MAGAmuricans say that Donald Trump won the election by a landslide. Math says that a majority of American voters did not want Trump to be President in the last election.
Math says that three-million more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton to be President than the number who voted for Trump when given a choice between the two.
Math says that four-million more Americans voted for Joe Biden at the end of Trump’s term in the Oval Office than the number who voted for Trump at the end of Biden’s term in office.
Over 76.5-million Americans voted for Donald Trump in the presidential election two weeks ago. It has left the rest of us contemplating how so many Americans could vote for a man who has done countless things, any one of which, even MAGAmericans would say should disqualify any other candidate from the office of the President. I have heard many explanations but no one else has expressed the reason that I think Trump was elected.
I have listened closely to MAGAmericans express the reasons why they support Trump and why they opposed Kamala Harris (and before her, Joe Biden). I have also noted their responses to me and others who have expressed why Trump is disqualified for the White House. I have seen a dynamic that has been consistent in all of these observations. When it comes to MAGAmericans’ perceptions of both candidates, they have been untethered from objective reality.
MAGAmericans have created a persona of Trump in their minds that does not reflect the person that he actually is. It’s a caricature of him that has only positive characteristics MAGAmericans want to see.
MAGAmericans have also created a persona of Harris that does not reflect the person that she actually is. It’s a caricature of her that has only characteristics they consider negative. For example, they say that she’s Communist when they obviously don’t even know what communism means.
And the only criticism that they can level against her is that she “cackles.” Granted, there are short video clips of Harris laughing in a strange manner but, if MAGAmericans were to watch extended videos of her, they’d see that most of her laughing is very normal. She laughs no more frequently than the typical person with a positive demeanor does, not to mention that it’s irrelevant to her qualifications to be President anyway.
I have also seen that MAGAmericans’ alternative reality is not limited to the candidates’ personae. It extends to the issues surrounding the campaigns. For example, they think that President Biden has made the United States more reliant on foreign sources of petroleum. The truth is that the United states is a net exporter of oil (i.e. it produces more than it consumes), a level of production that is greater than at any time Trump was President and America is now the largest crude oil producer in the world.
They think that crime is increasing when, in fact, violent crime is declining in America. I even know a Trump supporter who regularly blamed President Biden for the conditions in the United States in 2020. When I reminded him that Trump was President then, he simply denied it, insisting that Biden was President in 2020. He had literally convinced himself that President Biden had mismanaged the year of the pandemic because it fit his MAGA narrative.
These are just a handful of the countless examples of MAGAmericans’ alternative reality that I could cite. When they don’t have a grasp on reality and they think these caricatures are representative of the real candidates, it makes sense for Trump’s supporters to make the choice that they did two weeks ago. They don’t have to be racist or fascist or stupid to have a reason to decide to cast their ballot for Donald Trump.
But the SCOTUS makes a major logic flaw in that statement. The 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution says in Section 3 that, “Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability”. The “disability” to which the amendment is referring is disqualification from holding the office of the President of the United States (or any other federal office, for that matter).
That is to say that Congress is only responsible for removing a disqualification from holding office, not for “enforcing” one, as the SCOTUS claims. If only Congress enforced a disqualification, the clause regarding a vote of two-thirds of Congress to remove the “disability” would be moot. Congress could only remove a disqualification from the ballot put in place by some other agent.
So you don’t fool me, SCOTUS. I see what you’re doing there.
After four years of divisiveness in the White House, many Americans are calling on President-elect Joe Biden to govern in a bipartisan manner. They claim it will promote healing from the open wounds President Donald Trump has inflicted on the United States of America. But a wound cannot heal if the patient keeps picking the scab away.
Everyone who joined Paxton’s motion is guilty of sedition. How can the United States make them accountable? It can look to the 14th amendment, which says that:
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress … who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same.
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution
The congressmen’s attempt to subvert a free and fair election for the president of the United States is a clear act of rebellion against the United States Constitution.
Today I’m calling on House leaders to refuse to seat any Members trying to overturn the election and make donald trump an unelected dictator. pic.twitter.com/icTmGKCpuR
Some would say it’s a rash action and that congress should try to foster bipartisanship instead. Forget about trying to foster bipartisanship. The Senate Leader Mitch McConnell has not changed a bit in the four years since he opposed everything President Barack Obama did. And these 126 congressmen comprise 65% of the GOP in the House. They have made it abundantly clear that they will do everything in their power to cheat the Democrats and thwart President Joe Biden at every turn. That will defy the will of the American people who spoke clearly what we want in the election last month. It’s time for Democrats to fight fire with fire.
That said, I would support one concession to Representative Pascrell’s demand. If one of the seditious Members made a formal statement on the floor of the House under oath, they could be seated in the House. The statement must affirm Trump’s own administration’s position that the 2020 presidential election was the most secure in American history and that there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised. Absent such a statement, those Members can sit out the next congress.
Seating those Members who tried to overturn last month’s free and fair election would send the signal that they can get away with sedition in congress. Not only would that encourage them to do it again, the Republican track record indicates that they would try something even worse next time. And if Democrats don’t fight back hard now while they have a majority, Republicans will overrun them at their next possible opportunity. We already know what that would lead to. The GOP has demonstrated that it fully supports an autocracy in the USA — as long as the autocrat has an R behind his name.
Literally the day after releasing the guidelines, Trump encouraged people protesting the lockdowns in Virginia, Minnesota, and Michigan by exhorting the states to reopen in a series of tweets:
However, none of the states satisfied the gating criteria that the guidelines specified for proceeding to any of the opening phases. One gating criterion calls for a downward trajectory in coronavirus infections yet all three states were still on an upward trajectory.
The guidelines also make the states responsible for being prepared to do widespread testing and contact tracing. I see this as the linchpin to success reopening up America. However, my opinion is that the federal government is also responsible for this rather than leaving it up to the states alone. I called for the federal government to take leadership on the production and distribution of the resources needed to test and trace. But the federal government has failed to do so and, as expected, no state is yet prepared to test and trace at the level prescribed by the guidelines.
Nonetheless, states such as Texas, Indiana, Colorado, Florida, and Tennessee are beginning to reopen even though the number of confirmed cases are still increasing. Georgia began reopening businesses on April 24 even though coronavirus infections were still on an upward trajectory. But at the end of the month, Trump said of Georgia’s reopening that “I think it’s wonderful.” President Trump isn’t the only one encouraging states that are failing to follow Trump’s own guidelines for reopening. Vice President Pence also praised the thirty something states that have plans or have already begun to open up, even though none of them can pass the testing gate or have two weeks of a downward trajectory in infections.
I understand why the states want to reopen. Sheltering in place and social isolation will wreak severe economic damage not only across the United States but also around the entire planet. The only way to recover from the economic harm is by opening up businesses in all sectors of the economy and in every state. Setting aside the economy, the American people are personally wearying of social distancing for a couple of months now. We all want to begin gathering in large groups for all kinds of events again.
But that doesn’t assuage my concern at this point in the pandemic that we may be reopening society too soon. No one disagrees that opening up will cause an increase in COVID-19 hospitalizing and killing Americans. Everyone hopes that this will happen at a manageable level.
We need to reopen businesses and reduce social distancing with great caution to prevent the increases from occurring in major spikes. If other cities start experiencing overloaded health systems like New York City did (and still does) from COVID-19, they will have little choice but to begin shutting down again. And if we think the shutdowns we’ve all lived through already this year were painful, imagine how much worse it’s going to hurt if we have to shut down America again.
President Trump’s administration released guidelines for “Opening Up America Again” today. They comprise a federal policy that can be effectively implemented nationwide. They are clear, objective, and achievable while also allowing flexibility.
The guidelines assume that they will be implemented by governors on a state-by-state (or even county-level) basis. They set gating criteria and preparedness responsibilities as a baseline. This baseline will be met at different times by different states, so it allows those that are ready now to embark on Phase One immediately while ensuring that states which are not ready yet don’t open up too soon. The guidelines also give governors the flexibility to enhance the guidelines with their own requirements for conditions unique to a given state.
The guidelines are broken into three phases. The baseline gating and preparedness must be met and in place before moving to any of the three phases. Each phase addresses those aspects of daily life for which restrictions remain appropriate due to COVID. Once a phase has begun, states should have no evidence of a rebound before moving to the next phase. They might even have to retreat back to the previous phase if they experience too great of a rebound in COVID-19. Each phase has a distinct set of guidelines for individuals, employers in general, and specific types of employers.
Even Phase Three, which eliminates most restrictions, is not a full return to normal. The United States will likely not be able to return to a state like what seemed normal at the beginning of the year until a coronavirus vaccine has been developed and administered to a large enough portion of the population to get herd immunity. That will not happen until the year 2021 at the earliest. And even then, it will be some form of a “new normal.”
How well and how soon the guidelines will be implemented in a given state will depend largely on its governor. There will be a wide variance among states depending on the resources available to the state and the competency of the governance. Some states have already banded together with their neighboring states to begin working toward opening up to their residents. These coalitions will likely facilitate implementing the guidelines by pooling their resources and people.
The president wants to see the economy return to a reasonable level of productivity as soon as possible. For that to occur, the federal government will also have to step up to the plate. The first obstacle states will face is testing and tracing. States will not be prepared to begin even Phase One until they have widespread testing and contact tracing in place. And they cannot move beyond Phase Three until vaccination for coronavirus is widespread among their respective populations. Neither of these are likely to occur in the near future without the federal government taking leadership on the production and distribution of the resources needed to test, trace, and vaccinate. So the president needs to begin immediately working on this if he wants to see the economy turn around. If President Trump won’t take the responsibility to do so, it will be President Joe Biden who will.
Why is it that so many Trumpeteers believed all 16,000 lies Donald Trump spouted in the past three years but suddenly don’t believe him since he started telling the truth about the dangers of the coronavirus ten days ago? Asking for a friend.
I was watching Fox News when I learned that the Coronavirus is just another scam created by Democrats to impeach President Trump. I have long felt that the Democrat party is uniquely capable of leveraging a distinct advantage into a colossal failure. So imagine my surprise when they managed to exhibit amazing genius in creating their latest scam to remove Trump from office.
It all started late last year when the Democrats found a pangolin that was infected with a strain of Coronavirus that was at that time unknown to scientists. They brought the pangolin to China and tricked a vendor into selling it at an open air market in Wuhan. Then the Democrats induced the virus to jump species from the pangolin to humans.
But this was just the beginning of their genius. The Democrats knew that the Chinese people’s behavior was such that there would be an outbreak of the Coronavirus infection in Wuhan. That way, in spite of Trump’s quick implementation of a travel ban from China, the Coronavirus would still manage to get inside the United States.
The Democrats’ next step in their vast left-wing conspiracy was to manipulate the mainstream media into reporting on the Coronavirus. Specifically, they got the American people to panic and the MSM to blame Trump for the Coronavirus hoax. The Democrats did all this to impeach the president since they failed miserably with the Mueller investigation and the Ukraine scandal.
World Health Organization declares that COVID-19 outbreak is pandemic
So forget about Russia meddling in our elections. Be much more concerned about the Democrats using the Coronavirus to steal the election from Trump. They have finally managed to show true genius in an election scam. But America does not need genius if it’s driven driven by evil.
I speculated before the release of the Mueller report that Mueller had a “smoking gun” that would prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Donald Trump conspired with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election. It turns out that I was wrong about that. I was surprised to discover that Mueller uncovered no concrete evidence that Trump actively and directly conspired with any Russian agents to that end. In fact, there is little information in Volume I (the part about Russian interference) that was not already part of the public record from investigative reporting, indictments, and guilty pleas. Therefore, I accept Mueller’s contention that “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
But collusion is not a legal construct, so Mueller explicitly reported that he did not look at the evidence through a collusion lens. He looked for evidence that Trump conspired with Russia to defraud the United States. Unlike collusion, conspiracy is a crime but Mueller could not find evidence that all the elements of conspiracy as defined by federal law were met by Trump as relates to Russia’s interference in the election. So one of my principal conclusions is actually that there was no conspiracy. For all you Trump supporters to whom I said “mark my words,” now is the time for you to tell me “I told you so.”
But Mueller’s report also has a Volume II and it tells a different story. Volume II focuses on obstruction of justice and, contrary to Trump’s assertion, it does not exonerate him. It implicates Trump on at least four counts of obstruction. I’m not referring to obstruction in the vernacular; I’m talking about obstruction of justice as defined by federal law. The report cites almost a dozen incidents that seemed obstructive on their face. It sets out all of the elements that the law requires for the crime of obstruction then it carefully analyzes them against the facts. The report is fair to Trump because it calls out the cases which meet some but lack all of the elements required for a conviction of obstruction of justice. Nonetheless, the report still shows that all of the elements required for a conviction exist in at least five of the incidents.
Analysis of fourteen counts of obstruction of justice
This raises the question of how there can be obstruction of justice if there was no underlying crime of conspiracy. The law does not identify an underlying crime as one of the legal elements required for obstruction and there is a good reason for it. When agents begin an investigation, they don’t know if what they’re investigating is criminal. Sometimes even the target does not know. If the target of an investigation could legally obstruct it when there’s no underlying crime, that would give incentive for a target to obstruct when there is an underlying crime. After all, if they could obstruct the investigation well enough, they could prevent a conviction for their underlying crime, thereby resulting in justice being done for neither their underlying crime nor obstruction. That’s why it’s a crime to obstruct justice whether an underlying crime has been committed or not.
This raises another question of why the Special Counsel did not indict Trump since the report clearly lays out sufficient evidence of obstruction of justice to get a conviction. There’s no need for conjecture about this question—Mueller explicitly tells us that his reason is to show fairness to the president. The Department of Justice (DoJ) has a longstanding policy that prohibits prosecuting the sitting president. However, an indictment is an accusation that the defendant committed a crime. In normal circumstances, the trial is the defendant’s opportunity to publicly present evidence that refutes the accusation. But this is not a normal circumstance because the DoJ will not prosecute a president while he is in office, so he would not have the opportunity to publicly defend himself against accusation of a crime. Therefore, it would not be fair to Trump for the Special Counsel to implicate him while he is president. The only remedy the U.S. Constitution gives to determine if a sitting president is guilty of a crime, and for the president to defend himself against the accusation, is impeachment. Since impeachment is the purview of congress, not the DoJ, Mueller simply reported the facts and law related to obstruction with the intention that the House of Representatives use the information to decide whether or not to impeach Trump.
Each of us believes that the conduct of President Trump described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.
Mernitz, David W., et al. “Statement By Former Federal Prosecutors”. May 6, 2019. Medium.com.
They add that “these are not matters of close professional judgment…to look at these facts and say that a prosecutor could not probably sustain a conviction for obstruction of justice — the standard set out in Principles of Federal Prosecution — runs counter to logic and our experience.” I’m not a lawyer but I’ve read Mueller’s report, which is written in large part in layman’s terms, and it’s pretty clear to me. I agree with the 500 prosecutors referenced above that Trump is guilty of obstruction of justice.
News alert: I agree with a decision President Donald Trump made! I have opposed almost every thing he has said and every action he has taken as president, so I think it’s important to recognize when I agree with him. Let me qualify it by saying that I think Trump made the decision precipitously and is executing on it in a reckless and foolish manner. But I agree with the bottom line that American troops should be vacating Syria and Afghanistan completely and in the near future.
But as a principle, I think the withdrawal of American troops from the greater Middle East is long overdue.
I understand the arguments against doing so and even agree with them to some degree. Yes, there are still thousands of ISIS fighters in Syria but I agree with Trump’s assessment that “on Syria, we were originally…”
….going to be there for three months, and that was seven years ago – we never left. When I became President, ISIS was going wild. Now ISIS is largely defeated and other local countries, including Turkey, should be able to easily take care of whatever remains. We’re coming home! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 22, 2018
….going to be there for three months, and that was seven years ago – we never left. When I became President, ISIS was going wild. Now ISIS is largely defeated and other local countries, including Turkey, should be able to easily take care of whatever remains. We’re coming home!
It would be naive to think that ISIS could be completely eradicated, no matter how long American troops stayed in Syria. Proponents of our presence in Syria would say that we should wait until the conditions are more favorable for a withdrawal but they neither say what those conditions would look like nor offer objective benchmarks that would identify when the conditions have been met. And while they might be able to tinker around the edges to provide some temporary help in isolated situations, it’s also naive to think our troops could have any significant positive impact on the clusterfuck of overall conditions in Syria long term.
The situation in Afghanistan is much the same in terms of the outcomes we could expect. We have been there for seventeen years now and the security situation has been relatively stagnant for well over a decade. Russia got bogged down in Afghanistan for twenty years before they were smart enough to withdraw. Let’s not waste more years there than Russia did because we’re too proud to admit we did not win a war. We have not been able to eradicate the Taliban in seventeen years and we wouldn’t be able to do it in seventy years. As in Syria, staying in Afghanistan any longer would not have any significant positive impact on the overall conditions there either.
So mark my words—President Trump is right to order our troops to withdraw from the greater Middle East. He should listen to his own national security team for advice on how to do it rather than succumbing to the whims of other autocrats. But one way or the other, he should bring the troops home.
The Progressive Zone 