they even know his name? Nope. But for four days, “booga, booga, booga, no more hamburgers.”
Republicans project, like Trump criticizing Obama for not releasing his school records, yet he threatens his schools not to release his. But they don’t notice their hypocrisy. A conservative who accuses you of suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome probably has 148 AOC memes on his Facebook page, the majority of them dealing with cow farts. They’re oblivious.
Trump and his sycophants are the ones who truly are deranged. Unfortunately, they’re often successful in shaping the narrative. We can’t let the deranged set the tone or the agenda going into the next presidential election.
That would be deplorable.
We are told that America is divided and polarized as never before. Yet when it comes to many important areas of policy, that simply isn’t true.
About 75 percent of Americans favor higher taxes for the ultrawealthy. The idea of a federal law that would guarantee paid maternity leaveattracts 67 percent support. Eighty-three percent favor strong net neutrality rules for broadband, and more than 60 percent want stronger privacy laws. Seventy-one percent think we should be able to buy drugs imported from Canada, and 92 percent want Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices. The list goes on.
The defining political fact of our time is not polarization. It’s the inability of even large bipartisan majorities to get what they want on issues like these. Call it the oppression of the supermajority. Ignoring what most of the country wants — as much as demagogy and political divisiveness — is what is making the public so angry.
Some might counter that the thwarting of the popular will is not necessarily worrisome. For Congress to enact a proposal just because it is supported by a large majority, the argument goes, would amount to populism. The public, according to this way of thinking, is generally too ill informed to have its economic policy preferences taken seriously.
It is true that policymaking requires expertise. But I don’t think members of the public are demonstrating ignorance when they claim that drug prices are too high, taxes could be fairer, privacy laws are too weak and monopolies are too coddled.
This is the way the trade war ends. Not with a bang but with empty bombast.
According to multiple news organizations, the U.S. and China are close to a deal that would effectively end trade hostilities. Under the reported deal, America would remove most of the tariffs it imposed last year. China, for its part, would end its retaliatory tariffs, make some changes to its investment and competition policies and direct state enterprises to buy specified amounts of U.S. agricultural and energy products.
The Trump administration will, of course, trumpet the deal as a triumph. In reality, however, it’s much ado about nothing much.
As described, the deal would do little to address real complaints about Chinese policy, which mainly involve China’s systematic expropriation of intellectual property. Nor would it do much to address Donald Trump’s pet although misguided peeve, the imbalance in U.S.-China trade. Basically, Trump will have backed down.
If this is the story, it will repeat what we saw on the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Trump denounced as the “worst trade deal ever made.” In the end, what Trump negotiated — the U.S. Mexico Canada Agreement, or U.S.M.C.A. — was very similar to the previous status quo. Trade experts I know, when not referring to it as the Village People agreement, call it “Nafta 0.8”: fundamentally the same as Nafta, but a bit worse.
Why is the president who famously declared that “trade wars are good, and easy to win” effectively waving the white flag? Mainly because winning turns out not to be easy, at all.
...
The whole world now knows two things about us. First, we’re not reliable — an agreement with the U.S. is really just a suggestion, because you never know when the president will invent some excuse for breaking it. Second, we’re easily rolled: The president may talk tough on trade, but in classic bully fashion, he runs away if confronted.
- Stone, the long-time friend of President Donald Trump, in the past several days has deleted two websites set up to raise funds for his criminal case legal defense
- One of those deletions apparently occurred after CNBC reported on Sunday that Stone might have violated the terms of his judicial gag order by posting an image on his Instagram account asking "Who framed Roger Stone."
- That possible violation was noted to the judge in his case Monday by special counsel Robert Mueller, whose office is prosecuting Stone in federal court in Washington, D.C., for lying to Congress, witness tampering and other crimes.
