President Trump reportedly alarmed senior US officials due to his highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1317875
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1317875
I read about this on twitter earlier.
SIGH
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How much longer? Seriously. How much the fuck longer!?
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So all these adults on the room had nothing to say around impeachment time? Because of mean tweets?
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Trump would reportedly brag about his own wealth, genius, “great” accomplishments
• Wealthy people don’t brag about their money
• Geniuses don’t brag about their intelligence
• People who actually accomplish “great” things don’t bestow their own laurels
Too many more, like “Good golfers don’t need to cheat on their scores,” to list.
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Trump believed that he could “either charm, jawbone or bully almost any foreign leader into capitulating to his will”
Of course not. They may be evil, but they’re not fucking morons, duly elected by fucking morons. The same cannot be said of Republicans in Congress.
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He’s a fucking monster surrounded by a coterie of GOP service “drones.”
In his conversations with both Putin and Erdogan, Trump took special delight in trashing former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and suggested that dealing directly with him – Trump – would be far more fruitful than during previous administrations. “They didn’t know BS,” he said of Bush and Obama – one of several derisive tropes the sources said he favored when discussing his predecessors with the Turkish and Russian leaders.
Two sources compared many of the President’s conversations with foreign leaders to Trump’s recent press “briefings” on the coronavirus pandemic: free form, fact-deficient stream-of-consciousness ramblings, full of fantasy and off-the-wall pronouncements based on his intuitions, guesswork, the opinions of Fox News TV hosts and social media misinformation.
But his most vicious attacks, said the sources, were aimed at women heads of state. In conversations with both May and Merkel, the President demeaned and denigrated them in diatribes described as “near-sadistic” by one of the sources and confirmed by others. “Some of the things he said to Angela Merkel are just unbelievable: he called her ‘stupid,’ and accused her of being in the pocket of the Russians … He’s toughest [in the phone calls] with those he looks at as weaklings and weakest with the ones he ought to be tough with.”
The calls “are so unusual,” confirmed a German official, that special measures were taken in Berlin to ensure that their contents remained secret. The official described Trump’s behavior with Merkel in the calls as “very aggressive” and said that the circle of German officials involved in monitoring Merkel’s calls with Trump has shrunk: “It’s just a small circle of people who are involved and the reason, the main reason, is that they are indeed problematic.”
Germany, UK, France. Do us all a favor and release the transcripts.
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Delusional or insane?
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Imagine if The Manchurian Candidate accidentally got mixed together with Being There in the cutting room. Yeah … that’s the last four years. Plus maybe a few frames of The Exorcist.
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YES!
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This whole world leadership thing is really just a club for “us guys” to him. That he uses his official capacity to denigrate his predecessors places him in a position of weakness among all those who would seek to take advantage of his own fecklessness.
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This makes a whole lot of generals and “top security advisors” into collaborators and cowards, and way less than honorable patriots.
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According to one high-level source, there are also existing summaries and conversation-readouts of the President’s discussions with Erdogan that might reinforce Bolton’s allegations against Trump in the so-called “Halkbank case,” involving a major Turkish bank with suspected ties to Erdogan and his family. That source said the matter was raised in more than one telephone conversation between Erdogan and Trump
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Are you sure about that? What do you think private jets and 200 million dollar yachts are?
They sure do. Many of them are insufferable assholes. Dali comes to mind.
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Shocking. Who would have though that a lying cheating, grifter misogynist who’s never held a job in his life and has no human emotions could behave this way? Thank god you saved us, Trump voters, from that shrill woman with the cankles.
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In addition to rough, voice-generated software transcription, almost all of Trump’s telephone conversations with Putin, Erdogan and leaders of the western alliance were supplemented and documented by extensive contemporaneous note-taking (and, often, summaries) prepared by Fiona Hill, deputy assistant to the President and senior NSC director for Europe and Russia until her resignation last year. Hill listened to most of the President’s calls with Putin, Erdogan and the European leaders, according to her closed-door testimony before the House Intelligence Committee last November.
Elements of that testimony by Hill, if re-examined by Congressional investigators, might provide a detailed road-map of the President’s extensively-documented conversations, the sources said. White House and intelligence officials familiar with the voice-generated transcriptions and underlying documents agreed that their contents could be devastating to the President’s standing with members of the Congress of both parties – and the public – if revealed in great detail. (There is little doubt that Trump would invoke executive privilege to keep the conversations private. However, some former officials with detailed knowledge of many of the conversations might be willing to testify about them, sources said.)
ETA bolding
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When pressed for comment on CNN’s report, White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews told TPM in a statement that the President is “a world class negotiator who has consistently furthered America’s interests on the world stage.”
Is “furthered” some strange variant spelling of “buggered”?
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Nothing here is surprising given what came out about Ukraine. What is shocking is the sheer volume of what is being released. Maybe Bolton didn’t want to testify because he didn’t want to drop this whole mess. Finally, someone get fed up when the realized Trump is getting hundreds of thousands of people killed with his abominations.
Is this is why the rumors he won’t be on the ticket in November?
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The only thing smaller than his tiny hands is his fragile, stunted masculinity.
He’s even more incompetent at being a man than he is at being president.
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None of them are senators. And regardless, the senate wasn’t going to call any witnesses even if jesus christ came back to earth and told them it is the lords will, with a few lightning strikes to prove it. Nevertheless, some whistleblowers did testify to the house, providing the grounds for the impeachment.
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