TRUMP HAS REPORTEDLY BEEN TELLING PEOPLE HE’S GOING TO BE PRESIDENT AGAIN BY AUGUST, WHICH WOULD SUGGEST HE’S PLANNING A COUP (OR HAS FULLY DESCENDED INTO MADNESS)
Is Donald Trump ever going to be president again? In theory, should he set aside the fact that he actually hated being president, and decide to run again in 2024, and should tens of millions of Americans lose their minds and cast their votes for a wannabe dictator who is probably at this moment ranting to a garden hose about how he beat Joe Biden, he could make his way back to the White House in January 2025. Is he going to be president as early as this August? No! Obviously! Why? Well, there’s the minor matter of the fact that Biden‘s first term doesn’t expire for another 1,329 days, making it impossible for Trump to take over any time before then, unless he is planning a coup. Which it sounds like he might be, insomuch as one can plan a coup from the omelet station at Mar-a-Lago.
According to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, Trump has apparently been “telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated [as president] by August.” Though we said it mere moments ago, it bears repeating that one is not simply “reinstated” as president of the United States as though their being booted from the White House was simply a mistake; again, the only way Trump could become president again by the end of the summer would be if he was scheming something that falls under the umbrella of treason. Sane people know this. Yet while Trump is assuredly not going to come within 1,000 feet of the Oval Office any time soon—or ever again!—some of his craziest supporters appear to worryingly believe he might.
Over the weekend, disgraced national security adviser Michael Flynn—who Ivanka Trump insisted on bringing onboard in the Trump administration and who her father pardoned in the waning days of his presidency—declared at a Dallas event on Sunday that a Myanmar-style coup “should happen here” in the United States. (He later claimed that his words had been “twisted.”) In December 2020, Flynn, along with Powell and others, met with Trump at the White House to reportedly discuss the former national security adviser’s idea to invoke martial law as part of the effort to stop Biden from becoming president. The meeting was said to have devolved “into screaming matches at certain points as some of Trump’s aides pushed back on Powell and Flynn’s more outrageous suggestions about overturning the election.”
While some people see Trump is an unhinged has-been whose delusions should be ignored, others think treating “evidence of a possible seditious conspiracy as mere loose talk from an addled man” is dangerous, and that we should pay very close attention to what Trump is reportedly telling people. In a long twitter thread on Tuesday, attorney and reporter Seth Abramson wrote, “There are efforts afoot now in GA, AZ, NV, and WI to delegitimize Biden’s victories there. Meanwhile, Trump advisers Flynn and Powell are saying that once those victories are delegitimized, the military should move in. If Trump is in on the conversations, it’s a coup attempt…. To be clear, I have *consistently* said that I do *not* believe the military would ever participate in a coup. The point of this thread isn’t to suggest a coup will happen, but that Donald Trump and his co-conspirators must be investigated for seditious conspiracy immediately.” He added: “We’ve been around this mountain with Trump before—and specifically on the question of conspiracy, aiding and abetting, and attempted crimes. You can be arrested for certain inchoate federal criminal offenses even if the crime you ultimately want to see committed doesn’t occur. We don’t have a federal criminal justice system that says a crime is only a crime after it’s successful. I suspect that even a child would be able to see why. If that were how the system worked, criminals would *succeed* before we could start trying to undo what they had done. Instead, we have state/federal criminal justice systems that try to cut off criminal conspiracies at the pass once law enforcement has evidence the conspirators have taken at least one discrete step toward achieving their illegal ambitions.”
Biden continues to implement his “do the opposite of everything the last guy did” policy
Transgender military ban? “Remain in Mexico” asylum policy? Historically low, probably racist refugee cap? Oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? Not on this president’s watch. Per The Washington Post:
While Biden is clearly intent on reversing much of the damage done by the Trump administration, he hasn’t nixed everything. Last week, the Justice Department defended a drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope, in addition to backing the Trump administration’s decision to issue gas and oil leases in Wyoming, The Washington Post noted. Biden’s DOJ also declined to call for the shutdown of the Dakota access pipeline, which the Post points out Haaland personally protested while serving in Congress.
Located less than a mile from the White House, the hotel was the place where GOP lawmakers, corporate executives with business at the Justice Department, foreign-government officials, and anyone looking to kiss the ring knew their money would go far. “Why wouldn’t I stay at his hotel blocks from the White House, so I can tell the new president, ‘I love your new hotel!’ Isn’t it rude to come to his city and say, ‘I am staying at your competitor?’” an Asian diplomat told The Washington Post in 2016. More recently, the Washingtonian reported that servers at the hotel’s restaurant had to follow a seven-step process for serving Trump Diet Coke; that his dining companion could never have a bigger steak than him; that popovers “had to be served within two minutes” and shrimp cocktail “immediately;” that mini glass bottles of Heinz ketchup were to be opened “in front of [him], taking care to ensure he could hear the seal make the ‘pop’ sound;” and that “a tray of junk food needed to be available for every Trump visit: Lay’s potato chips (specifically, sour cream and onion), Milky Way, Snickers, Nature Valley Granola Bars, Tic Tacs, gummy bears, Chips Ahoy, Oreos, Nutter Butters, Tootsie Rolls, chocolate-covered raisins, and Pop-Secret.”
