Why do you like Donald Trump and what do you dislike about him.

[BootmanLA]

19 hours ago, dirtyarizona said:

Make America Great Again!  What the hell is wrong with that statement?  What is wrong with being a patriot?  What is wrong with loving the country that gives you every opportunity to excel & to succeed? 

Nothing's wrong with the statement. I look forward to the day when a Republican actually proposes something that would in fact accomplish that goal and not enrich our Grifter-in-Chief.

Nothing's wrong with being a patriot, either. I look forward to the day when it's a term that can accurately be used to describe Republicans.

Nothing's wrong with wanting America to succeed. Some of us just don't believe you show love for country by blowing a multi-trillion dollar hole in the budget to give ginormous tax breaks to the 0.01% top wealthiest people in the country so they can buy a seventh vacation home. Some of us don't believe you show love for country by deliberately expanding our poisoning of the environment. Some of us don't believe you show love for country by setting out to cripple the United States Postal Service deliberately, in order to ensure voting by mail this fall is screwed up beyond repair. Some of us don't believe you show love for country by steering millions of taxpayer dollars to the private companies owned by the president. 

In other words, we want the same things you claim to. We just know you'll never be able to produce them with Hair Furor in office.

[FillMyRear]

I dont really like him but he's not pushing for marxist/socialist/communist ideas and policies like his opposition is, want to see where those 3 things lead look at the shit hole Venezuela is now, or the big blue cities in the US that are being vacated.

[Guest cumlvrpig]

On 7/16/2020 at 10:35 PM, dirtyarizona said:

Trolling the "progressives" is so much fun; they have No Sense Of Humor whatsoever....... & they're all, invariably, DEFENSIVE.  Being "defensive" is always a losing strategy, but none of them ever had any training in DEBATE, so that's not surprising!  The Left is collapsing so fast it's almost like they've stepped into the quicksand they created!

It's fun watching them losing their minds when replying to the Sean Spicier account on Twitter.

[FillMyRear]

Have you not seen it go watch.

[think before following links] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQPsKvG6WMI

Edited August 26, 2020 by FillMyRear

[BootmanLA]

9 hours ago, FillMyRear said:

Have you not seen it go watch.

I assume you posted this because you think "marxist/socialist/communist ideas" have permeated the left and this is supposed to be a warning about leftism. You have it exactly wrong. Completely and entirely wrong.

It would be an outstandingly funny example of the pot calling the kettle black, if the topic weren't so serious. Bezmenov was warning about Soviet infiltration of American ideas, and the biggest example of that is Donald Trump. Russian (that is, the successor to Sovietism, headed by an autocrat who was right at home in the old Soviet system) interference stoking division in America on behalf of Donald Trump has been well documented - not just by our intelligence agencies, not just by the special counsel, but even by the REPUBLICAN-CONTROLLED Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Bezmenov's real message wasn't about capitalism vs. Marxism, or capitalism vs. socialism, or capitalism vs. anything else. It was about Soviet disinformation campaigns - convincing people to believe things that were not true, such that even factual information would fail to penetrate the "shell" people built up around their beliefs. He used the term "demoralization" - convince enough people that they couldn't trust authoritative sources like the media any more, and then they were ripe for manipulation. "As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell him nothing, even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents and pictures. ...he will refuse to believe it... That's the tragedy of the situation of demoralization." - that was Bezemov in 1983.

Fast forward to 2015-16, and what do we have? A sophisticated demoralization campaign on behalf of Trump spread by Russia, and one Trump's campaign, wittingly or not, echoed loudly. By denouncing the (very accurate) news media as "fake news" and insisting that he was the only one you could believe, Trump echoed the Russian message of dividing the US and rode that to an exceptionally narrow victory in the electoral college even while losing the popular vote by a huge margin.

And he's never stopped; if anything, the rhetoric has gotten worse, and the lies and disinformation bigger. He insisted, against photographic evidence, that his inaugural crowd was the biggest in history, and dared people to contradict his word with the evidence of their own eyes. And too many morons, already invested in his lies, chose then and afterward to believe him over massive evidence that he lies incessantly.

I can understand how people can have been swayed by the disinformation. But how anyone can take a warning about Soviet/Russian disinformation, like Bezemov's, seriously and then STILL support Donald Trump is a mystery. 

[Guest shyslut]

I hate trump. I hate Biden. I hate that billionaires get full blown socialism, while working class people get late stage capitalism under a fascist dictator. I hate that our only other option is a neoliberal ghoul who's only concern is his friends off shore bank accounts while people like us starve. 

[BootmanLA]

2 hours ago, shyslut said:

I hate trump. I hate Biden. I hate that billionaires get full blown socialism, while working class people get late stage capitalism under a fascist dictator. I hate that our only other option is a neoliberal ghoul who's only concern is his friends off shore bank accounts while people like us starve. 

I'm the last person to say Biden stands for everything I want to see. But I think he's still a move in the right direction, even if only a short distance; and I think another four years of Trump could easily spell the end of our system of government as we know it. And before I'm accused of hyperbole, bear in mind he keeps calling for an extra term beyond the next one, and his apparatus is already pushing forward Junior as the heir apparent. That's often how governments get overthrown nowadays - not by a military coup, but by a duly elected leader trashing all the constraints that used to ensure peaceful transitions of power, then changing the laws to allow the leader, or his family, to remain in power indefinitely.

Russia thought it had achieved a system where the presidency would be limited to one six-year term in a row. Putin found a hole in that "guardrail"; forced to step down as president, he instead ran for the Russian Parliament, while pushing his own former chief of staff as President. When elected, the new "President" selected Putin as Prime Minister, and things continued pretty much as they had, with Putin calling the shots from his new position. After sitting out a term, Putin was eligible to run again for President, and won; since then, he's pushed through constitutional changes (by dubious votes) that allowed him not only to serve two consecutive terms, but the clock was restarted on term limits, meaning he's now got another 12 years in power.

Trump can't do exactly that, but there's still plenty he *can* do. Despite the fact that only Congress can appropriate money, and that when it does so, it's for *specific* purposes, Trump just keeps changing the appropriations to allow himself to spend money on what he wants even when specifically forbidden to do so by Congress. And if the courts refuse to get involved - if they deem it a "political" question that can only be resolved by the voters - then there's simply no stopping much of what he wants to do. Right now, some of Trump's worst excesses have only been stopped by 5-4 votes in the Supreme Court. If one of those 5 (typically, the four justices appointed by Democrats, plus one of the Republicans, often Roberts) were to be replaced in a second Trump term, I don't see there being any means of stopping virtually anything he wanted to do.

And remember: the official platform of the Republican Party, as of this convention, is "Whatever Donald wants, Donald gets". If that doesn't scare the shit out of you, I don't know what would.

[BootmanLA]

On 2/24/2020 at 12:17 AM, Twochipigs said:

The economy will eventually go into another recession, and Trump’s fiscal fuckups have left the US virtually no tools to recover.  Budget deficits are already over a trillion dollars a year thanks to the GOP’s tax cuts for the 1%, so the federal government won’t be able to restore the economy via fiscal stimulus.  

Trump threatens Powell if the Federal Reserve Bank doesn’t keep rates artificially low so Trump can get re-elected.  

Big banks have loaned trillions for sketchy corporate “financial engineering” at the behest of Trump’s bank regulators.  If you net out this questionably collectible debt and federal deficits, the US economy has had negative GDP growth during Trump’s tenure.

Only the uninformed or ill-informed think Trump’s house of cards is producing actual growth.

Looking back, this was spot-on prescient. Had Trump been prudent, we'd have a lot more "headroom" to prop up the economy while fighting the coronavirus pandemic. And it's telling that a significant number of Republicans in the Senate (and some in the House, but they're outvoted) think we shouldn't do ANYTHING else to help people, because of course the rich are still rich and doing fine in their summer houses in the Hamptons or wherever, so fuck the rest of us.

Here's how bad it is: despite the country gaining 2.5 million jobs in May (over April), 4.8 million in June, and another 1.76 million in July - the only three months in history where we created more than a million jobs - we're STILL at a record high unemployment rate since World War II. We're still at a higher unemployment rate than at ANY point during the Great Recession. 

 

On 2/23/2020 at 11:28 PM, NatureBoy said:

Get rid of him so we can tank the economy again

Seems we didn't even have to get rid of Trump to tank the economy. Which isn't surprising. Most times in the last 30-40 years, when the economy has tanked, it's been during the presidency of a Republican, and most often it takes the election of a Democrat to pull us out.

[Guest shyslut]

21 hours ago, BootmanLA said:

I'm the last person to say Biden stands for everything I want to see. But I think he's still a move in the right direction, even if only a short distance; and I think another four years of Trump could easily spell the end of our system of government as we know it. And before I'm accused of hyperbole, bear in mind he keeps calling for an extra term beyond the next one, and his apparatus is already pushing forward Junior as the heir apparent. That's often how governments get overthrown nowadays - not by a military coup, but by a duly elected leader trashing all the constraints that used to ensure peaceful transitions of power, then changing the laws to allow the leader, or his family, to remain in power indefinitely.

Russia thought it had achieved a system where the presidency would be limited to one six-year term in a row. Putin found a hole in that "guardrail"; forced to step down as president, he instead ran for the Russian Parliament, while pushing his own former chief of staff as President. When elected, the new "President" selected Putin as Prime Minister, and things continued pretty much as they had, with Putin calling the shots from his new position. After sitting out a term, Putin was eligible to run again for President, and won; since then, he's pushed through constitutional changes (by dubious votes) that allowed him not only to serve two consecutive terms, but the clock was restarted on term limits, meaning he's now got another 12 years in power.

Trump can't do exactly that, but there's still plenty he *can* do. Despite the fact that only Congress can appropriate money, and that when it does so, it's for *specific* purposes, Trump just keeps changing the appropriations to allow himself to spend money on what he wants even when specifically forbidden to do so by Congress. And if the courts refuse to get involved - if they deem it a "political" question that can only be resolved by the voters - then there's simply no stopping much of what he wants to do. Right now, some of Trump's worst excesses have only been stopped by 5-4 votes in the Supreme Court. If one of those 5 (typically, the four justices appointed by Democrats, plus one of the Republicans, often Roberts) were to be replaced in a second Trump term, I don't see there being any means of stopping virtually anything he wanted to do.

And remember: the official platform of the Republican Party, as of this convention, is "Whatever Donald wants, Donald gets". If that doesn't scare the shit out of you, I don't know what would.

So I agree with you basically on everything, although I don’t believe Russia is as involved as people think within our country’s political sphere, but that’s a whole other conversation. I AM scared about what Trump can do with another four years, and I’m terrified about how our do-nothing congress just lets him do anything he wants. So of course I want to get him out because I believe that is the most important thing to do right now. 

HOWEVER, getting Trump out should not be the only thing on our mind. Biden needs to be better if he wants to meet this moment. He can’t refuse to pass Medicare for All when people are dying from an unavoidable disease made worse by the government’s response, then pull back on a public option as soon as they even announce the possibility. He can’t give the police MORE money as a response to the BLM protests. He can’t refuse to push for a UI so people can live through this economic disaster. He needs to be better. Also I know this is a thread about Trump I just think they are part of the same conversation. 

I’m sure you’ve noticed that the polling in swing states are tightening and looking more like Trump actually has a shot in winning again. Compared to even a month ago Biden had a double digit point difference!! All he has to do is commit to passing M4A and he would win, but he refuses to do that because the health insurance and big pharma industries have him in their pockets. And if he loses this November, he will blame the progressives for being too purist or whatever. 

[BootmanLA]

2 hours ago, shyslut said:

I’m sure you’ve noticed that the polling in swing states are tightening and looking more like Trump actually has a shot in winning again. Compared to even a month ago Biden had a double digit point difference!! All he has to do is commit to passing M4A and he would win, but he refuses to do that because the health insurance and big pharma industries have him in their pockets. And if he loses this November, he will blame the progressives for being too purist or whatever. 

I don't think it's that simple. I think most people who support M4A are going to vote Biden regardless - there may be some marginal falloff from people (aka idiots) who think it's tainted to vote for anyone who doesn't support 100% of your own values, and stay home, but my own opinion, based on the 2018 mid-terms, is that Trump's major vulnerability is the centrist voters, whom he won by a small margin in 2016 but who deserted the GOP in droves in the 2018 midterms. Keeping those people in the Democratic fold for 2020 is critical.

The problem, as I see it, is that while M4A is wildly popular among the Democratic base, and has some traction among moderates, that's mostly when it's framed as an alternative to traditional employer-based health plans. When you start talking about M4A replacing those, support drops dramatically (even though I think it's a better option for everyone). Yes, that's because Big Medical has managed to frame the debate as "losing" choices rather than "gaining coverage", and yes, people are dumb and don't realize that single-payer's cost savings alone would end up saving most people money.

Right now, the worst thing Biden could do is spook soft Republicans who are mostly fed up with Trump by embracing too progressive an agenda. Yes, he should immediately after winning stake out some big positions, especially if the Dems take the Senate, and be prepared to support killing the filibuster if need be to get most of it passed. (Obama could have done a lot more in 2009 and early 2010 IF he'd had 60 votes for more than a few weeks here and a few weeks there; with only needing 50 + the VP, a lot more could get through between 2021 and January 2023.)

Which is why I hate seeing the most progressive wing of the party still pushing him so hard. Right now, publicly committing to, say, the Green New Deal in its entirety or M4A as the mandatory option will only cost him votes. And while I'm glad you see getting rid of Trump as Job #1, unfortunately, for some on the far left, they're willing to endure four more years of him, in the hopes that it will be so bad the backlash will push someone like Sanders or AOC into the White House.

The problem with that scenario, as I see it, is (a) there's no guarantee the backlash will be that strong, (b) there's no guarantee Trump won't have so eroded the norms of government that his son or daughter won't just skate right in, (c) Sanders himself would be 83 at the time of the next election, so he's almost certainly out, (d) AOC will not turn 35 until right before the election, so she'll barely be eligible, and I don't know that six years in the House is really sufficient prep for the presidency, and (e) I can't think of anyone, other than those two, who'd be acceptable to the far-left end of the party at this point, though four years is a long time for someone else to rise to prominence.

[shortstackhole]

Trump isn't the worst president by far, he's been a typical politician on most fronts. Decreasing taxes, scaling back military intervention, strong stock market, falling jobless rate, these are pretty good signs of an average-to-successful presidency and I think he's done a pretty decent job despite MEDIA. His track record on guns sucks and his ability to play nice with the leaders of the EU isnt exactly a boon (but the EU is shit to begin with why on earth would you want a higher government system over your own government thats so stupid). I wish he'd go harder against the Chinese and Turks but I guess I'll settle for more saber-ratting in the Sea of Japan/ South China/East China Seas.

[BootmanLA]

2 minutes ago, putitinmecoach said:

Trump isn't the worst president by far, he's been a typical politician on most fronts. Decreasing taxes, scaling back military intervention, strong stock market, falling jobless rate, these are pretty good signs of an average-to-successful presidency and I think he's done a pretty decent job despite MEDIA. His track record on guns sucks and his ability to play nice with the leaders of the EU isnt exactly a boon (but the EU is shit to begin with why on earth would you want a higher government system over your own government thats so stupid). I wish he'd go harder against the Chinese and Turks but I guess I'll settle for more saber-ratting in the Sea of Japan/ South China/East China Seas.

We're on track to have 400,000 dead Americans by Inauguration Day. "Average to successful presidency" my fucking ass.

Here's the thing that ought to kill his campaign, right here, right now, and yet it won't, because yes, a huge portion of his supporters are a basket of deplorables. The man told John Kelly, standing next to Kelly's son's grave in Arlington Cemetery, that "he didn't get it - what was in it for him?". The man said that the graves at Belleau Wood were filled with losers who got themselves killed instead of, I guess, claiming bone spurs. The man said a US Senator, who endured five years of torture as a POW in a North Vietnamese prison cell because he refused to be released earlier than any other prison who had been there as long or longer than he had, wasn't a war hero because "He got captured. I like people who don't get captured."

And for all the Trumpanzees who will rise up and hysterically claim Trump couldn't have said such things: The final one is on videotape. We all saw it. The only people who have denied he said the other statements are PR flacks whose job depends on claiming Trump didn't say those things. One of them, Sarah Hillbilly Sanders, is a documented liar who admitted under oath to Robert Mueller that she made up things to tell the press while she was press secretary knowing they were false. Not ONE high-ranking military officer - not John Kelly (former Chief of Staff and Secretary of DHS), not  James Mattis (former Secretary of Defense), not Joseph Dunford (former chairman of the Joint Chiefs). None of the recent acting Secretaries of Defense (Patrick Shanahan, Richard Spencer). Not even the current Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. NOBODY of rank will say that Trump didn't say those things, and none of them will say he COULDN'T have said those things.

And we know why.

[BootmanLA]

12 minutes ago, putitinmecoach said:

Decreasing taxes, ... strong stock market, falling jobless rate, these are pretty good signs of an average-to-successful presidency and I think he's done a pretty decent job despite MEDIA.

I forgot this gem, above. Trump's "decreasing taxes" will actually result in a tax INCREASE for many lower-end taxpayers, in a few years (because our tax cuts are temporary while the ones for big business and the mega rich are permanent). And they blew a 2 trillion hole in the extended budget because Trumpanzees, like most Republicans, cling to the fiction that reducing taxes somehow improves governmental finances.

That of course was before his mismanagement of the Trump Coronavirus blew another trillion-plus hole in government finances. 

And jobless rate?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

That's not laughing at the unemployed. That's laughing at any moron who thinks that having hit, back in April, the highest unemployment rate since the fucking Great Depression is a "falling jobless rate". He inherited, in January 2017, an unemployment rate of 4.8% - below what used to be considered "full employment" at 5% (to account for normal job turnover, etc.). He managed to get that down to 3.6% by January 2020 - a whole whopping 1.2% decline in joblessness - before his disastrous (and re-election-driven) mismanagement of the Trump Virus caused that rate to skyrocket up to 14.7 percent. That's FORTY PERCENT higher than the WORST month under Obama, at the worst point in the Bush 43 Great Recession.

One could argue, if one wanted, that Trump's very minor troop reductions (most of which have just been shifting troops around the globe) are a good thing. One could argue (if one were an idiot) that repeatedly pissing off and insulting all of our allies is savvy foreign policy, even though we're likely to need those allies to help deal with threats here and there around the world. But to argue that this train wreck of an economy, where we've had 20 weeks this year where FIRST TIME unemployment claims were over one million (we'd never had a SINGLE month with that many, until Trump, much less twenty) is beyond laughable. 

[shortstackhole]

37 minutes ago, BootmanLA said:

We're on track to have 400,000 dead Americans by Inauguration Day. "Average to successful presidency" my fucking ass.

Here's the thing that ought to kill his campaign, right here, right now, and yet it won't, because yes, a huge portion of his supporters are a basket of deplorables. The man told John Kelly, standing next to Kelly's son's grave in Arlington Cemetery, that "he didn't get it - what was in it for him?". The man said that the graves at Belleau Wood were filled with losers who got themselves killed instead of, I guess, claiming bone spurs. The man said a US Senator, who endured five years of torture as a POW in a North Vietnamese prison cell because he refused to be released earlier than any other prison who had been there as long or longer than he had, wasn't a war hero because "He got captured. I like people who don't get captured."

And for all the Trumpanzees who will rise up and hysterically claim Trump couldn't have said such things: The final one is on videotape. We all saw it. The only people who have denied he said the other statements are PR flacks whose job depends on claiming Trump didn't say those things. One of them, Sarah Hillbilly Sanders, is a documented liar who admitted under oath to Robert Mueller that she made up things to tell the press while she was press secretary knowing they were false. Not ONE high-ranking military officer - not John Kelly (former Chief of Staff and Secretary of DHS), not  James Mattis (former Secretary of Defense), not Joseph Dunford (former chairman of the Joint Chiefs). None of the recent acting Secretaries of Defense (Patrick Shanahan, Richard Spencer). Not even the current Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. NOBODY of rank will say that Trump didn't say those things, and none of them will say he COULDN'T have said those things.

And we know why.

400K deaths by Jan 20 2021? I WISH! I wish it was going to be that high. Too many on the government dollar I say. Dead by what? This mysterious plan-demic all because some random chinese scientist couldnt help having undercooked bat soup at a nearby fishmarket? This thing was cooked up in lab to wreck havoc on the world by Globalists to try and crush the global economy and strengthen the corporations and technocrats. What, you dont think its weird how Main Street USA suffered the most but yet the corporate giants saw their earnings increase tenfold? How weird is it that 0 politicians have died from this "Spicy Flu"? Aint it weird how unemployment was averaging under 4% for the first 3 years under Trump and then this "spicy flu" just shows up during an election year to throw everything out of wack? Weird shit and some election year shenanigans. 

Yeah I could not care less about what he thinks about some people who died for imperialist ideals. Besides wasn't that Atlantic article proven false by known War Hawk and Anti-Trumper, John Bolton in his book The Room Where it Happened? To think anyone can just put out an article with anonymous sources for a hit piece on a president. John McCain is a war criminal and is responsible for several scandals that got swept under the rug all because his daddy was an admiral. I'd pay money to piss on McCain's gravestone if it meant that I couldn't get arrested.

I could not care what the EU thinks about America. I'm more concerned with the growing Chinese threat than what some hoity-toity europiss push-over thinks about America. The EU only cares about expanding its political reach and importing poor brown people from the middle east and north africa for cheap labor.

You're coming at me like I have a hard-on for the guy and let me tell you, I do not feel one way or the other about him. He's better than Bush and Obama and Reagan and Clinton

[BootmanLA]

3 hours ago, putitinmecoach said:

400K deaths by Jan 20 2021? I WISH! I wish it was going to be that high. Too many on the government dollar I say. Dead by what? This mysterious plan-demic all because some random chinese scientist couldnt help having undercooked bat soup at a nearby fishmarket? This thing was cooked up in lab to wreck havoc on the world by Globalists to try and crush the global economy and strengthen the corporations and technocrats. What, you dont think its weird how Main Street USA suffered the most but yet the corporate giants saw their earnings increase tenfold? How weird is it that 0 politicians have died from this "Spicy Flu"? Aint it weird how unemployment was averaging under 4% for the first 3 years under Trump and then this "spicy flu" just shows up during an election year to throw everything out of wack? Weird shit and some election year shenanigans. 

Yeah I could not care less about what he thinks about some people who died for imperialist ideals. Besides wasn't that Atlantic article proven false by known War Hawk and Anti-Trumper, John Bolton in his book The Room Where it Happened? To think anyone can just put out an article with anonymous sources for a hit piece on a president. John McCain is a war criminal and is responsible for several scandals that got swept under the rug all because his daddy was an admiral. I'd pay money to piss on McCain's gravestone if it meant that I couldn't get arrested.

I could not care what the EU thinks about America. I'm more concerned with the growing Chinese threat than what some hoity-toity europiss push-over thinks about America. The EU only cares about expanding its political reach and importing poor brown people from the middle east and north africa for cheap labor.

You're coming at me like I have a hard-on for the guy and let me tell you, I do not feel one way or the other about him. He's better than Bush and Obama and Reagan and Clinton

Actually, your response (by the way, your tinfoil hat is slipping) is full of misinformation.

Many politicians and political figures have died of Covid, including a representative in my own state, and many, many more have been diagnosed but recovered. 

Some corporate giants have seen increased profits (e.g. Amazon) while others (eg airlines, hotels, oil companies) have been severely impacted. The overall stock market has zero to do with the actual performance of the economy, and most especially the DJIA means little.

No, Bolton did not "prove" anything false. He says he didn't hear Trump say those things when he was on the trip. Bolton would not have been with Trump every minute of the trip; in fact, he's well documented as having been in side meetings for a goodly portion thereof. Also, Bolton's book came out long before the Atlantic article, so unless you've discovered a new form of time travel (in which case I suggest you patent it quickly), the book could not disprove the article. Period.

As for "anonymous sources": you clearly do not understand how those work, particularly with a magazine that has standards, like The Atlantic. Perhaps the comic books (sorry, "graphic novels"), blogs, Q-Anon websites, and other "information sources" on which you rely for "news" may allow that sort of thing, but a publication like the Atlantic requires reporters to provide multiple confirmations for its sources and those confirmations are available to the editors who decide whether to publish any given piece. I can assure you that multiple people within The Atlantic know exactly who those sources are. And I repeat: not one senior defense official has come forward to deny the accounts. None. The US military wouldn't hesitate to denounce a fabricated source in a case like this; their silence is a strong validation that the article is true.

As is the fact that Trump slipped up and called the sources for the articles "leakers". You don't make something up and then leak it; it's only a leak if it was said, secretly, and then someone blabbed.

But it's good to know you think so little of the men and women who fight for our country. You simultaneously want us to take on China and yet you denounce the military that will be undoubtedly called on to defend American interests against them some day.

And I don't care whether you have a hard-on for the guy. The fact that you think he's better than the other four presidents you cited tells me what I need to know.