CNN has a new poll out showing that almost 70% of Republicans believe that Biden is not a legitimate president. That’s 69% up from 63% for the last year. WTF is wrong with these people??? It’s good to look at the bigger picture, however and recognize that while this does represent tens of millions of our fellow Americans, it’s far from a majority: Overall, 61% of Americans say Biden did legitimately win enough votes to win the presidency, and 38% believe that he did not. Among registered voters who say they cast a ballot for Trump in 2020, 75% say they have doubts about Biden’s legitimacy. That says more about them than it does about Trump.
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Trump indicted for efforts to overturn 2020 election “You’re too honest.” Then-President Donald Trump (the Defendant) berated Vice President Mike Pence on a January 1, 2021 phone call for resisting his plan to seek a court ruling stating that “the Vice President had the authority to reject or return votes to the states under the Constitution.” So alleges special counsel Jack Smith’s 45-page indictment (gifted article) of Trump on three conspiracy charges and one for obstruction of an official proceeding. Along with Trump the indictment references six unnamed co-conspirators. Unnamed because they have not yet been charged, several are obvious from details in the indictment, Co-Conspirators 1 through 4 being Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, and Jeffrey Clark. The Washington Post identifies appellate attorney Kenneth Chesebro as Co-Conspirator 5. The sixth is described as a “political consultant” involved in helping implement Trump’s fake electors scheme. The Smith indictment draws heavily on the work of the House January 6 Committee but includes more detail than was public previously.
The twice impeached, thrice indicted former president has been rejected by almost his entire cabinet They worked with him. They know him. They do not want him to be president ever again: Donald Trump may have put them in the most powerful and prestigious jobs many will ever hold, but few who worked in his Cabinet are rushing to endorse him in his bid to return to the White House. NBC News reached out to 44 of the dozens of people who served in Trump’s Cabinet over his term in office. Most declined to comment or ignored the requests. A total of four have said publicly they support his run for re-election. Several have been coy about where they stand, stopping short of endorsing Trump with the GOP primary race underway. Then there are those who outright oppose his bid for the GOP nomination or are adamant that they don’t want him back in power. “I have made clear that I strongly oppose Trump for the nomination and will not endorse Trump,” former Attorney General Bill Barr told NBC News.
How Fox News is taking it: Donald Trump’s third indictment this year—which charged that the former president illegally tried to overturn the 2020 election—was apparently so unremarkable to The Five co-host Greg Gutfeld that the Fox News personality couldn’t help but draw several crude doodles while the news was first announced. He instead claimed that he couldn’t “take seriously” the charges, which accuse Trump of conspiring to defraud the United States, to obstruct an official government proceeding, and to deprive people of their civil rights. Fox News reporter David Spunt, reading from the 45-page indictment, explained the charges to those on The Five. After Katie Pavlich and Jesse Watters weighed in, Dana Perino turned to Gutfeld to see if he had any thoughts on the historic news. “I don’t know. What do you think of my sketches?” replied the Gutfeld! host while showing his drawings to the camera. “Usually when I’m bored, I’ll draw men in hats.
Oh how sad… Politico reports: Michigan’s Republican party is broke. Minnesota’s was, until recently, down to $53.81 in the bank. And in Colorado, the GOP is facing eviction from its office this month because it can’t make rent. Around the nation, state Republican party apparatuses — once bastions of competency that helped produce statehouse takeovers — have become shells of their former machines amid infighting and a lack of organization. Current and former officials at the heart of the matter blame twin forces for it: The rise of insurgent pro-Donald Trump activists capturing party leadership posts, combined with the ever-rising influence of super PACs. “It shouldn’t surprise anybody that real people with real money — the big donors who have historically funded the party apparatus — don’t want to invest in these clowns who have taken over and subsumed the Republican Party,” said Jeff Timmer, the former executive director of the once-vaunted Michigan GOP and a senior adviser to the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. Among some state GOP officials, the mood is grim.
“If we get this right … a safer and more secure” world After Tuesday’s monumental third indictment of the immediate past president, perhaps a palate cleanser. Over the weekend, President Joe Biden, the president actually chosen by the America people in November 2020 visited Maine to talk about his administration’s progress on the economy. But it wasn’t his public remarks you need to read, it’s Heather Cox Richardson’s account of Biden’s remarks at a private reception in Freeport. Biden views change as a challenge, not something to run from but to embrace: Biden talked again about the world being at an inflection point, defining it as an abrupt turn off an established path that means you can never get back on the original path again. The world is changing, he said, and not because of leaders, but because of fundamental changes like global warming and artificial intelligence. “We’re seeing changes… across the world in fundamental ways.
It’s ultimately up to the American people During the 2016 presidential campaign Donald Trump repeatedly said that the electoral process was rigged. After losing the Iowa primary caucus he declared that Sen Ted Cruz had stolen it and tweeted, “based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified.” That was just the beginning. Throughout the general election campaign he refused to say if he would accept the results , even in a televised presidential debate in October. He finally told his followers that he would accept the vote count — but only if he won — and they responded with rapturous adulation. Even when he won the electoral college he refused to accept the popular vote results and formed a commission to prove that the numbers were fraudulent. (It came up empty, of course.) So, it was no surprise that he spent most of the 2020 election casting aspersions on mail-in voting and planting the suspicion that the election was going to be stolen from him. It’s not like he kept it a secret.
He seems happy. They must have had a good take last night.
Ed Kilgore thinks the exposure of Trump’s lies in a trial might just penetrate more of the public’s consciousness. I’m not too optimistic but if it’s even a possibility, it’s a good thing: When indicting a former president of the United States in the middle of his attempt to once again rule, you can’t just think about the laws, in their majestic complexity, that are being violated. Special counsel Jack Smith clearly understands the “court of public opinion” will have the final say on Donald Trump’s conduct, if only because he will pardon himself if the public disregards his malfeasance and returns him to the White House. So in the indictment he secured involving Trump’s efforts to reverse his 2020 election defeat, Smith has pulled together a vast array of evidence on an extraordinary series of events with a reasonably simple theme: Trump’s self-conscious lies about what happened in that election.
Trump’s own words are being used against him. Again. We’ve mostly forgotten about the Manhattan hush money case but it’s chugging along. Here’s the latest: The Manhattan district attorney seeking to jail Donald Trump over his hush money payment to a porn star is seeking to potentially weaponize the same piece of damning evidence that nailed the former president at his rape trial: the deposition where he said stars like him get away with sexual harassment “unfortunately—or fortunately.” It’s now up to a federal judge to decide whether those prosecutors can get a video that shows Trump at his worst: unapologetic about sexual assault, uttering misogynistic comments, and willing to lie to the American public to save his own skin. It’s a testament to the breadth of Trump’s legal problems that we’re witnessing the collision of two totally separate cases: a civil defamation case about rape and a criminal case about a cover-up. And it all comes down to a closed-door question-and-answer session Trump had on Oct. 19, 2022.