Listen and Believe ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️🌻

Trump Truthing: The thing about Trump is that he tells us what he plans to do.  The thing is that Trump’s plans sound so impossibly ridiculous and implausible that too many of us have spent years dismissing them as just political speech from a highly unusual politician pandering to his base. So, way before the January 6 insurrection when Trump questioned the legitimacy of election outcomes, even responding to a question from Chris Wallace during one of the 2016 debates by saying that he couldn’t commit to honor the election outcome if he didn’t win, few took him seriously because who doesn’t honor election outcomes?  Well, as Maya Angelou said, when someone tells you who they are, believe them. Special Counsel Jack Smith is now seeking to include Trump’s early election denial statements as evidence of intent in his prosecution for one of the cases that may never get heard.  It’s not just election denial, Trump is also telling us his future governing plans. Last night during a town hall when Trump was asked by Fox’s Sean Hannity who was trying to give him an opportunity to pushback against rising concerns that he would act as a dictator should he get back into the White House, Trump repeatedly said he would act as a dictator “but only on day one,” when he would use his powers to close the southern border and to drill, drill, drill. Nothing to worry about though because he added after that “I’m not a dictator.”  Hannity repeated the question several times, his way of suggesting to Trump that he should just come out and day that he’d never act in a manner that was dictatorial or violated the constitution, but despite all the nudging, Trump couldn’t get there.  He couldn’t utter a straight denial because as much as he lies, even he couldn’t lie about his plans. Those plans are fairly dire, they include things like reclassifying “undesirable” civil employees so that they can be fired and replaced with loyalists, stocking the Justice Department with pre-screened lawyers who’d be willing to sign off on his plans regardless of their legality, people like Jeffrey Clark and all those Kraken lawyers from his last presidency, and installing Kash Patel and more like him into senior national defense positions. Patel is another one who says what he’s thinking so this week he doubled down on Trump’s threats to go after MSNBC and other media outlets he doesn’t like by saying on Steve Bannon’s podcast that when he’s back in government he’ll implement Trumps plans to go after the media.  If you think that the Senate confirmation process will spare us the worst of Trump’s future nominees, forget about that too.  First of all, given the election map, it’s likely that the Senate will be back in Republican hands in 2025 and we’ve know that there will be few, if any, remaining Republicans who will vote against Trump’s wishes and second, Patel and Trump’s other aide de camp Stephen Miller aren’t all that worried about confirmation votes.  Their plans include elevating like-minded government employees making them ”acting” secretaries if necessary and unfortunately a decent number of those likeminded folks remain in places like the Justice and Defense Departments.  Listen to Liz Cheney, who warns that should he win reelection Trump will never leave. Vote, influence, and contribute because we’re on a slippery slope to autocracy and holding out for a perfect alternative just greases that slide. 

Mistletoe: If you are looking for a holiday present for that hard to please person in your life and are willing to spend $200, you can gift a Cameo video message from George of many name Santos.  Order soon because the price for some Georgie time has already gone up from its $150 starting point.  Alternatively, if you’d rather not help George pay his for his legal bills and Botox, you could instead read the story of the newest outed Florida throuple out loud over eggnog.  That threesome includes Moms for Liberty co-founder/Sarasota School Board member Bridget Ziegler and her husband Florida Republican Party Chair Christian.  Nothing says Christian values better than a man named Christian being accused of sexually assaulting the woman who was previously the third in his throuple. How ironic that Moms for Liberty is the group that endeavors to ban books with “inappropriate” sexual content and “subversive” social messaging from libraries and school curricula and that Bridget Ziegler is one of the people that Governor Ron DeSantis appointed to the Central Florida Tourism Board to oversee Disney following their battle over his “don’t say gay” stuff.  On the subject of Ronnie D, in addition to bleeding polling points, he’s losing senior staff.  Two senior members of his PAC, including his long- term friend, college roommate and losing Nevada Senatorial candidate Adam Laxalt have jumped ship.  Despite the downward trajectory of his campaign and polling numbers, together with Chris Christie, Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley,  Ronnie D will be on the stage for tonight’s fourth(!) Republican debate but Doug Burgum who most forgot was still running won’t be.  He’s dropped out of the race. Mike Pence is also out of the race, but his schedule is filling up anyway, this morning Georgia prosecutors revealed that he’s on their Fulton County Witness list. 

Political Mayhem:  Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville has finally given up his blockade on military promotion, or at least most of them, he’s still holding up some for four-star general. Those were the holds he’d imposed in retaliation for the administration’s decision to fund out of state travel for members of the military seeking abortion services, not the abortions, just the travel. Immediately after Tuberville threw in the towel, the Senate approved more than 400 promotions meaning that members of the military can finally assume their new positions, move their families, and enroll their children into new schools.  It’s thought that Tuberville finally gave up because he was being pressured by his Republican colleagues, many of whom were concerned about how he was damaging US security at a time when military leadership is needed more than ever due to Ukraine, the Middle East, ship targeting, nuclear threats, etc.  Of course, as concerned as those Republicans were many didn’t want to say anything publicly because they feared stressing their anti-abortion supporters. House Republicans who can’t pass needed legislation are continuing to sling mud at Joe Biden as part of their tee him up for impeachment strategy.  To that end, you may have seen the story that alleged Joe had received a series of payments from his son Hunter’s business beginning in 2018 when he wasn’t in office. Daddy Joe did receive a few thousand from his son, Hunter but it turns out those were repayments for a truck that Joe had helped his son purchase so not a smoking gun, just a father being fatherly at a time when his troubled, problematic son was financially stressed.

 

Fog of War: Nothing good to report on the Gaza front, the war goes on, people are dying, and the hostages are still hostages.  On Monday State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said: “it seems Hamas has refused to release all of the Israeli women it is holding because the terror group doesn’t want them to tell what they have gone through in captivity.”  It’s believed that 18 women are still being held by Hamas, most of them are women who attended the border area music festival. Releasing those women and allowing the International Red Cross to visit the other remaining 120+/- hostages had been a condition of continuing the “pause” in fighting, but Hamas violated both conditions even though they had previously agreed to comply.  Things aren’t going well in Ukraine either where there’s a real possibility that President Zelenskyy and his country will run out of military funding soon if the US fails to act. Speaker Johnson has no intention of acting though there may be some movement out of the Senate where Leader Schumer seems open to allowing a vote on border security funding on to the Senate floor. 

And:  College presidents from Harvard, U of Pennsylvania and MIT testified in front of Congress yesterday about now they were handling anti-Semitism on their campuses.  To put it mildly, there was lots of equivocating. To summarize, sure anti-Semitism is bad but calling for Jewish genocide not so much.