This seems the stuff of alternative realities. But it isn’t.
Former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday invoked Vladimir V. Putin to support his case that the four criminal indictments he is facing are political payback, quoting the Russian president saying that the charges undercut the argument that the United States is an example of democracy for the world.
Mr. Trump made the comment during a campaign speech in Durham, N.H., in which he focused on pocketbook concerns of voters, hammered the state’s Republican governor, who endorsed one of his rivals, mocked his lower-polling competitors for not performing better and painted a dystopian vision of a country in “hell” under his successor, President Biden.
“Even Vladimir Putin says that Biden’s — and this is a quote — politically motivated persecution of his political rival is very good for Russia, because it shows the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others about democracy,” Mr. Trump said as he railed against the 91 criminal charges he is facing, citing Mr. Putin speaking in September.
Mr. Trump added: “So, you know, we talk about democracy, but the whole world is watching the persecution of a political opponent that’s kicking his ass. It’s an amazing thing. And they’re all laughing at us.”
If we could go back in time about 60 years and tell Americans that some day the presumed Republiccan presidential nominee would not only be under several criminal indictments, he’d be quoting (with approval) a Russian dictator and slamming American democracy, and that this guy could possibly win — they wouldn’t believe us. It’s like the Republican base has become the mirror opposite of what Republicans used to be.
CNN added a bit to it: ““Joe Biden is a threat to democracy. He’s a threat,” he told supporters at a rally in Durham, New Hampshire.” Joe Biden called him a threat to demoracy, so he has to return the favor. It’s the “I’m not the puppet. You’re the puppet” claim he threw at Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Trump also loves Viktor Orban, of course.
Republican polling leader Donald Trump approvingly quoted autocrats Vladimir Putin of Russia and Viktor Orban of Hungary, part of an ongoing effort to deflect from his criminal prosecutions and spin alarms about eroding democracy against President Biden. …
… He went on to align himself with Orban, the Hungarian prime minister who has amassed functionally autocratic power through controlling the media and changing the country’s constitution. Orban has presented his leadership as a model of an “illiberal” state and has opposed immigration for leading to “mixed race” Europeans. Democratic world leaders have sought to isolate Orban for eroding civil liberties and bolstering ties with Putin.
But Trump called him “highly respected” and welcomed his praise as “the man who can save the Western world.”
CNN reported that Trump also called North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “very nice.” Human rights groups might disagree.
This is from the NY Times:
At the rally on Saturday, a relatively new slogan for his campaign — “Better Off With Trump” — was displayed on a screen over Mr. Trump’s head as he stood onstage before a packed crowd at the Whittemore Center at the University of New Hampshire. In his speech, Mr. Trump criticized Mr. Biden’s economic policies, and then broadly said the president had contributed to the degradation of Americans’ everyday lives.
“We’re going to bring our country back from hell. It’s in hell,” Mr. Trump said. He cited statistics like mortgage rates and attacked Mr. Biden’s energy policies. He also revived a widely condemned comment about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country,” noting that immigrants are coming not just from South America but also Africa and Asia. He did not mention Europe.
Who is buying this stuff? Racists, obviously. But there was a time our national leaders liked to say things like “We stand, as we have always stood from our earliest beginnings, for the independence and equality of all nations. This nation was born of revolution and raised in freedom. And we do not intend to leave an open road for despotism.” (John Kennedy, 1961) Trump is an open road to despotism. A whole lot of Americans are, apparently, completely deaf to this.
And then there are the evangelicals. I’ve been reading the book The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory by Tim Alberta. I’m about a third of the way through it. It’s a survey of how screwed up evangelicalism in the U.S. is right now. Alberta is himself a sincere evangelical. I’d call him an old-school, traditional sort of evangelical. He is genuinely appalled at Trump support among evangelicals and the rest of the crap that’s coming out of evangelical churches. One of the points he makes is that a lot of these people falling into rabbit holes of crazy are genuinely convinced that the “secular left” is out to get them and destroy Christianity. Certainly a lot of people are (understandably) hostile to organized religion these days, but I’m not seeing calls for violence against Christians.
And, apparently, it’s just American evangelicals who are crazy. Evangelicals in Europe and Australia are still normal. So what’s causing the crazy is something happening here.
At one point a bunch of people were rushing to buy some dreadful pro-Christian nationalist book, saying we’d better get it now, because the secular left will somehow round up all the copies and burn them. They really believe this. And yes, I called it a dreadful book, but burning books doesn’t make ignorance go away.
By the same token, a lot of the racists must really believe the Great Replacement Theory, that “the left” somehow wants to replace white people with non-white people. So book burning (by them) is okay; indiscriminate killing of nonwhite people is excusable. They have given themselves permission to do unto others what they believe someone wants to do unto them. Except they are imagining things.
Conservatives have lost the culture war, says David Atkins. Here’s just some of his argument:
Contrary to the right-wing insistence that “woke goes broke,” the biggest movie of the year was Barbie, a stridently and subversively feminist juggernaut that raked in over $1.36 billion at the global box office. Oppenheimer, a nuanced meditation on the creation and use of the American nuclear bomb, followed closely behind with just under $1 billion in global ticket sales and broke box office records for a biopic. Disney’s live-action version of The Little Mermaid, which endured heavily racist conservative attacks for featuring a Black lead, hauled in $569 million globally and broke streaming records on streaming service Disney+.
Meanwhile, few people in history have lost as much money as quickly as Elon Musk has since taking over Twitter (now X). After endorsing Biden in 2020, Musk has become a right-wing icon by promoting homophobic, transphobic, racist, and anti-Semitic positions while advocating far-right conspiracy theories all the time feigning to be a zealous free speech advocate even as he caves to authoritarians. He bought Twitter largely because he was unhappy with its supposed left-leaning slant and has shifted the platform well to the right. The result? A financial disaster. Since the takeover, major advertisers have been fleeing Twitter (sorry, X). The flight has accelerated to crisis levels since Musk endorsed the anti-Semitic Great Replacement conspiracy. X is now worth at most $19 billion, compared to the $44 billion he paid. The enterprise is in grave danger of being forced into bankruptcy by its creditors.
It stands to reason. Counties that voted for Biden constitute 70 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. Americans continue to urbanize, with the percentage living in urban areas reaching 80 percent and growing. Blue states remain more prosperous than red states and subsidize them heavily.
And so on. The Right really is falling behind in nearly every way such a thing can be measured, and while they may not consciousely admit this, deep down they must feel it. And this makes them dangerous.
But they’re doing it to themselves. The “left” is not taking things away from the economies of red states. Red states are making stupid economic choices. And the “secular left” is not turning the young folks away from Christianity. The young folks see people calling themselves Christian on teevee and want to part of that.
Meanwhile, unfortunately, a whole lot of Americans who are not crazy and not especially dangerous are not following politics closely enough to know what’s going on. Will they show up to vote next year? Who knows?
Election years are always stressful, but 2024 is going to be unimaginably nuts.
I would point the finger at that time when postage on Life, Look, and The Saturday Evening Post was raised so high that they were no longer profitable/publishable. And also when Reader's Digest was forced to accept advertising.
I don't believe postage costs had much to do with putting magazines out of business. Print magazines make their profits from advertising, and in the case of the Saturday Evening Post and Look, the general interest advertising dollars were going to television. Also the subscribers were watching television and not reading magazines. Life hung on longer, but it couldn't compete with the Internet. General interest magazines don't do well any more. Also Reader's Digest started accepting ads in 1955 (I looked it up). They didn't sell ad space on the back cover until the 1970s, though.
What we have lost is our commonality. What destroyed it is the internet.
When I was a kid, and all the way up until the advent of the internet, we had common touchstones and references. There were three networks, and that was where the overwhelming majority of the nation got its information. There were essentially three sources for news: ABC, NBC and CBS. Not everyone watched the TV show Dallas, but the whole country knew someone had shot J.R., and waited for the truth to be revealed. Everyone learned about the Beatles (and the Rolling Stones, and The Hollies, etc.) through the Ed Sullivan show.
For better or ill, the nation had a common vocabulary, and common cultural references, and common knowledge of what was news.
Thanks to the internet, we now have thousands of sources of information, and they are tailor-made for smaller, discrete bits of society. Far from bringing us together, these outposts of agendas speak to an atomized population, now divided into smaller and smaller special interest consumers.
And we wonder whence the division?
I fear the Compromise of 2025.
American evangelicalism has always been weird; Jefferson was surprised and dismayed to find that the country he had founded was heavily evangelical.
The USA has a long history of mediocre-to-bad Presidents; we really aren't very good at picking them.
The evangelicals of Thomas Jefferson's day were an entirely different species from the sort we have now. There's no resemblance.
You would know. I retract that.
Not about the Presidents, though; I spent enough time studying them to know. It isn't quite luck that puts a great in the Oval Office, but mostly they were mediocre. It matters more, now that the Presidency has become so powerful. (And I wonder if Biden will go down as one of the greats.)
The religious nutjobs of Jefferson's times were mostly Calvinists, like the Puritans. American style Evangelicalism is mostly a product of the Second Great Awakening of the early 19th century. And even then they weren't nearly as far right and crazy as they are now.
I was thinking of his reaction to the Second Great Awakening, which he lived to see, and which horrified his vaguely sort-of-deist self.
This discussion sent me off to do some reading. I found that his Federalist political opponents spoke of him in language that sounds not all that different from the language we hear from evangelical Christians today, calling him a "howling atheist." (A-whoo!) The Wikipedia article on his beliefs offers this quote:
Historian Gordon Wood commented that his foundation of the University of Virginia was opposed by evangelicals. Wood didn't go into details, but I would guess his foundation of a university which did not teach theology (it still doesn't) drew their ire.
So thank you for sending me down this tangent.
"Who is buying this stuff?"
The question is who’s is selling this stuff? Sure Stump is "quoting (with approval) a Russian dictator and slamming American democracy" but our mainstream media quotes everything Stump says. Including when he quotes dangerous dictators. We got here because our tabloid media culture refuses to tell the truth about him, instead they just amplify all of his propaganda, all the outrageous lies, all of it gets packaged and fed to the voters. They dilute the coverage of his trials to the point where none of it means anything to anyone but us political nerds. That is how we got here. After J6 the mainstream media mostly (even FAUX to some point) decided that quoting Trump was dangerous and they for the most part stopped. Hell he was banned from every social media platform. The mainstream media embargo lasted all of four weeks or so. Stump lies because he knows his lies will be repeated, he knows exactly what the press wants and what they will repeat verbatim, it's that simple. The people that buy Stumps bullshit are the same people that always have, he's not gaining support he knows that but he is overwhelming the negative image to the point that he can convince some in the middle that the whole process is corrupt. Everyone is out to get Trump. They might not vote for him, he just wants them not to vote at all. He only needs a few thousand votes in five or six key states. He's playing the saturation game, throwing shit until the whole goddamn room smells like shit. That’s how we got here.
Trump is an open road to despotism. A whole lot of Americans are, apparently, completely deaf to this.
They’re not deaf to it. They want it. They think their world will be made right when it happens. Same as the fascists from the 1930s.
…One of the points Alberta makes is that a lot of these people falling into rabbit holes of crazy are genuinely convinced that the “secular left” is out to get them and destroy Christianity. Certainly, a lot of people are (understandably) hostile to organized religion these days, but I’m not seeing calls for violence against Christians.
It’s less about the left destroying Christianity, as it’s the imposition of secular values onto everyone in the country, including Christians. Especially around the issue of sexual minorities (my own term for LGBTQ). Evangelicals cannot separate their lifestyle from their religion. If their lifestyle is attacked, they view it as an attack on Christianity.
The people Alberta interviewed in his book genuinely believe that jack-booted Antifa thugs working for George Soros are going to march into their churches and shut them down any time now. They honestly believe their Bibles will be taken away and they won't be allowed to go to church any more. The pandemic church closings in 2020 seriously amped up their paranoia. They thought the whole covid thing was a hoax intended to close churches permanently.
Interestingly they went there during the beginning of the pandemic and shelter in place rules shut down churches. These greedy evangelical false prophet pastors demanded their people come to church because they wanted the income from the "tithes" they demanded every Sunday. The evangelicals said it was the left finally doing what it always wanted to do, shut down their churches and take their bibles. These are the same people that literally idolize and worship Trump. Some of the congregations of these churches never recovered to their pre pandemic numbers, but that was because the pandemic allowed more people to see that these churches weren't providing any spiritual sustenance and they didn't need them to practice their faith.
Some of them died, praying to be cured after ridiculing masks and the "Fauci ouchie". And I suspect some of them were secretly happy to have an excuse to not go back, at least not so soon, like me avoiding some family gatherings.
Where I was living a lot of churches were having "parking lot" services. People stayed in their cars in the parking lot and listened to the sermon through some streaming device somehow. And the plate got passed somehow also.
"How did the US come to this?"
I want to describe a shift in values through a couple of movies. I'm not saying the movies caused the shift but they describe where we were once relative to where we are now.
A truly classic western called "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" starred Jimmy Stewart as a college graduate who makes his way to the Wild West with a box of law books and ideas about bringing the blessings of Eastern (East of the Mississippi) civilization to one of the territories considering statehood. The bad guy, played by Lee Marvin is terrorizing the citizens and works for the cattle companies opposed to law and order of any kind. The story is beautifully told in retrospect – Jimmy Stewart is an old man considering retirement from Congress following a long and successful career as a statesman. Stewart's character has the credit for killing the bad guy in a shootout. "Nothing's too good for the man who shot Liberty Valance." but the bad guy was murdered by John Wayne at the moment Liberty Valance was going to gun down Jimmy Stewart's character. (John Wayne was a good guy – the anti-villain – who ruined his life by saving Jimmy Stewart's character. Jimmy got the credit, the girl, the fame and he built a democratic civilization in the wilderness.)
There's a point to this. Once upon a time, the US valued law and order, with the flaws that come with process. The hero was the hero for his courage and idealism which prevailed through democracy. He was revered for his honest dedication to public service. That's the kind of character I respect (in fiction and in real life) and I think most Democrats would agree.
In the early 70's a genre of films introduced the rugged individualist at odds with the bad guys AND with the system of law and order. I'm thinking of the Dirty Harry series and the "Death Wish" (Charles Brinson) films. Harry Callahan is a SF cop who never misses, knows automatically who the bad guy is, and resents the rules and procedures that fetter him. In the Death Wish series, Bronson is the widower whose wife and daughter were murdered by the bad guys, so he prowls the subways and bad neighborhoods to invite attacks which he repels with lethal force. Like Harry, he's unhappy with the imperfections of the justice system and he substitutes his own perfect judgment of who deserves to die.
These are the characters MAGA types see themselves as. They KNOW who the bad guys are and how to deal with them but they're inhibited by the risk of legal consequences. (The murder of a black unarmed jogger in GA by three white men who were certain he had or intended to steal something comes to mind as a classic example of why you WANT people to think twice about using lethal force except to protect life when there isn't recourse to the authorities.
MAGA types see Trump as a rule-breaker. They accept that because their value system respects the hero who is superior to the constraints which bind lesser men. You can prove in multiple ways that Trump is a liar, a rapist, a business cheat, a cheat on ALL of his wives, and an oath-breaker to the Constitution. It doesn't matter because as long as the audience thinks Trump is doing it for them, for justice, it's OK.
And that's the weak spot. Trump's fan base will evaporate, even the cultists, when the greed and self-serving nature of Trump's crimes become apparent. This is why I agonize over every detail of Trump's legal status. Trump's fighting to keep the facts from hitting the public view. He KNOWS that's what will ruin the illusion of Trump as a master businessman out to save America no matter what the personal cost to him.
I'm watching the USSC to see if they make the courtroom the stage where Trump's show finally ends.
I was pretty much with you right up to here
I don't think that's in the cards. If people can't see Trump for what he is now, they're not going to change their minds because of a judicial finding that he's a criminal. Hell we already have that, in the NY fraud case.
So, the evangelicals fear. They have a lot to fear. Not Antifa. They need to fear the 'my pillow guy' and all the other con artists in their midst. You never shake a baby, but everyone shakes down gullible evangelicals. Oh, the glory days of Jim and Tammy Fay. There was a whole lot of shaking going on. Still is, but it has mutated and gotten more malignant.
Nobody with a voice loud enough to be heard and believed by the disengaged has incentive to call out the situation, which is not only is Donald Trump a uniquely dangerous Presidential candidate, but that also the Republican Party has become a radical subversive criminal gang.
The legacy media political editors are not saying it or letting it be said, maybe because they literally cannot see it. D Party officeholders and allies are committed to trying to preserve the system working within the system, and calling out the Rs as basically traitors is too much risk of irrepairable rupture, for them.
Meanwhile, the bad actors on the R side are under no such constraints. They have no incentive to try to preserve the system, doomed as they are to irrelevance by demographics in a truly representative system. They have never, at least since the days of Eisenhower, had a strong commitment to winning only by fair means. Because they have always stood really for goals that can't win popular support. Since the end of the 1980s it has been increasingly impossible for R Presidential candidates to win without a lot of lying about what they intend, and very considerable electoral foul play.
That's how we came to this, in a nutshell.
A reporter conducting interviews on the topic of the earth's shape; "So you are claiming the earth is round – like a ball, why do you believe that?", "Well, its what I was taught in school, and I think certainly that's what all scientists agree on as a fact, and those pictures taken by astronauts, well it just makes sense to me.".
And to another interviewee; "You say you believe the earth is actually flat, why do you believe that?", "Well, not entirely perfectly flat of course, I mean there are mountains and low places filled with water and so on, and its really big – might take years to reach the edge, but basically yes, I mean it just makes sense to me that there has to be a top and a bottom, and if you get to the edge you fall off. Think of all the people that just disappear – Amelia Earhart and so on – that's what I believe happened to them. And the moon landing, well all that stuff is a faked government conspiracy, they have been raking in all that NASA money for years that's being spent on ways to control us. Look, you can't just go through life believing everything you've been told, and I know for a fact that there are a lot of people who agree with me, you should be talking to them too.".
Wrapping up, the reporter turns to the camera, "Well there you have it folks, it seems both sides are hopelessly gridlocked on this fundamental issue. It may be a very long time before there is any effective consensus – without some compromise".
…and now to our sponsor, who has an amazing deal on edge of the earth detectors.
I don’t understand why people are compelled to make this more complicated than it is. For most, tribalism is all there is. Bernays knew it. Bonhoeffer knew it. Neil Peart knew it. Be cool or be cast out.
Yes I know, it’s hard for self-reliant humanistic logicians to ‘feel’ the overwhelming need to be cool. We’d rather be cast out than dress disco. We’d rather reason things out than just impulse buying the Next Big Thing. Does it make sense? We want our governments to yield practical results. We think that voting against one’s own interests is lunacy. That blaspheming Christ as a Christian is bonkers. To be a Jets fan is an exercise in futility.
But for many, if one has wrapped themselves around the axle of their own tribe, nothing else matters. It feels good. An ounce of hope in that tribe is stronger than a pound of fear which might come with going it alone. I think we have to make things like being humanistic, being logical, hell – even being Christian American, cool again, because for many, logic won't work.
I think a lot of people don't see that as a simple explanation because US national politics is not supposed to be "tribal." I mean, yes it's a myth that there ever was a time when national leaders were all wise men with the pure public interest at heart, but for a long time there was a ban on being too narrowmindedly stupid about certain facts in the wider world. Such as, "the post-WWII international political order is run enormously to the benefit of the US and the American people, and it is worth it to us to spend more on NATO as a %age of GDP than the Germans do." It would be brain-dead stupid to pull out of NATO because of a perception that the EU is not pulling its weight.
Cleek's Law did not used to be a thing, before sometime in the 1990s or even 2000s. Legacy media political editors either are not able to see how literally the R Party now follows Cleek's Law, or they have decided not to take notice of that, in order to not complicate their jobs or something.
Interesting, I knew what Cleek's Law was before I knew it was called Cleek's Law. Mix that with equal parts Projection plus Dunning-Kruger Effect and I believe that is the formula for the stuff they are high on.
And a bit that I might have added previously had I thought of it. D side political actors are still trying to preserve or resuscitate(1) the Republic, but on the R side there is at least a faction, as called out by Amanda Marcotte, who at least think they want a dictatorship: their reaction to the warnings about Trump 2 is "They're just thrilled, because they loathe America's multiracial democracy and want to bring it to an end."
Arguably the D side also should be thinking about what comes after Constitution 1.0, As Amended. That stuff about equal franchise in the Senate is shortly going to result in 30% of Americans electing 70% of Senators. It's not tenable past another 10 years or so.
(1) Depending on how far gone you see things as being.
Indeed; when the Founders were writing the Constitution, the vast majority of people still lived in the countryside, and worked the soil for their livelihoods. Under such circumstances,the two-Senators-per-state rule did not give ridiculously disproportionate political power to the rural folks.
"30% of Americans electing 70% of Senators" – you nailed it! IMO we already have "dictatorship-lite" by proxy with the Lindsay Grahams, the Ron Johnsons, the Marsha Blackburns, etc. perpetually doing tRump's and their money-backers' bidding.
David French wrote a piece in the NYT about MAGA Man and what it takes to be one. I will shorten the piece a bit.
Step one: Be dishonest, Truthfulness is incompatible with Trumpism.
Step two: Learn to punctuate your lies with rage.
Step three: Employ Christianity, not by the admission of guilt but by howling about being biblically persecuted. French quotes Roger Snow claiming having a vision of a “demonic portal” that’s “swirling like a cauldron” about the Biden White House.
He names many other than Snow and Guliani who have mastered this simple sequence.
Of course, the lies of the leader if not sworn to, must at least not be characterized as falsehoods in any way. Best to just swear to its veracity like a true MAGA man,
I find this insightful as to how we got here. Divisive oppositional behavior like this.
Having had two days to think about your main point, I think the basic answer is the abrogation of anti-fascist media law and regulation under Reagan, allowing the emergence of fascist propaganda channels on radio and television and secondarily the widspread automation of the distribution of almost any attention-getting content imaginable. We've had fascist propaganda beamed into our cars and homes for over three decades, and it would be surprising if it had no effect. Then, internet media emerged without any of the restraints of older media. Fox News is one channel among many, but all the major internet sites that use "engagement" software end up pushing the material that gets the most response the quickest, and making people scared, angry, and crazy is the easiest way to do this – an automated tabloid press, without the human limitations of a newspaper publisher or television station.
O.T. I'm not ancient but I'm pretty old. I've been watching tee-vee my entire life. There have been a bunch of wars, conflicts, etc. I can't ever remember an instance when a country bought air time to sell a war on commercial tee-vee? I only watch two cable commercial news channels, cnn and msnbc and they have been running ads in support of the war in gaza since it started. The ads have no context, they are sterile stern warnings to justify the violence in gaza. The message is the war cannot end. I can't figure what I'm supposed to buy? Maybe the ads are directed at something else. Something is working, the war is fading from the media radar. I wonder if the ads and the coverage are related? Maybe Putin should fund a PAC and start selling ads to sell his war in Ukraine. Would they air those ads? Why not!
This is the "PAC" running the ads, funny thing is you can't find the ads online?
https://urbanempowermentactionpac.com/home/
Slightly OT… going here because it's late in the day and I've been watching commentary on the Colorado qualification ruling.
Can anyone here help me out with something that I continue to puzzle about. When talking about public statements of TFG at his rallies or online, commentators will use the term "core political speech". I don't see this phrase in the first amendment of our Constitution, so my question is this: what is this concept of "core political speech"? Is it a) or b)?
a) This concept is something made up by politicians attempting to avoid accountability for the things that state in public and in particular that they say on TV with the intention of manipluating the public.
b) There is some body of case law that has created this concept and which establishes some grounds for treating "core political speech" (whatever, exactly, that is) as a special case involving special privileges for evading duly passed laws?
I can't really help you but it is a very fundamental puzzle; do words have meaning or not? How MAGA world deals with their own inconsistencies is mind-blowing, a thing they consistently say appeals to them is "He tells it like it is!" then when he pushes the outrage meter off the scale that gets flipped into "oh that's just his campaign rhetoric" or "you can't tell when he's kidding, you have no sense of humor", which is it? I believe when he says he would be a dictator for one day, the only uncertainty I have is exactly how does he define "one day", I'm not at all certain he would limit it to only 24 hours. Creating the MAGAverse in one day could be like their god creating the universe in six days; maybe he means "one day" in the biblical sense. No doubt he has specific things in mind that he wants to at least set in motion on day one, "and on the second day he rested" (golf).
And just now I have learned that it is not possible for a person be a dictator or have dictatorial inclinations or think in Hitler-esque terms if they have not actually read "Mein Kampf". I have already learned it is possible for a person to become President if they have never read any book.
Dictator only for day one. Day one's primary action: declare himself dictator for life.
I thought most Americans were savvy about how to deal with a used car salesman.
Several years ago, I postulated that Trump is going for an insanity plea. Could it be?
"Trump is going for an insanity plea"
Even if it worked he would still appeal it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGfHoPvOi3g
I am surprised and pleased by the Colorado Supreme Court decision. It will go to the USSC for sure. I don't think the print schedule the Colorado Court mentioned forces the USSC, but I'm not sure they will ignore the deadline, either. Some are predicting the USSC will not only affirm the decision but expand it to ban Trump from being eligible to be sworn in. Not gonna happen. Others seem to think that since Thomas has his nose up Trump's a$$, the entire court will decide the 14th Section 3 only applies to Confederate Civil War veterans. I don't think that's gonna happen either. This decision will be interesting in how it is parsed.
Trump needs the USSC to strike down the entire concept or he's at risk. Remember, Trump appealed the decision that he won in the lower court to the Colorado Supreme Court because the finding of fact declared Trump DID participate in the J6 insurrection. The lower court was reversed on one point – the Supremes decided Trump was not exempt by definition. So the two Colorado courts agreed it was an insurrection and Trump participated. On what basis might the Supremes reverse or modify the decision?
One – The USSC might decide it's a state-by-state decision depending on the state constitution and the decision of the state supreme court. That leaves the USSC out of it and limits the damage to Trump. Trump will only be disqualified in states he's not likely to win.
Two – The USSC might decide only they can disqualify a candidate for POTUS under the 14th. If they decide THEY have jurisdiction and CO does not, they also have to decide the case. They don't want to affirm. The problem with reversing the CO Supremes is that the USSC would then have to either reverse the two previous two courts' finding of fact OR they'd need a different excuse why Trump isn't disqualified if he IS guilty of insurrection.
Three – I think this is how the USSC will go. I think the USSC will find that Trump has not been found guilty of insurrection in a court of law. Ths isn't a constitutional requirement but the J6 insurrection was not a war against the government in the sense the Civil War was. Trump has not faced his accusers in court before a jury with the protections of the rules of evidence. So without directly disputing or affirming the finding of fact (Trump was guilty in the J6 insurrection.), the court will lay the foundation for finding Trump is disqualified IF he's found guilty in the DC J6 trial OR the GA trial.
The implicit future decision might roil the primary elections which start in just over a month. If voters select Trump, he might not be eligible in the General election AFTER he's been picked by the voters. (If voters select somebody different in the primary, the problem goes away for the USSC. Which they would love.)
Yes, there must be other options, but I'm not sure what they are.
Wait! TFG shifted from reality TV to politics with the claim that our Black president was ineligible to be president! (Trump claimed Obama was born in Kenya.)
The current war cry of Republicans in defense of Trump sounds like this.
"Removing Trump using the 14th Amendment would deprive voters of their right to choose their candidate."
The press needs to ask GOP flacks to reconcile the eligibility status of Obama – where Trump led the drumbeat for YEARS – with the much more serious offense of attacking the Capitol.
"the entire court will decide the 14th Section 3 only applies to Confederate Civil War veterans"; I would argue he does serve the cause of the Confederacy even though he unfortunately was never able to actually fight in uniform (bone spurs, ya know).
Trump's "defense" is that he never read "Mein Kampf." Didn't address the words, just that he never read the book. I believe him. Trump is not a reader, and most likely those words were put there by Stephen Miller or some other aide who knew full well the implications of them. And once explained to him, Trump realized it perfectly expresses his own racist ideology. He made sure to single out Asian, African and South American countries — the omission of Europe was explicit — to drive the point home to his audience.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to discern what he meant. He's speaking to white people in this country who have been scared to death since Obama, and since the realization that, demographically, this will no longer be a white majority country in a few decades. These are the "Trump Supporters" and its their reason for being so. "Poisoning the blood" of America speaks to "race mixing," the result of which would, in their minds, further decrease the perceived white population (show me a person of any "race" who is "pure" and I'll show you a purple squirrel). Those words are an extension of MAGA, which to his audience always meant, "make America white again."
People are shocked at what Trump said, but his saying it was on brand for him. As always, "the border" is a cover for expression of his racist, white nationalist, white supremacist ideology. They won't admit it, but many of his followers believe that. And this is why they worship Trump. He says the quiet parts out loud and gives validation to their thoughts and fears, giving them license to openly express their own "fears." E.g. "maybe we're not so bad after all to think this way — here's a president that does!" When Trump has referred to Obama as if he is president, that's speaking to them as well. Many of them will tell you Obama, who had the nerve to be president while black, is still the primary villain who is somehow controlling Joe Biden, who's either not real or "doesn't know where he is" (and they say this about a president who brought us one of the best economies we've had, and deftly manages Netanyahu and the Israel/Hamas war!) from afar. The fact of Obama's presidency and the offense of it still resonates like a personal blight for them, down through the years. This is why Trump has recently been saying he’s going to have Obama locked up, investigated, and recently said he’s going to have him executed for “murder.” His followers love that.
Trump's a useful idiot to those on the far right who have longed for a time like this, when they could push this country over the edge into fascism. Many of the pieces they've longed for are in place, with Trump being one of them. The successful use of propaganda to condition the public towards acceptance of fascist, racist talk as "normal" is another.
I hate to see that Trump's been kicked off the ballot in Colorado, even though he deserves to be. That's because the best end to all of this is for him, his movement and the GOP to soundly defeated at the ballot box in 2024, and for all impediments to be removed for Trump to finally face justice. To leave no doubt that the real "real Americans" have had it with this stuff.
I want the guardrail in the Constitution – protecting our country against an insurrectionist – honored. As an engineer, I look at a ballot box defeat as problematic, to say the least, for dozens of reasons. There should be a hard limit within the Constitution instead.
The 14th should be as equally valid and as broadly interpreted as the 2nd.
I am not a lawyer but I think I know law because of a speeding citation in 1982. So don't judge. Any assistance in clarifying my confusion will be welcomed.
Article 3 of Amendment XIV seems to steer clear of any hint of adjucating the "shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same (the Constitution) or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof ( January 6th, anyone).
The downside is Article 3 permits Congress to remove "such a disability by a vote of two thirds of each House."
I can't decide, at this point, if Congress or the Supremes will decide more favorably toward Democracy or autocracy.
Good point! It says Congress, so I'd assume the Supreme Court doesn't have much to say about whether the big orange insurrectionist can escape accountability by way of his Supreme Court buddies. I'm no lawyer either,but my understanding is that the states have a sovereign authority to determine their own electoral processes in who they allow to be on the ballot.
A few thoughts on this mornings "buzz" over the Colorado Supreme Court ruling:
1) It occurs to me that all of the media outlets, left right and middle, are contributing GREATLY to the undermining of one of our US institutions, the judicial branch. I would like all reporters going forward to not longer report on which party appointed which of the judges involved in a decision. Any judge/justice appointed by either a Dem or Rep is capable of making judgments that are based solely on the facts, and the applicable law & constitution. I'm setting aside the McConnel travesty of stealing the Obama nomination for the Republican party, and talking about this in a more general sense. So let's leave aside the 50 year (?) campaign by the hard right to capture the courts… (culminating in Thomas, Scalia, Alito, Cavanaugh, Gorsuch (corporatist) & Coney Barrett) … that is a legitimate issue but it doesn't mean that all judges and justices are automatically party hacks. And having the news media constantly beating the drum about which party nominated which judge makes it hard to hold the line on the institutional level of partisan independence. Corruption can occur, but it should be reported as an instance and it should not be allowed by media to imply that all judges are the same.
2) Today I'm wondering how it will play out. I think the 14th amendment makes it unmistakably clear that TFG cannot hold any office in the future. It doesn't say anything about ballots. SCOTUS might actually signal that TFG could not be sworn in even if he convinces enough fools that he "won" the election; and that as for the administration of primary elections and the 2024 general election… for example, that how the ballots are prepared falls to each state based on their election laws and constitution; but with the proviso that all ballots for both primaries and the general shall clearly state that TFG does not qualify for office and will not be sworn in even if the voters choose him. Wouldn't that be interesting? Would the R party put him at the top of the ticket in order to get their VP candidate into the presidency?
3) I feel like it would be nice if the Dems could learn one thing from the R's: Repetition works. I think it would be awesome if every Dem getting camera time during election season makes sure to say at least once, if not several time, that the Republican party has become the party of whiners. That's all they do. They whine about this and that, but they never do anything to solve issues for anyone. All they do is whine. The Republican party used to be the party of "conservatives". Not longer. They are now the party of whiners. Is that who you want to identify with?
Not to be trite,
"Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
Good Luck to all here. Take many breaks. Drink moderately. Exercise. Breathe. Be brave if you can. But, be prepared because 24 besides being "unimaginably nuts" is going to range from horrifying to dystopian.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebyG4ijj0U0
Colorado Supreme Court. My first thought was this might be good for Stump (suprise). Seems like an easy thing to argue against. The supremes can say he was never convicted of insurection; he didn't have "due process" so he must stay on the ballot. If he stays on the ballot then maybe his other appeals are bolstered. If the SCOTUS says he wasn’t convicted then there was no insurrection (magats will argue). That could easily grease the skids for three or four more decisions in his favor (which he needs). Or in the real world it should put pressure on them to not shred the constitution and decide one or two cases in the DOJ's favor. That would put some sand in the gears. There is absolutely no doubt that he has at least four votes in the bag. Who's going to stop him, Roberts, Kavanaugh, Coney? Is it going to be grease or sand, we’re going to damn sure find out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FhNfXEG1Hk
Nikki Haley made a statement today that should give everyone pause. In response to the Colorado Supreme Court's ruling on eligibility, she said (paraphrased) I don't think we need courts to decide who will be president … I think we need voters to decide who will be the next president.
Either she doesn't understand something or it's just a matter of intentionally saying something that she thinks the base will hear as "x" when later on, after the voting is done, she can say, if challenged, oh that's not what I was saying… I was saying "y".
Here's the rub: The US Constitution establishes three branches of government with clearly defined domains and no overlap of powers (separation of powers). The matter in question was a court ruling that was appealed to the Colorado Supreme Court, whose jurisdiction include questions and disputes related to the administration of elections in Colorado in accordance with Colorado's state election laws and the state constitution. Matters of law, equity and constitutionality are not put to the electorate for adjudication. Since the ruling of the Colorado State Supreme Court was arrived at in consideration of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, it is entirely reasonable for one of the parties to appeal the ruling to the USSC. Per the US Constitution, it is clearly in the jurisdiction of of the US Article III branch of government. Matters of law, equity and constitutionality are not subject to elections by the people (referenda?). Section 2 and Section 2 of Article III make this absolutely clear. If a person is convicted of a federal felony by a due process trial by jury, does the convicted defendant have the right to demand that the jury's verdict be subjected to a national referendum? Of course not. Ms. Haley's statement is either absurd, stupid or disingenuous.
Shouldn't we have a Constitutional Amendment that says no one shall serve in any capacity of the US Government unless that person understands the US Constitution, particularly if their office requires an oath to uphold/support the Constitution. Yeah, fat chance. But I think there's a point here: People seeking to serve in the government should not be given that trust if they make public statements that mislead the population about the Constitution. Okay, that's a bridge too far. But is there anything wrong with advocating for the following: Every politician of any party affiliation should be saying the same thing about this matter: "The question that has been appealed to the Supreme Court is not a political question. The 14th amendment to the US Constitution has a provision for disqualification of office seekers in our Constitutional Republic. The question has to do with whether nor not that 14th Amendment provision applies to a particular office seeker. The Constitution clearly places ruling power on that question in the Judicial Branch."
The fact that none of the current GOP (other than Asa Hutchinson) would be willing to make that statement publicly means simply this: The current GOP is out to destroy the Judicial Branch. Period. By telling people over and over that "you, an individual person, an ordinary guy or gal, are much better able to make these decisions than those fancy-pants judges in our legal system."
Having said all that, I would be nervous about it but I wouldn't mind if it were decided that the voter WILL get the chance to decide the constitutional question… ALL of the voters. Let's have a national referendum in the Spring of 2024 to see if TFG should be eligible for the presidency. I think Biden won by about 7 million votes. He's lost some support, but most of those are people that hate TFG but don't think Biden has done enough of the liberal agenda.