President Donald Trump's Final Days...

[diamelsx]

Originally Posted by Vaxter

Repub. Congressmen: We need to distract people from Trump. How can we do it?

Other Repub. Congressmen: How about we create the worst possible health care bill we can and then talk about how great it is. That'll eat up some news cycles.

Repub. Congressmen: That'll only work if we screw over women as much as possible, too.

Other Repub. Congressmen: Got it.

I am going to agree with this, but also remind people that establishment Democrats also benefit from the White House drama. The more craziness @ 1600 the less they have to focus on their epic failure of a campaign they ran and how are they going to get young voters to the polls from here on out.

[diamelsx]

Originally Posted by diamelsx

I am waiting for a good deal of the Trump supporters to understand they have been conned...

First group of people: veterans

Originally Posted by The Daily Beast

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump surprised a group of startled tourists in the White House basement, took meetings with senators, and met with leaders of the AFL-CIO and the Boy Scouts. On the same day, Trump bypassed a West Wing meeting of military veterans, who met with the president’s staff instead.
For the assembled veterans’ service organizations, which have a combined membership of about six million veterans, the missed connection with the president was the latest in a series of puzzling interactions with the Trump administration. Despite Trump’s audacious campaign promises to them, including a commitment to overhaul the long-troubled Veterans Administration and vow to “do everything for veterans,” Trump himself has still not met face-to-face with veterans groups since he was elected president.

source

[diamelsx]

Originally Posted by 31D1

@diamelsx, Didn't he instead send Omarosa to meet with them?

This is true. I only posted the first two paragraphs in order so people can get the main idea of the article, and leave a link to the article if you want a more in-depth look

[tsunamiSD]

Is Trump worse than a liar?

I thought of a book I read years ago, “On Bullshit,” by former Princeton professor and moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt. For the bullshitter, the truth is not just what he gets away with, but what he gets away from. A person who lies, Frankfurt writes, is “responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it.” For the bullshitter, however, “all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all…”

A bullshit artist like Trump could be even worse than a liar– and more dangerous. Liars are rational. They lie deliberately, parsing their words carefully, knowing what they’re hiding. A bullshitter, Frankfurt writes, “does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.”
Why is this so dangerous? Because when you are so untethered from facts, you create your own reality. In Trump’s reality, there is no sense of proportion, no possibility of shame, no need for knowledge. There is only the need to feel like a winner, to be on top, to intimidate your opponent. For this purpose, bullshit is the blunt instrument of choice.
In Trump’s mind, he already has won the ultimate contest of becoming the most important person on earth. That means he can call his own rules and his own truth. It means he can get away from the facts and get away with it.
The danger going forward is that Trump will continue to wallow in this alternate reality, drifting even further from the tedious and demanding responsibility of running the country.

Donald Trump Is the Perpetrator of McCarthyism, Not the Victim of It

It is the parallels between McCarthy and Trump, rather than McCarthy and Trump’s adversaries, that are most compelling. As some have noted, Trump was literally mentored by Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s right-hand man. Trump, like McCarthy, alleges the existence of a shadowy cabal of government bureaucrats to which he attributes near unlimited power.

Trump, like McCarthy, uses reckless accusations to whip his supporters into a frenzy and disorient his foes.

Another parallel is the relationship between the two demagogues and their party. Few conservatives wanted to defend McCarthy flat-out. He was too buffoonish and unpredictable. Yet they found him useful.

Trump and McCarthy both captured the passions of the conservative base in a way no other Republican politician of their time had managed. They channeled populist, anti-intellectual paranoia that frightened elites in both parties by threatening to tear apart the structures of republican government. The main way that the two men differ should not come as comfort: It is that McCarthy was a senator and an insurgent within his party, and Trump is the president who commands his.

Trump’s election has created “safe spaces” for racists: Southern Poverty Law Center’s Heidi Beirich on the wave of hate crimes

Since the election of Donald Trump in November, there have been almost 1,000 reported hate crimes targeting Muslims, Arabs, African-Americans, Latinos and other people of color.

As demonstrated by his rhetoric and policy proposals, and the behavior of his supporters during the 2016 campaign and his presidency, it is clear that Trump relied on white racism and nativism to win the White House.

When forced by public outrage to comment on the wave of hate crimes spreading across the country, President Trump issued a weak and obligatory statement on the subject during his address to Congress last week.

The President helped build a hotel in Azerbaijan that appears to be a corrupt operation engineered by oligarchs tied to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.


(note – this is a very long article that seems to be very well researched, I've only quote a very small part of it).

No evidence has surfaced showing that Donald Trump, or any of his employees involved in the Baku deal, actively participated in bribery, money laundering, or other illegal behavior. But the Trump Organization may have broken the law in its work with the Mammadov family. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, passed in 1977, forbade American companies from participating in a scheme to reward a foreign government official in exchange for material benefit or preferential treatment. The law even made it a crime for an American company to unknowingly benefit from a partner’s corruption if it could have discovered illicit activity but avoided doing so. This closed what was known as the “head in the sand” loophole.

Ivanka Trump was the most senior Trump Organization official on the Baku project. In October, 2014, she visited the city to tour the site and offer advice. An executive at Mace, the London-based construction firm that oversaw the tower’s conversion to a hotel, met with Ivanka in Baku and New York. He told me, “She had very strong feelings, not just about the design but about the back of the hotel—landscaping, everything.” The Azerbaijani lawyer said, “Ivanka personally approved everything.” A subcontractor noted that Ivanka’s team was particular about wood panelling: it chose an expensive Macassar ebony, from Indonesia, for the ceiling of the lobby. The ballroom doors were to be made of book-matched panels of walnut. On her Web site, Ivanka posted a photograph of herself wearing a hard hat inside the half-completed hotel. A caption reads, “Ivanka has overseen the development of Trump International Hotel & Tower Baku since its inception, and she recently returned from a trip to the fascinating city in Azerbaijan to check in on the project’s progress.” (Ivanka Trump declined requests to discuss the Baku project.)

[Devius]

A man carrying a backpack was arrested inside the White House complex, near the entrance to the first family's residence, according to reports.

US media said said the man was discovered around midnight on Friday by a Secret Service agent, near the building's south entrance.

President Donald Trump was in the residence when the incident took place, the reports said.

The security level was reportedly raised and Mr Trump was informed.

Details:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-39244367

[Vaxter]

Originally Posted by savage560;3968882[url

http://nation.foxnews.com/2017/03/10/amazing-us-debt-decreased-more-60-billion-trump-inauguration[/url]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCTJvTuEwco

Okay and the real facts (non-spun alternative facts) on the "debt drop":

https://www.forbes.com/sites/timwors.../#6be93c3a1fe3

The debt is rising more slowly now because economic growth has strengthened and because of policy decisions made during Mr. Obama’s administration. But the debt is on a clear upward trend. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated in January that the debt would increase by $559 billion in the current fiscal year, ending in September.

note that the rise in the debt won't in fact equal that deficit. Because there are two entirely different sets of debt, that owed to the public and that owed inter-government (the Social Security trust fund for example, although there's lots more too) and the interaction between them is complex.

So if you were minded to say so you could, accurately, say that the public debt owed to the public has fallen since Inauguration Day. Which is fun and amusing but not important. For we're really very certain indeed that it is going to rise over the course of this year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKvAKROiwk4

[Vaxter]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.69ba66473e22

The bad news for Trump is that there isn’t much he can do to speed this up. Infrastructure spending would certainly help, but that's reportedly been pushed off for at least a year, and, given Republican priorities, might not happen at all. Tax cuts for the rich, meanwhile, don’t have much bang for the buck, stimulative-wise. Other than that, it’s not an exaggeration to say that the extent of his economic policymaking has been taking credit for business decisions that companies had already made, in some cases years ago. That might get a lot of retweets, but it won’t create any jobs.

[SanteeFats]

If you can't get along posts will be removed, infractions given, and vacation time might be parceled out.

[Devius]

50 Days of Trump by Jonathan Pie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXvcFkij04c

[bloke57]

What's happened to Mr Trump

On this side of the Atlantic we've hardly heard a word about him for a fortnight. Has he stopped doing stuff or has he just stopped doing daft stuff?

Status update please.