Those are all crap reasons. The real reason, as I’ve understood it for the last 40 years or so, was that having our embassy elsewhere was an ongoing signal to the Palestinians that Jerusalem might once again be theirs alone. Moving our embassy to Jerusalem slams the door on that possibility.
Of all the things that Trump has done, this is near the bottom of the list of things that piss me off. I’m not even sure it was entirely wrong to do it*. What was definitely wrong was doing it without using it as leverage with the Israelis to extract some human rights concessions. Why give away your bargaining chips?
*Although the fact that some evangelicals think it puts us one step closer to the Rapture makes me ill.
One thing that concerns me is, if Trump is totally repudiated in the near future (something I speculate is going to happen at some point), what will happen to the US/China sanctions? I actually think that, though he’s doing them for all the wrong reasons and in a stupid way, that we DO need to put pressure on China to abide by the WTO rules they agreed to as well as to stop using their state run assets to essentially steal our intellectual property and reverse engineer it to give to their home grown companies. There isn’t much, IMHO, we can do about them pressuring US and other countries companies to have to, voluntarily (in theory), give up IP if they want to do business in China…companies should be smart enough to recognize and evaluate that on their own, despite them doing really badly at this historically…but when they use Chinese government agencies to steal IP AND reverse engineer the stuff to give to their own companies I think that crosses a line. However, my worry is that, when Trump finally goes down in flames (gods grant that day comes soon), the backlash will be to basically just reverse everything he’s done and try and go so far in the other way that it purges him from our system. In most cases that would be a good thing…but I don’t think in this one it would be. I think there is bi-partisan understanding that China does, in fact, need to be brought in line to play nice with the rest of the world (and, more specifically and immediately with the US…Europe can, of course, look out for itself).
That’s my one concern point wrt Trump going down in flames.
It was a foolish decision. Which is not surprising because it was decided by a fool.
I’m a strong supporter of Israel but I don’t see how recognizing Jerusalem as the capital is something that needed to be done for moral reasons. (Lets face it; if it was a moral issue, Trump wouldn’t have done it. The man has no moral sense.) This was a political issue not a moral one.
And here in America, it’s a domestic political issue because there are some conservative Christians who wanted this to happen because it appeals to their interpretation of the Bible. Trump was just pandering to these people.
Trump threw away what could have been a useful bargaining chip in negotiations towards real benefits in the Middle East on a pointless gesture.
There are legitimate issues with China over trade policies. But the intelligent way to work on fixing them would have been to organize with other countries to isolate China with international sanctions.
Instead Trump’s done the opposite by annoying every other country on Earth and left us as the country that’s isolated. The United States dropping out of various international negotiations has actually left China in a stronger position.
I hope that there are enough Democrats who understand not to ad hominem that they won’t reflexively un-do every single thing Trump did - the good along with the bad - just because it has “Trump” on it. But I could see a Democratic president saying “Trump was mean to China, so we need to be nice to them.”
Oh, I totally agree. Not only has he fucked up what he’s done but his reasons for doing it are wrong (i.e. his ‘bring jobs back to the US!’ argument is horseshit). My concern is the backlash and that we might drop the whole thing. I don’t THINK that’s what will happen, as I think there is solid bi-partisan support that we should be doing something.
I’d certainly be willing to take the chance if it meant he was going down in flames though…
Yeah, that’s the thing. And I don’t just think it would be Dems. If the backlash was bad enough, I could see a very large part of the population basically saying that if Trump did it we should basically reverse whatever it was and do the opposite.
His real reason? Obama was perceived as chilly toward Israel, therefore he had to be the anti-Obama and grant them a huge symbolic victory, free of charge.
I think that’s too subtle a motivation for Trump. It requires us to accept that he understood Obama’s position well enough to do the opposite of it. I think it’s more likely that somebody who favored recognition of Jerusalem happened to be the most recent person to talk to him before he made the announcement.
Trump does’t have an honorable bone in his body. I know it’s difficult to beat incumbents, but I don’t think he’ll be re-elected in 2020, assuming he hasn’t had to resign before then. Mueller’s investigation should be winding down soon, and is probably going to be quite revealing. Also, in a couple of months, the House will take a looksee into Trump’s taxes. Let’s see what he has been hiding all of these years.
It doesn’t even matter the Democrats can’t even think of a viable contender right now, more than not will get behind anybody but Trump.
Most Democrats see Trump and company as an endless assault on the 1st ammendment. What happened this last November should continue on two years from now, and Democrats will be even more fired up, more so than the Republican base.
Trump is very beatable, the Dems need to look deeply and not find the candidate the just appeals to themselves but find one that also appeals to the middle, the very casual voters and the independents. The anti-Trump vote will be big, but they have to win the damn electoral vote this time.
