The Trump Presidency | Biden Inaugurated

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Oldham said:
Is this really happening?
The incompetent of this twat is beyond anything seen before. He must be removed!
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I think he seriously think its just a game -- he can show his base how he can bully his way out of a nuclear war. We really have two school yard bullies facing each other using weapons of mass destruction.

We should send Ivanka to negotiate peace talks. I bet it will be Trump's most effective weapon.
 
Starting to get the feeling that I need to dig out those Judge Dredd Booth images again :lol:

Can't, and yet also can, believe this is where we are. Also the fact that the likelihood is this is driven in pretty much equal parts by his ego, his ineptitude, the investigations against him, his flagging base, and the crude brinksmanship that's been the only way he knows how to do business all of his life.
 
sglowrider said:


He really isnt all there. And clearly, has a small willy.
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sglowrider said:


He really isnt all there. And clearly, has a small willy.
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So the president of the USA is now threatening potentially WW3 on twitter...

one can only hope part of this locked and loaded plan is an agreement China wont honour its treaties to defend NK or shit is about to get real
 
sun_tzu said:
So the president of the USA is now threatening potentially WW3 on twitter...

one can only hope part of this locked and loaded plan is an agreement China wont honour its treaties to defend NK or shit is about to get real
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How stupid can he be -- goading a fat kid who has a loaded gun in hand?
 
sun_tzu said:
true... though if somehow he avoids anything short of a world wide thermonuclear pissing contest he will no doubt portray himself as having Won...
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Until the last few seconds when he recognises the situation then he yells: 'God, what have I done' before being vapourised.
 
Barca84 said:
This is lengthy but I found it a solid read to get clarity on the Trump, Manafort, Putin et al money trail

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/20...is-money-the-old-fashioned-way-he-launders-it
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That's amazing. So the reality is if there's enough political will for it, it won't be hard to take Trump out. It's amazing how we've got this far when reporting on his dodgy dealings has been so rigorous, by reputable news and legal sources, and given the context of who those deals have taken place with. The fact that some of the names in the "Russian adoption" meeting have been concretely linked with Trump's business interests for years is a really damning indictment on how misguided the mainstream media's reporting on the subject has been, IMO.

Financial Times said:
“I don’t know who owns Bayrock,” Mr Trump said. “I never really understood who owned Bayrock. I know they’re a developer that’s done quite a bit of work. But I don’t know how they have their ownership broken down."

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Mr Arif’s right-hand man, Felix Sater, came to Bayrock from the criminal underworld — and left the group with a reputation as a valued government asset. Born in Russia in 1966 and raised in Brooklyn, Mr Sater was convicted of attacking a man in a Manhattan bar with a broken margarita glass in 1991, opening facial wounds that required 110 stitches. After going to prison, he admitted taking part in a $40m securities fraud that involved several members of New York Mafia families.

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“Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets, say in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo,” Donald Trump Jr told eTurboNews in 2008. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

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Mr Arif’s overseas leads failed to produce deals. In 2013, Mr Trump’s long search for a Moscow partner led him to talk with Aras Agalarov, a Russian real estate developer born in Azerbaijan, about building a local Trump Tower.
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Bloomberg said:
Trump’s soft spot for Russia is an ongoing mystery, and the large number of condominium sales he made to people with ties to former Soviet republics may offer clues. “We had big buyers from Russia and Ukraine and Kazakhstan,” says Debra Stotts, a sales agent who filled up the tower. The very top floors went unsold for years, but a third of units sold on floors 76 through 83 by 2004 involved people or limited liability companies connected to Russia and neighboring states, a Bloomberg investigation shows. The reporting involved more than two dozen interviews and a review of hundreds of public records filed in New York.

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Two months before Trump broke ground in October 1998, Russia defaulted on $40 billion in domestic debt, the ruble plummeted, and some of the biggest banks started to collapse. Millionaires scrambled to get their money out and into New York. Real estate provides a safe haven for overseas investors. It has few reporting requirements and is a preferred way to move cash of questionable provenance. Amid the turmoil, buyers found a dearth of available projects. Trump World Tower, opened in 2001, became a prominent depository of Russian money.

Sam Kislin, a Ukrainian immigrant, issued mortgages to buyers of multimillion-dollar apartments in World Tower. It’s highly unusual for individuals to issue formal mortgages for U.S. luxury real estate, and the tower loans are the only ones Kislin ever made in New York, public records show.

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Kislin became a fundraiser for Rudolph Giuliani’s mayoral campaign, bringing in millions for the future Trump surrogate. Investigated by the FBI in the 1990s for allegations including mob ties and laundering money from Russia, Kislin was never charged, and he maintains his innocence.

At Trump World Tower, Kislin provided a mortgage to Vasily Salygin, a future official of the Ukrainian Party of Regions linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin, to buy an 83rd-floor apartment. Salygin’s time in office overlapped with Paul Manafort’s tenure as an adviser to the party. Manafort later served as Trump’s campaign manager before his Russian links led to growing criticism and his resignation.

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Eduard Nektalov, an Uzbekistan-born diamond dealer, purchased a 79th-floor unit directly below Conway’s for $1.6 million in July 2003. He was being investigated by federal agents for a money-laundering scheme, which involved smelting gold to make it appear like everyday objects that were then hauled to drug cartels in Colombia. Nektalov sold his unit a month after he bought it for a $500,000 profit. Less than a year later, Nektalov, rumored to have been cooperating with authorities, was gunned down on Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue.

Simultaneous with when the tower was going up, developer Gil Dezer and his father, Michael, were building a Trump-backed condo project in Sunny Isles Beach, Fla. “Russians love the Trump brand,” he says, adding that Russians and Russian Americans bought some 200 of 2,000 units in Trump buildings he built. They flooded into Trump projects from 2001 to 2007, helping Trump weather the real estate collapse, he says.
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Washington Post said:
There is strong evidence that Trump’s businesses have received significant funding from Russian investors. Most notably, Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. made that very claim at a real estate conference in New York in 2008, saying “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.” Donald Trump Jr. added, “we see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Trump also made millions when he agreed to bring the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow in 2013, a deal financed in part by the development company of a Russian billionaire Aras Agalarov. Agalarov is a Putin ally who is sometimes called the “Trump of Russia” because of his tendency to put his own name on his buildings. At the time, Trump mingled with the Russian business elite at a swanky after-party. “Almost all of the oligarchs were in the room,” Trump bragged on returning home.

As a sign of the importance of Russian investors, partners of one of Trump’s projects then under construction in Panama visited Moscow to sell condos at the building in 2006.

Trump also made significant money from one Russian oligarch in 2008, when he sold a mansion in Palm Beach for $95 million to Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev. Trump had bought the home at a bankruptcy auction less than four years earlier for $41.4 million.

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Trump signed a one-year deal in 2005 with a New York real estate company called the Bayrock Group to try, again, to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. In a 2007 deposition, Bayrock executive Felix Sater (a Russian immigrant with an interesting mafia-related back story) testified that he had located Russian investors for the project, as well as a site, a shuttered pencil factory named for U.S. communists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

Sater testified that after trips to Russia, he would “pop my head into Mr. Trump’s office and tell him, you know, ‘Moving forward on the Moscow deal.’ And he would say, ‘All right.’ ”

That effort fizzled too. But Trump promised in a 2007 court deposition that he had not given up on Moscow. “Russia is one of the hottest places in the world for investment. . . . We will be in Moscow at some point,” he said.

Indeed, in 2013, he inked another preliminary deal to build in Moscow, this time in partnership with Agalarov, who had hosted the pageant. Agalarov told The Washington Post that the project is on hold while Trump runs for president.

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His campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, managed an investment fund for a Russian aluminum magnate with close ties to Putin. (The oligarch is suing Manafort, claiming, according to litigation in the Cayman Islands, that Manafort disappeared with $19 million.)

Manafort also unsuccessfully attempted a multimillion-dollar real estate project in New York City with funds from a Ukranian energy tycoon. And he worked as an adviser to the Putin-backed Ukranian president whose 2014 ouster sparked Russian intervention in that country, which has been opposed by U.S. officials in both parties.
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I figured this would be the case. For all his grandstanding..



behind the scenes the grown ups are trying to work things out
 
unchanged_lineup said:
Can't, and yet also can, believe this is where we are. Also the fact that the likelihood is this is driven in pretty much equal parts by his ego, his ineptitude, the investigations against him, his flagging base, and the crude brinksmanship that's been the only way he knows how to do business all of his life.
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You can't be that surprised mate. You were one of many of us that predicted pretty much everything that has transpired so far. I think the only shocks are how much and how many different scandals there are and the pace of it all. He's surpassed expectations with threatening WWIII inside 8 months, I don't think anyone said it would be that quick. Actually I might go back to the Election thread and see what was said and by whom. Not for any congratulatory reasons, it didn't take any real skill to see what was coming as his is as predictable in some ways and stunningly unpredictable in others.
 
Carolina Red said:
Thankfully China has stated that if NK shoots first, they'll stay neutral.

(But I'm more worried that we will)
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Of course there is always the issue of if something does happen, each side will claim the other shot first and it might not be clear who really did or at least everyone would just believe which story they wanted to.
 
langster said:
You can't be that surprised mate. You were one of many of us that predicted pretty much everything that has transpired so far. I think the only shocks are how much and how many different scandals there are and the pace of it all. He's surpassed expectations with threatening WWIII inside 8 months, I don't think anyone said it would be that quick. Actually I might go back to the Election thread and see what was said and by whom. Not for any congratulatory reasons, it didn't take any real skill to see what was coming as his is as predictable in some ways and stunningly unpredictable in others.
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Still unsettling to live through nuclear sabre rattling...
 
unchanged_lineup said:
Still unsettling to live through nuclear sabre rattling...
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Yes, indeed it is mate. I've said the same in the NK thread. It's horrible. I'm disgusted by them both, but especially Trump, however i'm more disgusted that the US system continues to allow him to get away with everything he has so far and how so few people have even raised an eyebrow let alone called him out for any of it. The threat of nuclear war is just as bad as it can get from him, people will be genuinely frightened, he should be fecking ashamed. Really he should step aside before he causes real permanent damage, but he wont. He still thinks he's in the right and doing a good job.
 
So long as David Friedman is Israeli ambassador, the US may as well send Ronald McDonald and Elmo to spearhead negotiations. This is the man with a history of fundraising for illegal Israeli radical settlements.
 
Raoul said:
Gorka is definitely getting on the media's nerves. With Bannon increasingly isolated, I can see Kelly making his move and prodding Trump to get rid.
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Apparently the BBC had loads of complaints this week when they had him on one of their news programmes :lol:

I was searching for the article but couldn't find it, but if you type in "BBC Sebastian Gorka" You get over 1.6 million results come up. I didn't realise he had been used by the BBC so much. He's been on Newsnight and HardTalk quite regularly by the looks of it too. I wonder if we have any regular BBC News viewers here to add how often they see him?

Edit! You only get 1.3 million if you search for "CNN Sebastian Gorka" and only 444,000 if you do the same for Fox News. :lol:
 
langster said:
Apparently the BBC had loads of complaints this week when they had him on one of their news programmes :lol:

I was searching for the article but couldn't find it, but if you type in "BBC Sebastian Gorka" You get over 1.6 million results come up. I didn't realise he had been used by the BBC so much. He's been on Newsnight and HardTalk quite regularly by the looks of it too. I wonder if we have any regular BBC News viewers here to add how often they see him?

Edit! You only get 1.3 million if you search for "CNN Sebastian Gorka" and only 444,000 if you do the same for Fox News. :lol:
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Expect a lot more reports questioning his academic credentials and his alleged ties to Hungarian fascists groups.
 
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