Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Politics & Religion => Topic started by: DougMacG on November 06, 2024, 06:05:14 AM
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World Leaders stand ready to work with Trump
https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-reacts-donald-trump-expected-victory-us-election-2024/
“Heartiest congratulations my friend Donald Trump on your historic election victory. As you build on the successes of your previous term, I look forward to renewing our collaboration to further strengthen the India-US Comprehensive Global and Strategic Partnership. Together, let’s work for the betterment of our people and to promote global peace, stability and prosperity,” said the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi
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Argentinian President Javier Milei congratulated Trump saying: “Now, Make America Great Again. You know that You can count on Argentina to carry out your task. Success and blessings.”
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Dear Donald and Melania Trump,
Congratulations on history’s greatest comeback!
Your historic return to the White House offers a new beginning for America and a powerful recommitment to the great alliance between Israel and America.
This is a huge victory!
In true friendship,
yours,
Benjamin and Sara Netanyahu
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A look at what Trump can and can’t accomplish in his first hundred days in office:
Implementing Trump’s border and trade policy agendas
First 100 days will be crucial in Washington swamp
PETER NAVARRO
NOV 06, 2024
Team,
Spent the final weeks on the Trump bus tour and in rallies with the Boss in Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. The excitement was palpable so the result last night was no surprise.
Here’s my thoughts on what’s next, as published in the Washington Times!
All my best,
Peter
P.S. Please share with a friend and restack!
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Implementing Trump’s border and trade policy agendas
Now that Donald Trump has won the historic 2024 election, he will aggressively pursue a policy agenda designed to rapidly fulfill every campaign promise he has made — see my book “The New MAGA Deal” for the 100 actions in 100 days he is likely to take.
Yet, for those who expect an overnight miracle, it is important to understand how the Washington swamp works and why it will seek to block Mr. Trump’s agenda.
Here’s what you need to know:
The Trump agenda will necessarily be implemented in two phases: (1) the proverbial first 100 days dominated by executive orders and (2) the first year (or more) thereafter featuring sweeping regulatory changes and new laws.
What distinguishes these two phases is the need — or lack thereof — for the Senate to confirm the Trump administration officials who will be critical in implementing the new MAGA deal.
Here’s the good news: Nobody in the West Wing other than the Office of Management and Budget director and Council of Economic Advisers chair needs Senate confirmation. The entire West Wing can be staffed immediately after Election Day without any Senate delay and can begin putting executive orders on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office for a Trump signature as early as Inauguration Day.
Here’s the bad news: All 22 Cabinet secretaries and deputy secretaries, along with numerous undersecretaries and assistant secretaries, must undergo a protracted and uncertain Senate confirmation process that is likely to take well beyond 100 days and up to a year or more to complete.
Such delays would not be unique to a second Trump term. It took 100 days to confirm 22 of Mr. Trump’s 24 Cabinet-level positions. Yet only five deputy secretaries were confirmed in those first 100 days.
As an example of how a hostile Senate can block a president on key issues, it took 111 days for Mr. Trump to get his U.S. trade representative, Bob Lighthizer, confirmed despite the importance the president had attached to his trade policies and cracking down on China.
President Biden fared no better, with only 18 of 23 Cabinet-level positions and 10 deputy secretaries confirmed. Together, Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden faced massive vacancies at the undersecretary and assistant secretary levels that stretched well into the second and third years of their terms because of Senate shenanigans.
It was not always like this. The Reagan and George W. Bush Cabinets were largely confirmed in the first month. Franklin D. Roosevelt and George Washington filled their Cabinets within days.
In a second Trump presidency, expect Senate Democrats to use legislative maneuvers such as holds, extended debate and committee obstruction to slow-walk the Trump Cabinet as they did in 2017. Expect at least a few anti-tariff, open-border Republican senators to use the same tools to block key appointments at Cabinet agencies involved in securing the border and implementing Trump tariff policies.
Note: A Trump-friendly Senate majority leader such as Rick Scott could ameliorate at least some of this intraparty warfare as both John Thune of South Dakota and John Cornyn of Texas are staunchly anti-tariff and initially opposed Mr. Trump’s 2024 candidacy.
It follows that 99% of what Mr. Trump will accomplish will be done in the first 100 days through executive orders and presidential memorandums. These will be crafted by presidential appointees in the West Wing who do not require Senate confirmation.
The White House chief of staff, the directors of the National Economic Council, Domestic Policy Council and National Security Council, the White House legal counsel and the staff secretary responsible for moving executive actions to the president’s desk will be of paramount importance. This is why the appointments of these key personnel must be swift and right.
This was not how things went while Mr. Trump was in office. All four of his chiefs of staff opposed his trade and border policies, as did his first White House legal counsel, Don McGahn, and first OMB director, Mike Mulvaney.
Both of Mr. Trump’s National Economic Council directors, Gary Cohn and Larry Kudlow, were staunchly anti-tariff, as were Trump’s two Domestic Policy Council directors. Meanwhile, his two staff secretaries, Rob Porter and Derek Lyons, repeatedly slow-walked or diluted his trade and border initiatives.
2024 should be different. There is a core of trusted Trump loyalists and West Wing veterans from Main Street rather than Wall Street who could step into these critical roles and make sure the Trump policy agenda gets out of the gate fast and hits the mark of 100 actions in 100 days outlined by the president at numerous rallies.
Of course, there are an equal number of Wall Street denizens and Republicans in name only jockeying for each of these roles.
As the boss says, “let’s see what happens.”
• Peter Navarro served as Donald Trump’s manufacturing czar and chief China hawk. He is the author of “The New MAGA Deal: The Unofficial Deplorables Guide to Donald Trump’s 2024 Platform.” Follow him at www.peternavarro.substack.com.
https://peternavarro.substack.com/p/implementing-trumps-border-and-trade?r=1qo1e&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&triedRedirect=true
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Claims the Epstein, Diddy, etc. list will be released by Trump. I certainly hope so:
https://x.com/BehizyTweets/status/1854603814978060445
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2nd post:
Liz Wheeler
@Liz_Wheeler
Trump is President-elect for two days:
- Stock market hits record high
- Migrant caravan at our border dissolves
- Hamas calls for end to war
- Bitcoin hits record high
- Putin ready to end Ukraine war
- Qatar kicks out Hamas leaders
- EU will buy U.S. gas not Russian gas
- Putin will sell oil in U.S. dollars
- Zelenskyy phones Trump & Elon
- NYC Mayor ends vouchers for illegals
- Mexico to stop migrants at U.S. border
- China wants to work peacefully with us
- Big U.S. company to move out of China
I repeat: Trump has been President-elect for two days.
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https://x.com/JackPosobiec/status/1854564278046478719
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https://x.com/JackPosobiec/status/1854564278046478719
Seems he makes a good point, prefaced with "if true". It does not endear him to Trump. I would still like to learn the longer, deeper story of the documents, if they incriminate the agencies attacking him and would have been destroyed - like J6 exculpatory d :-Docs etc.
If it was for no really good reason, then Trump was wrong, but should have been handled same as Joe, same as Pence, same as Hillary etc. Not armed, Jack booted thugs rampaging Mrs Trump's lingerie drawer while the former president was out of town.
Also, Pompeo perhaps was testing the waters for his own run at the time, and meaner things than that have been forgiven to assemble a new team.
Pompeo was a VERY good Sec of State.
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I don't agree
He said if the charges are true
and he is right Trump should have simply returned the darn documents instead of being the hard ass.
I don't see why I have to look the other way every time Trump is a jerk.
Yes I voted for him but I am not like Posobiec who is has love derangement syndrome for Trump.
And my view let
s move on. Pompeii was right on this point, and we should have him in the administration.
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"Trump should have simply returned the darn documents instead of being the hard ass."
Maybe. So much smoke here and so many lies from the Pravdas and dishonest leaks from Jack Smith that it is hard to tell.
As for Pompeo, the larger point is that Pompeo ran against him when Trump was looking to be down and out. What I cited above is but one instance of this larger point. I agree that Pompeo was an outstanding Sec. State, but am OK with Trump not feeling the love and trust.
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/donald-trump-banned-from-nation-s-secrets-by-defying-ethics-laws/ar-AA1tNxAH?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=143064c04b414d0d861ed8c6b213a4cd&ei=10
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https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-828491
I am good with this.
BTW I have noticed her doing real legislative work in the weeds about matters of importance.
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add her to the list of "smart
women" that Trump surround
s himself with.
Cuban very smart businessman and generally likable but a political gaffer.
He would not be a good candidate for President despite his dreams of doing it.
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maybe more than just a personal grudge and may also be due to policy differences:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/opinion-behind-trump-s-mike-pompeo-ban/ar-AA1tQj3a?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=f15f6a11152646dfacaefc410fffd3bc&ei=37
After all, didn't Vance say nasty stuff about Trump early on only to be promoted to VP?
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/muslim-americans-respond-to-donald-trump-s-nomination-of-elise-stefanik/ar-AA1tTqwT?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=a4c8e69bd9424326a32a5706b8b65703&ei=15
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https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2024/11/12/trump-has-made-his-pick-for-head-the-department-of-homeland-security-n2647653
Plus attractive :wink:
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I'm hearing of some great picks for the new Administration. But from what I read, I'm disappointed at first glance with the new Secretary of the Treasury, although I guess that decision is not final.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/11/09/donald-trump-cabinet-picks/76140063007/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Bessent
His plan I hear is based on the economic plan of former Japanese leader Shinzo Abe (ah-bay) , the three arrows.
https://www.adb.org/publications/three-arrows-abenomics-and-structural-reform-japan-inflation-targeting-policy-central#:~:text=Abenomics%20has%20%22three%20arrows%22%3A,and%20expanding%20social%20welfare%20expenses.
I like the Kudlow choice or whoever he would recommend. Maybe EJ Antoni
https://www.heritage.org/staff/ej-antoni
Casey Mulligan,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casey_B._Mulligan
Dan Mitchell
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Mitchell
How about a smart, strong woman, https://www.mercatus.org/scholars/veronique-de-rugy
Thomas Sowell is 94. Maybe he's available.
Hey Trump, are you reading the forum?
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https://x.com/Ultrafrog17/status/1856107996511604960
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https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-nominates-mike-huckabee-us-ambassador-israel
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Pete Hegseth from Forest Lake MN:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Hegseth
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I like Pete well enough, but Sec Def?!?
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and its' structure:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Secretary_of_Defense
Pete is probably the first military vet who is only a major but I have not checked the others
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What do we know about his books?
Although I am deeply concerned about his lack of executive experience and doubt his depth regarding the workings of the military-industrial complex and the complexities of the contracts thereunder, I do sense a genuine concern for those who actually serve and have served. He may be well-chosen to restore the bond with them and the will of those to come to serve.
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I agree
what do your military friends think ?
mine are gravely concerned about this choice.
We don't need to throw the dice which is what this choice is.
Why could he simply edict to present staff to cut out the woke stuff?
plus a Fox News host?!?
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What do we know about his books?
Excellent books I understand, but I haven't read them.
Referred to in this article:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-s-pick-of-pete-hegseth-to-lead-pentagon-signals-turmoil-ahead/ar-AA1tYWCR
Reflecting on this pick a day...
He might be the right guy for the job considering what needs to be done right now. They are losing good people to woke policies and they are having huge recruitment problems as well. Plus they need political leadership in the direction of building ships and arms etc, replacing what we left in Afghanistan and what we sent to Ukraine. That involves working in Washington, through the White House, on Capitol Hill.
The opposition media calls him a Fox News host, but they should be calling him an army veteran. The media experience Is a plus if it means he is a good communicator. I have not seen his show.
Other positions such as chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Secretary of the Navy etc should be filled with former top military Commanders like General Eisenhower or Patton if they were available.
The top generals should be ready to fight and win wars wherever sent. The civilian leadership above them, the Secretary of Defense and the President, are constraints on that power, not the designers of battlefield strategy, in my view. i.e. Navy, Army. Air Force can't go to Taiwan until we tell you to, but if we tell you to you need to fight and win like it's World War II again.
I would not choose Pete to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs but he might be just right for this position at this moment.
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" but he might be just right for this position at this moment in time."
but what if he is not?
never any guarantees but .......
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" but he might be just right for this position at this moment in time."
but what if he is not?
never any guarantees but .......
I was shocked at the pick also, but...
In times of war he tells the Generals, do what needs to be done and tell me what you need from Congress and the President to succeed. In times of peace, he'll be fine.
If he fails, it means the people above him and below him failed. Changing the personnel in the Pentagon is probably job one. He understands merit over dei. Now do it.
The Senate confirmation hearings will expose whether or not he is ready. I hope he can wow them. If not, shame on Trump.
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-picks-rep-matt-gaetz-to-be-attorney-general/ar-AA1u22eY?ocid=BingNewsSerp
sorry but this is becoming a real circus.
no one can talk me into this one.
:roll:
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On Martha MacCallum's show today, she had interesting convo with Shannon Bream. I get where you are coming from, but would suggest you don't solidify regarding him quite yet.
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" Martha MacCallum's show today, she had interesting convo with Shannon Bream."
Come on CD
what do these 2 have anything to do with it.
So what "insights" do they have?
Gaetz really?
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I respect MM, and IMHO Shannon Bream, beneath the good looks, isan attorney, is strong on legal analysis. I'm going by what they said though, not who they are.
Not inclined to flesh it out in this moment though. No doubt there will be much sound and fury in the coming days anyway.
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Legal Insurrection appears less than pleased w/ Gaetz. One commenter suspects he serves as a stalking horse to convince all the DOJ lefties to jump ship:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/11/trump-nominates-rep-matt-gaetz-for-attorney-general/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=trump-nominates-rep-matt-gaetz-for-attorney-general
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An interesting, inside baseball discussion of recess appointments. It appears there may be a petard in play:
The Volokh Conspiracy
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent
About The Volokh Conspiracy
Could President Trump Recess Appoint His Entire Cabinet Under Justice Scalia's Noel Canning Concurrence?
Would a person serving under the Vacancies Reform Act, who resigns, create a vacancy for purposes of the Recess Appointments Clause? Would a presidential adjournment of Congress be an inter-session or an intra-session recess?
JOSH BLACKMAN | 11.13.2024 4:47 PM
Ed Whelan writes that President Trump may adjourn Congress as a means to instantly confirm his entire cabinet without any confirmation hearings. In an earlier post, Ed writes that this approach may risk the Court overruling Justice Breyer's Noel Canning majority opinion, and adopting Justice Scalia's concurrence.
I maintain that Justice Scalia's opinion is correct on originalist grounds, as I noted in my earlier post. And I would be happy to see Justice Breyer's majority opinion repudiated. But even so, is this potential plan inconsistent with Justice Scalia's concurrence?
Under Scalia's opinion, the President could only fill a vacancy that arises during the recess of the Senate. Trump's plan would only be feasible if these cabinet positions become vacant during the recess of the Senate. Presumably, the holdover Biden cabinet officials will be long gone on January 20. And, on January 20, I suspect the President will use the Vacancies Reform Act to detail friendly people already in the federal government to serve as acting cabinet officials. What if one of them were to resign during the presidentially-induced recess? That is, on January 21, Trump adjourns Congress, and all acting cabinet officials resign. Would those vacancies have arisen during the recess of the Senate? Or, would the relevant starting point be when the last-confirmed official resigned? I don't know how the Recess Appointments Clause, as understood by Scalia, interacts with the Vacancies Reform Act. I doubt anyone has given this issue much thought.
There is a second issue. Under Justice Scalia's majority opinion, the President can only make a recess appointment during an inter-session recess, and not during an intra-session recess. That is, the President can make a recess appointment during the recess between sessions, and not during the recess in the middle of a session. Would a presidential-induced recess be an inter-session recess or an intra-session recess? This power has never been exercised before, so there is no precedent.
I had always thought this clause would cause an inter-session recess. At the Framing, intra-session recesses were very rare. Generally, Congress would meet for continuous periods, taking only short breaks, and then take very long inter-session breaks. To the extent this power was more likely to be used, it would be used to decide when to conclude one session, and begin another. But I don't know. I do think it is the case that this clause was not designed to trigger the President's recess appointment power. But that is a separate question from what kind of recess this power would trigger.
Those who joined the Noel Canning majority may very soon regret their choice.
https://reason.com/volokh/2024/11/13/could-president-trump-recess-appoint-his-entire-cabinet-under-justice-scalias-noel-canning-concurrence/
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I presume this is the video you are speaking of:
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-shannon-bream-says-trump-attorney-general-pick-matt-gaetz-would-definitely-be
It isn't very elucidating other than he has good chance of not being confirmed anyway.
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/sen-fetterman-calls-trump-s-gaetz-pick-a-god-tier-level-of-trolling-just-to-trigger-a-meltdown/vi-AA1u36gN?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=2414eda4b70c44b1b1b9e54f88c39c86&ei=15
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Following the Fetterman comments it went on with a video reporting the reaction within the Justice Dept. "Insanity!" Their reaction indicates he hit the right nerve. Files are being shredded to get ready for the new scrutiny.
Gaetz in the House was not a team player. In the DOJ, we are not looking for a team player right now.
My view: For what Trump has gone through the last nine years, he deserves his pick for Attorney General, whoever that may be.
Bill Barr had experience and some gravitas. I'm still waiting for him to investigate vote fraud and reform the agencies. We unfortunately need someone with no friends in the agencies.
These aren't ordinary times and Trump only has four years, maybe just two.
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I'm hearing from people who know him, Pete Hegseth is a great pick.
And Marco Rubio is a GREAT pick. I wonder what President Xi thinks of that.
Plus, Ron DeSantis gets to pick his successor in the Senate.
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https://youtu.be/fqMN_ixj41U?si=WhM3UxATZuzVmTXS
He's ready, day one.
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NY Post:
https://nypost.com/2024/11/13/opinion/donald-trumps-defense-secretary-pick-pete-hegseth-shows-why-dems-lost-the-2024-election/
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Vance on Gaetz pick:
The main issue with Matt Gaetz is that he used his office to prosecute his political opponents and authorized federal agents to harass parents who were peacefully protesting at school board meetings.
Oh wait, that's actually Merrick Garland, the current attorney general.
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I am still not convinced but as always time will tell.
I suppose he could replace Justice Thomas next.
sarcasm....yes
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I think this piece does a good job of explaining the Gaetz's backstory. It does reek of being a DC insider smear inspired by his effectiveness. If so it looks to me like Trump is giving the Deep State a long look at his middle finger:
The FBI’s Matt Gaetz Operation Sidelined An Effective Republican Voice At A Crucial Time. That Was The Point
BY: MOLLIE HEMINGWAY
SEPTEMBER 26, 2022
Gaetz was a highly effective member of Congress. Then all that changed with the publication of an anonymously sourced report accusing him of possibly being a child sex trafficker.
Author Mollie Hemingway profile
Prior to March 2021, Rep. Matt Gaetz was known for prominently pushing against Beltway groupthink.
The colorful Florida congressman had been one of the few Republicans to help win the public relations battle against the Russia collusion hoax, the conspiracy theory that President Donald Trump had stolen the 2016 election by colluding with Russia.
When Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., held secret hearings, selectively released information, and lied about coordination with the so-called whistleblower during the Ukraine impeachment hearings, Gaetz led a group of Republican congressmen in protest. The move, which enraged the corporate media and other partisans, helped unify Republicans in their eventual defeat of the impeachment stunt.
Following the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol, Gaetz defended concerns about election integrity, reminded Democrats of their support of nationwide riots the preceding summer, and criticized media and political overreaction to the rioters. He remains one of the very few Republicans to focus on the plight facing the men and women the Justice Department is targeting, just years after the department largely ignored the destructive nationwide riots that besieged the White House, federal courthouses, police precincts, and national monuments.
When Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., received praise from Beltway insiders for leading a small group of Republicans to join the Democrats’ second impeachment of President Trump, Gaetz immediately went to Wyoming to rally Republicans. The two had repeatedly sparred over Cheney’s support for lengthy and poorly managed foreign wars that Gaetz said did not serve American interests.
“We are in a battle for the soul of the Republican Party, and I intend to win it,” he said at a Jan. 28, 2021, rally in Cheyenne, long before she would be ousted from her leadership position in the House Republican conference. “You can help me break a corrupt system. You can send a representative who actually represents you, and you can send Liz Cheney home — back home to Washington, D.C.” Harriet Hageman delivered a humiliating primary defeat of Cheney less than two years later.
Gaetz was a frequent fixture on television, reportedly averaging 87 minutes a month on air during the 12 months prior to the end of March 2021. He was even considering leaving Congress to take a job as a cable news host.
Then on March 30, 2021, all that changed with the publication of an anonymously sourced report accusing him of possibly being a child sex trafficker.
A group of New York Times reporters who won awards for their roles pushing the Russia collusion lie penned an anonymously sourced article with a devastating headline: “Matt Gaetz Is Said to Face Justice Dept. Inquiry Over Sex With an Underage Girl.” The story was sourced to “three people briefed on the matter,” none of them identified in any way. The story contained no evidence against Gaetz of sex crimes, but much guilt-by-association. Late in the story, the pack of reporters admitted that no charges had been filed and that the “extent of his criminal exposure is unclear.”
Gaetz strenuously and immediately asserted his innocence and denied the accusations.
The Damage Was Done
On Friday, 18 months after he was accused of being a pedophile and child sex trafficker, the Washington Post published another anonymously sourced report. “Career prosecutors recommend no charges for Matt Gaetz,” said the article, published quietly on a Friday. Not only was he never convicted of any of the crimes he was alleged to have committed, he wasn’t even charged. And, if you believe the anonymously sourced claims, he isn’t going to be.
The damage was already done by the initial report, written by reporters who regularly regurgitate political leaks from Department of Justice and FBI sources.
“Matt Gaetz’s days in politics are likely numbered,” one CNN reporter claimed days after the initial report, noting how few people had come to his defense.
Of course, as even The Washington Post admitted, “Gaetz’s position is shaky. The allegations are of a sort that makes it very difficult for his colleagues to come to his defense. … [T]here’s an obvious political risk to vocally defending someone who might face sex-trafficking charges, so expect his political allies (including the former president) to remain fairly muted.”
That was the goal of the politicized leaks. Gaetz couldn’t very well critique the Department of Justice for their political prosecutions if he was a pariah who everyone thought was a pedophile.
On the year anniversary of the original Gaetz story, journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote that leaks “have the effect, and often the intent, of destroying someone’s reputation, convicting them of repellent crimes in the court of public opinion that will never be brought in a court of law, thus relieving the state of the requirement to prove the crime and depriving the accused the opportunity to exonerate themselves.”
That’s precisely what happened.
He was the target of multiple “Saturday Night Live” skits. “Gaetz is under investigation by the Justice Department for a number of crimes, including child sex trafficking and allegedly paying for sex,” The Washington Post said in a video report about the skits.
Politico reporters suggested the walls were closing in, writing, “Gaetz’s allies now fear that Greenberg is preparing to strike a deal with prosecutors to deliver Gaetz.” That was the tenor of coverage for months, even as Gaetz’s claims regarding being the target of criminal extortion were validated.
The Associated Press tried to tie Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to the scandal.
“If Matt Gaetz is innocent of sex trafficking, why does he need an expensive criminal defense attorney from New York?” said one left-wing attorney who is popular with corporate media.
The Democrat-run Ethics Committee in the House typically waits to run investigations of members until after the Department of Justice finishes an investigation. In Gaetz’s case, the committee went out of its way to begin — and announce — an investigation into the embattled Florida member.
Cheney and other obsessed Never Trump activists (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) delighted in the anonymously sourced allegations against Gaetz. They haven’t yet apologized or publicly commented on Friday’s also anonymously sourced news.
Former Vice President Mike Pence’s Chief of Staff Marc Short even accused Gaetz of being a child trafficker just this past July after the congressman said Pence was a “nice guy” but that he would never be president.
“I don’t know if Mike Pence will run for president in 2024, but I don’t think Matt Gaetz will have an impact on that,” Short said. “In fact, I’d be surprised if he’s still voting. It’s more likely he’ll be in prison for child trafficking by 2024.”
War on Critics
The Department of Justice, the FBI, and the corporate media have a history of viciously attacking — usually through deceptive leaks and lies — anyone who threatens their power. Then-Rep. Devin Nunes was viciously attacked for his leading role in fighting the Russia collusion hoax. Selective leaks to propagandists at The Washington Post, The New York Times, and other outlets were used to gin up ethics complaints, allege wrongdoing, slow down oversight, sideline effective pushback, and cover up massive malfeasance on the part of the agency.
The Department of Justice and the FBI are out of control. The propaganda press are operating as co-conspirators in the operations they run against the American people. Should Republicans be able to take control of one or both houses of Congress, their task of helping save the republic must begin with using their oversight and purse power to dramatically rein in bureaucratic tyranny.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is the Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist. She is Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College and a Fox News contributor. She is the co-author of Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court. She is the author of "Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections." Reach her at mzhemingway@thefederalist.com
https://thefederalist.com/2022/09/26/the-fbis-matt-gaetz-operation-sidelined-an-effective-republican-voice-at-a-crucial-time-that-was-the-point/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR2de8JV0RaDV6YriCXLwJpVdlpMTRztRCQBBGqCBWO8_mjIrWCllAXRhv4_aem_eWiG20cZi5-MHMQkpCroJA
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all I gather is he did or does like to go out with girls who are much younger but of age of consent.
this is not sex trafficing or rape for sure
perhaps somehow there was some connection with someone who was.
the rest is murky to me.
I wonder if the Congressional bruhaha between Gaetz who was pissed at McCarthy and now vice versa has something to do with the investigation - meaning political or based on facts.
I dunno....
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all I gather is he did or does like to go out with girls who are much younger but of age of consent.
this is not sex trafficing or rape for sure
perhaps somehow there was some connection with someone who was.
the rest is murky to me.
I wonder if the Congressional bruhaha between Gaetz who was pissed at McCarthy and now vice versa has something to do with the investigation - meaning political or based on facts.
I dunno....
My take is Trump thinks a Deep State setup such as the one he endured is at the root of Gaetz’s problems and this nomination will force them to poop or get off the pot. It’ll be fun to see which the choose.
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He is smeared by the 'seriousness of the charge'. Makes people like us hesitant to support him.
We want to think the FBI would never do this to a man if he wasn't guilty. Too bad we don't live in that world.
Both Trump and Gaetz must think he is Innocent (and Gaetz would know) or why would they invite more scrutiny.
I'm not getting behind him. I'm just in favor of Trump getting his pick up and try to fulfill his promises, unless we are shown good reason otherwise.
I wanted the DeSantis team. Before that I wanted the Rubio team. But we have this and I don't want it slowed down. We're asking him to completely reshape major institutions. Let's give it a try. Just my thoughts.
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https://patriotpost.us/articles/111897?mailing_id=8793&subscription_uuid=36e3d4d4-c349-40fa-9856-d1504ff07188&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.8793&utm_campaign=digest
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/pete-hegseth-s-plan-to-overhaul-the-military-you-need-to-fire-a-ton-of-generals/ar-AA1u5EPJ?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=c64e748d01cf4391b4f3efc95e37e59a&ei=13
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Second
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/tulsi-gabbard-s-ties-to-cult-could-cost-her-intel-job/ar-AA1u6FFn?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=695b0c6f46f041628aea711dd6e0e3e0&ei=13
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“If Trump wanted to defibrillate the Justice Department, the Matt Gaetz nomination is the 100,000-volt option. The President-elect clearly wants an outsider without cultural or professional ties to DOJ. However, securing confirmation will be a monumental challenge...”
Assuming Gaetz is the victim of character assassination, even if he’s not confirmed he’ll prove to be a win as the hearing will allow the DOJ’s skullduggery to be exposed, while the Deep State will poor resources into derailing him, resource it won’t be able to apply elsewhere. More here:
https://x.com/jonathanturley/status/1857007389834174672?s=61
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/stunningly-unqualified-expert-urges-senate-to-reject-trump-s-spymaster-pick/ar-AA1u3dVx?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=a982d2db16d643f1b18b52f9a89ee55d&ei=13
He is correct that she has absolutely zero background in these deep waters.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoN5ovwB8s4
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This does sound plausible:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/pete-hegseth-would-get-outmaneuvered-by-pentagon-leaders-ex-trump-aide/ar-AA1u37FN?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=e80451b744e5497dbf055f39f9e1daf8&ei=14
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/stunningly-unqualified-expert-urges-senate-to-reject-trump-s-spymaster-pick/ar-AA1u3dVx?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=a982d2db16d643f1b18b52f9a89ee55d&ei=13
He is correct that she has absolutely zero background in these deep waters.
Unlike Pete Buttigieg, etc.
Unlike George HWBush who was chair of the RNC before being CIA Director.
From the article :
"She has no significant experience directing or managing much of anything."
- Wouldn't that describe Barack Obama, and Joe Biden as well?
Wasn't Tulsi vetted to be President (top 10 finisher, ahead of Kamala) and considered for VP, but not to handle 'intelligence'?
Without doubts standards we'd have none.
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4th post: Fetterman on the Gaetz pick:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/11/fetterman-trump-picking-gaetz-is-god-tier-level-trolling/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=fetterman-trump-picking-gaetz-is-god-tier-level-trolling
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/javier-milei-becomes-first-world-001503932.html
I approve this message.
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8-) 8-) 8-)
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Not my list but interesting.
In order, hardest first:
1. Tulsi
2. Gaetz
3. RFK
4. Hegseth
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Does anyone remember when Hillary was secretary of state that she was not given the most contentious trouble spots, those were to be run from the Obama White House.
When Trump picks a loyalist instead of an expert, that is a bit of how I take it, they plan to run it from the White House and the cabinet secretary will be the face of the policy.
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There was a mainstream article today about how the senior officials at doj believe this attorney general pick to be Insanity, etc. The more shook they are, the better this pick is likely to turn out.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/doj-stunned-at-trumps-insane-unbelievable-choice-of-matt-gaetz-for-attorney-general/ar-AA1u36ky
WASHINGTON — "President-elect Donald Trump's choice of Matt Gaetz — a Florida congressman who was recently the target of an FBI investigation — to be the next attorney general of the United States sent shockwaves through the Justice Department on Wednesday."
- As intended.
" who was recently the target of an FBI investigation", means different things to different people in 2024, lawfare, warfare world.
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Heck, why would he want to give his clear enemies any sort of say in his selections?
Trump’s team skips FBI background checks for some Cabinet picks
Evan Perez Zachary Cohen Holmes Lybrand Kristen Holmes
US Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, speaks to the press outside the US Capitol as the House votes on a continuing resolution in the House in Washington, DC on September 30, 2023. Last-gasp moves to prevent a US government shutdown took a dramatic step forward Saturday, as Democrats overwhelmingly backed an eleventh-hour Republican measure to keep federal funding going for 45 days, albeit with a freeze on aid to Ukraine. The stopgap proposal adopted by the House of Representatives with a vote of 335-91 was pitched by Speaker Kevin McCarthy. (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP) (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)
Gaetz couldn’t get a job at the FBI if he tried, Andrew McCabe says
President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team is bypassing traditional FBI background checks for at least some of his Cabinet picks while using private companies to conduct vetting of potential candidates for administration jobs, people close to the transition planning say.
Trump and his allies believe the FBI system is slow and plagued with issues that could stymie the president-elect’s plan to quickly begin the work of implementing his agenda, people briefed on the plans said. Critics say the intrusive background checks sometimes turn up embarrassing information used to inflict political damage.
The discussions come as Trump has floated several controversial choices for high-level positions in the US government – including Matt Gaetz for attorney general and Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence.
Ultimately, the president has the final authority on who he nominates and decides to share intelligence with, regardless of the established protocol set in the wake of World War II to make sure those selections don’t have unknown foreign ties or other issues that could raise national security concerns.
But circumventing background checks would be bucking a long-established norm in Washington. It also reflects Trump’s deep mistrust of the national security establishment, which he derides as the Deep State. Sources say he has privately questioned the need for law enforcement background checks.
Dan Meyer, a national security attorney in Washington, DC, said the incoming Trump administration “doesn’t want harmony.” They “don’t want the FBI to coordinate a norm; they want to hammer the norm,” he said.
Some of Trump’s advisers began circulating a memo before the election, urging him to bypass the traditional background check process for some of his appointees, a source briefed on the memo told CNN. Instead of using law enforcement, the memo proposed hiring private researchers who could move more quickly to perform background checks.
The president-elect could always, however, decide to eventually submit names to the FBI.
Some of Trump’s picks for roles in his administration could run into problems during a background check, posing potential hurdles during the confirmation process.
Gaetz has been mired for years in Justice Department and House ethics investigations related to sex trafficking. The Justice Department declined to charge Gaetz, and the House ethics probe, days away from being completed, was effectively ended when the Florida congressman resigned from his seat this week. Gaetz has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.
Gabbard, meanwhile, has frequently appeared to take positions more favorable to foreign leaders widely considered not just American adversaries but, in some cases, brutal dictators, including the presidents of Syria and Russia, raising questions from allies and critics alike.
Gabbard notably met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Syria in 2017, and said in 2019 that he was “not an enemy of the United States.”
In early 2022, she echoed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rationale for the country’s invasion of Ukraine, pinning the blame not on Moscow but on the Biden administration’s failure to acknowledge “Russia’s legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine’s becoming a member of NATO” — a popular strain of thought in some right-wing circles.
In addition to the confirmation process, FBI background checks are used to vet nominees for a security clearance, which an attorney general nominee is required to have to do the job.
As president, Trump could bypass the process and order Gaetz to be granted a security clearance, as he did in his first term to grant a clearance to his son-in-law Jared Kushner after the approval languished amid questions about potential conflicts of interest.
Trump ordered clearances to be granted to about 25 people whose applications were initially denied for possible national security concerns, CNN previously reported.
If Gaetz does not participate in the vetting process, the FBI could still try to do a basic investigation at the request of the Senate. But one source familiar with the process noted that it is difficult to collect some data without his consent.
US officials are still waiting for the Trump transition team to submit a list of names, including those under consideration for Cabinet-level roles, to be formally vetted for security clearances, the source said.
Trump’s team has, to date, resisted participating in the formal transition process, which includes signing memorandums of understanding and secrecy agreements typically considered a prerequisite for accessing classified material before the new administration assumes office.
Instead, Trump’s transition team has been focused on conducting its own internal vetting of candidates for top administration jobs.
The delay in vetting candidates for clearances also impacts the timing of classified briefings for incoming administration officials, according to the source familiar with the process.
While Trump will have the authority to override any vetting concerns and grant access to sensitive material once he takes office, he won’t be able to do so until he is sworn in on January 20. So if Trump’s team continues to skirt the vetting process, those tapped for key roles wouldn’t be able to receive briefings until then.
The Trump team’s lack of urgency when it comes to pre-vetting individuals for national security positions isn’t surprising and is consistent with how he handled the transition process after the 2016 election, the source said. Trump’s team was “ill-prepared” for taking over in 2017, so the current lack of interest in participating in the vetting process is “par for the course, maybe,” the source added.
Submitting individuals who have current access to classified material or were previously vetted could help move the process along while those with no US government experience will take some time. Trump’s pick of Rep. Mike Waltz as national security adviser, is one such example.
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2nd post. Kennedy takes on the Nemesis form:
NEMESIS ☙ Friday, November 15, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠
A special Robert Kennedy, Jr. edition, pushing past the hot takes and quieting the media racket to explore the profound significance of this revolutionary, historic nomination.
JEFF CHILDERS
NOV 15, 2024
Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! And today’s Coffee & Covid is a special edition about the most exciting development since Trump’s re-election: the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to the post of Secretary of Health and Human Services. You’ve already seen the news, let’s mute all the noise and the hot takes and dig deep into what this miraculous development really means for America. You won’t be disappointed.
🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞
We had no right to receive such a blessing, especially after President Trump’s definitive victory. But it’s actually happened, and we are profoundly grateful. Also amusing is watching the Establishment freak out worse than a mask zealot at a country music festival. But however hard they are currently freaking out, they haven’t even scratched the surface. Just wait till they figure out what Kennedy’s confirmation would really mean.
🤯🤯 On Wednesday, President Trump, like the Road Runner kindly returning Wile E. Coyote’s misplaced explosives, dropped an Acme Gaetz-grenade down the back of progressive Washington’s trousers while it was distracted looking for the President down in the gulch of Florida. After Gaetz’s nomination for Attorney General, was inconceivable the President could have been any more provocative, but he managed it anyway. CNN covered the story under the headline, “Trump’s latest controversial Cabinet pick could have a huge impact on Americans’ health and lives.” Hopefully.
image.png
While DC was distracted, distressedly leaping around frantically trying to get the Gaetz-grenade out of its back pocket, the news of Kennedy’s nomination for Secretary of HHS fell out of the Mar-a-Lago-colored sky like an entire crate of Acme Gaetz-grenades and squashed CDC headquarters.
A few second later, a little cloud of black smoke exploded out from under the Kennedy-crate, along with a blackened arm holding a little sign that said, “boom.”
The implications are so stunningly vast that no single headline could do the story justice. CNBC took the economic view, reporting “Vaccine maker stocks fall as Trump chooses RFK Jr. to lead HHS.” (Losers included Moderna, Pfizer, Novavax, GlaxoSmithKline, and others.) The far-left UK Guardian headlined its story, “RFK Jr condemned as ‘clear and present danger’ after Trump nomination.”
It was a total freak out, from one end of J-street to the other. Fox:
image 3.png
NPR, which should be busy polishing up its resume instead of running hit pieces against my home state, darkly wondered in its headline, “What happens when a vaccine skeptic leads health policy? Ask Florida.”
Incidentally, why do they hate the Sunshine State so much? Hey M’arn’a, what’s the worst thing xe can think of, besides Florida?
Returning to NPR’s headlined question, the answer to what happens was, get ready, more vaccine skepticism. Dr. Lisa Gwynn, a licensed Miami doctor who believes men and women are biologically indistinguishable, is frankly terrified. She’s terrified because so far this year, Broward county has seen five measles cases. Five! (Everyone was fine, of course, but still.) Five! (In a county of millions.)
‘Measles cases’ is the metric the Establishment is using to measure vaccine skepticism these days. Whatever.
But possibly the best description of what terrifies the Establishment the most appeared in the sub-headline to one of the myriad New York Times articles about RFK’s nomination. It read, “Whether the Senate would confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic who has unorthodox views about medicine, is an open question.”
Unorthodox views.
🤯 Kennedy, one hardly needs reminding, is a lifelong Democrat. He believes in manmade climate change and strict gun control. When the Times cries over his ‘unorthodox’ views, all Kennedy’s intersecting areas of common progressive interests count for absolutely nothing. The fact that caused the Times and the rest of DC’s utter panic over Trump’s win, the fact that sent vaccine stock prices straight downwards, is the fact that Robert Kennedy has called for vaccines to be tested like all other drugs are.
Elite progressives can be divided into two groups. There is a smaller, cynical cohort, a kind of Marxist human parasite, that grows ever richer from every latest looney leftwing social experiment. They are in Congress. The larger group includes the true believers, who infest the government bureaucracy and the academy. They are rules-followers from birth. Follow the rules, and you’ll succeed. Break the rules, and you fail.
One of progressives’ most fundamental rules, to the point of religious dogma, is take your medicine and do what the doctor said. It matters not that America’s health is worse in every measure since the government took over big medicine (or vice-versa, the result is the same, it matters not who started it). Drugs are their sacrament, and compliance is the sacred ritual.
The unimaginable idea that HHS —the single largest agency in the U.S. government, with a budget exceeding national defense —a massive institution trusted to safeguard the sacraments— could be just handed over to a man who’s spent his career suing the government and vaccine companies is, well, unthinkable.
🤯 Progressives don’t want to debate vaccine safety and efficacy. They don’t want to question it. It must not even be discussed. But … how can they avoid the debate if RFK takes charge of HHS, which in turn oversees the CDC, FDA, NIH, and so many other sub-agencies that nobody is really sure how many there are, and I am not making that up.
Literally. Nobody knows. Even ChatGPT agreed:
image 2.png
The pandemic exposed a whole raft of major federal bureaucracies, like the intelligence services and the Pentagon, who all drink from HHS’ morbidly obese ‘health’ budget.
Including, but not limited to, military bioweapons engineering under the sinister rubric of gain-of-function research for predictive vaccine development. Just saying.
It is literally impossible for Congress to oversee the byzantine labyrinth of agencies, grants, foreign and domestic cooperative initiatives, and NGOs that all feed off HHS’s trillion-dollar annual budget. But there might be one man who could make a dent. That man is Robert Kennedy, who has spent decades digging through HHS’s trash and knows, maybe better than anybody, “where the bodies are buried.”
🤯 But the prospect of Kennedy digging around in the CDC skunkworks is not even the Establishment’s biggest anxiety. Over time, sneakily, gradually, bit-by-bit, the nation’s health laws have handed over vast swathes of power to one unelected official: the Secretary of HHS.
Take, for example, the PREP Act, over which I am currently suing Biden and the federal government. The Act provides total liability immunity to entire industries as long as the HHS Secretary signs a single declaration— literally, just a piece of paper. PFizer and Moderna, just to pick two, are both immune from all vaccine injury claims simply because Biden’s HHS Secretary said so.
So, Kennedy could upend the whole nauseating scheme in about ten minutes, just by issuing a new declaration. Kennedy could also, in his new declaration, order the PREP office to start recognizing automatically a whole slew of injuries related to covid countermeasures, and he could even direct the office to stop rejecting untimely claims. That single declaration could blow the lid off the whole covid scam and immediately aid millions.
And that’s just one Act. Which explains why you’re seeing headlines like Politico’s:
image 4.png
To be crystal clear: the HHS Secretary has been given so much power that Kennedy, if confirmed, won’t need Congress.
🤯 Even since before the primaries, many folks were mad at President Trump for not disavowing the covid shots. But had he done that, President Trump might never have been elected. Now that he’s been elected, he’s elevated the nation’s most notorious vaccine skeptic to a position to officially disavow not just the covid shots, but all so-called vaccines that have not truly been proven safe and effective.
Quibblers argue that vaccines are ‘long-proven’ to be safe and effective. But Kennedy’s repeated point, with which this author strongly agrees, is that most vaccines were never tested against placebos, nor measured for long-term, all-cause morbidity and mortality. Those aren’t unreasonable requests.
🤯 Now, let’s look closer at President Trump’s Gaetz-grenade. Flip the calendar back to 2005, when President Bush electrified the Establishment by nominating for the Supreme Court his personal lawyer, Harriet Miers, to replace beloved, left-leaning Sandra Day O’Connor, who'd retired (she died recently in 2023). The Establishment demanded another female justice to replace the late O’Connor, so Bush offered them Harriet, a die-hard conservative battle-lawyer who’d never even been a temporary traffic magistrate, much less a judge of any kind.
Following the predictable outrage explosion, including by many conservatives, Bush conceded, withdrew Harriet, and nominated conservative stalwart Samuel Alito instead. The demands for a female justice were quieted. Justice Alito slid quickly and comfortably through the Senate on greased skids. It was a masterful bit of political rope-a-dope that silenced enough diversity dopes to tilt the Court rightwards.
Here’s the point: Is Matt Gaetz the 2024 version of Harriet Miers? Is he just a provocative political sacrifice, to ease confirmation of the real target, RFK?
The Senate cannot politically afford to refuse many of Trump’s picks. RINOs must pick their battles wisely. I don’t claim to enjoy even a shadowy fraction of the political genius that re-elected President Trump against all odds in a modern-era landslide.
But from up here in the cheap seats, Matt’s questionable nomination appears to be brilliant, and offers hope for RFK’s confirmation. At minimum, it might give the Senate cover; by refusing to confirm Gaetz, the Senate shows backbone, shows it’s not just a rubber stamp but a separate-and-equal branch, thereby saving face while confirming Trump’s other nominations.
Still, don’t count Matt out. Yesterday, Politico ran a surprising story headlined, “Why Matt Gaetz Might Actually Become Attorney General.” The story makes the affirmative case for the unlikely, combative Florida Congressman. In short, Politico explained Matt Gaetz is scrappy and principled, doesn’t care what people think, and he has a proven record as a long-shot winner, just like President Trump. Read the whole thing.
🤯 At this historic moment, pregnant with hope and rapturous possibility, we cannot fail to finish with the pandemic overreach that made all of this possible.
image 10.png
It cannot be reasonably argued that, without the lockdowns, mandates, and political prosecutions, none of what Trump is now doing would even be imaginable, much less on approach for a safe landing. As the President reportedly observed at a Mar-a-Lago event last night, in 2016 he was dogged by Democrat debate that he lost the popular vote, and thus had no mandate.
That slender reed of an argument, that thin straw, was enough to fill up the tank of political fuel powering the so-called “Resistance” movement. The Resistance’s progressive ranks were, as you well know, padded out by squishy Republicans who successfully opposed Trump’s entire agenda and gummed up the machinery worse than an aging relative who clicks on every pop-up offering to “Clean Your Computer Now!”
Ahem, Liz Cheney. Ahem, Adam Kinzinger. You shall not be missed.
Corporate media’s talking heads can analyze the data all they want. But there is a simple explanation for why Trump was elected. He was elected because America is pissed off. It’s no more complicated than that. Corporate media keeps crying about how President Trump wants revenge. They’re missing the real story, maybe intentionally.
It’s not that President Trump wants revenge. A furious America wants revenge.
We want revenge for lost jobs. We want revenge for lost small businesses. We want revenge for boys cheating girls out of their athletic trophies. We want revenge for bizarre cross-dressers appointed to high offices. We want revenge for wretched drag queens exposing themselves on the White House lawn. We want revenge for the “Pride” flag hoisted above Old Glory. We want revenge for $7 butter, for open borders, for children’s lost educational attainment, for “six foot distancing,” for streets lined with homeless tents, for sneering, hubristic elites commanding trust in “the science,” for soccer moms raided by FBI SWAT teams, for raw political prosecutions, for lives ruined by fentanyl, for euthanized pet squirrels and cats butchered by Haitians, for kids sterilized by trans-affirmed drugs, for elderly parents dying alone, and for chronic, untreatable, disabling vaccine injuries.
“Revenge” is not just, as corporate media feared, Trump’s prosecution of the real insurrectionists who overthrew the 2020 election. What revenge really looks like is quickly and surely becoming abundantly and painfully clear.
image 5.png
Nothing about this is new. Nothing about this was unpredictable. As has been true since the dawn of time, revenge’s terrifying aspect is Nemesis. Nemesis is now taking its form, the form of Trump appointing to the top of executive federal agencies people who hate those agencies the most.
Dear CDC and FDA: prepare to drain the bitter cup filled with the tainted wine of your arrogance and hubris.
It’s not just Gaetz and Kennedy freaking out the Establishment. It’s the whole slate. For example, behold this overwrought headline from CNN, yesterday:
image 7.png
The Ancient Greeks believed that Nemesis was the goddess of retribution and vengeance. Nemesis hates hubris, or excessive pride. Nemesis balances the cosmic scales of justice by suddenly and unexpectedly appearing to punish mortals and gods alike just when they think they have won the day.
image 6.png
No explanation is needed to describe the prideful arrogance of the Democrats’ elite, paternalistic, pseudo-intellectual, top-down biomedical authoritarianism. It is self-evident. It was always there, long before covid, hidden behind a smiling mask of arrogant, faux empathy.
The pandemic ripped off the mask. The Democrats sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind.
It is, perhaps, too soon yet to express any gratitude for the pandemic. But that day is just over the horizon. We must wait until the crops have been hauled in to weigh the full harvest. But the seeds were planted, the crops are grown, and the farmers are already at work in the fields.
🔥🔥 I’ll leave you with this bit of encouragement. The far-far-left Economist ran a shocking story yesterday with a headline that asked, “Should America ban fluoride in its drinking water?”
image 8.png
Get ready. The Economist’s answer appeared right in the article’s subheadline: “The idea by Robert F. Kennedy junior—nominated by Donald Trump as health secretary—may have teeth.”
May have teeth! (Get it? Fluoride, teeth? Very clever, Economist.)
Defying all odds, the Economist actually endorsed Kennedy’s fluoride skepticism:
While the article continued by describing in painstaking detail how difficult it would be to implement any federal fluoride ban, the article’s overall tone and conclusion was it might not be such a bad idea.
Just one year ago, questioning fluoride was a cancellable offense. Now, even the lefties at the Economist can, like Biblical Belshazzar, read the writing on the wall.
Call it the “Kennedy Effect.” In other words, Maha is already starting. MAHA-HA-HA!.
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3rd post. A Politico post re Gaetz that basically says don’t count him outa:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/11/14/dont-count-out-matt-gaetz-00189680
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got thrown off the air by CNN propagandist anchor.
now she can throw them off the air as WH PS.
https://people.com/kasie-hunt-ends-cnn-interview-trump-spokesperson-karoline-leavitt-8668073
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A good overview of Trump’s picks and reason for choosing them. My favorite quote:
“Government spending is a problem everywhere. Avigdor Liberman, chairman of the Yisrael Beytenu party, told the Knesset, “The government hired a hard-working forester.
“Then they gave him a driver, a cook, an accountant, and a manager. They ended up with a bloated organization, and decided to make cuts. So they fired the forester.’”
The rest here:
This will be settled at recess
The Constitution allows Trump to appoint the best Cabinet possible
NOV 15, 2024
The speed with which President Trump has appointed Cabinet members takes my breath away. By my count, he is up to 6 after adding Matt Gaetz as AG and Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence on Wednesday night.
Oh wait a second. On Thursday, he named RFK Jr. as his head of Health and Human Services. As Will Chamberlain tweeted, “God forbid we let RFK Jr. be in charge of HHS, otherwise he might do something crazy like fund experimental gain-of-function research in Chinese laboratories and cause a global pandemic.”
I believe that is called sarcasm. Readers know that I am a stranger to such a concept.
And then Trump made it 8 by picking ex-Georgia congressman Doug Collins to run the VA.
Make that 9. Just before my bedtime last night, The Calvin Coolidge Project tweeted, “President Trump has announced that Doug Burgum will be his Interior Secretary.”
At this point 8 years ago, Trump had appointed no one. He was waiting for recommendations from the Republican Establishment.
Trump has created a No RINO Zone for this administration. The speed this time reflects the quality of the appointments. MAGA is a magnet for heroes and he has embraced them all.
However, the Senate must confirm his appointments to his Cabinet. No problem. The final paragraph in Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution reads:
The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune agreed to call a recess to let Trump’s appointees start their jobs immediately. On Inauguration Day, Vice President JD Vance as President of the Senate, can call a recess. Trump then appoints Gaetz and company. Formal confirmation can come later.
The deal likely was cut during the campaign because at one rally with Gaetz on stage, Trump announced they had a secret they would divulge after the election.
This Cabinet is the opposite of Lincoln’s Cabinet of Rivals. This is Trump’s Cabinet of Allies. He finally is getting an A Team of his own. The A stands for American.
Trump’s voters have issues with the federal government and Trump’s appointments reflect the grievances from the people who live outside the DC cocoon.
Charlie Johnston tweeted, “I have noticed an important theme to some Trump appointments: he is appointing people to head agencies that victimized them.
“Tulsi Gabbard will head the agency that put her on a terrorist no-fly list for endorsing Trump. Matt Gaetz will head the DOJ which tried to railroad him over what was almost certainly an extortion scheme. Pete Hegseth will head the DOD, in which a bunch of woke generals ridiculed his book on reforming the military.
“Interesting thing. In these cases, Trump will NOT have to prod these appointees to act: occasionally he may have to restrain them. This version of Trump is dead set on reforming the bureaucratic Deep State.”
Murkowski, Collins and the rest of the ladies on The View reacted to Gaetz like Blaine Edwards and Antoine Merriweather reacted to Little Women.
JD Vance tweeted, “The main issue with Matt Gaetz is that he used his office to prosecute his political opponents and authorized federal agents to harass parents who were peacefully protesting at school board meetings.
“Oh wait, that’s actually Merrick Garland, the current attorney general.”
ALX tweeted, “The same people who think Matt Gaetz isn’t qualified to be Attorney General thought Kamala Harris was qualified to be President.”
You have heard about revenge. Gaetz got prevenge.
He quit Congress upon the announcement, which by Florida law means there must be an election to replace him by January 8. Who will Democrats get to run on such short notice? I am pretty sure Gaetz has a successor and money lined up for the election.
Meanwhile, Rubio’s appointment as Secretary of State opens the door for a Senator Trump.
Benny Johnson tweeted, “Lara Trump responds to calls for Governor Ron DeSantis to appoint her U.S. Senator of Florida to fill Marco Rubio’s seat: ‘If I am able to serve, I would love to serve the people of Florida. Truly to have that opportunity I think would be incredible.’ ”
This term will be far different than the first one, which seems so long ago now. In the interim, Democrats broke all precedent.
Democrats staged an unprecedented and unwarranted raid on Trump’s home and confiscated 100,000 documents.
Democrats threw his supporters in prison on trumped up charges.
Democrats sued him for paying off an extortionists, taking out a loan and paying it back with interest, and for calling a lying psycho a liar.
Democrats made up 91 felony counts and took a mugshot.
But the final straw — the event that brought it all together — was the assassination attempt. Not today, Satan. The Lord intervened. Trump emerged a humbled and determined man. This is his last chance to save the country for which he stands. He has risen from the ash heap of politics to fight, fight, fight.
Leaders inspire and teach. Courtney Holland pointed out the ages of Team Trump: “Vivek Ramaswamy is 39. Elise Stefanik is 40. JD Vance is 40. Matt Gaetz is 42. Tulsi Gabbard is 43.”
Benny Johnson tweeted, “Elon Musk. Tulsi Gabbard. RFK Jr. In hindsight, Democrats making mortal enemies of their richest billionaires, youngest rising stars and most powerful political dynasties destroyed the DNC for a generation.
“They did it to themselves.
“Pride cometh before destruction.”
Democrats lost the male Latino vote. Many black voters stayed home rather than vote for Kamala. Native Americans overwhelmingly voted for Trump.
When I look at Kamala, I realize Trump dodged a bullet and America dodged a nuke.
Democrats in the Senate protest but they are as short-handed in Congress as Hezbollah members who answered their pagers.
But haters gotta hate and on Thursday they hated Gaetz.
Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal said, “Matt Gaetz Is a Bad Choice for Attorney General.” (Paywalled.)
From Never Trump Island, National Review said, “Matt Gaetz Cannot Be Allowed to Become Attorney General.” (Paywalled.)
The Hill reported, “McCarthy says Gaetz won’t get confirmed: ‘Everyone knows that.’ ”
That’s Kevin McCarthy, the roommate of Frank Luntz. Gaetz got Republicans to fire McCarthy as speaker.
Meanwhile, NBC has revived the Russian hoax to attack Gabbard.
NBC said, “President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, former Democratic lawmaker Tulsi Gabbard, has been accused of amplifying Russian propaganda and would come to the job having never worked in the intelligence world or served on a congressional intelligence committee.”
No mention was made of her being the first Samoan Cabinet member. Back when she was a Democrat, the press made a big deal about her being the first Samoan elected to a voting seat in Congress. Samoa has had a territorial non-voting member for 46 years. That seldom popped up in their stories.
So Trump haters hate most these two and Pete Hegseth, the defense appointee. I need not know more about them to recommend these MAGA winners.
Musk and Ramaswamy are catching flak for heading efforts to cut government spending. Socialists are so jealous of successful businessmen.
Government spending is a problem everywhere. Avigdor Liberman, chairman of the Yisrael Beytenu party, told the Knesset, “The government hired a hard-working forester.
“Then they gave him a driver, a cook, an accountant, and a manager. They ended up with a bloated organization, and decided to make cuts. So they fired the forester.”
Stephen Collinson spun Trump’s appointees for CNN saying, “Why Trump is trying to outrage Washington with his controversial Cabinet picks.”
He is not trying to outrage anyone because these loons are always angry.
The real issue is why the press is dead set against an incoming president who won a majority of the popular vote and 31 states is not allowed to pick his Cabinet.
My suggestions for other picks include Danica Patrick heading transportation, Dr. Phil as surgeon general, Buzz Aldrin to run NASA, Jake Paul heading the Secret Service, and Randy “Shitter’s Full” Quaid to run the EPA. Lee Zeldin can simply move over to the Department of Education and shut it down.
Fortunately for Trump, he never takes my advice.
As for the enemies of MAGA who don’t like the Cabinet, we’ll see you at recess.
https://donsurber.substack.com/p/this-will-be-settled-in-recess?r=1qo1e&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&triedRedirect=true
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Trump being handed a championship belt at the UFC:
https://x.com/margomartin/status/1858037538243383784?s=61
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cool but look at the size of it.
it does not appear that it will fit around his , ahem , waist..... :-D
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I am having a glorious time razzing a good friend who despite his IQ and love of Israel, holds on to his TDS. He called Trump a "divider" so I him things like this.
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/musk-top-trump-adviser-clash-over-cabinet-picks/ar-AA1uhwMu?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=dd910932d82048a7ae8ea9cf092eb09f&ei=24
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Tulsi Gabbard vs. Trump’s First Term
As Director of National Intelligence would she underestimate security threats to dodge hard policy choices?
By
The Editorial Board
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Nov. 18, 2024 5:31 pm ET
Tulsi Gabbard speaks at Madison Square Garden, New York, Oct. 27. Photo: Alex Brandon/Associated Press
Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth have received more attention as presidential nominees, but one choice who also deserves Senate scrutiny is former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard. Mr. Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence, or DNI, is on record as opposing the security decisions that made his first-term foreign policy a success.
***
The DNI oversees 18 spy agencies and coordinates the intelligence the President and his policy advisers receive. Strong Trump nominees like John Ratcliffe, at the CIA, can corral their agencies and keep them out of politics. But the DNI influences what the President sees each day, how that information is framed, and what the U.S. knows about security threats around the world. This is a job for an honest broker without pronounced policy biases.
Ms. Gabbard, a Democrat until 2022, shares Mr. Trump’s skepticism toward U.S. military involvement abroad. But she stands out as a troubling choice to manage intelligence because her views on the use of force and U.S. foreign policy mark her to the left of even dovish voices in the Democratic Party.
Mr. Trump is proud of his strong Iran policy, which worked. Yet Ms. Gabbard argued for years that Mr. Trump’s first-term policies would start a war. The opposite was true. Her preferred Obama-Biden policy led to the current Middle East war, and Iran accelerated its nuclear program after President Biden’s election.
Watch Ms. Gabbard’s 2019 video “Trump’s Path to War With Iran.” She begins the same way Kamala Harris would: “First, he tore up the Iran nuclear agreement.” For that, and the maximum-pressure sanctions that followed, she calls President Trump a warmonger. But as Mr. Trump often said in this past campaign, those policies had Iran “on its knees.” They also led to the Abraham Accords.
Mr. Trump wants Saudi Arabia in those accords. In 2019 Ms. Gabbard said Mr. Trump had turned the U.S. into the Saudis’ “prostitute.” She pushed to end support for the Saudis in Yemen. President Biden did that, and the Houthis have since shut down most commercial shipping in the Red Sea.
In 2020 Ms. Gabbard assailed Mr. Trump’s strike on Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s terror chief. She said the strike “undermined our national security” and had “no justification whatsoever.” She tried to limit Mr. Trump’s war powers against Iran. In 2018 she tried to cut from the annual defense bill a strategy to counter Iran’s influence. That would also push us toward war, she argued.
She had one note on Iran—Obama-style appeasement was the only way to avoid war—and she was wrong. Given those views, how would she analyze and present new, if uncertain, evidence that Iran is advancing toward a nuclear weapon if she thought it might lead to war?
In May 2018 Ms. Gabbard wrote, “Israel needs to stop using live ammunition in its response to unarmed protesters in Gaza.” Later that week Hamas admitted most of the dead were its members. It had sent them to breach the Gaza border in an operation presaging the Oct. 7 attack. Ms. Gabbard maligned Israel for daring to prevent it.
Most shamefully, Ms. Gabbard went to Syria in 2017 for a photo-op with dictator Bashar al-Assad while he was massacring his own people. She said she was “skeptical” that he was behind the chemical-weapons attack even as photos of the child victims moved President Trump.
Ms. Gabbard has been wrong about the rest of the world too. She opposed Mr. Trump’s wise decision to leave the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces missile treaty with Russia amid clear evidence that Vladimir Putin was violating the pact. She said Mr. Trump’s decision “heightens the danger of a nuclear holocaust.”
Mere hours after Russia invaded Ukraine, Ms. Gabbard blamed NATO: “This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden admin/NATO had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine’s becoming a member of NATO.” In 2019 she warned that Mr. Trump’s China trade policies could “escalate into a hot war.”
***
U.S. intelligence agencies have sometimes overestimated threats, as we learned about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction after the 2003 Iraq war. But the U.S. has also underestimated emerging risks numerous times and the result was sometimes catastrophe. See Pearl Harbor, or the prelude to 9/11. The U.S. also missed Iran’s nuclear advances of the past 20 years that were exposed by Israeli espionage but surprised the CIA.
The DNI isn’t the ultimate decision-maker, and perhaps Ms. Gabbard will drop her glib Bernie Sanders-style patter once she has responsibility, but she hasn’t renounced those views as far as we have seen. The world today is far more dangerous than it was in Mr. Trump’s first term. He will need honest assessments of the threats, and not an intelligence chief animated above all by fear that any U.S. action other than appeasement will result in World War III.
Ms. Gabbard has given no indication across her long political career that she is the right person for that vital duty.
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Yes they make good points. I remember cringing at her foreign policy views. Also at some of Trump's and of Vance's.
The confirmation hearings will be interesting.
I recall Trump liked to surround himself with trigger happy hawks when entering negotiations. Then he can be the one offering restraint.
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/christian-motto-or-nationalist-dog-whistle-could-a-tattoo-derail-trump-s-pick-for-defense-secretary/ar-AA1uaIPj?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=6160a2c6b0e54a53849847b61e2a433c&ei=42
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/christian-motto-or-nationalist-dog-whistle-could-a-tattoo-derail-trump-s-pick-for-defense-secretary/ar-AA1uaIPj?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=6160a2c6b0e54a53849847b61e2a433c&ei=42
It's a Latin phrase with Christian meaning. Why are they posting shirtless photos of him? Do they do that for AOC?
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As for the shirtless fotos, he has been playing the role of a Ken doll for FOX since he arrived. Witness the highlights in his hair, gradually added over time. Gutfield had the some fotos of PH a few nights ago, with hearts floating across the screen, the women guests giggling, and Gutfield saying "That settles it. I'm gay."
Apparently he is something of a horn dog-- witness the various marriages, his lawyer saying there was an NDA etc.
Tatts like that are a big statement. The chattering class will chatter. Flinching now would be an error.
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https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/hacker-testimony-matt-gaetz/2024/11/19/id/1188643/
always to the NYT or WP or less frequently to CNN
always.
brings up several points
1 - hacking to Congressional computer is a problem
2 - did NYT have a reward - under the table of course
3 - and of course who is hacker
4 - will anyone find out
5 - as well as will this even make any difference?
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Reminiscent of Trump, but also Kavanaugh, Thomas, etc, if the truth about him is so bad, why do you have to make up stuff?
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/11/about-those-allegations-against-matt-gaetz.php
I would add one thing about his real act that made him an extremist, ousting the Speaker, the Speaker made a promise to get their support and broke it. Sinking the ship wasn't the right response but there was cause.
Out of it came Speaker Mike Johnson, a better Speaker, and a reelected majority.
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And this...
https://thefederalist.com/2024/11/20/republicans-must-defend-matt-gaetz-to-end-the-use-of-salacious-lies-as-a-political-weapon/
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https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/11/is_burgum_the_right_choice_for_interior_secretary_and_energy_czar.html
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https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2024/11/20/trump-eyeing-dan-bongino-to-helm-secret-service-n2648072
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/nikki-haley-scorches-trump-pick-tulsi-gabbard-over-her-disgusting-2017-photo-op/ar-AA1uuh8j?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=719dc389250741e4a261622b36612713&ei=11
I don't know about this but may be good points. :?
Perhaps should be brought up during the Senate confirmation hearings.
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IIRC there were reasons at the time to doubt our story about the gas attacks.
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-looking-at-naming-right-wing-radio-host-dan-bongino-to-head-the-secret-service-report/ar-AA1usKuZ?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=bbe6fe973ef940c48f71d6f87b51560e&ei=14
interesting!
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This is disheartening. I was not aware of Bondi’s role in the Zimmerman prosecution:
The Gaetz Reversal: Still Losing When You Win is the Nature of a Rigged Game
The Republican Swamp is still the oil in the gears of the Democrat Machine
JUPPLANDIA
NOV 22, 2024
So Gaetz is out as Attorney General pick and Pam Bondi is in. Most of the MAGA crowd don’t seem too fussed. Bondi was after all a Trump lawyer who stood by him in some of the difficult times. Others cite this just as a personality issue, stating that you need a smoother and friendlier kind of persuasion than Gaetz can provide.
Republican Senators, we are told, are proud and skittish creatures, like thoroughbred race horses ready to bolt. You have to be a Senator Whisperer, offering them tempting lumps of sugar and cooing nicely before you get on their backs.
Jupplandia is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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It’s not corruption, we are told, it’s personality. Gaetz is too abrasive, too divisive, too much of an unpopular jerk, to be put in charge of persuading those wild horses to pull the chariot over the line. He’s just so rude and undisciplined. He rubs people up the wrong way, including even a few MAGA figures. Nobody serious likes him.
Does any of this sound familiar, because it should. It should sound especially familiar to Trump himself.
Supposedly the cause of Gaetz withdrawing from the race and Trump accepting this is the combination of this alleged personality issue with much more significant flak regarding sexual allegations against him. As ever, a significant number of Polite Republicans are prepared to accept these allegations on trust, apparently having still failed to learn the lesson that the Democrats and the mainstream media….brace yourselves for this shocking revelation, LIE.
It really is pretty amazing that anyone can treat a sexual smear from certain quarters seriously. After the entirely false claims against Judge Kavanaugh. And after the equally absurd Department Store Rape lie against Trump, or the even more lurid and even more absurd Golden Shower Dossier which claimed that Trump was an agent of Russia following a perverse sex act with honey trap prostitutes in a Moscow hotel.
You know, the one that prompted years of running sabotage of the first term? The one that led to the entire Russian Collusion Hoax? The one that the late John McCain spread around as an early example of the worst figures in the GOP doing everything they could to help Democrats? The one that was concocted by a “former” British spy and paid for by the Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign team and the DNC?
Nor does it ever seem to register with Polite Republicans who immediately take such allegations as proven that the source of the allegation matters. It doesn’t register with them, apparently, that the very people originating these claims against strong Republican opponents are always agents of the Genital Mutilation of Kids Party, the 350,000 or so Missing Sex Trafficked Kids Party, the Puppy Dog Mask Fetish Party, the Boycott Sounds of Freedom Party. It doesn’t seem to register at ALL that the sources of underage sex claims against strong Republican opponents are the Friends of Epstein and the Pals of Weinstein, that the people projecting these claims collect child torture ‘art’ for a hobby and emblazon their own kids and the entire world with a Love Is Love slogan invented by pro-pedophile pressure groups.
Yes, its true that Democrats and RINO Republicans are the acknowledged authorities and interested experts on sexual crimes…..just not in a way that means you should LISTEN to them.
How can any Republican today be unaware that false claims of sexual abuse are a pretty good indicator that the person doing it is projecting their own ACTUAL crimes onto the kind of person who might STOP them?
But sure, being polite and well liked by serpents is all that matters when dealing with the nest of slithering bastards that is the Senate or Washington DC as a whole. Especially when your elected remit, the thing you were chosen for, was cleaning up the filth without worrying about who it offends.
Charlie Kirk, by the way, has absolutely nailed the Gaetz allegations for what they are-projected crimes and imaginary smears. Here is the Kirk take, which is excellent:
“I've had enough of this so-called "House ethics report" on Matt Gaetz. The underlying allegations are so laughable and flimsy that the only purpose of it is to smear Gaetz.
Here are the facts:
The "report" comes YEARS after DOJ dropped its investigation into the same claims. Why did the DOJ drop the investigation? Because the claims hinge on the testimony of two witnesses who have such gaping credibility issues, that even the DOJ, which hates Gaetz, knew no jury would ever convict him.
Who are these witnesses?
1) Joel Greenberg, who has been described as "one of the most corrupt Florida politicians of all time" and who has literally made false sex allegations against a politician before! He accused an innocent school teacher who was running against him for tax-collector of having sex with an underaged student. Sound familiar? A judge called the lies "downright evil."
2) Greenberg became embroiled in a series of crimes and faced a possible 27 years in federal prison. One of these crimes was having sex with an underage minor, the same 17-year-old who is the central character in the claims against Gaetz. BUT, even Greenberg claims he didn't know she was underage because she LIED about her age! She is now active on OnlyFans, selling sexual access for money, and has appeared in porn videos. Go figure.
According to a 2023 lawsuit, Greenberg repeatedly begged Gaetz to secure a pardon for him, and when Gaetz refused, Greenberg vowed vengeance.
An inmate who shared a cell with Greenberg told two federal agents that Greenberg told him that the woman “would be willing to adopt Greenberg’s lie in hopes of a future financial benefit." Greenberg admitted to paying the woman's legal bills in a text to a friend!
Yes this is all ridiculous. Yes it is all clearly contrived lies. Will the media still use it to tar and feather Gaetz? Absolutely. Geatz has made a career of picking fights no one else in Washington had the stomach to pick. They fear him at the DOJ more than anyone.
And that's exactly why we need him running the Department of Justice—he's the only one with the guts to fight the most important fights at the DOJ and root out the corruption we've seen on full display these last 8 years.”
It’s now become as predictable as sunrise and sunset-the Polite Republicans will either be corrupt agents of a lie, or gullible fools accepting a lie, whilst alternative media figures are where you find some recognition of reality and some support for the truth. Trump would do well to stock his entire Cabinet with alternative media figures.
Try putting Russell Brand in charge of the DOJ. Maybe then you could get Gaetz as a compromise.
Kirk is not alone in recognizing the true situation. Jack Posobiec (The Attempted Public Murder of Gaetz) was also smart enough to recognize what was actually going on as pressure built to withdraw Gaetz from contention:
“In the realm of American politics, where character assassinations are as common as policy debates, Matt Gaetz has emerged not only as a figure of resilience but also as a beacon for those who value the integrity of justice.
The salacious allegations against him, which painted him as a villain in a lurid narrative, have been thoroughly debunked, revealing a tale not of personal misconduct but of political maneuvering by a convicted felon seeking leniency.”
Sundance is also frequently on the ball, and he knocks it absolutely out of the park in an article titled President Trump Nominates Pam Bondi for U.S. Attorney General-The Deep Swamp Smiles. This is a devastating critique of the replacement nomination Trump has plumped for having accepted the Swamp refusal of Gaetz (based as we have heard on entirely false slanders and smears).
The Sundance article centers on Bondi’s role in the Race Bait trial of George Zimmerman for the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, a typical modern example of political corruption and CRT racial politics determining justice system prosecutions today (rather than evidence and justice doing so). What we see in this case is that then Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi colluded with Democrats to get an innocent man (who killed in perfectly justifiable self-defense) falsely imprisoned. All of the evidence (including eye witness accounts and physical evidence) had led the Sanford police lead investigating detective (Chris Serino), the local prosecutor (Norm Wolfinger) and the Sanford police chief (Bill Lee) to conclude that Zimmerman killed in justifiable self defense.
The case however was taken up by a Florida civil rights lawyer called Benjamin Crump. Crump’s first act? Hiring a PR company (led by Ryan Julison) to create media pressure. Because that’s what you need when you have a solid case….media pressure. Crump had both Democrat and Republican political contacts and reached out to Bondi to help. Bondi and Crump had in fact worked together previously on the Martin Lee Anderson case. And boy, did she help in the twisting of an open and shut, evidence-supported justifiable self defense into another Racist Murder Hoax.
Bondi had all of the local personnel who had concluded Zimmerman was innocent replaced. All three were removed. State investigators were brought in instead, working for the new special prosecutor Angela Corey, again appointed on Bondi’s request. Sundance then describes the media fiction that shaped public perception on the case, based on ignoring the actual eye-witness accounts (which confirmed things like Martin straddling a prone Zimmerman and pounding Zimmerman’s head against the concrete pavement just before Zimmerman shot him). Of the whole process and Bondi’s role in it he states:
“Pam Bondi was part of that fraudulent prosecution architecture. In fact, without her origination the state case against Zimmerman was non-existent. Everything told about the Trayvon Martin shooting was a lie, including his age, the “skittles and iced-tea” story, this background criminal record, Trayvon’s known drug use, and just about everything else. It was all an entirely manufactured Lawfare case, pushed to a compliant media.
None of the witness statements were ever in the media. None of the (full context) 911 call evidence was ever in the media. None of the images of George Zimmerman’s face and head were ever in the media. None of the corroborating forensic evidence was ever in the media. None of the accurate pictures of Trayvon Martin were ever in the media. Nothing. It was one big, fabricated Lawfare operation headed by Benjamin Crump and Special Prosecutor Angela Corey.”
In other words, the Zimmerman prosecution and trial, together with his imprisonment during investigation, was JUST AS fake and corrupt, involving just as much collusion between Swamp Republicans and the Democrat Machine, as the equally false sexual allegations put forwards against Kavanaugh, Trump and Gaetz.
And supposed Trump loyalist Bondi was right at the heart of this thoroughly disgusting, Race Politics travesty of justice.
Not only that, but Bondi also went along with what became a key prosecutorial fiction against Zimmerman, which amounted to the fabrication of a witness. The star witness in the court case against Zimmerman was one Rachael Jeantel, presented as an ‘ear-witness’ to the death and to Zimmerman threatening and attacking Martin as well as being described as Martin’s girlfriend. Only according to Sundance none of this was true:
“Everything about Rachael Jeantel as a witness was entirely fabricated by Ben Crump and Angela Corey. They literally put a fabricated witness on the stand. Attorney General Pam Bondi knew all about it, in real time, as the false witness was being created and flown back and forth from Miami to Jacksonville in order to try and get some form of story aligned.
Let me be very clear. Florida AG Pam Bondi knew that her special prosecutor, Angela Corey, and her friend, Benjamin Crump, had manufactured an entirely false and fictitious witness against George Zimmerman.”
Now the case against Zimmerman of course eventually collapsed. He was acquited. He was however investigated for race crimes for another three years, and had spent considerable time in prison while the cases against him proceeded. His reputation was ruined and many people still think he killed a black man with no provocation and in cold blood for racist reasons, just because his ‘victim’ was black.
Bondi was therefore part of a cross-party form of sleaze and willingness to twist the law to fit an anti-white, anti-self-defense, entirely imaginary narrative of young black men being targeted for murder on a regular basis by racist white and Hispanic cops and vigilantes. And she seemed to do this either because it might advance her career or as a favor to her personal friend Benjamin Crump (all assuming Sundance is correct).
Is that the kind of person who is going to clear out the Swamp at the DOJ better than Gaetz would?
Of course maybe Sundance has it wrong. Maybe Bondi supported a false case not knowing it was false. But that’s not much better than doing it all out of corruption and connivance and knowing it was bullshit. The innocent explanation makes her an idiot. The guilty explanation makes her a Swamp operative whose seeming loyalty to Trump was always of the Bill Barr kind. Neither is a strong recommendation and a strong suggestion that she will clean house in the DOJ.
I can’t tell you how much I hope that Sundance is wrong on Pam Bondi, and hope too that Trump has done some art of the deal switch where he knew Gaetz would be rejected, knows Bondi will get the job done, and knows he can sneak her through on a wave of Senate Swamp relief that at least it’s not Gaetz.
But what I do know is that the claims against Gaetz come from evil bastards who want the Swamp to keep winning even when they lose elections, whereas the claims against Bondi don’t. Those come from alternative figures who have been right before and with every fibre of their being, like you and me, want the Swamp and the Machine to burn and break and never corrupt the world again.
Trump says he has learned who to trust this time. Pray that he is right.
https://jupplandia.substack.com/p/the-gaetz-reversal-still-losing-when?r=2k0c5&triedRedirect=true
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Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general, former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, withdrew on Thursday, barely a week after being nominated. There are lessons here, ones the gung-ho Trump team could benefit from internalizing as it continues filling out key posts.
Gaetz defenders are already attempting to blame this flameout on smears, or on hard feelings over Mr. Gaetz’s ouster of Speaker Kevin McCarthy, or on Republican spinelessness. Mr. Gaetz in his withdrawal statement insisted he was “unfairly” targeted. Whatever the Trump team says publicly, it would be unwise for it to fall for those excuses privately. Mr. Gaetz’s liabilities were all his own, and it was those liabilities that burnt down his confirmation.
The biggest was obviously the recently concluded House Ethics Committee investigation into a long list of allegations against Mr. Gaetz, including (from a June committee statement) “sexual misconduct and/or illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, and/or accepted a bribe, improper gratuity, or impermissible gift.” The claims weren’t limited to the allegations of sexual trafficking previously investigated by the Justice Department.
Mr. Gaetz looks to have convinced Mr. Trump that these probes were no different from the partisan Democratic allegations and lawsuits aimed at the former president—or, as Mr. Gaetz wrote this week, his own “Steele dossier.” That claim was always ludicrous. Even if one is to buy that a broad team of career prosecutors were plotting to take down Mr. Gaetz (a plot that failed spectacularly, as they never brought charges), the House probe was conducted by Republicans and Democrats on a panel known for its reluctance to throw stones—given that its members live in the same glass House. Yet bits of the Ethics Committee report were starting to leak out, and everything pointed to its findings’ being ugly.
And so, Lesson No 1: Not all allegations against Republicans are partisan shams. That’s surely hard for Republicans to swallow in light of witch hunts against Mr. Trump and Brett Kavanaugh, but the GOP as the law-and-order party has a duty to make careful distinctions.
The Trump transition team might have also read the insider room. Republicans are well versed in defending their brethren against nonsense attacks—even their unpopular brethren. There was a reason few if any Republican members rushed to Mr. Gaetz’s defense: They know him. Congress is a close space, and most all members had seen or heard something unpleasant enough to make them suspect fire accompanied the smoke. Ergo, Lesson No. 2: Take your lead from people who know, not MAGA Twitter insurgents.
All Things With Kim Strassel
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The name of the Trump nominations game is clearly “shakeup”—and that’s to be applauded. Few doubt that Washington is in desperate need of some rattling. But note Lesson No. 3: The Gaetz fiasco is a reminder that there remains a bright line between a candidate who is aggressive, committed and professional and one who is unthinking, partisan and a liability. Mr. Trump has chosen a solid lineup of the former, from Linda McMahon (Education) and Marco Rubio (State) to Chris Wright (Energy) and Brendan Carr (Federal Communications Commission). Mr. Gaetz was always clearly the latter—big on bravado, short on ideas and temperament. While not as discussed as the ethics question, it’s also an important reason his nomination was destined to fail.
Every politician faces a tension between party loyalty (confirming a president’s nominees) and constitutional principle. For all that Mr. Trump has rightly complained about Justice Department politicization and the need for change, his team underestimated how seriously senators take that problem and how focused they are on this vital opportunity to turn things around. They want someone serious and aggressive, but also someone who can command the respect necessary to rebuild trust among all voters in the department.
The temptation may be to pick another loud candidate made popular by catering to the base, rather than one with a true commitment—and plan—for restoring the Justice Department’s fealty to the Constitution and the rule of law. But such a pick won’t reassure senators who are truly eager to rally behind a rock star with a unanimous vote.
And of course it’s possible to tap a candidate able both to shake things up and to promote professionalism. The Republican firmament is teeming with past or current state attorneys general, former prosecutors and other legal heavyweights—many who also have knowledge and experience of the Justice Department’s structure, its problem staff, and potential barriers to reform. Mr. Trump has four short years and a lot of fixing to do. He needs an attorney general who is already sprinting on Day One.
And the country deserves it. A Justice Department that is doing its job is a department that isn’t leading every headline, that isn’t the source of nonstop drama. Starting with a drama-free nominee would be a great start toward that future.
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I'm hearing of some great picks for the new Administration. But from what I read, I'm disappointed at first glance with the new Secretary of the Treasury, although I guess that decision is not final.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/11/09/donald-trump-cabinet-picks/76140063007/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Bessent
His plan I hear is based on the economic plan of former Japanese leader Shinzo Abe (ah-bay) , the three arrows.
https://www.adb.org/publications/three-arrows-abenomics-and-structural-reform-japan-inflation-targeting-policy-central#:~:text=Abenomics%20has%20%22three%20arrows%22%3A,and%20expanding%20social%20welfare%20expenses.
I like the Kudlow choice or whoever he would recommend. Maybe EJ Antoni
https://www.heritage.org/staff/ej-antoni
Casey Mulligan,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casey_B._Mulligan
Dan Mitchell
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Mitchell
How about a smart, strong woman, https://www.mercatus.org/scholars/veronique-de-rugy
Thomas Sowell is 94. Maybe he's available.
Hey Trump, are you reading the forum?
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Note the part about Bondi.
I had forgotten that.
https://dailycaller.com/2024/11/22/the-view-sunny-hostin-reads-three-legal-notes-on-air/
=================
https://dailycaller.com/2024/11/22/dem-florida-attorney-dave-aronberg-pam-bondi-attorney-general/
============
Dubious on Second Amendment?
https://www.ammoland.com/2024/11/matt-gaetz-out-pam-bondi-in-as-trump-nominee-for-attorney-general-gun-rights-controversy-loom/?utm_source=Ammoland+Subscribers&utm_campaign=d6eac3de7d-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6f6fac3eaa-d6eac3de7d-7181749
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ex-trump-adviser-calls-for-full-field-fbi-background-probe-of-con-man-white-house-pick/ar-AA1uBvfH?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=cabecd9094244a6fbcfc5a828b7382ee&ei=13
I always enjoyed Gorka's radio show and IIRC as noted here, was a caller to it one time.
No surprise that Bolton is talking excrement here.
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-team-weaponizes-elon-musk-in-threat-to-senators-who-won-t-confirm-cabinet-picks/ar-AA1uzRM6?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=a900b0016c474e09ab73be729856f7d4&ei=17
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Fourth
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/dr-janette-nesheiwat-fox-news-medical-contributor-picked-as-us-surgeon-general/ar-AA1uBdNc?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=cabecd9094244a6fbcfc5a828b7382ee&ei=44
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Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, Fox News medical contributor, picked as US Surgeon General
Also Newsmax.....
:-o
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Trump’s Labor Choice: Unions Over Workers
He nominates Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a teachers union favorite, to be his Labor Secretary.
By The Editorial Board
Updated Nov. 22, 2024 8:48 pm ET
Hard to believe, but Donald Trump on Friday night nominated a favorite of teachers union chief Randi Weingarten as his Labor Secretary. Why would Mr. Trump want to empower labor bosses who oppose his economic agenda and spent masses to defeat him?
Mr. Trump’s regrettable choice is Oregon Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer. Ms. Weingarten on Thursday tweeted her support for the freshman Republican. Teamsters President Sean O’Brien, who spoke at the Republican National Convention, has also been pulling for her. In a Truth Social post, Mr. Trump said she’ll work toward “historic cooperation between Business and Labor.” But Ms. Chavez-DeRemer has backed union giveaways like the Pro Act, which are not “cooperation.”
Hence the enthusiasm from the labor bosses. “Teamsters are willing to work with anyone from any party, so long as they are committed to advancing a pro-worker agenda that creates and protects good-paying union jobs,” Mr. O’Brien wrote in Compact magazine this week. “By nominating Rep. Chavez-DeRemer, he can show that he stands by the people who are sending him back to the Oval Office come January.”
The pitch was that Mr. Trump could do a Nixon to China by improving the GOP’s relations with unions during his second term. But why return a political favor that Mr. O’Brien didn’t do for Mr. Trump? The Teamsters chief refused to endorse the former President even though a majority of its members supported Mr. Trump in the union’s national survey.
Mr. O’Brien no doubt didn’t want to alienate his Democratic friends who have done the union’s bidding. This includes sponsoring the Pro Act, which Ms. Chavez-DeRemer endorsed. The bill would override right-to-work laws in 26 states that give workers a choice of joining a union. It would also subvert secret-ballot elections, which protect workers from union intimidation.
The Pro Act would effectively ban gig jobs and codify the Biden National Labor Relations Board’s joint-employer standard, which would upend the franchise business model and contracting arrangements to make it easier for unions to organize workers. The result would be less autonomy for franchisees and small businesses that contract with bigger firms.
The Pro Act would essentially return labor relations to the days before the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act when strikes were rampant and labor mobility was harder. It’s a pro-union but anti-worker bill.
It gets worse. Ms. Chavez-DeRemer backs the misnamed Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, which would require all states and localities to collectively bargain with government workers. This is a recipe to turn Texas, Florida and other GOP-controlled states into fiscal basket-cases like Illinois, California and New York.
Teachers unions across the country could block education reforms and limit school choice via collective bargaining. No wonder Ms. Weingarten supports her. But most businesses don’t. The nomination of Ms. Chavez-DeRemer runs counter to Mr. Trump’s agenda of devolving power to the states, expanding school choice, empowering workers and easing business regulation.
Some Republicans think enhancing union power will help Republicans win more elections. Then why did Ms. Chavez-DeRemer lose her re-election? The reality is that the pro-labor agenda espoused by union honchos isn’t all that popular among working-class voters.
Private union membership has been falling for decades, in part because businesses are expanding their workforces in right-to-work states. When given a choice these days, employees typically opt against unionizing. Mr. Trump performed better among working-class voters than he did in 2020, but not because Mr. O’Brien spoke at the GOP convention.
Mr. Trump gained ground among workers making less than $100,000 a year because their wages after inflation declined under Mr. Biden, and those Americans believe Mr. Trump’s policies will do the reverse. The key to keeping those workers is raising their incomes, which means policies that spur economic growth and a robust job market.
Republicans can work with unions to improve workforce training and increase alternative education pathways like apprenticeships. But putting Ms. Chavez-DeRemer in charge of Labor will make labor bosses, not workers, more powerful again.
EDITED TO ADD:
Looks like Trump cut a deal with the Teamsters union and here is the payoff.
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It looks that way but only in hindsight do we find out when he is doing something stupid and when he is playing 4D chess.
Remember, he doesn't need to get elected, reelected ever again.
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https://x.com/i/web/status/1860512872280854707
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(1) TRUMP NOMINATES PRO UNION REPUBLICAN FOR LABOR SECRETARY: President-elect Donald Trump said he will nominate Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-OR) for Labor Secretary.
“The president-elect has nominated a unicorn: a genuine pro-labor Republican,” former Obama acting Labor Secretary Seth Harris said.
Pro-business trade groups including the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said they were alarmed that Trump picked Chavez-DeRemer to lead the Department of Labor, and Republican lawmakers said they are concerned about her pro-union sympathies.
Why It Matters: Trump is facing an International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) strike in the first days of his incoming administration, and is likely trying to bolster the administration’s labor bonafides to minimize the impact of the strike. Trump supported the ILA in October, and Sens. J.D. Vance (R-OH) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) have been outspoken supporters of labor unions, signaling that the populist wing of the GOP could try to chip away at rank-and-file union Democrat support. – R.C.
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) said Republican Senators broadly support President-elect Donald Trump’s agenda, but will defend Senate GOP “institutional prerogatives.” Cramer added, “It’s just hard for me to imagine a scenario where a Republican Congress would allow a recess appointment” when Republicans have a Senate majority.
Democratic lawmakers said they are alarmed that the Trump transition team has not signed memorandums of understanding to coordinate the transition with federal agencies. A Republican official familiar with the Trump transition efforts said the Trump transition team does not “need the hassle” of signing the memos, which would open the transition team up to the General Services Administration “and quasi-public organizations whose sole mission will probably be to derail them.”
Treasury Secretary nominee Scott Bessent said Trump should nominate a “shadow Federal Reserve chair” before Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s term expires in 2026. Bessent said tariffs can play “a central role” in Trump achieving his foreign policy objectives. (Bessent has criticized tariffs in the past, and was likely picked by Trump to assure Wall Street and minimize market disruptions. However, Bessent is signaling he will not impede the Trump administration’s use of tariffs to address trade imbalances, and pressure foreign partners and adversaries to negotiate on favorable terms for U.S. grand strategy. – R.C.)
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/11/23/police-report-casts-doubt-on-sexual-assault-allegation-against-pete-hegseth/
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You can listen to their take on the Hegseth and the "Jane Doe" affair here:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/media-lies-about-hegseth-and-the-cultural-shift-that/id1532976305?i=1000677946920
Meghan Kelly actually read the police reports and noted the police did not believe the accusers story and that the prosecutor did not either thus no charges.
Her conclusion and from the way it was reported the facts support
that witnesses did not see any evidence of accuser being drugged just before or after her going to his hotel room. Hegseth was clearly intoxicated. Witnesses and camera surveillence suggested she was walking arm and arm with Hegseth and smiling.
She was with him for some hrs and her husband with her 2 children were in the same hotel
called her and was asking where she was just before she got home ~ 4 AM.
This was a Sunday. The next day she had sex with her husband. Then around Wednesday she advised her husband that she thinks she might have been slipped a date rape drug and assaulted.
The next day this was reported.
Meghan's theory in filling in the blanks was she willingly had sex with Hegseth and when husband did not believe her story that she "fell asleep" she then came up with this concocted story that she was drugged and assaulted to take any blame away from her cheating.
Meghan and VDH on the same podcast point to all the evidence and both conclude her story is made up BS to cover for her cheating on her husband who was with her two children.
The way they present all the facts and evidence that is FAR more plausible then the theory Hegseth date raped her.
Hence no arrests, no charges.
Meghan poinst out how the MSM ignores any excultatory evidence as noted in the police reports.
She also surmises the Hegseth payoff was simply to avoid embarrassment over the whole one night stand.
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Thank you for that. That makes sense. I hear the smear machine out in full force. I answered back, after the Brett Kavanaugh debacle how will we ever know when a real rape occurs?
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Trump’s Cabinet Picks: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
The President-elect’s appointments signal a plan to disrupt Washington.
By WSJ Opinion Staff
Nov. 27, 2024 6:17 pm ET
Soon after his decisive win on Nov. 5, Donald Trump began nominating the team that will carry out his second administration’s agenda. His choices reveal a desire to disrupt Washington, and disruption is needed in many places. Read on for an overview of Mr. Trump’s picks—the good, bad and ugly, according to the Editorial Board.
Doug Burgum, Chris Wright, Linda McMahon and Brendan Carr
Some of Mr. Trump’s initial choices fit squarely in the first category. Examples include his choice of North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum to head the Interior Department and Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright to lead the Energy Department. Both nominees understand how energy markets work, unlike Biden officials whose primary goal was to lock up America’s fossil-fuel resources. Another productive pick is former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon to lead the Education Department, a job that will require brawling with the federal bureaucracy, teachers unions and other special interest groups. Ms. McMahon is well suited for the task. Brendan Carr, Mr. Trump’s pick for chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, is also a good choice. Mr. Carr will free up spectrum and ease broadband permitting—while remaining focused on the FCC’s core mission.
Photo: andrew caballero-reynoldsalain j/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk
Mr. Trump’s decision to hand Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk the job of running a new Department of Government Efficiency might be his best idea yet. Messrs. Ramaswamy and Musk will have the tall task of reforming and shrinking the federal government and liberating Americans from the suffocating control of an ever-expanding administrative state.
Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz
On national security, Mr. Trump’s nominees have been more of a mixed bag. For the most part, his choices have solid experience and an understanding of today’s security threats. Marco Rubio, the Florida Senator picked to lead the State Department, has long experience on foreign affairs and believes in U.S. global leadership. He has focused on the China threat and would likely push to restore U.S. sanctions on Venezuela and do more to combat Cuba’s malign influence in the Western hemisphere. Rep. Mike Waltz, the new national-security adviser, is a military veteran with hawkish views who previously led a group of 70 Republicans and 70 Democrats in crafting a framework to counter Iranian aggression.
Photo: Alex Brandon/Associated Press
Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth
Some of the loyalists Mr. Trump has promoted to top spots will distract from his second-term goals. In particular, he should weigh whether to stick with wild cards Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary and Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence.
Mr. Trump seems to have selected Mr. Hegseth to wage a culture war against the military brass, but the Fox News personality has never run a big institution and has no experience in government. The sprawling Pentagon bureaucracy could eat him alive. Mr. Trump might also wonder if he can trust Mr. Hegseth. The sexual-assault allegations against the 44-year-old TV host appear to have caught the Trump team by surprise.
Though Mr. Hegseth has received more attention, the choice of former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence also deserves scrutiny. Ms. Gabbard has a record of opposing policies that made Mr. Trump’s first-term successful. Her views on the use of force mark her to the left of dovish voices in the Democratic Party, and she has given no indication that she is the right person to assess the threats facing the country.
Lori Chavez-DeRemer
The president-elect’s choice of Lori Chavez-DeRemer for Labor Secretary may have pleased teachers union chief Randi Weingarten, but it will do little good for workers. Ms. Chavez-DeRemer’s positions run counter to Mr. Trump’s agenda of devolving power to the states, expanding school choice, empowering workers and easing business regulation. Instead, they will empower the labor bosses who set out to defeat him.
Photo: Andrea Renault/Zuma Press
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Similarly, Mr. Trump’s strange choice of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.to lead the Health and Human Services Department will do little to make America healthier. He’s more likely to harm public health by spreading confusion and attacking American companies.
But, nominations impulsively made can also be withdrawn, as Matt Gaetz’s recent flame-out demonstrates. What will Mr. Trump learn from the Gaetz mistake? There are plenty of smart, determined conservatives to fill a cabinet. Mr. Trump would be wise to lean on them rather than trying to strong arm Republican Senators over votes for ill-qualified nominees.
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Jay Bhattacharya Can Bring Science Back To NIH
The agency has created career pathways built on race rather than merit.
By John Sailer
Nov. 27, 2024 6:36 pm ET
The distorted priorities of American academia often have roots in the federal government. The National Institutes of Health pours millions of dollars into universities for large-scale hiring efforts based on diversity, equity and inclusion. Jay Bhattacharya, President-elect Trump’s nominee to lead the NIH, can put an end to it.
The NIH’s Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation program, or First, bars universities who receive its grants from hiring on the basis of race, but my reporting shows that many schools do it anyway. In one galling example, a grant recipient stated bluntly via email: “I don’t want to hire white men for sure.” The First program is modeled on the NIH’s own “distinguished scholars program.” Through a Freedom of Information Act request, I acquired records that show how the NIH makes these selections. Application reviewers repeatedly highlight candidates’ sex and minority status and favor those fluent in the vocabulary of progressive identity politics.
On paper, the program doesn’t involve racial preference. As Hannah Valantine, former NIH Chief Officer for Academic Workforce Diversity, described it in a lecture, the program aims to “change the culture” by recruiting “a critical mass” of scientists “committed to diversity, to inclusion, to equity, and to mentoring.” “Notice that I did not say any particular racial, ethnic or group or gender,” Ms. Valantine added, “because legally we cannot.”
Yet reviewers repeatedly mention candidates’ sex and underrepresented minority, or URM, status. “URM scientist,” “female physician,” “URM female scientist,” “male URM”—the records include more than a dozen such references. The NIH redacted portions of the records it deemed personal information. The occasional missing adjective stands out: “Female [redacted] physician‐scientist,” “Male [redacted] scientist,” “[Redacted] female physician,” and so on.
Reviewers played down applicants’ merit as scientists. “Excellent scientist but not particularly distinguished in the area of diversity in science,” one reviewer wrote of an applicant identified as a potential fit for the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.
Assessing scholars for their commitment to social justice inevitably hampers the scientific mission of the NIH. One review comment says of a candidate: “Appears not to have a fully developed and equitably centered understanding of diversity.” This sort of criteria favors scientists who share an activist’s vision for higher education, prioritizing ideology over science.
In some cases, that ideological lens becomes explicit. One reviewer praises a candidate’s diversity and equity “activism.” Another applicant receives praise for understanding the “historical context of structural racism” and the role of “intersectionality of multiple minority statuses.”
Mr. Bhattacharya has promised to “reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again.” The NIH’s First and distinguished-scholars programs illustrate his challenge. Federal grantmaking agencies, like universities, have created well-funded career pathways for academics who espouse an activist progressive vision. Mr. Bhattacharya should shut those pathways down and empower scientists who remain vigilantly committed to the pursuit of truth.
Mr. Sailer is a senior fellow and director of higher education policy at the Manhattan Institute
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My name is ccp and I approve of the above statements!
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(2) TRUMP TAPS GEN. KELLOGG FOR SPECIAL UKRAINE-RUSSIA ENVOY: President-elect Donald Trump announced he will nominate General Keith Kellogg as the special envoy to Ukraine and Russia.
Kellogg said allowing Ukraine to fire Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) into Russian territory has “actually given President Trump more leverage” for a peace deal.
Former State Department advisor and RAND senior political scientist Samuel Charap said Kellogg’s treatise, “An America First Approach to U.S. National Security,” which outlines a diplomatic strategy to end the war, is not “a plan to kowtow to Russia.”
Why It Matters: Trump nominating Kellogg is an indicator the Trump administration will make a serious effort on day one for a ceasefire and peace deal between Ukraine and Russia. Kellogg’s nomination, along with Trump’s nominees for the Commerce Department and U.S. Trade Representative, are a sign that the Trump administration will have a Realist grand strategic approach to U.S. foreign policy, rather than what appeared to be decentralized and scattershot grand strategy from the Biden administration. – R.C.
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https://spectator.org/pam-bondi-atone-framing-george-zimmerman/
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https://www.barrons.com/news/trump-nominates-charles-kushner-father-of-his-son-in-law-as-ambassador-to-france-08963729?refsec=topics_afp-news
This guy used to be a huge Dem donor.
https://www.barrons.com/news/trump-nominates-charles-kushner-father-of-his-son-in-law-as-ambassador-to-france-08963729?refsec=topics_afp-news
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What I am more curious about is his pardon of Pa Kushner and what it was for-- who was prosecuted and put in jail by Chris Christie-- who to this day still has a hard on for Pa Kushner.
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https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/11/breaking-trump-officially-nominates-kash-patel-fbi-director/
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/trump-appoints-massad-boulos-to-senior-arab-advisory-role-5768957?utm_source=Goodevening&src_src=Goodevening&utm_campaign=gv-2024-12-01&src_cmp=gv-2024-12-01&utm_medium=email&est=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYvAqcwcVzc7PzLYPrHFRB710wA0AIj31kx5JTWZu9FddhEg4S8RP
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Trump nominates deep state sleuth to lead FBI: The alarm and outrage on the Left is telling. It's as if they know that Donald Trump's nomination of Kash Patel to lead the FBI means that their deep state secrets are about to be exposed. Patel was both a federal prosecutor and a federal public defender, which Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton notes means he has experience "not only in putting criminals behind bars but also can understand what happens when government overreaches." Trey Gowdy, himself a former federal prosecutor, knows a good and well-qualified nominee when he sees one. "You would not know the foundation or the funding of the Steele dossier," said Gowdy. "You would not know about FISA abuse. You would not know about Fusion GPS had it not been for the hard work of a guy named Kash Patel. He is, quite candidly, the most unfairly maligned person that I worked with the entire eight years I was in Washington." Why might that be? Might it be that Patel knows where all the FBI's pro-Democrat, anti-Trump bodies are buried? All reform-minded liberty-loving Americans should be exceedingly pleased that Trump has nominated Patel to take over for pencil-pushing corruption-enabling Chris Wray at the FBI. If only Wray had the decency to resign instead of forcing Trump to fire him.
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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/white-house/3246478/thomas-massie-lone-republican-calling-out-trump-dea-pick/
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https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-considering-replacing-hegseth-with-desantis-defense-secretary-sources/
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First reaction-- I was willing to support Hegseth, but DeSantis is qualified, seriously anti-woke, and likely to be an easy sell.
Who becomes Gov of FL?
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/how-kash-patel-was-suspected-of-nearly-botching-seal-team-6-rescue-mission/ar-AA1vdmkR?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=a51bbb75cbf94455a6a64311f4b2d730&ei=64
https://m3.gab.com/media_attachments/80/64/93/8064935754b2c82c75a509c80ae06370.jpg?width=568
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Powerline: I drank with Pete (and nobody got hammered)
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/12/i-drank-with-pete.php
---------------
And VDH spells out what won't happen with Trump 2.0 nominees:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/12/06/what_the_trump_nominees_have_not_done_--_and_will_not_do_152053.html
current Patel critic.
He will not forge an FBI court affidavit, as did convicted felon and agency lawyer Kevin Clinesmith.
He will not claim amnesia 245 times under congressional oath to evade embarrassing admissions as did former Director James Comey.
He will not partner with a foreign national to collect dirt and subvert a presidential campaign as the FBI did with Christopher Steele in 2016.
He will not use the FBI to draft social media to suppress news unfavorable to a presidential candidate on the eve of an election.
He would not have suppressed FBI knowledge that Hunter Biden’s laptop was genuine — to allow the lie to spread that it was “Russian disinformation” on the eve of the 2020 election.
He will not raid the home of an ex-president with SWAT teams, surveil Catholics, monitor parents at school board meetings, or go after pro-life peaceful protestors.
(Doug) Funny that all these people worried about Trump's nominees never worried about any of this.
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/hours-after-withering-grassley-letter-fbi-director-to-resign-report/ar-AA1vBgTC?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=d34b5103cc774359bd4fffc1fc3c244c&ei=9
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second
(2) TRUMP NOMINATES HARMEET DHILLON FOR CIVIL RIGHTS DIVISION: President-elect Donald Trump nominated former chair of the California Republican Party Harmeet Dhillon as assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Department of Justice (DOJ), signaling his intent to use the Civil Rights Division to challenge diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies.
Harmeet Dhillon founded Dhillon Law Group and the 501c(3) nonprofit Center For American Liberty, which are behind a number of high-profile lawsuits against DEI policies in business and academia, and Dhillon has repeatedly called for an end to DEI policies in press releases and on social media.
President-elect Trump has pledged to direct the Department of Justice to pursue civil rights investigations into universities, citing earlier efforts to sue Yale University for discriminating against Asian and white applicants and a 2020 executive order banning federal contractors from DEI training.
Why It Matters: While the Department of Justice does not have direct enforcement authority, the Civil Rights Division still plays a significant role in shaping how civil rights laws are interpreted. Historically, the Civil Rights Division has generally avoided weighing in on cases that allege discrimination against Asian and white applicants and employees, but Dhillon is likely to depart from her predecessors and make DEI the focal point of her tenure. Additionally, while certain DEI policies may withstand legal challenges, it is likely that universities and businesses will still scale these programs back, regardless, to avoid DOJ scrutiny. – M.N.
============
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/412735.php
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/worst-prepared-candidate-gop-senator-says-trump-pick-is-flaming-out-in-capitol-meetings/ar-AA1vCkz9?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=573f304ff3724114add99feb6506a399&ei=9
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https://www.newsmax.com/politics/transition-guilfoyle-trump/2024/12/10/id/1191169/
:-D :wink:
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https://www.newsmax.com/politics/transition-guilfoyle-trump/2024/12/10/id/1191169/
:-D :wink:
Besides that she may have earned the new job, it looks like a settlement in the breakup with Don jr.
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:-D :-D :-D
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/kimberly-guilfoyle-trump-latest-nominee-124606533.html
:-o :-o :-o
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Doesn't sound particularly credible to me.
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https://patriotpost.us/alexander/112745?mailing_id=8884&subscription_uuid=e046cf62-a6a8-4317-a631-0e7db6e8f626&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.8884&utm_campaign=alexander&utm_content=body
============
FO
Trump transition advisor Corey Lewandowski said the Trump team will use every resource to target Senators who oppose Trump’s cabinet nominations. According to a Trump advisor speaking anonymously, President-elect Donald Trump has a “much more professional political operation around him,” and is “a lot more willing” to use political power during his second term. [According to reports, Trump backed off on nominating former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) as Attorney General. However, after Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth’s nomination met resistance from Senate Republicans, the Trump camp began a pressure campaign against Senate Republicans who signaled they will vote against confirming Trump cabinet nominees. – R.C.]
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third
(3) TRUMP COULD FLIP NLRB TO MAJORITY REPUBLICAN: The Senate voted 49-50 against reconfirming National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Chair Lauren McFerran, who will leave the NLRB when her term ends on 16 December. (President-elect Trump will now have the opportunity to flip the NLRB to majority Republican by appointing McFerran’s replacement, and block Democrats on the NLRB from continuing Biden’s labor policies into the Trump administration. – R.C.)
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Fourth
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/412759.php
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Biden Gets Lost in Trump’s Shadow
The president-elect acts as if he’s already in charge. There’s never been a transition like this before.
Peggy Noonan
By
Peggy Noonan
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Dec. 12, 2024 6:04 pm ET
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(7 min)
Volodymyr Zelensky, Emmanuel Macron and Donald Trump after their meeting in Paris, Dec. 7. Photo: Michel Euler/Associated Press
Like Donald Trump or dislike him, hate him or love him, doesn’t matter: You have to see that what we are witnessing right now is truly remarkable, with no precedent.
He is essentially functioning as the sitting president. In the past, a man was elected and sat in his house, met with potential cabinet members, and courteously, carefully kept out of the news except to make a statement announcing a new nominee. The incumbent was president until Inauguration Day. That’s the way it was even in 2016; Barack Obama was still seen as president after Mr. Trump was elected. All that has changed.
Opinion: Potomac Watch
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Mr. Trump is the locus of all eyes. He goes to Europe for the opening of Notre-Dame. “The protocols they put in place for his arrival were those of a sitting president, not an incoming one,” a Trump loyalist and former staffer said by phone. He holds formal meetings with Volodymyr Zelensky and Emmanuel Macron. There he is chatting on a couch with Prince William. Why not the prime minister? Because the British know Mr. Trump is enchanted by royalty and doesn’t want to be with some grubby Labour pol. Mr. Trump talks of new tariffs on Canada, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau rushes down to Mar-a-Lago. After their meeting, Mr. Trump refers to him, on Truth Social, as “governor” of “the Great State of Canada.” (The Babylon Bee follows up with a headline: “Trump Tells Trudeau He Won’t Annex Canada if They Admit Their Bacon Is Just Ham.”)
The government of Syria suddenly falls and the world turns to America for its stand. Naturally it comes, quickly, from Donald Trump. “THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. . . . DO NOT GET INVOLVED!” The next day, Joe Biden characterizes the moment as one of “risk and uncertainty” for the region. Was there ever a moment that wasn’t one of risk and uncertainty for the region?
Mr. Trump tells Vladimir Putin that now that he’s abandoned Syria, he should make a deal to end the war in Ukraine. “I know Vladimir well. This is his time to act. China can help. The world is waiting!”
Mr. Trump’s cabinet picks—especially the highly questionable ones!—dominate the discourse in a country that hardly ever notices a cabinet nomination below that of secretary of state. His representatives, most famously Elon Musk, are greeted on Capitol Hill with a rapture comparable to past visits by heroic leaders of allied nations.
Donald Trump hasn’t overshadowed Joe Biden; he has eclipsed him. A former senior official in Mr. Trump’s first term told NBC News a few days ago that Mr. Trump “is already basically running things, and he’s not even president yet.”
To some degree the status shift is expected. Mr. Trump is the future, Mr. Biden the past; Mr. Trump wide-awake, Mr. Biden sleepy. The 46th president is a worn tire, the tread soft and indistinct. With the pardon of his son he lost stature. Also, Mr. Trump makes other leaders nervous, as he enjoys pointing out. They can neither predict him nor imitate him, so they can’t take their eyes off him. And Mr. Biden’s been rocked by something he knew in the abstract that’s become all too particular: after 50 years at the center of public life he’s been dropped, cast aside, because it was about power all along, and not about him.
A president, however, still has the machinery—the National Security Council, the State Department, the nuclear football. I can hardly believe our biggest adversaries don’t capitalize on this split presidency, this confusion. For all our woes you sometimes forget what a lucky country we are.
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Here I mention a part of the amazing interregnum that I think is important, one that his friends and staffers speak of. Mr. Trump is calmer and more confident than he has been in the past. It is a commonplace to say that his surviving a shooting—that a bullet came within an inch or so of his brain—would change anyone, even a man in his eighth decade, even a man with fairly brittle ingrained views, even Donald Trump. But all of his friends go back to this as they speak of the Trump they’re seeing now. They think it took time for it to be absorbed and settle in. They see him as at least presenting himself in an altered way.
The former staffer said by phone, “Right now he is extremely relaxed.” It isn’t only the assassination attempt. “Everyone thought he was gonna change in a way that would be normal for most people to change—an outward reflection, more humble. I laugh when people say, ‘Normally, a president would—.’ Don’t use ‘normal’ with him.”
But, he said, after the second assassination attempt was thwarted, at Mr. Trump’s golf course, it had real impact. “Trump began to recognize, not in an unappreciative way but in a reality way, that he’d been spared. It gave him a stronger sense of confidence, some extra level of relaxation and of determination. He feels the American people are in trouble and if he can be a small part of fixing that, he must.”
The former staffer said Mr. Trump feels that “this wasn’t an election, it was a vindication.” The court cases, the indictments, the impeachments—“all these things against Donald Trump, and he doesn’t just come back, he roars back in a way that defies logic, reason and history. Few can fathom this.” He meant the history, but also its effect on Mr. Trump.
Something else, he said. When Mr. Trump was elected in 2016, his policy priorities and intentions weren’t fully clear. They are now, and have been popularized. “He knows the mission he laid out to the people—sane border policy, unleash energy, monetize ‘the liquid gold,’ make the tax cuts permanent—there’s an air of confidence about his mission now, and an understanding of the systems in place.” He is living something few get to live: “If I could do it all over again.”
A different observer, who’s seen Mr. Trump up close, said this week, “This is the best version of Donald Trump we will see.”
Back to the former staffer: “The gravity of this historic moment cannot be overstated. He has a level of swagger, a new level. People say, ‘Can I get the policy without the personality?’ No, you need a certain level of ‘I don’t give a damn.’ If you think he had it the first time, Katy bar the door.”
He had a prediction: “This has the potential to be historic in a way that only a handful of administrations have been. We remember some administrations with a level of history-altering moments. This one’s gonna have a lot.”
What about the potential for wrongdoing, such as using government to suppress or abuse foes? “He’s said a million times his revenge is going to be success. When Trump wins, he lets bygones be bygones.”
He paused. “Some of the people he’s hired aren’t that way, so there’s a chance some people may take it upon themselves to do some stuff. I don’t know.”
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https://x.com/i/web/status/1867650936459419782
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[Grifter] gargoyle goes to Greece:
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/12/12/trump-jr-didnt-like-kimberly-guilfoyles-style-family-happy-to-see-her-go-reports/
she will be missed almost as much as I missed her on Fox :evil:
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Canada, Panama, Greenland...
https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2024/12/23/canada-the-panama-canal-and-now-greenland-whats-behind-trumps-expansionist-rhetoric-n4935388
https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/24/get-greenland-before-china-does/
https://www.dossier.today/p/yes-america-should-absolutely-annex?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=69009&post_id=153538187&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=9bg2k&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
-------------------
As a matter of timing, I had just posted on the Forum that Trump should buy Siberia, just before he announced his intent to buy Greenland.
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(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Gfh2vvwXoAAkZ8h?format=jpg&name=small)
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The Panama thread is a good place for matters concerning Panama and perhaps the Arctic thread for matters concerning Greenland.
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(1) TRUMP DEFENSE PICK SIGNALS PIVOT TO CHINA: President-elect Donald Trump said he will nominate Elbridge Colby as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy.
President-elect Trump said Colby will work with Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth to restore U.S. military power and achieve Trump’s policy of “peace through strength.”
Why It Matters: Colby believes the Indo-Pacific, not Europe, is the decisive theater for the United States. Colby’s nomination combined with Trump’s calls for NATO countries to double their defense spending is a solid sign that U.S. foreign policy will pivot away from Russia-Ukraine to China and the Indo-Pacific. Colby advocates for containment with the goal of deterring China from seeking regional hegemony, which Colby argues would give China significant influence over the global and U.S. economies. – R.C.
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https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/corporate-donate-trump/2024/12/25/id/1192837/
I never thought about it before.
I would have thought Feds pay for ceremony.
We must still pay for all the securit and ground setup.
So what does this money actually go for? parties?
perhaps this saves taxpayer money but as we all know it is not without strings.
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Reading the Matt Gaetz Ethics Report
By blocking him as AG, Senators helped the country—and Trump.
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Dec. 23, 2024 5:38 pm ET
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Former Rep. Matt Gaetz Photo: Alex Brandon/Associated Press
Whether Donald Trump realizes it or not, Republicans did him a favor by making clear that former Rep. Matt Gaetz was unconfirmable as U.S. Attorney General. On Monday the House Ethics Committee released a 37-page report from its misconduct inquiry into Mr. Gaetz, which found “substantial evidence” of drug use, prostitution, and statutory rape.
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“The Committee heard testimony from over half a dozen witnesses who attended parties, events, and trips with Representative Gaetz from 2017-2020,” it says. “Nearly every young woman that the Committee interviewed confirmed that she was paid for sex by, or on behalf of, Representative Gaetz.” Some were first contacted via “a ‘sugar dating’ website,” the report adds. Mr. Gaetz “did not appear to have negotiated specific payment amounts.”
Yet the committee alleges that the terms of the deal were clear. “The women had a general expectation that they would typically receive some amount of money after each sexual encounter,” it says. One woman who got $5,000 over two years testified: “99 percent of the time that [Representative Gaetz and I] were hanging out, there was sex involved.” Text messages included lines such as: “Btw Matt also mentioned he is going to be a bit generous.”
The report says the record “overwhelmingly suggests” Mr. Gaetz had sex with a 17-year-old at a house party in 2017, when he was 35, citing corroboration by “multiple individuals.” The woman testified she was given “$400 in cash from Representative Gaetz that evening, which she understood to be payment for sex.” She said “she did not inform Representative Gaetz that she was under 18 at the time, nor did he ask.” The committee says it has evidence Mr. Gaetz didn’t learn her age until later, while noting that “statutory rape is a strict liability crime.”
In text messages, the report says, Mr. Gaetz would “ask women to bring drugs to their rendezvous,” in some cases “requesting ‘a full compliment [sic] of party favors,’ ‘vitamins,’ or ‘rolls.’” One woman said that she “witnessed him taking cocaine or ecstasy on at least five occasions.”
Mr. Gaetz denies illegal behavior. “In my single days, I often sent funds to women I dated,” he wrote last week. “I NEVER had sexual contact with someone under 18. Any claim that I have would be destroyed in court—which is why no such claim was ever made in court.” He added: “It’s embarrassing, though not criminal, that I probably partied, womanized, drank and smoked more than I should have earlier in life.” The Justice Department investigated Mr. Gaetz but didn’t bring any charges, which he claims is an exoneration.
The ethics report, however, alleges that his conduct broke state laws while also perhaps avoiding the federal sex-trafficking statute: “Although Representative Gaetz did cause the transportation of women across state lines for purposes of commercial sex, the Committee did not find evidence that any of those women were under 18 at the time of travel, nor did the Committee find sufficient evidence to conclude that the commercial sex acts were induced by force, fraud, or coercion.”
Appended to the report is a short dissent by a Republican, but it’s focused on the decision to release these ugly details after Mr. Gaetz quit Congress. “We do not challenge the Committee’s findings,” it says. Mr. Gaetz presents himself as a victim of a political vendetta, but his behavior should be disqualifying for a cabinet post, especially chief law enforcement officer. Mr. Gaetz abruptly resigned from Congress in hopes of forestalling the report’s release.
All of this vindicates GOP Senators who were skeptical of Mr. Gaetz’s nomination. The Senate’s advise-and-consent role is to protect the country from unfit nominees. By doing that job well, Republican Senators can also protect Mr. Trump from his worst decisions.
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/27/william-webster-kash-patel-tulsi-gabbard
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https://pjmedia.com/scott-pinsker/2024/12/28/theres-a-judas-in-the-magaverse-n4935483
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https://www.mediaite.com/politics/steve-bannon-slams-toddler-elon-musk-after-tesla-owner-tells-critics-to-fk-yourself-in-the-face-as-maga-civil-war-rages-on/
three points
why do we have to always during Trump have the problems aired all over the news scape? unlike Dems who rarely do this in public if at all to this degree.
funny the two foreign born Titans want to puch their business agenda in front of American born.
In another vein:
I read, and have no idea how true is the tech oriented H1Bvisas 70 % are from India and then next largest crew is from China at something like 8%.
The Indian ones are clearly quite motivated and do contribute . The ones at least in the medical field I have worked with are good citizens but then again I don't know if they came as
H1B visas or some other way.
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Note the article I posted on the Immigration thread #2304 which made some interesting third way arguments such as DEI suppressing white excellence and universities sucking on foreign money and govt grants while Americans go broke borrowing to finance their STEM ed.
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/trump-announces-additions-to-white-house-chief-of-staff-susie-wiless-team-5786529?utm_source=Goodevening&src_src=Goodevening&utm_campaign=gv-2025-01-05&src_cmp=gv-2025-01-05&utm_medium=email&est=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYvAqcwcVzc7PzLYPrHFRB710wA0AIj31kx5JTWZu9FddhEg4S8RP
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feCpIZ4sGbM
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Pete Hegseth Faces a Skeptical Senate
The Defense nominee must overcome doubts about his qualifications.
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Jan. 13, 2025 5:34 pm ET
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Pete Hegseth Photo: Tom Williams/Zuma Press
Pete Hegseth on Tuesday faces the Senate Armed Services Committee for his confirmation hearing to be Defense Secretary, and it could be a rough go. Democrats may make a spectacle of his personal history, and more than a few GOP Senators want to hear what he says about his plan to bolster flagging U.S. defenses.
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It’s still puzzling that President-elect Trump chose Mr. Hegseth for such a senior post. Mr. Trump seems to want someone to take on the “woke” policies of the military under President Biden, and they are problems. But retired four-star Army Gen. Jack Keane says this can be quickly addressed. Give the order, and the brass will follow and so on down the chain of command.
There are larger and more urgent issues at the Pentagon, and the 44-year-old Mr. Hegseth lacks the experience typically required. He has never run an organization of any size, never mind a bureaucracy with as many snares as the Pentagon.
Mr. Trump has nominated Stephen Feinberg, the CEO of Cerberus Capital, to fill the management gap as deputy secretary. Mr. Feinberg is a highly successful manager, but he also lacks familiarity with the vast Defense Department. Such experience is crucial lest Mr. Hegseth be swallowed up by the bureaucracy.
What does Mr. Hegseth think are the spending priorities to rebuild America’s military deterrent? Should the Navy stop building carriers that are vulnerable to long-range Chinese missiles? And has Mr. Hegseth thought about how technology innovators like Anduril Industries can enhance U.S. bang for the buck?
Nothing in Mr. Hegseth’s record suggests he has thought about any of this. He has an admirable combat record, but in private life he has mainly been a political combatant.
Democrats are likely to pound away on the accusation of sexual assault in Monterey, Calif., that he settled with his accuser. But police investigated and declined to bring charges, and the details in the public record leave us with doubts about the accuser’s claims. All Senators on the committee deserve to have access to the FBI’s background check.
The real concern is judgment—why was Mr. Hegseth, by then a well-known TV personality, cavorting with a woman whose husband was at the same hotel? He was setting himself up to be exploited by precisely such an accusation. The episode seems to have caught the Trump transition by surprise, and someone should ask if Mr. Hegseth was forthcoming when under consideration for the job.
The Defense Secretary has to make difficult calls on the behavior of general officers who violate military rules. Will the accused cite Mr. Hegseth’s conduct as a defense? Moral authority matters to command authority.
Mr. Trump’s social-media enforcers have been threatening Senators with reprisals if they vote against Mr. Hegseth, which suggests they know he still has doubts to overcome. This is too fraught a moment in global affairs for Senators not to ask the hard questions.
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https://time.com/7177760/trump-administration-changing-world-order/
He is not a Trump supporter but has some 'neutral' insights.
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Pete Hegseth Gets a Senate Pass
The Defense secretary nominee said he’ll ‘look under the hood’ if confirmed.
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Updated Jan. 14, 2025 5:40 pm ET
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President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth speaks during a Senate Armed Services confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Americans didn’t learn much about Pentagon nominee Pete Hegseth at his Senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday, but they did learn more about the world’s greatest nondeliberative body. Democrats mostly played into Mr. Hegseth’s hands with questions he easily parried, while Republicans asked little of substance.
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The most effective Democratic questioning came from Virginia’s Tim Kaine, who wanted to know why Mr. Hegseth didn’t disclose to the Trump team a settlement he paid to a woman who accused him of sexual assault. Mr. Hegseth kept saying he was “falsely charged” but never answered the question.
Many Democrats wasted their time framing Mr. Hegseth’s previous comments on women in combat as if this were 1994. But Mr. Hegseth said he now believes women should be able to serve in the armed forces as long as they can meet the same physical standards as men.
Republicans didn’t do much scrutinizing. Markwayne Mullin (R., Okla.) noted that Senators sometimes show up drunk for votes at night and cheat on their wives, but they aren’t in the chain of command of U.S. military forces. Tim Sheehy (R., Mont.), after opening his remarks by asking how many genders there are, did ask about Navy shipbuilding, to which Mr. Hegseth basically said Donald Trump wants to build ships. No details.
Ted Budd (R., N.C.) asked what the U.S. should do about its shortage of fighter aircraft, and Mr. Hegseth said he looked forward to “looking under the hood” once confirmed. He gave the same vague answer to Sen. Deb Fischer (R., Neb.) when she inquired whether the nominee supports a “nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile system” to counter Russian and Chinese nuclear capabilities.
Mr. Hegseth made noises about restoring U.S. military deterrence, and that’s something. But it appears we’re on track to have a secretary of Defense whose real views are a mystery. Let’s hope he rises to the occasion.
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MAGA Cashiers a Check on Tulsi Gabbard as DNI
Speaker Johnson bows to Mar-a-Lago in ousting Intel Chair Mike Turner.
By The Editorial Board
Jan. 16, 2025 5:55 pm ET
U.S. intelligence oversight took a turn for the worse Wednesday with the news that House Speaker Mike Johnson fired Ohio Rep. Mike Turner as chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Worse, the Speaker seems to have done it at the request of President Trump or his inner circle.
Mr. Johnson explained his decision by saying that “It’s a new Congress. We just need fresh horses in some of these places.” But Mr. Turner told CBS News that the Speaker cited “concerns from Mar-a-Lago” and that he will not serve from even a backbench committee seat.
Mr. Turner has been one of Mr. Johnson’s main supporters in the GOP conference, so the Speaker is sending the wrong message about the rewards of loyalty. It’s one thing for the Speaker to let Mr. Trump dictate to him on policy. But control over House leadership should be the Speaker’s prerogative. His ouster of Mr. Turner is a sign of weakness.
It’s also a bad message about the need for public honesty about threats to U.S. security. The House and Senate Intel Chairmen are checks on the CIA and the 17 other U.S. intelligence agencies. The committees can dig into intelligence findings by the director of national intelligence and ask pointed questions.
Mr. Turner went public last year with the news that Russia could put a nuclear antisatellite weapon in orbit. He was criticized as alarmist but he was right.
In a statement to the House Armed Services Committee, assistant secretary of Defense for Space Policy John Plumb said analysts believed detonation “at the right magnitude in the right location could render low-Earth orbit, for example, unusable for some period of time.” The Biden Administration would have preferred to keep that U.S. vulnerability under wraps.
Mr. Turner angered some in the GOP’s isolationist wing with his forthright support for Ukraine. In April 2024, he said Russian propaganda was being repeated on the House floor by Members who claimed the conflict in Ukraine was over NATO.
“To the extent this propaganda takes hold,” he said at the time, “it makes it more difficult for us to really see this as an authoritarian vs. democracy battle, which is what it is.”
MAGA critics also disliked his support for renewing, with some reforms, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to eavesdrop on non-U.S. citizens abroad. This is a crucial tool that Mr. Trump will be glad to have as President to prevent terror attacks.
Mr. Turner’s sacking is all the more troubling given Mr. Trump’s nomination of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Ms. Gabbard cast doubt on whether Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons and has supported a pardon for Edward Snowden, the traitor who leaked highly classified documents and fled to Moscow for asylum.
Ms. Gabbard also opposed Section 702 until she flipped her views last week in order to win Senate confirmation. The danger is that she will minimize threats to satisfy her isolationist policy preferences. She might be less willing to do so if she knows a serious House Intelligence Committee is watching.
Mr. Johnson is expected to replace Mr. Turner with Arkansas Rep. Rick Crawford, who voted against arming Ukraine last year. Perhaps he’ll rise to the role. But it’s alarming that Mr. Johnson is letting the GOP’s isolationist wing cashier one of his best committee chairs
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https://www.ammoland.com/2025/01/trumps-ag-nominee-bondi-expresses-willingness-to-work-with-dems-on-gun-control/?utm_source=Ammoland+Subscribers&utm_campaign=df6a2b98b5-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6f6fac3eaa-df6a2b98b5-7181749
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https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/01/president-trump-promotes-lt-col-matthew-lohmeier-under/
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This piece ought to make all the right heads explode:
https://instapundit.substack.com/p/happy-djt-day?r=2k0c5&triedRedirect=true
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https://pjmedia.com/catherinesalgado/2025/01/19/trump-sends-wrong-elitist-message-with-inauguration-change-n4936128
has a point.
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Though not deranged about it, the WSJ has always been dubious on Trump. Herewith it opines:
====================================
Can Trump Do Better the Second Time?
He’s stronger now, but his brand of political disruption has limits.
By The Editorial Board
Jan. 17, 2025 5:45 pm ET
Donald Trump takes the oath of office on Monday for a second term promising to disrupt the status quo—in Washington and around the world. Lord knows the status quo needs disrupting, but how he’ll do it and how far he’ll go remains a mystery, albeit for different reasons than eight long years ago.
In 2017 Mr. Trump had won narrowly, almost by accident, and he inherited a GOP majority in Congress that had a long-developed agenda on taxes, healthcare, judges and much else. The main policy victories of his first term—tax reform, energy development and judges—were traditional GOP priorities. He was less successful on his own signature issues of tariffs and immigration control.
***
This time Mr. Trump arrives in the Oval Office after a clear victory that was largely his own. The GOP majority in Congress is loyal to him, and a remarkable two-thirds of Republicans in the House were elected since 2016. Congress doesn’t have much of an agenda beyond what Mr. Trump campaigned on.
Eight years ago Mr. Trump also faced Democrats who were determined to oppose him on everything, if not impeach him from the start. There is no Russia collusion narrative this time. The press—which went all in for the “resistance” the last time—has hurt its credibility so much that Mr. Trump can afford to ignore most of its criticism.
The President-elect thus starts his second term with a personal favorable rating that is close to 50% and new political capital. Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, seems to have imposed order on the transition and the new White House staff. Mr. Trump’s first six months in 2017, by contrast, were a daily riot of media leaks and make-it-up-as-you-go orders.
All of this means Mr. Trump has political running room, though it’s not unlimited. His victory was solid but no landslide. Half the country still dislikes him. And the GOP majority in the House is so narrow that a couple of willful Members can kill anything. Mr. Trump could quickly find himself in trouble if he exceeds his mandate from voters.
Take immigration and border security. Mr. Trump has a mandate to stop the flood of illegal migrants, and that will be an immediate priority. He will have support for deporting criminals and gangs like Tren de Aragua.
But he also promised mass deportation. If this means midnight raids on busboys, or separating mothers from children, the politics could turn fast. His best option is controlling the border and using his political capital on the subject to cut a deal with Congress on legal and illegal immigration.
Or take the tax bill that must pass to avoid a $4 trillion tax increase in 2026. Merely extending the 2017 tax provisions will be a heavy lift. But Mr. Trump campaigned on trillions of dollars more in tax breaks—no tax on tips, Social Security benefits or overtime.
The danger is that the tax bill becomes a vehicle for income redistribution rather than economic growth. Inflation more than anything else elected Mr. Trump, and he will fail as President if his policies don’t lift real wages for his new working-class coalition. He needs to support the Federal Reserve’s efforts to keep reducing inflation and promote growth with supply-side tax and regulatory policies.
***
Which brings us to tariffs, which he calls the “most beautiful word” except perhaps “faith” and “love.” A tariff is a tax and a tax is anti-growth. Mr. Trump is going to impose tariffs as soon as his first week, and they may be large and universal.
The impact of his tariffs, and of the retaliation from other countries, is a growth wild card. Congress has ceded so much authority to the President on trade that financial markets may be the only real check on his tariff policies. His policy advisers this time have all endorsed tariffs of some kind.
Mr. Trump also views tariffs as an all-purpose political tool, which raises the question of how much he wants to disrupt the current U.S. network of alliances. He may not leave NATO, at least not right away, but he will want Europe to provide for most of its own defense. Same with allies in Asia.
What we don’t know is whether Mr. Trump believes in a world in which there are dominant spheres of influence: the U.S. in the Western Hemisphere, China in the Asia-Pacific, and Russia in Europe. This is the logic of the GOP’s isolationist wing, and it is a recipe for a chaotic reordering of world affairs.
The biggest risk in our view is Mr. Trump’s desire to court adversaries in search of diplomatic deals for their own sake. He won’t settle the Ukraine war in a day as he promised, but an ugly deal that favors Russia could be his version of President Biden’s flight from Afghanistan. Mr. Trump will try again to coax North Korea’s Kim Jong Un into a nuclear deal, despite his failure the last time. Mr. Trump will be tougher on Iran at first, but he wouldn’t mind a nuclear deal with the Ayatollahs if they’re willing.
Most important will be his courtship of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping. Former Trump security adviser John Bolton writes in his memoir that Mr. Trump said in his first term that a U.S. defense of Taiwan was implausible, and Mr. Xi can read. China could react to Mr. Trump’s tariffs with a blockade of Taiwan, or perhaps by taking nearby islands now controlled by Taiwan. How would Mr. Trump respond to avoid the risk of war? Would he cede Taiwan to Mr. Xi?
***
Mr. Trump’s victory was most important as a repudiation of the woke left, and it creates a rare opening for Republicans to build a new majority. But Americans don’t want disruption for its own sake. They will support it if it means broader prosperity that they can share. They also don’t want Mr. Trump to indulge in the politics of retribution by siccing the FBI and Justice Department on opponents.
If Mr. Trump focuses on settling scores rather than raising incomes, Democrats will sweep the 2026 midterms and progressives will return to power with a vengeance in 2028. A second presidential chance would be a terrible thing to waste.
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As for CCP's piece on the imagery of the inaugeration, I get the point, but IMHO unspoken is that they don't want to admit that they doubt security if it is held outside. Deep and hidden forces are out there to kill him.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/saraharnold/2025/01/18/glenn-beck-offers-chilling-reason-why-he-thinks-trump-moved-inauguration-indoors-n2650759
and then there is this:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/exclusive-maryland-police-unable-to-assist-with-inauguration-security-due-to-use-of-force-policy/ar-AA1xr5Iy?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=6cd4f69332bb497f8a2f1a8f969db61b&ei=12
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Had not thought of security as being a/the factor to move inside . Makes sense.
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https://redstate.com/christopher-arps/2025/01/19/beware-of-wolves-in-maga-clothing-n2184364?utm_source=twdailyam&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&bcid=a1714aba6c197395707aecde9ada65a65090b7be5f45291f6611e9cf3bd6bace&lctg=2677215
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Watching how an unfriendly jurisdiction where an unfriendly committee convened to erect an unfriendly framework within which vindictive prosecutors persecuted average Americans who would have been celebrated if their shoe of protest was worn on the other foot will tell us much about how the next 4 years will unfold:
From Insurrection to Resurrection
President Trump taking the oath of office inside the building that was supposed to constitute the graveyard of his political future and movement he created is a fitting end to the phony J6 narrative.
JULIE KELLY
JAN 19, 2025
Concerns over bitter cold in Washington on Monday—perhaps coupled with security concerns—prompted President Trump to move his inauguration ceremony from outside to inside the U.S. Capitol. No one loves a party more than Trump, so presumably his decision to take the oath of office in front of a few hundred legislators rather than perhaps one million cheering supporters was not made lightly.
But the optics of Trump being sworn-in inside the very building that was supposed to constitute the graveyard of his political future and the movement he created should erase any disappointment. The ceremony inside the Capitol Rotunda at noon tomorrow will represent the climax of the biggest political comeback ever, one historians (usually all leftists) will struggle to accurately explain to future generations.
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From insurrection to resurrection.
Democratic politicians and influencers undoubtedly will spend the day posting comparison photos of the activity inside the Rotunda on January 6, 2021 versus the inaugural proceedings. “OMG look there is Representative So-and-So who ALMOST DIED on January 6! How is this happening??!!”
Expect more lies about police fatalities—the Rotunda also acted as the setting to promote the lie that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who lied in state there, was killed at the hands of Trump supporters on Jan 6—more lies about how Trump incited the violence that day, more lies about the people who participated in the protest. But their collective deception is like spitting in the wind: the insurrection narrative not only failed, it backfired.
Even a member of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, one of the most dependable J6 propaganda machines, recently admitted Democrats had “overinterpreted the Jan. 6 riot.” Calling Jan 6 a “disgraceful event,” Barton Swain nonetheless said “voters didn’t buy” how the Democrats tried to weaponize that day. (If you missed my light criticism of WSJ coverage of Jan 6, it’s here. Funny to read one of their own suddenly denounce the “overinterpretation” of the Capitol protest.)
Further, “overinterpretation” is hardly the apt description. After the Trump administration opens the books on how much taxpayer money was wasted pursuing Trump, his allies, and his voters, the American people should brace themselves for shock and disgust.
The Cost of the Failed J6 Operation Will Come to Light
Disgraced former special prosecutor Jack Smith, for example, spent at least $50 million on his dual prosecutions of President Trump; that does not include what the Department of Justice spent before Smith’s appointment in November 2022 investigating Trump for the events of Jan 6.
Add to the DOJ’s tab the so-called “Capitol Siege” investigation, which resulted in the arrest of almost 1,600 J6 protesters to date. The DOJ’s top brass reassigned prosecutors and investigators from federal offices around the country to instead work for D.C. U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves, the office responsible for charging and prosecuting J6ers, to handle the growing caseload.
The four-year political crusade to investigate, arrest, charge, convict, and imprison Trump supporters likely cost the DOJ, excuse me, us, hundreds of millions of dollars. The receipt, by the way, is still tabulating as the DOJ arrested and put on trial J6ers as recently as last week.
And that does not include how much J6ers had to spend defending themselves or the costs incurred by the federal public defender's office, which represented hundreds of penniless J6ers, most of whom despise Trump supporters.
Or the DOJ’s prosecution of Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro or criminal investigations into Trump associates such as John Eastman and Jeffrey Clark.
Then, of course, there is the January 6 Select Committee. Not only did the committee hire a well-known television network producer to jazz up nationally televised performances, more than 1,000 witnesses—mostly Trump White House aides and sometimes more than once—were hauled in front of committee inquisitors, which included former federal prosecutors who don’t work for cheap.
Resurrection then yes, Retribution
But now those same committee members and staffers fear, rightfully so, they soon will be on the other side of the interrogation table. Reports indicate Rep. Bennie Thompson, former chairman of the J6 committee, spoke with Biden’s White House counsel’s office last month about a preemptive pardon.
Graves, who left his post last Thursday, is on a media tour defending his abusive prosecution of J6ers and fielding questions about his own potential pardon. During an interview with a local D.C. station, Graves, sounding more like “Saturday Night Live” character Nathan Sturm rather than a serious law enforcement official, nervously laughed off concerns he might be prosecuted:
Jack Smith’s top prosecutor in the classified documents case, longtime DOJ henchman Jay Bratt, retired earlier this month; Smith resigned on January 10. But both reportedly have lawyered up to prepare for a Trump DOJ investigation into their conduct and/or Congressional inquiries, which already are underway.
Marco Polo, the opposition research group that prepared the book containing materials from Hunter Biden’s laptop, is using facial recognition to identify all the slavish DOJ employees who just gave Merrick Garland a sendoff worthy of any tyrant.
Meanwhile, once-simpatico J6 architects Nancy Pelosi and the Bidens are at each other’s throats. Glowering in a photo for a recent Washington Post profile, Dr. Jill said she was “disappointed” in her friend of 50 years, Nancy Pelosi. Dr. Jill skipped greeting the Pelosis at the White House holiday party and the Bidens did not send well wishes to Pelosi after her fall last month.
The bad blood further spilled when Alexandra Pelosi, who filmed her mother’s minute-by-minute movements on January 6, referred to Jill Biden as “Lady McBiden” and told her to grow up. “There aren’t that many people left in America who have something nice to say about Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi is one of them.”
OOF.
“MAGA Extremists” Descend on DC as their Tormentor-in-Chief Prepares to Exit
Traveling by planes, trains, and automobiles, hundreds of thousands, maybe up to a million, Americans branded “MAGA extremists” by Joe Biden are arriving in Washington to celebrate something even the most diehard Trump supporter never envisioned. Biden departs office a broken man, carrying with him the disdain of the American people and the burden of his crime racket family, now political pariahs rather than the dynasty he had always envisioned.
And Donald Trump—the man who prevailed over an unprecedented, coordinated crusade to put him behind bars, destroy his business and his family, and wreck the MAGA movement—will stand triumphant before those very same saboteurs in the very same place they thought would end it all.
Enough to make you want to dance.
https://www.declassified.live/p/from-insurrection-to-resurrection
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Caught most of his event this evening, National Anthem, Christian cuties, to Kid Rock, culminating in a speech by him that had me quite caught up in it. Perhaps I am carried away, but I thought it one of his best ever-- the man is in the zone!
PS: Promised good things for the J6 folks!
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Dealing with the “reality distortion zone” embraced by sundry Western leaders and reasserting American strength by breathing de facto life into the Monroe Doctrine:
How Trump plans to make America greater
Speak to MAGA insiders, and the message is clear: the president is deadly serious about his imperial ambitions
Friday, January 17, 2025
“The mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation,” said William McKinley, America’s 25th commander-in-chief, who happens to be one of Donald Trump’s favorite presidents. Trump, who barely dodged a bullet in 2024, shares a number of traits with McKinley, who was assassinated in 1901: Scottish blood, ferocious work ethic, an affinity with the super-rich that somehow appeals to the working classes, a faith in tariffs as a means of safeguarding industry, and a willingness to expand America’s empire to boost future prosperity.
“I’m talking about protecting the free world,” said Trump last week, as he announced his intention to annex Canada and Greenland, to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America and to reassert American sovereignty over the Panama Canal. “You don’t even need binoculars. You look outside, you have China ships all over the place. You have Russian ships all over the place. We’re not letting that happen.”
The same day, the President-elect had dispatched his eldest son to Greenland aboard his Boeing 757, aka Trump Force One, to greet the locals. Don Junior, the princeling, came in peace. “We’re going to treat you well,” he told the Inuits, as 3,000 miles away, in the warmer climes of Mar-a-Lago, his father refused to rule out using military force to acquire their land.
Most of the world reacted to the Trump clan’s imperial ambitions with a mixture of amusement and disbelief. The political and diplomatic classes assume that his expansionist rhetoric is a madman ploy, a bluff to advance the Trump 2.0 tariff agenda and push his more sincere demands that Nato countries spend up to 5 percent of their budgets on defense. Speak to MAGA insiders, however, and the message is clear: he is deadly serious. “I keep speaking to Europeans and British embassy people and telling them he really means this stuff,” says one. “And they are like, ‘No, no, it’s just a negotiating tactic.’ I just think, are you guys never going to get it?”
Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, says the President-elect’s “geo-strategic vision” is “the new ‘Great Game,’ bro.” It is global power politics for the manosphere and a natural extension of America First chauvinism: Make America Greater and Safer — by adding vast swaths of land where necessary. Trump’s first inaugural speech, in January 2017, was an inward-looking diatribe against “American carnage.” His second, eight years later, is expected to convey a greater sense of international urgency, including perhaps a direct warning about the threat of China.
“If you want Fortress America,” says Bannon, “Trump’s giving you Fortress America, all the way from Panama up through Greenland. Can he pull any of this off? Hey, it’s Donald Trump.”
If anyone doubts Trump’s ability to bend reality to his will, his allies point towards the fact that, at the same press conference, he promised “all hell will break loose” should Hamas not return its Israeli hostages before he returns to the White House on Monday. Sure enough, Hamas appears to have agreed to give back the hostages as part of a peace deal. Such diplomatic breakthroughs make it difficult for any fair-minded observer to gainsay the method in Trump’s madness.
Quite how Trump might take over Greenland, let alone Canada, is another question altogether. He has already disputed Denmark’s legal claim to the territory and suggested that Greenlanders would vote to join America in a referendum. Inside MAGA circles, there’s confidence that the threat of tariffs could force Denmark’s hand. One idea being discussed is to give Copenhagen a pass on increasing its Nato defense spending commitments in exchange for the handover of Greenland. Another is that Trump might prohibit sales of the Danish super-drug Ozempic — a product he’s rumored to use himself — in the world’s fattest market. “What a great negotiation tool Trump has,” says Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist who travelled with Don Junior to Greenland last week. “He could be like, ‘Oh, it would be a shame if Ozempic was banned in America. I mean, do you guys want Greenland that bad?’”
That’s not necessarily a stupid threat. Novo Nordisk, Ozempic’s manufacturer, is valued at $400 billion, which is about the same as Denmark’s entire annual GDP. What could be more Trumpy than turning America’s obesity epidemic into strategic leverage? “The Greenland stuff is like everything Trump does,” says another insider. “He starts talking about it and everyone says that’s random. And then they realize that it makes perfect sense. Denmark doesn’t really have the scale to do anything meaningful with Greenland, but we really could.”
Greenland is rich in minerals and the rare-earth elements which make semiconductors work and drive our technological age. The territory is also likely to be an increasingly important asset when it comes to intercontinental trade, as improved ice-breaking technology and, perhaps, climate change open up the frozen North Sea passages. US military chiefs have long been sensitive to China and Russia’s maneuvers in the Arctic Circle.
According to some Trumpworld voices, America’s annexation of Greenland is part of a broader strategy to counter Beijing’s Belt and Road initiative. “An alternative US Belt and Road type scenario is very possible,” says one soon-to-be member of the Trump administration. “The feeling here is that we’ve been asleep at the wheel for too long. China’s tentacles are everywhere.”
During the Covid crisis, it is said, Trump became depressed at the vulnerability of America’s economy when it came to global supply routes. He is also understood to have been alarmed at the more recent Houthi attacks on international shipping lanes in the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea. Trump’s secretary of state Marco Rubio, national security adviser Mike Waltz and the under-secretary of defense Elbridge Colby are all similarly exercised about China’s naval build-up and determined to re-establish that America rules the waves.
Under Trump 2.0, then, America will be a far more assertive sea power, aping China’s tactics of buying up ports and strategic assets and aggressively taking back control of the key water lanes, especially around Panama, the Caribbean and southern America. It’s no coincidence that Rubio is of Cuban origin and his deputy is Christopher Landau, whose background is in Latin-American diplomacy.
The incoming administration is hardly the first US government to take a keen interest in the seas. The American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan’s preoccupation with British sea power shaped the thinking of McKinley and after him president Teddy Roosevelt. Both men used American warships to assert dominance in the western hemisphere, long before the advent of the League of Nations and the liberal idealism of Woodrow Wilson.
Trump, who thrives on being considered a fool, believes that American greatness accelerated towards the end of 19th century, when tariffs generated vast wealth for the American industrial robber-baron complex and the US didn’t bother with what today is called the liberal rules-based order. China and Russia aren’t playing by the rules anyway, runs the logic, so why should we?
The Republican party increasingly sees the world the same way. “The whole ‘rules-based’ order thing is simply not appealing to the American right these days,” says one source. “It’s been internalized as just more ‘Globo Homo,’ if you know that term.” When asked to define “Globo Homo,” Trump’s circle point towards what Keir Starmer’s government is doing with Diego Garcia, an important US-UK naval base in the Pacific and the biggest of the Chagossian islands, which Britain is hurriedly giving over to Mauritius, possibly to placate the Chinese Communist party. “My gaaad, what a disaster!” says the same source. “The brain rot of the liberal elite.”
“There’s this reality distortion zone around Nato and the United Nations,” says another insider. “All this moralizing goes on and it’s totally disconnected from hard power politics. Then you combine this moral tut-tutting with an unwillingness to do serious things with hard power. Just look at Ukraine. You think that war is existential and Russia is going to go on some expansionist campaign across Europe, then you need to be massively upping your military budget. I’m not saying that European powers did nothing. But the rhetoric was not being matched by the budgetary emphasis.”
It will be difficult for Britain’s Foreign Office to accept that people who speak in such damning terms are now perilously close to the White House. Yet we’ve already all seen in recent days the low opinion that Elon Musk, the First Buddy, has of the Westminster elite. Perhaps one idea that binds Team Trump together, from Musk to Bannon, is a deeply held belief that Britain, America’s predecessor as global hegemon, has lost control of its borders and gone to the dogs.
There’s a widely shared determination that America, the empire of liberty, will not go the same way, now that she has been freed from the leadership of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. “Biden meant four years of the dramatic liquidation of American power,” says one insider. The answer, according to Team Trump, is to restore peace through strength, and that means creating an icy strategic path through the north and a naval belt stretching out below the renamed Gulf of America. (“I actually hate that renaming of geographical places,” says one Trump source. “That’s what North Korea does.”)
The last, best hope for many Brexiteers, meanwhile, is that America might somehow rescue Britain from our China–appeasing, Europe-facing Labour government and benevolently assimilate Britain into its sphere of renewed North Atlantic influence. Trump has expressed his dismay at Britain’s “very big mistake” in shutting down oil and gas exploration in the North Sea. Rather than somehow forcing Canada to become the 51st state — a fanciful notion even for the most fanatical American primacists — why doesn’t the re-elected President focus on creating an Anglosphere Union, a free trade and military alliance comprising the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, as a great buffer against Chinese control?
But the Empire of Trump is not much interested in new international agreements: it’s all about America First, as the Donald has said all along. His advisers tend to talk with what-can-you-do sadness about the British experience of multiculturalism. “There’s obviously a special relationship and we would love to keep that, but if the UK turns into Pakistan then that’s less interesting,” says one source.
What is more likely is that the US State Department will use its bully pulpit to berate European powers and Britain for its suppression of free speech, a major concern for the Trump family, Musk and the broader MAGA movement. Expect that to be something Emperor Donald addresses sooner rather than later.
https://thespectator.com/topic/trump-plans-make-america-greater-empire/
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We've discussed this before, but with President Trump's EO yesterday I am thinking it is time to give it its own thread.
ND
Here is my current thinking:
The President is right. Period.
The key point IMHO is this: Note the word "AND". As a matter of statutory construction, this means TWO requirements must be met: Birth here AND subject to the jurisdiction. Those who would have birth here be the sole criterion violate the rule of statutory construction that language not be read to be meaningless.
So, the question presented becomes, "How can someone be here yet not subject to our jurisdiction?
I will give one example (there are more but I am busy in San Fran getting ready for three days of training the police here) -- the Apaches and the Commanches most certainly were born here and neither they nor we regarded them as subject to our jurisdiction! I submit that my point here is affirmed by the passage of a STATUTE (in the 1920s?) declaring them to be citizens by birthright.
There are other examples, but my proposition is that the Amendment envisioned the meaning of "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" to be fleshed out by statute cf the C. granting Congress the power to determine the jurisdictions of federal courts (a point I will need to research further).
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… here:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/
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Do we need a dedicated Melania thread? NSFW language:
https://x.com/KarluskaP/status/1881767877801631890?mx=2
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Love the clip, indeed I forwarded it to my wife! That said, I'm thinking Melania can comfortably fit in the Trump 2.0 thread-- we already have so many -- but I am glad to put it up to vote.
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Love the clip, indeed I forwarded it to my wife! That said, I'm thinking Melania can comfortably fit in the Trump 2.0 thread-- we already have so many -- but I am glad to put it up to vote.
I was only half serious and suspect there won’t be enough content to support a dedicated thread, at this point at least.
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I love the meme about the looks she gives when her husband is about to go medieval for the FBI going through her lingerie drawer.
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https://redstate.com/bonchie/2025/01/25/woman-who-accused-pete-hegseth-of-domestic-abuse-releases-statement-claims-she-was-promised-something-n2184796
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An accurate perspective:
From Daniel Jupp:
The 2nd term has been conducted so far even more gloriously than I thought it would be.
I don’t think people realise fully what is happening here. Trump is using the mandate and his personality to simply go straight through all the usual barriers, obstacles and crooks like they aren’t there.
And he’s taking action. It’s not just words.
Signing executive orders is one thing. But he’s learned the lesson from the obstruction that took place in the first term. He has his people, MAGA people, empowered and where obstruction is happening, they are going in and removing it.
You want to delay releasing J6ers? Ok, I’ll send US Marshalls in to pull them out.
You want to give someone a different job title and think you can still keep doing that DEI shit under a different name? Ok, we will spot it, get the legal team on it, and the person above has got 10 days to stop or you’re losing your job as well.
You are still doing nothing and fucking around leaving people freezing and homeless in Carolina? Ok, I’m ordering the Army back and they are building bridges and roads and fixing things. Enough of that shit.
You have a scheme with insurance companies and mortgage providers to steal all the land in California and ‘build back better’? No. I’m going in, I’m letting the victims speak live on every channel, I’m shaming the insurance companies. Federal permissions are going to delay rebuilding? No they aren’t, I’m waiving them. Karen Bass says it takes months to start rebuilding? No it doesn’t, I’m publicly shaming that and I’m looking at every means to bypass her and just let people get back to their properties and start cleaning up.
Ukraine grift? No, I’ve turned off the money tap. I’ve phoned Putin and Zelenskky. Get working on a peace deal, now.
You used security clearances and intel expert status to try to impose a Democrat permanent tyranny? Those security clearances are gone. Immediately. Oh, and you can forget your security detail too. I know people are going to bleat about it. I don’t care.
Basically Trump is treating the whole federal system as a company he owns where the employees have been lazy thieving bastards…and it is. But more, he’s treating it as a company YOU own where the employees have been lazy cheating bastards….and it is. And by sheer energy, force of personality and some obvious planning awareness that obstruction would be attempted again, he is, as Chuck Schumer whines, bulldozing.
Before, he reached over the heads of the Matrix to address the people directly. Ok, I’ll go round the media because the media is crooked. I’ll address the people directly through tweets and rallies and just constant presence always, every day, going somewhere and meeting ordinary people. I’ll walk into a restaurant and shake a hundred hands. I’ll visit a fire station. Every single day. Combine the rallies and the public appearances and Trump campaigns at a level and with an energy like nobody else….but he does it when in office too. He doesn’t stop. It’s perpetual campaigning.
Now, he’s added to that. Ok, the obstacle is this whole edifice of the Deep State, the administrative State, the obstructionists who want decline and disaster because that’s what they have schemes to profit from. Fuck that. FEMA are no good, I’ll use the Army. Do I have an honest piece I can place on the table? I’ll use that instead. The people are furious and being ignored? I’ll bring them right into the heart of this. I’ll reach over the heads of the Matrix again. But this time to do the tasks. Real action.
The most heartening thing for me was hearing that people were sacked and cleared out of their desks and escorted from buildings in some instances. Yes, the best news is these people being sacked. Because that signals it’s not just words. That signals action and consequence. You can’t try and block this. You have no legitimate ability to block this. And if you are sitting in a non job doing nothing but propaganda and obstruction, you’re being removed from the building.
Apply that to the Republican Senators who try to block appointments, and all is good.
My one cause of concern is the AI deal, but the rest has been golden. No western nation has seen an assault on the corruption of the system like this in centuries. Trump is dealing with the administrative State the way Thatcher dealt with the unions in Britain in the 1980s. In Britain, that led to the sole period of pride and success my nation has had since World War Two. Trump’s assault on the administrative State if continued will be bigger than what has already been achieved by a similar attitude in Argentina. It will be the greatest blow against the Matrix and for the people and the greatest impediment to the slave society that was being built ever seen.
The AI infrastructure deal is the only route he has left them for that dystopia, but I’m hoping he and Musk will be able to turn it to genuine good serving the people rather than to the control system of the elite. I don’t think as the truther crowd do that it means him and Musk want the same slave society that a Gates wants. Everything else they are doing contradicts that.
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AMEN.
PS: I'm glad to see the article note AI policy as problematic.
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https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-myth-of-mt-denali/
National Park Service notes that, “no fewer than nine Native groups… used unique names for the mountain. There are five Athabascan languages surrounding the park, each with its own oral place name.”
And Mt. Denali is not even the right tribal name.
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I am more than a little uneasy with this. Pompeo was an outstanding Sec State and even though Bolton turned asshole, both men's lives are legitimately in danger from the Iranians.
There is a whiff of pettiness here , , , Furthermore, if either is taken out, it will be very bad politically for Trump.
https://x.com/DefiyantlyFree/status/1881850242930491675
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@CynicalPublius
To fully understand just how remarkable today’s exchange with Colombia was, you need to understand how Washington DC has traditionally worked through these sorts of issues, and the different way it works now under Trump.
I’ll illustrate.
Traditional Approach:
1. Colombia announces it will not take our repatriation flights.
2. On Monday, the State Department convenes an interagency task force with DoD, NSC, DEA, INS, ICE, Commerce, Treasury and Homeland Security.
3. The task force meets for four days and develops a position paper.
4. The position paper is rejected by the Secretary of State, who is unhappy that insufficient equity considerations are built into the process.
5. The task force reconvenes a week later to redevelop three new, equity-centric courses of action and create a new position paper.
6. The process is delayed a week because Washington DC gets three inches of snow.
7. SecState approves the new position paper for interagency circulation, and considerable input is received from the heads of other departments so the task force must reconvene.
8. The original three proposed responsive courses of action are scrapped in favor of a new, fourth course of action that achieves the worst aspects of the three prior courses of action but satisfies the interagency.
9. Someone in State who disagrees leaks to the Washington Post, who writes a story about how ineffective the Presidential administration is.
10. The White House Chief of Staff sets up a session three days later to brief the President, who approves the new fourth course of action.
11. Over a month after the issue is first raised, the State Department Public Affairs Officer holds a press conference announcing that Colombia has agreed to try to send fewer criminals into the US and everyone declares victory.
Trump Approach:
1. Colombia announces it will not take our repatriation flights.
2. After a par-5 third hole where he goes one under par, Trump uses his iPhone to post on social media as to how the USA will destroy Colombia’s economy if they do not do what the USA demands.
3. By the time Trump gets to the par-4 sixth hole, Colombia’s President has agreed to repatriate all the illegal Colombians in his own plane, which he will pay for.
4. Trump finishes three under par and goes to the clubhouse for a Diet Coke where he posts a gangsta AI image of himself and the new FAFO Doctrine.
5. Winning.
See the difference? It’s called LEADERSHIP.
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I heartily concur!
https://www.dailywire.com/news/cotton-urges-trump-to-revisit-his-decision-to-pull-protective-details-off-people-targeted-by-iran
Not only is Trump in the wrong here, the whiff of personal pettiness is already in the air on this one (e.g. weathervane Lindsay Graham https://www.bizpacreview.com/2025/01/27/lindsey-graham-wants-senate-to-probe-why-trump-yanked-security-for-john-bolton-1518734/
https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1883554438889025792 ), and any attempt or god forbid, success would be devastating to Trump's image.
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'The GOP needs to act as though they have 18 months to fix everything because that could be the case.'
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The NLRB is capable of all manner of hijinks, and worse. This will be worth tracking; on the face of it Trump has a strong hand to play here, albeit one the next Democrat president will also be able to exercise:
@BehizyTweets
BREAKING: President Trump just fired Gwynne Wilcox, the National Labor Relations Board Chair.
Wilcox says she will fight to overturn his decision, "As the first Black woman Board Member, I brought a unique perspective that I believe will be lost upon my unprecedented and illegal removal... I will be pursuing all legal avenues to challenge my removal, which violates long-standing Supreme Court precedent."
President Trump's decision shocked the system because apparently, NLRB members are shielded from presidential removal, a rule that clearly violates the Constitution.
There is no such thing as an "independent agency" of the federal government. ALL agencies that wield executive authority are under the president's jurisdiction. Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution: “The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States.”
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2nd post.
This could go a lot of places, but given Trump’s election is the root cause of much of what is discussed, I’ll drop it here. Note, a lot of rabbit holes linked in the original and subsequent pieces I’ll also link below.
Amusingly and annoyingly, a theme that emerges throughout these pieces involve impact Trump’s EOs et all have on federal employees (FE). FEs don’t know if they’ll have jobs/predictable income, you know like many Americans that endured Bidenomics. FEs fret that they are or will be singled out for the choices they made while doing their jobs, you know like those that questioned woke dogmas, or had the wrong affiliations, or indeed had some characteristic that did not provide them membership in a “protected class.” Poor FEs, in short, feel persecuted for doing the bidding for their political masters and persecuting their fellow Americans.
Cry me a freaking river, mofos:
https://thetransom.com/p/trump-to-bureaucrats-freeze
Politico’s take on the destruction of political structures Dems used to maintain political power, calling it a “power grab:”
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2025/01/28/trumps-massive-power-grab-00200908
Yo Politico, make that some realpolitik jits.
And Politicos tale of the poor, beleaguered DOJ employees coming to terms with what it feels like to lose hunter status and contend with the powerlessness they imposed on their former prey:
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/27/trump-justice-department-week-one-00200860
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Tulsi Gabbard, Edward Snowden and Intelligence
Does the U.S. want a director of national intelligence who excuses mass leaking of secrets?
By The Editorial Board
Updated Jan. 28, 2025 6:24 pm ET
Voters want disruption in Washington, but it’d be something else entirely for the Senate to confirm a director of national intelligence who has a record of defending those who subvert U.S. interests. When former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard testifies Thursday, will Republicans pose questions that serve the public interest, or go along to get along with President Trump?
Sen. Tom Cotton, the head of the Intelligence Committee, recently said he hopes nobody questions Ms. Gabbard’s patriotism. We aren’t. The issue is what she believes and what she does, especially on U.S. intelligence. Her history isn’t encouraging. In 2020 she introduced a House resolution, alongside then Rep. Matt Gaetz, calling for the feds to drop charges against Edward Snowden.
“The National Security Agency’s bulk collection telephone records program was illegal and unconstitutional,” the resolution argued. “Edward Snowden’s disclosure of this program to journalists was in the public interest.” Oh, his disclosure of one NSA program to some trusted journalists? Is that all Ms. Gabbard believes Mr. Snowden did?
The reality is that Mr. Snowden betrayed his oath by pilfering a massive cache of U.S. secrets, fleeing to Russia, and subsequently taking citizenship there.
“The vast majority of the documents he stole have nothing to do with programs impacting individual privacy interests,” a House Intelligence Committee review said in 2016. “They instead pertain to military, defense and intelligence programs of great interest to America’s adversaries.” Many of the details are classified, though, and the report was heavily redacted.
Yet the damage was real. “Russia and China have cracked the top-secret cache of files stolen by the fugitive US whistleblower Edward Snowden, forcing MI6 to pull agents out of live operations in hostile countries,” the U.K.’s Sunday Times reported in 2015. The U.K. is part of the Five Eyes alliance of nations that share intelligence with the U.S. It’s hard to square that report with the euphemistic description in Ms. Gabbard’s House resolution.
Or take it from Mr. Cotton, who didn’t mince words in 2016. “Edward Snowden was an egotistical serial liar and traitor whose unauthorized disclosures of classified information have jeopardized the safety of Americans and allies around the world,” he said. “Snowden’s close and continual contact with Russian intelligence services speak volumes. He deserves to rot in jail for the rest of his life.”
We agree with the late New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who led a commission on government secrets in the 1990s, that overclassification is a problem. “The best way to ensure that secrecy is respected, and that the most important secrets remain secret, is for secrecy to be returned to its limited but necessary role,” that report said. “Secrets can be protected more effectively if secrecy is reduced overall.”
What Mr. Snowden stole wasn’t needlessly kept secrets, and the solution to overclassification isn’t for random government contractors to go rogue and download whatever they see fit. Ms. Gabbard might try to parry by saying today’s whistleblower protections offer better channels for dissent. But the House report said that “laws and regulations in effect at the time of Snowden’s actions afforded him protection.” He made a different choice.
No, the question isn’t Ms. Gabbard’s patriotism. It’s judgment, and what message it would send friends and foes to confirm a director of national intelligence who doesn’t really seem to believe in protecting national intelligence.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqmw-Gmemdc
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A wide ranging piece covering all sorts of ground and containing many insights. Given that Trump is the common denominator herein, I’ll drop it here:
https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/the-occupation-saturday-february
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Some very apt speculations and bon mots here:
https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/none-shall-sleep-monday-february
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https://ace.mu.nu/archives/413536.php
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(2) TRUMP TAKING CONTROL OF FINANCIAL REGULATORS: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent ordered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to stop all rulemaking, communications, and lawsuits yesterday.
President Donald Trump is expected to appoint new directors of the Federal Deposit Insurance Company (FDIC) and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), according to a person familiar with the plans.
Why It Matters: Reforming the CFPB has been a longstanding priority for Congressional Republicans and key Trump donors. This is likely an effort to finally put the CFPB under the appropriations process, deregulate digital fund transfers, and prevent regulators from “nudging” banks to debank Trump administration officials and political appointees as “politically exposed persons.” - R.C.
Beltway Rollup:
(3) RUBIO SAYS STATE NOW CONTROLS USAID: Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he is now in charge of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and USAID may be dismantled after a review of the agency’s operations.
(4) TRUMP CREATES U.S. SOVEREIGN WEALTH FUND: President Donald Trump issued an executive action directing federal agencies to create a U.S. sovereign wealth fund. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the sovereign fund will be created in the next twelve months, and creating a sovereign fund is of great strategic importance.
(5) TRUMP TO ISSUE EO ENDING EDUCATION DEPARTMENT: President Trump is preparing an executive order that aims to dismantle the Department of Education, according to people briefed on the draft order. Twenty Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employees have already started working in the Education Department to cut spending and eliminate employees.
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I concur!!!
And without it, what happens to Trump's pretenses of buying half of TikTok?
====================
‘Sovereign Wealth’ for Politicians
All the reasons Trump’s government investment fund is a very bad idea.
By The Editorial Board
Feb. 6, 2025 5:54 pm ET
Now here’s an idea: Leverage federal assets to create a new investment fund for the political class to invest in whatever it pleases, including private companies. What could possibly go wrong?
The answer is plenty, which is why President Trump’s proposal Monday to create a new sovereign wealth fund deserves to die in Congress. His executive order included scant details. But it said the fund would “promote fiscal sustainability,” “establish economic security for future generations, and promote United States economic and strategic leadership internationally.” More likely, it would take resources from the private economy, fund political boondoggles, and mess with the business decisions of private companies.
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Mr. Trump’s order directs Treasury and Commerce to develop a plan within 90 days for “funding mechanisms, investment strategies, fund structure, and a governance model” as well as legislation that could be required to set it up. Congress would have to authorize its creation and funding mechanism.
Why has no President done this before? One reason is the U.S. perennially runs budget deficits, projected at $1.9 trillion for this fiscal year. Countries with sovereign wealth funds typically invest surplus revenue from commodity sales or excess foreign exchange reserves from trade surpluses, e.g., China.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the U.S. can “monetize” federal assets, which the White House puts at $5.7 trillion. Treasury, theoretically, could sell or securitize future revenue streams from such assets to raise money for the fund. The money would then be invested to earn returns, also in theory.
In practice, federal assets aren’t what they seem. Washington’s biggest asset is its $1.6 trillion in student debt, about a quarter of which is already set to be written off. Other phantom assets include hundreds of billions of dollars in loans for disaster relief, low-income housing and green energy. The U.S. also owns some $2.6 trillion in property, software, plants and equipment, which are subject to depreciation.
Other countries that have wealth funds, such as Norway, finance them with revenue from oil or resource sales. The U.S. earns revenue from spectrum sales and royalties from leases. But the politicians spend it.
Such funds typically enrich a country’s rulers and their friends far more than citizens. Foreign leaders use the funds to finance businesses and projects of political allies. Corruption is a constant temptation. Malaysia’s version, 1MDB, channeled billions of dollars to support the lifestyles of a Prime Minister and his cronies.
There’s also no need for such a U.S. fund since Congress already spends on roads and bridges, technology, research and development and the other uses that Mr. Trump has cited as justification.
The biggest danger is that such a fund will be used to invest in private companies. Politicians would love a separate vehicle to direct capital without having to go through Congress. Mr. Trump gave the game away on Monday when he suggested such a fund could buy TikTok.
Howard Lutnick, nominated to be Commerce secretary, suggested that “if we are going to buy two billion COVID vaccines, maybe we should have some warrants and some equities in these companies and have that grow for the health of the American people.”
But with ownership comes political control. A sovereign wealth fund would give Mr. Trump and future Presidents more leverage to bully businesses. Witness how public pension funds use their investments to coerce companies to adopt their climate and cultural agenda. The French government’s stake in Renault has made it harder to cut jobs and close factories so the auto marker could become more competitive. If the feds own 10% of Pfizer, do you think Mr. Lutnick wouldn’t soon be telling the company what it can charge on drugs?
It’s no coincidence that after Mr. Trump floated the sovereign wealth idea last year, the Biden White House let it be known that it was working on such a fund to invest in strategic companies to compete with China. But then what was the $280 billion Chips Act all about?
***
In talking up his fund idea, Mr. Trump confuses “sovereign wealth” with the real wealth of nations. National wealth is created by the ingenuity and risk-taking of its citizens. They build new companies and make new discoveries. That’s how America became rich and built an economy worth trillions.
Government doesn’t create wealth, and a sovereign wealth fund would merely be one more way for the government to commandeer private wealth for political purposes. It will destroy more wealth than it creates.
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And another Coffee & Covid well worth perusing:
https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/gremlins-friday-february-7-2025-c
The section about OMB director Vought is well worth perusing.
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Standard gnashing of teeth from an expected quarter. You would think lawyers would understand the meaning of the term “probationary….”
Exclusive: ACLU asks Congress to investigate plans to fire 'probationary' federal employees
ACLU urges Congress to investigate layoffs
•The Hill News / by Rebecca Beitsch / Feb 7, 2025 at 2:34 PM
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is asking Congress to investigate the Trump administration's plans for “imminent mass layoffs” of as many as 200,000 employees hired within the last two years ago.
The letter comes as departments across government have been asked to assemble a list of employees still on probation after being hired. The probationary period lasts one or two years, depending on the agency.
The ACLU said Trump administration officials have “repeatedly made clear that they intend to reshape the federal workforce for their own partisan political purposes.”
“We respectfully urge that you investigate the Administration’s rationale and legal basis for these planned layoffs. … Mass layoffs of federal employees of the sort that have been reported to be under consideration are presumptively and inherently illegal,” the ACLU wrote to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
The ACLU argues the law requires reviewing each employee’s performance on a case-by-case basis, while any large-scale firings would have to follow existing law for shrinking the workforce.
Despite their probationary status, the employees are still afforded much of the same protections as the broader federal workforce, meaning they must be informed of “inadequacies” in their performance before being fired.
“While the law allows for the termination of probationary employees for performance or conduct reasons, a mass firing on this scale without any sort of individualized assessment or following of Reduction in Force (RIF) procedures raises serious legal concerns,” the ACLU wrote to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
“RIF decisions similarly cannot be motivated by partisan political reasons. Any effort to sidestep RIF procedures or apply political litmus tests to their employment status would violate federal law,” they added, noting reductions in force laws require a 60-day advance notice to employees.
The plan to remove probationary employees is just one of a number of sweeping actions to reshape the workforce.
The Office of Personnel Management has also offered nearly all government employees the option to take a buyout. Though the offer promises eight months of pay and benefits for those wishing to leave federal service, the proposed contract contains numerous conflicting statements and would leave employees with little recourse to challenge any fallout from the deal — including if it is not funded.
And President Trump also signed an order reigniting his Schedule F mandate, now dubbed Schedule P/C, that creates a new class of federal employees — directing agencies to reassign career policy staff to new positions where they could be hired and fired like political appointees.
The move has sparked fear the Trump administration will use the new employee class to remove career civil servants and replace them with political appointees, who would then have greater control over what have traditionally been nonpartisan roles.
The letter from the ACLU defended the current merit-based hiring system.
“Everyone in America relies on the professional and skilled federal employees who serve our communities,” it wrote.
“We need the people in these and so many other critical roles selected for their professionalism not for loyalty or cronyism. At this perilous moment, we urge that you make clear that the Trump Administration cannot violate existing laws and purge probationary employees government-wide based on partisan political objectives, rather than merit.”
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5133248-acolu-letter-congress-trump-administration/
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My first encounter with this Substack, though I’ve certainly encountered the author’s names before as they are both known in federal legal circles. Here they posit that Trump’s strategy can be found amid OMB’s new leader, Vought’s, speeches, writings, and methods. Though much of this is beyond my legal ken, I suspect they are on to something.
Marc, I suspect you’d derive value from clicking around this substack:
The Trump Executive Orders as “Radical Constitutionalism”
Much more than “test cases” may be at stake in Trump's aggressive claims of presidential authority
BOB BAUER AND JACK GOLDSMITH
FEB 03, 2025
President Trump looks at Russell Vought, who delivers remarks at the White House in 2019. (Official White House photo by Shealah Craighead)
Why do so many of President Trump’s multitudinous executive orders fly in the face of extant legal principles? Are they the result of incompetence? Is the administration laying the groundwork for test cases in an effort to expand executive power in the Supreme Court?
Below we assess a third possibility: the administration doesn’t care about compliance with current law, might not care about what the Supreme Court thinks either, and is seeking to effectuate radical constitutional change.
The third possibility sounds histrionic, which is not our usual posture. But it appears to be the view of Trump’s nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, who is one of Trump’s “most influential advisers,” who will be voted on for confirmation in the Senate soon, and who will play a central role in Trump’s executive orders, if he hasn’t already.
This post assesses Vought’s views on executive branch law compliance, examines how his views fit with the Trump approach to executive orders to date, and asks what administration lawyers might be doing in all of this.
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Vought’s Views
In May 2023, Vought complained at a talk at the pro-Trump think tank, the Center for Renewing America, that Trump’s policies in the first administration were thwarted because “the lawyers come in and say it’s not legal, you can’t do that, that would overturn this precedent, there’s a state law against that.”
Vought added that legal objections to presidential policies are where “so much of things break down in our country.” He provided a specific example: “a future president says, ‘What legal authorities do I need to shut down the riots,’ we want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community . . . to come in and say ‘that’s an inappropriate use of what you’re trying to do.’” Vought added: “I don’t want President Trump having to lose a moment of time having fights in the Oval Office about whether something is legal . . . .”
We cannot know if, or the degree to which, Vought’s theory of governmental legal advice is guiding the Trump administration’s executive orders. Yet Vought’s theory fits many of the known facts. And the OMB, as we will explain below, has a vital role in executive orders.
Executive Orders and Legal Process
President John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order 11030, today embodied in a regulation, governs the process for executive orders inside the executive branch. For our purposes, two components of the process are important. First, the executive branch entity that proposes an executive branch order must submit it to the Director of the OMB (i.e. Vought, if confirmed), together with a letter from the originator of the EO “explaining the nature, purpose, background, and effect of the proposed Executive order or proclamation and its relationship, if any, to pertinent laws and other Executive orders or proclamations.”
If the Director of OMB approves the order, “he shall transmit it to the Attorney General for his consideration as to both form and legality.” The Attorney General has assigned this function, like many legal interpretation functions, to the Office of Legal Counsel. Career OLC attorneys expert in executive orders review the orders. These lawyers do not typically do full-blown legal analyses of the orders, as they would with a legal question for which OLC writes formal legal opinions. But they typically do a serious legal chop on the EO to ensure its legality, and with any EO of substance there is normally a great deal of back and forth to ensure that the facts in the EO are accurate and that the order is lawful. If the proposed order passes OLC muster, the Attorney General approves and transmits it “to the Director of the Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration.”
The bottom line: By Executive Order and regulation, both still in force, the Justice Department must review the legality of the EO, and the Attorney General must approve it.
What’s Going On Inside the Trump Administration?
We do not know what legal process the New Trump administration is using to vet the legality of executive orders. But it does not appear that the executive order or regulation are being followed, or that DOJ or OLC is fully in the loop. Four pieces of evidence support this view.
First, many executive branch orders have serious legal problems that OLC typically would have raised legal doubts about. Jack listed just a few last week:
The TikTok ban delay reflects a controversial and not-obviously-lawful conception of presidential enforcement discretion. The withdrawal from the Paris agreement is contrary to prior executive branch views of presidential agreement-termination authority. Yesterday’s freeze of nearly all grants and federal loans, though nominally limited “to the extent permissible under applicable law,” foreshadows the much-telegraphed and almost-certainly-unconstitutional Trumpian Article II impoundment theory. Trump’s gambit to fire career civil servants rests on a conception of Article II that goes beyond the Supreme Court’s already-generous removal precedents. There are other examples of Article II overreach. And relatedly, several of Trump’s actions violate other provisions of the Constitution, such as the birthright citizenship order.
These examples are notable because one (birthright citizenship) defies an OLC opinion, another (constitutional impoundment) is contrary to another OLC opinion, a third (the Paris agreement withdrawal) reflects a view that OLC has found problematic (see pp. 8-9), and the others are in tension with or contrary to extant Supreme Court jurisprudence. And there are many other examples of EOs contrary to or in tension with governing law. It doesn’t appear as if these orders received OLC approval for form and legality. And if they did, the pattern raises questions about how OLC will function in this administration. OLC normally adheres to Supreme Court precedent, and though it sometimes reverses itself, it typically explains reversals in published opinions.
Second, Vought stated last May that his think tank, the Center for Renewing America, was “trying to build a shadow Office of Legal Counsel” to enable the president to avoid legal objections to his policies.
Third, the Trump 2.0 transition, unlike the Trump 1.0 transition, did not vet EOs with the Justice Department, but rather relied on “a team of lawyers from outside the Justice Department” in a “sign of Trump aides’ general distrust of the Justice Department,” according to the New York Times.
Fourth, at a January 29 White House press briefing, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked “who advised the president on the legality of telling government agencies that they don’t have to spend money that was already appropriated by Congress?” Leavitt’s answer was revealing: “The White House Counsel’s Office believes that this is within the president’s power to do it, and therefore, he’s doing it.”
This question was nominally directed at the OMB spending freeze memo. But the question of the president’s constitutional power to order spending freezes lurks behind other executive orders as well and is a theory we know the Trump administration is interested in pushing. This is an issue that OLC normally would have opined on, especially since the issue is of such momentous constitutional significance and because OLC (in a William Rehnquist opinion) has previously ruled on the matter. Leavitt, however, made no mention of DOJ or OLC. Her disclosure that the White House Counsel, David Warrington, delivered the decisive advice suggests that his office may have supplanted the Justice Department’s legal advisory function, at least on some major presidential initiatives in the EOs.
In sum, the plethora of legal problems in the EOs, the Vought shadow OLC idea, the reliance on outside lawyers instead of DOJ during the transition, and the Leavitt statement are four pieces of evidence that OLC, and the Justice Department more generally, are being sidelined in the legal review process for at least some executive orders, and for presidential actions more generally. It is evidence that would make sense of the apparent indifference to legal compliance in so many of the Executive orders.
We should note that if OLC and DOJ are being cut out or overruled in favor of a president-centered or White House-centered legal interpretation and review process, that is the president’s prerogative under Article II, though the process would defy EO 11030 and the regulation. Such an arrangement would be an extreme change of process from past administrations and would demand explanation beyond non-compliance with EO 11030.
Radical Constitutionalism
One way to look at the administration’s assault on legal barriers is that it is seeking to establish “test cases” to litigate and win favorable Supreme Court decisions.
But the typical test case is a carefully developed, discrete challenge to statutory or judge-made law with some good faith basis. The challenge may be based on changes that have occurred over time in the law, in the background facts, or in large changes in politics, which support a claim that the law should now be modified or reversed. And it is often an incremental program—one of test cases building on test cases.
The Trump executive orders might have some of these features, but in the aggregate they seem more like pieces of a program, in the form of law defiance, for a mini-constitutional convention to “amend” Article II across a broad front.
This pattern echoes a philosophy—“radical constitutionalis[m]”—that Vought laid out in a 2022 essay. The essence of radical constitutionalism is that “[t]he Right needs to throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last two hundred years and to study carefully the words of the Constitution and how the Founders would have responded in modern situations to the encroachments of other branches.”
Vought strongly implied that an element of radical constitutionalism is to instill fear in the Supreme Court that the presidency is prepared to resort to outright defiance of its decisions.
Vought interpreted Madison’s famous “ambition must be made to counteract ambition” idea to mean that the branches would have “a healthy fear of each other” that would “cause[] them to pause before encroaching” on another branch. He gave as an example John Marshall’s refusal in Marbury v. Madison to order Secretary of State James Madison to deliver William Marbury’s commission “{b}ecause he was afraid Jefferson would order [Madison] not to and show the Supreme Court to be toothless.” Vought then noted that “Jefferson . . . gave us a glimpse of the posture that prevents encroaching powers.”
If this is the theory behind the executive orders—and again, we are speculating here based on the views of one hugely influential Trump advisor—then the orders are not merely setting up Supreme Court test cases. They are, rather, bombarding the Court with a wave of legal challenges about the proper scope of Article II (among many legal issues) with the aim of provoking a confrontation over the legitimacy of the existing legal order, at least with regard to Article II, and perhaps more broadly. And the administration might be planning to dare the Court to say “no” with threats of noncompliance.
The administration’s TikTok executive order can be seen as an early gambit in this direction. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld Congress’s ban on TikTok, and the ban came into effect before Trump became president. A day after the law came into effect, Trump became president and issued an Executive Order in which he instructed his Attorney General to not enforce the act for 75 days based on the flimsiest of justifications that the already-in-effect law denied him an opportunity to review it for national security concerns or negotiate a deal. More remarkably, the president ordered the Attorney General to inform the relevant private firms that “there has been no violation of the statute and that there is no liability for any conduct” in violation of the statute during the 75-day period (or after the effective date of the act and before the EO).
The TikTok EO is not a direct defiance of a Supreme Court judgment, but it is close. And it could be signaling things to come. Whether the administration would threaten defiance because it actually intended to ignore a Supreme Court judgment, or because it simply wanted to pressure the Court into favorable decisions, no one can know.
Where are Administration Lawyers?
All of which raises the question: Is Trump getting legal advice, and, if so, from whom?
It is noteworthy that while the administration has announced nominees for most top spots at the Justice Department, it has not yet nominated anyone for OLC. Former Florida Solicitor General Henry Whitaker was the acting head of OLC for at least the first few days of the administration. But it is not clear if he is still at OLC (his name was briefly on the OLC website but no longer is), or who is in charge there. Is OLC in the loop on the Trump executive orders? Is it signing off on the ones with obvious legal problems? Under what legal theories?
Similar questions arise about the role of the White House Counsel. Did Leavitt’s disclosure of the White House Counsel’s advice about the OMB freeze memorandum foreshadow a commanding role for this office and a marginalized OLC? We (and others) have written about the risks that the White House Counsel, even more than the Justice Department, may be expected to wear the “team jersey” and conform his or her legal advice to meet the president’s preferences or demands. Will this administration more directly and openly empower the White House Counsel’s Office to assume the role traditionally performed by OLC? Will the White House find a pliant OLC head to dissipate this potential conflict?
In the days, weeks, and months ahead, the White House Counsel and his staff, the Attorney General, the head of OLC and his or her team, and many other lawyers in this administration will have choices to make in meeting the president’s expectations and demands. They all understand that they have professional ethical obligations independent of whatever loyalty they owe to the president and the administration. They have also pledged a constitutional oath as well as an oath to conduct themselves “uprightly and according to the law” if they are members of the Supreme Court bar. And they have duties of loyalty to the institutions they are serving.
We have been in the legal hot seat in the White House and Justice Department, respectively. We understand the hard and often intractable choices that high-stakes governmental legal advice entails, and we do not envy the difficulties that lawyers advising this president face. It is also true that administrations sometimes legitimately test the validity of accepted legal principles in court to seek a new legal understanding. And the White House Counsel inevitably has an elevated role in the legal advisory process, often in tension with OLC, on issues the president cares about. All of this is “normal science” in the executive branch legal process.
But the theory and process of “radical constitutionalism” that Vought has floated go very far beyond these typical tensions and conundrums in the roles contemplated for senior government lawyers. If something approaching the Vought theory defines the new Trump administration’s legal process—and there are clues that it does—then no senior government lawyer with integrity should countenance or participate in it.
https://executivefunctions.substack.com/p/the-trump-executive-orders-as-radical
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BBG's post is a serious and important piece-- and one deserving of a thread where a future Search is more likley to find it.
https://firehydrantoffreedom.com/index.php?topic=2917.msg178669#msg178669
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Trump solve US steel production issue not by forcing Japan to purchase steel from us, but by getting them to invest in the business itself:
https://x.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1888149541792203161
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/u-s-recovers-black-hawk-helicopters-amid-taliban-tensions/ar-AA1yUXrx?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=8c51bb8ce3814e52ad9af3b588b58913&ei=21
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Done.
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Tell us what you really think haha!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyqKT35Q1Es
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McConnell import is kicked to the curb.
Interesting Scott Jennings on CNN last night used to be an advisor for Mitch saying how he hates when two people he likes disagree. He says Mitch will vote with Trump 90% of the time.
And what the heck is Kaitlen Collins doing at press meetings asking hit and run and gotcha questions AND putting the clips on her hourly MAGA sabotague CNN fake news report later the same night.
Honestly I don't recall any other anchor doing both .
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-Happy about his economic policy. I like the deregulation of crypto. Additionally, bitcoin will have significant, potentially vital national security implications in the future.
-We'll see about his international policy, depends mostly on Syria for me. If he pulls out, I want it to be done in a way that ensures that a genocide and massacre of our allies that bled for us does not take place and Hamas or ISIS are not allowed to resurface. This part is a question of honor for me. I do not want to see what occured after Afgh withdrawal with Biden happen again under trump.
-I would like very much to see the Afghan commandos we promised to bring home, brought to the US. Currently they are being hunted and killed by Taliban and are still in hiding. This is another major issue for me, as I see it as a fundamental question of honor. Biden administration dragged their legs on this and many died as result. I'd like to see Trump set an example.
-Not happy about the divisive politics and insulting other polititions on the other end of aisle. I'm a big fan of tribalism in nationalism and social groups (Marc's included). Promotes coehesion.
But in the context of politics, not a fan. Taken too far promotes social breakdown and breakdown of national identity
-Happy about government reformation. I'm not sure if it's being done right, we'll see, but overspending is certainly an issue.
Something needs to change, and regardless, it will due to current global circumstances. Whether the change will be net positive or negative is yet to be seen, but I'm open to giving him a chance.
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Reagan’s former OPM director chimes in on Trump’s actions to date. Frumpy ol’ never Trump National Review is coming around?
https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/02/trumps-fight-against-the-bureaucracy-has-been-wildly-successful-so-far/?bypass_key=QWRwdVV2QVhrQTRoUWpxa3ZINVE4UT09OjpVVVkxWlVFd1RtNTNiVlpFYW5Sc2JrVnhkV3BFZHowOQ%3D%3D
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Another for the schadenfreude file:
https://www.newsweek.com/dc-housing-market-chaos-federal-employees-panic-2031016
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It's got a great beat I can bang my head to and is sure to trigger "Progressives" and perhaps cause them to wet the bed. I give it a 17 out of 10:
https://x.com/JimFergusonUK/status/1890709294456156232
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2nd post.
Another talking point that rears its head has to do with Trump’s ego and ability to share the limelight, with narcissism being the tacit criticism. Alas, he’s not marching to the called tune, witness the splashes Bondi, Vance, Hegseth, Musk, etc. are making.
An interesting point made below: is part of his method of giving a lot of lease part of an audition process to replace him in four years?
Trump shares the spotlight
He can trust Vance, Rubio and Hegseth to speak for MAGA
FEB 17, 2025
At the annual Munich Security Conference last week, Trump wanted to blast Eurocrats with the sobering truth that the USA is no longer interested in being their unpaid security staff. So he sent Vice President JD Vance to deliver the message.
Vance shocked the Europeans to the core:
The threat that I worry the most about vis a vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.
I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election. He warned that if things don’t go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany too.
Now, these cavalier statements are shocking to American ears. For years we’ve been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values. Everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defense of democracy. But when we see European courts cancelling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard.
Vance told it like it is as if he were Vice President Howard Cosell:
Speaking up and expressing opinions isn’t election interference. Even when people express views outside your own country, and even when those people are very influential—and trust me, I say this with all humor—if American democracy can survive ten years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.
Vance was not the only Trump official to enjoy a moment in the spotlight.
Pete Hegseth also laid down the law in Brussels:
A durable peace for Ukraine must include robust security guarantees to ensure that the war will not begin again. This must not be Minsk 3.0. That said, the United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement.
Instead any security guarantee must be backed by capable European and non-European troops.
If these troops are deployed as peacekeepers to Ukraine at any point, they should be deployed as part of a non-NATO mission. And they should not covered under Article 5. There also must be robust international oversight of the line of contact.
To be clear, as part of any security guarantee, there will not be U.S. troops deployed to Ukraine.
To further enable effective diplomacy and drive down energy prices that fund the Russian war machine, President Trump is unleashing American energy production and encouraging other nations to do the same. Lower energy prices coupled with more effective enforcement of energy sanctions will help bring Russia to the table.
Safeguarding European security must be an imperative for European members of NATO. As part of this Europe must provide the overwhelming share of future lethal and nonlethal aid to Ukraine.
This met with NATO feathers ruffled and neocon tut-tutting.
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The subject came up in one of Trump’s Oval Office chit chats with the press.
Reporter: Senator Roger Wicker said it was a rookie mistake for Hegseth to outline what would or would not happen as far as Ukraine’s membership in NATO.
Trump: I haven’t heard that. Roger is a very good friend of mine. Pete has been doing a great job.
Reporter: Were you aware of what Hegseth was going to say in his speech at NATO?
Trump: Generally speaking yeah. I’ll speak to Roger. I’ll speak to Pete. I’ll find out.
Hegseth is Trump’s man. Trump gave him the long leash. I like that.
I also like that former rival Rubio is getting his moment in the sun. He went to Latin America and laid down the law to Panama and others while Bukele feted Rubio in El Salvador.
LeMonde reported:
During a tour of five Central American countries, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio made sure it was known that the region was a priority to the United States. Ending his tour on Wednesday, February 5, Rubio's trip first trip abroad drew attention to Central America, presented by the Trump administration as a source of immigration and a region where China's presence harms American interests.
The first stop on this tour, in Panama on Sunday, February 2, was the most closely followed, following Trump's threats to take back the canal, claiming the neutrality treaty governing it had been violated by the presence of Chinese companies. As soon as Rubio got back on the plane, Panama announced its exit from the Chinese Belt and Road initiative, even though it had been the first Latin American country to join in 2017.
I have noticed a pattern. Trump is sharing the spotlight this time. The self-promotion is still there as after 50 years of media spotlight, this is engrained in Trump. But he also is sitting back and letting a new generation garner attention.
Sharing is caring, but Sharon isn’t Karen
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Certainly Elon Musk has enjoyed even greater celebrity than ever under President Trump. Musk is taking the heat for the mass layoffs but as you read the sob sister stories just remember anyone fired was offered an eight-month paid vacation and rejected the buyout.
The rise of these new MAGA faces is intentional.
My guess is Trump at 78 knows the sand is running out of his hourglass. He wants not only to complete the task but also a generation of warriors to carry on the MAGA Movement. Nixon was saddled with Ford. Reagan with Bush. Heck, Coolidge with Hoover. Each successor undid the master’s work.
Trump likely does not wish to repeat that so he has surrounded himself with like minded men and women who basically are auditioning for his job.
The public likes what he is doing. Axios reported to its dismay, “Every Arizona swing voter in our latest Engagious/Sago focus groups said they approve of President Trump's actions since taking office—and most also support Elon Musk's efforts to slash government.”
The story also said:
Some would like to see him do more, sooner, to rein in consumer costs. But several said they don't mind that Trump's early actions haven't primarily focused on inflation—even when that was their top issue in the election—and said they can be patient if prices don't come down for a while.
Several doubt the warnings that tariffs may translate to long-term price increases for American consumers.
Several expressed views that "waste, fraud and abuse" are so prevalent that government agencies can be slashed or eliminated without hurting services on which they depend.
As Frank Sinatra sang, “Love is lovelier the second time around/ Just as wonderful with both feet on the ground.”
Bondi, Noem and even Lee Zeldin are getting their media time. Tom Homan is a more familiar face on cable now than the Kardashians. He couldn’t get more time if he sold pillows with OxyClean.
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This Cabinet and Musk and Homan are better than Trump’s first Cabinet because they are in tune with the president and loyal to the MAGA movement. Well, maybe not RFK Jr. but he is coming around.
Don’t worry about Trump’s ego. He still garners attention. He became the first president to attend a Super Bowl and on Sunday, he was at the Daytona 500.
Trump will make America great again. But to keep it great will require young leadership (Vance is all of 40) to preserve it. I think that is behind Trump’s use of surrogates to spread the word.
Plus he doesn’t have to travel as much.
https://donsurber.substack.com/p/trump-shares-the-spotlight?r=1qo1e&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&triedRedirect=true
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It's got a great beat I can bang my head to and is sure to trigger "Progressives" and perhaps cause them to wet the bed. I give it a 17 out of 10:
https://x.com/JimFergusonUK/status/1890709294456156232
Wow. I'm not a heavy metal guy, but that is powerful.
We've wondered for years how to reach others. Not everyone wants to read Heritage or Cato or the Forum. Data and logic go so far but our opponents know how to reach out with emotion. This does that, understatement!
"I give it a 17 out of 10." - This got me to watch.
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Elements of this could go more than one place, but given it all backtracks to Trump, I’ll park it here:
☕️ WATERLOO ☙ Monday, February 17, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠
Deep State's Waterloo moment as DOGE dishes biggest scandal in human history; media's Napoleonic meltdown over Trump tweet; NYT op-ed signals massive win; funemployment in the Swamp; more.
JEFF CHILDERS
FEB 17, 2025
Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! The weekend’s news did not disappoint. Prepare for more exposed history in the making. In today’s roundup: in a month of history-making news, the story that rules them all, a genie of disclosure that can’t be stuffed back in the Social Security bottle; Trump’s ninja-level troll and the media’s Napoleonic meltdown over movie quote; Democrat dreams of rescue from dictatorship by the courts ebbs away in brutal NYT birthright op-ed; and funemployment strikes the Swamp amidst enthusiastic draining.
🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍
I confess to feeling lately like I’m starting to overuse words like “historic,” “unprecedented,” “revolutionary,” and “never seen before.” I need more words. But what can I do? We live in a time when centuries of history are being minted in minutes. Regardless, and unapologetically, this next story will blow your socks off.
🔥🔥🔥
We’ve discovered the Great Democrat Zombie Army.
A full decade ago in 2015, the Social Security Administration’s Inspector General reported that 6.5 million active Social Security numbers were assigned to people aged 112 or older, despite there being only 35 such individuals known to be living worldwide. (Robert Kennedy should be happy to hear about this.) That was alarming enough, but in 2023, an expanded audit looked at SSNs aged 100 and up. This time, 18.9 million active SSNs with birthdates of 1920 or earlier lacked a date of death, meaning they are still active.
But last year (2024), PEW Research reported there are only 80,000 living Americans aged 100+, leaving a shocking discrepancy of 18.8 million mysterious perennial people still receiving social security and possibly disability as well, not to mention generous credits from phantom tax returns, and of course, blue state and local benefits.
And of course, these immortal individuals are probably also voting. Voting Democrat.
The IG’s 2023 follow-up report detailed all the Agency’s terrific progress in resolving the problems identified since the earlier 2015 report. In short, the Social Security Administration’s diligent, alert, and apolitical permanent career civil servants grabbed hold of the IG’s 2015 report with both hands and shoved it into the basement furnace.
I, for one, thank the gods of bureaucrats for all the hardworking, non-biased, non-partisan federal workers in the Social Security Administration who concluded, probably right after their 3-mimosa-lunch (held by Zoom), that it was just too hard and too expensive to stop 18.9 million fraudulent social security records by putting a presumed date of death into the date field. It’s no use.
It’s not like it might have made any difference in the 2020 election or anything.
🔥 I’m sure this will (not) shock you. Both times, 2015 and 2023, the media ignored or downplayed the story. A sane person living in pre-Millennial America might assume that the tireless watchdog media, upon learning about the vast numbers of impossibly fake Social Security accounts and the trillions of dollars of attendant waste and fraud would never give the government a moment’s peace until it was fixed.
But no.
We are not surprised. We are scarred veterans of the post-Millennial period, and we understand the media’s main job is not to expose, but to cover up government incompetence — and especially bury any news at all that might fuel legitimate concerns about election integrity.
Not to mention upholding corporate media’s timeless narrative chestnut that entitlement fraud is rare and overhyped and only a right-wing conspiracy theory. That narrative, after all, is as timeless as the millions of zombified centenarian recipients.
In 2015, apart from one-offs in some conservative media (Breitbart, Washington Times, Fox), I could only find a single AP story about the 6.5 million fraudulent Social Security records aged 112+. In 2023, after the SSA’s OIG published its report finding 19 million digitally breathing people over 100 still “alive” in the system, once again, there was mostly media silence. It should have been a five-alarm fire, but only a handful of “far-right” sites mentioned the news (Federalist, Washington Examiner). The usually reliable New York Post only briefly mentioned the OIG report, but even that was buried in a bigger article about government waste generally.
But CNN, The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the other major outlets? Crickets. My searches came up empty. It just wasn’t important enough to report.
In the latest electrifying development that will also probably not shock you, DOGE —for the last week slogging through the SSA’s septic systems of archaic paper and antique Cobol software — is beginning to report that the OIG canaries in the SSA mineshaft were, if anything, woefully underreporting the problem.
🔥 Yesterday, apparent DOGE mouthpiece Elon Musk posted a simple database count of active Social Security Numbers by age range. The dumbfounding chart was a political hydrogen bomb, and it speaks for itself:
Apparently, we’ve been operating on the honor system this whole time. We normal, non-civil-service Americans were the only ones who didn’t know. It’s just the latest reason they sneer at us and think we’re stupid and gullible. Those neanderthal conservatives will believe anything. They’re right. We’re the biggest suckers in human history.
I added up the numbers for our cherished, specially abled readers in Portland. Based on Elon’s chart, the total count of active SSNs is 398 million. That means there are +64 million more active SSNs than the entire population of the United States (334 million).
Let me say it again: sixty-four million zombies. Needless to say, it’s totally impossible, at least under our current scientific understanding of human mortality. The diligent, hardworking, apolitical employees in the federal government appear to have diligently preserved a shadow army of dead or nonexistent “Americans” on the books — zombies — with tens of millions of them potentially still receiving benefits, filing tax returns, and “voting” Democrat.
This appears to be a scandal of unfathomable, indescribable, revolutionary proportions. Since I have a very strong feeling that we will not be receiving tax refunds for our cataclysmically misspent entitlements lavished on millions of career criminals, including those inside the government, I say burn it all down.
There is no fixing this. There is no audit big enough. There is no reform package meaningful enough. It is a soul-crushing abomination. It boils the blood. It is enraging beyond explanation. Just napalm the whole Kafkaesque apparatus and start over from scratch.
This scandal will be the Deep State's Waterloo.
🔥🔥🔥
Speaking of French dictators, consider yesterday’s UK Guardian’s breathlessly misleading article headlined, “Trump suggests he’s above the law with ominous Napoleon quote.” What gave media the vapors this time was a classic Trump troll in the form of an uncharacteristically short and muted single-sentence post. To be fair, he posted it everywhere, on Truth Social, on X, and it was re-tweeted on the official White House Twitter account. It simply said:
In no way, of course, did Trump’s post suggest doing anything illegal or unconstitutional. Media had to project and to impute motives to discover Trump’s sinister hidden meaning. Which they did, of course, in spades and with great enthusiasm. See! We told you! He’s a dictator!
But Trump just appeared to be obliquely quoting the 1970 film Waterloo, directed by Sergei Bondarchuk, in which the dictatorial frenchman Napoleon said he “did not ‘usurp’ the crown.”
The quip arose during a compelling scene where Napoleon Bonaparte, played by Rod Steiger, addressed his marshals during a critical moment. Pressured to abdicate after a series of military setbacks, Napoleon confronted his marshals, who’d presented him with a paper urging his abdication. In a display of defiance and justification, he soaringly said: “I found the crown in the gutter, and I picked it up with my sword, and it was the people … who put it on my head,” he says. “He who saves a nation violates no law.”
CLIP: Waterloo (1970) - Napoleon trailer (3:38).
The media’s absurd reaction was swift and totally deranged. The New York Times’s Jamelle Bouie hysterically called Trump’s latest statement “the single most un-American and anti-constitutional statement ever uttered by an American president.” Neocon Never-Trumper Bill Kristol, a living caricature of Godwin’s Law, raced to grab the Hitler comparison, darkly warning that “We're getting into real Führerprinzip territory here.”
Once again, the media owned itself, falling headfirst into Trump’s trap. Meanwhile, the indefensible DOGE disclosures keep escalating—like yesterday’s thermonuclear Social Security nuclear apocalypse. To mix film metaphors, they’re going to need a bigger Deep State.
🔥🔥🔥
Another reason the overwrought ‘dictator’ charges keep falling flat is because Trump keeps following the law. On Saturday, no less than the New York Times ran a narrative-smashing op-ed headlined, “Trump Might Have a Case on Birthright Citizenship.” The Democrats’ first ‘win’ against Trump is already crumbling—and even the Gray Lady is sounding the retreat. Like Napoleon at Waterloo, they confidently stormed into battle, realizing too late they marched straight into a legal ambush.
On his first day in office, President Trump issued an executive order ending so-called birthright citizenship for certain children of illegal immigrants. Democrats sued, wailing that his EO violated the 14th Amendment, which provides, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”
The key issue, intentionally provoked by the executive order, is what exactly does the Constitution mean by “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States? Federal judges in four states promptly enjoined Trump’s order. One of the judges claimed it “conflicts with the plain language of the 14th Amendment.”
But, the article advised, “Not necessarily.”
The Supreme Court has never held that children born to illegal immigrants are citizens — never. But thanks to decades of judicial hand-waving and bureaucratic indifference, citizenship has been quietly doled out with all the discretion of Social Security numbers.
The 14th Amendment’s well-known purpose was to convey citizenship to children of freed slaves. At the time it passed, Lincoln’s administration had rejected the Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott decision, and had already recognized free African Americans as citizens. The 14th Amendment resolved the Constitutional crisis in Lincoln’s favor.
The carefully considered article delved into the history of citizenship through the centuries. Then it noted the Supreme Court’s awareness of that storied common law history, which has long provided that only those born “in amity” receive the sovereign blessings of citizenship status:
This isn’t just some obscure legal technicality—the principle was common knowledge at the time the 14th passed. Citizenship was for people who owed allegiance to the U.S., not just anyone who happened to be born here. As our forefathers never fought for millions of imaginary Social Security recipients, the 14th Amendment wasn’t written to pass out citizenship to millions of undocumented invaders lacking loyalty to the country.
This editorial’s publication was a massive shift in the Overton Window, preparing the Times’ readers for bad news. The left’s sacred cow of birthright citizenship is finally getting serious legal scrutiny, and the fact that the New York Times is already conceding ground means they know their side’s legal foundation is much shakier than they’ve previously pretended.
🔥🔥🔥
The Swamp is going to need a bigger unemployment database. CNBC ran a story yesterday headlined, “Unemployment spikes in Washington, D.C., as Trump and Musk begin efforts to shrink the government.” The sub-headline added, “Jobless filings in Washington, D.C., surged to 1,780 for the week ending Feb. 8, a +36% increase from the prior week.” Pro tip: get out of Washington.
During the disastrous Obama-era economy, as jobs for people outside government crashed and burned, Nancy Pelosi infamously coined the term “funemployment.” The fossilized Speaker urged people collecting generous government unemployment benefits to spend time traveling, writing poetry, painting landscapes, and starting up NGO’s to teach transgender basket-weaving techniques to Namibian kindergartners.
It’s fun!
During the first two years of the pandemic, as ordinary Americans lost our jobs and small businesses by the millions, we were constantly assured by our federal betters that we were sacrificing for the common good. Meanwhile, the federal workforce metastasized, swelling like a taxpayer-funded tumor. Government workers got paid to ‘work from home’—which meant collecting full salaries, grant payments, and dead grandmothers’ Social Security checks between Netflix binges.
Maybe now it’s federal workers’ turn to sacrifice something for the common good.
Prepare for corporate media to circulate their perennial “hardest hit” sob stories, interviewing scores of bizarrely named ex-federal workers on food stamps who used to work on critically important projects like measuring the immeasurable land speed of treadmilled tortoises, mapping the astonishing diversity of prairie dog dialects, or making sure dead people kept getting their Social Security checks.
But remember: Trump gave them a chance. He offered eight month’s severance to any federal worker that wanted to take the deal. They didn’t take the deal.
There’s an old saying about making your own bed. It goes something like, if you make your own bed, you have to clean out the cheeto crumbs by yourself. Or words to that effect. They made their own beds. Don’t fall for media guilt manipulation.
Trump promised to drain the Swamp, and he meant it, this time. I’d only ask that he turn the draining machine up to 11.
https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/waterloo-monday-february-17-2025
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An apt way to look at the current moment, IMO:
The ‘Everything Is Broken’ Administration
‘The choice was between a slow canoe ride through more of the same, or a roller coaster. Americans chose the roller coaster.’
By Oliver Wiseman
02.17.25 — U.S. Politics
Are Elon Musk and the DOGE boys disrupters or vandals? Should Robert F. Kennedy Jr. be in charge of public health? Does the footage of the USAID sign being removed from a government building fill you with excitement or dread? Do Tulsi Gabbard’s criticisms of the “deep state” make her unfit for the role of director of national intelligence—or precisely the woman for the job?
A good predictor of how you answer these questions—better perhaps than whether you are a Republican or a Democrat—is whether or not you are a “brokenist.”
That term, coined by Tablet editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse a few years ago, has been bouncing around my head ever since Trump returned to power last month. In fact, I’m increasingly convinced it’s the key to understanding this administration. Allow me to explain.
In January 2021, Newhouse wrote an essay addressing what she would later describe as “the growing sense, made more glaring during the first year of the pandemic, that whole parts of America were breaking down before our eyes.” She argued that major institutions of American life—from the media to medicine—no longer worked. “Everything Is Broken,” was Newhouse’s unsparing conclusion—and the essay’s memorable headline.
Almost two years later, Newhouse wrote a follow-up, titled “Brokenism,” which translated the ideas of her first essay into a new political rubric. The most important divide in our politics, she argued, wasn’t between left and right, but between “brokenists” and “status-quoists.” Brokenists can be on the left or the right, or in the middle, but they agree that “what used to work is not working for enough people anymore.” Status-quoists, by contrast, “are invested in the established institutions of American life, even as they acknowledge that this or that problem around the margins should of course be tackled.” Bernie Sanders? Brokenist. Liz Cheney? Status-Quoist. Or—to pick further examples Newhouse doesn’t name in her piece—Joe Rogan? Brokenist. Matthew Yglesias? Status-quoist. (Presciently, Newhouse identified Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk as two tech world brokenists—two years before they would come out for Trump.)
Newhouse’s argument struck me as obviously true and important back in 2022. It explained how tech, Trump’s first term, Covid, wokeness, and so much else had combined to scramble our politics. After almost a month of Trump’s second term, “brokenism” looks like a more important idea than ever—the thread that connects so much of the revolution underway in Washington, D.C.
Does Newhouse agree? “100 percent,” she said when we spoke over the phone recently. This administration and its supporters are, she said, “a coalition of people who feel that whole parts of America’s governing bodies have decayed past the point of usability.”
J.D. Vance more or less tweeted as much last month when—in a push to secure the votes needed to confirm Gabbard as Trump’s intelligence chief and RFK Jr. as secretary of Health and Human Services—he wrote that these former Democrats “represent parts of the new coalition in our party. To say they’re unwelcome in the cabinet is to insult those new voters.”
In other words, what binds that new coalition is brokenism.
Gabbard, a military veteran and former Democratic lawmaker from Hawaii, was picked because she, like Trump, believes our intelligence agencies are broken. “For too long, faulty, inadequate, or weaponized intelligence has led to costly failures and the undermining of our national security,” she said in the opening statement of her confirmation hearing.
At his confirmation hearing, RFK Jr. took aim at a broken health system. The U.S. “has worse health than any other developed nation,” he said. The fact that he has long been pro-choice—a stance he only started to move away from after joining Trump’s team—didn’t matter. Well, it did to the editors of National Review, but the fact that their opposition didn’t make a difference only confirms the brokenism realignment. As does the fact that Chip Roy, a conservative Texas congressman and a staunch pro-lifer, enthusiastically backed RFK’s nomination. Read his explanation as to why in our pages and it’s clear that the thing he and RFK agree on—and the thing that really matters to Roy—is that America’s public health system doesn’t work and requires something more like revolution than reform. Whatever profound differences of opinion they have on other things, including abortion, are secondary.
You might think that the biggest Senate holdouts in the nomination fights over two former Democrats would be ultra-conservatives. Instead they were the self-styled moderates who are generally keen to preach the virtue of bipartisanship. According to the old left-right rules, this makes no sense. Viewed through a brokenist lens, it’s obvious. Mitch McConnell—the only Republican to vote against both Gabbard and RFK—is a quintessential status-quoist.
Time will tell if the brokenist coalition is durable. Indeed, the infighting has already begun. Take, for example, the fight between Elon Musk and Steve Bannon which flared up over legal immigration last month. (Bannon called Musk “truly evil” for supporting H-1B visas for skilled workers.) Their disagreement is broader than that, though. Bannon views Musk as a neoliberal plutocrat and threat to authentic MAGA populism—the problem, not the solution. “Bannon is a great talker, but not a great doer,” said Musk in response.
For Newhouse, what’s interesting about the Musk-Bannon debate “is that they’re both brokenists. What they’re fighting about is what to replace it with.”
“It’s part of the reason why I think the right has all this energy,” she said. “Because they’re not having fights about whether or not we should defend the old stuff. They’re having fights about what to replace the old, broken stuff with.”
For others, these fissures show the limitations of the brokenist framework. Yuval Levin is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has spent a lot of time thinking about why we’ve lost faith in our institutions and what to do about it.
“I think it’s not so much status-quoists and brokenists as something more like building crews and demolition crews,” he told me. “There’s work needed. The institutions are broken. I think there’s broad agreement on that. The question is, is the work that is needed demolition or construction?”
Newhouse may be a brokenist, but she’s interested in construction, not demolition. “One of the misimpressions about the piece and about me in general is that I want to burn stuff down,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to use their energy to do that, right? It’s just about where we put our resources. Which institutions are worth putting our energy into?”
Brokenism explains why, for those of us in the news business, every day feels like a week at the moment. Part of this is down to Trump’s own mode of operation: the off-the-cuff remarks, the late-night posts on Truth Social, the almost daily press conferences, the “flood the zone” approach. But the frenetic energy in Washington stems from the fact the brokenists aren’t outsiders any more. They’re in charge.
“Every day feels like a roller coaster,” explained Newhouse, “because now the people who want others to focus on what’s broken are in power, which means we all have to focus on what’s broken every day. We all have to wake up and see some new evidence of some new thing that is broken beyond what any of us could have imagined.
“There was no lever to pull in the last election for ‘change, but make it responsible and well-paced,’ ” added Newhouse. “The choice was between a slow canoe ride through more of the same, or a roller coaster. Americans chose the roller coaster.”
Under Joe Biden, Washington was run by people eager to cover up or minimize problems—including the president’s own mental decline. The new administration sees its job as being to expose those issues for all to see. Whether or not it will fix them is another story.
Levin recognizes the “weirdness” of institutions being run by people whose “basic ambition is to tear those institutions down.” And he’s skeptical that strategy will work: “To run for office and to want to be a public official is to want to be an insider, to think that there is work to be done inside the institutions that could be constructive for society. If you don’t think that, then you’re not really going to be able to play the role that our system assigns to insiders.”
Whether or not the Trump administration is capable of fixing the institutions it considers broken, its efforts to do so will lead to much tension and drama in Washington. For those of us in the news business, it’s been exhausting. And it’s only been a month. But Newhouse thinks it’s invigorating. “The brokenists say, ‘We can do better. We can make something better than this.’ Is it an exhausting challenge? It is. Is it more exhausting to sit in the misery and the stagnation of institutions that are broken? Many Americans certainly think so.”
As Newhouse put it in her essay a little over two years ago: “The ground is moving again. Everything bad comes from change, but so does everything good.”
https://www.thefp.com/p/the-everything-is-broken-administration
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Lots of fascinating bon mots here—like US/Russia cooperation in Syria against European globalists?—that wouldn’t be occurring sans Trump so it lands here:
https://badlands.substack.com/p/badlands-news-brief-e31?r=2k0c5&triedRedirect=true
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An intriuguing newletter. I just signed up.
For the record its assessment of Israel Gaza struck me as glibly disconnected from reality. Bibi supported Hamas as part of the plan for a Zionist Gaza?!?
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An intriuguing newletter. I just signed up.
For the record its assessment of Israel Gaza struck me as glibly disconnected from reality. Bibi supported Hamas as part of the plan for a Zionist Gaza?!?
That caught my eye, too ($30 million/month to Hamas?), but so much of the rest had a heterodox ring of, if not truth, an interesting perspective at least.
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Bibi's plan for a zionist Gaza by funding Hamas?
Sorry but this strikes me as a rather extreme case of denial.
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(6) TRUMP ADMIN WALKS BACK FIRING OF FED ENERGY EMPLOYEES: The Trump administration reversed mass firings at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) power marketing administrations, which dispatch power from federal hydroelectric dams across 34 states. The Bonneville Power Administration, which sells electricity from 31 dams and provides about 30% of electricity in the Pacific Northwest, expected to lose 13% of its staff.
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This piece makes an interesting point. Trump isn’t so much trying to end the centralized state as he is seeking to co-opt it to his ends, making him less than a champion of libertarian ideals, among other things:
Democrats built America’s over-mighty presidency. Now Trump is bending it to his will
The president isn’t trying to dismantle the centralised state. He is using its powers to take on the Left
Donald Trump has promised to root out fraud and corruption Credit: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images North America
Charles Lipson
20 February 2025 5:47pm GMT
Charles Lipson
The best way to understand president Trump’s ambitious goals is to understand how they alter the massive changes made to America’s government over the past century – and how they also leave many of those profound changes untouched.
Trump’s policy goals are obvious. He campaigned and won on promises to reduce the government’s bloat, cost, and regulatory burdens. He promised to root out fraud and corruption, and he’s doing it with Elon Musk and Doge. His Cabinet Secretaries will implement those plans or lose their jobs. He is asserting firm control over agencies that have long been de facto instruments of the Democratic Party and piggy banks for progressive causes. He’s wielding what Teddy Roosevelt called a “Big Stick”, without ever following Roosevelt’s admonition to “speak softly”.
What most observers have missed, however, is what Trump is not trying to do. He is not trying to change the basic structure of the powerful, centralised state, whose principal architects were Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. Instead, he is trying to gain control over the structure they created and use its potent tools for his own purposes.
That’s a horrifying prospect for the Democrats and progressive intellectuals, who constructed this modern state, formulated its key policies, and controlled its flow of funds for decades. It’s hardly surprising that they fiercely oppose Trump’s efforts.
Today’s strong, centralised state differs dramatically from the one envisioned by America’s Founders, when they met in Philadelphia in 1787. They gathered because the Articles of Confederation, established after American independence, were failing to protect the new nation at home and abroad.
The Founders recognised the need for a stronger, more energetic central government to confront foreign foes and suppress domestic rebellions. But they were careful not to make this reformulated state too strong.
Their aims were prudent and temperate. To prevent the new central government from becoming tyrannical, they set clear limits on its control over both citizens and local governments. The rights of citizens were laid out explicitly in the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. The last of those amendments bounded the central government’s authority, granting it only those powers allocated to it by the (federal) states.
This new national government offered Americans more protection, but it was still not the main way they were governed. That governance came from city, county, and state authorities. This local control was reinforced by the small size of the national government, its modest revenues, its difficulty communicating with the territories it governed, and the ability of local communities to govern themselves.
Those communities were still small and cohesive, held together by dense networks of voluntary organisations, including churches, which were supported solely by their participants. This vibrant “civil society”, described by Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s, stood between autonomous citizens and their governments at every level.
All that has changed over the past century, mostly in response to urbanisation, industrialisation, and modern communications. Democratic Party politicians, a few Progressive Republicans (beginning with Teddy Roosevelt), and Left-leaning intellectuals believed this new society required a different kind of government. They envisioned a far stronger central government, led by a more active president, and they succeeded in implementing that vision.
Their success transformed how America is governed. What Donald Trump is doing, to the horror of Democrats, is using the structure they created to pursue aims they oppose. It’s a kind of political jujitsu.
Trump has grabbed the powerful, centralised state structure by the throat, not to strangle it but to bend it to his will. He is using all the tools it affords him to change policies in Washington and to alter their impact on all Americans. The consequences will be felt in state capitals, city halls, police precincts, large corporations, mom-and-pop stores, NGOs, public schools, and universities.
How will Trump exert this leverage? Mostly by threatening to cut the funds those institutions rely on and change the regulations that control their activities. He’s threatening the funds for “sanctuary” cities and states if they obstruct his efforts to deport illegal aliens. He’s threatening the funds for local school districts and private universities if they refuse to eliminate “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” programmes. He’s threatening their funds if they keep biological males in female sports. He is loosening the Democrats’ Green Energy regulations to encourage energy production and lower prices. And he’s making rapid progress.
Trump’s demands carry weight for three reasons. First, he has shown that he is willing to act decisively. He’s not just talking. He is issuing a blizzard of Executive Orders.
Second, like all modern presidents, he carries a Teddy Roosevelt’s “Big Stick”, made far larger by Teddy’s cousin, Franklin. The scope of presidential authority is far greater than the Founders expected, or wanted.
Finally, the sheer scale of federal expenditures and the tangled web of regulations gives Washington’s paymasters enormous control over recipients. This control inevitably limits the autonomy of cities, states, and private organisations. In fact, so many NGOs are now dependent on funding from Washington they should be called GSOs, government-supported organisations.
The cumulative effect of these changes has been to weaken local control over essential governmental functions, such as K-12 schools, eviscerate the building blocks of civil society (independent, voluntary, self-funded organisations), and compel all of them to build their own bureaucracies to ensure compliance with complex federal regulations.
Once independent “private” institutions, like Beth Israel hospitals, Catholic charities and MIT, have effectively morphed into partnerships with the federal government, which supplies their financial lifeblood and the mountain of regulations that come with it.
This transformation of American life and governance is the backdrop for what Trump is doing – and what he is not doing. His aggressive actions glitter in bright lights; their limits are less visible.
Two limits are particularly important. First, Trump is not trying to dismantle the core institutions of the welfare state: FDR’s Social Security, LBJ’s Medicare and Medicaid, and probably Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. He may try to modify some of their features, such as saving money on Medicaid, but he is not proposing fundamental changes to the Entitlement State.
Second, he is not seeking to lessen the dependence of local governments and private institutions on federal funding. Yes, he will try to save money, but his larger goal is not to reduce their dependence on Washington but to use it as leverage for his own policy agenda.
Put simply, Trump has accepted the most important changes in American governance over the past century, pursued by Democratic politicians and progressive intellectuals and accepted by establishment Republicans. He is simply using the tools they created for goals they never expected and adamantly oppose.
Trump is succeeding in the early going. That’s strikingly different from his first term, when Beltway insiders took this outsider to the cleaners. He couldn’t control the bureaucracies or even his White House staff. He was ensnared by repeated efforts to impeach him, with Democratic legislators working closely with allies at the FBI and CIA.
This time is dramatically different. Trump is no longer a newcomer, and he has learned from past mistakes. He spent his years in exile planning how he would install his loyal team across the government and gain control over federal agencies. Those actions are all within the president’s enormous powers, and he has no intention of scaling those powers back. He is using them to defund and dismantle many of the Left’s cherished programmes, embedded across the sprawling executive branch.
The opposition party has responded as if they were struck by Tasers. They stand flailing and screaming in front of the federal agencies they built, populated, funded, and controlled. They created those agencies. They created their powerful fiscal and regulatory tools. Now, they can see them slipping out of friendly hands and into Trump’s.
Charles Lipson is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Chicago. His latest book is ‘Free Speech 101: A Practical Guide for Students’. He can be reached at charles.lipson@gmail.com
https://archive.is/uMa8D
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FWIW what I see is an "energetic executive" asserting his proper C'l authority over the executive branch.
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Go get the book and read it. If you want to understand what's happening behind closed doors, why Adam Schiff is absolutely soiling himself right now, or why Kash Patel's critics were terrified that today would come, go read this. In fact, read it, and then go beyond it and look into what else Kash Patel has been personally and directly involved with. You'll immediately understand the spike in searches for criminal defense attorneys and houses being put on the market in DC in record numbers.
Here's some of the big takeaways:
Patel played a significant role in uncovering how the FBI relied heavily on the now-discredited Steele dossier to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant against Carter Page.
He found that the dossier, which was funded by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign through the law firm Perkins Coie, was presented to the FISA court without proper disclosure of its political origins.
The FBI and DOJ continued to renew the FISA warrant even after learning that the dossier was unverified and that Christopher Steele’s primary source, Igor Danchenko, had disavowed much of the information.
Patel’s work contributed to exposing that high-ranking officials like James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, and Lisa Page were aware of the dossier’s weaknesses but still proceeded with actions that fueled the Trump-Russia investigation. He also brought to light the infamous insurance policy text between Strzok and Page suggested that elements within the FBI had a contingency plan in case Trump won the presidency.
Patel helped draft the Nunes Memo, which outlined the FBI’s misuse of FISA applications, the political origins of the Steele dossier, and the misrepresentation of evidence to the FISA court.
The memo faced intense opposition from Democrats and the media at the time, but later declassifications confirmed many of its claims and showed that many of the most vocal Democrats (especially Schiff) were lying and knew they were lying all along.
Patel’s team found that Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that commissioned the Steele dossier, was closely coordinating with media outlets to spread the Trump-Russia collusion narrative.
He also pointed to efforts by the Clinton campaign and its lawyers (notably Michael Sussmann) to feed false information to the FBI and intelligence agencies.
Patel’s team examined reports that certain Ukrainian officials, including former Ukrainian embassy staff in Washington, had worked with DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa to gather opposition research on Trump and his campaign associates.
The so-called Black Ledger—a set of financial records allegedly showing illegal payments to Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, from pro-Russian Ukrainian officials—was found to be questionable. Patel’s work indicated that the document was used strategically to force Manafort’s resignation from the Trump campaign in 2016, with its authenticity being later disputed.
Patel looked into how Ukraine-based individuals and organizations helped spread a narrative tying Trump to Russia, which fed into the broader Russiagate claims. Some of this effort involved Ukrainian parliamentarians who were in contact with Democratic operatives.
Patel’s work suggested that certain U.S. diplomats and intelligence officials were operating beyond their mandate in Ukraine. Marie Yovanovitch (former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine) and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman were among those whose actions raised questions regarding coordination between anti-Trump bureaucrats and Ukrainian officials.
Patel’s investigations aligned with reports that Hunter Biden was paid large sums by the Ukrainian energy company Burisma while his father, Joe Biden, was overseeing U.S. policy in Ukraine. Patel argued that concerns over corruption were legitimate, contrary to the media’s claim that Trump’s inquiry into Biden’s activities was baseless.
Patel’s team helped highlight concerns that the so-called whistleblower (later reported to be Eric Ciaramella) had ties to anti-Trump officials, including those involved in previous intelligence operations against Trump. Patel suspected that elements within the intelligence community orchestrated the complaint to trigger impeachment.
Grab your popcorn, folks. The New FBI Director knows where all the skeletons are buried, and he doesn't seem too bashful about a reckoning.
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Go get the book and read it. If you want to understand what's happening behind closed doors, why Adam Schiff is absolutely soiling himself right now, or why Kash Patel's critics were terrified that today would come, go read this. In fact, read it, and then go beyond it and look into what else Kash Patel has been personally and directly involved with. You'll immediately understand the spike in searches for criminal defense attorneys and houses being put on the market in DC in record numbers.
Schiff on a spit is something I would very much like to see.
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VDH on Trump’s return to normalcy. My favorite line (of many): “using the waxen effigy of Joe Biden.”
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1892840058555691152
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#2 at FBI!
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#2 at FBI!
More:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2025/02/trump-names-dan-bongino-as-deputy-director-of-the-fbi/
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I don't think CNN MSLSD NYT WP etc have enough room to hire all the leakers and bureaucratic operatives from these agencies.
I mean the ubiquitous "an anonymous source tells me Trump etc etc..."
Whisper whisper ....
What would Xi or Putin do with such "anonymous sources "; just wondering? :wink:
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https://www.newsmax.com/us/donaldtrump-poll-jdvance/2025/02/24/id/1200245/
but wait didn't we just see a CNN poll that said it was the other way around? :wink:
and the a holes on MSM continue to bash Trump in every way they can pounding the same tired old lying.
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Do we take those poll numbers literally, or do we add a certain number of points to account of bias?
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The devil is in the details and I thus have no clue but if CCN is calling this a big Trump win and they even flew in crats with newborns and IV med to oppose (of course) this must be good for us:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/25/politics/house-gop-budget-trump-agenda/index.html
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I watched the whole thing - while a snowstorm pelted the heartland.
He covered (nearly) everything, so hard to pick out individual issues. Democrats behaved like spoiled brats. Too bad.
One memorable line regarding just two genders, to potential trans people in particular, "you are perfect just the way God made you."
Explained virtually every policy in terms of common sense.
Give very few real opportunities for the Democrats to hold up their liar, false signs.
He missed my pet issues but he's better than any available alternative for the moment.
Easy to nitpick but hard for anyone to deny that he is very good at this.
But then there is MSNBC:
https://rumble.com/v6q5goi-msnbc-nicolle-wallace-just-said-she-hopes-13-year-old-dj-daniel-doesnt-kill.html
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My favorite line that comes to mind
was something to the effect: we didn't need legislation reform to control immigration we just needed a new President.
And all the crats could do was just sit there like a bunch of lying fools.
and Slotkin gets up and says we do need immigration reform since we are a nation of immigrants actually she means ->
[democrat voters]
And then called for more good middle class that are *unionized* In other words middle class jobs that are unionized to support her party.
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"we didn't need legislation reform to control immigration we just needed a new President."
- Yes, great line. Directly addresses and corrects a major falsehood they kept making.
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2025/03/04/cbs-news-poll-overwhelming-majority-viewers-approve-trumps-speech/
The 76 to 23 advantage was among those who viewed the speech. I suppose you were more likely to watch if you supported the President.
This poll says 57-32, maybe more realistic.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14462121/donald-trump-address-congress-poll.html
Each policy came with the full explanation. If you approved of it, that has a lasting effect. If you approved of the closing of the border, why would you ever vote for those people who sat for that? If you approve of the way he's trying to end the war, why would you ever vote for the people fighting that? If you approve of reading ourselves of the wasteful spending, why would you ever vote for the people who committed the wasteful spending? If you believe all these regulations being removed were excessive and wasteful, why would you ever vote for the people who pass them? If you approve of the goal of balancing the budget, why would you ever vote for the people who wanted the deficit run up to 2 trillion?
There isn't much middle ground here, sorry.
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Quite pleased with the speech.
A particularly potent rhetorical point in my opinion is when he pointed to the Dems and invited them to join, at least for one night, in applauding the good things that were being accomplished for America and then accurately predicting that they would not do that.
How can you not applaud a little boy beating cancer and becoming an honorary member of the Secret Service or a fine young man getting into West Point?
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" How can you not applaud a little boy beating cancer and becoming an honorary member of the Secret Service or a fine young man getting into West Point?"
The dems would say that was a cheap political circus stunt and therefore we will not give Trump the satisfaction. of course
Like he said he could cure cancer and they would still complain in some way .
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The SWF seems to me a hideous idea of vast corporatist fascist potential:
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(5) TRUMP TAPS BANKER FOR SOVEREIGN WEALTH FUND PLAN: The Commerce Department is hiring former Morgan Stanley banker Michael Grimes to lead a planned sovereign wealth fund. President Trump proposed the idea of a sovereign fund to invest tariff revenue in manufacturing hubs, defense and medical research during his 2024 campaign. The Commerce Department is considering pairing the sovereign wealth fund with the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation and Export-Import Bank to focus investment on national security priorities.
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https://tldavis.substack.com/p/restless-natives
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https://www.mediaite.com/trump/trump-appoints-two-fox-news-hosts-to-kennedy-center-board/
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This could be a lot of fun!
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March 10, 2025
View On Website
Open as PDF
A Personal Explanation of Why I Don’t Vote
By: George Friedman
I must confess that I have not voted in an election, other than local ones, since I left my life in academia and government 30 years ago. I chose to pursue my passion – geopolitical modeling and forecasting – as a business and so created a company that was my own Office of Net Assessment. (I’d encourage you to look this title up online.) Academic and government life constrained my ambitions. I sensed there were fewer constraints on ideas, and what it takes to develop them, in the private sector. I was too arrogant to imagine that I could fail, despite my ignorance of entrepreneurship.
And so off my wife and I went into business, producing and selling geopolitical forecasts and explanations of national behavior. It sounded like snake oil to some and boring to others. But the move left me free to pursue my passion and my wife (as crazy as I was) loved the challenge. She had no desire to be a professor’s wife. So we started this business by sending free articles to friends, and they forwarded them to others, until my wife told me to stop the free stuff and charge money. She was and is my business manager.
My idiosyncratic view of things boiled down to the idea that leaders do not make policy and that outside forces compel leaders to do what must be done, regardless of their intent. It is not ideology that shapes nations but national imperatives, constraints and capabilities. Watching politicians compete is a sideshow. History is impersonal.
Our marketing strategy was to be right more often than we were wrong so that, in time, the word would spread. To achieve this, we had an intellectual, business and moral imperative. I had to control the urge to express my own wishes regarding the outcomes in history and see instead what is and must be. My goal was to call the play-by-play of history, not to be a player in it. So I decided not to vote in national elections. I must force myself to be clinically distant from political personalities and their ideas. I must focus on the forces that create them, shape their actions and determine their fates.
This was not as difficult for me as it might be for others. At the heart of my model was an insistence to focus not on the behaviors of leaders but on the forces that call them to action. Presidents Ronald Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt had radically different political beliefs, and both had their share of critics, but neither would have become president without an unsentimental and ruthless understanding of how to win elections, and neither could govern with an equally unsentimental and ruthless understanding of the world. Each crafted his personality to the task. This is true in democracies and dictatorships alike.
I can’t suppress my love of my country or the New York Yankees. I won’t put money on them if they don’t have two good relievers. So I must discipline myself on the things I can disregard. This came up in a recent video interview, in which I mentioned that I didn’t vote for Donald Trump. I received many comments from Trump supporters who thought this meant I voted for Kamala Harris. But the truth is I didn’t vote for Harris either. I write this piece today because of that confusion. My job is to explain what Trump is doing in his capacity as president. But as with all presidents, who are the products of history rather than its masters, I care more about forces that shape his actions. This is because I think leaders, more often than not, do what they must or what they can. Leaders emerge because they have personalities that adapt to what is necessary. They craft their actions and personalities to suit the situation. If they can rise to leadership of a country, they have the wit and will to recognize what is necessary and possible. And if that’s the case, they must be ruthless and cunning to some degree. For some, their personality is what the times command. Others craft the personality they need. They make errors, of course, but they have gained an overwhelming ability to avoid errors in their climb to power.
I do not know if Trump’s persona is genetic or crafted, and I don’t care. In my thinking, we do not know the vices and deep thoughts of successful leaders. Leaders can see more clearly than I can what’s at stake, what’s necessary and what’s possible. If they cannot, they will be crushed by their enemies or by history. What I do know is that Trump understood what he must do to become president, and that taught him much about the principles of geopolitics.
It is my job to forecast events. So I must see as clearly as I can and suppress my own feelings. The passions of the time are not indicators of much. So far, I think I understand what Trump is doing, and in doing it, he reveals that the norms and guardrails of the last epoch have collapsed from old age. Remember that the Founding Fathers smashed through the rotted guardrails of their time and were loathed by the vast mass of American loyalists to the English Crown. This is the nature of America, and it is how my model told me that the norms and guardrails rot every 50 years (a regularity I have no explanation for), and it was time for a president like George Washington or Franklin Roosevelt to storm through them. I saw it coming but had no idea of the name that would be coming with it. And I knew that whoever was president would be both loved and hated by a divided nation. As for Trump himself, I am neither for him nor against him. I would say only that he is not violating the guardrails or norms as much as recognizing that they have outlived their usefulness and that new ones must be built. In my work on the United States, I have found that each cycle destroys the old cycle’s norms and replaces them with a new set. The defenders of the old cycle are outraged, and the defenders of the new cycle are pleased.
Mark Twain said, “history does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Trump is a product of American history and, as such, should have been expected, even if the new norms he ushers in are unknown. But emerge they will as they always do in U.S. cycles.