There is reality, sometimes quite grim, and there is spin, sometimes comforting for the squeamish and overwhelmed, regardless of how ridiculous it is. Here is a highly respected conservative judge’s take on a lawless Trump administration for comparison to the New York Times’s account of the same crime spree.
From Heather Cox Richardson:
In a piece in The Atlantic today, respected conservative judge J. Michael Luttig noted that for all of Trump’s insistence that he is the victim of the “weaponization” of the federal government against him, “[i]t is Trump who is actually weaponizing the federal government against both his political enemies and countless other American citizens today.”
Luttig warned that Trump is trying to end the rule of law in the United States, recreating the sort of monarchy against which the nation’s founders rebelled. He lists Trump’s pardoning of the convicted January 6 rioters (which he did with the collusion of Ed Martin), the arrest of Judge Dugan, which Luttig calls “appalling,” the deportation of a U.S. citizen with the child’s mother, and the “investigation” of private citizen Christopher Krebs.
“For not one of his signature initiatives during his first 100 days in office does Trump have the authority under the Constitution and laws of the United States that he claims,” Judge Luttig writes. Not for tariffs, not for unlawful deportations, not for attacks on colleges and law firms, not for his attacks on birthright citizenship, not for handing power to billionaire Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency,” not for trying to end due process, not for his attempts to starve government agencies by impounding their funding, not for his vow to regulate federal elections, not for his attacks on the media.
The courts are holding, Judge Luttig writes, and will continue to hold, but Trump “will continue his assault on America, its democracy, and rule of law until the American people finally rise up and say, “No more.”
The New York Times takes a more nuanced view of Trump’s second term:
The building of this coalition [to oppose a Trump dictatorship, which the Times apparently calls for] should start with an acknowledgment that Mr. Trump is the legitimate president and many of his actions are legal. Some may even prove effective. He won the presidency fairly last year, by a narrow margin in the popular vote and a comfortable margin in the Electoral College. On several key issues, his views were closer to public opinion than those of Democrats. Since taking office, he has largely closed the southern border, and many of his immigration policies are both legal and popular. He has reoriented federal programs to focus less on race, which many voters support. He has pressured Western Europe to stop billing American taxpayers for its defense. Among these policies are many that we strongly oppose — such as pardoning Jan. 6 rioters, cozying up to Vladimir Putin of Russia and undermining Ukraine — but that a president has the authority to enact. Elections have consequences.
“and many of his immigration policies are both legal and popular. “
Many are legal (which means some, or as many, or more, are not). Legal and as popular as racism, xenophobia, misogyny or homophobia. Hmm. Well done, Grey Lady!
As for the legitimate victory Mr. Trump achieved fairly, he got 77,284,118 votes while in every state controlled by MAGA voting for presumed non-Trump voters was systematically suppressed. As a threshold matter, we do well to recall George Carlin’s brilliant observation about the limitations of normal intelligence, and what that means for 50% of us.
There was also a nationally successful 2024 effort, in every MAGA controlled state — as the USPS delivered 20,000,000 less mail-in ballots than in 2020– to suppress the vote in a dozen different ways to make sure a maximum number of votes for the Orange Turd were recorded while all others were not cast. Houston County, Texas, for example, a gigantic county with a population of 4.2 million, had one drop box, a plan to limit drop off voting that Republican governors feverishly hatched in a dozen secretive meetings with Koch’s private Heritage Foundation and failed at implementing in 2020. Hence, the need for fake electors and a riot at the Capitol.
Say it again with Michael Luttig, Grey Lady:
“For not one of his signature initiatives during his first 100 days in office does Trump have the authority under the Constitution and laws of the United States that he claims,” Judge Luttig writes. Not for tariffs, not for unlawful deportations, not for attacks on colleges and law firms, not for his attacks on birthright citizenship, not for handing power to billionaire Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency,” not for trying to end due process, not for his attempts to starve government agencies by impounding their funding, not for his vow to regulate federal elections, not for his attacks on the media.
The conspiracy theorist/far-right influencer, Laura Loomer, is able to get Trump to fire experienced, nonpartisan national security officials she deems disloyal to MAGA. The perfect face of MAGA, this portrait was published by the New York Times the other day, as part of an editorial about the damage Trump and his myrmidons have done in the first hundred days.
Also in the New York Times, among a full spectrum of legal experts weighing in on Trump’s enactment of Project 2025:
The impression of a constitutional crisis is misleading. That impression was initially created by overreaching district judges selected by plaintiffs, who obtained temporary victories and leveraged those victories in the media. If there is a crisis, it does not arise from the actions of the administration but instead from a slew of highly aggressive judicial decisions that have transgressed traditional legal limits on the relationship between the judiciary and the executive branch — limits the courts respected during the Biden administration. — Adrian Vermeule, professor, Harvard Law School [1]
[1] Wikipedia: A convert to Catholicism, Vermeule has become an advocate of integralism, a form of modern legal and political thought originating in historically Catholic-dominant societies and opposed to the Founding Fathers’ ideal of division between church and state. Integralism in practice gives rise to state order (identifiable as theocratic) in which the Common Good has precedence over individual autonomy, the value prioritized by American democracy. Rather than electoral politics, the path to confessional political order in integralist theory is “strategic ralliement“, or transformation within institutions and bureaucracies, that lays the groundwork for a realized integralist regime to succeed a liberal democratic order it assumes to be dying. The new state would “exercise coercion over baptized citizens in a manner different from non-baptized citizens”.[11][12][13]
I love that while MAGA Pete Hegseth was standing in front of his kids angrily defending himself, (right sideburn down past the bottom of his ear, the other cut short), for at best sloppiness with national security (under normal circumstances violations of the Espionage Act) he had a moment of real human emotion. Listen to how his voice goes up after he delivers the word “disgruntled” to describe his three top advisors that he fired and blamed for being “leakers”. He sings those words in a high-pitched, childish tone, wonderful to hear from our Christian white nationalist Secretary of Defense. If you’re Putin, that is.
I understand now why my sister, as a girl, was always terrified of “scary clowns.”
Here’s what the commander-in-chief told the crowd at The Ellipse on January 6th, right before sending them off to fight like hell or they won’t have a country anymore.
Fascism is always based on lies. It cannot function without a lying counter narrative contradicting what everybody is able to see, hear and smell with their own senses.That this shameless enraged 2-year-old is a master of lying temper tantrums, should not distract anybody from his essential nature. Note the simplistic elegance of this particular lie:
The 2020 election was stolen, the proof of the rigged election was covered up by a corrupt bipartisan coalition of sick and insane haters, therefore, anything we need to do now is fully justified in the eyes of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Now go hang that traitor, Mike Pence!
I will try to post an infamous MAGA lie here every couple of days, until this insane fucker self-destructs, or I am arrested in the middle of the night and sent to a dark site somewhere.
Every person who can never be wrong, always blames others and fights to the death every time, knows the importance of controlling the narrative of what actually happened. If you can never be wrong, you tell the story in a way that makes you the brutally, viciously abused victim. The sick person who abused you, in your story, is the one who deserves rage and violence, because you were totally innocent, as always. It’s hard being perfect in a world of jealous weaklings.
You can read about this creep, appointed by Donald Trump, and wonder why, after covering up the destruction of all January 6 Secret Service texts and phone logs, and those of other key DHS officials, and paying out over a million to settle suits related to his “official acts” as Inspector General, he is still serving, and ready to do his master’s bidding again on January 20th. Read about him here.
Here’s a disgustingly flavorful chunk of that article, which notes Biden has taken no action for months since getting the report, stating:
The Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency’s integrity committee found that Cuffari provided wrongfully inaccurate and misleading answers during his nomination process to become DHS IG, spent $1.4 million to hire a law firm likely to retaliate against three OIG senior executives who questioned his qualifications and attempted to influence the firm’s independent investigation into those employees.
Cuffari, who was appointed by Donald Trump, was also accused of diminishing and delaying reports about sexual harassment at DHS, not informing Congress in a timely and adequate manner that the Secret Service deleted text messages related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and deleting his own work-related text messages.
I never believed for a second that Joe Biden suffers any age-related dementia. He’s slower, he stutters, he’s always been famous for being a gaffe machine, but he’s sharp and coherent every time I hear him speak. With the glaring exception of his glassy-eyed cold medication addled zombie imitation disaster (don’t get me wrong, his zombie imitation was impeccable) during the first half of the infamous debate against Trump, which only confirmed to the live audience what corporate media had been saying the whole time: Biden, unlike Trump, is not fit to be president.
That said, what the fuck, Joe? Why is this openly corrupt Inspector General still in office, four years after covering up the destruction of all evidence of what happened, from the Homeland Security point of view, before, during and after the MAGA riot on January 6th? You can’t blame Merrick Garland for this one, Biden, or the Senate committee that needs to vote out USPS Board nominees to get rid of equally abhorrent fucking Looey DeJoy. Cuffari is an executive branch employee, directly accountable to you. He is untrustworthy and has taken direct action to protect your criminal predecessor/successor. What the fuck, Joe?
The driving will of the super-wealthy to become ever wealthier cannot be overstated. While most people could live very comfortable lives on $10,000,000 or $100,000,000, those people are, objectively, losers relative to those competitors who have a billion (one thousand million) or a hundred billion (a hundred thousand million). The greed of those obsessed with owning everything is apparently insatiable.
We can see it every day among our greatest, most admired and important citizens. Elon Musk made $64,000,000,000 in the week following Trump’s election, after spending chump change, $200,000,000, to advance Trump’s electoral chances. An astounding, immediate thirty-two fold return on investment. 3200% profit, most excellent! Mark Zuckerberg rushed down to Mar-a-Lago to sample the famously delicious “ring”.
What is the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire? A millionaire is rich, a billionaire is an insatiably greedy psychopath.
In the old South these best of the best inherited vast fortunes based on slave labor. They inherited land, slaves, a lavish lifestyle of privilege and every advantage. A tiny percentage of white people ruled everybody in the antebellum south, in the manner of the old aristocracy in Europe. Poor whites were regarded, by the “Planters”, as rough tools to keep the slaves in line and were respected about as much as these genteel best of the best respected their dark-skinned human chattels. The poor whites, for their part, got to feel infinitely superior to, and brutally abuse, Blacks who showed them disrespect.
Poor whites died, or were maimed, by the tens of thousands supporting the cause of slavery and defending their masters’ right to rule them as well as their actual slaves. The myth they fought for was their superiority as white men, as a matter of their manhood fighting Northern Aggression to preserve a traditional, Godly way of life. After the Civil War, the Lost Cause myth [1] emerged quickly to explain why they had been righteous to fight, why their fight had nothing to do with slavery and why the South had never actually lost the war. Fast forward 156 years and you have rioters unfurling the Confederate battle flag in the Capitol. Here’s the story, drawn in a straight line, in under five minutes:
[1] Compare this racist alternative history of the Civil War to other myths about lost causes.
Hitler came to power after decades denouncing the “November Criminals” who, in 1918, “stabbed the victorious German Army in the back” by traitorously negotiating a humiliating surrender when the German Army was on the cusp of glorious victory (like they were again in April 1945, when the madman eventually shot himself in the mouth in his bunker).
Trump came to power endlessly screaming about a lost election that was stolen by sick, dangerous criminals and traitors (of both parties) that made a riot by patriots necessary, heroic patriotic martyrs who were viciously persecuted and unfairly locked up for justifiably attacking and hospitalizing more than 100 Capitol policemen in an attempt to selflessly save the nation they love. USA! USA!!!!
We are in for a hell of ride, boys and girls, a Führereid, if you will.
My German vocabulary is extremely limited. Virtually every phrase I know is an idiosyncratic, specialized term I learned while studying the history of the Nazis. I know words like vernichtungslager (annhiliation camp) sonderbehandlung [1](“special handling” stamped on the papers of Jews being expedited to the camps) and Lebensunwertes Leben [2] (“lives not worth living”, as deemed by the Nazis). Today I added a highly pertinent phrase, Führereid, the blood oath of personal loyalty to the infallible party leader, Herr Hitler.
We are living at a moment when an eighty-nine year-old psychopath, Charles Koch, is excited to see the culmination of his life’s work, his father’s Hitler-admiring dream come true in the administration of seventy-eight year old psychopath Donald “Jesus” Trump (Donald’s psychopath father was literally named Frederick Christ Trump). This is as serious a moment in history as any evil genius (such as Koch) could create in the lab. Wuhan’s got nothing on this gathering plague.
In order to be an elected (or appointed) Republican in good standing, one must do exactly what the leader demands. If that demand is to publicly stand behind a thoroughly debunked lie about a stolen election that got several of Trump’s attorneys disbarred, and others to take guilty pleas, if you know what is good for you, you will say, at the very least, that there are legitimate and serious questions about 2020 that were never answered (like, why are numerous Stop the Steal riot conspirators not serving long prison sentences?).
To be a Republican official in good standing you must state that it is perfectly fine for the leader to violate the Espionage Act by stealing (and most likely selling) secret documents, commit crimes while campaigning and then while in office (34 counts of which he’s been convicted for), have a fraudulent university and charity closed down, incite a deadly riot in a crazed attempt to stay in power, make vile, racist misogynistic threats (as a man convicted of committing a close variant of rape and then repeatedly defaming the victim), proudly echo Hitler in overheated rhetoric about vermin, blood poisoning and the “enemy within”.
Now, all that’s left for you, if your job is important to you, is to argue why it is necessary to shut down FBI vetting of wildly incompetent, badly compromised cabinet nominees, (as was already done with lifetime appointee Boof Kavanaugh), and the way is clear for Führerswortes haben gesetzeskraft (“the Führer’s word has the force of law”.)
For totalitarianism to take hold of a nation several things must happen. Language and meaning must be distorted beyond rationality, as in “alternative fact”, so that no reasonable discussion may ever take place. Fear must be so pervasive that citizens and officials obey pressure to conform in advance (Bezos, Mika and Scarboro, etc.) and are terrorized when they think of organizing to dissent. Political opponents become sick, evil enemies to be imprisoned, killed or otherwise silenced. Blackmail becomes the coin of the realm and only powerful insiders are excused for crimes, for all others, justice!
Resisting this oligarch-funded tsunami of blind obedience to their collective will is going to require great creativity, organization, doggedness and, unfortunately, a great deal of collective suffering. We have to be creative, united, resolute and ready to rumble. The first thing Biden has to do is order FBI vetting of this drawer full of creepy crawlers Trumpie has nominated as his cabinet. Then, as Steve Bannon (soon of the long prison sentence for defrauding MAGA nation) says “strap in.”
The Hitler Oath (German: Führereid or Führer Oath) — also referred in English as the Soldier’s Oath[1]—refers to the oaths of allegiance sworn by officers and soldiers of the Wehrmacht and civil servants of Nazi Germany between the years 1934 and 1945. The oath pledged personal loyalty to Adolf Hitler rather than loyalty to the Weimar Constitution of the country. Historians view the personal oath of the Nazi Germany as an important psychological element to obey orders for committing war crimes, atrocities, and genocide.[2] During the Nuremberg trials, many German officers unsuccessfully attempted to use the oath as a defense against charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.[3]
Doctors were the ones primarily responsible for applying the plan in order to eliminate people labeled as incurably ill, children with hereditary defects, criminals, the mentally ill, the physically disabled, pedophiles, homosexuals, and adults or elderly people considered “unproductive.”
Aktion T4 was implemented through two channels: euthanasia, practiced on people who fit into those categories, and sterilization en masse, so that there would be no new children with what the doctors considered disabilities that would make people unhappy. And we are speaking here of German patients.
Doctors considered that each of those persons was a “life not worth living” (Lebensunwertes Leben), and presented them as such. It is calculated that between 200,000 and 275,000 people were systematically murdered out of “compassion,” while massive sterilization programs reached more than 400,000 people—always, in every case, against the patient’s will and without consent.
Elon Musk, union-busting beneficiary of billions in US government contracts (and holder of high security clearance/buddy of Putin’s) hired vans full of door-knockers to spread the word about Trump/Vance. These poor devils had to sign NDAs so none can discuss the harsh quotas they had to fill if they wanted to be paid and have their motel bill handled by the world’s richest humanoid. In other news, his fake million dollar a day lottery is admittedly not a lottery, winners are carefully vetted and pre-selected. On the other hand, giving an old woman on line to vote in Georgia a cup of water is a state crime.
Just one more election day dingleberry. Who will be in charge of advising dictator on day one Trump about medical matters? The insane son of Robert Kennedy, decapitator of dead animals and vaccine skeptic who will make polio great again. There’s a good hat for MAGA — Make Polio Great Again.
WTF…
A vote for Trump/Vance/Musk/RFK Jr. is a vote for the BEST PEOPLE, THE BEST PEOPLE, AND DRAINING THE SWAMP AGAIN, IT WAS ALL A WITCH HUNT BY SICK AND DANGEROUS PEOPLE, RAPISTS, DRUG DEALERS, PET EATERS, I NEVER LOST IN 2020, 2024 OR 2028, YOU WILL ALL PAY, WATCH!
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