It’s pretty clear that Mr. Trump has no core beliefs about anything, outside of grasping at any idea he feels might be  helpful to his overarching need to win at any cost and to see all opponents crushed.   His beliefs are purely transactional, as are all of his relationships.   Actually, Mr. Trump does appear to have a few core beliefs: vanity and vindictiveness are virtues, law, rules and norms are for suckers and that deliberate cruelty demonstrates strength.   His Republican colleagues in Congress appear to believe the same things, or at least, are afraid of the fervency of their leader’s belief in these things.

Some who have hitched their wagons to the Trump juggernaut may actually have deep core beliefs.  Stephen Miller, for one, probably truly believes in the Nazi-like shit he spouts, the Nazi-like policies he advocates. The same for the belief, in many a pious conservative, that abortion is murder, in every case, no matter what.  It is a truism, in a republic where church and state are explicitly separated in the nation’s founding document, that you cannot legislate morality, but we’ll see about that soon.

Lists were created for Trump of judicial candidates vetted for their fealty to bedrock conservative moral propositions like abortion is murder.   The federal courts are now packed with judges who are skeptical about a woman’s constitutional right to have the final say over whether to become a mother or not.   While each of these judges, when pressed, would probably give lip service to the proposition that the government may not make moralistic, religiously-motivated laws that violate the constitution, they will search diligently for a legally sound way to make anti-abortion laws  stick anyway.

A number of Republican states are in a rush to help in the overturn of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that protects an American’s right to a safe, legal abortion.  Many are the same states who rushed to implement voter suppression laws immediately after the Supreme Court ended enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.  

In Alabama, an impoverished state with a shamefully high infant mortality rate (and maternal mortality rate, for that matter), twenty-five right-wing men have decided to test Trump’s highly moral courts with a draconian law that imposes a ninety-nine year prison sentence on any obstetrician who provides an abortion in the good state of Alabama.  There are two such obstetricians currently in practice in Alabama under the stringent current laws.  

If you were to rape and shoot one of these doctors, and be convicted of premeditated murder and rape, you would serve far less than the ninety-nine year imprisonment mandated in this deliberately provocative test case anti-abortion law.  The same applies if you serially rape children in Alabama.  A nice touch that a female governor signed this anti-woman bill into law.

You can call this politics, the idea that a doctor performing her job, protecting the health and life choices of her patients, is subjected to a sentence many times longer than murderers, rapists and the most foul perjurers get.  This new Alabama law applies even in cases where a girl is impregnated by an adult rapist– no abortion NO MATTER WHAT.   You will have the goddamned baby, slut!

We need to get back in the streets, boys and girls.   Regularly.   These swamp creatures, true believers and cynics alike, must be soundly rebuked in 2020, but a lot of serious damage has been done and we need to be out in the streets, millions of us, showing the world, and the TV pundits, that Trump’s is not the America at least 61% of us want to live in.  

(By the way, Charles and David Koch’s net worth tripled under Obama).

While I’m droning on about the rule of law, and our morally heedless president, here’s one that caught my eye recently.  The president recently pardoned a lieutenant who took a prisoner outside, stripped him naked and shot him in the head.   The president apparently agreed that this American soldier had acted in self-defense against this dangerous, possibly al Qu’eada-affiliated Muslim and that it was intolerable that he had been locked up for five years just for doing his duty.  Mr. Trump has acted in a similar way in other cases, the optics, or legality, be damned. [1] 

One of Mr. Trump’s first, and most famously in-your-face, pardons was of the contemptible Joe Arpaio, the famously vicious sheriff who set up open air concentration camps in the desert that he bragged about repeatedly.  A federal judge eventually informed him that such cruel and unusual  incarceration was illegal (this was prior to Trump’s widespread use of punitive child detention camps– now cruel AND usual, yo.)  Arpaio reacted to the federal court’s ruling with what the court decided was contempt of court.  Trump, impressed by Arpaio’s in-your-face defiance, extended a full, in-your-fucking-face pardon for Arpaio’s contempt of a federal court order.    Mr. Trump being Mr. Trump.

There are so many reasons to get this foul, persistent shit stain out of the Oval Office, boys and girls, outside of the multiple, very weighty counts to be found in Volume II of the Mueller report, which people are still fighting over America’s right to see. 

We need to be in the street, millions of us.   We need to be there today, tomorrow and for as long as it takes.

Note:  Steve Mnuchin’s father paid $91,000,000 yesterday for a statue by artist Jeff Coons, after making the winning bid at an auction.   I am no longer wondering why Mnuchin has that smug fuck-you smile on his face every time he talks to reporters on camera and smiles about obstructing execution of a lawful request for the president’s financial documents.   An expression remarkably similar to the one on Secretary of Education Betsey DeVos’s charming, clueless face, or Ivanka’s.

[1]  from the Washington Post:

Or consider the cases of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher and Army Special Forces Officer Matt Golsteyn. Gallagher is awaiting trial on charges that, without authorization or combat justification, he killed a prisoner in Iraq — and then held his reenlistment ceremony with the victim’s corpse. This March, Trump tweeted that Gallagher would be moved to “less restrictive confinement” in honor of his service to his country. And Golsteyn was investigated by the Army for the unsanctioned killing of an unarmed Taliban fighter in 2010, an investigation that was reopened when Golsteyn admitted to the killing on Fox News in 2016. In December, Trump tweeted that Golsteyn was a “U.S. Military hero” whose case he would be “reviewing.”

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Meantime, Chelsea Manning is back in jail today for her ongoing refusal to comply with a subpoena related to the prosecution of Julian Assange of Wikileaks, an outfit Mr. Trump expressed “love” for numerous times.

Mr. Trump flings his feces so regularly and so wildly that it’s often hard to see any plan or pattern in the spatter.   I recently heard three Trump tweets read aloud, in context, and it blew my mind a little.  I share them here, the president’s swing from euphoria to paranoid, arguably coherent Hitler-in-the-bunker raving.   It is good, sometimes, to step back, with the aid of hindsight, and look more closely at the thing that went by in a blur.

The tweets were read by a lawyer on an episode of an excellent podcast called “What Trump can teach us about Con Law”– Con Law being law student-speak for constitutional law.   Mr. Trump never studied Con Law (obviously), and so each time he sets off a complicated constitutional shit storm the host of the podcast, and his neighbor and friend, a constitutional law professor, dissect the particular constitutional issue involved.   The most recent episode was called Contempt Power.   It laid out the limited options Congress has for holding people openly contemptuous of its constitutional powers to account.   

As you might imagine, in the end, real enforcement depends on the federal courts who can order compliance.  Courts packed with conservative judges vetted by the Federalist Society for their extreme right wing bona fides and appointed in record numbers by the man who demonstrates his contempt for the constitution daily are not a sure bet to rule by the spirit and the letter of the law.   Additionally, even the fairest and most non-political of courts can take years to decide on a political matter.

The lack of  a speedy legal way to compel people who tell Congress to fuck off  to follow the law is another reason why impeachment, (once Americans are on board in sufficient numbers– and the Democrats have to keep pushing here), is the only real constitutional tool for a full investigation and excision of this tumor of a president.  

The professor read the president’s first tweet after Barr announced, falsely, that the Mueller report had exonerated Mr. Trump.   Hearing the tweets read out loud really drove home how wild and mad this prolifically tweeting president actually is.   Trump was euphoric after Barr cleared him, tweeting:

Never mind that Mueller’s summary ends with these words (words that would not be seen by the rest of us for several more weeks, as Barr redacted and continued misrepresenting Mueller’s report):

If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state.   Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment.   Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him,

Then it was only a matter of a few more weeks until Barr, after a wildly spinning hour long informercial for “his client’s” innocence, released the redacted report, including the redacted summaries that Mueller had prepared, and redacted, for immediate release on March 24th.   Trump outdid himself with the celebratory tweet this time:

HBO was not crazy about the president’s appropriation of their copyrighted Game of Thrones motif as Trump seemingly portrayed himself as the Night King, supreme leader of the massive and inexhaustible zombie army that threatened to wipe out humanity (and was finally defeated, after epic carnage, toward the end of this final season).

At this point Trump seemed to have won, declaring the game over.  Set and match.  Suck it, bitches.

Then people started reading the redacted report, released the day before Good Friday, which coincided this year with the first night of Passover. The release was timed to minimize the damage of the actual report.  Trump-haters nonetheless jumped on the redacted report, even as many of them prepared for religious holidays.  

It was, shockingly, nothing like the report that Barr had summarized in the letter he later hotly denied was a summary.  In fairness to Barr, nothing in his letter conclusively indicated that it was intended as a summary, unless you want to nitpick and single out the last sentence in paragraph two:

Although my review is ongoing, I believe that it is in the public interest to describe the report and to summarize the principal conclusions reached by the Special Counsel and the results of his investigation 

We now know (as we learned weeks later just before Barr testily testified before Lindsey Graham and friends) that Mueller immediately wrote to Barr to protest the misrepresentation of his report, the confusion in the minds of America that Barr’s misleading summary and ongoing distortions had created.   Unprecedented, as far as I know, for a Special Counsel to write a letter of protest to his boss about the deliberate mischaracterization of his work, and make it part of the public record.    At the time, the day before Good Friday, all we had was the redacted report released on the eve of two major holidays right before the weekend.   The president knew people were going to start talking about this “game over”/”no do-overs”, in light of new evidence,, so, beginning at 4:53 a.m. the  next morning our president tweeted this:

Finally, time for vengeance, to bring justice (think Texas-style) to some “very sick and dangerous people” guilty of “very serious” capital crimes.   Traitors will be hung from lamp posts, eleven and twelve year-old German boys will fight in the streets of Berlin until the last of them are killed… if the Reich is too weak to survive it deserves to be exterminated, I have been stabbed in the back by very sick, dangerous traitors…

The day after Mr. Trump’s paroxysm on twitter, some of the finest people, the finest people, celebrated the birthday of Mr. Hitler, who turned 129 this year, on April 20th, the day after Good Friday and the first night of Passover. 

from the report:

Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment [that Trump did not act with corrupt intent and did not commit felonies]. The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.  [1]

And, if you are still on the fence about the importance of moving forward on impeachment hearings, take three minutes to watch this excellent short video  on the five major benefits of beginning an impeachment of President Obstruction.

[1] Mueller also wrote, with no ambiguity whatsoever:

The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of the office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.

I had a professor in law school who drilled his students to begin every answer to a legal question with “it depends.”   He’d stop us if we forgot to begin our answer that way, smile encouragingly as one of us began with this phrase and wave his hand for the follow up, an explanation of the devilish details on which your actual answer depends.  He was no radical, as far as I know (he taught Intellectual Property, the area he also practiced), but that qualification, “it depends”, turns out to be the key to all critical discussion of our laws.

If you are eighteen and your girlfriend is sixteen, in many states you can be easily convicted of statutory rape.   Will every eighteen year-old sleeping with his sixteen year-old girl friend be prosecuted for this crime? Obviously not, but why not?   It depends.  On who the boy is, who the girl is, who their families are.  A prep school kid from a rich family can be excused for letting his heart rule him that way.   It seems so unfair to let this youthful love affair (even — yea, especially–  if it is only one night long) destroy the boy’s entire life!    A hard boy from the ghetto will generally get a less generous pass from the law for letting his heart decide what the law should be.   Additionally, justice reasons, the kid from the ghetto should know exactly how ungenerous his pass will be.    Impossible to compare the lives of those two boys, one a hard criminal type, the other the finest sort our society produces!

Is contempt of a subpoena to testify a crime?   It depends.

The Attorney General is instructing the president on a (very weak) “protective presidential privilege” defense for his ongoing obstruction of justice.  He has given Trump’s energetic attempts to cover up all potentially damaging information against him the tiniest, most obscene fig leaf of legal cover.   On the plus side, from Barr’s experienced point of view, when Obama was challenged on a similarly weak assertion of presidential privilege, it took the courts four years to decide that his weak-ass defense could not stand.    

A random note about time:   four years is the difference between Mr. Hitler as Time Magazine Man of the Year, for restoring German power and prestige,  and Mr. Hitler as a Hall of Fame mass murderer at the top of his game, gleefully slaughtering in the East.  

Back to contempt of a subpoena to testify, or to release documents.

Chelsea Manning, who leaked, among other things, video footage of American soldiers committing war crimes, murdering civilians and civilians who went to rescue the surviving machine gunned civilians, with the full backing of their commander (“light ’em up!”), was locked up for seven years, after being sentenced to thirty-five years for giving the files to Wikileaks.    She recently was locked up for more than two months for failing to comply with a grand jury subpoena (she got out yesterday or today, temporarily).  They are trying to force her to give additional testimony that will aid in convicting Mr. Wikileaks, Julian Assange, and locking him up under the jail for the rest of his natural life.

[1] You can read that basics about Contempt of Congress HERE. 

There’s a good discussion of what Congress can do to give teeth to a contempt citation HERE

A person cited for contempt of Congress can be arrested by the sergeant-at-arms of the House of Representatives and dragged into Congress.  The last time this procedure was used was a long time ago.  Gratifying as it would be to see Barr dragged into the House in handcuffs, it would just as likely be a bloodbath as a cornered, twitchy, enraged Barr could use his own armed agents to repel the sergeant-at-arms in a hail of bullets.   I would put nothing past the smug, contemptuous Nazi bastard.

Here are a couple of powerful government appointees who were held in contempt in recent times (from the table at the bottom of the Wiki):

Eric Holder, Attorney General under Obama, was found in contempt of Congress (by a vote of 255-67, no less) in 2012.

Note also that Anne Gorsuch, mother of our own Neil Gorsuch, was, like her son, a faithful soldier whose service to her masters included allowing herself to be cited for contempt of Congress.

A good Nazi is loyal to his leader, above all else.   The original Nazis back in Germany believed in strict obedience to the will of their infallible leader, uber alles.   The Fuhrer’s every word had the force of absolute law — they phrased it, in their inimitable language: Fuhrerworte haben Gesetzeskrafte.  Fuhrerworte was left to an army of Nazi lawyers to write indelibly into the German legal code of the time.    

You can read all about Nazis and their hierarchy of obedience to orders in many excellent books.  One I recommend, if you are only ready to read one short book about these very fine people, is Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem.

In that detailed and philosophical account of the prosecution of an unremarkable high school drop-out who rose to become a major cog in the industrialized Nazi killing apparatus, you will see numerous examples of ambitious men, unhindered by restrictive principles, hitching their destinies to an infallible, all-powerful Fuhrer, a man chosen by a certain type of savage pagan god as the instrument to dominate and slaughter every hated enemy of The People.  

A central trait of Nazis is rubbing the faces of despised people in Nazi imposed shame.  Nothing is more hilarious to a Nazi (or your equally fine klansman, for that matter) than watching a good bit of rough humiliating violence inflicted on a hated, subhuman enemy.  They forcibly cut the beards off of religious men, kicked children, humiliated enemies at every opportunity, stripped people naked as they marched them to anonymous deaths.

We are cautioned against comparing bad people who misuse their power to Nazis, that this sort of easy hyperbole undermines credibility (even when talking about people who openly applaud the beliefs of actual Nazis).  So I don’t compare Trump, a dictator wannabe, to his most famous all-powerful countryman, Mr. Hitler.  It’s a cheap comparison of two great men, right?  Forget the lying ex-wife who scurrilously claimed Trump kept one of the few books he ever read, the Collected Speeches of Adolf Hitler, on the gold-plated nightstand next to his gold-plated bed. [1]

The raging bitches I am comparing to ambitious young Nazis are the token Jews in Mr. Trump’s xenophobic, racist inner circle.   Stephen Miller, a nominally Jewish troll who needs no introduction, is one of the few remaining original Trump loyalists still loyally advising the president to remain ruthless with his many enemies.  Miller, you will recall, rode in on the coattails of disgraced former Trump ally Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, the first mainstream politician to endorse Trump in his then quixotic-seeming run for president.   The other skanky bitch I have in mind is the son of a convicted Jewish felon, the hereditary billionaire grandson of humble survivors of the Nazi holocaust.   You know him as Jared, the president’s loyal son-in-law. 

I have only one thing to say, at the moment, about Jared Kushner, a man, like his father-in-law, born stinking rich and possessing zero qualifications for his present job as a world leader.   Jared has apparently decided (probably in consultation with Miller and Trump himself) that the details of his “peace plan” for Palestinians shall be be announced immediately after conclusion of the holiest holy days of the Muslim year, Ramadan.   This month-long religious duty requires devout Muslims to fast during daylight hours for the duration of this period of prayer and self-reflection.

When Ramadan ends, there is a celebratory feast  عيد الفطر] ] to mark the end of this period of religiously mandated privation.  It is during this feast that Mr. Kushner will announce his “peace plan” for the Palestinians.  One can only imagine the generous humanity, fairness and decency of untutored C-student Jared’s historic proposal to the people he considers the rightfully hated enemies of his ancestral homeland.   The timing of its release: pure, in-your-fucking face Nazi.

Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, is the tenth of ten days of repentance.   A Jew is supposed to fast on that day, reflecting on any other harm he may have done to his fellow creatures and doing whatever is possible to repair that harm.   The Nazis took no greater delight than mischievously scheduling some really hateful shit for the moment when Jews were taking their first drink of water, eating the first food in twenty four hours, after a day of prayer and soul-searching.   “Here, have this with your bread, my dear Jewish friends,” said the playful Nazi, offering a bit of Xyklon B to spice up the festivities.

I don’t call Miller, the advocate of ruthless child separation at the border, a Nazi.   Though, in fairness, this kind of vicious state-sponsored terrorism is exactly what the Nazis routinely did.   I don’t call announcing a peace plan to enshrine the intolerable status quo on the very night that ends the holiest days in the target population’s year a Nazi-like thing to do.  Though, in fairness, it’s exactly the kind of thing the fucks who fully intended to kill all of Jared’s grandparents loved to do.

I’m just sayin’.

[1] once again, those America-hating commies at Business Insider with a lying hatchet job on, arguably, the greatest German in history.  Here’s a nice little tranche from those rabid freedom-hater’s 2015 hit piece on Mr. Trump:

When Brenner asked Trump about how he came to possess Hitler’s speeches, “Trump hesitated” and then said, “Who told you that?”

“I don’t remember,” Brenner reportedly replied.

Trump then recalled, “Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of ‘Mein Kampf,’ and he’s a Jew.”

Brenner added that Davis did acknowledge that he gave Trump a book about Hitler.

“But it was ‘My New Order,’ Hitler’s speeches, not ‘Mein Kampf,'” Davis reportedly said. “I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I’m not Jewish.”

After Trump and Brenner changed topics, Trump returned to the subject and reportedly said, “If, I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”

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