Trump 37: Tweeting instead of Leading

[Destiny]

Continued from here:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Angela Merkel is all of us here:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Another great cold open:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"‘Twists but no plot’: Trump’s diminishing foreign travel reflects a president scaling back foreign ambition"

Spoiler

After midterm elections in which their party loses political power in Washington, American presidents have traditionally used foreign travel to change the subject and more easily flex their executive muscle.

But in the wake of the Republicans’ electoral setback last month, President Trump has, once again, eschewed tradition.

Trump returned to Washington on Sunday after a relatively subdued two-day visit to the Group of 20 summit in Buenos Aires, where he announced modest breakthroughs on trade but chose to avoid provocative meetings with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin and Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.

His performance — coupled with his listless two-day visit to Paris days after the midterms, during which he skipped a visit to an American cemetery and appeared isolated from other world leaders — has created the impression of a president scaling back his ambitions on the world stage amid mounting political crises.

“The problem at the moment is he has no agenda,” said Thomas Wright, a Europe expert at the Brookings Institution. “He ticked through his bucket list of everything he wanted to do and declared victory on all fronts. What does he do now? They’ve not really thought it through.”

In his first 18 months, Trump withdrew the United States from Obama-era pacts — the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Paris climate accord and Iran nuclear deal — and declared that North Korea’s nuclear threat had been largely diffused after his Singapore summit with Kim Jong Un in June.

In recent weeks, Trump has curtailed his foreign itinerary. Last month, he skipped a trio of annual summits in Asia — the first time since 2013 an American president has been absent. And he canceled scheduled visits to Ireland in November and Colombia on the way home from the G-20.

White House aides said the president was too busy to stop in Bogota, a visit intended as a make up after Trump canceled a trip to Peru and Colombia in the spring. The Ireland stop, which was supposed to be tacked onto the Paris trip, reportedly included a planned check-in at the Trump International Golf Links at Doonbeg. News reports in Ireland suggested mass public protests were planned to greet him.

For Trump, there appears to be diminishing bandwidth to focus on foreign affairs, given that he is weighing a Cabinet shake-up and has threatened a partial government shutdown this month over border wall funding.

Furthermore, the Democrats’ looming takeover of the House has posed new dangers for the White House in the form of potential subpoenas and investigations. And bombshell revelations last week involving former Trump associates in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election have rattled the White House.

Aides dismissed the notion that Trump is distracted and insisted that a president who campaigned on discarding convention should not be compared to his predecessors. They said his foreign policy should be judged by the results, pointing to the new trade deal with Mexico and Canada that Trump inked at the G-20.

“President Trump has achieved ‘America First’ victories during trips abroad and here at home,” White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said.

Last week, national security adviser John Bolton told reporters that aides were “trying to fill every minute” of Trump’s schedule at the G-20, arranging meetings with eight world leaders, including Putin and China’s Xi Jinping.

Yet minutes after Trump boarded Air Force One to depart from Washington on Thursday, he tweeted that he had canceled his meeting with Putin over Russia’s seizing of Ukrainian naval ships and personnel. Press secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters on the plane that two other bilateral meetings — with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — would be downgraded to more informal “pull-aside” conversations.

Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said it was “particularly baffling” that Trump would bypass more time with Moon, given his crucial role in the ongoing denuclearization talks with North Korea.

A White House spokesman pointed to Trump’s robust travel schedule last year — during which he visited 13 countries, along with the Palestinian Authority and the Vatican — and the 60 foreign leader meetings at the White House as evidence of the president’s commitment to global affairs.

But Argentina marks just the eighth country Trump has visited this year — with no more on his schedule this month.

His recent White House predecessors also tapered their international travel leading up to an election, but they returned to the road extensively afterward to reaffirm U.S. leadership, especially in the face of domestic political setbacks.

In the two weeks following the midterms in Nov. 2006 — when Republicans lost control of both chambers of Congress — President George W. Bush visited seven countries, including meeting with Putin in Moscow.

In the month following the 2010 midterms — when Democrats lost control of the House, a setback President Barack Obama called a “shellacking” — he visited six countries, including a visit with U.S. troops at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. Trump has yet to visit troops in a war zone.

“I see it as an atypical, nontraditional person who is in a traditional role,” said Richard Fontaine, president of the Center for a New American Security.

Trump has participated in the kind of multilateral summits — including the Group of 7 and NATO — favored by his predecessors, but he has shown more interest in major media spectacles where he is squarely on center stage, such as his historic summit with Kim and a bilateral meeting with Putin in Helsinki in July, Fontaine said.

“It’s easy to see which ones Trump himself is driving toward versus the traditional responsibilities of office,” said Fontaine, who served as foreign policy adviser on the late senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Foreign affairs analysts said some capitals have grown wary given Trump’s sharp-elbowed performances.

Trump embarrassed British Prime Minister Theresa May by rebuking her in a newspaper interview published just as he arrived outside of London for a meeting last summer. Trump upended the G-7 Summit in Canada in June after taking umbrage at mild criticism from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and he obliquely renewed threats to withdraw U.S. support for NATO during a dispute over defense spending at a summit in Brussels in July.

“He doesn’t like these meetings, he doesn’t like the format and he doesn’t like multilateralism,” said Ted Piccone, a Latin America expert who served on the National Security Council in President Bill Clinton’s administration.

Piccone said the Colombians probably won’t be too unsettled that Trump has canceled twice, given that he met with President Iván Duque at the U.N. General Assembly meetings in New York in September. But Piccone added that Trump missed an opportunity to consolidate pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro after Bolton lumped that nation with Cuba and Nicaragua as the “troika of tyranny.”

Bolton’s tough talk, during a speech in Miami, came a week before the midterm elections, and Piccone said Trump’s decision to skip the Bogota stop could be viewed as evidence that the administration’s policy was largely a political gesture to rally conservative Latin American voters in south Florida.

White House aides pointed to Bolton’s visit to Brazil last week to meet with president-elect Jair Bolsonaro, whom Bolton invited to visit the White House next year, as evidence that the administration is committed to improving key relations in South America.

Brian Hook, a senior aide to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, pointed to an emerging “Indo-Pacific” strategy to confront China, the campaign to defeat the Islamic State, pressure on Venezuela and Cuba, and attempts to isolate Iran.

In Buenos Aries, Trump reaffirmed plans to hold a second summit early next year with North Korea’s Kim and he appeared to indicate he will participate in the G-20 next year in Osaka, Japan.

“I could go around the world and keep going,” Hook said.

Yet Trump’s approach to Asia offers a sharp contrast in his use of foreign travel.

In Nov. 2017, White House aides boasted that Trump’s 12-day swing through five Asian nations, aimed at rallying support for his pressure campaign on North Korea, represented the longest presidential trip abroad in 25 years.

But this year, amid the administration’s deepening trade war with China, Trump skipped three Asia summits last month in Singapore and Papua New Guinea. Vice President Pence traveled in his place and crossed paths briefly with Xi.

“Someone said recently that ‘The Apprentice’ was full of twists but no plot,” said Wright, referring to Trump’s reality television show. “That’s the question of Trump’s foreign policy. There will be twists, but is there a plot, is there a direction?”

 

[fraurosena]

Yep, @GreyhoundFan, he's completely lost the plot, and twists and wanders off all the time.

 

[Howl]

Just a reminder from October 2016: 

SO MUCH FUN! Inside Donald Trump’s One-Stop Parties: Attendees Recall Cocaine and Very Young Models

 

[47of74]

15 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"‘Twists but no plot’: Trump’s diminishing foreign travel reflects a president scaling back foreign ambition"

  Reveal hidden contents

After midterm elections in which their party loses political power in Washington, American presidents have traditionally used foreign travel to change the subject and more easily flex their executive muscle.

But in the wake of the Republicans’ electoral setback last month, President Trump has, once again, eschewed tradition.

Trump returned to Washington on Sunday after a relatively subdued two-day visit to the Group of 20 summit in Buenos Aires, where he announced modest breakthroughs on trade but chose to avoid provocative meetings with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin and Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.

His performance — coupled with his listless two-day visit to Paris days after the midterms, during which he skipped a visit to an American cemetery and appeared isolated from other world leaders — has created the impression of a president scaling back his ambitions on the world stage amid mounting political crises.

“The problem at the moment is he has no agenda,” said Thomas Wright, a Europe expert at the Brookings Institution. “He ticked through his bucket list of everything he wanted to do and declared victory on all fronts. What does he do now? They’ve not really thought it through.”

In his first 18 months, Trump withdrew the United States from Obama-era pacts — the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Paris climate accord and Iran nuclear deal — and declared that North Korea’s nuclear threat had been largely diffused after his Singapore summit with Kim Jong Un in June.

In recent weeks, Trump has curtailed his foreign itinerary. Last month, he skipped a trio of annual summits in Asia — the first time since 2013 an American president has been absent. And he canceled scheduled visits to Ireland in November and Colombia on the way home from the G-20.

White House aides said the president was too busy to stop in Bogota, a visit intended as a make up after Trump canceled a trip to Peru and Colombia in the spring. The Ireland stop, which was supposed to be tacked onto the Paris trip, reportedly included a planned check-in at the Trump International Golf Links at Doonbeg. News reports in Ireland suggested mass public protests were planned to greet him.

For Trump, there appears to be diminishing bandwidth to focus on foreign affairs, given that he is weighing a Cabinet shake-up and has threatened a partial government shutdown this month over border wall funding.

Furthermore, the Democrats’ looming takeover of the House has posed new dangers for the White House in the form of potential subpoenas and investigations. And bombshell revelations last week involving former Trump associates in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election have rattled the White House.

Aides dismissed the notion that Trump is distracted and insisted that a president who campaigned on discarding convention should not be compared to his predecessors. They said his foreign policy should be judged by the results, pointing to the new trade deal with Mexico and Canada that Trump inked at the G-20.

“President Trump has achieved ‘America First’ victories during trips abroad and here at home,” White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said.

Last week, national security adviser John Bolton told reporters that aides were “trying to fill every minute” of Trump’s schedule at the G-20, arranging meetings with eight world leaders, including Putin and China’s Xi Jinping.

Yet minutes after Trump boarded Air Force One to depart from Washington on Thursday, he tweeted that he had canceled his meeting with Putin over Russia’s seizing of Ukrainian naval ships and personnel. Press secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters on the plane that two other bilateral meetings — with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — would be downgraded to more informal “pull-aside” conversations.

Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said it was “particularly baffling” that Trump would bypass more time with Moon, given his crucial role in the ongoing denuclearization talks with North Korea.

A White House spokesman pointed to Trump’s robust travel schedule last year — during which he visited 13 countries, along with the Palestinian Authority and the Vatican — and the 60 foreign leader meetings at the White House as evidence of the president’s commitment to global affairs.

But Argentina marks just the eighth country Trump has visited this year — with no more on his schedule this month.

His recent White House predecessors also tapered their international travel leading up to an election, but they returned to the road extensively afterward to reaffirm U.S. leadership, especially in the face of domestic political setbacks.

In the two weeks following the midterms in Nov. 2006 — when Republicans lost control of both chambers of Congress — President George W. Bush visited seven countries, including meeting with Putin in Moscow.

In the month following the 2010 midterms — when Democrats lost control of the House, a setback President Barack Obama called a “shellacking” — he visited six countries, including a visit with U.S. troops at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. Trump has yet to visit troops in a war zone.

“I see it as an atypical, nontraditional person who is in a traditional role,” said Richard Fontaine, president of the Center for a New American Security.

Trump has participated in the kind of multilateral summits — including the Group of 7 and NATO — favored by his predecessors, but he has shown more interest in major media spectacles where he is squarely on center stage, such as his historic summit with Kim and a bilateral meeting with Putin in Helsinki in July, Fontaine said.

“It’s easy to see which ones Trump himself is driving toward versus the traditional responsibilities of office,” said Fontaine, who served as foreign policy adviser on the late senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Foreign affairs analysts said some capitals have grown wary given Trump’s sharp-elbowed performances.

Trump embarrassed British Prime Minister Theresa May by rebuking her in a newspaper interview published just as he arrived outside of London for a meeting last summer. Trump upended the G-7 Summit in Canada in June after taking umbrage at mild criticism from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and he obliquely renewed threats to withdraw U.S. support for NATO during a dispute over defense spending at a summit in Brussels in July.

“He doesn’t like these meetings, he doesn’t like the format and he doesn’t like multilateralism,” said Ted Piccone, a Latin America expert who served on the National Security Council in President Bill Clinton’s administration.

Piccone said the Colombians probably won’t be too unsettled that Trump has canceled twice, given that he met with President Iván Duque at the U.N. General Assembly meetings in New York in September. But Piccone added that Trump missed an opportunity to consolidate pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro after Bolton lumped that nation with Cuba and Nicaragua as the “troika of tyranny.”

Bolton’s tough talk, during a speech in Miami, came a week before the midterm elections, and Piccone said Trump’s decision to skip the Bogota stop could be viewed as evidence that the administration’s policy was largely a political gesture to rally conservative Latin American voters in south Florida.

White House aides pointed to Bolton’s visit to Brazil last week to meet with president-elect Jair Bolsonaro, whom Bolton invited to visit the White House next year, as evidence that the administration is committed to improving key relations in South America.

Brian Hook, a senior aide to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, pointed to an emerging “Indo-Pacific” strategy to confront China, the campaign to defeat the Islamic State, pressure on Venezuela and Cuba, and attempts to isolate Iran.

In Buenos Aries, Trump reaffirmed plans to hold a second summit early next year with North Korea’s Kim and he appeared to indicate he will participate in the G-20 next year in Osaka, Japan.

“I could go around the world and keep going,” Hook said.

Yet Trump’s approach to Asia offers a sharp contrast in his use of foreign travel.

In Nov. 2017, White House aides boasted that Trump’s 12-day swing through five Asian nations, aimed at rallying support for his pressure campaign on North Korea, represented the longest presidential trip abroad in 25 years.

But this year, amid the administration’s deepening trade war with China, Trump skipped three Asia summits last month in Singapore and Papua New Guinea. Vice President Pence traveled in his place and crossed paths briefly with Xi.

“Someone said recently that ‘The Apprentice’ was full of twists but no plot,” said Wright, referring to Trump’s reality television show. “That’s the question of Trump’s foreign policy. There will be twists, but is there a plot, is there a direction?”

 

Plus he doesn't have adoring crowds of Branch Trumpvidians on his overseas trips who will kiss his orange ass and call it Orange Ice Fucking Cream.  Usually he has people who hate his fucking guts there to greet his Orangeness with protests. 

[AnywhereButHere]

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/trump-overheard-saying-get-me-out-of-here-as-he-walked-offstage-during-g-20-summit-photo-op/ar-BBQnLN1?ocid=ientp

Quote

President Donald Trump was recorded saying "get me out of here" as he strode offstage during a photo op at the G20 Summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Load Error

Trump was onstage for a group photo Saturday before he shook hands with Argentinian President Mauricio Macri and walked off the stage, closely followed by an aide.

A microphone then recorded the president, who was then off-camera, telling an aide "get me out of here."

Trump eventually returned to take a group photo, marking the end of the two-day gathering of international leaders.

The video at the top of the article is - something.

[fraurosena]

The presidunce is on a tear today... so still vewwy, vewwy scawed.

(haha, keep dreaming... soon you'll be saying he's very weak, and ugly...)

Lol, Mueller is such an upstanding man that the presidunce can't even come up with something bad to say about Mueller other than he's a much different man than people think. SAD.

[fraurosena]

As evidence of witness tampering.

Note who tweeted this, btw.

[onekidanddone]

25 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

As evidence of witness tampering.

Note who tweeted this, btw.

Why is "President Trump" in quotes?

[GreyhoundFan]

6 minutes ago, onekidanddone said:

Why is "President Trump" in quotes?

Because Dumpy is an idiot and doesn't know how to use punctuation marks correctly. Oh, and his "spelling" and "grammar" are awful too. ?

[fraurosena]

I want to know who Scott Free is...

[fraurosena]

So the handler and the useful idiot met. 

However...

 

[onekidanddone]

51 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

So the handler and the useful idiot met. 

However...

 

Somebody didn't get his nap.

[AmazonGrace]

  So sad! Trump doesn't have a sub poenas, he has the greatest poenas that doesn't look the least bit like the Toad!  Witch Hunt!

 

[AnywhereButHere]

Oh no! What will the baby do? Daddy Putin is mad at him. Anyone think Putin may release a small secret or two just to reinforce the punishment?

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/putin-trip-to-washington-to-meet-with-president-trump-is-now-out-of-question-kremlin-says/ar-BBQrK0R?ocid=ientp

Quote

WASHINGTON – Russian President Vladimir Putin won't be coming to Washington for a second summit with President Donald Trump anytime soon, a Putin spokesman said Monday. 

"Now it is out of (the) question," Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesman, told Russia's state's news agency Tass. He said it's unclear when the two world leaders could meet next, adding that the current diplomatic standoff had created an "untenable pause" in U.S.-Russia relations. 

...

 

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[onekidanddone]

6 minutes ago, AnywhereButHere said:

Oh no! What will the baby do? Daddy Putin is mad at him. Anyone think Putin may release a small secret or two just to reinforce the punishment?

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/putin-trip-to-washington-to-meet-with-president-trump-is-now-out-of-question-kremlin-says/ar-BBQrK0R?ocid=ientp

 

Here is the spin: Hillary, Soros and Obama (did you know he was born in Kenya?) set this all up.  They worked with Putin to get Trump elected, then built a golem name Muller to pin it all on on orange shit stain. THEN... wait for it... wait for it...

Trump and Pence get impeached and Nancy Pelosi is sworn in and imminently she names Hillary as VP. Immediately after taking the oath, she steps down elevating Hillary Clinton to the top. THEN Clinton names Michelle Obama (did you know her husband was born in Kenya?) as the new VP.

[AmazonGrace]

6 minutes ago, onekidanddone said:

Here is the spin: Hillary, Soros and Obama (did you know he was born in Kenya?) set this all up.  They worked with Putin to get Trump elected, then built a golem name Muller to pin it all on on orange shit stain. THEN... wait for it... wait for it...

Trump and Pence get impeached and Nancy Pelosi is sworn in and imminently she names Hillary as VP. Immediately after taking the oath, she steps down elevating Hillary Clinton to the top. THEN Clinton names Michelle Obama (did you know her husband was born in Kenya?) as the new VP.

I'm on board with this. 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"After the latest Mueller news, these corrupt Trump moves look much worse"

Spoiler

The latest revelations in the Russia saga should refocus our attention on a critical period during the 2016 presidential campaign. I’m talking about the seven weeks or so that began in June 2016, when Donald Trump Jr. planned the infamous Trump Tower meeting with Russians, and ended in late July, with GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump publicly calling on Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails.

What we now know is this. During much of that period, the Trump Organization was secretly pursuing a business deal in Russia that required Kremlin approval — even though the most senior members of Trump’s own campaign, and possibly Trump himself, knew at the time that Russia was waging an attack designed to sabotage our democracy on Trump’s behalf, which they eagerly sought to help Russia carry out.

On at least one occasion, Trump publicly absolved Russia of any blame for this attack — while apparently carrying on private financial dealings that involved the office of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Over the weekend, the legal team working for Michael Cohen, President Trump’s estranged fixer and personal lawyer, filed a new document requesting leniency, now that Cohen has pleaded guilty to lying to Congress to conceal efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow that continued at least into June 2016, around when Trump clinched the nomination. The new filing says Cohen was in “close and regular contact” with White House advisers and Trump’s legal team while he prepared to lie to Congress — raising the possibility that they were actively consulted on this plan.

Why would Cohen want to conceal that timeline, which Trump, too, lied about? Because as Democrats pointed out on the Sunday shows, revealing it would show that Trump was likely compromised, because the Russians knew that Trump had concealed that he had pursued lucrative financial dealings with Russia even as he publicly called for an end to sanctions on them, giving them potential leverage over him.

To get a sense of just how corrupt this really was, we need to look at those seven weeks. With the help of this great new timeline of the Russia scandal by The Post’s fact-checking team, I’ve isolated these key occurrences:

• June 3, 2016: Donald Trump Jr. learns by email that Russians want to give the Trump campaign “very high level and sensitive information,” provided by the Russian government, that could “incriminate Hillary.” He responds: “If it’s what you say I love it.”
• June 7: Donald Trump promises a “major speech” about “all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons.” Trump sets the speech for the following week.
• June 9: The meeting takes place, but by most accounts, nothing of value on Clinton is offered. Still, the fact that it did take place — and was attended by Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort — confirms the campaign’s eagerness to conspire with Russian attempts to interfere in the election on Trump’s behalf.
• June 14-15: It becomes public, thanks to reporting in The Post and a statement from the cyber-sleuth firm hired by the Democratic National Committee, that Russian government hackers penetrated the DNC’s network.
• June 15: Trump puts out a statement claiming that the DNC faked the hacking — in effect absolving Russia of any role.
• July 22: WikiLeaks releases the stolen emails, shedding light on all sorts of embarrassing internal details involving Clinton and the DNC.
• July 24-25: Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr. both once again absolve Russia of any blame for the hack. Trump Jr. dismisses the idea as a “lie,” and his father dismisses it as a “joke.”
• July 26: Donald Trump tweets that he has “ZERO investments in Russia.” According to BuzzFeed News, the Russian-born developer working on the project takes this as the signal that the deal isn’t going to happen.
• July 27: Trump says this about Clinton’s emails: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” By coincidence or not, that same day, according to an indictment filed by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, Russian intelligence tried to hack Clinton’s personal servers.

One of the big unknowns of this whole affair remains whether Trump himself was informed of the Trump Tower meeting at the time. His vow of a “major speech” suggests he might have been. This is now potentially more serious: Trump might have known that the Russian government was trying to sabotage our election and then after this kept up his pursuit of a lucrative real estate deal in Moscow (one that according to Cohen’s plea agreement involved direct talks with Putin’s office) that he kept concealed.

At a minimum, Trump’s family members and top campaign officials knew of this sabotage effort. And according to Cohen’s plea deal, he kept them abreast of the real estate deal.

The new revelations also make Trump’s statement absolving Russia of any blame for the DNC hack look much worse. Trump had self-interested political reasons for absolving Russia of this blame, obviously, but now we learn he appears to have had self-interested financial reasons for doing so — again, which he concealed from American voters.

Finally, in light of the new revelations, Trump’s exhortation to Russia to hack Clinton’s emails becomes an even more emphatic exclamation point on this stretch of events. His openly proclaimed desire to politically benefit from a hostile foreign power’s efforts to undermine our democracy was bad enough. In retrospect, it looks even worse, now that we learn that up until that point, he’d been trying to reach a lucrative deal with that foreign power — while keeping that effort hidden from the voters.

All of these things “look a lot less random against a backdrop where there was this ongoing negotiation over the Trump Tower Moscow,” Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. “They certainly look more corrupt. It’s increasingly difficult to believe that this was all a coincidence.”

It remains to be seen whether Mueller will establish a conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign that amounts to criminality. But whatever is to be on that front, we now know that not only does this confluence of political and financial self-dealing with a foreign adversary appear much worse than we thought, but also Trump actively tried to keep it concealed by denying its existence.

As Vladeck put it: “If there are innocuous explanations for why these things were all happening at the same time, what are they?”

 

[AnywhereButHere]

1 hour ago, onekidanddone said:

Here is the spin: Hillary, Soros and Obama (did you know he was born in Kenya?) set this all up.  They worked with Putin to get Trump elected, then built a golem name Muller to pin it all on on orange shit stain. THEN... wait for it... wait for it...

Trump and Pence get impeached and Nancy Pelosi is sworn in and imminently she names Hillary as VP. Immediately after taking the oath, she steps down elevating Hillary Clinton to the top. THEN Clinton names Michelle Obama (did you know her husband was born in Kenya?) as the new VP.

That was awesome! I wish! 

[GreyhoundFan]

"The world’s tyrants are laughing at Trump — and America"

Spoiler

Grading on the steep curve by which he is judged, President Trump may have had his most successful international outing at the Group of 20 summit that concluded on Saturday in Buenos Aires. But that’s not because he accomplished anything significant. He didn’t. It was simply because he did not commit a massive gaffe.

Trump’s ballyhooed deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping was little more than an agreement to keep talking. Trump committed not to increase tariffs on China for 90 days, and Xi committed to buy more U.S. products — but with no specific numerical targets. This is no more binding than North Korea’s promise to denuclearize somehow, someday. The two countries’ post-summit statements showed that they could not even agree on what they had agreed on. China’s statement, for example, did not mention a 90-day negotiating.

But at least Trump did not have any cringeworthy moments — such as when he left early the Group of 7 meeting in Quebec in June and refused to sign the communique, or when he acted like a lackey toward Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in July.

Trump even distinguished himself in Buenos Aires by making appropriate comments on the death of George H.W. Bush rather than continuing his feud with the Bush family. With Trump, you can never take such human niceties for granted. And if he had been as petty and mean-spirited as he was after John McCain’s death, it would have been a big news story. So a disaster averted.

But not much accomplished either. If Trump took any action to rally his fellow democratic leaders to confront the looming threat of China or Russia, or to hold Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to account for the murder of Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi, there was no indication of it. Two months have passed since Khashoggi’s killing at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul and a week since Russia’s illegal seizure of Ukrainian vessels in the Kerch Strait, and the perpetrators of those crimes still have not paid any price for them.

The iconic image from the G-20 showed Mohammed bin Salman and Putin giving each other high fives, laughing and smiling. It reminded me of the classic David Low cartoon after the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939 showing Hitler and Stalin curtsying to each other, with Hitler saying, “The scum of the earth, I believe,” and Stalin replying, “The bloody assassin of the workers, I presume?” Mohammed bin Salman and Putin are no Hitler or Stalin, but they do have fresh blood on their hands — including that of the countless victims of Saudi bombing in Yemen and Russian bombing in Syria — and they are getting away with their crimes because Trump won’t do anything to hold them to account.

Trump’s refusal to meet with Putin officially at the G-20 is hardly the kind of action that will get the Russian strongman’s attention. (They instead saw each other at dinner.) Rather, it signals American weakness that will encourage Putin to transgress further. Likewise, denying overwhelming evidence of Mohammed bin Salman’s complicity in Khashoggi’s murder signals that Trump isn’t tough enough to hold his ally to account.

The Saudi crown prince was thumbing his nose at the United States with his chumminess toward Putin and his insistence, despite U.S. entreaties, to continue exploring the purchase of an S-400 air-defense system from Russia. He was also undercutting one of the chief rationales that Trump offers for his obsequiousness to Mohammed — the Saudis’ opposition to Iran — given that Russia is Iran’s chief ally. Putin, for his part, mocked Trump by saying that “two little boats gifted to Ukraine by the U.S. couldn’t even get through the Kerch Strait.” (The ships reportedly weren’t actually provided by the United States.) The world’s tyrants are laughing at the United States — and Trump is letting them get away with it.

But, again, it could have been much worse — and with Trump often has been. In some ways, the miracle of Buenos Aires is not what Trump said or did but that he could function at all, given how crippled by scandal his presidency has become. Just in the past week, we have learned that conspiracy-monger Jerome Corsi notified Trump friend Roger Stone of the Russians’ theft of Hillary Clinton campaign emails long before they were released and that the next day Stone talked to Trump. We have also learned that Trump was working on a deal to build a tower in Moscow even as he was winning the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. The evidence of collusion grows stronger — and so does the evidence of obstruction of justice. Trump on Nov. 28 dangled the possibility of a pardon before his former campaign manager, convicted felon Paul Manafort.

No wonder Trump so often looked distracted in Buenos Aires or felt compelled to cancel several meetings. Barely able to perform the duties of his office in the best of times, he is now preoccupied with his political survival, which no longer appears assured.

 

[onekidanddone]

28 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Barely able to perform the duties of his office in the best of times, he is now preoccupied with his political survival, which no longer appears assured.

From the author's computer screen to Rufus's ears.