US Politics, February 2018: Our country was founded by geniuses, but it’s being run by idiots

What's the line between "Trump does it himself" vs "Trump check boxes drawn by other people"? That's the presidency since forever.

xpost Unless I'm failing to give Trump enough credit for, e.g., his expert-level knowledge of the nuances of bankruptcy law.

I have no way of knowing for sure, obvs, but if Trump himself is guilty of collusion with Russia, it's on par with some dumb low-level hood who unintentionally gets pulled into a larger criminal conspiracy not because he's a savvy operator who sees the big picture for what it is but because he's a venal turd who's just following the money.

(Vox.com was mostly untouched by the layoffs. It affected the Curbed brands (Curbed/Eater/Racked) most acutely, and their "social video" teams more specifically. Damn Facebook.)

much of it comes to inherited wealth allowed him to hire savvy (ruthless) advisers. and the wherewithal to litigate the little people into submission. but I’m not sure occam’s razor cuts in favor of absolute idiocy.

if Trump himself is guilty of collusion with Russia, it's on par with some dumb low-level hood who unintentionally gets pulled into a larger criminal conspiracy

yeah, inclined to agree

however, i think regardless of the degree to which he was personally exposed to russian influence it's obvious that he's been desperate to do everything he can since taking office to cover the tracks of the crew of charlatans, grifters and idiots who attached themselves to him during the campaign, and as a result is at the very least guilty of obsturction of justice

I have to say I sent a good thought out to Alfred when I saw The Plankton getting roasted, assumed you had an extra martini

the thing where he says "If we did that we'd have to ban all semi automatic guns" and the crowd erupts in cheers and he had to stammer "fair enough....fair enough" was seriously amazing

The string of tweets justifying his "arm the teachers" argument this morning are seriously migraine/nightmare-inducing.

I doubt he was always an idiot. But a lifetime of wealth and years spent wandering the hinterlands of Hollywood and licensing his name out to shit to make an easy buck while passing the hard stuff on to a small cadre of much more malevolent enablers has likely left his brain rather ... vestigial. The bottom line is it's very difficult to make a rich person poor. But to make a rich person richer, that takes some savvy, and his greed plus his general ineptitude as a wealth generator (again, he goes for the easy bucks, at demonstrable cost to his potential worth, vs., say, the stock market) could very well have led him to look for several more shortcuts. Which could very well have included sketchy Russian money, which has been a major part of general international sketchiness at least since the fall of the Soviet Union.

if Trump himself is guilty of collusion with Russia, it's on par with some dumb low-level hood who unintentionally gets pulled into a larger criminal conspiracy

That's the irony of the situation. Trump, the guy ostensibly on top, is the dumb low-level hood. But he has long surrounded himself with relative criminal masterminds, like Manafort and Cohen, whose fatal flaw was hitching themselves to the Trump train.

Trump's intellectual curiosity and lack of geopolitical know-how is undoubtedly what has caused him the most problems. He probably understood regular old financial schemes and corruption, but running for office opened the scope and scale of that beyond his purview. Which is no doubt also why he was unable to grasp the problems with Flynn or why canning Comey was a bad idea or why hiring his kids or Kush to run things might lead to problems beyond merely mundane nepotism.

The string of tweets justifying his "arm the teachers" argument this morning are seriously migraine/nightmare-inducing.

i've said this several times already on ilx but i just can't get over the utter fucking idiocy of expecting teachers to murder people as part of their jobs now, and the blithe incomprehension of the horror of killing on the part of the people who repeat it

'respect the troops' is bad enough but 'respect the teachers, our last line of defence against school shooters' is abhorrent

xposts Yeah, the better analogy is maybe that Trump is like some hapless stooge who got installed as the head of a puppet regime.

Wait, did I say 'analogy'?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DWm8uKOUMAEYe-g.jpg:large

god i wish

trump is innocent of conspiring with his russian loan sharks as he was likely to beat hillary

i think regardless of the degree to which he was personally exposed to russian influence it's obvious that he's been desperate to do everything he can since taking office to cover the tracks of the crew of charlatans, grifters and idiots who attached themselves to him during the campaign, and as a result is at the very least guilty of obsturction of justice

― NEW CHIMP THREAT (bizarro gazzara), Thursday, February 22, 2018 8:32 AM (nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oh, for sure and absolutely. Dude's guilty of all kinds of shit and should rot in prison for however blessedly short a lifespan he has left. I just don't think he's a mastermind of anything more than convincingly passing himself off as a functional human being to a surprisingly-large number of people.

when in fact Occam's razor points the other way...

doesn't Occam's Razor suggest he's guilty? these guys try to cover up everything and there's already enough evidence to draw a pretty clear case of collusion and obstruction of justice. it follows that there's a ton more out there, just waiting to leak out. if Trump were offered a point blank quid pro quo he'd accept it in a heartbeat, thinking he'd just pulled some more Art Of The Deal shit. whether or not he'd remember doing it or knew about the illegality is another thing.

yeah, surely occam's razor suggests that trump is working overtime to interfere in russia-related investigations because he feels he has something worth hiding

^^^

Occam would have threatened Trump with his razor tbh

I wonder if the mistake these "faux sophisticates" (per Yglesias) continue to make in tempering the alarm is conflating the brazen or too-obvious nature of Trump's transgressions w the characterizations of same. IOW YES, it's as simple as it sounds, it's bracingly crooked, and I continue to maintain that there is likely a pee tape or something like it.

fake razor

i'm like an occam's razor
don't watch my size
i'm dangerous

What is partly throwing off the debate is, as observed elsewhere, that in a lot of ways we already know what he or his campaign did, what they are likely guilty of doing. From obstruction to broader "collusion," it's all right there in the open, from arranging meetings to admitting on national fucking TV that he fired the FBI director to stop the Russian investigation, to further boasting about it to the actual Russians more or less THE NEXT FUCKING DAY!

Usually it works the other way around. Investigations usually gather and seek evidence that leads to a conclusion. In this case, we pretty much know what was up, we know what they were after. This motherfucker is so brazen, so beyond the pale, even his criminality is not normal. He admits what he's done and *then* tries to cover it up.

If Trump were offered the opportunity to flip, I have no doubt he'd jump at the chance to bury every single person in his orbit with his imperfect understanding of what's been transpiring around him. He'd even send Jared and his sons up the river (no one touches Ivanka but Donald, and then only inappropriately).

In an attempt to clarify my position: A number of people in and related to the Trump administration undoubtedly directly colluded with Russia. Trump is a dumb fuck whose level of personal involvement in Russian collusion is likely insubstantial and incidental. Trump has unquestionably obstructed the investigation into Russian collusion because he's a dumb fuck who overestimates his level of involvement and, in customary Trump fashion, has subsequently caused more potential problems for himself than if he'd just sat back and let the investigation snare the major players. It's like burning down the 7-11 because you think you're gonna do ten to twenty for the pack of gum you shoplifted.

well that's the question, *how much* do we know already? because even with that meeting in Trump Tower, it was like..."oh it was just the four of us"...then every single day it's revealed that more and more people attended the meeting, while Trump himself went from not knowing about it to absolutely knowing about it and writing Jr.'s public statement. even when they're admitting their crimes they *still* try to obstruct and mislead at every turn.

xp to Josh

NRA main dude being a scumbag on TV right now

Usually it works the other way around. Investigations usually gather and seek evidence that leads to a conclusion. In this case, we pretty much know what was up, we know what they were after.

the Columbo presidency

OL if by "insubstantial and incidental" you mean that he never expected that by laundering money for a Russian crime syndicate he would one day have to submit to blackmail and compromise national security, I get that.

Yeah, basically. As a private citizen he's been criminally involved with and is suuuuuper compromised by Russia, no doubt. I'm just not convinced that he was a guiding hand in whatever Russian schemes were orchestrated by people in and around his campaign/administration.

Shady business deals? Sure. That's his stock in trade. High-level political conspiracy? Reply hazy.

Counterpoint: he is corrupt as fuck and knows it. Those 13 indictments, you think over the course of the last several months he didn't have a single person in the intelligence world let him know that kind of Investigation was in the works? He had to have known, or at least had to have been told, an outcome like that was likely, not least because of how much it has been hammered home by the entire intelligence community that Russian interference was a thing. We wonder how much Mueller and his team know, we also have to wonder how much Trump and his team know.

he doesn't have to be a super genius to be a secretive liar who values self-preservation above all else.

This can't be said enough. Stupidity is not mutually exclusive to criminal savvy.

Otherwise his strongest defense is that his political naivete precluded him from *planning* that high-level political conspiracy, at a minimum he most certainly knowingly participated in it.

Perhaps he just believed that if the president does it it's not illegal

no doubt that's where we're heading

again

surely occam's razor suggests that trump is working overtime...

okay i admit you've got me there

elite media figures are prone to underplaying 2scoops' conspiracy because they can't maintain that he's 1) stupid and 2) he's fooled everyone this long. this is the umpteenth sequel to the emperor's new clothes. it's kind of like how jar jar's father paying harvard $2 million to admit his son is one of many nepotistic data points that somehow never impact the professional advantages elite media figures (and their parents and children) enjoy by educational proximity to harvard etc, and doing anything about the inequality that makes the whole american engine run would require too much material and existential sacrifice on their part vis-a-vis their elite self-images

The common denominator to the denial right and left is humiliation. On the one hand it's obv humiliating to supporters and enablers of Trump who find themselves taken out in the riptide, on the other it's humiliating to a historically astute left conditioned to punching up. When you've honed your chops outflanking them on details, closing their loopholes, smuggling in nuance, etc., getting punked by a giant stupid baby is not a good feeling.

^says "berniebro"

reggie otm

Shady business deals? Sure. That's his stock in trade. High-level political conspiracy? Reply hazy.

― Jock Totty's Monocle (Old Lunch), Thursday, February 22, 2018 3:48 PM (twenty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

pretty sure his up to his eyeballs in laundering dirty russian money and hes terrified at the prospect that mueller's mandate will lead him there. he's said as much in public.

Donald Trump has warned his special counsel from looking into his family's finances beyond the scope of his investigation into Russian interference in last year's election.

In an interview with The New York Times, the US President was asked if Robert Mueller would be crossing a red line by investigating his family finances.

"I would say yes," Mr Trump replied.

However, the President would not be drawn on what he would do about it. “I think that’s a violation. Look, this is about Russia," he said.

yup i.e. tax returns

"This investigation is about whether I hacked people to death and froze their body parts. There is no reason investigators should violate my privacy by looking in my freezer."

Also if the Russia probe unearths bad acts stemming from shady finances its a double strike at the core of his being - questioning the legitimacy of his 'victory' and his personal wealth at the same time.

https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-pro-rata-59cc22d6-c7ec-4450-bfaa-19dcbf033a13.html

What has the new tax bill done so far? Well, between Jan. 1 and Feb. 20, 113 companies announced stock buybacks totaling $173 billion, the highest level ever at this point in the year, according to Birinyi Associates' Jeffrey Rubin, reports Axios's Zach Basu.

43 companies announced buybacks of more than $500 million, including Cisco, Wells Fargo, PepsiCo, Amgen, AbbVie, and Alphabet.
Meanwhile, in health care: Nine drug companies are spending a combined $50 billion on new share buyback programs, according to Axios's Bob Herman, who also notes that the "money is enriching hedge funds, other Wall Street investors and top drug company executives, but it isn't necessarily helping patients."