Thread: President Donald Trump

Can't say I've noticed the return of any Trumpanzees though.
I imagine they're all nursing their butthurt and awaiting their talking points.

Guy spills the beans on Trumps Russian connections.

Only 4 presidents have been impeached or resigned.
Only 5 presidents failed to win the popular vote.
Only 13 presidents failed to get re-elected.
Only 1 has done all 3.

.....

Originally Posted by raycarey

..Only 4 presidents have been impeached or resigned.
Only 5 presidents failed to win the popular vote.
Only 13 presidents failed to get re-elected.
Only 1 has done all 3.......

how many failed to win the popular vote twice?

Originally Posted by TheRealKW

how many failed to win the popular vote twice?

I Think we have a winner in that category. LOL He might even go for the hat trick in 2024

Originally Posted by helge

Now bear with me ( poor schooling and all)

A 41 % increase ?

How many died from corona in the USA then ?

More than a million ?

Shocking indeed

Whoosh, right over your head.

Originally Posted by elche

Whoosh, right over my head.

FTFY

Originally Posted by elche

Whoosh

Ah; you're back

Donald Trump approved a wave of pre-Christmas pardons, granting clemency to a former campaign aide caught up in the Russia investigation, disgraced Republican lawmakers and several contractors convicted in a massacre in Iraq.


The White House announced on Tuesday Trump has granted full pardons to 15 people and commuted all or part of the sentences of five others. The beneficiaries include George Papadopoulos, a former campaign aide who pleaded guilty to lying to federal officials as part of the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, and Alex van der Zwaan, who pleaded guilty to a similar charge in the Russia investigation and is the son-in-law of the Russian billionaire German Khan.


The three former Republican US representatives who were pardoned or had their sentences commuted on Tuesday were Chris Collins of New York, Duncan Hunter of California and Steve Stockman of Texas.


Collins, 70, had been the first sitting member of Congress to endorse Trump’s candidacy in 2016 and was a strong defender of the president. He pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit securities fraud and making false statements to the FBI and received a full pardon.


Hunter, 44, pleaded guilty in 2019 to conspiring to convert campaign funds for personal use and received a full pardon. Stockman, 64, was convicted in 2018 of misuse of charitable funds and had his sentence commuted after serving two of 10 years.


Also pardoned were Nicholas Slatten, Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard, former contractors at Blackwater Worldwide who were serving lengthy prison terms in connection with the killings of civilians in a 2007 massacre in Baghdad. Among those killed by the Blackwater contractors were children, including a nine-year-old, and a mother who was clutching an infant.


Two former border patrol agents were also among those pardoned. Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean were found guilty of crimes related to shooting an unarmed man who was smuggling marijuana in 2005. George W Bush commuted their sentences in 2009, but did not grant a full pardon.


‘Appalling decision’
Trump’s use of the presidential pardon power has attracted considerable controversy, and the list of recipients on Tuesday drew strong rebuke from Democrats.


“These corrupt politicians don’t deserve a pardon,” said the Democratic California representative Katie Porter. “Appalling decision by the president.”


“Are you still a pro-law enforcement President after you pardon killers of a 9-year old & an 11-year old?” asked Joyce Alene, a law professor at the University of Alabama and former US attorney for the northern district of Alabama, about the decision in the contractors’ cases.


Adam Schiff, the Democratic congressman who prosecuted Trump’s impeachment trial, tweeted: “Lie to cover up for the president? You get a pardon. Corrupt politician who endorsed Trump? You get a pardon. Murder innocent civilians? You get a pardon. Elect a corrupt man as president? You get a corrupt result.”


While remarkable, Tuesday’s wave of decisions did not come as a surprise. In November, Trump pardoned his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI during the Russia investigation.


Michael Cohen says he deserves early release from home confinement
Read more
Speculation has flourished about whom Trump may pardon next. The pardoning of Papadopoulos and Van der Zwaan may signal that more Trump associates embroiled in the matter could expect pardons, including his former aides Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani; the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange; and the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden are also among names commonly mentioned.


“Today’s pardon helps correct the wrong that Mueller’s team inflicted on so many people,” the White House said in a statement. Papadopoulos, 33, was an adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign. He pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to FBI agents about the timing and significance of his contacts with people who claimed to have ties to top Russian officials.


“The defendant’s crime was serious and caused damage to the government’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election,” a sentencing recommendation memo from the then US special counsel Mueller said. Papadopoulos served only 12 days of a 14-day sentence in federal prison, then was placed on a 12-month supervised release.


It has also been reported that Trump has considered issuing a pre-emptive pardon for himself and members of his family who have worked in his White House.


Pardons and other acts of clemency, often to ordinary federal prisoners, are a common feature of the end of any presidency. According to the Pew Research Center, however, Trump “has used his clemency power less often than any president in modern history”.


“While rare so far,” Pew added, “Trump’s use of presidential clemency has caused controversy because of the nature of his pardons and commutations. Many of Trump’s clemency recipients have had a ‘personal or political connection to the president’, according to a July analysis by the Lawfare blog, and he has often circumvented the formal process through which clemency requests are typically considered.”


Applying only to federal cases, presidential pardons do not imply innocence of the charges in hand.


The Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, a member of the Senate judiciary committee, said: “I doubt government contractors who slaughtered civilians or corrupt congressional cronies were what the founders had in mind when they drafted the pardon clause.


“Most despicably, President Trump is twisting this presidential power to reward allies who broke the law on his behalf,” Blumenthal added.


Several critics of the president also pointed out that the administration was rushing through a number of federal executions while granting pardons to allies. The administration has put 10 federal inmates to death and is scheduled to execute three more people in January, days before Joe Biden is inaugurated as the next president.


The White House cited Stockman’s age and health, and that he contracted Covid-19 while in prison, as part of its reasoning behind commuting his sentence. However, nearly 6,000 people who have tested positive for the virus in federal prisons remain incarcerated, according to the Bureau of Prisons.


The president commuted the sentences of three civilians, Crystal Munoz, Tynice Nichole Hall, and Judith Negron, who had been convicted on drug and fraud-related charges. He had previously granted them clemency, after the reality TV star Kim Kardashian West had advocated for them.

Trump pardons ex-campaign aide, Blackwater contractors and disgraced lawmakers | US news | The Guardian

He was always going to...

Originally Posted by TheRealKW

He was always going to...

this was just the opening salvo.

Yep. Buckle up. Thirty days left, and it is going to be a shit show.

Trump Is Losing His Mind
The president is discussing martial law in the Oval Office, as his grip on reality falters.


Donald Trump’s descent into madness continues.

The latest manifestation of this is a report in The New York Times that the president is weighing appointing the conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, who for a time worked on his legal team, to be special counsel to investigate imaginary claims of voter fraud.


As if that were not enough, we also learned that former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who was pardoned by the president after pleading guilty to lying to the FBI, attended the Friday meeting. Earlier in the week, Flynn, a retired lieutenant general, floated the idea (which he had promoted before) that the president impose martial law and deploy the military to “rerun” the election in several closely contested states that voted against Trump. It appears that Flynn wants to turn them into literal battleground states.

None of this should come as a surprise. Some of us said, even before he became president, that Donald Trump’s Rosetta Stone, the key to deciphering him, was his psychology—his disordered personality, his emotional and mental instability, and his sociopathic tendencies. It was the main reason, though hardly the only reason, I refused to vote for him in 2016 or in 2020, despite having worked in the three previous Republican administrations. Nothing that Trump has done over the past four years has caused me to rethink my assessment, and a great deal has happened to confirm it.


Given Trump’s psychological profile, it was inevitable that when he felt the walls of reality close in on him—in 2020, it was the pandemic, the cratering economy, and his election defeat—he would detach himself even further from reality. It was predictable that the president would assert even more bizarre conspiracy theories. That he would become more enraged and embittered, more desperate and despondent, more consumed by his grievances. That he would go against past supplicants, like Attorney General Bill Barr and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, and become more aggressive toward his perceived enemies. That his wits would begin to turn, in the words of King Lear. That he would begin to lose his mind.

So he has. And, as a result, President Trump has become even more destabilizing and dangerous.

“I’ve been covering Donald Trump for a while,” Jonathan Swan of Axios tweeted. “I can’t recall hearing more intense concern from senior officials who are actually Trump people. The Sidney Powell/Michael Flynn ideas are finding an enthusiastic audience at the top.”



Even amid the chaos, it’s worth taking a step back to think about where we are: An American president, unwilling to concede his defeat by 7 million popular votes and 74 Electoral College votes, is still trying to steal the election. It has become his obsession.

In the process, Trump has in too many cases turned his party into an instrument of illiberalism and nihilism. Here are just a couple of data points to underscore that claim: 18 attorneys general and more than half the Republicans in the House supported a seditious abuse of the judicial process.

And it’s not only, or even mainly, elected officials. The Republican Party’s base has often followed Trump into the twilight zone, with a sizable majority of them affirming that Joe Biden won the election based on fraud and many of them turning against medical science in the face of a surging pandemic.

COVID-19 is now killing Americans at the rate of about one per minute, but the president is “just done with COVID,” a source identified as one of Trump’s closest advisers told The Washington Post. “I think he put it on a timetable and he’s done with COVID ... It just exceeded the amount of time he gave it.”


This is where Trump’s crippling psychological condition—his complete inability to face unpleasant facts, his toxic narcissism, and his utter lack of empathy—became lethal. Trump’s negligence turned what would have been a difficult winter into a dark one. If any of his predecessors—Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan, to go back just 40 years—had been president during this pandemic, tens of thousands of American lives would almost surely have been saved.

“My concern was, in the worst part of the battle, the general was missing in action,” said Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, one of the very few Republicans to speak truth in the Trump era.

In 30 days, Donald Trump will leave the presidency, with his efforts to mount a coup having failed. The encouraging news is that it never really had a chance of succeeding. Our institutions, especially the courts, will have passed a stress test, not the most difficult ever but difficult enough, and unlike any in our history. Some local officials exhibited profiles in courage, doing the right thing in the face of threats and pressure from their party. And a preponderance of the American public, having lived through the past four years, deserves credit for canceling this presidential freak show rather than renewing it. The “exhausted majority” wasn’t too exhausted to get out and vote, even in a pandemic.



But the Trump presidency will leave gaping wounds nearly everywhere, and ruination in some places. Truth as a concept has been battered from the highest office in the land on an almost hourly basis. The Republican Party has been radicalized, with countless Republican lawmakers and other prominent figures within the party having revealed themselves to be moral cowards, even, and in some ways especially, after Trump was defeated. During the Trump presidency, they were so afraid of getting crosswise with him and his supporters that they failed the Solzhenitsyn test: “The simple act of an ordinary brave man is not to participate in lies, not to support false actions! His rule: Let that come into the world, let it even reign supreme—only not through me.”

During the past four years, the right-wing ecosystem became more and more rabid. Many prominent evangelical supporters of the president are either obsequious, like Franklin Graham, or delusional, like Eric Metaxas, and they now peddle their delusions as being written by God. QAnon and the Proud Boys, Newsmax and One America News, Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson—all have been emboldened.


These worrisome trends began before Trump ran for office, and they won’t disappear after he leaves the presidency. Those who hope for a quick snapback will be disappointed. Still, having Trump out of office has to help. He’s going to find out that there’s no comparable bully pulpit. And the media, if they are wise, will cut off his oxygen, which is attention. They had no choice but to cover Trump’s provocations when he was president; when he’s an ex-president, that will change.

For the foreseeable future, journalists will rightly focus on the pandemic. But once that is contained and defeated, it will be time to go back to focusing more attention on things like the Paris accord and the carbon tax; the earned-income tax credit and infrastructure; entitlement reform and monetary policy; charter schools and campus speech codes; legal immigration, asylum, assimilation, and social mobility. There is also an opportunity, with Trump a former president, for the Republican Party to once again become the home of sane conservatism. Whether that happens or not is an open question. But it’s something many of us are willing to work for, and that even progressives should hope for.


Beyond that, and more fundamental than that, we have to remind ourselves that we are not powerless to shape the future; that much of what has been broken can be repaired; that though we are many, we can be one; and that fatalism and cynicism are unwarranted and corrosive.

There’s a lovely line in William Wordsworth’s poem “The Prelude”: “What we have loved, Others will love, and we will teach them how.”

There are still things worthy of our love. Honor, decency, courage, beauty, and truth. Tenderness, human empathy, and a sense of duty. A good society. And a commitment to human dignity. We need to teach others—in our individual relationships, in our classrooms and communities, in our book clubs and Bible studies, and in innumerable other settings—why those things are worthy of their attention, their loyalty, their love. One person doing it won’t make much of a difference; a lot of people doing it will create a culture.

Maybe we understand better than we did five years ago why these things are essential to our lives, and why when we neglect them or elect leaders who ridicule and subvert them, life becomes nasty, brutish, and generally unpleasant.

Just after noon on January 20, a new and necessary chapter will begin in the American story. Joe Biden will certainly play a role in shaping how that story turns out—but so will you and I. Ours is a good and estimable republic, if we can keep it.

Trump Is Losing His Mind - The Atlantic

As the Trump show nears its final episode, America is bracing for potentially the most dramatic, disturbing and outlandish twists yet.

Donald Trump’s recent conduct has led critics to suggest that he has lost touch with reality and raise alarms over an increasingly desperate, deranged power grab in the climactic month of his presidency.



Trump has entertained extreme ideas such as military intervention and appointing a conspiracy theorist as a special counsel to investigate voter fraud. He has turned on allies and retweeted threats to put Republicans who failed to back him in jail. He has also undermined his own secretary of state’s assessment that Russia launched a massive cyber-attack on the US government.

And that was just in the past week. “I guess we cannot quantify the level of crazy that could come out of the Trump White House in his final days here,” said Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill. “This behavior is 100% a by-product of Donald Trump’s psychosis.”

Trump appears to have adopted a bunker mentality since the 3 November election, making few public appearances but continuing to air grievances on his increasingly manic Twitter feed. Even as one American dies from the coronavirus every 33 seconds and hospitals struggle, he is said to have all but mentally checked out on the pandemic.

America braced for final month of madness as Trump show nears its end | Donald Trump | The Guardian

Perhaps he expected, and expects, to be President of the United States forever. Not just for life; forever. Perhaps he expected, and expects, to be President of the World, and eventually, Master of the Universe.

I'm curious as to what he'll do with himself when he is no longer in power.

Originally Posted by TheMadBaron

I'm curious as to what he'll do with himself when he is no longer in power.

Me too. I'm guessing he'll busy himself being a vindictive [at][at][at][at] using his influence over the rabid base to try and get back at those he thinks crossed him.

He is broke, so he will spend the next four years bleeding his base like the Charlton he is. The idiots will lap it up.

The law about insurrection...

18 US Code 2383

Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

I'd be curious as to whether the FBI is just kicking back and watching....

Originally Posted by elche

This week he entertained the idea of using the military, who said they would not take part in it.

Who said? I missed that.

Can they legally refuse? Isn't the orange clown technically still the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces?

I'd like to think that he wouldn't be so stupid as to dare to try it, but this is Trump we're talking about.

Originally Posted by TheMadBaron

I'd like to think that he wouldn't be so stupid as to dare to try it, but this is Trump we're talking about.

I would hope he tried. We would be rid of him permanently as a result. But I agree, he would probably be not that stupid. But somebody did suggest it.

The fuckwittery is astounding.

Donald Trump’s supporters, who continue to believe in the outgoing president’s claims of election fraud, have planned a “second inauguration” event for him online on the day Joe Biden is due to take his oath of office.

The event called “Donald J Trump 2nd presidential inauguration ceremony” planned on Facebook is supposed to be held on 20 January and already more than 325,000 people have shown interest in attending it. Out of those, more than 60,000 say they are definitely going, according to the Daily Dot.

One of the hosts of the event is Evi Kokalari, also known as Evi Kokalari-Angelakis, according to her Twitter profile, who was part of the Trump campaign in the 2020 elections and appears on right-leaning news networks, including One America News Network (OAN), a channel often promoted by Mr Trump as he turned hostile towards Fox News.

Ms Kokalari’s latest post on the event’s page points towards Facebook’s election information system that she deems as “fake” and says: Our voting rights are under attack! So is our freedom of speech! And FB’s disclaimer on this post, proves just that.

The page is full of comments supporting the president’s claims of rigging during the election and links to articles to conservative news websites containing information that has been debunked in the past.

More than 300,000 Trump supporters plan to join virtual ‘second inauguration’ event on 20 January | The Independent

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

already more than 325,000 people have shown interest in attending it. Out of those, more than 60,000 say they are definitely going

Let's hope they all stand at least two meters apart from each other, and leave their rifles at home.

Originally Posted by Cujo

And the media, if they are wise, will cut off his oxygen, which is attention. They had no choice but to cover Trump’s provocations when he was president; when he’s an ex-president, that will change.

No chance of that happening.