Mark Penn, like his Third Way/No Labels wife, Nancy Jacobson, is a flat-out lowlife, one of American politics most vile grifters. I don’t give any credence to the HarrisX polling firm he chairs and almost never mention their bullshit. The firm did a poll for Utah’s Deseret News though and the conclusions are pretty funny and worth looking at despite the source. Señor T, probably the most profane person in politics, is considered to be a person of faith— even more so than religionists like Mike Pence and Mitt Romney— by 64% of the members of the party of abysmally low IQs. What is wrong with these people?
If you ask anyone who’s ever been involved with Trump, they might point out the only thing about him and faith is that he has faith in his ability to scam the world. Ask Chris Christie; for all his faults, he knows— and he knows first hand. It’s not a stretch to predict that Christie might not endorse Trump this cycle, not that it really matters much, especially since this ad below indicates he’s not going to endorse Joe Biden either, which would be the only thing Christie could do to make up for having enabled Trump in 2016. But Christie is, first and foremost, a conservative Republican, not a patriotic American. He knows what Trump is and he still won’t do anything to stop him from slithering back into the White House.
In a NY Times piece yesterday, Jonathan Swan, Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman reported on how Trump has used fear and favor to win endorsements from Republican office holders. Even the ones who wish he would choke on a pretzel and die and even the ones who know what a disaster he would be for America if he gets back into the White House, are endorsing him. My favorite story in their piece was Trump muttering disdainfully about crooked GOP whip Tom Emmer (R-MN): “They always bend the knee.” Emmer is in an especially vulnerable position. He was one of the top FTX bribe takers and if anyone at DoJ ever decides to take the Bankman Fried bribery scandal seriously, Emmer would be one of the first to go to prison… unless he had a presidential pardon.
“Trump,” they wrote, “has almost entirely subjugated the elected class of the Republican Party. As of this week, every member of the House Republican leadership is formally backing his campaign to recapture the White House. Trump has obsessed over his scorecard of endorsers… He sees gathering the formal endorsements as a public validation of his triumphant return that serves his strategy of portraying himself as the inevitable victor. He calls endorsements the ‘E word’; when lawmakers merely say they ‘support’ him, he considers it insufficient and calls that the ’S word.’ In recent weeks, his allies have told lawmakers that Trump will be closely watching who has and hasn’t endorsed him before the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 15.”
Trump works his endorsements through both fear and favor, happily cajoling fellow politicians by phone while firing off ominous social media posts about those who don’t fall in line quickly enough. In October, he felled a top candidate for House speaker, Representative Tom Emmer, by posting that voting for him “would be a tragic mistake!” On Wednesday, Emmer capitulated and endorsed him.
…Trump is privately ranting about and workshopping nicknames for other holdouts, like Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.
“Ted— he shouldn’t even exist,” Trump said recently of Cruz, a 2016 rival, according to a person who heard the remarks and recounted them soon after. “I could’ve destroyed him. I kind of did destroy him in 2016, if you think about it. But then I let him live.”
Aided by a disciplined and methodical political operation and by the rallying effect that his criminal charges have had on Republicans, Trump has demonstrated a remarkable show of force for a former president whose impeachment on the way out of office was supported by more members of his own party than any previous impeachment in American history. And he has done this while facing 91 felony charges across four criminal cases.
…Early in his post-presidential life, Trump weaponized the power of his endorsement to an extent that no predecessor had ever attempted.
He made it known he was eager to intervene in Republican primaries. Given his cult following among GOP voters, his endorsement, at times, packed the power to end a race.
Entire primary campaigns were organized around winning his endorsement. Trump insiders were hired by candidates as “consultants” for the sole purpose of saying nice things about them to Trump in the hope he might endorse them. Trump received these candidates at his homes in Florida and New Jersey and watched gleefully as they, in Trump’s own words to aides, “kissed my ass.”
In 2021, Trump endorsed dozens of candidates at every level. No chit was too small to collect, as when he endorsed Vito Fossella for borough president in Staten Island, N.Y. In the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections, Trump accelerated his efforts, ultimately endorsing more than 200 candidates.
Nowhere was his power more evident than in the Ohio and Pennsylvania Senate primaries. Trump endorsed J.D. Vance in Ohio and Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, taking two candidates not expected to win and ensuring their nominations. Oz lost in November, showing the limits of Trump’s sway in general elections. Vance became one of the first senators to endorse Trump and has been lobbying colleagues to do the same.
Republicans facing primaries saw that Trump could destroy their political careers. Then there were the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in 2021. He sought revenge in 2022, and only two of the 10 are still in Congress.
Will any of them ever pay a price? Example: Trump took at least $7.8 million in foreign bribes (mostly from China and the Saudis) while he was in the White House— probably many times more that. Will his enablers ever be held accountable? It appears that Jack Smith has evidence that Trump accepted bribes, ordered an FBI director to fake evidence against a political foe, ordered the military to murder critics & that he sold nuclear secrets to a foreign enemy. Will that kind of stuff ever rebound of Trump asslickers like Lindsey Graham, Marjorie Traitor Greene, Matt Gaetz, MAGA Mike, JD Vance or aNy of the rest of them? I doubt it.
Luke Broadwater reported that “The transactions, detailed in a 156-page report called ‘White House For Sale’ that was produced by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, offer concrete evidence that the former president engaged in the kind of conduct that House Republicans have labored, so far unsuccessfully, to prove that President Biden did as they work to build an impeachment case against him. Using documents produced through a court fight, the report describes how foreign governments and their controlled entities, including a top U.S. adversary, interacted with Trump businesses while he was president. They paid millions to the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.; Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas; Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York; and Trump World Tower at 845 United Nations Plaza in New York. The Constitution prohibits federal officeholders from accepting money, payments or gifts ‘of any kind whatever’ from foreign governments and monarchs unless they obtain ‘the consent of the Congress’ to do so. The report notes that Trump never went to Congress to seek consent.”
“By elevating his personal financial interests and the policy priorities of corrupt foreign powers over the American public interest, former President Trump violated both the clear commands of the Constitution and the careful precedent set and observed by every previous commander in chief,” Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, wrote in a foreword to the report.
Among the countries patronizing Trump’s properties, China made the largest total payment— $5.5 million— to his business interests, the report found. Those payments included millions of dollars from China’s Embassy in the United States, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and the Hainan Airlines Holding Company.
Saudi Arabia was the second-largest spender, shelling out more than $615,000 at the Trump World Tower and Trump International Hotel.
…[The report] noted that Trump sometimes bragged about the wealth that foreign governments had provided him, including at a campaign rally in 2015, when he suggested that his personal financial incentives might influence his dealings with another government.
“Saudi Arabia, I get along great with all of them,” the report quotes him saying. “They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much!”
The report urges Congress to consider adopting new disclosure rules to help the legislative branch obtain information for proper oversight. It also recommends a more formal procedure for presidents and other officials to seek Congress’s permission when they receive and want to retain wealth from other countries.
What would you like to see done with these people in the short clip? Insane asylums? Prisons? Something more permanent? Remember, tens of millions of our fellow Americans actually think they speak for some version of a great, white, bearded God in the sky.