Indiscretions = rape, sexual harrassment, financial mismanagement and serious alcohol use disorder.
Roy is not alone in that belief, of course. After all, the man they all worship is guilty of all but the alcohol problem. He’s an adjudicated rapist, fraudster and sexual harrasser. And 75 million or so Americans voted for that so you can’t say that it’s a deal breaker.
I don’t know if Hegseth will make it. But I won’t be surprised if he does. He’s a quintessential Republican alpha male.
Last February, as Donald Trump was running for the Republican presidential nomination, he appeared at SneakerCon in Philadelphia to debut his latest branded product, gold sneakers emblazoned with the number 45. They retailed for $399 and reportedly sold out immediately, or at least orders for them did. They ended up going for thousands of dollars on ebay.
Nobody knew exactly where these sneakers were made or who was making them but Newsweek reported that the designs were trademarked by CIC Ventures LLC out of Palm Beach and its managers were two Trump associates. The website states that the company selling the shoes is located in a small town in Wyoming and declares that the shoes “are not designed, manufactured, distributed or sold by Donald J. Trump, The Trump Organization or any of their respective affiliates or principals.” It uses the name, image and likeness under a license agreement. That same company is now selling a new product called “Fight, Fight, Fight” cologne and perfume which sell for $199, also under a license agreement.
There’s also a $100,000 gold watch and guitars that go for as much as $11,500 for an American Eagle edition autographed by Trump himself all of which come out of the same company in Wyoming.
These licensing deals are the same sort of consumer branding he did before he was president when he put his name on everything from steaks to water to ties and more. It was his most lucrative business in the years he was starring on “The Apprentice” and it appears he has no intention of stopping now that he’s going to be president again. I’d imagine he’ll be signing those guitars right in the oval office. Perhaps he feels that because he is just licensing the rights (for which he gets paid handsomely) it’s not really a side gig? Certainly no one would think to buy one of those expensive watches or guitars just to curry favor with the most powerful man in the world, right?
Trump famously refused to divest his businesses in his first term and nobody did anything about it. He made millions as president, whether it was through people currying favor by spending vast sums at Trump hotels and resorts or charging the government top dollar for stays at his own commercial properties. His sons were still running around the world representing the Trump organization despite their pledge to refrain from all foreign business dealings.
According to the New York Times they aren’t even bothering to pretend this time:
In the wake of Donald J. Trump’s election victory, his family business is poised to capitalize on his presidency with a variety of new ventures, according to a New York Times review of financial records and interviews with people knowledgeable about his finances. And unlike in his first term, the people said, the Trump Organization aims to issue a more limited ethics plan that is unlikely to significantly curb its growth.
They say they won’t do any deals directly with foreign governments which is awfully big of them. And anyway, why should they? They can just do what Jared Kushner did with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and wink and nod at foreign governments until Trump’s out of office to get their pay off. According to the Times, the company is now “free to profit from an array of business in countries essential to American foreign policy interests:”
In the months leading up to Election Day, Eric Trump struck real estate deals in Vietnam, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and he has shown interest in new hotel projects in Israel and other countries across the Middle East, Latin America and Asia.
All of these projects will have the name of the President of the United States plastered all over them.
As the Times lays out, they aren’t confining their foreign businesses to real estate and hospitality this time. The family helped create a cryptocurrency platform called World Liberty Financial. It’s already made millions for Trump through just one transaction from a Chinese entrepreneur that could eventually personally net him as much as $22 million. This investor, Justin Sun, made it clear that he was doing it to suck up to Trump with a post on twitter/X saying he’s committed to “making America great again.”
The fact that he’s currently under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission and Trump will be appointing new commissioners surely has nothing to do with it. As Judd Legum at Popular Information reported, he is suspected of:
“fraudulently manipulating the secondary market” for a crypto token “through extensive wash trading.” Wash trading involves “the simultaneous or near-simultaneous purchase and sale of a security to make it appear actively traded without an actual change in beneficial ownership.”
Sun is now on the board of World Liberty Financial and is essentially Trump’s business partner.
And then there is Trump’s publicly traded social media company, DJT, which is also open to foreign investors. Trump owns about $4 billion of its stock, making it his most valuable asset. As CBS News reported, the stock has been extremely volatile moving wildly on news about Trump, making it more of a “meme”stock defined as “companies that trade on social media buzz rather than financial fundamentals such as revenue and profit growth.” Since the company has made virtually no money that sounds like a pretty good definition.
CBS also noted that Trump was very upset about all that saying the company had been the target of “probably illegal rumors and/or statements” demanding an investigation by the SEC, — which will soon be answering to him. That’s not an appearance of conflict of interest it’s a straight up conflict and any president other than Trump would be embarrassed to flaunt his corruption this blatantly.
Trump says they plan to offer a “white paper” outlining their new ethical guidelines which appear to be nothing more than a vague promise not to work with foreign governments. According to the Times they figure that will “help the company contend with lawsuits based on the so-called foreign emoluments clause of the Constitution, which prohibits federal officials from accepting gifts or payments from other governments.”
The fact that they are already in bed with certain governments in one way or another will have to be litigated which takes a lot of time, particularly since Trump excels at deploying delaying tactics. The emoluments lawsuits that were filed during his first term took so long they ended up being rendered moot since he had already left office by the time they got to the Supreme Court. No doubt that’s exactly what they’re counting on happening again.
I’ve never fully understood why so few people seem to care about Trump’s flagrant corruption. The Democrats only half-heartedly investigated it and certainly didn’t bother to make it a campaign issue. Apparently, not selling the presidency to the highest bidder is just another one of those vaunted norms that was easily discarded, soon to be forgotten. Well, unless the son of a Democratic president traded on his father’s name in years past. Then all bets are off.
Salon
We’ve warned plenty here about Christian nationalism, the New Apostolic Reformation, and the Seven Mountains mandate. Considering the Second Coming of Trump already features cabinet nominees associated with efforts to turn our democracy into a theocracy (what’s the big deal about swapping out two letters?), it’s time for another look. Amanda Marcotte this morning offers a hair-raising glimpse at Salon.
“You think you ‘know’ what’s in it,” Marcotte introduces it on Bluesky, “but I promise it’s much crazier. I went deep in the research on this. Lots of quotes from Christian nationalists Trump has appointed, and experts.”
Plenty of those, but some key points before you click over to read the whole thing:
Just because we’ve heard this all before does not mean they are any less of a threat this time around. Believe them the first time. They don’t want to govern; they want to rule. The oligarchs behind Trump are in it for more money and power and because they are Randian adolescents. The Christian nationalists are after dominance with a capital “D.”
Donald Trump has had it out for non-European, non-whites on these shores since the Muslim ban of his first weeks in office in 2017. And before that, really, with his post-escalator ride tirade about Mexicans in 2015. Now with a second shot at cleaning house starting in January, Trump and his henchmen-xenophobes are poised to round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants and anyone who looks like one. And they’ll erase the four years of the Biden presidency while they’re at it out of spite, if they can.
But out where reality intersects with rhetoric, that tough talk is raising eyebrows, Greg Sargent explains. “Republicans or GOP-adjacent industries … suggest gingerly that a slight rethink might be in order.”
Rolling back President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act could decimate nascent green technology manufacturing in Georgia, for example, “from electric vehicles to batteries to solar power.” State representative Beth Camp worries that repealing Biden’s climate measures could leave factories in Georgia “sitting empty.”
Despite Trump’s claims that growth in green technologies would kill jobs, writes Sargent, “the IRA is spurring an outpouring of private investment that’s creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs, many in advanced manufacturing and well suited for people without college degrees.” You know, in places the MAGA faithful believe “were abandoned by liberal and Democratic elites.”
Whoops. Trump rolling back Biden initiatives could be the real job-killing move.
And then there are those brown-skinned migrants:
Something similar is also already happening with Trump’s threat to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. Reuters reports that agriculture interests, which are heavily concentrated in GOP areas, are urging the incoming Trump administration to refrain from removing untold numbers of migrants working throughout the food supply chain, including in farming, dairy, and meatpacking.
Notably, GOP Representative John Duarte, who just lost his seat in the elections, explicitly tells Reuters that farming interests in his California district depend on undocumented immigrants—and that Trump should exempt many from removal. Duarte and industry representatives want more avenues created for migrants to work here legally—the precise opposite of what Trump promised.
Now over to Texas. NPR reports that various industries there fear that mass deportations could cripple them, particularly in construction, where nearly 300,000 undocumented immigrants toiled as of 2022. Those workers enable the state to keep growing despite a native population that isn’t supplying a large enough workforce. Local analysts and executives want Trump to refrain from removing all these people or create new ways for them to work here legally. Even the Republican mayor of McKinney, Texas, is loudly sounding the alarm.
But surely Americans who believe migrants stole their jobs will flock to fill those low-skilled meatpacking, construction, and long-hour farm jobs once the deportations bite.
Paul Krugman thinks not. Immigrants, he told Sargent last month, “take very, very different jobs. They just bring a different set of skills, a different set of preferences. There’s very little head-to-head competition. In fact, immigrants are really complements to American workers, even American workers without college degrees.”
So what does that mean for Trump’s plans for ethnically cleansing America? It means, as with his plans for slapping tariffs on anything not made in America, that he’ll find ways to exempt companied and industries that kiss his ass and fill his pockets, all while claiming he’s smacked down the downtrodden just as he promised at his rallies. And use selective enforcement to punish blue cities and towns, those cesspools of migrant crime where, according to MAGA myth, little boys go to school with penises and come home girls.
It’s significant that this emotionally stunted septuagenarian is stunted in other ways. His world view seems stuck in the 1980s. He never learned much, but what he thinks he knows about the world is by now decades old. He’s wedded to fossil fuels, for example, and hates “green.” He complained about the Navy wanting electromagnetic catapults for its aircraft carriers. He prefers steam. Why? Because there’s steam heating and steam boilers in his properties. He knows this much (thumb and forefinger an inch apart) about steam, so that’s what he thinks is preferable.
As we know, he’s always the smartest person in the room.
A hearing of the bipartisan task force investigating the assassination attempts against President-elect Donald Trump devolved into a shouting match when Republican Rep. Pat Fallon accused acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe of “playing politics” when he attended a 9/11 memorial event with the nation’s top leaders.
Yelling between the two broke out after Fallon displayed a photo of Trump, President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and Vice President-elect JD Vance at the event in New York City in September. Rowe was standing directly behind Harris, then a candidate for the presidency, in the second row.
“Who is usually, at an event like this, closest to the president of the United States, security-wise?” Fallon, of Texas, asked Rowe.
“The SAC of the detail,” Rowe answered, referring to the special agent in charge of security. Fallon then questioned whether the acting director was serving in that role at the 9/11 memorial.
Rowe did not answer directly. He said the photo did not show the special agent in charge because he was just out of the frame and told Fallon that he was at the event to show respect for Secret Service members who died on 9/11. “That is the day where we remember the more than 3,000 that have died on 9/11,” he said. “I actually responded to Ground Zero. I was there going through the ashes at the World Trade Center.”
Rowe condemned Fallon, telling him, “Do not invoke 9/11 for political purposes.”The video player is currently playing an ad.Skip Ad
The congressman, meanwhile, said Rowe’s explanation was “a bunch of horse hockey.”
“Don’t try to bully me,” Fallon told Rowe. “I am an elected member of Congress and I’m asking you a serious question and you are playing politics.”
The acting director then shouted back: “And I am a public servant who has served this nation and spent time on our country’s darkest day. Do not politicize it.”
Apparently some weaponized MAGA “whistleblower” told the Republicans on the committee that this guy was angling for his promotion by being in the picture and somehow that endangered Donald Trump. Or something.
But it says everything a bout our juvenile, macho political culture. Maybe they should just stage wrestling matches on the House floor. It would be just as fake but more entertaining. At least for the people who get off on this stuff. I prefer Animal Planet but that’s just me.
They can’t even agree on their legislative priorities:
Republicans are already bickering over how to pass major parts of President-elect Donald Trump’s platform.
There is serious disunity regarding how and when to pass Trump’s legislative agenda, Politico reported Wednesday. Senator John Thune told his fellow senators that he wanted to accelerate the president-elect’s plans via budget reconciliation so that both the border policy and tax policy portions can pass within the first 30 days of Trump’s presidency.
Some House Republicans don’t think that’s the right approach, though, as passing border policy so early could make it harder for their committee to pass tax law later on. And then there’s also the fact that Republicans already have some significant disagreements on tax policy in general.
While Republican House leaders Mike Johnson and Steve Scalise have been in Trump’s ear in Mar-a-Lago, dissent has been fomenting in D.C.
“Our members need to weigh in on that. This doesn’t need to be a decision that’s made up on high, okay?” said Texas House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington. “We’re all unified around the objectives, [but] how we roll it out, the tactics and strategies, still under discussion.”
Trump loyalist Marjorie Taylor Greene noted that Republicans ought to rebuke Thune if he doesn’t approve the entire bill, while Freedom Caucus member Chip Roy also thinks that reconciliation should be forced through and then they can “maybe do a second version that gets at true long-standing permanent tax reform.
The GOP will have a 2 seat majority in the House in the first months. Only a five vote after that. Maybe they will be so euphoric over Dear Leader’s victory that they’ll all just sign off on anything he tells them to sign off on. But that’s a dicey proposition. As you can see they’re already fighting amongst themselves.
The Vivek and Elon show came to the Hill today and everyone was v ery excited to be in the company of such VIPs. We haven’t heard many details about what they plan to cut but there was this:
Incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune told her that the mandatory programs such as Social Security and Medicare are on the table.
Good luck with that.
Brian Beutler’s newsletter today proposes the idea that in light of the Hunter Biden pardon statement, in which Biden alluded to serious prosecutorial abuses in the case, that Biden needs to tell everything they know about Trump’s and the Republicans’ abuses before he leaves office. He writes:
We don’t know what these Democrats chose to leave buried. But the Hunter Biden saga, culminating in his Sunday pardon, and his father’s accompanying statement justifying the decision, all suggest the party still fails to grasp the importance of sunlight, accountability, and clear communication. The election is over and they lost, but now the question is whether they will cede all power to the GOP in six weeks without doing everything they still can to inform and protect the country
Between the lines, it’s clear Biden knows quite a lot that never made big splashy headlines.
He knows Republicans in Congress and the first Trump administration broke rules—indeed, committed impeachable offenses—to target Hunter in retributory fashion; that their subversion of the rule of law tainted his son’s prosecution; and that his son won’t be safe from Republican harassment without broad presidential clemency.
I happen to understand his allusions, and think they’re completely correct. But they raise big, fundamental questions about what all he and his party have been doing about it these past four years. Why are these recent Republican abuses forbidden instead of common knowledge? And if the looming danger to the people Republicans intend to target is so severe, what more is Biden prepared to do to help them, and warn the country? Or does it end with one pardon for a member of his own family,
He believes that because the Democrats (especially in the Senate which had the majority the whole time) and the DOJ shrugged off the abuses that gave permission for the even worse abuses to come.
It fell instead to a handful of independent journalists, Marcy Wheeler most prominently, to track the provenance of the Hunter Biden investigation, the improper workaround Trump and his allies used in an attempt to frame him and his dad, and the compromised nature of David Weiss, the Trump U.S. attorney-cum-Merrick Garland special counsel who oversaw the case.
This “weaponization of government” could on its own have formed the basis of a concerted congressional inquiry, starting in the second half of Trump’s first presidency, continuing into Biden’s. On the basis of all this wrongdoing, Garland could’ve terminated the Hunter Biden investigation, or fired Weiss, or reassigned the case, or launched new investigations of criminal activity in the first Trump administration.
But for reasons peculiar to Washington Democrats—a paralyzing fear of backlash, or of “appearing” partisan—they decided both to let the Hunter case run its course and to sweep the Trump-era perversions of justice under the rug.
Prior to Biden’s election, Democratic oversight of the Trump DOJ was extraordinarily weak.
In one memorable exchange five and a half years ago, then Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) asked then-Attorney General Bill Barr, “Has the president or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested you open an investigation into anyone?”
Barr responded: “Ahhhm… I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t… ahmmm! Could you repeat that question?”
This could, rather it ought, to have been the jumping-off point for an aggressive investigation of its own, rather than simply a feather in Harris’s cap. But Democrats just skipped past the breadcrumbs.
When one year later Trump, through Barr, tried to edge Geoffrey Berman out of his job as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and got caught, House Democrats held one hearing on the matter.
Naturally, in 2022, Berman published a tell-all full of extraordinarily damning detail about the Trump-Barr effort to harass and even prosecute Trump’s enemies. The midterms arrived quickly thereafter, but Democrats retained control of the Senate, and still did nothing with this information.
Without publicly litigating all the Trump DOJ’s aberrant ways, how its investigations of people like Hunter were tainted by partisan politics and corruption, there was no public, common-knowledge basis to set things right. And so they woke up on November 6, learned that Trump had been elected to a second term, and will have live with the fact that they could’ve done more, but chose not to.
The pardon is one of the consequences.
Beutler says that Biden should lay it all out before he goes and I think that’s right. Needless to say, all the handwringing over the pardon and Biden “lying” when he said he wouldn’t pardon his son (rather than changing his mind after Orange Hitler was elected) I’d imagine that’s a long shot. If anything I’m watching the Democrats’ spines melting before our eyes and much of the press seems to be resigned to submission.
This old Yiddish joke I’ve posted many times in the past illustrates how the Democrats tend to behave.
There is a joke about three Jews who are about to be executed by firing squad. The sergeant in charge asks each one whether he wants a blindfold. “Yes,” says the first Jew, in a resigned tone. “OK,” says the second Jew, in a quiet voice. “And what about you?” he enquires of the third Jew. “No,” says the third Jew, “I don’t want your lousy blindfold,” followed by a few choice curses. The second Jew immediately leans over to him and whispers: “Listen, Moshe, take a blindfold. Don’t make trouble.”
For quite a while the Democrats and the media showed some resistance in the face of Trump but since the election I’m seeing more and more “don’t make trouble.”
Beutler’s newsletter is one of the best. He writes a lot and it’s always interesting. Highly recommend.
Those of you who have been following this blog over the years will remember how the Freedom Caucus has blown up one “deal” after another, often to the dismay of Republicans who realize that getting most of what you want is better than getting nothing at all. They can always be counted upon to refuse to take yes for an answer.
Mike Johnson, with his tiny majority, is facing the same old challenge and I’m not sure even Donald Trump will be able to control them:
Speaker Mike Johnson is in talks when his own conference about how to fund the government. But he’s got at least two “no” votes no matter what he does.
Reps. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.) and Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), two House Freedom Caucus members, told POLITICO they would oppose any short-term government funding bill, known as a continuing resolution or a CR, regardless of whether Johnson attaches disaster aid to it. The Freedom Caucus took an official position this week that any disaster relief needs to be paid for and limited to what is “absolutely necessary” right now. President Joe Biden requested nearly $100 billion in emergency disaster aid.
“I have never voted for a CR and I don’t intend on concluding my time here by voting for one now. We have a $36 trillion dollar national debt and Congress has failed to do its job by funding government through the appropriations process, as mandated by the Budget Act of 1974, again,” said Rosendale, who is retiring at the end of this term.
GOP aides already expect there are enough Republicans who will vote against a CR no matter that Johnson will need to depend on Democrats to avoid a shutdown. The deadline to pass funding legislation is Dec. 20.
This will not be the last time he confronts this. These people are fanatics and they love to pose and preen — and lose. Freedom Caucus politics are much more performative than substantive. And they all love to be on camera.
Good luck, Mike. You’re going to need it.
Bolts has another of their “Ask Bolts” Q&A features up right now, this time on immigration. You can still get in on it:
Donald Trump’s promise of “mass deportations” looms over millions of people who live in the United States. But the infrastructure to detain and incarcerate immigrants didn’t start with Trump.
U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains an average of 37,000 people per night, often partnering with sheriffs who hold immigrants in their local facilities in exchange for a profit. This practice has a long history that predates ICE and other modern federal immigration agencies: For over a century, the U.S. government has relied on local jails to detain immigrants, creating a vast network of incarceration that operates with minimal oversight. The incoming Trump administration is likely to tap into this network in coming years.
Historian Brianna Nofil traces these developments in her new book, The Migrant’s Jail. From the detention of Chinese migrants in New York in the early 1900s to the jailing of Caribbean refugees in the South in the 1980s, her writing explains how federal authorities and local law enforcement have helped each other create a patchwork of policies that incentivizes incarceration.
We suspect you have questions about these issues in the wake of Trump’s victory, so we asked Nofil if she would be willing to answer them—and she agreed.
By the way, did you know that the US Government used Zyklon B on migrants at the border to disinfect them? They did:
Zyklon B arrived in El Paso in the 1920s courtesy of the US government. In 1929, for example, a Public Health Service officer, J.R. Hurley, ordered $25 worth of the material–hydrocyanic acid in pellet form–as a fumigating agent for use at the El Paso delousing station, where Mexicans crossed the border from Juárez. Zyklon, developed by Degesch (short for the German vermin-combating corporation), was made in varying strengths, with Zyklon C, D and E representing gradations in potency and price. As Raul Hilberg describes it in The Destruction of the European Jews, “strength E was required for the eradication of specially resistant vermin, such as cockroaches, or for gassings in wooden barracks. The ‘normal’ preparation, D, was used to exterminate lice, mice, or rats in large, well-built structures containing furniture. Human organisms in gas chambers were killed with Zyklon B.” In 1929 Degesch divided the Zyklon market with an American corporation, Cyanamid, so Hurley likely got his shipment from the latter.
As David Dorado Romo describes it in his marvelous Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An Underground History of El Paso and Juárez: 1893-1923 (Cinco Puntos Press, El Paso), Zyklon B became available in the United States when, in the early 1920s, fears of alien infection were being inflamed by the alarums of the eugenicists, most of them political “progressives.”
Donald Trump is a eugenecist. So is Stephen Miller. Just saying.
I know it’s hard to accept but there it is. They love him more than ever. And it’s not just that they hate Democrats, which they do. They affirmatively voted for Trump. Maybe it’s time to stop asuming they don’t support what he says and does?
By the way:
Trump won and hasn’t called fraud so that means it was fair. Like him his voters are happy to accept the election results — if they win.