Will he or won't he testify? Don't assume he won't.

Will he or won't he testify? Don't assume he won't.

By Hal Brown

As far as I can tell this (in my bold) is the common if not universal opinion being expressed in the media about the prospect of Donald Trump not complying with the Jan. 6 Committee subpoena and testifying:

The subpoena is not about getting former President Donald Trump to testify -- which almost certainly won't happen with 10 weeks or so left in this Congress and, in all likelihood, in the existence of the House Jan. 6 committee that voted on Thursday to issue it. (From ABC News)

Updated below as news on this story breaks: 

Maggie Haberman of The New York Times reported, "Since it became public that the House select committee planned to subpoena Trump for his testimony, the former president has been telling aides he favors doing so, so long as he gets to do so live, according to a person familiar with his discussions."

"However, it is unclear whether the committee would accept such a demand," Haberman noted.

This doesn't surprise me. He thinks by going live without a prior deposition he will be pitching a curveball to the committee, and the narcissistic part of his malignant narcissism thinks he will be able to outwit members of the J6 Committee.

He thinks he can showboat his way through a hearing and desperately wants a nationally televised megaphone. He knows that there are no scheduled further hearing but is well aware that if the committee agrees to having him testify they will schedule another one. He knows it will have a huge audience. Look for it being televised in prime time.

In his delusional grandiosity he doesn't think the committee will be prepared for him or will cower in his presence.

He is so very wrong.

He will be walking into a perjury trap if he lies, and if he takes the Fifth he will be announcing his guilt. If he tries this the committee should make him recite the Fifth in its entirety each time - not to tersely mutter "the Fifth" as others have done. Veiwers need to be reminded of this part: "I refuse to answer questions or provide information that might incriminate me."

So I say to Trump, bring it on.

Friday 5:00 AM PST

Trump Reportedly Has One Big Condition for Jan. 6 Committee Testimony - Daily Beast

After the Jan. 6 committee unanimously voted in favor of subpoenaing former President Donald Trump, he’s been telling those in his orbit he’s not opposed to the idea. “The former president has been telling aides he favors doing so, so long as he gets to do so live, according to a person familiar with his discussions,” The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman reported on Thursday evening. “However, it is unclear whether the committee would accept such a demand.” Not everyone in Trump’s circle is convinced that him testifying would be a wise idea, however. “He should not,” a Trump adviser who speaks regularly with the former president told The Daily Beast on Thursday evening. A Trump spokesperson didn’t immediately return The Daily Beast’s request for comment. Taking to Truth Social, Trump said he will share his response to the subpoena Friday morning, while claiming the committee is “a giant scam, presided over by a group of Radical Left losers, and two failed Republicans.”

Trump posted this yesterday so the sis the morning Trump promised to respond to the subpoena. It's 5:08 here in Portland, Oregon, so it if Trump is true to his word here his decision should have been posted eight minutes ago... I'll post it when I find it.

This is now on Truth Social:

It links to this FoxNews story:

Excerpt below shows a major fly in the ointment also in the subtitle above and the idea that the one person who could have easily assured that the National Guard was expeditiously dispatched to the Capitol was Trump himself.

EXCLUSIVE: Former President Donald Trump "loves the idea of testifying" before the House select committee investigating January 6th, a source close to Trump told Fox News Digital just after the panel unanimously voted to subpoena him.

The source said that if Trump complied with the subpoena and testified, he would "talk about how corrupt the election was, how corrupt the committee was, and how Nancy Pelosi did not call up the National Guard that Trump strongly recommended for her to do three days earlier on January 3, 2021."

Videos taken by Nancy Pelosi's daughter Alexandra, a documentarian covering the Capitol proceedings on Jan. 6th, were shown for the first time in yesterday's hearing show Pelosi and Senator Schumer trying desperately to arrange for the National Guard to basically saved members of Congress from the mob and allow the certification to continue.

Watch video:

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.

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