President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

The only official channel they care about:

 

We'd prefer a pro-Turkey op-ed came from some random professor? Or that there isn't a pro-Turkey that can be shared?

Couldn't we ask WTF of Twitter every time Donald Trump defends himself?

 

Disagree. It's too hard to prove corruption for that to be a significant deterrent. I'm sure Hunter Biden wasn't hired because of his vast knowledge of the energy industry, just as I'm sure the various Trump spawn deals are not taking place in a vacuum without the fact that His Orangeness is POTUS mattering, just as I'm sure that the various donations to the Clinton Foundation or speaking fees to Bill around 2012-16 would not all have occurred absent Hillary's status as very possible next president. I'm not sure why Biden didn't have to recuse himself from dealing with Ukraine issues as VP once his son took the Burisma board position; maybe that rule only applies to work done by spouses and not children, or maybe it doesn't apply to POTUS/VPOTUS as unworkable. As a mid-level person at State, I had to fill out financial disclosure forms and recuse myself from acting in support of a company if there could be the appearance of conflict of interest. That seemed fair to me; I owned a good bit of Coke stock and could see why Anheuser-Busch might not be thrilled if I led our embassy's efforts to, say, encourage a country to raise revenue by taxing alcohol rather than soft drinks.

By the way, is there any suggestion that there's a Biden angle to the POTUS decision on abandoning the Syrian Kurds? I'm pretty sure that as VP Biden was seen as very supportive of the Iraqi Kurds, anyway.

 

I think part of it is much of the Dem establishment's guilt on going in on Iraq. Oliver Stone's W painted him in a sympathetic light. The movie "Dick" made W seem like he was duped - a well-meaning person put in a position he wasn't prepared for. Plus his relationship with Michelle Obama. Also that he's been abandoned by the right. When he was elected, I thought he was a decent guy, respected his dad despite disagreeing with a lot of the social policies. But W did push for immigration reform, but was slapped down by his base. And he did make fighting AIDS in Africa a priority.
What really confounds me though about his "rehab" is that he has done it strictly on personality alone - without repudating or apologizing for any of his policy decisions that turned out bad. Katrina, Iraq or even Afghanistan.

 

There likely was not an objection to Biden dealing with Ukraine once his son was on the Burisima board because there were still significant interagency diplomatic efforts in place. The removal of the prosecutor, for instance, was not a unilateral push by Biden but a bipartisan and even internationally supported push.

Is that okay? Not really. I'd prefer he'd have recused himself. But I get the lack of concern at the time considering how universal the decision was that the prosecutor had to go.

Trump does whatever he wants, regardless of US policy, department advice, or allied input. Since he does that, he assumes every other president did, so he thinks Biden did it.

 

I imagine Trump would have been one of the ASU students chanting "PLO" at Kerr after Kerr's father was shot to death in Beirut.

 

FFS.

 

They would have taken a plane, but they were full of Revolutionary War soldiers.