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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
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It’s hard to fathom how reasonably intelligent people fall into the trap of believing the most ridiculous of stories. Dr. Theodore Woodward came up with the aphorism, “When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras.” It was a warning to medical students who want to believe the common cold is an exotic disease. Law enforcement uses the phrase as well. The solution to a crime is usually the simplest explanation, not a twisted web of events.
The meeting Donald Trump Jr. put together in June 2016 with a Russian lawyer stinks to high heaven. The straw man argument that it’s “no big deal” because it wasn’t illegal is similar to talk I heard from Clinton defenders in the 1990’s. Caught with their hands in the cookie jar, supporters of Bill and Hillary Clinton argued what they may have been immoral, but it didn’t matter because it was not illegal.
Whether it was illegal or not, is irrelevant. The fact is, Donald Trump Jr. was happy to meet with people he thought might have connections to the Russian government and who had information damaging to Hillary Clinton. Trump Jr. didn’t care and that makes what he did, at the very least, sleazy.
However, since the news broke, Trump defenders have engaged in mental gymnastics that not even Ripley would believe. Convinced the meeting was nothing but a setup by Democrats, their delusion grows deeper day by day to the point where Alex Jones is giggling at the absurdity of it all.
I repeat this history because I don’t think moral obliviousness is built in a day. It takes generations to hammer ethical considerations out of a person’s mind and to replace them entirely with the ruthless logic of winning and losing; to take the normal human yearning to be good and replace it with a single-minded desire for material conquest; to take the normal human instinct for kindness and replace it with a law-of-the-jungle mentality.
It took a few generations of the House of Trump, in other words, to produce Donald Jr.
The Donald Trump Jr. we see through the Russia scandal story is not malevolent: He seems to be simply oblivious to the idea that ethical concerns could possibly play a role in everyday life. When the Russian government offer came across his email, there doesn’t seem to have been a flicker of concern. Instead, he replied with that tone of simple bro glee that we remember from other scandals.
“Can you smell money?!?!?!?!” Jack Abramoff emailed a co-conspirator during his lobbying and casino fraud shenanigans. That’s the same tone as Don Jr.’s “I love it” when offered a chance to conspire with a hostile power. A person capable of this instant joy and enthusiasm isn’t overcoming any internal ethical hurdles. It’s just a greedy boy grabbing sweets.
Once the scandal broke you would think Don Jr. would have some awareness that there were ethical stakes involved. You’d think there would be some sense of embarrassment at having been caught lying so blatantly.
But in his interview with Sean Hannity he appeared incapable of even entertaining any moral consideration. “That’s what we do in business,” the younger Trump said. “If there’s information out there, you want it.” As William Saletan pointed out in Slate, Don Jr. doesn’t seem to possess the internal qualities necessary to consider the possibility that he could have done anything wrong.
That to me is the central takeaway of this week’s revelations. It’s not that the Russia scandal may bring down the administration. It’s that over the past few generations the Trump family has built an enveloping culture that is beyond good and evil.
The Trumps have an ethic of loyalty to one another. “They can’t stand that we are extremely close and will ALWAYS support each other,” Eric Trump tweeted this week. But beyond that there is no attachment to any external moral truth or ethical code. There is just naked capitalism.
Successful business people, like successful politicians, are very ambitious, but they generally have some complementary moral code that checks their greed and channels their drive. The House of Trump has sprayed an insecticide on any possible complementary code, and so they are continually trampling basic decency. Their scandals may not build to anything impeachable, but the scandals will never end.
[Trumpling Trumptard Trumpidiots ... Talking Point ... ROTFLMAOPIMP ...]
ONE OF THE most important investor protections in decades took effect on June 9. The new rule, issued by the Department of Labor, sets in motion a seemingly commonsense requirement that those who advise on retirement investments must put their clients’ interests ahead of their own. Yet it marks a revolution in retirement security, the result of an epic seven-year battle between consumer advocates and the financial industry that sunk millions of dollars into white shoe lobbying firms, industry-sponsored studies, congressional campaign contributions, and major lawsuits in an effort to block the rule.
“Investment advisers shouldn’t be able to steer retirees, workers, small businesses, and others into investments that benefit the advisers at the expense of their clients,” Assistant Labor Secretary Phyllis Borzi, who developed the rule, said in 2011. “The consumer’s retirement security must come first.”
The rule, finalized in April 2016, was scheduled to take effect a year later in order to give firms time to comply. It only survived till now thanks to a veto by President Obama of legislation that would have permanently blocked its implementation; Rep. Paul Ryan, who led the charge in Congress, had tarred the rule as “Obamacare for financial planning.”
Since the rule was already final when President Trump took office, it was invulnerable to his day one directive freezing all pending rule making. Nevertheless, within two weeks Trump signed a memo directing the DOL to review the rule and potentially rescind it. In March, before Trump’s labor secretary had even been confirmed, the Department of Labor issued a proposed rule delaying implementation for 60 days — bringing us to June 9 of this year.
[John McCain ...]
MOSCOW — Rinat Akhmetshin, the Russian-American lobbyist who met with Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower in June 2016, had one consistent message for the journalists who met him over the years at the luxury hotels where he stayed in Moscow, London and Paris, or at his home on a leafy street in Washington: Never use email to convey information that needed to be kept secret.
While not, he insisted, an expert in the technical aspects of hacking nor, a spy, Mr. Akhmetshin talked openly about how he had worked with a counterintelligence unit while serving with the Red Army after its 1979 invasion of Afghanistan and how easy it was to find tech-savvy professionals ready and able to plunder just about any email account.
A journalist who visited his home was given a thumb drive containing emails that had apparently been stolen by hackers working for one of his clients.
On another occasion, at a meeting with a New York Times reporter at the Ararat Park Hyatt hotel in Moscow, Mr. Akhmetshin, by then an American citizen, informed the journalist he had recently been reading one of his emails: a note sent by the reporter to a Russian-American defense lawyer who had once worked for Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the anti-Kremlin oligarch.
In that instance, the reporter’s email had become public as part of a lawsuit. But the episode suggests Mr. Akhmetshin’s professional focus in the decades since he immigrated to the United States — and the experience that he brought to a meeting last June in New York with President Trump’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and the then-head of the Trump presidential campaign, Paul J. Manafort.
...
Mr. Akhmetshin often warned his friends and contacts: “Nothing is secure.” It was a conviction that emerged from the chaotic and often violent corporate battles that convulsed Russia in the 1990s, when “chyorny P.R.” or “black public relations” based on stolen or fabricated documents became a powerful weapon for businessmen seeking to damage their rivals without resorting to physical threats, another frequently used tool.
The practice was rooted in the Soviet techniques of “kompromat,” the collection of compromising information by the K.G.B. against foes of the Communist Party, but reached its full flowering after the 1991 collapse of Communism and the privatization of the dark arts formerly dominated by the K.G.B.
Instead of simply examining old media reports, court records and other public documents to try to dig up dirt or embarrassing gossip, Russian-style “chyorny P.R.” has often focused on pilfering private information through hacking and physical intrusion into offices and filing cabinets.
In his own investigations over the years, Mr. Akhmetshin has acquired a reputation for obtaining email records, information from spyware and other data that appeared to be drawn from Russian hackers.
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