Pedestrian
Well-known member
- Joined
- Mar 23, 2018
- Messages
- 1,901
- Reaction score
- 340
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Conservative
There are difficulties:
This basic fact is difficult to keep in mind when assessing his decisions because we have never had a president like this. Far too often we look for a schema or strategy behind Trump’s actions, only to discover that his decisions were precipitated by the dumbest of reasons.
We must at least consider the possibility that Trump’s bizarre behavior with respect to Russian collusion, the Mueller probe, he just does not understand he committed crimes or what was so wrong. But it is possible that at a moral level and at a legal one, he's not smart enough to grasp the enormity of the crimes he et al...have committed.
That’s the picture that emerges from this portrait of Trump’s mood in the White House today.
The president privately fumed to one friend after another on Air Force One, in the Oval Office and over the phone that Manafort “has absolutely nothing to do with me,” according to people close to him. Although Trump tells them he feels bad for Manafort, he also has been complimentary of Judge T.S. Ellis, who has asked sharp questions of Mueller’s prosecutors…
As Trump sees it, Mueller is aggressively prosecuting Manafort detailing his alleged tax evasion and bank fraud scheme and flashing snapshots of his extravagant wardrobe for the jur to deliberately embarrass Trump and undermine his presidency. And, according to people familiar with the president’s thinking, he believes the news *media is complicit…
Still, Trump has confided to friends and advisers that he is worried the Mueller probe could destroy Trump Jr., who is under scrutiny by Mueller...the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with Russians for dirt on Clinton. As one adviser described the president’s thinking, he does not believe his son purposefully broke the law, but is fearful nonetheless that Trump Jr. inadvertently may have wandered into legal *jeopardy.
Reading this, it's one of three things: the possibility is that Trump is innocent of any more wrongdoing already revealed in the press. Incredibly unlikely given damning new quotidian revelations and the ever receding backtracking of the president’s communications team, even to the point of floating that “collusion is not a crime.”
The second possibility is that the various advisers who gave the Washington Post these vignettes of a brooding president are holding back on the full story of a president knowingly and actively attempting to cover his tracks after committing crimes that he well knows could lead not only to impeachment but even his incarceration. That is still the likeliest probability.
But we cannot exclude the notion that Trump legitimately believes that he did nothing wrong, and that the Mueller probe is a ginned up investigation seeking to get him and his associates in trouble on what he views as technicalities and trivialities.
This might seem astonishing, but consider that Trump has never in his entire career ever had to face consequences for his actions. He has never worked for a boss or even a bd. of dirs. He has managed to pawn off his debts onto others with every bankruptcy, he has crushed negative news stories and potential whistleblowers with a mix of bribes and intimidation, he has hired fixers to get around inconvenient red tape, as well as moral and legal obstacles, and he has spent a lifetime making business deals with everyone from mafia figures to despots in the developing world. For Trump, the rules are for little people and you make “deals” through almost any transactional means necessary.
It’s possible that Trump has spent the last decade deeply involved in the Russian criminal underworld, that they have both compromising personal and financial information on him, and that he agrees with their worldview. It’s even possible that the Russians came calling and said they had stolen negative information about Clinton and give it for certain favors, Trump didn’t even understand that...is a massive criminal offense. It’s even possible that he believed that it would cease to matter if he lost, but that if he did become president, he would be able to run the entire government with the same autocratic control with which he runs his business, and make whatever problems arose from his actions go away.
In other words, Trump may lack both the moral compass and the legal wherewithal to even judge the 'highness' of his crimes and the vulnerability of his situation. He understands how inconvenient all of this is for him, yet it’s not really clear that he grasps why this isn’t a witch hunt, but maybe the biggest scandal in American history.
Again, I’m not entirely convinced of this thesis. It’s still most likely that Trump is simply a knowing criminal scurrying like a rat caught in a trap. But that assumes a level of moral and intellectual capacity on Trump’s part that may not even be present.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/...d-wrong/?utm_source=quora&utm_medium=referral
This basic fact is difficult to keep in mind when assessing his decisions because we have never had a president like this. Far too often we look for a schema or strategy behind Trump’s actions, only to discover that his decisions were precipitated by the dumbest of reasons.
We must at least consider the possibility that Trump’s bizarre behavior with respect to Russian collusion, the Mueller probe, he just does not understand he committed crimes or what was so wrong. But it is possible that at a moral level and at a legal one, he's not smart enough to grasp the enormity of the crimes he et al...have committed.
That’s the picture that emerges from this portrait of Trump’s mood in the White House today.
The president privately fumed to one friend after another on Air Force One, in the Oval Office and over the phone that Manafort “has absolutely nothing to do with me,” according to people close to him. Although Trump tells them he feels bad for Manafort, he also has been complimentary of Judge T.S. Ellis, who has asked sharp questions of Mueller’s prosecutors…
As Trump sees it, Mueller is aggressively prosecuting Manafort detailing his alleged tax evasion and bank fraud scheme and flashing snapshots of his extravagant wardrobe for the jur to deliberately embarrass Trump and undermine his presidency. And, according to people familiar with the president’s thinking, he believes the news *media is complicit…
Still, Trump has confided to friends and advisers that he is worried the Mueller probe could destroy Trump Jr., who is under scrutiny by Mueller...the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with Russians for dirt on Clinton. As one adviser described the president’s thinking, he does not believe his son purposefully broke the law, but is fearful nonetheless that Trump Jr. inadvertently may have wandered into legal *jeopardy.
Reading this, it's one of three things: the possibility is that Trump is innocent of any more wrongdoing already revealed in the press. Incredibly unlikely given damning new quotidian revelations and the ever receding backtracking of the president’s communications team, even to the point of floating that “collusion is not a crime.”
The second possibility is that the various advisers who gave the Washington Post these vignettes of a brooding president are holding back on the full story of a president knowingly and actively attempting to cover his tracks after committing crimes that he well knows could lead not only to impeachment but even his incarceration. That is still the likeliest probability.
But we cannot exclude the notion that Trump legitimately believes that he did nothing wrong, and that the Mueller probe is a ginned up investigation seeking to get him and his associates in trouble on what he views as technicalities and trivialities.
This might seem astonishing, but consider that Trump has never in his entire career ever had to face consequences for his actions. He has never worked for a boss or even a bd. of dirs. He has managed to pawn off his debts onto others with every bankruptcy, he has crushed negative news stories and potential whistleblowers with a mix of bribes and intimidation, he has hired fixers to get around inconvenient red tape, as well as moral and legal obstacles, and he has spent a lifetime making business deals with everyone from mafia figures to despots in the developing world. For Trump, the rules are for little people and you make “deals” through almost any transactional means necessary.
It’s possible that Trump has spent the last decade deeply involved in the Russian criminal underworld, that they have both compromising personal and financial information on him, and that he agrees with their worldview. It’s even possible that the Russians came calling and said they had stolen negative information about Clinton and give it for certain favors, Trump didn’t even understand that...is a massive criminal offense. It’s even possible that he believed that it would cease to matter if he lost, but that if he did become president, he would be able to run the entire government with the same autocratic control with which he runs his business, and make whatever problems arose from his actions go away.
In other words, Trump may lack both the moral compass and the legal wherewithal to even judge the 'highness' of his crimes and the vulnerability of his situation. He understands how inconvenient all of this is for him, yet it’s not really clear that he grasps why this isn’t a witch hunt, but maybe the biggest scandal in American history.
Again, I’m not entirely convinced of this thesis. It’s still most likely that Trump is simply a knowing criminal scurrying like a rat caught in a trap. But that assumes a level of moral and intellectual capacity on Trump’s part that may not even be present.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/...d-wrong/?utm_source=quora&utm_medium=referral
