While Biden Craters, from Trump Every Breath a Lie

< the election|239|25|>

Democrats were in a state of panic after the president’s disastrous performance in what they hope was the first and last presidential debate. After extensive prepping, they expected an aggressive reprieve of the Biden of the State of the Union address. Instead, the president was at first barely audible, and was weak throughout, looking pale and seeming feeble, seldom unable to counter a vigorous Trump.

Foreseeing Trump’s tsunami of lies, CNN – the channel that hosted the event — said in

advance that it would not be fact-checking, and Biden let his falsehoods stand. After the “debate”, the media has filled in, but how many of Trump’s fan will ever be the wiser. Here’s our take:

Some Democratic states allow people to execute babies after birth. That insanity says that Trump live partly in the warped world of QAnon and child sex trafficking paranoia.

Every legal scholar wanted Roe v. Wade overturned and abortion policy returned to states. Not remotely true of an issue so split between pro-life and pro-choice advocates.

Everybody, even Democrats wanted Roe overturned. In fact, Roe was supported by two-thirds of Americans and foresaw the consequences.

The U.S. currently has the biggest budget deficit ever. False. Trump incurred the largest deficit — $3.1 trillion in fiscal 2020. Biden’s is the next biggest — a $2.8 trillion deficit in 2021 — but that’s Trump’s budget carrying over into Biden’s first year. To it, Biden added continued Covid relief.

The U.S. currently has a record trade deficit with China. No, the largest trade deficit with China belongs to Trump — $419 billion in 2018, Trump’s second year as president. The current trade deficit with China, $80 billion for the first four months, indicates around $240 billion for the year.

Biden personally gets a lot of money from China. Years of investigation by a Department of Justice special counsel and the House Oversight Committee have turned up no evidence of Joe Biden receiving money from son Hunter’s financial dealings.

He said there were no terrorist attacks during his presidency. In fact there were several: a mass murder of eight in New York City in the name of ISIS; the killing of three U.S. service members in 2019 by an extremist member of Saudi Arabia’s military. And he evidently doesn’t count as terrorism attacks such as the 2019 massacre of 23 in a Texas Walmart by a killer targeting Latinos.

Iran didn’t fund Hamas, Hezbollah or other terror groups while he was president. Funding declined owing to sanctions on oil exports, but Trump’s own administration said in 2020 that Iran was continuing to fund terror groups, including Hezbollah.

Biden wants to quadruple people’s taxes. Nonsense, obviously. Biden’s budget continues his refusal to raise taxes on all households earning less than $400,000 a year, which is over 95% of all payers. Given their high tax brackets, quadrupling taxes on the rest would have them paying 44% more than their entire income.

The U.S. has provided way more aid to Ukraine than Europe has. It’s the opposite, Europe having sent 40% more to Ukraine than the U.S. Trump said the U.S. has provided $200 billion. Closer to $110 billion.

He said 18 or 19 million people have crossed the border under Biden. A number plucked from the air. The count since Biden took office was 8.7 million “encounters” (which doesn’t deduct those turned away or deported) as of four months ago according to the Poynter Institute. Since then Biden has finally instituted restrictions that have cut border crossings by 47%.

Many migrants are from prisons or mental institutions. He has characterized all migrants as such since his first speech in 2015, as if none come here out of economic distress or fear for their lives from oppressive regimes. Rich all his life, Trump’s sociopathy makes him incapable of grasping the plight of others.

He said Biden has only created jobs for illegal immigrants. No answer possible when it gets this silly.

Nancy Pelosi turned down his order of 10,000 National Guard troops on January 6. Pelosi as House Speaker didn’t have the power to command troops. Trump was the commander in chief and did nothing. The military under new management installed in late 2020 by Trump didn’t move, concerned for “optics” of troops in American streets.

Pelosi now acknowledged she turned down the troop request. No she hasn’t.

Trump deployed the National Guard to Minneapolis in 2020. The Democratic governor did that.

“Ridiculous” fraud in the 2020 election. No evidence at all from the nation’s most scrutinized election in history, which scrutiny owes to Trump’s own predictions of rigging and fraud in the months beforehand.

NATO was going out of business before he took office. There was no notion of NATO dissolution whatever. Trump’s complaint was that Europe’s nations were spending less than NATO’s stipulated budget percentage on defense.

The U.S. was paying 100% of NATO before he came along. False. The U.S. did make up about 71% of NATO, though. Also, no one pays NATO; nations attribute portions of their defense spending to the pact.

He said Biden indicted him. No evidence Biden had any role in any of the four prosecutions.

Europe has no U.S. cars and won’t accept them. False. The European Union imposes a 10% tariff. That’s all.

Food prices quadrupled under Biden. Food prices have risen 23% in Biden’s four years. Bad enough without having to lie.

Biden made up the idea Trump called dead service members “suckers” and “losers”. In September 2020, The Atlantic magazine quoted four people who heard Trump use those words about long dead service members when he cancelled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018.

Biden called Blacks “super predators” for 10 years. Biden never used the term except to say in 1998 most youths weren’t “super predators” in arguing against putting them in adult prisons. He did use the term “predators” — no mention of Blacks — in a 1993 floor speech in support of a crime bill.

Trump’s tax cut was the largest in U.S. history. It wasn’t. Ronald Reagan holds that title, although he later had to restore some cuts when government revenue declined precipitously. Th effect of his cuts measured 2.9% of GDP according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.. Trump’s checked in at only 0.6%.

China and others stopped buying from Iran under pressure from Trump. Trump’s administration succeeded in reductions of Iranian oil imports by China, but they never stopped, and imports rose again sharply while Trump was still president.

Trump claims he created the Veterans Choice program. It gives vets the option of receiving care outside Veterans Administration hospitals. In fact, Obama created it in 2014. Trump signed an expanded version in 2018.

Biden got rid of Veterans Choice. False. Rather, it was expanded under Biden in June of last year with a new name, Veterans Community Care.

Justice Jackson Rips the Six Conservative Justices for Stunning Decision

Former Indiana mayor James Snyder was convicted on bribery charges for accepting $13,000 from a trucking company from which his town bought five trash trucks for $1.1 million in 2013. In a 6-3 decision difficult to believe, the six conservatives on the Supreme Court, in a pile-up of decisions in this last week of June among which this one would perhaps not be noticed, voted to vacate Snyder’s conviction, ruling that, because he received the kickback after the city bought the trucks, it wasn’t bribery. It was merely a “gratuity”. It would have
been bribery only if the trucker had paid Snyder before the city bought the trucks.

The ruling is yet another of a series in which the Court shows its belief that public servants are owed substantially more than their paychecks and should be allowed to accept payoffs as thanks for using their offices to award contracts to businesses or do favors for others. So baksheesh, vigorish, payola, kickbacks – all good now, but take care that payday comes after the deed.

 Last year the Court overturned the corruption conviction of two men involved with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration who were convicted for bid rigging and accepting payment for obtaining a favorable decision from a state agency in the a “show-me-the-money culture” in Albany.

 In 2020 the Court tossed a pair of public-corruption convictions ruling that tying up commuter traffic on the George Washington Bridge as retaliation against the local mayor for not supporting Chris Christie’s re-election bid for governor didn’t fit the federal fraud statute.

 And most notably, in 2016 the Court threw out the corruption conviction of former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell and his wife for accepting $175,000 in gifts and loans from a businessman who sought favorable consideration from the government for his dietary supplement company.

In all three — New York, New Jersey, Virginia — the Court’s vote served to set the bar so high that corruption has been given a green light, at least in federal courts.

new in town

The difference in the Snyder case is that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is now on the Court. She delivered a scolding opinion that brought along the other two liberal justices who in those three prior cases had unaccountably voted with colleagues to make the decisions unanimous. Jackson directly insinuated that certain of the Court’s majority were of kindred mind with Mayor Snyder, saying that “Snyder’s absurd and atextual reading of the statute is one only today’s Court could love.”

Writing for the majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, referring by number to the federal anti-bribery statute, opens
Justice Kavanaugh

with…

“The question in this case is whether §666 also makes it a crime for state and local officials to accept gratuities — for example, gift cards, lunches, plaques, books, framed photos, or the like — that may be given as a token of appreciation after the official act.”

Or such innocent gratuities, he offers, as parents who tip a teacher at end of the school year for the great job done educating their child.

That hardly equates to the $13,000 paid to Snyder, and in the instances of large, lucrative contracts awarded to construction companies by local governments, the graft can soar far higher.

Kavanaugh writes that the conviction should be vacated because federal law does clearly make it a crime for public officials to accept “gratuities”; it unfairly leaves it to prosecutors to decide whether a gift should or should not be prosecuted when a decade in prison could be in the offing, and for officials therefore having to guess whether accepting a given proffer would be risky.

Kavanaugh questions why there should be any federal statute at all. Under the ethos of federalism, why should the central government be allowed to intervene in state matters? He seems not to realize that Congress passed the law because there needs to be a federal right to step in because the citizenry out there in some American towns would otherwise have no recourse against corrupt local governments where officials are on the take and law enforcement, too.

The question of whether or not officials should accept handouts at all was not broached by Kavanaugh.

too close to home

Not surprising, given certain members of this Supreme Court. Investigative reporting by ProPublica exposed in a series beginning in April of last year that billionaire Harlan Crow over a twenty year span had paid all costs to treat Justice Clarence Thomas to flights on his private plane, vacations on his private yacht, vacations in exotic locales; had bought a house from Thomas and relatives for Clarence’s mother to live in (rent-free); paid private school tuition for Thomas’s grand nephew – very little of which Thomas had declared according to law.

Since then, Fix the Court, a non-profit that describes itself as a nonpartisan advocate for greater openness and accountability in the federal courts, has built a record of all emoluments received by Supreme Court members. Across the twenty years from 2004 and 2023, the justices have accepted 445 gifts valued at $4,780,720, they say.

Thomas’s receipt of largesse accounted for most of it, with FTC tallying $4,042,286. Justice Samuel Alito is next with a bit over $170,000. To give credit where due, the justices who had taken in the least are Amy Coney Barrett ($500), David Souter who retired in 2009 ($349), and Kavanaugh ($100).

Reading Justice Jackson’s dissent, lawyer Dahlia Lithwick got the picture:

”She is throwing a little shade the way of Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, who seem very comfortable taking … do I want to call them bribes? Do I want to call them gratuities? Do I want to call them million-dollar friendship bracelets?”

The Wall Street Journal, which stands behind the right-wing members of the Court no matter their malefactions, editorialized that Thomas and Alito have been accused by Democratic lawmakers of abrogating ethical responsibilities despite a lack of evidence that either of the justices’ decisions were influenced by outside parties. Should that be the only criterion?

challenging kavanaugh

Justice Jackson began her dissent with what everyone in the public not a crook thinks, “Officials who use their public positions for private gain threaten the integrity of our most important institutions”. She faults the
Justice Jackson


majority throughout for straying beyond the unequivocal language of §666, which imposes penalties on those who “corruptly” solicit, accept, or agree to accept payments “intending to be influenced or rewarded.” A reward is bestowed after the fact; the statute unmistakably covers what the majority has now decided cannot be federally prosecuted no matter the amount of money that will now freely flow across America.

Ms. Jackson must be wondering about this nest of corruption she finds herself in, whether the justices on the right end of the bench are gutting the part of §666 to shield Thomas or Alito from corruption lawsuits?

In any case, the Court has raised the bar making it ever more difficult to fight corruption. As Mark Joseph Stern, a principal writer at Salon, puts it, “The court is basically just legalizing a form of bribery that’s done with a wink rather than a handshake.”

Biden, Trump Deciding What They’ll Do to Your Taxes

A fight is brewing over which direction taxes should take. The catalyst is the expiration at the end of 2025 of a number of the tax cuts enacted in 2017 by Congress during the Trump administration. Donald Trump wants the lower rates extended and would push to cut them further. Joe Biden wants the cuts to lapse but only for higher income earners. And with taxes a hot topic again, a raft of nutty ideas has surfaced, which we’ll get to.

Republicans claimed that the 2017 tax cuts would pay for themselves by spurring growth that would bring in at least enough extra tax revenue to cover the void. But even The Wall Street Journal admitted that “a recent study
found it boosted growth but didn’t pay for itself”. In fact, the CBO says the Trump cuts will have added $2 trillion to the national debt.

Democrats decry the Trump cuts for individuals as a handout to the rich with only token tax savings for the middle class.

If Congress does nothing, higher rates will return for individuals and households, the standard deduction will be cut in half, and so will the child tax credit, but in the other direction per-person exemptions will return, and state and local taxes will again be deductible for those who itemize. Almost everyone will find themselves in a higher tax bracket, says Forbes. The Tax Foundation estimates that 62% of households will pay higher taxes, 9% will pay less.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates retaining the Trump tax cuts will cost the government $3.4 trillion over the next 10 years. And yet Biden intends to keep his pledge not to raise any taxes on households with incomes less than $400,000. That means that over 95% of taxpayers will keep the cuts, adding a large slice of that $3.4 trillion to the debt. Biden then imagines he can raise nearly $2 trillion over 10 years by raising taxes on only the wealthy. At best it’s a wash.

getting creative

Mr. Trump wants all of his cuts to be extended. Here and there he has said he wants to cut taxes still further.

Here’s one: Make tip income tax-free, he proposed last weekend while campaigning in Nevada. He was pandering to the service workers in a swing state which has many in that job description.

“For those hotel workers and people who get tips, you’re going to be very happy, because when I get into office, we are going to not charge taxes on tips.”

Tips are income, and yet Trump would make those workers a favored class of citizens with tax-free income.

It’s an idea that didn’t deserve to be considered, yet pundits were quick to point out that employers would figure ways to reclassify wages as tips to dodge the added cost of employer-paid withholding taxes. And imagine the coming societal rift caused by the growingly ubiquitous card readers that compel us to choose a tip percentage when it will be to donate our tax-reduced incomes to this newly privileged class.

But why stop there? Trump has been saying that he would impose a 10% tariff on every good coming into this country. He has grown exceptionally fond of tariffs since using them in his first term, even though they failed badly as policy. He repeatedly tells his supporters at his rallies a colossal lie:

“Nobody ever took money out of China like me. I took hundreds of billions of dollars out in the form of tariffs and taxes.”

China, of course, paid nothing. Americans paid his hundreds of billions. That’s how tariffs work. Those who import are penalized for doing so by paying the extra tax. Importers recover the cost by inflating prices charged to Americans. We pay the tariffs.

And now, a week ago, Trump lofted the idea of doing away with income taxes entirely and substituting tariffs to finance the government. After all, that’s how the government funded itself originally. Hoist on its history and tradition-minded petard, the originalist Supreme Court could hardly say no.

It is a harebrained idea right up there with drinking bleach as a cure for Covid. It would take a wrecking ball to our economy. Robert Reich, who worked in four administrations and was Bill Clinton’s labor secretary, says that for tariffs to equal the same amount of money raised by taxes, tariffs of 120% to 130% on top of the import value of goods would be required.

It’s a total inversion of progressive taxes. As Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell noted, there are tens of millions of low-income Americans who, through the standard deduction and other exemptions, owe no taxes, yet they would now be taxed through paying the higher prices of the tariffed items they need. Whereas the rich, whose purchases are but a tiny fraction of their wealth, would see their taxes wiped out altogether.

Economist Lawrence Summers, who was the first to raise the alarm about possible inflation from excessive Covid pandemic relief programs, calls Trump’s tariffs-replacing-taxes idea “the worst macro-economic policy proposal in U.S. history”.

The bigger fight: corporate taxes

The Tax and Jobs Act cut the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, a whopping 40% reduction, and it does not expire. The 2017 tax bill made it permanent. At the time, the U.S. rate was the fourth highest in the world, exceeded only by the United Arab Emirates, Comoros, and Puerto Rico. Corporations were fleeing the U.S. to domicile in lower tax countries. Republicans point to there being not one migration since the rate reduction.

President Biden wants to roll back Trump’s cut by half, raising the tax to 28% which would bring gin $2.7 trillion across 10 years. That would be above the worldwide average statutory corporate income tax rate across 180 jurisdictions of 23.37%.

Trump wants to cut corporate taxes further — from 21% to 20% he told some 80 corporate chiefs who had convened a couple of weeks back as the Business Roundtable. When asked why that number, he allegedly answered: “Well, it’s a round number.” He has also spoken of dropping the rate to 15%.

As it stands, because of the many deductions and exemptions by which corporations can trim their taxes, their effective tax rate declined in 2018, the first year of the Trump tax cut, to only 9% according to the Government Accounting Office. Profits today are at record highs, and yet corporations’ taxes amount to only 1.6% of GDP and provide a meager 8% of government revenue. In stark comparison, income taxes on individuals account for 45%.

Democrats were at least able to pass as part of the Inflation Reduction Act a 15% minimum tax on those corporations whose net income, with numerous adjustments across a three-year period, exceeds $1 billion.

drifting toward the abyss

Both candidates avoid the menacing future. Trump would beggar the government with continuance of his tax cuts and a promise for more. Biden would raise taxes but only on the wealthy and do so not to deal with the annual deficit, but to pay for sweeping new spending programs.

At the same time as their wishes revealed their irresponsibility, the CBO was telling us on the inside pages of newspapers that, even with the Trump tax cuts reversed per existing law, U.S. debt, now at almost $35 trillion, is on pace to top $56 trillion 10 years from now. The government spends a million dollars more than it takes in every 30 seconds.

Dynamic debt clock at usdebtclock.org.


There is no sign of controlling spending by either party. Trump added roughly $8 trillion to the debt, half of it Covid relief. Biden is adding $1.9 trillion to the debt this year alone, $300 billion more than last year, inflated by his student loan cancellations. Deficit borrowing feeds on itself in the form of interest, which is expected to exceed $1 trillion next year, well beyond the $850 billion request for defense.

It’s all a spending problem, says a Journal editorial in reaction to the CBO forecast. Democratic spending, of course. “It’s not because Americans aren’t paying their fair share in taxes”. Really? Three Republican tax cuts in this still young century, and the editorial suggesting what Trump might do for a fourth, have made no contribution to the ballooning debt?

“These Are Sick, Evil People”, Says Trump, Obsessed with Revenge

That Donald Trump chose Waco, Texas, in March of last year for the first rally of his 2024 re-election campaign was not accidental. It was the 30th anniversary of the Branch Davidian cult’s battle against the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and Trump sees himself as the victim of unjust persecution by federal agents. It was there that he said,

“I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

“If you go after me, I’m coming after you”, he has said, and he shows every intention of following through, of appointing an attorney general who will do his bidding once re-elected, of using the department and its
FBI to seek revenge against a broad spectrum of judges and prosecutors, journalists and television commentators, politicians who have incurred his disfavor. One of his former lawyers, Ty Cobb, sees Trump “angrier now than he was before because he is convicted now”. On Sean Hannity’s Fox News show he said, “Look, what I’ve gone through, nobody’s ever gone through”, and he said it on the 80th anniversary of what our troops went through on D-Day.

“Based on what they’ve done, I would have every right to go after them, and it’s easy, because it’s Joe Biden, and you see all the criminality, all of the money that’s going into the family and him”.

To Dr. Phil he said, “Sometimes revenge can be justified. These are evil people. These are sick, evil people”.

CREW (Committee for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) analyzed some 13,000 Trump posts on Truth Social across the year and a half since Waco to find him “vowing revenge, retaliation and retribution against his foes”, increasing as a consistent fixation as the election draws nearer.

He has 25 times indicated his intention to go after Joe Biden “with FBI raids, investigations, indictments and even jail time” as well as members of Biden’s family. He vowed to “APPOINT A REAL SPECIAL ‘PROSECUTOR’ TO GO AFTER THE MOST CORRUPT PRESIDENT IN THE HISTORY OF THE USA, JOE BIDEN.”

About Special Counsel Jack Smith’s charges, he warned of “repercussions far greater than anything that Biden or his Thugs could understand”. There are no constraints in the Constitution to prevent the president from investigating and prosecuting whomever he chooses.

Asked on the Fox News morning show “Fox and Friends” if he intends revenge, he called it “a really tough question” because “these are bad people.” He said he could have locked up Hillary Clinton, that it…

“would have been very easy to do it, but I thought it would be a terrible precedent for our country…And then this happened to me, and so I may feel differently about it.”

In fact, he did act against Clinton. Right off, upon assuming the presidency, he asked his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to prosecute his rival candidate for the presidency in 2016. But Sessions, a person of interest to the FBI’s Russian influence investigation for receiving Russians in his office, had recused himself out of conflict, and so declined. Trump then had the subsequent AG, Bill Barr, appoint John Durham special counsel in what largely became a four-year investigation of Clinton and her involvement in the Steele dossier.

Trump now claims in a Fox News interview that he never said about Clinton, “Lock her up”. That was quickly followed by ridiculing montages of videos on opposing networks of his saying “Lock her up” over and over.

Eight years later the psychosis has not abated. He says about Clinton, as if someone other than he is calling for her prosecution:

“Wouldn’t it be terrible to throw the president’s wife and the former secretary of state — think of it, the former secretary of state, but the president’s wife, into jail. Wouldn’t that be a terrible thing? But they want to do it. 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.”

There is no “they”, of course. Only Trump. As a builder in New York and a casino operator in New Jersey, he has had run-ins with the mafia and has picked up the mafia style, as in “nice store you’ve got here, a shame if something happened to it”.

violence? It’s to be expected.

Trump has since been signaling to militant elements, much as he did when in the September 2020 debate he told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by”, that violence would be unsurprising, as when he said shortly after Waco about a prison sentence…

“I think it’s a very dangerous thing to even talk about, because we do have a tremendously passionate group of voters.”

…and just recently on the same subject…

”I don’t know that the public would stand it…I think it would be tough for the public to take. You know, at a certain point there’s a breaking point. “

In polls, some 40% of Republicans think violence is acceptable if needed to get their way.

Such talk spurs others to action. Since Trump’s election loss in 2020, election workers and local officials across the country have been threatened, as have been the secretaries of state who oversee elections; as have federal judges been – 450 targeted in 2023 alone; as have members of Congress been – 8,000 threats logged by the Capitol Police in 2023. “People are threatening not just the prosecutor, the special counsel, the judge, but also family members,” said Ronald Davis, director of the U.S. Marshals Service.

Families have been doxxed, their street addresses and phone numbers posted on social media to cause fear enough for them to move from their homes to shelter elsewhere. Bomb threats against librarians have closed libraries. Reuters found 152 posts
of pro-Trump websites that called for the beating or killing of New York judges Arthur Engoron and Juan Merchan in New York and Scott McAfee in Georgia, and that was in just March and April before the guilty verdict in the hush-money case. The right-wing is working to find and harm the twelve jurors for the sin of doing their civic duty in the Manhattan case.

Trump’s followers often react with posts urging that the jurists be beaten, tortured, and killed. “Someone in NY with nothing to lose needs to take care of Merchan,” wrote one of them on Patriots.Win. Engoron received a fake bomb threat at his home in January; an envelope containing white powder was delivered to his chambers in February. “These judges and lawyers should HANG for perpetuating these fraud cases,” wrote one commenter. Executions would set “an example for future generations of judges and lawyers.”

Trump’s constant vilification of judges and prosecutors has brought this about. Now subject to laws that seek to bring him to account for what he has brought upon himself, he is out to undermine respect of the justice system. His followers have become dutifully distrustful of government and the courts. What then do they make of Hunter Biden’s conviction, and that Father Joe did not say the trial was rigged, did not attack the judge, did not vilify the jury, will not pardon his son? Will some of the Trump worshipful have second thoughts about a justice system purportedly weaponized against the Right as Trump says? Unlikely. It is a cult and cults admit of no contradictions. They are already saying that Biden orchestrated the conviction of his own son to justify the criminal charges against Trump. And Trump won’t stop. He will find excuse to go on attempting to destroy confidence in our nation of laws because the indictments against him, he who says he did nothing wrong, could only have come about in a “rigged” and “corrupt” system.

revenge is justified

Trump has prepared his disciples to believe that his campaign of retribution is fitting and proper. He has been telling them that the élites, the globalists, they are all…

”communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country”.

When they see one after another from Trump’s enemy list undergo investigation, indictment, prison, that will seem right because…

“they lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible — they’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.”

MAGA propaganda has fashioned what his supporters believe is an accurate description of an ugly America. They are persuaded that Trump exposes a truth about the government, the deep state, that no one else dares to reveal. So when as president he moves to shut down news organizations such as MSNBC – a desire he has expressed – and other purveyors of what they’ve long been told is fake news, they will applaud.

the gangster image

Trump’s narcissism disallows his thinking of himself negatively, so we are now watching him, as a convicted felon, fancy the idea of being an outlaw. It bolsters his tough guy image, suitable for his brutalist plans for retribution against the other side of the law. Convicted, he joins the dozen or so of his entourage and administration who have served time or are under indictment. He brought to his trial a former Hell’s Angels leader who had done time for attempted murder. At his rally in the Bronx last month, Trump invited onto the stage two rappers facing charges of conspiracy to commit murder.

And he has been comparing himself to Al Capone, bragging, “He was only indicted one time; I’ve been indicted four times” and he has a bigger team of lawyers “than any human being in the history of our Country, including even the late great gangster, Alphonse Capone!” (who was, in fact, indicted at least six times). “He was seriously tough, right?”, he said at a rally in Iowa last October. “If you looked at him in the wrong way, he blew your brains out.”

And most peculiarly, he has again — this time in the company of Republican lawmakers — spoken of the Hannibal Lecter, the cannibal in the film “The Silence of the Lambs”, as “a nice guy”, raising questions about sanity.

Political journalist Samuel Earle speaks of Trump as “besieged by the authorities, charged with countless egregious felonies but surviving and thriving nonetheless, with an air of macho invincibility”. As a felon who may nonetheless become president, what is to stop him from ignoring laws while in office? Not impeachment, surely. We learned that is a dead letter.

jail break

He continues to say he will pardon the January 6th insurrectionists, which invalidates the Depart of Justice and turns the White House into a criminal enterprise. Trump begins his rallies with the “J6 Prison Choir”, singing their rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner called “Justice for All” while Trump recites the Pledge of Allegiance. He took to calling the January 6th convicts “hostages” but now calls them “patriots” and “warriors”. “We’ve moved from the Beer Hall Putsch to the Night of the Long Knives”, says commentator Thom Hartmann, as Trump steps up his retributive cruelty.

The Nazi’s Aryan phraseology has entered his language – the radical-left “live like vermin” in our midst, migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” A video appeared on his Truth Social account with fake headlines in the style of newspapers of World War I vintage but describing a second Trump presidency. One predicts “what’s next for America” is the “creation of a unified Reich”. It was Hitler’s aim to create a Third Reich that would rule for a thousand years. Another said “15 Million Illegal Aliens Deported” next to World War I dates. The campaign said the staffer who posted the video did not notice the word “Reich”. “It is never accidental”, rebutted New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a scholar of history’s authoritarian “strongmen”.

Which makes one wonder. The DOJ says that 1500 January 6th insurrectionists have been charged. Does Trump imagine them, once freed from prison and pending cases, to become his private army akin to Hitler’s brownshirts — the Sturmabteilung, aka SA — or Mussolini’s blackshirts?

Republicans fall in line, of course

Trump tells his audiences, “They’re not coming after me. They are coming after you, and I am just standing in their way.” They’re not, of course. It is he and the MAGA Republicans, who have joined in Trump’s post conviction retribution frenzy, who intend to go after anyone who has displeased their leader.

 Jeff Clark, the former Trump Justice Department official indicted in the Georgia election case, urges “brave district attorneys in the United States to step forward and to take aggressive action”, to file lawsuits in federal court “just for starters, as soon as possible” against anyone involved in criminal cases against Trump. In other words, invent specious charges, burden targets with attorney costs, damage their lives and livelihood.

 Stephen Miller, expected to be Trump’s immigration czar in charge of deporting millions of undocumenteds, asks,

“Is every Republican D.A. starting every investigation they need to right now?…Every facet of Republican Party politics and power has to be used right now to go toe-to-toe with Marxism and beat these Communists”

No crimes committed; just invent something. Vigilante justice. “Communists” and “Marxists” are how right-wing extremists now regularly refer to Democrats.

 Ronny Jackson, formerly Trump’s controversial physician and now representing Texas, said:

“I am going to encourage all of my colleagues and everybody that I have any influence over as a member of Congress to aggressively go after the president and his entire family, his entire crime family, for all of the misdeeds that are out there right now related to this family.”

 J.D. Vance is pledging to use the Senate’s rule that allows a single senator to block nominations, as did Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville block military promotions for months, to throttle Biden’s judicial and U.S. attorney nominations in retribution for what he calls the persecution of the former president.

 John Yoo, infamous for writing the torture authorization letter for George W. Bush when in the Justice Department and long a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote in National Review that, as a balance to Trump’s prosecutions, “Republicans will have to bring charges against Democratic officers, even presidents”. Hunter Biden will need to be charged for taking money from foreign governments, Joe Biden for influence peddling at the behest of his son, he wrote. “Only retaliation in kind can produce the deterrence necessary to enforce a political version of mutual assured destruction.”

 Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has already demanded that Bragg and one of his top trial lawyers in the case, Matthew Colangelo, testify. There are of course calls for New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg and Judge Merchan to be prosecuted.

 House Speaker Mike Johnson declared that Republicans would “do everything we can” to exact revenge for Trump. He called on the Supreme Court — ” I know many of them personally” — to overturn Trump’s conviction and grant him immunity from prosecution. “This will be overturned, guys, there’s no question about it”. Johnson and his Republicans on the Hill are even writing legislation that would force any state cases against Trump to be transferred to federal courts where Trump could have his Justice Department vacate them or can pardon himself.

Out to flip Trump’s criminality into an indictment of the American legal system, Johnson says about all of this that they are “the law and order team. I mean, we believe in the rule of law”.

Jun 14 2024 | Posted in Election | Read More »