Trump Consciousness

How do you do that? Because I think it’s largely impossible without spending huge amounts of time researching each fact.

(Not knowing - or, worse, knowing full well! - what he was doing, Steve innocently starts a vast, sprawling, and irresolvable debate on epistemology in the middle of a political thread)
 
(Not knowing - or, worse, knowing full well! - what he was doing, Steve innocently starts a vast, sprawling, and irresolvable debate on epistemology in the middle of a political thread)

Is what I’m asking about a real thing? Or is it not worth bothering with?
 
Oh, it's a totally legit question, Steve, just one whose ramifications and implications are profound and wide-ranging. I was just playfully pointing that out.
 

00:29
It's really quite interesting how people have tried to manipulate people and how to intimidate people and change their minds. This has been going on since we've been in America. You know you go back to the days of slavery. You know. And in a lot of the states there were more slaves than there were owners. So what did they do, they had to divide the slaves. So they told the ones in the house you're better than the ones in the yard. And the ones in a yard, you're better than the ones in the field. And then after slavery was over, the light-skinned ones you're better than the dark-skinned ones. And on and on it went trying to divide people. Today they say if you are a conservative then you are somehow an Uncle Tom you're horrible person you're a demon. What a bunch of crap. You know. But you know it's been it's been going on for hundreds of years and it's really time to put a stop to it
...

02:14
I was a liberal. I was way out there. And then I did something that liberals are never supposed to do. I listened to a conservative. I listened to Ronald Reagan. And I said, you know he doesn't sound like a horrible racist person. He sounds just like my mother. And at that point I started thinking for myself. And that made a big difference.
....

02:54
... Your brain has billions and billions of neurons, hundreds of billions of interconnections. It remembers everything you've ever seen, everything you've ever heard. It can process more than two million bits of information in one second. Would God give you something like that just so that you can be a sheep and follow what somebody else tells you to do?
...

03:18
So many people say the president's a racist. He's a horrible racist, and everything he does. Well you know it seems to me like some years ago Jesse Jackson actually gave the president an award in New York City because he opened so many opportunities for black people. Is that what a racist does? And then when he moved to Palm Beach he was right on the forefront to fighting the clubs who were not admitting Jews and blacks. Does that sound like what a racist would do? He is the one who finally got the second chance act done, because that's not like what a racist would do. When he took office he brought the office of HBCUs to the White House who could get appropriate attention more money than ever. Opportunity zone so that people could take this money and direct it to the places where people did not have opportunities before. An economy where you have the lowest unemployment rates for black people in history and it goes on and on and on. Let me tell you something if he's a racist he's a awfully bad one he needs to go get a lesson from the real racists: the people who look at somebody like you and me and they say because your skin is a certain color you have to think a certain way and if you don't there's something wrong with you and they start calling your names. Those are the real races
...


05:36
So they can perpetrate this horrible image of him being a bad person it is absolutely not true. I work with him all the time. He's a wonderful person he's become a good friend. Do you remembered during a campaign when we were having a debate and I couldn't hear my name. I came out I stood there I was waiting to hear. Everybody else gleefully walked past. He was the only one who stood with me until they straighten it out. That's the kind of person that our president is. He is my friend and he will be your friend as you get to know him.

....
 
[Quoting a Ben Carson speech] Well you know it seems to me like some years ago Jesse Jackson actually gave the president an award in New York City because he opened so many opportunities for black people. Is that what a racist does? And then when he moved to Palm Beach he was right on the forefront to fighting the clubs who were not admitting Jews and blacks. Does that sound like what a racist would do? He is the one who finally got the second chance act done, because that's not like what a racist would do. When he took office he brought the office of HBCUs to the White House who could get appropriate attention more money than ever. Opportunity zone so that people could take this money and direct it to the places where people did not have opportunities before.

OK, Jim. Fair play to you: you have put some positive evidence on the table. I feel an obligation to respond because I have in this thread strongly supported the contention that Donald Trump is a racist.

The first point to make is that these claims and/or evidence, assuming we accept them, have to be weighed against the prior and conflicting evidence which others have presented in this thread already, e.g., that the Trumps rejected black applicants to their housing schemes, and that Donald Trump took out adverts alleging that Native Americans who presented a business challenge to him were drug-pushing criminals. So, let's first of all bear in mind that there is (plenty of) conflicting evidence.

OK, but, now, should we accept these claims/evidence? Let's look at the putative pieces of evidence that you (via your proxy, Ben Carson), present one by one:

  1. "Jesse Jackson actually gave the president an award in New York City because he opened so many opportunities for black people". First off: yes, this award (the Ellis Island Award) was granted to Donald Trump in 1986. However, I have been unable to confirm that it was presented by Jesse Jackson. If you can confirm that, then please share how you have confirmed it. More importantly, however, as factcheck.org notes (emphasis mine): Donald Trump "was not honored for his “work within the black community.”" Instead, the article goes on to note: "the Ellis Island Medal of Honor was given to Trump, who was a real estate developer at the time, for his contributions to the city of New York through his development projects, said Otto Coca, spokesman for the Ellis Island Honors Society. That’s the group that gives the award."
  2. "[W]hen he moved to Palm Beach he was right on the forefront to fighting the clubs who were not admitting Jews and blacks". OK. It does seem that Donald Trump opened up his own club to Jews and blacks when this was not the norm in Palm Beach. However, it also seems questionable whether this was based on genuine personal commitment to egalitarianism or whether it was simply a cynical business move. For example, the Snopes article So You Think You Know the Real Donald Trump? quotes town council member Allen Wyett as having asserted that "Trump’s nondiscriminatory policy at the club was more of a business decision than a social one": "Wyett, who is Jewish, said he would hear Trump talk with pride about Mar-a-Lago’s nondiscriminatory policy, but wondered if it was a business strategy: “Was he smart enough to realize that Palm Beach is about 40 percent Jewish and he was not going to attract the old guard anyway?”"
  3. "He is the one who finally got the second chance act done". Is he? Or did he simply sign it when Congress got it done? My (admittedly brief) research has not been able to answer these questions. That said, he certainly has expressed strong support for this act, which is laudable. But did he do that on the basis that it predominantly helps black ex-cons? And if so, was this based on genuine personal commitment or political expediency? (And there is a case history of political expediency: i.e., his claim to want to drain the swamp seems to be based on political expediency, given that he has swamped up his cabinet picks).
  4. "When he took office he brought the office of HBCUs to the White House who could get appropriate attention more money than ever". OK. Fair play. Based on my brief research, the claim that Donald Trump has advocated for the interests of HBCUs is credible.
  5. "Opportunity zone so that people could take this money and direct it to the places where people did not have opportunities before". OK. Based on my limited research, this does seem like a policy that will legitimately benefit minority communities. If anybody has any deeper research, then please share it.

To sum up, the evidence seems mixed, and it is questionable whether where the man has supported policies which benefit ethnic minorities, he is doing this based on genuine personal belief or political expediency. That said, there seems to be no doubt that he is supporting policies which benefit ethnic minorities, so fair play to him.
 
CNN Whistleblower: Liberal Media’s Charlottesville Hoax Was My ‘Red Pill’

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/20...ottesville-hoax-was-my-red-pill-moment-video/
EXCLUSIVE | CNN Whistleblower: Liberal Media’s Charlottesville Hoax Was My ‘Red Pill’​
Poarch was on the ground in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, covering the “Unite the Right” rally when white nationalists arrived to demonstrate against the removal of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.​
Following the riot, President Trump explicitly condemned white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and the Ku Klux Klan.​
“Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans,” Trump declared in a televised statement from the White House.​
He doubled down on his condemnation of racism at a press conference at Trump Tower in New York the following day, using the phrase “very fine people” to refer to non-violent demonstrators who were protesting against the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from a public park. He added: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”​
The mainstream media omitted Trump’s full remarks and claimed the president characterized white supremacists and neo-Nazis as “very fine people.”​
The “Charlottesville Hoax,” which has become the most important piece of evidence in the left’s case that Trump is in fact a racist, was a wake-up call for Poarch.​


1:15
The main one for me that kind of really set me down a pathway to kind of research things for myself Alicia was you know the Charlottesville riot was called the unite to right rally down in Charlottesville Virginia you know where it got crazy and a lady died and everything I was one of the team that was boots on ground that were helping cover that story and I was in the truck doing what I could do to help out the engineers get it on the air and we all know excuse me that in from the speech where there was a press conference a couple days after the fact where you know everyone was asking them to denounce the white supremacist and Nazis and everything like that in which he clearly did.
 
Donald Trump's lawsuit against New York officials over tax returns dismissed

A federal judge on Monday dismissed US President Donald Trump's lawsuit against New York officials aimed at preventing the release of his tax returns.

Mr Trump has refused to release his tax returns since he was a presidential candidate and is the only modern president to have not made that financial information public.

Not only is he withholding his tax returns, he's filing preemptive suits to avoid being forced to release them.

Seems legit. Nothing to hide here.
 
Not sure (can't remember) whether this article has been shared in this thread already, but my sense is "not", so here it is. It's a major investigation and a bombshell, from a bit over a year ago:

Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father

The president has long sold himself as a self-made billionaire, but a Times investigation found that he received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s.

Another big lie. But who's counting?

President Trump participated in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents, an investigation by The New York Times has found.

Much of [the equivalent today of at least $413 million that Donald Trump received from his father’s real estate empire] came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show. Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more. He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.

These maneuvers met with little resistance from the Internal Revenue Service, The Times found. The president’s parents, Fred and Mary Trump, transferred well over $1 billion in wealth to their children, which could have produced a tax bill of at least $550 million under the 55 percent tax rate then imposed on gifts and inheritances.

The Trumps paid a total of $52.2 million, or about 5 percent, tax records show.

Why would you trust to act in the public interest a man who stiffs the public via tax fraud?
 
How can you tell if a politician is lying?

His lips are moving
How connected is the typical person whose net worth is easily over half a billion dollars? If their is a "deep state" which is nothing less than coordinated political activity designed to empower their elite at the expense of the electorate, surely any person who is outside this group and wants in can do so once president.

To be clear, I agree with this video:


It's just that trump gets to form his own new power network. Nothing really changes. How could it? There is far too much disagreement (morally, culturally, religious division, policy division, etc. The deep state is normal part of the business of politics and will continue on. Maybe a different version...but concessions will be made. Just a different version of the same power structure!
 
Not sure (can't remember) whether this article has been shared in this thread already, but my sense is "not", so here it is. It's a major investigation and a bombshell, from a bit over a year ago:

Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father



Another big lie. But who's counting?





Why would you trust to act in the public interest a man who stiffs the public via tax fraud?
Yes, but keep in mind those who believe in small government respect trumps tenacity in doing so, if its true.
 
Donald Trump impeachment hearing hears Ukraine aid was necessary not to appear 'weak' in face of Russia

A senior United States national security official told an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump that the military aid withheld from Ukraine was necessary for the country to appear strong while negotiating a peace deal with Russia.

Mr Trump and some of his supporters have argued that the funds — approved by the US Congress to help combat Russian-backed separatists in the eastern part of Ukraine — were blocked by Mr Trump to press Mr Zelenskiy's Government to fight corruption, not to seek an investigation of Mr Biden and his son Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.

In her testimony, Ms Cooper described at some length the approval process for the millions in aid to Ukraine, including that the Pentagon had determined that Kiev had met anti-corruption requirements for the release of the funds.

Emphasis mine.
 
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