Clear and Present Danger

New documents unsealed in Donald Trump’s criminal Jan. 6 case disclosed $3 million spent to get people to the rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol building.

USA Today reported an unnamed organization spent $3 million to bring guests and protesters to D.C., and on ad buys to encourage people to make the trip. The actual costs of the event itself were under $400,000.

Among the recipients of the money was the conservative group TurningPointAction, which got $1 million, according to the papers. Donald Trump Jr’s super PAC, “Save the Senate” got a $400,000 payment. The Tea Party Express got $400,000 and $200,000 was sent to a redacted name that was recruited “to assist with his organization efforts,” the documents say.

There was also a $200,000 donation to the Republican Attorneys Generals (RAGA) Rule of Law Defense.

Meanwhile, “$300,000 was budgeted for speaker fees and travel for VIP speakers and a busing program to bring in rallygoers within a 180-mile radius.”

A $100,000 payment was given to a redacted group to cover “the estimated cost of their hotels, private flights, car services and private security for about 10 to 15 of its members.

THIS CLAIM BY TRUMP IS A COMPLETE LIE.  HE DID NOT, EVER, NOT ONE TIME, CHARTER A PLANE TO BRING NELSON MANDELA TO THE U.S.

A former NBC marketing executive, John D. Miller, has expressed regret for his role in creating the false narrative of Donald Trump as a successful businessman through The Apprentice. He explains how the show exaggerated Trump’s business acumen, leading many Americans to believe Trump could run the country like a corporation mistakenly. Miller’s confession reveals the harmful consequences of this manufactured persona, which many voters still hold as true.

• The Apprentice heavily exaggerated Trump’s business success by crafting a false narrative for television.
• Trump’s real businesses experienced multiple bankruptcies, contradicting his TV persona.
• Many voters believed Trump’s television image and supported him, thinking he could “run the country like a business.”
• Miller expressed regret, calling Trump’s false narrative a “dangerous” myth that has impacted the U.S. politically.
• Miller came forward to correct this narrative before Trump’s potential future political ambitions, feeling it was his patriotic duty.

John D. Miller’s confession underscores how media manipulation can have dangerous political consequences. Trump’s fraudulent business image, built for entertainment, deceived voters into trusting a man fundamentally unfit for leadership. This highlights the need for a more informed electorate, unshackled by myths peddled by corporate media, and a greater focus on leadership that prioritizes the common good over personal profit.

 

Seeing a candidate whose rhetoric consists of either stuff he vaguely remembers from the 80s or stuff he just read in a chain email or saw on Newsmax is something I would just as soon stop experiencing:

Kamala even wants to pass laws to outlaw red meat to stop climate change,” Donald Trump told supporters in North Carolina. “That means no more cows. You know, this is serious.”

Ruminate on that.

“She wants to get rid of your cows. No more cows,” Trump warned an audience in Georgia.

The steaks could not be higher in this election.

If you are alarmed by Trump’s portrait of bovine abolition under a President Kamala Harris, the good news is you probably wouldn’t have to look at it much if it happens. This is because, according to Trump, Harris is also planning to ban windows.

“They want buildings taken down and new buildings built without windows,” Trump informed his followers in Wisconsin.

He explained at another stop that Harris will see to it that “new buildings are built without windows because, you see, a window is environmentally unfriendly, having to do with the heat, the gases and the sunlight.”

On Oct. 12 in Nevada, Trump put the two grave menaces together in a single, apocalyptic sentence: “They want to do things like no more cows and no windows in buildings.”

And they say Harris has no policy agenda!

There are tens of millions of people who want four more years of this shit.

Link to ruling: https://ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show_public_doc?2023cr0257-263

 

On the next cloudless, full-moon night, expect Trump to be found outside, howling at the moon.  The man is nuts.

 

After Trump’s bizarre performance last night in Oaks, Pennsylvania, when he stopped taking questions and just swayed to his self-curated playlist for 39 minutes, his campaign this morning canceled a scheduled interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box, according to co-host of the show Joe Kernen. The campaign did not, though, cancel a scheduled live interview today with Bloomberg News and the Economic Club of Chicago. That interview echoed last night’s train wreck. 

Trump showed up almost an hour late to the event with moderator John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News. When he arrived, things went downhill fast. Micklethwait asked real questions about Trump’s approach to the economy, but the former president answered with aimless rants and campaign slogans that Micklethwait corrected, repeatedly redirecting Trump back to his actual questions. Trump quickly grew angry and combative.

When Micklethwait corrected Trump’s misunderstanding of the way tariffs work, Trump replied in front of a room full of people who understand the economy: “It must be hard for you to, you know, spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you’re totally wrong.” Referring to analysis that his plans would explode the national debt, including analysis by the Wall Street Journal—hardly a left-wing outlet, as Mickelthwait pointed out—Trump replied: “What does the Wall Street Journal know? They’ve been wrong about everything. So have you, by the way….. You’ve been wrong about everything…. You’ve been wrong all your life on this stuff.”

The economy is supposed to be Trump’s strong suit.

The former president seemed unable to stay on any topic, jumping from one idea to another randomly, or to answer anything, instead making statements that play well at his rallies—referring to people with insulting names, for example—or by rehashing old grievances and threatening to end traditional U.S. freedoms. He made it clear he intends to “straighten out our press,” for example. “Because,” he said, “we have a corrupt press.”

As Micklethwait tried to keep him on task, Trump asserted stories that were more and more outlandish. He claimed that children could do the work of U.S. autoworkers in South Carolina, for example, and that he would be a better chair of the Federal Reserve than Jerome Powell.

Micklethwait did not fight with Trump, but he didn’t indulge him either. When Trump explained that “you don’t put old in” the federal judiciary because “they’re there for two years, or three years,” Micklethwait replied: “You’re a 78-year-old man running for president.”

And therein lies the rub.

Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who watches and clips Trump’s speeches, called the appearance “bonkers.” Journalist David Rothkopf of Deep State Radio wrote: “The past 24 hours seem to have been a dividing line in the Trump campaign…and in Trump. He went from being periodically adrift and sporadically demented to being 24/7 unfit and in need of permanent medical attention. He’s one cloudless night away from baying at the moon.” 

Likely reflecting this shift, trading in shares of Trump media, the parent company of Trump’s Truth Social social media site, was stopped briefly today as the price plummeted in unusually heavy trading. Trump took to social media to hawk tokens for his new crypto project, although the nature of the project is still unclear and investing simply offers voting rights in the new platform. The website crashed repeatedly during the day.

Trump’s issues make it likely that a second Trump presidency would really mean a J.D. Vance presidency, even if Trump nominally remains in office.

Currently an Ohio senator, J.D. Vance is just 39, and if voters put Trump into the White House, Vance will be one of the most inexperienced vice presidents in our history. He has held an elected office for just 18 months, winning the office thanks to the backing of entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who first employed Vance, then invested in his venture capital firm, and then contributed an unprecedented $15 million to his Senate campaign.

Vance and Thiel make common cause with others who are open about their determination to dismantle the federal government. Although different groups came to that mission from different places, they are sometimes collectively called a “New Right” (although at least one scholar has questioned just how new it really is). Some of the thinkers both Vance and Thiel follow, notably dystopian blogger Curtis Yarvin, argue that America’s democratic institutions have created a society that is, as James Pogue put it in a 2022 Vanity Fair article, “at once tyrannical, chaotic, and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning.” Such a system must be pulled to pieces.

Thiel has expressed the belief that the modern government stifles innovation by enforcing social values like equality and anti-monopoly. Those limits have caused society to stagnate, a situation he warns could lead to an apocalypse. “We are in a deadly race between politics and technology,” Thiel wrote in 2009. To move society forward, he calls for freedom for technological leaders to plan a utopian future without government interference.

It is at least partly the promise of dismantling the administrative state and its regulation of technology that has brought other technology elites, most notably Elon Musk, to support the Trump-Vance campaign. These technology entrepreneurs envision themselves, rather than a government, planning and then creating the future. New campaign records filed today show that in just over two months, from July to the beginning of September, Musk invested almost $75 million in his pro-Trump America PAC to get Trump and Vance elected.

Like Thiel, Vance has spoken extensively about the need to destroy the U.S. government, but while Thiel emphasizes the potential of a technological future unencumbered by democratic baggage, Vance emphasizes what he sees as the decadence of today’s America and the need to address that decadence by purging the government of secular leaders. A 2019 convert to right-wing Catholicism, Vance said he was attracted to the religion in part because he wanted to see the Republican Party use the government to work for what he considers the common good by imposing laws that would enforce his version of morality.

Their worldview requires a few strong leaders to impose their will on the majority, and both Thiel and Vance have rejected secular democracy. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote in 2009.

In 2021, Vance called American universities “the enemy” and said on a podcast that people like him needed to “seize the institutions of the left, and turn them against the left.” In a different interview, he clarified: American “conservatives…have lost every major powerful institution in the country, except for maybe churches and religious institutions, which of course are weaker now than they’ve ever been. We’ve lost big business. We’ve lost finance. We’ve lost the culture. We’ve lost the academy. And if we’re going to actually really effect real change in the country, it will require us completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class…. I don’t think there’s sort of a compromise that we’re going to come with the people who currently actually control the country. Unless we overthrow them in some way, we’re going to keep losing.” “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power,” he said.

Vance told an interviewer he would urge Trump to “[f]ire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” This plan is central to Project 2025, whose main author, Kevin Roberts, has a book covering those ideas coming out soon—it was supposed to come out this month but was postponed when Project 2025 became a lightning rod for the election—for which Vance wrote the foreword. “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay [sic] ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon,” Vance wrote.

Like Roberts, Vance wants to dismantle the secular state. He wants to replace that state with a Christian nationalism that enforces what he considers traditional values: an end to immigration—hence the lies about the legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio—and an end to LGBTQ+ rights. He supports abortion bans and the establishment of a patriarchy in which women function as wives and mothers even if it means staying in abusive marriages. Vance insists this social structure will be more fulfilling for women than becoming “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.“

That desire to get rid of the current “ruling class” and replace it with people like him has prompted Vance to say that if he had been vice president on January 6, 2021, he would have done what former vice president Mike Pence would not: he would have refused to count the certified electoral ballots for President Joe Biden.

“Let’s be clear,” former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) said. “This is illegal and unconstitutional. The American people had voted. The courts had ruled. The Electoral College had met and voted. The Governor in every state had certified the results and sent a legal slate of electors to the Congress to be counted. The Vice President has no constitutional authority to tell states to submit alternative slates of electors because his candidate lost. That is tyranny.”

Early voting began today in Georgia, where more than 328,000 voters smashed the previous record of 136,000 set in 2020, during the worst of the pandemic. One of those voters was former president Jimmy Carter, who turned 100 on October 1 and said over the summer he was trying to stay alive to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.

At a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, tonight, a slurring, low-energy Donald Trump told the audience: “If you don’t win, win, win, we’ve all had a good time, but it’s not gonna matter, right? Sadly. Because what we’ve done is amazing. Three nominations in a row…. If we don’t win it’s like, ah, it was all, it was all for not very much. We can’t, uh, we can’t let that happen.”

Trump holds bizarre campaign rally that turns into a 39-minute Trump dance party

Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?

See WaPo, Trump sways and bops to music for 39 minutes in bizarre town-hall episode. (Accessible to all.)

The bizarre scene is described by WaPo as follows:

For 39 minutes, Trump swayed, bopped — sometimes stopping to speak — as he turned the event into almost a living-room listening session of his favorite songs from his self-curated rally playlist.

He played nine tracks. He danced. He shook hands with people onstage. He pointed to the crowd. Noem stood beside him, nodding with her hands clasped. Trump stayed in place onstage, slowly moving back and forth. He was done answering questions for the night. [¶]

. . . . Trump’s decision to cut the question-and-answer portion of the town hall short and instead have the crowd stay to listen to his favorite songs was a somewhat bizarre move, given that the election was only 22 days away. It also comes as Vice President Kamala Harris has called Trump, 78, unstable and called into question his mental acuity.

Trump is descending into madness. The major media should lead every news cycle with scorching questions about Trump’s mental fitness—right after stories about his promise to use the military against the American people. Trump is unraveling in front of our eyes. Make sure everyone knows about this story. It is important—especially given that Biden was forced out of the race over a single debate performance.

In a speech on Monday, Kamala Harris significantly ratcheted up her attacks on Donald Trump’s ugly threats to persecute his political enemies. She described Trump as increasingly “unstable and unhinged.” Harris’s comments came four days after Trump called for the military to be deployed against the “enemy within”—enemies identified by Trump as the “radical left.” See MSNBC, Trump suggests using the military to address ‘the enemy from within’. Trump later identified Rep. Adam Schiff as one of the “enemy within.”

Trump made the following statements to Fox personality Maria Bartiromo in an interview last Friday:

I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. . . .

It should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard — or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.

Trump’s threats of using the military are not idle. During his term, he repeatedly ordered his subordinates to use the US military against civilians—including “just shoot[ing] protesters in the legs”—but those subordinates refused or ignored his orders. See, e.g., Council on Foreign Relations (6/5/2020), Trump’s Threat to Use the Military Against Protesters: What to Know.

In her speech in Eerie, Pennsylvania, Kamala Harris strongly condemned Trump’s threats to use the military against political opponents. See CNN, Harris uses Trump’s ‘enemy from within’ comment to portray GOP rival as dangerous and unstable.

Kamala Harris’s new aggressiveness against Trump’s promised despotism is something that many (frustrated) Democratic faithful have been hoping for. Harris’s full speech in Eerie is here: YouTube | Kamala Harris in Eerie, PA. It is worth watching the entire thirty-minute speech.

If you don’t have time to watch the entire speech, I urge you to watch the final ten minutes. Kamala Harris is on fire as she describes Trump as the threat to democracy he is. And she uses a video montage of Trump’s repeated threats to persecute his political enemies. It is a “must-watch” moment of history. See YouTube | Kamala Harris addresses Trump’s comments re “the enemy within”.

Go ahead and watch the final ten minutes of Kamala’s speech, here. I’ll wait!

Using the military against civilians is the common tactic of fascist governments everywhere. It is a singular moment in American history when a major party candidate is using threats of military force against US citizens as a campaign promise.

How did we get here? Answer: Glenn Youngkin.

Why Glenn Youngkin? Because Youngkin spent Sunday excusing and defending Trump’s threat to use the military against Americans. Trump makes such threats because spineless cowards like Glenn Youngkin not only refuse to condemn him but rise to defend him. In the absence of the Glenn Youngkins of the world (and his ilk), there would be no cover for Trump’s obscene threats against Americans and the rule of law.

On Sunday, Jake Tapper read Trump’s comments to Glenn Youngkin and asked the governor of Virginia to condemn Trump’s remarks. In a tortured five minutes, Youngkin refused, repeatedly claiming that Tapper was “misinterpreting” Trump’s remarks. When Tapper repeatedly said, “I am reading his comments verbatim, let me show you the video,” Youngkin refused to condemn the comments and suggested that Trump didn’t mean what he said.

See CNN, Tapper presses Youngkin on Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric. If you can, watch five minutes of this interview. Warning: You may nauseous.

Youngkin clearly (and wrongly) believes he has a political future that is dependent on not angering Trump’s cultish base. Youngkin has made the political calculation that advancing his future political prospects is more important than protecting Americans against a threat of military force to achieve the partisan pollical goals of the president.

Can you imagine what the Framers would say about such a proposition?

Glenn Youngkin is, of course, a surrogate for every Republican politician who pretends to be a reasonable and moral leader with the nation’s best interests at heart. In reality, they are faithless cowards whose only loyalty is to themselves. They represent the worst of America. They are depraved, soulless, and spineless. The are cloyingly self-righteous as they look straight at the camera and lie for someone JD Vance called “America’s Hitler.”

There will be a time (soon) when Americans will face a moral and political reckoning for the depravity of the Trump presidency and MAGA movement. There is no ambiguity in where the moral and political judgments will fall or how future historians will view Trump’s supporters, enablers, and co-conspirators.

They are hoping only that they can delay that day of reckoning on which their white nationalism, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and depravity will be universally condemned. The historical precedents for such a reckoning abound.

On Monday, Kamala Harris began the process of moral and political reckoning. Good. She should keep it up until the major media begins every news cycle with this headline, “Candidate for US presidency threatens to use US military against Americans.” There is no story bigger than that—and it deserves to be at the top of the news 24/7 until Election Day.