As always, followers of Deposed Donald Trump (DDT) valiantly defend him, but even usually spineless Chuck Todd (Meet the Press) tired of their lies and avoidance. In 2019, DDT, when in the White House, said, “I can’t imagine anybody ever even thinking of using the debt ceiling as a negotiating wedge.” Todd asked DDT sycophant Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) why he, an advocate of sending the U.S. into default, doesn’t agree with DDT. Donalds quoted DDT saying that he reversed his position because he’s no longer president. “Do you realize how absurd that sounds?” Todd asked Donalds who denied that DDT’s excuse for changing his position wasn’t absurd. Todd said:
“‘What is good for me is not for thee.’ He’s basically saying, ‘When I’m president, there’s no negotiating on this. But, hey, when somebody else is president, screw them.”
Donalds retorted that DDT is “what America needs.” Actually, DDT is what MAGA wishes:
- Education: ranting against transgender people and burning woke books
- Military policy: retain insurrectionists.
- Healthcare: incite death threats against scientific methods.
- Campaigns: be as nasty and cruel as possible.
- Guns: promote deaths and injuries.
Mike Lofgren wrote about the new GOP: armed survivalists, psychopathic grifters, con artists, incels living in parents’ basements.
“Having been abused himself as a child, Trump now transmits abuse to others. The Trump base, disproportionately conservative and religious fundamentalist, is also likely to have been the subject of punitive and authoritarian upbringings; rather than making a clean break with the sickness, they keep replicating it in their lives. Their slave-like loyalty to Trump is a form of masochism towards the angry yet protective family patriarch…
“[Republicans] don’t want better health care, fiscal responsibility, better infrastructure, clean drinking water, or anything on a policy menu that serves rational ends… What they truly want is demons to wrestle with till the end of time. They want revenge… They crave contentiousness and conflict 24/7…
“Scholars studying the conspiracy theories these people fall for sometimes belabor the issue of whether they really “believe” such crackpot notions. Whether they believe is probably unknowable, but that is less important than the fact that loudly saying they believe it creates endless friction with relatives, co-workers, and neighbors. Being abrasive, if not actually threatening, gives them a sense of identity and attention they would otherwise lack.
“Other than tax cuts for the rich (and for himself), Trump hardly undertook any policies in his four years in office; instead he filled his time with giving his base a whole menagerie of demons to contend with. It is no coincidence that the people he verbally assaulted, be they politicians, the press or election workers, were soon besieged by death threats from his unhinged followers…
“The real glue between Trump and his devotees is his endless assurances that their lot in life is not the result of their own laziness, irresponsibility or failure to seek counseling. No, they are innocent victims, endlessly picked on by elitists, socialists and foreigners. These sinister groups are constantly changing according to expediency, but the point is to keep his acolytes in a constant state of agitation.
“He [demonized] Muslims … while going on to set up business deals (meaning bribes) between his family and the Persian Gulf despots. He even sided with the bloodthirsty Mohammed bin Salman over the Saudi-American journalist whom the Saudi princeling had murdered and dismembered…
“More than 80 years ago, George Orwell commented on the malleability of the endless hate propaganda of earlier charismatic dictatorships; it sounds eerily like the Trump technique: ‘As for the hate-campaigns in which totalitarian régimes ceaselessly indulge, they are real enough while they last, but are simply dictated by the needs of the moment. Jews, Poles, Trotskyists, English, French, Czechs, Democrats, Fascists, Marxists—almost anyone can figure as Public Enemy No. 1. Hatred can be turned in any direction at a moment’s notice, like a plumber’s blow-flame.’
“Trump’s hold over his base, a force that none of his Republican opponents can quite replicate, is ultimately predicated on the implied threat of violence. As armies, gangs and cults have demonstrated, violence is a tacit loyalty oath that bonds one member to another and above all the group to the leader. The simmering air of menace that characterizes Trump rallies is the sadomasochistic tie between Trump and his followers turned outward as hatred towards the rest of society…
“His pronouncements to his followers are functionally no different than an imam in a failed Middle Eastern state issuing fatwas to kill the infidel.”
Donalds also argued that DDT is the only person who can oppose Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russan President Vladimir Putin. Yet DDT fawned over both of them and gave Xi state secrets in front of a crowd of his followers at Mar-a-Lago. While in the White House, DDT also gave Putin anything he wanted.
Todd asked Donalds if January 6 was a “beautiful day,” as DDT claimed. Donalds disagreed it was “beautiful” but switched the topic to the southern boarder and the inflation he blamed on President Joe Biden—the inflation caused by big business that’s rapidly shrinking because of Biden’s actions. Also Donalds skipped over the progress that Biden is making, with the cooperation of the G7 summit, against China’s economic importance.
DDT led the Republicans to tie Biden to China. In 2019, while DDT was being investigated for his extortion of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinsky, he publicly called on China to publish negative information about Biden, then his opponent for the presidency. DDT accused of “all that money from China” going into Biden’s “pockets” because he was in China’s employ.
While in the White House, DDT collected at least $7 million from Chinese government-owned entities through just a lease agreement with a state-owned bank in Trump Tower. It was the second-largest tenant in the building. Two years after a five-year extension, the bank left Trump Tower at the same time that DDT left the White House.
As of 2017, DDT had at least 72 trademarks in China with another 45 pending. He also had a bank account in China, and his daughter Ivanka Trump received 41 Chinese trademarks while she was a White House adviser. Those trademarks were approved 40 percent faster than those she applied for before his inauguration. In the same year, a Chinese firm invested over $400 million in the Manhattan office tower owned by the family of Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s husband. Kushner Companies received a cash payout, an equity stake in a new partnership, and a refinancing of $1.14 billion in existing mortgage debt. About 80 percent of a $250 million loan was forgiven. Kushner had supposedly sold his stake in the property, but it was a “sweetheart deal” for his family.
And that was just in China.
DDT has lost his legal team’s lead lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, because of infighting, according to the attorney who will no longer participated in the special counsel investigations. He said he stepped down because of differences with another of DDT’s lawyers, Boris Epshteyn, and accused him of “misrepresenting” the classified documents that DDT illegally collected. Parlatore explained how Epshteyn blocked him and other lawyers from giving DDT information, creating a disadvantage in dealing with DOJ. Epshteyn tended to deliver good news to DDT, no matter the circumstances, according to Parlatore. He added:
“In my opinion, he was not very honest with us or with the client on certain things. Uh, there were certain things like the searches that he had attempted to interfere with.”
Parlatore also ridiculed Epshteyn’s limited legal experience of only 18 months as a corporate lawyer. In late April, DDT’s lawyers asked lawmakers to remove DOJ authority to run the investigation, moving the probe to the intelligence community. In the CNN town hall, DDT again admitted he took classified documents but repeated his false claim that he had the right to do it. Asked for the reason, he said:
“I was there and I took what I took. … I had every right to do it. I didn’t make a secret of it.”
By stating he took the classified materials when he moved out of the White House, DDT was confessing to a federal crime. The National Archives also found 16 records proving that DDT knew he broke the law by taking the classified documents to Mar-a-Lago. In them, advisers directed him on how to declassify materials.
Fulton County DA Fani Willis has told her staff they will be working remotely for the first few weeks of August. It seems the hammer is about to drop in litigation regarding the attempt to overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential election. DDT is trying to block the proceedings.
In the five-year lawsuit claiming DDT stole from Celebrity Apprentice viewers by pushing investments in an unsuccessful desktop videophone scam, his children have been removed to speed up the legal procedure.
The FBI raided an apartment owned by two Russian businessmen, partners in a shell company, in Miami’s Trump Tower. They have been evading trade sanctions with Russia caused by its invasion of Ukraine by sending Boeing and Airbus aircraft parts and electronics to Russia through an elaborate network.
Heather Cox Richardson’s “letter” for April 21 describes the way Putin has aligned himself with DDT in his list of 500+ people not permitted to enter Russia—both Republicans and Democrats who have opposed DDT. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/21/world/europe/russia-sanctions-trump.html She also explains how DDT’s loyalists in state legislatures are using the fear tactics of Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán to fight democracy.
Nel's New Day 