Our reading for this Sunday afternoon is this tweet.
I strongly pressed President Putin twice about Russian meddling in our election. He vehemently denied it. I’ve already given my opinion…..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2017
This confirmed something I suspected when I was reading through the transcript of Mnuchin and McMaster answering questions about the meeting yesterday evening. Read More
When I wrote the post below, trying to make sense of what happened in the Trump-Putin meeting, I didn’t have the transcript of the gaggle with McMaster, Cohn and Mnuchin. What I was going on were press accounts that they declined to address Lavrov’s and Putin’s comments. So I knew in general they declined but I didn’t have the details. The White House just released the transcript and I am publishing (after the jump) the portion on the meeting. Read More
Just what did President Trump say to Vladimir Putin about Russian interference in the 2016 President election? It is a fascinating question as an evidentiary matter, quite apart from the substantive question, since the four witnesses to the conversation are each either congenital liars or have situational incentives to deceive us regarding what happened. So how do we make sense of it? I have a post I’ll be sharing with you soon about critical textual analysis of the Hebrew Bible, the Christian New Testament, the Q’uran and the canonical writings which form the basis of the orthodox history of early Islam. I confess it may seem like a stretch. But this reminds me a bit of that subject since here we have multiple accounts, each of which merit high degrees of skepticism. We must look at each of them not so much to ascertain the truth of what actually happened – that’s likely impossible – but sketch out the range of plausible possibilities.
With that, let’s do this. Read More
I gave a talk yesterday in DC and in the Q&A I got a question about the outcome of the 2016 election which I ended up answering with what I’ve come to see as my general theory of what happened on November 8th. It’s not a complex or terribly surprising theory. It’s fairly simple. But since it is now implicit in a lot of the things I write I thought I would lay it out here for general purposes. Read More
Ivanka takes her father’s seat at meeting of heads of state and government at the G20 summit when Trump takes a break.
From a cross-country road road trip with his wife, the Democratic elder unleashes a tweet barrage for the ages against Donald Trump: “Dude, get your head in the game.”
NEW: First greeting between Trump & Putin at G20 – handshake & pat on the back, via German govt. pic.twitter.com/C5H14eYvYj
— Peter Alexander (@PeterAlexander) July 7, 2017
Sorry for the relative dearth of posts in recent days. I’ve been traveling and semi-off the grid with the holiday and other miscellaneous projects and tasks. I spent most of the day traveling and in meetings. But between them I have been looking into the feverish dialog and jousting in the President’s war against CNN. Read More
I want to share a thought about the on-going CNN/Reddit controversy, the question – reasonably – whether CNN should have maintained the privacy of the racist, violence-inciting Reddit user who had his anti-CNN gif picked up by President Trump. I don’t take seriously the idea that CNN ‘blackmailed’ this guy, a middle-aged man who as yet remains unidentified. But in any case I’d like suggest that newsworthiness rather than privacy is the proper prism through which to look at the question. Read More