I won’t waste my time or yours weighing in on what has predictably been labeled “Signalgate” except to note that Trump, Gabbard and Hegseth are all trying to brazen it out with transparent lies.
Most chilling of all
The ochre emperor, having figured out that he cannot control life-tenured federal judges, has taken to kidnapping law firms, negotiating ransoms that include not taking any cases he doesn’t like.
Courts decide cases. They don’t inject themselves unbidden into the affairs of the Executive and Legislative branches. If Trump’s kidnappings work (and so far they have worked pretty well), don’t trust the courts to keep him in line because people won’t be able to get law firms to represent them against the Administration’s already-lawless behaviors.
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump delivered a speech in the Great Hall of the Justice Department. But he did not laud the impartial application of the law, as past presidents have done in the staid space. Instead, he took the opportunity to signal some score-settling against the lawyers involved in legal challenges against him.
“They spied on my campaign; launched one hoax and disinformation operation after another; broke the law on a colossal scale; persecuted my family, staff, and supporters; raided my home, Mar-a-Lago; and did everything within their power to prevent me from becoming the president of the United States,” Trump said, referencing his past campaigns and some of the criminal and civil cases brought against him. He went on to single out several lawyers allegedly involved in the scheme by name, including “radicals like Marc Elias, Mark Pomerantz” and “scum” like “Andrew Weissmann, deranged Jack Smith.”
As of Tuesday, each of those attorneys has something else in common: They all have current or former ties to law firms now in Trump’s crosshairs. Over the last month, Trump has threatened four law firms in what appears to be a broader campaign of intimidation directed at the legal profession. Coinciding with the administration’s recent attacks on judges, legal scholars fear the moves could represent a serious threat to the independence of the bar and the ability of individuals to effectively challenge the government in court.
You’d think that BigLaw could stand up and fight, but it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and Paul Weiss found the other dogs trying to poach their top lawyers and clients rather than offering help. That’s why they felt they had to pay Trump’s ransom demand.
Let me get this straight …
Donald Trump is, as he will tell you, the world’s greatest negotiator, and he feels the need to renegotiate the existing U.S.-Canada trade deal, which was negotiated by an utter incompetent: Donald Trump, whose administration oversaw the replacement of NAFTA by the (rather lightly modified) USMCA the last time he was president. And now Canadians have learned what banks, investors, vendors, small business partners, wives, ex-wives, and pornographic performers rapidly approaching their expiration dates have all learned over the years: If you think you have a deal with Donald Trump, you are a fool.
The Roy Cohn theory of university perfidity
[T]he tone was a diatribe, the kind of ill-informed, red-meat rant Tucker Carlson honed throughout the first Trump administration every weeknight in prime time on Fox News: Come out of gate with guns blazing and never relent. Concede nothing to any less severe view of the topic. Reject any form of nuance. Illustrate the absolute truth of one’s position by giving a handful of outrageous-sounding anecdotes cherry-picked to demonstrate the absurdity of holding any other position.
On that day three years ago, it took Vance exactly 40 seconds to declare how important it was for conservatives like himself to “honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country”—just as it took just a few weeks for the second Trump administration to follow through on precisely this agenda.
Damon Linker. I quote it because the bolded part is the Trump style, which he learned from the infamous Roy Cohn. That’s why you dare not rely on anything anyone in this administration says.
More:
I know enough about what goes on in the country’s universities to recognize that the right-wing thugs currently running the executive branch and taking a baseball bat to higher education are utterly full of shit. They are poised to do an immense amount of damage to something valuable and good. And much of the broader public appears not to care—in no small part because of the incendiary lies the ideological propagandists behind the MAGA movement have been propagating for years. I won’t say they must be stopped, because I don’t know if they can be stopped. Still, it’s important we recognize exactly what they’re doing and the price our country and our world are going to end up paying for their destructive zealotry.
Of course a narcissist would feel this way
I believe that CNN and MS-DNC, who literally write 97.6 percent bad about me, are political arms of the Democrat Party and in my opinion, they’re really corrupt and they’re illegal, what they do is illegal, … And it has to stop, it has to be illegal, it’s influencing judges and it’s really changing law, and it just cannot be legal. I don’t believe it’s legal, and they do it in total coordination with each other.
Nellie Bowles quoting Trump’s speech to the DOJ.
Change “I” to “we,” format it, sign it, and file it with the District Court. That’s how Trump’s new toadies at DOJ operate.
I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.
Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 