Donald Trump says that “no one knows what magnets are” during a strange Oval Office press conference. During the swearing in of a new ambassador to India on Monday (10 November), the President launched into a rant about China, whilst discussing their recent agreement to start easing rare earth export rules. “China was going to hit us with rare-earth. Now, everybody says, ‘Oh, what does that mean?’ Magnets. If China refused to give magnets, because they have a monopoly on magnets… there wouldn’t be a car made in the entire world.” He then claimed that “nobody knows what magnets are”, before going on to praise the “great deal” the two nations made in October. Whilst the talks did not end in a formal agreement, Mr Trump agreed to reduce tariffs on some Chinese goods entering the US, whilst Beijing agreed to suspend export control measures it had placed on rare earths.
Probably in the process of being shredded and redacted.
Pardon my hopium, I do hope it’s not misplaced -
Given that it was a blackmail operataion among other things, and it would be mutually assured destruction if any holder of the documents tried to redact themselves and expose others. There must be some level of proliferation of at least partial copies of beyond incriminating evidence on a larger swath of people in current power that we could possibly know now.
They wouldn’t be above using it in party infighting, but there’s no “faction” within the republican party with enough institutional power to get away with the backblow if they were to try to excise certain members. Which does mean there’s still a clock on this, but the fact that they haven’t just released with Bill and Hilary as the only two on the flight logs and dropped it, leads me to believe that this is the stalemate they’re collectively in.