Finally Friday Reads: The American Triumvirate is Underwater
Posted: February 21, 2025 Filed under: democracy is threatened, Diplomacy Nightmares, Elon Musk, executive orders, executive privilege, FARTUS, kakistocracy | Tags: @johnbuss.bsky.social John Buss, @repeat1968, FARTUS and Elonia, Hockey Politics, Polls show disgust with the Trump Administration, Trump Russian Asset 4 Comments
“The latest retaliatory executive order.” @repeat1968 John Buss
Good Morning, Sky Dancers!
I usually check polls pretty carefully whenever they are presented by reliable pollsters. It’s because folks generally read too much into one observation. It’s really just a snapshot of the current moment. When you start to see coverage of multiple polls or many polls that provide the same results, and the results point to black swan events and are outside the margin of error, I pay attention. I follow the Consumer Confidence Index, an index of how folks feel about the economy and their well-being. It’s been continually polled for some time, and the snapshots have consistently predicted whether folks will spend or hunker down.
“The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index® declined by 5.4 points in January to 104.1 (1985=100). December’s reading was revised up by 4.8 points to 109.5 but was still down 3.3 points from the previous month. The Present Situation Index—based on consumers’ assessment of current business and labor market conditions—fell sharply in January, dropping 9.7 points to 134.3. The Expectations Index—based on consumers’ short-term outlook for income, business, and labor market conditions—fell 2.6 points to 83.9, but remained above the threshold of 80 that usually signals a recession ahead. The cutoff date for preliminary results was January 20, 2025.
“Consumer confidence has been moving sideways in a relatively stable, narrow range since 2022. January was no exception. The Index weakened for a second straight month, but still remained in that range, even if in the lower part,” said Dana M. Peterson, Chief Economist at The Conference Board. “All five components of the Index deteriorated but consumers’ assessments of the present situation experienced the largest decline. Notably, views of current labor market conditions fell for the first time since September, while assessments of business conditions weakened for the second month in a row. Meanwhile, consumers were also less optimistic about future business conditions and, to a lesser extent, income. The return of pessimism about future employment prospects seen in December was confirmed in January.”
The latest numbers on Consumer Sentiment, another poll of consumer intent, were reported today by Reuters. “US consumer sentiment plunges in February on tariff worries.” I’m glad to see that so many folks have finally figured out that tariffs are paid by the consumers. This is another set of polling of American households. The more these separate pollings converge, the more you can take stock of their numbers.
U.S. consumer sentiment dropped more than expected in February to a 15-month low and inflation expectations rocketed as households worried that President Donald Trump’s plans for steep and broad-based tariffs would eat into their purchasing power.
The University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers on Friday said its Consumer Sentiment Index dropped to 64.7 from January’s revised final reading of 71.7. The reading, the lowest since November 2023, was lower than the preliminary reading of 67.8, which was also the consensus expectation among economists polled by Reuters.
Meanwhile households saw inflation over the next year surging to 4.3% – the highest since November 2023 – from 3.3% last month. That was unchanged from the preliminary reading two weeks ago.
Over the next five years households saw inflation running at 3.5% – the highest since 1995 – compared with 3.2% in January. That was up from the preliminary reading two weeks ago for 3.3%.
So, since I follow the variables that influence people, like prices or job market expectations, I can usually eke out some valuable information. However, it’s still difficult to draw a line between the association of the variables and direct causality. Political polls are a different animal because the poll questions are fixed and the variables defined, but there is a lot more subtlety in the responses because of hidden preferences, so they vary a lot more. However, you can see when a poll is an outlier if it’s been consistently applied over time. The latest polls for FARTUS, Elonia, and JDank are historically bad. And yes, they’re polling for Musk because we’re basically being ruled by a Triumvirate. So far, there’s no polling on the Shadow Minister over there in Russia.
Rachel Maddow focused on this last night. It was seriously shocking. This is from The Daily Beast. She holds a doctorate in political science from the University of Oxford, so I know she knows polls and statistics even though the MSNBC point man on this is Steve Kornacki. “Even Rachel Maddow Is Surprised by Trump’s Historically Bad Approval Ratings. “Nobody has ever started off a presidential term this poorly in the eyes of the American people,” the MSNBC anchor explained.” So, yes, it’s special. This summary was written by William Vaillancourt.
MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow said Thursday that Donald Trump’s historically poor approval ratings for a newly inaugurated president are “sinking like a cinderblock in the ocean” due to the unpopularity of many of his policies.
Last month, Trump again became the only elected president with an initial approval rating of under 50 percent. Additionally, his disapproval rating in January of 48 percent was 3 points higher than in the beginning of his first term.
Currently, Trump’s approval rating is 45 percent—2points below his January mark. “We probably should have seen this coming,” Maddow said.
“I didn’t necessarily believe that it was coming this far, this fast,” she added, before showing the data from Gallup.
“Nobody has ever started off a presidential term this poorly in the eyes of the American people,” Maddow emphasized. “Trump was underwater with the American public from Day One. And since then, he’s been sinking like a cinderblock in an ocean trench. I did not know to expect that.”
“To be fair, part of the reason I’d expected that that Gallup number might go up and not down is because Gallup is not the only game in town. There were other national, well-regarded quality polls that came out right at the start of Trump’s term that did show him in positive territory—not big positive territory—but still positive,” she explained.
But those other polls,like from CNN, Reuters and Washington Post/Ipsos, grew bad for Trump as well.
“And what the data shows is that almost every single thing he has done is soundly and clearly and—in some cases—wildly unpopular with the American people,” Maddow continued, citing a Quinnipiac poll from last week showing Trump underwater on foreign policy, trade, the federal workforce, the Russia-Ukraine war, the Israel-Hamas war and the economy.
Turning to Trump’s “signature issues,” or “the stuff that he thinks makes him look great,” Maddow noted he’s losing public opinion there as well.
“For those categories, the stuff he’s doing is catastrophically unpopular,” she said, pointing to Trump’s plan for the U.S. to take control of Gaza, his dismantling of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and policies, his institution of tariffs, and him saying he trusts Russian President Vladimir Putin.
On that last issue, the same Quinnipiac poll found that only 9 percent of registered voters held Trump’s view.
Maddow noted that other Trump administration figures like DOGE’s Elon Musk, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, FBI Director Kash Patel, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Vice President JD Vance don’t have positive approval ratings, either.
“All of them are underwater in the new polling,” she said. “The American public does not like any of them.”
Politico focused on the polling for Elon Musk, which was terrible. “Musk underwater in public opinion, 2 polls show. Both Quinnipiac and Pew Research Center reported a majority of voters hold an unfavorable view of Musk’s role in the Trump administration.”
Elon Musk is underwater in public opinion, according to polls published Wednesday.
The surveys by Quinnipiac University and Pew Research Center show that a majority of Americans have an unfavorable view of President Donald Trump’s senior adviser — and the richest man in the world.
Pew’s findings put Musk 12 points under, with 54 percent of respondents reporting an unfavorable view of the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, compared to 42 percent with a favorable view. More specifically, 36 percent reported a very unfavorable view of Musk, and 11% reported a very favorable opinion.
Broken down by party lines, Musk was well-regarded among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents at 73 percent favorability. But far more Democrats disapprove than Republicans, with 85 percent reporting an unfavorable view. Pew did not do a breakdown of only independent voters.
Quinnipiac’s poll results Monday paint a similar picture, but with different questions. 55 percent of voters polled believe Musk has too big a role in the government, compared to 36 percent who think he’s got just enough power and a small minority of 3 percent who said they think he has too little power. This also breaks down by party lines, with 78 percent of Republicans surveyed saying Musk’s power is just right versus 96 percent of Democrats who said they think he has too much.
Of the independent voters polled, 56 percent said they thought Musk has too much power, versus 33 percent who said he has the right amount and 4 percent who think he needs more.
“That didn’t take long. “Russia, Russia, Russia” is back!” John Buss, @repeat1968
Grassroots Republicans are actually getting mad at the Republicans who are not standing up to the Triumvirate. Senators and Representatives are hearing from their Constituents. This is reported by Raw Story’s Matthew Chapman. “‘Stand up for us!’ Republican shouted down as he defends DOGE cuts at town hall.”
Rep. Rich McCormick (R-GA) tried to tout massive federal spending cuts proposed by tech billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency task force at a town hall in his heavily Republican district on Thursday evening — and attendees let him have it.
Most constituents who turned up at the packed-house event, laid out by Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Greg Bluestein in a series of posts to X, appeared angry over Musk’s takeover, and more broadly the Trump administration’s attempt to control spending powers. One woman shouted at him that Congress controls the budget, “not the president.”
“And you are doing us a disservice to set that down and not stand up for us,” she yelled.
When McCormick tried to sideline the comment, saying it was being “litigated,” the crowd erupted in anger.
He received similar shout-downs while proposing “bipartisan” ideas to cut the budget, and when he doubled down on his comments from last month that teens in school should not be entitled to lunches and take jobs at McDonald’s rather than “sponge off the government.”
“We’ll have to disagree,” he said as the crowd roared.
The whole spectacle drew a wide reaction from commenters on social media.
“After getting booed for defending DOGE cuts, McCormick (a Republican from Georgia) is trying to sell the constituents at his town hall on cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid,” wrote Aaron Fritschner, deputy chief of staff to Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA). “It’s going about how you’d expect.”
NEW: U.S. consumer sentiment plunges—down 10% from January over tariff and inflation fears.Most people I know think the economy is cooked thanks to Trump’s policies—designed to help the rich and screw working folks.He’s not doing shit to fix the economy or lower costs. Just broken promises.
— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline.com) 2025-02-21T15:47:44.712Z
This year’s CPAC gathering was more odious than usual. Musk’s weirdness and substance abuse were on full display. This is from The Verge. Sarah Jeong has the coverage. “I cannot describe how strange Elon Musk’s CPAC appearance was. So here’s a literal transcript instead.” I’ve chosen to clip the entrance description for you.
Schmitt: How you guys doing? Nice vibe this month, right? After the best month we’ve ever had. Nice to see you. Thanks for coming out. It’s good to see you. Let’s not kill any more time, let’s bring out Elon Musk.
Crowd goes wild. Elon Musk enters stage, pumping both fists high in the air, walking slightly unsteadily. He is wearing a black MAGA baseball cap and sunglasses that look like they were bought in a gas station in 1989. He continues to pump his fists as he makes his way in front of the beige armchairs at the front of the stage. Rob Schmitt attempts to get his attention, but he turns and waves at the crowd.
Schmitt: We’ve got one more surprise, in case this wasn’t enough.
Musk: Well, President, uh, President Milei has a gift for me.
Schmitt: [hamming at camera] Javier Milei from Argentina, you guys know who that is, right?
Milei, a friendly-looking figure who resembles Bilbo Baggins right before he Smeagolifies, enters the stage carrying a chainsaw. He presents the chainsaw to the billionaire, who then waves it around unsteadily.
Musk: This… is… the chainsaw for bureaucracy. [pumps the chainsaw in the air] CHAINSAAAW!
He takes a beat to examine the chainsaw. He is still wearing his sunglasses. He turns around and starts wandering to the other side of the stage, waving the chainsaw around.
Musk: Uwaaauwaargh!
Milei lurks awkwardly in the background, trying to wave goodbye to Musk, before Schmitt takes notice.
Bannon’s appearance was so noticeably appalling that “French leader cancels CPAC speech after Bannon’s apparent Nazi salute.” The Europeans must think the entire country is on ketamine. This is the French leader of the Right Wing party, the National Rally. This is from Axios.
French far-right leader Jordan Bardella canceled planned remarks at CPAC Friday, after ex-Trump adviser Steve Bannon made a “gesture referring to Nazi ideology,” according to a statement to French news agency Agence France-Presse.
Why it matters: Bardella’s change of plans is the strongest rebuke yet of Bannon, who, during his remarks at the annual conservative conference made a gesture that appeared to mimic a Hitlergruß, or Nazi salute.
- Bannon did not immediately respond to Axios’ request for comment.
- A CPAC representative did not respond to a request for comment Friday.
Driving the news: “At this forum, (Thursday), while I was not present in the room, one of the speakers allowed himself, out of provocation, a gesture referring to Nazi ideology,” Bardella said in a statement to AFP.
- “As a result, I have taken the immediate decision to cancel my speech scheduled for this afternoon at the event.”
The big picture: TheBannon incident comes about a month after Trump-ally Elon Musk also made a hand gesture that drew comparisons to a Nazi salute.
- Despite blowback, Musk dismissed the criticisms, writing on X: “Frankly, they need better dirty tricks. The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.”
Go deeper: ADL condemns Musk’s Nazi “jokes” after salute controversy
Bannon’s drug abuse must have cleared his memory of the NAZI occupation of France. Semaphor reports that “Steve Bannon calls France’s far-right leader Jordan Bardella ‘a boy, not a man’ after CPAC cancelation.” My personal observation is that Bannon and Musk are not even human.
Donald Trump ally Steve Bannon said French far-right party leader Jordan Bardella was “unworthy to lead France” because he was “a boy, not a man,” after Bardella canceled his scheduled speech at a conservative political event in Washington.
Bardella, the president of the National Rally party, said he decided to drop out of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) after Bannon “allowed himself a gesture alluding to Nazi ideology” during his speech there.
“Yesterday, while I was not present in the room, one of the speakers out of provocation allowed himself a gesture alluding to Nazi ideology,” Bardella said in a statement. “I therefore took the immediate decision to cancel my speech that had been scheduled this afternoon.”
Bannon denied the accusation Friday, saying the gesture was “a wave” that he regularly did at the end of his speeches “to thank the crowd,” including at a National Rally event several years prior. Speaking to a Le Point reporter, Bannon attacked Bardella for the decision to withdraw from CPAC, saying he was “wetting himself like a little child.”
The incident reflects mounting tensions between Trump allies, such as Elon Musk, and Europe’s far-right leaders, some of whom have expressed discomfort with a few of the administration’s positions.
As we appear to be a Russian asset, the big question we all have been asking is, was Trump a Russian Asset the entire time? This is interesting. If you believe this, he was and definitely is. It is still the best explanation for Trump’s bromance with the dude.
A former Soviet intelligence officer alleges Trump was recruited by the KGB in 1987 and given the codename “Krasnov.” Alnur Mussayev served in the 6th Directorate, responsible for counter-intelligence support in the economy. One key objective was “recruiting businessmen from capitalist countries.”
— Jon Cooper (@joncooper-us.bsky.social) 2025-02-21T16:26:52.263Z
This was reported by The Daily Beast. We’ll have to wait for the fact-checking to start.
A former Soviet intelligence officer has alleged that Donald Trump was recruited by the KGB in 1987 and given the codename “Krasnov.”
Alnur Mussayev, 71, a former head of intelligence in Kazakhstan and before that a Soviet KGB officer, made the explosive claim in a Facebook post on Thursday. He claimed that he served in the 6th Directorate of the KGB in Moscow, which was responsible for counter-intelligence support within the economy. One of its key objectives, he claimed, was “recruiting businessmen from capitalist countries.”
The allegation revives claims of Russian collusion or even of being a Russian asset which Trump has denounced as “the Russia hoax,” and which dogged his first term in the White House. Even before he was elected, the FBI had secretly opened an investigation into whether his campaign had illegal ties to Russia, which eventually morphed into the Robert Mueller inquiry—which ended without Trump being charged.
Mussayev wrote that in 1987 “our directorate recruited Donald Trump, a 40-year-old American businessman, under the pseudonym Krasnov.” He offered no corroborating evidence, but is a well-known former senior intelligence agent. The Daily Beast has reached out to him for comment.
In his Facebook post, he said that his department specialized in recruiting spies and intelligence sources from the West, asserting once again that Trump had been brought into the fold.
He made another shocking allegation in another comment, saying: “Today, the personal file of resident ‘Krasnov’ has been removed from the FSB. It is being privately managed by one of Putin’s close associates.”
The Russian family name “Krasnov” stems from the Russian word “krasota,” which means beautiful.
The Soviet Union and its KGB fell in 1991, and Mussayev returned to his native Kazakhstan—a former Soviet republic—from Moscow and then rose to run the new nation’s intelligence apparatus. The KGB’s most direct successor was the Russian FSB which kept its Moscow files.
The timing of his intervention is intriguing, coming as Trump seeks to meet Vladimir Putin—himself a former KGB operative—to discuss a possible deal to end the Ukraine war, in the teeth of opposition from the government in Kyiv.
So, I managed to get through a post without writing about what agencies they are disassembling now. Here are a few other interesting reads for you via Memeorandum.
- Lauren del Valle / CNN: Judge vacates Eric Adams corruption trial but doesn’t immediately dismiss charges
- Jacob Bogage / Washington Post: Trump expected to take control of USPS, fire postal board, officials say
- Qasim Nauman / New York Times: Justice Dept. to Drop Discrimination Case Against Elon Musk’s SpaceX
- Catie Edmondson / New York Times: Senate G.O.P. Passes Budget Resolution, and Punts on Tough Questions
- Amy Maxmen / KFF Health News: Texas Measles Outbreak Nears 100 Cases, Raising Concerns About Undetected Spread
- Catherine Rampell / Washington Post: Why Gen Z men love Trump’s reign of destruction
And then there is this from the AP. (Points up to the Featured Funny today by John Buss.) “Singer of Canadian anthem at 4 Nations Face-Off changes lyric to protest Trump’s 51st state remarks.”
The anthem singer who performed the Canadian anthem prior to the 4 Nations Face-Off championship game Thursday night changed a lyric in “O Canada” as a response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s repeated remarks about making the country the 51st state.
Publicist Adam Gonshor in an email to The Associated Press confirmed Chantal Kreviazuk changed the lyric from “in all of us command” to “that only us command” and confirmed Trump’s 51st state comments were the reason why. During Canada’s 3-2 overtime victory, Kreviazuk told the AP she did it “because I believe in democracy, and a sovereign nation should not have to be defending itself against tyranny and fascism.”
“I’m somebody who grew up on music that spoke to the heart and the moment, and it shaped me as a songwriter and really as a human being,” she added. “I don’t think it would be authentic to me to be given a world stage and not express myself and be true to myself.”
But in Boston, this happened during the Hockey Finals via NewsWeek. “Video Shows Canadian National Anthem Being Booed in Hockey Final Against US.”
Before the puck was dropped for Thursday’s title game, the announcer prefaced the opening ceremony: “In the spirit of the game, we kindly ask that you respect the national anthems and the players that represent each country.”
Still, some boos and jeers rippled across TD Garden in Boston during the rendition of “O Canada.”
The jeering came days after fans in Montreal loudly booed “The Star-Spangled Banner” during the weekend’s testy matchup between the two teams, which the U.S. won 3-1. Days earlier, hockey fans similarly booed the U.S. national anthem when the American squad played Finland in Montreal.
Trump alluded to his gripes with Canada in a Truth Social post earlier Thursday, saying he would “be calling our GREAT American Hockey Team this morning to spur them on towards victory tonight against Canada, which with FAR LOWER TAXES AND MUCH STRONGER SECURITY, will someday, maybe soon, become our cherished, and very important, Fifty First State.”
This is crazy.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Mostly Monday Reads: What Fresh Hell?
Posted: January 6, 2025 Filed under: 2025 What Fresh Hell?, Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, democracy is threatened, Republican politics, U.S. Politics | Tags: @johnbuss.bsky.social, Adjuctated Rapist, and Traitor of the United States with total credit given to JJ), FARTUS (Felon, idiocracy, John (repeat1968) Buss, kakistocracy, kleptocracy, Lambert, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, Sweet Apocalypse, Toxic Masculinity 10 Comments
“His nose is already growing!” John (repeat1968) Buss
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Today is the anniversary of the shameful January 6th treason and violence. It may seem quiet today, but the worst is yet to come. Not only is our new FARTUS (Felon, Adjudicated Rapist, and Traitor of the United States with total credit given to JJ) about to take the oath of office, but all these other traitors are about to be granted Presidential Pardons. My only solace is that I may eat King Cake now because today is also 12th night, the official start of the Mardi Gras Season.
These are degenerate times. That has a specific meaning in Buddhism. Lama Yeshe describes it like this. “It has five characteristics: short life spans, scarce means of subsistence, mental afflictions, strong wrong views, and weak sentient beings.” That’s a good enough explanation for me when thinking about what’s been going on lately.
I will rely on the columnists I read today because they make sense. Our media legacy has failed us. First up is Amanda Marcotte writing for Salon. I wrote something along these lines on Friday, but Amanda has thought more deeply. “Toxic masculinity links the New Orleans attacker and the Las Vegas bomber. Whether MAGA or ISIS, troubled men are getting sucked in by hateful online propaganda.”
As I noted in passing last week, the striking thing about the life of Shamsud-Din Jabbar is how much it reads like the boilerplate biography of any random Jan. 6 defendant or MAGA-inspired criminal. The 42-year-old who allegedly murdered 15 people at the New Year’s festivities in New Orleans appeared, on paper, to be relatively successful in his career: 8 years in the Army, a degree from Georgia State, and a $125,000 a year job for an accounting firm. But his personal life was a mess. He was thrice divorced in 10 years, and at least two of the divorces were acrimonious and required repeat court interference. His divorce lawyer even fired him. His financial mismanagement meant his healthy salary didn’t go far enough, and he had to be forced to make back payments on child support.
Like so many men facing personal troubles, Jabbar didn’t get the help he needed. Instead, he turned to radicalizing voices online, which led him to believe that he needed to double down on toxic masculinity. It’s a story we hear over and over, from so-called incels who commit mass shootings to Donald Trump fans who attack government buildings to terrorists imbibing ISIS propaganda. Rather than taking responsibility for their personal failures and striving to do better, men of all stripes turn to the internet where they’re greeted by a sea of influencers, ready to tell them that it’s other people — women, people of different races or religions, the “woke mob” — that is to blame. In some cases, as happened here, they go far enough down the rabbit hole that they talk themselves into violence.
Thankfully, no one but the bomber was badly hurt in the Las Vegas suicide bombing that happened the same night as the Bourbon St. attack, but the parallels between Jabbar and Matthew Livelsberger aren’t hard to spot. Like Jabbar, Livelsberger was a troubled man who picked a highly symbolic location, blowing up a Cybertruck in front of a Trump hotel. Both men had checkered romantic histories, and Livelsberger appears to have told multiple people he feared he suffered from PTSD. Like Jabbar, Livelsberger seems to have acted on a belief that he was going out like a hero, standing up for his far-right ideology and using his death to call on fellow MAGA believers to commit acts of terrorism.
“Try peaceful means first, but be prepared to fight to get the Dems out of the fed government and military by any means necessary,” he wrote in his final manifesto. He declared the U.S. is “terminally ill and headed toward collapse,” complained that people don’t believe “[m]asculinity is good and men must be leaders” and made tired Twitter jokes calling Vice President Kamala Harris a “DEI candidate” and President Joe Biden “Weekend at Bernie’s.” He concluded, “Rally around the Trump, Musk, Kennedy, and ride this wave to the highest hegemony for all Americans!”
Livelsberger defensively insisted the bombing “was not a terrorist attack.” This sentiment is belied not just by the violence of the act itself and his calls for MAGA men to use violence because “a hard reset must occur for our country.”
It’s the 12th night, which means the members of Skull and Bones Krewes get up early to remind us of our mortality.
When Cis men fall apart, they can’t just go silently into the night, get help, or do something productive. They have to injure or kill innocents while killing themselves. They destroy more than their own lives. They have to leave some formal Mansplaining document that lets us know why it’s all our fault. These are generally misogynistic, at the very least. Most of them spew more bullshit and bile than the waste from slaughterhouses.
John Pavlovitz wrote this on December 12th in his Substack, The Beautiful Mess. “America Chose the Monster.”
To have cast a vote for him with all that we have seen is to declare war on decency, on equality, on any semblance of forthrightness or goodness. It is to double-down on the bigotry which was dismissed as hyperbole during his campaign but which has already been ratified hundredfold as he assembles his Cabinet picks and broadcasts his agenda.
To witness his absolute disregard for the Constitution, his violent allergic reaction to facts, his complete lack of empathy and to not condemn it all becomes an indictment of one’s own heart. It becomes an act of aggression against humanity.
The are truths that are self-evident in the light of these days:
A viable healthcare alternative is not coming.
Taxes for the middle class are not coming down.
Project 2025 is going to be implemented.
Mexico is still not paying for the wall.
Immigrants are going to being persecuted.
Protections for those with special needs are evaporating.
The poor are getting thrown to the lions.
Public schools are being thrown under the bus.
The elderly are being left to fend for themselves.
The environment is being willfully set on fire.
The economy is going to be compromised.
The whole system is being intentionally blown-up.
The rule of Law in our Government is being trod upon.Aside from the smallest percentage of the wealthiest in this nation, no one is going to be healthier, safer, or more financially secure.
This is a nonpartisan tragedy.
We all do impulsive things when we are terrified, when it’s dark and we’re convinced there’s a monster under the bed. But eventually the light comes on and we have reality at our disposal and we get to choose to see things as they are. I can’t fathom those presently determined to stay in the dark, to pretend they’re not seeing what they’re seeing—when what they’re seeing is a danger to them too.
It’s morning here in America, friends. The brilliant light of day is illuminating every dark corner and exposing every unsavory decision from the night before.
For a myriad of reasons, America chose the monster. It chose the hatred, the fear, the nihilism, the separation. The question of why is too sprawling and nebulous to answer.
And with the coming of this Monster comes more monsters. Former Capitol Police Officer Michael Fanone reminds us about the kind of people that will be put back on the street when the mass pardon of traitors begins. This is from HuffPo. “Cowards, Liars And Jan. 6: Former Officer Michael Fanone Speaks Out As Trump’s Return Looms.
“I don’t believe we live in a democracy anymore,” says Michael Fanone, who was nearly killed by Trump supporters four years ago.”
“There’s no doubt in my mind that he got away with inciting an insurrection as well as defrauding the American people and attempting to subvert democracy,” Fanone told HuffPost during a phone interview just ahead of the fourth anniversary of the Capitol riot.“I don’t believe we live in a democracy anymore,” Fanone said. “I believe democracy in this country is dead, and it died when the Supreme Court granted the president of the United States immunity for official acts and then failed to define what the fuck official acts are.”
The Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States in July found that as long as something could be shaded as an “official” act, prosecution was off the table.
The ruling obliterated key parts of the criminal indictment brought against Trump in the Jan. 6 case by then-special counsel Jack Smith. And Trump’s victory in November means he’ll likely never face federal charges.
Shortly after the presidential election, Smith dismissed the case without prejudice ― meaning it could theoretically come back to life one day ― but Fanone’s faith in the justice system is already shattered. He called Attorney General Merrick Garland an “absolute coward.”
“Listen, people say I’m naive or I don’t know how these things work, but I was a cop for 20 years. Not only was I a cop, I was a cop in Washington, D.C. Our prosecutors were federal prosecutors. I worked with the [Department of Justice] every single day for 20 years. I know exactly how that institution and organization works. The decision not to pursue an investigation into Trump was all political,” Fanone said. “The investigation should have been launched on Jan. 7, 2021.”
Fanone was Trump-friendly before the J6 Insurrection and voted for him in 2016.
Senator John Thune from South Dakota is the new bad guy in charge of the Senate. We’re already getting some idea of how bad it’s going to be since he appears to be whipping the caucus for the gross number of idiots Trump wants in his cabinet. This is from The Hill. “Thune says it’s unclear whether all Trump Cabinet picks will be confirmed.” Some of the most worrying of them have to deal with National Security.
John Thune on Trump possibly pardoning J6 insurrectionists who assaulted police officers: "That's ultimately gonna be a decision that President Trump is gonna have to make. What I'm focused on is the future."
Thune joined NBC News’s “Meet the Press” for an interview that aired Sunday, as he took the lead of the upper chamber at the start of the 119th Congress.
“What I’ve promised them is a fair process,” Thune said of Trump’s picks. “And so, these nominees are going to go through a committee where they’re going to have to answer questions. There will be some hard questions posed.”
Thune highlighted the desire to provide Trump with the Cabinet he wants but noted that the Senate has a role to “advise and consent,” particularly regarding his national security choices.
“We have a lot of our senators who take that role very seriously,” he said. “And so, we will make sure that these nominees have a process, a fair process, in which they have an opportunity to make their cases not only to the members of the committee and ultimately to the full Senate but also to the American people.”
Thune wouldn’t confirm whether he would vote for or against any of Trump’s nominees, including some particularly controversial choices like Kash Patel to lead the FBI, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii) for director of national intelligence and Pete Hegseth for Department of Defense.
Thune said he’s met with some of Trump’s nominees, and there are “some” that he has been “really, really impressed” by.
This bit popped up over the weekend and is disturbing. This was reported by CBS. “Thune has privately told Trump that Hegseth has the votes to be confirmed as Defense Secretary, sources say.” Thune has so many toxic male issues combined with a lack of experience and knowledge of the job that anyone connected to the military has spoken out against him.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune has privately told President-elect Donald Trump that he believes Pete Hegseth will have the votes to be confirmed as Secretary of Defense, according to three sources.
When asked for comment, a spokesman for Thune would only tell CBS News, “Two things we don’t discuss publicly: Whip counts and private conversations with the president.”
The new Senate Majority Leader in an interview with “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” promised a fair process but expressed more caution.
“I think these are nominees who are new enough, they’ve been going around and conducting their meetings, which I think, frankly, have gone very well, but they still have to make their case in front of the committee. And, you know, we don’t know all the information about some of these nominees.”
Hegseth’s confirmation hearing is scheduled for Jan. 14, according to Senate Armed Services Chairman Roger Wicker.
Just so you know, future FBI Director Kash Patel is still making the rounds in the Senate Building. “Kash Patel Believes the FBI Planned Jan. 6th. His embrace of this wild conspiracy theory should disqualify him from leading the bureau.” This is from The Bulwark.
“WHAT WAS THE FBI DOING PLANNING January 6th for a year?”
Kash Patel, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as FBI director, asked that question during a November 25, 2022 episode of his Kash’s Corner podcast for the Epoch Times. It was no slip of the tongue. As the title of that episode suggested—“What Did the FBI Know Before Jan. 6?”—Patel spent considerable time trying to cast the FBI as a villain responsible for January 6th. Patel noted that FBI Director Christopher Wray had “testified that the FBI never instigated or helped the January 6th protesters commit crimes.” But citing a report that the FBI had confidential human sources in the crowd, Patel asserted: “Okay, well, that was in planning for at least a year.”
Our review of Patel’s public appearances over the past four years reveals that he has repeatedly insinuated or argued that the FBI used its confidential human sources or employees to instigate the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol and entrap Trump’s supporters. Patel has claimed (as in the podcast episode above) that what he calls the “FBI’s Confidential Human Source Corruption Coverup Network” was somehow involved with January 6th. That is not only an insult to the memory of that day; it should be disqualifying for him to helm the bureau.
During the September 30, 2022 episode of Kash’s Corner, for instance, Patel said: “The question that has to be answered is, when did the FBI put those guys in, and where? And did those confidential human sources engage people who are not going to conduct criminal activity and convince them to do so?” Patel claimed that “is the definition of entrapment, which is illegal, and you can’t charge someone who’s been entrapped.” And he wondered who “was running this confidential human source network” and reporting it to FBI Director Chris Wray.
Patel added he would “venture a guess” that “once we see the documentation from January 6th, you will see the FBI’s confidential human source corruption coverup network on blast.” And he accused the FBI of inserting these human sources “into these matters.” Patel asked rhetorically: “Why? Why would you say January 6th? Because they wanted a political target, a political prosecution, not one based on law and fact.”
The man who could lead Trump’s FBI has failed to substantiate these wild accusations, which are contradicted by other evidence and by common sense. Regardless, he has frequently advanced this conspiracy theory, using his background as a former federal prosecutor and public defender—key credentials used to buttress his nomination—to provide it with a veneer of credibility.
An extensive amount of documentation is provided in the article. It’s not a fun read.
ProPublica has published another astounding piece of journalism. This is long and shocking. It gets to the heart of Trump’s rabid base. Again, this is the heart of Toxic Masculinity. “The Militia and the MoleOutraged by the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, a wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover climbing the ranks of right-wing militias. He didn’t tell police or the FBI. He didn’t tell family or friends. The one person he told was a ProPublica reporter.”
So I pored over his files, tens of thousands of them. They included dozens of hours of conversations he secretly recorded and years of private militia chatlogs and videos. I was able to authenticate those through other sources, in and out of the movement. I also talked to dozens of people, from Williams’ friends to other members of his militias. I dug into his tumultuous past and discovered records online he hadn’t pointed me to that supported his account.
The files give a unique window, at once expansive and intimate, into one of the most consequential and volatile social movements of our time. Williams penetrated a new generation of paramilitary leaders, which included doctors, career cops and government attorneys. Sometimes they were frightening, sometimes bumbling, always heavily armed. It was a world where a man would propose assassinating politicians, only to spark a debate about logistics.
Federal prosecutors have convicted more than 1,000 people for their role in Jan. 6. Key militia captains were sent to prison for a decade or more. But that did not quash the allure that militias hold for a broad swath of Americans.
Now President-elect Donald Trump has promised to pardon Jan. 6 rioters when he returns to the White House. Experts warn that such a move could trigger a renaissance for militant extremists, sending them an unprecedented message of protection and support — and making it all the more urgent to understand them.
(Unless otherwise noted, none of the militia members mentioned in this story responded to requests for comment.)
Williams is part of a larger cold war, radical vs. radical, that’s stayed mostly in the shadows. A left-wing activist told me he personally knows about 30 people who’ve gone undercover in militias or white supremacist groups. They did not coordinate with law enforcement, instead taking the surveillance of one of the most intractable features of American politics into their own hands.
Skeptical of authorities, militias have sought to reshape the country through armed action. Williams sought to do it through betrayals and lies, which sat with him uneasily. “I couldn’t have been as successful at this if I wasn’t one of them in some respects,” he once told me. “I couldn’t have done it so long unless they recognized something in me.”
The last thing I want to post about is the Washington Post. The newspaper is hemorrhaging reporters, and Pulitzer Prize-Winning Political Cartoonist Ann Telnaes quit because Bezos axed her submission. The raw sketch is featured on the right. It’s also begun layoffs. This happens when greedy Tech Bros take over things they know nothing about. This is from Oliver Darcy’s Status. “Paper Cuts. The Washington Post is expected to lay off dozens of staffers this week, Status has learned.”
Layoffs are expected to rock The Washington Post this week, according to people familiar with the matter.
The layoffs are slated to hit the Jeff Bezos-owned and Will Lewis-led newspaper’s business division, I’m told. One person familiar with the matter said that the cuts will be deep, impacting many dozens of employees.
The layoffs will surely deplete morale further inside the beleaguered newspaper, which has suffered a talent exodus over the last several weeks. As I reported earlier, star reporter Josh Dawsey will exit The Post for a job at The Wall Street Journal. His departure comes on the heels of other top staffers fleeing, including Matea Gold, Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, Charles Lane, Tyler Pager, and Amanda Katz.
A spokesperson for The Post didn’t have an immediate comment. But The Post has been in poor financial shape in recent years, a fact that management has not hidden from employees. Those financial problems were exacerbated when Bezos blocked The Post’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris ahead of the November election, a move that led to more than 250,000 readers canceling their subscriptions.
I’ve been a bit on the gratuitous Buddhism-sharing thing today, which I try not to overdo, but this quote from Chamtral Rinpoche hit me hard last night.
The biggest threat to our world are not human beings per se. The biggest threat is each individual person’s level of greed. One extremely greedy person can harm our world more than a million people who practice contentment.
Drinking salt water will never quench your thirst. The more you drink, the thirstier you will become. Likewise, greed will never bring you satisfaction, as it will cause an endless pursuit of material wealth to the detriment of our world and all of the beings who inhabit it.
Always remember that the greedier you are, the more you and others will suffer, and the poorer you will become inside. But the more contentment that you have, the more you and others will benefit, and the richer you will become inside.
We will have to cultivate inner peace to get through all of this. I’ve already cut down on my TV News viewing. I have a mature meditation practice (since the 1970s), so I have that. Of course, the furbabies and the Zoom calls from the Granddaughters put a smile on my face. I’m just trying to stay in the moment. I hope you can find a way to cope with this all. I’ve been listening to a lot of modern classic piano. This piece by Lambert comes from an album called “Sweet Apocalypse.” It’s beautiful and relaxing, and the name is appropriate for the times; it was recorded in 2017 during this first stint of anguish.
Talk to me about how you’re coping with this blast of kleptocracy, kakistocracy, and idiocracy?
What’s on your reading and blogging list?
Finally Friday Reads: Full-on Full Moon Crazy
Posted: October 18, 2024 Filed under: "presidential immunity", 2024 Elections, democracy is threatened, Foreign Affairs, Fox News, Harris Walz 2024, Iran, Israel, Kamala Harris 2024, North Korea, Right Wing Angst, Russia, Ukraine | Tags: @repeat1968. John Buss, Full Moon Madness, Special Counsel Jack Smith, Trump's dementia 4 Comments
“Every single time he opens his mouth…” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
If you got to look into the sky last night, you got to see the Hunter’s supermoon. There certainly was a lot of Lunacy yesterday. That causation or even correlation doesn’t stand up to scientific scrutiny, but it has a literary tradition covering nearly all periods of history. DonOld’s Yesterday fits the adage neatly.
“It is the very error of the moon.She comes more near the earth than she was wont. And makes men mad.”
—William Shakespeare, Othello
Speaking of madness, “North Korea sends troops to support Russia in Ukraine war: NIS.” This was announced in The Korea Herald.
North Korea has dispatched special forces to support Russia in its war against Ukraine, with the first batch already having arrived in Russia and a second group of North Korean troops expected to follow soon, South Korea’s intelligence agency claimed on Friday.
The National Intelligence Service said it “confirmed that North Korea began its participation in the war by transporting special forces to Russia via Russian Navy transport ships from Oct. 8 to 13.”
However, the NIS provided no substantial evidence to support this claim, other than satellite imagery showing Russian vessels docked at the port of Chongjin in North Hamgyong Province.
Four amphibious ships and three escort ships from the Russian Pacific Fleet transported around 1,500 North Korean special forces to Vladivostok during this period, departing from areas near Chongjin and Musudan-ri in North Hamgyong Province, as well as Hamhung in South Hamgyong Province, according to the NIS.
The NIS further stated that a second operation to transport North Korean troops to Russia is “expected to take place soon.”
The North Korean soldiers deployed to Russia have been stationed at military bases in the Far East, spread across cities such as Vladivostok, Ussuriysk, Khabarovsk and Blagoveshchensk.
“They are expected to be sent to the battlefield once they complete their adaptation training,” the intelligence agency added.
According to the NIS, the North Korean soldiers were provided with Russian military uniforms and Russian-made weapons. They were also issued fake identification documents resembling residents of Siberian regions such as Yakutia and Buryatia, whose appearance is similar to North Koreans.
“This appears to be an attempt to disguise them as Russian soldiers and conceal their involvement in the war,” the NIS stated.
The NIS also reported that Kim Jong-sik, the first vice director of North Korea’s Munitions Industry Department and a key figure in the country’s missile development, was observed visiting a North Korean KN-23 missile launch site near the Russia-Ukraine front. He was accompanied by dozens of North Korean military officers to provide on-site guidance.
“It’s incomprehensible,” John Buss. @repeat1968. “More Full moon Madness!!!” me
American Madman DonOld is showing his age; finally, the legacy media have noticed and are reporting it. It only took 39 minutes of swaying to his playlist at a rally for them to start asking the real questions. He’s evidently tuckered out. “Trump cancels a streak of events with only days until election.” This is reported in AXIOS by Ivana Saric
Former President Trump’s planned appearance at a National Rifle Association event next week was cancelled Thursday, the latest in a slew of scuttled public appearances and interviews by the former president in recent weeks.
Why it matters: With only 17 days to go until Election Day, the spate of cancellations gives voters fewer chances to hear from Trump before heading to the polls in a coin toss race.
- Vice President Kamala Harris, on the other hand, has been on a media blitz after enduring criticism from Republicans about a perceived lack of interviews.
- And while Harris has ventured into the unfriendly territory of a Fox News interview, Trump has stuck to the safe spaces of conservative outlets.
- In the appearances he has made, Trump’s rhetoric has grown more violent and nativist. In recent weeks, he has decried his critics as the “enemy from within” and fanned the flames of false conspiracy theories about migrants.
Driving the news: The NRA said Thursday it had cancelled its “Defend the 2nd” event with Trump in Savannah, Georgia, next week due to “campaign scheduling changes.”
- Trump also pulled out of two mainstream media interviews this week, with NBC News and CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
- Earlier this month he backed out of a scheduled appearance on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” while Harris appeared on the program.
- The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to Axios’ request for comment.
Between the lines: Several of the events and interviews Trump has appeared at in recent weeks have raised eyebrows.
- Trump cut short a Pennsylvania town hall this week to listen and sway to music for more than half an hour. “Let’s make it into a music fest,” Trump said. “Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?”
- In an interview with Bloomberg News at the Chicago Economic Club Tuesday, Trump downplayed the Capitol riot and struggled to respond when confronted about the costs of his economic plans
- Trump later claimed he was “hoodwinked” into the interview.
- During an all-women Fox News town hall that aired Wednesday, Trump declared himself the “father of IVF,” a decades-old fertility treatment that has come under threat since overturning Roe v. Wade — which Trump has repeatedly bragged about ending.
DonOld is asking for a sitdown with Rupert Murdoch. This is from MEDIAITE’s Isaac Schorr. “Donald Trump Outlines His Demands For Rupert Murdoch Live On Fox News Ahead of Private Meeting: ‘I Don’t Know If He’s Thrilled.’”
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump outlined his demands for conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch live on Fox News Friday morning, musing that Murdoch should stop airing negative ads and allowing Democratic guests on the network in the run up to Election Day.
After Fox & Friends’ Lawrence Jones thanked Trump for appearing on the show Friday, the former president jumped back in to ask Jones and his co-hosts, “You know what the event I have now?”
“No,” said Brian Kilmeade.
“A very big event,” continued the former president. “I’m going to see Rupert Murdoch.”
A pensive Kilmeade replied, “Alright,” and Steve Doocy exclaimed, “Okay!” before Trump pressed on.
“That’s a big event. I don’t know if he’s thrilled that I say it. And I’m going to tell him, I’m gonna tell him something very simple because I can’t talk to anybody else about it: Don’t put on negative commercials for 21 days, don’t put them. And don’t put on the air their horrible people. They come and lie. I’m going to say, ‘Rupert, please do it this way.’”
“Right,” interjected Kilmeade.
“And then we’re going to have a victory, because I think everyone wants that,” concluded Trump.
Salon Fellow Griffin Eckstein reports that Faux News Reader Brett Baier is very sorry about his behavior during his interview with Vice President Harris. “”I did make a mistake”: Baier apologizes for playing edited Trump clip in Harris interview. The Fox News anchor’s deceptive video clip left out Trump’s remarks about “enemies from within.”
Fox News anchor Bret Baier is apologizing for playing a misleadingly edited clip in an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris.
Harris sat down with Baier on Wednesday for a tense interview, in which the “Special Report” host repeatedly cut off and chastised the Democratic candidate. One exchange in particular gave the game away.
When Harris admonished former President Trump over suggestions that he’d sic the military on his political opponents, Baier aired a portion of a Trump interview that omitted his comments against “the enemy from within.”
“I’m not threatening anybody,” Trump said in the clip Baier played. “They’re the ones doing the threatening.”
In a Thursday night episode of “Report,” Baier owned up his misdirection.
“I wanna say that I did make a mistake,” Baier admitted. “When I called for a soundbite, I was expecting a piece of the ‘enemy from within’ from Maria Bartiromo’s interview, to be tied to the piece from [Harris Faulkner’s ]town hall.”
Baier went on to play the intended clip for his audience, though Harris was still able to get her point across the previous night despite the misleading edit.
“You and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people,” the vice president said on Wednesday. “In a democracy, the president of the United States, in the United States of America, should be willing to be able to handle criticism without saying he would lock people up for doing it.”
Even the New York Times is noticing DonOld’s crazy demeanor and speech these days. “Trump’s Meandering Speeches Motivate His Critics and Worry His Allies. Some advisers and allies of former President Donald J. Trump are concerned about his scattershot style on the campaign trail as he continues to veer off script.” This is reported by Michael C. Bender.
Now, some Trump advisers and allies say privately they are concerned that the dynamic may be repeating itself four years later. They worry that Mr. Trump’s impetuousness and scattershot style on the campaign trail needlessly risk victory in battleground states where the margin for error is increasingly narrow.
At a time when his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, has stepped up her attacks on him as “unstable,” Mr. Trump has struggled to publicly hone his message by veering off script and ramping up personal attacks on Ms. Harris that allies have urged him to rein in.
“When he’s good, he’s great, and when he’s off message, he’s not so great,” said David Urban, a Trump adviser. “I don’t think anyone is really changing their mind at this point, but when he distracts from his biggest, broadest messaging, it’s counterproductive because the Harris campaign uses it to turn out their voters.”
During a speech on Saturday in California, he described mail-in ballots as “so corrupt,” reviving one of his false attacks on the 2020 election results, and did a play-by-play of his internal thoughts when he watched SpaceX, Elon Musk’s spaceflight company, fly a rocket back onto its launch site.
On Sunday, in response to a question on Fox News about the possibility of foreign adversaries’ meddling in the election, he reverted to autocratic language by saying “the bigger problem is the enemy from within.” On Monday, he halted a town-hall event in suburban Philadelphia after five questions when two people in the crowd needed medical attention. He spent roughly the next half-hour playing D.J., swaying and grooving in front of his crowd to a playlist he curated from the stage. “Let’s just listen to music,” he said.
Last week, he canceled a CBS interview on “60 Minutes,” in which he and Ms. Harris were both scheduled to appear — and has not stopped talking about it. He complained about it during events in Detroit and Reno, Nev., and again on Monday in a social media post at 1:12 a.m.
All of this makes me wonder if he doesn’t care about winning or if he’s just relying on a country-wide repeat J6 event and his cronies planted in positions to disrupt the voting process in many states. It might be he has other things on his rapidly disintegrating mind. Just a few hours ago, Judge Tanya Chutkin, keeper of the American Way and the U.S. Constitution, allowed the Special Counsel to open up the floodgates of evidence. This is from CNN. “Special counsel releases trove of redacted documents in 2020 election subversion case against Trump.” October Surprise, perhaps? Care to Dance in the Moonlight with me?
Special counsel Jack Smith on Friday released a massive trove of heavily redacted documents in his 2020 election subversion criminal case against former President Donald Trump.
There are nearly 2,000 pages in a massive trove of documents released Friday, but nearly all of the pages appear to be completely redacted.
The redacted appendices filed on the public docket in the case are related to Smith’s expansive filing from earlier this month that laid out his fullest picture yet of the case against Trump and Smith’s belief that his actions around the 2020 election should not be shielded by presidential immunity.
One volume is filled with sealed pages as well as tweets and other social media posts from Trump, his campaign and allies, including some posted during the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
One of the tweets include Trump’s post that day that Vice President Mike Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done” that day in supporting his effort to change the election results.
Others include a myriad of claims of voter fraud during the 2020 election.
Prosecutors have argued that these tweets from Trump should be allowed to be used in the trial because they were personal in nature or part of his campaigning efforts and not his official duties as president.
The documents were released a day after Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected a bid by Trump to pause the release. Trump argued that posting the documents now could be seen as election inference and had asked them to remain under seal until after Election Day.
“If the court withheld information that the public otherwise had a right to access solely because of the potential political consequences of releasing it, that withholding could itself constitute – or appear to be – election interference,” Chutkan wrote in a decision late Thursday.
Another volume contains memos from lawyer John Eastman with a plan for Pence to reject the congressional certification of the 2020 election. The volume also includes a public statement Trump released the night before January 6 claiming he and Pence were on the same page about the congressional certification, Trump’s prepared remarks for his speech on January 6, and fundraising emails sent out by his 2020 campaign in the days before January 6.
Pence’s letter to Congress on January 6 explaining why he could not reject certifying the election and a transcript of Trump’s 2023 CNN town hall are also included in the documents.
The redacted files were expected to include an array of materials, including grand jury transcripts and notes from FBI interviews conducted during the yearslong investigation.
This was a big news dump week. Hopefully, the death of Yahya Sinwar will lead to a peaceful conclusion to this latest Mid-Eastern War. I’m not sure that’s what Bibi wants, but I’m sure the return of the hostages and a ceasefire would be a good start to ending hostilities. This is from Reuters. “Yahya Sinwar threw stick at drone just before death, according to Israel video. “
Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was tracked by an Israeli mini drone as he lay dying in the ruins of a building in southern Gaza and filmed him slumped in a chair covered in dust, according to video released by Israeli authorities on Thursday.As the drone hovered nearby, the video showed him throwing a stick at it, in an apparent act of desperation or defiance. Not long afterwards, the military said, a tank shell was fired into the building.After an intensive manhunt that had lasted for more than a year, the Israeli troops that killed Sinwar were initially unaware that they had caught their country’s number one enemy after a gun battle on Wednesday, Israeli officials said.Dental records, fingerprints and DNA testing provided final confirmation of Sinwar’s death for Israel and on Friday, Hamas confirmed their leader had been killed.Intelligence services had been gradually restricting the area where Sinwar could operate, the military said. But unlike other militant leaders tracked down by Israel, including Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on July 13, the encounter which finally killed Sinwar was not a planned and targeted strike, or an operation carried out by elite commandos.
Wednesday Reads: If You’re Not Voting for Biden, You’re Voting for the End of Democracy. Period.
Posted: May 1, 2024 Filed under: abortion rights, democracy is threatened, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Surreality | Tags: "presidential immunity", concentration camps, deportations, immigration, mob violence, state monitoring of pregnanacies, Supreme Court, Time interview with Trump 6 CommentsGood Morning!!
Rene Magritte, The False Mirror, 1928
Yesterday, Time Magazine published an interview with Donald Trump. Why did he choose Time to reveal his plans for rescinding the Constitution if he is elected in November? I’d guess it’s because he wanted another Time cover to add to his collection. He’s a demented old man who doesn’t realize that Time long ago became fairly irrelevant. But they certainly got the attention of the the political world yesterday. Trump spelled out his plans for 2025 and beyond and they are horrifying.
I agree with this tweet that Aaron Rupar posted after reading the article:
I increasingly believe this election will be a referendum on whether anything matters anymore. There’s no rational case for Trump, but there’s a loud contingent on the left that just wants to burn it down. Combine that with low information voters and Republicans circling the wagons around their guy, and you have the outlines of a calamity. Hopefully people wake up.
Here’s the Time interview, followed by commentary from other publications. I’ve cut out the author’s cutesy commentary and just included Trump’s plans.
Eric Cortellessa at Time: How Far Trump Would Go.
Six months from the 2024 presidential election, Trump is better positioned to win the White House than at any point in either of his previous campaigns. He leads Joe Biden by slim margins in most polls, including in several of the seven swing states likely to determine the outcome. But I had not come to ask about the election, the disgrace that followed the last one, or how he has become the first former—and perhaps future—American President to face a criminal trial. I wanted to know what Trump would do if he wins a second term, to hear his vision for the nation, in his own words.
What emerged in two interviews with Trump, and conversations with more than a dozen of his closest advisers and confidants, were the outlines of an imperial presidency that would reshape America and its role in the world. To carry out a deportation operation designed to remove more than 11 million people from the country, Trump told me, he would be willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military, both at the border and inland. He would let red states monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans. He would, at his personal discretion, withhold funds appropriated by Congress, according to top advisers. He would be willing to fire a U.S. Attorney who doesn’t carry out his order to prosecute someone, breaking with a tradition of independent law enforcement that dates from America’s founding. He is weighing pardons for every one of his supporters accused of attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, more than 800 of whom have pleaded guilty or been convicted by a jury. He might not come to the aid of an attacked ally in Europe or Asia if he felt that country wasn’t paying enough for its own defense. He would gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.
Trump remains the same guy, with the same goals and grievances. But in person, if anything, he appears more assertive and confident. “When I first got to Washington, I knew very few people,” he says. “I had to rely on people.” Now he is in charge. The arranged marriage with the timorous Republican Party stalwarts is over; the old guard is vanquished, and the people who remain are his people. Trump would enter a second term backed by a slew of policy shops staffed by loyalists who have drawn up detailed plans in service of his agenda, which would concentrate the powers of the state in the hands of a man whose appetite for power appears all but insatiable. “I don’t think it’s a big mystery what his agenda would be,” says his close adviser Kellyanne Conway. “But I think people will be surprised at the alacrity with which he will take action.” [….]
In a second term, Trump’s influence on American democracy would extend far beyond pardoning powers. Allies are laying the groundwork to restructure the presidency in line with a doctrine called the unitary executive theory, which holds that many of the constraints imposed on the White House by legislators and the courts should be swept away in favor of a more powerful Commander in Chief.
TV Man, by Michael Vincent Manalo
Nowhere would that power be more momentous than at the Department of Justice. Since the nation’s earliest days, Presidents have generally kept a respectful distance from Senate-confirmed law-enforcement officials to avoid exploiting for personal ends their enormous ability to curtail Americans’ freedoms. But Trump, burned in his first term by multiple investigations directed by his own appointees, is ever more vocal about imposing his will directly on the department and its far-flung investigators and prosecutors.
In our Mar-a-Lago interview, Trump says he might fire U.S. Attorneys who refuse his orders to prosecute someone: “It would depend on the situation.” He’s told supporters he would seek retribution against his enemies in a second term. Would that include Fani Willis, the Atlanta-area district attorney who charged him with election interference, or Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan DA in the Stormy Daniels case, who Trump has previously said should be prosecuted? Trump demurs but offers no promises. “No, I don’t want to do that,” he says, before adding, “We’re gonna look at a lot of things. What they’ve done is a terrible thing.”
Trump has also vowed to appoint a “real special prosecutor” to go after Biden. “I wouldn’t want to hurt Biden,” he tells me. “I have too much respect for the office.” Seconds later, though, he suggests Biden’s fate may be tied to an upcoming Supreme Court ruling on whether Presidents can face criminal prosecution for acts committed in office. “If they said that a President doesn’t get immunity,” says Trump, “then Biden, I am sure, will be prosecuted for all of his crimes.” (Biden has not been charged with any, and a House Republican effort to impeach him has failed to unearth evidence of any crimes or misdemeanors, high or low.)
On his goal of mass deportation of immigrants:
Trump’s radical designs for presidential power would be felt throughout the country. A main focus is the southern border. Trump says he plans to sign orders to reinstall many of the same policies from his first term, such as the Remain in Mexico program, which requires that non-Mexican asylum seekers be sent south of the border until their court dates, and Title 42, which allows border officials to expel migrants without letting them apply for asylum. Advisers say he plans to cite record border crossings and fentanyl- and child-trafficking as justification for reimposing the emergency measures. He would direct federal funding to resume construction of the border wall, likely by allocating money from the military budget without congressional approval. The capstone of this program, advisers say, would be a massive deportation operation that would target millions of people. Trump made similar pledges in his first term, but says he plans to be more aggressive in a second. “People need to be deported,” says Tom Homan, a top Trump adviser and former acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “No one should be off the table.”
For an operation of that scale, Trump says he would rely mostly on the National Guard to round up and remove undocumented migrants throughout the country. “If they weren’t able to, then I’d use [other parts of] the military,” he says. When I ask if that means he would override the Posse Comitatus Act—an 1878 law that prohibits the use of military force on civilians—Trump seems unmoved by the weight of the statute. “Well, these aren’t civilians,” he says. “These are people that aren’t legally in our country.” He would also seek help from local police and says he would deny funding for jurisdictions that decline to adopt his policies. “There’s a possibility that some won’t want to participate,” Trump says, “and they won’t partake in the riches.”
Helen Lundeberg, Biological Fantasy, 1946
On Abortion:
As President, Trump nominated three Supreme Court Justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, and he claims credit for his role in ending a constitutional right to an abortion. At the same time, he has sought to defuse a potent campaign issue for the Democrats by saying he wouldn’t sign a federal ban. In our interview at Mar-a-Lago, he declines to commit to vetoing any additional federal restrictions if they came to his desk. More than 20 states now have full or partial abortion bans, and Trump says those policies should be left to the states to do what they want, including monitoring women’s pregnancies. “I think they might do that,” he says. When I ask whether he would be comfortable with states prosecuting women for having abortions beyond the point the laws permit, he says, “It’s irrelevant whether I’m comfortable or not. It’s totally irrelevant, because the states are going to make those decisions.” President Biden has said he would fight state anti-abortion measures in court and with regulation.
Trump’s allies don’t plan to be passive on abortion if he returns to power. The Heritage Foundation has called for enforcement of a 19th century statute that would outlaw the mailing of abortion pills. The Republican Study Committee (RSC), which includes more than 80% of the House GOP conference, included in its 2025 budget proposal the Life at Conception Act, which says the right to life extends to “the moment of fertilization.” I ask Trump if he would veto that bill if it came to his desk. “I don’t have to do anything about vetoes,” Trump says, “because we now have it back in the states.”
There’s much more at the Time Magazine link.
Two brief commentaries from TNR:
Elie Quinland Houghtaling at The New Republic: Trump Hints Another January 6 Could Happen If He Loses the Election.
Donald Trump hasn’t quite let go of the possibility of utilizing mob violence if he loses the next election.
In a sprawling interview for Time magazine, Trump hinted that leveraging political violence to achieve his end goals was still on the table.
“If we don’t win, you know, it depends,” he told Time. “It always depends on the fairness of the election.”
And from Trump’s perspective, that’s winning rhetoric. According to him, his incendiary comments supporting a mob mentality, his early warnings of forthcoming abuses of power, and his threats to be a dictator on “day one” are only inching him closer to the White House. “I think a lot of people like it,” Trump told Time….
Meanwhile, the trial that will determine Trump’s level of involvement on the day that his followers actually attempted to overthrow Congress’s certification of the 2020 vote has been indefinitely waylaid by the former president’s claim of presidential immunity. The Supreme Court heard arguments for that case last week. It is currently unclear how the justices will decide the case, though they are expected to issue an opinion sometime between the end of June and early July.
Also from TNR, by Hafiz Rashid: If This Trump Warning on 2024 Doesn’t Scare You, You’re Sleepwalking. Donald Trump is warning that 2024 could be America’s “last election.”
If you ask Donald Trump, the election could determine the fate of the United States itself.
“If we don’t win on November 5, I think our country is going to cease to exist. It could be the last election we ever have. I actually mean that,” the former president said at a campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Tuesday.
JeeYoung Lee, Panic Room, 2010
In fact, looking at Trump’s plans for a potential second term, it’s more likely that the opposite is true. He has claimed that he wants to be a dictator, but only on “day one,” and plans to install his legal allies at all levels of government. And his Cabinet? It’s sure to be full of ideologues, immigration hard-liners, and outright fascists. Even conservative judges claim he’ll shred the legal system.
But Trump’s remarks could also be a veiled threat that he should win, or else. The far right, from Trump down to militias, hate groups, and grassroots MAGA supporters, could react violently if the election doesn’t go in their favor.
As Brynn Tannehill wrote for The New Republic in March, “The election cycle either ends in chaos and violence, balkanization, or a descent into a modern theocratic fascist dystopia.” It might not be a stretch to suggest that Trump could plan another January 6–type event if he loses. After all, only months prior to the Capitol insurrection, he urged the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” on a debate stage.
Molly Olmstead at Slate: The Most Alarming Answer From Trump’s Interview With Time.
On April 12, former President Donald Trump sat for an interview with Time. That interview, which ran with some follow-up questions from this past Saturday, was published on Tuesday, and it included a number of alarming tidbits from Trump, many of which reaffirmed his earlier extreme positions or took them further.
But perhaps the most shocking response dealt with a hypothetical posed by the reporter, Eric Cortellessa. Relatively early in the conversation, Cortellessa pushed Trump to take a stance on a federal abortion ban. Trump refused, insisting that his views on abortion did not matter—that he was leaving it up to the states to decide, and that was that. Even as Cortellessa insisted that it was “important to voters” to know where he stands, Trump didn’t budge, even when asked how he felt about women being punished for having abortions. Cortellessa then raised the prospect of a surveillance state keeping tabs on women and their reproductive systems:
Cortellessa: Do you think states should monitor women’s pregnancies so they can know if they’ve gotten an abortion after the ban?
Trump: I think they might do that. Again, you’ll have to speak to the individual states. Look, Roe v. Wade was all about bringing it back to the states.
Trump’s refusal to take a stance on such a sinister possibility shows he remains just as concerned about disappointing his white evangelical base as he is about alienating more moderate voters. But he may have underestimated just how radical this nonstance really was, and just how unsettling it may seem to voters.
That ended up being a theme of the more than hourlong interview: Trump dodged so many questions by railing about his victimhood, boasting about his victories, or just straight-out lying, but when he did give a direct response, it showed a man who had learned no lessons from his 2020 loss or his ongoing legal challenges. The Trump of the interview was just as extreme as ever.
Read the rest at Slate.
Ed Pilkington at The Guardian: Trump threatens to prosecute Bidens if he’s re-elected unless he gets immunity.
Donald Trump has warned that Joe Biden and his family could face multiple criminal prosecutions once he leaves office unless the US supreme court awards Trump immunity in his own legal battles with the criminal justice system.
In a sweeping interview with Time magazine, Trump painted a startling picture of his second term, from how he would wield the justice department to hinting he may let states monitor pregnant women to enforce abortion laws….
Portrait of the Late Mrs. Partridge, by Leonora Carrington
Trump made a direct connection between his threat to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Bidens should he win re-election in November with the case currently before the supreme court over his own presidential immunity.
Asked whether he intends to “go after” the Bidens should he gain a second term in the White House, Trump replied: “It depends what happens with the supreme court.”
If the nine justices on the top court – three of whom were appointed by Trump – fail to award him immunity from prosecution, Trump said, “then Biden I am sure will be prosecuted for all of his crimes, because he’s committed many crimes”.
Trump and his Republican backers have long attempted to link Biden to criminal wrongdoing relating to the business affairs of his son Hunter Biden, without unearthing any substantial evidence. Last June, in remarks made at his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, Trump threatened to appoint a special prosecutor were he re-elected “to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family”. [….]
Several of Trump’s comments in the Time interview will ring alarm bells among those concerned with the former president’s increasingly totalitarian bent.
Trump’s remarks raise the specter that, were he granted a second presidential term, he would weaponize the justice department to seek revenge against the Democratic rival who defeated him in 2020.
Despite the violence that erupted on 6 January 2021 at the US Capitol after he refused to accept defeat in the 2020 election, which is the subject of one of two federal prosecutions he is fighting, Trump also declined to promise a peaceful transfer of power should he lose again in November.
Asked by Cortellessa whether there would be political violence should Trump fail to win, he replied: “If we don’t win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election.”
Pouring yet more gasoline on to the fire, Trump not only repeated his falsehood that the 2020 election had been stolen from him, but said he would be unlikely to appoint anyone to a second Trump administration who believed Biden had legitimately prevailed four years ago. “I wouldn’t feel good about it, because I think anybody that doesn’t see that that election was stolen – you look at the proof,” he said.
Philip Bump at The Washington Post: Trump won’t say what he plans to do as president.
The cover story of Time magazine is presented as definitive.
“If he wins,” it states over a picture of former president Donald Trump sitting on a stool. The story from reporter Eric Cortellessa bears the headline, “How far Trump would go,” and interweaves quotes from a lengthy interview Trump granted Cortellessa with the reporter’s assessments of what it tells us about a potential second Trump term.
Max Ernst, The Barbarians
But as is often the case, a lot of what Trump is reported as planning to do is constructed from murky, noncommittal answers Trump offered to specific questions. The interview is very revealing about Trump’s approach to the position in that it strongly suggests he hasn’t thought much about important issues, and makes clear how relentlessly he relies on rhetoric to derail questions.
The interview is not revealing about what Trump is firmly committed to doing. But that’s revealing in its own way: It makes it obvious that a second term, like the first, would see policy and executive actions driven by whomever is around Trump. And Trump is clearly committed to having around him only people who share his political worldview.
Before we list the firm policy commitments Trump offered to Cortellessa, which won’t take long, it’s useful to point out all the revealing comments Trump made simply by being given the space to talk.
For example, when asked whether he would use the military to help deport immigrants despite prohibitions against deploying the military against civilians, Trump told Cortellessa that “these aren’t civilians.” He claimed they were, instead, part of an “invasion,” rhetoric he’s used before. This is false — but revealing about Trump’s potential willingness to use force as part of a deportation effort.
I don’t know about this. I thought Trump made his plans pretty clear–especially because we can base our interpretations on what he has already done. But you can read more at the WaPo link.
Nicholas Nehamas and Reid J. Epstein at The New York Times: Biden and Democrats Seize on Trump’s Striking Interview.
The Biden campaign is mounting a concerted push to attack former President Donald J. Trump over statements he made to Time magazine in a wide-ranging interview published Tuesday morning, particularly on abortion.
In the interview, Mr. Trump refused to commit to vetoing a national abortion ban and said he would allow states to monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violated abortion restrictions.
“This is reprehensible,” President Biden wrote on X. “Donald Trump doesn’t trust women. I do.”
Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Mr. Biden’s campaign manager, said in a statement that Mr. Trump would “sign a national abortion ban, allow women who have an abortion to be prosecuted and punished, allow the government to invade women’s privacy to monitor their pregnancies and put I.V.F. and contraception in jeopardy nationwide.”
Abortion has become a winning issue for Democrats, and Mr. Biden has argued that Mr. Trump and Republicans will continue to erode abortion rights. He and Vice President Kamala Harris have campaigned heavily on the issue in battleground states, and Democrats hope that state ballot initiatives to protect abortion rights will help their candidates for president, Congress and state offices. Their messaging has sought to pin state abortion bans directly on Mr. Trump, whose appointees to the Supreme Court helped overturn Roe v. Wade….
The former president also told Time that he would deploy the U.S. military to detain and deport migrants, and did not dismiss the possibility of political violence should he lose the election.
Democrats highlighted some of those statements as well.
“Donald Trump’s repeated threats of political violence are as horrifying and dangerous as they are un-American,” said Alex Floyd, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee. “Trump is hellbent on threatening our democracy, win or lose.”
Hillary Clinton urged her followers on X to read about Mr. Trump’s plans for a second term and “take them seriously.”
That’s all I have today. I truly believe that our democracy is hanging in the balance. Whatever you think of Joe Biden, he has generally been a good president. Trump was a disaster last time, and if he wins again, it will be be far worse–beyond anything we can imagine.
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: August 5, 2023 Filed under: cat art, Cats, caturday, Criminal Justice System, democracy is threatened, Donald Trump, just because | Tags: cult psychology, Department of Justice, Judge Tanya Chutken, Special Counsel Jack Smith, Trump threats 7 Comments
Bazon, the artist’s cat, by Odilon Redon
Happy Caturday!!
Donald Trump has now been indicted three times, and there could be a fourth indictment coming soon in Georgia. Trump was arraigned for his conspiracies to overturn the 2020 election on Thursday.
At the end of that hearing, U.S. Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya warned him not to commit further crimes by attempting to influence witnesses with threats or bribes.
Trump swore he would follow instructions, but a little later he reneged.
One day later, Trump issued a threat on Truth Social, writing in all-caps ““IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”
From Joyce Vance at Civil Discourse: “If you go after me…”
Today, Donald Trump issued what can only be construed as a shot across the bow, after the Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya admonished him during arraignment yesterday that he must not commit any new crimes while on a pre-trial bond—the thing that’s keeping him out of jail before trial—and that efforts to influence or intimidate witnesses, jurors or others involved in the case were illegal….
It couldn’t be more clear that this is a threat to Jack Smith and the prosecutors and investigators involved in the case against him. It’s readily construed as a threat against state court prosecutors like Alvin Bragg in New York and Fani Willis in Georgia and could even be seen as a threat to people like E. Jean Carroll who have the temerity to hold him accountable for civil misconduct.
That’s a threat, made by a defendant in a criminal case, after being warned by a judge that there were consequences for violating conditions of release. Trump may think he can be cute and deny it if confronted. Maybe he’ll use his usual line: it’s just a joke. But we can all see it for what it is.
Girl with Cat, by Berthe Morisot, 1892
The special counsel’s office alerted the Judge to the post tonight, as part of its motion seeking a protective order for the discovery materials it will be releasing to Trump in the case.The government wants assurances, in the form of a protective order, that Trump won’t make the discovery materials public.
There is good reason for this. Some of the discovery contains personal identifying information for witnesses. If publicly disclosed, that could put them at risk of doxxing, identity theft or other harm. There is also grand jury testimony from witnesses, who might be put at risk if they find themselves suddenly in the public spotlight. As the government explains in its motion, “If the defendant were to begin issuing public posts using details—or, for example, grand jury transcripts—obtained in discovery here, it could have a harmful chilling effect on witnesses or adversely affect the fair administration of justice in this case.”
Prosecutors haven’t asked the court, at least not yet, to revoke Trump’s bond. That, of course, would be a step that would trigger prolonged litigation and possibly delay the trial. That seems to be the one thing Jack Smith is trying to avoid at all costs. He has made strategic decisions, for instance, only indicting Trump and leaving the co-conspirators unindicted, that streamline the process. He clearly wants his trial before the election.
Trump continued his threatening behavior during a speech in Alabama last night.
Alander Rocha at the Alabama Reflector (via MSN.com): Trump lashes out at prosecutors, Biden and DeSantis in Alabama speech.
Former President Donald Trump said in a speech in Montgomery Friday night that he wears his recent indictment on charges of attempting to subvert the 2020 presidential election as “a badge of honor.”
In a nearly-hourlong speech at a fundraising dinner for the Alabama Republican Party, Trump attacked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, his rival for the Republican nomination for president and President Joe Biden, who he accused of using the Department of Justice as a political weapon.
“They want to take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedoms. They want to silence me because I will never let them silence you,” Trump said.
Raminou, 1922, by Suzanne Valadon
The speech was the former president’s first extended public remarks since a federal grand jury Tuesday indicted the former president on four counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction of, and attempt to obstruct, an official proceeding; and conspiracy against rights….
In his speech Friday, Trump called U.S. Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith, who brought the indictment, “deranged.” At times he called prosecutors “communists” and “corrupt Marxist prosecutors.” He called the indictment “fake charges” that are an “outrageous criminalization of political speech,” even as he suggested it would help his presidential campaign.
“This is a ridiculous indictment against us — it’s not a legal case. It’s an act of desperation by a failed and disgraced crooked Joe Biden and his radical left thugs,” Trump said.
Trump also repeated election lies and claimed that Biden rigged the election in 2020 and suggested that the current president will interfere with the next election.
Also last night, federal prosecutors in the case called the judge’s attention to Trump’s threatening social media post and requested a protective order. Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein at Politico: Feds alert judge to Trump’s ‘If you go after me, I’m coming after you!’ post.
Prosecutors on Friday night called a judge’s attention to a social media post from Donald Trump — issued hours earlier — in which they say the former president appeared to declare that he’s “coming after” those he sees as responsible for the series of formidable legal challenges he is facing.
Attorneys from special counsel Jack Smith’s team said the post from Trump “specifically or by implication” referenced those involved in his criminal case for seeking to subvert the 2020 election.
In a court filing just before 10 p.m. Friday, Senior Assistant Special Counsels Molly Gaston and Thomas Windom alerted the judge in Trump’s latest criminal case — U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan — to a combative post Trump sent earlier in the day.
“If you go after me, I’m coming after you!” Trump wrote in all caps Friday afternoon on Truth Social, which is run by a media company he co-owns.
Cat with her Kittens (1913) by Julius Adam
The prosecutors said Trump’s post raised concerns that he might improperly share evidence in the case on his social media account and they urged that he be ordered to keep any evidence prosecutors turn over to his defense team from public view.
“All the proposed order seeks to prevent is the improper dissemination or use of discovery materials, including to the public,” Gaston and Windom wrote. “Such a restriction is particularly important in this case because the defendant has previously issued public statements on social media regarding witnesses, judges, attorneys, and others associated with legal matters pending against him. … And in recent days, regarding this case, the defendant has issued multiple posts—either specifically or by implication—including the following, which the defendant posted just hours ago.”
Smith’s office has not sought a gag order in either of the criminal cases it is pursuing against Trump: one in Florida focused on his retention of classified documents and the other in Washington over his efforts to interfere with the certification of the 2020 presidential election. The filing Friday night does not make any request to bar Trump or his attorneys from discussing the D.C. case publicly or with the media.
However, prosecutors in that case have indicated they’re prepared to share a “substantial“ volume of evidence with Trump as soon as Chutkan approves an order governing the handling of evidence. Chutkan is slated to bring attorneys for both sides to court on Aug. 28 to discuss setting a trial date. It’s unclear if Trump’s post will prompt her to seek more immediate efforts to implement a protective order or to impose a gag order, which can be issued under D.C. federal court rules.
Trump then got an anonymous “spokesperson” to put up a mealy-mouthed excuse for the threatening post.
https://twitter.com/BrianKarem/status/1687685417154342912?s=20
The Judge in the January 6 case, Tanya Chutken has ordered Trump to respond to the prosecutors’ request for a protective order:
Of the historic day when a former president was charged with serious crimes against the United States, CNN’s Stephen Collinson wrote this analysis: Trump’s surreal arraignment day in Washington augurs ominous days ahead.
As former President Donald Trump left Washington after answering charges of trying to subvert democracy, it felt like all the previous trauma and divisions of his eight-year journey into the nation’s psyche were just the start.
America now faces the prospect of an ex-president repeatedly going on trial in an election year in which he’s the Republican front-runner and is promising a new White House term of retribution. He is responding with the same kind of extreme rhetoric that injected fury into his political base and erupted into violence after the last election. Ominous and tense days may be ahead….
The entire day was surreal, but given its historic implications – after Trump became the first ex-president formally charged in relation to alleged crimes committed in office – also sad.
Thursday was a day when the country crossed a point of no return. For the first time, the United States formally charged one of its past leaders with trying to subvert its core political system and values.
It was Trump who forced the country over this dangerous threshold. A man whose life’s creed is to never be seen as a loser refused to accept defeat in a democratic election in 2020, then set off on a disastrous course because, as Smith’s indictment put it, “he was determined to stay in power.”
Trump is steering a stormy course to an unknown destination. If he wins back the White House, the already twice-impeached new president could trigger a new constitutional crisis by sweeping away the federal cases against him or even by pardoning himself. Any alternative Republican president could find themselves besieged by demands from Trump supporters for a pardon that, if granted, could overshadow their entire presidency. And if Trump is convicted, and loses a 2024 general election, he risks a long jail term, which would likely become fuel for him to incite his supporters to fresh protest.
Conservative legal scholar J. Michael Luttig tweeted after Trump’s latest indictment on Tuesday that it was a day made “all the more tragic and regrettable because the former president has cynically chosen to inflict this embarrassing spectacle on the Nation – and spectacle it will be.” Luttig warned that the world would no longer consider American democracy to be the same inspiration as it has been for almost 250 years.
Read the rest at CNN.
At The New York Times, Charlie Savage writes: How Jack Smith Structured the Trump Election Indictment to Reduce Risks.
In accusing former President Donald J. Trump of conspiring to subvert American democracy, the special counsel, Jack Smith, charged the same story three different ways. The charges are novel applications of criminal laws to unprecedented circumstances, heightening legal risks, but Mr. Smith’s tactic gives him multiple paths in obtaining and upholding a guilty verdict.
“Especially in a case like this, you want to have multiple charges that are applicable or provable with the same evidence, so that if on appeal you lose one, you still have the conviction,” said Julie O’Sullivan, a Georgetown University law professor and former federal prosecutor.
Study of Cats Flowers and Woman-1910-14, by Odilon-Redon
That structure in the indictment is only one of several strategic choices by Mr. Smith — including what facts and potential charges he chose to include or omit — that may foreshadow and shape how an eventual trial of Mr. Trump will play out.
The four charges rely on three criminal statutes: a count of conspiring to defraud the government, another of conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and two counts related to corruptly obstructing a congressional proceeding. Applying each to Mr. Trump’s actions raises various complexities, according to a range of criminal law experts.
At the same time, the indictment hints at how Mr. Smith is trying to sidestep legal pitfalls and potential defenses. He began with an unusual preamble that reads like an opening statement at trial, acknowledging that Mr. Trump had a right to challenge the election results in court and even to lie about them, but drawing a distinction with the defendant’s pursuit of “unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results.”
While the indictment is sprawling in laying out a case against Mr. Trump, it brings a selective lens on the multifaceted efforts by the former president and his associates to overturn the 2020 election.
“The strength of the indictment is that it is very narrowly written,” said Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., a Harvard Law School professor and former public defender. “The government is not attempting to prove too much, but rather it went for low-hanging fruit.”
For one, Mr. Smith said little about the violent events of Jan. 6, leaving out vast amounts of evidence in the report by a House committee that separately investigated the matter. He focused more on a brazen plan to recruit false slates of electors from swing states and a pressure campaign on Vice President Mike Pence to block the congressional certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.
Read the rest at the NYT. It’s interesting, and Savage is a serious writer–not a both-sideser.
One more by neuroscientist Seth Norrholm at Raw Story:
I was dying…It was just a matter of time. Lying behind the wheel of the airplane, bleeding out of the right side of my devastated body, I waited for the rapid shooting to stop.
—Former Representative Jackie Speier in her memoir Undaunted: Surviving Jonestown, Summoning Courage, and Fighting Back recounting her experience after being shot five times during an ambush during her fact-finding visit to Jonestown, Guyana where Jim Jones and his cult, Peoples Temple, had built a compound.
It, combined with everything else that was going on, made it difficult to breathe…Being crushed by the shield and the people behind it … leaving me defenseless, injured.
—Metropolitan police officer, Daniel Hodges, describing being crushed in a doorway during the January 6, 2021, attack by Trump supporters on the U.S. Capitol.
Horatio Henry Couldery, Curiosity
In both of the examples above, the individual speaking was the victim of extreme violence perpetrated by followers of a single person whose influence had spread to hundreds of people (in the January 6th case, thousands of people). In fact, Speier’s experience with the Jim Jones followers was part of the single greatest loss of American life (918 people) prior to 9/11/2001. These followings have been given an umbrella name, cult, and have involved what has been traditionally called “brainwashing.” The cult leader receives seemingly undying support as the Dear Leader or Savior. However, the term brainwashing suggests that indoctrinated members are robots without free will – behavioral scientists argue that this is not the case. It’s an oversimplification.
Rather than being seen as passive victims to an irresistible force, psychiatrist Robert Lifton argues that there is “voluntary self-surrender” in one’s entrance into a cult. Further, the decision to give up control as part of the cult process may actually be part of the reason why people join. Research and experience tell us that those who are “cult vulnerable” may have a sense of confusion or separation from society or seek the same sort of highly controlled environment that was part of their childhood. It has also been suggested that those who are at risk for cult membership feel an enormous lack of control in the face of uncertainty (i.e., economic, occupational, academic, social, familial) and will gravitate more towards a cult as their distress increases. I would argue that many of these factors are at play when we see the ongoing support of Trumpism and MAGA “theology.”
Psychologist Leon Festinger described the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance in which there is a disconnect between one’s feelings, beliefs, and convictions and their observable actions. This dissonance is distressing and, in order to relieve the anxiety, people may become more invested in the cult or belief system that goes against who they are individually. As such, cult members become more “dug-in” and will cling to thoughts and beliefs that contradict available evidence. In other words, they are no longer able to find a middle ground or compromise.
Norrholm argues that the Trump cult has changed our politics drastically–that there is no longer a “middle ground” between Republicans and Democrats/Independents.
Although members of the GOP still refer to themselves as a political party with principled stances, the reality is they have now morphed into a domestic terror organization and to use the umbrella term, a cult – the largest and most dangerous cult in American history.
Cult thinking includes ardent adherence to group thinking such as – clinically speaking, in the face of distorted thinking we ask about one’s strength of conviction by querying, ”Can you think of other ways of seeing this?” Sadly, what we are seeing publicly is ‘No’ from those who still subscribe to Trumpism/MAGA.
Read the rest at Raw Story. Norrholm really knows what he’s talking about.
What is happening in this country is really frightening, but I continue to believe that we will get through this somehow.
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