Trump and Melania entertaining Eddie Gallagher, one of the war criminals he pardoned, at Mar-a-Lago
Trump’s abuse of the pardon power is well known. But this analysis by Protect Democracy pinpoints three specific abuses that are unprecedented and provide a major threat in a Trump second term:
During the Trump presidency, we saw three types of henchmen pardons:
Self-protective pardons: Trump dangledpardons for associates implicated in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia, notably former campaign manager Paul Manafort and his former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, providing an incentive for them not to cooperate with the Mueller investigation into Trump and his 2016 campaign. Both were indicted, in Manafort’s case sentenced to years in jail, and later pardoned.
Pardons to reward illegal political activity that accrued to his benefit: Trump pardoned 2000 Mules filmmaker and vocal ally Dinesh D’Souza, who pled guilty to using straw donors to make illegal campaign donations to a Republican Senate candidate. Trump strategist Steve Bannon was charged with defrauding donors who gave money to build a border wall; Trump pardoned him before his trial began.
They note that Trump has also promised to pardon the January 6th insurrectionists. I would guess he’d do it on the very first day.
This isn’t just about these specific individuals. It’s a necessary corollary to Trump’s plans to dismantle the government and put the institutions of government to work to serve his personal and political interests. He has made it clear through actions and words that the people who help him do it will not be held liable and that includes the military and the police. Even during his first term he would tell people that he’d pardon them if they broke the law for him.
There are some guardrails but I wouldn’t count on them holding in Trump 2.0:
First, Congress enjoys the constitutional prerogative to conduct oversight of the pardon power and its potential abuse. Congress should pass legislation that strengthens its ability to do so, improving mechanisms for obtaining information related to presidential pardons during investigations — such as those included in the Abuse of Pardon Prevention Act.
Second, despite Trump’s claim that the president’s pardon power is “complete,” federal courts have long placed limits on that power when it threatens other constitutional provisions and principles — in casesdatingback to the 19th century — and could be called upon to do so again.
Third, the Executive Branch itself also maintains a role in investigating and prosecuting potential criminal abuses of the pardon power. Pardons that may function as bribes or to obstruct justice in violation of federal criminal statutes have previously been the subject of Department of Justice investigations, and could again be in the future.
Over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, Republican presidential primary front-runner Donald Trump revived calls to roll back Obamacare, also known as the Affordable Care Act, if he returns to the White House.
“The cost of Obamacare is out of control, plus, it’s not good Healthcare. I’m seriously looking at alternatives,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social on Saturday.
Trump’s post resurrects an issue on which he and his party are vulnerable. A Sept. 15-19 NBC News poll found that when it comes to health care, voters trust Democrats over Republicans by a margin of 45%-22%. The same survey found that Democrats trail the GOP on many other issues, including the economy, immigration and crime.
After trying and failing to repeal the ACA, and suffering for it at the ballot box, Republican candidates abandoned their calls for eliminating the law in the 2022 midterm elections, recognizing the push as a political loser. But Trump could bring it back in 2024.
“We had a couple of Republican Senators who campaigned for 6 years against it, and then raised their hands not to terminate it,” Trump wrote in his post over the weekend. “It was a low point for the Republican Party, but we should never give up!”
He doesn’t need to “seriously look” for the Republican Alternative to the ACA, it has been fully developed already:
If you think Republicans would never do this because it would be too unpopular, I would google “Roe,” “against,” and “Wade.”
Again, of course they will do it. The defection of McCain, Collins and Murkowski on that repeal vote is one of Trump’s most humiliating moments as president and he wants revenge. He hated McCain for it and railed against him for years on the stump. This will be at the top of his list and there’s no way in hell the Republicans will stand in his way. They don’t want to.
Kevin McCarthy appeared at the NY Times Dealbook Summit and suddenly he’s not a total Trump sycophant:
Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) jabbed former President Donald Trump while being interviewed at the New York Times’s Dealbook Summit on Wednesday.
McCarthy was joined at the event by other big-name interviewees like Vice President Kamala Harris and controversial tech billionaire Elon Musk.
“I didn’t say he’d be a great president. He’ll be a better president,” McCarthy said on stage when asked about Trump possibly returning to the White House.
“If his campaign is about renew, rebuild and restore, he’ll win. If it’s about revenge, he’ll lose,” McCarthy added, according to NY Times coverage of the event.
McCarthy is widely credited with helping to rehabilitate Trump’s standing in the GOP after the former president had briefly become something of a pariah following the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The Times’sRobert Jimson also reported that McCarthy made clear he plans to vote for Trump if he is on the ballot in 2024, but only characterized their current relationship in vague terms:
McCarthy says he did not expect Trump to support him when he faced an ouster, and says he currently has an “interesting” relationship with the former president. He repeats that he would vote for Trump in the next election. “America would be stronger.”
While on stage at the event, McCarthy also briefly addressed his future in politics and said he is unsure if will run for reelection – adding he will “take the time” to decide.
It sure sounds like he’s getting ready to cash in. Why pretend he has a future in politics? He’s done.
It actually sounds like he is royally pissed that Trump didn’t step up and try to save his speakership. Poor Kev. Did he think that loyalty went both ways?
Multiple GOP lawmakers expect Kevin McCarthy to step down from his seat before the end of the year.
McCarthy privately told donors he is looking to "get the hell out," according to a source familiar with the conversation. https://t.co/wj2lPfYMrd
On Jan. 6, before the attack on the Capitol, Cheney describes a scene in the GOP cloakroom, where members were encouraged to sign their names on electoral vote objection sheets, lined up on a table, one for each of the states Republicans were contesting. Cheney writes most members knew “it was a farce” and “another public display of fealty to Donald Trump.”
“Among them was Republican Congressman Mark Green of Tennessee,” Cheney writes. “As he moved down the line, signing his name to the pieces of paper, Green said sheepishly to no one in particular, ‘The things we do for the Orange Jesus.’”
CNN just reminded us of this about Green. He’s not some MMA fighter guy who lucked into politics. He definitely knows better:
Mark Edward Green (born November 8, 1964) is an American politician, physician, and retired U.S. Army major who has served as the U.S. representative for Tennessee’s 7th congressional district since 2019. A member of the Republican Party, Green has chaired the Committee on Homeland Security since 2023.[1] Before his election to Congress, he served in the Tennessee Senate from 2013 to 2018, representing the 22nd district.
After graduating from West Point, Green was an infantry officer. He then graduated from Boonshoft School of Medicine at Wright State University and became a flight surgeon, serving tours of duty in the War in Afghanistan and Iraq War. He wrote a book about his experience in Operation Red Dawn, in which Saddam Hussein was captured. After retiring from the military in 2006, Green became the CEO of a hospital emergency department staffing company.
This guy is not some illiterate boob. He knows exactly what Trump is and what he did. And he supports him solely for power. He is not alone.
The media breathlessly reported this week that the Koch Network, specifically their Americans for Prosperity Action fund, had finally decided who they would be backing for the GOP presidential nomination, former S. Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. This was reported as if it was a very significant moment signaling the final blow to the campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis whom Haley has been overtaking in some polls in the early states.
There’s only one problem. Both Haley and DeSantis are trailing the front runner, former president Donald Trump, by 50 points nationally which means all this hoopla over the Koch endorsement is about who is going to finish a very distant second place. This has to be the saddest example of horse race journalism in history.
The Koch network does have a lot of money, of course, and according to AFP, they’ve already been running negative ads against Trump since last winter when they announced that they were going to participate in the 2024 election, specifically against Trump. But it took them this long to decide to back a specific candidate, perhaps because the one considered most likely to beat Trump, Ron DeSantis, isn’t their cup of tea.
They come out of the libertarian wing of the party which favors immigration and international trade and doesn’t care for the idea of using state power to strong arm business. DeSantis is MAGA, the successor to the Tea Party which the Kochs bankrolled and astroturfed to victories during the Obama years. He hates everything they stand for (except tax cuts, of course.)
Haley, on the other hand, is a Koch Brothers dream. I’m sure she had them at “going to go after Social Security and Medicare.”
Haley: Any candidate that tells you they’re not going to go after Social Security and Medicare is not being serious. pic.twitter.com/4YgM2X6AGR
And here everyone thought that the cacophonous eruption of denials at the State of the Union address last year when President Biden said that’s exactly what they planned meant that the GOP had dropped their longstanding determination to end those programs.
As the NY Times Paul Krugman pointed out in his column on Tuesday, she’s a clever shape-shifting politician on the stump but when you look at her policies, she’s a standard issue corporate right winger. And that, of course, means she doesn’t stand a chance of winning the nomination even if she stands the best chance of beating Joe Biden. To paraphrase a famous Republican defense secretary, you go to war with the Republican base you have not the one you might wish to have and the base today has no interest in standard issue establishment Republicans. Her “lane” is the same lane that they all have: hoping for something to happen to Donald Trump.
The Kochs have a dubious record of choosing presidential candidates anyway. Recall that they had groomed Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker for years to be their own personal president and were ready to formally endorse him when he suddenly declared that he wanted to curtail legal immigration and then flamed out completely, leaving the race before it even started. Their network stayed on the sidelines from that point on. And you can be sure when the primary is over and Trump is the nominee they won’t be spending any of their loot to defeat him in the general. Like so many others of their ilk, they’ll pout and sulk a bit and then slink off to count all the money he saved them with his massive tax cuts for the wealthy.
But with all the talk about the Koch Network stepping into the arena on behalf of Nikki Haley, there’s been hardly a mention of another big bucks right wing family coming off of the sidelines for Donald Trump. CNBC reported last week that according to “people familiar with the matter” Bob Mercer and his daughter Rebekah are considering getting back in the game after laying out since 2018. And they’ve got $88 million sitting in their private nonprofit, the Mercer Family Foundation, just waiting to be spent.
Just as the Koch Network is more ideologically aligned with Nikki Haley, the Mercers came out heavily for Trump in 2016, way ahead of most of the rich guys, pumping tens of millions into the campaign. According to Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman they were originally motivated by their burning hatred of Hillary Clinton whom they believe is a murderer but once they got involved, their influence on the Trump campaign was huge.
Former Trump adviser and podcaster Steve Bannon said, “the Mercers laid the groundwork for the Trump Revolution” and that is absolutely correct. They bankrolled Bannon’s publication Breitbart News which served as Trump’s online propaganda arm during the 2016 campaign and spent millions on Cambridge Analytica, Robert Mercer’s data firm, which was reportedly involved in all sort of chicanery in that election. They were personally responsible for putting Bannon and campaign manager Kellyanne Conway in the campaign.
But their high profile involvement also brought them under intense scrutiny which they apparently didn’t like. They are very eccentric people and they soured on Trump for vague reasons and stepped out of the public eye after 2017. But they never stopped donating millions to their pet causes and other far right politicians. And as Salon’s Igor Derysh pointed out in this tour de force examination of the Mercers tentacles in all aspects of right wing politics, their influence and money was essential to the forces that brought the MAGA movement to its peak moment on January 6th.
And they have continued to help fund organizations and individuals that helped perpetuate the Big Lie. He quotes Mobashra Tazamal, a senior research fellow at Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative which issued a report on the Mercers involvement back in 2021:
“By strategically funneling millions into known hate groups, platforms amplifying racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia, and politicians who pushed forth outright lies of a stolen election, Rebekah Mercer played a role in inciting the violence by providing material support,” she said. “The billionaire family has used their extraordinary wealth to bankroll the rise of violent white nationalism in this country.”
This is what they believe in. This is what they care about. It’s no surprise that they have now decided it may be time to come out of the shadows and once again support Donald Trump. All his recent talk of mass deportations, detention camps, “poisoning the blood of our country” and expelling the “vermin” has to be music to their ears. They figure they may finally be about to get their money’s worth.
MSNBC ran the recording of “Why is this happening?” featuring Rachel Maddow over Thanksgiving weekend. Maddow spoke earlier in the month with host Chris Hayes about her new book, “Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism.” The rise of fascism in the U.S. now echoes the Depression-era movement by Americans who saw fascism as an attractive alternative to democracy.
During the discussion Hayes referenced the views of presidents Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt who felt there were elites destined to rule over others. In that sense they were not small-D democrats. He references debates at the time about what democracy is and whether it is good. Or whether rule by some group or some person is preferable. Our sense of consensus was perhaps an illusion, and disagreement was always there.
Hayes referencing FDR got me to look again at FDR’s speech decrying economic royalists.
“In 1776 we sought freedom from the tyranny of a political autocracy—from the 18th century royalists who held special privileges from the crown,” FDR said. He decried economic royalists who “carved new dynasties” to perpetuate their hegemony. But both FDR and Hayes view the struggle from within the confines of American history.
Royalists are royalists. The yearning to be led and the faith of others that they are destined to rule everyone else goes much deeper and is much older than the American Revolution. As old as feudalism. Perhaps DNA-level, metaphorically at least.
Having arrived in the South when a Baptist church on every streetcorner was (again metaphorically) still the norm, it was not hard to notice that conservative Christians especially are raised from a young age to yearn for the Savior’s return. “This, this is Christ, the King,” congregations will sing again this Christmas season in memory of his arrival. More radical congregations drink deep the eschatology of Revelations and look for signs of the Second Coming. The Bible promises His Church will co-rule the Earth with their King. But after two millennia, and especially as they see their cultural dominance slipping and a multicultural America rising, they’ve grown tired of waiting. They want to rule now.
This is the impulse behind the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) that we’ve discussedplenty. A friend pointed yesterday to an upcoming book on the subject, “American Evangelicals for Trump Dominion, Spiritual Warfare, and the End Times.” The book examines “the three main ideas inspiring NCP leaders who supported Trump in 2016 and 2020—Dominion, Spiritual Warfare, and Eschatology (the End Times)—the book examines how these ideas have sustained the evangelicals close to U.S. political power in the Trump era.”
When you hear faith talk from Speaker Mike Johnson, this is where he’s coming from. The less religious on the right who have abandoned any pretense of democracy are secular royalists. They simply dream of a more feudal America in which they rule over you. Jesus-schmesus.
The post above by Dave Weigel just resurfaced on Blue Sky. It reminds us how much in denial senior Republican officials were not simply about Donald Trump’s malevolence immediately after he lost the 2020 election, but before he won the nomination of his party in 2016. Party leaders thought by humoring this misanthropic sociopath Republicans might get what they wanted from him. In four years, they’d learned nothing.
“We don’t need someone who can think. We need someone with enough digits to hold a pen,” Grover Norquist told CPAC in 2012. Trump may have been a buffoon, but he could hold a sharpie. He delivered wish list item #1, a massive tax cut. It may cost them not only their party but their country. A growing list of them could lose their freedom along the way if he’s reelected.
Trump may be an idiot, a coward and a narcissist, but he has a feral instinct for survival they underestimated. Grossly.
This shady new compact between Univision and Trump was orchestrated by Jared Kushner. Judd Legum reminds us of Jared’s strategy:
In 2021, Univision merged with Televisa, a Mexican media company. Televisa is known for its friendly coverage of Mexican political leaders, who have rewarded the company with favorable regulatory treatment and other benefits. The co-CEO of TelevisaUnivisio Mexico is Bernardo Gómez, a close associate of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. In 2019, Kushner met with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador at Gómez’s house.
The Washington Post reported that Kushner “helped arrange the interview and was also in the room” during the interview at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence. Gómez was also present during the interview, along with two other TelevisaUnivisio executives, TelevisaUnivision CEO Wade Davis, and TelevisaUnivision co-CEO Alfonso de Angoitia Noriega.
Kushner has a history of trading access to Trump for promises of favorable treatment. After the 2016 election, Kushner reportedly told a group of business executives that he “struck a deal with Sinclair Broadcast Group during the campaign to try and secure better media coverage.” Sinclair is the owner of many local affiliates in swing states. The agreement “gave [Sinclair] more access to Trump and the campaign” in exchange for a commitment that Sinclair would “broadcast their Trump interviews across the country without commentary.”
Kushner boasted that Sinclair affiliates had a larger audience than CNN in states like Ohio. According to a Trump spokesperson, “the deal included the interviews running across every affiliate.” Sinclair did not deny that it had struck a deal with the Trump campaign but claimed it offered a similar arrangement with Hillary Clinton. There were no Clinton interviews aired on Sinclair stations during the campaign, however.
The Clinton campaign might not have been enthusiastic about granting special access to Sinclair because Sinclair is a conservative media company. An academic study found that “stations bought by Sinclair reduce coverage of local politics, increase national coverage and move the ideological tone of coverage in a conservative direction relative to other stations operating in the same market.”
It seems these Univision wingnuts are happy to downplay Trumps draconian 2024 immigration policies and they’re worse than ever. If Latinos don’t know about it will they inadvertently support it? It’s too depressing to think about.
Arin Dube thinks he knows the answer to an ongoing issue:
In other words, the answer is yes to both questions. People are concerned about their actual conditions and social media is making it worse.
But that’s wrong! The answer is no to both questions. The evidence is overwhelming that actual conditions are pretty good and that, generally speaking, people know it.
But— they are being overwhelmed by reports telling them how bad things are. And while it’s fashionable to blame everything like this on social media these days, Facebook isn’t at fault here. Fox News is, along with the rest of the conservative noise machine. You can’t get through a day of Fox News without hearing at least a dozen times that Joe Biden has wrecked the economy and produced ruinous inflation.
Why does it take so long to hammer this into people’s heads? We know people aren’t very upset about their personal situations because we’ve asked them. And we know that Fox News and the rest of the gang are infinitely more influential than Twitter or TikTok, especially among anyone over the age of 20. Come on, folks.
I know plenty of Democrats who are also bellyaching about the economy constantly even as they plan expensive vacations, buy new cars and shop like crazy. They also admit that they are doing great but are convinced that everyone else is in dire straits.
They aren’t getting this from Fox. They’re getting it from the other mainstream news sources like the networks, the newspapers and CNN/MSNBC. I watch them all the time and they relentlessly project doom and gloom in a circular feedback loop that tells them people are complaining about the economy so they must be unhappy so it’s important not to contradict something they don’t feel. But they “feel” this because of what the media is telling them.
It’s true that Fox presents the case in apocalyptic terms that you wouldn’t think any sane person would buy but we know that people who tune in to right wing media will believe anything. But the MSM isn’t all that much better. And it’s infected a whole lot of liberals and progressives too.
