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President Trump

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logger said:
It is so clearly obvious what your side has done, just watch the news every night that will give you a good idea on what leftist policies do. ;)

Every major city is in complete chaos, controlled by the extreme left.
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Every major city in the USA is in complete chaos?

huh.
 
phiwum said:
I'm not defending what Lewis said. I think it's dangerous and careless.[1] But Trump doesn't even think to address the issue. He's at home with childish ad hominems instead.
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Scary thing is, this makes him like the vast majority of people on the internet today. You want him to address the argument, not the arguer? Places like ISF are in the overwhelming minority in today's world... and even here, this is a pitfall that's hard to avoid. How many of our (collective) arguments devolve into semantics, strawmen, and the occasional thinly-veiled ad-hom? It's fairly de rigeur in today's society.

A lot of Americans want someone "like them" to be the president. Well, sadly, Trump is pretty much just like them in this regard.

[/pedantic soap-boxing] :o
 
newyorkguy said:
Congressman John Lewis said in an interview that he would have difficulty working with president Trump because he views his presidency as "illegitimate." He bases that opinion on the fact a foreign government tried to assist Trump's campaign in an underhanded way.

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Personally, I think the idea that Trump's presidency is tainted by the Russian issue is pretty much an established fact. I'm sorry to say that but I think that is undeniably true. But I also think at some point we -- meaning the American public -- need to move on. We're stuck with Trump and nothing is going to change that.
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I find myself waffling on this. Sure, Russia took actions that ultimately benefited Trump. But it's not like they hacked the voting system and cast fake votes, and they didn't intimidate or bribe the RNC to elect him, or anything else. They didn't even release false information. They released legitimate and accurate information against Hillary. That ends up supporting Trump in the end, but I have a hard time casting this as an "illegitimate" win for Trump.

I'm not happy with the outcome, mind you, but I still can't get behind insisting that Trump only won because of Russian "tampering" or whatever.
 
sunmaster14 said:
Well, in a way, yes, it was (or would have been) tainted, but all elections are so tainted. It wouldn't make the President illegitimate, however. The only way that would happen is if the actually voting process itself were corrupted. Which it wasn't.
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More to the point, would it have been considered "tainted" if the leaked information had come from WikiLeaks or a whistle-blower, instead of Russia?
 
Emily's Cat said:
I find myself waffling on this. Sure, Russia took actions that ultimately benefited Trump. But it's not like they hacked the voting system and cast fake votes, and they didn't intimidate or bribe the RNC to elect him, or anything else. They didn't even release false information. They released legitimate and accurate information against Hillary. That ends up supporting Trump in the end, but I have a hard time casting this as an "illegitimate" win for Trump.

I'm not happy with the outcome, mind you, but I still can't get behind insisting that Trump only won because of Russian "tampering" or whatever.
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The race was close. It's not a stretch to say that if Russia hadn't interfered, Clinton would have squeaked by in the rust belt states.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
For the record, I'm on Lewis' side. Maybe we need to wait for more evidence but the fact Trump won by cheating,
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How did Trump cheat?

Skeptic Ginger said:
that he got a small lead in three states while Clinton got almost 3 million more votes both are good reasons for Lewis' stand.
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Umm... let's talk math here for a minute. Clinton won fewer popular votes overall than she won in California alone. She won CA by 3.4 million votes, but had only 2.9 million more votes in aggregate. Trump won significantly more than a "small lead in three states".

At the end of the day, the popular vote argument for this particular election boils down to "California voted for Clinton, so Trump should have lost!". I'm not personally convinced that California is representative of the entire nation ;)


Skeptic Ginger said:
Can you say with absolute certainty that Trump didn't coordinate with the Russians to cheat? Can you say with certainty that Comey didn't wrongly interfere with his personal rant on the emails and his last minute letter to Congress, associating Clinton with Weiner along with reopening a closed case only to close it again a few days later because he had nothing, all the while refusing to comment on the ongoing investigation of a Trump team/Russia connection didn't unfairly interfere with the election?
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Can you say with absolute certainty that there is no teapot orbiting the sun?

Speculation that can't be disproved does not constitute evidence, nor even support.
 
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Emily's Cat said:
More to the point, would it have been considered "tainted" if the leaked information had come from WikiLeaks or a whistle-blower, instead of Russia?
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Exactly. Why does Candy Crowley get to defend (by lying, I'll add) Obama from Romney's attack during a Presidential debate in 2012, and that doesn't count as making Obama's election illegitimate? Republicans are always swimming upstream against enormous bias in the mainstream media. That's far worse than Russia airing some of the DNC's dirty laundry. If the political process was neutral, Hillary wouldn't have even been the nominee. She would have been defending herself against felony charges instead.
 
Fudbucker said:
The race was close. It's not a stretch to say that if Russia hadn't interfered, Clinton would have squeaked by in the rust belt states.
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Possibly. But Trump won and will be the president. And regardless of what Congressman Lewis says he is the legitimate president and he is the one he should try to work with.
 
Emily's Cat said:
How did Trump cheat?


Can you say with absolute certainty that there is no teapot orbiting the sun?

Speculation that can't be disproved does not constitute evidence, nor even support.
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Engaging is a waste of time. I'm waiting for some of the liberals here to complete a couple of more stages of the Kubler-Ross process before I'll take their ramblings seriously.
 
eeyore1954 said:
Possibly. But Trump won and will be the president. And regardless of what Congressman Lewis says he is the legitimate president and he is the one he should try to work with.
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I just heard one commentator make a distinction between "legal" and "legitimate." Trump is indisputably the lawful, elected President. But if his election was the result of improper manipulation by the Russians, the FBI or anybody else, you could still argue that it's not legitimate.
 
sunmaster14 said:
Engaging is a waste of time. I'm waiting for some of the liberals here to complete a couple of more stages of the Kubler-Ross process before I'll take their ramblings seriously.
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I will be following the Trump trainwreck. Even many conservatives in Australia see what a buffoon he is.
 
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eeyore1954 said:
Possibly. But Trump won and will be the president. And regardless of what Congressman Lewis says he is the legitimate president and he is the one he should try to work with.
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Is he legitimate? We know Russia wanted him to win, Russia hacked American citizens, and then sent the information to Wikileaks, which Trump referenced ad infinitum.

Lewis can't be sure that that enabled Trump to win, on the other hand, you can't be sure it didn't. I think Trump possibly won in a way that is unacceptable.
 
Emily's Cat said:
More to the point, would it have been considered "tainted" if the leaked information had come from WikiLeaks or a whistle-blower, instead of Russia?
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I'm not convinced that the DNC emails themselves were really all that significant. They were mildly embarrassing, but not enough to turn Clinton voters to Trump. If they had come from Wikileaks or a disgruntled ex-staffer, they would have been forgotten pretty quickly. But the fact that a foreign dictator actively tried to interfere with our electoral process is a big deal, and it should be a particularly big deal to people who call themselves conservatives in the Ronald Reagan mold. It would be the same issue if Putin had endorsed Trump and urged "peace-loving" Americans to vote for him. It's a related big deal that the FBI apparently knew about the DNC hacking for months without telling the DNC, and it was investigating Trump's Russian connections before the election without telling the American people.
 
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Sideroxylon said:
I will be following the Trump trainwreck. Even many conservatives in Australia see what a buffoon he is.
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Where do Australian "conservatives" fit on the global political spectrum? People who call themselves "conservatives" in many countries would be moderate-to-liberal in the U.S.
 
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Civet said:
As long as it doesn't involve underage participants, homosexuality or unambiguous rape, I think Trump can survive almost any sex scandal. Proof of deliberate and direct collusion with the Russian government to advance his political goals might be harder to handle. That said, the man is a political cockroach with a legendary ability to endure scandals so I think he should tell any potential blackmailer to do his worst.
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He is safer than that. Barging in on teenages is not a big deal so we have the underage thing not being a serious issue.
 
CapelDodger said:
Right or wrong, Lewis is expressing a justifiable concern about what does appear - by various threads of evidence - covert (barely) interference in the US Presidential election by a foreign power. Something you and Trump appear to be remarkably sanguine about.

Trump's response is, of course, ignorant insult and invective.
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I would be inclined to say "influence" rather than "interference". Interference implies a direct action, and Russia didn't directly tamper with the election. They released information that influenced the decisions made by voters... but they didn't actually mess with the vote itself. It's a minor distinction, I know, but I think it's an important one.
 
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