2016 Dec 4^th

We have Corey Lewandowski, a Trump supporter, claiming that no one takes Trump’s comments literally, except, of course, the media. We now have the perfect excuse for Trump’s lies, from the thousands of Muslims rejoicing in New Jersey when the World Trade Centers fell to the millions of illegal aliens who voted for Hillary Clinton to give her a popular vote total exceeding his by a factor several million.

Lewandowski said Thursday night at Harvard's 2016 campaign postmortem forum:

“This is the problem with the media. You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally. The American people didn’t. They understood it. They understood that sometimes, when you have a conversation with people, whether it’s around the dinner table or at a bar, you’re going to say things, and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up.” He’s right of course, but when that happens most of us, not employed by Donald Trump, call it lying. In short Lewandowski tells us to believe what Trump says at our peril. We knew that, but now it comes from his very own supporters.

Here in Michigan Trump’s victory margin was just a meager .22 percent of the total votes cast, just 1704 out of 4.8 million. Trump is bringing a lawsuit to stop the recount. Gee, why would he want to do that if he is sure that he won the state fair and square? His grounds to stop the recount are that Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate requesting the recount, has no grounds to request it because she wasn’t harmed by the current results, i.e. nothing the recount could produce would result in her winning the state. He is right about that but it is a lame excuse for stopping the recount if he is confident he won Michigan… apparently he isn’t!

Today we deal with that infamous congratulatory phone call from the President of Taiwan. Way back in 1972 Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger went to China and we eventually established a “One China” policy. We agreed that there is just one China and Beijing is its capital. Taiwan was a province of China, eventually to be reunited with the mainland government. We moved our embassy from Taiwan to Beijing; things had changed. Nixon and Kissinger wanted to separate China from Russia. It worked, at least to a limited extent.

Trump’s congratulatory phone call from Taipei was obviously pre-planned. The President of Taiwan is certainly not going to call Donald Trump without some assurance that her call will be accepted and that takes pre-planning. The notion that this was just a spontaneous gesture of goodwill is simply poppycock. This is not a very good way for a new administration to begin a China policy.