Heat alert with very little light. Big Lie revisited: previous guy 'policy' speech is about spaces inhabited by fewer people.
Like in Nevada, Adam Laxalt suggests voting in urban areas is suspect while saying that in rural GOP areas it's "legitimate." The absent 59 words from his 7 January 2021 TV address say more than anything Trump says today.
Donald Trump did his Juan Guaidó impression from the teleprompter, because J6 would have been successful if Trump had his own army. Similarly, Trump went all Filipino by mimicking Duterte in calling for drug dealer death penalties and police cars on every corner.
Donald Trump is delivering a speech Tuesday in which he proclaims to be for law and order. He is doing this half a mile from the Capitol, where he incited numerous crimes on his behalf amid an extraordinarily corrupt and potentially criminal scheme planned and executed by Trump himself.
If that seems jarring, please note: That incongruence increasingly defines a trend represented by a new breed of Trumpist candidates.
Their common trait? They cast themselves as tough on law and order while embracing the most pernicious aspects of Trump’s effort to persuade millions to give up on the rule of law and democracy, and to remain above accountability for his attempt to destroy our legal and political order at its foundations.
Some of these candidates are feeding the public the same lies Trump used to inspire those criminal acts on Jan. 6, 2021. Others are hand-waving away those same crimes. Still others are scoffing at the need for any accountability at all for Trump’s coup attempt.
The “rule of law” involves certain hallmarks: equality before the law, stable political and legal institutions, a commitment to accountability and no special treatment for the very powerful. These candidates are making an utter mockery of such notions: They combine phony pieties about lawful and civil order with craven fealty to Trump’s lawlessness and his bid for utter impunity, and to the undisguised authoritarian nature of his movement.
www.washingtonpost.com/...
There’s an obvious cut in the Jan. 7 video the White House released and the committee showed us why. One take stops when Trump argues with his staff over the line in his script that “the election is over.” The video then picks up where his recitation restarts. Because of testimony to the committee, we also know Trump was lying when he said on that video that he had “immediately deployed the National Guard and federal law enforcement to secure the building and expel the intruders.” Pence made those calls, as several officials testified.
But the 59 words he ran his Sharpie through speak the loudest. They say that Trump was never willing to distance himself from his supporters, no matter how heinous their actions. They show that he still wanted their adoration even as he paid lip service to the importance of obeying the law. Those deleted words make clear that he would rather have embraced the attackers than demonize them.
www.msnbc.com/...
Former Trump White House trade adviser Peter Navarro urged former President Trump not to deliver his keynote speech at the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), criticizing members of the think tank’s staff and alleging they were working on a “‘Trumpism without Trump’ coup.”
Trump is set to deliver remarks on Tuesday at an AFPI summit, returning to Washington for the first time in a year and a half amid speculation he will run for president again in 2024.
But Navarro said Trump should put off the speech despite the need to create a stable of policy experts.
“Yes, it is important for President Trump to have a well-credentialed stable of policy experts capable of both building a 2024 platform and finding solid MAGA talent to populate a new Trump Administration. But the AFPI Trojan Horse—whose leadership is now bragging about how it will staff Trump’s ‘shadow cabinet’—is decidedly not that,” Navarro wrote in an op-ed on conservative website American Greatness.
thehill.com/...
“If he would actually read on our website, he would see just reams of research and policy proposals that continue the success of the Trump policies, including the President’s tough on China stance and continuing the Trump China tariffs. So, it’s just misguided, and I would have expected better from him.”
Marc Lotter was director of strategic communications for the Trump-Pence 2020 campaign and served as a special assistant to the president and press secretary to Vice President Mike Pence in the White House.
Mr. Navarro, a key voice on trade in the prior administration, says former President Donald Trump should cancel plans to speak Tuesday at an AFPI event because, according to Mr. Navarro, the think tank is not devoted to the former president’s ideology.
Writing for the American Greatness publication, he said the policy panels feature experts who contradicted Mr. Trump in the past or worked with persons who are not aligned with the MAGA movement.
www.washingtontimes.com/...
Trump, who masterminded and incited the 1/6 attack said that violence is tearing America apart:
Trump later demanded the authority to unilaterally deploy the National Guard against the American people:
Trump bragged about sending the Secret Service out to hassle the homeless when he was president...
The speech was Trump wearing his authoritarianism on his sleeve. Trump told lots of scary stories about white people being crime victims, said that he wanted a court system like China’s for drug dealers, and lapsed back into the usual anti-immigrant racism that he has been running on since 2015.
Trump’s speech was a total disaster for the Republican Party because it reminded every non-Trumper that the former president is an unstable person with democracy destroying ambitions.
www.politicususa.com/…
Trump’s comments calling for a crackdown on drug dealers, which included praise for quick trials in other countries, came as part of a broader vision for harshly cracking down on crime.
The former president painted a picture of a bleak and dystopian country, highlighting instances of civilians being attacked in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere.
He called for police squad cars to be parked on every corner.
Trump suggested moving encampments of homeless people out of major cities and to “large parcels of inexpensive land at the outer reaches of the city” and creating tents with medical professionals.
Trump called for passing laws to give police more authority and strengthen qualified immunity so law enforcement does not fear repercussions.
He called for a “no-holds-barred national campaign to dismantle gangs and organized street crime in America.”
The former president called for efforts to defeat violence “and be tough and be nasty and be mean if we have to.”
thehill.com/...