President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

I suspect that the Secret Service isn't going to play the reality TV game in a case like that.

 

I'm glad the Hill made it clear that the image was photoshopped.

The cover of Thursday's New York Post shows a photoshopped image made to look like Omarosa Manigault Newman being dragged out of the White House.

 

He's running! Joe's trying to get ahead of the criticism he would face from a female candidate.

"I believed Anita Hill. I voted against Clarence Thomas. And I insisted the next election — I campaigned for two women Senators on the condition that if they won they would come on the Judiciary Committee, so there would never be again all men making a judgement on this," Biden said. "And my one regret is that I wasn’t able to tone down the attacks on her by some of my Republican friends. I mean, they really went after her. As much as I tried to intervene, I did not have the power to gavel them out of order. I tried to be like a judge and only allow a question that would be relevant to ask."

But ultimately, Biden said he wasn't able to do enough.

"I wasn’t able to convince three women we’d subpoenaed to cooperate with testimony. At the last minute they changed their mind and said they wouldn’t do it. I had them sign an affidavit saying, 'I want you to come, and you’re saying, No, I will not come.’ In retrospect, some, including Anita, think I should have subpoenaed them no matter what," he said. "The reason I didn’t, I was worried they would come and not corroborate what she said and make — I mean, Clarence Thomas only won by two votes. And we still thought we had a chance at beating him."

"I wish I had been able to do more for Anita Hill," he said. "I owe her an apology."

 

Fair enuff.

 

I'm no fan of Claire McCaskill in Missouri, but if it's a choice between her and Josh Hawley, I'm on Team Claire. That Senate seat is most definitely in play.

 

Trump finds it incomprehensible that anything good that happens wasn't because of him, or that anything bad that happens could have been caused by anything he did or said.


"In the final days before Donald Trump was sworn in as president, members of his inner circle pleaded with him to acknowledge publicly what U.S. intelligence agencies had already concluded — that Russia’s interference in the 2016 election was real.

HACKING DEMOCRACY

This report on how President Trump has responded to intelligence findings that Russia intervened in the 2016 election follows an earlier examination of the Obama administration’s actions as the Kremlin’s campaign unfolded.

• Previously: Obama’s secret struggle to punish Russia for Putin’s election assault

Holding impromptu interventions in Trump’s 26th-floor corner office at Trump Tower, advisers — including Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and designated chief of staff, Reince Priebus — prodded the president-elect to accept the findings that the nation’s spy chiefs had personally presented to him on Jan. 6.

They sought to convince Trump that he could affirm the validity of the intelligence without diminishing his electoral win, according to three officials involved in the sessions. More important, they said that doing so was the only way to put the matter behind him politically and free him to pursue his goal of closer ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“This was part of the normalization process,” one participant said. “There was a big effort to get him to be a standard president.”

But as aides persisted, Trump became agitated. He railed that the intelligence couldn’t be trusted and scoffed at the suggestion that his candidacy had been propelled by forces other than his own strategy, message and charisma."

How Trump’s skepticism of U.S. intelligence on Russia left an election threat unchecked

 

Impressive!

Trump’s Lies vs. Obama’s

 

How do we know that all 50 of those sources aren't lying?

 

Everything about the previous administration's Syria policy was a disaster.

Sophisticated weapons the U.S. military secretly provided to Syrian rebels quickly fell into the hands of the Islamic State, a study released Thursday disclosed.

The report said the Islamic State’s possession of these weapons remains a threat to the U.S.-led coalition still operating against the terror group in Iraq and Syria.

The arms included anti-tank weapons purchased by the United States that ended up in possession of the Islamic State within two months of leaving the factory, according to the study by Conflict Armament Research, an organization that tracks arms shipments. The study was funded by the European Union and German government.
...
The new study raises questions about a different source for weapons: arms secretly sent to rebel factions fighting Syrian President Bashar Assad in his long civil war. The covert CIA program, begun by the Obama administration in 2013, was ended earlier this year by President Trump. Saudi Arabia, which — like the U.S. — strongly opposes Assad, also supplies weapons to rebel groups.

 

Ryan trying to get him to resign, so far he's only agreed to "retire":

 

Teump may actually start a war with North Korea to save his presidency.

Tell me how Trump's North Korea gambit ends

 

Sounds to me like the exact reason that there was so much pushback against arming the various Syrian rebel groups. It wasn't possible to be entirely sure who they were or who they were ultimately loyal to. There was no way to know who would take the arms and simply sell them for profit, or who would switch sides when things changed in their area.

That push to arm them came from both sides of the aisle.