Donald Trump more crazy middle of the night screeds to violate American First Amendment Rights

 Heather Cox Richardson Letter from an American July 11, 2026

Department of Justice has subpoenaed reporters from the New York Times over a story the newspaper published. 

Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager, and Eric Schmitt reported that the Secret Service had security concerns about the Trump emolument violation new Air Force One Boeing 747-8 given to the U.S. by Qatar. So, when tensions escalated with Iran while Trump was in Türkiye for the NATO summit, they asked the president to use one of the other, older, Air Force One planes for his return journey.

Trump and White House officials pushed back strongly against the idea that the new plane had any security problems after pouring what appears to have been hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into renovating the plane. But, according to Adam Gramegna of Military . com, U.S. officials told CBS News that the speed with which the plane was rushed into service meant that it does not have the same protections as the older planes.

According to Devlin Barrett, Glenn Thrush, and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, the story that his prized plane was not as good as the older ones enraged Trump, and the White House called in FBI director Kash Patel to find the two anonymous sources who leaked it. Patel spent about 8 hours on Friday running an investigation from the White House, rather than FBI headquarters, before the reporters received the subpoenas.


U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton, whom Trump has nominated to be the next director of national intelligence, issued the subpoenas. The reporters are ordered to testify before a federal grand jury in Manhattan on Wednesday “in regard to an alleged violation of federal criminal law.” The Department of Justice said the subpoenas are related to “the crime of leaking national security information.”

The Justice Department emphasized that “reporters are not the targets. Those leaking classified information are.” But issuing subpoenas to U.S. journalists, who are protected from government interference by the First Amendment, is a huge red flag. As former Time magazine editor Rick Stengel noted: “The reporting that the Times journalists have been subpoenaed for is exactly the kind of journalism the First Amendment is designed to protect: matters involving national security and taxpayer dollars. Reporting that embarrasses a president is protected speech.”

David McCraw, senior vice president and deputy general counsel for the Times, said: “The appearance of Federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects. Our journalists report the facts and advance the American public’s right to know how their government is operating and their taxpayer dollars are being used. This brazen act should be seen as nothing more than an attempt to prevent the public from knowing what is happening in their country by intimidating journalists from doing their jobs.”

By 11:18 PM on Friday, Trump’s fury had turned back to Iran. He posted on social media that if Iran tried to assassinate him, “Locked and Loaded” missiles would begin to rain down on the country “to completely decimate and destroy all areas of Iran—PRAISE BE TO ALLAH!”  (Maine Writer: Obviously this bullshit 💩💩is an insult to Allah and all Christians should be disgusted by this inappropriate language.)

Today he turned his anger toward those questioning his mental acuity, particularly New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman, who commented on MS NOW about his reference in Türkiye to the “Islamic State of Japan.” At 12:23 PM he lashed out at “Maggot Hagerman” and then, to refute her claims, wrote that he “just finished a perfect physical at Walter Reed, I do it every six months, and I requested another Cognitive Test, the only President to do so, three times, and I aced them all—Got every question right. Few people in Washington, D.C., could do so, including Maggot and her flunky associate, Jonathan Swan. I would be willing to bet they couldn’t get 50% of the questions right.”

The White House said Trump was referring to a physical he underwent in May.

Then, at 3:16, the president’s account posted a screed of almost 450 words complaining angrily that “I win the Election IN A LANDSLIDE against the entire Dumocrat Party,…against almost 100% negative press and Fake News,…especially Maggot Hagerman, one of the most unattractive people in the News “Business,” and her lightweight assistant, Jonathan Swan…. All I do is WIN, often against all odds,” yet no one compliments him on his great successes.

Here he may have had in mind Thursday’s news story from Catherine Rampell of The Bulwark about his claim on social media on Monday that Walmart would be “dropping the price of ground beef by almost 15 percent” “at my Administration’s request.” Rampell reported that a Walmart spokesperson told her a different story: the price cuts were part of usual summer rollbacks, which had begun the week before Trump took credit for them. Rampell noted that Trump “looks for opportunities to slap his name on politically useful things that companies were already planning to do—seasonal sales, major investments, hiring, et very much cetera.”

White House spokesperson Kush Desai clarified on social media that the president’s “announcement was that the sale is extending all summer long,” adding, “The media’s obsessive need to try to undermine any good news when it affects President Trump is pathological.”

A rant about the news media took up most of Trump’s long post, as he insisted that those reporting his bad poll numbers and policy failures “have no credibility…. If the Election was held again today, I would win by even more—Actually, much more!” he posted. “The Dumocrats don’t have what it takes, their Policies are wrong, and they are, generally, stupid people. They are going COMMUNIST because they are a desperately ‘sinking ship,’ and there’s not a thing they can do about it.

“Instead of writing inaccurate, false articles, for over 10 years now, shouldn’t it be time that they say, ‘We give up, we can’t beat him, there seems nothing we can do.’ Isn’t it time they say, ‘TRUMP IS THE BEST POLITICAL ATHLETE OF ALL TIME! CONGRATULATIONS, MR. PRESIDENT. YOU HAVE BEATEN US FOR 10 YEARS, AND WE ARE NOT GOING TO WASTE OUR TIME FIGHTING YOU ANY LONGER. WE CAN’T WIN. DO A GREAT JOB, SIR, RUNNING OUR COUNTRY. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!’”

Journalist Aaron Rupar used a common meme often used to respond to unreasonably long posts. “I ain’t reading all that,” he commented. “I’m happy for u tho. Or sorry that happened.” Conservative lawyer George Conway wrote: “A severely mentally ill man has control of the launch codes for America’s nuclear arsenal, but it doesn’t seem that many people care.”

Almost 450 words evidently weren’t enough. At 4:54 he reiterated the themes of the long post in a shorter one, then a minute later, accused “the Dumocrats” of being communists. A minute after that, he claimed: “The Radical Left Lunatics, often referred to as Dumocrats, have lost control of their Party.”

Apparently, media criticism still stung. At 5:27, Trump took on reports of the high cost of his damaging renovations in Washington, D.C. Posting photos of what he said was “the horrible front of the White House,” he continued: “The Radical Left Dumocrats criticize me for spending so much time bringing our White House back to the Glory of 100 years ago—Actually, it will be far better than that, and they will not shame us for bringing our Great and Brilliant Monuments to the past and the future back to levels never seen before. This is what we are doing all over Washington, D.C., and, in different ways, with our Country, itself!”

But his confidence that American voters will support Republicans in the 2026 elections is shaky enough that he continues to call for the Senate to rig them. At 6:07 he reposted what purported to be a poll from right-wing loyalist Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) claiming that 97.2% of supporters want the Senate to take up the voter suppression SAVE America Act when it goes back into session next week, while only 2.8% want the Senate to take up “Anything else.”

Meanwhile, on Friday a Pentagon official told Rebecca Turco of WJLA 7News in Washington, D.C., that National Guard troops will stay activated in Washington through Inauguration Day 2029 “until law and order are fully restored in our Nation’s Capital.”

“So,” Bill Kristol of The Bulwark commented. “[M]ilitary troops under the direct control of Trump and Hegseth will be on the streets of our nation’s capital for the rest of Trump’s term. The rationale—they’re here to help with a crime emergency—is laughable. But of course the real reason is ominous.”
Notes:

https://www.military.com/justice-department-subpoenas-reporters-air-force-one-security

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/08/us/politics/trump-air-force-one-security.html

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/11/g-s1-133160/justice-department-subpoenas-new-york-times-reporters-over-air-force-one-reporting

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/27/us/politics/air-force-one-trump-cost.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/11/us/politics/white-house-patel-investigation-times.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/11/business/media/new-york-times-trump-subpoenas.html

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-walmart-beef-white-house-b3012769.html

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-says-he-just-finished-physical-walter-reed-2026-07-11/

https://cbs4local.com/news/nation-world/national-guard-washington-dc-pentagon-donald-trump-dc-safe-and-beautiful-mission-metropolitan-police-department-mpd-anti-crime-freedom-250-crime-federal-law-enforcement-emergency-executive-order-7news-district-of-columbia

Mass deportations planned by the Trumpzi loyalists like the ghoul Sephen Miller- Humanitarian horror happening in real time

Echo article published in the The New York Times, by  Charles Savage, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan

Sweeping Raids, Giant Camps and Mass Deportations: Inside Trump’s 2025, Immigration Plans.

If he regains power, Donald Trump wants not only to revive some of the immigration policies criticized as draconian during his presidency, but expand and toughen them.

Former guy Donald J. Trump is planning an extreme expansion of his first-term crackdown on immigration if he returns to power in 2025 — including preparing to round up undocumented people already in the United States on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled.

The plans would sharply restrict both legal and illegal immigration in a multitude of ways.

Trump advisers’ wrongminded vision of abrupt mass deportations would be a recipe for social and economic turmoil, disrupting the housing market and major industries including agriculture and the service sector.

Trump wants to revive his first-term border policies, including banning entry by people from certain Muslim-majority nations and reimposing a Covid 19-era policy of refusing asylum claims — though this time he would base that refusal on assertions that migrants carry other infectious diseases like tuberculosis.

He plans to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year.

To help speed mass deportations, Trump is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings. To help Immigration and Customs Enforcement carry out sweeping raids, he plans to reassign other federal agents and deputize local police officers and National Guard soldiers voluntarily contributed by Republican-run states.

To ease the strain on ICE detention facilities, Trump (like the Nazis) wants to build huge camps to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights. 

And to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Trump would redirect money in the military budget, as he did in his first term to spend more on a border wall than Congress had authorized.

In a public reference to his plans, Trump told a crowd in Iowa in September: “Following the (failed❗) Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” The reference was to a 1954, (failed ❗) campaign to round up and expel Mexican immigrants that was named for an ethnic slur — “Operation Wetback.”

The constellation of Trump’s 2025, plans amounts to an assault on immigration on a scale unseen in modern American history. 

Millions of undocumented immigrants would be barred from the country or uprooted from it years or even decades after settling here.

Such a scale of planned removals would raise logistical, financial and diplomatic challenges and would be vigorously challenged in court. But there is no mistaking the breadth and ambition of the shift  Trump is eyeing.

In a second Trump presidency, the visas of foreign students who participated in anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian protests would be canceled. U.S. consular officials abroad will be directed to expand ideological screening of visa applicants to block people the Trump administration considers to have undesirable attitudes. People who were granted temporary protected status because they are from certain countries deemed unsafe, allowing them to lawfully live and work in the United States, would have that status revoked.

Similarly, numerous people who have been allowed to live in the country temporarily for humanitarian reasons would also lose that status and be kicked out, including tens of thousands of the Afghans who were evacuated amid the 2021, Taliban takeover and allowed to enter the United States. 

Afghans holding special visas granted to people who helped U.S. forces would be revetted ❓😕😒 to see if they really did.

And Trump would try to end birthright citizenship for babies born in the United States to undocumented parents — by proclaiming that policy to be the new position of the government and by ordering agencies to cease issuing citizenship-affirming documents like Social Security cards and passports to them. That policy’s legal legitimacy, like nearly all of Mr. Trump’s plans, would be virtually certain to end up before the Supreme Court.

In interviews with The New York Times, several Trump advisers gave the most expansive and detailed description yet of Trump’s immigration agenda in a potential second term. In particular, Mr. Trump’s campaign referred questions for this article to Stephen Miller 💀👿👽, an architect of Trump’s first-term immigration policies who remains close to him and is expected to serve in a senior role in a second administration.

All of the steps Trump advisers are preparing, Mr. Miller contended in a wide-ranging interview, rely on existing statutes; while the Trump team would likely seek a revamp of immigration laws, the plan was crafted to need no new substantive legislation. And while acknowledging that lawsuits would arise to challenge nearly every one of them, he portrayed the Trump team’s daunting array of tactics as a “blitz” designed to overwhelm immigrant-rights lawyers.

“Any activists who doubt Trump’s (fascist ❗) resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Mr. Miller said, adding, “The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”

Todd Schulte, the president of FWD.us*, an immigration and criminal justice advocacy group that repeatedly fought the Trump administration, said the Trump team’s plans relied on “xenophobic demagoguery” that appeals to his hardest-core political base.

“Americans should understand these policy proposals are an authoritarian, often illegal, agenda that would rip apart nearly every aspect of American life — tanking the economy, violating the basic civil rights of millions of immigrants and native-born Americans alike,” Mr. Schulte said.

‘Poisoning the Blood’

Since Mr. Trump left office, the political environment on immigration has moved in his direction. He is also more capable now of exploiting that environment if he is re-elected than he was when he first won election as an outsider.

The ebbing of the Covid-19 pandemic and resumption of travel flows have helped stir a global migrant crisis, with millions of Venezuelans and Central Americans fleeing turmoil and Africans arriving in Latin American countries before continuing their journey north. Amid the record numbers of migrants at the southern border and beyond it in cities like New York and Chicago, voters are frustrated and even some Democrats are calling for tougher action against immigrants and pressuring the White House to better manage the crisis.

Trump and his advisers see the opening, and now know better how to seize it. The aides Mr. Trump relied upon in the chaotic early days of his first term were sometimes at odds and lacked experience in how to manipulate the levers of federal power. By the end of his first term, cabinet officials and lawyers who sought to restrain some of his actions — like his Homeland Security secretary and chief of staff, John F. Kelly — had been fired, and those who stuck with him had learned much.

In a second term, Trump plans to install a team that will not restrain him. 

Since much of Trump’s first-term immigration crackdown was tied up in the courts, the legal environment has tilted in his favor: His four years of judicial appointments left behind federal appellate courts and a Supreme Court that are far more conservative than the courts that heard challenges to his first-term policies.

The fight over Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals provides an illustration. DACA is an Obama-era program that shields from deportation and grants work permits to people who were brought unlawfully to the United States as children. Trump tried to end it, but the Supreme Court blocked him on procedural grounds in June 2020.

Stephen Miller is the Nazi minded architect of the Trumpzi massive immigrant deportation plan.

Stephen Miller said Trump would try again to end DACA. And the 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court that blocked the last attempt no longer exists: A few months after the DACA ruling, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and Trump replaced her with a sixth conservative, Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Trump’s rhetoric has more than kept up with his increasingly extreme agenda on immigration.

His stoking of fear and anger toward immigrants — pushing for a border wall and calling Mexicans rapists — fueled his 2016 takeover of the Republican Party. As president, he privately mused about developing a militarized border like Israel’s, asked whether migrants crossing the border could be shot in the legs and wanted a proposed border wall topped with flesh-piercing spikes and painted black to burn migrants’ skin.

As Trumpzi campaigned for the party’s third straight presidential nomination, his anti-immigrant tone has only grown harsher. 

In a recent interview with a right-wing website, Trump claimed without evidence that foreign leaders were deliberately emptying their “insane asylums” to send the patients across America’s southern border as migrants. He said migrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” And at a rally on Wednesday in Florida, he compared them to the fictional serial killer and cannibal Hannibal Lecter, saying, “That’s what’s coming into our country right now.”

Trump had similarly vowed to carry out mass deportations when running for office in 2016, but the government only managed several hundred thousand removals per year under his presidency, on par with other recent administrations. If they get another opportunity, Trump and his team are determined to achieve annual numbers in the millions.

Keeping People Out

Trump’s immigration plan is to pick up where he left off and then go much farther. He would not only revive some of the policies that were criticized as draconian during his presidency, many of which the Biden White House ended, but also expand and toughen them.

One example centers on expanding first-term policies aimed at keeping people out of the country. Trump plans to suspend the nation’s refugee program and once again categorically bar visitors from troubled countries, reinstating a version of his ban on travel from several mostly Muslim-majority countries, which President Biden called discriminatory and ended on his first day in office.

Trump would also use coercive diplomacy to induce other nations to help, including by making cooperation a condition of any other bilateral engagement, Miller said. For example, a second Trump administration would seek to re-establish an agreement with Mexico that asylum seekers remain there while their claims are processed. (It is not clear that Mexico would agree; a Mexican court has said that deal violated human rights.)

Trump would also push to revive “safe third country” agreements with several nations in Central America, and try to expand them to Africa, Asia and South America. Under such deals, countries agree to take would-be asylum seekers from specific other nations and let them apply for asylum there instead.

While such arrangements have traditionally only covered migrants who had previously passed through a third country, federal law does not require that limit and a second Trump administration would seek to make those deals without it, in part as a deterrent to migrants making what the Trump team views as illegitimate asylum claims.

At the same time, (ghoul❗) Miller said, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CMS) would invoke the public health emergency powers law known as Title 42 to again refuse to hear any asylum claims by people arriving at the southern border. The Trump administration had internally discussed that idea early in Trump’s term, but some cabinet secretaries pushed back, arguing that there was no public health emergency that would legally justify it. The administration ultimately implemented it during the coronavirus pandemic.

Saying the idea has since gained acceptance in practice — President Biden initially kept the policy — Miller-Trump racist policy would invoke Title 42, citing “severe strains of the flu, tuberculosis, scabies, other respiratory illnesses like R.S.V. and so on, or just a general issue of mass migration being a public health threat and conveying a variety of communicable diseases.”

Trump and his aides have not yet said whether they would re-enact one of the most contentious deterrents to unauthorized immigration that he pursued as president: separating children from their parents, which led to trauma among migrants and difficulties in reuniting families. When pressed, Trump has repeatedly declined to rule out reviving the policy. After an outcry over the practice, Trump ended it in 2018 and a judge later blocked the government from putting it back into effect.
Mass Deportations

Soon after Trump announced his 2024, campaign for president last November, he met with Tom Homan, who ran ICE for the first year and a half of the Trump administration and was an early proponent of separating families to deter migrants.

In an interview, Homan recalled that in that meeting, he “agreed to come back” in a second term and would “help to organize and run the largest deportation operation this country’s ever seen.”

Trump falls asleep during his criminal trial so he is incompetement to stay awake in the White House

Trump Is Furious He Got Caught Sleeping in Court
Echo report published in New York Magazine Intelligencer by Margaret Hartman:

Journalist Maggie Haberman is a target of Trump rages 

If a normal person fell asleep during a high-profile trial over hush-money payments they made to cover up an affair with a porn star, how would they react?

It’s a bit hard to say, since a normal person would never be in this scenario. But it seems likely they’d be embarrassed or angry at themselves.

Sleepy Don

Of course, Donald Trump doesn’t experience those emotions. So instead he has “privately raged” at the journalists who informed the public that he’s been unable to keep his eyes open in court, according to three sources who spoke to Rolling Stone.

The magazine reported that Trump has been particularly focused on Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, with whom he’s had a long, complicated relationship. Last Monday, on the Manhattan trial’s first day, she reported, “Trump appears to be sleeping. His head keeps dropping down and his mouth goes slack.” Then she repeated her observation in an interview with CNN. Per Rolling Stone:

The observation immediately went viral, provoking an irate denial from Trump’s campaign and reigniting the former president’s antipathy towards Haberman, who has been reporting on him for years. The resentment lasted the entire week, the sources add.

… In recent conversations with Republican associates, Trump has repeatedly torn into Haberman and her CNN appearances, attacked her journalistic credentials, and bizarrely insisted that she was wrong about him falling asleep. 

Despite his dozing being widely reported, the former president has laid much of the blame for the detail going viral at Haberman’s feet. He was even observed glaring at her on Monday as he exited the courtroom following her CNN appearance.

Haberman was the most prominent journalist to cover Trump’s courtroom naps, but several other reporters backed up her observation. And if Trump was so deeply upset by the accusation, he probably should have channeled that energy into staying awake; multiple journalists saw him sleeping in court two more times last week.

The “Sleepy Don” narrative isn’t the only thing sending Trump over the edge. Rolling Stone reported that he’s also upset about late-night hosts joking about the trial (which explains last week’s incoherent Truth Social rant about Jimmy Kimmel) and how he’s been portrayed by courtroom sketch artists:

Trump has also privately asked people close to him if they agree that the courtroom sketch-artist must be out to get him, two of the sources say. Trump has critiqued the sketches of him that have circulated in the media this week, and insisted some of the images were likely drawn to make fun of him. One such sketch captured Trump snoozing, with his eyes closed and head tilted.

When court broke for lunch on Tuesday, Trump was observed licking his lips as he walked down the middle aisle before flashing a small smile at the courtroom sketch artist as he exited.

So he’s upset about both journalists and sketch artists relaying what they’re seeing with their own eyes. I hate to needle a guy who’s already feeling paranoid, but it seems objective reality is “out to get” Trump.

John Eastman is a fake news expert!

Echo report published in The New York Times by Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman.

The former guy Trump is "able to muddy the waters so thoroughly that democracy wilts on the vine", The Independent

John Eastman’s path from little-known academic to one of the most influential voices in Donald J. Trump’s ear in the final days of his presidency began in mid-2019, on Mr. Trump’s favorite platform: television.

Mr. Trump, who had never met Mr. Eastman, saw him on the Fox News talk show of the far-right commentator Mark Levin railing against the Russia investigation. Within two months, Mr. Eastman was sitting in the Oval Office for an hourlong meeting.

Soon, Mr. Eastman was meeting face to face at Mr. Trump’s urging with the attorney general, William P. Barr, and telling him how Mr. Trump could unilaterally impose limits on birthright citizenship.

Then, after the November election, Mr. Eastman wrote the memo for which he is now best known, laying out steps that Vice President Mike Pence could take to keep Mr. Trump in power — measures Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans have likened to a blueprint for a coup.

Mr. Eastman’s memo is among the most alarming of the continuing revelations about the last stages of Mr. Trump’s time in the White House, when he was prompting the Justice Department to find ways to reverse his loss in the election and his top general was worried about the nuclear chain of command.

Mr. Eastman’s rise within Mr. Trump’s inner circle in the chaotic final weeks of his administration also underscores the degree to which Mr. Trump not only relied on, but encouraged, a crew of players from the fringes of politics. They became key participants in his efforts to remain in power as many of his longtime aides and lawyers refused to help him.

John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, said in an interview that it was troubling that at such a critical juncture, Mr. Trump had pushed aside the Justice Department and White House counsel.

Instead, he said, Mr. Trump was listening to an outsider “without the institutional learning that has gone on for a couple of hundred years that undergirds the advice that is normally given to presidents that keep them in sane channels.”

Mr. Eastman’s appeal to Mr. Trump, fleshed out in interviews with Mr. Eastman and others who dealt with him during this period, rested in large part on his expansive views of presidential power — and his willingness to tell Mr. Trump what he wanted to hear.

When it came to immigration policy, a favorite topic of both men, Mr. Eastman argued that Mr. Trump could use his executive authority to impose limits on birthright citizenship — the foundational concept that anyone born in the United States is automatically a citizen — by saying it should not be applied to people born in the United States to noncitizens.

But Mr. Barr, who was increasingly finding himself having to fend off the advice of outside lawyers, television commentators and Mar-a-Lago hangers-on, dismissed the idea, saying Mr. Eastman’s argument was a stretch and ultimately impractical.

Mr. Eastman admitted Mr. Barr was right.

“Well, tell that to the president,” Mr. Barr told him.

Still, by early January 2021, amid his wide-ranging effort to overturn the election results, Mr. Trump had become so enamored of Mr. Eastman’s advice that the two teamed up in an Oval Office meeting to pressure Mr. Pence to intervene to help Mr. Trump remain in power by delaying the Jan. 6 certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.

In a two-page memo written by Mr. Eastman that had been circulated to the White House in the days before the certification — revealed in the new book “Peril”, by the Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa — Mr. Eastman said that Mr. Pence as vice president was “the ultimate arbiter” of the election, essentially saying he had the power to determine who won, and that “we should take all of our actions with that in mind.”

As Mr. Trump hints at another run in 2024, Mr. Eastman remains a bridge between the former president and the continuing efforts by some of his supporters to promote specious allegations of widespread election fraud in 2020 and to undercut faith in the electoral system.

In a series of interviews, Mr. Eastman said he was continuing to investigate reports of election fraud and was writing a book on the subject. He also said he would still like to represent Mr. Trump, who faces a range of legal battles.

He declined to say whether he had advised any state legislatures — which have become hubs for Republican efforts to push claims of election fraud — on voting issues. And he insisted that his two-page memo, which he said he hastily wrote while on Christmas vacation with his family in Texas, had been taken out of context, but defended his view that Mr. Pence could have done far more to help Mr. Trump.

“I won’t be cowed by public opposition to it,” Mr. Eastman said.

He added: “There are lots of allegations out there that didn’t get their day in court and lots of people that believe them and wish they got their day in court. and I am working very diligently with several teams — statistical teams, election specialists teams, all sorts of teams — to try and identify the various claims and determine whether they have merit or there is reasonable explanation for them.”

Like many of the lawyers who worked in Mr. Trump’s administration, Mr. Eastman had strong conservative legal credentials, initially giving him a patina of respect in Mr. Trump’s inner circle.

Mr. Eastman attended law school at the University of Chicago and clerked for both Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court and Judge J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge who President George W. Bush considered for the Supreme Court. He is a member of the conservative Federalist Society and a former dean of the law school at Chapman University in Orange County, Calif. For two decades, he ran his own small law firm that focused on representing conservatives on issues like free speech, religious liberty, abortion and immigration.

After Election Day, Mr. Eastman served as a behind-the-scenes legal quarterback of sorts for Mr. Trump, alarming some of Mr. Trump’s aides, who feared he had found someone to enable his worst instincts at one of the most dangerous moments of his presidency. And it surprised many of Mr. Eastman’s longtime friends and others, who questioned whether his access to power had skewed his vision of reality.

“You’re always at risk when every fail-safe mechanism breaks down,” Mr. Bolton said.

Mr. Eastman’s role in Mr. Trump’s efforts to remain in power began the weekend after the election in Philadelphia, where Mr. Eastman had traveled for an academic conference. At a nearby hotel, Mr. Trump’s closest aides, including Corey Lewandowski, were putting together a legal brief to challenge the results in Pennsylvania.

Mr. Eastman had put himself on the radar of Mr. Trump’s political aides during the election when Jenna Ellis, a legal adviser to Mr. Trump’s campaign, had shared on Twitter an article Mr. Eastman had written. 

In fact, the article, in an echo of racist questions stoked by Mr. Trump about where President Barack Obama had been born, questioned whether Kamala Harris*, Mr. Biden’s running mate, could legally become president because her parents had not been born in the United States. (OMG!)

*Vice President Kamala Harris- Early life, family and education (1964–1990) Kamala Devi Harris was born in Oakland, California, on October 20, 1964! 

Toiletgate: More about Trumpzi's and toilets

Trump's toilet obsession just took a dark turn. 

Echo report published in Vanity Fair written by Bess Levin

"Maggie Haberman reports Trump has told people that since leaving office, he has remained in contact with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un—whose 'love letters', as Trumpzi once called them, were among documents the National Archives retrieved from Mar-a-Lago." So that’s nice for them. (Oh paleeze!)

Axios first reported on Wednesday one of the accounts Maggie Haberman details in her forthcoming books is that White House staffers regularly found ripped-up printed paper clogging a toilet in the presidential residence during Trump's time in office. 


Maggie Lindsy Haberman is an American journalist. She is a White House correspondent for The New York Times and a political analyst for CNN. 

Of the many obsessions that Donald Trump inflicted on the public during his four years in office—his hatred of windmills, the heights of politicians, hydroxychloroquine—one of the most bizarre was his fixation with toilets. Specifically, his insistence that it took an inordinate number of flushes to clear the bowl. “People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times as opposed to once,” he told reporters from the Roosevelt Room in 2019, claiming the EPA was looking into the alleged problem. “Ten times, right, 10 times,” he told rallygoers the following year. “Not me, of course not me. But you,” he said, pointing to a random member of the crowd, who we assume was mortified by the accusation.

In Trump’s telling, toilets were suddenly requiring nearly a dozen flushes due to onerous environmental regulations, which he insisted were not only killing businesses, but also creating scenarios in which people were spending half their day in the bathroom. Except, not one person—even among those who were similarly anti-regulation—ever came forward to claim that they, too, were flushing 10 to 15 times. This was clearly a Trump-specific issue. That made the whole thing not just ridiculous but deeply uncomfortable, in that it forced the American people to 1) picture the president sitting on the toilet, and 2) ponder the seemingly horrifying things coming out of him that necessitated an absurd number of jiggles of the handle.

But on Thursday, a new theory emerged: Perhaps it wasn’t Trump’s diet or the tiny demons that live inside him that required him to flush, flush, and flush again, but the fact that he was shoving documents down the bowl?

While TFG Trump was in office, staff in the White House residence periodically discovered wads of printed paper clogging a toilet—and believed the president had flushed pieces of paper, Maggie Haberman scoops in her forthcoming book, Confidence Man.

Why it matters: The revelation by Haberman, whose coverage as a New York Times White House correspondent was followed obsessively by Trump, adds a vivid new dimension to his lapses in preserving government documents.… The news of White House toilet-flushing comes as the National Archives has reportedly asked the Biden Justice Department to examine Trump’s handling of White House records, amid the congressional investigation into the January 6 assault on the Capitol. The Washington Post reports that National Archives officials “suspected Trump had possibly violated laws concerning the handling of government documents.” The National Archives later retrieved 15 boxes from Mar-a-Lago, the Post reported. Archives officials found possible classified material in the returned boxes, The New York Times learned.

In response to the toilet claim, Trump insisted in a statement that the allegation was “another fake story,” one “simply made up by a reporter in order to get publicity for a mostly fictitious book.”

News of Trump’s decision to abscond with more than a dozen boxes of presidential records comes alongside detailed reporting on his habit of shredding documents that were meant to be preserved and turned over to the Archives without issue. “The ripping was so relentless that Trump’s team implemented protocols to try to ensure that he was abiding by the Presidential Records Act,” according to the Post, which involved “aides from either the Office of the Staff Secretary or the Oval Office Operations team [coming] in behind Trump to retrieve the piles of torn paper he left in his wake,” and then painstakingly 

Good riddance to TFG*

“jigsawing the documents back together, using clear tape.” One person familiar with the matter told the Post, the Archives staff was “stunned at how many papers they received from the Trump administration that were ripped,” calling it “unprecedented.” Also seemingly unprecedented? A president perhaps disposing of official government property via the toilet; we just hope and pray no one was tasked with fishing out and drying off said property.

*The Former Guy

Crazy is as crazy does: Former Guy lives in delusion

Trump supporters and QAnon believers anticipating a coup that would restore Trump to the White House, Maggie Haberman noted.

Echo report published in Forbes Magazine from an article by Maggie Haberman:

CIACD

Trump has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August (no that isn’t how it works but simply sharing the information).

(Maine Writer: Crazy is as crazy does!)

The former president is telling allies he will be reinstated as President in August, due to fake audits by his fans and new GOP laws to overturn elections. Any politician who thinks the value of the filibuster exceeds the value of protecting America’s voting process is an idiot!

The New York Times’ Washington Correspondent Maggie Haberman reports that former President Donald Trump is telling “a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated” as president by August.

In a message posted to Twitter sharing a CNN report on Trump supporters and QAnon believers anticipating a coup that would restore Trump to the White House, Haberman noted “that isn’t how it works but simply sharing the information.”

Haberman says “it isn’t happening in a vacuum” but seems to be part of a strategy by Trump to counter the possibility of an indictment. “He is not putting out statements about the ‘audits’ in states just for the sake of it,” Haberman writes. “He’s been laser focused on them, according to several people who’ve spoken with him.”

The idea that the former president could be reinstated has gained traction among some die-hard supporters. At an event called the For God and Country Patriot Roundup Saturday, former Trump election lawyer Sidney Powell said Trump could “simply be reinstated,” a comment that drew cheers, according to a Newsweek report.

As CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan reported, former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn appeared at the same convention and appeared to support the idea of a “Myanmar-style coup” that could return the presidency to Trump—though he has attempted to walk back that suggestion.

The idea that the former president could be reinstated has gained traction among some die-hard supporters. At an event called the For God and Country Patriot Roundup Saturday, former Trump election lawyer Sidney Powell said Trump could “simply be reinstated,” a comment that drew cheers, according to a Newsweek report.

As CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan reported, former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn appeared at the same convention and appeared to support the idea of a “Myanmar-style coup” that could return the presidency to Trump—though he has attempted to walk back that suggestion. (Maine Writer- It's impossible to believe how #FlynnUSARet continues to receive a military pension when he has lied to the #FBI! 

The Photo That May Help Unlock the Trump-Russia Scandal
Congressional investigators say Trump’s former national security adviser lied about being paid to dine with Putin. (Mother Jones photo)

CIACD! "It's a ridiculous, preposterous statement. The idea that it comes from a former flag officer of the United States is beyond appalling," Neal Katyal says. "This is a guy who lacks any credibility, any sense of honor, any sense of decency.").

(Maine Writer- Flynn's behavior should cause him to face a court- martial!) 

But not everyone in Trump’s orbit buys into the idea that Trump could soon get his old job back. Jenna Ellis, another of the former president’s attorneys, said “no, President Trump is not going to be ‘reinstated.’” (Trumpzi-Dumpzi had a great fall.....!)

The U.S. Constitution has only one process for removal of a sitting president: impeachment and conviction. 

No, Trump is not going to be “reinstated.”

#FormerGuyDelusion

Exit alert! Donald Trump can't even keep a loyal personal assistant!

Trump’s Personal Assistant, Madeleine Westerhout, Steps Down (You're fired!)

So, Maine Writer question? Will Donald Trump appoint an "interim" personal assistant? Nearly everybody who surrounds him is "interim", while the neon exit sign on the White House corridor to the door shines with immersive 3 Dimensional intensity.  

A report published in The New York Times, by Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman.

Donald Trump’s personal assistant, Madeleine Westerhout, whose office sits in front of the Oval Office and who has served as the president’s gatekeeper since Day 1 of his administration, resigned on Thursday, two people familiar with her exit said.

Ms. Westerhout’s abrupt and unexpected departure came after Mr. Trump learned on Thursday that she had indiscreetly shared details about his family and the Oval Office operations she was part of at a recent off-the-record dinner with reporters staying at hotels near Bedminster, N.J., during the president’s working vacation, according to one of the people, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss White House personnel issues.

Madeleine Westerhout is now a former personal assistant to Donald Trump

The breach of trust meant immediate action: Ms. Westerhout, one of the people familiar with her departure said, was now considered a “separated employee” and would not be allowed to return to the White House on Friday.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Ms. Westerhout did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

Ms. Westerhout, a former Republican National Committee aide who also worked for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, reportedly cried on election night because she was upset over Mr. Trump’s victory. As such, the president at first viewed her warily, as a late convert to his cause who could not be trusted.

But some of Mr. Trump’s top officials — like John F. Kelly, who has since left as chief of staff — tried to turn Ms. Westerhout into an ally who could help them manage Oval Office traffic. They hoped that she could block individuals from reaching the president on the phone or in person, and that she would report back on the calls and meetings that made it through.

Ms. Westerhout’s power in the White House came almost entirely from proximity. She is not a name-brand White House aide and has never appeared on television, unless it was an accidental shot of her hovering behind her boss. But while she was not a decision maker, she enjoyed unique access to Trump.

She also often shared snapshots on her private Instagram account of her life in the West Wing, including travel to rallies and Trump properties, and in one post she joked that she had been responsible for printing out a piece of paper that Mr. Trump held up and referred to at a public event.