Mega-Thread: Trump Focused Discussion

[Breccia]

So let's check in on--

I would take the pay up front, then shout them down at CPAC.

The people paying CPAC attendees would almost refuse to pay up front, and could easily refuse to pay afterwards. They are Trump cultists, after all. You'd be ejected with nothing but a sense of pride in doing the right thing, and maybe some swag.

So let's check in on Trump.

1) So Trump told his audience

Just as the United States led the automotive revolution in the last century, I want to ensure that America – not China – leads this revolution in air mobility. These breakthroughs can transform commerce, bring a giant infusion of wealth into rural America, and connect families and our country in new ways.

"...the fuck?"

He wants flying cars.

"...in rural America?"

Oh, it goes on from there. He wants to build Freedom Cities in--

"Har har, 'Freedom Cities', what did he really call them?"

Um...

"No."

Trump also pushed for a contest to design what he dubbed “freedom cities” – 10 new urban areas built on federal land.

Trump said, too, that he would create “hives of industry” to manufacture goods that, under him, the U.S. would stop importing from China. And he said his government would implement “baby bonuses,” or cash to new parents that would “help launch a new baby boom.”

"Aren't there already social programs for that?"

Yes, but bear in mind, Trump supporters don't believe in contraception and he wants to bribe them into voting for him a third time. Or, possibly fourth or fifth.

"So he said that at CPAC? Or some other rally?"

No, it was a three-minute video on his Chinese knockoff Twitter.

"He couldn't build a wall that lasted more than a year, and he wants to build ten cities and load them with factories and...flying cars?"

He said that, yes. I think he's lying. I think his last set of promises backfired badly, I think he knows that, and I think he's doubling down by going with bigger, less believable lies.

2) Steve Bannon declares war on Fox News.

Murdoch, you’ve deemed Trump’s not going to be president. Well, we’ve deemed that you’re not going to have a network. Because we’re going to fight you every step of the way.

He then pointed out FOX News isn't covering the lawsuit against them, called the Murdochs a bunch of dirty foreigners, and demanded FOX News stop giving softball interviews to people who aren't Trump.

Let them figuratively tear each other to shreds.

3) And just in case you thought it couldn't get any Wilder:

Check under your seats. If there happens to be a gold chocolate bar underneath there — no, I’m not joking — that’s a VIP ticket to my father’s reception tomorrow at CPAC

"Wouldn't this have been a good attachment to those NFTs he sold? You know, the ones that granted an audience with Trump?"

No. Trump's NFTs were aimed at the gullible. You don't give the gullible free shit, you charge them extra. These people were already at CPAC.

But he did try to sell them on Patriot Mobile.

"What...is Patriot Mobile?"

They are America’s only Christian conservative wireless provider. According to their own website.

"They're Christians and they went with...Patriot?"

Yes.

[Kathranis]

My question is, what the hell is a "Racist in Reverse"?

Either a dog whistle version of "race traitor" or a colored person who disparages a white person, depending on the subject.

It's kinda funny because using a term like "reverse racist" instead of just "racist" shows they do recognize there's a meaningful difference.

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Do these folks have anything real that they can actually campaign on as a tangible benefit to the American people? Or is this literally all they've got? How bleak.

Well, they have the culture war (mostly trans panic these days), fear mongering over immigrants and minorities, debt hawking, and... let's see... "stolen" elections... and... Hunter Biden's laptop?

Missing anything?

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Still wondering who the fuck she thinks she's appealing to, if she's just hard-up for money and needs a boost, or if some wealthy conservative is funding this because he's on some heavy copium that an "establishment" candidate running as a MAGA can somehow win something.

It's gotta be a grift. I'm sure if you read the fine print a hefty chunk of all contributions to her PAC get siphoned into some sort of separate discretionary fund.

[Masark]

Don't worry, I'm sure they'll create some sort of police... a secret one, perhaps, to look into and deal with political opponents.

You mean the DEA?

[Corvus]

Freedom cities, huh? Why do I picture the slums built by factory owners to house their workers back in the industrial era?

[Breccia]

Freedom cities, huh? Why do I picture the slums built by factory owners to house their workers back in the industrial era?

Because Trump said he'd build them in the fronteir, suggesting they'd be nowhere near anything.

[jonnysensible]

Freedom cities, huh? Why do I picture the slums built by factory owners to house their workers back in the industrial era?

the first city will be called Lebensraum

[Cthulhu 2020]

It's all pretty easy to verify that employees of the FBI are not part of Biden's campaign

So who wants to remind him that it was Trump's own administration that clicked the report button...on Trump?

He has me on ignore, but surely someone can point out the monstrous self-own he just presented in public.

Or...he could claim "deep state" a conspiracy theory. I mean, either way.

I think it's also funny that he's also consistently failed to address the fact that Twitter changed its rules in order to not have to take disciplinary action against Trump.

Don't they do that for politicians in general? Something about not deleting their tweets because it's relevant to the public discourse...

Trump lied for years and years, yes.

Then he incited violence and that was too far. Well, except for Musk, who personally revoked that.

Bro, just stop it already. You blindly believe Elon Musk even though Musk and Taibbi both admitted to have doctored which files you got to view and you don't even believe their own words because you're so brain broken into believing whatever the current conservative narrative is. It's just sad at this point engaging with you.

[Poopymonster]

Freedom cities, huh? Why do I picture the slums built by factory owners to house their workers back in the industrial era?

Freedom city you say?

[Orange Joe]

Bro, just stop it already. You blindly believe Elon Musk even though Musk and Taibbi both admitted to have doctored which files you got to view and you don't even believe their own words because you're so brain broken into believing whatever the current conservative narrative is. It's just sad at this point engaging with you.

Do you have Breccia confused with someone else? When have they supported musk or any conservative view?

[DarkTZeratul]

Do you have Breccia confused with someone else? When have they supported musk or any conservative view?

Pretty sure that was directed at tehdang.

[tehdang]

It's just sad at this point engaging with you.

Perhaps it is better to stop, since you've only offered a string of lies and ad hominem attacks to justify your point of view. If you come upon new and fresh reasons to believe as you do, then please share. I am trying to channel Rozz's encouragement to acknowledge when the debate has broken down and has started to focus on a poster and not the thread, and to cease replying.

[Orange Joe]

Pretty sure that was directed at tehdang.

Thought about it after awhile and figured I got that wrong. Just the way the quotes came out to me it seemed he was talking to breccia at first. Didn't help that my cats had me up most of the night

[Breccia]

As I have enough CNN points to spare, I'm just going to use their fact check of Trump's CPAC speech. Again, at this point, I've cited FOX News, which is as conservative as it is admittedly dishonest, enough times to keep this up for a while. "CNN is a biased source" responses will be dismissed. Not only have I paid for them, at this point, CNN is so fucking far more honest than FOX News that I should start paying myself 10:1 at this point.

And, big surprise, Trump lied a lot.

Here is a fact check of 23 of the false claims Trump made. (And that’s far from the total.)

Crime and civil unrest
Crime in Manhattan

While Trump criticized Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who has been investigating Trump’s company, he claimed that “killings are taking place at a number like nobody’s ever seen, right in Manhattan.”

Facts First: It isn’t even close to true that Manhattan is experiencing a number of killings that nobody has ever seen. The region classified by the New York Police Department as Manhattan North had 43 reported murders in 2022; that region had 379 reported murders in 1990 and 306 murders in 1993. The Manhattan South region had 35 reported murders in 2022 versus 124 reported murders in 1990 and 86 murders in 1993. New York City as a whole is also nowhere near record homicide levels; the city had 438 reported murders in 2022 versus 2,262 in 1990 and 1,927 in 1993.

Manhattan North had just eight reported murders this year through February 19, while Manhattan South had one. The city as a whole had 49 reported murders.

The National Guard and Minnesota

Talking about rioting amid racial justice protests after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, Trump claimed he had been ready to send in the National Guard in Seattle, then added, “We saved Minneapolis. The thing is, we’re not supposed to do that. Because it’s up to the governor, the Democrat governor. They never want any help. They don’t mind – it’s almost like they don’t mind to have their cities and states destroyed. There’s something wrong with these people.”

Facts First: This is a reversal of reality. Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, not Trump, was the one who deployed the Minnesota National Guard during the 2020 unrest; Walz first activated the Guard more than seven hours before Trump publicly threatened to deploy the Guard himself. Walz’s office told CNN in 2020 that the governor activated the Guard in response to requests from officials in Minneapolis and St. Paul – cities also run by Democrats.

Trump has repeatedly made the false claim that he was the one who sent the Guard to Minneapolis. You can read a longer fact check, from 2020, here.

Trump’s executive order on monuments

Trump boasted that he had taken effective action as president to stop the destruction of statues and memorials. He claimed: “I passed and signed an executive order. Anybody that does that gets 10 years in jail, with no negotiation – it’s not ’10’ but it turns into three months.” He added: “But we passed it. It was a very old law, and we found it – one of my very good legal people along with [adviser] Stephen Miller, they found it. They said, ‘Sir, I don’t know if you want to try and bring this back.’ I said. ‘I do.’”

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. He did not create a mandatory 10-year sentence for people who damage monuments. In fact, his 2020 executive order did not mandate any increase in sentences.

Rather, the executive order simply directed the attorney general to “prioritize” investigations and prosecutions of monument-destruction cases and declared that it is federal policy to prosecute such cases to the fullest extent permitted under existing law, including an existing law that allowed a sentence of up to 10 years in prison for willfully damaging federal property. The executive order did nothing to force judges to impose a 10-year sentence.

Vandalism in Portland

Trump claimed, “How’s Portland doing? They don’t even have storefronts anymore. Everything’s two-by-four’s because they get burned down every week.”

Facts First: This is a major exaggeration. Portland obviously still has hundreds of active storefronts, though it has struggled with downtown commercial vacancies for various reasons, and some businesses are sometimes vandalized by protesters. Trump has for years exaggerated the extent of property damage from protest vandalism in Portland.

Russia, Ukraine and NATO
Russian expansionism

Boasting of his foreign policy record, Trump claimed, “I was also the only president where Russia didn’t take over a country during my term.”

Facts First: While it’s true that Russia didn’t take over a country during Trump’s term, it’s not true that he was the only US president under whom Russia didn’t take over a country. “Totally false,” Michael Khodarkovsky, a Loyola University Chicago history professor who is an expert on Russian imperialism, said in an email. “If by Russia he means the current Russian Federation that existed since 1991, then the best example is Clinton, 1992-98. During this time Russia fought a war in Chechnya, but Chechnya was not a country but one of Russia’s regions.”

Khodarkovsky added, “If by Russia he means the USSR, as people often do, then from 1945, when the USSR occupied much of Eastern Europe until 1979, when USSR invaded Afghanistan, Moscow did not take over any new country. It only sent forces into countries it had taken over in 1945 (Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968).”

NATO funding

Trump said while talking about NATO funding: “And I told delinquent foreign nations – they were delinquent, they weren’t paying their bills – that if they wanted our protection, they had to pay up, and they had to pay up now.”

Facts First: It’s not true that NATO countries weren’t paying “bills” until Trump came along or that they were “delinquent” in the sense of failing to pay bills – as numerous fact-checkers pointed out when Trump repeatedly used such language during his presidency. NATO members haven’t been failing to pay their share of the organization’s common budget to run the organization. And while it’s true that most NATO countries were not (and still are not) meeting NATO’s target of each country spending a minimum of 2% of gross domestic product on defense, that 2% figure is what NATO calls a “guideline”; it is not some sort of binding contract, and it does not create liabilities. An official NATO recommitment to the 2% guideline in 2014 merely said that members not currently at that level would “aim to move towards the 2% guideline within a decade.”

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg did credit Trump for securing increases in European NATO members’ defense spending, but it’s worth noting that those countries’ spending had also increased in the last two years of the Obama administration following Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea and the recommitment that year to the 2% guideline. NATO notes on its website that 2022 was “the eighth consecutive year of rising defence spending across European Allies and Canada.”

NATO’s existence

Boasting of how he had secured additional funding for NATO from countries, Trump claimed, “Actually, NATO wouldn’t even exist if I didn’t get them to pay up.”

Facts First: This is nonsense.

There was never any indication that NATO, created in 1949, would have ceased to exist in the early 2020s without additional funding from some members. The alliance was stable even with many members not meeting the alliance’s guideline of having members spend 2% of their gross domestic product on defense.

We don’t often fact-check claims about what might have happened in an alternative scenario, but this Trump claim has no basis in reality. “The quote doesn’t make sense, obviously,” said Erwan Lagadec, research professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and an expert on NATO.

Lagadec noted that NATO has had no trouble getting allies to cover the roughly $3 billion in annual “direct” funding for the organization, which is “peanuts” to this group of countries. And he said that the only NATO member that had given “any sign” in recent years that it was thinking about leaving the alliance “was … the US, under Trump.” Lagadec added that the US leaving the alliance is one scenario that could realistically kill it, but that clearly wasn’t what Trump was talking about in his remarks on spending levels.

James Goldgeier, an American University professor of international relations and Brookings Institution visiting fellow, said in an email: “NATO was founded in 1949, so it seems very clear that Donald Trump had nothing to do with its existence. In fact, the worry was that he would pull the US out of NATO, as his national security adviser warned he would do if he had been reelected.”

The cost of NATO’s headquarters

Trump mocked NATO’s headquarters, saying, “They spent – an office building that cost $3 billion. It’s like a skyscraper in Manhattan laid on its side. It’s one of the longest buildings I’ve ever seen. And I said, ‘You should have – instead of spending $3 billion, you should have spent $500 million building the greatest bunker you’ve ever seen. Because Russia didn’t – wouldn’t even need an airplane attack. One tank one shot through that beautiful glass building and it’s gone.’”

Facts First: NATO did spend a lot of money on its headquarters in Belgium, but Trump’s “$3 billion” figure is a major exaggeration. When Trump used the same inaccurate figure in early 2020, NATO told CNN that the headquarters was actually constructed for a sum under the approved budget of about $1.18 billion euro, which is about $1.3 billion at exchange rates as of Sunday morning.

The Pulitzer Prize

Trump made his usual argument that The Washington Post and The New York Times should not have won a prestigious journalism award, a 2018 Pulitzer Prize, for their reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 election and its connections to Trump’s team. He then said, “And they were exactly wrong. And now they’ve even admitted that it was a hoax. It was a total hoax, and they got the prize.”

Facts First: The Times and Post have not made any sort of “hoax” admission. “The claim is completely false,” Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander said in an email on Sunday.

Stadtlander continued: “When our Pulitzer Prize shared with The Washington Post was challenged by the former President, the award was upheld by the Pulitzer Prize Board after an independent review. The board stated that ‘no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.’ The Times’s reporting was also substantiated by the Mueller investigation and Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into the matter.”

The Post referred CNN to that same July statement from the Pulitzer Prize Board.

Awareness of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline

Trump claimed of his opposition to Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany: “Nord Stream 2 – Nobody ever heard of it … right? Nobody ever heard of Nord Stream 2 until I came along. I started talking about Nord Stream 2. I had to go call it ‘the pipeline’ because nobody knew what I was talking about.”

Facts First: This is standard Trump hyperbole; it’s just not true that “nobody” had heard of Nord Stream 2 before he began discussing it. Nord Stream 2 was a regular subject of media, government and diplomatic discussion before Trump took office. In fact, Biden publicly criticized it as vice president in 2016. Trump may well have generated increased US awareness to the controversial project, but “nobody ever heard of Nord Stream 2 until I came along” isn’t true.

Trump and Nord Stream 2

Trump claimed, “I got along very well with Putin even though I’m the one that ended his pipeline. Remember they said, ‘Trump is giving a lot to Russia.’ Really? Putin actually said to me, ‘If you’re my friend, I’d hate like hell to see you as my enemy.’ Because I ended the pipeline, right? Do you remember? Nord Stream 2.” He continued, “I ended it. It was dead.”

Facts First: Trump did not kill Nord Stream 2. While he did approve sanctions on companies working on the project, that move came nearly three years into his presidency, when the pipeline was already around an estimated 90% complete – and the state-owned Russian gas company behind the project said shortly after the sanctions that it would complete the pipeline itself. The company announced in December 2020 that construction was resuming. And with days left in Trump’s term in January 2021, Germany announced that it had renewed permission for construction in its waters.

The pipeline never began operations; Germany ended up halting the project as Russia was about to invade Ukraine early last year. The pipeline was damaged later in the year in what has been described as an act of sabotage.

The Obama administration and Ukraine

Trump claimed that while he provided lethal assistance to Ukraine, the Obama administration “didn’t want to get involved” and merely “supplied the bedsheets.” He said, “Do you remember? They supplied the bedsheets. And maybe even some pillows from [pillow businessman] Mike [Lindell], who’s sitting right over here. … But they supplied the bedsheets.”

Facts First: This is inaccurate. While it’s true that the Obama administration declined to provide weapons to Ukraine, it provided more than $600 million in security assistance to Ukraine between 2014 and 2016 that involved far more than bedsheets. The aid included counter-artillery and counter-mortar radars, armored Humvees, tactical drones, night vision devices and medical supplies.

Biden and a Ukrainian prosecutor

Trump claimed that Biden, as vice president, held back a billion dollars from Ukraine until the country fired a prosecutor who was “after Hunter” and a company that was paying him. Trump was referring to Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, who sat on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings.

Facts First: This is baseless. There has never been any evidence that Hunter Biden was under investigation by the prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who had been widely faulted by Ukrainian anti-corruption activists and European countries for failing to investigate corruption. A former Ukrainian deputy prosecutor and a top anti-corruption activist have both said the Burisma-related investigation was dormant at the time Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire Shokin.

Daria Kaleniuk, executive director of Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Action Center, told The Washington Post in 2019: “Shokin was not investigating. He didn’t want to investigate Burisma. And Shokin was fired not because he wanted to do that investigation, but quite to the contrary, because he failed that investigation.” In addition, Shokin’s successor as prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, told Bloomberg in 2019: “Hunter Biden did not violate any Ukrainian laws – at least as of now, we do not see any wrongdoing.”

Biden, as vice president, was carrying out the policy of the US and its allies, not pursuing his own agenda, in threatening to withhold a billion-dollar US loan guarantee if the Ukrainian government did not sack Shokin. CNN fact-checked Trump’s claims on this subject at length in 2019.

The economy
Trump and job creation

Promising to save Americans’ jobs if he is elected again, Trump claimed, “We had the greatest job history of any president ever.”

Facts First: This is false. The US lost about 2.7 million jobs during Trump’s presidency, the worst overall jobs record for any president. The net loss was largely because of the Covid-19 pandemic, but even Trump’s pre-pandemic jobs record – about 6.7 million jobs added – was far from the greatest of any president ever. The economy added more than 11.5 million jobs in the first term of Democratic President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

Tariffs on China

Trump repeated a trade claim he made frequently during his presidency. Speaking of China, he said he “charged them” with tariffs that had the effect of “bringing in hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into our Treasury from China. Thank you very much, China.” He claimed that he did this even though “no other president had gotten even 10 cents – not one president got anything from them.”

Facts First: As we have written repeatedly, it’s not true that no president before Trump had generated any revenue through tariffs on goods from China. In reality, the US has had tariffs on China for more than two centuries, and FactCheck.org reported in 2019 that the US generated an “average of $12.3 billion in custom duties a year from 2007 to 2016, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission DataWeb.” Also, American importers, not Chinese exporters, make the actual tariff payments – and study after study during Trump’s presidency found that Americans were bearing most of the cost of the tariffs.

The trade deficit with China

Trump went on to repeat a false claim he made more than 100 times as president – that the US used to have a trade deficit with China of more than $500 billion. He claimed it was “five-, six-, seven-hundred billion dollars a year.”

Facts First: The US has never had a $500 billion, $600 billion or $700 billion trade deficit with China even if you only count trade in goods and ignore the services trade in which the US runs a surplus with China. The pre-Trump record for a goods deficit with China was about $367 billion in 2015. The goods deficit hit a new record of about $418 billion under Trump in 2018 before falling back under $400 billion in subsequent years.

And hoo boy, this next section. Trump is still spinning the oldies.

Elections
Trump and the 2020 election

Trump said people claim they want to run against him even though, he claimed, he won the 2020 election. He said, “I won the second election, OK, won it by a lot. You know, when they say, when they say Biden won, the smart people know that didn’t [happen].”

Facts First: This is Trump’s regular lie. He lost the 2020 election to Biden fair and square, 306 to 232 in the Electoral College. Biden earned more than 7 million more votes than Trump did.

Democrats and elections

Trump said Democrats are only good at “disinformation” and “cheating on elections.”

Facts First: This is nonsense. There is just no basis for a broad claim that Democrats are election cheaters. Election fraud and voter fraud are exceedingly rare in US elections, though such crimes are occasionally committed by officials and supporters of both parties. (We’ll ignore Trump’s subjective claim about “disinformation.”)

War and peace
The liberation of the ISIS caliphate

Trump repeated his familiar story about how he had supposedly liberated the “caliphate” of terror group ISIS in “three weeks.” This time, he said, “In fact, with the ISIS caliphate, a certain general said it could only be done in three years, ‘and probably it can’t be done at all, sir.’ And I did it in three weeks. I went over to Iraq, met a great general. ‘Sir, I can do it in three weeks.’ You’ve heard that story. ‘I can do it in three weeks, sir.’ ‘How are you going to do that?’ They explained it. I did it in three weeks. I was told it couldn’t be done at all, that it would take at least three years. Did it in three weeks. Knocked out 100% of the ISIS caliphate.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim of eliminating the ISIS caliphate in “three weeks” isn’t true; the ISIS “caliphate” was declared fully liberated more than two years into Trump’s presidency, in 2019. Even if Trump was starting the clock at the time of his visit to Iraq, in late December 2018, the liberation was proclaimed more than two and a half months later. In addition, Trump gave himself far too much credit for the defeat of the caliphate, as he has in the past, when he said “I did it”: Kurdish forces did much of the ground fighting, and there was major progress against the caliphate under President Barack Obama in 2015 and 2016.

IHS Markit, an information company that studied the changing size of the caliphate, reported two days before Trump’s 2017 inauguration that the caliphate shrunk by 23% in 2016 after shrinking by 14% in 2015. “The Islamic State suffered unprecedented territorial losses in 2016, including key areas vital for the group’s governance project,” an analyst there said in a statement at the time.

Military equipment left in Afghanistan

Trump claimed, as he has before, that the US left behind $85 billion worth of military equipment when it withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021. He said of the leader of the Taliban: “Now he’s got $85 billion worth of our equipment that I bought – $85 billion.” He added later: “The thing that nobody ever talks about, we lost 13 [soldiers], we lost $85 billion worth of the greatest military equipment in the world.”

Facts First: Trump’s $85 billion figure is false. While a significant quantity of military equipment that had been provided by the US to Afghan government forces was indeed abandoned to the Taliban upon the US withdrawal, the Defense Department has estimated that this equipment had been worth about $7.1 billion – a chunk of about $18.6 billion worth of equipment provided to Afghan forces between 2005 and 2021. And some of the equipment left behind was rendered inoperable before US forces withdrew.

As other fact-checkers have previously explained, the “$85 billion” is a rounded-up figure (it’s closer to $83 billion) for the total amount of money Congress has appropriated during the war to a fund supporting the Afghan security forces. A minority of this funding was for equipment.

The Afghanistan withdrawal and the F-16

Trump claimed that the Taliban acquired F-16 fighter planes because of the US withdrawal, saying: “They feared the F-16s. And now they own them. Think of it.”

Facts First: This is false. F-16s were not among the equipment abandoned upon the US withdrawal and the collapse of the Afghan armed forces, since the Afghan armed forces did not fly F-16s.

Immigration
The border wall

Trump claimed that he had kept his promise to complete a wall on the border with Mexico: “As you know, I built hundreds of miles of wall and completed that task as promised. And then I began to add even more in areas that seemed to be allowing a lot of people to come in.”

Facts First: It’s not true that Trump “completed” the border wall. According to an official “Border Wall Status” report written by US Customs and Border Protection two days after Trump left office, about 458 miles of wall had been completed under Trump – but about 280 more miles that had been identified for wall construction had not been completed.

The report, provided to CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, said that, of those 280 miles left to go, about 74 miles were “in the pre-construction phase and have not yet been awarded, in locations where no barriers currently exist,” and that 206 miles were “currently under contract, in place of dilapidated and outdated designs and in locations where no barriers previously existed.”

Latin America and deportations

Trump told his familiar story about how, until he was president, the US was unable to deport MS-13 gang members to other countries, “especially” Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras because those countries “didn’t want them.”

Facts First: It’s not true that, as a rule, Guatemala and Honduras wouldn’t take back migrants being deported from the US during Obama’s administration, though there were some individual exceptions.

In 2016, just prior to Trump’s presidency, neither Guatemala nor Honduras was on the list of countries that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) considered “recalcitrant,” or uncooperative, in accepting the return of their nationals.

For the 2016 fiscal year, Obama’s last full fiscal year in office, ICE reported that Guatemala and Honduras ranked second and third, behind only Mexico, in terms of the country of citizenship of people being removed from the US.

I am fully aware this is a monstrous Wall of Text (3UU, 0/12, damage from trolls reduced to 0). I also don't care. As long as Trump keeps objectively blatantly lying, it is the job of reasonable people to be aware of these lies, to counter these lies, and to decry these lies. The problem isn't people calling Trump out for his behavior, it's Trump's behavior.

Trump is the leading Republican candidate, the lead speaker at CPAC, and the 2020 RNC said they were doing whatever he wanted. Trump's views are the Republican Party's views. Trump's statements are the Republican Party's statements. They are not just mainstream, they are the default. Any attempts to handwave Trump are objectively false, and also admission they know the Republican Party has taken substantial damage by inviting this person to be in charge, and then refusing to kick him out even after everything he did.

And we all know where this is going: I won't even bother to challenge Trump supporters to respond. They won't. They are either cowards for supporting Trump, knowing who he is and what he's done, and either pretending they don't or know they can't contradict anything, and would rather die than admit they made a mistake -- or, they believe everything Trump says, which makes them insane. One group won't respond, the other won't respond usefully.

Sad. Pathetic. Deplorable.

[Cthulhu 2020]

Do you have Breccia confused with someone else? When have they supported musk or any conservative view?

tehdang has most of the people who refute his bullshit on block, so I just quoted everyone who responded for him to see. Not sure why he has me unblocked. Kinda weird tbh. But still hilarious that he's just another blind crony and slave to the conservative narrative without an original thought in his head.

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Perhaps it is better to stop, since you've only offered a string of lies and ad hominem attacks to justify your point of view. If you come upon new and fresh reasons to believe as you do, then please share. I am trying to channel Rozz's encouragement to acknowledge when the debate has broken down and has started to focus on a poster and not the thread, and to cease replying.

Sad. You're the one who never addressed the part where I directly refuted every BS lie you copy pasted from Elon. Again, I asked you why you trusted Elon so much, you claimed he had nothing to lose by lying about the Twitter files. I showed you why and how he lied. You cried about "ad hominem" to sidestep actually addressing it not because you were actually hurt (or maybe you were, maybe you are a snowflake, idk, I'd like to think your skin isn't as thin as you're pretending it is) but because you had no way of refuting what I'd shown you about Elom's lies.

There's a reason the media isn't covering and only laughs at Elom's pathetic Twitter Files. They're hilariously doctored to a pathetically obvious degree. The fact that you believe every word is simple proof of your lack of objectivity and willingness to believe whatever you're fed from your political idols.

What little truth there even was in the Twitter files is simple communication between the Biden Campaign about Hunter's dick pics being taken down. That you and every other conservative think this is some huge controversy is just more proof of how hilariously detached from the real world you all actually are.

[tehdang]

he's just another blind crony and slave to the conservative narrative without an original thought in his head.

This has really been the substitute for argument from you.

Sad. You're the one who never addressed the part where I directly refuted every BS lie you copy pasted from Elon ...
why you trusted Elon so much...
cried about "ad hominem"

I understand that you think declaring something is true amounts to proof. I understand that you refuse to consider contrary evidence. I understand that you think it's sufficient to declare "All those who oppose my arguments are slaves to a billionaire," like your entire ploy is to insult your way to a victory (until the opponent gives up). So I just gave you room enough to bring something substantial to the table, and really their absence has done more talking than you have.

There's a reason the media isn't covering and only laughs at Elom's pathetic Twitter Files... They're hilariously doctored...

Because you haven't found anybody really pursuing your "they're doctored" angle, you think that proves they're doctored? I'm afraid no quantity will help you if that's the quality of your evidence.

But I thank you for sharing your opinions regarding the scandal, and how you think they relate to Trump's anger about a late night program. I would rather hear them from you, than depend on media reporting that this is the way leftists regard it. I'm sure you'll bring up substantial developments in related threads, should they arise.

[Breccia]

In the ongoing effort by the Republican Party to prove the conspiracy-ridden, even insane, views are in fact mainstream, CPAC had a poll for Vice President.

The winner was Kari Lake.

She got 20% in a field of twenty-eight candidates, a statistical blowout.

The Republican Party doesn't just allow crazy, they are now asking for crazy.

[gondrin]

In the ongoing effort by the Republican Party to prove the conspiracy-ridden, even insane, views are in fact mainstream, CPAC had a poll for Vice President.

The winner was Kari Lake.

She got 20% in a field of twenty-eight candidates, a statistical blowout.

The Republican Party doesn't just allow crazy, they are now asking for crazy.

Eh, they've always asked for crazy. However the GOP party leaders that picked the candidates usually just shooed the crazies away and gave the voting base something else.

Anyway, good ole DJT might not be able to run as a third party anyway and do anything because of laws on 6 states that prevent "sore losers" from appearing on ballots if they try and run 3rd party. They can still be written in but we all know that isn't a thing the GOP does. And we all know how much of a sore loser DJT is.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...031633e5&ei=39

Trump’s Threat of a Third-Party Run Is Undercut by ‘Sore Loser’ Laws

Donald Trump hates losing so much that he has suggested he will mount a third-party campaign if he doesn’t win the Republican presidential nomination.

But he can’t win that way either, thanks to “sore loser” laws in six states he would need to return to the White House.

Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas, as well as Arkansas and Alabama, have laws that bar a candidate defeated in a major-party primary from running as an independent or on a third-party ticket in the general election. That would put Trump at the general-election starting gate with a deficit of 91 electoral votes of the 270 required to capture the White House.

Trump has flirted since 2016 with running for president on a third-party ticket or as an independent if he loses the GOP nomination. Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel said she hopes to require candidates to sign a pledge to support the GOP nominee as a requirement to participate in primary debates, a similar tactic the RNC used to try to box in Trump in 2016.

But any pledge would not be binding. Sore-loser laws would keep Trump’s name from even appearing on the ballot, although voters could still write him in.

A third major candidate on a presidential ballot poses problems for the Republican or Democratic parties, which dominate US politics, by splitting the votes of similarly minded candidates and handing victory to the opposite candidate, something that has happened a handful of times since the 19th century.

Presidential candidates who ran as independents or on a third-party ticket after losing a major-party primary include former President Theodore Roosevelt — also making an attempt to return to office four years after leaving the White House — in 1912, US Representative John Anderson in 1980 and former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson in 2012. They all lost.

Asked about the risk of an independent run splitting the GOP vote, a Trump campaign spokesperson stated simply that he would win the Republican primary.

Trump declined to commit to an RNC pledge to back the presidential nominee, telling reporters during the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday he’d have to think about it because there are “people I wouldn’t be very happy about endorsing.”

Trump is generally ahead or roughly tied in early polls with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has not yet announced if he will run. Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, who launched her campaign in mid-February, and other potential contenders remain in single digits.

In a recent survey by Republican pollster Whit Ayres for The Bulwark, an anti-Trump conservative news outlet, 28% of Republican primary voters said they would back Trump if he ran as an independent in a three-way race with DeSantis and President Joe Biden.

That’s the exact situation that sore-loser laws were designed to prevent. Some simply set early deadlines for filing, which makes it hard for candidates to launch such a campaign only after losing a party nomination, to strict bans on appearing on the ballot at all.

The laws aren’t always clear on whether they apply to presidential candidates.

“These laws have not really been scrutinized or tested because there hasn’t been a significant case like this since John Anderson” in 1980, said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “My guess is if Trump tried this move, there’d be a lot of litigation.”

Mark Brown, a law professor at Capital University who has worked on cases involving the laws, said that if Trump mounts a credible third-party candidacy “all bets are off.”

Even in states without strict bans, he said getting on the ballot would be a massive undertaking, and Republican officials like secretaries of state and attorneys general wouldn’t be inclined to give Trump the benefit of the doubt.

“It’s a draining process,” he said. “I know Trump’s wealthy, but it costs a lot of money to navigate, even without the legal challenges which are sure to come.”

Still, Trump wouldn’t have to be a viable candidate to have an effect on the race. In 2000, third-party candidate Ralph Nader was only on the ballot in 43 states, but his share of the vote was larger than the margin of victory for George W. Bush in Florida and New Hampshire. A win in either state would have made Democratic nominee Al Gore president.

Theresa Amato, Nader’s campaign manager in 2000 and 2004, said tracking election laws in 50 states and the District of Columbia was a massive undertaking for the campaign, lining up everything from volunteer signature gatherers to election law attorneys and presidential electors. The campaign had to put together its own manual on getting on the ballot.

“It’s a huge logistical undertaking, and no candidate should underestimate it,” she said.

[Breccia]

"Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas, as well as Arkansas and Alabama, have laws that bar a candidate defeated in a major-party primary from running as an independent or on a third-party ticket in the general election. That would put Trump at the general-election starting gate with a deficit of 91 electoral votes of the 270 required to capture the White House."

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA (deep breath) MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Okay no seriously, I have three things:
1) If those laws are already in the books, why are we only now finding out about that? No disrespect to MSN but I kinda figured this big of an obstacle would have been mentioned sooner.
2) If that's true, I would expect the red legislatures of those red states to immediately start repealing those. Yes, changing the election laws just to make it possible for Trump to run.
3) If these laws are already in the books and the red legislatures fail to change them, I expect Trump to take them to court with the evidence of "I didn't lose". It's really easy for me to say that, because it seems highly unlikely that scenario will be tested.

[Gorsameth]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA (deep breath) MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Okay no seriously, I have three things:
1) If those laws are already in the books, why are we only now finding out about that? No disrespect to MSN but I kinda figured this big of an obstacle would have been mentioned sooner.
2) If that's true, I would expect the red legislatures of those red states to immediately start repealing those. Yes, changing the election laws just to make it possible for Trump to run.
3) If these laws are already in the books and the red legislatures fail to change them, I expect Trump to take them to court with the evidence of "I didn't lose". It's really easy for me to say that, because it seems highly unlikely that scenario will be tested.

They are hardly new. The were mentioned aswell 4 years ago as something to stop Trump from running 3e party if he lost the primary he first time.

But I also consider Trump moronic enough to try a 3e party run without being on the ballot in those states and having absolutely 0 chance.

[Breccia]

They are hardly new. The were mentioned aswell 4 years ago as something to stop Trump from running 3e party if he lost the primary he first time.

Well then either shame on me for missing it, or shame on political reporters for not making a bigger deal about it. Probably the former, to be honest.

I've said for years -- so have most of us -- that Trump running 3rd party would give Biden a far easier path to the WH. Because the USA still goes First Past the Post, splitting the Republican ticket dooms it to 2nd and 3rd place. The Clinton victory in 1992 would echo again.

This leaves Trump with only a few choices, all bad.

1) Win the Republican Primary, with stronger opposition than he faced in 2016, and also while facing multiple trials -- possibly criminal ones. Atlanta, NYState, and the FBI of Mar-a-Lago all have options, in particular, they all seem to have conspiracy and obstruction options. Based on what happened when boxes were being carried out of Trump's basement, I'd find it pretty realistic that, if one of them charges Trump, the other two would immediately follow. And we've seen enough judges souring on Trump that "they're only charging me because I'm running for office" won't fly in the courtroom.

2) Bow out. I said in 2020 he would take this option, faking an illness when he knew he would lose -- and honestly, even Trump's harshest critics didn't seriously predict Trump would lead a literal lynch mob, rather than admit defeat. But with Trump increasingly in legal trouble, I don't see Trump bowing out, gracefully or otherwise. It's the smart play once he knows he can't win, but it's possible his sociopathic, psychotic mind is incapable of reaching that conclusion anymore.

3) Run third party, split the ticket, and be the first third party candidate in quite a long time to get any EC votes at all, which he can count while Biden gives his victory speech.

4) Die.

I'm serious about that last one. Leaving aside any conspiracy theories, Trump is old, fat, sick, fat, obese, can barely stand, can barely talk, and is putting himself into a stressful circumstance in even more stressful circumstances. COVID nearly killed him. Running in 2024 might literally finish him off.

This would, of course, be a massive tragedy. Trump needs to face justice for his many crimes, as well as what he did to the country he professes to love and treated like one of his businesses. I will mourn the loss of Trump dying before he realizes everything bad happening to him was his own fault, and the worst thing he could have done to himself, his family, and his legacy was running for office.

Also I want Melania to serve him divorce papers, cite his on-the-record infidelity, and try to take half before Deustche Bank and NYState carve up what's left of his crumbling, useless empire.