Posts Tagged ‘THE INTERCEPT’
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on March 18, 2025 at 12:05 am
There were numerous instances where intervention by Federal legislators or law enforcement authorities could have utterly changed the outcome of the 2024 Presidential election.
Case #5: Even after Donald Trump left office, the Justice Department treated him with a deference not shown any other criminal defendant.
He was allowed, for example, to hurl insults and threats at Special Counsel Jack Smith and even Smith’s family.
One such post, published on Trump’s website, Truth Social, went: “Deranged Jack Smith, who is a sick puppet for A.G. Garland & Crooked Joe Biden, should be DEFUNDED & put out to rest. Republicans must get tough or the Dems will steal another Election. MAGA!”
By “A.G. Garland” Trump meant Attorney General Merrick Garland. By “put out to rest,” he meant that his followers should assassinate Smith.
Not even Mafia bosses like Charles “Lucky” Luciano and Albert “The Executioner” Anastasia dared issue such a threat.

Jack Smith
By contrast: Jimmy Hoffa was president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. But that didn’t prevent Robert F. Kennedy’s Justice Department from indicting him for jury tampering—and convicting him on March 4, 1964. He was sentenced to eight years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
No one in the Kennedy Justice Department said: “He’s the elected president of the Teamsters Union—so we can’t touch him.” Yet that is precisely how the Biden Justice Department repeatedly acted—simply because, in 2016, he won a Presidential election.
Case #6: Throughout his struggles to stay out of prison, Trump was aided by the unrelenting support of the Republican party.
Republicans loudly and repeatedly claimed that Donald Trump was the legitimate winner of the 2020 Presidential election—despite overwhelming evidence that he wasn’t.
They also claimed that, by appointing Special Counsel Jack Smith to investigate Trump, the Democrats had weaponized Federal law enforcement.
They also fully supported Trump’s demand for the release of those who attacked the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021.

For example: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has depicted these coup supporters as persecuted martyrs.
On March 24, 2022, members of the Republicans’ House Oversight Committee toured a Washington, D.C. jail where some of these defendants were held. “Their due process rights are being violated. And they have been mistreated and treated as political prisoners,” Greene told reporters after the tour.
Adolf Hitler similarly portrayed as martyrs the Nazis who tried to violently overthrow the government of Bavaria on November 9, 1923.
A March 2, 2020 Washington Monthly story concluded ominously: “U.S. democracy wasn’t set up to deal with a president openly behaving like a James Bond villain while being protected by a political party behaving more like a mafia than a civic institution.”
Case #7: While Congressional Republicans have relentlessly investigated President Joe Biden and his family, Democrats have refused to similarly investigate Trump’s family.
The United States House Oversight Committee opened its investigation into the Biden family on January 11, 2023. The investigation included the foreign business activities of Biden’s son, Hunter, and brother, James.
By November 2023, the investigation had not found any evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden.
Democrats, by contrast, have not probed why Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and former White House adviser, received $2 billion from Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The money came to Kushner’s private equity firm after Kushner left the White House in 2021.

Jared Kushner
Salman has been implicated by U.S. Intelligence reports in the 2018 torture and dismemberment of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. When asked if he believed the reports, Kushner said: “Are we really still doing this?”
Democrats have also refused to investigate the Trump administration’s illegally seizing vitally-needed medical supplies in at least seven states during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) did not publicly report the thefts, despite the outlay of millions of dollars of taxpayer money. Nor did the administration explain how it decided which supplies to seize and where to reroute them.
The Federal Government did not inform states whose supplies it seized if they would receive the materials they ordered and paid for.
Case #8: On July 13, 2024, Trump was allegedly wounded in his right ear by a gunman while speaking at an open-air Presidential campaign rally near Butler, Pennsylvania.
The would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, fired eight rounds from an AR-15 style rifle from the roof of a nearby building. Trump dived for cover behind his lectern, as the shooter killed one audience member and critically injured two others.
Crooks was shot and killed seconds later by the Secret Service’s Counter Sniper Team.
Had Trump not slightly turned his head at the moment Crooks fired, Republicans would have been forced to choose another nominee.
In addition, Trump would not have been alive to win the 2024 Presidential election and openly threaten to imprison the Justice Department prosecutors who sought to hold him accountable for his litany of crimes.
The assassination attempt calls to mind that by Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg on July 20, 1944, to kill Adolf Hitler with a briefcase bomb. Had he succeeded, the war in Europe would no doubt have ended far earlier, with countless lives being saved.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on March 17, 2025 at 2:37 am
On November 9, 1923, Nazi Party Fuhrer Adolf Hitler tried to overthrow the government in Munich, Bavaria.
About 2,000 Nazis marched to the center of Munich, where they confronted heavily-armed police. A shootout erupted, killing 16 Nazis and four policemen.
Hitler was injured during the clash, but managed to escape. Two days later, he was arrested and charged with treason.
Put on trial, he found himself treated as a celebrity by a judge sympathetic to Right-wing groups. He was allowed to brutally cross-examine witnesses and even make inflammatory speeches.
At the end of the trial, he was convicted of treason and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment.
Serving time in Landsberg Prison, in Bavaria. he was given a huge cell, allowed to receive unlimited visitors and gifts, and treated with deference by guards and inmates.
Hitler used his time in prison to write his infamous book, Mein Kampf-–“My Struggle.” Part autobiography, part political treatise, it laid out his future plans—including the extermination of the Jews and the conquest of the Soviet Union.

Adolf Hitler leaving Landsberg Prison, December, 20, 1924
Nine months later, he was released on parole—by authorities loyal to the authoritarian Right instead of the newly-created Weimar Republic.
Hitler immediately began rebuilding the shattered Nazi party—and deciding on a new strategy to gain power. Never again would he resort to armed force. He would win office by election—or intrigue.
Writes historian Volker Ullrich, in his monumental biography, Hitler: Ascent 1889 – 1939: “Historians have perennially tried to answer the question of whether Hitler’s rise to power could have been halted….
“There were repeated opportunities to end Hitler’s run of triumphs. The most obvious one was after the failed Putsch of November 1923. Had the Munich rabble-rouser been forced to serve his full five-year term of imprisonment in Landsberg, it is extremely unlikely that he would have been able to restart his political career.”

Thus, it isn’t just what happens that can influence the course of history. Often, it’s what doesn’t happen that has at least as great a result.
Future historians—if there are any—may one day write that it’s what didn’t happen that played at least as great a role in re-electing Donald Trump President as what actually did.
There were numerous instances where intervention by Federal legislators or law enforcement authorities could have utterly changed the outcome of the 2024 election.
Case #1: On December 18, 2019, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives adopted two articles of impeachment against Trump: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. On February 5, 2020, the Republican-dominated Senate voted to acquit Trump on both articles of impeachment.
Their motive: Fear that if they didn’t, they would be “primaried” by even more extreme, Trump-supported Right-wing candidates—and lose their positions and the accompanying power and perks.
Had Republicans agreed to convict him, he could not have run again for President.
Case #2: On January 13, 2021, Trump was impeached for the second time for “incitement of insurrection”—inciting the January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol.
The reason: To stop the counting of Electoral College votes, which he knew would prove that former Vice President Joseph Biden had won the 2020 Presidential election.
The evidence against him was overwhelming—including video of his inciting a mob of his followers to storm the Capitol Building.
But Republican Senators again acquitted Trump on February 13, 2021—choosing ambition over patriotism.
Had they done so, he could not have again been a candidate for President.

Donald Trump
Case #3: Only on November 18, 2022—a year and a half after becoming Attorney General—did Merrick Garland appoint Jack Smith Independent Counsel to investigate Donald Trump’s role for:
- Inciting the January 6 attack on Congress; and
- Illegally seizing and storing highly classified government documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach Florida.
This gave Trump time to play his “deny and delay” game. Had he been prosecuted and convicted before the November 5 Presidential election, the results might well have been different.
Even hardcore supporters might have proved unwilling to vote for someone found guilty of inciting a riot or stealing highly classified documents.
Case #4: In June, 2023, Trump was indicted for illegally seizing and storing hundreds of highly classified government documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee as Federal Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, presided over the case.
She repeatedly ruled in his favor and finally dismissed the case in July, 2024. claiming that Special Counsel Jack Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional.

Aileen Cannon
Southern District of Florida, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Many legal experts, citing her handling of the civil case against Trump, called for her recusal from the case. Jack Smith could have requested her removal from the case but did not ask a Federal appeals court to do so.
MSNBC analyst Barbara McQuade told Newsweek that Smith likely refused to do so to “return public trust” to the Justice Department, which had been challenged in recent years.
Cannon’s kid-gloves treatment of Trump echoed that of the Right-wing judge who presided over Adolf Hitler’s trial in 1923 for trying to overthrow the government of Bavaria.
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In Entertainment, History, Military, Politics, Social commentary on March 14, 2025 at 12:06 am
Major Dundee is a 1965 Sam Peckinpah Western focusing on a Union cavalry officer (Charlton Heston) who leads a motley troop of soldiers into Mexico to rescue three children kidnapped by Apaches.
Along the way they liberate Mexican villagers and clash with French lancers trying to establish the Austrian Archduke Maximillian 1 as emperor of Mexico.
The Wild Bunch is universally recognized as Peckinpah’s greatest achievement. It has certainly had a far greater impact on audiences and critics than Major Dundee. According to Heston, this was really the movie Peckinpah wanted to make while making Dundee, but he couldn’t quite get his hands around it.

As a result, Dundee’s virtues have been tragically overlooked. It has a larger cast of major characters than Bunch, and these are men you can truly like and identify with:
- The charm of Benjamin Tyreen (Richard Harrs), a Confederate lieutenant forced into Union service;
- The steady courage of Sergeant Gomez;
- The quiet dignity of Aesop (Brock Peters), a black soldier;
- The quest for maturity in a young, untried bugler Tim Ryan (Michael Anderson, Jr.);
- The on-the-job training experience of Lt. Graham (Jim Hutton); and
- The stoic endurance of Indian scout Sam Potts (James Coburn).
These men are charged with a dangerous and dirty mission, and do it as well as they can, but you wouldn’t fear inviting them to meet your family.

Charlton Heston as Major Dundee
That was definitely not the case with The Wild Bunch, four hardened killers prepared to rip off anyone, anytime, and leave a trail of bodies in their wake. The only place where you would have felt safe seeing them, in real-life, was behind prison bars.

The Wild Bunch
Dundee is an odyssey movie, in the same vein as Saving Private Ryan. Both films start with a battle, followed by the disappearance of characters who need to be searched for and brought back to safety.
Just as Dundee assembles a small force to go into French-occupied Mexico, so, too, does Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks) do the same, with his hunting ground being German-occupied France.
Dundee’s men retrieve the kidnapped children and survive a near-fatal battle with Indians. Miller’s men twice clash with the Germans before finding their quarry, James Ryan.
Before Dundee can return to the United States, he must face and defeat a corps of French soldiers.
Before Miller can haul Ryan back to safety, he must repulse a German assault.

Both groups of soldiers—Dundee’s and Miller’s—are transformed by their experiences in ways neither group could possibly articulate. (Miller, being a highly literate schoolteacher, would surely do a better job of this than the tight-jawed Dundee.)
Dundee’s soldiers return to a United States that’s just ended its Civil War with a Union victory—and the death of slavery. Miller’s soldiers return to a nation that is now a global superpower.
Of course, Ryan was fortunate in having Steven Spielberg as its director. With his clout, there was no question that Ryan would emerge as the film he wanted.
Peckinpah lacked such clout. And he fought with everyone, including the producer, Jerry Bressler, who ultimately held the power to destroy his film. This guaranteed that his movie would emerge far differently than he had envisioned.
In 2005, an extended version of Dundee was released, featuring 12 minutes of restored footage. (Much of the original footage was lost after severe cuts to the movie.)
In this, we fully see how unsympathetic a character the martinet Dundee really is. Owing to Heston’s record of playing heroes, it’s easy to overlook Dundee’s arrogance and lethal fanaticism and automatically view him as a hero. If he is indeed that, he is a hero with serious flaws.
And his self-imposed mission poses questions for us today:
- Where is the line between professional duty and personal fanaticism?
- How do we balance the success of a mission against its potential costs—especially if they prove appalling?
- At what point—if any—does personal conscience override professional obligations?
Whether intentionally or not, in Major Dundee, Peckinpah laid out a microcosm of the American history that would immediately follow the Civil War:
- Former Confederates and Unionists would forego their regional animosities and fight against a recognized mutual enemy—the Indians. This would prove a dirty and drawn-out war, shorn of the glory and (later) treasured memories of the Civil War.
- Just as Dundee’s final battle with French lancers ended with an American victory won at great cost, so, too, would America’s forays into the Spanish-American War and World Wars 1 and 11 prove the same.
- Ben Tyreen’s commentary on the barbarism of French troops (“Never underestimate the value of a European education”) would be echoed by twentieth-century Americans uncovering the horrors of Dachau and Buchenwald.
- America would learn to project its formidable military power at great cost.
Toward the end of the movie, Teresa Santiago (Senta Berger), the ex-patriot Austrian widow, would ask Dundee: “But who do you answer to?”It is a question that still vividly expresses the view of the international community as this superpower colossus hurtles from one conflict to the next.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Medical, Military, Politics, Social commentary on March 13, 2025 at 12:18 am
Although Donald Trump’s purges—current and continuing—of his own government are unprecedented for the United States, they nevertheless have a historical precedent.
Unfortunately for Americans, that precedent occurred in the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin.
The 1930s were a frightening and dangerous time to be alive in the Soviet Union. In 1934, Stalin, seeing imaginary enemies everywhere, ordered a series of purges that lasted right up to the German invasion in 1941.
In 1937-38, the Red Army fell prey to Stalin’s paranoia.
Its victims included:
- Three of five marshals (five-star generals);
- Thirteen of 15 army commanders (three- and four-star generals);
- Fifty of 57 army corps commanders; and
- One hundred fifty-four out of 186 division commanders.
And heading the list of those marked for death was Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a major Soviet military leader and theoretician from 1918 to 1937.

Joseph Stalin
Arrested on May 22, 1937, he was interrogated and tortured. As a result, he “confessed” to being a German agent plotting to overthrow Stalin and seize power.
On his confession, which survives in the archives, his bloodstains can clearly be seen.
On June 11, 1937, the Soviet Supreme Court convened a special military tribunal to try Tukhachevsky and eight generals for treason.
It was a sham: The accused were denied defense attorneys, and could not appeal the verdict—-which was foregone: Death.
Within hours of the verdict, Tukhachevsky was summoned from his cell and shot once in the back of the head.
In a Russian version of poetic justice, five of the eight generals who served as Tukhachevsky’s judges were themselves later condemned and executed as traitors.
From 1937 until 1956, Tukhachevsky was officially declared a traitor and fifth-columnist.
On January 31, 1957, Tukhachevsky and his co-defendants were declared innocent of all charges and were “rehabilitated” by order of Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev.

Postage stamp honoring Mikhail Tukhachevsky
The Stalin purges—lasting to 1938—decimated the Russian army and left the Soviet Union vulnerable to attack by its arch enemy: Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
On June 22, 1941, that attack swept over the western part of the Soviet Union, up to the gates of Moscow and, in 1942, as far east as Stalingrad. It took four years of bitter warfare—and a loss of at least 25 million Soviet casualties—before the Nazi threat was finally destroyed.
As a result of Trump’s purges of America’s health and security institutions, the United States now faces the same threat of invasion—through disease, terrorism, natural disaster or military conquest.

Donald Trump
Meanwhile, House and Senate Republicans are openly or silently rubberstamping Trump’s agenda.
The reason: They fear that Trump will turn his Fascistic voting base upon them. They want to keep their seats in Congress—and all the power and perks that go with them.
Republicans don’t care that Trump has trashed the institutions that Americans have cherished for more than 200 years. Institutions like an independent judiciary, a free press, and an incorruptible Justice Department.
He has viciously attacked all of these—and Republicans have either said nothing or rushed to his defense. Many of them tried to short-circuit Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation and prosecution of Trump’s inciting a deadly riot against Congress on January 6, 2021.
But there are signs that even some Republicans might be thinking of breaking with Trump—at least on slashing the Medicaid program.

States and the federal government jointly pay for Medicaid, which offers nearly-free health care coverage for roughly 80 million poor and disabled Americans, including millions of children. It cost $880 billion to operate in 2023.
Nationally, 55% of Americans said the government spends too little on Medicaid.
And pollster Tony Fabrizio, a chief architect of Trump’s 2024 victory, has heard rumblings of Republican discontent. He’s warned the President that:
- 59% of voters in 18 swing districts worry “about their personal financial situation.”
- In these swing districts, 80% favor extending the Affordable Care Act subsidies for health insurance—which will expire this year after Democrats expanded them in 2021.
- Majorities oppose cutting taxes on corporations.
- 63% say their top priority for tax policy is helping “working-class families,” versus the 1%, which Trump and Republicans favor.
The House blueprint, which Trump supports, lays the groundwork for up to $880 billion in Medicaid cuts and tens of billions in cuts to food stamps.
According to a February 22 story in The New Republic—“Trump’s New Pollster Just Hit Him With Very Bad News and a Warning”:
“One caveat: The Fabrizio poll finds that a very slim majority supports extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts when they are not defined. But that package contained enormous tax cuts for the rich and corporations, and those would get extended too.”
Yet even if Medicaid and Medicare remain untouched, that will do nothing for those thousands of federal workers who have lost their jobs.
Many of them waited months to undergo extensive background investigations. Many of them have been on the job only weeks or months before being pink-slipped.
Most of them won’t be given letters of recommendation, proving they were not removed for cause. Which will make it hard to convince new employers to hire them.
They are among the first casualties of Donald Trump’s “Make America Great” campaign. They won’t be the last.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Military, Politics, Social commentary on March 12, 2025 at 12:13 am
Donald Trump made butchering the federal workforce a major issue during his 2024 campaign for President. And since taking office for the second time on January 20, he’s thoroughly made good on it—with relish.
All of this was entirely predictable—long before Trump re-entered the White House.
And Part Two of my three-part series, “Love Thy Dictator,” published on August 21, 2024, did just that. From that post:
Under Project 2025:
- The Department of Homeland Security would be abolished.
- Traditionally independent federal agencies such as the Department of Justice, Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission would be placed under Presidential control.
- The Environmental Protection Agency would be stripped of its authority to protect the air, water and soil.
- States would be prevented from adopting stricter regulations on vehicular emissions, like California, has done.
- Fossil fuels—the leading cause of global warming—would be favored and environmental regulations to combat climate change abolished.
- The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) which the project calls “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry,” would be abolished.

- Federal funding for all public transit systems across the country would be eliminated.
- The wealthiest 1% would receive massive tax cuts at the expense of the poor and middle class.
- Conception would be designated as the point where life begins.
- Abortion would be outlawed.
- Access to birth control would be sharply restricted, if not banned.
- Christianity would be designated as the official religion of the United States.
- The use of capital punishment would be revived and expanded—and the right of appeals sharply restricted.
Trump’s declaring all-out war on America’s cherished institutions—such as the Forest Service, Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Food and Drug Administration—is unprecedented in United States history.
It will also prove catastrophic for Trump’s constituencies—as well for those who totally oppose his reign.
Even billionaires—the constituency Trump cares about most—need reliable weather reports before setting out on their private jets or yachts.
Eliminating the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will deprive them (as well as millions Trump doesn’t care about) of reliable information on approaching storms and other unsafe weather conditions.
Eliminating the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will expose everyone—billionaires included—to the threats of widespread diseases such as Ebola and typhoid.
And as of February 25, CBS and other reliable news media have reported a new virus rising out of the Democratic Republic of Congo. In the majority of cases, the interval between the onset of symptoms and death has been just 48 hours.

Firing workers at the Transportation Security Agency—which is responsible for preventing aircraft hijackings—can only result in a repetition of 9/11-style hijackings.
The TSA was born in 2001, just two months after Islamic terrorists slaughtered 3,000 Americans via hijacked planes in New York and Washington, D.C—and signed into law by Republican President George W. Bush.
Firing employees at the Department of Defense will endanger America’s national security by drastically lowering morale as remaining employees must carry out their own duties and those of fired workers.
Firing workers at the Federal Aviation Administration virtually guarantees an increase in airline disasters. Since Trump took office on January 20, there have been 14 aviation disasters, killing a total of 93 people.
Firing employees at the Food and Drug Administration will result in a return to unsafe food, prescription and over-the-counter drugs, dietary supplements, vaccines, medical devices, cosmetics, electromagnetic radiation emitting devices and veterinary products.
The FDA dates back to 1906 and the administration of Republican President Theodore Roosevelt. Even billionaires—Trump’s preferred constituency—must eat and seek medical care, so they will be as disadvantaged by its demise as ordinary Americans.
Although Trump’s purges—current and continuing—of his own government are unprecedented for the United States, they nevertheless have a historical precedent.
Unfortunately for Americans, that precedent occurred in the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin.
The 1930s were a frightening and dangerous time to be alive in the Soviet Union. In 1934, Stalin, seeing imaginary enemies everywhere, ordered a series of purges that lasted right up to the German invasion of 1941.
Joseph Stalin
An example of Stalin’s paranoia occurred one day while the dictator walked through the Kremlin corridors with Admiral Ivan Isakov. Officers of the NKVD (the predecessor to the KGB) stood guard at every corner.
“Every time I walk down the corridors,” said Stalin, “I think: Which one of them is it? If it’s this one, he will shoot me in the back. But if I turn the corner, the next one can shoot me in the face.”
In 1937-38, the Red Army fell prey to Stalin’s paranoia.
Its victims included:
- Three of five marshals (five-star generals);
- Thirteen of 15 army commanders (three- and four-star generals);
- Fifty of 57 army corps commanders; and
- One hundred fifty-four out of 186 division commanders.
And heading the list of those marked for death was Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a major Soviet military leader and theoretician from 1918 to 1937.
Arrested on May 22, 1937, he was interrogated and tortured. As a result, he “confessed” to being a German agent plotting to overthrow Stalin and seize power.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Military, Politics, Social commentary on March 11, 2025 at 12:44 am
Donald Trump made butchering the federal workforce a major issue during his 2024 campaign for President. And since taking office for the second time on January 20, he’s thoroughly made good on it—with relish.
There is no better symbolism of this than the video of his billionaire enforcer Elon Musk literally wielding a chainsaw at a CPAC convention at Orin Hill, Maryland, on February 20.
Musk appeared onstage, wearing shades and his trademark black “Make America Great Again” hat, and said Argentine President Javier Milei had a gift for him.
The Argentine leader then walked onstage with the red chainsaw and passed it to Musk. The chainsaw was engraved with Milei’s slogan, “Viva la libertad, carajo”—“Long live liberty, damn it.”
Waving the power tool high, Musk shouted: “This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy! Chainsaw!”

Elon Musk
Meanwhile, CNN has been tracking the number—and effects—of the mushrooming cuts at federal offices in Washington and across the United States.
By February 28, these are the numbers so far:
- HUD Community Planning and Development – About 780 employees fired (83.3%)
- Agency for International Development – About 2,000 employees fired (20%)
- Department of Energy – At least 1.8 thousand employees fired (10.6%)
- National Forest Service – About 3.4 thousand employees fired (9.7%)
- National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – About 800 employees fired (6.4%)
- Internal Revenue Service – At least 6,000 employees fired (6.3%)
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – About 750 employees fired (5.9%)
- Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – At least 100 employees fired (5.9%)
- Food and Drug Administration Food Division – 89 employees fired (4.5%)
- National Institutes of Health – About 1.1 thousand employees fired (5.3%)
- Department of Education – At least 60 employees fired (1.4%)
- Federal Aviation Administration – About 400 employees fired (0.9%)
- Department of Defense – 5.4 thousand employees fired (0.8%)
- Department of Veterans Affairs – At least 2.4 thousand employees fired (0.5%)
- Transportation Security Administration – 243 employees fired (0.4%)
Others who have been summarily fired—without warning–include:
- 17 Inspectors General, the executive branch watchdogs who conduct audits and investigations of executive branch actions
- The Board of Trustees members for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts —with Trump naming himself as chairman
- Elain Weintraub, chair of the Federal Elections Committee, which enforces campaign finance laws and oversees federal elections
- Gwynne Wilcox, the first black woman to serve on the National Labor Relations Board;
- Eight senior FBI officials involved in investigating the January 6 Capitol riots
- Several Justice Department prosecutors who had investigated Trump’s inciting the January 6, 2021 attack on Congress and his hoarding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate
And this is just within the first month of the Trump administration. More mass firings are certain to be coming.

Donald Trump
But statistics tell only part of the story—and entirely leave out the human element. Among the reactions of the fired federal employees interviewed by CNN:
- “In spite of everything, I am just waiting on word to go back to work so I can serve the American people. That’s why I’m in public service; that’s why all of us are.” Federal worker – Food and Drug Administration
- “There are five of us [in my office] who moved over from other HR departments. We are military spouses, we are veterans, one with 18 years.” – Arielle Pines, Veterans Affairs
- “I was given no time to reach out to colleagues or even clean out my office.” Andria Townsend – National Park Service
- “It was a job I loved doing, protecting consumers every day. It will also have a pretty serious financial impact on my family.” Federal worker – Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
- “I don’t even have a letter of termination to get unemployment.” Victoria DeLano – Department of Education
- “I deployed twice. I spent so much time away from my family. I was gone when my mom passed away. I feel very much like the message is that my service isn’t valued.” Chelsea Milburn – Department of Education employee and veteran
All of this was entirely predictable—long before Trump re-entered the White House.
And Part Two of my three-part series, “Love Thy Dictator,” published on August 21, 2024, did just that. From that post:
Donald Trump’s ambition to become absolute dictator fits brilliantly into the goals of Project 2025, also known as the Presidential Transition Project.
This is a collection of policy proposals to fundamentally reshape the U.S. federal government in the event of a Republican victory in the 2024 Presidential election.
Established in 2022 by the Right-wing Heritage Foundation, the project aims to recruit tens of thousands of radical Right-wingers to the District of Columbia to replace existing federal civil servants.
Under Project 2025:
- Republicans consider federal employees to be subversives who comprise the “deep state.”
- Replacing tenured civil servants with thousands of political hacks will arm Republicans with the power to establish an absolute dictatorship under the next Republican president.
- Republicans believe the Department of Justice has “forfeited the trust” of the American people by investigating Donald Trump’s proven collaboration with Russia to win the 2016 Presidential election.

- As a result, the DOJ must be thoroughly “reformed” and tightly overseen by the White House.
- The director of the FBI must be personally accountable to the President—just as the head of the KGB is personally accountable to Vladimir Putin.
- Federal employees could be instantly fired for not obeying illegal orders, or on mere whim—including the whim of the President.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on February 27, 2025 at 12:14 am
The latest wrinkle in San Francisco’s “be kind to Untermenschen“ (the German word for “subhumans”) campaign is the creation of “Navigation Centers.”
These are essentially holding pens for drug addicts, alcoholics, mentally ill and parasitic bums until they can be “navigated” to permanent housing.
But housing is in short supply in San Francisco, and there is no telling how long many of these Untermenschen will stay in them. Or what harm they will wreak on the neighborhoods warehousing them.
Since 2015, eight Navigation Centers have been opened throughout San Francisco; six are in operation.
Among the “amenities” they provide:
- Meals
- Privacy
- Space for pets
- Space separate from sleeping areas
- Laundry
- Access to benefits
- Wi-Fi
Hundreds—if not thousands—of their occupants are meth or heroin addicts. Such people commit virtually any crime to support their habit. And their crimes of choice are burglary and robbery.

Thus, pouring large numbers of them into San Francisco neighborhoods via “Navigation Centers” guarantees that countless decent citizens will become targets for desperate criminals.
At a public hearing in January, 2020, San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin touted the importance of Navigation Centers—including the one that would soon be established at Post and Hyde Streets.
When a local resident asked, “Is one of these centers located where you live?” Peskin replied: “No.”
In short: The city’s elite make sure their homes are far removed from the plague they so easily inflict on San Francisco residents.
In fact, when they’re not swallowing alcohol or injecting, swallowing or sniffing drugs, many of San Francisco’s “homeless” spend a lot of their time ripping off retail stores.
Walgreens drug stores have proven a particular target for these DDMBs—Druggies, Drunks, Mentals and Bums—the four groups that make up 90% of the “homeless” population.
“I feel sorry for the clerks, they are regularly being verbally assaulted,” a regular customer, Sebastian Luke, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
“The clerks say there is nothing they can do. They say Walgreens’ policy is to not get involved. They don’t want anyone getting injured or getting sued, so the guys just keep coming in and taking whatever they want.”

“Retail theft across our San Francisco stores has continued to increase in the past few months to five times our chain average,” Walgreens spokesman Phil Caruso told the Chronicle in October, 2021.
“During this time to help combat this issue, we increased our investments in security measures in stores across the city to 46 times our chain average in an effort to provide a safe environment.”
As a result, Walgreens has closed at least 11 stores in San Francisco.
One store in the San Francisco area reportedly lost $1,000 a day to theft.
Many shoplifters then sell their stolen goods on the street—often near the store where they stole them.
Under California law, theft under $950 is considered a misdemeanor, but many prosecutors prefer to free those charged rather than holding them in jail.
The maximum sentence they could get: Six months.

Low-income and disabled seniors who depend on these disappearing drug stores for prescriptions are especially at risk.
The city budgeted $1.1 billion for fiscal year 2021-22 on DDMBs. Dividing that amount by about 7,754 DDMBs provides the figure of about $128,925 per DDMB per year.
So what can San Francisco do to effectively combat the plague of DDMBs?
- Launch a “Please Do Not Feed the Bums” publicity campaign—as it has against feeding pigeons. And those caught doing so should be heavily fined.
- Trash cans should be equipped with locked doors, to prevent bums from using them as food dispensers.
- Those living on the street should be given two choices: (1) Go to a local shelter or face arrest and the immediate confiscation of their possessions;
- (2) An “Untermenschen City” should be set up near the city dump. There they can live in their tents and/or sleeping bags while being unable to daily confront or assault others to obtain free money.
- San Francisco’s rent control laws should be strengthened, to prevent future evictions owing to the unchecked greed of landlords. Tenants on fixed incomes should be given special protections against extortionate rent increases.
- Bus drivers should be able to legally refuse passengers who stink of urine/feces, as they present a potential health-hazard to others.
- The owners of restaurants, theaters and grocery stores should likewise be allowed to refuse service on the same basis.
- Those applying for welfare benefits should be required to provide proof of residence. Too many people come to San Francisco because, upon arrival, they can immediately apply for such benefits.
- Set up a special unit to remove “street people” and their possessions from city sidewalks. This could be a division of the Sanitation Department, since its personnel are used to removing filth and debris of all types.
- Forcefully tell alcoholics and drug addicts: “Your anti-social behavior is not welcome here. Take your self-destructive lifestyles elsewhere. We won’t subsidize them.”
- Take the mentally unstable off the street and place them in institutions where their needs can be met.
- Tell those who are just plain bums: “Don’t expect us to support you.”
Only then will San Francisco reclaim its place as America’s most beloved city.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on February 26, 2025 at 12:07 am
If you are a firefighter, police officer, paramedic or schoolteacher, and want to live in San Francisco, forget it.
According to Rent Cafe, which provides apartment listings directly from top property managers: “The average [monthly] rent for an apartment in San Francisco is $3,313.” And “the average size for a San Francisco apartment is 734 square feet.”

But there’s hope for you yet—if you’re a Druggie, Drunk, Mental or Bum (DDMBs).
Why?
Because the Mayor of San Francisco—currently London Breed—and Board of Supervisors have deliberately created an Untermenschen-friendly program that actually encourages such people to move to the city.
“Untermenschen,” in German, means “subhuman.”
The short version of this is “Unters.”
A major part of this lies in placing these “guests” in hotels throughout the city. These range from the relatively low-budget Motel 6 to the luxurious Mark Hopkins.
“Guests” receive personal grooming, sanitary and cleaning supplies, three delivered meals, and laundry service for clothes and linens.
The hotels were pressured into accepting the Unters, but they also wanted to recover monies lost to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The city is paying $200 per night per room, totaling $6,000 a month—nearly double the cost of a private one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco.
But there is a big catch for the hotels: When the “homeless” are placed in subsidized housing, their mental illness, irresponsible addiction to drugs and/or alcohol and/or generally sloth-like habits usually trash those premises.
San Francisco is secretly placing DDMBs—Druggies, Drunks, Mentals and Bums—among the tourists who check into these hotels. It does so by designating them as “emergency front-line workers.”
For most people, this means doctors, nurses and similar professionals.
It doesn’t mean DDMBs, if not outright criminals.
The city has invoked emergency-disaster law to keep this information secret. Officials refuse to notify the public about the dangers within their midst. The list of hotels is withheld from the press and reporters are forbidden to enter the properties.
City and hotel workers are required to sign nondisclosure agreements that forbid them to reveal the dangers they and their legitimate guests are exposed to. Doing so is punishable by a fine of up to $1,000, imprisonment for up to one year, or both.
Despite this, the truth has been leaking out. Security guards stand outside hotel entrances, alerting anyone who sees them that all is not well. Crime, vagrancy and drug usage/dealing have also increased around the hotels.
In one hotel, Unters receive needle kits and are advised to call the front desk before shooting up. Drug-related deaths have occurred. Containers for safely disposing of needles are placed on every floor. Even so, used syringes are often left where non-addicts can be infected by them.
“There are parties, drug overdoses, deaths, assaults on people, sexual harassment. It’s pandemonium,” City Journal writer Erica Sandberg reported. “This is very bad and it needs to be stopped.
“What they [hotel employees] told about the situation inside goes beyond any scope. They are not just terrified, they are traumatized by what they see. According to their stories, in hotels they found mattresses with feces, blood, hospital bandages on the floor. What people see is so terrible that they go out and say, ‘I don’t want to go back there.'”
City officials provide far more than free room and board to DDMBs.
The Department of Public Health (DPH) runs the COVID-19 Alternative Housing Program. And it works in two stages:
Stage 1: Move the “homeless” into the city’s hotels—at city expense.
Stage 2: Provide them with not only free food and shelter but free alcohol, cannabis, and cigarettes.
According to a May 11, 2020 story in City Journal.org:
“The program’s primary purpose is to keep homeless people, the majority of whom are addicts, out of harm’s way during the pandemic. By getting their substance of choice delivered, the thinking goes, the guests may be more apt to remain in their government-funded rooms.
“Another purpose of the program is to protect the public against the spread of coronavirus. The city doesn’t want homeless people who should be staying in their rooms roaming the neighborhood in search of the substances, potentially infecting others.”
But the agency doesn’t require that its addict “guests” remain quarantined. It merely asks that they do so.
After news about these deliveries leaked on social media, DPH claimed that “rumors that guests of San Francisco’s alternative housing program are receiving taxpayer-funded deliveries of alcohol, cannabis and tobacco are false.”
Except that the reports weren’t false.
The program is funded by private philanthropists. Nevertheless:
- DPH administers and oversees the program.
- It’s staffed by city workers, including doctors, nurse practitioners, nurses, social workers and security personnel.
- The department manages, stores and distributes the substances.
- Employee time is involved.
Thus, the program is financed by taxpayers, even if an outside group provides some of the funding.
The latest wrinkle in San Francisco’s “be kind to Untermenschen“ campaign is the creation of “Navigation Centers.” These are essentially holding pens for Unters—until they can be “navigated” to permanent housing.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on February 25, 2025 at 12:10 am
On November 3, 2021, National Public Radio’s website carried the following headline: “San Francisco’s new rapid response teams race to save lives as ODs dramatically rise.”
From the story:
“Faced with a stunning rise in drug overdose deaths the last few years, the vast majority tied to fentanyl, San Francisco has launched mobile teams made up of paramedics and nurses.
“The new Street Overdose Response Teams (SORT), a collaboration between the city’s health and fire departments, aim to deliver a broad range of support and care directly following an overdose.”
And what is the ultimate result of repeatedly saving drug-abusers from their own self-destructive behavior?
In his 2021 bestseller, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities, author Michael Shellenberger provides the answer.

According to its dust jacket:
“Progressives claimed they knew how to solve homelessness, inequality, and crime. But in cities they control, progressives made those problems worse.
“Michael Shellenberger has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for thirty years. During that time, he advocated for the decriminalization of drugs, affordable housing, and alternatives to jail and prison.
“But as homeless encampments spread, and overdose deaths skyrocketed, Shellenberger decided to take a closer look at the problem. What he discovered shocked him. The problems had grown worse not despite but because of progressive policies.”
In a June 1, 2022 interview with The Spectator World, Shellenberger blamed liberal ideology for this epidemic:
“The first thing is that they don’t enforce laws. They don’t enforce laws against people that they consider victims, which includes addicts and the mentally ill. And if you don’t enforce laws it turns out people don’t follow them and you don’t have functioning civilization.

Michael Shellenberger
Michael Shellenberger, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
“The second is that they have pursued a radical de-incarceration, de-policing and decriminalization agenda, which has removed penalties for many laws, including shoplifting $950 worth of goods, or possessing three grams of fentanyl and meth, enough to produce paranoid psychosis. And they’ve pursued a so-called housing first anti-shelter policy.
“So they’ve defunded the shelters. The governor himself has established that housing should be a right. That anybody who comes to San Francisco or Los Angeles should have their own apartment unit in those cities. That is the state policy. It is so ridiculous. It is shocking to even say that that is what the policy is, but that is what it is.
“What we need is pretty straightforward. We need to enforce laws. We need a shelter-first housing-earned policy and you need statewide psychiatric and addiction care like they have in every civilized country.
“We’re reviving people from overdose six, nine, twelve times and then sending them right back onto the streets to smoke more fentanyl. It’s bonkers.
“Fifty percent to 75 percent of all fires put out by the San Francisco and Los Angeles fire departments are in homeless encampments. My own research, and the research of others, shows that most of these are arson fires, people just getting back at each other.”

And how did the city’s mayor, London Breed, respond to the closing of the flagship store of Whole Foods Market? With a public statement that was pure boilerplate:
“Public safety is Mayor Breed’s top priority and vital to the City’s work around restoring our economy and making our residents and workers feel safe.
“We will continue to engage with them about the future use of the site. The Police will continue aggressively enforcing against open-air drug dealing, maximizing police response to urgent calls for assistance, partnering with retailers to address theft in their stores, and enforcing new street vending regulations to disrupt the sale of stolen goods.”
Nowhere in that statement is there any mention that from 2020 to July, 2022, San Francisco had a District Attorney—Chesa Boudin—who saw criminals as victims and sought any reason to excuse them for their crimes.
Nor is there any mention that the current D.A.—Brooke Jenkins—remains stymied by the realities that, under California law:
- Theft under $950 is considered a misdemeanor.
- As a result, many prosecutors prefer to free those charged rather than holding them in jail.
- The maximum sentence offenders can get is six months.
- This has led to massive shoplifting sprees at drugstores and merchandise discount stores like Target.
Also left unsaid:
- Firefighters, police officers and schoolteachers are unable to afford the extortionate rents charged by San Francisco landlords.
- But city officials have thrown out the welcome mat for DDMBs—Druggies, Drunks, Mentals and Bums.
- Many DDMBs refuse to enter the city’s available shelters. Some claim these places are dangerous—understandably so, since they’re peopled with drug addicts, alcoholics, psychotics and outright bums.
- Another reason why many of these shelters go unused: They don’t allow their “guests” to drink up or drug up.
Not everyone who can’t find housing is a DDMB.
If you are a firefighter, police officer, paramedic or schoolteacher, and want to live in San Francisco, forget it.
According to Rent Cafe, which provides apartment listings directly from top property managers: “The average [monthly] rent for an apartment in San Francisco is $2,879.” And “the average size for a San Francisco apartment is 739 square feet.”
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on February 24, 2025 at 12:05 am
On June 28, 2024, the Supreme Court, in City of Grants Pass vs. Johnson, empowered cities to enforce laws prohibiting camping and vagrancy.
Almost four years earlier, on September 28, 2018, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had issued Martin v. City of Boise. This held that “the Eighth Amendment prohibits the imposition of criminal penalties for sitting, sleeping, or lying outside on public property for homeless individuals who cannot obtain shelter.”
People could be evicted only if beds or shelter were available to those who were being evicted.
Thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling, communities nationwide can now fine, ticket or arrest those who make up the greatest part of this population–Druggies, Drunks, Mentals and Bums (DDMBs). But they aren’t forced to take any specific actions or to actively engage in criminal punishment.

United States Supreme Court
On July 25, California Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order directing state agencies on how to remove homeless encampments from public spaces.
For years, California has been plagued by thousands of tents and makeshift shelters that line freeways, clutter shopping center parking lots and fill city parks.
California has the highest number of homeless in the country—more than 181,000 people in January 2023, more than 27% of the country’s homeless population.
The governor’s order leaves it up to local mayors to remove the encampments.
“Local governments now have the tools they need to address the decades-long issue of homelessness,” declared Newsome in a statement.
“Today, we are issuing an executive order that directs state agencies & urges locals to address encampments while connecting those living in them to housing & supportive services.”
San Francisco’s Mayor and Board of Supervisors may finally be ready to do what, for years, they had refused to do: Clear the city’s streets of DDMBs.
A massive casualty of the irresponsibility of “city leaders” came on April 10, 2023: One of the largest supermarkets in downtown San Francisco—the Whole Foods Market at Eighth and Market streets—announced it would shut down at the close of business that day.
The store, operated by Amazon, had been operating slightly more than a year. It had become the repeated victim of wholesale thefts courtesy of the city’s DDMBs.

The Politically Correct name for these people is “unhoused.” The accurate name for them is summed up in a German word: “Untermenschen”—“subhumans.”
Given the Politically Correct climate of San Francisco, the closing of the Whole Foods store was almost guaranteed to happen.
At its opening, on March 10, 2022, the store operated from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. By October, it opened at 9 a.m. and closed at 7 p.m.
“It’s to better serve our customers, and it’s more or less because of the area and security issues,” said the store’s manager. “There’s just high theft and people being hostile.”
In November, the store enforced new rules for customers after syringes and crack pipes were found in the restroom. The bathroom was now open only to customers who showed security guards a receipt. Customers were then given a QR code for entry.
It was no coincidence that the bathrooms were often used by drug-abusers—the store was close to the Tenderloin Center, a safe drug-use site.

Crack cocaine
Argv0, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikipedia Commons
Another reason for the change in bathroom policy: Thieves would fill up suitcases with merchandise before going into the restroom.
And who is ultimately responsible for such outrages?
San Francisco’s topmost officials—the Mayor, Board of Supervisors, District Attorney and chief of the San Francisco Police Department. Together, they have formed an “Untermenschen”-friendly alliance.
The start of the COVID-19 pandemic inflicted a massive loss in foot traffic in downtown San Francisco as employees fled high rises to work remotely from home. Many small businesses—especially restaurants—shuttered.
Compounding this disaster has been an increasing influx of hardcore alcoholics, hardcore drug addicts, psychotically mentally ill and parasitical bums. Sidewalks are littered with huge tents, used hypodermic syringes and needles, empty beer cans and wine bottles, human feces and pools of urine.
The local and national press have predicted a “Doom Loop” facing San Francisco, as the city’s tourism rate sharply declines and City Hall officials currently project a nearly $800 million deficit in San Francisco’s budget.
Tech giants such as Meta and IBM have abandoned San Francisco for events in cities such as Denver and Orlando, Florida.
In September, 2023, Silicon Valley tech giant Alphabet announced that it would move its high-profile Google Cloud Next conference to Las Vegas in 2024.
But this has not prevented city officials from calling for increased efforts to comfort those very parasites who threaten not only their own lives but those of law-abiding San Franciscans and the city’s tourism industry.
On November 3, 2021, National Public Radio’s website carried the following headline: “San Francisco’s new rapid response teams race to save lives as ODs dramatically rise.”
From the story:
“Faced with a stunning rise in drug overdose deaths the last few years, the vast majority tied to fentanyl, San Francisco has launched mobile teams made up of paramedics and nurses.
“The new Street Overdose Response Teams (SORT), a collaboration between the city’s health and fire departments, aim to deliver a broad range of support and care directly following an overdose.”
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HOW TRUMP WON IN 2024: WHAT DIDN’T HAPPEN–PART TWO (OF FOUR)
In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on March 18, 2025 at 12:05 amThere were numerous instances where intervention by Federal legislators or law enforcement authorities could have utterly changed the outcome of the 2024 Presidential election.
Case #5: Even after Donald Trump left office, the Justice Department treated him with a deference not shown any other criminal defendant.
He was allowed, for example, to hurl insults and threats at Special Counsel Jack Smith and even Smith’s family.
One such post, published on Trump’s website, Truth Social, went: “Deranged Jack Smith, who is a sick puppet for A.G. Garland & Crooked Joe Biden, should be DEFUNDED & put out to rest. Republicans must get tough or the Dems will steal another Election. MAGA!”
By “A.G. Garland” Trump meant Attorney General Merrick Garland. By “put out to rest,” he meant that his followers should assassinate Smith.
Not even Mafia bosses like Charles “Lucky” Luciano and Albert “The Executioner” Anastasia dared issue such a threat.
Jack Smith
By contrast: Jimmy Hoffa was president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. But that didn’t prevent Robert F. Kennedy’s Justice Department from indicting him for jury tampering—and convicting him on March 4, 1964. He was sentenced to eight years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
No one in the Kennedy Justice Department said: “He’s the elected president of the Teamsters Union—so we can’t touch him.” Yet that is precisely how the Biden Justice Department repeatedly acted—simply because, in 2016, he won a Presidential election.
Case #6: Throughout his struggles to stay out of prison, Trump was aided by the unrelenting support of the Republican party.
Republicans loudly and repeatedly claimed that Donald Trump was the legitimate winner of the 2020 Presidential election—despite overwhelming evidence that he wasn’t.
They also claimed that, by appointing Special Counsel Jack Smith to investigate Trump, the Democrats had weaponized Federal law enforcement.
They also fully supported Trump’s demand for the release of those who attacked the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021.
For example: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has depicted these coup supporters as persecuted martyrs.
On March 24, 2022, members of the Republicans’ House Oversight Committee toured a Washington, D.C. jail where some of these defendants were held. “Their due process rights are being violated. And they have been mistreated and treated as political prisoners,” Greene told reporters after the tour.
Adolf Hitler similarly portrayed as martyrs the Nazis who tried to violently overthrow the government of Bavaria on November 9, 1923.
A March 2, 2020 Washington Monthly story concluded ominously: “U.S. democracy wasn’t set up to deal with a president openly behaving like a James Bond villain while being protected by a political party behaving more like a mafia than a civic institution.”
Case #7: While Congressional Republicans have relentlessly investigated President Joe Biden and his family, Democrats have refused to similarly investigate Trump’s family.
The United States House Oversight Committee opened its investigation into the Biden family on January 11, 2023. The investigation included the foreign business activities of Biden’s son, Hunter, and brother, James.
By November 2023, the investigation had not found any evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden.
Democrats, by contrast, have not probed why Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and former White House adviser, received $2 billion from Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The money came to Kushner’s private equity firm after Kushner left the White House in 2021.
Jared Kushner
Salman has been implicated by U.S. Intelligence reports in the 2018 torture and dismemberment of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. When asked if he believed the reports, Kushner said: “Are we really still doing this?”
Democrats have also refused to investigate the Trump administration’s illegally seizing vitally-needed medical supplies in at least seven states during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) did not publicly report the thefts, despite the outlay of millions of dollars of taxpayer money. Nor did the administration explain how it decided which supplies to seize and where to reroute them.
The Federal Government did not inform states whose supplies it seized if they would receive the materials they ordered and paid for.
Case #8: On July 13, 2024, Trump was allegedly wounded in his right ear by a gunman while speaking at an open-air Presidential campaign rally near Butler, Pennsylvania.
The would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, fired eight rounds from an AR-15 style rifle from the roof of a nearby building. Trump dived for cover behind his lectern, as the shooter killed one audience member and critically injured two others.
Crooks was shot and killed seconds later by the Secret Service’s Counter Sniper Team.
Had Trump not slightly turned his head at the moment Crooks fired, Republicans would have been forced to choose another nominee.
In addition, Trump would not have been alive to win the 2024 Presidential election and openly threaten to imprison the Justice Department prosecutors who sought to hold him accountable for his litany of crimes.
The assassination attempt calls to mind that by Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg on July 20, 1944, to kill Adolf Hitler with a briefcase bomb. Had he succeeded, the war in Europe would no doubt have ended far earlier, with countless lives being saved.
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