Month: August 2018

Got patriotism?

by digby

Congressman Duncan Hunter is an ass, always has been. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that he’s also an embezzler. But he has been trading on “honor” and “sacrifice” his entire career, just as his father did. An they do it because they are representing San Diego which is heavily military and they respond to patriotism

Let’s see just how sincere that ever was:

.@Rep_Hunter’s behavior is UNETHICAL. ILLEGAL. EMBARRASSING.

That’s why @GOP @SpeakerRyan removed Hunter from committee assignments. It’s over.

I’m running an honest, fair & transparent campaign. Voters deserve a lawmaker, not a lawbreaker.

Time to put country over party. pic.twitter.com/zlCpVE9c9M— Ammar Campa (@ACampaNajjar) August 30, 2018

This isn’t the Trump evangelical base. It’s the military. I’ll be curious to see just how their patriotism manifest itself in this instance.

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At what point do they start to seriously question his mental health?

by digby

What’s going on at @CNN is happening, to different degrees, at other networks – with @NBCNews being the worst. The good news is that Andy Lack(y) is about to be fired(?) for incompetence, and much worse. When Lester Holt got caught fudging my tape on Russia, they were hurt badly!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 30, 2018

Does he really believe that NBC “fudged” his interview with Holt? Or is it a purely cynical comment meant to get his devoted base to prove their loyalty one more time by finally abandoning all attachment to reality?

I don’t know. But we do know that he’s also said to people privately that the Access Hollywood tape wasn’t really him so this looney assertion is not a one-off. The question is just what kind of mental problem it represents.

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More poisonous vipers

by digby

It looks like The Trumps are attempting to all family business.  I posted yesterday about Javanka stabbing McGahn in the back. Apparently they’re pushing the latest attacks on Sessions too:

The willingness of Republican senators to turn on Attorney General Jeff Sessions is the result of a furious lobbying campaign from President Donald Trump, who for the past 10 days has been venting his anger at Sessions to “any senator who will listen,” according to one GOP Senate aide.

The president, who has spent a year and a half fulminating against his attorney general in public, finally got traction on Capitol Hill thanks to the growing frustration of a handful of GOP senators with their former colleague — most importantly, Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley and South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, who have been irritated by Sessions’ opposition to a criminal justice reform bill they support.

Trump raised the prospect of firing Sessions last week in a phone conversation with Graham, according to two Capitol Hill aides, who said that Graham pressed the president to hold off until after the midterm elections. The president has also complained loudly about Sessions to several Republican senators, according to a GOP chief staff.

Grassley has not gotten a call from the White House, according to a Republican familiar with events.

Trump hasn’t been pushing his case just with Republican senators: He’s worn down his lawyers, too, according to two Republicans close to the White House. Though they once cautioned him that dismissing Sessions would feed special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump’s potential obstruction of justice, these people say, Trump’s legal team has become increasingly convinced Mueller will make that case regardless of whether the president fires Sessions or leaves him in place.
[…]
Seized by paroxysms of anger, Trump has intermittently pushed to fire his attorney general since March 2017, when Sessions announced his recusal from the Russia investigation. If Sessions’ recusal was his original sin, Trump has come to resent him for other reasons, griping to aides and lawmakers that the attorney general doesn’t have the Ivy League pedigree the president prefers, that he can’t stand his Southern accent and that Sessions isn’t a capable defender of the president on television — in part because he “talks like he has marbles in his mouth,” the president has told aides.

Gosh, I remember when something like that would be considered a high crime for any politician. I guess it’s cool to make fun of southern accents now. Who’ll tell Lindsey Graham?

The impetus for Trump’s latest push, according to two White House aides, was the dual convictions last week of his longtime lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen and his former campaign manager Paul Manafort — outgrowths of the Russia probe, for which the president pointed the finger at Sessions. Trump fumed on Fox News that Sessions “never took control of the Justice Department” and that “the only reason I gave him the job is because I felt loyalty.”

Top Senate Republicans see their job, in part, as blocking Trump’s worst moves, several senators said this week. Firing Sessions at this time, or moving against Mueller, fall into those categories.

Sessions maintains the critical support of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who told reporters Tuesday, “I have total confidence in the attorney general; I think he ought to stay exactly where he is.” McConnell’s No. 2, Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas), has joined Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) in making public statements of support for Sessions in recent days.

Over the past week, Trump has belittled Sessions in conversations with several Republican senators, including Graham, and the idea of dismissing him no longer provokes the political anxiety it once did. Graham told POLITICO last week that fears over the fate of the Mueller probe if Sessions goes are passé because of how far that investigation has already progressed.< Along with Graham and Grassley, Sessions has also alienated presidential son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, the chief White House proponent of the Graham-Grassley approach on criminal justice reform, as well as his wife, Ivanka Trump.

Yeah, sure. It’s all about Graham, Grassley and Javanka’s commitment to criminal justice reform.

Apparently Sessions did misrepresent the White House position on the subject at some point, but let’s get real. Graham is up to something else, no doubt about it.

Oh, and by the way, the Republicans have given up:

Even the Republican senators who have risen to Sessions’ defense have appeared to have put a time limit on their support. The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that five GOP lawmakers, including Cornyn and Sasse, had breakfast with Sessions last Thursday and urged him to stay in the job — at least through the midterm elections.

They are just so powerless to resist the Borgias.

Be vewy, vewy quiet, he’s hunting witches
by Tom Sullivan

The man whose smallish fingers cannot get through 24 hours without shouting “Witch Hunt!” into his insecure phone is engaged in several. And now another one.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis last year issued a directive for additional background checks for non-citizen troops and extended the active duty time required before they were eligible to apply for naturalization. Applications dropped 65 percent.

Earlier this summer, news broke that the sitting president had tasked U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director L. Francis Cissna with tracking down and “denaturalizing” American citizens suspected of falsifying their citizenship applications.

In July, AP broke news that the Army had begun discharging foreign-born troops after promising them “expedited naturalization” for service. Those with expired visas now risk deportation.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has detained hundreds of U.S. citizens an average of 180 days, a Northwest University study found last August.

The Washington Post reports today the State Department is denying passports to Americans born along the Texas-Mexico border. Government officials question their citizenship based on suspicion that decades ago midwives may have falsified the birth documents of newborns:

The government alleges that from the 1950s through the 1990s, some midwives and physicians along the Texas-Mexico border provided U.S. birth certificates to babies who were actually born in Mexico. In a series of federal court cases in the 1990s, several birth attendants admitted to providing fraudulent documents.

Based on those suspicions, the State Department during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations denied passports to people who were delivered by midwives in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley. The use of midwives is a long-standing tradition in the region, in part because of the cost of hospital care.

The same midwives who provided fraudulent birth certificates also delivered thousands of babies legally in the United States. It has proved nearly impossible to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate documents, all of them officially issued by the state of Texas decades ago.

After an ACLU lawsuit settled in 2009, passport denials declined. Until now:

Attorneys say these cases, where the government’s doubts about an official birth certificate lead to immigration detention, are increasingly common. “I’ve had probably 20 people who have been sent to the detention center — U.S. citizens,” said Jaime Diez, an attorney in Brownsville.

Diez represents dozens of U.S. citizens who were denied their passports or had their passports suddenly revoked. Among them are soldiers and Border Patrol agents. In some cases, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have arrived at his clients’ homes without notice and taken passports away.

Other have had theirs confiscated at the border on reentering the United States, leaving them in “legal limbo.”

An immigration attorney cited in the Post story represents twin bothers in their 60s. They sought legal help after receiving a disturbing letter in the mail:

They had been scheduled for an appointment at the local U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office to provide proof that they were really born on American soil.

They had been U.S. citizens since their birth over six decades ago. They had no arrests or convictions. They had faithfully paid their taxes each year and owned homes. They were married with adult children.

They now faced possible deportation.

The problem?

They were born in a Texas border town with the assistance of a midwife.

After the death of gynecologist Jorge Treviño, celebrated for having delivered 15,000 babies in the border region, the government acquired “an affidavit from an unnamed Mexican doctor” alleging Treviño had provided at least one U.S. birth certificate for a child born in Mexico. Now those 15,000 and hundreds of others delivered by area midwives are under the Trump administration’s microscope.

Diez tells the Post hundreds in the region have had passports denied or revoked, almost all of them Hispanic.

The president’s lawyer asserts “truth isn’t truth.” His administration now denies the validity of official government records establishing the citizenship of Americans it disfavors. It requests from people like the twins obscure documentation — evidence of mothers’ prenatal care, baptismal certificates, rental agreements from when they were infants. And then rejects that. They themselves and thousands like them have done no wrong except be born in the wrong skin to the wrong parents.

It has happened here.

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For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

What a nest of vipers

by digby

Don McGahn had one job: stack the courts with extremist wingnuts. He’s been brilliant at that. Now he’s free to go cash in:

President Trump surprised Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, on Wednesday with an abrupt announcement that Mr. McGahn will be departing his post this fall, effectively forcing the long-anticipated exit of a top adviser who has cooperated extensively in the investigation into Russian election interference.

The president made the declaration on Twitter without first informing Mr. McGahn, according to people close to both men. It came 11 days after The New York Times reported the degree to which Mr. McGahn — who was by Mr. Trump’s side at major moments as the president sought to keep control over the Russia inquiry — has emerged as a key witness in the investigation. Mr. McGahn has cooperated extensively with prosecutors, who are scrutinizing whether the president tried to obstruct the investigation.
[…]
The president’s tweet was precipitated by a report on the  Axios website that Mr. McGahn planned to leave after Mr. Kavanaugh’s confirmation process concluded. Mr. Trump had grown tired of seeing reports that Mr. McGahn might leave, according to people familiar with his thinking, and decided to take away any wiggle room he might have.

But Mr. McGahn, who had been a frequent target of Mr. Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, believed the story was planted by his critics to force the president’s hand and hasten the timeline of announcing his departure.

Ms. Trump complained bitterly to her father about The Times report this month, which detailed how some in the White House were unaware of the extent of Mr. McGahn’s cooperation with Mr. Mueller, according to a person briefed on the discussion.

On Wednesday afternoon at the White House, Mr. Trump praised Mr. McGahn and said he had nothing to fear about what his counsel had told Mr. Mueller, even as he appeared to confirm he was not completely aware what that was.

“I don’t have to be aware,” Mr. Trump said. “We do everything straight. We do everything by the book. And Don is an excellent guy.”

Mr. Trump and his White House counsel had already grown distant, with the president bristling at being advised not to take actions that could draw legal scrutiny, and Mr. McGahn becoming increasingly weary of serving a client who often refused to listen to legal reasoning. Mr. McGahn had taken to telling people that a day without a single summons to the Oval Office was a good day, and he preferred to spend as much time as possible in his upstairs corner office in the West Wing next to the presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway — like him a New Jersey native — which they called the “New Jersey corner.”

The loss of Mr. McGahn will further whittle down the list of people in the West Wing who are willing to say no to Mr. Trump. Within the White House, Mr. McGahn was seen as the protector of presidential institutions and as a guardrail who was willing to tell the president when he should not take certain actions. Mr. McGahn was not afraid to fight the president and had several epic screaming matches with him over the months he worked in the White House.

Mr. Trump often griped that he wanted to get rid of Mr. McGahn, but the president never seemed willing to follow through and dismiss him. The president asked Rob Porter, then the staff secretary, several times last year if he would be willing to take over for Mr. McGahn, including after John F. Kelly became the chief of staff in July 2017. Mr. Porter told the president he did not believe that he was qualified for the role, those briefed on the discussions said, and he has since left the White House amid accusations of spousal abuse.

Mr. Trump often blamed Mr. McGahn for the cloud the special counsel’s investigation had cast over the White House. He said Mr. McGahn should have done more to stop Mr. Sessions from recusing himself from the investigation, the decision Mr. Trump believes allowed Mr. Mueller to be appointed in May 2017.

Still, despite his reputation for being brave enough to tell Mr. Trump no, there was one major event Mr. McGahn could not stop: the firing of the former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey. After failing to persuade Mr. Trump not to dismiss Mr. Comey, Mr. McGahn worked with Mr. Sessions and the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, to come up with a rationale for the dismissal. Eight days after Mr. Comey was fired, Mr. Mueller was appointed as the special counsel.

A lot of this is fed to the Times by McGahn himself who has been building his heroic image for a while. Nonetheless, it does seem that it was usual backstabbing that precipitated today’s presidential tweet. Trump does not trust him and believes he’s dangerous to him on the inside. Those 30 hours of interviews have to have him worried about just what he had to say. He was on the campaign, the transition and the White House. He’s seen it all.

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A little bit o’ Beto in my life

by digby

The Texas GOP is sending this around. They think it’s very clever:

Maybe Beto can’t debate Ted Cruz because he already had plans… pic.twitter.com/LdqKTh3yK4

— Texas GOP (@TexasGOP) August 28, 2018

There’s always the chance that Robert “Beto” O’Rourke won’t debate Senator Cruz because he got into a hazy situation… pic.twitter.com/4nmd42AEkl

— Texas GOP (@TexasGOP) August 29, 2018

From the comments, I see that most people assume this is a ploy by the GOP to get their old white voters out to vote. But there seems to be some confusion. Most old white voters are baby boomers these days.

Here’s what was going on when we were young:

This guy is even invited to the Trump White House:

I’m sure there are many old Trump loving white dudes and dudettes who will pretend that they are shocked by that loud rock and roll those kids are listening to these days but they are all liars. The people who felt that way are almost all dead now. Even if these Trump voters hated rock as young people it’s so much a part of their experience that any such display of horror at Beto being in a band is 100% prime bullshit.

By the way, I agree with this:

If I were @texasdemocrats I’d be tweeting the exact same pictures of Beto that @TexasGOP is but just change the captions to “hey girl” pic.twitter.com/rdcKnkvsRu

— Vote Matt Negrin for NY GOV to see Trump’s taxes (@MattNegrin) August 29, 2018

I don’t know why they are working so hard to make sure everyone knows just how hot Beto O’Rourke is but it’s probably because they are just that stupid.

Here’s his rival during his youth, by the way:

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The man watches TV all day long

by digby

How is it that the most powerful job in the world allows for this much TV watching? He watches more than I do and I’m a political blogger who does that for a living.

After watching Sean Hannity on Fox News, President Trump tweeted at Attorney General Jeff Sessions to investigate former rival Hillary Clinton. After listening to Tucker Carlson, he directed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to launch a study on bogus reports of murdered white farmers in South Africa.

And after Fox Business Network’s Lou Dobbs highlighted a questionable claim about Google search results, Trump took to Twitter early Tuesday to complain — prompting his top economic adviser to promise an investigation.

“We’re taking a look at it,” Larry Kudlow told reporters when asked whether the administration thinks Google searches should be regulated.

Cable television news hosts and commentators are among the first voices that Trump hears in the morning and the last he listens to at night. Now he is increasingly relying on those voices in making decisions — often running afoul of his actual advisers in the process.

Many of Trump’s Cabinet secretaries and senior advisers have a cable news shadow. Dobbs might be considered Trump’s television treasury secretary, Hannity his chief of staff and Carlson his secretary of state. Fox’s Jeanine Pirro serves as a de facto attorney general, railing against Sessions and the special counsel’s Russia probe, while regular Fox analyst Pete Hegseth was under consideration to be the actual secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Carlson said in an interview with The Washington Post that he doesn’t think about whether the president is watching his Fox show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” and that he was “really surprised” by Trump’s response to last week’s episode on white South African farmers.

President Trump speaks to members of the media before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House on Aug. 17, 2018. (Andrew Harnik/AP)
“The president tweeted it, and I had nothing to do with it,” Carlson said. “I’m glad he did, because I think the story deserves more attention than it has gotten in this country.”

That Trump reacts so frequently to what he sees on television, rather than what he is reading or being told by aides, underscores the outsize role that commentators and cable programming decisions play in Trump’s administration.

Among his other cable-fueled directives in recent weeks, Trump tweeted disapproval of Federal Reserve interest rate increases that echoed criticism leveled by Dobbs, a vocal Trump supporter. He has repeatedly attacked Sessions and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, citing cable figures such as Fox News Channel’s Gregg Jarrett.

This month, Trump ordered the revocation of John Brennan’s security clearance after the former CIA director said on MSNBC that remarks Trump made at his friendly Helsinki summit with Vladi­mir Putin were “nothing short of treasonous.” The president threatened to do the same to former intelligence officials and CNN analyst Philip Mudd, a former CIA official whose television commentary Trump called “unglued.”

Other presidents have received plenty of advice and ideas from outside the Cabinet Room. Nearly 200 years ago, President Andrew Jackson vexed critics by relying on a “kitchen cabinet” of informal advisers assembled after his purge of officials from the parlor, or official, Cabinet.

President-elect Donald Trump is interviewed by Chris Wallace of “Fox News Sunday” at Trump Tower in New York on Dec. 10, 2016. (Richard Drew/AP)
[From 2016: Donald Trump is holding a government casting call]

Trump’s 21st-century approach, by contrast, uses Twitter and the bully pulpit to amplify cable commentary that would otherwise reach only a small fraction of Americans.

Aides, in turn, try to influence the cable hosts who influence the president.

When Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin led a delegation to China in May, he announced on “Fox News Sunday” that the United States was “putting the trade war on hold.” But soon after, others in the delegation, including China hawk Peter Navarro, found an alternative audience with Dobbs to criticize Mnuchin’s message.

Then Dobbs’s criticisms were picked up on “Fox & Friends” the following day by host Brian Kilmeade. Before long, and on the basis of those media messages, the president made an abrupt change in policy, said an adviser who was not authorized to speak to the news media.

Stuart P. Stevens, a Republican political consultant and writer who was Mitt Romney’s senior strategist in the 2012 presidential election campaign, decried Trump’s reliance on the “insane feedback loop of Fox.”

“Here’s a guy who has access to the most sophisticated intelligence ever available, that cost billions to produce, that people have died for,” Stevens said. “And he’s relying for his information on something you can buy for like $2.98 a month with your cable subscription.”

One major risk for Trump is bad information — as illustrated in the recent flaps over South Africa and Google.

Yeah, I’d say so. But he can’t trust he Us Intelligence Community or the FBI. Only Fox and Friends, Sean, Tucker, Laura, Jeanine and Lou know what’s really going on.

Last night he was tweeting some nonsense about the Chinese hacking into Hillary Clinton’s email server and demanding that the FBI and the DOJ go after her. It was based on a Daily Caller article  that “reports” something nobody else has reported based on some wild charges from from Louis Gohmert months ago:

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Here, care of Rep. Louie Gohmert’s office, is the full chart he displayed at today’s House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing. pic.twitter.com/dPSHtGvwqK

— Chris Geidner (@chrisgeidner) November 14, 2017

It’s pathetic and lame but we can’t forget that the president of the United States is the most powerful man on earth.

All that’s left is the dogwhistle

by digby

Eric Boehlert:

Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) couldn’t even wait 24 hours after winning the Republican nomination for the Florida governor’s race before unfurling an insulting attack on his black opponent — an attack that was too far even for Fox News.

“Let’s build off the success we’ve had on Gov. [Rick] Scott. The last thing we need to do is to monkey this up by trying to embrace a socialist agenda with huge tax increases bankrupting the state,” DeSantis said of his Democratic opponent, Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum. Gillum is the firstAfrican-American to be nominated for governor in Florida.

DeSantis’ dog whistle was so loud, even Fox felt the need to distance itself from the Trump-backed nominee.

“We do not condone this language and wanted to make our viewers aware that he has since clarified his statement,” Fox News anchor Sandra Smith said later on air.

It’s quite a statement coming from the same outlet that helped fuel DeSantis’ primary campaign by giving him $9 million in free airtime.

Trump and the racist dogwhistle is all they have to run on. Unfortunately, it may be all they need.

DeSantis is going to be doing a lot of this, by the way. He’s actually a master at dogwhistling and ginning up the victimization of the poor, downtrodden white Trump voters who just can’t ever catch a break. He recently said this during the primary campaign:

“You look at this girl Ocasio-Cortez or whatever she is, I mean, she’s in a totally different universe,” DeSantis said, butchering her name. “It’s basically socialism wrapped in ignorance.”

Ain’t he sweet?

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My Salon column this morning:

One of the more trivial reasons to wish for the midterms to finally come is that we can finally put an end to the tiresome conversation about whether Democrats should talk about impeachment on the campaign trail. It’s been going on for months, even though it’s obvious most Democratic candidates are not running on that issue while Republicans have clearly stated they intend to use it to get the Trump-loving base to come out and vote. It couldn’t be more obvious how the two parties are approaching this, yet it continues to be a contentious point of discussion.

I’m on record going back nearly a year saying that despite my fervent desire to see it come to pass, I don’t see a path to removing Trump from office. I haven’t changed my mind. Even if the Democrats have a big sweep in November and take control of both houses of Congress, impeachment requires 67 senators to convict and I honestly wouldn’t expect more than a small handful of Republicans (if any) to vote for it no matter what he has done. The dynamic of appeasement and abetting is so set at this point that I can’t see that kind of shift happening.

Remember, we already know the president paid hush money to porn stars and Playboy models in violation of campaign finance laws, and Republicans don’t care. He’s refused to divest himself of his businesses and is clearly making money from the presidency, and they don’t care. He’s naively blowing up the nation’s alliances and kissing up to adversaries without the vaguest clue about what he’s doing, and they don’t care. He’s ruthlessly attacked the U.S. intelligence community and the Department of Justice, purely for self-serving reasons, and they don’t care. Most importantly, he is suspected of conspiring with a foreign government and they really don’t care. Indeed, most Republicans are going out of their way to help him cover it all up.

The Republicans have gone so far as to circulate a long (and growing) list of all the corruption and malfeasance they have failed to investigate as part of their oversight duties, claiming that the Democrats must be stopped before they actually do something about it. As Axios reported, the list “has churned Republican stomachs”:

Here are some of the probes it predicts:

• President Trump’s tax returns
• Trump family businesses — and whether they comply with the Constitution’s emoluments clause, including the Chinese trademark grant to the Trump Organization
• Trump’s dealings with Russia, including the president’s preparation for his meeting with Vladimir Putin
• The payment to Stephanie Clifford — a.k.a. Stormy Daniels
• James Comey’s firing
• Trump’s firing of U.S. attorneys
• Trump’s proposed transgender ban for the military
• Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s business dealings
• White House staff’s personal email use
• Cabinet secretary travel, office expenses, and other misused perks
• Discussion of classified information at Mar-a-Lago
• Jared Kushner’s ethics law compliance
• Dismissal of members of the EPA board of scientific counselors
• The travel ban
• Family separation policy
• Hurricane response in Puerto Rico
• Election security and hacking attempts
• White House security clearances

They’ll be adding the latest news that Trump personally intervened in the discussions regarding the construction of a new FBI building, which just happens to be across the street from the Trump International Hotel and about which the president has shown a bizarre fixation.

One would think that such an enormous list would automatically trigger impeachment hearings once the Republicans lose their majority. But the truth is that with the exception of the highly secretive Mueller probe, none of this has been properly investigated and investigations take time. Unfortunately, the minute this new Congress is sworn in we will be at the beginning of a new presidential campaign cycle with all the competing cross-currents that brings with it. Nonetheless, it is vital that the Democrats prioritize the most important items on that list and hold public hearings.

They will have the time to do it. After all, Donald Trump would rather chew glass than work with Democrats at this point, and his followers would run shrieking into the streets if he even pretended to compromise on legislation. So the prospect of anything but the most immediately necessary legislation being signed into law is nil. In fact, we can count on government shutdowns and endless standoffs. (What else is new?) Trump will be campaigning most of the time. It’s all he really likes about politics and he never stopped doing it anyway. So congressional oversight hearings and investigations will be job one for the Democrats.

QOTWeek

by digby

So far …

Trump speaking to a group of evangelicals on Monday on what will happen in Republicans don’t win the election in November:

“Democrats will overturn everything that we’ve done and they’ll do it quickly and violently.”

Violently. And that’s if they win. I guess he thinks they’re going to take to the streets and start beating up Trump voters?

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