If you’ve been lurking you’ll know why a random new poster linking RW media out of the blue has a received an unwelcoming response.
Then just read the post’s piece. The facts are not really in dispute. It also shows that a single delegate proposed an amendment to the platform that would have escalated significantly from Obama’s ukraine policy, which Trump people rejected.
I think you’re assuming that saying that Obama’s policy was the same would appeal to many of us, when really there are lots of people who disagreed with it.
No I am not assuming that at all and I do not have any real opinion on the issue. I am saying that if you read the post’s story, it says one single delegate tried to make the platform much tougher on Ukraine by supplying lethal weapons. That would potentially escalate the conflict because Obama was not doing that at the time, and opposed doing it. And trump had publicly called for better relations with Russia.
Unfortunately the false narrative because of the terrible headline from the post’s piece is that Trump changed the platform himself. When really they rejected a amendment to the existing platform from one delegate.
6 posts in an hour. Yeah, we’ve seen this before…
Well, no. According to your own source, an amendment was actually adopted, just one with weaker language than the one that was proposed. That weaker language was provided by the Trump team, because they opposed the commitment to stronger action against Russian intervention in Ukraine.
Now, you’re quibbling with the headline takeaway, but your own takeaway is wrong. And for some reason, you think Trump prevented tough Republican platform stance on Ukraine is substantially different than Trump weakens Republican platform stance on Ukraine. I can’t really see why, but you go, you.
Whoa. Hold on there, sparky.
This is what’s being discussed, including the claims in Byron York’s editorial for the Examiner:
- The original draft Ukraine plank, according to the Examiner. “had strong language on Russia, and in particular on Russian aggression in Ukraine.” How do we know this? Well, err, the original draft plank, according to the Examiner editorial, “has never been released publicly, but an insider shared the relevant passages with me.” So our only knowledge of the original draft plank is secondhand evidence, probably from Team Trump. In an editorial. In the Washington Examiner. By Byron York. Consider the source.
- At the convention, delegate Diana Denman proposes a stronger plank, one that contains specific mention of supplying weapons to Ukraine, as well as a preamble supporting Ukraine (which York dismisses as “throat-clearing.”)
- Trump aide Trump aide J.D. Gordon, on behalf of the Trump campaign, gets the preamble and the language about weapons taken out (instead the final plank promises “appropriate” aid - which of course could mean no aid at all, if you don’t believe it’s appropriate.)
- Denman says Gordon told her he had talked to Trump personally about the changes to the plank, (and apparently said the same to Congress last year.) Gordon, on the other hand, says he didn’t talk to Trump personally - but that he implemented the change because:
“Trump said on the campaign trail that he didn’t want World War III over Ukraine. And he wanted better relations with Russia,” Gordon said. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that arming Ukraine isn’t consistent with those two positions.”
So: there’s no dispute about points 2 and 3. In point 4 there’s no agreement about whether Trump knew personally about the specifics of Denman’s language - but there’s also no dispute that the Trump campaign “wanted better relations with Russia.*” Point 1 - Byron York’s assertion that the original draft plank was plenty tough on Russia to start with - is unknowable without an actual reliable source for that draft plank.
But here’s what’s undeniable: the Trump campaign’s only change to the 2016 Republican platform was to request softer language in the Ukraine plank. And in the words of the Trump representative responsible for the change, it’s because Trump “wanted better relations with Russia.”
(… though I did screw up by saying the plank was about Crimea, not Ukraine!)
*Even if Gordon didn’t talk to Trump at the convention, it may not matter. As a hypothetical, suppose Trump did have a quid pro quo with Russia over the platform. Then it doesn’t matter much from a legal standpoint whether Trump or his reps told Gordon to keep the language within certain parameters in advance of the convention, or while it was going on.
I am not saying you are wrong to think this should not be investigated further. The FISA application into carter page literally copied and pasted from the Washington post piece. I felt your post suggested something that did not happen (it conjured images of trump demanding a radical change to a platform when he/his people demanded a change to an amendment to the platform from one delegate) and think your most recent post clears it all up.
And When you initially asserted that Trump had “demanded” the Ukraine plank be softened, you said it was a “smoking gun.” And it seems like you are acknowledging now you are not totally sure what the original plank was. He demanded an amendment to the plank by a single delegate be softened because it was a escalation that Obama had not done yet, and it contradicted his Russia reset policies.
PS- I Think the difference in "Trump guts platform’ and “Trump kills an amendment” is big because one means that trump went out of his way to kill the platform. When what really happened is he killed an amendment that one delegate went out of her way to propose.
I have that deja vu feeling again.
Not sure why you guys are letting this guy drag you into a pedantic argument about one of an infinite set of examples of trump sucking putin’s dick.
I mean, hell, Trump sucked his dick on stage in front of the entire world. Everyone knows Putin owns Trump.
Hey everybody! Gman is back!
Don’t engage with that fucking trash.
He has been rhetorically easy on Putin but hard policy-wise. It is a contradiction. Arming Ukraine, opposing pipeline in germany, pulling out of nuke accord, new sanctions, etc. While also verbally equivocating on his involvement in acts of individual aggression.
Are you entirely sure you know to whom you’re speaking?
I think you’re flailing a bit here. I never said ‘Trump guts platform’. It was a platform drafting committee, which means they were drafting a platform, which means there was no platform to gut. An amendment to the draft was offered which was tougher on Russia, and Trump killed that amendment and replaced it with one that was softer on Russia. The result was a weaker on Russia draft that became a weaker on Russia platform. Isn’t that what your own source says?
The guy is obviously a Whig. Doesn’t he know his party died 150 years ago? :}
Sorry responded to wrong person. Yeah again the facts we all agree on except one. The Washington post piece said the platform gutted the GOP stance on Russia, but it did not explain or cite a source for its claim that trump’s reaction was at odds with most republicans in D.C. I assume that is why it was an opinion piece and not a news article. But that’s a big claim. Trump’s decision to not give lethal arms to Ukraine was just a continuation of US policy. It may also have been a continuation of the platform as it was! And sources indicate it was just that. When you mischaracterize that, it looks a lot worse than it was. It looks like a ‘smoking gun.’
No, we do not yet seem to agree on the facts. Did Trump or did he not kill a tougher amendment and replace it with a weaker one? If so, why can’t he be said to have weakened the final platform position?
Because he kept some of her language from the amendment, and the amendment was never part of the platform. A vote to add it failed.
Note your own logic is kind of faulty. How can you ‘amend’ something being drafted if there’s no platform and it’s just a drafting committee with nothing to go on? What happens is the party comes into the convention with a platform that needs to be approved/modified. The modification failed here. It was never part of the platform draft to arm Ukraine with lethal weapons as far as anyone knows. No source says it was part of the platform going in, and York cited sources saying it was not in there.
Platform seemingly got tougher on Russia compared to how it began the convention. But yeah the final platform was weaker than it would have been if amendment was added.
I love that the “smoking gun” that Trump is a secret Russian agent, distilled, is really just that Trump was publicly opposed to escalating tensions with Russia and wanted to maintain Obama’s policy with Ukraine. (And he ended up arming Ukraine anyways).
You are full of shit. This isn’t remotely true.
Stop lying.
Yep, there’s no shortage of examples. Which is why the Trump brigades are now changing their arguments from “There’s no evidence Trump sucks Putin’s dick” to “That so-called evidence of dick-sucking you keep citing was conclusively proven false months ago. You just haven’t caught up. What you think you saw doesn’t mean what you think it means!”
It’s worth calling out this pivot, since it aims to give the impression that there are new important facts that call Trump’s Putin-worship into question when instead it’s just based on vague claims made by shadowy unnamed sources in Washington Examiner editorials.
… sadly, records of the Before Times were lost during The Great Upheaval. So now it’s impossible for us to know how other Republican candidates and congressional leaders felt about arming the Ukraine before Trump.
Oh wait, it actually takes like two minutes on Google. Pre-eminent 2015 Republicans in favor of supplying the Ukraine with lethal aid: Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Lindsay Graham, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, John Kaisich, Bobby Jindal, and Carly Fiorina (and also John McCain, but he’s not mentioned in the article because he wasn’t running.)
Against: Trump, Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee.
Unclear: Chris Christie, George Pataki. (And Ben Carson is listed as “confused.”)
So that’s why the Post editorial didn’t spend a bunch of time explaining why Denman put forth the amendments, or why other Republicans at the convention were annoyed when Trump’s team shot them down. It was already known that support for arming the Ukraine was the position of most GOP candidates in 2016, and that Trump and Paul were the odd men out.
A continuation of Obama’s policy. (And specifically Obama’s - Hillary was calling for more military aid in 2015, per the linked article.)
If any more evidence were needed to show Trump’s soft spot for Putin, it would be that the one and only policy of Obama’s that Obama-loathing Trump didn’t initially try to wipe out was one going easy on Russia.
(Eventually in 2017 Congress forced Trump to sign on to lethal aid to the Ukraine. By then, of course, all of this had been laid bare and everyone was carefully scruitinizing both Trump and Congress for signs of going easy on Putin.)