The Art of the Deal

The Off-Topic forum for anything non-LDS related, such as sports or politics. Rated PG through PG-13.
_honorentheos
_Emeritus
Posts: 11104
Joined: Thu Feb 04, 2010 5:17 am

Re: The Art of the Deal

Post by _honorentheos »

Hey everyone! Even though the people on my staff who deal with economics and my tariff policy strongly advised against my weaponizing tariffs against Mexico, I choose to let Stephen Miller - a guy with a political science degree and a career in campaign communications with a boner against immigrants the size of the odds against the Book of Mormon being fiction - tell me what to do because I have the best people! MAGA!
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth?
~ Eiji Yoshikawa
_DrW
_Emeritus
Posts: 7222
Joined: Thu Apr 02, 2009 2:57 am

Re: The Art of the Deal

Post by _DrW »

Dear Mental Diary,

What a week!

Mueller said I wasn't exonerated of obstruction after all.

My friend Kim Jong Un just executed his US Envoy and a few other government officials because I walked out of a summit meeting with North Korea like a spoiled kid.

I walked out of another high profile meeting to which I had invited congressional leaders to discuss infrastructure because I heard they were saying bad things about me behind my back.

And now I just found out that 1189 psychiatrists have set aside the Goldwater rule to state publicly, in writing, that I'm severely mentally ill and clearly unfit to be president.

The first Republican legislator to do so has just called for my impeachment.

Let me think. Aha! Time for more chaos. Time to be more unpredictable.

Except being more unpredictable than I already am is getting harder to do. Maybe I should impose tariffs on our biggest trading partner. The economy should stay strong for another six months before recession hits because of my tax bill gift to the rich, so Americans should not mind paying for the tariffs.

Well, that's taken care of - just in time for a cheese burger, a diet coke and another dose of adulation from Fox and Friends.

It's great being me.

The Donald
David Hume: "---Mistakes in philosophy are merely ridiculous, those in religion are dangerous."

DrW: "Mistakes in science are learning opportunities and are eventually corrected."
_MeDotOrg
_Emeritus
Posts: 4761
Joined: Sun Jun 17, 2012 11:29 pm

Re: The Art of the Deal

Post by _MeDotOrg »

As the implications of this action take hold, it will be Stephen Miller against the State Department and Commerce, not to mention every Republican Senator with a constituent industry that will be affected. It would not surprise me to see this tariff walked back, if cooler heads prevail. If not, we are seeing the logical progression of Corey Lewandowski's 'let Trump be Trump' ethos.

I continue to be astounded at Republican refusal to criticize. People have said that working for or with Trump slowly corrupts your soul. I think part of the problem is that the more you defend him in public, the more difficult it is to admit you were wrong. After a while you are clinging to the idea that Trump must be right because you yourself could not be that wrong.

I will say this: Trump engenders loyalty that it difficult to fathom. Farmers are being hurt by his policies. The longer the trade war goes on, the more the rest of the world will adapt to life without American suppliers. It will be interesting how his supporters respond to this tariff.
"The great problem of any civilization is how to rejuvenate itself without rebarbarization."
- Will Durant
"We've kept more promises than we've even made"
- Donald Trump
"Of what meaning is the world without mind? The question cannot exist."
- Edwin Land
_honorentheos
_Emeritus
Posts: 11104
Joined: Thu Feb 04, 2010 5:17 am

Re: The Art of the Deal

Post by _honorentheos »

DrW wrote:Dear Mental Diary,

What a week!

Mueller said I wasn't exonerated of obstruction after all.

My friend Kim Jong Un just executed his US Envoy and a few other government officials because I walked out of a summit meeting with North Korea like a spoiled kid.

I walked out of another high profile meeting to which I had invited congressional leaders to discuss infrastructure because I heard they were saying bad things about me behind my back.

And now I just found out that 1189 psychiatrists have set aside the Goldwater rule to state publicly, in writing, that I'm severely mentally ill and clearly unfit to be president.

The first Republican legislator to do so has just called for my impeachment.

Let me think. Aha! Time for more chaos. Time to be more unpredictable.

Except being more unpredictable than I already am is getting harder to do. Maybe I should impose tariffs on our biggest trading partner. The economy should stay strong for another six months before recession hits because of my tax bill gift to the rich, so Americans should not mind paying for the tariffs.

Well, that's taken care of - just in time for a cheese burger, a diet coke and another dose of adulation from Fox and Friends.

It's great being me.

The Donald

Image
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth?
~ Eiji Yoshikawa
_Gunnar
_Emeritus
Posts: 6315
Joined: Sat Aug 11, 2012 6:17 am

Re: The Art of the Deal

Post by _Gunnar »

DrW wrote:Dear Mental Diary,

What a week!

Mueller said I wasn't exonerated of obstruction after all.

My friend Kim Jong Un just executed his US Envoy and a few other government officials because I walked out of a summit meeting with North Korea like a spoiled kid.

I walked out of another high profile meeting to which I had invited congressional leaders to discuss infrastructure because I heard they were saying bad things about me behind my back.

And now I just found out that 1189 psychiatrists have set aside the Goldwater rule to state publicly, in writing, that I'm severely mentally ill and clearly unfit to be president.

The first Republican legislator to do so has just called for my impeachment.

Let me think. Aha! Time for more chaos. Time to be more unpredictable.

Except being more unpredictable than I already am is getting harder to do. Maybe I should impose tariffs on our biggest trading partner. The economy should stay strong for another six months before recession hits because of my tax bill gift to the rich, so Americans should not mind paying for the tariffs.

Well, that's taken care of - just in time for a cheese burger, a diet coke and another dose of adulation from Fox and Friends.

It's great being me.

The Donald

Trump couldn't hurt his own country more or help Putin's Russia more if that were his actual intent, which it looks more and more like it probably is.

House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia Hardcover – August 14, 2018
by Craig Unger (Author)

“The story Unger weaves with those earlier accounts and his original reporting is fresh, illuminating and more alarming than the intelligence channel described in the Steele dossier.”—The Washington Post

House of Trump, House of Putin offers the first comprehensive investigation into the decades-long relationship among Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Russian Mafia that ultimately helped win Trump the White House.

It is a chilling story that begins in the 1970s, when Trump made his first splash in the booming, money-drenched world of New York real estate, and ends with Trump’s inauguration as president of the United States. That moment was the culmination of Vladimir Putin’s long mission to undermine Western democracy, a mission that he and his hand-selected group of oligarchs and Mafia kingpins had ensnared Trump in, starting more than twenty years ago with the massive bailout of a string of sensational Trump hotel and casino failures in Atlantic City. This book confirms the most incredible American paranoias about Russian malevolence.

To most, it will be a hair-raising revelation that the Cold War did not end in 1991—that it merely evolved, with Trump’s apartments offering the perfect vehicle for billions of dollars to leave the collapsing Soviet Union. In House of Trump, House of Putin, Craig Unger methodically traces the deep-rooted alliance between the highest echelons of American political operatives and the biggest players in the frightening underworld of the Russian Mafia. He traces Donald Trump’s sordid ascent from foundering real estate tycoon to leader of the free world. He traces Russia’s phoenix like rise from the ashes of the post–Cold War Soviet Union as well as its ceaseless covert efforts to retaliate against the West and reclaim its status as a global superpower.

Without Trump, Russia would have lacked a key component in its attempts to return to imperial greatness. Without Russia, Trump would not be president. This essential book is crucial to understanding the real powers at play in the shadows of today’s world. The appearance of key figures in this book—Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, and Felix Sater to name a few—ring with haunting significance in the wake of Robert Mueller’s report and as others continue to close in on the truth.

I am halfway through reading the book now, and the deeper I get into the book, the more alarmed I become. The book points out that to Putin, the worst geopolitical disaster in modern history was the collapse of the USSR and its empire of Eastern European satellites, greatly compounded by the fact that many of these former Warsaw Pact nations subsequently chose to join NATO. The fact of Trump's narcissism and corruption, plus the fact that his first wife, Ivana, was Czech, whose father was vulnerable to pressure and intimidation by the communist regime that still controlled Czechoslovakia at the time of their marriage to exert pressure on his son-in-law through his daughter's marriage to Trump to compromise Trump himself and the US democracy on behalf of the Communist block, presented an opportunity that Putin and his oligarch cronies simply could not pass up.
No precept or claim is more likely to be false than one that can only be supported by invoking the claim of Divine authority for it--no matter who or what claims such authority.

“If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you.”
― Harlan Ellison
_Kevin Graham
_Emeritus
Posts: 13037
Joined: Fri Oct 27, 2006 6:44 pm

Re: The Art of the Deal

Post by _Kevin Graham »

So Trump threatens to impose taxes on American people unless Mexico does something about illegal immigration. Republicans push back against Trump's tariffs because, unlike the President, some of them actually understand rudimentary economics and see this is nothing more than a tax on American consumers. It does nothing to "punish" Mexico.

So Trump gives in like he always does.

But instead of admitting defeat, he spins it like he always does and announces some amazing agreement he negotiated with Mexico. Its very short on details, but the conclusion from our Tweeter in Chief says it will basically eliminate illegal immigration on the southern border.

Chuck Shumer sarcastically tweeted back that this is wonderful news. Since Trump now believes illegal immigration is now eliminated, we should no longer be hearing anything on the matter from him.
_Maksutov
_Emeritus
Posts: 12480
Joined: Thu Mar 07, 2013 8:19 pm

Re: The Art of the Deal

Post by _Maksutov »

"God" is the original deus ex machina. --Maksutov
_canpakes
_Emeritus
Posts: 8541
Joined: Wed Dec 07, 2011 6:54 am

Re: The Art of the Deal

Post by _canpakes »

Kevin Graham wrote:But instead of admitting defeat, he spins it like he always does and announces some amazing agreement he negotiated with Mexico. Its very short on details, but the conclusion from our Tweeter in Chief says it will basically eliminate illegal immigration on the southern border.

If this guy was such a clever deal maker, why did it take him over two years to think this up, and only after spending billions of hard-earned American taxpayer dollars on two miles of wall?
Post Reply