a quick poll about Russia and Donald Trump

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

trump's dramatic arc calls for an ignominious fall. if russia doesn't do it some other criminal activity will have to be unearthed. it doesn't make aesthetic sense for him to just continue to lose popularity and sort of fade away after four years.

The thing is that this is real life and not a movie. Actual results will either be wholly unsatisfactory or so batshit insane that no one will believe it's actually real.

batshit insanity seems to cling to trump like a bad aroma

Like, the most likely scenarios I see panning out here are "Trump is an incurious moron who surrounded himself with compromised ninnies because they flattered home the most" or "Trump and Putin are secretly lovers planning to conquer the entire world through military action and trade shenanigans"

imo, the explanation could be: trump is addicted to the idea of making deals that make him money. this is central to his self-image. business deals are only about one thing: making or losing money. Russia offered him deals that make him money. there is no connection in his mind between his running for president, his deals with russia, his making money, and his committing treason or felonies. they are wholly compartmentalized in different parts of his brain. and then there was the money, too.

Dan's first scenario is almost exactly what I've been assuming for some time. Dan's second scenario is the plot of a series of self-published erotic novels I have coming out later this year.

kinda just wish the fucker would choke on a ham sandwich (DJT, not DJP)

because even if there is an actual fire in this case, idk how much more of this ugly shit this country can take at this point....which isn't to say I don't think it should be pursued, but just that it's all so fatiguing

I think it's something, just not the Manchurain Candidate LARP people want it to be.

otm

more to the point, not nothing, but also not something worth wasting precious effort on

imo, the explanation could be: trump is addicted to the idea of making deals that make him money. this is central to his self-image. business deals are only about one thing: making or losing money. Russia offered him deals that make him money. there is no connection in his mind between his running for president, his deals with russia, his making money, and his committing treason or felonies. they are wholly compartmentalized in different parts of his brain. and then there was the money, too.

I think the difficulty with this, and a lot of similar theories - like him 'owing money to Russia', is what we mean by 'Russia'. Is the Russian government offering him deals? Is he doing favours for non-government investors?

I think Trump is probably sceptical of sanctions and part of that scepticism could be motivated by self-interest, along with a broader idea that they are bad for business, but that scepticism seems to have been overridden by political reality and would fall a long way short of malfeasance on its own.

The wider trend of lumping everyone from Russians to Ukrainians, Azeris, Armenians, Russian-Armericans, Jewish Lithuanians who emigrated from the Soviet Union to the US aged seven, people who have business interests in Russia, people married to Russians, etc, as a suspicious monolith called 'Russia' is where it gets deep into what critics like Marsha Gessen are describing as a xenophobic conspiracy.

'putin's sphere of influence'

the saddest insult to everyday americans in a loooooong looooooooooongg time is trump and his buddies were convinced they could get away with it :/

I suspect the gist of it is that Trump surrounded himself with cranks and shady business people who couldn't get a seat at the table with more mainstream Republicans. Some of them, like Flynn, are more than usually sympathetic to Russia - probably in Flynn's case because he was paid and taken seriously as a critic of the Obama government when nobody else was interested in him. Some, like Manafort and Cohen, don't have any particular political axe to grind but have found the region a useful place to make shady money.

I do t think there will be evidence of a quid-pro-quo. Partly because, if Russia did provide the emails to Wikileaks, there was enough animus there towards Clinton to have done it anyway, partly because there doesn't seem to be any change of direction in the relationship with Russia. The sanctions have been reconfirmed, the inviolability of Ukrainian sovereignty loudly proclaimed and plans for a vast US military build-up announced. I can't see any of that changing unless Europe moves first on normalising Crimea.

otm

lol @ "something"

Russia is going to be Trump's Benghazi

maybe in terms of fallout but probably not in terms of what, like, actually happened

yeah there seems way way way more here than there was with Benghazi, and I'm not just saying that because I hate Donald Trump

his campaign advisor through the republican national convention had a $10,000,000 a year contract to advance russia's interests, from 2006 till Grover Norquist knows when. imagine the shoe on the other foot. moscowghazi hearings till the cows come home

the GOP called Obama "King Obama" for far lesser trangressions than Donald

they seem to be saying, people who believe above all in tax cuts for the rich are also epic hypocrites. it's not a good look, not that fox/koch nation gives a shit

Posted this on the main thread but worth a note:

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/us/politics/senate-jared-kushner-russia.html?referer

also didn't Roger Stone, who most biographies describe as Trump's closest advisor, straight up admit he was in contact with Russian hackers? isn't it weird how Stone, Guiliani, and every member of the Trump family (besides Tiffany, probably) knew exactly when the Wikileaks stuff was gonna start dropping?

it's only weird if you hate business and jesus and the constitution and success

yeah there seems way way way more here than there was with Benghazi

100 times zero is still zero

yes, but strangely, 100 plus zero is still 100

Some of the people around him might have been compromised and pushed him toward cerain policy positions without his awareness. This could have included direct bribes -- like a slice of Rosneft -- because the thing about deals like that is that they simultaneously work as blackmail. I think that's the most likely scenario -- We already know Flynn took money from Turkey during the campaign.

Granted the last thing we need is another Tweetstorm and the 'we KNOW' bit throughout here is tendentious, but I like this as a summary:

https://twitter.com/ColinKahl/status/846466154617077760

Schiff has formally asked for Nunes's recusal

https://twitter.com/RepAdamSchiff/status/846493210960637952

For some reason I don't think Trump himself would agree to a quid pro quo and put himself in such a compromised position.

but when you're a celebrity they let you do that

this one's going to be harder to get than Sessions' recusal, right? That one only came about due to some conservative voices suggesting he do it, whereas Ryan already came out in support of Nunes.

Ryan, so loved by conservatives right about now, yes.

Anyway, harder to get, but reaction to Nunes is turning towards the 'uh, dude, you can shut up now,' I've noticed.

it really does prove that Ryan is going to be a piece of shit until they finally flush him out. not that I had any doubts on that.

the things that raise my blood pressure the most are:

a) that Nunes is doing this all out in the open, with the weakest of alibis for every move he makes and
b) as usual, the Republicans demand an orgy of evidence enough to convict a criminal twice over before they'll let you investigate one of theirs, but something as miniscule as Nunes's vague statement (which as of yet has alleged nothing illegal occurred) or Trump's baseless claim = INVESTIGATE NOW.

"b" is why they've managed to be resilient for so many years, because they've kind of become the scum that even the most corrupt of the Dems refuse to become, so they win because they scream the loudest.

Ryan, so loved by conservatives right about now, yes.

I know he's slowly turning into persona non grata, but the Dems don't exactly have any way of enforcing this recusal without at least some pressure from the GOP, and I'm thinking it needs to come from outside of the typical Graham/McCain bloc.

of course, he may already be planning to recuse himself, thinking he already did what he set out to do (which was....give the White House cover in the poorest way imaginable?)

For some reason I don't think Trump himself would agree to a quid pro quo and put himself in such a compromised position.

I'm so tired of this nonsensical straw man people keep pushing around as if they're the only people who ever watched any gangster movie, or a season of the Wire or the Sopranos

Nobody expects there to be some kind of email thread where Trump and Putin agree to sell the country down the river, jesus fuck

"I dunno, I think there might be something to the Russia thing, you know? But I doubt there's going to be a direct connection to Trump himself."

THANK YOU WISEST SAGE

there was this thing called the trump dossier that was published a few months ago, got some coverage

oh right, blackmail is that one kind of illegal, covert influence that you do in person

????

i was saying that i don't think trump is necessarily aware of the extent of the links between russia and his team.

and what was motivating them to advise him in the ways they did

It seems to me that there is just an absurd amount of noise around what is probably some kind of signal. The antics of people like Olbermann, Madoff, Louise Mensch, that twitter person whose name I forget who always prefaces that she "studied authoritarian regimes" have been embarrassing and cringeworthy. All the vague innuendos about "the Russians" and "ties to Russia" etc. Still, there is probably *something* here. If Trump's campaign actively colluded with whoever hacked Podesta that would probably implicate them in illegal activity. The fact that it's Russia almost seems secondary. And if Russia sponsored electoral dirty tricks that weren't actually illegal I'm not sure how much you can make out of it. We'll see.

trumplethinskin's second campaign manager, from right before he won the nomination through when he accepted it at the republican national convention, is one of putin's leading american lobbyists, paid $10,000,000 a year from 2006 till when? the only item on the RNC plank the trump campaign changed regarded arming resistance to putin in ukraine. the current secretary of state, the former CEO of exxon, has been awarded a russian medal of friendship. these are all unrelated coincidences

i think it's bizarre that someone like manafort was given such a high profile, official appointment in the campaign. this and the complimenting putin's decision to wait before retaliating to US sanctions was just so flagrant, it seems like donald doesn't understand how this looks or what he is supposed to have done wrong.

like, i think he is not involved, but that there has been an attempt by people in his inner circle to push him toward certain positions. and these people were actively cultivated by the russian government.

i think that rich people receive such affirmative action in this country, that he is effectively too dumb to understand, six bankruptcies into it, that he might ever suffer consequences for his behavior. i mean dude has golfed every weekend he's been president so far, even when major legislation needed the presidential push

If Trump's campaign actively colluded with whoever hacked Podesta

Roger Stone's only defense against collusion with Guccifer 2.0 is that just because you DM with a guy doesn't mean you colluded with them

well, i doubt he will suffer consequences for letting his campaign be infiltrated because i don't think he understood what was happening, what was proper or improper, etc. xp

Treeship - I see and second your suspicion about this leak; however, this is interesting.. from two days ago: The REvil Ransomware Hackers Have Gone Offline

If it was Russia that forced them offline for whatever reason, maybe they already had these docs and were just waiting for the moment to drop them?

xp boring, MD

trump. i guess i'm making the assumption the republican candidate will be trump. if not him, i guess it would tucker carlson. white america loves a motherfucker

I don't think Pence has a chance

xp i was confused about what you were talking about jon, apologies. i didn't know the conversation started with speculation about the kremlin.

the kremlin re. 2024

people who are so racist that they wouldn't vote for a black person, or so sexist that they wouldn't vote for a woman, are voting for the republican candidate anyway.

I don't believe this for a minute. There are more than enough 2020 Biden voters who are plenty racist or sexist enough to sit out voting for Harris in 2024 and swing the results - and as he likes to point out, Trump got more votes in 2020 than any Republican in history.

i don't know. that could be offset by people who are inspired to vote for a woman, though -- she could get more women turnout. it's really hard to say how it will shake out.

i just think she doesn't need to become a lightning rod. no more than obama was anyway. he was a target of the right but still built a strong coalition of liberals and moderates.

if I were in charge of fucking up US electoral politics I would do everything I could to back Harris for sure, for a lot of reasons

re the guardian piece, something to keep in mind if you're unfamiliar the (very different) norms of UK journalism to keep in mind: when the article doesn't hedge, it might be wrong. when the article hedges, it's probably wrong.

This piece uses a version of the word “appear” seven times, “suggest” five times, and has one big “assessed to be.” pic.twitter.com/b7Su4NeYvK

— Isaac Chotiner (@IChotiner) July 15, 2021

that could be offset by people who are inspired to vote for a woman, though -- she could get more women turnout

I believe this, or rather want to believe this, while also hearing a voice on my other shoulder saying "yeah right, let's ask President Hillary Clinton about that."

different situations with different baggage of course

yeah, i mean, these questions are hard to answer. but i will say that i remember 2008 and the fact that obama was a black man didn't seem to hurt him. in fact, it helped make him a transformative and inspiring figure for many voters, including me.

so, yeah, women candidates face unique challenges and in 2016 misogyny played a big role in the animus we saw toward hillary. but this same dynamic might not manifest itself in the same way again. new election, new situation, new opportunity.

For many reasons “first Black” President or Governor or X does not seem to map onto other demographics or identities.

i don't know. first woman president seems inspiring to me.

Yeah, excitement over the first woman President is probably better predicted by whether or not you have a college degree than whether you’re a man or woman or any other information about you.

that might be true. either way, it is hard to say how strong of a candidate harris will be if she runs in 2024. it depends on what the biden administration accomplishes.

i know i'll be inspired when nikki haley becomes president

Boebert/Greene ftw

obviously it's no one's top criteria. i supported sanders in the primaries. i just think it's too simple to say she will be a lightning rod like hillary just because she is a woman and a POC.

xp boring, MD

trump. i guess i'm making the assumption the republican candidate will be trump. if not him, i guess it would tucker carlson. white america loves a motherfucker

They may even run an actual banana.

The only thing that would actually surprise me is if they nominated a competent and relatively sane human being. Anyone/thing outside of that is definitely on the table.

my feeling about Harris is that, as someone who pays more attention to politics than is healthy, I have no sense of what her priorities are and what, if anything, she genuinely believes in. She also doesn't have an immediately recognizable persona in the way that Biden does. Makes me think Republicans would have a very easy time defining her on their terms and villainizing her.

the Russia thing feels a little too good to be true - my guess would be that Russia's involvement in the election is a bunch of scattered directives to underlings, a few minutes in meetings here and there as the primaries progress, etc, rather than some novelistic meeting in which the fiendish plan is devised.