All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[worstblogever]

I uh... I have to post the Fanatical Republican Extremist entry for today. Coincidentally... it's the Trump update. And I've had to edit it day after day this week.

[babyblob]

Speaking of Trump and his toadies who won't comply with the law...

Rudy Giuliani refused to go to testify in Georgia in the election fraud case in Fulton County, citing "health issues that make me unable to travel".

He was just spotted at the airport going to New Hampshire.


Pretty sure Roodles is gonna end up in contempt of court.

An idea and this is crazy so laugh at me if you want.

But when you are a high profile figure that claims they cant Comply with a Legal Summons because you cant travel due to illness? Maybe dont go to a public airport with in a fee hours of saying that?

[worstblogever]

“Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” first profiled Donald Trump on this date in 2015, and continued to post updates in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021.

He has never an easy “revisit” for us. Like… in 2018, around Day 600 of the administration, we posted this:

"Donald Trump continues to grow worse, in spite of it being seemingly impossible for him to find a way to become so. The Mueller Investigation findings are in, but the public only got a redacted version that showed he is utterly criminal. His lawyer flipped on him and revealed a series of tax avoidance schemes. His Cabinet continues to rack up record resignations to the extent that virtually every senior level administration official has the word “acting” at the start of their job title. He has started telling Congresswomen of color to “go back where they came from” because he’s that racist. He’s trying to resume the failed “family separation” policy because he’s that cruel. He continues to praise authoritarian dictators. He continues to demonize the press. He put a credibly accused rapist on the Supreme Court AND mocked his accuser on social media. He has cranked up the white nationalism to an extent to where his supporters are committing acts of stochastic terror and literally using the defense of “Trump told me to”. So with the number of lies he’s telling picking up, and his incompetence growing practically exponentially, we’ve only had time as of this post to document days 501-600 of the Trump administration thus far."

By 2020,’s post, around Day 1300, we were approaching what seemed like the forgone conclusion of how his presidency would end. We stopped keeping a day by day, blow by blow account, knowing that while It’s important to keep track on the dark, authoritarian policies of dictators and try to help keep people informed so they don’t wake up and while they weren’t paying attention, fascism laid its seeds and bore dark fruit. We knew of the importance of not ceasing to point out how utterly bats*** insane Donald Trump has always been, and how progressively worse he’s getting. Not just in terms of having a complete lack of empathy, not just taking glee in cruelty (especially against minorities, because he’s racist as f***), but the pathological lies.

To this day, stories leak out about his time in the Oval Office, and we find out that he would ask top advisers and generals if a foreign power had a “hurricane gun” and that’s why there were more hurricanes. Which even if it were a story in a comic book, is f***ing stupid as hell.

The timeline we were keeping was at a point where every day, in our estimation, one would need to dedicate an hour or more of work to scouring news sites to stay on top of the horror show that was the Trump administration. The derangement, and of outright malice, that should always be confronted. The person who has made it her full time job, to our benefit, and done the best with it is probably journalist Amy Siskind, at her own site, "The List". She found hundreds of troubling headlines a week. HUNDREDS. And it’s easy to understand how, as of July of 2020, Donald Trump lied a documented over 20,000 times since taking office by the Washington Post (again, saluting them for doing the hard, hard work).

The FRED blog is a strictly unpaid, volunteer thing. And if we truly “kept up” with Trump, it would leave our profiles of the rest of the party he’s corrupted and twisted in his own image unexplored… and to be perfectly honest, we would probably need alcohol by the barrel or anti-depressants by the truckload to compensate having to do it again, and again. So we’re just going to do our best to summarize and preserve our mental health by not trying to make sense over every breathlessly ignorant moment that we’ve seen from this stupid, stupid carbuncle where a human should be as he’s held this nation hostage and insisted at being at the helm of a literal cult of personality for the past seven years.

Our 2019 update alone covered things like, y’know, just his first impeachment, continuing to try and let Russia back into the G8, abandoning our Kurdish allies in northern Iraq to the mercies of an invading Turkish army, when unemployment reached its highest level since the Great Depression in May 2020, and Trump’s constant misinformation and mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic. As he grew more unstable, he was throwing tantrums at Pentagon officials and wanting to turn loose the U.S. military on Black Lives Matter protesters. He then started spreading conspiracy theories against his vocal critics like Joe Scarborough, Nancy Pelosi, or just insane claims about widespread election fraud, Twitter had enough of his lies and started putting disclaimers on his posts that contained falsehoods, and he started to threaten the website itself with retribution. As the death toll from the pandemic started growing rapidly, Trump was holding daily press conferences where he’d talk over actual medical experts, contradict their advisement to wear masks by insisting he wouldn’t wear one, promoting hydroxychloroquine as a cure (when it was believed to do more harm than good), and y’know, at one point postulating that you could potentially stop the disease by injecting yourself with bleach or UV light.

This tinpot, crackpot dictator spent the summer months ignoring the Russian federation placing bounties on our troops, and literally said “I DON’T CARE” when the intelligence community pointed out the Russians were interfering in our elections AGAIN (to help him win a second term, of course) as if he was reading it off the back of the First Lady’s coat.

Even with deaths from Covid-19 escalating, he made the decision to return to public campaign rallies, each being a super-spreader event, including his first one back in Tulsa on Juneteenth, before delaying it one day… and that rally is believed to have caused no less than 500 infections on only 6200 attendees, one of whom was former GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain, who died of the virus. Predictably, he learned nothing and continued on, having a 4th of July rally at Mt. Rushmore that only drew 3700 people.

By the end of July, Trump administration goons were kidnapping protesters off the streets of Portland without identifying themselves, and Trump commuted the sentence of Roger Stone. By the time we posted that update, things were truly starting to spiral out of control, with Trump’s niece Mary writing a tell all book discussing everything from his tax avoidance schemes to the numerous times she’s heard him use racial slurs. The SDNY also were also investigating the Trump foundation for widespread fraud, and Trump outright was trying to use his toady at the Post Office, Louis DeJoy, to sabotage mail-in ballots, as Trump began to question if it was “fair” to use this method during a pandemic (when the military has been using mail-in voting for decades.)

Like… all of that, that was in our profile published on August 11th, 2019. And we crossed our fingers, hoping that the election would play out in favor of a Biden win and that Donald Trump would finally no longer evade prosecution for his crimes. He’d be out of office, and on his way to prison by the time we were posting this today.

Our dubious quote in August of 2020 was:

”This madness must stop. We shouldn’t have to write about it. People shouldn’t have to wake up to it every day. It’s just so much unnecessary suffering and death that no one should be enduring, but we are, because we’re being patient during this particularly ugly phase of the experiment that is American democracy, or what passes for it. Given the amount of perimeter fencing being set up around the White House, the actions of AG William Barr, and federal agents kidnapping people off the streets at protests… should there be bad news about the presidential in election in November… expect things to get uglier than the protests that erupted four years ago. Trump will be in power when they happen this time, and not just be a president-elect. And he will turn loose the goon squads on them with chemical weapons and rubber bullets with glee, for daring to show any resistance to him.

Resist. Our lives depend on it.”

Little did we know, behind the scenes, he kept annoying generals at the Pentagon and even Bill Barr with fascist ideas, wanting to openly turn the military loose on protesters to kill them in the streets, and plot ways to cling to power past his term, posting open ended questions on Twitter about delaying the election, perhaps indefinitely.

[worstblogever]

Somehow, half of our hopes came true and he lost. And given his actions as power slipped away from him, we have no idea how as we post this, he’s STILL not in jail yet:

To say Trump was especially erratic as the pandemic grew worse over the summer of 2020 and his odds of re-election grew longer would be an understatement. The only constant was his trips to his own golf courses, leaving the White House during an American crisis for nearly the 300th time. For whatever reason, most likely that he was jealous that Dr. Anthony Fauci was invited to throw out the first pitch at the Washington Nationals’ home opener, Trump announced he was throwing out the first pitch at the Yankees’ home opener on August 15th, only to reverse and claim he wouldn’t be doing so days later. The Yankees were apparently also blown away that he would prioritize that cameo during the pandemic and with the death toll around 150,000 people. Like… that’s just odd… and the virus seemed to be getting closer into Trump’s orbit all the time, including his own White House National Security Advisor in late July, and continuing into August, several members of his Secret Service detail.

The more he refused to wear a mask and hold rallies with maskless people, the more likely it seemed he would end up catching it himself. Especially when he was using his Twitter account to post (and then rage about those posts being flagged by the site) misinformation from a group of “doctors” that included a woman who argues against using masks and that some gynecological problems are caused by demons and witches (we are not making that last part up.

It just wasn’t that there were reports of the Trump Organization being investigated for fraud, but virtually everyone who had been in Trump’s orbit through the years seemed to be engaged in criminal activity, as even Steve Bannon was indicted for defrauding Trump supporters to make donations to a private company to build sections of a proposed Border Wall… (and what little they actually built in the scam was collapsing).

Trump’s personal legal woes saw him facing down a lawsuit for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll (although he took the unprecedented step of asking the Department of Justice to provide his lawyers for his defense), and he lost his lawsuit against Stormy Daniels. When the Washington Post began an investigation into how much money Trump had charged his own Secret Service detail to stay at his properties when he went golfing, he had a White House staffer threaten a reporter by telling them they were “building a dossier” on him, which is not something that is done in a country with a right to a free press.

His campaign continued to alienate suburban voters, pushing a racist narrative against immigrants and Black Lives Matters protesters, while falsely claiming that if elected, Joe Biden would “defund the police” (Biden had no such intention). Desperate to try to reframe the optics of his disastrous reign, Trump allowed himself to be interviewed by Axios’ Jonathan Swan on August 3rd, and… he proved to be completely disconnected from reality, refusing to accept any facts or be challenged on his lies at all. And Twitter and Facebook continued to take stands against Trump’s misinformation, taking down a post he made where he claimed children couldn’t catch Covid-19, and temporarily suspending the account of his presidential campaign for the same.

He made promises that the Covid-19 vaccine would be ready for the public before Election Day on November 3rd, and spoiler alert… the first doses weren’t given until late December. And his grasp of the historic significance… well, Trump at one point claimed that World War II was ended because of the 1917 Spanish Flu Outbreak… Which, World War I would have made more sense on that timeline, but neither world war ended because of a flu outbreak. Just… the man is bizarre and stupid. Flailing out of control, Trump started lying and saying that Joe Biden was in cognitive decline, or even more outrageously claiming that Biden was “against the Bible”, or even “Against God” when… well… Joe Biden is a devout Catholic. Oh, and Trump said that Biden needed to be drug tested prior to their first debate for performance-enhancing drugs. When Senator Kamala Harris was named as the VP pick on the Democratic ticket, he revisited the racist conspiracy theory tactic of Birtherism, this time not about Obama, but somehow questioning if Harris, who was born to two immigrant parents in the United States, was actually a citizen or not.

The 2020 RNC was held in late August, and fact-checkers were sent into overdrive by the fictions the Republican Party vomited out in succession, noting that night one had more lies told by Republican speakers than in all four nights of the DNC earlier in the month. You can imagine how Trump’s speech went on the fourth night. But, in a break from tradition and ethical considerations, both First Lady Melania Trump and Donald Trump gave their speeches from the White House, which as government property is not supposed to be used for any campaign events, as it is a violation of the Hatch Act. While the theme of the convention was “Keep America Great”, Trump’s campaign forgot to copyright the name for a website, and the Biden campaign seized the opportunity, redirecting anyone doing a web search to a site that highlighted Trump’s many failures.

[babyblob]

Fun GOP theories from the right about todays attack on the FBI office.

Antifa anti government nut. (Antifa has hated the government for years.)

Random Anti Government nut. (The Liberals want us all to forget there are people who hate the government for little to know reason. See OKC bombing and Waco.)

Random Anti Police nut (Most likely a BLM protester/supporter because of "Alleged unfair treatment of black people by law enforcement)

Suicide By Cop Nut (Even though he ran from a building of armed Federal Agents when an Alarm sounded and has spent the better part of 5 + hours running and hiding from the Police)

[babyblob]

Stand off is over. Law Enforcement just saying the Suspect is injured. Didnt say if police shot him or if it was self inflicted. Suspect is alive from the last report.

[worstblogever]

Trump’s thoughts on “winning” the 2020 election became less about doing so democratically, and instead, looking to break the election process to steal a victory, including having his own toady, Louis DeJoy, sabotage the postal service to attempt to delay or prevent mail-in voting, while repeatedly sowing doubt in our election processes on social media, and making vague threats to send law enforcement to watch the polls on Election Day (which he had no authority to do). Oh, and Trump and his campaign were trying to put Kanye West on the ballot in several swing states as a proxy candidate to try and pull minority votes away from Joe Biden, which West’s friends expressed concerns that the Trump family were preying on West’s mental illness. And of course, Russia was helping interfere in the election again, but Trump responded to reports by calling his own Intelligence Community “sleazebags” for trying to warn Congress and the public about it (Meanwhile he didn’t have much to say about Vladimir Putin having his key political rival Alexei Navalny poisoned).

All the while Trump insisted he would win the election by making note of “boat parades” his supporters were throwing in his honor (including the one where authorities warned of dangerous conditions that were ignored by his supporters and saw several boats disabled or sunk). Dubiously, and in a portent of what was perhaps to come, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley took the unprecedented step to put out a statement that the U.S. Armed Forces would not resolve any disputed election results.

After kooks like Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Nick Freitas, and Laura Loomer started winning GOP Primaries, Trump endorsed the worst candidates on GOP ballots in House and Senate races like them. Michael Cohen started doing press for his tell-all book that revealed details about Donald Trump cheating on his wife, and confirmation that Trump did witness sex workers performing “golden showers” as was long rumored. Oh, and to further plug her own book and defend its content, Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, released 15 hours of audio interviews with Trump’s own sister Maryanne, a retired judge, who referred to her own brother as “Cruel.”

Not normal things that happen with sitting presidents, y’know? Trump’s approval rating dropped to 35%, which given the state of the nation, was probably too generous of the public polled.

As September 2020 started… protests against police violence in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Portland, Oregon continued to see heated confrontations between protesters and police… and Donald Trump was fanning the flames of racial division on Twitter and promoting lies to escalate the tension, demanding authorities in either city and state call in the National Guard to attack protesters. In a new historical precedent, mayors, governors, and Democratic nominee Joe Biden all called on Trump to not visit, and to stop making the situation worse, because he didn’t know how to show any empathy to end the problem. He had sent out condolences towards a supporter shot in Portland, but made no mention of the victims of Kyle Rittenhouse while retweeting those complimenting the murder suspect out on bail, and spread new conspiracy theories about Antifa agitators flying in to raise hell, saying they were traveling in full tactical gear on commercial flights (you’d think the TSA would have noticed). Even by the second week of September, he was railing against Critical Race Theory and even Workplace Sensitivity Training.

As 500,000 people were displaced by wildfires in Oregon and California, Trump literally did nothing about it, and it seemed to be an afterthought. Then again, considering in the past, his idea of “helping” in wildfires was to yell at governors to rake forests more, maybe that wasn’t the worst scenario. No help would be better than him bleating like the d***ish ignoramus he is, and he was probably busy watching five different hours of Fox News (or more) a day.

While attacking the legitimacy of in-person voting in August 2020 was one thing, in September, Trump started to literally encourage his supporters to attempt to vote twice (which is a federal crime, of course, and several of the idiots did attempt to do so and got caught in November). Ominously, he threatened to “put down” protests if Democrats took to the streets in the event of him being declared the winner of the 2020 election. Political commentators began openly discussing the very real possibility that Donald Trump would not accept the results of the 2020 election, and what steps he might take to hold onto power. It seemed inevitable, given Trump literally said it in a White House press briefing.

Trump’s poll numbers were dwindling in historically low numbers for Republicans in historically traditionally good categories for a Republican president, including the military vote, in which he only had 35% support… and that was before news dropped that in a visit to Arlington National Cemetery during the anniversary of the end of World War I “losers and suckers” for having died for our country.

Now, obviously Trump was going to claim that was “fake news” and that you can’t trust what’s reported about him (several people came forward to confirm the Atlantic’s reporting on “losers and suckers”), but Trump is, if nothing else, a pathological liar. And that’s why it was completely believable when Bob Woodward’s new book, Rage dropped in mid-September, and he released audio from several telephone interviews he had with Donald Trump… and Trump was taped telling Woodward, the guy who busted open Watergate (who didn’t have to wait for secret tapes this time)… he told Woodward he was completely aware of the dire threat Covid-19 would be and lied to the public about it “going away” for months. He also admitted the attack on protesters by federal agents at Lafayette Park was his doing in the recording and inadvertently blurted out classified information about a secret nuclear weapons system having been developed during his administration.

[babyblob]

The police spokes person did have a light weight 90s badass action movie line

"Response has Ended. Lockdown lifted." Say these words with the voice of Rambo or Terminator.

[worstblogever]

Another frequent guest on cable news dropping dimes on Trump was Olivia Troye, former an aide to Mike Pence and member of the National Security team… she left the White House in utter frustration over Donald Trump’s mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic, repeating that advisers had repeatedly asked him to promote wearing masks, BEGGED him to do so, and that Trump was constantly disengaged in meetings, evidencing his “flat out disregard for human life”.

And right at the end of the month, the New York Times dropped a bombshell story… with the help of Trump’s niece, Mary, they had acquired 20 years of Donald Trump’s tax returns, that showed significant and deliberate tax avoidance schemes, typically by claiming his properties were more valuable in sales or when using them as assets in loan applications, but when reporting their values to the IRS, highly understating the value within the same tax year.

Trump continued to host live rallies, ignoring any and all regulations in place due to the Covid-19 pandemic about gathering in front of crowds and mask mandates if a state had any, and claiming as president, he was not subject to… y’know… laws. Whether it was in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Fayetteville, North Carolina, or Reno, Nevada, the lies and xenophobia just got worse.

His appearances in more controlled environments, like town halls where people could ask him questions… well, Donald Trump was going to struggle when actually asked to give coherent answers to anything, including theorizing about mask-wearing in terms of waitstaff, or referring to “herd mentality” instead of “herd immunity”. This as the death toll grew to 200,000 around the end of the month, and Trump rated himself an “A+” performance on the pandemic. Which, whatever curve he was grading himself on must have been pretty skewed, considering a Cornell study on Covid-19 misinformation found that Donald Trump alone accounted for 38% of the total amount of false claims about coronavirus. Not just in the United States, but worldwide.

On September 18th, 2020, a true blow was dealt towards America, when legendary Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg passed away. After Senator Mitch McConnell subverted the nomination process for Judge Merrick Garland starting in February of 2016 after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia for eleven months and after President Obama left office… he waited about 90 minutes before announcing he would move forward on replacing Ginsburg only weeks before the 2020 election. Trump, ever the douchebag himself, was eager to jump in and name a candidate fast to make a reality-show production out of a public swearing-in ceremony. The GOP Senate rushed their highly unqualified pick, Amy Coney Barrett, through faster than any Supreme Court nominee in recent memory, not wanting a repeat of the Brett Kavanaugh debacle. In repeated polls, over 60% of the country, in many even over 50% of Republicans stated their belief that the Supreme Court pick should go to whomever wins the 2020 election. The Senate moved her through the Committee process without Democrats voting, and she was confirmed just eight days before Election Day.

Then came the folly… the hubris… of Trump. He wanted not just the swearing-in ceremony to be a public event, but the announcement of the pick. Trump and White House staff were encouraging attendees to go maskless… and that Sept. 26th, 2000 White House gathering turned into a super-spreader event that a week later, in the first week of October, would see multiple members of Congress and the Senate test positive, with the upper branch being needed to be healthy and alive in order to show up to vote to fire Barrett through. Trump, though…

In October 2020… Look, let’s just speak very quickly about the lone presidential debate that was enough of a clusterf*** that the next one was postponed. Trump was completely unhinged, flailing and trying to yell over both Joe Biden and debate moderator Chris Wallace. Viewers at home were aghast, appalled, and disturbed by one of the worst debate performances ever, to the extent that if it was a boxing match, it was more like watching Mike Tyson snapping and biting off Evander Holyfield’s ear. Trump lost by just flat out losing it, and anyone watching was just disgusted with the whole sordid affair. We will note the chilling ending, though, where Trump legitimized the Proud Boys when asked to condemn them, instead telling them, “Stand back and stand by”.

In a lot of years, it would have been shocking that a month before the election, audio dropped of a First Lady yelling, “F*** CHRISTMAS!”, as Melania Trump did.

But the debate debacle and Melania’s shots fired in a real and actual “War on Christmas” weren’t enough to stay in the news cycle… it was all about the Coronavirus’ spread… but not just national cases or mortality rates… it was that high-ranking members of Trump’s White House and Senators started to pop positive on Covid-19 tests. First up testing positive… White House staffer Hope Hicks.

She was on board Air Force One with Trump, who was already likely infected himself, and he went to a New Jersey fundraiser where already likely positive with Covid-19, he wandered around unmasked to spread it to donors. They would continue to travel unmasked to… the first presidential debate, where of those present, Hicks, Stephen Miller, and both Donald Trump and Melania Trump ended up testing positive (mercifully, no one from the Biden camp got sick, but then again, they wore masks and Biden only was unmasked during the farce of a debate. We’ll add, that all attendees were supposed to be tested for Covid-19 prior to the debate, and remain masked, but the absolute dips***s in Trump’s entourage conveniently arrived late and were admitted by the Cleveland Clinic on “the honor system”, which given the entire f***ing family history was the dumbest move we have ever heard of.

So, while it was believed given ALL the people at the Rose Garden Ceremony on Sept. 26th that got sick with Covid-19… it’s believed that event was the culminating event where all the disease got spread. But that didn’t stop Trump from trying to blame it on Gold Star Families who he met with on the following day, because Donald Trump is a grudge-bearing ***hole and he keeps having fights with Gold Star families, so of course it’s THEIR FAULT.

By late October 1st, Trump had been given a Covid-19 test, popped positive, and his condition rapidly deteriorated on October 2nd, at which point the abhorrent pile of comorbidities was shipped off to Walter Reed Medical Center, given every experimental treatment on the table for Covid-19, where for three days he remained, getting out of bed with an advanced fever and low oxygen levels to pose for staged photos where he “signed documents” that were actually blank pieces of paper. In his delirium, Trump also ordered Secret Service to put him in a limo to do a lap around the building for photo ops on October 4th, unnecessarily endangering his Secret Service detail who had to drive laps with him while he was highly contagious. Trump returned to the White House late on October 5th, taking his mask off on the White House balcony for a photo op, which if you think sounds arrogant, please understand this was the understated return that could have been his original plan of tearing open his shirt to reveal a Superman logo.

[worstblogever]

More than once on Twitter, in spite of having a medical scare of this magnitude, Trump posted, "Don't be afraid of Covid. Don't let it dominate your life”, which infuriated many survivors of the virus or people who had lost loved ones to the disease. Trump spent the next four days while still contagious ignoring his advisors to stay in the White House residence where he could quarantine and wandered all over the building, including trying to do business from the Oval Office itself, risking the health of countless others in the White House. He returned to doing public events, again, maskless, on October 10th after he had received two consecutive negative Covid-19 tests.

All and all, that week was probably the least stressful week for the nation since he took office, and a wonder of stupidity to behold. There continued to be positive Covid-19 cases reported coming from the Trump White House through January of 2021 when he left office, as staff continued to intimidate each other to not wear masks at Trump’s behest.

No second presidential debate ever manifested, with Trump refusing to appear on one virtually to prevent the spread of disease, and chafing at discussion of a button being placed for the moderator to cut his mike if he attempted to talk over everyone present like at the first debate. Instead, we got a vice-presidential debate where Kamala Harris mopped the floor with Mike Pence appearing so lethargic that a fly landed on his head and stayed there for almost a minute.

But, all things had to return to abnormal, as it was during the Trump presidency, so after domestic terrorists were arrested in Michigan for plotting to kidnap and execute Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer for her actions to prevent the spread of Covid-19 within her state, Donald Trump started posting on Twitter in posts that seemed to pretty clearly side with the terrorists.

Trump could smell defeat coming up on November 3rd, and grew even more desperate to cling to power. As in, desperate enough to spread a secondary conspiracy theory being promoted by Qanon supporters that Osama bin Laden had not been killed during the Obama administration, and refusing to condemn the Qanon conspiracy theory when cornered about it in a town hall by Savannah Guthrie. Desperate enough to beg suburban women to vote for him at a rally, declaring himself immune to coronavirus, and offering to move into the crowd and start kissing women. Desperate enough to lie to the public and claim Democrats wanted to shut all the churches in the country down, that they wanted to “blow up” Mt. Rushmore, or that Joe Biden would “take your cars away”. Desperate enough to put out an all caps post on Twitter demanding Bill Barr arrest Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton. Desperate enough to have his followers run a Biden campaign bus off the road in Texas. Desperate enough to throw such poorly planned rallies that he was abandoning his supporters in the dark in freezing temperatures miles away from their cars.

Trump’s main allies, Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani (both under investigation from federal law enforcement) tried to save his bacon with the October surprise of “Hunter Biden’s laptop”, but it was pretty obvious that the computer located never belonged to Joe Biden’s son, and the entire thing was a flimsy, staged political hit.

The real story probably should have been that since 2019, Rudy Giuliani had been feeding stories to the American conservative media that he was getting from Russian intelligence sources. Or that Rudy got pranked by Borat into nearly participating in a sexual encounter with an actress who was supposed to be a Russian reporter/leBorat’s teenaged daughter.

Then again, from the point Trump was given a steroid cocktail at Walter Reed, he likely was in an altered state of psychosis, a common side effect to the treatment. And yet… nobody ever invoked the 25th Amendment. The body count from Covid-19 continued to grow, and all the wrong examples were set by Donald Trump about how to prevent spreading it. Hell, he hadn’t gone to Coronavirus Task Force meetings at the White House in months, and he sidelined infectious disease control expert Anthony Fauci for Scott Atlas, a guy he saw on Fox News, who questioned the efficacy of masks.

Trump kept claiming at every campaign rally that America was “turning the corner” on Covid-19, but consistently, new cases and deaths were escalating, with 75,000-100,000 new cases every day and deaths beginning to hit in the four digits daily as the month waned. Trump was too busy, for the remainder of his presidency, plotting a coup to stay in power, to focus on saving anyone else’s life. 232,000 people would be dead of Covid-19 by Election Day alone.

November 2020… it was probably a bad sign as Election Day approached that in a USA Today poll, 3 in 4 voters expected there to by violence on November 3rd, and only 1 in 4 expected a peaceful transfer of power if Trump lost the election. The easy predictions by election experts were that in many states, the in-person votes cast on election day would be counted first, and then, the mail-in absentee ballots would be counted. Republicans tend to traditionally vote in higher percentages in the former, Democrats, the latter. So the expectation was that as the votes were counted on election night in many swing states, Trump would jump out to a lead, but Biden would close, surpass, and then win those states. Axios reported that the Trump planned on just declaring himself winner at some point during the night while he was ahead, and then pretending the election was “stolen” from him as the full vote was counted.

Trump and his closest allies were watching from the White House (which caused another Covid-19 outbreak), and around the time that Fox News… FOX NEWS… .called Arizona for Joe Biden, Axios’ prediction would be proven correct. Trump lost it while viewing the results were coming in from Arizona, and immediately gave the command to “get that result changed”. At 2 AM on November 4th, Trump went out to give a speech from the East Room of the White House where he declared, “Frankly, we did win this election…” and also claimed he had won Pennsylvania and Michigan, states he lost by a significant margin. In the days that followed, they would insist the same was true in Wisconsin and Nevada, and as absentee votes kept being counted, Biden would win the final popular vote by roughly 7 million votes, and surprisingly, also flipped the state of Georgia blue, leaving Trump even more behind the 8-ball for what states he needed to have flipped in order to get the electoral votes to hang onto the presidency.

It was over.

Except… it wasn’t. For the final 62 days of his presidency, Trump was either golfing, or plotting a coup. After thrusting himself in front of cameras for almost an hour a day, on the average, for the entire year of 2020 during a pandemic… in the two months post election, he was only seen for two weeks.

Again, he was busy. Plotting a coup.

[worstblogever]

Trump supporters spent the weeks that followed whipped up into a frenzy descended upon voting sites where absentee ballots were still coming in and being counted, in some instances being directly sent by the Trump campaign via text notifications. With the final votes to count, and recounts to follow, those misguided souls sat outside, making empty threats and repeating the conspiracy theories about a stolen election Trump had been peddling them, and continued to. Trump impotently tried to claim that votes being counted after Election Day were illegal, which, is of course, stupid. But they bought it.

Twitter and Facebook executives had spent weeks dreading this, and planned a strategy to declare Republican messaging about election fraud to be flagged, if not deleted, in posts, for fear of it destabilizing the country. When Trump called press conferences to rave about election fraud that didn’t exist, most networks were more than prepared to cut away to point out that he was spewing lies that would be irresponsible for them to air (of course, not Fox News).

Trump never conceded the election, and never intends to. He drafted a “dream team” of conservative bats*** insane lawyers, led by Rudy Giuliani, to make the case that the election was stolen from him, that got us visuals like Rudy Giuliani leaking hair dye in a live press conference, and the time he mistook the Four Seasons Hotel for the Four Seasons Landscaping Company. As the months would wind on, that clown car of a legal team would only win one judgment in any court case, and that was to be allowed to have an observer present in a room during a recount… which really wasn’t ever in question.

It should have all ended as a sad joke, all this frivolous and childish stomping of feet.

The pandemic kept getting ignored, and in the months that followed, both Pfizer, Moderna, and eventually Johnson & Johnson developed functional vaccines. Trump seethed that they hadn’t made announcements prior to Election Day to save his ***. Out of spite, and still not caring about the massive death toll, Trump never developed a plan for distributing the vaccine throughout the country and putting shots in arms. No federal distribution plan was left for the incoming administration, even as the first vaccinations were to start in December, and for the final weeks of the Trump administration. 250,000 would be dead by mid-November. By mid-December, the number was 300,000. It was 400,000 by the time left office and continued to escalate as Republicans continue to echo his anti-mask and now anti-vaccination remarks. Trump would be vaccinated days before leaving office, but not allow the event to be photographed or promoted to encourage others to get their Covid-19 shots.

Trump’s harassment of election officials to just declare him the winner escalated. In the weeks and months that would follow, if Trump wasn’t impotently attacking them on social media, he was making phone calls to beg them to just name him the winner, most famously in Georgia, but also Arizona. Trump supporters began making death threats against election officials. Republican state attorney generals filed an amicus to the Supreme Court (controlled by a 6-3 conservative margin) to just overturn the presidential election result (but leave the results to Republicans who won down ballot in place). With his only stable means of income being political donations, Trump already formed a SuperPAC to center around a theoretical run for president again in 2024.

Trump fired Defense Secretary Marc Esper, furious that he had resisted all of his desires to unleash American troops on protesters over the spring and summer of 2020. Several high-ranking people at the Department of Justice resigned, refusing to participate in Trump’s requests to subvert American democracy and challenge the election result by investigating imaginary election fraud. Days alter, he fired Christopher Krebs, the head of election cybersecurity, for daring to debunk Trump’s lies about election hacking.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/securit...unked-n1248063

On November 14th, the Proud Boys marched in Washington, D.C., attacking dissenters and causing a near riot. It was a dry run for what they would attempt only weeks later. By the end of the month, another criminal got pardoned by Trump… former General Michael Flynn. Weeks later, he would pardon Steve Bannon, white collar criminal Michael Milken, Elliott Broidy, Rick Renzi, Duke Cunningham, Scooter Libby, Ed Henry, and countless others.

With Flynn, Stone, and Bannon out, Trump had three members of his merry little crime family out to help set up his insurrection. Attorney General William Barr… skipped out early and started to assure there was no election fraud on his way out the door, including banning Stephen Miller’s pawn inside the DoJ, Heidi Stirrup, banned from the building for harassing staffers for proof of election fraud that wasn’t there before resigning before the holidays.

Any Republican in the House or Senate who acknowledged Joe Biden was the president-elect was declared a RINO by Donald Trump, and he promised to sabotage their careers by finding MAGA-allied primary challengers to them as a result. Even a report that 25 members of the GOP polled anonymously confirmed Biden as president-elect had Trump demanding their names be released to back up his threat. With the majority of the Republican Party being invertebrates, Trump had them held hostage.

Trump and several of his administration staff would deliberately avoid acknowledging the incoming Biden administration, with Trump on multiple occasions responding to mentions of a Biden administration by insisting there would be a second Trump term. He and his legal team started spreading lies about “election fraud” while knowing everything they were saying were outright lies.


A multi-phase coup was under way. One that included Pennsylvania Congressman Scott Perry suggesting installing a Trump catspaw, Jeffrey Clark, who was widely unqualified, to be promoted to run the Justice Department and weaponize it to investigate all the Trump legal team’s concepts of “voter fraud”. Deranged lawyers paraded through the White House with people like General Michael Flynn to suggest Trump just declare martial law, or John Eastman advising him them to completely misinterpret one line of the Constitution to get Mike Pence to overturn the election results, admitting to White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and Eric Herschmann that the whole scheme was illegal as hell. At the state level, Trump cultists were all devoting themselves to the criminal cause by preparing slates of “fake electors” who would go to the Capitol on January 6th to just declare Trump won states he clearly lost, and then lost all legal challenges over. Scores of conspirators in on that part of the plan could be facing fraud and/or forgery charges. Trump himself tried pressuring Mike Pence and his own legal counsel to just refuse to count the electoral votes, and in a rare moment of Pence having the sense to not go along with a criminal scheme, he refused.

[worstblogever]

The “Stop the Steal” crowd got a permit for a rally on January 6th, with Trump promising on December 19th to his followers that it would be “wild”. Republican members of Congress were reportedly giving reconnaissance tours to seditionists in the days before the attack (since confirmed by video), which Democratic members of Congress noted was suspicious, given Congressional tours were suspended due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The 501(c)3 filed for the permit, “Women for America First”(whose funding is contributed by former Trump Cabinet secretary and WWE CEO Linda McMahon) and the heads of that group Amy Kremer (who was involved with Tea Party protests back over a decade ago), were actively communicating with the Trump White House, who was picking and choosing the speakers for that day, and which members of the Proud Boys could have their own little “Insurrection Eve” rally with Roger Stone. As we learned from testimony in court by Congressman Mo Brooks, the Trump White House gave their input on his specific speech, which helped incite the crowd. Trump, on January 6th, encouraged the mob to march to the Capitol, claiming he’d be right there by their side while they did (he didn’t and watched live back at the White House after the Secret Service prevented him.)

But as we’ve learned from the Jan. 6th investigation… Trump tried to overrule his Secret Service detail multiple times on January 6th, letting a crowd he knew was armed through the security perimeter, declaring, “They’re not here to hurt ME”, and trying to take the wheel of the presidential limo from the driver while having a tantrum that they wouldn’t drive him to the Capitol.

We know what happened next. A bunch of absolute deplorable morons cosplaying as patriots and military marched alongside militia idiots in tactical gear, looking to terrorize members of Congress into allowing a second Trump term. This wasn’t a crowd of people “caught up in the moment” after Trump’s speech… the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys were the tip of the spear, pushing past Capitol Police and then allowing the rest of the mob to follow. They showed up armed, and had large caches of weapons waiting nearby to escalate the attack if and when martial law was declared. They failed, but not before multiple fatalities were inflicted upon Capitol Police and their own number. Trump’s own former campaign chairman acknowledges Trump is responsible for getting people killed that day.

Hundreds have been arrested and charged in the months since, including some state legislators, who were dumb enough to identify themselves in live streaming video of their attack on social media. In the 187 minutes after he left the Capitol, Trump was never in contact with anyone at the Department of Defense, the National Guard, DC Police, Capitol Police, or anyone to quell the attack… but was actively calling Senators mid-attack to compel them to do his bidding, and drag out the certification longer, without ever offering consideration that their lives were literally in jeopardy. It seemed far more likely he was trying to use the attack to get them to do what he wanted. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, pathetic weasel that he is, called Trump to try to get him to put a statement on Twitter to call off the attack, and was rebuffed, with Trump taking the side of the mob, arguing that perhaps Pence “deserved it”. When Trump finally did listen to his daughter and son-in-law after three hours after gleefully watching the carnage from the White House while ignoring his White House Counsel and White House Chief of Staff, he threw a fit and threw a plate of hamberders against the wall, leaving a smear of ketchup running down the wall. He put a video out on Twitter he told the rioters to “go home”, but made it a point to say “We love you”, and Twitter finally suspended his account for fear he would continue to use it to foment a second American Civil War.

We now know that Trump himself made edits to the speech that was written for him, of course hand-writing them in Sharpie, and crossing out the harshest condemnation of his supporters.

The Trump coup failed. The electoral vote was certified by Mike Pence, who was not hung, in spite of Trump slagging him on social media in the weeks leading up to the attack if he would do his Constitutionally-mandated duty. Trump’s Cabinet were finally talking about the 25th Amendment, so Ivanka had to convince him to put out another video on January 7th to condemn the violence so the Cabinet wouldn’t act. He again ad-libbed from what his legal advisers wanted him to say, and still refusing to say he lost the election.

After a few days of the GOP paying lip service to everyone being involved being held accountable, they reversed course. This is probably because a LOT of Republicans were aware of the coup attempt, with a literal Power Point detailing the plan being passed among GOP Senators on the Hill, and Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley oddly stating in advance he’d step in when Pence would be unavailable to certify the vote himself. The lot of them betrayed their oath to the Constitution, and were aware they’d taken part in a criminal conspiracy enough that they were asking Trump to grant them pardons for those crimes.

The more aware the public became, the more the GOP aided the coverup and started to dig in to save Trump from impeachment, arguing that he would just leave office in a few days, so just let him go. The vote in the Senate fell nine votes short of convicting him. Trump swore revenge in the form of primary challenges to all of the ten Republicans in the House who voted to impeach, as well as the seven Senators who did, and one of the rare times his endorsements have paid off have been in many of these “revenge” races.

Meanwhile, Trump loyalists within the Department of Defense and the Secret Service also went to work trying to aid in a coverup of his crimes, deleting text messages from January 6th that were specifically ordered to be kept as evidence.

Trump has repeatedly tried to find ways to sidestep his ban from Twitter, and frequently makes veiled threats at the company and its CEO in press releases. He attempted to launch his own social media platform, but like all Trump business ventures, it was an abject failure, turning out to be nothing more than a blog that couldn’t even allow comments, and it collapsed within weeks. He started a second one with help… GETTR, which has quickly devolved into a hentai forum/ISIS recruiting site.

Instead, he founded Truth Social, another Twitter knockoff with shoddier service, where he bans any dissenting opinions about himself, and has former Congressman and full-on sycophant Devin Nunes running that into the ground.

[Anthony Shaw]

Go figure, Fox News is outraged about something a member of a Democratic administration is doing or not doing.


The version I'm seeing on CNN/NYT explaining the Mar-a-Lago raid...

1. The FBI/DOJ went to Trump some time ago and was like, "Hey, you uh... took some documents protected by the Presidential Records Act when you left the White House. We're gonna need those back."
2. Trump turns over 15 boxes of documents that were a crime to take. Just, right there, the FBI/DOJ and folks have that. But don't do anything because they don't want to look petty.
3. After spending some time going through those 15 boxes, the FBI and DOJ are like, "Hey, not for nothing, but the recordkeepers seem to think we're missing a bunch of documents still... and many of them contain classified information pertinent to National Security. We have it on authority that you still have them, and must insist you turn them over.
4. Trump's lawyers tell the DOJ & FBI to get f***ed, they're not turning over anything else.
5. DOJ/FBI go to a judge and get a warrant.
6. DOJ/FBI raid Mar-A-Lago and recover at least 15 more boxes of documents, many of which contain classified info (potentially top secret, but at least secret and confidential info).
7. Trump and his cabal of loons freak out that he didn't just get to do whatever he wanted, when asked more than once to comply.


Like... this is the fuss. This isn't some "GOTCHA!" raid like Fox News and the right are claiming where the FBI "planted evidence". It's documents that were missing, they knew they existed and they "vanished", and they knew Trump was the only person that should have them, and now they're recovered... but he got asked twice to return them... when he should have never taken them in the first place, and his own dumb ass signed the bill that made it a felony to do what he's doing.

Because they're classified info, by being in possession of them, he's not just in violation of the Presidential Records Act, but potentially the Espionage Act.


Marcy Wheeler summarizing, on Twitter:



That's the latest summary of "TRUMP SELF-OWNS, VOL. 87". His lawyers have f***ed up on a level only dwarfed by Alex Jones' lawyer. But that'll happen when you don't pay lawyers and keep doing all the crimes.

I'm having flashbacks of Norman Osborn impaling himself on his own glider.

[scourge]

Who would be punished here? And what is the punishment?

You damn well know we're talking about Graham.
And I'm all for locking him in jail until he complies with the subpoena but I'm not super familiar with the exact law down in Georgia.

[worstblogever]

Donald Trump… is not gone. He is still a threat. However, he is also arguably an albatross upon the GOP. Their voters do not know how to move on past him. Their elected officials fear retribution at the ballot box or perhaps in the form of violence from them, and did not rip the band-aid off in January of 2021. Trump still has hijacked GOP fundraising to funnel money intended for candidates into his own coffers. They still make him the featured speaker at CPAC, where all he can do for the party’s bleak future is drone on endlessly about how he’s actually the victim of a massive conspiracy. He’s still grifting, even while facing numerous grand jury investigations for trying to subvert the 2020 election, and his shady business practices. That includes last month, in July of 2020, when his first wife Ivana passed away, and he took $140,000 from her estate to inter her remains near to the first tee of his golf course in a pauper’s grave, which is, of course, a tax avoidance scheme to try to have his Bedminster Golf Course declared a “cemetery” so they can pay less taxes on it.

The earth on top of her burial site was still fresh, and Trump chose to do business with the Saudi-backed LIV Golf Tournament, partying only days after Ivana’s death, and only weeks before the 21st Anniversary of 9/11, defending the Saudis for any responsibility in the Sept. 11th attacks.

The country needs to heal, not just figuratively, in its soul from the hatred he stoked for the past six years (ten if you want to go back to when he was pushing Birtherism), but literally needs to heal from the incompetence his leadership has caused in the Covid-19 response. He continues to side with Vladimir Putin and Russia, no matter how dubious their actions. He complimented them when they escalated their war into Ukraine and tried to attack Kyiv, and when they arrested Britney Griner to effectively turn her into a political prisoner, he’s disparaging her.

His legal woes escalate, and he no longer has the presidency to shield himself from lawsuits or criminal charges. He repeatedly ignored the law regarding keeping official presidential records, and tried to take 15 pages of official documents, some of them classified as secret, to Mar-A-Lago as personal souvenirs or worse, espionage materials to trade. He thinks by running for president in 2024, that the minute he announces he’s a candidate, he’ll be granted immunity from prosecution. Republican insiders are dreading the impact it could have if he announces prior to the 2022 mid-terms. He continues to hold the Republican Party hostage, and is picking some of the absolute worst candidates and worst people to potentially be elected to office, further damning their chances to take back the House and Senate.

At the state level, Republican state legislators have tried paving the road so that when they attempt a coup again in 2024, that it will work this time. Trump is still harassing state legislators to overturn the 2020 election results (which is still a crime). He is going out of his way to try and contact witnesses testifying to the January 6th committee, which is, y’know, witness tampering and also a crime.

Like the malignant narcissist he is, he continues to hold hate rallies, but in the middle of them, he blurts out admissions of guilt in phases of his coup attempt. And if there were any sign he has no remorse over his actions, it would probably be that he’s dangled the idea of pardoning the January 6th attackers if he’s re-elected in 2024.

While his support has finally started to dwindle among some of his followers, others are still rabidly dedicated enough to send death threats towards members o the January 6th committee. He is aware how bad the January 6th hearings make him look, what with 6 in 10 Americans wanting him jailed for his actions and inactions that day.

Meanwhile, he’s armchair quarterbacking the decisions GOP leaders made along the way that have left only Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger on the bipartisan committee, when he’s the one that pressured them to make them in the first place. Still without his Twitter account, Trump’s messaging onslaught is blunted, but it’s clear he doesn’t seem to have any idea what the hell is actually happening on a day to day basis, but when he has a coherent thought, it’s usually repeating his “Big Lie” about election fraud or referencing posts from users calling in him to start a Civil War.

His health may be starting to catch up with him at his age more than it already appeared to, and the only negative to him suddenly dying would be he would never face justice for his numerous crimes.

We are aware that his supporters will potentially cause violence again if he faces the consequences from his raw criminality, but that’s not a reason to not put him behind bars for tax fraud (he pleaded the Fifth a presidential record 440 times in a New York court this week), allegedly violating the Presidential Records Act, if not the Espionage Act, and stealing documents (The FBI raided Mar-A-Lago within the past week after TWICE asking for the documents he refused to turn over, which if he goes down for this crime, it’s ironically hilarious because he’s the one who signed the law making removing presidential records a felony in yet another self-own), or trying to overthrow the government.

We warned of his fascism, his cruelty, his insanity since he first came down the escalator, going back through his entire life to show his incompetence, bigotry, lack of empathy, and revolting contempt for anyone he deems beneath him (which is everyone).

We’re frankly, f***ing tired of stating the obvious. And we’re hoping and praying he continues to be marginalized in any and all ways until he shuffles off his corpulent, revolting mortal coil and this Earth is spared his toxic presence. Because we sure as hell don’t want to keep writing about him once a year from now until a 2024 presidential run, or beyond. He’s got no place in American politics, he never did, and that it’s even a possibility after years of malfeasance, cruelty, and mass death at his hands, as well as the closest thing we’ve seen to the federal government being overthrown since the Civil War…

Full stop, objectively speaking, Donald Trump can get f***ed.