Double blow to Trump as Mueller agrees to testify on Russia and judge opens up his financial records - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15014405
Donald Trump has received two fresh setbacks as Democrats confirmed retired FBI special counsel Robert Mueller will testify before two congressional committees on 17 July over his Russia investigation and a federal judge gave party legislators permission to begin collecting the president's financial records for an emoluments lawsuit.

As the House of Representatives passed an emergency spending bill securing $4.5bn (£3.6bn) to address the humanitarian crisis at the US-Mexico border, Mr Trump's acting Customs and Border Protection commissioner, John Sanders, resigned following outcry over the treatment of children in US detention centres.

The administration has meanwhile confirmed Stephanie Grisham will be the new White House press secretary, succeeding the outgoing Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

Independent
#15014409
I think it's a positive for Trump about Mueller's testimony - and i think Democrat National Party might want to be a little nervous. The judge's ruling isn't really big news: As Justice will challenge and probably take things up an echelon. And I suspect editorializing happening there from your source.
#15014723
Mueller testifying is a mistake for Democrats. He can't go outside of the 4-corners of the report without violating DoJ guidelines for prosecutors. Yet, Republicans get to pepper him with questions about all the things that are not in the report that he didn't investigate. We'll see how it pans out. So far, every attempt to get Trump has backfired on his accusers. It's like some sort of weird spiritual judo or something.
#15014743
blackjack21 wrote:Mueller testifying is a mistake for Democrats. He can't go outside of the 4-corners of the report without violating DoJ guidelines for prosecutors. Yet, Republicans get to pepper him with questions about all the things that are not in the report that he didn't investigate. We'll see how it pans out. So far, every attempt to get Trump has backfired on his accusers.


I think the Democrats are going to go to DefCon 1 once Mueller starts testifying...

It's like some sort of weird spiritual judo or something.


Hehehehe... "weird spiritual judo"... I like that...
#15014837
Beren wrote:I wouldn't expect much from Mueller, Trump could rather get caught through is finances like Al Capone did.

Does that give you some sort of hope? The IRS has been auditing his tax returns since Obama took office. They've found nothing. The Democrats could try manufacturing evidence, like they've done with this Russia hoax. However, their credibility is already shot. The only thing that seems to be happening is that Democrats are giving anti-Trumpers false hopes. They are going to be devastated when Trump is re-elected.
#15014847
blackjack21 wrote:Does that give you some sort of hope? The IRS has been auditing his tax returns since Obama took office. They've found nothing. The Democrats could try manufacturing evidence, like they've done with this Russia hoax. However, their credibility is already shot. The only thing that seems to be happening is that Democrats are giving anti-Trumpers false hopes. They are going to be devastated when Trump is re-elected.

If US authorities can't find anything on Trump's finances, America must be hopeless indeed. It's the same if Trump gets reelected. :lol:
#15014849
Trump is a blessing for AOC and Sanders. The longer he stays in power the more their camp will have a chance to take over the Democratic Party(and then the Presidency) especially if the Democrats lose the next election by anointing some bog standard rightwing pretender to lead the party like usual, and the greater the rise of social democracy in the US is going to be. If Trump were to go tomorrow the Democrats would return to their good old self as they would figure that they do not have to change anything to return to power and they will simply carry on being the equivalent of Blair's Red Tories and that is no good for anyone. The Democratic party will switch to their Corbynite future only if Trump remains in power and polarises politics sufficiently. Much distance has been covered already and the seed has been planted, Trump's exit would be catastrophic for the plant as he provides the water.

Slavoj Zizek: Was I right to back Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton? Absolutely wrote:In the last couple of years, I have been often asked by friends (and by “friends”) whether I still stand by my preference for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, or would I now admit that I was terribly wrong. My answer is easy to guess: not only do I stand by what I said, but I think last year’s events fully confirmed my choice. Why?

As Yuval Harari noted, in his Homo Deus, people feel bound by democratic elections only when they share a basic bond with most other voters. If the experience of other voters is alien to me, and if I believe they don’t understand my feelings and don’t care about my vital interests, then even if I am outvoted by 100 to one, I have absolutely no reason to accept the verdict. Democratic elections are a method to settle disagreements between people who already agree on the basics. When this agreement on basics falters, the only procedures at our disposal are negotiations or (civil) war. That’s why the Middle East conflict cannot be solved by elections but only by war or negotiations.

So how does this apply to the growing lack of the agreement on the basics in the US politics? What complicates the situation is that the disagreement that exploded is double: first, Trump broke the established order from the side of the populist right, and then the Democrats (Sanders and others) broke it from the left. These two ruptures are not symmetrical. The struggle between Trump and the liberal establishment is a cultural-ideological struggle within the same space of global capitalism, while the left began to question this global capitalist order itself.

This is why the only true struggle going on today is taking place within the Democratic Party itself.

Liberals who are panicked by Trump dismiss the idea that the president’s victory can start a process out of which an authentic left would emerge. Their counterargument is basically a comparison with Hitler’s rise to power. Many German communists welcomed the Nazi takeover as a new chance for the radical left (“now the situation is clear, democratic illusions have vanished, we are confronted by the true enemy”) – but, as we know, their appreciation was a catastrophic mistake.

The question is: are things the same with Trump? Is Trump a danger which should bring together a broad front akin to anti-fascist popular fronts, a front where decent conservatives will fight together with mainstream liberal progressives and (whatever remains of) the radical left?

I think such a broad front against Trump is a dangerous illusion: it would amount to the capitulation of the new left, to its surrender to the liberal establishment. The fear that a Trump victory would turn the US into a fascist state is a ridiculous exaggeration: the US has a rich enough texture of divergent civic and political institutions so that their direct fascist Gleichshaltung cannot be enacted (in contrast to, say, France where the victory of Le Pen would have been much more dangerous).

What happened in the US is that the Trump victory triggered a process of radicalisation in the Democratic Party – and this process is our only hope.

Saritha Prabhu’s opinion piece recently published in the Tennessean deserves to be quoted at length. It moved me almost to tears with its description of a simple truth:

“Brace yourself; there is a civil war coming soon in the Democratic Party. At the heart of today’s Democratic Party is an identity crisis and an ideological struggle. For starters, is the Democratic Party a party of the rich or a party of the little guy? For many years, they’ve been the party of the rich playing a good game of pretending to be for the little guy. And the Democratic establishment does it in insidious ways that are too clever by half: they are for the marginalised guy or gal in the race, gender, and sexuality issues because, hey, that doesn’t hurt their and their affluent constituents’ pocketbook much.

“But in the economic issues that matter, they often sock it to the average Democratic working-class voter: in the global trade deals that’ve offshored jobs and have decimated the American manufacturing base; in their looking the other way as illegal immigrants depress the wages of working-class Americans, and more. But as long as they talk and talk and talk some more – about abortion and transgender rights and racism (not that these aren’t relevant issues), they can have their cake and eat it too. But all this worked until 2016, but can’t be pulled off anymore. The Democratic establishment wing is still either clueless or stubborn, but they want good ol’ Joe Biden to come to the rescue and Make Oligarchic America Great Again.

“When you rip off their mask, what is revealed is troubling: the Party of Davos masquerading as the Party of Scranton, Pennsylvania, that essentially hoodwinks much of the electorate.”

Let’s make it clear: it was the rise of Trump which triggered the “civil war” in the Democratic Party – and, by the way, the proper name of this “civil war” is class struggle. So let’s not lose nerve, let’s rather use the opportunity inadvertently opened up by Trump.

The only way to really defeat Trump is for the left to win that civil war.
#15014852
Beren wrote:If US authorities can't find anything on Trump's finances, America must be hopeless indeed.

Well, it would have to be something illegal that the American people care about. The guy has been making money with his Apprentice series for the last 10 years. Where would the law breaking be?

Beren wrote:It's the same if Trump gets reelected. :lol:

Let's hope America is hopeless then.


Slavoj Zizek wrote:The struggle between Trump and the liberal establishment is a cultural-ideological struggle within the same space of global capitalism, while the left began to question this global capitalist order itself.

This is why Slavoj Zizek is wrong. Trump cancelled the TPP, renegotiated NAFTA, slapped steel and aluminium tariffs on a number of countries, and is in the middle of a trade war with China. Even the Democrats are urging him to keep up pressure on Huawei. The reason Trump won is that he questioned the globalist order from the view of how it affect America's blue collar working class service and manufacturing workers. The Democrats have already lost them. The last few debates the Democrats are talking about taking away private health insurance and putting everyone under Medicare, giving free health care to illegal immigrants, decriminalizing crossing the US border, and providing free abortion services to men who decide to become women. They're straight up nuts.

noemon wrote:Trump is a blessing for AOC and Sanders.

Sanders got beat in these last two debates and AOC can't run for president for at least 6 years. Neither of them has a snowball's chance in hell of winning the White House.
#15014855
blackjack21 wrote:This is why Slavoj Zizek is wrong.


Does that give you some sort of hope? ;)

Political Views of Bernie Sanders wrote:Sanders described himself as a "democratic socialist"[5] and an admirer of aspects of social democracy as practiced in the Scandinavian countries. In an address on his political philosophy given at Georgetown University in November 2015, Sanders identified his conception of "democratic socialism" with Franklin D. Roosevelt's proposal for a Second Bill of Rights,[6][7] saying that democratic socialism means creating "an economy that works for all, not just the very wealthy," reforming the political system (which Sanders says is "grossly unfair" and "in many respects, corrupt"), recognizing health care and education as rights, protecting the environment, and creating a "vibrant democracy based on the principle of one person, one vote."[8] He explained that democratic socialism is not tied to Marxism or the abolition of capitalism but rather describes a program of extensive social benefits, funded by broad-based taxes.[9]

Read more....


blackjack21 wrote:Sanders got beat in these last two debates and AOC can't run for president for at least 6 years. Neither of them has a snowball's chance in hell of winning the White House.


You sound like a CNN news presenter talking about Trump.

Of course Sanders "got beat" would be the talking point just like Trump "got beat" several times before.

Every action makes a reaction. It is inevitable.
#15014857
noemon wrote:Trump is a blessing for AOC and Sanders. The longer he stays in power the more their camp will have a chance to take over the Democratic Party(and then the Presidency)

There's a great chance that a second Trump term would end as Dubya's second term did, although it would be even worse and there wouldn't be an Obama recovery. No one knows what would happen then, but I wouldn't expect any good, and the US establishment must be aware of it too. Even Republican leaders must realise that, no matter what sons of bitches they are, so I wonder whether they'd mind if Trump fell if they could replace him with one of their own. Maybe Trump himself wouldn't mind too if he could get away with this peacefully. I have a gut feeling that the situation in America, as well as the world, is more dire than it looks like, although it doesn't look good at all.
#15014859
Beren wrote:I have a gut feeling that the situation in America, as well as the world, is more dire than it looks like, although it doesn't look good at all.


I thought as a sort of Balkaner you would be more cynical and optimistic like myself and Zizek. Be positive and all will be well. Or as the Brits say 'keep calm and carry on'. :)
#15014860
noemon wrote:I thought as a sort of Balkaner you would be more cynical and optimistic like myself and Zizek. Be positive and all will be well. Or as the Brits say 'keep calm and carry on'. :)

I'm being in an optimistic mood actually, but I'm not exactly a Southern type, although I could imagine myself living in Italy. 8)
#15015568
noemon wrote:Trump is a blessing for AOC and Sanders. The longer he stays in power the more their camp will have a chance to take over the Democratic Party(and then the Presidency) especially if the Democrats lose the next election by anointing some bog standard rightwing pretender to lead the party like usual, and the greater the rise of social democracy in the US is going to be. If Trump were to go tomorrow the Democrats would return to their good old self as they would figure that they do not have to change anything to return to power and they will simply carry on being the equivalent of Blair's Red Tories and that is no good for anyone. The Democratic party will switch to their Corbynite future only if Trump remains in power and polarises politics sufficiently. Much distance has been covered already and the seed has been planted, Trump's exit would be catastrophic for the plant as he provides the water.


I think that you misunderstand what Zizek is saying. By left he doesn't exactly mean social democrats. He wants hardcore left to come out victorious and by that i mean real socialists or communists and not social democrats. That is perhaps one of things that worry me in Zizek. He understands that Soviet System failed and real dogmatical communists failed then on the other hand he fantasies if it would have been better if Trotsky was in charge instead of Stalin.

Zizek says a lot of good things and smart things. I just don't understand why he wishes for real communism and socialism to return. It shouldn't happen unless they propose some kind of new system to implement their socialism or communism. Basically the old Soviet model is verbotten in my mind.

As for Sanders and AOC. They do work within the liberal system but both of them are borderline real left. Sanders more so than AOC. AOC is more like a new version of a real socialist that wants to put some modernism in to the idea. AOC idea of a "Government plan" for green energy is outrages honestly. At best it will move money from the pocket of the taxpayers to the pocket of big business and at worst it will simply create immense corruption and wasteful spending.

The only real "Green deal" that can happen is that cost-effective solutions are employed. For now it means mostly nuclear energy with wind/solar/hydro taking a 2nd seat row. Nobody wants to pay double or triple for their electricity which will hurt the most vulnerable communities disproportionately. That kind of describes the problem of the "government plan" because it is limited to the ideas of its creators. I am not really sure that even nuclear is going to cut it. Currently US is full of very cheap natural gas that comes from fracking and that needs to be used. It is very cheap and i am not sure that nuclear can beat it.
#15015591
noemon wrote:I understand he means Sanders who is indeed a social democrat.

Sanders is waning. He's getting thrashed in the debates. He's not going to make it this time around.
#15015594
noemon wrote:I understand he means Sanders who is indeed a social democrat.


He means Sanders indeed. I think thought that he means that Sanders will have to win the "civil war" in the party and become true left though. May be i am overthinking it but i guess its my opinion. Ceasar was one of the sentors in the republic but he became a Dictator during and after the civil war. I guess this gets the point across.
#15015701
blackjack21 wrote:Does that give you some sort of hope? The IRS has been auditing his tax returns since Obama took office. They've found nothing. The Democrats could try manufacturing evidence, like they've done with this Russia hoax. However, their credibility is already shot. The only thing that seems to be happening is that Democrats are giving anti-Trumpers false hopes. They are going to be devastated when Trump is re-elected.


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