President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Hey, how things going down in Puerto Rico? It’s a priority of the Trump Administration, right?

I mean aren’t they American citizens? America First!

Oh, I forgot about all that water and distance stuff..

Labor force leaving. Maybe some of you may have heard about the IV bag shortage across the United States of America? With this influenza outbreak that’s kinda a big deal. Guess where many are made.

In the meantime we want that wall, we need that wall.

 

Hey, some good news about the IV bag shortage.

Reuters is reporting that more imports of bags manufactured in Mexico have been approved!

Odds Donald knows about any of this?

 

Welcome back to Hardball. Joining me know to discuss the GOP-FBI conflict is former FBI agent Johnny Utah.......

 

Not fake, just not easily blamed on Trump:

The reasons for the decline are varied, and largely due to a strengthening dollar, making travel to the United States more expensive for foreigners, Travel and Leisure reported.

"Some have dubbed the decline in foreign tourism the ‘Trump Slump,' citing the administration's January 2017 ban against travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries," the magazine wrote. "But the number actually began decreasing back in 2016. (A record was set in 2015 when the United States welcomed 77.5 million foreign visitors.)"

"Tourism has a special ability to transcend politics," Chris Thompson, president and CEO of Brand USA, told the magazine. "The United States continues to be an aspirational destination. What happens in Washington has an effect but so do many more things."

Along with growth of the dollar in recent years, economic growth, and increased competition, the United States is a more expensive tourist destination.

"When it becomes more expensive to visit a country, fewer tourists arrive," Travel and Leisure said.

In addition, the United States saw unprecedented growth in tourists from China and elsewhere in 2010 that was "unable to sustain itself." New airline routes under Open Skies treaties have also given tourists more options to visit destinations outside of the United States.

 

Enjoy religious freedom while you can: San Brownback is now its ambassador and look what he did for Kansas while he was governor.

 

So the whole basis of the "secret society" out to undermine Trump is a joke text?

The full 'secret society' text between FBI agents: Was it meant in jest?

 

So if I understand your view properly, we can not blame Trump for a tourism decline because it seems to have started all the way back in 2016. But we must give Trump credit for the economy/stock market even though it has been on an upward trend for 9 years. Do I have the talking points down?

 

If you have the time, the transcript of Trump's impromptu press gaggle yesterday is worth a read. CNN also has the full video.

Transcript

There's something for everyone, but here are two quick (for me) things that annoyed me, and two that amused me.

1. Trump said that if DACA legislation isn't passed by the deadline, he could simply extend it himself:

Yeah, I might do that. I might do that. I'm not guaranteeing it because I want to put a little bit of -- but I certainly have the right to do that if I want.

You might recall that he tweeted something similar back a few days after he first canned the DACA executive order, presumably because he didn't like some of the coverage suggesting he was mean to do so. The problem: isn't his administration's publicly stated rationale for him rescinding the order (though giving a window for Congress to "solve" it) because they think the order was unconstitutional? So if it's unconstitutional, how would they justify him simply continuing it? And if he can continue it on his own whenever he wants, then why not just do it now? Or why rescind it in the first place? Unless, of course, it's simply a cynical bargaining chip to extract concessions from Dems – who actually care about DACA – on the wall and, crucially, drastically changing legal immigration to move away from "shithole" countries.

2. Trump twice indicated that he would do a clean DACA-for-the-wall deal, such as:

And then after we do DACA, we'll take a look at the even-bigger immigration problem.

Then in the same conversation, just as he did in his big deal-making meeting a few weeks back, he indicated that any deal needs to address so-called chain migration and the lottery system, i.e. significant, restrictive changes to legal immigration. Yeah, he's going to be a great help to make a deal.

3. His parting shot was classic Trump:

The fact is, you people won't say this but I'll say it. I was a much better candidate than [Hillary]. You always say she was a bad candidate, you never say I was a good candidate. I was one of the greatest candidates. Nobody else would've beaten the Clinton machine, as crooked as it was. But I was a great candidate. One day you're going to say that.

4. But my favorite part was this:

But we're saving hundreds of millions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars, by building that wall. So Phyllis George, I like Phyllis George, I'll tell you, and I like John White Brown a lot, he was a good friend of mine, you know that. Do you know that?

Yes, it seems he's talking about *that* Phyllis George, the former Miss America and NFL Today co-host. He presumably means John Y. Brown, who was her husband when Brown was the Governor of Kentucky from 1979-83. No, I have no idea why he brought up Phyllis George. Does anybody know? Was the reporter from Kentucky or something? It's not like they were talking about the Kentucky school shooting (which Trump hasn't addressed at all, has he?). Purely from looking at the transcript, it appears to be out of nowhere.

Though it's an open question as to whether that's funnier than Trump arguing that spending $20B to build the wall will save "hundreds of millions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars." And not to be a pedant, but there's a big difference between hundreds of millions and hundreds of billions.

 

He was. He won.

 

You're funny.

Do you think Travel and Leisure is a partisan source?

As for the economy/stock market, are you really trying to say that Trump has made a difference? Are we going to give Obama credit for the tax cut, and the bonuses/wage increases we've seen?

Are you going to pretend that the GDP growth isn't just better than under Obama, but is better than we were told was possible by Obama?

And, let's remember, we were told by folks like Obama advisor Steve Rattner that if Trump won, we would see “a market crash of historic proportions”.

You would surely have blamed such a crash on him, but you don't want to give him credit for the upturn?