Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2

[Rick Plant]

Storing apparently was left out of the,loop!

Kellyanne must have had Storing working on those "internal poll numbers"

 

[Paul May]

“I alone can fix it”.

“I’m the chosen one”.

137,000 dead Americans.

American economy wrecked.

Rioting throughout our country.

What’s he fixed?

Is your life better than 4 years ago?

A reality tv flunky who has failed at everything in his life has failed America and killed Americans.

[Tom Scully]

“I alone can fix it”.

“I’m the chosen one”.

137,000 dead Americans.

American economy wrecked.

Rioting throughout our country.

What’s he fixed?

Is your life better than 4 years ago?

A reality tv flunky who has failed at everything in his life has failed America and killed Americans.

Premeditated Cruelty is in vogue, Katie Miller is openly proud she is dead inside, no ability to feel empathy, blames caged children of asylum seeking parents for "not assimilating", Pence sez, "gotta add her to my staff as public liason"! Stephen Miller falls in love with her.

https://www.businessinsider.com/katie-miller-says-unmoved-by-child-detention-facility-visit-book-2020-7
Katie Miller was unmoved by child detention facility visit: new ...
Jul 7, 2020 - Miller responded: "No, but I believe if you come to America you should assimilate. Why do we need to have 'Little Havana'?" Katie Miller. Vice ...

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/transcript-mary-trumps-interview-abc-news-george-stephanopoulos/story?id=71803869
abcnews.go.com › Politics › story
2 hours ago - Trump's niece calls on him to resign Mary Trump speaks exclusively to ABC News about President Trump for ... TRUMP: He had no empathy.

Death gets a new lease, just hours after Mary Trump's uncle spent time with "Killer" Kemp!:
Including at was recently the busiest airport in the U.S.:

https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/local-mask-mandates-suspended-by-gov-kemps-executive-order

Local mask mandates 'suspended' by Gov. Kemp's executive order
Governor Brian Kemp is overruling local governments that have issued mandatory mask laws in a new executive over issued Wednesday.
FOX 5 Atlanta -1 hour ago

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2020/07/15/in-atlanta-trump-will-tout-looser-environmental-rules-to-jolt-economy-by-speeding-up-road-projects/
In Atlanta, Trump touts looser environmental rules to jolt economy by speeding up road projects
COVID-19 pandemic and GOP fight between Loeffler and Collins provide backdrops for quick Georgia visit.

Honesty and integrity in the Trump campaign "train wreck"? Fuggetabboutit!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Stepien
Bill Stepien (born 1978) is a Republican political operative and former White House political director in the Trump administration. Stepien managed both of Chris Christie's gubernatorial campaigns and served as his Deputy Chief of Staff before being fired in 2014 after Christie said he "lost confidence" in Stepien's judgment.[1]

After Donald Trump secured the Republican nomination, Stepien joined the presidential campaign in August 2016 and was later named the White House political director during the Trump presidential transition.

On July 15, 2020, it was announced that Stepien would replace Brad Parscale as the campaign manager for the Donald Trump 2020 presidential campaign [2]

Contents
1   Early career
2   Chris Christie campaign and administration
2.1   Fort Lee lane closure scandal : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Stepien#Fort_Lee_lane_closure_scandal

New Trump 2020 "General" had no empathy when he participated in delaying GW Bridge traffic for hours in a political revenge scam, delaying emergency vehicles and all other inbound traffic from Ft. Lee, NJ to northern Manhattan.

How did you think Comey's replacement at FBI got his job?

https://www.wnyc.org/story/ethics-question-christies-hiring-fbi-director-nominee-bridgegate-attorney/

Christie's Hiring of FBI Nominee as Bridgegate Attorney .
Jul 24, 2017 - FBI director nominee Christopher Wray's agreement to represent Gov. Chris Christie in Bridgegate came 11 months after he actually started ...

Whaddya think is going to happen between Trump's election loss in November, and January 20, 2021?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Lee_lane_closure_scandal
Bridgegate,[1][2] is a U.S. political scandal in which a staff member and political appointees of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie colluded to create traffic jams in Fort Lee, New Jersey, by closing lanes at the main toll plaza[3][4] for the upper level of the George Washington Bridge.[5]
.....The problems began on Monday, September 9, 2013, when two of three toll lanes for a local street entrance were closed during morning rush hour. Local officials, emergency services, and the public were not notified of the lane closures, which Fort Lee declared a threat to public safety.[6] The resulting back-ups and gridlock on local streets ended only when the two lanes were reopened on Friday, September 13, 2013, by an order from Port Authority Executive Director and Democrat from New York, Patrick Foye. He said that the "hasty and ill-informed decision" could have endangered lives and violated federal and state laws.[7]


"Bridgegate" entrance, customary three rush-hour toll lanes (20, 22, 24)

First Amendment... for confederate battle flag wavers, but not for BLM peaceful protestors when it's time to use a bible as a campaign prop,  or for authors Mary Trump, Michael Cohen, John Bolton, Omarosa, or a for a duty bound Lt. Colonel Vindman, formerly serving at NSA, or for his uninvolved twin brother.

https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2020/07/13/as-vindman-retires-army-officers-demand-lawmaker-stops-holding-up-their-promotions/
As Vindman retires, Army officers demand lawmaker stops holding up their promotions
Meghann Myers - 2 Days Ago
...Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., has threatened to bar the promotions of more than 1,100 field-grade officers until she gets confirmation from Defense Secretary Mark Esper that his department did not meddle in the promotion chances of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a former member of the National Security Council who testified during President Donald Trump’s impeachment proceedings.

“I am writing to you to ask that you to reverse course on using them and their families as hostages in a political dispute between you and the President which does not, and should not, involve them,” Timothy Parlatore, who represents retired Chief Special Warfare Operator Eddie Gallagher, wrote in the letter. “The U.S. military is rightly an apolitical institution and elected officials on both sides of the political aisle must ensure that they are not dragging our military members into the middle of a partisan fight.”....

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-race-face-mask-school-roger-stone/

Transcript: Trump on masks, reopening schools, race and pardoning Roger Stone
JULY 15, 2020 / 2:36 PM / CBS NEWS
.....You say that's affecting the stock market right now?

Oh, absolutely. The stock market would be much higher, except for the fact that if he got in, the stock market will crash. You will be in a depression —

You will be in a depression like in 1929 if Joe Biden gets in. He's gonna put back all the regulations. He's gonna triple everybody's taxes. You'll be in a depression the likes of which you've never seen before.

President Trump, back in 2015, you said the Confederate battle flag belongs in a museum. Do you still believe that?

All I say is freedom of speech. It's very simple. My attitude is freedom of speech. Very strong views on the Confederate flag. With me, it's freedom of speech. Very simple. Like it, don't like it. It's freedom of speech.

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/495713-trump-company-lawyer-warned-michael-cohen-not-to-write-tell-all-book
Trump company lawyer warned Michael Cohen not to write 'tell-all' book:
May 1, 2020 - ... to Michael Cohen asking him to stop writing a tell-all book about his time working as ... Michael Cohen writing tell-all book about Trump: report ... He has saved a lot of them for when the time is right and the time is now right. ... he would be released early from prison due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, ...

Would you be comfortable with your supporters displaying the Confederate battle flag at political events?

You know, it depends on what your definition is. But I am comfortable with freedom of speech. It's very simple.

But you understand why the flag is a painful symbol for many people because it's a reminder of slavery.

Well, people love it and I don't view, I know people that like the Confederate flag and they're not thinking about slavery. I look at NASCAR, you go to NASCAR, you had those flags all over the place. They stopped it. I just think it's freedom of speech, whether it's Confederate flags or Black Lives Matter or anything else you wanna talk about. It's freedom of speech.....

https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/article/Trump-campaign-files-arbitration-action-against-13155122.php
Trump campaign files arbitration action against Omarosa Manigault Newman
John Wagner, The Washington Post Published 5:09 pm EDT, Tuesday, August 14, 2018
....."It's interesting that he's trying to silence me, so what is he trying to hide? What is he afraid of?" she said on MSNBC. "I think he should be afraid of being exposed as the misogynist, the bigot and the racist that he is."

The Washington Post has not seen a nondisclosure agreement signed by Manigault Newman during the campaign, but copies of other agreements signed by aides include broad prohibitions on behavior and appear to be drawn heavily from similar contracts used by the Trump Organization, the president's family firm.
https://twitter.com/joshgerstein/status/1278385403045675008

Case 1:19-cv-01868-RJL Document 19 Filed 07/01/20 Page 1 of 10 :
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.208668/gov.uscourts.dcd.208668.19.0.pdf

https://www.npr.org/2020/07/13/890647734/judge-frees-mary-trump-from-gag-order-on-new-family-tell-all
Judge Rules Trump's Niece Free to Discuss New Family Tell-All
A New York judge has lifted a restraining order against Mary Trump, niece of President Trump, that had prevented her from speaking publicly about her new ...NPR 2 days ago

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/13/us/politics/mary-trump-book.html
Mary Trump's Tell-All Cleared by Judge for Publication
A New York judge ruled on Monday that Mary L. Trump, the niece of President Trump, could legally go ahead with the publication of her explosive tell-all memoir ...2 days ago

https://abcnews.go.com/US/michael-cohen-back-federal-custody-released-home-confinement/story?id=71696130
Michael Cohen, furloughed from prison in May, back in federal custody after he balks at gag order
Michael Cohen is back in federal custody after having been released to home confinement over COVID-19 concerns.
ABC News 6 days ago

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/07/michael-cohen-prison-gag-agreement-book-confinement/
POLITICS JULY 9, 2020
Michael Cohen Was Sent Back to Prison After Refusing to Sign a Gag Agreement
Trump’s former fixer is writing a book. His lawyers suggest that’s why he’s back in jail.
.....Cohen teased his book on Twitter last week after a federal judge issued a ruling that allowed Mary Trump, President Trump’s niece, to proceed with publishing a book harshly critical of the president.....

https://www.justsecurity.org/71370/top-experts-bureau-of-prisons-blocking-michael-cohen-book-about-trump-violates-first-amendment/

[Paul May]

President Donald Trump failed to warn Americans about the coronavirus pandemic at the start and has continued to mislead the public, and some legal experts think he should face criminal prosecution.

There’s ample public evidence that Trump knowingly misled the public about the dangers from COVID-19 because he believed that doing so would advance his re-election efforts, and that some Americans died as a result of those lies and other misconduct, argued former attorney Dean Obeidallah in a new Daily Beast column.

“The question that needs to be asked is: Should a president be held criminally responsible for knowingly failing to inform the American public about the risks associated with a deadly virus during a pandemic because he believes, by doing so, it helps his political fortunes?” Obeidallah wrote. “Any answer but ‘yes’ gives a future president a green light to do the same thing as Trump at the expense of the lives of our fellow Americans.”

Obeidallah asked several former federal prosecutors and a Harvard Law professor whether Trump could or should be prosecuted for his misconduct during the pandemic, and they agreed his actions satisfied the three elements of either involuntary manslaughter or negligent homicide — but proving those elements would be nearly impossible.

“Trump had a duty to act as president and violated that by knowingly failing to warn the public about the known threats of the virus,” former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner told Obeidallah.

Kirschner, now an MSNBC analyst, argued the president would have known his actions or failures would likely produce death or serious bodily injury, and that his conduct was a substantial factor in causing the death of others, but Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe agreed to a point.

“Trump is almost certainly morally responsible for tens of thousands of coronavirus deaths that would not have occurred but for his recklessly misleading public pronouncements and his grossly negligent failures to act rationally on the basis of the medical evidence available to him,” Tribe said.

But, Tribe argued, “proving that Trump caused these deaths beyond a reasonable doubt in a criminal trial would be almost impossible.”

Former Watergate prosecutor and current MSNBC legal analyst Jill Wine-Banks told Obeidallah that Trump’s lies were “an impeachable offense,” but probably couldn’t be proven as a crime, and former U.S. attorney and fellow MSNBC legal analyst Joyce Vance agreed.

“I don’t see a sustainable charge,” Vance said. “[But] I’m not per se ruling that out.

[Rick Plant]

Another 1.3 million Americans applied for unemployment insurance last week, a number barely changed from the prior week and an indication that unemployment remains painfully high in the US.

Where is Royell to tell us how "great" everything is going with Benedict Donald?   

[John Tonkovich]

Looks like I was wrong. When asked some time back by John T. to estimate the number of USA COVID-19 deaths by the end of July I predicted about 140,000. That figure has been reached two weeks early so the figure will be closer to 150,000 it seems. I did predict 200,000 by the election but as the rate now appears higher than I had thought, due largely to a preemptive opening in certain states, that too is likely now an underestimate.

Thank you, Mr. Crow.
1,413 deaths in USA yesterday. 
Meanwhile, back at the ranch - oops- I meant the White House - the latest effort at denial includes bypassing CDC and having HHS receive and report coronavirus numbers, i.e. cases, hospitalizations, deaths. What could  possibly go wrong here?

[Paul May]

Under Donald Trump’s reign, America is a country run by a crime family. Trump and his Republicans have no moral authority. They are removing any oversight by firing inspectors general within the federal government, which has allowed Trump and his allies to loot coronavirus relief funds for billions of dollars. Trump and his cronies rage about “law and order” and locking up people who were looting during the George Floyd uprising — when in reality the plutocrats are looting an entire country and have been doing so for decades.

It’s a mafia state. There’s no control. There’s no regulation. The system is full of legalized bribery. The electoral process is corrupt as well. The courts are stacked with right-wing ideologues. The press has been bought off and corporatized. Many of our constitutional rights as Americans have been revoked by judicial fiat, including the right to privacy. Corporate money floods political campaigns in the name of “free speech.” The United States is a failed democracy and a mafia state, the natural result of what happens when capitalism is deregulated.

Trump, Mitch McConnell, the other Republicans and their gangster capitalist allies are telling the public that $1,200 in coronavirus relief money is adequate. But the billionaires and millionaires are the ones who received the majority of the “relief” funds. America’s billionaires are now $500 billion richer because of the coronavirus disaster. The average American is closer to homelessness. Neoliberal capitalism amounts to socialism for the rich and “free markets” for everyone else.

Mitch McConnell and the other elites really have not figured out what is happening in this moment of great crisis and upheaval. What we are seeing now in America is about so much more than people just being sick of the police murdering innocent people. It is a generational and class revolt. Yes, COVID certainly exacerbated it. But all of the kindling was already there. Chronic underemployment, massive consumer and student debt, being priced out of the for-profit health care system and the expansion of militarized police and the prison system.

This movement is multiracial. It is led by people of color, but certainly, there are a lot of young white people out there too, and my sense is that they are no longer buying into being gaslit by the elites anymore.

The empire always strikes back. What will that look like?

We have to acknowledge that the empire is tottering towards its collapse. So what is empire? Empire is the expression of white supremacy beyond our borders. The whole nature of empire is to go into the Middle East — previously into Vietnam, Latin America, the Philippines and elsewhere — and steal natural resources and exploit cheap labor in the name of white supremacy. And of course, we have an American society built on chattel slavery and genocide against indigenous peoples. What empires traditionally do at the end is they engage in what historians call “micro-militarism”.

At the end, as they slip into an irrevocable decline, empires engage in military adventurism in a desperate bid to bring back lost power, lost wealth and lost glory. America has done this in the Middle East. The result is that America has been hollowed out from the inside.

At the end stage, the elites need the tools that the empire perfected on people of color abroad. That is why we see the drones and militarized police and heavy weapons such as armored personnel carriers being used here in America against the country’s own citizens.

White supremacy hurts white folks. There are so many examples of this, from the way that federal and state resources are spent putting Black and brown people in prison in disproportionate numbers to how white racism hurts the overall economy. The police in Buffalo intentionally knocking down that older white man, who lay there bleeding from the head while the police walked over him like he was human garbage, was such a profound metaphor for how racism hurts white people. With the George Floyd protests and people’s uprising, white folks are seeing, again, that what Black and brown folks have been saying about police thuggery is true. Now the police are brutalizing white people.

People of color always, throughout American history, suffer first. They are the first to suffer — and they suffer disproportionately. But de-industrialization has now hit the white working class. The tools of control are now being used against them. Overall, I don’t so much fault the white racists. They are what they are. I fault the white liberals who really did not pay attention to what was happening to primarily poor people of color in urban areas.

Everything that is now enraging white progressives is not new — it goes back decades. But it was never really covered by the mainstream American news media. The liberal elites busied themselves with the boutique activism of “diversity” and “tolerance,” “multiculturalism” and the like. Sure, that is well and good, but not when such approaches are divorced from economic justice.

When you look at these multiracial, intergenerational protests, what do you see?

There has been mass economic disenfranchisement. There is a leadership crisis too among the Democrats and the so-called liberals.

For example, look at what the Congressional Black Caucus is doing. They are repeating the same kind of tired clichés about police reform we have heard for years. Most people participating in the George Floyd protests know that such reforms are useless. Empty symbolism. The mayor of Washington, D.C., Muriel Bowser, paints “Black Lives Matter” in 35-foot-tall letters on a street near the White House. But at the same time, she’s pushing for a $45 million increase in the police budget and the construction of a $500 million new jail. I don’t think people are buying such a performance. I also don’t believe that people are buying Pelosi’s little kente-cloth, “take a knee in solidarity with Black Lives Matter” trick either.

In part, such actions have no credibility because younger white people no longer buy into the policies of the oligarchs which produced all of this extreme social inequality in the first place. People of color have long known this truth. Now younger white people are being forced into a new type of awareness and consciousness. That is a good thing.

I worry that the Democrats are setting themselves up for great failure and a crushing defeat with all this celebration of how Biden is leading Trump in these early polls. Polls are a snapshot in time. They are not predictive of the outcome on Election Day. Hillary Clinton and Mike Dukakis had double digit leads at various times, and they both lost to Republicans.

As embarrassing and awful as Trump is, he serves corporate power just like Joe Biden. The big corporate Democratic Party donors made it clear that if Bernie Sanders became the presidential nominee, they would support Trump. The donor class has created a system where they cannot fail. If it’s Trump or Biden, Goldman Sachs doesn’t lose, ExxonMobil doesn’t lose, Raytheon doesn’t lose, Citibank doesn’t lose. There is no way that they can lose. They have rigged the system so that their interests are always served.

Donald Trump tried to order the United States military to attack the American people several weeks ago because they dared to participate in massive protests against police brutality and social inequality. These protests continue and social movement scholars are now saying that the George Floyd protests may be the largest such mobilizations in American history. Trump tried to order martial law and the senior leaders of the United States military basically told him no. On one hand I am glad the military defied Trump. On the other hand, I am deeply concerned about such power in a democracy being normalized. Either way, America is not a healthy democracy.

The military does not want to be deployed in the streets. At present they are the most respected social and political institution in the country. The military gets even more money than they ask for from the Democrats and the Republicans. The military, quite correctly, saw that it would be disastrous for them to follow Trump’s commands to crack down and enact martial law.

As a practical matter, the military does not need to intervene against the George Floyd protesters and others who have taken to the streets because the American police are so highly militarized. In America there are SWAT teams who don’t look much different than Army Rangers knocking down doors in Afghanistan.

In many ways, the most potent anti-democratic force in the United States is the military. They are untouchable. The U.S. military cannot even be audited. Such power and influence are a classic symptom of the end of an empire. The Praetorian Guard can no longer be controlled by the supposed political leaders.

There have been incidents across the country in which white mobs attack Black Lives Matter protesters, anti-fascists and other Americans of conscience. These thugs are yelling Trump slogans, wearing his regalia and attacking with baseball bats and other weapons. The Trump street enforcers also have guns. Where do we go from here?

The more beleaguered Donald Trump becomes, the more he and the other racists and nativists will incite violence. America right now reminds me of Yugoslavia during the 1990s.

Donald Trump’s supporters are willing to kill and die for him. This is just the beginning of what is going to happen as Election Day approaches. You have been in war zones and countries torn apart by ethnic cleansing and genocide. What is the model for how a people turn on each other?

It begins with economic dysfunction, which is what happened in Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia went into de facto bankruptcy. The huge state factories closed, just like they did here in the United States. There was massive unemployment, the social bonds in the country were ruptured. There were bread lines. People lost everything, including a sense of identity. As a result, they retreated into these mythical narratives about themselves as Serbs, Croats and Muslims. In such a moment shared public discourse is impossible. These other identities and their myths have now superseded verifiable historical fact. That’s what happened in Yugoslavia, and that is very much part of what is happening in the United States.

Then there is the rise of demagogues who demonize a segment of the population and target them as the Other. Then the eliminationist rhetoric and violent rhetoric begins. After four years, people started shooting each other in Yugoslavia. The United States is approaching that point.

We spoke with each other several months ago during the first few weeks of the national coronavirus lockdown and economic collapse. You told me that as horrible as things were then, it was in fact “the good times.” Several months have gone by. Is the United States still experiencing “good times” as compared to what will happen in the future?

Yes, as compared to what is coming. The elites are not responding rationally to the coronavirus pandemic, the economic devastation and the myriad of other problems facing the United States right now. America’s ruling class is doing just what they did in 2008, which is to line their own pockets at the public’s expense and to cast the rest of the country — the working poor and the working class — aside as if they were human refuse. That is all very shortsighted, of course, because of the blowback. The ramifications are catastrophic. One would think that America’s elites would respond in a smarter way, if even for their own self-preservation. If elected president, Joe Biden certainly isn’t going to respond properly.

The George Floyd protests are more accurately described as a generational class revolt. I hope that the protesters and their allies win, because if we do not take power back from this American mafia state then there will be a very ugly type of tyranny in the country.

As Aristotle said, once you have oligarchic rule, there are only two choices. It is revolution or tyranny, and that’s it. I’m not naive enough to tell you the revolution is going to win, but I’m going to tell you that if it doesn’t win then there will be a very ugly corporate tyranny in the United States.

The American elites, the ruling class, has already rewritten all the laws.They already have the prison cells. They’ve already militarized the forces of internal security. They’ve already legitimized the revoking of basic rights like habeas corpus and due process. Americans are already the most watched, monitored, surveilled, photographed population in human history. The forces of tyranny are ready to go.

I’m more optimistic because I see the resistance in the streets, which wasn’t there a few weeks and months ago. That’s where hope lies. It lies in the streets. And I have got to acknowledge these people. They’re mostly young, incredibly courageous, they are out there braving economic misery, arrests, indiscriminate, brutal and often lethal police violence and COVID-19, and they’re fighting against injustice and the elites anyway. They’re all heroes in my book.