00:00
that’ss eyes that are for people who are
00:01
actually suffering minorities be like no
00:02
no this is not cool so she’s not saying
00:05
this from small blogs I’m not seeing
00:07
this from anything main strike yep
00:09
correct because mainstream they’re
00:10
always gonna cover for this that right
00:11
100% of the time yeah they’re gonna
00:13
cover their the thing about those blogs
00:15
is like a lot of them are basically like
00:16
Ari Shaffir refers to them as like
00:18
college papers yeah it’s like a lot of
00:21
these blogs so a college student written
00:23
yeah but they’re often speaking truth oh
00:25
yeah well I would hope I would hope more
00:28
would come out and say hey you can’t say
00:31
you’re Native American just like like
00:33
you imagine the outrage if I just
00:36
started call myself African American
00:37
well do you know what did you see what
00:39
Trump said he said well I can’t call her
00:41
Pocahontas anymore because she’s not an
00:43
Indian and I’m just like oh my god we’re
00:48
not worthy he says some hilarious shit
00:51
oh yeah he really does he really does
00:54
he’s fucking funny off-the-cuff oh yeah
00:57
really is you know and the way he goes
00:59
after people like even though he’s the
01:01
president like he still calls people
01:04
fucking losers I mean he’s still he
01:06
still caused him losers on Twitter and
01:09
goes after them horse face horse face he
01:11
called star McDaniels horse face just
01:14
think of how repulsive he is physically
01:17
he’s fat his faces all fuckin hanging
01:20
off of his bones he’s got white raccoon
01:23
eyes and orange skin and yet he still
01:26
will mock stormy Daniels and call her
01:29
horse face someone tweeted out I forget
01:32
who and I apologized the thing he said
01:34
they go imagine what happens that he
01:36
Trump’s the first person who fucked a
01:38
porn star and she had to brag about it
01:40
and then she paid him yeah yeah well he
01:44
did pay her right but what he paid her
01:48
what she’s gonna have to pay him is
01:50
probably like a factor of three or fours
01:53
I mean how much more she’s gonna wanna
01:55
pain yes for 350k that’s all he asked
01:58
for you uh that’s proved very reasonable
02:01
yeah that doesn’t even cover her book
02:02
yes that’s probably like he just wants
02:04
just be done like that yet it just yet
02:06
give me that paper yeah just give me a
02:07
little something I need a little
02:09
something from you
02:10
with this let this slide I want 300,000
02:14
yeah yeah it’s probably her book that’s
02:16
really all the money no she got more
02:17
than 350 I’m positive
02:19
how much you think she got for that book
02:20
750 I’d guess yeah but she’s got to pay
02:23
taxes sure
02:24
and her agents getting 15 yeah she’s
02:26
probably not even bringing three home so
02:29
it’s all that’s money’s gone oh yeah
02:31
that’s all gone all gone 100% gone and
02:33
no one’s buying that book it stiffed
02:36
yeah yeah nobody gives a shit
02:37
she said it already like I fucked the
02:40
president that’s your book your book as
02:42
I fucked the president well you know
02:43
here’s the funny part with her remember
02:44
this people she was making fun of his
02:46
dick like she’d hit a mushroom deck
02:48
whatever and people are like that’s what
02:50
she said
02:50
and then people were like that you know
02:52
as fucked up as he is that’s body
02:54
shaming he really shouldn’t make fun of
02:55
someone and she’s like you know what
02:56
you’re right I’m sorry
02:57
and then he goes hey horse face she lost
03:01
his fucking mushroom dick at like the
03:02
next day she’s back on it it was amazing
03:05
[Laughter]
The fact that he can call her horse face
and he’s the president on twitter..
But she doesn’t even have a horse face.
It doesn’t matter. I know but it’s just
so weak I mean Ted Cruz really isn’t the
Unabomber or whatever the fuck you said
he was say that that’s the name they
cease is that Jeff gay fucking it’s also
crazy that was the best part so ted
cruz’s was known as like the best
debater in the senate he had this
Harvard or Yale whatever debating team
great debater everyone we recognized him
for this how did the fuck do you prep
for a debate be like oh yeah well your
dad shot JFK it’s like what the fuck
wait what well It didn’t have to make
sense right people the people that hurt
Trump supporters don’t want to make
sense they just want him to win right
right exactly and it works yes yeah well
he’s just had to get zingers in oh yeah
yeah I mean it’s like roast battle more
than right and they don’t get that there
04:01
was this my favorite tweet of his my
04:03
favorite where he goes whenever I speak
04:06
of the losers and the haters I do so
04:08
with great affection it’s not their
04:10
fault they were born fucked up at
04:12
exclamation point that’s a real tweet
04:14
tweet it’s the best one
04:16
and it’s true yeah you know one of my
04:20
favorite things was him at a speech
04:21
where he was talking it was 2015 before
04:25
he even talked about running for
04:26
president or it was even I don’t think
04:29
he was a hundred percent open about
04:31
running for president and he said
04:34
there’s two ways to talk to China you
04:36
could you know could prose things you
04:38
could propose things and he says it like
04:39
you know normally and then he says or
04:41
you could say listen motherfucker yeah
04:44
you heard that no oh my god it’s great
04:46
fucking pull it it’s it’s fucking great
04:49
because everybody starts cheering yeah
04:51
because it’s so forbidden in this
04:53
environment wearing an expensive suit
04:55
standing in front of a podium he says or
04:58
you could say listen motherfuckers like
05:00
this is what we’re gonna do and
05:02
everybody started yeah it’s so exciting
05:05
it’s so much more exciting then Marco
05:08
Rubio or you know someone boom Jeb is a
05:12
waste jam is a big fat mistake I watched
05:19
those videos which speech he wasted June
05:22
of 25th now when he said mother when
05:24
he’s just just not speech when he’s
05:26
talking about China and he said listen I
05:28
the fuckers China China China yeah that
05:32
was a thing Puerto Rican when he ordered
05:36
I’m announcing a ban on all Muslim
05:39
immigration Muslim here this is a great
05:43
one do this because it’s leadership this
05:48
time instead of with his name in gold
05:49
it’s with his words this is discussing
05:52
Iraq we build a school we build a road
05:55
they blow up the road they blow up the
05:57
school we build another school we build
06:00
another road they blow them up we build
06:02
again in the meantime we can’t get a
06:04
school built in Brooklyn do the
06:06
audience’s approval talking oil we have
06:09
nobody in Washington that sits back and
06:12
said you’re not going to raise that
06:14
price you understand me
06:17
this is a long time ago sing Chinese
06:20
goods here’s your mother we’re gonna tax
06:23
you 25% while poles 2011 is that what it
06:28
says over there yeah but here’s what’s
06:30
interesting notice the person who posted
06:31
their name is say no to racists yeah
06:40
they probably put it up as a negative
06:41
thing
06:42
well no 2011 he would have been
06:43
considered a Democrat right oh no he’s
06:46
endorsed Romney he endorsed Romney
06:47
Republican race he was a Democrat until
06:50
what 2010 probably around then because
06:52
he was gonna run independent at some
06:53
point Trump 2012 look at that this is
06:55
the guy we’ve been looking for ha ha ha
06:57
seven years ago but it’s just deplorable
06:59
what changed it they probably damaged it
07:03
in the future because it says seven
07:05
years yeah fuck that’s the time travel
07:09
that hack join read uh yeah someone did
07:12
it someone definitely hacked it yeah
07:15
just hilarious they didn’t give the good
07:17
version of that either because they
07:19
believed in it well not just that
07:21
because you also see if you can find the
07:22
better version because he basically
07:24
practices it like you know people been
07:26
saying it like this right you can say it
07:28
like this or you can say listen you
07:31
motherfuckers and that’s when everybody
07:33
starts cheering he actually gave an
07:34
example yeah he actually guys what can
07:39
you do yeah so easy I drop a twenty five
07:43
percent tax on China
07:47
and you know I said to somebody that is
07:49
really the messenger the messenger is important I could have one man saying way to tax you 25% and I could say another listen you motherfuckers brooder Here’s how the Press lies on the campaign trail he set a point I remember it was
the sense of it goes you better shut
your mouth so he didn’t say the word
mm-hmm they bleeped it and they bleeped it to make it look like he was cursing
and he’s like you guys are fucking shady as hell
that’s very Shady yeah that’s Shady you can’t just bleep a pause and pretend that there’s some sort of an offensive word in there right so that’s really
that’s just deceptive right and it’s pervasive they do it all the fucking time
08:40
well who’s good out there to challenge
08:43
him they’re fucked all right fuck you
08:46
know why they’re fucked why because
08:47
we’ve never had this happen before the
08:49
whole time all those Democrats are
08:51
fighting each other for the primary for
08:52
the nomination he’s gonna be tweeting
08:53
the shit out of those debates he’s gonna
08:55
be live tweeting the debates right and
08:56
they’re not gonna they have to worry
08:58
about the tax from their colleagues but
09:00
also from the sitting president I was
09:02
like look at this dope and he’s gonna
09:05
come up with nicknames right now this
09:07
stick Danang dick he already did I’m
09:09
like it’s amazing to demand dick
09:11
Blumenthal senator from Connecticut lied
09:13
about his Vietnam service oh no I
09:15
started calling him Danang dick he lied
09:17
about his Vietnam service so got elected
09:19
yeah Wow
09:22
shameless yeah how did he lie what did
09:25
he say he said he served and he didn’t
09:27
look it up yeah I mean it’s it’s it is
09:30
brazen it wasn’t some ambiguous area I
09:32
think he’s like he never left America is
09:33
my understanding oh yeah
Preview of Sunday’s episode: James Rickards is a renowned lawyer, economist, and finance expert. Jim is also the author of Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis and five other books.
PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS / APLove your nation. Celebrate its sovereignty. Never buy into the misguided idea that someone else’s country should tell you how to run yours. President Donald Trump’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly last week was an ode to chest-thumping nationalism. But in one specialized field of human endeavor, Trump seems to believe that America is not nearly great enough: sliming political rivals.
As a presidential candidate, now and in 2016, Trump has tried to outsource opposition research to countries whose legal systems are awash in corruption or tainted by political influence.
Three years ago, he looked into a bank of TV cameras and implored Russia, “if you’re listening,” to find Hillary Clinton’s deleted State Department emails. (Russia was listening and, we’ve since learned, hopped right to it, as Robert Mueller’s investigation showed.) Trump now faces an impeachment investigation in the House for pressuring Ukraine to dig up damaging information about the 2020 Democratic front-runner, former Vice President Joe Biden. Heedless of the impeachment machinery whirring on Capitol Hill, he stood outside the White House on Thursday and told reporters that he’d like to see the Chinese investigate the business dealings of Biden’s son Hunter in their country.
In so many other arenas, Trump has denounced and ditched international cooperation. He pulled out of the Iran nuclear agreement and the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership, both of which Barack Obama had negotiated. He’s questioned whether the NATO military alliance is worth the price. “America first” was the slogan that helped Trump win the presidency. But he doesn’t seem to believe it’s the tactic that will help him keep it.
Trump sees foreign-policy priorities as bargaining chips, advancing or discarding them as his needs change. In an example from 2017, he dialed back public criticism of China because he wanted the country’s help ending North Korea’s nuclear program. That summer, his aides had drafted a speech aimed at intellectual-property theft, which they viewed as a bedrock Chinese trade practice. At Trump’s insistence, they eliminated virtually all references to China in hopes of not offending its leadership at a time when he was coaxing them to lean on North Korea.
These sorts of calculations fall within the bounds of traditional statecraft. What happens, though, when Trump tosses domestic politics into the mix? What if China agreed to plow forward with an investigation into the Bidens at Trump’s behest? Could that induce Trump to go softer in U.S.-China trade talks—negotiations that influence the price of consumer goods, the livelihood of American farmers, and employment levels? When a president conflates personal politics with the national interest, we’re left to wonder.
If Trump was worried about possible corruption involving Americans overseas, he could turn to his own country’s investigators for help examining their dealings. There is, of course, a law-enforcement agency with a long tradition of investigatory work here in the sovereign United States: the FBI. It would be an abuse of power for Trump to order the FBI or the Justice Department to fast-track an investigation into any political opponent, but he would be within his rights to pass along what information he may have, Richard Painter, who was the chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, told me.
But Trump doesn’t want the bureau on the case. He’s spent much of his presidency savaging the FBI and the broader U.S. intelligence community, airing baseless accusations that they spied on him during the 2016 election. In an interview with ABC News in June, Trump was dismissive of the notion that it’s wrong for foreign governments to provide dirt on political opponents, and that the right thing for campaigns to do when they’re contacted is to involve the FBI.
“But when somebody comes up with oppo research, right, they come up with oppo research, ‘Oh, let’s call the FBI.’ The FBI doesn’t have enough agents to take care of it,” Trump told the network’s George Stephanopoulos.
Trump conveyed his disdain for the bureau’s leadership—officials he appointed—when Stephanopoulos reminded him that FBI Director Christopher Wray had recently testified to Congress that campaigns should report instances of foreign interference in U.S. elections. “The FBI director is wrong, because frankly it doesn’t happen like that in life,” Trump said. What’s wrong is not only saying, as Trump once did, that you’d accept help from foreign countries in an election, but strong-arming them into tarring a political opponent. After he said he’d like China to probe the Bidens, the Federal Election Commission chairwoman, Ellen Weintraub, retweeted a message she’d sent over the summer that it’s illegal to solicit something of value from a foreign national as part of a U.S. election.
“Is this thing on?” Weintraub wrote, cheekily, using a microphone emoji.
Between the entreaties made to China and Ukraine, it’s clear the blowback from 2016 has not made the president any more cautious, and he continues to blur the lines between his own interests and his duties as head of state. Take the batch of text messages released by House Democrats late Thursday night. Right before a July phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Kurt Volker, a former U.S. special envoy to Ukraine, sent a message to a Zelensky aide. The note suggests that a summit meeting between the two leaders was conditioned on Ukraine’s willingness to investigate a discredited theory that Russia might not have been the ones that pilfered Democratic emails in the 2016 race.
Writing that he had “heard from the White House,” Volker told the aide that if Zelensky would agree in the call to “get to the bottom of what happened in 2016,” the administration would “nail down” a meeting between the presidents.
The texts show Ukraine was reluctant to go along with the scheme, which smacks of a quid pro quo. In one note in July, William Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat there, wrote that Zelensky was “sensitive about Ukraine being taken seriously, not merely as an instrument in Washington domestic, reelection politics.” Yet Ukraine may have decided that defying Trump is too risky. New reports show that Ukraine’s prosecutor general is reviewing how the country handled an investigation into the energy company Burisma Group, on whose board Hunter Biden sat. That inquiry could ostensibly lead to the sort of renewed investigation into the Bidens that Trump wants done.
There’s no obvious parallel to a president so brazenly enlisting foreign countries in schemes to discredit political rivals. As a Republican candidate in the 1968 presidential race, Richard Nixon took steps to sabotage then-President Lyndon Johnson’s efforts to reach a Vietnamese peace deal. Using private surrogates, Nixon delivered a message to South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu that if he delayed, he might get better terms in a Nixon presidency. Nixon’s aim was to deprive the Democrats of a breakthrough in the war that might tip the election in Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s favor. Johnson would later complain that the ploy amounted to “treason,” as the author John Farrell described in his biography of Nixon.
But Nixon was only a candidate at the time, a private citizen. Trump is a sitting president.
“If you want democracy, hold onto your sovereignty,” he said in his U.N. speech. In the months leading up to that address, we now know, he was compromising U.S. sovereignty and weakening its democracy, all to extinguish the chances of a campaign opponent. In the week after the speech, nothing’s changed.
Chinese negotiators emboldened by perception U.S. was willing to compromise
The hardened battle lines were prompted by Beijing’s decision to take a more aggressive stance in negotiations, according to the people following the talks. They said Beijing was emboldened by the perception that the U.S. was ready to compromise.
In particular, these people said, Mr. Trump’s hectoring of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to cut interest rates was seen in Beijing as evidence that the president thought the U.S. economy was more fragile than he claimed.
Beijing was further encouraged by Mr. Trump’s frequent claim of friendship with Chinese President Xi Jinping and by Mr. Trump’s praise for Chinese Vice Premier Liu He for pledging to buy more U.S. soybeans.
An April 30 tweet, in which Mr. Trump coupled criticism of Mr. Powell with praise of Chinese economic policy, especially caught the eye of senior officials. “China is adding great stimulus to its economy while at the same time keeping interest rates low,” Mr. Trump tweeted. “Our Federal Reserve has incessantly lifted interest rates.”
“Why would you be constantly asking the Fed to lower rates if your economy is not turning weak,” said Mei Xinyu, an analyst at a think tank affiliated with China’s Commerce Ministry. If the U.S.’s resolve was weakening, the thinking in Beijing went, the U.S. would be more willing to cut a deal, even if Beijing hardened its positions.
That assessment, however, flies in the face of a strong U.S. economy. Gross domestic product in the first quarter rebounded from the end of 2018, with growth clocking in at a seasonally adjusted annualized rate of 3.2%, up from 2.2% the prior quarter. The jobs report for April, released on Friday, showed the unemployment rate falling to 3.6%, the lowest in nearly 50 years.
But at the same time, China’s economy has stabilized this year following months of weakness. Although China’s exports dropped unexpectedly in April, its first-quarter growth came in at 6.4%, beating market expectations. The generally improving economic picture gave Beijing more confidence in trade talks, as did a recent conference on the country’s vast infrastructure-spending program, called the Belt and Road Initiative, which was attended by about 40 heads of government and state.
Chinese leaders saw the conference turnout “as China has more leverage to improve relations with other countries and with the U.S. business community,” said Brookings Institution China specialist Cheng Li. “It made them play hardball.”
If China misread the signals—and vice versa—it wouldn’t be the first time.
The history of U.S.-China trade negotiations is filled with misunderstandings, as the two nations, with very different political systems, struggle to figure out each other’s intentions.
.. In another apparent sign of mixed signals, Trump administration officials had thought they had made it clear that they were weary of negotiations and that it was time for Beijing to make specific commitments to change laws, including adding protections for intellectual property and barring the forced transfer of U.S. technology.
As talks resume Thursday, one big question mark is whether China will agree to U.S. demands for changes in Chinese law to implement the trade deal. Beijing maintains this would impinge on Chinese sovereignty and take too long to implement, but Beijing had made similar commitments in prior trade deals, including those it signed to join the WTO in 2001.
U.S. officials say Beijing has failed to make good on those commitments, while China has promised to further liberalize its economy.
“The U.S. is correct to seek a multiprong approach of not relying solely on commitments but also actually changes to the laws, so as to ensure Chinese leadership intentions are fully conveyed down to all local levels of government,” said Harvard Law Professor Mark Wu.
