The Trump Presidency - how I stopped worrying and learned to love the Hair

Considering the entire investigation started off the back of the fraudulent Steele dossier that was paid for by the Clinton campaign,

Sorry most of it is probably true and so far there has been no successful litigation against it.

In October 2015, before the official start of the 2016 Republican primary campaign, The Washington Free Beacon, an American conservative political journalism website primarily funded by Republican donor Paul Singer, hired the American research firm Fusion GPS to conduct general opposition research on several Republican presidential candidates, including Trump.

The second operation of opposition research was funded by the DNC and the Clinton campaign, working through their attorney of record, Marc Elias of Perkins Coie.[10] In an October 2017 letter, Perkins Coie general counsel Matthew Gehringer described how, in March 2016, Fusion GPS approached Perkins Coie and, knowing that the Clinton campaign and the DNC were its clients, inquired whether its clients wished to pay Fusion "to continue research regarding then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, research that Fusion GPS had conducted for one or more other clients during the Republican primary contest."[37] In April 2016, Elias hired Fusion GPS to perform opposition research on Trump

former FBI Director James Comey described Steele as a "credible source": "It was coming from a credible source, someone with a track record, someone who was a credible and respected member of an allied intelligence service during his career, and so it was important that we try to understand it, and see what could we verify, what could we rule in or rule out."[183]

In May 2018, former career intelligence officer James Clapper believed that "more and more" of the dossier had been validated over time.

As we noted, our interest is in assessing the Steele dossier as a raw intelligence document, not a finished piece of analysis. The Mueller investigation has clearly produced public records that confirm pieces of the dossier. And even where the details are not exact, the general thrust of Steele’s reporting seems credible in light of what we now know about extensive contacts between numerous individuals associated with the Trump campaign and Russian government officials.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/steele-dossier-retrospective

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump–Russia_dossier#Research_funded_by_conservative_website


Stormy Daniels original lawyer Keith Davidson confirmed that the payments were campaign related, so Trump has no defense on campaign finance violations. Lucky not to go to jail on this alone as he has told so many lies about it. Question marks about obstruction, witness intimidation, co-ordinating testimony to congress, etc.

(Mar 11, 2019)

Between criminal, civil and Congressional there must be about 20 or more, and probably a record amount of investigations into his staff.
 
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bUt He LoSt ThE pOpUlAr VoTe
OrAnGe MaN bAd

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This has always been simply about hatred for Trump. It's why you can already see the left downplaying the report and gearing up for new attacks - GRtak is already calling for "further investigation", though I'm not sure into what. The amusing part is that not that long ago the left was complaining that the right wouldn't let go of the email investigation where there was actual misconduct yet here they are grasping at straws.

I may not hate the man so much if he wasn’t acting like a child, tweeting so much, holding campaign rallies after he’s in office, encourage hate, sucking up to nations of dictators and pushing away our allies, and actually did the job he was voted to do. I don’t think tweeting and ordering fast food while causing a shutdown because he thinks we need a wall was in the job description. While trump wasn’t the main reason for the major divide, he for sure hasn’t helped bring this nation together and made it “great.”

Why are we the tax payers paying him and staff to stay in his private hotels? Why is that ok when we already have a place like Camp David? When was the last time we used that?

So yeah, orange man bad because he’s done nothing but help drive the stake into everybody. Yeah Obama wasn’t the best but at least he acted like an adult and wasn’t such an embarassment to the world. Trump is like the screaming child in the grocery store.

Even bush wasn’t the best and let Blackwater happen (while Obama did nothing to stop that) but at least he seemed to know how to do his job or at least surrounded himself with somewhat decent people around.

With all of my travels around the nation, I have never seen such a massive divide until after the 2016 election. This is not what we should be doing. We should not be trying to piss off the other guy because it’s fun. Work together and come to a compromise!

Yeah, everyone is tired of the same old same old junk, do you really think this is a good option? As far as I can tell, the US is becoming less trustworthy on a global scale and the only way to change that will need to happen from the top especially because the president has to meet with so many world leaders. We cannot continue on this route unless you really want to turn our allies away.

Level, stop trying to stick up for this guy.
 

Per your own links, you (not the first time) conveniently neglected to include the following information.

wikipedia said:
In October 2017, the Free Beacon issued a statement:

“All of the work that Fusion GPS provided to the Free Beacon was based on public sources, and none of the work product that the Free Beacon received appears in the Steele dossier. The Free Beacon had no knowledge of or connection to the Steele dossier, did not pay for the dossier, and never had contact with, knowledge of, or provided payment for any work performed by Christopher Steele. Nor did we have any knowledge of the relationship between Fusion GPS and the Democratic National Committee, Perkins Coie, and the Clinton campaign.[36]

Although the source of the Steele dossier's funding had already been reported correctly over a year before,[2][34][35], and the Free Beacon had issued a statement to this effect in October 2017,[36] a February 2, 2018, story by the Associated Press (AP) contributed to confusion about its funding by stating that the dossier "was initially funded" by the Washington Free Beacon, so the AP posted a correction the next day: "Though the former spy, Christopher Steele, was hired by a firm that was initially funded by the Washington Free Beacon, he did not begin work on the project until after Democratic groups had begun funding it."

lawfareblog said:
But much of the reporting simply remains uncorroborated, at least by the yardstick we are using. Most significantly, the dossier reports a “well-developed conspiracy of co-operation between [Trump and his associates] and the Russian leadership,” including an “intelligence exchange [that] had been running between them for at least 8 years.” There has been significantinvestigative reporting about long-standing connections between Trump, his associates and Kremlin-affiliated individuals, and Trump himself acknowledged that the purpose of a June 2016 meeting between his son, Donald Trump Jr. and a Kremlin-connected lawyer was to obtain “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. But there is, at present, no evidence in the official record that confirms other direct ties or their relevance to the 2016 presidential campaign.

So, I put those portions up not to exonerate Trump, but to disprove your narrative. Fact is, let’s say you were right in that a conversative newspaper funded the Steele dossier... does that make its uncorroborrated reporting any more credible? The answer is no. It doesn’t matter if Mahatma Ghandi rose from the dead, and published this report while the unicorn he was sitting on farted rainbows. Uncorroborated still means uncorroborated. The optics of an uncorroborated report being funded by your political opponents however, certainly should put more skepticism into the validity of said report.

So, for anyone out there wondering why I claim not to be a Trump supporter but appear to stumping hard against this, it’s for this reason:

Truth matters. Period. Trump can be a loud, slobby boor and still not be guilty of the things many so desperately want him to be. He tweets a lot of things I find unbelievable cringey, and his latest decision to remove sanctions against N. Korea because “he likes” Kim Jong Un is, IMO, a bad move (but then again he’s tackling this as a businessman and not a statesman... so who knows?).

Nuance matters, too. I fully support his hard-line stance on illegal immigration, but I am completely opposed to his veto-ing the Senate vote (against his emergency declaration) as an abuse of his power.

Anyone without skin in the game can clearly (with hindsight) see the Mueller investigation was a witch hunt. The lack of any indictments against Trump after two solid years of investigation should make that clear.

Stormy Daniels original lawyer Keith Davidson confirmed that the payments were campaign related, so Trump has no defense on campaign finance violations. Lucky not to go to jail on this alone as he has told so many lies about it. Question marks about obstruction, witness intimidation, co-ordinating testimony to congress, etc.

(Mar 11, 2019)

Between criminal, civil and Congressional there must be about 20 or more, and probably a record amount of investigations into his staff.
Not sure what any of this has to do with Russian collusion, since you were replying to my previous post, but whatever. So a previous lawyer’s account, for a porn star who willingly slept with Trump and willingly accepted hush money to keep the affair quiet, who then decided to go public anyway (for no reason other than to push her own public visibility, and career, higher) should be taken at face value, even when her more recent (now also “former”) counsel has been caught lying and manipulating the media regarding Canavaugh, and had his “case” for his porn star client thrown out of court. Have I got that all right?
 
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Reports that Barr to deliver report to congress within next hour.

Some indications that its very bad for Trump.
 
I may not hate the man so much if he wasn’t acting like a child, tweeting so much, holding campaign rallies after he’s in office, encourage hate,
Hate of whom?

sucking up to nations of dictators and pushing away our allies, and actually did the job he was voted to do.
He was voted in to shore up America’s borders re: illegal immigration and bring jobs back. Although he still sabre rattles the former, he hasn’t managed to do a very good job. As to the matter, whethee you want to attribute the statistics to him or anyone else, the facts regarding the plunge in unemployment are remarkable.

I agree with you re: sucking up, as it were. His behavior towards KJU I find worrisome, but again, he may be doing this as part of a greater strategy. I don’t pretend to know.

His behavior towards the Saudi regime, especially with the Khasgoggi murder, I find more repugnant.

As for pushing away your allies... that might not be the worst thing in itself, especially if the gravest insults are that NATO countries should (gasp) foot for their own bills.

I don’t think tweeting and ordering fast food while causing a shutdown because he thinks we need a wall was in the job description.
I agree with you, in that I don’t agree with his calling an emergency governmental shutdown for the wall.

While trump wasn’t the main reason for the major divide, he for sure hasn’t helped bring this nation together and made it “great.”
It takes two parties to cause a rift. Trump’s done his fair share of division, but the leftist mainstream media, academia, and registered Democrats combined have done much more so. They all declared war on him the second he won office. The media being particularly egregious, claiming victim status for Trump catapulting the phrase “fake news” into the mainstream discourse.

I said this not long after he was voted in: all this talk about a racist, misogynistic “base” was ignorant of a much more viable reason Trump won. People with conservative values (shocker, these are compatible with equal rights for all) were sick and tired of being shit on, referred to as “flyover country” by the media, Hillary completely ignoring Wisconsin, calling his (then) potential voters “a basket of deploreables”, being told by Hollywood celebrities how their beliefs are wrong, stupid, uneducated (how’s that anti-vax campaign going now, Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey?), etc etc.

An honest political movement, like an honest person, would look inwards to see “what went wrong.” But no, the parties outlined above instead chose to double down, and became even more unhinged. Now you have blatant anti-Semitism, socialism, infanticide, and even dismantling the republic itself, via the electoral college (I wish Canada had something similar), coming from the left.

Trump is only as popular as the left make him. His approval has steadily risen, the Republicans gained senate seats in the mid-terms. At what point does anyone on the left stop and think about theconsequences of their actions?

Why are we the tax payers paying him and staff to stay in his private hotels? Why is that ok when we already have a place like Camp David? When was the last time we used that?
These are good questions.

So yeah, orange man bad because he’s done nothing but help drive the stake into everybody. Yeah Obama wasn’t the best but at least he acted like an adult and wasn’t such an embarassment to the world. Trump is like the screaming child in the grocery store.
Would you rather an affable person whom you disagreed with or an ascerbic type whom you agreed with? I’m not saying you agree with Trump, just that Obama being likeable in no way will reflect on his time in office.

Even bush wasn’t the best and let Blackwater happen (while Obama did nothing to stop that) but at least he seemed to know how to do his job or at least surrounded himself with somewhat decent people around.
“Bush wasn’t the best”? He was viewed as the antichrist during his tenure. Only now, the the benefit of hindsight, does the media claim “y’know, he wasn’t so bad.”

Rinse, wash, repeat.

With all of my travels around the nation, I have never seen such a massive divide until after the 2016 election. This is not what we should be doing. We should not be trying to piss off the other guy because it’s fun. Work together and come to a compromise!
Agreed. Takes both parties to do this.

As far as I can tell, the US is becoming less trustworthy on a global scale
  1. How can you tell?
  2. Why does it matter? In what sense is the US less trustworthy?
So ends my diatribe, with the following: we need to all start taking what others say at face value. Yes, historical context matters, but apart from that, just assume the person you’re conversing with (this is not aimed at you, Flareside, or anyone else here... I’m using the royal “you”) simply means what they say. My questions to Flareside above are just that? Questions. They are not meant to mock.

My comments to jackchristie? Take those at face value, and they were meant to disconstruct a fallacious argument, as well as call him out for a history of misleading quotes on these forums.
 
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Barr: the evidence is not sufficient to establish that the President committed a crime. No case for obstruction of justice.
No collusion by US citizen...

CNN: THE PRESIDENT HAS BEEN EXONERATED!

Huge headline across CNN front page: "MUELLER DID NOT FIND TRUMP CONSPIRED WITH RUSSIA"

So as I (and others) have said before, everyone should unanimously be happy to learn that the President of the United States is not a spy, a Russian agent, or anything along those lines. Yet I'm willing to bet that a lot of people on the left are extremely disappointed and upset so... speaking of division...

Why would we believe this report? Hasn't he gone waaaaaaaay out of his way to convince everyone that this report was full of shit, and should be ignored? What, now that it's convenient for him, this report is the best report, like, the best, there's no report like it?

Do you begin to understand why this muppet needs to shut his claptrap a little more, get his greasy fingers off twitter, and focus on being a leader?
 
The conclusion had nothing to do with DOJ guidelines re: indicting sitting president
Small correction, it's not DOJ guidelines, it is literally in the Constitution.
Huge headline across CNN front page: "MUELLER DID NOT FIND TRUMP CONSPIRED WITH RUSSIA"

So as I (and others) have said before, everyone should unanimously be happy to learn that the President of the United States is not a spy, a Russian agent, or anything along those lines. Yet I'm willing to bet that a lot of people on the left are extremely disappointed and upset so... speaking of division...
I'm actually rather sad, means I have to keep teaching kids English instead of just sticking with Russian :(
 
How much did Obama spend on his vacations and on golf resorts? I don't know the answer or how the two compare, that's a genuine question.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-trump-travel-costs/

While not super clear, it indicates that yes, Trump has spent more. We're well aware he golfs more despite always saying how Obama spent a lot of time golfing.


Obama divided us at every turn. It started with the Cambridge story, which was a complete embarrassment for Obama, imho, and continued non-stop for eight years. Obama divided us based on race, gender, sexual orientation, religion - you name it. Trump just wants everyone to get back to work. In fact, the whole mentality on the right is that the greatest minority of them all is the individual and we should just one another based on individual traits, rather than as part of a larger group.

Ok, Obama said some stupid things. What I recall from this and a few other issues like that was, we started to see how hostile police forces across the nation have become. Sadly, this focused around black men and white officers. There's more to it as I've personally know a couple white men who have been bated by police (weed stuck in a drawer during a raid for example). To say Obama hates police officers incorrect but a knee jerk reaction the media had at the time.

I agree with most of this except for the last word. The left's idea of compromise is to ask for triple and settle for double. Gun rights are the perfect example of this. As far as the divide in general goes, I get it - I was once gifted a Trump tshirt in 2016 and I've never worn it because I'm afraid of some crazy Massachusetts liberal attacking me. Talk about a massive divide...

Yes agreed. I don't see that getting rid of guns will ever happen nor should we try. The "flyover" states do have a lot of hunting. Some may not agree but allowing hunting has helped control deer population in these states. These people we don't need to worry about. What we should do is have a more common gun control set of rules instead of the widly varying ones we have now where if you cross boarders, you could be arrested. You have to agree with what's happened lately with the shootings that some rules should be adjusted, right? Now this also opens the subject to our mental healthcare. Why we do nothing with this angers me so much as it's something we just try and shuffle under the rug it seems.

Why does the US need to be trustworthy? Serious question. For example, is Europe going to cut ties with the US? Hell no, we defend them. In fact, we pay far more to defend them than we agreed to and yet they still have the balls to criticize us. It would be amusing if it wasn't my tax dollars protecting our European forum members.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-ta...-views-the-u-s-and-its-president-in-9-charts/

Will we be forgotten? no. But seeing how China is coming up, we should try to fix that instead of beating our chest and coasting on past success to say we're still the best, right? Though I'd rather want a more commonality than a nation at the top... What's happening now is not really all that new but its embarrassing to see how he conducts himself in front of world leaders.

trumpatg7summit79217b77b59742e5.jpg


The US needs to be trustworthy so that we're not looked at as a nation that can't stick with contracts. Changing tariffs like we did was stupid. Raising them just because we don't like jobs going away is stupid. If the products we make are so good, why are they leaving? It's not the tariffs, it's the greedy businesses that want to make something for pennies while reaping all the revenue by not changing the price but lowering manufacturing costs by outsourcing.

I'm going to list a few of the things that I like about Trump. Please feel free to explain why you disagree with each one, point by point.
  • Under Trump the US became energy independent. In fact, last year was the first time in 75 years when we exported more oil than we imported. Obama likes to take credit for this and he's lying - he actively fought against fracking, for example, which produces ~67% of all of our natural gas. Another example is that crude oil production spiked under Trump.
Being energy independent is good but to rollback EPA regulations that could directly benefit oil and gas production isn't the best way to go about it. You think reducing federal Clean Water Act regulations is a good idea if it means increasing jobs for the population? Jobs are more important than human health? My job uses natural gas, propane, and fuel oils. instead of trying to make it easier for everyone just because regulations are hard to meet today, slows progress on this type of fuel production. If we can't handle it in a safe way, we should move away from it, not make it easier to get, that just leads to dangerous situations.

2017 we saw the rollback of Steam Electric Effluent Limitations Guidelines (ELG) Rule. Explain how that is ok if it means we can continue polluting the environment, and now worse because we've lifted the rules that controlled how much pollution in the water our fossil fuel power plants discharge?


Unemployment is the lowest it has been since ~1969. Manufacturing jobs (the ones that Obama mocked Trump for and claimed that they'd never come back) are up; investor and consumer confidence levels are up. Black and Hispanic unemployment rates are the lowest in history.

I don't see how in just 2.5 years that's all Trump's doing. These things take time.

As I mentioned before, North Korea has been meeting with US and South Korean envoys to negotiate and hasn't conducted a single nuclear test in over a year; Arab nations are aligned against a common enemy (Iran); Egypt is finally backing Israel against Hamas; trade has been renegotiated with Canada and Mexico.

Let's hope North Korea isn't playing Trump. There's been talks that they're planning to start up again with testing. I cant find the freaking story so take this as wishful thinking for the moment.


ISIS is WasWas. They've lost all of their territory under Trump, while Obama not only created them but also couldn't keep them back.

Yes Obama and partially Bush because of the signifigant power vacuum we created in that region. I can't say that it was all on us that we got rid of the problem we created as only recently. They're not defeated yet.

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/03/23/isis-is-far-from-defeated/

Trump has banned White House officials from lobbying on behalf of foreign governments.

Terrific! Now can we start work with the rest of the lobby groups that have only made things worse here like the telecom industry? You can't tell me Trump knows nothing about that. It's been a long on going nose dive but it's frustrating how other nations can have things like fast low cost internet and tv while we're over here spending 60-100 dollars per month for 12mb speeds at best.


There have been no cuts to entitlement programs, no attacks on gay marriage, and no real attacks on abortions. Shouldn't liberals love this guy? Ironically, that's something I don't particularly like about Trump - I wish he would revisit entitlement programs (Johnson's war on poverty, for example, has wrecked the black family and we need to address that); I wish government would get out of marriage altogether (but in the absence of that I do like that Trump hasn't made the situation any worse); and I also think that the left has pushed the abortion debate to a despicable and immoral extreme (i.e. infanticide).

He hasn't? How are planned parenthood agencies doing? didn't Trump recently cut a bunch of funding to those places? I only know because my deeply Christian family spoke highly of it recently like a football team won a game. My personal feelings on both Gay marriage and abortions? I won't partake in either and the abortion one is something I should have no say in as it does not affect my body. That is something we as men should not be discussing, sorry.


I like Trump's stance on illegal immigration. We need to know who is trying to come into our country and the only way to make that possible is to secure the border. Once that's done, I'm more than happy to let immigrants that have been vetted and approved into our country.

We absolutely need to revisit our immigration rules. But instead of building walls like we're in an Age of Empires game to keep people out, how about since we do this with other nations, re-allocate funding we're supposedly cutting from other nations and help do something with mexico? It's clear theres an issue here otherwise they wouldn't be running for the boarder. To angrily say "all mexicans are thieving good for nothing wastes of air" (paraphrasing) is embarrassing to hear a grown man say. Rather, why not help teach instead of tearing family's apart? We have a mess on our hands with children who are citizens and parents who aren't which is something someone far smarter than me will have to address. I don't have an answer for this.


It seems to me like your problems with Trump can be summarized as "I don't like his rhetoric."

Absolutely that's part of it. If someone were to come to you like Trump does when you were for example, at a car dealer. Would be more or less inclined to deal with them? I for sure wouldn't.
 
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:lmao: I think you need to take your advice. Two years, 2800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants, 500 witnesses, 19 lawyers, 40 FBI agents, and $40mil later THERE IS NO FUCKING RUSSIAN COLLUSION! Trump has been 100% RIGHT ALL ALONG. The leftist swamp created this bullshit "insurance policy" out of thin air and you're still mad about the orange man? Seriously?? :lmao::lmao::lmao:

You missed the point entirely, then again you and the point have never met. He went on endless rants about how this report was full of shit, how everyone should ignore it, how when it came out would be entirely false and full of 'leftist bullshit'.
Now do you see how this comes bite him in the ass? So the report comes out and clears him. So let's do exactly what he told us and ignore the report and conclude there was collusion.

Your parents never read you Jack and the wolf when you were little, did they?
 
You missed the point entirely, then again you and the point have never met. He went on endless rants about how this report was full of shit, how everyone should ignore it, how when it came out would be entirely false and full of 'leftist bullshit'.
Now do you see how this comes bite him in the ass? So the report comes out and clears him. So let's do exactly what he told us and ignore the report and conclude there was collusion.

Your parents never read you Jack and the wolf when you were little, did they?
The thing is, all these accusations being made every day, there is one person that actually knows which are true and which are bullshit. Donald Trump. Imagine being in a public role and having accusations made against you that you know are false. Now imagine they launch a multi-year investigation, spending millions of dollars, to investigate those false accusations. How would you respond to it?

We all know Trump lacks diplomacy. He's brash, rude, undignified, and spends most of his time with his foot in his mouth. The way he responded to these investigations makes a certain amount of sense, given his perspective and the apparent falsehood of the accusations. He thinks everything is a witch-hunt, that everyone is out to get him. He probably imagined that the report would come back with a bunch of lies and fabricated evidence just to remove him from power. Which is understandable, given the amount of hatred, scrutiny, and pressure being put on him and his admin.

If only every politician was held to that same extreme high level of scrutiny and accountability, we would be living in a much better world.
 
No, I think it is you who is missing the point, which is that it doesn't matter what Trump has or has not said about Mueller's report. What matters is that the report has cleared Trump. The story is over.

And exactly why it doesn't matter? What Trump says shouldn't matter for this event? It shouldn't matter at all? Certainly you seem to think some of the things he says are to be taken seriously. So where do YOU draw the line?

The thing is, all these accusations being made every day, there is one person that actually knows which are true and which are bullshit. Donald Trump. Imagine being in a public role and having accusations made against you that you know are false. Now imagine they launch a multi-year investigation, spending millions of dollars, to investigate those false accusations. How would you respond to it?

You.. don't.
People didn't vote for him to personally respond to every bit of criticism or every thought one has against him. They elected him to govern and lead. Two things 61 percent of people don't seem to think he's doing all that well.

If only every politician was held to that same extreme high level of scrutiny and accountability, we would be living in a much better world.

If every politician who was held to such scrutiny reacts and responds this way, you really think we would be in a better world?
 
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If every politician who was held to such scrutiny reacts and responds this way, you really think we would be in a better world?
Yes. If every politician was held to this level of high scrutiny, and held accountable for their actions/crimes, I believe they would be far less likely to abuse their power, act corruptly/criminally, and we would end up with higher quality leaders since greedy charlatans would find a different grift. How they respond to being held to that high standard means very little to me compared to the possible benefits.
 
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