Jiggyfly
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My thoughts exactly.
2016 POTUS Election Thread
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Jiggyfly
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Jiggyfly
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Russian diplomat: Kremlin was in touch with Team Trump during race
By Yaron Steinbuch November 10, 2016 | 1:41pm | Updated
The Russian government was in touch with members of Donald Trump’s political team during the presidential race, a senior Russian diplomat said Thursday — a disclosure that could reignite questions about the Kremlin’s role in the US elections.
President-elect Trump, who has praised Russian President Vladimir Putin as a strong leader, was accused by defeated Democratic contender Hillary Clinton of being Moscow’s puppet.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said the Kremlin had been in touch with The Donald’s team, Reuters reported Thursday.
“There were contacts,” the Russian Interfax news agency cited Ryabkov as saying. “We are doing this and have been doing this during the election campaign.”
He also said Russia had “sporadic” contact with Clinton’s campaign — though it was “not always productive.”
“Obviously, we know most of the people from (Trump’s) entourage. Those people have always been in the limelight in the United States and have occupied high-ranking positions,” he said without providing names.
“I cannot say that all of them, but quite a few have been staying in touch with Russian representatives. We have just begun to consider ways of building dialogue with the future Donald Trump administration and channels we will be using for those purposes,” he said.
Trump has shot down suggestions that he had ties to Moscow during his bruising campaign for the White House.
His campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks on Thursday denied there were interactions between Russia and the Trump team before Tuesday’s election.
“The campaign had no contact with Russian officials,” she told the Washington Post in an email.
Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told Bloomberg News that Russian embassy staff met with members of Trump’s campaign — which she described as “normal practice.”
She later provided a revised interpretation of Ryabkov’s remarks, saying he was likely referring to meetings between Russian diplomats and US officials who supported Trump — rather than campaign staffers, the Washington Post reported.
The FBI has opened a preliminary inquiry into allegations that Trump or his associates might have had questionable dealings in Russia, but found no evidence to warrant opening a full probe, sources told Reuters.
The US government has blamed Russian hackers for cyberattacks on Democratic Party organizations and for infiltrating the email account of Clinton’s campaign chief, John Podesta.
The emails were released by WikiLeaks during the final weeks of the presidential campaign in what Clinton backers said was an effort to derail her White House bid.
The Russian parliament cheered Wednesday when it heard that Trump had been elected. Putin told foreign ambassadors he was ready for better ties with Washington, with which his country has been at odds over Syria, Ukraine and NATO.
By Yaron Steinbuch November 10, 2016 | 1:41pm | Updated
The Russian government was in touch with members of Donald Trump’s political team during the presidential race, a senior Russian diplomat said Thursday — a disclosure that could reignite questions about the Kremlin’s role in the US elections.
President-elect Trump, who has praised Russian President Vladimir Putin as a strong leader, was accused by defeated Democratic contender Hillary Clinton of being Moscow’s puppet.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said the Kremlin had been in touch with The Donald’s team, Reuters reported Thursday.
“There were contacts,” the Russian Interfax news agency cited Ryabkov as saying. “We are doing this and have been doing this during the election campaign.”
He also said Russia had “sporadic” contact with Clinton’s campaign — though it was “not always productive.”
“Obviously, we know most of the people from (Trump’s) entourage. Those people have always been in the limelight in the United States and have occupied high-ranking positions,” he said without providing names.
“I cannot say that all of them, but quite a few have been staying in touch with Russian representatives. We have just begun to consider ways of building dialogue with the future Donald Trump administration and channels we will be using for those purposes,” he said.
Trump has shot down suggestions that he had ties to Moscow during his bruising campaign for the White House.
His campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks on Thursday denied there were interactions between Russia and the Trump team before Tuesday’s election.
“The campaign had no contact with Russian officials,” she told the Washington Post in an email.
Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told Bloomberg News that Russian embassy staff met with members of Trump’s campaign — which she described as “normal practice.”
She later provided a revised interpretation of Ryabkov’s remarks, saying he was likely referring to meetings between Russian diplomats and US officials who supported Trump — rather than campaign staffers, the Washington Post reported.
The FBI has opened a preliminary inquiry into allegations that Trump or his associates might have had questionable dealings in Russia, but found no evidence to warrant opening a full probe, sources told Reuters.
The US government has blamed Russian hackers for cyberattacks on Democratic Party organizations and for infiltrating the email account of Clinton’s campaign chief, John Podesta.
The emails were released by WikiLeaks during the final weeks of the presidential campaign in what Clinton backers said was an effort to derail her White House bid.
The Russian parliament cheered Wednesday when it heard that Trump had been elected. Putin told foreign ambassadors he was ready for better ties with Washington, with which his country has been at odds over Syria, Ukraine and NATO.
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Yeah, because I'm sure that's what Trump said.
townsend
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townsend
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I'm a weird spot of having the relief of not gaining to support Hillary anymore, and the catharsis of being able to demand heads at the DNC.
But also have to fight off bouts of nausea when I realize Donald Trump will have access to nuclear launch codes and state secrets, and hear climate deniers are in charge of the EPA, and that names like Steve Bannon are being floated for chief of staff.
It's like getting to see the terrible head coach of your team get fired after a loss, but your team was also playing for the fate of the world.
Kbrown
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I will say that I am willing to give him a chance. I share some of his Buchananite positions. I just never have believed that he is sincere. Hopefully he proves me wrong.
I am very glad for the death of the Clinton dynasty and its open borders, open war positions. We'll see what comes of Chelsea.
Kbrown
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BipolarFuk
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If you voted for Trump because he’s ‘anti-establishment,’ guess what: You got conned
If you voted for Trump because he’s ‘anti-establishment,’ guess what: You got conned
The greatest trick Donald Trump pulled was convincing voters he’d be “anti-establishment.”
Well, maybe not the greatest trick. But in a campaign full of cons, it has to rank close to the top. This was near the heart of Trump’s appeal to the disaffected and disempowered: Send me to Washington, and that “establishment” you’ve been hearing so much about? We’ll blow it up, send it packing, punch it right in the face, and when it’s over the government will finally be working for you again. And the people who voted for Trump bought it. After all, he’s no politician, right? He’s an outsider, a glass-breaker, a guy who can cut out the bull and get things done. Right?
But the idea that he would do this was based on a profound misunderstanding of what the establishment actually is, and who Donald Trump is.
Here’s a report on Trump’s transition from Eric Lipton of the New York Times:
President-elect Donald J. Trump, who campaigned against the corrupt power of special interests, is filling his transition team with some of the very sort of people who he has complained have too much clout in Washington: corporate consultants and lobbyists…
Mr. Trump was swept to power in large part by white working-class voters who responded to his vow to restore the voices of forgotten people, ones drowned out by big business and Wall Street. But in his transition to power, some of the most prominent voices will be those of advisers who come from the same industries for which they are being asked to help set the regulatory groundwork.
An organizational chart of Trump’s transition team shows it to be crawling with corporate lobbyists, representing such clients as Altria, Visa, Coca-Cola, General Electric, Verizon, HSBC, Pfizer, Dow Chemical, and Duke Energy. And K Street is positively salivating over all the new opportunities they’ll have to deliver goodies to their clients in the Trump era. Who could possibly have predicted such a thing?
The answer is, anyone who was paying attention. Look at the people Trump is considering for his Cabinet, and you won’t find any outside-the-box thinkers burning to work for the little guy. It’s a collection of Republican politicians and corporate plutocrats — not much different from who you’d find in any Republican administration.
And it isn’t just personnel. What are the priorities Trump and the Republican Congress will be pursuing right out of the gate? There’s the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, of course. “Take that, establishment!”, 20 million people can say when they lose their health coverage. Next on the list is that eternal Republican priority, cutting taxes. If you’re waiting for your fat rebate from the government once the establishment has been sent packing, you’re in for a shock. It won’t actually be Trump’s plan precisely that will pass Congress and he’ll sign, it will be some combination of what he wanted and what congressional Republicans want. But the two share a driving principle in common, and you may want to sit down while I tell you that helping regular folks is most definitely not it.
No, their commitment is to be of service to that most oppressed and forgotten group of Americans, the wealthy. Trump’s tax plan would give 47 percent of its benefits to the richest one percent of taxpayers. Paul Ryan’s tax plan is even purer — it gives 76 percent of its cuts to the richest one percent in its first year, and by 2025 would feed 99.6 percent of its benefits to the top 1 percent.
Once that’s accomplished, Trump and the Republicans plan to either gut or completely repeal the Dodd-Frank financial regulations, the greatest wish of Wall Street bankers. Can you feel the anti-establishment wind blowing?
So what’s going on here? Most plainly, the voters thinking that Trump would vanquish the establishment were just marks for a con, like those who lost their life savings at Trump University. But it was made possible by the vagueness of the idea of the “establishment” — and some related ideas — and the way people could pour all their dissatisfaction into it and elect they guy promising to destroy it when he had no intention of doing anything of the sort.
You see, in Washington we think of the establishment as something specific to this city: the people who hold certain kinds of institutional positions and certain kinds of ideas about what should be done. We tend to think that, say, internal arguments between factions of the Republican Party represent a genuine threat to the establishment.
But for most voters it’s much bigger than that, and this is what Donald Trump recognized. By now we should understand that while Trump is an ignorant buffoon in some ways and an outright moron in others, he’s also a savant of hatred and resentment. He not only identifies the ugliest feelings that portions of the electorate have — that’s the easy part, and all of his primary opponents knew equally well what those feelings were — he finds just the right way to reach in and goose them. And he grasped that people were ready to sign on with an attack on all sectors of established power, in Washington or anywhere else.
That attack was politically potent because to those who heard it, it was about much more than politics. They didn’t really care whether the House Majority Whip is one guy or a different guy. What Trump tapped into was their sense of powerlessness, that unseen forces are pulling the strings and manipulating “the system” for their own benefit. That “system” encompasses everything from politics to the economy to their local schools to culture. The system made that factory leave town. The system lets immigrants come in and speak a language other than English. Everywhere you look you’re being held down by the system.
So when Trump complained that anything that didn’t go his way meant the system was “rigged” against him, they nodded in agreement and said, “Yep, it’s rigged against me, too.” And of course, the horror of the establishment (both Democratic and Republican) at Trump only reinforced the belief that once he was elected he’d change everything.
Now to be clear, the fact that in some ways — hiring lobbyists, cutting taxes for the wealthy, gutting regulations — Trump is going to be little different from any other Republican president doesn’t mean that he isn’t uniquely dangerous. He’s reckless, impulsive, vindictive, hateful, and authoritarian, and his presidency is going to be somewhere between disastrous and cataclysmic, likely in ways we can’t even imagine yet.
But one thing it will not be is a threat to the establishment, or the system, or whatever you want to call it. The wealthy and powerful will have more wealth and power when he’s done, not less. There’s a lot that Trump will upend, but if you’re a little guy who thinks Trump was going to upend things on your behalf or in order to serve your interests, guess what: you got suckered.
If you voted for Trump because he’s ‘anti-establishment,’ guess what: You got conned
The greatest trick Donald Trump pulled was convincing voters he’d be “anti-establishment.”
Well, maybe not the greatest trick. But in a campaign full of cons, it has to rank close to the top. This was near the heart of Trump’s appeal to the disaffected and disempowered: Send me to Washington, and that “establishment” you’ve been hearing so much about? We’ll blow it up, send it packing, punch it right in the face, and when it’s over the government will finally be working for you again. And the people who voted for Trump bought it. After all, he’s no politician, right? He’s an outsider, a glass-breaker, a guy who can cut out the bull and get things done. Right?
But the idea that he would do this was based on a profound misunderstanding of what the establishment actually is, and who Donald Trump is.
Here’s a report on Trump’s transition from Eric Lipton of the New York Times:
President-elect Donald J. Trump, who campaigned against the corrupt power of special interests, is filling his transition team with some of the very sort of people who he has complained have too much clout in Washington: corporate consultants and lobbyists…
Mr. Trump was swept to power in large part by white working-class voters who responded to his vow to restore the voices of forgotten people, ones drowned out by big business and Wall Street. But in his transition to power, some of the most prominent voices will be those of advisers who come from the same industries for which they are being asked to help set the regulatory groundwork.
An organizational chart of Trump’s transition team shows it to be crawling with corporate lobbyists, representing such clients as Altria, Visa, Coca-Cola, General Electric, Verizon, HSBC, Pfizer, Dow Chemical, and Duke Energy. And K Street is positively salivating over all the new opportunities they’ll have to deliver goodies to their clients in the Trump era. Who could possibly have predicted such a thing?
The answer is, anyone who was paying attention. Look at the people Trump is considering for his Cabinet, and you won’t find any outside-the-box thinkers burning to work for the little guy. It’s a collection of Republican politicians and corporate plutocrats — not much different from who you’d find in any Republican administration.
And it isn’t just personnel. What are the priorities Trump and the Republican Congress will be pursuing right out of the gate? There’s the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, of course. “Take that, establishment!”, 20 million people can say when they lose their health coverage. Next on the list is that eternal Republican priority, cutting taxes. If you’re waiting for your fat rebate from the government once the establishment has been sent packing, you’re in for a shock. It won’t actually be Trump’s plan precisely that will pass Congress and he’ll sign, it will be some combination of what he wanted and what congressional Republicans want. But the two share a driving principle in common, and you may want to sit down while I tell you that helping regular folks is most definitely not it.
No, their commitment is to be of service to that most oppressed and forgotten group of Americans, the wealthy. Trump’s tax plan would give 47 percent of its benefits to the richest one percent of taxpayers. Paul Ryan’s tax plan is even purer — it gives 76 percent of its cuts to the richest one percent in its first year, and by 2025 would feed 99.6 percent of its benefits to the top 1 percent.
Once that’s accomplished, Trump and the Republicans plan to either gut or completely repeal the Dodd-Frank financial regulations, the greatest wish of Wall Street bankers. Can you feel the anti-establishment wind blowing?
So what’s going on here? Most plainly, the voters thinking that Trump would vanquish the establishment were just marks for a con, like those who lost their life savings at Trump University. But it was made possible by the vagueness of the idea of the “establishment” — and some related ideas — and the way people could pour all their dissatisfaction into it and elect they guy promising to destroy it when he had no intention of doing anything of the sort.
You see, in Washington we think of the establishment as something specific to this city: the people who hold certain kinds of institutional positions and certain kinds of ideas about what should be done. We tend to think that, say, internal arguments between factions of the Republican Party represent a genuine threat to the establishment.
But for most voters it’s much bigger than that, and this is what Donald Trump recognized. By now we should understand that while Trump is an ignorant buffoon in some ways and an outright moron in others, he’s also a savant of hatred and resentment. He not only identifies the ugliest feelings that portions of the electorate have — that’s the easy part, and all of his primary opponents knew equally well what those feelings were — he finds just the right way to reach in and goose them. And he grasped that people were ready to sign on with an attack on all sectors of established power, in Washington or anywhere else.
That attack was politically potent because to those who heard it, it was about much more than politics. They didn’t really care whether the House Majority Whip is one guy or a different guy. What Trump tapped into was their sense of powerlessness, that unseen forces are pulling the strings and manipulating “the system” for their own benefit. That “system” encompasses everything from politics to the economy to their local schools to culture. The system made that factory leave town. The system lets immigrants come in and speak a language other than English. Everywhere you look you’re being held down by the system.
So when Trump complained that anything that didn’t go his way meant the system was “rigged” against him, they nodded in agreement and said, “Yep, it’s rigged against me, too.” And of course, the horror of the establishment (both Democratic and Republican) at Trump only reinforced the belief that once he was elected he’d change everything.
Now to be clear, the fact that in some ways — hiring lobbyists, cutting taxes for the wealthy, gutting regulations — Trump is going to be little different from any other Republican president doesn’t mean that he isn’t uniquely dangerous. He’s reckless, impulsive, vindictive, hateful, and authoritarian, and his presidency is going to be somewhere between disastrous and cataclysmic, likely in ways we can’t even imagine yet.
But one thing it will not be is a threat to the establishment, or the system, or whatever you want to call it. The wealthy and powerful will have more wealth and power when he’s done, not less. There’s a lot that Trump will upend, but if you’re a little guy who thinks Trump was going to upend things on your behalf or in order to serve your interests, guess what: you got suckered.
L.T. Fan
I'm Easy If You Are
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Good catch.
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My point is that's a little creative interpretation. Trump wants to continue to have rallies. I'm sure that much is true. The Times is the one claiming his rational for it is purely narcissistic.
And no I don't think it's weird for Trump to want to continue to have rallies. I actually think it would be great to have a president that average Joe can actually have a chance to see or meet.
Last edited:
L.T. Fan
I'm Easy If You Are
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The election is over. How long are you going to continue with the " bad boy Trump" stuff?
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Seems to be a lot of people jumping down Trumps throat before he even does anything.
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True, but for someone like Trump, doesn't he have to surround himself with people that have some experience, at least for now? I mean how the hell else is he supposed to know how things work?
Jiggyfly
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Sounds familiar.
He lost the popular vote by over 200,000 so yeah there will be a lot dissent.
Not questioning the fairness just saying he has a lot of doubters.
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It's fine to doubt. But shit, might as well wait until he actually does something wrong to bitch. I guess people just enjoy bitching so much it doesn't matter if they have any good rational for it. I can't ever remember people being this bad after an election. And lets face it, every election ends with nearly half the country not getting their guy.
L.T. Fan
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Kinda like having more yards in a game but coming up short on the scoreboard. Guess who won the game.
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