Trump 55: The Bronze Baron Of Bedminster Wants Back On Twitter And the Forbes 400

[Howl]

Trump sat for a video deposition this morning at Trump Tower. 

Lots of twitterati noting today that Trump is walking a very fine line in this deposition and in those to come.  If he throws people under the bus (Calamari, in this instance) as he is wont to do, it's likely they will turn on him and spill the beans to save their own ass.  

What to do, what to do! 

Edited October 18, 2021 by Howl

[onekidanddone]

Was there ever an investigation about the man who died in a fire in Trump Tower? Somewhere in my dusty memory  I seem to remember Trump Tower not having a sprinkler system.  

[Ozlsn]

Spoiler

 

Sounds like he's starting off with the "you can't try me! Don't you know who I am!" approach and waiting to throw people under the bus for when he's desperate.

[Cartmann99]

Looks like someone's not going to be paid for their work.

Spoiler

 

[fraurosena]

17 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

Looks like someone's not going to be paid for their work.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

[...] Trump brings this suit solely in his official capacity as a former president [...]

His official capacity? Nice try, but 'former president' is not an official capacity. A former president has no say in what is and isn't covered by executive privilege, and who can or cannot be called to testify before an official Congressional Committee. Trump is just an ordinary US citizen, with just as much power and say as any other ordinary US citizen, even though he likes to pretend otherwise.

[GreyhoundFan]

[AmazonGrace]

So classy.

 

[Dandruff]

4 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

So classy.

 

I think he knows exactly how sorry most people will be when he goes, and it's bothering him bigly.

Hope flags aren't put at half-mast for him.  It's a custom (for current and former presidents, when they pass) but I don't know that it's a requirement.

[onekidanddone]

1 hour ago, Dandruff said:

I think he knows exactly how sorry most people will be when he goes, and it's bothering him bigly.

Hope flags aren't put at half-mast for him.  It's a custom (for current and former presidents, when they pass) but I don't know that it's a requirement.

Flags were set to half mast for Nixon. A friend and I knocked around the idea of going all over town and raising the flags back up. 😉 .

[GreyhoundFan]

This is interesting: "Trump kind of admits he might have cost Republicans the Senate"

Quote

When Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said this week that he wouldn’t support Donald Trump for president in 2024, he noted that Trump has a rather dubious distinction. “President Trump is the first president [on] the Republican side at least to lose the House, the Senate and the presidency in four years,” Cassidy told Axios. “Elections are about winning.”

This is correct. When the Georgia Senate runoffs looked like they would hand Senate control to Democrats in January, we reported that Trump was in line to become the first president since 1932 to lose the House, Senate and reelection all in a single term.

Then it happened — with a potential assist from Trump himself. Consumed with a desperate and ill-fated effort to overturn his loss, Trump continued to press his bogus stolen-election claim even as some of his party’s leaders worried it would depress GOP turnout in Georgia.

Whether it was ultimately a decisive factor is difficult to say. But there’s plenty of evidence it might have been, including: how close the GOP losses were, how turnout lagged especially in more-conservative areas of the state, how the GOP actually lost ground in the runoffs despite usually overperforming in them, and how much polls showed Republicans said the 2020 election made them less likely to vote.

And in a newly published interview, Trump kinda, sorta cops to the role he played in losing the Senate.

“They didn’t want to vote,” Trump says in a new book by the Washington Examiner’s David M. Drucker, “because they knew we got screwed in the presidential election.”

Given that there is no actual evidence that Trump was cheated in the election, this is effectively Trump’s saying that the falsehood that he pushed so hard did, indeed, depress Republican turnout.

Drucker went on to ask Trump what might have happened if he had offered a different message: that despite supposed irregularities, they could trust Georgia election officials to count their votes on Jan. 5.

“I don’t know,” Trump said. “I did two rallies — very successful rallies. I did say a version of that, but not as strongly as you said, because I was angry with what happened there.”

Translation: I could have done more to help, but I didn’t because I was upset.

The timing of Drucker’s book is fortuitous. Just last week, Trump suggestively said Republicans might not vote in future elections if GOP leaders don’t rectify the supposed wrongs of the 2020 election. It was as much a threat as anything, but it also reinforced that Trump is going to keep talking about this in ways that could very logically depress turnout again.

And despite the lessons of Georgia, Trump’s continued electoral-fraud crusade and comment about Republicans boycotting elections have been met with a rather striking and deafening silence in his party. There has been private grumbling about it, as the New York Times reported, and some GOP strategists are throwing up cautions. (“Republicans should have learned this lesson after the Georgia debacle,” said longtime GOP consultant Scott Reed.) But apart from that and assurances from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), of all people, that Republicans still should vote, virtually no one is offering counterprogramming.

The silence underscores the reason that Trump’s claims have caught on in the GOP: Republicans are almost completely unwilling to call out his wild claims of voter fraud — even when they threaten the party’s prospects.

They do so from a standpoint of haplessness and self-preservation. If you look closely at how some Republicans, such as Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), talk about their party’s relationship with Trump, you see that they stress that a major factor in going along with what Trump says is their fear of what happens if they don’t. It is almost akin to a hostage situation.

“He could make the Republican Party something that nobody else I know can make it,” Graham said in another interview with Axios earlier this year. “He can make it bigger. He can make it stronger. He can make it more diverse. And he also could destroy it.”

When Jonathan Swan suggested that Graham was going along with Trump “so he doesn’t go off and form a third party,” Graham didn’t dispute the premise.

“A third party would be a disaster,” Graham said.

Graham has said this at other times, as well. Yes, he says he likes what Trump did, but the former vociferous Trump critic also has repeatedly acknowledged that alienating Trump comes with a political cost for himself and the party. And he’s not alone. Prominent Republicans have repeatedly made a pragmatic case for abiding by Trump’s vision for the party by noting how devoted the base is to him and how distancing themselves from him would splinter the party.

Those aren’t the things you say if you truly believe this is about principled support; they’re what you say when you’re trying to justify your willingness to go along with something you see as objectionable.

That Republicans continue to stand by Trump even as he might have cost them the Senate in January is testament to that rationalization. But, now we have evidence that Trump not only acknowledges the harm he might have caused in Georgia, but also is pressing forward with potentially doing it again in 2022. And Republicans can’t be bothered to do much about it.

If there’s anything that epitomizes how Republicans have chosen to let Trump’s baseless and routinely debunked stolen-election claims metastasize within the party, surely that has to be it. They have allowed the situation to get out of hand because they worry what would happen if they tried to stop it — what would happen to them individually, it bears emphasizing, rather than to democracy.

But now they are staring down the barrel of Trump’s potentially and knowingly helping them to lose future elections — and adding to the historic trio of losses already attached to his name. They have made their bed, though, and they apparently are going to continue lying in it.

 

[Cartmann99]

Spoiler

 

[fraurosena]

2 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

  Hide contents

 

Hmmm.

 

[fraurosena]

This had me laughing out loud. 

 

[onekidanddone]

6 hours ago, fraurosena said:

This had me laughing out loud. 

 

Aaaaand the greatest president of all times is punked yet again 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump faces new criminal investigation into New York golf club"

Quote

The district attorney in suburban Westchester County, N.Y., has subpoenaed property-tax records related to one of former president Donald Trump’s golf clubs, signaling a previously unknown criminal inquiry into the Trump Organization.

The town of Ossining, N.Y., which sets property tax rates for the course, received a subpoena from Westchester District Attorney Miriam “Mimi” Rocah (D) several weeks ago, according to an Ossining official. The town “has been fully cooperative,” said the official, who declined to be named because the subpoena was not public.

A spokeswoman for Rocah declined to comment Wednesday. The Westchester inquiry was first reported by the New York Times.

The Trump Organization had challenged the property valuation for its Westchester club for every year since 2015. That process — used by many real estate companies — typically requires a company to submit data about its property’s financial performance, as evidence that it is worth less than the initial assessment.

On Aug. 12, the Trump Organization said, the challenge was settled with an agreement to reduce the club’s tax valuations by about 30 percent. The valuation for 2020, for instance, was reduced from $13.7 million to $9.7 million — a change that could provide Trump with significant tax savings.

Trump Organization spokeswoman Kimberly Benza said that the Ossining town government and a county judge had signed off on the settlement.

“Accordingly, the suggestion that anything was inappropriate is completely false and incredibly irresponsible,” Benza said in a written statement. She noted that Rocah, a former federal prosecutor elected in 2020, had repeatedly criticized Trump on Twitter before she took office.

The Ossining town official said the subpoena had been sent before the August agreement was finalized.

Trump’s business is already facing a criminal investigation by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance II (D), who earlier this year indicted Trump’s longtime Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg on charges of felony tax fraud for allegedly concealing parts of Trump executives’ pay from tax authorities. Vance also indicted two of Trump’s corporate entities. Weisselberg and the companies have pleaded not guilty.

Vance’s investigation is still open, but no new charges have been brought since July.

Separately, New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) is also conducting a civil investigation of the Trump Organization’s finances. James has not accused Trump or anyone else of wrongdoing.

Both Vance and James have shown interest in Trump’s past appeals of tax valuations at various properties.

Former Trump attorney and personal fixer Michael Cohen testified to Congress that, during these appeals, Trump sometimes gave tax authorities an inaccurate picture. “It was my experience that Mr. Trump inflated his total assets when it served his purposes, such as trying to be listed amongst the wealthiest people in Forbes, and deflated his assets to reduce his real estate taxes,” Cohen testified in 2019.

James had previously inquired about Trump’s golf club in Westchester. Her office subpoenaed documents from Ossining in May 2019, according to the town.

Neither James nor Vance has accused Trump of wrongdoing in relation to any property-tax appeals.

Trump bought his Westchester golf club, located about 20 miles north of New York City, in 1996. In his financial disclosures as president, he said the club’s revenue had stayed relatively steady during his first three years in office, at about $7.2 million — then fell about 13 percent in 2020 during the covid pandemic.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

TFG's site doesn't seem to have username restrictions:

[GreyhoundFan]

[Howl]

I think Truth is going to bomb, although it will work to harvest more info to get more $$$  from D. Trump's feckless supporters.  Also, the company that put the deal together did NOT inform investors that Trump was involved.   There's some speculation that Trump will just siphon off the 300 million raised for Truth into his own companies, declare bankruptcy and the usual. 

Also, Jason Miller is doubling down on his platform Gettr  (he and Trump just couldn't reach an agreement!) because Trump is now a competitor, so some joy there. 

[church_of_dog]

Anyone think that there will be any lessons finally learned about the difference between the First Amendment and TOS of private companies, once the first few members of this new site have been banned for violating those terms?

[GreyhoundFan]

Apparently the site is offline. I like the "no excessive use of capital letters" rule. I guess that means TFG won't be using it himself. "Pranksters have already defaced Trump’s new social network"

Quote

Former president Donald Trump and his team declared Wednesday night that they would soon launch a “media powerhouse” that would help them triumph in their long-running war against Big Tech. But within hours, pranksters found what appeared to be an unreleased test version and posted a picture of a defecating pig to the “donaldjtrump” account.

The site has since been pulled offline — evidence that Trump is likely to face a daunting challenge in building an Internet business that can stand on its own.

Banned by all major social networks after his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, Trump has for months agitated to regain the online megaphone that once blasted his voice around the world. In a presentation released Wednesday by his new media company, Trump Media & Technology Group, his team hailed the new social network as the first tentpole for a Trump-led media, news and Internet empire that would one day compete with Disney, CNN and Facebook.

But the site’s early hours revealed lax security, rehashed features and a flurry of bizarre design decisions. An open sign-up page allowed anyone to use the site shortly after it was revealed, sparking the creation of the “donaldjtrump” account and the pig posting. A Washington Post reporter was able to register and post under the account name “mikepence” without any stops in place. New sign-ups were blocked shortly after.

A Trump Media and Technology Group spokesperson did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The site looks almost entirely like a Twitter clone: A user can post Truths, which are like tweets, or Re-Truths, which are retweets. There’s also a news feed, called the Truth Feed, a notification system so users can know “who’s interacting with your TRUTH’s,” the social network’s App Store profile states.

The site’s code shows it runs a mostly unmodified version of Mastodon, the free, open-source software launched in 2016 that anyone can use to run a self-made social networking site.

Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko told The Post Thursday that Trump’s site may violate Mastodon’s licensing rules, which require developers to share any modifications and link to the original source code. Rochko said he has contacted the company’s legal counsel to make a determination.

Mastodon would not be able to take the site down in case of a violation, Rochko said, because users can host the software on their own servers. “Such independence is one of the selling points of the platform,” he said, but “it is not an independence from the law, so avenues to take action still exist through legal proceedings.”

Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. promoted the social network on Fox News on Wednesday night, saying the “platform for everyone to express their feelings” would be in “beta testing” for the next few weeks and would stage a full launch in the first quarter of next year.

The social network’s rollout bears little resemblance to the caustic, attack-filled attitude that defined Trump’s years on social media. Truth Social’s listing on Apple’s App Store said the site will be a place for families with “varied opinions” to come “together to have an amazing time and share their viewpoints of the world.”

The company boasted that the site will showcase the basic features that have been expected of social networks for nearly a decade, including the ability to create a profile and post news stories, photos and videos.

The site’s terms of service, however, list some rules that would hamstring Trump himself. The site will ban, for instance, “excessive use of capital letters” — a hallmark of Trump’s online screeds.

Though the site portrays itself as a refuge for free speech uncensored by Big Tech, Trump’s site will ban any content that would “disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Site,” the terms state.

They also show that the site hopes to benefit from something on which Trump has long criticized Big Tech: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects companies from legal liability for the content their users post.

Trump last year threatened to veto a massive (and unrelated) bill for military spending unless Congress repealed the long-standing law, which Trump said should be “completely terminated.”

The company is “not responsible for … any Third-Party Content posted on, available through, or installed from the Site, including [its] content, accuracy, offensiveness, opinions [or] reliability,” the site’s terms of service state.

Trump has long blamed Section 230 as part of allegations that the tech companies are biased against conservatives, especially after his posts in which he sought to mislead the public about election fraud were flagged as misleading.

The company said it also reserves the right to “refuse, restrict access to, limit the availability of, or disable” a user’s access or contributions. Trump has vilified other tech companies for banning his accounts using that same right.

Truth Social’s listing on the App Store includes mostly inoffensive examples of posts that users might share, such as, “What’s your favorite place to go in the world? You won’t believe how beautiful Jamaica is.”

But it also includes logos for companies and, in one image, an entire fake post by the carmaker Chevrolet, which declared it was “going electric.” A spokeswoman for General Motors, which owns Chevrolet, told The Post on Thursday morning that the company has “no affiliation with this platform.”

Patent and trademark filings show the company in July trademarked “Truth Social” and “Trump Plus,” the latter of which was forecast to one day possibly cover TV shows, podcasts, movies and “online video games.” The company also applied to trademark terms such as “truthing,” “post a truth,” and “retruth,” filing records show.

The company’s presentation shows Trump still relishes the fame and following he amassed over years on social media. Three of the roughly 20 slides repeat Trump’s peak Twitter following, of 89 million accounts, to support its argument that the former president could still help galvanize the “conservative media universe.”

Trump’s attempt this summer to win online audiences, however — a blog, “From the Desk of Donald Trump,” heralded as a “beacon of freedom” — was discontinued after only 29 days. Trump advisers said he was upset by reports from The Post and other outlets highlighting its scraggly traffic count.

Trump’s lawyers earlier this month pushed for a federal court to force Twitter to reinstate his account, saying the company held “power and control over political discourse in this country that is immeasurable, historically unprecedented, and profoundly dangerous to open democratic debate.”

In the Truth Social announcement, Trump’s team said the site would be owned by Trump Media & Technology Group, a vaguely defined company headquartered at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s club in Palm Beach.

The Trump company said it was merging with Digital World Acquisition Corp., one of many so-called “blank-check” companies used for financial maneuvering, and would be publicly listed for trading. The statement valued the company at $875 million, though it was unclear how that number was reached.

The company said it intended to launch a video streaming service that would include news, entertainment, documentaries and sports, saying, “The American public is seeking ‘non-woke’ entertainment, and TMTG+ will provide content for all to enjoy.”

The company said it would compete with Netflix, Hulu and Disney+ but gave no information as to how. The slide, however, did include an old photo of Trump giving a big trophy to a sumo wrestler.

The site is likely to undermine other conservative-friendly social media alternatives, such as Gettr, Gab and Parler, that have sought to win over pro-Trump audiences.

Gettr, led by Trump’s former senior adviser Jason Miller, in a statement Wednesday congratulated Trump “for re-entering the social media fray.” Miller’s company had been angling to officially partner with Trump but “just couldn’t come to terms on a deal” with the “great deal-maker,” the statement said.

The Gettr statement also revealed lofty ambitions for other media properties, including a “GVision” short-video network and a “GETTR Pay” payments system. Its bare-bones social media site, however, has faced its own issues, including a launch that was plagued with terrorist propaganda and cartoon pornography. “Let the downloads begin!” the statement said.

 

[onekidanddone]

7 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Apparently the site is offline. I like the "no excessive use of capital letters" rule. I guess that means TFG won't be using it himself. "Pranksters have already defaced Trump’s new social network"

 

All I have to say is

https://sadtrombone.com

[Cartmann99]

6 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

The company said it would compete with Netflix, Hulu and Disney+ but gave no information as to how. The slide, however, did include an old photo of Trump giving a big trophy to a sumo wrestler

Streaming Service 1: "Come watch our exciting new mystery series with the guy who used to be on that show about the thing, now in space with cowboys!"

Streaming Service 2:  "Check out our new cooking/reality show set in a haunted house with blindfolded contestants who must make an entire meal out of random items like mayonnaise and SpaghettiOs while bickering nonstop and trying not to fall through the holes in the floor!"

Streaming Service 3: "Our quirky new romance series featuring a neighbor addicted to MLM, four brewery employees possessed by the spirit of an angry Chihuahua, and a former Las Vegas showgirl living in a house built on top of a sinkhole, is not to be missed!"

Trump Plus: "Watch Trump give a trophy to a sumo wrestler over and over and over..."

[church_of_dog]

4 hours ago, onekidanddone said:

All I have to say is

https://sadtrombone.com

And all I can say in response is

http://instantrimshot.com

[Cartmann99]

Spoiler

Where's Frank Speech or Lindell TV?

[onekidanddone]

1 hour ago, Cartmann99 said:

  Reveal hidden contents

Where's Frank Speech or Lindell TV?

Is it just me, or does the illustration look like a bunch of sperm about to fertilize an egg?

Or it could be several comets about to hit planet Truth.    🌏 ☄️