#loser j trump

[isawthismeme]

[sher-ee]

Perfectly sane ranting. Where did the thousands of people go Donald?

Let’s have this delusional nitwit run the country! What could go wrong?

PS Donald - Only TWO weirdos were outside supporting you today.

[stoph8co]

[razorroymatthews]

“armpits, ketchup, makeup and a little butt”

The potential set for “The Apprentice” just didn’t pass the smell test.

That’s according to producers on Donald Trump’s business reality show who have detailed the stale scent they encountered when they first checked out the 26th floor of Trump Tower in 2003, amid pre-production of the program.

“The first thing they noticed was the stench, a musty carpet odor that followed them like an invisible cloud,” New York Times reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig wrote in their new book “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success.” The Times published an adapted excerpt on Saturday.

There were also “scores of chips in the finish of the wooden desks and credenzas” and “the décor felt long out of date, making the space seem like a time capsule from when Donald J. Trump opened the building early in his first rise to fame,” per the Times’ journalists.

“When you go into the office and you’re hearing ‘billionaire,’ even ‘recovering billionaire,’ you don’t expect to see chipped furniture, you don’t expect to smell carpet that needs to be refreshed in the worst, worst way,” said Bill Pruitt, one of the said producers. “The whole thing was absurd to all of us,” said fellow producer Alan Blum, per the Times article.

Mark Burnett, who created the show, ended up paying Trump (whose own body odor has been described by former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) as “armpits, ketchup, makeup and a little butt”) almost half a million dollars per year for space on the fourth floor which he had revamped as a fake boardroom and the contestants’ apartments, per the book.

“Our job was to make him look legitimate, to make him look like there was something behind it,” said another producer, Jonathon Braun, “even though we pretty much all knew that there wasn’t.”

He added, “But that was our job.”

[justinspoliticalcorner]

I am not usually one to offer diagnoses of people I’ve never met, but it does seem like the pundit class of the American media is suffering from severe memory loss. Because they’re doing exactly what they did in the 2016 presidential race – providing wildly asymmetrical and inflammatory coverage of the one candidate running against Donald J Trump. They have become a stampeding herd producing an avalanche of stories suggesting Biden is unfit, will lose and should go away, at a point in the campaign in which replacing him would likely be somewhere between extremely difficult and utterly catastrophic. They do this while ignoring something every scholar and critic of journalism knows well and every journalist should. As Nikole Hannah-Jones put it: “As media we consistently proclaim that we are just reporting the news when in fact we are driving it. What we cover, how we cover it, determines often what Americans think is important and how they perceive these issues yet we keep pretending it’s not so.” They are not reporting that he is a loser; they are making him one. According to one journalist’s tally, the New York Times has run 192 stories on the subject since the debate, including 50 editorials and 142 news stories. The Washington Post, which has also gone for saturation coverage, published a resignation speech they wrote for him. Not to be outdone, the New Yorker’s editor-in-chief declared that Biden not going away “would be an act not only of self-delusion but of national endangerment” and had a staff writer suggest that Democrats should use the never-before-deployed 25th amendment. Since this would have to be led by Vice-President Kamala Harris, it would be a sort of insider coup. And so it goes with what appears to be a journalistic competition to outdo each other in the aggressiveness of the attacks and the unreality of the proposals. It’s a dogpile and a panic, and there is no one more unable to understand their own emotional life, biases and motives than people who are utterly convinced of their own ironclad rationality and objectivity, AKA most of these pundits. Speaking of coups, we’ve had a couple of late, which perhaps merit attention as we consider who is unfit to hold office. This time around, Trump is not just a celebrity with a lot of sexual assault allegations, bankruptcies and loopily malicious statements, as he was in 2016. He’s a convicted criminal who orchestrated a coup attempt to steal an election both through backroom corruption and public lies and through a violent attack on Congress. The extremist US supreme court justices he selected during his last presidential term themselves staged a coup this very Monday, overthrowing the US constitution itself and the principle that no one is above the law to make presidents into kings, just after legalizing bribery of officials, and dismantling the regulatory state by throwing out the Chevron deference. [...] Biden is old. He was one kind of appalling in the 27 June debate, listless and sometimes stumbling and muddling his words. But Trump was another kind of appalling, in that almost everything he said was an outrageous lie and some of it was a threat. I get that writing about the monstrosity that is Trump faces the problem that it’s not news; he’s been a monster spouting lurid nonsense all his life (but his political crimes are recent, and his free-associating public soliloquies on sharks, batteries, toilets, water flow and Hannibal Lector, among other topics, are genuinely demented). He’s a racist, a fascist and a rapist (according to a civil-court verdict). We are deciding whether this nation has a future as a more-or-less democratic republic this November, and on that rides the fate of the earth when it comes to acting on climate change. If the US falters at this decisive moment in the climate crisis, it will drag down everyone else’s efforts. Under Trump, it will. But the shocking supreme court decisions this summer and the looming threat of authoritarianism have gotten little ink and air, compared to the hue and cry about Biden’s competence.

Rebecca Solnit at The Guardian on why the pundit class is calling for Joe Biden to suspend his campaign but not Donald Trump to also do the same (07.06.2024).

Rebecca Solnit's opinion column at The Guardian regarding the pundit class's demands for Joe Biden to end his campaign over a bad debate performance but not for Donald Trump to do the same over his 34 felonies is a masterclass.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Donald Trump on Sunday called for President Joe Biden to take down an attack ad featuring a series of quotes attributed to the Republican in which he mocks dead soldiers.

The former president’s demand came on the same day that Biden honored fallen troops in a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France, the burial ground that Trump chose not to visit in 2018 and was later reported to have done so while describing the site as “filled with losers.” Trump has denied making the remark—and another in which he allegedly called more than 1,800 Marines “suckers” for being killed—ever since The Atlantic first published his purported words in 2020.

Those denials continued Sunday, first at a rally in Las Vegas. “He said I stood over graves of soldiers and I said: ‘These people are suckers and losers, the dead soldiers from World War I,’’ Trump said, referring to Biden. He went on to claim the whole episode was “made up” and, despite the Biden campaign knowing it’s “phony,” they still “took an ad using it—these are sick people.”

Trump appeared to be referring to an attack ad launched by the Biden campaign on Friday during the president’s visit to Normandy for ceremonies commemorating the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings. The video featured the reported “suckers” and “losers” quotes, along with audio of Trump mocking the late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) as being thought of as a “war hero” because he was captured during the Vietnam War. “I like people that weren’t captured,” Trump added.

“Donald Trump doesn’t know a damn thing about service to his country,” read a post on Biden’s X account featuring the clip.

At the rally in Vegas, Trump accused his political opponents of fabricating stories about him in order to get elected. “Unless you’re a psycho or a crazy person or a very stupid person, who would say that, anyway?” Trump said, referring to the “suckers” and “losers” comments.

He also took a swipe at the “geniuses” who advised him simply not to mention the allegation. “It just never goes away, I gotta mention it,” Trump told his supporters. “I don’t like mentioning it. But for me to say ‘suckers and losers’ about people that died in World War I in front of military people? It’s not a possibility you could say a thing like that.”

Trump’s fury about the matter continued in a pair of Truth Social posts Sunday. He dismissed the “losers and suckers” claim as “another Democrat Disinformation ‘hit job’” and said only “a sicko with an axe to grind would suggest that anyone would make such a statement.”

“They even made these horrific words into an advertisement, which shows how desperate they are,” the post continued. “No President, especially ‘dumb as a rock’ Joe Biden, has done more for our Military than DONALD J. TRUMP. The Military hates Crooked Joe, and all of the failure he represents. Take down the Fake Ad, Joe, and stop the unprecedented Weaponization of ‘Justice’ against your Political Opponent.”

In another post, he again claimed to have “never said that dead Soldiers are ‘losers and suckers.’”

“Anytime you see that despicable FAKE statement used, remember that it comes from the FASCIST SCUM that is destroying our Country,” he wrote.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Iam not usually one to offer diagnoses of people I’ve never met, but it does seem like the pundit class of the American media is suffering from severe memory loss. Because they’re doing exactly what they did in the 2016 presidential race – providing wildly asymmetrical and inflammatory coverage of the one candidate running against Donald J Trump.

They have become a stampeding herd producing an avalanche of stories suggesting Biden is unfit, will lose and should go away, at a point in the campaign in which replacing him would likely be somewhere between extremely difficult and utterly catastrophic. They do this while ignoring something every scholar and critic of journalism knows well and every journalist should. As Nikole Hannah-Jones put it: “As media we consistently proclaim that we are just reporting the news when in fact we are driving it. What we cover, how we cover it, determines often what Americans think is important and how they perceive these issues yet we keep pretending it’s not so.” They are not reporting that he is a loser; they are making him one.

According to one journalist’s tally, the New York Times has run 192 stories on the subject since the debate, including 50 editorials and 142 news stories. The Washington Post, which has also gone for saturation coverage, published a resignation speech they wrote for him. Not to be outdone, the New Yorker’s editor-in-chief declared that Biden not going away “would be an act not only of self-delusion but of national endangerment” and had a staff writer suggest that Democrats should use the never-before-deployed 25th amendment.

Since this would have to be led by Vice-President Kamala Harris, it would be a sort of insider coup. And so it goes with what appears to be a journalistic competition to outdo each other in the aggressiveness of the attacks and the unreality of the proposals. It’s a dogpile and a panic, and there is no one more unable to understand their own emotional life, biases and motives than people who are utterly convinced of their own ironclad rationality and objectivity, AKA most of these pundits.

Speaking of coups, we’ve had a couple of late, which perhaps merit attention as we consider who is unfit to hold office. This time around, Trump is not just a celebrity with a lot of sexual assault allegations, bankruptcies and loopily malicious statements, as he was in 2016. He’s a convicted criminal who orchestrated a coup attempt to steal an election both through backroom corruption and public lies and through a violent attack on Congress. The extremist US supreme court justices he selected during his last presidential term themselves staged a coup this very Monday, overthrowing the US constitution itself and the principle that no one is above the law to make presidents into kings, just after legalizing bribery of officials, and dismantling the regulatory state by throwing out the Chevron deference.

Trump’s own former staffers are part of the Heritage Foundation’s team planning to implement Project 25 if he wins, which would finish off our system of government with yet another coup. “We are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” said the foundation’s president the other day. This alarms me. So does the behavior of the US mainstream media, which seems more concerned with sabotaging the only thing standing between us and this third coup.

“Why aren’t we talking about Trump’s fascism?” demands the headline of Jeet Heer’s piece in the Nation, to which the answer might be a piece by the Nation’s own editor-in-chief titled “Biden’s patriotic duty” that proposes his duty is to get lost. Sometimes I wonder if all this coverage is because the media knows how to cover a normal problem like a sub-par candidate; they don’t know how to cover something as abnormal and unprecedented as the end of the republic. So for the most part they don’t.

Biden is old. He was one kind of appalling in the 27 June debate, listless and sometimes stumbling and muddling his words. But Trump was another kind of appalling, in that almost everything he said was an outrageous lie and some of it was a threat. I get that writing about the monstrosity that is Trump faces the problem that it’s not news; he’s been a monster spouting lurid nonsense all his life (but his political crimes are recent, and his free-associating public soliloquies on sharks, batteries, toilets, water flow and Hannibal Lector, among other topics, are genuinely demented). He’s a racist, a fascist and a rapist (according to a civil-court verdict).

We are deciding whether this nation has a future as a more-or-less democratic republic this November, and on that rides the fate of the earth when it comes to acting on climate change. If the US falters at this decisive moment in the climate crisis, it will drag down everyone else’s efforts. Under Trump, it will. But the shocking supreme court decisions this summer and the looming threat of authoritarianism have gotten little ink and air, compared to the hue and cry about Biden’s competence.

Few seem to remember that Biden’s age and his verbal gaffes were an issue in the 2020 campaign. Biden is a lifelong stutterer, and the effort to keep his words on track means that he operates under an extra burden with every unscripted answer he gives, particularly under pressure (though he had a long, easygoing conversation with Howard Stern a couple of months ago, in which he discusses his stuttering at about the 1:13 mark).

Some speech pathologists have suggested he may (not does, just may) have a disorder that sometimes accompanies stuttering, called cluttering, which is not an intellectual deficiency but a sometimes hectic and disorderly translation of thoughts into words. In recent months, actual gerontologists have said in print that Biden appears to have normal signs of aging, not signs of dementia. Nevertheless, the amateur armchair diagnosticians have been out in packs, and their confidence in their ability to diagnose from watching TV is itself an alarming delusion. I am not giving Biden a clean bill of health; I’m saying that I don’t have a basis to render a verdict (and neither do the august editors of large publications).

Few seem to remember that Biden’s age and his verbal gaffes were an issue in the 2020 campaign

Although the Biden administration seems to have run extremely well for three and a half years, with a strong cabinet, few scandals and little turnover, a thriving economy and some major legislative accomplishments, the narrative the punditocracy has created suggest we should ignore this record and decide on the basis of the 90-minute debate and reference to newly surfaced swarms of anonymous sources that Biden is incompetent. Quite a lot of them have been running magical-realism fantasy-football scenarios in which it is fun and easy to swap in your favorite substitute candidate. The reality is that it is hard and quite likely to be a terrible mess. Nevertheless, this pretense is supposed to mean that telling a presidential candidate in mid-campaign to get lost is fine.

The main argument against Biden is not that he can’t govern – that would be hard to make given that he seems to have done so for the past years – but that he can’t win the election. But candidates do not win elections by themselves. Elections are won, to state the obvious, by how the electorate turns out and votes. The electorate votes based on how they understand the situation and evaluate the candidates. That is, of course, in large part shaped by the media, as Hannah-Jones points out, and the media is right now campaigning hard for a Democratic party loss. The other term for that is a Republican victory. Few things have terrified and horrified me the way this does.

Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility

[tomorrowusa]

Every year during the Illinois State Fair in Springfield there is Governor's Day (for the party in power) and either Democrats Day or Republican Day for the opposition party.

Democrats currently hold all statewide offices in Illinois and on Governor's Day Gov. J. B. Pritzker on Wednesday spoke at the fair and called Donald Trump "a loser". Not exactly news, but J.B. did it in a great way.

Thursday was Republican Day at the fair and the best Illinois Republicans could do was get Trump's former acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker. Whitaker served in between Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr. Some of Whitaker's views may be odious but apparently he's not particularly weird by GOP standards.

So Illinois Republicans know they have a major problem with the public perceptions of their candidates – especially at the top of the ballot.

Regardless of state, we need to remind voters that Trump, Vance, and many GOP candidates for Congress and state offices are way out of the mainstream and have views which are far from the norms of American society. In short, Republicans are weird.

[azspot]

The loser of the popular vote has won the electoral vote five times in our history. It didn’t happen for 112 years after Benjamin Harrison lost the popular vote by 90,956 to Grover Cleveland. We all know what happened in 2000 when one of the best qualified candidates in American history, Al Gore, won the popular vote by 543, 985 votes, but lost the electoral college to dipshit nepo baby George W. Bush. History repeated itself in 2016 when Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2,868,518 but lost the electoral to dipshit criminal Donald J. Trump.

Abolish The Electoral College 2.0

[isawthismeme]

[vote-democrat-president-congress]

Deploying on U.S. Soil: How Trump Would Use Soldiers Against Riots, Crime and Migrants

NYTimes Aug 17, 2024:

The former president’s vision of using the military to enforce the law domestically would carry profound implications for civil liberties.

During the turbulent summer of 2020, President Donald J. Trump raged at his military and legal advisers, calling them “losers” for objecting to his idea of using federal troops to suppress outbreaks of violence during the nationwide protests over the police murder of George Floyd.

It wasn’t the only time Mr. Trump was talked out of using the military for domestic law enforcement — a practice that would carry profound implications for civil liberties and for the traditional constraints on federal power. He repeatedly raised the idea of using troops to secure border states, and even proposed shooting both violent protesters and undocumented migrants in the legs, former aides have said.

In his first term in office, Mr. Trump never realized his expansive vision of using troops to enforce the law on U.S. soil. But as he has sought a return to power, he has made clear that he intends to use the military for a range of domestic law enforcement purposes, including patrolling the border, suppressing protests that he deems to have turned into riots and even fighting crime in big cities run by Democrats.

“In places where there is a true breakdown of the rule of law, such as the most dangerous neighborhoods in Chicago, the next president should use every power at his disposal to restore order — and, if necessary, that includes sending in the National Guard or the troops,” Mr. Trump said at a conservative conference in Dallas in August 2022, shortly before announcing that he was running to be that next president.

During his time out of power, allies of Mr. Trump have worked on policy papers to provide legal justifications for the former president’s intent to use the military to enforce the law domestically. In public, they have talked about this in the context of border states and undocumented immigrants. But an internal email from a group closely aligned with Mr. Trump, obtained by The Times, shows that, privately, the group was also exploring using troops to “stop riots” by protesters.

While governors have latitude to use their states’ National Guards to respond to civil disorder or major disasters, a post-Civil War law called the Posse Comitatus Act generally makes it a crime to use regular federal troops for domestic policing purposes.

However, an 1807 law called the Insurrection Act creates an exception to that ban. It grants presidents the emergency power to use federal troops on domestic soil to restore law and order when they believe a situation warrants it. Those federal troops could either be regular active-duty military or state National Guard soldiers the federal government has assumed control over.

The Insurrection Act was last invoked in 1992, when President George H.W. Bush sent troops to help suppress riots in Los Angeles following the acquittal of white police officers who had been videotaped beating a Black motorist, Rodney King. In that case, however, the governor of California, Pete Wilson, and the mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, had asked for federal assistance to restore order.

But parts of the Insurrection Act also allow presidents to send in troops without requiring the consent of a governor. Presidents last invoked the act to deploy troops without the consent of state authorities in the late 1950s and early 1960s during the civil rights movement, when some governors in the South resisted court-ordered school desegregation.

Mr. Trump has boasted that, if he returns to the White House, he will dispatch forces without any request for intervention by local authorities. At a campaign rally in Iowa last year, for example, he vowed to unilaterally use federal forces to “get crime out of our cities,” specifically naming New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco as “crime dens” he pointedly noted were run by Democrats.

“You look at what is happening to our country — we cannot let it happen any longer,” Mr. Trump said. “And one of the other things I’ll do — because you are not supposed to be involved in that, you just have to be asked by the governor or the mayor to come in — the next time, I am not waiting.”

Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said that, as part of his group’s contingency planning for how to resist what it sees as potential risks from any second Trump administration, it is drafting lawsuits to challenge invocations of the Insurrection Act against protesters. He said the group sees it as likely that Mr. Trump would be drawn to the authoritarian “theatrics” of sending troops into Democratic cities.

“It’s very likely that you will have the Trump administration trying to shut down mass protests — which I think are inevitable if they were to win — and to specifically pick fights in jurisdictions with blue-state governors and blue-state mayors,” he said. “There’s talk that he would try to rely on the Insurrection Act as a way to shut down lawful protests that get a little messy. But isolated instances of violence or lawlessness are not enough to use federal troops.”

In a statement, a Trump spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, said, “As President Trump has always said, you can’t have a country without law and order and without borders. In the event where an American community is being ravaged by violence, President Trump will use all federal law enforcement assets and work with local governments to protect law-abiding Americans.” She added that he was committed to “using every available resource to seal the border and stop the invasion of millions of illegal aliens into our country.”

Mr. Trump has long been attracted to the strongman move of using military force to impose and maintain domestic political control. In a 1990 interview with Playboy, he spoke admiringly about the Chinese Communist Party for displaying the “power of strength” a year earlier when it used troops and tanks to crush the pro-democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

Many years later, at a 2016 Republican primary debate, he claimed that his comments in that old interview did not mean he actually endorsed the crackdown. But then, as he continued talking, he described the Tiananmen Square demonstration as a riot: “I said that was a strong, powerful government. They kept down the riot. It was a horrible thing.”

Seeking a Show of Strength

In 2020, the videotaped killing of Mr. Floyd, a Black man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Derek Chauvin, sparked racial justice protests. Peaceful demonstrations sometimes descended into rioting — especially when anarchists hijacked some of the protests as an opportunity to set fires, smash store windows and take other destructive actions. This was especially visible in Portland, Ore., where the Department of Homeland Security flooded the streets with hundreds of federal officers, many not wearing any identifying insignia.

During a stormy protest in Washington, D.C., centered in Lafayette Square outside the White House, protesters knocked over barricades. The Secret Service whisked Mr. Trump away to take shelter in a bunker underneath the White House. Attorney General William P. Barr later wrote in his memoir that Mr. Trump was enraged — in part by the violence but “especially the news reports that he was taken to the bunker.” He wanted to make a show of strength as the world watched.

Because D.C. is a federal enclave, not a state, it has no governor, and its National Guard always reports to the Pentagon. The secretary of defense, Mark Esper, sent National Guard forces to support the Park Police and other civilian agencies protecting federal buildings — and, to particular controversy, National Guard helicopters swooped frighteningly low over crowds of people.

But civilians remained in control of the response in the nation’s capital. Mr. Trump wanted to instead put the military directly in charge of suppressing violent protesters — and to use regular, active-duty troops to do it. Members of his legal team drew up an order invoking the Insurrection Act in case it became necessary, according to a person with direct knowledge of what took place. But senior aides opposed such a move, and he never signed it.

Mr. Barr later wrote that he and the acting Homeland Security secretary had thought using regular troops was unnecessary, and that Mr. Esper and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, had “recoiled at the idea, expressing the view that regular military forces should not be used except as a last resort, and that, absent a real insurrection, the military should not be in charge but should provide support to civilian agencies.”

As Mr. Trump nevertheless publicly threatened to put the regular military in the streets across the country, General Milley issued a memo on June 2, 2020, to top military leaders saying that every member of the military swears an oath to uphold the Constitution and its values, including the freedoms of speech and peaceful assembly.

The next day, on June 3, Mr. Esper contradicted Mr. Trump from the Pentagon podium, saying: “The option to use active duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations. We are not in one of those situations now. I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act.” Mr. Trump was outraged, seeing this as an act of defiance. He fired Mr. Esper that November.

In a comment for this article before President Biden dropped out of the 2024 campaign, Mr. Esper pointed to his earlier remarks, adding, “I think the same standard applies going forward, whether it is a second term for Biden, Trump or for any other future president.”

Back in 2020, the protests or riots eventually ebbed, without any use of regular troops or Mr. Trump’s federalizing a state’s National Guard. But on the 2024 campaign trail, Mr. Trump has rewritten that history, falsely bragging that he personally sent troops into the streets of Minneapolis, who quelled violence there.

In reality, it was Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota — now the presumptive Democratic nominee for vice president — who ordered his state’s National Guard to briefly deploy in Minneapolis. Mr. Trump did not direct and was not responsible for the operation.

In a 2021 interview, Mr. Walz recalled consulting with General Milley and Mr. Esper about his decision to use the state’s National Guard at a time when they were resisting Mr. Trump’s desire to send in federal troops — a step that Mr. Walz said would have made the situation worse by exacerbating the anger of people protesting a police murder.

“It was critically important that civilian leadership was seen as leading this, and that the face forward needed to look like your state, it needed to be the National Guard, it needed to be those local folk,” he told the authors Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns.

However, Mr. Walz has faced criticism from some quarters for moving slowly to deploy the guard when some protests in Minneapolis became riots.

Troops at the Border

Mr. Trump has broken with his former subordinates who raised objections to his desire to use federal troops that summer. Those who have stuck with Mr. Trump are working to ensure that a second administration would not contain politically appointed officials or lawyers who would be inclined to see it as their duty to constrain his impulses and desires — one of several reasons a second Trump presidency is likely to shatter even more norms and precedents than the first.

Indeed, even by the standards of various norm-busting plans Mr. Trump and his advisers have developed, the idea of using American troops against Americans on domestic soil stands apart. It has engendered quiet discomfort even among some of his allies on other issues.

Most of the open discussion of it by people other than Mr. Trump has focused on the prospect of using troops in border states — not against American rioters or criminals, but to arrest suspected undocumented migrants and better secure the border against illegal crossings.

In recent years, administrations of both parties — including Mr. Biden’s — have sometimes used the military at the border when surges of migrants have threatened to overwhelm the civilian agents. But the troops have helped by taking over back-office administration and support functions, freeing up more ICE and Border Patrol agents to go into the field.

The idea Mr. Trump and his advisers are playing with is to go beyond that by using regular troops to patrol the border and arrest people.

In an interview with The New York Times last fall, Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s top immigration adviser, said Mr. Trump’s plans for an unprecedented crackdown on immigration included invoking the Insurrection Act to use troops as immigration agents.

And, in its 900-page policy book, Project 2025 — a consortium of conservative think-tanks that is working together to develop policy proposals and personnel lists to offer Mr. Trump should he win the election — has a brief line saying regular troops “could” be used at the Southwest border for arrest operations in the context of tackling drug cartels.

But the book has no further analysis or discussion of the idea, and Project 2025 is not substantively engaging with the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act in any context, according to multiple people with knowledge of the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

‘Insurrection — Stop Riots ** — Day 1, Easy’

Regular troops are generally trained to operate in combat situations, not as domestic law enforcement, which heightens the risk of serious and, at times, even fatal mistakes — as happened when a Marine on an antidrug surveillance team assisting the Border Patrol shot and killed an American teenager near the border in 1997.

For that reason, the idea of using regular troops to enforce the law on domestic soil — especially away from the border — crosses a line that gives even some in the conservative think-tank world pause. Policy development work on using the Insurrection Act has joined a small number of other policy ideas circulating in Mr. Trump’s orbit, like disengaging with NATO, that are too radioactive to gain a consensus among the conservatives involved in Project 2025.

Instead, legal and policy development work on ideas that are too radical even for Project 2025 are being handled elsewhere, including at a Trump-aligned think tank called the Center for Renewing America that is run by Russell Vought, who was Mr. Trump’s White House budget chief.

An early 2023 email from a member of the center’s staff listed 10 agenda topics for papers that the center planned to write on legal and policy frameworks. An introduction to the email said the goal was to “help us build the case and achieve consensus leading into 2025.” The email went on to circulate more broadly, and The Times reviewed a copy.

The email placed each topic into one of three categories. One set involved Congress. A second involved “broader legal” issues — including “Christian nationalism” and “nullification,” the pre-Civil War idea that states should be able to negate federal laws they don’t like. The third category was “day one” ideas, meaning those whose legal frameworks were already well established, and which could be put into effect by a president unilaterally.

No. 4 on the list: “Insurrection — stop riots ** — Day 1, easy.”

The Center for Renewing America has since published papers about several other agenda items on its list, including arguing that a 1974 law banning presidents from impounding funds — or refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for things the White House dislikes — is unconstitutional (No. 1 on the list) and advocating for the elimination of the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department investigative independence from the White House (No. 5).

The center has not published any paper on invoking the Insurrection Act to use troops to suppress violent protests. But earlier this year, it published a paper on a closely related topic: invoking that law to use troops in Southwest border states to enforce immigration law. The paper was co-written by Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy Homeland Security secretary in the Trump administration.

While the paper focuses on border security, most of its legal analysis applies to any situation in which a president deems the use of troops necessary to suppress lawlessness. It laid out extensive arguments for why the Insurrection Act provides “enormous” leeway for the president to use regular troops directly to make arrests and enforce the law.

It also cited a sweeping Justice Department memorandum written after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, by John Yoo, a Bush administration lawyer with an idiosyncratically broad view of presidential power. Mr. Yoo had argued that the Posse Comitatus Act could not stop a presidential decision to use the armed forces domestically to combat terrorist activities.

In a statement responding to The Times’s reporting, Rachel Cauley, a spokeswoman for the Center for Renewing America, said, “Thank you for confirming that we have made it a priority to articulate that the president has the legal authority to use the military to secure the border.”

While the center’s statement — like its paper — framed the prospect of using troops on domestic soil in the context of securing the border, not suppressing anti-Trump protests, Mr. Vought was more expansive in a hidden-camera video released last week by a British journalism nonprofit, the Centre for Climate Reporting, which spoke with him while deceptively posing as relatives of a wealthy conservative donor.

“George Floyd obviously was not about race — it was about destabilizing the Trump administration,” he said. “We put out, for instance, a 50-page paper designed for lawyers to know that the president has, you know, the ability both along the border and elsewhere to maintain law and order with the military and that’s something that, you know, that’s going to be important for him to remember and his lawyers to affirm. But we’ve given them the case for that.”

Blurry Lines

Mr. Trump and his campaign have tried to distance themselves from Project 2025 and other outside conservative groups, saying that only policy proposals endorsed by the campaign count. Ms. Leavitt said, “As President Trump and our campaign has repeatedly stated, outside groups do NOT speak for him. The ONLY official second-term policies are those that come directly from President Trump himself.”

Still, as a matter of substance, the lines between Project 2025’s work, the materials being developed separately by the Center for Renewing America and the Trump campaign can be blurry.

For example, Mr. Vought has also been in charge of one of the most important components of Project 2025: drafting executive orders and other unilateral actions Mr. Trump could take over the first six months in office. Mr. Vought also remains personally close to Mr. Trump. And the Republican National Committee, which Mr. Trump controls through allies, including his senior campaign adviser, Chris LaCivita, and his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, put Mr. Vought in charge of the committee that developed the party’s platform.

That platform calls for “moving thousands of troops currently stationed overseas to our own southern border” to secure it against migrants.

At the Center for Renewing America, Mr. Vought has also hired Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official in the Trump administration who was indicted in Georgia for working with Mr. Trump to help overturn the 2020 election.

Mr. Clark wrote the center’s paper laying out a legal framework for why the president can take direct control of Justice Department investigations and prosecutions, and was also appointed to co-lead Project 2025’s Justice Department policy efforts.

The federal indictment of Mr. Trump, which deems Mr. Clark an unindicted co-conspirator, recounts how a White House lawyer told Mr. Clark that there had not been outcome-changing election fraud — and warned that if Mr. Trump nonetheless remained in office, there would be riots in every major city in the United States.

“Well,” Mr. Clark responded, according to the indictment, “that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”

Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy. More about Charlie Savage

Jonathan Swan is a political reporter covering the 2024 presidential election and Donald Trump’s campaign. More about Jonathan Swan

Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024 presidential campaign, down ballot races across the country and the investigations into former President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman

A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 18, 2024 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump’s Vision For the Border: Send In Troops. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

See more on: Donald Trump, American Civil Liberties Union

[mojave-pete]

KISS OF DEATH COUNTDOWN: 45 Days Left

September 09, 2023

Facebook

Twitter

"Ron DeSantis and his campaign have now decided their prospects of success are so dire, they’re running to the corporate media-- their words-- to lower expectations and to gaslight voters into believing he doesn’t have to win any state in the primary. Essentially, he’s campaigning to be top loser. 

And when there are reports about DeSantis being ‘apoplectic’ over his puppet master Jeff Roe, it’s safe to say when the Always Back Down drama bus is a-rockin,’ don’t come a-knockin.’

Just in time for the Iowa-Iowa State football game, a new poll shows President Trump crushing DeSantis by a score of 51 to 14 in the state."

—Steven Cheung, Trump spokesperson

On August 24, 2023, Always Back Down consultant Jeff Roe gave Ron DeSantctimonious 60 days to "beat Trump."

Another day, another gaffe from the DeSanctimonious camp. Yesterday, POLITICO quoted a DeSanctus spokesperson saying, “I don’t think there’s a single state we have to win."

The report highlighted the DeSanctus camp's realization that their campaign has completely stalled out and the revelation that they've lowered their sights to just a "strong second" place finish.

Meanwhile, President Donald J. Trump continues to expand his lead in Iowa, in early states, and in national polls while packing out an arena in South Dakota on Friday night to announce the endorsement of Governor Kristi Noem. 

[ernestbruce]

a patriot honors patriots

a traitorous coward like Donald J Trump is incapable of honoring people with whom he shares absolutely nothing

[doatk-revote]

ALRIGHT YOU SONS OF BITCHES IT'S TIME. WELCOME TO THE DIARY OF A TOURNEY KID TUMBLR REVOTE.

CURRENT BRACKET:

all matches last 24 hours

all matches for a round will start at the same time

sourcelists will be listed in the posts for each match, but honestly my vision for how this is gonna go is that it ends up mostly being voted on by non-tourneykids who can't process what most sourcelists mean anyway

dropdowns work roughly the same as canon DOATK (diagonal drops into losers after round 1, goners shuffle being lr1 v lr2 losers in every match, etc).

goners buffs that don't already exist canonically will be made up by me based on what seems likely, or by friends. if a goners buff is then revealed in canon for the same character, we’re sticking with the one from here. its weird to change mid-bracket

id love to use the actual match art/tracks for matches that actually exist on here, but it's very possible i'll run out of those really quickly and linking match tracks here has a high risk of biasing DOATK's actual voterbase so i'm not doing that. just look at the soundcloud and see for yourself if there's a track or something for that.

Links below the readmore

WINNERS ROUND 1:

MATCH 1: WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART VS KORONE INUGAMI  WINNER: WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

MATCH 2: TOBY 'RADIATION' FOX VS EDMUND MCMILLEN WINNER: EDMUND MCMILLEN

MATCH 3: ADAM CONOVER VS KEBIN WINNER: “ADAM CONOVER”

MATCH 4: DUBIOUS DUO VS ALPHAGENOS WINNER: DUBIOUS DUO

MATCH 5: EVIL MORTY VS DONALD J. TRUMP WINNER: EVIL MORTY

MATCH 6: JAKE VS GUPTILL89 WINNER: JAKE

MATCH 7: DEMONICKRAKEN VS YOU WINNER: DEMONICKRAKEN

MATCH 8: HAMOOD HABIBI VS THE EIFFEL TOWER WINNER: HAMOOD HABIBI

LOSERS ROUND 1:

MATCH 1: KORONE INUGAMI VS TOBY 'RADIATION' FOX WINNER: TOBY ‘RADIATION’ FOX

MATCH 2: KEBIN & IAN VS ALPHAGENOS WINNER: ALPHAGENOS

MATCH 3: DONALD J. TRUMP VS GUPTILL89 WINNER: GUPTILL89

MATCH 4: ME VS THE EIFFEL TOWER WINNER: THE EIFFEL TOWER

WINNERS ROUND 2:

MATCH 1: WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART VS EDMUND MCMILLEN WINNER: EDMUND MCMILLEN

MATCH 2: "ADAM CONOVER" VS DUBIOUS DUO WINNER: DUBIOUS DUO

MATCH 3: EVIL MORTY VS JAKE WINNER: JAKE

MATCH 4: DEMONICKRAKEN VS HAMOOD WINNER: DEMONICKRAKEN

LOSERS ROUND 2:

MATCH 1: HAMOOD HABIBI VS TOBY 'RADIATION' FOX WINNER: HAMOOD HABIBI

MATCH 2: EVIL MORTY VS ALPHAGENOS WINNER: ALPHAGENOS

MATCH 3: "ADAM CONOVER" VS GUPTILL89 WINNER: “ADAM CONOVER”

MATCH 4: WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART VS THE EIFFEL TOWER WINNER: THE EIFFEL TOWER

CONTROL GROUP 1:

ugghghh i dont wana link these right now

[mariacallous]

Last week, when Joe Biden remarked that democracy would be “on the ballot” in the midterms, he was criticized by some for not focussing on other issues. However, his warning was well founded. In this year’s elections, according to a tally by Bright Line Watch, a group of political scientists that monitors democratic practices and the potential threats to them, between thirty-one per cent and fifty-five per cent of all G.O.P. candidates for Congress or top statewide office had expressed support for the unfounded claim that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. Candidates for attorney general were the least likely to endorse the stolen-election claim, whereas candidates for the U.S. House were the most likely. The election deniers included Republicans running for the U.S. Senate, the House of Representatives, governorships, and for state offices that oversee the election process—usually secretaries of state.

In addition to the risk of election deniers gaining power, there were concerns that right-wing militia groups could interfere with voting. In parts of Arizona, vigilantes bearing arms and wearing tactical gear lingered near voting drop boxes, prompting a federal judge to order the members of one right-wing group, Clean Elections USA, to stay at least seventy-five feet away from the boxes and refrain from carrying firearms or wearing body armor. Another legitimate concern was that some defeated Republican candidates might mimic Trump and refuse to accept the results, prompting a rerun of 2020, albeit on a smaller scale.

Despite all these threats, democracy prevailed. In many closely watched races, voters repudiated Republican proponents of the Big Lie. Despite logistical issues in a few places, voting and vote-counting went ahead largely without incident. And, in something of a surprise, many of the defeated election deniers have publicly acknowledged that they lost. “The basic institutions of democracy held,” Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth who is a co-director of Bright Line Watch, told me. “We had another round of free and fair elections, and the major institutions of state haven’t been taken over by election deniers.”

Among the prominent Big Lie losers were the U.S. Senate candidates Don Bolduc (New Hampshire) and, it seems likely, Blake Masters (Arizona), along with the gubernatorial candidates Doug Mastriano (Pennsylvania), Tudor Dixon (Michigan), and Tim Michels (Wisconsin). In Michigan, Minnesota, and New Mexico, election deniers lost in races for secretary of state, and their vocal counterpart in Arizona, Mark Finchem, appears to be heading for a defeat, too, although that race remains undecided. Joanna Lydgate, who heads the nonpartisan election group States United Action, told the Times, “The voters stepped up to defend democracy.”

That they did, and they also delivered a message to the unrepresentative and far-right Supreme Court, which took it upon itself to overturn Roe v. Wade. In California, Michigan, and Vermont, voters approved amendments to their state constitutions that would guarantee abortion rights. In Kentucky, which Trump carried by more than twenty-five points in 2020, voters rejected a constitutional amendment in the opposite direction, which would have ended protections for abortion. Regardless of one’s view on Roe, these ballot measures indicated that the institutions of U.S. democracy are doing what they are supposed to do—giving the citizenry a voice.

In sum, Tuesday’s election showed that American democracy is in better shape than some people feared. But there were also some less encouraging developments. In the U.S. Senate races in Ohio and Wisconsin, J. D. Vance and Ron Johnson, two Republicans who have questioned the 2020 result and toadied to Trump, both prevailed. In some deep-red states, including Alabama, Indiana, and Wyoming, promoters of the Big Lie were elected as secretaries of state. And, according to the Washington Post, “at least a hundred and fifty G.O.P. election deniers running for the U.S. House won their races as of Friday.”

“There are going to be a lot of election deniers in the new Congress,” Nyhan noted. “We can’t be confident that the G.O.P. has repudiated election denialism. It has taken over the Party. The fact that the Democrats have done well in this one election doesn’t mean that the threat has been eliminated.” As if to emphasize this point, Trump is set to announce his 2024 candidacy, in which he will surely renew his assault on the norms and institutions of democracy. Although many Republican leaders are privately alarmed about the prospect of having Trump at the top of the ticket again, and though the conservative media outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch appear to have turned on him, the former President still has a great deal of support among the Republican base.

With Trump back out there whipping up the MAGA faithful, will other G.O.P. politicians, who have caved to him so often in the past, behave any differently? And would a defeat for Trump in the 2024 G.O.P. primary, perhaps at the hands of Ron DeSantis, actually end the threat of democratic erosion? “On the one hand, Trump is the locus of election denialism and the threat to democracy,” Nyhan said. “At the same time, though, he has demonstrated the appeal of an authoritarian populist approach, and there may well be other Republican candidates who will adopt it after him.” It was only three months ago that the audience at a conference of conservative Republicans warmly greeted Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian exponent of illiberal democracy, who has squashed his domestic opposition. “The results of the election were generally good news, but we have to keep up our vigilance,” Nyhan said. “There are still many grounds for concern.” ♦

[annahxredaxted]

I’ve never seen a pissier instagram user than Donald j trump himself like he’s such a sore loser