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.

@timorl This, in my eyes is mostly a non point.. We are talking about positions that dont have any actual power.. they cant vote for anything, they cant pass any laws or do anything politicially.. We are talking basically about people that trump wants as advisors. So I really dont see any problem with him assigning those positions to anyone he wants, or how long those positions retain an "acting" title. If the position holds no actual power I simply dont see this as an issue in the first place.

@freemo I wasn't aware all these positions don't have any power. Why do they require confirmations then, do you know?