President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Freudian Slip of the Day ...

 

And getting off the golf course and learning not only how to work Congressional leaders, but who the heck they are, would be a big first step, instead of throwing out tweets like lightning bolts from Olympus, then jetting off to Mar-A-Lago.

 

It's all of the above.

Trump and his campaign illegally worked with the Russian government to further their interests in exchange for Russian-friendly changes to foreign policy, an act of treason (colloquial sense, not the strict legal sense, although it's illegal in lots of other ways) we haven't seen since Nixon sabotaged Vietnam peace talks.

Trump's presidency has also been marked by spectacular incompetence. As one would expect from a man with not only no political skills, but also no particularly impressive skills of any kind. This is why he significantly lags in getting appointments confirmed, undermined his own travel ban on Twitter, can't release a simple press release without misspelling the name of a major US ambassador, etc. All of which contribute to his having the lowest approval rating of any President at this point since they started tracking approval ratings.

This is also why Mueller has such a target-rich environment. You can trip anyone up on perjury and related stuff if you push hard enough and investigate long enough. But Trump and his team are on another level, with massive unforced errors, the biggest being firing Comey. My god, he *just* directly contradicted testimony given under oath by his attorney general about whether or not he instructed people to leave the room. They can't get their stories straight because he can't stop contradicting them. Jesus, in a span of 48 hours we went through "the meeting never happened," "it was about adoption," "there was one other person there and we left after 10 minutes" to "there were 8 people there and also the Secret Service was there, implying someone with secret service protection at the time was there" and *half of those came from them, directly contradicting what they had said hours earlier*.

And finally, some of the shitburgers he's eating are standard political stuff. It kinda bothers me that the left can't tell the difference between policy arguments (lowering regulations on the health insurance market) and the actual Republic-threatening stuff (like more or less dropping the nation's cyberdefenses for the Russians' sake). There's this undertone that if we let Trump's incompetence sink Republicans, we'll be able to ride the resulting backlash into a glorious era of liberal governance and get all the things we want like single payer and $15 minimum wage. This scares the pee out of me, because it's the exact same free-rider bullshit that let Trump win the Republican nomination: everyone wants everyone else to have to expend political capital and give up policy preferences in order to stop Trump, but nobody wants to do it themselves. Every time someone says "Mike Pence would be just as bad!", I shake my head, because it shows they're missing the issue just as badly as Republicans who fall in line with Trump are.

 

Yes. People who act childish to avoid conversations are heroes. Equivalent to running into a burning building.

 

Oh. OK. Sure.

There's never been the slightest indication that anyone affiliated with Trump, or his campaign, had anything to do with that.

Not before the investigation began. Not now. No one in law enforcement has ever made an accusation of such. No one from the previous administration who has testified in public, from the heads of the FBI, CIA, DNI, has indicated that there is any reason to believe that anyone from the Trump campaigns was involved in the illegal hacking.

 

By all accounts, Trump has schmoozed members of the house and senate more in his six months in office than Obama ever did.

Obama was criticized for not engaging even the members of his own party.

 

They lied about it after the fact, which makes them accessories.

 

And yet he got shit done when he had a majority of Congress on his side.

 

And knowing how well they handled health care ... oh, never mind. TMI before noon here on the Left Coast.

 

Again, that speaks more to the incompetence of the leadership than the president.

 

Again, Obama famously left the details of healthcare reform to Congress.

And, Dems all wanted to implement "reform". The only question was how far to go. It's not like he needed to twist any arms to get the Dems to vote for the bill.