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drumpfwatch · 8 months ago

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The Final Plea: Trump's Gone Full Hitler

Originally I was going to write this huge, multi-part essay about how Trump is bad and how Project 2025 is evil and how he’s definitely going to do it but I don’t need to. Thanks to Trump’s big stupid mouth, and his recent dive into dementia-driven madness, I think I have something that any sane person can’t hear without being worried about.

Trump says immigrants are 'poisoning the blood of our country'

This? This is unacceptable. He is literally saying the exact same thing about immigrants that Hitler did about the Jews. If you have any moral fiber whatsoever, this should be the thing that gets you to see Trump for what he is. A fascist.

“But,” you say, “what if he’s just talking? He obviously doesn’t believe that! They’re just words!” And with all do respect I do not fucking care. There are only two possibilities here: either Trump is an actual honest to god fascist who legitimately sees the “pure blood of the American people” being threatened by the existence of brown people who want to breed us out of existence, or he knows his fan base does and is happy to rile them up with this kind of talk. And at the end of the day, that is a distinction without difference.

This sort of rhetoric breeds anger and violence, and keeps him nice and distant. He can claim that all he did was tell people to protest “peacefully and patriotically” ignoring the two months he spent before that lying and riling them up. Stochastic terrorism at its finest, on display at its worst on January 6th. It’s funny how many republicans I can encounter who can identify, say, Alex Jones’ rhetoric as inflammatory and inciting but immediately shut their brain off when Trump starts doing the exact same thing.

Honestly the fact that he’s cultivated a following like that should’ve told you all you needed to know in the first place. No other President’s fan base has attacked a federal building and interrupted government actions about their candidate losing. No President has been so butthurt by a loss that he shot over 60 frivolous lawsuits off that were all pretty quickly defeated because his people wouldn’t tell the lies they told to you under oath. You don’t get that kinda crazy by accident, you cultivate that.

Even if Trump himself were a good guy (he’s not), and had no intention of putting immigrants in camps (which he already did), his base - those lunatics he counts on to commit insurrections for him - are more than happy to do the dirty work.

But how do I know that? Because they already have. After Trump broadcasted the story about Haitian Immigrants eating dogs and cats, those places supporting them received bomb threats. Bomb threats that would continue for two days and be followed by the homes of those immigrants being vandalized. Threats so serious and numerous the children needed police protection just to go to school. Haitian immigrants who are there legally, by the way. Haitian Immigrants who were invited to Springfield, by Springfield, to take up jobs that the white folk there are apparently too good for. Jobs that benefit the community. These are people who have already suffered immensely and now they have a target on their back because of a bullshit racist story that isn’t even true. That’s right, the person who started this whole mess admitted they made the whole thing up! But the MAGAts don’t care, and neither does Trump, because he keeps spewing this god damned lie.

Why? Why would he do that? Why push this fake story so hard? Because Trump wants to scare you into voting for him, and whether or not he actually holds to the Nazi Propaganda of the Great Replacement, he is absolutely fine with all the suffering it’s causing as long as it helps build up the Fear Wave he’s hoping to ride into the White House on.

It’s the same reason he keeps lying that we’re in the worst crime wave of all time, ever, when crime is the lowest it’s been in 50 years. There is no migrant crime wave because migrants are, as a whole, less likely to commit crime.

That’s why I say if you have any moral fiber what so ever, you’d have dumped him. You’re willing to sacrifice the wellbeing of over 70% of the population of women, blacks, LGBT people and other minorities on the altar of Trump, and for what?

No, really. For what? The economy?

Trump only cares about the economy in as much as it helps him. That’s why the man who promised to drain the swamp of financial corruption appointed the freaking CIO of Goldman Sachs as his Secretary of the Treasury. No, it’s not because Mnuchin knew what he was doing, he had never worked with public funds once in his life. It was because he knew how to get rich people more money. That’s why the only thing that benefited from him was the stock market. Which, by the way, is doing even better under Uncle Joe. Every other measure of wealth indicated hard times for the middle class specifically. The unemployment rate, the deficit, housing prices and more. All of these things were worse under Trump.

Now, I understand that the economy is complicated. A whole bunch of things affect it and not every bad thing that happened under Trump was his fault (in the same way that not everything that happened under Biden was his either). COVID in particular really screwed everything over, and while he didn’t exactly handle the crisis well he didn’t exactly manufacture the disease for funsies either. That said, if Trump gets to take responsibility for the $1.00 gas prices that happened during lockdown because people weren’t driving all that much, then he also gets to take on the responsibility of the hundreds of thousands of jobs that were lost because of it too.

And that’s the crux. If Donald Trump were truly actually good for the economy, there’d be no room to equivocate. A healthy economy raises all ships, and his did not. That’s what you’re willing to summon at that altar. Mediocrity.

Besides, we know for a fact that some of the things he specifically did were bad. Those tariffs on China hurt American manufacturing arguably more than they hurt China. After all, tariffs end up being a tax on the consumer. All those promises he made to rebuild and protect American industries? He never did any of that, because that would require tax money and empowering workers, and his rich friends really don’t like either of those things. I know, a politician lied, truly a shocker! But if he actually gave a damn about the poor and working class, if he actually cared about the economy, he would’ve done something besides making his merchandise in China. But he doesn’t care about the working class except for how he can abuse them to get what he wants out of them. Every Trump Supporter who isn’t directly working for him is, in his mind, a gullible mark who exists purely to be a tool. Trump does not care about you.

And, you know, even if it were true - that Trump were great for the economy - you know who was? HITLER. While he was chancellor Germany had a 100% employment rate! Of course that was partly because they kicked all the Jews and women out of their jobs and had the unemployed men take them over, but that’s still a pretty impressive success. He also generated an astounding amount of wealth for his people by fueling his Wehrmacht and invading other countries. It was this stability he offered, contrasted with the horrific death of the Papiermark after the First World War, that allowed him to get enough people behind him to seize power. Because most Germans didn’t actually want to exterminate all Jews, but they did want to buy a loaf of bread for less than a bajillion dollars and were willing to look the other way for the sake of that.

Now, I’m not saying Trump is Hitler, or that we’re in as equally perilous a situation. 1920s Germany was 1920s Germany, Hitler was Hitler and there will never be another monster like him. But Trump is his own monster, and whatever color his soul is, whatever he actually believes, he has surrounded himself with people who are all too eager to commit treason in his name.

Literally, is that worth it to you? What price could possibly be worth putting the worst thing to happen to American Human Rights since Dredd-Scott into office? What good does he bring that are worth the continued strength of our democracy? What policies has he enacted that make supporting him worth it? The death of Roe v Wade, the Muslim Travel Ban, the decreasing enrollment of minorities due to the peeling back of affirmative protections, the encouragement of book banning, the aggressive attacks on free press that accurately report on his crimes? The violent use of police to silence peaceful protests? The Supreme Court that gave him the powers of a King while stripping power from other branches?

Or maybe you’re excited for what he plans to do! Like restoring the Alien and Sedition Acts to evict migrants. You know, those horrible blights upon our country? The ones that allowed us to imprison innocent Japanese citizens in camps just because they were Japanese, or allowed the government to restrict the free press because it didn’t say what they wanted it to? Don’t pretend that he won’t, or that he can’t. It’s happened before so it can happen again, and now that the guard rails are gone, there’s no stopping him. This country has done darker things under better presidents than he, and if you think the lackies he’s going to staff as much of the government as he can with are going to stop him this time, then you are a gullible tool.

That’s right! If Trump’s in office, expect, at the very least, rigged trials against his opponents, terrifying police oppression of non-violent protests and crimes! So many crimes! Crimes from Trump! Crimes from his friends, his family, his loyal mooks! Crimes for everyone! Crimes that are immediately pardoned - or even pardoned beforehand! How exciting! And if he does even part of what is in Project 2025 - which he’s very likely to - then expect wonderfully horrible stupid things like total federal bans on birth control, females getting arrested for crossing state lines while pregnant and teachers being put in jail for calling their student “Sam” instead of “Samuel” because their parent never signed a permission slip for that.

This is not hyperbole, this is not conjecture of a potential future, these are things that have already happened because of Trump, and things he has said he was going to do. Do you believe him? Because it’s the one thing I believe him on, because he did them all before and people like Trump only ever get worse.

What reason do you have to support this man? Do you think Harris is going to be worse, somehow? Harris, the most pliable politician we’ve had in decades - for better or worse? What, is she gonna let the woke mob take over America? The woke mob that barely exists? How terrible, people might have to treat Transfolk with the respect they deserve! Truly, a nightmare!

For the record, no one has been arrested for any trans discrimination law. Because most of those laws simply add transpeople to the list of people who are considered valid targets for discrimination/hate crimes. So if you weren’t planning on burning down a transperson’s house or denying them a job because they’re trans, you don’t have to worry about being arrested/fined for not liking transpeople. You’re allowed to be a bigot in your own house, just like bigots always have been, that hasn’t changed. I promise no one’s going to arrest you for deadnaming and misgendering a trans person. The fact that people won’t LIKE you for doing that, well, that’s a problem you just have to deal with if you really believe in free speech, now isn’t it?

What other reasons are there to think Kamala is worse than Trump? Do you think she’s a Marxist? I’ve heard people call her that before and it’s fucking hilarious to me because it displays either a profound ignorance of what Marxism is, a profound ignorance of who she is, or both. Yes, Kamala’s dad was a Marxist. He also barely talks to her - Kamala refers to their relationship as “strained but cordial,” - in part because his daughter is an avid participant in the free market. If you want to know who's a Marxist, you ask a Marxist. And if my experience has taught me anything, it’s that most of the Marxists don’t like Harris at all.

Of course people like Jordan Peterson have twisted the meaning of the word around so hard that it doesn’t mean anything anymore anyway. I’ve heard people call DEI initiatives Marxist because they don’t like it when people don’t agree with them? Because they don’t understand that calling an action racist doesn’t mean the one who did it was racist? Look, this stuff is complicated and I’m not going to litigate it right now, but the whole point of DEI isn’t to brainwash people into believing white people are all secretly evil. It’s meant to spread awareness so that people don’t accidentally say stupid, hurtful stuff because not everyone has the time of day to research the entire history of racism in America. The more important point here is that whatever you wanna call it, it’s not Marxism just because both Marx and your DEI speaker both get mad at you for disagreeing with them, and no one is teaching Critical Race Theory to children in school.

But to be clear - if we define Marxism as “extremely to the left,” she’s not. Entire progressive cultures are furious that Joe stepped down because Kamala turned her back on them. They felt they had a chance with Joe, but they definitely don’t think they do with her. A lot of leftists are disappointed in her. You should’ve seen how pissed they got when she said she’d appoint republicans to her cabinet. Anyone putting her in the same category as Angela Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders is either ignorant or malicious. Conversely, if by Marxist you mean the economic system by which the means of production are owned and controlled by the working class and that profit thereof is evenly distributed amongst all beneficiaries, be it at the company level or the governmental level, Kamala Harris does not believe that, never has, and probably never will. The PACs who back her campaign are way too interested in continuing the status quo to let her do that.

And that’s what this is about, isn’t it? I’ll admit it, Kamala Harris may be a change in the Democratic Party, appealing to patriotism in ways the democrats haven’t in a long time, breaking with certain party lines where it’s convenient but she’s not ever going to completely contradict party orthodoxy, not at this point. She chose Tim Walz instead of Josh Shapiro like the party wanted her to, but she didn’t choose, say, Bernie Sanders or even Pete Buttegig. She still plays the system, and at this point I think both sides can agree the system is broken.

And hey, Trump does offer a new system! But that new system is fascism, and if that’s what you want, then, well, I guess I can’t stop you. But if it’s not what you want, if you want to guarantee American democracy will prosper as democracy, vote for someone else. And if you want that vote to matter, vote for Kamala.

You have the right to vote for whoever you want. I can’t stop you, and I won’t. This essay doesn’t exist to deny you that right. But I want everyone who reads this to know that if Trump wins, his track history shows that he’s going to do the terrible things he says he’s going to do, especially now that he’s kicked out all the people who would stop him and has perfect immunity.

Or maybe not. Maybe he won’t. Maybe Trump will have a miraculous change of heart, realize that he actually has a responsibility when wielding all that power, tell the Supreme Court to reverse their decisions on immunity and tell the people behind Project 2025 to go eat bricks instead of pretending like he hasn’t heard about it for the 500th time this week. Maybe every one of his previous actions was just part of some super-uber-complicated 4D Chess game with the Deep State of The They™ that totally exists and is actively trying to evilly keep him out of power so the evil space lizard jews can continue to drink the blood of sexually abused orphans and destroy things with natural-disaster making space lasers.

And maybe I’ll win every single state lottery on the same day with the same numbers.

I feel like a crazy person, sometimes. It seems so strange to be staring down the loaded gun of a dictatorship, but history tells us this is how it always goes. But we have a chance to stop it this time. And hey, maybe I’m wrong about all of this. It wouldn’t be the first time. But I’d like to think I’ve grown up from my foolish days believing every conspiracy theory I found online, and feel that I’ve brought sufficient evidence to the table. Trump has done nothing but lie, be stupid, and step on whatever is in his way to get what he personally wants, damn the consequences. And at the end of the day, people tend to do more of what they’ve done, except occasionally more. So ask yourself, before you check that box, what has Trump done? In what ways has he helped this country and in what ways has he hurt it? And are you willing to risk more, or worse, of that harm? And if so, for what? Whose wellbeing are you potentially putting on that altar? Because if I’m right, and he wins, I did warn you.

#Election 2024 #by phoenix #thedrumpfwatch

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drumpfwatch · 8 months ago

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The Extreme Court

0. Introduction

One of the clearest symbols of Republican hypocrisy and callousness is the actions of Mitch McConnell in regards to the Supreme Court. By holding Neil Gosurch and dozens, maybe hundreds of other officials from their positions by stomping like a baby about how it was too late a year beforehand, and then shotgunning every potential Justice Trump appointed up until the last possible second, a clear pattern emerged. McConnell - and the Republican Party - do not care about the people of this country. They care about their team winning. Argue all you want about how “both sides are bad,” this level of absolute disrespect for the political process of our country keeps showing up only on their side. And as a result of this absolutely heinous behavior, we now have a Supreme Court stacked with Trump’s goons.

Yes, see, President Trump got to appoint a full third of the Supreme Court during his presidency thanks to the bullshit stunts of Mitch McConnel. He has more justices on the court then any other president at the moment, and for all the decisions I’m about to talk about all three of them voted to see the damage done. This is his court. I could go full tin foil and start pointing out how the other justices, say, Clarence Thomas, also have financial ties to Trump (via a Nazi in one case, funnily enough), but those haven’t been investigated enough for me to make full comment on one way or the other. What matters is everyone should know by now that Trump doesn’t pick effective people, he picks loyal ones. And with a full third of the court in his pocket, all he needs is two more of them to agree to get what he wants. Not that tall an ask, especially when one of them is already a die hard fanatic for you and the other is known to be easily bribable.

This is Trump’s Supreme Court, courtesy of Mitch McConnel. They may be a different entity, but he gave its rotten parts the chance to thrive. Besides, if you steal seats from other presidents it’s only fair you get blamed for what happens.

And what has happened? What changes have the now conservative majority made to our country? They've chipped away at our democracy, chipped away at our rights, and laid the groundwork for even worse horrors. This isn’t some liberal conspiracy theory touted by leftist commentators to get the lefties riled up. This stuff has already happened, will probably only get worse, and has the Founding Fathers individually spinning in their graves with enough force to power the Eastern seaboard for a week.

Let’s just start with the big one. The one that laid turned the President of the United States into a dictator, specifically for the dictatorship Trump wants. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v United States.

1.0 Trump v United States

There are two major problems with this decision. The first is the biggest part of it - the fact that “core acts” are immune to prosecution. This is now true for all Presidents going forward, and for Biden right now. Any President can now do some awful things without consequence, and no President, not even George Washington, deserves that power. That was sort of the whole point of our revolution.

Let’s explore the consequences of this decision through Trump’s own example.

1.1 Let’s Kill a Man

He once joked he could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue and get away with it. So let’s pretend he did. Let’s pretend he shoots Joe Biden. In this new world created by the Supreme Court, that is still a crime for which he can be prosecuted - contrary to the opinion of some leftist commentators. He can be arrested, tried, and found guilty of this act and put in prison for it. This falls outside of the bounds of his power as executive, and is in no way part of the needs of executing his office, so it is a crime. Hooray!

However, pardoning people does fall within his power as the executive. So he could pardon himself for the act. Given the nature of the pardon, he could even preemptively pardon himself. Imagine seeing that on the news - Trump pardons himself for the murder of Former President Biden that he will commit “within the next two weeks”. Because that is his exclusive right as President, he can do that. Hell, the pardon power can be so broadly applied that he can preemptively pardon himself for any and all crimes he ever commits for any reason, and now, he cannot be held to answer for it - or those crimes, what with the fact that he’s pardoned. A reminder that legally speaking, the process of the pardon implies the President is a judge in the case - in this case, the judge of his own case. Anywhere else, that is considered unethically unacceptable. But not for the President. Not anymore.

Further, it would be safer for the President to not even shoot the guy himself. In his role as Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces, he could simply order any soldier to do it for him. He could even delightedly declare that he did it because Joe was his former political rival and he just wanted to kill him, motive doesn’t matter. Trump can just do that, and that’s fine, because as President he has the exclusive right to command the military however most appeals to him, now without consequence.

Ah, but what if the soldier in question remembers the Nuremberg trials and says he won’t do it? That’s fine, Trump can find someone else. And then he can put the full weight of the Department of Justice into fabricating evidence for a loaded court that gets paid off to find the dissenter guilty of whatever crime most appeals to him. Again, as the head of the executive branch, that is his right, and now his unquestionable, protected right. He is above the law. Just like a King.

1.2 The President is a King

That’s right. Any president can now run a sham trial against anyone, including their political rivals, and because the power as chief criminal judge grants them immunity from any acts they commit in the process of that, including obviously illegal and unconstitutional ones, they can do whatever they want. That one should be the absolute scariest of all to everyone. Again, our country was sort of built on that idea. Even if you somehow, someway, believe Trump won’t abuse this power, what about the next President? Would you be okay with Bernie Sanders framing Elon Musk for murder just because he’s rich and Bernie doesn’t like that? I’ll admit that while emotionally I’d be highly amused by that I would still strongly and emphatically object because everyone deserves their day in court. The Rule of Law is one of the most important parts of the social contract, and I abhor its violation even if it’s for my benefit.

This power is the kind of power that only exists to be abused. Everyone of the six justices who joined this decision should be fucking ashamed of what they’ve done.

Actually, that’s a good question. If every single jurist with a brain has objected to this, why did 6 of the (supposedly) best jurists in the land sign off on it? Honestly, I could speculate, but I’m afraid few of those speculations are very kind. I don’t make a habit of ascribing motivations to people when I’m not positive about it, especially when I instinctively dislike some of those people. Besides, the color of their souls is up to them, at the end of the day. The thing is, it doesn’t matter. Maybe every single one of them genuinely believes that the executive would be severely impeded by being held accountable for even the most heinous abuses of power, even after they were no longer the executive. The problem is that regardless of their desire, the consequences are terrible. The words say that the President can use the “core official” powers of their office to do whatever they want, whyever they want, and Americans can’t do anything about it. It then goes on to state that those “core official acts” explicitly include their control of the military, their pardon power, their position as head of the DoJ, their right to hire staff under them, the veto power and pretty much everything else almost 250 years of precedent and law have given them the authority to do. Those words have meaning - and that meaning is that the President, at least in his position as executive, is above the law. I know I’m sort of repeating this, but it is absolutely imperative that this be understood.

1.3 It Gets Worse

So, this is, y’know, bad. Really bad. But it only gets worse from here. The second major nightmare with this decision is how the court defines the three categories it constructed - official core acts, official non-core acts, and unofficial acts. While it goes out of its way to enumerate what the “core official” acts are, it’s actually very vague about what constitutes an unofficial act. The Majority opinion only talks about how “this can be difficult to determine,” sighting examples like when the President speaks on behalf of the American people (which is not listed as one of his powers in the Constitution) being an official act, before concluding “For those reasons, the immunity we have recognized extends to the “outer perimeter” of the President’s official responsibilities, covering actions so long as they are “not manifestly or palpably beyond [his] authority.” (page 25)” Which is a definition so broad, you can drive an oil tanker through it, port-side first. It basically translates to “if the president doesn’t have the explicit authority to do it, then it isn’t protected.”

That’s bad enough, but the true problem with that little nugget doesn’t come until you see that the decision also says that official acts cannot be used as evidence in prosecutions. This is a decision so insane that even Amy Coney-Barret objected to it in her concurrence. Going back to our hypothetical from earlier, imagine if we got a recording of Trump in the first scenario, where he did it himself, discussing his plan and specific motive to kill Biden in vivid detail to J. D. Vance. Because of this decision, it could easily be argued that this conversation took place within the sphere of his presidential duties and is therefore inadmissible as evidence.

But it gets worse. See, the Majority Opinion also states that motive cannot be used to determine if an action was official or unofficial.

It’s funny. When I first heard about this decision, I was sure that motive was going to be what they used to not let this break the entire country. “But when Trump ordered that crowd of peaceful protesters drone striked, he was convinced they were a threat to democracy! His motives were to protect the people,” they’d argue. And since that could be a very difficult thing to prove, especially for a man like Trump, they could loophole his way out of consequences without letting anyone else do the same. But no. They explicitly killed that idea, for whatever reason.

And it gets. Even. Worse. “Nor,” it continues, “may courts deem an action unofficial merely because it allegedly violates a generally applicable law. (page 26)” This makes it explicit. Murder is not illegal. Perjury is not illegal. Corrupt acts are not illegal. If the President does it, then it is not illegal. If the justices hadn’t had said that, then whether or not a president could Seal Team 6 a political rival is something that could later be sorted out in the courts, as a lot of the vagaries of this decision will be. But there’s no alternate interpretation of those words.

So how do you do it? How do you differentiate unofficial acts from official acts? The Majority of the Supreme Court answers that question with a big fat shrug emoji ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

So yeah, Trump - or any President - can kinda do whatever he wants, as long as he does it “as the president”. And what “as the president” means…well, until the specifics of that little chestnut get hammered out in further litigation, we’re stuck with…

1.4 The Vagaries

The last, surprise nightmare of this decision is that because the only thing the justices decided to really define were core official acts, we have no idea where anything else can fall. The definitions are so broad as to be meaningless. For instance, those who are familiar with the decision might be saying “But what about how non-core actions have presumptive immunity? That means that if you can prove they weren’t done as the executive they can still be used to prosecute and as evidence?” Well the problem there is the line between non-core and core acts is also poorly defined. “At a minimum, the President must therefore be immune from prosecution for an official act unless the Government can show that applying a criminal prohibition to that act would pose no “dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.” (page 22)” which is, again, stupidly broad. What could be perceived as a danger - not a reasonable assumption of danger, just flat out a danger? By whom? I know someone who perceives games of rock-paper-scissors as a threat, you don’t think evil people are going to use that sort of language to twist out whatever bullshit excuse they need? “Sorry guys, the Muslims make me uncomfortable with all their suicide bombing, so I need to use the Alien Enemies Act to reopen the Japanese internment camps and stick them in there or I can’t do my job.” Being criticized by the people for corrupt acts, that certainly creates an impediment to the “vigor of the executive” because committing war crimes is easier if you won’t be held accountable. What about the cases where the separation of powers already limits the power of the executive? Should those no longer count, those certainly hamper the executive? These questions are going to be sorted out by lower courts and we don’t know what the answers will be. Worst case scenario, these broad definitions will be made even broader, and nothing a President does will be considered an unofficial act. In our hypothetical, Trump could argue in that first scenario that he shot Biden as a matter of state defense, thus making it an action as Commander in Chief, and therefore protected. Would the jury buy that? Would the Supreme Court? Because at this point that is a legitimate question that could come before a jury and if the answer to that question is yes then Trump really can just shoot anyone he wants, for any reason he wants, and be legally immune from the murder charge - all he has to do is say that the person being alive made him less willing to do his job. I don’t think that’s going to happen - I pray to Athena it won’t - but the point is that it is now, officially, on the table and until this ruling gets overturned it will remain there.

In the interests of fairness, the best case scenario is that everyone just sort of pretends this ruling never happened and carries on as if it doesn’t exist, killing it. Which actually isn’t impossible. There are all sorts of precedents and laws that are no longer considered binding even though they were never directly stricken because people didn’t care enough to enforce them. And while I am delighted by the possibility, until the current Supreme Court loses the festering rot that caused this, I don’t exactly have high hopes for that. Especially since Trump is already doing his best to apply it to every action he ever took - which, as we established, it doesn’t. At least, not yet anyway. Even if every other judge on every other circuit ignores it, as soon as it gets to the Supreme Court, they’ll likely stand by their incredibly foolish decision (especially if Trump gets re-elected) and they have the final say.

Trump and McConnell built this court. This is their fault. And this isn’t the only terrible thing his court has done.

2.0 Other Terrible Things The Court Has Done

I think anyone with a brain who fully understands the weight of what the Court has done can see Trump v US for the mockery of our democracy that it is. The few legal scholars who think this decision is okay have been filling the air with their counter arguments, which lets Fox News and friends make apathy gas out of the situation. But for some weird reason that I can’t possibly say (without potentially making myself liable for libel) every one of them are either people who Trump has worked with or who support him fanatically. While conservative commentators have openly raged at this, I have yet to see an actual liberal one argue its legitimacy. In a sane world, that’d be enough. But this isn’t a sane world. This is a world where an entire major news network was so used to getting away with bullshit that they trusted Sydney Powell (and her ghosts) with her version of the Big Lie. And they know they were lying because the minute the company they blamed for it called them out and got the receipts, Fox immediately settled for over a quarter of a BILLION dollars.

That said, the well is already poisoned here. So there are a few decisions I’d like to talk about because they don’t have the…knee-jerk reaction that this one might, while still providing evidence for my point. I think the actual effects of what they’ve done are worth panicking knowing about.

2.1 The Death of Chevron Deference

Chevron deference is a kind of esoteric legal tool. It’s complicated to explain, but the gist is this: when an issue comes before a court in regards to the workings of one of the executive offices - say, the EPA - if the matter is too complex for people who don’t have training in the field to determine the right answer, then the courts leave that decision in the hands of the organization and its staff - experts employed by the state for this exact sort of thing. Matters that Chevron had decided include “what counts as a protein?”, “what makes a species of squirrel distinct from another for the sake of the EPA?” and “what amount of human-produced noise might harm an ecosystem?”.

The concept is that while a general laity is equipped to decide matters of fact, scientific fact is in particular difficult to educate a lay person about. Further, some of these questions may not even have “answers” in a traditional sense. For instance, my interest in biology has taught me that the higher taxonomic grades like phylum, class, order, and even genus are all physically non-existent, only meaningful as sign posts to help guide us along the trajectory of a given lifeform’s evolution. The only one that has an actual definition is species, and we silently throw it out as soon as the gradations of biology make it apparent that trying to stick everything into convenient little boxes just isn’t how nature really works. How are you supposed to make an ironclad legal decision about those boxes when the boxes don’t even actually exist?

Chevron deference said you don’t. You hand that over to the experts who know what they’re talking about, and let them figure it out. If it could be shown that the law isn’t doing what it’s supposed to in an objective way, sure, get rid of it. But otherwise leave that sort of minutia to the professionals. But now, with it no longer the law of the land, the legal meaning of scientific fact is no longer going to be decided by the people who spent their life studying their topic and work daily with the very real consequences of the legal decisions about it, but by potentially very ignorant judges and the amount of money funneled into the lawyers on either side.

Not only is this bad from a perspective of “coal companies can now stick their fingers into their own regulations” kind of way, or a “charismatic enough conman can make the FDA’s assessment of their toxic drug irrelevant” perspective, but also just from a logistic perspective. Everytime a new one of these cases comes up, the already overworked federal judiciary is going to have to sink its teeth deeply into complicated stuff, if it's going to do the job right. And how successful do you think they’ll be with that? How often will they do the truth justice before they just give up and start letting the aforementioned coal lawyers and quack doctors convince them? Scientific fact, as understood by American Law, is now in the hands of layfolk, not experts. I know there’s a certain subset of the population who disdain experts for being “elitist” but when I’m getting a heart surgery done or even riding on a plane, I’d prefer it if the people doing those things were, at the very least, competently trained and experienced. Joe Public, who’s never spent a day in his life learning the difference between a protein and a prion, now gets to decide if we put mad cow disease in our food.

This ruling is also bad because it disrupts the balance of powers. Originally, the Executive Branch got to interpret these laws, and while that meant that the President got to decide truth to a degree (President Trump’s EPA interpreted oil legislation very differently then Biden’s for instance), the actual facts of the matter were still in the hands of the organization itself, not the President. This is why it’s important that staff of, say, NOAH, serve at the pleasure of their organization and not any politician, but especially not the President. Something Trump is also trying to mess with, by the way. This strips the power of the administrative state to do its job and puts it in the hands of the judiciary.

Now, it should be said that graciously, the decision doesn’t undo 40 years of precedent. Every decision that was previously decided still stands, until such time as it is overturned. The problem there is that the court also decided to make sure every single one of them could be challenged.

2.2 The Corner Post Murder

Another decision they’ve made, Corner Post v Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, is also worth knowing about. They’ve made a small tweak with Corner Post to previous decisions. Now, instead of laws having 6 years to stand before they reach their statute of limitations, any company can bring a case about a federal regulation as long as new harm was caused in the last 6 years.

This effectively means that regulatory law will never, ever be settled. Any rule you don’t like, you just start a new company in a part of the country with amenable judges, say that “this regulation hurts my company!” or whatever, and you bring it to court. The judge decides in your favor, because of course they does, that’s why you chose them, and then at some point in the future someone else comes along, starts their own company, changes the law into ways they prefer, rinse and repeat until, presumably, the heat death of the universe.

Another wonderful monument to hypocrisy. This isn’t smaller government, this is absolutely batshit insane government. Because of the various ways different regions have different opinions on things - and the way opinions will suddenly have a lot more power in the realm of fact, thanks to Chevron Deference’s death - we’ll suddenly be stuck with an incomprehensible knot of red tape. Imagine if you’re only allowed to have 33 ft square nets on your fishing boat, because anything bigger is considered illegal because the environmentalist lobby paid to have the amount of fishing you can do limited, and anything smaller defines your boat as a non-commercial vessel that doesn’t allow you to fish the amount of fish you need to make a profit because the big fishing companies want to limit potential up and coming competition by stifling them in the crib. Then imagine that as soon as you replace every one of your nets, the law changes. The specifics of this are so esoteric but broad reaching that if government organizations don’t write the entirety of a law out in every detail, a judge can just mark it up with as much red pen as appeals to them.

Liberal, Conservative, doesn’t matter. Fact should be decided by experts in the field, and laws shouldn’t be changed just because a corporation or a charlatan finds them inconvenient. But Trump’s court apparently doesn’t think that way. Probably because they’re owned by charlatans.

2.3 Other Things

These were all just decisions from this Supreme Court term that threatened democracy. I could talk about stuff they did that’s just vile, like how they how they made existing in public while homeless a crime. Or I could also go back to their other terms to find other decisions against our democracy, like that time they said an Amendment everyone thought was self-executing…wasn’t, specifically because it would benefit Trump. And I could be here all day screaming about the Dobbs decision. But I’ll restrain myself. If things like the strength of OSHA to protect workers or the rights of females to their bodily autonomy were enough to make you stop voting for Trump, you probably wouldn’t need to be reading this essay. You’d have dumped him long ago. Besides, I think the three cases I presented are enough to make my point. Which…

3.0 What’s the Point?

The point that I want to make is that the decisions that the Trump Court have made have already started to kill our democracy. That these sorts of decisions have consequences, and if he’s reelected there will be more of them.

Further, this is just the damage his Supreme Court did. One small facet of his presidential career. At every level, he and people loyal to him are planning to overturn this election. This, again, is not speculation or hyperbole. They have already started making moves to that effect. Thankfully the election process is robust enough that they won’t be able to outright cheat. But that’s not their plan. Their plan is to create enough chaos and confusion that if Trump doesn’t pass the post first, no one does, and then it goes to the Supreme Court to decide. The Supreme Court we have just established is willing to throw away foundational tenets of our democracy for the sake of kissing Trump’s ass. Will the fundamental part of our social contract, that “the person who won the election should be president,” be something they also throw under the bus? You wanna take that bet? I’d rather not.

The other point I want to emphasize is that the damage the Supreme Court does is especially hard to fix. They’re the highest court in the land and they get the final say - there’s no one to appeal to if their decisions are fucking horrifying. There are other ways around it, but none of them are exactly things to get excited about. For instance, Congress could pass a law or Amendment - though with how ineffective they’ve been, that’s practically a joke.

It’s funny. Back in 2016, when Trump was running against Hillary, I was convinced he was incompetent enough that he wouldn’t do a lot of damage on his own - but those three open supreme court seats he’d get to pick would. Obviously, my prediction has panned out in worse ways than I could have imagined.

But I think I’ve said all I need to on this. The court has opened some scary, scary doors, and it’s America itself that’s on the line if you’re wrong.

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drumpfwatch · 8 months ago

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0. Introduction

It’s said that the mark of a truly good leader isn’t just the decisions they make, but the people they make them with. Which makes sense. A good leader knows they don’t know everything and will seek advice from people more learned than them on things they don’t know about. Further, a leader attracts people to them who like their message.

So let’s take a look at the people who surround Donald Trump, to determine what kind of leader he is. Let’s start with the kind of people who make up his fanbase.

1.0 The Kinds of People Who Like Trump

Who likes Trump? Who are the people who he most appeals to?

1.1 Weirdos

Let’s have some fun first. The first sort of people who like Trump are what I’m going to call the MAGAts. They’re people who got swept up in Trump’s cult of personality - and I do mean “cult.” I don’t have time to do a full BITE Model analysis of the MAGAts, so I’m not 100% sure, but the way they talk and act about him shows that they’re not thinking normally. These people talk about Trump as if he’s the second coming of Christ. These people would rather Vladimiere Putin run America than a Democrat because they are just that lost in the sauce.

These people love his tough guy bravado show. They will never not vote for him because at this point they’re dogmatically invested in him as their Dear Leader. The result is that…they act kinda weird.

It makes perfect sense to them, of course! It has to, or they wouldn’t do it. Some of them even make sense to me. Wearing a bandage across your ear in solidarity of the wound a person you cared about received? That’s sensible, if a little unusual. But then they start wearing diapers because Trump is supposedly shitting himself and I have no idea where the mental hoops are on that one. Frankly, I kinda don’t wanna know.

It’s to the point where when I was writing this section, I found it very easy to get confused between real and fake stories. There’s a story about supporters carrying around a pretend cup of J. D. Vance’s sperm, complete with unaltered photos, and I believed it because that’s honestly not that different from the diaper thing. Then when I decided to double check the story it seems that it’s probably untrue? The timing doesn’t match up exactly and it looks like there was only one cup. So if it was a Trump Supporter, it was just one absolute nutter getting a few people to join in on their weird little joke.

Honestly though, these guys are pretty harmless, so I don’t want to spend much time on them. There are crazies all over the place, and while I’d argue Trump is definitely very good at attracting them, they’re not exclusive to him. Besides, they’re a little creepy and very weird, but they’re not hurting anyone directly. Which is less than I can say for the other people on this list.

1.2 Billionaires

Trump is a wealthy man, and so are many of his friends. It would make sense that he does things to appeal to them. Hell, he cut all their taxes and defunded the government for them, why wouldn’t they?

Most of them are pretty quiet, letting their money do the talking. Trump is a bit of a toxic name after all. But he serves their interests and that’s what I want to focus on.

Trump proclaims he’s here to drain the swamp and is our last hope of fixing America as a political outsider, but he absolutely isn’t. Not if the problem with America is that the corporate fat cats are putting their fingers too much in our government. It shouldn’t be a shocker that the man whose finances make a nightmarish web of inscrutable horror, who refuses to divest himself from those business, and who keeps getting billions in direct donations from the wealthiest industries with the most to benefit from buying him off is probably in their pockets - partly because they’re his pockets.

All of that said, these guys are also…not the worst. Yes they’re funneling billions of dollars into the campaign of a madman, but that’s they’re right and I won’t stop them from supporting who they want - even if I think you shouldn’t be allowed to donate that much to any campaign. That money will be used to hurt people, and that’s terrible, but a lot of these guys are so divorced from reality that when they fire someone, they think the firee should just spend a year at the beach with all the money they have to come back to the job market when it’s better. I can’t hate ignorance as much as I hate malice. And speaking of malice.

1.3 Nazis and Klansmen!

So to understand the modern Nazi you have to understand that a good number of them have realized directly calling themselves Nazis is bad publicity. They want you to join them and they know the past 80 years has been spent making sure the immediate knee jerk reaction to “Nazi” is “fuck off.” So they’re not Nazis, they’re just “concerned citizens,” they’re not white supremecists, they’re “Christian nationalists,” they're not trying to enact the Final Solution, they’re protecting themselves from the Great Replacement. They don’t “hate black/jewish/queer/latino/whatever’s on the menu today people,” they just think white people should be “proud of their heritage” too.

They’ve also given their image a glow-up. Instead of being loud, swastika-covered skinheads, they’ll dress in tailored suits and speak politely, using philosophical language and college-educated rhetoric. With this change in their rhetoric and appearance, they talk to you, the normie - yes that is what they call you - about how “you know, those immigrants are really a problem.” They’re taking all the jobs and causing all the crime (a lie). They’ll slip in these little hints that “they” want to erase white culture, and that white people are being “replaced”. Oh, no no no, they don’t want to kill the migrants, they want to “remigrate” them back to their homes. And once you buy that, they start pulling you further and further down - or letting you do that to yourself. Remigration sounds good, but it’s also expensive and they might sneak back in. Surely there’s a cheaper solution. A more…final one.

This is why knowing their dog whistles is very important. Nazis think they’re being clever when they put SS in their username or replace the swastika with the black sun. There are any number of a thousand symbols they use to signal to each other that they’re all in on the “joke,” ranging from Old Norse Runes to the 🥛 emoji. And to a degree, they are. How crazy do I sound when I say “that guy’s a Nazi because he has 1488 in his username!”? Sure, it could be a reference to the 14 Words that are the core of nazism, followed by 8 to mark the 8th letter of the alphabet - HH, for Heil Hitler - but maybe it’s just their birthday! You don’t know for sure, and to call someone a Nazi without knowing for sure, that makes you the bad guy.

All of this is to say that Nazis have made themselves very difficult to call out by weaponizing plausible deniability. But make no mistake, just because the lunatics aren’t shouting “Sieg Hiel!” at the top of their lungs, doesn’t mean they don’t want to get all of the Black, Jewish, Latinx and anyone else they personally don’t consider white out of America by any means necessary. They can call themselves whatever they want, just because they built a castle out of shit and not a bunker, doesn’t mean it isn’t made of shit. You can call it whatever you want too. I’m going to call it what it is - a steaming pile of shit.

So when I call Richard Spencer a Nazi, I’m not just saying that because I don’t like his very punchable face. I’m saying it because Richard Spencer has been at the forefront of the Great Replacement - a conspiracy theory about how brown people want to fuck us whities out of existence. When Richard Spencer says “Hail Trump! Hail our people!” while raising his hand in what is not exactly, but is suspiciously similar to a Nazi salute, I shouldn’t have to write entire paragraphs on how this is a Nazi doing a Nazi thing to support his favorite candidate, who he views as sympathetic to his Nazi cause.

I shouldn’t have to explain that when people like Sebastian Gorka see Trump as a great inroad for their political plans, we should be very concerned. As soon as I tell you that he is a supporter of the Magyar Garda, an antisemitic military organization so awful the EU banned it for being fascist, and a member of the Order of Vietz, which traces its heritage back to Nazi-occupied Hungary and was instrumental in shipping Jews off to the camps, I shouldn’t have to explain how whatever sort of policy plans Gorka has are probably not in the interests of anyone who cares about Jews. Sure, he denies it when directly asked, why wouldn’t he, he knows it’s toxic. But then he signs his doctoral thesis with L. v., the initials commemorating himself as a member. Deeds, not words, as they say. He was so toxic even Trump kicked him out after a few months.

I shouldn’t have to explain that when David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the KKK, says Trump is the first president he’s voting for because he’s the first one who he believes will carry out his will, that this is a bad thing. That whatever the rest of his plans, whatever color his soul, these people believe and are excited about him.

And I shouldn’t have to talk about Charlottesville. But I do, because people are good and want to give others the benefit of the doubt. A kindness the Nazis are more than eager to abuse.

I want to touch on it just a little bit deeper, because I think the circumstances around it are very illuminating. First of all, there’s no room for equivocation here. There were Nazis at this event, of all stripes. That’s what they meant by “unite the right”. Even if you argue that the average person wouldn’t recognize the black sun or the odal rune or 1488 or whatever else as Nazi symbols where they were presented on the shield wall, behind that, in the actual protest, there were swastikas and burning crosses galore. It would be impossible not to notice, and not to notice the rhetoric being spouted. If you were on that side, and you didn’t leave in disgust, your morals need some serious reevaluation. If you want an in depth description of just how bad it was, I suggest watching this video.

These assholes then killed someone. And in the wake of this, what did the leader of the free world say? To the grieving family, to the worried nation, to the horrified targets of past Nazi violence, how did he respond? When the worst sort of scum crawled out from under the floorboards and killed in his name, our president said that “there are very fine people on both sides.” And no, his follow up of “not those people” doesn't cut it.

I said anyone who stayed needs to reevaluate their morals, and I mean it. If you are standing on the same side as a swastika flag I don’t care what you believe, you’re choosing to stand with Nazis. Even if these people somehow didn’t look at the list of speakers and recognize them all as a cavalcade of varying flavors of Nazis, a “fine person” would have left as soon as they saw the first swastika - and there were a lot of swastikas.

Which isn’t to say they’re bad people. Maybe they were pressured into staying either by friends or inertia. But even those people were willing to put, say, the discomfort of leaving a party early over the wellbeing of others across the nation. Further, just because they’re Nazis doesn’t mean every one of them beats children and tortures cats. Hitler was very kind to his dogs. So I’m sure that yes, if you take a snapshot of the life of your average Nazi, they’re just a normal person for the most part. But so was Ted Bundy, if you forget the “making lamps out of women’s skin” thing. And that’s the rub, isn’t it? Just because they’re “fine people” some of the time, doesn’t make them fine people. The Nazis love it when the media runs stories about how “normal” they are because it makes it easier to forget they’re people with a desire to watch other people suffer and die. They need to be stopped first, then we can start talking about empathizing with them.

And again, I shouldn’t have to explain this. I should not have to explain that if you stand with Nazis, you are not a fine person, and that our President should be fucking ashamed of himself for even thinking that was a reasonable thing to say. That everyone who believed it should also be ashamed. But here we are. This is why White Supremacists love Trump.

It would be one thing to say that he’s just letting them think he’s on their side, and purely using them as an untapped voter block. But that isn’t all he’s doing. He is making active decisions to cover up their crimes. He’s doing everything he can to hide the surge in Hate crimes since he took office.

All of that said, can we at least agree that even if Donald Trump is not a fascist, he is at least fascist adjacent? That he’s using fascist principles to his advantage? Perhaps as a useful idiot? And can we please all agree that that is a problem? And while we’re at it, can we also agree that

1.4 Treasonous Bastards

are also bad? Look, I know America Max news or whatever have been making a nothing burger out of treason, but that’s what it was. It was an actual attack on our capitol, where the flag of traitors flew above the building, and people died. The only reason it didn’t turn into a massacre is that the Capitol police were smart and kind and the attackers were stupid and entempered.

I’ve already spoken about the January 6th riot, so I won’t spend too much time on the events themselves. I will say that since then, the evidence of Trump’s responsibility and complicity has skyrocketed.

He claims they were there because of concerns about the election, but who was the one telling lie after lie after lie about the election? Who was the one who arranged the January 6th protest, and who spent the entire time waxing on about the dangers of letting people get away with stealing the election.

Even if you don’t believe he’s responsible because you shut your brain off whenever it comes to Trump, there is no denying two things.

The first is that, at the very least, he sat back and watched as this went on. When he was told his mob was going after Pence, and that Pence had to be taken to a safe place, his response was “so what?”. When McCarthy called him and told him his people were rioting, he said it was Antifa. When McCarthy proved that it wasn’t, he said “well maybe they are more upset about it than you are” and hung up. He did nothing. And he could have done any number of things! The riot was stopped because the National Guard was brought in (by Mike Pence, by the way, not him) and was stopped relatively peacefully. Trump could have done that, but he didn’t, because he does not care about our country or our constitution, he's a sore loser, a baby and is terrified of facing consequences for his actions. To deny this is to deny the reality of the situation. Mentally twist yourself into whatever position you need to argue he’s not responsible, blame Nancy Pelosi for not “properly defending the capitol” in conspiratorial undertones that imply it was an inside job (even though Pelosi asked for more defense beforehand and was in fact not responsible for the number of Capitol police there that day or capable of calling in the national guard), the absolute and undeniable fact is Trump knew what was going on, and did jack and shit for over 3 hours. Or, more accurately, until he knew his plan had failed and there was no reason to let his “day of love” continue. And what did he do? He put a little video up telling them all they were very special people and should leave in peace. And before you say “why didn’t someone else do anything?” that’s because he’s the COMMANDER IN FUCKING CHIEF! When the Capitol is attacked it’s his fucking job to stop it! Only he and two other people have the authority to do that and Pence was technically overstepping when he finally made the call. If Trump had called the guard in to stop the insurrection when it had first gotten out of hand, I guarantee you I would have praised him for it and re-evaluated some of my thoughts on this. But he didn’t. He let this happen, and the only reason for that is because it would benefit him.

The second is that this is the sort of following he’s cultivated. Disavow them all you want, the people most enamored with Trump are these crazies. When else has this happened? What other President has had a following that stormed the Capitol because they thought the election was stolen from them? Even Al Gore didn’t have that, and he is arguably the most justified in history to the claim. This is not a kind of crazy that happens by accident, you need to cultivate it. He’s already making the same sort of whining noises for the 2024 election that he did in 2020. He stoked the fires of insurrection, is stoking them again, and my worst fear is that they will not die out with him.

My expectation for this election is that Kamala is going to win both the popular and electoral votes, but that Trump will use every single opportunity he can to complicate matters and ruin everything. Then, if that fails, he’s going to try for another physical insurrection attempt. What happens from there, I can’t say. Enough of the generals hate him that I think any actual coup attempt will be repelled, but who knows how the damaged nation will react to this and what happens from there.

The fact is, these are all reasonable assumptions based on previous events. When I say Trump is a threat to democracy, I’m not parroting liberal talking points, these are hard facts and reasonable inferences to make from them. The Capitol riot is a thing that objectively happened and was terrible for our democracy. Anyone trying to argue otherwise is wrong, and anyone pretending Trump wasn’t responsible on some level is at best, a fool.

2.0 The Kinds of People Trump Hangs Out With

But those are just his fan base. While Trump can certainly be blamed for signaling to them and using them, it would be understandable if he were just a disgusting person who used those sorts of monsters to his end. So, what sort of people does Trump keep in his inner circle? Who does he like to hang out with? Especially recently?

2.1 Laura Loomer

Laura Loomer has been a constant shadow for Trump for some time. He’s literally seen with her more often than his wife. In fact, is anyone else surprised by how much his wife doesn’t want to be involved with her husband’s political career? I’m sorry, I’m getting off track. We’re talking about Laura Loomer and how she shouts that "the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center." She called for a White Ethnostate, because she’s a Nazi, and is so appallingly racist that even Marjorie Taylor Green is calling her racist, that should probably concern you. Worse, she seems to have his ear pretty good, too, with multiple insider reports saying the reason Trump keeps saying conspiratorial nonsense is her.

Because, see, she isn’t just racist. She’s also completely nucking futs. She believes 9/11 was an inside job, that The Deepstate is using Magic Science Waves to create storms to stop people from voting for Trump, that some lunatic with a bomb was a member of Anti-Fa when he absolutely wasn’t, all while calling for the death of democrats, because at this point why not. She is a vile piece of filth, and she is currently the vizier in his ear.

2.2 Elon Musk

One of Trump’s favorite people to talk to and talk about is Elon Musk. The guy even came to a Trump rally in a black “Dark MAGA” hat and jumped around like an idiot to celebrate for him.

Look, I apologize to all the Muskiites out there, but Elon is an idiot. I’m not saying that because I don’t like him, I don’t like Jeff Bezos either but I wouldn’t call him stupid, mostly because he’s not. Musk, however, very much is. He is not some all-powerful ubermensch genius, he’s the modern Thomas Edison, and I mean that in the bad way. Only where Edison at least understood the basics of the technology he would minutely improve and then patent, Musk apparently doesn’t even know the Δv equation while trying to make a rocket. For proof of that look no further than what happened with Twitter when he bought it.

I could talk about how every decision he’s made has hurt it, from banning the block function to renaming it. But I think I’ll stick with my favorite example - the advertisement lawsuit. See, Musk sees himself as a free speech absolutist, believing that anyone should be able to say anything. Which is a fine position to hold, I suppose. But free speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences. If you use your public voice to espouse the death of GRSM/LGBT folk, then people also have the right to call you a bigot for that and tell everyone that’s what you believe, and other people have the freedom to choose to not platform you again. And if you put an ad for Disney next to a Nazi talking about how we should just gas the (ethnic slur for Jews) already, then Disney is well within its right to believe that’s detrimental to their brand and that the cost of their brand being associated with Nazis isn’t worth the benefit of the advertising on that platform. That’s not cancel culture, Elon, that’s people using free speech. The fact that people use grading organizations to help them determine that instead of each individually spending millions on doing the market research themselves doesn’t mean they’re colluding against you, either. That’s just called good business practice.

And that right there is the problem. It would be one thing if Musk were an actual absolutist who legitimately believed in the freedom to say whatever you want without consequence, but he doesn’t. See, when he discovered the Twitter account that posted status updates of his private plane’s location and flight plans, Elon immediately banned it. In a world of absolute free speech this should be allowed. It’s just words, after all, right? It's not even secret information - it’s all in the public record, freely available to anyone who knows how to find it - this guy was just using Twitter as a platform to aggregate and share it. Musk’s argument that it’s a potential threat to his safety because the crazies will always know where he is shouldn’t matter - it’s still speech and still the users right to say it. That’s what “absolute free speech” means. And while he did reinstate the accounts of journalists he banned for calling him out on it, he never reinstated the account itself.

This wouldn’t be the only instance of Musk censoring things. For a man who believes in the “free marketplace of ideas,” he has a really bad habit of forcing his views down people’s throats and silencing those of his detractors and opponents. Twitter’s algorithm is unkind to leftist views, and that is by design. And that’s where we really get into why Musk isn’t just an idiot, but a fascist sympathizer.

Now, I know I always say that the color of Donald Trump’s soul is up to him, but the thing is I do have an opinion on it. I just don’t think it’s productive to argue what truly is going on inside his head when his actual motives are secondary to the real damage he can, has and will cause. Musk, on the other hand, I legitimately have no god damned idea what he actually believes. But when I see him retweeting Great Replacement Nazi Propaganda, I’m sort of concerned he’s at least not bright enough to see through the lie. When he allows right wing scum bags like Alex Jones back on his platform, but then refuses to reinstate the accounts of equally pernicious leftist voices, I see at least hypocrisy if not self-delusion. And when he files a lawsuit against companies for not putting ads on his website because the website doesn’t meet the standards they require, I see at the best a petty loser who can’t admit to a mistake and at the worst one who is vindictive that his hateful message can’t be spread.

Again, I don’t know where along these spectrums the truth lies, but I don’t really care. What matters is none of these things reflect well on Musk. Musk is a self-interested loser. He pretends to be this genius, but he falls for dumb conspiracy theories and has tantrums whenever he’s not surrounded by yes men. The only reason Tesla and SpaceX are as successful as they are - and they’re not nearly as proficient as you think, the Tesla Cyber Truck has some hilarious flaw like having the accelerator get stuck or exploding when the battery gets wet - is because there are people at those companies whose job it is to keep Musk in check. As soon as Musk had to fend for himself he started trying to technobabble his way into sounding smart while breaking everything. Because as it turns out, when your motto is “move fast and break things” and you don’t have a dedicated team to clean up after your messes, you get left with a MESS. He’s not a genius, he’s a whiny idiot who used his family’s wealth to pay smart people to do smart things and then plastered his name all over their work.

And what matters for our purposes here is that Trump either buys the hype, or likes the man in spite of it. This is the man who has dropped the value of Twitter by over 70% because he breaks Chesterton Fence after Chesterton Fence with no respect for any of it. He’s a racist, a transphobe, and an asshole. He’s the worst sort of example of what Tech Bros are, which is why he’s their king. And as much as I love taking shots at him specifically, this is about Trump. And Musk is willing to give Trump a platform, a megaphone, and a shitload of cash to run his campaign, and Trump happily accepts it all. What does that say about him?

3.0 The Kinds of People Trump Appoints

Okay so those are just his friends. Maybe he keeps them around because they’re really nice people and he believes in free speech more than the lives of other people. That’s unacceptable, in my opinion, but maybe you’re okay with that as long as the people are hyper competent (spoiler alert: they’re not). So let’s talk about the kind of people he gives power to. We can all agree that if you give a Nazi a position of power, even if they’re really good at their job, you’re a bad person, right?

Now we don’t have time to go over every single one of his picks for every position. And to his credit, Trump occasionally made some good postings. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. So let’s pick some from around and see what we get out of them, shall we? Let’s start with the obvious - the man he chose to be his first Vice President, Michael Pence.

3.1 Mike Pence

What better place to start than the man Trump trusted to take his place should something happen to him, Michael Pence. The dude is old, and has been in politics for a long time. He actually used to be a Democrat, but then the Southern Strategy happened and he flipped to Republican in the early 80s, and that’s when he really began his career.

His career is marked by mediocrity and conservative actions. As Governor of Indiana, laws he passed include, but are not limited to one that required all terminated fetuses to be given funerals, tax cuts exclusively to corporations, laws that prevented local businesses from offering better wages then the federal ones, passed various laws to help kill renewable energy initiatives in his state, and one that allowed people to legally discriminate against LGBT people. You know, the usual sort of things conservatives do.

He wasn’t completely terrible though. How about all the additional funding he gave to education, especially pre-schools? Although he seems to really hate public education, taking funding intended for them and filtering it to private and charter schools (more on why that’s a problem later). Oh, also, he’s a creationist, which might explain why he’s so interested in killing science curriculum.

Wait, not great. Let’s try again.

How about the fact that he took the state’s reserve from $2 billion to a much higher number? Except he did that by stripping funding from college, social services and corrections. So much for the party of law and order.

Is the picture becoming clear? Pence is a staunchly religious conservative who worked hard to protect businesses from the working class and apply his personal Christian morals to his state’s laws. Sometimes he succeeded, sometimes he failed, but he was always mediocre. More importantly, his personality and platform were well known.

Enter Trump.

See, in the 2016 campaign, Trump had a problem. A lot of the religious saw this philandering, multi-divorced businessman as unchristian. The best choice for a vice president would be a man who could alleviate their fears that their religion wouldn’t be shoved into the government. He was advised that Mike Pence was the perfect choice. So he chose him.

In office, Pence did a lot of grandstanding and speaking to delegates, broke a lot of ties in the Senate and once Trump got around to actually acknowledging the Corona Virus, he put Pence in charge of that. Something Pence did…not terrible with, I guess. He lied about it in an attempt to keep people from panicking, and exempted himself from mask mandates because he needed to look people in the eye.

You know. The eyes that the masks cover? Apparently?

But he at least did what he could to get the vaccine rollout as quickly as possible.

So yeah. Mediocre. At best.

And then 2021 happened. Specifically, January 6th happened. Pence’s decision to not defy the rule of law and approve the actual winner of the election didn’t go over well in Trumpland. The chant “hang Mike Pence” being shouted at him by a crowd of lunatics was apparently enough to give Pence a sick stomach about ever working with Trump again. He has repeatedly called Trump out for The Big Lie and has done a lot of passive-aggressive “endorsement of candidates that Trump endorsed against” and “turning the president’s ’too honest’ insult into merch” type stuff.

Nowadays, he works for the Heritage Foundation and as a podcaster, citing humanoid ghoul Rush Limbaugh as an inspiration.

So Mike Pence is a mediocre politician with a particularly well known track record of being pro-business, pro-Christian, anti-LGBT, anti-abortion, and anti-worker. He also turns out to have a soul. He left the Trump collective after they threatened his life just because he didn’t want to end democracy.

Let’s look at, oh, one of his cabinet members.

3.2 Betsy DeVos

Let’s talk about Betsy DeVos, because I have a particular beef with her. Betsy DeVos is the heiress to the Amway fortune, and her brother is the man who started everyone’s favorite group of war criminals, Blackwater. She comes from money, and a lot of her early political activism involved making sure money could stay in politics. She then focused on running and otherwise supporting school choice programs and working with private schools.

This is to say Betsy DeVos had always been interested in education, so she was not an unexpected choice for Secretary of Education. She was, however, a controversial one. Hers was the first cabinet position to ever be decided by VP tie-breaking vote, and the reason for that is that there are two ways to look at Betsy DeVos. From one angle, she is a heroine come to bring parents of all stripes the ability to more dynamically choose the education their children get. From the other angle, however, she is a vampire come to suck the blood out of public schools and leave all those who must rely on them with scraps at best, while forcing everyone else to learn her particular religion.

See, Betsy DeVos doesn’t actually like public education all that much. She prefers private schools instead, and a lot of her time in office was spent steering public funding towards private schools with things like voucher programs and then deregulating those voucher programs. She also began deregulating student loan programs, because let’s not forget, her wealthy friends gotta make their money too.

Now, I’ve been fortunate enough to be adopted into a family that was able to afford private schooling for me my entire student career. I’m grateful for that, and my parents always strove to make sure we didn’t just go to private schools, but good private schools. Mom and dad, if you’re reading this, thank you.

And that’s just it - I was fortunate enough. My family had the knowledge and time to research good schools, and the money to send us to them. Not everyone has that fortune. Wouldn’t it be nice, say DeVos and people like her, if everyone could have that fortune? And it does sound nice! Everyone can have the chance to have a wealthy, private school education.

Except there are a few assumptions there that are worth unpacking. The first is that private schools are inherently better than public ones. Let’s look at curriculum standards to see what I mean. In some cases, not having to follow a restrictive curriculum is great! I learned some really cool stuff about European History in highschool that I wouldn’t have gotten to learn if I had instead gone to a public school. Things about the first World War and the death of the age of kings and the rise of the Soviet Union that were very relevant to the state of our modern world. Things that I don’t think I’d have learned as thoroughly in a public school. But to learn those things, there were others I didn’t learn about. Further, having a mandated curriculum that everyone has to learn means that other people can more or less assume you know a thing and don’t have to teach you about it, only remind you. It’s an effective way to make sure everyone starts at the same foot.

Neither type of education is better, inherently. They’re both just tools with different efficacies in different situations. Or at least that’s how it is in a perfect world.

See, another downside of not having a mandated curriculum? What you teach doesn’t have to be things that are, say, alternately useful or relevant to a child who is already sure of their future in a particular field. This means that, especially if they’re heavily unregulated and unmonitored, they don’t have to teach things that are true. Sure, the kid is gonna suffer for it when they go to College and find that they’re the only person who thinks Christopher Columbus discovered The District of Columbia 70 years ago, but that’s their problem. Right? They’ll learn the truth eventually, right?

Now, I’m not saying Betsy DeVos wants to teach lies to our children. I don’t think she’s that malicious. I do think, however, that her strategy of deregulating private schools, funneling public funding to them, and expecting the public schools to find other sources of funding will, amongst other things, allow people to do just that. We live in an age where parents are taking their kids out of school because they’re being taught the Earth is round. Imagine if a bunch of flat-earthers got together to make a private school where their science class only taught flat Earth with the sort of poisonous dogma of a preacher. Imagine there were no regulations about that. Imagine that because of DeVos’ programs, some of the kids who would be going to public school are instead sent to Flat Earth Elementary. Their parents could take them out of the school if they found out, but because all the funding that was supposed to go to public schools went to the voucher programs, the local public school district is absolutely failing. Not enough staff for too many students, no money for updated books or equipment, you know, all the fun stuff that comes along with defunding education. The parents are stuck between their children being taught wrong, or being taught barely anything at all. And that’s if they found out. What if the kids just never mentioned that’s what they learned, until it was too late? What if this was because their teacher told them that their parents were also lied to and in on the conspiracy, and they should never be trusted? This damage to the child’s mind isn’t necessarily irreversible, but it can be very difficult to undo - and how Orwellian is the word “re-education”? This is the world DeVos would create.

Further, and more importantly, her focus on vouchers and how she says things about how she sees herself as “advanc[ing] God’s Kingdom” on Earth, she wants children to go to Christian schools. Which is starting to skirt the separation of church and state. See, in this country, you have a First Amendment right to believe whatever religion you want and to not have other people try and force theirs on you in the public sphere. I believe this to be a very good thing. But see, she really wants every child, be they Christian or Jew or Muslim or Hindu or Sikh or Uniformitarian or Wiccan or whatever else to receive a Christian education, in the hopes it will convert them.

I get the feeling that if they could just teach their religions in public school, people like DeVos wouldn’t be interested in “school choice” at all.

Let me be clear here. If an informed Hindu parent wants to send their child to a Christian school because they feel that school has a better curriculum in general, and they’re okay with their kid learning about Christ, that’s their right and I don’t necessarily have a problem with it. I do, however, have a problem with public money being spent to do that, and I have a huge problem with that parent being forced into the situation against their will. I would feel the same about it if the religions were reversed - Christians shouldn’t be forced to learn Hinduism on public money. I don’t care what religion is doing it, none of them get to impose themselves on other people’s children who don’t want it, especially on the public dollar.

Real quick, I’m aware there are a large subset of people who believe that America isn’t just a nation of majority Christian people, but a Christian Nation, founded on the Laws of the Bible for Christian folk. This is wrong. I don’t have time to give a full education on this, but it should at least be understood that the Founding Fathers were largely Deists, not Christians, and that when they wrote “Congress shall make no law resting the establishment of religion, nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof (Amendment 1),” what they meant was to build a wall of separation between Church and State. Their words, not mine. Like it or not, believe whatever morally you want about it, that’s a fact, and part of the fact means that here in America we don’t get to use public money to promote religion. Again, I think this is a good thing. The spiritual beliefs of a soul are its business, and no one else’s.

Betsy DeVos thinks otherwise, and that’s why I have such a beef with her. She wants to weaken public schools to bolster her envisioned Kingdom on Earth, bringing more souls to Jesus regardless of how much that violates their right to believe otherwise. And she is okay stripping regulations that protect kids from lies and deceptive oversimplifications in order to do it.

All of this said, she isn’t an irredeemably evil human being. When Trump committed the Jan 6th Insurrection, DeVos actually resigned in protest, which is something I can at least respect her enough to mention. Her motivation comes from a place of wanting to better the world, it’s just what she believes about how that should be done is wrong and, in my opinion, harmful.

So, Betsy DeVos is a wealthy heiress with a conservative agenda to privatize schools, who never had experience working with public schools directly, and who used her time in office to weaken the Department of Education. She does, however, have principles and a soul. What next?

3.3 Jared Kushner

Jared Kushner is, on the face of it, a perfect example of nepotism. He is the husband of Trump’s daughter, who was given the position of the Office of American Innovation, a title that didn’t exist before or since, and Senior Advisor to the President. I’ll leave the depth of those charges for you to decide, but let’s start with what he did before the job.

Jared seems to be a quiet man. Those close to him describe him as intensely quiet, a good listener and “uncluttered in his mind, which allows him to filter some things out.” He doesn’t talk much, so we don’t have his words to go on. This makes him a bit of an enigma. But even an enigma can be unraveled. So let’s look at what the man has done.

Mostly real-estate stuff. He seemed to do pretty well at it too, making large profit margins on sales. He even dabbled in news for a bit, buying The New York Observer and turning it into a tabloid that he occasionally used to smear his rivals. While he certainly did make a profit, he lost a lot of good will with previous readers for this change.

Important to note is that Jared was a lifelong democrat, up until Daddy Donny started getting into politics. He was also very apolitical, with seemingly no interest in running for any office and was content with running his real-estate empire. But when he decided to help, he was considered Trump’s closest confidant, and so began their partnership.

Trump then started giving him jobs. The first job he gave him was running the campaign. Which, again, Kushner seemed to do very efficiently. He ran Trump all the way to the White House while only spending 59% of what Clinton did. Of course, there are complexities there worth examining, but I think it’s safe to say he was doing at least something right.

Then, Trump got into office. He was set in charge of Trump’s transition, and was also given a Top Secret Security Clearance so he could hear the daily security briefings. Then, the jobs started to pile up.

See, Mr. Kushner was put in charge of the Office for American Innovation. This office was created to “make recommendations to the President on policies and plans that improve Government operations and services, improve the quality of life for Americans now and in the future, and spur job creation”, mostly focusing on lessons learned from the private sector. What this meant was that Jared was put in charge of things from job creation to fixing the veteran’s office to solving the opioid crisis to upgrading IT infrastructure to making peace in the Middle East. He was even asked to “fix the Federal Government,” whatever that means. This would be a tough ask for the most capable statesmen, and Jared…isn’t.

He even got put in charge of a “shadow task force” to help fight the Corona Virus, secondary to Pence’s official one. He would then go on to use this to make sure the medical supplies the state was buying were coming from Trump’s friends, rather than experienced vendors.

Yeah, ol’ Jared had a few conflicts of interest. He never fully divested himself from his interest in Kushner Companies, or his wife’s brand, so he eagerly used that to enrich himself, like when he and his wife were able to get their chinese trademark fast-tracked. Nothing too serious, but enough that I think it’s worth mentioning because it is still reprehensible.

I could summarize more of what he did, but it mostly falls like that. For instance, he used WhatsApp for what was supposed to be work-related communication, which is, y’know, bad, but it doesn’t seem like he was spouting state secrets over it, so stupid, not evil. That seems to have been most of his role. Quietly sitting there, trying to solve the entire government’s worth of problems, and occasionally using his position to get some extra money. Then January 6th happened.

After the January 6th riots, Jared seems…uneager to continue in politics. He spoke for 6 hours to the committee, wrote a memoir, and seems interested in at least trying for that Middle East Peace thing he was supposed to do - though in his unique, business-man way. But he’s keeping his distance from Trump’s 2020 and 2024 campaigns.

In short, Jared Kushner was a reasonably competent businessman who occasionally makes mistakes and does evil business things, but doesn’t seem to want to burn the world. He also, notably, had no experience in politics at all until Trump dumped the entire government’s worth of problems on him. While not necessarily the moderating influence leftists hoped he would be, he was stable enough that he himself never caused much damage. He probably thought step-daddy was going to give him a nice cushy do-nothing job, and instead got overwhelmed with way too much work and just wanted to be left ALONE, thank you.

3.4 Steve Mnuchin

Trump sold himself on a platform of fighting for the little guy against big banks, so it’s weird that he would choose former Goldman-Sachs bank CIO Steve Mnuchin to be his Secretary of the Treasury. Not an unusual lie for a politician, but the kind of thing that should’ve made everyone smell bullshit from the get-go.

His political experience before his appointment to the Treasury was…nothing. Exclusively donating to pro-business candidates. He was more interested in running his hedge funds and what not. So Trump put him in charge of the entire nation’s economy.

This is a bad idea. The private and public sectors are two very different things, especially when it comes to profit. More on that with our next pick, but Mnuchin was all about cutting taxes to the wealthy, then acting surprised when that didn’t magically give the government more money somehow. He was also a bit of a jerk? He used government airplanes for his personal business, yelled at teenagers and college kids, and just, in general, was a bit of a pill.

His name also appeared in the Paradise Papers, as one of the many people who protected their money in offshore accounts. I just want to point out that this was the man Trump thought capable of running the country’s treasury. A scumbag.

When January 6th happened, Mnuchin was one of the many people considering use of the 25th Amendment to evict Trump from the White House for what he did.

So, Mnuchin is a terrible person who didn’t care about politics, just his business, ruined the economy and padded his wallet. In the end, even he left Trump and was one of the voices hoping to get rid of him. So he has a soul.

Also, he financed the LEGO Movies, so that’s pretty cool, I guess.

3.5 Louis DeJoy

Louis DeJay ran a company called New Breed Logistics (now XPO Logistics) where he made his staff work in 100 Fahrenheit warehouses with no air conditioning and overworked. You know, the kind of awful conditions that cause miscarriages. He also didn’t pay them. So yeah, not a nice dude.

Then 2020 happened, and, see, Trump had a seat to fill on the USPS Board of Governors. Well, actually, he had 5, but the law says that only 5 members can be from any one party, so he can’t directly appoint any more Republicans himself. Like hell he was going to appoint a democrat, the Republicans had spent the entire Obama administration ignoring Obama’s picks, he wasn’t about to hire someone that might interfere with his election interference plans! But the Postmaster General, he’s someone who Trump can’t appoint - but the governors can. And they’re loyal to him, so all he has to do is give them a name. But who to fill it with? Then he remembered Louis DeJoy, that guy who gave $700,000 to his campaign. He worked with shipping, he’d be perfect!

Of course some people had some reservations. When Trump was given two separate lists of competent people who were ready for the job, DeJoy wasn’t on any of them. This is partly because as the owner of New Breed Logistics, he was considered potentially conflicted. A fact that DeJoy immediately went on to confirm by investing in competing companies, like Amazon and subcontracting to his own business.

And of course, all of this ignores that working in the private sector is not the same as the public sector. The United States Postal Service is not meant to make a profit, it is meant to be a public service that we contribute our taxes to to make sure we all get mail. Because, as it turns out, it will never be profitable to ship heavy packages to the backend of nowhere, but a functional and good society still requires that. Grandma shouldn’t have to die because her medicine won’t be delivered to her house because “sorry, it’s just not in the budget to give you your mail everyday.” If the post office can be profitable, that’s great, it’s always good to get more public funding, but that isn’t the point and it certainly shouldn’t be treated like it is.

This seems to be a particular poison that affects the Republican mind. That public services should be profitable businesses and not, you know, public services. The idea that a profit motive should be anywhere near a public service or human welfare is absolutely abhorrent. The whole point of public services is that they’re provided for your benefit and while they themselves might not be profitable, they allow for other things to be. Jeff Bezos wouldn’t have half the money he did if the government didn’t pay for the roads his trucks deliver his products on, but building and maintaining roads is an expense that can’t be directly measured against that profit. You can’t expect the process of building the road itself to be profitable. And yet, apparently, these people want it to be.

Making it even weirder is how Republicans keep passing laws that make it harder to do that? The Post Office used to be able to make a good amount of money by providing basic banking services that could easily be used by poor folk, but Nixon canceled that. Then, the post office had a ridiculous amount of other demands put on it that no other public service has, such as paying for employee’s pensions years in advance (thanks Dubya) that seriously hurt their bottom line. I have no idea why they hate the postal service so much. Probably because it costs tax dollars and tax dollars are, to them, inherently evil or something.

But that’s a bit off topic. I’m talking about DeJoy here, and what matters is he also ascribes to this stupid notion. So he immediately started making cuts to try and get the post offices profitable again. Or that’s the presumed explanation because he never explained anything, he just started canceling overtime, banning late trips to deliver mail, and destroying over 600 high speed sorting machines.

Surprising no one, this slowed down the mail considerably. Not only this, he passed a bunch of rules that just made ballots harder to move. They couldn’t be upgraded automatically to priority if they were sent some other way like they were before, and post officers were no longer considered valid witnesses for signing a mail-in ballot. This, during the COVID pandemic, when mail-in voting was super important especially for people with compromised immunity. But democrats were more likely to mail-in their votes, because they were less likely to believe the bullshit conspiracy theories about COVID being fake and masks not working, so fuck ‘em.

Sound presumptuous? Maybe, but then why did he mainly take those sorting machines out of battleground states with mail-in voting laws that invalidated ballots that arrived after Election Day?

These were expensive to build but easy to maintain machines that could sort 30,000 pieces an hour. There was no other group who would buy them because they were so specialized, so they couldn’t be sold for profit (not that DeJoy even tried for that). The only thing they saved on by throwing them away was maintenance costs. OH, and the man hours it would cost to replace those machines would be even more costly than the maintenance anyway!

This whole thing was so disgraceful that DeJoy got shamed into holding off until after the election, and eventually even repealed everything he did. But by that time, the damage was done - 90% of the machines marked for trash were already removed and dismantled. The Post Office is still trying to recover from this bullcrap.

You wanna know the cherry on top of the shit cake? Because he slowed down all mail, including priority mail, there were animals who were transported by mail who died in transit because they spent days wasting in a molten warehouse with no food, no water, and no air. Admittedly this was mostly lizards and spiders and chicks, but those are still living things that are now dead because DeJoy had to mess with the post office. They died so DeJoy could make a buck. So DeJoy could feed his own narrative. So DeJoy could help his friend keep in power.

DeJoy remains in his office today, and it seems he’s done a turnabout from being a literal walking conflict of interest. For instance, he helped pass legislation that got rid of the ridiculous retirement requirement and seems to respect his office as an actual position of power instead of just a nice way to make money. He’s doing things to account for the decreased load on mailers but increase in parcel shipments in the new age of the Internet. He’s still an idiot who thinks that the post office should be a profitable business, but he’s making somewhat intelligent decisions about how to do that. That, or he’s just a suck up who does whatever his boss tells him. Hard to say.

He hasn’t talked much about Trump since Trump left office. He did testify to the Oversight Committee, but he’s pretty blaise about him, and has even talked about how being associated with “Trump this” and “Trump that” has been really annoying and he doesn’t want that to shape his time in office. Which is admirable, I guess. It’s hard to say much about him because he’s laying low.

4.0 Self Selecting for Insanity

I think that’s a good enough sample. Now, I acted like I sort of chose them at random, but I didn’t. You probably knew that, but you may not have guessed the methodology. I was actually trying to go for the middle ground. If I really wanted to make Trump look awful, I could’ve talked about, say, Bill Bar, a snake with no morals, or actual literal Nazi Sebastian Gorka, or Steve Bannon, who I’d love to personally congratulate for being the first corporal nightmare to get an oval office position. But I wanted to prove a few points, which were best made with the more moderate folks.

The first is competence. Few, if any, of the people Trump appointed had experience in their assigned field. Those that did often had tangential experience in the private sector. Which is only partially helpful.

The next, more important thing is nepotism. Even for those people who are good for the position, their skills are secondary. Sometimes, that’s politics. The choice to pick Pence to appeal to the religious vote despite his mediocre track record is an acceptable decision, the kind that I can get behind even if I don’t necessarily agree with it. But an inexcusable amount of the power he gave, he gave to his friends and family, choosing not competent actors but loyal ones. And not the good kind of loyal, where you care enough about someone to challenge them, the sycophantic kind of loyal, where you kiss an ass until it is no longer valuable to kiss. Or worse, the kind of dogmatically blind loyalty, the kind that could never be convinced he ever did anything wrong, even if he did shoot someone.

And that’s the next point. Everyone of these people has distanced themselves from Trump, or outright disavowed him. People are fleeing Trump, be they lifelong conservatives or family members, because he is just that toxic. Whether he disgusts people away or betrays them, he continuously alienates those he works with and relies on. And regardless of how you personally feel about that and about him, it means that a larger percentage of the people willing to work with him are going to be those dogmatic lunatics and sycophants.

As we’ll see, this is not a good thing.

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drumpfwatch · 9 months ago

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How To Get Me To (Maybe) Vote For Trump in 8 Easy Steps

Recently, a Trump supporter asked me "what would it take to get you off Trump's back?" That’s always a good question, you know? You should always be willing to be convinced that you’re wrong. So in the interest of academic integrity, here is a list of things Trump would have to do to get me to consider voting for him and to admit that he’s not a fascist monster. And to be sure, I would be absolutely delighted to be wrong. I don’t like the idea that, somehow, this monster of a human being is neck and neck with the normal alternative. But if I’m going to believe that, then Trump needs to do the following:

1. Stop saying weird evil shit. I'm talking about him saying things like "Immigrants are poisoning the blood of our people," saying that they're "animals", because building an us vs. them mentality against a foe you dehumanize is fascism 101. Him saying he's going to bring back the Alien and Sedition Acts that was used to lock away Japanese people in internment camps is also fascist, but not as much as him talking about "the enemy from within" that he wants to deploy the military against. Yes he only says he’ll use it against “radical lunatic leftists” but then he goes and calls Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi and everyone who disagrees with him radical lunatic leftists. So who qualifies for that particular category of his? Because it sounds like it encompasses everyone who dares to oppose him. I’m talking about him threatening to remove the press credentials of any network that doesn’t lick his boots, because only a coward censors criticism like that. What happened to the free speech he’s supposedly so interested in? I'm talking about him saying that religious radicals "won't have to vote anymore", a statement that is terrifying regardless of if he's saying there will be no elections anymore or that he's so going to give the radical religious right so much of what they want that they won't ever have to vote again - which was his own explanation. He needs to stop saying he'll indict anyone who's running against him and he especially needs to stop saying that he'd make up the charges he'd levy. That he'd be a dictator (but it’s okay he’ll only do it on Day 1) in the name of retribution. And hey, what does "drill baby drill" have to do with retribution? Who is he getting retribution for? Is it the oil companies who are backing him? Or was he just trying to change the topic because he realized that saying he wants retribution against the American People is a losing proposition? I wished Hannity had pressed him on that. There are so many more, these were just the ones I could think of off the top of my head. For everyone you discount I can find two more instances of it, because this isn’t just a slip up from a guy who doesn’t care (or in this case, know how) to play politics or whatever, this is a constant pattern of behavior that he then doubles down on. Oh, excuse me, sometimes he clarifies, recontextualizing what he says to make it sound less insane when it very well could be even more evil. Whatever is causing him to say (and do) this sort of nonsense, he needs to get it in check if he ever wants me to see him as a viable candidate.

2. Put his for-profit companies in a blind trust for the entirety of his presidency. If he really wants to drain the swamp, he can start by cutting off this massive tool the oligarchs would use to try and buy him. This is something every president did, until him, and would be a great show of faith to the American people that he's willing to put his money where his mouth is.

3. Release his medical records, as every Presidential Candidate since ever has done. If he’s a “very stable genius” with the “best medical records of all time, better than Obama and Biden put together” he should have nothing to fear from this. And not some bullshit letter ghost written by him from his doctor, I want to see actual lab results and documents.

4. Release his tax records, again, as every candidate since ever has done. If he’s not a tax-frauding jackass who is robbing the American People of what he owes, then he should have nothing to fear. If he does this, especially paired with #2, I see no reason why it would hinder him. He has nothing to lose from doing any of these first four, actually.

5. Promise to fix the damage done to our constitution by every one of his Supreme Court picks by making the President accountable again, be it through constitutional amendment or other means. No President in the over 200 years of our nation has needed this bullshit king-level immunity, we don’t need it now. And yes, that is his fault. If the three he chose hadn't been there, it might not have happened. Besides, this is what happens when you steal Supreme Court seats, you are responsible for what they do. It doesn't help that all the other people who voted for it were also appointed by a Republican, but that's a discussion for another day.

6. Admit to the Big Lie being a lie. Joe Biden won the 2020 election, even according to Trump’s own DHS, and the only losers who refuse to ever accept defeat and instead complain about how the universe is rigged against them are whiny narcissist losers. If there had been actual tampering one of his lawsuits would have found it. And before you say the ruling class has a vested interest in taking him down, I'd like to remind you he shot off over 60 of them, to 60 different judges, and some of those judges were ones he appointed. At least some of them would have had the spine to do their job in the face of The They™, especially since he stacked the courts during his presidency. But they didn’t, because the minute his lawyers were under oath and subject to perjury laws they all suddenly stopped spewing the “evidence” they had for these crimes because they had fabricated it in the first place.

7. Promise not to stop all of the DoJ investigations into him. If he’s as innocent as the right would have you believe, then the truth will show itself in the investigations eventually. If he’s not, then a man actually interested in draining the swamp wouldn’t exempt himself. I’ll tell you what, if Trump doesn’t settle his own lawsuit once he takes over the DoJ and gives himself whatever arbitrary amount of money he needs to pay off the debtors he’s beholden to, I will happily eat crow until I choke.

8. Apologize for all of it. This will be the hardest one because Trump’s words mean nothing to me. He’ll have to show he’s sorry, and that is a tall ask. I’m not even sure what he could do. Donate to immigrant funds? Donate to the Trevor Project? He could step down from running for President but then he wouldn’t be running, and the point of this exercise is to create a situation where I might vote for him. That said, simply doing the other items will go a long way to showing that he is interested in making amends, so that may be most of enough in and of itself.

If Donald Trump does all 8 of these things before he’s elected, then I will immediately stop calling him a fascist and apologize for ever calling him one. Hell, even one of these things would be enough for me to sincerely alter my opinion on the man, depending on which it is. I believe these to be entirely reasonable demands. Most of them are simply asking him to do things presidents have always done, and for good reason. The rest are things that, if he wasn’t a terrible person, he would want to do. This isn't a conspiracy of The They™. If it were, then it wouldn’t be so all encompassing and total. It wouldn't always lead directly back to him like it does. There would be people at every level - not just the online extremists and Fox News - who would be standing up for him, and doing so in legally consistent ways that stand up to general scrutiny of unbiased jurists. But no, that big target he has on his back is, near as I can tell, not falsely placed - it's there because he keeps giving people a reason to put a target on him. But they aren’t, because they can’t. Trump is a criminal and a fraud, and that was a thing he was guilty of before he even started running for office. He runs grift after grift, and I am convinced that now he is trying to grift the entire country to get himself out of having to answer for his crimes. If you want to prove me wrong, show me that he's better than all of this. Give me a reason to believe that this man, who has time and again done the most insanely damaging things to our country, won't continue to do them, especially now that he has carte blanche to do them. I am begging you.

P.S. You’ll notice that I never said that he needs to apologize for all the racism, misogyny and other vile or disqualifying behavior. Because, you know, on some level, I get it. I’ll even admit it - I’d probably vote for a homophobic, misogynistic, racist sack of crap if they appealed to my political desire to, say, end global warming. I would probably hate every second of it and hate defending that decision to my leftist friends even more, but I’d do it because the issue means that much to me. So I get the idea that sometimes you have to swallow your pride and vote for an asshole. But Trump isn’t just an asshole, he’s a wanna-be tyrant. A wanna-be tyrant who was explicitly told us that he plans to be a dictator and persecute his political rivals just because they’re his political rivals. THAT is what matters to me. And if he wins, and when he starts doing the things I warned you about, don’t act surprised to me.

#by phoenix #thedrumpfwatch

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drumpfwatch · 4 years ago

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drumpfwatch · 4 years ago

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America’s Wake Up Call

No more excuses. No more dismissals. After the mess on the 6th, I can no longer let people live and let live with their "different opinions". People are literally dead because they've been deceived, and it's time the bubble burst.

A couple of housekeeping notes before we begin. Stay safe - the same nut jobs who attacked the Capitol are talking about doing a much wider raid when they can, either on the 17th or the 20th. I'm not sure how much stock I put into the inane babble-threats of a bunch of lunatics, but we ignored their threats for the Capitol attack and we all saw what happened then. I love you all and I don't want anyone to get hurt. Keep your ears open, just in case. I also know a lot of you may know all this stuff already, but I ask you to give this a read through anyway. There may be some new information you weren't aware of if you agree with me, and if you don't it'd be really cool if you can say you actually sat down and heard the points of the opposition from their own mouth. You sincerely considered someone else's point of view, and even if you don't come away agreeing with me I think doing that alone is enough. Finally, all the links lead directly to sources or otherwise further information. I've sourced everything I think is relevant, but if you'd like sources for a claim I make that I didn't cover let me know and I'll get back to you. This is why this thing took so long. All that said, let's get started. First things first, let me make one thing super clear. The election was not defrauded in any way, shape, or form. This whole "steal the vote" thing was a ploy put in place by Trump himself and supported by his personal Propaganda Machine to avoid admitting that he was a loser, and any of you who fell for it need to see the truth. Think about it for a moment. All these things Trump and his lawyers have been saying to outside of court they seem to magically forget as soon as they're put under oath. Read the court transcripts (Search for "I'm sorry" and read the proceeding conversation for a brief snippet of the insanity if you don't have time to read the whole thing) and you'll see that the claims they tell you they're making are not what they're actually saying in court. This is why of 37 cases brought to court by the Trump Campaign, only one of them saw through and if you look into it it was more of a "You Tried" star. These decisions passed down by his own judges. Look at how the only states they complain about the rules that supposedly allow the election to be stolen are only being disputed in democrat won states. Look at how the democrats burned 90 million dollars to beat Mitch McConnel, much more then his campaign invested into his own run, and yet he still won. Democrats see McConnell as a threat and want him gone (as well they should), and it was a very real possibility he would have been ousted from the Senate entirely. But he wasn't. Instead he had the possibility of staying in charge of the Senate, pending the outcome of the Senate Runoff. The democrats were also appearantly stupid enough not to take Florida - a state that leaned democrat by all predictive algorthimns and would have made their victory a great deal easier. Apparently the explanation for that is the democrats wanted time to make sure they could mess with the count in other states, even though they wouldn't have to if they took Florida. Trump lost the election, pure and simple, end of discussion. Trump has crossed line after line, and his allies in The Party helped him to get away with it. Steve Bannon, the world's foremost merchant of Outrage Addiction, and his buddies like Tucker Carlson were the guys who poisoned the minds of so many people. In fact, I think at this point it's safe to say anyone who's gone along with Trump's delusions needs to be cut from your media diet, permanently. The brain worms it's infected people with has led them to the nonsense we saw on the 6th. So let's talk about that nonsense. First let's all get on the same page. This was a coup attempt. A hilariously bad, laughably ineffectual one, but a coup attempt nonetheless. This was not a random violent bunch of losers suddenly getting rowdy, it was planned.

Those shirts were specifically made for that day. You don't just magic shirts out of thin air, they can take a week at the quickest to create. They have the catchphrase of the President emblazoned on them - MAGA. They were charging for Donald Trump, who ordered them to do it.

Oh and in case any of you are far enough down the rabbit hole to think this was an Antifa False Flag, it wasn't. This coup attempt came with help from the inside. Plenty of senators remarked on how well these people knew their way around the Capitol when even their own staffers occasionally had trouble. There are all sorts of little rumors about various things and more then one of the terrorists - and they are terrorists - saying they got help from Republican Senators before the events. How much of this is true or not will be determined later, but it wasn't enough and so the We have footage of things like people with zip cuffs, we have them running around destroying whatever they can and even erecting a GALLOWS. Their intent was to take hostages and kill people until Congress voted Trump. Of course, they failed because these morons are so racist that the idea of lynching a single black man distracted them from their actual targets, but that's just racism for you. Remember that the next time someone tries to tell you that these guys weren't racist. But here's where it gets worse. We know that the Capitol Police were short handed, despite numerous warnings from both the CIA and the FBI that not only were these guys on the way but they were serious about taking hostages and lives. That said, no matter how underprepared they were, they still chose not to do their jobs. There's even rumors that they opened the gates. Watch the video and you'll see that while it's impossible to tell who is actually moving the gate, it's being carried by someone in black - like the Capitol Police were wearing - and it's being taken away on the side of the police. It is also being carried away, not violently thrown away. All of this is suspicious enough on its own, but it gets worse when you see the capitol police disappear into the crowd. The Capitol Police, at least some of them, were involved. In fact we even have them taking selfies with the terrorists.

Snopes Article

This in contrast to their treatment of Black Lives Matter protestors who were peacefully protesting in Lafayette Square and who Trump had tear gassed just so he could get a photo op. And how the military was then called to assemble and blockade the Lincoln Memorial just as soon as they heard they were getting rowdy.

This in contrast to the swift response to the disabled folks who protested McConnel's treatment of the ACHA. Are the circumstances different? Sure. No two protestors are the same. But that actually makes it worse. The people at the Black Lives Matter protest and the ACHA Protest were unarmed and in the latter case also disabled. Meanwhile, the terrorists who raided the capitol were not only armed with zip tie cuffs, but also guns and bombs. This was a disastrous mess and no matter how much of it the Capitol Police did or didn't let happen, the fact that these armed and dangerous terrorists were allowed past the Capitol steps without paying in blood is unacceptable. In addition to the aforementioned proof of them being buddy-buddy, it should concern every single one of you. This behavior is stupidity and racism at best and downright treasonous at worst. The literal flag of traitors was carried into the Capitol. The American Flag was taken down and replaced with a Trump Flag. That should be enough to tell you these terrorists hate America, what they love is Trump. No matter how patriotically they pretend to carry themselves, no matter how American they think they are, they're not. They are deeply indoctrinated members of Trump's Cult of Personality, and lots of other people are also infected, to lesser degrees. Over 70 million of them, it would seem - but that's a discussion for another day. The DC National Guard was never deployed because Trump refused to order their deployment. Even after people started dying, Pence was the one who finally activated it, and the Pennsylvania guard also assisted in the clean up. Trump never once sought to stop this. And that brings us around to his culpability.

So here's the thing. Us Libs like to joke that Trump is stupid, but he actually can be very clever. Trump is smart enough to know that if he tells people to go do a thing directly, it can come back to bite him. Like a mob boss, he doesn't tell you to go murder a guy. He tells you that it would be very nice if that guy was no longer a problem he had to deal with. He doesn't tell you he's going to have your store burned down if you don't pay for his gang's protection, he tells you that it's a really nice shop, and it'd be a shame if something were to happen to your place of business. Because of this, there is no direct speech incitement- that is, there is nowhere he directly tells people to go and raid the capitol. But we do have Trump calling Michael Pence a coward, followed shortly by the terrorists - and they were terrorists - chanting to hang him. We have him giving a speech where he uses the word "fight" just shy of once per minute - 20 times in about half an hour. That his people need to 'fight' and then says they're all going to march to the capital. So, from what I've read from legal scholars, the actual criminal charge of incitement is going to be a huge debate. One of the real, true cases of incitement vs protected speech. Long story short, political speech is always super protected, no matter who's making it, and since there's neither direct "do the violence" or "don't do the violence" it could go either way, and the judges are likely to give Trump every benefit of the doubt. But the context speaks for itself. You have Giuliani, at that same exact rally, calling for, word for bloody word, a trial by combat. Yes, really. Watch the video. He never told them to stop, despite his awareness of the plans for the 6th. He went ahead with his rally in spite of it. He refused to call the National Guard, even when he knew they were engaging in violence. Even after these people stormed the capitol and started trying to spill blood, Trump said he loved them and they were all very special. Of course, he denounced it at that point. Honestly him denouncing them after murder isn't really relevant to me anyway. Of course any politician with two brain cells to rub together is going to denounce outright violence whether they liked it or not when they can still be held accountable. And make no mistake, Trump did like what he was seeing. I can't prove it, but the suddenness of his denouncement tape and the way he looks like he's being held hostage correlates with rumors that his cabinet threatened to 25th him if he didn't at least pretend to be disappointed. Because the day before, when he knew someone died, all he said was to "not be violent." Not get out of the Capitol, not to go home, not to put their weapons away and surrender themselves. He chided them, as if they had spilled their milk on the floor, for murder. All of this together paints a picture of a man who is at the very least negligent of a very real and dangerous threat that he helped create - remember that Trump started this fake vote nonsense. At worst, though, he is responsible for it, riling up his base with these claims. After all, if there really was a voter fraud and suppression campaign like the Trump pretended happened to him, that would in fact also be a threat to the very heart of our democracy. I'd probably be out there protesting too! It's only natural to respond to this sort of thing with fear. As for Trump, once the protestors were under control, he tweeted this:

This is the tweet that would eventually get him banned, and isn't it great? What a perfect summation of this man. What a mob boss thing to say. "I'm sorry but this is just what happens when I don't get my way!" And what a dead giveaway to his involvement - or at least his enjoyment. This is a man who lost, got so upset and butthurt that he lost that he created a lie about it, got other people to believe that lie, and then got them to try and make the lie true. When it didn't work by legal fiat, he made it work through violence. Trump is a threat to the constitution and to America. That call to Georgia is so important because he didn't ask for them to find illegal votes and get rid of them - he specifically asked that they modify the result by the amount that would make him win, and he didn't care how. This isn't just a canary in the coal mine, this is a gas line explosion. He has been trying to defraud the election. He is a very real and present danger to the continuation of American democracy. I do not care one single little iota if he really is "the best at jobs, so good at jobs," that is not at all worth his facism. Hitler's Germany had a 100% employment rate, yet Hitler's great job numbers aren't exactly what we remember him for.

I hate to invoke Godwin's Law, but it can no longer be ignored. The Beer Hall Putsch was the same sort of orchestrated and hilariously failed coup attempt, but what it created was an environment where violence was on the political table, and where fascists felt emboldened. Those guys were also angry at the government, just as much as they were made at Jews for "corrupting it". Suddenly, they could have a part in power, because your average German citizen just shrugged and let horrible things happen because they didn't believe it was actually happening. It could never happen here! 10 years later, Hitler had Can't Happen Hered himself into Supreme Chancellor. Thankfully Trump is so old he probably won't live that long, but who knows what may rise from the ashes. It all depends on how we act going forward. So that's why I'm begging you all: Don't let yourselves go the same way. Watching and ignoring everything horrible until it suddenly is on your very doorstep. Trump is a fascist, pure and simple. America is not immune to the blinding effect of the banality of evil. It is not immune to group think, or to being deceived, because no human being is. As long as 50% of the country wants something and there are enough other filthy cowards at other levels of government, anything can happen. We saw that this year. Regardless of your thoughts on the Ukraine call, the fact that McMconnell blew every single precedent out of the water by not allowing witnesses at the trial - something that has happened at literally every other impeachment to ever occur in history ever - should be enough to prove that he doesn't give one shit about justice, just his party. He's not playing politics, he's playing a team sport in the halls of government. His actions, and the actions of Trump and his cronies, have shifted our mutable country towards authoritarian facism. But hey, that ability to change? That's how this country was designed, that's what makes it so amazing - we can change it, and make it better. That's what the Founding Fathers wanted. This country could turn into a nightmarish police state, or it could become a utopia. It all depends on what the people here want. I'm pretty sure all of us just want peace and civility, even if we can’t agree on what that is anymore. So let's work towards a world where that's a thing. Denounce this atrocity, and denounce the man who caused it. Be kind. Save the world.

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