Hi @freemo
I saw you claiming that you prefer Trump to Biden for US president, which surprized me as I was under the impression that Trump is so bad for democratic & rule of law standards that no reasonable person valuing these things could support him. I also saw you point out some anti-Trump propaganda that was just factually wrong, so you seem to be knowledgeable in that matter. Since I am now wondering whether my views are just a result of such propaganda I was hoping you could verify some of the things that led me to my conclusions.
I am not a US citizen and this exercise is mostly for anti-propaganda calibration purposes for me. You seem to enjoy this kind of discussion, but I know that you are a busy man, so I won't assume a lack of response to have big significance. I will still be grateful for any you give.
Thread follows, ordered by a combination of severity and how sure I am of specific claims.
@freemo
One: Obstruction of justice
Trump took multiple actions to hinder the Mueller investigation, including firing and pressuring people to resign, publicly verbally attacking people who cooperated with authorities, and ordering his subordinates to thwart the investigation in various ways.
The Wikipedia page on the Mueller report provides a reasonable overview of the situation, but the report itself is obviously the main source, and I have read significant fragments of it (but not everything).
This issue seems like an obvious abuse of power to me, and the facts associated with it are mostly a matter of public record, so I don't think I am a victim of propaganda in these regards (although I am open to somehow being wrong here). If I were to guess what I might be getting wrong -- maybe this is not unusual for US politics, and such abuses of power are normal there? And in this case the propaganda only highlighted Trump's abuses to me, despite them being a common occurrence?
@freemo
Two: Lowering transparency
I am a bit biased towards the importance of transparency, hence the high position on the list. I believe it is crucial for any system
we want to keep working to be transparent, and complicated ones like
politics are especially sensitive in this regard.
This is somewhat connected to the first point, discouraging people from testifying, but it is much more prevalent. The refusal to publish taxes returns is the poster boy for this issue, but there are also White House visitor logs, the significant increase in rejected FOIA requests, and, most recently, the restrictions to access of COVID-19 data.
I am much less sure about this point than the previous, especially the FOIA part -- I would be very surprized if the media lied about the increase, but the ones I was able to find didn't specify whether the total number of requests also increased. That data is not easy to query (sic), but checking a couple of data points on the foia.gov web page seems to confirm the claims -- the increases in the number of requests seemed in line with previous years and lower than the claimed increases in rejections.
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@timorl Transparency of government is a big issue for me as well.
Trump certainly hasnt won my love over in the transparency department, though neither did any previous president honestly. So the question for me is if he backtracked us in terms of transparency or not, because he certainly hasnt done anything I am aware of to make progress on that issue (though neither has biden to be honest).
With that said I am an evidence based person and like you most of the claims here abotu FOIA and such are just hear say and we cant confirm it, so I have to put that aside without evidence.
Where I think there is some validity and good evidence to prove on this issue is where he withheld not just COVID-19 data but also tried to take down scientific data on issues like global warming by using federal funding as leverage. There have been reports from quite a few science organizations that confirm this. Granted I cant completely verify this either but enough different sources have raised hell about this I am compelled to think it is valid.
So on this one, at least in regard to science data, I would agree with you, it is damning against trump.
In fact I'd say trumps anti-science anti-environmental approach to things (the transparency thing seems secondary to that and limited to those areas) is his most damning quality. His obstruction of science/environmental issues is absolutely the worst tick mark against him out of the lot. It is also where I personally dislike his policies the most.
Though to bring this back to a biden comparison, for me this election like most is about weighing the two evils that are the candidates. So while this is a huge black mark against trump, in the big picture it doesnt approach the things Biden has done, so ultimately i am stuck favoring Trump despite not liking him, at least out of the two.
@freemo I think the FOIA data is actually available, only hard to search, so technically there is no need to believe heresay.
I know revealing tax returns is not mandatory, but it was a nice informal policy while it lasted. There are two main reasons due to which I think it was useful: 1. Making it clear how the candidate gets money, which makes corruption harder to hide. 2. Essentially the reason you pointed out, but not caricaturised โ if people feel someone pays less than their fair share of taxes (whatever that may be) this informs them as to what tax policy that person will support, which is a very vald reason to vote for or against someone.
@timorl Oh but to be clear I have absolutely no issue with him witholding his tax returns.. He has every legal right to do so, there is no law suggesting he has to release it, and frankly I see no benefit to him releasing it. Paying more taxes than you owe is not a moral obligation and using the law to reduce your tax burden is not something that should be held agaisnt him..
Not only do u support him not releasing his taxes, I wholeheartedly agree with that decision. I can see no reason they would need to be released . Now if he cheated on taxes**that** we would want to know. But if he did that it would be on public record as the IRS makes that information public.
The reason people want and demand taxes is simply because americans have this misguided notion that if you pay the amount of tax the tax law dictates you are required to, and no more, that you are somehow a bad person.. In my eyes this is nonsense.