US president said Ukraine war would not have happened if Moscow had not been thrown out in 2014 over Crimea
Trump continues to be a servile mouthpiece for Vladimir Putin.
Donald Trump has displayed his disdain for the collective western values supposedly championed by the G7 group of industrialised countries by again demanding that Russia be readmitted to the group. He also said the war in Ukraine would not have happened if Moscow had been kept in the club.
Trump made his remarks in front of media, alongside Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, who is hosting the G7, at the start of the summit’s first round of talks.
Russia was thrown out of the G8 after it invaded Crimea in 2014, and Trump’s defence of Vladimir Putin came a day before the US president is scheduled to meet his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on the fringes of the summit. It will be the first meeting between the two men since Pope’s Francis’s funeral in April.
His words could have been written in Moscow – except that the Kremlin would have had difficulty mimicking his peculiar style of dementia.
TACO seemed to claim that there wouldn't have been a war in Ukraine if Putin hadn't been kicked out of the then G8. Of course The Orange One doesn't want you to remember that Putin got kicked out in the first place for his forcible annexation of Crimea in 2014. d'oh!
Jonathan V. Last and Will Saletan of The Bulwark delve into Trump's train wreck appearance at the G7 meeting in Canada.
While Donald Trump brags about his own intelligence, he doesn't have the intelligence to answer questions Fox News anchors directly coach to him. Will Saletan explains.
Signs and symptoms > Primary features > Core traits
Arrogant and deceitful interpersonal style: impression management or superficial charm, inflated and grandiose sense of self-worth, pathological lying/deceit, and manipulation for personal gain.
Deficient affective experience: lack of remorse or guilt, shallow affect (coldness and unemotionality), callousness and lack of empathy, and failure to accept responsibility for own actions.
Impulsive and irresponsible lifestyle: impulsivity, sensation-seeking and risk-taking, irresponsible and unreliable behavior, financially parasitic lifestyle, and a lack of realistic, long-term goals.
The cult of Trump won't accept any judgment against him.
Will Saletan at The Bulwark:
TO PROTECT DONALD TRUMP, the Republican party has turned against every institution that stood in his way: the press (“the enemy of the people”), the civil service (“the Deep State”), presidential elections (“rigged,” “stolen”), courts (for refusing to overturn the 2020 election), the House January 6th Committee (Democrats and “RINOs”), independent counsels (Robert Mueller, Robert Hur, Jack Smith), and law enforcement (for prosecuting the insurrectionists).
Now another institution is trying to hold Trump accountable. Last week, a jury in Manhattan found him guilty of 34 felonies in his hush-money trial. So Republican elected officials are doing what allegiance to their leader requires: They’re attacking the jury.
These attacks aren’t confined to the quirks of the case or the politics of Manhattan. Republicans are inventing reasons to reject any verdict against Trump. It’s an extension of what they’ve done since 2020: inventing reasons to reject any election Trump loses. Respecting juries, like respecting elections, is just another obsolete norm.
1. Trump did nothing wrong.
The best argument against the Manhattan case is that Trump committed misdemeanors—falsifying business records to hide his hush-money payments—but that those charges shouldn’t have been inflated into felonies by portraying the hush money, in the context of the 2016 election, as a secondary crime. That argument would be similar to what Democrats said about President Bill Clinton’s perjury to cover up a sexual affair in the 1990s: that he behaved immorally and misled a court, but his misconduct shouldn’t have been inflated into articles of impeachment.
But that’s not what Trump and his party are saying about the Manhattan case. They’re denying that he committed any crimes or even that he had sex with Stormy Daniels.
“Nothing ever happened,” Trump asserted at a press conference after the verdict. In a Fox News interview, he repeated: “I did absolutely nothing wrong. I mean, absolutely.” Congressional Republicans agreed. “He’s an innocent man who did nothing wrong,” Sen. Tom Cotton insisted on Meet the Press. “@realDonaldTrump did nothing wrong,” tweeted Sen. Marsha Blackburn. “The man did nothing wrong,” said Rep. Byron Donalds. “The only thing that Donald Trump is guilty of is being in the courtroom of a political sham trial,” said Sen. J.D. Vance.
Anyone familiar with the evidence knows these denials are preposterous. Trump committed adultery with Daniels, paid for her silence to hide the tryst from voters, and—to cover up the coverup—disguised the payments in his business filings. Some of his conduct in the coverup implicated him in crimes. That’s why jurors, after hearing the evidence, convicted him.
Republicans can’t accept that facts decided the case. So they’ve set out to discredit the jury.
[...]
2. All the jurors were Trump haters.
This is the GOP’s main line of attack. “Twelve New Yorkers decided they were Democrat partisans,” Sen. Ted Cruz scoffed on his podcast, trying to explain away the verdict. Rep. Jim Jordan called the jurors “12 partisans” and vowed that “the real verdict will be on Nov. 5, when 330 million Americans get to weigh in,” not “12 people from Manhattan.” On CNN, Sen. Tim Scott said the jurors couldn’t be trusted because “96 percent of Manhattan are Democrats.” Rep. Nick Langworthy argued that bias in the jury pool invalidated the verdict: “This is a place where Donald Trump got five percent of the vote. There was no jury of his peers. It was a jury of his adversaries.” Hogan Gidley, Trump’s former campaign press secretary, told Newsmax, “The jury’s from Manhattan. They all hate Trump.”
Manhattan is liberal, but these depictions of the jury are bogus. Trump’s lawyers vetted prospective jurors, weeding out those whose social media posts exposed them as Trump haters. One of the seated jurors said he watched Fox News. Another said he followed Trump on Truth Social. A third said she liked religious podcasts. One said he disagreed with some of Trump’s policies but agreed with others. Another said she appreciated that “President Trump speaks his mind.” The most common pattern among the jurors was a lack of strong feelings about politics.
It’s true that in 2020, Trump won only 12.3 percent of the vote in Manhattan, while Biden won 86.7 percent. But even with those lopsided numbers, it’s hard to pluck twelve jurors from a random sample of Manhattanites without including a Trump voter. By the time you’ve picked your sixth juror, the odds that your jury doesn’t have a Trump supporter are down to 45 percent. By the time you’re on the twelfth juror, the odds are down to about 20 percent. The most likely outcome, based on random probability, is ten Biden voters and two Trump voters.
That’s why the jury’s unanimity matters. The vote on each felony count wasn’t 10–2. It was 12–0. All the jurors, including any who sympathized with Trump, found him guilty. But Republican lawmakers don’t care. They’ve gone right on smearing the jury.
[...]
3. Only fools or haters could have found Trump guilty.
The GOP’s jury denialism, like its election denialism, is unfalsifiable. If one allegation of ballot fraud doesn’t pan out, Trump and his allies move on to another. And if one or two jurors in the hush-money trial turn out to have been Trump voters, no problem: Republicans have concocted lots of other reasons to dismiss the verdict.
[...]
4. Nobody who respects this jury can be a Republican in good standing.
The GOP has transformed itself into a cult by ostracizing members who put any principle above loyalty to Trump. That’s what happened to Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who served on the January 6th Committee. And now it’s happening to members who acknowledge, even with major caveats, that the verdict in Manhattan deserves respect.
[...]
Contempt for the Manhattan jury—and for any other jury that convicts Trump—is now a core commitment of the GOP.
Will Saletan wrote in The Bulwark on how the MAGA Cult (which at this point may as well be a large portion of the GOP) are espousing jury denialism as part of their war on institutions and public trust to protect convicted felon Donald Trump from accountability, branching out from their election denialism.
Will Saletan at The Bulwark explains what a HÜGE mess Trump created on Saturday which Marco Rubio failed to clean up on Sunday. Rubio is essentially an overwhelmed and inadequate janitor.
The fact that Trump sent US forces to nab Maduro while recently pardoning a former president of Honduras responsible for dozens of tons of cocaine being smuggled into the US will just not go away. Of course Honduras does not have any notable oil deposits. 💡
In that vid above, watch Marco Rubio's eyes. He tends to narrow them when he knows he's lying.
J.D. Vance is a craven opportunist. That's a surprise to nobody. He previously called Trump "America's Hitler" but now he's screaming "Sieg Heil!" louder than anybody else.
As vice president, Vance doesn't have to worry about getting fired by Trump. He's fireproof through 20 January 2029. He can say whatever he feels like. But he has transformed himself into a fire hose of mendacity – he seems to compete with Trump to see who can lie the most each day.
Perhaps J.D. is already virtually running in the 2028 GOP primary and is hoping his cavalcade of deceit in defense of Trump will be appreciated by MAGA voters in the future.
While it's a noble exercise to refute J.D.'s trumped-up bullshit, it will have no practical effect on J.D.. People with no shame just can't be shamed.
A good postmortem on Joe Biden's State of the Union by Tim Miller and Will Saletan at The Bulwark. Also, near the beginning Tim speaks with White House Communications Director Ben LaBolt.
Will had some of the more memorable comments.
I'm somewhat paraphrasing, but he made the point that fighting MAGA Republicans is essentially defending America.
He regarded Speaker "MAGA Mike" Johnson as a metaphor for what's happened to the GOP. Tim had commented on MAGA Mike's punchable face. So by implication, MAGA GOP as a whole is quite punchable.
The most fun part of the podcast was saved for last with discussion of Sen. Katie Britt's rather surreal GOP response to the SOTU. Will Saletan observed that she has "redefined bad State of the Union responses".
In two recent postings, here and here, Ross Douthat concludes that the Republican Party as we know it will soon no longer exist. “There is now no possibility that the Republican Party will survive its rendezvous with Donald Trump unbroken.” Which means that on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2017, there will be two Democratic presidents at the ceremony for the first time since the inauguration of James Buchanan in 1857.1 The difference is that Buchanan’s inauguration unwittingly symbolized the collapse of the Democratic Party, torn apart by the struggle over slavery. Hillary’s inauguration will wittingly symbolize the collapse of the Republican Party, torn apart by, well, what? Gay marriage?
That’s oversimplifying, of course, but it does point to the split between the Acela Republicans on the Northeast Corridor who have managed to control the party for decades despite not having won an electoral vote in twenty years and the pick-up truck Republicans from the South and West who cast all the votes but never seemed to share in the profits. The Acela mantra of tax cuts for the rich, free trade, liberal immigration policies, massive defense spending, an interventionist foreign policy, and cuts for entitlement programs (ever proposed, never delivered) somehow kept the hicks in the sticks mesmerized, until the Donald started running his mouth. Now that the masses have risen, what does the future portend?
Well, Ted Cruz, obviously. Over at Slate, Will Saletan lays out the Republican future. Cruz is smart, he’s made a name for himself this time around, he has superb outsider cred, and he can raise a ton of money, something very difficult for an outsider to do. Furthermore, 2020 will almost surely be a very winnable year for the Republicans. Winning four presidential elections in a row is almost impossible, unless your name is Franklin D. Roosevelt, in which case it seems almost easy.2 It will be very difficult for Hillary to make Hillary I much more than Obama III, and "Obama IV" really sounds like a stretch. In fact, for Hillary to win in 2020, she’ll need to be a better politician than her husband, and no one has ever accused her of that.
This is a little cute but true. Buchanan succeeded fellow Democrat Franklin Pierce, so unpopular that he was denied re-nomination. The only two more recent Democratic presidents to succeed a fellow Democrat, Truman and Johnson, both took office after the death of their predecessors. For anything comparable to the Obama-Hillary handover, you have to go back to the Andy Jackson/Marty Van Buren affair in 1837. ↩︎
Almost. To my mind, the odds are very, very good that without the catastrophe of World War II, FDR would have been retired, with very little regret, in 1940. ↩︎
