Can Trump pay his big bill?

Donald Trump doesn’t have the cash he needs to stop the state of New York from potentially seizing his assets. He’s asking the court — an institution he’s shown little but contempt for — for a bit of mercy. In a court filing, Trump’s lawyers laid out the stark economic reality facing the leading Republican candidate for president. His team spent “countless hours” negotiating with some 30 entities that could finance the roughly half-a-billion-dollar bond he’s on the hook for. But none would take the deal.

If Trump doesn’t pony up the $500 million or so he needs to set aside, pending his appeal of last month’s order against him for ill-gotten gains on his properties, Judge Arthur Engoron says the judgment may be enforced, and New York Attorney General Letitia James can start seizing Trump’s properties and selling them to pay down what he owes.

The New York attorney general’s office has filed judgments in Westchester County, the first indication that the state is preparing to try to seize Trump’s golf course and private estate north of Manhattan, known as Seven Springs. State lawyers entered the judgments with the clerk’s office in Westchester County on March 6, just one week after Judge Arthur Engoron made official his $464 million decision against Trump, his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, and the Trump Organization.

The judgment is already entered in New York city where Trump’s properties including Trump Tower, his penthouse at Trump Tower, 40 Wall Street, his hotel abutting Central Park, and numerous apartment buildings are located.

Trump invoked a dual loyalty trope by claiming Jews who vote for Democrats hate Israel. “Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion,” Trump said in an interview with Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump administration official, on Gorka’s web show. “They hate everything about Israel, and they should be ashamed of themselves, because Israel will be destroyed,” Trump continued, going on to discuss Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The remarks echoed a trope that American Jews have split loyalties to the U.S. and Israel.

[He is aiming at the Jewish population because 70% of voters in the 2020 elections voted for President Biden. Notice that he hasn’t gone after other minorities like this – although he hasn’t gone after Muslims in a little while.]

[And to add to the craziness….]

“President Trump is right — the Democrat Party has turned into a full-blown anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, pro-terrorist cabal,” Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.

[She really has been drinking the Kool-Aid after losing her election in the House elections in 2022 and before that working as an intern for Fox.]

Trump warned hat if he were to lose the 2024 election, it would be a “bloodbath” for the US auto industry and the country. “We’re going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you’re not going to be able to sell those guys if I get elected,” Trump said during a rally in Ohio. “Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole – that’s gonna be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That’ll be the least of it.”

[So Trump is getting desperate? Threatening an industry? Where would he threaten next? Does he think other countries won’t do the same on American made goods?]

On the morning of January 6, 2021, in a last-ditch bid to overturn his election loss, Trump told then-Vice President Mike Pence that his decision to uphold his constitutional duty and certify the results later that day would be “a political career killer,” according to an unnamed witness who overheard part of the call.

Trump came a step closer to reaping a major windfall from his social media firm after investors in a blank-check acquisition company approved a tie-up currently worth about $5.7 billion. The deal values Trump’s majority stake in the company that holds his app Truth Social at about $3.3 billion. The windfall could prove vital as Trump grapples with the financial fallout of a string of legal cases against him.

[However, while Trump will have that stake, it will be quite a while before he actually has it all.]

It is a bit bad when Nikki Haley, who is not a candidate for the Republican party anymore, garnered 108,000 votes [18%] in the Arizona primary. No response from the Trump campaign.

Trump is expected to enlist Paul Manafort, the former campaign manager he pardoned, as a campaign adviser later this year.

[No one will be shocked if he hires others who have been convicted and I’m sure some who never were in politics.]

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. refused to delay prison time for Peter Navarro, a former senior aide to Trump, as he appeals his conviction for refusing to testify before Congress about his involvement in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Roberts, who oversees emergency requests from the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, said he saw no basis to disagree with an appeals court ruling that Navarro must serve time while his appeal is underway. Navarro was sentenced in January to four months after a jury convicted him on two counts of contempt of Congress.

Trump suffered arguably his worst loss[es] in any criminal matter recently when, in his New York trial for alleged falsification of business records, Judge Juan M. Merchan ruled against him in virtually all of his motions to exclude evidence.

US District Judge Aileen M. Cannon ordered the defense lawyers and the prosecutors in the case to file submissions outlining proposed jury instructions based on two scenarios, each of which badly misstates the law and facts of the case, according to legal experts. She has given the sides two weeks to craft jury instructions around competing interpretations of the Presidential Records Act, often referred to as the PRA. While the law says presidential records belong to the public and are to be turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration at the end of a presidency, Trump’s lawyers have argued the PRA gave Trump the right to keep classified materials as his personal property.

Trump filed yet another lawsuit against the news media, accusing ABC News and George Stephanopoulos of defamation over assertions the anchor made in a combative interview. In an interview on “This Week,” Stephanopoulos pressed Republican Rep. Nancy Mace, a rape survivor, over her continued support of Trump after a jury found he sexually abused writer E. Jean Carroll in 1996, awarding her $88 million for battery and defamation. Stephanopoulos asserted multiple times in the interview with Mace that Trump had “raped” Carroll. “You endorsed Donald Trump for president. Judges and two separate juries have found him liable for rape and for defaming the victim of that rape. How do you square your endorsement of Donald Trump with the testimony that we just saw?” Stephanopoulos asked Mace. The South Carolina Republican defended her support of the former president, arguing that the jury decision was merely in a civil case.

According to February 2024 statistics, Truth Social has so far had 8.9 million sign-ups, of which Trump has 6.7 million followers. X, by comparison, has more than half a billion monthly users, according to Elon Musk.

A pro-Trump lawyer, Stefanie Lambert, who tried to overturn the 2020 election was arrested after a court hearing about her recent leak of internal emails belonging to Dominion Voting Systems. There was an existing arrest warrant for Lambert stemming from her failure to appear at recent court hearings in her separate criminal case in Michigan, where she was charged with conspiring to seize voting machines after the 2020 election.

Haley bows out, doesn’t kiss Trump’s ring

As you are probably aware, Nikki Haley has “suspended” her campaign today.

Of course, in most cases, suspending really means shutting down the campaign completely – Democratic candidate, Marianne Williamson, suspended her campaign and then strangely renewed it.

Haley has still not endorsed Donald Trump. During the campaign, she was harshly criticizing Trump – possibly more than President Biden.

But if Haley doesn’t endorse Trump, chances of trying another presidential run in 2028 will be slim. She will not get much support from the Trump base and that is a big chunk of the party.

If she does kiss his ring while bowing [or on one knee] and endorse Trump, it still may not help her political career. She could hope for a cabinet position which could repair her political career.

Or maybe she can go back to state politics unless she tries for the House of Representatives or Senate. At least with those, it will be the voters who pick you.

Or maybe just retire and go back to what she did prior to politics.

Where will he get the money?

Donald Trump, his adult sons, and two former Trump Organization officials have appealed the $464 million judgment entered against them in the New York attorney general’s civil fraud case. The Trumps filed a notice of appeal with the court, the first business day after Judge Arthur Engoron made the judgment official. Donald Trump is personally on the hook for $454 million, including interest payments. If he does not provide all those dollars then that interest is going to keep ticking throughout the entirety of the case.

Trump must come up with the full amount to cover the $454 million verdict in the civil fraud trial, an appeals court Associate Justice Anil Singh ruled. Singh lifted a ban on Trump’s ability to obtain loans from New York regulated financial institutions, which could allow him to access the equity in his assets to back the full bond amount. Singh denied Trump’s request to delay his obligation to post $454 million until a full appellate panel hears his motion to stay enforcement of that judgment until his appeals of the civil fraud ruling are over.

Trump could post the cash amount to cover the judgment. But if he decides to secure a loan, his lawyers told the judge, he would need to raise more than $550 million. Bond underwriters charge about 120% of the judgment and often require cash and other easy-to-sell assets like stocks or bonds as collateral.

Trump has asked the judge overseeing the defamation case with writer E. Jean Carroll to postpone enforcement of that judgment or allow him to post a smaller amount until all post-trial arguments are over. The judge has not yet ruled.

Trump sought to appeal to Black voters night in South Carolina by repeatedly citing the 91 felony charges he faces and comparing them to unfair treatment from the criminal justice system toward minorities in America. Funny.

[This is the same joker who claims that New Yorkers will leave the state after that recent $355 million judgment.]

A bipartisan ethics panel in Wisconsin has recommended felony charges against one of Trump’s fundraising arms in relation to an alleged scheme that it says was meant to circumvent campaign finance laws to take out a powerful GOP lawmaker who has turned against Trump. The Wisconsin Ethics Commission found probable cause that Trump’s Save America committee, a state lawmaker and multiple local Republican officials committed felonies and recommended six district attorneys investigate and prosecute them. The commission’s investigation centers on the 2022 primary race between Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, one of the most influential Republicans in Wisconsin, and Adam Steen, a political newcomer who embraced Trump.

The conservative Koch group has decided to pull funding for Nikki Haley after her showing in South Carolina. They originally decided to back Haley late last fall because they didn’t like what they see in Trump. They are now backing Republicans in tight races.

The co-founders of Trump’s media company, Andy Litinsky and Wes Moss, filed a lawsuit, claiming that Trump and other leaders had schemed to deprive them of a stake in the company that could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The case could complicate a long-delayed bid by Trump Media & Technology Group, owner of the social network Truth Social, to merge with a special purpose acquisition company called Digital World Acquisition and become a publicly traded company. That merger deal, which could value Trump’s stake in the company at more than $3 billion.

The two’s attorneys allege in the motion that Trump has recently attempted to “drastically dilute” the partnership’s stake as part of what they called an “11th hour, pre-merger corporate manoeuvring” tactic designed to increase the amount of authorized stock, from 120 million shares to 1 billion shares. They would get a watered down of under one percent instead of 8.6 percent.

From a speech at the Texas-Mexico border Trump repeated his familiar story about how migrants are supposedly arriving in the US after having been deliberately freed by foreign leaders from prisons and mental health facilities.

[Has he been watching the movie Scarface with Al Pacino too many times? That was 40+ years ago!]

From a CPAC speech:

• Trump claimed, as he has on numerous previous occasions, that although he was told it would take “four years” to defeat the ISIS terror group, “I knocked it out in four weeks.” The ISIS “caliphate” was declared fully liberated more than two years into Trump’s presidency, in 2019 after two additional years when President Obama made major progress. Even if Trump was starting the clock at the time of his visit to Iraq in late December 2018, as he suggested later in a speech, the liberation was proclaimed more than two and a half months later.

[Trump, of course, ignored the Kurdish forces who did much of the ground fighting. Do anyone really believe he did it in four weeks?]

• “Remember I used to say a long time ago, ‘Don’t go into Iraq. Don’t do it!’” claims Trump. In his 2000 book, “The America We Deserve,” Trump argued a military strike on Iraq might be necessary. In a September 2002 interview whether he is “for invading Iraq,” Trump responded, “Yeah, I guess so. I wish the first time it was done correctly.” Trump began criticizing the war in 2003, after the invasion.

• Trump said, “And then you wonder why we have a $2 trillion deficit. If you look at it now, it’s gotten to a level that nobody can even believe; it’s so bad under Biden.” The US has never had a $2 trillion annual trade deficit. The overall deficit, which includes trade in both goods and services, was about $773 billion in 2023, down from a record high of about $951 billion in 2022.

• Trump said, “We built 571 miles of border wall.” An official report by US Customs and Border Protection, written two days after Trump left office said the total number built under Trump was 458 miles [including both wall built where no barriers had existed before and wall built to replace previous barriers].

[And if you remember, some of the walls were made so bad that supposedly the wind tipped over a section of the wall that was made.]

• Trump also claimed “I ended Nord Stream” [actually Nord Stream 2 pipeline] and that “I stopped it, it was over.” While he did approve sanctions on companies working on the project, that move came nearly three years into his presidency, when the pipeline was already around 90% complete – and the state-owned Russian gas company behind the project said shortly after the sanctions that it would complete the pipeline itself.

• Trump claimed that, as president, he had threatened that he would cut off all US business with China if China bought even “one barrel of oil from Iran.” China’s oil imports from Iran did briefly plummet under Trump in 2019, the year the Trump administration made a concerted effort to deter such purchases, but they never stopped – and then they rose sharply again while Trump was still president.

• Then Trump said, “I’ve been indicted more than Alphonse Capone,” even though Capone was a notoriously vicious gangster. Trump has been indicted four times. Capone was indicted at least six times.

[Maybe he just watched the movie The Untouchables and thought that was it.]

In the Republican South Carolina exit polls:

• 54% preferred Haley over Trump. This is typical as more educated people prefer anyone but Trump.
• Two thirds of independent voters prefer Haley. Same for moderate/liberal voters.
• 55% of non-White evangelical Christians voted for Haley.
• With 61% of voters believed that Biden didn’t win the election, 87% were Trump voters
• 60% of votes would still vote for Trump if convicted – almost all are Trump voters.
• 31% are unsure if they’d vote for Trump if he is the Republican nominee with most are independent and moderate/liberal voters.

Pro-Russia and ignoring cases

In this past week, Donald Trump continues to spin things and then ignores the facts that things he has said are already at different courts to be decided or have already been denied.

More than 72 hours after Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s death in an Arctic penal colony, Trump mentioned him by name for the first time in a post on his social media site that focused not on Navalny, but his own legal woes. President Joe Biden and other Western leaders have blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin for the 47-year-old’s death, responding with anger and demands for answers. But Trump made no mention of Putin or Navalny’s family in the post that instead cast himself as a victim and continued to paint the US as a nation in decline.

“The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country. It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians…. WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE, A FAILING NATION! MAGA2024.” [I removed the usual whining comments from his post.]

Trump’s reference to Navalny’s “sudden death” was notable. Prison officials allegedly told Navalny’s mother when she arrived at the penal colony hat her son had perished from “sudden death syndrome.” The previous time when someone saw him alive, just within 48 hours, he was alive and looked well. At one point Trump compares Navalny’s time persecuted by the Russian regime him being persecuted by the Biden government.

[Navalny death was listed by Russian authorities as natural causes. You just don’t collapse and die from natural causes.]

The Securities and Exchange Commission has approved the merger proposal of Trump’s media start-up with a special purpose acquisition company, a critical step for a long-delayed deal that would make the owner of Trump’s website Truth Social a publicly traded company and unlock $300 million in investor funds. The approval is a victory for Trump, who will hold more than 78 million shares in the post-merger company, a filing shows — a stake that, at current prices, would be worth nearly $4 billion. Trump, who would own between 58 and 69 percent of the company.

[Being worth $4 billion is not the same as selling at that price.]

Trump could be at risk of losing some of his prized properties if he can’t pay his staggering New York civil fraud penalty. With interest, he owes the state nearly $454 million — and the amount is going up $87,502 each day until he pays. New York Attorney General Letitia James said that she will seek to seize some of Trump’s assets if he’s unable to cover the bill from Judge Arthur Engoron’s Feb. 16 ruling. Under state law, he is being charged interest on that amount at an annual rate of 9%. Any appeal requires a 10% bond on the judgment. So to appeal the $355 million ruling, he will need a $70 million bond.

Engoron has denied Trump’s request to delay the judgment for a month. Once the judgment is officially entered, it will start the 30-day clock for Trump to file an appeal. During that period, Trump will need to put up cash or post bond to cover the $355 million and roughly $100 million in interest he was ordered to pay the state.

So with Trump having a big bill to pay, he could use his Super PAC contributions but after spending $50 million in 2023 on legal matters, he has just over $5 million in the piggy bank. He needs money to pay his legal bills but also needs it for his campaign.

So what is he doing? He is selling Trump branded running shoes called “The Never Surrender High-Tops”. They go for $399 each pair. [We will assume it is a pair! You never know!] He is also dishing out perfume and cologne for $99 each. [Did he rip off a perfume or cologne manufacturer? Or maybe just filled up the containers with water and some smelly chemical.] He announced the running shoes at [get this] Sneaker Con in Philadelphia.

Trump urged a Florida judge to dismiss the criminal case charging him with illegally retaining classified documents, claiming in part that presidential immunity protects him from prosecution even as that sweeping argument has so far in failed in federal appeals courts in a separate case. Trump’s lawyers wrote that the classified documents charges turn on his alleged decision to designate the papers as “personal” records under the Presidential Records Act, and argued that he cannot be prosecuted since that was an “official act” made while he was still in the White House.

[Just like with everything else, his lawyers push for something that has already been decided elsewhere. You can’t dis miss a case when the validity in presidential immunity is still in question. And those documents were supposed to be returned to the government in January 2021 but were not and much of it was left unsecured.]

Washington’s federal appeals court in its decision this month was unsparing in its repudiation of Trump’s novel claim that former presidents enjoy absolute immunity for actions that fall within their official job duties. But Trump’s lawyers argued that the appeals court’s decision was wrong, telling US District Judge Aileen Cannon she should not follow the court’s “poorly reasoned decision” in the classified documents case.
[Wow! It was a poorly reasoned decision. OK. So Trump should be off the hook. Not.]

Trump’s lawyers argued that Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of special counsel Smith to investigate Trump was “unlawful” and grounds for dismissing the documents case. They also are attacking the law Trump is accused of violating as “unconstitutionally vague” as applied in his case.

[Might as well just say the case should be dismissed because the floors were not clean or they ran out of cappuccino at a nearby coffee (covfefe!) shop.]

The Supreme Court declined to revisit sanctions levied against two pro-Trump attorneys who filed frivolous lawsuits challenging the outcome of the 2020 election in Michigan. Sidney Powell and Lin Wood filed separate appeals asking the justices to review sanctions imposed by a US district court in 2021. The Supreme Court denied both appeals without offering any comment on the case.

Trump said that he supports women having access to in vitro fertilization in response to the Alabama Supreme Court’s IVF ruling and called on Alabama lawmakers to “act quickly to find an immediate solution” to keep the procedure available in the state.

[I wonder if Trump has enough clout to get Alabama to reverse or modify its position.]

Trump’s campaign has released an ad attacking rival Nikki Haley over her supposed stance on the state’s gasoline tax when she served as governor. But the Trump ad leaves out critical context about Haley’s position on the gas tax, omitting key comments to make her sound like the unequivocal tax-hiker she never was. In her speech, Haley said “Let’s increase the gas tax by 10 cents over the next three years” but the ad failed to include “when coupled with the 30% income tax cut, it still represents one of the largest tax cuts in South Carolina history.”

In a recent survey conducted by a panel of experts specializing in the American presidency, President Biden was ranked the 14th-best president, while his likely 2024 presidential opponent Trump found himself at the very bottom of the list. From 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey, President Obama is ranked 7th [was 15th last year]. However, a noticeable partisan split emerged in the rankings for Obama and Biden, with Democrat respondents placing them at an average of sixth and 13th, while Republicans ranked them at 15th and 30th, respectively.

In 2021, MyPillow founder Mike Lindell offered $5 million to anyone who could disprove his claim that he had data showing voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Now, he must pay a 64-year-old from Nevada that award, a federal judge ruled. Lindell, a prominent election denier and staunch supporter of Trump, claimed to have data showing Chinese interference in the 2020 race.

Robert Zeidman, a computer forensics expert who voted for Trump twice, did just that, a federal judge in Minnesota determined Wednesday, upholding a previous ruling from a private arbitration panel. Zeidman is owed the $5 million payout plus interest, Judge John Tunheim wrote in his ruling.

Abraham Josephine Riesman, author of the 2023 unauthorized biography of WWE’s Vince McMahon, said a young Trump has been watching McMahon family wrestling since he was a child in the 1950s. Riesman says Trump took his “showmanship” from how the WEE has evolved into not just wrestling. McMahon and his wife are major donors to Trump’s campaign.

[McMahon has faced multiple allegations of sexual misconduct over the years. He remains under federal investigation, and he has not commented publicly on millions of dollars in hush-money payments he reportedly made to several women at WWE. McMahon, who is 78, resigned last month as executive chairman of TKO, pro wrestling’s parent company, after being sued by a former employee who says she was sexually abused and trafficked by McMahon to other men at WWE. I guess fitting. Trump hangs around with Jeffrey Epstein and McMahon.]

18% of Americans believe in the Taylor Swift election conspiracy theory – that is she was secretly involved with the Biden administration to get him re-elected. It jumps to 32% for Republican voters! In comparison 12% think the moon landing was faked and 10% believe the earth is flat.

[Seriously. Why is it that these whack job crazy conspiracy theories seem to comes from the right. It is fitting that some of them are liars (Trump, George Santos, Mike Johnson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, etc.)]

First trial scheduled for March

Aside from Donald Trump’s civil trial there is actually other news in Trumpland.

Trump’s hush-money trial will go ahead as scheduled with jury selection starting on March 25, Judge Juan Manuel Merchan announced, turning aside requests for a delay from Trump’s defence lawyers. The judge took advantage of a delay in a separate prosecution in Washington charging Trump with plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. That case has been effectively on hold pending the outcome of an appeal from Trump.

The decision means that a case centred on years-old accusations that Trump sought to bury stories about extramarital affairs that arose during his 2016 presidential campaign will be the first of the four criminal prosecutions against Trump to proceed to trial. Trump’s attorneys blasted the decision to keep the March date, complaining that Trump will have to stand trial in New York at the same time as he is attempting to sew up the Republican nomination. “It is completely election interference to say `you are going to sit in this courtroom in Manhattan,” said his lawyer.

Special counsel Jack Smith urged the US Supreme Court to let Trump’s 2020 election interference case proceed to trial without further delay. Prosecutors were responding to a Trump team request from earlier in the week asking for a continued pause in the case as the court considers whether to take up the question of whether the former president is immune from prosecution for official acts in the White House. Two lower courts have overwhelmingly rejected that position, prompting Trump to ask the high court to intervene.

The NATO leader warned that Trump was putting the safety of US troops and their allies at risk after Trump said Russia should be able to do “whatever the hell they want” to alliance members who don’t meet their defense spending targets. The alliance has “Article 5” which states that an act of war on one member is an act of war on them all. Since campaigning in 2015, Trump has constantly bemoaned about the lack of countries paying their share [2% of their GDP]. Some countries have increased that. He claims that he was the only president to actually get the “delinquent” countries to pay more.

Trump also claimed that he had a conversation with an un-named NATO leader where Trump claims that he was asked about NATO spending when this he mentioned the comment above regarding Russia invading.

[If you remember in the 2020 election campaign, he would says something like farmers were crying when they met him. In the next campaign rally, it is not farmers but some other group. There was never any proof he actually met any group.]

“NATO remains ready and able to defend all allies. Any attack on NATO will be met with a united and forceful response,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said. “Any suggestion that allies will not defend each other undermines all of our security, including that of the U.S., and puts American and European soldiers at increased risk.”

[Trump, not being much of an economist [or anything for that matter], forgets that when some country are at war, they could affect the world’s economy. Russia threatened to cut off gas shipments to Europe as pipelines go through Russia. This caused prices to rise. Airlines had to change their routes around the Ukraine-Russian war to have their airliners avoid getting shot down. That added extra fuel, man hours, etc.]

Trump again is asking the US Supreme Court to extend the delay in his election interference trial, saying he is immune from prosecution on charges he plotted to overturn his 2020 election loss. Except, the status of his immunity hasn’t been decided. Already one court says he doesn’t have any.

“Without immunity from criminal prosecution, the Presidency as we know it will cease to exist,” Trump’s lawyers wrote, repeating arguments that have so far failed in federal courts. The Supreme Court has previously held that presidents are immune from civil liability for official acts, and Trump’s lawyers have for months argued that that protection should be extended to criminal prosecution as well.

[That’s laughable. If you don’t do anything illegal, you don’t need immunity.]

If Trump were to defeat President Joe Biden, he could potentially try to use his position as head of the executive branch to order a new attorney general to dismiss the federal cases he faces or even seek a pardon for himself.

[But that would also look very suspicious. It would be something like a judge asking the district attorney not to charge him with some count from illegal activity.]

Trump used a rally in South Carolina to attack rival Nikki Haley in her home state — and to mock the absence of her husband, who is deployed overseas in the military. “Where’s her husband? Oh, he’s away. … What happened to her husband? Where is he? He’s gone.” Michael Haley is deployed in Africa with the South Carolina Army National Guard in support of the United States Africa Command.

[What is Melania’s excuse? Shopping? At her divorce lawyer’s office. To attack someone serving in the South Carolina Army National Guard while in South Carolina is not a good idea. But, his loyal base at the rally didn’t seem to care. Allegiance to Trump over their state. Just remember that Trump has previous attacked those in the military including the late Senator John McCain, a Vietnam wart hero. I wonder how those in the military and the veterans can side with him.]

The day before the Senate is set to begin voting on a $95.3 billion foreign aid package that would provide for Israel and Ukraine, Trump said the US should stop providing foreign aid unless it is structured as a loan. “We should never give money anymore without the hope of a payback, or without “strings” attached. the United States of America should be “stupid” no longer!” Trump posted. [Note: Post was originally was in all capitols.]

[Wonder how well that will fly with the Republican Party. Knowing Trump, he’d charge huge interest rates.]

Trump has claimed that with a win in November, within days of becoming president [or dictator] he would force Ukrainian President Zelenskyy to cave in and let Russia take over the country.

Trump insulted Haley by using his derisive nickname for her, “Birdbrain,” and lavished praise on South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, who endorsed him early. Trump claims he would have had McMaster as governor and Haley as lieutenant-governor in 2017 when he picked Haley for UN Ambassador.

[He has previously said that those who went against him after working for him did a bad job. As I said previously, if they did a bad job, why did they keep them in their position for so long? If you run as company, (for example) you fire employees who aren’t doing their job well.]

Haley, 52, has called throughout her campaign for mental competency tests for politicians, a way to contrast with 77-year-old Trump and 81-year-old Biden. “Why do we have to have someone in their 80s run for office? Why can’t they let go of their power? … They are grumpy old men. … American can do better than two 80-year-olds for president,” Haley said.

Trump said that his recent mixing up of names was intentional. “When I purposely interposed names, they said I didn’t know Pelosi from Nikki,” Trump said at a rally. He said calling Obama the current president was sarcasm, not a gaffe. “I’m a great speaker,” Trump said.

[And if you believe him, I got a piece of land to sell you on the moon. Complete with a lake and a mansion.]

Trump said that he wants his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, and one of his top aides [Chris LaCivita] to take prominent roles at the Republican National Committee as his team attempts to exert control over the party. His preference is Michael Whatley, the chair of the North Carolina GOP, as the new chairman of the party to replace Ronna McDaniel, a longtime ally he has recently soured on.

Just before the Super Bowl, Trump attempted to pressure Taylor Swift, saying that she would be “disloyal” to him should she elect to endorse a Biden presidency. This after a poll said nearly a third of Republican voters think Swift is involved in a government conspiracy to keep Biden in office.

[Disloyal? What does that mean? Start a coup d’etat? You really don’t hear of any conspiracy theories by the Democrats.]

Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russia would prefer to see President Biden win a second term, describing him as more experienced than Trump.

Notable Fox News chief liar, Sean Hannity, claimed over the past year that President Biden and his son, Hunter, have taken $10 million bribery scheme to enrich themselves and sell out America. The tale, as it goes, claimed that an executive at the Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid for access to then-Vice President Biden to improperly wield his influence and help squash an investigation led by a Ukrainian prosecutor into the company. He said the allegations so many times of Fox News that Republican lawmakers/Neanderthals like James Comer and Jim Jordan believed him or were on the conspiracy theory.

Hannity himself had a FBI informant. Hannity indicated to his millions of nightly viewers that Biden had been “compromised,” using the informant claims to declare the president was “very credibly accused of public corruption on a scale this country has never seen before.” Except the informant, Alexander Smirnov, made the whole story up was arresting at an airport in Las Vegas. The special counsel charged Smirnov with lying to the FBI and falsifying records. Smirnov provided “false derogatory information” about Biden to the law enforcement agency. His “story to the FBI was a fabrication, an amalgam of otherwise unremarkable business meetings,” it said.

There’s is never a quiet week

Donald Trump is not immune from prosecution for alleged crimes he committed during his presidency to reverse the 2020 election results, a federal appeals court of three judges said. The ruling is a major blow to Trump’s key defense thus far in the federal election subversion case brought against him by special counsel Jack Smith. Trump had argued that the conduct Smith charged him over was part of his official duties as president and therefore shield him from criminal liability.

“For the purpose of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defences of any other criminal defendant. But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as President no longer protects him against this prosecution,” the court wrote. “Here, former President Trump’s actions allegedly violated generally applicable criminal laws, meaning those acts were not properly within the scope of his lawful discretion,” they wrote, meaning that existing case law “provide him no structural immunity from the charges in the Indictment.”

Trump suggested that he thought there would likely be changes at the Republican National Committee, which is led by Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel. Why is he doing this? Because he is spending more money to battle Nikki Haley when if he was the actual party nominee the money could be aimed at fighting President Biden. McDaniel has remained loyal to Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign, calling for Haley to drop out after her defeats in Iowa and New Hampshire.

The RNC had just $8 million in the bank at the end of December, the lowest figure since it reported about $5 million in cash on hand in 2014. The committee was outraised by the Democratic National Committee, which raised about $40 million to its GOP counterpart’s $20 million during the fourth quarter of last year.

[It just feels like you can run for the party’s nomination but don’t expect the party to back you unless you somehow with the nomination. Which is unlikely. This is why the RNC declared Trump the nominee and then pulled the announcement. Very democratic.]

Back in November, Trump and his fellow Republicans stated that they would not accept any border bill without including support for Ukraine in the bill.

Guess what? Trump is against the bill saying the bill should just be about the border – nothing else. He and his buddies can’t make up his mind. As usual.

GOP Sen. James Lankford leads a group trying to push a new bill to curtail migrants coming into the US. Trump dislikes the bill and wants to scuttle it as he wants what there currently is used as an election issue. He has therefore took aim at Lankford including claiming that he never endorsed Lankford. He did.

[The bill is supposed to be the largest sweeping bill in decades, closing loopholes and making it more difficult for migrants to stay in the US. Of course, Trump doesn’t want this and has stated previously no bill is better than this bill. Of course he does.]

Quite a few MAGA supporters in the Senate and House didn’t even bother to read the bill. They just took Trump at his word. Lankford has said that when a few did read it, they actually liked the bill while previously said they’d reject the bill.

In the mean time, the House Republicans tried to impeach DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

[It’s hard to do your job when the opposition party is stopping, for example, a bill to help ease the border “crisis”.]

Federal Judge Lewis Kaplan denied Trump’s motions for a mistrial in the defamation case brought by columnist E. Jean Carroll saying Trump’s arguments had no “merit” and are “entirely pointless.”

To show you how mixed up [I’m being nice here] the Republican Party is, the Nevada GOP will have both a primary and a caucus.

The Republicans are ignoring the outcome of Tuesday’s primary — one taking place without Trump on the ballot. Instead, the state GOP opted to award its delegates to the winner of party-run caucuses being held Thursday evening. The fractured process is the result of a 2021 state law that scrapped Nevada’s presidential caucuses in favor of government-run primaries.

The Nevada Republican Party — which is led by Trump loyalists — opted to hold caucuses this year anyway and award the state’s delegates to the Republican National Convention based on those results. It also warned candidates who participated in the primary that they would not be eligible for the caucuses or to receive any delegates.

Haley and some presidential contenders like Haley filed to run in the primary. Trump did not. So Trump is the only contender in the caucus and automatically wins.

[I am surprised, at this time, that there is no lawsuit or something filed by Haley’s campaign.]

After Haley’s loss in Nevada in the primary which had no other candidates, Trump said, “Watch, she’ll soon claim Victory!”

“We always knew Nevada was a scam,” Haley said in an interview. “Trump had it rigged from the very beginning. … We didn’t spend a day or a dollar there. We weren’t even worried about it.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson says “I am calling the shots” and not Trump. Ya. Sure. Anything you say.

Haley has requested to have the Secret Service with her after threats against her and her family.

[Raise you hand if you think the threats were coming from other right wing people. That many….]

As if they don’t get crazier, West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner claims that the CIA stole the 2020 election in support of Biden, and he accused the FBI of covering it up. Warner said the federal agencies at the table “need to clean up” their “own houses” to “restore confidence in our elections.”

[Probably with nothing but (far) right wing people. West Virginia seems to be home to fringiest of fringe people around.]

Trump said he would consider imposing a tariff upward of 60% on all Chinese imports if he regains the presidency. His remarks come at a time of high economic and other tensions between the US and China. As president, Trump slapped tariffs of 25% on $50 billion of Chinese goods in June 2018. Beijing countered with its own tariffs, and the spiral continued until the two countries arrived at an agreement in 2020.

[This may push Americans to buy non-Chinese items but can your typical American afford to pay extra. If you buy 20 items (excluding food), how many of them are made in China? Trump has already said he would raise tariffs on Canadian wood but that would be an issue because of the free trade agreement he brought in. When he tried it under his reign, there were quite a few complaints by American businesses as (for example) Canadian wood is used to build homes in the US.]

Trump is further proposing 10% across the board. The Tax Foundation claims that Trump’s latest tariff proposals would act as a $300 billion tax on most of us plus costing jobs, lowering growth and depressing American wages. He may still add another10% across the board.

Some of those getting prison terms in their part of the Trump Insurrection are betting everything on Trump starting his second reign and they would be pardoned.

Your typical Trump week

Donald Trump is claiming that the country is better off having no bill for the border rather than a deal being finalized between the Senate Republicans and Democrats. But Trump would prefer to block the deal for his own political gains. Two Republicans would push to have Republican House Leader mike Johnson ousted if the bill is passed. Trump also says that he is 100% certain that terrorists could cross the border with the new deal.

[So with the new bill, supposedly there would be a cap of 5,000 migrants entering a week. If Trump claims that terrorists would cross under the new deal, wouldn’t the same terrorists (or more) cross when there is no cap?]

[The Oklahoma Republican Party approved a resolution over the weekend condemning and censuring Sen. James Lankford, the state’s senior senator, for his role in the ongoing bipartisan border negotiations in Congress.]

Trump is making a push to shore up support from a historically Democratic voting bloc: union workers by meeting with members of the Teamsters union’s leadership as well as rank-and-file members in a roundtable discussion at their headquarters in Washington. The group, which represents 1.3 million workers including technicians, film and television workers and law enforcement officials, has yet to endorse in the 2024 election but backed President Joe Biden in 2020.

The Teamsters had extended an invite to all presidential candidates to meet with them; however, Trump said it would be a “waste” of their time to meet with his Republican challenger Nikki Haley. Meanwhile a vice-president-at-large member of the Teamsters has said that the chances of the union endorsing Trump is next to zero. He blame Trump for using scabs in the government while he was president, his participation in the Trump Insurrection, he previous dealings with the Teamsters weren’t good for them, etc. Of course, the Teamsters voting for them doesn’t mean they will all vote for Biden.

Trump said that if he is re-elected, he would not reappoint Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, accusing Powell of considering rate cuts to give Democrats an advantage in the 2024 elections. “It looks to me like he’s trying to lower interest rates for the sake of maybe getting people elected, I don’t know… I think he’s going to do something to probably help the Democrats,” Trump said.

Trump accused Powell of being “political,” adding to years of verbal attacks since Trump nominated him for Fed chair in 2017. Powell was reappointed by President Joe Biden in 2021. The Fed chair cannot be fired, but the president is responsible for nominating a candidate every four years for Congress’ approval.

[It seems everyone is out to get him. Department of Justice, various states, Federal Reserve Chair, …. If the weather goes bad at a rally, he’d start blaming the National Weather Service saying they did something to cause the bad weather.]

Attorney Roberta Kaplan, lawyer for E. Jean Carroll but not in this case, said Trump threw papers across a table and stormed off during a deposition at Mar-a-Lago after learning that his legal team had agreed to provide her lunch. Trump requested that they work through a lunch break because he believed the deposition was “a waste of my time.” Kaplan detailed the end of the deposition when she was set to leave, saying that Trump told her: “See you next Tuesday” – a phrase that is often used as a derogatory euphemism directed at women.

The former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg, is in talks to potentially plead guilty to a perjury charge related to a civil investigation into the real estate company’s finances. In 2022, he pleaded guilty to 15 criminal charges related to tax fraud and served 100 days in New York City’s Rikers Island jail. He testified at the criminal tax fraud trial of two Trump Organization entities, which were convicted and fined.

All those Republicans who are sucking up to Trump [instead of backing Haley] even though Trump has said nasty thing about them including: Nancy Mace [“terrible person”], Elise Stefanik, Ron DeSantis, Marco Rubio, Lyin’ Ted Cruz.

Related to sucking up, Bernie Moreno, a Republican businessman running for the US Senate in Ohio, once said there was “no scenario” in which he would support Trump. He’s called Trump a “fake Republican” who stokes “hatred and fear” and suggested that Trump’s popularity is the result of “ignorance in our society.” But Moreno has since come to praise Trump and earned his endorsement.

After the 2020 election, the president of the far-right network One America News sent an email to former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell, with a spreadsheet claiming to contain passwords of employees from the voting technology company Smartmatic, according to court filings. The existence of the spreadsheet was recently disclosed by Smartmatic, which is suing OAN for defamation.

Lawyers from Smartmatic said with that the email and the attached spreadsheet, they suggest OAN executives “may have engaged in criminal activities” because they “appear to have violated state and federal laws regarding data privacy.” The court records don’t say how OAN obtained the spreadsheet, or whether the supposed Smartmatic passwords were authentic.

A former conservative federal appellate judge, J. Michael Luttig, is urging the Supreme Court to keep Trump off the ballot, arguing Trump’s effort to cling to power after his 2020 election loss was “broader” than South Carolina’s secession from the US that triggered the Civil War.

Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton believe dictators around the world view former Trump as a “laughing fool”.

Charles Littlejohn , the man who stole and leaked Trump and thousands of other’s tax records has been sentenced to five years in prison.

Trump has $56 million on hand but has to spend money battling Nikki Haley instead of saving the money to eventually battle President Biden.

Two of Trump’s committees, Save America leadership PAC and the Make America Great Again PAC, spent $55.6 million on legal bills in 2023, including $29.9 million in the second half of the year, according to the new reports.

Two of Trump’s political action committees spent nearly $29 million combined on legal fees during the last six months of 2023. In all, Save America PAC and Make America Great Again PAC spent more than $50 million of contributors’ money on legal expenses last year, according to FEC records.

In a November Marquette Law School national poll asking whether Biden and Trump are “too old to be president,” a 57 percent majority said this describes Biden “very well” compared with 23 percent for Trump. Eighty percent said that describes Biden at least somewhat well, compared with 51 percent who said that of Trump.

IT systems belonging to the Fulton County, Georgia government have been disrupted by a cyberattack. Outages are affecting the county’s VoIP phone systems, as well as its court and tax systems. It is the same courts as where Trump’s trial is taking place.

[You think any Trump followers caused it? It is a cyberattack and not ransomware.]

An adage that seems especially appropriate: “For Republicans, life begins at conception and ends at birth.”

[They are “pro-life” only in that they want to make sure that unwanted children are “born”, but not that the necessities of life are provided to them once they leave the womb. But still vote for them.]

Trump needs to pay some “cheddar”

Donald Trump must pay $83.3 million to E. Jean Carroll for defamatory statements he made against her in 2019, a jury determined. The total is more than eight times what Carroll asked for in her initial lawsuit. Carroll’s lawyers have already said that they will take Trump to court again if he opens his big mouth against her. Trump went on his failed social platform and made comments about the case but did not mention Carroll by saying “I fully disagree with both verdicts, and will be appealing this whole Biden Directed Witch Hunt focused on me and the Republican Party.” His lawyers already said they’d appeal.

[There are about 2 million active Truth Social users. However X/Twitter has about 450 million monthly active users and Facebook has about 2.91 billion.]

Earlier, Trump renewed his motion for a mistrial of the defamation case after Carroll acknowledged deleting some emails. Trump’s attorney Alina Habba asked for a mistrial earlier in the middle of cross-examination of Carroll when Carroll testified that she had deleted some emails containing threats to her safety. It was promptly rejected by Judge Lewis Kaplan but Habba reiterated the request and said without the records there is no way to prove when the threats occurred. Trump has argued that Carroll immediately began receiving negative messages after an excerpt of Carroll’s book containing the assault allegations was published on New York magazine’s website – hours before Trump issued his first statement. His attorneys argued Trump shouldn’t be held responsible for what other people did.

[Trump shouldn’t be held responsible unless he encouraged the people to act on what he said – like at the Trump Insurrection – and they did.]

Meanwhile Carroll is likely face a huge tax bill for those damages — and it’s all thanks to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017, and it went into effect in January 2018. The measure gave everyone a larger standard deduction, but the law took away the ability for plaintiffs to deduct legal fees in many types of cases, including defamation cases, so the government wouldn’t lose too much in revenue. Who signed the act? Trump.

Habba also criticized the judge, saying the judge wasn’t allowed any defense in front of the jury. But this wasn’t a full jury, just the verdict of how much he should pay. He was already found guilty.

Fox News on TV didn’t even bother to report about the money verdict [from what I was told as I don’t have or want the TV “new” channel] but their web site did have the story but it was way down in the front page of the web site.

Trump said presidents of the United States should have full immunity from prosecution even if they “cross the line” while in office, pushing his claims even further as he awaits a highly anticipated ruling from a federal appeals court in Washington regarding his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. “Even events that ‘cross the line’ must fall under total immunity… A president of the United States must have full immunity, without which it would be impossible for him/her to properly function,” Trump posted.

[This goes back to Trump’s comment when he said he could walk down Fifth Avenue in New York City and kill someone and be immune while President. Some experts are saying that what he said is an admission of guilt of something he has already done in the past. Plenty to choose from! He basically says a president can do whatever every they want any no one in the government can stop the president. Immunity covers the president in office while doing his official duties but with exceptions. Telling a governor to find him 11,000+ so he can win the state isn’t one of them. At that time, he is acting as a candidate and has no immunity.]

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley questioned Trump’s mental fitness after he appeared to confuse her with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi when talking about the January 6, 2021, Trump Insurrection. “Last night, Trump is at a rally and he’s going on and on mentioning me several times as to why I didn’t take security during the Capitol riots. Why I didn’t handle January 6 better. I wasn’t even in DC on January 6. I wasn’t in office then,” Haley said. “They’re saying he got confused. That he was talking about something else. That he was talking about Nancy Pelosi. He mentioned me multiples times in that scenario.”

When Trump’s suggested that Haley was standing in the way of him earning the nomination, she responded, “I don’t do what he tells me to do. I’ve never done what he tells me to do.”

[That last sentence might not be true when she was the UN Ambassador. He is easily the front runner at this point. Is he nervous that she might actually be competition for him?]

“But as they said, we lost by a whisker,” Trump said in a speech in New Hampshire. Unsure if he meant the New Hampshire primary this week or from 2016 when he lost to Lyin’ Ted Cruz by almost 3.5% – not a whisker. Publicly, he criticized Haley speech and her outfit in a post online. Privately, Trump told his aides he was baffled that she was refusing to drop out and grant him the GOP nomination, urging his political aides to up their attacks on her.

[Is he admitting that he actually lost the 2020 election? And it wasn’t by a whisker. 74 electoral college votes. This was part of more ranting and complaining after his win in New Hampshire that featured new lies as well as the usuals.]

“My conscience won’t allow me to vote for a criminal,” said a Republican voter in New Hampshire.

Trump this week bragged about purportedly acing a widely used cognitive test that was administered to him when he was president. “I think it was 35, 30 questions,” Trump said of the test, which he said involved a few animal identification queries. “They always show you the first one, like a giraffe, a tiger, or this, or that — a whale. ‘Which one is the whale?’ Okay. And that goes on for three or four [questions] and then it gets harder and harder and harder.”

Ziad Nasreddine, the Canadian neurologist who invented the test in question said it has never included the specific combination of animals described by Trump in any of its versions over the years. The test is called The Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a test aimed at detecting dementia or cognitive decline. Experts also note that the assessment is not an I.Q. or intelligence test, though Trump has often talked about it as if it was.

Senior Senate Republicans are furious that Trump may have killed an emerging bipartisan deal over the southern border, depriving them of a key legislative achievement on a pressing national priority and offering a preview of what’s to come with Trump as their likely presidential nominee. In recent weeks, Trump has been lobbying Republicans both in private conversations and in public statements on social media to oppose the border compromise in part because he wants to campaign on the issue this November and doesn’t want President Joe Biden to score a victory in an area where he is politically vulnerable. But House Republicans want to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for not doing his job.

[How can Mayorkas be impeached when the same party is blocking him from doing his job.]

[You need to wonder whether northern states really care about what happens at the southern border. Very few migrants would make it to the northern states – except when a southern Republican governor forces the migrants to travel north by buses.]

The federal appeals court in Washington, DC, declined to rehear arguments over whether Trump can be prohibited from talking about witnesses and court staff while he awaits trial in the special counsel’s January 6 criminal case. Trump has unsuccessfully tried to challenge the gag order placed on him by Judge Tanya Chutkan late last year through appeals. The 11 judges from the DC Circuit Court of Appeals declined to touch the case after a three-judge panel previously upheld the gag order against Trump.

Maine’s top court declined to weigh in on whether Trump can stay on the state’s ballot, keeping intact a judge’s decision that the US Supreme Court must first rule on a similar case in Colorado. Democrat Shenna Bellows concluded that Trump didn’t meet ballot qualifications under the insurrection clause in the US Constitution but a judge put that decision on hold pending the Supreme Court’s decision on the similar case in Colorado.

So MSNBC decided not to show Trump’s speech after he won in Iowa. When they saw his speech was considered normal [i.e. very few or no lies], they decided to show Trump’s speech in New Hampshire but shortly after he started his speech, they pulled away. Can you guess why?

[Wouldn’t it be easier if they delayed showing his speech by about 15 seconds so they have the time to mute his lies?]

After his Iowa primary win, he said “She [Haley] didn’t, and she couldn’t even beat a very flawed Ron DeSanctimonious [DeSantis], who’s out of money, and out of hope. Nikki came in a distant THIRD!”

[Haley did come in third but right close behind DeSantis. They technically both were a distant second and third, but trump was going after Haley because there were hints that DeSantis wouldn’t stay in the race long which became true a couple of days later.]

Trump posted a comment that anyone who contributes to Haley’s campaign would be “permanently barred from the MAGA camp.” The Americans for Prosperity Action, the super PAC backed by billionaire Charles Koch, who backed Haley in November, said they will not give Trump’s campaign any money and instead focus on getting Senate wins when and if Haley drops. Others will follow. That’s a blow to Trump’s campaign.

Tim Scott, who decided to endorse Trump over fellow South Carolinian, Haley claims that the economy was great under. Does that include the double digit unemployment rate from April to July 2020 and still high after? It slid under 4% within 8 months of Biden’s election. Dow Jones was about 30,000 on December 31, 2020. It is now over 38,000. Trump seemed to always say the stock market was his indication that economy was doing well.

A bit of court action for Trump

The New York appellate court’ Judge Arthur Engoron, has dismissed an appeal from Donald Trump’s lawyers to remove the gag order placed on Trump in the New York Attorney General’s civil fraud trial. The court had reinstated the order from Judge Arthur Engoron, which prohibited Trump and his attorneys from making public statements about the courtroom staff in the $370 million trial that wrapped up this month, in November, 2023.

A federal judge denied former Trump senior advisor Peter Navarro’s bid to redo his criminal contempt of Congress trial based on his claim that the jurors may have been influenced by political protesters when they took a break during deliberations. Navarro was convicted in September on two counts of contempt of Congress for not complying with a 2022 subpoena issued by the now-disbanded House select committee that investigated the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol [a.k.a. Trump Insurrection].

Trump lashed out at GOP rival Vivek Ramaswamy for the first time as the former president and his campaign have grown increasingly frustrated with what they claim are Ramaswamy’s disingenuous campaign tactics. “Vivek started his campaign as a great supporter, ‘the best President in generations,’ etc. Unfortunately, now all he does is disguise his support in the form of deceitful campaign tricks…. Very sly, but a vote for Vivek is a vote for the ‘other side’ — don’t get duped by this. Vote for ‘TRUMP, don’t waste your vote! Vivek is not MAGA,” Trump wrote recently.

[Trump knows he will win easily in Iowa but is looking ahead at New Hampshire and South Carolina where Nikki Haley could win both. So he’s aiming his sights at Ramaswamy where he can grab some votes if Ramaswamy does badly in Iowa and drops out of the race. Ramaswamy did drop out after Iowa.]

“Any of the events that President Trump has are larger than every DeSanctimonious [a.k.a. Ron DeSantis if you haven’t figured that out] and Nikki Haley event combined,” Senior Campaign Advisor Jason Miller said.

[A reminder of how many time Trump or his campaign staff claimed larger crowds at events. Just look at his inauguration in January 2017 but pictures then showed a big difference between Trump [less for him] and President Obama in his inaugurations.]

Trump has finally given Haley a nickname: Birdbrain. However, he has also called her by her actual first name which is Nimarata. He’s also used some misspellings of her actual first name – unsure if on purpose or not.

Trump’s legal team is asking for access to Biden-era White House records, including from the National Security Council and the White House Counsel’s Office, as he attempts to build a defense against charges he mishandled more than 30 sensitive national security records after he left the presidency. If the judge allows it, Trump’s team would be aiming for sweeping access to core advisers around President Joe Biden and their communications, at a time when investigators were looking at Trump’s cavalier approach to state secrets and demands by the federal government to return documents he kept.

The European Union presidency warned that the foundations of democracy will be put to the test during the November US election, envisaging a scenario where the longstanding trans-Atlantic alliance could unravel ever more. Prime Minister Alexander De Croo of Belgium, whose country currently holds the rotating EU presidency, said that “if 2024 brings us ‘America first’ again from Trump, it is really more than ever ‘Europe on its own.’”

Not surprising, Tim Scott endorses Trump for president at New Hampshire campaign event.

61% of those who support Trump won’t change their vote if Trump is convicted, 18% would less likely vote for Trump but 19% would more likely support him. 67% of Iowa voters without a college degree support him. What does that tell you.

After his Iowa caucuses win, Trump congratulated DeSantis, Haley and Ramaswamy for their performances and described all three as “very smart people, very capable people.” Didn’t he call at least DeSantis and Haley incompetent [or the equivalent] recently?

In a recent poll, did the FBI organize and encourage the Trump Insurrection:

• US adults: 25% yes, 26% not sure
• Republicans: 34% yes, 34% not sure
• Independents: 30% yes, 22% not sure
• Democrats: 13% yes, 19% not sure
• Trump voters: 44% yes, 33% not sure
• Biden voters: 10% yes, 21% not sure
• Alien [as in outer space] voters: 26% yes, 42% not sure

[OK, I added one line in the poll above. Can you guess?]

Humor time:

To add to further invented things that Trump can complain about, he will invent some story that millions of migrants are crossing into the US from Canada with most of them being Hamas terrorists or future left wing voters and will spoil American blood and will push the government to build a wall that Canada will fully pay.

Finally a real quite week

The US Supreme Court said it will review the Colorado Supreme Court’s unprecedented decision removing former Donald Trump from that state’s ballot. The court scheduled oral arguments for February 8. Trump remains on the ballot as the lower-court ruling disqualifying him has been put on hold pending Supreme Court action.

A group of House Democrats is demanding Justice Clarence Thomas recuse himself from a case stemming from the Colorado ruling disqualifying Trump from holding office, citing past efforts by Thomas’ wife to reverse the 2020 election results. In a letter sent by eight Democrats on Thursday to Thomas, the lawmakers argue his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas’ role in the January 6, 2021, “Stop the Steal” rally that she attended make it “unthinkable” the conservative justice could be impartial in deciding whether the event constituted an insurrection.

Special counsel Jack Smith pushed back against Trump’s assertions that the prosecutor should be held in contempt for submitting filings while the federal election interference case is paused, calling accusations that he was intentionally violating a court order “false” and “baseless.” “The Court has held that there is a substantial public interest in the fair and prompt resolution of this case,” prosecutors wrote.

The New York attorney general, Letitia James, is seeking more than $370 million from Trump and his co-defendants and to bar Trump from doing business in the state, according to a post-trial brief filed in Trump’s civil fraud trial.

The Democrats “have weaponized the system.” Trump said at a rally in Iowa, this coming from the man who already wants to use the Department of Justice, FBI and others to go after his enemies once he is elected. He also says Democrats “are signing up” migrants to vote and these same migrants hate the US. If they hate the US, why would you want to migrate to that country? He also claims that Democratic donors are helping out Nikki Haley.

[And how come he hasn’t given Haley a nickname yet?]

Trump has only escalated his apocalyptic descriptions of America and its ostensible future under another President Biden term. “Our border has been erased. Criminals are running wild in our Democrat-run cities. And thanks to crooked Joe’s breathtaking weakness, the world is going up in flames… The whole world is up in flames.” He also told his audience that “the communists, Marxists and fascists are going hard after Catholics” and that Democrats “want people to take your children and do things with your children that are not even speakable.” Biden and “the far-left lunatics,” he said, are “willing to violate the US Constitution at levels never seen before,” adding that “we’re very close” to World War III.

[Everything in the paragraph above were just threats with no actual proof. In comparison, when Biden was talking about Trump and what Biden has said has is what Trump would say he would do or comment about – such as the dictatorship, accused migrants of “poisoning the blood” of the nation, calling enemies vermin and using the Department of Justice and other parts of the federal government to go after Trump’s opponents.]

[When Trump took over in 2016, many people who worked the various federal government departments left their jobs as they wouldn’t work for Trump. Expect a sequel to this if Trump wins in November. However, many celebrities claimed that they would move out of the US when Trump won in November of 2015, but very few did.]

Rumors floating that Nikki Haley [assuming she doesn’t get the nomination] could be pushed as Trump’s running mate in the next election by the GOP party. But Stephen Bannon and Donald Trump Jr. have stated that having Haley would be bad for the party.

“Why did American Disaster Liz Cheney … ILLEGALLY DELETE & DESTROY most of the evidence, and related items, from the January 6th Committee of Political Thugs and Misfits….” Trump and his allies have simply invented the claim that he requested 10,000 troops before the Jan. 6 Trump Insurrection attack on the Capitol, twisting an offhand comment into a supposed order to the Pentagon.

He “floated the idea of having 10,000 National Guardsmen deployed to protect him and his supporters from any supposed threats by left-wing counter protesters,” the report from the January 6 committee said. To mobilize 10,000-20,000 Guardsmen, he would have had to contact the Governors of other States and they would have had to then give orders, or he would have had to federalize the Guardsmen from those States.

Some of the documentation related Jeffrey Epstein case which had Trump as one of his clients – as well as Price Andrew and President Bill Clinton – is starting to ruffle the feathers of the right wing. Former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump Jr. and political allies such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene all posted about the release on social media, warning of a cover-up of alleged Epstein conspirators. Maybe they think most of the people on the list of clients are right wing perverts. I guess Taylor Greene may not have been clients but I wouldn’t be surprised about Giuliani, and like father like son for Donald Trump Jr. Why else would you warn of conspiracies or cover-ups?

As it was a quite week in Trumpland, here are some statistics that could shock you at least a bit – or not:

When The Washington Post and University of Maryland asked in December 2021 whether Biden was legitimately elected, 69 percent of Americans said he was. Now, that’s down to 62 percent. Slightly fewer Republicans today [31 percent] say Biden’s election was legitimate compared with 2021 [39 percent]. More than one-third of Americans, or 36 percent, do not accept Biden’s victory as legitimate.

Older Americans are slightly more likely than younger ones to say Biden was legitimately elected, as are voters with college degrees. About 3 in 10 people who get most of their information from Fox News think Biden won legitimately in 2020.

57 percent or Americans, say the Justice Department is “holding Trump accountable under the law like anyone else” by prosecuting him. A fifth of Republicans agree; the vast majority [77 percent] believe Trump is being targeted for political reasons, as he has repeatedly claimed without evidence.

Most Americans, 55 percent, believe the storming of the US Capitol on Jan. 6 was “an attack on democracy that should never be forgotten,” with majorities of Democrats and independents holding this view. But most Republicans and Trump voters reject this view.

More than 7 in 10 Republicans say that too much is being made of the attack and that it is “time to move on.” Fewer than 2 in 10 (18 percent) of Republicans say Jan. 6 protesters were “mostly violent,” dipping from 26 percent in 2021. Currently, 77 percent of Democrats and 54 percent of independents say the protesters were mostly violent, little changed from 2021.

Just over a quarter of Americans are confident that Trump will accept the results of the election if he loses the next presidential race, while 65 percent think President Biden will. A 71 percent majority of Americans are not confident Trump will accept losing in 2024, which is more than twice the share who say this of Biden. Nearly half of Republicans doubt Trump will accept the election if he loses, rising to 73 percent among independents and 93 percent of Democrats.

The Post-UMD poll finds that 55 percent of Republicans think legal punishments for the people who broke into the Capitol have been “fair” or “not harsh enough,” though that is down from 64 percent in 2021. Seven in 10 independents and about 9 in 10 Democrats say punishments have been fair or insufficient.

Two years ago, 60 percent of Americans overall said Trump bears “a great deal” or “a good amount” of responsibility for the attack; now, 53 percent do. Again, Republicans are driving that change — 14 percent assign him a great or good amount of culpability, about half as many as did in 2021 [27 percent].

A 56 percent majority of Americans say Trump is probably guilty of a criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results through false claims of voter fraud, including 40 percent who believe he is “definitely guilty.” Republicans are less united than Democrats. Nearly 9 in 10 Democrats believe Trump is guilty, while nearly 7 in 10 Republicans think he is innocent. Among independents, nearly twice as many think Trump is guilty as think he is innocent.

Even though most Americans believe Trump is guilty, the poll finds that fewer than half, 46 percent, say his actions related to Jan. 6 Trump Insurrection should disqualify him from the presidency. An additional 17 percent say Trump’s actions cast doubt on his fitness to serve, while 33 percent say they are not relevant.

Humor time:

After his speech in Iowa on Friday, Trump could be nominated for an Emmy prime time comedy special award for next year. A laugh a minute.