Weren’t you embarrassed?
I didn’t see the conference - was this the one where the stated openly that he withheld the information because he thought the democrats would betray our country?
Because if so, then yep; I’m mad because he held a press conference. Without the press conference he would have still been hallucinatorially withholding information due to partisan beliefs about imaginary traitors, but if I didn’t know about it I couldn’t be mad about it, now could I?
About what? I’m pretty sure the answer is ‘no’, but I don’t even know what you’re asking about. The press conference? Why would I be embarrassed about that?
How could you not be embarrassed? It was a flaming disaster from, “Aboo… Bakaar…” and went downhill from there.
Well, all you’re saying there is, basically, if you think congressional Democrats are traitors, then of course it’s realistic to be afraid that they would intentionally leak info about an upcoming military action to the press.
This is not a tautology, but something similar. Of course if X is true about someone, than it’s reasonable to be afraid that they’ll do something that people who are X do.
To paint an analogy:
If I assume that black people are criminals, of course it’s reasonable for me to avoid them, or call the police on them any moment I see a black person who looks “up to something”.
But it turns out that the assumptions are not reasonable, and so, even though my actions would have been reasonable (maybe; this is a loose analogy for the sake of not using variables. I’m not intending to get into a deep debate about analogical precision) if my assumptions were true, the fact that my assumptions were false (black people are not by definition criminal) means that my actions were also unreasonable.
Regardless of what Trump thinks, there is no good reason to believe that congressional Dems are traitorous, or that they would sacrifice the safety or success of a military mission in order to deny Trump his hugely-important PR win.
Trump’s perspective on this whole story (if we take it at face value) is unrealistic and unreasonable.
There are really only three scenarios:
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Trump delusionally thinks that the Democrats in question are literally traitors.
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Trump knows that the Democrats aren’t traitors, and this whole thing is just him being a deliberate asshole and/or deliberately trying to sow societal unrest by convincing his followers that the Democrats are literally traitors.
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The Democrats literally are traitors.
You are confused about the facts. President Trump never “stated openly that he withheld the information because he thought the democrats would betray our country” at the press conference. AFAIK, this is the relevant portion of the press conference:
It requires quite a bit of partisan spin on the above quote to reach an interpretation like you gave.
Thanks for the quote. It shows that it doesn’t require quite a bit of partisan spin to reach an interpretation like I gave.
Trump’s argument was that Wahington leaks like a sieve, and thus he couldn’t tell people or the soldiers would get killed. Now at a glance this sounds almost reasonable - one of Trump’s big problems in life is that his underlings have repeatedly decided to tell people when he breaks laws. Those are leaks, and much leaking is occurring. This all sounds almost reasonable.
Until you remember that he only excluded democrats, and happily told republicans. This demonstrates that when he said his concern was leaks he was full of shit, because it’s not like the leaks that Trump suffers are all coming from democrats.
So let’s pretend that you’ve read the above paragraph. That leaves two options:
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He is of the opinion that the democrats would have specifically leaked the information while the republicans wouldn’t, specifically because he believes they were traitors.
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Literally all of his words are lies once again and must be disregarded, and thus we have no information whatsoever about why he excluded the democrats. This option is what expands the possibilities from “He thinks they were traitors” and “He is pretending they are traitors just to slander them” to things like “he’s just a compete asshole” and such.
Looks like the article that started this thread could use to be updated. Since only the Democrats were complaining about not being briefed, that’s what CNN went with – McConnell wouldn’t say either way, so CNN had nothing to go on there.
So, OP, should we shut this thread down? Seems like Trump didn’t let anyone know ahead of time; that is, he didn’t just shut out the Democrats.
HD, somewhat off-topic, I read the article and John Boehner claims he was briefed multiple times on the Bin Laden raid, so there’s some conflict there with your earlier cite. I don’t care enough to track down the truth, and it would be a hijack here to get into that.
It is apparently not the case that he only excluded the Dems. See earlier cites in this thread.
This is false. He didn’t notify either Republicans nor Democrats prior to or during the raid. After the raid was concluded, but prior to the press conference, he told a few Republicans. Is that what you’re sore about?
I accept the altered information. I had not noticed it before.
I am less sore. It’s still a little off-putting that in the after-period he only informed his buddies - it smells like an attempt to get the dems caught by surprise or something. But it’s not as bad a selectively excluding them as the only possible traitors, though it could be even less of a thing than that - maybe the dems just aren’t in his gossip circle. (Okay, they certainly aren’t in his gossip circle.)
I shall bow out. As bad things Trump has done go, this is small potatoes. I’m sure there’s something better to yell about around here than this.
Speaking of people that were not told about the raid before(or during) it happened, apparently you can add White House Chief-Of-Staff Mulvaney to the list.
Mulvaney is on Trump’s enemies list because he didn’t lie through his teeth at the recent press conference. He said, “Get over it”, instead of flat denying the quid pro quo questions. He is said to have been on thin ice leading up to that accidental admission.
OP, turns out your thread title is really misleading. Can you request a change from a moderator? It probably should read:
Fear of Congressional Leaders leaking Baghdadi raid, realistic?
The answer is still, no, it’s not realistic. But, Trump didn’t just leave the D’s out of the loop, and so this thread really went off in the wrong direction. You’re injecting partisanship into a situation where there wasn’t much of it.
Sure, sounds good.
Admins/mods, want to change the title?
But what is the question?
No, really, “What?” is the question.
The point of the post wasn’t really to raise a question. Think of it like a push poll of message board posts.
A-ha. All I saw was a barely identified or described link, preceeded by an almost random sounding, short sentence.