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.
@freemo
Three: Profiteering and corruption
There are a couple really obvious cases, like the military planes being re-routed to Trump properties, or him suggesting a G7 summit should happen at his resort. There are also less clear ones, like the Saudis renting rooms at Trump's hotel, which I would label as coincidental normally, but the brazen ones plus the lack of transparency I mentioned before raises my priors for foul play.
The blatant profiteering seems pretty clear-cut, the actual political corruption less so. Again, maybe I lack knowledge about the US system, but I was under the impression at least the two former points were clearly illegal.
@freemo
Four: Appointments by decree
This one I'm actually very unsure about, but it's not topic, and learning that I am wrong would be useful. Supposedly Trump appointed multiple people as "Acting $POSITION", bypassing Senate confirmations. By itself this is not a problem, but the claim is that this happened to significantly more positions than in previous administrations and for a longer time without the confirmation.
What is surprizing and especially suspicious to me is that the current
senate is generally aligned with the president, so why would he even do that? This is both suspicious in the sense that I'm less inclined to trust what I think I know of this case, as well as in the sense of arousing suspicion of foul play if it actually happened.
@freemo
Five: Endorsements of violence and extremism
The most relevant example is still fresh -- the "I LOVE TEXAS!" tweet with the video of trucks surrounding a Biden campaign bus.
There were many earlier examples too, the "fine people on both sides" comment, "stand back and stand by" directed towards a militant group, the main reaction to the Michigan kidnapping attempt being criticizing the attempted victim (and afaik no actual condemnation of the attempt?).
I am not completely sure that I have all the facts right in these cases, in particular as to how dangerous the various endorsed groups are, but at least the first one is very clear-cut. I looked at the context of the statements and it ranges from somewhat lessening the impact, but still bad (with the both sides comment) to actually worse (with the "stand by" comment). I would have this point higher, since political violence is a very serious thing, but it is known that Trump says whatever his saliva brings to his tongue (to borrow an expression from my native language), so hopefully the impact of his words is lessened by fewer people taking him seriously. This is, however, quite a terrible excuse.
🇳🇱
@timorl Trump lacks even the smallest sense of charisma and I think one of the most damning things about him, and what gets him in so much trouble, is how he talks and how he tries to deflect criticism.
In that regard I agree, he didn't really handle these questions too well. What we wanted was him to decry people who acted out violently that appeared to be aligned with him politically. He didn't do that out of fear that it would cause him to loose supporters... That was a mistake on his part IMO.
To an extent I understand why he responded as he did, though I dont agree with it. I think he viewed the very question as a way for democrats to get one over on him.. if he dencounces the violence then he is 1) legitimizing that it is real and a concern and 2) loosing support from the people who do not view the violence as real and instead view the violence of the left as the legitimate violence (antifa). So he took the approach of dodging the bullet.
While I do agree trump should have very vocally denounced the violence, and there is no excuse for that, I also dont see Biden denouncing the extreme violence of Antifa, which is many orders of mangitude worse right now. When I am int he USA I live in philadelphia. We have been rioting like crazy the past few months and a large part of the violence i see right outside my door is largely antifa. They have been rioting, burning homes and businesses tot he ground, and assaulting people on the street in open violence like I've never seen before. There have been days the sky was black with fires here as self-proclaimed antifa run around like gangs assaulting anyone who has a MAGA hat on or supports trump.
The violence I've personally seen out my very window from antifa is horrific and yet I have yet to witness even a single pro-trumper act with this sort of violence.
So on this point I have to ask, have I seen Biden decrying antifa... the answer is, nope.. In fact I dont even see the media cornering him demanding he does like they did with trump.
So while I may give Trump a black mark for not detesting the violence outright, I would give biden and the democrats 10 black marks for doing the same in the face of much greater and widespread violence.
@freemo The antifa claims are strange to me – I was under the impression that most people ramming the protests and doing similarly scary stuff were mostly right-wing. Trump supporters and opponents have regular shouting matches (I saw clips in which either side could be considered the agressor) and there are the looters, opportunistic and not strongly politically affilated as far as I can tell. But in this I can well be wrong, since you say you saw that – how exactly did the antifa members self-identify if I might ask?
