On Tuesday, D. John Sauer, a lawyer for Donald Trump, went before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and said his client could not be prosecuted for ordering the assassination of one of his political opponents (clearly, if not specifically, meant to include President Biden) unless he was first impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate. Since that ignominious moment, pundits and commentators and legal experts have been all over the specifics of the argument, which had to do with Trump’s claim that he is immune from prosecution for anything he did while he was president that came under the broad-as-an-ocean (for Trump, anyway) category of “official duties.”
Trmp is too culturally incompetent to realize he is playing out the last scene of A Face in the Crowd. He doesn’t need Patricia O’Neal to flip the volume switch on so that his voice is broadcast across NYC. Trmp takes great pleasure and pride in scheduling his own camera time. Then he sees the red light and starts to dish about how wonderful he is, how powerful he is, who he hates, what he will do to them, why he’s the greatest. All we have to do is tolerate the sickening sound of his voice and his presence. It’s all there, vile and disgusting vitriol intended for all the people who done him wrong. The cult will remain unpersuaded he is dangerous. The choice should be clear.
Trump's cult, of course, cheers every vile word that comes out of his mouth. But will his celebration of political violence, talk of retribution, assassinations, suspending the constitution, being a dictator...turn off enough people to lose this election?
My bet is that it will, and Biden is on the right track. The message is not so much "defend democracy" as "Trump is Nuts", the man is certifiably dangerous, even more nuts than he was in 2016 or 2020; we have to believe that he means every word he says, and no guardrails will contain him this time. Even if just 25-30% of registered Republicans are scared enough to not vote for him it should be enough to make the difference. This reality should also scare straight the young progressives who are down on Biden now over Gaza. Just turning on the volume switch and blasting it good and loud should do the job and if it doesn't, God help us all.
You're right: he's never seen that movie, and Patricia O'Neal was much too classy to inflame Donnie's shroom, much less inform his "brain." (Those are *not* "air-quotation-marks." Whatever goes on inside his skull is not at all "ordinary.")
I don’t think we would be in this situation of mass delusional thinking if we hadn’t validated notions of victimhood from the right wing from the start--at the Reagan era. People thought they were being “open minded and considerate” when, in fact, they were being played and manipulated. The long, drawn out whine of Repugs culminated with the biggest, sociopath of them all: Diapered Don. And yet, we are STILL mired in twisted logic, entertaining P1135809’s claims to divinity. This is what happens when people of a democracy are not taught critical thinking--a product of the Humanities (particularly, philosophy & history & the ability to write coherently).
What do we expect from a man who has sailed thru life on a flying carpet of immunity. He was a shit as a child and got himself kicked out of school in NYC. His parents sent him to military school. Reports are that he was a shit there too. After military school Mr. Mediocrity got into Fordham, not a stretch in those days. Daddy paid big money to get him a transfer to Penn. At Penn he didn't do shit and his professors noticed, but he graduated anyway. And then Daddy gave him a ton of money to go into business. Money he has lost many times over because even as he stiffs contractors and threatens writers, he's still both a shit and a lousy businessman. Absent his connections to the NY mob and enablers like Roy Kohn and Michael Cohen, he's nothing. Now, to his greta credit, he has bullshitted and bullied his way to the top of a once great (if always wrong since Nixon) political party and turned it into a cult. Because he is still a shit. But now a shit who could have access to real power, he's a dangerous shit...and should be treated as such. It's about damn time that the press...and the judges...figured it out.
All accurate, but mild demurrer from Language Crank: shit, and the evacuation of same, has real value to ourselves and this world. Do the contents of an inflamed, infected pustule have value to the body, and the body politic? If the answer is no, then Language Crank submits that "pustule" is a "better" word to describe the Dee-ranged Defendant.
Pustule works. Perhaps we should look to another language for even better words. Spanish offers "cabron", also "hijo de puta" (or with Melanoma in the picture "marido de puta", or my favorite "gillipollas".
Is it spelled with two "L's" or just one? I had to look up gillipollas and my google translator (which isn't always accurate) insisted I wanted g-i-l-i-p-o-l-l-a-s. Either way it's delicious and I may, with your permission, start using it.
When I lived in Madrid I assume two ls, but regardless, the meaning is more or less clear. I use it all the time in many settings. It works when people know...and when they don't. BTW - what did Google translate say it meant? (literal xlate is crazy chicken)
The frankness of google translate just about knocks me over. Gilipollas was translated as "douchebag". (and I took 4 years of Spanish in HS, so I had some idea that pollo was a chicken) I almost fell off my chair, I was laughing so hard. And then I looked up "hijo de puta....and I won't even write what google told me what THAT translated to!!! (But it also made me laugh from sheer surprise)....so, thanks for all the chuckles and laughs--very welcome after all of the depressing news being bruited about.
Totally agree that DJT is a boil, an infected deposit whose poison if retained and spread can kill the body whole. It must be lanced and drained, which honestly inflamed campaigning by Biden can partly accomplish, but voters must provide the tip of that lance and plunge it deep when the time comes. This is a referendum not just on turning the US into a dictatorship but putting a demonstrable madman at the head.
We knew who he was decades ago. He used the courts to avoid paying his contractors, suppliers and business partners, often forcing them to settle for cents on the dollar. And he used the courts to go after those he did not like, to litigate them into penury. He thought himself to be a "king" then, of the business world, that he was untouchable. We who followed his career screamed our warnings in 2015-16, but the country did not listen, and instead we got four years of destruction of our democratic institutions and principles, not to mention the complete coarsening and vulgarization of social and political discourse.
Our only hope is that enough of the country has seen him now for what he is, and will turn out in overwhelming numbers in November to be sure he never gets near the Oval Office again, should he be the GOP nominee. We have a lot of work cut out for us in the next ten months.
New Yorkers told us what they knew from experience with him, but as people influenced by Fox understand it, New Yorkers are those evil liberals, “elites” who can’t be believed. ( I suspect there are more non- elite NYC residents than elite, no?)
Media might have interviewed some of the contractors he stiffed, but execs wouldn’t have approved. It would have cost less just to repeat “her emails.”
The first time I truly understood what was going on with this dialog between the Court and Trump's lawyer was a few seconds ago when I finished your article. I thought that since the qualifier was impeachment this was about the preposterously idiotic double jeopardy claim. Now I understand it's about presidential immunity which is an argument that is an order of magnitude more sensible and yet still complete nonsense.
It's amazing how many different ways the Trump brain trust is trying to turn impeachment into a win.
I don't think Trump himself really understands how much political harm is being brought down on him through discussion of absolute power and committing mass murders of opponents. He should know better than anyone that most people don't listen to the details. They just remember the keywords and to whom they are associated.
Trump...using special forces to kill people.
Trump....dictator.....above the law.....can't be prosecuted.
This is not going over well. It might make more sense if his attorneys, who I hope and pray are doing this over protest, had a case that had any chance of success. However, this case is dead on arrival. It should be interred quickly before it starts to smell.
I know... t-RUMP and his allies believe that, once their lord and master is in the White House, there will never be another Democratic president. But don't they ever worry that IF there is a subsequent president from that party, that individual will have the same unlimited powers? As for t-RUMP himself, he plans to live and rule forever and doesn't give a shit about a post-trump future.
The last part of the second clause of your last sentence is absolutely true. The Dee-ranged Defendant said so himself. But not the first part. Video loop in my storage unit (memory): Big tax cut for rich passed in 2017. Dee-ranged Defendant triumphant. Network news, don't remember which -- he is leaving White House, headed for helicopter, left to right on our TV screen. Reporter off-camera shouts, "Mr. President, what happens if those [wildly over-optimistic] revenue [increase] projections are wrong, and in twenty or thirty years we're trillions more in debt?" Dee-ranged Defendant keeps walking, looks back over his right shoulder, says with classic Donnie smirk, "I won't be here to see it."
If SCOTUS gives him immunity before Jan 2025, the Biden would have it, too, while he was president. Unless it is Trump only who would have such immunity, not current and future presidents.
Many of my hopes for our deliverance rely on the tireless integrity of Lucian and his fellows. A little of my hope is placed in the bone-deep stupidity of what’s his name who used to throw food in the White House.
I love your choice of "what's his name." I am going to steal it and use it. I can't think of anything more insulting to a narcissistic thug who is in love with his name and his so-called "brand"!
Personally leading an agitated mob to disrupt the proceedings of the US Congress does not strike me as fitting the definition of an official duty or action of the President of the United States.
His fraud lawyer -- and I mean that every way it can be interpreted -- argued this morning that the valuation shenanigans at issue in that civil trial were "victimless fraud". Wonder what other alternative facts come next? This whole thing is starting to sound like a Pentagon briefing or maybe a McKinsey communique. We should all re-read "Politics and the English Language", maybe monthly, until words start to have meanings again.
How perfect, whoever said it: "The freedom to assassinate claim." And that lawyer should go to vocational counseling the minute his license to practice law is lifted.
This former president is so clearly unmoored from his dock that it's a miracle we still have a country -- even if approx. 1/3 of its residents are bat shit crazy.
Notice how the guys -- and they are, AFAIK, nearly all guys -- who seek unlimited power are invariably the last people in the universe who should get anywhere near it?
Appalling as Trump's legal arguments and TruthSocial rants are, I'm even more horrified by the apparent fact that this is all OK with the GOP, the lawyers who say these things in court, and millions upon millions of U.S. voters. We're staring into the depths of unbelievable rot in the U.S. body politic -- and I don't use the word "unbelievable" lightly.
Trmp is too culturally incompetent to realize he is playing out the last scene of A Face in the Crowd. He doesn’t need Patricia O’Neal to flip the volume switch on so that his voice is broadcast across NYC. Trmp takes great pleasure and pride in scheduling his own camera time. Then he sees the red light and starts to dish about how wonderful he is, how powerful he is, who he hates, what he will do to them, why he’s the greatest. All we have to do is tolerate the sickening sound of his voice and his presence. It’s all there, vile and disgusting vitriol intended for all the people who done him wrong. The cult will remain unpersuaded he is dangerous. The choice should be clear.
Trump's cult, of course, cheers every vile word that comes out of his mouth. But will his celebration of political violence, talk of retribution, assassinations, suspending the constitution, being a dictator...turn off enough people to lose this election?
My bet is that it will, and Biden is on the right track. The message is not so much "defend democracy" as "Trump is Nuts", the man is certifiably dangerous, even more nuts than he was in 2016 or 2020; we have to believe that he means every word he says, and no guardrails will contain him this time. Even if just 25-30% of registered Republicans are scared enough to not vote for him it should be enough to make the difference. This reality should also scare straight the young progressives who are down on Biden now over Gaza. Just turning on the volume switch and blasting it good and loud should do the job and if it doesn't, God help us all.
"Trump is Nuts" SHOULD be Biden's campaign slogan - great idea!!
Add “and dangerous!”
Oh yeah...2 incredibly positive character points for the leader of the free world to have: nuts and dangerous.
I am afraid it is not enough and he needs to be put away behind bars.
You're right: he's never seen that movie, and Patricia O'Neal was much too classy to inflame Donnie's shroom, much less inform his "brain." (Those are *not* "air-quotation-marks." Whatever goes on inside his skull is not at all "ordinary.")
Amen…
I don’t think we would be in this situation of mass delusional thinking if we hadn’t validated notions of victimhood from the right wing from the start--at the Reagan era. People thought they were being “open minded and considerate” when, in fact, they were being played and manipulated. The long, drawn out whine of Repugs culminated with the biggest, sociopath of them all: Diapered Don. And yet, we are STILL mired in twisted logic, entertaining P1135809’s claims to divinity. This is what happens when people of a democracy are not taught critical thinking--a product of the Humanities (particularly, philosophy & history & the ability to write coherently).
And Civics!
What do we expect from a man who has sailed thru life on a flying carpet of immunity. He was a shit as a child and got himself kicked out of school in NYC. His parents sent him to military school. Reports are that he was a shit there too. After military school Mr. Mediocrity got into Fordham, not a stretch in those days. Daddy paid big money to get him a transfer to Penn. At Penn he didn't do shit and his professors noticed, but he graduated anyway. And then Daddy gave him a ton of money to go into business. Money he has lost many times over because even as he stiffs contractors and threatens writers, he's still both a shit and a lousy businessman. Absent his connections to the NY mob and enablers like Roy Kohn and Michael Cohen, he's nothing. Now, to his greta credit, he has bullshitted and bullied his way to the top of a once great (if always wrong since Nixon) political party and turned it into a cult. Because he is still a shit. But now a shit who could have access to real power, he's a dangerous shit...and should be treated as such. It's about damn time that the press...and the judges...figured it out.
All accurate, but mild demurrer from Language Crank: shit, and the evacuation of same, has real value to ourselves and this world. Do the contents of an inflamed, infected pustule have value to the body, and the body politic? If the answer is no, then Language Crank submits that "pustule" is a "better" word to describe the Dee-ranged Defendant.
Pustule works. Perhaps we should look to another language for even better words. Spanish offers "cabron", also "hijo de puta" (or with Melanoma in the picture "marido de puta", or my favorite "gillipollas".
Is it spelled with two "L's" or just one? I had to look up gillipollas and my google translator (which isn't always accurate) insisted I wanted g-i-l-i-p-o-l-l-a-s. Either way it's delicious and I may, with your permission, start using it.
When I lived in Madrid I assume two ls, but regardless, the meaning is more or less clear. I use it all the time in many settings. It works when people know...and when they don't. BTW - what did Google translate say it meant? (literal xlate is crazy chicken)
The frankness of google translate just about knocks me over. Gilipollas was translated as "douchebag". (and I took 4 years of Spanish in HS, so I had some idea that pollo was a chicken) I almost fell off my chair, I was laughing so hard. And then I looked up "hijo de puta....and I won't even write what google told me what THAT translated to!!! (But it also made me laugh from sheer surprise)....so, thanks for all the chuckles and laughs--very welcome after all of the depressing news being bruited about.
Having lived in Madrid, I can assure you that gilipollas is much much worse than douchebag. And may fit Dump better than anything else.
Totally agree that DJT is a boil, an infected deposit whose poison if retained and spread can kill the body whole. It must be lanced and drained, which honestly inflamed campaigning by Biden can partly accomplish, but voters must provide the tip of that lance and plunge it deep when the time comes. This is a referendum not just on turning the US into a dictatorship but putting a demonstrable madman at the head.
Ooooh, the Orange Pustule. I like it.
Time to wipe and flush
"We're gonna need a bigger roll of toilet tissue........."
And toilet bowl!
Goes without saying! (thank you for the early morning chuckle!)
Magnificently written, Lucian. We must do everything possible to keep this dictator wannabe out of office.
We knew who he was decades ago. He used the courts to avoid paying his contractors, suppliers and business partners, often forcing them to settle for cents on the dollar. And he used the courts to go after those he did not like, to litigate them into penury. He thought himself to be a "king" then, of the business world, that he was untouchable. We who followed his career screamed our warnings in 2015-16, but the country did not listen, and instead we got four years of destruction of our democratic institutions and principles, not to mention the complete coarsening and vulgarization of social and political discourse.
Our only hope is that enough of the country has seen him now for what he is, and will turn out in overwhelming numbers in November to be sure he never gets near the Oval Office again, should he be the GOP nominee. We have a lot of work cut out for us in the next ten months.
New Yorkers told us what they knew from experience with him, but as people influenced by Fox understand it, New Yorkers are those evil liberals, “elites” who can’t be believed. ( I suspect there are more non- elite NYC residents than elite, no?)
Media might have interviewed some of the contractors he stiffed, but execs wouldn’t have approved. It would have cost less just to repeat “her emails.”
Evil liberal elite. Thank you. I’ve been called worse. I may have that placed on a baseball cap.
Maybe you should keep that slogan under your hat. Don’t want you to be a walking target.
On the other hard, Evil Liberal Elite does have a certain appeal as a bumper sticker!
It's those old 'New York Values' they accused P01135890 of!! Irony anyone?
Beyond appalling that this loathesome creature walks among us and is worshipped by millions and seeks the power to destroy the world if he wishes to.
The first time I truly understood what was going on with this dialog between the Court and Trump's lawyer was a few seconds ago when I finished your article. I thought that since the qualifier was impeachment this was about the preposterously idiotic double jeopardy claim. Now I understand it's about presidential immunity which is an argument that is an order of magnitude more sensible and yet still complete nonsense.
It's amazing how many different ways the Trump brain trust is trying to turn impeachment into a win.
I don't think Trump himself really understands how much political harm is being brought down on him through discussion of absolute power and committing mass murders of opponents. He should know better than anyone that most people don't listen to the details. They just remember the keywords and to whom they are associated.
Trump...using special forces to kill people.
Trump....dictator.....above the law.....can't be prosecuted.
This is not going over well. It might make more sense if his attorneys, who I hope and pray are doing this over protest, had a case that had any chance of success. However, this case is dead on arrival. It should be interred quickly before it starts to smell.
Oops! Too late!
The maggots are all just fine with the Mango Mamzer as a dictator.
Self-destructive, super dangerous and possibly commanding the most powerful armed forces on earth in the future. What could go wrong?
I know... t-RUMP and his allies believe that, once their lord and master is in the White House, there will never be another Democratic president. But don't they ever worry that IF there is a subsequent president from that party, that individual will have the same unlimited powers? As for t-RUMP himself, he plans to live and rule forever and doesn't give a shit about a post-trump future.
It has ALWAYS (and will be until he's dead) been about him.
The last part of the second clause of your last sentence is absolutely true. The Dee-ranged Defendant said so himself. But not the first part. Video loop in my storage unit (memory): Big tax cut for rich passed in 2017. Dee-ranged Defendant triumphant. Network news, don't remember which -- he is leaving White House, headed for helicopter, left to right on our TV screen. Reporter off-camera shouts, "Mr. President, what happens if those [wildly over-optimistic] revenue [increase] projections are wrong, and in twenty or thirty years we're trillions more in debt?" Dee-ranged Defendant keeps walking, looks back over his right shoulder, says with classic Donnie smirk, "I won't be here to see it."
Let’s not forget that the 2017 tax cuts for individuals ends in 2025. Unlike the cuts for corporations and real estate people, etc.
If SCOTUS gives him immunity before Jan 2025, the Biden would have it, too, while he was president. Unless it is Trump only who would have such immunity, not current and future presidents.
Confused.Does that mean President Biden can do away with Trump via a Seal team and claim immunity?
Hope he does it soon!
Many of my hopes for our deliverance rely on the tireless integrity of Lucian and his fellows. A little of my hope is placed in the bone-deep stupidity of what’s his name who used to throw food in the White House.
I love your choice of "what's his name." I am going to steal it and use it. I can't think of anything more insulting to a narcissistic thug who is in love with his name and his so-called "brand"!
Or, as mentioned above and in Don Quixote, ‘Hijo de puta,’ which translates to “Son of a whore.”
I wouldn’t denigrate his mother like that. I don’t think he really had one.
IDK, I'm kind of fond of Orange Pustule. So many choices, so little time.
Personally leading an agitated mob to disrupt the proceedings of the US Congress does not strike me as fitting the definition of an official duty or action of the President of the United States.
His fraud lawyer -- and I mean that every way it can be interpreted -- argued this morning that the valuation shenanigans at issue in that civil trial were "victimless fraud". Wonder what other alternative facts come next? This whole thing is starting to sound like a Pentagon briefing or maybe a McKinsey communique. We should all re-read "Politics and the English Language", maybe monthly, until words start to have meanings again.
"I am going to stay on this criminal’s back for as long as it takes to drive him out of our lives and our consciousness. "
It is wonderful to think that that will happen someday, but I think that Trump will have to die before it does.
Where’s Silvio Dante when you need him?
"the freedom to assassinate claim."
WOW, you nailed it, Lucian! Sharing your column 2 days in a row. Thanks.
How perfect, whoever said it: "The freedom to assassinate claim." And that lawyer should go to vocational counseling the minute his license to practice law is lifted.
This former president is so clearly unmoored from his dock that it's a miracle we still have a country -- even if approx. 1/3 of its residents are bat shit crazy.
Notice how the guys -- and they are, AFAIK, nearly all guys -- who seek unlimited power are invariably the last people in the universe who should get anywhere near it?
Appalling as Trump's legal arguments and TruthSocial rants are, I'm even more horrified by the apparent fact that this is all OK with the GOP, the lawyers who say these things in court, and millions upon millions of U.S. voters. We're staring into the depths of unbelievable rot in the U.S. body politic -- and I don't use the word "unbelievable" lightly.