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General Category => General Forum => Topic started by: Kiwithrottlejockey on March 15, 2018, 03:49:03 pm



Title: Donald J. Trump just boasted that he makes up, then tells LIES…
Post by: Kiwithrottlejockey on March 15, 2018, 03:49:03 pm
from The Washington Post....

In fundraising speech, Trump says he made up facts
in meeting with Justin Trudeau


In Missouri, the president also seemed to threaten to withdraw U.S. troops from Korea over trade.

By JOSH DAWSEY, DAMIAN PALETTA and ERICA WERNER | 10:47PM EDT — Wednesday, March 14, 2018

(https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/Q531Lh63pW4S3wKRxfWr07KkcMQ=/1484x0/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/MJKEKYRHKQ3LVB5XB4W4TV73IM.jpg) (https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/Q531Lh63pW4S3wKRxfWr07KkcMQ=/1484x0/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/MJKEKYRHKQ3LVB5XB4W4TV73IM.jpg)
President Donald J. Trump speaks during a roundtable discussion on tax policy at the Boeing Company on Wednesday, March 14th, 2018, in St. Louis.
From left: Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, President Trump, Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg, and Boeing employee Hazel Jean Mims.
 — Photograph: Evan Vucci/The Washington Post.


PRESIDENT TRUMP boasted in a fundraising speech on Wednesday that he made up facts in a meeting with the leader of a top U.S ally, saying he insisted to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that the United States runs a trade deficit with its neighbor to the north without knowing whether or not that was the case.

“Trudeau came to see me. He's a good guy. Justin. He said ‘No, no, we have no trade deficit with you, we have none. Donald, please’,” Trump said, mimicking Trudeau, according to audio obtained by The Washington Post. “Nice guy, good looking guy, comes in — ‘Donald we have no trade deficit’. He's very proud because everybody else, you know, we're getting killed….”

“So he's proud. I said, ‘Wrong Justin, you do’. I didn't even know … I had no idea. I just said ‘You're wrong’. You know why? Because we're so stupid…. And I thought they were smart. I said, ‘You're wrong Justin’. He said, ‘Nope we have no trade deficit’. I said, ‘Well in that case I feel differently’, I said ‘but I don't believe it’. I sent one of our guys out, his guy, my guy, they went out,  I said ‘check because I can't  believe it’.”

“‘Well sir you're actually right. We have no deficit but that doesn't include energy and  timber…. And when you do we lose $17 billion a year’. It's incredible.”

The United States trade representative office says the United States has a trade surplus with Canada.

Trump launched a blistering attack against major U.S. allies and global economies, accusing the European Union, China, Japan and South Korea of ripping off the United States for decades and pillaging the American workforce. He also described the North American Free Trade Agreement as a disaster and heaped blame on the World Trade Organization for allowing other countries to box the United States in on trade.

He also seemed to threaten to pull U.S. troops stationed in South Korea if he didn't get what he wanted on trade with Seoul, an ally. He said the country had gotten rich but United States politicians never negotiated better deals. “We have a very big trade deficit with them, and we protect them,” Trump said. “We lose money on trade, and we lose money on the military. We have right now 32,000 soldiers between North and South Korea. Let's see what happens.”

“Our allies care about themselves,” he said. “They don't care about us.”

Trump's rare comments that laid bare his approach to arguing trade facts with foreign leaders show how he might try to engage with numerous other heads of state in the coming weeks. Trump has said he will impose tariffs on steel and trade imports as soon as next week, a steep increase in duties that could impact some of the U.S. government's biggest trading partners.

Trump said countries can request exemption from these tariffs but only after direct negotiations with him. And the audio from the fundraiser shows how difficult these discussions might prove.

In his 30-minute speech to donors in Missouri, Trump heaped praise on himself while ticking through a list of U.S. allies that he said were actually taking advantage of the United States.

The president did not mention his abrupt firing of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson by tweet, or the personnel turmoil that is swirling in Washington, or special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's investigation into Russian meddling, or reports of his affair with adult film star Stormy Daniels — and his lawyer paying her off.

While his White House picked up the pieces after a Republican lost a special election in a western Pennsylvania congressional district that Trump won by 20 percent in 2016, and pollsters said the results showed how Trump was dragging down the Republican party, Trump took none of the blame. He said that the candidate, Rick Saccone, would have lost even bigger without him. And he said the Democrat, Conor Lamb, won the seat because he was “like Trump” but that he would vote with Pelosi.

Trump was in Missouri to fundraise for Josh Hawley, who is taking on incumbent Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill. He called McCaskill “bad for Missouri, and bad for the country.” But he barely spoke about Hawley. Instead, he talked about Trump — even bragging about his 2016 election win.

Trump described his decision to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un through the prism of making history and besting his predecessors while lamenting his media coverage, questioning the United States allies and labeling his presidency as “virgin territory.”

“They couldn't have met” with Kim, he said, after mocking former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush. “Nobody would have done what I did.”

“It's called appeasement, please don't do anything,” he said of other presidents.

“They say, maybe he's not the one to negotiate,” he said, mocking a voice of a news anchor. “He's got very little knowledge of the Korean Peninsula. Maybe he's not the one…. Maybe we should send in the people that have been playing games and didn't know what the hell they've been doing for 25 years.”

The thru-lines of his meandering speech were simple: Trump was tougher than all the rest, and that the United States was not going to be laughed at or taken advantage of.

He accused Japan of using gimmicks to deny U.S. auto companies access to their consumers, said South Korea was taking advantage of outdated trade rules even though its economy was strong, and said China had single-handedly rebuilt itself in the back of its trade surplus with the United States.

“It's the bowling ball test. They take a bowling ball from 20 feet up in the air and drop it on the hood of the car,” Trump said of Japan. “If the hood dents, the car doesn't qualify. It's horrible,” he said. It was unclear what he was talking about.

He said he didn't even want Japan to pay the tariffs but to build more automobiles in the United States, which he said Japan would do if tariffs were imposed. There is no evidence of such a possibility as of now.

His comments were among his most protectionist to date and didn't identify a single benefit the United States receives from its trading relationships.

The so-called free-trade globalists, he said, are against his trade moves because “they're worldly people, they have stuff on the other side.” Gary Cohn, the president's top economic adviser, recently quit over the tariffs and was derisively labeled by his critics as a “globalist”.

Trump mocked other politicians for wanting to keep the NAFTA, calling Mexico “spoiled” and saying that Canada had outsmarted the United States. “The best deal is to terminate it and make a new deal,” he said.

Above all, he cast his presidency in historic proportions, saying he was attracting so much media criticism because he was doing so well. He seemed fixated on his media coverage, with much of his story-time about North Korea focused on how the media covered it, even talking about a specific CNN segment with Erin Burnett.

He said the news media was criticizing him for “conceding” a meeting with Kim.

“They were afraid of being blown up. Then all of a sudden, they say, let's not meet,” he said of reporters.

While Trump said some decry his rhetoric and think his bellicose and mercurial tendencies could bring the United States into a war, Trump explained why he taunted the North Korean president as “Little Rocket Man”. He said the South Koreans told him Kim Jong-Un was agreeing to meet because of the tough United States sanctions and that they promised to not do any nuclear tests or missile launches until a meeting occurred. That comment could not be verified.

“He's going to get us in a war,” he said, again mocking a news anchor. “You know what's going to get us in a war? Weakness.”

He said Republicans needed to run on their tax bill this year, but he was determined to not call it “tax reform,” as many other Republicans have done. He said Democrats would not appoint judges that Republicans like while reversing tax cuts and taking away guns, an unproven claim.

He implicitly rebuked Senate Majority Leader for not changing the rules of the Senate where only 51 votes were needed on all legislation, saying more Republicans were needed because the current leadership would not act and no one could explain why the current status quo made sense.

Trump criticized judges in the Ninth Circuit, saying that his presidency would reshape the judiciary and change courts such as that one. He said he planned to pick 145 judges and gave a “thanks” to Obama for leaving so many vacancies.

At the end of the day, the event, like it usually is with Trump, was about marketing. He said Republicans needed to run on tax cuts because they were very “popular”.

“Do me a favor, don't call it tax reform, it hasn't worked in 45 years,” Trump said he told others. “You say, you're reforming taxes, that means taxes could go up.”

“I actually said, let's call it the Tax Cut Cut Cut plan,” Trump said. “I actually did.”

He added: “They thought it sounded a little hoaky and called it something else. I liked the first one better.”


__________________________________________________________________________

• Josh Dawsey is a White House reporter for The Washington Post. He joined the paper in 2017. He previously covered the White House for Politico, and New York City Hall and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie for The Wall Street Journal.

• Damian Paletta is White House economic policy reporter for The Washington Post. Before joining The Post, he covered the White House for The Wall Street Journal.

• Erica Werner has worked at The Washington Post since 2017, covering Congress with a focus on economic policy. Previously, she worked at the Associated Press for more than 17 years, starting in the Los Angeles bureau and going on to cover the White House and Congress.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2018/03/14/in-fundraising-speech-trump-says-he-made-up-facts-in-meeting-with-justin-trudeau (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2018/03/14/in-fundraising-speech-trump-says-he-made-up-facts-in-meeting-with-justin-trudeau)


Title: Re: Donald J. Trump just boasted that he makes up, then tells LIES…
Post by: Kiwithrottlejockey on March 15, 2018, 06:51:47 pm

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DYIb0o6UQAARmH7.jpg) (https://twitter.com/davidhorsey/status/973371319688417280)


Title: Re: Donald J. Trump just boasted that he makes up, then tells LIES…
Post by: Im2Sexy4MyPants on March 18, 2018, 03:40:43 pm
he's doing a great job i sure hope he destroys the corrupt world banking system


Title: Re: Donald J. Trump just boasted that he makes up, then tells LIES…
Post by: Kiwithrottlejockey on March 22, 2018, 12:44:46 pm

from the Chicago Tribune....

Trump 2.0: Even more off the chain?

By CLARENCE PAGE | 5:15PM CDT — Tuesday, March 20, 2018

(http://www.trbimg.com/img-5ab169aa/turbine/ct-1521576358-l5yc00efkq-snap-image/925) (http://www.trbimg.com/img-5ab169aa/turbine/ct-1521576358-l5yc00efkq-snap-image)
President Donald J. Trump speaks about combating the opioid crisis during a visit to Manchester Community College in Manchester,
New Hampshire, on March 19, 2018. — Photograph: Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.


WHY DOES President Donald Trump lie so much? Because people believe him.

So says Billy Bush, who is on his own rehabilitation mission after losing his sweet NBCToday” show co-host job after his “Access Hollywood” tape fiasco with Trump in late 2016.

Appearing on HBO's “Real Time With Bill Maher” on Friday, Bush recalled how Trump exaggerated ratings of his “Celebrity Apprentice” shows when they faltered later in the show’s run.

“He'd been saying it's No.1 forever and finally, I'd had enough,” Bush recalled to Maher. “I told him, ‘Wait a minute, you haven't been No.1 for like five years — not in any category, not in any demo’. He goes, ‘Did you see last Thursday? Last Thursday, (age group) 18-49, the last five minutes’.”

But later, when the cameras were turned off, Bush said, Trump was more candid. “Billy, look,” Trump said, “you just tell them and they believe it. That's it: You just tell them and they believe. They just do.”

Right. They just do.

Or as P.T. Barnum is said to have said, “There's a sucker born every minute.”

This is the sort of cynical attitude that is seldom expressed openly by politicians.

Bush's story sounds not only credible but highly likely, if you've been following our president's breathtakingly cavalier attitude toward inconvenient facts.

Among other tallies that have kept fact-checkers busy, The Washington Post reports that his average of 4.9 false or misleading statements per day has soared up to an average of six a day.

Yet, just two nights before Bush's interview, the president achieved a new level of arrogance about the topic. He boasted in a private fundraising speech that he had made up information in a meeting with the leader of our nation's closest ally, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

In a dispute over trade between Canada and the United States, according to audio obtained by The Post, Trump confessed to making up information to insist that the U.S. has a trade deficit with Canada, even though, as he confessed in the fundraiser speech, he really didn’t know.

Actually it was less of a confession than a boast.

“I said, ‘Wrong, Justin’. I didn't even know … I had no idea. I just said, ‘You're wrong’.”

When caught in the lie, Trump did what Trump does: repeated the lie, louder, stronger and more stridently.

After the lie was reported, Trump tweeted his insistence that we do have a trade deficit with Canada. Yet, as PolitiFact reports:

“In 2017, the United States had a $23.2 billion deficit with Canada in goods. In other words, the United States in 2017 bought more goods from Canada than Canada bought from the United States.

“However, the United States had a $25.9 billion surplus with Canada in services — and that was enough to overcome that deficit and turn the overall balance of trade into a $2.8 billion surplus for the United States in 2017. The same pattern occurred in 2016.”

What makes this particular Trump lie so breathtaking is his nod-nod-wink-wink candor about the little scam, even at the expense of embarrassing an important ally. Why did he do it? Because he can.

We have become accustomed to audacious, unsupported Trump claims, such as the notion that his inauguration drew record crowds, despite photographic evidence to the contrary.

Yet what makes Trump's trade claim audacious enough to be ominous is its timing. It comes at a moment when the president is reported to be feeling a new level of comfort with his job and more confidence in his instincts than in his own in-house experts.

For example, his legal advisers urged him to avoid provoking or even mentioning the name of special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating the Trump campaign's Russia contacts.

But his decision over the weekend to ignore that advice in a Twitter storm, wrote The New York Times' Maggie Haberman, “was the decision of a president who ultimately trusts only his own instincts, and now believes he has settled into the job enough to rely on them rather than the people who advise him.”

Welcome to Trump 2.0: Trump off the chain. He thinks he knows the ropes and he's cleaning house, doing things in his own special way and getting rid of people who want to say something to him besides “yes.”

Sure, we should not assume that all of his decisions are going to be wrong. But, considering the recent turbulence in his White House personnel (including the departure of close adviser Hope Hicks, who acknowledged telling “white lies” on her boss's behalf), it brings little comfort to know that he would rather rely on his instincts than more experienced experts.

On the bright side, he offers plenty to keep journalists — and fact-checkers — busy.


__________________________________________________________________________

• Clarence Page is a syndicated columnist and Washington-based member of the Chicago Tribune's editorial board. Among other awards, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1989 and lifetime achievement awards from the Chicago Headline Club, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists and the National Association of Black Journalists. An aspiring bass player, Page also enjoys entering stand-up comedy contests, which he tends to lose.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/page/ct-perspec-page-trump-lies-billy-bush-0321-20180320-story.html (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/page/ct-perspec-page-trump-lies-billy-bush-0321-20180320-story.html)