Donald Trump and maga Republicans ignoring the lunacy of a failed administration where moral incompetence is running amok

The Psych-Ward Lunacy of Donald Trump
Obviously, Donald Trump has no moral core. 

And, according to his own chief of staff, he’s surrounded by amateurs, opportunists, and drug users.😵

Another tranche of sour🤢  💲economic data came down from the Bureau of Labor Statistics today. Jobs rose by 64,000 in November, but fell in October by 105,000, thanks in part to DOGE-induced federal layoffs that finally took effect. Even worse❗ 

So, the US economy is now losing blue-collar jobs—for the first time since the pandemic— and the unemployment rate ticked up more than expected, to 4.6 percent, the highest in four years. "Happy Holidays"❗😓😞😡

Donald Trump Is Morally Inept and Mentally Ill- As a professional registered nurse, my opinion about Trump's inability to behave like a human being is because he is overwhelmed by the stress of trying to be a King instead of behaving like a competent leader. Stress is a conduit to mental illness, believe me, psychiatric hospitalized patients give evidence to this cause and effect. 

This assessment is reported by Mona Charen in The Bulwark:

Tragedy in Hollywood. Indeed, the world reacted in horror to the news of the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife, apparently at the hands of their own troubled son. Donald Trump had a more uniquely evil response.

Donald Trump's patholically deranged post is narcissistic, crude, stupid, and cruel. No human adult outside a psych ward expresses such thoughts. This is Donald Trump's low IQ statement is evidence of a twisted soul.

A bizarre response unconnected to the reality about what happened to Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer Reiner. A mental health nurse would call this "tangential thinking", a symptom of mental illness. 

A couple was murdered in their own home, their throats slit. 

Rob Reiner was a Hollywood giant who played a huge part in American culture for half a century and brought pleasure to millions around the globe. One might think that Trump’s admiration for fame and money alone might have stayed his hand in celebrating this tragic crime. But no. Reiner was a Democrat and an opponent of Trump, so our commander in chief, who evidently fantasizes about the violent death of every critic, took time out of his busy TV-watching schedule to gloat that Reiner had been murdered because of his “raging obsession” with Trump.

Take a minute just to marvel at this. For most people, the idea of political violence committed by one’s own side is so psychologically uncomfortable that many would prefer to pretend it doesn’t exist. When such violence does break out, many prefer to retreat into comfortable lies rather than face the fact that their allies might stoop to such lows. And when the evidence is overwhelming that their confederates have done something despicable, they reach for crutches like “false flag.”

Trump is the opposite. So powerful is his thirst for political violence that he not only fails to recoil from it when it breaks out; he fantasizes that it’s taking place even when it isn’t. There’s zero reason to believe Reiner’s murder had anything to do with his political opposition to Trump. But the president says this is true for the same reason he says many false things are true: because he wants it to be true.

Has there ever been a simpler encapsulation of the Trump era❗❓

We suffer daily through reminders about the weakness of Donald Trump's amoral mind, but the United States has muddled along with other dim presidents. Where Trump occupies a category all his own is in his breathtaking moral depravity.

And witness the devoted maga cult cheering section who insist upon overlooking this man’s monstrousness. 

Donald Trump’s immorality has been on vivid display for a decade, but the response by his defenders has always been to treat attention to the matter either as pure partisanship or as class condescension.

For those whose minds were not nailed shut, however, the brutality of his actions comes as no surprise. Yes, a man who could rouse a crowd to murderous fury to attack Congress and his own vice president can assassinate people in boats, starve and kill hungry mothers and children in poor nations, pardon powerful drug runners, and send hapless immigrants to foreign gulags.

During these ethical swamp years, Trump’s denizens have fallen back again and again to excusing his evil as a matter of manners. Sorry, no. This is not a matter of style. The man is a moral abomination, and so are his defenders.

Not only that—notice how he continually makes his lackeys worse. Before Trump weighed in on this double horrific tragedy, most of the right wing’s social media discourse over Reiner was taking place in an odd, sanctimonious register—genuine shock and mourning over the tragedy paired with a million self-congratulatory little soliloquies about how Republicans, unlike those deranged leftists, don’t dance on the graves of their opponents. But then Trump posted, and the tone swung round at once: Suddenly dancing on Reiner’s grave was very much in style.

It is hard to be surprised. When you’ve spent ten years allowing your conscience to atrophy, there’s no muscle left.

“There’s no question that Trump is unfit for office" said Representative Liz Cheney

The Lesson of Trump: Character Matters (The Bulwark)

Donald Trump Is Now Forever Disgraced

By Brenda Wineapple echo opinion published in The New York Times.

On Monday, at the final public hearing of the House January 6 committee, Representative Bennie Thompson said that any attempt to overturn the legitimate results of an American election, impede the peaceful transfer of power or foment an insurrection must never be allowed to happen again. 

To that end, Representative Jamie Raskin firmly announced that the committee was making four criminal referrals whose center, in each, was Donald Trump, the man who hatched a scheme that would, if successful, defraud Americans of their sacred right to have their vote count. (House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Rep. Andy Biggs, Rep. Jim Jordan and Rep. Scott Perry, all close allies of Trump.)

These unprecedented referrals suggest that Mr. Trump, who as president took an oath to uphold the Constitution, not only violated that oath, but also committed a series of specifically indictable crimes. One of these referrals — for the crime of inciting an insurrection — is the most stunning, the most unpredictable and the most crucial, for its implications and its remedy include barring the former president from holding political office.

In making these referrals, the committee was certainly considering the past as well. Representative Liz Cheney spoke movingly of her great-great-grandfather, Samuel Fletcher Cheney, who served in the Union’s 21st Regiment, Ohio Infantry, during the Civil War. After the war, he marched with his fellow soldiers in the Grand Review of the Armies, passing President Andrew Johnson in the reviewing stand. She might also have added that Johnson, the 17th president of the United States, would soon be impeached. Like Donald Trump. And like Donald Trump, he was acquitted.

Johnson then returned to office, almost as if nothing had happened. That’s a cautionary tale- (a warning of what was to reoccur in 2020).

After Ulysses S. Grant won the election of 1868, Johnson went home to Tennessee, where he began to plot his comeback. Since he possessed a talent for uniting moderate and radical Republicans along with Democrats and former secessionists, many of whom either hated him or now wanted nothing more to do with him, it wouldn’t be easy. But it wasn’t illegal.

He hadn’t tried to overturn the election of Grant. He hadn’t impeded the peaceful transfer of power. (But like Mr. Trump, he refused to attend his successor’s inauguration.) He had abused power, usurping the function of Congress, which has the right to determine the qualifications of its own members — all the more critical after a civil war in which 11 states had been in rebellion.

As for inciting or aiding an insurrection, that was arguable. Though a staunch Unionist, in 1866, Johnson had stood by silently during the massacre in New Orleans that prevented a state convention from amending its Constitution to give Black men the vote. The mob included members of the New Orleans police department, which was largely composed of former rebels. They were supported by the mayor, a Confederate sympathizer, who had been jailed during the war as a traitor and elected even before he was pardoned.

A 1867, congressional investigation into that tragedy reported that more than 35 people, the vast majority of them Black, had died, and roughly 145 people were wounded. It also found that the massacre would never have happened without Johnson’s tacit approval. 

Moreover, the abolitionist Wendell Phillips predicted that “what New Orleans is today, Washington will be” — “ruled by the president and his mob.”

In 1868, when he was finally impeached, the 10th article of impeachment accused Johnson of ridiculing Congress and setting aside its authority, and the 11th article involved his obstructing its laws. During the impeachment trial, when Representative John Bingham of Ohio argued for the president’s conviction, he reminded senators that “none are above the law; that no man lives for himself alone, ‘but each for all.’” With tears in his eyes, he concluded that “position, however high, patronage, however powerful, cannot be permitted to shelter crime to the peril of the Republic.”

But since the Senate did not convict Andrew Johnson, there was no way to disqualify him from holding office. He may have abused power, ridiculed Congress, arrogated to himself a form of Reconstruction that enshrined white supremacy, but the arguable criminal charge (violating the Tenure of Office Act) did not stick — and even if it had, it was an impeachment tribunal, not a court of law, that had charged him.

So a disgraced Johnson returned to Washington in 1875, as a senator from Tennessee. He did not believe he was disgraced. He believed he had done nothing wrong, and though he might have been a bit foul-mouthed, he wanted to know: Who wasn’t? Certainly no one had ever suggested a criminal referral. That is new. Until this week, nothing like it had happened. And the implications are far-reaching.

“So we are to have Andrew Johnson back again,” the Washington journalist Mary Clemmer Ames wrote with some surprise. Not only did he return to the Senate (though he died only a few months after he was sworn in), by the 20th century, history resurrected Andrew Johnson. He would be seen just as he saw himself, the persecuted victim of vicious political enemies.

Which brings us to the investigation into the Capitol riot and the January 6 committee’s four referrals to the Department of Justice for obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to make a false statement and for inciting or assisting an insurrection or offering aid and comfort to its participants. The last is the most important. Violating 18 U.S.C. 2383, which derives from a law dating to the Civil War, carries the penalty that, if convicted, Donald Trump “shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.”

Here, at last, is an accountability that goes beyond what the impeachment managers, regardless of their brilliant arguments, were able to do in 2021. Here is the uncompromising statement that while an insurrection is an impeachable offense — Mr. Trump was after all impeached by the House of Representatives — it is also unequivocally and horribly a criminal act.

January 6, 2021 insurrection and the Hang Mike Pence noose.

This specific referral then holds out the hope that Trump will not be permitted to hold elective or appointed political office ever again. That was arguably the point of the impeachment: to make sure that his political career had ended.

Now, whatever the Department of Justice decides to do and whatever the special counsel Jack Smith discovers or determines, the Jan. 6 committee has achieved what the impeachment of Mr. Trump could not: a series of referrals that caps an expansive and heart-rending investigation into the abuse of power, the obstruction of Congress and the aiding and abetting of a rebellion, condoned, if not designed, by an American president. That president will be remembered as lawless, indicted or not, and will be disgraced in perpetuity, as Andrew Johnson should have been.

As a sample, the January 6 committee claims reported by NPR, that Trump:
1.  "purposely disseminated false allegations of fraud" related to the election

2.  failed to honor his constitutional duties as president

3.  "corruptly pressured Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count electoral votes during Congress’s joint session on January 6th"
4.  unlawfully pressured state officials and legislators to change the election results
5.  oversaw an effort to send false electoral certificates to Congress
6.  pressured members of Congress to object to valid electors
7.  verified false information filed in federal court
8.  summoned thousands of his supporters to Washington on Jan. 6 based on false claims that the election was stolen
9.  further incited violence by tweeting about then-Vice President Mike Pence on January 6
10.  refused repeated requests to ask his supporters to disperse

Corruption in the Trump administration had no bottom: Senate must expose the guilty former guy

The Bulwark reports: "Scan over the past few years and the stench of corruption wafting from Trump’s orbit is staggering. Campaign chairmen who secretly worked for foreign officials while skimming millions on the side. Presidential lawyers defrauding banks and taxpayers alike, or ushering in whichever foreign patron they could find. All of this while Trump tossed open the doors of his business to any and all comers, regardless of sources of their funds, regardless of whether Americans ever learned any details of their payments. (In a depressing bit of historic resonance, Trump’s first interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, resigned in disgrace under a cloud of his own corruption allegations—a move that few will remember, given the cascade of ethics violations and conflicts of interest deluging the administration throughout Trump’s four years.) Reported by Casey Michel

We’re still just scratching the surface of the depths of Trump’s and his administration’s rank corruption"

Echo opinion editorial published in the Los Angeles Times: Democrats should use their Senate majority to expose Republican corruption.

With Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia winning reelection, Democrats now have a 51-49 majority heading into the next Congress. Under a 50-50 Senate, each party seats the same number of members on committees. 

With a 51-seat majority, Democrats will now outnumber Republicans at the committee level for the first time in the Biden presidency.  (Although Democrat Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema changed political party affiliation after the Georgia election, she will now be "Independent", but she will retain her Committee appointments. IMO she will have the same status as Maine Senator Angus King, Independent and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a Democratic Socialist.)

Most important, this means Senate Democrats can now exercise the reins of their oversight authority unilaterally. In fact, Democrats don’t need Republican votes to issue subpoenas or conduct depositions.

Republicans in the House of Representatives have been downright boastful about their intentions to use their new majority, narrow as it is, to initiate an oversight tsunami targeting the Biden administration and Biden’s family. 

On Tuesday, Republican Leader (at least for the moment) Kevin McCarthy released an exhaustive list of oversight targets including Hunter Biden, the Justice Department, the FBI and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

"....stench of corruption wafting from Trump’s orbit is staggering." Casey Michel

The Republican playbook is a simple one: They will use their oversight authority to initiate actions and confrontations that will captivate media attention and keep the Biden administration and Democrats on the defensive. Republicans in Congress are betting the House on the idea that the media will do their dirty work and will chronicle their oversight overreaches as legitimate instead of what they are: taxpayer-financed witch hunts.

That is why it is crucial that Democrats in the Senate embrace their newfound majority margins and exercise their oversight authority as well. Giving Republicans a clear field to dominate the oversight conversation would be a huge mistake that could cost Democrats dearly by the time we get to 2024. Through the extraordinary work of the Jan. 6 Select Committee, we have seen how effective oversight, when done right, can affect public opinion. This committee, incidentally, is about to be disbanded and then investigated by House Republicans.

Republicans like Rep. James Comer, the incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee, plan on employing a “make accusations first, get the evidence second” crusade against the president and his family. There is no reason Senate Democrats should not turn the tables on Republicans by finally investigating the conflicts of interest created by Donald Trump, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner during their time in the White House.

Documents recently released by Congress reveal that foreign nations were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars at the Trump’s hotel at the same time they were trying to influence our foreign policy.

Records obtained by Congress exposed that when agents had to stay in Trump hotels, Trump’s companies charged the Secret Service as much as five times more than the government rate, costing taxpayers more than $1.4 million.

Six months after leaving the White House, Jared Kushner received a $2 billion “investment” from a fund controlled by the Saudi crown prince.

The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington released a report detailing 3,400 examples of Donald Trump’s conflicts of interest.

Let’s be very clear here: This is not a “both sides” situation.

If Democrats in the Senate pursue this kind of oversight agenda, it would be based on facts, building on investigative work that has already produced volumes of documents, testimony and indisputable examples of conflicts of interest by Trump and his family at the time. It’s worth noting that unlike Ivanka Trump and Kushner, Hunter Biden never served in the federal government in any capacity. The investigations Republicans are about to launch are conspiracy-theory-driven nonsense designed to smear their political adversaries.

I understand the impulse Democrats may have to not want to engage in this kind of oversight battle, but they should know that the battle is coming for them anyway. It would be a costly tactical mistake to allow Republicans to have an open field. Trump’s flagrant corruption has given Democrats more than enough ammunition for fruitful oversight inquiries, which should force Republicans to answer for their hypocrisy.

The only question is: Are Senate Democrats willing to step up, or will they yield to House Republicans?

Kurt Bardella is a contributing writer to Opinion. He is a Democratic strategist and a former senior advisor for Republicans on the House Oversight Committee. @KurtBardella

Donald Trump - a firehose of corruption, lies, gaffes, and buffoonish behavior

The Coronavirus According to Donald Trump

Echo opinion published in The Bulwark electronic newsletter by Tim Miller

One of Donald Trump’s superpowers is that his neverending firehose of corruption, lies, gaffes, and buffoonish behavior gushes out a flood of information that neither the human brain nor the news media is capable of comprehending or contextualizing.

Last night this superpower may have finally met its kryptonite as the reality of the coronavirus hit home in one dizzying evening. As a hoarse President Trump addressed the nation, a stunning and frankly scary onslaught of news about the virus exploded onto everyone’s smartphones: An NBA game mysteriously canceled. A travel ban on foreign nationals coming from Europe goes into effect. Jared Kushner is now in charge. Tom and Rita Hanks have contracted the virus. An NBA player has it. Stock market futures plunge again. The NBA season is canceled.

The contrast between the severity of breaking news and the narcissistic and cavalier treatment the pandemic has received from the White House is so sharp, it may pierce even the Fox News bubble.

So as the White House and the country grapple with what’s to come, it is important to cut through the MAGA-bullshit with a full accounting of just how unconscionably reckless Trump has been for the past seven weeks as the crisis of his presidency comes to a head. Here is a list of the most egregious false or misleading statements from the president and his top advisers about the coronavirus:

Trump Coronavirus Timeline
January 22:
Trump: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”

February 2:
Trump: “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.”

February 10:
Trump: “A lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat—as the heat comes in.”

White House acting budget director Mick Mulvaney: “Coronavirus is not something that is going to have ripple effects.”

February 24:
Trump: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. . . . Stock Market starting to look very good to me.”

Trump’s top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow: “You should seriously consider buying these [stock market] dips”

[Note: The Dow Jones ended February 24 at 27,960. It closed March 11 at 23,553.]

February 26:
Trump: “[The number of people infected is] going very substantially down, not up.” “The 15 [cases] within a couple of days, is going to be down to zero.” [Note: Two weeks later, as we compiled this list on March 11, there were over 1,000 confirmed cases in the United States.]

February 27:
Trump: “It’s going to disappear one day, it’s like a miracle.”

February 28:
Eric Trump: “In my opinion, it’s a great time to buy stocks or into your 401k. I would be all in . . . let’s see if I’m right.” [Note: The stock market closed at 25,409 on February 28. It closed at 23,553 on March 11.]

March 2:
Trump on a coronavirus vaccine: “I’ve heard very quick numbers, that of months.” [Note: Immunologist Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has repeatedly said that a vaccine will not be available for a year or year and a half.]

March 6:
Trump: “I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. . . . Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”

Trump: “I didn’t know people died from the flu.”

Trump on whether or not to bring coronavirus patients on a cruise ship to shore: “I like the numbers being where they are.”

Trump: “Anybody who wants a test gets a test.” [Note. This was a lie at the time and remains dangerously untrue today. The previous day, Vice President Mike Pence said, “We don’t have enough tests today to meet what we anticipate will be the demand going forward.”]

Larry Kudlow: “We stopped it, it was a very early shut down, I would still argue to you that this thing is contained.”

Larry Kudlow: “Investors should think about buying these dips.” [Note: The Dow Jones closed at 25,864 on March 6, over 2,300 points lower than the previous time Kudlow suggested investors “buy the dip.”]

March 9:
Trump: “Good for the consumer, gasoline prices coming down!”

Trump: “So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths.”

March 10:
Trump: “It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”

March 11:
Trump: “If we get rid of the coronavirus problem quickly, we won’t need [economic] stimulus.”

Trump [in response to a question from CNN’s Jim Acosta asking what he would “say to Americans who say you are not taking this seriously enough and that some of your statements don’t match what health experts are saying”]: “That’s CNN. Fake news.”

The “fake news” playbook reaches its limits when people are dying and forced to self-quarantine in their homes.

Over the past seven weeks, the president promised the country the virus would go away within a couple of days, then promised it would go away by April. He and his advisers repeatedly advised the public to buy stocks as the market plunged and stocks lost value.

These comments were not your usual Trumpian word salad. They were direct and declarative statements that happened amidst an ongoing outbreak—a national emergency and global pandemic—that required the U.S. government to be transparent, forthcoming, and responsive.

Finally, on Wednesday night he attempted a pivot to taking the growing threat seriously, mere hours after dismissing concerns as fake news.

Why would anyone trust or believe him?
Tim Miller
Tim Miller is a contributor to The Bulwark and a communications consultant. He previously served as senior advisor to the anti-Trump Our Principles PAC, communications director for Jeb Bush, and spokesman for the Republican National Committee.