It was, and there is.
I was with you right up until this bit. I can’t see Trump bothering to notice the staff, or their routines.
There’s even a cat!
At this point it’s not a joke.
Defecting, no. Running, yes. It’s a time-proven strategy for state heads who have pissed everyone off. Trump has, in fact, sold property to one of them, to the annoyance of Haiti, so he knows exactly how it works:
I mean, remember that whatever Trump may want you to believe, it is not collusion or bust.
If you haven’t read through the Trump Foundation suit, for example, you really need to do so. The Trump family has operated a wide variety of crimes over the course of the man’s adult life, and it’s likely that even before he became president that he was under investigation for various misdeeds. Remember how Preet Bharara refused to quit his job? There was probably a reason for that. Remember how the President’s personal attorney had a broad and deep warrant executed against him? And how Cohen had a wiretap on his phone? They don’t bug the President’s lawyer’s phone. Full stop. The FBI do not bug their boss’s lawyer’s phone. The only way that you get to that point is if there was already a large, open, criminal case against the guy from before the FBI’s boss became their boss and the evidence from that was so compelling and obvious that regardless of who the lawyer works for that even the most cautious and corrupt judge in the world can’t do otherwise than to approve further warrants.
If Cohen was being wiretapped by the FBI, during the Trump presidency, then that means that they already had enough to arrest him before Trump became President. And if they weren’t arresting Cohen, and Preet Bharara was refusing to step down, then that’s because they were trying to haul in a whole bunch of fish, not just the one fish.
Trump was under RICO investigation at the time he became President. There is literally almost no doubt on that.
And that was when he was just a little baby failed property developer and daytime TV host. He then proceeded to earn and necessitate the full and complete attention of every single person in the Federal government who cares about the rule of law - which is all of the FBI and most of the CIA and NSA - and the governments of several other nations, to dive into his person shit and winnow out every single sleazy and criminal thing that he or his family have ever done.
This is a man who currently stands accused of molesting 20 women, was friends with a guy who worked for Russia to disrupt the functioning of another country (the Ukraine) and owned multiple passports and cellphones registered under a variety of names, and sat around for 20 years noticing that another of his friends liked his girls “on the young side” and didn’t give a crap and just kept being that guy’s friend.
Mueller may come through and tell us that he couldn’t find a damn thing to prove that Trump knew anything about Russia - it was all just Manafort and Trump doing a bunch of stupid things that looked suspicious because his political positions are nutty - but Trump’s still going to go to jail the instant he gets out of office, if not sooner.
If Mueller clears him on Russia, then he still has to win in 2020. If he loses, then he will need to skip out of the country in December 2020. If he wins, then he’ll need to leave in December of 2024. If he doesn’t, he goes straight from the White House to the jailhouse. He has committed crimes. By this point in time, SDNY already has at least a few cases they could indict him for already waiting, and I’m betting they have even more still under investigation, and that the rest of the FBI has a bunch more pending as well.
The only paths for Trump are jail or “someplace that won’t trade for him”. And because this is Trump, he probably won’t be willing to go to North Korea - he’ll want a big tall building with his name on it nearby.
Thinking about this, and in my continuing to hope that somehow what I say will end up in the ears of someone in Congress, I would strongly suggest that they prep Cohen on talking about the victims.
I think everyone knows - even Trump’s supporters - that he’s criminal. But saying that someone is criminal and laying out a list of crimes just isn’t what moves people. Plenty of super-corrupt politicians have continued to get elected and re-elected because the people liked him and just didn’t give a shit. If most people were law-and-order types, then most people would try to go into policing, not psychology and communications.
But it’s different to say “Lo, since these many years ago, he has defrauded banks and government officials of numerous kinds.” and “He has stolen money from dying, starving, needy children. He opened a charity to veterans - disabled veterans - and he went out and he collected money so that these men and women, back from Afghanistan, could buy homes, start families, heal wounds, etc. and then he stole all of that money and bought paintings of himself.”
To get Trump, you need to remove his political protection of holding the support of the Republican base. And to do that, you need to make them feel like louts for supporting the guy - not in the abstract, but in the reality. You need to be able to say, “I don’t like Trump because I support the troops and Trump stole money from people who fought in the war, and used it to buy paintings of himself. Why do you support him? Because if you do, you disgrace our flag and everyone who has served under it.”
When people question Cohen, they need to ask him about the effects of Trump’s crimes. It’s better to find out more about fewer crimes that hurt people, than to get a full and complete listing, that’s nicely put into alphabetical order.
That Trump stole from his own charity for veterans should have been one of those things that everyone was posting as a bombshell. No one did because the Right were suppressing it and the Left doesn’t understand the Right and they’ve allowed themselves to get sucked into the “collusion or bust” narrative - which was never the issue to begin with, it was concern over blackmail-ability.
Prep Cohen to start thinking back over victims, and ask him about them.
To be fair, their job is to protect the life of the president, and any indication that they’ll happily spill what said president does out of the public eye adds a degree of unnecessary difficulty to their task, now and in the future.
That was my call, as soon as election night was over.
My bet is that he sees the walls closing in (on him and his family) and decides that staying in the USofA would be too embarrassing and costly. So long before we see what charges are levied, he slips off to a cheap rental on Patara Beach in Turkey.
I suspect he’ll hang on until he feels cornered, and then he’ll try to nuke somebody. I hope whoever’s carrying the ‘football’ knows when to disobey orders, and doesn’t let him…
Dude, the Left doesn’t understand the Left. That’s part of the problem.
This guy is on the Left, this other guy is a radical-assed moonbat. Me? I’m Spartacus.
“Call me Phillip.”
Or "The Shah in Exile.
I’l going with the Saudi theory. Trump will self-style himself as a king, and wants to live in an opulent palace with gold plated fixtures. Saudi Arabia is perfect for him. I’m sure the Royal family would love to have a pet president on display, along with the other zoo animals.
Idi Amin’s old digs are available, aren’t they?
I find it hard to believe Trump would want to live in some of these countries, seeing as how they’re full of people who aren’t white.
So are US prisons.
Don’t think he’d want to live in one of those either.
One can hope, though.
Turkey is much more likely to crumble to US pressure though. And though Putin is much less likely to let his ego run away with him, he does have that thing about Russia standing up to the West like the Soviet Union.
In the end though, its Trumps decision where he goes first. And this is not something he can get advice on, it’ll have to come from his own brain. Which is why I think Putins the most likely. He loves Putin so, and Putin may well have made promises.
Also, Trumps brain is not a normal brain, and he may be too ignorant to make it look like a head of state going into exile, and just defect like any other spy.
it could play out like the original House of Cards - where an assassination is ordered by a loved one (Putin) as the only un-messy end.
wouldn’t be great - I’d like to see him go to jail
Trump may be so stupid, but not Putin. Their conversation would have been reminiscing, speaking in generalities, and laying hints about mutual acquaintances who could be useful cut-outs.