This is true, but that was before Trump made it clear how corrupt he really is.
Before the election, I had several problems that would keep me from voting for him, but I also had some consideration that he might do some positive things (and he has done some, but not as many as I hoped).
Trump promised that if he won he would present his tax returns (as every previous president did before the election).
To me, that was acceptable - it meant he might have some activity that he did not really want to be made public, but his willingness to make his returns public after the election (if he won) was fair reassurance that he was not doing anything overtly illegal. I know white collar crime pays much better than blue collar crime and a good lawyer keeps activities in grey areas of the law where the legal system has a hard time getting good traction (even if the morality of the activities is obviously wrong).
However, after he won, he defined his promise to make his returns public as pointless, because if the people voted him in without seeing his taxes, they must not care what his tax returns say.
HighFigh, I respect you. Over the years, I have recognized you as intelligent, caring, and a man of integrity (maybe I am reading too much between the lines, but I feel pretty certain of my assessment).
However, I am very much miffed that you would let Trump decide for you that it was okay for him to break his conditional promise to release his tax records if elected. That is, in my book, a very dishonorable thing to do and raises a ton of questions about why he decided he would rather go back on his word than reveal his taxes.
Is it that easy? Does he hold enough sway that you agree his win means you don't feel his commitment to reveal his taxes has any relevance?
I have to assume that you would not argue his character at this point, we have seen him tell so many lies that he modifies again and again as facts come out to refute his statements. We have seen him destroy Mark Sanford's political career because Sanford publicly disagreed with him (essentially, Trump gave his seat to the democrats this past election). Republicans are keeping their mouth shut to avoid Trump's attacks. Is that a good model for functioning government? The Congressmen are letting it happen, but the cost of disagreement is pretty high! To me, it seems like we are getting amazingly close to a dictatorship in our democracy.
How do you perceive these thing such that you view them as acceptable? You are far from the only one, but I have a hard time understanding whether you believe it, or why it is not a serious concern!
Is it that you are aware of his "negatives" but feel the positive he is doing is great enough to live with the negatives?
Or do you believe he is a man of upstanding character and integrity?
Or what?
I think he could get more done if the press would stop making up the news, reports would be complete and people would read the whole story and not just the headlines (like the girl who died in US custody, but was denied food and water by her father for days before reaching the border). It would also help if the members of Congress would sit back, shut up and think about what their job is. Schumer is particularly annoying, since he has been saying things that directly contradict what he said in the past and many videos are available showing him talking about these issues in the past.
Our government hasn't been 'functional' for a long time but with people like Schumer, Pelosi, Waters, Ocasio-Cortez and others like them, we're headed in a bad direction.
I know it will be seen as a 'whataboutism', but others have blocked their personal info before, he's just the last one to do it and no, I have posted many times that if someone wants to be POTUS, they need to bare their soul (if they actually have one). He has a lot of negatives, but that doesn't make him unique, in any way. His are just different from those of others in government. He does, however, come from a different angle and that makes the typical political crowd extremely uncomfortable, to say the least. They don't know how to deal with him, so they're trying to block everything he does and a lot of what he's doing should have been done before, by the people who are trying to block him.
A lot of what people dislike most about him is how he speaks- he sounds like a kid on a New Jersey playground and his tweets are making peoples' hair explode, but does it seem likely that he's sitting there, typing with his thumbs, or speaking into the phone? He's busy- he doesn't have time to fumble and if he reads his tweets, spelling is of less concern than what he's saying. I know a helluva lot of people who couldn't win a 2nd Grade spelling bee, but are engineers, architects, doctors, lawyers and executives- either they can't see errors, they think spell check will catch everything, they have others to correct it or they don't care. That's not the issue, but too many people make it one.
As much as I dislike him as a person, I dislike the Clintons more. Bill has a lot of charisma that get him into some sticky situations but one difference between the two- Clinton did it while he was in office and THAT, IMO should have resulted in harsher consequences. Hell, it didn't even matter to the people who re-elected him. He had a much more cooperative Congress, too. Trump is an outsider, so the Democrats and many moderate Republicans won't work with him.
We can debate this until the end of time but the sad fact is, the majority of American voters know nothing about how government works, how it COULD work and where the country is going. Too many see helping others as Socialism, when it's just people being humane but when they get all lathered up over what they see in the media, rational thinking goes out the window. Some aspects of Socialism are OK, but the fact remains, no purely Socialist government has lasted very long because those at the top will always want more for themselves, which pisses off the rest. Communism doesn't work, if there's ANY desire for people to have some small amount of ambition. In Wisconsin, we have had school vouchers for a short time and they're working well to get kids out of the inner city schools and into a situation where they can learn. Inner city parents jumped at the chance and before that, they would scrape their money together and get any aid that was available, so they could send their kids to parochial or private schools. This started in Sweden and they found that it works. The rationale was that it costs a certain amount to send each kid to school, so why not let parents decide where they go? Makes sense and it's one of the reasons people would choose a neighborhood but then, government decided they couldn't make that choice. Unfortunately, the kids whose parents couldn't afford to get out were stuck in the city schools but that's EXACTLY where the cities should have stepped up and made a difference- THEY had the choice to make schools a place where kids go to learn, to interest them in the way out of poverty and where it could be safe. Here, they have failed miserably. In Chicago, there's Urban Prep Academy that has 100% Black students, 100% graduation and the kids wear uniforms. They college acceptance may actually be >100%, many kids having been accepted to more than one school. I watched a show about them and some kids were offered over $45K/year in scholarships. My point- it's possible, but there's too much bureaucracy.
I have said, for a long time, "The ones we get aren't the ones we need and the ones we need aren't the ones we get".
