What's new

US Politics

download (5).jpg



Opinions
This nation is at the mercy of a criminal administration

By
Max Boot Columnist May 3 at 11:29 AM

Imagine that you live in a town that has been taken over by gangsters. The mayor is a crook and so are the district attorney and police chief. You can’t fight city hall. But at least you know you can turn for help to the state or federal government. Now imagine that it’s not a city or state that has been taken over by criminals — it’s the federal government. Where do you turn for help? That is not a theoretical concern. After the release of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report, it’s our grim reality.

Even before Mueller’s probe ended, federal prosecutors in New York had implicated President Trump in ordering his lawyer, Michael Cohen, to violate federal campaign finance laws. Mueller then documented at least six ironclad incidents of obstruction of justice by Trump along with numerous instances of misconduct that, while not criminal, are definitely impeachable. The New York Review of Books reported that two prosecutors working for Mueller said that if Trump weren’t president, he would have been indicted.

Now the administration is obstructing attempts to bring the president to justice for obstruction of justice. William P. Barr isn’t the attorney general; he is, as David Rothkopf said, the obstructor general. We now know that Mueller wrote (in Barr’s description) a “snitty” letter objecting that Barr’s deceptive summary of his work, designed to falsely exonerate Trump, “threatens to undermine … public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”

Yet when Barr testified to Congress after receiving the Mueller letter but before releasing the Mueller report, he claimed not to know whether Mueller disagreed with his conclusions. “He lied to Congress,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) charged. But even if it could be proved that Barr committed perjury (no sure thing), who would prosecute him? Is he (or his deputy) going to appoint a special counsel to investigate himself? Unlikely. And if he did appoint a special counsel, would he heed the counsel’s conclusions? Also unlikely.

Barr’s jaw-dropping performance before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday dispelled any lingering confidence in the impartial administration of justice — the bedrock of our republic. He actually testified that if the president feels an investigation is unfounded, he “does not have to sit there constitutionally and allow it to run its course. The president could terminate the proceeding and it would not be a corrupt intent because he was being falsely accused.” Given that no president has ever felt justly accused of any misconduct, this means that the president is above the law. Barr is endorsing the Nixon doctrine: “Well, when the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.”

The administration makes clear that this is precisely its intent with its scandalous stonewalling of Congress. Barr himself refused to appear before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday. Trump is suing to prevent his accountants and financial institutions from sharing his business records with Congress, while his treasury secretary is refusing to comply with a lawful demand for his tax returns. Trump is also blocking numerous current and former officials, including former White House counsel Donald McGahn, from testifying about his misdeeds. His conduct is redolent of the third article of impeachment against President Richard M. Nixon for failing “to produce papers and things as directed by duly authorized subpoenas” from Congress.

While conferring legal immunity upon himself, Trump is eager to weaponize the legal system against his opponents. The Mueller report documents three separate occasions when Trump demanded a Justice Department investigation of Hillary Clinton. Now, the New York Times reports, Trump and his attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, are attempting to instigate a criminal probe of his leading 2020 opponent, Joe Biden, on what appear to be trumped-up charges of corruption. In one of the more chilling exchanges during his Senate testimony, Barr would not say whether “the president or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested” that he open an investigation. If the answer were “no,” he would have said so.

It is hard to think of any president in the past 230 years, including Nixon, who has ever sabotaged the rule of law so flagrantly or so successfully to protect his own hide. And, sadly, it is hard to imagine that anything can be done about it before Nov. 3, 2020. The House could try to compel compliance with its subpoenas, but the Justice Department will never file criminal charges, and the courts could take years to decide a civil suit. The House could vote to impeach Trump or Barr — which they richly deserve — but that would be a purely symbolic act and could backfire politically because Senate Republicans, like the O.J. Simpson jury, would vote to acquit regardless of the evidence.

So for the next 18 months, at a minimum, this nation is at the mercy of a criminal administration. I am in despair as I have never been before about the future of our experiment in self-rule. Before Mueller filed his report, it was possible to imagine the president being brought to justice. That fantasy is no longer tenable. Instead we are left with the dismaying likelihood that the president will now feel emboldened to commit ever greater transgressions to hold onto power — and thus delay a possible post-presidential indictment.
Source


 
.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has paid farmers $8.39 billion of the estimated $9.56 billion it promised in December. Source

There goes Trump's war on socialism. :lol:

Note: ranchers and farmers are a key constituency for Trump.
Aaahhh...That is not socialism. Protectionism or subsidies are not socialism.
 
.
Trump is staking reelection on one of his biggest lies

President Trump has spent the last 24 hours tweeting manically about trade, repeating the absurd falsehood that China is paying us billions in tariffs. We keep hearing that this shows Trump “doesn’t understand” how tariffs work.

But this is better seen as a straight up, deliberate lie — a lie upon which Trump is staking his reelection.

A long-term trade war with China now looks plausible. Trump just hiked tariffs to 25 percent on $200 billion of Chinese goods. Moments ago, China announced it will retaliate with $60 billion in new tariffs, on over 2,000 U.S. goods.

If this does continue, Trump’s lie about China paying us billions in tariffs will become ever more imperative for him.

That’s why it’s such a big deal that Fox News’s Chris Wallace debunked this falsehood by getting economic adviser Larry Kudlow to admit that China is not paying the tariffs. In fact, they amount to a tax on U.S. consumers:

But this lie is not a mere superficial sign of Trump’s failure to understand how trade works. Rather, it’s becoming central to the political strategy he’ll employ if we see protracted trade hostilities.

Trump is in a jam on trade

Trump’s trade war has put him in a jam. Revamping trade with China was a central campaign promise. But if Trump agrees to a deal that does not win real concessions, that will reveal his agenda of “toughness” as hollow — particularly if those concessions do not appear worth the pain the tariff wars have already imposed on farmers, in the very region that’s crucial to his reelection.

So the New York Times reports that Trump is now hoping to flip the political calculus: No deal, followed by still more tariffs, will allow Trump to proclaim he’s still being tough on China. Incredibly, the Times reports that Trump apparently believes this will be a political winner even if increased tariffs impose still more economic pain.

Here’s where Trump’s lie comes in

How is this possible? Enter Trump’s lie. The new, convoluted story he’s telling is basically that the money we “take” from China in tariffs will be given to farmers in exchange for their products, which we will then exported to other countries that need them.

It’s unclear how this would work. But Trump is set to approve another round of financial aid to farmers hit by his trade war. Basically the claim will be that continued tariffs are a good thing: Trump is in effect taking money from China and giving it to his voters.

There are three possible resolutions here, as Heather Long explains. We could end up with no deal and a full blown trade war. We could end up with a bad deal — U.S companies don’t get improved access to expanding Chinese markets and many tariffs remain. Or we could get a good deal — an end to unfair Chinese trade practices, access to Chinese markets, and real enforcement mechanisms.

The lie that China is paying us tariffs will be necessary if one of the first two scenarios happens. The third could still happen, but even if it does, Trump’s lie is still just that: a lie, and it’s obviously central to his back-up plan.

Trump’s narrative about China, repurposed

Notably, this backup plan repurposes the story that Trump has told about China for years: that China is robbing U.S. workers blind. Throughout 2015 and 2016, he claimed that China is “ripping us off" and is our “economic enemy," targeting us with the “greatest theft in
the history of the world.”

It’s true that China is a bad international actor, and that Trump did tap into real grievances about globalization. But as Paul Krugman notes, Trump hasn’t built an international coalition against China’s abuses. Instead, he’s waging trade wars on multiple fronts, alienating allies, so the one with China is better seen as an outgrowth of his desire to tear down the international trading order.

In this regard, go back and watch Trump’s closing 2016 ad. It depicts a shadowy globalist plot, via imagery of George Soros (hint, hint), Asian businessmen, Democratic politicians, and Chinese sweatshop labor. The story: globalist elites are enriching themselves by pitting foreign low wage workers against U.S. workers. (The better answer to this story is the progressive trade agenda, which includes international wage and labor standards and real investments in displaced workers.)

Some observers look at Trump’s trade wars and still manage to see hints of his supposed economic populism, in which Trump vowed to defy GOP economic orthodoxy. But, given that Trump has gone all in with GOP plutocracy on taxes and shredding the safety net, while punting on infrastructure — three areas where he’d supposedly defy that orthodoxy — the real story is obvious. Trump’s “economic” populism remains operative only in areas that satisfy his xenophobicnationalist impulse to attack other countries as our enemies — immigration and trade.

Indeed, it’s no accident that Trump also vowed to make Mexico “pay” for his border wall, to punish Mexico for “sending” us their outcasts and pitting them against U.S. workers, similar to his claim about China Central to this whole tale has always been the idea that Trump will take back for U.S. workers what this alliance of elites and foreign workers is stealing from them — he will take back what is rightfully theirs. That is: “I alone can fix it.”

Given all this, failure on China could be catastrophic for Trump. So he’s just swapping in a new story: He’s making China pay restitution to U.S. workers by forcing it to “pay” us in tariffs. Source



AABbvPV.jpg


Aaahhh...That is not socialism. Protectionism or subsidies are not socialism.
It’s a very slippery slope, we do not know how long Trump’s trade war is going to last and how long taxpayers will have to bail out farmers. Yes, it’s not pure socialism, but it is not pure capitalism, either. Many free market conservatives have called subsidies to farmers as a form of socialism.

BTY, do you consider Social Security and Medicare socialist programs?
 
. .
It’s a very slippery slope, we do not know how long Trump’s trade war is going to last and how long taxpayers will have to bail out farmers. Yes, it’s not pure socialism, but it is not pure capitalism, either. Many free market conservatives have called subsidies to farmers as a form of socialism.

BTY, do you consider Social Security and Medicare socialist programs?
Subsidies and social safety net programs are neither socialism nor are they 'slippery slope' arguments.

Socialism is government controlled means of productions. Payments intending to help certain industries does not mean the government owns and controls those industries. Same for social safety net programs. Social Security does not produce anything, other than being a repository of money for retirees.
 
. .
Lets-Make-America-Great-By-Impeaching-Me-Now.jpg


Clearly, the lawless clown is scared/incapable of winning free and fair elections, as if gerrymandering, minority voter suppression, fear-mongering, racism and help from KGB thug was not enough, now he wants help for 2020 election from Communist China and Ukraine (a helpless country which depends on our financial help).

Here’s what you need to know why the Democrats opened an impeachment enquiry last week:

Judge Andrew Napolitano served as a New Jersey Supreme Court judge from 1987 to 1995. He’s a Fox News senior judicial analyst and Fox Nation host and writes for right-leaning publications like Washington Times and Reason. He supports Libertarian party.

The House of Representatives has begun to gather evidence in an effort to determine if President Trump has committed impeachable offenses. The Constitution defines an impeachable offense as "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors."

The president need not have committed a crime in order to be impeached, but he needs to have engaged in behavior that threatens the constitutional stability of the United States or the rule of law as we have come to know it.


Has Trump committed any impeachable offenses?

A CIA agent formerly assigned to the White House – and presently referred to as the "whistleblower" – reported a July 25, 2019 telephone conversation that Trump had with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. That conversation manifested both criminal and impeachable behavior.

The criminal behavior to which Trump has admitted is much more grave than anything alleged or unearthed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and much of what Mueller revealed was impeachable.

What has Trump admitted?

The whistleblower’s revelation caused the White House to release a near-verbatim summary of the conversation between the two presidents. By releasing it, Trump has admitted to its accuracy. In it, Trump asked Zelensky for dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden, who at this writing is Trump's likely Democratic opponent in the 2020 presidential election.

Trump also admits to holding up $391 million in aid to Ukraine – $250 million in the purchase of already approved and built military hardware and $141 million in a congressionally authorized grant. This is aid that Trump's own secretaries of state and defense, his own director of national intelligence and director of the CIA, and his own National Security Council unanimously asked him to release.

Trump has also admitted to accusing the as-yet publicly unnamed whistleblower of treason, and suggesting that the whistleblower and those who have helped him are spies and ought to be treated as spies were in "the old days" (Trump’s phrase) – that is, by hanging.

The president’s allusions to violence are palpably dangerous. They will give cover to crazies who crave violence, as other intemperate words of his have done. His words have already produced offers of "bounties" in return for outing and finding the whistleblower.

Trump also suggested that his impeachment would produce a second American Civil War. This language is a dog whistle to the deranged.

All of Trump's admissions need to be taken in context. In 2014 and 2015, Russian troops invaded Crimea, then a province of Ukraine. They took over government buildings and held a sham referendum, which had been declared unconstitutional under Ukrainian law by Ukrainian courts.

The troops dispersed the courts, and the Russian government annexed Crimea. What was a part of Ukraine five years ago today houses Russian troops and Russian tanks eyeing Kiev, Ukraine's capital.

It is easy to see why all of the senior members of the Trump administration involved in security – all of them – advised the president to release the military hardware, which was ready to be shipped, and the foreign aid, which Congress had appropriated.

Trump rejected that advice. Instead, in the Zelensky phone call, he told the Ukrainian president that he needed a personal "favor." The clear unmistakable inference is that the $391 million in aid would be held up until the favor was delivered. The favor he sought was dirt on Biden.


Now, back to impeachment.

Federal law defines as criminal the solicitation of aid – anything of value – for a political campaign from a foreign national or foreign government, whether the thing of value arrives or not.

Federal law also prohibits bribery and attempted bribery, which is defined as withholding the performance of an official duty conditioned upon the personal receipt of a thing of value, whether the thing of value arrives or not.

The law further prohibits intimidating witnesses, which is defined as the use of language designed to deter witnesses from giving testimony, whether the intimidation is successful or not.


The whistleblower has also alleged that senior administration officials attempted to dissuade Trump from asking for the favor from Zelensky. The whistleblower’s sources relate – and reporting now reveals – that a debate took place in the White House before the telephone call was made.

Should the aid be held up? Should the president ask for dirt about Biden from his Ukrainian counterpart? If Biden did anything criminal, shouldn't the Justice Department get involved? Should the transcript of the Trump-Zelensky phone call be hidden? Was the president warned in advance that asking Zelensky for a personal campaign benefit could be criminal or impeachable? Does anyone in the White House tell the president what he doesn't want to hear?

Can the president put his own needs and wants above the nation's? In a word: No.

The president has taken an oath to enforce federal law, not break it. He cannot lawfully impose conditions – conditions that benefit him alone – as a prerequisite to compliance with the law.

Is violating campaign finance law by involving a foreign government in an American presidential campaign an impeachable offense? Yes, it is.


The expressed intention of those who wrote the Constitution and those who wrote the campaign finance laws 200 years later – and the lesson of the post-2016 election and Mueller-investigated angst in America – was to keep foreign governments out of the American political system.

For heaven's sake, Trump was just investigated by Mueller for two-and-a-half tumultuous years for allegedly bringing the Russian government into the 2016 election and now he has attempted in one phone call to bring the Ukrainian government into the 2020 election! Does he understand the laws he has sworn to uphold?

It was to remedy just such reckless, constitutionally destructive behavior that impeachment was intended.
 
.
Picture Of The Century!
EHCisDuW4AAGIsV.jpg


Brilliant, the picture shows U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is staring down and pointing a finger at Trump in the White House. Criticizing him for his foreign policy blunders and told him “All roads lead to Putin.”


So far, the best defense of Trump. Ben Shapiro takes the cake. He thinks Trump is too stupid to make plans to commit crimes. :lol:
 
.
Subsidies and social safety net programs are neither socialism nor are they 'slippery slope' arguments.

Socialism is government controlled means of productions. Payments intending to help certain industries does not mean the government owns and controls those industries. Same for social safety net programs. Social Security does not produce anything, other than being a repository of money for retirees.
There are several problems with your argument, you are referring to the socialism that no major country follows today. Majority of Democratic socialists especially in the West, including Bernie have rejected that the whole economy should be centrally planned.

Now let’s look at the other side, is United States a pure capitalist economy? If I’m not wrong, a pure capitalist economy is a system in which the small government acts like a referee, all property is owned by private individuals and all services and goods are privately provided, prices fluctuate based on demand and supply.

Now the million-dollar question is, what is the capitalist government doing running Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Public schools, Veterans health care, Libraries, Airports, Public parks, Food stamps, Amtrak trains and I can go on and on and on.

The bottom line is, the United States just like all major countries in the world including China is a mixed economy. All the programs I have mentioned are socialistic programs.
 
. .
I wonder if Donald Trump will be impeached or lose the election in 2020? It will depend on who the Democrats will pick as their candidate.
 
.
Let's see if there is any Republican with enough balls to step up and put this disaster of a clown of a president in his place and rock his boat into sinking. So much of the focus is on the Democrats or the liberals (better yet, the "radical Liberals lol) but not much given to a conservative who would actually be a great choice for the GOP to back up and get this idiot out of office before it's too late. There might just be that one guy in Bill Weld. Someone who is not easily intimidated by the douchebaggery and sleazy and insulting tactics of this idiot who's the current president. And as a native of Massachusetts, we know Bill Weld since he was governor and did a hell of a job here during his tenure.

For me, this is not about parties or democrats or Liberals or Republicans, it's about the right candidate who properly represents this great country in a dignified manner and has the country's interest first and foremost in mind, not his own personal and self-aggrandizing motivation like this scum-sucking racist hog.

And for those of you who might disagree with what I say, put yourself in my position for one second and then see how you feel. When a racist pig like Donald Trump first comes out and says he's calling on a complete ban of all Muslims entering this country until they find out what the hell is going on.................followed by his disgustingly racist anecdote of general Pershing dipping his bullets in pig's blood and killing Muslims and that supposedly effectively took care of things for 17 years.............says NOTHING to support American Muslims when 50 of them are gunned down in mosques but when the Jewish people suffered the same, unfortunate fate in Pittsburgh last year, there was nothing but empathy for the Jews and Jewish people. Now, if you were a Muslim American, would any of this just blow over your head because you simply hate Democrats and Liberals and be ok with it? Well, guess what, I (along with millions of Muslim Americans) are not ok with a filthy, racist, bigot of a scumbag as the president of the United States and I truly hope he doesn't get elected for a 2nd term. We deserve MUCH MUCH MUCH better than this POS. Rant over!

Trump the predator


A new book uncovers fresh allegations of the president’s inappropriate sexual behaviour

Barry Levine and Monique El-Faizy, additional reporting by Lucy Osborne

Sat 19 Oct 2019 09.58 BST Last modified on Mon 21 Oct 2019 00.57 BST

Shares
1.759



Donald Trump attends The Miss Universe Guide to Beauty book launch at Trump Tower, New York, in 2006. Photograph: Patrick McMullan/Getty Images
We all know the story by now. In 2005, Donald Trump was caught on tape bragging that his fame allowed him to sexually assault women. In 2016, as he was running for president, that recording, the so-called Access Hollywood tape, was made public, resulting in a stream of women coming forward and alleging that Trump had groped or otherwise sexually assaulted them. He was elected anyway; the women’s stories didn’t seem to matter. But they should.

If we have understood one thing in the two years since actor Alyssa Milano tweeted #MeToo, sending the then 11-year-old phrase viral, it is that when women are not listened to, men in positions of power are left free to abuse their authority. When the accused abuser is the president of the United States, those allegations and how they are handled matter all the more. Thanks to his bully pulpit, Trump’s words and actions resonate far beyond the deeds themselves.

1399.png

Sign up for Bookmarks: discover new books in our weekly email
Read more
And then there is the question of collective responsibility. If we avert our eyes from the allegations of Trump’s abuse because we find it distasteful, we tacitly endorse his behaviour. When we dismiss or ignore his objectification and denigration of women, we legitimise it. Leaving these attitudes and actions unchecked allows them to proliferate.

When the recording was released, Trump brushed it off as “locker-room banter”. A short time later he denied having had affairs with **** star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal. We, however, conducted more than 100 interviews in the course of researching our book All the President’s Women and found that the language and the affairs were not mere aberrations. Since his campaign, Trump has already faced allegations from nearly two dozen women. Our book reveals another 43 allegations, bringing the total to 67 accusations of inappropriate behaviour, including 26 instances of unwanted sexual contact. In short, far from being occasional or accidental, his alleged misconduct with women was regular and widespread. We found that Trump repeatedly and systematically engaged in aggressive sexual pursuit of women over many decades and that his alleged behaviour followed discernible patterns. One of those was a predilection for young models.

All of a sudden she heard someone shout: 'Put your robes on, here he comes!'

In the early 1980s, NaKina Carr was working in New York for Oscar de la Renta and was backstage in the models’ dressing room at one of his fashion shows when she heard Trump’s name mentioned for the first time. She was getting ready when all of a sudden she heard someone shout: “Put your robes on, here he comes!”

At 21, the Texas native was already on the older side for a catwalk model, who generally start working when they are in their teens, but she was new to New York and had no idea what was going on. “I didn’t know what they were talking about … but suddenly everyone threw on their dressing robes,” Carr said, speaking publicly about her memories of Trump for the first time. Carr asked another woman what was wrong, and she pointed to a man across the room. “She said: ‘He’s the money man. He can do whatever he wants … Unless you’re a gold digger, you avoid him at all costs.’”

Trump walked in as if he owned the place, according to Carr’s account, with a pregnant Ivana, his first wife, trailing behind him. “He threw his arms wide open and said: ‘OK now ladies, drop ’em,’” Carr said. “The one thing I’ll always remember is the dejected look on Ivana’s face in the dressing room. I thought how horrible, that he would treat her in this way.”

As Trump strode around the dressing room, Carr concealed herself behind a pillar, incredulous that someone would be so crude. “The other girls were obviously afraid of him, like they knew he meant it and it wasn’t a joke,” she said. The model was later assured that she was not Trump’s type – at the time the rumours among modelling insiders was that he preferred younger women. “If you’re over 21 you don’t have to worry,” Carr said she was told.

Those rumours appear to be backed up by other accounts of Trump during that era. Model Barbara Pilling was not yet 18 when her booker took her to a party a few days after her arrival in New York, in the summer of 1989. Trump was also in attendance. Pilling didn’t know who the real estate developer was, but she noticed him looking at her. “I could see him eyeing me up and watching me,” she said. She claims that once he caught her gaze, Trump started talking to her. “I remember him saying: ‘Oh, how old are you?’ And I said 17, and he said: ‘That’s just great; you’re not too old, not too young.’”

Pilling said Trump tried to make small talk with her for a while, but his gaze kept veering to her chest. He asked her if she liked where she was living and said he knew great places she could stay if she didn’t. Trump offered to show her the city and to take her to dinner. He told her she was gorgeous, like a dark-haired Marilyn Monroe, and asked her if she would ever consider going blond. “I was starting to feel uncomfortable,” Pilling remembered. “It’s not a nice feeling for a young girl to have an older man making advances on her.” Another model standing nearby whispered to Pilling that Trump clearly liked her, and explained who he was. “I wasn’t impressed by it. I mean, I was only 17.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest
From left: Rachel Crooks, Jessica Leeds and Samantha Holvey speak at news conference in New York, 2017. Photograph: Andrew Kelly/Reuters
Pilling eventually excused herself to go to the restroom, where yet another woman was talking about the developer. “She said he grabbed her *** and kept going for her and was all hands,” Pilling said. Between that and her own conversation with him, Pilling was so disturbed that she left the party without saying goodbye to anyone.

When the Australian Shayna Love was living in New York in 1991, she says models were encouraged to attend dinners that became occasions for “men to pick up girls”. “You’d go to these things and look pretty, give the men attention,” Love said. She was 16 at the time and part of the Elite model agency’s “New Faces” campaign. “We might as well have been called ‘fresh meat’.” Love recalled a dinner with Trump. “This time it was a private area, a big table and lots of girls – I’d say around 10 to 15 of us, all between the ages of 14 and 18,” she said. “It was just us models, Trump and [Elite founder] John [Casablancas]. We were all underage, but we were offered drinks.” Love said she went home early, but other girls stayed.

Trump was often seen with Casablancas. He hosted events for Elite’s modelling contests at his New York properties and provided lodging for the contestants. Eli Nessa had just turned 17 and was representing Norway during one such Elite competition hosted by Trump’s hotel in the early 90s. In addition to the events for the competition, the women were expected to attend several nights of parties. “There were all these older men,” she said. “It was so seedy.” Nessa was accompanied by her agent, but other women appeared to be alone. “I remember this Italian girl, extremely naive, who couldn’t speak any English. She was easy prey. They were all around her,” Nessa said. “We were a bunch of kids, just put there with all these older men.”

Heather Braden was also an Elite model and, in the late 90s, alleges that she was instructed to go to a party in a mansion on one of the islands off Miami Beach. Trump was going to be there, she was told. Braden went with a couple of friends who were also models. When they arrived, the first thing they saw was a table manned by two security guards. The models were handed papers. “I presume they were NDAs for us to sign,” Braden recalled. They ignored the papers and walked into a big room where there were about 50 models. In her mid-20s, Braden was one of the oldest women there. Many were from eastern Europe and didn’t speak English, so Braden and her friends kept to themselves.

They found the party odd. There was no DJ, no food, and no bartender – though there were drinks, Braden remembers. “It was very awkward from the beginning,” she said years later. “Fifty females in this room, no real hosts. Very unusual. And then down this large staircase, in front of all of us, there was Donald Trump and behind him there were three actors, 40s, maybe 50s. I don’t want to name them because they’re all still around.” The actors were famous. “They came down the stairs and spread out like sharks among the girls,” who had broken up into little clusters throughout the room. “Obviously, some of these younger girls were starstruck.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest
John Casablancas and Trump at the Elite Model Agency Look of the Year awards in 1991. Photograph: Ron Galella/Getty Images
Braden said she had been in the industry long enough to understand what was happening. “Clearly, we were there for one reason. We were just pieces of meat.” At a typical fashion industry party, there would be a mix of people, men of different ages, male models, men in the business. Not here. Braden believed that this party had been set up specifically for Trump and the three actors. “This was not eye candy,” she said. “Sometimes you’re brought to these big parties like that, but this was different.”

From a couch in the farthest corner of the room, Braden and her friends watched as each man made his way through the knots of models. They started with the standard opening lines, asking the women their names and where they were from. “Five minutes later – this is what they did to me: ‘You want to come upstairs?’ It was anything from, ‘You want to see the rest of the house?’ to ‘Do you want to see the bedroom? The view?’ Or ‘Do you want to partake in party favours?’ That was the terminology,” Braden said. “Sometimes there’d be a couple of girls that would go up together.” Braden said Trump approached her at the party, and chuckled when she turned him down.

In addition to Casablancas, whose marriage ended after he had an affair with a 16-year-old Stephanie Seymour and who later married another one of his models when she was 17, Trump’s social circle in the early 90s included Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender who allegedly ran a sex ring of underage girls. Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting a minor and in July 2019 was charged with two federal counts of sex trafficking before being found dead in his prison cell in an apparent suicide in August. Trump once said of Epstein: “Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Eventually Trump found an easier way to surround himself with models: he started his own agency. Trump Model Management launched in 1999, the same year Trump divorced Marla Maples. When Leonardo DiCaprio – another man with a taste for women who walk the runway – heard about Trump’s new venture, he approvingly dubbed it “one-stop date shopping”.

'Clearly, we were there for one reason … We were just pieces of meat'

Now Trump had the models coming to him, and it is alleged that he introduced them to his sons. Ksenia Maximova said she worked for Trump Model Management in 2003 and 2004, and again a few years later. In 2004, when the Russian-British model was 18, her agent summoned her to a meeting in Trump Tower. “He said: ‘Oh, we’re just going to meet the owner of the agency,’” she said, speaking publicly for the first time about the encounter. “And then he told me to get all dressed up, properly, because I was quite tomboyish, so he did tell me to put a nice dress on and some high heels and stuff.”

Maximova complied, and she and her agent took the elevator to Trump’s offices. The developer was at his desk with Donald Jr, then 26, standing behind him, although they weren’t introduced so Maximova didn’t know this was Trump’s son. She settled on a chair and Trump and her agent began talking. “I was just kind of sitting there,” she said. Trump asked her a few questions but for the most part didn’t address her. Donald Jr was generally silent, too. “It was all really awkward because it was like: ‘Let the grownups do the talking,’ kind of thing,” she said. “It was just like I didn’t matter and he didn’t matter. I just thought he was some aide or something.”

Maximova was made to feel so inconsequential that she began wondering why she had been brought there in the first place. “I didn’t really get introduced much. It was more like just to actually show me, visually. It wasn’t like anyone was interested in my personality or anything like that, so I was like: ‘What’s the point in this?’” She asked her agent as much when they were back in the elevator on their way down to the street. “We’ve heard that [Trump’s son] is maybe looking for a girlfriend now,” Maximova claims her agent told her. “That’s when I got really angry and told him off and asked him to never, ever, please, do this kind of thing again, especially without my consent.”

But even before he put the Trump brand on young models, he had found another business that ensured he would have a steady supply of beautiful young women in his life. In 1996, he purchased the Miss Universe Organisation, which also operates the Miss USA and Miss Teen USA pageants. “It’s a very, very great entertainment format,” he said at the time. “It gets very high ratings, it’s doing very well and we’ll make it even better.” Trump’s improvement plan? “I made sure the women were really beautiful because they were getting a little bit not as beautiful. They had a person who was extremely proud that a number of women had become doctors. And I wasn’t interested,” he said on the Howard Stern radio show. “I made the bikinis smaller and the heels higher,” he told the late-night TV host David Letterman in 2010.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Trump addresses the contestants in the Miss USA beauty pageant in 2012. Photograph: AP
From the very beginning, Trump exercised what he saw as the owner’s prerogative. “I’ll go backstage before a show, and everyone’s getting dressed and ready and everything else,” Trump told Stern in 2005. “No men are anywhere, and I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant and therefore I’m inspecting it … ‘Is everyone OK?’ You know, they’re standing there with no clothes. ‘Is everybody OK?’ And you see these incredible looking women, and so I sort of get away with things like that.”

At times, Trump’s gaze was more targeted. Samantha Holvey told CNN that when she was 20 and competing in the 2006 Miss USA pageant, Trump made pointed visual inspections of all the contestants. “He would step in front of each girl and look you over from head to toe like we were just meat, we were just sexual objects, that we were not people,” she said. “You know when a gross guy at the bar is checking you out? It’s that feeling.” Being ogled by Trump made Holvey feel “the dirtiest I felt in my entire life”. She and her fellow contestants were also invited to private parties filled with “old, rich, drunk guys ogling all over us”, Holvey said.

These women are just a sample of those who have come forward with accusations against Trump; new allegations continue to emerge. And while Trump is the most visible of the influential men accused of predatory behaviour, he is far from an outlier, as even a cursory glance at recent headlines illustrates. Jeffrey Epstein. Harvey Weinstein. R Kelly. Hundreds of men were brought down in the wake of #MeToo as women began to share their stories.

Still, these reckonings, while important, are not the ultimate solution, because the individual men are not themselves the core of the problem; that runs much deeper. These abuses took place over the course of decades and were far from secret. All too often, institutions sacrificed accusers to protect themselves and the coteries that ran them. If lasting and significant change is to take place, it will require a significant overhaul of the systems and societal attitudes that allowed that to happen.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/19/trump-predator-new-book-fresh-allegations

The article does not even cover this:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...rape-lawsuit-13-year-old-cancels-public-event

trump has mob connections and the mob gives death threats to anybody who would expose trump in the media of wrong doing.

 
.

Meanwhile, support for impeachment keeps on growing.

Support for impeaching Trump soars among independents: Reuters/Ipsos poll

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Support for impeaching U.S. President Donald Trump surged among political independents and rose by three percentage points overall since last week, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Tuesday.

More Americans also said they disapproved of the president’s handling of foreign threats.

The Oct. 18-22 poll showed public opinion continued to shift as Americans digested a flurry of news over the past several weeks stemming from the congressional impeachment inquiry and Trump’s decision to pull troops from northern Syria.

Overall, 46% of Americans said they supported impeachment and 40% said they opposed it.

Support for impeachment was relatively steady among Republicans and Democrats over the past week but it surged among independents, a group that includes people who neither identify as Democrats nor Republicans and do not favor either party when they vote.

Among independents, 45% said in the latest poll they supported impeachment and 32% said they opposed it, the strongest level of support recorded in more than a year.

A little more than 1 in 3 independents had said they were in favor of impeachment in more than a dozen previous Reuters/Ipsos polls since June 2018.

Trump leveraged his advantage in support among independents to narrowly win the White House in 2016 and it is expected that he will need them again to be re-elected. Read more


I wonder if Donald Trump will be impeached or lose the election in 2020? It will depend on who the Democrats will pick as their candidate.
So far, it looks like the House is going to (more than 90% chance) impeach him, but most probably (though still up in the air) the Senate is going to acquit him. It is too early to predict the outcome of 2020 election. I think it will depend on three main issues: Democrat candidate, trade war with China and public opinion on impeachment.
 
.
The lying clown caught red-handed again. :lol:

210255.png


When a reporter asked Trump during the White House briefing:

Reporter: Mr. President — President Trump, what is McConnell — what is McConnell telling you about impeachment? Has he assured you that Senate Republicans won’t vote for it?

Trump: No, but I read Mitch McConnell’s statement yesterday, and he read my phone call. And, as you know, he put out a statement that said that was the most innocent phone call he’s read. And I spoke to him about it, too.

He read my phone call with the President of Ukraine. Mitch McConnell — he said, “That was the most innocent phone call that I’ve read.” I mean, give me a break. Anybody that reads it says the same thing. Source

But McConnell says he never spoke with Trump about the phone call. In other words, Trump completely made up the story and as usual, LIED!

 
. .

Country Latest Posts

Back
Top Bottom