Trump 48: Nobody Likes Me

[GreyhoundFan]

Sometimes I enjoy stream of consciousness, but with twitler, it's just random gibberish. Again with the sharks...

 

[AnywhereButHere]

Okay. Dude has seriously jumped the shark. 

[fraurosena]

He has a extremely limited set of accusations that he’s using over and over.
And so he’s now using birtherism on Biden.

 

 

[thoughtful]

10 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

And so he’s now using birtherism on Biden.

Well, by "here," he meant Scranton, PA, not the US.

But give him time . . .

[Audrey2]

3 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Does he really believe conjuring a mental image of him and his hair wet under the shower is going to win him votes? 

Excuse me while I go puke.

In the words of my best friend and I, now that's bad nudity!

[fraurosena]

5 minutes ago, thoughtful said:

Well, by "here," he meant Scranton, PA, not the US.

But give him time . . .

I know, right? At this stage I would not put it past him either...

[Smash!]

Don‘t count on fair elections

 

[Botkinetti]

I understand this is frightening but trump says a lot of shit simply because it crosses his mind.  He believes himself to be an emperor able to command armies to do his bidding. He isn’t and recent court cases against him prove he doesn’t have the Supreme Court in his back pocket. I’m trying to have faith that this attempt at voter intimidation will be stopped.

[Audrey2]

1 hour ago, Botkinetti said:

I understand this is frightening but trump says a lot of shit simply because it crosses his mind.  He believes himself to be an emperor able to command armies to do his bidding. He isn’t and recent court cases against him prove he doesn’t have the Supreme Court in his back pocket. I’m trying to have faith that this attempt at voter intimidation will be stopped.

The problem is, the idiots with the BAGs (big ass guns) feel like their leader has called them to show up and I can easily see them showing up, just like those he incited to March and take over the Capitol building in Michigan to protest wearing masks. I still shudder when I think of the pictures of those guys aren't to the teeth with their faces have covered standing around the rooms of democracy.

[onekidanddone]

I’ll just leave this here. ? 

[GreyhoundFan]

5 hours ago, Smash! said:

Don‘t count on fair elections

 

 

An interesting analysis: "Trump’s claim he’ll send sheriffs to polling places is revealing in a lot of unintended ways"

Spoiler

On repeated occasions, President Trump has embraced a contentious idea following a question posed by a journalist. Sometimes, too, he will seize on one presented by someone like Fox News’s Sean Hannity, as he did on Thursday.

The two were discussing Trump's favorite subject of late, his untrue allegations that the 2020 election will be subject to massive electoral and voter fraud. While Trump's recent focus has been mail-in balloting, Hannity mentioned an older favorite: the idea that in-person voting is suspect.

“Are you going to have poll watchers?” Hannity asked his friend during an interview clearly aimed at pulling viewers away from simultaneous coverage of the Democratic convention. “Are you going to have an ability to monitor, to avoid fraud and cross check whether or not these are registered voters? Whether or not there’s been identification to know that it’s a real vote from a real American?”

“We’re going to have everything,” Trump replied. “We’re going to have sheriffs, and we’re going to have law enforcement, and we’re going to have hopefully, U.S. attorneys, and we’re going to have everybody, and attorney generals. But it’s very hard.”

This, understandably, raised eyebrows. The president would send law enforcement to police polling stations? It’s a scenario that seems analogous to elections conducted by Eastern European strongmen, not by an elected official in the United States.

There are a few things to keep in mind about this claim, though.

The first is that, like so many of Trump’s wild assertions, he has made it before. In August 2016, he gave a speech in Altoona, Pa., in which he pledged to combat what he presented as endemic fraud in the state.

“We have to call up law enforcement. And we have to have the sheriffs and the police chiefs and everybody watching,” he said then, later adding another familiar refrain, that “the only way they can beat [me] in my opinion — and I mean this 100 percent — is if in certain sections of the state they cheat, okay?”

When he made the claim at the time, though, there was a significant roadblock to the plan. The Republican Party had been restricted from dispatching poll watchers to precincts for more than 30 years, the result of a lawsuit filed by the Democrats in 1981. Why? Because the Republican National Committee was using “poll watchers” in an effort to intimidate non-White voters.

Here’s how the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit described what the party was doing:

The RNC allegedly created a voter challenge list by mailing sample ballots to individuals in precincts with a high percentage of racial or ethnic minority registered voters and, then, including individuals whose postcards were returned as undeliverable on a list of voters to challenge at the polls. The RNC also allegedly enlisted the help of off-duty sheriffs and police officers to intimidate voters by standing at polling places in minority precincts during voting with “National Ballot Security Task Force” armbands. Some of the officers allegedly wore firearms in a visible manner.

This is precisely the specter that Trump's comments raise.

Four years ago, though, the party (and, some argued, Trump’s campaign) could not actually implement his plan, given that the consent decree barring that activity was still in place. But in early 2018, the decree expired, potentially making Trump’s plan more feasible, should it be more than idle cable-news flexing.

If you accept the Hannity-Trump position that in-person voter fraud is a significant problem — which you shouldn't, because it demonstrably isn't — you might think sending cops to the polling places might make sense.

But then think about it a little more. What, exactly are they going to do? How is a sheriff going to identify “a real vote from a real American”? Stop people who look like they don’t belong there, possibly triggering a new consent decree? Arrest people who show up at the wrong polling place — as Trump did multiple times when he went to vote in 2004? Perhaps if you think in-person fraud is rampant, you think there are clear tells, like a guy wearing a false mustache asking for Mary Jones’s ballot. That doesn’t happen — in large part because it’s almost never the case that someone goes to a polling place in an effort to vote for someone else.

At this point, Trump defenders scramble to email me something about the 1960 presidential election or to send me a news article showing that in 1997 a guy in Tempe did precisely that. Sure, it has happened. It has also happened that people have been struck and killed by meteorites, but that doesn't mean you should wear a helmet every time you leave the house.

This is the sewer pipe that runs through the entire Trump-Hannity conversation. Fraud is not the threat that the pair asserts (to a large viewing audience), and the reason they claim that it is such a threat is solely to advocate for changes that would make it harder for Democrats to vote.

Hannity, true to form, offered misleading data to prove his point.

“This whole issue of mail-in balloting, the Heritage Foundation — I have it here in front of me — the sampling fraud cases across the country,” he said. “What they found is 1,088 proven instances of voter fraud, and that includes 949 criminal convictions.”

Here's the Heritage database. It includes somewhere around 1,000 examples of people committing a wide range of offenses, from voting illegally to giving homeless people cigarettes to sign voter applications — a likely function of organizations that pay staffers for hitting voter registration benchmarks. (This was what Hannity described as “a Skid Row scheme.”)

The database includes cases going back to 1982. While Heritage’s goal is to advocate for new rules restricting voting, its concerted effort to show the pervasiveness of fraud cobbled together, by its own tally, about 1,200 instances of electoral fraud, illegal signature gathering and illegal votes over four decades.

If all of those instances were illegal votes and all of them occurred only in 2016 and all of them occurred in a single state, it would not have been enough to swing the result in the presidential contest. It would have constituted 0.0009 percent of all of the votes cast that year.

But, again, this stretches back to the 1980s.

Trump, of course, accepted Hannity’s presentation. He went on to complain about mail-in voting, as he did in a tweet shortly before he went on the air.

“This will be the most fraudulent election in history. Fifty-one million ballots being sent to people,” he said. “Many of them will have been dead. Many of them will get more than one. But it’s going to be a really horrible thing. It’s just a horrible, horrible thing. And it's impossible to police.”

A few things about this. Those 51 million ballots will go to voters in states like California, where Trump received 4.5 million votes four years ago, and Utah, which he won. There will be ballots mailed to dead people, given that families selfishly decline to immediately inform their county registrars of voters the instant a loved one dies. And some people will get more than one ballot.

If you have ever read anything I’ve written on this subject, you know what’s coming next, and I, at least, will apologize for repeating myself. But this assertion that because voters will receive improper ballots, those ballots will necessarily lead to fraudulent ballots being submitted and accepted is ludicrous. The analogy I generally use is that nearly every home in America has a hammer, a device that could be used to break into a car. But very, very few hammers are used for that purpose, and, if someone gave you an extra hammer, the odds are low that you would then use that hammer to steal your neighbor’s Corolla.

There’s another level here, though. Trump is not only claiming that people will commit fraud but that it will go undetected. That there will be a rash of car thefts that no one picks up on.

Why would this be “impossible to police”? Because Trump doesn’t seem to know how it works.

“Fifty-one million ballots are going to [be] indiscriminately sent out to people that didn’t even ask for them, people that say, hey, I just got a ballot. That’s great. Let me vote,” Trump said later.

He gave examples.

“You have some of these states sending them out like Nevada where they don’t even have to check the signatures so anybody can sign it,” Trump said. “New Jersey just sent it where the governor, as I understand, has just signed an executive order, didn’t even go through the legislature to get it done.”

First: The legislation in Nevada that would send ballots to registered voters does require that signatures be checked. It’s one of a number of ways in which ballots are “policed” for irregularities. At other times, of course, Trump points to that policing as evidence of fraud, claiming that a large number of ballots being thrown out (generally for issues with postmarks or questions about signatures) is evidence that election results can’t be trusted.

Second: Trump's sudden opposition to executive orders will be news to President Trump.

Trump’s reelection campaign is still worried about Pennsylvania, by the way. It filed a lawsuit aimed at restricting measures in the state aimed at increasing the ability of voters to cast a ballot in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. The judge in the case made a simple request: If fraud is so rampant that it necessitates blocking these changes, it should be easy to turn up evidence of that fraud.

The campaign filed a 524-page response to that request. It reportedly included no evidence that fraud is a significant problem in the state. (In 2012, the state admitted as such in another legal filing.)

All of this comes back to the same point. Trump knows he’s losing, just as he believed he was losing Pennsylvania four years ago this month. So he creates this argument that gives him an out: There’s all this fraud, and that’s why we can’t trust the results! He probably believes this to some degree, which is alarming in itself, but it nonetheless provides an excuse, an excuse we know he will use since he used it even after he won in 2016.

In service to that argument, he takes Hannity’s suggestion and turns it up: Fraud is so bad that we need police to stand watch! That this reinforces concerns about his authoritarian tendencies probably never even enters his mind. That his party suffered three decades of punishment for doing this in the 1980s may not even be something he’s aware of.

None of that is important to Trump. What’s important is that people think that any loss in November was not because the majority of voters don’t like him.

 

[fraurosena]

It looks like yesterday's trend of bad news for Trump is continuing today. Wanna bet Trump is petrified by this ruling?

 

[Smash!]

@Botkinetti I don’t count on it. the dismantling of the USPS came as a total surprise for me. I didn’t think he was brazen enough to do that. This is why I fully believe he‘s able to send law enforcement to the polling places. Personally I think we’re in for a wild ride until hopefully Biden is sworn in.

[fraurosena]

Jealousy by Queen comes to mind.

 

[fraurosena]

It looks like there's nothing new in today's speech.

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

The sad thing is that so many of his moronic followers believe his crap:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Yet another attempt to hide his financial info:

"Trump files emergency request to prevent subpoena of his tax records after judge denies motion"

Spoiler

(CNN)Lawyers for President Donald Trump filed an emergency request Friday for a federal appeals court to put a subpoena for his financial documents and tax returns on hold until the higher court can weigh in on the matter.

The filing immediately followed a ruling by US District Judge Victor Marrero, who denied Trump's request to put his decision dismissing the lawsuit on hold to allow the President's legal team time to appeal.

Trump's lawyers told the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals that without a stay it would result in "quintessential irreparable harm" by allowing the subpoena for the records to go ahead.

As part of an agreement between the President's lawyers and the Manhattan district attorney's office, the subpoena would not be enforced until seven calendar days from Marrero's decision.

Trump's lawyers are now asking the appeals court to not allow the subpoena to be enforced until one week after the appeals court rules on the case.

Trump's emergency action is the latest effort to block a subpoena for eight years of personal and business records and tax returns.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance's office has been examining whether Trump or the Trump Organization violated state laws in connection with hush money payments made to women alleging affairs with Trump. The investigation has also looked into whether business records filed with the state were falsified and if any tax laws were violated, CNN has reported.

Thursday Marrero ruled that the subpoena to Trump's long-time accountant Mazars USA was valid and New York prosecutors could have access to Trump's accounting records for a criminal investigation. Trump immediately moved to have the decision stayed while he appealed.

Marrero rejected that request on Friday saying he didn't believe Trump's argument would win.

"The Court is not persuaded that appellate review would be successful in any event. This argument cannot suffice to show irreparable harm," Marrero wrote in denying Trump's motion.

Trump had sued Vance to stop the grand jury subpoena of his longtime accounting firm Mazars USA for years of his records.

The subpoena asked for records from Mazars related to Trump, the Trump Organization, his foundation and several related subsidiaries. The requested documents, court records said, pertain not just to business in New York, but also in other states like Florida and California and countries including Turkey, Dubai, Canada and Indonesia.

 

[fraurosena]

His fabrications and mental decline are consistently obvious:

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[47of74]

Fuck face surrounds himself with only the finest people...

 

[47of74]

Fuck head isn’t sending his best people  

 

[fraurosena]

So Thursday, the court ruled that Vance could issue the subpoena for Trump's tax returns. 

Then, in desperation...

Trump filed emergency motion to block release of his tax returns

Quote

President Donald Trump’s battle with Manhattan prosecutors entered a new phase Friday as lawyers for the president filed an emergency motion with an appeals court to stop the release of his tax returns.

Trump’s lawyers filed the motion with the Second Circuit Court of Appeals hours after a lower court judge denied his request to halt the sharing of his tax documents.

The same U.S. district court judge, Victor Marrero, on Thursday rejected Trump’s attempt to quash a subpoena seeking eight years of his tax returns as part of an investigation by Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance into the Trump Organization.

In the emergency motion, Trump’s lawyers asked the court to impose an immediate stay on the case, which would cause an immediate halt in the proceedings even before it makes a decision on whether a freeze is justified for the entirety of the appellate case.

“The idea that the District Attorney needs these records so badly that there’s no time for appellate review—after he voluntarily stayed enforcement for nearly a year—is implausible,” Trump’s lawyers wrote. “Regardless, any harm he might suffer pales in comparison to the case-mooting harm the President will suffer.”

But...

Judge denies Trump's request for a stay on subpoena for tax records

Quote

A federal judge in New York on Friday denied President Trump’s request to temporarily halt a grand jury subpoena for his tax returns from taking effect.

The ruling by District Judge Victor Marrero comes a day after he dismissed Trump’s latest attempt to block a New York grand jury subpoena for eight years of Trump’s financial documents, including his personal and corporate tax returns.

Trump’s personal attorneys had asked Marrero, a Clinton appointee, to pause his Thursday decision from taking effect while Trump appealed to the New York-based federal appeals court — a request Marrero shot down Friday in a nine-page decision.

ADVERTISEMENT

The recent rulings against Trump move Manhattan prosecutors closer to obtaining the president's tax returns, though it’s unlikely the public will see them before the November election.

In his Friday decision, Marrero said Trump had failed to prove he would suffer “irreparable harm” if his stay request were denied.

“Because a grand jury is under a legal obligation to keep the confidentiality of its records, the Court finds that no irreparable harm will ensue from the disclosure to it of the President’s records sought here,” Marrero wrote.

Within hours, Trump's personal attorneys asked the New York-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit to halt Marrero's ruling from taking effect while they mount an appeal.

The circuit court on Friday afternoon agreed to hold a Sept. 1 hearing on the issue, but declined Trump's request for an emergency stay. It's unclear if Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. will attempt to enforce the subpoena in the interim, and his office did not respond to a request for comment.

The earliest day Vance could enforce the subpoena is next Friday.

Trump’s personal attorney Jay Sekulow said that his team would continue to seek a stay at the Supreme Court.

The judge’s dismissal of Trump’s arguments relied heavily on the Supreme Court’s landmark decision last month that rejected Trump’s claim that presidents enjoy absolute immunity from criminal probes.

The dispute over access to Trump’s financial records arose after Vance obtained a grand jury subpoena for Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars USA.

Vance's office is looking into payments made to silence two women who allege they had affairs with Trump, including adult-film star Stormy Daniels, before he became president, as well as possibly extensive criminal conduct at the Trump Organization.

Trump has tried for nearly a year to fend off the Manhattan district attorney subpoena and has lost every round of the battle in court.

Recent developments in the case may accelerate the timing of when prosecutors obtain the president's tax returns. But legal analysts expect that grand jury secrecy rules will keep Trump’s financial records concealed from the public beyond the election.

 

[onekidanddone]

28 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

So Thursday, the court ruled that Vance could issue the subpoena for Trump's tax returns. 

Then, in desperation...

Trump filed emergency motion to block release of his tax returns

But...

Judge denies Trump's request for a stay on subpoena for tax records

 

Biden should release his tax returns and triple dog dare #bunkerbrat to do the same. 
 

[K'Z'K]

1 hour ago, onekidanddone said:

Biden should release his tax returns and triple dog dare #bunkerbrat to do the same. 

Biden released his recent tax returns (through 2018) last summer. He and Jill have made quite a bit of money since he left the Vice Presidency (I think it's mostly Joe, since Jill is a community college professor, making more than most of us but not millions), but it's all legit employment, speaking fees, book royalties, investments, and so on, nothing hinky. They pay their taxes.

I am not an accountant and only skimmed, but I'm sure that if there was anything even remotely questionable, someone would have found it in the year since these were released and raised a stink, hypocrisy about Trump's taxes be dammed; the closest I could find was a Forbes article about how Biden used a tax loophole (that Obama had tried to close) to lower his tax bill somewhat, which failed to become a scandal.

Here's 2016-2018, plus OGE (Office of Government Ethics) forms for 2019 and 2020: https://joebiden.com/financial-disclosure/#

Biden's tax returns from his Veep years can be found through https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/   I didn't find an index page for the tax forms, but a search for "Biden tax return" yields links to the documents. The link to 2008 was broken, but 2010 and 2012 were there; I didn't check any others.

 

I'm kinda surprised he hasn't released 2019 yet, but I'm sure he will if need be.

[47of74]

Not even his sister thinks that much of #BunkerBitch 

Quote

Maryanne Trump Barry was serving as a federal judge when she heard her brother, President Trump, suggest on Fox News,“maybe I'll have to put her at the border” amid a wave of refugees entering the United States. At the time, children were being separated from their parents and put in cramped quarters while court hearings dragged on.

“All he wants to do is appeal to his base,” Barry said in a conversation secretly recorded by her niece, Mary L. Trump. “He has no principles. None. None. And his base, I mean my God, if you were a religious person, you want to help people. Not do this.”

Barry, 83, was aghast at how her 74-year-old brother operated as president. “His goddamned tweet and lying, oh my God,” she said. “I’m talking too freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy shit.”

 

Edited August 23, 2020 by 47of74