The spawn and spawns in law of Orange Julius Caesar are Caligula level bad. And he’s a spawn-heir himself. This is what inherited wealth and aristocracy bring you.
"what digby sez..."
Month: August 2020
I don’t know about you, but when I saw Donald Trump do an abrupt pivot on his crusade to depict mail-in voting as a form of voter fraud on Tuesday, I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
That certainly wasn’t because I believe he’s seen the light and has realized that mail-in voting is perfectly safe, or that he realizes it’s imperative at a time when in-person voting may expose people to the deadly coronavirus. No, it was because he singled out Florida as the one state he believes really knows how to handle elections. Anyone who was around 20 years ago to observe the 2000 election will understand why I felt that awful sense of dread.
You may recall how that disputed election result, with a 538-vote difference in Florida and a recount in progress, was decided in favor of the Republican candidate — whose brother just happened to be the governor — helped along by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, two of whom happened to have been appointed by their father, the former president. Let’s just say that the Republicans controlled the levers of government and they knew how to use them.
The same is true today. Here’s what Trump said at his daily perfunctory coronavirus briefing on Tuesday when questioned about his change of tune on mail-in ballots in Florida:
“Florida’s got a great Republican governor. And it had a great Republican governor,” Trump said, citing Ron DeSantis (R) and Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.). “Two great governors. And over a long period of time they’ve been able to get the absentee ballots done extremely professionally.”
“They’re so well run. Florida’s a very well run state,” he added. “Low taxes, low everything. They’ve done a great job. Really a great job. And the two governors, between the both of them, they’ve really got a great system of absentee ballots and even in the case of mail-in ballots.”
Obviously, DeSantis and Scott got Trump on the horn in the last day or two and told him that he was screwing up their chances of winning Florida with his frenzied campaign against mail-in voting. There are a lot of senior citizens in Florida, a group that distinctly skews Republican, and they like to vote by mail. I’m sure they also reminded him that DeSantis had already gone the extra mile to disenfranchise the 744,000 ex-felons whom the state had voted to allow back on the voting rolls by instituting what amounts to a poll tax. (That would be the clearest reading of this Trumpian phrase: “Florida’s Voting system has been cleaned up we defeated Democrats attempts at change.”)
Florida Republicans have the system wired, which is why Trump has now excluded his adopted state from the list of states that he claims are rigging the election against him with mail-in voting. I won’t be surprised to see him endorse the practice in others as well, if governors there are able to assure him that they’ll look out for him.
But he doesn’t seem to understand how this muddles his case. After all, one of Trump’s primary objections to voting by mail is that the Postal Service is incapable of handling all the ballots. But unless Florida uses a different system to deliver ballots than the rest of the country, it’s hard to see how they can escape this calamity. And saying that only Republican-run states can competently handle vote by mail is too transparently self-serving, even for him.
According to the Washington Post, 78% of American voters can vote by mail in November. Thirty-four states and the District of Columbia already allowed anyone to vote absentee for any reason, well before the pandemic. There have been some adjustments in the process in some states to accommodate the coronavirus, but mail-in voting is perfectly normal. While the system may be strained this time because more people will use it, this manufactured hysteria is ridiculous. Unless Trump is able to destroy the Postal Service, as Salon’s Bob Cesca predicts he may be able to do, and unless the media decides to re-run its destructive coverage of the 2000 election, which they claim they have no intention of doing, the only chaos will likely be coming from Trump’s camp for his own purposes.
With all his braying about the election being “rigged,” it was pretty obvious back in 2016 that Trump believed he wasn’t going to win. There’s even some famous footage of him on election night giving a very tepid thumbs-up, looking stunned and even despondent.
The following was tweeted just as Trump took the lead in Electoral College votes:
Trump had said, “It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it,” and that didn’t really work out for him. So I’m quite sure he was looking forward to making up for it once he lost. He was no doubt planning to parlay all that attention into a rumored media empire and completing those big deals like the Trump Tower Moscow plan he’d had to drop. He’d had fun on the campaign trail but actually being president clearly wasn’t something he’d thought too much about.
This time I think Trump really does want to win, if only to prove that he has a legitimate claim to the White House. (Protecting himself from legal trouble for another four years would be nice too.) But even someone as thick as he is can read the polls, and I would guess that he’s plotting to turn defeat to his advantage if the worst happens.
It would seem that his plan is to sow chaos if possible, challenge the result where he can, and claim that Joe Biden’s victory is illegitimate, regardless of the margin of victory. He can then set himself up as the president in exile, free to make money from speaking fees and books while trying to rehabilitate his tattered “brand.” Perhaps that rumored media empire will finally come to fruition. Most importantly, he’d be able to keep his cult alive with the tantalizing promise of a rematch in 2024.
I have no idea if Trump would actually want to do that — he might want to pass the torch to Don Jr. or Ivanka, and there’s no guarantee Republican voters would play along all over again. But in many ways, losing will offer him the opportunity to do what he loves to do most, and make money while doing it: tweet, shoot the breeze with media sycophants, play golf and bask in the adulation of his adoring fans. Who knows, he might even hold rallies. He could have all that without all the unpleasantness of trying to do a job he has never been able to figure out how to do.
It’s depressing to think that Donald Trump won’t simply fade into obscurity if he’s defeated this fall, I know. But I think he’s going to be like that obnoxious party guest who’s always the last to leave, whether we like it or not. The silver lining is that if he does decide to stay in the game, he’ll be like a lead weight dragging down the Republican Party for another four years. You know he’s going to make their lives even more hellish than the Democrats — and after their cowardly enabling of his monumental failures and criminal misdeeds, it’s exactly what they deserve.Â
In a close race this could make a difference. We know for a fact that the difference in several decisive swing states in 2016 was the third party vote.:
At least four people who have been active in Republican politics are linked to Kanye West’s attempt to get on the presidential ballot this year. The connection raises questions about the aims of the entertainer’s effort and whether it is regarded within the G.O.P. as a spoiler campaign that could aid President Trump, even as those close to Mr. West have expressed concerns about his mental health as he enters the political arena.
One operative, Mark Jacoby, is an executive at a company called Let the Voters Decide, which has been collecting signatures for the West campaign in three states. Mr. Jacoby was arrested on voter fraud charges in 2008 while he was doing work for the California Republican Party, and he later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor.
Mr. Jacoby, in a statement, said his company was nonpartisan and worked for all political parties. “We do not comment on any current clients, but like all Americans, anyone who is qualified to stand for election has the right to run,” he said.
New York Magazine reported Monday evening on the campaign’s links to two other people with partisan ties. One is Gregg Keller, the former executive director of the American Conservative Union, who has been listed as a contact for the campaign in Arkansas. Mr. Keller, who did not respond to a message seeking comment, is a Missouri-based strategist. He was under consideration to be Mr. Trump’s campaign manager in 2015, a role that was ultimately filled by Corey Lewandowski, according to a former campaign official.
Another person linked to the West campaign is Chuck Wilton, who is listed as a convention delegate for Mr. Trump from Vermont and as an elector with the West operation who could potentially cast an Electoral College vote for Mr. West. Mr. Wilton could not be reached. He and his wife, Wendy, a Trump appointee at the United States Department of Agriculture, have been political supporters of the president. She hung up immediately when called at her office.
Late Tuesday, a local reporter in Madison, Wis., recorded a woman dropping off ballot signatures for Mr. West. A report in Vice identified the woman as a Republican elections lawyer, Lane Ruhland. Ms. Ruhland worked for the Republican National Committee during the 2016 presidential election recount in Wisconsin. She did not return requests for comment, and a spokesman for the law firm where she works, Husch Blackwell, did not have an immediate comment.
“It appears that the Kanye West made a smart decision by hiring an experienced election attorney,” said Alesha Guenther, a spokeswoman for the Wisconsin state Republican Party. “We welcome Kanye West and all other candidates who qualified for ballot access to the race.”
The nature of the financial relationships between the West campaign and the operatives, if any, was not immediately clear.
Mr. West was until recently a fervent supporter of Mr. Trump and said they shared a “dragon energy,” but he declared early last month that he would run for president himself. A few days later, Mr. Trump retweeted a post that said Mr. West could siphon votes from Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has clinched the Democratic nomination. “That shouldn’t be hard,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Corrupt Joe has done nothing good for Black people!”
This is gross exploitation of a mentally ill person. All we can do is hope that there are very few voters who will be fooled by what’s going on.
Frankly, I’m more worried about this:
Hey, for all we know they’re working with Kanye too.
We looked in June at how one function of policing in this society is to enforce America’s caste system. It is about protecting defined hierarchies:
No matter how far down they are on society’s social ladder, some people want someone lower than them. They need someone lower than them. Someone they can look down on and say, well, at least I’m not THEM. Black people have filled that role for centuries. Not as long as India’s untouchables maybe, but the principle is the same.
Journalist Isabel Wilkerson tells Terry Gross of NPR’s “Fresh Air” that race is an insufficient frame for understanding what in the United States is essentially a caste system based on skin color.
“Caste focuses in on the infrastructure of our divisions and the rankings, whereas race is the metric that’s used to determine one’s place in that,” Wilkerson says. The very concept of race dates from the transatlantic slave trade — 400 to 500 — years whereas caste is thousands of years old, argues the author of “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” Being “white” is an American innovation.
Economic uncertainty, I would add, is as imprecise as racism for explaining the political movement behind Donald Trump. Just as the liberal knock is that white working-class conservatives who support the Republican Party are voting against their best interests.
Caste creates an invisible, false pedestal for those ranked higher by the system, Wilkerson explains, one they are born with and do not recognize [timestamp 11:25]:
“The other thing is that it can create easily activated resentment at anything that does not track with how one perceives oneself. In other words, the perception that someone who has been deemed lower, or that that one perceives to be lower than them, any advancement by someone in that group can be seen as a greater threat than it otherwise would be. There would be a greater investment in maintaining the caste system as it is in maintaining the hierarchy as we have known it to be. And I think that one way that it shows up a lot is that we often say in our era … that white working-class voters will often be acting against their own interests in opposing policies, for example, that may be geared toward working people. Like universal health care, for example. But from the lens of caste it would not be surprising that they might oppose policies that they fear could threaten their own status by assisting those that they perceive as being beneath them.”
They may perceive maintaining that hierarchy as having a higher priority than improving their own status.
Or, as President Lyndon B. Johnson once observed, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
George Lakoff argued in “Moral Politics” that preserving the conservative moral hierarchy is a defining feature of the conservative “strict father” worldview:
Lakoff gives that moral hierarchy more intellectual credit than it is due. It is about pecking order and a function of baser programming. It is about who is the alpha dog in the pack, about who are his lieutenants, and who are the submissives. Caste simply further reduces to this elaborate system to a single element: power.
Wilkerson wrote at length about America’s enduring caste system last month in the New York Times:
Caste is rigid and deep; race is fluid and superficial, subject to periodic redefinition to meet the needs of the dominant caste in what is now the United States. While the requirements to qualify as white have changed over the centuries, the fact of a dominant caste has remained constant from its inception — whoever fit the definition of white, at whatever point in history, was granted the legal rights and privileges of the dominant caste. Perhaps more critical and tragic, at the other end of the ladder, the subordinated caste, too, has been fixed from the beginning as the psychological floor beneath which all other castes cannot fall.
This is a much broader subject than a blog post and crude illustrations, I’m afraid. The fact that there are few pyramidic images floating around that combine to illustrate how race and class interact in America, plus the fact that we are still dealing with Jim Crow and the legacy of the Confederacy over a hundred years after the Civil War is testimony to how effectively America has avoided confronting the issue.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.
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A story to make you smile this evening:
South Carolina’s 2020 U.S. Senate race is neck-and-neck with just three months to go until Election Day, as Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison’s well-funded campaign appears to have significantly narrowed the gap against Republican incumbent Lindsey Graham, according to a new poll released Tuesday.
Graham led Harrison by just a single percentage point, 44 percent to 43 percent, in the poll conducted by data intelligence firm Morning Consult, well within the survey’s 3.5-point margin of error.
Republican President Donald Trump, by comparison, holds a five-point lead in the historically red state over Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, 49 percent to 44 percent — though Morning Consult’s tracking data shows Trump’s margin has shrunk from around 15 percent in early June.
The survey of 750 likely voters in South Carolina, which was conducted online from July 24 to Aug. 2, offers one of the first snapshots of the Palmetto State races from a nonpartisan, independent pollster, appearing to confirm Democratic claims that the contests are growing tighter.
The discrepancy between Trump and Graham’s numbers can largely be attributed to independent and Republican-identifying voters.
While Trump had support from 46 percent of independents and 92 percent of Republicans, Graham only garnered 41 percent and 81 percent from those two groups, respectively.
More Republican voters — a total of 13 percent — said they either didn’t know who they would vote for or would vote for “someone else” in the Senate race compared to the presidential, where that number was just 4 percent.
Though Graham has become one of Trump’s most loyal congressional allies in recent years, he has previously battled skepticism from some Republican voters who felt he was insufficiently conservative due to his willingness to strike compromises with Democrats on issues like immigration and his criticism of Trump during the 2016 campaign.
Graham won his Republican primary in June with 68 percent of the vote over three little-known challengers. There will be Libertarian Party and Constitution Party candidates on the ballot in November, a factor Harrison has cited as a potential draw for Republican voters to split their tickets.
No Democrat has won a U.S. Senate race in South Carolina since 1998. Trump defeated 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by 14 percentage points in the state.
It looks like being the world’s most energetic Trump bootlicker hasn’t helped Graham all that much. But then Trump beat Clinton by 14 points and is only ahead by 5 so maybe that isn’t the smart strategy he thought it was.
Graham is still favored to win, ofcourse. It’s South Carolina. But you never know … this is a very weird year.
California may be a blue, blue state but there are millions of Trump voters here too. It’s a big population. And the right-wingers here are as right wing as it gets. Remember, both Kevin McCarthy and Devin Nunes are from California.
The California wingnuts aren’t happy:
President Trump’s support among Republicans and other conservative voters has begun to erode amid the continued coronavirus pandemic and its associated economic havoc, a new poll from UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies shows.
The poll shows Trump far behind Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, in California. That’s no surprise — even at his strongest Trump was unlikely ever to be competitive in California, a heavily Democratic state.
What is notable, however, is the size of the gap and the degree to which approval of Trump’s work as president has declined among groups that until now have supported him.
Biden leads Trump in California by 39 percentage points, 67% to 28%, the poll found. That’s 9 points larger than the margin by which Hillary Clinton beat Trump statewide in 2016 — a record at the time. And the share of Californians who approve of Trump’s performance in office, which has held steady in the mid-to-low 30% range for nearly his entire tenure, has now ticked downward to just 29%.
That’s consistent with other polls nationally and in battleground states that show a nationwide tide lifting Biden, swelling his margin in states like California, moving him solidly ahead in close-fought states like Pennsylvania and Michigan and making him potentially competitive in states that Trump won more handily last time, such as Texas and Georgia.
“There was a question of whether his support was already so low in the state that it couldn’t go lower,” said Berkeley political scientist Eric Schickler, co-director of the Institute of Governmental Studies. The poll “shows the answer is no.”
Aides to both candidates believe the biggest factor in Trump’s decline is voters’ fear of the coronavirus and belief that the administration has botched its handling of the pandemic. The poll provides further evidence of that.
About two-thirds of the state’s voters see the health threat from the coronavirus getting worse. They back Biden 84% to 11%. By contrast, about 1 in 8 say the health threat is getting less serious; they back Trump 87% to 10%. About 1 in 5 voters say the threat from the virus is about the same as it’s been; they’re closely divided.
[…]
Opinions of Trump … have gotten worse since the winter. A Berkeley IGS poll in January showed 33% of the state’s voters approved of the way he is handling his job as president. In the most recent poll, that’s dropped to 29%, with 71% disapproving, including 63% who say they “strongly” disapprove.
Since the vast majority of Democrats already disapproved of Trump, the drop in approval comes mostly among Republicans and nonpartisan voters. Among voters who identified themselves as moderate conservatives, for example, approval dropped 11 points, from 76% in January to 65% now.
Erosion of Trump’s support among moderate conservatives is another trend seen nationwide in recent surveys.
In California, the decline shows up in the more conservative regions of the state. In the Inland Empire, approval of Trump dropped 8 points, from 43% in January to 35% in the current poll. In the Central Valley, it dropped 7 points, from 44% in January to 37% now.
“There’s evidence nationally of a decline for Trump in more rural areas where the coronavirus has spread,” Schickler said. The poll seems to be “showing a similar thing here.”
The equal opportunity haters seem to be holding their noses for Biden:
About 15% of voters have an unfavorable view of both candidates. That group supports Biden by 5 to 1. That’s a big shift from 2016, when voters nationwide who disliked both candidates broke heavily in Trump’s favor.
Biden has a huge lead in the state not only because Democrats heavily outnumber Republicans in California, but also because the former vice president has a big lead among non-partisan voters and has made inroads among traditionally Republican groups while Trump has almost no traction among traditionally Democratic groups.
For example, Biden gets about one-quarter of California voters who call themselves “somewhat conservative” — about 1 in 6 California voters. By contrast, Trump gets almost no support among voters who call themselves “somewhat liberal,” who make up about 1 in 5 of the state’s voters.
The state’s nonpartisan voters back Biden by about 4 to 1, the poll found.
[…]
In liberal California, even white men without college educations — Trump’s strong point nationwide — back Biden. The former vice president leads among that group 54% to 42%, the poll found. That pales compared to Biden’s support among college-educated women, however. They back him 79% to 17%.
One group is sticking by him though:
Evangelical Christians, who are among Trump’s most steadfast backers nationwide, form one of the few major demographic groups in the state that gives majority support to the president. California voters who say they are evangelicals back Trump 56% to 39%, the poll found.
Trump, who has pitched multiple campaign appeals to racial prejudice, also gets strong support from the roughly 30% of the state’s voters who disapprove of the Black Lives Matter movement. Those who disapprove of the movement back Trump over Biden 83% to 11%, the poll found. The much larger group that approves of the movement backs Biden 93% to 3%.
You can’t judge anything about the rest of the country by California, but it’s not a stretch to judge the Republican Party by California Republicans. There are plenty of suburban GOP moderates and they’re lost to Trump. That’s hardly surprising. But as I said, while California is a super blue state, the right wingers here are as right wing as the wingnuttiest Mississippian. If he’s losing some of them, as he surely is if he’s now losing white non-college educated white men by ten points, it’s really something.
January 22, 2020:
“We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”
July 28, 2020:
Trump: “I think It’s under control.”
“How? A thousand Americans are dying a day.”
Trump: “They are dying. That’s true. And it is what it is.”
Whatever gibberish he tries to sell his deluded cult, all you need to do is remember this:
The US has a little over 4% of the world’s population.
But we have more than 25% of the world’s hospitalizations and 25% of the world’s deaths from COVID-19.
This is stunning.
Unless you believe that our (still inadequate) testing program is actually giving people the virus, (something I think Trump might actually believe) all of his braying about doing too many tests and case death mortality (not that he uses that term but that’s what he’s talking about) is completely irrelevant.
We have had over 156,000 deaths in five months from this thing and even more people who got terribly ill and may suffer long term damage. Almost 5 million people have tested positive and the thing has exploded like wildfire all over the country.
And this ass is still out there saying that he has it under control.
I think this is becoming a criminal case of negligence at this point. He can’t be allowed to simply lose the election then set himself up as the president in exile as if this didn’t happen. This is a mass death event and he is refusing to do his job to try to stop it.
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On the first day of the first full week when tens of millions of Americans went without the federal jobless aid that has cushioned them during the pandemic, President Trump was not cajoling undecided lawmakers to embrace a critical stimulus bill to stabilize the foundering economy.
He was at the White House, hurling insults at the Democratic leaders whose support he needs to strike a deal.
Mr. Trump called Speaker Nancy Pelosi “Crazy Nancy,” charging that she had no interest in helping the unemployed. He said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, only wanted to help “radical left” governors in states run by Democrats. And he threatened to short-circuit a delicate series of negotiations to produce a compromise and instead unilaterally impose a federal moratorium on tenant evictions.
The comments came just as Mr. Trump’s own advisers were on Capitol Hill meeting with Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Schumer in search of an elusive deal, and they underscored just how absent the president had been from the negotiations. They also highlighted how, three months before he is to face voters, the main role that Mr. Trump appears to have embraced in assembling an economic recovery package is that of sniping from the sidelines in ways that undercut a potential compromise.
On Monday, the president said he remained “totally involved” in the talks, even though he was not “over there with Crazy Nancy.” But while White House officials say that he is interested in the talks and is closely monitoring them, he has not sought to use the full powers of his office to prod a deal, and more often he has complicated the already sensitive negotiations.
The situation reflects the dysfunctional dynamic that Mr. Trump has developed with leaders of both parties in Congress. He has a toxic relationship with Ms. Pelosi, with whom he has not met face-to-face since last year. And Republicans have learned to eye their own president warily in delicate negotiations, knowing that he is prone to changing his position, bucking party principles and leaving them to suffer the political consequences of high-profile collapses.
In the stimulus talks, Mr. Trump’s ideas have often been out of sync with members of his own party. On Monday, he said he was considering acting on his own to eliminate payroll taxes, something a president does not have the power to do himself, and an idea that his advisers had dropped from the talks in the face of near-unanimous opposition by Republican lawmakers. The eviction moratorium he has championed was not a part of the Republican plan.
“I’ll do it myself if I have to,” Mr. Trump said.
While that might be possible, virtually every other measure under discussion to stimulate the economy would require congressional approval.
[…]
Mr. Trump, who spent Saturday and Sunday on his golf course in Virginia, berated Democrats from the White House on Monday, accusing them of being blinded by a focus on “bailout money” for states controlled by Democrats, as opposed to extending unemployment benefits.
“All they’re really interested in is bailout money to bail out radical left governors and radical left mayors like in Portland and places that are so badly run — Chicago, New York City,” Mr. Trump said.
[…]
White House officials describe Mr. Trump as interested in the talks, but from a distance. He calls Mr. Meadows, a former House member, for updates nearly a dozen times on some days, and in general gets briefed in 10-minute increments from other aides. He makes frequent calls to allies like Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, and to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader.
But he does not reach out to members of the House he is not personally close with to use the power of persuasion that comes with the presidency, they concede, and he is expending little energy of his own to move the ball forward.
If you read the rest of the article you’ll see that the GOP is a total mess on this, with members all over the place, some babbling about deficits others trying to respond to the business community, all of the confused and impotent. The White House is, of course, completely chaotic because the man at the top is a moronic basketcase.
The reason I blame the GOP entirely for this is that they all had a chance to make one crucial vote last January to remove this lunatic before he could completely destroy the country and they were all, except one, too cowardly to do it. Now, with their help, he’s done it.
I assume they will come up with something eventually and that the money will be retroactive. It has to be. But this is just insane. And it’s all their fault.
It’s really not hard to figure out why he says what he says. He often blurts out comments that expose his reasoning — think about what he said to Lester Holt when asked why he fired Comey.
Trump has often made it clear that he will protect people who don’t rat on him. He’s said he prizes loyalty above all else many times. His comments to Axios about Gislaine Maxwell, referencing Epstein’s death in prison more than once, tell me that he’s probably going to pardon her, his rationale will be that he believes she will be killed in prison otherwise.
When Trump spoke to Axios on Monday, he was quizzed about the reason for an earlier comment where he offered sympathetic words to Maxwell.
He replied that he didn’t know what Maxwell had been charged with.
Trump added: “But I do know that her friend or boyfriend was either killed or committed suicide in jail.
“She’s now in jail, so yeah, I wish her well.
“I would wish you well. I would wish a lot of people well. Good luck. Let them prove somebody was guilty.”
His comments come days after he initially offered his well-wishes and admitted that he had met her numerous times.
During a press briefing at the White House on July 22, Trump was asked if he thought Maxwell – who has pleaded not guilty to federal sex trafficking charges and was a long-time companion of Jeffrey Epstein – would turn in powerful men.
Trump responded then: “I don’t know – I haven’t really been following it too much. I just wish her well, frankly.”
The president continued: “I’ve met her numerous times over the years – especially since I lived in Palm Beach, and I guess they lived in Palm Beach. But I wish her well.”
His well-wishes raised fears that he was sending a message to the accused sex trafficker that he will pardon her, an outraged victims’ lawyer claimed at the time.
I cannot think of a good reason why he would publicly say this twice for no reason. She knows things. And probably has the documents to prove it.
Reminder:
There’s a moment in the footage where Trump points to someone on the dance floor and he whispers something in Epstein’s ear that has Epstein doubled over in laughter.
I’ve always wondered what he said? I’m pretty sure it was disgusting.
Not even a boy. A baby:
President Trump dismissed the legacy of the late Rep. John Lewis in an interview with “Axios on HBO,” saying only that Lewis made a “big mistake” by not coming to his inauguration.
Trump’s comments were a glaring contrast with the praise Republicans and Democrats showered upon Lewis this week, and a default to personal grudges during a week of mourning for a civil rights hero.
In the interview with Axios’ Jonathan Swan, Trump said, “I really don’t know” how history will remember the Democratic congressman. “I don’t know John Lewis. He chose not to come to my inauguration. … I never met John Lewis, actually, I don’t believe.”
- When asked if he found Lewis’ life impressive, Trump responded, “He didn’t come to my inauguration. He didn’t come to my State of the Union speeches. And that’s OK. That’s his right. And, again, nobody has done more for Black Americans than I have.”
- “He should have come. I think he made a big mistake.”
- Trump also declined to say whether he found Lewis personally impressive: “I can’t say one way or the other. I find a lot of people impressive. I find many people not impressive.”
The interview took place last Tuesday as Lewis was lying in state at the Capitol.
There’s more. A lot more. And I see that I was insulting to babies. He’s a monster:
Trump: “I think It’s under control.”
“How? A thousand Americans are dying a day.”
Trump: “They are dying. That’s true. And it is what it is.”
Did I mention that he’s a monster?
The whole thing — if you can bear it:
This interview is simply scary. He’s not just dumber than any other president. That goes without saying. (And they haven’t all been geniuses by any stretch.) But Donald Trump is dumber that the average person.