Lazy Caturday Reads: It’s Over. Trump Won.

By Katrina Pallon

Good Afternoon!!

Yesterday I posted a sarcastic comment on Dakinikat’s thread to the effect that I was surprised that she was looking forward to elections in 2026. She explained to me that there would be midterm elections in two years.

Am I the only one here who thinks it’s unlikely there will be any more elections? Trump himself has said that if he won there wouldn’t be any more need to vote. I think this is it. We are living in Germany 1933. It only took Hitler a couple of years to win full control of the German government.

The Guardian, July 30, 2024: Donald Trump repeats controversial ‘You won’t have to vote any more’ claim.

Donald Trump on Monday repeated his weekend remarks to Christian summit attendees that they would never need to vote again if he returns to the presidency in November.

But, after being asked repeatedly on Fox News to clarify what he meant, the Republican former president denied threatening to permanently stay in office beyond his second – and constitutionally mandated final – four-year term.

During the initial remarks made on Friday, which caused outrage and alarm among his critics, Trump told the crowd to “get out and vote, just this time”, adding that “you won’t have to do it any more. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote any more, my beautiful Christians.”

Democrats and other critics called the remarks “terrifying”, authoritarian and anti-democratic. And Monday, in a new interview with the Fox News host Laura Ingraham, the former president attempted to explain what he meant.

“That statement is very simple, I said, ‘Vote for me, you’re not gonna have to do it ever again,’” Trump told Ingraham. “It’s true, because we have to get the vote out. Christians are not known as a big voting group, they don’t vote. And I’m explaining that to them. You never vote. This time, vote. I’ll straighten out the country, you won’t have to vote any more, I won’t need your vote any more, you can go back to not voting.”

Okay, so maybe the statement was directed at Christians only. I don’t know. I only know that in 2021, Trump crazies like Michael Flynn urged Trump to invoke the insurrection act and take control of the voting machines, and Trump considered it. I expect him to do that this time so he can use the military to attack protesters and decide whether and when we can have elections.

Just before the 2024 election, Trump told followers that he should have just refused to leave office in 2020. Steve Benen at Maddow Blog: At the finish line, Trump says he ‘shouldn’t have left’ after 2020 loss.

On the last episode of “Fox News Sunday” before Election Day, Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona raised an important criticism about Donald Trump: The former president, the Arizona senator said, is trying to “set up the conditions where he can do what he did in 2020.”

Host Shannon Bream quickly interrupted to say that Trump, at the end of his term, “did leave in 2020.” It fell to Kelly to remind the host and viewers that the Republican left office “after he sent a mob to Capitol Hill,” adding, “There are people who died that day because Donald Trump refused to accept the election.”

The exchange was notable for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the familiarity of Bream’s argument. Indeed, it’s the line the former president’s defenders have peddled for nearly four years.

By Marina Aizen

Yes, Trump rejected legitimate election results because he disapproved of the voters’ verdict. Yes, he tried to overturn the outcome in ways federal prosecutors believe were blatantly illegal. Yes, he filled his radicalized followers with lies, incited a riot, and deployed an armed mob to attack the U.S. Capitol, as part of a plot to seize illegitimate power by force.

But when it was time for his successor’s inauguration, Republicans argue, at least Trump left the White House when he was supposed to.

It was against this backdrop that the GOP candidate, just hours after Bream’s observation, expressed regret for having left the White House when he was supposed to. NBC News reported:

At another point in the [Pennsylvania] rally, Trump said he should not have left the White House on Jan. 20, 2021, when Biden was sworn in. “The day that I left, I shouldn’t have left. I mean, honestly, because we did so, we did so well,” the former president told supporters.

He didn’t appear to be kidding.

In other words, with just two days remaining before Election Day, as undecided voters made up their minds, the Republican nominee for the nation’s highest office reminded the public about his increasingly overt hostility toward democracy.

Trump is a criminal, a gangster. He is once again going to be president of the United States. There will be nothing to hold him back this time–no “adults in the room.” Thanks to the Supreme Court he is now immune from prosecution as long as he or the Court can define his behavior as somehow part of his official duties. The crimes he has been indicted and prosecuted for are in the process of being erased. He will appoint his fellow criminals and thugs to his cabinet and other powerful positions. Why should I believe he will allow any limits on his powers? Why should he allow elections that might allow Democrats to win House and Senate seats in 2026? This time he isn’t going to fool around. Can anyone stop him? I hope so, but I’m skeptical.

I wrote on Wednesday that I think Putin will be a powerful voice in Trump’s government (as will China’s Xi and Hungary’s Orbán). Trump and Elon Musk have both been talking to Putin, and Russia has obviously helped by spreading on-line disinformation. And of course Musk and his South African buddies expect to have a hand in running the government. It remains to be seen if Trump will go along with that.

As I noted above, Elon Musk obviously thinks he’s the shadow president now. The New York Times: Elon Musk Helped Elect Trump. What Does He Expect in Return?

Even before Donald J. Trump was re-elected, his best-known backer, Elon Musk, had come to him with a request for his presidential transition.

He wanted Mr. Trump to hire some employees from Mr. Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, as top government officials — including at the Defense Department, according to two people briefed on the calls.

That request, which would seed SpaceX employees into an agency that is one of its biggest customers, is a sign of the benefits that Mr. Musk may reap after investing more than $100 million in Mr. Trump’s campaign, pushing out a near-constant stream of pro-Trump material on his social media platform, X, and making public appearances on the candidate’s behalf across the hard-fought state of Pennsylvania.

By Lucy Almey Bird

The outreach regarding the SpaceX employees, which hasn’t been reported, shows the extent to which Mr. Musk wants to fill a potential Trump administration with his closest confidants even as his billions of dollars in government contracts pose a conflict to any government role.

The six companies that Mr. Musk oversees are deeply entangled with federal agencies. They make billions off contracts to launch rockets, build satellites and provide space-based communications services.

Tesla makes hundreds of millions more from emissions-trading credits created by federal law. And Mr. Musk’s companies are facing at least 20 recent investigations, including one targeting a self-driving car technology that Tesla considers key to its future.

Now, Mr. Musk will have the ear of the president, who oversees all of those agencies. Mr. Musk could even gain the power to oversee them himself, if Mr. Trump follows through on a promise to appoint him as head of a government efficiency commission. Mr. Trump has told Mr. Musk that he wants him to bring the same scalpel to the federal government that he brought to Twitter after he bought the company and rebranded it as X. Mr. Musk has spoken of cutting at least $2 trillion from the federal budget.

The effect could be to remove, or weaken, one of the biggest checks on Mr. Musk’s power: the federal government.

“All of the annoying enforcement stuff goes away,” said Stephen Myrow, managing partner at Beacon Policy Advisors, a firm that sells corporations daily updates on regulatory and legislative trends in Washington.

Hal Singer, an economist who has advised parties filing antitrust challenges against technology companies and also is a professor at the University of Utah, said that Tesla and SpaceX can expect less scrutiny from the Justice Department.

“They are unlikely to go after Elon — Trump’s D.O.J. won’t,” he said. “Abstain from investigating your friends, but bringing cases that investigate your enemies — that is what we saw during the first Trump administration.”

Trump stole hundreds of secret documents from the government, and the FBI believes he hasn’t returned all of them. He’ll never have to do that now, and he won’t be punished for these crimes or any future ones. I have no doubt that Trump shared secret information with Putin and other foreign leaders, and he will likely keep doing that as president. Prove me wrong. 

Soon, Trump will begin getting intelligence briefings again. Time: Trump, Who Was Charged with Mishandling Secrets, Will Get Classified Briefings Again.

Two years ago, the FBI raided Donald Trump’s home to retrieve government records he had refused to return, including hundreds containing classified information. The indictment that followed alleged the former President had left classified information laying around next to a toilet and stacked on a ballroom stage.

Now Trump is poised to be briefed once again on the country’s secrets to prepare him to take the reins of government on Jan. 20. “They’re not going to restrict it,” says a Republican involved in the transition. 

It’s an awkward dance. Biden previously called Trump’s handling of Top Secret documents “totally irresponsible.” And during his first term, Trump raised alarms in the intelligence community when he reportedly shared secrets of a close U.S. ally with senior Russian officials during an Oval Office meeting. In the interim, federal officials charged Trump with violating the Espionage Act for unauthorized retention of national defense information, a case that is now likely to be closed in the coming weeks.

By Catriona Millar

But Biden has directed his entire Administration to work with Trump’s team to ensure an “orderly” transition. That means looking past Trump’s previous history with classified information.

“He was indicted for mishandling classified information,” says Jeremy Bash, a former chief of staff for the CIA and the Department of Defense during the Obama Administration. “But given that he is about to assume the Presidency, the responsible thing to do would be to provide him the classified briefings and offer government resources to help him handle and store any classified material he needs to hold on to.”

For decades, President-elects have been allowed to receive sensitive national security briefings by the country’s intelligence services well before Inauguration Day. It’s a practice rooted in the idea that the voters have chosen the person to run the country, and there is no further vetting required beyond they are sworn into office.

We are all supposed to just pretend that Trump is a normal president-elect, even though he is obviously suffering from dementia and numerous psychological disorders.

At least some in the military leadership are trying to prepare for the worst. CNN: Pentagon officials discussing how to respond if Trump issues controversial orders.

Pentagon officials are holding informal discussions about how the Department of Defense would respond if Donald Trump issues orders to deploy active-duty troops domestically and fire large swaths of apolitical staffers, defense officials told CNN.

Trump has suggested he would be open to using active-duty forces for domestic law enforcement and mass deportations and has indicated he wants to stack the federal government with loyalists and “clean out corrupt actors” in the US national security establishment.

Trump in his last term had a fraught relationship with much of his senior military leadership, including now-retired Gen. Mark Milley who took steps to limit Trump’s ability to use nuclear weapons while he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The president-elect, meanwhile, has repeatedly called US military generals “woke,” “weak” and “ineffective leaders.”

Officials are now gaming out various scenarios as they prepare for an overhaul of the Pentagon.

“We are all preparing and planning for the worst-case scenario, but the reality is that we don’t know how this is going to play out yet,” one defense official said.

Trump’s election has also raised questions inside the Pentagon about what would happen if the president issued an unlawful order, particularly if his political appointees inside the department don’t push back.

“Troops are compelled by law to disobey unlawful orders,” said another defense official. “But the question is what happens then – do we see resignations from senior military leaders? Or would they view that as abandoning their people?” [….]

Defense officials are also scrambling to identify civilian employees who might be impacted if Trump reinstates Schedule F, an executive order he first issued in 2020 that, if enacted, would have reclassified huge swaths of nonpolitical, career federal employees across the US government to make them more easily fireable.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said on Tuesday that “I totally believe that our leaders will continue to do the right thing no matter what. I also believe that our Congress will continue to do the right things to support our military.”

There’s much more discussion of these issues at the link.

By Gracie Litleman

Politico: Pentagon officials anxious Trump may fire the military’s top general.

Defense officials are getting anxious about the possibility of the incoming Trump administration firing Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. C.Q. Brown, due to perceptions that he is out of step with the president-elect on the Pentagon’s diversity and inclusion programs.

The Trump administration’s DOD transition team — led by former Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie — has yet to officially set foot in the Pentagon since the election was called, owing to the transition team’s refusal so far to accept assistance from the federal government. But concern is beginning to bubble up that Brown, who spoke publicly about the challenges of rising through the military as a Black man as Donald Trump urged the Defense Department to crack down on the George Floyd protests in 2020, could be swept out by a president-elect who has promised to make the Pentagon less “woke.”

The chair’s four-year term normally is staggered so they serve the end of one administration and the beginning of another.

For Brown, that two-year mark arrives in September 2025, well into Trump’s first year back in office. There is no rule, however, prohibiting Trump from dismissing him sooner. Any such move would be extraordinary, though not unprecedented.

“There is some anxiety,” said one current DOD official, who like others was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters. “I think they are immediately worried,” the official said of Brown’s team.

“He’s a DEI/woke champion,” a second DOD official said. “Can imagine he’ll be gone quite quickly.”

Two people close to the Trump transition team mentioned that Brown has long been a target of congressional Republicans who accused the Pentagon of conducting social experiments with diversity programs, to the detriment of traditional military tasks.