Bear with me on this and keep in mind that I’m no particular fan of Donald Trump’s.
What if it turns out that the Trump campaign was being wiretapped and he wasn’t “colluding” with Russia to fix the election? Go a step farther. What if there’s proof positive that there was massive vote fraud and he did actually win the popular vote?
My guess is that none of these would have any effect whatever. He’d still have the lowest approval rating at this stage of his presidency of any post-war president, the highest disapproval rating, and the tenor and tempo of agonistic criticisms would continue.
Duh! When Obama released the long form you didn’t suddenly see people on the right give him favorable ratings. As each of the “scandals” was found to have no linkage to Obama, that didn’t change anything either. Of course in these cases the right was trying to create problems that didn’t exist. In Trump’s case he just makes stuff up. Or, as the conservatives would say about Obama, he was lying. ( This excludes the collusion claims. I don’t think most people on the left believe this, but it provides an opportunity to keep an ongoing investigation open. Just like the GOP did with BENGHAZI!)
Steve
40% of Americans think that Trump colluded with the Russians to swing the election. Do you think those are mostly on the right? IMO most on “the Left” and some in the center think he did.
Not being on either “the Left” or “the Right”, I didn’t comment much over the last eight years on the various things that Republicans were perseverating on but I do see a difference. Real Americans were killed in Benghazi. Real Americans were killed as a consequence of the administration’s “Fast and Furious” operation. They weren’t completely imaginary.
By and large I don’t think that the Obama Administration’s mistakes were crimes but I do think they were mistakes, largely fomented by prioritizing politics over any other consideration to a degree unhealthy for the United States.
It now appears to be the case that the Obama Administration wiretapped the Trump campaign. A president was driven from office for a similar act, lying about it, and covering it up. That’s real, too.
Why do you think Barrack Obama was so popular? Because everything he said, did, attended, accessorized, wore, were calculated to that end. By professionals. A “body man”? Do you have one of those? Would Trump? Everything he did was politically assessed and motivated. Yes, I think he would have wiretapped Trump’s campaign, may still with loyalists in the FBI, but you’d play hell tracing it back to him.
Of course, “they” would not. Everyone knows is a boorish, sexist, racist, homophobe etc etc and besides thinking unlike emoting hurts.
BTW, some of the Obama era mistakes were driven by hubris.
Well, either Obama went after Manafort before the election to gather information in order to humiliate Trump after he won, because that makes so much sense, or Manafort was a conduit for Russian laundering on the FBI radar.
But I could actually believe that the Clinton campaign would somehow manage to rig an election so that they won the popular vote by 3 million but lost the electoral college by tens of thousands of votes.
Uhh, they wiretapped Manafort starting in 2014. The article does not say the campaign was wiretapped. The real question should be why did Trump choose someone whose behavior was suspect enough to have a warrant granted for surveillance. As reported in your article, and a similar one by Fox, it sounds like they did not monitor him for most of 2016, i.e. during the campaign.
Query- If they already had him under surveillance, 2 years before he had a role in the campaign, should they have stopped just because he joined the campaign? Should they have informed the Trump campaign? Finally, why are you accusing the Obama campaign of actively surveilling the Trump campaign to influence the election, when all of the news sources are saying this started years before the campaign? Is the claim here that the Obama administration predicted that Manafort would become the campaign director so they started early? Is there any evidence that the Obama administration, not just people in the FBI, knew that Manafort was being wiretapped?
” Real Americans were killed in Benghazi.”
You do realize that was not what the GOP was investigating? That was not the scandal? They resolved that with the first of the 8 investigations. The real claim was that the Obama administration released false information to influence the election.
“Real Americans were killed as a consequence of the administration’s “Fast and Furious†operation.” This was an operation started by the Bush admin and just continued under Obama. The GOP wanted to claim that this was created by Obama personally. Lots of investigations and, to date, they all seem to conclude that neither the GOP nor Democrat higher level officials actually knew that guns were walking, that this was initiated by lower level agents.
Still, these were not issues because people died. They were issues because the GOP thought they could link them to Obama. They could not. Same as all of the others. Please note that not even Sessions, as partisan as they come, is not even going to bother prosecuting Lerner. (He would bump Trump’s popularity even higher on the right if he found any way to prosecute her.) No big conspiracy here. Who would have guessed.
Steve
I’m still waiting for anyone to explain to me by what mechanism Russians might have helped Trump. If all you can say is that they exposed Clinton’s misdeeds, so good, so what?
Um, you know how Trump accused Obama of illegally wiretapping him? You know how you think Obama was behind that? Trump sent his dumbass son to ask the Russians for any emails they might have had because they were the ones who hacked the DNC. It’s essentially the same thing. Not hard to figure out.
I think “truth” is so politically camouflaged that it’s simply not part of the equation anymore.