Category: Donald Trump

Tuesday Speech YUGE Win for Trump; Democrats Self-Destruct on Live TV

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Probably I need to go ahead and write that column I’ve been kicking around in my head for the past couple of weeks, based on Sidney Blumenthal’s idea of The Permanent Campaign, but not right now.

There will be time enough later for deep-dive analysis of how the Democrats have lost their way, but at the present moment what matters more is what an absolute triumph Donald Trump’s Tuesday night speech was. The “instant” polls by both CNN and CBS News showed overwhelming approval by those who watched it, and while we may discount those numbers somewhat — after all, Trump supporters were more likely than Trump haters to be watching his speech — it’s still a clear win. We’re only 43 days into Trump’s second term, and we don’t know what the future holds, but there can be no denying that he now has strong momentum, and the Democrats don’t know how to cope.

“This is an indictment, in my opinion, on the Democratic leadership,” Symone Sanders said on MSNBC and, do you know who Symone Sanders is? She was national press secretary for the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, then in 2020 she worked on Joe Biden’s campaign before becoming senior advisor for Kamala Harris. In other words, she’s about as hard-core Democrat as you could find and, if the Democrats have lost Symone Sanders . . . ? Dude, they are so toast.



 

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Ain’t I Done Told Y’all? Democrats Pushed Zelenskyy to Sabotage White House Deal

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Note the time and date on that, please — shortly after 5 p.m. ET on Friday, I shared my suspicion that the real reason why that White House meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy turned into a s***show was that Zelenskyy had been encouraged by Democrats to “pull that stunt,” and now my hunch has been validated:

Before meeting Trump, Zelensky met with anti-Trump Democrats who advised him to reject the terms of the mineral deal the president was offering, according to Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.).
“Just finished a meeting with President Zelensky here in Washington. He confirmed that the Ukrainian people will not support a fake peace agreement where Putin gets everything he wants and there are no security arrangements for Ukraine,” Murphy’s office posted on X at 11:15 a.m. Friday.
He attached a picture of Zelensky at a conference table, with Murphy seated on the opposite side.
Forty minutes later, Zelensky arrived at the White House, where Trump met his car, smiled, shook his hand and walked him into the Oval Office.
The meeting, as the world now knows, quickly went off the rails and ended with Trump angrily ejecting the arrogant ingrate from the White House.
The earlier meeting with Dems undercuts wild claims that Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance staged an ambush. In fact, it was Zelensky who came with an ulterior motive.
The purpose of the meeting was to sign the mineral agreement he and Trump representatives had negotiated. He had twice refused to sign it after promising to, and thanks to Murphy, we now know he had no intention of signing it Friday.

An old saying, often cited by Hillary Clinton: “If you see a turtle on top of a fence post, the one thing you know is, it didn’t crawl up there by itself.” This meeting with Zelenskyy turning into a catastrophe was not a coincidence, you see. The whole thing was a setup by Democrats. In his column Michael Goodwin of the New York Post points out that this mineral deal — the whole purpose of the White House meeting was for Zelenskyy to sign the treaty — was something that Zelenskyy himself had suggested, and it was also Zelenskyy who insisted on a White House setting for the occasion. Democrats were behind the whole thing, see?

Well, let them own the consequences now. Also let me say this clearly: Fuck Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the horse he rode in on.



 

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Zelenskyy Self-Destructed, So Why Are Media Acting Like Trump Is to Blame?

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The deal was all settled. On Thursday, the basic terms of a mineral-rights treaty had been agreed upon, and Friday’s Oval Office meeting was supposed to be a formality — a handshake, a meet-and-greet with the media. For some reason, however, Volodymyr Zelenskyy decided he should start an argument in front of the cameras. It has been pointed out that the meeting ran for about 50 minutes, and was uneventful until about the last 10 minutes. The fireworks started after Vice President J.D. Vance pointed out the difference between Biden and Trump:

Vance: “For four years, the United States of America, we had a president who stood up at press conferences and talked tough about Vladimir Putin, and then Putin invaded Ukraine and destroyed a significant chunk of the country. The path to peace and the path to prosperity is, maybe, engaging in diplomacy. We tried the pathway of Joe Biden, of thumping our chest and pretending that the president of the United States’ words mattered more than the president of the United States’ actions. What makes America a good country is America engaging in diplomacy. That’s what President Trump is doing.”
Zelenskyy: “Can I ask you?”
Vance: “Sure. Yeah.”
Zelenskyy: “OK. So he (Putin) occupied it, our parts, big parts of Ukraine, parts of east and Crimea. So he occupied it in 2014. So during a lot of years — I’m not speaking about just Biden, but those times was (Barack) Obama, then President Obama, then President Trump, then President Biden, now President Trump. And God bless, now, President Trump will stop him. But during 2014, nobody stopped him. He just occupied and took. He killed people. You know what the –”
Trump: “2015?”
Zelenskyy: “2014.”
Trump: “Oh, 2014? I was not here.”

What the hell is going on here? Why has Zelenskyy decided that now is a good time to deliver this history lecture? The word “impertinent” comes to mind. He is talking out of turn, presuming that his hosts are ignorant.

In fact, Zelenskyy’s interruption — his little lecture about Putin seizing Crimea in 2014 — merely serves to illustrate Vance’s point about the failure of “the pathway of Joe Biden.” When Putin grabbed Crimea, there was a lot of tough talk from Obama and Biden, but they weren’t actually willing to risk anything over it. So when Biden returns to the White House in 2021, and then makes a catastrophic error in Afghanistan, it’s a signal of weakness that encourages Putin to invade the rest of Ukraine.

What has happened since then is that the United States has poured more than $180 billion — that’s BILLION, with a “B” — into Ukraine, and the strategic situation after three years is basically a stalemale. How many more hundreds of billions of dollars does Zelenskyy expect us to spend to keep this going? If we’re already spending a billion dollars a week just to maintain a bloody stalemate, is there any estimate of what an actual Ukrainian victory might cost? Like, if we spent twice as much money for six months, would that be sufficient to enable Ukraine to drive the Russians back across the border? Or is it the case that, however much money we give Zelenskyy, it will never be enough for Ukraine to win?

Zelenskyy seems to believe that he is entitled to more than he’s already gotten, without regard to the actual military results and with no feasible prospect of a better result in the near future. But y’all didn’t come here for a geopolitical realism lecture — readers have their own opinions about the Ukraine situation, and aren’t going to be influenced much by my ranting like this — so instead let’s get back to what happened after Zelenskyy interrupted Vance at the White House:

Zelenskyy: “Yes, but during 2014 ’til 2022, the situation is the same, that people have been dying on the contact line. Nobody stopped him. You know that we had conversations with him, a lot of conversations, my bilateral conversation. And we signed with him, me, like, you, president, in 2019, I signed with him the deal. I signed with him, (French President Emmanuel) Macron and (former German Chancellor Angela) Merkel. We signed ceasefire. Ceasefire. All of them told me that he will never go … But after that, he broke the ceasefire, he killed our people, and he didn’t exchange prisoners. We signed the exchange of prisoners. But he didn’t do it. What kind of diplomacy, JD, you are speaking about? What do you mean?”
Vance: “I’m talking about the kind of diplomacy that’s going to end the destruction of your country. Mr. President, with respect, I think it’s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office to try to litigate this in front of the American media. Right now, you guys are going around and forcing conscripts to the front lines because you have manpower problems. You should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to this conflict.”

Game. Set. Match. J.D. Vance has here summarized the essence of what’s gone wrong with Ukraine’s war effort the past couple of years — their “manpower problems.” In April 2023 (“Pentagon Leak Confirms Ukraine Suffering Shortage of Trained Manpower”) I tried to call attention to this problem, and I further pointed out in February 2024:

Even if we could give Ukraine all the weapons they need, the manpower shortage would still make it difficult, if not impossible, for them to mount an effective counter-offensive against Russia.
Merely throwing money at Ukraine’s problems won’t fix the problems. One consequence of the Russian invasion has been the discovery that the United States and its allies lack the capacity to manufacture enough artillery ammunition and other supplies in sufficient quantities quickly enough to meet an emergency demand. It doesn’t matter how many billions of dollars Congress votes to spend, we’re still not going to be able to put enough equipment into Ukraine to make complete victory over Russia a reality this year, or next year, or the year after that.

For the past year or two, some people have been living in a delusion about this situation. Ukraine’s manpower problem was apparent as early as spring 2023. One would think that the Russian invasion might have stirred such a surge of patriotism among young Ukrainians that they easily could have gotten 200,000 healthy young volunteers in the first few weeks of the war. Allow a full year for these raw recruits to get trained and equipped and organized into military units, and by spring 2023, Ukraine should have been ready to launch a major counter-offensive.

The year 2023 came and went without any such offensive, and it was not until August of this year that Ukraine made a minor incursion into Russian territory that did nothing to alter the larger strategic situation — stalemate on every front, with no end in sight. So now let’s get back to that White House transcript from Friday:

Vance: Do you disagree that you’ve had problems, bringing people into your military?”
Zelenskyy: “We have problems –”
Vance: “And do you think that is respectful to come to the Oval Office of the United States of America and attack the administration that is trying to prevent the destruction of your country?”

You can read the rest. My point is that it’s J.D. Vance making these arguments, not Trump, and the reason Vance went off like that is because Zelenskyy tried to use this Oval Office photo-op to embarrass the Trump administration. The way the media are spinning it, however, is that somehow Trump blew up this meeting, instead of Zelenskyy.

Much more at Instapundit, where Professor Reynolds suggests “Zelensky knew exactly what he was doing, and picked this fight on purpose,” pandering to anti-Trump sentiment in the European Union. If true, this would be the height of folly; the big problem with NATO is that Our European Allies don’t really have much in the way of military power; as allies, they’re practically worthless. How many divisions of armor or paratroopers can be deployed by France, Germany, Belgium, etc.? Even if the Europeans did want to go to war (which they certainly do not), they don’t scare anybody. Let Zelenskyy go back to Brussels and bask in the admiration of the Europeans. That will do nothing to help Ukraine.



 

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Zelenskyy Gets Pimp-Slapped on Live TV by Trump in White House Meeting UPDATE: Lindsey Graham Blames Zelenskyy for ‘Complete, Utter Disaster’

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“Pimp-slapped,” metaphorically speaking, of course. This event has astonished the world. When it happened, my office TV was tuned to Fox News, but I immediately switched over to MSNBC to see how they were reacting and . . . Well, it would be wrong to say it’s driven them crazy, as they’ve been non compos mentis for years, but whatever else the MSNBC crowd was obsessed over before, they’ve suddenly forgotten it and will be 24/7 on this story until further notice. The big question, really, is why Trump decided to chew out the president of Ukraine in public.

My first thought was, well, a big slice of Trump’s hard-core supporters hate Zelenskyy and don’t like the way he’s been hailed as a latter-day Winston Churchill for the past three years. So, inasmuch as what Trump did was a performance, it would be applauded by that segment of Trump’s basis. But as I contemplated it a bit longer, it occurred to me that the intended audience might be Our European Allies — i.e., the deadbeats who haven’t been paying their share for NATO, and who think American taxpayers should have no higher priority than pouring billions of dollars into Ukraine. In this analysis, Trump slapped around Zelenskyy to send a message to the Europeans: “Free ride’s over, guys. Y’all want to save Ukraine, do it on your own dime.” But that’s just my guess.

Maybe Trump just lost his temper, but I think there must have been some kind of four-dimensional chess strategy involved, and I reckon the foreign policy specialists will figure it out evenutally. In the meantime, we can just sit back and watch liberals’ heads explode.

See, this is why we voted for Trump. Would we be getting this kind of quality entertainment from Kamala Harris? I don’t think so.

UPDATE: Thanks to Evil Blogger Lady for this:

Lindsey Graham, who is very pro-Ukraine, puts the blame for this “disaster” squarely on Zelenskyy, and says he should resign.



 

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Obama Judge Orders DOGE to Stop Telling Us Where Our Money Went

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Chuck Schumer and friends protest DOGE

Wow, what a week it’s been, huh? Elon Musk’s young wizards at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have applied their superpowers — weaponized autism — to the simple question: Exactly who has the federal government been giving our tax dollars to? The resulting revelations, especially at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), have been shocking — the biggest scandal of my lifetime, and perhaps the biggest since Teapot Dome.

USAID Plotted to Promote
Censorship Practices Worldwide
— Breitbart, February 7

USAID Funds Ended up at BLM (and
You Might Not Believe Where Else)
— PJMedia, February 7

USAID Funneled Nearly $800 Million
To ‘Gender Transformative’
Global Censorship Group
— The Federalist, February 7

USAID: $270 Million
for ‘Independent’ Journalists
— Hot Air, February 6

These headlines are just a tip of the iceberg of shady spending that the DOGE geeks have turned up in the past week, and the way they were doing it, apparently, was by doing automated searches through federal payments by the Empoloyer Identification Number (EIN) of recipient organizations. The discoveries are mind-boggling. Hello, the government was paying millions for subscriptions to Politico?

The reaction of Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) to these revelations was a simple three-step process:

  1. Deflect
  2. Distract
  3. Demonize

The deflection involved claiming that all the bizarre spending by USAID was normal and/or trivial. The distraction involved claiming that the real scandal was not the corruption uncovered by DOGE, but rather the “unfettered access” to federal data with which DOGE was making these discoveries. The demonization involved making Elon Musk a scapegoat, with the slogan “Nobody Elected Elon” being repeated by Democrats.

If you’re getting your news from any establishment media organization — CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, New York Times, Associated Press, Washington Post, etc. — you’ll find that their coverage is entirely structured around this deflect/distract/demonize narrative. They are devoting zero coverage to what it is that DOGE actually found about federal spending, except to mention “right-wing outrage” as a reaction to these revelations.

All of this distracting noise generated by Democrats and their media handmaidens was necessary to buy time for them to obtain an emergency injunction from an Obama-appointed judge in New York:

Judge Halts Access to Treasury Payment Systems by Elon Musk’s Team
A federal judge early Saturday temporarily restricted access by Elon Musk’s government efficiency program to the Treasury Department’s payment and data systems, saying there was a risk of “irreparable harm.”
The Trump administration’s new policy of allowing political appointees and “special government employees” access to these systems, which contain highly sensitive information such as bank details, heightens the risk of leaks and of the systems becoming more vulnerable than before to hacking, U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer said in an emergency order.
Judge Engelmayer ordered any such official who was granted access to the systems since Jan. 20 to “destroy any and all copies of material downloaded from the Treasury Department’s records and systems.” He also restricted the government from granting access to these categories of officials.
The defendants — President Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent — should show cause on Feb. 14 before Judge Jeannette A. Vargas, who is handling the case on a permanent basis, Judge Engelmayer said.
The order came in response to a lawsuit filed on Friday by Letitia James of New York along with 18 other Democratic state attorneys general, charging that when President Trump gave Mr. Musk the run of government computer systems, he had breached protections enshrined in the Constitution and “failed to faithfully execute the laws enacted by Congress.”
The attorneys general said the president had given “virtually unfettered access” to the federal government’s most sensitive information to young aides who work for Mr. Musk, who runs a program the administration calls the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, though it is not an actual department.
While the group was supposedly assigned to cut costs, members are “attempting to access government data to support initiatives to block federal funds from reaching certain disfavored beneficiaries,” according to the suit. Mr. Musk has publicly stated his intention to “recklessly freeze streams of federal funding without warning,” the suit said, pointing to his social media posts in recent days.

Several things to note here: Judge Engelmayer was appointed by Obama, while Judge Vargas — she who is “handling the case on a permanent basis” — was appointed by Joe Biden. And, of course, New York AG Letitia James is under investigation for colluding with the Biden administration in her witch-hunt prosecution of Trump. Of course, the basis of their lawsuit — the claim that DOGE’s investigation of federal spending, ordered by the duly-elected President, are somehow violating “protections enshrined in the Constitution” — is absurd.

You know it’s absurd, I know it’s absurd, the federal judges know it’s absurd and the “journalists” reporting this story also know it’s absurd. They don’t care. They’re at the stage of desperation — viewing Trump as an existential threat — where they don’t care about the plausibility of the claims they’re making. Evil Orange Man is trying to stop their access to taxpayer money, and this must be prevented By Any Means Necessary.

Eventually, of course, this case will make it to the Supreme Court, where the majority decision will be brief: “LOL. GFY.” What Democrats are banking on is that the appeals process will take a couple of years, and that in the meantime, Democrats will take back Congress in the 2026 midterm elections, which will have the effect of neutralizing the Trump administration. Obtaining a delay in DOGE’s operation through the judicial process is therefore quite valuable to Democrats, even if they know darned well that they will ultimately lose at the Supreme Court.

The best thing that Ordinary Americans can do is simply to start focusing on the 2026 midterms. If Democrats lose in the next midterms — when historic trends suggest they should gain seats — that would serve as the proper rebuke of their obstructionist actions. Democrats obviously learned nothing from their 2024 defeat, and so it is our to duty to teach them a lesson in 2026 that they will never forget.



 

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END OF AN ERROR: Joe Biden Leaves in Disgrace as Trump Returns Triumphant

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Mark Penn is a Democrat — he was pollster for both Clintons — so his denunciation of the last-minute pardons of Biden’s “political accomplices” carries more weight that anything a Republican might say on the subject. Biden’s tenure in the White House was corrupt from start to finish, but why bring up those 3 a.m. ballot dumps at this late date?

We have survived these four years, and now Donald Trump has been sworn in as president again, completing the greatest comeback in American political history. Will update this post momentarily.

UPDATE: As commenters have already noted, doesn’t it feel good to say “former President Biden”? And now, a few inspiring words from our 47th president’s inaugural address:

From this day on, the United States of America will be a free, sovereign and independent nation. We will stand bravely. We will live proudly. We will dream boldly, and nothing will stand in our way because we are Americans. The future is ours and our golden age has just begun. Thank you. God bless America.

UPDATE II: Just minutes before he became former President Biden, the corrupt old fraud completed his disgrace:



 

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The Agony of #NeverTrump: His Comeback Has Destroyed Their Prestige

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If you want to see something funny — that is, assuming you have a sadistic sense of humor — you should go watch YouTube highlights of The Bulwark’s Election Night podcast, featuring Bill Kristol, Tim Miller, Sarah Longwell, Jonathan V. Last and company in a slow downhill slide from hope to despair. Perhaps never in human history has disappointment been more well deserved. You have to remember how and why the #NeverTrump Grift started to truly appreciate its squalid denouement. If you go back to early 2015, the “smart” money among conservative pundits was on either Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz as the likely Republican nominee. The neocon types like Rubio better, since he came with a Bush-connected political pedigree. There were other hopefuls — Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckbee, John Kasich, et al. — but Rubio and Cruz were seen as real contenders.

Then came the fateful day in June 2015 when Donald Trump rode down that escalator and things began to change. At first, Trump’s candidacy was viewed as a sort of joke, a publicity stunt that surely wouldn’t amount to much. Or would it? After going all-in on the 2012 campaign (“Doomed Beyond All Hope of Redemption”), I’d decided to avoid the 2016 campaign and was more or less neutral about the GOP primary. But then in September 2015, I got a call from Pete Da Tech Guy, who was covering a Trump rally in New Hampshire. “Stacy, this Trump thing is for real,” Pete told me. “You wouldn’t believe the size of this crowd.”

There was a real grassroots surge of support for Trump, and so the attitude of the Professional Conservative Pundit crowd turned from ridicule to hatred. Whereas they had originally treated Trump as a joke, now he was seen as threat. Their main point seemed to be that Trump could not possibly beat Hillary Clinton. Beyond whatever disagreements they might have had with Trump on any policy, the pundits simply could not imagine Trump winning the 2016 general election but — perhaps more to the point — his winning the GOP nomination would mean that their own favorite Republican candidates would be denied a shot at the White House. Most people can’t comprehend the selfish careerism of the Professional Conservative Pundit crowd, for whom prestige and influence are their real stock-in-trade. They climbed aboard the #NeverTrump bandwagon because it seemed like the “smart” thing to do.

After all, if Trump could not possibly beat Hillary (which was what the pundits kept telling us), then even if he did win the GOP nomination, the #NeverTrump crowd would be vindicated in November 2016, and step forward ready to assert their rightful place as the divinely ordained Intellectual Leaders of the Conservative Movement™.

They bet their bankroll against Donald Trump, and when he won in 2016 despite their opposition, they doubled-down against him. So here we are, eight years later, and now Trump is more popular than ever:

The Hill reports Trump’s rating hit 54 percent in the wake of his runaway election win, which is up from 48 percent pre-election contest, according to an Emerson College poll cited by the outlet.
Trump is viewed most favorably by men, at 61 percent, while 48 percent of women view him favorably.
Among white voters, 59 percent view him favorably, while 53 percent of Hispanics and 28 percent of Black voters view him favorability, the poll found. The Hill offered further detail:
Fifty-five percent of voters under 30 expressed a favorable view of Trump, according to the poll. He is viewed most positively among Americans in their 40s and 50s, with 60 percent viewing him favorably, while 48 percent of Americans over 70 years old view him favorably.
The poll also asked Americans if they didn’t expect the final results of the 2024 race and found that 46 percent of voters were surprised that Trump beat Vice President Harris. Among those who voted for Harris, 67 percent said they were surprised by the results, while 71 percent of Trump voters said they were not surprised.
The poll was conducted two weeks after election day, from November 20 to 22, amid the Trump transition back into the White House.
The president-elect has named most of his nominees for Cabinet posts and choices for senior staff positions, who will help carry out his agenda.

This is very good news for Trump, and for sadists who enjoy watching their enemies suffer paroxysms of agony. The #NeverTrump grifters are doubly humiliated, and are running out of chumps to swindle.



 

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Trump 2.0: ‘Siri, What Is Payback?’

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Donald Trump has apparently decided to settle all family business, and his enemies have good reason to fear his retribution. Like nearly everybody else on the planet, I was shocked by the choice of Matt Gaetz as Attorney General, which Trump ally Thomas Massie says will be done by recess appointment, bypassing the need for Senate confirmation.

All day Wednesday, my office TV was tuned to MSNBC (I watch, so you don’t have to) and they were howling over Trump’s pick of Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, which choice is perfectly defensible, given Hegseth’s combat record as an infantry officer with two bronze stars, and never mind his degrees from Princeton and Harvard. If the MSNBC talking heads were howling over Hegseth, however, their reaction to the news of Gaetz as Attorney General could best be desribed as autistic screeching, as the kids say. Their brains completely melted.

Well, first let’s get the news from Associated Press:

President-elect Donald Trump chose Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida to serve as his attorney general on Wednesday, bypassing more experienced options in favor of a loyalist who has built a national reputation as a disruptor and whom Trump has tasked with dramatically overhauling the Justice Department.
Trump also announced that he had tapped Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida as his nominee for secretary of state. And he selected Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic member of Congress and presidential candidate, to serve as his director of national intelligence.
The choices continued a pattern of Trump stocking his Cabinet with those he believes he can trust to execute his agenda rather than longtime officials with experience in their fields. Gaetz’s selection, in particular, was seen as a shock. The Florida lawmaker was not among the more established attorneys who had been mentioned as contenders for the job, and even his colleagues in Congress appeared stunned by the news. . . .
[Gaetz] irked fellow GOP members in early 2023 when he filed the resolution that successfully ousted former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. McCarthy then helped fund a primary challenge to Gaetz that included commercials alleging that he paid for sex with a 17-year-old, an allegation that had been under investigation by the House Ethics Committee — though that probe effectively ended Wednesday when Gaetz resigned from Congress. Gaetz has denied any wrongdoing and the Justice Department ended its own sex trafficking investigation without bringing charges against him.

In case you forgot, Gaetz’s friend “Joel Greenberg pleaded guilty [in 2021] to six charges, including sex trafficking of a minor, identity theft, stalking, wire fraud and conspiracy to bribe a public official, and agreed to cooperate with federal investigators as part of his plea agreement.” Gaetz’s friendship with Greenberg was the subject of all kinds of stories at the time — one might use the adjective sordid to characterize the allegations — and I have no way of knowing what was true or false in any of that. Certainly, it was damaging to Gaetz’s reputation, but he has been reelected to Congress twice since then, so at least two-thirds of voters in the 1st District of Florida didn’t mind. The AP article makes much of Gaetz’s status as a “Trump loyalist,” but it seems to me much more relevant that Gaetz has a motive for revenge against the feds, when you consider that the Justice Department sent his buddy Greenberg to prison in what may have been a prosecution whose real target was Gaetz.

Anyway, while I’m not a member of the Matt Gaetz Fan Club, his selection as Trump’s Attorney General makes sense in the context of Trump desiring to get revenge for Merrick Garland’s politically motivated targeting of Republicans. It’s not just the Mar-a-Lago raid, Fani Willis, Alvin Bragg and the other prosecutions aimed at Trump personally, but also Garland’s use of the FBI and DOJ as a weapon against Republicans quite generally. Gaetz’s job is to expose everyone responsible for those abuses, and to ensure they face some serious consequences. It’s medieval justice — the victorious army has seized the besieged fortress, and the heads of the king’s enemies are going to be hoisted on pikes.

Payback is a bitch, and Gaetz’s job is to deliver payback.



 

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