Trump is a Threat to National Security

[_Kevin Graham]

There should be zero doubt in the mind of any sane person that the President of the United States has been compromised.

NBC's Kristen Welker: "Mr. President, did you tell [Putin] not to meddle in the next election?"

Trump: "Excuse me, I'm talking. I'm answering his question. You are very rude."

Trump, pressed again, says he didn't discuss it with Putin.

So after a two year investigation that revealed a widespread Russian attack on our elections, directed by the top government officials, our President of the United States, the guy who is supposed to protect Americans and be a leader, calls up the culprit to say not a damn word about it. They spoke for over an hour, and instead of talking about Russian attacks that are still ongoing, he goes on gossiping about FOX News conspiracies and then spits in the face of his own advisers again by saying Putin has no interest in getting involved in Venezuela, contrary to what our US intelligence has been telling him.

Dare I say that if President Obama has done anything remotely similar to this the people cheering Trump today would be marching on Capitol hill with loaded rifles. Republican supporters of Trump cannot claim to be patriotic anymore. And that's the irony here because part of their shtick is to insist Democrats aren't real Americans.

This is just damned insane. Even FOX News acknowledges the sophisticated and widespread Russian attacks but the President keeps calling it a hoax! He has never once acknowledged the threat even exists. This is our leader?

Now here's the part where bach and subgenius derail with "look at the economy though." Yeah, you should probably thank Obama.

[_Chap]

This is just ____ insane. Even FOX News acknowledges the sophisticated and widespread Russian attacks but the President keeps calling it a hoax! He has never once acknowledged the threat even exists. This is our leader?

Yup. Good luck with that.

For the sake of the USA, and the rest of the world, I sincerely hope that the Democratic party can come up with a candidate who can beat him in 2020. Do you think that is likely? (By the way, that is a genuine question, posed without irony.)

[_Kevin Graham]

This is just ____ insane. Even FOX News acknowledges the sophisticated and widespread Russian attacks but the President keeps calling it a hoax! He has never once acknowledged the threat even exists. This is our leader?

Yup. Good luck with that.

For the sake of the USA, and the rest of the world, I sincerely hope that the Democratic party can come up with a candidate who can beat him in 2020. Do you think that is likely? (By the way, that is a genuine question, posed without irony.)

Yes, the only thing Trump has going for him is that the Obama recovery is being interpreted by economic morons on the Right as evidence of Trump's greatness. But our system is completely broken. Our democracy is broken, our constitution is broken because checks and balances is being made a mockery of. Trump and his attorneys just refuse to do their Constitutional duty and their followers congratulate them for it. Trump obstructs justice, orders people not to testify, intimidated witnesses, uses an army of high powered attorneys to delay delay delay, etc. Never has the swamp been this putrid, with now the Justice Dept in the President's back pocket and every Republican in Congress has already sold their soul for the new Trumpublican party.

[_EAllusion]

Any "normal" president would be cruising to reelection right now given the underlying fundamentals he lucked into for first term incumbent. Trump probably has a 50/50ish shot right now based on his miserable, but not hopeless polling. But then you add in our broken media culture and the Trump admin and various Republican party entities signaling over and over and over that they are trying to defeat common sense efforts for election security, and I think you are looking at a more likely than not Trump reelection.

Authoritarians are very hard to boot from power once they start subverting the mechanisms they used to achieve it. I know there are a wave of conservatives just waiting to gloat about this. Heck, there's a wave of Democrats/liberals just waiting to insist that if only candidate X adopted all their policy and personal style preferences, they would've won. But nothing about that is good.

[_Kevin Graham]

[_EAllusion]

The checks and balances system as designed simply isn't isn't working because the architects of the Constitution didn't understand or anticipate how partisanship would undermine the opposed interests of the legislative and executive branch. The Senate isn't acting as a check because the political party that controls it is in political alliance with a corrupt executive. Outside of slavery related compromises, the original sin of the Constitution was a failure to anticipate the inevitability of political parties and how they would operate. When you read the writings of Madison, Hamilton et. al. on this subject, they understand the concept of political parties - "factions" in their parlance - but believe them to be bad. They just sort of hope that the benevolence of political actors will prevent them from developing a lock on government administration. This has undermined their intent on government structure again and again throughout American history.

The rosey story America told itself during the Nixon resignation is that the whole fiasco proved "the Constitution works." You even see this theme creep up in high school history texts. Now that we are living through much worse Nixon with a similar outcome being very unlikely, this implies that the story is, "The Constitution doesn't work." You know, if people into that positive spin re: Nixon are being consistent.

[_Markk]

It's not that simple EA, there are so many variables. One that your scenario does not let in is a political "faction" that has, by ideology , and for lack of a better term, "infected" or dominated the system.

In other words much or most of our governments inter-workings in Washington were and are liberal or blue, and they are having a hard time dealing with it.

When I read through some of these posts, I can only imagine goverment workers with that same type of bias. It could be for either "faction" but in this case it is the liberal faction.

Trump is a idiot...okay, a lot of presidents and leaders are and were, so what...vote him out. But he is not a spy, he did not collude, and it is becoming more and more evident that this whole mess is a huge case of sour grapes.

Over all we have a very good system, given the size of our country nothing comes close.

[_honorentheos]

Liberal Western Democracy is held together by trust in the same way authoritarian regimes rely on fear.

Over decades, a meaningful portion of the electorate has been swayed into distrusting the institutions of democracy while feeding fear and anger. Its growing and defines strong elements on all sides of the political spectrum. But the OG are the Fox News addicts.

Also part of the bedrock of our system is maintaining an independent judiciary that upholds the law on principle. Losing trust in this would be signs of a fatal collapse of the system established by the Constitution. Democracy of sorts can survive hollowed out by the loss of the above, but it would merely be a shadow of what our system of government has stood for over the last few centuries.

Anyway. Mueller charged 12 GRU agents before Hellsinki and Trump said Putin was very strong in his denial so why disbelieve him. Now the Mueller Report leaves it clear who did what and to what aim that AG Barr and Senate Republicans acknowledged as fact in the hearings this week. But we have Trump telling us he called Putin up, assuming using only a Russian interpreter loyal to Putin as he does because all the deep state Americans who could translate can't be trusted with the information, and again Trump says Russia did nothing wrong.

Collusion isn't the right word for this. But it's not coinicidental Trump and Putin appear to be the only ones sharing that view.

It also begs another question. We know about this hour long phone call because Trump blabbed about it. How often do those two talk without US state department staff that we don't know about?

Its mind blowing that this happens and people like Markk just say it's sour grapes.

[_MeDotOrg]

It's not that simple EA, there are so many variables. One that your scenario does not let in is a political "faction" that has, by ideology , and for lack of a better term, "infected" or dominated the system.

In other words much or most of our governments inter-workings in Washington were and are liberal or blue, and they are having a hard time dealing with it.

When I read through some of these posts, I can only imagine goverment workers with that same type of bias. It could be for either "faction" but in this case it is the liberal faction.

Trump is a idiot...okay, a lot of presidents and leaders are and were, so what...vote him out. But he is not a spy, he did not collude, and it is becoming more and more evident that this whole mess is a huge case of sour grapes.

Over all we have a very good system, given the size of our country nothing comes close.

When the President of the United States:

• Knows the intelligence consensus is that Russia intervened heavily in the 2016
• Spends an hour on the phone talking with the President of Russia
• Talks about the fact there was 'no collusion' between his campaign and the Russians
• DOES NOT SAY ONE WORD ABOUT RUSSIA INTERFERENCE IN 2020

Does that make Donald Trump a spy? No it does not. Does it make him a patriot? HELL NO. Does it make him guilty of abdicating his responsibility to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution? I think it does. Donald Trump is a prisoner of his narcissism. It blinds him to anything that would diminish his victory, even if it means ignoring Russian interference.

This country has had bad Presidents. We have survived. But Donald Trump is a new level of dangerous. You think this is all a liberal plot by the deep state? Where was the deep state before Trump? What gets called the deep state is, by in large, the reaction to the deliberate destruction of our governmental norms. And the reaction would be the same if a Democrat were destroying our faith in public institutions.

[_Kevin Graham]

Congress doesn't even have the unredacted Mueller report because Barr decided against it, but Trump is briefing the Russians on it.