And Donald Trump, a man of fundamental incoherence, is the perfect point man to effortlessly make that point over and over again. Below Lawrence O’Donnell lays it out with characteristic intelligence and thoroughness.
Trump: “We may have casualties, that often happens in war.” Often, yes, so true, and shrewdly observed, war kills and maims, very, very often.
And this recent tour de force of presidential incoherence, which truly never gets old:
Legal arguments not yet articulated or vetted, but irrefutable. No need for Congress, or hostile voters with TDS, I alone will ensure that I remain irrefutable. And be honest, those drapes I picked out are to die for, as is often necessary in a room done up like one of Saddam’s castles.
Good night, boys and girls, don’t let the Nazis bite.
I saw a video last night from Angela at Parkrose Permaculture in which she reminded viewers that an executive order is not a law or a royal decree. Executive orders that are illegal, and most of Trump’s have been, can be challenged in court and ruled unconstitutional, as many of Trump’s have. But what jumped out at me was the reporting she played that kept saying that Trump is “reviewing” a draft secret executive order. He’s considering it. But who wrote the executive order for his review and consideration?
My money is on the cabal of fascist billionaires who put him back in the Oval Office, using both hook and crook. These amoral organisms, focused solely on increasing their already obscene wealth and profiting handsomely off every economic disaster, are intent on a creating a new feudalism where most of the work is done by unpaid robots and where all non-billionaire humans are dependent on their mercy. Billionaires have shown over and over that they have very limited mercy for anyone but themselves.
Bear in mind that Trump’s DOJ (literally, since he consistently lied that Biden weaponized his DOJ, he considers himself fully entitled to use it as his personal Roy Cohn) has sued 30 states for their detailed voter rolls, the better to identify and disenfranchise anyone who voted against MAGA in the past, lives in certain zip codes, or who can be identified as Black, Hispanic, young, female, Asian, a voter in Democratic primaries, etc. Since the five-four 2010 decision in Citizens United, when unlimited campaign contributions from billionaires and corporate “persons” became unquestionable “free speech”, these sick bastards have spent literally thousands of millions of dollars getting their preferred candidates into power.
Meanwhile, wielding his dependable high-powered fire hose of diarrhea, and spraying it in every direction at once, Trump, acting unilaterally, at the prodding of Netanyahu, Kushner and Witkoff, and on behalf of the monetary interests of these same obscenely wealthy monsters, sent US forces to attack Iran and destabilize the Middle East. The Iranian head of state has been killed by either the US or Israel. USA! USA!!! Or should I say, TRUMP! TRUMP!!!!.
So today we don’t see stories on the front page about the 13 year-old interviewed by the FBI four times about Trump forcing sex on her and smacking her around when she tried to resist. Once a rapist, always a rapist, most would say. If you can do whatever you want to girls and women, because you’re an aggressively litigious star with a hundred white-shoed pit bull lawyers on staff, you’re golden. You can do whatever you want to the people who donated to your charity, the suckers who attended your “university”, that multitude who died of COVID because you weaponized the pandemic, the millions of working class voters you suckered into voting for you. The question is — why not do it to THE WHOLE WORLD? Why wouldn’t you, if you were Trumpie?
Trump’s favorite poem is The Snake. When someone recites their favorite poem over and over, believe it.
Freedom is safety from domination by willful, arbitrary state powers, or the violence of mobs, under the protection of law. Fascism is obedience to the will of willful, arbitrary state powers. The Leader’s word, truthful or blatantly false, is the law. Fascists demand obedience to the will of the infallible Leader or death. Death in service to the infallible Leader is seen as the greatest show of patriotism in a fascist regime. Killing to enforce the will of the infallible Leader is the sacred duty of the duped faithful. The ultimate weapon of fascists is their ability to convince their citizens to kill all dangerous, sick, hated, inhuman enemies, to unleash the faithful and obedient on everyone else.
Stephen Miller, American Nazi, is the worst of the worst. Born Jewish, to a family that escaped Nazi persecution and found refuge in the U.S., he has embraced a murderous ideology of force based, as all such ideologies, on a series of hate-inspiring lies. Miller himself is a prolific liar and perhaps the most adept Trump whisperer in history. There is nothing worse than a Jewish Nazi, from my perspective as a Jew with zero tolerance for Nazi behavior, especially when done by those who call themselves Jews. I compare Miller to Black Klansman Clarence Thomas, a “conservative” Black man who shows no hesitation to consistently delight white racists with his racist rulings.
These Nazis, our own homegrown Nazis, have already shown they will fully support those who murder protesters who hurt their delicate feelings. When their agents shoot a compliant woman in the face, or kill a man pinned to the ground with multiple gunshots into his back, they instantly announce that these people were terrorists who got what they deserved. When videos emerge showing that these claims are blatant lies (like the lie that Derek Chauvin was not deliberately killing a restrained, unarmed man suspected of passing a counterfeit $20 bill), they shift the story slightly, without retracting the lie.
When ICE and CBP repeatedly violate the Fourth Amendment by breaking down doors without a warrant, and send the people they capture to concentration camps a thousand miles away, the constitutionality of this becomes a matter for the Supreme Court to ponder for months or years, since there is, in the mind of the majority, no REAL emergency involved. When Trump petitions them for an emergency ruling to allow him to continue violating the law, they jump to give him enough rope to hang his enemies until they can rule on the merits. People die while the Federalist Society Six jumps through hoops to accommodate the deranged, fully transactional avatar of their merciless ideology.
Recall Trump’s murderous zeal, during his rage after losing the 2020 election, to execute (with the zealous help of religious Catholic fascist Bill Barr) as many federal death row prisoners as possible before he was dragged out of the White House kicking, screaming and stealing classified documents, two weeks after his riot at the Capitol to overturn the election results. How many innocent South Americans on small boats did he have Hegseth murder in international waters far from our shores? How many have died, and continue to die, in ICE detention here in the United States of America, in our lucrative, privately owned concentration camp system? How many Ukrainians and Palestinians have died while Trump ridiculously postures on the international stage and instructs his DOJ to prosecute his enemies here in America? The only death that means anything to Trump and his power-drunk ilk are their own deaths. Killing others is the ultimate high for these Nazi fucks.
Heather Cox Richardson’s report from last night contains this account of the depraved state murder of a highly vulnerable political refugee legally in the United States. Makes me wanna holler.
But the timing of the Republicans’ story [Stephen Miller on how Democrats hate the US and love illegal aliens — ed] coincided with the horrific story that on February 19, Border Patrol agents had dropped Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a nearly blind legal refugee from genocide in Myanmar who spoke no English and could not read, write, or use electronic devices, miles from his home in Buffalo, New York. They did not notify either his lawyer or his family that he had been dropped off, and when his family filed a missing persons case, the police believed Shah Alam was with Border Patrol and closed the file. He was found dead on the street on February 24.
A spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of Border Patrol, said: “Border Patrol agents offered him a courtesy ride, which he chose to accept to a coffee shop, determined to be a warm, safe location near his last known address, rather than be released directly from the Border Patrol station. He showed no signs of distress, mobility issues or disabilities requiring special assistance.”source
Of course he showed no signs of distress, mobility issues or a need for special assistance. He was inhuman, couldn’t speak a recognizable language, he was a dead man walking — into the Arctic winter of Buffalo, New York. Nothing to see here.
I wonder if the NY Times put this sickening story on their front page. Hey, what do you know? Here’s a gift link to the article, headlined:
Border Patrol Left a Refugee at a Cafe. Days Later, He Was Found Dead.
The disabled man had been released from jail when federal officers showed up and drove him to a coffee shop. His family searched for him for days.
Bad timing, Mr. Shah Alam, coming here on the eve of weaponized Christ’s birth, less than a year before the suspicious reelection of America’s Dictator on Day One…
By the way, the DOJ disabled the search function on their public Epstein Transparency Act database. Nothing to see here!
I’d estimate that most people in the US and worldwide believe that Trump would have punched a fourteen year-old who bit him when he proffered his dick for a blowjob. He’d punched his first wife, Ivana, before raping her, then paying her to recant the story, after all. He has a foul temper, as everyone knows. The FBI talked to this girl on four separate occasions, indicating they found her complaint credible (records of all these interviews put into a black hole by Bondi, Blanche and Patel, to protect the real victim), but there’s no reason to think THAT SHE WASN’T LYING BECAUSE SHE’S A PEDOPHILE HERSELF WHO USED A TIME MACHINE TO GO BACK AND MOLEST AN INNOCENT FOUR YEAR-OLD DONALD TRUMP TO TRY TO PREVENT THE DOW FROM REACHING $50,000!!!!!
Murdered American citizens, asylum seekers dead in US custody, a dead child here and there — all immediately attacked for causing their own deaths by being the worst of the worst!
Fascism smells the same every place it takes root. If the smell had a face, it would be Stephen Miller’s.
The flailing president, sinking to a historic low in the polls and recently “betrayed” by members of a partisan judicial fraternity that he appointed, is railing against — among many other things — mail-in voting. He wants to ban it, has threatened to do so with a stroke of the Sharpie at the bottom of a royal decree. He claims, without evidence, that mail-in voting is ripe for cheating, as the corrupt Bill Barr also insisted, on national TV, in the lead-up to the election his boss would insist was stolen from him (Barr later said under oath that he told Trump the election fraud claim was “bullshit”). The entire idea of widespread voter fraud, of any kind, is definitively debunked by the far right Heritage Foundation’s own voter fraud database.
I was super concerned, in the lead up to the 2024 election, that Trump megadonor, pugnacious Postmaster Louis DeJoy, had the motive and the means, the lack of scruples and the demonstrated track record of slowing mail delivery, to not deliver ballots from selected zip codes. Aided by, as far as I could tell, the unprincipled “independent” Kyrsten Sinema, the Postal Board of Governor nominees that could have removed DeJoy were permanently stuck in committee as the swing vote, Sinema, kept the status quo in place. There was no reporting on this deadlock.
I read somewhere recently that mail in voting in Fulton County decreased from 29% of votes cast in 2020 to 5% in 2024. This would support my theory that MAGA man was on the job in Fulton County, Georgia, and other key counties nationwide, for his corrupt buddy in 2024, the guy who never met Jeffrey Epstein, the guy who told Florida officials, after Epstein’s arrest, that Ghislaine Maxwell was evil.
I did a search for percentage of votes by mail in Fulton County, 2020 vs. 2024. Elon Musk/Peter Thiel/Mark Zuckerberg/Jeff Bezos’s AI belched out this non-answer, the first search result that always comes up, a dubious one at best. You can type -AI at the end of your search term and sometimes avoid this Artificial Idiocy bullshit with its disclaimer that it might be totally false.
Auto-generated, may contain inaccuracies, or outright falsehoods. Bots programmed by those who work for psychopathic oligarchs do not necessarily reflect the views of the transactional oligarchs who had them programmed. Tried doing ten or twenty more searches, for potentially better results.
Georgiavotes.com has this number for early voting in 2020, but nothing for 2024:
Early Voters (Fulton County)
318,565 (71.4%) of 2024 general election early voters voted early in the 2020 general
It has been virtually impossible to compare mail-in ballots from 2020 and 2024. I haven’t been able to verify the drop from 29% to 5% mail-in ballots in Fulton County with numerous searches. Google directs me to a string of articles alleging (without evidence) massive voter fraud, many involving a purported 315,000 votes, in Fulton County in 2020 and other claims related to Trump’s ongoing propaganda war against mail-in and Black, and female, voting. There were also numerous hits, totally unrelated to my search, about the seizure of 2020 ballots in Fulton County, based on an affidavit that did not make out probable cause for a search and seizure.
After a frustrating amount of dead end searches, these, from Georgiavotes.com, seem to confirm the steep decline in mail-in voting from 2020 to 2024. I have to think pugnacious weasel DeJoy played his part, as did RAGA, the Republican Attorneys General Association.
The numbers, in each case, seem to have been posted during the election. But note that almost three times as many people (451,520) requested ballots in 2024 as in 2020 (166,603), if the very specific numbers on Georgiavotes.com are to be believed. Note also, the 451,000 early ballots requested in 2024 doesn’t specify how many were mail-in. It’s not like I’ve been able to verify any of this anywhere else. Here is Louis DeJoy’s public relations press release, why would he lie?
The determined squids of the right have spread ink, mud and shit in the water, nothing to see here! Frustrating that straightforward searches no longer yield relevant search results. Place AI in charge of internet searches and you can cook the information people get to see. AI, of course, can be programmed to do whatever its masters need. The horror. Here’s another piece of random data I was able to glean somewhere:
If you have any questions about the United States Postal Service’s commitment to the timely delivery of every mail-in ballot, this should reassure you.
Meanwhile, call your senators, especially if they are Republicans, and tell them to vote no on the SAVE MAGA Act. The Senate switchboard number is (202) 224-3121.
CEO of “the most transparent administration” in US history
Liz Oyer, the former DOJ Pardon Attorney (until Trump 2.0 began and all pardons became purely transactional) lays out the real intent of the SAVE Act. Not only is it designed to make it harder for Democrats to vote, its real purpose is to create complete chaos ahead of the midterm elections. Liz does an excellent job laying out the method and desired effects of this heavy handed Nazi attempt to fully Nazify our United States in the midterm elections. This proposed law (which does not yet have support in the senate to become law) will be particularly important in the disobedient, so-called Blue States, the places Bill Barr dubbed “Anarchist Jurisdictions” under Trump’s first wild spin as president. They can’t afford another Minneapolis!
Generally a sweeping nationwide change in laws takes a year or more to efficiently roll out, but efficiency is clearly not the goal here. Elon Musk and Peter Thiel (and Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc.) don’t have that long, they’ve got to get this done chop chop, with the zeal of billionaire “disrupters” who break the thing into too many parts to ever put back together before asking permission, or getting sued and stopped by courts enforcing the law.
The business model of disrupters is also the business model of MAGA. Break things you hate, smash them to smithereens, like Trump Postmaster Louis DeJoy did by disassembling gigantic mail sorting machines in “Blue” cities, delaying mail delivery and so on, and let your accursed enemies try to stop you in court. Let them keep trying this defensive tactic after you’ve ramped up to targeting them, killing them (when needed) and shoving them into concentration camps a thousand miles from their homes.
Not losing in 2026 is a TOP priority for the VERY STABLE GENIUS and his united billionaire benefactors/beneficiaries, if there is going to be a country anymore! So much the better if they are able to bring on the chaos in time to disrupt the 2026 elections, eh, Susan Collins (an announced “yay” for the SAVE MAGA Act in the Senate)?
There is only one purpose to this proposed legislation which will make it harder for tens of millions to vote in the upcoming midterm elections — to save MAGA. The Senate would have to change the filibuster rules to pass this Jim Crow 2.0 bill with 54 votes. If we want to preserve our experiment in democracy, we have to keep Democratic senators honest, and a few set to retire Republican senators, (and good luck with some of these mf’s).
For future reference (when Congress returns from yet another break during yet another Trump shutdown — this time only TSA, FEMA, the Coast Guard and a few other agencies within DHS will lose funding, ICE and CBP are fully funded through the Big, Gorgeous, Junior High School Girl Bill)
The U.S. Senate switchboard is (202) 224-3121. Ask to be connected to your senators’ offices.
Update:
The Capitol emptied out on Thursday, a full day before the midnight Friday deadline for funding the Department of Homeland Security. Lawmakers who were deadlocked over new restrictions on immigration officers jetted off to Munich for a security conference or headed home for a weeklong recess, seemingly unconcerned with the looming closure. It was a jarring change from the past, when lawmakers were reluctant to seem like they were giving up for even a moment before time ran out for a deal.
“We are not even going to pretend that we are trying to figure it out,” said Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, one of those bound for Germany. “It doesn’t look great.”
The blasé attitude reflected a conviction on the part of both parties that they were in the stronger political position in this round of the shutdown wars. (source, NY Times)
Brian continues on the fake fraud behind the latest, and perhaps most brazen, Republican voter suppression effort:
Levitt’s study found exactly no instances of a noncitizen knowingly or purposefully voting illegally. And why would they? The penalty is deportation.
Trump’s own investigation into illegal voting by migrants turned up not one shred of evidence of widespread fraud.
Out of 49.5 million voter registrations checked, 0.02% of the names were investigated as possible registered noncitizens. There was no evidence that any of those people had actually voted. A serious blow to Trump’s unfounded hysteria over droves of illegal voters sandbagging elections in favor of Democrats.
for more details on Jim Crow 2.0, a federal voter suppression law that will target women, young people, college students, people of color, people with various accents, people with physical disabilities, (while allowing Trump’s administration to access a national database voter information more powerful than what his then campaign manager Paul Manafort gave Russian agent Konstantin Kilimnik during the 2016 “Russia Hoax”) here’s Brian Tyler Cohen’s full report on this desperate fascist move
In a desperate move to disenfranchise millions of voters ahead of a midterm election MAGA is expected to lose badly, and to foster the election rigging myth of widespread voter fraud, the MAGA House passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act by a typical 218-213 margin (reflective of their mandate) . Like all of Trump’s other bogus national emergencies, the SAVE Act is designed to solve a crisis that doesn’t exist. SAVE is a transparent pile of lies designed to advance the organized right-wing’s consolidation of one party rule.
We come to this ugly precipice because our country was unable to punish a president who lost an election, hatched a multipart scheme to overturn the election, and finally urged a violent, armed crowd to march to the Capitol (without a permit, which would have lined the route with police) to confront a joint session of Congress and “fight like hell or you won’t have a country anymore” We all know the story. Here are a few details about the bill which must now go through the Senate and will have a hard time getting 60 votes.
President Trump has called on Republicans to support the legislation, saying “we won’t have a country any longer” [sound familiar? — ed] if it’s not enacted. Mr. Trump has said it’s essential that all voters show identification and proof of citizenship. But he’s also gone a step further and demanded an end to mail-in ballots, with some exceptions.CBS news
Heather Cos Richardson:
The Republicans are also trying to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act, which would require a document proving citizenship in order to register to vote and in order to vote. Only Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Vermont, and Washington have “enhanced” driver’s licenses that would meet the requirement. In all other states, voters would need either a passport or a birth certificate.
Half of Americans don’t have a passport, others don’t have their birth certificates, and the names of married women who took their husband’s last name and transgender Americans would not match their birth certificates. All of these groups tend to vote for Democrats. The bill also calls for state officials to purge voter rolls. The Brennan Center for Justice found that if the measure passes, about 21 million Americans could lose their votes.
The goals of the far-right — no tax on the super-wealthy, taxpayer subsidies for lucrative corporations, cutting government funding for social programs, ending regulations designed to lessen pollution, ending public education , enabling government agents, armed for an insurrection, to conduct warrantless searches and make arbitrary arrests of non-criminals that are difficult and expensive to contest in court, etc. — are very unpopular. These “policies” are increasingly unpopular even among those who voted for President Project 2025.
So unpopular that Gallup will stop conducting presidential popularity polls (they’ve been doing it for 88 years, but are taking no chances with this vindictive madman at the wheel). A police state to “own the libs,” and kill or detain citizens with complete impunity, doesn’t seem to be all it was cracked up to be for screwed working people who were lied to extravagantly in exchange for their MAGA votes. Like much of the MAGA agenda, it’s based on easily demonstrable lies, endlessly repeated by right-wing “influencers” and transactional media conglomerates.
For more than a decade amid Republican bluster about widespread noncitizen voting, the Heritage Foundation has been investigating and documenting such cases. And according to its own dataset, from 1982 to 2025 there have been only 99 documented cases of noncitizens voting in U.S. elections.
What’s the world coming to when you have a billionaire crony buy a major news network, appoint a reliable political ally as news editor-in-chief, and they still report this kind of ugly, critical shit about you? From Heather Cox Richardson:
Daniel Klaidman, Michael Kaplan, and Matt Gutman of CBS News reported that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit after a federal raid on a popular horse racing venue in Wilder, Idaho, led to the detention of 105 undocumented immigrants as well as the temporary detention of 375 U.S. citizens or lawful residents. Only five arrests ended in criminal charges, all for unlicensed gambling.
Answering allegations that agents had used zip ties on children, both the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) field office in Boise and Homeland Security spokesperson Trisha McLaughlin flatly denied the allegations. “ICE didn’t zip tie, restrain, or arrest any children,” she said. “ICE does not zip tie or handcuff children. This is the kind of garbage rhetoric contributing to our officers facing a 1,300% increase in assaults against them and an 8,000% increase in death threats.” But after photographic evidence of zip-tie bruises on a 14-year-old female U.S. citizen as well as personal testimony, the FBI changed their assertion to say no “young” children were zip-tied.
An 8,000% increase in “death threats” against Trump’s violent, armed for insurrection Ku Klux Klan brigades? That’s almost as high as the 9,000% reduction in my drug prices under the most transparent, generous and loving president in world history. All that cash they send me every month is making me not care so much about civil liberties anymore, as long as those fat checks keep rolling in. Still, some part of me still notices there’s not a peep in the corporate media, or anywhere else, really, about the steady number of actual military veterans who kill themselves every day in the US. It adds up to around 6,000 a year.
More than 6,000 veterans have died by suicide each year since 2001, with the figure peaking in 2018 at 6,738 deaths. The slight decrease in 2023 follows the downward trend since 2018. source
Thank you for your service, loser.
As for actual total losers, nobody is reporting how many hundreds of thousands of poor, “nonwhite” children Elon and Donald continue to gleefully kill by slashing USAID funding and putting Little Marco in charge of closing it down completely. The shameful, quiet mass slaughter was discussed in the press briefly after The Lancet’s recently produced report projecting more than twenty million additional deaths (on top of the between 500,000 and 1,000,000 already dead in 2025) that will occur in the next four years. Here’s Little Marco, for the defense of Ayn Rand’s strong-get-to-fuck-the-weak view of the world:
Asked about the study, a senior US State Department Official called The Lancet a “failed journal” and said: “Some recent ‘studies’ are rooted in outdated thinking, insisting that the old and inefficient global development system is the only solution to human suffering. This is simply not true.”
“Rather than helping recipient countries help themselves, the old system created a global culture of dependency, compounded by significant inefficiency and waste. This has prompted development donors everywhere – not just the United States – to reconsider their approach to foreign aid,” the senior official added. Last July, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the new approach as “prioritizing trade over aid, opportunity over dependency, and investment over assistance.” source
And finally, the latest in Epstein/Trump news, Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) with a nice summary of the facts of the coverup and the always outraged, tantrum pitching Pam Bondi burning him for blasphemy. She had previously screamed at lawyer and constitutional scholar Jamie Raskin (D-Md) ” ‘You don’t tell me anything, you washed up loser! You’re not even a lawyer!” You can google that yourself, Pam.
gratuitousblahg 