Oh poor Donald, turn that frown upside-down

Oh poor Donald, turn that frown upside-down

By Hal Brown

If it's really getting through to Donald Trump that the predictions coming from the likes of George Conway that he could actually end up in prison then the photo (below) used for the article in RAWSTORY about what Conway said on "Morning Joe" earlier today would be appropriate. 

While I can't manage to muster any empathy for the malignant narcissist, sadist, and bully who has proved willing to do anything to maintain his dictatorial power, perhaps I can at least eke out a smidgen of sympathy for the poor man. Hmmm... is there anything smaller than a smidgen? 

I want Trump to suffer the pangs of anxiety over the legal peril he is in,  but if he had a fleeting moment of angst and if, an if as big as the planet Jupiter, I wanted to cheer him up I'd have to reenforce his delusion of being invulnerable. In that remote or remotest possibility I'd tell him to turn his frown upside-down.

Here's the Rawstory article about what Conway said with my illustrative magic added.

Conway told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that although Trump's inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection was probably the most serious crime Trump has committed it would be a difficult case to prove. He said that the easiest case to prove was his likely violation of the Espionage Act. Conway said:

"That to me is the shortest distance between Donald Trump and an orange jumpsuit is that case. It's so simple. It's like the U.S. attorney trying to bring a big mob case against the Five Families and trying to connect it up to the boss and all of a sudden they get the call from the NYPD saying, hey, the big boss is loading jewelry on a truck at Kennedy Airport, and you know, that's what happened here."

"He's caught red-handed. Basically what he's done, refusing to give the documents back upon request is sufficient under the Espionage Act, and he's done that, and then you have the aggravating facts about how the volume of documents and the lying and how long it's dragged on. I don't know how they don't bring the case."

George Conway has been a thorn in Trump's side as his profile has increased as much as his girth since he became a Trump turncoat. He's penned OpEds and has been a frequent guest on MSNBC.

I can't find any recent articles about whether Trump still watches Morning Joe, however in 2017 it was clear that he did. This is from:

Trump Tweets Disgustingly Sexist Attack Against 'Morning Joe' Host

The president said Mika Brzezinski "was bleeding badly from a face-lift."

President Donald Trump attacked Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski Thursday morning, insulting Brzezinski’s physical appearance in two unmistakably sexist tweets.

I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don't watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 29, 2017

...to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year's Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 29, 2017

Brzezinski appeared to respond to the president’s tweets with an image of a Cheerios box that says “Made For Little Hands.”

My sense is that while Trump, the inveterate television watcher, luxuriates in being praised on Fox News shows even he may not be able to resist checking in with "Morning Joe" to see what his nemeses are saying about him. 

He knows that if he blasts out a Truth Social post about anything said about him on "Morning Joe" or any other MSNBC show, he'll only give them publicity so I think he'll be able to restrain his impulses since there isn't a damn thing he can do to shut them up.suits as his 

Trump may avoid the wardrobe change into an orange jumpsuit, but if he's paying attention to what's happening in New York he may have to think twice about buying expensive new suits when can't squeeze into a girdle anymore:

Illustration by Wren McDonald for The New Yorker

New York AG asks judge to bar Trump from moving assets to new company he formed amid fraud lawsuit 

and

If Elon Muck buys Twitter, what with it's much larger audience than Truth Social has, I expect we'll see more impulsive tweets especially in the early morning when Trump may be groggy and not be able to sensibly resist engaging in a Twitter war with Joe and Mika. Assuming Trump come back to Twitter this will be fun to follow. 

Here's a comment on this story from Ben Kalom:

Most of us would not wish him the Demolition Man one-liner I often quote to folks in jest, "Be Well, John Spartan!"

"I want Trump to suffer the pangs of anxiety over the legal peril he is in, ..."

Naw. a snarky "Naw!" I want his frown to become a perma-frown, like permafrost. I want his risorius muscles to atrophy to the point he cannot chew food properly, and a bolus migrates across the epiglottus into his cephalic tracheal opening and permanently obstructs it.

I want more than the pangs of anxiety.

I literally want the Big Mac attack to attack him.

I want his "Glorious, magnificent, stupendous, spektak-a-lur" bulls**t to end as a one liner obit, "Choked on a fried chicken bone..."

The only way this cult of personality ends is ...

The people need their human sacrifice. They need their blood lust sated.

Find him a bunker, let him join his "hero" Adolph in ending this sickness...

Then, maybe, just maybe, we can all recover... just a little bit... before we have to deal with the next anointed one...

The Conway interview has already made it into this Salon article:

While some legal experts believe that there is evidence to charge Trump with obstruction, conservative attorney George Conway predicted that the "shortest distance between Donald Trump and an orange jumpsuit" is a case showing that he violated the Espionage Act.

 "He's caught red-handed," Conway told MSNBC. "Basically what he's done, refusing to give the documents back upon request is sufficient under the Espionage Act, and he's done that, and then you have the aggravating facts about how the volume of documents and the lying and how long it's dragged on. I don't know how they don't bring the case."

Viral video showed organizers cutting open the fish to reveal a total of 10 weights, each weighing either 8 or 12 ounces.

As Fisher yelled, "We got weights in fish!" the angry crowd booed the men, who were immediately disqualified.

On Tuesday, authorities seized a boat and trailer belonging to Comisnky that was used during the tournament.

If convicted, the pair could face a year in prison and a $2,500 fine on each of the felony counts.

The men are not expected to be arraigned until later this month, and it was not immediately clear whether they had retained an attorney.

 

Moment of Zen (click to enlarge):

Some thoughts about Putin's Russia and Trump's MAGAmerica

Some thoughts about Putin's Russia and Trump's MAGAmerica

by Hal Brown 

I used for a background this natural-color image which combines cloud-free data from over 500 Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) orbits with shaded relief Digital Terrain Elevation models from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) and other sources. It shows an astonishing diversity of geological features, ecological systems and human landscapes. I meant it to show how from space there are no state lines.

I'll start with the comment I put on the following David Ignatious column in today's Washington Post (subscription):

The parallels between Russia under Putin and what the of MAGA part United States has become struck me. Even if Trump never gets a second term his MAGA cult will remain with us. They envision a United States chillingly similar to those who want Russia to be an imperial fascist country. The equation to describe these segments of the two countries looks like Russian First = America First. The remedy is the kind of transformation that occurred in Germany after World War II.  I don't know how this can happen without the resounding military defeat the NAZI regime suffered. It will require not only a victory of morality over immorality for both countries, but a moral awakening among a large portion of those who adhered to the belief that ultra-nationalism was their credo.

These are what I thought were the most important observations in the column. As you read them substitute how the Ukrainians view Russia with how you view MAGAmerica and how you think these MAGA cultists want the United States to be.

Through Ukrainian eyes, this terrible conflict has become a clash of civilizations. They argue that most Russians support Putin’s brutal war in the way that most Germans supported Adolf Hitler. Unless Russia as a nation abandons the imperial dreams that Putin has evoked, the conflict cannot be resolved through negotiations.

“Russia has to go through the same process that Germany did after World War II,” presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak insisted Saturday in an interview with me and the other members of a group organized by the German Marshall Fund, of which I’m a trustee. “If Russian society doesn’t understand what they’ve done, the world will be brought into chaos.” He enthusiastically predicts that postwar Russia will dissolve into five or six smaller nations.

The word "rebirth" below jumped out at me:

For me, thinking about how this war ends juxtaposes two conflicting lessons of the 20th century. Historians generally agree that the punitive peace imposed on Germany after World War I helped bring on the vicious Nazi quest for revenge. But historians also agree that the decisive outcome of World War II, with Germany and Japan pounded into unconditional surrender, allowed the miraculous postwar rebirth of both countries.

I would rephrase the last paragraph...

Surely, this is a war worth winning. I don’t want to see Russia destroyed, and I think any argument that it is forever an alien civilization is wrong. But the ideology that Putin represents, and that many Russians embrace, must be defeated.

 ... in this way:

Surely, the war against MAGAmerica a war that Democracy loving Americans must win. MAGAmerica can't be literally destroyed the way NAZI Germany as a military machine was. MAGAmerica is currently a country within a country. I think any argument that it is forever an alien civilization is wrong.  But the ideology that Trump and his cult represents, and that many Americans embrace, must be defeated. Those who "reside" in MAGAmerica can't be exiled. They have to be rehabilitated.

This will be a long arduous process which would ideally follow the kind of Democratic Party win in November which Michael Moore predicted (and I wrote about here). 

It would be too much to hope that Rupert Murdock fired his Hitler-Mini-Me money makers, in particular Tucker Carlson. It would certainly help if these ultra-nationalists didn't have a major television platform. 

Obviously it would help the most if Donald Trump, probably reinstated on Twitter, would at least develop severe chronic laryngitis.

We can't be naive. If Trump was indicted, tried, and found guilty of any crimes, and even sentenced to prison or home confinement this would have a huge backlash as his cult would believe he was a victim of the "deep state" and would make him into a living martyr. 

No matter what the January 6th Committee reveals, no matter whether that have incontrovertible proof as to Trump's culpability in more than inciting the attack on the Capitol but being part of a felonious conspiracy it won't matter to these MAGAmericans. They will take this as his being the most patriotic of all patriots.

Liberals like us see articles like this (top) and this (bottom) and hope for eye-popping revelations.

It won't matter because for the MAGAmericans "fascist" is simply a word describing the country they want to live in and the promotion of violence is laudable as long as it is their violence.

We see articles like “Utterly devastating”: Legal experts say DOJ filing “pulverizes all of Trump’s arguments” to SCOTUS on Salon but while this news pleases us, it hardly matters because show me a resident of MAGAmerica who reads Salon or even follows news about the legal peril Trump is in and I'll show you a  Where's Waldo where some prankster decided not to put Waldo in the picture.

By chance as I completed this David Ignatius was being interviewed about this column on Morning Joe. There's a good chance that if you are reading this you are a regular viewer of MSNBC and you may even read their website but we can't delude ourselves that any warnings about what Donald Trump's American fascism would look like in reality are even heard by residents of MAGAmerica. I summarized the David Montgomery Washington Post Magazine article "What Will Happen to America if Trump Wins Again? Experts Helped Us Game It Out" here. 

What is horrifying is that diehard MAGAmericans want the country to look like this.

Main blog page

The blog archives are on the right at the top of the page. Here are the last three editions:

• The horror of a second Trump presidency
• Could Michael Moore be right again? Is he Carnac t...
• What does it mean when a former federal prosecutor...

The horror of a second Trump presidency

A Washington Post Magazine article excerpted by Hal Brown

If you don't subscribe to the WaPo here are the bullet points from this article:

What Will Happen to America if Trump Wins Again? Experts Helped Us Game It Out.

The scenarios are ... grim.

By David Montgomery (scroll down to see author's profile)

October 10, 2022 at 10:00 a.m. 

From the article:

To help game out the consequences of another Trump administration, I turned to 21 experts in the presidency, political science, public administration, the military, intelligence, foreign affairs, economics and civil rights. They sketched chillingly plausible chains of potential actions and reactions that could unravel the nation (if Trump is reelected).

Based on what these experts described, here are the three phases described in the article:

Phase 1: Trump seizes control of the government

… He installs super loyalists.

... He governs without Senate advice and consent.

... He creates a MAGA civil service.

Phase 2: Trump deploys the military aggressively at home, while retreating abroad.

... He uses the military to promote his own political power.

In such a scenario, the response of other elements of the federal government and federal law enforcement could be unpredictable. “What that order does is that it fractures the American federal government, because you give an order like that to fire on American civilians and then maybe some agencies will pick it up and some won’t,” says Timothy Snyder, a historian at Yale University who writes about freedom and tyranny. “There’s a very real possibility that giving an order like that leads not to protest being put down, but it leads to some Americans in uniform firing on other Americans in uniform, with the people on both sides being convinced that they are doing the lawful and correct thing.

... American global leadership is finished — much to Putin’s delight.

... Intelligence work is harmed.

Phase 3: Political violence and democratic collapse? It’s possible.

... Ideological, racial and ethnic tensions ramp up.

... The bonds that bind the Union loosen.

... The chances of civil war increase.

That’s when the potential for violent conflict is real. For those studying the implications of these trends, “there’s no scenario that worries us more than that the wheels just come off completely from the restraints against violence in the United States,” says Diamond, of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute. “My biggest concern is what citizens would do to citizens, and what citizens might do to legitimately constituted government authority.”

... 

Could it happen here? Would it be that bad? The message of prophets of democratic doom can sound over-the-top — “crackpot, practically,” acknowledges Wilentz, the Princeton historian. But to dismiss it, they say, would be naive — and they urge vigilance and civic engagement to prevent the nightmare from coming true. 

The article concludes:

After four more years of nihilistic energy like that, the experience of being American could well have been transformed into something unrecognizable. “If Trump wins, I don’t imagine some kind of normal inauguration in ’29,” (Timothy) Snyder says. “If we want a normal inauguration in ’29, we need one in ’25 which involves somebody else.”

Author profile, David Montgomery

Washington, D.C.

Staff writer for the Washington Post Magazine

Education: Princeton University; University of Michigan

David Montgomery was a reporter at the Buffalo News before joining The Washington Post in 1993. He covered Prince George’s County, politics in Maryland and life in D.C., then became a feature writer in the Style section. Now he writes features and profiles for the Washington Post Magazine.

Honors and Awards: 2022 Climate Narratives Prize, 2nd Place, Arizona State University, for "The Search for Environmental Hope" ; 2018 Excellence-in-Features, 2nd Place, Society for Features Journalism, for "After the Fall," the story of a Confederate statue in Demopolis, AL 

Languages spoken in addition to English: Spanish

Afterword: 

Michael Cohen isn't an expert in any of the fields that would provide the type of bonafides that the author of the Post article sought to ask their predictions about the consequences of another Trump presidency. However, he is the only one who knew Trump up close and personal, who was very familiar with his modus operandi and, significantly, helped him implement his nefarious schemes. With this in mind it is worthwhile to consider what he predicts in this article: 

Keep up with news of interest to progressives as it breaks with coverage from all over the Internet on RawStory

They also cross-publish with Salon, and summarize article published on websites which you need to subscribe to in order toe read them, The New York Times and Washington Post for example. They have an active c0mment section.