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Donald Trump 2019


Francisco 2.0

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2 minutes ago, Red Five said:

It blows me away that he's still waaaay above W's worst poll numbers. Yeah I know, the economy...

That CNBC poll also shows him underwater on the economy (42-50) for the first time in a long time. 

The façade is cracking.  

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1 minute ago, Red Five said:

It blows me away that he's still waaaay above W's worst poll numbers. Yeah I know, the economy...

W got us into a massive set of wars that killed hundreds of thousands/millions of people and cost us trillions of dollars and thousands of lives.

W is far worse than Donald.

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52 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

Can you point me to a transcript of Schiff's monologue?  I have a few "friends" who need to see exactly what you posted along with the rest of (at least) that part of his statement.

The gaslighting is just so over the top. 

 

"I am not quoting the President directly -- this is my interpretation of what he said on the call . . . "

"OMG you claimed you were reading my exact words and you LIED LIED LIED!!!"

the issue is that the "paraphrased" or "more jokey" and "over-the-top" essence version schiff stated was actually uncomfortably close to how trump actually talks.  thus the confusion.

if it was any other world leader, functioning adult, or high-school student, it would be obvious that it was basically summed up satire, spoken in easy-to-understand language (because the mueller report was deemed too convoluted).  but when trump heard it, he thought to himself, "that's pretty close, but i feel like he changed a few of my words, so i'm gonna make sure everyone knows it."

it's really a self-own to even acknowledge it as an [inaccurate] direct quote.

at first i agreed with jimmyjazz that it was unnecessary to do it, but now i kinda like it.

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1 hour ago, jimmyjazz said:

Can you point me to a transcript of Schiff's monologue?  I have a few "friends" who need to see exactly what you posted along with the rest of (at least) that part of his statement.

The gaslighting is just so over the top. 

 

"I am not quoting the President directly -- this is my interpretation of what he said on the call . . . "

"OMG you claimed you were reading my exact words and you LIED LIED LIED!!!"

This pretty much spells it out....

https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/30/politics/donald-trump-adam-schiff/index.html

First off, it's clear that Schiff is not attempting to portray his summary of Trump's call as a some sort of verbatim retelling. Schiff literally says before he starts, "in not so many words, this is the essence of what the President communicates."

 

1) What Trump said: "I will say that we do a lot for Ukraine. We spend a lot of effort and a lot of time. Much more than the European countries are doing and they should be helping you more than they are."

What Schiff said: "We have been very good to your country, very good. No other country has done as much as we have."

 

2) What Trump said: "I wouldn't say that it's reciprocal necessarily because things are happening that are not good but the United States has been very, very good to Ukraine."

What Schiff said: "But you know what? I don't see much reciprocity here."

 

3) What Trump said: "I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it."

What Schiff said: "I have a favor I want from you though."

 

4) What Trump said: "There's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great."

What Schiff said: "I want you to make up dirt on my political opponent. Lots of it. ... I'm going to put you in touch with people, not just any people, I am going to put you in touch with the attorney general, my attorney general Bill Barr."

 

5) What Trump said: "I will have Mr. Giuliani give you a call, and I am also going to have Attorney General Barr call and we will get to the bottom of it."

What Schiff said: "I'm going to put you in touch with Rudy. You are going to love him. Trust me. You know what I'm asking. So I'm only going to say this a few more times. In a few more ways."

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3 minutes ago, Jive Turkey said:

I’m expecting Trump to tweet about the Amber Guyger verdict. He’s watching Fox News. They’ll talk about it. He’ll throw red meat to the base. 

He'll pardon her and award her the Medal of Freedom for her bravery during the soft on crime, anti-cop Democrat witch hunt.

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46 minutes ago, bad_teammate said:

W got us into a massive set of wars that killed hundreds of thousands/millions of people and cost us trillions of dollars and thousands of lives.

W is far worse than Donald.

Donald is a huge pussy. He's all hat and no cattle. He'll badmouth and backstab you 26 hours a day. But actual blood on his hands is something else. If it came down to a boots on the ground fight he doesn't want his brand tarnished with Trump's War.

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52 minutes ago, RPM said:

Donald is a huge pussy. He's all hat and no cattle. He'll badmouth and backstab you 26 hours a day. But actual blood on his hands is something else. If it came down to a boots on the ground fight he doesn't want his brand tarnished with Trump's War.

Exactly. Plus, a war isn't really about him.If he can't profit from it or get votes from it, it is useless to him. He doesn't really care about people dying or suffering, that much is obvious (unless it is him dying or suffering) so a war is unlikely. I mean he is down to pretty much one and two syllable words (Staff tweets don't count) so if there is a war, what is he going to do, go in front of the cameras and say, "Go! Fight! Win!"?

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On 9/24/2019 at 6:07 PM, Chuckie Finster said:

The only constant of Trump's presidency is that his approval rating rises when he stays out of the news, and drops when he's a featured player.  This ensures that he will be front and center for the foreseeable future.

The Republicans were never going to react any other way, but their muted defense (aside from the usual chucklefucks) leading up to today about Ukraine tells me all I need to know about what they really think about the situation.

It's only been a week, but this seems to be holding up.

Edited by Chuckie Finster
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30 minutes ago, Queen Bitch said:

A quick gander to the Tiger Droppings politics board will tell you those people will NEVER turn on him.

I grew up in a SE Texas refinery town. Of my HS graduating class of 500ish people, I'd bet 400 either work in plants, supporting the plants, or have spouses or other family that do. Their mindset at the moment is "if I lose my job to help Trump MAGA, so be it. It will be better in the long run, then we will be making big bucks when we break China and all the illegals stealing our jerbs are gone!!" 

It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Lets see how they feel when they can't make a house payment and the F250 gets repoed. 

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1 hour ago, Chuckie Finster said:

 

1 hour ago, triplehorn said:

And this WINNING is happening in certain key states that handed him the WH by the slimmest hair:

 

 

I sure hope they haven't made cuts to welfare, affordable healthcare, SNAP and other unemployment benefits in Michigan and Louisiana. And since they obviously don't take kindly to socialized government programs, they won't be asking for funds from wealthier Liberal states.  Right? Or maybe Ted Nugent can play a benefit concert for them.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/us/politics/trump-border-wars.html

 

Quote

The Oval Office meeting this past March began, as so many had, with President Trump fuming about migrants. But this time he had a solution. As White House advisers listened astonished, he ordered them to shut down the entire 2,000-mile border with Mexico — by noon the next day.

The advisers feared the president’s edict would trap American tourists in Mexico, strand children at schools on both sides of the border and create an economic meltdown in two countries. Yet they also knew how much the president’s zeal to stop immigration had sent him lurching for solutions, one more extreme than the next.

 

Quote

Privately, the president had often talked about fortifying a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a cost estimate. He wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh. After publicly suggesting that soldiers shoot migrants if they threw rocks, the president backed off when his staff told him that was illegal. But later in a meeting, aides recalled, he suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down. That’s not allowed either, they told him.

“The president was frustrated and I think he took that moment to hit the reset button,” said Thomas D. Homan, who had served as Mr. Trump’s acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, recalling that week in March. “The president wanted it to be fixed quickly.’’

 

Quote

Mr. Trump’s order to close the border was a decision point that touched off a frenzied week of presidential rages, around-the-clock staff panic and far more White House turmoil than was known at the time. By the end of the week, the seat-of-the pants president had backed off his threat but had retaliated with the beginning a purge of the aides who had tried to contain him.

Today, as Mr. Trump is surrounded by advisers less willing to stand up to him, his threat to seal off the country from a flood of immigrants remains active. “I have absolute power to shut down the border,’’ he said in an interview this summer with The New York Times.

 

Spoiler

This article is based on interviews with more than a dozen White House and administration officials directly involved in the events of that week in March. They were granted anonymity to describe sensitive conversations with the president and top officials in the government.

In the Oval Office that March afternoon, a 30-minute meeting extended to more than two hours as Mr. Trump’s team tried desperately to placate him.

“You are making me look like an idiot!” Mr. Trump shouted, adding in a profanity, as multiple officials in the room described it. “I ran on this. It’s my issue.’’

Among those in the room were Kirstjen Nielsen, the Homeland Security secretary at the time; Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state; Kevin K. McAleenan, the Customs and Border Protection chief at the time; and Stephen Miller, the White House aide who, more than anyone, had orchestrated Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda. Mick Mulvaney, the acting chief of staff was also there, along with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and other senior staff.

Ms. Nielsen, a former aide to George W. Bush brought into the department by John F. Kelly, the president’s former chief of staff, was in a perilous position. She had always been viewed with suspicion by the president, who told aides she was “a Bushie,” and part of the “deep state” who once contributed to a group that supported Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign.

Mr. Trump had routinely berated Ms. Nielsen as ineffective and, worse — at least in his mind — not tough-looking enough. “Lou Dobbs hates you, Ann Coulter hates you, you’re making me look bad,’’ Mr. Trump would tell her, referring to the Fox Business Network host and the conservative commentator.

The happiest he had been with Ms. Nielsen was a few months earlier, when American border agents had fired tear gas into Mexico to try to stop migrants from crossing into the United States. Human rights organizations condemned the move, but Mr. Trump loved it. More often, though, she drew the president’s scorn.

That March day, he was furious at Mr. Pompeo, too, for having cut a deal with Mexico to allow the United States to reject some asylum seekers — a plan Mr. Trump said was clearly failing.

A complete shutdown of the border, Mr. Trump said, was the only way.

Ms. Nielsen had tried reasoning with the president on many occasions. When she stood up to him during a cabinet meeting the previous spring, he excoriated her and she almost resigned.

Now, she tried again to reason with him.

We can close the border, she told the president, but it’s not going to fix anything. People will still be permitted to claim asylum.

But Mr. Trump was unmoved. Even Mr. Kushner, who had developed relationships with Mexican officials and now sided with Ms. Nielsen, could not get through to him.

“All you care about is your friends in Mexico,” the president snapped, according to people in the room. “I’ve had it. I want it done at noon tomorrow.”

The Start of an Overhaul

The president’s advisers left the meeting in a near panic.

Every year more than $200 billion worth of American exports flow across the Mexican border. Closing it would wreck havoc on American farmers and automakers, among many others. Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, said in an interview at the time that a border shutdown would have “a potentially catastrophic economic impact on our country.’’

That night, White House advisers succeeded in convincing the president to give them a reprieve, but only for a week, until the following Friday. That gave them very little time to change the president’s mind.

They started by pressuring their Mexican counterparts to rapidly increase apprehensions of migrants. Mr. Kushner and others in the West Wing showered the president with emails proving that the Mexicans had already started apprehending more migrants before they could enter the United States.

White House advisers encouraged a stream of corporate executives, Republican lawmakers and officials from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to tell Mr. Trump how damaging a border closure would be.

Mr. Miller, meanwhile, saw an opportunity.

It was his view that the president needed to completely overhaul the Homeland Security Department and get rid of senior officials who he believed were thwarting efforts to block immigrants. Although many were the president’s handpicked aides, Mr. Miller told him they had become part of the problem by constantly citing legal hurdles.

Ms. Nielsen, who regularly found herself telling Mr. Trump why he couldn’t have what he wanted, was an obvious target. When the president demanded “flat black” paint on his border wall, she said it would cost an additional $1 million per mile. When he ordered wall construction sped up, she said they needed permission from property owners. Take the land, Mr. Trump would say, and let them sue us.

When Ms. Nielsen tried to get him to focus on something other than the border, the president grew impatient. During a briefing on the need for new legal authority to take down drones, Mr. Trump cut her off midsentence.

“Kirstjen, you didn’t hear me the first time, honey,” Mr. Trump said, according to two people familiar with the conversation. “Shoot ’em down. Sweetheart, just shoot ’em out of the sky, O.K.?”

But the problem went deeper than Ms. Nielsen, Mr. Miller believed. L. Francis Cissna, the head of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services until earlier this year, regularly pushed back on Mr. Miller’s demand for a “culture change” at the agency, where Mr. Miller believed asylum officers were bleeding hearts, too quick to extend protections to immigrants.

They needed to start with the opposite point of view, Mr. Miller told him, and start turning people away.

John Mitnick, the homeland security general counsel who often raised legal concerns about Mr. Trump’s immigration policies, was also on Mr. Miller’s blacklist. Mr. Miller had also turned against Ronald D. Vitiello, a top official at Customs and Border Protection who the president had nominated to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

By midweek, the campaign to change Mr. Trump’s mind about closing the border seemed to be working.

Maybe there’s another way to do this, the president told Ms. Nielsen. How about if I impose tariffs on the Mexicans, or threaten to impose tariffs? Tariffs are great.

But the staff worried that his retreat would only be temporary. The president never really let go of his obsessions.

They were right. On a trip to California late in the week, Mr. Trump turned to Mr. McAleenan, the Customs and Border Protection chief, with a new idea: He wanted him to stop letting migrants cross the border at all, with no exceptions. If you get into any trouble for it, Mr. Trump told him, I’ll pardon you.

The Turning Point

Once on the ground, Mr. Trump met up with Ms. Nielsen and worked a room filled with Border Patrol agents. Start turning away migrants at the border, he told them. My message to you is, keep them all out, the president said. Every single one of them. The country is full.

After the president left the room, Mr. McAleenan told the agents to ignore the president. You absolutely do not have the authority to stop processing migrants altogether, he warned.

As she and her staff flew back to Washington that Friday evening, Ms. Nielsen called the president. She knew he was angry with her.

“Sir, I know you’re really frustrated,” she told him. The president invited her to meet with him on Sunday in the White House residence.

Ms. Nielsen knew that Miller wanted her out, so she spent the flight huddled with aides on a strategy for getting control of the border, a Hail Mary pass. She called it the “Six C’s” — Congress, Courts, Communications, Countries, Criminals, Cartels.

Unbeknown to her, Ms. Nielsen’s staff started work on her letter of resignation.

When Ms. Nielsen presented her plan to Mr. Trump at the White House, he dismissed it and told her what he really needed was a cement wall.

“Sir,” she said, “I literally don’t think that’s even possible.” They couldn’t build that now even if it would work, which it wouldn’t, Ms. Nielsen told him. The designs for steel barriers had long since been finalized, the contracts bid and signed.

The president responded that it was time for her to go, Mr. Trump recalled later. “Kirstjen, I want to make a change,” he said.

The president said he would wait a week to announce her resignation, to leave time for a transition. But before Ms. Nielsen had left the White House that day, the word was leaking out. By evening, Mr. Trump was tweeting about it.

“Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen will be leaving her position,” Trump wrote, “and I would like to thank her for her service.”

The dismissal was a turning point for Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda, the start of the purge that ushered in a team that embraced Mr. Miller’s policies.

Mr. Trump quickly dismissed Claire M. Grady, the homeland security under secretary, and moved Mr. McAleenan to take Ms. Nielsen’s old job. Within two months, Mr. Cissna was out as well, replaced by Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, a former Virginia attorney general and an immigration hard-liner.

On August 12, Mr. Cuccinelli announced that the government would deny green cards for immigrants deemed likely to become “public charges.” Nine days later, Mr. McAleenan announced regulations to allow immigrant families to be detained indefinitely.

In the months since the purge, the president has repeated his threat of placing tariffs on Mexico to spur aggressive enforcement at the border. Mr. McAleenan and Mr. Cuccinelli have embraced restrictive asylum rules. And the Pentagon approved shifting $3.6 billion to build the wall.

Mr. Trump has continued to face resistance in the courts and public outrage about his immigration agenda. But the people who tried to restrain him have largely been replaced.

In the interview with The Times this past summer, Mr. Trump said he had seriously considered sealing the border during March, but acknowledged that doing so would have been “very severe.”

“The problem you have with the laws the way they are, we can have 100,000 of our soldiers standing up there — they can’t do a thing,” Mr. Trump said ruefully.

 

Edited by Francisco 2.0
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2 hours ago, Queen Bitch said:

A quick gander to the Tiger Droppings politics board will tell you those people will NEVER turn on him.

That board is 95 percent Russian/eastern European trolls. Its what happens when the moderators of a board fail to moderate and actually agree with the Russian trolls stance.

First of all, anyone who has ever been to Louisiana knows that while the people there are pretty ignorant, they aren’t quite that dumb and are not such big right wingers that they are actually going to spend the time getting on the internet to post about politics. Getting on the internet to post about the saints, yes. Getting on the internet to post about impeachment of trump, no. 

Second, even if they did want to get on the internet to post about trump, 80 percent of them couldn’t figure out how to do it anyway. And surely not on tiger droppings. 

That board is a complete fraud. The good news is it brought us Hugo (ha ha). 

Edited by JimmyJames
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"Can I get a cost estimate on enough venomous snakes and crocodiles to span 2600 miles?"

"Sir, this is the GAO, a federal bureaucracy, prank calls won't be tolerated and could result in severe criminal charges."

"I'm not playing on the phone. I'm Mick Mulvaney."

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8 minutes ago, Chooky said:

"Can I get a cost estimate on enough venomous snakes and crocodiles to span 2600 miles?"

"Sir, this is the GAO, a federal bureaucracy, prank calls won't be tolerated and could result in severe criminal charges."

"I'm not playing on the phone. I'm Mick Mulvaney."

Sharks with frickin laser beams would be more effective IMO

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That board is 95 percent Russian/eastern European trolls. Its what happens when the moderators of a board fail to moderate and actually agree with the Russian trolls stance.
First of all, anyone who has ever been to Louisiana knows that while the people there are pretty ignorant, they aren’t quite that dumb and are not such big right wingers that they are actually going to spend the time getting on the internet to post about politics. Getting on the internet to post about the saints, yes. Getting on the internet to post about impeachment of trump, no. 
Second, even if they did want to get on the internet to post about trump, 80 percent of them couldn’t figure out how to do it anyway. And surely not on tiger droppings. 
That board is a complete fraud. The good news is it brought us Hugo (ha ha). 


And me!

The president’s Director of Social Media actually posted this today.

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12 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

While that is of course ridiculous, it's such a perfect window into his brain.  He actually thinks these are viable, realistic ideas.  He lives in a cartoon.  Unfortunately, now we do too.

He has the brain of a toddler.  Seriously, a moat with alligators and spikes?  That’s little kid shit.  

So, you know, “He thinks just like us!”

Edited by BrickHorn
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6 hours ago, Chad Fuck said:

No new unprovoked wars either.

*Looks like BT beat me to it.

Donald Trump is waging war on American Democracy. That makes him worse than Bush even if he doesn't have the body count. That's to say nothing about his weakening of our alliances and empowering of our adversaries. I've said before that I think the appointment of Bill Barr as his stooge AG is the point where he took over the title of worst president ever. It remains to be seen whether America will recover. 

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