@TheCobbler,
I know for a fact that Mr. Trump did not do many of the things that that letter accuses him of doing.
And quite frankly, given the track record of his accusers, he probably didn't do any of those things at all.
I can support Mr. Trump.
I will support Mr. Trump.
@oralloy,
You don't know anything, you are full of **** too...
@TheCobbler,
You cannot provide any examples of untrue statements in my posts.
Instead of denying reality 100% of the time, you should try accepting reality every once in awhile, just for the sake of a little variety.
#1
Trump destroys the environment
President Trump’s position on environmental protection “has been consistent,” EDF President Fred Krupp notes in an essay published in the July-August issue of Foreign Affairs, a subscribers-only magazine. “He wants far less of it.”
Here’s your chance to quickly catch up on the Trump environmental decisions Fred outlines in his essay – just as the big fight over the 2018 federal budget gets under way.
He wants to decimate the EPA
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s annual budget, currently at $8.06 billion – its lowest level in 40 years – makes up just 0.2 percent of the federal budget. Even so,Trump and his EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, want to cut the agency by nearly one-third.
If Congress passes anything close to these proposed cuts, Fred writes, it will “destroy the EPA as it currently exists.”
He has questioned science and silenced scientists
Trump’s political team has imposed new restrictions on public communications by EPA staff and, in late April, ordered the agency to take down its climate science web page. It now redirects to a page that says updates are pending “to reflect EPA’s priorities under the leadership of President Trump and Administrator Pruitt.”
Trump and many of his cabinet leaders question the scientific consensus that human activities drive climate change. Every single cabinet secretary Trump chose to oversee his energy and environmental agenda, meanwhile, has ties to the fossil fuel industry.
It’s the governmental equivalent of a hostile takeover.
He’s rolling back key environmental standards
Over the past few months, Trump has:
resumed sales of coal mined on federal land
reversed an Obama-era restriction against dumping mining waste into waterways
killed a mandate that federal agencies must consider climate change when making decisions
revoked the EPA’s landmark Clean Power Plan
announced the United States will withdraw from the 195-country Paris Climate Agreement
asked the courts to delay a hearing about limits on mercury and other toxic pollutants from power plants, which suggests he plans to weaken such rules
moved to overturn rules that limit methane gas pollution from oil and gas production
allowed, over the objections of EPA scientists, the continued use of the pesticide chlorpyrifos, which has been linked to breast cancer and birth defects
And yet, Fred writes, there are some grounds for optimism.
Americans and markets disagree with Trump
Recent polls show that an overwhelming majority of Americans support the EPA as well as government support for clean energy development.
At the same time, market forces continue to favor clean energy over fossil fuel investments – by a huge margin. Red congressional districts today boast more large-scale wind and solar production than do blue ones.
Solar power is now so cheap, in fact, that even the Kentucky Coal Mining Museum in the heart of U.S. coal country is switching to solar, Fred writes in Foreign Affairs.
@TheCobbler,
It's a shame about the environment, but let's get our priorities straight.
Progressives are out to violate everyone's civil liberties, and for no reason other than their own sadistic pleasure over violating people's rights.
Mr. Trump protects us from progressives.
Being protected from progressives is what truly matters in America. The environment is secondary to that.
#2 Trump has damaged our standing in the world.
Donald Trump has achieved the unthinkable in Syria: He’s driven a NATO ally into the arms of Russia and abandoned our long-time Syrian allies, the Kurds. Critics argue his ad-hoc diplomacy stems from ignorance, but the record shows he likely knows exactly what he’s doing.
There’s a pretext, but look beneath the comb-over and you see everything this would-be oligarch says or does benefits Vladimir L. Putin. Trump’s “America First” agenda has served as ideal cover for Russia’s asset in the White House.
Now, 1,000-plus days into his presidency, it’s long past time Americans surveyed the totality of the damage Trump has wreaked on the United States and on our standing in the world.
Here’s just some of what he’s done since Jan. 20, 2017:
By pulling the U.S. out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, he vacated our seat at the table on Asian trade. A similar abdication of scientific leadership came when he withdrew from the Paris Agreement on Climate.
Within weeks of taking office, he attacked NATO, the most important check on Russian influence in history, on the pretext our allies “owe” us for our military protection; and he applauds the U.K.’s Brexiteers who would dismantle the economic solidarity of the European Union.
He’s gutted the U.S. State Department, leaving vacancies unfilled at the highest levels, which mutes our nation’s voice across the globe. In Ukraine, this gutting aided his threat to withhold military aid to a fledgling democracy trying to stand up to Russia.
He’s dismantled the federal government’s civil service, the nation’s institutional memory, under the guise of rooting out the so-called “Deep State” – driving some of our best scientists from government.
Since before his presidency began, his “fake news” mantra has undermined trust in a free press. Among his Fox News-loving base, his fake news claim continues to inoculate him from criticism of his lies and flip-flops.
He’s picked fights with Canada and Mexico, our most important trading partners. He initiated a destructive tariff war with China, which threatens to throw the United States and our allies into recession by 2020. Meanwhile, American farmers denied their biggest foreign market face bankruptcy.
In the Middle East, Trump abandoned America’s “fair broker” role in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, backed the Saudis to the exclusion of other regional U.S. allies and, most importantly, pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal over imaginary treaty violations.
Even the farcical Greenland kerfuffle had the effect of alienating longtime ally Denmark, which since 1941 has allowed the U.S. to operate a military installation there. Within days of being told “Greenland is not for sale,” Trump petitioned our allies to allow Russia to rejoin the G-7.
At home, he emboldened white supremacists – “good people on both sides.” His normalization of hatred against minorities and abuse of migrants is ripping the social and moral fabric of American society.
Trump’s tax cut increased destabilizing income inequality as middle class wages remain stagnant and jobs continue to disappear. Trump has done little to benefit even his own base, working class whites, beyond assuring them that when the race war he’s stoking begins, they’ll still have their assault weapons.
Lastly, he has done nothing to heed repeated warnings that the Russians are still targeting the U.S. election system.
The pattern is clear. The monkey-wrenching Donald J. Trump is doing to the United States is systematic and being waged on a remarkably broad front. The damage he does daily to the nation, its economy, its government, its standing in the world, and how Americans relate to one another will take a generation or more to repair.
We can only hope that before Election Day, Nov. 3, 2020, the 45th president and his family will have been forced from public life – hopefully to relocate to Trump Tower Moscow – which, when built, will deserve its own special footnote in world history.
Dan Vukelich is a retired Albuquerque news reporter and editor.
@oralloy,
You know we can do two things at once when we are not bowing to Russia...
@TheCobbler,
It doesn't matter how many things we do at once. What matters is that Mr. Trump protects America from the progressive menace.
@TheCobbler,
TheCobbler wrote:#2 Trump has damaged our standing in the world.
Again, the only thing that matters is that Mr. Trump protects America from the progressive menace. Everything else is secondary to that.
#3 A "brief" history of Trump's racism... (oh there is a lot more)
Trump has a long history of racist controversies
Here’s a breakdown of Trump’s history, taken largely from Dara Lind’s list for Vox and an op-ed by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times:
1973: The US Department of Justice — under the Nixon administration, out of all administrations — sued the Trump Management Corporation for violating the Fair Housing Act. Federal officials found evidence that Trump had refused to rent to black tenants and lied to black applicants about whether apartments were available, among other accusations. Trump said the federal government was trying to get him to rent to welfare recipients. In the aftermath, he signed an agreement in 1975 agreeing not to discriminate to renters of color without admitting to discriminating before.
1980s: Kip Brown, a former employee at Trump’s Castle, accused another one of Trump’s businesses of discrimination. “When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,” Brown said. “It was the eighties, I was a teenager, but I remember it: They put us all in the back.”
1988: In a commencement speech at Lehigh University, Trump spent much of his speech accusing countries like Japan of “stripping the United States of economic dignity.” This matches much of his current rhetoric on China.
1989: In a controversial case that’s been characterized as a modern-day lynching, four black teenagers and one Latino teenager — the “Central Park Five” — were accused of attacking and raping a jogger in New York City. Trump immediately took charge in the case, running an ad in local papers demanding, “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” The teens’ convictions were later vacated after they spent seven to 13 years in prison, and the city paid $41 million in a settlement to the teens. But Trump in October 2016 said he still believes they’re guilty, despite the DNA evidence to the contrary.
1991: A book by John O’Donnell, former president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, quoted Trump’s criticism of a black accountant: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. … I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.” Trump at first denied the remarks, but later said in a 1997 Playboy interview that “the stuff O’Donnell wrote about me is probably true.”
1992: The Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino had to pay a $200,000 fine because it transferred black and women dealers off tables to accommodate a big-time gambler’s prejudices.
1993: In congressional testimony, Trump said that some Native American reservations operating casinos shouldn’t be allowed because “they don’t look like Indians to me.”
2000: In opposition to a casino proposed by the St. Regis Mohawk tribe, which he saw as a financial threat to his casinos in Atlantic City, Trump secretly ran a series of ads suggesting the tribe had a “record of criminal activity [that] is well documented.”
2004: In season two of The Apprentice, Trump fired Kevin Allen, a black contestant, for being overeducated. “You’re an unbelievably talented guy in terms of education, and you haven’t done anything,” Trump said on the show. “At some point you have to say, ‘That’s enough.’”
2005: Trump publicly pitched what was essentially The Apprentice: White People vs. Black People. He said he “wasn’t particularly happy” with the most recent season of his show, so he was considering “an idea that is fairly controversial — creating a team of successful African Americans versus a team of successful whites. Whether people like that idea or not, it is somewhat reflective of our very vicious world.”
2010: In 2010, there was a huge national controversy over the “Ground Zero Mosque” — a proposal to build a Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan, near the site of the 9/11 attacks. Trump opposed the project, calling it “insensitive,” and offered to buy out one of the investors in the project. On The Late Show With David Letterman, Trump argued, referring to Muslims, “Well, somebody’s blowing us up. Somebody’s blowing up buildings, and somebody’s doing lots of bad stuff.”
2011: Trump played a big role in pushing false rumors that Obama — the country’s first black president — was not born in the US. He even sent investigators to Hawaii to look into Obama’s birth certificate. Obama later released his birth certificate, calling Trump a ”carnival barker.” (The research has found a strong correlation between “birtherism,” as this conspiracy theory is called, and racism.) Trump has reportedly continued pushing this conspiracy theory in private.
2011: While Trump suggested that Obama wasn’t born in the US, he also argued that maybe Obama wasn’t a good enough student to have gotten into Columbia or Harvard Law School, and demanded Obama release his university transcripts. Trump claimed, “I heard he was a terrible student. Terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?”
Comment:
This is the tip of the iceberg, do you need me to post more?
@oralloy,
Trump is the menace and you are a brainless idiot.
Oooo progress is evil!! lol! Progress is coming to get you!
@TheCobbler,
My IQ is 170.
And no. The menace is progressives who violate people's civil liberties for their own sadistic pleasure.
Mr. Trump protects us from the menace.
#3 Trump's racism part 2
As a candidate and president, Trump has made many more racist comments
On top of all that history, Trump has repeatedly made racist — often explicitly so — remarks on the campaign trail and as president:
Trump launched his campaign in 2015 by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” who are “bringing crime” and “bringing drugs” to the US. His campaign was largely built on building a wall to keep these immigrants out of the US.
As a candidate in 2015, Trump called for a ban on all Muslims coming into the US. His administration eventually implemented a significantly watered-down version of the policy.
When asked at a 2016 Republican debate whether all 1.6 billion Muslims hate the US, Trump said, “I mean a lot of them. I mean a lot of them.”
He argued in 2016 that Judge Gonzalo Curiel — who was overseeing the Trump University lawsuit — should recuse himself from the case because of his Mexican heritage and membership in a Latino lawyers association. House Speaker Paul Ryan, who endorsed Trump, later called such comments “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”
Trump has been repeatedly slow to condemn white supremacists who endorse him, and he regularly retweeted messages from white supremacists and neo-Nazis during his presidential campaign.
He tweeted and later deleted an image that showed Hillary Clinton in front of a pile of money and by a Jewish Star of David that said, “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!” The tweet had some very obvious anti-Semitic imagery, but Trump insisted that the star was a sheriff’s badge, and said his campaign shouldn’t have deleted it.
Trump has repeatedly referred to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) as “Pocahontas,” using her controversial — and later walked-back — claims to Native American heritage as a punchline.
At the 2016 Republican convention, Trump officially seized the mantle of the “law and order” candidate — an obvious dog whistle playing to white fears of black crime, even though crime in the US is historically low. His speeches, comments, and executive actions after he took office have continued this line of messaging.
In a pitch to black voters in 2016, Trump said, “You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed. What the hell do you have to lose?”
Trump stereotyped a black reporter at a press conference in February 2017. When April Ryan asked him if he plans to meet and work with the Congressional Black Caucus, he repeatedly asked her to set up the meeting — even as she insisted that she’s “just a reporter.”
In the week after white supremacist protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, Trump repeatedly said that “many sides” and “both sides” were to blame for the violence and chaos that ensued — suggesting that the white supremacist protesters were morally equivalent to counterprotesters that stood against racism. He also said that there were “some very fine people” among the white supremacists. All of this seemed like a dog whistle to white supremacists — and many of them took it as one, with white nationalist Richard Spencer praising Trump for “defending the truth.”
Throughout 2017, Trump repeatedly attacked NFL players who, by kneeling or otherwise silently protesting during the national anthem, demonstrated against systemic racism in America.
Trump reportedly said in 2017 that people who came to the US from Haiti “all have AIDS,” and he lamented that people who came to the US from Nigeria would never “go back to their huts” once they saw America. The White House denied that Trump ever made these comments.
Speaking about immigration in a bipartisan meeting in January 2018, Trump reportedly asked, in reference to Haiti and African countries, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” He then reportedly suggested that the US should take more people from countries like Norway. The implication: Immigrants from predominantly white countries are good, while immigrants from predominantly black countries are bad.
Trump denied making the “shithole” comments, although some senators present at the meeting said they happened. The White House, meanwhile, suggested that the comments, like Trump’s remarks about the NFL protests, will play well to his base. The only connection between Trump’s remarks about the NFL protests and his “shithole” comments is race.
Trump mocked Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign, again calling her “Pocahontas” in a tweet before adding, “See you on the campaign TRAIL, Liz!” The capitalized “TRAIL” is seemingly a reference to the Trail of Tears — a horrific act of ethnic cleansing in the 19th century in which Native Americans were forcibly relocated, causing thousands of deaths.
Trump tweeted that several black and brown members of Congress — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) — are “from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe” and that they should “go back” to those countries. It’s a common racist trope to say that black and brown people, particularly immigrants, should go back to their countries of origin. Three of four of the members of Congress whom Trump targeted were born in the US.
This list is not comprehensive, instead relying on some of the major examples since Trump announced his candidacy. But once again, there’s a pattern of racism and bigotry here that suggests Trump isn’t just misspeaking; it is who he is.
Comment:
And yes, there is even more...
@TheCobbler,
Progressives are pretty silly the way they falsely accuse everyone who disagrees with them of racism.
@oralloy,
Does a smart person have to be a racist, misogynist homophobe and hate progressives?
Is that what your 170 IQ has told you?
Do smart people need guns?
You are not smart, you are a pathetic little nobody who lives in so much fear that guns are your only solution to everything.
This is not smart, this is the very definition of paranoid idiocy.
Smart people make alliances and are capable of trust and "progress" as civilized human beings. The democratic (progressive) party is the most diversified and unified body on earth...
You are deluded and mislead due to your inability to function as a thinking and rational being. You are the exact opposite of what is intelligent and wise.
Your masters prefer you terrified rather than thinking for yourself...
You put on airs while the truth is you are sorely uninformed, unenlightened, baroque, misaligned and intellectually malnourished..
Romans 1:22 (KJV)
22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,
1 Timothy 4 (KJV)
2 Speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron;
Comment:
The Bible is quite familiar with your brand of "intelligence" as if an IQ number gives you the right to lord over others with your self righteous pious WHITE privilege.
You are not wise, you are a fool and your conscience is seared with a hot iron.
A scarred and unfeeling heart with only a gun to comfort your unfounded and paranoid fears... This is pathetic stupidity at best.
@coldjoint,
Jesus hated the crooked moneylenders, does that make him stupid?
