Thread: President Donald Trump

Originally Posted by SKkin

Allegedly he turned water into wine.

It's their story not mine.

Originally Posted by SKkin

"Fake Christians" aka "Judeo-Christians"

Semantics.

Originally Posted by bsnub

It's their story not mine.

Yes snubby, but in your version I don't think he would have been quite as popular.

Originally Posted by bsnub

Think you are wrong there. Jesus (if he existed) was a long haired hippy that turned wine into water.

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

Yes snubby, but in your version I don't think he would have been quite as popular.

I skipped most of Sunday school.

Originally Posted by SKkin

Trump has claimed to be an atheist in the past.

Correction...seems that may not be the case. I was misinformed.



In reality though, I think he worships at the Altar of Trump.

The Trump administration is resuming its efforts to deport certain protected Vietnamese immigrants who have lived in the United States for decades—many of them having fled the country during the Vietnam War.

This is the latest move in the president’s long record of prioritizing harsh immigration and asylum restrictions, and one that’s sure to raise eyebrows—the White House had hesitantly backed off the plan in August before reversing course. In essence, the administration has now decided that Vietnamese immigrants who arrived in the country before the establishment of diplomatic ties between the United States and Vietnam are subject to standard immigration law—meaning they are all eligible for deportation.

The new stance mirrors White House efforts to clamp down on immigration writ large, a frequent complaint of the president’s on the campaign trail and one he links to a litany of ills in the United States.

The administration last year began pursuing the deportation of many long-term immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia, and other countries who the administration alleges are “violent criminal aliens.” But Washington and Hanoi have a unique 2008 agreement that specifically bars the deportation of Vietnamese people who arrived in the United States before July 12, 1995—the date the two former foes reestablished diplomatic relations following the Vietnam War.

The White House unilaterally reinterpreted the agreement in the spring of 2017 to exempt people convicted of crimes from its protections, allowing the administration to send back a small number of pre-1995 Vietnamese immigrants, a policy it retreated from this past August. Last week, however, James Thrower, a spokesperson for the U.S. embassy in Hanoi, said the American government was again reversing course.

Washington now believes that the 2008 agreement fails to protect pre-1995 Vietnamese immigrants from deportation, Thrower told The Atlantic. This would apply to such migrants who are either undocumented or have committed crimes, and this interpretation would not apply to those who have become American citizens.

“The United States and Vietnam signed a bilateral agreement on removals in 2008 that establishes procedures for deporting Vietnamese citizens who arrived in the United States after July 12, 1995, and are subject to final orders of removal,” Thrower said. “While the procedures associated with this specific agreement do not apply to Vietnamese citizens who arrived in the United States before July 12, 1995, it does not explicitly preclude the removal of pre-1995 cases.”

The about-turn came as a State Department spokesperson confirmed that the Department of Homeland Security had met with representatives of the Vietnamese embassy in Washington, D.C., but declined to provide details of when the talks took place or what was discussed.

Katie Waldman, a spokeswoman for DHS said: “We have 5,000 convicted criminal aliens from Vietnam with final orders of removal—these are non-citizens who during previous administrations were arrested, convicted, and ultimately ordered removed by a federal immigration judge. It’s a priority of this administration to remove criminal aliens to their home country.”

Spokespeople for the Vietnamese embassy did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

But the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center, a Washington, D.C., advocacy group, said in a statement that the purpose of the meeting was to change the 2008 agreement. That deal had initially been set to last for five years, and was to be automatically extended every three years unless either party opted out. Under those rules, it was set to renew next month. Since 1998, final removal orders have been issued for more than 9,000 Vietnamese nationals.

When it first decided to reinterpret the 2008 deal, Donald Trump’s administration argued that only pre-1995 arrivals with criminal convictions were exempt from the agreement’s protection and eligible for deportation. Vietnam initially conceded and accepted some of those immigrants before stiffening its resistance; about a dozen Vietnamese immigrants ended up being deported from the United States. The August decision to change course, reported to a California court in October, appeared to put such moves at least temporarily on ice, but the latest shift leaves the fate of a larger number of Vietnamese immigrants in doubt. Now all pre-1995 arrivals are exempt from the 2008 agreement’s protection.

Many pre-1995 arrivals, all of whom were previously protected under the 2008 agreement by both the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, were refugees from the Vietnam War. Some are the children of those who once allied with American and South Vietnamese forces, an attribute that renders them undesirable to the current regime in Hanoi, which imputes anti-regime beliefs to the children of those who opposed North Vietnam. This anti-Communist constituency includes minorities such as the children of the American-allied Montagnards, who are persecuted in Vietnam for both their ethnicity and Christian religion.

The Trump administration’s move reflects an entirely new reading of the agreement, according to Ted Osius, who served as the United States ambassador to Vietnam from December 2014 through November 2017.* Osius said that while he was in office, the 2008 agreement was accepted by all involved parties as banning the deportation of all pre-1995 Vietnamese immigrants.

“We understood that the agreement barred the deportation of pre-1995 Vietnamese. Both governments—and the Vietnamese-American community—interpreted it that way,” Osius told The Atlantic in an email. The State Department, he added, had explained this to both the White House and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

News of the Trump administration’s renewed hard line quickly made the rounds on Vietnamese American social media, with advocacy groups warning of potentially increased deportations.

“Forty-three years ago, a lot of the Southeast Asian communities and Vietnamese communities fled their countries and their homeland due to the war, which the U.S. was involved in, fleeing for their safety and the safety of their families,” said Kevin Lam, the organizing director of the Asian American Resource Workshop, an advocacy group. “The U.S. would do well to remember that.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/internat...I_Lkv4uqUFJ_OQ

^That's a very misleading subject line that does not reflect what is in the article.

Originally Posted by Davis Knowlton

That's a very misleading subject line that does not reflect what is in the article.

Can you be more specific?

Originally Posted by Davis Knowlton

^That's a very misleading subject line that does not reflect what is in the article.

It sums it up, considering the way baldy orange cunto directs ICE to grab and deport people first and ask questions later:

Now all pre-1995 arrivals are exempt from the 2008 agreement’s protection.

Originally Posted by bsnub

Can you be more specific?

No. I suggest you read the article yourself.

Originally Posted by Davis Knowlton

No. I suggest you read the article yourself.

Umm I posted it so yes I did read it.

^Well then, my friend, you need to work on your comprehension skills. The title "Trump Moves To Deport Vietnam War Refugees" is hysterical crap designed solely as an anti-Trump attack. The article says nothing remotely like your title suggests. It is an effort to get rid of criminals and illegal immigrants, just like is being done for countries other than Vietnam. Those Vietnamese who were fortunate enough to get out before we slunk away assimilated very successfully, more than most recent refugee groups. Those who came later did not do as well.

Originally Posted by Davis Knowlton

^That's a very misleading subject line that does not reflect what is in the article.

no point in arguing with anti-Trumpette drunk tards

Originally Posted by Davis Knowlton

^Well then, my friend, you need to work on your comprehension skills. The title "Trump Moves To Deport Vietnam War Refugees" is hysterical crap designed solely as an anti-Trump attack. The article says nothing remotely like your title suggests. It is an effort to get rid of criminals and illegal immigrants, just like is being done for countries other than Vietnam. Those Vietnamese who were fortunate enough to get out before we slunk away assimilated very successfully, more than most recent refugee groups. Those who came later did not do as well.

Reminder:

Now all pre-1995 arrivals are exempt from the 2008 agreement’s protection.

Wouldn’t the later Vietnamese immigrants be the Hmong hilltribesmen who were brought after they were persecuted by the government? They have had problems assimilating in the US and lots of run-ins with the law.

they are Laos based, not Vietnamese

Originally Posted by misskit

They have had problems assimilating in the US

...I don't know why...Minnesota is a cultural twin to Vietnam...

...tRumptards believe most of what He says: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graph...=.7d0a8a9179bf

Originally Posted by tomcat

...tRumptards believe most of what He says: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graph...=.7d0a8a9179bf

Misleading poll in that sense. The statements were not attributed, thus some trumptards would not believe a lie when it was anonymous, but had the lie been attributed to Trump, they probably would have believed it.

...thanks for clarifying...

Originally Posted by SKkin

Trump Considering Son-In-Law Jared Kushner For Next Chief Of Staff

Mick Mulvaney got the job on an interim basis. The position is meaningless under Trump who just has periods of executive time, golf and a few minutes of actual work every day.

So Kim Il Trump is setting up a family dynasty eh.
I’m surprised that the Kushner wasn’t required to change his name after he married Barbie Bigones.

With the Democrats soon to be in control of the House of Representatives, the inside-the-beltway punditry has largely posited that a Nancy Pelosi-led House of Representatives will naturally become Donald Trump’s latest bête noire. To be sure, an empowered Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler leading, respectively, the House Intelligence and Justice committees isn't welcome news for the president, but a Democratic House is a threat that the White House should have seen coming long ago.

As veterans of political combat know, the biggest threat isn’t the one you see from miles away; it’s the one you didn’t anticipate, oftentimes because it comes from one of your supposed allies. And in January, Trump’s biggest antagonist in DC may very well emerge from within his own party.

But who is this statesman who will muster the courage to say “enough is enough” and attempt to put an end to the house fire burning at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? What conservative has the gravitas and authority to speak for Republicans who have been gritting their teeth every time that Trump waxes effusively about Vladimir Putin or Mohammed bin Salman?

It’s Mitt Romney, of course. Technically, he’ll be the junior senator from Utah starting January 3, but the former Massachusetts governor and 2012 GOP presidential nominee is the de facto leader of the pre-Trump GOP. Not since Hillary Clinton was elected in 2000 from her adopted state of New York has a junior senator come to Washington with so much clout and influence.

Between Robert Mueller's investigation and the Democrats taking back the House, the Washington media hasn’t given the intramural politics of the Republican Senate and the impact of Mitt Romney much airplay. But Romney’s arrival in Washington might mark the beginning of a political dynamic more problematic for Trump than the Democrats’ regaining control of the House.

The contentious relationship between Romney and Trump is well documented. Although the two have publicly made nice at several junctures for raw political expediency—Romney was rumored at one point to be in the running for Trump’s secretary of State—there is a degree of underlying personal and political animus that will be impossible to keep bottled up now that Romney will have a front-row seat to Trump's eschewing so many traditional GOP policies and norms.

For Romney, the measured, calculated, religious, and refrained management consultant, there is no greater a polar opposite in business or politics, nor in matters of faith and family life than Donald Trump. These differences were put on full public display in the heat of the 2016 Republican Primaries when Romney, who at the time was the spiritual leader of the ultimately unsuccessful “Never Trump” movement, called out the future president, slamming him as “a phony” and “a fraud” who is “playing the American public for suckers.”

“Think of Donald Trump's personal qualities, the bullying, the greed, the showing off, the misogyny, the absurd third grade theatrics,” Romney said in a speech in March of 2016. "We have long referred to him as The Donald. He is the only person in America to whom we have added an article before his name. It wasn't because he had attributes we admired.”

Romney evidently sees Trump as a pathogen that has infected his party, and with each and every Tweet or impulsive directive, he is steering the country into more dangerous waters. And Romney may feel that he is the guy who can right the ship—and he wouldn’t mind getting the credit for doing so. Keep in mind that Romney is probably not in the Senate just to be a great senator for the people of Utah; he clearly continues to harbor higher aspirations.

And unlike nearly every Republican in the Senate—and unlike Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, the Trump antagonist who retired to avoid facing reelection—Romney just got elected in a deep-red state that is decidedly un-Trumpy. Although he won the state’s six electoral college votes, Trump managed to lock in only 46 percent of the vote, with a virtually unknown third-party candidate picking up a solid fifth of the ballots. Trump’s coattails in Utah are virtually nonexistent, so Romney has plenty of freedom to push back against Trump without having to face a firing squad back home. When he ran for president in 2012, Romney won Utah with 73 percent of the vote, and in his latest race for the Senate, he scored a nearly equally decisive victory, with 63 percent. And even if Trumpist voters in Utah are unhappy with him, Romney won’t have to face reelection for six years, 100 lifetimes from now in modern US politics.

Whereas nearly all other Republicans in the Senate fear the political pound of flesh that Trump’s base may extract if they don't follow the president off of whatever cliff he's teetering on, Romney has no such concerns. Here are three early signs that Mitt Romney is lacing up to go mano a mano with the President:

1. The battle to approve the new attorney general. Expect to see Romney dig in and demand that his support for the new AG be conditional on that nominee to vow to uphold the rule of law and protect Mueller and his investigation.
2. Shielding the Mueller Investigation from White House Meddling. So far, this idea has been a non-starter for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, but expect to see Romney voice his support for legislation protecting the investigation from President Trump.
3. The Wall. Romney, who often touted his fiscal chops on the campaign trail in 2012, might take a very public stand against Trump’s quixotic quest to invest $5 billion in a physical wall no one in Washington besides Trump himself seriously thinks we need. His stance against Trump’s pet project could provide cover for a handful of other fiscal conservatives in the Senate to join him in shooting down the idea.

Romney is uniquely positioned to take a stand. He likely knows that historians will not be kind to Donald Trump, nor to his enablers, and that although the cost of excising Trump from the White House may render some short-term setbacks for the GOP in 2020, Mitt Romney may very well end up cast in the role of this generation’s Lowell Weicker, the senator from Connecticut who became the first Republican to call for the Richard Nixon’s resignation. History may very well see Romney as the man who brought the GOP back to sanity after the Trump fever finally broke.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7...CvbE8vQc96ZULI

Isn't it funny how Trump manages to make the likes of Romney and even Bush Jnr look good in comparison.

Originally Posted by AntRobertson

Isn't it funny how Trump manages to make the likes of Romney and even Bush Jnr look good in comparison.

They are both shit but yes in the current situation I would take either of them over this orange scumbag.

The way things are going it could well be President Pelosi.

So, now that we know that Donald Trump and Mike Pence reached the White House through at least two specific and separate criminal conspiracies, what do we do about it?

Can they be removed from office? Can the election be done over? Can the Trump/Pence administration’s actions over the past two years be reversed, particularly the appointments of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and all the damage to our federal agencies?

According to federal court filings last week from the Southern District of New York, and from the Special Counsel’s office, Donald Trump and Michael Cohen criminally conspired to hide from the American people the fact that Trump had sexual relations immediately after the birth of his son Barron with both Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, and that his affair with McDougal lasted about a year.

Had Republican voters known about those affairs long before Trump gained the momentum he did during the period of the cover-up, Trump wouldn’t have become the GOP’s nominee and would now be back to playing the roles of a faux billionaire and a reality TV star.

Similarly, those same court filings tell us that even after Trump won the GOP’s nomination for president, he continued to negotiate with the Russian government to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Presumably construction would begin right after he lost the election of 2016, which is fully what he expected: he hadn’t even bothered to write an acceptance speech.

That Moscow property would have brought him, according to the court filings, “hundreds of millions of dollars” in net revenues, probably more than any other project he’d ever engaged in. It would finally make him financially secure.

And, because it was going to be financed by a Russian bank that’s under sanctions, and both Cohen and Manafort were expecting to get a cut of the action, they led his campaign to corruptly change the GOP’s platform to go soft on the Russians. The goal was to end the sanctions so they could move forward with the Moscow construction right after the elections.

In exchange for Trump Tower Moscow, it appears that either Russian oligarchs (who were presumably in on the Trump Tower Moscow deal) and/or the Russian government itself (which quite reasonably wanted the sanctions lifted) set out, at Trump’s explicit and public request, to help Trump.

They hacked the DNC and took down Hillary Clinton, both with the WikiLeaks revelations and a widespread social media campaign, which also constituted an illegal campaign contribution and further ensnared the Trump/Pence campaign in a campaign finance crime.

All of this adds up to Trump and Pence holding control of the Executive Branch of government fraudulently; the rightful claimant to the White House is Hillary Clinton, and the rightful claimant of Scalia’s SCOTUS seat is Merrick Garland.

Trump not only knew about these frauds but, according to the court filings, directed at least the sexual cover-up. We’re still waiting to hear the details of Trump’s involvement in altering the GOP’s platform to benefit the Russians, but it strains credulity that Trump didn’t know about this, if not being the force behind it.
Meanwhile, Mike Pence — who ran the transition into the White House — either knew or, with even a small bit of competence and common sense, should have known but was looking the other way. Thus, he’s complicit, legally and/or morally and politically.

We don’t yet know all the dirt that Mueller and company have on Trump, but just these two things that Trump successfully hid from the electorate — that he was porking porn stars and Playboy bunnies prior to the primaries, and that he was negotiating with the Russians right through the first half of the general election — mean that he committed two separate massive frauds to become president.

If he had not committed that fraud, he would never have become the GOP nominee and, even if he had won the nomination through some inexplicable miracle, he and Pence would not have squeaked through the Electoral College with about 70,000 votes spread over three or four states. Hillary Clinton would be president, but for Trump and Pence’s fraud.

So, what do we do?

The Framers of the Constitution had such confidence in the “wise elders” of the Electoral College that they didn’t even envision such a scenario, so there’s no mention of such a situation in the Constitution. And, while courts have ordered that elections be done over on numerous occasions all over the country, I can’t find a single case of that happening years after the initial election. (If you know of one, please let me know!)

As to solutions, it’s remotely possible that the election of Trump and Pence could be challenged in federal court.

In the Federal District Court case of Donohue v Board of Elections (1976), Judge Mishler wrote in his decision that ordering a new election is within the purview of the courts, and that this has been done in the past. He wrote:

“The point, however, is not that ordering a new Presidential election in New York State is beyond the equity jurisdiction of the federal courts. Protecting the integrity of elections, particularly Presidential contests, is essential to a free and democratic society. See United States v. Classic, supra.
“It is difficult to imagine a more damaging blow to public confidence in the electoral process than the election of a President whose margin of victory was provided by fraudulent registration or voting, ballot-stuffing or other illegal means. Indeed, entirely foreclosing injunctive relief in the federal courts would invite attempts to influence national elections by illegal means, particularly in those states where no statutory procedures are available for contesting general elections.
“Finally, federal courts in the past have not hesitated to take jurisdiction over constitutional challenges to the validity of local elections and, where necessary, order new elections. The fact that a national election might require judicial intervention, concomitantly implicating the interests of the entire nation, if anything, militates in favor of interpreting the equity jurisdiction of the federal courts to include challenges to Presidential elections.”

But this case from December 7, 1976 was a futile attempt by the GOP to prevent New York State from casting its electoral votes for Jimmy Carter (thus handing the presidency to Gerald Ford) before the swearing in of Carter in January, 1977; it wasn’t an effort to reverse an election that had already been decided and the candidate had been sworn into office.

Additionally, such a case could take years and would certainly end up before the Supreme Court; given the current composition of the Supreme Court, it’s hard to imagine that they’d invalidate Trump’s “victory” and possibly remove two of their own from the Court.
But there is a constitutional route that can be taken by Congress, via impeachment.

In January, Nancy Pelosi will become the Speaker of the House. As such, should the nation lose its president and vice-president to impeachment, we’d have President Pelosi. It wouldn’t reverse the damage the GOP and Trump/Pence have done, but it would be a start.
The key is to illuminate Mike Pence’s role in Trump’s frauds, so both men succumb to impeachment in the House, and conviction and removal from office by the Senate.

The level of criminality engaged in by Donald Trump, his family, his campaign, and his “fixer/lawyer” is broad and sweeping, consistent with lifetime patterns of criminality on all of their parts (and we still have more to learn).

To imagine that Mike Pence didn’t know about this, or at least suspect it, is simply inconceivable, making him an accessory to those crimes — as well as being the principle secondary beneficiary of those crimes.

As evidence that Pence was complicit or knowledgeable, or should have been, comes to the fore, an impeachment effort must include both men. The nation can no easier withstand the incompetence of a corrupt former right-wing talk show host (Pence) than a corrupt former reality TV star and real estate con man.

And that evidence must be strong enough that it’ll overcome the concerns of nearly a dozen Republican senators, so both Trump and Pence are removed from office.

Nothing less than the integrity of our nation and the survival of democracy are at stake.

https://www.salon.com/2018/12/14/wit...sident-pelosi/