Tag: trump

The president of the United States incited/commanded a mob to attack a joint session of Congress, in order to stop through murderous violence […] the legal installation of his successor. The president of the United States is quite literally guilty of felony murder, as well as sedition. He came close to getting his own vice president murdered in front of the man’s own family.

Paul Campos writing for Lawyers, Guns, and Money. Every time the microphone is turned on, this needs to be said by every Democrat. Every member of the GOP needs to be asked to acknowledge this as fact any time they are in public and every time forever from now on until Trump is removed from office, prosecuted, and if found guilty sentenced to jail. Any member of our government who denies these facts should be, at a minimum, censured. Insurrectionists like Cruz and Hawley (among many others) should be expelled and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

I am not interested in someone’s heartfelt account of their near-collision with actual integrity.

Charlie Pierce captures the essence of the whole Anonymous leader of The Resistance inside the White House thing. This is shameful, not brave or daring and should be characterized as such.

Yesterday, Trump tried to attack me at his campaign rally by saying I abandoned Pennsylvania. I’ve never forgotten where I came from. My family did have to leave Pennsylvania when I was 10 — we moved to Delaware where my Dad found a job that could provide for our family. Trump doesn’t understand the struggles working folks go through. He doesn’t understand what it’s like to worry you will lose the roof over your head. He doesn’t understand what it’s like to wonder if you’ll be able to put food on the table. And he doesn’t understand that the longest walk a parent can make is up a short flight of stairs to their child’s bedroom to say, honey, I’m sorry. We have to move. You can’t go back to your school. You won’t see your friends because Daddy or Mommy lost their job. My dad had to make that walk in Scranton, Pennsylvania. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized how hard it must have been for him.
But he was not alone. This story isn’t unique to the Bidens. Too many people around this country have had to make that walk.That’s why I’ve spent my whole career fighting — and I will continue to fight — like hell so that no one ever has to make that walk again.
If you’re with me, I hope you’ll join my campaign and chip in what you can

Joe Biden, responding to Trump and showing that, even though I view his 2020 prospects as pretty dim, he can still bring it. The man understands the power of a simple, yet visceral appeal that is clearly drawn from experience and not some focus grouped amalgam of a “formative experience from my recent book.”

I don’t have an attorney general. It’s very sad.

Donald Trump. I’m still waiting for a journalist, anyone with access really, to ask him “In the simplest terms, what do you think the job of the Attorney General of the United States is?” I think the answer would be quite illuminating.

You can’t plead Trump on this one, Republicans. You can’t say the base drank the Trump Kool Aid, and you had no choice but to submit. [With the indictment of  Maria Butina] we are staring at clear evidence that the Russians decided in or before March 2015, before Trump was remotely in the picture, that they were going to target your party, working through the NRA, and bank on your winning the 2016 election so that America would become more pro-Russian.You need to ask yourselves why they might have thought this.

Yes, yes; you opposed Putin on Crimea and Ukraine, and you attacked Barack Obama for not being tough enough with him. But even so, Republicans, the Kremlin felt it could play you. If I were you, I’d be asking myself: What was it they saw?

Maybe they saw what some of the rest of us here in America see. That you became, before the rise of Trump, a party devoid of any principle except the maintenance of power. Or that if they won over the NRA, they’d have you, because you’d never cross the NRA. Or maybe they saw that what really matters to you at the end of the day is that if Barack or Hillary was against it, you could be persuaded to be for it. And just maybe they peered a little deeper and saw the growth of the authoritarian turn of mind in your party’s base and liked what they saw.

That is what you became, even before Trump. And look what you’ve become now. Look what you’ve given us. Some of you howled in protest at what Trump did Monday in Helsinki (but it’s still worth noting that many did not). Well, it’s a little late now, isn’t it? You have placed an anti-patriot in the Oval Office. Exactly as the Russians bet you would. Never again browbeat us with your cheap shows of patriotism. You’re the un-Americans.

Michael Tomasky gets it exactly right and simultaneously explains why the vast majority of the GOP is was and forever will be in lock-step with Trump. All that “joking” between Ryan and McCarthy about being in the employ of Putin was not, in fact, joking. More like gallows humor. They knew. They know. They cannot change course. All they can do is hope that Trump goes away before the party burns to the ground in the inevitable blowback should the full truth ever emerge. I suspect that, come November, we’ll see some meaningful rank-breaking as individuals try to protect themselves and their careers. And then the dam will truly break. And then they all have to be tried and serve meaningful jail time. All of them.

Donald Trump is unequivocal proof that A’s hire B’s and B’s hire C’s, and Trump hires people without the judgment, qualifications, ethical foundations, and moral stature to run an underground bum-fighting operation. Scott Pruitt’s obvious money problems should have screamed out in any background check, to say nothing of a Senate confirmation hearing.

  Pruitt is a man, like so many of Trump’s claque of low-rent hoodlums, bus-station conmen, edge-case dead-enders, and caged-immigrant child porn aficionados, utterly unsuited to a role of public trust and responsibility.

Rick Wilson, the conservative who really gets Donald Trump. Just a perfect distillation of the current state of play.

The reason Trump won’t be [challenged in the primary] like Gerald Ford in 1976 or George H.W. Bush in 1992 is simple: Trump unquestionably represents what Republicanism is at this moment – certainly more than any potential challenger. The GOP is a resentment-driven party, and there’s no potential challenger who taps into that anger the way Trump does. There’s no contest.

Ford and Poppy Bush didn’t Unquestionably represent their party. They were the last two Republican presidents with greater ties to the GOP establishment than to the newer coalition of religious conservatives and resentment-driven suburban and exurban whites. It’s no surprised that they faced reelection challenges from within the party.

Maybe Trump’s voters will be disillusioned with the direction of the country in a couple of years, especially if the economy cools off or collapses (though nothing Robert Mueller is investigating will bother them) – but it’s likely that even an economic downturn won’t faze them. George W. Bush retained considerable support within his party even in the waning days of his presidency, when nearly everyone else in America had abandoned him, because he wouldn’t give up on the war, a stance GOP voters cheered because it infuriated liberals. Trump will be in a similar position in two years: We’ll still hate him, so Republican voters will continue to embrace him.

Steve M. provides some trenchant analysis over at No More Mister Nice Blog. Nothing to add to this, really, other than “Yep.”

As a result of the fact that he vacations at Mar-a-Lago and his New Jersey golf club, demands protection for his adult children, and had his wife and youngest son stay in New York for the first five months of his presidency, Donald Trump has added $120 million to the annual cost of providing protection for the president compared with what a normal president would require. The New York Times reported that he pledged to contribute 0.8 percent of this amount ($1 million) to help the victims of Hurricane Harvey. If he follows through on this pledge, it means the public will only be down $119.0 million ($119.6 million, after taking account of the tax deduction).

Dean Baker, getting it right as usual. Even with all that taken as fact, Trump will inevitably still try to wriggle out of actually paying, try to run it out of campaign or “charity” funds. At the very least, can we hold him to spending his own goddamned money on this, even if he is making said money by renting golf carts to the Secret Service? Is that too much to ask?