Politics Thread

This is finally starting to get some press after the election. For those of you that supported Trump: What are your thoughts on this? This ranked as one of my top several concerns RE: a Trump Presidency (after all the policy stuff). Fortunately it seems like he is backing off of many of his claims (Mexico paying for the wall, deportation force, Obamacare, Muslim ban) - but this feels like a very bad idea to me. This seems more like something that would take place in an Eastern European Oligarchy, not a Western Democratic Republic.

http://money.cnn.com/2016/11/13/news...cts/index.html

The situation is made even more dubious, IMO, by the failure to release tax returns. Much was made (not without validity) of accusations of pay-to-play politics with respect to the Clinton Foundation. This seems like an even worse conflict of interest, particularly when you consider his role as the President vs. her role as Secretary of State. Are we really OK with him having his kids run is businesses as long as they pinkie swear not to talk to him about it? Are we OK with having no visibility to those business dealings? Not knowing who is funding his ventures?

Trump can't simply turn over the operations to his kids. That would be a clear conflict. I'm sure he has trusted people he can turn the day to day operations over to. This is uncharted waters. I'm not sure if any presidents in recent memory had such varied business interests. For them, I think it was mostly investments, stocks, bonds, and passive interests in others entities. Those are easy to turn over to an advisory firm who can operate independently. That's much tougher when you're incredibly active in the running of the operations.

I heard something on one of the news programs this morning that the conflict of interest rules don't technically apply to the President like they do to cabinet members. No idea if that's true.


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The tax returns may have shown his involvement with the Russians. I don't think too many NYC banks wanted his business after he stiffed them so many times, so he may get his money from the Putin oligarchs.
Donald Trump Jr. pretty much covered that saying “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.” He added, “we see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

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Originally Posted by bobbiemcgee

The tax returns may have shown his involvement with the Russians. I don't think too many NYC banks wanted his business after he stiffed them so many times, so he may get his money from the Putin oligarchs.
Donald Trump Jr. pretty much covered that saying “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.” He added, “we see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

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Clever move to get Secret Service protection from the Russian mob. They play by different rules than Wall Street banks.

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Originally Posted by boozehound

This is finally starting to get some press after the election. For those of you that supported Trump: What are your thoughts on this? This ranked as one of my top several concerns RE: a Trump Presidency (after all the policy stuff). Fortunately it seems like he is backing off of many of his claims (Mexico paying for the wall, deportation force, Obamacare, Muslim ban) - but this feels like a very bad idea to me. This seems more like something that would take place in an Eastern European Oligarchy, not a Western Democratic Republic.

http://money.cnn.com/2016/11/13/news...cts/index.html

The situation is made even more dubious, IMO, by the failure to release tax returns. Much was made (not without validity) of accusations of pay-to-play politics with respect to the Clinton Foundation. This seems like an even worse conflict of interest, particularly when you consider his role as the President vs. her role as Secretary of State. Are we really OK with him having his kids run is businesses as long as they pinkie swear not to talk to him about it? Are we OK with having no visibility to those business dealings? Not knowing who is funding his ventures?

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CNN?

Ha....ha...ha..aaaahahahahaha!

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Originally Posted by Strange Brew

CNN?

Ha....ha...ha..aaaahahahahaha!

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Good to see the Trump victory hasn't gone to your head.

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Originally Posted by Caf

Good to see the Trump victory hasn't gone to your head.

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CAF -

If there is one thing we learned from this election, it's that CNN is just a corrupt as Crooked Hillary, the Clinton Foundation, Qatar, Donna Brazelle, Don Lemon, Chris Matthews, and Mick Cronin. For anyone to legitimately get their "news" from CNN, is laughable. I wouldn't trust them to deliver sports scores.

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Originally Posted by Lamont Sanford

CAF -

If there is one thing we learned from this election, it's that CNN is just a corrupt as Crooked Hillary, the Clinton Foundation, Qatar, Donna Brazelle, Don Lemon, Chris Matthews, and Mick Cronin. For anyone to legitimately get their "news" from CNN, is laughable. I wouldn't trust them to deliver sports scores.

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CNN stinks - not many people are going to challenge you on that. However, you can find this story and question on basically every news outlet. It's a valid question, boozehound set it up well, and a CNN link doesn't somehow invalidate it.

Watchdogs question Trump’s plans to keep his empire in the family

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Originally Posted by Caf

Good to see the Trump victory hasn't gone to your head.

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This mentality is a little frightening to me, and I hope it isn't widespread. CNN isn't Huffington Post. You can make a good argument that they slant their news to the left, but they don't generally report outright falsehoods. It's looking like it's going to be VERY easy for Trump to continue to manipulate the roughly 27% of the population that voted for him. He already has his propaganda minister in Steve Bannon, now he just needs to continually reinforce that Breitbart should be their source for the 'real' news, and that all other media is 'biased' and 'wrong'.

The thing that does give me hope, is that you generally need much more than a quarter of the people in your camp in order to actually seize control of a democratic republic. The question becomes how many of the roughly half of Americans who didn't vote will buy his message. If it under-indexes relative to the people who actually did vote (as I suspect it does), he may have closer to 35%-40% of the people's support, which still isn't really enough to seize power ala Vladimir Putin in Russia. If you can manage to control the media it gets much easier, but I think that would be difficult to do on a large enough scale in America.

I figure probably 20% of the people will believe literally everything he says, with the remainder of the population falling at various other places on the spectrum.

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Originally Posted by Caf

CNN stinks - not many people are going to challenge you on that. However, you can find this story and question on basically every news outlet. It's a valid question, boozehound set it up well, and a CNN link doesn't somehow invalidate it.

Watchdogs question Trump’s plans to keep his empire in the family

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Thank you. See my above post for why this mentality frightens me. To wholesale discount CNN is a little ridiculous. It is, however, highly convenient when they are reporting on things you really don't want to address though.

Donald Trump has done a phenomenal job of convincing his supporters that every media outlet that reports negative things about him is biased and false, even in the face of video evidence to the contrary.

It's one thing to elect Donald Trump. It's another thing entirely to allow him free reign to do whatever he wants. That could be disastrous, particularly when you consider who he is taking advice from (I'm looking at you, Steve Bannon). The question RE: his business is legitimate and valid, and should be addressed. Unless we want to go full oligarchy here.