Even if Trump keeps his yap shut, will Chris Christie and Michael Flynn, his two companions at the briefing?
Flynn, yes. He’s a retired Lt. Gen. and former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He’s well accustomed to dealing with classified material.
Christie, no way. You just have to find the button.
I suspect Trump invited them so that if it gets out that the information was sold to North Korea, Trump could finger one of them as the perp. (Christie will look good for it, given his probable low earning capacity once he’s out of NJ office.)
About a year ago, I boldly stated on this very board that Trump would drop out of the primaries when he realized that he had to stand outside the factory gate in the snows of New Hampshire and shake hands.
He never did, of course; just flew in, held a rally, and flew out. Obviously, hand-shaking was optional this year.
What do you think they are going to be telling him? I think people are making a bit too much of a big deal about this. From what I’ve read this meeting “is expected to cover major threats and emerging concerns around the world.” Do you think Russian or Chinese intelligence don’t already have the same basic info? They’re not giving him the launch codes and Balkans battle plans.
Funny how the “confidential” bits of Clinton emails were kind of laughed off around here but this is somehow frightening.
It doesn’t matter what they tell him about major threats and emerging concerns – he won’t believe them anyway.
Personally, I would have waited to say this until after the briefing.
Holy crap.
Trump just threw the entire US Intelligence service into the toilet because of Bush’s little bullshit tales about WMD in Iraq 13 years ago.
(bolding mine)
Talk about making us LESS safe in the world. Good God.
This move pretty much makes it clear that Trump absolutely does not give a piss if he wins or loses, and I actually suspect that he really does not want to win because he’d actually have to do real work, which he clearly doesn’t want to do.
I think this whole race is going to be turned into a Showtime or HBO documentary, or I guess now a Breitbart / Infowars documentary. Manafort got dumped because Manafort wanted to transform Trump into a real candidate who could actually beat Hillary Clinton. But Donald Trump clearly does not want this. He wants to turn the entire primary and general election into made-for-TV reality programming.
Folks, get the popcorn. This is going to be the mother of all shit shows. He’s going to come out with Alex Jones type conspiracy theories. He wants to maximize the drama. I would not put it past him to double down on charges that the election is rigged. I fully expect him to come out and claim that Obama wants to stay in power and declare martial law or claim that there’s new proof that Mitt Romney won the 2012 election. I bet he gets nasty during the debates and that he calls Hillary a ‘cunt’ or a ‘bitch.’
I predicted this a while ago. If he’s gonna lose, he’s gonna lose bigly (or big league). He wants to be a Poli Sci case study for the next 20 generations.
The claim by Lewandowski that he was the one who tweeted the poop on Manafort’s dealings in Ukraine make complete sense now. Trump wanted to stop pretending to be a presidential candidate and needed a reason to dump Manafort. For once I actually believe Manafort when he claims that his Ukraine involvement isn’t really news – Trump probably knew all along what kind of lizard boy Paul Manafort is. All of this is just another chapter in Trump’s parade of insanity, and Manafort’s on the receiving end of it. Corey knew that Trump wanted to be Trump and he made it possible for that to happen again. Only this time, he’s going to dial it up to defcon five.
If it’s information they go to so much trouble to keep secret that they only tell candidates about it, I think there must be information they don’t want to get out to the general public for some reason.
If we could run a simulator, I’m sure that 9 times out of 10, with the way events have developed up to this point and on its current trajectory, Trump would probably lose by a pretty wide margin, with Hillary almost certainly getting a minimum of 300 EVs and possibly getting 400 (less likely).
But there’s perhaps one scenario in which Trump could actually make this frighteningly close. Let’s say Trump doubles down on the toxic rhetoric and let’s say he becomes blatantly hostile to Muslims and proposes an immigration control act, hints at bringing back Jim Crow laws, or something along those lines. Sure, 95 times out of 100, maybe 98 or 99 times out of a 100, he would get crushed. But what if there are massive race riots like the kind in Milwaukee that get out of control and a lot of white citizens and police officers get shot or killed. And what if there’s a massive terrorist attack? What if other insurers start pulling out of Obamacare like Aetna just did today? What if it were to happen in the next 90 days? It’s unlikely, and I think it’s almost to the point where he’s destined to lose no matter what, but I could see a scenario in which Trump starts to get a second look and the race tightens again.
So he won’t trust the people in the intelligence community but he will take advice from Breitbart.
This, folks, is how you double down on the stupid.
I am worried that Russia seems to be working pretty hard to destabilize the United States, and this election is their big chance. I would not be at all surprised to hear that Putin’s goons are working over how to trigger scenarios like you describe above.
Trump’s team seems to be equivalent to Putin’s team at this point.
I don’t doubt that at all. I think he wants to win. I’ve said from the beginning that this is the real Trump. Those who know him have always said this is how he always acts…If he were planning anything, his behavior would be different.
But I don’t think he wants to be president, and I don’t think he really planned on it going this far back when he started. I think he actually didn’t realize what he was getting into when he started.
Being president wasn’t a job to him but an achievement. A way to glorify himself. And when it actually seemed like he had a chance, he took off with it.
I actually think it’s less that he thinks this will help him win, and more that he doesn’t really know how to act in any other way. And only people who agree with him does he keep on.
He’s a germophobe. Not to mention those baby hands make pressing the flesh problematic.
I’ll bet you won’t see him washing clean dishes at a soup kitchen
Yessiree, that would be a bad scenario. But if Trump wins this election based on something like that happening, well, it would still be a Poli Sci case study for the next 20 generations. Every batshit thing he does only makes this a more interesting campaign to study down the road.
Certainly the work that most Presidents do would bore Trump. But he has before him the example of George W. Bush, who took more vacation days than any President in history. So Trump knows he can pretty much do as he pleases, once he’s got the “job.”
The fact (apparently) that Kasich was offered authority over ALL domestic AND foreign policy pretty much tells you that Trump is going to make his own rules. He won’t bother with any boring stuff.
This is a great post, so it’s worth nit-picking. Let’s go through the assumptions of someone running for the President: [ul]
[li]Serious[/li][li]Average or above average intelligence[/li][li]Average or above average mental stability.[/li][/ul] Trump certainly isn’t serious at all. I’d argue that he is of average or above average intelligence. And that his narcissism puts him below the waterline in terms of mental sanity.
That last paragraph is fully consistent with the hypothesis that Trump is a guy of middling intelligence who has spent his life surrounded by sycophants and has a less than expansive comfort zone. Trump has a skill set. He can read a room brilliantly and the author of Art of the Deal notes that Trump very much uses his ability to lie through his teeth to his advantage. It was his secret weapon back in the 1980s, before inattention to his businesses caused them to crater.
Trump is not a numbers guy, not a policy guy, not a newspaper guy. He’s a TV guy. But lots of people of average intelligence are like that. It’s just that most people of all intelligence levels have somewhat better self knowledge than Donald Trump. Not that extensive self knowledge is common: the bar isn’t high.