Donald Trump is my hero

[HarryN]

You might not like what Trump said - but reality is that no matter what party you are in, you won't become a significant US or EU political candidate without saying essentially the same words.

Look at Liz Truss in the UK:

[Simon of the Playa]

well harry, your stupid is quite stupid.


and barely nuanced anti-semitism, so you can fuck right the fuck off.


here, read about your Commander in Grift, maybe you will learn something.

probably not, because obviously you are hard wired to suckle on fox "news" talking points.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/whistle ... d=91585455

[HarryN]

That is pretty funny.

Typical - start calling people names because your imagination is being overwhelmed.

[Simon of the Playa]

i calls them as i sees them harry.

and you my friend, based on what you have written in this thread, are an idiot.


here, have some facts...i know you're kinda allergic to them, but try anyway.

"Today the Biden administration opened the website to apply for relief from student debt, a policy that is expected to benefit 43 million Americans directly and others tangentially as debt relief frees up family resources. The administration also announced that the Food and Drug Administration’s final rule concerning Biden’s Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy went into effect today, making hearing aids available over the counter and thereby lowering costs for the devices by as much as $3,000 a pair.

The administration has also recently achieved a historic diplomatic victory by brokering an agreement between Israel and Lebanon, two countries that have been formally at war since 1948, to establish a maritime boundary.

But all that news got drowned out by the continuing drama coming from the Republican Party. As Republican political strategist Sarah Longwell wrote in The Bulwark today, the Republican Party is facing an “extinction event,” having been taken over by former president Trump to become the right-wing MAGA Party. As Longwell wrote, “In the Republican party as it is currently constituted, political power emanates completely and totally from Donald Trump.”

Longwell explains that Republicans have been stuck in a “Triangle of Doom,” in which Republican base voters want their media to confirm their biases. Fringe media outlets confirming those biases gain traction. In order to reach voters, Republican politicians have to go on those fringe outlets, and that, in turn, normalizes fringe media. Over time, this triangle radicalized the party until 70% of Republicans now believe the lie that Democratic president Joe Biden didn’t win the 2020 election.

“Say goodnight,” she writes. “The party’s over.” All but the MAGA Republicans have left. “The Good Republicans are gone,” Longwell writes. “Probably for good.”

Today, Fox Nation began a mock trial of Hunter Biden, with reality TV personality Judge Joe Brown saying that “something’s way wrong here, way wrong,” and suggesting that the legal investigations into Trump and the lack of them into the Bidens give the appearance that Trump and Biden “don’t live in the same country.”

Hunter Biden is not in the government, of course, and is not under indictment; Trump and the Trump Organization are embroiled in a number of lawsuits that suggest the former president and his associates saw government service not as a way to improve American lives but as a way to make money. Ginning up a show trial for Hunter Biden seems an attempt to rile up the base and undercut the many legal issues in the news concerning the former president. But such a show trial is also a fundamental rejection of the rule of law, suggesting that the law is simply a political tool to use against enemies rather than a body of laws before which we are all treated equally.

There is a reason Trump supporters are trying to undermine the rule of law. In New York, Trump’s wealthy friend and financial backer Thomas Barrack is on trial for selling his access to Trump to the leaders of the United Arab Emirates in exchange for investment money. The U.S. government says that Barrack fed confidential information to UAE leaders while permitting them to shape Trump’s speeches and policies. In the first three years of Trump’s term, Saudi Arabia and the UAE invested about $1.5 billion in Barrack’s real estate company.

In Northern Virginia the trial of Igor Danchenko for making false statements to the FBI, led by John Durham and other holdovers from the Trump Justice Department, suggests the Trump administration played fast and loose with national security in an attempt to undermine the Russia investigation. Witnesses in the trial have testified that the “highly unusual” decision by Trump attorney general Bill Barr to declassify an interview with Danchenko and share it with Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) hurt national security. Graham promptly made a summary of the interview public to bolster the argument that the Russia investigation was “corrupt.” But that release meant that internet hobbyists quickly figured out who Danchenko was, exposing a key FBI informant as well as his friends and family in Russia.

This exposure for political reasons not only burned a key source, it weakened the ability of the U.S. to cultivate informants."

https://open.substack.com/pub/heatherco ... er-17-2022

[DVD Burner]

Actually NOT!


But I Get It.

[Simon of the Playa]

[Simon of the Playa]

[BBadger]

As I've said before, the Republican party is completely debased by Trumpism and beyond salvaging. Any conservatives that have any shred of dignity or decency need to abandon the party entirely and form something else.

[some seeing eye]

Woodward's taped time with Trump reveals much about both the author and his subject

The Trump Tapes
Simon & Schuster

The voice of Bob Woodward is well known in Washington and former President Trump's is familiar worldwide. But we listen to both in a new way in Woodward's new audiobook The Trump Tapes.

Woodward has released the transcript and raw audio of a score of interviews he did with Trump in 2019 and 2020.

https://www.npr.org/2022/10/23/11307122 ... nald-trump

[Simon of the Playa]

2DC812C5-954F-4D9E-9C7A-D9CDCA070FAF.jpeg

[lucky420]

2DC812C5-954F-4D9E-9C7A-D9CDCA070FAF.jpeg

Flabbergasted and gobsmacked

[Simon of the Playa]

1FC4874C-BDB2-4F3C-A0CF-8E4BD42828CB.jpeg

[Simon of the Playa]

[Simon of the Playa]

BD115051-1F39-4DE8-96CF-7172D9DC9349.jpeg

[Sham]

BD115051-1F39-4DE8-96CF-7172D9DC9349.jpeg

The entire first paragraph is a rambling run-on sentence. My old high school English teacher would have beaten him with a lead pipe.

[BBadger]

I say that Trump and DeSantis duel it out in a knife fight to see who is the real worthy contender for the Republican primary.

[Simon of the Playa]

ann coulter blames the jews...

A9671768-F362-4E1B-A0A7-FF277E6E97ED.jpeg

[some seeing eye]

Rupert Murdoch buries the lede:

https://news.yahoo.com/new-york-post-tr ... 02923.html

[Elorrum]

Dan Rather nailed it: “Many Republican elected officials are eager to turn away from the man who got them their tax cuts and stacked the federal courts, especially the highest one, with their true believers. These cynical operatives stood by that man for years of lies, outrageous behavior, and threats to American democracy. Losing the soul of this nation didn’t seem to worry them much, but losing elections certainly does. “

[Simon of the Playa]

"If the facts demonstrate Trump violated the law, we have no doubt that the Special Counsel will pursue indictment. As a veteran former federal prosecutor with more than 16 years of experience at the Department of Justice, Smith is well aware of the Department’s policy that suggests prosecution when, among other things, “the person’s conduct constitutes a federal offense,” and “the admissible evidence will probably be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction.”"


https://www.justsecurity.org/84217/our- ... l-counsel/

[Simon of the Playa]

"On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, November 22, former president Trump hosted the antisemitic artist Ye, also known as Kanye West, for dinner at a public table at Mar-a-Lago along with political operative Karen Giorno, who was the Trump campaign’s 2016 state director in Florida. Ye brought with him 24-year-old far-right white supremacist Nick Fuentes. Fuentes attended the August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and in its wake, he committed to moving the Republican Party farther to the right.

Fuentes has openly admired Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and authoritarian Russian president Vladimir Putin, who is currently making war on Russia’s neighbor Ukraine. A Holocaust denier, Fuentes is associated with America’s neo-Nazis.

In February 2020, Fuentes launched the America First Political Action Conference to compete from the right with the Conservative Political Action Conference. In May 2021, on a livestream, Fuentes said: “My job…is to keep pushing things further. We, because nobody else will, have to push the envelope. And we’re gonna get called names. We’re gonna get called racist, sexist, antisemitic, bigoted, whatever.… When the party is where we are two years later, we’re not gonna get the credit for the ideas that become popular. But that’s okay. That’s our job. We are the right-wing flank of the Republican Party. And if we didn’t exist, the Republican Party would be falling backwards all the time.”

Fuentes and his “America First” followers, called “Groypers” after a cartoon amphibian (I’m not kidding), backed Trump’s lies that he had actually won the 2020 election. At a rally shortly after the election, Fuentes told his followers to “storm every state capitol until Jan. 20, 2021, until President Trump is inaugurated for four more years.” Fuentes and Groypers were at the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, and at least seven of them have been charged with federal crimes for their association with that attack. The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol subpoenaed Fuentes himself.

Accounts of the dinner suggest that Trump and Fuentes hit it off, with Trump allegedly saying, “I like this guy, he gets me,” after Fuentes urged Trump to speak freely off the cuff rather than reading teleprompters and trying to appear presidential as his handlers advise.

But Trump announced his candidacy for president in 2024 just days ago, and being seen publicly with far-right white supremacist Fuentes—in addition to Ye—indicates his embrace of the far right. His team told NBC’s Marc Caputo that the dinner was a “f**king nightmare.” Trump tried to distance himself from the meeting by saying he didn’t know who Fuentes was, and that he was just trying to help Ye out by giving the “seriously troubled” man advice, but observers noted that he did not distance himself from Fuentes’s positions.

Republican lawmakers have been silent about Trump’s apparent open embrace of the far right, illustrating the growing power of that far right in the Republican Party. Representatives Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) have affiliated themselves with Fuentes, and while their appearances with him at the America First Political Action Conference last February drew condemnation from Republican leader Representative Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), now McCarthy desperately needs the votes of far-right Republicans to make him speaker of the House. To get that support, he has been promising to deliver their wish list—including an investigation into President Joe Biden’s son Hunter—and appears willing to accept Fuentes and his followers into the party, exactly as Fuentes hoped.

Today, after the news of Trump’s dinner and the thundering silence that followed it, conservative anti-Trumper Bill Kristol tweeted: “Aren’t there five decent Republicans in the House who will announce they won’t vote for anyone for Speaker who doesn’t denounce their party’s current leader, Donald Trump, for consorting with the repulsive neo-Nazi Fuentes?”

So far, at least, the answer is no."


https://open.substack.com/pub/heatherco ... er-26-2022

[Simon of the Playa]

618FE631-53E4-4F81-ABF5-5A071CB8ADD3.jpeg

https://apple.news/AARzqr9zXR0GAYa0DqjB7tw

[Simon of the Playa]

"Today, one of former president Trump’s messages on the struggling right-wing social media platform Truth Social went viral.

In the message, Trump again insisted that the 2020 presidential election had been characterized by “MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION,” and suggested the country should “throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or…have a NEW ELECTION.”

Then he added: “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”

In other words, Trump is calling for the overthrow of the Constitution that established this nation. He advocates the establishment of a dictator.

This outrageous statement seems to reflect desperation from the former president as his political star fades and the many legal suits proceeding against him get closer and closer to their end dates.

The midterm elections, in which the high-profile candidates he backed lost, prompted some members of his party to suggest it’s time to move on to new candidates. At the same time, lawsuits are heating up. The Department of Justice continues to investigate Trump’s role in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, an attempt that led to the events of January 6, 2021.

Chief Judge Beryl Howell of the Washington, D.C., District Court recently rejected Trump’s claims of executive privilege and ordered Trump’s White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, and deputy counsel, Patrick Philbin, to provide additional testimony to a federal grand jury. On Friday, they each testified for several hours. On November 29, Trump advisor Stephen Miller, who worked with Trump on his speech at the Ellipse, also testified before the grand jury,

The Department of Justice is also investigating Trump’s theft of documents when he left the White House. The December 1 decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit declaring that Judge Aileen Cannon had no authority to allow Trump a special master to review the materials the FBI took when they searched Mar-a-Lago on August 8, 2022, had a very clear, concise rundown of what the government has so far recovered from the former president, and the list was damning.

In the first group of documents Trump returned to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), after significant pressure to do so, included “184 documents marked at varying levels of classification, including twenty-five marked top secret.” After a subpoena, Trump’s lawyers returned another 38 classified documents, seventeen of which were marked top secret. Trump’s team declared that a “diligent search” had turned up only these items, and there were no more left.

But the FBI learned that there were, in fact, more documents still at Mar-a-Lago and obtained a search warrant. On August 8, FBI agents retrieved about “13,000 documents and a number of other items, totaling more than 22,000 pages of material…. [F]ifteen of the thirty-three seized boxes, containers, or groups of papers contained documents with classification markings, including three such documents found in desks” in Trump’s office. Agents found more than 100 documents marked confidential, secret, or top secret.

Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith to oversee these two investigations after Trump announced an early candidacy for president in 2024. Smith got down to work immediately, sending out a letter on Thanksgiving Day itself. It seems likely there is good reason for Trump to be concerned.

Meanwhile, Georgia’s Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory, and South Carolina’s Supreme Court has ordered Trump’s White House Chief of staff Mark Meadows to testify to that grand jury, another reason for the former president to be concerned.

And the Trump Organization’s trial for tax evasion is reaching a verdict, while the House Ways and Means Committee has finally received six years of Trump’s tax returns after years of attempts by the former president to keep them out of Congress’s hands. At Lawfare, Daniel J. Hemel says that as a matter of law, the committee can make the returns public. He counsels against it for a number of reasons (although he says they should be made public) but notes that the Senate Finance Committee, which will remain in Democratic hands, can now get access to the material easily and will be able to release it. If his attempt to hide his taxes was anything other than principled, there is reason for Trump to be concerned about this as well.

So, the former president has reason to try to grab headlines with an outrageous statement about overthrowing the Constitution.

But the real story here is not Trump’s panic about his fading relevance and his legal exposure; it’s that Trump remains the presumptive presidential nominee for the Republican Party in 2024. The leader of the Republican Party has just called for the overthrow of our fundamental law and the installation of a dictator.

White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates said in a statement: “The American Constitution is a sacrosanct document that for over 200 years has guaranteed that freedom and the rule of law prevail in our great country. The Constitution brings the American people together—regardless of party—and elected leaders swear to uphold it. It’s the ultimate monument to all of the Americans who have given their lives to defeat self-serving despots that abused their power and trampled on fundamental rights. Attacking the Constitution and all it stands for is anathema to the soul of our nation, and should be universally condemned. You cannot only love America when you win.”

But Republicans, so far, are silent on Trump’s profound attack on the Constitution, the basis of our democratic government.

That is the story, and it is earth shattering."

https://open.substack.com/pub/heatherco ... ber-3-2022

[Simon of the Playa]

"Special counsel Jack Smith has subpoenaed local officials in key presidential swing states for any and all communications involving former President Donald Trump, his campaign and a series of aides and allies who assisted in his effort to overturn the 2020 election.

Subpoenas were issued to top elections officials in Wayne County, Michigan; Milwaukee and Dane counties, Wisconsin; Maricopa County, Arizona; and Allegheny County, Pa. Those counties are home to Detroit, Milwaukee, Madison, Phoenix and Pittsburgh."


https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald ... -rcna60363

[Simon of the Playa]

Former President Trump hosted a prominent QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy theorist at his Mar-A-Lago club in Florida on Tuesday night, just two weeks after his much-criticized dinner with Ye and white supremacist Nick Fuentes.


Liz Crokin, a former journalist and celebrity gossip writer now associated with far-right conspiracy theories, spoke at a fundraiser intended to combat child trafficking, according to posts on her Telegram account.


Crokin is an early embracer of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which alleges the world is run by a shadowy cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles and that Trump is the only one who can stop them.

In 2017, Crokin infamously picked fights with celebrities Chrissy Teigen and John Legend after she suggested the couple was part of the Pizzagate conspiracy.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/3 ... -theorist/

[pink]

And the Trump Org is convicted of tax fraud.

[BBadger]

And the Trump Org is convicted of tax fraud.

I do hope it opens a huge can of worms for everyone involved in that organization, and isn't limited to that pretty weak fine.

[Elorrum]

I wonder what the dollar difference is between the taxes they owed and did not didn’t pay, and the fine.

[mgb327]

Probably pennies on the dollar. Chump change. "Here, let me slap that wrist for you...."

[Popeye]

But don't they still owe that money? Plus interest and possibly fines?