love jeremy scahill. hes done alot of forgien policy american empire coverage over the last years.
Intercepted Podcast: Donald Trump and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Presidency
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JS: I think we’ve come to a point in the Trump presidency where we need to take very seriously the strong possibility that when it comes to
the most basic elements of being president, Donald Trump is a bona fide idiot. It truly appears that he’s not even trying to figure out how to be president. He’s just a failure by almost every possible measure. Now, I’m not saying that there is no possibility that there are dark secrets in need of exposing about Donald Trump. I mean, certainly, there are. His financial dealings remain totally shrouded in secrecy. The firing of the FBI Director James Comey is undoubtedly an ominous development. You have senior members of Trump’s campaign team and some that are still in his administration that have a lot to answer for, particularly when it comes to their dealings with various Russian officials. Now, maybe there is some lurid or scandalous truth about Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin that will one day be revealed. Maybe. But what we know, because it’s sitting there in plain sight in front of all of us, is that
this guy is not in control. Or rather, he is in control, and it’s a complete and total train-wreck. He doesn’t read his intelligence briefings. He needs the world explained to him with basically cartoons that have to fit on one page, or he’s gonna lose attention. He seems to genuinely not understand how government works, or what the Constitution actually says. Donald Trump’s behavior around world leaders is buffoonish, and it’s embarrassing.
So, by all means, let’s have aggressive investigations of Trump from all angles. But it’s long past due that we recognize the obvious — that
when it comes to just basic issues of competency, Trump is a clown. The latest scandal revolves around this bizarre meeting that Trump had with Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and Moscow’s ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak. Trump had that meeting the day after he fired FBI Director Comey.
Now, just on a basic level, the timing of that meeting was unforgivably dumb, just on the level of optics, on the most basic level. But then, Trump bars the U.S. press from coming into that meeting, even to take the little pictures at the beginning of it. But he does allow in a Russian photographer. And it’s because of the pictures that the Russian photographer released that we even knew that Ambassador Kislyak was in the meeting. Trump was not going to tell us that. His administration was not going to release that fact. And Kislyak is one of the main figures at the center of this whole Russia affair. Now, maybe this was a nefarious, super secret meeting, where Trump was going to spill state secrets to the Russians because they have him compromised. They have the pee tape. He has secret financial dealings in Russia. Maybe.
But set all of that aside for a second and consider the obvious. Trump is arrogant. Trump likes to brag. And Trump has proven to be a buffoon as president of the United States. The man has diarrhea of the brain. Whatever pops into his head is gonna come shooting out of his mouth. Or he’s gonna just tweet it. What’s way more likely than Trump intentionally divulging anything classified to the Russians because he’s compromised or actively working with Moscow to undermine the United States is that he is as he seems.
He’s the village idiot who somehow ended up as president. And this is not actually a funny situation. In fact, it’s a quite dangerous situation, given the views, the publicly espoused views of Trump and his team on a wide range of foreign and domestic issues: their view of poor people; their view of immigrants, both documented and undocumented; their views of Islam and Muslims; their views of foreign policy; their views of healthcare. What we already know and can prove is frightening enough. And I’m far more worried about the damage they can do with whatever time they have in the White House than I am about what the Russians are going to do."