Trump supporters frequently complain that they don’t get a proper hearing here. But frequently, after a post like this, we’re “all ears,” waiting to learn why Trump’s ways are best. All too often, the silence is deafening.
There’s a photo of Obama and Putin sitting at a table in a crowded room (at a G20 conference?) but with only interpreters at their table. Is that the Trumpist answer to the clandestine Putin-Trump chats? “Obama did it too”?
It may have started that way, but the shady deals with Trump and the oligarchs have done over the years then gave him leverage, which a man like Putin would obviously use.
We know two things:
It’s impossible to imagine that in between those two things is Putin saying, “It’d be a shame if this stuff was revealed”.
The idea that Trump is engaged in some secret dealings with Putin has one big flaw; Trump himself can’t keep a secret. He’d have blurted it out in on Twitter by now. Sure, he would then reverse himself and deny it all the next day but the man can’t control himself.
This suggests that it’s more likely that Putin has a pipeline to the America-hating fuckstick.* And the America-hating fuckstick doesn’t necessarily know about it.
*And yes, I recognize that Putin is a fuckstick, and in all likelihood he hates America (for convenience, described as the sum total of all the worthwhile virtues to which America aspires on her best days), but the one in the Oval Office is the one that I REQUIRE to NOT hate America.
One of the Fox hosts was pointing out both Carter and Reagan had one-on-one meetings with their Soviet counterparts with only interpreters present, so why the criticism of Trump?
Umm…I don’t think we had to worry about Carter and, especially, Reagan getting marching orders from Moscow.
There’s another potential big flaw. It’s one that could be explained by sheer incompetence on Trump’s part so it’s only potential. Trump’s been pretty awful about giving Russia things they want.
Trump’s offered a pretty poor ROI to Putin to date both economically and militarily. There’s one area that there’s a benefit. Trump is a great distraction on the world stage. If Putin was going for more than that, he needs to redo his KGB training on how to manage agents.
Because Fox News wasn’t around when Carter and Reagan were President.
This
and this
Yeah, I suspect that whenever Trump shocks his critics by spouting pro-Russian talking points, he’s just parroting stuff he heard on Fox. Half the time, he doesn’t even know it’s pro-Russian.
We know Trump admires dictators and has always had a hero crush on Putin. And I think Vlad is still playing hard to get. When Trump does something pro-Russian that he knows is pro-Russian it’s partly out of the hope that Vlad will notice him and say something nice about him. He’s still playing the frumpy schoolgirl to Vlad’s BMOC*. Putin can probably get more out of Trump by playing this game than he could by acknowledging him as a worthy confederate.
The media does, fairly commonly, write articles that hint at an expectation of how things are supposed to be, that isn’t actually how things are supposed to be, and the reader is up the creek if they aren’t critical of the things they read.
Another flagrant example, in the same territory, was articles that were pointing out that Trump had a lot of Russian people buying his property. Well yeah, but, “a lot” as in “they’re significantly more interested in Trump than they are in other property developers” or “a lot” as in “Hey, wow, a lot of Russians buy upscale property in New York!”? Chirps.
And it’s aggravating because it gives the smart people cause to doubt the trustworthiness of their news, and so we can’t give an unqualified recommendation, to those who don’t know how to evaluate the trustworthiness of sources, of any particular news source, and that leaves everyone else who doesn’t know how to assemble a greater image from multiple, disagreeing sources into a cohesive whole in a complete void of trust. They’re all just floating blind and hate the media for being liars.
And it’s aggravating for me, as someone who wants to see Trump go down, that they’re not doing the legwork to prove their case in so many instances. They’re just spinning innuendo. They could have gone and checked all of those other property developers and gotten a fair, representative sample before writing anything. As it is, it’s still chirps, years later.
Really the whole “concealing information about the meetings” thing seems to come down to the single line that he took the interpreters notes and tore them up. Otherwise, everything else in the article seems pretty normal. Like, maybe more secretive than most other Presidents have been for that many meetings in a row, but still fairly reasonable. It’s not strange to imagine that the top guys of the most spied upon countries in the world, and where one of them has a government that loves to leak secrets to the press, should want to meet in privacy.
Yeah, Trump should have figured out some sort of “recusal” like approach to Russia, picking someone else to take over everything on that front, who we could all trust (e.g. John Bolton), if he was a reasonable human being, but that’s not Trump. But for all the things you can rag on Trump for, this one is sort of stupid.
If Putin and Trump are having secret communications in any way, they’re not doing it in front of any interpreters at all. If you can tell us that, in Helsinki, the American interpreter was sent to sit in the corner, 40 feet away, or told to go to the restroom for a few minutes, then that’s an issue. That Trump would destroy their notes…eh. It’s worrying, but it’s not worth writing a whole multi-page article about. Unless you can find more things like that, you’re better off to keep digging or release it as a tweet or something, for the die-hards who want the extra details.
Any competent agent could very easily communicate with the Kremlin, in ways that even the NSA couldn’t detect.
Trump is not a competent agent, and his communications with the Kremlin are really easy to detect.
We know that Trump prefers to use his own, personal, cell phone, and as far as we know his usage of it- and who he calls or texts on it- isn’t tracked. We also know (from his tweets) that Trump is often awake at 3am… which is 11am in Russia.
Couldn’t he just be calling or texting Putin directly?
First, those that are claiming Trump can’t keep a secret - nope. Evidence suggests he is not THAT dumb. e.g. Stormy Daniels. He didn’t blab about that did he? I’m going to suggest that she is just the tip of the iceberg in that area. In other areas that he needs to keep a secret, I have no trouble thinking he can. Whereas if he is confronted, he just spins his chaos tornado as defense.
Regarding the secure bat-phone, c’mon, Mueller/Assange/Snowden/Manning/Winner has shown that somebody somewhere on the planet is listening in on everything.
Regarding what DinoR posted, my take is that:
[ol]
[li]Trump didn’t expect to win. He really expected to lose and keep his role as a sideline sht stirrer, throwing twitter bombs at Hillary for the next 4/8 years.[/li][li]He really thought if he did win he could just basically waltz in and pencil-whip all of Putin’s sanctions away. But when he got in, “his Generals” gently explained things to him.[/li][li]We know he is a fan of Dictators. In his basic insecurity he looks up to them! He doesn’t see himself as on the same level. But, again his Generals explained to him that he CAN make himself as big and strong and important as Putin by continuing to build and expand US might abroad, in spite of his early isolationist and anti-NATO rhetoric.[/li][li]So, in his inimitable chaos way, he plays both sides with Putin - play lapdog where he can ('cause Putin owns him, after all), but also try to best him where he can (without screwing it up). As I said, he’s not a TOTAL dummy. It’s not 12 dimensional chess, it’s just standard greased-pig Trump.[/li][li]None of this absolves him, or suggests we should support him and continue to vote for him. One small molecule residing in my left little toenail fungus actually has sympathy for him as he tries to thread this needle. It’s got to be exhausting! Yeah, Putin helped him win, but to Trump it’s a big "So fcking what! Why is everyone making such a BIG DEAL about it?"[/li][/ol]
Donald is so far up Putin’s ass that he can see Sarah Palin’s house. It’s either that he owes much more than he can pay or the pee tape is real or both. Putin calls the tunes and his puppet dances for him.
You’re using Trump’s affair with Stormy Daniels as evidence that he can keep something a secret?
Because it was a cover story in Time magazine. I think that fails to qualify as a successfully-kept secret.
From Fred Kaplan in Slate:
Kaplan goes on to discuss the detailed notes we have on Presidential meetings with foreign leaders going back to Eisenhower, and contrasts Trump with Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, and Obama. (Kaplan doesn’t mention Presidents Ford or Carter or either President Bush by name, but I can’t imagine, for example, that George H.W. Bush wasn’t one hell of a lot sharper about following proper protocol and procedure than Trump.)
And to quote the second President Bush, this is just one more thing about this administration that is, at the very least, “some weird shit”.
He didn’t blab. The story came out in the Wall Street Journal because she sued him over the non-disclosure agreement hush money.
Phone records should be incredibly easy to subpoena. Trump might not realize that, but I’d think his Russian contacts would.
There’s a reason criminals use burner phones.
Okay so, did Trump follow protocol when he met with other foreign leaders? North Korea? India?