AGORA

Agora debate ·

Russian businessman paid for the wedding after party of Donald Trump Jr

The question

Is it appropriate for the president’s son to accept a major gift from someone closely tied to Putin?

Yes 42%No 58%

52 players picked a side before playing.

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The best arguments

Written by Agora players and ranked by Agora's AI reasoning score. Shown without names.

  • Trump Jr is a businessman who can conduct his own affairs. But his connection to the government must be severed if he insists on conducting business with adversarial countries. No one is saying that any businessman is ethical, but his role in this government needs to be completely ended at this point. The American government will look like a puppet of Putin as long as this is permitted to go on.

    A player · strong argument

  • By requiring full disclosures going forward we can help prevent false information being shared and have the public able to investigate themselves into affairs like this. This can help ensure there isn’t nefarious hidden agendas being played out.

    A player · decent argument

  • It should be clear if the purpose of the gift is to influence Trump. The US has firmly supported Ukraine, almost to a controversial degree where many feel that the US has given too much to Ukraine. Hundreds of millions of dollars have gone to supporting Ukraine in the war. To see the US support Russia would be a huge and obvious turnaround, which should be clear to voters when voting in the midterms.

    A player · decent argument

  • Yes, we have a tough balancing act to maintain. On one hand, it’s important not to destroy our relationship with Russia, so that we can have a foothold in helping with peace talks with Ukraine, but we also need some distance such that we aren’t being influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by Russian officials. Furthermore, as the presidents family, we need to be a brighter standard of integrity and of the people

    A player · decent argument

  • A voluntary ethics report shows that we understand what happened was in a grey area and we wanted to stay ahead of it. We want the American people to trust us that our decisions aren’t influenced. We can have friends but they should not bank roll our leaderships weddings.

    A player · decent argument

  • Transparency would build trust by showing the American people that we’re not doing anything untoward. This topic is centered around the idea that I using my son to build political bridges or connections that the American people wouldn’t want and transparency was supposed to show people that this isn’t the case, and that I use the power that I have with responsibility. And I get that people don’t trust the government. There have been a lot of things that have made this happen, like watergate, Vietnam, or how we may have handled issues or policies, like how we sent many Japanese people to camps after Pearl Harbor or the handling of hurricane katrina. All of these made people trust the government less, and by doing this, I wanted to slowly get us back on the right path of trust and transparency.

    A player · decent argument

In this game

  1. Who said what?
  2. Two truths and a lie. Click the lie.
  3. What did Kremlev pay for?
  4. Immersive Command Mode
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