This thread is about Trump. You didn't hear it from me. Trump cont

[Orlantina]

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/2927686-This-thread-is-fired-Terminated-Trump-cont

Only been 4 days since the last one.

The Independent‏Verified account @Independent 3m3 minutes ago
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Guests watch 'slack-jawed' as Trump's son-in-law masterminds $110bn weapons deal with Saudi Arabia ind.pn/2qCQfe7

So the Russians interfered in the election because they hated Clinton rather than because they supported Trump? Or a bit of both?

I imagine there's nothing in the US constitution to allow for a new election, so I don't know how they'll deal with it. I think there's a crisis ahead - I'm sure senior Republicans would like to oust Trump as quickly as possible and put a replacement in, and then continue smoothly as if nothing had happened. But they can't do that if Pence is implicated too, which he may well be. I think their options are:

1. Get rid of Trump now, and put Pence in place. That carries the risk of another scandal if Pence is involved in the Russian stuff.

1. Get rid of Trump and Pence, and put Paul Ryan in place. Runs the risk of massively alienating the entire electorate - those who voted for Trump and those who voted for Clinton.

1. Bide their time and see if new information emerges that will make the decision clearer. The risk is that while they're waiting Trump will do something utterly insane such as starting a war with another country. Even if he doesn't do that, there is a risk that more and more information will come to light that implicates more and more members of the Trump administration, thus tarring the Republican party as a whole and making them look like a bunch of corrupt incompetents.

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Turkey will not participate in an offensive on Raqqa, an ISIS stronghold in Syria, Turkish President Erdogan says cnn.it/2q2PBVc

I expect cocoa prices have peaked in antecipation of the Trump's war on cocoa cultivation.

I don't think the Russians took all this trouble for revenge. But they knew Hillary would be an adversary. While Trump, they can control him. He's susceptible to manipulation as well as being financially susceptible and they fully knew it.

I think this might have backfired on the Russians. They probably thought Yeah, Trump is a bit simple, easy to manipulate, we can do what we like with him. They probably didn't bargain for how startlingly inept the man is - I mean, who on earth goes on Twitter and admits that they've passed on classified information to the Russians?

Counter-intuitive though it seems, I do think you need a base level of intelligence in order to be manipulated successfully.

Yes, hackmum I have to agree with that.

Gives me a slight happy thinking just how many "head-desk" moments Putin has likely had over Trump.

I read somewhere that they weren't necessarily expecting trump to win but try wanted to sow seeds of discontent and label Clinton as "illegitimate" so that when she was in power, she'd find it harder to pursue their agenda, which they were opposed to and would have suffered under. I think some of that was based on how little the Russians did to cover their tracks with Gucifer 2.0 and the hacking etc

I've completely mangled that!

*they weren't expecting trump to win but wanted to try to sow seeds of discontent so that when Clinton was in power she'd find it harder to make pursue her agenda

Ffs! There's a stray "make" in that sentence.

I'm wondering if it began with undermining Hillary who they expected from the get go would be the Dems candidate. This does raise interesting questions about whether they also 'supported' Bernie against Clinton. Hillary as Pres would block some of Putin's financial dealings so at that stage, as Comey said at the house hearing, it was anyone but Clinton

The GOP candidate was not known at that stage but maybe Putin got lucky with the kompramat he had on Trump. Though I also suspect he has kompramat on most of the top Republican candidates which may be why they are so quiescent.

On the succession, Pence may be brought down first. It's easier to indict a VP than impeach a President. So Pence is replaced by someone who is clean and acceptable. Trump goes and the clean skin becomes President. It's what happened after Watergate. Agnew was VP and resigned because of tax problems. Ford became VP. Nixon resigned. Ford became President.

@broadswordsix

THREAD
What if there was a former CIA case officer who worked on a 2013 GOP presidential campaign, and socializes with top GOP leaders.

1. What if that same former CIA case officer caught wind of dirty money being washed through GOP campaign coffers? What if that same ex-spy

1. Went to the FBI with that suspicion. What if the FBI gave him a tape recorder and he used his own presidential campaign as cover for

1. Something much bigger than himself? Plausible? Just sayin...

Evan McMullin. Somebody of his tweets seem rather cryptic. Sheesh it'd be good if it's true!

Newsweek‏Verified account @Newsweek 1m1 minute ago
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The way it's going, Jared Kushner seemingly could one day replace everyone at the White House bit.ly/2rk44Rt

MrsT Yes, I posted something about that yesterday that the GOP were panicking because he'd sat in on meetings and they were now worried he'd recorded them.

CNN Politics‏Verified account @CNNPolitics 5m5 minutes ago
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Besieged by bad news at home, President Donald Trump is about to get religious, bigly cnn.it/2qx6Z7Y

Rick Wilson‏Verified account
@TheRickWilson

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1/ Some Republicans are boo-hooing about the special prosecutor.

You know what would have prevented it? I'll tell you

2/ Not trying to turn the House Intel hearings into a "but muh leaks" clown show. Not having the WH conspire with Nunes.

3/ Not slow-rolling the House and Senate investigations and hoping it will all go away. Not tweeting and giving incriminating interviews.

4/ Not trying to suborn the FBI director. Not having RUS officals in the Oval Office. Not posing for RUS propaganda photos.

5/ Not hiring a package of people in business with RUS oligarchs. Not screeching praise for the GRU asset Wikileaks.

6/ Not engaging in every flavor of whataboutism. Not lying constantly from the press room podium.

7/ You bought this bad pony. You ride it.

[Rick WIlson is a GOP political strategist/media consultant]

BBC Breaking News‏Verified account @BBCBreaking 41m41 minutes ago
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Swedish prosecutors drop investigation into Wikileaks founder Julian Assange over rape allegation

bbc.in/2rl6Be5

Re some of May's rubbish she's spouting:

Quote from a city worker :
"The Conservatives will attempt to soften the blow by promising that pensioners will not have to sell their homes to pay for their care costs while they or a surviving partner are alive. Instead, 'products will be available' allowing the elderly to pay by extracting equity from their homes, which will be recovered at a later date when they die or sell their residence.
I have just seen this post online:
'People need to read the small print associated with this because its a lot nastier than it looks.
I work in the City. The insurance industry was approached by the Government several months ago with the aim of creating a new market for a new product.
This arrangement is a culmination of those discussions. You wont have to sell your house PROVIDED that you purchase an insurance product to cover your social care. The "premiums" would be recovered from the equity after the house has been sold and the Insurance company will have a lien on the house and can force a sale if it wants to. So your offspring cant keep it on the market for long in order to get the best price.
The real kicker in this is that in order to encourage the industry to market these products the government guaranteed that there would be no cap on the premiums.
This was in some ways "attonement" for Osborne's destruction of the highly lucrative annuties market. This means that the premiums could be up to (and including) the entire remaining equity in the property after the government has taken its cut. Compamies will be falling over themselves to get their snouts in this trough.
In short your offspring and relatives could get absolutely nothing from your estate.
If you buy one of these products you need to read the small print very very carefully indeed because there will be some real dogs on the market.
I suspect that this is another financial scandal waiting to happen, but by the time it does May will be long gone." The bits the tories don't tell you

The Independent‏Verified account @Independent 6m6 minutes ago
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Donald Trump leaves for his first ever foreign trip as President ind.pn/2pSaUO0

Buckle up people. I suspect this is going to be interesting.

AFP news agency‏Verified account @AFP 1m1 minute ago
Recap of the landmark Iran nuclear deal signed in 2015 pic.twitter.com/LHx66uwqX6

Buckle up people. I suspect this is going to be interesting

Will he have data abroad?

The Right Builds an Alternative Narrative About the Crises Around Trump

<a class="break-all" href="https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/us/politics/trump-scandal-conservatives-media.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0&referer=t.co/muToOxQ6Sn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/us/politics/trump-scandal-conservatives-media.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0&referer=t.co/muToOxQ6Sn

Some excerpts:

“They’re going to say that Donald Trump has Alzheimer’s,” said the president’s friend and longtime associate Roger Stone, who made an online video laying out how the president’s own cabinet could trigger a never-used provision of the Constitution’s 25th Amendment to stage a coup on the grounds that Mr. Trump is mentally unsound. “This is the game plan. Watch carefully,” Mr. Stone swore.

In the conservative media, an alternate story line has already taken shape. In this story, Mr. Comey, an embittered and opportunistic employee whom Mr. Trump fired, is now trying to redeem himself with retroactively released — and unseen — memos of his version of events. On “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday morning, one of the hosts, Brian Kilmeade, expressed disbelief. “If you write it down, does that mean it’s true?” he asked.

The chief accomplice in this version of events is the media, which in the case of The Washington Post, erupted into cheers when its story on Mr. Trump’s disclosure of intelligence to the Russians broke. “WASHPOST Newsroom staff openly applauding at latest Trump hit finally clarifies how this has turned into nothing but a bloodsport!” Mr. Drudge wrote on Twitter. (A reporter for the Post had actually written on Twitter that the newsroom applauded when the story broke an online traffic record.)

In some corners, the explanations took on a much more sinister tone. Fox News, talk radio and websites like Alex Jones’s Infowars heavily covered the story of a murdered employee of the Democratic National Committee and attempted to link his death to unproved claims that he surreptitiously sent party documents to WikiLeaks. The staff member’s family has vigorously denied the story, and distanced themselves from the private investigator working on the murder case, who has given conflicting accounts of his findings.

But the mainstream media, these organizations said, were burying the story and focusing on Mr. Trump’s woes instead.

Albert Ruiz‏ @databreak 15h15 hours ago
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Republicans were with Nixon until the end -- on the eve of his resignation, 59% were opposed to impeachment

The Hill‏Verified account @thehill 1m1 minute ago
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Comey was "disgusted" when Trump hugged him in public hill.cm/UA4tiaM

POLITICO‏Verified account @politico 23s23 seconds ago
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Senate Democrats reject Lieberman for FBI director politi.co/2rxk6Vo