DON JONES INDEX… |
|
|
GAINS
POSTED in GREEN LOSSES POSTED in RED |
|
3/26/21… 13,913.34 3/19/21…
13,930.56
6/27/13… 15,000.00 |
DOW JONES INDEX: 3/26/21…32,618.48; 3/19/21…32,862.80; 6/27/13…15,000.00)
LESSON for March 26, 2021 – “A CLOWN who should be KING!”
Spring
has sprung, beautiful things are come… warmth,
flowers, maskless SuperSpreader parties on Florida
beaches. But also a few unpleasant
things… yellow dust pollen, insects, weeds. You take the bad with the good.
Ex-President
Donald Trump’s address to the hungry hordes at the Conservative Political
Action Committee (CPAC) (see recent DJI) promised them plenty of
the latter, but augured enough of the former to orthodox Republicans (oft
derided as RINOs) fearing, rather than hoping a cleansed party will overcome
(or at least hold even) in 2022 and 2024.
Right
off the bat (tastier stewed than roasted, with cumin and cinnamon and a side of
kimchi), 45 announced his resurrection like Freddy or
Jason or one of those sorts leaping from the grave and proclaiming “I’m
b-a-a-a-ck!”
“I stand
before you today to declare that the incredible journey we’ve begun together,
we went through a journey like nobody else. There’s never been a journey like
it. There’s never been a journey so successful. We began it together four years
ago, and it is far from being over. We’ve
just started.”
Now
the Medal Mitts and Killer Kinzingers (and maybe even
Mike Pence and Minority Mitch) can hold out hope Trump… maybe, just maybe… was
referring to his intent to start up a cable news network to supplant the
despicable wussies of Fox and sock it to Sleepy Joe,
or write a tell-all book or even resuscitate “The Apprentice”. And they might even be joined, clandestinely
of course, by certain ostensible incensibles who fear
Trump but love Trumpism – specifically, those with
ambitions of their own for 2024: Pence, Dakota Gal Kristi Noem,
defriended gal Nikki Haley, Lyin’
Ted Cruz or the Florida trinity of Governor Ron deSantis
(who finished second to The Donald in a CPAC straw poll) and Senators Rick
Scott and Little Marco Rubio.
But
it did seem, from the speech at least, that the Ex was laying the groundwork
for a return, like General McArthur, preparatory to an awful, awful defeat – a
thrashing on the order of Goldwater 1964 that will drag down the House and the
Senate, Governors and down-ballot Republicans – perhaps even giving Joe Biden a
veto-proof, filibuster-proof supermajority.
Their task becomes to distract the easily distracted Donald by finding
him a job to do that will stoke the dumpsterfire of
his enormous ego without doing further damage to the party or the country.
A
niece, Mary… daughter to Djonald’s older brother
Freddy who failed to live up to his grandfather’s expectations and died an
alcoholic… compares her uncle to Frankenstein’s Monster. In her tell-all best seller “Too Much and
Never Enough”, she recounts some of the more grisly and grotesque Tales of
Trump including his own apprenticeship at the claws of Roy Cohn, Sen. McCarthy’s
old lawyer from the 50’s.
“He’s
a clown!” was the curt opinion of his older sister, Maryanne, upon the announcement…
in 2015… that he would run for President.
But,
lacking shame or sense, is 45 ready to strike up the marching band and reach
for 47?
For
‘Pubs, the stakes are existential.
Those
who have the means to access them have had spirits elevated by the three
vaccines now roaming America, looking for arms in which to be shot; spring
break is at hand with wild, maskless parties and states and localities are
opening public attractions and schools and restaurants quick as they can wield
a plastic bottle of spray disinfectant or rip the mask off an Uber driver and cough. Doctors and bureaucrats are aghast,
going on television and social media to warn Don Jones that, despite the vaxxes and (until last week) the drop in plague
particulars, we have already endured three waves of the Coronavirus:
a small First Wave largely affecting global travelers and bat-eating Chinese; a
larger Second Wave, in which the pandemic spread to all corners of the globe
before hot weather moderated its spread and then, when the Northern Hemisphere
cooled down, a humongous Third Wave, in which hospitalizations spiked to the
extent of overwhelming resources in the hardest hit states or, as in the case
of Texas, of late, the unluckiest. Now,
they say, a Fourth Wave is at hand – egged on by the multiplying mutations and
variants. South Africa, Britain, Brazil…
it seems as if every week brings a new plague upon us – and every new plague is
more communicable and/or deadly than the last.
So
it seems with the advances and retreating of ex-President Donald J. Trump. Number forty-five now seems poised to enter
his own Fourth Wave… a plague to his detractors, a life and soul-saving vaccine
to his followers. So let’s look back at…
four, three, two, one…
Zero?
Why
not? Like many… even most if you tweak
the DNA… Mister Drumpf is descended from multiple
royal bloodlines.
A
short diversion…
After weeks of sifting through thousands of documents and
old photographs at the Norfolk Central Records Office, the Norfolk (U.K.) Gazette unearthed
the extraordinary Trump maternal heritage in the village of West Newton, just
south of Sandringham.
“Mr Trump’s great, great-grandfather Archibald “Archie” Trump,” they
announced (hint, hint at the royal reference) bought eight acres of land in
1827, and he toiled for more than 50 years with the help of his sons Abraham
and Henry, before he died in 1879, aged 68.”
We’ll
return to that cue anon. Moving on
through birth and, writes cuzzin Mary, a truly dreadful
childhood, apprentice slumlordship, brash but lonely
boy learning the tricks of the trade from an uber-tricky
Daddy, draft dodger and heir to a real estate fortune, First Wave Donald was no
more than a shady and starstruck hotel and casino
developer with political pretensions and not much in the way of policies except
for the fact that, being rich, what was good for rich people (deregulation, tax
cuts, media muzzling, hating Ed Koch) was good for him.
In
his Second Wave, Trump campaigned for and won the Presidency, then governed
four years. His campaign was a beast of
malevolent beauty; aided and abetted by jokers like Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, former (anti-Koch, ergo good) Gotham Mayor Rudy
Giuliani and his fright-wig of a family (not to mention Scott Baio and Johnny Rotten), Djonald
swept to victory (perhaps with a little help from his friends in Russia). Four years slaves (or willing supplicants) to
45, America endured and feared… but the worst scenarios failed to occur. We did not get into a nuclear war with
Russia, nor even with North Korea, the Chinese were
alternately too bemused and confused by the strange round-eye in the White
House and the economy, abetted by drilling deregulations whose effects will
become apparent over the coming decades, soared to record heights.
Well,
at least the stock market did. Working
people with incomes under fitty thou, or thereabouts,
found their wages did not even keep up with lowered inflation rates, the poor
were abandoned, the elderly sighed and opened another can of cat food. The struggling middle Jones, struggling to
keep up with other Joneses, put their purchases on plastic and hoped for better
days ahead – the second coming of an Obama, or Christ. And Trump, who dubbed Himself a “stable
genius” struck a genius (if ultimately destabilizing) blow… he turned the
always-menacing, always-incipient prospect of class war into the twenty-first
century alternative: race war.
Warning
the sheep that grim and grisly hordes of Mexican and other Spanish-speaking
drug-pushers, killers and psychopaths were flooding across the border like the
cockroaches in Robert DeNiro’s campaign commercials
in “Machete”, inner-city blacks would invade the suburbs to rob and rape and
kill while sinister Orientals spread lethal disease amidst the homeland, Trump
pronounced he would build a great and beautiful wall. He didn’t, but he did built a lot of cages
into went the immigrant children while their parents – some, of course,
criminal but many having lived and worked here for years, or decades – were
taken away separately and sent back down across the Rio Grande. Chinese and other Asian-Americans were tarred
and feathered, occasionally literally, more often as carriers and, some of the
Circle maintained, masterminds behind the Chinese plague. A troubled parishioner of the Crabapple
Baptist Church in Milton, GA gunned down eight people… seven women, six Asian…
at Atlanta massage parlours, setting off a
victimization contest between partisans fighting racism or misogyny, Black unemployment
remained at unhealthy levels and anxious policemen took to harsh repressive
measures to fight crimes like driving while black or eating ice cream… bodies
started mounting up and public outrage did, too. Some of the demonstrations against police
brutality escalated to riots which generated a black masked alt-left Antifa burned cars and stores and looted bling, thus enabling the Enabler-in-Chief to (indirectly)
mobilize the troops of his hard-right base… the mob, the alt-righters and even neo-Nazis (whom he celebrated as “good
people” and beckoned to stand ready).
And
a peanut in the gallery of the Fresno Bee cited the ejection of uppity Univision anchor Jorge
Ramos from a press conference “for asking irreverent and disconcerting questions”,
comparing it to “a scene from “Monty Python and The
Holy Grail.”
But
when the ham all went to hell in 2020, the culprit was not human (unless you
believed some of the further-out White MAGA-cians of
Twitter and Parler, talk radio and Fox who declared
that the Coronavirus had had its origins in the
secret laboratories (not exotic meat markets) of devious Orientals) but,
rather, a plague – another of the sort that crop up every century or so from
Justinian Rome to the Black Death to Restoration England, even to the Spanish
flu pandemic of… hey, presto!... one century ago. But there was a difference – this distemper
was not spread by rats, or fleas, or soldiers returning from World War One… it had gone viral.
And
it has already proven longer-lasting (if not quite as lethal as the Black Death
– not yet).
Trump’s
shiny but shaky economy collapsed. His
response to the plague ranged from the incompetent to the bizarre (the base
were summoned to drink bleach, not Kool-Aid).
The
Second Wave collapsed and Trump was beaten by an elderly Vice President by the
same electoral margin as he had defeated and melted the wicked witch Hillary
Clinton four years ago.
And
then the Third Wave arrived… much shorter, but much more
fiercer in terms of collateral damage to the nation as well as just the
people. Although there was plenty of
lead-up preparation and, to this day, the law and order mopping up continues, the Third Wave spawned, crested and retreated in
just a matter of hours on January 6th.
It
failed… for reasons still unclear as President, militia and the mob point
fingers at one another; replicating one of the Democrats’ favorite
entertainments, the circular firing squad.
Two
months after the One-Six, after the Senators slithered back from their
hidey-holes to count the electoral ballots and declare Joseph R. Biden the 46th
President; two weeks later whence, now under heavy guard, the disgraced Ex and
his entourage forwent a desperate armed White House standoff with police,
packed up the moving vans and fled south like so many honking geese who, after
Twitter and such cut off his social media accounts, stopped honking and started
brooding in his basement.
But
you can’t keep a good (say Lindsay Graham, Ted Cruz and Mike Lindell) or bad (say Chuck, Nancy and the wokesters on the left) man (or woman, or alt-) down; not
one bursting with so much energy and sheer volume of vowels, consonants and
coughing as Djonald Unchained. Like a kitten distracted by something,
anything, dangling and shiny, maybe it’s time for the Old Right to join Uncle
Joe’s Old and New Left and pass a Constitutional Amendment more palatable to
Trump than the 14th.
Let’s
make him a King! Our
King. King Donald the First!
There
is both precedent (dating back eight hundred years to the Magna Carta) and plenty of leeway in establishing a King of
America for an awkward former President, should the Brits be our model. AboutBritain.com defines the problem
succinctly…
Asked: “A short guide to the
constitutional framework of the United Kingdom”
Answered: “The United Kingdom does not have a constitution”
(See
Attachment One)
Wikipedia
has listed a directory of constitution and… uh… other monarchies. The
“Commonwealth realms” include Antigua and Barbuda; the Commonwealth of
Australia; the Commonwealth of the Bahamas; Barbados; Belize; Canada; Grenada;
Jamaica; New Zealand; the Independent State of Papua New Guinea; the Federation
of Saint Kitts and Nevis; Saint Lucia; Saint Vincent and the Grenadines;
Solomon Islands; Tuvalu; and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern
Ireland). They evolved out of the British Empire into fully independent states
within the Commonwealth of Nations that retain the Queen as head of state,
unlike other Commonwealth countries that are either dependencies, republics or
have a different royal house. All sixteen realms are constitutional monarchies
and full democracies, where the Queen has limited powers or a largely
ceremonial role.
Other
European monarchies, all constitutional are the Principality of Andorra; the
Kingdom of Belgium; the Kingdom of Denmark; the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg; the
Kingdom of the Netherlands; the Kingdom of Norway; the Kingdom of Spain; and
the Kingdom of Sweden are fully democratic states in which the monarch has a
limited or largely ceremonial role.
Liechtenstein and Monaco are constitutional monarchies in which the
Prince retains many powers of an absolute monarch. Sovereign Military Order of Malta (S.M.O.M.), and the Vatican City State in Europe are also
monarchies, of sorts.
Muslim
monarchies “generally retain far more powers than their European or
Commonwealth counterparts.” There are
also Asian monarchies in Bhutan, Cambodia, Japan and Thailand.
For
centuries, the English monarchy held a great deal of authority, but its history
is full of challenges to that power and of concessions to nobles. Most
famously, King John's signing of Magna Carta in 1215
acknowledged that the monarchy's powers did have limits and, crucially,
established that the crown could not levy taxes without the consent of a
council of religious officials and feudal lords. That council of wealthy and
powerful figures evolved into Parliament, which gradually took on a greater
role as English people began to appeal to it to solve disputes and send
representatives to petition it on their behalf.
(See History.com, Attachment Three)
.
The
Amendment(s) to the American constitution, inasmuch as much of the original was
derived from English common law, despite the Revolution, would be amended and
tidied up as a new Section Five to Article Two (or, if the Trumpish
ego so demands, as the new Section One with the existing Sections One through
Four each downgraded by one space – a concession that would probably not alter
the context, although some lawyering would be
inevitable.
Further,
the preceding Article One, Section Nine (8) would be amended by simply deleting
the prohibition of issuing titles of nobility – either as specifically refers
to the King (or Queen) or generally, incorporating Queen Melania,
Prince Donald (the Second), Princess Ivanka, Prince
Jared and… God save Melania… Prince
Erik and Princess Tiffany. As grandfatherees, the Trump grandchildren would also be Princified (if not necessarily Principled). During a budgetary crisis some years ago,
this Index once recommended said issuance of lesser titles… Counts,
Earls, Dukes, Dukes of Earl, Knights of the Realm, whatever… for a sliding, but
significant fee. With the plague
debts incurred over the past year, this might be an especially tasty cherry
atop the royal cone.
A
simple Amendment might look like this:
Article II
Section I
(The Constitutional Monarch)
The ceremonial power of the United States shall be
vested in a King or Queen1 whose duties shall consist in the
bestowing of national honors, interacting with the public on festive, but not
solemn occasions, and attending such celebratory functions, parades and
occasions of State in which the President cannot participate and gives the
monarch his or her consent. He (or She)
and the heirs to the throne shall receive a stipend for said services, and
shall have use of the Royal Palace at Mar-a-Lago in
Florida with expenses to be paid for by the Republic. Under no circumstances is the monarch to
conduct policy, make appointments or approve or disapprove of legislation passed
by the House and Senate, save in the annual bestowal of a golden medal to that
American citizen whom, in the monarch’s estimation, is most worthy of the
honor.
1
The monarchy shall fall to such King or Queen as satisfices
the traditional rules of primogeniture.
If a monarch should decease or be removed from Office as a consequence
of incapacity (as so ordained by a panel of medical professionals appointed by
the Surgeon General) the line of succession shall be as follows: Spouse; Eldest
son or daughter, grandchildren of eldest in order of birth, Siblings of Monarch
and their offspring in order of birth, grandchildren of Monarch by
primogeniture or, lacking all of the above, a televised duel of contestants
supported by sufficient American citizens – said outcome to be decided by
popular vote or trial by combat, said method also to be determined by popular
vote.
The
powers and duties of an American King should be explicitly and solely
ceremonial… King Donald would have the budget and authority to lead parades,
issue medallions of tribute to worthy worthies after nomination and approval by
Congress or President Joe, smash champagne bottles on the prow of new ships and
maybe (if his consent demands such) be allowed to regain his Twitter account
with the hashtag @RealKingDonald
I.
A
deal should also be brokered in which Mar-a-Lago is
sold back to America for a dollar with the provision that Djonald
and all his royal descendents shall continue to inhabit it, rent free, so long
as the lineage survives. (The rest of
its inhabitants would be bought out or kicked out.) He would also receive a
modest royal budget, including staff, Secret Service protection, a Christmas Tree, unlimited American flags, and could keep the gold
statue much embraced at CPAC to be installed at its entrance.
The
AIRBnB leeches inhabiting various nooks and crannies
would be evicted, but money might be recouped by daytime tourism and the
occasional… you know… classy fete permitted under the model of the realWhitehouse and Buckingham Palace after the danger of
the Coronavirus has lessened. (Well, strike that, 45
probably still believes that the plague is a Chinese hoax, so let ‘em all in. Except for Chinese and the
Democrats.)
But
there’s good news for the egotistical 45… researchers in Norfolk, U.K. have
unearthed evidence of at least a royal connection (if not birth - See
Attachment Four)
There
is ample reasoning to believe that Mister Trump might accept the offer of
Kingship as an alternative to running in 2024 and, if somehow victorious,
having to pick up those duties he often decried as onerous and distracting from
his golf game. Personally,
psychologically and professionally, this Ex-President is a perfect match.
Consider
his upbringing… niece Mary wrote a rather nasty tell-all about the various
Trumps and Drumpfs - some passages included below –
but there are other sources that hint at the ex-President’s psychology.
Five months
before the 2020 contest, the New York Times… covering the President’s photo-op
tour of Britain, expressed the conviction that “Trump’s Love Affair With the
Royal Family Dates Back to His Mother” citing the wife of real-estate
developer-tyrant Fred Trump whom Mary called “Gam” as
one of those star-struck Kool-Aid drinkers of the Cult of the Crown. (See Attachment Five... further coverage in
advance of and during that June journey from the likes of the hoity toity Town and Country to plebian U.K. tabloids to the
U.S.A.’s NBC is attached as Sixes: A through E and a summing up of the
financial costs of Presidency v. Royalty has been documented by Politico... Six F.)
Some may
have considered Djonald a lousy President, but most
would agree that he was, and remains, a master creator of spectacles and rooty-toot rallies, the greatest showman since, well,
whomever it was that choreographed those rallies in Nuremberg and elsewhere
Mister Hitler so desired. A P.T. Barnum
for the twenty-first century and… especially once the plague had worked its own
cancel-magic on spectator sports, arena concerts, bar, nightclub and restaurant
schmoozing, family gatherings, movie theatres and cultural events highbrow (the
ballet, the opera), lowbrow (monster truck races) and in-between middlebrowsings like Broadway… his tweets and rallies, his deeds
of vengefulness and silliness all helped bored Americans and even foreigners
pass the boring and lonely nights and days of Corona.
What would
life be like with, if not under, Donald the First. History, historians, talking heads and
tap-tap-tapping fingers proffer a mixed message of a complicated and
unpredictable monarch.
Good King
Don
“I
said at the start that I do it to do it.
But in the end, you’re measured not by how much you undertake, but by
what you finally accomplish.” So the Art
of the Deal concludes with a recapitulation of Djonald’s
ventures and adventures of the course of a week – some involving the United
States Football League (post-mortem, litigation failing), Wollman
Rink (completed under budget in 1986), Palm Beach Towers (a successful joint
venture with Lee Iacocca that opened Trump’s eyes to the possibilities in South
Florida – he calls Mar-a-Lago “as close to paradise
as I’m going to get” - (See Attachments Eight, A and B, and “Art of the Deal
pgs. 25/6 – for those interested, an adjoining mansion
is on the market for fifty mil.), a casino in Las Vegas (an opportunity
studied, then rejected in favor of Atlantic City) and a hotel in Moscow. (This would eventually fall through, but did
introduce Mister Trump to some very interesting persons.
It’s not as
if America is unsuited or unfamiliar to dynastic rule. John Adams begat John Quincy; one month
wonder William Henry Harrison’s grandson Benjamin also became President; Teddy
and Franklin Roosevelt were distant cousins from different parties and, in more
modern times, there have been the Kennedys, Bushes and Clintons. Erik’s wife
Lara Trump is said to be thinking of sticking at least a privileged toe into
the political waters as Senatorial challenger to RINO Richard Burr and former
press secretary Sara Huckabee Sanders will run for
Daddy’s old job (and Slick Willie’s) as Governor of Arkansas. Name recognition counts. Fame engenders familiarity.
As does
success… or its measure in twenty-first century America, money. Pacific Standard allowed, shortly before the
2016 contest that, while racial and ethnic animus and the appeal of authoritarianism are clearly a
factor, “there’s something about Trump that his fans identify with and find
appealing.” They cited a theory by Amanda Friesen: It’s not Trump’s wealth so much
as the way he flaunts it.
“I wonder if Trump supporters at a
certain economic level, and from a certain cultural background, would make
exactly his choices, if they had the money,” she wrote. “They do not aspire to
hobnobbing over foie gras
and a ’78 Margaux before the Met gala; they want ringside seats at Mayweather-Pacquiao with the penthouse suite at MGM Grand.”
In other words, Trump largely shares
his supporter’s tastes; the difference is that he has the money to act on those
mutual desires. “And that, Friesen argues, forges an emotional connection with
his working-class supporters.” Sufficient to get him elected President,
sufficient to accept him as King.
Trump
retains a firm grip on his party, topping polls of prospective nominees for
president in 2024, according to the liberal Guardian U.K. “He is eligible to run for office again
because he was acquitted at his second impeachment trial, on a charge of
inciting the Capitol riot.”
“Candidate
Trump’s personal and policy certainty, when combined with his ability to
entertain and brand, gave him an unstoppable advantage,” GOP stalwart Newt
Gingrich (“Trump and the American Future”) gushed.
“So when
Trump became president, he continued these patterns to the delight of millions,
the astonishment of many, and the hatred of some. One of the things that most upset the
Republican establishment and the Left was the degree to which President Trump
had been shaped by his career in business.
Anyone who’s read Trump two bestsellers, The Art of the Deal and The Art of the Comeback would have
recognized that this was a very thoughtful, calculating and daring
businessman.”
And what must be the real world
function of a Constitutional Monarch other than to point a royal finger at the
foibles and the follies of the hoi polloi?
And, on Planet Tabloid, to pay for his and the family’s privileges by
providing the mob with circuses (if not bread)… the libertarian Reasoners noting that Trump had told attendees at a late
October rally in Erie, Pennsylvania that a vote for Biden was a vote for "boredom"
and "…if you (have) Sleepy Joe, nobody's going to be interested in
politics anymore."
Sen.
Lindsay Graham, an alternating Trumpian pitbull and poodle placed nice doggie in a Smithsonian
article of March 8th, likening the deposed President to famous controversialists of days gone by. “To me, Donald Trump is sort of a cross
between Jesse Helms, Ronald Reagan and PT Barnum. I mean, just bigger than
life.”
(Helms, a North Carolina senator who died in 2008, was a hardline conservative and segregationist; in the words of
one columnist when he died, an “unabashed racist”. PT Barnum was a 19th-century businessman, politician, and circus
impresario.)
Trump,
Graham insisted, “could make the Republican party
something that nobody else I know could make it. He can make it bigger, he can
make it stronger, he can make it more diverse. And he
also could destroy it.” (See Attachment Nine)
When Trump was planning Television City prior to entering
politics, a 150-story monolith that would have become the tallest building in
the world (and an irresistible target to al-Qaeda!) Republican columnist George Will wrote: “Donald Trump is not
being reasonable. But, then, man does
not live by reason alone… Brashness, zest and elan
are part of this country’s character.”
Mad King
Don
Of course there have been (and will continue to be)
detractors. Even Reason itself chided
the unreasonable 45, concluding he “wasn’t a dictator, but he played one on
TV.” (See Attachment Ten)
And the “Murdoch-owned New York
Post, which endorsed Trump and ran with Hunter Biden allegations that other
outlets could not substantiate”, questioned the madness according to a
pre-Christmas, pre-one/six column in the Washington Post warning of a “dark
charade”, and further citing an editorial urging
Trump to stop “cheering for an undemocratic coup” and to avoid being the “King
Lear of Mar-a-Lago, ranting about the corruption of
the world.” (Attachment Eleven)
Stage left - Sasha Abramsky
of the liberal Nation tweeted… post-election, pre-coup… on December fourth that
“…the
last spasms of Trumpist rule are truly a sight and
sound to behold. Trumpism is at this point nothing
more than a blend of cultism and fascism, a violent, nihilistic howl against
the pillars of American democracy unparalleled in presidential history.” (Attachment Twelve)
But the San Jose Spotlight
(Attachment Twelve A) even poked fun at Djonald’s
dictatorial acumen, opinionating that he had blundered his way out of the
military support necessary to mount a successful coup.
And then along came Mary (Trump). “Donald today,” she concluded… and remember, this was before the one-six… is much as he was at
three years old; incapable of growing, learning, or evolving, unable to regulate
his emotions, moderate his responses, or take in and synthesize information.”
As we know,
the U.K. has a tradition of, even affection for, their
crazy monarchs. Their tabloid people…
like MAGA a minority, but sizeable, live and breathe the adventures of Charles
and Diana, Diana and the paparazzi and Camilla, William and Harry, Meghan and
Kate and the to-do over what-to-do with poor, reviled Andrew.
Let’s be perfectly clear, a Constitutional Monarch
isn’t a dictator. “And while
(Trump’s base) almost certainly don’t have the bite to match their bark (The
Nation, 12/4/20), the very fact that people surrounding Trump are calling for
dictatorship ought to send a chill up all Americans’ spines. That Trump himself apparently muzzled the
bite… albeit in a confused and ad hoc manner… revealed him as a wannabe – a
strange little man playing with the costuming of authority, just as Mr. Alissa brought home his new guns to play with before
decamping to the supermarket to shoot shoppers.
Giving him
the fiction of importance, so most Republicans who want to win and will want to
do so even more desperately by 2022, let alone 2024, means giving him a stage,
rather as Sen. Cruz (R-Cancun) called the Democrats’ doomed gun control
legislation, as opposed to the bully pulpit which the bully indulged in during
his incumbency. That it is an empty
stage… the lights down, the audience nonexistence or removed to the remoteness
of Zoom… really doesn’t matter, so long as the thatch-haired thespian can pose
and preen and stutter his utterance ceremonial to the delight of the mob.
Yes, the
Brits know well… and many of them are quite fond of… their crazy royals. Part of this warmth might well derive from
their tabloid media (which have just taken a slap from Meghan, Duchess of
Sussex whom they drove off to Canada and now regret the loss of a certified,
verified cash cow) and a culture of glitz and gossip that would make a Prince
wince (Andrew, not Charles). And perhaps
an even larger part derives from the conviction among the masses that, for all
their titles and pretense, the royals are little more than a passel of loons –
succored and sucked-up to for their ability to entertain, rather like some of
the more frenzied and discombobulated thespians before the advent of the cancel
culture.
The U.K. Independent compared Donald Trump – as his grasp on
power melted away on election night – to "Mad King George, muttering,
'I won. I won. I won,' " according to one close adviser, who spoke to The Washington Post. Another anonymous WashPost leaky Pete told the
paper that the post-electoral
theory (between November fourth and January fifth) was: "Just roll
everybody up who is willing to do it into a clown car, and when it’s time for a
press conference, roll them.” (See
Attachment Thirteen)
During the
long, long impeachment longnesses and even longer
suzerainty of King Pest, reasonable Deep State mouthpieces positively swooned
over the prospect of another master manipulator (lacking only a toothbrush
moustache) manipulating America into the trenches of totalitarianism. As the bony fingers of Coronavirus
tightened around Americans’ necks, the Associated Press and U.S. News and World
Report (April 18th, see Attachment Fourteen) called the President “pretender
to a throne that doesn't exist” and fact-checked his statements on Federal and
State power division, Chinese culpability, the World Health and Trade
Organizations and the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine
while, in urging the necessity of impeachment
before November 4th, Rolling Stone (see Attachment Fifteen) summoned
up the ghosts of the Framers (of the Constitution and Declaration of
Independence).
They might
have also mentioned the French. Mister
Trump has not exactly been decapitated but, with seventy percent of the
electorate now wise to his con, his continued capers on the stage merely allow
the Democrats to slide further and further to the left until even Bernie
Sanders and the Squad evince alarm.
Fortunately,
with the plague still imposing varying degrees of lockdown and cancellations
driving Americans to drink, the ex-President’s professional peccadillos
and pejorative personal persiflage directed at rivals and scoundrels and
disloyal subordinates are a match for those of the British Royal Family;
It’s
been a visible (if not exactly
glorious) month for royalty. Over the
pond, QE2 issued a Proclamation in advance of her grandson and his blackamoor paramour Meghan’s tell-all on Oprah; a
performance that let Liz and her ailing Prince Philip off the hook, but raised
questions about the Princes Charles and William, not to mention their
wives. Also off the
hook, Prince Salman of oil-rich Saudi Arabia, to whom
Biden delivered a lecture on democracy, but no sanctions (except to some
forty-odd patsies implicated in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi).
Other royalty with royalties… Absolute, Constitutional or other… include
Spain, the Netherlands, three-fourths of Scandanavia,
Jordan, Thailand and Japan.
Queen Elizabeth and her more Princes than a “Purple
Rain” impersonator night in Minneapolis (but not Andrew - as we learned from
Oprah, the Queen’s consort, her children and grandchildren are so titled, but Princification of any great-grandchildren has to be greenlighted by Her Majesty, who has, heretofore, enacted
her prerogative or doling out a royal snub to the little rascal) hold their
titles and responsibilities under Parliamentary rule.
Meghan Markle became a princess of the United Kingdom
upon her marriage to Prince Harry, entitled to the
style of Royal Highness. ... Following the Duke and Duchess's decision to step
back from royal duties in 2020, the couple agreed not to use the style of
"Royal Highness" in practice, but still technically retain the style.
This
has not precluded a smattering of royal jealousy between Meghan and Princess
Kate Middleton- with Prince William, Duke of Cambridge second in the line of
succession to the British throne, Catherine being first in line as future queen
consort under the British laws of primogeniture.
Quoth da Queen…
“The whole family is saddened to
learn the full extent of how challenging the last few years have been for Harry
and Meghan.
“The issues raised, particularly
that of race, are concerning. While some recollections may vary, they are taken
very seriously and will be addressed by the family privately.
“Harry,
Meghan, and Archie will always be much loved family members.”
And if misfortune should befall The Donald, America may have
faith that Donald Junior will pick up the (ceremonial) reins and trot off on
his own course – shooting elephants and awarding gold medals to Mike Lindell. And if the
elephant tramples the hunter, there’s always Ivanka.
Or Erik.
Of course, not everybody lionized the British royals in the
first place. Mary McAleese is still fighting
on, she tells Liadán Hynes (See Attachment Sixteen).
'He's
always been a dictator,” scoffed ex-president Mary McAleese
in the Irish Independent; “a man of absolutely no moral conscience whatsoever.
And now he heads a domestic terrorism group, which he created."
A
true British aristocrat, in other words.
Or, suggested the Pacific Standard, a “Jay Gatsby, throwing the party
and drawing people in with his excess and opulence.”
Like his
Trump Taj Mahal – which a
bystander standing by the palace called “ostentatious”, but then added “…that
attracts the majority of people.”
To be sure,
there are downsides – reasons why Trump’s masquerades might spin crazily out of
control, or why 45’s ego had so swelled that he no longer would be content with
the trappings and perks of power, but would insist on retaining the
reality. This would be a shame – a great
waste of a great pretender
Above all,
Joe Biden, his Administration, Congress and America would have to maintain
constant vigilance and slap down the King when he strayed off his reservation
and started cutting deals with foreigners.
Those pursuits pursued for profit should not be a problem, but if the
mercurial King woke up one day with the notion to use his influence with the
mob and military (not there is much of the latter… see Attachment Twelve) to
storm D.C. again and seize the authenticity of an Authentic, not Constitutional
monarchy, he should just have to be put in his place, sent to bed without his
supper (other than a bowl of broccoli) and without his SmartPhone. No tweets for you!
Eventually,
one hopes that he would adapt (and that, menaced by a potential Act of
Parliament… er, Congress… suspending primogeniture,
Donald Junior would also behave or risk being shoved aside in favor of King
Erik while Jared and Ivanka could be dissuaded from
plotting against the commoners and lesser nobility by charity work and,
perhaps, running a small but high-end business in crafts and jewels and the
like).
"I
spoke briefly with the Queen when I came in. I spoke to the president a little
bit longer,” said Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy after
June’s state banquet (See Attachment Six (E). “He was very happy and excited.
She seemed to be very pleased they were there. The president has tremendous
respect for not only the British royals but for Britain.”
So maybe Djonald would just take to the job like a duck to water. Or a fly to… something
else.
The post
might, as the Simpsons say, “embiggen him.” Even Mad King George, after losing the
colonies and depriving Americans of the pomp and circumstance of sovereignty,
had his lucid moments – the stage play and subsequent film starring Nigel
Hawthorne and Helen Mirren concludes with George
routing his enemies in Parliament and his family, proclaiming: “The King is
Himself Again.
And
alighting from his coach, he beams upon his subject and expounds upon his role…
“Smile at
the people. Wave to
them. Let them see that we are
happy. That is why we are here.”
Americans
can only hope for such a denouement.
Long Live
the King!
Dull week this, but people start getting back to normal – meaning,
buying stuff on credit. Consumer debt
increase far and away topped all other Jonesian factors…
and with the plague, the economy and government largesse, prices of
stuff are going up, too. A 3% mortgage
rate sounds piddling compared to the 20-something charges of the Gerald Ford
years, but, given the Spring Break idiocy and Suez disasters, more costly news
may be coming.
THE DON JONES INDEX
CHART of CATEGORIES
w/VALUE ADDED to EQUAL BASELINE of 15,000
(REFLECTING…
approximately… DOW JONES INDEX of June 27, 2013)
See a further
explanation of categories here…
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ECONOMIC INDICES (60%) |
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DON JONES’ PERSONAL ECONOMIC INDEX (45% of TOTAL INDEX POINTS) |
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CATEGORY |
VALUE |
BASE |
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RESULTS |
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SCORE |
SCORE |
OUR SOURCE(S) and COMMENTS |
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INCOME |
(24%) |
6/27/13 |
LAST |
CHANGE |
NEXT |
3/19/21 |
3/26/21 |
SOURCE |
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Wages (hourly, per capita) |
9% |
1350 pts. |
3/19/21 |
+0.04% |
4/2/21 |
1,429.18 |
1,429.18 |
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/wages 25.19 |
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Median Income
(yearly) |
4% |
600 |
3/19/21 |
+0.03% |
4/2/21 |
668.49 |
668.72 |
http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 35,396 |
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Unempl. (BLS –
in millions |
4% |
600 |
12/1/20 |
+1.61% |
4/2/21 |
323.48 |
323.48 |
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000 6.2% |
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Official (DC – in millions) |
2% |
300 |
3/19/21 |
+0.03% |
4/2/21 |
389.67 |
389.79 |
http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 9,964 |
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Total. (DC – in millions) |
2% |
300 |
3/19/21 |
+0.20% |
4/2/21 |
326.73 |
327.38 |
http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 17,672 |
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Workforce
Participation Number (in
millions) Percentage
(DC) |
2% |
300 |
3/19/21 |
+0.017% +0.029% |
4/2/21 |
311.63 |
311.72 |
In
150,319 Out 100,828 Total: 251,147 http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 59.85 |
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WP Percentage (ycharts)* |
1% |
150 |
12/1/20 |
-0.16% |
4/2/21 |
151.74 |
151.74 |
http://ycharts.com/indicators/labor_force_participation_rate 61.40 |
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OUTGO |
(15%) |
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Total Inflation |
7% |
1050 |
3/12/21 |
+0.4% |
4/2/21 |
1,014.25 |
1,014.25 |
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm +0.4 |
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Food |
2% |
300 |
3/12/21 |
+0.2% |
4/2/21 |
283.27 |
283.27 |
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm +0.2 |
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Gasoline |
2% |
300 |
3/12/21 |
+6.4% |
4/2/21 |
297.02 |
297.02 |
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm +6.4 |
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Medical Costs |
2% |
300 |
3/12/21 |
+0.5% |
4/2/21 |
287.06 |
287.06 |
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm +0.5 |
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Shelter |
2% |
300 |
3/12/21 |
+0.2% |
4/2/21 |
294.32 |
294.32 |
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm +0.2 |
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WEALTH |
(6%) |
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Dow Jones Index |
2% |
300 |
3/19/21 |
-0.74% |
4/2/21 |
360.56 |
357.89 |
https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/index/DJIA 32,618.48 |
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Sales
(homes) Valuation
(homes) |
1% 1% |
150 150 |
3/19/21 |
-1.04% -1.90% |
4/2/21 |
194.41 162.28 |
194.41 162.28 |
https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics
Sales (M):
6.69 Valuations (K): 303.9 |
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Debt (Personal) |
2% |
300 |
3/19/21 |
-0.07% |
4/2/21 |
274.26 |
274.44 |
http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 64,107 |
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AMERICAN
ECONOMIC INDEX (15% of TOTAL INDEX POINTS) |
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NATIONAL |
(10%) |
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Revenues (in
trillions) |
2% |
300 |
3/19/21 |
+0.09% |
4/2/21 |
297.10 |
297.36 |
debtclock.org/ 3,476 |
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Expenditures (in tr.) |
2% |
300 |
3/19/21 |
+0.10% |
4/2/21 |
221.78 |
221.55 |
debtclock.org/ 6,711 |
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National Debt (tr.) |
3% |
450 |
3/19/21 |
+0.11% |
4/2/21 |
330.18 |
329.82 |
http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 28,097 |
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Aggregate Debt (tr.) |
3% |
450 |
3/19/21 |
+3.45% |
4/2/21 |
382.21 |
369.01 |
http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 85,651 |
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GLOBAL |
(5%) |
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Foreign Debt (tr.) |
2% |
300 |
3/19/21 |
+0.14% |
4/2/21 |
290.57 |
290.16 |
http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 7,133 |
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Exports (in
billions – bl.) |
1% |
150 |
3/19/21 |
+1.00% |
4/2/21 |
159.63 |
159.63 |
https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/index.html 191.9 |
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Imports (bl.) |
1% |
150 |
3/19/21 |
-1.38% |
4/2/21 |
134.93 |
134.93 |
https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/index.html
260.2 |
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Trade Deficit (bl.) |
1% |
150 |
3/19/21 |
+2.35% |
4/2/21 |
106.13 |
106.13 |
https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/index.html 68.2 |
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SOCIAL INDICES (40%) |
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ACTS of MAN |
(12%) |
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World Affairs |
3% |
450 |
3/19/21 |
-0.6% |
4/2/21 |
397.88 |
395.49 |
Twelve
policemen ambushed and killed in Mexico.
New Israeli elections end in another deadlock, meaning more
chaos. NoKo
tests more missiles; two near misses on Japan considered an Olympic
preview. President Joe shrugs:
“Whatever!” Container ship blocks Suez Canal, backing up traffic. Europlague lockdown
sparks riots in France, Germany, Italy and Poland. Some countries (Iceland, Australia)
demanding proof of vaccinations.
Venice “celebrates” Sweet Sixteen Hundredth amids
floods, plague and lockdowns. The
chattering class debate U.K.’s “Royal Diversity Office” fallout from Oprah;
also whether William or Harry… one of ‘em… is writing a book. |
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Terrorism |
2% |
300 |
3/19/21 |
+0.8% |
4/2/21 |
242.87 |
240.93 |
Following
Atlanta massage parlour murders, Detroit man stabs
eight at hookah bar and Syrian shooter mows down ten in Boulder CO supermart – copycat arrested at Atlanta grocery with tons
o’ guns. Supremes
will consider reinstating death penalty against Boston Marathon bomber. |
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Politics |
3% |
450 |
3/19/21 |
+0.2% |
4/2/21 |
435.12 |
435.99 |
In
his first press conference, President Joe doubles his promise to 200M vaxxes in 100 days and says he’ll run again in 2024. Giving up on bipartisanship, Biden ponders
EO against “ghost guns” while states rush to pass voter-suppression
laws. Mask, vaxx
and election denialist Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Al) seeks upgrade to the
Senate. From his palace of exile,
Donald Trump declares: “I know the Queen.” (Of England, ‘midst a tirade
against evil Meghan.) |
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Economics |
3% |
450 |
3/19/21 |
nc |
4/2/21 |
397.93 |
397.93 |
House
passes laws easing restrictions on farmworkers. Dollar General to open 1000 more
stores. Semiconductor shortage
impacting manufacturing – especially cars.
Vatican budget crisis forces 10% pay cut for Cardinals. The good news: homelessness is down. The bad: because so many died over the
winter, mostly of plague and freezing. |
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Crime |
1% |
150 |
3/19/21 |
+0.3% |
4/2/21 |
256.36 |
255.59 |
Dumb
daddy drags 2 year old daughter into elephant enclosure, arrested for
“endangerment”. St. Louis man arrested
for killing 15 drug dealers… and his wife.
Hungry passenger bites off United Airlines attendant’s ear. |
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ACTS of GOD |
(6%) |
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Environment/Weather |
3% |
450 |
3/19/21 |
-0.1% |
4/2/21 |
415.22 |
414.80 |
Severe
weather threats finally ease. Kentucky
farmers grateful that climate change will enable them to compete with
California on produce other than tobacco
as world population slated to increase to 9.3B by 2060. Tornadoes touch down from Texas to Tupelo –
then on to Alabama, killing three. |
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Natural/Unnatural
Disaster |
3% |
450 |
3/19/21 |
-0.2% |
4/2/21 |
414.33 |
413.50 |
Japanese
earthquake sparks warning of a tsunami that doesn’t arrive. And a volcano erupts near Icelandic
capital, also no casualties. (Except
for battling weathermen fighting to be first to compare it to Mordor.) Mass fire destroys Bangladesh refugee camp.
Two Massachusetts mountain hikers killed falling off mountain. Alabama tornadoes kill three. Naked woman pulled alive out of storm
drain. |
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LIFESTYLE/JUSTICE INDEX (15%) |
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Science, Tech, Education |
4% |
600 |
3/19/21 |
+0.3% |
4/2/21 |
652.20 |
654.16 |
Exasperated
parents hail reduction of social distancing for kids from 6 to 3 feet,
enabling schools to re-open. Teachers
get the plague jitters. |
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Equality (econ./social) |
4% |
600 |
3/19/21 |
-0.1% |
4/2/21 |
567.07 |
566.59 |
National newscrawl scrolls: “Thousands attend
anti-Asian hate rallies” instead of “Thousands attend attention anti
Asian-hate rallies.” |
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Health |
4% |
600 |
3/19/21 |
nc |
4/2/21 |
507.31 |
507.31 |
Secresto Secresto
flea and tick killers accused of also killing 1700 dogs. President Joe extends Obamacare
registration period. |
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Plague |
+0.2% |
- 102.21 |
- 102.41 |
Arizona
mask burners hold riotous rally. Miami
Beach imposes curfew on rowdy, maskless Spring Break super spreaders. Critics say embattled Gov. Cuomo sought and
got preferential vaxxing. Rite Aid trolled for refusing vaxxes to illegals.
Docs say Vitaman D helps plague
symptoms. Hong Kong redlights Pfizer after packaging glitch. |
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Freedom and Justice |
3% |
450 |
3/19/21 |
+0.1% |
4/2/21 |
452.45 |
452.90 |
Final
Chauvin/Floyd juror seated. Lead
Capitol riots prosecutor floats “sedition” charges – calls unindicted Djonald Trump a maggot… er,
“magnet”. Thousands of drug
convictions in Massachusetts thrown out due to lab error. |
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MISCELLANEOUS and
TRANSIENT INDEX (7%) |
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Cultural incidents |
3% |
450 |
3/19/21 |
+0.5% |
4/2/21 |
489.82 |
500.69 |
Oscar
producers ban zooms and jeans. AMC
reopens theatres – at limited capacity.
Scalpers rake in the cash reselling baseball tickets. Sister Jean prays Loyola into Sweet
Sixteen. RIP L.A. Lakers star Elgin
Baylor, “Goldbergs” dad and Streisand co-star
George Segal, “Arrested Development” actress Jessica Walter. |
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Miscellaneous incidents |
4% |
450 |
3/19/21 |
+0.2% |
4/2/21 |
473.05 |
474.00 |
Turkey hunting season begins in turkey hunting
states. Pepsi rolls out Mango
Cola. Ex-Pres. Trump is not
amused. Robot artwork sells for 70
million. (Critics say it’s only 70 thousand – and still too much.) $70?
70˘? Shortage of Grape Nuts
cereal ends – scalpers and hoarders cry.
7-11 announces it’ll sell drive-by tacos. |
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The Don Jones Index for the week
of March 19th, through March 25th, 2021 was DOWN
17.27 points. The Don Jones Index is sponsored by the
Coalition for a New Consensus: retired Congressman and Independent
Presidential candidate Jack “Catfish” Parnell, Chairman; Brian Doohan,
Managing Editor. The CNC denies, emphatically,
allegations that the organization, as well as any of its officers (including
former Congressman Parnell, environmentalist/America-Firster Austin Tillerman
and cosmetics CEO Rayna Finch) and references to Parnell’s works, “Entropy
and Renaissance” and “The Coming Kill-Off” are fictitious or, at best, mere
pawns in the web-serial “Black Helicopters” – and promise swift, effective
legal action against parties promulgating this and/or other such slanders. Comments, complaints, donations (especially SUPERPAC
donations) always welcome at feedme@generisis.com or: speak@donjonesindex.com |
|
BACK
See further indicators at
Economist – https://www.economist.com/economic-and
inancialndicators/2019/02/02/economic-data-commodities-and-markets
ATTACHMENT ONE – From
about-britain.com
Unlike most other countries the
United Kingdom does not have a codified constitution. There are however a
number of texts which are considered to be constitutional, for example the
Human Rights Act 1998.
A short guide to the constitutional
framework of the United Kingdom
The
United Kingdom does not have a constitution
The UK has no written constitution. Nor does
England have a constitution, neither written nor formulated. The United Kingdom
is one of the few countries of the world that does not have a written
constitution: it just has what is known as an "uncodified
constitution".
Thus the only "British Constitution" that exists is a set of rules and regulations
constituted by jurisprudence and laws (English and Scottish law), and by
various treaties and international agreements to which the United Kingdom has
signed up. This uncodified constitution has largely
developed out of historic English law, since many of its founding principles
and essential laws go back to charters and bills that were drawn up by the
English parliament long before the creation of the United Kingdom.
Although England's
parliament, often called "the mother of parliaments" has existed for over seven centuries, the
founding document of England's "constitution" is generally considered
to be the Magna Carta, or Great
Charter of the Liberties of England, which
the barons drew up and forced King John to sign in the year 1215. The spirit of
this document has guided the evolution of English law over the centuries, as
well as inspiring numerous constitutional documents drawn up by other
countries, including notably the Constitution of the United States of America,
and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Among other landmark bills that
have established major new principles in the British Constitution are the English Bill of Rights, passed after the Glorious Revolution of 1689, and the Acts of Union, of 1707, establishing the linking of England and Scotland within a
United Kingdom.
Parliament,
the phantom Constitution and Brexit.
The absence of a written constitution caused a major constitutional argument
about what a government can do without the consent of Parliament.
Constitutional experts tended to agree that Parliament had to be
consulted, and vote, before the Prime Minister could activate Article 50 of the
Lisbon Treaty, to take the UK out of the European Union.
However Theresa May and her government thought differently. The
Prime Minister did not want a debate, or a vote, in Parliament before Britain
left the European Union at the end of the long process of negotiation.
In July 2016, a group of citizens appealed to the High Court to
stop the government activating Article 50 without Parliament's consent.
On 3rd November, the High Court delivered its verdict. This verdict was
confirmed by the Supreme Court on 24th January. Parliament must vote before
Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty could be triggered. It did so.
Nevertheless, Parliament was not bound by the result of the Brexit referendum, which was consultative, not legislative.
Before the referendum, three quarters of elected MPs were against Brexit, and until the 2019 General Election, it remained
possible that Brexit would not actually take place;
Parliament had the power to veto it. In the end, Parliament held up the Brexit process, but could not stop it. While some
Conservative MPs rebelled against their party and tried to block it, enough
remained loyal to their party to ensure a situation of stalemate (impasse) in
Parliament, where MPs could not agree on a way forward. Eventually there was a
new General Election in the autumn of 2019, and Boris Johnson secured a
majority of 80, promising to "get Brexit
done". With a big Conservative majority, Parliament approved Brexit, and the UK left the European Union on January 31st
2020.
Vetoing Brexit, however, would have been
a dangerous step. If Parliament had vetoed a process that was approved (however
marginally and on the basis of however many lies) by
a popular referendum, it would have sparked a massive constitutional
crisis and possibly serious trouble on the streets.
The debates and arguments did not stop when Britain technically left the
EU on Jan. 31st 2020. Later in 2020, Johnson proposed a law that would allow
the UK to renege on parts of the international agreement signed with the EU
concerning Britain's terms of exit from the Union (the Withdrawal Agreement).
Johnson's action was severely criticized by all of Britain's
living former Prime Ministers (3 Conservatives, 2 Labour),
and by another former leader of the Conservative Party. It is likely that the
House of Lords will, at least on the first reading, refuse to ratify Johnson's
bill to override some parts of an international agreement that Johnson himself
signed earlier in the year.
Parliament is supreme. It is Parliament,
as the representative of the "estates" of the nation - monarchy,
aristocracy, church and people - which makes laws. Parliament cannot act
illegally, nor anti-constitutionally, as Parliament determines what is the law of the land, and a bill that is passed by
Parliament, and signed by the monarch, is by definition constitutional. In the
past, the Monarch could refuse to sign bills; but today he or she has to sign
any bill passed by the two chambers of Parliament.
In past centuries, the Parliament
was inspired, and laws were dictated, by the Monarch and the Upper Chamber,
known as the House of Lords. Since the 19th century, parliamentary power has been
held by the elected members of the Lower House, known as the House of Commons. It is here that the Government of the day
introduces and debates most new legislation, and for any new bill to become
law, it must be "passed" (accepted) by the House of Commons, as well
as by the House of Lords, and finally signed into law by the Monarch.
Legislative programmes
are determined by the Government in power, known as "Her (his) Majesty's
Government". In theory, the government is appointed by the Monarch; in
practice, the monarch no longer has any choice in the matter. He or She
appoints as Prime Minister the leader of the political party with a majority in
the House of Commons; or, if no party has a majority, the leader of a coalition
that has been agreed between party leaders. The Prime Minister then appoints
the Ministers of "Her Majesty's government ". As well as piloting its legislative programme through Parliament, the government can also
manage the day-to-day affairs of the nation by using "statutory
instruments" to make administrative
changes or minor modifications to existing legislation; these are not submitted
to Parliament for approval .
The body of
legislation passed by the British Parliament accounts for the major part of the
nation's uncodified constitution.
Since the British Parliament
is supreme, the United Kingdom is a unitary state. It is neither federal nor confederal. While Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have
their own parliaments or assemblies, with delegated powers, these regional
governments are subsidiary to the British Government in London. The British
Parliament can, if it chooses to do so, take back any powers delegated to
regional assemblies. This does not usually happen, but it can, and it did in
1972, when the London Parliament provisionally suspended the Northern Ireland
Assembly (Stormont), on account of its inability to properly manage the affairs
of Northern Ireland during the time of the "troubles".
While Parliament cannot act outside the law as it is the supreme
maker of law, the government can do
so. This was shown in January 2017, when the Supreme Court ruled that the
Government's decision to short-circuit parliamentary scrutiny in preparing a Brexit agreement was unconstitutional.
Common
Law and the constitution
After Parliament,
the other great base of the United Kingdom's uncodified
constitution is "Common Law". Great Britain does not have a
"penal code" nor a "civil code"; its "Common Law"
is the fruit of centuries of jurisprudence, that is based on historic
principles of "natural law" (moral law, founded on historically accepted
basic principles of right and wrong) . Common Law,
though based on the principle of "precedent", can change at any
moment, as it is determined by judges; for this reason, it evolves slowly to
reflect changes in society and social norms. It cannot evolve in a manner that
is in contradiction with social norms or parliamentary law, as any
controversial verdict based on common law would be challenged in the courts of
appeal.
Other elements of the British
Constitution
Finally, there are
other elements that serve to define the rights and obligations of the British
people. Britain has signed up to numerous international conventions and
treaties, which can determine the legality or otherwise of
actions or processes, such as marine pollution or human rights.
European law also applies in the UK, and according to the principle
of Primacy included in the charter of the
European Union, EU law takes precedence over UK law in any event of
incompatibility.
Church
and state
The United Kingdom is not a secular state -
at least, not in principle. Ever since the Protestant
Reformation in the 16th century, the British Monarch has also been the official
supreme governor of the Church of England, the "Defender of the
Faith" - fidei defensor. Each coronation takes place at a
ceremony at Westminster Abbey, where the new monarch is crowned and
blessed by the Primate of the Church of England (the Anglican church), the Archbishop of Canterbury.
In addition, twenty six Anglican
bishops sit in the House of Lords.
These aspects are part of the
ritual or ceremonial heritage of England. In reality, the Monarch takes no more
part in the running of the Church of England, than he or she does in the
nation's government. And the Bishops who sit in the House of Lords can only
have a marginal influence on debates in the House which, as previously noted,
does not have the power to oppose government legislation passed by the House of
Commons. Their main function, in the 21st century, is to act as guardians of
moral or socially equitable values in the British parliament; this does not
mean "conservative" values, as was shown when the UK Parliament was
one of the first national parliaments in the world to approve gay marriage.
Developments
Being uncodified, the Constitution of the
United Kingdom is in a state of constant flux. Each new law, each new major
decision by judges, becomes a new stone in the edifice of the British
Constitution. Thus, the British constitution changes all the time, very
slowly, often imperceptibly. Britain moves forward by evolution, not by
revolution.
Currently, one of the changes
being discussed is the modernisation of the House of
Lords, to make it at least in part a chamber to which members can be elected.
At present, this is not the case. The Cameron government pledged to introduce chages in the life of the present Parliament, but British
voters are not very concerned by this issue. It does not arouse much passion on
either side of the argument. As of 2014, it seems unlikely that this
"constitutional reform" will be enacted before the next General
Election; few people in the UK think that constitutional reform is is necessary, let alone essential; the UK functions fairly
well without a written constitution, and without big changes to the uncodified constitution that it does have. When it comes to
change, the Government and the British people have other more important
and urgent things to think about.
ATTACHMENT TWO – from various,
through Wiki
TYPES OF
MONARCHY
These are
roughly the categories which modern monarchies fall into:
·
Commonwealth realms. Queen Elizabeth II is the monarch of
sixteen Commonwealth realms (Antigua and Barbuda;
the Commonwealth of
Australia; the Commonwealth of
the Bahamas; Barbados; Belize; Canada; Grenada; Jamaica; New Zealand; the Independent
State of Papua New Guinea; the Federation
of Saint Kitts and Nevis; Saint Lucia; Saint
Vincent and the Grenadines; Solomon Islands; Tuvalu; and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland).
They evolved out of the British Empire into fully independent
states within the Commonwealth of
Nations that retain the Queen as head of state, unlike other
Commonwealth countries that are either dependencies, republics or have a
different royal house. All sixteen realms are constitutional monarchies and
full democracies, where the Queen has limited powers or a largely ceremonial
role. (See Attachment Three, below)
·
Other European constitutional monarchies.
o The Principality of
Andorra; the Kingdom of Belgium;
the Kingdom of Denmark;
the Grand Duchy of
Luxembourg; the Kingdom of the
Netherlands; the Kingdom of Norway; the Kingdom
of Spain; and the Kingdom of Sweden are fully democratic
states in which the monarch has a limited or largely ceremonial role.
o Andorra is
unique among all existing monarchies, as it is a diarchy, with the Co-Princeship
being shared by the President of France and
the Bishop of Urgell. This arrangement creates a unique
situation among monarchies, as a) neither Co-Prince is of Andorran descent, b)
one is elected by common citizens of a foreign country (France), but not by
Andorrans as they cannot vote in the French Presidential Elections, c) the
other, the bishop of Urgell, is appointed by a
foreign head of state, the Pope.
·
European
mixed monarchies. Liechtenstein and Monaco are constitutional monarchies in
which the Prince retains many powers of an absolute monarch. For example,
the 2003
Constitution referendum gives the Prince of
Liechtenstein the power to veto any law that the Landtag (parliament) proposes and
vice versa. The Prince can hire or dismiss any elective member or government
employee from his or her post. However, unlike an absolute monarch, the people
can call for a referendum to end the Prince's reign. The Prince of Monaco has simpler powers: he
cannot hire or dismiss any elective member or government employee from his or
her post, but he can select the minister of
state, government council and
judges.
·
Muslim
monarchies. These Muslim monarchs of the Kingdom of Bahrain;
the Nation
of Brunei, the Abode of Peace; Malaysia; the Hashemite Kingdom
of Jordan; the State of Kuwait; the Kingdom of Morocco;
the Sultanate of Oman;
the State of Qatar;
the Kingdom of Saudi
Arabia and the United Arab Emirates generally
retain far more powers than their European or Commonwealth counterparts.
Absolute
monarchs remain in the Nation of Brunei, the Abode of Peace; the Sultanate of
Oman; the State of Qatar; and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom of Bahrain, and the State of Kuwait are classified as mixed,
meaning there are representative bodies of some kind, but the monarch retains
most of his powers. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, Malaysia, the Kingdom of Morocco, and the
United Arab Emirates are constitutional monarchies, but their monarchs still
retain more substantial powers than in European equivalents.
·
East and
Southeast Asian constitutional monarchies. The Kingdom of Bhutan; the Kingdom of Cambodia; Japan;
and the Kingdom of Thailand have
constitutional monarchies where the monarch has a limited or ceremonial role.
Thailand changed from traditional absolute monarchy into a constitutional one
in 1932, while the Kingdom of Bhutan changed in 2008. The Kingdom of Cambodia
had its own monarchy after independence from the French Colonial Empire,
which was deposed after the Khmer Rouge came into power. The monarchy
was subsequently restored in the peace agreement of 1993.
·
Other
monarchies. Five monarchies do not fit into one of the above groups by
virtue of geography or class of monarchy: the Kingdom of Tonga in Polynesia; the Kingdom of Eswatini and the Kingdom of Lesotho in Southern Africa; and the Sovereign
Military Order of Malta (S.M.O.M.), and the Vatican City State in Europe. Of these, the Kingdom of Lesotho and
the Kingdom of Tonga are constitutional monarchies, while the Kingdom of Eswatini and the Vatican City State are absolute
monarchies. The Kingdom of Eswatini is increasingly
being considered a diarchy. The King,
or Ngwenyama, rules
alongside his mother, the Ndlovukati, as dual
heads of state originally designed to be checks on political power. The Ngwenyama, however, is considered the administrative head
of state, while the Ndlovukati is considered the
spiritual and national head of state, a position which has become largely
symbolic in recent years. S.M.O.M. is governed by an elected Prince and Grand Master. The Pope is
the absolute monarch of the Vatican by virtue of his position as head of
the Roman Catholic Church and
Bishop of Rome; he is an elected rather than hereditary ruler. The Pope need
not be a citizen of the territory prior to his election by the cardinals.
For a delineation between Constitutional and Absolute
monarchies, see here.
ATTACHMENT THREE – FROM the WEEK, U.K.
WHAT POWERS DOES QUEEN ELIZABETH II HAVE?
Hung
parliament would leave monarch in a sensitive position once again
10 DEC 2019
The fractious Brexit
landscape has placed the Queen at the heart of political debate in 2019.
The prorogation row at
the end of summer put her role under scrutiny - and should there be a hung parliament following
Thursday’s election, Elizabeth II will be in the spotlight again.
Here is a guide to Her Majesty’s
powers.
A
constitutional monarchy and the Queen’s role
In a monarchy, the king or queen is
the head of state. However, as the UK has a constitutional monarchy, the
ability to make and pass legislation belongs to Parliament rather than the
Queen.
The monarch retains a symbolic role
in government. She formally opens Parliament every year, and when the
government passes a bill, it cannot become an Act of Parliament until it
receives her stamp of approval, a process called Royal Assent. In reality,
though, no monarch has refused to give Royal Assent since 1708, when Queen Anne
did so only at the behest of ministers.
As such, Queen Elizabeth II’s formal
duties are largely representational, such as embarking on goodwill visits
abroad and hosting foreign heads of state. The monarch’s main role is to serve
as a vital part of Britain’s “national identity, unity and pride”, says the
official royal website, royal.uk.
But the Queen does have a few unique
legal privileges. Royal.uk says she “retains the right to claim ownership of
any unmarked mute swan swimming in open waters”. She also claims dominion over
all whales, sturgeons and dolphins in the waters around England and Wales, doesn’t
need a passport to travel abroad, and can drive without a licence.
The
Queen’s role in a hung parliament
In a straightforward general
election, the Queen would accept the resignation of the outgoing prime minister
and then instruct the incoming leader to form a government in her name - but
this process is “put in jeopardy if there is uncertainty over the government
being formed”, says the Daily Express.
If no single political party wins an
overall majority in the House of Commons, the Queen is left in a sensitive
position. She must be kept informed about any negotiations to build a
coalition, but cannot exercise any personal discretion over the choice of
Downing Street’s occupant.
With no majority, the existing PM is
given the first chance to create a government, either by trying to govern with
a minority of MPs or by forming a coalition or “confidence and supply”
arrangement with another party or parties. If this fails, the largest
opposition party is usually invited to try to do the same.
In 2010, as Gordon Brown attempted
to reach a deal with the Liberal Democrats, the Queen “very conspicuously
removed herself to Windsor Castle to signal her unwillingness to play a part in
the formation of a new government”, writes Philip Murphy, director of the
London-based Institute of Commonwealth Studies, in an article on The Conversation.
David Cameron later admitted that he
could not be totally sure about what kind of government he was going to form
when he finally met Her Majesty to become PM.
The
Queen and the prime minister
Once a PM is in office, the Queen
meets with them weekly and offers counsel. She reads the Queen’s Speech to open
Parliament, although this is written by the government, and in normal times her
powers are usually exercised on the advice of the PM.
However, as lawyer David Allen Green
wrote in the Financial Times earlier this year, “these are not normal times”. In the lead-up to the 31
October Brexit deadline, former attorney-general
Dominic Grieve raised the possibility that the Queen could sack Boris Johnson
if he refused to comply with Parliament’s new legislation to avoid a no-deal
exit from the EU.
“This is now possible in
constitutional theory and not inconceivable in the strange politics of the
moment,” wrote Green.
Robert Hazell, professor of government and constitution at
University College London, told The Guardian that the
Queen could dismiss a PM if he or she lost a vote of no confidence and refused
to resign. “But she would only do so if the House of Commons indicated clearly
who should be appointed as prime minister in his place,” Hazell
said.
The Fixed-term Parliaments Act gives
a 14-day window after a vote of no confidence to find a new PM capable of
securing the confidence of the Commons. In practice, the Queen could ask
another political leader to put an alternative administration in place that
could win the confidence of parliament. “The removal from office of the prime
minister is implicit,” says Green. (See
also History.com – Attachment Seven)
ATTACHMENT
FOUR – FROM the Norfolk (UK) Gazette
REVEALED: DONALD TRUMP’S NORFOLK
ANCESTRY WITH ROYAL LINKS
By Ian Bred, Norfolk Correspondentm 2017
American President Donald Trump’s ancestors were Norfolk farmers
with an incredible modern-day link to the Queen, we can reveal today.
We traced his family tree going back many generations, and
discovered his ancestors eked out a living on farmland that is now part of Her
Majesty’s sprawling Sandringham Estate.
Our special investigation featured weeks of sifting through
thousands of documents and old photographs at the Norfolk Central Records
Office, which unearthed the extraordinary Trump heritage in the village of West
Newton, just south of Sandringham.
Mr Trump’s great, great-grandfather Archibald “Archie” Trump
bought eight acres of land in 1827, and he toiled for more than 50 years with
the help of his sons Abraham and Henry, before he died in 1879, aged 68.
The family endured many hardships, yet young Henry – who was
Donald Trump’s great-grandfather – displayed some business acumen by being
featured in an early edition of the Eastern Daily Press newspaper, posing for
the camera as part of a feature about rearing geese.
Henry displays many of the distinctive Trump features as a
young boy, but as he grew older he bore an uncanny resemblance to Donald Trump.
We discovered another photo of Henry, believed to be taken in 1880, just after
his father’s death.
He would have been around 35 years old at this point, and
the photograph, which featured in the West Newton parish newsletter, shows
Henry was still working the land, as he poses proudly with a hay fork. He even
has tiny hands! (See pictures here) Henry as an older man was the spitting image
of Donald.
Henry had one son – Donald Trump’s grandfather, Isaac – who
moved to the remote Isle of Lewis in Scotland when the family sold their
Norfolk land to the Sandringham Estate, which had
been the country retreat of British monarchs since 1868.
It seems extraordinary now that the Trump family’s first business
venture, a smallholding farm in Norfolk, was sold to the
British Royal Family. (Note the Mar-a-Lago Prehistory as a U.S. Government possession in “The Art
of the Deal” and in Attachment Eight B).
The rest of the Trump family history is more commonly known.
Isaac raised three daughters on the Isle of Lewis, one of whom was the
President’s mother, Mary Anne, who moved to America in 1930 to work as a house servant.
Donald Trump's paternal ancestry is traceable to Bobenheim am Berg, a village in the Palatinate, Germany, in
the 18th century. Johann Trump, born in Bobenheim in
1789, moved to the nearby village of Kallstadt where
his grandson, Friedrich Trump, the grandfather of Donald Trump, was born in
1869. This German heritage was long concealed by Donald Trump's father, Fred
Trump, who had grown up in a mainly German-speaking environment until he was
ten years old; after World War II and until the 1980s, he told people he was of
Swedish ancestry. Donald Trump repeated this version in The Art of the Deal
(1987) but later said he is "proud" of his German heritage, and
served as grand marshal of the 1999 German-American Steuben Parade in New York
City.
ATTACHMENT
FIVE – from the New
York Times
Trump’s Love
Affair With the Royal Family Dates Back to His Mother
By Ellen Barry June
3, 2019
LONDON —
One of President Trump’s earliest memories, one he routinely recounts to
journalists and biographers, is of watching his mother watch television, so
enthralled that she barely moved for hours, on the day in 1953 that Queen
Elizabeth was crowned.
He was
only 6 years old, but he understood that the gilded spectacle unfolding more
than 3,400 miles away inside Westminster Abbey struck a chord in his mother,
Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, a poor girl who had immigrated from Scotland and who
had worked for a time as a housemaid in a grand mansion. He also understood
that, for some reason, the same spectacle offended his father.
“I also remember my father that day, pacing around impatiently, ‘For
Christ’s sake, Mary,’ he said, ‘enough is enough, turn it off. They’re all a
bunch of con artists,’ ” Mr. Trump recalled, years later. “My mother didn’t
even look up. They were total opposites in that sense.”
Mr. Trump
tells this story in his book “The Art of the Deal” as an explanation for why he
was not satisfied with simply inheriting his father’s business. His mother had
passed on a love of spectacle and grandeur, as expressed in the coronation —
“loftier dreams” of “splendor and magnificence.”
The story
also explains why this week’s visit to Britain matters to the president, who
throughout his life has expressed a desire to be close to, or on an equal
footing with, the British royal family. Though Mr. Trump met the queen for tea at Windsor Castle last year,
the event was marred by a gaffe when he walked ahead of her while reviewing troops, and it
lacked the pageantry of a state dinner at Buckingham Palace.
“This is
more important than any piece of legislation he could get through Congress,
greater than resolving problems at the border with Mexico,” said Michael D’Antonio, the author of “The Truth About Trump,” a 2016
biography.“I would think one of his dying thoughts will be of this. When he is
about to leave this earth, he will think, ‘I was that person, standing with the
queen.’ ”
Mr. Trump
likes to declare that he does not respect most people, because “most people are
not worthy of respect,” said Mr. D’Antonio, who said
that he interviewed Mr. Trump for about eight hours.
“The queen
may be one of the only people on Earth who could expect he was going to be
respectful,” he said. “It is sincere. He is as sincere as he can be about
anything with this respect.”
Mr. Trump
arrived in London on Monday morning, bringing turbulence with him. He is a deeply
polarizing figure in Britain, with 67 percent of respondents in a recent YouGov
poll reporting negative opinions of him, and only 21 percent
reporting approval. An outspoken proponent of a hard Brexit,
he has already brushed aside any pretense of diplomacy, giving interviews to
The Sun and The Times of London, endorsing Boris Johnson’s campaign to succeed
Theresa May, and describing the Duchess of Sussex,
also known as Meghan Markle, in an answer to an
interviewer’s question, as “nasty” for speaking critically of him in 2016.
But the
royal family has plenty of experience hosting contentious figures, said Andrew
Morton, the author of several royal biographies. The queen is expected to
remain neutral on political matters, so she will steer clear of divisive
topics.
“They tend
not to take a view, or try not to,” Mr. Morton said.
But in
some cases, he added, “they take the view that they can influence things.”
Prince Charles, for example, may try to influence Mr. Trump on climate change,
Mr. Morton said, adding that the prince has the power to extend invitations to
the next coronation.
Thomas
Wright, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said that in the past,
private conversations with “iconic individuals” have made an impression on Mr.
Trump’s thinking.
“If the
queen says something to him, he might take it to heart,” he said. “He would
probably tell everyone about it.”
In a
sense, it is curious that Mr. Trump’s mother, born Mary Anne MacLeod, was such
a royalist.
Her
forbears had been impoverished and evicted from their farms in a land grab by
English-backed Scottish lords, known as the Highland Clearances, writes Nina
Burleigh in “Golden Handcuffs: The Secret History of Trump’s Women.”
The
youngest of 10 children, Mr. Trump’s mother sailed to the United States around
1930, reporting to American immigration officials that she had an eighth-grade
education. Late in life, she had a taste for luxury, which her son was happy to
indulge, said Gwenda Blair, the author of “The
Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire.”
“The
photos that we see of Queen Elizabeth in her dowager clothes, and often, if it
is winter, in some extremely luxurious warm fur coat, reminds me of how his
mother came across,” she said. Mrs. Trump died, age 88, in 2000.
As a real
estate developer and television personality, Mr. Trump seemed to regard the
royal family as a benchmark for prestige. In the 1980s, he circulated a rumor
that Prince Charles and his wife, Diana, were considering purchasing a unit at
Trump Tower, Mr. D’Antonio wrote in his book.
He
expressed attraction to Diana, Princess of Wales, sometimes in crude terms.
Selina Scott, a
British journalist who interviewed him for a documentary in 1995, recalled that
as soon as she entered his office in Trump Tower, “he wanted to know the
intimate details of the deteriorating state of the marriage” between Charles
and Diana. After the two divorced, in 1996, Ms. Scott later wrote, Mr. Trump
sent Diana “massive bouquets of flowers, each worth hundreds of pounds,”
accompanied by handwritten notes.
In 1997,
shortly after Diana had died in a car accident, Mr. Trump told the television
journalist Stone Phillips that he regretted not having asked her on a date. “Do
you think you would have seriously had a shot?” Mr. Phillips asked.
“I think
so, yeah,” Mr. Trump replied. “I always have a shot.”
Mr. Trump
returned to the subject with the radio host Howard Stern, who asked,
“You could have gotten her, right? You could have nailed her?” Mr. Trump joked
that he would have asked her to take a medical exam beforehand.
Mr. Trump
also made a comment about Catherine Middleton, now the Duchess of Cambridge,
after a photographer took a picture of her sunbathing topless in 2012.
“Who
wouldn’t take Kate’s picture and make lots of money if she does the nude
sunbathing thing,” he wrote on Twitter.
“Come on Kate!”
He also
hoped to acquire some of the trappings of royalty. Mr. Morton, Diana’s
biographer, recalled that he was giving a speech about her around that time at
Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club. One of the club managers
approached him to ask if he could help Mr. Trump hire Paul Burrell, who had worked
as Queen Elizabeth’s footman and Diana’s butler.
The two
families couldn’t be more different, Mr. Morton said.
“I would
argue that Trump is more royal than the queen, he behaves more like a
potentate,” he said, adding that Mr. Trump had an “ostentatious type of living,
whereas the British royal family are known for their parsimony. The queen
famously collects string, and eats her breakfast out of Tupperware.”
Mr. Morton
said that, for Mr. Trump, Monday’s state dinner represented a particularly
important stamp of approval.
“What
strikes me about people around the world, if they’ve had any interaction with
the monarch, it defines their lives,” he said. “They save the invitation, they
save the train ticket, they save the article in the newspaper.”
It will be
the same, he said, for Mr. Trump.
“If he is
accorded love by the queen, he will be smiling like a Cheshire cat,” he said.
“He will be purring away.”
ATTACHMENT SIX (A) - From Town and
Country
A BRIEF HISTORY OF DONALD TRUMP’S
CONTROVERSIAL INTERACTIONS WITH THE BRITISH ROYAL FAMILY
The American president is heading to the U.K. for a state
visit next week.
by CAROLINE
HALLEMANN. MAY
31, 2019
After much controversy, Donald Trump is finally heading to the U.K. for an
official state visit next week, and on Monday, he'll touch down in England
for a three-day itinerary filled with events also attended by the Queen, Prince
Charles, and other members of the royal family.
But this isn't the first time Trump has interacted with the
British royals. Here, a brief timeline of Trump's somewhat unsavory history
with the Princess Diana, Duchess Kate, and the rest of the Windsors.
Trump
courts Princess Diana.
Following the announcement in December 1992 that Princess
Diana had separated from Prince Charles, then-American businessman Donald Trump
reportedly started courting the Princess of Wales, allegedly bombarding her
with flowers to the point that she said, "He gives me the
creeps."
According to accounts by British journalist Selina Scott, Trump pursued Diana quite aggressively.
"Trump clearly saw Diana as the ultimate trophy wife," Scott wrote in The Sunday Times. "As
the roses and orchids piled up at her apartment she became increasingly
concerned about what she should do. It had begun to feel as if Trump was
stalking her."
The pair did meet once, though never dated, and after the
Princess died, Trump had the following exchange on air with Howard Stern:
"You could've nailed her, right?" Stern asked Trump. Trump replied,
"I think I could've."
Then in 2000, Trump once again reminded the world that he
had wanted to have sex with Diana, saying, "she
was crazy, but those are minor details."
In recent years, Trump changed his story and denied having
pursued Diana romantically. In an interview with Piers Morgan in 2016, he said, "I did respect her, but no interest from that
standpoint. But I did meet her once, and I thought she was lovely."
This reversal of tone may not hold much sway with William
and Harry, given how protective they are of their mother and her public memory.
"When it comes to the younger royals, especially given his crude comments
about Diana after her death, it is hard to imagine that Charles, William, Harry
and Kate will view Trump as anything but crass and overbearing,” said royal biographer Christopher Andersen.
Trump
defends the paparazzi who took intrusive photos of Duchess Kate.
In 2012, paparazzi used a powerful zoom lens to capture
photos of the Duchess of Cambridge sunbathing topless while on vacation in the
south of France with her husband, Prince William. These photos were then sold
and published in a French magazine called Closer.
There was a public outcry and a broad consensus that the
pictures were a grave invasion of Kate's privacy—and recently, a French court
ruled in the royals' favor, awarding the Duke and Duchess €100,000 in damages.
Never one to shy away from rendering an opinion on a matter
of public controversy, Donald Trump defended the photographers on Twitter, and
shamed Duchess Kate, blaming her for the whole incident
"Kate Middleton is great--but she shouldn't be
sunbathing in the nude--only herself to blame," he tweeted.
"Who wouldn't take Kate's picture and make lots of
money if she does the nude sunbathing thing. Come on Kate!"
The Tweets are still public on his official account.
This unsavory history was on many people's minds when
Theresa May revealed, during her first visit to Washington following the
inauguration, that Donald Trump had accepted the Queen's invitation to Britain.
Meghan Markle speaks out about Trump.
The royal family keeps their political
leanings to themselves, but Meghan Markle made her
thoughts about Trump known before marrying Prince Harry in May.
The then-actress called Trump "misogynistic" and said she would
consider staying in Canada if he won the 2016 election. (Her show Suits filmed
in Toronto.)
Prince
Charles speaks out too, albeit a bit more subtly.
In December 2016, Prince Charles spoke publicly about the
dangers of populism and xenophobia. He may well have been speaking of the
climate—and campaign tactics—that lead to Brexit, but
it's hard to ignore the veiled reference to Trump's politics as well.
“We are now seeing the rise of many populist groups across
the world that are increasingly aggressive to those
who adhere to a minority faith. All of this has deeply disturbing echoes of the
dark days of the 1930s."
Charles, a noted environmentalist, may also
not be a fan of Trump's record on climate change.
And in the forward of a recent book on the topic,
Charles wrote: "I hope this modest attempt to alert a global public to the
'wolf at the door' will make some small contribution towards encouraging
requisite action; action that must be urgently scaled up, and scaled up
now."
Melania meets with Prince Harry.
In September of 2017, Melania
Trump embarked on her first solo international trip under her husband's
administration, a big step for the presidential spouse who has taken her time
stepping into the role embraced by most modern first ladies.
Following in the footsteps of her predecessor,
Michelle Obama, Melania attended the Invictus
Games in Toronto, an Olympics-style international competition
for wounded servicemen and women.
The Games are Prince Harry's
passion project, and in the past, he has recruited the American president and
his family to help support the games. In 2016, the Queen even appeared
in a video to smack talk the U.S.
Though Melania did meet with
Prince Harry in Ontario, there was hardly the same cheeky rapport between the Windsors and the first family as in years past.
Trump does
not attend the royal wedding.
Given how Meghan spoke out against the Trump campaign, it's
no surprise that he wasn't invited to her wedding, but in the end, no political
leaders attended the celebration.
"It has been decided that an official list of political
leaders–both UK and international– is not required for Prince Harry and Ms. Markle's wedding," a spokesperson told Harper's Bazaar in advance of the big
day. "Her Majesty's Government was consulted on this
decision, which was taken by The Royal Household."
Trump does
meet with the Queen, but it's not a state visit.
In July of 2018, Donald Trump traveled to the U.K. on an
official trip, but it wasn't a state visit.
When the President first accepted the invitation for a state
visit England at the beginning of his term, he reportedly envisioned playing golf with the Queen, perhaps
hoping for a photogenic moment similar to the shots of Reagan riding horses
with the monarch during his term.
But that initial invitation immediately prompted a petition
to block the meeting, and so it was put off. "Donald Trump's well
documented misogyny and vulgarity disqualifies him from being received by Her
Majesty the Queen or the Prince of Wales," reads
the document.
"Donald Trump should be allowed to enter the UK in his
capacity as head of the US Government, but he should not be invited to make an
official State Visit because it would cause embarrassment to Her Majesty the
Queen," it continues.
The petition quickly garnered over a million signatures,
triggering the requirement for a debate in British parliament, but the
government responded that Trump should be able to meet with the Queen.
And so, Trump had tea with the Queen at Windsor Castle, but
avoided London as much as possible during his time in the country as massive protests have broken out in capital city.
ATTACHMENT
SIX (B) – from NBC
By Nina Burleigh, author of
"The Trump Women: Part of the Deal"
June 5, 2019, 5:43 AM EDT
As President Donald Trump and his family trooped into
Buckingham Palace for a state banquet with Queen Elizabeth II on Monday night,
royal watchers, palace protocol chiefs and journalists were on the alert.
Consider, even before Trump landed, he had labeled Meghan Markle
“nasty” and the London mayor “a stone cold loser."
For Trump, however, this royal dinner was clearly more than the usual
state visit, as the New York Times pointed out on Tuesday. While Trump
has worked hard to build his life into a glittering, eponymous brand, there has
long been a royal-specific yearning in the Trump family. What is less known is
that this desire arguably dates back to Trump’s mother, an immigrant maid who
came to America almost 100 years ago and bequeathed to her fourth child the
notion that all that glitters really is gold.
While Trump has worked hard to build his life into a
glittering, eponymous brand, there has long been a royal-specific yearning in
the Trump family.
Unlike his mother's origins, Trump’s obsession
with the royals — the human epitome of his old go-to word,
“classy” — is hardly a secret. Besides all the gold
T’s and his gilded Versailles triplex in Trump Tower, there’s the family crest
that Trump essentially stole from the socialite who
built Mar-a-Lago,
modifying it to remove the word “Integritas” but
keeping the three rampant lions.
Indeed, Trump has a long history of seeking
royal stardust. In 1981, he made up a story about
Prince Charles and Princess Diana planning to shell out $5 million for a Trump
Tower condo. In 1994, he claimed that Prince Charles and
Princess Diana had sent in $50,000 checks to become charter
members of the Florida Mar-a-Lago club, a Trumpian whopper that a palace spokesman sniffed was
“complete nonsense.” Trump even tried (and failed) to date post-divorce Diana,
who reportedly said he gave her “the creeps.” Prince
Charles reportedly
declined an invitation to Trump’s 2005 wedding to Melania.
Pundits like historian Doug Brinkley have blamed Trump’s
obsession on his autocratic political bent — he wanted to be “King Donald.” Or simply a penchant for outrageous marketing strategies.
But the true source is likely a far more personal inheritance: A Trump family
secret is that his mother worked as a maid in the household of steel magnate
Andrew Carnegie.
Mary Anne McLeod was the 10th child of a fisherman, born
into muck boots and peat smoke on a remote Scottish island. She grew up in a
two-room cottage and probably got no more than an eighth-grade education before
she left the Isle of Lewis in the 1920s, following older sisters who had
nestled into a community of nannies, butlers and maids from the British Isles
who worked for the robber barons of New York.
Trump has long claimed his
mother came to America on a holiday. But the truth can be found in the 1930
U.S. Census, where McLeod is listed at the bottom of a lengthy retinue of
butlers, footmen, chauffeurs, cooks and maids working for Louise Carnegie.
It’s not clear how long McLeod held that position, because
the Trump family has never acknowledged it. But in 1936, she married Fred
Trump, Donald’s father, and moved to Queens. As Fred Trump got richer, Mary
Anne modeled herself as a Queens Louise Carnegie — dressing in furs, her blonde
hair coiffed into a now-familiar confection, as she was reportedly chauffeured
in a Rolls Royce to, some stories say, collect the
change from the laundromats at her husband’s growing middle-class
apartment building empire.
Mary Anne’s affinity for royal pomp was so deep that she
reportedly couldn’t be dragged away from the television set during the
coronation of Queen Elizabeth, even as her thrifty German husband and her even
thriftier German mother-in-law scorned her for it.
Donald seems to have inherited that yearning whole — along
with his father’s scorn when he moved to Manhattan and put up his glass tower.
Trump admits in “The Art of the Deal” that Fred Trump told him that Trump Tower
could have been built of cheaper brick for pennies on the dollar.
Late in life, Mary Anne Trump finally did get to spend a
small fortune decorating her own mini-palace in one of the Trump Tower condos.
But, according to a family member who spoke to me for my book, she never spent
a night in it, because her husband, by then enfeebled and suffering from
Alzheimer’s, wouldn’t or couldn’t live there.
Donald Trump’s abiding sense of being an outsider is also
likely owed to his mother — the girl looking in at the castle window in
Scotland, the teen maid peeking down a polished banister into the candle-lit
Carnegie dining hall. Donald, born and raised in an outer borough, was rich —
but not to the Manhattan manner born.
Trump’s children, however, were born to rich celebrities in
Manhattan — and in America, that means they can play
at being royal issue. Ivanka writes in her first
book, “The Trump Card: Playing to Win in Work and Life,” that her last name is
synonymous with class and luxury. Via Instagram, she
assiduously curated her family’s arrival in the White
House to look like the Camelot of the Kennedys. Meanwhile, her nickname inside
the White House was at least initially a pejorative “princess royal,” according to Vanity Fair.
Many American political families would have celebrated the
remarkable ancestral story of a royals-struck maid from the British Isles who
gave birth to a son who became president of the United States — and who walked
into Buckingham Palace Monday to present that woman’s grandchildren to the
Queen of England.
But not the Trump clan. For one thing, to admit that they are living out the
culmination of that immigrant woman’s dream would be to acknowledge the
possibilities that America offers to other men and women.
ATTACHMENT
SIX (C) – from observer.com
TRUMP’S HISTORY OF LIES ABOUT THE BRITISH ROYAL FAMILY SPANS
DECADES
By Harmon
Leon • 06/05/19 6:27pm
·
The imagery of Trump’s dinner at Buckingham Palace, earlier
this week, looked like a trailer for an upcoming documentary about the
Illuminati. This was the pinnacle moment in the life of a man who has his very
own gold toilet— after his deposition and resuscitation
at the CPAC
conference a year and change later, he’d obtain a gold statue of himself for
his very, very own (DJI) — and embraces the world of “classy.”
Trump finally got the attention of the Royal Family that
he’s been so wanting for decades.
Though, from an outsider’s perspective, the state banquet
with Queen Elizabeth II also reminded me of something you’d see in the 1991
John Goodman fish-out-of-water comedy, King Ralph.
But
Trump’s most embarrassing royal moments took place beforehand: he had labeled Meghan Markle “nasty” and
London’s mayor Sadiq Khan “a stone cold loser.”
Classy.
Trump has
a long history of seeking royal approval. For decades, he’s tried to link
himself to the royals with the assistance of “fake news.” No, I’m not talking
about what Trump refers to as the mainstream media—but actual “fake
news,”—with Trump, himself, actually planting fake news stories in New York
tabloids. Between 1981 and 1995, Trump reportedly planted at
least five stories that alleged members of the British royal family were
considering moving into his “classy” properties.
At the
time, I guess, it might have made sense to the general public that Trump would
rub elbows with the royals. Trump was “classy.” The royals were “classy.” Why
wouldn’t the bloodline to the throne of England want to move into a building
with gold Trump letters blazoned on the outside?
In 1981,
Trump allegedly fueled gossip that Prince Charles and his new bride, Princess
Diana, were planning to purchase a $5 million condo in Trump Tower. When a
reporter called him about the self-perpetuated rumor, Trump responded by saying, he
could not confirm or deny it. At the time, though, Buckingham Palace did confirm that
this transaction was completely false.
Trump
also claimed, in 1994, that Charles and Di had sent him a $50,000 check to
become charter members of Mar-a-Lago in
Florida, to which a palace spokesman retorted that
the proposition was “complete nonsense.”
In 1996, once Charles was out of the picture, Trump also pursued the newly
divorced Diana. In a gesture of pure stalker creepiness, Trump reportedly sent a
blitz of flower bouquets to Di at Kensington Palace. (He must’ve seen her as
the ultimate trophy wife.) “What am I going to do?” Diana told a friend,
according to Britain’s Sunday Times. “He
gives me the creeps.”
(Yes, Di,
he does that to a lot of people.)
My
only thought is, would Trump have cheated on Princess
Diana with porn stars?
In 1997,
when Diana died in a car crash in Paris, Trump reportedly told friends that his
biggest regret was that they hadn’t dated. Maybe that was the reason why in
2005, Prince Charles snubbed Trump’s invitation to his wedding with Melania.
For the
most part, Trump has used lies about the royals to benefit his pocketbook, add
prestige to his tacky brand and publicize his properties. Classy!
ATTACHMENT
SIX (D) – from USA Today
REPORT: TRUMP PURSUED PRINCESS DIANA
By Jane Onyanga-Omara
LONDON — Donald Trump pursued Princess Diana after the
breakup of her marriage to Prince Charles, "bombarding" her with
flowers, a journalist claims in Britain's Sunday Times.
The claim was made by Selina Scott,
a TV presenter in the United Kingdom who has had a long-running feud with
the Republican presidential hopeful.
"He bombarded Diana at Kensington Palace with massive
bouquets of flowers, each worth hundreds of pounds," after she and Prince
Charles divorced in 1996, Scott wrote in the Sunday Times.
"Trump clearly saw Diana as the ultimate trophy wife."
Scott said Diana, who confided in her over dinner, grew
increasingly concerned about what to do as flowers sent by the tycoon piled up
in her apartment.
Scott said Diana asked her: "'What am I going to do? He
gives me the creeps," to which Scott replied "Just throw them in the
bin."
"Diana laughed," she added.
The feud between Trump and Scott began in 1995, when Scott
questioned Trump's business dealings in a TV documentary, leading him to brand
her "insecure", "obnoxious", and "dishonest".
In 2009, the dispute reignited after councilors in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, where Trump wanted to build a golf
resort, were anonymously sent a DVD of the documentary in the post. The package
was accompanied by the words: "Know who you are dealing with." It is
not known who sent the DVD, but Trump called Scott "a third-class
journalist" who "faded into obscurity where she belongs."
Scott claimed in the newspaper article that when Diana died
in a car crash in Paris in 1997, "Trump told friends his biggest regret
was that they hadn't dated."
She added: "He said that he always thought he had a
chance of romance and would have had a 'shot' with her."
Scott added that said Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly “had it easy” in her dealings with Trump.
Earlier this month, Kelly questioned Trump about past insults to women
during a debate, after which the tycoon told CNN: "You could see there was
blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever."
Trump's spokesman told the Sunday Times:
"(Trump and Diana) had a great relationship, liked each other a lot, but
nothing ever came of it."
ATTACHMENT
SIX (E) – from Newsmax via The Hill
CONSERVATIVE NEWSMAX CEO CALLS
TRUMPS 'AMERICAN ROYALTY'
BY MARINA PITOFSKY - 06/04/19 10:07 AM EDT
Longtime friend of President
Trump and Newsmax Media CEO
Christopher Ruddy called the Trump family “American royalty,” and said a state
banquet in the United Kingdom on Monday night was a "love fest"
between Queen Elizabeth II and
the president, Newsweek reported.
Ruddy said the first family was impressed by the British
royal family and their homes and palaces in London during the state visit,
despite the Trump family’s personal wealth.
“The Trumps and Ivanka was there.
Don Jr. — I spoke to them all last night — Jared. They were so impressed and
these are folks not easily impressed," Ruddy told the BBC's Today program.
"Remember they have their own ballrooms and palaces and
they have wonderful homes like Mar-a-Lago, where I am
a member. So they are used to very high living, sort of American
royalty, should we say," Ruddy added.
At the state banquet, Trump cited the “eternal friendship”
between the two countries, ahead of the 75th anniversary of the
D-Day landings in France during World War II.
"I spoke briefly with the Queen when I came in. I spoke
to the president a little bit longer,” Ruddy said. “He was very happy and
excited. She seemed to be very pleased they were there. The president has
tremendous respect for not only the British royals but for Britain.”
"This is a president that loves brands. The Queen has
the greatest brand in the world, doesn't she? I think he is just super
impressed by that," Ruddy also said.
Trump has warmly greeted the Queen, Prime Minister Theresa
May and other members of the royal family during his trip.
But, he reportedly called Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex,
“nasty,” according to The Sun, after she called him “divisive” and
“misogynistic” during his 2016 presidential campaign. Trump has also exchanged jabs with
London Mayor Sadiq Khan on Twitter and in interviews
over the state visit.
ATTACHMENT
SIX (F) – from Politico
WHO COSTS TAXPAYERS MORE: THE TRUMPS OR THE BRITISH
ROYALS?
POLITICO
tallies up their tabs.
BY ROSA PRINCE, September 18, 2019 4:04 am
LONDON — There’s something
comfortably retro about the British royal family. No matter the geopolitical or
domestic turmoil, you can count on them to be there, lurching from one scandal
to the next.
It’s a lesson that Donald Trump seems to have taken to heart
— with the U.S. president’s sometimes glamorous, sometimes goofy,
never-not-scandalous first family traipsing after him to global summits and
state visits.
The trouble is that maintaining bevvies
of VIPs can be expensive — especially as economies threaten to turn sour.
Whether the cost is worth the benefit isn’t always clear,
however, as neither the U.S. nor the U.K. is terribly transparent when
it comes to funding their first families.
Ep 184_ Europe reacts to Biden's inauguration — Merkel
succession - POLITICO's EU Confidential
Below, POLITICO takes a stab at tallying up the price tag
for the British royals and the presidential brood, and dishes each family a
Sponger rating for how much they’re costing the taxpayer.
The royals
The scandals swirling around the royals in recent months
have focused on Prince Andrew’s connections to the late billionaire pedophile
Jeffrey Epstein, and Harry and Meghan’s use of private planes while lecturing
the rest of us about climate change.
Both raise a similar question: To what extent should
taxpayers pick up the tab for minor royals?
The queen herself is funded through the Ł82.2-million-a-year
Sovereign Grant, which came to about Ł1.24 per taxpayer in the last financial
year. She uses this for the upkeep of all her palaces (including the Ł2.4
million renovation of Harry and Meghan’s pad, Frogmore Cottage), as well as her
staffing and travel costs.
Fifteen other senior royals are largely financed by two
slush funds set up by King Edward III in the 14th
Century: the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster. With vastly valuable
holdings of residential and agricultural land, their combined income last year
stood at Ł43.3 million.
Then there’s the cost of police protection, covering not
just the Fab 16 but also some of their children,
including such lesser figures as Andrew’s daughters, princesses Beatrice and
Eugenie, ninth and 10th in line to the throne respectively.
The exact budget for guarding the royals is not public, but
in 2017 it was estimated the Royalty and Specialist Protection Team — also
responsible for guarding government ministers and foreign dignitaries — had
running costs of Ł128 million.
Following criticism of expensive royal travel — including
some Ł126,000 charged to the taxpayer for protecting Princess Eugenie during
her gap year to Asia, America and Africa — it was reported that the younger
members of the family were being urged to ditch the Royal Train and private jets
in favor of budget travel.
William and Kate at least seem to have got the memo: Last
month the duke and duchess of Cambridge and their family boarded a Ł73.05 Flybe flight from Norwich to Aberdeen.
This was interpreted as a delicious act of trolling by the
parents-of-three, coming as it did after William’s brother Harry suggested it
was an eco-crime to have more than two children before dashing off for the
first of four journeys by private jet. A grateful and cash-strapped nation
saluted the thrifty couple, while pouring scorn on the newlyweds.
POLITICO’s Sponger Rating: 9.5 / 10
Would have been 10 if not for
William and Kate’s Flybe flight.
The Trumps
When it comes to salaries, the Trump family is cheap
compared with the British royal family. Presidential compensation has remained
the same since 2001 at $400,000 a year, along with a $50,000 expense allowance,
$100,000 travel account and $19,000 entertainment budget. First lady Melania Trump draws no salary, but her own support staff
costs about $500,000 a year. The pair live at the
White House for free along with their teenage son, Barron.
The president’s daughter Ivanka
and her husband Jared Kushner, both employed as senior White House advisers,
also draw no salary.
So, are Americans actually getting a good deal? Not quite.
As with the British royals, the real strain on the public
purse comes from keeping up with the itchy feet of young, energetic VIPs who
are at best vulnerable and at worst a hostage situation waiting to happen.
Flying teams of bodyguards around the world is proving
particularly pricey in the case of the Trump administration. The president has
five children, four of whom are adults, three with children of their own,
leading to a total of eighteen family members entitled to protection.
The full cost of guarding the Trump children and
grandchildren is not available, however breakdowns for
some individual trips have been released by the Government Accountability Office
at the request of Congress, giving us a glimpse into the sums involved.
For example, we know that Trump’s decision to invite his
adult children to accompany him on his state visit to the U.K. in June cost
taxpayers $3.5 million and that his frequent trips to his Florida resort of
Mar-a-Lago each come with a similar price tag, at
around $3.4 million per visit.
More broadly, Trump’s lack of enthusiasm for the White House
is costing U.S. taxpayers dearly. By October, he will have racked up 1,000 days
in office, nearly 300 of which have been spent at his own properties, and more
than 200 at golf resorts. In May, it was reported that the U.S. government had
spent $102 million to facilitate presidential rounds of golf, including $60,000
on renting golf carts for the secret service to trail along behind him in one
year alone.
As with the minor royals, it’s the personal travel by lesser
Trumps that is the most eye-catching.
A November 2018 business trip by Donald Trump, Jr. to India,
where he sought to sell a family condominium, set taxpayers back nearly
$100,000. When the president’s youngest daughter Tiffany visited Serbia in
March it cost $23,000; two months later she spent a weekend at the Cannes Film
Festival. The price tag: $19,000.
Thanks to Trump’s international property portfolio, his
companies often make money off his family’s trips to his properties. In
February 2017, for example, Donald Jr., Eric and Tiffany Trump all travelled to
Vancouver to open a new Trump hotel; the cost of putting up the secret service
at the Trump International Hotel and Tower Vancouver was $20,000.
It was not long after that, in August, that the head of the
secret service warned that the agency is at risk of running out of money due to
the strain of protecting the extensive Trump family.
POLITICO’s Sponger Rating: 9/10
The Trumps certainly share the royals’ love of lavishness
and carelessness about public funds. But the U.S. has one big advantage.
Presidencies last four to eight years, and Trump’s family members will lose
their protection as soon as he leaves office (Trump himself will continue to
receive secret service protection for another 10 years). Unlike the Brits, U.S.
taxpayers won’t be stuck paying the first family’s bills forever. Unless Ivanka runs for president.
Or Barron marries Princess Charlotte…
Or the Democrats circling round Biden and
exasperated Republicans join together and make Trump our King Donald the First
(DJI)
ATTACHMENT SEVEN – from History.com
Historic Powers of the Monarchy
For centuries, the English monarchy
held a great deal of authority, but its history is full of challenges to that
power and of concessions to nobles. Most famously, King John's signing of Magna
Carta in 1215 acknowledged that the monarchy's powers
did have limits and, crucially, established that the crown could not levy taxes
without the consent of a council of religious officials and feudal lords. That
council of wealthy and powerful figures evolved into Parliament, which
gradually took on a greater role as English people began to appeal to it to
solve disputes and send representatives to petition it on their behalf.
Parliament’s role ultimately
depended on how much power the monarch wanted to give it, and how much he or
she needed Parliament’s support. King Charles I governed without Parliament for
over a decade, setting into motion events that would end with his beheading and
the abolition of the monarchy in 1649. Parliament then ruled without a king until
the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.
In the Glorious Revolution of 1688,
Parliament invited William II of Orange and his wife, Mary II, to invade
England and depose King James II, who wanted absolute power. William and Mary
then assented to the Bill of Rights, which legally required Parliament to be
held regularly, granted full freedom of speech in Parliament and instituted
various civil liberties. Britain does not have a single, written constitution
like that of the United States, but foundational documents like Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights formally took power from the
crown and gave it to Parliament.
British Government Evolves
Over time Parliament evolved into a
true representative government, similar to the Congress of the United States.
Its upper house, the House of Lords, consists of nobles and originally held
nearly all of Parliament’s power, but over the centuries the lower house, the
House of Commons, grew more powerful. By the 1700s, the Commons had obtained
the sole right to initiate taxes, meaning that a legislative body consisting of
elected officials—though most people still couldn’t vote—controlled the state’s
purse.
The monarch retains the right to
“invite” whomever he or she pleases to form a government, but this is a
holdover from the time when “Prime Minister” was an informal way of referring
to the Member of Parliament selected by the king or queen to lead proceedings.
For well over a century, the crown has always extended this “invitation” to the
leader of the party that controls of Parliament—the last time a British monarch
tried to impose his preferred Prime Minister on Parliament was in 1834, and it
didn’t work. Likewise, the representative government is said to govern “in her
name,” and her formal assent is still required for many of the functions of
state, but for the Queen to criticize, impede, or fail to assent to the will of
Parliament would be a violation of over a century of tradition.
The Queen's Role in Government
Today
The Queen remains the head of
British state, the highest representative of the United Kingdom on the national
and international stage. The head of the British government, however, is the
Prime Minister. One serves as a symbol of the country and the other serves as
the chief executive of the government.
In her role as head of state, Queen
Elizabeth II gives a regular speech at the opening of each new Parliament and
makes official appearances and speeches on holidays and special occasions. The
Queen keeps in close contact with the Prime Minister and is regularly briefed
on all important national matters, but never publicly weighs in on political
debates—nor are any final decisions up to her.
As the Royal Family has shed most
of its political powers, Queen Elizabeth, her husband and her children have
emphasized their roles in various charitable organizations—the Queen is the
titular “patron” of over 600 charities, although this role consists mostly of
drawing attention to the causes. Her presence during some of the great crises
in recent British history, including the COVID-19 pandemic, has drawn praise.
As Britain's global empire crumbled
in the wake of World War II, a number of its formal colonies declared
independence but chose enter the Commonwealth of Nations, of which the Queen
remains the figurehead. Citizens of Australia, Canada and many island nations
across the world consider themselves subjects of Queen Elizabeth, who famously
toured 13 of these “Commonwealth realms” in 1953. Elizabeth appears on the
currency of many of these nations and her visits are usually a cause for
celebration, but her duties there, as in her home country, are entirely
ceremonial.
ATTACHMENT
EIGHT (A) - From Business Insider
DONALD TRUMP RETREATED TO MAR-A-LAGO. TAKE A LOOK
INSIDE HIS EXCLUSIVE RESORT THAT THE PUBLIC NEVER SEES
By Michal Kranz , Mariana
Alfaro , and Taylor Borden Jan 22, 2021,
11:08 AM
·
Mar-a-Lago
is Donald Trump's private club in Palm Beach, Florida. The property made a
number of headlines and served as the First Family's gilded getaway throughout
Trump's presidency.
·
It's where the family went on
Wednesday following the end of Trump's
presidential term, even though neighbors
weren't thrilled at the
prospect.
·
Here's a look inside the
exclusive resort that the public doesn't get to see.
Over
the last four years, Donald Trump's exclusive Mar-a-Lago
resort in Palm Beach, Florida was often referred to as "the winter White
House."
Now,
it's just his house.
Following
the end of his presidential term on Wednesday, Trump decamped to the ornate
resort. Recent reports of construction work at
the family's on-property living quarters and Melania
Trump touring a local school (presumably
for son Barron) stoked rumors of the move long before it was official.
Neighbors even publicly spoke about wanting Trump to
stay away, though it clearly didn't deter
him.
Mar-a-Lago has hosted a number of high-powered visitors over the
years, as it has seemingly always served as the Trump family's gilded weekend
getaway. Mar-a-Lago has served as a lavish backdrop
to host important dignitaries with its elaborately decorated halls. It was
built to impress.
Case
in point: the property was closed for 57 days amid the coronavirus
pandemic after visitors like the press secretary to
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro
and Brazil's Chargé d'Affaires Ambassador Nestor Forster tested
positive for the coronavirus in March.
See Town and Country Magazine
for pictures of the sprawling complex, which was built in the early
20th century, where the Trumps have hosted
opulent holiday parties and watched Super Bowls alongside
members of the exclusive private club.
See, also, Business Insider, Washington Post, Miami Herald CNN, Business Insider, The New York Times, Time and Mar-a-Lago.
Some details…
It spans the entire width of the island Palm Beach is
located on, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Intracoastal Waterway.
Trump bought the estate and all of its antique furniture
in 1985 for a total of $8 million.
Today, it serves as the Trump family's opulent
playground, but is also open to people who purchase a membership at the club.
Back in the 1990s, memberships cost $50,000, but they
soared to $200,000 after Trump's election.
Members also have to pay a $14,000 annual fee, with a
$2,000 dining minimum.
Members can access the club's pools, beaches, dining
halls, and private rooms. They can also rent out the resort for events like
weddings, bar mitzvahs, and charity galas.
Trump has also used it to host numerous campaign events
and publicity events, like the one pictured below, which was held in Mar-a-Lago's giant ballroom.
For most people, access to the club stops at its gated
entrance.
Those who do make it inside are treated to a detailed
portico that leads into the main building, which features neo-Gothic and Andalusian accents.
Once inside, ornate decor reminiscent of European
palaces accompanies pricey antique furniture. The club's main living room
features high ceilings and gold-plated designs over every wall.
Here, the president and first lady Melania
Trump used the cavernous library to make calls to children on Christmas Eve in
2017.
Not all of the rooms are so lavish. This interior room
is where Trump gathered with his advisers to order 2017's missile strikes in Syria
in response to what the US said were President Bashar
al-Assad's chemical attacks on his own people.
Trump has also hosted world leaders at the resort,
including Chinese President Xi Jinping and Prime
Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan.
In February 2017, Trump got into a bit of hot water when
he discussed national security details with Abe in full view of the resort's
other guests.
Trump used Mar-a-Lago's
luxurious interior to full effect when Xi visited the complex. As usual at
Mar-a-Lago, bouquets were everywhere. Reports later
found that such flowers cost the US government $6,000 — with the entire visit
totaling more than $35,000.
In 2018, Trump also welcomed the Chinese president's
delegation in a royal neo-Baroque hall at Mar-a-Lago.
Not a detail was amiss for the visit, including the
elaborate place settings
The food at events like these is prepared by a team of
expert chefs.
But not all of it is up to fine dining standard: In
January 2018, a customer was disappointed when she was served caviar with plastic
spoons, with allegedly "low-budget" crackers to accompany it.
Trump's taste is evident throughout his palatial second
home.
Because of its flat terrain and open air access, Trump
can fly in on his own helicopter.
If the club's multiple beaches aren't enough for guests,
they can relax by the various pools on the property. It seems Trump and his
security team have taken advantage of brief windows of
downtime to do so.
Mar-a-Lago has become
synonymous with Trump's lavish lifestyle.
The parties he holds there,
like those on New Year's Eve and Super Bowl Sunday, last late into the night.
In addition to being a social setting for the elite, the
resort itself has become a backdrop for a number of recent national news
stories.
In September 2019, Mar-a-Lago
made headlines as one Jeffrey Epstein victim said she had been recruited
directly from the resort in 1999 when she was 15.
In September 2019, a Chinese businesswoman was convicted
of trespassing on Mar-a-Lago with multiple cell
phones and electronic devices. She was suggested to be a spy for the Chinese
government and was ordered to be deported after her eight-month sentence.
In February 2020, a 30-year-old opera singer from
Connecticut named Hannah Roemhild was arrested after
leading police on a high-speed chase through Palm Beach. Roemhild
barreled through two security checkpoints at Mar-a-Lago
in a black SUV that was shot at by police.
Most recently, Mar-a-Lago
hosted events with attendees who later tested positive for COVID-19, including
a Brazilian press secretary who came into contact with Trump. On March 15, the
club was shut down for a deep cleaning. It did not reopen until May.
Following the Trumps' exit from the White House in
January, the family seemingly moved back to Mar-a-Lago
to live full time. Recent reports have surfaced about construction work being
performed on the family's living quarters during Trump's final months in
office. Sources close to the president told People in December that his
2,000-square-foot private residence at Mar-a-Lago in
Palm Beach "will be expanded and spruced up." Melania
Trump also just toured the $35,000-a-year Pine Crest School in Fort Lauderdale,
ostensibly for their 14-year-old son Barron. It's a 40-minute drive south from
Mar-a-Lago, but also has a campus in Boca Raton,
which is 10 minutes closer to West Palm Beach. Neighbors, however, aren't
thrilled at the prospect and are even trying to keep him from taking up
residence at Mar-a-Lago. The DeMoss
family sent a letter pleading their case via an attorney. They claim that Trump
cannot live at Mar-a-Lago because he signed an
agreement to that effect around 30 years ago, around the time he transformed
the estate into the members-only club it is today, according to the Washington
Post, which obtained a copy of the letter. The signatories asked the town to
step in and enforce the agreement.
ATTACHMENT
EIGHT (B) – From Smithsonian Magazine
THE IRONIC HISTORY OF MAR-A-LAGO
A
deep dive into an obscure archive reveals that the Palm Beach property had once
been envisioned as a “Winter White House”
By Michael Luongo,
NOVEMBER 2017
16368
Within 48 hours after the presidential
election last November, the Palm Beach Daily News headlined a
question that “many in town” were asking: “Trump’s Mar-a-Lago:
Another Winter White House?”
By January, the president-elect had an
answer: “Writing my inaugural address at the Winter White House, Mar-a-Lago,” he tweeted from his elite private club, along with a
photograph of himself seated behind a large desk, legal pad and pen in hand.
Palm Beach might have been having déjŕ
vu, and not only because President-elect John F. Kennedy wrote his inaugural
address at his father’s estate in the town’s North End. The woman who built
Mar-a-Lago in the 1920s and presided over it for
almost half a century, Marjorie Merriweather Post,
had gone to great lengths to turn the mansion into an official wintertime
presidential retreat.
Post said she wanted “a little cottage
by the sea.” “Look what we got!” said her exasperated husband.
But even extreme wealth has its
limitations, as my visit to the Post Family Papers suggests. They occupy 57
seldom-seen linear feet at the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library
and document the life of one of the most famous and consequential women of the
20th century. The files offer unusual glimpses of the girl who glued labels
onto packages of Postum, the coffee substitute that
made her family’s fortune, and of the woman who built the General Foods
Corporation. Her four husbands, her bountiful philanthropy, her megayacht, her grand balls, her jaw-dropping jewels—all are
documented in the archives.
And then there’s a volume bound in
still-handsome red leather. A yellowing file card dated “February/March 1976”
is taped to the cover: “Original Proposal for Disposition of Mar-a-Lago.”
The mansion dates to the 1920s, when
Palm Beach’s wealthiest visitors were forsaking luxury hotels for their own
digs, says Debi Murray, chief curator of the Historical Society of Palm Beach
County. Post herself explored the site of her future home, on 17 acres of scrub
between Lake Worth and the Atlantic. (Mar-a-Lago
means “Sea to Lake” in Spanish.) Construction began in 1923 and kept some 600 workers
busy, even though, as Murray notes, “Florida entered the Depression earlier
than the rest of the country.” The mistress ensured that her workers wouldn’t
go hungry.
Even by Palm Beach standards, Mar-a-Lago was grandiose: 58 bedrooms, 33 bathrooms with
gold-plated fixtures (easier to clean, Post believed),
an 1,800-square-foot living room with 42-foot ceilings. Its 110,000 square feet
glinted with gold leaf, Spanish tiles, Italian marble
and Venetian silks. All told, Post spent $7 million—somewhere north of $90
million today.
It was finished in 1927. That March,
Post and her second husband, Edward F. Hutton, had a few score guests over for
dinner before the annual Everglades Costume Ball. The hosts wore costumes
evoking the reign of Louis XVI. But there was also noblesse oblige: In 1929,
when she hired the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus to perform for
a charity fund-raiser, she invited underprivileged children to attend. In 1944,
she offered her grounds to World War II veterans who needed occupational
therapy. In 1957, she opened Mar-a-Lago to the
International Red Cross Ball, and the gala event has been held there many times
since—but not this year. It was one of more than 20 charity events that were
relocated from Mar-a-Lago or canceled after the
president’s remarks on violent protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, in
August.
As the social seasons came and went,
however, Palm Beach tastemakers’ tastes changed. The grand houses they built in
the 1920s were seen as “white elephants,” Murray says, and were razed in the
’50s and ’60s.
Except that isn’t how Post
saw Mar-a-Lago—or Hillwood,
her estate in Washington, D.C., or Camp Topridge,
her retreat in the Adirondacks. She arranged to donate all three properties to
government entities. The state of New York added some of Topridge’s
acreage to a forest preserve but sold most of its 68 buildings to a private
owner. The Smithsonian Institution, citing maintenance costs, returned Hillwood to the Post Foundation, which now runs it as a
museum.
And the original Mar-a-Lago proposal, the one bound in red leather, was to donate
it to the state of Florida for a center for advanced scholars, but state
officials also balked at the maintenance costs.
By 1968, according to other papers in
the archive, Post had turned to Plan B: Mar-a-Lago as
winter White House, property of the United States. After she died, in 1973, at
age 86, the Post Foundation pursued the idea. But in 1981, the federal
government declined, for the same reason the Floridians and the Smithsonian did.
Thus
Mar-a-Lago went on the market. Three potential sales
collapsed before Donald Trump bought it in 1985, paying a reported $8 million
for the estate and its furnishings—a small fraction of the original cost, no
matter how you calculate it. And after three decades and the most confounding
presidential election in living memory, Marjorie Merriweather
Post’s wish for her mansion came true.
ATTACHMENT NINE – from Guardian UK
LINDSEY
GRAHAM: TRUMP MAY DESTROY REPUBLICAN PARTY BUT HE HAS A ‘MAGIC’
Senator defends his refusal to
abandon ex-president in Axios on HBO interview even
though Trump has a ‘dark side’
Mon 8 Mar 2021 08.50 ESTLast
modified on Mon 8 Mar 2021 08.52 EST
Senator
Lindsey Graham has defended his refusal to abandon Donald Trump in
the aftermath of the deadly attack on the Capitol, saying that though the
former president has “a dark side … what I’m trying to do is just harness the
magic”.
He
also said Trump’s continued grip on the Republican party
could make it “bigger, he can make it stronger, he can make it more diverse.
And he also could destroy it.”
The
South Carolina Republican initially said the US could “count [him] out”
from backing Trump after the riot but he quickly dropped any show of
independence.
On
Sunday he was speaking to Axios on HBO at the end of
a weekend in which Trump was reported to have told the Republican party to stop fundraising off
his name and was also reported to be preparing to leave Florida for the first
time since leaving office, to visit New York,
his home city.
Five
people including a police officer died as a direct result of the storming of
Congress by a crowd Trump had told to “fight like hell” in support of his
attempt to overturn election defeat by Joe Biden.
Graham
was one of 43 Republicans who
voted to acquit.
“Donald
Trump was my friend before the riot,” he said, of a man who attacked him viciously
in the 2016 Republican primary and who he famously said would destroy the party
if he became its nominee. The senator pivoted once Trump took power, to become
one of his closest and most eager allies.
“I’m
trying to keep a relationship with him after the riot,” he said. “I still
consider him a friend. What happened was a dark day in American history. And
we’re going to move forward.”
Graham
said the best way for Republicans to do that was “with Trump, not without
Trump”.
Jonathan
Swan countered that Trump is “still telling everyone he won in a landslide”,
a lie repeatedly
thrown out of court and which has placed the former president in legal jeopardy.
“I
tell him every day that he wants to listen,” Graham said, “that I think the
main reason he probably lost in Arizona was he was beating on the dead guy
called John McCain.”
McCain,
an Arizona senator, 2008 presidential nominee and close friend and ally to Graham,
never accepted Trump as the face of his party. Trump attacked McCain viciously,
even over his record in the Vietnam war, in which
McCain endured captivity and torture while Trump avoided the draft.
Asked
if he could afford to abandon Trump because he is not up for re-election until
2026, Graham said: “Yeah, I could throw him over tomorrow … I could say you
know that’s it’s over, it’s done. That’s just too
easy.
“What’s
hard is to take a movement that I think is good for the country, trying to get the
leader of the movement, who’s got lots of problems facing him and the party and
see if we can make a go of it.
‘Mitt
Romney [the 2012 nominee] didn’t do it, John McCain didn’t do it. There’s
something about Trump. There’s a dark side. And there’s some magic there. What
I’m trying to do is just harness the magic.
Helms, a North Carolina senator who died
in 2008, was a hardline
conservative and segregationist, in the words of one
columnist when he died, an “unabashed racist”.
PT Barnum was a 19th-century businessman, politician, controversialist and
circus impresario.
Trump, Graham insisted, “could make the Republican party something that nobody else I
know could make it. He can make it bigger, he can make it stronger, he can make it more diverse. And he also could destroy it.”
ATTACHMENT
TEN – from Reason
TRUMP WASN'T
A DICTATOR, BUT HE PLAYED ONE ON TV
The
45th president busted norms left and right. But the abuse of executive power
didn't start and won't end with him.
A Return
to Normalcy?
On May 14, 1920, in soporific, passive-voice verbiage,
Republican presidential candidate Warren G. Harding described a nation
exhausted by war, federal overreach, and global pandemic: "Poise has been
disturbed, and nerves have been wracked, and fever has rendered men irrational.
Sometimes there have been draughts upon the dangerous cup of barbarity."
He went on: "America's present need is not heroics, but
healing; not nostrums but normalcy." The word that Harding
popularized in that speech enjoyed renewed cachet in 2020, generating
"normalcy" thinkpieces and spiking on
Google Trends as Americans longed for a return to relative calm and regular
order.
The 47-years-familiar figure of Joe Biden seemed to fill
that need, with a sort of rebooted front-porch campaign run out of a basement Zoom studio. Toward the end of the race, Trump almost seemed
to be making the case for his opponent. A vote for Biden, the president
declared at a late October rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, was a vote for "boredom."
"Look at all those cameras," Trump urged the crowd, "If you had
Sleepy Joe, nobody's going to be interested in politics anymore." Four
days after the election, when the president-elect delivered his victory
speech—"an outpouring of joy, of hope, renewed faith in tomorrow to bring
a better day"—the old platitudinous yammery
struck many as surprisingly soothing.
Why wouldn't it? As November ground on, so did Trump's
Norm-Demolition Derby. At a gonzo press conference on the 19th, the president's
lawyers insisted—sans evidence—that he'd won reelection in a
"landslide," the true result stifled by a vast conspiracy involving
the "massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and
likely China." "This is real! It is not made up!" a sweaty Rudy
Giuliani squawked. Was "boredom" supposed to be a threat?
But while a change in tone is welcome, it won't change the
fundamentals. Good luck forgetting about presidential politics when the
president has the power to shape what our health insurance covers or
unilaterally forgive student loans, STEMless or even STEAMless handouts to
cancel culture morons – DJI the ability to launch a trade war from his
couch or a shooting war with Iran. You may not want to be interested in the
presidency, but the presidency is interested in you.
After Trump, the office will still be invested with more
power than any single, fallible human being can safely be trusted with. Unless
and until we start taking that power back, it's only a matter of time before
politics gets all too interesting once again.
ATTACHMENT ELEVEN – from the New York Post
THE POST SAYS: GIVE IT UP, MR. PRESIDENT — FOR YOUR SAKE AND THE NATION’S
By Post Editorial Board
December 27, 2020 | 9:02pm
Mr. President, it’s time to end this dark charade.
We’re one week away from an enormously important moment for
the next four years of our country.
On Jan. 5, two runoff races in
Georgia will determine which party will control the Senate — whether Joe Biden
will have a rubber stamp or a much-needed check on his agenda.
Unfortunately, you’re obsessed with the next day, Jan. 6,
when Congress will, in a pro forma action, certify the Electoral College vote. You have
tweeted that, as long as Republicans have “courage,” they can overturn the
results and give you four more years in office.
In other words, you’re cheering for an undemocratic coup.
You had every right to investigate the election. But let’s be
clear: Those efforts have found nothing. To take just two examples: Your
campaign paid $3 million for
a recount in two Wisconsin counties, and you lost by 87 more votes. Georgia did two recounts of the state, each time affirming Biden’s win. These ballots were counted by hand, which alone
debunks the claims of a Venezuelan vote-manipulating Kraken conspiracy.
Sidney Powell is a crazy person. Michael Flynn suggesting
martial law is tantamount to treason. It is shameful.
We understand, Mr. President, that
you’re angry that you lost. But to continue down this road is ruinous. We offer
this as a newspaper that endorsed you, that
supported you: If you want to cement your influence, even set the stage for a
future return, you must channel your fury into something more productive.
Stop thinking about Jan. 6. Start thinking about Jan. 5.
If Republicans David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler
win, they will prevent Biden from rolling back what you have accomplished. A
Republican Senate can pressure Biden against returning to the old, failed Iran
deal, can stop him from throwing open our southern border, will prevent him
from packing the Supreme Court.
Now imagine a government controlled by your nemeses — Nancy
Pelosi in the House, Chuck Schumer in the Senate, Biden in the White House. How
high will taxes go? How many of your initiatives will be strangled? And, on a
personal note, do you think they won’t spend the next four years torturing you
with baseless hearings and investigations?
Consider this. You came out of nowhere to win the
presidency. Not an elected official, not a lawyer, not beholden to any
particular faction of the swamp. You took on the elites and the media who had
long lost touch with average working people. You changed politics, which is
something few in American history can say.
If Georgia falls, all that is threatened. You will leave
your party out of power, less likely to listen to what you have to say or to capitalize
on your successes, such as expanding the Hispanic voting bloc for the GOP.
Democrats will try to write you off as a one-term aberration
and, frankly, you’re helping them do it. The King Lear of
Mar-a-Lago, ranting about the corruption of the world.
Securing the Senate means securing your legacy. You
should use your considerable charm and influence to support the Georgia
candidates, mobilizing your voters for them. Focus on their success, not your
own grievances, as we head into the final week.
If you insist on spending your final days in office
threatening to burn it all down, that will be how you are remembered. Not as a
revolutionary, but as the anarchist holding the match.
ATTACHMENT
TWELVE – from The
Nation
WHY THE TRUMPISTS’ CALLS FOR DICTATORSHIP SHOULD WORRY
US
It may sound laughable, but it’s no
joke—the GOP leadership and the right-wing media machine are colluding with Trump’s
assault on democratic institutions.
By Sasha Abramsky,
DECEMBER 4, 2020
We
are less than seven weeks away from the inauguration, and I’d be lying if I
said I wasn’t counting down the seconds. For the last spasms of Trumpist rule are truly a sight and sound to behold. Trumpism is at this point nothing more than a blend of
cultism and fascism, a violent, nihilistic howl against the pillars of American
democracy unparalleled in presidential history.
Donald
Trump and his acolytes know their gig is up; they can file lawsuits till they
are blue in the face, but they’re not going to overturn the election results in
multiple states simultaneously. They have reached a fork in the road: Accept
the results and move on, or attempt to flex the presidential muscle in a way
that launches America into an experiment with dictatorship. They have decided,
at least rhetorically, to opt for the latter. And while they almost certainly
don’t have the bite to match their bark, the very fact that people surrounding
Trump are calling for dictatorship ought to send a chill up all Americans’
spines.
ATTACHMENT TWELVE (A) – from the San Jose Spotlight
TRUMP'S MILITARY
DICTATORSHIP FOILED BY TOP MILITARY LEADERS
Any crackpot, Third World dictator could have told President
Trump the military was needed for a successful coup d'état.
January 15, 2021
Any crackpot, Third World dictator could have
told President Trump the military was needed for a successful coup d'état.
Looking back, Trump's administration removed the
USS Theodore Roosevelt's courageous Capt. Brett Crozier
for standing up for his COVID-19 ravaged crew. Trump incessantly and crudely,
criticized war hero and distinguished statesman John McCain even while the
senator was on his deathbed. Trump made serving the nation so uncomfortable that Marine Gens. John Kelly and James Mattis,
both proven top administrators and honorable men, found it necessary to resign
their Cabinet-level posts.
He went from bad to worse. Trump denigrated our
fallen WWII heroes as "suckers and losers" when he refused to visit
the D-Day ceremony at the French military cemetery for the 1,800 Marines killed
while holding the line that saved Paris during WWI at Belleau Wood. Then the
military's official investigation of Capt. Crozier
recommended that he be reinstated to his command. But after checking with
Trump, his Secretary of Defense required another investigation terminating the
captain's reinstatement.
ATTACHMENT
THIRTEEN – from Independent U.K.
TRUMP
WAS ‘MUTTERING, I WON, I WON, LIKE ‘MAD KING GEORGE’ AFTER ELECTION DEFEAT,
REPORT SAYS
President
‘scrambled for an escape hatch from reality’ according to The Washington Post
Harriet
Alexander. Sunday 29 November 2020 20:36
Donald Trump on election night was like
"Mad King George, muttering, 'I won. I won. I won,' " according to one close
adviser, who
spoke to The Washington Post for a remarkable recap of the 20
days since the election.
More
than 30 senior administration officials, members of his legal team, campaign
aides and advisers told the paper of his increasingly unhinged attempts to
overturn the election result, and how those left within the White House humoured him.
Those
around the president after 3 November were "happy to scratch his
itch," the close adviser said.
"If
he thinks he won, it’s like, 'Shh,
we won’t tell him.'"
Of the ensuing legal
strategy, a senior administration told
the paper that the theory was: "Just roll
everybody up who is willing to do it into a clown car, and when it’s time for a
press conference, roll them.
The paper confirmed that, on the
night of the election, Mr Trump was enraged by Fox News being the first network
to call Arizona for Joe Biden - a
call which ultimately proved correct - and that he ordered his son-in-law,
Jared Kushner, to ring Rupert Murdoch and demand a retraction.
n
the days that followed Mr Trump surrounded himself by people who told him what
he wanted to hear, the paper reported, such as campaign pollster John
McLaughlin, who told the president of a poll he had conducted after the
election that showed Mr Trump with a positive approval rating and a majority in
the country who thought the media had been "unfair and biased against him".
"Trump
scrambled for an escape hatch from reality," the authors write.
Thanksgiving
was spent for the first time at the White House, further insulating him from
the real world. He played golf in the morning and spent part of the day calling
advisers to ask if they believed he really had lost the election.
"You
really have to understand Trump’s psychology," said Anthony Scaramucci, a longtime Trump associate and former White
House communications director, who has now distanced himself from the
president.
"The
classic symptoms of an outsider is, there has to be a
conspiracy. It’s not my shortcomings, but there’s a cabal against me. That’s
why he’s prone to these conspiracy theories."
Perhaps
most telling is the number of insiders who have tried to distance themselves
from the spectacle.
There
was no mention in The Washington Post story of Mike Pence, the
vice president, nor his daughter Ivanka.
The
Trump campaign had arranged for deputy campaign manager Justin Clark, Justin Riemer, the Republican National Committee counsel and
others to make plans for post-election litigation.
The
two men had readied a series of law firms across the country for possible
recounts and ballot challenges
The
self-declared "elite strike-force" team of Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis
and Sidney Powell - since dropped - were not involved.
"Literally
only the fringy of the fringe are willing to do pressers, and that’s when it
became clear there was no ‘there’ there," a senior administration official
told the paper.
Many
of the other lawyers felt that Mr Giuliani seemed “deranged” and ill-prepared
to litigate, a source said.
Mr
Giuliani and Ms Ellis were “performing for an audience of one,” and Mr Trump
held Mr Giuliani in high regard as “a fighter” and as “his peer.”
On
13 November, Mr Giuliani and Ms Ellis staged what a senior administration
official called “a hostile takeover” of what remained of the Trump campaign.
Mr
Trump called Mr Giuliani from the Oval Office while other advisers were
present, including Mr Pence; White House counsel Pat Cipollone;
Johnny McEntee, the director of presidential
personnel; and Mr Clark, the deputy campaign manager who had laid the legal
foundations for the challenges.
Mr
Giuliani, on speakerphone, told the president that he could win and that his
other advisers were lying to him about his chances. Mr. Clark called Mr
Giuliani "an expletive," the paper reported, and said he was feeding
the president bad information.
The
following day, 14 November, Mr Trump tweeted that Mr
Giuliani, Ms Ellis, Ms Powell and others were now in charge of his legal
strategy.
Ms
Ellis arrived at the campaign’s Arlington headquarters and told employees that
they must now listen to her and Mr Giuliani, the paper reported.
"They
came in one day and were like, ‘We have the president’s direct order. Don’t
take an order if it doesn’t come from us,'" a senior administration
official recalled.
Mr
Clark and Jason Miller, an aide to the president, objected and so Ms Ellis
threatened to call Mr Trump - to which Mr Miller replied: “Sure, let’s do
this,” said a campaign adviser.
Ultimately
Mr Giuliani and Ms Ellis were victorious.
On
23 November the president reluctantly allowed the General Service
Administration to approve the release of funds for the Biden transition team,
and grant them permission to speak to government officials.
Permission
was granted, however, after Mr Trump's aides told him that it didn't mean he
had to give up his legal fight, or concede.
The
president has vowed to fight on but, with the electors meeting on 14 December
to officially name Mr Biden the president-elect, it is seen as a futile fight.
ATTACHMENT FOURTEEN – from U.S.
News and World Report
AP FACT CHECK: Trump Isn't a King
but Claims Expansive Power
In the latest turns of the coronavirus
crisis, President Donald Trump has weighed in on how much power he thinks he
has to deal with it.
By Associated
Press, Wire Service Content April 18,
2020, at 9:10 a.m.
BY HOPE YEN AND CALVIN WOODWARD, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — Over the past
week, President Donald Trump was pretender to a throne that doesn't exist as he
claimed king-like powers over the coronavirus
pandemic response and Congress.
He also denied
praising China's openness in the pandemic, when he's on record doing so
repeatedly, and claimed far more Chinese than Americans are dying from COVID-19
when the numbers show the opposite.
A look at his recent rhetoric and its
relationship with reality.
CHINA vs. US
TRUMP: “China has just announced a doubling in the
number of their deaths from the Invisible Enemy. It is far higher than that and
far higher than the U.S., not even close!” — tweet Friday.
THE FACTS: It’s the reverse, more than 4,600
recorded deaths in China compared with more than 36,000 in the United States.
And the notion that China can overtake the U.S. in a final accounting of the
dead is a long shot right now.
Even with the upward revision Friday of Chinese
deaths — which was not a doubling, as Trump claimed — the recorded U.S. death
toll is about seven times higher than China’s, according to the count by Johns
Hopkins University as of Friday night. And China has more than four times more
people.
The full picture is not known in either country.
Trump routinely manipulates information to make the U.S response to the coronavirus pandemic look better than it is. China’s
secretive leadership obscured the severity of the crisis for crucial weeks, and its numbers remain in question.
As well, deaths from the virus have not been fully
reported in either country because the pandemic is still raging in the U.S. and
still being accounted for in China.
But for China to surpass the U.S. in this count, it
would have to be underreporting deaths by the tens of thousands, and deaths in
the U.S. would have to nosedive from the current trend and projections.
___
EXECUTIVE AUTHORITY
TRUMP: “Some in the Fake News Media are saying that
it is the Governors decision to open up the states, not that of the President
of the United States & the Federal Government. Let it be fully understood
that this is incorrect ... It is the decision of the President.” — tweets Monday.
TRUMP, asked about his level of authority to reopen
the country: “I have the ultimate authority.... They can’t do anything without
the approval of the president of the United States.” — news
briefing Monday.
THE FACTS: The federal government did
not close down the country and won’t be reopening it. Restrictions on public
gatherings, workplaces, mobility, store operations, schools and more were
ordered by states and communities, not Washington. The federal government has
imposed border controls; otherwise its social distancing actions are mostly
recommendations, not mandates.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, knocking
down a series of false rumors about the coronavirus,
makes clear that “states and cities are responsible for announcing curfews,
shelters in place, or other restrictions and safety measures.”
Trump has argued that states and communities imposed
restrictions because he let them and that he can overrule their decisions.
Constitutional experts disagree.
“The president can un-declare
his national emergency declarations, which freed up federal funds and provided
assistance to state and local governments,” said Walter Dellinger, a former
acting U.S. solicitor general. “But he has no federal statutory or
constitutional power to override steps taken by governors and mayors under
state law. He has never understood that he lacks a general power to rule by
decree.”
The federal government does have broad
constitutional authority over states on things that cross state lines and
involve the entire nation, such as regulating interstate commerce and
immigration, levying taxes or declaring war. What Trump is proposing, however,
is different. He is wading into states’ sharply defined powers to protect
public health.
Asked what authority he had to make such an
assertion of presidential power, Trump promised earlier in the week that he
would provide a legal memorandum supporting his view. By Thursday, he hadn't and
he told governors that day they could reopen states when they deem appropriate.
___
TRUMP: “If the House will not agree to that
adjournment, I will exercise my constitutional authority to adjourn both
chambers of Congress.” — news briefing Wednesday.
THE FACTS: His power to adjourn Congress is highly
questionable.
The Constitution does not spell out a unilateral
power for the president to adjourn Congress. It states only that he can decide
on adjournment if there is a dispute over that matter between the House and
Senate. Such a disagreement does not exist, nor is it likely to arise.
Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley said on
Twitter the Constitution gives a president authority in “extraordinary
occasions” to convene or adjourn Congress. But, he said, “This power has never
been used and should not be used now.”
Trump is unhappy that Congress has
refused to fully adjourn during most breaks. Because Congress is still formally
in session, Trump can't circumvent Congress and unilaterally put his nominees
for various positions to work in the jobs he wants them to have. Lawmakers also
used the tactic of holding off on adjournment to thwart some of President
Barack Obama’s nominees.
Doug Andres, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said McConnell will find ways to confirm nominees
essential to the pandemic response but Senate rules will require that the
Democratic leader, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, give consent to move forward
on them.
___
WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION
TRUMP, explaining in part why he is freezing money
to the World Health Organization: “The WHO willingly took China’s assurances to
face value, and they took it just at face value and defended the actions of the
Chinese government, even praising China for its so-called transparency. I don’t
think so.” — news briefing Tuesday.
TRUMP, asked about his past praise of China: “I
don’t talk about China’s transparency.” — news
briefing Tuesday.
THE FACTS: He did praise China's transparency as
well as its overall performance in the pandemic.
While it's true that WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus complimented China's response, Trump early on
similarly took China's assurances at face value.
In a CNBC interview on Jan. 22, Trump was asked if
he trusted information from China about the coronavirus.
"I do,” Trump said. “I have a great relationship with President Xi.”
Two days later, he was even more effusive. “China
has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus,”
he tweeted. "The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and
transparency. It will all work out well. ...I want to thank President Xi!"
Trump kept up the compliments when asked several
times in February about whether data from China can be trusted,. He called Xi “extremely capable” and said he's “doing a
very good job with a very, very tough situation.”
Such praise faded as the pandemic hit
hard in the U.S. and the federal response stumbled. The time was ripe for
scapegoats. It also become clearer that China had not
been forthcoming at the start.
On March 21, Trump said of his earlier remarks:
“China was transparent at that time, but when we saw what happened, they could
have been transparent much earlier than they were." In any event, his
denial that he ever praised China's openness is false.
___
TRADE
TRUMP: “China has paid us nothing in your last
administration, nothing in any previous administration. They paid us tens of
billions of dollars because of what we’ve done. And the trade deal we have,
they have to give us $250 billion in purchases. ...We’re taking in billions of
dollars for China — from China. They never paid us 10 cents.” — news briefing Tuesday.
THE FACTS: A familiar assertion, false to the core.
It’s false to say the U.S. never collected a dime in
tariffs on Chinese goods before he took action. They are simply higher in some
cases than they were before. It’s also wrong to suggest that the tariffs are
being paid by China. Tariff money coming into the treasury is mainly from U.S.
businesses and consumers, not from China. Tariffs are primarily if not entirely
a tax paid domestically.
___
TRUMP, on the World Trade Organization: “We’re
winning a lot of lawsuits right now that we never won before in the past. We’re
winning a lot of money that we never won in the past. That’s with the World
Trade.” — news briefing Wednesday.
THE FACTS: He is wildly wrong to suggest that the
U.S. was bound to lose disputes taken to the trade organization before him.
The U.S. has always had a high success rate when it
pursues cases against other countries at the WTO. In 2017, trade analyst Daniel
Ikenson of the libertarian Cato Institute found that
the U.S. won 91% of the cases it took to the Geneva-based trade monitor.
As Ikenson noted,
countries bringing complaints to the organization tend to win because they
don’t bother going to the WTO in the first place if they don’t have a strong
case.
___
DRUG TREATMENTS
TRUMP, on the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine:
"We have millions of doses that we bought, and many people are using it
all over the country. And just recently, a friend of mine told me he got better
because of the use of that — that drug. So, who knows? ...It’s a lot of good
things that are happening with it.” — news briefing
Monday.
THE FACTS: He continues to make unverified claims
about a drug that can have serious side effects and may not work. The drug has
not been proven as a treatment for COVID-19, and Trump’s own health experts say
more studies are needed to know whether it’s safe and effective to use.
The president has been talking up hydroxychloroquine, a drug long used to treat malaria,
rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, after very small preliminary studies suggested
it might help prevent coronavirus from entering cells
and possibly help patients clear the virus sooner.
Doctors can already prescribe the malaria drug to
patients with COVID-19, a practice known as off-label prescribing. The Food and
Drug Administration has allowed the drugs into the national stockpile, but only
for narrowly defined purposes as studies continue on whether they are effective
and safe enough to be approved for wider use by people sick with the coronavirus.
The drug has major potential side effects,
especially for the heart, and large studies are underway. The FDA says people
should not take it without a prescription and emphasizes that the malaria drugs
being explored “are not FDA-approved for treatment of COVID-19.”
The American Medical Association, the American
Pharmacists Association and the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists
in a joint statement warned against “prophylactically
prescribing medications currently identified as potential treatments for
COVID-19.” That means prescribing a medicine for the purpose of warding off a
disease or preventing its spread.
The Federal Aviation Administration on Tuesday
barred pilots from taking hydroxychloroquine and
closely related chloroquine within 48 hours of
flying. The safety agency cites the “wide variety of dosages” and lack of
standards around using the drugs to treat the coronavirus
in deciding that any pilots who take them must wait before flying.
___
TRAVEL RESTRICTIONS
TRUMP, on imposing restrictions on travel from
China: “I saved tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives, by
doing that.” — news briefing Monday.
TRUMP: “And if we didn’t close our border early —
very early, long before the kind of dates you’re talking about — we would have
had thousands and probably hundreds of thousands more death.” — news briefing Tuesday.
THE FACTS: Trump has no standing to boast about
saving thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of lives because
he imposed travel restrictions on China when he did. The impact hasn’t been
quantified.
While Dr. Anthony Fauci of
the National Institutes of Health has praised the travel restrictions on China
for slowing the virus, public health officials don't know the effect of them.
The move left plenty of gaps in containment.
Trump’s order in late January did not
fully “close” the U.S. off to China, as he asserts. It temporarily barred entry
by foreign nationals who had traveled in China within the previous 14 days,
with exceptions for the immediate family of U.S. citizens and permanent
residents.
Americans returning from China were allowed back
after enhanced screening at select ports of entry and for 14 days afterward.
But screenings can miss people who don’t yet show symptoms of COVID-19. While
symptoms often appear within five days or six days of exposure, the incubation
period is 14 days.
A recent study from the journal Science found
China’s internal crackdown modestly delayed the spread of the virus. It cast
doubt that travel restrictions elsewhere will do much compared with other
preventive measures, citing in part the likelihood that a large number of people
exposed to the virus had already been traveling internationally without being
detected.
For weeks after the first U.S. case of the coronavirus was confirmed in January, government missteps
caused a shortage of reliable laboratory tests, leading to delays in diagnoses.
ATTACHMENT
FIFTEEN – from Rolling
Stone
DONALD TRUMP IS THE MAD-KING
PRESIDENT OUR FOUNDERS FEARED MOST
The Framers knew exactly what to do with a president who
believed he was a monarch. Do we?
By ANDY KROLL
WASHINGTON — Three and a half years after
candidate Donald Trump bragged
he could shoot someone in
Fifth Avenue and not lose a vote, a lawyer for President Donald Trump was asked
about the same scenario in a court of law.
Trump’s lawyer had gone before the judge to stop the release
of the president’s tax returns, which the Manhattan district attorney had
subpoenaed as part of a criminal investigation. Trump’s legal team was
breathtaking in its hubris: Because he was the president, Trump was immune from
the criminal laws of New York or any other state.
Did the same argument apply to Trump’s Fifth Avenue
hypothetical, the judge pressed Trump’s lawyer. “Local authorities couldn’t
investigate? They couldn’t do anything about it?”
Trump’s lawyer noted that his client could be held liable
once he left office. But what if the sitting president
shot someone on Fifth Avenue, the judge asked. “Nothing could be done?”
“That is correct,” the lawyer replied. We’ll call this
Exhibit A.
A few weeks later, Trump announced he would pardon three
service members accused or convicted of war crimes. When the Navy secretary
refused to carry out Trump’s order to reverse the punishment given out to a
SEAL officer convicted of taking a trophy photo with the corpse of an Afghan
teenager, the secretary was forced out. Let’s call this Exhibit B.
And not long after that, Exhibit C: At the end of a week
that saw a parade of witnesses give damning evidence about the president’s
corrupt shake down of the Ukrainian government, Trump called into his favorite
TV show, Fox & Friends, and delivered a 50-minute screed
during which, almost as an aside, he admitted to obstructing justice when he fired FBI Director
James Comey two years ago.
“By the way, if I didn’t fire Comey,
I would have been in some trouble right now,” Trump said. “Because they were
coming after me and I wouldn’t have known that he was a phony. And that Strzok and Page, and all of these people — McCabe
— the whole gang of them. We wouldn’t have been able to find it out.
Turned out to be the best move I ever made, firing Comey,
because they were looking to take down the president of the United States.”
So it goes in Trump’s America. Not a week goes by without
fresh evidence of President Trump’s total disregard for the rule of law and the
guardrails of a functioning democracy. He pardons war
criminals because Fox News told him to. He takes the position that the president is impervious to
accountability for possible crimes. He profits from domestic and foreign
interests who book his hotels and golf at his courses. He shakes down foreign
leaders in exchange for personal favors, calls on foreign adversaries to meddle in U.S.
elections, incites violence among his supporters, and demands loyalty from those around him in office, even if that
means ignoring a legal subpoena.
Trump is hardly the first president to make full use of the
frighteningly expansive power of the presidency. That bipartisan tradition
dates back decades. More recently, we saw it in the vast executive theory used
by George W. Bush to justify torture and wage endless wars. We saw it Barack
Obama’s expansion of the war on terror, use of a secret drone-strike kill list,
and wielding of executive authority to put in place hundreds of new
regulations.
But Trump exists in a different realm. He thinks he is the
law, an untouchable and all-knowing sovereign. Reality bends to his will. He
stands in front of the American people and tells them to believe the opposite
of what they see and hear, tells them that he alone can fix
what’s broken in American politics.
This is the behavior of a president who believes he’s a
king.
THE SIGNS
HAVE ALWAYS BEEN there. The
gold-plated fixtures, the portraits of himself displayed at his properties, and
the procession of wives. As a businessman, he’d treated the law as a mere suggestion,
whether by ducking
taxes or stiffing
workers. He descended a golden escalator into
the 2016 race as if delivered unto the people from high, and he declared his
candidacy in the closest thing to a royal hall at one of his finest properties.
At the Republican convention in 2016, he told party faithful that no one but
him could cure America’s broken politics. “Nobody knows the system better than
me,” he said, “which is why I alone can fix it.” I alone can fix it.
Back then a few Republicans saw the inner monarch in Trump.
“Donald Trump does not represent Republican ideals to me,” Rep. Chris Stewart
(R-Utah) said in
March 2016. “He is our Mussolini.” Stewart criticized Obama’s use of executive
power, and then likened that strategy to then-candidate Trump. “Donald Trump
has exactly the same approach, and it offends me,” Stewart said. “Donald
Trump’s approach is: ‘Well, I’m just going to do it.’ I say no, you don’t. You
are the president; that doesn’t mean you are the king.”
Three years on, Stewart is one of Trump’s loyal defenders in
the House of Representatives, dismissing the ongoing impeachment investigation
as “nonsense,” “unfair,” and “Impeachapalooza 2019.”
In truth the Trump-Ukraine scandal captures so many of
Trump’s king-like impulses. No one disagrees that the most crucial part of
the transcript of
Trump’s now-infamous phone call with Ukraine’s president is the word “favor”
— as in, the president wanted a favor when he conditioned a White House
meeting and nearly $400 million in foreign aid on Ukraine announcing
investigations into Trump’s political rivals.
But the second-most important part of that transcript is the
date: July 25, 2019.
The day before, Special Counsel Robert Mueller went before
Congress and painted the picture of a lawless and dishonest president.
Mueller’s delivery was uneven, but the
message was clear enough: His investigation turned up voluminous evidence that
Trump had obstructed justice when he fired Comey and
tried to fire his first Attorney General as well as Mueller himself. Mueller
said Trump was untruthful in his written responses to the special counsel, and firmly rejected Trump’s chest-beating assertion that the special
counsel’s report exonerated him. If he were confident the president hadn’t
committed any crimes, Mueller said, he would’ve said so.
Any other president (aside from maybe Nixon) would have felt
chastened by Mueller’s testimony. Trump felt liberated — so liberated that, the
very next day, he asked Ukraine’s president to interfere in the 2020
presidential race. What could be more revealing about Trump’s mentality and his
I-alone approach to governing this country?
The founders of this country anticipated a future president
like Trump. They’d just rid themselves of one mad king and
now sought to prevent the rise of another in their new home. George Washington
feared that “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to
subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of
government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to
unjust dominion.” James Madison, writing in the Federalist Papers, warned against
the rise of “a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold
in his temper, possessed of considerable talents.”
Madison and the other founders outlined all the ways such
a man could run roughshod over American democracy. A president, Madison wrote,
“might betray his trust to foreign powers.” (Trump in 2018:
“They said they think it’s Russia; I have President Putin, he just said it’s
not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.”) He might
“displace from office a man whose merits require that he should be continued in
it.” (Trump to Comey: “I need loyalty. I expect
loyalty.”) Another signer of the Constitution, Abraham Baldwin, similarly
warned against a president who “in a fit of passion” ousted “all the good
officers of government.”
What the founders feared, in short, was a president who saw
himself as above the law and free from accountability. As James Wilson, one of
the first Supreme Court justices, put it, a president “cannot act improperly,
and hide either his negligence or inattention…Far from being above the laws, he
is amenable to them…in his public character by impeachment.”
The Framers insisted on the power to impeach a president for
a moment like this one. For the high crime of abuse of power, impeachment is
one of the few checks Congress has on an unaccountable president. The real risk
would be to not pursue impeachment for what President Trump
has done so far. To do so would send a message to future presidents: Go ahead
and rule like a monarch. No one’s going to stop you.
All hail the king.
ATTACHMENT
SIXTEEN – from the independent
(Ireland)
MARY MCALEESE: 'TRUMP HAS ALWAYS BEEN A DICTATOR IN THE MAKING; A MAN
OF ABSOLUTELY NO MORAL CONSCIENCE WHATSOEVER'
Growing up in a conflict zone prepares you for life's
knocks even if some things rattle you. Covid is a
worry and Trump 'evil'. But former president Mary McAleese
is still fighting on, she tells Liadán Hynes
'He's always been a dictator in the
making; a man of absolutely no moral conscience whatsoever. And now he heads a
domestic terrorism group, which he created." It
is the day after a mob stormed Capitol Hill in Washington, and former president
Mary McAleese is reflecting on the soon-to-be-former
President Trump.
The events were, she adds, an inevitability. "It's what he was always about."
We had been talking about Northern Ireland, and the dehumanisation of
two groups; existing alongside each other, but entrenched in their opposing
beliefs. What we're seeing in America feels similar, I suggest.
"It's exactly that," Mary
replies. "You get a stirrer upper, like Trump, someone who is able to
manipulate, for example, the Christian gospel. We had that in [Dr Ian] Paisley.
Someone who talks the gospel, but is actually a spewer, a contaminator of the world with hatred. And
then you get what you got yesterday. I still can't believe that the people of
the United States would have preferred him to Hillary Clinton." She shakes
her head.