It’s a terrible thing for our nation, but a real gift to the satirists. Charles P. Pierce, for Esquire:
… I thought for months that the Pool Shed Papers was the smallest beer at the bar. I thought this because there seemed to be so many easy outs for El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago. He could have pleaded sloppy packing. He could’ve called on the deference to former presidents in these matter. He could have shut his damned yapper and spoke to the DOJ only through his lawyers, instead of acting in such a way that all his lawyers became witnesses and (potentially) defendants. Once again, I underestimated the man…
Trump Has Got to Put a Padlock on His Piehole
… It’s like the guy has Evidence Tourette’s. He absolutely has not been able to keep from bragging about his criminal behavior to practically everyone who will listen, all of which likely will prove invaluable when Jack Smith hauls him before the bar…You just know he’s going to want to testify, but his lawyers would have to be drunk to let him.
Trump continues: “All sorts of stuff – pages long, look. Wait a minute, let’s see here. I just found, isn’t that amazing? This totally wins my case, you know. Except it is like, highly confidential. Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this.”
This document totally would win his case, if it weren’t, you know, illegal for him to possess the document, and to show it around, and if it weren’t an example of the very thing he’s been indicted for. Can a defense lawyer ask the court to gag his client for the balance of the trial? We may have to find out.
======
Dave Roth, at Defector — “So It’s A Crime Now To Have Boxes Full Of Cool Folders With Various Words Printed On Them?”:
About the most that can be said for Donald Trump, as a politician and as a person, is that he didn’t let being President of the United States change him. This is not really a compliment, to be clear. Trump’s public persona was grandiose enough that he tended to talk about becoming president as if it was something like a demotion, with him benevolently stepping away from his job as The King Of Success and his wonderful life enjoying the finer things alongside the most powerful and influential people to do the world a favor. If he was awed by the power of the office at all, it was mainly in the same way that he would previously have been impressed by particularly large slabs of marble, or the number of models in attendance at an associate’s birthday party. He certainly never let the immensity of all that responsibility push him to work any harder; the fantasy that Trump would rise to the moment, which persisted in the elite echelons of the mainstream media through a poignantly long series of entirely unmet moments, was not so much misplaced as it was a category error…
In the recollections of the various operators and strivers and morally malleable retreads and aspiring genocidaires and off-brand Beltway reptiles and innumerable lawyers whose paths crossed with Trump’s during his time in power there is almost always some moment when they awaken to the fact that the person they are talking to, who is beloved by millions and temporarily the most powerful man in the world, is not just a blowzy weirdo but a fucking dunce. It’s not like these people were there because they believed in him, although there are a few of those; these people are all, in varying ways and to varying degrees, amoral opportunists who thought that they might be able to get something from Trump, and that helping him do whatever it was that he wanted to do at that moment might help them get what they want, down the line. Many of them surely knew that Trump wouldn’t do anything to help them on purpose. The ones that actually believed in him seemed to love him precisely because of how selfish and cruel he was, and saw it as aspirational; the rest realized that he was world-historically distractible and, again, kind of a dunce, and figured that they might be able to get theirs while his attention was elsewhere. It is America’s strange blessing and profound damage that it keeps producing more and more people who believe that this sort of thing might work for them, which it never does…
… Trump is just not a guy who likes paying retail, and there’s a strange sort of comic tension to watching him confidently and repeatedly try to Do Deals with the increasingly unamused representatives of the FBI vis-à-vis his repeated and unambiguous violations of various federal laws. This comic thread, which was sometimes much easier to laugh at than others, ran throughout Trump’s presidency and post-presidency—when he was upset, which he almost always was, it generally stemmed from his blithe, instinctual disregard for the idea that any objectively major national concern or red-letter law could matter enough to even momentarily inconvenience him…
As part of the extremely calm defense that Trump posted on his personal social media platform, he described the (many) such documents that “the Gestapo” discovered, and which he had denied having, as “just ordinary, inexpensive folders with various words printed on them, but they were a ‘cool’ keepsake.” This is not a workable legal defense, but taken altogether it’s tempting to give Trump the benefit of the doubt on it. Whatever specific secrets might have been in those folders—the “various words” printed on them—clearly didn’t matter very much to Trump, or anyway didn’t matter as much as the fact that he considered them his to keep, and periodically wave around in front of whatever Palm Beach real estate dingleberry he was aiming to impress at that moment.
This, too, is authentically Trump. The club in which he lives fills and empties every day like a gilded, laboring heart; passing through it are people who, for all their differences, share in common the decision to have paid Donald Trump many thousands of dollars a year to hang around him and eat fancy-style food from 1989. If that is all Trump knows about them, it is also all he needs to know—the thrice-divorced orthodontists, the socialites and realtors all stretched and poreless and uncanny in their pastels, the plump yacht flotsam and incredibly racist Europeans claiming some vague royal lineage and the bristly young sociopaths on the make are all marks. Trump holds them in low regard as such, although he’s happy to take their applause and money when it’s offered. He knows that they want something from him, or believe that they can get something from someone else simply from being around Trump; he knows, too, that his status as a past and possibly future President of the United States is a big part of that appeal. But this is another way in which the job never left a mark on the man—that status still wouldn’t feel real, or sufficiently his, unless he had some props around to sell it, and some, any, secret to wave in front of his guests and then keep as his own.
Gollum in a cheap suit, muttering about his Precious (ego).
======
Meanwhile the NYTimes, via Chief Mar-A-Lago Court Jester Maggie Haberman, stand in awe at TFG’s generalship:
… At 7:21 p.m., he did what he used to do so often when he was president: He personally programmed the chyrons on every news channel in the country. He broke the news of his own indictment — drafting and then sending a three-part statement on his social media network, Truth Social, that soon interrupted the nighttime shows on Fox News, MSNBC and CNN…
As speculation intensified ahead of the Justice Department’s notification of the indictment, Mr. Trump’s team pretaped a video of the former president reacting to the expected charges in a speech direct to the camera — and standing in front of what appeared to be a version of a painting of President Theodore Roosevelt and Kaiser Wilhelm II, Germany’s leader during World War I.
Half an hour after he announced his indictment, he posted the video on his social media website. In it, he bashes Democrats, portrays the indictment as evidence of “a nation in decline” and calls himself “an innocent man.”…
His political advisers had been preparing for weeks to exploit the federal indictment for full effect. His team has come to view federal law enforcement actions against him as a core part of its fund-raising strategy. Online fund-raising — which has long been the lifeblood of Mr. Trump’s political operation because high-end Republican donors largely shun him — has dried up for all Republican candidates over the past several years, including Mr. Trump.
G.O.P. donors are exhausted by constant hysterical appeals to give money to Mr. Trump to stop Democrats from destroying the nation. It takes a lot these days to grab the attention of such contributors; indictments are among the few events that enliven the grass roots enough to dip into their pockets…
Not even an hour had passed since Mr. Trump learned of his indictment before his campaign had sent its first mass email to monetize the sense of shared persecution and victimhood that the former president has fostered among his supporters. The Trump fund-raising appeal around 7:45 p.m. on Thursday began, “We are watching our Republic DIE before our very eyes.”
Mr. Trump’s allies outside his official campaign structure have also prepared to milk this moment, and to push his political antibodies into effect…
Roughly 90 minutes after he found out about his latest travails, Mr. Trump — who was playing disc jockey on his club patio at Mar-a-Lago after his April arraignment — went to the main building at Bedminster for dinner outdoors.
Wearing a red Make America Great Again cap, he again acted as a D.J., according to a person there, using an iPad to play some of his favorites: Elvis, the opera singer Pavarotti and his idol in showmanship, James Brown.
Such tremendous content — the loss! Truly, we shall not see his like again… if we’re lucky.
Saturday Afternoon Open Thread
SiubhanDuinne
I love pointing and mocking, naturally — but I also plan to do some serious chortling. Hope that’s okay.
jimmiraybob
All this coverage and not one person has commented on the fact that the toilet seat was down in the Trump SCIF (Sh#t Can Information Facility).
Ken
So did Osama bin Laden, Maggie.
SiubhanDuinne
@jimmiraybob:
The seat and the lid!!
JPL
@Ken: Yup!
Baud
I don’t know if this is real, but it’s funny.
https://i.redd.it/s2bxbtyqk85b1.jpg
Another Scott
@jimmiraybob: @SiubhanDuinne:
It is called a throne after all….
Cheers,
Scott.
Chris Johnson
Yeah, so NOPE NOPE NOPE.
I think that take is going to age like milk. I think it’s a kind of spin that’s put out by Trump’s real handlers, and it’s very similar to Boris Johnson’s bozo act.
Bullshit. Trump knew what he had, was very interested in it, and it all mattered a great deal: and he took pains to hang on to what was most damaging to the US and make sure he still had damaging stuff even while it would have benefitted him to let some of it be grabbed back. He could have got away with so much by playing dumb and allowing stuff to be grabbed back. He risked everything to make sure he still had espionage information in spite of the suspicion he was under, and he knew exactly what he was doing.
He had what he had on purpose. Very much on purpose. This take is bullshit.
SiubhanDuinne
Well, I watched as much as I could tolerate of TFG’s statement, but I admit I paid no attention to the painting. But I read something somewhere earlier today which stated quite definitively that it depicted the signing of the Monroe Doctrine. Now I feel compelled to go back and watch again just so I can try to identify the damn painting.
MattF
@Chris Johnson: I’m coming around to your point of view. Trump certainly understood that the classified material was valuable— although exactly how that value would be realized was unclear.
SiubhanDuinne
@Baud:
Yours doesn’t have the video. I hope this works, because yeah, MTG was completely besnubbed by TFG.
NotMax
“I am not a crook” phase 2, electric boogaloo.
//
Another Scott
@Chris Johnson: Devil’s advocate:
If he grabbed the stuff because he knew it was so valuable to VVP, why did he still have it? Why did he treat the storage of it so casually? Why did he show relative nobodys the stuff like it was a first edition Mickey Mantle rookie baseball card?
Why didn’t he have Jr ship it to himself on one of his safaris, have one of Lavrov’s guys meet him at the hotel, and hand it over?
No, I don’t buy it.
VVP didn’t need to have TIFG on the payroll – TIFG was a very willing useful idiot. But even the VWUI was more interested in feeding his ego than in helping VVP.
Just my $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
KenK
After reading Charles Pierce’s opinions, Jack Smith has to be thinking that this is the easiest goddamned money he’s ever made. This is a one-off from the “prisoner, sentence thyself”; more akin to “suspect, convict thyself.”
Baud
@SiubhanDuinne:
Hahahaha. Maybe she should have worn a dress that made her stand out more.
Another Scott
@SiubhanDuinne: Thanks for the pointer. (I had to strip the “mediaviewer” off your link).
This works for me.
Thanks again.
Cheers,
Scott.
SiubhanDuinne
@Baud:
You want that lil’ ole shrinkin’ violet to do whut now?
Parfigliano
The reason he took it and flat refused to return it is to sell it. Money is his life blood and only thing he cares including his shitheel kids.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Baud:
She should’ve introduced herself with this playing over loudspeakers
JaySinWA
@SiubhanDuinne: Didn’t work for me, this did https://twitter.com/i/status/166762296916878131
MTG ignored by T.
ETA Scott got there first.
Geminid
In the energy odds and ends department: Reuters reports that the Biden administration has started refilling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The administration bought 3 million barrels of oil and has put out bids for 3 million more. The purchase price is ~$72 dollars a barrel, well below the $95/bbl price paid for the oil when the government sold it last year. A tidy profit.
Last year the administration sold 180 million barrels of oil from the Reserve in order to stabilize fuel prices. This brought the Reserve down to 372 million barrels, the lowest level since 1983.
MomSense
@Chris Johnson:
We know that foreign intelligence services placed spies at MAL. He compromised sources and methods. And we all know that sources means humans. Were people killed? Tortured? This is serious.
It’s such a confusing experience. Of course it is satisfying that he may finally be held accountable for something. It’s also funny because he’s such a fucking strange (in addition to being evil)person. He had his people scurrying around moving boxes to pool rooms and bathrooms and storage areas. He admits to crimes openly like a fucking idiot.
There was probably a part of him that got off on having something of value. I’m sure it made him feel powerful or stroked his ego. We also know that he is transactional so the idea that he didn’t attempt to or succeed in cashing in on the documents isn’t plausible to me.
I’m also furious. This is terrible for relations with our allies and our national security. And what the fuck are we going to do about all the people who still support him, including elected representatives of our government? What will finally be bad enough to get through to them? Maybe nothing will.
This whole situation feels terribly precarious and deeply unsettling.
Baud
@Geminid:
👍🛢️
Citizen Alan
@Chris Johnson: Oh I agree. But I honestly wonder if he might try to claim “functional illiteracy” as an affirmative defense. It would certainly be plausible.
piratedan
Trump sure seems to be a creature of Id, does what he wants, in whatever way that serves him, be it his finances or his ego (both if he can manage it). He appears to have a cunning instinct in finding weakness in others and exploiting it and has been conditioned to double/triple/quadruple down on any and everything because its more or less worked out for him. Even now, with ALL of this, national security on the line, secrets supposedly for sale, the majority of the GOP refuses to make a choice and not more than a few have attached themselves like lampreys to his political ass because for whatever reason, they fear some Cletus with an AR15 will do their ass in instead of watching their miserable life be made a shambles as they are deprived of money, integrity and respect.
Citizen Alan
@piratedan: If Trump were any more a Creature of Id, he would have been summoned into existence by Walter Pidgeon while Robbie the Robot stood in the background yelling DANGER! DANGER! (/Forbidden Planet ref for the uninitiated)
Wyatt Salamanca
Meanwhile, Trump’s main rival DeSantis wants to make white supremacy great again:
DESANTIS: “I also look forward to, as President, restoring the name of FORT BRAGG to our great military base in Fayetteville, North Carolina… It’s an iconic name and iconic base, and we’re not gonna let political correctness run amok in North Carolina.”
https://twitter.com/DeSantisWarRoom/status/1667306460236087303
Another Scott
@Citizen Alan: I don’t think national security law has an exception for that.
I’m reminded of Harold Martin (from July 19, 2019):
IIRC, he was a bit of a hoarder, which can be an illness. He still went to prison for a long time – without even showing the stuff to anyone else, and while still having a security clearance…
Prosecutors, judges, and juries take this national defense information law stuff seriously.
Cheers,
Scott.
Citizen Alan
I still can’t believe that those were direct quotes. Shitgibbon is impossible to parody, isn’t he!
cmorenc
@Chris Johnson:
Both possibilities can be true at once – Trump retained some of the docs to impress his own ego and occasional select others as a show of power, but also kept some or all of them for their potential value to make deals or sell the info. With Trump, everything is ultimately about some combination of money and ego,
smith
It’s not clear that he did still have it, or at least the information contained. Some of the document covers shown in the famous photo of papers scattered across the floor were obvious photocopies. Genuine original covers of this kind of document have the colored frame all the way to the edge of the page. Several of those shown had a white band around the edge, indicating they were photocopies.
In addition, do you remember a month or so back when it was revealed that an aide who worked for some kind of PAC of his had scanned some of these documents and copied them on to a thumb drive? Maybe I missed the followup, but that story seemed to evaporate soon after. I’m betting neither DOJ nor various security agencies have forgotten it, though.
Geminid
@Wyatt Salamanca: “Iconic name?” That sure Is a laugher. Braxton Bragg was one of the Confederacy’s worst generals. A contemporary said it was painful to watch Bragg struggle to read a map. He was even worse with people. Everybody but Jefferson Davis thought Bragg was an idiot.
dmsilev
dmsilev
@Geminid: I guess if you must commemorate the Confederacy, best to honor the incompetence therein.
Mallard Filmore
I went down a twitter rabbit hole an hour ago and came across this thread from “fooler initiative”
https://twitter.com/metroadlib/status/1667248343255220227
It makes the indictment readable, understandable. A sample from the thread:
Brachiator
All this just illuminates how tiresome, pathetic and empty Trump is. As a former president (or furious pretender to the office), Trump does no good or notable deeds, but simply retreats to his prior life as pretend mogul, also leaving a rancid trail of disrepute and infantile rebellion against rules, norms and the law.
Unfortunately, the world can’t ignore him, because Trump insists on dragging the country down after him. The GOP leadership could have prevented this long ago, but they still see political advantage in propping Trump up.
trollhattan
@Another Scott: Is there any before/after accounting? What was seized ≠ what was stolen.
“Who has the missing files?” deserves its own meme.
Geminid
@dmsilev: It’s like Fort Benning, recently renamed Fort Moore after Vietnam-era General Hal Moore and also Mrs. Moore. “Rock” Benning was best known for failing to take Little Round Top on the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg. That qualified him as a hero for Lost Cause historians.
Sure Lurkalot
@MomSense:
We’re going on 8 years since this toxic manbaby paid people to watch him glide down an escalator. Thousands of people flock to his rallies, millions have sent him money, voted and re-voted for him. A large cadre of pundits opine that he can do no wrong and can only be wronged and the media declares any consequences for his actions as bad news for anyone but him. The more crimes he commits, the more popular he becomes.
Frankly, sometimes it’s hard not to think it’s time to stick a fork in this country.
Ruckus
@Another Scott:
I tend to agree with you and Parfigliano, that it was for the money. And he also seems to think he’s very high on the list of great humans. Hint – he’s not even close.
But.
There is a point that if he knew he wanted to sell it, wouldn’t even SFB have taken better care of it? And the amount and some of the actual stuff he stole wouldn’t have likely gotten vlad’s attention. Did he take everything to hide the stuff he was trying to sell within a pile of not much of anything? I mean sure he’d have taken it, just out of spite that he didn’t get reelected. But then again I ask, would you think that something made out of paper you stole to sell for real money would be storable in the tub/shower or an unlocked bathroom and on a stage?
My point is that I think your concept may not be far off, that SFB is a reactionary type of person, not a big, reasonable, forward thinker. And often his reactionary personality gets him figuratively shot in a rather valuable pace to a human being. Or he shoots himself there…
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Sure Lurkalot:
Evidence for this?
RaflW
Based on a couple of tweets I saw, it IS criminal for Joe Biden to have stored an old lamp shade in his garage next to his Corvette.
Alison Rose
@Mallard Filmore: There was a whole post dedicated to this thread yesterday :P
West of the Rockies
Maggie H senses a disturbance in the farce.
Snarki, child of Loki
“You just know he’s going to want to testify, but his lawyers would have to be drunk to let him.”
When it gets around to the trial, Giuliani might be the only lawyer that Trump has left, so yeah, drunk.
Remember, one of the only ways someone can be convicted of Treason is by running their mouth in court, so maybe!
Phylllis
Insert Alex Murdaugh joke here.
Alison Rose
The original working title for Bright Young Things.
Frankensteinbeck
@Chris Johnson:
So far it’s aging like fine scotch, which is satisfying to me because I said this was about his ego and not money from day one. It’s nice to see that take becoming the standard one, since I was very much in the minority.
And why is it taking over? Because the evidence supports it. There are tapes of him specifically using the papers as a “Look, I still have President stuff!” ego props. He didn’t store these things safely and process them for sale. Nobody had to buy them, because they were lying around to be scanned or stolen. His defense when they were discovered has been the stupidest imaginable, and will likely get him jailed when he could have sold the juiciest secrets, gone “Gosh! You mean I still have these?”, returned them, and laughed his way to the bank Scott-free on former president privilege.
If he sold any, that was serendipity*. In public and private, Trump has said he did it because He Is President Damn It. His actions are consistent with that. He’s a total fucking dumbass, mythic levels of stupid. Believe him.
*I strongly suspect Jarvanka and maybe others around him scooped up a few prizes to sell, since Trump handed the opportunity to them.
Wyatt Salamanca
@Geminid:
DeSantis becomes more pathetic with each passing day.
Given his relative young age, I’ll never understand why he didn’t sit out this election cycle. When this primary season wraps up, his reputation will be in tatters and he’ll be an absolute laughingstock.
Another Scott
@smith:
The infamous photo has obvious redactions (the white areas). The cover sheets used to be able to be downloaded as PDFs from a GSA web site – I don’t think the border or lack thereof matters.
Yeah, he could have transferred stuff, and that’s an obvious concern. And infuriating. Still, he wasn’t treating the boxes as if they were his payment to VVP or his ticket to unlimited power – he was treating them as if they were trinkets to keep like movie ticket stubs or old photos.
I’m remembering the stories about him tearing up notes at meetings, eating paper, throwing paper down the toilet. Presumably those pieces of paper made him look bad. He also infamously demanded that briefings talk about him and have lots of pictures. Those stories don’t fit with him hoovering up stuff to sell to VVP.
My $0.02. YMMV.
Cheers,
Scott.
cmorenc
@Geminid: Scary fact about the struggle at highly strategic Little Round Top @Gettysburg is that Union troops only beat a larger contingent of Texas Confederate soldiers to LRT by a mete 5 minutes. Had the confederates taken Little Round Top before the Union troops arrived, the position would have left the Union Army’s flank dangerously exposed, negating their advantage of holding the higher ground. The confederacy might then have won Gettysburg.
Ruckus
@Wyatt Salamanca:
What do you mean “will be?”
twbrandt
@Geminid: given that Bragg was a terrible commander who lost most of his battles and despised by many who knew him, it’s entirely on point for DeSantis to laud the man.
Geminid
@Wyatt Salamanca: DeSantis was polling really well among Republicans this winter. His whopping victory in Florida stood out in an election cycle that was otherwise disappointing for Republicans. I think DeSantis made his decision to run then, and by the time his numbers started dropping this Spring it was too late to turn back.
Wyatt Salamanca
@Baud:
@SiubhanDuinne:
@Another Scott:
I watched the first few minutes of his Georgia speech and he gave a shout out to MTG, so it appears that she’s still in his good graces.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?528640-1/donald-trump-delivers-remarks-columbus-georgia
kalakal
@SiubhanDuinne: I will begin with chortling, followed by a bout of snorting, and then guffaw, often and loudly
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Geminid:
@Wyatt Salamanca:
I don’t get why he thinks anybody worth catering to would care what those bases are called. Josh Marshall was right when he said his campaign is a Very Online One that caters to internet far-right weirdos
WaterGirl
@Mallard Filmore: I had an entire thread on that last night, if anyone wants an easy way to read the whole thing.
The Jack Smith Indictment: Next Level Shade
Ken
@twbrandt: I doubt DeSantis knows who Bragg fought for, or anything else about his career. It’s possible that he’s confused Bragg with Commander McBragg, who did have some stellar accomplishments.
Brachiator
It is so annoying to see Haberman included on TV news panels with real journalists covering the Trump indictment. I guess it is marginally interesting to learn how Trump is trying to make money off his current predicament, but you can tell that Haberman is trying hard to stay on Trump’s good side in order to gain access to him.
Did she ever write her Trump book? Is she shooting for multiple volumes?
Mallard Filmore
@Alison Rose: Nuts. Depite being retired, I can’t keep up.
Wyatt Salamanca
@Geminid:
DeSantis blew a golden opportunity. He had a brief window after his big re-election victory in which he was getting great press coverage and Trump’s attacks on him had not yet reached Defcon 1. That was the time he should jumped into the race. Now, unless Trump has a heart attack or a stroke, DeSantis is toast.
Geminid
@cmorenc: The Union troops who took up position on Little Round Top were still hard pressed for most of two hours. If Benning had shifted his troops a couple hundred yards to the right they could have helped overwhelm the 20th Maine Regiment that held the very end of Meade’s line. Instead Bennings’s troops spent an hour fighting through the Devil’s Den, which was nothing but a bunch of big rocks.
twbrandt
@Ken: oh it wouldn’t surprise me if DeSantis hasn’t a clue who Bragg was, I was just poking fun.
Frankensteinbeck
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Republican primary voters and the hardcore white supremacists who pre-Trump weren’t voting because the Republican Party wasn’t overt enough both care. A lot.
@Ken:
All he needs to know is that Bragg was a Confederate, and the name was removed because Bragg is a Confederate. I’m sure he at least knows that much. DeSantis is totally straightforward and loud about his political strategy being anti-anti-bigotry.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Anybody watching 24hrs at Le Man’s? There’s a modified NASCAR Cup car racing as an exhibition entry
smith
@Another Scott: I wasn’t referring to the blanked out portions in the centers of the pages, but the white margins around the edges, which would not be there in original covers. Photocopying leaves those margins. This story from Dkos shows what they should look like.
Baud
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
No, but I enjoyed Ford vs. Ferrari.
Mai Naem mobile
@Brachiator: it’s not just him. His kids are just as worthless. Junior seems unable to do much more than shove white powder up his nose and shoot animals. I go to Ivanka’s Twitter feed once in a while. All this bimbo does is go on exotic vacations with her equally odious husband. They also make constant trips to the middle east to collect their payoffs. They can’t even so simple nothing stuff like show up at a wounded warriors event or do a charity golf event.
Wyatt Salamanca
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
@Ken:
DeSantis is just flailing. He doesn’t have the guts to directly attack Trump so instead he’s just throwing out a ton of red meat in a desperate attempt to grab attention and remain relevant.
Anne Laurie
The Saudis didn’t give Jared (at least) two billion dollars ‘venture capital’ to lose because they’re enamored by his fetching dimples.
Jared’s not smart enough to steal the right stuff on his own, but he’s extremely open to financial criming, and he’s married to a woman who’s both smarter and more experienced with ‘Daddy’ and his little foibles. MBS and his friends would never take a mere woman into their alliance (story of Ivanka’s life), but paying an ‘observant’ Jew like Jared to steal for them would strike them as extremely entertaining (and in their mythic ‘tradition’).
I’m really curious to see the full story of how Ivanka navigated between the various wildly overconfident men in her life to end up where she is today. But I’m not sure I’ll live long enough for all the details to be released!
Mai Naem mobile
@Geminid: gas has gone down about 50 cents around here in the past couple of weeks.
WaterGirl
@Ruckus: Oppositional defiance disorder.
Another Scott
@Ruckus: I do agree that he wanted to sell some of the stuff, but not necessarily to VVP.
Remember that he’s mentioned several times that Nixon got $18M for returning some of his papers. TIFG wanted the opportunity to shake-down the Archives for a few orders of magnitude more than that, I’ll bet.
It would be delicious if one of the charged counts is related to the “love letter” he got from Kim. You know he just loves, loves, loves that letter…
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
WaterGirl
@Alison Rose: But definitely worth sharing if you didn’t know that people already knew about it!:-)
Brachiator
@Wyatt Salamanca:
DeSantis has also chosen to defend Trump with respect to being indicted. This should further collapse his lame presidential campaign.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
His criminality inspires fervor more than builds support. I have no data.
WaterGirl
@Another Scott: All you have to do is take a photo of a document and share that, and then you can treat the paper as badly as you like.
Anne Laurie
His lady wife has had a very serious health scare (breast cancer). If you accept that she’s at least 60% of the combined brain power / ambition in that couple, since she so obviously badly wants to be the new Jackie O, she may just have pushed him to jump in this year at a low point where she wasn’t sure she’d be around for 2028.
Mike in NC
Donald Trump became a career criminal the very same day he fell out of his mother’s crotch.
Baud
I guess Christie did finally go after Trump somewhat.
HinTN
@Geminid: Grant tells a very funny story on Bragg at the end of the chapter in his memoir that finishes off Chattanooga. Grant also gives Bragg the benefit of the doubt as to the reason that 20,000 Confederates were ordered north to Knoxville just as Grant was about to attack. So it goes.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Frankensteinbeck:
Fair point. Can’t win with only those people though. Would DeSantis even try to tack to the center were he to be a general election candidate?
@Wyatt Salamanca
Exactly. He won’t attack Trump directly, so he does dumbass stuff
Brachiator
@Anne Laurie:
It always amazes me that Trump supporters see Jared and Ivanka as carrying on legitimate business deals, but demonize Hunter Biden’s laptop as the epitome of depraved nepotism, cronyism and, well, ism ism.
Anne Laurie
Many people are saying — and I can’t disagree — that Trump’s inner circle designed / designs entirely too much of his campaign around the complaints of the noisiest malcontents on social media. Not least because Trump loves being King of the Right-Wing Web, whether or not it’s ‘prudent’ or ‘successful’.
(Inversely, President Biden’s secret weapon is that he doesn’t actually care about ‘what people are saying’ online. He’s assigned a very good staff of mostly young people to fight the essential battles on Twitter and TikTok, and I get the impression he never bothers to read Online unless they point out a specific message to him.)
SiubhanDuinne
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
The first GOP primary debate is scheduled for August 23, 2023.
I’m predicting that Puddin’ Boots will “suspend” his campaign by COB August 24.
Another Scott
@smith: From your Kos link:
Again, it used to be you could download PDFs of the cover sheets from a GSA web page and print them out yourself. (They want people who need them to order them from GSA now.) The FAS has one for Secret.
The point is, the borders don’t matter (if they did, they wouldn’t have let people download and use them from their own printer) – the text and the colors, do. Going down a rabbit hole about borders or not is analogous to worrying about kerning…
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Geminid
@Mai Naem mobile: Gasoline prices have stabilized the last few months in my part of Virginia, at about $3.39/gal. If I just wanted to accelerate the clean energy transition, I’d want prices a dollar higher and increasing 7% year over year.
But I also want Democrats to win next year, so I’d just as soon gasoline prices remained below $4 a gallon through 2024.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Baud:
I never watched it, but I remember it looked good based on trailers
dmsilev
@Brachiator:
I’m amazed that you’re amazed. Hypocrisy isn’t just tolerated, it’s positively celebrated among that group. Comes, I think, from similar tendencies among the evangelical set. Tribalism above all.
Anne Laurie
You don’t understand — Hunter Biden was enjoying a life of unbridled sexual / substance abuse, and his father has the nerve to still love him!!!
Jarvanka present as a business partnership, not a love match, and Big Daddy has made it all too clear that his relationship with *all* his kids only extends to the degree they’re useful to him.
Republicans want their representatives to be either joyless sociopaths or driven by obvious self-loathing, and they want them to be as imprisoned within a cult bubble where one’s ‘normie’ family rejects them as the average GOP voter is. Notice how every right-wing bloviator keeps bringing up the ‘shock’ that Joe won’t simply block Hunter’s number and tell the world he’s done it — because that’s what they would do.
lollipopguild
@Anne Laurie: He was coming off a huge win in the Gov. race and he wanted to strike while he was the hot “new” candidate. He and his people thought that they could bum rush trump and seize the nomination.
Frankensteinbeck
@Anne Laurie:
Everything you said sounds right to me. Jared isn’t as stupid as the Old Man, but he’s impressively dumb, and Ivanka shows all signs of having fashioned her life around manipulating the rich, stupid narcissists that have been foisted upon her.
prostratedragon
@SiubhanDuinne: Didn’t even come close enough to drag his mink coat over her.
Matt McIrvin
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Nobody remembers the people these bases are named after. They just vaguely associate the names with military badassery and all they know is that some woke woke wokester took their badass names away from them.
WaterGirl
@Baud: So Christie thinks there’s something to prosecute Biden for?
different-church-lady
NARRATOR: “His lawyers were drunk.”
Baud
@WaterGirl:
I think he means politically. But who knows?
Matt McIrvin
@Brachiator: I occasionally go over to RealClearPolitics for poll data. That is, of course, a right-wing site and their news headline roundups have an entertaining looking-glass-world quality. Right now everything mentioning the Trump indictment says something about a “Biden bribery scandal” in the same headline, and there are a bunch more just about the “Biden bribery scandal” which is apparently the biggest story in the world right now. I understand Biden dismissed it as “malarkey”. I’m not even sure which wingnut hallucination they’re talking about because I didn’t click through.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@different-church-lady: God knows, I’d be drunk if I were his lawyer.
Brachiator
@dmsilev:
My amazement is mainly sarcastic. But I think that more than mere hypocrisy is at work. It is, as you note, tribalism, but to a delusional extreme.
WaterGirl
@Baud: That’s better, at least.
prostratedragon
@Another Scott: A por qué no los dos situation if ever there was one.
Princess
@Chris Johnson: Again, I agree. Ford’s take is bullshit. Trump is no dunce. He knew exactly what he had and what it was worth.
TriassicSands
Kevin McCarthy has now come out with a passionate defense of criminality. Naturally, Donald Trump’s indictment is nothing but a witch hunt perpetrated by the DOJ and FBI, which have been weaponized by the Deep State to exact revenge on Donald Trump for being the greatest president and most saintly human being in the 13.8 billion year history of the universe.
All future Democratic presidents, should any Democrat manage to be elected in the face of all the Republican efforts to ensure a neo-fascist, one party minority controlled USA, can now be expected to be impeached while in office when the House has a GOP majority or indicted and tried once out of office. Should the conditions be right, both impeachment and criminal indictment will be the preferred course of action. This is necessary now that the greatest law enforcement injustice ever has been committed by Merrick Garland, Jack Smith, and a grand jury chosen entirely by George Soros.
McCarthy once again distinguishes himself as the stupidest, most corrupt Speaker in my lifetime. It’s even likely that McCarthy’s claim extends all the way back to the founding of the US. Although I don’t know either Garland or Smith, I suspect that both have more integrity in a single cell of their bodies than McCarthy and his entire party have collectively.
None of the Republicans have the capacity to surprise me anymore with their mindless corruption, but now they’ve even lost the ability to shock me. When something unexpected happens, it can be surprising. But the ability to shock requires language and behavior that exceeds or at least severely challenges one’s capacity to believe those words and deeds could be uttered given the prevailing reality. What is certain is that no matter how bad Republicans are today, they will worse tomorrow.
Geminid
@HinTN: I think Grant also recounted a story from Bragg’s tenure in the prewar “Old Army.” Commands were often spread thin, and officers sometimes had to multi-task. At one point Bragg was both commander of a base and quartermaster. So Bragg as Commander made a written request for more supplies, and then as Quartermaster denied the request. Bragg’s two personae went back and forth over the issue until a superior officer intervened and said, “My God, Mr. Bragg! You’ve quarreled with every officer in the Army and now you are quarreling with yourself!”
It’s not certain this actually happened. The “Old Army” was a very gossipy institution. Grant himself was a subject of gossip about his drinking. The truth was that Grant drank so much that he was a median officer in that respect. Grant’s reputation still dogged him when the Civil War began and it retarded his early progress to the higher commands he merited.
Wyatt Salamanca
@Brachiator:
I’ve watched too many films and tv shows over the years and maybe that’s caused me to view the world through rose colored glasses, but I wish we had some politicians who cared more about how they’ll be remembered by history rather than whether they’ll win their next election.
It’s time for Republicans to replace their elephant with a jellyfish because this political party is nothing more than a collection of sniveling, bed wetting fucking cowards.
bbleh
@Another Scott: oh c’mon, this is Trump. He took it because he thought it would make him money or impress people, or because he thought it might get him in trouble, or because he just liked it. He was a kid in a candy store. And for sure VVP and BinBoneSaw were on his list of potential buyers, but it’s not like he had a specific plan for every document. And maybe waving it around might, y’know, catch somebody’s eye.
The scary part is, I dunno if ANYONE knows what he took and is gone. They don’t even know what went to Bedminster, and they’ll probably never know cuz for sure he’s burned it all by now.
The dude was and is a walking security hazard.
bbleh
@Frankensteinbeck: @Anne Laurie: I’d put money on at least some connection between BinBoneSaw, Wonder Boy Jared, and Daddy Trump vis-a-vis the potential value to certain people of certain information. Eg, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, during one of his “I want this, I’ll keep it” episodes of stuffing things in random closets or boxes he thought “I’ll bet Jared would think MBS would want this.”
He isn’t imaginative. He’s basically a nickel-and-dime grifter. Eg, charging the Secret Service rack rate at his resorts for rooms for his protective detail? What’s that, thousands? WTF? At least Jared had the right sense of scale …
Suzanne
@dmsilev: I am laughing so hard that Mr. Suzanne is annoyed. ZOMG.
Geminid
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): DeSantis will attack Trump indirectly, through implied comparison. DeSantis emphasizes that the task of transforming American politics requires a two term President. Trump can only serve one more term. DeSantis will say that unlike himself, Joe Biden is too old and feeble to be President, Trump is basically as old as Biden.
DeSantis will also emphasize that he can win in November. A lot of Republicans think that Trump cannot, and DeSantis will go after their votes. The object is to avoid irrevocable alienating Trump’s hard core supporters. I don’t think DeSantis can, but he has to try because if too many of Trump’s supporters stay home on Election Day the nomination will be worthless.
Viva BrisVegas
As a general observation, wouldn’t it make more sense to vet any documents before an ex-President drives a truck load of them out through the White House gates?
I might be an ignorant furriner, but it seems a cack handed way of doing things.
HinTN
@Geminid: That’s the story Grant recounts.
No shit, that’s the median human condition.
Was Grant a drunk? Probably not. Did he drink, maybe too much on occasion? My experience says this is likely. McCullough glossed it over and that’s as much reporting as I have on the man. I will say that he writes well.
rekoob
@Suzanne: You had mentioned a potential Philadelphia-area meetup the week of 12-16 June. For what it’s worth, I’ll be in the neighborhood on Thursday, 15 June. Otherwise, I’m slated to visit my sister and BIL in PGH in mid-to-late-July. Say the word and I’ll find a green balloon or two.
TriassicSands
C’mon, your bias is showing. The proper name is, in fact, “The Mar-a-Lago Ultra Secure Shit Can Information Facility.” It is also only fair to point out that the tacky gold fixtures and cheesy chandelier add significantly to the security of documents stored there.
Needless to say, the facility is climate controlled where humidity never exceeds 100%, which means that it will probably never rain in the facility. Trump obviously spared no expense in his effort to safeguard all the documents stored therein. I’m sure Trump found that necessary because, as we’ve seen, he has always taken the greatest care imaginable to keep the documents safe and secure. It undoubtedly took a great deal of effort for Trump to telepathically declassify all the documents and it would make no sense to risk anything happening to the documents that would interfere with their saleability (in a future world wide auction).
Viva BrisVegas
Shelby Foote (for what it’s worth) opined that Grant drank when he was bored and away from his wife. Perhaps it was a way to dull his libido?
Suzanne
@rekoob: YES, I will be in town on Monday the 12th and leaving midday on Friday the 16th. I have one work dinner, probably Wednesday. Thursday eve would be fabulous. Anyone else down?
Narya
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): we are watching IndyCar Detroit first, then hockey….
I hear the Penske Porches have rainbow livery
persistentillusion
@trollhattan: Listen the Allison Gill’s “Jack” podcast if you want more information.
rekoob
@Suzanne: Perhaps we can try over the next couple of threads to see who’s up for it. I’ll check in again tomorrow and, in due course, alert WaterGirl.
Geminid
@HinTN: Grant’s drinking got him in trouble when he was posted at a base in California. His commander was a martinet, and one payday he saw that Grant was obviously tipsy while serving out the enlisteds’ pay. Grant’s commander threatened him with a court martial. The other junior officers told Grant that he would beat the charge, but Grant had had enough of the peacetime Army and he resigned.* Grant missed his wife and young children terribly, and between California’s high cost of living and the hazards of the passage, he could not bring them out.
So Grant borrowed $100 dollars from brother officer Simon Bolivar Buckner and returned home to his beloved Julia. Grant was able to pay Buckner back in 1862, when he captured the Confederate general at Fort Donelson.
* Grant’s father Jesse was appalled at his son’s decision. He traveled to Washington to see if the Secretary of Wark would restore Grant’s commission, but Jefferson Davis refused.
Frankensteinbeck
@Princess:
Trump’s legal strategy in this documents case proves beyond any reasonable doubt that he is a dunce. Not just a dunce, but ‘You will never meet anyone as stupid as Donald Trump’ stupid.
Steeplejack
@WaterGirl:
I think he’s saying the opposite: that it would be equally bad to prosecute Joe Biden as it is to defend Trump’s criminal conduct.
Geminid
@Viva BrisVegas: I think that most of time Grant drank because he was bored. And whiskey drinking was customary for most Army officers.
Whiskey could also serve as a sleep aid. One of Grant’s biographers (I wish I remembered which one) gave an interesting anecdote from Grant’s Overland Campaign of 1864, when his army fought Lee’s for six weeks almost without a break. A field officer was visiting a prewar friend one night. His friend was a surgeon, and while the two were talking Grant walked into the tent. Without a word, the surgeon poured him a cupful of whisky. Grant downed it, nodded to those present and left, presumably for bed.
The officer recounted how he ran into Grant after the war. Grant did not remember him, so the officer reminded Grant of their encounter in his friend’s tent. “Ah yes,” Grant said. “I don’t think I ever needed a drink as much as I did that night.”
El Muneco
@Geminid: TBF, incompetent traitors actually served the USA in their own way – so if we should honor anyone who committed treason in defense of slavery, it should be idiots.
Similarly, Benedict Arnold was the most accomplished general officer in the Continental Army, but at or below replacement level as a lobsterback. His treason didn’t do as much real damage on the battlefield as it did propaganda and morale damage.
WaterGirl
@rekoob: @Suzanne: Yeah, somebody let me know once you get it partially figured out. There will surely be people who haven’t seen the discussion in the comments.
WaterGirl
@trollhattan: Quite some time I did a post about classified documents, and we have a link to it in the sidebar.
I suspect it will answer a lot of your questions about why/how they don’t know exactly what is missing.
Classified Documents: A Primer
WaterGirl
@Steeplejack: Now that you say that, I can see that his comment could be taken either way. Not the best communicator, apparently!
WaterGirl
Now I rememberer the thing that Popehat said on his podcast last night that pissed me off. I forget his exact words, but he said that Trump is favored to win the election in 2024. That’s just bullshit.
dave319
@Ken: “Oh…..oh……oh! I’m……gonna…….cu…cu…..” –Maggie Haberman, getting some body work from Waltine
JaySinWA
@Steeplejack: I’m pretty sure that is wrong. He was talking about the R party going up against Biden instead of defending T. I think “prosecute a case” was either a mistraction or a figure of speech. OTOH much of the defense of T is claiming Biden is directing the case against T as a political war, and if that is what he meant, your interpretation could be right. The tweet is ambiguous and the clip doesn’t really address that phrase
On the third hand, there’s the Biden bribery BS that T is pushing, so maybe it is a literal prosecution he’s talking about.
Jackie
@WaterGirl: He wanted to goad you into voting 😉
I hope Dems and Independents don’t assume anything in ‘24 and get lackadaisical. Too many social issues need Dems in 100% charge in order to implement them into law.
And, of course no Repug in the WH!!!
bbleh
FWIW, per NYT, Clerk of the Court “confirmed that no court practice would return the case to be assigned to another judge. In short, Judge Cannon’s assignment is permanent unless she were to step aside.”
So … apparently not just arraignment only.
You may resume hyperventilating now.
WaterGirl
@Jackie: Like Preet, who is also popular on the left, I think Popehat leans Republican
They are both too “both sides” for me.
Narya
@WaterGirl: I take the same approach as I do to comment threads: if a commenter I generally appreciate (not necessarily agree with) says something I think is BAD, I just ignore that part and remind myself they usually have instructive things to say. It’s possible for someone to work their way into my “ignore completely” list, but it’s really a pretty short list.
Narya
@WaterGirl: MMV :-)
But I’m okay w that; I appreciate your perspective a lot.
Anne Laurie
@WaterGirl: I don’t agree with your assessment about Popehat; I think he is (at least in his ‘public’ capacity, and for good reason!) pro-procedure, not pro-Republican.
And in this particular instance, I think he makes an excellent argument about Judge Cannon’s assignment here.
scribbler
@Anne Laurie: Thank you for linking to this Popehat argument. It is excellent.
Barry
@Wyatt Salamanca: “DeSantis is just flailing. He doesn’t have the guts to directly attack Trump so instead he’s just throwing out a ton of red meat in a desperate attempt to grab attention and remain relevant.”
DeSantis’ approach mystifies me. It’s straight put of 2016 – ‘draft’ behind Trump as the #2, then pick up his followers *when* he inevitably crashed and burned. And be totally surprised by Trump keeping and eye out for this chief rival and and smashing him.
Barry
@Brachiator: “It always amazes me that Trump supporters see Jared and Ivanka as carrying on legitimate business deals, but demonize Hunter Biden’s laptop as the epitome of depraved nepotism, cronyism and, well, ism ism.”
It’s a combination of Freudian projection (it’s what they’d) and throwing a glob of sh*t on somebody when you yourself are covered in shit a foot deep, so that you can claim ‘bothsidesdoit’.
Barry
@Geminid: DeSantis might. If he does, Trump will continue to hammer him at an emotional level.
I would place my money on DeSantis getting crushed.
Barry
@WaterGirl: “Like Preet, who is also popular on the left, I think Popehat leans Republican.”
Not in the slightest.
Geminid
@Barry: Yeah, I think DeSantis will not not beat Trump. He’s not an attractive enough candidate to consolidate the non-Trump vote. Little charisma, as far I can see.
I still wonder how strong a primary candidate Trump will be this time around. Given his status as former President, Trump ought to be able to clear 70%. He may run closer to 50% though, which I think would signal weakness within the party. A broader problem is that many Independents have turned away from him. They are Trump fatigued.
SFAW
Late to the party, but going to make a “not-a-lawyer-so-WTF-do-I-know?” prediction:
This case will never go to trial: there is no way the prosecution and defense lawyers can find a “jury of his peers,” because how TF are they going to find enough pathologically lying narcissists as stupid and crazy as he is?
Yeah, yeah, I’m sure there are at least 18 (jury plus alternates) persons like that in that country, but the amount of time it will take to find them pushes the case start date out past TFG’s Second
ComingInauguration, at which point he’ll order AG Roger Stone to end the trial.Now, I know some “lawyers” like Omnes will probably say “That’s not how it works.” We’ll see.
RaflW
@Baud: I watched the video. MTG claps for him, then stops, then resumes with half-hearted dejection when it becomes clear he isn’t heading over to greet her. Delish.
Paul in KY
@Geminid: He helped win the war…for the Union.
Paul in KY
@Ken: He knows he was a confederate general.