A clip of the event suggests a more nuanced impression than all the straight news headlines allow.Quote:
Originally Posted by Crandar
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A clip of the event suggests a more nuanced impression than all the straight news headlines allow.Quote:
Originally Posted by Crandar
Polls of GOP voters still show Trump as their choice for 2024 with DeSantis a very distant (and currently waning) second place.
Exceedingly early in the game, of course, but a fair indication of the GOP still being his 'creature' despite little hiccups and momentary miscues.
I wonder what his endgame would be for running again. It would have to be an ego thing, nothing more.
Immunity would be a bloody nice thing to have for starters.Quote:
Originally Posted by Hooahguy
~:smoking:
All of those who seek the presidency are motivated in part by ego. You have to wake up one morning and think, sincerely -- not just a flight of fancy, "I am the best person to lead the biggest economy and military on the planet." That's a lot of ego period. Though as our cynical medic Rory notes, the idea of functional immunity cannot help but add to the mix.Quote:
Originally Posted by Hooahguy
Take Trump's attempts in 2k and 2016 and 2020, along with his leadership style during office, and I am minded to think that an "ego thing, nothing more" is more than sufficient to prompt him. I believe Trump would, given his druthers, echo Zaphod Beeblebrox from Douglas Adam's classic in asserting "If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.”
Communists have infiltrated the judicial system: Jenna received a prison sentence, despite her blonde hair (looked brown to me, but anyway), white skin and private jet.
Untold story of one of Trump's top aides:
I can tell you from real-life experience that this is indeed how many think a good, strong man acts. Those people tend to find a lot to like about Trump's personality.Quote:
What was so urgent as to pull the chief of staff out of a Supreme Court confirmation hearing just two weeks before a presidential election?
On the line was Andrew Hughes, the top staffer at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Meadows had asked him to call because it had been brought to Meadows’s attention that a young assistant at HUD had been caught consorting with the enemy.
She had liked an Instagram post from the pop star Taylor Swift.
The first photo in the post was of Swift with the word vote superimposed on it in large blue letters. But a swipe revealed a second photo, of Swift carrying a tray of cookies emblazoned with the Biden-Harris campaign logo. “We really can’t have our people liking posts promoting Joe Biden,” Meadows told Hughes.
Never mind that nearly 3 million other people had liked the post or that the young woman was a Taylor Swift fan who liked just about everything Swift had ever posted. To the enforcers of Trumpian loyalty, this was a sign of treachery in the ranks.
Those enforcers—including the eagle-eyed official who had first spotted the offending “like”—worked for the Presidential Personnel Office, a normally under-the-radar group responsible for the hiring and firing of the roughly 4,000 political appointees in the executive branch. During the final year of the Trump administration, that office was transformed into an internal police force, obsessively monitoring administration officials for any sign of dissent, purging those who were deemed insufficiently devoted to Trump and frightening others into silence. (Many sources for this story asked to remain anonymous so they could talk about sensitive personnel issues.) Some Trump aides privately compared the PPO to the East German Stasi or even the Gestapo—always on the lookout for traitors within.
The office was run by Johnny McEntee. Just 29 when he got the job, he’d come up as Trump’s body guy—the kid who carried the candidate’s bags. One of Trump’s most high-profile Cabinet secretaries described him to me as “a fucking idiot.” But in 2020, his power was undeniable. Trump knew he was the one person willing to do anything Trump wanted. As another senior official told me, “He became the deputy president.”
McEntee and his enforcers made the disastrous last weeks of the Trump presidency possible. They backed the president’s manic drive to overturn the election, and helped set the stage for the January 6 assault on the Capitol. Thanks to them, in the end, the elusive “adults in the room”—those who might have been willing to confront the president or try to control his most destructive tendencies—were silenced or gone. But McEntee was there—bossing around Cabinet secretaries, decapitating the civilian leadership at the Pentagon, and forcing officials high and low to state their allegiance to Trump.
When Trump wasn’t happy with the answers he was getting from White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, McEntee set up a rogue legal team. This back-channel operation played a previously unknown role in the effort to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the vote. Just days before January 6, McEntee sent Pence’s office an absurd memo making the case that Pence would be following Thomas Jefferson’s example if he used his power to declare Trump the winner of the 2020 election.
More than anyone else in the White House, McEntee was Trump’s man through and through—a man who rose to power at precisely the moment when American democracy was falling apart.
I first met johnny McEntee when I visited Trump Tower in 2015, not long after Trump announced he was running for president. McEntee was polite, earnest, and eager to please. He identified himself as Trump’s “trip director” and gave me a tour of the campaign headquarters. (He declined to comment for this story.)
McEntee was one of the first full-time staffers on the campaign, and he went everywhere Trump went. When Trump became president, McEntee had a workspace outside the Oval Office—right against the curved wall. The boss liked having McEntee around. A former quarterback for the University of Connecticut, he was good-looking and tall—but not too tall, about an inch shorter than Trump. During the first 14 months of the Trump presidency, McEntee did what he had done during the campaign: He carried Trump’s bags.
In March 2018, it looked for a moment like his Washington career was over. He was fired by then–Chief of Staff John Kelly after a long-delayed FBI background check revealed that he had deposited suspiciously large sums of money into his bank account. It turned out that the money was from gambling winnings. After Kelly himself was fired, McEntee returned to his old spot outside the Oval. It was January 2020, and he wouldn’t be just a body guy for long.
In mid-February, Trump called his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to a meeting. Ominous signs of the coming pandemic were beginning to emerge. Hundreds of Americans who had been evacuated from Wuhan, China, were in quarantine on military bases. The World Health Organization had just reported a frightening new development—a small number of COVID-19 cases in people who had never traveled to China. But the subject of the meeting wasn’t the virus. It was staffing. Trump, newly acquitted in his first Senate impeachment trial, was looking to make some changes.
“I want to put Johnny in charge of personnel,” the president told Mulvaney.
The director of presidential personnel is responsible for vetting and hiring everybody, including ambassadors, Cabinet secretaries, and top intelligence officials. McEntee had never hired anybody for anything. Now he was going to be in charge of perhaps the most important human-resources department in the world?
Mulvaney called his top deputy, Emma Doyle, who oversaw the current director of personnel, into the meeting. “Mr. President,” she said, “I have never said no to anything you’ve asked me to do, but I am asking you to please reconsider this. I don’t think it is a good idea.”
Doyle had spent a lot of time around the president, but she had never seen him as angry as he was about to become.
“You people never fucking listen to me!” Trump screamed. “You’re going to fucking do what I tell you to do.”
But you don't think I brought you here for the boilerplate Trumpism, do you?
Ahhh. The rest of it is just the loyalty test stuff - which, to be clear, is quite bad, just not noteworthy anymore, not even the crazy-person story that played a role in the clearing away of disloyal defense officials in the run-up to Trump's coup attempt.Quote:
McEntee began scouring federal agencies for people who didn’t support all things Trump. Beginning in June 2020—in the middle of both the pandemic and the presidential campaign—the personnel office informed virtually every senior official across the federal government, regardless of how long they had worked in the administration, that they would need to sit down for a job interview.
A president has a right to expect that his political appointees support his policies and will work to carry them out. These are, after all, political appointees. But most of the people McEntee’s team questioned were already devoted to Trump; they were still putting their reputations on the line to work for him three and a half years into his administration. But that wasn’t enough for the loyalty enforcers.
McEntee’s underlings were, for the most part, comically inexperienced. He had staffed his office with very young Trump activists. He had hired his friends, and he had hired young women—as one senior official in the West Wing put it to me, “the most beautiful 21-year-old girls you could find, and guys who would be absolutely no threat to Johnny in going after those girls.”
“It was the Rockettes and the Dungeons & Dragons group,” the official said.
In fact, one McEntee hire was literally a Rockette; she had performed with Radio City Music Hall’s finest in the 2019 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The only work experience listed on her résumé besides a White House internship was a stint as a dance instructor. McEntee also hired Instagram influencers. Camryn Kinsey, for example, was 20 and still in college when McEntee gave her the title of external-relations director. In an interview with the online publication The Conservateur, she said, “Only in Trump’s America could I go from working in a gym to working in the White House, because that’s the American dream.” (Kinsey went on to work at the pro-Trump One American News Network.)
It might as well go here as anywhere. I'm guessing Seamus won't be voting Republican again for a while.
A Florida Republican who was defeated by 59 percentage points in a congressional special election won't concede
Quote:
With all precincts reporting, Cherfilus-McCormick defeated Mariner by a 78.7% to 19.6% margin in Florida's 20th District — representing a 59.1 percentage-point victory. The congresswoman received 43,663 votes to her opponent's 10,883 votes in a clear victory.
However, in a move reminiscent of former President Donald Trump, who continues to dispute his election loss to President Joe Biden, Mariner has pointed to irregularities in the South Florida district.
"Now they called the race — I did not win, so they say, but that does not mean that they lost either, it does not mean that we lost," the Republican told CBS after the race was called for Cherfilus-McCormick.
Before the polls closed for the special election, Mariner filed a lawsuit pointing to ballot issues in Broward and Palm Beach counties, the two populous Democratic-leaning jurisdictions that anchor the district.
"We'll also have some stuff coming out that we've recently discovered," Mariner told the television station, without disclosing any developments that could affect the outcome.
Very likely not in my lifetime at this rate. Too many in the GOP are divorced from reality, far too many others willing to ignore the threat this represents to secure power. They need to face a series of crushing defeats (not in the offing yet) or a third party that sucks the life from theirs like the GOP once did to the Whigs.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pannonian
Right now, the GOP is continuing the purification process, distilling itself into a fascist-lite party (some of who revel in fascism, others of whom are just racist asshats, and others still who will sacrifice almost anything to avoid the communist nanny-state and its Stalinist operators (and yes, some of the really do view the progressive dems as just that).
My vote will have to be used to hurt the GOP as much as possible.
Read the never-issued Trump order that would have seized voting machines
What would have happened had it been issued? Would troops have followed the order? If they had found troops who would follow the order, what would have happened if Trump had managed to delay the election result (and would it have been long enough for him to retain power), and what would have happened when Biden was finally installed as President?Quote:
The order empowers the defense secretary to “seize, collect, retain and analyze all machines, equipment, electronically stored information, and material records required for retention under” a U.S. law that relates to preservation of election records. It also cites a lawsuit filed in 2017 against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
It has been pointed out that a literal handful of people were the only ones standing in the way of Trump's plan(s), such as they were, from reaching fruition. Ultimately, as I have posted about throughout 2021 the big idea for a legalistic shroud to the coup was to either fabricate a new electoral vote in the Senate, or throw the election to the House, where 26 of 50 state delegations led by Republicans would presumably have voted to reinstate Trump - unless Liz Cheney, sole (at-large) Rep of Wyoming, dissented, in which case there would have been a tie in the House, and I believe there isn't even any contingency in the Constitution for that.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pannonian
In any of the above cases two things would have had to happen to preserve the Republic:
(1) Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer very shrilly and indefatigably tell all Republicans to :daisy: off
AND
(2) The military (JCS) tell Trump to :daisy: off (which they did have to do in the event, but an order of magnitude higher in amplitude in this scenario)
Millions would expectedly have taken to the streets in vociferous protest against the coup; that's actually part of what 1/6 organizers and directors hoped would occur at DC that day, precipitating violent confrontations ostensibly warranting martial law or other authoritative action by Trump. Inflated to a national level, the scenes would have been the next level of ugly.
The United States came very close to the brink a year ago. I was wrong to project as much confidence as I did here in December 2020 that seditionist efforts could not succeed.
In other news, Newt Gingrich, one of the most influential Republicans of our lifetime - he was a Clinton-era Speaker of the House and pioneer of anti-liberal partisanship - this week reiterated the Republican consensus that the Democratic legislators and investigators pursuing oversight of Trump's coup attempt should be imprisoned for unspecified crimes.
Brought to my attention recently, from 2020:
Quote:
When Reince Priebus was the White House chief of staff [2017], President Donald Trump often subjected him to questioning about badgers, the state animal of Priebus' home state of Wisconsin, a new book says.
Legitimately a surprising level of curiosity, if erratic and unproductive. And oddly reaffirming of my determination not to produce or raise children.Quote:
When Reince Priebus was the White House chief of staff, President Donald Trump repeatedly asked him whether badgers, the state animal of Priebus' home state of Wisconsin, are "mean to people," how they "work," and how aggressive they can get.
That's according to "Sinking in the Swamp: How Trump's Minions and Misfits Poisoned Washington," a new book by the Daily Beast reporters Lachlan Markay and Asawin Suebsaeng.
Priebus was Trump's chief of staff for roughly six months, from when Trump took office to the end of July 2017.
During that time, Trump would often "waste Priebus's time" during briefings about foreign and domestic policy by pelting him with questions about badgers, the book says.
Here's what the book says about the president's fascination with badgers:
"After Trump was reminded that the short-legged omnivore was practically synonymous with the Badger State, he'd make a point of bringing it up at seemingly random occasions to his beleaguered chief of staff.
"'Are they mean to people?' Trump at least twice asked Priebus in the opening months of his presidency. 'Or are they friendly creatures?' The president would also ask if Priebus had any photos of badgers he could show him, and if Priebus could carefully explain to him how badgers 'work' exactly.
"He wanted Reince — resident White House badger historian, apparently — to explain to him Wisconsin's obsession with the animal, how the little critters function and behave, what kind of food they like, and how aggressive or deadly they could be when presented with perceived existential threats.
"Trump also wanted to know if the badger had a 'personality' or if it was boring. What kind of damage could a badger to do a person with its flashy, sharp claws?
"An obviously enthralled president would stare at Priebus as the aide struggled for sufficiently placating answers, all the while trying to gently veer the conversation back to whether we were going to do a troop surge in Afghanistan or strip millions of Americans of healthcare coverage."
The president also has a habit of grilling his advisers on other topics of interest to him, according to the book.
At one point, the book says, he asked his space-policy advisers about garbage, posing questions like:
"Where does it go?"
"Where does it crash to earth?"
"What exactly is up there, circling the globe?"
"Who, or what, is creating all this space garbage?"
"Is this a national security threat?"
Lauren Witzke, the Delaware GOP's candidate for Senate in 2020, has nothing but praise for Putin and "his Christian nationalist nation": "I identify more with Putin's Christian values than I do with Joe Biden."
Will this kind of thing be damaging to Republican candidates, or do the alt-right have enough votes for it not to matter?
It's something akin to a Tory standing for the seat in Liverpool Walton -- you can be extreme/polemical (generating donations from the 'faithful') -- and everyone knows that you are not a serious contender for office. Delaware has put relatively few GOP types into their Senate and House seats over the last 40 years and most of those have been what the Trump purists loathe as RINOs.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pannonian
The other GOP candidates can deny/decry her without hurting their party's power base (or applaud her if it generates more money for them in their districts).
Trump advocates putting Chinese flags on bombers and bombing Russians.
Didn't the Americans shoot Germans for doing less illegal stuff than that during the Bulge?
High-density fascism even for Trump. Can't wait.
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1502811357535776772 [VIDEO]
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1502812678582059010 [VIDEO]
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1502813111782359042 [VIDEO]
Using 'false flags' has been a tool of war since Sargon if not before. As it annoys those who have been fooled, it sometimes gets the perpetrators very dead when they are caught out. War is a foul business and those tasked with fighting it on our behalves ultimately police it themselves. One of the reasons we should resort to war as sparingly as possible.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pannonian
One of the more concrete issues would have been that this proposal is an 8-year-old's idea of a false flag, and ultimately there are adults in Russia and China.Quote:
Originally Posted by Seamus Fermanagh
Oh be nice. For Trump this was pretty advanced. Right up there with the "invisible" F-35... :rolleyes:Quote:
Originally Posted by Montmorency
Quote:
That night, I went up to my hotel room and listened to a podcast interview Vance had conducted with Jack Murphy, the big, bearded head of the Liminal Order men’s group. Murphy asked how it was that Vance proposed to rip out America’s leadership class.
Vance described two possibilities that many on the New Right imagine—that our system will either fall apart naturally, or that a great leader will assume semi-dictatorial powers.
“So there’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things,” Vance said. Murphy chortled knowingly. “So one [option] is to basically accept that this entire thing is going to fall in on itself,” Vance went on. “And so the task of conservatives right now is to preserve as much as can be preserved,” waiting for the “inevitable collapse” of the current order.
He said he thought this was pessimistic. “I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left,” he said. “And turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program.”
“I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” he said. “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”
“And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say—” he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order—“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”
This is a description, essentially, of a coup.
“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said later, evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”
“Indeed,” Murphy said. “Among some of my circle, the phrase ‘extra-constitutional’ has come up quite a bit.”
I’d asked Vance to tell me, on the record, what he’d like liberal Americans who thought that what he was proposing was a fascist takeover of America to understand.
He spoke earnestly. “I think the cultural world you operate in is incredibly biased,” he said—against his movement and “the leaders of it, like me in particular.” He encouraged me to resist this tendency, which he thought was the product of a media machine leading us toward a soulless dystopia that none of us want to live in. “That impulse,” he said, “is fundamentally in service of something that is far worse than anything, in your wildest nightmares, than what you see here.”
He gave me an imploring look, as though to suggest that he was more on the side of the kind of people who read Vanity Fair than most of you realize.
If what he was doing worked, he said, “it will mean that my son grows up in a world where his masculinity—his support of his family and his community, his love of his community—is more important than whether it works for fucking McKinsey.”
JD Vance is a former "moderate conservative" and candidate for senatorial race nominee in an upcoming Republican primary, where he has been endorsed by Donald Trump even as he has trailed in the polls, behind more extreme candidates. Vance has increasingly escalated his rhetorical posturing over the past year to keep up with the crowd. Culture war is class war, just using more ponderous terms for the ancient verity that eradicating an adversary's community goes hand-in-hand with seizing what they have for yourself.Quote:
Vance believes that a well-educated and culturally liberal American elite has greatly benefited from globalization, the financialization of our economy, and the growing power of big tech. This has led an Ivy League intellectual and management class—a quasi-aristocracy he calls “the regime”—to adopt a set of economic and cultural interests that directly oppose those of people in places like Middletown, Ohio, where he grew up. In the Vancian view, this class has no stake in what people on the New Right often call the “real economy”—the farm and factory jobs that once sustained middle-class life in Middle America. This is a fundamental difference between New Right figures like Vance and the Reaganite right-wingers of their parents’ generation. To Vance—and he’s said this—culture war is class warfare.
Vance recently told an interviewer, “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine,” a flick at the fact that he thinks the American-led global order is as much about enriching defense contractors and think-tank types as it is about defending America’s interests. “I do care about the fact that in my community right now the leading cause of death among 18- to 45-year-olds is Mexican fentanyl.” His criticisms of big tech as “enemies of Western civilization” often get lost in the run of Republican outrage over Trump being kicked off Twitter and Facebook, though they go much deeper than this. Vance believes that the regime has sold an illusive story that consumer gadgets and social media are constantly making our lives better, even as wages stagnate and technology feeds an epidemic of depression.
Can't believe we're talkin about freakin' Curtis Yarvin again. By 2024 (not 1924!) the "alt-right" will have finally completed its long transition to "Right" (i.e. national socialism). Watching history unfold along predictable lines over decades would be much less tedious and aggravating if I weren't human.
Well, since nobody else mentioned it, the FBI raided Trumps Florida home on Monday to seize classified documents that Trump illegally kept in his home. Ironically, it was Trump himself who made this a felony in 2018 lol. Granted he will try to defend it by saying that he declassified them before leaving office, which is really hard to prove one way or the other. And of course the media is full of bad takes.
Internet person with an insight: Given that Trump and his minions have tried to argue* that Trump has the authority to mentally, instantly, classify and declassify information, it may be inevitable that Trump eventually tries to rest on the claim that he mentally blanket-pardoned himself, his family, and all his associates the minute before he left office (thereby rejecting the validity of any federal legal action to his disfavor).
*This is an irrelevant contention even if it had virtue, since the possession of the documents, not their secrecy classification, is itself a crime and a substantive major breach of national security in Trump's hands. What makes it noteworthy is the corrupt principle of unlimited power (offer not valid for Democrats) that the these people feel comfortable uttering. If Trump was (characteristically) so foolish and so brazen to mafia-style threaten the Attorney General to cut him a deal in return for "reducing the heat" among his base just now, why not arrogate pardons?
If some of the documents really did contain nuclear secrets, I dont think any amount of mental declassification can save him, since those types of documents cannot be declassified.
They say the Storm(y) is coming.
Trust the plan.
Well at least they're not attacking public officials under the supposition that this is all a deep-state ploy to draw the Trump loyalists out and arrest them.
Just want Trump to go away finally, so tired of this stupid chapter of American History that keeps being written.
This isn't the sort of joke one cares to explain, but just to be sure...
Since 2018, the MAGA/QAnon faction has adopted the reassuring phraseology of "trust the plan", which regarded a coming "storm". The storm was said to be a large-scale event that would - depending on the time period the claim was generated - either award Trump dictatorial power, or return him to the presidency, while sweeping away the entire system of his enemies (i.e. the enemies of America).
The joke is that the "storm" seemed to culminate, after years, in the form of Stormy Daniels, whose allegations have really been a central source of legal trouble for the Trump junta more or less since QAnon was first conceived.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxU2eqZtYmc
More to the substance of the news, lawyers and legal scholars tend to lean that Trump will not face actual criminal trial anytime this year, if ever, at least on the current charges (this was just an indictment). So we'll have even more of a Netanyahu situation developing over time.
Trump is going to be around in the public sphere until his natural death I'm afraid.
I knew the "trust the plan" bit before, it just made me shake my head more that these people think Trump's got some 4-D chess long term plan beyond trying to save himself.
Yup, he'll be a factor till he dies I'm afraid.
The only real shame with the arraignment is that it wasn't done two years ago.