Eric Trump explains why his pa descended from his gilded tower via his Escalator of Shiny Truth to become the hero who will save America.
Eric Trump, listing off reasons his father is running for president, said in an interview this week that one of the motivations was the renaming of the White House Christmas tree to “holiday tree.”
Except, and stop me if you've heard this one before, vis-a-vis Donald Trump, that never happened. The National Christmas Tree remains the National Christmas Tree everywhere but in conservative email chains. Unfortunately for us, the Trump family lives inside one of those conservative email chains.
“He opens up the paper each morning and sees our nation’s leaders giving a hundred billion dollars to Iran.
This one will never die in the Trump household, mostly because giving someone money that you owe them is incomprehensible to a Trump when you could just, say, not do that and keep the money yourself. As has been explained repeatedly and using appropriately small words, after the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis (which helped propel Ronald Reagan into the White House, for You Kids Today) the U.S. government froze $400 million Iranian assets in the United States in retaliation. Those assets have remained frozen for decades; this January, however, amid U.S. concerns that The Hague was moving toward a ruling that would heavily favor Iran, a settlement was reached to un-freeze those assets and some, but not all, of the accumulated interest; the total worked out to $1.7 billion. It was publicly announced at the time, and covered in all the papers, and mostly nobody gave a damn, and $1.7 billion is very long way from "a hundred billion dollars" but nobody can accuse a Trump of being good with money.
At around the same time, a prisoner exchange was announced; four Iranian-held American citizens would be released in exchange for seven American-held Iranians. None of the prisoners had anything to do with the 30-plus year financial dispute, but some Republicans were still quite sure that it was all connected. Ironically, it was—but not in the way Republicans were convinced of. The State Department actually put the brakes on delivering the agreed-to first payment at the last minute, after the Iranian government made noises about not holding up their end of the prisoner exchange. It was allowed to go forward only after the American prisoners had indeed been released.
This is of course precisely what any Good Republican would have demanded—if the State Department blindly kept its end of one negotiation while the Iranian government was actively reneging on another one, can you imagine the uproar? No sir, Donald Trump would have told Iran that if they were going to start backing out on their other agreements with us that he'd personally eat their $400 million in cash with a knife and fork before handing it over. The State Department played hardball, but few would argue they should have done otherwise.
[...] or he opens the paper and some new school district has just eliminated the ability for its students to say the pledge of allegiance, or some fire department in some town is ordered by the mayor to no longer fly the American flag on the back of a fire truck,” Trump told James Robison in an interview posted this week.
Wait! Now that last one actually happened! Well ... sort of, anyway. Except it wasn't the mayor, and it wasn't an order—but there was indeed a furious small-town row in Coventry, Rhode Island, as to the specifics of the town's firefighters affixing full-size American flags to the back of their firetrucks. Some in the city were concerned that having full-sized flags affixed to poles mounted on the rear of firetrucks could represent an ironic-if-patriotic safety hazard to motorists behind them, or an impediment to firefighters themselves when responding to an emergency situation. Others had complained that the displayed flags were dirty or ragged, and questioned whether the city was following proper flag etiquette when displaying them. And the whole thing boiled over in the last days of a pay dispute that had tensions between the firefighters' union and the fire district already bubbling to begin with, thus making the associated rhetoric very heated indeed.
The end was, as befits decent governing anywhere, anticlimactic. New flags were donated, thus placating the insulted patriots, and the fire district has a new policy requiring staff to "ask for permission" before putting flags or emblems on the trucks in the future, thus placating people worried about safety concerns and/or individual firefighters someday painting the Slayer logo on the side of their truck because they just happened to feel like it, and as far as anyone can tell the whole dispute has been settled except for the part where it will live on forever in that segment of conservatism that doesn't really care whether it was settled or not.
All right, so let's sum up here. Donald Trump's son says his dad is running for president because his dad keeps hearing bits and pieces of conspiracy theories and credulously believes them.
Yup. We can't really disagree with that assessment. I'd say Eric here has his father pegged. None of that is to say that "man who gets outraged over conspiracy theories on the internet" is really the best we can do, when it comes to future presidents, but I do believe Eric has summarized what makes his pa tick.
Friday, Aug 26, 2016 · 10:20:22 PM +00:00 · Hunter
Ah ha—reader leftygator points out that Eric must have been referring to the “100 billion dollars” (or, according to his father, 150 billion dollars) of frozen assets Iran estimated would be freed up worldwide in countries such as India, China, and Turkey as nations ended their sanctions against Iran after the multilateral nuclear deal. (I had instead fixed on the much more recent target of Trump’s wrath, his claimed “film” of cash being airlifted into the country.)
While the dollar number matches up better, the details are worse for Trump(s). “Our nation’s leaders” didn’t give any cash to Iran as part of that deal; the estimate refers to Iranian oil money held by other nations that had purchased that oil but which was frozen under worldwide sanctions as leverage for reaching an eventual nuclear agreement; those funds were then unfrozen by the individual nations holding them after post-agreement inspections confirmed Iran was indeed acting to curb its nuclear programs. Iran still won’t be getting that warned-of “100 billion dollars” number, sanctions or no sanctions, as much of it was already tied up in other Iranian debt. (And if additional monitoring shows Iran is backtracking, the sanctions are almost certain to be re-imposed, starting the process anew.)
So that one isn’t a case of “our nation’s leaders” “giving” money to Iran under any reasonable interpretation—whereas repaying 1979-seized assets and interest could at least be more directly construed as that. It’s a misinterpretation of news events even more egregious and conspiratorial, unless you consider “our nation’s leaders” to be China or India, or “giving” to be “letting you have your wallet back.” Both of which, come to think of it, would not be at all surprising to hear Trump argue.