clearandpresentdanger.blog

— Trump creates another pump-and-dump opportunity for the billionaires in his cabinet and people close to him (including his kids). It’s pretty well documented that just before many of Trump’s market-killing tariff announcements people around him take profits by dumping their stocks when the market’s at a high, then buy back in when it hits bottom, typically the day before he backs off and the market rebounds. Yesterday, he did it again, this time threatening to impose a 50% tariff on goods exported from the European Union starting on June 1st. (Remember, he’s doing this entirely outside of the law and the Constitution itself, which gives the SOLE power to impose tariffs on Congress: he’s claiming “emergency” powers, but there hasn’t been an economic emergency in America since the last time he was president and he screwed up the response to Covid so badly that the market crashed worse than in 1929 and a half-million Americans died unnecessarily.) This follows the EU this week imposing substantial sanctions targeting 130 individuals and entities tied to Russia’s “shadow oil fleet” that’s been evading sanctions. Some Europeans are pretty sure Trump’s tariff “attack” on them is “payback” on behalf of Putin. And he keeps repeating the entirely false anti-EU talking point that Putin has repeatedly shared with him, saying this week: “The European Union, which was formed for the primary purpose of taking advantage of the United States…” For the record, the EU was created to prevent another war in Europe after two of them in the past century. It’s a safe bet that once the Trump family and friends are safely bought back into the cratered stock market he’ll come up with some minor “win” with the EU that’ll let him back off this threat, just like he did with China, so the market will rebound and Trump’s insiders will buy back in. It bears repeating: This is the most criminally corrupt administration in the history of America.

— Well, so much for the lie that tax cuts for billionaires — including this $4 trillion one Republicans tried to pass in the dead of night — don’t do a damn thing for the economy other than running up the debt that we and our kids will have to pay off. The Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) is “a nonpartisan committee of the United States Congress, originally established under the Revenue Act of 1926. The Joint Committee operates with an experienced professional staff of Ph.D economists, attorneys, and accountants, who assist Members of the majority and minority parties in both houses of Congress on tax legislation.” The JCT just issued their detailed analysis of the GOP’s massive tax scam/gift-to-the-morbidly-rich and concluded that it’ll produce an increase in annual growth of 0.03%, an amount so small as to be meaningless. It will, however, ensure Republican politicians that the roughly 100 American billionaires who poured fully $2.6 billion into the 2024 election will show up in 2026 and 2028 to keep the gravy train rolling.

— “The orgy of corruption…” Most Americans have no idea what a “meme coin” is, but Trump sure knows. A few years ago he ridiculed them and called them a “scam,” noting that they have no value and are simply little digital pictures that are uniquely numbered on a blockchain. And he was right: they are not a form of cryptocurrency or any other type of money. They’re just little digital pictures that look like a photo of a coin that Trump says people can “collect.” And every time the $TRUMP or $MELANIA meme “coins” are bought or sold Donald and Melania make out like bandits: so far it appears they’ve made over a billion dollars selling these little pictures. Thursday night, Trump hosted the top 220 purchasers (who spent $148 million to buy his pictures) to a budget dinner (one attendee described it as the “worst food I’ve ever had”) at one of his tacky golf motels, and — in a clear and illegal selling of access — yesterday gave the top 20 purchasers a personal tour of the White House. It’s a damn profitable scam: CNBC reports that just 58 “wallets” (presumably including Trump, Melania, and those close to them) made over $1.1 billion in profits on the sale of the “coins,” while 764,000 “wallets” (presumably belonging to average Trump voters) lost money. This was not a campaign fundraiser: that money goes straight into Trump’s bank accounts. As Senator Elizabeth Warren noted, “Donald Trump’s dinner is an orgy of corruption. That’s what this is all about. We are here today to talk about exactly one topic: corruption, corruption in its ugliest form. Donald Trump is using the presidency of the United States to make himself richer through crypto, and he’s doing it right out there in plain sight. He is signaling to anyone who wants to ask for a special favor and is willing to pay for it exactly how to do that.”

— Trump amplifies his authoritarian attacks on media he doesn’t approve of, spitting on the graves of the Founders and Framers who wrote the First Amendment’s protection of the press and free speech into the Constitution. The progressive group Media Matters for America has been aggressive in notifying advertisers on Musk’s Xitter platform when their promos appear next to Nazi and other hateful content, and Musk and Trump are fighting back. This week the group was informed that the Federal Trade Commission is demanding that they turn over a massive trove of emails, text messages, and other communications the FTC suggests may contain proof of a “conspiracy” to hurt Musk’s company. Musk’s multiple lawsuits against the organization have led to budget cuts and layoffs, but Media Matters insist they’re not giving up because their fight is on behalf of the rights of a free and independent press. The group’s president, Angelo Carusone, issued a statement saying that the Trump administration has been “defined by naming right-wing media figures to key posts and abusing the power of the federal government to bully political opponents and silence critics. It’s clear that’s exactly what’s happening here, given Media Matters’ history of holding those same figures to account. These threats won’t work; we remain steadfast to our mission.” If Trump really is committed to going down the trail Putin and Orbán blazed and destroying any “opposition” media, this is probably just the beginning. Buckle up.

— Taking America back to 1950. The Trump administration is reviewing Confederate monuments for replacement, unraveling LBJ’s civil rights legacy, purging the government (and ordering purges across private business) of diversity efforts, undoing police reform efforts, and evicting brown- and black-skinned immigrants while opening the door to white-skinned ones. It all adds up to a major shift in the steady progress America’s made on racial issues since the Brown v Board of Education Supreme Court case in 1954 first ordered the desegregation of the nation’s public schools, notes Axios, adding that, “Open racism, antisemitism, and white nationalism have flourished online” in this new environment. Nonetheless, people of good will and civil rights organizations are hopeful that this is a mere blip in the racial history of this country. As NAACP president Derrick Johnson told the publication, “Progress isn’t a straight line. It swings like a pendulum.” We can hardly wait for it to swing back toward tolerance and love.

Coincidence?  I doubt it.

Let’s review some facts.

• The week before President Donald Trump unveiled bruising new tariffs that sent the stock market plummeting, a key official in the agency that shapes his administration’s trade policy sold off as much as $30,000 of stock.
• Two days before that so-called “Liberation Day” announcement on April 2, a State Department official sold as much as $50,000 in stock, then bought a similar investment as prices fell.
• And just before Trump made another significant tariff announcement, a White House lawyer sold shares in nine companies, records show.
• More than a dozen high-ranking executive branch officials and congressional aides have made well-timed trades since Trump took office in January, most of them selling stock before the market plunged amid fears that Trump’s tariffs would set off a global trade war, according to a ProPublica review of disclosures across the government.

All of the trades came shortly before a significant government announcement or development that could influence stock prices. Some who sold individual stocks or broader market funds used their earnings to buy investments that are generally less risky, such as bonds or treasuries. Others appear to have kept their money in cash. In one case unrelated to tariffs, records show that a congressional aide bought stock in two mining companies shortly before a key Senate committee approved a bill written by his boss that would help the firms.

Read the full article here.

The whole backward-looking Biden frenzy mostly seems like an excuse for the press to look away from the present day. Right now, the most acute problem the United States has with presidential age, capacity, and fitness is not about what people didn’t know or wouldn’t say about the last president. It’s about what they can’t bring themselves to say about the current president. 

Shortly after his chit-chat about golf on Wednesday, Donald Trump ordered the lights in the Oval Office dimmed so that he could show the president of South Africa a video about what Trump believes to be the conditions in South Africa. First came a long—bizarrely, obsessively, grindingly long—montage of clips of Black South African politicians at various rallies singing or chanting about killing the Boer. None of the politicians were Cyril Ramaphosa, and the most frequently occurring figure was Julius Malema, who was ejected from Ramaphosa’s African National Congress party in 2012. Then came a likewise oddly extended clip, filmed from above, showing vehicles parked along a roadway that had white crosses running alongside it. 

“Now this is very bad. These are the, these are burial sites right here, burial sites, over a thousand, of white farmers,” the President of the United States said. He continued: 

.. and those cars are lined up to pay love on a Sunday morning. Each one of those white things you see is a cross, and there’s approximately a thousand of them, they’re all white farmers, the family of white farmers. And those cars aren’t driving, they’re stopped there to pay respect to their family member who was killed. Uh, and it’s a terrible sight. I’ve never seen anything like it. Both sides of the road, you have crosses. Those people were all killed.

This was categorically not true. The crosses were not a row of thousands of farmer graves but a protest set up in response to the murder of one white farming couple. Soon after, while flipping through a stack of printouts that he said were stories about more murders of white farmers—”Death. Death. Death. Horrible death. Death”—Trump held up a page printed out from a far-right website, saying, “Look, here’s burial sites all over the place, these are all white farmers that are being buried.” The photo was of bodies from the Democratic Republic of Congo,    where prison escapees had murdered several women.

Fixated as he was on supposed white genocide, Trump was even more obsessed with the fact that an NBC reporter had interrupted his transition between the video and the stack of clippings by asking about the luxury jumbo jet the administration had just accepted as a gift from Qatar to be used as a new Air Force One. Here was his response when Ramaphosa tried to tell him that Black people are being killed in South Africa:

The farmers are not Black. I don’t say that’s good or bad, but the farmers are not Black, and the people that are being killed in—in large numbers—and you saw all those gravesites, and those are people that—loved ones, going, I guess, on a Sunday morning, they told me, to pay respect to their loved ones that were killed. Their heads chopped off. Uh, their—they died, died violently. And you know, we’re here to talk about it, and I didn’t know we’d get involved here, but I will say this, that if the news wasn’t fake like NBC, which is fake news, totally, one of the worst, ABC, NBC, CBS. Horrible. But if they weren’t fake news like this jerk, uh, that we have here, if we had real reporters, they’d be covering it. But the fake news in this country doesn’t talk about that. They don’t want to talk about it. But now they have to talk about it, but they won’t. They, this won’t even be a subject. They’ll have him talking about, Why did a country give a free—think, think of this—why did a country give an airplane to the United States Air Force? OK. The United States Air— Not to me. To the United States Air Force so they could help us out because we need an Air Force One until our—[points toward model plane] see that’s Air Force One, it’s being built, two of ’em being built. But Boeing’s a little bit late, unfortunately. So why did they give us a plane, to the United States Air Force. That is what that idiot talks about after viewing a thing where thousands of people are dead.

This is how the president talks every day: in rambling, broken thoughts veering from petty yet grandiose grievances to paranoid conspiracies and fantasies dredged up from the gutters of the racist internet. Last month, before the nonexistent graves, it was a photo of the tattoos on the hand of the wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia—or rather a caption of the characters “MS 13” that had been added to the photo and which Trump insisted were part of the tattoos themselves, to the point of losing his temper at ABC’s Terry Moran for trying to dispute the claim.

Who believes that Donald Trump—fixated on imaginary graves and Photoshopped tattoos—is going to be able to process new and alarming information in the middle of the night, with the fate of the world at stake? This is a president who reverses his own tariff policy depending on which advisors can catch him alone at any given moment, who decides to declare he’s reopening the derelict Alcatraz prison on a whim, who needs to be mollified with baby talk to keep him focused on his own budget bill.

None of this is any sort of secret. Trump clearly isn’t capable of carrying out the duties of a president in any consistent, meaningful way. Until his defenders and enablers are afraid of the consequences of that, it doesn’t matter.

Trump claims he is 6’3″, 235 lbs.  As we know, he wears 2-inch shoe lifts and his belly flops over his belt.  Let’s check out others who are really 6’3″, 2235 lbs.

Tim Tebow — 6’2″, 236 lbs 

The order requires signs throughout the parks to have the following message:

(Name of property) belongs to the American people, and (name of land management bureau) wants your feedback. Please let us know if you have identified (1) any areas of the (park/area, etc. as appropriate) that need repair; (2) any services that need improvement; or (3) any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features.

———————————-

The Trump administration is enlisting national park visitors into the Republican president’s fight to rewrite American history, with a new directive that forces all park units to display signs that encourage guests to report any information that is critical of American history.

On May 20, U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum directed all park units to display the signs to comply with President Donald Trump’s earlier executive order, which claims that U.S. history has been distorted by ideology and seeks to counter what it describes as revisionist narratives that portray the country’s past in a negative light.

Burgum’s order directs federal agencies and cultural institutions to remove content that “inappropriately disparage[s] Americans past or living,” and to instead highlight the nation’s progress and achievements. It also calls for the removal of what it terms “improper ideology” from museums, monuments and public exhibits under federal control.

In a statement released in March, the American Historical Association, or AHA, condemned the order, defending the importance of historical integrity in public institutions and places. Thirty-six other organizations also signed on to the AHA statement.

“The stories that have shaped our past include not only elements that make us proud but also aspects that make us acutely aware of tragedies in our nation’s history,” they wrote. “No person, no nation, is perfect, and we should all — as individuals and as nations — learn from our imperfections.”

https://www.sfgate.com/california-parks/article/national-parks-negative-history-trump-20343308.php

Burgum’s order implements President Donald Trump’s executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which aims to remove any stories or information that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times)” from national parks and monuments.

The parks in question include many historic locations central to slavery, Civil War battles, the imprisonment of Japanese Americans, and other ugly chapters of American history.

Denver7 reached out to the National Parks Conservation Association, the 100-year-old nonprofit created to protect America’s national park system. President and CEO Theresa Pierno called Secretary Burgum’s order “outrageous” and “frightening.”

“A lot of our history is difficult to hear, but these are the places where people are educated about many issues in our past, and it’s so important,” said Pierno. “How do you tell that story accurately, but you can’t describe anything that might negatively impact the history? History is full of good and bad, and mistakes were made. And we try to understand that history so we don’t repeat those mistakes.”

https://www.denver7.com/news/national-politics/interior-secretary-orders-signs-to-flag-negative-depictions-of-u-s-history-at-national-parks

(NOTE:  “MAGAt” rhymes with “maggot” — they are the same creature — putrid and vile.)

Not that Comer really needs an excuse. The fever swamp that is his brain likely means that pretty much any time anyone even mentions the Biden name, he spins up the House Oversight Committee to “investigate” something, anything. After Biden pardoned his son, Hunter, Comer ran to Newsmax to say that meant it was time to open another investigation into Hunter’s laptop. That was after he spent 15 months fruitlessly trying to invent some corruption for which Biden could be impeached.

The one-two punch of Tapper’s media blitz and Biden’s cancer diagnosis must have been a dream come true for Comer, who dashed off letters to Biden’s doctors and former aides. He wants Biden’s doctor to prove that his “financial relationship with the Biden family” didn’t affect his assessment of Biden’s fitness to serve, while also basically saying that the doctor helped cover up Biden’s decline from the public. Inquiries to former aides are so that Comer can “understand who made key decisions and exercised the powers of the executive branch during the Biden Administration,” with the implication there being, of course, that it was not Joe Biden.

Hilariously, Comer is pretending that one of the reasons Biden’s physician has to share the former president’s private medical information is that the Oversight Committee needs that to “explore whether the time has come for Congress to revisit potential legislation to address the oversight of presidents’ fitness to serve pursuant to its authority under Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.”

Comer has no actual interest in fitness to serve. This is just him building on Trump’s 2024 campaign rhetoric saying the 25th Amendment should be “modified” to allow for the removal of a vice president because Kamala Harris was part of a conspiracy to cover up Biden’s decline. Any real query into the capacity of a president to do his job would have to grapple with not just Trump’s inability to do the job but also his obvious handoff of vast chunks of decision-making.

Trump routinely makes things up out of thin air, but that’s always been the case. That makes it difficult to tell whether he’s lost the plot or is just lying. When he showed South African President Cyril Ramaphosa pictures from the Democratic Republic of Congo and insisted they were instead evidence of white genocide in South Africa, it’s just as likely that Trump knew the truth but didn’t care as it is that he genuinely didn’t have any idea what he was looking at.

But even if you set aside all the times in which Trump blatantly lies in service of a political point, you’ve still got all the other times where it seems like he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He told the press he didn’t sign the Alien Enemies Act proclamation that paved the way for the mass deportation of Venezuelan migrants, despite his signature appearing on it.

And he routinely admits he doesn’t know about major decisions. Earlier this month, The Washington Post compiled the most recent ones. He said he didn’t know his nominee for surgeon general, but had listened to a recommendation from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He said he hadn’t been briefed on U.S. soldiers killed in Lithuania. He wasn’t aware the administration was considering deporting people to Libya. He’s not the person responsible for the failure to bring Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia home from a Salvadoran prison, because, “We have lawyers that don’t want to do this.”

It’s a cliche to say that every accusation is a confession, but that’s pretty much what happens every time Republicans open their mouths.