Pathetic

While he waits for the many, many, many lawsuits and investigations into him to be resolved, one way or another, former President Donald Trump spends most of his days at his Mar-a-Lago Club doing what he enjoys most-- playing golf and being told how great he is. That means he spends a lot of time driving his golf cart around.

After the Mid-Term Election

front cover: November 10, 2022

Still Near Rock-Bottom

He's still 3rd from the bottom. Biden is in the top 50% now in his 2nd year in office.

Book: Confidence Man

Excerpt from an online article dated 10/06/2023:

When asked to choose between California and Washington in allocating a navy hospital ship during the early months of the pandemic, Trump’s go-to metric was not public need or even party politics but the rationale of a toddler deciding who to share a toy with on the playground: “[California governor Gavin] Newsome said nice things about me. [Washington state governor Jay] Inslee said bad things about me.”

Raised by a monstrous, withholding father, Trump has a bottomless hunger for praise and attention. He doesn’t read (some of Haberman’s sources speculate about a possible learning disorder), can’t concentrate on anything of substance for long, and yet returned insistently to certain crackpot ideas (closing the borders, sending troops to subdue protestors, buying Greenland), no matter how many times his aides pointed out that such actions would be impossible or illegal. He had no grasp of how government works and no concern for the national welfare or even any conception of a value that might transcend self-interest. Whenever anything went wrong, he blamed somebody else.

Trump, that is, is constantly revealing to anyone who will listen his motivations and his inner self (such as it is), summarized by Haberman as “a narcissistic drama-seeker who covered a fragile ego with a bullying impulse.” Yet as soon as he began his presidential campaign, and especially after he took office, the people around him were flummoxed because they expected him to be someone different from the man he kept telling them he is.

At the 2016 Iowa caucuses, Haberman asked a man why he planned to vote for Trump, and the man told her, “I watched him run his business.” [Meaning he watched the TV show "The Apprentice" which was a complete made-up illusion of a real-life business.]

It's Always a Competition

President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden sat in the 14th row for the Queen’s funeral on Monday. Former President Donald Trump mocked Biden for where he was seated, saying that he would have had a better seat.

Biden's position was likely decided by factors that would not be different if Trump were president, including how he traveled to the funeral and because he is not related to the Queen, he is not a monarch, and the US is not a member of the Commonwealth.

A seating chart published by The Times of London shows that those seated appeared to be arranged in the following order: the family of the Queen, monarchs, leaders of the Commonwealth, and other world leaders. 

Jerked Around

The FBI executed a search warrant August 8 at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, as part of an investigation into the handling of presidential documents, including classified documents, that may have been brought there.

Bill Barr, the one-time attorney general under former President Trump, told Fox News today that the ex-president had no “legitimate reason” to hoard classified material at his Florida resort. Furthermore, he defended the Justice Department’s decision to raid Mar-a-Lago, arguing that the DOJ was “being jerked around” by Team Trump.

The Justice Department revealed on Friday just how careless the former president had been with state secrets at his private club. In an eight-page inventory list, the department noted that Trump had casually mixed TOP SECRET documents with magazines, books, and his wife’s clothes. One box allegedly found in the ex-president’s office also contained “43 empty folders with CLASSIFIED banners.” Federal prosecutors are mulling whether to charge Trump with criminal offenses under the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice.

Why Bother?

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois) on Sunday said he did not trust former President Donald Trump to tell the truth, even under oath, if he were to testify before the Jan. 6 committee.

"Look, Donald Trump has made it clear that he doesn't mind not telling the truth, let's just put that mildly," Kinzinger told Margaret Brennan, host of CBS's Face the Nation. "He lies all the time; I wouldn't put it past him to even lie under oath. So I'm not sure what the value is there."

Kinzinger said the committee was already getting a lot of information without Trump being physically there at the hearing.

January 6 Committee Hearings

Day 4 of the January 6 Committee hearings were broadcast on TV yesterday. Just before the hearing the disgraced twice-impeached former president issued a statement claiming that witness Rusty Bowers, the speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, told him “the election was rigged and I won Arizona.”

Bowers, a Republican who had wanted Trump to win the election, told the committee that this was false: “Anyone, anywhere, anytime I said the election was rigged, that would not be true.”

Bowers also recalled a conversation with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and lawyer Jenna Ellis about allegations of voter fraud in Arizona. In a phrase that captured the president’s own mindset, Giuliani allegedly said: “We’ve got lots of theories but we just don’t have the evidence.”

But the centerpiece of the big lie is Georgia, which Trump narrowly lost and which became his all-consuming obsession for wild conspiracy theories. The committee heard testimony from its secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, and his deputy Gabe Sterling. 

Excerpts from a 67-minute phone call between Trump and Raffensperger were heard during the hearing. One by one, Trump could be heard making ludicrous assertions without foundation. One by one, Raffensperger and Sterling calmly demolished them.

The president was heard claiming that votes were “in what looked to be suitcases or trunks, suitcases but they weren’t in voter boxes.” Sterling testified: “They’re standard ballot carriers that allow for seals to be put on them so they’re tamper proof.”

Trump went on during the call: “But they dropped a lot of votes in there late at night. You know that, Brad.” Raffensperger told the committee: “There were no additional ballots accepted after 7 pm.”

The president insisted: “The other thing, dead people. So dead people voted and I think the number is close to 5,000 people. And they went to obituaries. They went to all sorts of methods to come up with an accurate number and a minimum is close to about 5,000 voters.” Raffensperger observed: “No, it’s not accurate ... We found two dead people when I wrote my letter to Congress that’s dated January 6 and subsequent to that we found two more. That’s one, to, three, four people, not 4,000.” 

More sinister yet, Trump claimed that election workers had been shredding ballots, “a criminal offense” that could put Raffensperger at risk. “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.” Raffensperger told the hearing: “What I knew is we didn’t have any votes to find.” 

At the end of his call to Raffensperger, Trump could be heard saying: “It takes a little while but let the truth comes out.” Now, finally, the truth is coming out, but not the one that occupies his fantasies. 

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The Guardian     06/21/2022

The Big Ripoff

The Committee* is holding televised hearings. It was revealed that Donald Trump and his campaign engaged in potential fundraising fraud, raising $250 million for a Trump “election defense fund” that did not actually exist.

In showing that Trump deceived donors into contributing money to the election defense fund – based on claims about a stolen election that his top advisers told him were nonsense – the Committee suggested Trump engaged in potential fraud as well as other violations of federal law.

But the “Official Election Defense Fund,” as it was billed on fundraising emails did not formally exist, according to Trump campaign aides.

During the hearing Congresswoman (D-Calif.) Zoe Lofgren said, “Not only was there the Big Lie, there was the Big Ripoff.”

Most of the money went to Trump’s newly created Save America PAC. The PAC then made contributions to Mark Meadows’ charity, to a conservative organization employing former Trump staffers, to the Trump Hotel Collection, and to the company that organized the rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol last Jan. 6.

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*Wikipedia:  The U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol is a select committee of the U.S. House of Representatives to investigate the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. The attack, inspired by Donald Trump's false claims of a stolen 2020 presidential election, was the culmination of attempts to overturn the election, which the incumbent Republican Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

On June 12, 2022, the committee announced it has enough evidence to recommend that the Justice Department indict Trump. The committee has argued that Trump knew he did not win the election and was thus perpetrating a fraud, and it has referred to a "criminal conspiracy" that led to the attack on the Capitol.