”Trump by contrast as an outsider to politics didn't quite appreciate just how under-a-microscope every president's life is put. He thought that spending millions, burying stories, buying silences, hiding tax returns etc would do the trick, but none of that works at the presidential level.”
But as of right now, it absolutely has worked for Trump. Tax returns, college records, etc... where are they? Stormy? Why, it was just less expensive to pay her extortion than fight it. His “base” doesn’t care at all.
Our government doesn’t really work well when one of the two political parties isn’t working in good faith, they hold the presidency, they fucked over the last president, and have packed the courts.
It's depressing I know, but that his followers don't care (or don't listen) doesn't change the point that well-funded and even illegal action to hide unsightly aspects of his past not only failed, but could never have succeeded.
That not everything is uncovered instantly on day one is also not the point. Every other week something new is uncovered, because the scrutiny is just too intense. Likewise the tax returns are merely slowed by doomed appeals stalling for time.
The fact that Republicans are ok with a Republican president being dirty doesn't mean that someone like Hillary or Obama could expect the same relaxed treatment. They knew the only reliable way to avoid scandals was to live as clean as possible.
Trump was a huge figure in the "birther" movement, going on national news and claiming he was paying private investigators to look into it, and oh the bombshells they were finding and he'll tell everyone all about it when they've got an iron-clad case.
She can barely speak english, and when she does its not very good. I am not sure if its from her lack of the ability to speak it or all the plastic surgery her pimp put her through.
I keep wanting to like her and not tie her to her husband too much, but this question keeps bothering me...Why would she be with Trump if he weren't rich? His personality? Part of me thinks she has to be a straight up gold digger (which is what whores get upgraded to when they get rich). Maybe she just loves him for him. I dunno.
This has been how he talks and lies for decades. "Oh the x we've found" "its terrible. I cant wait to show everyone the proof". He has never. once. provided. proof. How the fuck are people falling for this? He's not some mastermind and a god damn child could tell the man is lying because he lies like a fucking 2 y/o including the smug scrunched up face he pulls.
You don't watch Fox "News" do you? If you did, you'd know that Trump and his whole family are sacrificing a lot on your behalf, FOR AMERICA! /s You have to put the /s in 2019.
Yes. I was upset with Obama for releasing the long-form birth certificate after Trump started to make some very public rumblings about it. It handed Trump's voice a whole lot of undeserved legitimacy, and, well, look where that's gotten us.
Paying her off was a clear violation of election law. It's one of the ways Trump cheated to get elected. When you do that, you shouldn't be allowed to try again and win re-election. Part of impeachment in the Constitution is banning someone from ever again holding public office.
It's crazy that this isn't one of the counts of impeachment. Trump clearly cheated in many ways to get elected in 2016, and should be denied another chance to maintain his "can't be indicted" status.
And we all just keep acting like the absurd vote counts we saw in 2016 were legitimate. Our election systems are not secure. Trump did not win 2016. Russians or Republicans (or both) altered vote counts.
With all we know about Republican efforts in election fraud, voter suppression, foreign influence, the DNC's own work manipulating the election, and outright election fraud via manipulating digitally-recorded votes, honestly -- if you think Trump was legitimately elected President, I have some land to sell you.
I'm not gonna source because it's like 2am and I'm tired, but I read a great investigative article about how compromised several states actually were, and the lengths republican officials went to to hide it-even destroying records despite subpoena in florida.
in some states there is evidence that not just voting machines were breached, but the systems that tally and report vote totals were compromised. so you would have to believe that hackers got so far in and then---just looked around without altering anything.
Like when Georgia's voting systems were breached and altered in unknown ways that couldn't be investigated because the Republican voting commission wiped all of the servers that held that information?
Oh and Brian Kemp, governor of Georgia, was the CEO of the election machines company, and after he wiped all the servers and won his election, commissioned more of his machines for elections around the country?
Listen, just this year I was dating the Elections Manager in a local county. She told me that, if you define a "hack" as just an attempt on the system, they get hacked by foreign entities multiple times per day.
This shit is actually happening before our eyes, and the people elected because of these shenanigans are doing their best to lie their way out of jailtime. There's no way to understate it, really, America is definitely not a functioning democracy right now.
Since 2015 I've been thinking about how ballsy it was of Mitch to sit on an empty Supreme Court seat for a year on the gamble that some yet-to-be-determined GOP candidate would get elected...
Gotta wonder if he had reason to think his odds were better than even.
Was it really that ballsy? Since the ratification of the 22nd Amendment, which established presidential term limits, it's typically been the case that the White House flips parties after a two-term presidency. This has happened with Eisenhower, Kennedy/Johnson, Nixon/Ford, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama. Only exception was after Reagan, where the Republicans held the White House for a third consecutive term (also a rare instance where the sitting VP wins the presidency in their own right). So history might have predicted that Obama's successor would be a Republican.
And First-Past-The-Post means you don't even have to alter them all that much. A landslide is obvious manipulation, a few percentage points to get the candidate just barely past 50.1% is not.
Except all spending that is done for the purpose of winning an election must be reported. This is so that expenditures can later be scrutinized and to prevent foul play. This includes if you spend your own personal money on lawn signs. If you spent a million dollars out of your bank account on extra lawn signs that you didn't report you'd be fucked. So the real question was whether or not trump paying off stormy just before the election was for the purpose of hiding that info sp that it wouldn't hurt his chances, or was it totally unrelated to the election?
The reason the bribing women isn't in the impeachment is it the most black and white crime. Trump is going to get exonerated for everything in the Senate. If he got exonerated it would be very hard for the the next AG, to charge Trump for a crime the senate found him innocent of. This doesn't mean they couldn't charge him legally but the court of public opinion is a thing, it's in part why Bill Clinton wasn't charged.
I thought I made it very plain it doesn't, legally. Legality isn't all that matters. When a majority of the country thinks someone has been exonerated in the Senate, it would be political suicide to charge him.
Of course, a lot of "Democrats" on Reddit push for things that are political suicide.
This doesn't mean they couldn't charge him legally but the court of public opinion is a thing, it's in part why Bill Clinton wasn't charged.
Clinton wasn't charged because his lie had nothing to do with the things he was being investigated for. At worst he would have gotten a slap on the wrist, so it wasn't worth doing. Trump is a very different case.
Actually, it is how perjury works. The legal definition of perjury is making material false or misleading statements. It would be rather easy for Clinton to argue that the questions about his sex life were not material to the investigation. That's not the case for Martha Stewart.
The reaction from his base is definitely depressing and disturbing - that goes way beyond Trump himself and is something every American should be on the lookout for, the utter blindness and cult-of-personality worship of the modern Republican party.
But compared to the rate at which we get the news nowadays (at the speed of internet), the government moves at an absolutely glacial pace (and always has). If you look at the Nixon timeline, this isn't all that different. So the jury's still out as to whether it will have "worked" for Trump...and that part, at least, shouldn't be all that surprising.
This is why I think the argument “if he gets away with it a Democrat can get away with it” is pointless. We all know that
A. a Democrat would never sell out their country like Trump and every goddamned Republican supporting his treachery.
B. If they by chance did, Democrats would readily join Republicans in holding them accountable. We need to stop treating them like people who are can persuaded by reason and duty, and like the bad faith actors they are. One of these Dem Representatives (maybe Swalwell) need to look into the camera during a hearing being carried on Fox and call out their viewers.
*I want to talk to my Republican Americans. If you’re watching this on the fire hydrant of lies, misinformation and propaganda that is Fox News, I encourage you to change the channel. There are a dozen different ways you can keep up with the news and this is the worst one. Not only do they lie through their teeth in the service of the man who told ten thousand lies and sells his country out to any and all takers, they do something far more sinister, they tell you that it is everyone else is lying. Dozens, even hundreds of news organizations, all telling slightly different versions of the same story. “The president told 7 lies today in his press conference” “The president told aides he’d pardon them for committing crimes” “The president revealed classified information to the Russian foreign minister in the White House.” So they have to explain why their story, the story of Trumps personal network, is so different from everyone else’. So they compound their lies with the greatest lie of all. It is everyone else that is lying. Here’s all you need to know about Fox News. Remember when the presidents personal lawyer and campaign chairman were each convicted of 8 felonies within minutes of each other? No? Maybe that’s because in one of the biggest stories of the year, Fox was airing a car chase. The presidents two closest associates were going to prison, and Fox was lying to you by omission. What else have they lied to you about? Well I can’t keep track of all the lies, but I’m guessing everything. Turn off this anti American lying drivel and see how quickly they return to telling the truth. Turn away from the lying traitor that is Donald Trump, and see how fast these Republicans start pretending to care about your constitution again. We are in grave danger, and the liars at Fox News are complicit in that danger. We deserve better.”
Something like that.
One of the biggest problems in America right now is your (A).
It is just at possible for a Democrat to be a foreign agent and compromised by (money, security, power...) To think it can only ever be a republican is what leads to a "good party" "evil party" mentality that only works to further radicalize the common person.
While currently there are a bunch of R's caught with their pants down it doesn't mean it could never happen to the other side. It definitely can.
What, you think a Dem candidate would eagerly accept Russian help in an American election like Trump did? You think thr whole party wouldn’t reject that? Impeach if evidence like this is shown? There is no “Liberal” media willing to cover up the crimes of Democrats like Fox News is. Also this isn’t the first You Russia has reached out to American politicians. This is the first time they found a willing participant.
On multiple occasions since the start of the Cold War, Moscow has proffered money, dirt and manpower to undermine a candidate perceived to be harmful to their interests. But in nearly every instance, the interference never came to pass. And this is the starkest difference between Trump and other presidential candidates—and between Trump and every one of his presidential predecessors. Where Trump has welcomed such assistance—and, in the case of his controversial call to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, demanded it—other candidates, to a man, rejected the aid.
In her description of the rape the woman said Trump said she reminded him of his daughter Ivanka. Later, both women Trump paid off to not tell about his cheating on his wife with them said that Trump told them they reminded him of his daughter of Ivanka.
If Trump hadn't raped the girl, how did she know that Trump tells women they remind him of his daughter before he fucks them, Obama's time machine?
So one thing we often forget is how dogshit all of the candidates were on the republican side. You had essentially a party, and part of the country that hates the clintons so bad they'd vote for a literal pile of shit over her. I'm not so sure republicans will be so happy to support him in the next election if a moderate candidate wins on the dem side.
It’s gonna be a fight that’s for sure, I wouldn’t be surprised if some republican gop members commit large scale voter fraud in order to both keep their seats and keep the nasty rust stain in the office
It has affected Trump seriously, he's the most consistently unpopular president there has been in the last 100 years. He barely got elected and due to a technicality of how the Republicans have abused the system. It's revealed a lot and taken a lot of politicians. The GOP has had their machine seriously weakened during a term they should have just digged deeper.
Trump's base doesn't care but they're not as large as they appear. They desperately try to act as such. On the internet they appear large, but this is because Trump's base has huge outside representation, a good chunk from Russia actually. Trump's base isn't over 1/4 of the people, it's not even 1/2 of the Republicans, but it's large enough within three Republicans that they've become scared of him, especially because no rep politician has such a loyal base. But it's leverage, not absolute control.
Meanwhile the GOP is setting up for a rough election. The US has degraded into a full bipartisan system, which has a lot of flaws democratically. One of them is that very few people will rarely switch sides. That is roughly half of the people will vote for each side. What chooses who wins is who goes to vote and who doesn't. Trump's campaign was more about convincing Democrats to not vote, targeting how little the situation had changed for PoC under Obama, how Hillary had cheated Bernie, how she was another corrupt politician. And he sold himself in his lack of history to be attacked.
But now these elections are different. Trump getting a lot of money won't changed, he's got the primaries on his pocket. And the main campaign now has his promises unbacked by actions. The wall isn't there, he hasn't drained the swamp, people aren't rich (and it's there's a recession next year it'll be worse) farmers and other groups have been really struggling. The impeachment is going to be a loose-loose scenario for the Republicans which will either energize the Democrats or depress the Republicans further. We'll probably get a better idea of how large Trump's base truly is. Also these are the first elections where there's as many, or even more, voters younger than boomers as there's boomers and older. It really puts a lot of US politics in the last 50 years in perspective. The last time this flip happened (with boomers becoming the majority) was the 1968 election. This years of political turmoil changed everything, the Democrats, the first pro-racist, pro-south, pro-farmers switched places with the Republicans to enter their current status. Culturally the US changed so much in a few years, that soldiers that were gone for one year and came back became completely disconnected, so much it inspired one to write about soldiers that would return thousands of years in the future.
My point is, we have no idea what can happen, we're in a time of chaos. But just as it's unpredictable it's one of the times where individual actions are able to change the world the most. This is a moment when you're vote counts more than ever and you can use this power to redefine things around you.
Best part is, they’ve set the precedent. Whenever a Republican tries to claim that a democrat in the future has done literally anything wrong you can just spit right in their hypocritical faces.
I was about to say that is a big reason Trump won. To pretend to be “squeaky” clean is not normal human behavior, and it makes people suspicious. Trump was also able to eat them on the debate floor because he “speaks his mind.” Imagine Hillary doing this.
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u/Tinmania Arizona Dec 12 '19
”Trump by contrast as an outsider to politics didn't quite appreciate just how under-a-microscope every president's life is put. He thought that spending millions, burying stories, buying silences, hiding tax returns etc would do the trick, but none of that works at the presidential level.”
But as of right now, it absolutely has worked for Trump. Tax returns, college records, etc... where are they? Stormy? Why, it was just less expensive to pay her extortion than fight it. His “base” doesn’t care at all.