Traitor Watch - The 45 & 47 Thread

[Paladin]

Well that's it then.

Roberts delays handover of Trump tax returns to House panel

Chief Justice John Roberts has put a temporary hold on the handover of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns to a congressional committee.

apnews.com

this delay means the Committee won't see anything until AFTER the midterms.

If they get it at all. a GOP House will gladly sweep the investigations under the rug.

He will not spend a minute in jail. He will never suffer any consequences. And he's likely to win 2024 in a cakewalk.

 

[G.B.Blackrock]

Well that's it then.

Roberts delays handover of Trump tax returns to House panel

Chief Justice John Roberts has put a temporary hold on the handover of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns to a congressional committee.

apnews.com

this delay means the Committee won't see anything until AFTER the midterms.

If they get it at all. a GOP House will gladly sweep the investigations under the rug.

He will not spend a minute in jail. He will never suffer any consequences. And he's likely to win 2024 in a cakewalk.

Not responding to the doom-and-gloom, but let's be real, even if folks DID see the tax returns before midterms, it would mean practically nothing toward the midterm results.

 

[Wheelimus]

Can Donald Trump's taxes magically erase record inflation and drop gas back to under $3? If so there's a chance it matters this midterm. If not it won't matter.

Trump isn't going to easily win in 2024 because the country is going to have two years to watch them not govern in the House and maybe Senate. The only Republican Joe Biden can probably beat, in a nail biter, is Donald Trump.

 

[The Mighty Mollusk]

It's too late for this stunt to effect the midterms one way or the other. And it won't really matter in the long run anyway. A red majority would mean it'd all be swept under the rug anyway (because as terrible as Trump is for the party, he's still a useful figurehead among the cult); a blue majority means the investigations continue, and maybe actually go somewhere when they can't be voted down so easily. It's a delay for whatever was already going to happen.

 

[Pocket]

So an appeal on conviction is already in the bank and most likely to succeed. That's great.

To be fair, you'd be hard pressed to find twelve people in this entire country who aren't already either part of his cult or want to see him hanged.

 

[Pale Rider]

FB friend:

Reading Reddit threads about ex-Trumpers explaining why they voted for him in 2016, one theme keeps coming back: "I hated Hillary".

I can see why someone would dislike Hillary. She's easy to dislike. But to hate her so intensely that you would vote for ANYONE, even Trump, just to keep her out of office is something else entirely. Especially among people who still retained enough common sense to eventually turn on Trump.

This begs the question: why exactly did people hate Hillary so intensely? I get that she's just not what you'd hope for, but there's a pretty big gap between "not what I'd hope for" and intense seething hatred.

What's interesting is that when other Redditors ask these people WHY they hated Hillary so much, they don't have real answers. Some of them say they believed the conspiracy theories about her, others shrug and talk vaguely about how they just had a gut instinct or a general feeling or something.

One interesting thing is how many of them were turned off not by the behaviour of Trump himself, but the increasingly unhinged behaviour of their fellow Trump supporters. One guy said he couldn't believe his friends and family were defending SharpieGate and were literally stocking up on storm supplies and bracing for the hurricane even though it wasn't coming anywhere near them. He was shocked that his state's weather service made a public apology for contradicting Trump even though they were telling the truth. That's when the "oh my god I'm in a cult" feeling finally hit him.

 

[DefaultOption]

This begs the question: why exactly did people hate Hillary so intensely?

The twenty-five year smear campaign against her by the GOP ultimately had its intended effect, with a push over the finish line by the eleventh-hour help from Russia. There was also part of the left who were eager to buy into anti-Hillary propaganda for various reasons.

To paraphrase the meme, the worst part about 2016 was seeing so many people willing to ignore the worst facts about a man while believing the worst rumors about a woman.

 

[Ungnome]

I'll admit, I'm not the greatest fan of the Clintons, but even with me preferring another candidate, Trump was much worse BY MILES than Clinton would have been and that much was obvious to me even then. I'm still a little dumbstruck at how the 2016 election turned out, TBH(even more dumbstruck at how high of a percentage of the vote he got in 2020 after 4 years of his shinanigans).

 

[Rhinox]

Is it just me or do the GOP hold special hate for female politicians. Hillary is the obvious one, but look at Nancy Pelosi and AOC. It's like they save their worst vitriol for the women.

I see AOC as the next Clinton, with the propaganda machine fully working on equating her name with mud. Is this fear or just an overall distain of women in general?

 

[Nevermore]

Is it just me or do the GOP hold special hate for female politicians. Hillary is the obvious one, but look at Nancy Pelosi and AOC. It's like they save their worst vitriol for the women.

I see AOC as the next Clinton, with the propaganda machine fully working on equating her name with mud. Is this fear or just an overall distain of women in general?

Then again, MTG and Lauren Boebert...

 

[The Mighty Mollusk]

So in other words, they only like stupid women.

 

[Pocket]

AOC, at least, makes sense as a target because she genuinely espouses pretty radical leftist ideals. She's the closest thing Congress has to a 2010s Tumblr SJW stereotype.

Pelosi and Clinton are both pretty standard middle-of-the-road Democrats, if I'm not mistaken. To the point where I think the worst thing to come out of the smear campaign against Pelosi is that it's galvanized the defensive support for her against any possibility of being primaried by, or even replaced as Speaker by, someone with more of a spine.

 

[NovaSaber]

Homeland Security Admits It Tried to Manufacture Fake Terrorists for Trump

The Department of Homeland Security launched a failed operation that ensnared hundreds, if not thousands, of U.S. protesters in what new documents show was as a sweeping, power-hungry effort before the 2020 election to bolster President Donald Trump’s spurious claims about a “terrorist...

news.yahoo.com

The DHS report offers a full accounting of the intelligence activities happening behind the scenes of officers’ protest containment; “twisted efforts,” Wyden said, of Trump administration officials promoting “baseless conspiracy theories” to manufacture of a domestic terrorist threat for the president’s “political gain.” The report describes the dossiers generated by DHS as having detailed the past whereabouts and the “friends and followers of the subjects, as well as their interests” — up to and including “First Amendment speech activity.” Intelligence analysts had internally raised concerns about the decision to accuse anyone caught in the streets by default of being an “anarchist extremist” specifically because “sufficient facts” were never found “to support such a characterization.”

One field operations analyst told interviewers that the charts were hastily “thrown together,” adding they “didn’t even know why some of the people were arrested.” In some cases, it was unclear whether the arrests were made by police or by one of the several federal agencies on the ground. The analysts were never provided arrest affidavits or paperwork, a witness told investigators, adding that they “just worked off the assumption that everyone on the list was arrested.” Lawyers who reviewed 43 of the dossiers found it “concerning,” the report says, that 13 of them stemmed from “nonviolent crimes.” These included trespassing, though it was unclear to analysts and investigators whether the cases had “any relationship to federal property,” the report says.

 

[Rhinox]

Quelle surprise. Donald Trump was, is, and remains the greatest threat to democracy in our time.

 

[KidTDragon]

Don't discount the efforts of the rest of the GOP.

 

[CoffeeHorse]

The DHS was unofficially but practically run by Stephen Miller at the time, so this is not surprising.

 

[Pocket]

Also, it's the DHS. A department encompassing various "security" and "intelligence" agencies (read: the Deep State) at the behest of W during the biggest wave of xenophobia in recent history. Expecting them to be anything but a front for fascism even during a Democratic administration would probably be asking too much. Trump becoming president was probably the high point of their pathetic lives.

 

[G.B.Blackrock]

Is it just me or do the GOP hold special hate for female politicians. Hillary is the obvious one, but look at Nancy Pelosi and AOC. It's like they save their worst vitriol for the women.

They seem to be willing to tolerate female politicians in the GOP itself, but I do agree that they seem to hold special antipathy for female politicians in the opposition.

 

[Ungnome]

Yup, Bernie Sanders is much further to the left than Hillary or Pelosi ever were and he's not treated nearly as badly.

 

[The Mighty Mollusk]

They seem to be willing to tolerate female politicians in the GOP itself, but I do agree that they seem to hold special antipathy for female politicians in the opposition.

They tolerate females who agree with them because they know their place. Female opposition needs to be quiet and get back in the kitchen.