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[Trekkin]

I haven't seen anyone mention the Dinesh D'Souza pardon yet, so here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/us/politics/dsouza-pardon.html

It would seem Trump is increasingly worried about Cohen flipping.

[smjjames]

The pardons only work for federal level indictments, not state level indictments. So, pardoning Cohen won't actually change anything. It could actually backfire in that Cohen can't plead the fifth and would have to testify if subopenated as mentioned here. Ditto if they commit perjury since that's a new charge and does not count under the pardon. Trump could do a new pardon, but that'd be a blatantly obvious abuse of power.

[martinuzz]

So erm, yeah.  Fuck.
Trump went ahead and there are now tariffs on steel for the EU.
One more point scored for Putin.
Any of you working in a US industry that relies on EU quality steel, best start looking for another job, your employer is about to bankrupt.

[Doomblade187]

I don't want our fellow USigans to feel the brunt of these tariffs, but at the same time, this is some serious bs on Trump's part. Apparently the NAFTA negotiations "weren't professing quickly enough".

[smjjames]

I don't want our fellow USigans to feel the brunt of these tariffs, but at the same time, this is some serious bs on Trump's part. Apparently the NAFTA negotiations "weren't professing quickly enough".

If he really said that and it's his actual reasoning, then he is clearly trying to use the 'blunt object leverage' method and seems to be convinced that it's a viable negotiation tactic given how he got concessions out of others while using it.

For all his claims of being a master negotiator, he seems to only know one form of negotiation and the rest of the world is trying to tell him to calm down and put the stick (of tariffs) down.

[PTTG??]

Rosanne did not make one mistake and get discarded -- this has been coming a long, long time, and she's been given a lot of warnings.

And as for Trump and the USA, I used to care. I used to want to minimize the effect Trump would have on the US. But the majority of states wanted him, so you know what, they can live with him.

Majority of states perhaps, but majority of voters? no.

Hey, maybe we'll get rid of that ridiculous compromise with slaveholders that got us here, too.

[Trekkin]

For all his claims of being a master negotiator, he seems to only know one form of negotiation and the rest of the world is trying to tell him to calm down and put the stick (of tariffs) down.

Well, it's worked for him throughout his career; Daddy gave him enough money that he could always afford to let any one deal fall through, and he's parlayed that into a "negotiating" tactic, encouraged by Roy Cohn, that depends on being able to ruin the other guy and walk away if he doesn't get everything he wants. It's like a mugger boasting of how they've successfully made a deal with everyone they've ever held at gunpoint.

You might think this isn't sustainable over the long term, and you'd be right; Trump's consistently underperformed relative to the market, and he was even worse prior to Ivanka coming up with the present scheme whereby he's paid to put his name on other people's buildings while being utterly uninvolved with the actual business. It's also why the Trump brand is persistently marketed to the public at large; the steaks and wine and water and "university" are all attempts to cash in on the only people who hadn't seen through his con by the mid-90s.

[nenjin]

Rosanne did not make one mistake and get discarded -- this has been coming a long, long time, and she's been given a lot of warnings.

And as for Trump and the USA, I used to care. I used to want to minimize the effect Trump would have on the US. But the majority of states wanted him, so you know what, they can live with him.

Majority of states perhaps, but majority of voters? no.

Hey, maybe we'll get rid of that ridiculous compromise with slaveholders that got us here, too.

It was a terrible deal for business owners. TERRIBLE.

[smjjames]

BTW, this is a bit over a week before the G7 summit in Toronto, so, he's going to have to explain his actions since the whole excuse of 'national security' is blatantly BS.

I can see it giving Kim Jong-Un pause since if Trump treats allies and friends that way and Kim wants to be a future friend....

[Trekkin]

Kim wants to be a future friend....

I don't think he does. Recall he was nobody's first choice to run the DPRK, and the death spiral he inherited shows no signs of ending gently even though it's nuclear-powered now.

At a guess, what Kim Jong Un wants most right now is a way out that doesn't end in him dead a la Gaddafi at the hands of his own generals, living in austere exile, or trapped in the rubble of an imploded DPRK being carved up by South Korea and China. We've fairly well pissed away our ability to credibly offer him that.

[smjjames]

Well, Kim would definetly like it if things weren't as hostile as they are now. Point is that if Trump does that to allies, who's to say that Trump won't do it to Kim?

As for austere exile, I'm sure Xi would give him the most pleasant exile they could give him as long as he doesn't do anything that'd piss off Xi. However, exile would be a last choice out of desperation for Kim.

Trump keeps saying that we'd provide him security, but, outside of the summit (where he'd be the safest person in the world next to Trump because Secret Service), that'd be impossible because he knows that if he escapes to anybody other than China, Russia, and maybe Singapore, he'd get turned over to the ICC and theres nothing we can do about whatever factions he has to deal with at home.

As for internal factions, there was a rumor that he was concerned about a coup if he left, but that's kind of BS since if it really were that unstable, he wouldn't be able to give Xi a visit or even entertain the idea of a summit.

[Reelya]

he'd get turned over to the ICC

No, he wouldn't. Because there are no charges pending against him in the ICC that I know of. Threatening America isn't a crime. Testing nukes and rockets isn't a crime either. It just makes other people shit their pants. It's all perfectly legal until you actually start dropping weapons on each other, and even then, it's probably not illegal, because other countries do it.

Also, you might not realize this but the USA refuses to ratify the ICC, and in the past USA has also refused to recognize International Court of Justice decisions that went against it, using the USA's Security Council Veto to block the legal decisions. So, yeah, America can't even bring up ICC charges against Kim if they wanted to, because to do so, you'd have to ratify the treaty first, and your government really doesn't want to do that. e.g. Kim could nuke Washington and you probably still couldn't have him charged by the ICC for that, since you're not a member state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_the_International_Criminal_Court
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua_v._United_States

[smjjames]

I was thinking of the 'crimes against humanity' bit, what with the brutal regieme.

[Reelya]

"brutal regime" describes tons of places however. You need to quantify what the charges are and why NK specifically would come under them, that we wouldn't also apply to other places in general. I'm sure you can, but it needs to be specific and within the ICC's legal framework.

e.g. 120,000 people in North Korean labor camps seems like it must be a lot, because North Korea is small, but it's still far less than the total US prison population, on a per-capita basis. NK has about 0.5% of its citizens locked up, and USA has almost 1% of citizens locked up. So you're locking up Americans about twice as fast as NK locks up their own people.

However, if you look at just black people, they make up 34% of the US prison population and only 12.1% of the total population. They're a total of around 3 times more likely than "average" to be locked up. This makes a black American about 6 times more likely to be locked up than a North Korean. This is in possible breach of the "crimes against humanity" law of the ICC:

- "systematic attack directed against any civilian population"
including
- "Persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender"
-  Imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law
- Enslavement

https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2018/country-chapters/united-states

Other longstanding US laws and practices—particularly related to criminal and juvenile justice, immigration, and national security—continued to violate internationally recognized human rights.

So ... good reasons why you guys don't actually sign up to the ICC, but also good reasons why you should harass your government to do so.

[Starver]

Trump's been boiling off intensely on Twitter for a few days now with both spammy voice-of-an-adult announcements and the usual muckspreading stuff that seems less likely to have been written by his staff (while, it is noted, reclusive "Melanie" has posted only in Trump-typical language to claim that she's happy!).

If it aint Nixonian "If I look crazy, they'll listen to my 'sane' representatives with keener interest" then it's gaslighting and FUD and possibly even actual borderline mental breakdown on the horizon.

The tarrifs thing I would have said was just pretending to not care to get nervous people to accept a more Trump-sided deal quicker, but right now I'm inclined to think that it's not so much "crazy-looking to do diplomacy" but "diplomacy gone all crazy". Time may tell!