It has been 113 days since Trump has appeared on Fox News.
Trump hasn’t been on Fox News in a long long time | Salon.com
Trump hasn’t been on Fox News in a long long time | Salon.com
“On April 13, Mr. Trump called into Mr. Hannity’s show and ran through a list of crises he claimed would not be happening ‘had we won this election, which we did.’ He hasn’t been interviewed on the network since,” the newspaper reported.
If the Murdochs didn’t want all this to happen, it wouldn’t happen. Rupert gave Carlson a job and a show, Lachlan reportedly speaks to him regularly, and together they made him the face of their network, which has defended him against any and all criticism for years.
“I’m 100 percent [Rupert Murdoch’s] bitch,” Carlson once said. “Whatever Mr. Murdoch says, I do.”
The Murdochs may want some credit from the establishment for having their relatively high-brow outlets, the Journal and the Post, criticize Trump. But they also want to speak to the party’s Trumpist, pro-insurrection base. And so they are cheering on Tucker Carlson’s blood-soaked white nationalism, his deadly anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, and his reprehensible 1/6 trutherism.
No, the Murdochs haven’t turned on Trump | Media Matters for America
Now, many people have taken a step back even from these groups altogether. But the folks that have stuck around continue to be quite radical, and probably even more radical than they were before. Especially thinking about what is going to happen with the midterm elections, we are going to see a lot of invigoration.The Conversation
In Wake of Jan. 6 Hearings: What was Trump’s Relationship to the Militias who invaded the Capitol?
History tells us these things don’t turn around overnight and go on for longer than is good for anyone.
The Right’s plan to take the presidency in 2024 requires a candidate with a higher-than-average disregard for the truth. That’s why Donald Trump is still their man — a fact that should worry us all.
Here’s a reason not to “take the money” If Trump had not been the failed businessman he is, he’d have $12 B just from investing his father’s gift conservatively when he first started. Today he has $2B and 4000 court cases in his wake. Hardly a person to take business advice from.
‘If you don’t take the money now, you will get nothing after the merger takes place, and only say how smart the original signees were.’ Donald Trump
there is a grotesque orange cloud hovering over the GOP in the person of Donald J. Trump who is planning to announce his candidacy any time now and remind everyone in the country that the Republican Party has been remade in his image and still dances to his tune. When asked what he thought about Trump entering the 2024 race, Joe Biden said he welcomes it. No doubt. Biden may be unpopular but in head-to-head polls, he still beats Trump.
He’s running: The specter of Donald Trump looms over the GOP | Salon.com
The former president had previously instructed Bannon and other associates not to cooperate with the panel, claiming that executive privilege – a president’s power to withhold certain internal executive branch information –compelled them to stay silent. But in recent days, as several witnesses have come forward to offer the House panel damning testimony about his conduct, Trump has grown frustrated that one of his fiercest defenders has not yet appeared before the committee, people close to him said.
Source: Steve Bannon, facing jail, agrees to testify to Jan 6 committee
The Murdochracy is what failed it was the gristle the grout that failed to keep the Conservatives in America, UK and Australia together
Republicans seem to have reached that conclusion before, only to reverse course. This time, however, they have an example directly in front of them, not only of how it can be done, but, crucially, that it can be done with finality. If, as Johnson said himself, “In politics, no one is remotely indispensable,” surely then that is as true of former presidents as it is sitting prime ministers.
Republicans, let’s learn from our British political brethren.
Source: Opinion: Republicans, look across the pond and take note. Now’s the time to dump Trump – CNN
The three amigos finally bite the dust – » The Australian Independent Media Network
The three amigos finally bite the dust – » The Australian Independent Media Network
“And you would think a reasonable response from a president would be, oh my goodness, let’s make sure the metal detectors are operating properly,” he explained. “He said just the opposite, take them down, let the armed members of the group in, and they can march to the Capitol from there. To do what? To stop the certification of his political opponent’s election win. So in a very real sense, that smoking gun evidence that Donald Trump wanted to lead what we now know is an armed attack on the Capitol. The loaded gun evidence is, the witness tampering information, and you know, witness tampering just strikes at the very heart of the integrity of investigations, whether congressional or criminal.”
He lunged at a Secret Service agent’s throat. He threw dishes during temper tantrums. And he wanted metal detectors taken away so his fans could march with guns and knives.
An astonishing portrait of Donald Trump as an unhinged and personally violent president emerged at Tuesday’s hearing of the congressional committee investigating last year’s attack on the US Capitol.
“Anyone downplaying Cassidy Hutchinson’s role or her access in the West Wing either doesn’t understand how the Trump WH worked or is attempting to discredit her because they’re scared of how damning this testimony is,” tweeted former White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews, who resigned after Jan. 6. “For those complaining of ‘hearsay,’ I imagine the Jan. 6 committee would welcome any of those involved to deny these allegations under oath.” ( Mick Mulvaney )
As Hutchinson laid out, Trump was not only aware that many in the rally crowd were heavily armed, he seemed to be counting on it. He got angry with the Secret Service for not letting people with AR-15s and body armor clamor to his side during the rally, saying, according to Hutchinson, “I don’t fucking care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me.” He demanded that the armed thugs that support him “march to the Capitol from here.”
Trump knew they were armed. Yet he directed his supporters to the Capitol on Jan. 6. He then repeatedly insisted on being the head of the mob. When Secret Service wouldn’t let him, he yelled, “I’m the f-ing president! Take me up to the Capitol now!” and physically attacked the agent driving th
Source: Cassidy Hutchinson’s surprise Jan. 6 testimony exposes the violence that fuels Trumpism | Salon.com
When the king of “alternative facts ” Isn’t one himself
Last week, three news stories broke that are set to prove consequential for nonagenarian media billionaire Rupert Murdoch and his News and Fox media empire.
Source: Rupert Murdoch’s wild week: Jerry Hall, Trump and parties
State election officials have recounted how Donald Trump supporters threatened them and their families after they refused to help the former president overturn his 2020 election defeat.
Source: US election officials reveal Trump threats before Capitol riot
It is pretty clear that Eastman knew there was a good chance for serious bloodshed if Pence overturned the election.
after the insurrection on Jan. 6th he came back to one of the White House lawyers who said what is no doubt going to be one of the most famous quotes of this scandal: “I’m going to give you the best free legal advice you’re ever getting in your life. Get a great f-ing criminal defense lawyer. You’re going to need it.” A few days later Eastman emailed Trump’s other attorney Rudy Giuliani asking to be on the “pardon list.”
Washington: Donald Trump put his own vice president’s life at risk by embracing an elaborate plot to overturn the 2020 election, despite knowing the plan was unlawful, a Congressional hearing on the US Capitol attack has been told.
Trump produced an unprecedented flood of lies and false statements during his presidency—over 30,000, according to the Washington Post. Is it possible he cannot tell fact from fiction? As a narcissistic egomaniac, does he believe he can manufacture reality? His psychological relationship with the truth has always been difficult to fathom. Trump cannot cite any confirmed evidence of fraud, yet he has unwaveringly insisted dark sinister forces stole a grand electoral landslide from him. Again and again, reality was presented to him, but he acted as if it did not exist. Is this because he cannot recognize reality or because he doesn’t want to recognize reality for assorted transactional purposes? So far, the committee has not provided an authoritative answer. But that may be above its pay grade. In any event, there is a fundamental truth that transcends resolution of this issue: Whether or not Trump believes in his Big Lie, he has successfully encouraged millions of Americans to do so, and that includes the thousands who assaulted the Capitol on January 6. In either case, Trump is a threat to the republic.
Source: The 1/6 Committee’s Biggest Challenge: Assessing Whether Trump Is Bonkers – Mother Jones
January 6 and its aftermath clearly could have been far more bloody if the Capitol police and then the Secret Service had not done such a good job of protecting elected officials from these heavily armed and militarily trained wack jobs. It should be remembered how the odious Trump cultivated these right-wing militias, and told a similar group to “stand back and stand by” during his debate with Joe Biden. They stood by all right.
Source: Why the Oath Keepers looks an Awful lot like al-Qaeda and Trump is its Usama Bin Laden
Trump is satisfied he has enough wriggle room
Members of the House committee investigating the Capitol riot say they have uncovered enough evidence for the Justice Department to consider an unprecedented criminal indictment against former President Donald Trump for seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Source: US Capitol riots: Donald Trump evidence enough to indict ex president
In other words, even if he avoids prosecution, even if he is never formally deemed a criminal under the law, Trump will be accountable to history. That is not as satisfying a form of accountability as a criminal judgment, to be sure. But it is a form of accountability that is inescapable. If the committee does its work properly — and I have every confidence it will — it will create a clear record. Which means that for our children and our children’s children — for as far as future generations will know of our recorded history — Donald Trump will live in infamy.
Source: A Final Thought on the Hearings: How Trump Will Be Held Accountable | The Smirking Chimp
Trump will abandon his own failed site and it’s shareholders
Ads account for 90% of Twitter’s revenue, and now that advertisers know exactly what Twitter would look like under Elon Musk’s leadership — they should be terrified
Source: Elon Musk says he would reverse Twitter’s ban on Donald Trump. | Media Matters for America
The beginning of May before midterm elections marks the start of primary season and six months of fall campaigning. The conventional view this year is that Democrats will be clobbered in November. Why? Because midterms are usually referendums on a president’s performance, and Biden’s approval ratings are in the cellar.But the conventional view could be wrong because it doesn’t account for the Democrat’s secret sauce, which gives them a fighting chance of keeping one or both chambers: Trump.
Murdoch’s destroying America’s 450 year Dream
Fox News personality Tucker Carlson is the focus of an in-depth three-part report by The New York Times that was published online on Saturday and will appear in the Sunday newspaper. Part one is titled “How Tucker Carlson Stoked White Fear to Conquer Cable.” “In the years since, Mr. Carlson has constructed what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news — and also, by some measures, the most successful. Though he frequently declares himself an enemy of prejudice — “We don’t judge them by group, and we don’t judge them on their race,” Mr. Carlson explained to an interviewer a few weeks before accusing impoverished immigrants of making America dirty — his show teaches loathing and fear. Night after night, hour by hour, Mr. Carlson warns his viewers that they inhabit a civilization under siege — by violent Black Lives Matter protesters in American cities, by diseased migrants from south of the border, by refugees importing alien cultures, and by tech companies and cultural elites who will silence them, or label them racist, if they complain,” the newspaper reported.
“Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill, a member of the Select Committee, characterized the January 6 attack on our democracy as a “dry run” – implying it could happen again – perhaps successfully. It will happen again – unless we put mechanisms in place to constrain a corrupt president from exploiting the absolute power presently conveyed by the Insurrection Act. That change needs to happen now – before yet another authoritarian – or even the same one – tries another Jan. 6 and succeeds,” he argued.
Democracy protects the rights of its enemies to its own detriment at times.
Trump’s indictment and conviction must occur as quickly as possible. The upcoming midterm elections won’t simply be a battle between Republicans and Democrats. They will be a battle between Trump acolytes and fair election supporters over protecting the integrity of our elections and our democracy. The sooner Trump is held accountable for his criminality, the safer American democracy will be.
Source: The United States vs. Donald J. Trump — Why It Must Happen Soon | The Smirking Chimp
“again help our partner ( Trump) to become president “
Soloviev expanded on that point, suggesting that Russia should just go ahead and nuke the US because that is the true nature of the war in Ukraine.
Propagandists on Russian state television told their public audience last week that the time has arrived to sever diplomatic relations with the United States and that the Kremlin is finalizing its “preparations” to interfere with future American elections. The Daily Beast’s Julia Davis reported on Monday that President Joe Biden’s unwavering support for Ukraine has revitalized Moscow’s appetite for manipulating the American electorate. Their objective, one of the individuals revealed, is to “again help our partner,” former President Donald Trump, “to become president.”
Trump’s Republicans are now voting for Putin and against the Ukraine
A poisoned well: 63 Republicans just voted against even expressing support for democracy
Straight from Trump’s Playbook or Steve Bannon’s appoint as many of your friends to positions that will hamper any new government. There’s no ICAC to investigate the corruption that this government has delivered and wielded on the Australian electorate. Economic and Cultural Crimes done dirt cheap.
Attorney-General Michaelia Cash has defended the appointment of ex-Liberal MPs and coalition staffers to high-paying roles on the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, saying they are “qualified”.
It was the third time in recent months Putin has blasted the so-called “cancel culture”. Which is exactly what Trump, Tucker Carlson, and the Republican party have blasted for several years.
This is the definition of “Insanity” and irresponsible lending.
Banks Are Still Willing to Lend to Trump March 9, 2022 at 2:03 pm EST By Taegan Goddard 76 Comments “A bank’s decision to loan Donald Trump’s company $100 million is the latest evidence the former president might survive fraud investigations and a business-world backlash over his efforts to stay in office after losing the 2020 election,” the AP reports. “San Diego-based Axos Bank finalized the loan with the Trump Organization on Feb. 17.” “That’s just three days after public revelations that the Republican’s longtime accountants had disavowed a decade’s worth of his financial statements amid allegations by New York’s attorney general that they had exaggerated his wealth.”
While Putin is “doing it” the West merely “postures”.
It shouldn’t be difficult to seize—or at least freeze and hang onto—the wealth Russian oligarchs have deposited in the West. After all, a mega-yacht is hard to miss, and private jets, some of the most valuable assets that can be purchased, can barely move across an airport taxiway without being directed and tracked by air traffic controllers. Earlier this week, France did manage to seize the 290-foot Amore Vero, owned by close Putin associate Igor Sechin, but it was one of the few oligarch-linked items taken since the war started.
What would Senator Joe McCarthy and J E Hoover have said and done with a Putin loving Trump?
Trump’s fawning admiration of Vladimir Putin is well known, but it has often been brushed off as a quirk. We should have known how dangerous Putin was when he praised Trump as “impressive.” Trump is impressive the way spoiled butter left out too long is, rancid and foul-smelling. Now Trump is calling Putin “smart” and “savvy” and a “genius” for his brutal invasion of Ukraine.
Will the ALP take advantage of Murdoch’s support of Russia and Morrison’s love fest with Murdoch?
Democrats decried Trump’s praise for Putin as “undermining national security” and “near treasonous.” But his comments also represent “a great opportunity for Democrats,” one pollster said. Americans, and particularly those who are older, will not side with Russia, the pollster added.
Outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, and the AP are failing in a basic civic obligation after Trump pushed January 6 pardons, called for more demonstrations, and said Pence should have “overturned the election”
But let us be clear: No American president is going to go to war with Russia over the Ukraine. There is no compelling US national interest in a military involvement in that part of the world, and Russia is a nuclear-armed state. The steps President Biden has spoken about, including sending 8,000 US troops to countries in the vicinity of Ukraine that are allied with Washington, are (rather weak) symbolism. The threat of economic sanctions is in any case far more powerful. But Biden wouldn’t be playing such a weak hand if the US had had a unified position for the past five years and if Trump hadn’t appeared to be working for the other side.
Source: How Trump appeased Putin and Endangered Peace in Ukraine
Is Australia’s Scott Morrison the 3rd Musketeer?
There’s a truism of conventional wisdom, broadly accepted on both sides of the Atlantic, that British and American politics since World War II have run in rough parallel. Sometimes one of the two Anglophone democracies gets ahead and sometimes the other falls behind, but roughly similar phenomena — adjusted for cultural differences and quite different political systems — tend to occur at roughly the same time.
Source: So what the hell happened to Boris Johnson — and can it happen to Donald Trump? | Salon.com
Note Americans still call Murdoch ‘the Australian Billionaire’ not even the Australian-American. He simply isn’t one of them but might as well be a Russian in his support for Trump and the degree of influence he has.
Republican outlets like Politico and Fox and the Wall Street Journal (the latter two echo chambers for reactionary Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch) have been asking whether Biden’s is a failed presidency. The stupid gives me vertigo. After the lunacy Trump put the country through, even if Biden had had fewer successes than he did, he’d have been a roaring success just by not replicating the previous four years of dysfunction.
Trump also made clear, however, that he will not cease inciting the insurrectionist movement—whose animating lie, that the 2020 election was “stolen” through fraud, continues to stir threats of far-right extremist violence. According to a report from the Department of Homeland Security shared on January 3 with various US law enforcement and intelligence agencies, “threat actors will try to exploit” the January 6 anniversary “to promote or possibly commit violence.” The DHS report cites extremist material circulating online, including flyers calling for renewed attacks on the seat of American government: “This was just the beginning,” one says, featuring an image of rioters inside the Capitol Building a year ago, doctored with blood splatter. “Reunion on Capitol Hill January 6 2022,” it further reads.
Source: Trump Continues to Incite the Violent Extremist Movement of January 6 – Mother Jones
As much as we may critique the democratic system in the United States for not living up to its name, or the Democratic Party for not getting enough done, what we now face is dire. Trump himself may not precisely fit the “classic” definition of a fascist leader — we can quibble about that around the edges — but he’s close enough for many experts. More to the point, he is a nonstop liar, a conman and a sociopath. He doesn’t care about his own followers, only about himself. No such person should be in a leadership position at any level.
Source: Are we normalizing the “death of democracy” by talking about it so much? Definitely not | Salon.com
Trump loves Russia, Nth Korea, and so it’s no surprise he loves Israel. He is anti- Democratic and approves of autocratic rule and in particular their leaders. However, he doesn’t conflate Jews with Israel. Israel on the other hand conflates itself with Jews, even when they are increasingly becoming distanced from it. Lets face it Israel only has 30% of the worlds Jewish population. and 25% of Israelis aren’t Jews. So to call Trump anti-Semitic is simply to say he’s pro-Israel and that Israel is anti-Semitic as the worlds Jews are turning their backs on the State in increasing numbers. However, if the Western world and some Middle Eastern countries are largely pro-Israel and one considers that Jews against Israel are the real representatives of Judaism, it’s community and it’s spirit, then yes anyone “for Israel” is anti-Semitic.
Donald Trump said that the American Jews “no longer love Israel” in a recently aired interview, claiming that “evangelical Christians love Israel more than the Jews in this country.” “People in this country that are Jewish no longer love Israel,” Trump told Israeli journalist Barak Ravid in a Friday episode of podcast “Unholy: Two Jews on the news.” Trump continued: “I’ll tell you, the evangelical Christians love Israel more than the Jews in this country. It used to be that Israel had absolute power over Congress. And today I think it’s the exact opposite.”
Even once Trump started receiving the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), a daily summary of high-level national security and intelligence issues, Trump chose not to read it, according to Ted Gistaro, a career CIA analyst who frequently briefed Trump. This backed up earlier reports that Trump did not read the PDB. “He touched it,” Gistaro said when asked how closely Trump read the briefs. “He doesn’t really read anything.”
Source: Trump Was ‘Fact Free’ During Briefings, Says Former Intel. Director – Rolling Stone
Never forget Atlantic City the real reflection of Trump’s economic record. There’s his inheritance too blind Freddy would have over $12bn dollars after 40 years doing nothing. DJ Trump has $2.5bn and trail of blood and carnage in his wake.
Chuck Jones of Forbes reports that Trump was in the habit of boasting about economic gains during his administration, but now his records are being “soundly beaten” according to the S&P 500.
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