Maybe, just maybe, the bone spurs magically disappeared after 1968. — GRWelsh
Here's a CNN list of 24 former Trump aides and allies all of whom now see him as a threat to democracy — Wayfarer
This must be historically unprecedented in the United States, maybe with the exception of Nixon, right? To have so many turn on you? — flannel jesus
Last week, in a memo written by Club for Growth president David McIntosh to a Club-linked PAC called Win it Back, the takeaway was stark: Trump’s supporters do not care what he did or what he said before. They like him still. They like him now. “It is amazing,” McIntosh told me in a text. “All attempts to undermine his conservative credentials on specific issues were ineffective,” the memo said. “Even when you show video to Republican primary voters with complete context of President Trump saying something otherwise objectionable to primary voters, they find a way to rationalize and dismiss it.”
“What I saw there that really stood out to me was that people dismissed any negative information about Donald Trump as just another attack on Donald Trump,” Mercieca told me (Jen Mercieca, the author of Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump). “So they want to believe that Donald Trump is their guy, and he’s a good guy, that he’s fighting for them and that no one else is, that everything is corrupt, and he’s the only one who will save them. That’s the message that he has always given them,” she said. “Every attack against him feeds the narrative that he has created.”
Republicans need to get better at election fraud themselves. — wonderer1
Here's a CNN list of 24 former Trump aides and allies all of whom now see him as a threat to democracy. — Wayfarer
Cue the anger and protests? No — NOS4A2
Joe Biden faced intense criticism from environmental advocates, political opponents and his fellow Democrats after the president’s administration waived 26 federal laws to allow border wall construction in south Texas, its first use of a sweeping executive power that was often employed under Donald Trump.
“The money was appropriated for the border wall. I tried to get them to reappropriate, to redirect that money. They didn’t. They wouldn’t,” he said. “In the meantime, there’s nothing under the law other than they have to use the money for what it was appropriated for. I can’t stop that.”
Biden was asked whether he thought the border wall was effective and responded “no.”
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Biden aides Thursday repeatedly sought to highlight that the funding being used to build several miles of additional wall was allocated before Biden took office.
“Fact: Congress is forcing us to do this under a 2019 law. Fact: We called on Congress to cancel these funds. They didn’t. We follow the rule of law,” deputy press secretary Andrew Bates wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “Congress needs to stop delaying the effective border solutions @POTUS proposed.”
I don't know what the solution to the immigration issue is, but I'm not sure it's a border wall. — GRWelsh
Yet the claim that walls have been nearly universally “successful” could not be further from the truth. Research from around the world indicates that both the direct and indirect costs of building border walls exceed the benefits. Tunnels, drones, ladders, ramps, document forgery, and corruption—the strategies for circumventing the walls end up multiplying. Walls do not achieve the objectives for which they are said to be erected; they have limited effects in stemming insurgencies and do not block unwanted flows, but rather lead to a re-routing of migrants to other paths. As migrants take other routes, circumventing the obstacles and therefore becoming more difficult to monitor, they rely more on smugglers and as a result pay greater costs. This is a process that many studies have shown, for instance along the U.S.-Mexico border and between Israel and the West Bank. As border enforcement increases, so do smugglers’ profits and the presence of organized crime.
After a temporary lull in migration during the early part of the pandemic, that very month (October 2020) saw a significant jump in both known successful entries (what the Border Patrol calls “gotaways”), as well as arrests to levels as high as before the pandemic, and the numbers kept rising. Even before Biden assumed office, the Border Patrol was making more arrests and witnessing far more successful crossings after the wall went up than most months before the Trump wall.
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The Trump border wall failed for all the predictable reasons. Immigrants used cheap ladders to climb over it, or they free climb it. They used cheap power tools to cut through it. They cut through small pieces and squeezed through, and they cut through big sections and drove through. In one small section in 2020, they sawed through at least 18 times that Border Patrol knew about in a month. They also made tunnels. Some tunnels were long, including the longest one ever discovered, but some were short enough just to get past the barrier.
While it was always obvious why the wall would never stop crossings, the border wall may actually have been counterproductive. The New York Times reported the roads created to build the wall “now serve as easy access points for smugglers and others seeking to enter the once‐remote areas along the border.”
But most importantly, many, if not most, crossers never tried to evade capture. They just walked up to the fence (which is mostly in the United States) and asked to be arrested, so they can try to obtain asylum.
How so? Were they previously good, decent human beings who could easily tell reality from fantasy?Truly scary. He's succeeded by innoculating millions of people against reality. — Wayfarer
I hadn't paid much attention to the Trump Organization civil trail in New York. Seeing how it's going now, I think the consequences might be even greater than those potentially coming from the criminal trials. It never struck me before how big a blow this could be, financially, politically, and psychologically. — T Clark
It strikes down the Trump mythology of being this successful businessman — GRWelsh
Truly scary. He's succeeded by innoculating millions of people against reality.
— Wayfarer
How so? Were they previously good, decent human beings who could easily tell reality from fantasy? — baker
...millions choose to believe Trump's lies over reality. — Wayfarer
I'm not at all certain that many of those supporters are even able to comprehend all the relevant facts that may influence their worldview... — creativesoul
Months after leaving the White House, former President Donald Trump allegedly discussed potentially sensitive information about U.S. nuclear submarines with a member of his Mar-a-Lago Club -- an Australian billionaire who then allegedly shared the information with scores of others, including more than a dozen foreign officials, several of his own employees, and a handful of journalists, according to sources familiar with the matter.
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Prosecutors and FBI agents have at least twice this year interviewed the Mar-a-Lago member, Anthony Pratt, who runs U.S.-based Pratt Industries, one of the world's largest packaging companies.
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According to Pratt's account, as described by the sources, Pratt told Trump he believed Australia should start buying its submarines from the United States, to which an excited Trump -- "leaning" toward Pratt as if to be discreet -- then told Pratt two pieces of information about U.S. submarines: the supposed exact number of nuclear warheads they routinely carry, and exactly how close they supposedly can get to a Russian submarine without being detected.
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