DOJ has defendant Trump’s personal phone from January 6, 2021, after its disappearance and years of concealment (can you say obstruction, boys and girls?) along with all relevant Secret Service and White House, Homeland Security and Department of Defense phone calls and text messages from before, during and after the permitless parade to, and deadly riot at, the Capitol.
And here’s the big guy himself, calm and credible as can be, in his most reasonable and persuasive tones, from a month ago. He was asked about the propriety of weaponizing the government against his enemies.
They’ve taken a President who’s very popular, I got 75 million votes, much more than that I believe. No president’s ever got that many votes, and they’ve taken that number of people, and I think you can double it or almost you can triple it in terms of the real, the feeling.
“But we’ve watched it for a long time and it’s not unique, but it’s unique for the United States. Yeah If they do this, they’ve already done it, but if they want to follow through on this, yeah, it could certainly happen in reverse. It could certainly happen in reverse.
What they’ve done is they’ve released the genie out of the box, you understand that. They’ve done something that nobody thought would happen. They’ve taken a President who’s very popular, I got 75 million votes, much more than that I believe. No president’s ever got that many votes, and they’ve taken that number of people, and I think you can double it or almost you can triple it in terms of the real, the feeling. You can’t do that, you can’t go after people.
You know when you’re President, and you’ve done a good job and you’re popular, you don’t go after them, so you can win an election. They’ve done indictments in order to win an election. They call it weaponization and the people aren’t going to stand for it. But yeah, they have done something that allows the next party, I mean if somebody, if I happen to be President and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly I say “go down and indite them”.
[Yesterday], Johnson supported Trump’s message about January 6 when he said that he was making sure the faces of rioters are blurred in the surveillance footage. “We have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in the events of that day because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ [Department of Justice] and to have other, you know, concerns and problems,” he said. Johnson’s spokesperson quickly walked back the comment, saying Johnson meant to say that faces were blurred to prevent “all forms of retaliation against private citizens from any non-governmental actors.”
(Heather Cox Richardson)
This cherub-faced little extremist assholewas running around the Capitol days before the January 6th riot/insurrection, urging his colleagues to sign on to an amicus brief to support corrupt Texas tough guy AG Ken Paxton’s grotesquely unconstitutional ploy to the Supreme Court to deny the right of several statesBiden won to send their legally certified electors to Congress on January 6th.
Here’s just a reminder, from the evidence–based world, of what the insane former president is charged with in relation to disrupting Congress on January sixth.
It’s no wonder incendiary lies, threats of violence and retribution and cheap theatrics are the staple of Chrump’s 2024 campaign. It’s all he’s got, it’s all he’s ever had, and along with daddy’s fortune, it’s all he’s ever needed.
So says Glenn Kirschner. Glenn’s not wrong, here’s a nice bit, with a link to the rest:
Perhaps no one understood the compelling public interest in the rule of law better than our first former President, George Washington. His decision to voluntarily leave office after two terms marked an extraordinary divergence from nearly every world leader who had preceded him, ushering in the sacred American tradition of peacefully transitioning Presidential power— a tradition that stood unbroken until January 6, 2021. In announcing that decision, however,Washington counseled that the newfound American independence carried with it a responsibility. “The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government.” Washington’s Farewell Address,S. Doc. No. 106-21, at 13 (2d Sess. 2000), available at https://perma.cc/E5CZ-7NNP. He issued a sober warning: “All obstructions to the execution of the laws,” including group arrangements to “counteract” the “regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle.” Id. at 14. In Washington’s view, such obstructions would prove “fatal” to the Republic, as “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
In Washington’s view, such obstructions would prove “fatal” to the Republic, as “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
Right wing billionaire Elon Musk, enemy of unions and any kind of regulation on wealthy businessmen, piously styles himself a First Amendment absolutist any time the increasing hate speech on his social media site is reported on. Musk and his determined ilk peddle the myth that white men are viciously singled out as the most oppressed victims in society. If hate-filled lies that tend to stoke violence are limited by the government, say by requiring warnings to be posted on inflammatory conspiracy posts with no basis in fact (as finally happened on Twitter just before the January 6 riot), Musk and his persecuted minority are placed at a great disadvantage in the war for everything.
The freedom to lie, and enrage alienated masses with a long list of grievances real and imagined, is crucial to the right wing’s cherished dream, so close they can taste it, of a tiny minority of our greatest and most deserving citizens controlling everybody else now and forever. Hammer on woke elites, majoritarian tyranny, blood drinking pedophiles, eternally scheming Jews, murderous Muslim fanatics, homosexual groomers, raping, infectious disease-carrying, blood poisoning, illegal immigrants and so on and you have a chance of keeping the lynch mob whipped up enough to do your bidding. Truth and accurate reporting are these guy’s worst nightmare.
If your chance of winning an argument depends on lying, as is the case almost any time you have a conflict with someone who can never be wrong, and your ability to lie is being limited, in the name of some squishy abstract principle like “fairness,” you will fight like hell or you won’t have a grandiose dream of perfection and enraged superiority anymore.
Steve Bannon, unkempt global fascist, is an enthusiastic advocate of an old propaganda technique espoused, if memory serves, by Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. The theory goes that if you flood the news with infuriating lies, one after another, at a dizzying pace, you will so confuse and enrage the populace that you can do whatever you like with them. The technique was refined by the Hitler team, led by cunning, supremely able Minister of Public Enlightenment Josef Goebbels. Chrump is the perfect avatar of this firehose of mendacity, lying as naturally as most people breathe, flooding the zone with shit and gleefully setting that shit on fire. You can’t keep your eye on the previous lies, or fix institutional problems, because the newest one is so incendiary and burning so hot.
The NY Times recently broke the story of a commutation Chrumpie signed hours before leaving office, one of hundreds of last minute pardons and commutations he likely sold (he is nothing if not transactional). This guy, Jon Braun, is a predatory lender and violence threatening thug who was finally beginning to serve a ten year sentence that had been delayed by ten years as he grudgingly began to cooperate with the DOJ against his predatory lending colleagues. Braun had a connection to convicted felon, and fellow recipient of Trumpie’s mercy for hire, Charles Kushner, father of grossly unqualified entitled idiot Jared, Chrumpie’s right hand boy (back when it was worthwhile to Jared to serve in that role). Alan Dershowitz, Braun’s attorney, made a call and Jared took care of their friend’s prison sentence. It was nullified by a stroke of the big guy’s pen. Braun went back to his old job and told DOJ to go fuck itself and its fucking investigation into predatory lenders. Here is Team Chrump’s perfect response to the NY Times revelation (actually this is in response to the Koch Network throwing its support behind Nikki Haley — the responses are pretty much interchangeable):
Kushner had testified to the J6 Committee that he didn’t know anything about the many tentacled plan to stop the certification of Biden’s victory on January 6. 2021 because he was busily working on pardons around the clock in that final month. Giuliani, or his assistant, described a profit sharing scheme for pardons that didn’t go through the office of the pardon attorney, as is traditionally done before a president issues a pardon. These pardons went for $2,000,000 each, according to this source, and if everyone was to pocket their share of this tidy sum it was important that the office of the pardon attorney not be in the loop. We’ve heard nothing more about this, or about the NY State case against Steve Bannon for bilking MAGA loyalists out of millions in his Build the Wall scam (Trump pardon erased identical federal charges against Sloppy Steve).
Every American convicted as a result of the Mueller investigation (witch hunt!) got a pardon from the Big Guy, in exchange for dummying up when it counted most. Nothing to see here, the president has 100% unappealable discretion to pardon anyone he wants, Joe Arpaio (contempt of court for telling judge to fuck off after she ruled his broiling, outdoor prison camps were illegal), Rod Blagojevich, Michael Milken, a bipartisan rogue’s gallery of infamous scumbags. As is the president’s absolute right, apparently, unless the DOJ were to challenge any as corrupt, for example as a quid pro quo for not cooperating with federal investigators (see for example, Roger Stone, his former partner Paul Manafort, Mike Flynn, et al). Nothing has been done to prevent misuse of the judicial system by wealthy weasels like Don (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh) McGahn, John Bolton, Trump and others to weaponize the delays appeals cause, allowing them to routinely moot legitimate, legal claims against them.
This abuse of the pardon power, aggravating, unjust and sickening as it is, is one among a hundred, two hundred piles of toxic poop Chrumpie left burning in his wake. There’s a new one every news cycle.
Trump channeling Hitler, raising the question among MAGA nation — why this sudden irrational hatred of the Führer? Trump’s plan to build concentration camps for immigrants, even the children of immigrants born here, to deport millions, the Fourteenth Amendment be damned. Trump’s plan to fire thousands of civil servants and replace them with servants who believe the 2020 election was rigged and who’ve taken a personal oath of loyalty to Trump (German: Führereid or Führer Oath). His repeated vows to get revenge on everyone from Rosie O’Donnell and Crooked Hillary to “the Biden Crime Family” and to weaponize the DOJ, as Biden, he insists, has weaponized it against him.
His grotesque, deadly mishandling, and continuing lies about, the COVID pandemic that resulted in further polarizing Americans and causing this great nation to have the highest COVID death toll in the world. The massive corruption involved in the pandemic relief money he handed out to wealthy people he liked. His open interference in the 2020 election by launching hundreds of pre-election lawsuits trying to stop mail-in voting during a spike in the plague and having his mega-donor postmaster general remove mailboxes and dismantle high speed mail sorting machines in areas where Blacks and other “undesirable” voters live.
The riot of January 6 itself, directly incited by his hourlong speech which included the immortal “when you catch somebody in a fraud you’re allowed to go by very different rules” (actual fraud, no, different rules and lynch mob, yes) and years of subsequent lies about the innocence of the rioters, valorizing those who attacked the police as true patriots he will pardon as soon as he gets back into office. The list is literally fucking endless, before we get to the Orange Polyps financial fraud (and already shuttered Trump University and Chrump Charitable Chrust), sexual abuse, hush money payments, illegal non-disclosure agreements and his limitless frivolous lawsuits, groundless motions and futile appeals designed only to delay adjudication.
In this environment, with the firehouse of shit blasting full bore all the time, amplified by right wing media and echoed in the corporate “liberal” media, it’s impossible to remember things like the reasonable plan to get rid of that Republican-minority benefiting vestige of slavery The Electoral College by having states pledge to award electors to the winner of the nationwide popular vote [1]. Or to restore something like the Fairness Doctrine for mass media, making it harder for partisan news outlets to pump out a stream of inflammatory lies, “opinions” presented as fact, 24/7. Or the group Biden set up to monitor online threats that was quickly shut down amid a flood of violent online threats.
Or to regulate hate speech and violence-producing lies on social media, because, to do so, according to the beneficiaries of hate speech and related lies, is to unfairly hobble one side of the political debate. A rightwing racist billionaire will bring lawsuits to carefully selected extremist judges to prove that Communists, Marxists, Jews and Fascist Thugs are illegally interfering with his right to run his own private social media company as he sees fit. The Senate is unable to abolish the filibuster or make sure that one potato-headed imbecile can’t block the presidential appointment of military leaders year after year. The list is almost endless, and this is by design.
You take a firehouse, connect it to the crusty asses of everyone you can find with projectile diarrhea, and blind ambition, you turn it on full and when the high power spray comes out, set it on fire. In a landscape of constantly replenished plumes and sloppy mounds of burning shit, nobody can focus on what needs to be done to hold the shit sprayers responsible and turn off the pressurized firehoses of mendacity. You have to admit, the plan works beautifully, if you can get over the stench.
[1]
However, a constitutional amendment is not the only means by which an alternative to the current Electoral College can be implemented. The most popular alternative is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC). Started in the mid-2000s, the NPVIC is a fairly straightforward system that capitalizes on the constitutional guarantee that states are free to determine the manner in which they award their electoral votes. The compact requires states to pass laws that would award their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote nationally. Under the current plan, states that join will not activate the compact until enough states have joined to total 270 electoral votes. That is, the compact does not go into effect until there is a critical mass of states for it to be effective.
No court, judge or prosecutor has suggested that the world’s greatest winner doesn’t have the right to say everything he said above, channeling one of his historical heroes. There is no gag order relating to any of his angry, paranoid rantings and projections that does not involve threats and intimidation of witnesses or public officials involved in his prosecutions.
He is free to do his dead-on imitation of the Führer, or to state that Hitler was a great person, and so unfairly misunderstood. He may describe in detail how he’d like to bring back an American version of Herr Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich, or even declare that he loves Hitler, as it was Kanye West’s every right to say, whether he meant it or not.
The First Amendment covers a lot of fucked up and despicable things a person could say or write. You have the ACLU defending fucking Nazis’ right to spread Nazi propaganda as a First amendment issue, which it is.
A category of speech not protected by the First Amendment is fighting words, words which are intended as nothing more than a pugnacious “invitation to exchange fisticuffs”. Words whose only intent is to create ill will, stir rage and cause a lingering threat of imminent violence are not protected speech. If violence happens once as a direct result of your speech, and violence happens again after a similar speech and violence continues to happen as a result of your speech, then your speech has been shown to incite violence and is no longer protected by the First Amendment.
The scope of First Amendment protections for your violence-producing speech will be argued about by well-paid First Amendment experts for hire until the next riot your identical lies produces, then it will be argued about again, because the precise scope of fighting words has been narrowed by the Supreme Court over the years [1]. Like the high bar the ethics-free nine built for finding corruption of public officials, which now requires an explicit, provable agreement that both parties knew the deal was corrupt before corruption may be found. USA! USA!!!
[1] results of a quick search for an update on the 80 year old Fighting Words Doctrine:
Fighting words are words meant to incite violence such that they may not be protected free speech under the First Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court first defined them in Chaplinsky v New Hampshire (1942) as words which “by their very utterance, inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.”
After 95 pages documenting the mountain of compelling evidence that then president Trump, loser of the “most secure election in US history” (Trump appointed maker of that statement immediately fired), intended to incite, and did incite, an insurrection [1], the violent riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 that disrupted the certification of Biden’s electoral college victory, the new judge, (appointed on January 10, 2023}, made her ruling about this particular insurrectionist’s right to be on the Colorado Republican presidential primary ballot.
She concluded that the oath mentioned in the Fourteenth Amendment, to “support” the Constitution, is very different from the president’s oath to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution and that, therefore, along with the President not being an enumerated officer of the United States listed in that clause, there was no problem with this particular insurrectionist being on the primary ballot in her state. All he is seeking is the highest office in the land, an “office” which was not mentioned specifically as an office in that clause in the Fourteenth Amendment. Here she goes, with the money shot:
313. Here, after considering the arguments on both sides, the Court is persuaded that “officers of the United States” did not include the President of the United States. While the Court agrees that there are persuasive arguments on both sides, the Court holds that the absence of the President from the list of positions to which the Amendment applies combined with the fact that Section Three specifies that the disqualifying oath is one to “support” the Constitution whereas the Presidential oath is to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution, it appears to the Court that for whatever reason the drafters of Section Three did not intend to include a person who had only taken the Presidential Oath.
Which, of course, makes perfect sense…
[1] “Trump acted with the specific intent to incite political violence and direct it at the Capitol with the purpose of disrupting the electoral certification,” she wrote. “Trump cultivated a culture that embraced political violence through his consistent endorsement of the same.”
Have you noticed that when people are in a rage, angry on a deep level about things they can’t necessarily put into words and unable to calm themselves, only more rage makes sense to them?
The solid 35% of the country that loves wannanbe strongman Donald Chrump love him because he keeps fighting, no matter what. When he is proved wrong he just fights harder. When caught lying, or is criticized for echoing Hitler’s incendiary rhetoric, he angrily calls his critics liars, says they’re Hitler, with that winning sneer of his. “I know you are, but what am I?” His angry 35% love, love, love it. “You won’t be calling me Hitler when I put you in one of my camps, asshole…”
When the mountain of evidence against him in multiple criminal and civil court cases is steep and mighty he rages that it’s all a witch hunt, total lies told by hacks and peekaboo racist riggers, chiggers and diggers. His claims that the “most secure election in American history” (he fired the lying Trump appointee who lyingly made that claim) was rigged and stolen, by a cabal of Democrat [sic] radical thugs and traitorous, weak RINOs, while not provable in court, is still true! “Look how many millions of Americans believe it!” as Lyin’ Ted himself put it the day before the patriotic MAGA riot at the Capitol.
The bit that’s hard to wrap the old brain around, the bit I experienced recently in my personal life, to my great horror, is that even the most transparent and easily disprovable lies, as long as they inflame the emotions to righteous rage, can be very hard to resist, even for good people. For angry and or stupid people? A delicious slice of cake! You want to argue with a delicious slice of cake, you sick fuck? Go for it. Make my day, punk, what kind of assault weapon you bringing to the fight, pussy?
“Today, especially in honor of our great veterans on Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the Communist, Marxist, Fascist and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie, steal, and cheat on elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream…. Despite the hatred and anger of the Radical Left Lunatics who want to destroy our country, we will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”
All of the steps Trump advisers are preparing, Mr. Miller contended in a wide-ranging interview, rely on existing statutes; while the Trump team would likely seek a revamp of immigration laws, the plan was crafted to need no new substantive legislation. And while acknowledging that lawsuits would arise to challenge nearly every one of them, he portrayed the Trump team’s daunting array of tactics as a “blitz” designed to overwhelm immigrant-rights lawyers.
“Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Mr. Miller said, adding, “The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”
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