What If: trump Attacks the 2026 Midterms

For all the good news about the polling predicting a Democratic Blue Wave disrupting trump's plans for empire this 2026, there remains genuine concern that trump and his Far Right Republican allies will do whatever they can to deny, disrupt, or destroy the actual midterm elections.

Remember what Wilhoit observed: Conservatives believe "There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." Conservatives view themselves - and only themselves - as the In-Group that must be protected at all costs. When the conservative ideologues dispersed across both major parties decided by the 1980s to make themselves all Republicans, that was when the modern Republican Party came to believe only THEY were the legitimate party and that every Democratic win were "stolen" or fraudulent.

For all of trump's whining and gaslighting about "stolen" ballots or acts of mass voter fraud, it didn't all start with him: he's co-opted a long-standing narrative from the Far Right about voter fraud that's been pursued for decades (SEE Kris Kobach's entire political career). No matter if a vast majority of actual voters across the United States - a good number of them may even be angry Republican voters betrayed by their own party - will turn out for Democratic candidates this November: Republicans will refuse to accept those results (because in their minds, anyone who votes for Democrats are not REAL Americans).

Because we've seen it before in 2020.

The most obvious attack that trump and the Republicans - especially in the Red states seeing cracks in their one-party rule like Texas and Florida - will attempt is to fight the results in the courtrooms, claiming massive fraud without, you know, actually proving that fraud... again, what we saw in 2020. Just like in 2020, the courts are going to insist on proof instead of any false promises of "oh we'll find it, trust us" like trump's lawyers argued then and have been arguing in a lot of other court cases during this second administration. It's gaslighting that works on the wingnut media outlets but never convinces the judges, and it's an attack strategy doomed to fail.

One possible attack is trump threatening to send ICE and other federal agents to precincts on Election Day to "arrest all illegal voters." Again, there's no evidence of massive voter fraud being committed by non-citizens: This is trump and his racist lackeys fearmongering over immigrants. There's also the threat of sending the FBI and other agencies to the county-level elections offices (shades of the Brooks Brothers riot) to disrupt or even seize the ballots to prevent the counts. 

This all sounds scary and it should. This is also something that local activists at the state, county, and city levels are prepared to fight; because it is against the law to send armed federal agents to election sites. Lawsuits are already getting filed. trump will likely run into the same angry judges who aren't happy about getting lied to about "voter fraud" in the first place, and there's no compelling argument trump and his thugs can provide to change legal minds.

I'm seeing arguments that in spite of the actual election results - if everything turns for the Democrats and there's a massive Blue Wave at both the state and congressional levels - there's the risk of Republicans still in charge at the state level - the elections officials, the Secretaries of State, the state Attorney Generals (many of them elected Republicans unhappy in this scenario of getting voted out of power) - simply refusing to certify the results. It was the thing trump tried to force on January 6th - stopping Congress from certifying the Electoral count going to Biden - could happen on January 3rd when Congress verifies their own election results, and this could be a legitimate concern.

Derek Muller at Election Law Blog did a big article about the fears over certification blocks, and he's adamant there's little trump or the Republicans could do to stop it:

Even these calls, however, assume that the majority party is exerting control over minority delegations. That is, if a delegation currently controls a chamber, it can refuse to seat a member or a number of members in a kind of “hardball” move (with varying degrees of likelihood of success, left for another day).

That, however, is very different in kind from concern that the minority party could become the majority through some kind of “one weird trick” approach. It is that concern that is the angst of the fearmongering chronicled seriatim above.

Now, there are a range of nuanced views on how, precisely, a minority in Congress would go about doing this across these pieces. I’ll operate from the assumption that it would be Republicans denying Democrats in the House a majority, although occasional reporters I’ve spoken with worry about Democrats refusing to seat Missouri’s delegation over unlawful maps, or some Senate scenarios, which are less complicated because the Senate is a continuing body. And I’ll truck through scenarios pretty quickly.

1. As Ned has pointed out repeatedly, often on deaf ears, the House is not a continuing body. Mike Johnson ceases to be Speaker at noon on January 3. He holds no power. Whatever the House has done or decided before that is cannot bind the incoming House, including any purported findings regarding the validity of elections. It is a brand new House that will adjudicate all matters afresh.

2. If a minority of Republicans object to the seating of some Democrats on January 3, it would only happen after the Speaker’s election (presumably, Hakeem Jeffries). The more recent traditional mechanism is a “stand aside” mechanism, where members whose seats are in dispute stand aside while the remaining putative members vote on whether to seat them. That practice does not have an ironclad precedent, and the Speaker presiding over that vote may well permit the disputed members to vote on their own seating, and a majority of the body would likewise approve of that rule change. The point being, there is a ready way for the majority to thwart an effort by the minority to become the majority.

3. The most sophisticated disaster porn asks about replacing the clerk of the House on the eve of January 3, and the new clerk refusing to recognize the credentials of incoming Democrats, so that Republicans could choose a Speaker and organize the House as if they were in the majority. Ned shares good thoughts from Matt Seligman on this front.

It is worth emphasizing the clerk is not a member of the House, so the political question doctrine does not apply to the clerk’s actions in the event the judiciary is asked to intervene. But more to the point, these actions have happened before, and they’ve not been successful...

As I’ve told many reporters over the last two years on this topic, you can throw sand in the gears, but “stealing the House” is another matter entirely. And the wider the margins (both in terms of the number of votes separating the winner from a contestant, and the number of seats the House turns on), the less likely such scenarios are to occur (I have admittedly quipped that if it’s 217-217 in the House with a tight contest in the 435th race, all bets are off.)...

while it’s possible for a majority to subvert a minority (as Democrats did to Republicans in 1985), it is essentially impossible for the minority (note: which the Republicans would be after a Blue Wave election) to subvert the majority, as the chronicle above should help demonstrate.

One could argue that this moment is different, but that’s really just the assumed premise of this kind of analysis.

In short, most scenarios get basic facts or law wrong, and the most complicated scenarios require a unique convergence of factors that have never existed, a unique level of coordination that seems very unlikely, docile political opposition, and a judiciary willing to acquiesce to all these moves–and all working simultaneously. Even then, most of these scenarios could, at most, delay some organization of the House by a matter of hours or days.

As for blocking certification at the state levels, there are already laws in place requiring county and state officials to certify results once all the counting is done and verified (this is why fears that trump and his thugs will simply seize the ballots to prevent certification. Again, there are laws blocking them from attempting that). No matter what happens, if a state Attorney General or Sec of State refuses to do their duty, the courts are likely to compel them one way or another. 

This all could lead to something that's outside the purview of law, and that's trump simply ignoring every law and pulling a political coup (technically an autogolpe, but everyone understands what a coup means). This is where things really get interesting.

In spite of trump's belief - and the Supreme Court's recent rulings to give the presidency broad overreaching powers - there are still limits to what a president can do even under national emergencies. Rick Hasan also at the Election Law Blog has this to say: 

One of the most alarming threats to the upcoming midterm elections is the possibility that the president will declare a national emergency to try to postpone, cancel, or seize control of the midterms, a tactic that strongman leaders around the world have used to evade electoral accountability. Yet, any claim by the administration that a national security threat allows the president to unilaterally nationalize elections is not based in legal reality and would be an unprecedented attempt in U.S. history to interfere in elections and prevent citizens from voting.

As the Center for American Progress has detailed, no constitutional provisions, emergency powers, statutes, executive orders, Supreme Court precedents, or other sources lawfully delegate to the president any power to change election-related laws. This is true even in the face of a national security threat or an emergency—including attempted foreign interference in elections. The founders wrote the Constitution to prevent presidents from becoming kings, and they expressly gave states the power to administer federal elections, with Congress having authority to set national guidelines when needed. Exercising their clear authority, states have repeatedly demonstrated that they are able to conduct free and fair elections, even under emergencies and challenging circumstances such as the Civil War, both world wars, the COVID-19 pandemic, and—as discussed below—previous attempts at foreign interference...

This has come up before: Our nation faced legitimate national emergencies - armed insurrection by the slave-holding states, world wars, even the Korean and Vietnam wars where we had the presidency itself change hands between parties - and nobody in high office - even President Lincoln in 1862 when pro-slavery Democrats were poised to take control of the House - ever tried to declare national emergencies to disrupt or delay the elections. 

For trump to declare a national emergency over the midterm results would, once again, require facing legal challenges in court that trump and his lawyers can't win. This is when trump's last resort - ordering armed troops (either National Guards units from Republican-controlled states, or the actual military under Secretary of Idiocy Hegseth) could take place.

In that situation, trump would have to argue that the Insurrection Act - a law he violated in 2021 and got away with - applies to the midterms and use it to override the Posse Comitatus Act to deploy the military. As John May over at the Justia Verdict website notes:

Sections 251 through 255 of Title 10 of the United States Code, usually referred to as the Insurrection Act, implement the President’s constitutional authority to call forth “the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel invasions.” Section 253 has two parts. The first allows the President to use the military in a state to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” that “so hinders the execution of the laws” that any portion of the state’s inhabitants are deprived of a constitutional right and state authorities are unable or unwilling to protect that right. The second permits the President to deploy troops to suppress the same conduct when it “opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.”

Many authorities believe that these sections can only be invoked in very limited circumstances. A 1964 U.S. Justice Department Memorandum states that the law may only be invoked in three circumstances: (1) when a state requests help in putting down an insurrection; (2) when deployment is needed to enforce a federal court order; or (3) when “state and local law enforcement have completely broken down.” The circumstances posited by this paper fit well within the confines of the last scenario.

That all depends on what trump can prove, not gaslight about. trump and his Republican allies could argue the midterm results are part of a "conspiracy" "hindering the execution of the laws" that would be insurrection... but it would be trump and those Republicans doing the actual hindering. The execution of laws are already in place to count and certify votes, and the Democrats aren't the ones interfering with that. It would be a question of how the Republicans would pull that argument (most likely by lying their asses off about mass voter fraud again).

It could be a situation for example in Texas where the Democrats win a plurality of US House districts, as well as state legislative offices that breaks the stranglehold the Republicans have over the last two decades, as well as winning the Governor and Attorney General offices (at which point corrupt bastards like Ken Paxton are shit out of luck). The sitting Republican governor, Greg Abbott, could apply Circumstance (1) asking trump to "put down" the Democrats Abbott would accuse of bringing in illegals to vote and "inciting insurrection".

Depending on how quickly the federal courts could shut that down, even if they could should and would, there's still a risk trump will ignore the courts and proceed with declaring any Democratic win an act of insurrection and start arresting people using ICE - or worst the military - to do so. THIS becomes the true nightmare scenario. It might explain why trump doesn't even seem bothered by how the midterms turn out: Not because he's convinced Republicans will win, it's because trump's convinced he can shut everything down by Executive dictate and force election results the Republicans didn't earn. 

Fearing that result, however, doesn't do anyone any good. Granted it's a worst-case scenario, and it depends on if the Far Right conservatives are that desperate to hold onto power that they would risk open civil war. It's better to fight the battles now, vote as best you can, side with the Democrats to drive the corrupt Republicans out of office through legal means, and get ready to fight trump and his horde for the soul and future of America.

Just be ready for anything. Stay safe.

One Sentence Observation About the Obvious Corrupt Connections Between trump's Crime Family and the Russians

Donald Trump Jr.’s Bahamas Wedding Was Secretly Bankrolled by Russian Oligarch Close to Putin (read the article)

Considering absolutely every single fucking public revelation of donald trump and his kids - especially donnie junior - taking money and hiding - poorly - every fucking corrupt deal we've seen that's on a scale far worse than anything Hunter Biden ever did, can we at last accept the reality that donald trump has had, is having, will have betrayed the United States to Russia every fucking single chance he gets.

Desperate to Buy Off the Voters (and Cheap, Too)

Update: thanks as always to Steve in Manhattan over at Crooks & Liars including this article for Mike's Blog Round-Up! Good luck everyone, stay safe, and for the LOVE OF GOD throw every Republican crook out of office this midterms!

I didn't watch trump at his midterm egofest last night, but I saw the responses. Gods, he's never been subtle but even this reeks of desperation (via George Chidi at the Guardian(US)):

Donald Trump’s promise of a $5,000 “Trump dividend” for every US citizen if Republicans retain control of the US Congress in November’s midterm elections has sparked incredulity and accusations of bribery.

“If the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000,” Trump said during the unprecedented Republican midterm convention in Dallas. “It will be called the Trump dividend.”

It comes amid extreme concern over the US national debt, which exceeded $40tn for the first time in August.

Even other Republicans questioned it (although they'll likely promote it with grins painted on their faces when trump insists).

Speaking to Politico, Chip Roy, the Republican US representative from Texas, sounded skeptical. “Well – I would like to know how they would plan to pay for … back of envelope … well over $1tn,” he said.

In the moments after Trump made the announcement, Marc Goldwein of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget wrote on X that “this would cost about $1.2 TRILLION in just one year. That’s more than ALL THREE ROUNDS of COVID relief checks, despite no recessions. The result would be a huge spike in the deficit, and almost certainly in the inflation rate.”

The US has roughly 240 million adult citizens, suggesting the cost of $1.2tn. The federal government spent about $7tn in fiscal year 2025, with about $2tn taken on as debt.

And the funny thing is? The average American household - which depends on what expenses they're carrying from mortgages to bills to medical expenses and outstanding college loans - has around $105,000 in personal debts (note: under normal circumstances I'd be dealing with around $52,000 in debt right now. My dad - with his financial acumen - helped pay off my mortgage last year before he died. Millions of others don't get that kind of help). A meager $5,000 dividend bribe to vote for the party putting us most into debt in the first place is too cheap a payoff to be of any good to anybody.

And it is a bribe trump offers: We'll only get the money "IF" the Republicans win the 2026 midterms that was already looking like a certain Democratic Blue Wave. Everybody - including the MAGA punditry - saw it for what it is (via Malcolm Ferguson at New Republic):

“We should note though, it is not the first time he has promised a cash payment like this,” the (Fox News) network clarified shortly after Trump’s speech. “He promised Americans $2,000 rebates during his tariff policy when that was enacted, but after court challenges to the tariffs themselves, those $2,000 checks so far have not materialized.” 

Fox hosts laid these concerns at the feet of Vice President JD Vance. 

“You do the quick math, that’s about $1.3 trillion,” Brett Baier told Vance. “I can hear the critics’ heads exploding. They’re saying out loud, I guarantee you: ‘The president is bribing voters to vote for Republicans to take over the House. And then he’s bankrupting the country because the deficit debt is huge, and inflation would come back if this comes into play.’ So how do you answer those criticisms?”

Vance tried to defend it by claiming we'd get the money from other countries through trump's trade wars:

“What the president’s talking about is fundamentally a dividend for American workers. We’re taking in an extraordinary amount of revenue because the president of the United States is actually standing up to both foreign companies, but also foreign countries who’ve been taking advantage of America’s workers for pretty much my entire life,” Vance said, referring to tariffs.

In reality, the revenue brought in by Trump’s tariffs, under $500 billion, would not cover a $5,000 check for every American, which would cost $1.2 trillion. 

It’s obvious at this point that Trump’s first inclination when his back is against the wall is to dangle money in front of the masses. He’s promised cash payments multiple times, including $2,000 stimulus checks for the “tariff dividend,” a $5,000 stimulus check for the bygone “DOGE dividend,” and $1,000 checks for the Affordable Care Act. None of those ever materialized. 

Republicans, by the way, already control Congress. If Trump wanted to make this a reality, he could have by now.

If trump really wants to flip the majority of American voters - angry as hell towards a Republican-controlled government that's wrecking everything from Washington landmarks to our public schools - he would reverse course on his ruinous tariffs policies, end the fighting in Iran and the bombing of fishermen across South and Central America, stop a violent and unnecessary deportation program disrupting our communities, and apologize to voters on bended knee. Of course, trump can never admit he is wrong any anything so that will never happen.

Instead - as the corrupt con artist bastard he is - trump can only offer bribes in clear violation of the law. Social media is rampant with posts of critics pointing to the laws in the US Code trump is openly breaking:

There are at least two provisions in the U.S. Code that make it illegal to offer or accept a $5,000 "GOP Dividend" for voting. Both the offerer (Donald Trump) and the accepter (good luck with that!) are liable for fines and jail time.

[image or embed]

— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@mrsbettybowers.bsky.social) September 10, 2026 at 11:19 AM

Just in case Mrs Betty Bowers' skeet disappears,
here is the screenshot

If you want the link to the Code for 18USC s597  and 52USC s10307c here you go. Even the offer of the payment to change votes is illegal even if the payment never goes through.

It is enraging that the corrupt Republican-controlled Supreme Court ruled that a sitting president can't be charged with crimes. trump is so crooked and reckless he believes - no, worse, he knows - the law won't touch him. However; if enough voters show up this November midterms to flip both the House AND the Senate to supermajority Democratic control (it's possible for the Senate, but EVERY seat has to flip to pull it off) these are impeachable offenses, and we can kick trump's corrupt ass out of the White House he does not deserve.

You want motivation to vote, America? VOTE THE REPUBLICAN CROOKS OUT and IMPEACH trump. That is far more valuable than that cheap-ass $5,000 bribe.

Where The Hell *Are* The Billions Already Wasted At the Pentagon, If They're Desperate to Pilfer Even More Money?

What the HELL is going on here? According to the Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee, Hegseth's Department of Defense is about to raid the National Institutes for Health's piggy bank:

House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT-03) has learned that officials at the Department of Defense (DoD) are working to divert billions of dollars from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to supplement the Department’s budget.

Without notifying Congress or the American people, DoD has signed an interagency agreement that could give the Department access to billions of dollars that Congress provided to NIH for critical biomedical research. These funds were provided to support research to develop treatments or cures for infectious diseases such as influenza, malaria, tuberculosis, HIV, Ebola, and other dangerous pathogens...

We as taxpayers have witnessed billions of dollars going to Defense every budget, we've had Secretary of Steak and Lobster Dinners Hegseth come begging for even more money this summer as ammo and troops got thrown into a costly destructive war on Iran. We've seen the end results of our front-line soldiers and sailors suffering with supply woes, bad food, and lack of support from a logistics system broken under Hegseth's misrule.

Something is rotten in the Pentagon, if they're having to raid other agencies for funds. What the hell happened to the billions we already gave the Defense Department, to where they're now out of money?

There's been calls for years to have a full audit done on the DoD. This is a major red flag warning us that audit is way overdue.

The Crimes of the DeSantis Power Circle, Symbolic of Statewide Republican Corruption

If you want to know how corrupt Republicans are, not only look to their crimes but also look to how they cover up said crimes when they're in control of the investigation. Right here in Florida is a perfect example as a grand jury probe dug into political fundraising misdeeds by those in power (via Jim Vertuno with AP News, linked through PBS Newshour):

A Florida grand jury found that Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration "misappropriated" $10 million in taxpayer money it diverted to a charity connected to his wife, but it declined to file criminal charges due to a lack of evidence indicating who specifically was responsible.

DeSantis on Thursday did not dispute the legitimacy of the secret grand jury report obtained and published online by CBS News Miami, but he insisted no laws were broken and said whoever leaked the sealed documents would face "consequences."

What consequences? The report already indicated nobody in a position to do anything about this is pressing criminal charges!

The Leon County grand jury completed its report in January on investigations into Hope Florida, the charity started in 2021 by Florida first lady Casey DeSantis. Despite the lack of charges, the report ignited a new round of criticism aimed at DeSantis and other top state Republicans over the charity receiving $10 million from a state Medicaid settlement intended to help poor children get health insurance.

Basically, DeSantis' own wife stole from sick kids. SHE STOLE. FROM SICK KIDS. The sociopathy is bottomless with these crooks.

Also note, the grand jury completed their work in January but it's only NOW - after the August primaries were voted on - that the report leaked.

The Hope Florida charity is supposed to help financially struggling families connect with churches and aid groups to help keep them off publicly-financed assistance programs. The $10 million was instead moved to political action committees that used the money to oppose a 2024 statewide ballot measure that would have legalized marijuana for adults in the state...

The grand jury said no one would take responsibility for sending the money to the charity or had any memory of who did.

"We recognize that this would be an impediment to criminal prosecution," the report noted. "While we can't prove who is responsible, we can plainly see that taxpayer money was misused for political purposes and we would like to see changes made to prevent this from happening again."

The grand jury report concluded that James Uthmeier, who was DeSantis' chief of staff at the time, "was in a position of authority over those involved in settling," and that his Keep Florida Clean PAC was the prime recipient of the $10 million. The grand jury said then-state Attorney General Ashley Moody's office knew of the plans to divert the money. She was later appointed by DeSantis to the U.S. Senate...

Take note of all the players involved in both the crime and the cover-up, how they're all interconnected and relying on each other to stay in political power. Uthmeier and Moody both owe DeSantis their offices, and they have personal incentives to make sure they're never held accountable for any role they had in this.

The articles covering this story don't delve too much into how a grand jury investigation into this even started back in October 2025. That it was a fellow state Republican in the state House questioning the fundraising diversions seems a bit surprising unless you recognize it as an intraparty power play: Back then, Casey DeSantis was campaigning to run for governor to follow in her husband's footsteps, a blatant act of nepotism that arguably angered other Republicans ambitious for that office. The polls favored her well into February 2026, but the grand jury created enough scandal to keep her from running.

When she didn't show up on the ballot, you'll notice the other state-level Republicans didn't care to hold anybody accountable for it, even though clearly crimes took place. Their inaction reeks just as much as the DeSantis' power grabs and theft.

And this is what you get when one party runs everything at the state level for 28-plus years. The Republicans - driven more and more by their wingnut extremists - have been in control of Florida since 1998, packing the state courts with conservative judges happy to bend the laws to their favor, shredding every voter-backed referendums that supported funding schools and keeping ecosystems safe, denying local communities any sovereignty, and mocking any accountability to the voters who keep putting the same crooks back into office.

All I want - all I've been praying for the last two decades - is for my fellow Floridians to wake up to the reality that the state-level Republicans - as much as the national party - are a bunch of honest-to-God crooks. The Republican Party from trump on down to DeSantis and to every state legislator and county official are part of an ongoing criminal conspiracy to take taxpayer money for their own pockets and make most of us - even their own voters - suffer to their cruelty.

Please. I am begging every Florida voter. You want an end to criminal corruption in politics? You're going to have to recognize it's all coming from the Republicans in charge at Tallahassee, and you are going to have to vote every goddamn Republican crook out of office. Please.

trump and Republicans, Selling Us Out To the Crooks Every Day

Put a corrupt businessman in power, expect the only ones to benefit from that to be the other corrupt bastards ripping us off (via David Frum at the Atlantic): 

So it is with the news that the Department of the Treasury has ended ownership-reporting requirements for U.S. businesses and purged the existing database of ownership information. This seemingly technical-sounding change is a huge gift to financial crooks, who can now store and launder dark money in U.S. financial institutions with less risk of detection. But the gift comes at the direct expense of banks, mutual funds, insurance companies, and other financial institutions, which now have to shoulder the burden of verifying customer data themselves.

The Treasury advertises the measure as deregulatory, lifting burdensome red tape from business owners. But the relief to honest business owners is tiny. The added burden on the financial sector is huge. The real winners here are shady business owners. In 2021, Capital One, the Trump Organization’s then-bank, closed more than 300 of the Trump Organization’s accounts on suspicion that they violated anti-money-laundering rules. The action just taken by the Treasury may best be understood as payback for those who tried to enforce the law against Donald Trump.

After the 9/11 terror attacks, Congress took action to prevent terrorists and other criminals from using the U.S. financial system to move money around undetected. Congress enacted laws requiring U.S. financial institutions to “know your customer.” If someone tried to open an account for a shell company, perhaps owned by another shell company, the financial institution had to pierce the layers of concealment to know the human beneficial owners of the account...

Financial institutions have clamored for years for some relief from the tangled mess of reporting imposed on them. In 2020, Congress attached a new Corporate Transparency Act to the 2021 Pentagon budget, which imposed an obligation on most businesses operating inside the United States to report their ownership directly to the government. The Corporate Transparency Act authorized the Treasury to establish a database of this information. At first, the database would be accessible only to law enforcement, but the plan was to open the database to financial institutions too. If a financial institution sensed something amiss, the federal database would assist its investigation. The goal was less to exclude criminals from the banking system than to use “the banks to track the money and find the criminals,” Aaron Klein, an expert in banking regulation at the Brookings Institution, explained to me.

By destroying the database, the Trump administration has removed that help from financial institutions and foreclosed an essential avenue for tracking crooks.

Despite the Treasury’s claims that this purported deregulation of financial information “is a victory for common sense and American small businesses,” in the words of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the change provides scarcely any benefit at all to honest businesses. They still have to report the relevant names, addresses, dates of birth, and government-ID numbers every time they transact with a financial institution. That burden remains the law. They have been relieved only of the slight additional chore of filing the same information with the federal government—a chore that lowered their costs of doing business. Those costs are now destined to rise...

This isn't as much about costs or burdens as it is a loss of accountability, the lost of faith in institutions to do honest business with the vast majority of us who aren't crooks.

This isn't capitalism, at least not the way it evolved in the 20th Century with regulatory guidelines to keep our global economy from crashing every 20 years. This sure isn't socialism, not as "government control of the means of production" as much as trump is forcing businesses to kick him a piece of their action like a mob boss.

This is a rebirth of the economic conditions Mercantilism that created the corrupt East India Company: a small circle of political and business elites raging across the landscape using monopoly power and brute force to vacuum up every cent they can. It's the Five Families, the shakedown artists, the identity thieves who keep stealing our parents' and grandparents' debit card numbers.

Goddamn them. Goddamn the entire Republican Party for defending their only constant constituents: thieves and greedheads. Be honest to yourselves, voters: The modern Republicans have betrayed your trust with their economic malaise, destruction of communities, and desire to sell every inch of America to twisted techbros eager to consume our resources and privacy. 

We need to do better, America. We need to STOP voting for a Republican Party of the crooks, by the crooks, and for the crooks.

The Only Truth That Is Also A Fact: The Republicans Are Beyond Saving

Over on Bluesky I reposted this skeet, because it spells out in easy terms why the Republicans cannot be redeemed.

This is an apt descriptions of Republicans now.

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— migas7.bsky.social (@migas7.bsky.social) July 25, 2026 at 10:11 AM

In case the embed fails

The modern Republican Party defends no virtue, performs no service to others, provides no leadership to our nation in any way.

In every respect, the Republican Party is still dead as a functioning political force. It is now an occupying army, treating other Americans - other humans - as targets for their greed, fear, and hate. Anyone in that party that can claim any rational capability cannot be turned around as a force for good: They have had a DECADE of trumpism to walk away, deny any support of such criminality... and they refused. They are too beholden to "owning the libs" that they cannot break from a corrupt, destructive faction.

This is why I've been screaming to the nation FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, STOP VOTING REPUBLICAN. There is nothing there to vote for, only against (against Blacks, against women, against Latinos, against gays/lesbians/trans, against fiscal sanity, against vaccines, against foreign allies, against holding any person of power/wealth accountable for their crimes).

I'm not taking crazy pills. The Republican downward spiral has been going on for decades now, and it's dragging the United States - and the world - down with it.

Just stop pandering to any Right-leaning faction you think you can appeal to. The Republicans killed the better angels of their nature ages ago. They'll just waste your time (and take your money). Just stop that. There's millions of Democratic and Independent voters to reach for to get them motivated to vote. There's millions more who aren't even registered to vote - and who can - that the Dems and other center-Left forces need to reach to get them in enough numbers to drive the corrupt GOP out of power at the state and federal levels.

Those are the Americans we need to stand up for the nation. Go talk to them, get them on board. Save the true Republic, Dems.

The Fall of Florida's Higher Education Under Far Right Republicans

As part of Ron DeSantis' ambitious agenda - for his insane presidential hopes - in 2023 to "fight Wokeness" in Florida's educational system, we witnessed the Sunshine State's schools fall under the merciless attentions of Far Right wingnuts eager to purge "diversity" and any genuine standards at every level. As I wrote back in February 2023:

 Not only are the classrooms at our public schools been emptied of every book so that DeSantis' foot soldier censors can refuse whichever titles they fear, but DeSantis is happily plugging in conservative political hacks into leadership roles at every major state university...

This is essentially a hostile takeover, not just by DeSantis but also by Far Right Republicans obsessed with dismantling higher educational systems they fear are too liberal...

DeSantis is essentially saying that things like civil rights and Title IX protections won't be upheld at state universities. Segregation and racial discrimination, sexual harassment, hostile workplaces, hostile classrooms... all of this will become the norm in DeSantis' Florida.

This is all echoed in DeSantis' efforts to shut down ANY discussion of "Critical Race Theory" essentially meaning our state cannot teach one iota of Florida's history regarding racism, slavery, Jim Crow, Civil Rights marches, all because Republicans are terrified that White People's Feelings (tm) will be hurt if we teach the facts that Yes Goddammit racism happened and keeps happening. He's just making sure that college students will be kept ignorant as much as our K-12 students.

(Christopher) Rufo is, by the by, a wingnut conservative hack actively campaigning to shut down public education of any kind in an obsessive desire to privatize something for greed and racism. DeSantis, desperate to win over 2024 Republican primary voters, is giving Rufo the opportunity to wreak havoc on Florida's educational system...

So it's been two years since then, with DeSantis' presidential hopes all dashed while Florida's educational standards sank into the swamps. In the meanwhile, we had situations like political hack Ben Sasse - Far Right Republican dragged in from another state - causing massive administrative and financial damage to the flagship University of Florida. We keep witnessing Republican leadership at the state level fail our kids and families when it comes to high school success and getting prepared for colleges. The state's budget for education across the board is disappearing, forcing more cuts that shouldn't be happening.

And DeSantis' takeover of New College? How is that turning out? Let Nate Weisberg's report at Washington Monthly educate us:

As Chris Mullin wrote recently in the Washington Monthly, DeSantis exploited Florida’s unusually centralized system of higher-education governance to insert political control directly into the classroom—stacking boards, replacing presidents, and rewriting curricula. His boldest gamble has been a complete takeover and ideological makeover of ​​New College of Florida, a small public liberal-arts college on Sarasota Bay known for its experimental pedagogy and progressive-left campus culture. Charging poor performance and ideological bias, DeSantis announced plans in early 2023 to transform the school into a “Hillsdale of the South”—a reference to the small, selective, conservative-leaning Michigan college that eschews government funds and focuses on teaching the classics. The governor appointed six new conservative trustees to New College, including activist Christopher Rufo, ​who then ​fired its President, Patricia Okker, and replaced her with former Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran ​at more than double Okker’s salary​. Within months, the new board abolished the gender​ studies program, dismissed faculty and administrators, created athletic teams, and secured tens of millions in state funding.

Two years later, the picture looks grim. New College’s four-year graduation rate has plummeted from 58.3 to 47.4 percent. The school’s U.S. News & World Report college ranking has fallen by nearly 60 spots, from 76th among national liberal-arts colleges in 2022 to 135th this year. Faculty and staff have fled, and students have followed them out the door. “It’s kind of like a Ponzi scheme,” one professor told Inside Higher Ed. “Students keep leaving, so they have to recruit bigger and bigger cohorts.” Spending​ at the college​, meanwhile, has exploded. ​In Tallahassee, there is now open talk of either privatizing New College or shutting it down completely. 

DeSantis’s justification for the takeover was that New College was an educational disaster—a failed experiment in left-wing academic culture. Though the school ​had its problems (it struggled​​, for instance,​​ to reach its enrollment goals, as do many small, less-selective colleges around the country) and ​was indeed ​​left leaning, it was far from a disaster. In fact, by most objective measures, it was a model of what a small public liberal-arts institution could achieve. As Aalia Thomas reported in the Washington Monthly in 2023, New College consistently ranked near the top of the magazine’s l​ist of l​iberal​ ​arts ​colleges ​​for upward mobility, research, and service. ​​Its graduates earned PhDs at rates higher than many of the nation’s most prestigious private liberal arts colleges. Its curriculum mixed ​​postcolonial theory with Aristotle and Voltaire. The college charged about $7,000 a year for low-to-medium-income students—a bargain compared to most similar liberal arts colleges. It enrolled a high share of Pell​ ​​Grant recipients and produced civically engaged graduates—​​92.6 percent of its students were registered to vote in 2020. Far from failing, New College embodied many of the qualities conservatives say they prize in public higher education: affordability, rigor, civic virtue, and upward mobility. 

​​The governor’s appointees arrived convinced they were rescuing a failing school. ​​They replaced New College’s narrative-evaluation system with traditional grades. They bragged about making the college more “selective” (instead, the percentage of new students with a 4.0 or above high school grade point average decreased from 55.1 percent in 2022 to 42.1 percent in 2024)​.​ They recruited athletes and ​​self-described “normal” students to reshape the culture, ​​many of whom quickly transferred out. ​The campus began to change in telling ways: the reopened campus café, operated by a vendor tied to Corcoran, now serves coffee in cups printed with Bible verses, and the college has commissioned a statue of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk to stand on campus in honor of “free speech​.​​​” ​All this change has been financed by ​​an ​​eye-watering ​​boost​​ in ​​spending​​. The college’s budget has grown from​​ ​$53,232,164​​​​ ​​​​the year before the overhaul ​​​​to​​​​ ​​​​$93,043,119​​​​ ​​​​today​​​​—a​​​​ 75 percent​​​​ increase​​​​.​​​​ ​

​​​​​​​​Even DeSantis allies are turning on the project. “There can be no question anymore about what the numbers really are,” said Eric Silagy, a​​ DeSantis-appointed​​ member of the state Board of Governors. Nathan Allen, ​​who served as ​​​​vice president of strategy​​ for New College ​​during the conservative takeover but has since resigned​​, ​suggested where the blame for those numbers should be placed​: “​​New College is not a House or Senate project … It’s a Ron DeSantis project.”​​ ​​​Corcoran himself has said, ​​if New College doesn’t produce something different, “then we should be closed down.”

That Corcoran - a political hack hire who didn't deserve the job in the first place - is looking for the exit is a telling sign of how screwed up New College under Rufo and the other wingnuts turned out. And as much as this is all on DeSantis - pushing a political agenda on our state's schools - all of the state-level Republicans who backed DeSantis' efforts on this need to answer for their own corruption and incompetence here.

Look at the waste in dollars at New College: almost doubling the spending with reduced results, arguably funneling that money into wingnut ideas that aren't working out, if not funneling that money into their own pockets. Remember what happened at UF under Sasse: He hired in 'consultants' and lackeys at double if not triple the pay for no-show jobs and no-show results. It was... it is a huge grift for these greedheads.

For the Republicans, this was never about improving the educational standards of Florida. This was about viewing public education as a cash cow, a means of filling their own pockets with state money while the system breaks down. It was about playing into the hypocrisy of accusing our schools and colleges of being 'broken' and 'corrupt', while being the ones in charge breaking it all and using their own corrupt urges to make it worse.

We've had almost 30 years of constant Republican (mis)rule in the state of Florida, a straight line of crooked behavior by our elected officials and their shady business allies. Why the hell should they be allowed to retain any office after these decades of deceit and destruction?

Injustice For All

Update: Again, many thanks to Batocchio for including this article at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. Sorry I'm not in a better mood. Please leave comments below, hopefully the revised Blogspot system is easier to navigate. I just want to hear from people. It's so lonely for me.

Ever since the election results, I've been dreading this moment. Special prosecutor Jack Smith - who had been pursuing two criminal cases against donald trump for both his involvement in the January 6th Insurrection AND the theft of thousands of classified documents - filed paperwork with the courts today to cancel those prosecutions now that trump will be legally protected with presidency. David A Graham at the Atlantic tries to cover the implications (paywalled):

Donald Trump will never face federal criminal charges for trying to corrupt the 2020 presidential election, the fundamental democratic procedure. Nor will he ever face consequences for brazenly removing highly sensitive documents from the White House, refusing to hand them back, and attempting to hide them from the government.

Special Counsel Jack Smith, representing the Justice Department, today filed to dismiss charges in the two federal cases he was overseeing against Trump. Smith effectively had no choice. Trump had promised to fire him and end the cases as soon as he took office on January 20. (The president-elect reportedly plans to fire not only Smith but also career attorneys who were assigned to his team.)

In both cases, these were crimes that only a president could commit: No one else could have attempted to remain in office by the same means, and few people could have made off with boxes full of these documents. And only a president-elect with nearly unlimited resources could have gotten away with them.

Trump pulled off this legal trick with a simple and effective strategy of running down the clock until being reelected president. Traditionally, defendants have had two ways to beat a rap. They could convince a judge or jury that they didn’t do the crime, or at least that there isn’t enough evidence to prove they did. Or they could look for a way to get sprung on a technicality. Faced with a choice between A and B, Trump chose option C: weaponize the procedural protections of the American justice system against itself.

The problem is not that these protections exist. They are a crucial part of ensuring fairness for all defendants. But just as he has done in other circumstances, Trump sniffed how the things that make the American system great can also be cynically exploited. If you have sufficiently deep pockets and very little shame, you can snow a case under procedural motions, appeals, and long shots, enough to slow the case to a crawl. And in Trump’s case, delay was a victory—not because he could put it off indefinitely, but because he will soon be president again, with the Department of Justice under his authority...

I decried trump's tactics, and I hated how the legal system seemed to go out of its way to play the game by his rules not theirs. And yet this is how broken our American Justice has become: 

But in Attorney General Merrick Garland, Trump drew the ideal foil. The man overseeing the two cases against Trump is obsessive about proceduralism. His view was that the best way to restore the justice system, and the Justice Department, after the first Trump presidency was to do everything precisely by the book, no matter how long it took. It took quite a while—Smith was not appointed until November 2022, two months after the paperwork coup began and three months after the FBI seized documents at Mar-a-Lago. By the time Smith brought charges, in summer 2023, the timeline was tight, either for verdicts soon enough to inform voters or to avoid dismissal if a Republican won the presidential election...

Most important, Garland’s attention to detail meant the system failed to do the basic work of holding accountable someone who had committed serious crimes in plain sight. And partly because of that, Trump will soon return to the White House with the power and intention to destroy all the independence and careful procedures that Garland took such pains to protect...

The lack of accountability for January 6 is an affront to the Constitution. But the lesson that Trump will take from charges being dropped, along with the immunity ruling, is that the system is not capable of holding him accountable for most rules that he violates. The affronts will continue.

With regards to the one criminal trial that did convict trump on 34 counts, even that is now facing turmoil as the prosecutors and judge try to figure out sentencing on someone who will be federally protected from the law. The civil trials that trump lost - the one involving tax fraud on his properties, and the ones involving his sexual assault and defamation on E. Jean Carroll - are likely to continue through the appellate process, but you can be damn sure trump will use every legal power the presidency can inflict on those rulings to weasel his way out of those matters.

I am angry at Garland - and at President Biden, who nominated Garland as a sign of professionalism and normalcy returning to the Justice Department - only as far as his inability to understand the seriousness and severity of everything trump represented. Dammit, man. trump was - still is - a clear and present danger to the United States.

I am more angry at a Republican Party that - confronted with multiple facts that trump was dangerous and criminal to boot - refused to hold trump accountable, and refused to regain any semblance of ethical responsibility towards the United States. They happily did something the Founders could never have imagined: They openly supported a convicted felon, tax fraud, and sex offender for the highest office in the land.

I am extremely angry at a Beltway media that repeatedly refused to remind the American public who and what trump really is. Not just the increasing signs of mental instability and the ongoing evidence of trump's sadism, sexism, and racism. They kept underplaying the facts that trump had been convicted of felonies, that he'd been exposed as a business fraud and gaslighter, that his contempt towards women drove him to acts of vulgarity. This is the same Beltway media that had fucking meltdowns over Hillary's emails, and they failed to point out how trump was the most corrupt person - in a field containing the likes of LBJ, Nixon, Harding, and Andrew Jackson - in presidential history.

But my deepest ire is for the 75 million or so fellow Americans who - with all the evidence that IS out there, with all the reporting that did happen that showed trump was a convicted felon and sex offender - still voted for a monster like him. There may have been a lot of low-information voters out there this cycle, and a number of them voted for trump without knowing - or comprehending - the facts that trump was a legal abomination. But enough of you knew. Enough of you knew he was a criminal and you voted for him anyway. Goddamn you.

trump is now the most dangerous person in America, because he's going to get granted executive powers - yet again - that he openly promises to abuse the minute he gets sworn into office. trump is going to twist the Department of Justice into his Department of Vengeance, attacking every person who exposed his criminal acts by turning them into criminals without evidence or rationale. Think of the disastrous Durham prosecutions that never proved trump's lies about the 2016 elections: Think of how worse it's going to be as trump pursues falsehoods and fantasies about 2020 being 'stolen' from him that four years of digging by his wingnut allies never confirmed. Think about all those people who were convicted for their roles in the January 6th Insurrection, that trump claims are 'heroes' and who'll get pardoned even after all those trials and juries proved how violent those insurrectionists are.

Think of how trump's entire existence - all the bankruptcies, all the acts of fraud he plead away - is proof that our legal system fails to hold everyone accountable. If you're poor, if you're a minority, if you're a woman, you won't find any justice with prosecutors or judges or cops who'll punish you even when you're innocent. If you're rich, if you're white, if you're male, you can buy and bully your way into favorable treatment and slaps on the wrist because you can afford the lawyers who play the game.

And if you're donald trump, you fucking get away with everything.

Goddamn us.

Judgment Cometh and That Right Soon: trump is Toast (and Now Broke) (w/ Update)

Update 5/8/24: I think I wrote this thing too fucking soon. When I insisted towards the end that trump was facing four criminal trials in short order, I jinxed it or something. Three of those trials are now suffering delays due to trump-appointed judges or his spamming of the appeals system, and the likelihood is trump won't see those three trials until 2025 after the November election. If that Shitgibbon pulls off a goddamn steal of the election - either through a broken Electoral College or getting a Republican-controlled Congress to gift it to him - he will shut those trials down and never answer for his sins. He's currently facing trial in Manhattan for his hush money schemes to silence stories about his sex scandals during the 2016 election, but he HAS to answer for the serious acts of insurrection and document theft he caused. 

For the LOVE OF GOD, America, do NOT vote for trump or the Republicans this November...

We were waiting for this. trump's civil case over tax evasion and acts of fraud came due today (via Ximena Bustillo at NPR): 

The Friday decision from Judge Arthur Engoron orders Trump and his flagship organization to pay the bulk of that amount: nearly $355 million. Trump's two sons and co-defendants, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., are each liable for $4 million. Allen Weisselberg, a former Trump Organization executive, is liable for $1 million. The total is even higher with interest — more than $450 million overall, according to the attorney general's office.

"Their complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological. They are accused only of inflating asset values to make more money. The documents prove this over and over again. This is a venial sin, not a mortal sin," Engoron wrote in the court filing. "Yet, defendants are incapable of admitting the error of their ways..."

trump is of course not admitting to his errors and is screaming on his social media bubble about how unfair this is, A TOTAL WITCH HUNT, it's a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham. etc.

If you want to view the full travesty of a mockery of a sham, the court filing should be here.

If you want popcorn, that should be in Aisle 9 at your local Publix. If you don't have a local Publix I assure you there will soon be one. (evil laughter from Publix HQ in Lakeland FL)

The judge also decided to limit Trump and his co-defendants' ability to do business in the Empire State. Trump and his companies are prohibited from serving as an officer or director of any New York business or applying for loans for three years. His sons are limited from similar leadership roles for two years.

Jeffrey McConney, ex-controller of the Trump Organization and also a defendant, was not ordered to pay any amount, but he and Weisselberg are permanently barred from serving in the financial control function of any New York corporation or similar business entity registered or licensed in New York state.

One of the thing trump - and his sons - can't do is get any loans from banks that do business in New York, which was one of the ways he'd been inflating his personal wealth and perpetuating his ongoing grifts over the decades. Considering New York City is the financial capital of the world - well, it's one of the major centers along with London, Tokyo, Hong Kong and (checks notes) that one nation-state that allows shell companies to money-launder off-shore accounts - this is tossing a wooden shoe into trump's gears real quick. If trump is trying scheme up anything else to make money down the road... he might not be able to. At least not for the next three years.

This is also going to put a crimp on trump's ability to pay not only the penalties in this case but also the fines and penalties in the Carroll defamation and sexual assault decisions (add in another $88 million to trump's bill).

I mentioned earlier that trump - like most rich folk - doesn't have a lot of real cash on hand to be able to pay these kinds of fines. Most of the wealth is on paper, on the estimated values on properties and businesses owned, and on the amounts floating around in investment portfolios and the stock markets. Either trump is going to be forced to sell a number of properties - at fair market value, NOT the inflated prices trump claimed - or use other people's money. There's a reason why a lot of people - myself included - viewed trump's effort to claim control of the RNC this week was to claim the revenues flowing in to the party organization's campaign coffers.

It's going to be a question of how trump can get to any of that RNC money, if the court-appointed oversight by judge Barbara Jones is expanding over the next 14 months to ensure this order gets enforced (even during the appeal process, by the looks of it).

And he doesn't have that time afforded to him. trump is facing more court trials, specifically the criminal cases. A quick update on those:

The ruling comes at a crucial time for Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. Engoron's decision comes a day after another judge set the date for what could be Trump's first criminal trial, related to hush money payments issued during the 2016 election.

He is facing a combined 91 state and federal charges, including several related to his role to stay in office after he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden...

Just this week, the judge overseeing that Hush Money trial - the DA is trying to claim it's an "election interference" trial because trump evaded campaign finance rules and lied to voters about the matter, but seriously it's the Hush Money To Stormy Daniels case - ruled against trump's bid to have the case dismissed and set the jury selection to start March 25, 2024 (it's also Bustillo but it's a different NPR article, well that IS her beat):

New York Judge Juan Merchan has rejected an attempt to dismiss the charges in the hush money case against former President Donald Trump, and a jury trial will begin as originally scheduled on March 25.

The case was brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who charged Trump with 34 felony counts last year, alleging he falsified New York business records in order to conceal damaging information before the 2016 presidential election. That included hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels, who was threatening to go public with charges that she had had an affair with Trump not long after he married Melania Trump. Trump, who was present for Thursday's court hearing before Merchan, has denied the affair.

You should remember, this is the matter that brought "bagman" lawyer Michael Cohen to the national stage ("I have a hard drive just labeled 'YIKES'!"), and there was enough proof back then - with trump as un-indicted co-conspirator Individual-One - to get Cohen to plead out. It took awhile - and Bragg overcoming his initial reluctance when he took office - for these charges to come out, but it's here now, it's starting in March and should be finished in four weeks, meaning in late April we'll see if trump gets convicted on even one count or survives his first criminal trial.

The next trial was technically the matter in DC federal court regarding trump's involvement in the January 6th insurrection, with four felony counts there. However, Judge Chutkan postponed that trial awaiting the ruling on trump's claim of Absolute Immunity, which an appellate court rebuked and which the Supreme Court received this week to determine if they need to hear the matter.

A number of legal experts are arguing SCOTUS doesn't even need to hear the appeal, and that is a choice the justices can make. They could still take it, and deliberate the matter in order to give trump what he REALLY wants - more delay - but they'd still have to make a ruling on it this term year (by late summer if they pad it out). If they dismiss trump's appeal, this trial could start as early as mid-May (depending on another trial): If SCOTUS takes it, they still have to rule on it by August (and like the 11th District of Appeals, they dare not approve in favor of absolute presidential immunity, it would literally kill the Constitution) and the trial could start by September (cutting it close to Election Day).

That other trial that could skew the DC trial schedule is the one in South Florida regarding trump's mishandling of federal classified documents at Mar-A-Lago. Ostensibly it's set for late May, but Judge Cannon overseeing that matter has been causing havoc with the pre-trial elements - such as wanting to expose the Justice Department's witness list to trump's lawyers earlier than usual, and against Special Counsel Jack Smith's wishes - that a potential delay could be happening in that trial as the appeals courts straighten the mess. Outside legal experts -some of them former federal prosecutors - argue Cannon should be removed from this case considering how she's risking witness safety, but that could delay the start of trial as well.

If by some miracle the Mar-A-Lago trial does start by May, it's still expected to take two or three months to complete considering the sheer amount of classified documents - and their mishandling - to go through. It would affect whenever the DC trial starts, which I would argue deserves to go first because of its immediacy and its importance in confirming trump's culpability over the nightmare of January 6th. Hopefully this will get straightened out soon.

Thrown into this mix is the fourth criminal matter trump faces in Fulton County, Georgia... which hit a huge delay when one of the co-defendants filed a complaint against DA Fani Willis over possible misconduct with an affair with one of the special investigators hired by the DA's office. The judge overseeing that trial held a hearing the last two days, during which the worst part of trumpian (damn you Roy Cohn) legal tactics - public smearing of opponents - was on full display.

Igor Derysh at Salon has more details:

Thursday’s evidentiary hearing on the misconduct claim against Fulton County, Ga., District Attorney Fani Willis yielded a lot of drama but little evidence of wrongdoing, legal experts say.

Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee held a hearing after Ashleigh Merchant, an attorney for Trump co-defendant Mike Roman, alleged an improper relationship between Willis and top prosecutor Nathan Wade and claimed that Wade used his earnings from the case to fund trips for the pair...

“I simply don’t see any new evidence that requires disqualification. It’s a credibility pissing match so far. Ugly. Dramatic. But the needle hasn’t moved,” tweeted Georgia State University Law Prof. Anthony Michael Kreis.

“As an excavation of a now-defunct relationship, it was Bravo-worthy (and frankly, sad). But as an evidentiary hearing, it wasn’t the win the defense promised, especially under the governing legal standard,” agreed MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin...

Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance told MSNBC that the hearing featured “a lot of spectacle but not very much substance.”

"Ultimately, at the end of the day yesterday, it was just a big nothingburger," she said. "There was nothing to show that Fani Willis and Nathan Wade had the financial conflict of interest that Georgia law recognizes, something akin to a prosecutor who only gets paid if they win a case. That's the classic case in Georgia law where there is a conflict that results in disqualification. That wasn't there yesterday in the courtroom..."

If trump and his co-defendants were hoping to throw the whole prosecution out, that wasn't going to happen. At the least, the judge could have removed Willis from overseeing the matter and handing it off to another prosecutor in the DA's office. Whether it delays this trial any further - which legal experts considered an open-shut case because of so much direct evidence against trump including that audio tape - is unlikely, because it's all the other trials' schedules that's interfering when this one starts.

Again, to all the Republican voters out there, to all the Republican Party leaders out there: You could have avoided all this. trump was dirty and corrupt and vulgar in the years before 2016. You had all the warning signs when he first campaigned - the failed casinos, the civil trial involving trump's university scam, the reports of sexual assault, the open racism and sexism - that trump was going to be a disaster of a human being. AND YOU STILL VOTED FOR THAT.

We've had other corrupt men in high office before, just that none of them reached the criminal lows that trump has. trump's not facing criminal trials because he's a "great conservative American," he's facing criminal trials now because 40 years of bills over his bullshit are finally coming due.

The civil trials are mostly done, and trump has to pay those dues soon. The criminal trials start March, and the countdown to just even ONE felony conviction begins.

Tick fucking tock, trump.

Update: This got to be a very popular tweet.

at this rate, trump should raise the $355 million in 30,527 days.
That's almost 83 years.
It could work.

— Witty Librarian 2024 (@PaulWartenberg) February 17, 2024

Violating Emoluments Every Day as a trumpian Way of Life

I have on this blog since the rise of donald trump as a corrupt political force of doom documented how much of what trump was doing was out of greed, needy for money and happy to pander to foreign powers to get as much as he could.

Well, today a number of Democrats on the House Oversight Committee - in order to counter the Republicans' obsession over Hunter Biden's dick pics laptop - presented solid evidence that trump routinely violated the Constitution's Emoluments Clause by taking millions from foreign countries like China, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar (via Luke Broadwater at the New York Times (may be paywalled)):

Donald J. Trump’s businesses received at least $7.8 million from 20 foreign governments during his presidency, according to new documents released by House Democrats on Thursday that show how much he received from overseas transactions while he was in the White House, most of it from China.

The transactions, detailed in a 156-page report called “White House For Sale” that was produced by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, offer concrete evidence that the former president engaged in the kind of conduct that House Republicans have labored, so far unsuccessfully, to prove that President Biden did as they work to build an impeachment case against him.

Using documents produced through a court fight, the report describes how foreign governments and their controlled entities, including a top U.S. adversary, interacted with Trump businesses while he was president. They paid millions to the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.; Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas; Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York; and Trump World Tower at 845 United Nations Plaza in New York.

The Constitution prohibits federal officeholders from accepting money, payments or gifts “of any kind whatever” from foreign governments and monarchs unless they obtain “the consent of the Congress” to do so. The report notes that Mr. Trump never went to Congress to seek consent...

It so happened that in 2017 when this all started that Congress was under Republican control, and the Republicans are too cowardly and too crooked themselves to raise a fuss over trump's open corruption. trump didn't even need to bother Congresscritters who were happy to look the other way.

Among the countries patronizing Mr. Trump’s properties, China made the largest total payment — $5.5 million — to his business interests, the report found. Those payments included millions of dollars from China’s Embassy in the United States, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and the Hainan Airlines Holding Company.

Saudi Arabia was the second-largest spender, shelling out more than $615,000 at the Trump World Tower and Trump International Hotel...

Half of this was stuff we already knew over years of reporting about how foreign lobbyists would check into trump's DC hotel pandering for favors. It's just now, we have a great idea how much money was actually involved.

The frustrating question to ask now - just as I'd been asking since 2017 - is WHEN THE FCK CAN WE CHARGE TRUMP FOR VIOLATING THE EMOLUMENTS CLAUSE?!

Part of me is worried that we may be too late: there is a thing about statute of limitations, that there's a ticking clock to when the legal system can't pursue the matter any further. Granted, trump was doing this all the way up to January 20, 2021: There is hope the clock hasn't run out.

But one of the things that kept coming up in the courts whenever the lawsuits were filed was who had standing to do so (this is from Laurel Wamsley for NPR back in 2019): 

A constitutional challenge to President Trump's continued ownership of his businesses has been ordered dismissed by a federal appeals court.

The case was brought by the attorneys general of Washington, D.C., and Maryland, arguing that Trump had violated the domestic and foreign emoluments clauses of the U.S. Constitution by accepting money from state and foreign governments via his Washington hotel and business empire.

A three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled unanimously that the attorneys general did not have the standing to bring the lawsuit and instructed a lower court to dismiss the lawsuit.

Judge Paul Niemeyer wrote in the opinion: "The District and Maryland's interest in enforcing the Emoluments Clauses is so attenuated and abstract that their prosecution of this case readily provokes the question of whether this action against the President is an appropriate use of the courts, which were created to resolve real cases and controversies between the parties."

One thing that ruling didn't spell out was: If the state AGs didn't have standing, who did? I'm still not sure, other than it being Congress, except that another court ruling in 2020 said the Democrats in Congress didn't have standing either (via Dareh Gregorian at NBC News).

In the ruling, the three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia found the members of Congress did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit against the president for violating the clause, which bars federal officials from collecting payments from foreign governments without the approval of Congress.

In their unsigned ruling, the judges cited Supreme Court precedent, noting the 215 lawmakers filing the lawsuit are not the majority of Congress, and that they might have had standing if they had done so as a majority. "[O]nly an institution can assert an institutional injury," the ruling says...

This feels like moving the goal posts on the part of the courts: "Oh, only Congress can charge trump with Emoluments violations! No wait, only a MAJORITY of Congress members can charge trump! No wait, only a MAJORITY of BOTH HOUSES of Congress members can charge trump! No wait, only..."

/headdesk

For all the back and forth, all the debates over all the other crimes trump's been charged with, the one thing we KNOW trump committed - using his businesses to curry favor from foreign powers - is the one thing nobody seems able to charge him on.

What the hell, judges. What the hell, Republicans. You're letting the corruption flow freely anymore.

The only way to hold trump - and his Republican cronies - accountable is to deny him another chance to sit in the White House and violate the Emoluments Clause any further. Stop voting Republican, Americans. Stop voting for the crooks.

I'm Just Sitting Here Watching the Indictment Wheels Go Round and Round

It is Tuesday August 1st 2023.

I was promised indictments for donald trump and his associates/handlers/lackeys involved in both the January 6th insurrection in Washington DC, as well as indictments in Fulton County Georgia covering trump's attempts to bully state elections officials into throwing the results and scheming fake electors to steal the 2020 Electoral College count.

Goddammit. The sooner we get these charges before a judge, the sooner we get trump in a courtroom before the November 2024 general election, and the sooner we can see trump dragged off in handcuffs when a jury finds him guilty - one hopes - on at least ONE of the multiple charges he's facing.

I am tired of the delays.

Indict him on everything, for the Love of Mom, Baseball, Apple Pie, and good music, just do it, and let God - and a competent jury - sort it all out.

Lemme quote from Lennon:

Ah, prosecutors asking questions
Lost in confusion
Well, I tell them trump insurrected
Bring the solution

Well, they shake their heads and they look at me, as if I've no legal mind
I tell them there's a hurry, I'm hoping trump finally sees doing time

I'm just sitting here watching the wheels of justice go round and round
I really love to watch them charges roll
No longer riding on the media go-around

I just hope to see trump go (to jail)
I just hope to see trump go (to jail)
I just hope tooooooooo see trump go (to jail)

(piano flourish at the end)

Update about seven hours later: ASK AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE. Special Counsel Jack Smith indicts trump on four charges related to January 6th insurrection. More to follow.

A Simple Question (w/ Update)

(Update: Many thanks again to Batocchio for adding this article to Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up on 06/22/23. Please take a few minutes to peruse the other articles I've written, and please leave comments!)

To all of the Far Right, MAGA-driven Republican voters siding with donald trump on his allegations of his indictments being a "WITCH HUNT" I ask a simple question.

Do you honestly think that all of these criminal charges and indictments on trump would happen to Chris Christie if he had been your 2016 Presidential candidate and had upset Hillary in the Electoral College?

I use Christie as a "what if" example as the then-governor of New Jersey was neck-deep in the Bridgegate scandal that had erupted over the partisan closing of an interstate highway bridge. Allegations about misuse of federal relief aid after Hurricane Sandy were still rampant. A lot of questionable criminal allegations surrounded Christie more than 8 years ago.

The result in real life was that Christie avoided a courtroom. The federal and state investigations couldn't prove enough against him on many of those allegations and he skated. The Supreme Court overturned the convictions of two of his staffers who were involved in the bridge closing. One thing about a career politician like him is that he knows how to create plausible deniability between himself and his handlers. If he had been President, it certainly would have put a hold on the investigations (bloody OLC memo, mutter grumble).

But would a former President Christie be facing a "witch hunt" today by vengeful Democratic/liberal leadership of the Biden administration? There could have been a few unanswered questions after 2021 that Biden's people could have reopened to make Christie's life a living hell. And yet, no it did not happen.

Has there been a history - I'm thinking back to LBJ, who could be that petty - of previous Democratic Presidencies that turned the Justice Department into the Vengeance Department, anything that would suggest something like that happening now towards trump or any other Far Right figure? There were and still are a number of partisan Republican annoyances who could be jailed just for being so, but yet you don't see that happening (yet. To be honest: the January 6 Grand Jury may drop that hammer soon). For the love of GOD, Matt Gaetz is still a free man because the FBI and DOJ were not able to find enough evidence and credible eyewitness testimony - Gaetz's cohort Greenberg was compromised, and the teen girl Gaetz abused refused to testify - to bring him to court. 

Also, there's no evidence that Christie would have risen to the level of criminal behavior - especially with the theft of classified documents and obstructive attempts to keep them - that trump has. Character still matters in the formation of Presidential behavior, and while Christie can be a bully there's no evidence he is as narcissistic as trump to where Christie would have crossed the lines trump has.

You could also ask if there's been a history of previous Republican Presidencies that tried to make the Justice Department the Vengeance Department, but for what I've learned the closest was Nixon's administration going after Anti-War protestors like the Chicago Eight. 

You can ask that simple question at the beginning of this article not only using Christie but of every other credible 2016 primaries choice for the GOP: Would Jeb Bush have done the things trump has? Would Marco Rubio? Would Scott Walker? Would John Kasich? Hell, would Ted Cruz be as stupid and crooked as trump when it comes to violating the federal laws - stealing classified documents, obstructing investigations, inciting insurrection and violence towards Congress - trump is alleged doing?

Let us be honest here: If the Republican voting base had not gone for donald trump, if they had agreed that their standard bearer could have been any of the other 2016 candidates, the Republican nominee would have been someone better versed and more savvy about the political and legal systems. That person would have had a (slightly) stronger Character. That candidate (and President) would have avoided the traps trump happily jumped into. And there would be nothing today for the federal justice system - which isn't liberal by nature, but has to uphold laws in as consistent a manner as possible - to pursue for indictments, either legitimately or for "witch hunts".

No. Everything that is happening to trump - every criminal charge getting laid at his feet - is tied directly to trump's nature as a con artist grifter obsessed with money, power, and leverage (or as his Russian buddies call it Kompromat). It has nothing to do with trump being conservative, or Republican, or Christian, or "great". It has everything to do with trump being a crook his entire adult life.

trump is calling it all "WITCH HUNT" not only because he's desperate to avoid criminal conviction, he is also convinced that the legal system is meant to inflict witch hunts and punishments on political opponents in the first place. You can look to how he pushed for dubious "investigations" into Hillary's 2016 campaign for "illegally spying on him" all of which ended up as John Durham's Special Counsel inquiries... which all ended with no proof of trump's allegations and acquittals on the two cases Durham brought to trial.

Durham's failures should in truth prove that the American legal system - from the federal courts to the Justice Department to the FBI to even the state police and courts - tries its best to avoid political attacks in spite of trump's accusations (and hopes, should he return to power). The legal system is not based on Narrative - the opinions and unproven fears of the partisan hacks - but on Fact - the evidence gathered, the testimony of witnesses, the relevant matters - and on the Facts trump is either lying to the public or he's lying to himself. It can be both.

Again, this is the simple question: If it had been anyone else in the White House other than trump, would we be honestly seeing criminal indictments on the things trump has done (and hilariously enough, things he's openly bragging about)?

Here is the simple answer: No. This is all on trump.

The horrifying thing is how the rest of the Republican Party now wants to behave like trump.

This is not going to get better anytime soon. 

And yet, let justice be done.

Update: Later today I saw reports from the Washington Post that the FBI and key Justice Department figures fought against any kind of investigation into trump's misconduct in the Presidency. This partly fits my argument that the federal law enforcement agencies are not "witch hunting" as trump proclaims, but this does point to a troubling unwillingness by the FBI and DOJ to hold ANY high-level figure accountable (as long as that figure isn't Hillary). That it took the DOJ almost a full year to open investigations into trump's involvement in the January 6th riot, and that the department dragged out the efforts by the National Archives to recover the stolen classified documents, signals how slow this move towards justice truly is.

There's a ticking clock here, America, and if trump delays any justice until Election Day 2024, we may well be screwed forever.

Speed it up, Garland. Let justice truly be done.