Saturday, December 26, 2020
Monday, December 21, 2020
"Trump saved the worst for last"
Trump has saved the worst for last — and there is still a month to go before he is evicted from the White House.
Trump’s singular focus since the election has been on overturning the results even at the cost of destroying U.S. democracy.
For more than six weeks, Trump has been spewing conspiracy theories about nonexistent election fraud — claims that have been rejected in 59 court cases and counting, including by Trump-appointed judges.
On Friday, as the New York Times first reported, Trump met at the White House with retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a pardoned felon, and attorney Sidney Powell, who was fired from the Trump legal team after promoting conspiracy theories about the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez too wacky even for Trump. Trump reportedly discussed with the duo Flynn’s idea of declaring martial law and having the military “rerun” the election — or, failing that, appointing Powell as a special counsel to probe (nonexistent) election fraud.
These dangerous ideas may not be implemented, but simply the fact that they are being discussed marks a new low.
Never before in U.S. history has there been a record of a president discussing a military coup to stay in office. Is there any doubt that if Trump could find any active-duty generals willing to carry out this plot against America, he would give it the go-ahead?
In this instance, all that is preserving the Constitution is the military’s fidelity to the rule of law.
While Trump is focused like a laser on his election grievances, he has all but checked out of the fight against a pandemic that has already claimed the lives of more than 316,000 Americans and that is projected to kill more than 560,000 by April. This past March, after repeatedly claiming that the coronavirus would miraculously go away on its own, Trump said that if it killed fewer than 200,000 people, that would mean his administration has “done a very good job.” So he has failed by his own metric. “I think he’s just done with covid,” one of Trump’s closest advisers told The Post. If only covid-19 were done with us. The only time Trump even mentions the pandemic anymore is to brag about the vaccine rollout, yet he has ignored pleas from his aides to tout the safety of the vaccine, push for a national testing plan or promote universal mask-wearing. The latter step alone could save more than 50,000 lives by April 2021, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
The pandemic isn’t the only threat to America that Trump is ignoring. U.S. government and corporate computer systems have been massively infiltrated, apparently by Russian hackers. “The magnitude of this ongoing attack is hard to overstate,” warns Trump’s former homeland security adviser Thomas P. Bossert. “The Russians have had access to a considerable number of important and sensitive networks for six to nine months.” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo attributed the assault to Russia. But Trump took to Twitter, contradicting Pompeo, playing down the severity of the attack and claiming that “it may be China (it may!).”
Thus the Trump presidency ends as it began — with Trump denying the reality of Russian cyberattacks and serving as an apologist for the dictator in the Kremlin.
Gregory F. Treverton, the former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, told The Post that Trump “behaves so much like a paid Russian agent. If you look at the string of his actions and pronouncement, the only consistent interpretation that you can logically draw is that he’s in their thrall.” Treverton joins a long line of intelligence and law enforcements veterans — including former FBI agent Peter Strzok, former director of national intelligence Daniel Coats and former CIA director Michael Hayden — who have concluded that Trump must have been compromised by the Kremlin. Such allegations haven’t been proved, but so much that Trump does lends credence to them.
There are many other Trump transgressions since the election. He has purged the senior leadership of the Pentagon and installed conspiracy-mongering loyalists in their place. He has fired a senior cybersecurity official, Christopher Krebs, for attesting that the election was free of fraud. He unloaded on Attorney General William P. Barr for not doing more to politicize his department, leading to Barr’s departure. He has pulled U.S. troops out of Somalia just as a new al-Shabab plot to attack the United States was uncovered. He has held holiday parties that undoubtedly spread covid-19. And there is certainly worse to come — including a pardon-palooza that would put Trump cronies and family members beyond the reach of the law.
If future generations are tempted to romanticize the Trump presidency, all they will have to do is look at his final days to see why historians are likely to regard him as the worst president in U.S. history.
"History will demand to know why we didn’t hang trump"
Trump sits on hands while Russia hacks nuke networks.
Silence on bounties on US troops. Stole $600M in campaign funds.
Millions of doses of COVID vaccine sit in a warehouse.
HHS emails demanding infecting kids ASAP.
-----------
Nuclear weapons agency breached amid massive cyber onslaught
Acting Pentagon chief halts Biden transition briefings
A growing call to invoke the Insurrection Act shows how off-the-rails MAGA ideology has become in the wake of Trump’s election loss.
Friday, December 18, 2020
The Real Election Fraud was by the Republicans
A good analysis of the massive irregularities in Kentucky with Mitch McConnell's recent "election".
Some of the fraud was in the presidential election too, and helped trump.
Wednesday, December 16, 2020
How Much of a Fascist Was Donald Trump?
So what matters more, the president’s desire to overthrow American democracy, or his inability to follow through? Just how fascist was Trump? Part of the answer depends on whether you’re evaluating Trump’s ideology or his ability to carry it out.
It seems obvious enough that the spirit of Trumpism is fascistic, at least according to classic definitions of the term. In “The Nature of Fascism,” Roger Griffin described fascism’s “mobilizing vision” as “the national community rising phoenix-like after a period of encroaching decadence which all but destroyed it.” Translate this into the American vernacular and it sounds a lot like MAGA.
Fascism is obsessed with fears of victimization, humiliation and a decline, and a concomitant cult of strength. Fascists, wrote Robert O. Paxton in “The Anatomy of Fascism,” see “the need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s historical destiny.” They believe in “the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason.” This aptly describes Trump’s movement.
Yet Trump was only intermittently able to translate his movement into a government. The national security state was more often his antagonist than his tool. There were Justice Department investigations of the president’s political enemies, but they mostly came to nothing. The military was deployed against protesters, but only once.
"We want them infected": Trump appointee demanded ‘herd immunity’ strategy that would kill millions of Americans
Putin congratulated Biden on his win before Mitch McConnell finally did.
Putin is an asshole. McConnell is a GOP asshole
Tuesday, December 8, 2020
Trump's Insanely Bonkers and Illegal Coup Attempt
On Tuesday, Gabriel Sterling, the Republican who serves as Georgia’s voting-system implementation manager, appeared at a press conference. Voice shaking, he talked about how the home of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger—his boss—had been targeted after the president once again baselessly claimed that there was massive voter fraud in Georgia and called Raffensperger “an enemy of the people.” Sterling called on the president and the state’s two Republicans senators to condemn threats of violence against election workers.
That scene itself was unsettling. But when, just a few hours later, Trump retweeted Sterling’s plea with a shrug and a reassertion of his desire to steal the election, the situation turned profoundly frightening. “Rigged Election,” the president wrote. “Show signatures and envelopes. Expose the massive voter fraud in Georgia. What is Secretary of State and @BrianKempGA afraid of. They know what we’ll find!!!”
With just a few notable exceptions, Republican officials have met Trump’s lies with a combination of tacit approval, pretending not to notice them, or forbearance. In a recent survey, an alarming 222 Republicans in the House and the Senate—88 percent—refused to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the presidency. Another two insisted Trump won. A few more have started speaking out, but what has finally taxed their patience seems to be anxiety that Trump’s antics may cost them an upcoming election for two U.S. Senate seats in Georgia—an instrumental concern about continuing to exercise power, rather than a substantive worry about the attempted election theft itself. (It should be noted that there have been conservative voices who have responded with the appropriate fury, but that few are elected officials or leaders of the GOP.)
After Sterling spoke in Georgia, a local TV station asked the two Republican senators running for election in the January runoff for comment. But instead of offering straightforward denunciations, both issued perfunctory condemnations and then used the opportunity to continue to fan doubts about the process. “Senator [David] Perdue condemns violence of any kind, against anybody. Period,” his campaign said. “We won’t apologize for addressing the obvious issues with the way our state conducts its elections.” The other senator’s campaign took a similar line. “Like many officials, as someone who has been the subject of threats, of course Senator [Kelly] Loeffler condemns violence of any kind. How ridiculous to even suggest otherwise. We also condemn inaction and lack of accountability in our election system process—and won’t apologize for calling it out.”
What is it that the Republican leadership is hoping will pass without too much comment, solved by the ticking down of the transition clock? Let’s run through it—and this is not even all of it. Every day adds more.
The president has repeatedly and baselessly claimed that the election was stolen from him, and continues to do so daily. He is, effectively, charging that election officers around the country are involved in a dangerous conspiracy and that the incoming president is the leader of this illegal attempt.
The president and his key allies have repeatedly called for Republican state legislators to steal the election for him by appointing new electors who will support him instead of backing the winner of the state’s electoral votes.
The president, who has the power to appoint judges for lifetime appointments, and who has appointed nearly a third of federal judges on the crucial circuit-court level in the United States—more than any other president in recent history at this point in their presidency—has asked the courts to throw out valid votes wholesale, especially in cities with minority voters.
Right after the election, a legal adviser to the president stated on national television: “We’re waiting for the United States Supreme Court—of which the president has nominated three justices—to step in and do something. And hopefully Amy Coney Barrett will come through.”
The president’s high-profile allies are holding rallies where supporters are chanting “Lock him up!,” calling for the imprisonment of Georgia’s Republican governor, who is opposing his attempts to steal the election. (Georgia conducted two thorough recounts of the votes and found that the margin by which Trump lost the election holds.)
The president personally called the two Republican canvassers in Wayne County, Michigan, and then both signed affidavits attempting to rescind their certification of the vote in that state. They had earlier tried to block certification of votes from Detroit, providing a glimpse of what could happen if a more competent president tried to steal an election.
The president has amplified messages that call for people to “fight back hard” against the allegedly stolen election.
The president’s election lawyer said that “the entire election, frankly, in all the swing states, should be overturned, and the legislatures should make sure that the electors are selected for Trump.” She has since been dismissed from his team, but he has not publicly repudiated her statements, and she continues to make similar statements.
Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser—a powerful post—who was just pardoned by Trump, has amplified calls for the president to suspend the Constitution and hold another election (an exercise presumably to be repeated until he wins).
The president summarily fired Christopher Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the Department of Homeland Security, because he vouched that the election was not stolen. Joseph diGenova, a lawyer for the Trump campaign, said that Krebs should be “taken out at dawn and shot.” (DiGenova later said that the statement had been “made in jest.”)
Before the election, the president pressured the attorney general to investigate his opponent and his son, after being impeached for pressuring a foreign state to announce its own investigation into his opponent’s son.
The president also fired the chief of the Pentagon, along with other top officials. These dismissals remain unexplained, but Trump was reportedly infuriated at the defense secretary’s opposition to using active-duty military troops against protesters in U.S. cities—portending what he might have liked to do, even though his incompetence has meant that he hasn’t found a way.
What makes this moment deeply alarming—and makes Republicans’ overwhelming silence and tacit approval deeply dangerous, rather than merely an attempt to run out the clock on the president’s clownish behavior—is that Trump’s attempt to steal this election builds on a process that has already entrenched minority rule around the country.
In North Carolina, where I live, only three of the state’s 13 representatives in the House were Democrats after the 2014 congressional election, despite Democrats getting 44 percent of the vote. In 2016, the Democratic Party’s vote share in the state increased to 47 percent, but still only three representatives were Democrats. In 2018, Democrats won an even larger share of the vote—48.3 percent—but still had only three representatives. In 2019, North Carolina’s blatantly gerrymandered district maps were finally struck down by the Supreme Court. And so, this year, the Democrats managed a meager increase in representation—five representatives out of 13—despite again receiving 48 percent of the vote.
"No One Expects Civility From Republicans"
Perhaps you remember the terrible ordeal suffered by the White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the Red Hen in 2018. She was awaiting her entree at the Virginia farm-to-table restaurant when the co-owner, appalled by Sanders’s defense of Donald Trump’s administration, asked her to leave. This happened three days after the homeland security secretary at the time, Kirstjen Nielsen, was yelled atfor the administration’s family separation policy as she tried to dine at a Mexican restaurant in Washington.
These two insults launched a thousand thumb-suckers about civility. More than one conservative writer warned liberals that the refusal to let Trump officials eat in peace could lead to Trump’s re-election. “The political question of the moment,” opined Daniel Henninger in The Wall Street Journal, is this: ‘Can the Democratic Party control its left?’”
Somehow, though, few are asking the same question of Republicans as Trump devotees terrorize election workers and state officials over the president’s relentless lies about voter fraud. Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, described her family’s experience this past weekend: “As my 4-year-old son and I were finishing up decorating the house for Christmas on Saturday night, and he was about to sit down and to watch ‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas,’ dozens of armed individuals stood outside my home shouting obscenities and chanting into bullhorns in the dark of night.”
The radically different way the media treats boundary-pushing on the left and on the right is about more than hypocrisy or double standards. It is, rather, an outgrowth of the crisis of democracy that shields the Republican Party from popular rebuke. There’s no point asking if the G.O.P. can control its right. It has no reason to.
Democrats have just won the popular vote in the seventh out of the last eight presidential elections. In the aftermath, analysts have overwhelmingly focused on what Democrats, not Republicans, must do to broaden their appeal. Partly, this stems from knee-jerk assumptions about the authenticity of the so-called heartland. But it’s also just math — only one of our political parties needs to win an overwhelming national majority in order to govern.
Republican extremism tends to become a major story only when there are clear electoral consequences for it. Pat Buchanan’s demagogic culture war speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention was seen, at the time, as shocking, and elite Republicans later believed it helped George H.W. Bush lose the election. Twenty years later, after Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012, Republicans undertook an “autopsy” and went public with the results of focus groups calling the party “scary,” “narrow-minded” and “out of touch.” There were always zealots in the modern Republican Party, but there were also forces interested in quarantining them.
After that autopsy, Reince Priebus, then the Republican Party chairman, called for a more “inclusive” G.O.P., saying, “Finding common ground with voters will be a top priority.”
Trump would prove that wasn’t necessary. In 2016, he got a smaller percentage of the popular vote than Romney did four years earlier, but still won the Electoral College. And while widespread revulsion toward Trump was a problem for him this November, down-ticket Republicans performed far better than almost anyone expected.
As a result, the effect of right-wing fanaticism on mainstream public opinion has become a non-issue. It doesn’t matter if Biden voters don’t like paranoid militants, many of them armed, menacing civil servants. The structure of our politics — gerrymandering in the House and the rural bias in the Senate — buffers Republicans from centrist backlash.
One thing would change this dynamic overnight: a Democratic victory in the Georgia Senate runoffs on Jan. 5. Republicans might learn that there’s a price for aligning themselves with a president trying to thwart the will of the electorate. They might regret the arrogance of Senator David Perdue, who didn’t deign to show up for a Sunday night debate with his Democratic opponent, Jon Ossoff. Trumpism might come to be seen as an electoral albatross, and Republicans would have an incentive to rejoin the reality everyone else operates in.
But unless and until that happens, few will be able to muster much surprise when Republicans condone the most outrageous right-wing thuggery, because few will expect anything else.
The uproar over shunning Sanders was an outgrowth of an old liberal quandary — how a tolerant society should treat those who conspire against tolerance. The people screaming outside Benson’s house raise an entirely different question, about how long our society can endure absent any overlapping values or common truths. You can condemn an anti-democratic party for behaving anti-democratically, but you can’t really argue with it.
Wednesday, November 25, 2020
Monday, November 23, 2020
21 Cowardly GOP Senators Show ‘Extreme Contempt’ For Trump But Only In Private
The senators, Bernstein tweeted, include the five who have congratulated Joe Biden on his election victory despite Trump’s refusal to concede: Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Mitt Romney (R-Utah), Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.).
Also included in Bernstein’s list are several Senate GOP leaders – though notably not Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell – including Senate GOP Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) and his predecessor John Cornyn (R-Tex.), Senate GOP No. 4 Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) and newly elected NRSC Chair Rick Scott (R-Fla.).
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who Trump mocked as “little Marco” when they faced off in the 2016 campaign but who has since become a firm Trump backerin public, is on the list, though Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who sustained some of Trump’s harshest attacksin 2016, is not.
Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) Pat Roberts (R-Kans.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who have broken with Trump in either calling forthe transition to start or for Biden to receive classified intelligence briefings, are on the list.
The list also includes Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), the Senate GOP’s only black member, outgoing Sen. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.), and Sens. Jerry Moran (R-Kans.), Mike Braun (R-Ind.), Todd Young (R-Ind.) and Richard Burr (R-N.C.).
Post Election Madness and Assholery
Monday, November 16, 2020
President Gutter Swill Still Won't Concede
Trump, the Absolute Worst LoserHe has spent his life gaming the system, so it’s no surprise that he can’t accept defeat.
By Charles M. Blow
Nov. 15, 2020
Donald Trump lost the election. He knows it. But he won’t admit it. He still hopes and believes that there is a way for the courts to erase enough votes to tip the election in his favor.
This will not happen. His legal challenges in swing states across the country are largely being met with defeat and setback. In court, you have to provide evidence. Lies, accusations and conspiracy theory don’t cut it. Trump has spent his life gaming the system. It is unfathomable to him that this system can’t be gamed.
In the end, Trump hopes to push his case to the Supreme Court, where he has seated three conservative justices. That is also not likely to be a winning strategy. Trump believes he can use the judiciary as a weapon against the American people. The judiciary is not likely to allow itself to be used.
Barring that, he is committed to destroying faith in the electoral process itself. If he didn’t win, he insists he must have been cheated because, in his mind, failure is not a possibility. Like he has done for the entirety of his presidency, he is lying, concocting a narrative detached from reality.
His Twitter feed since the election — he has made precious few appearances or official statements during this time — has been an unprecedented attack on election integrity and the voting franchise as a whole. He keeps complaining that the election was rigged, that it was stolen from him, that computer software switched millions of votes from him to Joe Biden.
On Sunday, in reference to Biden, he tweeted: “He only won in the eyes of the FAKE NEWS MEDIA. I concede NOTHING! We have a long way to go. This was a RIGGED ELECTION!” (snip)
After Republicans lost in 2012, they produced an autopsy report designed to grow the party. With Trump, they threw that out and doubled down on being the party of white grievance.
This year’s election and Trump’s reaction to it is not likely to produce an autopsy but induce a séance. The Republican Party is dead. Trump killed it. MAGA is dancing on the grave. The way to remember that party is in spirit.
#25thAmendment Trending On Twitter As Trump Insists He Won The Election
Saturday, November 14, 2020
Trump Is a Demonic Force
If I were still a believing Christian, I might be tempted to think that Donald Trump is Satan himself.
No, I don't mean that literally, but I do mean it seriously.
The idea of Satan, the Devil, Lucifer, a fallen angel, or demonic force who rises up in defiance of God, tempts human beings toward sin, inspiring evil, sowing chaos and disorder, tearing down good things, desecrating the beautiful, telling lies for the sheer thrill of spreading confusion and muddling minds — the pious believe such a being actually exists, wandering the world, intervening in lives, possessing bodies, polluting souls. But it's also possible to make use of the character as a metaphor, an idea, treating it as the fanciful creation of culture as it tries to make sense of something real in human experience.
What is this something? It's more precisely a someone — the kind of person who delights in wreaking havoc, who acts entirely from his own interests, and whose interests are incompatible with received norms, standards, restraints, and laws. Someone who actively seeks to inspire anger and animus, who likes nothing more than provoking conflict all around him, both to create advantages for himself and because pulling everyone around him down to his own ignoble level soothes his nagging worry that someone, somewhere might be more widely admired. This is a person who lives for adulation without regard for whether the glory is earned. The louder the cheers, the better. That's all that counts. And so the only thing that's a threat is the prospect of the cheers going silent — of someone else rightfully winning the contest for public approval.
Donald Trump is the demon in American democracy.
A week ago, immediately following Election Day, I felt anxious. I'm a liberal-leaning centrist. I've written hundreds of columns lambasting Trump. I voted for Biden without a moment's hesitation. So I was disappointed to see that the outcome of the election was much closer in the Electoral College than I hoped it would be. The rest of the week was tense. But by midday Saturday, the outcome was clear. Biden had pulled into the lead in Pennsylvania (my home state) the day before, and by late morning his lead in the vote count had grown to more that 0.5 percent. With that milestone reached, major news organizations called the race.
Members of my family traveled from the suburbs into Philadelphia to celebrate on the streets. That evening we gathered in front of the TV to watch the speeches from Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. We all felt grateful. Relieved. In my own case, the feeling flowed less from partisanship than patriotism — love of my country and hope that the civic turbulence of the past four years might recede for a time. We had held a national election during the worst pandemic in a century and peacefully voted the president out of office. That realization, combined with Biden's calls to healing and unity and his gestures of reconciliation toward the other side, felt like a return to normal politics after years of crisis.
A Democrat holding the White House isn't how I define "normal." I define "normal" as the country managing an orderly transfer of power from one administration to the next. The fact that many Americans consider this normal, and that it is achieved (for the most part) democratically, is an enormous achievement — and a testament to the great good fortune of everyone lucky enough to call the U.S. home.
But that sensation of normalcy has already vanished — thanks to one man.
What makes Trump demonic? One thing above all: His willingness, even eagerness, to do serious, potentially fatal, damage to something beautiful, noble, fragile, and rare, purely to satisfy his own emotional needs. That something is American self-government. Trump can't accept losing, can't accept rejection, and savors provoking division. He wants to be a maestro conducting a cacophony of animosities at the center of our national stage because it feeds his insatiable craving for attention and power — and because, I suspect, he delights in pulling everybody else down to his own level.
That is a satanic impulse.
Think of all the ways that Trump could have responded to the election results.
He could have acted and spoken like a normal president. Whatever his personal feelings of disappointment, he might have said, "We fought a good fight, but Joe Biden prevailed. I will now do whatever I can to ensure an orderly and productive transition."
Or he could have been more feisty and combative: "Yes, Joe Biden won. I'm not happy about it. I think it was a mistake. But a loss is a loss, and we'll be working with the incoming administration over the coming couple of months to help out where we can."
Or he could have pushed even further into nastiness: "You know, this was a big mistake. At least Republicans made gains in the House and prevented the Democrats from taking over the Senate. That's important because the Biden administration is going to be a disaster. You'll see, and then I'll be back to boot him out of the Oval Office. I'm declaring right now, I'm running for president again in four years. You'll be begging for me to return to the White House."
That would have been an unprecedented thing to say and do. But it wouldn't have crossed the line into an attack on the system itself. The president is allowed to express negative thoughts about his successor. Having served only one term, he's allowed to run for office again in four years. Indeed, all three of these imagined scenarios would have done the essential political work of reconciling his supporters to the reality of life in a functioning democracy, which involves ruling and being ruled in turn, winning some and losing some, and consoling oneself with the thought of getting another chance to try again down the road and in the meantime accepting the legitimacy of one's opponent taking power.
But Trump didn't do that. Instead, what he's done is deny that he lost at all — even though he did. He's asserted that the Democrats stole the election without providing a shred of proof in even a single state to back up the incendiary accusation. The result? Seventy percent of Republicans are already prepared to say that the election wasn't free and fair. Which means they are inclined to believe that the Biden administration is illegitimate even before it starts — because, as Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina put it on Monday night on Fox News, the Democrats are only able to win power by cheating.
It would be one thing if Trump said these civically poisonous things and elected members of his party broke with him over it to congratulate the president-elect on his win. But of course, with a fewkey exceptions, they haven't. On the contrary, they've rushed to denounce the imaginary scourge of voter fraud, with many committing themselves to, in the words of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, "a smooth transition to a second Trump administration." Pompeo's line may have been a joke, but it wasn't funny.
A few of these GOP office holders might actually believe the president's nonsense. But I suspect most stand with the "senior Republican official" quotedin TheWashington Post:
What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change…. He went golfing this weekend. It's not like he's plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He's tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he'll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he'll leave. [The Washington Post]
Sure, haha, no problem. We can let the just-defeated president assert without evidence that in fact he won the vote, that the incoming president and his party stole the election, and that the most elemental processes of American democracy are untrustworthy. No biggie. Just a little good-natured fun and games from the commander-in-chief about how the upcoming transition of power is actually a coup. No harm, no foul!
Except that the harm to come from allowing this dangerous game with American democracy to proceed could be enormous. The "downside" of continuing to play the game is the further cultivation of a segment of the electorate that lacks any trust in or attachment to democratic elections — or rather, that only accepts an election's legitimacy when its own side prevails. "If we win, it's fair; if they win, it's fraud" is not a motto that is compatible with liberal democratic government. It's a formula for democratic breakdown. And Trump is doing everything he can to encourage his supporters to embrace it, with the active complicity of his party.
I still believe that the most likely outcome of this mess is that Trump eventually relents, allowing the process of presidential transition to move forward. But that doesn't mean it's anything close to guaranteed. And even if he does back down, it seems certain to be combined with the deliberate nurturing of a stabbed-in-the-back narrative that keeps alive the pernicious fiction that Trump didn't really lose, that the Democrats' win in 2020 is tainted, and that the Biden administration has been illegitimate from the start, founded in an act of treachery for which no one has yet paid a price.
That it is all a lie won't matter one bit. The demon infecting our democracy doesn't care, and neither will those whose enmity he has worked so tirelessly to inflame over the past four years.
Thursday, November 12, 2020
We Need to Accept That At Least 70 Million Americans Just Suck
"So many times in the last few days, since Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were declared the winners of the presidential race, I've heard someone say that it's fine to be happy, but "we have to grapple with the fact that 70 million still voted for Donald Trump despite everything that we know about him. What are we going to do about that?"My response is simple: Maybe we just need to accept that at least 70 million Americans are just shitty people. And, frankly, it's on them to change. They're not fucking children. They're adults who made adult decisions.I'm so fucking sick of the infantilization of the Trump voter, the idea that they're these naifs who need to be nurtured into some kind of maturity, that they have fears of the progressive world (even as they benefit from it in many places with expanded Medicaid), that they are uneducated and inundated with bullshit from Fox "news" and its devolved progeny in the nutzoid right-wing media.Fuck that. They chose this ideology. They chose what to believe. They decided to be a bunch of scabby pricks. They gotta own that shit.Forgiveness is wasted on those who refuse to believe they need to be forgiven. The more charitable of you might be able to do it, but I'm not fuckin' charitable to these goons and freaks and worms.Donald Trump played 'em like a goddamn fiddle. Hell, he's still playin' them, squeezing them for more cash under the umbrella of his bullshit "voter fraud" lawsuits. Until they wake the fuck up or are woken the fuck up, they need to exist as a warning not to let them get more power than they have and to work like hell to take away their remaining power.It's time to tell Trump voters to spend a little time trying to understand Biden voters so they can see why we fucking kicked Trump's ass."
Tuesday, October 27, 2020
Brett Kavanaugh Caught Lying in SCOTUS Opinion Against Voting Access
Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh on Monday voted that 2020 elections ballots in Wisconsin can only be counted if received by Election Day.
Kavanaugh issued his own concurring opinion, where he suggested that state courts should be barred from protecting voting rights.
Kavanaugh also made a mistake of fact.
Sam Levine, a voting rights reporter for the Guardian, noted Kavanaugh was inaccurate in his concurring opinion.
“Other states, such as Vermont, by contrast, have decided not to make changes to their ordinary election rules,” Kavanaugh claimed.
That is not correct, on July 2nd the legislative bill S.348became law in Vermont. The bill was titled, “An act relating to temporary elections procedures in the year 2020.”
The good-government group VPIRG explained the importance of the bill.
“On Friday, Governor Phil Scott allowed S.348 to become law without his signature. This law grants full authority to the Secretary of State to mail all registered voters a ballot for this year’s General Election in November. This law finally makes it possible for Vermont to move forward with a vote-by-mail system, which is the safest way for citizens to cast their ballot during the pandemic,” VPIRG explained.
Amy Coney Barrett's First Decision As a Justice Was a Wrong One
Barrett didn't have to participate in a prime-time political spectacle at the White House, just eight days before Election Day. But she did.
Oct. 27, 2020, 8:00 AM EDT
By Steve Benen
snip//
Last night, the former reality-show personality turned the dial to 11, hosting a prime-time spectacle at the White House. It was, for all intents and purposes, a campaign celebration, held for the cameras, just eight days before Election Day.
The merriment had all the subtlety of a sledgehammer: Barrett stood in the spotlight, on a White House balcony in front of the presidential seal, alongside Trump who beamed with pride before an applauding audience, which included Republican senators who spent last week pretending they have no idea how the far-right ideologue will rule on cases of lasting import.
Barrett was then ceremonially sworn in by Justice Clarence Thomas -- arguably the high court's most reactionary conservative -- as if to drive home the point that the right had taken over the judiciary.
Barrett had a choice. She does not serve at the pleasure of the president. The Supreme Court's newest member could've told the White House, "No, I'm not comfortable with this. I'm not a trophy to be shown off during a re-election campaign." On the show last night, Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) described the event as "the latest episode of the Trump reality-TV show, 'Re-Election Theater.'"
And therein lies the point: Barrett's first decision as a confirmed Supreme Court justice was to agree to participate in this political spectacle. She knew about the electoral context; she knew this prime-time program would give the appearance of a political victory party; and she chose to do this anyway.
CNN's Jake Tapper heard from a Republican consultant last night who said in reference to the White House show, "If I'm [Amy Coney Barrett], I don't go to this." The consultant added that it "looks bad."
Her apparent indifference to the damage all of this does to her credibility and the legitimacy of her institution speaks volumes about Barrett and the indefensible process that concluded with such a brazenly political coda.
Sunday, October 25, 2020
Trump's campaign is not returning donations from white supremacist donors
but he's the least racist person ever!!!
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/white-supremacist-donors-trump-campaign-2020_n_5f9336c7c5b6494ba13be8d8?ncid=engmodushpmg00000004
President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign has repeatedly accepted donations from well-known white supremacists, extremists and bigots, Federal Election Commission records show.
Among the far-right figures who have given money to Trump’s reelection bid are a neo-Nazi pastor in Louisiana, a wealthy Florida businessman who called former President Barack Obama the N-word, and a neo-fascist activist recently arrested for opening fire on Black Lives Matter demonstrators in Portland, Oregon.
The Trump campaign, which did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment on this story, has been aware of at least some of the white supremacists’ donations, past media reports show. But it has declined to reject or return their money ― even though it is common practice for political campaigns to voluntarily forfeit donations from extremists. In 2015, for example, the Republican presidential campaigns of Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz returned thousands of dollars in contributions from the leader of a white supremacist group.
The extremists’ donations to Trump’s campaign can be seen in official FEC filings. The contributions were spotted and compiled into a dossier by American Bridge 21st Century, a Democratic super PAC that conducts opposition research to boost the campaign of Trump’s opponent, Joe Biden. HuffPost independently verified the records of the contributions.
Saturday, October 24, 2020
Trump Is Purposefully Spreading a Deadly Virus
Trump’s campaign made stops nationwide. Coronavirus cases surged in his wake in at least five places.
As President Donald Trump jetted across the country holding campaign rallies during the past two months, he didn’t just defy state orders and federal health guidelines. He left a trail of coronavirus outbreaks in his wake. The president has participated in nearly three dozen rallies since mid-August, all but two at airport hangars. A USA TODAY analysis shows COVID-19 cases grew at a faster rate than before after at least five of those rallies in the following counties: Blue Earth, Minnesota; Lackawanna, Pennsylvania; Marathon, Wisconsin; Dauphin, Pennsylvania; and Beltrami, Minnesota.
Thursday, October 15, 2020
The Barrett Nomination Shows the GOP Are Pushing for a Christian Theocracy
Let me assure you. As a survivor and scholarof authoritarianism, the Amy Coney Barrett confirmation is much, much worse than you probably think, and that’s alreadyif you think it’s pretty bad. Why do I say that? The big picture is this: America has a choice before it. Either it begins to become a modern society, like Europe and Canada — it’s half a centurybehind them. Or it plunges into hardcore implosion, like Russia and Iran — becoming a true failed state.
All this at the most crucial juncture, by the way, in human history, when the fate of civilisation will be decided— but I digress.
The Republicans, who are ramming her through the confirmation process, breaking every norm and precedent, have effectively two arguments. Each is more absurd than the last.
The first is that she is a “brilliant legal mind.” The second is that she’s not the fanatic she appears to be. Think about that — it’s literally asking you not to believe what’s in front of your face.
Is she a brilliant legal mind? It’s easy enough to observe that America doesn’t really have brilliant minds at that level anymore, which is why it’s a collapsing society. It has minds ranging from mediocre — Ezra, Jake, Chris — to thoughtless, like all those alt-right “intellectuals” like Bannon, who was once hailed as Nietzsche in cargo pants. ACB is on the poorer half of that spectrum. Maybe you think that’s unkind, so let me prove it.
A truly brilliant legal mind would observe something like the following. America is a society in the latter stages of collapse. The average American has become a poor person, dying in $60,000 of debt, unable to raise a small amountfor emergencies, struggling to pay the bills. As a result, happiness, trust, meaning, and social bonds have all come undone. That despair, in turn, fuelled a vicious circleof authoritarianism.
Where didn’t all this happen? Europe and Canada.Why not? Precisely because their jurisprudence has created a vastly different set of societies — truly modern ones, where living standards are vastly higher. So why did America collapse, while Europe and Canada prospered?
It’s a little known fact that American jurisprudence is effectively failed American economics in disguise. No, not Mom and Pop shops. The law of the artificial lowest price. The thinking goes that the lowest price is always the best — it “maximizes consumer welfare.” Who can provide the lowest price? The biggest corporations. That is why every industry in America is now what economists call “highly concentrated,” meaning dominated by a tiny number of monopolies, from banking to finance to real estate to healthcare.
Now, a good legal mind — not even a brilliant one — would ask: was that theory true?Did the law of the lowest price by way of gigantic monopolies really lead to higher living standards? The answer is: obviously not. Americans have the lowest living standardsin the rich world, approaching those of much poorer countries. They live vastly shorter, poorer, dumber, meaner, and more desperate lives than Canadians and Europeans.
A good legal mind would conclude that something went badly, badly wrong with the grand American theories of the lowest price.
ACB seems to be a staunch supporter of all the above. She’s never asked the question once: why did America collapse, while Europe and Canada prospered? Why not?
The answer to that question reveals what she really is. A fundamentalist. ACB subscribes to a theory that’s called in America “originalism.”It means something like: no deviation from America’s founding documents should ever be possible. The constitution should be interpreted as it is, in the way it would have been intended when it was written.
In simpler language, we’d call all that fundamentalism.Because it prevents a mind like ACB’s from asking the question above, and answering it properly. If you assume the answer to every social question is always: go back to America’s founding documents!! What kind of progress can you really make? The answer is none. And in that literal and real sense, “originalism” is a euphemism for fundamentalism.
A better mind would observe that Canada and Europe prospered because they have cutting-edgeconstitutions.In them, things like healthcare, retirement, education, income, and so on, are all guaranteed as basic rights. Therefore, there have to be social-scale institutions to provide them. America’s constitution, by contrast, is two and a half centuries old. It is not fit for the 21st century, because it recognises none of the things we now consider basics as rights. Hence, Americans have to battle one another for them, in a never-ending, bitter, bruising contest for the basics, whether income or healthcare. That is what it means to be a collapsed society.
But if all you assumeis “originalism,” that America’s founding ideas are flawless, the answer to every possible question, then you can never understand any of the above. You cannot engage with the modern world at all.
America’s founding documents are deeply inadequate to build a modern society upon precisely because they were meant for a slave state.Americans may not want to hear that, but it’s true. And that brings me to the second half of ACB’s fundamentalism, the second argument Republicans make for her. “She’s not the fanatic she appears to be!” now that we’ve dismantled the foolish notion that she’s some kind of American Aristotle.
Monday, October 12, 2020
Last Chance for American Democracy
In normal times, we might regard any vote as ethical. To participate in an election is to dignify oneself as a citizen with a voice, and to express with others the interests and values that guide the future of our land. But these are not normal times. This is clear from the perspective of the candidates. During a normal campaign, both candidates take for granted that they will walk free after the election. One will be in the Oval Office; the other will go home.
This year is different. One candidate, Donald Trump, knows that, should he not remain in power, he will descend into poverty, go to prison, or both. He can hold the ongoing criminal investigations at bay so long as he is president, but not thereafter. Trump owes hundreds of millions of dollars to his creditors and has no visible means to pay them back. As president he can expect his creditors to wait; as a private citizen he cannot.
If someone can maintain wealth and freedom only by holding onto power, that person will fight to hold onto power. Behind the ideologies and the propaganda, this is the core history of tyranny: government becomes the bodyguard of a gangster. Modern authoritarians such as Vladimir Putin have much to say about why they must remain in power, but the real issue is that they wish to die wealthy and in their own beds rather than poor and in prison. In authoritarian countries, the anxiety of the tyrant can be allayed by a promise not to prosecute the leader and his family, and to leave their bank accounts in peace.
Because the rule of law still (more or less) prevails in the United States, no one can offer Trump such a deal. He is therefore in a fight for his life; from his point of view, he needs to spend the rest of it in the White House. His predicament might not be obvious to Americans, but people in authoritarian countries see it right away.
It is also unusual, in an American presidential campaign, for one of the candidates to admit defeat. Trump has a fine political mind, and he can read polls and the national mood as well as anyone. For months now, he has been signaling that he cannot beat Joe Biden in an election. When he tried to summon the armed forces to aid him in June, it was the gesture of a man who needed unusual forms of help. When he tweeted in July that elections should be delayed, he revealed that he did not think he could win them. Undermining the United States Postal Service, asking his supporters to vote twice, and saying that he will not accept the results: all of these are ways of saying that he expects to lose. His campaign has ignored swing voters, and the Republican National Convention made no attempt to reach the undecided.
In the first presidential debate, Trump tried, as he has done for months, to delegitimize the election as such. The plan is not to win the popular (or even the electoral) vote, but rather to stay in power in some other way. If we take Trump at his word and begin from the premise that he cannot win the election, then his actions make sense. The plan is not to win the popular (or even the electoral) vote, but rather to stay in power in some other way.
We don’t even really have to guess about this, since Trump has spelled it out himself: he will declare victory regardless of what happens, expect state governments to act contrary to vote counts, claim fraud from postal ballots, court chaos from white nationalists (and perhaps the Department of Homeland Security), and expect the Supreme Court to install him. In general, the idea behind these scenarios is to create as much chaos as possible, and then fall back upon personal ruthlessness and an artificial state of emergency to stay in power.
If Trump creates a constitutional crisis while his supporters commit acts of violence, the Supreme Court might be intimidated. In this transition from democracy to authoritarianism, otherwise known as a coup d’état, the actual number of people who vote for Trump matters less than it would in an ordinary election. In this scenario, it matters more how angry they are, and how willing some of them are to endorse extraordinary actions by Trump, or to take such actions themselves. Since he is treating election day as the occasion for a coup, Trump has good reason not to soften his message to reach more voters. In doing so he would risk losing some of the emotion he needs when he tries to stay in power by non-democratic means. He only has to stay within about ten points of Joe Biden to avoid the demoralization that arises when even core supporters realize they have been deceived by their leader and overwhelmed by their fellow citizens at the polls. It is unusual for a plan for a coup d’état to be broadcast so clearly.
Yet there is a political logic here, one with deep moral implications. By telling Americans in advance that he intends to stay in power regardless of the vote count, Trump is implicating his supporters in the action as it unfolds. He is giving them notice that they are siding with someone who intends to work hard to see that votes are not counted. He is giving them to understand that they are participants in the unravelling of American democracy. They might not want to face this reality squarely, which would be a normal reaction. This is a lesson of modern tyranny: authoritarianism need not be a conscious project of those embraced by it. They need only sleepwalk through the roles assigned to them. When democracy lies in the dust, they will find rationalizations for what they have done, and will support the authoritarian regime that follows, because they are already involved. No argument from emotions or interests can stop that process. The degradation is ethical, and so the question is about ethics.
What, then, is the moral meaning of a vote for Donald Trump on November 3? To vote for Trump is to traduce the meaning of voting, which is a normal part of the transition to authoritarianism. Since the collective effect of votes for Trump is to create background plausibility for a coup, each vote for Trump is participation in a plot to end the American republic. It is to vote for a future in which voting does not matter. It is a choice by Americans to no longer make choices as Americans. It transforms individuals with interests and values into elements of a spectacle that legitimates an authoritarian regime change.
If Trump stays in power, elections will continue to take place, but they will be meaningless. Soon we will not bother to speak of fraud, because voting will be a joke. In that dark scenario, the joke is on the Trump voter, since a vote for Trump is a vote for spiritual self-annihilation. If Trump stays in power in 2021, a Trump voter will enjoy the quick hit of “winning,” a spasm of joy that distracts from a profound moral loss. It is no victory to vote for never voting again, to beg for voicelessness. It is submission.
Joe Biden is not a perfect candidate, but he is a candidate who supports democracy: the American dignity of representing oneself, and the American aspiration to see our values and interests prevail in our government. If our democracy dies, a Biden voter will be able to say to herself that she did the right thing, did what was possible, did not give in. A Biden voter can speak proudly about America’s past as a democracy, will preserve the moral resources to resist authoritarianism, and might at some later point contribute to a resurrection of the republic.
In a moral sense, a Trump voter has much more to lose than a Biden voter, since the stakes in November are not only about what the candidates would do in office, but about who we will be afterward as individuals. The Trump voter is risking something precious: his or her standing as an American to be counted, as a person to be reckoned with. To vote for Trump is to cast away that standing; it is to become, as the president likes to say, a “sucker” and a “loser.” To vote for Trump is to give away something that rightly belongs to others, their future in a democracy, and to lose something of yourself that you can never recover, the dignity of a citizen of our republic.
Trump is indeed a traitor and murderer, a filthy traitor and a greedy ass bribe-taking criminal.
Saturday, October 3, 2020
The President Is Our Mass Murderer
Sometimes, oh, my sweet, weary people of Donald Trump's America, it feels like we're sailing in skiffs on a sea of shit and some of us believe we can get across the shit sea to shore and some of us believe that we're gonna sink but we all know we're damned to keep sailing as wave after wave of shit keeps hitting us, and every time we dare to hope that we've seen the worst shit wave, that perhaps we'll get a break and just sail as smoothly as possible through a shit sea, a fucking massive turd wave in a shit storm appears on the horizon and we've gotta batten down the hatches and ride this one out, even though we know that in the best possible circumstances, we'll get over or through but still coated in shit.
What does it change that we now have Trump on audio telling reporter Bob Woodward that he knew back in early February that COVID-19 was airborne and dangerous, far worse, in his own words, than a "strenuous flu"? What does it change that we now can hear Trump say that he downplayed the virus to the public on purpose? In some ways, obviously, it changes nothing. It doesn't bring back the dead. It doesn't rebuild the lives shattered by the shutdown economy. It doesn't really make us understand Trump any more than we already did. We know that he is the motherfuckingest motherfucker anyone has ever met. We know that he was deliberately avoiding action on coronavirus until the mounting death toll and hospitalizations forced him to do something.
But what has changed today is that we know without a doubt that Trump wasn't just spitballing and gambling that the virus wouldn't be bad, despite experts outside of the federal government telling us it would be. He knew. He fucking knew. He knew it and could articulate how dangerous the situation was going to get. And he chose to pretend otherwise and lie to the nation, forcing others to lie, too. After telling Woodward it was worse than the flu, he tweeted the exact opposite, mocking the idea that it's worse than the flu. After telling Woodward that "young people" are susceptible to it, he said that children are "almost immune" to the virus. And no matter how many ways Trump and his ass remoras attempt to spin this as nobly trying not to panic people, there's a fucking world of difference between yelling, "Fire" in a crowded theatre and telling everyone to just sit still while the fire burns out. This is not fine.
Every single person who knew should have spoken. They should have given Trump the finger and told us, including Bob fucking Woodward. Because how the fuck do we trust anything now? Most of us didn't trust Trump, but we thought we could look at others, look at the CDC or Anthony Fauci and find the truth. But they all decided to stay silent, out of either blind or craven loyalty to Trump or the misguided hope they could mitigate the damage by staying quiet, the pathetic error that so many tainted public servants have made.
And now we're supposed to listen when this lying son of a bitch whose face looks like a one-nut pig scrotum and who speaks in barks like a brain-damaged beagle bitch tells us to get an untested vaccine? Fuck off all the way to Moscow.
This is personal, too. I remember wondering all through February and into March whether or not I should wear a mask. I was reading articlesabout whether or not masks are effective, with many telling us not to worry about it, that the slim supply of masks had to go to health care workers. It gnawed at me until I finally decided, "Fuck it, I'm wearing one" about a week before the CDC changed course and said we should. The thing is that by that point I already had gotten COVID. I didn't get sick until a few days after I started mask-wearing, which means I was doing my part then. As I've said before, I had very mild symptoms, just a low-grade fever, some fatigue, and a bit of a cough. Sure, it could have been far worse, and I'm pissed at Trump about getting sick. But most of the time, you have the goddamn virus before your symptoms show up. I should have been wearing a mask all along. I don't fucking know who I might have spread it to. And that bullshit weighs on me, and that's on Trump and everyone who stayed quiet.
We knew Trump was busily corrupting every part of the government he could get his shit-stained fingers on. We knew that he was too fucking lazy to really take the action that he needed to take, as simple as that may have been. We knew that we needed to amp up production of masks and gloves and fucking tests. We knew that it was goddamn weird that it didn't happen. We knew that the only thing that matters to Trump is re-election, something that Fauci is quoted as saying in Woodward's book. Fuck, we knew that Trump was actually, actively evil and not just stupidly so. The cockscab wants violence in the streets (which is something that makes his claim of trying to prevent panic utterly laughable).
I'm not really shocked by what we've learned. I'm frankly only shocked that Trump went on the record with it. Which means that he thinks he was right to lie to Americans. He said that today, like he's some fuckin' hero for shutting down the information we needed to save our fucking lives. And by so willingly talking to Woodward, it also means that, even though he should be forced out of office and arrested, Trump believes he will suffer no consequences for his evil. And every single time, that has been proven correct. Even now, when he's killed people in the middle of every avenue, the president as our mass murderer. And that, dear Americans, is something we haven't seen in a long damn time.
Sometimes it feels like the sails on our skiffs are broken, and so we are just drifting on the shit sea, buffeted by the waves, wondering if we'll float to land before we die of exposure.
How This Fascist Asshole POTUS Wants to "Win" "Re-Election"
--Having his white supremacist asshole supporters intimidate Democratic voters at the polls
-- Slow down the mail service and interfere with mail balloting
-- challenging the validity of mail-in ballots in swing states in the courts
-- winning the case in his rigged Supreme Court
--as a fall-back throwing the electoral college into disarray and winning the election by bizarre, sleazy and extraordinary means.
One way or another, he wants to disenfranchise millions of voters and destroy our democracy. It's sick and he's one sick fuckface.
Trump Is a National Security Threat And Trump Supporting Republicans Have Shit the Bed on National Security
Trump's Very Bad, No Good, Horrible, Catastrophic Week
Second, his debate performance with Joe Biden was a massive trainwreck, shitshow, dumpster fire. It showed off what a complete sociopath this president is.
Then he got the Coronavirus because he's a fucking dumbass and got sick enough to be taken to Walter Reed Army Hospital.
For a president who bathes in bad news, this was rough week even for him.
Sunday, September 13, 2020
Week 200 in Trump's America
Things are getting worse in America, week by week. This week, as the West Coast saw wildfires spread, with much of California, Oregon, and Washington covered in smoke so thick the sun couldn’t break through and the sky was a hazy gray or shade of yellow and orange, Trump ignored it. Just as he skipped a commemorative ceremony in lower Manhattan for the anniversary of 9/11 — as if the blue states were not his responsibility — repeating a theme from the start in office: leader of his supporters, not the country.
Lots of assholery in the list.
US DOJ wants to defend Trump in E. Jean Carroll defamation lawsuit
The US Justice Department, in an extraordinary move on Tuesday, asked to take over the defense of President Donald Trump in a defamation lawsuit filed against him by E. Jean Carroll, a woman who has accused Trump of sexual assault. While the alleged sexual assault occurred long before Trump became President, the Justice Department argued that it must take over because Trump's comments spurring the defamation lawsuit came while he was in office. The move -- defending Trump at taxpayer expense -- comes amid ongoing criticism that the Justice Department has acted in the President's personal interests.
Trump Regime Traitors
10/ Mike Flynn, national security adviser Ω
Cut-rate traitor. Covered previously.9/ Erik Prince, mercenary
Real-life Bond villain.8/ Steve Bannon, campaign chair Ω
The LeCarre novel about him would be called The Man Who Wore Three Shirts. Cambridge Analytica principal. His fingerprints are all over the place, and now that he’s under indictment, he will flip like Nadia Comăneci.7/ Roger Stone, advisor Ω
Convicted felon. Nexus of Trump/Russia. The commuted sentence is going to be challenged and overturned next year. Covered previously.6/ Paul Manafort, campaign chair ΩΩ
Felon. That he is still treasoning from behind barsis a compelling argument for capital punishment.5/ Mark Zuckerberg, social network CEO
Hoodie-wearing fraud. Facebook is Russian malware. You know what’s cool? A million dollars. You know what’s even cooler? A billion dollars with vodka-soaked strings attached.4/ Rupert Murdoch, media mogul
Did not die on that accident aboard his son’s yacht, alas, so may yet live to see his ultimate dream fulfilled: the death of the republic.3/ Bill Barr, Attorney General
Most dangerous man in America. Previously covered.2/ Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader
No politician in my lifetime has done more to erode our democracy than Cocaine Mitch. Worst American since Robert E. Lee. This seditious piece of neo-Confederate dogshit a) refused to jointly condemn Russian election interference when Obama made the request in 2016, and b) refuses to allow a vote on a bill to safeguard the 2020 election from foreign interference. (I’m sure it has nothing to do with mega-oligarch Oleg Deripaska’s company building an aluminum plant in Kentucky.) Giving aid and comfort to an enemy is treason. That’s the high crime in which Addison Mitchell McConnell, Jr. is actively engaged.1/ Jared Kushner, Acting President
Boy Plunder has broken so many laws, I’ve lost track. Some of them, like for example espionage, are traditionally punishable by death. As the pandemic raged, he shelved his own secret team’s plan, hoping for a Blue State Genocide. He’s an evil, evil fucker, with the political sensitivity of a Novocained glans penis, and he’s absolutely calling the shots.
Trump is not included because he's obviously the main traitor and this list is his enablers.