When it comes to manipulating public opinion, particularly regarding an embarrassment to the party in power, lead with an aggressive, lying attack directly contradicting the actual truth.
The Environmental Protection Agency [1], a thoughtful, forward-looking Nixon creation hated by Project 2025 and Leonard Leo’s Supreme Court, had its legs cut off by the 6-3 majority. They ruled that the EPA does not have the authority to mandate carbon emissions from existing power plants. The 2022 decision also opened the door for a future Unitary Executive to have the final word over government scientists on most things formerly protected by the EPA. Not enough for Project 2025, the arms and head had to be cut off too.
So President Project 2025 obliged.
The Trump administration fired at least seven employees for signing a letter criticizing the agency’s leadership for undermining “the EPA mission of protecting human health and the environment.” The firings are, Amudalat Ajasa of the Washington Post noted, “an escalation of the administration’s effort to clamp down on dissent within the federal bureaucracy.”
Here’s Trump appointee-speak (note the consistent sprachregelung, with piquant, aromatic notes of the boss’s seat) for what the EPA, and the entire federal government, which has the final say in every state, now stands for (and it’s not the so-called environment, woke mind virus infested cucks!)
“The Environmental Protection Agency has a zero-tolerance policy for career officials using their agency position and title to unlawfully undermine, sabotage, and undercut the will of the American public that was clearly expressed at the ballot box last November,” an EPA spokesperson said.
But [Heather adds], increasingly, it seems obvious that the administration is claiming a mandate for policies that voters did not intend to endorse.
Like Dr. Brainworm’s clueless concepts of a plan to make random little kids in airports not strike him as so mitochondrially defective.
Fuck those fucking putos.
They only get away with this incoherent, immoral, indecent, crude, lying lawlessness if good people stop fighting them at every turn. It is on us all, to pace ourselves and do whatever is in our power to do, Remember to stay encouraged by the uniformly high level of reckless idiocy and constant failure displayed by these mirthless assclowns [2] as they carry out their boss’s wildly unpopular cruelties. Do not accept deliberate incoherence as the final word.
[1]
The Environmental Protection Agency is an independent agency of the United States government tasked with environmental protection matters. President Richard Nixon proposed the establishment of EPA on July 9, 1970; it began operation on December 2, 1970, after Nixon signed an executive order. Wikipedia
[2] They might actually be asshats:
In the word’s official entry in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, lexicographers theorized that it could be a play on the phrase to “have one’s head up one’s ass,” an insult which, if pictured literally, would indeed result in the person’s ass serving as a sort of hat. However, the author concluded, “a more precise history will depend on the location of further attestations.”source
With an insane and increasingly demented Unitary Executive empowered by a far-right Supreme Court to commit as many crimes as he likes as part of this “core duties”, it’s no surprise he’s been able to destroy as much as he has in seven short months (while personally making literally billions since taking over as US CEO). His goal is clearly American Carnage, creating the violent, bloody battleground for his childish dream of world domination. This dystopian dream requires off the charts desperation among average Americans, violence, mayhem and unpunished murder. His more immediate dream, adding to his personal fortune, has been advanced by about $3,000,000,000 since he gilded the Oval Office.
He’s surrounded by supremely ambitious, unprincipled loyalists, backed by a dozen powerful “Libertarian” think tanks and judicial pipelines (all owned by the same handful of billionaires), who fund nefarious projects and get deadly legislation passed, policies designed to maximize fear, instability and mass desperation, to bring about the social disintegration needed for violence and dictatorship.
Who, but a Nazi, is focused on “mass deportation”, particularly of law abiding residents who pose no threat to anyone? American carnage, now! It’s their only hope for permanent minority rule.
With so much disgusting offal hitting the fan every hour of every day, orchestrated by rabid chaos agents frantically working for a visibly declining old maniac, it’s hard to focus on any one aspect of it for more than a moment. That is by design. It enables all kinds of abuses, humming along in the background. For starters, get rid of FEMA, Emergency Management after killer storms is just more woke mind virus. Same goes for the CDC, woke mind virus stubbornly insisting on vaccines for pandemics!
Donald Trump’s team, by arbitrarily shuttering USAID, the agency of American soft power in the poorer parts of the world, is quietly committing mass murder. More than 60,000 people, most of them children, die every MONTH since team Trump nullified Congress’s appropriation of funds to USAID. This horrific fact is no longer reported, it’s among so many other senseless acts of willful idiocy performed daily by the president’s competitive sycophants. Countless child deaths, at the stroke of an insane unelected bureaucrat’s pen, the stuff of nightmares.
Doing a search just now I learned that the last media mentions of this ongoing international slaughter by an American president were in June or early July when the number killed, mostly children, was reported as over 300,000 dead so far. Understood, when an insanely cruel man leads a heartless movement bent on permanent enforcement of their privilege, many ongoing atrocities will simply have to get overlooked.
It is like the National Rifle Association’s lobbyists prevailing for decades on the issue that it is unfair to include suicide by gun (more than 50% of all American death from gunshot) in the annual tally of American gun homicides. Dead bodies are considered, by a certain economic philosophy, to be externalities, unfortunate, perhaps, but part of the cost of doing business, and always subject to negotiation. So, according to the NRA, gunshot being the number one cause of death for children below the age of 18 in American is bad enough without by conflating it with tens of thousands of annual voluntary self-killings that don’t hurt anyone else.
When the Supreme Court condemned girls just old enough to menstruate to bear to term and give birth to their rapists’ babies, if their state legislature so ordered, I thought the outrage of that barbarously medieval ruling would shock people awake and cause a tidal wave at the polls that could not be countered by fraud. Take in the full horror of it: the girl is eleven, she has a period, she gets raped by a pedophile. JESUS SAYS SHE MUST CARRY THE SACRED FETUS TO TERM, say the majority of “Red” states newly empowered to enforce radical Christian views. No matter if you and your daughter are Christians, Muslims, Hindus, atheists, Jews, Buddhists, Wiccans, you must obey what five rich, unappealable, “justices” say Jesus Christ commands under the US Constitution. I don’t know why that MAGA crime against girls and women wasn’t the single most decisive issue of the 2024 election. I pictured the ad with the blurred face of the ten year-old who was forced to flee her state to terminate a pregnancy initiated by a rapist of children. I saw this irrefutable ad in my mind, MAGA is the party of forced pregnancy and birth for child rape victims, but don’t recall ever seeing it anywhere else.
After one of the world’s richest psychopaths generously donated $250,000,000 to convicted felon Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and Trump was elected, Elon Musk received full access to the personal data of all Americans and the files and personnel of every agency that was investigating him. Musk also had carte blanche to defund and close down any agency that particularly offended him. USAID [1] was one of these agencies. At the time Musk and his bogus “DOGE” operation cut USAID funding by 83% and slashed its staff, it was estimated that as a result of services and medications not delivered and food rotting in warehouses, 103 people AN HOUR were dying worldwide. A virtual 9/11 death toll (2,977) every day — 2,472 dead EVERY DAY because Elon Musk’s teenaged hackers followed Mr. Neurodivergent’s orders to take down this massive source of “waste, fraud and abuse.”
USAID expenditures amounted to less than 1% of the US budget, and the agency saved millions of vulnerable lives annually. However, USAID was apparently investigating Musk’s selective use of Starlink in various war zones and “DOGE” had a mandate from Trump and the Heritage Foundation to radically slash the federal budget by any means necessary (with full, unchallengeable presidential pardons at the ready for anyone caught “over-reaching”).
Since the closure of USAID (after “DOGE” canceled the agency, Marco “MAGA” Rubio ordered USAID’s website removed from the internet) hundreds of thousands, mostly children, have died worldwide, particularly in war zones where the US has long provided life saving humanitarian aid.
I searched for an update about the USAID cuts and there is no news more recent than June or early July, it’s simply not a story anymore, with the high-powered firehouse spraying fecal “content” 24/7 as advocated by Sloppy Steve Bannon. Though, by sheer chance, Project 2025 made another move today to claw back the rest of the shuttered agency’s funds, through an untested legal theory called presidential “pocket recission”, taking back money already appropriated by Trump’s majority Congress. By chance this was reported in the NY Times, in the hours since I started writing this post earlier today:
The request largely targets accounts funding the United States’ contributions to the United Nations and economic development and aid programs run by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has already largely been dismantled by the Trump administration.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio hailed the proposal on Friday, saying that none of the targeted programs “are in America’s interest, which is why the president is taking decisive action to put America and Americans first.”
The single biggest clawback would be a $445 million cut to U.S. funding of peacekeeping operations abroad, including through the United Nations. The request also proposes a $132 million rescission of the $340 million approved by Congress for the Democracy Fund at the State Department. The White House’s proposed budget released earlier this year suggested eliminating that program entirely.
Millions die in distant lands every day, nature and humans are cruel, what are you going to do? It’s like raped girls, bad things happen to good people, like the kids murdered the other day while praying, though their souls got thoughts and prayers from MAGA.
The estimate of hourly deaths as a result of the Musk/Trump/Project 2025 USAID cuts is currently 88 dead per hour. You can see the breakdown of how these deaths are happening and how many of the dead are children, dying easily preventable deaths. Should we be relieved that only 2,112 people are dying every day, down more than 300 a day from the earliest projections? Or is outrage more appropriate when rich, corrupt psychopaths, at the behest of our nation’s greediest billionaires, cut off a program, fully funded by our Congress, that saved tens of millions of lives over the last two decades? The good news is that the wealthiest 1% got even wealthier, so, even if just under a million have to die unnecessarily in 2025, it wasn’t a total loss.
Adolf Eichmann was tried, convicted and executed for his role in the mass murder of millions of Jews and others he’d had shipped to death camps. He insisted that he’d never killed anyone, Jew or any other person, and no evidence was ever produced to show he had. He claimed he’d only done his job, as was his lawful duty under the laws of Nazi Germany and the oath of personal loyalty he’d taken to Adolf Hitler. Contrary to the myth that Eichmann was the architect of the Final Solution, he was not the mastermind of anything, except the logistics of moving large numbers of doomed people to their places of execution. He was very good at delivering these condemned souls to their final nightmare deaths. Eichmann was a bragging, self-aggrandizing bureaucrat of limited imagination who worked tirelessly to please his bosses and make himself look good by “getting results”. Much like the highly competitive crew of grossly unqualified sycophants who pretend to love the taste of the big orange guy’s lowest sphincter.
The same addled sycophants are frantically busy protecting the boss and a group of powerful white male pedophiles who were supplied with teenaged girls by longtime close Trump buddy Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein very likely blackmailed them after secretly videotaping their statutory rapes of minors. The criminally unaccountable Talented Mr. Epstein, a billionaire with no obvious source of his billions, of course blackmailed the wealthy, powerful white men who came to “party” with him. Why WOULDN’T he? He even got a secret non-prosecution deal from Trump’s future Secretary of Labor, since disgraced, Alex Acosta. Click the hideous clause below to read the whole seven page 2007 “sweetheart” deal the late Mr. Epstein, with tactical support from Mr. Dershowitz, negotiated for himself for the “crime” of … uh… hiring a few underaged hookers.
The legal notice to victims required by law before settling such cases… uh… you know what? Screw the “victims”?!! Who has suffered more than that powerful friend of many of the world’s most powerful white men, Jeffrey Epstein? Only one name comes to mind.
[1] The United States Agency for International Development was the agency within the United States federal government primarily responsible for foreign aid. Established in 1961 during the Cold War by President John F. Kennedy, USAID was designed to counter the Soviet Union through the use of soft power across the world. Wikipedia
If you say I am wrong, I will beat you down. If you say it again, I will have my people kill you. I have millions of people that follow me, all willing to die and kill for me, so I can do whatever I want to you and nobody can stop me.
This is the basic premise of fascism, it’s a strict hierarchy in which all authority flows from the will of the dictator. Followers of the dictator, empowered to enforce his will, get to dominate everyone below them in the hierarchy. That’s just how society is supposed to run, in the fascist worldview. The strongest person rules and everybody else accommodates themselves to the will of the strongest person.
Donald Trump‘s niece Mary, daughter of Donald’s ill-fated older brother, has called her uncle the weakest man she ever met. She said his amazing talent is his ability to find people even weaker than he is and getting them to do his bidding. Trump the unapologetic bully exerts great appeal to the people who follow him, because he’s projects being strong and he doesn’t take any crap from anybody, and even when he’s wrong, he demands to be recognized as being right. This is inspiring to a certain type of person, who identifies with and admires someone able to live that way, to take what they want, grab women by the pussy and so on. The laws that apply to the rest of us don’t apply to him, because he’s a winner in a way that nobody else has ever been.
A bully like Trump is able to collect weak and useful people who were bullied earlier in their life and developed a driving need for domination and revenge. They’re drawn to a bully like Trump as a source of power that will allow them not to feel weak anymore, as they derive their own power from someone as powerful as he is. They are forced to constantly compete for his favor, stay in his good graces, and avoid the humiliation that he has forced on virtually all of their predecessors. Think of creatures like Kashyap Pramod “Kash” Patel, or Pete Hegseth, Emil Bove, Caroline Leavitt, Little Marco, Stephen Miller, Laura Loomer, Pam Bondi or any of Trump’s current lie-embracing myrmidons. Loyalty and proximity to Trump, who craves and demands absolute loyalty and obedience, no matter what (hang that asslicking traitor Mike Pence!) is literally a license to kill, as long as your loyalty, flattery and actions are pleasing to the boss.
Young Donald Trump [1], the second youngest child in a wealthy family run by a psychopathic father and a distant, born very poor, immigrant mother, became a bully when his baby brother was born. Mom had been gone when Donald was at that formative age when children most need their mothers, she was in the hospital for a prolonged stay. His father being a driven and ruthless man obsessed with amassing wealth, was unable to give his youngest son much by way of anything except his annual $200,000 a year tax-free allowance. With the arrival of the smallest, weakest little Trump, young Donald finally had someone to take out his feelings on. With a helpless sibling he could dominate from day one, Donald began to show his now famous sadistic ‘pleasure’ in tormenting and humiliating people weaker than him.
Trump, who was disrespectful to his mother at home, became a bully in school. When his parents discovered he’d purchased a cache of switchblades to give out to a gang he was planning to arm at his exclusive private school, they yanked him out of that school and sent him off to a military academy. They sent him there to teach him discipline, to make him a man, as they used to say (back when America was great). While Trump, who enjoyed the sadism of military academy life, was there his parents drove up every visiting day with different beautiful young women they’d pay to come to hang out with their son. This made him look good to his classmates. He was voted the “ladies’ man” of the military school by his peers, who couldn’t believe how many good looking chicks he kept pulling to come up and visit him, pose for photos with him.
When his smart, charismatic older brother Fred Jr., the heir apparent to the Trump empire, revealed that he lacked the ruthlessness their father demanded of his heir, the father decided to break and destroy his oldest son. He reluctantly groomed young Donald to take over the business. Donald was soon in the tender embrace of the father he never had, ruthless, demonically brilliant Roy Cohn, homophobic closeted promiscuous homosexual, rabid anti-communist, and high functioning antisocial psychopath. Cohn taught young Donald how to use the media and law to bully, as he’d always done in his personal life. When somebody comes at you, come at them twice as hard. You never admit fault, and if somebody accuses you of something accuse him of something ten times worse. If the government sues you for longtime racist housing discrimination, now illegal under the Fair Housing Act, sue the government for defaming you — demand a hundred million dollars. The Department of Justice lawyers will literally shit themselves.
And so it came to pass, eventually, that this narcissistic bully who enjoys nothing in life but “winning”, that is, dominating everybody else in the zero sum world in which such stunted souls live, became president of the United States. Russia’s dictator had a strong interest in seeing him elected in 2016, as Marco Rubio’s Senate committee detailed in a multivolume report after Special Counsel Robert Mueller documented 140 cases of Russia and the Trump campaign working together to get Donald elected. No criminal conspiracy was charged, because Trump’s people were no rats (and they lied and destroyed evidence, one reason Mueller hurried to collect and include as much evidence as he could in the report) but Mueller could not exonerate Trump for ten counts of obstruction of justice. None of this stopped Trump and Christofascist Bill Barr from announcing Trump’s complete and total exoneration from the Mueller “witch hunt”.
When Trump lost reelection in 2020, after a chaotic term that broke all records for cabinet firings and personnel changes, he went insane. His team launched a multi-pronged attempt to reverse Trump’s electoral loss. They’d sent lawyers to every state in an effort to suppress voting before the election, then hatched several schemes to contest the outcome and do everything imaginable to overturn the election results. Revenge against a “rigged election” became his rallying cry. He fomented a riot by whipping up a crowd he’d primed for months with claims of a stolen election, an election stolen from THEM, and sent them to take out his rage on the joint session of Congress.
He watched on TV for hours as they overran police and ransacked the Capitol (a “day of love.”). The DOJ had four years to bring him to justice for multiple heavy duty felonies, but in their meticulous institutional devotion to “norms”, DOJ shat the bed. In 2024 the only thing we know for sure that Russia did to get Trump back into power was to call in voting day bomb threats to key Democratic precincts in swing states.
Bullies only understand one thing, force. They are intimidated when people they mean to terrify don’t flinch. We must not flinch, there is no compelling reason to flinch right now.
Bullies bully and lie for the same reason people always do those things — fear. Only while being more scary than the people they bully do they feel safe. Meanwhile, anyone subject to the bully’s need to feel powerful has to defend herself, himself, themself, ourselves. As a society, we can only protect ourselves from bullying by an insane dictator and his minions by organizing, standing up for our rights, doing whatever it takes to assert our rights as citizens of a constitutional democracy.
The forces of American fascism, racism and misogyny have been working hard for decades, and spending a fortune organizing and influencing, to bring about this dark moment in history. The rest of us, a large majority of our citizenry, need to not flinch from doing whatever needs to be done to resist American fascism. That the “opposition” party is so spineless, due to corporate interests controlling most of its leaders, is a grim fucking tragedy. No time to weep about that. It is on us not to be bullied by an insane movement of enraged toddlers wielding government power. Don’t be intimidated by an insane bully’s ranting threats to illegally deploy the military to lock us all up in privatized torture prisons, this guy’s rowing with one oar. He is panicking. He wants us to panic. Do not panic.
[1] This short biography of Trump is no doubt one reason the ever vengeful DJT defunded PBS.
Inheriting a fairly thriving economy (an unjust one, but by the measures we use to determine the health of a capitalist economy, healthy) and a Congressional budget that promoted renewable energy and allocated funds to address many other longstanding problems, Trump went to work deliberately negating the will of the majority, as expressed in Congress, and tanking the world’s richest economy. In doing so he also sought to crush all hope for a sustainable and more equitable future for 90% of Americans.
Make people insecure enough, gouge them for services they need, deny them health care, and food, demonstrate your right to rough up, detain and deport anyone you like with masked, unidentified squads of secret immigration police not accountable to any laws, remove all hope of change for the better and you have fertile ground for public panic. Mass firings, in violation of civil service law, by unaccountable, secret state actors, great for stoking fear and outrage. By putting the populace in increasing fear for their day to day existence you create the desperate, violent conditions in Germany after the Great Depression. Once you’ve set the stage on fire, creating enraging propaganda and stoking the blind fear necessary for a fully fascist state becomes child’s play for the dictator on day one.
There were at least three direct outcomes of Trump’s “in your fucking face” approach from the day he claimed victory in the 2024 election. Trump, as the Unitary Executive, on a self-proclaimed divine mission of vengeance, asserted, in a series of executive orders he never read, that he would carry out Project 2025 boldly by saying “fuck you” to Congress, which, under our constitution, has the exclusive “power of the purse” and later to every court but the 6-3 majority one that has his hideous back. He declared a fake emergency (we are supposedly at nationwide war with a super powerful Venezuelan gang) which he claims gave him the unlimited powers his idol, Mr. Hitler, assumed under the Enabling Act in the Weimar constitution after the torching of the German parliament building. Trump’s seizure of emergency powers, based on nothing, is currently under leisurely review by the courts.
The second direct, predictable outcome of his “economic” policies (and the president’s claimed right to impose tariffs without the consent of Congress is currently also tied up in court) is already hurting tens of millions, sending the poor deeper into inescapable poverty, increasing poverty and child hunger, until the rippling effects of his idiotic, economically nihilistic policies fuck the vast majority of Americans a short time later (while further enriching our most lucrative corporations). All of this predictable economic destruction, the inevitable result of his colossally stupid (or devilishly clever, depending on desired outcome) policies, is coming to pass as surely as his “clean coal” and fossil fuel pollution will continue killing people as he defunds what Congress has allocated for renewable energy and places new taxes on it to further enrich super-wealthy psychopathic fossil fuel barons who will now generate all electricity by burning up handsomely subsidized non-renewables.
The third, and probably most dangerous, is Trump’s largely uncontested insistence on his right to prevail with incoherent arguments that fly in the face of all evidence. He continually reserves to himself the right to lie and to fight, to the death, anyone who calls out his lies. Emotionally, he is two years old, and he cannot control his impulse to rage. Our acceptance, as a culture, of a powerful two year-old’s right to rage at us whenever he feels frustrated, which is several times a day, is the most damaging part of this stunted strongman’s attack on reality. That and the sycophancy of his shamelessly ambitious political appointees (and powerful unappointed “influencers” like Laura Loomer).
The capitulation of America’s most powerful individuals and institutions, the prime beneficiaries of our corrupt culture, is probably the most sickening aspect of this Project 2025 scenario. Frivolous lawsuits brought by America’s most litigious asshole, lawsuits that would be laughed out of any court, net the Orange Polyp tens of millions of dollars in settlement money (a business expense and tax write off for these craven financial giants) from corporations (and their human alter-egos) eager not to get on the madman’s shit list.
One key thing to remember during all this — there is only one true victim in the United States. Donald J. Trump. Everyone else is whining about nothing, only poor, innocent Mr. Trump is persecuted like nobody’s ever seen. In Trump’s mind there is no such thing as an “Epstein victim,” aside from Donald J. Trump, whose only “crime” was being friends with a creep.
In closing, here’s a bit from Heather Cox Richardson’s most recent letter:
Today Sadie Gurman, Josh Dawsey, and Brett Forrest of the Wall Street Journal reported that, according to an official at the Department of Justice, Bondi has signed an order directing a U.S. attorney to present evidence concerning the matter [Tulsi Gabbard’s Russian talking point that Obama, not Trump, committed treason — with allegedly false claims of Russian meddling — in the lead up to the 2016 election] to a grand jury. This is a major escalation in their crusade to convince voters that the real story in the news should be that Trump is a victim.
The Wall Street Journal reporters note that the administration’s claims “come as the Trump administration has faced intense bipartisan criticism over its refusal to provide more information about the FBI investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.”
”Jeff was a creep who stole my beautiful 16 year-old Mara-Lago towel girl.”
Every insane, violent, totalitarian plan for world domination has an end game, one Nazi word for this was Endlosüng — The Final Solution. This widely known secret plan of mass extermination, of all Jews and millions of other undesirables, would solve Germany’s problems once and for all, true believers in the infallibility of a morally deformed supreme leader believed. The Leader spellbound masses of otherwise hopeless Germans with promises of endless winning and eternal national glory, once the homeland was cleansed of blood poisoning and made mythically pure again. Mass belief in the Leader was fueled by his charismatic certainty in his holy mission. God, it is well known, and those He speaks to directly, can never be wrong.
94 year-old saltwater crocodile, and compelling argument against naturalization, Rupert Murdoch, and equally crusty, soon to be 90 year-old fossil trillionaire Charles Koch don’t have much time left to see the payoff for their vast investments, to watch their 50-year wet dream come to full, final fruition — a one party government that protects their privileges from “majoritarian tyranny” in perpetuity. American fascists are in overdrive now, working overtime around the clock, as their figurehead battering ram reveals himself as more and more of a liability to their cause of a government permanently controlled by the 0.01%.
Cracks are appearing daily in the transactional far right coalition currently going by the idiotic name of MAGA. It seems, by The Wall Street Journal’s current treatment of Trump (Murdoch’s other main public opinion organ, FOX, continues to play both sides for now) that Trump may be close to the end of serving his purpose for the oligarchs’ cause. An additional data point: Murdoch has always personally hated Donald Trump, outside of Trump’s usefulness to Murdoch’s cause. So, of course, Trump sues Murdoch for truthful reporting he claims is a lie and demands Murdoch immediately appear to be grilled under oath.
During Trump’s six month snatch and grab crime spree, preemptively greenlighted by the best Supreme Court unlimited dark money could buy, POTUS has done such widespread damage, in so many ways, that his political brand is probably expendable now. His inept attempts to distance himself from his good friend Jeff, a guy who appears to have become a billionaire by blackmailing his rich, powerful libidinous guests with videos of them in compromising positions with 14 year-old girls, seem to be digging him deeper and deeper into a hole he can’t get out of. What are Charles Koch and Rupert to do at this point? They’re not going to be taken down by this ranting, revenge obsessed two year-old and his cult of violent dupes. He’s crashing the economy with his demented tariffs and other destructive and widely unpopular agency closures. First order of business: make sure citizens can’t vote! Then they can deal with the Trump problem.
I would think what the FBI would posthumously identify as a flamboyantly gay Venezuelan hairdresser, former prisoner illegally rendered to CECOT, the torture prison for terrorists, on a successful mission of revenge (turn off the cameras, let the Secret Service fall asleep, not notice the crowd pointing to the nut with a gun on a nearby rooftop), after posting communist messages online, would be the perfect patsy to place the quieter, less obtrusive, equally psychopathic JD Vance into the Oval Office to put the final touches on Koch’s Project 2025. Fascists are always killers who practice strategic murder along with indiscriminate killing — death threats and murder are integral to fascist rule. A dramatic political murder would leave the base in a much better mood than removing a cognitively failing popular president (among his 39%, anyway) using the 25th Amendment. Killing makes the most sense to transactional psychopaths.
In fact, Trump’s US, in all of our names, is currently engaged in mass killing that makes Israel’s horrific killing spree in Gaza look restrained. Project 2025, demanding the closure of USAID, has already killed hundreds of thousands of poor people worldwide. As of June 15, the death toll for adults and children from aid funding cuts topped 340,000 and came out to 103 deaths PER HOUR (per HOUR!) [1] (on pace for 14,000,000 total deaths, it is widely reported [2]) by denying food and medical aid to desperately poor HIV, TB, malaria and diarrhea patients and starving children and elderly around the world. The story of this deliberately caused (illegally so, but the president may commit unlimited crimes in office with impunity, see Trump v. US) senseless program of mass death, alone, should be disqualifying for an American presidential administration. Instead, because of the far right firehouse of mendacity, always spewing disinformation full-bore, it’s a rarely covered “externality” of Making America as Great Again as it was during previous Gilded Ages.
A successful takedown of numero uno, organized with discipline, distance and perfect deniability by the ruthless Koch network (and we still don’t know exactly who was involved in Lee Harvey Oswald’s successful hit on JFK, 62 years later), committed on live TV by a “gay illegal alien radical leftist” would also inflame the public and merit imposition of martial law. That would seem to be pretty timely about now, in light of the raging unpopularity of Project 2025 and the cascading follies of Trump.
What better than something dramatic. cinematic, galvanizing — riveting live reality TV with scripted commentary — to facilitate seizing absolute power once their popular front man has proved himself expendable and becomes an involuntary martyr to the cause? Killing is nothing for Nazi types, the goal of autocratic power and limitless wealth is worth every bit of the illegality and violence it takes to achieve. Would they rule out nuking an anarchist jurisdiction? Do you think these folks would hesitate for a minute if there was a chance it could cement them into permanent power?
When the ideologically pure 6-3 Supreme Court majority, bought and paid for by our oligarchs and groomed in the extreme right judicial fraternity, The Federalist Society, declared, before his reelection, that Trump could not be prosecuted for virtually any crime he committed while president the first time and had immunity for any crimes he might commit, no matter how many or how egregious, during his second term — unless they ruled otherwise (they haven’t), that was set and match for American democracy, unless we, the People, can stop these motherfuckers first. The Federalist Society majority he recently railed against has continued to rule that Trump can engage in illegal firings, illegal agency closures, illegal renderings of humans to foreign countries without due process and so forth until they get around to ruling on the merits of things like mass firings without cause that violate civil service law, usurping the powers reserved to Congress, and the constitutionality of the 14th amendment and birthright citizenship, in a year or two, or never.
July 2024’s 6-3 decision in the aptly named Trump v. US effectively made the next president, be it Trump, JD Vance, or Peter Thiel himself,the American dictator. In order install a dictator implementing wildly unpopular programs that benefit only the top of the top 1% while immiserating tens of millions of less fortunate Americans, the vote must be suppressed as much as possible. Fortunately for Koch and Rupert, Leonard Leo and their creepy allies, this is something the Supreme Court can adjust at any time by striking down all voting rights legislation, like it did in Shelby County v. Holder, disemboweling the Voting Rights Act reauthorized last time 98-0 in the Senate and then nullified by John Roberts and four Federalist Society Libertarians, based on a lie Roberts wrote into the heart of the ruling.
Here’s something to add a bit of steel to your spine here in the shadow of the swastika and urge you not to tune out, not to give up advocating for truth, justice and the American way (well, not all of the American way, obviously, but the high principles we are supposed to always be animated by in the world’s longest running experiment in democracy).
[1] The calculator shows us that’s 2,472 deaths a day, 17,304 a week, 74,160 in a thirty day month. WHAT THE FUCK?!!! Cutting a program that cost 0.3% of the federal budget to give billionaires a little more money they don’t need? This is what happens when AI is employed to make life and death decisions that benefit a select handful of citizens at the expense of everything else.
[2] from that article:
Projections suggest that ongoing deep funding cuts – combined with the potential dismantling of the agency – could result in more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million deaths among children younger than 5 years, the study in The Lancet said.
Three major examples of prosecutorial misconduct in his short six month tenure in Trump’s DOJ, including a contempt hearing delayed for months by two Trump judges on the DC Circuit appeals court (until their colleague can be appointed to a lifetime post on the federal bench), and the creepy Emil Bove, Trump’s modern day Roy Cohn, is put up for a party line vote without any further debate or questioning.
Voted in for life with a 50-49 mandate!
In his honor, here is Trump’s tribute poem to Bove, himself, the Deep State and Project 2025.
Here are a couple of major, and extremely urgent, real life stories that the corporate mass media (and, recall, corporations, as “persons” are psychopaths whose only goal is monetary profit) mentions marginally, if at all. The mass media covers politics as a good old fashioned horse race, with handicappers giving betting odds. The whole enterprise is a mind-numbing casino designed to fuel anxiety and generate advertising dollars. Meanwhile, in the board rooms, the human embodiments of corporate personhood who make decisions for their corporate alter egos openly bribe the most corrupt president in US history, pursuant to the plan to fully corporatize the US meticulously outlined in Charles Koch’s Project 2025.
To learn what’s really going on more of us need to become reliable citizen journalists, people so offended and alarmed by the march of fascism — masked goons squads on the streets obedient to no law, brutalizing law abiding immigrants, and the occasional Democratic elected official, to make their arbitrary arrest quotas of 3,000 per day, unrestrained by a spineless Congress passively watching laws unenforced, and court orders defied, overseen by an openly partisan DOJ leadership composed entirely of Trump’s recent team of criminal lawyers, criminal in the sense of having defended the boss in numerous criminal proceedings and criminal in their contempt for the law — that they follow stories more closely than corporate advertisers may be comfortable with.
ICE filling privatized for-profit detention centers (GEO Group’s former lobbyist, Pamela Jo Bondi, is on board with this highly lucrative plan) with law-abiding immigrants and American citizens with Hispanic surnames:
That tricked out used 747 that AG Pamela Jo Bondi’s former employers, Qatar, gifted to President Agent Orange? We haven’t heard a peep about it in the media for months. Did he accept the illegal emolument? We may never find out from “the most transparent administration in US history.” All media eyes are on the distraction du jour, are there videos of Trump cavorting with underaged girls at his former best friend Jeff’s place? Calling it a distraction is not to minimize the destruction done to countless young lives by these powerful, unaccountable pedophiles who anonymously participated in Epstein’s sex trafficking operation. Wait, what about the big, fat, beautiful plane Qatar is bribing Trump with? No news. Except, there was apparently almost a billion dollars to refurbish the plane, snuck into the Big, Hideous, mass murdering Bill that Trump twisted arms to ram through Congress 51-50, as reported in the NY Times… at the same time Trump denied $15M in FEMA aid to Maryland after a devastating storm, because they are not a “red” state, like the surrounding ones, all hit by the same storm, that got FEMA money.
Most of my once large family was killed by Nazis and their accomplices in 1943. I was raised in the shadow of this horrific fact, like Armenians, Native Americans, Darfuris, Hutus, Tutsis, Gazans, Ukrainians, descendants of enslaved Africans, the list is as long as history. The fuckers who create the conditions for genocide are always the same, they change hats, colors, languages but their deadly narrative is always identical — don’t look at what I am doing to YOU, go kill THEM!
It is frustrating as hell that there is no clear organized resistance for progressives, how hard it is to jump directly into the fight, the way there is on the right with a marching lockstep and a million opportunities to prove their devotion to the cause. We have no strong opposition party organizing resistance and making news every day by presenting facts in reaction to every single incoherent step toward fascism that Project 2025 inplements. The Democratic party urges us to donate and vote, and sometimes sign petitions, and to please, please donate to the important fight. The minority leader of the House of Representatives telling the American people that Democrats will address everything being done to our democracy “at a time and place of our choosing” come on, Hakeem Jeffries.
We can’t rely on mass media owned by psychopaths for accurate, actionable information about the world. It has a single minded agenda: to sell advertising to generate profits for shareholders. Billionaires all have the same bottom line — to make even more money. It’s a kind of sickness that has no cure. Corporate culture is its deadliest symptom. We are living in it. Keep your eyes open.
Subscribe to historian Heather Cox Richardson’s invaluable free daily newsletter, for starters; follow Robert Reich, Alison Gill, David Feldman, Katie Phang, Mehdi Hasan, Brian Tyler Cohen, Glenn Kirschner. Be alert for other trustworthy, non-corporate sources for what is actually going on during the American far-right’s determined lurch toward permanent one party rule, also known as totalitarianism.
Trump is as insane as the most powerful madmen of the 20th century, but he is only a battering ram for the interests of those much smarter and more calculating than him. The people calling the shots, even if equally mad, have been fine tuning their secretive plan for American fascism for decades, and financing it with unlimited dark money. Their goal is within reach, but for our resistance, and you can almost smell their frothy saliva at being so intoxicatingly close to their goal.
Also, never forget that mockery is what monsters fear more than anything. This short bit cracked me up. Laughing has never been more important than it is right now, my friends.
Emil Bove III, supremely loyal Trump criminal attorney, is, unless several Republicans find their spines, about to be confirmed for a lifetime seat on the federal appeals bench, with a party line majority of 51-50 or so. That would put the relentless, unprincipled 44 year-old Trump warrior, Trump’s present day Roy Cohn, in position to take ethically compromised Samuel Alito’s or Clarence Thomas’ smelly seat before the midterms, when he could be confirmed 51-50.
Bove is, not to put too fine a point on it, a straight up evil fuck. Significantly, Bove lacks candor. A lawyer, as an officer of the court, has a duty of candor to the court. Bove (as made explicit in a 2/5/25 memo from Pam Bondi the day after she was confirmed as AG, quoting Executive Order, Ending the Weaponization of The Federal Government (Jan. 20, 2025)) instructed DOJ subordinates to fuck candor to the fucking court if the court was not letting DOJ carry out the policies and directives of Mr. Trump.
A prevaricating, stonewalling lawyer is bad, unethical, an enabler of evil practices and subject to disbarment in the rare case where the stars line up correctly. If a dishonest lawyer works for the Department of Justice, it’s very dangerous, for justice and democracy. Imagine the harm a federal appeals judge without candor can do to the faithful administration of justice. Try to imagine a harm an unappealable Justice without candor, or the capacity for remorse (a feature of moral weaklings in a fascist regime) would not be capable of doing.
Here are a few highlights from the resignation letter of Trump appointee, acting US Attorney for SDNY, Danielle Sasson, on being instructed, by then acting AG Emil Bove, to conditionally drop the charges against NYC mayor Eric Adams in exchange for Adams’ agreement to allow ICE raids in New York City. The letter was sent to Pamela Jo Bondi, Attorney General of the United States. Bondi apparently accepted the resignation of this principled Trump appointee:
You and I have yet to meet, let alone discuss this case. But as you may know, I clerked for the Honorable J. Harvie Wilkinson III on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and for Justice Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court. Both men instilled in me a sense of duty to contribute to the public good and uphold the rule of law, and a commitment to reasoned and thorough analysis. I have always considered it my obligation to pursue justice impartially, without favor to the wealthy or those who occupy important public office, or harsher treatment for the less powerful.
I therefore deem it necessary to the faithful discharge of my duties to raise the concerns expressed in this letter with you and to request an opportunity to meet to discuss them further. I cannot fulfill my obligations, effectively lead my office in carrying out the Department’s priorities, or credibly represent the Government before the courts, if I seek to dismiss the Adams case on this record. . .
. . . Rather than be rewarded, Adams’s advocacy should be called out for what it is: an improper offer of immigration enforcement assistance in exchange for a dismissal of his case. Although Mr. Bove disclaimed any intention to exchange leniency in this case for Adams’s assistance in enforcing federal law,[1] that is the nature of the bargain laid bare in Mr. Bove’s memo. That is especially so given Mr. Bove’s comparison to the Bout prisoner exchange, which was quite expressly a quid pro quo, but one carried out by the White House, and not the prosecutors in charge of Bout’s case. . .
. . . Moreover, dismissing the case will amplify, rather than abate, concerns about weaponization of the Department. Despite Mr. Bove’s observation that the directive to dismiss the case has been reached without assessing the strength of the evidence against Adams, Adams has already seized on the memo to publicly assert that he is innocent and that the accusations against him were unsupported by the evidence and based only on “fanfare and sensational claims.” Confidence in the Department would best be restored by means well short of a dismissal. As you know, our office is prepared to seek a superseding indictment from a new grand jury under my leadership. We have proposed a superseding indictment that would add an obstruction conspiracy count based on evidence that Adams destroyed and instructed others to destroy evidence and provide false information to the FBI, and that would add further factual allegations regarding his participation in a fraudulent straw donor scheme. . .
. . . For the reasons explained above, I do not believe there are reasonable arguments in support of a Rule 48(a) motion to dismiss a case that is well supported by the evidence and the law. I understand that Mr. Bove disagrees, and I am mindful of your recent order reiterating prosecutors’ duty to make good-faith arguments in support of the Executive Branch’s positions. See Feb. 5, 2025 Mem. “General Policy Regarding Zealous Advocacy on Behalf of the United States.” But because I do not see any good-faith basis for the proposed position, I cannot make such arguments consistent with my duty of candor. N.Y.R.P.C. 3.3; id. cmt. 2 (“A lawyer acting as an advocate in an adjudicative proceeding has an obligation to present the client’s case with persuasive force. Performance of that duty while maintaining confidences of the client, however, is qualified by the advocate’s duty of candor to the tribunal.”). . .
. . . I remain baffled by the rushed and superficial process by which this decision was reached, in seeming collaboration with Adams’s counsel and without my direct input on the ultimate stated rationales for dismissal. Mr. Bove admonished me to be mindful of my obligation to zealously defend the interests of the United States and to advance good-faith arguments on behalf of the Administration. I hope you share my view that soliciting and considering the concerns of the U.S. Attorney overseeing the case serves rather than hinders that goal, and that we can find time to meet.
In the event you are unwilling to meet or to reconsider the directive in light of the problems raised by Mr. Bove’s memo, I am prepared to offer my resignation. It has been, and continues to be, my honor to serve as a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.
Here’s a short excerpt from Emil Bove’s acceptance of Danielle Sasson’s resignation letter (nicely annotated by the Grey Lady) in which he suspended lawyers working for Sasson and told her they’d all be investigated for disloyalty to the Boss and flagrant violation of Executive Order 14147.
On January 20, 2025, in Executive Order 14147, President Trump established the following policy: “It is the policy of the United States to identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the Federal Government related to the weaponization of law enforcement.” In a February 5, 2025 memorandum setting forth the Department’s general policy regarding zealous advocacy on behalf of the United States, the Attorney General stated:
[A]ny attorney who because of their personal political views or judgments declines to sign a brief or appear in court, refuses to advance good-faith arguments on behalf of the Administration, or otherwise delays or impedes the Department’s mission will be subject to discipline and potentially termination, consistent with applicable law.
Your Office was not exempted from the President’s policy or the Attorney General’s memorandum.
Here is a former AG Merrick Garland’s October 4, 2021 memorandum, duly rescinded by Pam Bondi in footnote two of the Führerwortes haben Gesetzeskraft [1] memo of 2/5/25. It is now officially and explicitly NOT the policy of the totally, like not-weaponized Trump DOJ that: the Department is steadfast in its commitment to protect all people in the United States from violence, threats of violence, and other forms of intimidation and harassment.
[1] Führerwortes haben Gesetzeskraft “the Leader’s words have the force of law”
There is a powerful documentary about Hannah Arendt, one of the twentieth century’s most fearless and original thinkers, currently available to watch for free (until July 26th) on recently knee-capped PBS. Arendt is a hero of mine, I’ve seen the film twice so far, looking forward to seeing it at least once more before it vanishes behind a pay wall (though we all need to kick in some cash for PBS now after Koch/Project 2025 defunded it in a treacherous 51-48 “recission”). Her insights about totalitarianism (it is driven by intense mass loneliness/hopelessness) could not be more relevant today. Here is the link.
Charles Koch, fossil fuel baron and America’s most successful and influential living Nazi/Libertarian, has a favorite think tank, The Institute for Humane Studies. You can imagine how humane those studies must be if second generation Nazi Charles Koch loves them. The name of that outfit’s got to be up there with Arbeit Macht Frei for cynically “puckish” repurposing of language. That was a Nazi specialty, coming up with comically misleading names for hideous things. They even had a word for their creative designations to hide their actual purposes, sprachregelung. This refers to strict rules for language to be used about sensitive subjects. References to Jews on cattle cars heading to death camps in the East — sonderbehandlung [1]“special handling”, kind of darkly funny, to Nazis, anyway.
While playing with language, a central feature of our Age of Incoherence and brute force (destroy meaning, destroy the possibility of negotiation), as the largely incoherent master of the “weave” likes to do (or at least, can’t help himself from doing) why not contest the legitimacy of the National Endowment for the Humanities?
You can easily spin it: that agency, by its very title, is false, divisive and insanely, destructively over-inclusive — there is only one humanity, not multiple humanities! To claim there is more than one humanity is sick, a liberal plot to groom children to become sexual slaves to powerful creeps like Jeffrey Epstein. On second thought, not like Epstein, forget about Epstein, Epstein killed himself, Bill Barr said so, Epstein’s so-called victims are all lying, and anyway, who cares? Those “victims”, like the one who got millions of dollars in a settlement and then killed herself? Why does someone get millions of dollars and then kill themselves? You have to question that, don’t you? May I answer a question with a question? Is that questionable? That’s a funny word, when you think about it, “questionable”, right? What makes something questionable? Just asking a question, right? Right? Am I right?
Anyway, looking for concrete information about this sudden, posthumous fuss about one disgusting, rich, well-connected dead pedophile, I started reading the Wikipedia article about Virginia Guiffre. She was the young woman (14) who worked at Mar-a-Lago and fell into Epstein’s orbit, eventually broke free, sued and won large settlements against Ghislaine Maxwell and Prince Andrew (a real royal prince of a man, apparently) and then, quite recently, committed suicide.
Did you know that all this was out in 2005?
In March 2005, while Giuffre was still establishing her family in Australia, the Palm Beach Police Department began investigating Epstein after a 14-year-old girl and her parents reported his behavior.[39] The girl described being recruited by a female classmate from her high school to give Epstein a massage at his mansion in exchange for money, wherein he subsequently molested her.[22][39] By October 2005, the police had a growing list of girls with similar claims of sexual abuse, statements from Epstein’s butlers corroborating their claims, and a search warrant for his Palm Beach property.[39]
Police detectives noted that the accusers all described a similar pattern[40] where Epstein would ask them to massage him and then sexually assault them during the massage. When police searched through Epstein’s trash, they found notes with the telephone numbers of the girls on them.[39] One of the girls was called by Epstein’s assistant while being questioned by police.[39]
Giuffre told the Miami Herald that she received a series of phone calls in rapid succession over three days in 2007. The first call was from Maxwell, then one day later came a call from Epstein, both of whom asked if she had spoken to authorities, followed by a third call from an FBI agent who stated that Giuffre had been identified as a victim during the first criminal case against Epstein.[41] She resisted speaking at length to the FBI until she was approached again about the matter in person, this time by the Australian Federal Police, six months after being contacted by phone.[41][42]
Photos, records and witnesses confirm large parts of Giuffre’s statements about her time with Epstein.[43][44]
Anyway, Epstein, because he was very rich and had many powerful friends (who he would NEVER think of blackmailing), got a sweetheart non-prosecution deal on his Florida state prosecution from then US Attorney for South Florida Alex Acosta. The state of Florida declined to prosecute, after monkey business during the investigation caused the lead law enforcement officer involved to turn it over to the FBI for federal investigation. The FBI referred it to Acosta, who, somehow, left the case in state court instead of federally prosecuting Epstein, as he should have, given the weight of the serious allegations against Epstein.
Wikipedia continues:
Lead police detective Joseph Recarey asserted that the state prosecutors were at first eager to pursue criminal action against Epstein, but that “everything took a turn” when lawyer Alan Dershowitz got involved.[45] Krischer then decided to take the unusual action of turning Epstein’s case over to a grand jury, and then presented testimony from only one girl. Epstein’s legal team aggressively sought concessions and prolonged the process when negotiating a plea deal with Acosta.[46] Acosta, who described the tactics of Epstein’s lawyers as a “year-long assault on the prosecution and prosecutors”, eventually agreed to sign a controversial non-prosecution agreement in 2008, which was done without informing the victims,[46] later determined to be in violation of the Crime Victims’ Rights Act.[47]
Reiter expressed that the state and federal prosecutors’ handling of the Epstein case amounted to “the worst failure of the criminal justice system” in modern times.[40]
Pursuant to the “sweetheart” non-prosecution agreement negotiated between Dershowitz and Acosta, Epstein was able to leave the minimum security prison whenever he needed a “massage”, after kind of pleading guilty only to not verifying the age of the young “prostitute” he hired that one time. Acosta wound up in Trump’s cabinet, until he had to resign in shame, and former Florida AG (2011-2019) Pam Bondi is currently Trump’s Attorney General, the one with only one client, the president.
What does Bondi have to do with it? Just asking.
As for Joe Biden, check this out!
Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on July 6, 2019, at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey[99] and charged with sex trafficking and sex trafficking conspiracy by prosecutors with the Public Corruption Unit of the Southern District of New York[100] In the indictment, Epstein was accused of soliciting massages from underage girls where the activities became increasingly sexual and then of enlisting the girls to recruit other underage victims for pay.[100] U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York appealed for other victims of Epstein to come forward.[100] The federal indictment also listed the key role of Epstein’s paid “employees and associates” responsible for scheduling victims.[100]
One month after his arrest, Epstein was found dead on August 10, 2019, after reportedly hanging himself in his Manhattan prison cell.[11][101]
On August 29, 2019, in the wake of Epstein’s death 19 days prior, the case against Epstein was closed after District Judge Richard Berman dismissed all sex trafficking charges.[102][103] Judge Berman expressed support for Epstein’s accusers, stating that he invited them to speak publicly at a hearing on August 27, 2019, out of “respect” for “the difficult decisions victims made to come forward”.[102] Giuffre was among the 16 women who spoke publicly at the hearing, which included Anouska De Georgiou, Sarah Ransome, Jennifer Araoz, Chauntae Davies, Courtney Wild, Theresa J. Helm, and Marijke Chartouni.[104] At the hearing, Giuffre stated, “The reckoning must not end. It must continue. He did not act alone. We the victims know that.” Prosecutors signaled that they would continue an investigation for potential co-conspirators.[103]
I know what you’ll say, Trump was president in 2019. That’s what they WANT YOU TO THINK!
Watch the Hannah Arendt documentary, please. It is, in part, an instruction manual for what we are up against at this perilous moment in history.
Trump’s hero, Andrew Jackson (from Trump’s first administration when he hung Old Hickory’s portrait in the Oval Office) was enraged by South Carolina’s attempted nullification of a tax bill Jackson had signed into law (South Carolina’s nullification decree was written by his vice president John C. Calhoun, “the Great Nullifier” [1]). Jackson, a famously violent psychopath, was mad enough to kill. Calhoun advanced the proposition that any state may nullify any federal law that is not in that state’s best interests. Jackson’s public response was to threaten to go to South Carolina and personally hang Calhoun. South Carolina was forced to back down and the federal government’s power was retained, for the moment. That Jackson hadn’t followed through on his threat to kill Calhoun was one of his greatest regrets as he was leaving office.
In our current Age of Incoherence, presidential nullification (if the president is Republican) — of Congressional budgets, of agencies created by Congress, of civil service and immigration law, of separation of powers, of long cherished norms and common decency — is fine, according to the Supreme Court.
It’s crucial for thinking people to understand this anti-democratic mechanism for centralizing all government control in a corporate CEO with no constraint from a board of directors and no input from stakeholders. Koch’s network of “think tanks” have coined the idiotic term Unitary Executive as shorthand for this kind of imperial presidency and it has long been their dream to have a supremely manipulable, brazen puppet in the Unitary Executive’s chair. The better to advance their long game agenda to destroy “majoritarian tyranny”.
Our democracy lurched to a jarring halt during the heat of the 2024 presidential campaign when six unelected members of an activist, far-right judicial fraternity decided Trump v. United States in Trump’s favor. The 6-3 Trump appointed majority (the result of a political deal he made with Leonard Leo/Charles Koch/Evangelical leaders, brokered by the far-right Council for National Policy) delayed hearing the case for months, putting the criminal case against Trump for his multi-pronged attempt to retain power after losing the 2020 election on ice until it was too late to prosecute him for crimes he definitely, and publicly, committed. Then they ruled in favor of Trump.
A president, they ruled, specifically for Trump’s benefit, may not be held accountable for criminal acts done while performing the core duties of his office. A convincing hypothetical for when this criminal act might be necessary was not provided. President Trump, they ruled, is presumptively immune from prosecution for all criminal acts done as president, and proof of criminal acts protected by his new “core duties” absolute immunity may not be offered in evidence in any other criminal case against him. The Fascist Six gave candidate/prospective president Trump, the proverbial carte blanche. For dessert they ruled that no presidential pardon may ever be challenged as corrupt or an abuse of power. How you feeling now, Ghislaine?
If it was illegal for Trump to create a government “department” (that power is reserved for Congress), appoint his top donor to lead it, illegally fire tens of thousands of protected civil servants without cause, and harvest sensitive, personal data on every American, see Trump v. US. If Musk’s actions were criminal, there is no questioning Trump’s pardon of Musk, if the president deems it advantageous to pardon his deeply creepy former bestie, see Trump v. US. If withholding the funds allocated by Congress, sole holders of the “power of the purse”, by the president was illegal, a flagrant violation of the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, see Trump v. US.
The 6-3 majority has increasing used the “Shadow Docket” (formerly reserved for extreme emergency applications) to rule in Trump’s favor whenever he needs a win. His winning percentage in those rulings is impressive, like .900. Shadow docket rulings are bare bones, no explanation for the ruling, no cases cited, no argument, the shadow docket ruling is a mere thumbs up or thumbs down.
Trump illegally fired tens of thousands of civil servants in violation of civil service law (arguably a crime for which he’s immune under Trump v. US.). A shadow docket ruling, in response to an “emergency” application by Trump — the emergency being Trump lost at the trial court and on appeal– put the question of these illegal firings on hold indefinitely. Those firings might be illegal, might be legal, but we’ll allow him to continue doing it until we have time to rule on the merits of the case.
Same deal for his day one executive order purporting to end birthright citizenship. The legal issue is not complex — the Constitution may not be changed by a scrawled Sharpie signature on an order written for the president by someone who hates immigrants and their children. But, for the meantime, pursuant to an unsigned one paragraph 6-3 shadow docket “decision”, taken without argument or any kind of briefing, the president may continue to act as though he has abolished birthright citizenship, until there can be a full argument on the merits. There is no argument on the merits that supports Trump’s illegal action, therefore, delay is the best the 6-3 majority can provide for Trump until an actual police state, and network of private “detention centers” can presumably be put into place.
The most recent 6-3 shadow docket ruling, in McMahon v. New York, allowing Trump to finish dismantling the Department of Education, is a grotesque example of Federalist Society methodology. You work backwards from the conclusion you want, focusing on technicalities, rather than the actual merits of the case or anything that would constitute a true emergency. Fill in the blanks as needed, ignore inconvenient facts, Supreme Court precedents, cite specious authorities (like the 17th century witch burner Alito cited over and over in Dobbs as the “authority” for criminalizing abortion rights [2]) glibly distinguish between substance and procedure and pull new “legal theories” out of far right “think tanks” who act as amicus curae, friends of the court.
Ignore law, and the Constitution, whenever necessary and create binding new law (see Trump v. US., Citizens United, Shelby County v. Holder, etc.) derived from the mystically divined “original intent” of the wealthy slaveholders, and other wealthy non-slaveholding white men, who compromised to come up with our constitution-based system of law. Ignore any constitutional amendments that were not part of the “original intent of the Framers” four score and seven years before the Civil War ended.
McMahon v. New York, the case brought in the name of Linda McMahon, the professional wrestling magnate/generous Trump donor who Trump appointed to dismantle the Department of Education, to allow her to continue gutting the Department of Education (most of its funding goes to poor and disabled students) was lost at the trial court level, where a hold on mass firings was imposed and that stay was affirmed by the appeals court. Time for an emergency application to the rocket docket!
Note the cunning of the unappealable Federalist Society Six. They decline to rule if the president has the power to order the gutting of a Congressionally authorized agency. They rule instead, in an unsigned one paragraph shadow docket ruling, that the practice may continue in the meantime, until they get a chance to hear arguments and rule on the merits of the case. Only Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent sheds any light into the dark, ominous shadow of the 6-3 ruling by the lockstep MAGA majority:
Justice Sonia Sotomayor did offer a sharp dissent, saying the decision is “indefensible” and that “it hands the Executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out. The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive, but either way the threat to our Constitution’s separation of powers is grave.”
In a press release, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said, “While today’s ruling is a significant win for students and families, it is a shame that the highest court in the land had to step in to allow President Trump to advance the reforms Americans elected him to deliver using the authorities granted to him by the U.S. Constitution.” source
Because Linda McMahon is a lying, unqualified political hack/Trump megadonor attached, remora-like, to Trump’s underside, let me give Justice Sotomayor the last word on this:
In her dissent, Sotomayor emphasized that, until this year, “Presidents have recognized they lack the unilateral authority to eradicate a Department that Congress has tasked with fulfilling statutory duties.” But President Donald Trump, she said, “has made clear that he intends to close the Department without Congress’s involvement.”
In its briefs at the Supreme Court, Sotomayor continued, “the Government does not defend the lawfulness of its actions” but instead “presents a grab bag of jurisdictional and remedial arguments to support its bid for emergency relief” – none of which, she said, “justifies this Court’s intervention.”
Delay is the primary legal weapon Trump has used throughout his long career as America’s most prolific vexatious litigant/serial scofflaw. If he can get a long enough delay, that generally amounts to a victory. He has evaded legal responsibility for an impressive list of immoral and criminal acts committed over the ugly course of his long, miserable, highly parasitic life.
Right before cynical, defiant, crying, conspiracy theory spouting, self-pitying right-wing partisan Boof Kavanaugh was confirmed for his lifetime seat on the Supreme Court, days after the American Jesuits called for him to gracefully step down in the face of credible allegations of his unfitness for the Supreme Court, I did a little research on the Jesuits. Kavanaugh had gone to an elite, very expensive, ivy league prep school down the street from my aunt and uncle’s place in Maryland. I’d passed its majestic gates and seen its enormous lawn many times on visits to my relatives. Georgetown Prep is run by Jesuits. I visited their website and learned that the heart of Jesuit teaching is that the godly in us, when it recognizes the godly in another person, is the basis for the deepest love and understanding between people. This is what the Jesuits teach their students, to reach for the godly in everyone you meet.
I mentioned this beautiful idea to a Catholic friend who grunted before gently castigating my naivete. “Read the history of the Jesuits,” he said. The Jesuits were founded in Spain as “defenders of the faith”. They were the fanatical lawyers for the Spanish Inquisition who used learned, convoluted Biblical reasoning to give the green light to Inquisitors to torture heretics in the name of Jesus Christ, essentially arguing that God and His son Jesus love the agonized screams of heretics as they are burned alive. And why wouldn’t They?
The Great Nullifier was dead. A man of enormous ability, Calhoun was, and perhaps still is, South Carolina’s most distinguished son. One cannot help but think that had he devoted his political skills to preserving the Union, rather than championing “state’s rights” and slavery, he would have realized his presidential ambitions and, vastly more important, spared his beloved South and the nation the horrors of civil war.
Sir Matthew Hale, a 17th-century jurist who conceived the notion that husbands can’t be prosecuted for raping their wives, who sentenced women to death as “witches,” and whose misogyny stood out even in his time.
gratuitousblahg 