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Comment by bboygravity | Hacker News Reader

Random examples that I can think of: Trump has/had (strong) ties with Russia, needed those Russian ties to win the election and used them to win the elections.

People still believe this to this day. Globally.

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The only incorrect part of that is that it played an important role in his winning the election. But that part isn't necessary for the whole thing to be very bad, in my view.

> People still believe this to this day.

Who? It is accepted that Trump got help from Russia and that he publicly asked for it. It is not accepted that he has strong ties with Russia, and unlike what the GGP has claimed, there is no "official" story saying that. The only person who did say that was private investigator Steele, in a dossier that Clinton didn't believe and discarded but that McCain did and leaked.

As I understand it, the Wikileaks DNC email dump was just a front for Russia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_National_Commi...

more realistically, it was israel: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/trump-israel-collusi...

perhaps you recall trump’s first two acts in office — recognizing jerusalem as israel’s capital, and sanctioning russia. curious!

Ha! Makes sense.

I abhor partisan politics but there are things associated with (e.g., Trump) that call for scrutiny.

Trump is a fascinating character and has broken so many norms that it's been mind bending. It saddens me that HN has many of his rabid acolytes that make any such discussion a shit show.

The GP comment is not telling the whole story. Yes the first thing _congress_ did was pass additional sanctions on Russia but Trump delayed [1] them from going into affect for over a year allowing more than enough time for Russia to mitigate the impact significantly.

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/timeline-trumps-delays-r...

There's so much more to explore, but not here.

It blows my mind that there are so many rabid supporters here on HN. There's no point in dialog there because there's no interest in that.

That said, we should be exploring how to hack society to "improve efficiency at scale", and that requires discussing policy and that is what politics is ostensibly all about. C'est la guerre.

Why wasn't there a discussion of the contents of the leaks, that the DNC did everything in their power to coronate Hillary, and only a discussion of the leak's provenance?

There was a ton of discussion about those claims but it largely stalked because the leaked emails didn’t show anything significant. You can still find Bernie die-hards claiming a conspiracy but they’re generally ignored because there’s no evidence that he did anything but lose fairly.

There was. Only barely literate morons and Russian social media astroturfers interpreted the leaked documents that way.

There was plenty of discussion of the DNC crowning Hillary. I'm pissed about it to this day. What's your point?

It was discussed at the time. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz resigned as DNC chair over what was in the emails.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/24/debbie-wasse...

which is often accused, although never proven.

when putin accuses media he doesnt like of being foreign agents without proof we can recognize how transparently self serving it is. wouldnt you agree?

Trump openly asked for help from Russia on national TV. I don’t see how the existence of some degree of Russian collusion is debatable given that it was done in the open.

I do agree that there are people who vastly overestimate the extent or effectiveness of whatever Russia did do. Trump won due to general discontent with the status quo coupled with the fact that Hillary Clinton was a politically tone deaf candidate who ran a terrible campaign. If anything Russia did succeeded it’s because it was able to capitalize on this dynamic.

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