Comments by "" (@DavidJ222) on "Washington Post"
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Trump: "I am the chaos and disorder president. I am the purveyor of fear & loathing, of pandemics & death. I am the provocateur of mayhem and upheaval. And I am creating an America in my own image: vile, dark, hopeless, backwards,
grotesque, insecure, selfish, indecent, malevolent, paranoid, indifferent, sociopathic, inept, and deceitful."
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Trump never misses an opportunity to display the utter contempt he has for America and the American people. In a tweet today, Trump claimed that the 75-year-old protester in Buffalo NY, who was pushed down by police officers, may have just been acting.
Trump: “Buffalo protester shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateur,” Trump wrote. “75 year old Martin Gugino was pushed away after appearing to scan police communications in order to black out the equipment. @OANN I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?”
Gugino’s attorney, Kelly Zarcone, told The Associated Press that “No one from law enforcement has even suggested anything otherwise, so we are at a loss to understand why the president of the United States would make such dark, dangerous, and untrue accusations about him. We can confirm that those accusations are utterly baseless and ridiculous,” she said.
Trump was parroting lies and propaganda from One America, a far-right network that's actually more craven than Fox. One of the on-air reporters at the 24-hour network is a Russian national on the payroll of the Kremlin’s official propaganda outlet, Sputnik.
Kristian Brunovich Rouz, originally from the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, has been living in San Diego, where OAN is based, since August 2017, reporting on U.S. politics for the 24-hour news channel. For all of that time, he’s been simultaneously writing for Sputnik, a Kremlin-owned news wire that played a role in Russia’s 2016 election-interference operation, according to an assessment by the U.S. intelligence community.
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In his interview with Lester Holt, Trump literally admitted to obstructing justice when he said he fired Comey because he wouldn't stop the Russia investigation.
Trump and his people were warned by Obama, Sally Yates, Comey, and the FBI, that Russia was actively trying to infiltrate Trump's inner circle. And what does Trump do? He fired Comey, and Sally Yates, the very people who had warned him about what the Russians were up to. Even after Trump had been warned, his people were still holding secret meetings with the Russians, and they all lied about it......every single person lied about their meetings with the Russians. And then on the day after Trump fired Comey, the guy who was in charge of the FBI, the agency charged with catching Russian spies, Trump invites the Russian foreign minister, and Russia's Ambassador to the Oval Office, and brags about firing the head of the FBI. And they all got a big laugh out of it, at America's expense. Let that sink in for a moment.
On July 16, 2018 in Helsinki, Trump threw America and the men and women in our intelligence agencies under the bus once again when he sided with Putin.
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It's becoming abundantly clear, that Trump and republicans are now owned by Russians. They receive their funding for Russians, and then they receive their marching orders from Russians. That's how it works whenever you've been fully bought, and fully compromised.
Lev Parnas, the indicted associate of Rudy, received a $1 million payment from Russia and tried to hide it from investigators, prosecutors have now stated. Trump denies knowing Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, even though they have attended events at his properties, and they have posed in multiple photos with Trump.
Parnas, who was charged with illegally funneling foreign cash to Republican politicians, including a pro-Trump super PAC, received $1 million from a mysterious account in Russia in September, which he conveniently forgot disclose to the government.
Lev Parnas paid Rudy $500,000. The mysterious payment from Russia should not be a surprise considering that all roads lead to Putin and Russia when it comes to Trump.
Prosecutors say Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman donated larger sums of money to Republicans in an effort to enlist them in their effort to oust then-Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, who testified that she was recalled after a smear campaign by Rudy. Along with their work with Rudy, Parnas and Fruman are accused of meeting at Trump’s Washington hotel to discuss a Ukraine gas deal linked to Yovanovitch’s removal.
Parnas was throwing Russian money at Republicans like beads at Mardi Gras to any republican that was willing to expose themselves to him.
In October, Repub. McCarthy said he plans to donate the $111,000 that was given to the House Republicans' main fundraising committee by Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas.
A handful of Republican campaign committees received nearly $500,000 from Parnas and Fruman..
Prosecutors say that they “conspired to circumvent the federal laws against foreign influence by engaging in a scheme to funnel foreign money to candidates for federal and state office so that the defendants could buy potential influence with candidates, campaigns and the candidates’ governments.”
In 2018, Parnas and Fruman donated directly to Texas GOP Rep. Pete Sessions. Fruman also gave to SC. GOP Rep. Joe Wilson and to a joint fundraising committee tied to Florida Gov. Rick Scott in his successful bid for Senate. Both Sessions and Wilson have acknowledged meeting with both men.
Fruman and Parnas also gave to other joint fundraising committees, which drew more GOP lawmakers. FEC records show that 22 other Republicans who were lawmakers at the time received contributions from Fruman, who misspelled his last name as “Furman” in filings in “a further effort to hide the source of the funds and to evade federal reporting requirements,” according to the indictment.
Moscow Mitch knew from receiving intelligence briefings in 2016 that our electoral process was under attack by the Russians. Two weeks after the Dept of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint statement in October 2016 that the Russian government had directed the effort to interfere in our electoral process, Moscow Mitch's PAC accepted a $1 million donation from Blavatnik's AI-Altep Holdings. The PAC took another $1 million from Blavatnik's AI-Altep Holdings on March 30, 2017, just 10 days after Comey publicly testified before the House Intelligence Committee about Russia's interference in the election.
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"I have a chapter in the book on malignant narcissism as a characteristic of destructive cult leaders. These are people who have a deep need for grandiosity, to be the center of attention, who need to control others, and who lack empathy and lie without hesitation. These are psychological traits perfectly attuned to manipulation and projection.
But the malignant part is about sociopathic tendencies. Almost every cult leader thinks he’s above the law, which is why he’s allowed to persecute and harass or harm anyone he wants. When someone really believes this, they can rationalize all kinds of destructive behavior.
I began this book with the assumption that Trump is a malignant narcissist. Actually, watching him and listening to him reminded me of Sun Myung Moon, the leader of the cult I joined in college, in that both have a kind of God complex where they’re the only one with the answers, the only one who can fix things. Moon was going to create a theocracy and Trump was going to “drain the swamp.” But the way they carry themselves is similar.
But what really made me think of Trump as a cult was the way the groups who supported him were behaving, especially religious groups who believed that God had chosen Trump or was using Trump. There are actual pro-Trump religious groups, like the New Apostolic Reformation, whose leaders were saying, “We’re of God. The rest of the world is of Satan, and we need to follow our chosen leaders who are connected to God.”
There was this blind-faith aspect to the whole thing and an unwillingness to look at any inconvenient facts. That’s all very cult-like.
The bottom line is that I see very sophisticated mind-control techniques being used through the media, through religious broadcasters and radio talk-show hosts. It’s a black-and-white, all-or-nothing, good-versus-evil, authoritarian view of reality that is mostly fear-based. And there’s a deliberate focus on denying facts in order to protect the image of the leader."
--Steven Hassan, The Cult of Trump
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President Obama visited our Troops overseas 7 times. That's not even counting the multiple times he visited our troops at military bases here during the holidays. Obama visited our troops in Iraq just 3 months after taking office. Traitor Trump waited two whole years before he visited our troops for the first time in Iraq. And that was only because he was pushed to do so. And even then, he turned that visit into a rally for himself, and used our troops as political props.
As a compromised President and traitor, Trump serves at the pleasure of Putin. He's not interested in protecting our troops, he's only interested in slavishly serving and protecting Putin. And if that means selling out our troops, then so be it. As far as Trump is concerned, their lives are a small price to pay, just as long as he gets what he wants.
Since the 80s the Russians have been financially supporting Trump and bailing him out from bankruptcy after American banks stopped loaning Trump money. He is still indebted to them today. And just like any loyal dog, Trump knows better than to bite the hand that feeds him..
And now, In order to garner favor with Putin, Trump is allowing him to place bounties on the lives of our troops serving in Afghanistan. This is what happens when you have a disloyal treasonous cretin like Trump as our President. He has spent the last four years on his knees at the feet of dictators like Putin, sniveling and groveling for their approval, all the while selling America out, and hanging our troops out to dry.
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Jan. 22: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.” —CNBC interview...
Jan. 30: “We think we have it very well under control. We have very little problem in this country at this moment— 5 — and those people are all recuperating successfully. But we’re working very closely with China and other countries, and we think it’s going to have a very good ending for us, that I can assure you.” —Trump speech in Michigan.
Feb. 26: “So we’re at the low level. As they get better, we take them off the list, so that we’re going to be pretty soon at only five people. And we could be at just one or two people over the next short period of time. So we’ve had very good luck.” — Trump White House briefing.
Feb. 26: “And again, when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.” — Trump press conference.
Feb. 27: “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.” — Trump at a White House meeting.
March 4: “We have a very small number of people in this country infected. We have a big country. The biggest impact we had was when we took the 40-plus people from a cruise ship. We brought them back. We immediately quarantined them. But you add that to the numbers. But if you don’t add that to the numbers, we’re talking about very small numbers in the United States.” — Trump White House meeting.
March 24: "But we've never closed down the country for the flu. So you say to yourself, 'What is this all about? " -- Trump fox interview
March 27: “You call it germ, you can call it a flu. You can call it a virus. You can call it many different names. I’m not sure anybody knows what it is.” -- Trump interview
Trump today: "The World Health Organization got it wrong. In many many ways they were wrong. They minimized the threat of the coronavirus very strongly...not good. I on the other hand, was tremendously strong in my warnings about the coronavirus.
I knew this was a pandemic from the very beginning, but no one believed me. No one even knew what a pandemic was until I used the word. Meanwhile, you had some people calling it a hoax. Some people even said it would just disappear like magic, and we should end social distancing by Easter. I think it was Obama who said that. Then we had some people comparing COVID-19 to the flu, which is like comparing apples to origins. The oranges of the coronavirus virus are totally different from the flu. Even I know that.
Now many people are saying that I was the first person to warn the world about the seriousness of the coronavirus. I correctly predicted everything that has happened so far. In many ways, I'm sort of like a modern day Nachodamus."
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"Lying is second nature to him. More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true."
--Tony Schwartz, the ghost writer for Trump's book "The Art of the Deal":
This had the feel of speeches given by one the world's most despotic dictators in history.
Trump criticized Dems who did not applaud during his first State of the Union address. “They were like death and un-American,” he said. “Un-American. Somebody said treasonous. I mean, yeah, I guess, why not? Can we call that treason? Why not?”
Trump is very reminiscent of Stalin in this way. You can see it in him during this SOTU address. He literally pauses for the applause, and he even applauds himself.
During Stalin's reign of terror, he demanded a long and enthusiastic applause, and standing ovations whenever he gave a speech. As a result, the applause and ovations he received became largely panic-driven. People feared that the first person to stop clapping would be the first to be called an enemy of the state, and be hauled off to a gulag. The clapping and ovations would last up to 10 minutes. Failure to applaud could certainly be considered treason. So the sheeple went on and on, clapping and shouting “Long live Comrade Stalin,” “Glory to our beloved Comrade Stalin," clapping to the point of exhaustion, and until the palms of their hands bled.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described what the surreal scene looked like in his book, The Gulag Archipelago:
“The applause went on—six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly…Nine minutes! Ten!…Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers.”
At last, after eleven minutes of non-stop clapping, the director of a paper factory finally decided enough was enough. He stopped clapping and sat down—a miracle!
“To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down,” Solzhenitsyn says.
That same night, the director of the paper factory was arrested and sent to prison for ten years. Authorities came up with some official reason for his sentence, but during his interrogation, he was told: “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!”
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Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, who once taught at Harvard Medical School, wrote a paper titled Cult Formation in the early 1980s. He delineated primary characteristics, which are the most common features shared by destructive cults, destructive cults like Trumpism.
1. A charismatic leader, who increasingly becomes an object of worship as the general principles that may have originally sustained the group lose power. That is a living leader, who has no meaningful accountability and becomes the single most defining element of the group and its source of power and authority.
2. A process of indoctrination or education is in use that can be seen as coercive persuasion or thought reform commonly called "brainwashing".
The culmination of this process can be seen by members of the group often doing things that are not in their own best interest, but consistently in the best interest of its leader.
3. The exploitation of group members by the leader and the ruling members.
Here are 10 warning signs of a potentially unsafe group or leader.
• Absolute authoritarianism without meaningful accountability.
• No tolerance for questions or critical inquiry.
• No meaningful financial disclosure regarding budget or expenses, such as an independently audited financial statement.
• Unreasonable fear about the outside world, such as impending catastrophe, evil conspiracies and persecutions.
• There is no legitimate reason to leave, former followers are always wrong in leaving, negative or even evil.
• Former members often relate the same stories of abuse and reflect a similar pattern of grievances.
• There are records, books, news articles, or broadcast reports that document the abuses of the group/leader.
• Followers feel they can never be "good enough".
• The group/leader is always right.
• The group/leader is the exclusive means of knowing "truth" or receiving validation, no other process of discovery is really acceptable or credible.
As we've all seen, when it comes to the warning signs and characteristics of a cult, Trump and his followers check most of the boxes.
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I'll stop calling Trump a Russian asset when he finally stands-up for America, and condemns Putin for engaging in cyber-espionage against America during the election. In other words, I'll be calling Trump a Russian asset for the rest of my life.
Trump, Kushner, Don Jr, and his other cohorts are Russian assets, willingly or unwillingly. They are all compromised. And they became compromised the moment they starting having secret meetings with Russian officials/agents, and not reporting it. They then lied about those meetings when asked, which only confirmed to the Russians that Trump and his cohorts were willing to protect them by lying to FBI and to the American people. To any Russian spy, that's a victory. The Russians were able to infiltrate and compromise Trump and his inner circle, by exploiting their hubris, their insatiable greed, naivety, lack of patriotism, and by exploiting Trump's malignant narcissism. Trump and his people presented themselves as easy targets
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“If there is one fact we really can prove, from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism can be a development, often a late development and very often indeed the end of societies that have been highly democratic. A despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
“When the Rule of Law disappears, we are ruled by the whims of men.”
― Tiffany Madison
“Whatever government is not a government of laws, is a despotism, let it be called what it may”
― Daniel Webste
“There’s no English equivalent for silovik. It doesn’t translate succinctly because to create something as Machiavellian as a silovik requires both the KGB and the GRU, and then a shift from communism to capitalism, followed by a gear-grinding reverse into despotism.”
― Tanya Thompson, Red Russia
“The actions of government, we are told, bear down only on imprudent souls who provoke them. The man who resigns himself and keeps silent is always safe. Reassured by this worthless and specious argument, we do not protest against the oppressors. Instead we find fault with the victims. Nobody knows how to be brave even prudentially. Everyone stays silent, keeping his head low in the self-deceiving hope of disarming the powers that be by his silence. People give despotism free access, flattering themselves they will be treated with consideration. Eyes to the ground, each person walks in silence the narrow path leading him safely to the tomb..”
― Benjamin Constant, Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
― Theodore Roosevelt
The Founding Fathers understanding of bribery was derived from English law, under which bribery was understood as an officeholder’s abuse of the power of an office to obtain a private benefit rather than for the public interest. This definition not only encompasses Trump’s conduct—it practically defines it.
Trump took 400 million in taxpayer dollars, which had been appropriated by Congress, and used it to bribe a foreign country into taking specific actions that would only benefit him personally.
The Founders placed articles of impeachment in the Constitution for the purpose of protecting our democracy. A democracy that Trump clearly has no respect for, and is trying to tear apart.
Article II, Section 4, says the president “shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."
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The sad reality is that Trump and republicans don't believe in democracy, our Constitution, or your right to vote, and they are terrified of American voters. Your right to vote is the biggest threat to them.
In March, Trump openly admitted that an increase in voting numbers would hurt his party, saying proposed reforms would result in “levels of voting, that if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
Trump and the GOP are obssessed with greed and absolute power. And the three biggest threats to them achieving those goals, are the Constitution, the free press, and the American voters. If Trump and the Republican party had their way, there would be no earlier voting or mail-in ballots. There would be only one day to vote, at one location per state, with only a 2 hour window to cast your vote.
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Republican campaign finance reports, which are, available to the public, show connections between a group of wealthy donors with ties to Russia and their political contributions to Trump and a number of top Republican leaders. And thanks to changes in campaign finance laws, the political contributions are legal. Bottom line, our campaign finance laws are now a threat to our country.
Len Blavatnik, is a dual U.S.-U.K. citizen and one of the largest donors to GOP political action committees in the 2015-16 election cycle. Blavatnik's family emigrated to the U.S. in the late '70s from the the Soviet Union and he returned to Russia when the Soviet Union began to collapse in the late '80s.
In 2015-16, Blavatnik's political contributions soared as he pumped $6.35 million into GOP political action committees, with millions of dollars going to top Republican leaders including Moscow Mitch, Rubio and Lindsey "Two-faced" Graham..
Oleg Deripaska is said to be one of Putin's favorite oligarchs, and he is founder and majority shareholder of Russia's Rusal, the second-largest aluminum company in the world. Blavatnik holds a stake in Rusal with a business partner.
Nearly 4% of Deripaska's stake in Rusal is owned by Putin's state-controlled bank, VTB, which is currently under U.S. sanctions. VTB was exposed in the Panama Papers in 2016 for facilitating the flow of billions of dollars to offshore companies linked to Putin.
We already know that Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, began collecting $10 million a year in 2006 from Deripaska to advance Putin's interests with Western governments. Deripaska's name turned up again in an email handed over to Mueller's team by Manafort's attorneys. In the email dated July 7, 2016, just two weeks before Trump accepted the Republican nomination, Manafort asked an overseas intermediary to pass a message on to Deripaska: "If he Deripaska needs private briefings, tell him we can accommodate."
Viktor Vekselberg is one of the 10 richest men in Russia. He and long-time business partner Blavatnik hold a 20.5 percent stake in Rusal. Vekselberg has connections to at least two Americans who made significant GOP campaign contributions during the last cycle.
Andrew Intrater, is Vekselberg's cousin. He is also chief executive of Columbus Nova, Renova's U.S. investment arm located in NY. in January 2017 he contributed $250,000 to Trump's Inaugural Committee. His six-figure gift bought him special access to a dinner billed as "an intimate policy discussion with select cabinet appointees,"
Simon Kukes is an oil magnate who has something in common with Intrater. From 1998 to 2003, he worked for Vekselberg and Blavatnik as chief executive of TNK. In 2016, Kukes contributed a total of $283,000, much of it to the Trump Victory Fund.
In total, Blavatnik, Intrater, and Kukes made $10.4 million in political contributions from the start of the 2015-16 election cycle through September 2017, and 99 percent of their contributions went to Republicans. The common denominator that connects the men is their association with Vekselberg.
Moscow Mitch knew from receiving intelligence briefings in 2016 that our electoral process was under attack by the Russians. Two weeks after the Dept of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint statement in October 2016 that the Russian government had directed the effort to interfere in our electoral process, Moscow Mitch's PAC accepted a $1 million donation from Blavatnik's AI-Altep Holdings. The PAC took another $1 million from Blavatnik's AI-Altep Holdings on March 30, 2017, just 10 days after Comey publicly testified before the House Intelligence Committee about Russia's interference in the election.
It's safe to say that Trump and the GOP have been bought and paid for with Russian money.
It's why repubicans are fighting so hard to defend him instead of the Constitution. It's also why Republicans have been repeating the exact same lies and propaganda of the Russian government and Russian security services like the GRU.
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What's so mind-boggling to me, is the fact that we have a sitting President, who isn't even trusted by his own people to testify under oath, because they know that he's incapable of telling the truth....about anything....EVER.
Trump isn't even trusted by his lawyers and the people closest to him, but yet the want the American people to trust him. Let that sink in for a moment.
This is the 3rd time that Trump has asked another foreign country to interfere in our elections. And if he gets away with it this time, he will absolutely do it AGAIN!!! Because a sociopath like Trump, with no impulse control, who doesn't know right from wrong, and believes he's impervious to consequences, is 100% incorrigible, and completely incapable of being corrected.
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U.S. intelligence officials with the National Center for Medical Intelligence issued a report in late November warning that a virus was taking root in China. Analysts concluded it could be a "cataclysmic event,” and the report was shared with the White House, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and the Defense Intelligence Agency. There were multiple briefings about the report throughout Dec, Jan, and Feb for the National Security Council, and the White House..
On Dec. 31, China publicly confirmed that dozens of people in Wuhan were being treated for pneumonia-like symptoms. Three days later, on Jan. 3, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said he first learned of the spread of the virus in China at a White House briefing attended by CDC and Prevention director Robert Redfield. Trump fired Alex Azar shortly there after because he knew too much.
Public-health experts have stated that Trump's early efforts to downplay the threat of the virus robbed the US of valuable time needed to prepare for what is now a pandemic — potentially costing thousands of lives...
You need a president who’s willing to hear bad news, willing to understand that they’re going to have to focus on something that they may have not intended to focus on. President trump clearly did not want to hear that bad news when he heard about the outbreak in coronavirus,”
--Ben Rhodes, Former Deputy National Security Adviser under President Obama..
Trump spent "two months of completely ignoring every bit of scientific advice," Dr. Ashish Jha, the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute stated in mid-March. "We've wasted two months. And this is not a disease where you're allowed to waste two months."
Jha, who received his doctorate in medicine from Harvard Medical school, criticized Trump for telling Americans that everything was "under control" when it was very clear to anybody paying attention that it was not under control."
"I don't use these words lightly, and it's incredibly painful for me to say it," he said, adding: "The cost of all of this is that tens of thousands of Americans are going to die unnecessarily." He went on to say: "It was wholly preventable, and not just preventable in hindsight — it was preventable in foresight. Everybody said this is how it was going to play out if they didn't act."
Trump said that COVID-19 “came out of nowhere” and “blindsided the world.” His comments left scientists, doctors, and national security experts in a state of disbelief. Experts had been warning about the next pandemic for years and criticized the Trump’s decision in 2018 to dismantle a National Security Council directorate at the White House, charged with preparing for WHEN, NOT if, another pandemic would hit the nation.
Trump’s elimination of the office suggested, along with his proposed budget cuts for the CDC, that he did not see or comprehend the threat of pandemics. Trump has defended his record, arguing, “I’m a "businessperson." I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them. When we need them, we can get them back very quickly.”
But experts argue that’s not how pandemic preparedness works, and that's definitely not how a virus works. “You build a fire department ahead of time,” Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security stated. “You don’t wait for a fire.”
“One year later I was mystified when the White House dissolved the office, leaving the country less prepared for pandemics like COVID-19,” Beth Cameron, the first director of the unit, wrote in an op-ed. She said the directorate was set up to be the “smoke alarm” and get ahead of emergencies and sound a warning at the earliest sign of fire — “all with the goal of avoiding a six-alarm fire.”
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"Saudi Arabia, I get along with all of them. They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million,” Trump told a crowd at an Alabama rally on Aug. 21, 2015. “Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.”
In 1991, as Trump was teetering on bankruptcy yet AGAIN, and scrambling to raise cash, he sold his 282-foot Trump yacht “Princess” to Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin-Talal for $20 million.
Four years later, the prince came to his rescue again, joining other investors in a $325 million deal for Trump’s money-losing Plaza Hotel....Which eventually went under anyway.
In 2001, Trump sold the entire 45th floor of the Trump World Tower across from the UN for $12 million, the biggest purchase in that building to that point, according to the brokerage site Streeteasy. The buyer: The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Since Trump took the oath of office, the Saudi government and lobbying groups for it have been lucrative customers for Trump’s hotels.
A public relations firm working for the kingdom spent nearly $270,000 on lodging at his Washington hotel through March of last year, according to filings to the Justice Department. A spokesman for the firm told The Wall Street Journal that the Trump hotel payments came as part of a Saudi-backed lobbying campaign against a bill that allowed Americans to sue foreign governments for responsibility in the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
Attorneys general for Maryland and the District of Columbia cited the payments by the Saudi lobbying firm as an example of foreign gifts to Trump that could violate the Constitution’s ban on such “emoluments” from foreign interests.
Congress is furious over Trump’s secret efforts to secure a nuclear energy deal with Saudi Arabia. Congress is rightfully furious when they discovered that the Saudis refused to accept limits preventing them from developing a nuclear weapon.
It was revealed that the Trump gave approval for companies to share certain nuclear energy technology with the kingdom without a broader nuclear deal in place.
House Democrats began investigating the administration’s nuclear talks with Saudi after the Oversight and Reform Committee announced in February it was launching a probe to “determine whether the actions being pursued by the Trump administration are in the national security interests of the United States or, rather, serve those who stand to gain financially as a result of this potential change in U.S. foreign policy.”
Energy Secretary Rick Perry approved seven authorizations that let U.S. companies share certain nuclear energy technology with Saudi Arabia.
lawmakers were outraged when they found out they were not told about the approvals, saying the secrecy violates the Atomic Energy Act, which requires that Congress be kept “fully and currently informed” of 123 agreement negotiations.
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A review of the public record reveals a clear and disturbing pattern: Trump owes much of his business success, and by extension his presidency, to a flow of highly suspicious money from Russia. Over the past three decades, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to Russian mobsters or oligarchs have owned, lived in, and even run criminal activities out of Trump Tower and other Trump properties...
Many used his apartments and casinos to launder untold millions in dirty money. Some ran a worldwide high-stakes gambling ring out of Trump Tower—in a unit directly below one owned by Trump. Others provided Trump with lucrative branding deals that required no investment on his part...
Taken together, the flow of money from Russia provided Trump with a crucial infusion of financing that helped rescue his empire from ruin, burnish his image, and launch his career in television and politics. Trump was 4 billion dollars in debt, and American banks had stopped loaning him money after multiple bankruptcies. Trump was financially ruined until the Russians bailed him out. "They saved his bacon,” says Kenneth McCallion, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Reagan administration who investigated ties between organized crime and Trump’s developments in the 1980s....
For two years, ending in 2013, the FBI had a court-approved warrant to eavesdrop on a sophisticated Russian organized crime money-laundering network that operated out of Trump Tower. In April 2013, a little more than two years before Trump rode the escalator to the ground floor of Trump Tower to kick off his presidential campaign, police burst into Unit 63A of the high-rise and rounded up 29 suspects in two gambling rings. The operation, which prosecutors called “the world’s largest sports book,” was run out of condos in Trump Tower—including the entire fifty-first floor of the building. In addition, unit 63A—a condo directly below one owned by Trump—served as the headquarters for a “sophisticated money-laundering scheme” that moved an estimated $100 million out of the former Soviet Union, through shell companies in Cyprus, and into investments in the United States.
The FBI investigation led to a federal grand jury indictment and arrest of at least 29 people, including one of the world’s most notorious Russian mafia bosses, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov. Known as the “Little Taiwanese,” he was the only target to slip away. Tokhtakhounov, who had been indicted a decade earlier for conspiring to fix the ice-skating competition at the 2002 Winter Olympics, was the only suspect to elude arrest during the FBI raid on Trump Tower. Today, he remains a fugitive from American justice.
Tokhtakhounov's whereabouts remained unknown for the next seven months after the raid on Trump Tower. The Russian crime boss fell off the radar of Interpol, which had issued a red alert. Then, in November 2013, he suddenly appeared live on international television—sitting in the audience at the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Tokhtakhounov was in the VIP section, just a few seats away from the pageant owner, Donald Trump.
“He is a major player,” said Mike Gaeta, the agent who led the 2013 FBI investigation of Tokhtakhounov and his alleged mafia money-laundering and gambling ring, in a 2014 interview with ABC News.
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Only an illiterate imbecilic like Trump would believe that going back to having NO inspectors, cameras, check marks, and inspections, is better than the Iran deal. Pulling out of the Iran deal put us back to where we were before, which is exactly where we are today, which is totally blind to what's going on in Iran and NK.
Obama was able to bring 5 countries together, and secure a deal with Iran. It was something we had never had before, and the deal was working.
In July 2015, Iran had almost 20,000 centrifuges. Under the Iran deal--JCPOA, it was limited to installing no more than 5,060 of the oldest and least efficient centrifuges at Natanz until 2026. Iran's uranium stockpile was reduced by 98% to 300kg (660lbs), a figure that must not be exceeded until 2031. It must also keep the stockpile's level of enrichment at 3.67%.
By January 2016, Iran had drastically reduced the number of centrifuges installed at Natanz and Fordo. Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the global nuclear watchdog, continuously monitored Iran's declared nuclear sites and also verified that no fissile material is moved covertly to a secret location to build a bomb. Iran also agreed to implement the Additional Protocol to their IAEA Safeguards Agreement, which allowed inspectors to access any site anywhere in the country they deem suspicious.
But the best part about it is that Obama didn't have to praise the Ayatollahs or the Iranian leadership. He didn’t demean himself, or the office of the presidency, by meeting with them, which would have only given them the perception of being on the same footing as a US President. Trump on the other hand, disgraced himself, and the office of the presidency, by meeting with the most despotic, and maniacal dictator on the planet....not once, but twice. He then proceeded to compliment him, and wax poetically about how he and Kim Jung Un fell in love after exchanging letters. And what does Trump have to show for disgracing himself and his presidency? Nothing....other than heightened tensions with Iran and NK. Trump doesn't solve problems, he creates them..
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Trump: "I will nevet take responsibility for anything. People are acting as if I'm a REAL president, and a real leader. I'm the same guy who betrayed America in front of the entire world in Helsinki. I'm nothing more than a fraud, who with the help of Putin, managed to con my way into the Oval Office. Plus most people knew I was fundamentally unfit intellectually, morally, temperamentally, emotionally, and psychologically to be president. Someone as mentally unstable and divorced from reality as I clearly am, should have NEVER been allowed anywhere near the White House..
So again, don't blame me, blame the people who were dumb enough to vote for me. Blame republicans in Congress who aided, abetted, and pardoned my crimes. Blame people like Lindsey Graham and Moscow Mitch. They both know exactly who and what I am, but yet they continue to defend me. So you see, I'm the same person that I've always been, an irredeemable con-man and a sociopath, but you already knew that."
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