He’s still claiming this. But obviously he either doesn’t know what he’s talking about, or he can’t give up the lie. I’m guessing it’s the latter, but could be both, since dementia patients often lose their understanding of numbers early on.

This all sort of reminds me of Saddam Hussein in a weird way. He’s ordered to give up something he claims to have (WMD’s or a half billion dollars), or face serious consequences. We all know he doesn’t have it, all the experts he has told us he doesn’t have it, and he literally won’t show proof he has it, but he insists he does.

He refuses because if he admits he’s empty-handed, he assumes he’ll lose his popular support AND any political power or ability to threaten his opponents that he has. So he clings to the lie—he doesn’t think he has a choice, and he can’t imagine facing consequences.

It’s like a mental catch-22 for hanging on to power as it evaporates. I don’t think it’s going to work.

Trump said during a deposition for this case, taken about a year ago, that he had plenty of cash. He said, "I believe we have substantially in excess of $400 million in cash." And, he added, it's "going up very substantially every month."

So, maybe slap on perjury charges just for fun?

Did you know that the US Constitution does not give citizens the right to vote? There is no affirmative right to vote in the original document, only a requirement that the states define it. Amendments forbade discrimination based on gender and race relatively recently, but deciding who can vote has been a contentious issue since the country was founded. From the start (for the most part) only property-owning white men had the privilege, but even that varied by state and location, and few founders believed that universal suffrage was desirable or even possible in a democracy.

Teri Kanefield has written a great summary of the practice— link and except are below. This has been a contentious issue from the beginning. Just because you have the privilege today, don’t expect that people in power want you to keep it.

A government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” raises a question: Who is included? Who are the people? It is obvious that if you can’t vote, you are not one of the “people” in “We the People.”

If you zoom out and take a look at the history of voting rights from 30,000 feet, you see this:

In the colonies and early America, the right to vote was restricted to white men who owned property. (Some colonies imposed other restrictions.)

“Jacksonian Democracy,” the era of President Andrew Jackson, expanded the franchise to all white men. The Jacksonian idea was that a poor barely literate white man on the frontier should have the same voice as a well-educated easterner. (Jackson—an unrepentant enslaver, a slaughterer of Native people, and a fan of white men on the frontier—despised East Coast “elites.” As a practical matter, those elite Easterners generally didn’t approve of taking land from Native people, whereas those white guys on the frontier were fine with raiding and plundering lands belonging to Native people, so Jackson wanted their votes.)

After the Civil War, the vote was extended to Black men in theory. In practice, voter suppression tactics and terror tactics kept most Black men from the ballot box.

The 19th Amendment added all women, in theory. In practice, it added white women.

The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the 1960s attempted to expand the right to vote to all Americans by enforcing the 14th and 15th Amendments. The 26th Amendment lowered the voting age to 18.

The current Supreme Court majority is not a fan of these voting rights acts and has sought to cut them back on the grounds that the Constitution does not contain an affirmative right to vote.

Until you get to that last part, you might think that “the history of voting in the United States has been characterized by “a smooth and inexorable progress toward universal political participation” until Justice Roberts and the current Supreme Court majority. Nope. This is from the Oxford Companion to American Law:

The history of voting rights has instead been much messier, littered with periods of both expansion and retraction of the franchise with respect to many groups of potential voters.”

In his first campaign, Donald Trump famously confused Jeb Bush with Ted Cruz during a debate.

Trump tried to reference the widely known conspiracy theory that George HW Bush was personally and directly involved in JFK’s assassination. It’s a classic conspiracy theory, as far as they go, with lots of great coincidences, reliance on the secrecy of the CIA and general distrust of government overall.

It was odd to see a presidential candidate bring it up, but he had already been bringing up things that candidates simply had not done. For example he pointed out in interviews that Israel had nuclear weapons and we all know that, which no candidate had done, because the US’s official position is to never comment on that, and the press happily stuck to the US position and gave him a pass.

When he bungled who Jeb & Ted were, he simply accused Ted’s dad of killing JFK. That’s nonsensical, unless of course you follow what the nutjobs are saying here and there. And anyone who does immediately knew he meant Jeb.

So what did the coverage focus on? “How will Cruz react to Trump calling his dad a murderer?”

Totally asinine way of looking at the flub. But it was a feeding frenzy clamoring for Ted’s response. I believe that they simply didn’t know how to highlight something they were afraid to touch. That conspiracy theory was too hot to mention without looking like a conspiracist too. I don’t recall a single reporter or news outlet asking Trump about wtf he was thinking. (They may have, but it didn’t rise above the din of Ted questions.)

There has been some improvement in coverage. Eight years ago I think we would’ve seen reporters demanding Biden respond to Trump’s confusion. The fact that this is raising tepid questions about Trump is a major change and a welcome one. There’s a long way to go in covering Trump’s idiotic rambling without cleaning up his quotes, but at least this one thing is finally breaking through the wall of deference that Trump has inexplicably enjoyed.

This isn’t a new choice, either. It’s one the nation has had to make many times.

The newly united states chose white authoritarianism with limited voting rights at its founding, but grew into inclusiveness over many many years. That’s always my first thought whenever I hear someone call themselves an “originalist.” I always assume that they want that for us again, and they almost never give me a reason to think otherwise.

Choose inclusive democracy to save our country.

Carnegie was brutal as well. While he said "the man who dies rich dies in disgrace," he also believed he knew what was best for everyone else. He mercilessly beat back the Homestead Steel Strike of 1892, while the workers asked, “what good is a book to a man who works 12 hours a day, six days a week?”

Carnegie replied that the workers would simply have wasted that money and that they needed libraries and concert halls instead. It’s not so much different than Wal-Mart sponsoring the free admission to the Crystal Bridges museum in Arkansas instead of paying a few cents more to their workers.

Ultimately, all philanthropy with the donor’s name attached is a form of public relations propaganda. And even without the donor’s name attached it’s often a form of paternalism and superiority. Carnegie didn’t “feel bad” for stealing, he felt like he was better than everyone else.

Carnegie changed the US with his free libraries. Was that change worth it to the people he exploited to accumulate that much wealth? Perhaps, perhaps not, but many of them certainly didn’t think so.

Billionaires are a disease, not a success.

Robber barons of yore built hospitals and libraries, established public parks and museums. They felt bad for stealing.

Note: Andrew Carnegie built 1700 libraries across America.

Today's unethical and ruthless mega-rich do nothing.

“One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”

—Plato

The more that involvement and voting are discouraged, the worse this problem will be. In fact, that is the intent of Republicans in suppressing the vote.

A weaker and less competent government will be overrun by the wealthiest and most powerful citizens and corporations, leaving the people with no recourse. That is the intent of Libertarianism and most Conservatism.

This is where we are today. The US is effectively an oligarchy with still-functioning elections. We could yet return to our roots as a republican democracy, but we are on the edge of a fascist pit that we will likely not be able to climb back out of should we fall. Apathy, both-sidesism, demonization of politics & politicians, and blatant bribery & corruption have gotten us here. If they aren’t addressed we won’t be able to turn around.

“The American electoral system is broken in multiple ways, but one is that it doesn’t offer up even remotely acceptable Presidential candidates (or much in the way of acceptable candidates for lower offices.) This has been true for a long time, but it is getting worse and worse.”

— Is Lesser Evilism Failing In America

Go read the whole thing. It makes a lot of sense and it’s a good window into how they think.

Further, Republicans have continued their plan of making Congress into a dysfunctional laughingstock in order to discredit it. And they’ve done this with elections wherever possible for even longer.

To what purpose? For Congress, look at the impeachment hearings they’re holding, the new investigations underway, even their attacks on Hunter Biden. The point of all of this is to inoculate Trump against his impeachments as well his losses in court and likely convictions. Those things really hurt him with likely voters, even republicans. The past year has included a slew of personal attacks designed to make Congress unfairly persecute someone as much as Trump supporters claim that he was.

With voting, their goal is even simpler. The attacks aren’t intended to reverse the last election. They’re intended to decrease trust in the ballot box through frivolous lawsuits, ridiculous fraud accusations, wacky conspiracy theories and “stolen” claims until enough people start to believe that US elections can’t be trusted. At that point, enough people—and it doesn’t have to be everyone, just enough of his supporters—will agree that we should ignore election results, and let a strongman or a biased, compromised Supreme Court pick the winner.

It’s a dangerous game, but only for the vast majority of the country that will lose when it’s played.

“One point about this plan which is worth noting explicitly is that it is a microcosm of the chaos-based authoritarianism we have now seen unfolding around us for years, and saw again in spades in the legislative chaos last week. As I mentioned, the plan outlined here was not really to allow or make it possible for Congress to install Donald Trump as President. It was rather to make Congress play the role of chaotic, dysfunctional laughingstock, a body which was clearly unable to bring the electoral chaos to a conclusion. In other words, the plan was to discredit parliamentary democracy as a functional system and thus provide an opening and justification for the Supreme Court to step in, as an unreviewable power, to install Trump as President against the electorally expressed choice of the American people.”

— TPM AT WORK: Never-Before-Published Details on the Trump Coup

This article in Time is an awfully long-winded way to say one thing:

“It’s a bigger deal because we report Biden’s gaffes and ignore Trump’s continuous stream of unhinged remarks.”

We all know Trump has dementia and a very tenuous hold on reality itself. It’s obvious even to the most casual observer; we only have to read a printed paragraph from one of his speeches that hasn’t been stripped down to make a coherent sound bite. Yet our national media simply doesn’t talk about it, preferring instead to chase after any misstatement from Biden, as if he sounds any different now from how he’s sounded for the past five decades.

They’ve learned basically nothing in the last seven years.

Here’s how I see this.

Trump's appeal to the people I know (at least as I understand it) is that he essentially says, "we are all crooks, but I admit it, and I'm your crook. So when I get into power there is no more need for elections or even a balance of power."

If we all believe all politicians are corrupt, as Trump claims, then there is no reason to vote for one over the other, or indeed to avoid having a dictatorship. That’s his point, and people will buy it when they’re disillusioned by seeing corruption. It’s how corruption ends a democracy.

This is not much different than how republicans campaign on calling government ineffective and get into office and make it even more ineffective. It’s the same sort of cynical cycle.

I think our national media can’t see the forest for the trees here. And many democrats seem to be missing it as well.

This Republican-led process is supposed to be a sham. The point is to make impeachment proceedings, all impeachment proceedings, look like a partisan tool. This is a deliberate and necessary part of the 2024 presidential campaign for Republicans.

When independent voters are polled about Trump and his impeachments are mentioned, that distinctly and consistently lowers his support. His impeachments are a serious weakness with voters, and the GOP knows it. They can’t un-impeach him, of course, but what they can do is to pretend that the trials were partisan (they were not), over policy (they were not), and that this is always the case.

They are counting on Americans forgetting what a clown show Trump’s entire presidency was. And frankly, it might work. Few people want to remember what those four years were like; they were awful in a whole variety of ways and most of us have gladly blocked it out.

Many Republicans also truly do believe that impeachment is a sham process in general and to be used as a political tool. They’re not entirely wrong, since it’s a political process. But the main problem with their approach is that corruption or truth doesn’t matter to them, it’s only about putting points on the scoreboard.

In this case, impeaching the DHS secretary does get them bonus points, even if that is not the main goal. It adds to confusion regarding border policy, and it potentially makes the DHS less effective. These are important outcomes when they’re trying scuttle any sort of solution to problems there as long as Biden is in office. This circus also potentially shifts the blame from Congressional Republicans for not funding the bills they’ve passed onto Mayorkas for not doing them, and away from Abbott for blocking the DHS rom the Texas border.

It’s all about deflection. Never about solutions. When Democrats claim this impeachment is about policy differences, they’re giving Republicans way too much credit. Policy isn’t important to them; this is about power.

This is pretty fucked up. And it does seem to relate to Holocaust denialism.

I also think we should note that the deaths of at least ten times as many Palestinians since October 7 has made this sort of denialism spread much more easily. I don’t intend to justify it, because it’s not justifiable, but there is a lack of proportionality of death that has simply buried the massacre of October 7 in the public eye.

For many of us of us who aren’t from Israel/Palestine, aren’t Jewish, and aren’t Muslim, we recall the massacre on October 7th along with a blur of massacres since. The Hamas attack was horrific to be sure, but in the hazy fog of war it now reads to many people as part of that same ongoing senseless killing. Netanyahu’s response (both within and outside of Israel’s borders) has all but ensured that the Hamas attack no longer stands out as a singular event, only as the first of a relative dozen tragedies that began that day.

It’s hard to see how Palestine can survive this, and that appears to be the Israeli government’s intent. It’s equally hard to see how Israel will survive this either, at least in its current form. Netanyahu is isolating his country from at least a generation of potential goodwill, a generation around the world that now sees Israel as a regime that will deliberately destroy the lives of the people who were born there in pursuit of an aggressively apartheid state.

I don’t know the answer and I don’t know who does. All I know is that we never achieve peace by killing each other’s children.

I think this meme overlooks the fact that the US has always been something of a corporate oligarchy, if not in those exact words.

Those wealthy landowners & merchants who set up our government included a sort of power-sharing arrangement between members of their class that was modeled on the one they overthrew, one that was designed to keep their wealth in charge. They even talked about the “tyranny of the majority,” and how they feared the rabble (yes that’s us) usurping control.

The history of the United States of America is a constant push back and forth for control between wealth and that rabble the founders so feared. No matter how you look at it, the rabble has gained power since that famous beginning, and it’s counterproductive to believe that this country was ever some sort of egalitarian paradise.

The main point of arguing that it ever was is to ensure that the majority loses that limited voice that it has gained over the past 250 years. Today’s corporate control should be expected based on our past. It has taken the hard work of thousands to build any sort of equality and it will take the hard work of thousands more to build it further.

The oligarchy is advanced, yes, but that isn’t new. Fighting against it, even from the inside, is an American tradition and it must keep going.

This post made me stop and think.

It appears that the overall concept above explains the opposition to the International Criminal Court.

Countries that voted against the ICC were China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar, the US, and Yemen. Israel’s stated opposition was that it listed mass relocations of people for apartheid as a war crime. The US military’s ability to act with impunity was an obvious sticking point, but of course it wasn’t the reason the US gave. The US said it was opposed because it allowed citizens to be tried for crimes they committed in the US, which I’ve always assumed referred to cops, not soldiers. China opposed the ICC’s ability to prosecute crimes against humanity during peacetime.

Seems to be that these reasons all sort of overlap, in that the countries can be prosecuted for how they currently treat their own people.

[Also some interesting commentary here from Columbia Law Review: Perhaps the most controversial component of the ICC’s jurisdiction is its ability to prosecute “crimes of aggression.” As defined by Article 9 of the Rome Statute, an “act of aggression” entails “the use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations.” In other words, signatories have to play by the rules, respect borders, and not unilaterally overthrow other nations’ leaders. It’s sadly easy to see why the two most powerful nations in the world wouldn’t want that.]

i think if there was a faction for something like a liberal rules based international order, it would be trying to increase the power of the united nations over hegemonic states, and see the israeli apartheid state and current genocide, and the us militaries ability to act with impunity, as some of the prime examples of the thing it wants to prevent

“Originalism” and “strict construction” have always meant “let’s ignore precedent and make shit up.” We’ve been pointing this out for years. The way so-called original documents have been cherry-picked from history, and the convoluted interpretations that Originalists have written have proven that from the start.

How each Justice votes on Trump’s eligibility is very likely going to show us how far they will take that phony concept. Are they going to deliberately misinterpret the Constitution to keep Trump on the ballot? And for the ones that do, what sort of pretzel logic will they use to justify their vote?

When the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade in 2022’s Dobbs decision, the court’s conservative majority outdid themselves with displays of moral superiority and self-righteousness. Roe was “egregiously wrong,” crowed Justice Samuel Alito. “No such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision,” he declared. “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion.” Justice Clarence Thomas, sidling up in concurrence, menacingly promised to revisit the court’s prior rulings legalizing contraception and same-sex marriage. One could almost hear their chortling as they summarily tossed away 50 years of jurisprudence to achieve their long-standing goal of reducing all women, girls, and anyone who might ever become pregnant to second-class citizens. We were assured, even in the language of the opinion itself, that this was not a political decision. No, it was simply a matter of “originalist” textual interpretation, duly deferring to those hallowed framers, authors and drafters these six justices purportedly hold in such high esteem: They were simply reading the words of the document itself! But these devotees of “originalism” and "strict construction" now have a serious problem. They are now tasked to decide the effect and application of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which contains no ambiguity whatsoever. In fact, it explicitly directs them to make a decision that this same conservative Supreme Court majority emphatically does not want to make: allowing the state of Colorado (and, by extension, any other state) to preclude Donald Trump from running again for office in light of his actions surrounding the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol.

I think it’s important to look at stories about hypocritical politicians in terms of how that hypocrisy is wielded.

Clearly, here, these two have built their reputations on attacking both open-mindedness and LGBTQ people as being a negative influence on children. So it’s only fair to see this scandal as them getting their just desserts for their crass general assholery.

But it’s also important to note that this scandal means almost nothing to their supporters. Hypocrisy has an entirely different meaning to conservatives. They tend to see such different standards of behavior as a birthright that’s under attack.

Hypocrisy is the point of conservatism. It is the point of white supremacy, of bigotry, of xenophobia, and of fiscally conservative policy.

If you see yourself as a rightful ruler, and your privilege as fully deserved, then this isn’t hypocrisy, it’s what you are due. Some conservatives will have a problem with the moral issues at play here, but most will not. They will see a powerful white couple who (simply by their wealth, whiteness, and social views) define our culture’s ideas on morality, and therefore are not required to follow them.

This 4-year old post just got some notifications on it and so I reread it.

It hasn’t aged well. For trump at least. Since Charles Blow’s 2019 column was written, Trump has (unsurprisingly I might add) become an unapologetic and public white supremacist.

@john-cenas-toes

I’ll let Charles Blow take this one:

…Is Trump patriarchal and misogynistic? Definitely. But what of white supremacy?

It is clear that Trump is a hero among white supremacists: He panders to them, he is slow to condemn them and when that condemnation manifests, it is often forced and tepid. Trump never seems to be worried about offending anyone except Vladimir Putin and white supremacists.

What does that say about him? How can you take comfort among and make common cause with white supremacists and not assimilate to their sensibilities?

I say that it can’t be done. If you are not completely opposed to white supremacy, you are quietly supporting it. If you continue to draw equivalencies between white supremacists and the people who oppose them — as Trump did once again last week — you have crossed the racial Rubicon and moved beyond quiet support to vocal support. You have made an allegiance and dug a trench in the war of racial hostilities.

Either Trump is himself a white supremacist or he is a fan and defender of white supremacists, and I quite honestly am unable to separate the two designations.

“THEY DID IT TO US!” Trump claimed in an August post on his struggling Truth Social platform, demanding Republicans impeach Biden or “fade into oblivion.”

***

Partisanship in this impeachment was never meant to be a secret, but that does not mean Republicans are exposing their political motivations. This article can’t even describe them, so it’s increasingly unlikely that many voters will see them either.

The point of a Biden impeachment is closely related to the point of the Big Lie. Neither are intended to succeed or to appear thoughtful. They are intended to undermine Americans’ interest in democracy.

The Big Lie is continually deployed by conservatives not to change the election outcome. It’s too late for that, and they know it. It is used to sow doubt and distrust, so that more and more Americans will decide that voting is inherently unreliable, and that it is no longer the best way to select our leaders.

Similarly, a Biden impeachment circus would be used not to remove Biden in a fair process, but to claim that all impeachments are inherently politically motivated and unfair, and that turnabout is fair play whether warranted or not.

This goes hand in hand with Trump’s constant bellyaching about being “politically persecuted,” and his often-stated promises to illegally prosecute Democrats, judges, attorneys, and civil servants if elected. When Trump claims that all charges against politicians like himself are politically motivated, it clears the way for him to open politically motivated prosecutions of his own. When Republicans openly state that their impeachment hearings are politically motivated, they are doing so to claim that Democrats had the same motivation in 2021.

The two impeachments of Trump did hurt him politically, and Republicans know it. Therefore, they’re trying to negate that black mark—not by giving Biden a similar one, as most pundits and press will claim, but by demonstrating that there doesn’t even have to be crimes or corruption to start this sort of proceeding. They are betting that Americans won’t remember just how bad Trump looked before, during, & after those trials occurred, and that this stunt will make the earlier impeachments of Trump look like a circus as well.

They may be right. Especially if a so-called liberal media outlet like MSNBC can’t even connect the dots to see what’s going on.