Cont: The Trump Presidency VIII

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GlennB said:
I've been wondering if an aide is actually typing them. The spelling has improved and there's occasionally some tricky grammar that comes out right.
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Perhaps Trump's acute laziness is now affecting his tiny hands so someone else has to hold phone and type for him?
 
McHrozni said:
You're missing the point of the deal. It is not to benefit the US as a whole, it might benefit a select few in the soy farming business - saving them from bankruptcy due to Chinese boycotts, more or less - it is to benefit Trump personally. There are mid-term elections in November and all the signs point to it being either Democrat wave or a Democrat tidal wave. If Trump is to survive politically he must give his base a victory of some sort, anything will do. Literarily anything, even something that's actually a defeat, but can be spun into a temporary victory, will do. A few months down the line his base won't remember it anyway.
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Yes, it allows President Trump to portray himself as the consummate deal-maker and I fear that enough of the US electorate will buy that vision to keep him in power and turn the Democratic Wave into a barely perceptible ripple.

As long as President Trump can avoid completely derailing the economy, the GOP is in good shape IMO.
 
EU-US deal on tariffs: nothingburger wrt the trade deficit. Wasn't a pricing issue in the first place in this case. Nice to see Trump has been hit by a hurricane of complaints from US businesses who know he is dead wrong on EU trade.

Another day, another backing down from extreme rhetoric, admitting to reality. Hard times for child-abusing, treasonous Republicans.
 
More secrecy from the White House....

The Trump administration will no longer publish public summaries of President Donald Trump's phone calls with foreign leaders, US media report.

Non-public readouts will still be distributed to agencies but press will reportedly be told only certain details of the calls.

Traditionally, both US and foreign heads of state post brief readouts of their conversations after calls.

The White House has not offered reasons for the largely symbolic change.
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-44955992

Are they trying to make sure that the US public have no idea what their President is saying ?

Are they just embarrassed about the calls ?
 
The Don said:
More secrecy from the White House....



https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-44955992

Are they trying to make sure that the US public have no idea what their President is saying ?

Are they just embarrassed about the calls ?
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The two aren't mutually exclusive. Still, this seems a bit more like an arbitrary horrible thing as a distraction to the horrible distraction to the horrible distraction to the...
 
dudalb said:
Swiped from the final scene of George Orwell's "Animal Farm" . If you steal, srteal from the best.
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[DERAIL] A couple of years back one of the waitresses working for me mentioned that she was doing "Animal Farm" for her GCSE (or possibly A Level) English so I said-:

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which
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And she gave me a blank look, "What?"

It turned out that they weren't reading the book but studying extracts with no context. Seems like an excellent way to make sure an entire generation never read one of the important works of modern English literature or understand it's context. [/DERAIL]
 
Aridas said:
The two aren't mutually exclusive. Still, this seems a bit more like an arbitrary horrible thing as a distraction to the horrible distraction to the horrible distraction to the...
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Actually, it's a continuation of an arbitrary horrible thing, which I guess makes it no longer all that arbitrary (albeit, still horrible). This goes hand in glove with their wish to keep the visitor logs and diary entries secret, too. Trump's version, of course, is that we're just too dense to understand the nuances of 4D Chess Diplomacy, while I think we understand it all too well. When your phone logs consist of:

08:15 call biggest creep in the world
10:20 take call from second biggest creep in the world
11:00 call newly elected creep
12:00 taco bowl with some embezzler
etc...

Would you want everyone reading it?
 
Foolmewunz said:
Derail, but not Derail

Who's pulling the strings nowadays, e.g. which advisor is smart enough to channel the Trump insanity the way they've been managing the past week or two.

We know they've got good data. But now they're using it. Trump's tweets, for the most part, are targeting the sub-points in the various polls that he knows there is support for, particularly trade and US job protection. Someone's directing him. He's not this smart or this focused on his own. He'd be off arguing about ratings or crowd sizes, but tweet after tweet keeps hammering home the talking points (well, in his case "wondering points") that actually resonate with the Republican and Republican-leaning base. No one's that fond of tariffs, but everyone is fond of decreasing the deficit and protecting American jobs.

I doubt that it's family; neither the Trumps nor the Kushners are that bright. It's got to be one of the inner circle, though. Miller?
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Whatever strings they're using to steer Trump with, I think the directing minds are old hands in the GOP, or what I think of as the Deep Party. They think "it's the economy, stupid" when it comes to the mid-term campaign, and they are probably right.
 
P.J. Denyer said:
[DERAIL] A couple of years back one of the waitresses working for me mentioned that she was doing "Animal Farm" for her GCSE (or possibly A Level) English so I said-:



And she gave me a blank look, "What?"

It turned out that they weren't reading the book but studying extracts with no context. Seems like an excellent way to make sure an entire generation never read one of the important works of modern English literature or understand it's context. [/DERAIL]
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It's usually expected that the students read the books they are studying. Certain sections and passages are focused on in the actual course material but you are supposed to read the books as well.
If you don't want to read the literature why are you doing the A level?
 
Foolmewunz said:
And, well, lemme tell ya what I got for you. If you buy now, we'll include not 20, not 30, but 50 billion in soy beans (which the EU needs anyway because China is buying everything Russia, Brazil and Ukraine produce).
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Soybeans subsidised by the US taxpayer - European buyers would be fools not to take advantage of that.
 
Venom said:
Honestly there is a time and place to ask questions like that. But to ban her was crossing the line.
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The time and place for a reporter to ask questions is when he or she is near the person he or she wants answers from. If they didn't want questions don't make it a press event.
 
Government seized more than 100 Trump-related tapes from Cohen: report

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-brief...-more-than-100-trump-related-tapes-from-cohen

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Craig4 said:
This is right and just; the enablers should suffer too.
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She's not an enabler. She's complicit. I still find liberals (although they're rarer) who give her credit for some wispy version of having reined in her father. Reined in? How? Would he be strangling kittens on Fox & Friends, otherwise?
 
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, was one of those who insisted the EU would not negotiate with a gun to its head, and had called for the metal tariffs to be dropped in order for wider trade negotiations to progress.

The 28 member states had additionally agreed at a summit in Sofia in May that any deal on industrial goods with the US would come with a price tag in the form of a deal on public procurement, opening up US contracts to EU providers. “We don’t want to give away anything for free,” said an EU diplomat. “And that gun is on the table and the bazooka of tariffs on cars is just in the cupboard and could come back at any time.”
A French government source said: “It’s good to have discussion, but we have to be very cautious throughout the process.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/busines...ld-trump-trade-deal-washington-talks-analysis


"Opening up US contracts to EU providers" is a built-in deal-breaker.
 
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