Category Archives: January 6 MAGA riot

Fitness for office — not an issue for MAGA

Fitness for any powerful office is based on competence, experience, character, intelligence, the capacity to reason and a measured temperament. Fitness for office should be a prerequisite for anyone who exercises power over others (as it is for active US military commanders), particularly those in control of the deadly force of a nation. Fitness and judicial temperament are particularly vital for a judge, someone who must fairly weigh facts in light of law and precedent. It applies as well to anyone bound to faithfully carry out the law.

Someone who is always aggrieved, angry, competitive, spiteful, vengeful, untruthful, entitled, grandiose, impulsive, given the power to appoint people to positions of power, will always choose people with these same attributes. Case in point:

Donald Trump’s inability or unwillingness to distinguish fact from fiction, wanton disregard for the rule of law, intolerance of perspectives different from his own, rageful responses to criticism, lack of impulse control and sweeping condemnations of entire populations rendered him temperamentally unsuitable to be in command of the nuclear arsenal.                                                                             

— Dr. Nanette Gartrell from The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump

Outside of Trump gastroenterologist Dr. Harold Bornstein’s 2016 claim that “Donald Trump will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency” and a one page letter released by a loyal White House doctor, Ronny Jackson, (whose name Trump got wrong in bragging about the letter), a man demoted by the Navy for various infractions including being drunk on duty, bullying subordinates and dispensing pills like Pez, a loyalist who is now a MAGA Congressman, we know nothing of the Orange Temper Tantrum’s health, physical or mental.   We do know a lot about his readily observable behavior, which is as predictable and unalterable as anything in the universe.

Dr. Judith Herman sums up the mix nicely as “grandiose, belligerent and unpredictable behavior” — unpredictable only as to the full extent of his impulsiveness.

An insecure, grandiose braggart who makes all his school records, tax records, medical records and conversations with Vladimir Putin top secret, who insists everyone around him sign NDAs, while sharing actual top secret government documents with undisclosed persons, after leaving office, certainly has nothing to hide.

If asked a question about what happened on Election Day 2020, or on January 6, 2021, it’s not hard to predict the answer of Trump’s VP pick, chosen by Trump for this Trump-like characteristics. His answer will be an angry demand for the questioner to answer an unrelated question. He will do this over and over, challenging the poser of a legitimate question in the manner of a hectoring bully. Is anyone surprised Trump’s VP pick responds with anger whenever he’s “fact-checked”?

Of course, the whole conversation about fitness for duty is a nakedly partisan issue raised only by rabidly Marxist, Communist, Fascist, Democratic, Egalitarian cuck types like yours’ truly. Forget I mentioned it, or I will send the National Guard to your house to take care of you, if you know what I mean, while you resist arrest, cuck.

My first note to Dr. Bandy Lee

This was my first comment to Bandy Lee, a few days earlier. At the end is a link that explains why I think Ryan Reynolds would be a good person for her to contact (assuming he shares our concern with the unthinkable possibility of a violent madman becoming “president” again, against the will of the majority of voters).

What you have to say is so important, so crucial, to protecting our society. I learn something new from every interview you do and every article you publish.

I wish you would have your media team put out 15 to 30 second shorts that could go viral. Take one great point at a time and just present it to the camera. No undecided voter could remain undecided after hearing what you and your colleagues have to say about the clear and present dangerousness of Trump and his myrmidons.

I’ve been thinking you bury the lede when you save this for paragraph two:

At no time has mental fitness in leadership been more important. Yet, at no time have we had a presidential campaign where mental fitness has been a more precarious issue.

Keep up the good work, and please, please, create some short clips that can become memes. This is, sadly, the age of information and public relations we live in. Although it couldn’t be further from our purposes, check out this short for an example of the power of well-wielded social media: https://youtube.com/shorts/cesrZd73sQY?si=26eefs5di6eb3e9X

At another point I suggested this very compelling story I’ve heard from her, which she told in about half a minute:

Your story about the American Psychiatric Association gagging public discussion of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump might make an excellent illustrative short. 

A powerful psychopath feeling under attack, in a position to reward a US government-funded organization with a record allocation and a new $10,000,000 headquarters in DC, who then rewards them for their favor, ably put into effect by no less than the venerated/hated NY Times, gagging all experts by publicly enforcing the association’s own voluntary rule as if it was federal law.  

That story of the “inviolable” Goldwater Rule, and its always clear political intent, and how it was used to silence the experts to the advantage of the dangerous, powerful psychopath, is too good not to be shared by millions before the election.    

The story of that Trump-facilitated nationwide gag order of professionals acting out of a duty to warn of imminent danger is the perfect illustration of how this malignant type gets away with this open corruption. 

Help Bandy Lee’s message go viral!

Bandy Lee is a forensic psychiatrist who has great, and highly relevant, expertise from years working with violent psychopaths. Feeling that she had a professional duty to warn, based on her observations of newly elected President trump, she convened a 2017 conference on the Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. Lee and twenty-six highly respected colleagues, including Robert J. Lifton (author of, among other works, “The Nazi Doctors”) published The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, NY Times best-seller and invaluable primer on malignant narcissism. I recommend that book to everyone.

Trump’s allies were able to marginalize the indispensable guide to Trump’s pathology and largely remove it from public discussion. The conservative American Psychiatric Association, ably aided by the powerful NY Times, attacked and vilified the book as a clear violation of the APA’s Goldwater Rule.

That rule (binding only on members of the APA, but treated as an inviolable federal law) states that, no matter what public evidence exists, psychiatrists are forbidden from offering their informed opinions about any public person they have not personally interviewed — and may publicly draw psychiatric conclusions only if the person in question authorizes it.

In other words, the Goldwater Rule states that, if an angry psychopath in a position of public power is cool with public discussion of their rage and unslakable thirst for revenge, after personally consulting with a shrink, only then may the psychiatrist publicly speak about it.

Bandy Lee is brilliant, courageous, articulate and she has a CRUCIAL message that would wake up millions of undecided voters, if they were exposed to it. She has assembled great experts, and recently held a second conference on trump’s dangerous unfitness at the National Press Club [1]. What she has not been able to do is disseminate her message widely, in a way succinct enough for the average distracted, traumatized, non-intellectual American voter to digest, or even encounter.

Bandy Lee’s website is http://www.bandylee.com. Her Substack newsletter is at https://bandyxlee.substack.com/. You can read her detailed assessments and hear long form interviews at those sites, along with a video of the full recent conference. Sadly, you will never encounter her CRUCIAL information in a short, shareable form that could (and should, and MUST) go viral.

I URGE ANYONE READING THIS to put on your thinking cap and find a way to recruit a Ryan Reynolds, or some other genius of social media manipulation, for help getting Bandy Lee’s crucial message out to millions, particularly as it could well be the deciding factor for the “undecided” voters out there.

As I wrote to her on Substack:

Corporations (including a democratic forum like Substack) control most communication in the US, one way or the other.  There are only two ways to influence mass public opinion, both engines for disseminating persuasive information/content, true or false, are problematic.  

The corporate mass media news and editorial narrative leaves out context, engages in false equivalencies, allows lies to air unchecked, consents in the destruction of norms, normalizes pathology, etc.  Profit-driven mass media, whose only motive is financial gain, exerts tremendous influence on most Americans, particularly older voters.

“Social Media”, odious and divisive as it also is, is a powerful driver of public opinion, for better and for worse.  A meme is born when it hits quick, memorably makes a good point, and makes people want to share it.  Billions of shares of a video featuring a memorable dance to a song called Gangnam Style.

I don’t know how to use social media myself, as I’ve learned again recently trying to get answers for why trump appointees Louis DeJoy (slow the mail, cut costs) and Joseph Caffari (Homeland Security IG who, uh, accidentally let all January 6 secret service evidence be irretrievably destroyed) are still in positions of power, but there are geniuses in the field of internet marketing with expertise in how to create viral short videos.  Talk to the folks at Meidas Touch about how to make important, individual points in shareable 30 second bytes.   

Your expert insights need to be set out in short, shareable videos.  If undecided voters are exposed to your message, it’s hard to believe many would vote for trump.   You should be in touch with the Lincoln Project, for example, their take on your main points about Trump’s dangerousness, coming from experts in violent pathology assisted by experts in propaganda, would get wider exposure.  Talk to Anthony Davis about creating some shorts from your interviews with him, I have seen many 30-60 second sections of those talks that would make great shareable shorts.   We need 30 second clips of some of your best points, points that can instantly be shared. Millions of people need to hear them!

Your best-selling book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump is an indispensable primer for understanding the personality type capable of pathological violence.  That we have a presidential candidate for a major political party possessing all the clear warning signs of destructive rage, on steroids, is CRUCIAL for undecided voters to know.  

Trump’s brand is violence, fighting, oppositionality, never admitting fault or defeat.  A classic psychopath.   He’s already fomented criminal violence in his name that he’s promised pardons for, as well as constant threats of, and pardons for, future violence.   His handpicked (by his handlers) Supreme Court majority recently ruled that his pardons may not be questioned or appealed, even if they are offered for sale.

Blah, blah, blah. . . Dr. Lee is busy and I haven’t heard back from her.

On the well-funded extremist right, they always march in lockstep, speaking in one voice, defiantly repeating the same disproven lies over and over until they wear people out. On the non-fascistic side of the spectrum there are a million voices, ten million shades of nuance, and those diverse and personal messages have neither the persistence nor the compelling public force of a unified, infuriating talking point grunted over and over and over and endlessly amplified by mass media.

Bandy Lee correctly diagnoses the danger we face right now — Trumpism is a public health emergency, like the recent pandemic. Trump contagion (which, to be fair, emanates as much from Charles Koch, Leonard Leo, John Roberts and their filthy ilk as from their current performative avatar, the Orange Polyp, himself) has made millions admire and imitate his lowest impulses, impulses he cannot control. This way lies rage, more and more violence and eventually mass murder, guaranteed.

Want a nice factoid? In 2014 there were 912 antisemitic incidents in the United States, a number that has gone up every year since Trump’s (oops, trump’s) 2016 election — last year there were 8,873 reported antisemitic incidents [2]. I would assume all hate crimes in the US have increased in similar numbers, remember the violent aftermath of trump’s witty, peaceful Kung Flu call to violence?

You want to argue about whether Trump is dangerously, violently insane, an American Hitler or not? Put him in back power, surrounded by loyal MAGA appointees, wait a couple of years and — guaranteed, I’ll meet you in a death camp somewhere (if we’re lucky, that is). It took the actual Hitler twenty full years, from his violent attempted coup, to the opening of the first true Nazi death camps. All these creatures need is time.

[1] Bandy Lee, earlier today:

The theme of our conference was that fitness is not a subjective, partisan, or even political “opinion” but a scientific finding based on extensive research, clinical experience, and uniform application of medical standards to military officers, officers handling nuclear weapons, surgeons, and executive officials.  The consensus at the conference was that mental fitness is critically important for the U.S. presidency and that Donald Trump is decisively unfit.  It should become widely known that Trump’s mental unfitness has now been objectively measured in multiple ways; that mental health expertise is critical to explaining what he is and is not capable of doing; how dangerous it is to have a mentally unfit person in a position of power; and how his psychological dangers can quickly spread into social, cultural, and geopolitical dangers, by rendering domestic legal and political institutions, and global balances and alliances ineffectual.

source

[2] Reporter Bob Garfield, in a particularly brilliant post, includes this:

The preemptive blame, of course, is meant to both intimidate Jewish voters and rally the violent among MAGA faithful, such as the ones who attacked the Capitol over his 2020 “stolen election” lies, such as the “very fine” neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us,” such as the mass murderers who shot six Jews to death at a deli in Jersey City, NJ, such as Robert Bowers, guilty of gunning down worshipers in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, such as the perpetrators of 8873 antisemitic incidents in the United States last year alone (in 2014, the year before Trump’s first presidential campaign, there were 912, and the number has risen every year since), such as the Proud Boys, Goyim Defense League, Blood Tribe, Ku Klux Klan, QAnon, Black Hebrew Israelites, Atomwaffen Division and other hate groups.

source

Traumatically low self-esteem

As psychiatrist James Gilligan, who spent years working with violent prison inmates, observed: all violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem. It is an illuminating and important insight.

How does a child turn into a violent sadist? By being traumatized at the hands of those they relied on, beyond the ability to trust anyone, beyond hope of self-esteem. They internalize this hopeless, isolated, humiliation and must inflict violence on others to get a twinge of what feels to them like self-esteem. The suffering and helplessness of their crushed victims confirms for them that they are powerful after all, to be respected, and feared.

In one sense this seems obvious, after years watching the nonstop sickening performance of a thin-skinned, whining “strongman” who controls one of our two major political parties, banished all critics and bent it to his perverted will. He perceives violence carried out in his name as love, as he observed on January 6 when the “patriotic” mob of political martyrs were forced, by a massive bipartisan cabal of his cheating enemies, to attack Capitol police. He’d never seen so much love, he tweeted, as when his people were passionately injuring dozens of cops in his name.

It is true of any narcissist who is far enough on the scale to behave psychopathically. They literally cannot help what they do, though that’s no excuse for their predictably treacherous behavior. They are compelled by a desperation someone not traumatized to the extent they are can ever fully comprehend.

These creatures need to feel the power of hurting others, otherwise they feel utterly worthless. The humiliating feeling of being undeserving of love motivates monstrous behavior. The attempt to gain self-respect, respect and love by dominance, fear and manipulation is, as Gilligan points out, a misguided attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.

I point this out because knowing this basic mechanism of all abusers is important, if you are faced with one of these supremely destructive assholes. Once you see abusiveness in your personal life, say nothing (appeals to empathy or fairness are futile with these assholes) but put maximum emotional distance between yourself and one of these hopeless, reflexively harmful humanoids.

Don’t forget John Roberts

From Heather Cox Richardson yesterday, on the long judicial coup run by the cunning, privileged owners of the activist extremist party that is now calling itself MAGA (see, also John Birch Society):

In 1986, when it was clear that most Americans did not support the policies put in place by the Reagan Republicans, the Reagan appointees at the Justice Department broke tradition to ensure that candidates for judgeships shared their partisanship. Their goal, said the president’s attorney general, Ed Meese, was to “institutionalize the Reagan revolution so it can’t be set aside no matter what happens in future presidential elections.” 

That principle held going forward. Federal judgeships depend on Senate confirmation, and when McConnell became Senate minority leader in 2007, he worked to make sure Democrats could not put their own appointees onto the bench. He held up so many of President Barack Obama’s nominees for federal judgeships that in 2013 Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) prohibited filibusters on certain judicial nominees.

McConnell also made it clear that he would do everything he could to make sure that Democrats could not pass laws, weaponizing the filibuster so that nothing could become law without 60 votes in the Senate. . .

She then details McConnell’s right-wing judiciary appointment mission, and how he removed the filibuster for Supreme Court justices, when the time was right, to get a couple of 50% supported nominees on to the court, after denying Obama his constitutional right to nominate a replacement for Antonin Scalia eight months before the 2016 election.

. . . Throughout his tenure as Senate majority leader, McConnell made judicial confirmations a top priority, churning through nominations even when the coronavirus pandemic shut everything else down. Right-wing plaintiffs are now seeking out those judges, like Matthew Kacsmaryk of Texas, to decide in their favor. Kacsmaryk challenged the FDA’s approval of the drug mifepristone, which can be used in abortions, thus threatening to ban it nationwide.

Meanwhile, at the Supreme Court, Trump appointees are joining with right-wing justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito to overturn precedents established long ago, including the right to abortion. 

source

Don’t forget America’s most partisan balls and strikes umpire John “Corporations get to say ‘go fuck yourself'” Roberts. How does this smiling corporate shill, who schemes behind the scenes, votes in every key case with the right-wing fraternal order of the Federalist Society block, and has authored some of its most infamous decisions, get a pass from even someone as brilliant as Heather? How is he, the man who, although he didn’t vote with the other four to kill Roe v. Wade, gleefully signed on to nullify the power of federal regulators, keep an insurrectionist on the ballot in Colorado and immunize criminal acts committed by a criminal president, among other MAGA endorsed rulings, still seen as somehow “moderate” or an “institutionalist”?

Look no further than his infamous decision in Shelby County v. Holder when he ruled that enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, which he acknowledged righted a historical injustice, was no longer necessary. His argument is bland and pristine: Congress relied on forty year old data when they reauthorized it, so me and four Federalist Society diehards are undoing their uninformed, undemocratic activism. True, except that he was lying about the forty year old data, as it turns out. As I wrote when I read the decision:

Only when you read Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent (another magnificent piece of clear, precise legal and moral logic) do you realize the audacity of the Roberts majority’s legal sleight of hand. You learn that the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act was passed, after 21 hearings and 15,000 pages of evidence of ongoing discrimination in the states under preclearance, by a vote of 390-33 in the House and, after further debate, 98 to 0 in the Senate. Reading the John Roberts decision you’d have no reason to suspect that President George W. Bush signed the reauthorization into law a week later, as Ginsburg writes:

recognizing the need for “further work . . . in the fight against injustice,” and calling the reauthorization “an example of our continued commitment to a united America where every person is valued and treated with dignity and respect.” 

Nah, says John Roberts, we’re going back to that golden time when the wealthy land owners, the ancestors of our greatest billionaire donors and close friends, made all the decisions for the USA.  Dignity and respect, after all, are just words, and ridiculous ones when applied to those who deserve neither. Strike three, bitches.

I began writing this yesterday, and today the Gray Lady herself chimes in on Roberts. Here’s how he teed up the question posed by the Roberts court in Trump v. US:

The justices instructed lawyers from both sides to address a broad question: “whether and if so to what extent does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure.”. . .

. . . On April 25, the justices and the lawyers in the case gathered for oral arguments in the courtroom, across the street from where the Jan. 6 rioting had taken place three years earlier. The clamor from the Capitol attack had been audible from inside the court building, former employees recalled in interviews, and afterward, security sharply increased and fences shielded the building.

During the arguments, however, several conservative justices said that they wanted to focus not on what had happened that day, but on broader legal questions.

“I’m not discussing the particular facts of this case,” Justice Alito told the courtroom.

“I’m not focused on the here and now of this case,” Justice Kavanaugh said. “I’m very concerned about the future.”

“We’re writing a rule for the ages,” Justice Gorsuch said.

For the Thousand Year Reich, no doubt.

Here’s a bit about Roberts’s fundamental dishonesty:

One footnote left scholars wondering whether former presidents could ever be prosecuted for taking bribes. An N.Y.U. professor was startled to discover that the opinion, which leaned heavily on Nixon v. Fitzgerald, a 1982 case on presidential immunity, truncated a quote from that decision, changing its meaning.

Verdict: Federalist Society stalwart and Nazi fuck.

MAGA influencer of the week

She traveled with Donald “People don’t leave my rallies” (think roach motel) Trump to his most excellent September 10th debate in Philadephia, a debate he won, he said, like 98 to 2, and then on his September 11th rounds. Her overt racism, proud “white nationalist” self-identification and penchant for lying and promoting wild, unfounded conspiracy theories provoked Trump sychophant Lindsey Graham to urge Donald to distance himself from her. She fired back, questioning coy bachelor Graham’s sexual preference. Klan Mom Marjorie Taylor Greene criticized her racism as too extreme and appalling even for Greene (wow!), and Trump’s companion’s response was to remind the world of Greene’s extramarital affair and compare her to a “hooker” (arguably not unfair, but still).

Meet 31 year-old Laura Loomer.

The NY Times described her this way:

A far-right activist known for her endless stream of sexist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-Muslim and occasionally antisemitic social media posts and public stunts, Ms. Loomer has made a name for herself over the past decade by unabashedly claiming 9/11 was “an inside job,” calling Islam “a cancer,” accusing Ron DeSantis’s wife of exaggerating breast cancer and claiming that President Biden was behind the attempt to assassinate Mr. Trump in July. source

Wikipedia:

Loomer continued to advocate for the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump in 2024, telling The Washington Post, “I’m happy to dedicate all my time to helping Trump, because if Trump doesn’t get back in, I don’t have anything.”[54] Loomer was brought as a guest by Trump to Philadelphia where he engaged in the September 10 presidential debate with opponent Kamala Harris.[55] The following day, Loomer attended events alongside Trump commemorating the September 11 attacks. Loomer had previously endorsed claims that 9/11 “was an inside job.”[56] According to anonymous sources on the Trump campaign, Loomer reportedly influenced Trump to publicly endorse various false conspiracy theories, including the claim that Kamala Harris hid her black heritage and the claim that Haitian immigrants were eating other people’s household pets in Ohio. Loomer also posted a tweet referencing stereotypes of Indians, saying that if Harris, who is half-Indian, were elected President “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center.” Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right member of the United States House of Representatives, condemned this remark as “appalling and extremely racist.”[57]

As part of a promotional deal for the pet food brand Pawsitive on her Rumble channel, Loomer filmed herself eating dog food.[58]

. . . Early life and education

Loomer and her two brothers were raised in Arizona.[21] She attended Mount Holyoke College, leaving after one semester; she said she felt targeted for being conservative.[22] She transferred to Barry University in Miami Shores, Florida, and graduated in 2015 with a bachelor’s degree in broadcast journalism.[22][23] Loomer is Jewish.[24][25]

Oy! No, not Jewish, please, for the love of Jesus…

Read the new indictment of our criminal former president

To win a legal argument a lawyer must wield a blunt instrument, the law, with precision. A prosecutor must prove every element of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt or there is no conviction. There are many ways for wealthy, politically connected defendants to game the system and gain long delays in trial, conviction and sentencing. Ultrawealthy scofflaws enjoy tremendous advantages in court, as in life, and it is frustrating as hell to watch these litigious fucks run roughshod over law and decency.

Once in a blue moon we have a moment of seeming legal clarity. It is a beautiful thing to see an indictment lay out a case against one of these fucks that allows for no reasonable doubt. You can read that kind of indictment here, the very readable superseding indictment Jack Smith’s office recently brought against serial offender Donald J. Chrump.

The indictment uses plain language to lay out in clear, crisp detail, every element of each of the four crimes the Orange Polyp has been indicted for. The superseding indictment steers clear of the MAGA Supreme Court’s unconstitutional made-for-Trump July ruling that presidents may legally commit crimes, if they do this in the course of carrying out their core “official duties”. (Thought experiment challenge — imagine a criminal act that would be necessary for a noncriminal president to commit in order to carry out his official duties).

The revamped indictment removes references to losing candidate Trump’s “official acts”, as when he sought to promote an unqualified loyalist, American Eichmann Jefferey Clarke, to Attorney General to give an official stamp to his Stolen Election lie, or when he told officials just to lie and his allies in Congress would do the rest. It is an easy read that leaves the reader in no doubt as to the guilt of the infallible criminal candidate in knowingly spreading a lie about the rigged and stolen 2020 election, using that lie to whip up duped supporters and raise money, arm twist, wheedle and threaten government officials, inviting election officials of a state he lost to the Oval Office to convince them to change the votes in their states, signing on to a fake elector plan, exhorting an angry crowd he’d lied to for over an hour, at a private event, to “fight like hell or you won’t have a country anymore” and taking no action, for hours, outside of stoking the mob’s anger at Mike Pence, as the peaceful mob of reverent tourists he inspired shut down a joint session of Congress.

In Defendant’s defense, during his hour long, lie-studded harangue of the angry mob at the Ellipse, a private event paid for by private funds (as Smith points out), losing candidate Trump used the word “peaceful” several times. So when he told them to go down to the Capitol to fight like hell or you won’t have a country anymore, he meant to fight peacefully, you know, as one does when your country is about to be stolen from you.

The law is a blunt instrument and many serious harms are considered trifles by a system of law, designed for all, that routinely favors the rich and powerful. It is a refreshing thing to see a case laid out as beautifully, as indisputably, as Jack Smith’s office did in the reworked election interference indictment of Trump. We can lament the many delays a spoiled, entitled, unaccountable, law suit wielding, blustering, lying, ultra-wealthy bully like Trump always gets, and that Merrick Garland, a stickler for norms and rules, waited so long to appoint a Special Counsel, but, damn, this indictment is good. Check it out.

Now we just have to make sure very fine American Nazis don’t steal the upcoming election for their criminal figurehead so the trial can go forward, with all deliberate speed, in the several cases of US v. Trump (and his indicted co-conspirators).

Trump v. United States SCOTUS ruling

You won’t read this in the New York Times, necessarily, but this is the essence of what the Supreme Court ruled, 6-3, in regard to former president Donald J. Trump’s case against the United States claiming absolute immunity from prosecution for any criminal act he committed while in office, or afterwards. It is an obscenely anti-democratic ruling by six members of an extremist, doctrinaire judicial fraternity (The Federalist Society) in service to American oligarchs.

The highest court in the land ruled that a president, present or former, may not be prosecuted for crimes he commits in office, if those crimes were done in the course of his official duties. If he was speaking to another government official about committing a crime — official business. All other crimes he commits while in office, not strictly in furtherance of his core official duties (try to picture why any crime would be necessary to carry out any core presidential responsibility — ah, never mind), carry the presumption that he had a good and legally justified reason to commit the crime. This presumption must be rebutted by a prosecutor before charges can be brought.

Just to ensure maximum protection to the man they protected in this one and done, tailor-made for the felon candidate ruling, evidence of any protected criminal act, or conspiracy to commit a newly protected presidential crime, may not be introduced in any other prosecution of a current or former president, in any criminal case where he is not protected by the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Forget logic, the plain text and original meaning of the Constitution Leonard Leo’s appointees pretend great deference toward, common sense, political wisdom, basic fairness, any concern with democracy. This unappealable ruling was made simply to protect the brazen, audacious, ever-cooperative figurehead presidential candidate whose electoral victory is their constituency’s only current chance for holding on to power. The 6-3 Federalist Society supermajority did what loyal, lifelong partisans always do — gave their teammate a uniquely tailored, unappealable assist.

The even more poisonous part of this demented ruling (demented from the point of view of democracy) is the holding that corrupt presidential pardons, even ones he openly sells to felons, his criminal co-conspirators, serial killers with billionaire sponsors, pardons given as the quo of quid pro quo favors done for him or his business, MAY NOT BE CHALLENGED IN A COURT OF LAW. This means a president may hire a hit man to murder a political opponent, or Rosie O’Donnell, and then pardon that hit man as soon as the murder is done — or by preemptive pardon, if needed to seal the deal. As was the clear original intent of the Framers of our experiment in democracy.

MAGA, the rebranded Republican party, the truckling followers of reality-definer Trump (in service to reactionary billionaire polluters and blasphemously false Christian leaders) strenuously opposes an enforceable ethics code for the Supreme Court, the one branch of government they are majority stakeholders in. These über-entitled motherfuckers always get what they pay for. NO ETHICS FOR OUR PARTISAN IDEOLOGUES! So ordered.

If you want to call these swine Nazis, you are currently within your rights as an American citizen to do so. At least until use of the term “Nazi” is recognized, when applied to those who behave like actual, historical Nazis, as verboten, strictly forbidden, illegal and grounds for immediate imprisonment, reeducation and worse, at the sole discretion of the infallible Führer.

American hero, to millions…

From the great Heather Cox Richardson

And then, this evening, Quil Lawrence and Tom Bowman of NPR explained the story behind the surprising photos of Trump on Monday giving a thumbs-up over a grave in Arlington National Cemetery. The reporters wrote that “[t]wo members of Donald Trump’s campaign staff had a verbal and physical altercation Monday with an official” at the cemetery, where “[f]ederal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities.” When a cemetery official tried to prevent Trump campaign staff from entering the section where the grave was located, “campaign staff verbally abused and pushed the official aside.” A Trump campaign spokesperson said the official who tried to prevent the staff from holding a political event in the cemetery was “clearly suffering from a mental health episode.” 

The elephant in the room these days is that most Republicans, along with many pundits, are pretending that Trump is a normal presidential candidate. They are ignoring his mental lapses, calls for authoritarianism, grifting, lack of grasp on any sort of policy, and criminality, even as he has hollowed out the once grand Republican Party and threatens American democracy itself.

It’s hard to look away from the reality that the Republican senators could have stopped this catastrophe at many points in Trump’s term, at the very least by voting to convict Trump at his first impeachment trial. At the time, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) said, “Out of one hundred senators, you have zero who believe you that there was no quid pro quo. None. There’s not a single one.” Republican senators nonetheless stood behind Trump. “This is not about this president. It’s not about anything he’s been accused of doing,” then–majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told his colleagues. “It has always been about November 3, 2020. It’s about flipping the Senate.”

When the Framers wrote the Constitution, they did not foresee senators abandoning the principles of the country in order to support a president they thought would enhance their own careers. Assuming that lawmakers would jealously guard their own power, the Framers gave to the members of the House of Representatives the power to impeach a president. To the members of the Senate they gave the sole power to try impeachments. They assumed that lawmakers, who had just fought a war to break free of a monarch, would understand that their own interests would always require stopping the rise of an authoritarian leader. 

But the Framers did not foresee the rise of political partisanship. 

In the modern era, extreme partisanship has led to voter suppression to keep Republicans in power, the weaponization of the filibuster to stop Democratic legislation, and gerrymandering to enable Republicans to take far more legislative seats than they have earned. The demands of this extreme partisanship also mean that members of one of the nation’s major political parties have lined up behind a man whom, were he running this sort of a campaign even ten years ago, they would have dismissed with derision. 

Finally, devastatingly, the partisanship that made senators keep Trump in office enabled him to name to the Supreme Court three justices. Those three justices were key to making up the majority that overturned the nation’s fundamental principle that all people must be equal before the law. In July 2024 they ruled that unlike anyone else, a president is above it.  

In May 2016, South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham famously observed: “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…….and we will deserve it.”

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