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Old 08-06-2018, 01:29 PM   #1
Pete F.
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Everything Trump touches Dies

Another new Book by a Republican
Here is a review

"Under the rules of present-day political engagement — partisan orthodoxy or bust, us vs. them, my side is always right and your side is always wrong — I shouldn’t like Rick Wilson.

He’s a longtime Republican strategist and the architect of all manner of knives-out campaign ads, including one particularly vicious spot from the 2008 presidential campaign that hammered Barack Obama’s connection to Rev. Jeremiah Wright with the tag: “Barack Obama: Too Radical, Too Risky.”


I got to know him through Twitter during the 2016 presidential campaign. He was one of the few Republicans who took a look at Donald Trump and said, “Nope. Never. Hell, no.”

He helped start the Never Trump movement. It cost him friends and all manner of potential political work. It subjected him to the threats and fury of Trump’s troll army. He was labeled a RINO (Republican In Name Only) and a GOP traitor.

And he didn’t care. Right is right, and Trump was clearly, transparently, unquestionably wrong.

At a time when honesty and integrity were as gone as the dodo in politics, Rick demonstrated both. And he and his band of Never Trumpers fought mightily to remind Americans what it actually means to be a conservative. (Hint: It doesn’t mean being a conspiracy-theory-bellowing liar hellbent on fomenting outrage and inflaming the misguided aggrievement of what Trump would call “the poorly educated.”)

With Trump in office and creating exactly the kind of chaos Rick predicted, he has done those of us who haven’t been lost to the cult of Trump a favor. He has written a book, a searingly honest, bitingly funny, comprehensive answer to the question we find ourselves asking most mornings: “What the hell is going on?”


"Everything Trump Touches Dies," by Rick Wilson. (Simon & Schuster)
The book is called “Everything Trump Touches Dies,” and, because it’s written by a 30-year veteran of conservative politics, it does what no squishy liberal newspaper columnist like myself can do: It pushes the modern-day Republican Party into the public square and roundly shames it for allowing an obvious conman like Trump to become its standard-bearer.

Rick writes: “Everything we Never Trump folks warned you of, including massive, decades-long downstream election losses, is coming. Alienating African Americans and Hispanics beyond redemption? Check. Raising a generation of young voters who are fleeing the GOP in droves? Check. Age-old beefs, juvenile complaints, and ego bruises taking center stage while the world burns? Check. Playing public footsie with white supremacists and neo-Nazis? Check. Blistering pig-ignorance about the economy and the world? Check. … Shredding the last iota of the GOP’s credibility as a party that cares about debt, deficits, and fiscal probity? Check.”

He goes on to absolutely clobber the voters who make up Trump’s base and devour his conspiratorial ramblings: “Honestly, at this point, it’s almost a moral imperative to slap the stupid out of them.”

Rick admits that he and others Republicans “didn’t see that there is a deep strain in American political life that isn’t seeking party rigor or ideological purity or even an independent iconoclast but the safe reinforcement of the pack of people just as pissed off as they are. We underestimated the deep human psychological need to be part of a movement based not on hope but on channeling the comments section of the nuttiest blogs. That’s what Trump gave them. He was an avatar for their anger, their impotence, and their blamestorming for everything wrong in their world.”

It’s harsh. And it will undoubtedly cause Trump’s core supporters to dig in even more, but at this point, what difference does that make? Those loyal to Trump — accepting all his obvious faults and unforced errors, incapable of acknowledging the slightest flaw — are not coming back to any form of traditional conservative thinking. At least not now, in the throes of Trump passion.

I asked Rick in an interview why he wrote the book. Liberals like me don’t need convincing and many in his own party have already bent the knee to Trump.

“I want people to be able to go back in a year and a half or so and say, ‘Oh, that’s how this happened,’” he said. “I wanted to lay down a marker and say, ‘It’s OK that you’ve been scammed. It’s OK that you’ve been conned. Here’s the evidence about how it happened and why you shouldn’t do it again.’”

He continued: “I also wanted to remind Republicans that you can be a party of decency and humanity and still be a conservative. I want people to have some reminder that you don’t have to live this way. Nothing’s forcing you to do this other than inertia and partisan policy reflex.”

The book doesn’t spare the liberal crowd, with Rick dissecting (quite accurately, I think) the Democratic Party’s political failings and highlighting politicians and political operatives every bit as calculating as him on the left.

He gives one of the most candid assessments of the cynicism of modern-day political tactics I’ve read, readily acknowledging the part he played in feeding and nurturing the more rabid elements of the Republican base that metastasized into Trump’s slavish supporters.

In our interview he said: “I had to do a kind of tough assessment on this thing, and I did. … Starting back with Sarah Palin, we built a system to turn on these people, to feed this endless stream that the liberals are trying to kill you, they’re coming for you. … We built a set of persuasion tools that persuaded these people, and the arrogance of our position was, ‘Well, we’re all responsible adults; we’ll motivate these people during the election” and then calm things down after.

“What we never anticipated was that somebody else would grab that tool box. But the Russians and Trump sure did, and they ran wild with it.”

“Everything Trump Touches Dies” — which goes on sale Tuesday — is a fascinating, fierce and fearless exposition of the political mess America finds itself in today.

It’s a reminder that, for the wide majority of us who aren’t too far gone, ideological disagreement should never be grounds for hatred. And love of country should rule the day.

rhuppke@chicagotribune.com

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Old 08-06-2018, 02:53 PM   #2
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"Trump was clearly, transparently, unquestionably wrong"

It's not unquestionable. It's not anywhere near unquestionable.

"those of us who haven’t been lost to the cult of Trump"

Besides Sean Hannity, name a nationally prominent, influential conservative who refuses to criticize Trump.

"Playing public footsie with white supremacists and neo-Nazis? Check"

Keep hearing that accusation, keep asking for evidence, keep not seeing it.

"pig-ignorance about the economy "

I'm not an economist, but I know a lot more about it than a pig. Other than some potentially problematic things that Trump inherited (interest rates too low for too long, overdue for a recession), the economy looks robust. If that makes me as ignorant as a pig about the economy, someone explain why. Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman said the US economy would not survive Trump. Krugman may well emerge as the one who is dumb as a pig.

"He goes on to absolutely clobber the voters who make up Trump’s base and devour his conspiratorial ramblings: “Honestly, at this point, it’s almost a moral imperative to slap the stupid out of them.”

I know that the Trump haters desperately, desperately want to convince themselves that Trump voters all suffer from a significant moral shortcoming, or an intellectual shortcoming. Sure some do, as do some Hilary voters. But that's it. The alternative in the election was someone whose moral compass is just as disgusting (though in a less crass way), who was an uber liberal, and who almost no one likes.

I'm not a big fan of Trumps personal behavior. I'm OK with most of his policies. I'm not stupid, I'm not a racist, I'm not any of the things that this hate-filled reviewer wants you to think I am.

Reading this, was like watching the opening monologue of an MSNBC show at either 8:00 or 9:00 PM.

Life isn't this simple Pete.

"Alienating African Americans and Hispanics beyond redemption? "

Nope.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog..._above_50.html
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Old 08-06-2018, 03:01 PM   #3
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Pete, Obama called everyone who disagrees with him, a bitter, clinging racist. Hilary called those who disagree with her, deplorable and irredeemable. THAT'S why the GOP nominated Trump. It's that simple. If you can't see it, maybe your side are the ones with cognitive issues.

This guy goes on and on about how angry Trump voters are. Pete, which side is responsible for an overwhelming majority of politically-motivated riots in this country? What's the evidence that the right is so much more angry than the left? This is one of those things that liberals repeat over and over until it's assumed to be true. That doesn't make it true.

You people crack me up. All you can grasp, is that liberal=good, conservative=bad.

And if young people are flocking to the left, that may say more negative things about the left than it does the right.
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Old 08-06-2018, 03:05 PM   #4
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Originally Posted by Pete F. View Post
for the wide majority of us who aren’t too far gone, ideological disagreement should never be grounds for hatred. And love of country should rule the day.
IMHO, that's a lesson the left needs to learn much more urgently than the right.

Maxine Waters, a US Congresswoman, is telling her supporters to hound Trump cabinet members, because "they aren't welcome anywhere". Her words.

I mean, this reviewer calls Trump supporters every name in the book, and even a new insult I've never heard before - pig ignorant - and then he's going too lecture us that we shouldn't hate people we disagree with? Seriously? He's lecturing us on tolerance? Did you read any of what you posted? Did you read a single sentence?
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Old 08-06-2018, 03:13 PM   #5
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Pete, Obama called everyone who disagrees with him, a bitter, clinging racist. Hilary called those who disagree with her, deplorable and irredeemable. THAT'S why the GOP nominated Trump. It's that simple. If you can't see it, maybe your side are the ones with cognitive issues.
Neither said either...you make more stuff up than Trump does.
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Old 08-06-2018, 04:09 PM   #6
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Neither said either...you make more stuff up than Trump does.
No?

What Obama said...

" not surprising then they (Midwesterners) get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment"

https://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-s...ophobia-007737

Hilary...

" to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” Clinton said. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it"

http://time.com/4486502/hillary-clin...es-transcript/

Half of Trump supporters is tens of millions of people.

Liberals love to demonize those with whom they disagree. It's acceptable - even admirable and heroic - to lose to hate and racism. It's easier for today's liberals to convince themselves of that, than it is to admit that they could ever lose a dignified, fair contest.

I made it up, huh?
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Old 08-06-2018, 04:26 PM   #7
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I made it up, huh?
Neither said it was about people who disagree with them, yet you made that up.

Regardless, while both comments weren't exactly politically expedient there's a lot of truth to what they said.
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Old 08-06-2018, 04:35 PM   #8
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Neither said it was about people who disagree with them, yet you made that up.

Regardless, while both comments weren't exactly politically expedient there's a lot of truth to what they said.
i have zero doubt that you see validity in both.

so if there’s a lot of truth to both statements, why did each of them quickly apologize and walk them back? Either they lied when they said those things, or they are both willing to abandon the truth for political expediency. which is it, pray tell?

You have fun with that. it’s getting boring slapping you around on this forum.
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Old 08-06-2018, 05:25 PM   #9
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so if there’s a lot of truth to both statements, why did each of them quickly apologize and walk them back? Either they lied when they said those things, or they are both willing to abandon the truth for political expediency. which is it, pray tell?
Obama didn't apologize, he said his words were ill chosen and clarified what he said. Clinton said she regretted using the word "half."

Neither sounds like crow eating apology if you ask me.

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You have fun with that. it’s getting boring slapping you around on this forum.
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You seem to be living in a fantasy world where you just dream up your own perception of events and constantly have to slap yourself on the back for your own approval. Reminds me of Trump but I don't think you're a narcissist. It's very odd.
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Old 08-06-2018, 08:17 PM   #10
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Obama didn't apologize, he said his words were ill chosen and clarified what he said. Clinton said she regretted using the word "half."

Neither sounds like crow eating apology if you ask me.


You seem to be living in a fantasy world where you just dream up your own perception of events and constantly have to slap yourself on the back for your own approval. Reminds me of Trump but I don't think you're a narcissist. It's very odd.
"Obama didn't apologize, he said his words were ill chosen and clarified what he said"

And why does the truth, need clarification?

"You seem to be living in a fantasy world where you just dream up your own perception"

It's "fantasy", according to you, if I equate "Trump supporters" with "people who disagree with Hilary"? That was yur beef with what I said, I claimed that Hilary aimed those remarks at people who disagree with her, and you objected, because she aimed it at Trump supporters.

That's the best you have? Anything, I suppose, to avoid conceding the other side has a point. We all know you aren't capable of that.
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Old 08-06-2018, 09:19 PM   #11
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Life isn't this simple Pete.

"Alienating African Americans and Hispanics beyond redemption? "

Nope.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog..._above_50.html
You do understand that the author of the book, Rick Davis is a longtime conservative Republican strategist, the author of the review is a liberal opinion writer and they are different people.
It seems like you missed that somehow and since neither they nor I think Trump is anything but a conman must be “Liberal”. Of course you don’t believe in a divisive political environment.
Claiming that 10% more Hispanic voters support Trump is a good example of how figures lie and liars figure. Only 25% or less of Hispanic voters supported Trump, so an increase of 10% would bring it to 27.5% but that doesn’t sound as good as a 10% gain.
Everyone loved that other guy from NYC who had spectacular results but Bernie Madoff is in jail, Trump and his relatives will join him, but not soon enough.
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Old 08-07-2018, 06:18 AM   #12
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You do understand that the author of the book, Rick Davis is a longtime conservative Republican strategist, the author of the review is a liberal opinion writer and they are different people.
It seems like you missed that somehow and since neither they nor I think Trump is anything but a conman must be “Liberal”. Of course you don’t believe in a divisive political environment.
Claiming that 10% more Hispanic voters support Trump is a good example of how figures lie and liars figure. Only 25% or less of Hispanic voters supported Trump, so an increase of 10% would bring it to 27.5% but that doesn’t sound as good as a 10% gain.
Everyone loved that other guy from NYC who had spectacular results but Bernie Madoff is in jail, Trump and his relatives will join him, but not soon enough.
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The author stated that Trump's numbers with Hispanics are beyond redemption. The data says otherwise.

You say he's a Bernoe Madoff con man. Yet all those buildings with his name on them still stand, people living happily in them. He has thousands of employees, who fo decades have worked, raised families, saved for retirement. If it's all a Ponzi Scheme, when will it implode? How has he kept the charade going for so long is it's all a con? Are those buildings all an optical illusion?

The two men in recent history who utterly destroyed the left, are Bush and Trump. Look at how the media, and lefties, treated each man.

You can add to the list of Trumps accomplishments, the ability to live in what's left of your brains, rent free. And he loves it.

If he committed a criminal offense, I'll call for his punishment as loudly as anyone. I promise you. He's been investigated for a year. If there's anything there, and he's such a shallow, incompetent con man, you'd think they would have found it by now.

"You do understand that the author of the book, Rick Davis is a longtime conservative Republican strategist,"

Yes I do. And do you understand that he's trying to sell a book, trying to monetize the predictable and thoughtless hatred people like you have of Trump.

So Trump has a business with thousands of employees, with successful buildings and golf resorts all over. But you say it's all fake, he's just a con man. Then this guy who neither one of us has ever heard of says Trump is s cartoon villain and all of his followers are deeply flawed, pig-ignorant hate mongers, and provides no evidence of that, but that's good enough for you.


The reviewer went on and on about how ignorant and deranged we all are, then he ends it by saying that we shouldn't hate people who disagree with us. Any hypocrisy there? No?


Liberal=good, conservative=bad. No exceptions, not ever. You are like parrots, you really are.
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Old 08-07-2018, 06:24 AM   #13
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[QUOTE=Jim in CT;1148385]

Liberal=good, conservative=bad. No exceptions, not ever. You are like parrots, you really are.

/QUOTE]

I think the Russians are feeding them all of this divisive info....could have started with this and saved a lot of words
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Old 08-07-2018, 06:25 AM   #14
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You seem to be living in a fantasy world where you just dream up your own perception of events

.
SPENCEWORLD
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Old 08-07-2018, 08:22 AM   #15
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The author stated that Trump's numbers with Hispanics are beyond redemption. The data says otherwise.

You say he's a Bernoe Madoff con man. Yet all those buildings with his name on them still stand, people living happily in them. He has thousands of employees, who fo decades have worked, raised families, saved for retirement. If it's all a Ponzi Scheme, when will it implode? How has he kept the charade going for so long is it's all a con? Are those buildings all an optical illusion?

The two men in recent history who utterly destroyed the left, are Bush and Trump. Look at how the media, and lefties, treated each man.

You can add to the list of Trumps accomplishments, the ability to live in what's left of your brains, rent free. And he loves it.

If he committed a criminal offense, I'll call for his punishment as loudly as anyone. I promise you. He's been investigated for a year. If there's anything there, and he's such a shallow, incompetent con man, you'd think they would have found it by now.

"You do understand that the author of the book, Rick Davis is a longtime conservative Republican strategist,"

Yes I do. And do you understand that he's trying to sell a book, trying to monetize the predictable and thoughtless hatred people like you have of Trump.

So Trump has a business with thousands of employees, with successful buildings and golf resorts all over. But you say it's all fake, he's just a con man. Then this guy who neither one of us has ever heard of says Trump is s cartoon villain and all of his followers are deeply flawed, pig-ignorant hate mongers, and provides no evidence of that, but that's good enough for you.


The reviewer went on and on about how ignorant and deranged we all are, then he ends it by saying that we shouldn't hate people who disagree with us. Any hypocrisy there? No?


Liberal=good, conservative=bad. No exceptions, not ever. You are like parrots, you really are.
Madoff made it for more than 30 years.
Where did the money for Trumps golf courses come from?
How did he go from borrowing to being cash rich and buying golf courses?
Where did Trump go after the big banks told him no?
Who is funding him thru Deutsche Bank?
Who's funding the Kushner 666 project?
Follow the money and you'll find the answers to Trump.
Muellers report will come

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Old 08-07-2018, 08:25 AM   #16
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Who's funding the Kushner 666 project?
probably Satan
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Old 08-13-2018, 01:45 PM   #17
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Do you think Harley Davidson will die now that Trump expressed pleasure that people are going to boycott it?
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Old 08-13-2018, 05:23 PM   #18
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6 MORE YEARS 👍
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Old 08-14-2018, 10:17 AM   #19
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6 MORE YEARS 👍
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No, no, no. we’re 30… 30, three zero.
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Old 08-14-2018, 11:10 AM   #20
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How are you at languages, in 6 MORE YEARS you might be in a former world power speaking Russian

By Jonathan Chait

"On June 14, 2016, the Washington Post reported that Russian hackers had broken into the Democratic National Committee’s files and gained access to its research on Donald Trump. A political world already numbed by Trump’s astonishing rise barely took notice. News reports quoted experts who suggested the Russians merely wanted more information about Trump to inform their foreign-policy dealings. By that point, Russia was already broadcasting its strong preference for Trump through the media. Yet when news of the hacking broke, nobody raised the faintest suspicions that Russia wished to alter the outcome of the election, let alone that Trump or anybody connected with him might have been in cahoots with a foreign power. It was a third-rate cyberburglary. Nothing to see here.

The unfolding of the Russia scandal has been like walking into a dark cavern. Every step reveals that the cave runs deeper than we thought, and after each one, as we wonder how far it goes, our imaginations are circumscribed by the steps we have already taken. The cavern might go just a little farther, we presume, but probably not much farther. And since trying to discern the size and shape of the scandal is an exercise in uncertainty, we focus our attention on the most likely outcome, which is that the story goes a little deeper than what we have already discovered. Say, that Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort told their candidate about the meeting they held at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer after they were promised dirt on Hillary Clinton; and that Trump and Kushner have some shady Russian investments; and that some of Trump’s advisers made some promises about lifting sanctions.

But what if that’s wrong? What if we’re still standing closer to the mouth of the cave than the end?

The media has treated the notion that Russia has personally compromised the president of the United States as something close to a kook theory. A minority of analysts, mostly but not exclusively on the right, have promoted aggressively exculpatory interpretations of the known facts, in which every suspicious piece of evidence turns out to have a surprisingly innocent explanation. And it is possible, though unlikely, that every trail between Trump Tower and the Kremlin extends no farther than its point of current visibility.


What is missing from our imagination is the unlikely but possible outcome on the other end: that this is all much worse than we suspect. After all, treating a small probability as if it were nonexistent is the very error much of the news media made in covering the presidential horse race. And while the body of publicly available information about the Russia scandal is already extensive, the way it has been delivered — scoop after scoop of discrete nuggets of information — has been disorienting and difficult to follow. What would it look like if it were reassembled into a single narrative, one that distinguished between fact and speculation but didn’t myopically focus on the most certain conclusions?

A case like this presents an easy temptation for conspiracy theorists, but we can responsibly speculate as to what lies at the end of this scandal without falling prey to their fallacies. Conspiracy theories tend to attract people far from the corridors of power, and they often hypothesize vast connections within or between governments and especially intelligence agencies. One of the oddities of the Russia scandal is that many of the most exotic and sinister theories have come from people within government and especially within the intelligence field.

The first intimations that Trump might harbor a dark secret originated among America’s European allies, which, being situated closer to Russia, have had more experience fending off its nefarious encroachments. In 2015, Western European intelligence agencies began picking up evidence of communications between the Russian government and people in Donald Trump’s orbit. In April 2016, one of the Baltic states shared with then–CIA director John Brennan an audio recording of Russians discussing funneling money to the Trump campaign. In the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, head of the U.K. intelligence agency GCHQ, flew to Washington to brief Brennan on intercepted communications between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The contents of these communications have not been disclosed, but what Brennan learned obviously unsettled him profoundly. In congressional testimony on Russian election interference last year, Brennan hinted that some Americans might have betrayed their country. “Individuals who go along a treasonous path,” he warned, “do not even realize they’re along that path until it gets to be a bit too late.” In an interview this year, he put it more bluntly: “I think [Trump] is afraid of the president of Russia. The Russians may have something on him personally that they could always roll out and make his life more difficult.”

While the fact that the former CIA director has espoused this theory hardly proves it, perhaps we should give more credence to the possibility that Brennan is making these extraordinary charges of treason and blackmail at the highest levels of government because he knows something we don’t.


Suppose we are currently making the same mistake we made at the outset of this drama — suppose the dark crevices of the Russia scandal run not just a little deeper but a lot deeper. If that’s true, we are in the midst of a scandal unprecedented in American history, a subversion of the integrity of the presidency. It would mean the Cold War that Americans had long considered won has dissolved into the bizarre spectacle of Reagan’s party’s abetting the hijacking of American government by a former KGB agent. It would mean that when Special Counsel Robert Mueller closes in on the president and his inner circle, possibly beginning this summer, Trump may not merely rail on Twitter but provoke a constitutional crisis.

And it would mean the Russia scandal began far earlier than conventionally understood and ended later — indeed, is still happening. As Trump arranges to meet face-to-face and privately with Vladimir Putin later this month, the collusion between the two men metastasizing from a dark accusation into an open alliance, it would be dangerous not to consider the possibility that the summit is less a negotiation between two heads of state than a meeting between a Russian-intelligence asset and his handler.


It is often said that Donald Trump has had the same nationalistic, zero-sum worldview forever. But that isn’t exactly true. Yes, his racism and mendacity have been evident since his youth, but those who have traced the evolution of his hypernationalism all settle on one year in particular: 1987. Trump “came onto the political stage in 1987 with a full-page ad in the New York Times attacking the Japanese for relying on the United States to defend it militarily,” reported Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The president has believed for 30 years that these alliance commitments are a drain on our finite national treasure,” a White House official told the Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin. Tom Wright, another scholar who has delved into Trump’s history, reached the same conclusion. “1987 is Trump’s breakout year. There are only a couple of examples of him commenting on world politics before then.”

What changed that year? One possible explanation is that Trump published The Art of the Deal, which sped up his transformation from an aggressive, publicity-seeking New York developer to a national symbol of capitalism. But the timing for this account does not line up perfectly — the book came out on November 1, and Trump had begun opining loudly on trade and international politics two months earlier. The other important event from that year is that Trump visited Moscow.


During the Soviet era, Russian intelligence cast a wide net to gain leverage over influential figures abroad. (The practice continues to this day.) The Russians would lure or entrap not only prominent politicians and cultural leaders, but also people whom they saw as having the potential for gaining prominence in the future. In 1986, Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin met Trump in New York, flattered him with praise for his building exploits, and invited him to discuss a building in Moscow. Trump visited Moscow in July 1987. He stayed at the National Hotel, in the Lenin Suite, which certainly would have been bugged. There is not much else in the public record to describe his visit, except Trump’s own recollection in The Art of the Deal that Soviet officials were eager for him to build a hotel there. (It never happened.)

How do you even think about the small but real chance that the president of the United States has been influenced or compromised by a hostile foreign power for decades?
Trump returned from Moscow fired up with political ambition. He began the first of a long series of presidential flirtations, which included a flashy trip to New Hampshire. Two months after his Moscow visit, Trump spent almost $100,000 on a series of full-page newspaper ads that published a political manifesto. “An open letter from Donald J. Trump on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves,” as Trump labeled it, launched angry populist charges against the allies that benefited from the umbrella of American military protection. “Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests?”

Trump’s letter avoided the question of whom the U.S. was protecting those countries from. The primary answer, of course, was the Soviet Union. After World War II, the U.S. had created a liberal international order and underwritten its safety by maintaining the world’s strongest military. A central goal of Soviet, and later Russian, foreign policy was to split the U.S. from its allies.

The safest assumption is that it’s entirely coincidental that Trump launched a national campaign, with himself as spokesman, built around themes that dovetailed closely with Soviet foreign-policy goals shortly after his Moscow stay. Indeed, it seems slightly insane to contemplate the possibility that a secret relationship between Trump and Russia dates back this far. But it can’t be dismissed completely. How do you even think about the small but real chance — 10 percent? 20 percent? — that the president of the United States has been covertly influenced or personally compromised by a hostile foreign power for decades?"

Here is the link to the rest of the article, that lays it all out.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer...collusion.html

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Old 08-14-2018, 04:25 PM   #21
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If the nominee is Liz Warren or Corey Booker or Bernie Sanders?
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Old 08-14-2018, 04:37 PM   #22
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If the nominee is Liz Warren or Corey Booker or Bernie Sanders?
It's hard to contemplate a candidate I'd rather keep Trump for...really hard. There's little chance Warren would get the nomination. Corey Booker seems like he's a pretty competent person, no issues there. Sanders not likely to run again, I think his Administration would be pretty boring.
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Old 08-14-2018, 05:18 PM   #23
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If the nominee is Liz Warren or Corey Booker or Bernie Sanders?
Cheeto Epidermis will likely be in deep doodoo by that time and those three won't be the nominee
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No, no, no. we’re 30… 30, three zero.
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Old 08-14-2018, 07:27 PM   #24
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Cheeto Epidermis will likely be in deep doodoo by that time and those three won't be the nominee
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Then who?
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Old 08-14-2018, 07:39 PM   #25
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cheeto epidermis has been in the verge of being in trouble for quite awhile. if he gets impeached, and the economy is still in good shape, the ticket will likely be pence and nikki haley, they would do fine against warren, sanders, or booker. who else is there, that gal from CA i guess. how is it possible their bench is this thin?
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Old 08-15-2018, 03:50 AM   #26
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If the nominee is Liz Warren or Corey Booker or Bernie Sanders?

Warren cant win enough of the swing vote .. if she was cast as VP it could be more effective ... like pence brought on board for evangelical vote ... now he is the invisible man
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Old 08-15-2018, 07:05 AM   #27
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Warren cant win enough of the swing vote .. if she was cast as VP it could be more effective ... like pence brought on board for evangelical vote ... now he is the invisible man
neither warren nor booker nor sanders has much ability to appeal to swing voters. who can they put at the top of the ticket that can get a vote from anyone to the right of Fidel Castro? there aren’t a lot of nationally known moderate democrats. the gop is sort of havingbthat struggke right now, but the dems are past that struggle, and the national leaders are fairly extreme liberals. the gop may end up there too, but we’re niwhere near there as of right now.
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Old 08-15-2018, 07:33 AM   #28
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Bullock, Hickenlooper, Ryan
All moderate flyover guys and teamed with a not too progressive VP
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Old 08-15-2018, 07:59 AM   #29
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Sandra Bullock, Ricky Hickenlooper, Meg Ryan All moderate flyover guys and teamed with a not too progressive VP
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Old 08-15-2018, 08:18 AM   #30
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Then who?
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Biden will win the nomination. Kamala Harris will probably be strong in the primary, but I think if you have her, Warren, and Bernie, they will split the far left voters in the early voting states.

Everything else equal to 2016, if Biden can swing the vote 0.2% in pa and 0.2% in Michigan he would win. Given how disliked Hillary was and all of Trump's flaws, 0.2% better than Hillary in those two states is achievable for Biden.
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