It was apparent within the first minutes of the… eh… event last night that T had zero intention of playing by any rules that ordinary, regular rational people would attempt to follow in good faith back in The Before Times (which were… when… exactly? like when Abe Lincoln debated Stephen Douglas maybe?).
He was all about undermining, derailing, denying, accusing, and outright lying.
In case anyone is interested in reading “the corrected transcript,” it appears that CNN has posted it here:
The media feeds off of drama and uncertainty; it’s like oxygen to their fire. When the front pages are filled with swirling hypotheticals, that’s not really news. And when lies go unchallenged, that’s not really journalism.
If Trump wins, it will be because the media has failed in its most basic job: to keep the people informed.
Absolutely. What bothers me though is that if Trump wins then at least some of them (those that aren’t willing to fight a US President for real) stand to make a lot more money by keeping people disinformed.
At this point anyone still pretending this is a normal “conservative” candidate is complicit.
It really is a moral hazard when the media is operating as a for-profit business, especially because chaos is just so damn profitable for them. It’s rats hooked up to a dopamine button.
It’s not about balance or even the appearance of balance. It’s tipping the scales toward whatever produces the most chaos. And I don’t have a solution. Social media and AI are engines making it all worse, and society has no idea how to handle it. Most of society doesn’t even see it happening.
Humanity has made real progress in the last half century and we can continue to do so, but we cannot do it while sleepwalking. We need clarity on what is happening. And that is getting harder to find.
Much is discussed, please be aware it’s not just all about the tagline on the video frontispiece.
ETA: the panel does point out that we all know who T is, and that Biden campaign needs to talk about Project 2025 and what T will do to the U.S. if given the opportunity. Mehdi Hasan was spot-on on a lot here.
It’s probably a good idea to bring up Project 2025, but only to get a response from Trump about it. It’s been out there for a little while, and he’s said nothing about it, giving him plausible deniability to people somehow on the fence about him. There just needs to be a soundbyte from him speaking one way or another about it, either dissuading swing voters or disappointing his camp. But talking about it like it’s Trump’s plan beforehand just makes Biden and his supporters sound like conspiracy theorists.
There’s plenty of documentation (eh “receipts” as the youngsters say these days) generated by the Heritage Foundation and they even have a web site, conveniently enough:
So the MAGA plan is all out in the open…
… and nope, it ain’t some random conspiracy theory. Whether Team Biden “sounds” like credulous nut jobs or not, it’s pointless for them to worry about how they will sound. Ring the freakin’ bell, ring all the bells, the barbarians are at the gate.
Every single objective of the anti-human, anti-life-on-Planet-Earth MAGA agenda needs to be unpacked, repudiated, brought into the light of day, whether the words “Project 2025” get mentioned per se or not.
Trump’s campaign trail claims that he never did business in Russia were swiftly undermined by a mountain of evidence, much of which was well known and widely reported, that he pursued several business deals in Russia over the last three decades.
As early as his 1987 Art of the Deal book, Trump expressed dreams of “building a large luxury hotel across the street from the Kremlin in partnership with the Soviet government.”
Trump closed his first Russia-based deal in 1996, announcing a plan to invest $250 million in Russian real estate projects, including a “super-luxury residential tower.” In the mid-2000s, Trump explored building a luxury tower with his business partner Felix Sater. In 2008, Donald Trump Jr. reportedly spoke openly about the high number of Russian businessmen invested in Trump’s New York properties, but detailed the difficulty of developing a property in Russia, calling it a “scary place.”
Trump’s proposed deals ultimately fell through. But the Trump Organization wasn’t discouraged. In 2013, Trump announced at the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow that he was in talks with Russian companies to build a skyscraper.
“TRUMP TOWER-MOSCOW is next,” Trump tweeted following the event.
That effort began to materialize during Trump’s presidential run, according to special counsel Robert Mueller’s 448-page report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Sater and Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen communicated with Russian officials about the project, and in November 2015 they sent a letter of intent with a Moscow investor laying out details of the multi-million dollar deal.
The Trump Organization reportedly planned to give a $50 million penthouse at Trump Tower Moscow to Russian President Vladimir Putin as Trump’s businesses negotiated the luxury real estate development around the 2016 election.
Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, said plans for the Trump Tower in Moscow were “active” into November 2016.
Trump repeatedly denied exploring a project in Moscow, as did Cohen, who pleaded guilty in November 2018 to lying to Congress.
Though he was never able to complete a building in Russia, Trump has profited from wealthy Russian businessmen with ties to the authoritarian government. Reuters reported in 2017 that members of the Russian elite had invested nearly $100 million in Trump-branded properties in Florida.
Additionally, Trump sold a Palm Beach property in 2008 to Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95 million, more than twice the roughly $41 million he for which purchased it just four years earlier, according to a Panama Papers filing. The Rybolovlevs reportedly never lived at the estate. During a July 2017 press conference in which he urged Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s missing emails, Trump identified the sale as the only deal with Russian individuals he had made.
In 2017, golf writer James Dodson told Boston radio station WBUR that Eric Trump talked about the Trump Organizations’ source of funding for its golf courses during a 2013 interview at Trump’s Charlotte course. Following an inquiry about which banks were funding golf courses during the recession, Eric Trump reportedly told Dodson “Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.” Eric Trump later denied telling Dodson this, calling it “fake news.”
Trump’s lengthy history with influential Russian businessmen and politicians during his time as a private citizen came under intense scrutiny during the 2016 election as Russian actors attempted to help Trump win.
Mueller’s report details attempts from Russian actors to infiltrate the Trump campaign, representing brazen attempts at foreign influence. Highlighting this kind of direct influence is the 2016 Trump Tower meeting in which Russian actors directly appealed, unsuccessfully, to the Trump campaign to oppose Putin’s least favorite bill, the Magnitsky Act.
Russian actors continued to discuss sanctions as the Trump campaign became the Trump transition team. Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak spoke with Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn about the penalties invoked by the Obama administration, a conversation about which Flynn lied to the FBI. The Justice Department in May 2019 asked that Flynn’s wiretapped conversation with Kislyak remain confidential.
Russian actors have also pursued more traditional forms of foreign influence. After the Trump administration imposed sanctionson businesses owned by Putin ally Oleg Deripaska, the chairman of one of Deripaska’s groups hired a former senator to lobby for a deal to have sanctions removed. In January 2019, the Trump administration lifted the sanctions on some of Deripaska’s companies after the company underwent an ownership shakeup. Millions of dollars in Deripaska’s shares would be transferred to his children under the deal.
The Russian government granted Trump six trademarks in 2016. Four of the Russian trademarks were approved for renewal on Nov. 8, 2016, the day after Trump’s election, including a trademark for Trump Tower.
This, exactly. News coverage is wall to wall “Biden should just resign like not just from the race but just resign the office of president right now.” I’m sitting here like FFS he did a bad job at a debate that wasn’t even a debate as if any of these talking heads would have done a better job. Somehow I highly doubt it.
Meanwhile almost nobody is talking about all the terrifying things and complete fiction Trump spun for the entire debate beyond passing mention. “Biden is an embarrassment to the world and the whole universe is laughing at us and he needs to just quit his job and never show his face again, oh and Trump lied a few times but Biden did sooo bad and he’s old.”
There are so many ways to deal with a president dropping dead in office. Laws exist to cope.
I cannot understand how obstinately stupid one would have to be not to see that Trump is higher risk to the economy and the safety of each and every one of us than the old guy whose worst offence to this nation is most likely to be a fucking ill-timed heart attack.
