Donald Trump Presidency-Day One

[filghy2]

YES. We owe all that money to the rich people, and you can bet they get paid with interest. They own us.

No. most of it's owned by Social Security and other government Trust Funds, foreign governments and investors and the Federal Reserve. Apart from the bit that's owed to foreigners you mostly owe it to yourself (indirectly). https://www.thebalance.com/who-owns-...l-debt-3306124

Whether the debt is a problem depends on what it is used for. Obviously it was a bad idea to blow out the debt for tax cuts to the rich, but borrowing for something with future benefits (like infrastructure and education) might be no bad thing. If the next Democrat administration decided that it couldn't afford to spend on things like that because of the debt it would be doing exactly what the Republicans wanted.

[buttslinger]

No.....

Let's borrow 22 trillion more from ourselves and everyone will be a millionaire!

[Stevie.Thomas]

But if we are all millionaires then the bracket will be moved and we would all be back to were we are now

[buttslinger]

But if we are all millionaires then the bracket will be moved and we would all be back to were we are now

True. Let's kill all the millionaires and take their stuff. Trump can declare another Emergency Action.
Jeez, this waiting around for Mueller is gnawing at my sense of humor. Would it be too much to ask to slap the cuffs on Don Jr or Ivanka???? The Kellyanne Conway marriage is at stake!!!
I want to hear the sound of laughter again. From John McCain's coffin. Too soon?

I've got a bad feeling Trump already knows what's in the report and he cheated the hangman, again. I hope I'm wrong, again.

[filghy2]

According to recent poll, 78% of Republican Fox News viewers believe that Trump has achieved more than any other president in US history. A country is in serious trouble when a large chunk of the population is this deluded.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/poll-7...-ever?ref=home

[Stavros]

Deluded is only part of the problem--

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said it is "possible" that President Donald Trump was sent by God to save Israel from Iran.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-47670717

[buttslinger]

Well, gee whiz Mr President, it looks like I was all wrong about you.....
HA HA HA HA HA!!
I ain't over just because the fat boy Barr sings, he's practically one of Trump's legal team. Four pages???
Let's go, release the Mueller Report and lets find out the facts.

[filghy2]

If Trump was sent by God then maybe God reached down and hid critical evidence from Mueller.

We can't know whether Barr is telling the full story unless the full report is released, but we shouldn't be entirely surprised by the reported conclusions. Mueller is a very 'by the book' guy so he always going to be careful about what he said and not make recommendations unless he was sure the evidence could support them beyond reasonable doubt.

One obvious question is what was the campaign of vilification against Mueller all about if there was nothing to it? If the "witch-hunt" has now delivered a "total and complete exoneration" then they must be very incompetent witch-hunters.

[Stavros]

What do we know so far? Not a lot.

1) The Muelller Report may be judged by what it does not say rather than what it does, by the issues that it did not investigate if they were deemed to be outside the scope of the enquiry.

2) From the start, I believe there was a belief that the Office of the Presidency should be protected, in the sense that it was not just about the candidate who became President, but the potential damage that could be caused to pubic confidence in the Presidency if one man and his team were found to have acted against the law. It would also have challenged the Justice Department to either confirm the convention that sitting Presidents cannot be prosecuted, or overturn that convention to do just that - but with the same standard as applied to other cases: will this one stand up in court and secure a conviction? There may be a lot of evidence that the campaign appeared to cross the line of legality, but is that enough?

3) From the above: when the FBI reaised the Russians were hacking the US and that there were 'links' between the Republican campaign and the Russians, a public investigation with arrests would been presented as an interference in the election, so the investigation continued without publicity. When Barack Obama met his successor in the Oval Office in November 2016 he told him that the evidence the FBI had suggested Michael Flynn should not be given a job in the government, alerting BS45 to the existence of a substantial enquiry, and out of spite, because he hates Obama, BS45 did the opposite even if Flynn was the first high profile casualty of his grubby administration.

4) Again, from the start, BS45 has been able to present this as a campaign against him and the people who voted for him, and he will exact his revenge because he knows no other way of living, other than to humiliate, insult and abuse Americans who don't like him, but it remains to be seen if he can actually have any of 'them' arrested, tried and convicted, though he will maintain his campaign of hate to the end of his life.

5) If it is the case that Bs45 has 'got away with it', this is another tremendous victory for the Russians and their campaigns of interference. We may now never know what role Cambridge Analytica played in the 2016 campaign, if Aaron Banks was given a USB stick in one of his many meetings with the Russian Ambassador to the UK, a stick he gave to Nigel Farage that was given by him to Wikileaks commisar in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London -or maybe there is something in the Report that has yet to see the light of day.

6) Most serious of all, this is not just a triumph for Russia and cybercrime, this President is now emboldened to do things he was shy about before. Having already indicated his desire to smash to pieces the international order that was created in 1945, this man sees no limits to American power, and must now want to be the second American President to use nuclear weapons, in his case, to prove that it can be done again, regardless of the loss of life and long term damage caused.
He loves to destroy, it is his revenge on all those who said he was a shmuck from Queens who could never be President.
The only question is, who will be the victim of this semi-literate lunatic? Iran is in the frame right now, hated by his lovely dollar friends in the 9/11 Kingdom, the 'in-our-pocket' Gulf Sultans, and Israel, though so far Israel's intelligent Generals have succeeded in preventing Netanyahu from attacking Iran -and we won't know for a while if this corrupt little creep will be re-elected Prime Minister. One can only hope for the sake of those not yet dead it doesn't happen.

it is now time for the Democrats to take control of the process, or lose everything. Are they up to it?

[broncofan]

Mueller is a very 'by the book' guy so he always going to be careful about what he said and not make recommendations unless he was sure the evidence could support them beyond reasonable doubt.

One obvious question is what was the campaign of vilification against Mueller all about if there was nothing to it? If the "witch-hunt" has now delivered a "total and complete exoneration" then they must be very incompetent witch-hunters.

I agree with you completely. The answer to your question goes to the heart of why Trump is unfit for office. He wasn't sure whether the investigation would reveal minor improprieties on his part or whether it would incriminate his family members so he felt he had to call it a witch-hunt. When the investigation didn't reveal anything too damaging for him to accept, he can say it exonerates him and Mueller's word is good.

But he did obstruct justice. What were all of his fulminations on twitter and behind the scenes about if not to corrupt the process? Why did he fire Comey and threaten to fire Sessions and Rosenstein if not because they would not serve his own personal interests? The problem is that Democrats set the bar so high by insisting he must be a traitor or an agent of Russia, that simply having no respect for the rule of law seems trivial. At the beginning of this, I said I wasn't sure whether his behavior was consistent with someone who is guilty of something or simply of someone who cannot accept scrutiny. If it turns out it's the latter, that's no less damning.

Now we sit and wait to see if Mueller has handed off crimes that are outside his mandate to state prosecutors. Either way, it is time for Democrats to mostly move on. Impeachment is a political process anyway. There was an investigation conducted by an honest man who has indicted those he saw fit to indict and there may be investigations that branch off of this one, but 2020 approaches.