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US Politics The 2020 Trump Presidency Thread

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Xorkoth said:
They've 0 for 10 in court so far. Obvious flailing is obvious.

Meanwhile Trump is using campaign donations to pay off his debt... lest we forget he is $400 million in debt. Isn't that pretty illegal, by the way?
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in the fine text it states it will be used to pay off debt aswell so technically not illegal
 
It's probably not illegal but it's kinda immoral.

More and more I wonder if trump is knowingly using his fanatic supporters. If he knowingly says what he knows will gain their support and is just using them to his own ends.

Actually saying it aloud, I feel pretty convinced that that's exactly what he's doing.

I've long thought that trump fanatics might one day come feel let down by trump in the way many Obama fans did. But increasingly I suspect trump fanatics don't have the necessary self honesty for that.

Just for the record I'm not talking about everyone who voted trump. Just the huge trump fanatic types.
 
cduggles said:
Probably fundraising— Trump is using the money to pay off campaign debt.
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Bingo.... Nobody is taking any of these claims seriously. It's a way for Trump to make one final push to con money out of his base and a chance for other Republicans to appeal to the Trump base by paying lip service to his obviously unsubstantiated claims.

I hope all you guys are giving Trump your money. He needs your support....lol... Probably even a discount on MAGA garbage if you hurry so you don't miss the fire sale.
 
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TRUMP SHOULD'VE WON THIS ELECTION HE SHOULD BE THE PRESIDENT THIS IS RIGGED RIGGED RIGGED IM LEAVING THIS COUNTRY AND MOVING TO ALASKA WITH MY FAMILY
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Haha. Even his supporters are having fits that end up sounding silly. Perhaps he isn't aware Alaska is part of the country? Have fun in the ice!

Trump lost and now he is broke. Even better.
 
This is a good (not great, imo) article about the head of the CDC.
www.usatoday.com

The CDC chief lost his way during COVID-19. Now his agency is in the balance.

Director Dr. Robert Redfield compromised the CDC’s scientific credibility during COVID pandemic. A new administration inherits a loss of public trust.
www.usatoday.com www.usatoday.com
I don’t envy anyone in the position of humoring Trump and doing what they see as their civic duty, so to speak. Particularly with anything to do with science.
Unfortunately, the CDC has lost a lot of credibility with COVID.
Is it better to be like Redfield and compromise but carry on, or to stand up to Trump and get canned and replaced by a loyalist? I don’t think the lines are so easily drawn.
Fauci is in a much more protected position, ftr.
 
I think similar arguments could be made for Esper. It's a sad situation every which way, but I think they did the best they could, given the impossible situation they were in.
 
I can't help but notice that nobody has actually provided any credible evidence that a number of votes large enough to affect the election result were fraudulent.

You'd think if such evidence existed trumps people would be presenting it in court. In reality they're having to admit they don't have any.

The only argument trump supporters seem to have is that there has to have been fraud, because otherwise how else could trump have lots!

Which, is not credible evidence. It's just denial of the reality that has been the case since the beginning, that most Americans don't want trump.

If the Trump people are hoping their evidence will see the courts throw out enough votes for trump to win, they're likely to be very disappointed.

Courts aren't like ceps, you actually have to tell the truth, and youtube videos of conspiracy nuts won't be accepted as evidence. And since there's no real evidence of fraud, or of mistakes of the scale to change the outcome. They will almost certainly lose. And even if they won, they won't overturn enough votes to make a difference. Not even close.

And no doubt they'll cry fraud about that too.
 
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I found this to be quite alarming:

As an ex-president, Trump could disclose the secrets he learned while in office, current and former officials fear

All presidents exit the office with valuable national secrets in their heads, including the procedures for launching nuclear weapons, intelligence-gathering capabilities — including assets deep inside foreign governments — and the development of new and advanced weapon systems.

But no new president has ever had to fear that his predecessor might expose the nation’s secrets as President-elect Joe Biden must with Trump, current and former officials said. Not only does Trump have a history of disclosures, he checks the boxes of a classic counterintelligence risk: He is deeply in debt and angry at the U.S. government, particularly what he describes as the “deep state” conspiracy that he says tried to stop him from winning the White House in 2016 and what he falsely claims is an illegal effort to rob him of reelection.

“Anyone who is disgruntled, dissatisfied or aggrieved is a risk of disclosing classified information, whether as a current or former officeholder. Trump certainly fits that profile,” said David Priess, a former CIA officer and author of “The President’s Book of Secrets,” a history of the top-secret intelligence briefings that presidents and their staff members receive while in office.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

As president, Trump has access to all classified information in the government and the authority to declassify and share any of it, for any reason. After he leaves office, he still will have access to the classified records of his administration. But the legal ability to disclose them disappears once Biden is sworn in January.

Many concerned experts were quick to note that Trump reportedly paid scant attention during his presidential intelligence briefings and has never evinced a clear understanding of how the national security apparatus works. His ignorance may be the best counterweight to the risk he poses, they said.

“A knowledgeable and informed president with Trump’s personality characteristics, including lack of self-discipline, would be a disaster. The only saving grace here is that he hasn’t been paying attention,” said Jack Goldsmith, who ran the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department in the George W. Bush administration and is the co-author of “After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency.”

“He probably doesn’t know much about collection details. But he will have bits and pieces,” said retired Brig Gen. Peter B. Zwack, who served as a military intelligence officer and was the senior U.S. defense attache to Russia from 2012 to 2014.

The chances are low that Trump knows the fine details of intelligence, such as the name of a spy or where an intelligence agency may have planted a surveillance device. But he almost certainly knows significant facts about the process of gathering intelligence that would be valuable to adversaries.

“The president is going to run into and possibly absorb a lot of the capacity and capabilities that you have in intelligence,” said John Fitzpatrick, a former intelligence officer and expert on the security systems used to protect classified information, including after a president leaves office. The kinds of information Trump is likely to know, Fitzpatrick, said, include special military capabilities, details about cyberweapons and espionage, the kinds of satellites the United States uses and the parameters of any covert actions that, as president, only Trump had the power to authorize.

He also knows the information that came from U.S. spies and collection platforms, which could expose sources even if he did not know precisely how the information was obtained. In a now infamous Oval Office meeting in 2017, Trump told Russia’s foreign minister and ambassador to the United States about highly classified information the United States had received from an ally about Islamic State threats to aviation, which jeopardized the source, according to people familiar with the incident.

By bragging about intelligence capabilities, Trump put them at risk. And he has been similarly careless when trying to intimidate adversaries. In August 2019, he tweeted a detailed aerial image of an Iranian launchpad. Such photos are among the most highly guarded pieces of intelligence because they can reveal precise details about technical spying capabilities.

Using publicly available records, Internet sleuths were able to determine which satellite took the image and identify its orbit based on the image Trump disclosed.

Experts worry that Trump’s braggadocio may lead him to spill secrets at a rally or in a tête-à-tête with a foreign adversary. One former official imagined Trump boasting about the technical features of Air Force One or where the United States had dispatched spy drones.

Trump has also demonstrated a willingness to declassify information for political advantage, pushing his senior officials to reveal documents from the 2016 probe of Russian election interference and possible links to Trump’s campaign.

Last month, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, a Trump loyalist, made public a set of handwritten notes and a referral to the FBI concerning intelligence that the United States had obtained on Russia and its belief that Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign would try to tie the hacking and leaking of Democratic Party emails to Russia to deflect from the controversy over Clinton’s use of a private email server.

Those declassified documents were heavily redacted. But according to people familiar with their contents, they may have revealed enough information to point the Russian government to a valuable source of intelligence the United States has and is now at risk of losing.

Experts agreed that the biggest risk Trump poses out of office is the clumsy release of information. But they didn’t rule out that he might trade secrets, perhaps in exchange for favors, to ingratiate himself with prospective clients in foreign countries or to get back at his perceived enemies. When he leaves office, Trump will be facing a crushing amount of debt, including hundreds of millions of dollars in loans that he has personally guaranteed.

“People with significant debt are always of grave concern to security professionals,” said Larry Pfeiffer, a veteran intelligence officer and former chief of staff to CIA Director Michael V. Hayden. “The human condition is a frail one. And people in dire situations make dire decisions. Many of the individuals who’ve committed espionage against our country are people who are financially vulnerable.”

As a practical matter, there’s little that the Biden administration can do to stop Trump from blurting out national secrets. Former presidents do not sign nondisclosure agreements when they leave office. They have a right to access information from their administration, including classified records, said Fitzpatrick, who served as the director of the Information Security Oversight Office at the National Archives and Records Administration, which houses former presidents’ records.

They’re expected to safeguard information, as they did while in office. “But outside the confines of the Presidential Records Act, there is no boundary except the president’s behavior,” he said.

As president, Biden could refuse to give Trump any intelligence briefings, which ex-presidents have received before meeting with foreign leaders or embarking on diplomatic missions at the current president’s request.

“I think that tradition ends with Trump,” Priess said. “It’s based on courtesy and the idea that presidents may call on their predecessors for frank advice. I don’t see Joe Biden calling up Trump to talk about intricate national security and intelligence issues. And I don’t think Biden will send him anywhere as an emissary.”

The last line of defense, like so many chapters in Trump’s presidency, would pose unprecedented considerations: criminal prosecution. The Espionage Act has been successfully used to convict current and former government officials who disclose information that damages U.S. national security. It has never been used against a former president. But as of Jan. 20, 2021, Trump becomes a private citizen, and the immunity he enjoys from criminal prosecution vanishes.
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I've been calling trump a massive threat to national security for years.

He's a narcissist, I suspect it would be very easy to manipulate him by playing to his ego.

Unfortunately the damage is done.
 
Deru said:
I think similar arguments could be made for Esper. It's a sad situation every which way, but I think they did the best they could, given the impossible situation they were in.
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Yes, I was thinking of Esper, although his situation is more alarming with regard to national security, obviously, it is another example of the quandary between loyalty to an individual or to do one’s civic duty.
Esper and company have been replaced by spineless loyalists.
 
JessFR said:
I can't help but notice that nobody has actually provided any credible evidence that a number of votes large enough to affect the election result were fraudulent.
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as i understand it, there have been a handful of suits including
  • pennsylvania: trump campaign claims length of time it took to count ballots is "a sign" that something fraudulent must be happening. president trump claimed "big" legal wins in the state but the state ag says that the lawsuits have yielded no material changes to election processes.
  • michigan: in two suits, the trump campaign alleges "lack of transparency". so far, neither judge has been impressed. in one, judge timothy kenny denied a request to delay certification saying "This court finds that while there are assertions made by the plaintiffs that there is no evidence in support of those assertions..."
  • arizona: the trump campaign alleged that some voters had their ballots rejected incorrectly because they used a sharpie to fill them out. that claim was debunked by president trump's own dept. of homeland security. the campaign dropped that suit but filed another. the az secretary of state quoted as saying "the claims are baseless"
  • georgia: a state judge dismissed a trump campaign suit which alleged that ballots received after a an election day deadline were mixed with legitimate ballots. judge james bass dismissed the case saying "the court finds that there is no evidence that the ballots referenced in the petition were received after 7:00 p.m. on [Election Day], thereby making those ballots invalid"
there seems to be a pretty common theme - lots of assertions, no evidence.

alasdair
 
TripSitterNZ said:
in the fine text it states it will be used to pay off debt aswell so technically not illegal
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Okay, but isn't it pretty shitty for the guy to be taking his supporters' money to pay off personal debts? How can you shrug that aside and still support the guy? How can you see that and believe he is doing any of this for the people, and not himself?
 
Xorkoth said:
Okay, but isn't it pretty shitty for the guy to be taking his supporters' money to pay off personal debts? How can you shrug that aside and still support the guy? How can you see that and believe he is doing any of this for the people, and not himself?
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It's not that much shittier than stealing from your own charitable organization, which was supposed to support children with cancer iirc. It can't get much lower than that...
 
I think I got the general idea.
So... dipshit president owes millions and will be in court for the rest of his life...so he fakes an election scandal to drum up support money. He knows he will lose but he needs as much money as possible if he will survive the lawsuits coming to him once hes removed from power.

makes total sense. its still disgusting but it makes sense,
 
I was reading an article about the recent Pentagon firings by Trump and found this:

““Hanlon’s Razor,” a phrase inspired by Occam’s Razor, is a way of explaining other people’s behavior. Variations occur, but the most often repeated version is, “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”

Article I was reading:
www.theatlantic.com

Trump’s Pettiness Is the Simplest Explanation

The postelection shake-up at the Pentagon has raised alarms in the national-security world, but Trump’s likeliest motive is plain old spite.
www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
Article that defines the phrase:
www.psychologytoday.com

Hanlon’s Razor and Estrangement

Your adult child’s hurtful behavior probably isn’t motivated by malice.
www.psychologytoday.com www.psychologytoday.com

I thought you might enjoy it, particularly @JessFR!
 
cduggles said:
I was reading an article about the recent Pentagon firings by Trump and found this:

““Hanlon’s Razor,” a phrase inspired by Occam’s Razor, is a way of explaining other people’s behavior. Variations occur, but the most often repeated version is, “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”

Article I was reading:
www.theatlantic.com

Trump’s Pettiness Is the Simplest Explanation

The postelection shake-up at the Pentagon has raised alarms in the national-security world, but Trump’s likeliest motive is plain old spite.
www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
Article that defines the phrase:
www.psychologytoday.com

Hanlon’s Razor and Estrangement

Your adult child’s hurtful behavior probably isn’t motivated by malice.
www.psychologytoday.com www.psychologytoday.com

I thought you might enjoy it, particularly @JessFR!
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Thanks. Very good article. And I completely agree.

Trump's no political genius, it's astounding that anyone still believes that. It's kinda hard to believe anyone who actually knew trumps history ever believed it.
 
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