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.

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.

Hiding From the Reality of trump's Unwanted War

Update: Hello to everyone from Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Thanks to Batocchio as always sharing this blog. I should note that since this article posted, the Defense Department did update their casualties report to try and justify what they did (hiding it under a generic "Overseas Operations" tag) as well as expand the number of wounded from Iranian strikes. This is messier than the GOP wants to admit. /rage

As every con artist is a bad liar, the trump administration is trying to hide the reality their war against Iran is getting our troops killed (via Robert Mackey at The Guardian (US)):

The Pentagon’s official online list of service members killed in the ongoing Iran war does not include the four soldiers who died during renewed fighting over the weekend, despite the fact that their names were included in a Pentagon press release on the formal transfer of their remains back to the United States on Wednesday.

A review of the current list on the Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System website shows that, despite having been last updated on Wednesday, the number of US military personnel killed during Operation Epic Fury, the Pentagon’s name for the US-Israeli war on Iran that Donald Trump launched on 28 February, remains at 14...

According to a New York Times report, the Pentagon website listed 18 American service members as having been killed during the war on Iran on Wednesday, but was changed on Thursday to exclude three service members killed last Friday, Saturday and Sunday as Iran retaliated for new US strikes with an attack on a base used by US forces in Jordan. The list also excluded a fourth soldier who was killed during a controlled detonation of an Iranian drone at Erbil airbase in Iraq...

Three military officials told the Times that “one reason behind the change was that the Trump administration decided to remove four service members killed this past weekend from the list … because their deaths occurred after President Trump declared a cease-fire in the war in April”.

A Pentagon spokesperson disputed that contention, telling the Times that the decreased total of service members killed was due to “temporary data disruptions” that would be quickly fixed.

The Pentagon did not immediately return the Guardian’s request for comment.

trump and his lackeys want to pretend that his "cease-fire" back in April - much like all the other failed "peace deals" - was the end of military operations against Iran... in spite of the reality that we're still essentially fighting the same damn war. This is because trump and crew are avoiding the legal restrictions of the War Powers Act - which requires them to petition Congress for authorization for any prolonged military action - so they can pretend the ongoing war are brand new military actions.

This is insane. The entire goddamn planet knows this is all one big war instigated by trump's ego and fueled by Netanyahu's ambitions. trump is dodging any accountability - anything that should reign in an illegal presidency - and daring the Republicans in Congress to do something to stop him (they won't).

This is why every voter needs to get out the vote this midterms and kick every Republican congresscritter from the House and Senate from office. Elect a Democratic supermajority as best as possible in Congress to bring goddamn trump to heel.

Before he sends more of our troops into harm's way and ignore their deaths like he's doing now.

Always the Dollars, Always the Fcking Dollars with trump: 4th of July Edition

The 4th of July celebration that trump hijacked for himself was never about celebrating America, it was about trump and his buddies milking it for every penny they could get (via Josh Kovensky at Talking Points Memo): 

I visited the Great American State Fair on several days over the past week. Yes, it’s empty. Security is extremely tight, with no clear reason as to why. Federal marshals, Oklahoma state troopers, and others roam the area, providing a mini-museum of cops. The mini-arch is as half-assed as everyone says it is.

But President Trump’s Freedom250 project and the Great American State Fair is really a corruption story. And, in true MAGA fashion, there’s no real effort to hide the graft here: it’s all playing out in front of you. The fair itself showcases different forms of the rampant conflicts of interest and grifting that is coming to define the second Trump administration. On MAHA Monday, I stopped by the “Freedom stage” and listened as a doctor who runs a network of clinics pitched a top administration official on having Medicare and Medicaid cover a controversial scan that his business offers. It was hot, so I went inside an air-conditioned tent; firms funded by Don Jr. had booths on display. Government contractors like Lockheed Martin, SpaceX, Northrop Grumman, and others had exhibits in the tents and around the area. A Truth Social representative tried to sell me on creating an account with a video service that the president’s company is launching. 

People have compared the fair to a Potemkin Village. But my experience was more akin to stumbling upon a scam, more like Fyre Festival combined with a turbocharged form of D.C. pay-to-play. It’s eerie: the fair is mostly empty. The parts that are supposed to be for visitors are either falling apart or dramatically fail to deliver. The only real activity appears to come from large businesses using the fair as a vehicle to gain favor with the president.

Congress originally created a bipartisan America250 commission in 2016. Planning started under the first Trump administration, and continued through the Biden years. In 2024, former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush agreed to serve as the Commission’s national co-chairs.

When Trump took office a second time, he first installed a 25-year-old former Fox News producer, Ariel Abergel, and Trump campaign officials to direct it. The commission fired Abergel in September, in part over his efforts to make the celebration about Trump rather than the country’s 250th birthday. In December, Trump dispensed with the bipartisan commission entirely: he announced Freedom 250. It’s a limited liability company that exists within a congressionally chartered nonprofit, the National Park Foundation. It’s the official fundraiser for the National Parks Service. 

In November, Trump added his campaign co-manager, Chris LaCivita, to the nonprofit’s board. At one point, he reportedly asked Congress to give America250 $150 million instead of $100 million; the extra $50 million was to go to the White House. Per a report from House Democrats, Freedom250 ended up capturing the majority of the funding.

Every bit of those details deserve note. What had been a bipartisan affair turned into another trump grift.

Follow the money - Old Vulcan Proverb

Freedom 250 reportedly offers personal access to the president for those who contribute $1 million or more; $500,000 gets you “V.I.P. access.”

With any access buying, the direction of travel is often unclear from the outside. Is a firm or person purchasing a way in? Is the company there in order to maintain access? Or, in this case, are they only present in response to an existing tie to the Trump administration...

There was another, uniquely Trumpian, example of this kind of messiness. On MAHA Monday, I went to the “Freedom Stage,” where Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Director Dr. Mehmet Oz was interviewing a psychiatrist named Dr. Daniel Amen.

It was over 90 degrees and sunny outside during this interview, in which Amen showed a slideshow to a small crowd of people that featured the brain scans of people suffering from various forms of mental illness. The pitch, Amen said, was that these scans could diagnose psychiatric disorders. At the end of the presentation, he and Oz produced a blender and made “brain healthy hot chocolate” in the sweltering heat.

Around halfway through, Amen mentioned to Oz that “CMS should start covering scans,” telling him, “I bet I could save you billions of dollars. This is the MAHA moment.”

It wasn't a public forum on health, it was a goddamn late-night informercial.

As for Dr. Amen, Kavosky noted "Amen also runs a network of clinics that offer the scans, known by their acronym SPECT, for people experiencing a range of psychiatric and relational issues. It’s controversial: the American Psychiatric Association found in 2012 that this kind of neuroimaging impacted neither diagnosis nor treatment."

And we're paying this alleged quack with taxpayer money.

It’s not clear exactly how much money went from the federal government to the fair.

The National Park Foundation received a $68.3 million grant from the Department of the Interior for “semiquincentennial events.” Beyond that, it’s not clear how much money went to the fair...

It’s hard to overstate the mismatch between the tens of millions of dollars that have gone to Freedom 250 and the result on the ground (Freedom 250 is putting on other events around the country). American flags branded on a white Freedom 250 background appear to have been made out of a thick pillowcase material. The canvas that covers the tents sags; air conditioning barely works to keep the inside areas cool.

At one point, I strayed into a concessions tent. There, I found a woman who had spent $5 on a bottle of water before staff realized that they had run out. The customer was becoming increasingly irate as the staff refused to provide a refund.

This is all JAC. Just Another Con.

When sanity regains control of the federal government, every single one of these grifters deserve jail. Even if trump tries to pardon them beforehand, fuck the rules (why not? trump and his Far Right buddies do) and jail 'em anyway. This is criminal bullshit and we're stuck paying the bills for it.

And in the meantime, the tacky and cheap way it was all put together is going to get people hurt or killed. Look at this:

Whatever glue they used to put it together is melting in the heat wave. Gods help the people stuck in the middle of this.

The Vanity of Plastering Your Ugly Face On Money No One Will Ever Use

Just remember this is all about trump's vanity (via Raquel Coronell Uribe and Gabe Gutierrez at NBC News):

The Treasury Department is preparing to print $250 bills with President Donald Trump’s face on them and is just waiting for Congress’ green light, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Thursday...

I'm going to stop quoting the article right there because I just can't fcking handle the whole situation, this farce of leadership attempting to force trump's ugly mug into everyone's wallets. I'm not going to share any photos of what the planned $250 bill looks like, just to note here that the photo they're using of trump is the one of him scowling at everyone like a sociopath.

Most other depictions of people on our American currency usually have them looking upward or to the side, with stoic and thoughtful expressions implying wisdom, foresight, or peace. No, for trump he's going with the WANTED poster look.

Which is the other thing about this vanity project: It's written into the U.S. Code that bans living people from getting depicted on our coinage / dollars (also stamps, if I'm reading it properly). trump is more than willing to ignore the law, willing to mock a century-plus of tradition, willing to tear down an American culture that tries to avoid idolatry in our politics. But this is trump buying into the false worship of extremists who mock such values in order to promote their own egos. This is the trump who broke laws to desecrate the White House with a gaudy oversized ballroom, this is the trump happily engraving his name over federal buildings that have nothing to do with him.

Even the dollar value is degrading: this is trump trying to tie himself to the 250th year of the United States creating the Declaration of Independence that founded the nation's existence. They're looking to generate a dollar value that's never been used before - not replacing Ben Franklin on the 100, or Lincoln on the 5, or Washington on the 1 - to make it unique, unavoidable, something to stand out in the history books (and coin collecting indexes) for decades to come.

Thing is, almost nobody uses high-value currency in this day and age. Not only due to the commonplace use of banking debit cards to directly pay from our checking accounts, but because handling such large denominations is no longer useful in common (legal) business. Few places are willing to accept even $50 bills for payment anymore, let alone $100s. The risk of those bills being counterfeit are common enough to be a hit on the economy. Putting a $250 into circulation is going to make con artists printing their own fake cash salivate even more.

There is no honest reason in America to create a brand new currency, meaning this whole thing is driven by dishonest reasons. Above all, playing to the greed and vanity of a morally bankrupt thief who lied and bluffed his way into high office.

If the Republicans in Congress do succumb to trump's will on this and give him this farcical honor - something that no one else is really asking for - they will never live it down. They already deserve to get voted out of office for all their failures to rein in trump's crimes and excesses: This will be just one more reason to kick them out these midterms.

P.S. putting yourself on money is the depraved act of movie villains like Jack Nicholson's Joker or Raul Julia's Bison. trump is following the same insane game plan.

Elect Clowns, Get Circus

trump's desecration of the White House - the People's House, not his - continues with this mockery (via Nicholas Kerr at ABC News):

Construction on the Ultimate Fighting Championship Octagon is underway on the White House South Lawn ahead of President Donald Trump’s planned fights this summer to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the United States.

The event, dubbed "UFC Freedom Fights 250," will take place on June 14 -- coinciding with the president’s birthday and Flag Day -- and feature a lightweight title matchup between undisputed champion Ilia Topuria and interim title holder Justin Gaethje alongside four other fights.

How the actual fuck can you tie in a cage match fight system to the anniversary of the United States' "birthday" that was the Declaration of Independence???

photo by Mark Schiefelbein (AP Photo)

Look at how much of an eyesore that stage is going to be, dwarfing the White House itself.

In all the years that the White House has stood - since the later days of the John Adams' administration - there has never been a spectacle like this staged on the property: It's not like there's a long history of boxing fights (Teddy Roosevelt himself was an avid boxer until he got blinded: then he switched to judo) or music concerts being performed there (most concerts are better staged on the Mall just down the way).

trump is doing this because he's enamored of - and probably has money in - the UFC organization, showing up at various fights over the years the way celebrities would at boxing championship nights. It also ties into the whole "alpha male" machismo identity - the open misogyny, the willingness to delve into toxic behaviors - that trump and his lackeys crave.

trump may really believe that this event would somehow promote the "American Way" of manhood, fighting, and success: ignoring how few people - about 3.3 million per average viewership for UFC fights, compared to 125 million who watched Super Bowl LX - may actually tune in. If he's expecting a large in-person turnout - they're talking about 75,000 to 100,000 people showing up - I doubt the locals in DC are going to show up at a trump-sponsored event, and uncertain about how many will travel all that way to be there (only 5,000 or so showed up for trump's riot on January 6th, and barely half of that actually raided the Capitol).

This shouldn't be how America should be celebrating it's 250th year of existence.

This is going to be a grotesque display of violence that only the sadists like trump enjoy.

Don't tune in. Don't watch this circus of stupidity. Look away. 

Find better ways to honor America, like protesting at ICE facilities or getting out the vote in Red states to flip them Blue.

trump and His Cronies Aren't Even Hiding the Theft Anymore

This is how corrupt trump's administration is: he sued his own government for billions of dollars so he could then weasel out of the lawsuit and claim an imaginary settlement for a mere billion to pay off his foot soldiers among the insurrectionist ranks (from Katherine Faulders, Peter Charalambous, and Alexander Mallin at ABC News):

The Justice Department announced Monday that as part of a settlement agreement in President Donald Trump's $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, the attorney general is establishing an $1.776 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund" to compensate those who allege they were wrongly targeted under the Biden administration. 

The announcement came after attorneys representing Trump informed a federal judge in a court filing earlier Monday that the president was dropping his suit against the IRS.

The judge overseeing the case, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams, subsequently ordered the case closed -- signaling that she does not plan to challenge the controversial settlement. 

In a brief order issued Monday, Judge Williams said she was "stripped of jurisdiction" to continue overseeing the case. She noted that the settlement agreement was never docketed in the case, so there is no "settlement of record" -- leaving her with no authority to adjudicate the private settlement. 

Do you see it? There's no official settlement of record. There's no paper trail the legal system is supposed to rely on. And yet, there's a billion dollars that Congress never approved of getting set up in a slush fund that I doubt will have any real oversight to where it gets turned into a funnel of illegality where even more money gets siphoned off to gods know where.

As thought making the payment amount symbolic to make it say 1776 like it's for FREEDOM on our nation's 250th birthday is going to patch things over. GODDAMN THIS IS CORRUPT.

This is Paul Krugman over at the National Memo:

So the Trump administration is creating a $1.776 billion slush fund — 1776, get it? — to pay off victims of “lawfare and weaponization.” Just to be clear, if you’re a U.S. taxpayer, this action means that almost $1.8 billion of your money will be handed out to whomever a panel appointed by Donald Trump decides to reward. The beneficiaries are likely to include January 6 insurrectionists, as well as Trump, his family, and his allies.

Few things shock me these days, but this development — in which a Justice Department that works for Trump is paying a vast sum to “settle” a lawsuit brought by Trump himself — is a new nadir in self-dealing, further revealing Trump’s utter contempt for the American people.

Now, massive corruption on the part of Trump and his minions isn’t new. But the shamelessness of this latest episode of looting takes it to a new level. Until now, we’ve seen a combination of crony capitalism and insider trading. Plutocrats and corporations have been enriching Trump through back channels, especially crypto, in return for government contracts and policy favors, while Trump himself and people close to Trump have been making hugely profitable market bets thanks to advance knowledge of government policies.

But now Trump has eliminated the middlemen, effectively telling his officials to pay money directly to him or anyone else he favors.

Granted, we already knew that Trump was, by orders of magnitude, the most corrupt president in U.S. history. But now Trump is the most explicitly corrupt leader in today’s world. After all, Vladimir Putin has obviously stolen billions, but never this brazenly. Even Third World dictators normally try to mask their corruption.

If there's any true justice, trump's move here should get tied up in the courts - especially over that fact that there's no judge-approved agreement on record - long enough for the Democrats to win back Congress this midterms well enough to guarantee they will use their Article I constitutional powers to block trump and his cronies from stealing one more nickel from our nation's coffers.

This is why the Republicans are so desperate to gerrymander the hell out of congressional districts, this is why the Republicans are so desperate to suppress voter turnout to keep their Senate seats safe from statewide anger. They're not that stupid to ignore the polls showing how unpopular they've gotten among even independent voters (and even enough registered Republicans willing to flip their ballots).

Voter turnout still matters: that's the good news. The Republicans can't rig enough barricades and tip enough scales to stop all of us angry at them and trump. Everyone needs to understand the mission this midterms: GET THE DAMN VOTE OUT FOR DEMOCRATS. VOTE EVERY REPUBLICAN OUT AT EVERY LEVEL OF THE BALLOT.

We can save this nation from an eternal void of Far Right grifting and greed, if we show up and vote goddammit.

The Revenge Tour

trump promised he would seek vengeance on those who convicted or attempted to convict him on the many crimes he'd committed over the years, and while he's a known liar we all knew this was going to happen because trump is a tiny, spiteful, bitter man who must lash out against those who humiliated him in public (and to the history books). 

So it's one week into his second attempt to fleece and destroy the United States when trump got around to firing anybody he could who was involved in his insurrection and stolen documents federal cases (from Ryan Lucas and Carrie Johnson at NPR): 

The acting attorney general moved on Monday to fire several Justice Department officials who worked on the federal criminal investigations into President Donald Trump, according to two department officials familiar with the matter.

In termination letters sent to more than a dozen officials, acting Attorney General James McHenry wrote that he did not believe they "could be trusted to faithfully implement the President's agenda because of their significant role in prosecuting the president," one of the officials said...

The move comes the same day that Trump's acting U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., Ed Martin, issued a memo announcing a "special project" to review the department's prosecutions of Jan. 6 Capitol rioters, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

Martin instructed prosecutors to provide all information related to the use of a specific obstruction charge, including files, documents, emails, notes and other information. He also describes the use of the charge against rioters as a "great failure," according to the person who described the memo to NPR...

Martin is lying, because those obstruction charges worked in the court trials to convict 1,500 or so rioters who were violent towards law enforcement and threatening the safety of Congressional elected officials and staff. This is trump and his loyalists attempting to rewrite the facts into trump's fantasies. Back to the firings:

President Trump, has lashed out for years at the Justice Department, accusing it of unfairly targeting him and his supporters in what he claims were politically motivated investigations.

He was particularly angry about the two investigations brought by special counsel Jack Smith. One case revolved around Trump's efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and the other case stems from Trump's keeping of classified documents after he left office. Both cases were dropped after Trump won the election.

Department officials, including former President Joe Biden's attorney general, Merrick Garland, have rejected the allegations of weaponizing the department. They point out that the department prosecuted prominent Democrats during Biden's term, including the president's son, Hunter, as well as two prominent Democratic members of Congress.

The horrifying thing is, trump - and those lackeys who have their own agendas against American ideals - needs to accuse Democrats of "politicizing" the Justice Department because he himself wants to turn it into his own political enforcement tool. he needs to turn the courts away from holding him accountable for the many crimes he wants to accomplish back in the Oval Office, and to harass everyone else to keep them broken or too afraid to stop him.

Look at the other firings trump committed over the weekend, when he purged the Inspector Generals of most of the Executive branch agencies that will be most affected by trump's schemes (via Lucia Suarez Sang, Scott MacFarlane, and Nancy Cordes at CBS News):

The Trump administration purged at least a dozen federal inspectors general overnight Friday, multiple sources confirmed to CBS News. It is an unprecedented move that will likely result in legal challenges.

Speaking to reporters abroad Air Force One on his way to Florida, President Trump on Saturday described the firings as "standard" and a "very common thing to do."

But one of the fired inspectors general, Mark Greenblatt, who was nominated to be inspector general of the Interior Department by Mr. Trump during his first term, told CBS News in a phone interview Saturday that he was "stunned" when he received the notification.

Asked why he thinks Mr. Trump fired him and others, he responded, "The most charitable interpretation is that he doesn't believe in our independence or our fairness. The least charitable interpretation is that he wants lackeys to rubber stamp what he's trying to do."

"It's very bizarre," Greenblatt said. "There's no unifying theme as to why he chose this group of 17. It just doesn't make sense, to be completely honest. It does not make sense. No one can figure out what was driving the list."

Don't forget, it was an inspector general who provided direct testimony into trump's illicit phone call to Ukraine withholding funds, which led to trump's first impeachment trial. You can bet trump did not forget that slight either.

If there's any good news, it's that trump's firings may have been illegal, and could well raise the ire of even a Republican-controlled Congress:

The inspector general of the U.S. Small Business Administration, Hannibal "Mike" Ware, said the firings are legally dubious and will be challenged.

Ware, who was among those fired and who chairs the the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, argued in a letter to a White House personnel official that he "does not believe the actions taken are legally sufficient."

According to Ware, he and other inspectors general were sent an email from Sergio Gor, the director of presidential personnel, on Friday informing them that "due to changing priorities, your position as Inspector General...is terminated, effective immediately."

Ware, in his letter, which was obtained by CBS News, recommended Gor reach out to White House legal counsel to discuss the "intended course of action" as "we do not believe the actions taken are legally sufficient to dismiss Presidentially Appointed, Senate Confirmed Inspectors General."

Federal law requires the White House to give Congress a full month of warning and case-specific details before firing a federal inspector general.

The fired inspectors general include many who were appointed during the first Trump administration, according to one source. Ware and Greenblatt were both sworn in during Mr. Trump's first administration. Back in 2020, Mr. Trump fired five inspector generals.

Ware, who is also the chair of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, an independent oversight body, said in a separate statement that inspector generals are not "immune from removal." However, he echoed that unjustified removals are a "significant threat" to the jobs they're meant to do.

"Congress specifically established the authorities and structure of the IGs to safeguard their vital oversight role, by mandating independence under the IG Act," he said. "Removals inconsistent with the law are a significant threat to the actual and perceived independence of IGs."   

Ware also noted that Congress recently amended the Inspector General Act to require the president to notify Congress 30 days prior to the removal of an inspector general, as well as requiring a "substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons."

in short: trump has to show cause, direct evidence that all of these inspector generals were in violation of some other law, or performing at a level of incompetence that would justify removal. But trump doesn't have that: All he has are his grievances and his corrupt needs to behave without accountability to anyone.

The firings of career prosecutors at Justice may also be unlawful, but it depends on how the civil service protects their professional employees from wrongful terminations.

This is now all on a Congress that may be controlled by Republicans, and whether they are keen to at least push back against trump's aggressive assaults on the rule of law and threats to their own authority. This is also on a Supreme Court - also controlled by Far Right jurists - who already granted presidents - trump especially - with broader executive powers, to which they could justify these firings and allow trump to escape further accountability.

None of this would be happening, by the by, if 77 million of you sadists and assholes didn't vote for the Convicted Felon and Court-Confirmed Sex Offender.

You're going to see corrupt rule by the worst people now over the coming months, and it's a legitimate question if most of us will even survive any of it.

(on a personal note, this is blog No. 2491, I'm nine away from 2500 which should be celebrated in some way. Maybe if people would visit the Sunshine State Book Festival in Gainesville, FL this February 1st when I'll be there promoting my books! Ow stop hitting me...)

A Thimbleful of Justice But I'll Take It

This may seem too little, too late, but at least the New York state criminal matter into trump's hush money felonies ruling will reach a conclusion before Inauguration Day as Judge Merchan will issue sentencing this Friday January 10th (via Ximena Bustillo at NPR): 

In a decision Friday, New York Judge Juan Merchan noted that his inclination was to not impose a sentence of incarceration. In the filing, Merchan noted that if a sentence was unable to be given before Trump took the oath of office, the only other viable option may be to postpone proceedings until after Trump's presidential term is over.

In May, Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, officially labeling him a convicted felon. The decision also comes after Merchan ruled last month that Trump is not immune from a conviction in the case...

After about a day and a half of deliberations, 12 New York jurors said last May that they unanimously agreed that Trump falsified business records to conceal a $130,000 hush money payment to adult-film star Stormy Daniels to influence the 2016 election.

Following the verdict, Trump virtually completed a routine pre-sentencing interview with the New York City Department of Probation. The prosecutors for the Manhattan District Attorney's office, who prosecuted Trump, and Trump's legal teams each submitted sentencing recommendations last month. Those documents have not been released to the public.

Trump also turned his attention to mobilizing donations for his campaign and mounting legal fees by using the conviction as a fundraising tool. Within 24 hours of the guilty verdict, Trump's campaign boasted raising millions of dollars. Trump and his legal team have also vowed to appeal the conviction, a process that could take years...

In a sane world, that May conviction should have been the end of trump's efforts to regain the White House to avoid all legal accountability. Instead, too many other Americans don't seem to give a rat's ass about ethics or character or the necessity of more honest, less criminal leadership. /fume

But if America is supposed to stand for Truth and Justice -if the rule of law and loyalty to the constitution matters more than loyalty to any one person - then it matters that trump face some measure of justice so that history - so that our better angels of our nature - can denounce the lies and gaslighting that trump and his followers will use to wipe away the facts of his sins.

As Austin Sarat notes at Salon:

Merchan has set an example of resistance on the cusp of a second Trump presidency. His ruling will serve this country well as we enter a period in which the occupant of the Oval Office intends to bend judges and others to his will and in which serving him will be the standard against which government officials, journalists, and others will be judged.

Before looking more closely at Merchan’s decision, let me say more about the role of history and memory in a democracy.

Writing in 2019, Jeffries Martin observed that in a democracy, respecting and learning from the past is a singular virtue. “Historical work,” Martin explained, has “long served as a major intellectual bulwark for democratic republics….” He conceded that such work would not in itself “preserve our democracy. But when fostered in a critical and democratic spirit, they constitute an important piece of what we might call a culture of resistance and liberty.” 

In a democracy, we can argue over what history means or what parts of the past should be venerated and which should not be, as fights over monuments have shown.  But, no one gets to re-write history or erase memory to suit their convenience or serve their partisan purposes. In authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, history and memory belong to the powerful. Rewriting and whitewashing the past, whether of a nation or its leaders, is standard operating procedure. As Jason Stanley puts it, “Authoritarians…erase history… seeking to separate us from our own history to destroy our self-understanding and leave us unmoored, resentful, and confused.”

Once Merchan's sentencing is a matter of record, trump can try to lie and deceive and ignore it as much as he wants, but it will exist as a counter to the false narratives of his "greatness" that will undermine his attempts to literally rewrite history. trump and his lackeys/followers will attack anyone who refers to the ruling, to anyone who openly points out how trump is a convicted felon - and the implications of his failures at both business and deceit - but those attacks will run into the reality that right there in Westlaw (and the legal court references at your law libraries) there is proof trump is a crook.

Merchan has already noted that he will not seek to impose any jail time - either that trump will face only fines and probation, or if any jail time occurs it will be suspended until after his term of office - but trump now faces the possibility that his future - which may be shorter than he thinks because the 22nd Amendment says the presidential term limits is two and nothing about them being consecutive - is not going to be all victory parties at Mar-A-Lago rolling around in millions in cash.

Unless trump decides to act up in court this Friday and compels Merchan to hold him physically in contempt.

One can always hope.

The pity of this tiny amount of justice getting delivered unto trump is how tiny it is. he WAS facing federal charges and Georgia criminal charges in other matters, but now his impending presidency closed shut the federal cases and may prevent the Fulton County office - once they figure out if the DA can oversee the entire case any further - from keeping his charges active (they may still bring to trial the other defendants in that election interference / fake electors cases). 

Any justice that may arise here is that the Special Prosecutor Jack Smith is required to issue his (final?) reports on those inquiries, much like Mueller did with his report, only except this time it's unlikely Attorney General Merrick Garland will redact the ever-loving hell out of Smith's reports the way Barr did to Mueller's.

Which is why trump is now pleading - demanding - that Garland delay the release of those reports, so that HIS puppet Matt Gaetz Pam Bondi can commit massive redactions and rewrites of Smith's findings and hide trump's sins from the public and from history itself.

For the love of God and Truth and America, Garland: Release the Smith Reports in full, without serious redaction (only the names of the innocent and the witnesses who need protection from trump's wrath). And re-release the Mueller Report unredacted while you're at it, so that Barr and trump can wriggle in public disdain for those sins as well.

Truth and Justice, goddammit. Those aren't just words. They're supposed to define what America stands for.

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.

The Constant trumpian Grift: Shilling Worthless Watches Edition

donald trump really only knows how to do one thing: market himself as a fucking brand.

Not just putting his name in gold on buildings, golf courses, steaks, fake universities: In the past few years even in the midst of fighting criminal charges and running for President (again) trump's been out here shilling NFTs, his own publicly traded media stock, overpriced golden sneakers, trump-themed Bibles (!) that alone should be an epic form of blasphemy, cryptocurrency, and now - what the actual fuck - overpriced watches (Alistair Charlton at Wired shared my horror):

Celebrities partnering with watch brands is nothing new. Sometimes a bona fide watch enthusiast like John Mayer partners with Audemars Piguet, or Ed Sheeran (owner of a unique Patek Philippe, no less) teams up with Casio. Then there's the other end of the scale, where controversial Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy and his own watch company resides.

Now, however, there’s a new nadir: the Trump Watch. Announced this week by former US president Donald Trump, the collection consists of two pieces. One is called “Fight Fight Fight” and is priced from $499, and the other is the “Victory Tourbillon.” The latter is claimed to be made from solid 18-karat gold, with 122 diamonds and a tourbillon automatic movement. It’s priced at a nice, round $100,000—about three times the price of an equivalent Rolex Submariner—and, yes, crypto payment is available.

The watches are claimed to feature “premium, Swiss-Made materials and intricate details,” but so far as we can tell, the Fight Fight Fight uses a movement by Japanese company Seiko, while the Victory Tourbillon has a movement alleged to be partially built from Chinese components...

Everything we know about trump and his business empire is that he will cut corners, buy cheap with no care for quality, and sell to excess (and try to trick his suckers customers into spending even more). This watch will be no different.

But don’t just take our word for it. WIRED Watch expert Tim Barber told us: “Trump evidently has some cut-through among certain watch fans, since the gold sneakers he auctioned earlier this year were bought by Roman Sharf, one of the most prominent gray-market watch dealers, with a sizable YouTube following." (Incidentally, the companies that made the gold sneakers and the new Trump Watches were established by the same register agent, Andrew Pierce of Cloud Peak Law, Wyoming.)

“Having said that, I doubt these hideous pieces will increase his equity among most watch collectors. As it happens, all-gold watches being very on trend in the luxury market at the moment, he joins Rolex in producing a gold dive watch this year. But I would be less confident of this sharing any other qualities with a Rolex...”

Now for the Tourbillon, the $100,000 flagship of the Trump watch collection. “This isn’t just any watch,” the former president said. “It’s one of the best watches made,” he adds without context...

This is Trump as Used Car Salesman: he's going to tell you "this is the best ever" and "everybody's talking about" (that part is right, although laughing/screaming in horror is more apt). The kind of fake oversell for shoddy product that led to a ton of Lemon Laws. I digress.

The watch is claimed to use a “TX07 Tourbillon” with 105 hours of power reserve, but finding any record of such a movement online is tricky. Watch commentator Nico Leonard van der Horst said in an Instagram post: “This is hilarious … the manufacturer of this movement is Olivier Mory, who ironically is known for making very affordable Tourbillons half made in China, half made in Switzerland.” Van der Horst added: “If you were to buy this movement and put it in your own watch, you would be able to buy it for under $3.5k...”

Why even sell a watch so much that your average MAGA voter - most of them middle-class/self-employed (car salesmen themselves more likely) - can't afford one? It's a watch meant for the oligarch class, the foreign millionaires and billionaires still looking to curry favor with trump should he ever cheat his way back into the White House. It doesn't help that trump is encouraging people to use crypto as a way to purchase these watches, because that kind of money can't be tracked.

trump is not just violating the Emoluments Clause, he's mocking it: because he knows Congress can't touch him and the courts have no idea how - or no willingness - to enforce it.

Hell, why I am sitting here whining about what trump's doing? If trump is out here shilling overpriced watches to gullible buyers reasonable markets, I can be doing that too!

Hey, everybody, BUY MY BOOKS! People are out here saying they're great reads, even the ones with poor formatting and glaring grammatical flaws!

NOTICE A TREND: 17 Years of Prime Blogging for 7.99!

FUNNY LOCATIONS: Collected Stories for 6.99!

Buy now, and you can happily receive a firm handshake and a pat on the back from me some time down the road if you ever run into me hiding from the feds for possible tax evasion (you can't prove I had anything to do with Eric Adams' mayoral operations, I swear!).

These books are guaranteed to NOT tell you the proper time in any way - unless you use them as part of a makeshift sundial - and will NOT rust or fall apart on you within seven days of receiving.

Amazon Kindle operators ARE STANDING BY!

If I can get oh 12 million people to buy the ebook versions that will allow me to buy a Big Mac next Tuesday, hmmmm yum.

P.S. for the LOVE OF GOD do not let that grifter trump anywhere near the White House again.

Flooding the Zone With Lies

The wave of outright lying by the Far Right Noise Machine - and their Republican Party allies hacks - is overwhelming us now as the 2024 election day nears.

It's been well-documented that trump lies nearly every line he says in public; but he's been spewing offensive allegations the past few months that hospitals in Blue states are "performing post-abortions" (which is legally infanticide), and the past few weeks that there are schools forcibly performing transgender surgeries on children (the second part of that covered by Matt Lavietes at NBC News):

Former President Donald Trump repeated his false claim that children are undergoing transition-related surgery during their school day, worsening fears among some conservatives that educators are pushing children to become transgender and aiding transitions without parental awareness.

“Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation? Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?” Trump said Saturday at a campaign rally in Wisconsin, a vital swing state.

Trump made similar remarks — saying children were returning home from school after having had surgical procedures — the previous weekend at an event hosted by Moms for Liberty, a parent activist group that has gained outsized influence in conservative politics in recent years...

There is no evidence that a student has ever undergone gender-affirming surgery at a school in the U.S., nor is there evidence that a U.S. school has sent a student to receive such a procedure elsewhere...

According to trump and his Far Right acolytes, our public schools have the medical facilities and the means to perform surgeries at a whim: Considering how most of our schools are struggling to keep up with office supplies makes this deluded narrative a clear fantasy.

You'll notice trump doesn't mention where these things are happening: No mention of which school, which state. If any school has been transitioning kids without parental consent we'd have heard of it by now, even by the traditional media outlets expressing some level of outrage. If any hospital has been killing newborns as trump is claiming, the pro-fetus crowd in those states - even in deep Blue states like California or New York - would be massed outside that building protesting every minute of every day. Vague allegations without any eyewitnesses or documentation, not a thing that could stand up as factual evidence in an actual court of law.

So we know he's lying, we know he's fearmongering to his MAGA base... and yet the mainstream media isn't holding trump accountable - they are not challenging him to his face - for these blatant lies.

And now just over the past few days, JD Vance and several of his GOP buddies are sharing the outrageous and debunked claim that Haitian immigrants are out there eating our pet cats. Even Ian Millhiser over at Vox's Explainer can't fully explain it:

For the record, there is no evidence that any Haitian immigrant ate a cat in Springfield, Ohio, or anywhere else in the United States, for that matter. But the lack of factual evidence hasn’t stopped the GOP from pushing the nativist narrative, which seems designed to play off bigotry and suspicion against the mostly Black population of Haitian immigrants.

More than 300,000 previously unauthorized migrants from Haiti received temporary protected status in June, which means these Haitian immigrants are now — despite Vance’s suggestion otherwise — legally present in the United States. Still, Vance and other Republicans’ attacks on these immigrants come at a moment when more Americans have grown skeptical of immigration...

Springfield’s Police Division said on Monday that there have been no reports of any pets being stolen or eaten in that city. However, there apparently was an incident in Canton, Ohio — a nearly three-hour drive from Springfield — where a woman was charged with cruelty to animals for allegedly killing and eating a cat. But there’s no evidence that this woman is an immigrant or of Haitian descent.

Despite that lack of evidence, the woman appears to have been identified as of Haitian descent in far-right tweets...

The wingnuts are twisting the facts to make it fit their narrative that Haitian refugees - that immigrants in general - are inhuman. That's the only explanation here. And these wingnuts are desperate to turn the manufactured fear of immigrants into easily-promoted hate.

So it’s not surprising that many prominent members of the Republican Party, a party that frequently flags isolated crimes committed by immigrants to fuel nativist sentiment, latched onto an unfounded internet rumor about Haitians and cats as “proof” that immigrants present a problem (that Republicans can fix).

Still, none of this context changes the fact that Republicans at the pinnacle of the party, including sitting US senators and even one of the party’s two nationwide candidates, see no downside to spreading racist, completely unfounded rumors based on random social media posts spread by far-right trolls...

Millhiser spells it out at his conclusion even though he doesn't want to discuss the implications further: Vance and everyone else at the top of the GOP chain of command are happily spreading the fearmongering lies because there's no one willing to hold them accountable for being liars. The ones who could sue for defamation - right now, the entire Haitian community in the United States have every right to sue the GOP for their slander - are too poor or too constrained by their legal status to fight any courtroom battles. The media outlets that are supposed to maintain professional standards of journalism are too cowed by their rich owners - and too blinded by the need for "access" - to push back.

There's been a long and troubling history of the Far Right - especially as trump rose to power among their ranks - to exaggerate at best and outright lie at worst about so-called "criminal" acts committed by liberals and Democrats in order to excite their base into violent action. Think of every attack on Planned Parenthood facilities whenever the wingnuts claim that "baby killers" are farming for body parts. Remember how accusations about a child sex smuggling ring involving Hillary drove a man to attack a pizza parlor in Washington DC.

This is where we are at now in America, as the November general election draws nearer and trump - fearing he is going to lose the Popular vote again and likely the Electoral College - is desperate to stir up the passions of his MAGA base... but not to show up and vote, instead to show up with guns and commit acts of terror and chaos to do whatever it takes to disrupt any voting at all.

Gods help us. The lying is going to get worse until November and beyond, not until every wingnut liar is out of power... and in trump's case sitting in a jail cell.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD AND TRUTH, AMERICA, STOP VOTING REPUBLICAN. Hold them accountable. That IS in your power to stop their lies.

Update: A historian from Northwestern University is raising the warning flag that violence aimed at immigrants is sure to follow:

So let's not get confused: the debunked claims that refugees are eating cats aren't just nonsense. They are the beginning of a wave of violence. The people spreading this rhetoric either know exactly what they're doing, or they should know. But violence follows. Every time. (3)

— Kathleen Belew (@kathleen_belew) September 10, 2024

trump wants the blood to flow: It's how he knows he has his mob doing his dirty work for him.

trump's Violations of Norms and the Beltway's Inability to Cope

Ben Kesling at the Columbia Journalism Review has it right: 

On Tuesday, NPR’s Quil Lawrence and Tom Bowman broke the news that Trump and members of his campaign appeared to violate federal law during an appearance at Arlington to mark the third anniversary of the deadly attack on US troops that punctuated the deeply flawed withdrawal from Afghanistan. Members of Trump’s staff had sought to film the event for a campaign video, and got into an altercation with an Arlington National Cemetery staff member who tried to stop them. Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign official, strongly denied that any altercation had taken place and said the campaign was ready to release a video to prove his point. (They have yet to release it.) It wasn’t surprising that these two NPR pros with deep knowledge of the military, and sources among veterans, were the first with the news. The Washington Post followed with a story the same day, as did the New York Times. The public took note.

As more publications followed suit, the Arlington stories suffered a dreadful fate: they all started to sound the same. News outlets ended up with articles bogged down in parsing federal law, carefully defining what exactly counts as an altercation, and quoting milquetoast official statements like “There was an incident and a report was filed.” 

Lumped together, the reporting this week left readers and listeners, especially those with no knowledge of the military, at a loss to understand what actually happened—and, crucially, why it mattered so much. The Trump campaign team had successfully muddied the waters by alleging that the photographer had been invited to the event by family members of soldiers buried there. 

But as any veteran knows in their bones, the solemnity of the ceremony is exactly why the unauthorized photographer had no business being there—regardless of who invited them...

This is a very big reason why the veterans' organizations and a lot of veterans on social media are livid towards trump right now. And yet, the Beltway media doesn't seem to understand the fury:

Readers needed to know that, when you visit Arlington, you might not know exactly what you’re supposed to do when confronted by those rows of headstones, but you damn sure know what you’re not supposed to do. But the coverage this week left many readers with the impression that the whole thing might have been a bureaucratic mix-up, or some tedious violation of protocol. It focused on bland horse-race coverage so common during election season, rather than clearly stating what really took place: an egregious and willful violation of long-standing norms...

This has been one of the most obvious problems that our mainstream media suffers when it comes to covering trump, especially those moments when trump violates not only the established norms of political comity but also the long-established norms of common courtesy.

Put aside the well-told tales by now of trump's personal inability to understand military service, and his blunt disdain for those who suffered and died in that service. trump simply has no respect or diligence for anything he can't use or abuse.

Look at how trump himself behaved during this staged fiasco. Not only ignoring the cemetery's requirements to not bring his own campaign staff - he did - and not to bring his own photographer - he did, and promptly blamed it on the families he talked into hosting his appearance - and not to turn the memorial service into a partisan event - it became clear he was going to claim the moment was an official ceremony and accuse Biden and Harris of failing to show, in order to paint THEM as disrespectful to the military - trump proceeded to preen and pose at the gravesite of the fallen soldier with a grin and a thumbs up.

I refuse to show that photo on my blog. It is offensive and obscene. It's not that he's desecrating the burial grounds by urinating on the grave marker, it's that he's violating the common custom of treating cemeteries as a solemn and sacred location.

This is on him. This is how trump behaves for ANY photo op: standing with someone or a group who must act "grateful" to be in his presence, flashing that smile like he's happy instead of the dour bad boss he often is, and giving a thumbs up like "I'm perfect, I'm winning!"

And that's trump having no sense of place, no sense of humility, no sense of the gravity or gravitas of the situation, no sense at all really.

You damn sure know what you’re not supposed to do. And trump clearly doesn't know that.

The pity is the goddamned Beltway media doesn't know what to do with trump.

The media is unable to call trump out for his inhumane, clueless, selfish behaviors. They just can't, terrified of seeming biased and getting attacked by the Far Right for speaking the obvious that the GOP standard bearer - hell, the entire Republican Party leadership - is incapable of being a goddamned normal human being. 

This isn't just on the media owners, who are clearly in the tank for a Republican Party that's going to cut taxes for the uber-rich if they regain full control of government this 2024. This is on the editors and the writers and the reporters in the field just genuinely incapable of making the moral decision to point out how immoral trump truly is.

Gods help us.

I should mention how this is a personal matter for me. In the time that this scandal's percolated to this level of trump struggling to blame everyone else for his screwup, I've remembered that my father took me to Arlington a long time ago - probably on that week my older brother got married in Maryland when I was in my 20s - to visit the gravesites of his father and mother. I never met Grandpa Wartenberg - he died in 1968 before I was born - and dad rarely talked about him. Best I recall, my grandfather served as an officer on a Navy submarine during World War II in the Pacific (Grandma died when I was 8, and was buried in another spot in that region because of how the cemetery works). If the Naval records I've read is correct, Grandpa joined the Navy in 1917 and it looked like he served until 1946. If he was on the front lines of the Pacific War, he earned that spot in Arlington. (I need to find more about his duty during the big war).

When we visited, Arlington was a peaceful, calm, quiet place. There were others nearby visiting the graves of their family members, and everyone was solemn. Dad and I paid our respects at the markers, it might have been when dad talked about grandpa's service, but that was it. Nothing fancy. Nothing outlandish. That's all you're expected to do when you're honoring the dead.

trump just can't do that, can he.

/rage

Bad Numbers and Bad Vibes and a Bad Choice

Vanz can't dance, but he'll steal your money/
Watch him or he'll rob you blind...
-- John Fogerty, "Vanz Kant Danz"
(and I'm not the only one who thought of this song when JD Vance got picked for trump's Veep)

It's taken me awhile to write about donald trump's Vice Presidential selection of Senator JD Vance for his 2024 ticket, but in the few weeks that Vance has been on that ticket it's become hilariously - and horrifyingly - clear that picking Vance was a bad idea.

Given trump's previous history with his Veep - trying to bully Pence into throwing the election results in 2020 to the point of sending an insurrectionist mob at him - it was a bit sad to see other Republican figures audition themselves on Fox Not-News for the 2024 ticket, but there was nothing you could do dissuade them. DeSantis, Tim Scott, Doug (seriously, North Dakota?) Burgum, all of them made their daily talking head shows to argue their own submission to trump's will; but none of them pandered - attacking Ukraine, praising Russia, showcasing misogyny - like Vance did.

Thing is, when trump picked Vance - or had others pick him, depending on the story - he didn't do a good enough job of finding out if Vance would boost the ticket or not.

For all I've said about the need for Vice Presidents, as long as that office is part of the electoral process it matters that you choose wisely. A Presidential candidate choosing his/her campaign partner is signaling to voters what he/she values as skills for those who will work in their potential administration. If you're a domestic policy guru, tagging someone with foreign policy cred helps win over the voting base (definitely the punditry) that you'll balance out your agenda. If you're a Moderate from the Midwest, it helps to get a more die-hard candidate from another region (South, Pacific, Northeast) to appease the other party factions (and vice versa). And no matter what, you have to make sure the VP choice has their own charisma or credibility (just not too much to outshine the boss) to win over the mainstream media.

In short: Your Veep pick sets the tone.

What trump and his handlers found out real quick post-convention was that Vance - for all that he's known at the state and federal level of politics- is tone-deaf. And more unpopular than anyone - other than several polling services who were firing off emergency flares - realized.

Let's hear it from Nicholas Liu at Salon:

Senator JD Vance, R-Ohio, is making history as Donald Trump's 2024 running mate, but not in the way that the Trump campaign had hoped. According to a CNN survey taken after the Republican National Convention, Vance has an approval rating of -6 points, making him the first vice presidential nominee to enter the general election with a negative rating since 1980.

The average rating for a running mate after a party convention has been +19 points.

"Frankly, I don't really understand the pick, and apparently neither do the American voters," CNN data analyst Harry Enten said on Tuesday's OutFront with Erin Burnett. Vance, he said, is "dragging Trump down..."

With Trump struggling to appeal to moderate women, the former president may rue choosing a man who ran for Senate on a hardline anti-abortion stance, criticized childcare subsidies as "class war against normal people" and suggested that married women would be selfish for divorcing their abusive husbands, saying in 2021 that "one of the great tricks that the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace" was "making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear...”

Even Vance's purported appeal among white working-class voters appears overstated. He won Ohio in his 2022 Senate election by 6 points; by comparison, Trump won by 8 points in 2020 and Gov. Mike DeWine carried the state in 2022 by 25 points. Among white voters without a college degree, Vance, with a 31-point lead over Democrat Tim Ryan, also lagged behind Trump and DeWine, who won by 36 and 45 points respectively...

I've talked before about how at the state level, a candidate can overcome personal faults to win election all because the partisan nature of local elections make it too easy to win no matter what. Ohio could have run a dead dog for the Senate back in 2022, and that poor mutt could have beaten Tim Ryan by double digits. Vance arguably eked by at 6 percent.

And trump picked a guy with negative popularity at the national level, something that hadn't happened since 1980 (was that Bush the Elder?). For a campaign that's supposed to be tracking every favorable poll to feed trump's vanity, how did they mess that up?

Think back to some of the, ahem, more questionable Veep picks we've seen. 

Sarah Palin? She had a positive boost - and genuinely gave McCain and the GOP a healthy poll bounce - coming out of the convention before her appearances and interviews quickly exposed her as a near-illiterate self-absorbed fool before the November election. Joe Lieberman? In terms of polling and voter turnout, Lieberman mattered little to how Gore performed: However, Lieberman's more conservative stances turned off the more progressive Dem voters which hurt the eventual turnout (the same might be said for Hillary's VP pick Kaine). Dan Quayle? The jokes about him started flying the moment he was tabbed, but even then he brought enough positives to the table that his polling wasn't as bad as Vance.

In each of their cases, there were valid reasons at the time for their picks that did help balance the ticket - geographically, demographically, ideologically - even as those picks ended up hurting or negating the overall effort. The same can't be said for Vance: He mimics trump's ideology to a horrifying tee, and he doesn't appeal to the youth demographics of Millennials or Generation X. He only fulfills a geographic necessity by being from a Midwest (Rust Belt) state, and that will get negated by whomever Kamala picks as her running mate (especially if it's a Rust Belt figure like Walz, Beshear, or Shapiro).

Vance is standing on the national stage with little in the way of genuine charisma or likeability. One of the new breed of Culture War Republicans who attack often and impress rarely, he's demonstrated a shocking ability to alienate people in a heartbeat even among his own Far Right audiences. His anti-immigrant and "DEI" stances - and eagerness to attack a biracial opponent like Kamala Harris - are hard to reconcile with the fact Vance married an Indian (Asian) American woman (where Kamala is Jamaican-Indian (Asian) with a similar background). And Vance's views on women? "Misogynistic" is the nicest word you can say about that.

As Paige Oamek at the New Republic notes in her article title, "Everyone Hates JD":

Just when J.D. Vance thought his polling numbers couldn’t get worse, they have.

Vance’s net negative favorability rating was a major topic of discussion during a Tuesday night CNN roundtable. According to this week’s ABC News/IPSOS polling, Donald Trump’s running mate is polling at a staggeringly low minus 15 points.

It's like watching the rushing numbers by UMass' football team get worse every drive they play against Georgia's defense.

During the CNN segment, former South Carolina state Representative Bakari Sellers called Vance “the Sarah Palin of Dan Quayles.” But as Enten pointed out last week, both former vice presidential picks began with positive favorability ratings: Quayle with 15 points and Palin with 26 points.

“He is historically unpopular, even more so than V.P. nominees who of course went on to infamy,” Enten said of the Ohio Republican.

Vance also won’t be saved by his home state or by the Rust Belt, where last week he polled even worse at minus 16 points, according to a CNN/SSRS poll, with 44 percent of people saying they have an unfavorable view of the senator...

When I noted earlier how intraparty dynamics would give Vance a chance to survive in Ohio, now that he's a candidate on the national level that state-level partisanship won't be able to help him (this is what Scott Walker and Jeb Bush and Rick Perry and other milquetoast candidates found out long ago).

Vance is so unlikeable he's vulnerable to that most dreaded of political attacks, the Whisper Campaign. 

Someone off in the far corners of social media posted a joke rumor - completely unfounded and without direct evidence - that JD Vance wrote a scene in his best-selling book Hillbilly Elegy - by the way the "memoir" turned out to be exaggeration at best and deplorable at worst - having sex with a couch. The joke spread quickly on Twitter to where the AP Newswire had to publish a report calling the story "false"... but then retracted that report because of the slight possibility that Vance could have engaged in that act anyway the editors claimed it wasn't vetted properly.

As Zachary Folk covered at the Daily Beast (paywalled):

The anonymous poster who started the viral—but false—rumor that Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance had sex with a couch said he came up with the smear while shopping at a grocery store. The viral post’s author, who only identified himself as “Rick,” gave his first interview to Business Insider on Tuesday, telling the publication the joke came from “a place of irreverence if not outright disrespect.” The viral tweet has since attracted the attention of late night hosts, Fox News talking heads, and even Vice President Harris’ campaign. Rick said he has since protected his account and changed his Twitter handle to avoid unwanted attention. He also said he did not intend to spread misinformation, but instead simply wanted mock the Republican candidate...

Since then, while the mainstream media tried to keep away from it everyone else went all-in on the "couchfucker" mockery. Why is this joke proving so harmful to Vance?

Because being this unlikeable already didn't provide Vance with enough popular support to laugh off or shrug away the insult. Just looking at Vance - his physical appearance is just on the wrong side of being creepy, his hateful demeanor that just advertises "messed-up psychology," the general vibe of being weird - makes it more believable to the general population that this is a guy who would do something tawdry with your living room sofa.

Any stand-up comedian - or wannabe who did the Open Mic nights in South Florida back in the 1990s, ahem - can tell you this: When the majority of people are laughing at you instead of with you, you're screwed.

Rumors are now swirling that trump has soured on Vance already (don't forget, trump is a Bad Boss who will kick you to the street curb once he thinks you're no longer useful) while other party leaders are discussing how to remove Vance from the ticket. Problem is, replacing a ticket partner at this stage of the election is dicey at best (and that's just the paperwork you need to refill). The last time a Vice Presidential candidate got replaced mid-campaign was Eagleton back in 1972, and all that did was confirm that McGovern's campaign was in utter chaos and led to one of the biggest Electoral College defeats in history (that fact gets diminished with how Nixon's campaign unleashed massive sabotage and trickery against the Democrats when the facts of Watergate went public). 

trump can't afford to dump Vance even at this early stage of the final leg of the 2024 election cycle. trump can't afford to keep Vance because the way things are going JD is going to make Sarah Palin look like Margaret Thatcher.

This needs to be a warning to the American voting public at large: trump has no idea how to pick competent people to work for him. The Republicans don't have any competent or quality candidates to choose from anymore. For the LOVE OF GOD, don't vote trump/Vance this 2024, or for any other Republican hack ready and willing to destroy everything America stands for.

And in the meantime, ScotchGard your ottomans!