Thread: President Donald Trump

^ Rock, hard place and all that.

Originally Posted by Cujo

The real reason is Clinton was just such a bad candidate.

Well I suspect she would have got the nomination anyway, and if it had been done fairly she probably would have got the votes, but the bottom line is that it left a sour taste in the mouth for a lot of Democrats and they weren't going to vote for her on principle.

Lets home the DNC aren't fucking dumb enough to try that stunt again with Biden.

Not for nothing, just seen a clip, but when and why did Rand Paul become another Trump sycophant-slash-toady.

Originally Posted by AntRobertson

Not for nothing, just seen a clip, but when and why did Rand Paul become another Trump sycophant-slash-toady.

Shitting himself after he saw what happened in his state last week I expect.

Another Republican hypocrite.

Before he publicly demanded that the media expose the identity of the anonymous Ukraine whistleblower, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) was literally the toast of the whistleblower advocacy world. Six years ago, the Kentucky Republican received an award for his work to protect those who come forward anonymously with allegations of wrongdoing by the powerful.


The honor was issued at the Whistleblower Summit for Civil and Human Rights—a non-partisan conference that had given their Pillar Human Rights Award to other elected officials in the past, including Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA). In 2013, they chose to to acknowledge Paul, among other lawmakers, for being one of a few GOP senators willing to take political flak in defense of Edward Snowden, who had just come forward with a sweeping disclosure of federal government snooping. Many of Paul’s colleagues were livid with Snowden, and though the Kentucky senator believed he deserved punishment, he maintained that the revelations were a service to the country.

In the aftermath, Paul pushed for whistleblower protections to be extended to government contractors such as Snowden. “We’ve got so many millions of government contractors that when they see something wrong, they should be able to report it without repercussions,” Paul said in an address to a libertarian conference in 2014. The following year, Paul introduced an amendment to a Senate cybersecurity bill to that effect: the legislation proposed that contractors with knowledge of surveillance programs could send formal complaints to the Government Accountability Office, the congressional Intelligence Committees, or through internal channels.

Catching a GOPer in baldfaced and blatant hypocrisy is easier than catching an STD from a low-rent, back street, hooker bar.

drumpf won because he was a fat white man

ok boomers

MSNBC’s Morning Joe brutally mocks Jeff Sessions for launching Senate run by sucking up to president who called him ‘dumb’


MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough mocked former Attorney General Jeff Sessions for sucking up to President Donald Trump in a video announcement of his candidacy for the U.S. Senate.

The Alabama Republican is seeking his old seat, which he gave up to serve in the Trump administration, and the “Morning Joe” host ridiculed his fawning reassurance to the president that he’ll serve his agenda — despite the abuse he has heaped on Sessions.

“The first task on his agenda appeared to be making amends with Donald Trump,” Scarborough said. “That’s right, the guy who unmercifully mocked him, called him stupid, made fun of him being from Alabama. Well, now President Trump can’t vote, of course, in Alabama, but Sessions announced his run for his former Senate seat with a campaign ad that clearly targeted an audience of one.”

Scarborough said Sessions had shamed himself almost as badly as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who backs Trump despite the president’s rude insults against the senator’s wife and family.

“If somebody attacked my wife, said she was ugly, a political opponent, I would spend the rest of my life just going after them and making sure that they paid for it,” Scarborough said. “Whereas Ted Cruz cannot hug Donald Trump enough, and if I had been attacked like Donald Trump attacked Jeff Sessions, oh, man, it would be ugly. I think most people would respond this way.”

“But you look at Jeff Sessions, like Ted Cruz and these other Republicans, and get insulted and trashed and their manhood challenged by Donald Trump and they just — they remain quislings,” he added. “I feel like asking the question, who are these men? Who are these men some who would humiliate themselves in front of the president and the country like that?”

Democratic strategist Guy Cecil compared Sessions’ video announcement to a “hostage tape,” and former George W. Bush aide Elise Jordan said she was amazed by the former senator’s toadying.

“It just really blows my mind how so many men, and primarily men, because, well, let’s face the fact, most national elected Republicans these days are men,” she said, “but they are just willing to bow at the altar of Trump.”

“They just take it, they just roll over,” Jordan added, “and I don’t want to say roll over like dogs, because I like dogs — but they just roll over.”

Scarborough agreed, and wondered what message that sent to voters.

“People like tough leaders,” he said. “I mean, that’s at least what I saw. People like to have representatives that aren’t going to put up with anything, that are going to go to Washington, D.C. and are going to be tough and fight for them, not fight for whoever the president is or fight for whoever the speaker of the House is, but fight for their constituents. This is a personality cult.”

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/11/msn...lled-him-dumb/

Fucking hell, what a brown nosing dumbarse!

The bald orange turd on Sondland.

“This is the man who said there was no quid pro quo — and he still says that ... and he hasn’t changed that testimony,” Trump said.

Except he did, now he doesn't, and he has.

Fucking lying twat.

Some comedians have been putting a new cover on little Jr's book and moving it to the young adults section.

Oh FFS



https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/ent...b00927b233c78c

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

Oh FFS https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/ent...b00927b233c78c

Jesus wept.

Senior Trump administration officials considered resigning en masse last year in a “midnight self-massacre” to sound a public alarm about President Trump’s conduct, but rejected the idea because they believed it would further destabilize an already teetering government, according to a new book by an unnamed author.

In “A Warning” by Anonymous, obtained by The Washington Post ahead of its release, a writer described only as “a senior official in the Trump administration” paints a chilling portrait of the president as cruel, inept and a danger to the nation he was elected to lead.

The author — who first captured attention in 2018 as the unidentified author of a New York Times opinion column — describes Trump careening from one self-inflicted crisis to the next, “like a twelve-year-old in an air traffic control tower, pushing the buttons of government indiscriminately, indifferent to the planes skidding across the runway and the flights frantically diverting away from the airport.”

The book is an unsparing character study of Trump, from his morality to his intellectual depth, which the author writes is based on his or her observations and experiences. The author claims many other current and former administration officials share his or her views.

The 259-page book — which was published by Twelve, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing/Hachette Book Group, and goes on sale Nov. 19 — does not re-create many specific episodes in vivid detail, which the author writes was intentional to protect his or her identity.

At a moment when a stream of political appointees and career public servants have testified before Congress about Trump’s conduct as part of the House impeachment inquiry, the book’s author defends his or her decision to remain anonymous.

“I have decided to publish this anonymously because this debate is not about me,” the author writes. “It is about us. It is about how we want the presidency to reflect our country, and that is where the discussion should center. Some will call this ‘cowardice.’ My feelings are not hurt by the accusation. Nor am I unprepared to attach my name to criticism of President Trump. I may do so, in due course.”

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham derided the book as a “work of fiction” and its anonymous author as a “coward.”

“The coward who wrote this book didn’t put their name on it because it is nothing but lies,” Grisham wrote in an email. “Real authors reach out to their subjects to get things fact checked — but this person is in hiding, making that very basic part of being a real writer impossible. Reporters who choose to write about this farce should have the journalistic integrity to cover the book as what it is — a work of fiction.”

Earlier this week, the Justice Department warned Hachette and the author’s agents, Matt Latimer and Keith Urbahn of Javelin, that the anonymous official may be violating a nondisclosure agreement. Javelin responded by accusing the administration of seeking to unmask the author.

The author’s Sept. 5, 2018, [at]op-ed in the Times, headlined “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” depicted some senior officials as a bulwark protecting the country from the president’s reckless impulses. Trump denounced it at the time as treasonous.

In the book, the author repudiates the central thesis of the column: “I was wrong about the ‘quiet resistance’ inside the Trump administration. Unelected bureaucrats and cabinet appointees were never going to steer Donald Trump the right direction in the long run, or refine his malignant management style. He is who he is.”

The author describes senior officials waking up in the morning “in a full-blown panic” over the wild pronouncements the president had made on Twitter.

“It’s like showing up at the nursing home at daybreak to find your elderly uncle running pantsless across the courtyard and cursing loudly about the cafeteria food, as worried attendants tried to catch him,” the author writes. “You’re stunned, amused, and embarrassed all at the same time. Only your uncle probably wouldn’t do it every single day, his words aren’t broadcast to the public, and he doesn’t have to lead the US government once he puts his pants on.”

The book depicts Trump as making misogynistic and racist comments behind the scenes.

“I’ve sat and listened in uncomfortable silence as he talks about a woman’s appearance or performance,” the author writes. “He comments on makeup. He makes jokes about weight. He critiques clothing. He questions the toughness of women in and around his orbit. He uses words like ‘sweetie’ and ‘honey’ to address accomplished professionals. This is precisely the way a boss shouldn’t act in the work environment.”

The author alleges that Trump attempted a Hispanic accent during an Oval Office meeting to complain about migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

“We get these women coming in with like seven children,” Trump said, according to the book. “They are saying, ‘Oh, please help! My husband left me!’ They are useless. They don’t do anything for our country. At least if they came in with a husband we could put him in the fields to pick corn or something.”

The author argues that Trump is incapable of leading the United States through a monumental international crisis, describing how he tunes out intelligence and national security briefings and theorizing that foreign adversaries see him as “a simplistic pushover” who is susceptible to flattery and easily manipulated.

After the 2018 killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents, the author writes, Trump vented to advisers and said he would be foolish to stand up to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

“Do you know how stupid it would be to pick this fight?” Trump said, according to the book. “Oil would go up to one hundred fifty dollars a barrel. Jesus. How [expletive] stupid would I be?”

The book contains a handful of startling assertions that are not backed up with evidence, such as a claim that if a majority of the Cabinet were prepared to remove Trump from office under the 25th Amendment, Vice President Pence would have been supportive.

Pence denied this on Thursday, calling the book “appalling” and telling reporters, “I never heard anything in my time as vice president about the 25th Amendment. And why would I?”

One theme laced throughout the book is Trump’s indifference to the boundaries of the law. The author writes that Trump considered presidential pardons as “unlimited ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ cards on a Monopoly board,” referring to news reports that he had offered pardons to aides.

As he ranted about federal courts ruling against some of his policies, including the 2017 travel ban, the author writes, Trump once asked White House lawyers to draft a bill to send to Congress reducing the number of federal judges.

“Can we just get rid of the judges? Let’s get rid of the [expletive] judges,” the president said, according to the book. “There shouldn’t be any at all, really.”

The author portrays Trump as fearful of coups against him and suspicious of note-takers on his staff. According to the book, the president shouted at an aide who was scribbling in a notebook during a meeting, “What the [expletive] are you doing?” He added, “Are you [expletive] taking notes?” The aide apologized and closed the notebook.

The author also ruminates about Trump’s fitness for office, describing him as reckless and without full control of his faculties.

“I am not qualified to diagnose the president’s mental acuity,” the author writes. “All I can tell you is that normal people who spend any time with Donald Trump are uncomfortable by what they witness. He stumbles, slurs, gets confused, is easily irritated, and has trouble synthesizing information, not occasionally but with regularity. Those who would claim otherwise are lying to themselves or to the country.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...5a8_story.html

For those of you lazy to read...

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

Shitting himself after he saw what happened in his state last week I expect.

Another Republican hypocrite.

Before he publicly demanded that the media expose the identity of the anonymous Ukraine whistleblower, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) was literally the toast of the whistleblower advocacy world. Six years ago, the Kentucky Republican received an award for his work to protect those who come forward anonymously with allegations of wrongdoing by the powerful.


The honor was issued at the Whistleblower Summit for Civil and Human Rights—a non-partisan conference that had given their Pillar Human Rights Award to other elected officials in the past, including Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA). In 2013, they chose to to acknowledge Paul, among other lawmakers, for being one of a few GOP senators willing to take political flak in defense of Edward Snowden, who had just come forward with a sweeping disclosure of federal government snooping. Many of Paul’s colleagues were livid with Snowden, and though the Kentucky senator believed he deserved punishment, he maintained that the revelations were a service to the country.

In the aftermath, Paul pushed for whistleblower protections to be extended to government contractors such as Snowden. “We’ve got so many millions of government contractors that when they see something wrong, they should be able to report it without repercussions,” Paul said in an address to a libertarian conference in 2014. The following year, Paul introduced an amendment to a Senate cybersecurity bill to that effect: the legislation proposed that contractors with knowledge of surveillance programs could send formal complaints to the Government Accountability Office, the congressional Intelligence Committees, or through internal channels.

"I don't know about you, but remember the Rand Paul who campaigned on a platform about individual right to privacy, who staunchly opposed things like wiretapping?

He's dead. And the new Rand Paul is a vindictive and spiteful little elf who moved out of the tree where he makes cookies to take up permanent residency in the president's ass."


- Jimmy Kimmel

So Eric Baldy Orange Cunto Jr. and his big titted bimbo girlfriend were doing an event to promote his book about how "the left are trying to silence them" and got booed off stage by trumpanzees because he refused to answer any questions.

This is your modern day trumpanzee loon...

A group of alt-right and “dissident right” activists have joined forces with neo-Nazis and others on the far-right fringes to attack conservatives who they feel aren’t true conservatives, both online and in person.

Sunday, for instance, members of this group heckled Donald Trump Jr. at an event in California. And conservative speakers have been beset by the “groypers” at events in Texas, Tennessee and Arizona as well.

This group, which calls itself the “groyper army” — “groyper” being a reference to a meme of Pepe the Frog, itself a meme overtaken by the alt-right — purports to be supporting “traditional values” within conservatism, like immigration restrictionism. And it argues that relatively mainstream conservative student groups like Turning Point USA need to be confronted because they are shutting down “socially conservative Christians and supporters of President Trump’s agenda” and promoting “degeneracy” by having gay speakers.

This “groyper army” targets what it has termed “Conservative Inc,” a collective epitomized by conservative speakers like pundit Ben Shapiro, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, conservative writer Jonah Goldberg, and even Trump Jr., as well as conservative student organizations including Turning Point USA and Young Americans for Freedom.

Beyond the sort of heckling Trump faced, the network’s tactics usually focus on asking speakers specific and very leading questions about Israel, immigration, and LGBTQ issues within conservatism, hoping to elicit answers that reveal the speaker’s “fake conservatism.” “Real conservatism” being defined essentially as an emphasis on ethnic and racial characteristics as determinants for immigration coupled with an isolationist foreign policy and a “traditional” stance on LGBTQ issues. These tactics have gotten support from some mainstream right-leaning pundits who advocate for extreme restrictions on immigration, like Michelle Malkin.

In reality, the “groyper army” is simply the alt-right of 2016 and 2017, warmed over, reenergized and using new terminology aimed at disassociating itself from the “optics” problem caused by the tremendous failure of 2017’s Unite the Right Rally, which ended in the murder of a young woman. Its leaders and advocates are racists and Holocaust deniers, its message boards wax rhapsodic about the man who perpetrated the Christchurch mass shooting, and the questions it presents to conservative speakers are based on anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and “white genocide” fears.

As one source told me after a Turning Point USA event beset by “groypers,” “I did not know there were this many racists out there.”

The groyper army at work

Over the weekend, the “groyper army” targeted Turning Point USA events, one featuring Donald Trump Jr. at UCLA and another featuring Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) at Arizona State.

According to a source, the former event was intended to be a brief interview conducted by Kirk, followed by a book signing of Trump Jr.’s new book Triggered.

But the groyper army, which made up roughly a third of the audience, overwhelmed Trump, Jr. and Trump campaign senior adviser Kimberly Guilfoyle, screaming loudly and demanding a Q&A session (The video above was from the Twitter account of a “groyper army” supporter.)

Rep. Dan Crenshaw was another target of the groyper army this weekend. At an event at Arizona State titled “Prove Me Wrong ft. Congressman Dan Crenshaw,” at which Crenshaw answered questions from an audience, Crenshaw was asked a series of questions which he later told me by email were “almost exclusively about Israel.”

“The basic nature of their questions was to ask a question that at first seems like a legitimate policy difference, perfectly debatable,” Crenshaw told me. “But what then becomes clear — and there are hints along the way — the motivations are deeper and darker than their original question indicated.”

One of those questions is centered on the USS Liberty. As BuzzFeed News reporter Ellie Hall detailed in 2018:

The USS Liberty is a dog whistle referring to an incident in 1967 where Israeli forces fired on the US spy ship, killing 34, during the Six-Day War. In the aftermath, Israel said that its pilots had thought the ship was an Egyptian vessel, and apologized — the government eventually paid out $6.7 million in reparations to the survivors and families of the dead. Ever since, there have been unproven conspiracy theories surrounding the circumstances that question whether the attack was intentional. Both the Israeli and the United States governments have said that it was a case of mistaken identity.

The USS Liberty has now become an anti-Semitic meme, used to argue that the Israeli government is actually an enemy of the United States and that the country should not be receiving American funding. And members of the groyper army have been urged online to ask TPUSA speakers about the USS Liberty and other anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, like that of the “dancing Israelis,” which alleges that Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks and five Israeli nationals “danced” in celebration while watching them.

They ask these questions with the hopes of creating viral content of the responses like this video, of an October 21 Turning Point USA event at Grand Canyon University.



According to the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, countering speakers by simply shouting out specific conspiracy theories is good enough. It urges readers who attend Turning Point USA events who fail in their attempts to ask questions, “When you get pulled out [by security], yell “GOOGLE THE USS LIBERTY” or “GOOGLE DANCING ISRAELIS” or “AMERICA FIRST NOT ISRAEL FIRST” or just “NICK FUENTES.”




Nick Fuentes and “America First”

The groyper army is led in part, or at least symbolically, by Nick Fuentes, a 22-year-old former conservative radio host and Unite the Right attendee who hosts a YouTube show called “America First.”

A Fuentes has attempted to obfuscate his views by arguing on the messaging service Telegram that “America First” is a “traditionalist, Christian, conservative, reformist, American Nationalist” movement while the alt-right was “racialist” and “transnational.”

But this is pure semantics, as Fuentes is a white nationalist and an avowed anti-Semite who referred to Daily Wire writer Matt Walsh as a “shabbos goy race traitor” for condemning the El Paso, Texas, gunman who killed more than 20 people in August. In fact, in an interview with a French Canadian white nationalist, Fuentes said that the only reason he didn’t call himself a white nationalist is because “that kind of terminology is used almost exclusively by the left to defame.”

“I think in a way it’s almost redundant that you’re a ‘white’ nationalist. We know that the word ‘nation’ almost implicitly talks about ethnicity and biology,” Fuentes said.




In a series of videos deleted from his YouTube account in late October, Fuentes argues (using a thinly veiled metaphor referring to black Americans as “blackboards” and white Americans as “whiteboards”) that “America First is not America First if it’s not 100 percent whiteboard” and that he’s a “whiteboard nationalist.”

In another video, he advocates for segregation and Jim Crow, arguing “even if it was bad, who cares?” He has also described one of the Koch brothers as “an enemy of the white race” and his reaction to the El Paso shooting was to say, “the easiest way for Mexicans to not get shot in Wal-Mart is to not fucking be here.”

In September, Turning Point USA — which has faced allegations of racist behavior previously — cut ties with a brand ambassador, Ashley St. Clair, who was photographed with Fuentes, and in October, Fuentes was prevented from accessing an event at Politicon, the annual non-partisan political conference, that featured Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.

A source told me that it was the organization’s decision to cut ties with St. Clair that led to Fuentes’s fight with the organization, and to a host of resignations from chapters from members more aligned with Fuentes’s world view. In fact, a source told me that Turning Point USA decided to dissolve one chapter of the organization, at Kansas State University, saying, “Turning Point has a very specific big tent message” that Fuentes and his followers are not a part of. He said that the organization largely greeted the resignations with “don’t let the door hit you.”

But he added that Fuentes isn’t trying to take down just Turning Point USA: “He wants to burn down Conservative Inc.”

The war over campus conservatism

The fight over the groyper army is not just about college campuses. It’s about the future of conservatism, and what that future should look like as the groyper army attempts to make itself, as Ben Shapiro put it in a speech focused on the alt-right last week, the “heirs of conservatism.”

And yes, that future begins in college. College campuses have long been where conservative groups and conservative concepts get their start, from Young Americans for Freedom and the Sharon Statement in the 1960s to the “trigger the libs” style of TPUSA.

Basically, there are two paths.

To Rep. Crenshaw, “conservative principles aren’t exclusionary, and I firmly believe the Republican Party must continue to grow.” But in Fuentes’s view, that’s not true — conservatism must be white, Christian, and heterosexual. As he posted on his Telegram account, “America is NOT a propositional nation. We have NO ALLEGIANCE to Israel. We are CHRISTIANS and we don’t promote degeneracy. Demographic replacement is REAL and it will be CATASTROPHIC.”

And Fuentes and his army believe that they are the real conservatives and the true inheritors of conservatism, the last real defenders of what they view Trumpism to actually be standing against the “unelected face of Trumpism” in Kirk and other pundits. While Charlie Kirk and others enjoy close ties to the White House, Fuentes and the groyper army believe that he and similar figures are betraying Trump by allowing LGBTQ conservatives within the movement and advocating for legal immigration.

Or, as neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin, editor of Daily Stormer, put it, “We want Donald Trump to do what he said he was going to do. ... Kirk and all of these other shills and Jews are traitors to the revolution. They have attached themselves to Trump to push a big money corporatist, homosexualist, Zionist, globalist agenda.”

In a statement, Young Americans for Freedom spokesperson Spencer Brown told me his organization sees the groyper army as working to “advance repugnant views that are antithetical to conservatism’s core belief in the sanctity and equality of every individual. “

But to Fuentes and his groyper army, that’s precisely the problem.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-polit...m-antisemitism

boon mee used to spam political discussion threads with cartoons.

taking up the mantle, harry?

Why not to help them a bit when Hunter is no longer available with his expert advice?

After push from Rick Perry, his backers got huge gas deal in Ukraine

The contract was awarded a little more than a month after the U.S. energy secretary attended President Zelenskiy's May inauguration.

KYIV, Ukraine — Two political supporters of U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry secured a potentially lucrative oil and gas exploration deal from the Ukrainian government soon after Perry proposed one of the men as an adviser to the country's new president.

Perry's efforts to influence Ukraine's energy policy came earlier this year, just as President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's new government was seeking military aid from the United States to defend against Russian aggression and allies of President Donald Trump were ramping up efforts to get the Ukrainians to investigate his Democratic rival Joe Biden.

Ukraine awarded the contract to Perry's supporters little more than a month after the U.S. energy secretary attended Zelenskiy's May inauguration. In a meeting during that trip, Perry handed the new president a list of people he recommended as energy advisers. One of the four names was his longtime political backer Michael Bleyzer.

A week later, Bleyzer and his partner Alex Cranberg submitted a bid to drill for oil and gas at a sprawling government-controlled site called Varvynska. They offered millions of dollars less to the Ukrainian government than their only competitor for the drilling rights, according to internal Ukrainian government documents obtained by The Associated Press. But their newly created joint venture, Ukrainian Energy, was awarded the 50-year contract because a government-appointed commission determined they had greater technical expertise and stronger financial backing, the documents show.

Read more
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/nat...-deal-n1079896

Originally Posted by raycarey

boon mee used to spam political discussion threads with cartoons.

taking up the mantle, harry?

Have you only just noticed Ray?

Are you some kind of senile twat Ray?