Sound The TRUMPets! A Thread for Presidential Pondering 2016-2020(?)

[drogulus]

     Why don't Trump's friends and associates pretend to think everything he did with Michael Cohen was above board?

"They're going to threaten him with a long prison term and try to turn him into a canary that sings," the Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz said.

But what if Cohen doesn't know the words?

That feels like the third possibility we should be discussing: that Cohen has nothing of value to tell federal prosecutors about Trump, because they never engaged in criminal wrongdoing together.

Of course, that's not my working theory of the case. But isn't that a possibility the president's advocates and defenders should want to pretend is plausible?

Yet they don't. And it reflects a weird, unspoken assumption in discussing the president's legal troubles, going back at least to the president's declaration that his personal business interests outside Russia are a "red line" the special counsel Robert Mueller must not cross.

     That's what I mean. Why don't Trump's defenders presume his innocence? If his defenders don't, why should I?

     Trump allies worry Cohen will flip

     

[Mahlerian]

     Pardoning Trump might not be a high priority for a #46 of either party. He's seen as far worse than Nixon, someone who can't explain why he consistently acts to protect Putin while doing nothing to protect the election process from the next attack. A more civilized era would call him a traitor on the evidence in plain sight.

An era less beholden to partisanship would at least agree on the main points of what evidence exists.

[drogulus]

An era less beholden to partisanship would at least agree on the main points of what evidence exists.

     My point is they effectively agree without saying so. If Dershowitz thinks he is defending Trump by supposing Cohen will "sing like a canary" I wonder what his theory of the case is. It's not so different from my own. Trump is threatened by both the truth and by his own lies.

[BasilValentine]

Samantha Bee perfectly captures my feelings about the recent James Comey media blitz:

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

(After a montage of talking heads touting his bombshell revelations and the beanpole himself spouting the oft quoted words, Samanta, exasperated, says: "Morally unfit to be president? That's not a bombshell, that's how they answer the phone at the White House now!")

[drogulus]

     Trump attorney Michael Cohen withdraws libel lawsuits over Russia dossier

     My grocery store isn't carrying the National Enquirer any more. I looked for it at the checkout line where I always see it, and no, it's gone. Of course the store is in the Deep State hellhole of Cambridge. Still, if you've lost Star Market.....

     I wonder if Hildabeast is still dying of all of those diseases the Russo-trolls gave her. How can I find out now?

[André]

It must be a slow, painful death. In slow motion, with flashbacks. It will still be news come november 2020. You can't let a good story go to waste.

[BasilValentine]

Did anyone mention that Trump is now being forced to pay the $25,000,000 in damages assessed for having defrauded a couple thousand people in the Trump University scam, an amount that does not quite make the victims whole? I'm curious about what our resident Trump supporters think about this.

[Zeus]

That was something he did in PRIVATE about TEN YEARS AGO.  It has NO BEARING on his ability to act PRESIDENTIAL.

In fact, he wasn't even involved. That's all FAKE NEWS.

CROOKED HILLARY should be in JAIL!!




(How'd I do?)

[BasilValentine]

That was something he did in PRIVATE about TEN YEARS AGO.  It has NO BEARING on his ability to act PRESIDENTIAL.

In fact, he wasn't even involved. That's all FAKE NEWS.

CROOKED HILLARY should be in JAIL!!
(How'd I do?)

Well, obviously, jailing Hillary is the first priority if we want to secure the country. Besides, Trump's misdeeds are way in the past and I have it on good authority that he has found Jesus and turned over a new leaf. We can be sure if he feels any further itch to skim money from charitable foundations, sexually assault girls and women, launder money for criminals across the globe, defraud thousands of vulnerable citizens, engage in self-dealing, violate the foreign corrupt practices act, violate housing discrimination and campaign finance laws, bribe attorneys general or, possibly, conspire against the United States, he will be able to resist temptation.
(Pretty good!)

[Sammy]

That was something he did in PRIVATE about TEN YEARS AGO.  It has NO BEARING on his ability to act PRESIDENTIAL.

I think it would be hard for a con-man and swindler to act presidential for any sustained time period.  I suppose that it's to Trump's credit that he hasn't tried to act presidential; it's not in him.

[Karl Henning]

I think it would be hard for a con-man and swindler to act presidential for any sustained time period.  I suppose that it's to Trump's credit that he hasn't tried to act presidential; it's not in him.

He is ever true to his contemptible self.

[lisa needs braces]

Haha at Israel.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/natalie-portman-forces-genesis-prize-to-cancel-israel-ceremony-1.6012937

[Christo]

Did anyone mention that Trump is now being forced to pay the $25,000,000 in damages assessed for having defrauded a couple thousand people in the Trump University scam, an amount that does not quite make the victims whole? I'm curious about what our resident Trump supporters think about this.

Judge finalizes $25 million settlement in Trump's fraud case

"A federal judge finalized the $25 million settlement between President Trump and students of his now shuttered Trump University on Monday, with New York's attorney general claiming "victims of Donald Trump's fraudulent university will finally receive the relief they deserve."

The order from U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel – the same Indiana-born judge Trump called biased because of his "Mexican heritage" – comes a year after he first approved the settlement. It marks the end of two class-action lawsuits and a civil lawsuit from New York accusing Trump of "swindling thousands of Americans out of millions of dollars through Trump University," in the words of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.

The circumstances are nothing short of bizarre: a sitting president of the United States has written a check for $25 million to a group of Americans who credibly claimed that he ripped them off by perpetrating a fraud.

You know things are bad for a president when a story like this goes almost entirely unnoticed by the public, eclipsed by a dozen or so more pressing scandals."

[drogulus]

     Comey memos reveal (surprise!) Republicans have blundered again

Then came the dopiest idea of all — threaten to subpoena the James B. Comey memos and then charge Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein with contempt when he refuses. Did it dawn on them that he would hand them over and that they would match almost identically with everything Comey has said or written? Apparently not. This crowd has blown itself up more times than Wile E. Coyote.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) and House Intelligence Committee Chair Nunes, for reasons known only to them, thought the memos' release would be helpful to Trump. Wrong. The Comey memos released to the House and immediately leaked contain, it is fair to say, not a single helpful fact for Trump.

     The Rosenstein gambit puzzles me. It looks like Nunes, Gowdy & co are doing defense pantomime. How don't they know what the memos would reveal? How don't they assume Trump will lie and Comey will be shown to be truthful about the contents of his contemporaneous notes?

     

[Spineur]

Democratic party sues Trump, Wikileaks, Russia for election conspiracy

https://www.npr.org/2018/04/20/604343810/democrats-sue-russia-wikileaks-and-trump-campaign-over-election-conspiracy

I find it ironic to see Trump in the same basket as Mr Assange Wikileaks

[SimonNZ]

Tennessee House passes bill calling for monument for unborn children

[arpeggio]

Democratic party sues Trump, Wikileaks, Russia for election conspiracy

https://www.npr.org/2018/04/20/604343810/democrats-sue-russia-wikileaks-and-trump-campaign-over-election-conspiracy

I find it ironic to see Trump in the same basket as Mr Assange Wikileaks

This seems to me to be more of a political move and I doubt if anything will come of it.  It would be fun if they succeed.

[SimonNZ]

Trump lied to me about his wealth to get onto the Forbes 400. Here are the tapes.

"In May 1984, an official from the Trump Organization called to tell me how rich Donald J. Trump was. I was reporting for the Forbes 400, the magazine's annual ranking of America's richest people, for the third year. In the previous edition, we'd valued Trump's holdings at $200 million, only one-fifth of what he claimed to own in our interviews. This time, his aide urged me on the phone, I needed to understand just how loaded Trump really was.

The official was John Barron — a name we now know as an alter ego of Trump himself. When I recently rediscovered and listened, for first time since that year, to the tapes I made of this and other phone calls, I was amazed that I didn't see through the ruse: Although Trump altered some cadences and affected a slightly stronger New York accent, it was clearly him. "Barron" told me that Trump had taken possession of the business he ran with his father, Fred. "Most of the assets have been consolidated to Mr. Trump," he said. "You have down Fred Trump [as half owner] . . . but I think you can really use Donald Trump now." Trump, through this sockpuppet, was telling me he owned "in excess of 90 percent" of his family's business. With all the home runs Trump was hitting in real estate, Barron told me, he should be called a billionaire.

At the time, I suspected that some of this was untrue. I ran Trump's assertions to the ground, and for many years I was proud of the fact that Forbes had called him on his distortions and based his net worth on what I thought was solid research.

But it took decades to unwind the elaborate farce Trump had enacted to project an image as one of the richest people in America. Nearly every assertion supporting that claim was untrue. Trump wasn't just poorer than he said he was. Over time, I have learned that he should not have been on the first three Forbes 400 lists at all. In our first-ever list, in 1982, we included him at $100 million, but Trump was actually worth roughly $5 million — a paltry sum by the standards of his super-monied peers — as a spate of government reports and books showed only much later.

[André]

Trump lied to me about his wealth to get onto the Forbes 400. Here are the tapes.

"In May 1984, an official from the Trump Organization called to tell me how rich Donald J. Trump was. I was reporting for the Forbes 400, the magazine's annual ranking of America's richest people, for the third year. In the previous edition, we'd valued Trump's holdings at $200 million, only one-fifth of what he claimed to own in our interviews. This time, his aide urged me on the phone, I needed to understand just how loaded Trump really was.

The official was John Barron — a name we now know as an alter ego of Trump himself. When I recently rediscovered and listened, for first time since that year, to the tapes I made of this and other phone calls, I was amazed that I didn't see through the ruse: Although Trump altered some cadences and affected a slightly stronger New York accent, it was clearly him. "Barron" told me that Trump had taken possession of the business he ran with his father, Fred. "Most of the assets have been consolidated to Mr. Trump," he said. "You have down Fred Trump [as half owner] . . . but I think you can really use Donald Trump now." Trump, through this sockpuppet, was telling me he owned "in excess of 90 percent" of his family's business. With all the home runs Trump was hitting in real estate, Barron told me, he should be called a billionaire.

At the time, I suspected that some of this was untrue. I ran Trump's assertions to the ground, and for many years I was proud of the fact that Forbes had called him on his distortions and based his net worth on what I thought was solid research.

But it took decades to unwind the elaborate farce Trump had enacted to project an image as one of the richest people in America. Nearly every assertion supporting that claim was untrue. Trump wasn't just poorer than he said he was. Over time, I have learned that he should not have been on the first three Forbes 400 lists at all. In our first-ever list, in 1982, we included him at $100 million, but Trump was actually worth roughly $5 million — a paltry sum by the standards of his super-monied peers — as a spate of government reports and books showed only much later.

A fascinating article indeed. The decades long history of lies, boasts and fabrication is just flabbergasting. Trump's obsession with boosting his net worth in the major lagues points to a grievous inferiority complex, probably the result of a deeply troubled relationship with his father.  The man is a pathological liar on the grandest scale.

[Mahlerian]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/magazine/dan-scavino-the-secretary-of-offense.html

The full extent of Scavino's role in Trump's Twitter regimen has never been fully disclosed. White House officials initially maintained to me that he only typed and posted verbatim what Trump dictated to him, while occasionally contributing anodyne tweets relating to the president's schedule. ("News conference at the White House concerning the Omnibus Spending Bill. 1:00 P.M.") Somewhat begrudgingly, one senior official did not deny that Scavino also sometimes corrected Trump's spelling errors. But the Knight Institute lawsuit had named Scavino, Hicks and Sanders because, as communications staff members, they are likely to "suggest content" for Trump's tweets, just as Trump's subordinates did during the campaign.

The biggest surprise here for me is that there's actually someone out there who gives the okay to the spelling and grammar regularly seen coming from Trump's Twitter feed.