In any case, the series of Trump advisers and allies expressing disgust at his actions should convince all but the most delusional cultists that Trump should never be trusted with power again. As Pottinger said, Trump gave America’s enemies ammunition to claim our nation was in “decline” and that democracy doesn’t work. In an eloquent summation, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.)reminded the countrythat “we cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.” Her message was clear: Trump’s return to power would be unimaginable.—5 things we learned in the Jan. 6 committee’s stunning hearing, July 21, 2022,
Her message was clear: Trump’s return to power would be unimaginable.
WN: The article highlighted below is reporting by a conservative news outlet. The final line captures the essence:
Trump is a disgrace. Republicans have far better options to lead the party in 2024. No one should think otherwise, much less support him, ever again.
I can add: A realization that is a tad late, don’t you think, boys? And just who might those Trump obsequious suck-ups be, who have demonstrated integrity to lead? Who actually have shown they have a spine?
The title is of course deeply ironic, if one adds a comma, italics, and an exclamation mark:
Trump proven unfit for power, again! [Please click on the highlighted word for so much on my website, which I’d love to disgorge, once Trump is safely off the world scene forever.]
If this (sudden) awareness has not screamed that reality to the world since Trump’s first descent down his Trump Tower escalator (maybe since first words spoken?), then conservative America just wasn’t paying attention, or embraced fully being lied to; all in overwhelming need of Escape From the Trump Cult! And what does that say about its willingly duped, or prevaricating leadership–or both?
Speaking at one of the sacred sites of the Republican right, the Ronald Reagan Library in California, Jan. 6 committee vice chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) got enthusiastic support from the crowd during a searing speech following this week’s hearing when she said, “It’s undeniable—the Republican Party cannot be both loyal to Donald Trump and loyal to the Constitution.”
In any case, the series of Trump advisers and allies expressing disgust at his actions should convince all but the most delusional cultists that Trump should never be trusted with power again.
It was Donald Trump, and Donald Trump alone, who summoned and loosed the mob that sacked the Capitol, threatened Congress and the vice president and imperiled our democracy. That is the powerful message that emerged from Tuesday’s televised hearing of the Jan. 6 select committee. And these hearings make clear just how dangerous it would be for the former president to be elected again.
Amazingly enough, this wasn’t the plan advanced by Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Flynn and the rest of Trump’s “Team Crazy” advisers. The page from the authoritarian playbook they chose was sedate by comparison: Nullify the 2020 election by sending troops to impound the voting machines. And it certainly wasn’t the course advocated by Trump’s “Team Normal,” including then-White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, who urged Trump to acknowledge the truth: that he had lost the election to Joe Biden.
On the night of Dec. 18, 2020, witnesses told the committee, Trump presided over a rancorous, hours-long screaming match between the Crazy and Normal camps that ended after midnight with no real resolution. At 1:42 a.m. that night, Trump embarked on a third, radically different course of action: He posted the infamous tweet telling supporters to come to Washington on Jan. 6, ending it with what MAGA extremists understood as a call to arms: “Be there, will be wild!”
That was his decision, not anyone else’s. As Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the committee’s vice chair, said in her opening statement: “President Trump is a 76-year-old man. He is not an impressionable child.” That might be how Republicans eager to exploit his candidacy saw him in 2016. And it’s the accidental subtext in efforts to exculpate him for Jan. 6. But it’s not true.
Steve Bannon: Court Jester
Then, please view this piece of leaked audio from Steve Bannon, one that shows utter disregard by Trump, Bannon, and his prevaricating ilk, for truth. Yet a close relative only rails against the Democrats for their lies!–there in abundance too, acknowledged.
On the evening of Ocober 31, 2020, Steve Bannon told a group of associates that President Donald Trump had a plan to declare victory on election night—even if he was losing. Trump knew that the slow counting of Democratic-leaning mail-in ballots meant the returns would show early leads for him in key states. His “strategy” was to use this fact to assert that he had won, while claiming that the inevitable shifts in vote totals toward Joe Biden must be the result of fraud, Bannon explained.
“What Trump’s gonna do, is just declare victory. Right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner,” Bannon, laughing, told the group, according to audio of the meeting obtained by Mother Jones. “He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.”
“As it sits here today,” Bannon said later in the conversation, describing a scenario in which Trump held an early lead in key swing states, “at 10 or 11 o’clock Trump’s gonna walk in the Oval, tweet out, ‘I’m the winner. Game over. Suck on that.’”
Trump’s plan to falsely declare victory while tens of millions of votes were still being counted was public knowledge even before the election. Axiosreported on the scheme at the time. Bannon himself discussed the idea on November 3—Election Day—on his War Room podcast. Weeks earlier, Bannon had interviewed a former Trump administration official who outlined how Trump would use allegations of fraud to dispute an electoral defeat and would seek to have Congress declare him the winner. Last month, the congressional committee investigating January 6 detailed how Rudy Giuliani convinced Trump to go ahead with a victory declaration after 2 a.m. on November 4, over the objections of campaign staff. “Frankly, we did win this election,” Trump insisted in that infamous news conference.
The nearly hour-long audio obtained by Mother Jones is new evidence that Trump’s late-night diatribe—which came a few hours later than Bannon had anticipated—followed a preexisting plan to lie to Americans about the election results in a bid to hold onto power. The new recording stands out for the striking candor and detail with which Bannon described a scheme to use lies to subvert democracy. Bannon also predicted that Trump’s false declaration of victory would lead to widespread political violence, along with “crazy” efforts by Trump to stay in office. Bannon and his associates laughed about those scenarios at various points in the recording.
Bannon and his attorney, Robert Costello, did not respond to questions about the recording.
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Election Day 2020 would not be like others, Bannon said. “This is a revolution,” he explained. “This election just triggers more fighting.”
Bannon also said during this meeting that once the voting was done, Trump would be unencumbered by electoral pressure. “Here’s the thing. After then, Trump never has to go to a voter again,” Bannon said. “He’s gonna fire [Christopher] Wray, the FBI director…He’s gonna say ‘Fuck you. How about that?’ Because…he’s done his last election. Oh, he’s going to be off the chain—he’s gonna be crazy.”
Bannon also said he expected that Trump would quickly fire CIA Director Gina Haspel, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Heath and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, and Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“If Trump is losing by 10 or 11 o’clock at night, it’s going to be even crazier. No, because he’s gonna sit right there and say, ‘They stole it. I’m directing the attorney general to shut down all ballot places in all 50 states,’” Bannon said. “He’s not going out easy. If Biden is winning, Trump is going to do some crazy shit.”
In an interview with Showtime’s “The Circus” released in early October — about a month before these other comments — Bannon predicted that there would be such uncertainty that Congress would be forced to decide the election. Bannon couched it in terms of Democrats supposedly seeking to overturn the election by counting mail ballots that he described as “uncertified,” but even that framing suggested that this supposed uncertainty could well be manufactured. And the practical effect was him predicting a situation much like the one Trump would ultimately gun for on Jan. 6.
So in total, Bannon predicted Trump’s premature victory declaration, which came true. He predicted that all hell would break loose on Jan. 6, which came true. He predicted that uncertainty about election results spurred by a bunch of lawsuits would force Congress to decide the election, which wound up essentially being Trump’s plan. And he suggested that unrest was perhaps desirable and/or could be of some utility in all of this, which evidence suggests Trump might well have agreed with on Jan. 6.
We don’t know just how much coordination there was between Trump and Bannon, though the Jan. 6 committee noted Tuesday that the two men spoke at least twice Jan. 5, including before Bannon’s prediction about Jan. 6. It’s certainly possible Bannon was engaging in guesswork. But it also seems possible that he was privy to some of the strategizing about what was to come.
We are political conservatives who have spent most of our adult lives working to support the Constitution and the conservative principles upon which it is based: limited government, liberty, equality of opportunity, freedom of religion, a strong national defense, and the rule of law. We have become deeply troubled by efforts to overturn or discredit the results of the 2020 Presidential Election. There is no principle of our Republic more fundamental than the right of the People to elect our leaders and for their votes to be counted accurately. Efforts to thwart the People’s choice are deeply undemocratic and unpatriotic. Claims that an election was stolen, or that the outcome resulted from fraud, are deadly serious and should be made only on the basis of real and powerful evidence. If the American people lose trust that our elections are free and fair, we will lose our democracy. As Jonathan Haidt observed, “We just don’t know what a democracy looks like when you drain all the trust out of the system.” Paul Kelly, “Very Good Chance” Democracy Is Doomed in America, Says Haidt, AUSTRALIAN (July 20, 2019).
We therefore have undertaken an examination of every claim of fraud and miscount put forward by former President Trump and his advocates, and now put the results of those investigations before the American people, and especially before fellow conservatives who may be uncertain about what and whom to believe. Our conclusion is unequivocal: Joe Biden was the choice of a majority of the Electors, who themselves were the choice of the majority of voters in their states. Biden’s victory is easily explained by a political landscape that was much different in 2020 than it was when President Trump narrowly won the presidency in 2016. President Trump waged his campaign for re-election during a devastating worldwide pandemic that caused a severe downturn in the global economy. This, coupled with an electorate that included a small but statistically significant number willing to vote for other Republican candidates on the ballot but not for President Trump, are the reasons his campaign fell short, not a fraudulent election.
Donald Trump and his supporters have failed to present evidence of fraud or inaccurate results significant enough to invalidate the results of the 2020 Presidential Election. We do not claim that election administration is perfect. Election fraud is a real thing; there are prosecutions in almost every election year, and no doubt some election fraud goes undetected. Nor do we disparage attempts to reduce fraud. States should continue to do what they can do to eliminate opportunities for election fraud and to punish it when it occurs. But there is absolutely no evidence of fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election on the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any state, let alone the nation as a whole. In fact, there was no fraud that changed the outcome in even a single precinct. It is wrong, and bad for our country, for people to propagate baseless claims that President Biden’s election was not legitimate.
In the past 30 years, those tasked with administering our elections have helped create a modern election system in which we can and should have confidence. In all fifty states and at the national level there are transparent recount and election contest procedures designed to allow candidates to investigate and litigate claims of voter fraud and corruption. Those procedures have been tested in every presidential election since at least 2000 and have been found in every instance to be sound and reliable. The Trump Campaign and its supporters had full access to these remedies and used them in 64 proceedings in the states we examine, and in each instance, their claims of fraud and miscount failed. Our review of each of these Trump charges affirms that the 2020 election was administered by trained professionals who reaffirmed their established track record for fairness.
The performance of the system in 2020 was all the more remarkable because of the extraordinary circumstances caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which precipitated changes on an unprecedented scope and timeline. Some of those changes may have created possibilities for fraud, but there is no evidence that those risks materialized in reality; nor did they result in dampening voter participation—quite the opposite. Nonetheless, moving forward, the states should redouble their efforts to strengthen the integrity of our voting systems and make it as easy to vote and as hard to cheat as possible for persons of every circumstance.
We urge our fellow conservatives to cease obsessing over the results of the 2020 election, and to focus instead on presenting candidates and ideas that offer a positive vision for overcoming our current difficulties and bringing greater peace, prosperity, and liberty to our nation.
Alan B. Morrison, associate dean at George Washington University Law School, penned an op-ed that was published in The Hill on Saturday evening. In it, Morrison calls for Democrats to sue Trump in federal court, citing the insurrectionist clause in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution to block any future run for office — including for president.
Section 3 of that amendment bars any person who has held federal office and “previously taken an oath…to support the Constitution of the United States” from entering any political office again if they have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the country.
Morrison called for Democrats to hold Trump accountable to that amendment’s language. Citing explosive testimonies from witnesses during the January 6 committee’s public hearings (in particular, from former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson), Morrison said there is little doubt that Trump “fomented the insurrection” that resulted in the attack on the U.S. Capitol building.
…
“It was clearly in his power to call off the insurrection — but instead of trying to stop the violence, he chose to do nothing,” said Morrison.
If the 14th Amendment insurrectionist clause applies to anyone, he added, it “must surely apply to Donald Trump.”
Democrats should bring forward a lawsuit, on behalf of current President Joe Biden or any potential candidates that may run in 2024, “seeking a ruling that Donald Trump participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection,” which would bar him from being a candidate for president.
Although it’s unclear whether such a lawsuit would be successful, Democrats have “nothing to lose” in trying, Morrison concluded.
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Rolling Stone has reported that Trump is considering launching another presidential campaign because he believes that a successful run would dissuade the Department of Justice from investigating or indicting him on a slew of possible criminal charges relating to his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential race.
On Friday, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post published separate, searing editorials about former President Trump’s failure to act during the siege of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Critics of the congressional investigation into the January 6 coup attempt at the U.S. Capitol have repeatedly questioned whether the hearings would move the needle. Now there is at least one discernible effect. Less than 24 hours after the close of Thursday night’s hearings, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post published separate, searing editorials about former President Trump’s failure to act during the mob attack on the Congress, and they asserted Trump’s unfitness to return to office.
The two publications are controlled by the internationally influential conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, whose family-owned trust also owns Fox News. So the pieces do suggest a rupture in an important political alliance. NPR’s media correspondent David Folkenflik is with us now to tell us more. David, welcome back. Thanks for joining us.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Pleasure.
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FOLKENFLIK: Well, it was really a one-two punch. You had, at 5:39 p.m., The New York Post say, as you said, that Donald Trump had been shown by the revelations and the evidence set forth in those hearings to be unfit for office and explicitly pointed to the 2024 race and say he should not be welcomed back into the race or into the Oval Office. And then you had The Wall Street Journal post a similarly powerful piece talking about this being a test of his character, a test through crisis as many presidents face, and that he had utterly failed that test.
The second thing that really struck me was that The Wall Street Journal‘s post was just, I think, 73 minutes later. And so you have the tabloid of the Murdochs and the high-end sort of considered quality daily of the Murdochs saying the same thing with slightly different language a little more than an hour apart.
MARTIN: So I take it you’re convinced that these pieces were coordinated?
FOLKENFLIK: Right. I’m not saying that I think the people from the Post and the people from the Journal were on a conference call. They’re proud of what they do there. They have their own separate lines to the Murdochs. But this is something that could not be done, given the stakes, given the national interest, given the Murdochs’ previous alliance with Donald Trump, as it became clear that he would prevail in the 2016 Republican primaries, as he headed to the White House – Rupert Murdoch finally had somebody at the White House as president who he could have a rapport with, frequent meetings with, advise, and he got some things out of that on a business sense as well. You know, given those stakes, there’s no way those titles would do that without Murdoch’s assent or direction. And why do I say that? I see that because having covered him for over 20 years, I can tell you time after time in the United Kingdom, he would support candidates, and then his titles would turn against them at Murdoch’s direction. And you’re seeing that happen here again.
MARTIN: Do you think a couple of newspaper editorials matter? I have to mention the Murdochs also control Fox News through their family trust. I mean, they have – what? – 39.2% ownership of the trust. So it’s publicly traded, yes, but they have the majority ownership of the trust – not the majority ownership. What’s the right way to say that? They have – what? – a controlling interest.
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FOLKENFLIK: I think it matters for a couple reasons. Look; Murdoch didn’t want Trump to win in 2016, and the Journal in particular and the Post were very critical after January 6 of Trump, in one case going so far as to say he should resign. But in this case, it’s a reiteration looking ahead to 2024, not simply accepting the fact that Trump polls seemingly ahead of the pack, saying, look; we want to put this guy out of bounds, and therefore we’re giving cover to major donors. The financial folks who, for example, read The Wall Street Journal. We’re giving cover for you to send your money in other directions. People can point to the Journal and say, we’ve been sanctioned. Murdoch is basically not on board at this point. We can go in another direction. And you’ve seen Ron DeSantis rise in coverage, and I think that’s really the alternative the Murdochs are looking to at the moment.
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FOLKENFLIK: Look; there are principles being articulated by both the Post and the Journal in the pieces in which they’re essentially trying to dismiss Trump’s viability as a candidate. But in reality, this is about pragmatic politics. That is the way Murdoch has operated on the three great English-speaking nations in which he’s been so dominant. It’s the way in which he’s operating here. These are not perfectly independent journalistic judgments. These are what’s going to be best for a pro-business, anti-regulatory, kind of anti-tax administration? How can we get that best? We think it’s best by looking ahead, not clinging to Trump.
The newly disclosed email shows that Mr. Eastman did not let up even after Mr. Biden had been sworn in. It was sent after the Trump campaign had raised tens of millions of dollars from solicitations to Mr. Trump’s supporters suggesting the money would be used to fight voting fraud, even as the claims made by Mr. Trump and his allies were rejected by the courts and broadly debunked even by Mr. Trump’s own Justice Department.
In proposing to use the Georgia runoff elections as a route to finding fraud in the general election held months earlier, Mr. Eastman was implicitly conceding that other, more direct accusations of fraud had failed to find any traction.
The email suggests that Mr. Eastman saw the courts in Georgia as an investigative tool, using the discovery process, for continuing to try to bolster claims that had already been dismissed.
“We need to figure out how to keep up the fight,” Mr. Eastman wrote. “I’m inclined to pursue an election challenge to the Georgia runoff election, using what we already have learned (huge statistical anomalies, violations of Georgia law, etc.) as the basis. Under Georgia law, a challenge can be brought by any qualified voter, even if the candidates themselves are not interested.”
In the email, Mr. Eastman argued that if the group of lawyers and Trump advisers involved in the effort could find fraud in the Jan. 5 runoff elections in Georgia — which were won by Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, both Democrats — they could vindicate themselves for the claims they made about the November election.
Toward the end of the email, Mr. Eastman implied that the Trump campaign could fund the ongoing efforts. He named a team of lawyers he would recommend, but he said two of them needed their outstanding Trump campaign bills paid before they would consider taking on the work.
Trump demands attention, and demands an explanation, because he wants to get in front of the coming calamity. But he cannot avoid the reckoning he is due, no matter how much he cries. Garland is a meticulous, smart prosecutor who won’t give Trump the fuel he wants to ruin the prosecution. Careful, stealthy and quiet is the perfect way to investigate Trump, who is careless, bombastic, loud and rude.
Remember Trump is a hollow man and we all know how they end: “Not with a bang, but with a whimper.”
Now see below some comedic takes on Trump, that are insightfully necessary to remind us of his being a clear and present danger:
Finally, Liz Cheney‘s dad, Dick Cheney, recorded the following video in support of Liz Cheney’s upcoming primary.
I have profoundly disliked their pro-military, America First positions. The father, for instance,
. . . directed the United States invasion of Panama and Operation Desert Storm in the Middle East–two profoundly evil imperial campaigns that typically murdered vast numbers of innocents–of course just collateral damage.
But he does nail it about Trump in this brief video, so he and Liz get my vote 🙂 :
excerpts:
Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s Tuesday testimony ought to ring the death knell for former President Donald Trump’s political career. Trump is unfit to be anywhere near power ever again.
Trump is a disgrace. Republicans have far better options to lead the party in 2024. No one should think otherwise, much less support him, ever again.
Hutchinson’s resume alone should establish her credibility. The 25-year-old had already worked at the highest levels of conservative Republican politics, including in the offices of Sen. Ted Cruz (TX) and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (LA), before becoming a top aide for former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows.
As Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the committee’s vice chair,said in her opening statement: “President Trump is a 76-year-old man. He is not an impressionable child.”–Oh, the grand and tragic irony of that statement!
In short, Hutchinson was a conservative Trumpist true believer and a tremendously credible one at that. She did not overstate things, did not seem to be seeking attention, and was very precise about how and why she knew what she related and about which testimony was firsthand and which was secondhand but able to be corroborated.
What Hutchinson relayed was disturbing. She gave believable accounts of White House awareness that the planned Jan. 6 rally could turn violent. She repeated testimony that Trump not only knew that then-Vice President Mike Pence’s life had been credibly threatened that day but also that he was somewhere between uncaring and actually approving of Pence’s danger.
She also told, in detail, that Trump repeatedly insisted that he himself should join his supporters at the Capitol — even after being informed the crowd contained armed elements and that it was breaching the perimeter against an undermanned U.S. Capitol Police force.
Wayne Northey was Director of Man-to-Man/Woman-to-Woman – Restorative Christian Ministries (M2/W2) in British Columbia, Canada from 1998 to 2014, when he retired. He has been active in the criminal justice arena and a keen promoter of Restorative Justice since 1974. He has published widely on peacemaking and justice themes. You will find more about that on this website: a work in progress.
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Dan Friedman
Maggie Haberman and with the subtitle, “On the day of President Biden’s inauguration, John Eastman suggested looking for voting irregularities in Georgia — and asked for help in getting paid the $270,000 he had billed the Trump campaign.” We read:
