Is The President Wanting To Use Another Trump Putin Meeting To Sell Us Out?….A Trump Putin meeting is held in private with only interpreters in the room, so what evil plots might they be hatching? With another one scheduled in the fall as a follow up to Helsinki, we can only wonder whether Putin is using a clueless Trump like a puppet (the so-called useful idiot), or is Trump a willing co-conspirator for whatever nefarious schemes they might be unleashing on the world? From Helsinki, we don’t know what they agreed to in private, other than we’ve already discovered Trump tried to sell out our diplomats (explained in part 2). Maybe this upcoming Trump Putin meeting could work out some lousy plan for Ukraine or Syria as dictated by Putin. Or will this Trump Putin meeting sell out NATO? It might go even bigger than that, where the purpose of the Trump Putin meeting is to coordinate their strategy to defeat the Mueller probe & cover up their crimes, &/or use the power of having 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons as an implied threat to basically team-up as the de facto rulers of the world. See doubling-down-trump-invites-pu
Our suspicions are raised even more now that we’ve just found out American intelligence officials presented president-elect Trump indisputable proof that Putin personally ordered the Russian attack on our presidential election: from-the-start-trump-has-muddi
Yes, it would be helpful to have better relationships with the Russians, but not at the price of giving them a pass over discrediting our elections, or serving to advance their interests. Trump keeps conflating the message about whether Russia interfered in the election, probably because he doesn’t want to tarnish his win, plus he may well be compromised. And when pressed, Putin in essence practically admitted they really did hack & release the DNC emails in the Chris Wallace interview. Investigators are working hard on the facts, since ultimately we must learn the truth. All any of us can do is wait on Mueller’s reports. But with another scheduled Trump Putin meeting coming up, we must not forget the lessons of the Helsinki meeting: the-stench-from-trumps-execrab
We’re Still Vulnerable & Unprepared, so read the analogy to 9-11 & Pearl Harbor
We are completely ill-prepared to stop Russia as they seek to also taint our next election in November, especially when our nation’s leader denied this week the fact Russia is still coming after us! Trump is practically inviting them to do it again! All the signals are definitely pointing at Putin having something on Trump, so we’re just waiting on Mueller to tell us what. As many of us are speculating just based on what we’re witnessing, this might be textbook treason: if-this-is-not-treason-then-wh
For a perspective, imagine after 9-11 if George W. had denied our nation was attacked by terrorists despite overwhelming evidence from our intelligence agencies they did, & then a scared nation fearing potential future attacks, W. had a blase attitude to the point he totally ignored beefing up our defenses to prevent another attack. Then on top of that, when intelligence offers up the site of origin where the terrorists came from, imagine W. showering the leader from that country with constant praise without a note of criticism about the attacks on us. The American people in unison would cry out with outrage over an incompetent president totally derelict in his duties! So what’s up with Trumpeters & the echo-audience? Why are they so willing to give this current president a pass? It’s been proven our democracy was attacked during the last presidential campaign, we know which foreign power did it, & it’s likely they’re ready to do it again. Yet our president sloughs off Russia’s involvement, constantly praises their leader, & does nothing to ward off future attacks.
Cyberattacks are a new type of warfare, but in this case it’s still a foreign power attacking us to discredit our electoral process & undermine our democracy, in effect being a terrorist attack: stop-calling-it-meddli
Making matters even worse, despite current proof our nation was & continues to be under attack, we’re seeing Trump, his pundits & base are irresponsibly pushing for the current investigations to wrap up. Stretching the 9-11 example to its ultimate absurdity, suppose many among George W’s administration & campaign staff were in regular contact with various shady figures with direct connections to the terrorists who were on those planes. Nobody would call the subsequent investigations a witch hunt or try to shut them down. We Americans would be unanimous in our resolve to discover the truth, demanding to know whether W. & any of his staff colluded with those enemies of our democracy. To the extent Trump’s minions are attacking the investigators & attempting to hide the truth, it goes to show the president’s force of personality has won over his fans to the point it’s in essence turned into a cult. Such a cult always believes whatever their cult leader says to the point of the entire tribal group being dismissive of the actual facts.
A President Likely Compromised
I’ve posted the entire article from trump-putin-summit-was-no
It’s a funny word, appeasement. It’s the word prominent politicians and pundits are using to describe Donald Trump’s extraordinary decision to side with Vladimir Putin against U.S. intelligence agencies following the two leaders’ private “summit” in Helsinki. But these comparisons to Neville Chamberlain—who famously tried to mollify Adolf Hitler by letting him take parts of Czechoslovakia—are fundamentally misguided.* Chamberlain, at least, was trying to protect his country. Trump’s lavish praise for Putin—who has repeatedly attacked American democracy—was protective in neither its execution nor its intent. It is now all but confirmed that Russian GRU officials under Putin targeted the 2016 election. American intelligence experts and an American grand jury have concluded that 12 Russian nationals hacked the Democrats prior to the 2016 election and that some Republicans, including some “in regular contact with senior members of the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump,” were in communication with them. There is no doubt that members of Donald Trump’s campaign were extremely interested in precisely this kind of arrangement, including his eldest son, his son-in-law, and his then–campaign manager, who is currently in jail. Trump mentor Roger Stone has, among other things, admitted to communicating with Guccifer 2.0, now known to have been a Russian-backed persona aimed at disrupting American elections. Just hours after Putin and Trump’s joint press conference on Monday, the Department of Justice revealed it had charged a Russian gun-rights activist named Mariia Butina, a woman who tried to arrange a secret 2016 meeting between Trump and Putin, with serving Russian interests to influence the U.S. election. She can now declare both of her missions successful.
Nor has Russia ceased its attacks on the United States: Per Trump’s Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, “the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, in coordination with international partners, have detected Russian government actors targeting government and businesses in the energy, nuclear, water, aviation and critical manufacturing sectors.” He described the threat as “blinking red,” making clear that these efforts aren’t just going to hit during the 2018 midterms, they’re happening now. “These actions are persistent. They’re pervasive and they are meant to undermine America’s democracy on a daily basis.” To wit: Trump has been told—by the very men he hired—that the United States has been and is currently under cyberattack by Russia. And his response was to praise Putin, defend his denials, and blame the United States for poor relations between the two countries. That is not appeasement toward another country; it is aggression against your own. On one level it’s understandable why people have tended to use appeasement to describe Trump’s attitude: It’s readily available as a term for weakness. If you are accustomed to a framework that equates aggression with strength, then Trump’s debasing himself to Putin can easily call to mind the word (and world-historical event) that best describes geopolitically submissive behavior. There’s no question that Trump himself constantly obsesses over who is the “alpha” in international relations, which makes his abject behavior with Putin all the more remarkable. But you can’t appease someone if you’re both on the same side—as Trump and Putin seem to have demonstrated themselves to be. When Churchill condemned Chamberlain’s “long series of miscalculations, and misjudgments of men and facts,” he still admitted that Chamberlain’s “motives have never been impugned.” Trump’s have. And that distinction is crucial to understanding what’s happening. Calling Trump’s behavior appeasement, in other words, pre-emptively grants that Trump is trying to help his country rather than himself, even though those two interests are to his mind plainly opposed. Trump has made his loyalties clear, and they are not to the country he governs.
This should not be surprising. Trump has made no secret of the fact that he operates according to naked self-interest—many of his followers like that he is (I use the term loosely) “a businessman,” that he openly bragged that not paying taxes “makes me smart.” Nor is it news that Trump views America as a resource for his and his associates’ personal enrichment. The only time he spends with its people are when they are customers at his own properties or his fanatical base at rallies. His attitude toward Putin makes sense, then. Russia’s “election meddling” was done to help elect Trump. Trump benefited enormously from those efforts, and he is not in the habit of condemning those who personally benefit him until they stop. Putin—as Coats has been at pain to point out—hasn’t stopped. Putin may, of course, have some other kind of power over the president, but Trump has consistently sympathized with strongmen over the democratic leaders he ought to see as his peers. He admires the strength that authoritarians draw by taking power from their own people, and so he himself is willingly and actively trading against his country, as its president. This is … unprecedented. Eighteen months in, we still too easily default to treating this presidency as though basic political assumptions are still intact. It is reasonable to suppose that a president is always acting on his country’s behalf and representing its interests as he understands them. That is not the case with Donald Trump, whose White House has at this point utterly failed to function as a metonym for America. The split between the administration and the country it’s meant to govern is severe and undeniable. Trump’s behavior with Putin was indeed craven: He was nervous and submissive and deferential. But what he did was not appeasement. It was a great deal worse.
See what national security experts have to say about an American president who seems to be serving as more of a Russian agent: trump-acting-like-russian-asse
The White House staff offers up an alternative explanation for Trump’s bizarre obedience to a foreign enemy. As seen inside trump-putin-helsinki-me
After Trump and Putin met in Helsinki, many pundits and politicians struggled to understand what it is they saw, to rationalize it, to explain it away, to speculate on what kinds of kompromat the Russians could have on Trump, when the answer—like infidelity or death—was staring them, us, in the face. Yes, Putin has something on Trump: He helped him win. That’s the kompromat. Donald Trump today described his campaign as “brilliant,” but those of us who were there remember it for what it was: lurching, volatile, scraping the bottom of the barrel for even remotely competent staff. As we now know, the campaign, in the form of Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone, was willing to take all the help it could get. The trickle of indictments from Robert Mueller make it increasingly difficult to believe that there’s no there there, that the Russians didn’t meddle, that the Trump campaign didn’t know about it, let alone actively welcome it, that all this stolen information just happened to coincide with Trump’s statements and the campaign’s ad buys and didn’t change any votes. Of course, Trump denies it now. It’s hard to imagine even a politician less thin-skinned and prideful than him saying, essentially, “Yes, you’re right. My victory was illegitimate, and therefore so is my presidency.” There is no other way to frame this: This is, and has always been, about the legitimacy of his presidency. And no one, especially not a sitting president who values the idea of himself above all else, would cede that ground.
A Cancer On Our Nation
As posted here from its-time-to-excise-the-tr
Surely, now, we can concede that letting President Trump be Trump has exhausted itself — even among the smugly credulous. For a year and a half, we’ve heard his supporters say: Watch what he does, not what he says. Sure, he’s rude and crude, they said, but he’s going to make America great again. No, he’s not. Nor was he ever, notwithstanding a column I wrote just before Election Day, saying that America would survive no matter who won. My optimism was based solely on faith in the U.S. Constitution and the inherent checks and balances prescribed therein. To be wrong would mean that the checks aren’t being applied when imbalances occur. We are there.
Trump, rather than holding a hard line with Russian President Vladimir Putin at their summit in Helsinki, essentially sided with the enemy by attacking U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies regarding their solidly conclusive finding that Russian hackers interfered with the 2016 presidential election. (Trump tried to backtrack Tuesday afternoon, saying that he does, in fact, accept the intelligence community’s findings on Russian meddling.) The two leaders all but held hands during a news conference Monday as each dismissed the idea that Russia wants to undermine American democracy — and that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into possible collusion between Russian operatives and the Trump campaign has no legs to stand on. This despite Mueller having just this past Fridayissued an indictment against 12 Russians believed to be involved in hacking the computer networks of Democratic organizations. Are we to believe that these two known liars were telling the truth or hadn’t agreed to a script during their private, one-on-one meeting?
On Sunday, Trump, in his usual manner, blamed the Democrats for having a weak defense system against hacking. On Tuesday, he again waved the “fake news” flag, blaming the media for unfavorable summit coverage. The whole experience surely bonded him further with Putin, who favors a state-run media and rules a nation where journalists who become troublesome are often killed. Between Trump’s antipathy toward the First Amendment, which he previously has expressed wishing to weaken — and his stated desire that “my people” sit up at attention when he speaks, as North Koreans did during his visit with Kim Jong Un — the president has made his dictatorial proclivities clear. That said, such inclinations may more accurately reflect severe narcissism than a conscious desire to subjugate the American people. Given Trump’s paltry understanding of world affairs or his role as president, he quite possibly aligns himself with thugs as a means to man up, as they say, and correct some sense of impotence that persists despite his impressive success. Consider Trump’s reply when challenged about his dubious posture toward American intelligence agencies: “I have great confidence in my intelligence people,” he said, “but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.”
Note “my” intelligence people, plus the obvious lie about confidence. And the words “strong,” “powerful” and “denial.” This is Trump in four words: self-absorbed, impressed by authority and at home in denial. This makes him easily unlikable to a majority of Americans but not necessarily treasonous, as some have charged out of proper outrage. Treason, frankly, sounds a little high-minded for such a reckless, clueless vaudevillian. Where does this leave us? What might one deduce from the Helsinki summit? Either Trump is too thoroughly inept to continue as president, or his predatory nature, as demonstrated in his business — not to mention his boasting about aggression toward women — has led to his collecting rogues to enhance his own power. Or both. In any case, he has stepped over all lines of acceptable presidential behavior and presents a clear and present danger to the United States.
When our chief executive, whose principal job is to defend both the Constitution and the nation against aggressors, stands alongside our chief geopolitical foe and betrays two of our most important institutions in the service of his own ego, he has dimmed the lights in the shining city on a hill and left the world a far darker place. It’s often said that America is great because America is good. My faith in the institutions and the individuals who conferred upon us a singular role in the history of humankind is yet unshaken. But a cancer lives among us, and the good people of this country must be precise in its excision. If Republicans don’t do it now, Democrats will probably sweep the ballots in November and do it then. History will note when, and by whose hand, America ceased to be great.
Scared GOP
GOP politicians looking to get reelected &/or ward off a blue wave, they’re reluctant to call out Trump knowing most of the GOP base are still under the spell of this mindless Trump cult. But they’re caught between the proverbial rock & a hard place, knowing swing voters are smart enough not to buy into the blatantly false conspiracies directed against the DOJ/FBI, drummed up by Trump & his lackeys in Congress & the echo. These excerpts present that dilemma from the-truth-about-trump-and
It is being widely reported today that many Republicans are criticizing President Trump’s refusal to confront Russian President Vladimir Putin over his sabotage of American democracy. Many of their statements sided with the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia did interfere in the 2016 election, and defended our intelligence services against Trump’s continued assault against them. But ask yourself this question: How many of those statements from Republicans also acknowledged the conclusion of the intelligence community that the goal of that Russian interference was to elect Trump? Obviously, Republicans are reluctant to say that out loud, because it might diminish the greatness of Trump’s victory, which would anger him and his voters. But I think this gaping hole in the public posture of the GOP hints at deeper truths about the predicament that Republicans — and all of us — are consumed with right now. The Washington Examiner reports today that many Republicans are privately worried that Trump’s display with Putin will hurt them in November’s midterm elections. Their concerns: Republicans lose when the focus is on the Russia investigation and Trump’s temperamental recklessness, and not on the economy, and swing voters aren’t going to side with Trump on this matter. As one aide to a vulnerable House Republican put it: “Is there an independent, swing voter in the country who would say: ‘Yeah, I really think Putin is telling the truth and the U.S. Department of Justice is the real problem?’ ”
It’s good to have it confirmed that Republicans admit this. After all, we keep hearing that Trump is “winning” in his effort to delegitimize the Russia probe. But beyond this, it creates a problem for Republicans. That’s because the Republican base sides with Trump (and increasingly with Putin, as well) against special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. As one House Republican suggested to CNBC’s John Harwood, Republicans must be careful about opposing Trump when they stand up for the Russia inquiry, because “my constituents love him.” The Republican evasion on this is not just a political dodge to avoid offending Trump voters. It’s also substantively important. The big unknown right now is why Trump refuses to take Russian sabotage of our democracy seriously, at a time when our own intelligence officials say it will happen again. The easy answer that has been pushed by Republicans and some Trump loyalists is that the president doesn’t want to diminish the appearance of his victory’s legitimacy. It’s just a matter of ego and temperament. It’s just crazy Trump being crazy Trump. But as a Brian Beutler thread demonstrates, that explanation cracks up against the known facts. We all had good reason to suspect in real time that Russia was interfering, and Trump relished it, and even encouraged it, as it happened. Now that Mueller’s indictments have started fleshing out the fuller dimensions of this sabotage and its now-confirmed goal of electing Trump, this can no longer be about guarding appearances of legitimacy, because his current conduct makes that more suspect. The only conceivable explanation is that he was both perfectly happy to benefit from Russian interference and wants to obstruct/or and delegitimize the ferreting out of the truth.
Court Cases
Mueller is coming out with guns blazin’ in the trial against Manafort, in so far as reams of evidence mueller-releases-list
NATO or North Korea, Can Trump Identify Our Enemy?
The more we as a nation isolate ourselves, the less cooperation we’ll get from our allies & international intelligence sources, & the more vulnerable we become to our enemies. Trump lays over for thuggish dictators. He caved to Putin & it looks like he’s also caving to Jong Un: trump-now-says-no-time-limit-d
Have the Will to Read the Truth
George Will certainly has an important say in the matter, seen inside george-will-charges-tha
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and others might believe that they must stay in their positions lest there be no adult supervision of the Oval playpen. This is a serious worry, but so is this: Can those people do their jobs for someone who has neither respect nor loyalty for them? Like the purloined letter in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story with that title, collusion with Russia is hiding in plain sight. We shall learn from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation whether in 2016 there was collusion with Russia by members of the Trump campaign. The world, however, saw in Helsinki something more grave — ongoing collusion between Trump, now in power, and Russia. The collusion is in what Trump says (refusing to back the United States’ intelligence agencies) and in what evidently went unsaid (such as: You ought to stop disrupting Ukraine, downing civilian airliners, attempting to assassinate people abroad using poisons, and so on, and on).
Americans elected a president who — this is a safe surmise — knew that he had more to fear from making his tax returns public than from keeping them secret. The most innocent inference is that for decades he has depended on an American weakness, susceptibility to the tacky charisma of wealth, which would evaporate when his tax returns revealed that he has always lied about his wealth, too. A more ominous explanation might be that his redundantly demonstrated incompetence as a businessman tumbled him into unsavory financial dependencies on Russians. A still more sinister explanation might be that the Russians have something else, something worse, to keep him compliant. The explanation is in doubt; what needs to be explained — his compliance — is not. Granted, Trump has a weak man’s banal fascination with strong men whose disdain for him is evidently unimaginable to him. And, yes, he only perfunctorily pretends to have priorities beyond personal aggrandizement. But just as astronomers inferred, from anomalies in the orbits of the planet Uranus, the existence of Neptune before actually seeing it, Mueller might infer, and then find, still-hidden sources of the behavior of this sad, embarrassing wreck of a man.
Give Me A Break
Over the weekend, also check out the news of a taped recording proving a discussion of a payment to a Playboy model! The scandals keep rolling along! I have numerous commitments this weekend & won’t be as active perusing the newsfeeds. So if my favorite WaPo columnist, Jennifer Rubin, can take a vacation as she’s doing now, I guess I can also take a few days off. So my plan is to send the next 3-part message in a week, giving us just one posting next week instead of two. The exception would be a major breaking headline (which seems to be happening with a lot more frequency), particularly on Russiagate, in which case I’d send out an abbreviated version of TheVORACS early next week on just that big news story. Otherwise, check back in a week for more commentary & articles providing The Voice of Reason & Common Sense!
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