Pitty the person who inherits the "hang Mike Pence" position in a Trumpzi facist campaign

On Twitter X./ from Mary Trump- niece of Donald Trump (according to her, he hates to be called "Donald")... "While our hysterical friends in the corporate media continue to lose their minds over Joe Biden’s loss of support from the star of Monuments Men, it should be much bigger news that Donald Trump has lost the support of virtually every single person who served with him when he was in the Oval Office--including the vice president his followers, whom he incited, almost murdered on January 6, 2021."

Job Opening: Republican Vice President: Why Donald needs a new running mate

It was on January 6th, 2021, that Donald sent his supporters to attack the Capitol in an attempt to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in American history. That was the day Donald’s most fanatical followers erected gallows outside the Capitol while chanting “Hang Mike Pence.” 

That was the day Donald sat on his ass and watched the attack unfold on television. At the same time, Pence and his family had to be taken to a secure location, barely missing the rioters who were out for his blood.

But Donald had been setting Pence up to be the fall guy all along. Well in advance of January 6th Donald and people in his orbit had been pressuring Pence to reject the Electoral College votes despite the fact that, according to the Constitution, the vice president has no such power.

On January 4, Donald held a rally in Georgia and told the crowd, “I hope Mike Pence comes through for us.”

Early on the morning of the sixth, he tweeted, “If Vice President @Mike_Pence comes through for us, we will win the Presidency.” Later that day he wrote, “All Mike Pence has to do is send them back to the States, AND WE WIN. Do it Mike, this is a time for extreme courage!”

I have zero sympathy for Mike Pence, but the pressure brought to bear on him was enormous and, in the end, he actually did his job. And for that he almost lost his life—because of his boss.

During the Republican primaries in March, Pence told Fox News that “it should come as no surprise that I will not be endorsing Donald Trump this year.”

Well, yes and no. No, it’s not that surprising that Pence wouldn’t endorse the man who almost got him and his family killed. 

But, it is fairly surprising that a candidate for the presidency lost the endorsement of his vice president. Or at least it should be and it is frankly shocking that the corporate media has moved on from this major story.

“During my presidential campaign I made it clear that there were profound differences between me and President Trump on a range of issues, and not just our difference on my Constitutional duties that I exercised on January the 6th,” Pence said at the time.

My memory of Pence during the four impossibly long years of the administration in which he served was that he, as Vice President, was a shameless sycophant who polished my uncle’s boots for four years — abandoning him, refusing to endorse him, and refusing to vote for him seems like a bigger story to me than anything George Clooney has to say.

And it isn’t just Pence—at least 40 of 44 members of Donald’s administration have made it clear they aren’t going to support him. Some of his closest aides go on television every single day to warn the American people that Donald is unfit to hold office.

Mark Esper, Donald’s Secretary of Defense, has stated clearly that Donald is a “threat to democracy.” His former chief of staff, John Kelly said last October that Donald “has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.” National Security Adviser John Bolton sounds the alarm about Donald almost daily.

I’ve known the man my whole life, and since 2020, I’ve been devoted to trying to keep him from being re-elected.

It’s a truism that a man is judged by the company he keeps, so it’s mystifying to me that Donald isn’t being judged for hosting fascists and Holocaust deniers, cultivating the support of Q-Anon conspiracy theorists, sucking up to autocrats and dictators, declaring his allegiance to Proud Boys and other white supremacists, and hanging out with his fellow racists, misogynists, and insurrectionists.

But we — and the media — should be talking a lot more about the company that Donald can’t keep because even the people who know him best, the people who worked with him, know he’s a cruel, dangerous, and incompetent lunatic who will ignore the Constitution and destroy the country.

When Donald announces his pick for vice president, chosen from a group of men who are proven sycophants, the media and the nation should take a moment and ask what happened to the last one.

And that his new VP pick should ask himself what will happen if he chooses the Constitution, the rule of law, and the American people over his corrupt, despicable boss.

Or he can just ask Mike Pence.

Donald Trump tells Americans how he will destroy the U.S. Constitution

Echo opinion by Charles M. Blow published in The New York Times:  At a rally in Wildwood, N.J., former guy Donald Trump said that if he is re-elected, he will “immediately deport” any campus protesters who “come here from another country and try to bring jihadism or anti-Americanism or antisemitism.”

Trump Is Still at War With the Constitution

Of course, Trump dwells in linguistic imprecision (😉IOW "lies"). What does “try to bring” mean? Are we using his definitions of jihadism, anti-Americanism and antisemitism? How would those sentiments be monitored? Would the deportations be extrajudicial? Would the deportations be only of student visa holders, or would it include green card holders?

This campaign pledge — this threat — is not only unworkable; it’s ludicrous. But it’s a powerful bit of propaganda. It ties together Trump’s message of nativism and xenophobia with one of his fixations: an iron-fist approach to protests that challenge his beliefs or interests.

Trump understands, intuitively, the power of crowds, and views it as a pressing threat when aligned against him.

Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper has said Trump was furious about the protests in the summer of 2020, after the murder of George Floyd. In his memoir, Esper wrote that in one meeting, Trump asked, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” According to Esper, Trump believed that the protests made the country — and him — look weak.

Trump has a thirst for authoritarianism because he conflates suppression with strength. In a 1990, interview with Playboy, Trump said this about the Chinese government’s response to the Tiananmen Square protests: “They were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak.”

It’s hard not to conclude that Trump relishes the idea of doing the same.

But what Trump seems to see as a weakness is actually one of America’s strengths, the First Amendment. It protects not only freedom of speech but also the freedom to peaceably assemble.

The First Amendment also protects the freedom of the press, which has been under constant assault from Trump. Not only have his incessant references to the news media as the “enemy of the people” helped to poison public sentiment about the trustworthiness of basic facts; he has long expressed a desire to erode press freedoms in the country in general.

During his 2016, campaign, he promised to “open up our libel laws” to allow news organizations to be more easily sued if they write what he deems “purposely negative and horrible and false articles.” There is already an avenue for litigation for false reporting, but it is the subjective “negative” and “horrible” designations that should set off alarms.

In many ways, Trump is at war with the Constitution itself.

In 2022, just weeks after announcing his current campaign, he took to social media, continuing his lie that the 2020, election had been stolen, writing: “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”

In fact, one of the founders’ greatest fears was a populist demagogue.

As Alexander Hamilton wrote to George Washington in 1792, just a few years after the Constitution was ratified, “the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the country is by flattering the prejudices of the people and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion and bring on civil commotion.”

That is a rather prophetic description of the rise of Trump and the precarious point at which the nation now finds itself.

And if Trump is re-elected, some of his allies are already planning to indulge and institutionalize his authoritarian inklings. Much of what they have planned involves reshaping the executive branch and exploiting regulatory power.

But it would be unwise to think that Trump would limit himself in this way. With an obsequious Congress — which he would have if it is controlled by Republicans — he could also, potentially, enact laws that undermine the Constitution. We’ve seen this before.

In 1798, fearing a possible war with France, a Federalist Party-controlled Congress passed a series of laws known as the Alien and Sedition Acts, permitting the president to deport “aliens” and allowing the arrest, imprisonment and deportation of citizens of an enemy country during wartime. The Sedition Act made it illegal to “print, utter or publish … any false, scandalous and malicious writing” about the government.

As the National Archives explains: “The laws were directed against Democratic-Republicans, the party typically favored by new citizens. The only journalists prosecuted under the Sedition Act were editors of Democratic-Republican newspapers.”

The Sedition Act is no longer on the books, but it is now widely considered to have been unconstitutional. It’s alarming to see so many Americans shrug when a former president floats a similar idea.

As Benjamin Franklin printed in his newspaper, a half-century before our Constitution was written and adopted: “Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved and tyranny is erected on its ruins.”

That appears to be Trump’s (stated❗) ambition.💥