Trump

[BillyStubbsTears]

How long a journey is it from

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”
 to
“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?”

Jesus f**king wept.

[Hounslowrover]

Now blaming Obama for his not coming to open new London USA embassy, saying Obama sold old one too cheaply, such a bad deal.  Unfortunately process began under George W Bush and he's scared of the demonstrations.   You can't make it up.

[Dutch Uncle]

Now blaming Obama for his not coming to open new London USA embassy, saying Obama sold old one too cheaply, such a bad deal.  Unfortunately process began under George W Bush and he's scared of the demonstrations.   You can't make it up.

But unfortunately he seems very good at it.....

[Filo]

Now blaming Obama for his not coming to open new London USA embassy, saying Obama sold old one too cheaply, such a bad deal.  Unfortunately process began under George W Bush and he's scared of the demonstrations.   You can't make it up.

Apparently they never owned the other one to sell

[Glyn_Wigley]

Now blaming Obama for his not coming to open new London USA embassy, saying Obama sold old one too cheaply, such a bad deal.  Unfortunately process began under George W Bush and he's scared of the demonstrations.   You can't make it up.

Funny how this wasn't a problem when the visit was arranged, or for the several months it's been in the diary since.

[Wild Rover]

Now blaming Obama for his not coming to open new London USA embassy, saying Obama sold old one too cheaply, such a bad deal.  Unfortunately process began under George W Bush and he's scared of the demonstrations.   You can't make it up.

 it was leased from that little known property man £Duke of Westminster,

[wilts rover]

Who do you think said this today:

It is the most secure, hi-tech and environmentally friendly embassy that the United States has ever built. Purchased and built from the sale of our London properties, the new embassy did not cost the US taxpayer a cent. Yet is one of the most advanced embassies we have ever built.

a) Donald Trump
b) some bloke on Twitter
c) the US Ambassador to the UK

https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/our-nine-elms-embassy-is-the-most-advanced-we-ve-ever-built-a3738566.html

[selby]

  I  think large parts of London outside the visitor areas are dog holes, Millwall, Charlton, Q.P.R. Brentford, just to name a few.

[bobjimwilly]

"So the US Embassy ‘deal’ was instigated by George W Bush, whose administration secured the Battersea site, & the Grosvenor Square freehold was never theirs to sell."
https://twitter.com/mrjamesob/status/951727814738415616

quelle surprise

[selby]

  The stock exchange is up 30% in the U.S.A. since he took office, he must be doing something right, well he has made some people a lot of money.

[bobjimwilly]

  The stock exchange is up 30% in the U.S.A. since he took office, he must be doing something right, well he has made some people a lot of money.

yes, he's pretty much done the opposite of draining the swamp, that's why the markets are up

[BillyStubbsTears]

Markets are up all over the world over the past year because the global economy is finally getting up to speed after the Great Crash.



The USA isn’t doing particularly well compared to other markets, but it’s nothing to do with Trump either way.

[Donny Dub]

Yes Trump is winning; DOW at all time record levels, higher employment and there’s the worldwide bounce too!  What’s not to appreciate about all that?

[bobjimwilly]

Yes Trump is winning; DOW at all time record levels, higher employment and there’s the worldwide bounce too!  What’s not to appreciate about all that?

Did you see BST's post above? Worldwide markets are all up, so how can that be because of Trump?

[hoolahoop]

  The stock exchange is up 30% in the U.S.A. since he took office, he must be doing something right, well he has made some people a lot of money.

yes, he's pretty much done the opposite of draining the swamp, that's why the markets are up

That's exactly what he is doing .

[MachoMadness]

Yes Trump is winning; DOW at all time record levels, higher employment and there’s the worldwide bounce too!  What’s not to appreciate about all that?

What legislation has he passed to achieve all that? Aside from his tax bill, which most economists agree will hurt when it starts to take effect, he's still essentially running on Obama-era policies.

[Glyn_Wigley]

Hmmm....

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-42724380

Next it'll be "Wall? What wall? I never said anything about a wall! FAKE. NEWS."

[BillyStubbsTears]

Wait and watch Mueller’s investigation. It’s gatgering pace nicely. He’s already turned several Trump associates to his side. We’ll see the details of what Putin has on Trump sometime in late 2018.

And it’ll be the biggest criminal scandal in American political history. There’s a very good chance that Trump will be in prison before the next Presidential election.

[MachoMadness]

I think the key is if Mueller gets an interview with Trump. Trump is doing his best to weasel out of it (wonder why?), and his legal team seem to be taking an extremely flexible view of the law in doing so. That surely won't stand up under pressure from Mueller.

[BillyStubbsTears]

MM

That is one way. But Mueller already knows that Trump has breached the Logan Act. He’s assiduously putting the evidence together by turning the screws on Trump’s ex-associates.

Flynn has cracked. Papadopoulos has cracked. Kushner is the next one. They will provide Mueller with his evidence. It’s coming.

[BillyStubbsTears]

If you’ve got a spare few minutes, this guy is worth reading. He’s been predicting the steps of the Mueller inquiry correctly for months.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/937816893448245248.html

[hoolahoop]

If you’ve got a spare few minutes, this guy is worth reading. He’s been predicting the steps of the Mueller inquiry correctly for months.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/937816893448245248.html

Hard work reading through it but you can see exactly how Mueller will reel them all in despite their best efforts - he wants them all especially the big lardarse himself . Trump is used to buying off people, manipulating the rules of the game to get maximum leverage however  Mueller will prove to be his nemesis.

With a target, masquerading as a President, Mueller is right to be methodical- he has to get both Trump and Pence right in the crosshairs before firing

[BillyStubbsTears]

Hoola

There will be a wonderful irony if it is the Logan Act that brings Trump down. If his criminal action was (illegally) negotiating with Putin in the period between the Nov 2016 election and his Jan 2017 inauguration. It would mean that a combination of
a) His overwhelming desire to appease Putin
b) His ignorance of procedure and law, and
c) His bombastic arrogance and egotism, in think that he can do whatever he wants and get away with it
would be what destroys him. That would be perfect.

Mind, as abramson says, the scary thing is the concerted attempt by right wing commentators to try to brush away the Logan Act as irrelevant. It’s a pattern. Trump will be supported by them whatever laws he breaks and trouble he causes because he’s on their side. Just like they supported Roy Moore in Alabama despite the allegations that he was a predatory child molester, because he wasn’t a Democrat.

[Glyn_Wigley]

But he's pissed off an awful lot of influential Republicans that you wouldn't have expected from a Republican president. There's quite a few of them that would be happy to hang him out to dry for the sake of both their party and their country.

[BillyStubbsTears]

They’ve got to be careful though. 35-40% of Americans and 80-odd% of Republican supporters still thing Trump is doing a good job and believe he’s being unfairly treated by the liberal Establishment. This is the endgame of decades of Fox News.

So Republicans who genuinely think he’s somewhere on the scale from evil to deranged, via just a plain and simple greedy, ignorant egotist have to be careful about being accused of not being behind him.

I still think they WILL stick the knife in eventually, when they get eviscerated  in the mid sessional, but I’m far from certain.

In some ways it’s fascinating. This is how very bad things happen. When a charismatic leader tells the base that their hatreds are normal, and the politicians a level down who are meant to keep him in check are too self-serving, craven or vowed to do so. Godwin’s Law and all that but this is precisely how You Know Who became all-powerful.

If Trump survives Mueller through the Republicans being prepared to cover for him then God f**king help us.

[MachoMadness]

That was one thing that I picked out in Abramson's recent threads. Trump and the people around him are deliberately putting up ludicrous legal arguments to muddy the waters, such as Don Jr arguing attorney client privilege just because someone on a conference call happened to be a lawyer. These arguments are ridiculous and hold no water but they cause delays as Trump runs every issue to the Supreme Court. His endgame is to buy time and delay the issue until the midterms, when the Republican establishment will be less inclined to stick the knife into the Dear Leader for fear of not getting elected.

Essentially Trump is going to fall back on extreme bureaucracy to obfuscate and bury the issue somewhere in America's justice system.

If you'd told me all this a couple of years ago, I'd have said there was no way Trump stays out of prison, much less stays president, but then we aren't exactly living in logical times.

[BillyStubbsTears]

Well now.

If you were guilty as hell of committing treasonous crimes to get yourself into the White House, and if the Department of Justice brought in an FBI Special Investigator to look into these allegations, and if that Investigator was getting damn close to nailing you, what would you do.

This is what I’d do. I’d get my lackeys in Congress to write up a one-sided memo that accused the FBI and DOJ of being in the pocket of my political opponents. I’d stir up the issue of this memo for days. I’d release it to the public, hoping for a wave of support.

What I’d do then is, I’d paint myself as the Saviour of the Nation who was going to clear out these scoundrels. And I’d fire the Investigator and the top officials at the DOJ who hired him. And then I’d have got away with it.

Actually, I really wouldn’t because that would effectively destroy the concept of the rule of law in America. That would mean that, as President, I could effectively get away with breaking any law I wanted. It’d never happen. I’ve just watched too many episode of House of Cards.

Hang on though...

https://mobile.twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/959389424806191104?

If he gets away with what he’s now openly planning, that’s the game up for America. There’s no way back.

I said a couple of weeks ago “If Trump survives Mueller through the Republicans being prepared to cover for him then God f**king help us.” It looks like I was naive in the extreme. He wasn’t banking on the Republicans covering him. Instead they have actually made him a gun and bullets with which to come out shooting. This next week may well be the most important one in America’s history since the Civil War. He must not be allowed to get away with this.

[Sandy Lane]

Yes, it is indeed very scary and I’m wondering whether he will, in fact, get away with it. He is doing what he does best - as Andy says, putting up walls, creating subterfuge, accusing the accusers and lying like hell.  And weirdly since the ‘office of president’ has always held a special respect to us, no one is pushing back too hard or at all, tbh.  But if the republicans in Congress put their own political ambition before those of the truth and democracy and watch while illegal sh*t goes down - which is very clear to anyone that there were dealings which are close to the edge and need to be investigated, then we have indeed lost the war, and god help us, and who knows what will happen next.

[BillyStubbsTears]

You can see it rolling out before our eyes. The most brazen attack on the structures of American democracy.

This is how it works this week.

1) The memo  is hyped across the Trump-supporting media and the Putin troll factories as “proving” that the FBI and DOJ were institutionally anti-Trump. (They weren’t of course. The FBI announced days before the election that Clinton was under investigation and that probably lost her the election.)

2) They increasingly focus on the Deputy Attourney General, Rod Rosenstein. They will say that the memo “proves” that he wrongly approved an investigation into links between Trump’s aid Carter Page and Russian spies.

3) The calls to sack Rosenstein will be ramped up this week. Trump stirring it on Twitter as he did in that link above, last night.

Why does this matter? Because Rosenstein brought in Mueller as the Special Investigator into Trump/Putin. Trump knows that even the Republican Congress will not allow him to sack Mueller himself. But he CAN sack Rosenstein, using the memo as his reasoning - then replace him with a subservient Deputy AG who WILL sack Mueller.

Watch it play out this week. If the Republican Party allow him to sack and replace Rosenstein without impeaching him for clear and unambiguous obstruction of justice, then American democratic rule of law dies. For the first time in history, the president will have established that he can commit treason and get away with it. That’s why this week is such a huge one.

[MachoMadness]

This is interesting, or it would be if it weren't so scary. This memo has been built up as a smoking gun even though the tiny amount of evidence it presents is hopelessly twisted, misleading and often based on lies and falsehoods. That this piece of fluff can lead to calls for Democrat, FBI and DOJ figures to be charged with treason is really worrying.

Since it was first mentioned I was questioning why people were buying it even though it was named after Trump's pet Nunes. I still don't understand it fully.