Comments by "" (@DavidJ222) on "Trump walks out of shutdown meeting after Dems say no to wall" video.

  1. "Donald Trump’s presidency has raised a question that many of us never thought we’d be asking: Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes. Democracy no longer ends with a bang—in a revolution or military coup—but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms. The good news is that there are several exit ramps on the road to authoritarianism. The bad news is that, by electing Trump, we have already passed the first one." "How Democracies Die" By Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt
    22
  2. One of the very first episodes of Trumps documented ties to shady Russan mobsters was in 1984 when David Bogatin — who is a Russian mobster, convicted gasoline bootlegger, and close ally of Semion Mogilevich, a major Russian mob boss — met with Trump in Trump Tower right after it opened. Bogatin came to that meeting prepared to spend $6 million, which is equivalent to about $15 million today. Bogatin bought five condos from Trump at that meeting. Those condos were later seized by the government, which claimed they were used to launder money for the Russian mob. Documents show Trump had approximately 1,300 transactions of this kind with Russian mobsters. By that, I mean real estate transactions that were all cash purchases made by anonymous shell companies that were quite obviously fronts for criminal money-laundering operations. And this represents a huge chunk of Trump’s real estate activity in the United States, so it’s quite hard to argue that he had no idea what was going on.
    12
  3. "I play to people's fantasies....I call it truthful hyperbole.(LIES ) It's an innocent form of exaggeration--and a very effective form of promotion."  -- Donald Trump, "The Art of the Dead" (1987)  Straight from the con-man's mouth himself. Trump has lived his entire adult life by one rule, which is, ignorance is strength. You don't have to be intellectually curious,  or informed, you just have to be loud, boisterous, and assertive. It also helps if you can lie with confidence.  You have to be able to overwhelm the masses with so many lies,  that by the time they've debunked  just one of your lies,  you've already told 20 more new lies.
    3