As a proud American what stuns me as much as anything is how the White House became such a cesspool under Trump, a beacon for virtually any groupie, grifter, or lowlife who would tell the childlike insecure Trump whatever he wanted to hear and do his bidding without question. Sidney Powell? Michael Flynn? My Pillow Guy? How did such opportunists even get within the same zip code as the Oval Office?
Every time I think of it I feel the need to take a shower and try to clean off the psychological ooze and slime that accumulated over those horrendous four years -- and more, since January 6 is now the bad gift that keeps on giving. Whatever the merits of the legal case against him, Trump is clearly guilty of being the most immoral and least qualified person ever to occupy our land's highest office. That alone should disqualify him from garnering serious consideration for another run. That it doesn't speaks volumes of how wide and deep the cesspool has become in our nation, when we willingly lower our standards and confuse the cult of personality and entertainment for anything remotely resembling effective leadership and good judgment.
Not a coup! Claims one who knows from experience, John Bolton. Goldang it, he went and planned a coup with some brilliant people, far more brilliant than TFG, and it was an abject failure. So, he knows his coups... Plus, wasn't he a part of this very same administration that also was an abject failure? What more proof do you need? Why this is sad enough to make even Paul Ryan sob again. All the way to the bank with his checks from Fox News.
In a troubled and unrelenting universe I find no small solace watching one Donald J. trump getting his (ample) arse handed to him in the most public of forums imaginable. I'm further heartened imagining him sputtering and spewing as the full consequence of his lifelong perfidies come back to bite him in same. Furthermore, I can't believe I'm the only person on the planet reveling as this grindhouse comic book edition of King Lear unfolds.
Thank you to the January 6th Committee for matching, surpassing even, the schadenfreude engendered in the Watergate Hearings, and thank you, Charlie, for this concise timeline; I expect to see it in high school textbooks one day. Too bad it likely won't be read by those who prefer their "research" on 4chan, OANN, and the Dear Patriot/10 Hour Matching Fund cabal, but then consider that audience.
I've always wondered if Trump's certainty that he couldn't have lost without the Democrats cheating was because he knew there was cheating - because his side was doing it. How could such a massively unpopular president get 10 million more votes for re-election than he got the first time? He lost supporters during his presidency so how could he legitimately get more votes? The only investigations into fraud were in areas that Biden won. A state, almost any state, is a big place and most counties did go for Trump. How hard would it be to add votes in those areas?
Second, is Trump delusional? If I were him, watching these hearings, seeing what's going on in Georgia and some of the indicators from the Justice Department, I'd be worried enough that I might be looking at a country with no extradition. Maybe he believes that nobody would actually charge him - he was president after all - but if it were me, I wouldn't want to take the chance. Trump has enough money to live well in any number of countries.
Well said, Charlie. Trump was driving the coup bus since the very first election. Mid 2019 I was on a flight next to a sales executive from Lexus-Nexus. He filled my ear with Qanon nonsense for the four hour flight. He shared that his chapter was arming at the directive of Donald Trump and getting coded messages from Jr. This fellow claimed that his chapter was recruiting active military and police successfully. I thought nothing of it until Jan 6. On January 7 I filed a report including this fellow’s business card with the Seattle office of the FBI. In 2016 Trump said that he would only accept the results of the election if he won. Otherwise it would have been rigged, he claimed. He has courted extremist groups since day one. Despite all that has happened most of the GOP is behind him running again. The GOP has been staunch in its support of assault weapons. Hmmm. Trump could not do what he has done without the complicity of Republican leaders. This mess is bigger than Trump. This coup is in full motion now and will not end easily. The American people must wake up just like the fellow from Ohio in yesterday’s hearings.
MAGAland is already at work memoryholing all of this.
There is not ONE article about yesterday's hearings on either FoxNews' or National Review's websites. Not. A. Single. One.
Not even Andrew McCarthy telling everyone how terrible this all is, but because there's no (real?) Republicans on the committee, that is a far worse crime and therefore we can just disregard it all.
A chilling (but not surprising, for an experienced con man) detail was the revelation that there was a deliberate attempt to make the march to the capitol seem spontaneous on the part of protesters, when in fact it was planned and orchestrated by the puppeteers.
As Steve Schmidt writes,"this is the worst crime against the United States government since 1814".The dots have been connected.As with all of the hearings, they have been stunning.I thought Jamie Raskin's final statement yesterday very powerful. Charlie this may be wish casting,but wouldn't
it be a grand finale in Mike Pence is the final witness. Dave Y
We need to step back from the trees being felled here and see the remains of the forest.
We owe to the future citizens of our country, the full and unvarnished truth of Trump's
MiniMe hands all over this coup.
Regardless of the screams about politics, more objective minds of future generations will judge "The Gang That Couldn't Coup Well" in the same vein as Jefferson Davis, et al in 1861.
Trump and his minions have to be tried regardless of the possible verdict.
~ Team Crazy needs to be in dock with Trump,
~ All ten two bit, nit wit GOP congressman in the December meeting need to be tied to knowing about the impending coup,
~ All aides involved in the planning of 1-6 Rally need to be charged.
Please accept that if Trump is convicted he WILL NOT GO TO JAIL. That will be the reality.
Justice will be served when he is under house arrest living out his days on his private St. Helena Island/Mar a Lago, knowing and constantly being reminded that he will go down in history as the worst U.S. president.
He will babble incoherently about the 2020 election and the fraudulent trials, while spewing spittle like the Fredrick March character at the end of "Inherit The Wind."
The cherry on top is that his crime family may do time for their financial misdeeds in New York State.
Trump is not smart, let's just get that out of the way. He is a dumb man's idea of a smart man, sure (similar to how he is a poor man's idea of a rich one), but he himself is not smart. What he does possess though is a raw, pure, animal cunning which allows him to see ways to maximize his own position, in whatever avenue it is applied. There is a distinct difference between these, and quite frankly, anyone can be cunning.
Trump's real advantage (and our downfall) is because he was born somewhere between third base and home, he grew up assuming he hit the grand slam all by himself, and thus was also never held to account for anything he did. This is why now that the walls are well and truly tightening on him, he's scared. He's going to lash out more. He's going to run again in '24. And regardless of what happens, he's going to engender more violence. We must be ready for this.
He deserves to be tossed in a cell with the key forgotten in the Marianas Trench to ensure he pays for his treason against the Republic. But if we can't have that, we at least must do everything we can to ensure he never has real power again
And yet we still have once respected men and women defending him, saying he did nothing wrong, that none of it was planned, that there was no "smoking gun" on Fox, in the Washington Post! (for God's sake!), etc. And many of them are still willing to vote for him. Putin sure got his money's worth when he backed Trump.
Being bad at pulling off a coup doesn't mean that you didn't try to pull off a coup. It doesn't make the crime any less.
Trump is not a smart man, this is apparent when you look at his career over the last several decades. Not only is he not particularly smart, he has serious mental issues--I am not sure whether Trump is a psychopath or a sociopath, but he is certainly on that spectrum. He has less risk aversion (but he does have some, witness the mob-style things that he does to avoid getting pinned down on things) because his wealth and connections have insulated him from risks that people normally face.
He confuses that with intelligence, just as many of his followers do.
He has a certain low cunning that is good at scamming people out of money or getting them to do illegal things for him... because he "gets it" or his is "like us" (ya, like someone worth millions or more and raised in the environment he was raised in is like a guy from rural Kansas, please). Mostly he is angry and feels victimized and his anger and victimization resonate with a bunch of people. That is his magic--he is a deplorable and he resonates with other deplorables.
Absolutely right that it's all Trump's responsibility. The grifter/crazies didn't influence him. He chose them because he could not find support for his views from his own Administration. And then when he realized the crazies were not helpful, he tweeted the Far Right to come to Wash. on Jan. 6.
Whether Trump is stupid or smart is irrelevant; the insurrection was his idea.
Timeline of a (Premeditated) Coup
As a proud American what stuns me as much as anything is how the White House became such a cesspool under Trump, a beacon for virtually any groupie, grifter, or lowlife who would tell the childlike insecure Trump whatever he wanted to hear and do his bidding without question. Sidney Powell? Michael Flynn? My Pillow Guy? How did such opportunists even get within the same zip code as the Oval Office?
Every time I think of it I feel the need to take a shower and try to clean off the psychological ooze and slime that accumulated over those horrendous four years -- and more, since January 6 is now the bad gift that keeps on giving. Whatever the merits of the legal case against him, Trump is clearly guilty of being the most immoral and least qualified person ever to occupy our land's highest office. That alone should disqualify him from garnering serious consideration for another run. That it doesn't speaks volumes of how wide and deep the cesspool has become in our nation, when we willingly lower our standards and confuse the cult of personality and entertainment for anything remotely resembling effective leadership and good judgment.
Whether Trump is an idiot or idiot savant I don’t see that it changes his culpability.
Not a coup! Claims one who knows from experience, John Bolton. Goldang it, he went and planned a coup with some brilliant people, far more brilliant than TFG, and it was an abject failure. So, he knows his coups... Plus, wasn't he a part of this very same administration that also was an abject failure? What more proof do you need? Why this is sad enough to make even Paul Ryan sob again. All the way to the bank with his checks from Fox News.
No question trump needs to face criminal indictments, both state [ GA ] and federal
but remember it only takes one juror to hang a jury
That is the nightmare facing any criminal prosecution: Indictment, prosecution and the hung jury possibility
We must roll the dice
We cannot allow one person to be above the law
In a troubled and unrelenting universe I find no small solace watching one Donald J. trump getting his (ample) arse handed to him in the most public of forums imaginable. I'm further heartened imagining him sputtering and spewing as the full consequence of his lifelong perfidies come back to bite him in same. Furthermore, I can't believe I'm the only person on the planet reveling as this grindhouse comic book edition of King Lear unfolds.
Thank you to the January 6th Committee for matching, surpassing even, the schadenfreude engendered in the Watergate Hearings, and thank you, Charlie, for this concise timeline; I expect to see it in high school textbooks one day. Too bad it likely won't be read by those who prefer their "research" on 4chan, OANN, and the Dear Patriot/10 Hour Matching Fund cabal, but then consider that audience.
Cheers.
Two things.
I've always wondered if Trump's certainty that he couldn't have lost without the Democrats cheating was because he knew there was cheating - because his side was doing it. How could such a massively unpopular president get 10 million more votes for re-election than he got the first time? He lost supporters during his presidency so how could he legitimately get more votes? The only investigations into fraud were in areas that Biden won. A state, almost any state, is a big place and most counties did go for Trump. How hard would it be to add votes in those areas?
Second, is Trump delusional? If I were him, watching these hearings, seeing what's going on in Georgia and some of the indicators from the Justice Department, I'd be worried enough that I might be looking at a country with no extradition. Maybe he believes that nobody would actually charge him - he was president after all - but if it were me, I wouldn't want to take the chance. Trump has enough money to live well in any number of countries.
Well said, Charlie. Trump was driving the coup bus since the very first election. Mid 2019 I was on a flight next to a sales executive from Lexus-Nexus. He filled my ear with Qanon nonsense for the four hour flight. He shared that his chapter was arming at the directive of Donald Trump and getting coded messages from Jr. This fellow claimed that his chapter was recruiting active military and police successfully. I thought nothing of it until Jan 6. On January 7 I filed a report including this fellow’s business card with the Seattle office of the FBI. In 2016 Trump said that he would only accept the results of the election if he won. Otherwise it would have been rigged, he claimed. He has courted extremist groups since day one. Despite all that has happened most of the GOP is behind him running again. The GOP has been staunch in its support of assault weapons. Hmmm. Trump could not do what he has done without the complicity of Republican leaders. This mess is bigger than Trump. This coup is in full motion now and will not end easily. The American people must wake up just like the fellow from Ohio in yesterday’s hearings.
MAGAland is already at work memoryholing all of this.
There is not ONE article about yesterday's hearings on either FoxNews' or National Review's websites. Not. A. Single. One.
Not even Andrew McCarthy telling everyone how terrible this all is, but because there's no (real?) Republicans on the committee, that is a far worse crime and therefore we can just disregard it all.
Unbelievable.
A chilling (but not surprising, for an experienced con man) detail was the revelation that there was a deliberate attempt to make the march to the capitol seem spontaneous on the part of protesters, when in fact it was planned and orchestrated by the puppeteers.
As Steve Schmidt writes,"this is the worst crime against the United States government since 1814".The dots have been connected.As with all of the hearings, they have been stunning.I thought Jamie Raskin's final statement yesterday very powerful. Charlie this may be wish casting,but wouldn't
it be a grand finale in Mike Pence is the final witness. Dave Y
We need to step back from the trees being felled here and see the remains of the forest.
We owe to the future citizens of our country, the full and unvarnished truth of Trump's
MiniMe hands all over this coup.
Regardless of the screams about politics, more objective minds of future generations will judge "The Gang That Couldn't Coup Well" in the same vein as Jefferson Davis, et al in 1861.
Trump and his minions have to be tried regardless of the possible verdict.
~ Team Crazy needs to be in dock with Trump,
~ All ten two bit, nit wit GOP congressman in the December meeting need to be tied to knowing about the impending coup,
~ All aides involved in the planning of 1-6 Rally need to be charged.
Please accept that if Trump is convicted he WILL NOT GO TO JAIL. That will be the reality.
Justice will be served when he is under house arrest living out his days on his private St. Helena Island/Mar a Lago, knowing and constantly being reminded that he will go down in history as the worst U.S. president.
He will babble incoherently about the 2020 election and the fraudulent trials, while spewing spittle like the Fredrick March character at the end of "Inherit The Wind."
The cherry on top is that his crime family may do time for their financial misdeeds in New York State.
Can someone forward this to Garland, please?
Trump is not smart, let's just get that out of the way. He is a dumb man's idea of a smart man, sure (similar to how he is a poor man's idea of a rich one), but he himself is not smart. What he does possess though is a raw, pure, animal cunning which allows him to see ways to maximize his own position, in whatever avenue it is applied. There is a distinct difference between these, and quite frankly, anyone can be cunning.
Trump's real advantage (and our downfall) is because he was born somewhere between third base and home, he grew up assuming he hit the grand slam all by himself, and thus was also never held to account for anything he did. This is why now that the walls are well and truly tightening on him, he's scared. He's going to lash out more. He's going to run again in '24. And regardless of what happens, he's going to engender more violence. We must be ready for this.
He deserves to be tossed in a cell with the key forgotten in the Marianas Trench to ensure he pays for his treason against the Republic. But if we can't have that, we at least must do everything we can to ensure he never has real power again
And yet we still have once respected men and women defending him, saying he did nothing wrong, that none of it was planned, that there was no "smoking gun" on Fox, in the Washington Post! (for God's sake!), etc. And many of them are still willing to vote for him. Putin sure got his money's worth when he backed Trump.
Being bad at pulling off a coup doesn't mean that you didn't try to pull off a coup. It doesn't make the crime any less.
Trump is not a smart man, this is apparent when you look at his career over the last several decades. Not only is he not particularly smart, he has serious mental issues--I am not sure whether Trump is a psychopath or a sociopath, but he is certainly on that spectrum. He has less risk aversion (but he does have some, witness the mob-style things that he does to avoid getting pinned down on things) because his wealth and connections have insulated him from risks that people normally face.
He confuses that with intelligence, just as many of his followers do.
He has a certain low cunning that is good at scamming people out of money or getting them to do illegal things for him... because he "gets it" or his is "like us" (ya, like someone worth millions or more and raised in the environment he was raised in is like a guy from rural Kansas, please). Mostly he is angry and feels victimized and his anger and victimization resonate with a bunch of people. That is his magic--he is a deplorable and he resonates with other deplorables.
Absolutely right that it's all Trump's responsibility. The grifter/crazies didn't influence him. He chose them because he could not find support for his views from his own Administration. And then when he realized the crazies were not helpful, he tweeted the Far Right to come to Wash. on Jan. 6.
Whether Trump is stupid or smart is irrelevant; the insurrection was his idea.