Information from Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, provides further insight into Trump and cast further doubt on the conspiracy theories being spread by Democrats that Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election due to a conspiracy involving Donald Trump and Russia. An excerpt appearing in New York Magazine shows, as many suspected while he was running, that Donald Trump neither thought he could win nor wanted to win the 2016 presidential election:
Most presidential candidates spend their entire careers, if not their lives from adolescence, preparing for the role. They rise up the ladder of elected offices, perfect a public face, and prepare themselves to win and to govern. The Trump calculation, quite a conscious one, was different. The candidate and his top lieutenants believed they could get all the benefits of almost becoming president without having to change their behavior or their worldview one whit. Almost everybody on the Trump team, in fact, came with the kind of messy conflicts bound to bite a president once he was in office. Michael Flynn, the retired general who served as Trump’s opening act at campaign rallies, had been told by his friends that it had not been a good idea to take $45,000 from the Russians for a speech. “Well, it would only be a problem if we won,” Flynn assured them.
Not only did Trump disregard the potential conflicts of his own business deals and real-estate holdings, he audaciously refused to release his tax returns. Why should he? Once he lost, Trump would be both insanely famous and a martyr to Crooked Hillary. His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared would be international celebrities. Steve Bannon would become the de facto head of the tea-party movement. Kellyanne Conway would be a cable-news star. Melania Trump, who had been assured by her husband that he wouldn’t become president, could return to inconspicuously lunching. Losing would work out for everybody. Losing was winning.
Shortly after 8 p.m. on Election Night, when the unexpected trend — Trump might actually win — seemed confirmed, Don Jr. told a friend that his father, or DJT, as he calls him, looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania was in tears—and not of joy.
It looks even worse for Hillary Clinton to have lost to a candidate who didn’t even want to win. Part of Clinton’s problem is that she wanted too much to be president, and for the wrong reasons, using her political career for personal financial gain, not even caring about how this looked–as Matt Taibbi discussed in this excerpt from his book on the election.
In theory, having a president who did not want to be president might sound like a good thing in contrast to the corruption of Bill and Hillary Clinton, but in this case Donald Trump was not the right answer. Like the Clintons, Trump’s motives were based upon personal greed. Unlike the Clintons, Trump lacked even rudimentary understanding of the position, and has showed no desire to learn. One consequence was yesterday’s tweet in which, rather than try to diffuse hostilities with North Korea as any rational political leader would, he bragged about the size of his nuclear button.
There is already considerable reason to doubt the conspiracy theory started by Hillary Clinton that collusion between Donald Trump and Russia were responsible for her loss. Such a conspiracy between Trump and Putin appears even less likely if Trump was not interested in being president. Wolff’s book also revealed that Putin had no interest in meeting Trump when he came to Russia, quoting Steve Bannon as saying that,”Putin couldn’t give a shit about him.” That hardly makes Trump and Putin sound like the co-conspirators which the Democrats make them out to be.
More significant information came from Steve Bannon’s interview on the Trump Tower meeting, in which Russians teased Donald, Jr with claims of information on Clinton, but actually had nothing to deliver. While not of any significance in terms of altering the election result, it does show the lack of principles of Donald, Jr, with Bannon calling this “treasonous” and “unpatriotic.”
I have noted that, while there is no evidence available that Donald Trump knew of the meeting, it is hard to believe he did not know about it. Bannon’s comments on the meeting further confirm this suspicion.
I have also been writing since the start of this scandal that the real crimes appear to involve financial crimes such as money laundering, followed by Trump’s cover-up of contacts with Russia, as opposed to anything related to altering the election result. Bannon further confirmed that this scandal is really about money laundering:
Bannon, speaking to author Michael Wolff, warned that the investigation into alleged collusion with the Kremlin will focus on money laundering and predicted: “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV.”
This view that the investigation will focus on money laundering is consistent with the first indictment from Robert Mueller.
There was another interesting admission from Bannon:
Bannon went on, Wolff writes, to say that if any such meeting had to take place, it should have been set up “in a Holiday Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire, with your lawyers who meet with these people”. Any information, he said, could then be “dump[ed] … down to Breitbart or something like that, or maybe some other more legitimate publication”.
Bannon added: “You never see it, you never know it, because you don’t need to … But that’s the brain trust that they had.”
So we see that Steve Bannon realizes that Breitbart is not a “legitimate publication.”
Other revelations from the book include that Ivanka wanted to ultimately become the first woman president instead of Hillary Clinton.
Donald Trump responded to the quotes from Steve Bannon by saying that Bannon has “lost his mind.”
Related Posts:
The Nation Debunks Russiagate Conspiracy “Fantasyland” And Irresponsible Media Coverage
Update:
Vox Provides Further Evidence That The Actual Trump/Russia Scandal Is About Money Laundering
Update II:
Ha! Maybe years from now we will find that Trump secretly funded a movement to get himself impeached. All joking aside, I know personally how it felt once to be in a job where there would have been a financial windfall had I been "fired" rather than voluntarily leave it. It did not make me want to do anything wrong, but it did make me pretty bold in taking risks that I thought were right. If Trump still doesn't want the job, or would rather lose it, that could explain why he is so fearless in saying things on twitter and elsewhere. Unless he leaves office for health reasons or something else, I believe we will know if he really wanted the job by whether he tries to run for re-election or not. I will also caveat my last statement by discounting anything he might say currently about his intentions to run or not to run. Given his propensity to say things only for effect, with no compunction or concern for a statement's accuracy, I don't believe we will know until he actually does, or does not run for re-election.
I know you and your fanboys will go to your deathbed of no Russia but the evidence say otherwise
https://twitter.com/nytopinion/status/948358263590047744
Once again your link verifies my view without you understanding it. The only actual evidence mentioned is of crimes such as laundering as I have repeatedly pointed out. There is no evidence contradicting what I have written.
Of course you will go to your deathbed believing the conspiracy theories spread by Democratic partisans (just as Republican partisans will go to their deathbed believing their claims). I will continue to post based upon the facts and evidence, regardless of whether it serves the narrative of one political party.