The current ongoing budget talks marathon is a repeat of many others through the years. It appears that the GOP’s position is conservative spending no matter the effect on the neediest Americans. The Dems seem to working in the opposite direction. Sometimes there is middle ground and a deal is struck. In all of this there is never a delay or stoppage of the Congressional paychecks. There is never an interruption of health care or the threat of eviction. This may never be changed except by the insistence of voters. We can send messages that we are not happy with their work. but as long as we vote by rote, uninformed or underinformed , there will always be poor to awful representation in Congress. This is where our (the voters) will is done. Current members talk one way when running for the office and quickly fall into the “insiders” trap once seated. It is odd that we never investigate the activities of those we elect until some news article appears which could or could not be factual, offers some detail about an action or behavior. Where we need to be active is asking questions of the people we voted in and keep asking until we receive satisfactory answers. There is and always will be folks who decide to run for office whose beliefs and morality do not allow them to carry out the legal and correct duties of their office for the benefit of ALL voters no matter the party or subset thereof. When we the people do not do our due diligence in vetting aspirants for political office then we get the types of representation we currently have and allow the rise of “depot wannabe’s” such as Donald J. Trump aka “TOTUS”.
It seems that loyalty is a one way street in Trump world. When it appears that Congress is actually following the law (The Constitution), TOTUS has set fire to the building and locked the doors. Now with no signed fiscal budget and other critical bills the Congress is flailing in the wind yet still have not acknowledged the fact that misplaced fealty to party over voters is akin to unleashing wild dogs in a playground. Their champion (and cover) has turned his ire on them for not backing him against the Constitution as they have in other cases which barely passed the smell test. This should be the defining message to voters that they get no loyalty for their loyalty to the party. It must be remembered that the party is still no more than a group of people with similar beliefs but different personalities and traits. Essentially the parties are an olio of people with similar interests that are hit or miss and sometimes do sensible things. Now that TOTUS is at the exit door, “Botch” McConnell is still doing what he does-obstruct in the name of fiscal responsibility. This flies in the face of the fact that no one in Congress has lost a paycheck, housing or medical treatment during this pandemic. The question remains “Loyalty To Whom”
Trump likely thinks he’s blackmailing McConnell into stealing the election for him. While we have no direct proof this is an extortion scheme, the circumstantial evidence is abundant and compelling. Here’s what we know:
Trump is particularly incensed at McConnell right now for not doing more to make Trump’s failed coup successful. On Monday, Trump’s office sent out emailsto congressional Republicans in which Trump took credit (falsely) for McConnell’s successful re-election, and implied that McConnell should show his gratitude by doing more to steal the presidential election for Trump. Trump believes that Congress will have an opportunity to overturn the election on January 6, by refusing to certify the Electoral College vote. We know he believes this, even though it’s false because he’s been scheming with House Republicans on how to do it. We also know — because Trump keeps tweeting about it — that Trump believes Senate Republicans are, for whatever reason, not doing enough to help him and need so more threats to get motivated to back his coup.
To be clear, this isn’t 11th level chess. It’s actually Trump employing junior high school bully logic: McConnell wants a thing (this paltry coronavirus relief bill), and so Trump is threatening to take it away unless Trump gets what he wants (a successful coup). Trump, being very dumb, has not considered the possibility that McConnell couldn’t give in to the extortion if he tried because there’s actually no secret file in McConnell’s office labeled “How To Steal Any Election.” Nor has Trump apparently given much consideration to how Democrats might react to him threatening McConnell by pretending that he wants a more generous bill.
Washington Post reporter Mike DeBonis confirmed that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is planning the unanimous consent vote Christmas Eve, which will force Republicans to go on the record against mailing $2,000 checks to Americans. Considering that McConnell is hoping $600 checks will be enough to buy off Georgia voters on January 5, a vote against a more generous bill is clearly something Republican politicians likely hope to avoid.
In no way does this theory require believing Trump is crafty, clever, or heaven forbid, intelligent. Trump is a moron who is employing what he thinks is a clever Roy Cohn-style scheme to blackmail McConnell. It is, however, an idiotic misfire, because he’s trying to extort something McConnell simply doesn’t have, that is some deeply buried secret method to steal the election.
The best part about this is that Democrats handed Republicans a chance to get rid of Trump a year ago, when the Democratic-controlled House impeached Trump for, yep, another one of Trump’s many extortion schemes to keep himself in office. (As a refresher, Trump threatened to withdraw military aid from Ukraine if the Ukrainian president didn’t help him cheat in the 2020 election.) But rather than accept this golden opportunity to rid themselves of an erratic and disloyal narcissist in favor of a more easily controlled President Mike Pence, Senate Republicans chose to acquit Trump and keep him around.
To thank them, Trump is now blowing up their spot on this coronavirus bill. Because Trump is loyal to no one and can only be failed. To him, you’re only as good as the last illegal or unethical thing you did to help him.
And boy, it’s hard not to wonder if McConnell isn’t regretting his choice to acquit Trump. Because if he’d just taken the chance Democrats gave him back then, he’d have President Pence happily just doing what he’s told. But no, like so many discarded lawyers, staffers, and other Trump enablers, McConnell made the mistake of thinking he could somehow protect and enable Trump without Trump screwing him over. But Trump will always betray his allies in the end. It’s like the moral of the story Trump loved telling at campaign rallies: Republicans knew Trump was a snake when they picked him up.
Comments Off on Trump’s Future: Tons of Cash and Plenty of Options for Spending It
Is this the real reason TOTUS keeps his name in the headlines? MA.
Shane Goldmacher and Maggie HabermanFri, December 18, 2020, 1:51 PM CST
Election workers during the Fulton County ballot recount in Atlanta on Nov. 14, 2020. (Nicole Craine/The New York Times)
Donald J. Trump will exit the White House as a private citizen next month perched atop a pile of campaign cash unheard-of for an outgoing president, and with few legal limits on how he can spend it.
Deflated by a loss he has yet to acknowledge, Trump has cushioned the blow by coaxing huge sums of money from his loyal supporters — often under dubious pretenses — raising roughly $250 million since Election Day along with the national party.
More than $60 million of that sum has gone to a new political action committee, according to people familiar with the matter, which Trump will control after he leaves office. Those funds, which far exceed what previous outgoing presidents had at their disposal, provide him with tremendous flexibility for his post-presidential ambitions: He could use the money to quell rebel factions within the party, reward loyalists, fund his travels and rallies, hire staff, pay legal bills and even lay the groundwork for a far-from-certain 2024 run.
The postelection blitz of fundraising has cemented Trump’s position as an unrivaled force and the preeminent fundraiser of the Republican Party, even in defeat. His largest single day for online donations actually came after Election Day — raising almost $750,000 per hour Nov. 6. So did his second-biggest day. And his third.
“Right now, he is the Republican Party,” said John McLaughlin, a Republican pollster who worked on Trump’s reelection campaign. “The party knows that virtually every dollar they’ve raised in the last four years, it’s because of Donald Trump.”
Trump has long acted with few inhibitions when it comes to spending other people’s money, and he has spent millions of campaign dollars on his own family businesses in the last five years. But new records show an even more intricate intermingling of Trump’s political and familial interests than was previously known.
Lara Trump, Trump’s daughter-in-law and a senior campaign adviser, served on the board — and was named on drafts of the incorporation papers — of a limited liability company through which the Trump political operation spent more than $700 million since 2019, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times.
The arrangement has never been disclosed. One of the other board members and signatories in the draft papers of the LLC, American Made Media Consultants, was John Pence, the nephew of Vice President Mike Pence and a senior Trump adviser. The LLC has been criticized for purposefully obscuring the ultimate destination of hundreds of millions of dollars of spending.
Lara Trump and John Pence were originally listed as president and vice president on the incorporation papers, documents reviewed by the Times showed. Sean Dollman, the campaign chief financial officer, was the AMMC treasurer.
“Lara Trump and John Pence resigned from the AMMC board in October 2019 to focus solely on their campaign activities; however, there was never any ethical or legal reason why they could not serve on the board in the first place,” said Tim Murtaugh, a spokesperson for Trump. “John and Lara were not compensated by AMMC for their service as board members.” Murtaugh also said the two were not compensated for other positions they were listed as holding.
For Trump, the quarter-billion dollars he and the party raised over six weeks is enough to pay off all of his remaining campaign bills and to fund his fruitless legal challenges and still leave tens of millions of dollars.
Trump’s plans, however, remain extremely fluid. His refusal to accept Joe Biden’s victory has stunted internal political planning, aides say, with some advisers in his shrinking circle of confidants hesitant to even approach him about setting a course of action for 2021 and beyond.
Those who have spoken with Trump say he appears shrunken, and over his job; this detachment is reflected in a Twitter feed that remains stubbornly more focused on unfounded allegations of fraud than on the death toll from the raging pandemic.
Trump has talked about running again in 2024 — but he also may not. He has created this new PAC, but a different political entity could still be in the works, people involved in the discussions said. Talk of counterprogramming Biden’s inauguration with a splashy event or an announcement of his own is currently on hold.
Trump had been tentatively planning to go to Georgia on Saturday, according to a senior Republican official, to support the two Republicans in Senate runoff races there. But he is still angry at the state’s Republican governor and secretary of state for accepting the election result and simply doesn’t want to make the trip. There is some discussion about him going after the Christmas holiday, but it’s not clear he will be in a more magnanimous mood by then.
But even as he displays indifference toward the Georgia races, the Trump political apparatus has taken advantage of the grassroots energy and excitement over the two runoffs to juice its own fundraising. Email and text solicitations have pitched Trump supporters to give to a “Georgia Election Fund,” even though no funds go directly to either Republican senator on the ballot, irritating some Senate GOP strategists.
Instead, the fine print shows 75% of the donations to the Georgia fund go to Trump’s new PAC, called Save America, with 25% to the Republican National Committee.
After weeks of shouting “FRAUD” to supporters in emails and asking them to back an “Election Defense Fund” (which also sent 75% of donations to his new PAC), the Trump operation has subtly shifted its tone and focus, returning to more sustainable preelection themes, like hawking signed hats and opposing socialism.
Trump and the RNC did spend about $15 million combined in legal costs and other spending related to disputing the election between Oct. 15 and Nov. 23, according to federal records.
Besides a $3 million payment to Wisconsin to fund a partial recount in the state, Trump’s largest recount-related payment did not go to attorney fees but to American Made Media Consultants, the Trump-linked LLC on which Lara Trump was listed an original signatory. The firm received $2.2 million Nov. 12 in two payments labeled “SMS advertising,” better known as text messaging.
American Made Media Consultants was the subject of a complaint to the Federal Election Commission earlier this year that accused it of “laundering” funds to obscure the ultimate beneficiary of Trump campaign spending. Federal records show the firm had more than $700 million in funds flow through it since 2019. The vast majority of funds were spent before Lara Trump resigned from the board.
For a sense of scale of just how much money Donald Trump will have at his disposal, the new Trump PAC’s $60 million-plus haul — and counting — is about as much money as he spent to win his party’s presidential nomination in 2016.
Some campaign finance experts have speculated that Trump might try to use the excess of cash in his new PAC, formally known as a leadership PAC, to pay for his own personal future legal quagmires as he faces investigations once he leaves office. (A senior Trump adviser said they don’t expect the money to be used for personal legal needs.)
“A leadership PAC is a slush fund,” said Meredith McGehee, executive director of Issue One, a group that supports increased political transparency. “There are very, very, very few limits on what he can’t spend money on.”
In the last five years, Trump has never shied from spending hundreds of thousands of dollars from his contributors on his private businesses, a practice he could continue or expand while out of office.
Just since mid-October, the Trump Victory Committee, a joint account operated with the RNC, has paid more than $710,000 to the Trump Hotel Collection, while his reelection account has continued to pay more than $37,000 per month to rent space in Trump Tower.
It is not clear where his post-presidential operation will be based or who will run it, although several advisers expect it will be in Florida, where he is planning to move.
But as a former president, Trump will be allocated a certain amount of taxpayer money for staff and office space for life after leaving the White House, and he is beginning to have discussions about which aides from the West Wing will accompany him.
His senior political advisers — Bill Stepien, Justin Clark and Jason Miller, among others — are among those who may stay involved with him politically.
While Trump’s post-presidency remains largely shapeless, he has demonstrated his desire to exert his control on national politics, especially among Republicans.
He has already endorsed Ronna McDaniel, a close ally, to serve another term as chair of the RNC. He has floated primary challenges to Republicans, such as Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, who have crossed him by rejecting his baseless theories of election fraud. He has even asked aides how he can retain control of the party if he isn’t a candidate.
One person close to Trump said that he has sounded less certain about declaring he’s running in 2024 than he had just two weeks ago. That uncertainty is causing anxiety for a number of advisers and aides to the president, some of whom might join other campaigns but are stuck in limbo until Trump makes up his mind. Announcing for president would trigger tighter rules on Trump’s political spending and added financial disclosures, including of Trump’s personal finances, that simply operating a PAC would not.
Trump’s future ambitions have also created a cloud over who exactly will control some of the most valuable assets from the 2020 campaign, including Trump’s lengthy list of supporters from whom he has raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Both the RNC and Trump are entitled to some of this valuable voter data, and efforts at “decoupling” the data are underway but expected to last months.
The RNC has typically stayed out of presidential primaries, but no former president in the modern era has seriously considered running again after losing reelection, putting the party apparatus in uncharted territory. His embrace of McDaniel as an ally in running the party could further complicate matters.
“There’s no bully pulpit as large as the presidency, but nevertheless, President Trump is likely to play a significant role in the future of the Republican Party,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster. “It’s very difficult to imagine him following the same pattern as George W. Bush, Barack Obama and other presidents have followed in keeping their mouths shut and letting the new president try to govern.”
No Matter what one wants to believe, Donald J. Trump has lost the election! The funding for the numerous failed lawsuits are the stock in trade for Donald. He has done this all of his adult (Business) life. His modus operandi is to use someone else’s money as he has none. This is still true as the lawsuits are paid for by his backers including his “base” many of them cannot afford to contribute but do it anyway possibly in lieu of food and personal comforts. The GOP members who have supported this madness up to and including signing onto a petition to overturn the election. The high court has rejected taking on this case and TOTUS is furious as in his uniformed mind he assumed he owned the court because of his appointments. The worst of this is not over, what will be left is a potentially un resolvable rift in the country between the right and left with the GOP sitting on the right with known extremists backing them (whether they want them or not). It should be noted that the left is no better in their own pursuits. The current Congress has shown their preference for taking care of their big money donors over their constituents whom they profess to work for. Hopefully the voters no matter their party preference will remember who their elected officials really work for. TOTUS will trash talk any and everyone after this is sorted out so why follow the head lemming?
Comments Off on Trump’s desperate gambit to stay in office alarms Europeans, who know about coups
Europeans seem to be just as delighted that Biden-Harris won. MA
Melissa Rossi·ContributorFri, December 11, 2020, 5:35 PM CST
BARCELONA — Last month, when Sweden’s TV4, the largest broadcast network in Scandinavia, sent political correspondent Ann Tiberg to cover the U.S. election, her producers were so afraid of the possible mayhem awaiting her that they insisted she pack a bulletproof vest, helmet and gas mask. Understandably: The United States had often appeared out of control in previous months, and not just due to COVID-19. The president had urged his followers to vote twice and cryptically told the militia group the Proud Boys to “stand by”; peaceful protests sometimes turned ugly, devolving into looting and the occasional fatal shooting; showdowns between armed groups were widely predicted for Election Day.
Happily, Tiberg didn’t need the combat gear. “There was no violence, and not a lot of cheating — the system worked. And people showed up in numbers never seen before. I thought that was so impressive. That’s what I brought back to my viewers: The U.S. pulled it off.”
Citizens across the Atlantic cheered the election results. “Europeans were overwhelmingly happy that Trump lost and Biden won,” says Jon Henley, political reporter for the London-based Guardian. But now, “they’re looking on in shock, horror and disbelief — saying this is not right and this is dangerous.”
President Trump speaks at a campaign rally for Senate Republican candidates Sen. Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., and Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., at Valdosta Regional Airport on Dec. 5 in Valdosta, Ga. (Evan Vucci/AP)
After being cast aside by Trump as irrelevant and viewing the administration over the last four years from an icy distance — and preoccupied with the pandemic, Brexit, economic meltdowns, terror attacks and violence-ridden demonstrations against police brutality in France, among other crises — Europeans were bewildered at first by the chaos unleashed by Trump’s desperate efforts to stay in power.
But they are paying attention now. “People are deeply dismayed by what they’re seeing unfold,” says Dave Keating, a Connecticut-born politics reporter now working for French, German and British media from Brussels. “Particularly damaging is that the last few weeks have called into question the rule of law and political stability in the U.S.” And at least some political analysts are worried that the violence expected during election week may instead take place when the Electoral College votes are finalized in January and Trump’s fantasies of overturning the results have become moot.
American presidential elections are, naturally, always big news everywhere in the world, but media coverage in Europe is now awash with stories about Trump’s cries of stolen and illegal votes as well as his mad legal/political dash to overturn the election, competing with news of Joe Biden’s Cabinet nominations and his plans to return to the Paris climate agreement and his pledge to revive the transatlantic bond. Some European media outlets, as well as American, have even called Trump’s machinations an attempted coup, although Europeans who have lived through actual coups tend to have a high bar for use of the word. “We usually think of coups as armed, rapid and decisive,” Henley noted. “This, for the moment, is not armed, and it’s certainly not rapid or decisive. But if you look at its intent, and where it might end up, then we probably should consider this a coup attempt.”
A graffiti with the President Trump, located at the Grand Canal in Dublin on Nov. 17. (Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Brussels-based political scientist Roland Freudenstein, director of the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies, sees the glass of democracy half-full, as well as half-empty. “On the one hand, the U.S. democracy redeemed itself in the eyes of Europe because the madman was not reelected. On the other hand, there’s a huge discrediting of the U.S. democracy by the incumbent who is basically hollowing out the democratic process from the inside.” Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the election is not just weakening American democracy, Freudenstein says, but also democratic governments all over the world. “We always expected he would cause trouble and mischief, but even moderate Republicans thought this would stop after 10 days or two weeks — but it’s not stopping.”
For Marius Dragomir, Director of the Center for Media, Data and Society in Budapest, who grew up in Romania where his family once huddled around the radio listening to Radio Free Europe with the volume low and the drapes closed, Trump’s recent attacks on the electoral process along with his actions over the past four years are heartbreaking. “America was the model and the dream for Eastern Europe, especially after 1990. But it’s not anymore,” he says, “especially after Trump.”
Seeing Trump place family and friends in positions of power while continuing to make money from official visits to his hotels and resorts was reminiscent to Dragomir of the kleptocracies that emerged after the breakup of the Soviet Union. His colleagues kept asking, “‘Is it really possible for the American president to do whatever he wants and to mix his business interests with the position he has, to do bad things with impunity?’ We are used to that in Eastern Europe — but to see it in America was strange,” he says. “People lost the appreciation they once had for America” — all the more over the past month when Trump went after anyone who failed to bend to his insistence that he’d won. The difference, says Dragomir, is that somewhere like Romania or Bulgaria, Trump probably would have prevailed.
Derek Leonard gestures behind a poster supporting Joe Biden in the town of Ballina, Ireland, on Nov. 7, 2020. (Peter Morrison/AP)
“When people lose faith in the electoral process, they’re losing the most important part of democracy,” Dragomir says, and Trump’s defiance of the results sent a bad signal to fledgling democracies everywhere.
Trump’s latest actions have branded him “a saboteur” in France, says English-born historian and author Andrew Hussey, a professor now based in Paris. “He’s regarded as trying to subvert the democratic process” — a big deal in France, where the republic is rooted in that very ideal, which is regarded quite seriously.
“France is now looking at the United States with a mixture of glee and disgust,” he says — with even right-wing parties, like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, now distancing themselves from the current White House occupant whom they once cheered. Then again, admits Hussey, France “always has a love-hate relationship with America. They love American pop culture. But they look at the arrogance of someone like Trump and wonder how a so-called republic could allow one individual to wreck it — and sabotage its foreign and domestic policies.” Recent editorials in French papers are quick to condemn Congress for not reining him in long ago — all the more given these past weeks of attacks on the American election results.
The GOP’s complicity and outright support of Trump’s attacks is perhaps what most galls European thinkers. “That over 200 Republicans haven’t stood up and said anything is absolutely ridiculous,” says political scientist Freudenstein. “It beggars belief that grown-up politicians can act like this.”
A supporter of President Trump listens to him speak during a campaign rally at on Dec. 5 in Valdosta, Ga. (Evan Vucci/AP)
Worse than handing Biden a nation where tens of millions now apparently believe Trump’s false claims that the election was unfairly stolen from him, Europeans believe, are the increasing divisions in American society, some of which Trump helped to stoke. But the growing schism can’t be blamed on Trump alone. Noting that Republicans won more congressional seats than predicted, Freudenstein believes it’s because “Americans are genuinely scared of violence from the radical left.” He is worried about the rise of antifa and the looting that accompanied some Black Lives Matter protests. “I’m not repeating the rhetoric of Trump and his people. But I don’t think [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.] and radical slogans like ‘Defund the Police’ are helping Biden — quite the contrary.” He’s equally wary of the rise of armed militias — whether the Boogaloo Boys or the Proud Boys or the kinds of unorganized terrorists that allegedly plotted to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in October.
He believes that while they may persist for another five or 10 years, such divisions cannot last, and ultimately a new consensus will emerge from new movements “when people see that this polarization actually destroys the country.”
People identifying themselves as members of the Proud Boys join supporters of President Trump as they march on Nov. 14 in Washington. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
Except for Hungary, Poland and Slovenia, where the pro-Trump leaders keep fanning the flames that the recent elections were rigged, the theme that echoes across the Continent is that even though it creaked and shuddered, the American system weathered these most recent attacks from the current White House occupant — thanks to its courts, where even Republican judges and Trump appointees have tossed flimsy lawsuits back in his face. “It’s heartening,” says Henley, “that the U.S. judicial system is holding up.”
For Berlin-based Judy Dempsey, a nonresident senior fellow at Carnegie Europe and editor in chief of the Strategic Europe blog, there are two fundamental takeaways from what’s been happening in the United States during this very rocky presidential transition. “First, you can’t take democracy and rule of law for granted; you have to protect it — especially the courts,” she says. “Secondly, we must find ways to keep the center ground and to maintain a dialogue” between disparate factions.
With 40 days to go, Europeans have joined the countdown to the Biden inauguration, when such issues as climate change, migration, trade and cohesive policies between Europe and the United States on how to approach countries like China and Iran are expected to come to the forefront. “European governments,” says Henley, “will be delighted to talk with somebody who makes sense again.”
The U.S. flag placed on a balcony of an apartment is hung upside down, a sign of distress, in Madrid on Nov. 6. (Paul White/AP)
When did we fall asleep at the switch? This past 4 years of Trumpism has clouded the eyes of many. This clouding has allowed the Conservative GOP and the right side of religion to ascend in ways that serve them selves, not the voters. This election kerfuffle has sucked all of rationality out of ordinary events and allowed “Botch” McConnel to jump on it with both feet. He and his miscreants are busily withholding the tax payers funds from the pandemic and economic relief. Their reasons for dragging their feet have ranged from the future financial burden on our grandchildren to people not wanting to go to work if they receive benefits from the government. If anyone could be accused of not going to work, it would be the Congress! I can assure you that not one of the 535 plus members of the Congress has lost a minutes pay, healthcare or a place to lay their heads during this pandemic yet they are creating a nation of indigents while continuing to lie about their actions. How many millions are they spending to fight a legal election because TOTUS wants it. Once Donald J. Trump is out of office, will they all of a sudden start doing their jobs? If you are paying attention please listen to what these neer do wells are saying and pay close attention to what they are doing. The wake up call is now as we have put too much trust in 500 plus people of whom a third of them are actually doing their jobs. A simple line I coined is: The two middle letters in politician is “LI” pronounced “lie”.
Only in America can on have the right to speak out against injustice, government overreach (or under reach). The one right we should not have is the right to follow an inept leader into the jaws of death and despair. TOTUS has spent 4 valuable years (ours) promoting himself and his poor policies using “dog whistles” and racial slurs. It is unfortunate that too many citizens have fallen for the old “it’s them not us” theme. It would be wise to recall that as citizens we condoned slavery while relying on those enslaved to help us make progress. The current resident of the White House has no knowledge of government beyond what he “perceives” as wrong but no facts to back it up. He has taken the idea that he is smartest person in the room and isn’t. The reason for a cabinet and other agency heads is to inform the President of world affairs and what is happening in the country. This leader(?) has no patience for meetings that do not aggrandize his ideas and actions. His cadre of aides and assistants rarely go against his wishes or desires for fear of his tweeting about them and firing them via tweet. His appointments of agency heads are many times “acting” positions because he wants to be able to fire them at will. If we were able to “lay” the lies he has put forth end to end we could possible circle the globe. What we have is an entertainer seeking approbation on a daily basis rather than “attempting” to do the job and associated work of the Presidency. His loyalist followers fail to realize what affects one group of people affects us all. The end all (or it should be) is the farce of the recent election being “rigged” against him. His callous actions regarding the pandemic and the subsequent economic downturn should be enough to replace him but his loyal voters fail to see that and follow him unmasked while potentially spreading a deadly infection. With the GOP firmly in hand TOTUS and his allies have brought the country to the lowest level since the “McCarthy Hearings”. The GOP has always been the party of fiscal restraint but this is not the time for restraint with Millions of voters suffering with death, illness, homelessness and economic stagnation. World War II showed us that we (America) can rise out these ashes but not by fiscal restraint. We all need to understand that many times our elected officials are lying to us in order to remain in office. There is no worse crime by elected officials than allowing their constituents to suffer while their paycheck and health care continues unabated. It is incumbent on voters to remember who had their backs in times like these and party affiliation should not be a factor. A persons integrity is more important than their party affiliation.
How smart or reliable are the GOP members across the country? These “diehards” would be better served saying nothing in regard to TOTUS’s continual harangue about voter fraud and the seemingly incessant denial of the election. Their tacit approval of his actions is on broad display for all to see and voters should take note of it. Are these the type of folks we want to represent us? Their loyalty (in order of importance) appears to be to party, themselves and voters. Voters should remember who actually is working for them (no matter the party) when the next election comes around. There will never be perfect representation but honest representation is possible and should be demanded.
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