In his early years in stand-up comedy, the late George Carlin played more with observational humor, mocking, for example, the internal contradiction in the term “jumbo shrimp.”
What to make now of “radical constitutionalism” (Washington Post):
A battle-tested D.C. bureaucrat and self-described Christian nationalist is drawing up detailed plans for a sweeping expansion of presidential power in a second Trump administration. Russ Vought, who served as the former president’sbudget chief, calls his political strategy for razing long-standing guardrails “radical constitutionalism.”
He has helped craft proposals for Donald Trump to deploy the military to quash civil unrest, seize more control over the Justice Department and assert the power to withhold congressional appropriations — and that’s just on Trump’s first day back in office.
And they called 1960s yippies radicals for having long hair, beards, and for wearing the American flag. Guess they won that culture war. Vought seemingly hasn’t noticed.
“We are living in a post-Constitutional time,” Vought wrote in a seminal 2022 essay, which argued that the left has corrupted the nation’s laws and institutions. Last week, after a jury convicted Trump of falsifying business records, Vought tweeted: “Do not tell me that we are living under the Constitution.”
Vought aims to harness what he calls the “woke and weaponized” bureaucracy that stymied the former president by stocking federal agencies with hardcore disciples who would wage culture wars on abortion and immigration. The proposals championed by Vought and other Trump allies to fundamentally reset the balance of power would represent a historic shift — one they see as a needed corrective.
Tell the guy in the Filipkowski tweet above that he’s out of step with the New Trump Order and in need of correction.
From the Trump campaign’s efforts to distance itself from Vought’s remarks and Center for Renewing America correspondence, what seems obvious is that these proud Christian nationalists believe that they can steer Trump’s agenda in his second term. They believe they can control him the way the Weimar boys “persisted in their delusion that they could control” the loudmouth Austrian with the funny moustache and yet “preserve the ‘guardrails’ that would contain him.” You know, they’ll help Trump exact retribution on his growing enemies list and he, in turn, will help them turn the United States into Gilead, a glorious, new Christian reich.
The Post recounts the failure of people like Vought to get what they wanted from the first Trump administration. But this time it will be different, no doubt about it.
Vought’s long careeras a staffer in Congress and at federal agencies has made himan asset to Project 2025, an initiative led by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, to lay the groundwork for a second Trump term. Vought wrote the chapter on the executive office of the president in Project 2025’s 920-page blueprint, and he is developing its playbook for the first 180 days, according to the people involved in the effort.
“We’re going to plant the flags now,” Vought told Trump’s former strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, on his far-right podcast. “It becomes a new governing consensus of the Republican Party.”
Maybe everyone will be ordered to wear two shirts instead of armbands.
As Vought and other Trump allies work on blueprints for a second term,he is pushing a strategy he calls “radical constitutionalism.” The left has discarded the Constitution, Vought argues, so conservatives need to rise up, wrest power from the federal bureaucracy and centralize authority in the Oval Office.
“Our need is not just to win congressional majorities that blame the other side or fill seats on court benches to meddle at the margins,” he wrote in the 2022 essay. “It is to cast ourselves as dissidents of the current regime and to put on our shoulders the full weight of envisioning, articulating, and defending what a Radical Constitutionalism requires in the late hour that our country finds itself in, and then to do it.”
In practice, that could mean reinterpreting parts of the Constitution to achieve policy goals — such as by defining illegal immigration as an “invasion,” which would allow states to use wartime powers to stop it.
“We showed that millions of illegal aliens coming across, and Mexican cartels holding operational control of the border, constitute an invasion,” Vought wrote. “This is where we need to be radical in discarding or rethinking the legal paradigms that have confined our ability to return to the original Constitution.”
As radical as Benedict Arnold, if that’s what it takes. He was an original too.
Vought’s views amount to a kind of Anglo-Protestant cultural supremacism, said Paul D. Miller, a Georgetown University professor who published a book critiquing Christian nationalism.
“The Civil War taught us that America is big and broad and strong enough to include non-Christians and non-Whites,”Miller wrote in an email to The Post. “It also should have taught us that the greatest threat to the American vision are racial and religious supremacists.”
Update: Replaced original image containing copyright watermark.
The Republican Party might actually draft a platform in 2024 for the first time in eight years. And a “Stop the Steal” election denier will lead them (The New Republic):
On May 15, Ed Martin, a former chair of the Missouri Republican Party, was hired to serve as the deputy policy director of the platform committee, reported NBC News. Martin is well known for supporting Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, even giving a speech in Washington, D.C., the day before the January 6 Capitol riots in 2021 to rally Trump’s supporters.
“No matter what happens tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after, we still need to be in the fight. There’s no summer soldiers and springtime patriots here. There’s the die-hard true Americans,” Martin said in that speech. “We start today, go through tomorrow and every day till we have a last breath and go home to the Lord because we will stop the steal.”
Well. Echoes of Gone with the Wind.
Of course, “true Americans” is a euphemism in an organization imbued with the spirit of the convicted criminal of the hour, The Man of 30,000 Lies.
The New Republic adds, “Martin’s appointment suggests that 2024’s platform will include challenging the integrity of any election that Republicans lose.”
Yes, but what else might that platform include? What all-American value might lie at the heart of a platform worthy of a man who thinks only of himself?
Former President Donald Trump continues to center his third presidential campaign on retribution against his political allies, saying in a recent interview that at times revenge is “justified” — comments that President Joe Biden’s campaign seized on Friday to point to Trump’s focus on personal and political retribution.
[…]
In an interview with television host Dr. Phil McGraw — best known as “Dr. Phil,” Trump was asked about his calls for retribution, and his claims of taking action against some political opponents. Though Trump originally said he would work on forgiving and forgetting, he quickly changed his tune after McGraw, referencing the pope, said forgiveness was necessary in order to avoid revenge.
“Well revenge does take time. I will say that, and sometimes revenge can be justified,” Trump said in the interview that aired Thursday night.
“You know the word ‘revenge’ is a very strong word, but maybe we have revenge for success. But that’s what I’d like to see. I want to see the country survive, because this country is not going to survive like this.”
Revenge For Success could be Trump’s next slapdash, ghost-written volume on screwing your neighbors. (Make sure that gets into the platform, Ed, if it takes your last breath before you go home to the Lord, justified.)
Imagine the acceptance speech Trump might give next month (with a few minor edits):
In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . retribution today . . . retribution tomorrow . . . retribution forever.
London Zoo’s three Asiatic lion cubs have been pictured taking their first steps outside with mother Arya.
The 8-week-old cubs appeared tentative at first, looking to mum for reassurance, but were soon spotted skipping around their Indian-inspired habitat, chasing each other and playing with mum’s tail.
The cubs, born on 13 March 2024, have so far spent their time cosied up in their special indoor cub dens with mum. The trio are yet to be sexed, and this will happen during their first health check later this month. From their first moments of nursing to their playful antics inside the den, every development has been closely monitored by zookeepers and captured on the zoo’s hidden “cubcam”.
The three cubs are an important addition to the conservation breeding programme, which safeguards a healthy population of the Critically Endangered species. Surviving only in the Gir Forest in Gujarat, India, the wild population is particularly vulnerable to disease or natural disaster. Recent population estimates suggest that only 600 to 700 individuals remain in the wild.
In France, Biden rhapsodized about “the story of America” told by the rows of graves at the Normandy America Cemetery: “Nearly 10,000 heroes buried side by side, officers and enlisted, immigrants and native-born, different races, different faiths, but all Americans.”
In Phoenix, Trump, invoked the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, saying Biden had orchestrated an “invasion” at the border as part of “a deliberate demolition of our sovereignty” because “they probably think these people are going to be voting.”
Biden hailed NATO, the “greatest military alliance in the history of the world,” and vowed to defend Ukraine: “To bow down to dictators is simply unthinkable. Were we to do that, it means we’d be forgetting what happened here on these hallowed beaches.”
Trump hailed a modern-day tyrant, Hungary’s Viktor Orban (“strong man, very powerful man”), complained about “endless wars” and “delinquent” Europeans, and vowed to “spend our money in our country” — including by “moving thousands of troops, if necessary, currently stationed overseas to our own borders.”
Biden honored the heroes of Operation Overlord, who launched an invasion to liberate a continent knowing “the probability of dying was real.” Trump promised the “largest domestic deportation operation” in U.S. history.
Biden spoke powerfully about the threat to democracy then, and now: “In their hour of trial, the Allied forces of D-Day did their duty. Now, the question for us is, in our hour of trial, will we do ours? We’re living in a time when democracy is more at risk across the world than at any point since the end of World War II, since these beaches were stormed in 1944. Now, we have to ask ourselves: Will we stand against tyranny? … Will we defend democracy? Will we stand together? My answer is yes, and only can be yes.”
And Trump? Though he posted on social media about the “immortal heroes who landed at Normandy,” his message in Phoenix was full of self-absorbed thoughts on his “rigged trial in New York” and nihilistic commentary: “It’s all fake. Impeachment is a fake. The court cases are a disgrace to our country. Everything is fake.” He went on: “I don’t like using the word ‘bulls—’ in front of these beautiful children, so I will not say it.”
The crowd struck up a chant: “Bulls—! Bulls—! Bulls—!”
Trump laughed.
When I was young, people like those at Trump rallies who talked about America in such derogatory terms would be told “love it or leave it.” Now they all dress up in red, white and blue to watch an America hating sociopath and scream bullshit.
You knew that, of course. She’s managed to delay the stolen classified documents trial so long that it’s almost impossible for it to be tried before the election. It’s obvious that she has a bias for the defense, which shouldn’t be too much of a surprise since Trump appointed her and many of the judges he appointed were highly partisan and chosen for that reason. She’s also extremely inexperienced and possibly a little bit weird on top of it.
Several attorneys who have practiced in front of Cannon – and who spoke to CNN for this story – pointed to her isolation as one explanation for her conduct. Cannon’s solitary post in the Fort Pierce courthouse, one that rarely sees high-profile action, deprives her of the informal, day-to-day interactions with more seasoned judges who sit at the other courthouses and could offer her advice, the lawyers told CNN.
They also said Cannon’s lack of trial experience, both as a lawyer and a judge, is apparent. In her seven years as a Justice Department attorney, Cannon participated on the trial teams of just four criminal cases. And on the bench, she’s only presided over a handful of criminal trials – and Huck took over one of them.
[…]
The attorneys described Cannon as extremely diligent and well prepared, a tough questioner who accepts nothing at face value, and thoughtful in her rulings. But they also said that some of her habits that have raised eyebrows in Trump’s case have plagued her approach from the bench more generally. Those tendencies include a penchant for letting irrelevant legal questions distract from core issues, a zero-tolerance approach to any technical defects in filings, and a struggle with docket management that allows the type of pretrial disputes that other judges would decide in weeks go unresolved for months.
“She is not efficient,” said one attorney who practices in south Florida. “She is very form over substance.” Another attorney described her as “indecisive.” A third attorney who’s had cases before Cannon said, “She just seems overwhelmed by the process.”
Five months after Huck visited Cannon in Fort Pierce, she was thrust into the center of back-to-back legal hurricanes. First, she oversaw the lawsuit Trump brought challenging the FBI’s search of his Mar-a-Lago residence that August, when agents found hundreds of classified documents scattered about the property. (Cannon granted Trump’s request for a third-party review of the search, only to see her rulings reversed by a conservative appeals court.) Then, in a twist of fate last June, Cannon was assigned the criminal case in which Trump is charged with 40 felony counts of allegedly mishandling classified documents and obstructing the government’s attempts to find them.
The high-profile national security case is a dramatic departure from most of the other criminal cases playing out in Cannon’s courtroom, the bulk of which are more mundane prosecutions like gun charges or immigration infractions that are often resolved through guilty pleas, a CNN review of her case log showed.
Cannon’s assignment to the documents case was a game of odds. Though the charges were filed in West Palm Beach, the division that is home to Mar-a-Lago, Cannon was randomly chosen from a broader pool of judges in Florida’s southern district.
Her approach as a jurist – detail-obsessed to the point of tedious – appears uniquely prone to being exploited by a defense team eager to delay the case. And the complicated system Cannon has set up for redacting public filings has only exacerbated a backlog of unresolved issues. She still has not decided foundational questions that will determine whether the Trump case will go to trial. Marginal issues clutter her docket, including a longshot motion to invalidate Jack Smith’s appointment as special counsel that she’s scheduled a hearing on later this month.
Some attorneys who have practiced before Cannon chalked up her struggle handling the practical logistics of being a trial court judge to her background of mostly appellate work for the local US Attorney’s office. They described her as latching onto abstract, academic questions at the expense of the type of on-the-fly decision-making required by trial judges that keeps litigation moving along.
As Cannon slowly plods through the backlog of issues on her plate, special counsel prosecutors are now learning firsthand the wrath that they can incur from the judge for seemingly minor discrepancies in their filings, and they have drawn Cannon’s ire for pushing her to move more quickly to resolve the substantive pretrial issues that have slowed the pace of the case to a crawl. “You can’t really take issue with her, otherwise it’s going to work against you,” a fourth attorney who has practiced before Cannon said.
Trump’s attorneys have also attracted heat from Cannon, though far less often than the special counsel.
Defense attorneys CNN spoke to described Cannon as a judge who gives minimal deference to defendants and as a “notoriously” tough sentencer. To that end, the long leash she’s given the Trump team in the pretrial phase of the case has struck a chord with them.“She’s certainly not sympathetic to most defendants, and she’s certainly playing a different game with the current defendant before her,” another lawyer told CNN, in reference to Trump.
Read the whole thing. Considering the way the right wing has packed the federal courts with extremists and hacks, I think Occam’s Razor suggests she’s just a MAGA shill. How would the results of her decisions be any different?
But it’s also possible that she’s inexperienced and isolated and doesn’t have a clue. After all, that’s how Trump runs the government, why should it be the same for MAGA acolytes? The sad fact is that the only way this will ever get anywhere is if Trump loses in November and the federal judiciary decides they’re through with Trump.
Convicted criminal Donald Trump wanted to jail his predecessor
It’s important that people understand just what crock this new line about Trump never calling for the prosecution of his political enemies is. He’s a liar, of course. But there’s more to this than just Trump’s usual mendacity, which Aaron Rupar ably covers in this free article from his newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.
It’s tough to remember now as Donald Trump regularly wails about the need for total presidential immunity, but four years ago, the then-president was a huge proponent of prosecuting presidents.
In the spring and summer of 2020, Trump desperately tried to make a big scandal out of “Obamagate” — the idea that President Obama had done, uh, something or other worthy of serious investigation and possible prosecution. (Trump at one point called the non-scandal the “biggest political crime in American history, by far!”)
We won’t get too into the details, because Trump certainly didn’t. The below exchange from a news conference on May 11, 2020, underscores that he had no real understanding of what “Obamagate” was even supposed to be.
“Some terrible things happened and it should never be allowed to happen in our country again,” claimed Trump.
“What is the crime exactly that you’re accusing him of?” reporter Philip Rucker followed up.
“You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody,” Trump replied.
Trump’s calls for Republicans and DOJ officials to act on his made-up scandal didn’t amount to anything, and the whole thing receded from view along with the 2020 campaign.
The episode is worth revisiting now, however, not only as a reminder that Trump’s immunity claims are a bunch of BS, but also as a preview of how he hopes to abuse power if he returns to the White House and can avail himself of an administration stuffed with sycophants who will unquestioningly carry out his whims.
“FULL IMMUNITY” (some exceptions apply)
As a newly convicted felon, Trump has obvious reasons for his newly developed view that presidents should have total immunity.
Trump still faces even more serious charges for his illegal attempts to overturn the 2020 election and his theft of classified documents. He succeeded in delaying his cases in Georgia, Florida, and DC, but if he doesn’t win the presidency, his final reckoning is coming.
During his post-conviction press conference, Trump stated that his ongoing battle to place himself above the law is actually about ”our Constitution. It’s very important beyond me and this can’t be allowed to happen to other presidents.”
So Trump has laughably claimed that “presidential immunity” is not just about him. He worries that future presidents will be unable to function if they’re afraid their actions might break the law. But “Obamagate” gives the lies to the idea that there’s anything beyond naked self-interest at play here.
Back in May 2020, as the covid death total escalated and the prospect that Trump would become a one-term president became more real, he lashed out at a familiar foe. He spent Mother’s Day tweeting accusations that Obama masterminded a plot to topple his presidency, including retweeting a post from Twitter user “Rexxurection” that bore his image with the caption, “Hope you had fun investigating me. Now it’s my turn!”
Trump didn’t believe the first Black president was entitled to “absolute immunity” for his actions while in office. The inconsistency is hardly shocking.
The real scandal came from inside the house
As Americans got sick and died, Trump tweeted frantically about Obama’s supposed crimes, which he claimed “makes Watergate look small time!” But when pressed by Rucker on May 11 to explain exactly those crimes were, he responded with gibberish.
“Uh, Obamagate. It’s been going on for a long time,” he began. “It’s been going on from before I even got elected, and it’s a disgrace that it happened, and if you look at what’s gone on, and if you look at now, all this information that’s being released — and from what I understand, that’s only the beginning — some terrible things happened, and it should never be allowed to happen in our country again.”
“Obamagate” was an obvious distraction tactic from Trump’s botched covid response, which Obama had publicly criticized, and as the walls closed in on his presidency, Trump only grew more obsessed with the idea that a Barack-led cabal had conspired against him. During Obama’s 2020 DNC speech, a furious Trump tweeted, “HE SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN AND GOT CAUGHT!”
“It’s treason,” a frantic Trump told CBN News in June 2020. “Look, when I came out a long time ago, I said they’ve been spying on my campaign. I said they’ve been taping, and that was in quotes, meaning a modern day version of taping, it’s all the same thing. But a modern day version. But they’ve been spying on my campaign.”
The amorphous “they” included Trump’s direct political opponent, Joe Biden, who Trump claimed “led the charge” along with Obama. This was baseless slander unsupported by any actual facts. In reality, Trump had been impeached in 2019 for his attempts to coerce Ukraine into producing damaging (and false) narratives about Biden. “Treason” is itself narrowly defined as “levying War against [the United States], or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” Trump is egocentric enough to consider his personal interests indistinguishable from America’s.
This was all classic Trump projection: Trump’s 2016 campaign welcomed and actively solicited Russia’s assistance. Most infamously, during a July 2016 news conference, Trump said, “Russia, if you’re listening — I hope you are able to find the 30,000 [Hillary Clinton] emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens.”
Trump would later lie that he was joking in front of “25,000 people in a stadium,” but Vladimir Putin didn’t think he was kidding: Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation determined that “on or around the same day” as Trump’s remarks, Russian officials targeted email addresses associated with Hillary Clinton’s personal and campaign offices. It was a cyber version of the Watergate break-in.
That wasn’t the first time and Trump and Russia had worked together. Donald Trump Jr. was told in June 2016 that a Russian lawyer was willing to share damaging information about Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Trump Jr. didn’t immediately report this conversation to the FBI — as Al Gore’s campaign did when it received documents stolen from George W. Bush. Instead, Trump Jr. replied he’d “love it.”
The next month, the FBI learned about Trump campaign foreign policy George Papadopoulos drunkenly blabbing to an Australian diplomat about having inside knowledge of Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton, and the FBI opened an investigation. Code-named “Crossfire Hurricane,” it would determine “whether individuals associated with [Trump’s] presidential campaign were coordinating, wittingly or unwittingly, with the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election.” Four Trump campaign operatives were specifically targeted, including campaign manager (and future convicted felon) Paul Manafort and national security adviser Michael Flynn.
It’s against federal law for a political campaign to accept or solicit contributions or donations — directly or indirectly — from foreign nationals. The FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign was clearly warranted, but more to the point, Obama had nothing to do with it. The Department of Justice and the House of Representatives found no evidence that Obama initiated or influenced the FBI’s investigation. And as Trump’s DOJ acknowledged, Obama didn’t have Trump Tower wiretapped, either — a repeated Trump lie.
Further, the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee released a report in August 2020 stating the obvious: “Moscow’s intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the US democratic process.”
Obama, of course, didn’t spend the 2016 election promoting baseless conspiracies about the Trump campaign. The sad irony is that rather than actively sabotaging his campaign, the Obama administration was if anything too protective of Trump, to the nation’s detriment. Biden revealed in 2020 that after Mitch McConnell refused in September 2016 to join a bipartisan statement condemning Russia’s election interference, he and Obama agreed not to speak out themselves and risk undermining the legitimacy of an American election. Trump’s GOP no longer has such scruples.
Immunity for me, not for thee
In January, Trump posted an unhinged, all-caps screed on Truth Social stating that even presidential actions that “‘CROSS THE LINE’ MUST FALL UNDER TOTAL IMMUNITY, OR IT WILL BE YEARS OF TRAUMA TRYING TO DETERMINE GOOD FROM BAD.”
In making his case, Trump compared himself to a “ROGUE COP,” adding, “SOMETIMES YOU JUST HAVE TO LIVE WITH ‘GREAT BUT SLIGHTLY IMPERFECT.’”
Trump’s desperate, blatant plea for the Supreme Court to let presidents, specifically those named Donald J. Trump, slide on criminal acts nonetheless resonated with Justice Samuel Alito, who echoed his nonsense a few months later during oral arguments.
“If an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?” he asked.
Alito’s logic is backward. Trump is the destabilizing force in our democracy, not the legal efforts to hold him accountable.
It’s especially twisted that Trump might benefit from a ruling Alito argues is intended to protect a former president from a “bitter political opponent.” Trump is that hypothetical opponent. He already shredded previous norms about presidents not attacking their predecessors, and when his reelection prospects started to tank, he escalated his smears against Obama — later complaining that the Justice Department, under sycophant Attorney General Bill Barr, had quietly ended its investigation without any charges against his nemesis.
Trump is also the first modern president to actively campaign on prosecuting his foes. Despite his recent gaslighting statement to the contrary, Trump frequently joined chants of “lock her up” during his hate rallies. He once told his lynch mob crowd that they should “speak to Jeff Sessions,” who was his future short-lived pick for attorney general.
If Trump was just “joking” again, his stand-up material contains a disturbing amount of treason and authoritarian-based “humor.”
During Trump’s second debate with Clinton, when he was fighting for his political life after the Access Hollywood tape, he threatened to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate her email server — even after the FBI had determined she hadn’t done anything illegal.
“If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation,” he said, “because there has never been so many lies, so much deception.”
This is an actual example of weaponizing the Justice Department. It was clear Trump wasn’t interested in where the facts led, either. When Clinton said it was a good thing he wasn’t president, he snapped back, “Because you’d be in jail.”
As president-elect, Trump still dangled the prospect of pursuing charges against Clinton. “I’m going to think about it,” he told CBS News’s Lesley Stahl, when asked if he still planned on appointing a special prosecutor.
Now in a spiral after his conviction in the Stormy Daniels case, Trump has openly vowed retribution. During a Newsmax interview Tuesday night, Trump described his conviction as “a terrible precedent for our country. Does that mean the next president does it to them? That’s really the question.” He later repeated the threat: “So, you know, it’s a terrible, terrible path that they’re leading us to. And it’s very possible that it’s going to have to happen to them.”
In short, the convicted felon who thinks presidents should be immune from prosecution is simultaneously threatening to weaponize the justice system to prosecute the current president. It sounds incoherent, but really that’s just Trumpism — for me, everything, for my enemies, the law.
For Trump, total immunity, but for his enemies, “Obamagate” — and the planned sequel, “Bidengate.”
Oh my dear God. The greatest whiner in the history of the world, an epic sore loser who never, ever stops complaining about how unfaaaaair everyone and everything is to him has a thick skin?
Trump in Phoenix at a Turning Point Action event: "Impeachment hoax number one. Impeachment hoax number two. All hoaxes. Everything's a hoax." pic.twitter.com/AUnK6bCn9p
Phillip: You said the argument that President Biden can't stop the Trump prosecution because it's a state case, you called that an explanation for stupid people. pic.twitter.com/gLVkLhXFb0
Public opinion polls about the current presidential race are mystifying in a lot of ways. How can it be that the twice impeached, convicted felon Donald Trump is the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party again? As inexplicable as it is to many of us I think after eight years we have to just accept the fact that almost half the country is beguiled by the man while the other half looks on in abject horror. and carry on from there.
But as much as we may be dismayed by this adoration and fealty to Trump the man, it’s still maddening that so many voters, even including Democrats, insist that everything was so much better when Donald Trump was president. By almost any measure it was an epic shit show and I can’t believe that people have forgotten what it was really like.
One obvious explanation is that he lies relentlessly about his record and after a while people start to believe him. According to him we had unprecedented prosperity, the greatest foreign policy, the safest, the cleanest, the most peaceful world in human history and it immediately turned into a toxic dystopia upon his departure.
The reality was far different. From the day after the election it was a non-stop scandal. Even in the early days of the transition there were substantial and well founded charges of corruption, nepotism and collusion with foreign adversaries which led to the early firing of his National Security advisor, the subsequent firing of the FBI director and appointment of a Special Counsel. He did manage to do one thing that nobody else ever managed to do which was have the highest number of staff and cabinet turnovers in history, (85%)some of whom were forced out due to their unscrupulous behavior. Others quit or were fired after they refused to carry out unethical or illegal orders ordered by the president. This continued throughout the term until the very last days of his presidency when a handful of cabinet members including the Attorney General resigned over Trump’s Big Lie and refusal to accept his loss.
Yes, those were really good times. Let’s sign on for another four years of chaos, corruption and criminality.
But, let’s face facts. What people think they miss about the Trump years was the allegedly great pre-pandemic economy and the world peace that he brought through sheer force of his magnetic personality. None of that is remotely true. The Trump economy was really the tail end of the longest expansion in history begun under President Obama and the low interest rates that went with it. Nothing Trump did added to it and he never lived up to his own hype. For instance:
Trump assured the public in 2017 that the U.S. economy with his tax cuts would grow at “3%,” but he added, “I think it could go to 4, 5, and maybe even 6%, ultimately.”If the 2020 pandemic is excluded, growth after inflation averaged 2.67% under Trump, according to figures from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Include the pandemic-induced recession and that average drops to an anemic 1.45%. By contrast, growth during the second term of then-President Barack Obama averaged 2.33%. So far under Biden, annual growth is averaging 3.4%.
Inflation started its rise at the beginning of the pandemic (in Trump’s last year) and continued to rise sharply in the first year of the Biden administration before it started to come back down. The reasons are complex but the fact that it was lower under Trump is simply a matter of timing.
Trump’s economy was good but it wasn’t great even before the pandemic. He had higher unemployment than we have now, he blew out the deficit with his tax cuts and the tariffs accomplished zilch. The stock market was roaring but it’s even higher now and unlike Trump who simply rode an already good economy, Biden started out with the massive crisis Trump left him and managed to dig out from under it in record time. No other country in the world has recovered as quickly and had Trump won re-election there’s little evidence in his record that he could have done the same. All he knows is tariffs and and tax cuts and he’s promising more of the same.
On the world stage, he was a disaster. From his ill-treatment of allies to his sucking up to dictators from Kim Jong Un to Vladimir Putin, everything he did was wrong. He was impeached for blackmailing the leader of Ukraine to get him dirt on Joe Biden, for goodness sakes! Does that sound like a sound foreign policy decision? The reverberations of his ignorant posturing will be felt for a generation even if he doesn’t win another term.
And despite the alleged peacenik’s boast that he never had a war while he was president, it’s actually a lie. The US had troops in Afghanistan fighting throughout his entire term despite his promise to withdraw and there was a very ugly drone war carried out throughout his term. Trump bombed Syria and assassinated Iranian leaders and did all the things American presidents had been doing ever since 9/11. His only answer today to the vexing problems that are confronting Biden in Ukraine and Israel is to fatuously declare “it never would have happened” if he were president. On Gaza, Trump’s solution is “finish the problem” and I don’t think there’s any question about what he means by that.
Trump, who called himself the greatest jobs president in history, was the first president since Herbert Hoover during the Great Depression to depart office with fewer jobs in the country than when he entered. He can say that doesn’t count because of the pandemic but so much of that was his fault that it actually is. It was his crucible and he failed miserably.
His administration had disbanded the pandemic office and failed to replenish the stockpiles of medical supplies so we already started out ill-prepared. He denied the crisis at first which we learned from Bob Woodward’s interview that he knew very well how deadly it was, he lied, he put his son-in-law and some college buddies in charge of logistics. He pushed snake oil cures, and disparaged common sense public health measures because they threatened his desire for a quick economic revival despite the fact that Americans were dropping dead by the thousands every single day. And, as always, he blamed everyone else for his problems. COVID killed far more Americans than other peer nations and it was due to Trump’s failed leadership.
For all these reasons, anyone who looks back on the Trump years as a golden time when everything was so much better isn’t remembering the reality of those four awful years. There really are worse things in life than inflation.
“They hope that the generation coming along understands what they fought for rather than just giving them credit they deserve for being brave.” – Joe Biden
The contrasts during Thursday’s 80th D-Day remembance in Normandy could hardly have been more stark. The choices ahead for the U.S., NATO and Europe were there in subtext even when not all but obvious.
President Joe Biden is in Europe, warning of totalitarian evil and the dangers to democracy. Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump is back home, seeking a favor from Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, mulling revenge and trashing US elections.
The former president is making his 2024 opponent’s case — that the West is being challenged by unprecedented threats to the rule of law from hostile forces outside and in.
But Trump’s strength also suggests that the centerpiece of Biden’s trip — an homage on Friday in Normandy to one of former President Ronald Reagan’s greatest speeches — may fall on many deaf ears back in America. The former president is showing in every speech and public appearance that the seduction of demagoguery, the demonization of outsiders and the language of extremism is as potent now as it was before World War II.
The 80th anniversary commemorations of the D-Day invasion that led to the liberation of Europe have turned into a rallying point for Western leaders warning that the darkest forces of political extremism are awakening. They have also used their meetings and speeches to draw parallels between Putin’s vicious assault on Ukraine and Adolf Hitler’s blitzkrieg.
There’s nothing new in a modern US president traveling to Europe to invoke the shared history of victory over tyranny. But no other commander in chief has done so after his predecessor tried to destroy democracy to stay in office. The possibility that Biden could lose reelection — and the threat of a return to the chaos Trump inflicted on European allies — has cast an ominous shadow over the trip.
Let me interrupt the horse-race framing the press prefers to garner views and clicks to remind readers that the presidential contest is trending away from Donald Trump. That won’t silence coverage intended to keep readers engaged in an election contest media outlets cast as a page-turner.
On Friday, Biden will send an unmistakable message by co-opting the legacy of Reagan — one of the greatest Republican presidents — to suggest that his rival is an affront to US and GOP values. In 1984, atop a cliff stormed by US Army Rangers on June 6, 1944, known as the Pointe du Hoc, the 40th president denounced US isolationism. He also invoked the war against Nazism to summon the West to a renewed and ultimately successful Cold War struggle against another form of extremism — Kremlin-style communism. Biden will imply that Trump, with his “America First” foreign policy, attacks on the integrity of the free and fair 2020 election and use of extreme anti-immigrant rhetoric that echoes that of the Nazis, is summoning the same forces that triggered global war.
Trump might not be the anti-Christ, but he is the anti-Reagan for Republican dead-enders who still hold onto some American values. Biden means to stimulate their vestigal memories and perhaps tweak their consciences.
Eighty years after the allied landings, the president will draw a “throughline” from World War II to today in his remarks, national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters. But the subtext of the speech is also likely to be aimed at former President Donald Trump.
“He’ll talk about the stakes of that moment – an existential fight between dictatorship and freedom. He’ll talk about the men who scaled those cliffs and how they … put the country ahead of themselves. And he’ll talk about the dangers of isolationism and how if we back dictators, fail to stand up to them, they keep going, and ultimately, America and the world pays a greater price,” Sullivan told reporters aboard Air Force One.
Biden has repeatedly cast Trump’s embrace of authoritarian leaders – including Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un – as a threat to democracy.
We once fought them over there so we didn’t have to fight them over here, to borrow from the failed Global War on Terror (GWOT). But we grew complacent. The result is MAGA, the rolling back of civil rights, and an authoritarian cult.
How far has America fallen, asks this TikTok user, to consider for a second a wannabe dictator for the presidency? Donald Trump has failed upward his entire life, but that’s enough for the morally bankrupt Republican Party to nominate him again for president after he incited a violent insurrection. WTF?
Let me leave you with something more positive, this clip from an interview with Tom Hanks in Normandy. Fight bad faith with good faith this year.
AMANPOUR: “Do you worry about the United States in terms of its commitment to democracy and freedom and what they died for — if there’s another Trump term?”
TOM HANKS: “I will always have faith 🇺🇸 cannot help but turn towards what is right.” pic.twitter.com/BmXqa1SD8b
— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) June 7, 2024
“To Me!” cried Donald Trump, brandishing stacks of news clipping during his Manhattan criminal trial. His Republican supplicants rushed to their king dressed like him.
It is supreme irony how readily MAGA Republicans abandon their own heritage of freedom, of democratic self-rule, of the fundamentals of law dating from the Magna Carta, British common law, and William Blackstone. They’ve replaced it all with the Law of Trump. Their patriotism, like Trump’s business prowess, is a sham, disposable if power is on the line. And commitment to the principle of equal justice under law? As the expression goes: For my friends, everything, for my enemies, the law.
Half a dozen of his businesses have gone bankrupt, including casinos. Trump’s charitable foundation was a sham, dismantled, and its assets distributed to genuine charites. Trump University was judged a fraud, sued and shuttered. The Trump Organization is banned from doing business in the state of New York. Trump has been civilly judged for sexual assault. Last week, Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts of business fraud.
Trump could (in theory) be in jail by the time of the Republican convention in July. He has three other federal cases pending and possibly more state and federal cases being assembled.
Trump’s greatest achievement in bankruptcy is the moral bankruptcy of the Republican Party.
Yet MAGA Republicans hope to re-elect the convicted leader of a crime syndicate to the White House. Now a felon, Trump cannot possess a gun. They want to hand him the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
That’s not all bankrupt Republicans want to hand him.
Trump promises in a second term to weaponize the Department of Justice to punish his enemies while, as is his M.O., claiming it is payback for what was done to hold Trump the Remorseless, like a commoner, accountable to the rule of law Republicans have abandoned like American democracy.
His lackeys in Congress now hope to restructure the law to enable their liege lord to escape further punishment:
In the wake of Donald Trump’s felony convictions, House Speaker Mike Johnson told his GOP conference this week that he has a “three-pronged approach” in mind to respond to the former president’s prosecutions. The first involves “the appropriations process” — Republicans want to defund prosecutors they don’t like — and another prong relates to “oversight,” which refers to another round of partisan, conspiratorial investigations.
But the Louisiana congressman also vowed this week to make use of “the legislative process, through bills that will be advancing through our committees and put it on the floor for passage.”
Conservatives want a floor vote on a bill that would allow current or former presidents to move any state case brought against them — such as the one in New York that resulted in Trump’s conviction — to federal court, according to multiple House Republican sources.
Meanwhile, Johnson told Republicans in a conference meeting Tuesday that the House GOP will target DOJ through attempts at increased oversight, funding cuts and other means, according to a source in the room.
Moving state cases to federal courts would enable Trump, if reelected, either to shut down his prosecutions or pardon himself if convicted. The president has no pardon power in state cases. Sneaky bastards.
Oh, and the hissy fits they’ll throw now that former Trump adviser Steve Bannon is headed to jail. Greg Sargent explains:
A judge just ordered longtime Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon to surrender to prison on July 1st after his conviction for defying the Jan. 6th committee’s subpoena. Not surprisingly, Trump and MAGA have already exploded in rage. Making this worse, Bannon is one of the leading pro-Trump figures calling on Trump to jail Democrats without cause if he wins the White House—and Bannon’s jail time will only fuel that mania. We talked to Eric Columbus, a lawyer who represented the Jan. 6th committee, about the alarming signals this sends about the perils of a second Trump presidency. Listen to this episode here.
The explosion of Trump/MAGA rage about Steve Bannon's jail sentence confirms yet again a key dogma of the MAGA movement: Any and all applications of the law to MAGA are deemed inherently illegitimate.
