Tiffany Trump dodged him at one of the debates like she was wrapping up a bad first date.
But there were other videos taken from a broader angle that suggest she suddenly saw someone in the group and was looking at them, not noticing her dad. It was only a split-second shot, and the impression you get depends heavily on which version you saw.
Agree with Broomstick and Clothahump. Kids are off limits in political debates. Sal just demonstrated why Melania is making the right decision, keeping Barron out of the swamp that is Washington.
And from an even wider shot, like from the moon, one wouldn’t know she was there at all. But as you can see now, she was standing in line to genuflect and walked right up to him. then pulled away. She noticed him.
If the idea was to make yourself look even pettier than Donald Trump, then congratulations - it worked.
Regards,
Shodan
Thanks for making me laugh harder than I have in days! And great user name/post combo!
I didn’t “forget” it: I took it for granted that everyone here would realize that my cite’s “precise hourly rate” amount of “$206,337” for the cost of operating Air Force One has to be spurious in its least significant figures. Which is why I rounded it up in my own estimate to an even quarter-million dollars.
But that doesn’t mean that the more significant digits of that number are untrustworthy. Even if we don’t believe that the Air Force really knows for certain that the precise hourly cost of operating Air Force One is $206,337 rather than $206,336 or $206,338, AFAIK there is no reason to doubt their estimate that the approximate cost is more like $206,000 than like $150,000 or $300,000.
So my point stands: namely, that we do have a reasonable ballpark estimate that the annual cost of operating Air Force One is actually significantly less than the $1 billion that Trump’s proposed commuting schedule would add to the annual cost of Presidential transportation.
In short, contra Martin Hyde’s claim, an extra $1 billion per year is not in fact negligible couch-cushion change compared to what the taxpayers already shell out for the President’s transportation needs.
True, which is why it’s all the more important to subject such hypocrisy to scrutiny and criticism. The fact that Trump’s personal lifestyle choices are projected to cost American taxpayers orders of magnitude more money than those of Obama or his predecessors ever did is something that Obama detractors/Trump supporters should not be allowed to get away with blithely ignoring.
I was not pointing out a mistake in significant digits. The clear statement is that the number given cannot be trusted. There is no indication that it’s in the right ballpark, only that it’s “an accounting fiction”.
They chose to ignore Trump being accused of all manner of awful, personal crimes; his supporters will only mind wasteful spending when it bolsters whatever argument they’re making at the moment. There will not be a moment here someone says, ‘You know, I love that Trump fella to pieces despite his history of treating women poorly and would vote for him another 2 or 3 times if I could. But all that money spent on flying him all over is beyond the pale.’
BTW, the whole business about AF1 is pretty much besides the point anyway. The way to do this would be more like: What was the average annual “cost of being president” for Obama, adjust for inflation, and what will be the average “cost of being president” for Trump if he spends X% of his time in NYC. And of course this thread is about Melania, not Donald, so it’s even more complicated than that. Not that we know what’s going to happen, only what is rumored at this point. And rumors are flying fast and furious right now, so I’m not going to worry too much about doing the math for awhile.
As I said, I agree that they definitely should be, but many more influential opinion-makers than salinqmind don’t follow that rule (e.g., Rush Limbaugh’s notorious reference to 12-year-old Chelsea Clinton as “the White House dog”). The number of ordinary opinion-havers who grossly insult and denigrate politicians’ young children, of course, is legion: just google the names of Sasha and Malia Obama along with any traditional racist epithet, for example, and see the tide of festering shit remarks.
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Sal just demonstrated why Melania is making the right decision, keeping Barron out of the swamp that is Washington.
[/QUOTE]
:dubious: I don’t think Barron Trump’s place of residence will make much difference to nasty people who want to make fun of him.
I personally don’t care where Melania and her son choose to live (except, as I noted above, to the extent that that choice puts a significantly increased cost burden on taxpayers), but I think that defending their choice on the grounds of wanting to protect them from publicity is a fairly feeble position.
The way our Chief Executive system is set up has made it traditional and inevitable that the President’s family will get a lot of publicity. This is why Presidential candidates generally check with their families about their willingness to spend some years in the public eye before they run for office. Saying that all that tiresome publicity (and its inevitable subset of a certain amount of nasty vitriolic abuse) is something that Presidential families are entitled to be shielded from is an unrealistic view of the US Presidency.
:rolleyes: Nonsense, John. Such cost estimates may be intrinsically imprecise, but they’re not pure numerological voodoo. It’s not as if all we REALLY know about the hourly cost of operating Air Force One is that it’s somewhere between, say, ten dollars and $100 million. The ballpark in question is actually pretty well mapped out, as this Snopes article describes:
In other words, although the precise $206,337 figure is spurious, it conveys valid approximate information: namely, that the hourly operating cost of Air Force One is more like $206,000 than like $150,000 or $300,000. Which is exactly what I said.