Tag: Trump wants to be a dictator

Trump Aides Prepared Insurrection Act Order During Debate Over Protests

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President Donald Trump never invoked the act, but fresh details underscore the intensity of his interest last June in using active-duty military to curb unrest.

Responding to interest from President Donald J. Trump, White House aides drafted a proclamation last year to invoke the Insurrection Act in case Mr. Trump moved to take the extraordinary step of deploying active-duty troops in Washington to quell the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd, two senior Trump administration officials said.

The aides drafted the proclamation on June 1, 2020, during a heated debate inside the administration over how to respond to the protests. Mr. Trump, enraged by the demonstrations, had told the attorney general, William P. Barr, the defense secretary, Mark T. Esper, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, that he wanted thousands of active-duty troops on the streets of the nation’s capital, one of the officials said.

Mr. Trump was talked out of the plan by the three officials. But a separate group of White House staff members wanted to leave open the option for Mr. Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to call in the military. Continue reading.

Trump tried to sic government lawyers on Saturday Night Live because they ridiculed him: report

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According to a report from the Daily Beast,  Donald Trump pressed aides to get government lawyers to go after late-night TV shows like Saturday Night Live for the way that they were treating him.

Trump, whose blustery style was recreated by actor Alec Baldwin, was reportedly obsessed with how he was mocked by late-night comics and reportedly asked administration officials to bring legal pressure to bear to stop it — only to be told there was no legal mechanism available.

According to the report, in 2019, Trump tweeted, “It’s truly incredible that shows like Saturday Night Live, not funny/no talent, can spend all of their time knocking the same person (me), over & over, without so much of a mention of ‘the other side. Like an advertisement without consequences. Same with Late Night Shows. Should Federal Election Commission and/or FCC look into this?” Continue reading.

Speaker of the House? These delusional Trump sycophants are giving the former president false hope

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Former President Donald Trump departed the White House nearly six months ago and he still cannot accept defeat. To make matters worse, many of his loyal supporters are continuing to give him false hope about his future in politics. 

According to Politics USA, there are now rumors circulating about Trump possibly becoming Speaker of the House. The publication laid out a possible path that could get the former president back in a position of power.

“If Trump wanted to, he could easily win a Republican House seat in the state of Florida,” the publication wrote, adding, “And if Republicans won back the House at the same time, Trump could be elected into a leadership position, potentially even Speaker of the House.” Continue reading.

Alex Jones Says He Coordinated With White House On January 6

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Before Donald Trump’s presidency, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars was considered a fringe outlet in right-wing media circles; even former Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly dismissed Jones as a buffoon. But the Trump White House treated Infowars like a serious news organization, and according to Free Speech TV, Jones “is now claiming that he coordinated with the Trump White House on the events of January 6.”

Free Speech TV, in a page for David Pakman’s show, explains, “The Infowars host made the claim last week that he even put up $500,000 of his own money to make it happen. Jones said, ‘The White House told me three days before: We’re going to have you lead the march.’ He went on to say that 30 minutes before the end of Trump’s speech at the Rotunda, the Secret Service planned to take Jones out of the crowd to the spot where the march was supposed to begin. He went on to say, ‘Trump will tell people: Go, and I’m going to meet you at the Capitol.’ Jones’ statements are basically a full-on admission about his involvement in the riots, although he can always hide behind saying he did not intend for the rally to get violent.”

Pakman, however, stressed that Jones has a long history of lying. Continue reading.

Trump supporter who led ‘armed fighters’ into the Capitol was just angry about having to wear a mask: lawyers

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According to The Daily Beast, an attorney for Russell Taylor, a California man accused of leading a group of “armed fighters” into the Capitol to stop election certification on January 6, insisted in court that he should be released ahead of trial because he is not really a terrorist or an insurrectionist — he’s just an ordinary guy who was driven to do what he did because he was angry about COVID-19 mask mandates.

“‘He’s kind of boring, this is probably the most exciting thing that’ll happen in his life,’ Taylor’s lawyer, Dyke Huish, said during a Tuesday detention hearing,” reported Pilar Melendez. “‘Really he’s kind of a vanilla kind of guy — though admittedly he was upset about the masks.’ Huish describing his client as ‘moderately successful,’ and a religious man who doesn’t drink and went to Brigham Young University. He insisted that Taylor’s actions during the insurrection were unique and spurred by his anger over the state-wide lockdown and mask mandate. He denied that Taylor is a militiaman — just that his documented violent actions were misunderstood. ‘This was a guy who got mad about the masks and so he got wound up and felt like this was an appropriate thing to do,’ Huish said during the hearing.”

Prosecutors, however, outlined evidence that Taylor wasn’t quite the easygoing family man his lawyer characterized him as. Continue reading.

21 House Republicans vote against awarding Congressional Gold Medal to all police officers who responded on Jan. 6

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Twenty-one House Republicans on Tuesday voted against awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to all police officers who responded to the Jan. 6 violent attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.

The measure passed the House with overwhelming bipartisan support from 406 lawmakers. But the 21 Republicans who voted “no” drew immediate condemnation from some of their colleagues, and the vote underscored the lingering tensions in Congressamid efforts by some GOP lawmakers to whitewash the events of that day.

Rep. Robert C. “Bobby” Scott (D-Va.) called the “no” votes “a sad commentary on the @HouseGOP,” while Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) declared, “How you can vote no to this is beyond me.” Continue reading.

Opinion: A trove of preposterous emails raises the question: How can Republicans still be loyal to this man?

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MANY REPUBLICANS want the nation to ignore and forget President Donald Trump’s poisonous final months in office — the most dangerous moment in modern presidential history, orchestrated by the man to whom the GOP still swears allegiance. Yet the country must not forget how close it came to a full-blown constitutional crisis, or worse. Tuesday brought another reminder that, but for the principled resistance of some key officials, the consequences could have been disastrous.

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform on Tuesday released emails showing that the White House waged a behind-the-scenes effort to enlist the Justice Department in its crusade to advance Mr. Trump’s baseless allegations of fraud in the 2020 election. On Dec. 14, 10 days before Jeffrey Rosen took over as acting attorney general, Mr. Trump’s assistant emailed Mr. Rosen, asserting that Dominion Voting Systems machines in Michigan were intentionally fixed and pointing to a debunked analysis showing what “the machines can and did do to move votes.” The email declared, “We believe it has happened everywhere.”

Later that month, Mr. Trump’s assistant sent Mr. Rosen a brief that the president apparently wanted the Justice Department to submit to the Supreme Court. The draft mirrored the empty arguments that the state of Texas made to the court before the justices dismissed the state’s lawsuit. Piling on the pressure, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows also dispatched an email asking Mr. Rosen to examine allegations of voter fraud in Georgia. A day later, Mr. Meadows apparently forwarded Mr. Rosen a video alleging that Italians used satellites to manipulate voting equipment. These were just some of the preposterous White House emails claiming fraud in arguably the most secure presidential election ever. Continue reading.

We’re learning more about how Trump leveraged his power to bolster his election fantasies

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He had already been impeached on allegations of using federal resources for his own political benefit

On Dec. 14, 2020, about 2,500 people died of covid-19, the disease for which a vaccine was just beginning to be deployed. On that day, more than 200,000 people contracted the coronavirus, a number equal to 13 out of every 20,000 Americans. But in the White House, President Donald Trump’s focus was largely elsewhere: on his desperate effort to overturn the results of the presidential election that had been settled more than a month before.

At 5:39 p.m., Trump announced that his attorney general, William P. Barr, would be leaving his administration. The timing was odd, given that Trump had only a month left in office. But Trump, we learned on Tuesday, wasted no time in getting Barr’s replacement up to speed on the president’s primary concern.

About 40 minutes before Trump’s announcement about Barr, the president “sent an email via his assistant to Jeffrey A. Rosen, the incoming acting attorney general, that contained documents purporting to show evidence of election fraud in northern Michigan — the same claims that a federal judge had thrown out a week earlier in a lawsuit filed by one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers,” the New York Times’s Katie Benner reported. Continue reading.

Trump’s last attorney general willing to discuss last-minute efforts to undo election loss

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Donald Trump’s final attorney general Jeffrey Rosen may be willing to reveal new details about the former president’s last-minute efforts to remain in office despite his election loss.

Rosen, who served the final month of Trump’s presidency as acting attorney general, is in discussions with the House Oversight Committee to sit down for a transcribed interview about his communications with the ousted president, reported the Washington Post.

“Such an interview could fill in critical details,” wrote Post columnist Greg Sargent. “Among the things Rosen could speak to are whether there were additional communications between Trump and Rosen — including verbal ones, as well as unreleased email communications.” Continue reading.

Why Mike Lindell Can’t Stop

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The MyPillow tycoon has lost business pumping up Trump conspiracy theories, and probably lost his chance at a political future. But he believes he’s on a divine mission to overturn the election—and he’s not alone.

CHASKA, Minn.—One day in mid-May, after a rally in South Dakota to promote his new website, Mike Lindell, the pillow magnate and indefatigable election-conspiracy promoter, barreled into his company headquarters, sat himself down at a long table in a conference room he uses as a makeshift office and slid a dropper under his tongue.

The dropper was full of oleandrin, a plant extract that he touts—alarmingly, to scientists—as both a preventative and “miracle” cure for Covid-19. He squeezed.

“Look at this … I can never get the virus,” he said, near the beginning of the roughly six hours I spent with him over two days at MyPillow. “It’s impossible for me to get it.” Continue reading.