Posts Tagged ‘Trump’

The Trumps are Scam Artists

Posted: September 30, 2019 in News and politics, Uncategorized
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During the planning for the inauguration, Ivanka Trump, the president-elect’s eldest daughter, and a senior executive with the Trump Organization, was involved in negotiating the price the hotel charged the 58th Presidential Inaugural Committee. A planner emailed Ivanka, and others at the company to “express my concern” that the hotel was overcharging for its event spaces, worrying of what would happen, “when this is audited.”

The Trumps raised money for the inauguration and then funneled those funds through the Trump Organization and back into their own pockets. Ivanka Trump was both a Trump executive and also in charge of the organizing committee. She overcharged for space at the Trump Hotel in violation of tax laws and then pocketed the profits!

It also looks like donors gave money in exchange for favors from the Trump administration! The inauguration committee is currently under investigation.
Then there is Daddy
• The presidency is benefiting Trump’s business in several ways. Government officials stay in Trump hotels at inflated prices while some foreign government officials take steps to gain favor by giving Trump breaks on his properties in their countries!

Eric Trump has been giving his father quarterly updates on the financial health of his businesses, despite promises that the President would have no involvement. Those businesses have also done deals with foreign governments, despite the President’s pledge that they wouldn’t.

Trump spent nearly 40 million in taxpayer money to travel to his own properties, where he outlandishly gouged the Secret Service for food, lodging, and even golf cart rentals to follow him around!

Scott Pruitt, A former Trump appointee to the Environmental Protection Agency, regularly dined with donors and lobbyists from industries his department was regulating. He also used public money to pay for a soundproof booth in his office, no one ever has done, and chartered private and military overseas flights!

Ryan Zinke, a former Trump-appointed secretary of the interior, chartered a $12,000 flight from Las Vegas to Montana at taxpayers’ expense. He also failed to disclose an investment in a Montana gun company, booked a $12,000 flight on an oil executive’s plane, spent almost $40,000 on a wildfire fund to pay for flights and paid $6,000 for a helicopter trip to visit Vice President Mike Pence!

Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, tried to use a government plane to fly him to Europe for his honeymoon. He may also have availed himself of a taxpayer-funded military aircraft to view the solar eclipse in August, though he says the trip had a different purpose.

Tom Price, the former secretary of health and human services appointed by Trump, spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on private planes. Trump hired Price despite Price’s history of using his position in Congress to receive sweetheart stock deals.

Trump has not spent much time in Trump Tower as President so far, but the government has spent $130,000 per month to lease space in the building for a military office that supports the White House. As far as I can find, it has not been used for anything!

Jared Kushner has reportedly used his closeness with Trump to secure foreign investment in Kushner’s family-owned business, in exchange for granting visas.

Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, used his position to a Russian oligarch as part of a long-running money-laundering and tax-evasion scheme, according to charges brought against him by Robert Mueller.

Michael Flynn lobbied on behalf of the Turkish government, but Trump selected him as national security adviser anyway before later firing him!

Kellyanne Conway, a top Trump adviser, promoted Ivanka’s fashion line on television. A clear violation of her job! Not a big deal, but all part of the list of things that no other administration would be able to get away with!
Trump lawyer Marc Kasowitz donated or solicited more than $50,000 on behalf of a Manhattan district attorney who later dropped a case against Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr.

Ivanka Trump, a White House adviser to her father, owns a stake in a Trump-branded luxury hotel in Washington valued at between $5 million and $25 million.

K.T. McFarland, Trump’s former deputy national security adviser, violated federal law by using over $13,000 in campaign funds to boost her work as a media figure.

Rebeckah Adcock, a top Department of Agriculture deregulation official, met with pesticide lobbyists from her former employer and discussed issues related to her previous lobbying.

A charity led by Eric Trump paid over $145,000 to properties owned by his father during the election.

Brenda Fitzgerald, Trump’s former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director, purchased shares in food, drug, and tobacco! This after taking charge of an agency that aims to reduce smoking. She resigned.

Despite ethics rules, Ben Carson, the HUD secretary let his son help organize an agency event and invite individuals with whom he had potential business dealings. Then Ben proceeded to spend almost $32,000 on dining furniture for his government office!

Trump has refused to release his tax returns.

Crews flying to the Mideast are now flying a new routinely! What wasn’t routine was where the crew stopped along the way: President Donald Trump’s Turnberry resort, about 50 miles outside Glasgow, Scotland. Previously all flights to the Mideast refueled at military bases which are much cheaper on fuel than public airports! The choice of the hotel so struck one crew member that he texted someone close to him and told him about the stay, sending a photo and noting that the crew’s per diem allowance wasn’t enough to cover food and drinks at the ritzy resort!

Pence stayed at Trump International Golf Links and Hotel in Doonbeg, which is on the western coast of Ireland. He traveled by Air Force One, or whatever it is called when a vice president is aboard, to Dublin on the other side of the country. He should have stayed locally, which was the original plan!

Trump has been accused of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment, including non-consensual kissing or groping, by at least 22 women since 1980. Even his ex-wife Ivana said he raped her. She later changed her statement after a settlement agreement!

We are all familiar with the tape of him bragging about what he could do to women because he was rich and famous! I cannot repeat what he said, but the f and p words were used!

And of course, the call to the President of the Ukraine! When you start putting it all together, it tells the story of a dishonest, immoral man, who cares only for himself! It reveals a man that has no respect for law enforcement, woman, people of color, or anyone who does not worship the ground he walks on!

 

The Blame Game

Posted: August 6, 2019 in News and politics, Uncategorized
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Republicans point to video games, Trump blames fake news but does admit that white supremacy is to blame! Trump does not admit, however, that he stokes the fires of said white supremacy! News media, just because it disagrees with Trump is not fake news! But is responsible in one sense, they cover his rallies and hate speech giving him a world platform to spread his hate, fear, and blame game! So in that way, they contribute to the incitement of those who are ready to hate into actions that cause death and destruction! I played a lot of video games, and yes I played shooting games that included combat. I also played cowboys and Indians as a kid because the movies at the time screwed with history and I did not know any better! But I have never entertained a desire to do another harm! In adulthood, I became an avid supporter of Native American rights and programs to help improve their lives! That is because unlike some politicians, I became educated by reading and studying about what is really going in the world, you know actual history! Columbus did not discover America, never even saw it. His main gift to his Queen upon his return was, in his opinion, a native population that could easily be enslaved and stripped of any wealth! And no, Africans did not migrate to America, they were stacked asshole to bellybutton in the hold of a ship and brought here to be sold like cattle to the highest bidder. One last rant, we are all one race, we all came out of Africa at one point or another in our past, and climate and the local environment caused us to adapt and is responsible for our differences in appearance. But we all have common ancestors, there is no superior race, only inferior thinkers. We have one of those inferior thinkers in the current White House, backed by some of the most backward-thinking people in our history! Do you get it now!

Do You Get It Yet

Posted: April 2, 2019 in News and politics
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image.pngTrump is a narcissistic megalomaniac, thief, and moral deviate! Everything that is associated with his family is the most beautiful, the grandest this and that. But since his facts and history only exist in his head, I guess he can embellish all he wants, or lie, which is what he does every single time he opens his mouth! Are any of you starting to get it yet!

Trump several times, whenever he is overseas and complains about NATO says his father was born in Germany, he was actually born in New York. Trump does have German roots through his grandfather. Grandad Trump tried to immigrate to Bavaria as his wife hated the Bronx, where they were living at the time. Gramps was forced out of Bavaria because he had formerly run away to avoid military service, which was required! Trump also claims his dad was a hero in the war and shot down 80 enemy aircraft if so he would be a national hero, but the fact is neither his father Fred Trump nor grandfather was ever in the military, the apple does not fall far from the tree, evidently!

In 1927 Fred Trump, Donald’s dad was arrested by New York police while marching in a Ku Klux Klan parade, Donald denies his father was ever arrested, I guess he was to busy shooting down those 80 aircraft in the war!

In 1954, Fred Trump was investigated by a U.S. Senate committee for profiteering from public contracts, including overstating his Beach Haven building charges by $3.7 million. Sound familiar, taught his son well!

Donald Trump joined Trump Management Company around 1968 and rose to become company president in 1971. Donald Trump claimed to receive a loan from his father in the mid-1970s of $1 million but actually documented as numerous loans exceeding $14 million!

Minority applicants turned away from renting apartments complained to the New York City Commission on Human Rights and the Urban League, leading the League and other groups to send test applicants to Trump-owned complexes in July 1972. They concluded that whites were offered apartments, while blacks were generally steered away. Both advocacy organizations then raised the issue with the Justice Department. In October 1973, the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a civil rights suit against the Trump organization (Fred Trump, chair & Donald Trump, president) for “violating the Fair Housing Act of 1968.” Actually, they had to file against Donald Trump a second time, as he was still turning tenants of color away years later! Really a great man and role model sitting in the Oval Office, don’t you think!

There is a whole list of building projects that were not reported accurately on taxes, whole sets of apartments Fred sold to Donald way below market value as a tax dodge. Probably one of the reasons Donald Trump does not want anyone looking at his taxes, one of many reasons I am sure!

Again, I ask, are you starting to get it now?

Socialism is Alive in the GOP

Posted: March 4, 2019 in climate change, Health and wellness, Life, News and politics, science
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Let’s start with a few facts. There are no true socialist countries in the world, never have been. There are countries that spout socialist ideas and like the Soviet Union, as it was called during the cold war era, mixed socialism and communism ideologies together, but was neither. It was a dictatorship or a monarchy take your pick! The communist party owned everything, controlled everything, and gave the populace enough to sustain the workforce, not much else!

So Trump wants you to believe, and why you would not just automatically assume anything he said was a lie with his record, that the Democratic Party wants us to become a socialist country! That liberals want to destroy capitalism using climate change as its driving force! That his wall and his rule are necessary to keep our country from being overrun and decimated by non-white criminals, and by any green initiatives, again an attack on capitalism, according to Trump! That he is a religious icon and that Christianity is under attack and the Christian Bible should rule our education and our government. In that vein, he states that the Constitution is too restrictive and the rules need to be rewritten! His words, not mine!

So now, let’s look at a few things from a world point of view. If climate change is not happening, and we are not accelerating it (humankind) then why is it that we are the only country, the only one, on the entire planet not to actively engage in the fight to combat it! Or why, on the world stage, are we the only industrial nation not to provide universal health care to its citizens, even though we spend way more than they do on healthcare, have less positive outcomes, a lower life expectancy than all to them! Again, the only one! When everyone else on the planet says one thing, and you are the lone holdout, does that not suggest you may be on the wrong side of a said issue? Especially since our own Pentagon has told us that climate change is the #1 most dangerous threat to our national security! That prestigious organizations across the globe like NASA and our own National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have said that climate change is real, it is caused in large part by our industry and lack of restraint. And that it will be devastating to our economy, safety, and quality of life. Yes even under the Trump admin they still say the same thing!

Now let us dwell on the title of this article for just a moment. Trump only cares about power, money, and adulation, as do a majority of his fellow Republicans, they just do not take it the edge of lunacy, but they protect their President because he is their scapegoat. Get it while you can and screw the rest mentality exists in our political representatives, and if you are honest, more prolific as a GOP trait. In that pursuit, they have given out corporate welfare by the trillions, including huge perks to the most wealthy among us. At the same time write-offs that policeman, firefighters, and teachers used to get were abolished, in favor of the rich being able to write off the maintenance and storage costs of their private jets! If you block any attempt to barter for the best prices for drugs, what possible moral road have you just gone down, or are we protecting oligarchs and their bottom line? Of course, we are! They never replaced the Affordable Care Act with the big beautiful and so much better plan Trump promised! They, Republicans, are not even trying to create one, they never intended to! The ACA messed with the oligarch’s profit margins and that could not be allowed to happen. And since money now has as much standing as our citizenry, it just stood up and bought what it wanted, or those that have it did, anyway!

I do not know if you are aware, but the countries that inhabit the planet earth do not consider us a capitalist country, but an oligarchy! They no longer trust us, and think we are a threat to the health of the planet and its safety! And no matter what Trump says, he is not respected, but rather he is feared among our allies for his ignorance, his innate fascination with dictators, any so-called strong man, and people who have absolute power over their respective populations. This is power he admires and wants! This is why countries that used to be our allies are looking elsewhere because we are now thought of as a bullying nation, not a bastion of peace or safety for the globe, not any longer!

So Trump, our Liar in Chief, has already started on his campaign of misinformation and outright lies to make the American people think that he is at war and that he is our savior! Just fact check the CPAC speech, there was no truth in anything he said! It was all misdirection, obfuscation, and prevarication! If you cannot bear to vote democratic, at least try and elect someone who has some integrity, some moral values! I am sure there must be a Republican candidate that has not been accused of sexual misconduct, is not under investigation, convicted, or confessed to multiple crimes out there somewhere, find he or she and get rid of the orange menace!

The News by John love

Posted: January 12, 2019 in News and politics
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Trump inherited a booming economy with low unemployment and steady job growth — an easy win on day one — and he quickly claimed credit. Early in his presidency, Trump boasted about job gains starting from his election onward, crediting Obama’s final months as his own. Fact not fiction, and anyone who is honest will find this to be absolutely true!

The U.S. is now its 10th year of economic growth, and in its longest period of growth with 95 straight months of job creation. The bulk of that decade of growth was under Obama’s presidency, and can fairly be credited to him.

While the tax cuts probably helped inject some cash into the economy — particularly the stock market — the country has largely maintained the growth it saw under Obama.

Here is a small but effective way to tell if Trump is lying. If Trump calls someone or some organization, like the news in general, a liar about some topic, you can bet a fact check will show it to be absolutely true. Now, this, of course, is not 100% effective, but my testing of this scenario has been that it works 98% of the time with 100% accuracy. Or 2% of the time with 95% accuracy! Of course, a Trump pundit would go for the 2%, leave out the accuracy equation altogether, and forget the 98% part of the equation ever existed! Hannity for example!

So now Trump wants to declare a national emergency over his border wall! So far the federal funds he wants to divert are for California wildfire damage and flood control and includes disaster relief fund diversion from, guess who, Puerto Rico! I guess we Californians did not sweep our forests properly and Puerto Rico, as you know, is in a really big ocean and very hard to access. Evidently, he forgot about the Wright Brothers and other aviation enthusiast’s contributions to delivering things through the air! Or do both these areas of the globe contain too many brown people and are too (earthy) hard to find?

Plus just a few weeks ago he claimed that nothing has gotten through or over the border under his watch. If so, where is the emergency, and who needs a wall? His own intelligence agencies say there are no terrorists at the border. If you believe his latest that you can just drive down the fence line a couple of miles, find a huge hole then turn left in your van full of tied up and gagged women and cruise right on into the U.S. then you sir or madam, are idiots! This is the logic of a disturbed individual!

The wall is part of an ego trip. He is not even looking into the scientific ways to monitor and stop traffic across the southern border. He is not even considering the fact that almost all illegals came here on a commercial flight and then overstayed their visa. That almost all drugs come into our ports in cargo vessels, not across the border! That illegal crossings of the border are at an all-time low, not increasing, and the so-called caravans are caused by massive human rights violations! He is ignoring that for the first time we are being sanctioned by the United Nations as human rights violators ourselves! Who would have thought that possible just a short few years ago?

You need to wise up people, look at the world with open eyes. Almost every NATO country sees us as a threat right now! Trump is hated by most countries, and is not respected by our allies and their leaders! All you have to do is look, not hard to find these things out when you take your blinders off and actually look for actual facts, not what you want the facts to be!

 

 

 

 

Trump Wants War, With Anyone!

Posted: October 30, 2018 in News and politics
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The Trump administration has ordered 5,200 additional troops — more than double the deployment in Syria — to the Southwest border in response to a caravan of Central American migrants who may seek to enter the U.S. through Mexico. Though the group is about 900 miles away and dwindling!

President Trump has seized on the immigration issue ahead of the midterm election, but illegal immigration this year is on pace to be lower than in all but four of the previous 45 years.

Among other roles, Black Hawk helicopters equipped with night sensors will be available to ferry Border Patrol personnel “exactly where they need to be” to “spot groups” and “to fast-rope down” to intercept migrants trying to cross the border. Military aircraft will conduct surveillance. The Pentagon is also sending engineers who could build vehicle barriers, walls and razor-wire fencing around the entry points. Soldiers arriving at the border were bringing 22 miles of concertina wire and would have another 150 miles available!

In addition, the Pentagon is sending four larger transport planes, including three C-130s and a C-17 to ferry the agency personnel to spots along the border where migrants may seek to cross illegally. The Pentagon is also sending riot gear, ready-to-eat meals and tents to equip, feed and house additional Border Patrol agents sent to the border.

So we are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to repel a bunch of men, women, children, farmers, and the working poor who our own intelligence agencies have already said have no ISIS operatives or terrorist cells in them, just terrified victims! Just another Trump fear tactic to enrage his base!

And a note to end on, Trump now says he wants to cancel the 14thamendment so that people born in the United States will no longer automatically be citizens! So this has been a law for 150 years. All of this is to get your mind off his sophistry, rhetoric if you will, and his responsibility for acts of violence because of it!

Most of this was gleaned from an article supplied to me by email from the L.A. Times. Some, of course, is from me! I did fact check this as best I could before publishing, as always! Anything I could not find, I did not include! Do you get it now!

 

 

Trump is the Point of the Spear

Posted: October 24, 2018 in News and politics
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So, what do the Clintons, the Obamas, Eric Holder, Maxine Waters, George Soros, John Brennan, CNN, and Debbie Wasserman all have in common? They are all on Trump’s hit list! He attacks people, calls them names, says they are the enemy of America, that they have a low IQ, and congratulates attacks on reporters! He cheerleads his followers in chants against all these people and reporters, especially CNN! Trump is at the center of this current threat to people’s lives and the bombs sent to intimate, harm, and possibly kill people!

Reporters across the globe are being threatened, and yes killed. The people on Trump’s hit list have been receiving an increasing amount of threats since Trump has taken upon himself to foment hate in a public forum. He is the President of the United States, he is heard by millions at his many, many, pep rallies. Now figure out how many crazy unstable people per million are out there, this current threat was a foregone conclusion.

So if you are a Republican, a conservative, you may dislike, maybe even hate the people that appear in the first paragraph, Trump’s hit list, but do you honestly believe they should live under threat and get bombs delivered to them? Do you believe a President should cheerlead millions of people in hateful rhetoric, or should he instead be asking everyone to act with moderation?  The latter of course, but is that what Trump has done, you and I both know that he did not. He has preached fear, played a blame game, and has been a cheerleader for violence every chance he gets. Praised a body slamming GOP candidate, offered to pay any court costs if people beat up people who disagree, and named names when he called them low IQ, horrible dangerous people, fake and dangerous enemies of the U.S.

This is a guy [Trump] who has tried to tell you that we will lose 40,000 jobs if we lose an arms deal with Saudi Arabia, then the next day it was 100,000, then 500,000 a few days later, and finally he upped it to a million! He has tried to get you to believe that immigrants fleeing for their lives, or at least from starvation and threat are somehow mostly Democrats coming here to vote illegally and be given new luxury cars by the liberals. Oh yeah, they have whole phalanxes of ISIS operatives amongst them. He has no way of knowing this, as the FBI or even CIA are not allowed to investigate without permission of the foreign countries involved. Plus these claims are ludicrous to anyone with any common sense or knowledge of why these people left their homelands in the first place. The same is true of Trump’s claim that he has investigators on the ground solving the Khashoggi assassination in Turkey. The FBI has already said they have not gotten any such authorization! These are just more daily lies that Trump tells every day!

A President, by the way, who at this point in time has not reached out to either former Presidents of these United States about this latest threat on their lives! He might later because he has been told he needs to, but I guaranty he will not think to do so on his own. He never even mentioned the people threatened in his statement earlier today, and it was plain he was just reading a statement that had been prepared for him!

A united front from both sides of the aisle in Congress should at least censure the President for the hateful rhetoric he spews at every opportunity because he is the point of the spear, he is directly responsible!

Just a Few Examples of a Liar in Chief

Posted: October 9, 2018 in News and politics
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  1. At a recent campaign rally, Donald Trump added a new line to his standard message. Unfortunately, it involved the president attacking a pending piece of legislation that exists only in his imagination. I quote; “Every single Democrat in the U.S. Senate has signed up for the open borders – and it’s a bill. And it’s called The Open Borders Bill. What’s going on? And it’s written by – guess who – Dianne Feinstein.” No such bill exists written by anyone, this is just what he does, all the time. But you say he doesn’t lie! Well, he is either a liar or he is mentally afflicted! Trump also has an unnerving talent for repeating conversations that actually never happened, but he believes they did! Also indicative of serious mental problems!

 

  1. Trump; “I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down, and I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.” There are several easy reasons why this is a lie. Thousands gathered where, and no else saw them, and how did they know to gather. Plus there are several factual events that Trump attended during that time period that would have put him where he would not have been able to witness this even if it had happened! An event everyone else in the world missed, by the way! Trump did claim to have also viewed the archival footage, footage I might add no one has ever been able to find! The man just lies and does not even have the sense to lie well. But yet you say you have never heard him lie? Well, then you have never heard him speak!

 

  1. Trump; “The Obama administration is bringing a quarter-million Syrians into the country.” “Refugees are pouring into our great country from Syria. We don’t even know who they are. They could be ISIS. They could be anybody.” In fact, the U.S. has resettled fewer than 2,000 refugees from Syria, out of the millions of people displaced by a civil war that started years ago. In a country of 322 million people, 500 refugees a year is better described as a trickle. The idea that “we don’t even know who they are” is laughable, considering the much-publicized vetting process that requires refugees to wait up to 18 months and to pass multiple background and health checks before gaining admission.

 

  1. Trump claimed that 81 percent of white murder victims are killed by black people, and 97 percent of all black murder victims are killed by black people. The actual fact of the matter is more than 80 percent of white murder victims are killed by other whites. If you look at any statistic Trump has given concerning black people they have all been totally false, every time! What does that tell you?

 

  1. He and Vladimir Putin are buddies. Trump said: “I got to know him very well because we were both on 60 Minutes, we were stablemates and we did very well that night.” Trump and Vladimir Putin did, indeed, appear on the show on the same night. But Trump is clearly implying that the two bonded over the experience. However, both men appeared in pre-taped segments. Trump was recorded in his New York office. Putin was in Moscow. Trump didn’t meet Putin! And why is it that you still think Trump does not lie all the damn time?

 

  1. Trump; China is the big winner in the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership. The Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal “was designed for China to come in through the back door and totally take advantage of everyone,” and currency manipulation “is not even discussed.”Trump was corrected by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) who noted that China is not a party to TPP. However, that’s not the only thing about what Trump said that was false. The TPP was released simultaneously with an agreement on, you guessed it, currency manipulation, which was lauded by trade expertsas a historic achievement that met the goals Congress had set for the president’s negotiators. So, that’s really a twofer.

 

Look, I could go on for hours here, but you would not bother so I will leave off. I chose these items because any fact checking at all will easily reveal these lies! There are thousands of examples of Trumps lies, his cheating on his wives while still married to them, forget the porn stars! People in business he has cheated, federal lawsuits, twice actually, for discrimination, the list goes on and on and on. DO YOU GET IT NOW?

I gleaned a lot of this from the link below. I did a fact check on my own, and so can you! Oh, and look at the dates, he hadn’t even gotten wound up on most of these! Except for the #1 example, which is current, these are just a few of the lies he told you that got him elected! His lies have gotten way worse over time, and his facts, we don’t need no stinking facts!

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2015/11/24/Donald-Trump-s-8-Most-Recent-Blatant-Lies

I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration

Posted: September 6, 2018 in News and politics
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The Times today is taking the rare step of publishing an anonymous Op-Ed essay. We have done so at the request of the author, a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure. We believe publishing this essay anonymously is the only way to deliver an important perspective to our readers.I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.

President Trump is facing a test of his presidency unlike any faced by a modern American leader.

It’s not just that the special counsel looms large. Or that the country is bitterly divided over Mr. Trump’s leadership. Or even that his party might well lose the House to an opposition hellbent on his downfall.
The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.

I would know. I am one of them.
To be clear, ours is not the popular “resistance” of the left. We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.
But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.

That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.

The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.

Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets, and free people. At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings. At worst, he has attacked them outright. In addition to his mass-marketing of the notion that the press is the “enemy of the people,” President Trump’s impulses are generally anti-trade and anti-democratic.
Don’t get me wrong. There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.
But these successes have come despite — not because of — the president’s leadership style, which is impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.
From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.

Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.
“There is literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to the next,” a top official complained to me recently, exasperated by an Oval Office meeting at which the president flip-flopped on a major policy decision he’d made only a week earlier.

The erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren’t for unsung heroes in and around the White House. Some of his aides have been cast as villains by the media. But in private, they have gone to great lengths to keep bad decisions contained to the West Wing, though they are clearly not always successful.

It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.
The result is a two-track presidency.
Take foreign policy: In public and in private, President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations.

Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest of the administration is operating on another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and punished accordingly, and where allies around the world are engaged as peers rather than ridiculed as rivals.
On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin’s spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his national security team knew better — such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable.
This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.

Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over.
The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.
Senator John McCain put it best in his farewell letter. All Americans should heed his words and break free of the tribalism trap, with the high aim of uniting through our shared values and love of this great nation.
We may no longer have Senator McCain. But we will always have his example — a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue. Mr. Trump may fear such honorable men, but we should revere them.

There is a quiet resistance within the administration of people choosing to put country first. But the real difference will be made by everyday citizens rising above politics, reaching across the aisle and resolving to shed the labels in favor of a single one: Americans.
The writer is a senior official in the Trump administration.

Two Funerals and a Wedding

Posted: August 28, 2018 in News and politics
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This is an excerpt from an article written by Noah Bierman and published in the L.A. Times!

“Sen. John McCain’s decision to exclude President Trump from his funeral is an extraordinary moment on its own; a posthumous rebuke from an American icon that regarded the presidency as sacred, and believed its current occupant defiles that office!

Yet Trump’s exclusion from such high-profile events of mourning and celebration — where American presidents are typically counted on to stand in for an entire nation — is emerging as a pattern over his 19 months in office.
In April, Trump was asked to stay away from the funeral of Barbara Bush, wife to one president and mother of another, leaving it to former Presidents Clinton and Obama to serve as national consolers to the Bush family. In December, he opted to skip the president’s traditional attendance at the annual Kennedy Center Honors gala after several of the artists being feted threatened a boycott.
The British royal family dispensed with inviting foreign dignitaries to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding in May partly to avoid having to invite Trump, whom Markle had attacked as “divisive” and “misogynistic.”

End of Excerpt!

In the words of John Love for the rest of the article, there are several more examples, but two funerals and a wedding pretty much sum up how Trump is viewed here and abroad!

Trump got into office by using fear of race, religion, resentment, insults, and lashing the immigrant to his whipping post for most of our problems, anyone not Christian for the rest!

This is indicative of how he is seen, and an embarrassment for the U.S. on the world scene and yes, here at home. Despite what Trump says, which should always be taken with a grain of salt, he is alienating our long-time allies, making a world war more likely again, and in the long term his bullying, because that is what it is, using tariffs to do so, is going to backfire on our economy. Trump has always been a bully and dreams of being large and in charge of the world! Beware your support you are only endangering yourselves.

When has the United Nations needed to castigate the United States for human rights violations before Trump? Never in our history before is the answer! Why would the United States, a champion of human rights pull out of the U.N. Human Right Council? Because it does not go along with Trumps hate and fear policies, think about it!

So our allies exclude him from what is normally a President’s privilege, and a President’s family and Senator from his own party have excluded him from attending their funerals. Trump, exhibiting his total lack of class, refused to lower the flag at half mast for John McCain until he was lambasted with complaints from both political parties and veterans groups! Again, think about it, is this the man you want representing you to the rest of the world, or a man you believe is really interested in helping anyone but himself? Do you get it now?

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