All Things Trump: the story continues...

[Brian Peacock]

Trump and his confederates have always rejected accountability as a concept, in private and in public life. It's a concept that does not apply, and should not be applied to them - because their identity is based on getting away with things. Similarly they reject notions of morality and ethics, because if getting away with things is their aim then ideas about what might be good or bad, right or wrong, are subverted by their identities as guys who get with things by any means they can, erm, get away with. Larger ideas of right or wrong don't apply if one's goal is to do, to get, or to be whatever you want - the 'right' or 'good' thing is getting what you want. And into that moral vacuum they simply transpose a kind of code, one based on their shared identity and, of course, loyalty - the 'right' or 'good' thing is the one that helps the team and the team leader get what they want. In this sense the 'guys who get away with things' detach themselves from the everyday world, the world of social norms, laws, and legal constraints -- the world most of us have no cho8ice but to live in -- along with obligations to things like facts, truth and evidence, rational argument or justification. In this respect, what applies to Trump and his confederates in the political realm also applies to dictatorships, theocracies, and organised crime - and to a great extent the Trump project has been an exercise in branding 'the guys who get away with the things they want to get away with' as a pseudo-religious criminal cult which anyone can join, if they're happy to put aside moral and ethical concerns and willing to demonstrate loyalty to the team and the team leader.

[Sean Hayden]

What kind of benefits are we talking about? I heard he shits in a golden toilet.

[Brian Peacock]

People have to do what he says and give him anything he wants, even if he doesn't really want it or need it.

[Tero]

....Michael Bender’s work, “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost.” And for weeks, the former president had anxiously anticipated it surfacing. When Bender first approached him about it in the spring, Trump, through a spokesperson, told the Wall Street Journal reporter the anecdote was “defamatory.” Bender said he interpreted it as a legal threat; but like many such threats from Trump, nothing came of it.

https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2021/ ... oks-499741

[L'Emmerdeur]

Hmm, the maybe piss tape, or something like it.

'Kremlin papers appear to show Putin’s plot to put Trump in White House'

Vladimir Putin personally authorised a secret spy agency operation to support a “mentally unstable” Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election during a closed session of Russia’s national security council, according to what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents.

The key meeting took place on 22 January 2016, the papers suggest, with the Russian president, his spy chiefs and senior ministers all present.

They agreed a Trump White House would help secure Moscow’s strategic objectives, among them “social turmoil” in the US and a weakening of the American president’s negotiating position.

Russia’s three spy agencies were ordered to find practical ways to support Trump, in a decree appearing to bear Putin’s signature.

By this point Trump was the frontrunner in the Republican party’s nomination race. A report prepared by Putin’s expert department recommended Moscow use “all possible force” to ensure a Trump victory.

[Cue Russian denials.]

The report – “No 32-04 \ vd” – is classified as secret. It says Trump is the “most promising candidate” from the Kremlin’s point of view. The word in Russian is perspektivny.

There is a brief psychological assessment of Trump, who is described as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex”.

There is also apparent confirmation that the Kremlin possesses kompromat, or potentially compromising material, on the future president, collected – the document says – from Trump’s earlier “non-official visits to Russian Federation territory”.

The paper refers to “certain events” that happened during Trump’s trips to Moscow. Security council members are invited to find details in appendix five, at paragraph five, the document states. It is unclear what the appendix contains.

[Tero]

They just have the two copies. One is in Putin's safe. The more grainy VHS tape copy is shown once a year at KGB Christmas parties.

[Sean Hayden]

Or maybe he just thinks taking credit is helpful.

[Seabass]

Even fucking general Mark Milley, Trump's own chairman of the joint chiefs, knows Trump and MAGAs are fascists.

Top U.S. General Said Trump Preached ‘Gospel of the Führer’

General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, likened Donald Trump’s effort to hold on to power after the 2020 election to Adolf Hitler, saying the president was preaching “the gospel of the Führer” with his lies about the election being stolen, according to a new book by two Washington Post reporters.

As chronicled in I Alone Can Fix It, by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, the Pentagon’s top general said shortly before the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol that Trump had led the country to the brink of its own “Reichstag moment,” viewing him as a potential threat to American democracy. (Intelligencer obtained a copy of I Alone Can Fix It, which is due out July 20.)

Trump had appointed Milley to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs in 2018, over the objections of Defense Secretary James Mattis. The Army general’s tenure at the top of the Pentagon had been relatively quiet, until last summer, when he appeared in uniform during an infamous photo opportunity for Trump in Lafayette Square that followed the clearing of protesters in front of the White House. Milley later apologized for creating a “perception of the military involved in domestic politics.”

Although the book chronicles Milley’s concern with Trump dating back to that moment, the general’s worries grew rapidly as the president plunged the nation into chaos following Election Day. Seven days later, Milley got a call from “an old friend” with an explicit warning that Trump and his allies were trying to “overturn the government.” Milley was confident that any attempts by Trump to hold on to power would be thwarted, because the military wouldn’t go along. “They may try, but they’re not going to fucking succeed,” he told aides. “You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with guns.”

Still, Milley was disturbed by the sight of Trump supporters rallying to his cause in November, calling them “Brownshirts in the streets.” Leonnig and Rucker wrote that Milley “believed Trump was stoking unrest, possibly in hopes of an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and call out the military.” The general likened the U.S. to Germany’s fragile Weimar Republic in the early 1930s. “This is a Reichstag moment,” he said, referring to the arson attack on Germany’s Parliament that Hitler used as a pretext to assume absolute power and destroy democracy.

On January 6, Milley watched with disgust as Trump addressed his supporters. Soon after Trump finished speaking, a violent mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol in an attempt to disrupt the certification of the presidential election by a joint session of Congress — and many promised to return for Biden’s inauguration. “These guys are Nazis, they’re boogaloo boys, they’re Proud Boys. These are the same people we fought in World War II,” Milley said a week after the attack on the Capitol.

After Biden took the oath of office on January 20, and Trump was finally an ex-president, former First Lady Michelle Obama encountered Milley at the Capitol and asked how he was feeling. “No one has a bigger smile today than I do,” he said. “You can’t see it under my mask but I do.”

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/07 ... itler.html

[Tero]

Reinstating Trump is going to take a little longer. Just winning Arizona is stuck:
https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2021/7/8 ... s-going-on

[Sean Hayden]

I figured it out, what Putin has on Trump. Our Trump is a Chinese clone.

[Tero]

He had a note from his podiatrist:
An excerpt from the note reads, “Donald J. Trump is suffering from extremely painful bone spurs that would make any active-duty participation in a military coup out of the question. In the event of such a coup, I strongly recommend that he be limited to an
administrative role.”

The podiatrist’s searing exposé is the thirty-seventh book about the last days of Trump’s Presidency published this week, according to industry estimates.

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowit ... EVY83bnCKc

[Sean Hayden]

[Tero]

Nothing came out of Arizona.

F16FCE7F-F49B-4778-9BC0-A17D244326F3.jpeg (67.69 KiB) Viewed 1307 times

[Tero]

Trump loses Arizona again
AP: Arizona county election officials find fewer than 200 potential voter fraud cases, undercutting Trump claims

https://amp.usatoday.com/amp/7997513002

[Tero]

People will have to wait till December to find out the truth, as opposed to msnbc fake news. Only then the facts come out when FORMER Fox host hosts FORMER president in the "how many losers can we find?" tour:
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-oreilly-rally/

And they do not even like each other:
"With that said I would add choosing Bill O'Reilly was a mistake here," he added. "I would have chosen Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson. I wouldn't have announced it at this point, probably closer to August, late September, to give people less time -- couple of strategic things from a marketing perspective that people did wrong or missed the ball altogether."