The Former Trump Presidency Thread

[malchior]

Logistically, sending an inter-continental missile to the middle of the country would have to be more logistically and technologically difficult, right?

Not quite - think great circles - they are generally going to be coming in over the pole so east or west is just degrees of inclination at launch time. To see it - go to google earth and rotate so that you are looking down at the earth. Then think that Russian ICBM sites are generally clustered in the west and center of their country. Ours are generally out in Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas. Either way - they can strike any part of the other country with reasonably great precision (especially nowadays).

[Anonymous Bosch]

I still am more concerned about loose nukes, limited target terror and loan-wolves by far...

Yeah, but loan-sharks always struck me as nastier than loan-wolves.

[Smoove_B]

Here I was thinking that Trump winning might cause the forum to devolve into crazy talk.........

Did you watch the address he gave today? The only way he could have appeared less Presidential is if he offered to do a quick magic trick for the people sitting in front.

[Enough]

I still am more concerned about loose nukes, limited target terror and loan-wolves by far...

Yeah, but loan-sharks always struck me as nastier than loan-wolves.

Ouchie, good catch heh. That's a knick-knack paddywhack, give that frog a loan!

[YellowKing]

The problem is that Trump supporters see "less Presidential" as a *good* thing. Though I wager if their boss acted as unprofessional as he does, they'd be looking for another job.

I see numerous posts after every one of Trump's childish outbursts by conservative Facebook friends applauding and cheering it. They're delighted and amused that someone's finally "stickin' it to the liberals."

Personally I don't find it funny. The guy just became arguably the most powerful person on the planet. I don't think the office is a joke. Millions of people's lives depend on what he does and says. I just hope all those that are yukking it up at his "antics" aren't on the receiving end of them some day.

[malchior]

Here I was thinking that Trump winning might cause the forum to devolve into crazy talk.........

Did you watch the address he gave today? The only way he could have appeared less Presidential is if he offered to do a quick magic trick for the people sitting in front.

Nah - he just likely saw a guy he'd like to have a bottle of Cristal with.

[Zarathud]

Nothing you can do, folks. Although the First Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know.

[Max Peck]

a tad.

I'll give you that actually. I've always been curious if the military has a "madman" failsafe scenario? Then again having such a thing publicly known would weaken the psychological component of a nuclear deterrence policy.

It's my understanding that POTUS has the sole authority to order a nuclear strike. Presumably the process of becoming POTUS should be the failsafe. That said, IDK how the actual chain of command works or if there is room for a person of conscience to refuse the order -- i.e., does the order go through the Pentagon or directly from White House to bunker?

Hopefully this question is purely academic.

No one can stop President Trump from using nuclear weapons. That’s by design.

All year, the prospect of giving the real estate and reality TV mogul the power to launch attacks that would kill millions of people was one of the main reasons his opponents argued against electing him. “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons,” Hillary Clinton said in her speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination. She cut an ad along the same lines. Republicans who didn’t support Trump — and even some who did, such as Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) — also said they didn’t think he could be trusted with the launch codes.

Now they’re his. When Trump takes office in January, he will have sole authority over more than 7,000 warheads. There is no failsafe. The whole point of U.S. nuclear weapons control is to make sure that the president — and only the president — can use them if and whenever he decides to do so. The one sure way to keep President Trump from launching a nuclear attack, under the system we’ve had in place since the early Cold War, would have been to elect someone else.

[...]

That the president would be the only person competent to use nuclear weapons was never challenged. Even asking the question would throw the entire system into disarray, as Maj. Harold Hering learned in 1973. Hering was a 21-year Air Force veteran who was decorated for his flying in Vietnam before being sent for training as a nuclear missile squadron commander. He had been taught that officers had an obligation to disobey illegal orders. So when he was told how to launch a nuclear attack, he asked what seemed like a simple question: How could he be sure that an order to launch his missiles was lawful? How could he be sure, for example, that the president wasn’t insane? Instead of an answer, he got the boot: an aborted promotion and an administrative discharge for “failure to demonstrate acceptable qualities of leadership” and for indicating “a defective mental attitude towards his duties.”

The Air Force’s problem, in short, is that once a serviceman starts down the rabbit hole of doubt, he becomes an unreliable second-guesser — and suddenly he is one of the few people who can decide whether nuclear weapons are used.

[...]

Could the secretary of defense refuse to carry out a presidential order for a nuclear attack? The legal and constitutional aspects are not clear. The official doctrine that has been released says nothing about this question, and the cryptic public responses to official inquiries, even from Congress, indicate that it is not something that can be openly talked about. “Only the president can authorize the use of nuclear weapons” is essentially the only reply officials ever give to any questions about nuclear controls. Could the president simply fire the defense secretary and move on to the deputy secretary, the secretary of the Army and so on through the chain of command? Maybe. Such an action would at least slow things down, even if the refusal to carry out the order was illegal.

Commanders further down the pipeline are trained to act quickly on any orders that do come in. The launch officers are trained to launch weapons, not to debate the legality or advisability of the action. Hence the problem with Hering’s question in 1973: While nuclear launch officers are not meant to be strictly mechanical (and indeed, the United States has always resisted fully automating the process), if they stopped to question whether their authenticated orders were legitimate, they would put the credibility of U.S. nuclear deterrence at risk.

[Rip]

Here I was thinking that Trump winning might cause the forum to devolve into crazy talk.........

What's crazy is that you are not freaked the fuck out on any level apparently, but every single thing Obama did was a HUGE RED FLAG to you. But no, it would be impossible for you to be suffering some confirmation bias here like that ACA Trump voter.

I admit I am not freaked out on any level.

I am entertained. With four years of good news denial to look forward to I am sure you guys can raise the bar to levels I had never imagined.

[Enough]

Here I was thinking that Trump winning might cause the forum to devolve into crazy talk.........

What's crazy is that you are not freaked the fuck out on any level apparently, but every single thing Obama did was a HUGE RED FLAG to you. But no, it would be impossible for you to be suffering some confirmation bias here like that ACA Trump voter.

I admit I am not freaked out on any level.

I am entertained. With four years of good news denial to look forward to I am sure you guys can raise the bar to levels I had never imagined.

Even beyond you and MSD? Unpossible!

[Blackhawk]

I saw someone on twitter post a terrifying scenario. What if someone hacks Trump's twitter account and writes something like, "To protect the U.S. I've just launched nukes aimed at X" to try to incite a retaliatory strike against us. I hope Trump at least has two-step verification on his account...

I would guess that if we actually launched nukes, any nation capable of a retaliatory response would know about it even before Trump's fat orange fingers could tweet it. And if we didn't, they'd know that, too.

[Kraken]

I saw someone on twitter post a terrifying scenario. What if someone hacks Trump's twitter account and writes something like, "To protect the U.S. I've just launched nukes aimed at X" to try to incite a retaliatory strike against us. I hope Trump at least has two-step verification on his account...

Maybe I should feel reassured that I'm probably safe here in Texas because the nukes would much more likely rain down on the east or west coast?

TX has to be one of the most strategic pieces of ground to pave to glass if we end up there: oil and gas, military assets out the ass and major population centers. Just a cursory look would not comfort me if I were you. I am in no better shape, the entire Front Range of CO is basically a prime target.

Interesting. I always assumed D.C. or NYC would be the target, or maybe Hawaii if launched from the far east, but I guess there are other considerations about what would make a "good" target.

Logistically, sending an inter-continental missile to the middle of the country would have to be more logistically and technologically difficult, right?

With something on the order of (edit) 7300 warheads, there are plenty to go around. You can bet that every manufacturing, resource, and command center in the US is already targeted, and the impetus is to throw them all at once rather than gamble on a second-strike capability surviving.

Here I was thinking that Trump winning might cause the forum to devolve into crazy talk.........

When one unthinkable thing happens, it's reasonable to consider other unthinkable things happening. Hypothetically, at least.

[Isgrimnur]

Lockheed Martin is in Fort Worth. There's a GM plant in Arlington. There's are at least a couple of Raytheon facilities.

If the balloon goes up, so does DFW.

[Max Peck]

I like to think that the Russians have a target set for Yellowstone National Park. Weaponizing a supervolcano smack in the middle of enemy territory makes for a great doomsday device.

[Enough]

I like to think that the Russians have a target set for Yellowstone National Park. Weaponizing a supervolcano smack in the middle of enemy territory makes for a great doomsday device.

This needs a b-movie so bad.

[$iljanus]

Here I was thinking that Trump winning might cause the forum to devolve into crazy talk.........

What's crazy is that you are not freaked the fuck out on any level apparently, but every single thing Obama did was a HUGE RED FLAG to you. But no, it would be impossible for you to be suffering some confirmation bias here like that ACA Trump voter.

I admit I am not freaked out on any level.

I am entertained. With four years of good news denial to look forward to I am sure you guys can raise the bar to levels I had never imagined.

Well I didn't mention aliens but the sky, or the stars in the case of aliens, is the limit!

[malchior]

With something on the order of (edit) 7300 warheads, there are plenty to go around. You can bet that every manufacturing, resource, and command center in the US is already targeted, and the impetus is to throw them all at once rather than gamble on a second-strike capability surviving.

That was the thinking in the 50s/60s. Eventually the likelihood of limited strikes came into vogue - because the all out option is the end. So the only plausible scenarios are thought to be tit-for-tat strikes with the hopes of not pushing it too far and causing a escalation to full out strategic release. At least that was 80s/early 90s thinking. The missiles and stealth bombers are certainly even more accurate and monitoring is so much better now that a 2nd strike isn't really a practical concern. You can't sneak an attack that'll eliminate the other's capability without getting totally leveled in an all out slog. Especially since you'd have to get all the subs, planes, and the ICBMs. That's also why any thought that you can't retaliate immediately (<45 minutes) is bad. Downside is that the expectation for a small numbers of launches makes a big (undetected) asteroid strike or a sensors failure (like in '83) all the more dangerous.

[Holman]

Lockheed Martin is in Fort Worth. There's a GM plant in Arlington. There's are at least a couple of Raytheon facilities.

If the balloon goes up, so does DFW.

Isn't Trump already nuking Lockheed Martin via Twitter?

[Isgrimnur]

Lockheed Martin is in Fort Worth. There's a GM plant in Arlington. There's are at least a couple of Raytheon facilities.

If the balloon goes up, so does DFW.

Isn't Trump already nuking Lockheed Martin via Twitter?

[Sepiche]

The Director of the OGE gave a hell of a speech today:
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/up ... emarks.pdf

For these reasons, the plan does not comport with the tradition of our Presidents over the past 40 years.
This isn’t the way the Presidency has worked since Congress passed the Ethics in Government Act in 1978 in
the immediate aftermath of the Watergate scandal. Since then, Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan,
George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all either established blind trusts or
limited their investments to non-conflicting assets like diversified mutual funds, which are exempt under the
conflict of interest law.

Now, before anyone is too critical of the plan the President-elect announced, let’s all remember there’s
still time to build on that plan and come up with something that will resolve his conflicts of interest. In
developing the current plan, the President-elect did not have the benefit of OGE’s guidance. So, to be clear,
OGE’s primary recommendation is that he divest his conflicting financial interests. Nothing short of divestiture
will resolve these conflicts.

This has been my view from the start. The media covered some messages I sent the President-elect
through Twitter. While some people got what I was doing, I think some others may have missed the point. I
was trying to use the vernacular of the President-elect’s favorite social media platform to encourage him to
divest. My thinking was that more pointed language would have been too strong at a time when he was still
making up his mind. I reiterated my view in a written response to questions from the Senate, which is posted on
OGE’s website. I’ve been pursuing this issue because the ethics program starts at the top. The signals a
President sends set the tone for ethics across the executive branch. Tone from the top matters.

I’ve had the honor and great privilege of serving as Director of the Office of Government Ethics for four
years now. But I’ve been in ethics for much longer than that, having come up through the ranks as a career
government ethics official. Over the years, I’ve worked closely with countless officials in administrations of
both major parties. Ethics has no party.

[hepcat]

I am entertained. With four years of good news denial to look forward to I am sure you guys can raise the bar to levels I had never imagined.

Read back over your Obama tirades. You put the bar in a cannon and shot that bastard toward Alpha Centauri.

[Grifman]

I like to think that the Russians have a target set for Yellowstone National Park. Weaponizing a supervolcano smack in the middle of enemy territory makes for a great doomsday device.

I've actually read somewhere recently that they have considered doing just that.

[Rip]

On the bright side worrying about such things should take your minds off your climate change fears.

[Defiant]

BBC claims a second source backs up Trump dossier

[Zarathud]

Silver lining -- there were no Roswell aliens or faked moon landings. Or Trump would have tweeted about it.

[$iljanus]

On the bright side worrying about such things should take your minds off your climate change fears.

Which is what Mother Russia is hoping for comrade since the receding ice shelf in the Arctic will open up all sorts of sea lanes and resources for the benefit of the Rodina!

(actually I believe that quite a few countries close to the Arctic are thinking of the strategic implications of the melting ice shelf)

[Max Peck]

On the bright side worrying about such things should take your minds off your climate change fears.

Meh, what's to worry about. Trump loves his own skin too much to launch a nuclear strike at a country that can hit back.

[hepcat]

For someone who claims to have not been that much into Trump, Rip seems to be on the defensive a lot.

[Daehawk]

Whats up with him appointing a anti vaccine advocate to head the vaccine safety thing?

[YellowKing]

At this point I'm almost convinced of that theory that we're all living in a digital simulation. Trump's cabinet couldn't be hand-picked to be any more "evil stereotype" if it came out of central casting.

[Max Peck]

BBC claims a second source backs up Trump dossier

Here is the BBC article referenced.

The opposition research firm that commissioned the report had worked first for an anti-Trump superpac - political action committee - during the Republican primaries.

Then during the general election, it was funded by an anonymous Democratic Party supporter. But these are not political hacks - their usual line of work is country analysis and commercial risk assessment, similar to the former MI6 agent's consultancy. He, apparently, gave his dossier to the FBI against the firm's advice.

And the former MI6 agent is not the only source for the claim about Russian kompromat on the president-elect. Back in August, a retired spy told me he had been informed of its existence by "the head of an East European intelligence agency".

Later, I used an intermediary to pass some questions to active duty CIA officers dealing with the case file - they would not speak to me directly. I got a message back that there was "more than one tape", "audio and video", on "more than one date", in "more than one place" - in the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow and also in St Petersburg - and that the material was "of a sexual nature".

The claims of Russian kompromat on Mr Trump were "credible", the CIA believed. That is why - according to the New York Times and Washington Post - these claims ended up on President Obama's desk last week, a briefing document also given to Congressional leaders and to Mr Trump himself.

Mr Trump did visit Moscow in November 2013, the date the main tape is supposed to have been made. There is TV footage of him at the Miss Universe contest. Any visitor to a grand hotel in Moscow would be wise to assume that their room comes equipped with hidden cameras and microphones as well as a mini-bar.

At his news conference, Mr Trump said he warned his staff when they travelled: "Be very careful, because in your hotel rooms and no matter where you go you're going to probably have cameras." So the Russian security services have made obtaining kompromat an art form.

One Russian specialist told me that Vladimir Putin himself sometimes says there is kompromat on him - though perhaps he is joking. The specialist went on to tell me that FSB officers are prone to boasting about having tapes on public figures, and to be careful of any statements they might make.

A former CIA officer told me he had spoken by phone to a serving FSB officer who talked about the tapes. He concluded: "It's hokey as hell."

Mr Trump and his supporters are right to point out that these are unsubstantiated allegations.

But it is not just sex, it is money too. The former MI6 agent's report detailed alleged attempts by the Kremlin to offer Mr Trump lucrative "sweetheart deals" in Russia that would buy his loyalty.

Mr Trump turned these down, and indeed has done little real business in Russia. But a joint intelligence and law enforcement taskforce has been looking at allegations that the Kremlin paid money to his campaign through his associates.

On 15 October, the US secret intelligence court issued a warrant to investigate two Russian banks. This news was given to me by several sources and corroborated by someone I will identify only as a senior member of the US intelligence community. He would never volunteer anything - giving up classified information would be illegal - but he would confirm or deny what I had heard from other sources.

"I'm going to write a story that says…" I would say. "I don't have a problem with that," he would reply, if my information was accurate. He confirmed the sequence of events below.

Last April, the CIA director was shown intelligence that worried him. It was - allegedly - a tape recording of a conversation about money from the Kremlin going into the US presidential campaign.

It was passed to the US by an intelligence agency of one of the Baltic States. The CIA cannot act domestically against American citizens so a joint counter-intelligence taskforce was created.

The taskforce included six agencies or departments of government. Dealing with the domestic, US, side of the inquiry, were the FBI, the Department of the Treasury, and the Department of Justice. For the foreign and intelligence aspects of the investigation, there were another three agencies: the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Security Agency, responsible for electronic spying.

Lawyers from the National Security Division in the Department of Justice then drew up an application. They took it to the secret US court that deals with intelligence, the Fisa court, named after the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. They wanted permission to intercept the electronic records from two Russian banks.

Their first application, in June, was rejected outright by the judge. They returned with a more narrowly drawn order in July and were rejected again. Finally, before a new judge, the order was granted, on 15 October, three weeks before election day.

Neither Mr Trump nor his associates are named in the Fisa order, which would only cover foreign citizens or foreign entities - in this case the Russian banks. But ultimately, the investigation is looking for transfers of money from Russia to the United States, each one, if proved, a felony offence.

A lawyer- outside the Department of Justice but familiar with the case - told me that three of Mr Trump's associates were the subject of the inquiry. "But it's clear this is about Trump," he said.

I spoke to all three of those identified by this source. All of them emphatically denied any wrongdoing. "Hogwash," said one. "Bullshit," said another. Of the two Russian banks, one denied any wrongdoing, while the other did not respond to a request for comment.

The investigation was active going into the election. During that period, the leader of the Democrats in the Senate, Harry Reid, wrote to the director of the FBI, accusing him of holding back "explosive information" about Mr Trump.

Mr Reid sent his letter after getting an intelligence briefing, along with other senior figures in Congress. Only eight people were present: the chairs and ranking minority members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, and the leaders of the Democratic and Republican parties in Congress, the "gang of eight" as they are sometimes called. Normally, senior staff attend "gang of eight" intelligence briefings, but not this time. The Congressional leaders were not even allowed to take notes.

That's kind of a long excerpt (there's more to the article), but it was difficult to trim it down to a concise lede.

[Kurth]

Just watched the Kellyanne Conway/Anderson Cooper clash over CNN's reporting of the dossier/appendix/briefing/presentation about Russian attempts to compromise Trump.

I'm a big Anderson Cooper fan, but I have to say, I think she owned him. Just absolutely cleaned the floor with him.

I haven't followed this closely, but from what I could tell, Cooper was defending CNN on a technicality, bur Conway was going at him for the substance. CNN made a call to report on the dossier because the fact it was included in Trump and Obama's briefing is an important news event. But if -- as the Trump team maintains and CNN doesn't refute -- it was never actually presented during the briefing but just included in a 2 page appendix that no one discussed, was it really "presented", and is it really important enough to merit reporting? Especially when the dossier is basically an opposition research memo filled with a ton of salacious, sensational and completely unsourced stuff.

This kind of stuff drives me crazy and further reinforces my feeling that the press pretty much sucks ass today. Now more than ever, we need a credible free press that objectively and responsibly informs the people about what this new administration is up to. What we don't need is breathless headlines that score a ton of clicks but further erode the trust we have in the press while simultaneously leaving the press open to attacks from the people they should be reporting on that they are purveyors of "fake news."

[Zarathud]

Kellyanne Conway tried to say (1) the news is false but admitted (2) she wasn't there and didn't know. It goes to her credibility -- and she can't have it both ways. She's the worst type of guest in that she repeats the party line, dissembles on irrelevant tangents to throw up smokescreens, and outright lies when backed into a corner.

Trump relished this type of story when it was about his opponents. He thrived on it as a birther and in the primaries. Trump is going to be President and not every story about him is going to be fair. Suck it up, buttercup.

It's news if the intel communities think the material was something Trump needed to know. CNN should have been more careful with the scope of the story, so their hands aren't clean. And Anderson Cooper messed up by talking about the political motivations of Kellyanne's dissembling.

But Trump trying to publicly punish CNN is terrible and is much worse. The news conference was designed to intimidate and warn the media not to get out of line. A cheering section in the newsroom? Terrible day for America.

[Sepiche]

Here is the BBC article referenced.

Michael Hayden, former head of both the CIA and the NSA, simply called Mr Trump a "polezni durak" - a useful fool.

Ha!

[RunningMn9]

Kurth, I watched the same video last night and could not possibly have come to a more opposite conclusion.

[Skinypupy]

I was in training all day yesterday and didn't get caught up on the circus until late last night. That went well.

A couple Stromtrumpers I know were applauding him for "standing up to" the CNN reporter, so I posed a hypothetical to them. Obama does the exact same thing to a Fox News reporter. Still happy? One's response was "Of course not, that would be completely inappropriate." When pressed about why, he told me, "Everyone knows CNN is dishonest media and can't be trusted. Fox News tells the truth, so there's no reason the President shouldn't answer questions from them."

Le sigh...there truly is no winning with these types.

[Smoove_B]

I was waiting for confirmation on what was being said on Twitter, but it's true - no one was allowed access to the pile of folders at the press conference yesterday. Wheeling out a table and setting up props. Absolutely amazing. I do sort of wish I was rich enough to have someone follow me around with a table and a few hundred pounds of folders and blank papers.

Trump stood at a podium next to a pile of manila folders on a table. But only well into the press conference did he later explain the papers were documentation of his new business arrangement, details of which were explained only when Trump abruptly ceded the stage to his lawyer. Trump staffers blocked reporters from examining the folders.

I'm actually surprised he didn't instruct his staffers to carry all the papers and folders out and then 10 minutes later bring them all back and indicate it was his plan for health care.

[hepcat]

Next presidential speech he'll wheel out a giant, fur covered humanoid on a table. Then he'll tell everyone he bested a Sasquatch in hand to hand combat over the weekend, before having it wheeled out before the press can reach the table.

[malchior]

Kurth, I watched the same video last night and could not possibly have come to a more opposite conclusion.

Seriously - I give it up to Cooper for not just yelling - 'STOP LYING!'. He specifically called out her tactics live and kept exposing that she couldn't support the statement she was making. I think it went too long though. It was painful to watch her just talk over him over and over. That is my ultimate problem with 24/7 news. They need to fill the air so they go with nonsense like this. She shouldn't be running from show to show. The networks shouldn't be giving her a platform at all to spread her poison.

Next presidential speech he'll wheel out a giant, fur covered humanoid on a table. Then he'll tell everyone he bested a Sasquatch in hand to hand combat over the weekend, before having it wheeled out before the press can reach the table.

Hopefully not shirtless like his mentor and master.

[Jeff V]

Next presidential speech he'll wheel out a giant, fur covered humanoid on a table. Then he'll tell everyone he bested a Sasquatch in hand to hand combat over the weekend, before having it wheeled out before the press can reach the table.

That's only after someone tells him Teddy Roosevelt was the best president ever because he strangled a grizzly bear with his bare hands.