The Trump hate is through the roof here. I remain very optimistic of Trump and his team to negotiate trade deals. If the China deal is made, the stock market and economy will boom. Plus there is the potential for a EU deal after the China deal. Autos are a big point of emphasis in the talks, especially EVs (this was specifically mentioned in a recent interview with the commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross). We will all be big beneficiaries if the deals fall into place. I hope those spewing the hate here, will be able to concede that Trump may be more capable than they have given him credit for. If the deals do not happen and the economy is worse off, I will be sure to state that you all were correct and that I have been wrong about him.
First off I am in the same camp as some others who have spoken up. I don't really hate anyone, though I may hate someone's actions or take issue with their ideas.
Going by the old "by their acts you show know them" I have educated myself on who Donald Trump really is. His persona is a master deal maker and genius businessman, but in reality he blew his inheritance, and it appears he turned to organized crime and money laundering to finance his lifestyle from there.
I have had an amateur's interest in Psychology for most of my life and my SO has both a masters in Psych as well as a JD equivalent. She both runs a counseling agency for domestic violence perpetrators and practices law. Her mother had a Borderline Personality Disorder and her ex's brother had an Antisocial Personality Disorder. She's taken a special interest in personality disorders (though she rarely deals with the professionally).
I also had a friend who unfortunately died just before the 2016 election who was a Psychiatrist and worked in mental hospitals most of his professional life. Usually the local county hospital where the police take the mental cases. He saw just about every mental illness imaginable.
My SO, my friend, and everything I have ever read myself about personality disorders screams that Donald Trump is a textbook case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder and specifically a sub-type which is called a Malignant Narcissist. Malignant Narcissists differ from NPD in that they have a sadistic streak on top of the NPD. One Psych professor who teaches mental illness classes said he started using Donald Trump videos to illustrate NPD traits because Trump is such a perfect example.
Donald Trump's track record as a deal maker is pathetic. He blusters a lot, but in the end he gets taken by people much better at making deals. Since he came on the political scene in a big way in 2015, investigators have been digging into every one of his business deals and mostly he's been making money from money laundering. It's a different kind of money laundering than what we're commonly used to which is the Breaking Bad kind of money laundering of cash from drug sales.
In places like Russia, there is a relative handful of gangsters that run the country. They rip off the wealth of the country to line their pockets. But they want to get this money out of the country and hidden overseas. Their primary game is to deposit their money in a bank in Russia, then someone who is working with them in another country puts up for sale something at an inflated price and they buy that thing at that price using the money they deposited in Moscow. They hold onto that asset for a few years, then sell it for whatever they can get for it and deposits the money in some account offshore from Moscow.
Their partner in this deal makes money from the over-inflated price, but also makes money with loans given by the corrupt bank that just never seem to get paid back.
All the evidence points to almost all of Trump's business income for the last 20 years has been as the American end of this money pipeline.
Trump's foreign policy as president has been horribly mismanaged. His "deals" are at best small improvements, but most have been utter failures. He met with Kim Jong-Un and made a big deal about coming to a great deal. In reality the North Korean dictator played him giving some nods to some of the things Trump said, went home and destroyed a facility that had already been damaged beyond repair, then doubled down on his nuclear program.
Trump made a big deal about tearing up NAFTA and rewriting it, but in reality that's not what the new agreement is. It's a few relatively minor tweaks to NAFTA, almost all in the automotive sector, and leaves the original agreement largely unchanged.
Trump's policy with China has been an utter disaster. The tariffs are a tax on Americans, not on China. It raises prices on goods imported to the US, and it's doing very little to spur domestic production because there isn't enough domestic production left to spool up. China has retaliated with tariffs on American goods which has almost shut down those exports. As a result the trade deficit with China is at an all time high. Trump made a big deal about his trade war deal with China, but if you actually read the Chinese statements about Trump's G-20 meeting, the Chinese take away from the talk was very different and very little has changed.
The trade war has hit the company I work for. They make test instruments for the integrated circuit industry and 1/2 their business is in China. They make everything here in the US and thanks to the trade war, most companies are doing what companies always do when things are uncertain, they have stopped capital spending. They have laid off a bunch of people and cut me back to 4 days a week. I don't know if they will still be in business in 2020 if this continues.
On the legislative front the Republicans have had both branches of government and the presidency for two years. Something that rarely happens. Normally when that happens, the party in power rams through some substantive legislation, but the Republicans have been an utter failure at getting anything through except a massive tax bill that has already blown up the deficit and primarily gives money to people who don't need any more at the expense of the rest of us. That and packing the courts with conservative judges, some wildly unqualified, is about the only thing that have to show for their lock on power.
Donald Trump has one talent: he's a very good sales person to a certain type of person. He's also been very, very lucky up to now he hasn't been caught in any of his crimes. And Mueller has made it clear in his latest sentencing memo that he has Donald Trump for multiple crimes now and he'd be in custody today if he wasn't president.
Conservative media and the Republicans have crafted a fluid reality where everything is constantly changing. They have been making up BS stories and wildly exaggerating others about Democrats for 25 years and none of those wild stories have proven to have much truth. They have launched bogus probes that turned up little or nothing like Whitewater, Benghazi-gate, etc.
Kenneth Starr investigated the Clintons for most of Bill Clinton's 8 years in office. There were all sorts of wild rumors floated in conservative media and Starr looked at everything. He got a whole lot of nothing, but the conservative media left a lot of Americans thinking Clinton got away with it. That is a witch hunt.
For most of Obama's second term, a House committee investigated Hillary Clinton's role in the unfortunately loss of life at the Benghazi US consulate. They ignored the fact that the state department had asked Congress for more money for embassy and consulate security in Libya, but the Republicans had refused to give it. Instead they spun stories about some mythical rescue mission that could have been put together in Italy and flown out the ambassador if not for Hillary wanting him dead or something. They came up with nothing and quietly dropped the whole investigation when Hillary lost. Another witch hunt.
Because of all this crying wolf, the true believers on the right think that there are many corrupt people on the left who are managing to get away with crimes because of some liberal cabal in the DOJ or something. Among independents who are mostly independent because they don't like either party, these fake crisis leave them with the boy who cried wolf syndrome. So when a real scandal comes up with real evidence of bad doing by Republicans, it's written off as the liberals just going after Republicans like the Republicans did to the Democrats.
But this time there is a wolf. A really big one.
The Mueller investigation has been cast in right wing media as a liberal witch hunt, but every principle in the investigation is either deliberately lifelong apolitical (like James Comey) or a lifelong Republicans (like Mueller and Rosenstein). Mueller has been at the Trump-Russia investigation less time than most modern investigations and unlike bogus investigations of Democrats, Mueller is finding a staggering collection of crimes.
The crimes connected to Trump, his businesses, and his campaign are absolutely nothing like Benghazi, Whitewater, Obama being a secret Kenyan, or Hillary's emails. This is real and it's been hiding in plain sight for 30+ years.
For those writing off the Trump scandals as just the Democrats getting payback are woefully under informed and are playing right into the narrative the conservative media wants you to believe.
As far as I've seen from following the facts the current president of the United States is a criminal. He has been involved in criminal activity for decades and he's still involved in criminal activity. He is mentally ill, not very bright, and very toxic to the institutions of this country.
I still don't hate him because I don't really hate people. I am very, very concerned about the future of this country. The rule of law is thus far holding, but the Constitution is threatened and if it breaks, the US as it has existed for the last 240 years will be gone. One party, the Republican party has become hopelessly corrupt. The Democrats are far from perfect. There are Democratic politicians in prison today, but the Democrats are not guilty of the systematic corruption of the Republican party. The elected Republicans are supporting a corrupt president out of fear and greed.
The conservative media beat up the rest of the media for the last 2 decades claiming they were too liberal. So they bent over backwards to be "fair" to both sides. It helped create a narrative that both sides were equally wrong, but that is not true at all. The distortion of facts, abusive behavior towards opponents, corrupting the system to favor them, etc. has been far, far worse on the right than the left. There has been some on the left, but the split is 80-20 or even 90-10.
And all this comes from someone who grew up in a very Republican household and really is an independent now. I've been voting Democratic since GW Bush because one party has become the Wonderland party living in a reality that only has some tangential relationship to the facts. I have my issues with the Democrats, but they are the only adults left in the room.
