If You Hate America And Democracy And Want To See Them Destroyed, Vote For Trump And The GOP

QAnon All The Way

There’s a GOP civil war in Michigan— relatively normal conservatives trying to take the party back from the MAGA/fascist wing. It’s been brewing since the party elected a crackpot MAGAt, Kristina Karamo party chair. She quickly ran the whole apparatus into the ground, including “financial problems, lackluster fund-raising, secretive meetings and persistent infighting” (including first fights). Nick Corasaniti reported about the mess for the NY Times over the weekend. The pressure of Karamo to resign is mounting; she refuses.

You call that a mess. How about another, albeit not unrelated mess, this one in Congress. Marjorie Traitor Greene is just another version of Kristina Karamo, a crackpot on QAnon who should never have been allowed out of the home. She’s giving MAGA Mike a band time and I can’t say I feel sorry for him in the slightest. He deserves every moment of rabble rousing misery she inflicts on him. Mychael Schnell spoke with her and wrote that she didn’t hold back in her criticism of the new spreaker, whose record so far as speaker, she called terrible. “He went from having a voting record to literally a month later … going against his own voting record and being Speaker of the House… Literally all of a sudden talking about doing things that he had literally voted against only a month before that. And, you know, that was unacceptable to me, and it still is… I’m not the Republican team player; I never have been… I would love to help Mike Johnson be successful, but so far I can’t support the decisions that he’s made. He’s got to earn it. But would I help him? Of course I would. If he listened. See, there’s a difference. Kevin McCarthy would listen. Kevin McCarthy would, you know, he would take ideas, he would take suggestions, he would take help because he was willing to take it, and he didn’t try to do everything on his own.”

A Trump operative, she is, more than anything else, an agent of failure, discord, chaos and dysfunction. She is working to gum up the works-- to hand Ukraine to Russia, to stoke as much chaos at the border as she can and to shut down the government.

The head of the snake, though, is not Traitor Greene and not Kristina Karamo. Neither would have anymore influence than spit if not for Mr. Chaos himself. And hopefully Jack Smith’s going to haul his carcass off to prison. On Saturday, in a new filing, Smith said that his immunity bid is a license for presidents to commit crimes, a response to Trump’s “claims that he is immune to prosecution for his efforts to undo his 2020 defeat because he survived an impeachment proceeding in the Senate, and because his plotting fell within the powers and duties of his office.”

If these arguments— which District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected earlier this month— won out, a president could commit crimes freely so long as he threw up sufficient hurdles to keep two-thirds of U.S. senators from voting to remove him, Smith said.

“A former president could thus bank on the practical obstacles to impeachment (a remedy designed to remove, not hold criminally accountable, a corrupt officer) to provide a safe harbor insulating him from prosecution once he has left office,” the brief reads, highlighting one potential scenario that might unfold should Trump triumph. “Under the defendant’s framework, the nation would have no recourse to deter a president from inciting his supporters during a State of the Union address to kill opposing lawmakers— thereby hamstringing any impeachment proceeding— to ensure that he remains in office unlawfully.”

That was hardly the only apocalyptic vision that Smith and his colleagues conjured. The prosecutors assailed the defense's claims that Trump's conspiring with state and federal officials to block President Joe Biden's victory in the Electoral College fell within the rights and responsibilities of a president to engage with other officials on matters of federal importance.

“That approach would grant immunity from criminal prosecution to a president who accepts a bribe in exchange for directing a lucrative government contract to the payer; a president who instructs the FBI director to plant incriminating evidence on a political enemy; a president who orders the National Guard to murder his most prominent critics; or a president who sells nuclear secrets to a foreign adversary,” Smith and his team wrote. “In each of these scenarios, the president could assert that he was simply executing the laws; or communicating with the Department of Justice; or discharging his powers as commander-in-chief; or engaging in foreign diplomacy.”