Well, I would say shocking if I a) didn't already not put anything past the Trump Administration, b) didn't assume that was exactly the sort of thing that would disappear. The Obama Administration thought this was exactly the sort of thing Trump would make disappear and made a little list of items that would definitely be missed.
(It's very hard to deny something on Twitter, and then turn around and be like "Hey kids, let's do a joint cycbersecurity with Putin!" and not sound like your head was up Vova's ass. Or giving Israeli intelligence to Russia. Or halting aid to Ukraine. Or any of the other "deliverables" Trump seemed to want to give Putin since oh, Day One of his first term, He'll be doing the same Day One of a second term as well, while also being a dictator.)
A few notable figures in the Fulton County case have requested a speedy trial--Ken Cheseboro (whose request for a speedy trial might have sent pangs through the legal teams of several of the other indicted individuals) and Sidney Powell. There's a benefit to a speedy trial, of course. The defense can work with still-fresh evidence and make their best case for what had happened. In the case where multiple people are indicted at once, it severs their trial from the rest--that's definitely a great idea in the case where one is providing evidence that others have more culpability for wrongful events--right?
It's a right of the accused under the Constitution. And one of Donald Trump's crack team of legal experts--the finest his political donors can pay for so far--has explained on television why even Donald Trump should think about going to trial as soon as possible:
The waiting for Trump's indictment over the attempted overturn of the 2020 presidential election is over, and I encourage everyone (even Ron DeSantis if he still hasn't!) to go ahead and read the indictment. It's not long, and it is pretty thorough in laying out the case that despite no evidence of voter fraud, Trump spread that lie and attempted to overturn the election by means of litigation alleging fraud, encouraging state legislatures and slates of alternate electors to act on the alleged fraud, to halt the lawful proceedings of Congress on 1/6 and to encourage Trump's faithful to wreak havoc on the day.
Trump lost. There was no proof of voter fraud that would have changed the result of the election. And no, Trump's belief is completely irrelevant, because whether he chose to believe he won or not, he was informed on various occasions that his theories of fraud ("conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership") were bogus, as outlined in pages 6 through 8.
If Trump persisted in his belief, he was delusional, and we should not excuse people on the basis of being delusional--nor should we continue to entertain whether they are fit to lead a country if they are.
It's also irrelevant whether he understood the law well enough to know exactly what he was violating--ignorance of the law has been determined to be no excuse long before this.
For what it's worth, even if the Espionage Act stuff (Two grand juries? with Jay Bratt whose deal is Espionage Act? Hmm!) seems like the real damaging stuff (I think it's bad, because it certainly looks bad), I'm not overlooking the possibility that Trump also eventually sees some heat from the 1/6 stuff, especially regarding the gathering of R. Congress people and talking to assorted goons to that fell purpose. (I consider Flynn a goon. Some people wouldn't but that just attributes to his success at creative goonery.) Steve Bannon has been subpoenaed in that matter.
Am I confident that we're going to see some indictments in these things as early as this week? Hell if I know. I know in the short term, based on what I see on the MAGA comments on Twitter, if it happens some folks are gonna be shirt-ripping mad, and then their mommas are gonna be mad they ripped their shirts.
I keep saying this, but it really wouldn't take me but one lynch mob to be out on a soap box testifying to everything the next damn day. But Mike Pence and me, we're built differently, and I get that. Maybe someone can ask Dan Quayle to tell him that he has to do the right thing this time, too. And besides, it's not like he won't have a whole lot of company.
Now, I have a guaranteed break-even strategy regarding gambling that has never failed at me not losing money--I don't bet. That's one way to never lose. The TrumpWorld folks aren't me, a working-class kid with a tenuous middle-class existence in adulthood. They are whales, machers. They live whole lives of fucking around without the guarantee of finding out. They gamble. They risk a whole country. That's why I write about TrunpWorld, in part--the fascination for how they think.
So, you all know about Alex Jones' phones and the specter of some "intimate conversation" with Roger Stone? (Yes, I had to do a third-eye wash to not see the word "intimate" and "Roger Stone" together and be like "Ewwwwwww." It's probably way more like Stone's entirely not weird caught on documentary video conversation with Matt Gaetz about pardons than the way my brain tried to interpret "intimate".) Yeah, I think there's more there though. There's supposedly two years worth of communications, and it's not like Jones is in the Secret Service and has the incriminating bits extremely intentionally wiped, right?
The worst thing about a conspiracy is that the people in on it have to communicate to keep their cover-up alive. Is that why Trump isn't supposed to talk to Mark Meadows anymore? This is a reasonably fraught thing--it might very well legally benefit Mark Meadows to shrive himself before the DOJ or the 1/6 committee, but there is hardly anything in this world Trump loves like he loves loyalty tests and witness tampering.
And then there's the funny old thing about the revelation that Trump DOJ lawyer (oddly working on behalf of the Trump campaign) John Eastman was still looking for the very elusive proof of the voter fraud that didn't exist weeks after 1/6. He was also looking to get paid. This is so amateur. Trump believes he should be defended because his cause is always sanctified and is its own reward because he is who he is, and I don't know how Eastman (or Giuliani, or anyone else) failed to notice that. Also, too, Eastman and Giuliani and other lawyers never did get pardons, because like a Trump wife or girlfriend, he expects his lawyers to get themselves off.
Trump is at the center of this, and it's his party, and he should cry if he wants to, but all signs point to his culpability. And if he doesn't get served, boy, I don't know. I just don't. But I don't like what that implies.
Consider if you will the sound of accountability riding an elevator to the penthouse where one man lives-- in his own mind, a master of all he surveys, largely because he's been wearing blinders the whole time. He doesn't see accountability approaching him, but all the same he waits for the dreaded "ding" of destiny reaching his floor. Once again, I'm talking Trump World, which is for all intents and purposes--the twilight zone.
The New York Times had a big reveal about the cynical hacks cooking up the alternate electors scheme--or should we use the lexicon of the moment before it was corrected and call them "fake"? They apparently had consciousness of their fakery and bad faith. They knew what they were doing danced on the edge of the illegal. And the GOP nominee for governor of my state, who definitely was at the Capitol 1/6, was the point person for trying to throw away my vote, which I still resent. Also, he's a goddamn anti-Semite. (What has two thumbs and hates Nazis? Vixen Strangely. Points to self with two thumbs, super-demonstratively.)
Anyway, it really seems like the DOJ is looking at Trump as a big part of their investigation because yep--they say so. Merrick Garland is definitely not ruling indicting Trump out, despite Lester Holt's bullshit framing. I just want to point out that saying that the indictment or prosecution of Trump is going to tear the country apart is editorializing and framing this possible eventuality as if the Trump stans would be justified for freaking out and fucking up--they wouldn't be. Trump lied in a way that has already caused deaths. His lie, his BIG LIE, and the faith of those who still believe in it, needs to be cratered because it is, in fact, a lie. Framing anything in the way where he plausibly could have won, or that his second term was stolen, is grievous journalistic malpractice. There are no two sides of this story--because look at this shit:
They aren't exactly ahead of the reporters, the 1/6 Committee, because a lot of what I'm hearing now, I know I knew either contemporaneously or from later investigative reporting, but now it's even more substantiated. And I don't feel in the least jaded. My word!
Tie the latest thing about Steve Bannon's speculation that denying the election results and claiming they were always rigged via Mother Jones (which he was always going to do, c'mon, it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to see that) with the revelation that Trump was calling Bannon pre-1/6, and this was exactly where his podcast's claim that all hell was going to break loose came from. That's a sign that Trump was directing his flying monkeys in the right- wing media system to send troops where he wanted them. (The 1/6 Committee video of this was effective.)
This has echoes of Julian Assange's suggestion in 2016 to Don Jr. that it might be more interesting if his father lost, because he would then be able to create fuckery by claiming the system was rigged. It also serves to remind us that "Stop the Steal" was created by Roger Stone in 2016 for just that kind of fuckery. What we have is a big picture coming into focus.
Today's testimony makes clear that Trump wanted to go to the Capitol with the armed mob, despite warnings not to do so from his advisors.
When the Secret Service ruled out the possibility, the former President erupted in anger in the Suburban he was riding in. pic.twitter.com/Ef69CAenn6
— January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) June 28, 2022
It's the small tantrum-y details that stick out in Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony yesterday that actually made it feel very real to me. The shit-fit in the Suburban. The ketchup dripping on the wall. One of the filthy secrets of Trump World seems to be that their man actually does behave like a toddler, a shocking little rage-beast--except because he's fully grown and powerful, they don't know what to do about him.
The answer should never have been: make him president and then cater to his whims. After his having become president, he did any of a number of things that were simply, obviously, not normal. And yet the people around him closed their eyes, like trying to ignore a toddler. Someone who was a pain in the ass--but would grow out of it. Who would, is Susan Collins put it, "learn his lesson."
But not addressing the angry elephant in the room endangered our country. That's the big part. He didn't care if his own vice-president was killed. He didn't care if there were guns at the rally--after all, they weren't going to kill him. They were there for him!
Why in the world didn't people explain what Trump was doing all along? Because, for the most part, they were going along with him--accomplices. But I have to also imagine some part of it was sheer embarrassment. Forget whether what he has done is presidential (my retort to Trump's bashing of the "Unselect Committee" is that he has been an "Unpresident"), he has demonstrated he doesn't even act like a normal person. I think the shock of him and his willingness to go further, wilder, immobilizes some moral sense in the people around him, like a magnet spinning a moral compass wildly out of control.
Not to excuse them. But the phrase "grown-ups in the room" always sounds disjointed when the president of the US was not one of them.
In other news, Giuliani and Mark Meadows sought pardons. They knew what they had been involved in was criminal. Did they also consider it was in service to a gigantic evil toddler?
Peter Navarro was tremblingly aggrieved today to find that the act of dodging a lawfully issued subpoena caused him to be treated like a common criminal. Who in the world did they, the Department of Justice, think they were dealing with? It's not like in the time he was working diligently for the public that anyone who mattered thought he was the unethical toady of a vicious moneyed would-be tyrant. (I mean, except for the people who did. But did they matter?) They intercepted him at the airport for crying out loud! As if they were watching him! (Do you think!?)
It's getting so conservatives can't even lie to Congress or the Feds, noted legal mind Louie Gohmert opined. If you're a conservative, of course. He's thinking of how Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman was acquitted of lying to the FBI because it wasn't actually proven, and how Michael Flynn, who plead guilty to lying to the FBI (and apparently, was unmasked quite innocently in a scandal that wasn't, thank you so much), was absolutely railroaded by having his sentence shortened by Trump AG Bill Barr before being pardoned by Trump himself. It's the damnedest thing when Republicans can nearly be held accountable for stuff they did and you can hardly hold Democrats responsible for stuff you want them to be punished for.
Now, about that stealing elections thing--I know I'm going to come across as some kind of stickler, but with each bit of material gleaned from the Trumpers (especially Mark Meadows, MVP, whose texts are a source of abundant context), it sure does look that it was they, not anyone else, who were fixing to steal an election, and apparently detailed what they were going to do in assorted memoranda. (Insert jokes regarding taking notes on a criminal conspiracy here. I'm too tired.) It didn't even entirely occur to them that subverting the will of millions of voters would even matter in the end so why not be a little aggressive about it? (I mean, better to ask forgiveness than gain permission and all that? Or even coerce forgiveness in the form of compliance by way of martial law. You know. Strongman shit.)
And did the 81 million Biden voters really matter? Particularly the ones whose votes could just be thrown away? Probably ones in dodgy areas like the Philly metro area--I wonder if that was something Mark Meadows discussed with Scott Perry before those notes went up in smoke. Why Republicans think heavily Democratic-voting areas are rife with fraud is certainly a puzzlement is it not? (Looking at which voters the Republicans will choose to intimidate in the future and insert it in the very real context of who has gotten to vote in this country historically, it certainly is not.)
In order for democracy to work, it is necessary that even Republicans be bound by the law. But upon hearing they might be so bound, they sure are fit to be tied.
UPDATE: AS an entire afterthought--isn't the least bit problematic that the former president wanted a mob to kill the former VP? Because I know the former VP is all like, "bygones", but in the real world, that kind of depraved indifference is basically murderous. (Sorry, l wasn't paying much more attention than the former VP seems to be feeling about that. But he totally could have died and Trump would have been okay with it. )
Apparently, some of the cast of characters featured in the over 2,000 text messages to Mark Meadows that CNN got a hold of were advised they were getting hung out, and that's great. They should have expected that. They were involved in trying to overturn an election. It is serious business. Now, I am starting with Matt Schlapp, who as far as I know is still taking CPAC to Hungary next month and really isn't deviating at all from who he's ever been:
(I stay mad about 2000). And I would venture to add--I don't think this was completely unexpected a violation of democratic values from the Republican party, the party of Watergate and the October Surprise and Iran-Contra, and Benghazi (yeah--I am calling the politicization of that tragedy solely about elections, not at all about justice for the slain or rectification of security issues). I don't expect better from this party. I am a little shocked about how many Republicans sold their soul and allied their reputations to Trump, the amoral reality tv show pussy-grabber.
The GOP occasionally pretends they have standards. Their support for Trump has belied this and I will not ever let them live this down. He is corruption and amorality in a saggy skin-suit.
So, while I can laugh with all of you at Perjury Traitor Greene being shown up about her confusion at whether martial law was ever discussed (or Marshall Law, as the illiterate case may be), it's nonetheless disconcerting that apparently, there was a GOP House group chat where martial law was very strongly recommended--just days before the inauguration. When the election of Joe Biden should have been a settled cause, and the imposition of martial law would have definitely been a full military autogolpe situation. (And yet we weren't unaware that this was part of the conversation at the time--it's just who all was saying it that was striking.)
The thing that makes TrumpWorld what it is, is the sense of an alternative reality. It almost feels like they aren't drinking the same water or breathing the same air. I've been fascinated with Ginni Thomas as an activist in a world where we presume some degree of judicial impartiality but also consider SCOTUS justices based on partisan lines--and how she is an unabashed conservative warrior. A Tea Partisan. A supporter of Project Veritas. A conspiracy theorist.
So, it doesn't actually surprise me that Thomas texted White House COS Mark Meadows running the full QAnon gamut regarding the Venezuelan voting machines, Italian satellites, Chinese thermostats, German servers, green clovers, blue diamonds, and the evil liberals who were after Trump's lucky charms and were definitely going to go to GITMO and face a military tribunal.
What is concerning is that she was talking with her "best friend"--her spouse, the temporarily, one presumes, hors de combat Justice Clarence Thomas, who was in a capacity to rule on matters concerning the contested election, and on matters concerning what documents became available to the 1/6 Committee. And knowing of his wife's various intercessions on this issue, never thought to recuse.
But the thing of it is, people like Ginni Thomas are still at work. Now, Mo Brooks, now that his endorsement by Trump has been rescinded, might be saying that despite Trump's continued entreaties, he was determined to draw the line at the impossibility of the election being somehow rescinded or done over after 1/6!? But ask yourself, how many other people besides Mo Brooks who have made the political pilgrimage to Mar-A-Lago to kiss the hem of the golf pants of St. Don might have vowed a path of continued fuckery? After all, there are Trump supporters to this day who might acknowledge that Biden is president but draw the line at calling him "duly-elected".
And as for the mindset of Trump himself, he has taken it upon himself to sue everyone for the "rigging" of....2016? The election he actually won? Because he blames the "Russia, Russia, Russia" thing for his uneasy time in a job he was not especially suited for.
So clearly, more alternative reality, there, folks. It's a plague in TrumpWorld, you see. Or it's just a grift to garner attention and donations in that particular case.
And don't get me started on all the reasons why Trump wanted to stay in the White House, but seems just as protected outside of it. I will scream.
Former Trump campaign strategic adviser Boris Epshteyn to @AriMelber: "Yes, I was part of the process to make sure there were alternate electors."https://t.co/v06GFV4vpO
It actually is pretty shocking to see the actual draft of an EO to seize the voting machines and appoint a special counsel. But there was already solid reporting that Flynn and Powell proposed exactly this (with a strong likelihood that Powell is the author and proposed special counsel pick) and the thing is, they also said that's exactly what they wanted to anyone who would listen.
They would have a soft coup over basically an uploading error in Antrim Co. for "national security" making American great. But they wouldn't mind thug tactics and head cracking from RW militias along the way. It's a sick joke.
I am nearly past laughing, though. Except for gallows humor.
Trump loves obstruction and lawsuits the way normal people would love things like their families, or maybe their country, or like, I guess, their personal notion of a deity. Trump established a pattern of obstruction that was fully noted in the Mueller investigation, and which I rather wish had been followed up on. He's done everything he can to obstruct people getting hold of his tax returns (although they sure have) even though that's kind of a normal thing for presidential candidates to turn over. He loves countersuits and appeals. He is, verily, the illegitimum qui carborundums.
Now, I'm not a lawyer and I don't play one on the blog, but I think the constitutional right issue is sort of a non-starter because it upends the idea that crime should be investigated because people are involved. I mean, what if people were hoping to find a certain outcome, like, that someone was ever guilty of a crime? Biased! What if someone said bad things about a person they considered guilty of crimes? Obviously biased! Just entirely violating the right to not ever be accused of a thing despite evidence and reasonable cause for which warrants have been obtained, and, no, that isn't a thing. Being of the opposite party from an AG also shouldn't be a "Get Out of Investigations Free" card. It's a really weird reach.
But it's about the public opinion. It's about poor little Everyman Trump struggling to keep his family business from being torn apart by political vultures when he meant it to be a legacy for his own kids, who are also all totally conniving shitasses. His father built that real estate empire with his own two hands and his grandfather's brothel money, and despite multiple bankruptcies, Donald Trump will be goddamned if he'll let it get shut down like his fraudulent University or his bullshit charity!
Will it really matter if he's already screwed to the wall? See, he and his little buddies who want to stay shtum right now perpetrated a whole fraud. Trump, like Sidney Powell, fundraised off of bogus election fraud claims he had to have known weren't so. The RNC did. Multiple Republicans have used these fake claims. They sent emails and regular postal mailers with these false claims. They tried to pay for pointless audits and are still doing that sort of thing.
It really does look like the election fraud of 2020 was the proposal of many devious and dumb people to pretend there was voter fraud so as to a) maybe overturn an election but definitely b) make money and convince state legislatures they needed to DO SOMETHING to make sure (Republican) candidates didn't face what Trump faced: a searing loss because people realized he didn't know what the hell he was doing. Because that, not any voter fraud, was what actually happened. He sucked. He lost jobs, his foreign policy was awful, his SCOTUS picks are going down in history in totally not a good way.
But regardless of the politics, the money grab over false pretenses was definitely a whole crime. And I don't think there ought to be a law about that, I believe there is. And Trump should go down for that, and the incitement for 1/6 as an attempt to obstruct the business of Congress, and for his business practices. Basically, I think we should, as a nation, set aside every January to find a new thing to prosecute Trump over in memory of his two impeachments and just make that a national thing going forward.
As to the pic above: He is Vigo! You are like the buzzing of flies to him! So many Trump followers are like the Peter MacNicol character. It's so weird.
Also, I mean, he totally did not win that election. He had to finagle a new AG because Bill Barr even said he lost. He lost. He really did. You can tell by the way he isn't in the White House anymore. He lost.
So, let's start this TrumpWorld Grab-Bag with Jim Jordan, who was introduced into the conversation a bit ago when his text to Mark Meadows was revealed without attribution. To make this controversial, The Federalist leapt in to "help" by outing the originator of the text as Jim Jordan, so there, and obviously, not attributing Jordan was a kind of fuckery, are we doing this right? No, Federalist overpaid airheads, you are not. Yeah, we could have narrowed this down to the eagerest of beavers, and just because he was only forwarding yet another memo in the dark arts of how to steal an election because you are the president right now and maybe can isn't actually a better look.
So, okay, Jordan was only passing on the legal opinions of Joseph Schmitz to add to the McEntee, Ellis, Eastman, Whosits, Whatsits, Dewey, Cheatem, and Howe memos. I was already familiar with this name because I do this thing. He was part of the Clinton email hunt way back as part of Trump's early foreign policy team in the 2016 campaign. I never forget anything--it's actually a passion of mine to never forget. And this is the sort of useful SOB who served Trump's putsch.
It was Jordan, not Schmitz, who got the Medal of Freedom for services rendered, but oh, well. Maybe next time, if as a country we are stupid enough to have a next time. (I know the Medal was supposedly for Jordan's defense of Trump during the first impeachment but actually, since Trump stays impeached and lost his election in part because he will never not be impeached, I prefer to believe it is for all manner of loyalty. All. Manner. of. Loyalty. An actual prize for most excellent ass-licking.)
The Federalist thinks this is--okay? He was just passing on a thing he supposedly didn't think was a how-to about stealing the election? So weird, because that's what throwing out uncounted votes would mean!
So anyway, what else is news? Reuters did a piece on retired military folks (like, ahem, Flynn and Waldron) lending their credence and credibility to fake stories about voter fraud. This reminds me of a couple of threads I have tried to follow on this blog, with varying success--the theocrats in the upper ranks, and the psyops perpetrated by military-affiliated people. It's astonishing to me that right-wing people would use their training to undergo a mission against the homeland for pay or whate...oh wait, I totally think that could be a thing!
Liz Cheney reads texts from Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Brian Kilmeade, and Donald Trump Jr. urging former President Trump to act while he sat around and did nothing for hours during the insurrection pic.twitter.com/jkk7KhxF0s
There is definitely a game of "one of these things is not like the other" you could play here. Three of these people are Fox News hosts, which makes them trying to crisis manage Trump's reputation by accessing the White House via Meadows when they are allegedly some kind of journalists (no they aren't) is kind of a reach and crazy levels of access for them, but it's kind of really pathetic as all hell that Don Jr., Trump's #1 son and namesake, is also trying to contact his dad's Chief of Staff to get listened to.
This is Don Jr. considering his future and maybe that of his own kids and how they will read about their grandpa in history books. Considering the businesses he and his siblings are all working to keep some kind of reputable and profitable. A legacy. And his dad is not just fucking with it, but not taking his calls to hear this from him personally?
That makes me a little sad for him, but not enough not to notice he hasn't denounced his dad at all, never once.
So for one thing, it doesn't escape my notice that Meadows' devices, including his personal phone, seems to be what reveals the Trump putsch, as well as his personal emails, etc. These are things a certain someone never would have had in her email.
And I can't help but notice all of the Fox News folks gleefully went along with the "antifa" bill of goods the Trump insurrection needed to divert attention from the responsibility of Trump's very own invitees, to people who weren't even there (antifa). They did this knowing it wasn't so, like it was their job to promote completely erroneous batshit propaganda to the masses. Shocker!
So of course Trump never stopped the violence just for the sake of propriety. The Capitol Police did their job. He failed at his. That was his violence. That was all Trump. His ego, his sissy snit-fit at losing the presidency. His trying to do something audacious and failing because he understood nothing at all.
But the evidence damns not just him, or Meadows, or Fox News. There was ample Republican complicity, and the media, for the sake of book deals, failed to be what Woodward and Bernstein were (even Woodward himself).
This all needs to be front page news--now, and not when hearings start. Now. We need to recognize that Jeffrey Clark is pleading the fifth because he perpetrated a fraud. Giuliani perpetrated a fraud. Sidney Powell perpetrated a fraud. Jenna Ellis perpetrated a fraud. Phil Waldron perpetuated a fraud. Mike Lindell perpetuated a fraud. They all told people there was voter fraud and had no evidence/manufactured evidence. And this is where it lead. And it could have lead to the end of our democratic experiment for which our forefathers bled and gave their last full measure of devotion.
Whatever they intended, what they got was mob violence, a failed coup, and just scads of these SOBS need charged with sedition, fraud, and fuck it. It's treason. Dare we call it that yet?
Fox News isn't ready to call it that. But it needs thrown in their faces. Giuliani, like a zombie, is still perpetrating the fraud. It needs called out. The spirit of the insurrection is still ongoing. It can not be put down by half-measures. I am pleased to see the 1/6 Committee calling people out but it is the hearings that I look forward to. The American people must know the extent of the lies and the conspiracy and how close we came to losing our country as we know it.
Just a little bit in advance of Mark Meadows being held in contempt of Congress (unless he realizes that he has little choice but to, shall we say, be less contemptible?) and interesting item comes to light from the trove of documents already handed over the the 1/6 Committee: an email indicating that the National Guard was to be put on standby to protect Trump supporters. From whom?
Just to put a pin in the whom question--this is what Former Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller already testified that Trump told him. They were to protect Trump's demonstrators.
From the hordes of antifa super-soldiers bearing soup cans and malice, once has to assume. After all, it was goldurn liberals and whatnot who were going to go hog wild according to the Claremont war games, and the police would need to take shocking bloody measures to put them down. Especially the antifa and BLM elites in their upper middle class urban enclaves.
That's what they were counting on. Outlandish stereotypes detached from reality. Their own people were the thugs, but they never thought that was how Trump supporters would be viewed. That's how sincerely they believed their own bullshit.
UPDATE: And I will not stop laughing that part of the referral for Meadows' contempt charge is due to his having written a book partially covering the subject matter. It's just very choice. Stable genius, even.
Former Trump COS Mark Meadows might not actually be the sharpest ball in the ball pit, because damn, he seems to have incriminated himself by giving "just the tip" of information to the House January 6th Committee, because it looks like the "but her emails" crew learned nothing about properly digitally maintaining and giving over records required to be kept. Also, they may have just gotten enough to pretty much nail Meadows' involvement down, anyway. And you, know, besides all that, he did undercut himself about wanting to keep privilege about certain details by a) Writing a book and b) going on news shows to talk about just what he wasn't willing to talk about.
And all this before he knows exactly how the courts are going to come down ultimately on the executive privilege claim--but it doesn't look great for him. Because we only have one president at a time, Trump isn't it right now, and OMG YOU ASSHOLES TRIED TO STEAL AN ELECTION. And left a detailed PowerPoint about what the fuck?
So, before I go all Stringer Bell about taking notes on a criminal conspiracy (again! because I'm pretty sure I did that reference before) I have to note there are similarities between the PowerPoint and the Claremont war games. The really hilarious things are how the PowerPoint definitely leans on the Chinese Thermostat/Italian satellite kind of conspiracy theories for what happened to give the election to Biden (instead of like, the COVID-19 disaster, the unemployment and the fucking constant drama) and relies on "a national security emergency" on or about January 6 that means the military totally has to take over. So sad!
Mark Meadows is an absolute Trump loyalist, and if he says in his book that Trump had a positive Covid-19 test and then tested negative and decided to go ahead without quarantining to do a presidential debate and some fundraisers because why actually do the considerate and cautious thing? You know what? I believe that super-loyal Mark Meadows is telling the truth, and is dopey enough to think this makes Trump look like a real hard-working maverick who doesn't care a fig for his own health when there's a job to do.
Sure, a normal person might surmise that this is crazypants, and obviously it's irresponsible and Trump probably infected all kinds of people and endangered who knows how many others. It's the same kind of ignorant irresponsibility that led to 400,000 US deaths during his presidency, and a presidential campaign notable for actually killing some of its supporters, like Herman Cain. After all, the White House stayed a practical Covid-19 "hot spot" for a good while afterwards, even resulting in one WH official receiving amputations and a three month hospital stay, and an absurd number of Secret Service personnel also became sick during this time.
But no one associated with the Trump White House is goddamn normal. After all, this is a world where VP Mike Pence had a whole flipping lynch mob set on him, and is to this day like, "Well, President Trump and I will never see eye to eye on this..." when, like HELLO! he was gonna be fine if you died! This is a world where Chris Christie wrote a book allegedly trying to separate himself from the Trump Era conspiracy theories and to some extent, Trump, and acknowledged that when he was in the hospital with Covid-19. Trump's major concern was whether Christie would blame getting sick on him. BUt you know, it's not like he's mad.
So sure, the White House didn't have it in them to stop Trump doing what he wanted to do and it was fine and dandy with them if Trump and his family strolled in late to the debate without masks on the "honor system" and who knows? Maybe threatened to infect the Democratic candidate. So sure, Trump might have exposed Gold Star families to the virus quite knowingly as well, and even blamed his exposure on them.
Trump denies it of course, and called it "Fake News"--which is really just Trump's way of saying he doesn't like how it sounds and it doesn't match his lie. And this being Trump World, how does Mark Meadows respond?
Newsmax anchor Rob Schmitt: "I believe the president said it's fake news. What's the story here?"
So there you have it, there is no good reason to read Mark Meadows' book because it is chock full of fake news. Sure, some of it might be true, of course, but screw him. And Trump too, but with protection because who knows what you might catch off him. right?
There is something about TrumpWorld Grab-Bags that starts feeling like an old comfy shoe over time: the mediocrity. Hannah Arendt referred to the banality of evil, and yep. It doesn't fucking startle anyone with its brilliance or beggar the imagination with strategy and insight surpassing the norm. It's just grubby little ambitious motherfuckers going about what they consider their business even if it usurps the rights, comfort, or lives of millions because they found themselves in the position to do it. It's chastening about the human condition but I drink and write bad poetry so I can handle that.
I'm not sure myself how much of a pay rise it would take to make me cool with defending rapeor subverting US democracy. But Clark gives us a flavor of how it might just be for some folks. (I will say, there are people on social media fine with doing this for free and they are also in my humble opinion very bad, but lacking in the capitalist spirit.)
