I didn’t say you did. Trump broke with norms to meet with Putin without anyone else from the US listening at least once, he parroted Russian anti NATO talking points and he repeatedly cut Russia huge slack in his dealings. He obviously was serving Putin’s interests at the expense of US interests. I half expected him to turn up in Moscow and run for president from there.
DOJ saying that classified docs at Mar-A-Lago were likely ‘concealed and removed’ prior to the FBI raid, taking the air out of any possible “oops, we didn’t know we had those files” defense.
More than 320 classified docs?!? And yet Repubs keep equating this to Hillary’s email server, as if there’s any parallel.
Not to derail my own thread, but what do you think trump really accomplished? I’ve asked this of trumpers.
He only managed to build a few miles of his big, beautiful wall.
He appointed a lot of Federal judges, but he just took recommendations from the Federalist Society. Any Repub Pres could have done this.
Likewise, his Supreme Court stuffing was all engineered by Mitch McConnell.
He’s not much help to other Repub pols. An strong argument can be made that the House in the midterms, and then the Senate and the Presidency in 2020, could all have been held by Repubs but were lost due to trump’s constant bloviating.
He certainly did have “a lack of shame in calling people over and over and over again to harass them for what he wants”, but I don’t remember many instances of being successful at it. He harassed Zelinskyy for dirt on Hunter Biden, which came to nothing. He harrassed Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes”; no dice.
He got elected to office, convinced the party to follow him, etc.
I’m not aware of any policy achievements. Kushner got the Abraham Accords, the NAFTA update, and a prison sentencing law put through but I haven’t seen anything to indicate that Trump was involved with any of that. He derailed most of Kushner’s work in the Middle East when he decided that the US would recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
Trump tried to convince the US military to pull out of a few places but I think they didn’t trust him and ignored his commands, overall. Apparently, nagging and whining aren’t successful techniques against military.
What he accomplished was mostly in his life before politics. Where whining and stiffing suppliers worked wonders.
Within politics he certainly helped the Rs become even more radical.
And what we really don’t know is how many moles and toadys got planted in the bowels of the Federal bureacracy and how much money Trump diverted into his own coffers by inserting middleman shell businesses in the middle of otherwise legitimate Federal government purchasing.
What’s truly unknowable is how much more, and how permanently, that same sort of Russian-style endemic industrial-scale institutionalized klepto-government will be installed during Trump’s second term if we’re so unfortunate as for that to happen.
The 2 trillion in tax cuts were a pretty big hit with the wealthy folks. The makeup of the Supreme Court and overturning Roe are like a wet dream for the Christian Right.
That was Paul Ryan and we would have had it with any Republican president.
Any other Republican would have also hired a bunch of Republican justices. It’s not clear to me, though, whether Trump just rubber stamped the choices of the party and so we got what we would have gotten with any Republican president or if he chose the justices for his own purposes.
With 50 years of being in the majority in the Supreme Court and zero movement on rolling back Roe v Wade, on the part of the Republican party, my sense is that they were studiously preserving the decision as a tactic for drumming up support among the fundamentalists. But, likewise, it seems strange that a man with a zipper problem would do something to nix morning after solutions and abortions.
My personal guess would be that Trump was mostly thinking about gaining maximum power for the Executive Branch and simply hired based on whoever would make decisions favorable to that. He didn’t guard against secondary outcomes - like that he would strengthen Biden’s positions against him out of office, or that they might also favor state’s rights - out of incompetence.
Here’s one theory why he keeps papers:
Ah, the pack rat theory. Could be. It even explains why he’d try to resist the docs being taken back- hoarders fight to keep the stuff they have, no matter how useless it is to them or complicates their lives unneccessarily.
Sounds like it might make for a good episode of “Hoarder House Flippers: Mar-A-Lago Edition”
He took the documents to eat them. He’s already exhibited a propensity for eating paper. It’s called pica, and he just happens to find classified documents the most delicious.
From a legal standpoint, an insanity defense would probably work well. But, you immediately give your political opponents a weapon to use against you: court confirmed senility. And, likewise, you lose a lot of cool points by being revealed as a crazy hoarder dude.
Trump might not be able to make himself accept a senility defense. He’d rather go to jail and claim political persecution.