The Ultimate Vampire Resource and Directory

A federal appeals court upheld the criminal conviction of ex-Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon for defying a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Bannon was sentenced to four months in prison for contempt in October 2022, but U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols agreed to postpone the jail term while Bannon appealed the decision.

"We conclude that none of the information sought in the trial subpoenas was relevant to the elements of the contempt offense, nor to any affirmative defense Bannon was entitled to present at trial," the three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals said in its opinion Friday.


"The judgment of conviction and sentence [is] affirmed," the judges concluded.

Former Trump White House adviser Peter Navarro is currently serving a four-month sentence in prison after he was convicted of two counts of contempt of Congress.

Prosecutors had been seeking a six-month sentence for Bannon, though he could've faced up to two years in prison.

Bannon was also ordered to pay a $6,500 fine, much less than the $200,000 the government had been seeking.

Prosecutors blasted Bannon's reason for skipping the subpoena, writing in their sentencing request, "From the time he was initially subpoenaed, the Defendant has shown that his true reasons for total noncompliance have nothing to do with his purported respect for the Constitution, the rule of law, or executive privilege, and everything to do with his personal disdain for the members of Congress sitting on the Committee and their effort to investigate the attack on our country's peaceful transfer of power."

MORE: Prosecutors rebut ex-Trump adviser Steve Bannon's attempt to dismiss fraud charges

Bannon is facing an unrelated trial on fraud charges connected to the "We Build the Wall" online fundraising campaign, which was supposed to raise money for Trump's signature domestic project. Instead, prosecutors allege Bannon defrauded donors by falsely promising that none of the money they donated would be used to pay the salary of "We Build the Wall" president Brian Kolfage -- while Bannon secretly funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to Kolfage by laundering it through third-party entities.

Bannon has pleaded not guilty. The trial was scheduled for May, but has been postponed to later in the year since Judge Juan Merchan is currently overseeing the hush money trial for Bannon's former boss, Trump.

ABC News' Katherine Faulders, Alexander Mallin and Aaron Katersky contributed to this report.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/steve-bannons-contempt-congress-conviction-150618081.html

lol..... here is another dolt who doesn't like anything about this democracy. He wants Mango to be a Dictator . Well now he is one step closer to the joint. Remember Mango advisorPeter Navarro is in the joint on the same charges.

Here's hoping multi millionaire Bannon enjoys some quality time with folks he wouldn't ordinarily be around.

Rudy Giuliani was suspended from WABC radio on Friday and had his show canceled, according to station owner John Catsimatidis.

Catsimatidis, a billionaire and major GOP donor, told NBC News that Giuliani had been warned twice by station management about his on-air comments questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election on his daily talk show, which he's hosted for three years.

Giuliani's suspension and show cancellation was first reported by The New York Times.

In a letter addressed to Giuliani and obtained by NBC News, Catsimatidis said that Giuliani, who is Donald Trump's former lawyer, was "prohibited from engaging in conversations relating to the 2020 Presidential Election" on his WABC programs.

"These specific topics include, but are not limited to, the legitimacy of the election results, allegations of fraud effectuated by election workers, and your personal lawsuits relating to those allegations,” Catsimatidis wrote in the letter dated Thursday.

The letter cited a recent news article about two Georgia poll workers who were awarded $148 million in damages last year in a defamation lawsuit against Giuliani and are accusing him of making fresh false statements.

"You are now once again stating that there was fraud. You may not do so on our airwaves. This is a clear condition of your continued relationship with WABC. We do not condone these actions, and do not want to be subject to the ramifications of your conduct under any circumstances," Catsimatidis wrote.

The cancellation of the former New York City mayor's show was not preplanned, Catsimatidis told NBC News, adding that he “feels very bad, because he is still America’s mayor, but we need to know where to draw the line.”

Giuliani blasted WABC's actions in a statement Friday.

"This directive is a clear violation of free speech," Giuliani said, arguing that he had not been informed previously about restrictions.

"Obviously I was never informed on such a policy, and even if there was one, it was violated so often that it couldn’t be taken seriously,” Giuliani said.

Giuliani is facing charges in connection with efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia and Arizona. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges in Georgia but has not yet entered a plea in Arizona.

His suspension from WABC comes after some news organizations have been hit with lawsuits from voting machine companies over false statements regarding the 2020 election and the integrity of its results.

Last month, Smartmatic settled its defamation suit against One America News Network out of court. In 2023, Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems reached a $787.5 million settlement agreement over a 2021 lawsuit that claimed the voting machine company was defamed by hosts and guests on Fox News and Fox Business.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/radio-station-suspends-rudy-giuliani-050617682.html

Another Mango follower and liar goes down

Seems his creditors are closing in on him too.

A federal judge smacked down a series of threats by Alabama’s Republican attorney general to prosecute groups that help women obtain out-of-state abortions, wading into a debate over access to the procedure that has lingered since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago.

The plaintiffs, including a group called the Yellowhammer Fund that helps women obtain out-of-state abortions, sued Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall after he suggested prosecution might be possible for groups that “aid and abet abortions,” including by helping women travel out of state.

That issue has been closely watched by advocates on both sides of the abortion debate as red states across the country ban or severely limit access to the procedure in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe. That has forced many women seeking an abortion in a clinical setting to cross state lines.

“The right to interstate travel is one of our most fundamental constitutional rights,” US District Judge Myron Thompson wrote in a preliminary ruling late Monday.

“Alabama can no more restrict people from going to, say, California to engage in what is lawful there than California can restrict people from coming to Alabama to do what is lawful here,” Thompson wrote.

The suits were brought not by women seeking an out-of-state abortion but rather by groups that intend to help them. Thompson, appointed to the bench by President Jimmy Carter, wrote that a patient’s right to travel was “inextricably bound up” with those groups. Collectively, he wrote, the groups receive as many as 95 inquiries each week asking about the availability of out-of-state abortions.

“The Constitution protects the right to cross state lines and engage in lawful conduct in other states, including receiving an abortion,” Thomson wrote in a decision that will allow the lawsuit to proceed. “Travel is valuable precisely because it allows us to pursue opportunities available elsewhere.”

A spokeswoman for Marshall did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe in 2022, abortion rights groups warned that some states might attempt to limit out-of-state travel for the procedure. Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, nearly two dozen states have banned or heavily limited access to abortion.

Florida’s six-week abortion ban took effect last week, for instance, cutting off access to the procedure in most of the southern United States. Alabama has banned abortion with no exception for rape or incest.

“I think we will see statements like these increase as attorneys general and other state actors try to extend their own abortion politics and policies across state lines,” said Temple University Beasley School of Law Dean Rachel Rebouché. “This is the world Dobbs created – one of intense interstate conflict.”

The Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Dobbs didn’t deal with out-of-state travel.
But Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative who joined the court’s 5-4 majority to overturn Roe, wrote separately to suggest that the question wasn’t an “especially difficult” one to decide.

“As I see it, some of the other abortion-related legal questions raised by today’s decision are not especially difficult as a constitutional matter,” Kavanaugh wrote. “For example, may a state bar a resident of that State from traveling to another state to obtain an abortion? In my view, the answer is no based on the constitutional right to interstate travel.”

Access to abortion medication, another option for women in states that ban the procedure, is also facing a legal challenge. The Supreme Court this year is considering a suit by conservative doctors and advocates who say the Food and Drug Administration overstepped its authority by expanding access to the abortion pill mifepristone.

The Alabama groups were represented by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The decision “brings us one step closer to ensuring that healthcare providers can fulfill their ethical duties to their patients and to establishing that pregnant Alabamians can access comprehensive information about their legal healthcare options.,” said Alison Mollman, legal director of the ACLU of Alabama.

This story has been updated with additional information.

For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com

https://www.yahoo.com/news/federal-judge-blasts-threat-alabama-112135650.html

Well finally. But the article did point out that abortion is cut off in most of the South.

Georgia’s former Republican Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan announced Monday that he is endorsing Joe Biden in the 2024 election, a stunning defection that puts him at odds with other leaders in his party.

Countless Republicans who have been personally slighted by Donald Trump, from William Barr to Ted Cruz, have nonetheless pledged their support to him in the upcoming election. But Duncan has drawn a line in the sand. The former Georgia official faced pressure from the Trump campaign to stop the certification of 2020 election results in the crucial swing state.

“The healing of the Republican Party cannot begin with Trump as president (and that’s aside from the untold damage that potentially awaits our country),” Duncan wrote in an op-ed for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “This November, I am voting for a decent person I disagree with on policy over a criminal defendant without a moral compass.”

Despite conservatives’ insistence to the contrary, Trump’s legal troubles are convincing some Republican voters to jump ship ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Duncan, for his part, cited Trump’s criminal case directly: “The alternative is another term of Trump, a man who has disqualified himself through his conduct and his character. The headlines are ablaze with his hush-money trial over allegations of improper record-keeping for payments to conceal an affair with an adult-film star,” he wrote.

Duncan, who also refers to Trump’s chilling Time magazine interview as a reason for his defection, was once considered as a potential challenger to Trump in 2024. In March, Duncan considered and then turned down overtures from No Labels to mount a third-party campaign.

Now, Duncan is throwing his support behind Biden, in the hope that it may convince other lifelong conservatives to break with the man who threatened Duncan’s colleague, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, to “find 11,780 votes.”

Duncan is the second high-profile Republican to express support for Biden in recent days. Last week, Trump’s former White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews announced she will vote for Biden because Trump “will not uphold the Constitution.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/republican-trump-pressured-overthrow-election-194255539.html

A Texas man is seeking a court order so he can depose a woman he was dating who traveled to Colorado to get an abortion, in a case that may have ramifications in the ongoing legal battles over abortion rights.

Collin Davis, a resident of Brazos County, filed a legal petition in March stating that on February 20 — the day after he learned the woman intended to obtain the abortion — he retained an attorney, who sent the woman a letter requesting that she preserve all records related to her plans to terminate the pregnancy.

According to the petition, the letter warned that he “would pursue wrongful-death claims against anyone involved in the killing of his unborn child.”

Davis argues that the deposition is necessary to determine whether there was a violation of the Texas wrongful-death statute, which the petition references alongside a Texas civil code that includes among those defined as individuals “an unborn child at every stage of gestation from fertilization until birth.” His petition additionally points to Texas’ civil enforcement six-week abortion ban, known as SB 8.

The woman filed a petition for court records to be sealed so her identity would remain anonymous, her attorney told CNN. She began dating Davis in November 2023 and found out that she was pregnant in January, according to the petition.

The case, which was reported on by The Washington Post on Friday, is being cited by abortion rights supporters who fear that anti-abortion advocates will use — or at least threaten to use — strict abortion laws to target abortions obtained even in states where the procedure is legal. Texas’ law, passed in 2021, targets doctors and those involved in facilitating abortions, not the women who undergo the procedure themselves, but opponents say that legal uncertainty about restrictions in a post-Roe America has the intended consequence of intimidating women.

Davis is seeking the deposition to obtain information about those involved in the abortion, including the identity of the doctor who performed the procedure in Colorado, and he considers filing a lawsuit against all of them, according to the court filings.

Davis is being represented by Jonathan Mitchell, a well-known lawyer and abortion rights opponent who also represented former President Donald Trump in his Colorado ballot case.

Mitchell helped craft SB 8, also known as the Texas Heartbeat Act, which uses a novel civil enforcement mechanism to prohibit abortions after fetal cardiac activity is detected, a point usually around six weeks into a pregnancy. Davis cited the law in his petition for the deposition.

CNN has reached out to Davis for comment.

Mitchell said in a statement, “Fathers of aborted fetuses can sue for wrongful death in states with abortion bans, even if the abortion occurs out-of-state. They can sue anyone who paid for the abortion, anyone who aided or abetted the travel, and anyone involved in the manufacture or distribution of abortion drugs.”

The case is seen by some abortion rights advocates as an example of the new legal landscape facing women who wish to obtain an abortion, even by legal means.

“We don’t think there is a basis (for a lawsuit),” Marc Hearron, an attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, which is representing the woman, told CNN. “It is perfectly legal to leave Texas or any state and go get an abortion in a state where it is legal. And it is perfectly legal to help someone or be involved in someone going out of state and obtaining an abortion where it is allowed by law.”

Nancy Northup, president & CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn Roe v. Wade “opened the door to this kind of frightening and unacceptable fearmongering and harassment by one citizen against another.”

Mitchell has spearheaded other legal efforts in the wake of Texas’ abortion law. Last June, he represented a man who filed a wrongful death lawsuit against three friends of his ex-wife who allegedly assisted her in terminating her pregnancy with abortion medication, in an early legal test of the reach of wrongful death statutes in the wake of Roe’s reversal. That case has not yet been resolved.

It’s unclear whether Davis’ petition could lead to a lawsuit against the woman, said Drexel University Law Professor David Cohen.

“I definitely don’t think there is a basis for this,” he said. “But we have no confidence to know exactly what the Texas courts will say anymore, at any level.”

Other Republican-led states have sought to pressure women against seeking abortions in other states, particularly minors. Idaho’s legislature last year passed a bill — later blocked by a judge over constitutionality concerns — that would prohibit adults from helping minors cross state lines to get an abortion without parental permission. Meanwhile, Tennessee’s legislature is advancing a law that would similarly criminalize so-called “abortion trafficking” for minors in the state.

“This is all part of a scare campaign to make people afraid that if they go out of state and get an abortion, that they or their loved ones might be sued,” Hearron said. “We really want to emphasize that people should not be intimidated.”

Temple University Beasley School of Law Dean Rachel Rebouché called Davis’ legal maneuver “bizarre and concerning” but said it was not “surprising.”

“I think that we’ll see much more of this in the years to come, so long as Dobbs is in the books. And, frankly, this is exactly the type of example we should point to when we talk about when the Supreme Court should overturn Dobbs,” Rebouché told CNN.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/05/us/texas-abortion-collin-davis-colorado/index.html

So there you go

At a conference center plastered with slogans like “Let’s drain the swamp,” Republican after Republican endorsed harsh immigration policies, crackdowns on LGBTQ rights, and a battle against “woke ideology.”

The scene could have been any recent GOP event – except it was taking place roughly 4,000 miles away from the US at the Conservative Political Action Conference’s third annual gathering in Hungary.

The visiting GOP dignitaries’ praise for Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his authoritarian government showed how the small central European country has become an unlikely model for a potential Trump second term – despite what international observers have described as an alarming backsliding of democratic rights.


The American right’s growing embrace of Orbán builds upon millions of dollars that his government has spent on lobbying in the US, and new connections between Hungarian and American conservative think tanks.


In his opening speech at the CPAC conference in Budapest last week, Orbán endorsed former President Donald Trump’s reelection bid and painted this year’s elections in the US and European Union in militaristic terms.

“Make America great again, make Europe great again!” Orbán declared in English, before continuing in Hungarian: “Go Donald Trump! Go European sovereigntists! Let us saddle up, don our armor, take to the battlefield and let the electoral battle begin.”

Trump, who hosted the Hungarian leader at his Mar-a-Lago resort in March, sent a pre-recorded video message to the conference that echoed similar themes. The former president called Orbán “a great man” and hailed “so many patriots in Hungary who are proudly fighting on the frontlines of the battle to rescue Western civilization.”

The bromance between the two leaders comes as some Trump allies are turning to the Orbán playbook as they plan for his potential return to the White House. In his own video message, Trump confidant Steve Bannon described Hungary as “an inspiration to the world” and called Orbán “one of my heroes in the world today, in addition to President Trump.”

After Trump’s loss in 2020, “American conservatives started to look for what would be a successful conservative governing agenda,” said Gladden Pappin, a conservative political theorist who moved from Dallas to Budapest and now leads the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, a state-run research organization. “When American conservatives look to Hungary, they see a prime minister in a government that actually delivered on the slogans that they promised.”
Over his 14 years in power, Orbán has transformed Hungary into a laboratory for conservative policies and eroded democratic rights and civil society protections, according to his critics and European Union officials.

Orbán has centralized power by dismissing judges, changing election rules to favor his party, cracking down on NGO’s and appointing loyalists to key institutions. His government built a fence along the country’s southern border amid a migrant crisis in 2015 and passed stricter immigration policies. It tightened its grip on state media, reducing space for dissent.

The prime minister has also promoted a Christian nationalist view of Hungarian society, passing laws restricting transgender rights and adoption by same-sex couples, redefining marriage in the constitution to only cover unions between a man and a woman, and banning materials related to LGBTQ issues in schools.

Those are policies that some Trump allies would love to see him adopt if he returns to the White House next year. (Trump himself has previously called same-sex marriage settled law.)

Orbán’s policy platform “shows you what the recipe is for maintaining your national identity in a conservative way,” Pappin said in an interview. “Conservative politicians in America had this negative mindset toward government. They need to think about how to use government,” as Orbán has done.

The rhetoric on display at CPAC Hungary – a branch of the decades-running political confab in the US – showed that the American right is increasingly onboard with that idea. Conservatives from around the US, Europe and beyond traveled to Budapest for the two-day event, which was organized by a Hungarian government-funded think tank.

The meetings and speeches took place at a conference center inside a sprawling park on the west bank of the Danube River. The venue featured posters with English slogans that would have been right at home at a Trump rally, like “Let’s drain the swamp!” and “We win, they lose.” At least one attendee wore a shirt emblazoned with Trump and Orbán’s faces that declared the two leaders “saviors of the world.”

Security guards told reporters to stop filming in the park and organizers denied CNN’s request to attend the conference, writing in an email that the venue was “a NO WOKE ZONE.”

“We look forward to welcoming you to future events when and if your organization becomes significantly less woke,” the email read. Several other independent news outlets received similar denials.

Three Republican members of Congress spoke at the conference, and prominent GOP figures including Bannon, Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake, and Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows sent video messages that were played for attendees.

The Republicans lauded Orbán despite his authoritarian bent. Lake gushed about how her experience meeting the prime minister “changed my life.” Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland said that “Hungary has become one of the most successful models as a leader for conservative principles and governance.”

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/01/politics/gop-conservatives-hungary-cpac-orban-invs/index.html read it all

So I will say it..... the GOPQ really prefers Hitler and his policies.....

All you breeding incubators better wake the fuck up

Donald Trump used his day off from a criminal trial related to a past election to cast a dark, familiar shadow over the next one.

The presumptive GOP nominee declined to say if he’d accept the result of his White House race with President Joe Biden in November, warning in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Wednesday that if the election was not “honest,” then “you have to fight for the right of the country.”

The ex-president was campaigning in Wisconsin and Michigan but was due back in court Thursday in Manhattan for the resumption of his first criminal trial – over alleged falsification of business records to cover up a hush money payment to an adult film star ahead of the 2016 election.


His remarks on the 2024 contest were especially ominous given his refusal to accept his loss in 2020 based on his false claims of voter fraud. They also recalled his warning to supporters before the January, 6, 2021, mob attack on the US Capitol that if they didn’t “fight like hell,” they wouldn’t have a country anymore.

Trump’s warning was just the latest example this week of extreme rhetoric that suggests his threats to American democracy are undimmed.

On a sun-soaked airfield in Michigan on Wednesday, with his improbably long red tie appearing to levitate on the breeze, he conjured a strongman’s vision of a future America that would cause the country’s founders to shudder.

Trump cut an unrecognizable figure from the grim ex-president who bleats a daily dirge of complaints about his hush money trial outside Judge Juan Merchan’s court. And as if to defy prosecutors trying to call him to account in multiple cases, Trump used his most energetic rally in months on Wednesday to show a second term would test the law even more than his first.

“When I return to the White House, we will stop the plunder, rape, slaughter, and destruction of the American suburbs, cities and towns,” Trump vowed, pledging mass deportations of undocumented migrants, crackdowns on the bureaucracy and higher education and on what he called the “communists and criminals” in the Democratic Party. Earlier in Wisconsin, he updated his sketch of an “American carnage” national hellscape, warning that the nation was under siege from “radical extremists and far-left agitators who are terrorizing college campuses.”

Seeking to capitalize on protests sweeping universities countrywide, Trump claimed, “New York was under siege last night” and praised cops for breaking up a protest at Columbia University. “It was a beautiful thing to watch, New York’s finest. You saw them go up in ladders, they’re breaking the windows and getting in and that’s dangerous,” he said.

Since the hush money trial opened last month, he’s held fundraisers and local political stops but no full-scale rallies. (One event in North Carolina was canceled because of a storm.) But Wednesday was the first time an ex-president and potential future one used a midweek break in his own criminal trial to dash through swing states that could send him back to the White House. His raucous reception before a large crowd in Michigan was a reminder that days of potentially damaging testimony have done nothing to dent his appeal to supporters.

Trump, according to recent polls, has an even chance of winning the presidency, and his dynamic return to a stage where he, and not Judge Merchan, wields authority underscored his political threat to President Joe Biden’s hopes of a second term. On specific issues, surveys show Trump leading Biden on most issues including the economy, immigration, and the Israel-Hamas war. One of Biden’s few strong points is abortion rights – which Vice President Kamala Harris drove home on a trip to Florida Wednesday that saw her hammer Trump 21 times over the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade as she highlighted the state’s new six-week ban.

CNN political analyst David Axelrod, a former senior strategist for President Barack Obama, dispensed straight talk on Wednesday after days of media coverage of a trial that in a normal political era would likely have driven Trump out of the race. “The question really is, what effect is this whole thing having on the campaign, and I think there is very little evidence right now is that it is having an effect on the campaign at all,” he said.

Axelrod acknowledged that the verdict could move the needle but told CNN’s Erin Burnett: “In many peoples’ estimation, this is a non-event. “

Six months before the election, Trump’s searing campaign rhetoric is becoming less an exercise in performative demagoguery than a blueprint for a potential second term.

This is especially the case in the wake of an intriguing and at times chilling interview with Time published this week. The transcript, an 86-minute read on the magazine’s website, offers the most categorical personal statement from the man himself of how he’d change the country in a second term. He’s proposing a brand of quasi-autocratic leadership based on personal whim, a desire for retribution and almost no acknowledgement that the presidency is an office constrained by laws, the Constitution and the bedrock republican recoil from unbridled executive power.

Up to now, pro-Trump think tanks and advocacy groups have laid out policy manifestos for how Trump, as the 47th president, would gut the administrative state, introduce draconian immigration policies and shatter decadeslong traditions of US global leadership with a return of “America First” on steroids. Sometimes, Trump’s aides have cautioned that no one speaks for the ex-president but himself. But in the Time interview, Trump explains in his own words how a president who left office after a failed attempt to overturn democracy would behave if he ever got power back.

He said he’d mount an immediate effort to find, imprison and deport millions of undocumented migrants — a pledge he renewed on Wednesday with the words, “We will begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” Trump told Time he’d be open to firing any US attorney who doesn’t carry out his order to prosecute someone. Trump also said that he’d consider pardoning hundreds of supporters who attacked the US Capitol in a bid to overturn the 2020 election, thereby validating the use of violence as a tool of political expression in a hammer blow to the sanctity of democratic elections. He warned he’d send the National Guard to quell campus protests and to participate in immigration enforcement, apparently willing to smash the narrow exceptions on the use of the military on home soil. Trump spoke of the Guard more as a personal presidential militia than a legally circumscribed reserve force.

As the implications of the ex-president’s solidifying intentions sharpen, the hours he spends constrained in a Manhattan courtroom seem to be fueling his desire for retribution against his political opponents. “Never forget our enemies want to take away my freedom, because I will never let them take away your freedom,” Trump told his crowd in Freeland, Michigan, blasting four criminal indictments and several huge civil trial verdicts against him. The ex-president did not, however, appear to infringe a gag order that prevents him from taking aim at witnesses, court staff and even members of the judge’s own family. He was fined $9,000 for violations on Tuesday and faces another hearing on the issue before Merchan on Thursday.

It’s not just the fast-approaching election and Trump’s strength in the polls that makes his words carry more weight. In the Time interview, Trump comes across as confident and determined to learn the lessons of his first term in which he claims he was let down by “bad” officials. And this all comes as the Supreme Court considers his bid to establish almost absolute immunity from prosecution for presidents for acts they undertake in office.

At one point, the Time reporter, Eric Cortellessa, asked Trump if he understood why so many Americans are troubled by what he claimed were his past jokes about being a dictator for one day or terminating the Constitution. The former president replied simply, in one of the most revealing but disquieting answers of the entire interview: “I think a lot of people like it.”

He’s not wrong. Trump raced to the Republican nomination, crushing his rivals despite his disgraced exit from Washington in 2021, two impeachments and legal quagmire that would be remarkable for any defendant, let alone a potential future president. His strength shows that millions of Americans support policies that, if implemented, would buckle many of the safeguards on presidential power and that are likely to test the rule of law. So, Trump’s success in this election so far is not just a tale of an idiosyncratic political force, it’s a commentary on the sentiments of millions of people in the most important democracy on Earth at a tense political moment.

With Trump there are always caveats. His first term was a festival of chaos, led by a president who had a fleeting attention span and often appeared at war with his own administration. Sometimes, Trump is surprisingly loath to take risks that could harm his popularity. So there are no guarantees he could actually implement his hardline agenda. The interview was also a reminder of the way that Trump can come across as dangerous and vacuous at the same time. He often had a rudimentary grasp of policy or global realities. His potential approaches to challenges from abortion rights to China seem based on personal hunches and prejudices as much as considered strategy. And he’d face another showdown with the courts if he followed through as president with some of his harshest policies on immigration and firing civil servants wholesale.

Yet Trump would not come to Washington in January 2025 as a neophyte. He told Time that “the advantage I have now is I know everybody. I know people. I know the good, the bad, the stupid, the smart. I know everybody. When I first got to Washington, I knew very few people. I had to rely on people.”

This sense that things are suddenly getting serious was highlighted at the White House Correspondents’ Association annual dinner on Saturday. Biden recalled that Trump had made no secret of his “attack on our democracy” and highlighted his predecessor’s desire for “retribution.” He added: “Eight years ago, you could have written off it as just Trump talk. But no longer. Not after January 6.”

In the words of two presidents, only one of whom can win a second term in November, the stakes of the 2024 election are becoming increasingly clear.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/01/politics/trump-strongman-ambitions-analysis/index.html

Bt the way crime is down in the country. That includes murder rates.

Better wake the fuck up

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said states with abortion bans should be free to monitor pregnant women to make sure they don’t terminate their pregnancies, suggesting that would be in line with his newfound position of leaving abortion rights up to the states.

“I think they might do that,” Trump said in a Time magazine interview published Tuesday, when asked if he thinks states with abortion bans should track women who are pregnant.

Again, you’ll have to speak to the individual states,” he said. “Look, Roe v. Wade was all about bringing it back to the states.”

After months of giving mixed messages on abortion rights, Trump declared a few weeks ago that his position is that it’s up to states to decide their own laws.

But his position has long been that he opposes abortion rights.

He campaigned in 2016 on nominating conservative Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade. That is exactly what happened, and the three justices he put on the court were the driving force behind a ruling that removed the country’s 50-year constitutional right to abortion.

Trump’s positioning now, by putting the onus on state governments, aims to absolve him of any responsibility for restrictions that GOP-led states are currently placing on abortion. Reproductive rights are going to be a huge issue in the November elections, and Trump is trying to appear neutral on a topic he’s never been neutral on.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-states-monitoring-pregnant-women-abortion_n_663123ffe4b0849b2edd2cf3

So there you go women are nothing but breeding stock to him.... and to the MAGA trash

While even top GOP lawmakers are yielding to the will of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, at least one Republican who used to work in Trump’s White House says she has to vote for the other guy.

Former White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews torched Trump and the dissenting conservatives who’ve bent their knee to him in recent months, telling MSNBC that it’s “really frustrating” because “a lot of Republicans” that she has spoken to, including top elected officials, “will bash him privately, but many of them will not even say it publicly.”

“A lot of times what they often say is that they’re supporting him because of the policies, that they want the conservative agenda. And where I get really frustrated is that they’re treating this like it’s a normal election, a normal Republican candidate, and a normal Democratic candidate. Well, this couldn’t be anything further from the case,” Matthews said Monday night.

But when push comes to shove, conservative policy arguments don’t matter when the GOP presidential nominee is someone who refuses to acknowledge that he lost the last election, and who has not set aside the possibility of utilizing mob violence for his own political gain in November. For that reason, Matthews explained, she will be voting for President Joe Biden.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/finally-republican-shows-spine-says-164632119.html

Former Trump White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin has warned that Donald Trump’s potential second administration will be staffed by either “liars or lunatics.”

Griffin, a co-host on “The View,” on Tuesday pointed to the former president’s new interview with Time magazine — which reported the presumptive GOP nominee would “staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen” — as proof.

The lengthy interview is “Trump in his own words saying these scary things,” said Griffin.

“It is devastating to me that this is not resonating with Republicans, a party I’ve been a member of my whole life, that they’re just not believing it,” she continued. “The things he says, we should take literally.”

Trump admitted “he’s going to hire only loyalists and people who say that the last election was stolen,” Griffin added. “So, he’s admitting he’s going to staff a White House and the entire federal government with either liars or lunatics.”

The former Trump aide said she unequivocally wants her former boss to lose I November.

“He and [President] Joe Biden are neck and neck,” she warned. “It is very real that in seven months we will wake up to President-elect Donald Trump and that should be scary for every American.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/ex-aide-sums-ll-staff-073039645.html