The Future President, Donald Trump

Blickers wrote:

Quote McGentrix:

Quote:

Nimh, what does any of that have to do with the people that do own cars having dash cams in them? That was Blickers supposed point which had nothing to do with anything.

It has everything to do with it, because you did not say most Russians wealthy enough to afford cars have dash cams, you said most Russians have dash cams in their cars.

Which implies that most Russians, like most Americans, Germans, British and other First Worlders, are able to afford a car. Which is baloney, the Russians can't.

Why Almost Everyone in Russia Has a Dash Cam

Why do you feel the need to be so hostile and specific about something so inconsequential? It was a passing comment that you attacked like a starving dog.

So if Russia is doing so well, why did they screw up the Olympics. No light bulbs, rooms without doorknobs, restrooms lined with 8 or more toilets I suppose to create a social scene for athletes to relax and share newspapers while they all have a nice communal poops.

...Im happy you aren't one of ours.

In the wake of the ludicrous media frenzy over Hillary Clinton’s bout of pneumonia, Donald Trump has now released a one-page letter describing the results of his latest physical exam with the inimitable Dr. Bornstein , including figures on things like his cholesterol level and blood pressure. Everything seems basically fine, at least for a man who’s overweight, loves fast food, and gets no exercise.

But in all the attention being paid to the candidates’ health, I fear we’re losing sight of what actually matters when we get so caught up in questions like this. At the same time, we haven’t yet paid nearly enough attention to another absolutely stunning lack of disclosure with profound implications for the presidency and American policy.

Donald Trump is currently the CEO of a company with an extraordinarily complex web of interests and arrangements both here in the United States and around the world that could be directly affected by his decisions as president, and he refuses to tell us what they are . The fact that we’re expending so much effort worrying about how many hours it took Hillary Clinton to share her diagnosis of a perfectly treatable illness — or what Trump did or didn’t share with Dr. Oz — when the question of his business interests is still unresolved is positively insane.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has, as the man himself might say, yuuuuge conflicts of interest. As Kurt Eichenwald ably and extensively noted in Newsweek this week, Trump's business ties around the world are so deep and so shady that it would be impossible for him to untangle them were he to win the Oval Office come November.

"Never before has an American candidate for president had so many financial ties with American allies and enemies, and never before has a business posed such a threat to the United States. If Donald Trump wins this election and his company is not immediately shut down or forever severed from the Trump family, the foreign policy of the United States of America could well be for sale," Eichenwald concluded.

Problematic Trump Organization associations can be found in Turkey, India, the United Arab Emirates, Russia (of course) and a host of other global hotspots; it's easy to see in many instances how Trump could calibrate U.S. actions to line his own pockets – or react badly if things go poorly for his business.

Worries about the Trump Organization's influence on the candidate's thinking are not new to the campaign, of course. Previously, Trump has insisted that he would be able to avoid mingling his business interests with whatever his administration's foreign policy would be by turning his company over to his children. He sometimes refers to this as a "blind trust," which it is obviously not; having one's children in charge, as opposed to an independent manager, makes it very un-blind.

And Trump certainly understands that fact somewhere deep in the recesses of his mind. "I would put it in a blind trust. Well, I don't know if it's a blind trust if Ivanka, Don and Eric run it. But – is that a blind trust? I don't know," he said during one of the GOP primary debates.

Still, he reiterated the plan to have his children take over the company during a Thursday interview on Fox News' "Fox & Friends." Said Trump: "Well, I will sever connections and I'll have my children and my executives run the company." Easy, right?

The Trump scions, though, have done nothing to mitigate concerns about their father's conflicts of interest, as their plan for navigating them amounts to "Trust us."

Here's Ivanka Trump, speaking on "Good Morning America" on Wednesday:

"There's something so much bigger than our business at stake and that's the future of this country. As a private business we can make decisions that are not in our best interest. We're not beholden to anyone, to shareholders. We can say, you know what, we're going to do less deals, we're not going to do that deal, even though it's a fine deal, it's economically reasonable because it could create a conflict of interest and we'll act incredibly responsibly. My father already said he would put it into a blind trust and it would be run by us. So he's been very articulate on that fact and outspoken, but this is so much bigger than another deal and we all recognize that."

Donald Trump Jr. also said, per the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, that "he and other family members involved in the company would not be part of their father's would-be administration and would not do business directly with foreign governments that might be inclined to give the company preferential treatment to curry favor with a Trump White House." Are there foreign governments that wouldn't be inclined to give preferential treatment in order to curry favor with the White House? Is there any business entity that could plausibly be seen as rising above such interests? Come on.

This is all, simply put, nowhere near good enough. Aside from Ivanka Trump also using the same sleight of hand to call something a "blind trust" that is nothing of the kind, the Trump children are asking American voters to believe that they will simply navigate their father's web of conflicts appropriately out of their sheer selfless patriotism, or something. It's patently absurd. As Trump the daughter herself put it: As a private business they're not beholden to anyone. That reasoning cuts both ways. And there's good reason to worry about Trump promoting his business interests via the presidency – in fact, he's already outlined a way to do just that by restarting the rip-off outfit that is Trump University.

This, again, is a good example of the low bar set for Trump during this election. He won't release his tax returns (as his son has now admitted, for political reasons), his "foundation" is a scam that he used to buy himself presents and he refuses to give a satisfactory answer as to how he would avoid using the Oval Office as his own personal ATM. And yet these political sins gets treated by many in the chattering class as equivalent to whatever nonstory is cooked up about the Clinton Foundation on a given day.

As the Washington Post said this week, Trump is "the least transparent major presidential nominee in modern history." We all need to act like it. And demanding that Trump account for the ways in which he could use the presidency to enrich himself and his family is a good place to start.

This is not hyperbole, the man is a danger to the US and the world just on his financial ties alone let alone his character which is so lacking in any redemptive quality.

I hope Hillary uses every single tool available on the side of legal boundaries (not matter how close) to stop Trump from becoming president.